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They Are On My Side, or Books For My Summer

1 Jun

I am not a superstitious person.  I say that knowing that no one is entirely reasonable, that like anyone sometimes I think about objects as though just by having them around they can keep me safe, that they are on my side.

Last Saturday I drove 13-ish hours to live in North Carolina by the beach for two months.  The couple weeks beforehand were a slow emptying of closets and furniture, edging up to leaving.  I am so thrilled to be to living in this beautiful place with beautiful people for the summer, but I’d dreaded saying goodbyes – guh, see-you-laters – so much that I didn’t look at the fact of departure directly, not until I took my leave.  Even this one that’s only a couple of months. I left to live by the beach for a summer a few years ago, but then I didn’t dread going at all; there weren’t as many people it hurt to leave.

When I first thought about what books I would take, these I immediately knew I wanted to pack were ones I’ve already read, all multiple times.  If I’m honest about how I think of them, they are little guardians, voices of conscience, talismans warding against forgetting who I am/want to be and how important books have been to that personal trajectory.  When so much else gets uprooted their steadiness moors me to some wispy feeling of safety.  If there can be such a thing as holy books for an individual life then these I knew I would come with me are part of an ever-expanding gospel:

Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless by Matt Hart:  The music of Matt’s poems is totally wild but still steady, intentional, an ocean always coming back to where you can walk up to meet it.  Leaving this behind would’ve been like not having favorite albums to sing me the way here.

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany:  Reading these poems feels like hearing prophecies of a strange god you know will be fulfilled.   Mullany breathes a quiet but swelling kind of truth, thunder or bells tolling to more bells.

Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder:  I’ve never read a book of poems and experienced as much gentleness and mercy and glimmer as from this marvelous thing.  It was given to me by someone who says I’ve called from them their ghosts.  I don’t know if that’s a thing I can do, but these poems help me remember how to inhabit haunted and fearful places with light.  They reassure me that a trembling heart is better than none at all.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman:  This is not the sort of book usually written about on here but yeah, okay, whatever.  I first read this just over ten years ago and my attachment to it still grows.  When I became an atheist after ten years of devout faith it took on special significance, this story of a ragged twelve-year-old girl pitted against a cruel, powerful god and his army of angels.

Several months ago I took the copy I first read from the public library in my hometown. I took it from the shelf in the young adult section I virtually lived in through adolescence and walked out.  There are some things that never leave you, and I had to go back for this one.

Erasure Single Sentence Review(?): I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone by Thomas Patrick Levy

24 May


Christopher wrote an awesome review of Thomas Patrick Levy’s new book, I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone. I did an erasure of that review, creating this Single Sentence Review or whatever.

Zack Morris, An Obsession by Natalie Nuzzo at NAP

22 May

That awesome Diana Salier has taken over poetry picker duty for NAP and look at this new issue, specifically let’s lean our faces towards this poem “Zack Morris, An Obsession” by Natalie Nuzzo, oh how awesome I like it, how it radiates the obsession, the locked-in heart’s musicality, the distracted-by-narrow-narrow-focus brain’s bounce, the story smacked into shape by this big O word obsession, yes.

Here’s a super part:

LA Looks hair gel and stolen eyeliner
pancake makeup fists full of Cover Girl
and Aussie Stiff Spray works well
with Zack’s summer job
at the Sands Country Club

AC Slater’s nips were visible in that
tight green and white striped polo
Da Boss short fat dago Mr. Carossi
of course from New York City,
specifically Brooklyn, NYC
Such a bummer, he was
last name like so Italian and grossi !

Check out these poems by Laura Kochman at PANK, please.

18 May

Here, catch these five poems from Laura Kochman in the new PANK. They’re heavy or maybe not so much heavy as weighted, as weighing, from the images and the sounds and the movement, like bump-bump-dump. Like the first three and their if’s, a qualifying thump at the beginning of each sentence, a tactic both shaking and soothing, never does it grow old. Like the last two, their lovely pictures yet scary and sad yes, this woman and the sand unstoppable powerful, the images grown BIG. They’re fascinating, these poems.

The first half of “Circle of Salt – November 11″–

If the gray bone of the beach did not tease the sea. If salt did not form crystals. If a body was not made of water. If it had not left behind traces of itself, a white web through the house. If a storm. If a staircase. If plants could twist their feet between the cracks in my sidewalk. If the wave had not salted the earth. If water contained only itself.

A Long Poem I Love: Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey

16 May

1. Daniel Bailey’s long poem “Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf,” from his new book of the same title, is this dude at his finest, thirteen pages of his stare snapped on those Big Things, religion and existence, belief and human relations, and in true Bailey form, he has created this hunk of confession and feeling, one long blip that doesn’t worry about rests (won’t find any periods here), or where it moves, only that it is moving and never stopping until he’s expended all his self can muster.

2. The stepping stone into this poem has God’s name on it, that’s where he’s going, he’s stepping up, reaching up, jumping up. He says it: “I am fighting god again.”

3. Reminds me of that Modest Mouse song, from that scrappy lovely disc The Lonesome Crowded West, about “Cowboy Dan” (this Dan a little meaner, a little greedier perhaps than our friend Mr. Bailey, but definitely the running towards the fight with God similarity is evident here): “Goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky and yells ‘God if I have to die, you will have to die.”

4. But what’s really incredible about this poem is the emotion and how it explodes out uncontrollably and scurries around but it never feels like Bailey is giving us too much to handle at once or that its for any purpose besides expelling his true innards:  “I have about a thousand emotions/and love is the spine of them all.”

5. Take this huge chunk, the second half of page one, where Bailey gets ramped up, where he challenges himself and us to rethink what we see as ourselves and possibilities and the earth and good things, a something he whittles away at for the whole twelve pages:

Jesus God,

let us flood the earth with laughter tonight

let there be more juice about the earth tonight

let tonight be the earth’s rebirthday and let it be born

as something new and let it not remember its old life

let it be a fly

once when I was born I looked at the earth like a fly

at the bottom of the ski-lift of ceaseless miracles

when I am young and getting younger I could be

a maggot that loves the entire earth, that can only love

and look at the earth with its love and say “I love you”

in a small fly voice

tourists of the future, where are you

we are breaking bread over the volcano

do you sleep through the world’s disasters?

uh huh, I sleep through the good things too

6. And he goes from there, ruminations of what it means to exist and belief and not belief and die. Battles with Jesus, this Giant Space Wolf, a “you” that seems to change but hold a cup with some valuable juice to quench what. And the best way I can describe it is attacking, bursting, busting, these extreme words basically meaning “to leak” but where at the end it is major huff and puff tired. What I’m saying is, this poem shreds itself, its man, until exhaustion in its many forms.

7. What is it about graduating college, or even just being in college, that makes young adults tackle their beliefs majorly, shouting into the sky, walking around for hours looking/thinking/turning their hands over, crying why? At least a dozen of my friends went through some spiritual switch battling their Christianity and plopping into some sort of Agnosticism/Atheism during college and I see their stories in this long poem, see their inner spirits slapping for a heavenly one:

mine eyes have seen the glory, as they say

and it always rides away in the form of some disappointed child

Or

 on earth, before all of this, I remember staying up late

walking to the bathroom, brushing my teeth

washing a line of ants down the basin of the sink

and then going to sleep and not thinking about it

I feel like a vulture who does not wait for death to prepare his meal

8. This poem is a collection of those moments of untrapping oneself from the snare of blind faith, unpacking the feelings and actions and thoughts of those days, dictating the what ahead.

9.  Sure, here here here is a complaint I hear about Bailey’s style, some of that unpacking can get messy and a little wild. But that’s fucking life, man. And poetically, there’s so much goodness here, too, where the emotion bends into this poem shape. Form is function highly highly here. It wanders because it is the wandering (also the wondering).

10.  Reading this poem reminded me of my favorite of Bailey’s Drunk Sonnets, Number 14, which begins “IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY/I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME” and ends “GOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE.” That poem as it moved between those two fences trying to know what the fuck is up (i.e. be happy) and dealing with this umbrella called God that is supposed to help meet that goal. And this long poem seems to be Bailey going after that same help in knowing what is going on, or at least figuring out what to do with the fact that it might not be possible/God might really be a dickwad.

11. I love the booming spirit of this poem, even when covered in worry and maybe fear, the nerve to accuse, assume, wonder: “don’t think of life in terms of right and wrong/because what is the second coming if not a terrorist attack.” Yeah, this is contradicting, where much of the rest of the poem seeks loving and human compassion (doing right?) to battle this big opponent. Point is, admirable is Bailey’s willingness to speak through all the ugliness of doubt, through the bitter feelings, and have that blasting glimmer of hope.

12. It’s not always about just fighting God though. The loving and the compassion, it’s a true concern here. Sad drops of that we’re-all-connected idea, like “for every baby that’s born/there are two people who want a baby/but will never have one” and “the best compliment you can give anyone is/‘I hope you don’t die today’/because you are with them/and that should not be taken away,” are the bits of that control I was talking about, where another weapon of human nature, that downward gaze to the other living heads around us, gets revealed and the poem shines a little brighter, maybe in hope, but most certainly in sincerity.

13. At the top of the last page, for all the pondering and wondering and talking, Bailey has seemed to come to terms with moving beyond higher thinking to this self-decision of going with the feeling, as how to dictate one’s own life:

you will die eventually anyway

you will

if I am unhappy

I am

if I am happy

then I am that too

I cannot possibly understand this thought that is life

which is why I am done thinking

it is all feeling from now on

the loving

the hating

the fearing

the crying, etc.

the loving

14.  Seen that happen so much, good or bad, people wanting to know why loving, pursuing happiness, being a feeling being is not enough. And as Bailey makes clear earlier in the poem, that way you’ll die to, like all other ways of thinking/being, but you’ve moved (beyond?) and at least you’ve been this flailing ball of realness when you’ve reached the other end of life (heaven, hell, nothing, giant space wolf), in life or in long poem.

*

Buy this book from Mammoth Editions. It’s good, really good, big bold and booming.

I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone by Thomas Patrick Levy

9 May

I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone
by Thomas Patrick Levy
Yes Yes Books, Poetry
100pgs, $16 ($6 for web book)

I’ve been having a hard time talking about books lately. The words just aren’t coming. I’m not sure why. I have so many words. There are nearly infinite ways to string them together. Disregarding context and structure, the possibilities grow even more uncountable.

I first started this review discussing how I’ve changed in the past 5 years since graduating from the writing program at Ball State. I talked about how I would’ve hated this book then. Then, I liked primarily realist work, no tricks, give me subtext or give me death. I devoured Carver, Hempel, Sandburg, Wright. I strayed on occasion. I loved the less playful Brautigan, adored cummings.

I would’ve hated Levy’s I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone then.

Maybe that’s too strong. I wouldn’t have hated it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it but maybe for some of the more readily available beauty in lines like:

Sometimes there is too much light and the leaves are crushed across our linoleum floor. I fold your dough into itself on the counter. I whisper I AM GOING TO TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS. Your eyes watch the strays chase children across our lawn. Your eyes know what it means to sleep through the smallest hurts.

Or:

Sometimes I touch your face with the moisture of my tongue, I press my fingers into your hair while I do this. You are not a desert.

But, I would’ve read Levy’s recent discussion of “negative capability” in a recent interview at Monkey Bicycle as attempting to justify nonsense. I would’ve thought about “The Wasteland” by Eliot, how I learned in school that it was meant to be intentionally obtuse, how I agreed with Stein that while Eliot had written some of the most beautiful lines in the history of the English language, he had written few if any of the greatest poems.

At lines like:

In your eyes of terrycloth I cannot pretend I don’t exist. I try to come apart again, a bathtub or windowpane. I concentrate on you as if I were stepping on a hill of sand. I touch you again, my tongue of branches, my touch of cracking leaves.

Or:

When my heart is the wind the sweet kernel corn is born into me like a splintered two by four. You can’t tell how I bleed each sack of skin into a paper flower. You can’t see my heart which frays like sun-burnt cloth.

I would’ve recoiled, likely. I might’ve read them out loud; I might’ve enjoyed their sounds and the sharp freshness of their images, but ultimately, I would’ve said, “I am tired of these words not communicating anything.”

I know now, words put down with intention always mean something, or mean to mean something. There is still plenty of writing out there like this that I don’t care to “get,” that doesn’t communicate with me. It’s a mystery of chemistry, maybe. But with a title like I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone, I am already invested in this book. I often feel so unimaginably lonely.

So, when Levy, before I even break the cover says, “That’s okay. I don’t mind. Here, I wrote this for you. I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to show you something new,” I want to try harder. I want to invest myself in what Levy wants to show me, even if I at first don’t quite understand it beyond words beautifully strung together. I know that now.

Available from:
YesYes Books | Powell’s | Amazon

“Ghosts Keep Us Moving, Stella Said, Think About a Field At Night, How You’re Always” by Christian Anton Gerard

5 May

Camping last weekend was the first time I’d ever seen a Chinese lantern.  Men whose vehicles I’d earlier half-jokingly called “douche-SUVs dragging douche-boats” invited us – me, Ashley, Tyler, and Chris – to watch them launch it.  Someone drove by and joked about how the lantern was a large condom.  When it finally hovered from the men’s hands we watched for as long as possible, going back to our own earthbound fires while the one we celebrated burned itself out in the dark.

After we came back Sunday, Ashley posted on Facebook about the trip and our friend Joel commented asking what it’s like to go camping with writers.  We’d already murmured about it around the fire, how glowing we’d felt away from words.

*   *   *

April was National Poetry Month and of poems I saw posted online in commemoration, this one The Rumpus showcased on April 8 was my favorite, called “Ghosts Keep Us Moving, Stella Said, Think About a Field at Night, How You’re Always.”  From the title I was gone, hopeless; this wants you where it is, breathing its air from the first moment.  Here’s a part:


I love this because it doesn’t feel like reading so much as ingesting straight experience.  That this is how I most simply/honestly know how talk about why this moves me feels weird because 1) I really value and enjoy words in and of themselves, it’s not like I always want to forget they’re there 2) I make an assumption with that statement/sentiment that reading itself can’t be unfiltered experience, which I don’t actually believe, and 3) a poem getting me past its words seems benevolently deceitful.  It couldn’t get me past its words were it not for the quality of and attention paid to its words.

But sometimes I do want to forget they’re there.

*   *  *

Ashley and I perch on beached ends of dead trees criss-crossing the lake.  We trade “I remembers,” digging exes, family fall-outs, direct quotes from people who love(d) us from shallow graves ‘til we go quiet.  When we don’t talk it still feels like a confession, some knotty, delicate mess presented in absolute safety.

*   *   *
Tyler and I watch open-mouthed as grass shimmers, tree tops sway in and out of shapes like animal faces in the wind.  We laugh about being post-poetry, all I mean, who even needs words anymore.

*   *   *

Near the fire Chris tells me something I know, something about a pretty intense time in my recent past.  Something unsurprising, understandable, sad.  For a little while I thought that time was buried but it keeps coming back in my writing and conversations, refusing to rot.

That it haunts my thoughts is good, I’m learning.  It keeps them hurrying away from complacency.

Here is the end of “Ghosts Keep Us Moving…” which grabs me for a couple reasons:


What we need is often what we’ve tried to bury and will eventually unearth itself with vengeance.  How gorgeously  “Ghosts Keep Us Moving…” sings that here.  Like the title says, what stalks us keeps us living and pushing to be more alive.  That these phantoms exist in dirt doesn’t just make me think “buried” but also “tangible;” they wait in fields at night, flower-scattered woods, the material everything where living happens.

I couldn’t ever be permanently tired of words – I love them, how I lead my measly ghosts by the wrists at all is through them – but having the chance to forget or run out of or lay them aside is sometimes when I appreciate them most.  Like I said earlier, part of what I enjoy about this poem is how it feels more experiential than verbal.  There is graciousness to a medium that lets you forget its existence for the sake of worthy experience.

Here’s the whole poem at The Rumpus. 

Vouched Visitors: “Poem” by Rachel Zucker

4 May

Visiting us this month at Vouched is Adam Robinson, editor of Publishing Genius Press and author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem.

* * *

Here’s the poem I think I’ve read more than any other poem on the Internet. It’s by Rachel Zucker, and it’s called, “Poem” and it was in her book Museum of Accidents which came out from Wave in 2009. Read it, it only takes a breezy 3 minutes.

I don’t love it because it features a “who’s who” cast of cool poets, though that works nicely, or even for Matt Rohrer’s smart advice — “the next time you feel yourself going dark / in a poem, just don’t, and see what happens.” I have a predilection against poems that reference “poetry, writing of” because poems are for everybody, not just poets. But of course “Poem” is about what is happiness, and about we ain’t got it, and it does it with a light touch. Also it’s about motherhood — something I care for not a whit — I’m embarrassed by it! — but I feel like the poem is exceptionally well dressed and looking at me. The perfectly pitched, conversational tone! The turn at the end! The jokes! My favorite line is when she’s in Deborah Landau’s office — “and Deborah said, “Mark, I’ve got / Rachel Zucker here, she’s happy, // I’ll have to call you back.”

Even the sorrowful ending acknowledges more happiness than it should.

I don’t think I like the idea that we shouldn’t acknowledge how miserable life can be just because we are US Americans, and this poem doesn’t, but it is still aware of the problem of complaining.

And last night I was at an open mic reading that went on for 45 minutes. I loved it. Why are they so bad? The worse the poem — the more it drifts toward the dark — the more I like it. But I don’t really like it. I’m not moved by it — I just think, right on, way to go, no one gets me either. But I also wonder, like, how hard can it be to write a good, resonant, dark poem? Zucker’s “Poem” (such a relevant title) makes it seem not only easy, but like there is no other way to do it.

These 2 Pomes by Thomas Patrick Levy. Srsly.

3 May

At Metazen. Srsly. What to say? I’ve nothing to say. Just read them. You need to. This is part of one of them. Go.

THE LIGHT SOMETIMES CUTS

And we maintain these plans like a bush of herbs. We wait and wait and then destroy them with too much water. We wait too long of course. We wait like birds who do not wait for us to wake in the morning. You know how the light sometimes cuts us. You know how sometimes the light is not a knife but a bandage, how the moment my eyes are open I am checking my email. And then despite our plans we never cross the mountains.

Go now to Metazen.

Vouched Visitors: 100 Kisses, 100 More

2 May

Visiting us this month at Vouched is Adam Robinson, editor of Publishing Genius Press and author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem.

* * *

The Formal Field of Kissing
by Bernadette Mayer
Monk Books
30 pages | $10

In Dorothea Lasky’s introduction to The Formal Field of Kissing by Bernadette Mayer, republished last year by Monk Books from NY, she writes, “When the editors asked me to [write this introduction], I could not believe my luck.” And that’s how I felt when Christopher asked me to be the first Vouched Visitor.

The Formal Field of Kissing is amazing, by the way, and you’d be doing yourself a favor to buy a copy. At $10, it’s a steal, in spite of the misleadingly short page length (30 pages, some of which have several pieces on them). This book is my first time reading Bernadette Mayer, who is so fresh, where’ve I been, and it’s a nice way to revisit Catullus and Horace, whom the book translates and takes as its starting point.

You won’t find a what-the-fucker more than Catullus #42 — which you can hear Mayer read at Penn Sound (listen). (In the beginning of this reading she says you’ll probably never hear a real translation of that poem. A professor at Middlebury explores why in this old-Internet essay.)

Isn’t it surprising, when the ancients turn out to be profane and funny? Here’s a translation of Horace, from the Greek:

You sing and play the lyre and I’m on fire
I want to strum the whole fucking universe
You know I want to loosen your strings

When he says “I want to loosen your strings,” I feel like he’s saying “I want to get into your pants” as much as he’s referring to the strings of the lyre. Right? Or am I crazy?

One of my favorite bands is Old Songs (feat. Chris Mason, author of Hum Who Hiccup). They translate ancient Greek poets like Sappho and put the songs to music. Here is Sappho “104a”. It’s so moody! But other Old Songs songs have lines like “You didn’t give me no coat,” and “The girls were driving me from the door with sticks.” When savvy poets are translating the ancients, I’m never sure how much of the punky parlance exists in the original and how much the translator instills, trying to make it familiar to our jagged, modern ears. I’m sure someone could tell me. Why don’t you just tell me, Anne Carson?

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