Black Metal Poetry

John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats & The Extra Glenns) is in the midst of writing thirty poems for his favorite black metal band on Last Plane to Jakarta. And he makes a Phillip Jeck reference in today's.

If you've never seen his extreme metal picks on emusic you should check them out, if only for write-ups like this description of Burning Witch:

You know that feeling you get when it takes you 10,000 years to die and you're expected to swallow whole planets once every eclipse of your home-world's thirteenth moon? That slow, heavy, howling, sinking, overwhelming, body-beautiful feeling? That is exactly what this album sounds like.

Love is in the Air

Walking through the English building just now I passed one of my old poetry students just as the person sitting next to him leaned over & very cutely kissed him on the cheek. He waved sheepishly at me & I couldn't help but smile. Oh, it might help you to visualize it to know that my old student's name is Judge Reinhold & he was the star of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The person who kissed him was not a person at all, but a human-sized & human-shaped stack of blueberry pancakes.

This Friday & Saturday: Jake Gillespie Art Show

Friday, December 1st 6-10pm
Saturday, December 2nd noon-3

@ Jake Gillespie's studio, basement of The Mill, 800 'P' Street
take the stairs in the middle of the dock down.
Discover/Visa/Mastercard accepted

Jake is going to be showing a handful of new video art pieces. In one of them Z & I play a married couple. Well, it doesn't say we're married, but that's how I picture it.

Lately I've been Dreaming of Giraffes

I would like to donate a giraffe fact or interesting story about giraffes. German officers line up giraffes and teach them to goose-step. To see a giraffe in your dream suggests that you need to consider the overall picture. Significantly, the giraffes in my dream are taller, and would appear to possess much greater ability than those who watched 20 hours or les. If you dream of a giraffe, ask yourself if it’s time to take chances—that is, stick your neck out. Giraffes can dream of non-traditional careers holding mirrors up to their faces for the perfect tomato. If the victims of Sudan's genocide were giraffes, we would have acted like tomatoes. So very little of my life involves giraffes.

Teddy Roosevelt Totally Hates Marcel Duchamp

Reading an annoying but informative social history of early avant garde artists & writers I was struck by this quote from Teddy Roosevelt, from his book History as Literature, which responds to the Armory Show:

Take the picture which for some reason is called "A Naked Man Going Down Stairs." There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, "A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder," the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the "Naked Man Going Down Stairs." From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.

The painting is, of course, more commonly known as “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Roosevelt begins the essay with a nationalistic pride in the American painters before he turns toward ridiculing the more extreme innovators. The "extremists," as he calls them, are only of use to provide more options for the more aesthetically mediated American artists. I’m interested in this quote from TR for a couple of reasons.

First: Teddy Roosevelt was at the Armory Show! How weird is that to think of that stodgy, masculine blowhard at the epoch defining presentation of modern art. But beyond that, the fact that the Armory Show was a spectacle that self-impressed people felt the need to see (& usually then mock, it seems). Public officials & such felt compelled to go there. I’m not trying to do that silly “art used to mean something important” thing, but rather I’m amazed by what a huge impact the Armory Show had on American culture. When I first learned of the Armory Show I had assumed it was only big in the art world--which typically means having little impact outside of the art world (which is fine with me). Learning more about it, I was surprised just how large of a public impact it had.

Second: I’m struck by how many of the negative reactions to the Armory employed satire & ridicule, as if the jokes proved the art was without value. There was no room, perhaps in previous reactions to art for ecstatic fun & joy. Doesn’t it seem that Duchamp must have been inviting the very jokes people made of “Nude Descending” since it took the cubist ideas to their conclusion? It makes me wonder if part of the modern art explosion was not only the introduction of new perspectives & theories for the roles of art, but the introduction of a set of new possible reactions to art.

Third: Roosevelt assumes that we think it would be ridiculous to consider a Navajo rug to have the same aesthetic value as a “real” piece of art. I know this is beating up on the social values of someone in the past, a weak move, but I think this also tells us something significant about how art could be seen by someone like Roosevelt before 1913.

Holiday Weekend Showdown: Toto’s “Africa” versus Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt”

Toto’s “Africa” versus Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt”

This song & this poem have been locked in battle for decades. It has been at times amusing but has grown exhausting. The battle between Toto’s “Africa” & Andrea Bakers poem from the Gilda Cycle, which appears in the fabulous new online journal Harp & Altar, must come to an end. I have been appointed by the high court to put this battle to an end. I am here solely to mediate the battle & to assess the winner. I am a completely neutral judge.

Maybe not, but since first reading Baker's poem last week I've been thinking about it a lot. The immediacy, the space of it, the simplicity of it. At this same time I've been getting the Toto song stuck in my head a lot. The kind of stuck in my head when I don't notice that I've been singing it to myself for perhaps an hour. So for some reason or another both of these are inhabiting me right now & I need to have them battle it out. Only one may remain in my head.



First category: use of simile & metaphor.

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” jumps immediately into a beguiling & compelling simile. I ask myself how this she could wear another body like a shirt & it leads me in multiple directions at once. The most immediate is a kind of grotesque surrealism of entering into a torso & buttoning it up, but the line “she wears your body like a shirt” is so direct & simple, that I see it not as a silly horror movie trope but somehow loving. Another view I have of it is sensual, the other’s body so close as to become a piece of clothing. Then there is the more abstracted idea of how we try others on & what we admire of them in us & another of how a body can become so familar & comforting. All of these work immediately & then the poem extends the simile: “saying/ this beautiful long sleeve shirt.” This continues to produce disjunctive images attempting to correlate the sides of the simile. The next line, “but she folds,” continues to extend the metaphor & through that the scene I have built in my head. The she has removed the body & is now folding it back up. But then the final two lines might create another simile or might be creating a sense of time. “as fumes//from marching.” The extended space before these two lines make me wonder whether they have fragmented from the initial idea, and given that I allow myself to move farther from the notion of how they might directly extend or set the beginning of the poem.


Toto’s “Africa” seems to bank on a big metaphorical idea of what Africa represents, which is unclear to me & decidedly Orientalist. It is possible that Africa is the metaphorical equivalent of the state of sexual desire the speaker feels. The song starts “I hear the drums echoing tonight/ But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation.” This could imply that the drums he hears are not physical drums but the beating of his own desirous heart, which the she does not hear. The song extends the seemingly archetypal images of Africa, without delving into how these metaphors propel the emotions or narrative. We get an old man, whom the speaker stops “Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies,” though it is unclear why. One might think that these would be for the song, but it contains no musical cues that relate to the aforementioned melodies. The old man cryptically responds “’Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you’" but we, as listeners are unsure what this it is, the woman? the words? the melodies? All in all the use of metaphor in this song is dependent on racist assumptions of associations between passion and Africa.

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” wins this category: AB 1, Toto 0



Second Category: Explosive Chorus
Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” does not have a chorus. It is a fragmented lyric.

Toto’s “Africa” has a kick-ass swell of keyboards that follows a somewhat sterile drum-fill. The singer, who had up until then been quiet & introspective, begins to wail desperately & by the end of the chorus some cheesey but effective distorted guitars rise. All in all this is a pretty strong chorus for radio synth-rock. This is definitley the part of the song I get stuck in my head the swelling lead-in to the chorus.

Toto’s “Africa” wins this category: AB 1, Toto 1

Third Category: precision of language

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” consists of twenty words. Not a single one of them is extraneous. Not a single one of them strikes a sonic or tonal chord outside the aura of the poem. In my daydreams I speak in Andrea Baker lines.

Toto’s “Africa” contains the line “Gonna take some time to do the things we never had.” There is not a single evocative or effective word in this line.

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” wins this category: AB 2, Toto 1



Fourth Category: Keyboard solos

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” contains so keyboard solos. It is a lyric poem, not a synth-rock song.

Toto’s “Africa” has a big keyboard solo in the breakdown after the second chorus. Just when you think the song is going to return to the verse, it switches things up on you. The synth setting sounds like a mix of both pan flutes & steel drums, somehow. It sounds a bit like the keyboards I would imagine used in an interlude of Full House, when the scene changes & they are using an establishing shot of Uncle Whatever’s practice space.

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” wins this category: AB 3, Toto 1

Fifth Category: Ability to not only stomach but look forward to repeated engagements with the poem or song

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” is a lovely poem, quick & haunting it produces an immediate response in me, it draws me to the other poems of hers in Harp & Altar & it makes me want to read the entire Gilda sequence. I’m not sure how often I would read this particular poem over & over again. It has a lot to offer & I love what it does, but I look forward to seeing the whole sequence, which I imagine I will want to read & reread repeatedly.

Toto’s “Africa”: My brother used to drive me to the pool every morning for swim practice. He is the type of person who listens to the same song over & over again. One summer he played “Africa” just about every morning & every morning I thought it was awesome. Yes this might be simply older-brother hero worship, but that doesn’t not diminish the aesthetic effect of the song. Like I said above I've had this song stuck in my head a lot recently & I tend to not think of any aesthetic pleasure as a "guilty pleasure" & instead just try to dig it for whatever reason I'm thinking of it. Today, after listening to this song repeatedly I notice that I went through a four-stage process of reaction:

Stage One: rediscovery, during which I became aware of how gross & Orientalist the lyrics are & how bad the keyboard solo sounds.
Stage Two: reveling, during which I might have even pursed my lips & nodded my head to the chorus.
Stage Three: interest, during which I listened closely to the production of the song & the strange style of the drummer.
Stage Four: overload, at which point I felt somewhat gross. I don’t want to hear this song for quite a while.

Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” wins this category: AB 4, Toto 1


So, in final Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” kicks Toto’s “Africa”’s ass. It is a comprehensive defeat that should finally silence those who consider Toto’s “Africa” to be in aesthetic contention with Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt.” But I wonder whether being aware of the superiority of Andrea Baker’s “she wears your body like a shirt” is going to help to banish it from my head. I guess I'll find out soon.

Movie Idea

It is the hundredth anniversary of a famous murder on a small college in the north east. The college is filled with poorly lit crumbling mid-Nineteenth-century buildings & peopled with attractive upper-middle class white people of varying degrees of intelligence & charisma. (There might be one black male. Or an Asian female.) On this centennial one of the sororities decides to throw an illegal dance in the boarded up building in which the murder took place. Everyone on campus is going. Unfortunately, everyone on campus also eats at the cafeteria & they all get a does of salmonella with their evening chicken. A madman wearing academic robes haunts the campus, preparing to turn the dance into a bloodbath. He has been lurking around the corners of the college throughout the first half of the film. However, just as the murderer is about to kill his first victim the food poisoning begins to take effect & everyone at the dance begins to frantically run for appropriate receptacles. The madman is left with a difficult choice. Should he proceed with the brutal murders of the college kids, which is ostensibly his goal, or should he wait. If he waits the victims will be more willing & able to defend themselves in cinematically impotent ways & the killings will be imbued with the mix of sexuality & violence that horror movies bank on. However this is the centennial of the original slayings, a once in a lifetime chance to wreak insane havoc on the campus.

Ancient Greek Lyric Poetry, pt 3

My tongue curls, a flame
runs beneath my skin,
I need to find someone
who has some jumper cables.

--Sappho

Ancient Greek Lyric Poetry, pt 2

The American consulate
in Turkey

has 4000 words
for snow.


--Archilochos

Gerard de Nerval, from Aurelia

—“Nonetheless,” I told myself, “it is certain that these sciences are interspersed with human error. The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyphs arrive to us incomplete and partially distorted by time as well as by the efforts of those who have an interest in perpetuating our ignorance; were we to find the lost letter or an erased sign, reassembling the dissonant whole, we would gain force in the spirit-world.”

It is in this way that I thought to perceive the connections between the real world and the spirit world: The earth along with its inhabitants and their history are a theater where physical actions take place in preparation for the existence and determine the situation of immortal beings tied to its destiny. Without addressing the impenetrable mystery of the eternity of the universe, my thoughts went back to the period when the sun, like the planet which shares its name-sake, which while inclining it head follows the revolution of its astronomical path, sowed on earth the fertile seeds of plants and animals. This was none other than fire itself, which, being compounded of souls, formulated instinctively their communal dwelling. The spirit of the God-Being, reproduced and, as it were, reflected upon the earth, became the prototype of human souls, each of whom, was by turns both man and God. Such beings were the Elohim.

I’m tired
of the clink
of knife
on marble.
You get no
extra credit
for googling
your own
face twice.

--Callimachus

The Clean Part (With Paintings)

Zach & I were pleased as pickles to have GC Waldrep, Kerri Sonnenberg & Kristi Maxwell read at The Clean Part last night. It was a truly wonderful reading. I felt blessed for the following reasons:

1. It the first time I had the chance to experience a whole group of Kristi’s terrific poetry all together & it blew me away.
2. Kerri read some delicious recent work, which has taken a turn from The Mudra but continues to explore many of the same aesthetic issues with a different engagement of subject matter.
3. After being a Grade-A fan of GC’s work for years I finally got to hear a reading of his that was longer than 5 minutes.
4. GC was able to not only overcome technical difficulties but somehow work them into his reading.
5. It was a great crowd that seemed as wowed as I was.
6. All three poets are not only exceptionally talented but are delightful people (who hopefully will forgive my general level of over-exuberance & over-chattiness about tattoos & black metal)

Many, many thanks to all three of them & to anyone reading this, you should go buy a couple dozen copies of Kerri’s & GC’s books & give them to all your family members as “Secret Admirer” gifts. And when Kristi’s book comes out from Ahsahta you should buy another dozen of them & read each one as if it were a brand new book to you.

Z & I hired elementary school kids from Glasgow to document the reading, here are their renderings of the event.



Kristi & Kerri before the reading.


Zach introducing Kerri.


Some kind of treasure chest with arms & legs.


Zach & Me outside the Sheldon.


Kristi & Kerri listening to GC's reading.


Kristi, Kerri, Michael & Jeff riding some kind of flying worm-dinosaur to Yia Yias.


Then we found a mermaid.


Kerri discovered a slightly malicious cat.


Someone put a mysterious grey circle around my face.

Obsessive Consumption in the New York Times

Kate Bingaman-Burt, who is a fantastic designer & artist (& has been typesetting the Octopus Chapbooks) runs a website that you might know about called Obsessive Consumption. If you haven't looked through it, you need to. There is a piece about her in the NYT Magazine today, which is very cool.

A Brutal Way to Sell Shirts

Robin Schiff's reading last night was breathtaking, both by virtue of her performance & the consistently wondrous quality of her poems. The poems from Worth are strong poems, which I highly recommend, but the poems she read from her upcoming manuscript are dazzling. They slip between prosodic categorizations, meditation to narrative to lyric to more fully open. Through this protean movement the poems in one way become objects uniquely defined by this process--I was emailing Nate a week or so ago about how in experimental poetry the process has a kind of unified ego to it & he asked me to say more about this. I never wrote him back (sorry, guy) because I'm still not sure what I think of that. Schiff's process, while hardly in keeping with the 'traditions' of avant garde line & syntax experimentation, has this element of creating a kind of persona. The poems may not fit a single category, but the have the effect of being objects uniquely linked to the creator. I'm thinking of (and these are hyperbolic names to associate anyone with, so take a grain of salt here) Christopher Smart & Mina Loy. Their poems are, to me, extensions of their ability to negotiate the lived world.

And yet the poems are highly public as well, with a development of concerns & associations with rhetorical purpose. Schiff's poems from the new manuscript (if you don't have the red Canary order it right now to read "Project Paperclip") develop through associations that are often linguistic, but culturally so, following how the words perform multiple meanings. And while this could produce a poetry of Oulipo-like playfulness (not that I have anything against that), her poems grow density through their associations. She never allows the associations to lead her out of the poem, instead moving deeper into the potential and every association takes a dark turn. But the immediate thing that keeps the poems from being simply play is that the associations are dazzling. I felt a kind of exhilaration listening to her poems that I associate more with the whipping plotlines of action movies than most poetry.

Saturday Nov. 18, 2006, 7PM: G.C. Waldrep, Kerri Sonnenberg & Kristi Maxwell

The Clean Part Reading Series presents GC Waldrep, Kerri Sonnenberg & Kristi Maxwell Saturday night. Come for the carrot cake, stay for the poetry. Though there won't be any carrot cake. We already ate it.

Robyn Schiff Reading Thursday Night

Poet Robyn Schiff will be giving a reading at 7:00 pm in Callen conference center on the Wesleyan campus. Schiff is the author of the book Worth. She holds an MFA from the Iowa writers workshop and an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Bristol. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern.

Life in Nebraska: A One-Act Play

Setting: An elevator on the campus of University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Characters:
Man 1, a white male in his forties
Man 2: a soft-spoken man of Middle Eastern descent in his late thirties, early forties

Man 1: So are you from Iraq [pronounced eye-rack]
Man 2: No, I am from Iran [pronounced correctly]
Man 1: Oh, did you come over here in the eighties?
Man 2: No, I came over at the beginning of this semester.
Man 1: Did you start studying English here?
Man 2: No I studied English in Iran.
Man 1: So, what do you think of the University of Baghdad now?
Man 2. That is in Iraq. Iran is different from Iraq.


-the end-

Nothing gets clean
Until it's called into question

Happy Go Licky
live

Laurus

Please join me in welcoming Laurus. This is the UNL undergrad lit mag, which is now a mix of online & print. The Clean Part intern & all-around wonder, Alisa Heinzman, has poems in this first issue.

Missionary Conquest

A few years ago my friend Robert came to visit me here in NE, he was freshly back from Spain for a while & I was only newly in Nebraska. Scrounging through a thrift store we found a board game called Missionary Conquest. It was a dollar & we thought it was funny so we bought it & back at my apartment, drinking kalemochos (spelling?) we read through the game cards with delight & horror.

The rules state that “Missionary Conquest is a board game of fun, strategy, competition and interaction in which players should use a sense of fair play and good stewardship.” However, as with life itself, they may choose to be as devious and dastardly as they think they can get away with. Missionary Conquest combines the financial daring and risk of Monopoly and the world conquering spirit of Risk. The object of Missionary Conquest is to establish Missions throughout the world and to earn Blessing Points.

here are some examples of the ways in which you earn or lose Blessing Points. Actual quotes from the game cards:

In Greece "While visiting an olive grove you eat green olives. Wrong. Wrong. Dr's are expensive in Greece. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Cuba "You tell crowds that communism does not work. For that, you are arrested and expelled from the country. Gain 75 Blessings."

In China "Your interpreter goofs! He tells the people they should be jiving instead of telling them they should be tithing. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Nicaragua "You sell your camcorder to buy food, clothing, and building supplies for a needy family. Gain 25 Blessings."

In Angola "Your interpreter has the hiccups. You laugh so hard you can't continue. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Mexico "The water that you drank gives you an upset stomach and an upset mouth. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Canada "You call a church lukewarm when it refuses to accept your obnoxious message. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Ethiopia "You win a communist leader to Christ. Gain 50 Blessings."

In Spain "Your wife wears shorts while touring a local abbey. the monks are offended. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Spain "You release two bulls into the street while visiting a bullfight. Much damage is done. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Poland "You organize a protest of an abortion clinic in Warsaw. Local officials arrange your expulsion. Gain 75 Blessings."

In Finland "You brave a fierce winter storm on foot to deliver Bibles. Gain 25 Blessings."

In Afghanistan "The food is bad but so is your attitude. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Nepal "You overheard that the Dalai Lama is coming to town. You attend the meeting and find out that it is a belly dancer. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Iran "You were martyred after evangelizing Teheran. Great is your heavenly reward. Gain 150 Blessings."

In Egypt "You threaten the people with frogs when they walk away from your preaching. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Malaysian "Your youth rally goes according to God's plan. Gain 25 Blessings."

In Peru "Your leg is broken while rescuing two children caught in a mudslide. Return home to recuperate. Gain 75 Blessings."

In Columbia "You helped a family harvest tea. Instead of tea, you learned it was coca that yields cocaine. Lose 25 Blessings."

In Saudi Arabia "You preach at Mecca during a Muslim holy day that Jesus is the only way to God. A Mob martyrs you. Gain 150 Blessings."

In Syria "You read your Bible aloud at a sidewalk café. The People stone you. You have to return home."

In Iraq " You preached on the streets of Qum (a holy city) even though you were warned not to in a dream. You were stoned to death by fanatical Muslims. Gain 150 Blessings."

Today i'm spending my day with


Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics


Donald Revell's Arcady


Witchcraft's Firewood


Matt&Kim's S/T

& finding them all to be lovely company.

There are books & journals lying around here in the English building, usually oudated editions of unexciting anthologies, old copies of PMLA or a Kenyon Review from the 80s. Because I am a scrounger & a packrat I usually stop to look at them. Today I picked up the 1992 A Gallery of Writing from a table because I found it to be an unusually bad title for a journal. It turns out it is (was?) the undergrad lit journal from William & Mary, which was down the road from my old college & where my little brother went to school for a while. I thought that was cute & was curious about how it could have ended up in Nebraska but when I flipped to the toc I saw Brian Henry, Andrew Zawacki & Laura Sims. I was more than a little surprised, impressed. Something must have been in the water in Williamsburg in the early 90s.

Pilot Magazine & Books

Good Poems, for real.

Selda

OK, stop what you're doing & listen to Selda. Especially "Ince Ince."

If I were the guy whose job it is to write the text on those silly stickers they put on cds to lure you I would write this:

Fuzzed out Turkish psych-folk with drum production big enough to swallow Bonham whole.

Full-throttle political Turkish folk-funk that will have you marching on the capitol, any capitol.

Kind of like a distorted, overdriven & a little messy Turkish Joan Baez, but with occasionally spine-clenching vocals.

Maybe that last one wasn't so good. Apparently Selda was considered a threat to Turkish national security in the 70's. This music knocks me over & then when I stand up it grabs my hands & hits me in the face with them, chanting "Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?"

My Baby Daddy is Robert Penn Warren

(pictured above: Robert Penn Warren)

My friend Naca spoke to my po-po class about Asian-American poetry, Spanish in English-writing poetry & writing about place in a way that is not simply landscaping. She was brilliant & warm & amazing. In talking about her writing & revision process she came to an impromptu theory of influence that I think I'’m willing to present (with some ironic disengagement) if not quite defend: the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence.

The setting for the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence is an erotics of textuality that is somewhat seedy & smoky & disoriented by Coors Light. There is no Oedipal anxiety in the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence, no contested relationship to the influencer, rather the poet takes influence in the way that he or she might become pregnant accidentally & without being in love with the baby daddy. Those characteristics that might seem ugly, troubling, annoying in the baby daddy can somehow produce the most beautiful & beloved babies. What you hate in a Mary Oliver poem might, when processed through your aesthetic & process, become a beautiful baby. Some semi-prophetic muck from Galway Kinnell might become wondrous in your own poem.

Given, the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence casts the role of the poet as a heterosexual woman & the equation of creativity to fecundity is a little silly in so many ways. These are obvious faults in the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence, but for the sake of the argument I think I just ask you to ignore those faults in favor of thinking about who the baby daddies of your art would be. Maybe you wouldn'’t want him over for dinner, wouldn't want your friends to know he's partially responsible for that poem, but you can see his eyes in your syntax, his chin in the pacing of your images, the baby's concourse of consonants has his laugh. Obviously this is pretty traditionally dialectical, but it'’s a Baby Daddy way of thinking about an engaged dialectic.

The flipside of the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence, though Naca didn't get into this, is that you can't make babies with the ones you love. The poet is (either defiantly or sadly) never able to bed the one he or she truly loves for the purpose of making baby-poems, but is destined to a series of unsatisfying, drunken one night stands that result in the most shockingly & surprisingly beautiful babies. If the Baby Daddy Theory of Poetic Influence weconsciousscous decision, which I don't think it is, this means no more attempting to consciously work with the palette of a poet you love, but rather to harbor your dislikes & engage your dislikes.

Black Metal Poetry: Christine Hume

from her incredible book Alaskaphrenia


Animal House Shape of God

We tracked every acre in full fury.
It seemed withdrawn: a meandering line
in the dog-smelling wind.

Eyeless black wolves lope like
lapping fur currents.
Their thousand syncopations brighten

a splitting silence; the smoke
runs down ridges.
Everyone else's son's in jail.

Why should our thoughts slope
below us? Grazing grotesques of rock--
see what's diamondback-struck.

We change our body temperature.
We are noise, depending. The mind
blanks out a fault, shoots into river.

when once circles another,
it teaches forty-eight examples.
How many wolves we did not know.

We calm our hands by holding sticks.
Calling your name
guts the sky where branches

net a pulse of stars until calling out
bleeds your name please
make it drain all shape from our heart:



That is so black metal.
Here is a black metal remix of a classic american poem:

Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man (a Black Metal Remix)

One must have a mind of BLOOD!!!
To regard the steaming entrails
Of the sacrificed victims crusted with snow;

And have been praising the dark lord a long time
To behold the armies of wolves shagged with ice,
The swords & medieval stuff in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and always to think
Of every misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few broken skulls,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
everything is misery, pain & sacrificed victims.

This Sunday: An Evening of Jewish Poetry

An Evening of Jewish Poetry
Read by Hilda Raz and Jehanne Dubrow

Sunday, November 12, 2006
7:00 PM
Congregation B’nai Jeshurun
The South Street Temple
20th and South Streets

Hilda and Jehanne will read selections from their own work
and from a forthcoming issue of the Prairie Schooner featuring Jewish Poetry


In Spring, 2007, the Prairie Schooner will publish a special issue featuring a portfolio of work by Jewish writers who examine the revived interest and immersion in yidishkayt—“Jewishness” or “things Jewish”—which has occurred among Jews over the past decade. Speaking in tones simultaneously irreverent and devout, both modern and traditional, contributors examine ways that Jewish poets may interpret yidishakyt through verse, through translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, and even through prose. Contributors include noted poets Marge Piercy, Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Ostriker, and Mark Halperin,

Hilda Raz, the Luschei endowed editor of the Prairie Schooner, and a professor in the UNL Department of English. Her poems, essays, articles, and reviews have been widely published.

Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy, and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at UNL, and is the recipient of UNL’s Maude Hammond Fling Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Tikkun, and The New England Review.

Oh My God! Montana! Virginia! I know, right?

Sorry, that was my Howard Zinn impersonation.

Blogger is being really slow, probably because of the dems writing posts cheering themselves & the republicans grumbling. And while I hardly feel that a change in the control of the house & possibly the senate would significantly move this country to where I would like it to be (radical reform of environmental laws & enforcement, drug laws & prison systems, free market strategies, for starters), at least this might break the right-wing control of this country, which for so long has seemed locked.

Last night I went to a great reading from Anthony Hawley & Grace Bauer at Wesleyan's series organized by Michael Dumanis. Chatted with Michael before I went home; we were, of course, discussing the elections. I said the typical 'If the dems lose this one we're really screwed' & he retorted that he thought that if the dems blew yesterday it could mean that it's conservative control for just about the rest of our lives. Hyperbolic, perhaps, but biking home I was thinking about how much this country has become the country that Reagan & then Gringrich envisioned it to be. I mean, Rick Santorum was a national leader! This guy is a hateful, sick, zealot & we had him making decisions for us. I'm glad to see such a nation-wide voice desiring change, even if I am dubious of how much a change it will really be. So pour a little out for Montana where the margin is less than 2000 votes & Virginia where even the most conservative of democrats is not, at least, George Allen. Maybe blow them a kiss or two.

And pour a little out for David Hahn, who sadly is not the govenor elect of Nebraska today. He ran with conscience & didn't pander too much to the republicans who make up most of this state. He seems like a good guy, intelligent, open-minded & committed to making Nebraska a better place. He would be good for the state of Nebraska. So of course they didn't vote for him.

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A bit later.

OK, ignore my cynical second guessing.

This is a big deal.

Sure there is a lot to do but people should be happy.

Live reports from Oaxaca here.

Good Luck Dems

Gertrude Stein, "Reflections on the Atomic Bomb" (1946)

They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.

I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.

Sabastiaan Bremer

I've been seeing this guys work every once in a while & forgetting to check him out more until I read a show review in Art in America this weekend. I love the baroque qualities of the drawn part in relation to the murky melodrama of the photographs. I doubt I would be interested in either part of it alone, but put them together & I'm fascinated. You can check out more of his work here.

Last weekend Matt Hart gave me a copy of Brigit Pregeen Kelly's Song, which I'd never read before & the title poem has been haunting me all week. You can read it here, but it might haunt you as well.

Also, Homemade Tattoo Club started in Lincoln this weekend.

The Crisis is Big

On a whole different level of poet-as-controlling-mechanism from Warren check out Nate Pritts' Big Crisis. Pritts is writing from individual experience & the work of many of his poems is to hold onto that "I." No matter what. Jumpy, tense, anxious & exclamatory, part of the fun of reading his poems is wondering whether they're going to fall off the cliff. And it's a real cliff.

rbally is/was a yummy music blog, which is closing up shop. If you're reading this there is a good chance you'll want to slip over here & download this Cat Power concert before it disappears.

By Beer Comes Drawing, By Ben Comes McQuillan

Iron Brush Tattoo Art Gallery
1024 'O' Street

Ben McQuillan is a one-man heat-seeking man. He has an art show of late-night sketches at Iron Brush Gallery that opens Friday. Anyone with a tattoo gets in for free. Anyone without a tattoo gets into trouble.

Alli Warren: Cousins

The intellectual charm of this chapbook is its inclusionary disassociation, which bashes disparate modes of thinking and speaking together within single sentences or syntactical gestures. But this is not what sets it apart from any number of experimentally minded poets who’ve done a similar thing. It is first off, & importantly, a lot of fun to read. The immediate charm for the reader is how a controlling humor coheres the dissassociations & relishes the wild, occasionally trashy language without that relish turning overtly ironic.

On an immediate level this humor develops through the inherent silliness & energy created when things are spliced together. And though I am hardly inured to this brand of fun I recognize that it’s pretty old hat. Beyond that, the fluctuation of voices creates little zones of human stability & these create a kind of humor of recognizable voice as well. At one moment avuncular, another corporate-speak, at another hip hop, it is as if there is a constantly set of firing synapses of public speech or perhaps one of those sped up overhead city shots where the people become a nearly abstract expressionist mix of line & identity. These voices become individually recognizable for a moment before returning to the blur. I see the role of the poet as a kind of culture conductor in this chapbook, inviting one voice in and then another in ways that are surprising & fun. But what I like about this chapbook is that the fun doesn’t seem campy but somehow (& I can’t place that somehow) committed.

This is also a wonderfully made chapbook, which I feel like I should point out as I think a chapbook is importantly an object. Beautiful design & production.

Get it Here (if there are any left)
Alli Warren's Blog

Finally

Graywolf has reprinted (I almost wrote repressed) Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T & Muse & Drudge in the new book Recyclopedia. This is great news. These are extraordinary books full of wondrously smart & visceral poetry.

Check this out from Trimmings, it is so alive it seems to vibrate:

Girt, a good old girl got hipped. They thrive with wives, broad beams. Most worthy girth, providing firm. Foundations in midriff. Across (between) girdled loins, tender girders. Gartered, perhaps, struts. Stretching, a snap crotch.