Tag prose poetry

recent writings

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Been busy with life and emotional happenings, but am hoping to get back into the swing of Influence-related things. Thank you to everybody who read my latest post and would-have-been speech! I greatly appreciate it.

I continue to be grateful to have been a finalist. One of the boons has been getting to be featured in articles and interviews, such as this one by David Bates of Oregon ArtsWatch titled, “It’s not my poetry that matters, it’s poetry that matters.” Bates did a great job of funneling down my in-person digressions and written loquaciousness into readable / followable quotes. One thing I’m glad he captured was my sense of advocacy and community that drives a lot of my teaching, writing, and editorial work:

“Without a platform for one’s work, without representation and visibility of one’s culture and identity, and without a feeling that there is a space for you somewhere in the world, writers can be sent down a discouraging path, questioning the worth not only of one’s words but of one’s existence. Things aren’t perfect, but good work is being done, and good work is being honored.”

berlin-sculptures-mythical-ancient-greek-gods-11876Another recent happening has been my prose poem sequence Gods and Goddesses being published as part of Oxidant Engine’s Boxset Series. Those familiar with my prose poems in Reasons (not) to Dance (FutureCycle Press) and The Book of Flight (Essay Press) will find this sequence kindred to those poems.

This Boxset Series is awesome and includes work by Rachel Mindell, Alexa Doran, Marlin M. Jenkins, Robert Okaji, Dorothy Chan, and John Sibley Williams among other stellar writers. Purchase a copy here.

Below are two excerpts from my prose poem sequence. Enjoy!

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Gods and Goddesses – José Angel Araguz

She told the class to imagine themselves as gods and goddesses, and to draw that. A few laughed, then grew silent, leaving the strokes of a pencil to grow louder, faster, a hand in the back of the room furious across a sheet, where teeth could be found, and the beginning lines around a mouth. Everyone waited, wanting to hear what it had to say.

First – José Angel Araguz

– and then the sun looked down upon the earth, took in how countless and unending life here seemed, saw in it something of the universe, at least what he knew of it, boundless and crowded, only what he saw was a thing that held nothing as bright as he was, nothing that aspired to take his place, nothing even to take a place beside him, and he continued in his thoughts, taking note of everything in regards to what he could not see, trying to block out his reflection which is all he saw – on the water, on the leaves – his thoughts multiplying and emptying him until he looked at the ground and saw shapes, dark, no light in them, a whole world that was not a world but a passing feeling that moved as he moved. The first shadows looked back at the sun –

one more from Susan Lewis

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

susan lewis zoomIn my recent microreview & interview of Zoom (The Word Works, 2018) by Susan Lewis, I discussed Lewis’ deftness with the prose poem as working through a push-pull between familiarity and distinction. The traditional structures of sentence and paragraph are subverted in the poems of Zoom with non-traditional phrasing and concepts.

In the case of “In Praise of Attention,” (below), the familiar phrasing of “in praise of” is subverted by a poem whose goal seems to be an interrogation of attention as a distinct act. Attention is first described as “that stiff upper chamber of another bloody pump,” implying a physicality to what we call attention, one that is similar to the physical heart. Yet, the poem immediately pushes against this logic by turning from the phrase “bloody pump” to “upper cut. Or cut to the quick & the dead.” In this phrasing, conceptual logic gives way to a logic of sounds, three syllable phrase replaced by another three syllable phrase, which is then further interrupted by a riff on the word “cut,” which in turns leads to a movie reference. The lyrical momentum of these lines would be inaccessible were it not for the self-awareness that runs the speaker of this and other poems in the collection.

Because the speaker shows themselves as aware of the frustrating yet fruitful fluidity of language, the reader’s own awareness of this fluidity, felt at turns as difficulty and fascination, can be grounded in faith. Faith in language as reckoning ground, as meeting place and place of obfuscation. The ending line, building off the italicized quote from physicist Werner Heisenberg, becomes a telling description of not only the prose poem form as exhibited here but of poetry itself.

In Praise of Attention,

that stiff upper chamber of another bloody pump. Or upper cut. Or cut to the quick & the dead, to be blunt, to be smooth as an animal in the grass, shooting the breeze with its salutary moods, its whispering timbre. Not so much chasing facsimilar euphoria as synthesizing with the generative wisdom of chlorophyll. Attending, nursing plus paying out my bottomless cache, that recirculating pump begging to be trimmed to droplets of uncertainty, those nemeses of finitude. That what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Words grasping boldly at the known grasping boldly at what is.

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from Zoom (The Word Works)

to learn more about Susan Lewis’ work, visit her site