New Website

Kimberly Grey Moved

Check out my new website and blog over here: http://kimberlymgrey.com/

Poem by Bob Hicok

re: incarnation

To you who say you've been here before, I say
I've not been here yet, I say
I'll be here soon, I say
what a mess you've made.

Next time, come back as an apology
or broom.

Next time, bring enough doughnuts
for everyone.

I would ask if there's a next time
to be the phrase, life is brutish and short.

I would have a child who is the phrase, life is supple
and vibratory.

She would have a child
who is the clamor behind the waterfall, twin of the child
who is the ruckus in front of a waterfall, sisters
to the child who is the screaming of the sun
against the dark.

The first atom bomb came back
as whispers, fallen eyelashes, dew.

Sometimes I hope I'm shitting out
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot.

In those moments, I wished Americans believed
in bidets.

If Americans came back as Europeans, we would believe
in bidets.

And the carrier pigeon would come back
as the carrier pigeon, only this time,
it wouldn't be the fashion to shoot them.

It would be the fashion to say look, the carrier pigeons
are back.

Everyone would turn and wait for the buffalo.

Everyone would turn and wait for us
to honor our treaties with the Indians.

And while everyone was turned, all the interesting stuff
would happen up ahead: the bumper car
would come back as making love.

Advice as minding your own business.

Slivers as roots of jungle
under skin.

And there God would be
trying on all the slippers, hoping one pair
fit, hoping one pair got him from the ball
to happily ever after.

As if.

As if.

from Washington Square Summer/Fall 2010

Four years

From Anne Carson's translation of Sappho:

"For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see
but the good man will at once also beautiful be.





I feel so lucky.

New York Geometries

Little Bite of Light



Little Jailed Sphere



Little Striped India



Little Gate to Go



Little Squares to Save



Little Circle of Noon

A View to Sing

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

By John Ashbery


This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.


From Poetry Magazine
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181395

Poems

I have two new poems in The Awl:


http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/the-poetry-section-kimberly-grey

Lower Manhattan

It felt strange to walk around Battery Park tonight. I still feel like I should be silent, like I should be muttering some kind of elegy to the suffered buildings. Like I should walk with my head slightly toward the ground. Maybe it's because I still think of this part of Manhattan as bruised. Or maybe, it's just me that is still tender. But after hearing Anne Carson read tonight, one thing remains: Death makes us stingy. However immensely beautiful the buildings seemed, the Hudson, the sky, the poems; tonight I want to keep it all to myself.

from Ceiling Unlimited Series

(magnet mine)

It isn't a question of what's quaint, what
hurts. If the telephone wires look like
an endless perch, the birds will avoid
the trees. The train's reflection in the water
can't help but glimmer more than the train.
As long as the local cathedral has an
unpronounceable name, people will come in
droves to sing their songs to the residual blue.
When the rain was wanted they used to shoot
cannonballs into the clouds. So prosaic. So pretty.
The planets couldn't be more so. Or if it's scale
that attracts you, come closer - there are seven
tiny piles of bright pigment in the sink. Lava-less-
lament, flimsy-attempt-to-draw-you-in-
call them what you want, but call them.


from Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form
By Matthea Harvey

The Awl

Here's to taking chances. A few weeks ago I read two of Matthea Harvey's new poems in The Awl, a new New York magazine that is interested in politics, culture, and the arts. Harvey is easily my favorite poet writing today. I was quite enamored with her poems and other poems published in The Poetry Section. So I sent Mark Bibbins a couple poems on a whim and wish, not even sure if they take unsolicited submissions. And as it turns out, they don't. All the work has thus far been solicited. But, the lovely Mark liked my poems and has decided to publish them in The Awl in a few weeks. I am thrilled and can not help but think a little turtle that left this world and broke my heart, has something to do with all the great things that are happening to me.


Matthea Harvey's poems in The Awl: http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-poetry-section-two-poems-by-matthea-harvey

A View to Love and Slaughter

A View to Love

A View to Ride

A View to Leave

A View to Eat

A View to Memorize

A View to Write By

Nox

Today I received Anne Carson's latest book "Nox" almost two months earlier than I expected to. What a great surprise. The book is one of the most strange and beautifully constructed books I've ever seen. I haven't actually read it yet, just ogled over the pages and designs, but she never disappoints me. This is what it looks like:




In other news one of my poems was accepted into The Brooklyn Review. It was one of the nicest acceptance letters I've gotten. (It was addressed to "Dearest Kimberly"). I'm really excited for two reasons: it's my first print publication and it's a poem I wrote well after I graduated from my MFA program. It was never workshopped, never revised, and only one person read it before I submitted it out. It is one of my favorite poems I've written thus far and I'm excited to share it with The Brooklyn Review and the world.

Advice To The Busted Among Us

By Ada Limon

But everyone is busted a little.

No consciousness of the breaking, just the history
of a dirty footprint—even the easy stuff,
the small conversations about our worth.

(To be an anonymous object,
the innocuous heart, the smallest part of flesh.)

On Withers Avenue, a rat circled the bottom of a trashcan,
it threw its body against the plastic green walls of its new world,
I heard it. I removed the top. I put the top back on.

(Small brilliant hole in the dark, let me out.)

Standing, in what seemed ridiculously human clothes,
I argued with the rat. I asked him,

Are you rabid?
Are you crazy?
Are you responsible for the plague?

He didn’t answer, he threw his body again.

Are you mean?
Did you hurt your children?
Did you hurt anyone?

I want to tell you that I let that rat out.

Kindness overwhelmed the tough pout of people-cleanliness.
I want to tell you I put him in a shoebox and
brought him to the country, fed him corn and taught him to read.

(Ungettable parallel time, fathomless choices.)

I say to a stranger, I am harmless.

But the word doesn’t seem right. I have been harmed,
but I do not wish to do harm, but I could do harm,
I am not without desire.

I want to tell you the rat moved in with me, made a good living.

But, I tell you, I let him be.

I think he might have managed to release himself,
he was not harmless. He had intent. Flirting with the world.

He’ll show up one day, long-wandered in the weather.

He just needed someone subversive to bend in
real close and say,

You can bristle all you want,
you can reinvent the shout,
but you got your rat-self in there,
now, get your cunning rat-self out.


From Octopus Magazine
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue10/main.html

Morning Dialogue A

8:31 a.m

J - Good morning sleepy darling.
K- Throw a shoe at the ceiling.
J- A shoe?
K- They are making so much noise
J- I am not going to throw a shoe at the ceiling
K- Just throw a shoe (falls back asleep)

What I want for my birthday...

Good Ole Galway

Why Regret

By Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19553

Still Full of Ness. The Sad Kind.

I keep going back to this passage from Anne Carson's book Decreation:

Between grief and nothing
I'd take grief (jean Seberg)
I'd take nothing (Jean-Paul Belmando)

Earlier she says The tough wound plucks itself

It does. And between grief and nothing, I don't know which to take.

I heart Tony Hoagland

Yesterday I bought this:




And I am in love with this:



Love

The middle-aged man
who cannot make love to his wife
with the erectile authority of yesteryear
must lower his head and suck her breasts
with the tenderness and acumen of Walt Whitman.

And if the woman has lost her breasts
to the surgeon and his silver knife,
she must hump the man's leg in the dark bedroom
like a rodeo bronco rider.

Let them be hard and wet again, respectively.
Let them convince, and be convinced.

It is the kind of heroic performance
that no one will ever mention.
It is the part of the journey where the staircase gets narrow
and you must turn sideways to pass.

Over the earth the clouds mutate and roll.
The trees catch their breaths for another try.
Wind rips through the dried-out grass
with a threshing sound.

The man going under the covers.
The woman letting him.
Both of them refusing
to be stopped by shame.

All that talk about love, and this
is what the word was pointing at.

His poem "Poor Britney Spears" was a close second.

SHMO DAY

So, being snowed-in in New York is less exciting than it sounds. But I did get some useful things done today, including watching Inglorious Basterds, eating Thai food (yes they delivered in the snow!), completing another poem, finishing "Eros- The Bittersweet" by Anne Carson, and getting a poem accepted in Opium Magazine. I am very excited that they will be publishing the title poem of my first-book manuscript, which I expect to have completely done by August. It will appear online sometime in the near future.

Besides that, I haven't been blogging much of late because I lost my beautiful beautiful grandmother a few weeks. She was far too young and far too healthy to have left us. But, such is life. I will miss her incredibly. And I have gotten a turtle tattooed on my foot to remember her by. She was my biggest fan. Little did she know, I was hers.

The Lovely Gertrude Stein

My most favorite moments of Tender Buttons:

from A PLATE

A sad size a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious. A kind of green a game in green and nothing flat nothing quite flat and more round, nothing a particular color strangely, nothing breaking the losing of no little piece.

from A LONG DRESS

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

from A CHAIR

Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation.

from A NEW SAUCER AND CUP

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.

from A SOUND

Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.

from ROASTBEEF

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

from MUTTON

Student, students are merciful and recognised they chew something

from BREAKFAST

A hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article of exceptional relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended.

from DINNER

Only a moon to soup her, only that in the sell never never be the cocups nice be, shatter it they lay.

From ROOMS

Startling a starving husband is not disagreeable. The reason that nothing is hidden is that there is no suggestion of silence. No song is sad. A lesson is of consequence.

Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away. Not giving it away.

Star-light, what is star-light, star-light is a little light that is not always mentioned with the sun, it is mentioned with the moon and the sun, it is mixed up with the rest of the time.

Sugar any sugar, anger every anger, lover sermon lover, centre no distractor, all order is in a measure.

A pecking which is petting and no worse than in the same morning is not the only way to be continuous often.
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

DIAGRAM

I am thrilled that DIAGRAM has accepted two of my poems! It is certainly one of my top five favorite online literary magazines. There is some brilliant, brilliant work to be found there. Make sure you check it out.

http://thediagram.com/

In other news I've taken up origami. So far I've mastered the crane. I've made about 50 so far. What I am doing with them is to be determined.

Sneak peek:

That is all.

Oh

and

WhaZam

:)

The Year of the Lost Man

Is it just me or did 2009 seem like the year of men, interminably lost and confused? I mean, look at the movies: The Wrestler, Gran Torino, Up in the Air, Crazyheart, A Single Man - cowboys, washed up vets, gay men, business men, Mickey Rourke? It seems so many movies are focusing on the struggle of the male in everyday life with prejudice, alcoholism, women and sex, self-acceptance, peer-acceptance . Is it a statement of the times? That this world we have today is a hard world for men to live in? It is easy to believe. And I am nothing near a feminist. But what about the woman? This concerns me because of the most recent criticism of my writing. I was told that I write like a man, that the speakers of my poems are most often genderless. That I am uncelebratory of the woman, of being a woman. Because I don't write the expected "woman" or "mother" poems? I see my struggles and concerns in life and in writing as human struggle and concerns, not merely related to women or gender stereotypes, but to all beings. And, however important or unimportant audience is, hopefully my audience will always contain both men and woman. So I will continue to write poems that speak to both genders. And however much I did enjoy Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, I look forward to movies that more deeply explore the situation of the woman, beyond (and hopefully less repugnant than) Sex and the City and He's just not that into you. WhhhaaZAMM

The Lovely Matthea Harvey