Port of Sleep

Big business in the small press world

2011-11-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

Blue Square Press has been acquired as an imprint by evil giant - scratch that, evil genius - Mud Luscious Press. This is exciting. I'm a huge fan of MLP's roster of ruthless law consultants like Michael Stewart (The Hieroglyphics), and evil business titans like Mathias Svalina (I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur).

HTMLGIANT reports, with interviews of the relevant parties.

The Town of Empire

2011-10-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Empire, Nevada has become a ghost town within the last year, according to the BBC.

"A handful of USG employees mow the lawns, maintain the houses and keep an eye on the mothballed plant...

But the town's zip code, 89405, no longer exists, and former workers express doubt that it will ever open again."

The Trees are Full of Owls

2011-10-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

from "Song of the Abducted" (2006) by Aleda Shirley.

"Later from a hotel room

I saw helicopters a few feet from the window,
but there was no noise. At night
everyone comes back to me eventually,
this one I loved and that one.
The air grows sharp as copper & there's

a beautiful green light that deepens
like water; I move through it slowly
but it is not wet & I never surface, no matter
how hard I kick my legs..."

The rest of the poem.

Aleda Shirley's last book, the haunting Dark Familiar.

Norwood by Charles Portis (1966)

2011-10-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

In which Charles Portis hilariously and tenderly sums up the American situation:

"They shimmied on down the road. At the first stop, a roadside grocery store, Norwood got a quart of milk and had the grocer make him a couple of baloney and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise. He leaned on the meat box and ate and watched the bread man do his stuff. The bread man carried old bread out and brought new bread in. He squatted and rearranged it on the rack. Norwood noticed that he was poking finger holes in the competitors' loaves. Their eyes met, just for a second, and the bread man looked away. He tried to recover by doing peculiar things with his hands, as though he had a funny way of arranging bread. Norwood was not deceived. The bread man had no gift for pantomime and he did not seem to consider that from a range of eight or nine feet it is easy enough to tell whether someone is or is not punching holes in bread.

He said nothing about it and neither did Norwood. But back on the road the guilty knowledge hung heavy over the conversation."

Overlook Press site for Norwood.

Theater-State Reviewed

2011-09-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

At Montevidayo, James Pate takes a close look at Theater-State.

"Everything is in motion; American society has reached the state of being an ongoing theater. As Janus, the main protagonist in the book, thinks at one point, 'Nothing remained as mapped for very long.' The world of essences and depths has vanished. We have now reached a place of perpetual transformation."

Svalbard Global Seed Vault Norway Lovely

2011-08-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

photo: Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Mari Tefre

What you can't see in this one: the Monsanto operatives with their walkie-talkies and their snowmobiles, creeping beyond the crest of the snowbank.

So begins a semi-regular series in which I tell you what sinister or qualifying thing lies just beyond the reach of the photographer in a particular image that I find beautiful.

It's Blood That Calls To Our Blood

2011-08-19T16:46:00.001-07:00

Six year Richard Buckner hiatus is over. This album's really good.

I wonder if the title comes from "Elizabeth Childers" from The Hill, the Spoon River setting. "It's blood that calls to our blood." Though it could be that I'm just obsessed with the song.

Theater-State available from Powell's Books

2011-08-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

Theater-State can now be ordered from Powell's Books in Portland.

Theater-State is Shipping!

2011-07-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm reading at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi on August 9th at 5:00 P.M in celebration of this. The novel was written in Texas, but probably started brain-brewing in Mississippi, so it's appropriate.

Click here for details on the reading.

You can reserve a copy at Lemuria Books here. (click on "reserve").

Or you can order the book at Blue Square Press by clicking here.

Theater-State should also be available from Powell's Books in Portland at some point soon.

HTMLGIANT Interviews Librarian - Must Read!

2011-05-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

HTMLGIANT interviews a random librarian in Mississippi.

Theater-State

2011-04-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

My novel Theater-State is scheduled for August 2011 with Blue Square Press. It is now available for pre-order.

Links:

Blue Square Press

Goodreads

HTMLGIANT

A couple excerpts can be read in Horse Less Review #7

I Want His Baby!

2011-04-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

A new story, "I Want His Baby!", appears in the new issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Check it out here.

This story was partially inspired by standing in line at the supermarket checkout and reading the title phrase on a celebrity magazine. Which is to say, "real life."

Special thanks to Mike Meginnis for his help with the post-production of this story.

drop bombs on the author, he failed

2011-03-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Somehow I failed. I failed at linking to three poems of mine at Kill Author back in late summer. But these poems are still fresh. They have not expired, and they never will because they all take place in the spring. They can still be read here.

No One's Gonna Drag You Up

2011-01-31T10:50:00.000-08:00

It's another year. Above, John Darnielle instructs us on how the past is still going to haunt us in one way or another, and assures us that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Another Segment of Irradiated Mangosteen

2010-12-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

You can read the poem mentioned in the post below here, via Verse Daily.

A Segment of Irradiated Mangosteen

2010-11-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

A new poem of mine, "A Segment of Irradiated Mangosteen," is in the current issue of Gulf Coast.

The Sierra Club of Texas Opposes The Devil's River State Natural Area Swap and So Do I

2010-10-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

Sierra Club Announces Opposition to Devils River Land Proposal

Says Devils River State Natural Area Should Remain in State Ownership

(Austin) – The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club today released a new letter to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department formally opposing the proposed transfer of the existing Devils River State Natural Area and a $7.9 million cash payment in order to acquire the smaller Devils River Ranch. In the letter the Sierra Club expresses appreciation to Parks and Wildlife for providing additional information to the group over the past couple of weeks while a review of the proposal was underway, and Sierra Club spokesperson Ken Kramer characterized the Devils River matter as one of “a disagreement among friends.” Kramer says in the letter, however, that: “The Sierra Club has an obligation to its heritage and to its members to speak up for the preservation of wild lands, including state natural areas, and that is the crux of our opposition to the proposed land transfer.”

In today’s letter to Parks and Wildlife, five major reasons for the opposition are cited:
• The Devils River State Natural Area has important natural and cultural resources, including endangered species habitat and springs that provide water to the Devils River, and continued state ownership is the best way to protect those resources.
• The value of a state natural area is not the number of visitors to the area, and the state should not trade away such an area because it receives relatively few visitors.
• A complete scientific, natural resource, and cultural resource comparison of the two properties proposed for the exchange has not been made, and thus the public cannot compare the merits of the two properties.
• The loss of the Devils River State Natural Area would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the public to canoe or kayak the upper stretches of the Devils River. Moreover, the loss of the public land represented by the State Natural Area would likely complicate rather than facilitate efforts to reach resolution on the issues of public access to and use of the River.
• The expenditure of $8 million in extremely limited state parkland acquisition funds would result in a reduction of 2000+ acres in the state parks inventory and potentially impact other elements of the state park system at a time of serious constraints on state agency budgets.
The Sierra Club is urging Texans to voice their opposition to the proposed land transaction to Parks and Wildlife via email to ted.hollingsworth@tpwd.state.tx.us or by attending the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting in Austin on November 4, which will include a public hearing on the proposed land transaction and a possible decision on the proposal by the Commission.

The full text of the Sierra Club letter to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department may be found at http://www.texas.sierraclub.org/press/n ... rSmith.pdf.

Bodies and Departments

2010-09-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

A new story, "Bodies and Departments" (once known as "The Center for Disease Conceptualization"), appears in the the ongoing issue IX of Sleepingfish.

Also, I am determined to write a post about Clayton Eshleman and his poem "Combined Object" for dropperbomber, and soon.

Knives

2010-08-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

A story, "Knives," is in the new issue of Fence.

This is one of my oldest stories, but also one that has changed the most over the years. I hope that in a few centuries, when I have been long forgotten, some literary critic of the day - perhaps a well-programmed computer, which would explain the ability of future criticism to unearth even the most marginal of texts for "analysis"- will read this story as heavily autobiographical, in some sense or another, defiantly wrong.

The Mountain Whose Shadow We Lived In

2010-07-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Also, I've got a very short story at Fried Chicken and Coffee called "The Mountain Whose Shadow We Lived In" Read it here.

"my arms are warm/ aram saroyan" - Aram Saroyan

2010-07-01T18:53:00.001-07:00

I made this poem for the Abjective "A Contest" contest, which asked for texts no longer than a single character.

Check out the winning entry by Anne Marie Rooney here.

I enjoyed the challenge of working with one character, and how such a constraint opens up so much possibility. The idea made me think of Aram Saroyan, but then I went back and flipped through my copy of Complete Minimal Poems and saw that while he often worked in single (often misspelled) words, he didn't work with the single character much, other than this "M" that goes on for one more arch than is standard, which makes sense to me.

The Deviants -- same great (?) chapbook, lower price

2010-06-05T22:02:00.001-07:00

My chapbook of poetry The Deviants, released last fall from Greying Ghost, is down from 7.50 to 5.50. Read about it here here. Free shipping in the US and Canada (hey Alabama! hey Saskatchewan!)

Also, I've got some copies sitting around. Maybe I will give a few (yes, 3) away. Maybe I'll hold some sort of contest. The contest might be simply to e-mail me with an address before three other people do. It might be going on right now. Free shipping to the US and Canada? Why the hell not!

You could probably click on my profile page if you wanted to, if you were interested in topics such as contemporary poetry and social deviancy.

UPDATE: Greying Ghost is holding a one-week only summer sale - five chapbooks for $15 in the U.S., $20 everywhere else. The Deviants is one of the five books. I haven't read a few of the other ones (I'm sure they're top-notch), but I can put my recommendation behind Iredell's When I Moved to Nevada. It's fabulous. You can read a review here, with a great excerpt.

When automatic sinks in airports no longer see your hands

2010-05-21T15:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I don't have time to write much about something I've enjoyed (I'm walking away from the Internet tomorrow and I won't return for one particular week that reaches out and grazes infinity). But I can copy an excerpt which stands just as well as anything critical I could say about the text.

Hence, these sentences from "transition," a piece from a fabulous prose-and-poetry chapbook by Evelyn Hampton called We Were Eternal and Gigantic (Magic Helicopter Press):

"When the pipes burst, time reversed. Somewhere there was a vacuum cleaner made of dark matter identical to the vacuum in the closet. When I cried, someone in the closet complained about the weather."

That last line gets me especially. Learn more here.

And a great poem from the book here (the poem that encouraged me to get it).

The Imagination is the Truth

2010-05-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

I've been hunkering in this weird imaginal cave for a while and I should've mentioned that I had these stories earlier, but here they are:

"Goodnight, America," is in Annalemma No. 6.

Sample sentence: "From that warm and rust-rough footing your tiny toes gripped, you could smell the blasts off the steel furnaces and see the deer sleeping on the banks below, color of simply smoke, not yet skittish because the first boy hadn't jumped and cracked the hushed rush of the current."

This story is accompanied by these beautiful and perfect images made by Daniel Lucas, these sort of garbage-landslide collage things. In fact, every piece in the issue has wonderful accompanying visual art.

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"Black Mold" is in the Spring/Summer issue of Black Warrior Review.

Sample Sentence: "Disputes continue over the authorship of the infamous children's book The Two Corpses."

Black Warrior Review is quickly becoming one of my favorites. They have these great features in each issue - pieces oriented broadly around a theme or phrase. Last issue was the wunderkammer, and this one is cartography. I have a weakness for cartography.

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Also, Spring - my favorite. I had a birthday recently, and not long after a mysterious package of books arrived in the mail - Pigafetta is My Wife by Joe Hall (Black Ocean), Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner (Copper Canyon), The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz (Dalkey Archive), and the recently reprinted story collection by Frank Stanford, Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away (Lost Roads). It's going to be a great springsummer. It's hot this week and it's Cinco de Mayo so I finally bought some nopalitos, which before I've merely stared at with a mystifying yet curious expression. I made this salad out of it. All you do is saute the nopalitos (8 oz. - mine were already de-spiked and cut into strips) in a tablespoon of olive oil for about 5-10 minutes (until they all change color to a dull olive green). Sprinkle with a dash of salt while cooking them. Then mix these cooked strips in a bowl with the following raw ingredients: two ripe tomatoes, chopped, one jalapeno, minced, two tablespoons chopped cilantro, two tablespoons lemon juice, 1/2 cup chopped scallions, and another tablespoon of olive oil. Add salt to taste. I used a little more nopalitos than 8 oz. because I didn't have quite 1/2 cup scallions. This culinary aside is for Jacqui. Celebrate anything now.

Police State

2010-03-25T19:54:00.000-07:00

I've got a story called "Police State" in the new issue of Puerto del Sol.

Sample sentences:

"A few years later, Dad was ready to take the both of us to the firing range. That ordeal depressed me; I wanted to get to know the target-range silhouettes by name..."

The Golden Age

2010-03-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

So excited.

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Also, there is a new horse less review! I have some excerpts from an ongoing project. But there is so much going on in this thing. Adam Clay acknowledges that he is "a customer of time" and pitches his tent "in the deepest part of the delay" (side note: did you know that Adam Clay once said, "I hope for insects to evolve toward magnetism/to bring down a plane, even."?!?). Justin Marks has an amazing poem, and C.S. Carrier and Karyna McGlynn, among many others, also box your brain to heightened understanding in about three rounds.

Monetize, Vaporize

2010-03-01T21:16:00.000-08:00

I have new poems in Radioactive Moat as well as Sawbuck the latter of which includes some Illuminated Manuscripts and one of my favorite terrible oaths. Not that there are others.

Bright Slouch

2010-02-24T18:49:00.000-08:00

So as a foil to that last post, here is some better news - the Laredo Public Library increases services after the city's last bookstore shuts down. Library Journal article here.

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I have a couple poems in the new issue of Free Verse.

Alabama Barry Hannah Jailhouse Riot

2010-02-20T14:25:00.001-08:00

Book banning in Texas prisons sounds a lot like book banning in public schools everywhere:

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/banned-in-texas-prisons-books-and-magazines-that-203986.html

Yeah, I guess Barry Hannah could, to his credit, probably cause a riot, given a highly literate prison population. But some of these other examples are pretty rich.

If I'm ever jailed, someone please smuggle me some Vollmann.

Jimmy's Battle

2010-02-11T19:56:00.001-08:00

I have a story in the new issue of Pleiades, which is mammoth and also has poetry by Tomaz Salamun and Thomas More. I never thought I would be in a journal alongside Thomas More. Utopia!

This story has a goofy title, I admit, but it's maybe my favorite fiction thing I've written. I'm not sure why I've continued to insist on keeping that title since writing it a couple years ago. My brother says of it: "I like it because my name is Jimmy and every day is a friggin' battle."

What I've Been Digging

2010-02-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

Dan Boehl's Les Miseres Et Les Mal-Heurs De La Guerre from Greying Ghost.

These short stoical poems are grim and then surprisingly not, like: "Apparently unaware of the lessons/of the Greeks, a team of scientists de/veloped a chemical weapon that would/provoke widespread sexual behavior/among enemy troops" (from LA PENDAISON (The Hangman's Tree)). Also,I think this is the prettiest Greying Ghost title I've seen yet. It has these perfect royal blue inlays. Never mind. You'd just have to see it.

I've also dug Ben Black's story "The Kettle Pond" in Fence, from vol. 12 no. 1, and it's the sample from that issue so you can read it here. Baffling in the best way. Ben Black is not very googleable. I want more of his kettle ponds. "Well, I began reeling in the line with a prayer in my chest."

I also finished Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart.
I would not mind a glut of verse fiction if most of it moved like this. Actually, I'm surprised there hasn't been a glut of verse fiction yet.

It's easy to dig when you're an archaeologist.

Saturn Descends to Earth; Lands in Texas

2010-01-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

Salvador Plascencia is speaking in Austin next week!

The details as I received them:

On Thursday, February 4, novelist Salvador Plascencia will speak in the Joynes Room at 7PM. Plascencia is the author of The People of Paper, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book and San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. "The People of Paper is a novel like no other . . . Calvino, Borges, and Garcia Marquez will come to mind, but Plascencia's novel is a creature of its own, firmly grounded and soaring at the same time." -T.C. Boyle

"The Joynes Room" is on the University of Texas campus.

It does say speaking. Not reading. In any case, a chance to see what's happening with him these days.

Reading///Reading

2010-01-21T18:58:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading at the next Five Things as part of the new year's celebration. My story has something to do with reusable mail and cult dynamics. And the turning of the calendar, of course (that's the theme).

Details: 7:30pm///January 29th///United States Art Authority///510 West 29th Street

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I'm reading Where I Stay by Andrew Zornoza. Really great. To me its road manias read a bit like a cross between The Journals of Lewis and Clark and Richard Linklater's Slacker.

If you don't believe:

EX. 1 (Slacker)

from "Sept. 30, Moran Junction, Wyoming":

"Fuel-can man grabs the letter from me, his braids are tied into a chunky top-knot that whips around his head. You know the stamps have gone up, 37 fucking cents? You know what you got to do, you got to take the return address and reverse it with the real address. See, that way when they return the letter, they return it where you want it to go. He pushes the letter back into my chest. We've got a camp, up in the mountains, he says."

EX. 2 (Journals of Lewis and Clark)

from "Oct. 13, Lincoln City, Oregon":

"Then he goes down the steps, faces the seawall, kneels and prays. It is early morning, nothing but gray and fog. A chill comes through the open window. I thought that seeing the ocean would be the end of something. It is not."

Poetry, Not Poetry Blogging

2010-01-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

Poetry: There is a new Alice Blue Review. I've got a couple poems in it from a series I've been sporadically abandoning and then later reconsidering for about a year now.

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Not Poetry: The fish counter at the Asian supermarket is intimidating but ultimately satisfying to navigate.

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Going to read The Camp by Ohle first, wait a couple months, and then read Boons. Time-release imagination gratification. Unless I decide to read them both in one sitting.

Excerpt from JANUS

2010-01-08T12:40:00.001-08:00

They were moving. “What income bracket has your father fallen into?” Janus heard Katydid Clark say, but he couldn’t tell if this question was directed at him or another student unit.

In the auditorium, they waited for Stone to appear onstage. Janus drowsed down into the deep brown padding, drowned into the comfort of its foam and scratchy cross-stitch. He was almost out when Stone’s voice detonated hello. Janus looked up. Stone was ghost-blue and blurry, pixels shifting in the huge projected image.

“Settle down,” Stone said, though the room was already silent. A recording, Janus noted. “Students. I have some good news to start the school year.” His voice sounded distant but booming, twice-removed, like a recording of a recording. “Our school has been chosen out of over 1,000 applicants in the State Department’s Adopt–a-Country program. Now all we have to do is decide on a nation-state from the list provided, and we can get down to business. Each home room class will be responsible for a sector of the government of our chosen country. This is not only a great service project, but an opportunity to learn a lot, and I hope you young adults take advantage of that. We never would’ve dreamed of such fortune as schoolboys, in my time.”

Every once in a while Stone’s image flexed into a demented grin and the grain of the projection crackled like old film disintegrating. Stone’s recording kept reading from the script. There were additions to the school’s code of conduct, apparently. Janus heard some passing reference to the Hammurabi Code.

Back in class, the other kids argued and bickered over a world map. “Burma!”

“No, Sierra Leone!”

“You’re all idiots, the country that most needs our help is Nicaragua” said effervescent Katydid Clark, with her curly dirty blond hair named after a certain river. "My father was very briefly the President of Nicaragua, so I would know!" Janus thought that the name of the river for which Katydid's hair had been named made a lovely disyllabic gurgle when mouthed to oneself.

Mrs. Denton hushed them. She turned to Janus, oh no. “Janus, which country do you suggest?”

Janus knew the name of every sovereign nation and principality in the world, had learned them from The Units in his third year actually - with corrections forthcoming according to potential geopolitical flux in the years to come, he knew - but in a rare lapse of his infamous memory, he couldn't seem to summon the correct answer to Mrs. Denton’s question.

Janus attempted to blush but could not.

Glitterpony

2009-12-29T20:40:00.000-08:00

Whoa, this: http://glitterponymag.com/poetry/Rachel-B-Glaser/Incest-is-Lazy

Review: A NEW MAP OF AMERICA

2009-12-15T15:13:00.000-08:00

My review of A New Map of America, a pamphlet of creative prose (Louis Streitmatter, ED. James Brubaker) published by The Cupboard, is up at the Tarpaulin Sky reviews and interviews page.

I'm excited to explore more of The Cupboard's cupboard. They're doing something interesting with that term "creative prose," incorporating both poets and fiction writers. Their newest volume is an actual encyclopedia of magic by Michael Stewart, whose "moths" pieces I remember fondly from horse less review a few years back.

Check out The Cupboard

Winter Sounds

2009-12-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

My top five winter soundtracks for the last four or so winters, if you could call those months by that name in the south:

1. Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn by Do Make Say Think
2. Things We Lost in the Fire by Low
3. Master and Everyone by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
4. Devotion+Doubt by Richard Buckner
5. The Helig-Levine LP by Ticonderoga

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Listen to Ticonderoga. Under "Music" you can find songs off their two masterpieces for 54'40 or Fight! I particularly recommend "They Can Run" off The Helig-Levine LP. Parts of this defunct band are now becoming better known as The Bowerbirds.

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Richard Buckner on the writing of Devotion + Doubt (1997):

Gardner: How did Washington affect your songwriting as compared to San Francisco?

Buckner: Well, I have a lot of friends in San Francisco, it's a very familiar territory. It's a real urban environment...where I was living in Washington was in the woods, near a bay during flood season. The flood waters were coming up to my door, I was running out of wood, there was no furniture in the place. I was like some crazy hippie hillbilly pacing around the cabin in his union suits and boots trying to keep warm and get some writing done. It was a completely different experience and it was actually cool because I got a lot of privacy whether I liked it or not. I could also really switch my hours around, which I like to do, by writing all night and sleeping all day because it was more quiet out in the woods.

(from an interview at "Twangin'")

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Hard to believe he has no control over that remarkable album now, and that whoever owns its rights is letting it languish. That's almost as sad as the album itself. But that's what's so wonderful about that album. Whatever happens to it can never be as sad as its songs.

2009-11-23T20:41:00.000-08:00

A story of mine appears at Pure Francis

THE DEVIANTS

2009-10-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Photo: Greying Ghost

My new chapbook of poems, The Deviants, is now available from Greying Ghost Press.

Visit The Greying Ghost here for more information. Now for some vital signs.

VITAL SIGNS::THE DEVIANTS

HISTORY: The Deviants artifact was written by a nondescript young man accustomed to the feel of small rooms, during the period spanning early spring of 2007 to the early spring of 2008, spring being the young man's preferred calendar season. A few adjustments were made in the summer of 2008. The Deviants was written in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Jackson, Mississippi, and Austin, Texas.

CONSTRUCTION: The artifact contains 23 small pages of poetry, or small rooms. Though it does not espouse an architecture.

MUSCULOSKELETAL: Carl Annarummo designs very fine paper-skeletal objects.

INGREDIENTS(?): The poems in the artifact have something to do with some pirates or something. And some militants and a nomadic theater troupe. And government rain. A flooded village (unrelated to gov't rain). The abandoned International Space Station. And the world's first officially privatized state. Also spices, artificial flavoring, xantham gum.

THE CRITICS SAY: The artifact is, at the time of this writing, already being mistaken by local scholars for a variation on Merton's strain theory, the confessional memoirs of a defunct cult's charismatic persona, and the lost travelogues of Genghis Khan, among other vicious wonderful claims.

THANK YOU: to anyone who might read this thing. Pick its mind organ like you would a grizzled sea captain for stories of what it is like to dress up like a grizzled sea captain every night at a casino gambling establishment designed to look like a clipper ship in the deep south.

ERRATUM: the fourth poem in, "My Summer Job," got some unintentional splicing during some reformatting of the text. This new version is kind of interesting, but also maybe not. You can read the original here on page 27.

THANK YOU: once more. You are a good mood, whoever you are.

Horror of the Infinite Laugh Track

2009-10-06T18:21:00.000-07:00

Here is a great conversation about the role of humor in poetry:

It's lengthy, and not really recent, but I want to put it in the official dissemination pod because I think it's important, and an interesting conversation to listen in on.

I got the link from Gabriel Gudding's blog, at which he looks back on the conversation and topic and gives a few selections of his views on the subject, among them:

"If damage, flaw, hamartia, is a given, I think humor is a means of dealing with damage by appreciating suffering as just another form of change.

Humor seems to be a method of equanimity. It seems to be a means of practicing and exercising that kind of equanimity some people call detachment." - Gabriel Gudding

YES. But the round table discussion features other views of what humor does or fails to do. Which reminds me of this excellent article, "Serious Art That's Funny" by Matthew Rohrer, which is an old standby of mine and which takes yet another view of what humor can do in a poem. It is sort of a defense of irony, in which irony is portrayed as a democratizing or unifying, community-bolstering force, not as a mode of alienation or cynicism.

From Rohrer's essay:

"Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it."

John Keats the Time-Traveling Surrealist

2009-09-30T17:32:00.000-07:00

"What is more soothing than a pretty hummer
That stays for one moment in an open flower."

-from "Sleep and Poetry."

Even though "hummer" isn't capitalized in the above, my mind first read it as the vehicle rather than the bee. For like less than a second.

Marginalia

2009-09-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write some words on marginalia - uselessness, pointlessness.

This is just a reminder to write or not write those words.

For Fans of Heart and Horns

2009-09-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

The first track found here, Mario Bauza and Machito's "Afro Cuban Jazz Suite," is really amazing. Hearing it for the first time a few days ago (it's from the late 40s) startled me because it wasn't what I expected from any of the genres or eras of jazz referenced: big band, latin and mabmo, and early bop (Charlie Parker solos on this suite). It's a weird and lively hybrid that doesn't sound exactly like any of those reference points. Most of it is pretty wham bam (I have no clue what I mean by that), but the slower parts remind me a bit of Miles Davis' similarly orchestral Sketches of Spain.

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With lots of new reading and new writing happening, I haven't felt inclined to write any reviews or "interviews" in this space. I think the fake interview could become big though. Genrefied and canoninzed. What if every one wrote poetry, especially iconic figures in popular culture, is a bad question.

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The Deviants is available for pre-order here.

Interview With Dr. Phil About His Poetry

2009-07-30T20:41:00.001-07:00

So, I interviewed Dr. Phil about his poetry. I was inspired by reading the title of Blake Butler's Blog, "Gilles Deleuze Committed Suicide And So Will Dr. Phil." It's true that Dr. Phil's poetry "travels" to some dark places, and I wanted to ask him about that. What follows is just an excerpt. I expect that the whole thing would probably come out in POETRY magazine, I mean, I don't see why not.

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DB: Dr. Phil, in a sense I suppose my question is really about your comeback to American letters (laughs). But first, can you tell us why you decided to quit writing poetry?

Dr.P: Well, it was a hard decision (laughs). I think it was just...you know, I'd made all this money. I think it happened once I started getting really really rich off my poetry...that I just, you know, started feeling disillusioned about it. I mean, that's not why I started writing in the first place. That's not why I invented the "image-based/epiphany-at-the-end" lyric poem. You know I invented that style of writing a poem. But again, that check at the end of the day, that's not why I wrote Heart to Ass (Dr. Phil's 1974 debut). I wrote that book and I invented that type of poem to help people reduce complex and nuanced emotions into simplistic aphorisms, which they could then conquer by repeating aloud in front of a mirror. At the end of the day, I guess it was all about pain (laughs).

DB:Really. And was that pain an influencing factor in your decision to write again?

Dr.P: The only factor, I would say. ABC wanted me to start doing happy poems and poems about the backstage intrigues on the show. I said are you kidding? So I turned down their advance and I'm publishing my next edition with a small house out of DC, Edge Books. I'm excited about it. It comes bundled with my weight loss product. It's my most gothic work yet. It's about ghosts in my native Oklahoma, and when I say ghosts I'm talking about mules and Indians and the little people who work at the Wal Mart and that sort of thing, I guess.

DB: Um.

William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels

2009-07-12T20:53:00.001-07:00

You Bright and Risen Angels, William T. Vollman. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

“This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.”

William T. Vollmann, Karachi-Anatuvak Pass – San Francisco, 1981-85 (in an epigraph to the novel).

Because he tagged along with mujahideen into Soviet-invaded Afghanistan, because he traveled to the north pole and a number of war zones, because he bought the freedom of a Burmese prostitute, has written about other prostitutes, asked poor people why they are poor, ridden the rails, and written a 3,000 page treatise on the moral calculus of violence, William T. Vollmann the persona has, to some extent, outgrown or overwhelmed the text.

But in Vollmann’s defense, the text he writes never seems to suffer too much from this fascination with his methods, and, besides, his aesthetic frequently hybridizes fiction and non-fiction, and in the books I’ve read authorial intrusion is common. By continuing to write ambitious, surprising books, and perhaps by the quirks on his resume`, Vollmann has become a well known name in American literature. And one way to look at well known names in literature without having to tug along a lot of the baggage and detritus that comes with notoriety is to examine the earliest work.

You Bright and Risen Angels is unlike anything else Vollman’s written since, to my knowledge (which is rudimentary: in addition to YB&RA I’ve only read - so far - An Afghanistan Picture Show, Europe Central, and Riding Toward Everywhere). The author calls the book a cartoon, and that appellation is pretty much exact. So what is the value of the literary cartoon?

It shouldn’t even have to be asked. We identify the form with humor, usually, and everything that You Bright and Risen Angels has to say about the world is said through humor, humor that is black and biting but ultimately good-natured. The book eschews seriousness at all turns, though it lacks neither ambition nor sincerity, and this is the crux of its genius: it’s a cartoon, meant to be read quickly and digested easily and then lost to time and the sprawl of undifferentiated information, but unlike that model it also encompasses wonderful digressions on science, war, history, and politics (some of it invented), as well as an insistence on speculating about both the emotional trauma of conflict as well as difficult moral questions when there are no easy heroes to serve as exemplars or subjects of our sympathy.

And, of course, the book addresses a subject not typically known to cartoons: large-scale political and social conflict and how such conflict is shaped by changes in technology. Gail Pool’s 1987 review of the book in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/books/vollmann-angels.html - adequately summarizes the rambling narrative, but for this review I’ll just cover the skeletal structure: Vollmann’s world is divided between revolutionaries and reactionaries, and since this is a cartoon, don’t bother looking for any middle ground. The reactionaries are led by Mr. White, a powerful leader in both reactionary politics and industry, as well as the primary developer of electricity, which he achieves through his remote Colorado school of indentured engineers, The Society of Daniel. Bug is our revolutionary hero, though we learn early in the book, when Bug’s charge Susan questions him about the rebellion’s motives after Susan assists in an attack on the San Francisco Municipal Subway, that Bug “suppose(s)” that they are “doing this for the trees.” It is soon after this and other random targets and acts of violence that we learn not to sympathize with the revolutionaries or any particular social force in the book, but to sympathize with every pitiable actor caught in its maelstrom, the book itself being a battle of wills between the narrator/author, a perhaps revolutionary-sympathetic computer programmer himself reliant on the force of electricity, and Big George, a mysterious, immortal entity who is sort of like Cormac McCarthy’s The Judge as though applied to a metafictional conceit (Vollmann describes him as “the eternal winner”). The resistance is complicated by a parallel movement composed entirely of insects under the leadership of something called The Great Beetle (there are a lot of characters, like a Russian novel, but Vollmann includes a helpful index or “social gazette” at the beginning).

Gail Pool, in The Times review, notes that the book is, one sense, a critique of American history and the crimes of the powerful. But the version of history it critiques is also a cartoon – constructed with invented dates, places, and events all revolving largely around Mr. White and his cohorts and the development of electricity, Bug’s alienated childhood, or entomology. I loved this alternate history aspect of the book for the simple pleasure of watching the warped verisimilitude unfold, and it seems to me a precursor of a book like Ben Marcus’ Notable American Women. Everything in the book refers to the world imagined in the book: products are brand-named after Mr. White and his underling Dr. Dodger. Wayne listens to bluegrass music about the “blue globes” of electricity. Historical figures like Thomas Edison are incorporated into the narrative of Mr. White’s American dynasty.

With its alternate histories, manic cartoon tone, absurdly stylized characters (mean that in a good way), various locations (California, Colorado, Oregon, Florida, Texas, Alaska, South America, and probably more) and its visionary, digressive silliness, the novel reminded me a lot of Johannes Goransson’s writings about excess and grotesquerie on his blog Exoskeleton. You Bright and Risen Angels is an excessive work, long, unrefined (one blurb called it barbaric) and unwieldy, and much of the pleasure of reading it lies in the exhilaration its excesses provide. The book addresses questions of morality and conflict, but there are no final lessons or heroes or tidy resolutions to draw. The book is a living world, even if it’s a cartoon world, and in a world like that there cannot be simple resolutions.

In The Times review, Pool critiqued the book for its digressiveness. I guess this is a polarizer, but I’d say the book succeeds on the Moby Dick principle – the digressions become an essential part of the narrative. Pool also critiqued the book (her review was mostly positive, though clearly she didn’t think as much of it as I do) because its cartoonish characters are not “emotionally involving.” I think the characters are emotionally involving, but not in the traditional way in which specific characters win our sympathy or identification. The novel is a sort of farce in which we are compelled to sympathize more democratically, with both supposed heroes and supposed villains, all of whom, at one point or another, will probably disgust us. In this way, this absurd, magical, Kafka-meets-Pynchon –meets-Lautremont ride is surprisingly similar to “real life.”

(Postnote: yes, there is a story about Vollmann and this book: it seems he basically tricked a company into hiring him as a computer programmer in the late 80s, though he had no experience in this field, and instead of going home, many nights he would stay in the office all night, writing the novel on the computer, sleeping under his desk, hiding from the custodial staff, and subsisting almost entirely on candy bars for days at a time. Most of that according to the author, I think).

dreamspots/updates are ready to install

2009-06-21T19:54:00.001-07:00

My friend records his dreams into a Dictaphone in the morning, and then later transcribes them on this blog:

http://thesedreamsaremine.blogspot.com/

Why would you want to read this? My friend is a talented dreamer or a talented transcriber. These dreams are funny and alarming. They are sort of like the poems James Tate and Russell Edson write consciously, but these do not come from regular old consciousness. I won't review his dreams at length but I will heartily recommend them as good literature from an underutilized genre/medium.

I rarely have amusing or interesting dreams. I also don't remember dreams often.

The dream transcribed on 9.20.08 about the exchange student's ears is a classic.

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In the coming weeks there should be some prose reviews here, starting with William T. Vollmann's first novel You Bright and Risen Angels, which seems either underrated or forgotten to me in light of much of the attention on his later work. Later in the summer: maybe back to poetry.

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Also, the links to my writing will be updated soon. I have a chapbook of poems coming out soon. Updates are ready to install. If I make a note of it here, I might actually get to it...

2009-04-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Areas of Fog. Joseph Massey. Shearsman Books. 2009

Talking about the weather
became trite
which was sad

- Joshua Beckman

In thinking of Joseph Massey’s new collection Areas of Fog, I allude to the Joshua Beckman poem above not because Beckman and Massey share a similar aesthetic when it comes to the short poem – far from it – but because Massey’s poems would probably agree with the sentiment expressed. These poems are set to the weather, and by the weather are inextricably bound to the local geography Massey explores in Northern California, a point I’ll come to later.

But first I should acknowledge the context of my reading of the book. It would be disingenuous for me to review this collection as though I hadn’t seen the majority of its poems before – the reality being that I’ve read chapbook versions of four of the five sections of Areas of Fog. So perhaps the primary question of this review is how Massey’s visually and sonically muscular minimalism – so accustomed to chapbook length – reads when collected together in Areas of Fog.

I have no complaints, or very few. Ever since I took a chance on Bramble a few years back, I’ve felt that Massey’s aesthetic is one to be soaked up for its vivid pleasures and envied for what it’s able to do with so little and without resorting to any artificially constructed world or externalized imagination. All the blurbs on the back of the book note the idea that “the world” in Areas of Fog is “this world,” utterly, crisply real and unaffected (as Peter Gizzi says in his, “the world simply happens in these poems”). Not that I feel there’s anything wrong with artificially constructed worlds, surreal imagery, the use of narrative, or even dreaded irony, if applied sparingly and without a bunch of built-in cynicism. But the poems in Areas of Fog don’t use these tricks, and they seem to exist simply for the music Massey can wring from the physics of the world around him. So what, more specifically, do these poems “do” besides the obvious detailing of a particular environment on very precise and careful terms?

The Objectivists were also interested in nailing down the details of the immediate world for their own sake, but these poems build on that aesthetic with a new twist. There are reference points to Creeley, Niedecker, and Cid Corman, but Massey doesn’t stop once he’s distilled the clarity of his environment into a few choice details – moonlight picking out the oil on the surface of a puddle of rain, a hummingbird in hover, or factory lights that “crease” gradations of darkness at night – he also takes an interest not just in the perceived object but in the nature of our perception, and often very affectingly. Take this one from Bramble: “ before we feel the/ breeze we see/the weeds fold over.” Or, the poem “February,” in its entirety, from the section Out of Light:

rain’s
remnants’

shape
splinters

window
night pulls

apart

I can imagine the window losing form and fracturing into liquid in the rainy night. These poems offer no pretensions about how we describe the world to appease our need for order and ease of recognition, instead choosing to make music out of the reality of our senses’ separations, ambiguities, and perceptual scales; they chart, in other words, the inner world of the mind and eye (and ear and so on) rather than simply the thing seen or perceived, and so only in Areas of Fog can it realistically happen that “Sun/blots out a mountain” through the “dusk-tinted window” of a Greyhound bus. In another poem simply titled “Scale[1],” the reader can again feel an act of immediate perception taking place, something completely natural, though to see it verbalized is (pleasantly) surprising:

Gust of litter – now
the light’s

obvious.

This effect, repeated throughout the book, shapes the dimension of these poems that might be described as “geographical” or “environmental.” I’m very interested in ideas of place in poetry, particularly those that go beyond surface preconceptions and received ideas, and through this perceptual sculpture Massey manages both to create and very precisely describe a world at once – largely the Northern California coast in Humboldt County. Another way in which Massey makes the landscape his own while also effectively noting it down “objectively” is through smart repetition throughout the book’s sections: of words (especially verbs), recurrent images, devices (e.g. possessives doubled up like “rain’s/ remnants’//shape). The book’s accuracy in this “environmental” regard also has to do with the openness and inclusiveness to the phenomena noted down. It’s not all fog-cloaked redwoods and foaming pacific beaches so that the reader knows the exact position of the poem on the map, but also images that could occur anywhere in the twenty-first century U.S.: traffic’s drone, garbage in sunlight, a wad of gum, an abandoned lot. It’s an honest balance of dark and light, mysterious and routine, unique and ubiquitous. And this extended, monumental-in-miniature study of a landscape and the carefulness with which it’s approached in words are the evidence of the success of Areas of Fog in synthesizing previously independent chapbook-length works. The overall image we’re left with is somehow a singular vision, though fractured and diverse and teeming with distinct phenomena.

Some of the more recent poems, such as “Impasse,” indicate new interests and more expansive forms. Some of these more expansive poems are fruitful for me, but I don’t get as much from lines like “Our senses/snag against//the world’s burned,/blurred lists” (from “Impasse”) as I do from much of the shorter, more imagistic material. But some variety and experiment within a project don’t hurt anything. Most of all, at the risk of reinforcing the old cliché of books being your friends, these refreshing poems are good company – quiet, open, and free of unwelcome proclamations and dictations (except those taken directly from the weather). To quote from another of the lunes originally published in Bramble and now collected in Areas of Fog:

company tonight -
silence’s
cricket-warped surface

Company tonight indeed. I can’t think of why you shouldn’t read Areas of Fog.

[1] Collected, interestingly, in the Out of Light section, though some readers will probably note that these poems originally appeared in a much earlier chapbook titled Minima St. and still available (I believe) in its entirety online.

Three from Lorine

2009-02-21T13:03:00.001-08:00

Dusk -

He's spearing from a boat -

How slippery is man

in spring

when the small fish

spawn

Beautiful girl-

pushes food onto her fork

with her fingers-

will throw the switches

of deadly rockets?

No matter where you are

you are alone

and in danger - well

to hell

with it.

Poems, 1957-1959

from Collected Works, Lorine Niedecker

The Cosmopolitan

2009-02-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

The Cosmopolitan.

Reading Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan[1] reminded me of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ responses in a book of interviews titled Borges at Eighty:

Audience: Since you are such a peaceful man, why is there so much violence in your stories?

Borges: Perhaps because I come of military stock. Because I might have been somebody else. But really, now, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in violence, I don’t believe in war. I think the whole thing is a mistake. I believe in agreeing, not disagreeing. I don’t believe in countries. Countries are a mistake, are a superstition. I suppose the world should be one, even as the stoics thought. We should be cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. I have so many hometowns, for example, Buenos Aires, for example, Austin, Texas, for example, Montivedo, well, tonight Cambridge, why not? Geneva, Edinburgh, ever so many hometowns. It’s much better than having one hometown or one country.

Borges speaks of the romantic cosmopolitan, of globalization as peaceful seamlessness under ideal or humanistic principles, of ceaseless exploration and cultural ferment – a vision of cosmopolitanism, of world citizenship, that it seems many of the nameless figures in The Cosmopolitan’s more narrative moments – the man, the woman, the architect, the “cosmopolitan sitting in Hong Kong drinking a caipirinha” – also seek, only to be rebutted, ultimately, by a frank sense of limit in this limitlessly imagined world: “We walked under the awnings of fancy hotels and were reminded that life could be otherwise, but when we walked past the poor we felt on the contrary reinforced in our own destinies”

Borges’ cosmopolitanism in the interview (conducted in 1980) is a sort of utopian world citizenship abstracted from history, which is an attractive notion, but in truth this sort of cosmopolitanism vanished before it could ever begin. The systems, processes, and consequences of globalization have only accelerated since the time of the interview, and today the idea of nationalism or national influence really could seem superstitious, or at least antiquated, in an age of global financial interdependence, transnational banking, and endless cultural transferal (or hegemonic infection, given the tone one wants to take). A world that is, as we know very well after recent events, nothing at all like the pleasant vision offered by Borges.[2]

All of this to say that Stonecipher skillfully envisions this same conflict of imagined and real world-system through the unlikely metaphor of travel. But these poems are “travel writing” as it ought to be, or at least travel writing that is honest with itself. The violence here is under the shiny, orderly surfaces of transit and commerce. From Inlay 8:

9.
From this airport alone, you could fly to Geneva, Fez, Malta, Alicante, Berlin, San Francisco, and Luxor. We’ll do that one day, he said. We’ll arrive at the airport with one suitcase each and fly to the destination that seems to us to hold the greatest promise of annihilation.

Passages like these and their destruction-bent citizens are intermingled with writing that evokes the genuine pleasure and antiquated mysteries and myths of the travelogue (“As for me, I would choose to infiltrate foreign territories via the spice route rather than the silk route” – also from Inlay 8), including all we find enticing about art, architecture, poetry and the rest, so that the ideals and realities of a globalizing world are not seen so much in opposition but in a muddled, shifting blur – wherein the perspective of the tourist is woven through the perspectives of all those the tourist encounters – “I would choose to infiltrate” (emphasis mine). As Ron Silliman observed in his review of The Cosmpolitan (and with regard to the Claude Levi-Strauss quote and Strauss’ confrontation with poverty in India), “travel is guilt, tourism borders on genocide.” But Stonecipher reminds us that “The Cosmopolitan” – ever self-aware and engaged – “knows the difference between the hutus and the tutsis” (Inlay 5). In these poems we see the new world enacted constantly – in every waking moment, as if by keystroke or takeoff – on the ruins of the old – the declining nation-states for which one nameless figure secretly mourns and the abandoned houses of Detroit where Utopian colonies might start up. But just as “No one likes walking down a broken escalator” (Inlay 15), all the obsessions of the new do not give pause to ponder their own waste and byproduct. Stonecipher manages to capture both the hyperkinetic lure of an endlessly reinvented set of global conditions and also the terror, the underlying threat of overload, conflict, and instability.

I feel obliged to mention the form of this book, of course – the inlay structure and quoted material, but I also suspect much has already been said of these formal devices. What I might add (or not) is this: I find it interesting how certain quoted phrases are not only lodged within each inlay, but also resonate throughout the book, their words reappearing in the details of the numbered prose passages of other inlays. E.g. Susan Sontag’s “the inauthenticity of the beautiful” from Inlay 4 reappears throughout the book in other guises, and I don’t just mean that phenomena presumed beautiful are dissected or deconstructed in some way. Stonecipher’s choices of word and imagery – the materiality of the language, the poetry as delivered by the poet herself - also tend to replicate this sentiment, and some of the most typically lyrical or vivid moments in these poems describe the utterly banal – e.g., “In a blitzkrieg of a stranger’s perfume I was suddenly illuminated” (Inlay 20) or “stamps of the most beautiful ice-blue” (Inlay 21). The effect of this swarm of echoes and slant repetitions is not so much a structured cohesion, but a sense of connections more subtle and (ultimately) fleeting, a sense reminiscent of a phenomenon invoked a few times in The Cosmopolitan: déjà vu.

The quotations also affect the reading of the poems in other unexpected ways. I.e., you may begin to imagine your own inlays and think of these poems in dialogue with other source material you know. Like Borges on violence and cosmopolitanism. And then, in Inlay 16, you read: “He wanted to be a citizen of the world and was crushed to discover that the world fields no citizens as such.”

[1] I haven’t yet read any of Donna Stonecipher’s other books, but you might check out her excellent translations of German poet Veronika Reichl wherever you can find them online.
[2] Which is not to indicate, at I know it might sound, that I think this is indicative of some naïveté on Borges’ part; clearly Borges was putting forth an ideal he would have wanted to see (and which relates to his own work, as does the question he was asked). Nor should I ignore, as I do, the way the reaction to loaded terms like cosmopolitanism is going to be substantially different for someone born in the late twentieth century in America vs. someone – a genius, frankly – who lived under Peronism in Argentina.

The Surveyic Hero

2007-03-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Surveyic Hero is (check it) out:

www.horselesspress.com/surveyichero.html

File under scooters and call it a poem.

Surveyic Information

2007-02-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

CHAPBOOK

I have a chapbook forthcoming from horse less press in July 2007. It is called The Surveyic Hero.

More on this later.

Dropperbomber

2006-11-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Dropperbomber, an irregular review blog.

It is not November 2006. It is 2009 now. Soon I will understand how to place information on the sidebar.

Below are some links and/or names of journals where you can find my own writing.

Poems or prose, appearing or forthcoming in:

storySouth
horse less review
Kulture Vulture
Stylus
The Hat
The Denver Quarterly
Absent
NOO Journal
Past Simple
Siren
La Petite Zine
The Diagram
Indiana Review
Pleiades

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Chapbooks of poems

The Deviants (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming)

The Surveyic Hero (horse less press, 2007)

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