Rooftop Poetry Club - Doug Manson

Douglas Manson

Bio:
Douglas Manson is editor and publisher of Celery Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter and the Little Scratch Pad Chapbook Series. Recent short works include At Any Point, Sections in Four Seasons, The Dew Neal, and A Book of Birthdays. His first full-length book of poems, Roofing and Siding, will be available in June of 2007 from BlazeVOX [books]. An essay on poets bpNichol and d.a.levy, “Mimeograph as the Furnace of Los” was recently published in Bottom Dog Press’ d.a.levy and the mimeograph revolution. He domiciles in Buffalo, where healthy, wakeful pollinators are still needed.

Poems:

From At Any Point (to becoming normal)

pigment or dye music

inks for the days to

follow the heart out

does it mean buy a poem

the rubber requires

stamp patience for doctors six

for Kenmore, mercy

iced tea outsells all bound matter

on a hot day you sit on

with a generous concept

long animal scroll

of graven shapes

tired marks from making eyes

we are all together the fall

rushes towards knife crazy

crushing streets

rapid brushstrokes of adoption

seeing her unseeing him

makes wave capsized faith

froth up accusatory

two way in genderings

street our basic attractions

coming in clubs

a rare grace a role

under drowning beats

of flowers and missing you

Blossom Tenors

Ill earls, or pearls
of locution
cast scents
about us or a
little less
cold and
more or round
centripetal
forethoughts sent
outward the day
compound umbels
coax the crow
and pepper this misprint up.

Thousand-mile Marker

There is a jungle in this house
and a forest in your eyes,
or a fire signaling out of the sky
because the season fails to spark.

As time consumes spaces by different degrees
you accelerate what senses I have
that turn without momentum.

Now the shards of ice high above the rivers
—confluence and constellation—
race against those rapids
and this is the extent
to which I reach for
comprehension of the difference
between my own glacial
abrasion with its low illumination
and the music of the fires and the chutes.