My Dearest Best American Poetry and/or Coconut Reader, if
you’ve ever connected to the World Wide Web over the past five years, you
surely recognize the name of Rebecca “Reb” Livingston, poetry’s most forthright
and sparkly blogger, editor of one of the world’s best poetry journals (http://www.notellmotel.org/), book
publisher extraordinaire,
author of the fantastic Your Ten Favorite Words, the first-ever Coconut Book, along with lots of other world wonders. What most amazes me about Reb is that she
never does anything in an ordinary way: No Tell Motel is one of the rare web
journals that rejects the issue format (Dan Nester’s Unpleasant Event Schedule is another) in favor of a poem a day;
when she and I co-hosted an offsite AWP reading last year, Reb kept pushing the
format into the now famous Micropress Poetry Pageant; and her forthcoming book God Damsel, from which the laments below
spring, is unlike anything I’ve ever read — a sexy, multi-toned rhetorical
fugue. She’s famous not only for her
inventiveness, but for her ever-grounded, ever-honest, ever-direct perspective
on contemporary poetry and poetics, the person more than any other who brings
listserv disputes back into focus. No
one else has Reb’s energy; no one else has the same mix of hilarity,
brilliance, and sexiness!! & she’s a
great mom!! I adore her like no one else!!! Reb’s poems first appeared in Coconut 12.
— Bruce Covey
Lament for Bust
"Because his language mistreated me, I once suckled a
shepherd like a woe-dodo competing with a miscreant. My tenderness consummated fracture,
birthed my alien nation. Because there was a tempest in my meadow, I bleated
into my cleavage like a love-struck lamb bleeding; and my vessel ceremoniously
packed with princely trinkets; and a gigolo rose among tomatoes. Because the
language of the Tempest was abandoned and slack, I undreamed the entire event
and weeped "Greeny trespassers stole my utensils! Oh darling
spatula!" The Tempest’s poised speech flattened, relieved.
Lament for Must
The Sultana, after she scribbled the poem for her thinking
thingamabob, her one-time hearttrob, she scatters humbly a lament for the dead
meadow, her home dubbed asylum: "The Tempest who introduced himself – his
language flabberghasted. Compelled to buckle because of the Tempest, I am the
Sultana for whom the Tempest thrummed to be – his language mistreated me. The
macabre Tempest scrubbed in hush, I numbed for gust but did not depart. Because
of this vantage Tempest I could not salvage a beholder, not one Savage
beheld."
— Reb Livingston