Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Rooted, Lit, Boned – An Unerasure

      April 22, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Rooted, Lit, Boned – An Unerasure

      April 22, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
InterviewPoetry

National Poetry Month Featured Poet: Abraham Smith

written by Entropy April 6, 2017

Stay tuned all month for poet interviews in honor of National Poetry Month.


1) Why poetry?

Because sound is the shape I live and give in: one better than a hovel, it’s repast: best vegetable being how vowels meld and glint and interlace and surface fishwise. And it’s the currency called the chance to frame in those everyday commonplace miraculous twitches: just today I heard a woodpecker slamming away while Rodney the finest dog in North America did a little back scratch wriggle roll in among the blackberry vines whose phantomy flowers are lights out. I expect the Rodney roll and woodpecker slam to surface from my mindloam in poemform sometime around 2027.

2) Do you feel like poetry is more or less important & relevant today?

MORE! My paraphrase for Frye’s thoughts on Blake’s prophetic stance: it’s the capacity or bravery to see sense and say the difference between moral sheepishness and moral higher ground. It’s our duty to keep on with the spelunking in the wounds. See something say something: the salves and joists and unmaskings in tension attention.

3) Tell us about one poet who has greatly influenced you as a writer and a thinker.

An ear is more of a flower than a shell or the @ between your name and your email provider. One important seeder and sculptor or corroborator of my ears was Roethke: when I first read him in grad school, pedaling nowhere on an exercise bike at the Rec Center, I had that salmony feeling; that I was slaloming upstream with ultimate ease towards my unknown, felt, real home whirl:

4) Tell us about one lesser-known contemporary poet who you’d like more people to know about.

Hard to single it so I’ll quadruple it. Some readings pretty well stay stippled and stapled to my lobes: one old one and two new ones were by Robyn Schiff and Valerie Hsiung and Bailey Hutchinson. And while he’s very well-known, still I’d say there should be billboards and flags and his poems piping in while folks browse the aisles: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Giscombe.php

5) Share with us one of your recent poems and tell us a little bit about its context.

I am writing poems and poems and poems about cranes because I prefer cranes to lamps these days. Here’s one wherein I purloin a phrase from hero Emily Bronte.

SHELL LIFE THE SECOND

through the tight white curve veil
narrow self new beat yum
bum comes right out

hatch man that’s some excellent reckless
prep for the seed kill days
and nights days and nights

the self throw throe
the wanton craps dice
them bones-ing that riot curve wall

dead same as
sexy sex
most people want hammered at

we want
the animal
to peek or rear

the self set
aside a spell
one minute’s year

often gravely misunderstood
for my inveterate gentleness
one such suckling leveret me

my hips
born rusting
burnt opal crushed gold

sometimes now mother
crane she’ll eat
the shell

lightbulb
icecream
eucharist bell

paint chip
deadly fly twist
paint chip

wonder while mother angles on up
the spent shell rattling inside her
how she sounds to herself

you in shambles up there? you
rat slapdancin plastic riding
over fetid insulation

you ladder handmade by
deep time each rung one filament
exposed tooth root seaplant wild

seek a plastic plant for shade?
dog turned on the big red plastic bat
when the antler

proof that lightning prays
to stone for a walker on
all fours gut green with clover

when the antler was antler
all the way to the center
wish glass held fast same

corks not cool to stoop for
the echoes of resolutions
mobbing that gob

no no time no money
to deal and the weather careless
laughing from the west

the broke patch the broke car window
with plastic bags
yeah wind’s

juiciest pleasure ever probably
is fucking with halfassed expediency
and fustianly

blats black heavy waters fire
given any speed
save the milkblood school zone one

the sound of yr sometimes father
when you were young
and begging for gum says

oh why don’t you just chew
on your tongue pulled harder
than any fish

your kite
you’re kidding me
god’s eyelid fluttering

wanting to hold you
in its high hole
heaven did or sky


Abraham Smith is the author of four poetry collections: Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. His creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Presently, he is at work upon a poetry manuscript about cranes–birds whose song and stature electrify him. Destruction of Man, his book-length poem about farming, is forthcoming in 2018 from Third Man Books.

National Poetry Month Featured Poet: Abraham Smith was last modified: April 2nd, 2017 by Entropy
National Poetry Month
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Entropy

A new website featuring literary & non-literary content. A website that seeks to engage with the literary community, that becomes its own community, and creates a space for literary & non-literary ideas. About Entropy

previous post
Full-bodied Prose
next post
DIS•ARTICULATIONS 2017: April COLLABORATING POET: ashaki m. jackson

You may also like

Birdwolf V

February 2, 2016

The Birds: Elegy Toward Indifference

February 11, 2020

BLACKCACKLE: Three Poems by Cameron Quan Louie

April 5, 2019

The Birds: Bird Lady of Kingston Arms

January 15, 2020
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top