Lavender: Look the Universe is Dreaming

Lavender Ink is a small publisher of poetry and literary extravagance in New Orleans.

You are viewing a page in the old website. Please click here to go to the new one. Thanks!

look the universe is dreaming

by Bill Lavender

Potes & Poets Press, 2003

ISBN 1-893541-73-8

5.5x8.5 inches, perfect bound, 64 pages.

$12.95 plus 1.50 shipping.

Return to Lavender Ink

from look the universe is dreaming:

While away a list of night’s language, Paul being Wallace, roomed with me.
What he on reading the mailbox to the students found, save his few, were the years it talked beach gag.
Easy to put an address on the million kinds of first sleep,
but the year’s placed singer, if on second I agree, Bill, is novelty when I’m distribution: finally they see Peter and he the later poem. Some poems folks disenjoined.
Response did run the year at Loyola, the beach was in folks’ books, and her e-message— I mean
it’s yammering, writing questions to Leon, wanting something second— what did
I mind when sent 6 too few at the hearing, never to poems by Chomsky, but the in-box, is it it then? Maybe
but the third I
poem hit Loyola alone on Hamlet’s day without Bill well. Can’t but half of you put
a week long date; lets go through the sun over the guy’s problem, but not my about face,
not the grape’s state open not looking about.
Book and the The are I and about ‘em a doing. Will you call because they asked
about the week, what is what and what for next, the “along he came with them to an experience learned address that pointed
all about...” Too weak the poems yet I carry away the actual, the partial somehow
my Golden Book has let go. What poems then recall, the book
full of Michael’s stuff looping away, day by day, poem to ESP.
Anyway the knot does last into the beach.

from the back cover:

The “excuse for/ privilege is shame,” writes Bill Lavender in the stunning title sequence of his new collection, look the universe is dreaming. Lavender’s subject is as ethical as Oppen’s, his poetry as contemplative of the what is as Stevens (Lavender calls it the “the”). But Lavender’s nothing if not his own man. Poems of found, recycled, recontextualized language swerve from prismatic abstraction to the wry and tender observations that are his signature: “a future ecstasy uncovering/ a planetary love” (“Dwellingplace Mountainsprings”). In “caps for privilege man,” Lavender wittily exhorts: “out-comprehend him”! And he does in these brilliant poems, again and again!

— Cynthia Hogue

Will you take some responsibility for this; vatic echo replicants revolving (evolving) in one hundred and one debts( doubts( DNA trails. [syntax sleuth] Earnest ping-pong and ironic slaughter is your tradition( but estranged, as if managed by mass publication, dictated by a linguistic universe sleeping thru the distinctions you wd or cd make. Bill Lavender as absentee landlord’s flunky who cares enough to help you rearrange the furniture left behind. [sorts] Whodunit: poem scene forensic investigation manual. Corpus delecti or abjection of po-rhetorical slurs: find your match or stand yourself up, "murmur and annihilate." Now's the time the time is then. You, poet, implicated and uncomfortable in that fact?

— John Lowther

A poetry beautifully computed, figured, factored, equated, equivocated, assembled, & trimmed. "the have & I clash." "into our daddy of these." Borrowed & re-composed, guided, formulated. One's own words returning repossessed and re-placed. Of worlds imagined and imagining, at once archaic & futuristic. Erasure in the sun; a re-tolling for whom the bell; a recalibration; a re-tooling; machine shop poetry; quite a-musing & engaging. A tasty reduction—the sauce is the thing. "now the soul has dust-men"!

— Hank Lazer

I like this book because my name is in it three times. That aside, look the universe is dreaming is impressive in its warmth. Bill doesn't paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa because he hates it; he does so because the painting has been hidden under the blanket of its own reputation for too long. The moustache he made isn't so big that you can't still see the original under his spray paint, but it's made with enough flair and precision that the painting’s brand new now. His moustache is an element that has to be considered on its own terms, and its technological origin only makes things finer and shinier.

— Alex Rawls

Return to Lavender Ink