Anatomy of a Dress

I am making memories so fast here.

The Body is the Inscribed Surface of Events!
A Volume in Perpetual Disintegration!
The Body is Always Under Seige!

Lara Glenum

Although these [gurlesque] books all inhabit different stylistic approaches, they seem to share a sense of revolting, bodily-based horror associated with femaleness and a desire to birth this horror or abort it or deconstruct, reconstruct, or vivisect it.… I’m also interested in poetic/art content in which the female body is some kind of representational battleground.

Juliet Cook’s review of Maximum Gaga (the rest of it here)

I flip the channel.

Pink O-ring. Pink baton.

The medical landscapes straggle through me,

toting their abstractions.

White jets. Jellies and occlusions.

(In the far corner of the screen, on a wall crucifix, Jesus suffers

the ecstasy of the plastic.) Then — static, static.

In the cracked shell of a TV

lies a pile

of dusty limbs

and a single lotus.

The lotus says: No exit.

No exit from these heiroglyphs

on the pavement of non-meaning.

No exit from a life circumscribed

by flame.

(I say: Like Hell.

I place white-out here, over the meaty celluloid that it may congest with sick stars

I scratch out these skewed limbs

hanging on the tree of sight.

I cut out chrome skies, pink anemonies, chalk cliffs

and glue them onto the patient screen.

We are not bodies, we are nimbuses of static

seeking our starry capes of flesh.

And I, without you,

a moth

pinned alive.)

Lara Glenum

How do you feel about the critical response to The Hounds of No, and has it had any effect on your writing?

I’ve been totally stunned by all the positive press. I’m still convinced I’ll be eviscerated. I’ve always wondered why people go to Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier movies in droves, devour everything Radiohead puts out, and then go home and read lame Wallace Stevens knock-offs. It makes no aesthetic sense (not to mention political sense). So I’m glad to find that people also like poetry books that act like a crash site… I also thought people might think that I level all this grotesque, over-the-top material at them just for shock value and miss the ethical and political stakes in my work. That hasn’t been the case, though. I’ve been amazed at how well people have articulated what’s at stake in my work.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

More than anything, I believe in poetry’s ability to change us by disrupting our habits of language and image-making. I believe in poetry that takes tremendous risks, poetry in which the stakes are extremely high, poetry that connects with the perpetual state of emergency we find ourselves in. And it’s not just the current political climate I’m referring to. Being embodied in flesh that decomposes and that is inscribed with all manner of cultural values not of your choosing is also a state of emergency.

The rest here.

In the forest of ovaries, crimson trees snap beneath the
weight of their egg sacs. With a large, pearl-covered button, I
fasten the thick flaps of skin over the holes in my abdomen.
There are hairy rivers I will not cross. Dolls climb backwards
out of my mouth.

On skin-covered trees, colonies of embryos hang like crystal
pendants. The Mother-body slides among them, a predatory
spider, dropping mannequin legs out of her shiny thorax like
silent bombs. I prop the mannequin legs against tree trunks,
frilly socks slouching at their ankles.

The Mother-body lives in a black velveteen parlor littered
with anesthesia canisters. As she works, glass figurines crowd
around her macular hole. Raptor fetuses shriek toward her
through the tired skies.

The Mother-body sails the hairy rivers, scavenging. She will
remove my poison-sacs. She will remove the deposits of
nougatine cream in my shriveled forelegs. I will wear her glass
coffin like a wedding dress.

Lara Glenum

Message to the Department of the Interior

I have decided to grow a second body This may be of some
concern to you

I fear my second body will have a forking spine & a rubber
leg & refuse to wear anything but a bloody deer costume

I fear my two bodies will have unseemly public duels

The second body will, in all likelihood, publish obscene
treatises on “the hairy halo” & radicalize the cottage industry
in deer pornography

I will most certainly attempt to cut off the face of the first
body & wear it as a mask whenever it enters “the reality
testing booth”

It will drool “red language” into a steel cup affixed to its chin
The “red language” will be collected & be inserted into the
tongue-holes of its enemies to induce morbid hallucinations

I know you said I should try to relax & ignore the residue the
bombs left in my torso

by eliminating all my bodies & proto-bodies, but who can
relax in our repblic now that it’s laid its terrible eggs on our
tongues

Lara Glenum

A writer’s self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

John Updike