Do What Now by Mike Young

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend November 28, 2014   Do What Now   Mike Young

for ET   We are things embarrassing, strange, and hang around feeling everything things, things, considering beautiful that which does not consider anything. Are we? Strange and hang embarrassing, things around, beautiful feelings. Consider everything. That which considers we are. Feeling feeling, not beautiful. Hanging things. Everything we are, strange, which does not feel. Strange, that which hangs around feeling. Consider beautiful embarrassing anything. Which thing? That thing thing. We hang around embarrassing our strange everything. Consider feeling. Are we? Beautiful everything, we that does and does not. Hang strange, things, things feel. We are. Everything feels that strange which feels. Everything that strange which feels. That strange everything. Which feels. That strange beautiful anything which feels strange and embarrassing. Are we? That hanging strange and everything which feels considers that we feel, things, hangs, things and feeling everything we are. Oh and not who.            Copyright © 2014 by Mike Young. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I wrote ‘Do What Now’ for the poet Emily Toder because she donated to my magazine NOÖ Journal, and she said it was just the right degree of Gertrude Stein for her. ET’s own poems are often startlingly pure, like the geometry in Devo videos, so in this poem I tried to distill two of my favorite words—feeling and thing—into their purest struggles. The word ‘thing’ was originally just a Viking assembly, then it expanded. ‘Feeling,’ meanwhile, might come from a failed imitation of how touching sounds.” —Mike Young   Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (Publishing Genius, 2014). He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Most Recent Book by Young   Sprezzatura (Publishing Genius, 2014) "The Dream of a Common Language" by Leigh Stein "Having Words" by Alfred Corn "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve" by Adrienne Rich Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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