About Riff Raff

Riff Raff is an eclectic chapbook published by the venerable Unicorn Press (helmed by Al Brilliant) in 2007. As opposed to most of my longer projects, which are in fact long projects, Riff Raff is a collection of individual poems not originally intended to hang together. Each poem is a riff on some other artwork, and the chapbook is divided into three sections. “The Neruda Remixes” each take one of Pablo Neruda’s poems and render it through a combination of literal translation, metaphorical translation, and insertion of material Neruda never wrote, ending up with, well, a remix. “Graffiti” consists of ekphrastic pieces based on artwork ranging from an actual graffito on a rock in rural Iowa to an imagined mural produced by Diego Rivera and J. Alfred Prufrock. “Riff Raff” is for the riff raff, poems that take their idea from existing piece of “literature,” maybe Paul Celan, maybe a biology textbook. The volume itself is hardcover, rare for a chapbook, and I did the jacket design based on a wonderful piece of remixed art by Antonio Pratsa.

Cover Image

Sample Poems

Los Enigmas (Eco remix)

You would ask me
what the crab weaves
between its golden claws,
and I would respond:
The Ocean knows.

You say to me: what
does the squid wait for
in its transparent bell?
What hopes does it have?
I say to you all: it waits,
like us, for time and nothing else.

Of course you ask me
about the damned ivory of the narwhal,
what good it does him,
then laugh amongst yourselves
when I lecture on the nobility
of the harpooned unicorn.

You ask about the wisdom
of the albatross, about
the civility of the mako,
about the embrace of the octopus,
and the literature of tuna.
You prod me as though I were coral,
never realizing that the Ocean knows.

This great pulsing womb,
birthing and bleeding,
taught you everything.
You learned to move in water.
In sorrow you shed tears.
You are made of water,
and the Ocean knows
you are not immune
to the tides, that what is given
is taken, that the crest becomes
the undercurrent, that knowledge is merely that
which is forgotten.

December 2004: Just in case Osama stops by

Highway 20 in northeastern Iowa
there’s a Midwestern mountain painted
with a mis-starred flag and the words
WE AIN’T SCARED.

You can tell the author is shouting
because it’s in all capital letters.
Just in case Osama’s English ain’t so good
the sheer volume will carry the message

that even here in the tundra
in the dead of a three-year winter
(September to September and over again)
there’s a farmer with Teutonic blood

awakened inside him.
America thinks it sleeps safely
tonight, but he knows that in
those caves the hand of some giant

terrorist organization reaches towards
him and his own.
He watches the cat grown longer
in the shadows,

pops open a beer
and drains it in three gulps,
ignores the creak in his bones, wipes
his mouth, and smiles

because he has hands, too,
and one is gripping
a shotgun, the other
pulling back the hammer.

[After the story of Thor and Utgarð-Loki]

Let there be Light

After Paul Celan’s “Es war Erde in ihnen”

Have we erred in winning?

We are seen grabbing and gobbling. Souls
fare
back down
each night. Unseen gods appear,
seeming so hurt, saying, “All die beholden.”
This unseemly hurt. “All die, beholden.”

This grasping hurtful nightmare:
Warden Night, wise before fawning
kings lied,
before
kings spoke,
dumbed by unending candles.

I come still, though I come for naught
in this un-Night. I grab
you,
grab for anything
before we’re worms,
before the sickening door sags.

Woden goes from door to door,
turned aside at each hovel
by wolves devouring lightbulbs.