On musician Arthur Russell

Eduardo C Corral: "Archival & elegiac & resonant"

Jimin Seo: "Erotic, sad, hopeful & unerringly true"

Feedback Harmonies

As a poet, as someone looking for love, I often desire the imaginary. I find that in poems. That’s not something new for artists: we often desire the imaginary and the real simultaneously, I think, and the poem can navigate that space in between.

Interview by Karan Kapoor in ONLY POEMS

The Wish

	after Elizabeth Bishop 

I sought an apprentice wish
and sailed whim—see! ride the throat
laugh votive lover kiss me // took
grasping adornment of his mouth.
Appended light.
Appended bright catch-all...

3 poems of homophonic translation

[A Tape]

William Basinski cradling an old
         cassette in his hands,
                  hearing the easy
                           melody
                                    dis-

integrate over the course
         of an hour...

Frame Loop // Disintegration Loop

I’m on a dwarf planet, in a hive of sound and gravity,
the lush architecture of a cello, strings rustling softly
against the stars, thick with sixteenth notes, sweet
 
honey of bees...

Cello Song

No, I don’t want to come home
for dinner. No, I don’t want
to have sex tonight. No, I don’t
want to get a dog. Don’t
want to pick up the dog shit.
Don’t want to revise the poem,
or make the sonnet rhyme...

Three Poems

Give me a map in the shape of a bird.
Give me a thousand amoebas, pulsing.
Give me blue. Give me a blood-stained postcard.
Give me backwards. Give me everything false...

Enclosed in a castle of cassettes,
you fortify your body with song...

Arthur, 1992

In his loops & echo & reverb, we can hear ourselves: the queer time of his music is about more than intention—it’s about reception. Every time—the hundreds of times—I put my headphones on and play World of Echo, hear Arthur’s voice wash over me...

Cover Songs: On Arthur Russell, Queer Obsession, and Failure

Lo butch demands
undrawn

a plaid teal
sparrow

dazed inane
poppers

be kind to nice
faggots

Two Homophonic Translations

Half

​               Jasper Johns, Handprint, 1964

Half your hand is blue.
Half is red. Half is yellow.
Half is green & half is you.
Half is me & half is cello...

Four Poems

I wasn’t prepared for your music
when I first heard it: your voice

gliding through consonants
liquid & voiceless,

your cello trembling unlike
a cello, the sound’s

edges sanded, weathered
by gales & saltwater,

a jellyfish loping gelatinously...

Reuben Gelley Newman

Books

Selected work

Projects