(opening lines; trans, Maureen Freely)
The silence of snow…. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.
Déjà vu, déjà vu you & me too, fou
Mea maxima culpa! I’m an idiot—an idiot squared!
… where angels go / I am / a snowflake / and thus / I snow
I am snowing… was snowing… I will snow you!
Snowed in da face, fren’ — Istanbul
tour guide white rain spittle reign
— this Nobel prizer aint no prize here
persona non grata Do NOT speak his name!!!
“They’s no there there” just a
snow white brick Angel # Zero
Nothing pools like suk’cess…
That thing he felt inside himself
… pooling across his face?
Some take-home orphan
spray-on poem [1]
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Stephen Bett
Quote & italics are from the Kohout poem, earlier; mentioning the name of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk in his hometown. Istanbul can be an innocent tourist’s health threat—“no one here reads him; do NOT dare mention his name again!” (the Euro-focussed Pamuk, no fan of the Erdoğan quasi-dictatorship?); better not mention Galatasaray vs. Fenerbahçe either
Novel Lines 101: 101 alphabetical poems. Through 101 novels and metafictions, each poem in this collection riffs, literally, on its subject texts’ opening line(s).
An innovative, sassy, but deadly and pointedly serious tour through late 20th and early 21st centuries’ fiction from the Americas and from Western, Central and Eastern Europe. A mash-up of signifiers and signifieds, numerological flakiness, and PoWorld’s bland, Mega-church hegemonies—all encountering, in the midst of our present day cocktail-hour capitalism, some of the truly great novelists of our times.
Website: StephenBett.com
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