Issue 2.1
Winter 2022
Dana Stamps II
Reflection
It is not my intention to impose a method of analysis for achieving an accurate understanding. But that said, I will say that this poems is not making a statement; it is, rather, trying to create a language experience.
The Forest of True Incivility
Old sentences, splendid perturbations
of winging it, are propagated amid the impetus,
a gathering of blunt mediums.
In addition to free pizza, a rare position
​
which falls like the philosophies
of humor, calligraphy is Egyptology
dating the stoned. The format
is seasonal, a venal epic bequeathed to lemons
​
—think Vivaldi—the science of hi-
jacking. Almost spin, neurotransmitters
flood the tells of solo gigolos in the dormitory
of dirty rooms, not a representation
of Corbusier shelters-n-such, which succumbs
to snoops, a salty culinary artifice.
Facts be damned, exclusively for friends
who hunt, the rulers are lost as inch-
​
worms and centipedes; the new miasma of yon haughty
quietus is dire, an effete effrontery of
horns. Tritons and troglodytes, Gertrude Stein
might have said, are in the inn of innuendo.
​
Ducasse? Not obvious, but staying
at the goosy mobile home park Lautréamont,
far from SoCal, could zonk
loquacious ideologues into gadabouts.
​
That bodacious bugaboo could be a bee,
a byzantine brouhaha, but it’s not.
At last, to ameliorate the anathema, great zeal
is maudlin, a gallivant to Azusa, cruising Route 66.
Dana Stamps, II. has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Cal State University of San Bernardino and has worked as a fast-food server, a postal clerk, a security guard, and a group home worker with troubled boys. Poetry chapbooks For Those Who Will Burn and Drape This Chapbook in Blue were published by Partisan Press, and Sandbox Blues by Evening
Street Press.
Dana's Book Recommendation
A favorite book that inspired my poem published in CPJ would be Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery. His poetry is different than mine, more about the interior landscape of the mind than mine. I explore words. His lack of making a statement in many of his poems, though, and my realizing the beauty he achieved by doing this, inspired me to spend a year trying to make the language itself enough...by giving it subtle music and intense voice...without it specifically saying anything to overbear or hinder the enjoyment of the language experience, the power of the words themselves.