Shawn Kemp Carwash

New Spiritualized: Hey Jane

2012-02-24T11:34:00.006-06:00

The first single off Spiritualized's new album Sweet Heart Sweet Light was leaked earlier today. It's vintage J Spaceman and it's good. The whole record drops on 17 April. Listen below:

Scary, No Scary (or Return of the Poop Book)

2012-02-24T11:26:00.008-06:00

I used to read books while I pooped. I read Leaves of Grass in its entirety, over the course of a two year period, on the toilet; the first thirty cantos of Pound's The Cantos (only a total asshole would read the whole collection); and an historical overview of visual collage, which was the last book I read under these circumstances, just to name a few.

But ever since May of 2011, my housing situation has been fluid and I haven't settled into a solid poop-and-read routine. Until now.

I'm not exactly sure how, but Zachary Schomburg's Scary, No Scary ended up on the ledge of my bathtub, so I started re-reading the book while taking my morning "bathroom break." To my mind, it's a book of discovery and transformation, both of which are found in "New Kind of Light":

I move my hands
in these woods
to find her sex-parts.

We discover our sex-parts
make heat
and blue light.

We become outlines of ourselves—

long scratches
in the sky.

We have a daughter
who was never born.

She lives in the house
we never built,

But in this new light,
you can almost see
its tattered roof. (9)

Both the discoveries and transformations are fantastical, creating a dream-like aura. Many times, they deal with the natural world. Take the excerpted material very next poem "Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In A Farm Accident," for instance:

Your limbs
will be torn off
in a farm accident.

Tree limbs
will grow in those places.

...

Soon you'll be
more tree
than person. (10)

Of course, it is not until the book's closing poem that the "You" of the poem, or the poem's speaker for that matter, understands that the transformation takes place. Moreover, the transformation only registers when the natural world informs us, so to speak: "if there is a shadow of a tree and no trees around / I am the tree" (58).

Certainly, these tropes can be viewed through the lens of an American neo-surrealism, which often seems to be the case with Schomburg's writing. But a different (and for that reason more productive) reading could be to filter Scary, No Scary through an eco-fabulist lens, wherein the poems convey extraordinary parables about humanities interaction with nature. Of course, because of the abundance of death within the collection, readers may wonder as to whether or not the relationship is parasitic or symbiotic. The answer may be a matter of personal interpretation, but one thing is clear: regardless of whether the interactions are cyclical self-regulating systems, or self-destructive mechanisms, we are told to approach them with courage, just as the speaker does: "You'd think I'd be scared / But I'm not scared" (79).

Sink Review

2012-02-23T11:46:00.004-06:00

The ninth issue of Sink Review is now live, which stars several members of the Glitteratti: Jeff Alessandrelli, Bret Shepard, and Tina Brown Celona. There are also a bunch of other folks in there as well, such as Stephanie Anderson, Sommer Browning, Heather Christle, Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Amy Lawless, Mike Lala, Ashleigh Lambert, Dolly Lemke, Timothy Liu & Hansa Bergwall, Aubrie Marrin, Henri Michaux & Paige Taggart, Gina Myers, Brandon Shimoda, Bianca Stone, Robert Alan Wendeborn, & Jared White.

Louise Glück's No Hammy Hamburglar

2012-02-23T10:45:00.001-06:00

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/02/louise-gluck-is-a-marvelous-yelper/

Christmas by Fernando Pessoa

2012-02-23T09:14:00.001-06:00

One God is born. Others die. Truth
Did not come or go. Error changed.
Eternity is different now.
What happened was better always.

Blind Science plows the useless sod.
Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.
A new God is but a word.
Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.

No One Is (As I Are Be)

2012-02-22T18:57:00.003-06:00

Below is "No One Is (As I Are Be)," the first video-single from Stephen Malkmus's most recent album Mirror Traffic, which I purchased a vinyl copy of this past weekend. It's not revolutionary, but it's solid Malkmus; and, in my opinion, it's his best album since Pig Lib. My only complaint is that the album is three-sides, meaning the second side of the second record doesn't have anything on it. Weird.

"I can't even do one sit-up / sit-ups are so bourgeois":

Flowers

2012-02-20T22:47:00.019-06:00

"Today I have lived wholly inside the drift from how I feel / to how others feel about me. I'd like to forget everything, / and then I do" (9) writes Paul Killebrew in the poem "Invisible Scoring," which appears near the beginning of his debut collection Flowers (Cranarium 2010). Killebrew's poems, and the collection in general, do indeed drift, so much so that we forget where we are located. Such drifting and forgetfulness, though, should not be interpreted as a pejorative assessment of the poems therein; instead, it becomes an aesthetic imperative to the extent that "it's not entirely clear that the poet exists" (6) in this flow of memory loss. True, the poet declares a "wish to be conscious / of myself," but must concede that "My frontiers are long and insecure," and thus he "cannot command them" (5).

Given this lack of self-knowledge, or at least an absolute self-definition, how does the poet navigate both the world and his poems? Killebrew proffers an answer, it would appear, in the humorously titled "John Fucking Ashbery": "Sometimes when I'm only a sense of myself, / I answer the phone and just breathe. The soul / coagulates behind the eyes and I think not / of the self in its dissolution" (11). Just breathe, the poet suggests, and stop thinking about the ever-deteriorating self. And that is what these poems do: breathe within an amorphous context of forgetting, which allows the poems, the poet, and the reader an opportunity to be "digested by time" in order for us "to lose thoughts or patterns of thought" (49).

It should be noted, though, that if these poems cause us to lose patterns of thought, it does not mean they are vacuous or meaningless. In fact, "meaning is always happening" (11); it's just that meaning, to some extent, is a function of the subjective mind: in all reality, "there's no message in the incidental," but nonetheless we "hear whatever message [we] listen for" (28). In other words, there are no master narratives, messages, or meanings, but there are local ones that form, deform, then reform throughout these poems. It should come as no surprise, then, that "The present forms of glory," which are those found within Flowers, "are much less indelible" (64) than those of days past.

Of course, in these less indelible, drifting, forgetful, and selfless poems, one may question whether or not we should care about a work of art that lacks authority, permanence, or stability. Killebrew worries little about these matters; in fact, he acknowledges that "I know that I'm at least barley relevant" (29). But what of what concern is relevance or glory when "It's not art if it feels important" (7)?

Several Gravities

2012-02-17T14:17:00.007-06:00

In the poem "The Ghost of a Hunter," reprinted in Several Gravities (Siglio Press 2009), Keith Waldrop writes: "The shapes have been salvaged" (49) and "Of countless ruined world, he would appropriate the essential" (48). These quotes, to a large extent, could be read as guiding principles for Several Gravities, as well as Waldrop's entire career as a poet-artist. In the former instance, the book contains samples of Waldrop's expansive career as a visual artist, in addition to poems excerpted from seven earlier collections. In the latter instance, as Robert Seydel (the editor of Gravities and author of the afterward) writes, Waldrop's oeuvre has been marked by "multivalent" tendencies that are "rife with the dispensations of the plural," which speak toward "an originary confusion" (85) in his work. In other words, Waldrop salvages shapes from "countless ruined worlds" in order to "appropriate the essential" to create a wholly new construction. But these constructions are tenuous in form, so much so that "fragments align only partially, and their alignment is always fragile" (94). In the excepted portion of "Poem from Memory," the speaker informs us that:

Perfection
demands images at
strategic intervals, something
steady on which to
map the random. My world
is in disorder. Like-
wise my schedule. I
live within
acceptable
tolerances. At the
intersection of innumerable
fantasies. Irreconcilables
point me to
my orient. Ambiguous
suns. A shower of
elementaries. Venus rising
from the nutrient broth.
Accidents of sensual
logic. Fringes of
interference. That
doorbell. (35)

A world in disorder and randomness, but a world that can be mapped with images and strategic intervals. While mapping and randomness appear to be at odds, the speaker is oriented within these irreconcilable concepts: an intersection of disparate but elementary components that produce accidents of sensual logic for both the producer and consumer of these visual and linguistic collages.

In Several Gravities, the speaker in the fragment excerpted from the poem "Potential Random" tells us that "The shape of things rise up against me....and threaten to trip me up, obstruct me, box me in"; to counteract these possibly destructive properties, the speaker declares: "I take them all, straight-lined or curved, reducing each...by a movement of my hand" (65): a dangerous energy converted into artifice/art through the hand. Here, then, are two examples of how Waldrop converts destruction into an affirmation of piecemeal art-objects:

"In my tender years, I fretted because I could neither whistle a tune nor draw a likeness. Though I no longer fret about it, I still can't do either" (14).

"I have no sky. Sometimes the ground seems tenuous. But composition remains an enjoyment" (15).

The Proposed Cover for How We Remake the World

2012-02-16T15:08:00.002-06:00

Harp & Altar

2012-02-14T18:25:00.002-06:00

The 9th issue of Harp & Altar went live yesterday with new poems by Tina Brown Celona, Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Dougherty, Kevin Holden, Paul Killebrew, Noelle Kocot, Aubrie Marrin, and Sampson Starkweather. There's also prose by Oisín Curran, Farrah Field, Gregory Howard, and Jenny Nichols.

2 poems by Devin Johnston

2012-02-13T18:07:00.002-06:00

Customs

At the sink, a business traveler
memorizes one hand with the other.

The Difference

I wake up missing what
I would no longer want.

Futuring

2012-02-12T17:57:00.006-06:00

I am unsure of the writing process Michael Sikkema employed while writing his 2008 collection Futuring (Blazevox), but given the fact that these poems exhibit an aesthetic that is a) acoustically-driven, b) serial in nature, yet c) semantically fragmented, I'm left to assume that he used some type of collage, erasure, found, or procedural method when writing these pieces. Reading the poems as such, they function mainly as soundscapes within/upon the field of the page. It is no coincidence, then, that Geoffrey Gatza designed the book artifact in a landscape orientation, literally allowing Sikkema's words (and their corresponding articulations) both to populate and situate themselves within the dual sonic and material fields. In lieu of a more traditional review, then, I thought it would be more appropriate to collage (mostly) phrases from Futuring together so as to offer a review that embodies the aesthetic of the poems while simultaneously addressing the text's conceptual underpinnings.

IMAGINED GEOGRAPHY

Hidden in the acoustics of imagined geographies, the girl wakes with an excited sentence in her mouth: "Everything you see is music," she says, "but my voice is not quite loud enough to cross so many fields." Yet, when crossing the field, this distance filled with static, this brilliant meadow, there are no names for trees or the idea of you in it. If the field is a landscape, then give me a landscape as real as a painting so paintings operate like sunsets. Undone by sounds, we look up from syntax to find the music irreparable: a series of hole-punched suns.

Finally, it should also be noted that there are some great, lasting images scattered throughout the collection as well. Particular favorites of mine include: "fuckable sunshine during police raid," "after a condom on a pie plate," and "Men harness cattle to the Trans Am."

Good poem in the new Boston Review

2012-02-10T09:25:00.001-06:00

Ambiguous Origins

Jack Boettcher

The desk is of a deep grain like a stirred pond
but also scored with nicks. Whenever I open it,
select a hammer, and try to describe, with hammer,
my origins, these grackles always flock up
from the power line as low as my shoulder
as though jolted by a surge (they looked
lifeless before), and hover in the close gray damp
to whoop wings all at once. That’s how
I was born: all at once. Born in the suburb
with a pocketful of what. Born in the riverbed
just moments before the flash flood.
I was born busy in some new kind of flight, and
though I don’t recall it, that’s the wonderful story
I’ve always been told. In a spring-green slum
those birds will swim you with their dreaded drone.

Fossil

2012-02-08T22:55:00.012-06:00

For Dusie Kollektiv No. 5, BJ Love and Friedrick Kerksiek wrote the chapbook Fossil. While the full contents can be found online, purchasing the artifact is well worth the $10. Like everything Kerksiek produces under the banner of Small Fires Press, this collaborative chapbook is a well-crafted art-object that is a joy to look at and hold. As the back matter states:

The book is constructed from various handmade sheets pulled at the Lost Arch Paper Mill in Alabama or the front cover, Clearprint Vellum for the text, & Chipboard for the rear cover.

Images & Bell MT fonts have been reproduced with photopolymer on a Vandercook No.4 Proof Press at the Small Fires Press Memphis studio.

Of course, even if you know what all that technical jargon means, it still doesn't do justice to the fine quality of the artifact. But buying a copy and pulling the lengthy accordion vellum will in understanding the fine craftsmanship that went into its making.

As for the poems therein, Love and Kerksiek write mostly about dinosaurs, but, obviously, it's not just about dinosaurs; these are love poems as well. Take, for instance, the following lines from the opening poem "Lava! Lava! Lava!":

Let us set something in stone: Apology is
an invention that is still a few years off

& that is why I can never be sorry, but
what I can tell you now is that, when your

fossil is found, I hope everyone will love it
just like I do & though I can never promise

anything this sweet, or even milkshake sweet,
what I can promise is to hate every evolution

that removes you further & further from me.

A lament to a fossilized lover about the trouble of evolution. Yes, it is humorous, but readers get the sense that it also is heartfelt. Later, in the poem "Rawr Rawr Rawr," the poets strike a more wholly sincere tone, albeit sandwiched between some lighter verse about dinosaurs, milk, and tar pits, when they write:

All history is according to
carbon, which is no more
the history of our own breath,
that time when we sat, face-to-face,
& just breathed through each
other's mouths. All I have ever wanted
was to give this some kind of name.

A touching moment to be sure, distilling passion, science, and longing into a remembrance when two lovers shared each other's breath and, in doing so, created a shared history in carbon: most definitely a Whitmanesque concept.

I'd like to close with what I believe is the strongest poem from start to finish. It's titled "The Thing About Dinosaurs Is That They Only Get Famous After They Die" and reads:

You keep telling me it's only a photocopy
of a dinosaur, that his teeth aren't scary
rather, they're duplicates, & duplicates
of duplicates at that, that that is no more
scary than any great waste of ink, that
the fear of dinosaurs is based on the price
of toner alone, but you can't make those
cavities any less real, I think, not the fact
that every hole in his collated head is
an exact, though concaved, reproduction
of my arms, my legs, my purple lungs
&, as I've always said, if I'm going to be
digested, I prefer it come with the dignity
that a stomach offers & not the slow
disgrace of being worn away by tongue
& spit, which isn't digestion at all, no,
it's more like recycling, that is, if recycling
was just tubs stuffed with nightmares &
breaking up bags teeming with rats, or
maybe the neighbor boy who screams
like rats, & this death is horrible, & this
death is scary, & this death has already
been scanned into the imaging unit, &
if you leave, this dinosaur will surely eat me,
& then he'll put on my glasses, & wear
all my t-shirts, & kiss you in that one place
that only I get to kiss you, & he'll become
an excellent copy of me, & you will never
be the wiser, that is, until he gargles, &
rather than gargling what you will hear is me,
the actual me, complaining about the cramped
& damp conditions, about the loss of skin,
about how I miss you most of the time, but
especially at night when I can still hear you
snore, yeah, that's when I'd miss you the most.

A few more items of self-promotion.

2012-02-08T11:29:00.005-06:00

The new issue of esque, edited by Amy King and Ana Božičević, is live and I have poem inspired by Jacques Lipchitz's Hagar I in there; also, in the new Word For / Word there are some illustrated collaborations of some of my "Tree Lung" poems. Finally, over at HTMLGiant, Christopher Higgs wrote a lyric/visual/collage essay that contains a brief snippet of Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley toward the end.

Echo & Ache by Carolyn Guinzio

2012-02-07T20:56:00.002-06:00

Come back, sound of out-
stretched arms. Look away
from the bones pieced back
together. Last bright vision,
they buried the loved
little dog in the mound,
little bowl. A quarter
moon in a daytime sky,
a season at the threshold
between barrenness and being.
Lean, lean, to rupture.
What the clouds
come to cover is still
behind the clouds. Nothing
can banish what has existed
into never having been.
A bag in the back of the drawer
holds the teeth
that would have been
sorcered away
back in the other world,
back when the other world was.

(from Free Verse, Issue 21, Winter 2011--
http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/index.html )

how like foreign objects

2012-02-07T19:56:00.008-06:00

A variety of tropes reoccur throughout Alexis Orgera's first collection how like foreign objects (H_NGM_N BKS, 2011), but one of them stands out for it meta-poetic qualities: the voice and, to a certain extent, its attachment to the body via the mouth and throat. Within the collection, readers learn that in Orgera's poems "the office is a voice speaking / inside me about all the things left / to do, the never-ending possibilities / of overcoming" (29), or "Their voices are seagulls" (32), or "Giving up is hearing a voice you've always known / sing a song you've never heard" (41), or "No light except what exudes / from both my bodies, / as if they are riddled with the light / of memory, the millions of tinny voices / the...scream" (56), or "A man with fibrillating voice / sang into my left ear—" (61), or "One afternoon, a strange voice came home / sopping wet and blue-lipped / ... / and this is what the voice told me: / your fingers are electric // when you drown / your lungs explosions" (81), or "all the voices— / I mean all—corpses in the corner / of every living room in America / must have risen together / because the drone was deafening" (93). We encounter the voice as office, seagull, resignation, light, fibrillator, a drowning victim with surreal anatomical knowledge, and American corpses.

And what of the voice's attachment to the body and its effect upon the speaker? The list of attachments and their effects is no less expansive: "If I ever go to hell it's because / of my motherfucking mouth" (13), and " we laugh in the mouth of the fire" (14), and "I get to sit inside your mouth" (20), and "Happenstance has a way of shoving / that little square of paper / into your mouth... / ... / while a mouthful of post- / teens strip and swell in the mud" (33), and "It's a myth that the right hand feeds the mouth / of the world"(44). The mouth (i.e. the conduit for the voice), it would appear, damns the speaker to hell, is a fire starter and a receptacle for paper and naked teenagers.

Such diverse ontologies of the voice and corresponding utility for the mouth are cast within a pejorative light; certainly, this is intimated at when taking such statements as "Nothing works, but what doesn't work / most is the word flesh as in flesh" (86) and "sounds / like failure. We are failing // us. I am failing us" (64) in combination. The flesh of the mouth and the sound of the voice have failed us, producing "a language I still don't quite get" (42) because "we [speak] / gibberish...or didn't speak / at all"(22). In this sense, our consciousness, seeking to escape our minds, cannot; thus, our thoughts become "like foreign objects in [our] own skins" (20). The zenith of this failure can be found in the"On The Exile Of My Throats"; the poem concludes:

But that's so many years ago—
before words stuck
in my thirty throats weaving tender
tendrils from their vowels. Today
is another story altogether.
Today we are sad, me and my throats.
We wake up that way
after certain events we can't name.
I hear my throats cawing
through the window—I locked them out,
one thing leading to another
around midnight. They are meaner
than rooks, uglier than magpies.
My throats are a folktale
always throwing
their eyes into treetops
or spelling my thoughts inside out. (30-31)

In a pre-Lapsarian time when all was well, one could find such diversity of voice "weaving tender / tendrils," but no longer. Today the voices and the throats in which they are contained are sad, mean, ugly, and turning thoughts inside out. The speaker of these poems faces a new reality that does not embrace an egalitarian utopia filled with variety, but fears we have entered a monolithic society that would rather lock difference outside than nurture it. One should be no means infer that the poet or the speaker agrees with this stance; instead, the poet and the speaker call attention to the alarming "events we can't name" because we no longer have the mouths, voice, and words to say them.

Dr. Ware

2012-02-02T10:11:00.003-06:00

A belated SKC congratulations to Mr. Ware for now being able to introduce himself in the following manner: "Hey, I'm Joshua Ware, Ph.D. Pleasure to meet you."

Dr. Ware, you now join these other fine Dr. Wares--maybe a mid-country dinner party at a conference hotel restaurant is in order?

Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware; Dr. Ware.

ILK Issue 2

2012-02-01T19:18:00.002-06:00

The second issue of ILK is now live, which contains two new poems of mine. There is also work Erika Jo Brown, Gina Myers, Nate Pritts, Nick Sturm, and several others.

My Fiction Debuts

2012-02-01T15:07:00.004-06:00

Some "Impossible Motels" I built have been published and recently released in the new issues of Nano Fiction and Hobart. What's even more amazing is the fact that I receive actual money for publication in the latter of these two journals. Either way, both of these journals contain loads of awesome short fiction and whatnot.

Hard to argue with, popular or not

2012-02-01T12:20:00.002-06:00

"Publicity is the medium of choice for many of our most popular artists."

Two Pieces of Good New for Shawn Kemp

2012-01-31T18:56:00.003-06:00

Jeff Alessandrelli drops truth bombs all over the great state of Nebraska with a hard-hitting and edgy interview in the Daily Nebraskan. By hard-hitting and edgy, I mean sexy and tangential.

In other news, Slope Editions announced today that Trey Moody and Joshua Ware's hard-hitting and edgy collection How We Remake the World: A Concise History of Everything won their First Annual Chapbook Prize. By hard-hitting and edgy, I mean bipolar and absurd.

The best 22 seconds of your life

2012-01-30T16:03:00.002-06:00

Your Moment of Zen

2012-01-26T13:58:00.007-06:00

What's even better than Ben Mirov's first inclination that "Trey," perhaps, might be Trey Moody is the fact that "Trey" wishes he was Trey Moody. Of course, this should come as no surprise, as I too wish I was Trey Moody. Click on the image for bigness and enjoy:

Biovac

2012-01-25T13:38:00.017-06:00

Ten years ago, Slope Editions published Biovac, Laura Solomon's first collection of poems; since then, Ugly Duckling Presse has released two more books by her.

Many of the poems within Biovac contain abstract images and an elevated diction that produce a poetic density necessitating the audience slow down their reading and hone their focus so as to access these poems. The opening lines of the incipient poem "Gallows Holus-Bolus" provide a perfect example:

The noose is smug and to the point
that it pretties and offers succor. It shines
up to the point where I leave you, roadside
off again to bandy the bounty beneath your tongue. (1)

That a "noose is smug and to the point" is clear enough, at least in the sense that, through personification, we understand it to be prideful and exacting in its duties; likewise, that fact "that it pretties and offers succor" informs us that it provides both assistance and glamor to the act of killing oneself (or execution). But, afterward, we find that it "shines / up to the point where I leave you, roadisde /off again." Certainly, one could make assumptions about how a noose "shines," but given the previous personified context, the work of unpacking the second sentence is a bit more difficult.

While readers could take exception to the trajectory of the poem, the conclusion of the the second sentence offers two distinct elements that both save the poem from frivolous lexical wanderings and provide us with an example of the poetic maneuvers found throughout the collection. First, we encounter the alliterative "bandy the bounty beneath"; such phonemic repetitions infuse the poem with a musicality that enables us to enjoy it on an affective level through an immersion in its auditory characteristics. Second, all this occurs (both in the poem and within the reader) "beneath your tongue"; to this extent, the poem employs the body as a trope, as well as offering a meta-poetic statement.

Even when one considers these postive traits, the speakers of Solomon's poems acknowledge that language, both in this book and in general, is problematic. The poem "Its Hologram Emergin from the Stainless Steel Spout" tells us that "A sleep-talker in an alien language, / these think Germanic words never fully express our desire" (7); we find a sentiment similar to this, albeit more violent, in the poem "Letter":

Afterward, when they hack off my head and my tongue lies slack,
my body will dash at the pointing, stupified crowd.
For now, this is all I can vow.
This is the way our body will persist in its bend toward sunlight
despite the slimness (10)

In this latter case, a mutitlated body with a "tongue [that] lies slack" can no longer speak and now only has the ability to stupify its audience. But even in this stupification that is a "slimness" of understanding, the tongue, the body, and, yes, the poem "will persist in its bend toward sunglight" and its yearning for, if not understanding, at least desire and pleasure.

There several exceptional poems in Biovac, particularly "So Hums the Muted Bugle," "Meet Me in the Mess Hall," "Coup d'État," and "To Continents," but I want to close by quoting "Good Evening My Friends (and you are my friends)" in its entirety because it encompasses the aforementioned abstractness and elevated diction, as well as the trope of the body, musical elements, and meta-poetic commentary all within a relatively compact thirteen lines in a deft and beautiful manner:

Runtish miscreant, do not be mistaken.
No one is as solipsistic as I.
Not even Pappy Hugh with his poor diction,
Misdirected knocks and thuds. The sunsets,
Indeed, were all prop, and the grizzly occurrencies
Closet other fictions too terrible to mention—
Even this quick synopsis is a dead giveaway.
Decrepit shall dub what may be set astrum
Until, at last, you blabbermouth the lyrics you thought you knew,
Though by all accounts receivable, the radiowaves
Eclipsed your body long ago and the platitudes now
Clank at your skull. Suffer the chump change they offer,
The awful thump of your two feet left. (54)

Another Republic

2012-01-20T10:08:00.007-06:00

So I'm teaching this book to my poetry writing class this semester:

So far it's going well. The Follain poem I posted a few days ago is in this book. We're discussing these two poets today:

THE TENANTS OF THE LITTLE BOX by Vasko Popa

Throw into the little box

A stone

You'll take out a bird

Throw in your shadow

You'll take out the shirt of happiness

Throw in your father's root

You'll take out t he axle of the universe

The little box works for you

Throw into the little box

A mouse

You'll take out a shaking hill

Throw in your mother pearl

You'll take out the chalice of eternal life

Throw in your head

You'll take out two

The little box works for you

And here's my boy, Frankie Ponge, looking all dapper:

THE PLEASURES OF THE DOOR

Kings do not touch doors.

They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently or brusquely one of those large familiar panels, then turning back to replace it--holding a door in one's arms.

. . . The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles to a room by its porcelain node; that short clinch during which movement stops, the eye widens, and the whole body adjusts to its new surrounding.

With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it decisively and shutting oneself in--which the click of the tight but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

The French Exit

2012-01-18T14:59:00.007-06:00

I recently read Elisa Gabbert's The French Exit and what initially struck we was how the poems therein were filled with the speaker's dreams or dreamlike landscapes. Whether "We both dream about wild animals" (21), find ourselves in a "sex-dream-cum-anxiety-dream" (24), or dream about the end of love via a tennis match (i.e. "The person I'm playing tennis with keeps changing" (27)), these poems linger in a half-waking space in which the writing employs dream worlds as a conduit for the ideas and emotional register of the poem, the speaker, and/or the poet. Of course, given the nature of dreams, the emotions and ideas are never that clear cut. To wit, in the opening poem "Commissioned," the speaker tell us: "You must know it says. / But in the dream you can't read it. // In dreams there's no quality to the weather" (9). A text we can't read, in weather with no characteristics: we know something is there, but it will remain unknown.

After thinking through the collection a bit more, the body also seemed to be a central trope of the book. Sure "the body wakes up" (13), perhaps from the aforementioned dreams, but this does not make the body anymore clear to the speaker or the audience than the confused emotions and thoughts produced by and within dreams. Take, for example, the beginning lines from the poem "X":

Mindless, the body is perfect,

an outline—form without
content, absent of tone, lying

in the street. (14)

The focus on dreams and bodies is all the more enjoyable in the poems where Gabbert infuses these subjects with a healthy does of humor that also exhibits an impressive intellect. A great example of this confluence of elements occurs in "Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin," which to my mind is the best of the collection; here is the poem in its entirety, which riffs on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction":

Every time you reproduce a piece of art
you remove some of its aura and that's why
your mix tape didn't impress me much,
it was so fucking aura-less
but in the film
version of the novelization of this poem
I play myself but have fantastic breasts
and there are probably some blood baths

and also when my fangy tooth catches
on my lip men everywhere crumple
w/ the ecstasy and agony of it and really

who needs aura in your movie when
you're so hot it breaks people's knees. (44)

Sky Harbor

2012-01-14T17:31:00.009-06:00

In the opening poem of Miles Waggener's Sky Harbor (Pinyon Publishing, 2011), the final lines offer readers an image of "Two sparrows / ...trapped in the crowded terminal" (4); in many ways, one can understand this to be a metaphor for the entire collection: the natural world unwittingly "trapped" within a man-made creation, unable to escape its complex labyrinths.

The man-made creation—in the case of Waggener's most recent collection—is the poem, and the complex labyrinths are the sinuous and expansive syntactical structures that comprise the sentences within the text. Poems like "Ampersand in Mind," "Bird in a Box," and "Too Easy Questions on Lonely Roads," in fact, are all one sentence in length and unfold in various directions throughout the course of the individual pieces. But, even in the poems that contain multiple sentences, the syntax therein is still circuitous. Take, for instance, the opening sentence of the poem "Horse":

Among sixteen horses on the western slope
     weathering sleet and sunshine, reflecting field-lit
contours, there is a first horse, one where I might
     bring my face to its cheek, feel the eyelash of its thought,
see myself reflected there, hand extended—how it had seen
     an early flash upon a winter clarity restaged on the iris
of its companion, and they whitened together in the comet's return. (9)

The digressions that the sentence makes necessarily "restage" "clarity" in such a manner that the "field-lit / contours" of the poem are illuminated just enough for the "iris" to discern the way, but not without having to carefully trace and retrace the intricate paths of its construction. To this extent, one can easily lose themselves within the poem if attention to its nuances are not minded; of course, if a reader moves through the passageways of these poems, then they justly rewarded. When the speaker of the poem "Sky Harbor" asks "How else to bring what won't / come to us on its own / a bit closer" (3), it would appear that we know have an answer: trap it in a maze that is an ornate poem.

1/14/12

2012-01-14T15:49:00.002-06:00

Jean Follain

2012-01-13T16:56:00.002-06:00

SIGNS

Sometimes when a customer in a shadowy restaurant

is shelling an almond

a hand comes to rest on his narrow shoulder

he hesitates to finish his glass

the forest in the distance is resting under its snows

the sturdy waitress has turned pale

he will have to let the winter night fall

has she not often seen

on the last page

of a book of modest learning

the word end printed

in ornate capitals?

(tr. W.S. Merwin)

Classic Kemp

2012-01-10T17:23:00.003-06:00

Found this SKC-appropriate image over at gotemcoach.com:

The Black Mariah

2012-01-09T22:44:00.006-06:00

The Black Mariah by Jen Tynes, which will be released by DoubleCross Press at the 2012 AWP, is a longish poem that alternates between sections of standard lineation and sections containing scattered lines that employ the page as an open field. Moreover, the poem focuses on the body and a series of strange transformations it undergoes. Take, for instance, this excerpt from the incipient section:

Where her eyelashes should
be: rattlesnakes on
full alarm. Her breasts a couple
mushroom clouds, vitals
full of holes where the red-
headed gunslingers missed her
apple. It looks like both a woman
and a vase inside her
pupils.

Rattlesnake eyelashes, mushroom cloud breasts, and pupil vases: the poem creates a new being that is neither one nor the other, but indissolubly both. While some may find such fantastic displacements off-putting, the speaker of these poems (and, by extension, anyone calling themselves a poet) thinks otherwise, saying as much when she states: "My head will not turn / against all the body's forms." In some respects, embracing "all the body's forms," including those of that cross species lines, hearkens back to Horace's The Art of Poetry. In his treatise on verse, the ancient wrote:

Suppose you'd been asked to come for a private view
Of a painting wherein the artist had chosen to join
To a human head the neck of a horse, and gone on
To collect some odds and ends of arms and legs
And plaster the surface with feathers of differing colors,
So that what began as a lovely woman at the top
Tapered off into a slimy, discolored fish—
Could you keep from laughing, my friends? Believe me, dear Pisos,
Paintings like these look a lot like the book of a writer
Whose weird conceptions are just like a sick man's dreams,
So neither the head not the foot can be made to apply
To a single uniform shape. "But painter and poets
Have always been equally free to try anything."
We writers know that, and insist that such license be ours.

Indeed, poets must take "license" to develop in their writing a disparate beast (to develop their writing as a disparate beast) that does not conform to "a single uniform shape," and to do so freely and without fear of the spectators "laughing."

The following "weird conception," originally published in an issue of Anti-, is my favorite of The Black Mariah and brings to bear the transformative capabilities of the poet:

We perform best when
we listen to the bird
inside the bird, dark bellied
ugly augur song that
likes to measure us out
of space. For demonstrative
purposes the body can affix
to any orphan line. My eyes are bulls’
eyes, my calves are wet,
pliable, the roped-in death
of me. My mother is
a fertility trick. We perform
best when we admonish
our animals for
the gaminess they visit
upon our routine. We are not two
of everything in
a line, following the color
spectrum. My father is a shadow
on the image. I look for a bird
inside a bird because it slips
bones out of
everything I touch.
I break the character and look
for hours like a body
no one knew to recover.

The "character" embodied within the poem's "I," literally, "breaks" into pieces and is reconfigured in ways that allow the reader to "look [at it] / for hours": constant permutations providing enjoyment for an audience who reveals in displacement and the collage of shapes into new forms.

Leaves and Light by Yves Bonnefoy

2012-01-08T18:27:00.001-06:00

II.

The voice was of pure irony in the trees,
Of distance, of death,
Of the unloosening of dawns far away from us

In a forbidden place. And our harbor
Was all black clay. No ship
Had ever shown a sign of light there,
Everything began with this song of the cruel dawn,
A liberating hope, a poverty.

It was a naked moment, torn, as when
Working difficult soil
One feels the blade sink into the earth’s dark heart
And invents death under the changing sky.

Places Apart by William Bronk

2012-01-04T19:40:00.001-06:00

Beyond the daylight, all day long, the stars are

shining still unseen by us who make

our lives apart from them though they are there.

Old News

2012-01-04T11:53:00.017-06:00

Philadelphia-based writer Ryan Eckes's second book of poems, Old News, which Furniture Press Books released late in 2011, alternates between narrative pieces concerning the speaker's life in contemporary Philadelphia and appropriated text from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Evening Bulletin printed during the early twentieth-century. After the collection's first two poems, the poet, in a brief paragraph, explains to some extent how the project came to fruition:

we tore up the rotten carpets and the mats underneath, which were stapled to the old pine floor from the days before carpets, and found newspapers from 1923 spread across the room...some 1923 in some 2007. (8)

From these newspapers-as-flooring, Eckes's travels through time to create a space within his book wherein he constructs an alternate, trans-temporal Philadelphia. A life-long resident of the city, the place, the author, and the speakers of these texts seem inextricably linked. In the poem "news is the old old," we begin to understand why:

alice notley said "more important than having
been born is your city, the scale upon which
your heart when you die will be weighed"
and then she said "i don't know if that's true
or not, i think about it a lot." me too. the
scale can hardly be trusted. it rusts out. (42)

For Eckes, Philadelphia becomes a "scale upon which / [his] heart...will be weighed"; but, given the fact that the "scale," his city, "rusts out," it "can hardly be trusted" to accurately measure the parameters of his "heart." This is not to say that it doesn't accurately measure his "heart," there is just no way of being sure one way or the other.

Such indeterminacy could be a source of anxiety, though, due to the fact that the rusted city is filled with racism:

ah, the
subway, he says, well the subway's a little too dark for me if you
know what i mean. (14)

Poverty:

we wait and wait
he goes picking through garbage
along the curb and comes up with
a large rubber flashlight (39)

And heartache: "money's why we broke up, more or less" (53).

Could the collaged, newspaper material from 1923 be a way for Eckes and his poems to connect to a past Philadelphia so as to remember "a rich history"; to look back on a city that "fostered the birth of a nation, and through the years established an extraordinary record for political, cultural, and scientific firsts" (41), as as inset from the American Geographical Society's 1951 pamphlet series "Know Your America Program: Philadelphia" states?

Hardly. In fact, the newspaper material that the poet weaves into his collection contains stories of "a suicide attempt" (43), the mysterious disappearance of a mailman, "the sioux indian tribe" suing the United States for "practically three-quarters of a billion dollars / for lands and property taken / by the white man" (45), and a write-up of a "BRIDGE HERMIT STRANGELY KILLED" (30) just to name a few. The collages, indeed, allow the poet to time-travel, but time-travel for the sake of demonstrating the city-scale isn't just rusting out now, but rusted out long-ago. Far from a history rich with a tradition of political, economic, and cultural accomplishments, Old News presents Philadelphia as a "narrow street" filled with "a deep sadness" (55).

Dayglo

2011-12-30T12:23:00.013-06:00

Terrance Hayes selected Dayglo by James Meetze as the winner of the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press; it was published in January of this year (2011). The poems of Dayglo construct a linguistic landscape that is rooted, decidedly, in San Diegan imagery (which, not coincidentally, is the author's current residence).

Highlights of the collection include the first poem "It's Overhead" and the title poem, which opens the third section. In the former of these two poems, Meetze writes: "Poetry too is subject / to fogginess and wobble. / Our beacons never near / enough to illuminate / what we don't know" (4). In many cases, one could consider this phrase to be an ars poetica for the book as whole, in that nothing in these poems is fully illuminated, and thus a fogginess surrounds them. Of course, this "fogginess and wobble" allows for the reader to swim about in a vast ocean of unknowing outside the glare from beacons of understanding, leaving only a particular type of nostalgia for lost meaning: "We remember what it is / to be bathed in light, / to read and be changed" (4). But if the poetry in this collection wobbles in the fog outside of the known and abjures a change in the reader, what then does this collection intend to do? One could argue that through his naturalistic but fragmented lyrics, Meetze wants "To train the swimmer's ear / to recognize harmonic / reason" (5), which, ultimately, enables one "To speak underwater or / to echolocate a companion" so that "you become the conductor of a sound / only ever dreamt of" (7). To hear and speak in or underwater so that, through "harmonic / reason," one can "echolocate a companion": poets connecting with poets through a language of water "only ever dreamt of."

The poem "Daylgo, " in contradistinction to "Its Overhead," moves away from water (one can assume, in this case, the Pacific Ocean) as a trope and toward a more conflicted zone inland, in which "the dark of rain and resilient sun / now meet" so as to produce a "gray" area wherein "the mind attributes color to an idea" (41). In this gray confluence of "dark...rain" and "resilient sun" where "the mind" filters "an idea" through "color," we find a series of juxtapositions that offer readers a middle space in which conflicting images (and thus thought) arise. Take, for example, "The freeway's rush of hybrid cars and hummingbirds birds" or a place where "Mountains of earth rise from marshland / where we live background lives / with basketball hoops in the driveway" filled with "digital children and their rapid-fire, / virtual dreams" (41), or, likewise, overhead where "FA-18 Hornets boom above the freeway / as eucalyptus leaves rustle" (51). How, it should be asked, does one navigate these contradictions within a place? For the average citizen, the "Dumb American" (49), it may be something that simply happens, in that it is not considered; or, as Meetze writes: "How the transaction between people / and place happens / when it becomes part of what we do" (52). Perhaps, this "transaction between people / and place" simply "happens" because it is just something that "we do"; but for the poet, it would appear, something else is expected. The poet must be both a receptacle and transmitter of these contradictions, transforming them into art. To this extent, the poet must "listen to the room and its silences" and become "a silent container" (52), but also "become the glare of earthly sounds, / the culture of noise" (47). Silence and sound transacting within the poet, place and people transacting in the poet. A nexus of contradictions forms within the mind, and the poet must then "scatter their foreign parts" (52) onto the page for the sake of the poem.

Climate Reply Review

2011-12-28T20:40:00.002-06:00

Patricia Casper reviews Trey Moody's Climate Reply over at Prick of the Spindle. She seems to love the chapbook almost as much as Shawn Kemp does, which is saying a lot. Check it out.

Spurs Notes: 12/26 vs. Grizzlies

2011-12-28T12:35:00.007-06:00

*The average age of all NBA teams is a few days shy of 27 years old. Surprisingly, the Spurs' average age is just a few months over 27 years old.

*Similar to Joshua Ware, Ginobili can defend a 2-on-1 break.

*Similar to Shawn Kemp, Zach Randolph looked out of shape.

*Duncan was limited by foul trouble but played well in his 21 minutes. Also limited by foul trouble, DeJuan Blair smiled way too much for Gordon Ramsay's liking.

*Splitter played decently despite looking like Dolph Lundgren, but he needs to be more aggressive near the basket, similar to Jeff Alessandrelli.

*I was surprised by the small forwards--an area of concern coming into the season. Jefferson didn't hesitate in shooting 3s, James Anderson filled in a bit and reminded me of Willie Anderson, and I was really surprised with the all-around solid play of rookie Kawhi Leonard. Once he starts finishing breaks and figures out some offensive moves, look out.

*Overall, not a bad way to open the season. CP3 and Blake Griffin bring the Lob City show to San Antonio tonight.

Country Music, Issue 3

2011-12-27T11:40:00.007-06:00

To read the new issue of Country Music, click the image below.

The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature

2011-12-26T21:29:00.014-06:00

The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Cow Heavy Books 2011) tips its hat, at least nominally, to the Oulipian movement and in service of "potential" texts. More specifically, blurbs based upon fictitious texts compose the entirety of the book. Some are humorous, others are dull, while most fall somewhere in-between. The most telling, though, is the pseudo-blurb Blake Butler wrote for the pseudo-book Pony House by pseudo-author Richard Meninsensen; it reads as follows:

I guess I just don't care about books really and this is no exception. There has never been a book that walked into my life. Even when this book lit down upon my house and ate my children and my mind, it could not keep me from closing its face against against its face and setting it down, recalling nothing. That one would ask anyone to ever say a word about a book or in a book or in any way to anyone is a sickness unto the human. I am terrified.

To the extent that Butler's blurb is short, funny, and concludes with meta-commentary tinged with self-effacement makes the piece work; those blurbs of a similar nature do as well. Those blurbs that don't? Well, that "one would ask anyone to ever say a word about a book [whether actualized or potential]...is a sickness."

Once Was A Weather

2011-12-23T20:53:00.005-06:00

Trey Moody's newest chapbook, Once Was A Weather, was recently released by Greying Ghost Press. The collection builds itself around a series of prose poems, each one titled "A Weather" and highly-attuned to the sonic landscapes they produce. Repetition and rhyme permeate these pieces. For example, the sixth instance:

Why a. Why not bring bodies back to home. Bones before our tracks, after parks cleared leaves. Why radio. Listen listlessly, then sleep. Why weather becomes a lack—language suffers, like you. Paths, too, refuse use. Why department. Why soda. Five calendars of blue. Light lingers long as memory, but why winter. Music wanes, despite the view.

The paragraph, obviously, is overloaded with alliteration and anaphora, and closes with the hard rhyme of "blue" and "view." But regardless of these auditory effects, the speaker of the poem posits a particular failure when addressing the topic of weather, and a subsequent inability of the audience to making meaning (or at least make meaning easily) when we read: "Why weather becomes a lack—language suffers, like you." The reason for this failure can, perhaps, be found in the opening sentence: "Why a," which echoes Zukofsky's claim that "one might spend a whole lifetime considering the difference between 'the' and 'a'." Taking these sentiments literally, if one needs a lifetime to determine the proper article in a particular instance, how much longer would it take to translate the weather into language? More than a lifetime, no doubt: hence the "lack." This question is further complicated in "This Hemisphere Of Leaves," as Moody adds the concept of identity to the formula:

I am not the moon, nor am I the tree.
What is writing. What is debris.

More questions, of course, to let you scratch your over; buy the book, my friend, and try to figure them out.

It Was All a Dream

2011-12-23T12:25:00.003-06:00

Check out this interview with Shawn Kemp Carwash contributor Jeff Alessandrelli about his new book, Erik Satie Watusies His Way into Sound; The Notorious B.I.G.; Plutarch; and Beckett Long Snout.

My Favorite Albums 0f 2011 (Alphabetically by Artist))

2011-12-22T20:12:00.004-06:00

James Blake: James Blake
Cults: Cults
Destroyer: Kaputt
The Field: Looping State of Mind
Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer
Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes
John Maus: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
The War on Drugs: Slave Ambient
Youth Lagoon: The Year of Hibernation

t&u& lash your nipples to a post history is gorgeous

2011-12-22T12:09:00.003-06:00

Jared Schickling's most recent book, t&u& lash your nipples to a post history is gorgeous (Blazevox 2011), opens with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida's essay "Différance," which states: "and whoever believes that one tracks down some thing? one tracks down tracks." To this extent, Schickling's collection does not track down language, poetry, sound, or emotion, but the tracks of tracks in the form of language. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the 0pening poem "Epiphytic":

for

lovers'

sleeping, change plstc

of

nation

panic re

store nothing

too

gone, morning

mourning for

arts

nos HERMIT

If one definition of a track is "evidence, as a mark or series of marks, that something has passed," then the tracks of language in these poems indicate that language, perhaps as a system of signification, has passed through these fragments and moved on. Or, perhaps, language systems in these poems have passed in that they have died. What remains in t&u& are, literally, the remains of language.

Another aspect of Schickling's collection that call attention to itself is the use of diagrammatic figures. Below is an excerpt from the poem "The":

In many ways, we can read these moments as post-signifying. As Deleuze and Guatarri wrote in A Thousand Plateaus, post-signification and the diagrammatic are intimately entwined, wherein the diagrammatic are "transformations that blow apart semiotic systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of positive absolute deterritorialization" (136). This, again, speaks to the tracks or tracks mention earlier: we are not seeking a way to discover a signing system through tracks or diagrams, but merely to find and immerse ourselves within these tracks and diagrams: a wholly different manner in which to conceive of words and language.

Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945

2011-12-21T12:49:00.000-06:00

Good Things About The NBA: 1

2011-12-20T11:32:00.007-06:00

This morning we were all able to see Metta World Peace's line in a box score for the first time. It was, overall, an extremely satisfying experience. The NBA player formerly know as Ron Artest (a.k.a. Ron Ron), with killer name change and acting as one of the main participants in the most shameful brawl in professional sports history, now may, officially, be more of a character than Dennis Rodman!

Rambo Goes To Idaho

2011-12-18T12:00:00.015-06:00

Scott Abels's first book, Rambo Goes To Idaho (Blazevox 2011) conflates the identity of film character John Rambo and editor-poet Scott Abels, oftentimes with humorous results. In the opening poem "Screenplay," we find "Rambo, checking his email" (9) and "drawing diagrams / of sex moves with his knife in the sand"(10), among other activities, while he pursues an MFA at Boise State University. Later, we discover that Rambo "started a journal called Country Music" (Hey, just like Scott Abels). And so goes the collection: a quirky examination of self with poems that are "brutally / autobiographical" (19), all through the persona of a Hollywood-constructed action-hero who "is a product of the world" (9): the world and the individual as a singular farce.

And if that's not reason enough to read Abels's debut collection, check out the trailer for First Blood to really get your juices flowing:

Good News For Shawn Kemp

2011-12-11T12:18:00.004-06:00

Earlier this week, Greying Ghost Press released Trey Moody's second chapbook, Once Was A Weather. Today at Verse Daily, a poem from Jeff Alessandreill's book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound appeared. Somewhere out there in America, all seven of Shawn Kemp's children are smiling.

Coincidence?

2011-12-07T22:17:00.001-06:00

Coincidentally, my daughter shares her birthday, November 26, with Shawn Kemp.

Wave's STATE OF THE UNION: Mathias Svalina

2011-11-25T18:34:00.002-06:00

FORGIVENESS

There are two

problems: the problem

of human to human

forgiveness & the problem

of a dead blue jay

in the drainpipe.

During his trial

Saddam Hussein

addressed the problems thus:

When Heidegger defeated

the Neo-Kantians at the Conference

he was wearing worn

ski pants & ski pants

became a new invention

that we call "the microphone,

the photograph & the

newspaper."

This is why credit cards

mail you photographs

of yourself & why water

bubbles over the gutters.

There is no history

that passes for history.

Everyone knows the definition

of Darfur & yet in a

random poll of 200 Americans

only 12% would reach

their hands into the drainpipe

& pull the rotting

blue jay out.

This is a lesson on

forgiveness: the scar

forgives the knife

through its pink &

a bomb forgives the

trigger with its blood.

If you see a photograph

of a murdered girl

you will forever after

wear her teeth as a

necklace for your throat.

This is not forgiveness.

It is forgiveness

when you eat

with her teeth.

Old Review I wrote about Neveragainland

2011-11-22T10:00:00.003-06:00

The confluence of body and poem, or flesh and word, is a primary concern in MC Hyland’s book Neveragainland. In the opening poem “Diegetic,” the speaker says: “This is / a sheet of paper, with a memory of skin // it clothed”; the fact that “paper,” or the page, contains “a memory of skin,” as opposed to skin itself, I think, offer s bit of insight into the complexities of the body-poem dyad, at least to the extent that “paper” is the sight of the poem and “memory” is a trace (in the Dierridian sense?) of the body: almost as if the blank page presupposes the poetic embodiment. Of course, once the poem becomes body, or the body is realized in the poem, the relation remains influx or curious, as in the poem “Bird, How Beautifully You Sing!” when the speaker claims: “This other world on you, your body fits you strange.” In many ways, “This other world,” which is word, does “fit” the body, but “fits” it strangely; and within this strange fitting the tragic resides, most notably voiced in the “Ballet Méchanique” series, wherein we find the speaker “had lost interest in the body” because or due to the fact that the “body is an emptiness bruised by sound.” But, it would appear, such “emptiness” created by “sound” is not permanent or irredeemable. In fact, if we wait “all night,” perhaps the “body” will “rise again” if we “allow the air to come toward” us. Or, perhaps stated differently, if we allow the air to come into us, via the mouth (i.e. the voice), and to be vocalize through the language of the poem, a cry toward the heavens wherein we are “calling our names / up to the oranged night sky” can be articulated. Might this cry be a symbolic (or real) gesture upward toward the infinite poem, which is the “emphatic expletive / of indefinite meaning” as we “rise / always into language”? By the very nature of the poem and its “indefinite meaning,” one cannot say for sure; it will always remain, to some extent, ineffable. But what we can be certain of is that the communion of body and word is always prescient, as in “Dear ________,” when we find that: “By the time I finished writing, you had disappeared inside me.” Is “you” the writer? The poem? Some imagine other? All of these? It probably matters little, but what is important is “you’s” entrance into and eventual indecipherable union with the body. In the end, the mingling of the body and the word, very literally makes “your mouth / a round word,” which is an instance of “Using your body as a well,” or using your body well. All this, of course, says nothing of the poem “Residential, As In,” which further conflates the word and body with the trope of the house or building, so much so that one finds an “abandoned text of the front / door” that is “syntactic & wooden,” while simultaneously “the body” as “residential” “responds to this homing and light”: another way to say that “the body's turning / in on itself” are “these stanzas. / little rooms”: body, poem, and house as one.

Etymological derivation of the word “gymnasium”—in all likelihood I am going to the “gymnasium” tomorrow

2011-11-15T18:06:00.002-06:00

A gymnasium, or gym for short, is a place to exercise. In Ancient Greece, a gymnasium was a training ground for men to exercise physically as well as to socialize and exercise their minds by engaging in philosophical discussion. When men would exercise in Ancient Greece, they would do so naked to honor the Gods for creating man's body. The Greek adjective for "naked" is "gymnos". The Greek verb gymnazien means "to exercise". When Latin and English developed, they took the Greek roots and came up with "gymnasion", which eventually became the modern English "gymnasium".

Surprisingly, NBA Labor Talks Once Again Stall

2011-11-14T15:01:00.003-06:00

Carmelo Anthony attempted to save the 2011-2012 NBA season by wearing this dashing scarf and eyeglass combination to the player's meeting and subsequent address to the media this morning. Everyone, including me, thought it would work. I mean, how couldn't his stylish garb prevent owners and players from coming to a consensus on the variety of "system issues" and the division of "Basketball Related Income" that have been hampering negotiations since the 2010-2011 season concluded? We need a thorough investigation, folks.

Be there or be square

2011-11-10T17:12:00.002-06:00

On the abrupt firing of Pennsylvania State football coach Joe Paterno and the subsequent student riot that occurred in downtown State College, PA

2011-11-10T08:55:00.004-06:00

Kevin Goff, 19, a freshman studying film, did not protest Mr. Paterno’s firing. He came out just to see the show.

“My friends were like, ‘I don’t want to get maced,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to miss seeing this, so I guess that means I do kind of want to get maced.’

On the playing of the flute (please read because it took forevs to type out)

2011-11-08T22:18:00.004-06:00

“When [Alcibiades] came to study, he was fairly obedient to most of his teachers, but refused to learn the flute, which he regarded as an ignoble accomplishment and quite unsuitable for a free citizen. He argued that to use a plectrum and play the lyre does not disfigure a gentleman’s bearing or appearance, but once a man starts blowing into a flute, his own friends can scarcely recognize his features. Besides, the lyre accompanies and creates a harmony for the words or the song of its performer, but the flute seals and barricades his mouth and deprives him both of voice and of speech. ‘Leave the flute to the sons of Thebes,’ he concluded, ‘for they have no idea of conversation. We Athenians, as our fathers say, have Athena for our foundress and Apollo for our patron, one of whom threw away the flute in disgust, while the other stripped the skin off the man who played it!’ In this way, half in jest and half in earnest, he not only avoided learning the instrument himself, but induced the other boys to do the same. The word soon went round that Alcibiades detested flute-playing and made fun of everybody who learned it, and with good reason, too. In consequence the flute disappeared from the number of so-called liberal accomplishments and came to be utterly despised.”

—Plutarch—The Rise and Fall of Athens

Baron "The Real Deal" Davis

2011-11-07T13:55:00.008-06:00

Yes, this blog's namesake is Shawn Kemp, and, thus, one would assume that the contributor's of this blog hold The Rain Man in high-regard. But every now and then, an NBA player comes along who out-classes everybody with their "I just don't give a fuck" attitude. Baron Davis, my friends, is just one of those players (Click through the link attached to his name for his amazing official website). As the above image clearly shows, Davis, indeed, doesn't give a fuck. At a labor negotiation and public address, almost all of his peers came dressed in designer suits (many with ties). Not Davis. Sure, you may say: "Neither did Carmelo." You would be correct. But let's break-down the general aesthetics of Davis and Anthony a bit more. Yes, they are both wearing brightly-colored plaid shirts, but Davis goes hard by buttoning his shirt all the way up to and including the top button, is rocking a black winter's cap, has a full beard, and black-rimmed nerd glasses. If you mistook him for a member of TV On The Radio, you cannot be faulted. In fact, I'm pretty sure TVOTR recently made him an honorary member.

Türme by Neo Rauch (2011) (click for magnification)

2011-11-06T18:07:00.002-06:00

Nick Courtright Interview

2011-11-03T11:22:00.003-05:00

My bearded friend and past teammate on The Bad Mother Faulkners, TX State's MFA softball team, was interviewed by a snazzy new Austin website that is serializing excerpts from his forthcoming book, Punchline. He drops many truth bombs, but look closely for the one lie. An additional truth he failed to mention: in his final softball game, Nick, our pitcher, hit a home run.

Wisconsin

2011-11-01T16:41:00.001-05:00

In honor of our impending trip to WI, in honor of Jorsch's whining, and in honor of my home state, which makes me so proud:

Searching online for Robert Creeley's homage poem to Robert Bly and Federico García Lorca (which I could not find) I came across this Lorca poem

2011-10-31T22:07:00.003-05:00

Malagueña

Death
enters, and leaves,
the tavern.

Black horses
and sinister people
travel the deep roads
of the guitar.

And there’s a smell of salt
and of female blood
in the fevered tuberoses
of the shore.

Death
enters and leaves,
and leaves and enters
the death
of the tavern.

Filler Post

2011-10-31T16:19:00.001-05:00

This post is, merely, a place-holder post so October 2011 isn't in sole possession of least blogged month. Thanks again, Trud & Jerf, for doing so very little.

Tattoo by Wally Stevens

2011-10-29T20:33:00.002-05:00

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

KFC Hammer Time

2011-10-27T12:54:00.002-05:00

This commercial reinforces so many negative cultural stereotypes that I shouldn't like it as much as I do:

Finally, Some Relevant Material!

2011-10-27T11:18:00.002-05:00

When Shawn Kemp blew up, and other warning stories

I mean, you've been waiting for this, right?

2011-10-26T16:21:00.001-05:00

Q & A with Chris McCreary

2011-10-25T19:38:00.002-05:00

There is a Q & A with Chris McCreary regarding his collection Undone: A Fakebook posted on my course blog. Check it out.

Work

2011-10-22T20:53:00.004-05:00

Today, I've been jamming to Vampire Weekend's self-titled album, circa 2008, on repeat while working on my field list essay.

Below is borntofolk93's rendition of one of the album's catchier tunes, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." If you're curious, on his YouTube channel borntofolk93 also covers Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, and Wolf Parade, among others.

I'm sort of done writing for the day.

751 Magazine

2011-10-22T15:15:00.004-05:00

I have some more new work in the new issue of 751 Magazine. These pieces are from the same manuscript (i.e. Imaginary You) as the recent poems that appear in the new issue of diode. In addition to my work, there's some solid prose poems, etc. in there.

Poem-A-Day

2011-10-22T12:38:00.002-05:00

Poets.org, which is the website for The American Academy of Poets, runs a series called "Poem-A-Day." As you might guess, they published one poem everyday. On October 20th, they published an awesome poem by Tina Brown Celona titled "Potentially Interesting & Secretly Devastating." You can check out the "poem flow" and other entries in the series here, but below you can read the text of the poem in full:

Potentially Interesting & Secretly Devastating

is never to give away your secrets
though people will guess
and say you write like the following poets
e.e. cummings Wallace Stevens Richard Brautigan
Ted Berrigan Frank O'Hara
though you'd prefer to be compared to
the Old Possum
and to me you sound a bit like Robert Creeley
who once was embarrassed by me at a party
he died a few years later.
It's easier to talk to you on the phone
after Nebraska which sounds
wonderful when you say it
even with loathing
and "formally innovative"
and "hybrid forms"
and the human being you are looking for
in my poem
because what are we but our words
in the end and what
are poems but perceptions
and who do YOU want to fuck
and how much do you want it
and what are you willing to do
to get what you want and how can you be satisfied
with what you have. Utterly sufficient
to be apart and how you will never say love
before October and I don't mind
or even know what I mean when I say it
whether what defines it is intensity or duration
of feeling or preordained by fate
which pushes us together and draws us apart
the one human voice speaking in all of our poems
what it felt like to be alive
and being in love is most alive
whether it's with the world or you or
poetry. In every aspect
no one resembles anyone
and can you become a poet just by trying
or do you have to go to an impressive school
and how poems are dangerous
when there are real people in them
and nothing is really new but only to you
and you are the most powerful pronoun

The poetry of Joshua Ware (Fall 2011)

2011-10-21T17:02:00.003-05:00

Imaginary Portrait

You paint a vase of roses
one hundred times over, each one
a representation of the previous painting.
Roses look less like roses
with each subsequent attempt
yet you capture the idea
of roses more thoroughly
with every new permutation
enabling the viewer to understand
what it means to be a rose
in the illimitable imagination.

More to be found in the latest issue of diode:
http://www.diodepoetry.com/v5n1/index.html

Jeff Alessandrelli Tastes Like Mother's Milk

2011-10-19T22:05:00.004-05:00

My boy Jeff Alessandrelli's book Erik Satie Watusies His Way into Sound was just released by Ravenna Press. This is gonna be the feel-good poetry pamphlet of the winter; kind of like Jason Alexander's (as Jason Alexander) book pamphlet Acting without Acting.

Two paintings by Helen Frankenthaler (click for magnification)

2011-10-09T19:57:00.004-05:00

As Do I

2011-10-08T20:39:00.002-05:00

Kathleen Peirce

2011-10-08T13:02:00.002-05:00

Since you don't have tumblr, Jorsh: I posted a link to this review of Peirce's The Ardors over on early morning corn, where I also included a poem from the book. Check it out!

Joshua Ware on YouTube

2011-10-04T19:39:00.004-05:00

I did a search on YouTube for "Joshua Ware" and I must say there were a few "interesting" results. Take, for instance, the first video; apparently there is a Joshua Ware out there that likes to participate in amateur dance competitions. Check out the wicked action-roll at the 1:00 minute-mark Joshua does when his buddy Miles begins to get his groove on:

This next Joshua Ware really brings it, as the kids say nowadays. Outside of the fact that this version of Joshua Ware has a rad hair-do, I wonder what compels him to wear oven-mitts in the opening sequence. There are some real gems in this 11-minute-plus sequence:

Q & A with Tina Brown Celona

2011-10-04T19:28:00.002-05:00

There is a Q & A post on my ENGL 253: Introduction to Writing Poetry class blog with Tina Brown Celona wherein she discusses her first collection The Real Moon of Poetry. Check it out.

On Broken Bones & Glory

2011-10-03T21:15:00.002-05:00

During his career as a professional daredevil Evel Knievel broke 433 bones, a Guinness World Record.

Tumblr Sux

2011-09-29T22:21:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I want to comment on Jeff and Trey's Tumblr accounts, but I can't because I don't have one myself, and even if I did, I could only "like" it or some shit. Tumblr blows.

"Fog-Horn" by W.S. Merwin

2011-09-29T12:44:00.002-05:00

Just as was the case when I read Bly's A Light Around the Body a few weeks ago, I've never been all that into W.S. Merwin's work. Of course, this morning when I picked up The Drunk in the Furnace, I was pleasantly pleased with what I read. Take, for instance, the "Fog-Horn," which develops a beautiful and heartbreaking conceit in the tenor of the Deep Image movement:

Fog-Horn

Surely that moan is not the thing
That men thought they were making, when they
Put it there, for their own necessities.
That throat does not call to anything human
But to something men had forgotten,
That stirs under fog. Who wounded that beast
Incurably, or from whose pasture
Was it lost, full grown, and time closed round it
With no way back? Who tethered its tongue
So that its voice could never come
To speak out in the light of clear day,
But only when the shifting blindness
Descends and is acknowledged among us,
As though from under a floor it is heard,
Or as though from behind a wall, always
Nearer than we had remembered? If it
Was we that gave tongue to this cry
What does it bespeak in us, repeating
And repeating, insisting on something
That we never meant? We only put it there
To give warning of something we dare not
Ignore, lest we should come upon it
Too suddenly, recognize it too late,
As our cries were swallowed up and all hands lost.

David Foster Wallace on Precision

2011-09-29T10:07:00.001-05:00

I suppose this video is more about the economy of expression, but I think, especially with his etymological anecdote about "Prior to," it does address precision as well:

Mark Your Calendars

2011-09-28T20:10:00.001-05:00

Clean Part

Raymond Carver on precision

2011-09-26T18:28:00.003-05:00

"One right word. Use it despite its ludicrous associations."

Cincinnati Poem by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

2011-09-25T10:49:00.000-05:00

You’ve been asking for a ghost
poem to take up against the kill-hole.

This is us flung off with
so much fireplace slag.

Now a cup of coffee seems
the best ingress or salvo.

A drunk kid outside the strip club fakes
throwing his bottle at me to

spook me. I flinched, but
something’s following him around alright.

Here You Go, Jerf

2011-09-23T17:12:00.001-05:00

No More Last Meals for Texans on Death Row

2011-09-23T10:36:00.002-05:00

"The controversy began after Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed on Wednesday for the hate crime slaying of James Byrd Jr. more than a decade ago, asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Prison officials said Brewer didn't eat any of it."

--via here

Wilco on Letterman

2011-09-22T10:09:00.004-05:00

The other night, Wilco performed a song on Late Night with David Letterman; they also performed an hour-long, in-studio, web-only performance (that's a lot of hyphened adjectives). The first song of the set is "Art of Almost," which is the opening track off their new album, The Whole Love, is, incidentally, my favorite of the new material. It's pretty awesome. I should also mention, apropos of watching the video, that Jeff Tweedy is an unattractive human being, which, of course, says absolutely nothing about the quality of their music, but is just a bitch-thing to state:

"I have no inner resources b/c I am heavy bored."

2011-09-22T09:59:00.003-05:00

John Berryman had an alcohol problem; sometimes, he wrote great poems. Below, Berryman, quite obviously drunk, reads one of my favorite of his poems. His rendition of the poem is even more spectacular due to his affected speech patterns and the ferocity of his beard:

From Harper's Magazine, Oct. 2011

2011-09-21T09:56:00.003-05:00

Percentage of the current U.S. debt that was accumulated during Republican presidential terms: 71%

Percentage of profits American corporations paid in taxes in 1961: 40.6%

Today: 10.5%

Percentage of the world's population that could fit in Texas by living with the population density of New York City: 100%

Number of states in which less than 20 percent of adults are obese: 0%

Percentage of U.S. college grades that are A's: 43%

Rereading Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's, I came across this dandy

2011-09-20T19:19:00.003-05:00

September 30, 1996

I don't like the idea of "old fashioned" hamburgers. The desire to dwell in the ways of old reduces being to tourism. It puts a "Ye Olde" in front of every location. Ye Olde Drugstore, Ye Olde Restroom, Ye Olde Prison, Ye Olde Strip Club, Ye Olde Convenience Store. The only place that still is a place--and Wendy's is, despite this silly slogan--exists primarily before, not after, history.

Q&A with Ada Limón

2011-09-20T12:45:00.001-05:00

I asked poet Ada Limón some questions about her book Sharks in the Rivers as an introduction for my ENGL 253 class. You can check it out on the course blog.

3 Years Ago...

2011-09-20T10:41:00.005-05:00

I wrote the below text for my friends and read it at their wedding three years ago today. First, in retrospect, I'm amazed they let me read this during the ceremony; second, I wonder what the hell I was thinking; third, I remember being really drunk while reading it and making a lot of odd hand-gestures so as to ham-it-up for the crowd. I shouldn't be allowed to go out in public:

Today, given the occasion, I thought it appropriate to read something about love. But after thinking about the subject, a problem became apparent: language, by its nature, is limiting in that it always leaves a space between a concept and an articulation; that space always contains an inexpressible remainder. As such, to convey a concept with language, in this case love, diminishes it by negating the remainder and leaving that concept incomplete. When one says Love is…, one does a disservice to the concept of love. Unless, of course, one says To love is to love, or To be loved is to be loved. With tautology, or self-definition, the concept is wholly explained, yet, at the same time, elusive; it attains totality, but remains absent; it is both everything and nothing. For if language intends to express love, it must betray itself. It must disregard empiricism, and embrace the inherent paradox of the tautological statement: To love is to love, and to be loved is to be loved. These statements, both simplistic and perplexing, produce, as an effect, mystery. And it is mystery that produces and maintains the love story, which Barthes wrote is “the tribute…lover[s] must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it." By this, I take Barthes to mean that, while lovers may have recourse to a secret language that allows them to compensate for the space traditional language creates, the rest of us simply do not. The lovers, then, present us with the narrative, the love story, so as to foster communal understanding. Today is but one chapter in such a love story, a symbolic gesture toward mystery, the product of a tautological statement: a language exhausted, but a language complete: To love is to love, and To be loved is to be loved.

Joe Wenderoth is one of my favorite writers

2011-09-18T15:52:00.001-05:00

Oakhurst

2011-09-18T11:26:00.002-05:00

Jorsh is friends with the banjo player. We saw them at the Bourbon. Wasn't that fun?!?!? I NEED A HULA HOOP.

Into the Woods

2011-09-16T13:19:00.004-05:00

Into the Woods is a Portland-based video blog that features live performances (both on the road and in-studio) of various indie-bands, as well as a variety of documentary-type shorts. A particular favorite of mine is the Gardens and Villa performance below:

And I would be remiss if I did not mention, as well, the below video documenting the day-job of Shaky Hands drummer Jake Morris as a Pizza Delivery Boy, which he's held-down for the past five years. Jeffrey Roberts would be proud!

The last lines of the last speech Martin Luther King Jr. made before his assassination the next morning

2011-09-16T09:18:00.004-05:00

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!"

Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire: Lost in Translation

2011-09-13T13:17:00.002-05:00

Stereogum seems to be creaming over this mix-tape (you can download it here); I'm curious as to what Jeffrey Roberts thinks about it:

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Partial Ending)

2011-09-13T11:16:00.000-05:00

2 poems by Justin Marks

2011-09-12T18:08:00.002-05:00

VI

A pill the first thing
every morning Behind the eyes
where the view is broadcast
water towers and cranes
Sunlight Winter
It’s dead outside but alive
in here Concepts and forms Intros
and endings Memory
is merely a mock-up A creepy
little doll At age 32
I had my first wet dream My inner
strength is my money A mild
discomfort Something making me sad
but I don’t know what

VII

Toothpicks from a dead man’s
estate A baby
crying through a bull-horn
I project myself into the future
as a slogan on a sandwich
board Tennis at 3 Homemade
sex tapes I’m so happy
I could puke I’m typing so hard
it feels like maybe I chipped
some bones in my fingers
At night some wine and a Xanax
Bursts and inconsistency
A messaging system that transfers
the self composing the words

(taken from the chapbook On Happier Lawns; Poor Claudia 2011)

"Watching Television"

2011-09-08T10:11:00.005-05:00

I've never been much of a Robert Bly fan, but this summer I purchase a used, first-edition copy of his 1967 collection The Light Around the Body from Mondragon Bookstore in Lewisburg, PA for $3. I finally got around to reading the book this morning while I took a shit, and the poem "Watching Television" definitely is worth posting. Check it out in its entirety (I've italicized my favorite parts):

WATCHING TELEVISION

Sounds are heard too high for ears,
From the body cells there is an answering bay;
Soon the inner streets fill with a chorus of barks.

We see the landing craft coming in,

The black car sliding to a stop,

The Puritan killer loosening his guns.

Wild dogs tear off noses and eyes

And run off with them down the street—

The body tears off its own arms and throws them into the air.

The detective draws fifty-five million people into his revolver,

Who sleep restlessly as in an air raid in London;

Their backs become curved in the sloping dark.

The filaments of the soul slowly separate;

The spirit breaks, a puff of dust floats up;

Like a house in Nebraska that suddenly explodes.