What Is the Difference by Laurie Sheck

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 26, 2016   What Is the Difference   Laurie Sheck

Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity.  Resemblance. Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth didn’t use a question mark but still wondered at the difference what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.   What is the difference between blind and bond. Between desk and red. Between capsize and sail. Between commodity and question. A lively thing, a fractured thing. To smile at the difference.   (Such gray clouds passing over. Thick, wet sky.)   What is the difference between mutiny and dust. Between noose and edge. Between brittle and obey.   Between shunned and stun. What is the difference.   As now, Mary Shelley’s monster flees to the north, his sack of books his lone companions.            Copyright © 2016 Laurie Sheck. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This piece came into being during the time I was immersed in the Shelley manuscripts and Frankenstein (a word that I now see contains “stein” herself), and with reimagining Mary Shelley’s ‘monster’ still alive in the twenty-first century, as I wrote my hybrid work, ‘A Monster’s Notes.’ All writing is hybridity in one form or another—Gertrude Stein, the monster, Mary Shelley, they are all embedded in this piece. As Stein said, ‘The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything… I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.’” —Laurie Sheck   Laurie Sheck is the author of Island of the Mad (Counterpoint Press, 2016). She teaches in the graduate program at The New School and lives in New York City. Poetry by Sheck   A Monster’s Notes (Knopf, 2012) "Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]" by Gertrude Stein "The Taxi" by Amy Lowell "Thunderstorm Stack" by Anne Carson Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038