Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #6

 

Mal à Hat - Penn Kemp

 

Mal adjusted  

Hat in the ring

list ten up

Re view

Re wind

Re store

Re move

I am a sub scribe

If I delete all will I

surscribe?

Thank you to Penn Kemp for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series here. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.

Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #5

  

Not As Funny - Mary Peelen

I promise that nothing you write 

will be funny at all. You're 

making the notifications worse. 

Please correct this mistake! 

If this is not corrected 

I will be forced to 

“reply all” to this email. 

Criminal charges are in order. 

Everyone: random people, 

famous writers including me: 

STOP for the love of GOD 

please stop. I'll definitely 

send flowers. You are not 

as funny as you imagine 

yourself to be 

but I will re-subscribe 

as soon as the email fiasco 

is resolved. 

Thank you to Mary Peelen for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series here. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.

Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #4

 

"PLEASE FIX YOUR EMAIL" - Rose Morris

This morning I woke to an inbox brimming.
Thought it was love.
Get your shit together, they accidentally
sent one email that went to everyone.

I have no idea how or why this message came to me. I know mistakes happen.

I’m also receiving this email, but I don’t think I’m supposed to.
Gawd knows my secret membership in this rather pornographic group is a terrible fate.

My inbox is suddenly flooded with emails from people I don’t know and I am a full time writer.
I do not have time for this. I know mistakes happen.

I definitely have time for this.
Nice to meet you all.
I know mistakes happen.

Please delete me.

Please remove from list.

Please remove me from the list.

Please remove me from this list as well, thanks!!

^^this is just a test to see if my “reply all” gets thru. I know mistakes happen.

I am upset.

I agree with George Bowering.

I too write full time.

If you what me on your list, you can re earn my support,
if you’re worth it. I know mistakes happen.

Where the hell is the secret and one and only Northwest Mounted Police when you need them.

With no kindness,
gerry sharing the pain

Amigos, no entiendo nada de este bellísimo discurso. Que les vaya bien. Abrazos a todos.
Friends, I understand nothing of this beautiful speech. Good luck. Hugs to all. 

Thank you to Rose Morris for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series here. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.

Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #3

What the World ----- Re: Love - Tara Colbourne

“I suddenly see all around us” – George Bowering “On Quadra Island”

we say please when we mean [fuck off]
sometimes          don’t we?

please check, please update, please fix or better

yet, please remove me, remove my name, remove

my love, same, same

same

to wade through
all this ----- I don’t know
is anyone paying attention?

I thought it was [love]

I keep getting messages
from people       I don’t know
everyone ----- please stop
please prevent further flooding
have you been accessed
or compromised or FLOODED

we say fuck off sometimes when we
mean

[please] ----- with no kindness
remove me because
this is ridiculous
please ----- take me
off
forever

please love, please

Thank you to Tara Colbourne for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series here. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.

Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #2

"A decade after I broke the malahat review listserv" - Patrick Grace

Oh my god I accidentally
sent one email.
I've just learned from a friend
a terrible fate.

As I understand it,
it comes from the heart--
"fuck off, delete me"
in English, it means unsubscribe.

The poor human
who made this mistake again.
Someone alert NATO!
Call the police and the army!

Something went haywire.
Please correct this
warped sense of humour.
You all have time for this.

Thank you to Patrick Grace, who brought us the 2014 meltdown, for this little gem. You can read all the found poems in this series here. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.

this makes me nervous

Back in 2014, a reply-all unsubscribe outbreak on the Malahat Review listserv brought such joy to my heart that I wrote a found poem compiled from the various replies. You can read that poem here.

One might have thought that in the intervening nine years, the Malahat Review would have addressed this flaw in their listserv system but, bless them, it appears they did not. We're back at it, and the replies are even more confused, angry and conspiratorial this time around (this is Pierre Poilievre's Canada we're living in, after all).

Rhonda Ganz has stepped up to write a found poem for this year's meltdown. I present it below. If you'd like to contribute your own Malahat Review listserv found poem, please email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com and I will post it here. And most importantly, enjoy the madness while it lasts. It will be another nine years before we get to do it again!

Thought it was love - Rhonda Ganz

I did not get the original love, but I am getting all the replies

My inbox suddenly flooded

Este amar, no es un virus.

People I don’t know

People pressing “love”

This makes me nervous

(Me, too!)

(I’m also receiving this love, but I don’t think I’m supposed to)

(Likewise)

Please

I don’t think I should receive this love

Anyone paying attention

You’re making the love worse

Please

Please stop pressing “love”

Please remove me

Remove me from your love list immediately

Please stop pressing “reply all” to this love

Please take me off your love list forever

All of you! Stop sending love!

All of you brimming with love

You are the problem

glimpses of how my books are carried

During the solitary months and years spent writing a book, it can be easy to forget that it will—if you are lucky—live a social life. That your book might enter the imaginations and memories of its readers and thrive there, that your book might be crammed into pockets or backpacks and carried up mountains or to foreign countries, or that your book might be given by one person to another. Perhaps the aspects of authorship I cherish most are the glimpses I get of how my books are themselves carried, or are themselves given. When I sign books at readings, people frequently want their copies inscribed as gifts. Would you make this out to my mother, who loves mountains?... to my brother, who lives in Calcutta?... to my best friend, who is ill?... to my father, who is no longer able to walk as far as he would wish...? Several times I’ve been asked to inscribe books to young children who can’t yet read: We want to give this book to them now, so it’s waiting for them when they’re ready for it. These conversations with readers, and the stories that arise from this giving of gifts, are among the strongest of the forces that keep me writing.

- Robert MacFarlane, from his essay The Gifts of Reading. You can read the whole thing here.

that infinitely expanding shelter

Beauty can’t be canceled. O’Connor is problematic, but she’s indispensable. I think of Calvino’s “Uses of Literature,” his notion of a universal library that’s always expanding around a core of canonical books. The core may be less fixed for those of us looking for alternatives to a white, male, Eurocentric canon—but the important thing is that infinitely expanding shelter, which is tethered to history but always gravitating toward what’s still outside it, toward what Calvino calls the “apocryphal.” No books are removed from this library. No books are burned. I’m not going to remove Faulkner. I’m not going to remove Wallace Stevens. I see them as flawed, complicated, dimensional people. 

- Terrance Hayes, from his Paris Review interview. You can read the whole thing here.

what this country is like

Well, the English sonnet is twelve lines of thinking what you want to think, and then in the final couplet, the volta, you change your mind. I think this, I think this, I think this—­and only then, I think that. In the Italian sonnet, you think what you’re thinking for eight lines, two quatrains—­I think this, I think this—­and then you change your mind, and for six lines it’s, I think that. Of course the English were like, I’m right for twelve lines and wrong for two. That’s the kind of thinking that led to colonialism … Maybe the Italian sonnet is more reflective of Enlightenment thinking. 

The premise of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) was very simple—I’ve got to change my mind more than once for it to be an American sonnet. It has to have several turns, to have voltas all over it, because that’s what this country is like, zigzagging between insight and blindness, beauty and ugliness, joy and pain. 

- Terrance Hayes, from his Paris Review interview. You can read the whole thing here.

an acoustic pot

Among the medieval artifacts in the British Museum is an example of what’s called an acoustic pot. These earthenware vessels were placed in cavities in the chapel walls where monks and nuns would sing; they made the pitch more resonant. Lately, I’ve been thinking that poets do much the same thing when they quote or imbed allusions to other poems in their own art. When poets resonate together, especially across the divide between the living and the dead, it lends an eerie power to the work.

 

- Ange Mlinko, from her essay on The Waste Land over at Poets.org. You can read the whole thing here.