Archive for June, 2011

Black Seeds on a White Dish

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

by Shira Dentz
Shearsman Books 2010
Reviewed by Cindy Hochman

“glossy oval backs”

Despite the achromics in the title of her book, Shira Dentz utilizes color to paint what mourning looks like: not funereal black, but green. Beginning with two epigraphs (“the appetite//for comfort went looking//inner, tonal//for where the green begins” by Fanny Howe and “a thousand needlesful of green & blue thread” by Francis Ponge), these poems are a study of loss in living color, a valiant attempt to breathe life into a brother who died in childhood.  From the Whitmanesque, but melancholy title of the opening poem, “The Grasses Unload Their Grief,” and throughout the book, the poet unloads a heavy burden; if there is any joy here, it is muted by a profound keening:

A son, a brother.

By the time we slipped back into our bodies, the chain had
shrunk like an umbilical cord.

Instead of words, my mother uttered syllables that fit onto silver
teaspoons whose glossy oval backs flew into the sky.

Instead of words, my father blew cinders.

As if to demonstrate the poet’s lament that “I’d rather play with a ghost than all alone,” she has relegated all of her otherworldly concerns to the shadowy background while the homage to her brother remains sharply focused. To be sure, there is an array of provocative topics (bisexuality, infidelity) in this book, but they are only hinted at, while her spirit brother appears frequently in a panoply of shapes–in glances, in glimpses.  There he is in “the landscape of a shaft of wheat”; here he is singing Beatles lyrics with his sibling; here he stands in a childhood photograph (“a charcoal blue wool hat, the matching scarf with small snowflakes sewn onto his snowsuit, the dresser drawers that were his”)–and, yes, even in the small dots that appear, literally and figuratively, on the page.

I look for him
when we pass boats,
wooden tables, the sign “Wonderland.”

(from “Ribs”)

And again, there is color:

blue your brother
gone, missing, lost, who…

…

Gone, like a cuff link.

Shira Dentz’s work is a compelling hybrid of the literal and lateral, starting off in the living room perhaps, but ending up on the moon. The key to this poet’s logic is in her own declarations that “I will appreciate disconnected bits of form” and “some people like to find unassociated bits of things and put them together.” It is in these “bits of things” that the poet, and ostensibly the reader, can find wholeness.

This poet’s forté is her diversity of form.  Her best poems showcase a wide range of styles, from poems that look like poems, to imaginative prose, to word barrages under quirky titles (“Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad in a Monet painting,”  “The Moon is an Antiseptic in Your Religion”).  She is in top form when free-associating. The award-winning poem “A Thin Green Line” seems not so much written as shot out of a cannon; it is the perfect forum for Dentz’s deft engagement of the senses, and to once again dwell in color (“a green thought in a green shade”):

Dino     pistachio     Osiris     mucus     cumin     cucumber

caterpillar          lilypad              pine          thyme    vine

In the delicate and sensual poem “Chantilly Lace,” the color reverts to various shades of white, but there is more disappointment than purity tucked demurely amidst the Victorian setting and frilly linens:

The end of a love affair has the extravagance
Of a wedding; so much cream,
Fabric, reams and reams.

“Concert” is a breathless dance of confusion and betrayal:

Clamp the wings butting wings butting wild in a jar–bitter white–
She’s on stage in gold satin pants–You in another woman’s bed–me,
Coughing–I dance,           danced with you,           wine in my legs.

These poems are not without their flaws.  Even allowing for stylistic nuance and the poet’s own desire for disconnection, some of the poems are marred by cliches (“twinkling stars,” “still, as a lake”) and mixed metaphors, and some are crushed under the weight of clunky syntax. For all their bluntness and blatancy, her fragments and subtle clues do not always need to tell the whole story beyond the emotional jarring. Nevertheless, the power of Shira Dentz’s poetry lies in what is left unsaid–the secrets she allows herself to keep. You will find death here, both physical and spiritual.  But there is also ripe fruit (avocado, persimmon), a burgeoning of color, and the hopeful greens of birth and rebirth.

*

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spotlight: Travis Nichols

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

The Dark Arts, That Is

Interview by Ken L. Walker

***

A preferential statement is awfully difficult to make because, as Foucault writes, it is only etched into a culturally temporal concrete.  It is, in actuality, systems of discipline that coerce us to believe our statements are eternal. In fact, they’re dead once they reverberate into the ether. Nevertheless, some statements reverberate into an individual’s memory, and there live on, at least until Alzheimer’s sets in. Travis Nichols performed this feat when he wrote one of 2010′s best lines — “Poetry is an ovary with an eyeball in it.” That comes from the poem “March 21, 2003” and the collection See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). That line, seemingly, sums up the methodology with which Nichols consults the page — a constant process of waking up within the possibility of the lack of a true waking state. In his first collection of poems, Iowa (Letter Machine Editions, 2009), Nichols comparably wrote, “All I had to cure was the boredom, but it never moved.”

Both his books of poetry attend to the necessary timeliness of the statement, yet the poems in both extend themselves in different forms. Nichols is a trickster, a narrative breaker, a taunter who may either be smiling or smirking. Whoever can tell is lucky. He lightens the load on everything heavy, drawing attention to its innocent subconsciousness torn down by the not-so-innocent actuality that being smaller isn’t painful but funny, that dying isn’t an end or a sleep but a “new, strange dream.” Nichols, unlike most folks (Foucault would be proud), never seems to be afraid that his statements are representatives of him, aware that behind the statement or the declaration is a life that hides or sleeps or produces boredom. That’s where it’s at. There’s a ubiquitous level of deceptive mockery which poses as though it doesn’t come back around to a mockery of self, a la many of the great latter New York School poets.

Nichols lives in Chicago and is an editor at The Poetry Foundation. He’s also published a novel on Coffee House Press. We exchanged e-mails for about a month and compiled the following conversation.

***

KW: You have interviewed quite a few hefty hitters, namely John Ashbery, James Franco, and Rachel Zucker. What do you think an interview should do/get at/attempt/succeed at?

TN:  There’s a school of thought that poets (or novelists, or painters, or musicians, or, sure, macramé enthusiasts) shouldn’t be interviewed, that they should say what they have to say in the work itself, and after the work gets “out there,” the poets and macramé enthusiasts should maintain a respectful silence in the face of the ensuing criticism.  Is this true?  Sometimes.  I’ve read my share of Paris Review and Crafts ‘n’ Things interviews that I sure wish I hadn’t.  But other times, it’s nice to read the poet or macramé enthusiast in conversation.  In the same way it can be nice to read blogs, or diaries, or letters, because some people have a gift for conversation and writing-as-thinking-on-the-fly, though, yes, sometimes they have this gift and not so much the poetic/macramé gift.  And charming (or “controversial”) interview subjects often get more attention than good poets (okay, forget macramé for now) who freeze up in the spotlight.  In this interview I could say “Poetry is an ovary with an eyeball in it,” but I’d rather say it in my poems, which I hope are more interesting than anything I might say here. But why do I have to choose?  I don’t, but I think in dichotomies because I went to thinking school.  Anyways, I do think interviews can contribute to the environment of impoverished criticism, because everybody (me included!) wants friends and/or employers.  But all that aside, one thing I think your interviews (in particular) do really well is to get poets to come into your headspace a little bit, to drift from canned classroom/AWP panel answers about poetry into, let’s face it, some pretty funky territory, which I hope we’ll enter in here at some point.

What kind of films were you watching when you were writing/revising See Me Improving?

The earliest poem in the book is from 2001 (when I was 22), and the last is from, I think, 2009 (when I was 23–no, haha, just kidding–30), so I watched a lot of films in those 8 years.

Earlier, when I lived in a flophouse in Northampton, Massachusetts and had a borrowed combination VHS/TV unit propped on a milk crate, I was fascinated with Claire Denis, how in a film like Beau Travail or Chocolat she would let the camera linger well past the human-action of the shot, building atmosphere and a rapport between the viewer and the scenery.  I guess like Antonioni did, but her version has a little less black-and-white angst than he had.  Anyways, poems like “Blue Prince of Breath” float in that area, as well as “First Light at Lascaux,” which actually has a scene from Truffaut’s Small Change nestled into it.

Antonioni’s final shot in Blow Up does that so well. What do you think, then, of Ashbery’s “Forties Flick”?

I had to go look it up, and, of course, it’s a great poem.  Fucking Ashbery.  It’s like, what do you do?  You can’t ignore him and not read him or willfully misunderstand him like the hobo train of anti-intellectual jackasses do, but his style is so seductive that any sensitive reader will be drawn to it.  That Grand Guignol lamentation mixed with some everyday doofus thinking it through.  I shake my fist at it and let out a profound sigh, which you won’t have heard or seen but I’m telling you about it anyway.  Maybe the best thing to do is just to embrace the suffocating pillow?  Not a bad way to die. What do you think of “Forties Flick”?

I think it triumphs where many Ashbery poems confuse, contort or fail, in the sense that it is his presentation of a scene (a noir scene, at that) where the triangulation of poet-reader-object/subject is so clearly and crisply provided that he is probably in the scene. The passage of time slows and simultaneously expands the dimensions of space which helps the poet fully succeed in directing his reader, thus making the poet director and poet.

What were you reading while writing and revising this book?

I like that triangulation idea.  It does make me think of playing the triangle in music class.  What a great thing, playing the triangle!  But, yes, books:  Towards the end, I was reading a lot of Philip Whalen.  Living in Seattle, I felt his presence hovering around my daydreamy, freelancing-from-home days since he was a very Pacific Northwest writer and also a great daydreamer.  I’d like to get back into that way of thinking at some point in the future, but I can’t really see it happening anytime soon since I am back in the Midwest where it’s a bit harder to snowboard.  I probably should make more of a point to wander around and do nothing, but there’s always some little fire that needs putting out.

In the flight-of-verbal-fancy stuff (“Gallant Phantoms Through the Pineapple Door”), or at least the more not-everyday imagery, I like to think my reading of people like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe comes through, though probably more like Philip Lamantia and some idea of Meret Oppenheim.  Since I first encountered it (and him), I’ve read and read Eric Baus‘s poetry, letting it lead me into some seriously bonkers cognition territory. And through him I’ve come to love Nathaniel Mackey for his dilation of experience.

There’s a frequent looking back over the shoulder in this book at the uncertainty of childhood — but with a twist. The twist seems to be that a boy is looking back on his boyhood, and both identifications are absurdly yet surrealistically confident. Twisted, though. Can you speak to that?

Emotion recollected in tranquility doesn’t seem quite right, more emotion recollected with an equal if not greater emotion distorting it.  I don’t know.  Wordsworth made up the idea of childhood, so now it’s become a “thing.”  Being a kid was great and sad and true, so why not use it?  It’s as good a myth as we have, and besides we were smaller, which is funny.

I’ve been thinking a lot of this lately, how a concept turns damn near into an object. Marx claimed that ideas are materials. But, even further from that, in a sort of a way that the Antarctic isn’t even there; earth controlling the mind, or at least playing tricks on it. Perception, a prisoner to limits—how the indigenous folks couldn’t see Columbus and his imperial ships but they could see differences in the current of the water.

Wait, the Antarctic isn’t there?

What I am thinking of is something like how the earth as a corridor itself forms its own interior corridors, and allows us a certain level of perception, and we break through those corridors through technological innovation, etc—in the case of landing on the moon, breaking the “sound barrier,” and climbing mountains and especially living in the Antarctic (where clearly human beings are only equipped to live if they have the right technological innovations; if a human being were naked in the Antarctic, he or she would freeze to death in no less than 36 minutes). As well, when European colonists first landed, indigenous folks told similar stories in different parts of the continent that they could not see the ships, but they could tell something insanely big was in the water because the water felt different. Perception is the real border to examine.

I like that.  The hard part is not to become so focused on the nuances of your own perception that you end up in your own private Antarctica, or so in tune with your own personal waters that you go around maniacally cursing the world for not recognizing the secret genius of your morning pee.  I really worry about that for poets, probably from having had so many “normal” (read: actually imaginative and strange but not “arty”) people tell me that they hate poetry.  I should probably embrace the hatred (“Bully for them”) but, fatally, I want to be liked.  That’s the second time I’ve mentioned that in this interview.  Why?  Do you like me, Ken?

I’d sure as hell have a Bell’s Two Hearted and a neat pour of Basil Hayden’s with you. Tell me your ideas about friendship. What should a friendship be, look like? I’m thinking now of John Berryman, Etheridge Knight, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I had a profound experience when I took LSD for the first time, with five or six people who weren’t really my friends but whom I knew well enough to take LSD with.  Do people still have friends like this?  Probably.  Anyways, up until then, I had (selfishly) considered someone my friend only if I could rely on him or her to save me when I went into one of my frequent depressive swoons.  I was really morose and whiny, very emo, and, well, depressed, and I would do things like try to put a cigarette out on my arm just to see who would think it was a tragic waste. Very boring.  Not fun, and, in fact, I wouldn’t blame you if it made you reconsider wanting to share a drink with me . . . but wait!  I had this really awful experience on acid with these kids, and while it scared the bejeezus out of me (E=T=E=R=N=I=T=Y), it did helpfully throttle me into realizing that no one was going to save me.  No one was going to just go ahead and call off the game on account of pity (or, in the case of this acid experience, rescue me from the Aztecs with swirling eyes who wanted to suck me into the weird psychic vortex of the linoleum).  I was alone with all that emo, and I had to live with it, or not, as the case turned out to be, as I got my shit together after I built my consciousness back up and stopped being such a drama queen about everything.  All of which is to say, I feel the lesson holds true for “poetry friends.”  I love my friends (duh), but I think it’s dangerous to write for them, to hope to please them, or to hope that they will be able to save poems that I know are actually derivative failures.  No one can write the poems for you, in other words, and in the end you have to live with what you’ve put your name to, so maybe those contests that aren’t taking your manuscript are doing you a favor?  (You, in this case (as always?) means the straw-man in my mind, not you personally).   I’m certainly happy that Fence did not publish my 22-year old epic, “Hello, Bee-Thigh Mane,” because goodness knows I wouldn’t have handled it well, and, in fact, it was more fun to join my friends in feeling all superior about the stuff that was getting published at the time.  Perhaps this is really what friends are for.  As far as Berryman, Knight, Emerson, or the New York School, or the San Francisco Renaissance, I think mostly those friendships consisted of alcohol-fueled mansplaining, which I’m a little wary of (despite my prolixity in this here interview), and the good poetry happened incidentally.  Just because Frank O’Hara wrote poems during raucous lunch hours doesn’t mean every poem written during raucous lunch hours will equal Frank O’Hara’s.

Do you feel directly influenced by Surrealism? A reader could certainly take away many notions of early Modernist work from reading SMI (a bit of nonsensical Futurism, some elements of Dada, etc… and of course surrealism).

I’ve spent a lot of time with Motherwell’s Dadaist Poets and Painters, and I when I was writing a lot of these poems I was sorting through translations of Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault, experimenting with my own translations which were wonderful private exercises, though terrible. There’s also a thing which I’m sure you’ve noticed which is called UMass Surrealism.  Michael Earl Craig, Heather Christle, Matthew Zapruder, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Noah Eli Gordon . . . we were all subjected to Surrealism Boot Camp during our first weeks in the Pioneer Valley.  They made us shout “My duck sat on a firecracker!” and to wash our socks in fur with the night nailed to our foreheads like an orange.  That kind of thing.  I have no regrets.

Forgive me for not knowing that group of contemporary poets can be summed up as “UMass Surrealism.” And I like Dorothea’s work a lot. I heard Heather read once, which was great.

Oh yes.  Umass Surrealism.  Someone should do an anthology and include Zach Schomburg as an honorary degree-holder, have the Secret Sisters do the intro in a series of two-panel cartoons, maroon boards, a CD of field recordings from old riverboat journeys along the Vistula, only barter for old copies of Lucky Darryl . . .   Anyways, yes. Dottie is a beacon for me.  I gather courage from reading her work, and from hearing her belt out her poems.  She was always great to have in MFA classes because she would read her wild poems and everyone would look around blankly, then some timid soul would say something like, “I don’t know about this ‘morning wood with its pool of sad nurses,’ . . .” This would usually lead to some guy clearing his throat to lecture us all about how you can or can’t say certain things in poems, how ‘morning wood’ is not a suitable subject for a poem unless handled with a certain delicacy and awe, advice Dottie would then gleefully ignore.  James Tate always seemed to like her, which is a boon.  It seemed easy to please Jim if you put animals in your poems, but then, for me, I would try and dump a menagerie into some ten-line piffle, and he would just look at me with those google-eyes like I was a world-class dullard he couldn’t quite believe had made it out of my baby-crib without inadvertently choking on my own tongue.

If you had to, what animal would you find best to enter into a poem?

Patrick Culliton.

When I think of James Tate, I think of that poem “Rescue” from his first book, The Lost Pilot. Love is dangerous; what is dangerous can rescue us if we’re not afraid of it. Great stuff. But, I never think of him or his followers as essentially surrealist.

I’m sure he’d appreciate that, since he has been badgered about “American Surrealism” for years, and his work, at its best, is much weirder and richer than whatever that is.

All the soluble fish dry off. I’ve always enjoyed the anthology The Dada Market; though it is not surrealism, it’s nice to look at a large open field so full of unique differences but slapped with the same grass. Basically, the label is a bit gray.

I remember interviewing Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields (total disaster, by the way) and he said to me, “Smashing genre is what I do.”  Oh really?!  I would love to be the type of person who could say that sort of thing, or something like “labels are useless,” but I actually find them to be kind of useful.  I may be a shallow and evil person.  What’s The Dada Market?  Never read it.

The Dada Market is a great anthology that SIU Press put out in the nineties. It features Tzara, Man Ray, Huelsenbeck, etc…but it also displays some unusual, lesser heard of Dadaist/Ultraist poets. And that kind of poetry presented as mixtape-reading, anthologized patterns, can really help a poet struggling to alter their metaphorical capabilities. At least I find the exercises in both Dadaism and Surrealism are very helpful with pushing the envelope of an individual poet’s analogic qualities. I give it to students who need to drain cliches out of their minds and figure something new out.

I just put it on hold at the library.  I look forward to reading it.

The most intriguing poem in SMI, to me, is “Recess,” because of the abrupt turn that occurs at the end of the poem. The fable all of a sudden becomes very real and vivid and feels panoptical. Did you intend to construct it that way?

I think that one was the product of a bit too much caffeine (which I’ve recently gone back to after six whole months away.  Turns out I was even duller and more wooly-headed without it, and so now I suffer giddily in its clutches).  I got carried away by a fit of scribbles and once I was back to myself I found that I had written a poem.  It was “Recess” of the mind.  I’m glad you like it.  I wasn’t really sure if it was any good, and I still have my reservations.  But I’ve found that what I think is good during the writing process and what turns out to actually be good in other people’s eyes are radically different.  So I’m perpetually confused and disappointed by the arts.

What could “the Arts” do to un-disappoint you, to erase the jadedness they create?

Stop sucking?  No, haha, “the Arts” are great!  The dark arts, that is.

I guess I mean I’m disappointed and confused about why I persist in trying to create my version of “art” when it never quite turns out the way I had hoped.  And I’m not good at just throwing up my hands and saying, “It’s the MUSE moving THROUGH me!  I take no responsibility for what APPEARS!” (fingery majesty and then the laying of some terrible sprayed language on the world).  Monica Fambrough (great poet, also my wife) recently joked to me about how she’d like to present her most recent “project” at a reading, and then unveil a dinosaur diorama. But I think struggle is generative, anxiety productive, and so that’s why I try to also exercise and watch TV so as not to really lose my mind.  I might have tipped the balance in the wrong direction with this year’s NBA playoffs, where the radical insistence of the self happens.  I have been having some very deep thoughts about the pick and roll and FLOW, but my guess is that expressing them out loud would make me sound like someone Kenneth Koch would like to have strangled in “Fresh Air.”

 

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AUDIO: Lehman, Yeager, Sisskind @ KGB Bar

Friday, June 24th, 2011

Here is some belated audio from three readings given this past spring as part of The KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series. David Lehman and Matthew Yeager read together on Monday, March 28; Mitch Sisskind read on Monday, May 9. The KGB Series is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez, and Michael Quattrone. These recordings were made (somewhat crudely) from a table at the bar.

 

 

“Sleep, Mothers,”  Matthew Yeager

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“Sleep, Mothers” was first published by Supermachine.

 

 

 

“Anyplace I Hang My Hat,” David Lehman

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“Criticism is Death,” David Lehman

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“He Wore an Alarm Clock,” Mitch Sisskind

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“He Wore an Alarm Clock” was first published at The Best American Poetry Blog.

 

 

 

 

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Holy Son of the Bop Apocalypse: An interview with polymath Emil Amos by Lisa Wells

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

I started reading poetry during puberty, a meeting of kindred logics. Like anyone, naivetes cued up to be crushed. I thought poets belonged in the street brandishing their wine bottle at the moon, in ecstasy and burning at all times. Now I suppose I imagine the annex of cubicles provided adjunct teachers at the state university, the pale skin and bitter ash, the sneering face over the cafe table that’s learned the identity of this year’s Whitman winner. In envy and smoldering. I’ve since been informed that one should never include the word “moon” in a poem.  Also; stars, darkness, love, and death. And I guess it makes sense. If the whole of planet earth must submit to domestication, why should poetry be immune?

Because the poem is holy.

Perhaps this is the final naivety to be crushed but it’s where I meet Emil Amos, in his ten dollar Supercuts Taper, to commiserate. Since 1992 Amos has written and recorded more than 1000 songs under the name Holy Sons. While simultaneously recording and touring with heavyweights like OM and Grails, Holy Sons has persisted as a basement project that, despite all efforts to avoid publicity and commercial success, has collected a massive cult following. Until this year, Holy Sons has appeared live just a handful of times, including openings for Quasi, Devendra Banhart, Will Oldham, J Mascis, Daniel Johnston, and a show at a community center in Dharmasala, India (difficult offers to refuse, one presumes.) Some have called the project an exercise in personal catharsis, but it seems to me a strategy for staying in love.

In an era of excessively pleasant indie music, so much chamber folk, so many pretty girls affecting a vocal style like a doped Brenda Lee, Amos continues to explore the shadows; extreme states, despair, spiritualism. He screams sometimes. Unbranded and unencumbered by a single “sound”, each song is its own world, its own experiment. The style shifts but the speaker remains, like a sleeper moving through dreams, or like the chapters of an acid trip. Now, in its 20th year, Holy Sons seems to be emerging publically and I wondered why.

LW: I’ll start by bringing up some old shit. When I begged you to play my birthday party a few years ago you said “I hope Holy Sons never plays live again.” But now you’re touring. What gives?

EA:  Historically I dreaded presenting myself, from the very beginning… The fairy tale that most people envision concerning success was never in the cards for me. I just kept writing instead of confronting the dynamic head-on, for almost two decades. I’d flirt with playing shows, but mostly, especially in Portland, I found the whole thing profoundly miserable and ultimately, not the point.

By a series of peripheral factors concerning my other bands I eventually found myself with a great booking agent, and by this later period, I had trouble summoning the energy to really care about the dilemma at all… which freed me up to enter a more experimental state of mind concerning presenting myself.

I had a conversation with a friend in earlier days that, for me, had helped clear up the dynamic partially. I’d asked him if someone were to invent something and/or think a valuable thought, would the point of its profundity be that the thought/invention occurred at all… or would the point of its existence be that it was communicated to the larger community? Without hesitation, he answered that if no one knew about it, then it really didn’t exist. My stomach kind of sank… how people generally view the machinations of our individual will vs. the popular attitude disturbs me.

It was pretty clear that I was a tree falling in the forest with no one around… and I really didn’t see why it should matter that no one knew I existed if my own thoughts and discoveries are of direct value to me. If I was born to make a music characterized by ‘aloneness’, then the frontier of playing in front of people brought that hermetic tradition into a new and more complex arena.

A lotta kids grow up with dreams of playing music and emulate their musical heroes like you’d watch a pro baseball player… a simple mythology that’s inextricably tied to success and social affirmation. But that’s not what I was dreaming of… I wanted to be delivered beyond temporal things to the actual truth… and music is a practical vehicle you can use to reap actual spiritual rewards if you can perceive how to achieve freedom through it.

DRIFTER’S SYMPATHY from The Fact Facer on Vimeo.

LW: Your songs are full of religious/spiritual references, psychedelia, ecstatic transcendentalism… lots of trippy godhead stuff in your music videos. At one point you were at work on a memoir about a guru you followed. Can you tell me more about him and how he affected your work?

EA: That was a major goal of mine probably about six years ago but it’s been abandoned for now. At that time some friends and I weren’t sure if he’d died and I was in an in-between period in my life where I felt compelled to write. …But then we located him and it became clear that he didn’t want to be identified or associated with in any public way. There’s definitely an element of paranoia and LSD damage in both of our temperaments, distaste for being made public… but he took it all the way. When we were young I definitively wanted to make records… so I was unconsciously preparing for whatever trials were coming. I don’t think he really had enough naivety or maybe respect for others to really believe it was a worthy endeavor. We flirted with some radical anti-commercial ideological restraints and they ended up helping to strangle his ability to make anything. This is not dissimilar from other idols I’d had…Fred Neil, Syd Barrett, Gene Clark, Danny Kirwan/Peter Green—were all people whose understanding of why they should present music to others became corroded… their naivety destroyed.

In ways, that story is one of the only things that inspires true sadness in me… I actually broke down crying one morning in a bagel shop trying to explain his situation. I felt that we saw the world in the exact same ways… spiritually bereft. We flirted with falling off the face of the earth and not existing… but at some point I pulled out… and he’s still alive so I suppose it could have been worse.

LW:  I think that conflict, that feeling of being between worlds really comes across. There’s an ecstatic reverence in your music and simultaneous recognition of death. Like Lorca’s conception of Duende, or the Sufi’s… I love this section from “Things you do While Waiting for the Apocalypse.” It’s such a call to arms!

Did you build from the ground your own church?/ Down with the written histories /Celebrate the graves that  you stand upon

…I wonder how much of that spiritual bankruptcy is owed to carefulness. I mean, ironically, you see it more in poetry these days than in rock and roll but there’s this absolute horror of sentimentality. I suspect our generation confuses sentimentality with blood. People reign in their force to avoid making mistakes. You’ve written hundreds and hundreds of songs for Holy Sons and I wonder if writing that much helps to keep you open to the big forces.

EA: You’ve got a good theory about conservatism fucking with people’s ability to be completely honest. I’d say it’s always been that way though… People have always been embarrassed and hidden themselves to avoid potential persecutions… not realizing that it’s a disservice to themselves and everyone else to camouflage themselves.

I’m always going towards Happiness in the songs… but my version of Happiness is living in union with the way the universe actually is; which would mean admitting the difficulties that appear in an attempt to appreciate it, …having my feet on the actual ground… knowing what’s going on street-level and not being lost in visions of how I’d like the world to be.

In terms of writing, I’d say it’s extremely hard just to say what you mean… there’s an old idea that to learn a craft you need to stop everything for a year or two and live in a cave. But I’d say it really takes a solid decade to get to the bottom of your own point and ability to articulate it… it takes years to purge all the corrupted language and conditioned elements. There are so many celebrated artists that haven’t even really begun breaking down their conditioning long enough to have arrived at a unique statement.

A Chapter Must Be Closed >> Holy Sons from The Fact Facer on Vimeo.

LW: Speaking of street-level, a bunch of your song titles seem to refer to one collapse or another, apocalyptic, cultural. I wonder how your conception of those themes has changed, as an artist. Have the stakes changed for you?

EA:  Aging itself, maybe more than the surrounding age, has had a bigger effect on my process. Only because you become more and more deliberate and less about purely capturing a fleeting feeling as if it means everything… which has its advantages and disadvantages. Like you said, Holy Sons was built to be a continuous monologue… hugely influenced by the format of projects like Lou Barlow’s Sentridoh which captured a songwriter in various moments of the day or states of mind in their natural habitat. That seemed way more exciting and interesting to me as a listener. If any phenomenon of ‘genius’ does exist, it seemed much more likely to occur in a crease of less-inhibited-ness, being that the person was free to be mentally wandering on whatever drugs out in the woods with a hand-held tape recorder, not in an expensive/sterile studio at war with the engineer about mic-placement, ya know.

In terms of apocalypses and collapses… a lot of that imagery just comes from moments of brutal dark sarcasm, but there are other layers of truth behind it. Titles like “Doomsayer’s Holiday” or “Take Refuge in Clean Living” (Grails’ records) were originally just jokes that stuck… there just has to be enough of a double-meaning or parallel to my world-view to give them relevance, so I guess humor and dread lead back to the same place. The main thread though, is not that there’s an apocalypse occurring in the physical world like those recent doomsday predictions… but that there’s a spiritual apocalypse occurring constantly… I feel like Roddy Piper in “They Live” if he couldn’t take the shades off. (Not a recommendation of the film.)

LW: Where do you see that apocalypse manifest? Is there a way to be saved?

It may sound strange but I think the idea of predestination is actually pretty accurate, but maybe only when applied through a healthy lens of Taoism. I’m not interested in fighting the world… the world is the way it is by a certain design, so you’re forced to accept that design if you want to be in union with it.
I realize this all sounds very oversimplified, but, for me, a major part of happiness is in apprehending the design to one’s own ‘individual fate’. I became obsessed with this concept in college; everything was predetermined in my mind concerning one’s capacity to be aware, curious or to generally understand themselves. So, in the same way that a constant spiritual ‘apocalypse’ is not a literal physical occurrence, ‘Individual Fate’ is not about how things happen, but more about how our facilities for dealing with life are somewhat individually predetermined. This frame of mind helped me see the world from overhead as more of a larger organism, instead of something that just wasn’t arranged the way I might prefer it.

You have to develop a sense of humor about the limitations of a world that was born malnourished… to say the world is fucked isn’t to say it ought to change necessarily… it’s just like noticing the sun setting.

~~~

On Entering at Revelations

Had I known it would be this way
I might not have come. All of us skulking around
like hermit crabs, waiting to get inside
someone else’s life. Bunkers where shells
shock the ground and everyone sleeping through. Had I known
the gods were limping, the knotted cord and terrible ring
of thorns, the psalms reduced to mournful aluminum, 160bpm
and the tachychardic chatter of gunbelts emptying. Had I known
the snub-nosed .357, the subwoofer and the spoiler. The sun
always laughing, tongues of magma
lashing a black thinner than we can imagine.

The moon is long gone
but the light-bars are on and the boys are out
four-bying tonight, screaming “Get some!” Tossing the empties over.
Their faces are as simple as the hill at Golgotha, their smiles
the lightning bolt cracking through. One of them said he wanted inside me
as if it were that easy. As if any wound would do.
The moon gone and the hour late. Someone rolled
the boulder back. We kill the engine and wait
at the pouting lip of the cave for whatever resurrects.

Lisa Wells is the author of Yeah. No. Totally., a book of essays (Perfect Day Publishing, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals.  Most recently in Plazm Magazine, Ecotone, Dunes Review, Re:Union and 400 Words. Bedouin Books will release her chapbook this fall. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Trailer: Yeah. No. Totally. from Perfect Day Publishing on Vimeo.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

Posted in poets off poetry


Summer reading preserved Wave style

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

We here at Coldfront think summer is the perfect season for reading poetry.  The kind folks at Wave Books happen to agree, and have started a  tumblr page to post photos of people reading all kinds of poetry all over the world.  The best part is they want you to participate.  Here are the details from Wave:

“Send [Wave Books] your snapshots of people reading poetry as their summer reading of choice, and we’ll post our favorites here all summer long. If your photo is posted, you’ll be entered in a drawing for a 2011 Wave Books hardcover subscription – a $275 value! – to be given away Labor Day weekend. Send your photos to: poetrysummer@gmail.com. Happy reading!”

Check out the photos here.

* photo of Ellen reading Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting! taken from the Wave tumblr.

-steven karl


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Maggot

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

“…for having acted on a whim”

Commonly dubbed a “poet’s poet,” Paul Muldoon is well-known for his obscurity of references and ambitious rhyme schemes. His latest collection, Maggot, fits this mold, and is made up mainly of sequence poems, with sonnets and other shorter poems scattered throughout. It begins with “Plan B,” a sequence poem which was published separately in collaboration with photographer Norman McBeath in 2009. While readers of Plan B in its original volume had McBeath’s images to guide them through the poem, those coming to the poem in Maggot must simply rely on Muldoon’s vivid images, their own historical knowledge, or an intervention from Wikipedia. This is typical of Muldoon’s work. By the second stanza of the first canto, we have already been taken “away from the straight/ and narrow of Brooklyn or Baltimore for a Baltic state,” but Muldoon keeps us steady, from Cork to Vilna to New York, by beginning each stanza with the last line from the previous stanza.

After chasing the images in poems such as “Plan B,” which discusses Edward VII, Thomas Edison and the KGB, the reader might suspect that the links between these subjects are coming from the poet’s own associative mind. The poem, like McBeath’s photos, seeks to illuminate moments of cultural memory, particularly in times of great social change. The shorter poems are usually easier to decode. “Ohrwurm” is a four-line poem that begins with “Just as I’m loading up on another low carb pork rind snack” and manages to touch upon fears of mortality via the image of a crack in the speaker’s “wing-fuselage.”

Muldoon’s repetition of commonplace phrases like “I used to” in the title poem both unifies the poem and grounds it aurally, while simultaneously defamiliarizing it, somewhat in the fashion of Beckett–virtually detaching it from meaning. In the same poem, which is another sequence, the third stanza of each canto is the same “where I’m waiting for some lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim.” The transitions are often awkward, even as each canto fits its rhyme scheme. A comfortable attitude toward sexual promiscuity and perversion runs throughout the book, often juxtaposed with images of gruesome death and decay. This is most apparent in “The Humors of Hakone,” a long sequence that enumerates the unidentifiable parts of a decomposing corpse, relating them to a girl the speaker met at a “purikura.”

Paul Muldoon remains an Irish poet. Frogs and mushrooms continue to people his poems, along with other images and themes relevant to childhood in the Northern Irish countryside. “Moryson’s Fancy” provides an especially moving look at imperialism. He takes an image from Fynes Moryson’s A History of Ireland in which starving children feed upon the “entrails” of their mother, and then expands upon the story. He imagines the family is starving after a forced march, which would have been enacted by Lord Mountjoy, Moryson’s superior. A reference to Boudicaa, an Iceni queen who nearly drove the Romans out of her territory in England but ultimately lost, comments upon the timeless savagery of colonial forces. In the next stanza, the speaker wonders if, looking into their mother’s entrails, the children could “haruspicate,” or divine that the Muldoons would be forced off their land centuries on.

Muldoon continues to keep a close relationship with Belfast, where he lived and worked from 1969 to 1986. On February 25, 2011, he returned to Belfast to headline at the annual Bel/Nash festival at the Rhythm and Rhyme Concert alongside other Irish writers such as Owen McAfferty and folk musicians like Brian Kennedy. Muldoon recited two new poems. The second one, called “Julius Cesar was a People Person,” was a wry indictment chock full of accessible historical references and had a rhyme scheme akin to a song. His understated stage presence and soft but clear reading voice completed the humor of the poem and the beauty of its sound.

The object of the Rhythm and Rhyme concert was to demystify the process of song writing for non-industry folk. Each writer and musician was asked to collaborate to write a song for the occasion. Muldoon was paired with Brian Kennedy. According to Kennedy, Muldoon had e-mailed him his lyrics a week before, but then showed up on the day with a completely different set of verses, although you wouldn’t know it from the performance. Kennedy’s vocals flawlessly and emotively delivered Muldoon’s beautiful lyrics. The song, called “When I Heard the Sirens, I Tried to Harmonize,” concerns life in Belfast during the sectarian violence and destruction known as “The Troubles,” which plagued the latter half of the twentieth century in Ireland. But the song has further reach, referencing various other violence-plagued cities around the globe. Here, as ever, Muldoon displayed both a raw reality of the Northern Irish situation while managing to universalize it. Muldoon’s performance was revealing in understanding his appeal as a poet. While his work is sometimes obscure and difficult, and while the reader may sometimes feel led up the garden path, reading Muldoon is never without its rewards, and the garden is always beautiful.

*

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VIDEO: Bill Murray reads with poets at Poets House Bridgewalk

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Good poems have the power to disturb one’s complacency, says Bill Murray.

“They’re shocking. They shock people.”

The actor and comedian joined the poets Galway Kinnell, Terrance Hayes, Thomas Lux, and Eileen Myles for the 16th Annual Poets House Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge last Monday. (videos below)

The walk is the largest annual fundraiser for Poets House, the nation’s largest poetry library. Participants walked across the bridge at sundown, and the poets gave readings at stops along the way. The event culminated with a dinner at Bubby’s Brooklyn, where the poets read again, joined by Murray.

“He’s never ever not been here, except for one year when it was impossible,” said Poets House Vice President Frank Platt. That year, Murray was instead filmed reading poems for an audience of construction workers as the new Poets House was being built.

Murray read three pieces: Sarah Manguso’s “What We Miss,” Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness.” (videos below)

Poets House Executive Director Lee Briccetti described the Brooklyn Bridge as “a place of mutuality and service,” noting that onlookers frequently stopped and listened to the readings.

There were special moments, she said, like when Kinnell read Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” on the bridge, and a nearby ferry nearly drowned out part of the poem. Whitman first published the poem in 1856; the bridge was completed in 1883.

Myles, Hayes, and Lux also read poems on the bridge, and again at the dinner portion of the event. Murray had two black eyes for the reading, the result of makeup left on after an afternoon of filming Wes Anderson’s new film Moonrise Kingdom.

“It was pointed out to me by my son that I was scaring the straight people in the room – you know who you are – because I was have two full black eyes which I was given in a scene I was doing today and I forgot to take them off before I came,” he said. “This didn’t happen underneath the bridge, so I want you to know it is all safe to walk across.”

After Murray’s reading, Kinnell closed out the evening by reading the conclusion to Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

All News

 

Billy Murray “What We Miss” by Sarah Manguso

Bill Murray reads “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” by Cole Porter

Bill Murray reads “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

Terrance Hayes reads “New York Poem”

Eileen Myles reads “Mitten”

Galway Kinnell reads the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Set Lists

Bridgewalk

Eileen Myles:

“February,” James Schuyler
“Healing the World From Battery Park,” Tim Dlugos

Terrance Hayes:

“Brooklyn Bridge,” Vladimir Mayakovsky
“Harlem Sweeties,” Langston Hughes

Thomas Lux:

“Greenwich Village of My Dreams,” Tuli Kupferberg
“Granite and Steel,” Marianne Moore

Galway Kinnell

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Walt Whitman

Dinner Portion

Terrance Hayes:

“New York Poem”

Eileen Myles:

“Mitten”

Thomas Lux:

…

Bill Murray:

“What We Miss,” Sarah Manguso
Frank Platt reads a poem at Murray’s request
“Brush Up,” Cole Porter
“Forgetfulness,” Billy Collins

Galway Kinnell:

end of “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman

 

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Kate Colby @ Spring Litmus Book Release Party

Friday, June 17th, 2011

On Friday, June 10th, 2011 Litmus Press held its Spring Book Party at 443 PAS.  The reading was for Kate Colby’s Beauport, Leslie Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, and issue 10 of Aufgabe. The event featured readings by Charles Bernstein, Kate Colby, Stephanie Gray, Jill Magi, Christopher Stackhouse, and Joan Retallack.

Here’s Kate Colby’s set-list:

“Fashionable Turn-Outs in Central Park (1869)”

“The Sailor- Far- Far at Sea (1845)”

“Home To Thanksgiving (1867)”

“Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (n.d.)”*

“The Snow-Shoe Dance: To Thank the Great Spirit for the First Appearance of Snow (n.d.)”

 

* means video. Video & photo by Hitomi Yoshio

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-steven karl

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Salerno, Yeager at The Poetry Project

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

Monday, June 6th, 2011 marked the ending for the Spring Monday Night series at The Poetry Project, hosted and curated by MacGregor Card.  This evening event featured Brooklyn’s own Matthew Yeager, and recent New Jersey resident by way of North Carolina, Christopher Salerno.

Yeager read first and treated the audience to his poem “Chad Johnson” and some of his “Gut Sonnets.” After Yeager’s reading, there was a brief intermission where people mingled in the Project’s courtyard garden.

Salerno is the author of the books, Whirligig and Minimum Heroic. Recently, Horseless Press released his chapbook, ATM.  Salerno was also featured on Coldfront’s Tourist Trap.  Click here to watch.  Below is Salerno’s set-list:

“Nostalgia Disorder”

“Diary of the Big Northeast”

“A Few Halloween Ideograms“*

“Folk-remedies for Shut-ins”

“A Book of Fertility”

“The Wrong End of the Telescope”

“Selected Marginalia“*

“Most Effective Way of Living”

“Home of the Brave”

“Captivity Narrative”

“Parts of Jokes”

“A Cherished Idea About Acrobats”

-from Minimum Heroic:  “Whirl”, “Parks, Recreation”

“Polygraph”

“The Very Weird Landmark”

“The Bryonic Method”

 

* indicates video.  Photo & video by Hitomi Yoshio

 

-steven karl

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Memorial Reading for Akilah Oliver tonight

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Please join The Poetry Project tonight at 8 p.m. for a memorial and performance in honor of Akilah Oliver, a poet who has touched and inspired many.  Click here to read Coldfront‘s previous coverage on Oliver including poems and videos.

The reading will be in the Parish Hall, at St. Marks Church on the Bowery. The event is an opportunity  to express gratitude and pay homage to Oliver. The evening will feature Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Rachel Levitsky, Tonya Foster, E. Tracy Grinnell, Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein, Steven Taylor, Tyler Burba, Julian T.Brolaski, Rachel Zolf, Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, Laura Meyers, Stacy Szymaszek, Marcia Oliver and a special tribute from a group of some of her former students: Stephen Motika, Lydia Cortes, Kate Jaeger, Jamila Wimberly & Mia Bruner.

A reception will follow. The event is free.

-steven karl

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