Mary Ellen Solt

owl

soon

extra explanatory note on the BellumLetters

BellumLetters is a series of anti-war/protest poems written during April 2007 as part of the napowrimo undertaking.* BellumLetters is a play on the term belles-lettres, which means"beautiful" or "fine" writing. Bellum is the Latin word for war, thus "bellumletters" is meant to suggest "war writing."

*napowrimo = national poetry writing month. Term coined by Maureen Thorson who originated the tradition of writing one poem per day throughout the month of April, aka "National Poetry Month."

poems from Guantanamo

BellumLetters (2.1)

BOOKS OF TOMORROW (waving goodbye)

the needle threads the space that was
the body before handguns, plastics.
glass-litter in the grass, a home
for ants, crow-gifts, a sublime
hatchet the sun glinting over
the tracks, razor zips away
towards corn, corn-fed autos
and stones stacked according
to plan (whose home?). Waxed
lumber builds our wishlist, snug
in water, a place for bones
to bend without a sound.

Kaya Oakes is rad

Kate Greenstreet interviews Kaya Oakes

BellumLetters en route

I mailed out the BellumLetters chaps for Dusie yesterday. It's an interesting punctuation for a project that I feel is still developing. I like this actually -- the idea of publication as a moment of shift or diversion or pause as opposed to a sort of terminus or ending. It's almost a way to see it as a terminus in literal sense -- a point of simultaneous departure and arrival in all sorts of directions. Disruption.

In the end, I opted for a design that satisfied my desire for a tactile sense of the pedestrian. A design that used materials familiar to me from days in elementary school. The war is in everything I touch. It is even in construction paper and glue. And in stickers from kmart. Stickers that depict dog tags and tanks and army stars and bombers and helicopters. No ambulances. No wounds. No flag-draped coffins. No people even. Only the depiction of materials that remotely represent the human who wears the dog tags, who drives the tank, who flies the plane. And a representation in which "the enemy" is an absence. A space without. For a moment it possible to imagine that soldiers are released to this emptiness. That this emptiness is not a construction that intends to conceal the humans who live there. Live where soldiers are sent to fight. Sent to _________.

SUPERSONIC