I Love Information: Poems

By Courtney Bush

I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a sophisticated and cerebral examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.

Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the name Penelope. “Nobody owns the meaning of these things,” Courtney Bush writes, but this does not stop the poet from seeking, from “reading meaning in the garbage” and in the flowers growing there. What does she seek? Not facts. Instead, something transcendent and mysterious, knowledges that can only be unlocked through experimentation with language, with art.

In lieu of linear thought, Bush’s poems operate under unique logic systems that grow and branch like vines, driven not only by the urge to learn but also by the need for connection—between people, things, stories. Her speakers make cognitive leaps with youthful credulity, eager and open. “It comes down to a few things,” says one. “Vessels and bags / Every crude tool / Every day a friend to tell.” And another: “I want to tell you what a sword is. / To want to tell you has been my entire life.” They are explorers of the pathways between our outer and inner worlds, translators between what is and what could be.

Bush’s reverence for the act of thought echoes that of a religious scholar gazing at the heavens. In order to learn, these poems suggest, we must believe the not-known is worth knowing. We must let belief hover around all parts of our lives, as a child does. “To have the idea of the secret chord is to have the secret chord,” Bush writes. To learn, we must make believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639550029

Courtney Bush

Courtney Bush is the author of I Love Information and Every Book Is about the Same Thing. Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. She lives and works as a nanny in New York.

Book preview

WHEN YOU GET TO SPARTA VOICE

I do not want to be crazy 

about the circle whose center is everywhere.

The metallic parts of mind drawn to an image of the spill,

one that goes wine and wine and more wine. A friend is gone

and I wanted to be all blade, too scary to use.

Where the intuitive paths people took before us

rubbed the grass away from the dirt at the top corner of the park,

what’s wrong with you?

You seemed combinedly possessed by every robin that fell.

I am expected to write about the art I’ve been looking at.

Well the story in Wagner was only the summary of a story.

In summer I arrived at the idea of entering sacred time recklessly

as it regarded the way men interpreted the behaviors of my friend Jessa and me.

We walked home from Del Taco saying you snap, then I’ll snap.

She pulled her tampon out behind the dumpster while the Scientology cross burned.

The strongest member of our party had gone overboard.

Of course not everything is about that.

To yellow-haired Helen, I really liked you, I thought you were amazing.

The way you threw away the pretty napkin we got with the takeout.

The little cockroach on the lip of the stove then the lip of the sink

going around the whole room with complete freedom.

I wanted you to be happy like that, where I could see you

and my sight at times had no limit. As a visionary I was a loser.

My spinal cord always filled up with whatever chemicals felt like

the other world had already rejected me.

If you give me the chance, I’ll hold the handful of egret feathers by the gate,

wave long goodbye, smile with teeth like lemon seeds, I don’t care, at this point,

I understand exactly half of everything.

In Los Angeles there was fake blood ponding in the ring. There was someone cool

to drink the blood. A dove drunk on mulberries. There was the underworld

of learning which is not beautiful, not the ugly beauty of a model even.

There was instead a path of decimation upon which all you could do was submit.

LATE PREAMBLE 

My thing that year

was believing in things

There would be a lost pilot

An internal logic in each event

It was easy with the children. We found money for Elsa from Frozen. Plastic chess pieces gathered in arrangements on the floor. Ten of the kids piled scarves over the bodies of the two smallest as they lay on the floor playing dead. A pink then a red scarf fell. They told me as I approached, before I even asked

These are our bodies and we said it was okay.

When the adults showed me in word and action what they cared about, it was harder to imagine there was some internal logic strong enough to believe in, but I did it.

I was the dad who can sing

Pain is the lost pilot

and I was the lost pilot

and I was the person 

who had come a long way

with arms outstretched 

from the famous poem

and I was the cowboy 

and that year turned into many years

KATELYN

1

Fucked-up Greek movie on Easter Sunday

Mulberries made the doves drunk

Kite’s foot was a reedlike grass

How are you supposed to be survived

Grief does not make us weaker

But it might not make us strong like they said

I love when celebrities cry on Instagram

Like I love my first love

And life in my eyes then outside them

My house dying for the Lord to come

In the form of a nonlinear accumulation

In the synopsis you are described as a vulnerable screenwriter

But you tried to strangle the fiancé you proposed to yesterday

When I couldn’t hear the sink running

Singing so loud in the shower I’ll fly away in the morning

If I die Hallelujah by and