1.
A Sarah Arvio reading represents an opportunity for strangers to gather into an audience for the purpose of being disregarded together.
2.
Sarah Arvio’s poems reveal a mind as dull as Emily Dickinson’s Outlook calendar.
3.
Sarah Arvio’s poems illustrate one possible result of a combination of privilege, ignorance and preening self-regard. Such concatenations are as common in America as folding chairs, fatness and discomfort.
Descriptions of joy are less abundant than those of misery. Because misery itself is more abundant? Perhaps. But more likely: descriptions of joy are received as sources of pain and irritation by the audience, who cannot participate vicariously in the joy described. A sort of opposite process is at work with descriptions of misery — at least among fools.
Lunchtime shakes the memory
As an asshole shakes a platinum AmEx.
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Burying coins in casino slots.
Year of the Snake
Month of deja poos
Day without PowerPoint
Logorrhea of the wang (mainly Carson)
“But he was no homeless idiot attracted to cold climates. He had once learned to tie knots in an Edwardian khaki-philia society, and may have been qualified for jobs requiring marginal literacy and fresh breath.”
According to my Uncle, the main thing to know about western culture is that Europeans invented photography before toilet paper. This is also the main thing to know about stock picking, Ronald Reagan, the art market, Texas, Atlanta, eighteenth century France, Nancy Reagan, poets and Silicon Valley.
Some people I see, they take great pleasure in making a show of rejecting good taste. “I don’t like nice things,” they crow to celebrators who hadn’t asked. Then they sit back and inspect their audience for signs of embarrassment.
Thomas Hobbes calls laughter “sudden glory,” but I have no record of his opinion as to flatulence.
And yet my enemies praise the significance of silences.
Whenever we saw sunshine in the rain, Grandpa said Elizabeth Seton and Cotton Mather were making out in heaven.
Now I am the Grandpa and tell this to the little ones, except I say “totally making out.”
The New Enthusiast 