Poems and Texts

From CHECKING IN by Adeena Karasick

From Checking In

Red Wheelbarrow (glazed with rainwater) is beside the Angry Chickens
Gargantua and Pantagruel are listening to They might be Giants
Narcissus is listening to Echo and the Bunnymen
Smashmouth is reading Lip Service
Hugo Ball is singing, Come to the Cabaret, old chum
Total Syntax is in Total Recall
George Oppen is opening syntax
Père Ubu is listening to the Meat Puppets
Allen Ginsberg is trusting his own mind
Antonin Artaud’s mind is in Umbilical Limbo
Michael Palmer is storing his alphabet in the Eighth Sky
Paul Bowles is piercing the fabric of the Sheltering Sky
Maria Damon’s fabric exposes the Poetics of Everything
The Grady Twins are going to the Theatre and its Double
Antonin Artaud shared L’art de le Mort
Annie Sprinkle shared L’art de le petite mort
Jacques Lacan shared le objet petite a
Louis Zukofsky shared un grand A
Lucretius and The Shining shared De RE(D)RUM Naturum
Marcel Duchamp likes The Fountain of Blood
Charles Bernstein is Close Listening to Hidden Noise
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is listening to Barenaked Ladies
Ron Silliman and R. Eliezer ben Yehuda are Tjanting
Ludvig van is reading the Grand Piano
Blondie is asking you to call her
Walt Whitman is crossing Brooklyn Ferry en route to Ikea® singing Song of my Shelf
Dylan Thomas is in Greenpoint
Mary, Mother of God is flying Virgin
Siri is not available.
Carravagio is at the Bellagio
Robert Creeley is reading Island at the Shore Club
T.S. Eliot is listening to Teenage Wasteland
Dante is in Hell
Dolce & Gabbana like Dulce et Decorum Est
Kenny Goldsmith is in Suck City reading the Sour Grapes of Wrath
Wittgenstein is weighing his case
Francis Ponge is sopping it up
Being is unspeakable

Photo: Anya Roz

Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is a  poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Related Events