If I remember right, I saw Scott McClanahan give this performance after Abby Koski got me wasted on rum and Cokes then introduced me to Matt Siegel, and I had no idea what to do. Or where anyone was.
I didn’t think, “Hey, where are all the people I know” until after.
You can tell I’m happiest not when I smile but slapped into dumb stunned awe like I was watching Scott bark his generations, a latter-day prophet too made of thunder and dirt-real truth for any church, so boiling over with harsh and angelic vision, soothing my frayed thoughts while setting the room ablaze.
I’m sorry, but I’m just not a cheerleader; I’m a lower-tier saint.
This was probably my best moment in the Beauty Bar at AWP 2012, followed closely by drunk hugs from Brian Oliu and laughs with a few others but roundly defeating some other interactions, Hellos I didn’t want to say, Nice to Meet Yous that felt everything but. Again, some unraveling. Basic kindness can appear to us as an unblemished lamb, so we take up our knives.
* * *
There is a place I go to read and write when I need to recalibrate and push off the stupid shimmery idea of being a writer or an indie lit writer so I can just do the thing without all the shit. Two people know where that is. Both of their names start with A.
I took Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby there during the ugliest time of year, when winter is worn out and spring is all, “Whatever, be there in a sec,” when I’m sick of wearing scarves.
I could barely hold a fork, knocked slack-jawed by Baby’s rapacious beauty. I found myself mouthing the last story, “Zachary, Zahir, Zedekiah,” a real electric rush that swells like Explosions in the Sky, incanting
And then every morning, some new and constant sun, born upon the horizon.
and almost crying in my booth. I paid, left, and stared at the iron atmosphere too much for safety as I drove.
* * *
The cover of Nick Sturm’s chapbook, “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!” with its birthday party horses is the perfect graphic representation of a genuine smile, which seems like the kind of person Nick is (Nick Sturm: A Genuine Smile) and the requisite spirit embodied in that joyous little book.
I remember for a while keeping it in the passenger’s side interior door pocket to show to anyone I gave a ride. It seems like there are about three people at any given time who are riding in my car regularly, so my evangelism wasn’t far-flung but lacked no enthusiasm. I generally showed my passengers the poem that ends
…My spirit animal is a bear
with a confetti cannon strapped to its back
The point is to surprise you & then maul you
into pieces of joy
and thank goodness, no one ever said they didn’t understand why.
* * *
For some reason I read Matt Hart’s Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless a lot while giving plasma this spring, squeezing myself through a needle with one hand and holding the book with another. Listening to Jimmy Eat World, Lovedrug, The Smashing Pumpkins, that helped too, to distract from the displaced queasiness that got better little by little but never went entirely away.
It makes sense that his poems helped the same way; the direct mention of Sunny Day Real Estate aside, the upfront guitar fuzz and gorgeous thrash of them calmed and exhilarated. Every appointment I had a half hour to imagine where else I could be besides Muncie in February, March, April, still slushed and gray. It felt holy, an internal push toward whatever better places there were to be.
* * *
Brian Oliu’s Level End is the first book I’ve ever delayed reading to intentionally take time to absorb its packaging. I couldn’t stop just looking at the thing, turning it over and getting happier with every detail from a childhood and adolescence spent on four generations of Nintendo consoles, starting with the NES, a game for which the book’s design was modeled after.
When I finally did get to reading the thing the effect was much the same, a combined joy and relief that someone understood so well the real emotional tug 8-bit worlds have on us whose first big adventures included finding the Master Sword and discovering gold-littered shortcuts in the clouds above danger. And rendered it so truly in its surreal beauty and sincerity; all nerd jokes aside, sitting in front of a pixel-laden TV screen with my big brother, defeating all number of monsters and villains, is one of the most loaded and precious memories I have.
* * *
I remember texting
I AM THE OCEAN, I AM THE BROKEN ATMOSPHERE BEING HEALED
to Chris Newgent as soon as I read it, and immediately claimed it in a tiny yet steady fashion for my own near future: a beach, a flock of friends, an ocean, a slew of present moments far from Indiana. I read the rest of Thomas Patrick Levy’s I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone with a similar hyper-focused sprint, or as a binge, on the couch in my beige and tan apartment and sunk into myself with relief, consuming its color and breathlessness.
* * *
There’s a modest handful of books that wind themselves around the edge of my thoughts almost constantly. I think this is in part a residual effect of being an expatriate of Christianity that took the idea of being in constant prayer deeply to heart: once the verses about no hope for men outside of Yahweh and his son were discarded from whatever walled garden in me they occupied, there was left a decade’s worth of empty earth.
Ben Kopel’s VICTORY is one of those few books that immediately took root in me. Fragments of it run through my head throughout the day, quiet meditations on how to stay vital and honest and brave. This book was the first thing I wrote about for Vouched and it remains one of my favorite, most dearly loved books of poetry or anything else. When I read it I feel like the first time I realized that wet pavement under streetlight is beautiful. I feel fifteen, riding with my brother in his Explorer through cornfields at night, summer, hands out the windows, brushing fingertips with fireflies.
I could not tell you what my favorite poem is from the book, but there is one part from the poem “Because We Must” that heartbeats through my thoughts almost daily:
A prayer, now
& at the hour of our death—
Fill me with yr light inside this car.
Fill me with yr light.
* * *
Yesterday, Christmas, after my family ate a lot of things then opened a lot of things and then said even more things, I continued reading Sal Pane’s novel Last Call in the City of Bridges. I get embarrassed with how often the book describes my own tendencies and identity: self-doubt alongside a sense of superiority, a feeling of specialness bred in part by constant consumption of heroic narratives growing up, strong attachment to video games and college memories, yet another member of a generation that was told by parents and teachers to get good grades or else we’d have to work at McDonald’s then was chastised by parents and teachers for thinking we were too good to work at McDonald’s. The accuracy is painful.
I’m only halfway through so I can give you no conclusions, other than to state that I’m curious to see what direction a story about the directionless will take, and that reading will take me into 2013, heading in one of many possible directions.
Look how awesome he is when he reads out loud, some new stuff and some of his portion of 
.
