Simone White is the author of three collections, Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, and House of Envy of All the World, the poetry chapbook, Unrest, and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly, with Kim Thomas. Her poetry and prose have been featured in publications such as Harper's Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, and Harriet: The Blog. Her honors include a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, Cave Canem Foundation fellowships, and recognition as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She has a JD from Harvard Law School, an MFA from the New School, and a PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches writing and American literature at The New School, Eugene Lang College.
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Of Being DispersedPoemsFrom"Actionary"
Who can give an account of occasions
Can mechanized description so falter
Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline
Each to enable a series of seconds breaking or burning
Can undo the work of a million years of human love
if I curse you just right
Of Being Dispersed:Poems -
Of Being DispersedPoemsFrom"Was Old Lion, or, On the Camino Trail"
It’s raw to have no hobbies except chasing objects small enough to pick up and carry in your mouth. Adorno says it is not bourgeois. It is never all that clear whether Adorno is cursing a thing or what, but Lourdes can never be bourgeois or want pants. The form of our togetherness forbids her from spending money. Getting anything, getting freedom or pants, costs money.
Lourdes reminds me of the pilgrims. Gloriana—was dead, a generation of her people sagged into the grave before the action began, perished on the rocks before the evolutionary whoosh of fleet violence. It was Lourdes or them. Choose Lourdes. To worship, to smooth over wrinkles, to light candles, to stroke, to be unable to separate, to walk without water toward, to faint, to be falsely pregnant, and immured, to bite and be bled, to be strait-jacketed, to sanctify, to accidentally kill with fire, to make rich to confound these predators. All this from Lourdes, to her miracle as alleged icon of late maturity.
Of Being Dispersed:Poems -
Of Being DispersedPoemsFrom"Comment"
The subways could be anywhere because a state of unhearingness prevails there; unless there is an emergency, and people begin to speak.
From the Old French comment and before that the Latin for “invention, contrivance, enthymeme.” Speech from or with mens: Speech that has wishes, wishing to be more than sound; that non-talk for which the poetic so painfully hopes.
Also, commend. I commend to you a period of abstinence. Preferably from drink. I eked out the most moderate drunkenness for many lonely days. I poured thimblefuls of white wine and still staggered under the same motherfucker of a headache. My liver was tender, very tender. I wanted to say, “The principle of this body is to put out. Invagination is a cosmic scam!”
Of Being Dispersed:Poems
"As she slips in and out of forms, dialects, and registers, White demonstrates that various cultural influences collide in a single individual, producing an ever-shifting foundation . . . Sharp and vibrant, White can make her readers work, and her poems never fail to engage." —Publishers Weekly [on Of Being Dispersed]
"Of Being Dispersed is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks." —Eileen Myles
"In Simone White's poetry the action is always multiple, palpable, sounding as thought, coming forward through this highly sensitized plane, sudden and hovering, exchanging centers, afflicted and added to by company. The continuous listening company demands—company including imaginary self, receding boundaries, the horseman on the night's street, the live, the loved, the drunk, the words, the turnstile, the endless destructive projections people force—and the rendering of that listening into irreducible depths of tone, wit, and perception constitute much of what makes Of Being Dispersed a masterful book." —Anselm Berrigan
Selected Works
- Print Books
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- Print Books
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In formally experimental, intellectually incisive, sonically enchanting lyric poems, Simone White captures what it is like to feel displaced within one’s own identity. She deconstructs our ideas of Americanness and the failure of language to be the transparent scrim we sometimes mistake it to be. Her work moves with acrobatic ease among multiple selves and registers, marked by colloquial immediacy and wit. Always, her poetry is alert, curious, exploratory, and responsive to the world we live in – a journey like few poets writing today, rendered in expertly handled syntax and indelible images.