Rattle and Numb Live #3: "Karma Souptra"

While quarantined at home, I started a new video series, "Rattle & Numb Live." Here's episode #3, featuring the 3rd poem in my recently published Selected and New Poems, "Karma Souptra" (from 2009).

For more about the book, Rattle and Numb: New and Selected Poems, 1992-2019, visit https://venetianspiderpress.com. And please subscribe to my YouTube channel as well.

Video permalink: https://youtu.be/PI7yGsPltQU.

Karma Souptra

Tin can karma
In a cemetery green sedan
Drives into the past
Through the future
Running round and round
And over and over
The illusory track of time
Like a bomb
That never goes off
Like a song that rings
In Campbell's soup cans
Round and round the rims
Not going out or in
Just sticking to the circuit
Like a one ring soup can
Gerbil wheel circus
Till the tin finally erodes
The illusion of time caves in
And full circle
Cemetery green
Karma darts to the next can
In the aisle of now
  

Karma Souptra live in St. Louis

Thank you, Jim Z McGowin, for recording this clip of me reading my "Karma Souptra" on Friday 13 April 2018 at Foam in St. Louis, Missouri. Permalink: https://youtu.be/ZOK_MgTT9dI.


The poem comes from 2009 chapbook 6/9: Improvisations in Dependence [Crisis Chronicles Press].
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Charlotte Mann Impersonates NightBallet to Attack Me

This morning I noticed a new "review" on the Amazon listing for my 2009 chapbook 6/9: Improvisations in Dependence.  It's by someone using the identity "night ballet."

I knew it couldn't be by my friend Dianne Borsenik, who runs NightBallet Press and published my 2012 book The Eater of The Absurd.  So I wondered who it was.  I clicked on night ballet and noticed that he or she had reviewed other books, back in 2006.

Since NightBallet Press didn't exist in 2006, and anyway is not and would never be responsible for such a "review," I presumed that this Amazon reviewer recently changed his or her screen name to "night ballet." 

One of this person's older reviews was of a book called Licensed to Kill.  If you take the text of that older review and plug it into a Google search, you'll see that the reviewer's name change apparently hasn't yet propagated to all systems.  You'll see her real name, which she used to review under before adopting the "night ballet" charade.  It's Charlotte Mann.