Q & A with David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006)

This is a new game called “Ask David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006) Questions About It’s Morning.” The way you play it is you get yourself a copy of David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006), you ask it questions about things it did this morning & then you open it at random & have it give you responses. It’s like divining the future with the Aeneid, but this bibiomancy allows you to understand more about David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006)’s morning. Witness:



Q: How was your breakfast, David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006)?

A: When they took Albert Einstein home
He put on some casual clothes and took a walk
They gave him the ice-cream special
called “The Balt”



Q: Hey David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006), what did you think of the waitress at the diner?

A: Part of the universe is missing.




Q: Did you have a good time at The Sheldon this morning, David Shapiro’s New & Selected Poems (1965-2006)?

A: A black ear crawls on the window. It is
my own, my very own remarkable ear.
I hear little of the original spirit.

Key Bridge, &c

Tornado warning today! Hail the size of gumdrops! And isn't George Harrison's "Isn't it a Pity" the best post-Beatles Beatles song? Sometimes it is. Today it is. The shimmering drums mesmerize. I want the song to last forever, to follow me around. I could get stuck in a labyrinth of those drums, those whispery vocals & be completely fine with it. Here are some lines that are not in that song:

She's got these green galoshes
& can't wait for it to rain.

New issue of Sawbuck is up & at 'em.

I've been reading & rereading Ken Rumble's Key Bridge over the last few days. I'd also be willing to spend my life in a labyrinth of this book. A meditation on place & race, both of which are both ever-present & theoretical when it comes to DC. Having spent time in NoVa & DC, this book connects with my background pretty directly. beyond that, though, it's an astoundingly paced book. Moving back & forth in time, not insignificantly across the 9-11-01 date-line, this book talks to itself, discusses the state of thinking about a city. It's at one moment hyperactive & horny & the next moment rent & imagistic. I think Rumble's super-power is the open parenthetical. Check this out:

24.december.2001

The return from there from her
Park Road above the park
blue weight & location
blue 3 a.m. Tuesday taxis--she that
she there
(she all that
good-ness visions sake slakes
there, above the zoo
(the zoo
the giraffe & elephant
(what?
the city & she
name, history & stake
a stake in the world
an open hand there,
an open hand curled into the sign
for brick for sub for height for here for land
for land for this we
know: ether & the angles:
this woman this city this coincidence this concordance
this conjunction this freedom this injunction
to call you in this first hour of this 27th Christmas



Yes! That is so thrilling. Blogger messes up the formatting a bit, but you need to buy this book anyways. So go buy it.

Seriously.


Also, Devin the Dude's record Waiting to Inhale is my new favorite record.

Pat Goes Meat

Boo Meat!

Luna

A series of reviews of the Octo-8 chaps starting today at Luna's blog.

Tonight at Kimball Hall

"Mike Lowenstern, bass clarinet, will perform. Lowenstern, considered one of the finest bass clarinetists in the world, has performed, recorded and toured the U.S. and abroad as a soloist and with ensembles of every variety. His career has traveled across equally diverse territory, and Lowenstern has enjoyed performing with musicians and groups such as The Klezmatics, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Steve Reich and Musicians, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and John Zorn."

The title of this concert might be MidwestClarifest, which is pretty silly, but I hear from good sources that this guy is the real deal.

Howl, Howl, Howl

There is a moment 2min 40 sec into Otis Redding’s version of “Chained & Bound” on Good to Me: Live at the Whiskey A Go-Go, just after the band has gone slack after the first wrenching crescendo, when someone in the crowd howls. It’s sanctified, uncontrolled, but strangely it is at the very moment when Otis has come back down to earth to think through his love for this woman. I would think of the screaming to accompany the climax, but this is the thing about Otis Redding, the emotional climax is not in the musical climax. It is in the neck-breaking rhythms of his meditative moments. It’s not swagger, it’s not bravado, he stares down the potential abyss of identity that is the danger of love & like an epic hero he steps through it & returns to us. Now with light, now with fire, now with the ultimate climax of the song that will wash away every sickly-sweet characteristic that words can not cleanse. Redding made the music to howl to. It's wolf as a verb, not as in to eat quickly, but to become lupine, fanged, howling, vibrating.

Pink Shirt Warning

Um, if you got a pink Octopus shirt from us please dry it alone first to set the screening ink. We forgot to set them. They will get all smeary if you don't.

If they already got smeary then let me know & I'll apologize a whole bunch.
I think this is only the black ink shirts, but maybe any of you should dry it & set it.

Sorry. On the other hand, most of you got them for free, yes?

Blog All Day, Blog All Night

I had a dream last night that I was interviewing my mother & was going to post the interview here on my blog. However all the questions I had written down were horribly maudlin, like "How have I failed you most as a son?" & "When did you first understand that our family was so depressing & how did you react?" I had a lot of questions & I asked them all of her & it was really sad & bewildering because I didn't want to be asking her these questions. And then at the end of the dream I posted them on my blog. And now I sort of posted some them. Some people say dreams don't come true. These people have never met my mother. Who is a wonderful mother, whom I love very much.

This was my first blog-related dream.

Octopus Books & Magazine News

April Reading Period for Full-Length Manuscripts at Octopus Books

In April, Octopus Books will read full-length manuscripts for publication in the winter. All manuscripts will be read anonymously & we will choose at least one book from the submissions we receive. We are asking for a ten-dollar reading fee, which will help fund the project. For more information click here

April Deadline for Reviews & Recovery Projects for Octopus Magazine

The next issue of Octopus Magazine, due in the summer, will consist entirely of critical work. We are still taking submissions of reviews, essays & recovery projects. Our initial deadline is April 15, but if you are interested in writing a review or recovery project contact us.

Recovery Projects, as you probably already know, are brief celebrations of books that have fallen off the radar of the poetry world. These are not scholarly essays per se, though they may contain scholarly analysis. They focus readers' attention on a book that you feel people should be talking about, but are not. We would prefer that the book be out of print & at least twenty years old; though as with all guidelines these are flexible.

Bapsi Sidhwa & Earth this Week at Wesleyan

From Michael D

The Nebraska Wesleyan Forum committee is pleased to announce that Bapsi Sidhwa, author of four internationally acclaimed novels, will be on campus this week at three events. Sidhwa was born in Karachi before the partition of India and Pakistan. She published her first novel, "The Crow Eaters", in English in Pakistan in 1978. Her visit is part of the emphasis on India and Pakistan this year.

Her prize-winning novel,"Cracking India", was made into the film "Earth", directed by Deepa Mehta, and released in the United States in 1999. The film will be shown on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. in Olin B (in the Olin Science building), followed by a commentary by Sidhwa on the making of the movie, which was a very difficult and politicized undertaking.

She will speak at Forum on Thursday at 1:00 in O'Donnell Auditorium (Rogers Fine Arts building) on "Cracking India: Fiction, Film, and Politics of the 1947 Partition." Then at 7 p.m. she will read from her fiction in Callen Conference Center (Smith-Curtis building).

My Broken Up Condition

2-3-/ 27 M M Metcalf
cfo F. B Hospital

Asheville, NC

Dear Mr. Lida,

Would you be so
kind as to help
me a little in my
Broken up condition
I rote yo some time
ago. got no ancer
So please Send me
a little help So I
Can get up— and
get Back home
help me little and
more.

Yours very truly
MMM Metcalf

[???} Ship love

Mr. Lida I
am a critical
Condition So
Please help me
I would you

or

I warned you

Stuff I Was Reading This Weekend

John Gallaher is the king of the painfully personal final gesture. Reading his new book, The Little Book of Guesses, I was struck repeatedly at the end of the poems. His super-power is the ability to open a poem in a particular voice or scene or a way of engaging a set of images, playfully move out of that opening gesture & then by the end of the poem suck me into an incredibly personal & emotionally fraught space that I not only accept but am blown away by. Oh, also he can fly, but I think the first super-power is more impressive.

Check this poem out:



Statements as Questions

We’ve been leaning toward people for years, out there
with our inside voices. Surrounded by hyacinth
and purple skies.

I’ve been meeting their gazes as well, pretty friend.
See it as an act of citizenship, with these neat rows of houses
under fluffy trees, as we’re full

of quavery emotions out here. And we’ve plenty of fluffy trees,
they start from the ground
and go all the way up…

Call it education
(Summer night. Blank pages.) And how it’s grasped.
This park, say. With lovers

and crickets. a basketball someone forgot, back and forth
slightly in the breeze, as we have our knowledge
and we have our knowing.

I’m desperate to see you, say. Or, Call me…

Something is bound to happen
in the understory, among the palliatives.

For the little book of guesses, dark birds
against a dark sky.

I don’t know how to comfort you.



Here are some other closing moves that kill me:


No wind at all to speak of.

Everyone accounted for.


&


You can call yourself a pilgrim,
noting the texture of matter.
You can go here to here.


&


It's serous business at the obstacle race.
(& our cheerleader & her buttercup...)


&


Don't remember me like this,
remember me some other way,

some way I never was.



Now go buy it & see how those poems get you to those places.



When I was in Atlanta I heard Laynie Browne read from her book Daily Sonnets & a few poems in she dropped these lines:

To make a person you need two people
Otherwise you’ll just get a big belly
And the baby will never hatch

So, of course, I was hooked. If I remember correctly she wrote these sonnets every day as she was hanging out with her kids & that somehow gives me the OK to not care that I don’t like all of the poems, but it’s more of the dailiness of them that is important to the book. All weekend I just kept the book with me, stepping in & out of it, finding some gems & not worrying about the baser stones. I’m not going to say that this is a great book & you need to buy it & learn from every poem in it, but every time I start reading around in it I find something that delights me & that is worth the price of admission to me. It's a great book to read from while walking around Lincoln, Nebraska's downtown with friends.


The new Ted Leo & Andrew Bird records do not make my knees weak. The new Panda Bear, on the other hand, is all rubber bands & sugar.

There Are Three Ways to Enter a Wolf's Heart

There are no more sweet, genuine & exciting two people than Joshua Poteat & Allison Titus. And the poems! Oh my dear, my dear. These two are so deliciously wonderful. Josh will read you a poem about foxes & you will want to stand up & hug him; you will feel like the metal springs of a clothes-pin, formerly rusted & now it is summer & now there are Jeep Grand Cherokees in every syllable. Allison will read you advice from the narwhale & you will wish your tusk, your horn, your little minor chord of twist.

Also (& maybe I should have mentioned this first) The Clean Part Reading Series has been converted into a fully functioning, self-sustaining farm. Our poets birth & raise at least one calf per reading. They bale the hay. They play with the big knife. They stick their heads into the coyote dens & whisper. I grew a beard & then lost it, all in the span of an afternoon.

So yes, many thanks to Joshua & Allison for coming to Lincoln to read here. Many thanks to the Sheldon for hosting us. Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading. I know I’ve said it before, but we have the best audiences in Lincoln, they are willing to open up to poets they’ve (mostly) never heard of before, willing to listen closely & attentively & are willing to be moved. I could not ask for a better group of peeps. Thanks to the Reinkordts & their lovely farm with the most dessicated cats you ever seen.

You know what is good for you. You know you need to read Josh’s book Ornithologies & Allison’s forthcoming chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhale.

Also, I’m going to officially call out John Gallaher as a coming-to-the-clean-part-reading-series tease. However he does have the single best epigraph to a book that I have ever read, which opens up his delightful new book, The Little Book of Guesses. So I also forgive him.

The Clean Part Reading Series

This saturday.

Joshua Poteat & Allison Titus.

Both coming in from Richmond, Virginia.

At the Sheldon Museum.

7pm.

For bios & links to samples check out The Clean Part site.

The First Weekend of Spring

This is fixing to be a wonderful weekend. Ande & Boz w/ Her Flyaway Manner are playing tonight at the Chatterbox. Amber Harris Leichner & Dave Madden are reading this afternoon at The No Name Reading. Joshua Poteat & Allison Titus are coming in today to read tomorrow at The Clean Part Reading Series (at The Sheldon, 7pm, yo).

Last night was a great set-up. I attended the composition showcase at UNL & while the first half was not for me the second half was absolutely incredible. Local avant-impresario Luke Polipnick performed a piece scoring the Maya Deren film “At Land.” It played up the lyric tensions of Deren’s surrealist piece, it was propulsive without being frantic. He’s great. And with his new haircut he kind of looks like a circa 1995 skater. Cute!

The second piece was composed by Jen-Kuang Chang: “The Manhattan Project: To Victims of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.” With a title like that I had steeled myself for a morbidly dirgy work, but was surprised that Change set up the stage with a dozen vases of paper cranes & light boxes projecting images of marionettes. The piece was haunting, clanging, contorted & simply lovely. An extraordinary surprise!

Then Ande & I stayed up late playing music. I played guitar until my fingers bled, which always makes me feel far cooler than I am.

Hey, check out this Sandburg poem:

Greig being Dead

Greig being dead we may speak of him and his art
Greig being dead we can talk about whether he was any good or not.
Greig being with Ibsen, Bjornson, Lief Ericson and the rest,
Greig being dead does not care a hell’s hoot what we say.

Morning, Spring, Anitra’s Dance,
He dreams them at the doors of new stars.

A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight

Welcome to Hadara Bar-Nadav's new website, feel free to step in, read the poems, order the book. I haven't actually read my own copy of it yet, but I read earlier versions of it & I'm pretty sure it will make your knees buckle. If you have knees. Do you have knees? If you don't have knees you should get some. I love mine. If you haven't been reading Hadara's work you probably haven't been reading literary journals over the past few years because she's in just about every one & just about every one of her poems is fabulous. And she has knees. Dozens of them.

Kryah: Glean

Spent a good day with Joshua Kryah's Glean yesterday. It hums like viola strings picking up the resonance of landing planes. I know that simile sounds a bit precious, but seriously, it does. Despite my general lack of religiosity I have a fascination with the religious experience, primarily because I don't distinguish between the theistic & atheistic experiences of the sublime. Well, I mean, I do, but I don't. You feeling me? However, I feel like there are few contemporary poes who can approach religiosity without ending up in the banal.

Kryah has the yearn of those desperate psalms, offset against a Rilkean feel for the attention to emotional incongruence. His poetry works in a space that not many people approach--it's a space where language stretches, becomes flexibly but not arbitrarily referrent. There are only a handful of religiously minded poets who really bring me into the experience. I won't bother listing them as you probably know who I'm talking about already. I'm glad to find this book & have another to add to my not-list.

I won't bother putting a poem up here since he has a pdf of sample poems here

In No One’s Land

I spent a few hours last night rereading Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s debut book In No One’s Land, you know the Sawtooth prize-winner. During my first read-through I didn’t really get it until halfway through. It seemed wet & sloppy. Not sloppy in the sense of loose writing or anything like that but sloppy in the sense of emotion-soaked sponges beneath every step, squishing & squishing & the whole reading experience was confusing. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Hass.

But then there was a point halfway through the book when I remembered that D. A. Powell had chosen the book & suddenly everything made sense. It is a wet book, a sloppy, one-too-many-kisses kind of book, but it is not my job as the reader to try to connect with these poems, to try & feel. I am being spoken to. I am in the position of the egg in the crate. The other eggs above me have cracked & I know that soon the whites that have been drooling all over me will dry & crust.

In that sense it is a painful book, because there is a way that the barest emotions are presented with an aching wit. But this distance is not a deflecting mechanism, but the inability to take it in. The imperative comes in frequently, but I never believe it is a you. The you is the I with smoke-burnt eyes.

The poems as individual objects are less important to me than the weird turns that occur continually throughout the book. It is a book of twisting through the mildew of emotion, but every twist is connected. It is at our most vulnerable that we no longer have identity, We become the voice. The voice of the pain. That’s what these poems tap into.

But this all sounds so emo & it isn’t. It’s funny & kind of bewildering because Paige is a good poet. She uses words that I tell my students just aren’t allowed in poems any more, bare, base, stultifying words like “beautiful” & “the.” This is a book that won me over, that made me struggle with it. It’s been a while since I’ve had this experience. I feel like usually when I open a book I know the poet’s work already; I know usually that I am going to like it already. I was generally unfamiliar with Paige’s poetry & therefore the whole book was new territory.

I like how the poems create a form to their arcs & I can depend on this form as I read it. I like the strangely fleshy tension between the syntactically-concerted & the emotionally bare. And so, sitting down with it today I already know that the poems are going to twist me into street-signs; I look forward to the strangely nude endings that I know are coming. To poems like this:

One Type of Hunger

It is October, an October said low under a light meant to resemble candlelight. Pretty. The leaves do their best to hang on; no one goes to the store until there is no choice. The refrigerator is empty. A man leaves the house. A man folds his hands together flush as a door clicked shut. A man. leaves. Falling is not the first step of a child; doesn’t begin. Yards and yards of dead and curling mouths. A man is known by his hunger, the way he tilts his head to the side, at once admonishing and at once a boy hoarding junk. The way a man falls and breaks badly. Each bone a hopeful twig laddered to another hopeful twig, posed skyward. October and the leaves are reorganized first by color and then by who dies first. We let the dark ones die alone. Nightcry. Trunks bellowing then starving in a proven mouthlessness. Where is the man. Where is the man. Nothing comes up from the ground, the ground is afghaned and unseen. Where has the man gone.

Name My Bike!

About a month & a half ago I realized that my bike was falling apart. Luckily Kona replaces flawed frames & I just finally got my bike back. It has changed from a stately, stoic gun-metal grey bike into a slightly more gigi khaki green bike. Even though it has all the old components & therefore is not really a "new" bike I'm psyched about it & I've decided I need to give it a nice new name. However, I'm having trouble coming up with good bike names & i would like some suggestions. So far I have vetoed the following names:

Carl
Carlton
Carlyton
Cal
Cal Ripken
Billy Ripken
Cal Ripken Jr.
Cal Ripken Junior Jr.
Crying
Sobbing
Weepering


Does anyone else think that Arcade Fire sound like John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band?

I probably should have swept the leaves from my kitchen floor before taking those pictures.

Have you read the amazing poems by Elizabeth Savage, Michael Rerick, Joshua Edwards & Susan Tichy in the latst issue of Court Green? If not then what are you waiting for?

This is me, marrowless and fluff, grub-eaten

There's going to be three readings in town this week, a No Name, Lucille Clifton at UNL tomorrow night & Joshua Poteat & Allison Titus at The Clean Part on Saturday. As I was putting together a packet of poems for my po-po students, I was struck yet again by how damn good this poem is of Josh's. He understands the lyricism of meditation, the inherent melancholy of transition. To be reminded of another thing is not metaphor, it's the failure of experience to remain distinct. It's a poem that I effectively grows desperate through its own thought process. It absolutely slays me, as it did the first time I read it in Gulf Coast. If it is late in the evening I will proclaim to you & anyone else that I think Joshua Poteat & Jake Adam York are the only two poets really progressing the work of Southern narrative right now.

The formatting is messed up here but you should buy his book Ornithologies & read it there.





The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls (Malvern Hill Battleground)

after Alice Aycock


There is truth in the phrase, the dead are at ease under the fields.

Autumn is what seizes it. A field of dried cotton stalks
have a grace in the wind only the dead can love,
and so, belief comes simple, rendering not a season
but stalk against stalk,

poor cousin-song of crickets,
poor furrow-in-the-gut, little nothing-at-all.

At least it will snow soon goes the cotton's rattled melody,
and this field beyond the city, flooded by night,
turns blue in the first frost as the ghosts of past crops
bridle upon it.

I give the field ghosts, and the wind eggs them on --
corn and sweet potato, tobacco and bean --
hovering the mule-plough of two hundred years.

So much for truth.

It's the least I can do since I cannot for the life of me
think of anything but the thin curtains of a hospital room
and an X-ray of my crooked spine pinned to a wall of light,

the sweet milk of vertebrae, my own skull
frowning back at me, such a cold cup of jaw,
so white I could have easily drank myself.

What a desire, to take one's self in, to unravel
the body's red yarn shapes and deceive the plague
of boundless hunger, to imagine this cotton field as bone
ready for the gin, rib and wrist and collar,

all tenderhearted stars,
inexact, held up to the light of no moon, no cloud.

This is me scattered in the furrows, I thought.
This is me, marrowless and fluff, grub-eaten.

I don't believe in much. Not the descent and re-ascent
of the soul ... the palace of the kingdom of the dead ...

So much for desire.

I have seen those X-rays of Velasquez, the hidden layers
illuminated to reveal six ghost-versions of hands along the rim
of an egg bowl, six different plates of fish and garlic,
a dwarf's blind face formed into the severed head of a pig,
then back to a dwarf, leaving the pig's wondrous eyes.

A bird later becomes a peach in the mouth of a jug,
and this is how I feel about the world at the moment.

Troppo vero, said Pope Innocent in a letter
to Velasquez of his portraits. Too faithful.

Representation is all we are in the end, I guess, and then some.

Charred ivory: muller stone: horse-hair:
white lead: madder: massicot.
This is me.

It is almost winter, here in the leftover cotton
that once held the thousand luminous angels of desire
as they curled inward towards a truth

unlike any flame they had seen.

This must be how the soldiers slept,
with the night all around them
and their bodies knowing where it was.

And this must be how the deer moved
over the fields long after the battle, drinking frost
from the eyes of the dead with their small pink tongues.

Oh dwarf, oh king, oh skeleton of mine,
will I ever feel your wings between my hands again?

Book Making & Elegy

Back in Nebraska, where is spring is steeping. Spent much of yesterday making more Octopus Books books, with Zach & Alisa & I tell you that there is no better day to be had than stab-binding with the peeps you adore while listening to Snowblink & Matt & Kim. You can't see it very well, but Alisa is wearing the best t-shirt ever. It reads "Nebraska Press Women" & has a skyline of Licoln on it.

if you are a Realpoetik subscriber then you saw some lovely poems by Julie Doxsee in your inbox today. If you are not (& if you aren't, well, why not silly?) you can read them here.

A couple of months ago I wrote a little bit about my love for Elizabeth Willis’ Meteoric Flowers. I didn’t really have anything to say about it except that it is wonderful & I stick by that somewhat simplistic assessment. I spent some time with her book Turneresque on my way back from ny & I find it both more & less impressive. While Meteoric Flowers was all of a project, deeply devoted to the exploration of its subject Turneresque is like a series of minor projects. The noir-ish turn of the title section left me less thrilled, though most of the best lines of the book were in that section. Her poem “Elegy,” however, encapsulates all the things I love about her poetry. Check out this first section:

The day I drove

in the driving rain
from realism to impressionism

a moving hillside fooled the town

What does it take
to make a happy ant?

a dropped lozenge
on the damp step

bumping into a friend
in the daily grind

avoiding death

Still you slip away
in a desert hospital

and cannot see to see

Hawthorne’s hand
against your hair

the stumbling blue
of windowed air

The Stevens-like intellectual whimsy mixes with her odd-ball wordplay (Like, who the hell would ever use “drove” & “driving” in such close proximity? And why do I love it?) & her playfully vexing movement of attention. I think the correct response to the happy ant is to turn your head slightly, like a confused dog & then keep going. But the play of that kind of move allows a line like “avoiding death” to not only be effective but chilling. That’s the moment when the reader looks back at the title & knows that they are part of something significant here. The beautiful gauziness of “Still you slip away/ in a desert hospital // and cannot see to see” runs smack into the name Hawthorne (writer or friend?) & a lovely set of images that ground the place, the end of this first part of the elegiac journey.

The poem goes on longer, but I think this first section really shows why Willis is incredible—the tonal mix of grief & light, the control of exactly how much a line can give, the wtf moments that progress the poem. So good. So good.

In other news I get my bike back today! And it has changed colors!

No One Gets Out

I'm at LaGuardia. I talked to the guy running my gate, offering to be bumped for a voucher & a confirmed flight tomorrow. He played around with the computer for a bit & then looked up at me ruefully. "I don't think you should do that," he said. "You got a confirmed seat here & tomorrow nobody is getting out of here."

Bible & Collapse

While there are few records that need to be written about less at this time, asessing my reaction to the new Arcade Fire has been interesting for me. It is a beautifully produced record, with a rich range of sound that extends the first record significantly. There are some fine songs with compelling melodies. Despite these reactions, which should seem to result in fandom of a record, I'm not all that into it.

My brother used to have this '81 Chevette. It was white. It had a topogrpahy of dings, bumps & scars across its body. When we were out on the highway it would begin to resonate & shake at about 70MPH; once he got to 77MPH it would convulse epileptically. And then if he pushed it just a bit faster, just as it felt like the engine block would fall out at any moment, just as it felt that we would all crash horrifically in a ball of flame, the shaking would be gone. Smooth driving through the rural hills of Virginia. It was one of his favorite games. It scared the hell out of me, eleven years old in the back seat.

And it is this form of shambolic redemption that I look for in the rock. If I want precision of sound, technique, skill I tend to look outside of the rock. If I want to the feeling of everything being about to collapse & only a mad vision can save it then I look to the rock. Arcade Fire's first record had a lot of faults that I could point out, but I never paid attention to those faults while listening to that record in the first six months after it came out. I just wanted to feel everything shake.

The weather is gross. A wintry mix. My flight was cancelled. All of the flights. All of them cancelled. So just as I made my peace with leaving I seem to have one more day in NY.

I set up a job interview at The Nonsense Factory for later today. Apparently Ana used to work there, but the boss was too mean. I think it might be the ideal job for me.


I've been reading the Schuyler to O'Hara letters all week while I've been here. They fill me with so much joy.



I've also been reading Lisa Robertson's Xecologue, which is (along with Cole Swenson & Anne Carson) making me want to write more in the space between the essay & the poem. Robertson brings a vastly greater level of lyric mystery to this space. The declarative, essayistic elements arrive through the play & wrench of metaphor, rather than depending on the metaphor to illustrate the idea. Witness:

These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing: it is an anthem, sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues in fluent scandal, reined with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched, caressed by an accent as rubbed fur murmurs to the sneaking night, sulking as a flicked skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserves--Dirty per se:


Or this:

How then may we speak of futures? I would prefer to lean and whisper in the throaty privacy of roses but distance brings discipline both anticipatory and fettering. Our anxieties have dissapated into all the varieties of edge a ruffling hand describes. A vocabulary is no longer adequate to the precisions of our desires. We're on the cusp of an umbelliferous and sweet coin. A timorous wordling flushes and buckles into secrecy. Greeness and violence wipe our lips. Fingers fall into the buxom air, the flickering and rhyming flesh. Skin is a rhythm cupped. Skin hinges the light. The buxom air unbraids us. We regret only our costly addiction to the beautiful.


In other news, A.O. Scott is getting all up with Chris Rock's new movie. Weird.