Powerhouse Books hostedLIT ‘s Issue 18 launch party in Dumbo, Brooklyn last night. Readers included Traci O Connor, Mike Young,Nate Pritts and Eduardo Jiménez Mayo reading his translation of Rafael Pérez Gay. Pritts read six poems:
1. Demonstrated Melancholy
2. Locomotive in Autumn
3. The Existing Situation As It Presently Exists
4. American Water
5. No Hidden Portals
6. Big Bright Sun
Check out our exclusive video coverage by DJ Dolack:
The night before, ACA Galleries and Boog City hosted a celebration for Eleven Eleven Journal, featuring readings by J. Mae Barizo, Suzanne Gardinier, Steven Karl and Amy King. King read four poems:
1. Read Me Like Braille
2. That I Will Listen to Until
3. Imperfect Debt
4. Radio Sleep
Over the weekend, in the Brooklyn good-hood known as Bushwick, a faction of literary arts organizations set aside their political and clothing-choice differences to bring together a cavalcade of readings, performances, video screenings and beer drinking. The festival known as Popsickle, organized by Niina Pollari and Douglas Piccinnini, took place on Saturday the 24th and Sunday the 25th. Each day began in the post-brunch afternoon, and carried on until the early evening.
Ben Fama, another of the many festival organizers, provided fair warning: “There will be a ton of limited edition chapbooks to purchase, beer for sale, and generally a casual atmosphere. It is supposed to be hot as shit and people should dress accordingly.”
The hardly bearable heat was a small price to pay to hear the lot of selected young talent share lexis at the historic Bushwick Market Hotel, an otherwise closed venue on Broadway at Myrtle under the elevated portion of the J-train. In the seventies, the Market Hotel operated as a password/invite-only Dominican speakeasy that has now morphed into, as one Popsickle audience member commented, “an awfully anarchish place” where party organizers can hold festivals like Popsickle or D.I.Y. music shows. In fact, there is a small stage in the farthest corner of the main room loaded with music instruments. Two ghosts box in a mural on the adjacent wall. It’s a dark place with black walls, black floor, minimal plumbing, a perpetual musty scent and the predictable cockroach in the scuffed bathroom. But it’s ideal for these kinds of events — or almost ideal, when one considers the reach-out-and-touch-it train that droned by the window every ten minutes or so.
Utterly particular at Popsickle was that all the readers were, by and large, mainstays in the younger Brooklyn/NYC literary scene, and were hosted by a consortium of great Brooklyn reading series curators and magazine-upstarts: Body Actualized Control, the Bushwick Reading Series, Crowd, Poetry Time, the Stain of Poetry, and Supermachine.
The performances ranged from regular poems to video poems to sex essays and on-the-spot storytelling.
–Ken L. Walker
Day 2
The second day of Popsickle began with readings by Evan Burton, Carter Edwards and Paige Taggart. Taggart (Won’t Be a Girl) used the festival to debut all new poems; she was followed by Fama (Aquarius Rising), Natalie Lyalin (Pink and Hot Pink Habitat), Emily Pettit (How) and James Copeland (A Constructing Egg), who read one poem each in succession to promote their collective chapbooks, OMG WTF and Whole Milk.
A raffle followed, and included book prizes from Ugly Duckling Presse, Four Way Books, Supermachine, Birds of Lace and Death Panel. Dan Magers picked up where the poetry left off by reading primarily from his forthcoming H_ngm_n chapbook, White-Collar Worker: I am a Destiny. Magers was followed by Leigh Stein, whose poem showed a mix of sincerity and pop-culture cynicism. Joshua Mehigan closed out the weekend by reading new poems as well as a few from his book 2004 Hollis Summers Prize-winning book, The Optimist.
Popsickle was well-attended, and though some not-so-discreetly complained about the heat, it was clear that everyone was willing to sweat a little for the love of poetry. This was was succinctly summed up by Pollari, who said, “that’s how we roll.”
by Edward Sanders
Coffee House Press 2009 Reviewed by Mike McDonough
“O beautiful for an end to war”
If anyone doubts the impact Charles Olson had, look no further than the prolific and varied career of Ed Sanders, one of the chief chroniclers of his generation, and in a fair way to be the Carl Sandburg of our era. While editing Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts out of the Peace Eye Book Store, the legendary Lower East Side gathering place for poets and radicals, Sanders fomented the mimeograph revolution, America’s answer to the Samizdat. Founding The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg in 1965, he virtually invented folk rock. Today, he creates unique musical instruments such as the electric necktie and the pulse lyre. He also writes a 9-volume populist history of America in poetry, invigorating both history and poetry with a sense of performance, music and myth.
Here’s an introduction to the Fugs for their foreign tour in 1968, complete with what one imagines to be hilarious Danish subtitles attempting to translate Ed’s impromptu comic book psychosexual romp introducing his concept of goofitude:
It is also worthing checking out The Fugs official site, where Ed’s goofy outrageousness is toned down into a politically engaged, historic camaraderie. Sanders’s work is so congenial by now that it takes historical perspective to remember how subversive and necessary his elm fuck poem was:
fuck till the come drift
down through the bark furrows
fuck thru the warm afternoon
sperm steams in the sun
such care and kindness
—as when a rabbit nose snoozles a carrot—
but give it thrill jabs,
give it to her
a tree-twat is as good as
a buttock
& the elm branch is the dryad’s breast
So joyously in your face. What might have once seemed gratuitous and shocking now seems almost environmentally sincere, if a bit goofy.
Knowing what I do about Sanders’s place in history, I wanted to get a little more excited about the 2 volume career-spanning retrospective put out so professionally by Coffee House Press. Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century is his collected poems from 1961-1985, and Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War covers a similar span of years from 1986-2009. In addition to including some of his song lyrics for The Fugs, Sanders taps into the tradition of the illuminated manuscript, freely incorporating his own glyphs and illustrations. Poems such as “Sun Arms” reproduce the original Courier typeface, and the glyphs surround the poem like a pair of arms. Glyphs like “The Celestial Golf Game” arrange hieroglyphs that indeed look like a golf course mapped from space, or chart “Paths Through the Data-Clusters in the Search for Brilliant Verse.” The quest here is to unify an entire body of work in various media by squeezing it all into print.
Problems arise with the inevitable leveling of print, and the use of a standard typeface and page size. Even though Ed’s handwritten glyphs and illustrations are beautifully reproduced, the print and the drawings don’t mingle as promiscuously as you’d expect, sometimes feeling more like illustration than a Blakean marriage of poem and art. A hip primer is still a primer. A picture of the pulse lyre seems only to point out the lack of actual sound. Life defies our attempts to trap it within the covers of a book. Sanders’s work should be distributed on broadsides and in stapled mimeographed editions; it should be written on the inside of toilet paper rolls and cigarette packs and smuggled out of jail in your shoes, as was his first major effort, “Poem from Jail,” after his arrest for trying to swim aboard a Polaris nuclear submarine.
Sanders keeps you reading with fond recollections of Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Most of this reminiscence doesn’t come across as self-indulgent, partly because the incipient nostalgia is tamed by Ed’s sense of gratitude at the community they created, and his sense that the work of the beats is still ongoing, which shows up clearly in “A Visit to Jack’s Memorial Park,” a poem also interrupted by a somewhat gratuitous photo of the skateboarding kids of today:
“Life spills out”, as Olson says
and so it does as the boys skrunk happily
among your tall shiny stones, o Jack Kerouac
where I catch in a blaze your sense of
being part of eternity
staring at your writings carved in the shiny
I am feeling the awe of the Loner commingling
so Newly
amidst all the conservatism
O Jack phantom of the Lonely Dream
Daimon of the skrunks!
The experience of writing The Family, a book about the Charles Manson cult killings that once ranked a close second to In Cold Blood in the previously nonexistent “True Crime” genre, led to Sanders’s practice of investigative poetry, perhaps the true fruit of Olson’s anguished efforts to be both a poet and a historian. For both Olson and Sanders, polis is eyes, and every citizen must investigate for themselves: “know the new facts early! And do not back away one micro unit because some CIA weirdomorph whose control agents never ended WWII invades your life with a mouthful of curdled exudate.”
Sanders is more interested in the cosmic story than the ideology: we easily forgive the occasional gratuitous asides, because his storytelling ability is in no way limited to personal anecdotes or political sloganeering. Through scholarly backtracking he traces his rebellious spirits to Sappho and the Egyptian slaves forced to build the tombs of the Pharaohs. He mingles ancient tales with stories adapted from Anton Chekov. He takes us easily from ancient Egypt to the depths of outer space.
But unlike his mentor, you don’t get a sense of mythic massiveness as much as a sense of event, of reportage. The mythic element is much lighter, and more digestible. Sanders’s work dreams big, but does not totter under its own weight. One senses immediately that Sanders is a happier man. The older I get, the more I feel that should count for something.
Sanders is a sincere idealist, reminding us as Emerson had it in his essay “Politics” that:
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that they are all imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
Whatever your politics, this is a much needed message of hope. One need to look no further than “Further Verses for ‘America the Beautiful.’”
O beautiful for an end to war
An end to class and strife
Bring Freedom Rides where no one hides
The truth in every life!
America! America
Come sing your song of grace
For every hue beneath the blue
And every creed and race!
When I first visited New York City in 2007 (six months before I moved here), a Kentuckian friend told me to make sure and visit “Poets House on Spring Street.” I did. And I was automatically seduced by the prowess with which New York keeps poetry animate and fairly healthy; a city filled daily with readings, performances, walks and artsy opines.
I write “New York” and mean “Poets House” in the same vein that someone might say The Roots keep hip-hop respectable or the BBC retains all that is decent about radio news broadcasts. I was, in fact, so seduced, that like many poet-transfers coming through town with a moving truck full of books and a gentrifying-flag tied to the antenna, I interned at Poets House while it was in transition from the old Spring Street location to its new waterfront Battery Park biosphere with a lovely window-filled row of Hudson horizon-views.
While the Poets House library of over 50,000 volumes of poetry continues to be its faithful vitality, it is its annual showcase that acts as icing on the cake.
Suzanne Wise, publicity and marketing director for Poets House, says that the showcase is: “a display of nearly all the poetry books published in the U.S. in the last year, a wonderfully diverse and inclusive exhibition where micro-presses receive the same care and attention as major publishers. The nearly 2,200 titles gathered include spoken word CDs, translations, anthologies, poetry-related prose (essay collections, memoirs, biographies, scholarly works and more), chapbooks and poetry baseball cards.”
One easy aspect to focus on is the number of books the showcase displays. 2,200 operates at an average of six poetry-related published documents per day released to the reading public.
Earlier, this month, The New York Times reported that the first Poets House Annual Showcase, held eighteen years ago, exhibited just over 800 titles. This year, viewers of the showcase will not only find English language books. There are more than 20 different languages present that I could see in my minimal observations (from Urdu to Spanish to Cantonese), and major American presses are actually the minority. The books face forward so that spectators can see the highlighting of specific cover designs, as comfortably, the breadth of what matters is the poetry inside. The past year represents highly intriguing works, like Tiresias: the Collected Poems of Leland Hickman, Guillevic’s Geometries, and mauve sea-orchids, a lovely, hard-to-find chaplet by Lela Zemborain (translated by Rosa Alcalá and Mónica de la Torre).
Aside from the simple display of forward-facing books, chaplets and CDs, the showcase also administers a handful of diverse readings during its July sojourn. The final reading of the month is coming up on July 27, celebrating auteurs featured in the new Alyson Books anthology, Persistent Voices: an Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS. This reading is admission-free. Showcase readings provide this advantage since, often, Poets House readings come with a door-cover of anywhere from $7.00 to $10.00.
Walk through the showcase and unearth its artifacts. Experience that last great reading. Not quite a flash of lightning, more like a heat wave, there is only one week left before the amazing stanza-shelf-deity that Poets House is goes back to normal, or at least its version of normal, which you can see here performed by Bill Murray, who reads to construction workers during the construction of the new Poets House:
The Forward Arts Foundation has released its list of finalists for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize, reports BBC. The list includes Seamus Heaney for Human Chain, Lachlan Mackinnon for Small Hours, Sinead Morrissey for Through the Square Window, Robin Robertson for The Wrecking Light, Fiona Sampson for Rough Music and Jo Shapcott for Of Mutability.
This year, the £10,000 award is being judged by Ruth Padel, Hugo Williams, Dreadlockalien, Alex Clark and Fiona Shaw.
by Samuel Amadon University of Iowa Press 2010 Reviewed by PJ Gallo
“each country has made these phrases for / us”
Samuel Amadon’s new book, Like a Sea, is like a sea in that, when you are floating out the middle of it, you have no idea where you are. It is also like a sea in that nothing but a sea is really like a sea. The book’s twisted intelligibility comes together over pieces of language that are not strictly supported by meaning or uninterrupted relay of information. It is easy to trip over the big, heavy things Amadon hides amid his poems’ scrambled logic. The poems obsess over the limits of language, moving from clarity into complicated washouts of prepositions, copulae and pronouns. They do plenty of philosophizing. “Each H,” a series of poems that provides a strong, philosophical skeleton for the book, is a premiere example of the book’s overarching mode. “Each H (IX),” for instance, begins with the simple first line, “That it could sound like him.” The speaker then folds the line under itself with, “That it could sound like him / sounding like he knew / what he sounded like.” By the final stanzas of the short poem, we are racing to keep up; it disintegrates into ambiguity:
we all sounded saying that
was it, but that was it
again, and then wasn’t this more
it anyway, or just it with more
people, more to say
that it could sound like people.
Because the speaker begins clearly, it is easy to imagine the rest of the poem as an intricate word puzzle. The “it” and “that” and “was” are ordered so they lose their original points of reference. The words become less specific, opening them wide for interpretation. The idea that these two, three, and four letter words might veil some earth-shattering revelation is itself a revelation. There are underlying forces—unidentifiable forces—that push all the components of language together into its primary use as a communicative tool. The poem implies that language can seem to make perfect sense without the burden of meaning.
This implication brings to mind a telling adage that Wallace Stevens, whose influence is made explicit through an epigraph, slipped into a short essay defending the artistry of one of Marianne Moore’s poems: “Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.” It is tough to know what Stevens meant by “aspect.” One suspects it refers to a kind of aura of connotative and denotative meaning that exists around very real, hard things. The ambiguousness of some of Amadon’s poetry fulfills this definition. But applied strictly to Amadon’s book, “aspect” might mean something like “component.” In the middle of “Cognitive Burr,” the effect is kaleidoscopic:
This is the scene for the less-
than-casual gardener. The gardener of import
is not the gardener of intrigue
which is why we have levels rewarding the non-
native English speaker works for a mapmaker
who strikes that those are not
the phrases I would use cultural to assume
each country has made these phrases for
us.
The effect is kaleidoscopic because the poem breaks the world into disconnected bits of language (words, phrases, idioms, points of view), holds these bits up against one another, and argues which is the purer, prevailing thought. It is also kaleidoscopic because it fluidly forces those components back together into something fractured but softened, something that avoids simple representations of time and space but takes on an “aspect” of reality. When the speaker in “Cognitive Burr” explains “why we have levels rewarding the non- / native English speaker,” we can’t be sure what he means by levels or by rewards. We can be sure that some kind of hierarchy exists—one that seems to parallel the hierarchy inherent in an economy. We are given a bit more guidance with the words “import” and “strike.” Ideas about money, the economy, and personal relationships hover here, suspending the pressure each exerts on the other. The lines are like individual thoughts pulled from a collective consciousness; the complexity of the relationship between these thoughts and the finiteness of language allows the poems to seem bursting with meaning.
From its opening line, “I could not sound like anyone but me,” Like a Sea is possessed by its fascination with the limits imposed on communication by the concept of “voice.” The voice Amadon lends his speakers is just one more restrictive container of thought and emotion. It is one more thing his speakers must overcome to communicate clearly. In most cases, the poems exemplify these constraining elements of voice, but there is a definite, self-aware desire to explain these limitations. In “Like an Evening,” Amadon’s speaker makes a fumbling attempt to characterize his own awareness:
I could go several ways
with how best to put everything
should come together is no longer available
now that I am aware I govern
what makes what I govern
differ not from how it must seem
In a book of poems that takes every opportunity to shrug off intelligibility, moments like this are attractive. But even when communication is intended, language can prove a flimsy system. It takes much effort to understand how the “govern[ing]” is occurring here, though the lines are likely worded in the clearest possible language. Parsing out the kind of reflection found in “Like an Evening” (and elsewhere) is still not easy, and Amadon has made the distinct decision to avoid clear-cut, nostalgic adventures in aphorism. In avoiding making perfect sense in perfect syntactic units, the big emotions, the ones that make us cry or punch people in bars, have been set aside. By forgoing manipulation of the big emotions in favor of initiating nervous laughter or confusion, Amadon avoids simplification and approaches a portrait that seems much closer to the emotional and intellectual environment in which we–always a little claustrophobic and scatterbrained–live our lives.
Ryan Eckes read new poems as well as poems from his chapbook, when i come here. Here’s the list:
1. Training
2. Pete Rose
3. Flash Mob
4. Odd Jobs
5. Bhagavad- CVS
6. Application
7. Hating Me Won’t Make You Pretty
8. Thomas Paine on the Jack of Spades
9. Not The Time
10. Poem
The second set consisted of collaborative poems written and read with Brandon Holmquest:
1. Correspondence
2. Algebra in Search of a Large Stick
3. Fits All
4. No Frontsies, No Backsies
5. Dog My Cats, I Dans’t Disremember
6. Yuengling
7. Does Marsellus Wallace Look Like A Bitch?
8. Epic Nothingness
9. Cowboys Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Mamas
10. Six More Weeks of Winter
Stevie Nicks is my chanteuse library. What I mean is that she is my Influence. She is one of my greatest muses (if I believed in muses.) There is little music that is more important to me than hers. There are so many reasons why.
Until recently, I believed that she grew up in Florida. But that’s not true––she actually grew up in Arizona. But until I found that out, I loved her songs for what I assumed was their wet Florida heat. Behind her songs, I always heard white sand, hot pink bathing suits, and palm trees.
When I think of voices that I can hear, either spoken or sung, I often consider their notes. You know how a perfume has notes that you can smell? For example, Chanel No. 5, we smell as one thing, but that smell is actually complex with layers. Within that one smell, is ylang-ylang and neroli first, then jasmine and rose, then a warm vanilla woodsy burst. Senses feel like one thing, but there are many strata to our experience of them. This happens with food, too. The tastes often happen in layers, especially in the best food. In the best heard voices, there are notes to the person’s accent. Stevie Nicks has a great sounding voice, so hers has a lot of layers.
During the long time I thought of Nicks being from Florida, I had always thought that when she sang it sounded like a family of crocodiles had shredded her voice and the notes you heard coming at you in time was a time-line of the sounds of the shredding. When she sings, the first note you hear is the large father crocodile taking a bite of her voice, then a mother one has it, then the baby chomps, then a teenage crocodile bites softly. Then there is a note of flowers thrown in, some flowery perfume (but not Chanel No. 5, I think of it more like Quelque Fleurs), and then something metal rings around, maybe the metal taste of blood or maybe a truly metal object. Or maybe it’s both.
Stevie Nicks has always been important to me. I’d say my love for her really took flight around ten years ago when I heard this song in a grocery store:
I’d always liked Fleetwood Mac songs (“Don’t Stop”–sorry I am still a really big Clinton fan), and of course, loved her “Landslide” as we all do (hell, even those Dixie Chicks can appreciate that one), but “Room on Fire” is the one that really threw me into a deep love for her. It seemed sort of overlooked. Or maybe I’d heard it before when it came out when I was 10. It’s probably the most spiritual song I know. It is the layers of life within the poem that make it so. Listening to it (listen to it!), it’s easy to think it’s about fate or physical attraction or some great sea of love (“where everyone would love to drown”). I know it is actually about specific things that happened to her, but I tend to forget about them. Really it is about living and dying and memory: the great questions. She says there is magic all around you when you walk in the room and you believe it. The faith she has in the magic in this song is sometimes the only thing that can get me through a dreary day. Its faith is more loyal to me than my most loyal friends. That song is my friend.
Stevie Nicks’ second solo album is called The Wild Heart (1983). Just an aside, but is there seriously a better name for an album? No, I don’t think so either. Anyway, on that album the title song “Wild Heart,” is about what else but a wild heart. If you spend your free nights watching Stevie Nicks videos on YouTube like I do, then it is easy to find this short clip:
The clip is from 1981, a few years before the album was released. To me, this fact has always meant something important about the swiftness with which songs are written and the lag between their creation and public consumption of their slickness within an actual album. In the clip, Stevie is getting her make-up done and she is singing with one of her back-up singer’s prompts (which you don’t realize until late in the clip). I love this clip for at least three main reasons. The first is because I think performers are not always better when they are practicing their songs, but at least more connected to the actual song. I don’t think her voice ever gets better than the way it is in this clip. As she practices, she is deep into the song, because she isn’t worried about anything else, like the eyes on her. (This of course begs the question: does she realize she is being filmed? Probably so. But we never know.) The second is the end of it, when she throws her head into her friend’s lap. I like thinking of her as this sweet and maybe a bit like an animal. (If you didn’t know, I love animals more than I love people, and I love people a lot.) The third has to do with a strange connection I feel to it because of this thing I used to do when I was little. Growing up, I wanted to be an actress. To study on my own, I’d always think of the best performances I’d see on TV or on a stage as the ability of the performer to seem carefree (almost careless), so that the actual performance seems effortless. In my room, I used to practice this skit I’d made up where a waitress is taking orders, but is distracted, but never messes up her orders. Or I’d sing songs into the mirror and look away from the mirror until the final moment when I’d look in the mirror straight on, so that the perceived audience then knew that I was in control, not distracted, the whole time. In this clip, I think it is so great that all of these activities are happening around her, but she is still singing like she means it. It is carefree, seemingly effortless, but there is a lot of actual effort in it. Maybe these three reasons are one main reason. I thought I’d piece it out just in case they aren’t. The three reasons can probably best be summed up by the famous Emily Dickinson line: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”
I like the young Stevie Nicks that is so witchy that people actually thought she was a witch. Her song “Rhiannon” was a reason why. This is a really great video of her singing that song:
I like the song “Rhiannon” because it is not afraid to be an unironic song about a witch. There is no wink to the audience that she is singing about anything else. The song believes in every over the top thing that it says. In the video, you can see what makes watching her perform for an audience so wonderful. If you know that song well, you know how she is gently riffing on the beats (just like a witch!). Also, her dancing. She spins around for no reason, but for every reason. She owns that microphone. It is her pivot point. The whole song is sung from the power its placement creates. Sometimes I think I want to live my life being the Stevie Nicks in this video.
Stevie Nicks sings about nature, wildness, and love and she couldn’t do it without the witchy total belief of a song like “Rhiannon.” Another wild song that I love is “Gypsy” from the Fleetwood Mac album Mirage (1982):
In the song, the singer is a witch, a gypsy, everything a so-called “bad” female should be. She “faces freedom with a little fear” but she really “has no fear, has only love.” She’s a gypsy and she doesn’t give a shit and I love it.
There is a Stevie Nicks who is past being a gentle witchy persona and moves into being something who is both hard and sad. This is the Stevie Nicks that wrote “Rooms on Fire.” The shift is not totally sequential in time, because some of it happens simultaneously during The Wild Heart album. Here is “Stand Back” which I associate with this other persona:
There is a better video from a Saturday Night Live performance of this song that I don’t think is available anymore on the internet. There are slices of that performance in the video above. In the actual video, the person who is announcing her (God help me, I don’t know who he is), says something like “Some singers are rock stars and some are beauty queens, but Stevie Nicks is a rock star beauty queen.” The crowd goes crazy when he says that and she comes out afterwards punching the beats of the song. I’ve always felt that the way she hard sings the endbeats of that song is akin to a poet wanking the hell out of the end of each line, or pumping out a punctuation mark, especially a period. Like: Period—boom! Stevie Nicks punches those beats out. It is both hard and sad.
A similar busted-out song to me is “Talk to Me” from Rock a Little (1985):
In the song, Stevie Nicks is full of despair. She is totally at point zero, but that is also a place of empathy and power, as she asks for the listener to let her in. She punches those beats, but they are sad beats. The crocodiles of her voices have slithered away and now the voice is just ragged, shot out. Nevertheless, in this song, like all the others, she is singing for freedom. Nature has been beaten into her voice and she still rises throughout the song, resounding. And she’s sweet, too, a spring rain.
Watch this short clip in which Nicks supposedly talks about her songwriting. It’s hilarious how she suffers the stupidity of Rita Braver in that interview, who seems to have no clue about her music or even what to ask her, so she just lets her ramble on about her permed 80’s hair. I love how unafraid Stevie Nicks is to say nothing of substance at all. She does say something interesting though about her songwriting in the beginning—that she gets inspired a lot by everyday things and she’ll write a line down and start a poem (I think it’s cool how she thinks of her songs as poems). She seemed to indicate also that there are lots of lines that don’t become poems, that are just random lines floating in the ether. I respect this kind of quotidian freedom of hers to create beauty out of seemingly nothing at all.
I remember a video I watched a long time ago of her talking about going solo out of the success of Fleetwood Mac. The excuse she gave was how many songs she wrote and how she never got to sing them as part of the band. She said that they rotated who wrote which songs that they all sang and that she got frustrated. She said something like “It was too hard when you are writing literally hundreds of songs a week and you have to rotate the time between band members. So, I had to go solo.” I believe in the unending generative nature of creative writing, so I believe in this. I think it would be great if Stevie Nicks taught a poetry workshop.
Just like everyone else who loves her music, I’ve always been curious about her love life. Even knowing everything about her I can voyeuristically get my hands on, I still think Lindsay Buckingham is her one true love. I think that is kind of pretty amazing, as he could not be more of a cheeseball and completely not her equal at all.
It makes sense though. Geniuses often fall in love with people who are not as smart as them—it’s just the way it works. About seven years ago, I went to see Fleetwood Mac for my birthday in Boston. I went there with my best Stevie Nicks shawl, fake flowered ensemble and was prepared to dance my ass off. She did play a couple of greats, but the largest portion of the night was devoted to Lindsay Buckingham belting out his guitar for 45 minutes like a 13-year-old schoolboy. You kind of have to love a person who is willing to be on a stage with one of the greatest American songwriters ever and completely upstage her. The hubris was fantastical. I understood why she loved him.
People tend to make a big deal about her drug use or other things she’s done that are less than commendable. I could care less what she does in her spare time—just as long as she manages to write some more songs before she dies. To steal a phrase from the great movie, Pootie Tang (2001) (“Pootie know what Pootie do”): Stevie know what Stevie do. I’ll only give that license out to greatness. Hail hail, Goddess Stevie.
~~~
Baby of air
Baby of air
You rose into the mystical
Side of things
You could no longer live with us
We put you in a little home
Where they shut and locked the door
And at night
You blew out
And went wandering through the sea and sand
People cannot keep air in
I blow air in
I cannot keep it in
I read you a poem once
And you called it beauty
And then I read you another one and
You called it harmony air
My brother is not air, he is water
He is not a baby, he is older than me
And when he brushes the hair from my face
I cannot see him, but he surrounds me
I cannot see you baby of air
I put you in your bed and you get out
I put you in the air and you blend
I put you on the beach and you blow out
Like an air bird, flying and flying
I find other things similar to you
And like you, they are air and
Are nothing eventually
I am not made out of air
I hold your baby body in me
As I am a mother to you
I am a mother to you
My brother is my mother
He tells me when I have lost you
To grieve grieve
He says grieving is good
He says crying is good
He says sadness hits you in waves
Of water and air
I feel your fine hair hit me when I am sleeping
I feel your hair hit me in the head
Will you remember me
When you breeze upon the other world
O you are already there
O you are already there
My brother tells me, you are already there
He is already there, he says
And I cry
And he tells me
It is ok to cry
It is ok to cry,
He says
You are not made air
It is ok to cry, he says
When you are not made of air
Dorothea Lasky is the author of two books of poetry, Black Life (2010) and AWE (2007), both published by Wave Books. She is also the author of an educational text, Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She currently lives in New York City.
Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com. Check out previous POP essays here:http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/
by Julia Story Sarabande Books 2010 Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney
“you are barely a sound”
The only really bad part of Julia Story’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning debut, Post Moxie, is the judge’s introduction by Dan Chiasson. “You wouldn’t call them ‘prose poems,’ implying the unbelievably drained tones and attitudes of that anemic genre,” he writes, introducing what is, in fact, a collection of prose poems, or perhaps a long poem composed of small prose blocks. “Prose poems don’t thread the needle the way Story’s poems do.”
Even leaving aside a desire to argue that a lot of prose poems do “thread the needle” and are quite good, why Chiasson would want—even jokingly—to dismiss the very genre in which Story’s book is written is baffling. Reading him do so feels misdirecting and does the book itself a disservice, throwing the reader out of the appropriately open frame of mind in which the collection is best encountered. Story’s work is generous and formally innovative, whereas its intro is ungenerous and narrow, or at least distracting and tonally off. Thus, the best approach to Post Moxie might be to skip the introduction entirely and just jump into the text.
Jumping right in is a technique at which Story excels; her opening sentences establish scenarios and atmospheres with a subtle blend of specificity and mystery. “We look at a statue and feel uncomfortable,” says the speaker in the book’s first poem. “Time is a series of pellets,” starts another, and “For six years the girls careen in his dream like little flashlights” starts another still. Her second and third sentences, when the blocks go that long, are equally skillful, balancing precision with generality, as when she writes in the ensuing sentences of the aforementioned poems: “I am backward light, which isn’t as cool as it sounds,” and “The gerbil that sniffs them reacts by scratching his neck ferociously,” and “My intelligence is measured by the number of sweat bees in the yard.”
If these individual poems present a compelling balancing act, then so too does the book as a whole, establishing a coherent narrative element in its content alongside a cohesive formal one in its structure. Like any poetic form, the prose poem possesses its own rules and restrictions, as well as opportunities for its writer to make personal flourishes. Story takes full advantage of these chances. In an interview, she explains how she shaped the book into its finished form: “For a while, the stanzas were in short lines. About a month into writing them, I got tired of messing with the line breaks; they seemed arbitrary and unimportant to what I was trying to do. Once I set up the prose blocks, I could do the work I needed to do, which was to pour the language into little containers.”
Cover to cover, Post Moxie does give the impression that writing it might really have been this easy, as though Story just poured the words like water into vases; but this apparent ease would belie the precision and care with which the prose chunks must have been composed. Remnants of the “shorter lines” to which Story refers still lurk within the blocks. They create tension within the sections and across the book because, although the final form consists of solid bricks of writing, within them lies a competing sense of fragmentedness. Some of the blocks themselves are unfinished and fragmentary:
As delicate as an ass’s bray are the little
lights which descend from the distant
city inside you can’t pedal fast enough
to get there and when you finally do
catbirds have called it a day ears grow
dim you are barely a sound so you head
out again for the ring of trees
This poem appears to be a huge run-on, a single breathless sentence. But there’s no punctuation and it ends abruptly with no period, so it’s not even a sentence. In her interview, Story adds, “There was a certain impatience and desperation I felt when writing and I think the form reflects this.” It does. What happens in the ring of trees? From what menace is the speaker fleeing? Story isn’t saying. Thus, the pull the reader feels is often a narrative one, although the narrative is never complete or conventional.
Even when they seem to possess a plot, the poems are patchy, full of omission. One poem reads in its entirety:
Fucking mirrors. Reaching into a . . .
feeling. Pleiades a group of shadows on
the floor, flickering light to see me by.
Sadly the erotics of doubt.
Almost every prose poem in the collection has the quality of an intriguing overheard conversation that you would totally understand had you caught just one more sentence. In the end, the conversation is that much more memorable because you didn’t.
Story’s speaker can be funny and critical, as when she writes “My neighbor drives his big stupid car over and asks do I want breakfast,” but also self-deprecating, as when she implicates herself in the same poem: “No, I say, I’m writing, then go back in to watch Sixteen Candles.” Her speaker is also frequently elegiac and wistful, mournfully observing the passing of childhood, the natural world, and love. Story manages to do so in a fashion that describes the perception of ordinary moments in a way that restores strangeness both to the moments and to the act of perception itself. The poems’ elusiveness evokes their speaker’s efforts to place these moments in a coherent narrative—efforts that never quite succeed, if only because they tend to expand and open onto other potential narratives, becoming properties to which all have access and none can claim ownership. “Everyone understood that the world was a kind of story,” Story writes in a poem toward the end of the book. Maybe not everyone, but Story definitely does.
Powerhouse Books hosted LIT ‘s Issue 18 launch party in Dumbo, Brooklyn last night. Readers included Traci O Connor, Mike Young, Nate Pritts and Eduardo Jiménez Mayo reading his translation of Rafael Pérez Gay. Pritts read six poems:
