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Imaginary Poems for the Old-Fashioned Future
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 27, Number 4, Fall 2004
- p. 1084
- 10.1353/cal.2004.0150
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Callaloo 27.4 (2004) 1084
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Imaginary Poems for the Old-Fashioned Future
Terrance Hayes
- Sooner or later I'm going to have to talk about the white house and how the men there don't seem to like big butt women.
- There will also be a praise poem for the smartest, strongest, and/or fastest human alive should he or she live in a region with no reporters, printing presses, indoor plumbing etc.
- And further additional efforts to demonstrate the ways my undoubtedly brilliant mind transforms day to day happenings into stuff. (parts 1-30)
- A poem by someone named LesterSea. Someone named Lenore. Headline sonnets maybe. Titles ripped from the annuls of jazz bebop, no doubt.
- Written in seat 9A between Chicago and Traverse City. Little shacks with stoves on the big iced lake. (Fish cakes in the stoves.)
- Four long titled poems transcribing recipes into poems using color, shape—senses, and the pronoun I where ever there is a the.
- An "I love big" button somewhere. (I love you, Portly, don't let em take me...")
- Part I "Viscous circus"; Part II "Victory Circle"; Part III "Vicious Service" and if there be a Part IV "Very Surly"
- "Dwell," "Furl," maybe. Girlish laughter in the pipes. (Keep talking, we know the same people.)
- "The Short Age" followed by "The Us Age" followed by "The Bond Age" followed by "The Volt (or Re-volt) Age" followed by "Dose Ages," "Mile Ages" and "Out Ages." (See appendix)
- Definitions of Divine Imaging, Speed Lightening, and Gerimantic Racial Demography. (Pronunciations of logistic as lowgetstick; stroll as scroll)
- Half a dozen one hundred line attempts at resolving the poem: "I come from a long line of . . . "
- A stanza rhyming bric-a-brac, brick-a-black, and papa bag.
...