52 Songs

Cutting it Off

2012-02-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

I could use some time away, I think.

Three Poems Up

2012-01-17T11:36:00.001-08:00

At Entasis Journal. Read on...

Chuck D.

2012-01-17T11:33:00.001-08:00

"Jay-Z says that now that he's got a daughter, he's going to stop using the b-word. We commend you, brother, in your 42nd year of life, on that decision. But you had a mother...."

Another Poem Up

2011-12-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

In Smalldoggies Magazine.

Poem Up

2011-12-16T16:13:00.000-08:00

At Zocalo Public Square. For your pleasure...

Rimbaud

2011-12-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed.

Leonard Cohen

2011-11-29T09:43:00.001-08:00

"As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. And the instructions were these: Never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity & beauty."

Film Death

2011-11-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

Time to elegize it, maybe. Probably.

This country...

2011-11-21T23:27:00.001-08:00

...uggh.

"Lord,

2011-11-13T21:27:00.000-08:00

Protect My Child"

Why Critics Can't be Trusted, Wrote the Critic

2011-11-13T16:21:00.000-08:00

Feist

The Kid I'm Angry At

2011-11-13T13:05:00.000-08:00

is bouncing the basketball in the yard

out back, has ignored me when I asked

if he'd help out, is singing or talking to

himself. The ball goes pat pat pat on

the cement then a break then he holds it.

His head is like mine, in some way.

It must be. What makes me so bad

is my refusal to stop what I know makes me

so bad, and could make it worse for me,

us, for him. He mocks openly because

he's young. What I do is what's been done.

Like him I don't know how to stop.

Or I do, I do, but my body, and my will.

The lines carrying electricity and

information above his head are arrayed

like a funnel of sin beneath the sky

bringing dispatches pulse-propelled

to the hole above the window and

down the wall to me to where I type.

I can feel a world opening at my touch.

It can't be his fault, his anger-making

actions. He's too young. Protect him.

yeah yeah

2011-11-08T21:49:00.001-08:00

everyone's keeping me out.

hello////?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

2011-11-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

[Last night, I took the kids to see it at The Bay Theatre. Below is a thing I wrote up as a way to get a reviewing job at the now-dead District Weekly.]

Steven Spielberg has a lot to answer for—Michael Bay, for example—though it’s not exactly his fault. His movies from the 70s and early 80s are rich in spectacle and detail. His followers kept the spectacle and missed the detail. That’s why Close Encounters of the Third Kind is still playing in revival, as it is this week, instead of, say, Pearl Harbor. Yes, the spaceships are cool, but the earth-bound stuff is cool, too—even, at times, awe-inspiring: Witness, for example, the astronomers rolling a globe through the halls of an office building, like children with a giant beach ball; or the sea of hands in the Indian desert pointing up in unison toward the washed-out sky; or the moment when Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon exit their car and see Devil’s Tower lifting out of the Wyoming landscape. That image alone—and not just the climactic vision of the mothership hovering over the same mountain—will more than compensate for the eight bucks it’ll cost you to see it on the big screen. Images like that are what movies are for.

Plath

2011-11-04T13:57:00.001-07:00

It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.

Tom Waits

2011-11-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

I like writing melody without an instrument, just so it's more like the, the choreography of a bee. You just go. There're no frets on your neck.

Hoops and Lines

2011-11-02T20:53:00.001-07:00

On offense, the team gave itself over to nonstop cutting and ball movement, what guard Walt Frazier called "making a poem."

- Free Darko Presents The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History, p 74

Limerick

2011-11-02T19:27:00.001-07:00

That dog with the big, bushy tail,
as slow as a slow-witted whale:
nothing can stoke him,
no creature provoke him,
except for the man with the mail.

Woody Allen

2011-08-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Midnight in Paris, which we went to last night, is a pretty enjoyable movie, once you let go of the fact that nobody--and I mean nobody--talks like the people in that movie do.

[The heavy use of Bechet on the soundtrack helps things out.]

Victoria Williams

2011-07-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

Why must it start? / Why must lovers part? / Why does the cheating go on? / Why have hearts turned to stone--why look at that moon!

Joe Strummer

2011-07-19T00:42:00.000-07:00

"They used to ask me, 'So you think you schmucks can change the world,' they'd say to us. They said it so often that you began to believe them, which is fatal."

Another Poem Up

2011-07-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

In ZPS.

Poem Up

2011-06-28T10:11:00.001-07:00

In ZPS.

Two Challenges, Post-Road Trip

2011-06-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

=updated to be less ridiculous=

Today we leave for other climes etc. yeah, but post-road trip I will finally be freed up, tho I've always been freed up (excuses are easy always and fun sometimes to make), to meet two challenges:

1. 300 words a day, no exceptions.
2. 10 miles per week, no exceptions.

Levertov, for inspiration:

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Epitaph

2011-06-09T22:57:00.001-07:00

"I took four bullets to the chest and all I got was this lousy gravestone!"

It's inevitable:

2011-06-08T18:58:00.001-07:00

a Counting Crows resurgence among the young will soon be upon us. I predict it. College students will be writing as epigraphs for their poems

'Round here we stay up very very very very late.

Auden & John Garrett

2011-06-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

A great many people dislike the idea of poetry as they dislike over-earnest people...

Wonderful, Strange Review

2011-05-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

This is by Jordan Davis, whose criticism I've enjoyed before. The open-hearted, unrevised nature of the thing is what strikes me, esp. as coming from a so-called post-avant. Fascinating.

Also, I wrote one, here.

Bill Knott

2011-05-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

From HTMLGiant.

Tuscaloosa

2011-05-02T21:20:00.001-07:00

"We actually saw the small tornado as it was forming, the big one grab it and suck it in, and it expanded like the mouth of hell." - Constance Foster, from the story headlined 'South Picks Up the Pieces After Deadly Tornadoes' on today's All Things Considered

Good Friday

2011-04-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.

[the rest...]

Southern Cal

2011-04-15T10:02:00.001-07:00

Today is one of those days where you can put up with it, and where you realize why you put up with it. Here's a good song to go with it.

Book

2011-04-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

I've got a poem in this book. Many poets of note have poems in it, too. Buy it. Support this little independent venture.

2011-04-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

This is a narrative of very heavy duty proportions.

- Dr. Teeth

Jesus is a burning fire

2011-04-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

Jesus is a burning fire
the preacher said consuming
all in a flame of love and
what survives is what love
therefore burnishes for
eternity and that that
vanishes into ash cannot
last so where do you
put your trust and how
do others know you have
faith which means acting
on what cannot be
seen he said and sipped
from water and the faces
were blank around us
and my heart I could feel
in my neck I wish I was
dead I thought and you
are I might have heard.

Box

2011-04-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

When you’re stuck in a box

and the walls are thin but

breaking one would make

the whole thing collapse

and those remaining in it

would suffer needlessly,

as all who suffer certainly do,

despite what jerks say,

then I think the thing to do

is to figure out how escaping

and keeping it intact despite

your wanting to burn it up

is an art that few can master

and fewer can imagine

but I’m starting to think

in my way that we must try.

Fie on Thee, Spring!

2011-03-22T14:35:00.001-07:00

I heard flowers breathing freely

after the rain. And then I heard

the heartbeat of trees enjoying

clean wind. I heard the moaning

of insects circling the ripe fruit

held by the trees. The fruit

sounded slick and drippy, and made me

feel slightly sick. I'm all for love,

brothers and sisters, but such

absence of decorum approaches

the very bounds of breeding

and fine manners, and may give

to the impressionable young

feelings for which their as yet

delicate minds have not the

forbearance to resist. Fie!, therefore.

Thing To Do

2011-03-12T22:31:00.000-08:00

SALON

David Lowery

2011-02-28T00:10:00.000-08:00

2011-02-24T23:35:00.001-08:00

Stones

2011-02-23T22:43:00.000-08:00

The Sartorialist

2011-02-19T08:39:00.001-08:00

More here.

Wilcume

2011-02-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

Wilcume means Welcome

In English that’s old,

Though nobody speaks it--

Or so I am told.

Yet each pilgrim I meet,

My greeting's the same:

Wilcume min sweostor

Beowulf is min nama.

Lies

2011-02-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

Identifying lies told by powerful political leaders -- and describing them as such -- is what good journalists do, by definition. It's the crux of adversarial journalism, of a "watchdog" press. "Objectivity" does not require refraining from pointing out the falsity of government claims. The opposite is true; objectivity requires that a journalist do exactly that: treat factually false statements as false. "Objectivity" is breached not when a journalist calls a lie a "lie," but when they refuse to do so, when they treat lies told by powerful political officials as though they're viable, reasonable interpretations of subjective questions. The very idea that a journalist is engaged in "opinion-making" or is "taking sides" by calling a lie a "lie" is ludicrous; the only "side" such a journalist is taking is with facts, with the truth. It's when a journalist fails to identify a false statement as such that they are "taking sides" -- they're siding with those in power by deceitfully depicting their demonstrably false statements as something other than lies.

- Glenn Greenwald

Recommended for headphones or,

2011-02-13T18:35:00.000-08:00

better yet, next time you're driving at night: The first three songs of Dire Straits' Making Movies, especially the first, "Tunnel of Love." Loud while driving is best. I can't recommend it highly enough. Great for Valentine's Day or not.

Lewis Hyde

2011-02-12T12:13:00.001-08:00

Barnet's language, the language of gift exchange, has procreation at its root. Generosity comes from genere (Old Latin: beget, produce), and the generations are its consequence, as are the gens, the clans. At its source in both Greek and Sanskrit, liberality is its desire; libido is its modern cousin. Virtue's root is a sex (vir, the man), and virility is its action. Virtue, like the gift, moves through a person, and has a procreative or healing power (as in the Bible story about the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment in the faith that it would heal her: "And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned about in the press and said, 'Who touched my clothes?'").

I Don't Pretend to Know

2011-02-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

all--or even a little--of what the events unfolding in Egypt mean.

Nevertheless, I find myself pretty exhilarated by what I've been watching. I hope it turns out beautifully, though I know it might turn out dismally. Let's hope for better than what it could be.

Pound on a Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) Simile

2011-02-10T23:14:00.000-08:00

Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Beach Boys & T.S. Eliot

2011-02-09T16:29:00.001-08:00

From "Good Vibrations," 1966:

I don't know where but she sends me there.

From "Burnt Norton," 1936:

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

A New Thing

2011-02-09T16:28:00.001-08:00

I will attempt to post one new thing here daily. That's my new thing. Let's see if I can do it, yo!

Frost / Kennedy

2011-01-21T22:28:00.000-08:00

Here's an essay my friend Aaron wrote that I much enjoyed. Perhaps you will, too.

My Band

2011-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

When he said, You’re band is ok, it’s

Pleasant, it sounded jokey—the tone—

Though he meant it. In the intervening years,

Surplus CDs have scarred birds

Raiding the fruit trees, have served

As coasters for drinks for guests who

Sometimes “drop in,” and have been hung

As part of a shiny, clicking wind-chime,

For reals, made with binder clips,

And twine. The cases I have no use for.

Hey Man, Slow Down

2011-01-20T10:07:00.001-08:00

A: Sherry Turkle

B: Radiohead

Amidst the Deluge

2010-12-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

What should (or can) be done?

Silent Night

2010-12-21T21:52:00.001-08:00

It's been some time since I've posted any music here, and this is not a new recording, but it's ripe for uncovering--a four-track, apartment-recorded version of the oft (over?) recorded classic. Free. Click here to download. Merry Christmas!

C-Moon

2010-12-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of C-Moon, after

some McCartney-clowning, a woman,

presumably Linda, half-laughs easily

at the 5-second mark. This I played

for a girl half my life ago, at sundown,

in the apartment I shared. She heard

what I heard in that laugh, and that was fire,

friends, that felt smokeless, a shaft of light

leading a multitude through the wastes.

You exhort your people for years on end,

you codify the words that come to you

in a finger of smoke smoting stone

at the peaks of mountains, and you die

for a mysterious infraction.

Water from a stone evaporates, joins

its brethren in the wreath around the world,

is breathed in, keeping sky blue, rotting

a body even while giving it life to shake

that tambourine. Linda couldn’t sing,

was the common story, and I, too, laughed

cruelly at the tape going round. But the girl

in the apartment could. She was the promised land

glimpsed in sound slipping away, or dead:

The laugh’s gone as it’s being registered,

cannot here be fixed. Macca loved his wife

to the end, the blessed sentimentalist. There:

There’s a figure walking by the window

doesn’t know me, doesn’t know I’m here.

Writing is fun

2010-12-15T19:20:00.000-08:00

and easy!

And another side of...

2010-12-08T11:45:00.001-08:00

challenging assumptions.

Challenging Assumptions

2010-12-07T13:54:00.001-08:00

and Wikileaks.

Technology

2010-12-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

No one imagines that we’d wind up with a world that looks like this on the basis of the technology that’s emerged in the last hundred years. Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.

I’m sitting here at age 52 with almost all of my own teeth. That didn’t used to happen. I’m a cyborg. I’m immune to any number of lethal diseases by virtue of technology. I’m sitting on top of this enormous pyramid of technology that starts with flint hand-axes and finds me in a hotel in Austin, Texas, talking to someone thousands of miles away on a telephone and that’s just what we do. At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.

- William Gibson

sonny

2010-11-29T16:28:00.000-08:00

being confronted by your past work, the work you made
when it was important to be important is a necessary walk
through the fire of humility. it lives on to confront you--
terrible melodies and earnest signs, the stab at currency
in bad clothing and hair that looks like that--and memory,
too, does a good job of it. in 8th grade, when i thought
to play a trick on some girls: i ran toward them
on the blacktop with my plan. i tripped and fell on my knees
and elbows and palms, and their laughter and the are you
all rights. i refuse to forget. i'm telling you this, sonny,
because you keep smirking whenever i tell you anything.
you'll see. you'll see. i'm telling you, sonny: you'll see.

Tolstoy

2010-11-28T21:55:00.001-08:00

'The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.'

Aesop's Fable #112: The Wolf, the Mother, and Her Child

2010-11-18T22:08:00.000-08:00

A hungry wolf was prowling about in search of food. By and by, attracted by the cries of a child, he came to a cottage. As he crouched beneath the window, he heard the mother say to the child, "Stop crying, do, or I'll throw you to the wolf!" Thinking she really meant what she said, he waited there a long time in the expectation of satisfying his hunger. In the evening he heard the mother fondling her child and saying, "If the naughty wolf comes, he shan't get my little one. Daddy will kill him." The wolf got up in disgust and walked away. "As for the people in that house," said he to himself, "you can't believe a word they say."

Trans. (?) V.S. Vernon Jones

Things are rough

2010-11-16T22:01:00.000-08:00

Here's something to help out, though getting it in better quality and loud in your house wd be better.

Wait

2010-11-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

Don't wait. Go.

Me & Binka

2010-10-22T21:22:00.000-07:00

Separated in Minsk, lovers since Nice,

we'd met in Bath. The trash Binka combed

through there, looking for earrings,

belonged to the man who arranged

abduction half a continent away.

I had no money. Still don't.

I thought I had wits. My late 20s,

I liked my looks in the mirror, and on paper:

Two degrees, I'd predicted the response

to my report (My lover, I said

[I wince recalling the word], is kidnapped):

They acted like they didn't hear me.

So I looked for her myself, and I looked.

I'm looking for her always. Like the Holy Ghost,

her spirit is the dome under which Europe breathes

for me. I await manifestations.

Despite my faith, they never show.

Wright: Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

2010-10-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Film Recommended

2010-10-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Brick

Plath: You're

2010-10-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,

Trawling your dark as owls do.

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth

Of July to All Fools' Day,

O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.

Farther off than Australia.

Bend-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.

Snug as a bud and at home

Like a sprat in a pickle jug.

A creel of eels, all ripples.

Jumpy as a Mexican bean.

Right, like a well-done sum.

A clean slate, with your own face on.

Plath: Rhyme

2010-10-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've got a stubborn goose whose gut's

Honeycombed with golden eggs,

Yet won't lay one.

She, addled in her goose-wit, struts

The barnyard like those taloned hags

Who ogle men

And crimp their wrinkles in a grin,

Jangling their great money bags.

While I eat grits

She fattens on the finest grain.

Now, as I hone my knife, she begs

Pardon, and that's

So humbly done, I'd turn this keen

Steel on myself before profit

By such a rogue's

Act, but--how those feather's shine!

Exit from a smoking slit

Her ruby dregs.

In Media Res

2010-10-17T12:22:00.001-07:00

The sword, if a sword,

gleamed beneath breath

of cold morning, exhaled

by the man whose neck

would soon be irrecoverably

gashed. Soon's not soon

enough to convey its

quickness. Movies wrecked

us, revealed us: Image

followed image faster

than words, and mind

understood.

Who is this man who is

about to die? Events

have led him here.

The meaty sound

of metal on flesh rings

from speaker to ear.

Crumbling figures vanish

with the cut of the scene,

the credits’ upward scroll,

the car walk, the quiet

in the drive home snapped

at the question you fear

asking but do: So.

What'd you think?

The answer rings in

the cabin, or doesn't—

the voice low or voluble,

depending, but, I speak

here only for me: one

puts forward a word,

helplessly, and one

can't help but not get

what's wanted in return,

when it itself is not

what's wanted.

What is wanted?

Review Up

2010-10-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

Overwritten review, actually. Here.

Poem Up

2010-10-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

At Denver Syntax. Here.

Crazy in Reasonable Language

2010-10-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

Or a reminder of why, despite persistently getting bad grades on the tests, I regard astronomy as one of my best undergraduate classes.

What My Younger Son Said at the Piano When Asked by Some Visiting Musicians if He Could Play

2010-09-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

I cannot read the book, but I make
a beautiful sound.

What Fantastic Excitement!

2010-09-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

she said, like an old-timey lady of the prairie
visiting a carnival. And she was old-timey,
in the lilt of her voice, was lady-like too,
came in fact from South Dakota and it was
the carnival where she said it, into the air,
as we exited together the Hammerhead, me
feeling a mite woozy. Her dress, which slipped
on my lap as we spun, mightn't have flown
back home in Rapid City among her kin,
but who can say? She was as tender to me
as a teacup, and smooth like one, and brittle,
full--a rush of warmth. I'll win you
a panda, and we'll head out to space.
Conditions demand it. The night does. The day.

Something to maybe go to...

2010-09-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

....if you're free. I'm reading at this thing.

My New Favorite Video

2010-09-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

Here.

Band T-Shirts

2010-09-16T09:31:00.001-07:00

The dude w/ Vampire Weekend on his chest--
his undeveloped chest above his well developed

paunch--looked like he could be
Vampire Weekend in glasses.

Maybe he was, walking around college cause
he missed it, but this was no Columbia,

and that's no reason to cry, unless you want
a promising future. Buck up, man!

My Life Has Been Bereft...

2010-09-15T14:19:00.001-07:00

...and I didn't know it. Then I heard this on the radio the other night and sat, parked and riveted, till it ended. What have I been doing?

Claudia Rankine

2010-09-15T12:36:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an "I" discusses socially. Though Myung Mi Kim did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space. She did say it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then to translate it here. She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters.

Claudia Rankine

2010-09-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

In truth I know the answer to her question, but how can I say to her, Understand without effort that man is left, at times thinking, as if trying to weep. I am somewhat rephrasing the poet Cesar Vallejo because Vallejo comes closest to explaining that any kind of knowledge can be a prescription against despair...

The one briefly present

2010-09-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

is every breathed-into thing. A person
is no thing, of course, in the way
that word's used, and words read
in volumeless, voluminous waste,
incapable of weakening sad's dominion.

This arrival comes in light of a smile
attached to one whom I expected to,
later and without expectation, send me
a dispatch from a life beyond my ken,
as anybody's is for you, for me, and
who will now not be sending it.
What's the proper tribute? What loss.

The Scene in the Movie I Mean

2010-09-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

is the scene where the girl hits the landing
when the stairs abruptly turn up to the right
and the window behind her blazes out
a wash of sunshine that in the colorless
film stock washes her out chest to crown
toward the ceiling. Her skirt is an altar
which upon the presence of God rests, He
the author and sustainer of all things we read,
and if interpretation is embodiment, then
the vision seen at home on that screen
has sustained sentences that rise and pause
at a break in the ascension before turning
abruptly away from the power that made them.

Repeatedly, the Afternoons

2010-09-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

make a body tired. When adopting outdated locutions
be sure to work them seamlessly into a straight face.
The coffee, black natch, in the cup is a constrained sea.
For us here the land is: The "sea grows old in it" we read,
satisfied, mysteriously. A white prow below a white deck
and sails cuts through the dark, unstable mirror,
apparently unframed, fog obscuring the border
where image yields to the receding hills--always
something darting behind the next breast. You may stop
regarding yourself. Look what else there is to see.

I Submitted to Poetry

2010-09-08T01:18:00.001-07:00

The venerable (overused word) magazine. It's true. I've done it before and will again. Stay tuned for the inevitable--for whatever happens is inevitable. After it happens, I mean. Right?

oh man

2010-09-07T20:31:00.000-07:00

Your friends are more successful than you.

They don't mean to but don't stop letting you know.

There is a star with a clock in it bursting from the wall.

They all wear swatches that double as weights for their tanned and muscled arms.

We get it: you're great.

Love better be better.

Two Claims Derived from Recent Listening

2010-09-02T23:55:00.001-07:00

McCartney's at his best when he doesn't mean it.

Lou Reed's at his best when he does.

James 5, v. 8

2010-09-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

Yet something else
to do—not said in tones
especially authoritative (unearned,
Stalinistic, like as to those
we read about with untraceable cash
we never have buying
policy)—is learn to wait,
always meaning long.
Set up camp for what you want
and make it what you want, for soon
from around the invisible
intuited screen… —To sum up:
Calm and slow down, it’s happening
fast: you (won’t) know.

Poetry on an E-reader

2010-09-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

Poetry points out literature’s ambivalent oscillation between what Craig Mod calls “formless content” and “definite content”—between a discourse conveyed without fixed visual shape and a discourse that relies on specific appearance. Poetry shows that literature, like light, is both wave and particle. - Siobhan Phillips

Must-Listens

2010-08-28T12:07:00.001-07:00

HOLY SMOKES! Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Cello Concertos in A Major (Wq. 172), esp. the third movement, and in A Minor (Wq. 170), esp. the first movement, are spectacular. This is music to be alive to. (Currently listening a 1995 recording from Naxos records.)

Also: Television. When I was a college d.j., we had two go-to songs to play when you needed time to leave the studios and get to the restroom across the hall: King Crimson's "In the Court of the Crimson King" and Television's "Marquee Moon." I always enjoyed, though I didn't pay close attention to, the Television song, but I recently purchased the album that shares its name, Marquee Moon, and it's terrific. Everyone praises the guitar playing on it, so it's nothing for me to say, Everyone's right. Bach is in tray one of the CD player with Television in number two.

The Future

2010-08-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

More remarkable photographs here.

Song of the Week: Sweet as They Come

2010-08-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

Old. Misgivings (re: the recording, not as much the song). But free. (Nice horn breakdown.)

Song of the Week: Worlds Gone

2010-08-15T23:25:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite recent pieces of music that we've made. It's the second track down (follow the church, which is an image of a stunning edifice located in the stunning Trona, CA--a place too weird to believe but in person).

Moore

2010-08-14T14:25:00.001-07:00



I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important 
      beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, 
      one discovers in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.

Sentence Fragments as Convention

2010-08-14T11:18:00.001-07:00

In the preface to the book review I posted below, I wrote that the heavy use of sentence fragments marks the writing as dated. This is probably not a fair claim, since what fragments amount to is a convention, like any poetic convention: slant rhyme, pentameter, sprung rhythm, juxtaposition, synesthesia, etc. It's just that this type of writing feels particularly prevalent at this moment--on Facebook, in blogs, in journalism, as well as in poetry and prose--and it seems to me played out. But that might simply be a matter of taste. There are certain types of singers--or better yet, certain kinds of singing--that I don't like. My disliking it oughtn't be understood as some universal judgment on it, he wrote with great obviousness. But there's also that terrific experience when a convention you don't particularly care for is used in a way that surprises even you. It's then that the work and convention meld in some way I find thrilling. (I like that feeling--in art, at least--of being wrong. It seems to better define the parameters of what I know and don't know.)

If this all sounds unformed, it is. I'm simply trying to understand why I don't buy certain kinds of writing. A sentence fragment, as a thing, is not something I object to. A well-placed fragment can be devastating. In some poetry, all we get are fragments, which in their broken-up quality carry great emotional resonance. And maybe, since I've been reading Ovid in translation and Keats and Melville lately, I'm feeling partial to the "completed" sentence. I still feel, though, that there's an over-reliance on the fragment, that it's an easier way "out" of vexing compositional, or editorial, even aleatory, predicaments, and that somehow it feels like a tic, an unexamined habit, more than anything else.

Melville

2010-08-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.

- "Bartleby"

The French Exit

2010-08-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

[The following is a review written for a publication that, b/c of my own laziness, had to reject it—I missed the deadline! Anyway, I’m posting it here for archival purposes, and for the few readers who sometimes wander by. There are two things I didn't put in the review b/c they simply didn't fit: 1) Stylistically, the book relies heavily on a habit in contemporary poetry—the dramatic sentence fragment—that marks, for me anyway, the much of the language in it as dated. 2) The book feels pretty pleased with itself. Having said that, there’s no question Gabbert is a smart and very talented writer, and people much more accomplished than me have praised the book as an excellent collection of poetry. I’m not merely being self-deprecating. I’m saying that any review should be taken w/ a very large grain of salt.]

Look no further than to Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann, or the comments section of an online article, to see that public discourse is coarse and getting coarser, driven by often illogical statements serving larger, often all-too-incoherent agendas. And I’ve had more than one experience—with students, with family, even with strangers at the grocery store—where what seemed to me a harmless utterance of greeting or preference is scanned for ideological bias. The world of poetry is no less fraught. How can you work in this lonely art and not consider the risks of being dismissed as a Quietist on the one hand or as an obscurantist on the other? Even worse is to be labeled with the appellation “Third Way” or “Hybrid,” those poets wanting it both ways and thus having it neither way. It's enough to make you want to simply refuse—to refuse conclusions, arrivals, or any clear allegiance.

Elisa Gabbert, in The French Exit, appears to take this path of refusal. A key method for blazing it is, oddly enough, through making declarations. Sometimes these serve humorous conceits—“You will be woken by the chirping of the birds, which is the sound of their egos escaping their bodies” (“Ornithological Blogpoem”)—and sometimes self-definition: “I don’t want to apprehend the unknown” (“Day Trip with Spires”). To reverse the old writing-class maxim, these poems “tell” instead of “show,” but what they tell remains veiled, to the reader and, quite possibly, to their speaker as well.

Take these lines from “Blogpoem the Litany”: “The people need more opiates, or less. / One way or the other they are not satisfied.” And here’s “Poem with a Threat,” which I quote in full:

Columning storm cloud, natch, dead bird.
My fear of X is worse than X,

more scary. What am I wearing?
The less I recognize myself, the less

I contradict—scratch, feel contrary
to my mirror image in the “pool of grief”

down there. No one would ever say that.
But I may say “puddle of despair.”

Finally, the concluding lines of “Poem with Negation”:

Toward the definition,

untoward the meaning. I run
through the emphases—

It doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean anything.

It doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean anything.

“Toward the definition” and “untoward the meaning”: Like the majority of what’s in the book, each of these has the word “poem” in the title, reminding us that what we’re reading are, in fact, poems (as defined at the top of the page), even as the words comprising them, as the lines readily claim, don’t add up to anything.

Early in the book, Gabbert describes the landscape as “supersaturated with meanings. / With meaningness,” and part of what her work embodies is the anxiety of the moment, of being overwhelmed and alienated by a speeded- (and speeding-) up society. Wordsworth described an affliction of an “almost savage torpor,” caused by political upheaval, the growth of cities, and the “craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” (What would he have made of the 21st Century?) For him, poetry was to defend and preserve all that’s good in the world, was to carry forward with it “relationship and love,” and it would do this by using the language of common men and the subjects of common life, reminding readers of a shared humanity. Even as his diagnosis remains sapient, his prescription has come to feel quaint, as much of the Romantic project has, in the face of lightning-quick change and rampant ecological destruction. This may explain why poets like Gabbert retreat into their own heads, describing the distorted view of the world perception affords, like the backward, very limited vision provided within a camera obscura (which happens to be the subject of one of her poems): It may not be an accurate picture of things, but it’s mine. A blurb on the back of the book makes this very point, describing the work as “obsessively interior.”

It’s the poet’s interior whim (and whimsy) that leads her in “Blogpoem w/ Ellipses” to contemplate what happens to holes—like the dent in her car—when they “die,” i.e., are fixed: “Their cemetery / sure would seem a waste / of space.” Halfway through, the poem marks the end of this reverie by (you guessed it) ellipses before moving into a description of what could be called morbid torpor:

I’ve started practicing
creative apathy. Can’t
spend all day in transit
among various funerals.
Everybody’s got the
same epitaph anyway:
Was alive. Is Not. Tried
To Save Life Thru Not
Caring. Died Bored.

You read a poem like this and see what Gabbert’s up to. The radically different halves of the poem, lightly connected by death-industry terms, suggest that any move a poem makes—even when it seems meaningful in some “organic” sense—is, in fact, arbitrary. The fact of death makes it so, reducing everyone, and every human act, to a kind of “living” funeral. One way to face that awful situation is to practice “creative apathy,” “not caring” as a means of self-preservation, but the gravestone makes concretely clear that the strategy doesn’t work. What, then, to do? The only vital alternative, the only pathway to life, to waking up, is “desire,” and even that’s circumscribed: “My desire / flaps and beats against the walls / like an idiot bird trapped inside the flue” (“Camera Obscura”).

The image brings to mind Ron Silliman’s recent poem-in-progress, Revelator: “Desire, / Desire is the answer, hunger / never rests.” What gets a person, or what gets Silliman, up every morning to work, is the same thing that gets the geese up “each dawn / now for decades circling lake.” Desire orders a being’s existence and gives it agency, but only if it has an object, and though Gabbert does indicate one now and again—most touchingly in the final poem, when she asks of her brother, “(If he’s mine, / why can’t I keep him?)”—the poems in this book often seem willfully object-less, making a piece like “Poem with Intrinsic Music” stand out by contrast:

Empty tennis courts of autumn,
the landscape wants to appropriate you

like fallow cortex, the brain over-
turning itself: A blind woman has no use

for sports, but the cells could go
to memorizing Bach—the cello suites,

the overtures.

Say those lines out loud. The title of the poem winks at us, its author showing us she knows this is recognizably “musical” writing, but that knowingness attacks its very real beauty and sense, as if Gabbert wants to apologize for giving to people a pleasure they go to poetry for. You want to say, Yes, we’re all masses of mixed motives, and Yes, meaning often feels more a product of the interpreter’s perspective than of any (ugly phrase) “objective reality,” but art this self-consciously, showily aware betrays a lack of faith, if not in the poet then in the reader. Her misgivings are stated more directly at the end of “X”:

I want to lie on the top level
of an empty garage, to be close

to the sky as I lose my mind—
I’m afraid. I’m afraid

I’ll feel pretty
transcendent.

The cleverness of these breaks seems meant to blunt or hide the fear these lines really allude to, which is not of transcendence but of the means of getting there: escaping, or “losing,” one’s own mind. A poet must engage that fear, I think. She’s got to risk looking like a fool.

POEM THAT WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED ANYWHERE EXCEPT THIS BLOG

2010-07-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

The home budget is not for foreclosure:
If you’re making a budget, you’re making
A plan, indicating optimism, indicating
You’re planning on sticking with this person
You’re making the budget with, despite
Everything this person is or does that falls short
Of your perfect, flawed ideal. I love you, baby.
Let’s have a baby. We’ll name her Milly: Baby Milly.