Sunday, December 26th, 2010
“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast”
Here are links to ten snow poems:
“Desert Places,” Robert Frost, “Snow Day,” Billy Collins, “The snow that never drifts,” Emily Dickinson, “Dream Song 28: Snow Line,” John Berryman, “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens, “Snow,” Anne Sexton, “The Snow Storm,” Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The snow is melting,” Issa, “Snow,” Louise Glück
Sunday, December 26th, 2010
by Chad Sweeney
Alice James Books 2010
Reviewed by Kate Angus
“…watch the sky / braiding and unbraiding its light.”
Although there are many smaller pleasures in Parable of Hide and Seek, Chad Sweeney’s latest collection, the book’s greatest strength is Sweeney’s embrace of mutability and potential. The poems in this book move effortlessly between the concrete logical world and a place where the laws of nature are suspended or irrelevant. Through his use of associative imagery and elegant line breaks, Sweeney creates a liminal space where the real work of poetry begins, which is to say that his readers–with a tip of the hat to an older master– wander through a series of shifting images that allow them to “find (themselves) more truly and more strange” (Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”).
This world of infinite possibilities is perhaps best illustrated by “Wednesday,” a poem comprised of five elegant tercets. He begins with the mundane; “A hubcap was ringing,” moves rapidly into the rest of the stanza’s unexpected action (“I lay flat on the street / to answer it.”) and then leaps into a series of assured and surprising associations as the poem unfolds. Sweeney continues,
A fern was ringing.
A tombstone. A ladle.
It was Wednesdayat the center of the year
and everything was calling
to everything else.
This assertion that everything interacts is one of the essential and most interesting tenets underlying Sweeney’s poetry. The contradictory images of metal and plant (hubcap and fern) merge as they perform the same action, and the speaker’s action creates another implied image (hubcap and fern as telephone). These associated images propel the action of the poem forward into the second great strength of his poetry: a clear-eyed and calm acceptance of the world’s inescapable danger. Sweeney concludes:
Hello! Hello!
The clouds were doused
in gasoline.Hello! I answered,
into a blue sheet
fluttering on the line.
The implication of danger remains after the poem has ended, and yet the reader is left with a curious and lovely sense of tranquility as well. Amidst the anxiety inherent in clouds doused in gasoline, the blue sheet on the line holds the connotation of the blue sky, an inherently peaceful image, and the speaker is speaking to all of it as he greets and answers the world.
This twined sense of calm and danger is consistent in Parable of Hide and Seek, most notably also in “The Methodist and His Method,” where the speaker’s dead grandfather “preaches to the other corpses” and concludes with the ominous and lovely
Each man has been given his row boat,
he says,to lie back in and watch the sky
braiding and unbraiding its light.
No one is safer than we are.
There are less interesting poems in this collection–moments where Sweeney draws a bit too much attention to his magician’s tricks (for instance, by telling us “a noun is verbing” in “Captain’s Log”). But overall, this is a book of manifold pleasures written by a poet with a deft, assured hand.
*
Sunday, December 26th, 2010
The poet Janine Pommy Vega “died peacefully at home” on Thursday at the age of 68, according to her Web site. Vega is associated with the Beat poets, and published her first book, Poems to Fernando, on City Lights in 1968. Nomadics has published the book’s opening poem, “The Last Watch,” in tribute.
Vega’s Web site bio reads: “Janine Pommy Vega is the author of eighteen books and chapbooks since 1968. The latest is (poetry) The Green Piano, Godine, May 2005. Her first CD, Across the Table, recorded in Woodstock, and from live performances in Italy and Bosnia, came out in November, 2007. An Italian translation of her travel book Tracking the Serpent (Sulle tracce del serpente, Nutrimenti, Rome) was published in July 2007. Her translations from Spanish of migrant workers’ poems, Estamos Aquí, came out from Bowery Books in 2007. Vega performs with music and solo, in English and Spanish, in international poetry festivals, museums, prisons, universities, cafes, nightclubs, and migrant workers’ camps in South America, North America and Europe. She is the Director of Incisions/Arts, an organization of writers working with people behind bars, and has taught inside prisons for more than twenty-five years. She currently teaches a course in poetics for Bard Prison Initiative. She has worked as well in creative writing programs in public schools, elementary through high school-all grades for over twenty years.”
Here is a video of Vega reading “Habeus Corpus Blues” at the Walla Walla Poetry Party on April 16, 2005:
Here she is reading “Bird Mother of Cagliari”:
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Chris Tonelli: So the readers know, we met at a Black Mountain College (BMC) tribute reading/event type thing for the Hopscotch Music Festival here in Raleigh, NC. With as many as 19 members and countless side projects, what do you imagine are some of the similarities between the collective that is Broken Social Scene (BSS) and BMC? What is it that attracts you to these sorts of communities?
Andrew Whiteman: Um well, I guess I don’t see much the same between BSS and BMC. If I searched for it, I’d say the ‘innocent’ style beginnings of both projects? Given the relative obscure location of BMC and well, BSS really was a basement-only band for quite a while. Beyond that, BSS is just a band. We are friends, family more like it at this point in our career, and we play everywhere because people want us to, and we want to keep making music and touring is the only way to support the expenses we have. The way I see it, BMC was an inter-disciplinary cauldron where people could come who were really searching for a modern path to take their creativity. I mean really: Cage, Cunningham, Olson, Dorn, Creeley, R. Johnson, Ruth Asawa, I won’t bother to name [all] these, er, titans of modern art. BSS is just a band. We bring happiness.
I’m lucky enough to have just fallen into what became the family of BSS and Stars, Metric, etc. It was the early days and the musical chemistry was out of sight.
CT: I guess since people often refer to BSS as a collective, and on any given project there are various numbers of members and collaborators and cameos and since people have other projects going on as well, that there might be a similar atmosphere. Of support, of challenge, of variety, etc.
What inspired you to organize a BMC tribute at the Hopscotch festival? Was it simply being in NC? Have you organized other poetry events while touring with BSS?
AW: Grayson reached out to me once he had BSS locked in for the festival. He was wondering if Apostle of Hustle could do a late-night set that same night. I knew my head would be too deep into the BSS world, plus our drummer, Dean, wouldn’t be there, so I went back with the idea of organizing a poetry reading. My vision was kind of that it would be in a tiny bar or weirdly, someone’s hotel room because there’d only be probably 10 or 12 people that’d be into a poetry reading. We’d decide beforehand what poem to read and then everyone would have a copy of the work, sort of know it, I suppose, and then at around midnight the reading would start. Basically a drinking game with some fantastic American poetry: The Cantos of Pound, The Sonnets of Berrigan, di Prima’s revolutionary letters. Whatever poem was decided. After half a second I realized that yes, we were in NC and therefore it was only proper to choose a poet from BMC. Later on, Grayson decided to kind of add this idea into his ‘artists and authors’ series he already had going. The event was a cool experience for me because well you introduced me to Jonathan Williams’ world, plus the other Chris had been a student of Ed Dorn’s, whose Gunslinger is absolutely the greatest American long poem of the last 75 years. Still, I believe that poetry is almost like a faith these days – and so what’s needed sometimes is a more causal and emotional and cabal-type setting for an exchange of it.
Which brings up your second question: Have I organized other poetry events while on tour? Sadly, no. Being on the road is the epitome of non-organization as when you show up to a town to play in, you usually have no idea where the venue is, what time the bus leaves after the gig, how to get around, or if you even need to. Hmmm it sounds like I’m making excuses. To be honest, it’s never dawned on me that with a fair amount of pre-production, poetry events could be organized ahead of time, at least in some places. In my touring of the last year, I have made a few connections: my friend Tom King in Lawrence, Kansas is the custodian of Bill Burroughs’ house, and I met him solely thru walking to where it was after sound check. I wanted to take a picture of it and ended up hanging out later after the show with him and James Grauerholz and couple of other local poets. Meeting Ann Waldman has been the high point of my year. In Philadelphia, I had an afternoon off, so I walked to the Kelly Writer’s House, met Al Filreis and all the good people there. I was on a mission to secure a Penn Sound page for my friend, the poet Victor Coleman – who is, I believe, Canada’s best poet of the last 40 years. Al didn’t need me to convince him – now you can hear some of Victor’s poetry by scooting over to Penn Sound.
You’re right, Chris…it would make touring life a lot more exciting if I knew there were poets to meet and hang out with a few times a week. Usually, I see on Silliman’s blog that, Nope, I just missed Linh Dinh with CAConrad by two days in Philly or nope the DA Levy tribute is next week. Ann certainly never stops moving, and it kills me to lose out on her performances. It’s as bad as missing Marc Ribot or Tom Waits or Lucky Dragons or something. I played European Festivals all summer and never saw Wildbirds and Peacedrums!!!! Arggg!!
CT: Well, I’m glad you came back to Grayson with that revision. I’d never heard Dorn’s work before to be honest, so thank you for that. Along with Dorn, you mention a handful of poets…Pound, Berrigan, di Prima, Burroughs, Waldman…Grauerholz, Dinh, Conrad, Filreis…Coleman. Is there an aesthetic thread you see running through their work that links them in your own personal canon? If so, is there a parallel thread for you in music? I guess what I’m asking is, for you, does the aesthetic transfer mediums?
AW: Good question given that I just finished unpacking my boxes of books in my new apartment and felt the weird ‘challenge’ of what goes where and how to organize them all. I ended up not organizing the poetry in and of itself. It went poetry/drama/performance/ myth & ritual/spirituality/philosophy (special sections went to Ezra Pound and then again to William Burroughs, Beckett, Nicky Drumbolis, and Jodorowsky).
I’m interested in poetry of the ‘other tradition,’ as spoken about by Jerome Rothenberg or Marjorie Perloff or blogged by Al Filreis or Lemon Hound. It’s not simply contemporary work. It’s a way of reading poetry through types of restlessness of being in the world. It could be Pound translating “The Seafarer” or it could be Linh Dinh’s photo blog; the poet is engaging with the ‘soul of the world’ which he or she finds to be fucked up in some way or another. The stance of being against the zeitgeist. Saying that, I definitely am not a fan of all types of ‘rebellious’ / ‘disruptive’ poetry, whether abstruse or ‘slam’, just because it speaks out. Nor do I dislike the haiku of Basho or the ‘everydayness’ of Berrigan and the New Yorkers. I suppose the way I read these writers is that their voices are implicitly rejecting of what society-at-large was pimping at the time. I feel like the times are hurtful, solipsistic to a new level and cruel and ignorant to staggering degrees. Poetry is a way to make vision clear. What’s my fucked up version of Shelley? “Poets are the true legislators of the unacknowledged world.” There is so much work to be read, it’s too much. Many paths.
Musically speaking, I’m a pure crow. I fly around and when I hear something that looks like it’d be good, I swoop down and steal it. So I see my tastes as much more polyglot. Plus, a lot of the music I listen to isn’t English-language, so I have very little idea what they’re singing about. I would definitely like to say while I’ve got a chance: LYRICS≠POETRY and vice versa!!! I can’t stand the ‘rock poet’ tag even when applied to such brilliant musicians as Stephen Malkmus, Dan Bejar, mf DOOM, Bill Callahan, or Dylan. Two different beasts. Of course, the connection is deep and essential – it’s the musicality of poetry that is probably the first hook for me when I’m reading, certainly before much of the ‘meaning’ seeps in. But to name rock lyricists as poets, is, I think, giving them a little too much credit. It somehow de-centralizes the power of the melody and sound that is integral with lyrics. Hmmm…does that make me more of a poet snob or musician snob?
If there’s any ‘style’ that runs through my musical taste, it’s probably ‘rough edged’ – Moroccan Gnawa or American Folk or whatever. Then again, I’m a sucker for Burt Bacharach too. There’s no accounting for taste.
CT: Glad to see someone else has mfDOOM and Pavement in their playlist. What if Danger Mouse and DOOM got together and worked on some Burt Bacharach?
How do you see this interest in the “other tradition” manifesting itself in your work with BSS? I guess as a band and also as an individual player working within a band? Do you feel like a ‘restlessness’ is being expressed? How would you say your music is ‘rejecting what the world is pimping?’ I guess I mean both the world at large and the music world.
AW: I’m afraid I can’t map BSS onto my ideas of a more radical, less cautious, ‘other tradition’ in poetry. What music(ians) would we put there? Ornette Coleman? Sonic Youth? PJ Harvey? Wildbirds and Peacedrums? Genesis P. Orridge? Noise bands? Scandinavian death metal? Hmmm…I dunno. Maybe a band like Dirty Projectors and their friend, Tune-Yards.
I think of BSS as a band that is working alongside many THOUSANDS of other bands and that we cross-pollinate all the time. We are at a point culturally where in pop (ie Pitchfork or most music blogs), ironic attitudes, post irony and the game of cool have eliminated the borders between genre to such a degree where anything can [be] tabled and accepted no matter where on the scale of recognizable they occur: from ‘oh my mom used to like this’ to ‘ whoa what is that.’ I doubt any musician fills in their ‘genre’ slot on their MySpace page without being ironic: traditional/ soukous [EDITOR'S NOTE: According to Andrew, 'soukous' is "a damn trendy ironic (and for some bands Not Ironic ) demarker"]/ metal. Anything can seem fresh. These days viewpoints telescope so that micro-niches are the topics of discussion and division. Perhaps we might say this is the restlessness I mentioned earlier, but in terms of music. The ‘Kill your Idols’ mentality. BSS doesn’t really set out to be radical. We are primarily an emotion band, with attention to melody. I also don’t see BSS as a ‘rejecting the con’ band per se, but there are definitely lyrical moments where that stance is taken strongly. And our presentation is somewhat oblique, in that the audience often enjoys our ‘what the fuck is going to happen next’ stage show.
But the world of pop and taste moves at a much faster speed then that of poetry. You click a couple of times and boom, you’ve heard the new National album. You listened through your laptop speakers and made some judgment calls. Barely anyone reads books these days, let alone poetry. The functions of tradition and anti-tradition mean something else in the slower, page-bound, time-frame. To extract poems, you have to read and think and feel and re-read. Very generally, I’ll agree with McLuhan – somehow working within writing in and of itself seems more radical than rocking out, at least in my world view.
CT: Poets love to hear that they’re more radical than rock stars.
The day we read for the BMC tribute thing, you read only Dorn’s work. But I remember you saying, or someone saying about you, that you are working on a manuscript. Can you talk about that a bit. What does it look like…is it a long piece or individual poems? Are the lines broken or is it in prose? Would you say you have more of a contrarian aesthetic as a poet than a musician, thinking back about what you said about pop music?
AW: Yeah, I am slowly working on a manuscript for a book of poems. It’ll be called ‘Tourisms.’ It is a series of ‘documentary’ poetics about a year on the road with BSS. I see it as a long poem but with many different types of poems within it…….write about what you know, right? But there’s another structural dimension as well – many if not all the poems will be imitations, to greater or lesser degrees, of other poets’ work. For example, BSS played on the Letterman show earlier this year. After that we went to Sears studio, a famous old joint in NYC, to record a song for the second Sea Shanties record that Hal Wilner is producing. Things got weird that night, and I ended up meeting Anne Waldman. Gush gush!!! So perhaps I’ll borrow the style of “fast speaking woman” or “makeup on empty space” or one of her list poems to record that entire event. Maybe get into some more ideas on what it’s like to perform on one of those ridiculous TV shows.
Another example is one poem I’ve already completed. It’s based on the first canto from Pound. In that canto he tells the story of when Odysseus has to go to hell and sacrifice oxen for Tiresias the poet to drink and then tell Odysseus what/how he will get back to Ithaca and Penelope. I changed the story to be of when BSS flew to Minehead, UK to play in the Pavement-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. So, one is a grand narrative epic & the other is a typical banal rock show – but told using as much of the AMAZING VOWEL-LEADING that Pound, of course, was a master of. I hope that will get completed within next year. Memories die so quickly.
As for my aesthetic/poetics…I know where my taste runs, and hopefully I’ll end up being a poet of the anti-tradition tradition that I spoke of earlier. I certainly am not New Yorker bound, that’s for sure.
CT: I really like the idea of a long poem of imitations…any chance we could get a sample poem from the manuscript? Maybe that Pound/Pavement one?
AW: Here’s a chunk, in media res, of the poem entitled “Kanto”. [It] is just a small part of the longer work in progress….both in the specific poem (‘Kanto’) and as a book length long poem (Tourism(S)).
I’m looking forward to the fear of the blank page vs. the fear of the empty tequila bottle in the new year, although BSS will still be playing a fair number of shows.
Andrew Whiteman is a musician (Broken Social Scene & Apostle of Hustle) and poet/reader from Montreal, Canada. He says “If there’s anything I’d want to add to the interview it would be an exhortation for any poets that read it and are interested in similar poets/poetic concerns as me to PLEASE GET IN TOUCH!! Community is often so difficult to build or maintain and I’m really searching for some kindred ‘outriders’ to help push poetry’s platform along and preserve the lessons of our ancestors. I’m interested especially in the collaborative spirit of the New York School, past & present, and also especially in Alice Notley’s practice.”
~~~
Chris Tonelli is one of the founding editors of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He also founded and curates the So and So Series and edits the So and So Magazine. He is the author of four chapbooks, most recently No Theater (Brave Men Press) and For People Who Like Gravity and Other People (Rope-A-Dope Press), and his first full-length collection, The Trees Around, came out in April. New work can be found in upcoming issues of The Laurel Review and Fou. He teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison and their son Miles.
Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com. Check out previous POP essays here.
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
The Metropolitan Transportation Administration in New York City will replace its “Train of Thought” ads, which contain snippets of literary wisdom, with “a new ad campaign designed to communicate subway service advisories and improvements,” according to Transportation Nation. “Train of Thought” featured small pieces of poetry and prose for commuters to read and re-read in transit. In 2008, “Train of Thought” replaced “Poetry in Motion,” a similar series devoted solely to poetry. Reflect on “The Literary Decline of the Subway” here.
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Nate Pritts, poet and editor of H_NGM_N BKS, launched H_NGM_N Reissues in 2010 with the republication of William Heyen’s lost 1981 classic Lord Dragonfly. He wrote the following essay in support of the reissue, which can be purchased here. (A wonderful and affordable holiday surprise for poetry readers!)
~
by Nate Pritts
In 1992 I was a seventeen year old college freshman in Brockport, New York, a town where it’s always fall or winter, where the Erie Canal dominates both landscape & mood, all full of bird shadows, & where sunflowers look stark & lovely against the weathered brick of academic buildings.
Seventeen & I walked up the stairs of Lathrop Hall on the SUNY Brockport campus to my first college English class & the hallway chalkboard/message center told me:
xii.
Lord Dragonfly
sees me from all sides
at once.
~
William Heyen’s Lord Dragonfly was first published in 1981 by Vanguard Press. It went out of print at some point before the end of that decade, definitely by 1988, when their list was bought & mostly mishandled by Random House.
Rather than function as a retrospective on Heyen’s career, which spans decades, continues today, & is marked most emphatically by its consistency & devotion, I’d like to focus on the book itself, my reading of it, & my friend William Heyen.
The aim of this book series, H_NGM_N Reissues, has everything to do with those traits that characterize Heyen’s commitment to the art of poetry: consistency, devotion. As a reader of poetry, I yearn to have my knowledge of what it means to be human enriched by the words on the page – either through their meanings or through the way they mean. As a writer of poetry, I need to be supported in my efforts, to constantly learn, to absorb &, once saturated, to spark & flare.
~
It wasn’t until 1993 that I first met Bill, though I had read Lord Dragonfly several times by then. I was struck immediately by his graciousness, his calm & steady exuberance. Through workshops, where he was both nurturing & fierce, & thousands of private conversations, Bill taught me lots about poetry but even more about how to be a poet.
It is his legendary work ethic, his boundless commitment to poetry, which is Bill’s biggest gift to me as a poet. It was well known around campus that Bill was up before the birds, shooting hoops with an ingrained Long Island sprezzatura that indicated it didn’t matter if he made each shot, though he always did. Before sunrise, he was writing poems in the Student Union, or hunkered in his office, maintaining his extraordinary journal habit or his voluminous correspondence with his own former teachers, students, brother & sister poets.
To be clear, all of this is embodied in the poetry of Lord Dragonfly, so maybe this is the place to stop talking about me, & my love, & start talking about why this book, why now.
In these poems, Heyen communicates a vision of the world as equal parts spiritual & physical. The transcendent comes together with the earthly physical again & again, resoundingly so, in a racket that is recognizably human but also luminous. It is poetry that is rooted in sensory perceptions & in the sensual – those things we can’t ascertain but must simply believe.
From “Cedar” in the book’s third sequence Of Palestine:
O death
in whose wood
our world is tonguewe cannot hear
and what will save us
when will we awaken
Leaving aside a discussion of the tonal quality of this (grim & deafening), the speaker’s stance is one of ecstatic desperation. But in even these depths, bordered by death & mute wood, there is an implicit hope – not will we awaken, but when.
This transcendence, this move from crude physical thinking to a more phenomenal state of knowledge, is enacted with devastating precision. Also, it’s not naïve. Some of the most powerful poems come in the book’s fourth sequence XVII Machines, where the physical isn’t always pastoral or natural but instead mechanistic & brutal. How much more beautiful & ravishing, then, the transition (in “The Machine in Your Field”) from a machine that “lops off your legs and arms” to this:
The machine’s gentle rain will bless you.
At night its own stars will burn above you,
its moon draw blood from your bones.
You’ll stretch and grow, your shoulders
will break earth. The machine will lift you,
kiss your forehead, teach you to live again.
The constant shift from delicate utterance to violent action (bless to burn, draw blood but also lift you, kiss your forehead) keeps the reader unbalanced but attuned, aware that “all our lives are lived / in the here and now, in one constant season” (“The Machine that Air-Conditions the World”).
~
“Lord Dragonfly / sees me from all sides / at once.” What affects me most profoundly in this collection is the visionary nature of the work, that the poems relentlessly create & enact a sense of the world as something we can know, something we must strive to know. In “The Eternal Ash,” from the book’s first sequence The Ash, Heyen directs the reader, in a torturous passage, to a simple goal, “yes, but to know one thing, but know it.” There’s an emphasis on the final “know” in that line; certainly we all agree that we can come to universal truths through knowing “one thing” but the truly “know” it – to see it from all sides at once – is something more harrowing, more fraught.
Today, with evening dawning, the landscape of contemporary poetry is littered with lines & whole poems that seek to reject this world we’re stuck with, that forge a barrier between our human feelings & this emotional living we’re trying to make sense of. We’re having a conversation about what poetry can be & it is cluttered with ironic postures & an elaborately codified estrangement that forgets the reality it is seeking to make new. There are so many poems that forget we can be made out of words that mean, & that mean what they mean earnestly.
Lord Dragonfly is a book that challenges me in its forms of feelings, through the intricacies of its thinking, & by the linguistic deployment of both, a book sadly unavailable to a generation of readers & writers who need it. It is a book I am honored to welcome back into this ongoing conversation.
*
Monday, December 20th, 2010
by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books 2010
Reviewed by David Sewell
I have never read The Da Vinci Code, which I don’t mean to present to you here as an advertisement of my suitability for mating. Or perhaps I do, though I don’t want to give the impression that that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. But, anyway, having lived in Paris for almost two years now and having seen groups of tourists lugging that estimable work all across this fair city, it occurs to me that the twain must have some connection. It’s possible I could validate this hunch with a few clicks on the computer machine and some time surfing the world wide web, but my ironic coolness depends on my not really knowing, and my ironic coolness is very important, not only to me, but to forces far greater in scope, coherence, and personal hygiene—forces, for all of our sakes, I dare not mention here. So let’s just assume the tourists are not misguided, other than in a sartorial sense, and keep this journey of discovery steaming along.
Slowly, and then somewhat more quickly, then, strangely, slowly again, it occurred to me that my being in Paris, the book-toting tourists’ being here, the deictic opus’s being set here (as far as I know), and my being asked to write a review of a new poetry collection…it was all starting to add up to something. I needed to focus my eyes, or perhaps let them go out of focus completely, or perhaps I just needed a stiff drink, and then what exactly had been carefully hidden out of my view for so long, the big secret that would make all of this make sense would be revealed, like Lindsay Lohan’s underpants as she emerges from the backseat of a chauffeured sedan.
I discovered the path through this forest of intrigue around 1 a.m. one night, walking home through the darkest evening of the year, rain filling up the streets, somewhere near the Louvre, after staying out past the Metro shutting down and having no cab fare after spending all my money on research materials. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so might as well exercise the old cerebrum along with the legs. If you have read TDC, as the cool kids call it, it might be useful at this point for you to think of whichever character is the sandalwood-smelling, furiously handsome one, and imagine me as him. Or him as me—it is really the same thing. I am your hero. Please keep that in mind as we move forward. The fate of all humanity now and in the future could very well depend on it.
~
Anyway, speaking of reading effluvia, if you’ve ever passed your eyes over any of the handful of reviews I’ve written for this site, I’m frankly surprised that you’re still reading this now. You see, the me that writes poetry reviews is a bit of a dandy, a fancy-pants who pretends to write reviews nominally about the book in consideration but mainly spends an unwarranted amount of time trying to show off some notion of je ne sais quoi, or mateability, that, in the end, really should have been kept concealed beneath the proverbial trench coat. (If, on the other hand, you find yourself captivated by my tarty insouciance and florid scratching style, please do yourself a favor and check out my multivolume doctoral dissertation on the role of trouser pleats in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, available at some of the finer university libraries in Bhutan and Turkmenistan.)
You might notice, for instance, that we are more than six hundred words into this very review and I’ve yet to say anything even remotely substantive about the book, such as its title or the author’s name. You don’t need me to tell you that life is like that sometimes—not so much a box of chocolates as a long walk home at 1 a.m., with the recurring urge to knock a fellow night denizen off his velocipede as he cycles by, then pedal quickly away, whisking yourself safely home, where there is never a shortage of research materials or anyone telling you you’ve had enough research for one night and will be given no more, or if there is, you are certainly more powerful than her and her puny girl arms. But that is tea for another time, as the man says.
~
It is at this point that you are probably thinking that the review of the book will begin, but I’m sorry to inform you, dear reader, that is not quite the case. I haven’t even laid out the bare facts of the Da Vinci Code–like case we have on our hands here, the revelation of which I’m sure will shock and excite you in, hopefully, unequal measures. Here it goes: Michael Earl Craig, the putative author of Thin Kimono, goes authorially by three first names, any of which may or may not be his own. Such a situation is unusual in today’s go-go times of acronyms, initializations, and abbreviations, especially as his friends seem to refer to him as Earl (full disclosure: I would like to be his friend). There are any number of reasons why this might be the case, the most prominent of which is that his nom de plume (and, perhaps, de vie) is a sly, tripartite homage to (1) Philip Michael Thomas (also three first names), noted thespian best known for his smoldering turn as Ricardo Tubbs in the ’80s romantic comedy Miami Vice; (2) the Earl of Sandwich or the Second Earl Grey, or possibly both (thus totaling three Earls); and (3) Craig T.(heodore) Nelson (three first names again), noted coach. I once had a Miami Vice Trapper Keeper, every day I eat exactly one sandwich and drink exactly one pot of Earl Grey tea, and one time I saw Mr. Nelson at the airport… This is starting to get spooky.
There is yet another layer at work here, revealed to me late one night after doing extensive research in my kitchen by the light of the moon. You see, no sane individual would ever believe that anyone would say or write a name as long as Michael Earl Craig’s these days. As a thoroughly mateable and ironically cool person, I’m privy to the knowledge that the cool kids nowadays write and say, in their sexting sessions and such, “MEC,” when referring to our mysterious author. Fine, you might be saying to your wife or prostitute or butler, so what? Well, did you know, smart guy, that mec is a word in French, which by some strange coincidence is the official language of the country I currently live in? Weird, I know. And it’s not just any word, either. In French, mec is roughly equivalent to dude in English. (Need I remind you of the original definition of dude—“a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S.”—and that Michael Earl Craig was born in the thriving metropolis of Dayton, Ohio, and now summers and winters, as well as springs and falls, in the wild west?)
~
Cleverly, our thrice-forenamed author has revealed to us his true identity: the dude. A crucial document in the corpus of mysterious symbology behooving us to consider it is the 1998 historical documentary The Big Lebowski, which followed the comings and goings of a Renaissance man and bowling enthusiast who also went by the name of The Dude. Here is some introductory prose from that film, which sums up that dude’s presence rather succinctly:
“…He called himself The Dude. Now, Dude, that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But, then, there was a lot about The Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I found the place so durned innarestin’…. I only mention it ’cause, sometimes there’s a man—I won’t say a hee-ro, ’cause what’s a hee-ro? But sometimes there’s a man…. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here—sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time ’n’ place, he fits right in there—and that’s The Dude…. Sometimes there’s a man…. Sometimes there’s a man. Ah, I lost my train of thought here. But… Aw, hell. I done introduced him enough.”
Indeed. Sometimes there’s a man… Sometimes there’s a man in Montana who shoes horses and writes unadorned poems about extraordinary ordinary things, and all the time this is a good thing for the rest of us. The poems in Thin Kimono (as in his previous two books), for the most part, eschew the sudden jumps or shifts in tone, style, placement, or focus that so many poets today hop around on like a crippled albino being chased by a tiger, perhaps also albino. (The second section, of three, is one long, sectioned poem mostly comprising unconnected images and thoughts presented in somewhat non-sequitur fashion. But there’s plenty of emotional/tonal glue here, and it works.) Most of the poems’ images, lines, and thoughts follow what came before in a natural yet not-obvious way. Nearly everything is connected in a logical and emotional sense. This is sometimes called accessibility. Indeed, even the detours are easy to manage—they feel like normal cognitive diversions, following the mind as it follows a tangent to a related place, then returns to the original train of thought like a cross-country traveler who just needed to stretch his legs on the platform for a second.
On the stylistic level, the poems are most often composed of simple declarative sentences, short in length, without many subordinate clauses or complex constructions. There’s not much enjambment of lines, not many metaphors or much figurative language. Most of the lines end with a period or a comma. There’s nothing really experimental, nothing neo-this or post-that at work here. And yet the poems consistently pop with brightness and originality against a humorous and clever backdrop.
Take, for instance, the poem about the man hanging out at the bottom of the swimming pool to check out (and not in a weird way) two dozen synchronized swimmers as they practice. Or the three poems about being at an acupuncturist’s. Or the two about lying on a hotel bed. The poems here are about small things: talking to his grandmother on the phone, visiting New York City, riding on an airplane, shoeing a horse. The poem “Windsor” begins, “I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.” Then, for the rest of the poem, he talks plainly about a one-eyed horse. That is more or less how these poems work. One does not have to consult the etchings on Bruncvik’s Sword or stare intently at a pair of Leonardo’s used underpants during a penumbral lunar eclipse to unlock the secrets here, or to fully enjoy these poems for all that they are and aren’t. “Trying again I wrote / in capital letters THE READER / CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY / AND STILL GET MY POEMS,” he writes in “Bluebirds.” Empirically, I can attest to that statement’s truth.
The source material Craig draws from is the same available to anyone else, but the results transcend the standard product. He talks often about things he sees in the newspaper, on TV, while driving his automobile. It’s through the peculiar alchemy that occurs in the writer’s/speaker’s head that these everyday scenes and situations become something of a more precious nature—to quote “After a Terrifying Nap”: “Not golden like a bar of gold / (an ingot) / or golden like honey / or paint on a football helmet. / It was another kind of gold.” That poem is about a golden grasshopper that falls into a car and comes to rest, next to a potato chip, on the floor in the backseat, below a soundly napping infant. That’s all that happens, really, yet the poet somehow arrives at, “The grasshopper sent forth a golden light. / The infant awoke in his car seat, / looked at the grasshopper / and wiggled his feet, his white socks.”
~
It’s worthwhile mentioning the sort-of shorthand poetics found in “Poem (The nitwit danced…)”: “To those people who are always talking about ‘surrealism’ / can I suggest you open your fucking eyes? / If you do this, you will see mothballs. And a green nightgown.” I think the point here is less whether these poems do or do not trade in surrealism than that such discussions are inherently less interesting than what one can see by simply opening one’s eyes and looking around. Ultimately, it’s what Craig sees, and how he sees it, that makes these poems work so well. “Clear writing is clear thinking,” he writes in “Humans.” The obvious danger in such perspicuity is that stripping away all the stylistic and poetic drapery is a bit like being naked in front of a crowded room of insurance salesmen: there’s nothing to conceal one’s human frailties from their prying, insatiable eyes. That Michael Earl Craig’s poems are continually as lean, well-proportioned, and finely chiseled as that other Renaissance giant, Michelangelo’s David (no relation), proves he has nothing at all to hide.
*
Sunday, December 19th, 2010
Shira Dentz read with Laura Hinton earlier this month in the Zinc Bar reading series (set below). Dentz is the author of black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman, 2010), the chapbook Leaf Weather (Tilt Press, 2009), and door of thin skins (forthcoming from CavenKerry). The Zinc Bar reading series is hosted by Tim Peterson and takes place most Sunday nights at 6:45 pm at the Zinc Bar, located at 82 West 3rd Street.
The poem from which the title is taken, “Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad,” required Dentz to pantomime some of the punctuation that becomes a kind of language itself in the poems. For example, between lines, “…we just don’t come apart” and “Behold,” Dentz held up her arm, a kind of hinge between the words, to indicate a comma. Later, after the line, “Black seeds on a white dish,” to signal a series of ellipses on the next line, Dentz pointed dots across the air between her and her captivated audience. Farther along in the poem, she held up both hands to indicate parenthesis around, “pores.” Later, again, parenthesis, her hands, held the words she read: “like shadows.”
Other poems she read that evening:
from Leaf Weather:
1. “what transforms a white bough, for instance” (fast forward sign)
2. anatomy
3. Leaf Weather
from black seeds on a white dish:
4. The Grasses Unload Their Grief
5. The Wind of Madness Has Broken a Skin
6. Limn
7. Numbness and Shade
8. -TUDE
9. Here
10. The Moon Is an Antiseptic in Your Religion.
11. Autobiography
12. Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad in a Monet painting
13. Blue Skies
14. A Ritual
–Ely Shipley
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
An interview with Farrah Field, Jared White and Shelton Walsmith
How long has Yardmeter Editions been going on?
Shelton Walsmith: In April, Yardmeter Editions will be 2 years old.
Farrah Field: We try to have events once a month, but sometimes we just do it when we can. We try to keep it pretty stress free.
Jared White: Yardmeter started up as an event series in Shelton’s beautiful and cozy Gowanus studio. Shelton, poet Mathias Svalina, and a third friend, Jon Pack, started it up. Farrah was actually featured as a reader in the first event, in which Mathias read poems as well and Jon hung his photographs on the large blank dry wall in Shelton’s space.
What is your favorite thing about curating the series?
Farrah Field: Our series is generally designed to be multi-media events and I really like getting to know the artists, musicians, film makers, writers, etc. who attend and who have presented. Although Yardmeter Editions is a series, I really like it that we treat each happening as its own event.
Shelton Walsmith: And it’s an opportunity to shine light on talented artists who may or may not have other venues for their work. Everywhere, but I think especially in New York, the climate of competition is such that artists have to hit the streets and beat the bushes in search for opportunities to showcase their talent and further their careers. Having done this myself for many years, and always wishing for invitations rather than rejections, curating satisfies a larger ambition: to be a part of the New York art world by creating it on a grass roots level.
Jared White: We love being able to gather people who are doing very different kinds of work, especially in different mediums. New York is so balkanized in terms of art scenes that it is fun to bring people together who might not otherwise meet in conversation. Some of our most exciting events (though hard to plan!) have been one-off evenings in which presenters were able to collaborate beforehand – an artist responding to poets and vice versa – and we look forward to doing more of these sort of unique high-concept events in the future. The full name of the series, Yardmeter Editions, suggests our desire to play with the limits of the transitory event versus the artifact, and we’ve talked about various ways to explore this aspect further.
In particular, I think something that Farrah and I particularly enjoy (though I also find it very stressful) is exploring various ways to do introductions. We’ve tried reading whole poems by presenters, doing complicated flowcharts about the presenters’ work, recording our introductions beforehand and playing them as audio files, and performing live interviews.
Tell me about any other people who work on the series.
Shelton Walsmith: In the past Yardmeter consisted of poet Mathias Svalina and photographer Jon Pack. I think back on the people who have performed as being collaborators, for instance, filmmaker Cat Tyc has shown her work but, like Jon, remained as a technical advisor. I also feel the regular members of the audience have collaborated with us somehow, perhaps in their abiding presence but more importantly in their shared memory of events. That said the consistent force behind Yardmeter Editions is the three of us.
Farrah and Jared are writers with an enormous openness and capacity for ideas and experience. As individuals they are assured enough in their own work to concentrate attention on the writers within their immediate sphere but also to reach out and connect with the work of others outside the comfort zone. As a couple they make an irresistible stand-up act. Kind of good cop bad cop without the bad cop…Our partnership began with Farrah’s initial involvement as a performer at Yardmeter. Since then the three of us have evolved into a good shared vision. It’s exciting working with them because while they are very rooted and plugged into poetry culture they also view change/growth/development as essential to a functioning event series.
Jared White: Farrah and I are poets and so our knowledge and social network tends to lead toward other writers, whereas Shelton as a painter knows a lot of artists that he wants to invite to Yardmeter; still, Farrah and I have invited visual artists and Shelton has invited writers so there is definitely no hard and fast rule about this.
After Cat Tyc, a video artist and writer, showed her short film, “Umbrella,” for Yardmeter last spring, we invited her to help out with future events and she’s been a terrific asset in facilitating the use of a projector to show short films. Jon Pack has also been an invaluable part of Yardmeter; beyond being of the hosts, he showed work from his photography project exploring derelict Olympic stadiums in the first Yardmeter and has done amazing work at many of our events taking photographs to document these transitory occasions for posterity (and Facebook).
Farrah Field: I really like it when Shelton, Jared, and I get together to plan events. We have all kinds of ideas—we like generating ways to break away from the typical reading format. (Think about it: a reading in total darkness. It can happen!) So planning events that have artwork that speaks to what poets and musicians are doing, well, it takes quite a bit of planning.
What are the best and worst things about the venue?
Jared White: Shelton’s studio is located right on top of one of the one-hundred-year-old toxic spills that pepper the Gowanus valley. It’s such a terrible situation environmentally and an enormous worry; it seems to me to be a very positive development that these sites have finally been given superfund status so eventually they will be cleaned up. In the meantime, the superfunding of the area may stave off development and allow it to retain its gritty, arty texture amidst the surrounding neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn. It is wonderful to walk up Douglass St and feel like you are coming upon a secret. Shelton’s studio is very friendly and it is always such a wonderful feeling simply to be in his space. (Not to mention the unforgettable Brooklyn skyline visible from the roof.) The only downside we have found so far is that the space gets very hot in the summertime when filled up with people, but we’ve addressed this issue simply by just taking a break. We’ve talked about perhaps taking Yardmeter outdoors to a nearby park or rooftop and hopefully we may get this going next summer.
Farrah Field: I love how homey Shelton’s studio is, a space where people can present and perform without having to worry about background bar noise and that sort of thing.
Shelton Walsmith: Because the venue is my painting studio, I could go on at great length about its problems. Before anything it is my work space and a sanctuary to follow my vocation. I work there 5-6 days a week. Having a monthly event series can be very taxing when you proliferate large objects which have to be shuffled safely around on a monthly basis. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to paint. Gone are the days when an artist could find an otherwise unused cold water flat and make art for $100 a month because it’s ugly old Brooklyn. Now Brooklyn is a destination instead of a last resort. My studio is very expensive to maintain and at times, especially when we started Yardmeter I was at risk of losing it for lack of resources. However, this financial focus was one of the reasons I began approaching writers in 2008 to join forces and stage events there. The full weight of the financial meltdown was dawning and every conversation I had with artists was all gloom and doom. It was real but it was tiring and discouraging that people ordinarily obsessed with art and culture were now obsessing on “the end of art as a means to make money.” Since my space is largish (aside from a load bearing column in the center of the room which is another stone in my shoe) it is a fairly open and can handle an audience. I saw an opportunity to punch a small hole in the presiding despair with a bohemian venture that had nothing to do with money.
Despite all that, it’s a room full of possibility. Constant rearrangement (while a pain) is completely doable. There is a place to step outside and still be in touch with what’s going on inside. It’s old and has architectural details that speak to this older New York idea.
What is your favorite Yardmeter memory over the last couple of years?
Shelton Walsmith: Our most recent Yardmeter was number 13. So many magic things have happened I hesitate to isolate individual memories. The musician Snowblink sent chills down the foundation of the building. The antlers attached to her guitar created a daemon which still lives in the room. Recently playwright Kristen Kosmas did something unforgettable with clarinetist Chris Speed. Cellist James David Jacobs conducted a rousing chorus of about 40 of us singing, “You haven’t been eating scalloped potatoes for 3 days, like I have!” in row-row-row your boat-like sections. Mathias Svalina imprinted us with a pulpit style delivery which leaps to mind as the high bar established for future Yardmeters. Oh hell, all of it. I am always so pleased to be there more as an awed witness than a proud host.
Farrah Field: One of my favorite events was when painter Bari DeJaynes collaborated with three poets prior to the event. He mailed small pieces to each of the readers and on the night of the event, they each read something they wrote in response to the work Bari sent. In turn, Bari made new pieces that responded to all of the poets’ work. I loved that!
Jared White: I love how every event always offers some spontaneous energy and excitement – for instance:
– a live lottery to determine which Yardmeter audience member could go home with a piece by the New Zealand-based sculptor Kristin D’Agostino in a globe-circling artistic exchange.
– Paige Ackerson-Kiely sitting down on the steps to the fire escape during a mesmerizing reading of her poems
– Much-missed ex-New Yorkers Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen offering readings from Denver on an abstract collaborative video piece at the event for Trickhouse
–Leah Souffrant performing a poem for two voices by reading live over a ghostly tape recording of herself
–the audience trying on necklaces designed by the poet Paige Taggart while she did a reading of her work from memory
–impromptu folk dancing to Central European gypsy/klezmer by Jeff Perlman and Patrick Farrell of Romashka
I’m always just so honored and happy to be able to invite some of our favorite writers, artists, musicians and other creative folks to come spend time with us and show us what they are working on – especially those who are coming in from beyond New York City and who we wouldn’t get to see otherwise.
photographs by: Jon Pack
** The next Yardmeter Editions will be held on Friday, December 17 at 7pm. **
— Ken L. Walker
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
InDigest Magazine celebrated its three year anniversary on Sunday, December 12th at Le Poisson Rouge. InDigest Magazine is an online journal which curates readings in New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The anniversary party also served as a fundraiser for Dean Young who needs a heart transplant. For more Coldfront coverage on Dean Young click here.
Editors, Jess Grover and Dustin Luke Nelson introduced the readers. There were nine readers and each reader read for between 5 and 7 minutes. The readers were asked to read a poem by someone they admired in addition to their own work. The readers included Coldfront‘s Poets off Poetry editor Jackie Clark, who has recently released two chapbooks, Red Fortress and Office Work. The other readers were myself, Martin Rock, Bianca Stone, Becca Klaver, Erica Wright, Autumn Giles, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Leigh Stein. Stein is the author of chapbooks, Summer in Paris, How to Mend A Broken Heart with Vengeance and Combatives # 5. Here’s Stein’s set-list:
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