ooOO That Smell! / Elevator Music XV

     "...poetry is offensive and readers must confront and pass through the offense, which is a moment of challenge, crisis, and decision generated out of the prevailing cultural view of language, its appropriate uses, and its characteristics."
          - Hazard Adams in The Offense of Poetry

     Of course, we're not talking about subject here, offensive subject matter is easy enough. We're talking about an assault on language, and an, uh, salt on language. And Dan, uh... it''s all tongue language. Of course it is.

Elevator Music

all the all the ceonothus
flowers covered in bees, they
buzz, a machete curves
but she did it with a
wire, not a
blade, she wanted to
hang, and
hangs
still in me who found her
hanging
she was right to do so
to pray in such a way
to offer such an image to the world
what image have you offered?
that has affected anyone so profoundly?
all you seem to do is
sit in gardens scribbling the names of bees
as if you were the stone beside you
as if you had never destroyed anyone

For God's Sake

     Writing in the early twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton lamented the state of art around him thus: "In the beginning there was art for God's sake, then in the Renaissance there was art for man's sake. Beginning with Impressionism there was art for art's sake. Now, unfortunately, we have no art for God's sake!"
     PageBoy Magazine calls this bit of art criticism written 100 years ago "the most clever statement on the state of art today," and has deemed him one of the "top five funniest men alive!" (For the remaining four on that list please buy a copy of PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 either from the email above or your friendly neighborhood soon-to-be-going-out-of-business magazine shop... Cheerio!)

Douche Chomp

     "As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good. I use it because I have to but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other."
          - Marcel Duchamp

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 is out. To get copies email us or go to various places of magazininess in Portland, Olympia and Seattle. Don't worry, like the universe, we too are expanding, and will soon be in other solar systems. PageBoy Magazine: Use it because you have to!

Ding. Dong.

     "You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine."
                       - da Vinci

Euclid / Elevator Music XIV

                                           GUILTY

    Euclidean - referring to parallel lines and right angles. geometric in form or effect.

  
you can't decay of a summer evening
it's no use, these archaisms
even if you want to, it's sung
though with a strange bird it's possible
to have a good rot in the grass
somewhere in the city park
where drunken men pee under
rhododendron tendrils, loggy
or in thick azalea villages
it doesn't matter where so long as they're peeing
that's how you know it's a city park

     we decomposed last night
     the weight of broken families
     pinning us to the grass
     the park like a haiku
     whose misery we couldn't escape

(Referential) Elevator Music XIII

last night
     she had a bee sting
and played for hours on it
until bath time
when the tears came
it was red and swollen and
looked incongruous
     on a child's foot
          otherwise so
undersized
     the ovenmit was a good joke
but helped only
     for a moment
her tears carried us in
          (again)
to that steady panacea
     sleep.

To Print

     Issue II 10 is going to print. No, it's gone to print. PageBoy Magazine issue II 10 includes work by the following artists:

     Erik Anderson's The Poetics of Trespass is just out from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. He lives in Colorado.

     Emily Beyer continues to live in Seattle. Her poems have been published in The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, The Diagram, and are forthcoming in TriQuarterly.

     Amalio Madueño lives in the Upper Rio Grande region of New Mexico, near Taos. Long associated with the Taos Poetry Circus, he publishes and performs his work throughout the West in various formats. His second feature length book of poems will be forthcoming in Fall 2010 by MouthFeel Press (El Paso). He considers himself a Border poet & cruises at an altitude of 7500 feet.

     Chicago native/Seattle resident Paul Nelson founded SPLAB, wrote a book of essays on poetics, Organic Poetry, a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter and hopes to be fully hydrated someday.

     Natalie Phillips is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. She grew up in the East Bay in California and studied at the University of Santa Cruz, where she received a BA in art with a concentration in painting and drawing. She's an only child, and very special.

     Collin Tracy has work forthcoming in Alligator Juniper and in a microfiction anthology from Cinnamon Press. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a lazy eye.

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 will be out sometime in the next two weeks. To order copies write to pageboymagazine@hotmail.com, or look for it at local bookstores / magazine shops / libraries in Seattle and Portland. PageBoy Magazine: yay!