distinct walk Arkikosa
nor Algol Arkikosa

azury slag patchouli
blowback skald Arkikosa

can obsidian light stay
grisly Whig Arkikosa

cardboard mask Grinchus tsantsa
you that rock Arkikosa



"Next time someone diagnoses "the situation of poetry" in earnest tones."


"And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatization to it began to set in. (...) It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial. Reverses, losses, deadlocks now almost unnoticed bred one another; every day the news hammered one more nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel. Faith came down to a slogan, desperately re-worded to catch the eye, requiring to be pasted each time more strikingly on to hoardings and bases of monuments. ...No, no virtue was to be found in the outward order of things: happy those who could draw from some inner source." --3lizab*th Bow*n, from Th* H*at of th* Day; quoted in: Writ*rs in World War II, ed M Richler (1991)



"Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with which it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes." --Al*xand*r Smith


"Milman Parry asked an epic singer in Nevesinje, Hercegovina, if he could compose a song about him. Milovan Vojcic' did so, and it has been published in The Singer of Tales." --Lord


"The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards." --Smith

"They are insouciant against their missing what they have not owned,
     they alone can master this skill"


"Let me chop apart
With my bare hands
This blurred forest."

--Spic*r


"The tradition is not a rigid monolith outside the singer, but as dynamic as the singers who operate in it, who form and constantly reform it." --Lord, op cit


M. Pavic has now-ish "d*lta-nov*l" out!


Circumstantial assiduous hourglass folk · woo lay loo
Aglow shoal circumstantial · assiduous you'll forsook
Algol ash arousal lull fog · halloa wooly slug
Assiduous circumstantial · Allah forsook golly woo us


(via)


"And so [Avdo Mededovi´c] had a repertory of fifty-eight epics; Parry recorded nine of these on phonograph discs and Nikola Vujnovi´c, Parry's assistant, wrote down four others from Avdo's dictation. ...The total singing time for all the recorded material listed here is approximately fifty-three hours." --Lord

Coolth. Running on almost nothing. How good i am at that.


Wom*n of th* Asylum.


"...when Parry asked singers when they had finished dictating songs for him whether they thought that sung songs were better than dictated ones or vice versa, their answers invariably were: 'Sung songs are truer, dictated songs are finer.' " --Lord, op cit


Arcosanti craw
scalar posh

as famish into Ithaca wintry school
trawl washboard swag is scrumptious

caravan all basilisk crystal


"For many in Citta slow, the urban ideal is the late-medieval city, a rabbit warren of cobbled streets where people came together to shop, socialize and eat in charming piazzas." --Honoré


"Linguistics is divided like Graves' mythology of mythology, a triple goddess--morphology, phonology, and syntax." --Jack Spic*r

Sentence #4, guest-edited by Peter Johnson, is now available.

Peter has selected prose poems for this issue from:

Robert Alexander, John Allman, Nin Andrews, Margaret Atwood, Walter Bergen, Chad Bartlett, Louis E. Bourgeois, John Bradley, Jen Bryant, Laura Chester, Killarney Clary, Peter Conners, Matthew Cooperman, Andy Cox, Talia Danesi, Cortney Davis, Michel Delville, Denise Duhamel, Jamey Dunham, Tom Dvorske, Russell Edson, Richard Garcia, Scott Glassman, Georges Godeau (tr. Kathleen McGookey), Ray Gonzalez, Nolan Heinz, Cecil Helman, Friedrich Holderlin (tr. Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff), Louis Jenkins, Brian Johnson, Roxane Beth Johnson, Alice Jones, Christine Boyka Kluge, Ginger Knowlton, Mary A. Koncel, Gerry LaFemina, David Lehman, P. H. Liotta, Rachel Loden, Gian Lombardo, Eric Lorberer, Robert Lunday, Morton Marcus, Campbell McGrath, Joyelle McSweeney, Jay Meek, Christopher Merrill, Robert Miltner, Michelle Noteboom, Nina Nyhart, Ethan Paquin, Jane Lunin Perel, Chris Propst, Kerry Reilly, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Maureen Seaton, David Shumate, Barry Silesky, James Tate, Ryan van Cleave, Mark Vinz, Liz Waldner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Thom Ward, Charles Harper Webb, Bruce Weigl, Tom Whalen, Elizabeth Willis, Max Winter, Peter Wortsman, Kirby Wright, and Gary Young.

The issue also features essays by Marjorie Perloff, Peter Johnson, and Rolf Hughes. And:
Joe Ahearn reviews Sight Progress, by Zhang Er
Sally Ashton reviews Povel, by Geraldine Kim
Jarret Green reviews The Feast, by Walter Bargen
Brooke Horvath reviews Heart of Anthracite, by Campbell McGrath
Gian Lombardo reviews two books by Carlos M. Luis and Derek White
Ellen McGrath Smith reviews The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, by Rachel Loden
Jerry McGuire reviews Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair, by George Kalamaras
Chris Murray reviews nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, by Sawako Nakayasu
Ravi Shankar reviews Precise Machine, by Dennis Barone
Rebecca Spears reviews The After-Death History of My Mother, by Sandy McIntosh
Plus the usual bibliography of recent articles and books on prose poetry, prose poets, and the poetics of the prose poem.

Sentence is available at many independent bookstores around the country. If your local book store doesn't carry Sentence, it may order from Bernhard DeBoer. You may subscribe or purchase a single copy at the Sentence website: http://firewheel-editions.org/sentence/current.htm
Sentence is also available from Amazon and EBSCO.

"Two centuries ago, the average pig took five years to reach 130 pounds; today, it hits 220 pounds just after six months and is slaughtered before it loses its baby teeth." --Carl Honoré, In Prais* of Slown*ss (2004)


Always angry, always anxious; but wanting most of all, to follow a narrow path without difficulty or slowdwns. I put on music, and try to think of humans as making only this sound. Not a raucous roar, or cry of pain. Just this. This.


"Why should we not erect an asylum for venerable genius, as we do for the brave and the helpless part of our citizens? It might be inscribed a Hospital for Incurables!" --Curiositi*s


Bitt*r is th* N*w Black.



Arkikosa crawling skald
silk akin
Sogdian tsunami laptop scaffold fry

mask twinkling slow fizz
unknown aggry osmium skin map
alloy idiom

is gibbons
slag skull caracul skimp biz

on asking folly ago idolatry
fizgig fathoms and its usurp sump


"...for this cold impersonal dawn was for me another kind of darkness, a new and secret form of night." --Gw*ndolyn Mac3e*n


Plan*tary Dissid*nts.

"A shadowy, unapproachable forest of maple, birch, dogwood, cypress and pine softened by a garland of New England wildflowers: bergamot, columbine, rue anemone, blue violet, creeping phlox, bloodroot, toadflax, and pixie moss. ." (via M*tafilt*r)


marrow turmoil zarf
Munthuch zarf

bright bars Sogdian script aurochs myrrh
murmuring sandalwood zarf

toad dirham parch stomp tumultuous wodwo
Mithra sorrow zarf

aurochs myrrh lair Grinchus waspish chull
dowsing chav talismans zarf


"Sir Robert Cotton (it is said) being one day at his tailor's, discovered (what must have been the antiquary's astonishment!) that the man held in his hand, ready to cut up for measures--the original Magna Charta, with all its appendages of seals and signatures. He bought the singular curiosity for a trifle, and recovered in this manner what had been given over for lost! This anecdote is found in the Colomesiana, page 198; and Colomies long resided and died in this country, a man of pure morals and rigid veracity. The original Magna Charta is certainly preserved in the Cottonian library; it exhibits marks of dilapidation, but whether from the invisible scythe of time, or the humble scissors of the tailor, I leave for the subject of a future archaiological volume." --ibid


Ik Marv*l.


"Sherman's work then descends into darkness..."

"In the sixties you'd count on less than one percent of moulds meeting tolerance, which translated to about three or four hundred diaphragms per day being rejected and sent to orphanages where they'd be used as foundation garments. Nowadays the figure is in the thousands and they go straight to landfill."


   "TV Off

He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass--

Staring into flames, through thr grille of age
Like a late fish, face clothed with fungus,
Keeping its mouth upstream.

Remorseful for what nobody any longer suffers
Nostalgic for what he would not give twopence to see back
Hopeful for what he will not miss when it fails

Who lay a night and a day and a night and a day
Golden-haired, while his friend beside him
Attending a small hole in his brow
Ripened black."

--T*d Hugh*s


"The situation only makes sense if you consider a separate entity called "American Christianity" which is an entirely separate religion to Christianity." (via robotwisdom)


Taylorism.


"It is a curious circumstance in literature, that we owe Tacitus to this singular copy [from a monast*ry in W*stphalia]; for the Roman Emperor of that name had copies of the works of his illustrious ancestor, placed in all the libraries of the empire, and every year had ten copies transcribed: but the Roman libraries were all destroyed, and the imperial protection has availed nothing against the teeth of time." --Curiositi*s of Lit*ratur*

finicky chav sharav · coign
of nadir · mokita incog

in this abrupt coolth · Pluto
ablution · no ringing ghost coign

talion potlatch · snitch brillig
hip octopus · griffin incog

obsidian thorns throng · Grinchus
clings · Achamoth coign


Kilim.


Aurochs R*divivus.