It isn't often that one has a gaggle of virgin writers on one's desk, ready to answer any question, important, trivial, philosophically or gastro-erotically significant..Thus, an earnest question meets a prophetic answer. (With an occasional aside by the oracle.) This seance begins thus:
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QUESTION: from Jeffrey Cyphers Wright "Blue Lyre" (Dos Madress Press)
"Don't give me those woof-woof eyes,
the Dark & Stormy look at KGB bar,"
ORACLE interprets:
WHY YOU GIVE ME THOSE WOOF-WOOF EYES IN THE DARK & STORMY KGB BAR?
ANSWER: from Pat Nolan "Exile in Paradise" (Nuallain Press)
"cup raised i challenge my shadow"
ORACLE interprets:
EVERY TIME YOU HAVE ANOTHER DRINK I LOOK IN THE MIRROR
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QUESTION from Vincent Katz "Southness" (Lunar Chandelier Press)
"fork in the path but you
could come back always
could see one again,"
ORACLE interprets:
MAY I RETURN THIS FORK?
ANSWER: from Alan Watts "The Culture of Counter-Culture" (Tuttle Publishing)
"you might first try to reason with him"
ORACLE forks up an Ouroboros to an earnest zendik:
ALL VIRIGIN WRITERS ON THIS BLOGGER'S DESK WILL BECOME ORACULAR FODDER (REVIEWS) IN OUR NEXT DELPHIC DEBAUCH
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QUESTION: from Dorothea Lasky "Awe" (Wave Books)
"The murder took place on a day that was made for the children."
ORACLE interprets in the language of goofy whodunnits:
ON WHAT DAY DID THE MURDER TAKE PLACE?
ANSWER: from David Shields "Enough About You: Notes Toward an Autobiography" (Soft Skull Press)
In Janette Turner Hospital's novel The Last Magician, Lucy, the narrator, asks Charlie, an avant-garde photographer, why he takes photographs so "constantly, so obsessively, why he collects other people's photographs, why he scavenges in secondhand shops and buys, by the box full, old, cracked, brown-and-cream records of other people's pasts."
ANSWER: from David Shields "Enough About You: Notes Toward an Autobiography" (Soft Skull Press)
"So that I will see what I've seen, he says"
ORACLE:
DAVID SHIELDS IS A NARCISSIST!
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QUESTION: from Sandra Liu "On Poems On" (Ugly Duckling Presse)
"it's miserable to be deprived
of sex you can't live this way"
ORACLE:
WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT SEX?
ANSWER: from John High "Vanishing Acts" (Talisman House)
all the hours fallen away from the body into bowling pins & acrobats & letting go into vast air"
ORACLE:
WHEN QUESTION FITS ANSWER SEX WAS HAD (IN VERSE)
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QUESTION: from Basil King "mirage: a poem in 22 sections" (Marsh Hawk Press)
"No. This is my country
and I'm staying here."
ORACLE:
EVEN IF EVERYBODY FLEES TO CANADA?
ANSWER: from Jose Luis Peixoto, translated by Hugo Dos Santos "A Child in Ruins: Collected Poems" (writ large press)
it's a secret i will keep my entire life for not knowing how to say it."
ORACLE:
ONE DOESN'T NEED TO FLEE THE PLACE THE QUESTION REFERS TO BECAUSE JOSE IS ALREADY A CITIZEN OF ANOTHER PLACE
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