Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Associate Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

Alexis Almeida

Some Things I Love

I love when I don’t have to speak for days. I love not needing a towel because it’s so hot.
I love when I’m too tired to distrust my own mind, or when I’m awake long enough to
know I need to sleep, at least a little food or to stop obsessing over whatever I’m looking
at, this way the intensity does not seem embarrassing or wasted, and I can just lay down
among the clothes that have gathered in my bed. I love exhaustively digressive logic,
and a field in central Italy I imagined but that also exists, it was impossible to be there
with you and I love that memories are message-less, a voice can fade but music replaces
it, someone remembers us in the morning and they are there and we are gone. I love
that dew floats and settles, and that my son loved toast for weeks and now will not
touch it, sucks the peanut butter off and then throws it on the floor. I’m even being
serious about that, it makes me laugh and that laughing is like blood or naked air in my
body, the scuffed floor seems almost soft, is moving. I love that several of my friends
now have a more livable wage in new york city because of recent strikes, even if it feels
sometimes more impossible to live here by the day, and that feeling does not go away
even when I find ways to make more money, or leave the city, maybe I just need to find
a different way to live. Emily’s wedding photos arrive from the future and we all look so
good, I love that weddings make me cry predictably when they are between people I
love, though weddings in the abstract fill me with dread, that I can still share a hungover
breakfast with a friend where I doubt my most steadfast beliefs, the restaurant will not
send me away, and my friend will still love me even if I am unbearable then. I love that I
did math for years in school and have now forgotten it, didn’t really understand what
calculus had to do with planets or the trajectory of continuous change, so much of high
school felt like hell, but outside the streets sometimes did fill with singing, and flowers
made a sound in the small house.

Contributor Bio: Alexis Almeida
Reflective Piece: Caetano: On Liquid Intelligence, Speculative Genealogy, and Being Inside the Form

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