Headline

By Bryan Sentes

​Australian water rats
cut cane toads open
with surgical precision
to feast on their hearts

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Hegel in Jena
                lectured Napoleon's soldiers
                                on the French Revolution
                                                right back out his door

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The titles

By Bryan Sentes

Identität und Differenz
Différence et Repetition
 
speak volumes

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Standard eyes I shun

By Bryan Sentes

Dada data
 
Marxian Martian
 
‘incarnation’ read
aloud as ‘incantation’
 
Little Read Book
 
Ill-read Herring

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We’re all on
Kamikaze autopilot

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Why can’t I just
let myself be

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"And if I thought ..."

By Bryan Sentes

And if I thought
what must be done
were true, what good?
Es gibt kein richtiges
Leben im falschen…
 
Regularly cast
a dutiful vote,
join a party, run
just to stand,
whipped, from my
backbench seat,
 
then? Join a march
and chant in the shade
of a sign? Shoulder
a sack of horseshit
to lob at speeches?
Better:  blockade?
 
Stalk night streets,
pockets full of lentils?
Don white overalls,
sabotage infrastructure?
Commit symbolic suicide
by self-immolation or,
 
better, vest?
                         Let May
green the linden
in my study’s window,
on its boughs bark grey
squirrels forage, foliage
screen sparrows’ amours,
 
looping in the inner ear
yesterday’s unprecedented
storm, record heats, another
tornado in the Rhineland,
famine, pox, war...

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The gadfly of the institutional avant-garde

meets two dozen poets

By Bryan Sentes

“…how you folks quickly capitulated on your original, stated ideals—one of the most rapid ‘avant-garde’ recuperations ever…”

In Bowling Green, his second year there, he thinks
When he was invited to read at the Buffalo/SUNY series
Invited to come back to the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, to give a talk and a reading
Giving a reading at the University of Texas library
At Ball State, in Indiana, where he was invited to read
In New Jersey, at Rowan University, where he was invited to read
At the University of Pennsylvania, invited to talk on a panel
At the AWP, in Chicago, giving a talk
At Illinois Wesleyan University
…
At Lake Forest College, where he’d been invited to read
…
At Princeton, at a symposium on Conceptual Poetry, on the panel
After a reading he gave at Illinois State
Reading at the swanky new headquarters of Chicago Review
Giving a reading in Normal, Illinois
…
At a reading for a book of sestinas he was in
…
At the Sarajevo Poetry Days conference
On his second night in Sarajevo
The morning he left Sarajevo
In Buenos Aires, where he and Forrest Gander were giving a reading
At the Walker Arts Center, where Eric Lorberer, then-editor of Rain Taxi, had invited him to give a lecture and reading

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Bryan Sentes is the author of Grand Gnostic Central (DC Books, 1998), Ladonian Magnitudes (DC Books, 2006), March End Prill (Book*hug, 2011), and, most recently, the chapbook “As on a holiday…” (Cactus Press, 2021). Translations (with Antoine Malette) from Louis Riel’s Massinahican are forthcoming. More can be found at https://bryansentes.com/.