Live Nude Poems

Sawnie Morris Interviews Joan Houlihan at Boston Review

2012-01-23T12:53:00.000-05:00

This book, and 'The Ay' look extremely interesting.

Joan Houlihan’s third book, The Us, is a fifty-one page sequence of poems recounting the story of an imagined pre-historical culture. The narrative focuses on one of the culture’s members in particular—in a sense, its first true individual—“ay.” Although the book is mythological in its scope, it is lyric rather than epic in its approach, proceeding not with heroic pomp and encyclopedic comprehensiveness but instead with lyric delicacy and attention to carefully chosen particulars. The Us is not monumental, nor is it meant to be.
The Us begins with a table of contents, an “Argument” (which is in fact a synopsis), and a list of the cast of characters. These three elements serve as guide to a vaguely familiar yet unnamed country and time where the living is primitive and the people’s speech is rendered in an English unlike any known before—a broken, thorny idiom that scrambles the linearity we associate with traditional heroic narratives. It is the hobbled tongue of an anti-hero, and with The Us, Houlihan has given us an anti-epic with a scrappy, rebellious underdog placed front and center.

Curse of the Cat Woman--Edward Field

2011-12-20T12:30:00.000-05:00

Edward Field is a new discovery of mine, and here's a representative poem, both funny and odd, like most of his work that I've read.

Curse of the Cat Woman
by Edward Field

It sometimes happens that the woman you meet and fall in love with is of that strange Transylvanian people with an affinity for cats. You take her to a restaurant, say, or a show, on an ordinary date, being attracted by the glitter in her slitty eyes and her catlike walk, and afterward of course you take her in your arms, and she turns into a black panther and bites you to death. Or perhaps you are saved in the nick of time, and she is tormented by the knowledge of her tendency: that she daren't hug a man unless she wants to risk clawing him up. This puts you both in a difficult position, panting lovers who are prevented from touching not by bars but by circumstance: you have terrible fights and say cruel things, for having the hots does not give you a sweet temper. One night you are walking down a dark street and hear the padpad of a panther following you, but when you turn around there are only shadows, or perhaps one shadow too many You approach, calling, "Who's there?" and it leaps on you. Luckily you have brought along your sword, and you stab it to death. And before your eyes it turns into the woman you love, her breast impaled on your sword, her mouth dribbling blood saying she loved you but couldn't help her tendency. So death released her from the curse at last, and you knew from the angelic smile on her dead face that in spite of a life the devil owned, love had won, and heaven pardoned her.

Nice, eh?? I love especially the first half of this poem because it could really go anywhere subject-wise. I wish I could write something funny. As it is, my new poetry manuscript (as opposed to the four old ones) is called 'Two Crows Short of a Murder.' Funny, eh?

We Who Have Sold Out, by Bruce Embree

2011-11-25T14:54:00.001-05:00

We who have sold out
are working on dreams of sheetrock
and vasoline
Don't tell us we are shallow
We were denied your lonesome road
and guitar music
cursed with our own choices
which were to go to work
Your smoky nights and poverty
they all at least pretended to care
when you took a notion to go out and lose your mind
We put on our nigger jokes and coveralls
laughed as we hated everything, ourselves especially
and had no tears
The pretty words, carved rocks
and canvas you decorated?
We buy tigers or big eyed kids on black velvet
Our curses are not for your freedom
or songs of protest
They are for the dues we paid
They are for turning around one morning
and finding we were nobody
Yes we are working on dreams
We who have sold out.

New Draft

2011-11-11T18:15:00.001-05:00

It'll disappear soon.

*poof*

John Berryman Still Loves Us When We Wish We Were Dead

2011-10-24T16:31:00.002-04:00

High, West, and Crooked

2011-10-22T14:44:00.000-04:00

cross-posted from Fried Chicken and Coffee

That's how I feel right now after trying to manage my time in the last few days since I found out my chapbook Broke was going to be published (and quickly) by Didi Menendez and MiPoesias, the same folks that brought you Redneck Poems. That great news, combined with the home situation in which my wife is working ever more hours as the B&N gears up for Christmas, and the kids needing what kids need, like, uh, food, homework, interesting things to play with, and not so much TV, has given me a pain I'm just now wending my way out of. Having two books to promote at the same time is not ideal, but I'm not bitching, either. I am capital G grateful to Didi Menendez for seeing fit to pub this chapbook. And in keeping with this, here are all the links for purchase and/or download.

Here's how you can order or download Broke:

To get a print edition of Broke, please see magcloud.com:
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/286157

To get the Kindle edition see amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/005YDVX3G (link not yet live)

To get the Epub version see bn.com
(link not yet live)

To get the free (!) editions, visit:

Issuu:
http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/broke

Scribd
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/69723727

Appalachian Prison Book Project

2011-10-18T17:02:00.002-04:00

The Appalachian Prison Book Project, a program that aims to rehabilitate inmates by giving them free books to read, has lost their funding and is looking for book donations. The West Virginia University Department of English is accepting donation on the program’s behalf.

The most sought after books from the program are dictionaries, auto repair manuals, psychology textbooks and fiction. And for security purposes, all donations must be paperback.

Please give to this good cause.

Thanks to Kerrie Kemperman for bringing it to my attention.

Salem Literary Festival: Poetry Crush

2011-09-27T14:24:00.001-04:00

Here's a pic, stolen from January O'Neil's blog, Poet Mom (thanks!). I'm the hairy guy at the back, along with the much-less-hairy January, Colleen, Walnut and Jennifer, beginning from the rear.

I had a great time with this, even including the 45 steps to the third floor of the Phillips House in Salem MA, where the event was held. In the heat we all talked about our favorite poets, even admitting to some schoolboy/schoolgirl like crushes like mine for Frank Stanford.

I'm an awfully fickle reader and lover of poetry as a rule. I simply dump shit I don't enjoy reading and wait for my next pass of donations to get rid of it. But somehow my fickleness has never evidenced itself with Frank Stanford. I read and read and I never get tired. If you haven't read him, I feel badly for you.

Circle of Lorca
BY FRANK STANFORD

When you take the lost road
You come to the snow
And when you find the snow
You get down on your hands and knees
Like a sick dog
That’s been eating the grasses of graveyards
For twenty centuries.

When you take the lost road
You find woman
Who has no fear of light
Who can kill two cocks at once
Light which has no fear of cocks
And cocks who can’t call in the snow.

You find lovers who’ve been listening
For the same roosters to sing
For twenty centuries
Roosters that have swallowed stones
Out of each other’s tracks
But have never met
Anywhere on the road.

When you take the lost road
You find the bright feathers of morning
Laid out in proportion to snow and light
And when the snow gets lost on the road
Then the hot wind might blow from the south
And there is sadness in bed for twenty centuries
And everyone is chewing the grass on the graves again.

When you get lost
You come to the moon in the field
The light all lovers soil
The sheet no one leaves clean
The light cocks are afraid to cross
The same moon woman danced under
For twenty centuries
With blood on her face.

When you get lost on the road
You run into the dead
Who have broken down stones
In their throats for twenty centuries
I saw two little crazy boys crying
Because it was morning
And when morning comes it comes
In the morning and never at night.

I saw two security police taking out a man’s balls
And I saw two little crazy boys
Crying by the road who wouldn’t go away
But two has never been a number
Because it’s only legal to pass one at a time
It’s only a drum you can carry but you can’t beat
It’s the evidence they need to make you disappear.

Poem Draft

2011-09-19T15:51:00.002-04:00

*poof*

Another Blazevox Post

2011-09-08T12:05:00.000-04:00

If you're a small press, you've likely heard of this tempest in a teapot already and formed an opinion. In case you haven't, Sandra Beasley makes a great deal of sense here.

If the epicenter of your annual sales model is the AWP conference, you gotta shake it up. That's right, even if you plan to have really cool swag (shot glasses!) at your table, and an offsite reading at the grubbiest hipster bar in town. We have got to stop thinking that credibility in our own community is enough (emphasis mine).

You need to bust your ass, whether you can or not, getting out there personally among the potential readers. It's not enough to be great poetry, you have to make your poems known by reading them at events and publishing them where non-writing friends and other people can see them (online, if you ask me). It doesn't take a salesperson to sell them, it takes simply your presence along with a desire to discuss what you already love.

Prosody and Other Fun Things

2011-08-30T12:39:00.001-04:00

If you've ever struggled with meter, this place can help you out.

http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/

I'm still here, just distanced for the moment from poetry. I'm writing two new stories for someone who solicited me, and banging away on my old novel trying to make it better for public presentation. What are you all up to?

John Wieners - Hyannisport, MA - 2.21.02 - Last Public Reading

2011-08-11T14:24:00.000-04:00

Found at Silliman's blog, but worth reposting.

Clare Pollard, Poet

2011-08-01T13:49:00.002-04:00

Clare Pollard is a English poet, andnew to me. I read her book Changeling, from Bloodaxe Books in Englandrecently, and was struck immediately by some refashioning of myththat so many people do badly, but not her, thank God, as well as somestark confessional poetry that hit me even more. It's Sextonish, yes,but with a contemporary and more cynical feel. Well worth the time totrack it down, this book. Go forth and do what you must: consume.

Adventures in Capitalism

Nothing is real and I want it to stop.

I cut my wrists, but the blood lookslike make up.

I slump in toilets snorting cocaine

but it doesn't seem true, just a grimydream.

I wanted to feel, so had atattoo done.

I chose a sea-blue anchor near thebone,

then saw it in a tabloid and felt afake.

Crashed a car dad bought me. Nothingbroke.

I went to see Othello swallow alie

and cried at the end, but it was only aplay.

Read some Rimbaud, bought a blackpolo-neck

and a bottle of absinthe, but felt likea prick.

I whisper 'I love you' and 'Tie medown,'

but all that moan and fisting is justporn.

Signed an online petition but it madeno difference.

I bought a house, but it's like playinghouse.

I own How to be a Domestic Goddess,

but I've nevercooked from it, if I'm honest,

and the browniesand aprons are only props

and my wardrobe's aFancy Dress box,

and I yell ateveryone who cares. I hurt them

because I needsomething to fucking happen.

New Poem (exists for a couple days only before it poofs)

2011-07-19T19:34:00.002-04:00

Hi. I know it's been a while. I've been unnaturally busy elsewhere, otherwise known as 'life intrudes.' Here's a new draft with an awful, obvious title. In fact, I think I'll leave it titleless it's so bad.

SEE TITLE HERE

Poem goes *poof*.

From Bill Knott's Latest Collection Murder/Suicide

2011-06-23T14:55:00.000-04:00

which is available for free, as all of his books are, or you can pay a few bucks for a print copy via Lulu. This is the first poem from this edition. I had not read it before, but now I can't stop thinking about it.

1946

The year Noir was born; the year Nazis hid
In monasteries to restore their force;
Peace, but peace that made some things even worse
Than they were pre-war: I was just a kid,

Hard at play, cap pistols, hooky, apples
Filched through a farm fence: then my mother dies,
Killed illegal abortion style by guys
Quoting God, his badboy lies, his bibles.

Pope Vandal burnt the last Complete Sappho
Publicly, my mother was butchered in
A secret site; their results much the same,

So I blame him and him and him and him,
All of them from Adam onwards are men,
Meaning me, meaning the worst thing I know.

Note: In 1073, Pope Gregory VII ordered the public burning of all books containing the poetry of Sappho

from Three Variations, All About Love, by Philip Whalen

2011-06-14T15:39:00.002-04:00

I love this poem so much I typed it in.

I.

So much to tell you
Not just that I love
There is so much more
You must hear and see

If I came to explain
It would do no good
Wordlessly nibbling your ear
Burying my face in your belly

All I would tell is you
And love; I must tell
Me, that I am a world
Containing more than love
Holding you and all your other
Lovers wherein you
And I are free from each other
A world that anyone can walk alone
Music, coathangers, the sea
Mountains,ink, trashy novels
Trees, pancakes, The Tokaido Road
The desert--it is yours

Refuse to see me!
Don't answer the door or the telephone
Fly off in a dragon-chariot
Forget you ever knew me

But wherever you are
Is a corner of me, San Juan Letran
Or Montreal,Brooklyn,
Or the Lion Gate

Under my skin at the Potala
Behind my eyes at Benares
Far in my shoulder at Port-au-Prince
Lifted in my palm

Anywhere you must be you
Drugged, drunk or mad
As old,as young, whatever you are
Living or dying the place will be me

And I alone the car that carries you away.

44 Joy Street Boston MA--John Wieners

2011-06-06T15:45:00.000-04:00

I guess I have a project now. Take pictures of places where my favorite poets lived. It's fun, and gets me places I wouldn't normally go. Any suggestions?

Charles Olson, 28 Fort Square Gloucester MA

2011-05-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

The family took a drive today, and this is where we went: Charles Olson's Gloucester home. The remainder of these pics are mostly the view from the house, or the house itself. You'll see the plaque on the wall in a few of the shots. It was a fun trip.

If you want more Olson photos and ephemera, go here.

Try Some Hayden Carruth on for Size

2011-05-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

I know I've posted this before, but it's so damned good it deserves more web-time.

Emergency Haying by Hayden Carruth

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we've put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image
fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.
Now is our last chance to bring in
the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales
to the barn, these late, half-green,
improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine
across the field, tossed on the load, and then
at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help – 
I, the desk-servant, word-worker – 
and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands
are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.
Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,
her father in the camps of Moldavia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers
herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands
too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even
the touch of love. I have a friend
whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day
she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly at the sky. Now

in September our New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first color. I look
beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,
to the notch where the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new-risen moon like a pale
medallion hangs in a lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes
sting with sweat and loveliness. And who
is the Christ now, who

if not I? It must be so. My strength
is legion. And I stand up high
on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out
you sons of bitches who would drive men and women
to the fields where they can only die.

William Dickey, Parliamentary Procedure

2011-05-03T15:26:00.000-04:00

H/t to Don Share from Facebook. This is surely a weird one.

February 1971 : Poetry Magazine

Paul Blackburn's Statement of Poetics

2011-04-20T12:46:00.001-04:00

What do you think?

From Modern American Poetry:

My poetry may not be typically American, or at least in matter, not
solely so: but I think it does make use of certain techniques which, even
when not invented by American poets, find their particular exponents
there in contemporary letters, from Pound & Doctor Williams, to younger
writers like Paul Carroll or Duncan or Creeley.

        Techniques of juxtaposition.
        Techniques of speech rhythms,
                                               sometimes very intense,
                                                sometimes developed slowly, as
                                                one would have
                        conversation with a friend.

Personally, I affirm two things:
                                                           the possibility of warmth & contact
                                                                       in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only   "useful"   i.e., exploited, either
        psychologically or materially.

                                                                 2⁰, the possibility of   s o n g
within that world: which is like saying 'yes' to sunlight.

On the matter of song:   I believe there must be a return toward the
musical structure of poetry, just as there must be, for certain people at
least, a return to warmth within a relationship.

However impractical that may seem in a society controlled in some of its
most intimate aspects by monstrous, which are totally irresponsible,
corporations, organized for the greatest gain of the most profit: and whose
natural growth, like that of any organism, is toward monopoly,
                    self-support, self-completion, self-
                                                                                           perpetuation,
                    and eventually self-competition and self-destruction.

      In a world that is so quickly losing its individuals, it can only be the
individuals who persist, who can work any change of direction, i.e. control
the machines, or destroy them.

Machines can be very beneficent as means

                      to a better
                      (materially better)
                                                             life, as either
              democratizing or socializing agents.
But as a means to control for the limited number of men who now own them,

(but the president or general manager of the corporation
really owns nothing but his own salary (and his power) so that
even the controlling minds of these gigantic corporate machines
are irresponsible. That is, not subject to the effects
                              of their own decisions)

                                                                       (and
                                                                             the personnel, the individuals
are replaceable, all the way to the top. The machine, the organisation, has
itself created the position and will function without the individual, has,
in that sense created the person to fill the 'p o s i t i o n'
                                                                          and its own needs) so that
when, in these upper reaches, the 'organisation' the machine itself
becomes master, it can only mean disaster, global and particular.

     I do not claim that a greater frequency of rhyme than is now made use of
in American poetry will, in time, set things right.

   Only that if a man could sing the poems his poets write

                                     - and could understand them - and if

    the poets would sing something from their guts,    rather than
    the queasy contents of same,
    then that man would stand a better
chance,   of being a whole man,   than
him who stands or sits and says but 'Yes' all day.

Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

To give
and man enough to receive, LOVE,
                                 when he finds it offered.

To take the sun and the goods of the earth, while it lasts.
                                                                                                                    and to
                             fight in whatever way he can
                                 the monstrous machines that try,   and will try, to

                                                o b l i t e r a t e   him, for

                                                         $1 more.

from The Parallel Voyages, Sun-Gemini Press,1987. Copyright © Paul Blackburn 1954, 1987.

New Review of Redneck Poems

2011-03-25T13:59:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't had much to say on poetry lately. I'm writing another novel, so don't be surprised if the lull lasts for the three-four months it'll take me to put together a draft. In the meantime, Sheldon Compton reviewed Redneck Poems and has some smart things to say about it, for a guy who says he doesn't talk about poetry much.

I'm not a poet. Wouldn't know a couplet from a coupling. It's why I rarely talk about books of poetry and even more rarely write poetry, but I felt a stout and strong urge to talk a bit about Rusty Barnes' REDNECK POEMS.

In this collection of fourteen poems, there is much to appreciated in as far as poetic device is concerned. I can recognize that much, but I'll go no further on that topic. Rusty moves as easily from poetry to short short fiction to longer works to editing the writing of others with equal ease and skill. MORE.

If you're still missing this tiny book of mine, why? It's free.

Alaska Poet John Haines Dead

2011-03-03T11:37:00.000-05:00

He was a sane man. He left much of society behind in favor of homesteading in Alaska's interior, and he wrote great poems about nature. I say that to differentiate great nature poems from great poems about nature. There are writers who show the natural world in all its magnificence (Mary Oliver, sepia-toned) but I find Haines more, well, real. Oliver's poems seem to glorify while Haines tends more to describe, and let you draw your own conclusion. This quote is from a lengthy article in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

John Haines is well known as a writer who has communicated not only his rare experience of homesteading in Alaska, but also a view of modern society as seen from the perspective he gained there. Ever since I discovered Haines’s poetry in an anthology in the late 1980s, I have returned to it many times for its sane values and contemplative intensity. Recently I read for the first time his prose memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (more memoir pieces are in the earlier Living off the Country). I was taken with his economical, clear depictions of hunting, trapping, building, and surviving in Alaska, where he lived on and off for twenty-five years, of the land and the plants and animals around him, about which he seems to know every feature, habit, and use. What a fascinating, enviable life he led at the Richardson homestead, north of Fairbanks. More.

Modes of the Lyric Poem/Matthew Zapruder

2011-02-07T11:13:00.033-05:00

Hanging 'round the internet poetry world as I do (usually without saying much) I love to find little trails of commentary that give me new ways to think, in this case, about the lyric poem. A little gift Sean Patrick Hill at Bookslut gives us before he reviews Matthew Zapruder's Come On All You Ghosts, this brief discussion frames Zapruder's work as a tension between two modes of the lyric poem. Since I'm not a critic nor interested much in poetics yet, I read this with great interest, since I see this essay more as the by now ages-old discussion between what gets discussed first in poetry (call it the main poetic mode) as opposed to discussion of what passes for experimentation. And curiously, it's an essay that doesn't seem to take sides (bravo!).

In the 21st century, the lyric poem has found itself in quite the quandary. But much of this depends on who you ask: if one considers the general poetry readership to be represented as a typical subscriber to The New Yorker, Poetry, or The Atlantic, the lyric poem maintains a kind of allegiance to the type of poem we’ve come to rely on for at least the past three decades, an utterance at once confessional, imagistic, narrative, or a combination of any of these modes. Of course, minus a few exceptions, most of these poets are usually numbered in the older generations, if by “older” we mean anyone prior to Generation X, though The New Yorker’s readers are typically treated to poets as far-ranging in generations as W.S. Merwin and Jack Gilbert down to Matthea Harvey and the Dickman twins.

But the young are working at their own translation of the lyric poem -- not all of them, surely, as the new return to “surrealism” testifies, imperfectly -- though it can be argued this poem has largely followed lockstep, at the very least, with the general historical trend of the lyric poem: the brief, songlike expression of the self, its world, and its feelings: the old Romantic notions of importance. We see, too, its reliance on the mid-to-late 20th century mode of incorporating images of the common life, or cultural icons, which certainly dominate the poetry of, say, the '60s on up, a poem which can incorporate Coke bottles as easily as strains of agony.

Nevertheless, the lyric poem has found itself split, a kind of dual personality that incorporates both everything that came before as well as the new (old) fascination with surrealism, as well as newer trends such as the interest in the Russian Absurdists, and postmodern language theory, to name a few. Interestingly, the elders among this generation, Matthew Zapruder for one, often leans close to a kind of poem that acknowledges the tradition in a more obvious fashion (sometimes a poet like Joshua Beckman also reaches after this tradition in a way both self-conscious and ironic, but at the same time equally serious), whereas a younger poet like Julie Doxsee or Joshua Marie Wilkinson relies less on concrete “sense” in favor of music and suggestion of emotion as the presiding vehicle.

And on another note, here is the poet himself discussing his concerns at the Poetry Foundation.

Once, in high school, I met a girl who liked very strange music. She was in art school and lived in the city. She gave me a record, and when I went back to my room in the suburbs and put it on, it sounded like a garbage truck backing up over a giant bag full of aluminum bagpipes and dead robots. I played it over and over, until the music finally made glorious sense to me. Listening now to “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground, I can’t remember what it was like to be the person who couldn’t hear that music.

What is the purpose of literary criticism? Among other things, to guide the reader past his or her resistance. Most art, subtly or aggressively, resists the familiar. Poetry in particular suffers from this resistance, because poets take the material that we depend on to operate in and make sense of the world (language), and bend it to other, often seemingly obscure, purposes.
Readers, sophisticated and beginner, need critics to explain why and how poets are using language for these different purposes, and what those purposes might be. Our attachment to familiar language is powerful, and understandable. Without critics, we will hold on to the familiar and be unable to accept that there are other uses for language, that there is new and exciting poetry all around us.

Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love.

Today, in American poetry, very few critics take it upon themselves to examine the choices poets make in poems, and what effect those choices might have upon a reader. As a consequence, very few people love contemporary American poetry. Many more might, if critics attempted to truly engage with the materials of poetry—words and how they work—and to connect poetry with an audience based on an engagement with these materials.

This is fun stuff to read and edifying. And it made me buy the book. It's the perfect poet-consumer nugget, all laid out for you to just click, purchase and enjoy.

Live Nude Poem--New Draft

2011-02-03T03:08:00.001-05:00

*poof*

Beneath the Chickenshit Mormon Sun by Bruce Embree

2011-01-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

I've posted this before, on a depressing day probably just like this one. This poem makes me feel better. That's all I have to say on that.

It turned out worse than I thought
The champion defended his title
then Eldridge Cleaver came on
to talk about his reasons for becoming a member
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Grandma and I damn near fell out of our chairs
Went to town and got crazy drunk
Came back home, called you long-distance
after cruising and drooling Mainstreet again

This is my last wish and love poem
It is as follows
Want to hold the wake at noon with plenty of acid and rum
No friends and relatives
Ghost music by Hendrix and the Byrds
drowning all sound
as you fuck me to dust
beneath the chickenshit Mormon sun.

Links: http://www.limberlostpress.com/authors/161embree1.html

Paul Blackburn and Sexism

2011-01-15T16:34:00.002-05:00

How does one respond to sexism in poets whose work seems to be filled with it, like Blackburn?

The quick answer most people would give is: ignore it. Yet here I am, reading more and more, and yes, enjoying, the supposedly sexist work of Paul Blackburn and wondering why there isn't much if any criticism of his important work in the late 50s and 60s, when he served as gatekeeper and recorder of many readings which have helped establish the avant-garde presence and reading scene in New York as well as given us great historical insight into the poets associated at that time with the New York scene. And of course I'm thinking about his poems, which kept him in the middle of things as a talent in his own right. It's not difficult, unfortunately to see why he's not read, and that makes me sad. His poetry is worth more than a few cursory footnotes to the era.

I've come to the conclusion now, after dipping into the collected poems at length, but randomly, and reading four or five of his individual books, that the majority of his work isn't sexist (unless every's man work is, which is another question entirely)but the places where it is sexist tower over every other consideration of the poems, which is really, really too bad.

In his 1968 book In* On* Or About the Premises, it takes only six poems before he sets readers back with a poem narrating through what, today, we could only describe as rape, though I'm sure Blackburn didn't think of the poem in this way. In an introduction to Parallel Voyages, a posthumous edition of some Blackburn poems the critic, poet, and friend of Blackburn Clayton Eshleman gives us an interesting way to read through this sexism, though it doesn't ultimately convince.

However, the facts, according to the poetry, seem to indicate that Paul’s sense of creative worth was exceptionally contingent upon sexual acceptance, very overtly in the case of women, and very covertly in the case of men. His antennae were lust-sensitive, and many poems are organized explicitly around an anonymous or intimately-known person who aroused him. As he approached his 40s, this point of imaginative ignition increasingly misfired, or did not spark at all, to the point that the pain of loving (himself as well as others) appears to have engulfed sexual gratification. In the chasm that began to appear as this single power gave way and divided was a morass of unresolvable childhood unhappiness.(all Eshleman quotes from http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/2010/11/clayton-eshleman-on-paul-blackburn.html)

Well, without entering into Blackburn's psychological well-being and deciding to empathize or not with his life and outlook, I guess there's no way to read past the sexism, yeah? Bad childhood or no, a sexist is still a sexist, a poet is still a poet, but he or she has more complex reasons for their sexism, fair enough; it doesn't forgive them the point. But the Eshleman essay gives us a further nugget, in addition to the bad-childhood/bad marriage explanation.

[It] is worthwhile to think about what looked at superficially appears to be a heavy load of machoism in Blackburn’s poetry. Women are often signed, or identified, as sexual targets, and his seeming dependence on women for self-affirmation empowers them with overwhelming, sometimes menacing, psychic size.

This is another argument entirely. He's not sexist solely because of his bad childhood or unresolved identity issues, he's sexist because he's afraid of women. The logical extension of this theory might explain it all. Blackburn needs to prove his male power and rather than act on those power impulses or issues he relegates them to his poetic imagination and lets fly there, in the safe zone between poet and persona. This might work as explanation, too.

It could also be that his discussion of matters sexual (and sexist) harkens back to Blackburn's eye for detail: simple revelation of what he sees in himself and his relationships, which is part of the final points Eshleman makes.

A third kind of sexuality, and certainly the dominant one for the first half of Blackburn’s writing career, is an admiration and tender respect for what might be thought of as femininity in all forms. This motif is sounded again and again, as contact with women, animals (generally cats—the occasional dogs seem to indicate a negative male presence), and plants, and appears to envision a feminine principle as the force that provides the world with growth and beauty. When Blackburn is under the sway of this persuasion (generally in his apartment, in contrast to out on the street or in the New York City subway, he is fair-minded, masculine, and extremely sensitive.

It's true that the sexism present in Blackburn's poems became more present the older he got and the more cynical he got about his failed relationships, but we might not have seen that progression at all were it not for Blackburn's willingness to put himself on the page knowing full well the effect he might have on his readers, men and women alike. Given the time frame in which much of his work was written (the beginning tremors of the feminist movement and the turbulent 1960s) I'm pretty sure he was made aware of his shortcomings in this area, though I don't know that for a fact. How could you be unaware of the profound shift in cultural values, in New York City in 1968 especially, as centered as he was around the poetry scene?

I've come to no conclusion after all these words, sadly. I see the point: Blackburn is offensive to many people. I believe they rightly take up the cudgel against his sexism but ignore his considerable gifts and presence in poetic history, and 'canon editors' do the same by ignoring the large body of work in favor of lesser lights from the same time period. I urge them to rethink this position. In terms of his lineation alone, how the breath-line works in his poems, Paul Blackburn should be read. Whether he's read for the right reasons or not, I believe it's wrong to ignore him entirely, even if his life and point of view make it easy to do so. In youth we ignore our fathers only to find out later on that what they had to say was worthwhile in ways we had no recourse to know in our youths. I believe it's time to learn and know more about Blackburn, and to cement his place in the canon not just of the avant-whatevers, but in all of poetry.

A good first step would be another edition of his Collected (mistitled for sure, as it includes only 500 or so of the 1200+ poems Blackburn wrote) if only because the current book is organized chronologically, apart from the way Blackburn organized them into his published books. Then, maybe someone could take up a biography. Right now, as his persona non grata status remains quo, we're doing poetic history a grave disservice by not including his work, and adding further insult by not giving readers sufficient tools (like a true full Collected) to review. With these tools in hand, readers could decide for themselves how to read him.

Any Reviews?

2011-01-06T16:44:00.001-05:00

Anyone noticed any reviews of Redneck Poems out there, or have one planned? I sent out maybe 5-10 copies to various places and people,and would like to remind potential reviewers and other people that they can get the (FREE!) nicely formatted e-chapbook by visiting either of these two URLS:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38606297/Redneck-Poems-by-Rusty-Barnes#fullscreen:on

http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/barnes_rusty_chapbook?viewMode=magazine&mode=embed

or get a cheap print copy ($5.50) by visiting Magcloud.

If you like rural-based poems of sex, violence or shelling peas, or the visceral feel of mud in your toes, you might like this little chapbook. Here's part of what one reviewer liked--

from Rene Schwiesow at the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene blog:

Edge. Rusty Barnes work will walk you out to the edge, ask you to look over, and consider whether you feel your stomach drop or your eyes water as you read. This is the real thing. Barnes grew up in rural Appalachia and his words are shot through with those Appalachian roots.

Or you can check What to Wear During an Orange Alert:

The term "redneck" has many different meanings. There is the humorous Jeff Foxworthy parody, but there is also the hard-working rural farmer and fresh air image that is tied a little closer to reality. I'm not sure why Rusty chose that word to represent this collection of poems, but I feel he almost uses it affectionately. Sure there is mention of cut-off jeans, halter tops, beer, shotguns, fights, and of course cows, but in each of these poems there is also something that is universally relevant. Be it young love (or lust), a father's fears, neglect, or lose, the poems are power, moving and real.

Rusty is a master of capturing the darkness in everyday life and magnifying its effect. Just as in his short story collection Breaking It Down (Sunnyoutside, 2007), he brought the rawness of rural America into a structured and controlled setting. What is unknown is if these are observations or scenes pulled from imagination, but nonetheless Barnes yet again pulled me into his world.

Book-Counting Games

2011-01-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

I don't read nearly as many books as this guy, who is the single most widely read person on the continent, probably, but I read more than my fair share, usually in bed from midnight to three am. I can get most or all of one book into my brain during that time, if it's fiction or non-fiction, but then I don't really enjoy it (reading fiction) the way I used to, pre-academia. I don't get what Steve (see aforementioned link) calls the 'element of submersion.' I'm always reading with one eye to craft. But the point of this post is to say that I'm going to list what I'm reading every week or so to keep track (and so I can add to Goodreads, which is still good fun for me). I may comment further, I may not. You can still count on periodic longer posts detailing or discussing what I'm reading on the 'nets in regards poetry.

So, in 2011 so far, and via the blessings that are used bookstores online, I have read these books:

Against the Silences, Paul Blackburn, poetry
Deep in the Heart of Texas,Wyatt Wyatt, novel
Halfway Down the Coast, Blackburn, poetry & photos
this gone place, Lisa J. Parker, poetry
Wolf Face, Matt Hart, poetry
The Men's Club, Leonard Michaels, novel
Sylvia, Leonard Michaels, false memoir
Bluets, Maggie Nelson, poetry

Most of these are shortish poetry books. I'm not tackling more novels until mine is finished.

The Field Goal Dialectic by Daniel Pritchard

2011-01-03T15:51:00.001-05:00

This is a sweet little nugget I ran into on Twitter.

“Can’t you even tell a good tree from a poor tree?”

— Lucy Van Pelt, A Charlie Brown Christmas

Lucy puts the football down and then pulls it away at the last moment, leaving Charlie Brown sprawled across the lawn. Time after time, Charlie commits to the kick whole-heartedly, despite all evidence that the game is rigged. He’s going for the touchback. He throws himself into the task. Lucy cheats him. He tries again. Lucy pulls the ball away again. It’s downright sociopathic.

Anyone who was a good, productive worker at the beginning of 2008, but finds themselves on unemployment today — that “pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,” as Ronald Reagan so quaintly put it — probably feels a great deal of sympathy for poor Charlie. Those who side with Reagan probably find it funny. This football scene is a sort of paradigm for capitalism: a system of fairness, merit, and opportunity that easily, often, and by its own rules, implodes. When poor Charlie misses the ball during the homecoming game — again because Lucy pulls it away — it isn’t Lucy who gets the blame.

The façade of working class life has changed dramatically for most Americans over the last three decades. Working people are more likely to hold a service job today than a factory job, and to interact daily with people from across the economic spectrum. Opportunities for conspicuous consumption have been extended to small town and ghetto by malls and the Internet. Distinctions of high and low culture have all but been erased. Families of every income level watch “Survivor.” In talking about poetry and class, we’re trying to pin down social classes that are in more flux than usual, even by shifting American standards. Assume from the very beginning that this is, at best, a seriously flawed discussion.

Let’s think about being “poor” for a moment. Lucy contrasts the idea of a “good” Christmas tree with the “poor” one that Charlie bought. Here it’s unclear whether she intends poor in the sense of low-quality or in the sense of low-class. The tree is both. (Does it have to be both?) That in itself is telling: poor meant “not wealthy” long before it meant “of low quality,” and the pun is ingrained in American speech. The use of “good” is interesting as well. Much of the English-speaking world might use “nice” or even “fine” to impart a level of quality (although I would bet that the more American good has taken hold). The word good carries with it a whole array of ethical connotations, and Lucy’s is a uniquely American contrast: good things (or people) are not poor in either sense of the word. The so-called (and inaccurately-named) Protestant Work Ethic value system is reflected in / imposed by the language we casually use. More:

New Review of Redneck Poems

2010-12-20T14:36:00.000-05:00

From The Legendary:

You'd never guess, gazing upon the cheerful monarch butterflies gracing the cover and many of the pages, that this is a treasure full of personal depths, mountain landscapes, and trapped moments. Rusty Barnes manages to surprise even us, and we were already fans.

I'll have better, less self-promotional posts soon, I promise. It's the holidays, and I can barely keep up.

Redneck Poems Reviewed

2010-12-15T20:55:00.001-05:00

Redneck Poems reviewed by Rene Schwiesow at Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:

Edge. Rusty Barnes work will walk you out to the edge, ask you to look over, and consider whether you feel your stomach drop or your eyes water as you read. This is the real thing. Barnes grew up in rural Appalachia and his words are shot through with those Appalachian roots. Barnes creates an image that arouses all the senses in the opening of “When the Wrong Words Get Said:"

Poem Draft

2010-12-10T09:54:00.001-05:00

I can't remember whether I posted this one or not. I generally ~~hate~~ dislike intensely poems that are so obvious. This one has something at the end that needs more exploration, I think, but it's tough to find energy to work on it because it's so obvious. It'll disappear in a few days.

*poof

More on my Paul Blackburn Obsession

2010-12-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

Paul Blackburn and Lee Byrd

I'm officially and permanently obsessed. Now I want to know where the criticism is. Shouldn't a poet of Blackburn's status and lifework have more written about him? If you, any of you reading, can give me links or info about articles of books, I'd really appreciate it.

Blackburn at Wikipedia
EPC/Blackburn
Jacket 12/Blackburn
Modern American Poetry
Poets Path/Blackburn
Burt Kimmelman on The Journals
Blackburn papers UC San Diego
Blackburn reading The Old Days
Blackburn reading at Bard
Google Books Poem of the Cid
PennSound Blackburn Readings
Joe Hall discusses The Journals

Essay on Paul Blackburn by Clayton Eshleman

2010-11-24T14:30:00.000-05:00

I found this on Facebook where Don Share linked to it. The author is Clayton Eshleman, the blogger is A.M.Bramhall.

The essay goes to some trouble countering the established view that Blackburn is sexist in a way that immediately draws attention to itself, and overcomplicates reading the poems. I assumed Blackburn had been assigned minor figure status in the strange way that the canon adjusts itself to new or different criticism. I see from this essay that Blackburn seems to always have been minor status, and that's too bad. The defense (Eshleman) doesn't work hard enough to change that, but I stand here saying it needs changing.

Eshleman brings out Freud in Blackburn's defense, with over-significant broken masts and purse-seine vaginas and what have you, and discusses what he calls the three modes of sexuality in the poems, a dirty joke variety which has become the standard text of discussion and includes the few poems anthologized, along with a 'turgid sexual despair' which dominates the work of the middle sixties, and last, an "admiration and tender respect for what might be thought of as femininity in all forms" in the first half of his career. The progression implies that the late-career poems are somehow less than the remainder of his work, though still important for a fuller understanding. I find the later period more interesting than the early work, frankly, but then I'm no poet-scholar like Eshleman. And the Freud is just silly.

But it's worth reading, this essay, and makes me want to pull out my collected Blackburn again.

PAUL BLACKBURN’S PARALLEL VOYAGES

The quintessential Paul Blackburn poem (“Affinities II” would be a good example) is visually speaking more like a sketch (Franz Kline was his favorite painter) than a work in oil. Lines are brisk, deft strokes resulting in mobile half-stanzas, particle-stanzas, slightly assymetrical, that tilt the poem on. Whether in Barcelona or in the New York City 23rd Street “Bakery,” the Blackburn persona is generally off-stage, activated by desire, an observer scoring nodes which the reader can connect to constellate relationship-oriented patterns. The tendency is to seek out value, or as Blackburn himself puts it in one poem included in The Parallel Voyages,[1] “the whole and the flowing,” but he is also fascinated by the extent to which humankind is derailed, and redesigned, by a ritualistic emotional and material interface. The content of this quintessential poem is spare, idiomatically erudite, and only marginally introspective. It frames itself as it tracks its own material, resulting in a page design that is quite mobile, with weighted, balanced lines and word clumps:

More:

2010 NBA winner Terrance Hayes Reads "Arbor for Butch"

2010-11-19T15:51:00.000-05:00

Mather Schneider's Drought Resistant Strain

2010-11-16T18:01:00.000-05:00

I don't recall reading Mather Schneider's work before this year, but that's apparently because I don't read widely enough, as he's published something like five hundred poems. I took him first for yet another Bukowski imitator (I suppose I could ask him straight out if he thinks he's influenced by the dirty old man but I don't really care all that much, and I suspect, neither does he)but found when I read a bit more discovered he had more going for him than the Buk, namely, some humility and compassion that leavens the (often tired) attitudes toward licker and wimmen and durgs, as well as a way with phrasing that renders his work a pleasure to read. More than mere narrative, these poems at their best evince a practiced and polished lyric and an attitude toward life that looks forward to better times instead of wallowing in the past. You can find plenty of evidence of his gifts on the 'nets, but my examples come from his most recent book, Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2010).

Of all the poems about bars—there must be a gajillion—I think most of them end up being about pickups or hookups or oddball-character poems. It's refreshing to read something like the following: short, short-lined, observation-based and solidly in the moment, without being smarmy or sentimental. The final metaphor, for me, exhibits the rueful, nearly jaundiced eye of the lifetime observer, the often forced-into-humility watcher who exists in every bar I've ever spent more than a night in. "A long line of buckets/leading to a fire," indeed.

Julie at the Bashful Bandit

Your cigarette smoke curls up
like a telephone cord
to the hereafter.

Over the oval maw of a highball
a wan smile rims
a red straw.

Your hands
are like crazy
white spiders

and your drinks
are a long line of buckets
leading to a fire.

Compassion is not automatically native to poetry, as some poets believe, their dead dogs and busted-up relationships and kind wisdoms from the old man's splintered teeth notwithstanding. The true gen is in a poem like "Bad Summer."

Bad Summer

We killed fourteen copperhead snakes

one summer.

My dad helped me skin one

and make a hat band

for my black cowboy hat.

I remember a fat one

I slit at the belly

(as my mother looked on)

and out squirmed a spaghetti mess

of baby snakes

slimy and bloody

but alive.

We didn't know what else to do

but feed them

to the fire.

Though it's not a tour de force in its language or metaphor, the direct tone and straightforward recounting of events is powerful in its simplicity. I'd point to the parenthesized line as the high point of compassion in this poem. The decision to burn the snakes in front of the mother becomes the force whereon the family turns and the persona gets a life lesson by performing the unexpected cesarean-section. Little dangers grow up to be bigger dangers,the father seems to say. So burn them. In the last stanza, the first line "we didn't know what else to do" is what may be a first failing—one of many, we know—in the narrator's relationship with his parents.

In the poem "Ten Years Away," the narrative takes the forefront again. In plain language,the narrator describes home in terms of how everything has changed but nothing changes.

Ten Years Away

I come home to find my cousin Todd

won't take his Lithium,

my mother has a tissue box

in every corner of her house

and nothing but a police scanner for company,

my sister's married to a man

who wears a hunting cap at dinner, and who drinks

a gallon of whole milk a day,

Kim Hecht has taken too many vacations

with the Rainbow People

and is now able to communicate with cats and marigolds,

Shelley Macintire is now a mad

drunken nurse who hates people and breaks

dinnerware at parties,

our old house is all grown up

with vines and mean-looking grasses

and there are cages of angry dogs behind the shed

where I opened my first nudie mag,

most of the good looking girls from high school

are a mess

and a couple of the homely ones

have found their own

and most of them have been divorced at least once,

the bridge is out down

by Johnson's Hollow

and the lake where I used to skinny dip

with Theresa Ozuna

has been drained,

there's a new road to my grandpa's old house

out in the woods,

but it still looks rough,

it still looks plenty rough back there.

Though "it still looks plenty rough back there," it seems the narrator's celebrating that he managed to get away at all and recognizes how far he's come from the rough, that catalog of characters from his past who have all gone their own way and ended up in situations none of them would probably choose if they had it to do over. I don't want to say too much about the poems, so I'm going to stop now. It's not as if they require explication anyway. They're rigorously assembled and compassionate, hard and fast in some poems while smooth in others, and in general a pleasure to read. I think of these poems in much the same way as I do Jim Harrison's verse: I read Harrison,and now Schneider, to feel connected to reality when the umbilicus that ties me to this plane seems near-cut. The best thing I can say about Schneider's poems is that I want to live in the world they present, and that's no small accomplishment.

Appeal to Poetry Editors

2010-11-09T14:29:00.000-05:00

from Poetic Asides and Robert Lee Brewer:

Dear Poetry Editors,*

For years, poets have grown accustomed to rejection in several forms (as in rejection forms) and the occasional nice note. However, there are some editorial practices that need to be done away with for the good mental health of poets, who already have their mental health called into question for working tirelessly at their craft for little or no money (myself included).

No Note

First, there's the case of editors who don't include any sort of note--even a form letter--with rejected poems. I totally understand if you can't afford to print up form rejection letters, but surely you at least have a pen that can write something on the poems. The word NO would probably convey your meaning.

No note gives poets a false sense of hope. For instance, they may think, "Hey, there was no rejection included, so maybe...maybe they liked what I sent?"

Don't laugh. Poets are a hopeful people.

Empty Envelope**

This is even more bizarre than the no note tactic. After all, the poet sent poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Where did the poems go? Where is the confirmation of rejection? Keep reading.

Yet Another Draft

2010-11-04T13:27:00.001-04:00

*poof*

Another November Draft

2010-11-03T15:28:00.003-04:00

*poof*

New Poem Draft

2010-11-01T22:09:00.001-04:00

It'll disappear in a few days, but it's the first one in a while, so I thought I'd post it. I'll slowly be working on poems every day this month.

*poof*

A Quick Poem For You and News of Some Upcoming Posts

2010-10-15T15:24:00.002-04:00

Hi everybody. Long time no see. I had visitors for a week, I got behind on Night Train, the kids got sick all at once, and here I am, with no posts for a while except my self-puffery, which I'm trying to avoid (but no one else will do it; see my dilemma?).

I've been trying to restart my poetry engine by going back and forth between new-to-me poets and standbys. I'll have a short review or commentary on Drought Resistant Strain, poetry by Mather Schneider and possibly another, on an anthology called New European Poets, up on the blog soon. The latter will be a little slower in coming because I have to rethink my approach to 'criticizing' poetry, not just because of this book, but mostly. See, I'm ignorant of a lot of contemporary European poetry (among many other things), and it's so different in some ways from American poetry it's as if the two barely communicate--or have communicated--at all. And I want to communicate, in my own work, which is not the goal for some poets. I want the interplay of culture-clash and languages and class division, the red meat of the thing, whatever it happens to be. I want its skin off and guts on display so I can haruspicate. In short, I don't want to be ignorant of, well, anything, really, but poetry for sure. Dumb I can handle--not much choice in the matter-- redneck I was born with--but I sure as hell don't have to be ignorant. Anyway. Below is my favorite Frank Stanford poem. I've posted it before but I don't care. It does everything I want a poem to do.

Hidden Water/Frank Stanford

A girl was in a wheelchair on her porch
And wasps were swarming in the cornice

She had just washed her hair
When she took it down she combed it

She could see
Just like I could

The one star under the rafter
Quivering like a knife in the creek

She was thin
And she made me think

Of music singing to itself
Like someone putting a dulcimer in a case

And walking off with a stranger
To lie down and drink in the dark

P.S. after the fact: I'm not entirely ignorant of European literature. I have my own little obsessions, such as poets from the Russian-bloc countries of the Cold War, and some Soviet-era samizdat, thanks to a proselytizing teacher, Bernie Koloski, now retired from Mansfield University and the summer honors program I got kicked out of in the late 80s. But that's not much for a practicing writer and sometime academic.

Redneck Poems is Released

2010-10-02T18:52:00.002-04:00

Hey--some biggish news today. My free e-book/chapbook is available now. It's called Redneck Poems and it's part of the MiPOesias Chapbook Series. It's available for free via Issuu and Scribd, and in print (free on iPad) for a small fee via Magcloud. It's even on Goodreads if you should find it in your heart to rate or review it: Goodreads. It's my first poetry chapbook and I hope you like it. If you do, lemme know. If not, don't harsh my buzz. Just kidding. If you tell me it sucks, though, I'll probably ball up for 15 or 16 hours and then kill something cute like a bunny. Just an FYI.

New E-Chap from Kyle Hemmings: Avenue C

2010-10-01T13:05:00.002-04:00

I've known Kyle's writing for some time now--and was lucky enough to publish a couple stories--and he never fails to impress me. His e-chapbook from Scars Publishing, called Avenue C, fits more than neatly into the subject matter I like to read about. I'm somewhat jealous of these poems, to be honest, and that doesn't happen often. Here's the first poem in the book, the title poem.

Avenue C

1.

She gets high on diesel dust
& mute reruns of Jack Benny.
This slinky white boot Barbarella
has got a rubber soul
that stretches into angel octave,
levitates in the nightly limbo
of bong & free trade
called Avenue C.

Claiming to be owned
by 3 bipolar Kings of Funk,
she breaks glass beer bottles
in the backseat of my old Cougar
& gives herself up
at least once a month.
She doesn’t even wipe
the rivulets of blood
spelling my name
with a missing vowel.

I drive my car
on methamphetamine rage
fill everything up
on zeroes.

At the club tonight,
the D.J. looking like
some fucked-up owl on Special K,
I dance with everyone’s girl
of a thousand bar butterflies.
She twists & gyrates
to the boom boom boom
& sonic Charlies,
shouting to the world
that her body is protein & crystalline salt,
addressing that constant hunger
of dead-eyed mystics,
shouting to the world
that she’s not wearing underwear.

2.

After the artificial red smoke
& dancers with a thousand names
have cleared, he spots the old man
leaning against the piano
that the Siamese twins played out of key.
He’s wearing a flannel shirt that is just so
out of place. He thinks: the crow
must be a veteran of a foreign war
where everyone lost their left hand
& some buttons.

How much? says the Crow-man.
An arm & your left leg, says Banshee-Bob.
In the hotel room,
Crow-man pumps Banshee-Bob
as if channeling his very soul
through the only bridge-&-tunnel there is.
& tonight, neither trick or customer has wings.

When finished, Banshee-Bob looks up
at Crow-man and spots a squiggly red line
across his throat. He hadn’t noticed it
in the misty darkness of the club
that sold rum & quick-pop soul with ice.
It reminds Banshee-Bob of a snake.

But tonight, no need to call 911,
it’s just a mongoose on home turf
just a self-inflicted wound,
the snake’s eyes like tiny keyholes
into a room vacated by draft-dodgers
an old wallet photo of an Asian boy
how cold-blooded bodies can never be forgotten
except in Apt. 214d, last door on the right.

3.

My pit bull girlfriend protects me
from dreams that form scabs
under the skin. I draw a fibrous lining
around my sleep well, or live within
the chain-link perimeter of
hoping-never-to-wake-up.
But despite the subliminal waterfall
of wishes, I do.

In bed, we go down like good cough medicine.

By morning, I am cradled by the love of fur.
I recall the dream of her white teeth
that are mountains & the sun & the moon
that are various shades of her eyes.
There is no trace of a calibrated whistle.

& what I have at the end of my leash
is something that will never return
only the outline of someone
who once found me too needy
of claw & red meat.

The poem is 'streetwise' and seductive in its rhythms, doesn't depend, really, on a narrative thread, though there's a hint of one, and uses its language to describe both what's happening and what might (could? should?) happen. It's rare enough that this type of poem isn't overdone or simply embarrassing. With every line Kyle gets better and better, with tighter control on the language and images. And the damned thing is free! Go get it.

New E-Chap from Kyle Hemmings: Avenue C

2010-10-01T13:04:00.000-04:00

David Huddle and Brian Brodeur

2010-09-23T22:55:00.000-04:00

Brian Brodeur's How a Poem Happens recently had an enlightening Q&A with poet David Huddle, a part of which I'll paste below. This entry, and the whole blog is worth a long look.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

Tough question. I used to claim I thought about audience only after I had finished the piece of writing and had begun to wonder where I should send it. In recent years, however, I’ve been writing with my students, and in that case I’m writing for the immediate audience of the writing class where I will present my poem alongside the other poets presenting theirs. I do still like to think that I don’t write “to” any particular audience. This is sort of like confessing that one is somewhat promiscuous but one is not a complete slut.

I'm not familiar with Huddle's poetry, but I will be pretty soon, you can bet, based on the quoted poem in that entry.

Franz Wright's Drafts

2010-09-11T14:49:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note. I thought this presentation deserved wider audience. It contains discussions and drafts of one of our indispensable poets, to my ear. There's an interview linked within, which I've pulled out to the front, here. Reading his best poems make my internal organs contract, all at once. They're signs of witness, as well as signposts toward--and somehow working against--the sort of life that most of us have. They give us something to look up to and strive for.

What I'm Reading and More on Ted Berrigan

2010-09-10T00:51:00.000-04:00

I am reading these books, in no particular order. I leave them at the bedside, by my laptop, in the library, in both bathrooms, and on the shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen, so's I always have something to read when I have time away from the kids. Yes, bathroom time is included in that.

Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter: This book will scalp you and make you like it. I just got it today and dipped in here and there. Go get it now.

Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan: Pretty much what it says it is. These interviews deal significantly with the Sonnets--even at the end of his life the first thing interviews talk about are the Sonnets--and I can't imagine that was pleasing for him, though he handles the questions every time without showing how many times he's been asked about them. That's a good skill to have.

Paterson, by William Carlos Williams: I got tired of not knowing Paterson, so I'm reading it. Jury's still out on quality assessment, though I haven't put it down bored, like I have with some other 'important' books(Cantos, anyone?).

The Livelihood of Crows, by Jayne Pupek: Jayne died recently, and I hate that I missed telling her how really good this book made me feel, and how good she was.

The God of Loneliness and Failure, by Philip Schultz: a Pulitzer winner I knew nothing about until a couple days ago. I love these plain, plangent poems.

The Name of the Nearest River, by Alex Taylor: excellent Appalachian stories. If you like the grit, go get this one.

A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter: I had to quit reading this before, I think, though I really enjoyed what I'd read up until the time something--I think the last kid being born :-)--made me put it down.

And speaking of Ted Berrigan, Isola di Rifuti has some nifty points of view and discussion of the new book of letters I mentioned a few posts ago. Here's a taste.

Ted Berrigan, writing about The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (out of Dear Sandy, Hello):

The final literary matter I wanted to talk about was the Grove Press anthology. . . . I thought I’d tell you some of the writers in the book that I liked most. Robert Creeley’s short poems seem very interesting to me. He often says very good things in a very good way. Brother Antoninus writes very good poetry, I think. I like Ginsberg’s poem called “A Supermarket in California,” and his other things too. I like Gregory Corso some of the time, and some of the poems he has in here, like “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” I like a lot. I like Barbara Guest a little, and of course Koch and O’Hara and Ashbery very much. I like Gary Snyder’s work, too. I like some of Michael McClure’s work, but like his books better than selected poems from his books. I think that John Wieners is very good, and sometimes I like Ron Loewinsohn and Dave Meltzer. Personally, I think I can write better than many poets in the book, but I can’t write well enough to satisfy myself yet.

Bravado of the up and coming. Lacking (one obvious hole): Olson. (Though one notes, too, Berrigan’s own sense of what Olson call’d a “saturation job”—“It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa”—:

I’ve always found that to sustain myself in any project it was important that I talk about it, write about it, make voluminous notes, even if I discarded them all later. But the discipline of forcing oneself to study onesubject consistently, for a certain amount of time every day, is great. It gives you a realization both of how much can be accomplished through reason and discipline, and of how much cannot be accomplished that way, but rather must be blundered into.

Echoing O’Hara’s cautionary note regarding Olson’s “sometimes rather cold” approach. See O’Hara’s conversations with Edward Lucie-Smith, particularly the succinctly measured cut of: “Olson is—a great spirit. I don’t think that he is willing to be as delicate as his sensibility may be emotionally and he’s extremely conscious of the Pound heritage and of saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time.”) (O’Hara’s remark made in 1965, Berrigan’s sense of what “must be blundered into” is found in a letter dated March 25, 1962. He reports a card in reply to the letter he’d sent O’Hara—“Dear Ted Berrigan: Boy you certainly know how to cheer a person up . . .”—though the two’ve still to meet. Evidence of parallel sensibility.)

More.

Best of the Web Nomination

2010-08-30T21:36:00.000-04:00

I just got news from Helen Losse at the Dead Mule that she'd nominated my poem "How It Begins" for this anthology. Thanks to her, and to the Mule. You should go read the other fine work on the site, and get to mine (you"ll have to scroll a bit) when you have time.

Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters by Ted Berrigan

2010-08-30T21:31:00.000-04:00

I mentioned this book a couple weeks back and just now saw this interview with Berrigan's close friend Ron Padgett on Harriet, originally published in PW.

Poet Ted Berrigan's close friend Ron Padgett co-edited Dear Sandy, a collection of letters the young Ted wrote his wife when she was institutionalized by her parents for marrying him.

What was your relationship with Ted while he was writing these letters?

We were both living in New York on the Upper West Side, but I was keeping my distance from him. Although we saw each other and there was no overt hostility, I was feeling a bit cool toward him during that period.

How do you think all Ted's interests in writers and artists come together in these letters?

They combined in several ways. First, in a general way, that is, as an affirmation that art and literature really do matter in one's life. Ted was encouraged by all the great art he was seeing in New York and all the books he was reading. In a more literary sense, he was studying his favorite writers and artists from a technical point of view and trying to apply what he found to his own writing.

By free associating so much in his letters, do you think he was exploring a state of confusion?

I suspect that he was using his letters to Sandy partly to find out what he thought and how he felt. Sometimes you can't do that until you try to articulate it and, in doing so, you stumble, free associate, and try out ideas to see how they sound out loud, so to speak. When you have the privacy that letter writing allows, you're willing to let your mind go and be more open than if you were writing for the public, of course. The letters allow us to see so intimately inside the mind and heart of a poet and to see how intense he is about it all, how single-minded he was and how he devoted himself to this peculiar art of poetry. So no, I don't think he was confused. He was quite determined, actually, defiant about his position as a penniless poet in a society that had no use for such a person.

Ever Wondered About Poetry Bestsellers?

2010-08-23T15:42:00.003-04:00

Jim Behrle lays it out for you.

Weekly, the good folks at Harriet put up a post that links back to a list of poetry bestsellers. Where does this list come from? Is this a Publishers' Weekly bestseller list? Does the Poetry Foundation create a list? The word "bestseller" is a dicey supposition to begin with, across any genre. The New York Times bestseller list does ask many bookstores to report their own bestseller lists to contribute to the numbers. But a New York Times bestseller doesn't usually mean more customers bought #1 than #2. When a warehouse at a distributor replenishes another warehouse at a chain, that could count as bestseller numbers. And it's up to the individual reporting store to decide how to report to the New York Times. If a reporting store had events that particular week with Carl Hiaasen and Sloane Crosley, guess who will be at the top of their Bestseller List? Neilsen's Bookscan does not take into account sales at Walmart or Sam's Clubs or most independents. Many small independents either don't have the ability to report or don't wish to share sales info with potential competitors. Do Amazon sales # compute in people who buy new books used by some of the small stores that sell on Amazon? Probably not.

To look at a Bestseller List one assumes that all books were equally represented as possibilities for sales. But most of the Bestseller games are won in brick and mortar environments in Stock and Placement. Which is why the list Harriet highlights is filled with major publishers, the Bukowskis and Mary Olivers. These are the books generally on display, with more than one copy. Not the lone copy of a poetry book that is spined out in a small poetry section. If a publisher pays for a book to be well-displayed it will be in the major chains and some smaller indies. More.

Why Can't I Leave You, by Ai

2010-08-17T23:29:00.000-04:00

Speaking of great poems this time, from Poetry 365--

You stand behind the old black mare,
dressed as always in that red shirt,
stained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,
that will not stop for anything,
stroking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.
I pick up my suitcase and set it down,
as I try to leave you again.
I smooth the hair back from your forehead.
I think with your laziness and the drought too,
you’ll be needing my help more than ever.
You take my hands, I nod
and go to the house to unpack,
having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip
for you to take off, because you like that
and when you come in, you pull down the straps
and I unbutton your shirt.
I know we can’t give each other any more
or any less than what we have.
There is a safety in that, so much
that I can never get past the packing,
the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy,
come close between my thighs
and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

Poem Draft

2010-08-12T15:28:00.001-04:00

As always, this will disappear soon.

poof

Letters to Yesenin #3

2010-08-09T12:19:00.000-04:00

Last night, in a reaction to some new meds, all my joints exploded with a pain I can only describe as burning from within. I felt like shit and knew I wouldn't sleep, so I picked up Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison, a book I reread every year or so to remind myself to stay alive. Last night was the time; I grabbed it and a bunch of John Wieners (check out the new EPC page on Wieners) for my dark night of the soul. It's a great life-affirming read though every poem is more or less about suicide. I think this poem is from 1972 or 1973, as it describes events from the 1972 Olympics.

Letters to Yesenin

3

I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up

Doctor Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there

with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and

perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present

all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are

never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted

so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on

with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in

the early history of Australia. But then the movie

was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping

and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with

the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could

not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin

glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared

as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is

all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from

the rope–We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota

halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck

will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted

again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and

just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage

away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red

robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

Poetry Bomb

2010-08-06T13:35:00.001-04:00

Here's a prosaic poem. I tried to do something with the repetition, as you can see, and I'm sure it doesn't work right now. I'll force myself to recast it at some point, but the sentiments are there so when my wife stumbles over my blog as she sometimes does she can read it. Like a poetry-bomb, except it'll disappear in a couple days.

*poof*

A Book to Look Forward To

2010-08-05T12:22:00.001-04:00

I yanked this info from the Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet. It's a starred review, too, so I'm very much looking forward to reading it. I love poet's letters, but I wonder if any contemporary poets are archiving their emails for posterity. I doubt it, and that's too bad. The interwebs have shortened not only our attention span but our capacity for those long conversations letter-to-letter and closer to the heart than the short coldness of email.

Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan, Ted
Berrigan, edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett, Coffee House (Consortium, dist.), $19.95 paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-56689-249-0

In 1962, poet Ted Berrigan (The Sonnets) was an unknown New York writer. While visiting New Orleans, he eloped with 19-year-old Sandy Alper. Suspecting Ted of drug use, Sandy’s parents “became frightened and irrational” and had her involuntarily committed to a mental ward, although after a few months, Sandy managed to flee with Ted. By 1969 the couple was divorced. This volume vividly preserves their young love through Ted’s letters to Sandy while she was institutionalized--packed with rage, frustration, and thoughts about writing--and Sandy’s responses, reporting on her reading and the little dramas of the mental ward. Seventeen years after Ted’s death, this volume “validate[s] my presence in Ted’s life,” Sandy explains somewhat wistfully. According to Padgett, Ted’s letters reveal “much of the emotional turbulence that helped infuse The Sonnets with such energy and drive.” “It’s time for less warm tears and more cold fury,” writes Ted, transporting the reader to a time when a passionate and impulsive young woman could be committed for behavior contrary to social norms. Even those unfamiliar with Ted’s poetry will be fascinated by the drama inherent in this collection. 20 b&w illus. (Oct.)

More on John Wieners

2010-07-20T12:49:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note on John Wieners, via Silliman.

Between Visions:

I printed a few paragraphs from the essay below in My Year 2004 in a piece devoted to Marjorie Perloff, in whose course I first encountered the work of John Wieners. The essay was one of my first attempts to discuss contemporary poetry, and it reveals the graduate-student environment in which it was written. The essay was written at a time when postmodernism was just beginning to have an impact on literary texts and my own notions of postmodernism, moreover, were highly influenced by the course for which I wrote the essay, which would ultimately result in Marjorie Perloff’s important study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage.

Consequently, I had decided not to republish the piece until news came last week that Wieners had collapsed on a Boston Street and died a few days later, on March 1, in Massachusetts General Hospital. Without any identification upon him, he lay in the hospital for several days, hooked up to a machine, until a worker traced a prescription in his pocket to a local pharmacy. Soon after, the hospital connected with John’s friends Jim Dunn and Charles Shively, who sat with him as he died.

I first met Wieners in the mid-1990s when Raymond Foye, who had edited Wieners’ Selected Poems in 1986, introduced me to him at a small press book fair in New York. I had previously communicated with Wieners and had published some of his poems in my 1994 volume, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, but I don’t believe John ever knew of the essay below. Nonetheless, he recognized my name, and, although he looked like a street derelict with his three-day beard and torn and ripped clothing, he spoke—as Fanny Howe described him—like a Southern gentleman: “Sir, it is so very nice to meet you,” he slightly bowed. The paradox was memorable, as if one were witnessing a true-life character out of a Damon Runyon novel.

I believe that I met him again a year later at the same affair, which I attended briefly for several years out of a sense of affiliation with these very small presses similar to mine years before. I believe Raymond invited him there each year—where he stood out as a sort of unexpected celebrity—to sell books and signatures that might bring the destitute Wieners a few needed dollars.

Ariana Reines

2010-07-09T09:11:00.001-04:00

is someone whose poems I admire very much. Part of the attraction seems her complete willingness to try anything to make the work bold and memorable. The poems follow no discernable form, look like average-to-bad free verse on the page--random line breaks, simple language-- it seems to me, and on first read you might find it easier to chuck them than face them straight-on, but that would be a terrible mistake. As Gardner said of Robert Penn Warren, read it again. Her books include The Cow and Coeur De Lion, and she also translates Baudelaire and Jean-Luc Hennig.

Here's one from Everyday Genius.

from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE

when my boyfriend called the cops on me
i waited in my room for them to come
i waited a half hour and then another half
hour
this naked whiteness i could contrive to cleanse me
officer i am in love and now my lover hate me
always having dreamed of being a monk in a cell
if i eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle
i could sit in the seat of rocks and razors
standing on one foot for ten years near the gingerlight
where the lees of my mind would fizz and then unto heaven sail

everyone i know beats up their lover and their lover beats them up
and the cops come and the cops go and sometimes someone passes a night in holding
i saw a shade pass across his face when he said he loved me
and he would not tell me what that shade was
i’m just a lover officer
but they never came though later they would come for him and i looked at my computer
and the internet was so depressing
then you wrote me a message like
call me sometime
and i think i chatted like how about right now
and you were like
yeah
do it
call me right now
when you walk in the rinsed orange light
shining like rotting tangerines picking up a deck of cards
low mean cards a low mean deal
twos and threes of clubs
which is pretty much what we got
blood is a spangle
bright colors are hidden deep in the body
fruits impossibly moist
trees blow out their hair along a furrow
i’m sick of eating beans in ugly light
i should not have spent my friend’s money on a miniskirt
but this is the future
the insects are dead in the cupboard
and dead on the floor
and i left one over there
quivering
alongside a clot of strawberry jam
to write this down

the small ones and the fat orangeish ones
they die through the holes in the ceiling
and they live and die upon me no matter how much love I make
sleeping like promises when I have to go
to sleep against the future which is not
going to come to term today and not tomorrow either
why would you sit down and write it
this is the total experience
we’re too big to fail

Yay! A New Draft

2010-07-03T00:31:00.001-04:00

I was supposed to be critting some novel excerpts from other people (mea maxima culpa), but I got this instead. Truth: DON'T COUNT ON ME FOR ANYTHING ON TIME OR AS AGREED UPON.

First one in a while. Content-wise, it's another knee-slapper. Will disappear in a few days.

Poem on a Line by Ken Clark

*poof*

A Poem From Back a Ways

2010-06-29T15:06:00.001-04:00

I don't have much going poem-wise. I'm prepping two books right now, my collection of stories that will be out soonish, and my novel (endlessly), whose ending I'm rewriting and whose polishing will take forever if I let it. It's been two years now since I 'finished' it. I hope it's worth doing.

Anyway, as promised, a poem I've probably linked before, from Girls with Insurance.

How Terror Might Work for John Smith, IT Guy

With the formless voices that bitch in his ear!
Instructions: cap your appearance off with a balaclava.

No one but the people on the mask's other side
will know. True terror does not require identity

revelation; otherwise one might set goals
for vengeance in one's yearly situation report.

This year was very poor for Terror Investors LLC: little
Jimmy from next door escaped our 23-hour-vigil,

lived to ram candy into sister Suzy's cute dark hair;
Mama had to cut it off. George at the office moved

to a corner suite with high-rise view and a leggy
blonde assistant taking dictation on her knees every day

at 12:15 as you stand by the coffeepot that never
works. Your wife and the coffee-brown pool boy

(ye gods, the hits just keep coming), licking batter sensuously
from the paddle of the Kitchen-Aid mixer you bought her

on anniversary ten: the blowjob anniversary, she said.
Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden aerates

his blood in an expensive machine as the United
States of Indecency sits on its hands. He laughs in his

beard. Homeland Security can't contain the domestic
rage of the auto industry or the corpse-fucking

of the banking industry. It’s time to go home. The baby
too lies like one dead on the sofa, sleeping off her future.

Mahmoud Darwish--Rita and the Rifle

2010-06-16T08:45:00.001-04:00

photo by Amer Shomali

This must be a popular poem--it's all over the internet, but I found it via Tom Clark (thanks).

Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and prays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle

Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again

Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita

Between Rita and my eyes—
A rifle

David Bottoms

2010-06-08T13:35:00.001-04:00

I'm slow to discover nearly everyone, I'm finding. Like David Bottoms. I admire the beard.

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump
by David Bottoms

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

Apply by Commenting

2010-06-06T20:40:00.000-04:00

The Nepotist

2010-06-02T06:37:00.000-04:00

Somebody likes me!

Three poems worth: Parkinsonism; Sonnet for So and So; Hollywood Appalachian Noir: A Lesson.

Elegy for a Puritan Conscience, by Alan Dugan

2010-05-26T13:42:00.000-04:00

He's one of my new favorites, and this bitter little pill shows what he does best, afflict the comfortable. I wish I'd been able to meet him.

I closed my ears with stinging bugs
and sewed my eyelids shut
but heard a sucking at the dugs
and heard my parents rut.

I locked my jaw with rusty nails
and cured my tongue in lime
but ate and drank in garbage pails
and said these words of crime.

I crushed my scrotum with two stones
and drew my penis in
but felt your wound expect its own
and fell in love with sin.

Kinnell's Book of Nightmares/Under the Maud Moon

2010-05-24T12:11:00.000-04:00

Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully--I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every time I open the book, so it's never far from me.

Under The Maud Moon

1

On the path
by this wet site
of old fires -
black ashes, black stones, where tramps
must have squatted down,
gnawing on stream water,
unhouseling themselves on cursed bread,
failing to get warm at a twigfire -

I stop,
gather wet wood,
cut dry shavings, and for her,
whose face I held in my hands
a few hours, whom I gave back
only to keep holding the space where she was,

I light
a small fire in the rain.

The black
wood reddens, the deathwatches inside
begin running out of time, I can see
the dead, crossed limbs
longing again for the universe, I can hear
in the wet wood the snap
and re-snap of the same embrace being torn.

The raindrops trying
to put the fire out
fall into it and are
changed: the oath broken,
the oath sworn between earth and water, flesh and spirit, broken,
to be sworn again,
over and over, in the clouds, and to be broken again,
over and over, on earth.

2

I sit a moment
by the fire, in the rain, speak
a few words into its warmth -
stone saint smooth stone– and sing
one of the songs I used to croak
for my daughter, in her nightmares.

Somewhere out ahead of me
a black bear sits alone
on his hillside, nodding from side
to side. He sniffs
the blossom-smells, the rained earth,
finally he gets up,
eats a few flowers, trudges away,
his fur glistening
in the rain.

The singed grease streams
out of the words, the one
held note
remains – a love-note
twisting under my tongue, like the coyote’s bark,
curving off, into a
howl.

3

A round-
cheeked girlchild comes awake
in her crib. The green
swaddlings tear open,
a filament or vestment
tears, the blue flower opens.

And she who is born,
she who sings and cries,
she who begins the passage, her hair
sprouting out,
her gums budding for her first spring on earth,
the mist still clinging about
her face, puts
her hand into her father’s mouth, to take hold of
his song.

4

It is all over,
little one, the flipping
and overleaping, the watery
somersaulting alone in the oneness
under the hill, under
the old, lonely bellybutton
pushing forth again
in remembrance,
the drifting there furled in the dark,
pressing a knee or elbow
along a slippery wall, sculpting
the world with each thrash-the stream
of omphalos blood humming all about you.

5

Her head
enters the headhold
which starts sucking her forth: being itself
closes down all over her, gives her
into the shuddering
grip of departure, the slow,
agonized clenches making
the last molds of her life in the dark.

6

The black eye
opens, the pupil
droozed with black hairs
stops, the chakra
on top of the brain throbs a long moment in world light,

and she skids out on her face into light,
this peck
of stunned flesh
clotted with celestial cheesiness, glowing with the astral violet
of the underlife. And as they cut

her tie to the darkness
she dies
a moment, turns blue as a coal,
the limbs shaking
as the memories rush out of them. When

they hang her up
by the feet, she sucks
air, screams
her first song – and turns rose,
the slow,
beating, featherless arms
already clutching at the emptiness.

7

When it was cold
on our hillside, and you cried
in the crib rocking
through darkness, on wood
knifed down to the curve of the smile, a sadness
stranger than ours, all of it
flowing from the other world,
I used to come to you
and sit by you
and sing to you. You did not know,
and yet you will remember,
in the silent zones
of the brain, a specter, descendant
of the ghostly forefathers, singing
to you in the nighttime -
not the songs
of light said to wave
through the bright hair of angels,
but a blacker
rasping flowering on that tongue.

For when the Maud moon
glimmered in those first nights,
and the Archer lay
sucking the icy biestings of the cosmos,
in his crib of stars,

I had crept down
to riverbanks, their long rustle
of being and perishing, down to marshes
where the earth oozes up
in cold streaks, touching the world
with the underglimmer
of the beginning,
and there learned my only song.

And in the days
when you find yourself orphaned,
emptied
of all wind-singing, of light,
the pieces of cursed bread on your tongue,

may there come back to you
a voice
spectral, calling you
sister!
from everything that dies.

And then
you shall open
this book, even if it is the book of nightmares.

Keetje Kuipers--"Across a Great Wilderness without You

2010-05-17T09:03:00.000-04:00

If you missed this on the internet, you can catch it here. Don't say I never gave you nuthin'.

Across a Great Wilderness without You
by Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them— language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the platinum thread beyond them where the river runs the length of the valley. That's where the fish are. Tomorrow I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled stone beneath the bank, their bodies desperately alive when I hold them in my hands, the way prayers become more hopeless when uttered aloud. The phone's disconnected. Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you: I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm over my bed. It's the sound of them shouldering against each other that terrifies me, as if it might hurt to brush across another being's living flesh. But I carry a gun now. I've cut down a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town— my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools I've retired from their life of touching you.

Weldon Kees

2010-05-14T10:19:00.001-04:00

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955, which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years.

James Reidel's book Vanished Act: the Life and Art of Weldon Kees, is a more traditional biography which restates the (much more interesting and fuller) material Knoll used, but is worth your time as well. I'll finish it soon and have more to say, most likely.

Kees published stories and poems easily, and in the best journals, though his novels weren't published in his lifetime. He's still a recognized, that is, canonical poet for a single poem, For my Daughter, which most of you have read, I'm sure, or can find online easily enough, so I won't bother posting it. Kees painted as well, wrote documentary films, played barrelhouse piano, and took photographs of professional or show quality. But we know him for his poems, which are dark and odd and unlike his contemporaries.

The Coming of the Plague

BY WELDON KEES

September was when it began.

Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs

Silent, moving like shadows on a wall;

And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind

We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;

Badgers and snakes, abandoning

Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten;

Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods

Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors

Rising from the earth - all these,

And more began that fall. Ravens flew round

The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,

We could hear the sound of beating clothes

All through the night. We could not count

All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.

And one day in a field I saw

A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,

Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,

Huddled together, silent, ominous,

And heard the sound of rushing wind.

Kees' disappearance in 1955 contributes to what Dana Gioia calls his cult following, but I'd like to think there are more people out there reading his work and finding pleasure in its singular creepiness and the slow overtaking of your heart rate as a reader, something amply pushed by his pacing in this poem and in many others.

One person I know who's reading Kees is Kathleen Rooney, of Rose Metal Press. Her chapbook of Robinson poems (Kees' New Yorker poems featured a persona he called Robinson) will be out from Greying Ghost Press, and in her book of essays, For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, she hunts down Kees' haunts and habitations in New York City. Those poems and essays are all well worth your time and money. So there's Kathy and me. Anybody else out there reading Kees? Why?

Some Talk About Jack Gilbert, by Curtis Faville, and Some Other Talk

2010-05-06T13:49:00.002-04:00

If you don't know Jack Gilbert's poems, I suggest you run out right now and get some. I've read a great deal about him over the last couple years, mostly to the effect that he was a poet who moved almost completely outside the poetry scene, which is an anomaly considering how well-known he seems to be. Curtis Faville writes about some of the poems and the man himself in this series of three posts. I hope you go read them all. Found via Silliman, who must spend half his life scouring the net.

Part I:

Jack Gilbert [1925- ] is a poet I only recently had the experience of reading. After winning the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1962, at the age of 36--rather late in the game, as such things happen, even then, almost 50 years ago now--he went into a sort of self-imposed exile, steering clear of America, the American university system, the lecture and reading circuit, and spending large blocks of time in Europe, especially Greece.

In his formative years, Gilbert lived in San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the local poet heroes of the time (Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth). Once Gilbert had published his first book, Views of Jeopardy, and gained national notoriety, he threw over these associations, and left for Europe. The American poetry scene--perhaps specifically the California poetry and art scene, with all its laissez-faire accommodation of counter-culture permissiveness and joie de vivre--just wasn't severe and demanding enough for his taste. Intuitively, he sensed that there were deeper levels to his spirit, and that older, Old World settings were the place to cultivate his austere daemon. This spiritual renunciation of the New World had symbolic as well as aesthetic meaning to Gilbert. More.

Part II:

Perhaps the saddest elegy of all is the one fate writes of our own demise, anticipated, acknowledged, postponed, denied, rejected--finally, unavoidable. The full weight of what we cherished, were given to experience, to know, to accomplish, is served up as a conclusive summary--what we thought to say, or tried to, over and over again, over years of chances, is telescoped into relief--but, like the soldier on Bierce's Owl Creek Bridge, the release into emptiness leaves nothing but a false memory, another version of the story.

For the better part of his life, Jack Gilbert rejected the standard literary career, in favor of a kind of spiritual retreat, choosing a modest life, an attention to the detail of living privately, intimately, over the theatre of approbation and congeniality, of ambition and guile. One's tendency is to regard this renunciation as a virtuous sacrifice, but the benefits of aesthetic celibacy aren't what Gilbert was after. For a poet as committed to convulsive finalities and verdicts as Gilbert is, the drama of epitaphs is irresistable. More.

Part III:

In 1982, after a hiatus lasting fully 20 years, in which he had been living for the most part abroad, mostly in Greece, Jack Gilbert broke his aesthetic fast and published his second collection of verse, Monolithos: Poems 1962 and 1982 [Knopf].

Imagine what the effect would be if your poems could only survive as fragments, moth-eaten papyri stashed in caves and forgotten for a thousand years in an arid, sparsely settled land. Would you be content to let half your lines--say, the left half--exist as testaments to the partial content of your assertions, to the sum of your sentiments? Are your poems as full enough of what you most wish to endure, over time, that what would survive would be somehow sufficient to your purposes?

But our lives and our poems are like different versions of the shadows of our selves. Who knows what Sappho looked like, what she liked to eat for breakfast, or what color of skin appealed to her? Perhaps it isn't important that we know--certainly we never shall--only that the quality of feeling she was able to transmit, much in fragmentary shards, is apprehensible to us, across the barriers of time, language, context, and material surface. More.

On another completely unrelated note: I've been asked why I don't really analyze the posts or poetry I reference here. Part of it is that I envisioned a blog of book excerpts and articles that I thought people should pay attention to, and part of it is that poetry is my first love and in some way everyone's first love is beyond rebuke and resistant to analysis. Ask me about fiction--I have an aesthetic already in place and a fairly lengthy history of publication to back it up. Poetry, eh, not so much. I still have the temerity of loose preferences and (why yes, I like Ted Berrigan and James Wright about equally; I think flarf is amusing, but written by well-meaning and intelligent folks lost somewhere up the tightly puckered asshole of theory; Ariana Reines and Lara Glenum both frighten and fascinate me (both are good things); Jack Spicer and Jim Harrison are both interesting for different reasons; I can't seem to read H.D. well but I love Vassar Miller) I plan to keep it that way, at least until my poetry library is 2/3 the size of my fiction library (it's about 1/5 right now). Sorry. If you want poetry analysis, you can go here and here and here and here.

John Berryman's Dream Song 131

2010-04-29T14:30:00.001-04:00

This is one of my favorites from Berryman--I re-read him regularly--and now that NaPo is over (well, I'm giving up, anyway) I'll be back to posting regularly with ephemera and poems. During NaPo I read Berryman and Kim Addonizio and Maurice Manning and Rae Armantrout and Robin Blaser. Blaser's the only one I didn't really get into, but that may be a factor of my dipping into and out of his Collected at random instead of reading through conscientiously as I usually do.

Dream Song 131: Come Touch Me Baby In His Waking Dream by John Berryman

Come touch me baby in his waking dream
disordered Henry murmured. I’ll read you Hegel
and that will hurt your mind
I can’t remember when you were unkind
but I will clear that block, I’ll set you on fire
along with our babies

to save them up the high & ruined stairs,
my growing daughters. I am insane, I think,
they say & act so.
But then they let me out, and I must save them,
High fires will help, at this time, in my affairs.
I am insane, I know

and many of my close friends were half-sane
I see the rorschach for the dead on its way
Prop them up!
Trade me a lesson, pour me down a sink
I swear I’ll love her always, like a drink
Let pass from me this cup

NaPo #17

2010-04-23T00:44:00.004-04:00

Getting tired.

NaPo #17

*poof

NaPo #16

2010-04-23T00:41:00.002-04:00

*poof

NaPo #15

2010-04-22T23:49:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #14

2010-04-22T23:35:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #13

2010-04-21T23:46:00.003-04:00

*poof

NaPo #12

2010-04-21T22:44:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #11

2010-04-21T21:45:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #10

2010-04-21T20:58:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #9

2010-04-15T00:21:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #8

2010-04-14T01:02:00.001-04:00

*poof

NaPo #7

2010-04-08T00:07:00.002-04:00

*poof

NaPo #6

2010-04-07T00:03:00.003-04:00

*poof

Poet Audio for People Not At AWP

2010-04-06T07:19:00.000-04:00

Self-Portrait: Lynn Behrendt

Enjoy the silence. Or break it with some poetry audio.

Via Geof Huth, here is Lynn Behrendt reading 'I am an Asshole' and 'Luminous Flux,' the former of which is very funny and savage and altogether worth your time. Luminous Flux was published in an edition of 20, and so is impossible to find, sadly for you and me. You can find more audio from the Segue Series here.

NaPo #5

2010-04-06T00:12:00.002-04:00

*poof

NaPo #4

2010-04-05T22:38:00.002-04:00

*poof

Napo #3

2010-04-03T18:03:00.003-04:00

*poof

NaPo #2

2010-04-01T23:32:00.001-04:00

*poof

Daisy Fried on How a Poem Happens: Interesting Uncertainty

2010-04-01T22:02:00.006-04:00

I have not found better words than hers to explain how I go about writing a poem. This Q/A is from Brian Brodeur's wonderful blog, How a Poem Happens.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

All of my poems are fiction, regardless of whether what “I” says happened really happened. Ron Silliman wrote at his blog something like that my poems are in the persona of myself. Which seems right, though I had never thought of it that way explicitly before. I am aware that the appearance of autobiography makes people want to know if it’s true. Obviously I’m willing to exploit that desire in my poems. I think I may be more involved than many poets in using fictional techniques—the kinds of things that novel and short-story writers think about. But fact or fiction, telling what happened is not the point of my poems. I use story, and the word “I,” as strategies toward getting the poems to a place of what I hope is interesting uncertainty.

I write poems and stories with the same impulse, I think, except with poetry I feel a duty to use better language (at least part of the point with poetry) and to get in and out within a short period of time, whereas in fiction the story I'm trying to tell is most important, so I think less about language and more about how the story works on the reader, or doesn't work well enough, as the case may be. I don't feel as if I'm pointed toward 'interesting uncertainty,' though. I'm not entirely sure what that means. I think it's near-impossible, in a poem of specific details, the kind I like, to end up with a feeling of 'interesting uncertainty.' But I need to think about it more.

And as it is the first day of NaPoWriMo, I present here Daisy Fried's Exercises, via Amy King.

1. Write a ten-line poem in which each line is a lie.

2. Write a poem that tells a story in 18 lines or less, and includes at least four proper nouns.

3. Write a poem that uses any of the senses EXCEPT SIGHT as its predominant imagery.

4. Write a poem inspired by a newspaper article you read this week.

5. Write a poem without adjectives.

6. Ask your roommate/neighbor/lover/friend/mother/anyone for a subject (as wild as they want to make it) for a ten-minute poem. Now write a poem about that subject in ten minutes; make it have a beginning, a middle and an end.

7. Write the worst poem you possibly can. Now edit it and make it even worse.

8. Poem subject: A wind blows something down. Or else it doesn’t. Write it in ten minutes.

9. Write a poem with each line, or at least many of the lines, filling in the blanks of “I used to________, but now I_________.”

11. Write a poem consisting entirely of things you’d like to say, but never would, to a parent, lover, sibling, child, teacher, roommate, best

friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc.

12. Write a poem that uses as a starting point a conversation you overheard.

13. First line of today’s poem: “This is not a poem, but…”

14. Write a poem in the form of either a letter or a speech which uses at least six of the following words: horses, “no, duh,” adolescent, autumn

leaves, necklace, lamb chop, Tikrit, country rock, mother, scamper, zap, bankrupt. Take no more than 13 minutes to write it.

15. Write a poem which includes a list or lists-shopping list, things to do, lists of flowers or rocks, lists of colors, inventory lists,

lists of events, lists of names…

16. Poem subject: A person runs where no running is allowed. Write it in ten minutes.

17. Write a poem in the form of a personal ad.

18. Write a poem made up entirely of questions. Or write a poem made up entirely of directions.

19. Write a poem about the first time you did something.

20. Write a poem about falling out of love.

21. Make up a secret. Then write a poem about it. Or ask someone to give you a made-up or real secret, and write a poem about it.

22. Write a poem about a bird you don’t know the name of.

23. Write a hate poem.

24. Free-write for, say, 15 minutes, but start with the phrase “In the kitchen” and every time you get stuck, repeat the phrase “In the

kitchen.” Alternatively, use any part of a house you have lots of associations with-”In the garage,” “In the basement,” “In the bathroom,” “In the yard.”

25. Write down 5-10 words that sound ugly to you. Use them in a poem.

26. Write a poem in which a motorcycle and a ballerina appear.

27. Write a poem out of the worst part of your character.

28. Write a poem that involves modern technology-voice mail, or instant messaging, or video games, or… 29. Write a seduction poem in which somebody seduces you.

30. Radically revise a poem you wrote earlier this month.

NaPo #1

2010-04-01T02:21:00.001-04:00

*poof

Two Days to NaPoWriMo

2010-03-29T15:42:00.002-04:00

As usual, I will be posting my poem-drafts here from the beginning until the end of April, and then they'll all disappear due to the magick of the interwebs fairies. I may occasionally send you to other blogs to see what's up there, too. I'm having a difficult time getting into the right groove for this year. It will, considering the family's health, be the worst year ever for me to keep up, so I'm giving myself a head start and posting a draft tonight that I wrote a few days ago. I want to be a couple poems ahead of the game, so I don't stress when I miss a day, as will do. This one needs a new ending, but I haven't seen it yet. :-/

Dowsing

The forest for the trees, he said as the cows lowed.
The sun dropped behind the mountain in blue-orange fire.

First you sit a minute to clear your mind,
he said, and plopped down on a chunk of granite.

Closed his eyes. I watched his eyelids tremble and still.
Best is wood, he said finally, hold a forked branch

with a hand on each side of the fork and relax your
palms. Soon you'll feel the water pull at you like

a real strong wind. After a few moments he said,
this wood's no good for witching water. He straightened

some wire hangers into elongated L shapes with a belt tool.
Now here you hold the small bit of the L in each hand.

Hold them in front of you till the bars cross. There's
your water. He closed his eyes. My father with us

closed his eyes. I kept mine open to see the wires
cross into an X. Mark the spot, he said. And went

to his knees slowly to thank the Lord. My dad
lit a cigarette and sighed. Uncle Marty handed me

the military shovel, olive-green with purpose.
Now dig, he said. There's your wellspring.

The ground soft and loamy. I dug and dug.
Eventually we drilled, and found nothing.

New Poetry Press--Birds, LLC

2010-03-24T16:10:00.041-04:00

I haven't had a great deal of time lately to surf for new poetry 'stuff,' though it's one of my favorite websurfing pastimes, but I did find a new poetry press doing cool things recently. A group of friends got together and created a press for the purposes of both publishing and self-publishing, not uncommon these days, and probably the way the small press poetry ought to work, optimally. Besides being a great idea, Birds LLC began with a near-nuclear bang, as far as I'm concerned, as their first two books are by folks I greatly admire: Chris Tonelli and Elisa Gabbert. I'll let the interview with Chris stand in for most of what I'd like to say on the topic.

Or not. If you want to publish poems, fuck the contest circuit, stop slavering at the asses of the poets around, under, below and above you, and start a small press. There can never be too many. Your poems will find readers, though not without a lot of work on your part, but you'll end up with the tribe that is right for you eventually. Link to other small presses, buy their chaps, read their books, talk 'em up when you like 'em, and just keep at it.

Shake what your mama gave ya.

Okay, so I had more to say.

I'm sure we'll hear a lot more from these folks before many years pass. This text is swiped from the Constant Conversation, the blog of the Quarterly Conversation, where Carrie Olivia Adams interviews Chris Tonelli of Birds, LLC.

Tell us a little about the history of your press, where the idea came from, and what makes your press unique.

At the AWP conference in Austin a few years back, Sam Starkweather—one of the founders/editors of Birds, LLC—put BIRDS, INC. on his nametag as his affiliation . . . as a joke, and since then we’ve had this theoretical poetry entity called BIRDS, INC. And the more we noticed that there was a lot of poetry out there that we all loved that wasn’t getting anywhere on the contest circuit, the more we wanted to make that entity a book press. At the time, one of the other founders/editors, Justin Marks, had just started Kitchen Press and was putting out chapbooks in this vein, so we knew we had his process experience to lean on. Then, like a lot of things you repetitively joke about, they become real. And at some point last year we started getting serious . . . thinking about the manuscripts, thinking about the website, editing the manuscripts, etc. Sam and Dan Boehl (another founder/editor) figured out the business/financial side of things and we became an official company here in North Carolina. As it turns out, getting incorporated is harder than becoming an LLC, et voila! Birds, LLC. Which we kind of like better . . . sounds even colder and more business-y than Inc. Then Sam and Elisa Gabbert (Birds, LLC author . . .The French Exit) really worked on her book, and Justin and I worked hard on mine (The Trees Around), until we had finished, polished books. Justin got his unreal book designer, Joshua Elliot, on board and then signed on and worked with Friesens, and we had our covers/interiors and our printer. Matt Rasmussen (founder/editor) and I are working on distribution (Amazon, SPD, etc.) so we can get these books out in the world.
We’ll see what makes our press unique . . . I think it’s too early to tell. What we know we offer are good looking books, a real working relationship between an author and an editor, and the support authors need to promote their work. Too often friends of ours would win contests, and their publishers were so uninvolved in the shaping of the manuscript, in getting readings, interviews, reviews—in promotion in general— and too rigid in their approach to book design. All of which is stuff I simply just don’t get. If you love books enough to have a press, why wouldn’t you want to help the author edit them? Why wouldn’t you want to sell as many copies for you and your authors as possible? Why wouldn’t you want them to look terrific? It’s baffling the indifference a lot of presses have towards their own books. I mean, what’s the point?
One of my favorite recent publishing stories also began at that Austin AWP . . . There was this great reading at an outdoor bar, and one of the readers was Zach Schomburg. The thing I remember best was the title line from the title poem of his latest book: “you should say / no scary.” Anyway, afterward, Black Ocean publisher Janaka Stucky approached him about his manuscript. Long story short…we now have The Man Suit and Scary, No Scary. But besides all that, the part I like best is the extensive editorial processes the manuscripts went through. It was the first time I’d heard my contemporaries talk about that . . . having a real back and forth with an editor about the work they wanted to publish. Certainly Black Ocean [This is where I, the interviewer, should note that I help Janaka edit poetry for Black Ocean and Chris was formerly the online marketing manager] is in many ways an ideal publishing model—great books that look fantastic, a concerned and active editorial staff, enthusiastic promotion, etc.

AI 1947-2010

2010-03-23T01:15:00.003-04:00

I discovered AI between the time I left graduate school and when I wrote steadily for ten years before I published anything. That fun period--let's call it, oh, 1999. I taught three comp courses at Emerson College, and two at Northeastern University, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other days of the week I worked at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street, and it was during that time, most likely stocking the shelves, I found her. It wasn't just what the Poetry Foundation bio calls her "uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers," it was the sheer flux of her line, the skin-slipping dramatic monologues and the unabashed sexuality. Why is that women are more frank about sex and better able to write about real sex, as opposed the sometimes dreamy, sometimes porny world of male sex-writing? Question for another time. In any case, I immediately fell in love with her poems, and I always remember the first poem by a new poet. Here it is, with another one I like nearly as well:

Twenty-year Marriage

You keep me waiting in a truck
with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,
while you piss against the south side of a tree.
Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.
That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows
and the seat, one fake leather thigh,
pressed close to mine is cold.
I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,
but get inside me, start the engine;
you’ll have the strength, the will to move.
I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half.
Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.
Pretend you don’t owe me a thing
and maybe we’ll roll out of here,
leaving the past stacked up behind us;
old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.

The Kid

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud,
then climbs through the truck window.
She ignores me as I walk around it,
hitting the flat tires with an iron rod.
The old man yells for me to help hitch the team,
but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder,
until my mother calls.
I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window,
but it falls short.
The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball
I can’t lift my leg over.

I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn’t look up
and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.
Mother runs toward us. I stand still,
get her across the spine as she bends over him.
I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house.
Roses are red, violets are blue,
one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown.
They’re down quick. I spit, my tongue’s bloody;
I’ve bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back.
I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot.
The doll lands on the ground with her.
I pick it up, rock it in my arms.
Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son.
I’m nimble, I’m quick.
In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit
and his patent leather shoes.
I pack my mother’s satin nightgown
and my sister’s doll in the suitcase.
Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.
I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere.
I can break your heart.

You can find surprisingly little written about her life or death on the interwebs, though I'm going to point you toward what I've found so far.

Charles Olson Centenary Celebration

2010-03-21T13:02:00.004-04:00

As for me, I'm a third of the way through the massive Maximus Poems and not likely to return to it anytime soon. The energy spent on it didn't always pan out for me. Anybody have other Olson I should know? I've read several volumes of the Creeley-Olson correspondence, which have been much more edifying than Olson's poetry, I'm sorry to say. But it is his centenary, and he should be centenarianized. I just don't cotton to his stuff much, myself.

Charles Olson was a complicated man who wrote complicated poetry.

The Worcester native was also a big man — 6 feet 8 inches — who still casts quite a shadow and presence in 2010, his centennial year. A “Charles Olson Centenary Celebration” being held in Worcester this week will draw a number of guest poets and scholars, and include performances, workshops, a symposium, and even the screening of a film about Olson’s life, “Polis Is This,” narrated by John Malkovich.

“It’s turning into quite a notable event,” said Mark Wagner, program chairman and a member of the Worcester County Poetry Association, one of the centenary sponsors. “It’s been a ton of work, but at the same time there’s a real tribe of ‘Olson-ites’ who are going to come together.”

Events this week are scheduled to include “Project Verse” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, a reading at Clark University led by students at Worcester-area colleges; a talk and poetry reading at WPI Thursday by nationally renowned poet Anne Waldman; and symposium discussions Friday and Saturday on an array of topics ranging from “Olson’s Politics/Poetics of Transnational Utopia” to “Charles Olson and The Blackstone Canal.” More.

The Worcester County Poetry Association sponsors the Olson Centenary, and you can find the relevant pages here. Many poets are reading and panelling here, and it's no doubt worth your time.

In Which I Promote Some of My Lovely and Talented Friends

2010-03-16T22:49:00.000-04:00

I have many many poet friends but three are dear to my heart. I'm going to link them because I can. Probably best-known among them is Timothy Gager, a one-man publishing machine. He also runs the Dire Literary Series, co-founded the Somerville News Writer's Festival, and edits fiction for the Wilderness House Literary Review. You can find his poems in Night Train and many other places around the web.

Sue Miller is a founding editor at GUD and has published poems all over the place, too. notably in FRiGG, Thieves Jargon, and in Night Train. Never let it be said I don't take care of my friends. :-) Good thing their work all holds up.

Last but not least, Kenneth L. Clark. He's kept a somewhat lower profile than most poets today, but that's going to change here very soon. Poor Mojo's Almanack, Story Garden, Fried Chicken and Coffee is where you can find some of his stuff.