Not in the Margins, But (snugly) in the Kerning by Stephen Bett

August 11, 2023
Poet title: Not in the Margins, But (snugly) in the Kerning Poem title: Stephen Bett Poem: I’ll l’ight the fire You place the flow’ers in the vase (dude crude lewd... chick bailiwick shtick) La-la, la-la-la-la-la Come to me now (come to me now) And rest your head for just five minutes Such a cozy room (such a cozy room) Y’all CSN Young cool coots unkerned it’s N Y corduroyed off the sill cozy, cozy insistent! (in Creel voice) infra-aged, in that lil’ split second Our mouse is a very, very, very fine mouse (very fine mouse) With two cats [bats, rats] in the yard Life used to be so h’ard For you “a fluent” faux-freak (zed-head?) ... some kerning & tracking for sure La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la I (’n) sip it (lol-lol) if U kern t’ do id Catchy as catchy can (aka, rasslin’ w/ Picabia) coddled catch, all holds bar two half-C’s on Snug as a bug in smug a mis-kerning? * *Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Our House”; Marjorie Perloff’s advance praise for derek beaulieu’s VisPo work in his Surface Tension: db’s “poetry of difference, chance, and eruption? Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of infrathin” (my emphasis); one of beaulieu’s poetics’ statements: “Write not just in the margins, but in the kerning”; Creeley’s “Some Place” (“had I, had / I, insistent”); “Catch as Catch Can”: a late 19th C wrestling phrase used as the title of a 1913 Francis Picabia painting End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Stephen Bett Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 25 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com