Poet Genine Lentine

The 2014 issue of Provincetown Arts features, along with many other poets, the poet Genine Lentine, of San Francisco. I really loved her style, with words, phrases, and images sidling up to each other, sometimes bouncing off each other. It used to be more common, I think, that poets would use spacing on the page to define rhythm and emphasis, etc. In this one, I like how she uses brackets and slashes. Do I know what the poem "means"? No, thank God. But I do have an inkling about certain passages. (I hope she doesn't mind that I put this up here. Buy one of her books!)

Read "The World"

For [you], I cast [the world]

—eye level          agave
has its own wrapping / is its own wrapping 
between the wrapping and itself, nothing but itself
groove the blades make \ embossing self with self

plums jostle clean in a glass bowl of water
leafblade or plum—yes, closer, like that

pale green crown, glass bowl
I don't care what form you take this time press
here on my shadow
I like it when you touch me there

everywhere casting

Would you mind standing here, where the planet would be?
where reality would be      if I let it?

let me list the ways I'd like to [    ]
let me list
let me
let
and now I've disappeared.
(what I've been wanting all along)
saying it, I'm back
(all along what) I've (been wanting)

let me list                    rustle
your chapparal
divebell your vents

where I was standing—reality to be there
where I am standing—reality to be here

come here, speculative and spinning
come here, you flooded, burning rock


Copyright © 2009 Genine Lentine All rights reserved
from Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes
New Michigan Press