I Love Information: Poems
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Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the name Penelope. “Nobody owns the meaning of these things,” Courtney Bush writes, but this does not stop the poet from seeking, from “reading meaning in the garbage” and in the flowers growing there. What does she seek? Not facts. Instead, something transcendent and mysterious, knowledges that can only be unlocked through experimentation with language, with art.
In lieu of linear thought, Bush’s poems operate under unique logic systems that grow and branch like vines, driven not only by the urge to learn but also by the need for connection—between people, things, stories. Her speakers make cognitive leaps with youthful credulity, eager and open. “It comes down to a few things,” says one. “Vessels and bags / Every crude tool / Every day a friend to tell.” And another: “I want to tell you what a sword is. / To want to tell you has been my entire life.” They are explorers of the pathways between our outer and inner worlds, translators between what is and what could be.
Bush’s reverence for the act of thought echoes that of a religious scholar gazing at the heavens. In order to learn, these poems suggest, we must believe the not-known is worth knowing. We must let belief hover around all parts of our lives, as a child does. “To have the idea of the secret chord is to have the secret chord,” Bush writes. To learn, we must make believe.
ISBN-13: 9781639550036
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: 08-22-2023
Pages: 104
Product Dimensions: 6.30(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.55(d)
Courtney Bush is the author of I Love Information and Every Book Is about the Same Thing. Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. She lives and works as a nanny in New York.
KATELYN 1 Fucked-up Greek movie on Easter Sunday Mulberries made the doves drunk Kite’s foot was a reedlike grass How are you supposed to be survived Grief does not make us weaker But it might not make us strong like they said I love when celebrities cry on Instagram Like I love my first love And life in my eyes then outside them My house dying for the Lord to come In the form of a nonlinear accumulation In the synopsis you are described as a vulnerable screenwriter But you tried to strangle the fiancé you proposed to yesterday When I couldn’t hear the sink running Singing so loud in the shower I’ll fly away in the morning If I die Hallelujah by and by Starting from the top until my house had flooded 2 Concerning the bartender Jef with one f It was like the Middle Ages and I was like the angel Talking to Molly who was trying to work I’m back I said Maybe it was only my kink radar speaking A kink angel with a recitation just the same as the other kind Looking like a Mylar balloon in the yard I would calm down if it weren’t for the risk of dislocating my personality You’ve written beautifully about your manic episode What wonderful things to believe There is always reason to stop a sentence But no structural obligation I want to smell like Rachael Leigh Cook smelled In the scene where they go to prom I want to smell like a Roman centurion I had this lazy baseless idea I would go back to writing regular poetry 3 My boyfriend’s brother does the voice-over On a half-hour television show about animal rehabilitators Called Hope in the Wild Brittany watched it while she ate tomato pie I put bronzer on my face saying Bronzer is the velvet of the face The disgusting seal who keeps trying to escape In the third episode quickly became my North Star The cycles of love and torment coming faster Small and in my heart Last night propped up on one arm to delete larger files To free memory in my phone and saw the cat A month before the divorce Follow me along the counter The thin strip of fake granite by the sink I sat up crying afraid of the bad dreams that would come But from the dream that came I woke up laughing About the way my student wrote his last name on a star A red paper star like in a car lot And everyone in your dreams is you So you never know the you you are And you’re the only one who does I began to see all art is about organization Yes, all of it And the portrait show seems to have no faces Only the deeply ingrained human need To make useless things Everybody makes mistakes That’s what this shirt is about I called Anne-Louise, my anxious student The loudest opera recording played in her house Her mom said Anne-Louise can’t talk right now She’s giving birth to animals There she was in the background on the floor Her mom in dangling elaborate earrings said Anne-Louise made me wear these We are making soup out of Play-Doh Anne-Louise drank the purple water we rinsed the cabbage with I play along but know that of all the children This lifestyle could break Anne-Louise Who wants to count the circle crackers on each child’s napkin Who needs to help me pass out the snack Who can’t sleep at rest time because she is so excited to have a job But I’m not lucky My fear is that I will forget to do everything my fear Is that my love is weak What will I do when my little students start organizing the world this way Anne-Louise did once write a poem, though not an alarming one Only mimicking the organization that will ruin your life It was about eating a rainbow Then Mikey lying on the floor said I’m writing a poem about circles And we saw a circle has 0 sides but I can’t have 0 things 5 I had my second revelation The thought planted in my head in usable language when I woke from sleep Was not a novel idea We are supposed to recreate our lives the way a little child would Inside the realm of your imagination And the small realm of your control Pronoun incongruity is retained because it was a revelation I do not love the revelation Which pretends to know the way a child’s mind works So many adults do that Even I talk to the children this way sometimes I say We aren’t yelling today, my love When that’s clearly what we are doing The people who made up that revelation Are the same people who think every kid likes the Beatles We make our own music here Oh my word / I love that bird All the same it was my revelation If someone else has a revelation I get to keep mine I have had a revelation And I will have no other worry Well I have one My love being weak DIED SINGING At 9 a.m. holding a sponge bloated with soap and water I burst into tears imagining my life without the constant torment Of my relationship with alcohol My arms became weak and more realizations entered About what I was afraid of What was beautiful in my village What gave stories necessity It was the personality I have Oh it was myself John Cassavetes knew something about me In all those scenes when someone forces someone else to sing There is a dark interpretation to the sweetest song The children gathering seaweed The unreliable narrator you follow to the riverbed Reading meaning in the garbage Flowers growing in the garbage My heart has been totally eclipsed with an unhealthy need Through the countryside I’ve been dragging this shovel I will drag until I find the right clay for building a bell My hero designed the ugliest restaurant I’ve ever laid eyes on Feed the dogs Give the demons to the pigs Wear a simple garment God will forgive you That’s not your job I love these drums I am so pure of heart I didn’t believe in evil until it befell me Women gather at the fountain Small radios hung from their necks Men laid down to rest on rugs with intricate patterns Kim said she has learned remarkable things by living Receiving hostility with no motivation Transmitting Withstanding forces of love The clay became pliable as my hands warmed it More red than brown Many hands dedicated their heat to the red bell In dreams I pursued the bell until my waking life took on the quality of a ringing The contour of all sounds added pressure Under which I was compelled to submit To the sharp rim of the bell The tongue inside it being swung by a strong angry man With ginger on his breath It comes down to a few things Vessels and bags Every crude tool Every day a friend to tell Raphael’s fresco The two angels flanking And his manic episode a few years ago And you’re told they have the knowledge of the causes of things And they tell you where to look And you’re told to have fun with it You there at the limits Having your breakdown in the kitchen with the whole day ahead POEM AFTER MY FIRST REVELATION I’m it I’m not a part of it It is a narrative of immaculate control. Marjorie, by meeting me in my experience of reality imprints what she could’ve only said in person: Everything is a choice. She would’ve decided this to be the most predictable moment for the rest of my life, here at Andrew’s house, choosing not to wear shoes outside to sit on the bench. I heard, Looks like somebody doesn’t have shoes on. It was a choice. Andrew operates as light from a dead star says if I learned anything from Marjorie Welish it’s everything is a choice and the work is done in a mechanism we are fools in believing taught by nature’s incoherence, the disorder of how leaves fall how sometimes the bank is just closed and same, each other. In ways the outside might know down into each self, and dimly inharmonious with not. I received a revelation, I will have no other worry I don’t think about it Sitting in Delaware beyond the revelation, I will have no other worry I don’t think it The revelation is that this narratological structure is included in the perfect disorder. The point of this narrative, as particular fatal intervention arches back over the looseness of a friendship, a time spent in schools, and swallows, joins the river returning to bare feet the song of Marjorie’s maxim, it is not the narrative, but that the structure exists, that it is possible It is not thinking it which I do That these should not be tercets, but they would not be tercets, and it never goes back to the way it was, if someone else gets a revelation I keep mine. Across the marble countertop someone says he is just getting started. To say started on the comparative outskirt of life’s first moment after revelation, nothing could start. In bed I can’t explain this, I feel like the revelation is going to text me, it feels different. Life after having the revelation is not receiving the revelation. How is life after. Slow, the holy emerging fit for use. Not because of the revelation and not despite it, it’s not that good. It is just between, it is alongside. I give a value judgment to prepositions because they have them. 2008 After the shrimp festival under bug glow little moving pieces of light in the pale light halos responding to my motion threw rotisserie chicken bones into the woods that night. The quarter hour alone I read from the Bible on my phone and thought is this about me? I went listening, let words between myself and one who is no longer in or has not yet entered this world be few as pure strategy. I was so desperate for information from outside the event, like the dark outside the windows but from outside it was the house that was dark. In comparing myself to others there was a slippage, from other bodies to somewhere between myself and works of art, first a documentary about a very rare type of mirage. I was nothing like the mirage and nothing like the way the men talked about it, a kind of respectful wonder I doubted I had ever felt. Then there were the poems I was nothing like. Kyle reached out having read Ecclesiastes to his father. I remember you loved there is a time for casting stones away and a time for gathering stones together. From the rectangle of blue light I read all is vanity all is vanity and a striving after wind and I did love that but at 90 degrees, sweating in the middle of the night, my nearly euphoric fear, how much I didn’t know I didn’t know, that one day I would turn around and see lined up all the things I had done in order to survive and think what’s amazing is not what you did, not that you did it when you were a little child but that you did all these sad strange things for me.Read an Excerpt
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My captain told me I’m only a transmitter for other things
Late Preamble 3 Katelyn 4 Katelyn 14 Jubilate Agno 15 Katelyn 20 Katelyn 22 Katelyn 23 Died Singing Katelyn 26 Rilke Voice 28 Poem After My First Revelation 35 Cassandra from Agamemnon Voice 37 My Son Is Home 39 Penelope Voice 42 Katelyn 45 Seraphim or Nothing 47 Baby Blue 57 Katelyn 61 Katelyn 63 One-Day Winning Streak 64 Last Night Kyle 66 Upstairs Bar 68 Talking 71 2008 75 I Love Information 77 Table of Contents
When You Get to Sparta Voice 1