Most men don’t rape. Most men benefit from rape. These are guillotine facts. Clean. Unflinching. Philosophically accurate. Painful to most everyone. What we avoid is the emotional violation they imply: these truths pierce protective myths that uphold the illusion of patriarchal safety and permit us to romanticize the roles of men in our lives. I’m…
Read more Most Men Don’t Rape – But Most Men Benefit From Rape
Anne Waldman: Traditionally in Buddhist psychology, male energy is “upaya” which means “skillful means”. It has to be balanced with “prajna” the feminine principle which refers to womb-like wisdom. Skillful means without wisdom is dangerous, lethal, deadly in fact. It goes power-mad. The “warring god realm” in Buddhism constantly need to create -- hallucinate -- its own enemy in order to survive. It survives on this out-of-control paranoia. It is a mind-set not unlike William Blake’s “Urizen” – a patriarchal mindset.
When they said she was mean, they meant uncontainable. Her power didn’t serve the fairy tale’s moral. She wasn’t there to illustrate “be good” by contrast. She radiated charisma laced with contempt for the script itself.
Disney sells femininity as customer service. Disobedience must be rehabilitated or annihilated.
The Evil Queen was supposed to hiss prettily and step aside for the ingénue’s song. But Sabrina Von B. inverted the hierarchy. She turned cruelty into camp, arrogance into art. The audience loved her for it. That’s what scared the powers that be.
Read more All Hail the Queen: The Good Girl Inside Me Is Dying
The Glamour Is the Spell: the Mirror of Leonor Fini I’m learning there are many ways to cast a spell. Some whisper quietly. Some laugh aloud. Others arrive in cardinal-red tights, dressed as the Pope, while Salvador Dalí, thief and showman, watches and later imitates. Leonor Fini didn’t just don the disguise. She enacted the…
In 1970, when Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she had already decided that her work would not be a home for the white gaze. She knew Black literature was expected to make room for white perspectives and sensibilities; instead, her work would center Black life itself, with its own conflicts, beauty, horror, ethics, and…
In limited rational systems where everything is measured by clocks, rules, and who sits at the top, the psychic is straight-up resistance. The psychic does not regard productivity charts and timetables with respect.
In oppressive systems, the rational is weaponized: order, linear time, productivity, hierarchy, and punishment.
The psychic resists and values: nonlinear time via dreams, prophecy, and ancestral memory. It seeks hidden knowledge with intuition, somatic knowing, and symbol. The feminist and poet in me adores communal transmission via oral storytelling, ritual, and kitchen table talk. Gossip is real communication on forbidden subjects.
For the oppressed (by class, gender, race, etc.), these are survival hacks.
Read more Mysticism vs. Fascism: A Guide for Psychic Resistance
Fascists Are Fragile, Brothers and Fathers Too “If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.” —Toni Morrison Ever stood up to a bully? Recall how fast they folded? Keep that cowardice in mind as I paint a bird’s eye view. Nature doesn’t favor sameness; she thrives…
Invisible Strings: Poets Honor Taylor Swift's Songs
Please check out my latest pandemic-inspired essay on poetry and capitalism at Jacket Magazine – EXCERPT: There is a reason so many observations exist in relation to poetry versus politics. Try as some more privileged poets and industry makers might, they cannot truly and fully permanently attach the value of poetry to the capitalist machinery…
Jackie Henrion 5.0 out of 5 stars IN THE FUTURE AGE OF WOMAN Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2020 If you are curious about a new way to put words together to create art, Amy King’s book of poems “The Missing Museum” will blow your headphones off. Amy King doesn’t just create poems,…
Pleased to post 2 of 3 poems published in the recent issue of Tusculum Review. Thanks to Heather Elouej for the invite. ✨ Enjoy! ✨ EXCERPT: We will probably die without solutions. / In waves. And particles of light. Tusculum Review @ Tusculum University ~~~~~
If you are interested in adopting Bettering American Poetry - Volume 3, email us at [email protected] to request your sampler!
Here lives poetry that resembles a sticky dance floor. Poetry that is at once terraformed music and primal shout and wet kiss and sweaty palm. The "American" in Bettering American Poetry is a kind of ghoulish placeholder for whichever more rebellious, more enlivening world comes next.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
PRESS Breaking the Ice With Pints and Poetry @Wall Street Journal The first hour involved cocktails at the Housing Works Bookstore and Café in SoHo. Then there were readings by Colson Whitehead (“Sag Harbor”), Emily St. John Mandel (“The Singers Gun”) and poet Amy King, who runs a popular poetry group on Goodreads. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 20…
We’re carving out a new discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry to nourish and give voice to a rising tide of female resistance—and you’ve clicked right into it. Click here to read more Ms. Muse. “There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we start to recognize that we are making choices, that…
Read more Ms. Muse: Amy King on the Power of Stories and the Weight of the Current Political Moment
Bodies inhabit landscapes, are part of the landscape, and often the traditions and behaviors of specifically-identified bodies define the landscape.From Hesiod to Patricia Smith to Billy-Ray Belcourt to Ocean Vuong, we’ll interrogate what it means to be a body, to belong, to be scrutinized geographies, and to inhabit the late-capitalist American landscape. Our poems will…
Panel Discussion and Poetry Reading featuring Esther Schor, Murad Awawdeh, Christina Greer, and Amy King Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 7:00 pm The American Jewish Historical Society 15 West 16th Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212-294-6160 10$ general ● $7 students/AJHS members/seniors ● $12 at the door Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “The New Colossus,” is perhaps…
Read more “Give Me Your Tired..” : Poem, 135 years old, Makes Waves
EXCERPT from Introduction: Some may ask: Why poetry? Why respond in a kind of language where meaning is not always transparent, when the subject matter of sexual abuse might rather invite language that states categorically the terms of the experience, that does not allow for misinterpretation or ambiguity? Shouldn’t this be language that gets straight…
THE HEART KEEPS ITS OWN COMPANY I know it’s an anomalous title but I’m talking about it anyway on my 47th birthday I think because I’m thrown by the “7” as symbolic of heaven while also being a not-quite-but-almost 50 year signifier. I like to say the years are survivor points, talismans, as…
Amy King collaborated with the Guardian to curate this collection of poems. She is the author of five books of poetry, received the 2015 WNBA award, is a founding member of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and teaches Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
The only thing I know, something I must try to communicate to the future, is that a more complex and fatal humor defines the body politic. Amy King’s “Perspective” helps illustrate just how nasty and troubling it is...
Amy King’s workshops and critiques are as intelligent and intuitive as she is. She’s introduced me to conceptual ideas that seem at first complex and perhaps over my head—but the way she breaks them down and incorporates them step by step into fun and challenging exercises makes them so accessible that I find myself pondering and using them in my own poetics again and again. I’ve worked with her several times, and I highly recommend Amy’s teaching style—learned yet lucid, erudite yet playful. She’s a joy!
—Jenn Givhan, 2015 Winner NEA in Poetry
Out of the masculine guitar-as-erection sound of rock hard hard rock there emerged two women whose voices are iconic: the cool purety of Grace Slick that soared on the updrafts generated by all that electricity to sing a drug-enhanced surreality and the hot distorted whiskey voice of Janis Joplin that, when she sang the blues of blighted love, wailed for a generation. I know I’m pushing it here, but in the music of Amy King’s voice I hear an heir to those two women.
“This, of course, comes as no surprise to those familiar with King’s work. It is uninterested in evenness and regularity. It is adroit and sharp and scream-y (often in literal caps) and rampaging. You don’t disgorge a poem entitled “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI QUEER PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY” because you are trying to lull…
“Poetry is the water, the planetary pull, the sky’s embrace, and the song of oars; it is the potential of all that is human, which is comprised of atoms from farthest reaching stars, and will not cease until, perhaps, the last person no longer knows words, says the Romantic humanist in me. It is in…
Check out the event website here! As the website states, this will be an “evening of cross-genre, experimental, hybrid and anti-genre literature.” February 11th, at 7pm come hear this list of writers: Nat Baldwin Claire Donato Johannes Göransson Elizabeth Hall Brandon Hobson Robert Lopez Vi Khi Nao Julie Reverb Joanna Ruocco Abe Smith Aaron Apps Valerie…
AMY KING 