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Visitors: Sheila Heti — How Should a Person Be?

31 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.

* * *

How Should a Person Be
by Sheila Heti
Fiction, 320pgs
Henry Holt and Co.
$25 (hardback)

This is the last day of May, which means it’s the last day of my Visitorship here, something I’ve enjoyed even if I haven’t posted in the last couple weeks like I meant to. But the last day of May means tomorrow is the first day of June, which is the month that brings us Sheila Heti’s amazing, vivid and vital novel How Should A Person Be? It comes out on the 19th, and you’ll want to bring a sleeping bag and camp outside the bookstore for this one.

The thing that is so remarkable about it, I think (as if there is just one thing), is its structure. The chapters don’t necessarily follow each other in a linear way. It’s like an umbrella — straight until you open it, then you see how all the parts were touching all the other parts all along. The novel, which is both fiction and non-fiction, and dubbed by the publisher “a novel from life,” really revolves around the titular question. It addresses it not just through the engaging story, but with deliberately philosophical and critical insights. For instance:

… the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are: as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type. One only has to travel on a subway during rush hour and pull into a station and see all the people waiting to get on and off to be struck by how many of us there actually are in the world.

It takes a writer of extraordinary abilities to comprise a novel from nuggets like that. What’s more, there’s a sort of fatalism in that quote, I guess, but as a whole the book doesn’t come across as hopeless. Maybe the gist of it could be summed up by cutting “how” from the title — a person should be. We are given that should. It’s remarkably hopeful, the distinction between ”a person is” and “a person should be.”

My copy of the book is scarred with underlinings and the margins are blackened with stars — and I make it a point NOT to write in books. I practically read the 300 pager in one sitting. The unique way the novel works makes it difficult to contextualize things, or I would type out a few more of my favorite passages. Instead I’ll just offer my strongest recommendation that you take Amazon up on their discount. It’s currently $16.50 for the hardcover.

Single-Sentence Review: Letters From Robots by Diana Salier

28 May

Letters From Robots
by Diana Salier
Night Bomb Press, 2012
$12

Good gracious we grow up and we get jobs and we try to be Adult, but that churn-churn yaps at our guts where we’d rather ride our bikes around and drink and talk loudly and text message lovely people, which is the reminder that the poems in Diana Salier’s first book Letter From Robots issue, that it is okay to stumble in some rowdiness, that it is good to be wacky with the lights on.

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.

SSR: Steal Me For Your Stories by Robb Todd

23 May

Steal Me For Your Stories
Robb Todd
Tiny Hardcore Press, 160 pgs., $11

Robb Todd wants us to remember that we need to be comfortable in our loneliness, that we need to remember every day is made of 1,440 moments and we never know which ones will be the loveliest, yes, Robb Todd wants us to remember these things and while he may not stick with you immediately, you will find yourself wanting to keep returning to his pieces to remember to discover them again.

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

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?

Three Print Magazines I Read Recently And Said WOW

1 May

Artifice 4

First, let’s celebrate the fact that Artifice lives and will continue to do so. (And yeah yeah, a little sad bummer tear for it going electronic, for the bye-bye to that slick little print format…okay, that’s enough, MORE GOODNESS TO COME FROM THEM.)

This issue does what Artifice set out to do: publish work that is aware (duh) of its own artifice. And I declare that it does it better than any of the previous (yes, still stellar) issues, because this stack of good words is also the most accessible (for me), the most purely collar-grabbing bunch so far (admittedly what I look for most in a mag is a bunch of stories fist-fighting and making out for my emotions and attention). A little selfishly perhaps, I was constantly thrilled to find a piece that made its point with the artifice and then leapt out at me and never let go.

Take this beginning to “& What Shoulder, & What Art” by Marc McKee:

Sing la la la. Sing huzzah,

huzzah, motherfucker:

The weather’s clotted with events

increasingly, the piano you carry

has a piano factory on top of it

and on top of that the city

futzing out in all directions

like a busted hydrant.

PANK 6

And how about this beauty! PANK’s print issues continue to be my favorite hunk to lug around, their gorgeous design, their assemblage of “the brightest and most promising writers for the most adventurous readers,” their fulfillment of the promise to provide “access to emerging and experimental poetry and prose,” as their mission statement says. And that’s another cooool thing about a magazine, this magazine at the tip-top: doing what they say. Lots promise to provide the best and to give voice to the up-and-comers and to do it different (and the best!) and whatever; PANK has never let me down with that promise. And like Artifice, this might be my favorite of the four issues I’ve read. You’ve got a wild sonnet by Sherman Alexie; you’ve got stories from Vouchers Christopher Newgent and Ashley C. Ford; you’ve got some beautiful poems from shining people like Russ Woods and M.G. Martin; you’ve got thumping stories from Ashley Farmer and Lindsay Hunter; you’ve got so much more people why haven’t you ordered it!?

Check out this beginning to Lindsay Hunter’s story “Candles” (or maybe it’s CANDLES):

I AM IN THE CANDLE SHOPPE I CAN’T HELP IT

THE NEW AUTUMN LINE IS ORANGE NUTMEG AND IT IS AS CLOSE TO BARF AS THE BOTTOM OF A DIP CUP

I DIPPED ONCE RIDING IN THE CAB OF THE TRUCK OF MY ONE TRUE LOVE, HE WAS DRIVING HE WAS GETTING A HAND JOB FROM A PUERTO RICAN PUTA WE WERE GOING ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES AN HOUR NOT EVEN ENOUGH FOR THE WIND TO LIFT MY HAIR IN A POWERFUL FUCK YOU WAY

Salt Hill 28

Two questions: How’d it take me 28 issues to get a hold of one of these beauties? Are they all this lovely or what?

I love how this magazine surprises me! I’m not always into literary surprises, but these are neat enough, subtle enough, for real enough, that I am joyed. I turn the cover and am hello-ed by strange choir-boy faces singing but maybe shouting in pencil drawings. Everywhere poems and stories that stretch that cord between thinking and feeling,  interviews that REALLY say something, images that startle me into a “hmmmmm.” I read through and the end is a Ben Mirov poem “Destruction Manual” aligned horizontally, destructing me, or maybe more appropriately the issue, out of this beauty of an artifact.

Here here here is the beginning to my favorite piece, “Because Thought Isn’t Prayer” by John Gallaher:

This is kind of a danceable tune. To turn ourselves

around and then think about it this other way. “I’m

unsure about it,” we can say, and kiss someone new

or kiss no one at all. Think about every dog

you’ve ever hand, or every cat you’ve ever had,

or every time you’ve ever played put-put golf. Is there

anyone left in America who hasn’t played put-put golf?

you can ask yourself. Are there no more reasons

to be thankful? you can say.

Single-Sentence Review: THIS IS WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST by Ben Hersey

26 Apr

The man flapping out his Whitman-inspired glow at a recent event

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST
by Ben Hersey
The Chuckwagon, 2008, $4 (postage included)

Ben Hersey came to Indiana for the last Vouched Presents Reading and read, no no silly, the right word is performed, or maybe exploded is an even better word, stomping around in a hockey jersey, doing some wild stuff with lettuce, chomping and sniffing and whatever, pulling this character, angry and afraid from Boston, unstable and shouting, from his body, and here in this book those words, those beautiful tragic scary scenes Hersey expelled from his body, are captured, quite remarkably, quite intact, as much as can be hoped, proving this shit can be shaking in person, but even on the page, man, his take on rattly emotion and fucked-up existence thrives.

An awesome excerpt at The Chuckwagon (where you can buy this wonderful thing for only four bucks!)

VICTORY by Ben Kopel

24 Apr

VICTORY by Ben Kopel
H_NGM_N BKS, January 2012
112 pages,  $14.95

I feel lucky that I came in contact with this book.  I hadn’t caught word of it ‘til Nate Pritts at H_NGM_N asked me to design promotional buttons for the thing.  He sent me three of them in the mail along with the book, which looks like it can cut you open.

One of the epigrams comes from Patti Smith:  I’ll give you one tip:  use your fists.  Here is a sizable chunk of the opening poem, “Gymnasium of the Sacred Heart,” which throws its fists like fight and celebration:

Two boys, wearing track jackets,
with shaved heads and smooth hands,
are breathing Pine-Sol out of
a plastic bag and breaking
into a car with coat hangers.
Sad, thin-skinned kids with flammable
names and feathers for lungs.
Who tape their regrets to the top of the Atari.
Who write out their girlfriends’ names in gasoline.
Who take a match to the front yard
before cutting a path through police tape
to get to a tall, cool, catholic school gym.
From the bleachers they stand as if to say
I sing for the canary gassed beyond belief
in the basement of the biology building.
I scream City of Love! City by the River!
Don’t disown your skinny fisted sons
locked inside the locker room.
They too are the father of you.
They too are made mostly of noise.

Reading Kopel’s book reminds me of listening to early U2 for the first time at 14, falling hard for how they were honest and wounded yet on fire, totally present and alive.  Bono’s mother died when he was 14, and his lyrics often wrestle with his growing up as a boy desperate to fill her absence.  VICTORY possesses that same fierce youthfulness, an anthem for beautiful and ragged sons who grow up keying names into car doors, kissing in parking lots, and hungering for whatever genuine loves can fill the absences they carry.

The only reason I didn’t finish the thing in one sitting was having to work and I’m going back through, being blown away again by these poems.  If you’re  not convinced, here’s another fireball called “Because We Must:”

The kids from the federal
tanning booths have burned
down the Dairy Queen again.

Everyone died warm
& no one was alone.

. .

. .

We had a good time.  I remember ice cream.
I remember legs.  I remember gym shorts.

. .

. .

A prayer, now
& at the hour of our death –
Fill me with yr light inside this car.
Fill me with yr light.

Available from:
H_NGM_N BKS | Powell’s | Amazon

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