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    15 Ways to Stay Alive
    15 Ways to Stay Alive
    15 Ways to Stay Alive
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    15 Ways to Stay Alive

    By Daphne Gottlieb

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    About this ebook

    Broken hearts, scattered dreams, postpunk politics, and postmodern cut-up collages spiral and flow in award-winning poet Daphne Gottlieb’s latest collection of startling new works that explore survival after personal or communal disasters and the renewal that follows. Whether she’s writing about unanticipated outcomes (After the Midway Ride Collapsed”), her mother’s passing (Somewhere, Over”), or absurd situations (Preoccupation”), Gottlieb’s deeply personal insights into the complex areas where life and contemporary culture collide offer readers a unique, thought-provoking perspective.

    "I Have Always Confused Desire with Apocalypse"

    We met over a small
    earthquake. Now, my knees

    shake whenever
    you come around

    and I’ve noticed your hand
    has a slight tremor.

    Daphne Gottlieb is the award-winning author of seven books including the critically acclaimed poetry collection Final Girl (Soft Skull Press) and the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious (Cleis Press), illustrated by Diane DiMassa. Gottlieb has performed and taught creative writing workshops throughout the United States. She received her MFA from Mills College, and currently resides in San Francisco.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManic D Press, Inc.
    Release dateApr 19, 2011
    ISBN9781933149554
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      Book preview

      15 Ways to Stay Alive - Daphne Gottlieb

      reading daphne gottlieb: an introduction

      Daphne Gottlieb’s poetry insists on truth telling. Her work refuses boundaries; linguistic and cultural pyrotechnics smash through preconceived notions of contemporary poetics. These poems formally and thematically traverse barriers of aesthetic, poetic, and political division to spark new and incendiary meanings. The inclusion of external narratives— of linguistic bits, of colloquial language, of pieces from the popular and mainstream press, of famous and found words across canonical and genre lines—has a long history, particularly since modernism. Gottlieb’s poems are informed by and make their own place in this tradition.

      In their sampling of other texts and their recontextualization of voices, these poems draw generatively on images and references whose meanings are amplified or transformed by their poetic re-sourcing. The contrapuntal mash-up of, for example, St. Augustine and a BDSM manual, of Charles Bukowski and Kanye West is made more meaningful by the location of the source material at the book’s end rather than on the page itself. This location allows us to avoid oversimplified readings and reveals connections and disjunctions that are part of the new textured voice of the poem and that lay bare something about the myths under which we live.

      Gottlieb’s poems engage in a call and response with Adorno’s famous claim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. 15 Ways to Stay Alive questions speech value, narration, and access, asking critical questions of itself and poetics and politics in general: What is voice? What voices are heard and for what and by whom? Are any voices non-complicit? If not, then what? There is still the screaming. Can a book be a grenade? An activist space? Can a poem? What the book finally asserts is the popping power of the words on the page as words, as frame, as highly or hypertextual/ textured language which refuses to be evacuated of meaning, and which in fact shimmers and shakes and reverberates with powerful claims about meaning and the requirement of language to create change.

      Kirsten T. Saxton

      Mills College

      "Unbeing dead

      isn’t being alive."

      — ee cummings

      adage

      Don’t borrow

      spilled milk.

      Beggars don’t have another

      shoe to drop.

      The pot’s calling

      the early bird.

      Don’t count

      your chickens before

      pigs fly, before pearls.

      Don’t call the sow’s ear.

      Clothes make

      others. A rolling boy

      gathers. One man washes

      another. Unto. Others.

      Take the boy

      out of the country. Kill

      two birds. Save nine. Walk

      a mile. Unto. It is better

      to give. It is better to grieve.

      It is better to grift.

      Receive. The hand

      that feeds you

      must come down.

      The bite is worse.

      God only gives you

      a stitch in the side.

      Kill two. Save nine.

      Bless the sow purse,

      the silk ear.

      Make hay. Shine.

      open water

      There’s a shark in Australia.

      I live in San Francisco.

      Today is Monday.

      I am almost out of nicotine patches

      and there are so many ways to be white

      and all of them are wrong.

      On the bus today, this woman

      was telling me that doctors

      cut off her antenna.

      She sleeps much better now

      but it’s easier to sneak up on her.

      Somewhere in Australia,

      there is a shark swimming in

      the open sea. I visit that shark

      in my head

      when things are bad.

      The shark doesn’t care.

      I didn’t go to a party last night

      but I think I will go to one tonight

      maybe.

      You have to be careful

      who you turn your back on.

      I can’t go to a party

      with no one

      to watch

      my back. Here is what I

      learned today on the TV: Now we have

      healthcare. A shark can bite

      another shark in half.

      The important men are using

      bad words at each other.

      There are too many parties

      not to go to.

      Sharks do not sleep.

      Now we have healthcare.

      Some days I am the only

      sane person in the world

      and I get lonely.

      On the bus, this woman was telling me

      about the bullets in her vagina.

      Not the same woman.

      A different one.

      I didn’t tell her about my shark.

      My friend’s cat is sick.

      He is now a five thousand dollar cat.

      It is a five thousand dollar love.

      It is a big love.

      It is spring.

      I am a girl

      and there is also a boy.

      It is more fun to think about boys

      than sharks. The shark swims in small circles

      at night when I am awake

      and I am thinking about the boy.

      Sharks do not sleep.

      The shark thinks about food.

      I worry about who has my back.

      I worry about spring ending,

      about the price of things.

      There’s a five thousand dollar love

      in the belly of that shark.

      lonely indonesia

      ¹

      1. Checking In

      I’d like a room.

      Can I see the room?

      Is there any better room?

      I will take this room.

      2. During Your Stay

      Where can

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