* * *
If you stop me
from cutting
your hair,
there is a sense
in which
you are interfering.
*
But, since you are entitled
to determine
whether I cut your hair
or not, you do not
wrong me.
*
I make your trip to the store a waste.
*
I buy the last quart of milk
before you
get there.
*
There is a sense / in which / you are interfering
Universe is a long poem about exemplarity. Here, for example, hair-cutting, the wearing of hats, and soviet bacilli stand in for questions about consent, social conventions, and racism. Taking these substitutions largely from texts on moral philosophy, the poem rewrites them in and out of their original contexts. In this new, all-the-more exemplary world of pushing and shoving, someone has wronged someone. But who? The revenge is combinatory, and the lines are short.
Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of three books and four chapbooks, including God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018) and The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017). They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams, art, and love have taken. Hamilton’s critical and creative work has appeared in frieze, Amodern, Changes Press, the Brooklyn Rail, the Washington Post, BOMB, Prelude, et al. They received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, with a dissertation—Style and the Experiment—that considered the persistence of something like a ‘single-author style’ even in works produced by collage, chance procedure, or other means of undermining it. Hamilton has taught first-year and creative writing at Cornell University, CUNY, the Bard Prison Initiative, and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.
Praise for previous work:
Jordan Davis
From the apology for feeling in the Radioheadesque title to the ungoogleable narrative that closes the book, Okay, Okay is resolutely not an invitation to share an inside joke or an appeal to intellectual vanity. The feelings may be borrowed, quoted, distorted and inverted; they may take time to come into focus; nevertheless, they are real and strange and there every time the book falls open.
Her poetry—almost all of which is in rendered in prose, almost all of which is one-dimensional in the best possible sense of that word—forces Okay, Okay’s reader to examine and reexamine what is surely one of the most primal, instinctive of mammalian acts.
Jeff Alessandrelli
Chapbook
Saddle-Stitched. 36 pp, 5.25 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 20 2014
Distribution: Direct Only