from “The Links”
Author’s Note
Above are three sections of an eighteen-part sequential poem called “The Links.” It engages the vocabularies of golf and mini-golf; I composed it while thinking about architectures of competition and liminal ecological states. I was thinking about a certain cliche of American masculinity as expressed in manufactured states of competition and leisure; thinking about sporting games, which place environments and their ecological imperatives in various interlocking poses with social power. I was also thinking about compost as a metaphor for textual collage, following Jed Rasula and some others.
Parker Menzimer is a poet and editor. He is editorial director of Topos Press and an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College, where he is a Truman Capote Literary Trust Fellow. His writing has recently appeared in BOMB, Epiphany, Second Factory, and elsewhere.
