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Brian Droitcour
Works in ELMHURST, New York United States of America

BIO
Rhizome curatorial fellow September 2008 - April 2009, staff writer April 2009 - December 2011, poetry editor January 2012 - 20??
BLOG POSTS

Two Poems by Cathy Park Hong


 

Engines within the Throne

 

We once worked as clerks

            scanning moth-balled pages

into the cloud, all memories

outsourced except the fuzzy

            childhood bits when

 

I was an undersized girl with a tic,

they numbed me with botox.

            I was a skinsuit

of dumb expression, just fingerprints

over my shamed

 

            all I wanted was snow

to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,

muffle the drum of freeways, erase

            the old realism

 

but this smart snow erases

            nothing, seeps everywhere,

the search engine is inside us,

the world is our display

 

            and now every industry

has dumped cubicles, desktops,

fax machines into developing

            worlds where they stack

them as walls against

 

what disputed territory 

            we asked the old spy who drank

with Russians to gather information 

the old-fashioned way,

 

now we have snow sensors,

            so you can go spelunking

in anyone’s minds, 

let me borrow your child

 

thoughts, it’s benign surveillance,

            I can burrow inside, find a cave

pool with rock colored flounder,

and find you, half-transparent

with depression.

 

A Wreath of Hummingbirds

 

I suffer a different kind of loneliness.

From the antique ringtones of singing

wrens, crying babies, and ballad medleys,

my ears have turned

to brass.

 

They resurrect a thousand extinct birds,

Emus, dodos, and shelducks, though some,

like the cerulean glaucous macaw,

could not survive the snow.  How heavily

they roost on trees in raw twilight.

 

I will not admire those birds,

not when my dull head throbs, I am plagued

by sorrow, a green hummingbird eats me alive

with its stinging needle beak.

 

Then I meet you.  Our courtship is fierce

in a prudish city that scorns our love,

as if the ancient laws of miscegenation

are still in place.  I am afraid

I will infect you

 

after a virus clogs the gift economy:

booming ...

READ ON »


Robot Literature by Angelo Plessas


Angelo Plessas, from Untitled Portrait Gallery, 2009

 

Double Faced

For those who Know Best their mirror,

a Conspiracy revolves around.

Silence from behind devours a relic from the past.

Life is usually attached to lengths of magnetic fields.

You might be Emerging as something else.

I might Switch Back. All I wish is that when I start up,

my life will be OkaY

 

Around us

Keep, Art was Stolen By a Masked man in thong.

I thank Obama because he\’s black,

he said We love Colors.

You are feeling suicidal now please stop.

Apocalyptic, I contemplate the Universe around us.

 

elated quilt 

elated quilt establishes despairingly

victorious coma becomes elatedly

thoughtful income clips deprecatively

beautiful sidewalk checks long-windedly

combative pie cracks giddily

crowded haircut buzzes dazzlingly

quaint answer enhances garishly

 

A TYPICAL DAY OF DALI AND GALA

DALI, materialized in a apartment. Many persons in a single body. It was the

sixth game of attention. Behaving scarcely angered, DALI punched a ninja star,

but this certainly didn't encourage DALI deciding what to do in smart way. Out of

nowhere, DALI hoped that DALI's marginal fidelity is to be perpetually positive,

because hatred is born out of fear. Unconsciously DALI emailed GALA, DALI's

neighbor/accomplice 'Free yourself from common sense', said DALI. DALI must

have seen GALA for 20 hours in Tahrir square during the Revolution some of

them were modest diabolical and empirical inspirations. GALA was a nobody.

Many persons outside a single body. Between the line of black and white. GALA

was outgoing more or less... pestering. DALI called GALA 'Somebody has to

listen to me' he said. 'These are the symptoms of the liberal-democratic affluent

society', said DALI.

GALA hypnotized by lazy DALI. 'Why and for whom does philosophy work today

?' , said GALA. GALA ...

READ ON »


Two Poems by Christine Kelly



Christine Kelly, Apple 1 is an apple. Apple 2 is the idea of an apple, 2011

 

 

One or More Occasions


If the diviner,

when he wakes up to the sound

of his own trumpet,

or presents the

                        MUST-HAVE

 

in moonlight, the wrong kind of bottle

 

we belong in the monosyllabic new

the diviner won’t embarrass

on fear of exits (this and an absence of such

fear are both aphrodisiacs)

 

stone cold absence

then the diviner becomes crooked

a bendy-neck swan totem stands in for

subjectivity

and

a subjective everything

 

features:  

 

 

feature: handle

 

 

features:

 

 

feature: permanent hat

 

 

and guess what

 

this is a timeslot

a clutter among others

at which we marvel occasionally

 

 

sink

into clean and empty

sing about the full

about means around

or in proximity to

timespace designations.  Hey,

take it like a spittoon.

 

sink

into the bloated order of cause and effect—

cranial piping is how I arrived

at permanent hat, actually

 

resembling a column of smoke

 

puff

puff

puff

puff

 

coming out of the diviner’s hat

 

 


I Baroque It

 

“DOES sport imply sanctity?” was a sporting question, which through no extension

other than the yawny, tragic phonetiks surrounding someone’s (I bet) snowmobile accident…

…less likely than a skiing accident,

more likely than a competitive taffy pull filling the interior of a milk hood shared by two school chums

with vacuum trident

tongues 

hitchedup. 

Early incidence of dual ownership can create loquaciousness so drippy that it requires a dish.      

OBLITERATE        WET         GENEROSITY 

 

-----towel                  towels-----

 

Shan’t discuss human sexual attraction in this one, but know, just know, know what you know,

when you hear those angels trumpeting:  oxygen.  100% oxygen hands slip in from behind.

                $527 Cobra Quiz [win again and again]

Cobra the yogic asana. 

Cobra the health insurance for poor sods.

Cobra ...

READ ON »


"Two Days Diary" by Lisa Oppenheim


Alexandra Gorczynski, Bathroom in the Dark, 2011

March 23rd, 2011

Early mornings were never my thing. I mean, it’s not that artists are lazy. Or out drinking late most nights. Or not out last night, a Tuesday. Hungover. I go out with the dog.  It’s still basically dark. A kind of dark blue fog, super cold and grey. A couple are out early, two middle aged men bundled up and both smoking with thick leather gloves. They are sitting on a bench in front of the takeout place on the corner. It’s way too cold to be sitting outside.  I hear one say to the other as I pass them, “do you want the thing or the other thing.” And I think, this is true partnership, to have thoughts coalesce around the same object. Not a shared thought, but a coming together. The muffin or the bagel.  Privileging someone else’s desires for a subjectless thing. Generosity. Just as likely the better looking half of an egg and cheese sandwich. I go in the store and order one for myself. Salt and grease. 

Today in 1923 Tennessee became the first state to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Today in 1933 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, granting Hitler total power. Fittingly, today is miserable. Still basically dark, hail. The never ending domino fall of winter storms. 

March 29th, 2011

I live in America’s most bug infested city. There are bug infested mattresses all around my neighborhood this evening. It’s trash night and everyone has put the big stuff on the curb. Not just bug-ridden mattresses, also rugs, rotting Ikea cushions from a few seasons back, clothes of all kinds. I drop off my sheets at the laundry across the street and six o ...

READ ON »


"Excerpt from my Novel Screenburn" by Lance Wakeling


I start by looking for images of parking lots. I’m thinking about finding the perfect image, or making one. I have to see an image of a parking lot with over-layed text that reads “Social Network.”

Then I move on to looking at images under the term crash. There are cartoon characters, crash dummies, airplanes in pieces, bodies, stills from the movie, cymbals, explosions. I open a new tab: Wikipedia – Crash. I’m redirected to collision.

A collision is an isolated event in which two or more moving bodies exert relatively strong forces on each other for a relatively short time. ¶ Collisions can be elastic, meaning they conserve energy and momentum, inelastic, meaning they conserve momentum but not energy, or totally inelastic (or plastic), meaning they conserve momentum and the two objects stick together.

It’s this last type of collision that interests me most, the totally inelastic one—when the two colliding objects merge into one and conserve momentum.

While cruising through the images I’m collecting, I think of Jean Baudrillard and then J.G. Ballard, retracing steps that I took three years ago, all in perfect recall. I make a new folder called parking-lots and drop in images with filenames like 5781586-aerial-view-of-an-empty-parking-lot, grantham-parking-lot-0951, Lot, Tel_Aviv_parking_lot, and zoo_lot2-750149.

It’s getting dark outside and my terminal is bathing this corner of the room and the front side of my knuckles in bluish light. My fingernails dimly reflect the screen. All the tiny parallel ridges reflect light in opposing directions, causing the reflection to appear matte.

I get up from my desk, look out the window, decide not to close the drapes, turn around and glance at the cat, then sit back down. My fingernails are long and hit the keys before the pads of my fingers. I ...

READ ON »



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Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon


A bit of related trivia: Rhizome commissioned a splash page based on Brandon: http://www.archive.rhizome.org/exhibition/splashback/06_cheang.php

DISCUSSION

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck


Oh hi, "Guest Blogger" is me, Brian Droitcour.

DISCUSSION

Letter from the Poetry Editor


ALSo Wordworks posts will appear twice a month, on the second and fourth Tuesdays.

DISCUSSION

Letter from the Poetry Editor


Hi, I just wanted to clarify a few things for people who are interested in submitting.

1) Several people have asked me about submitting videos of readings, or video works where words appear as images. The Wordworks series is mainly about writing, rather than performance, video, or other mediums. Any submission should have a core of text that people don't have to press "play" to read. I welcome the inclusion of diverse media objects in submissions as complements to text, but not as replacements of it.

2) Submissions should be able to fit in a Rhizome blog post, without requiring readers to go to another site to read it. I'm aware of the strong traditions of electronic literature, hypertext, interactive fiction, etc., where writers make use of the entire browser window, from the background color to the forward and back buttons. I read and enjoy works like that, but for Wordworks I'm looking for writing that does not exceed the format of the post. This is just an arbitrary decision that I have made in order to maintain continuity throughout the series.

Thanks for reading and responding!

DISCUSSION

It’s Only Humanist


If you make it, they will blog.