What's Been Going On In Denver?

Been spending time with Seth Landman, watching him make a face that is halfway between contemplative & kissyface. In addition to his impressive facial repertoire, Seth edits Invisible Ear, which is awesome.


I had a great time talking to Selah Saterstrom after a DU student reading event at which Tina Celona read the best elegy for a cat that I can ever imagine existing. And here is a very large mushroom.


Though the bikepath graffiti that I'd blogged about previously is now painted over, I saw some great paste-up pieces on broadway coming back from Food Not Bombs last week. Also I'm loving the Denver Food Not Bombs. Nice group of people & one Native American dude who insists on giving D'Count as many eggs as he can each week & calling him "Shorty."




Hung out in City Park with Eric & Andrea last weekend & I think they went paddleboating after we left. Oh! Did you read the microreview of Eric's Tuned Droves on the Black Ocean Blog? Pretty good. There is also a review of TD in the Poetry Project Newsletter but I have not read it yet.


Look at this cute thing.


Look at this door. And find the mastodon.


D'Count loves Kristin Naca's Bird Eating Bird & you will as well. Order it!

Some Poems, Some Musics

Kristin Naca's book is out! Check out her fancy Harper Collins website.

It rules! I'm so happy this book is out, it was a humbling & inspiring experience to be a part of Naca's writing world for some of these poems & was delighted to get to publish the anchor series for the book in Octo here.

Bird Eating Bird is totally brilliant--funny, wise, deep & challenging, all that good stuff--& it's also a unique mix of English & Spanish poetry from an American-born author. I'm glad it's not only out but that it won such a prestigious contest.



I'm also really excited about Beth Bachmann's book Temper, which is recently out from Univ of Pittsburgh.

I first read this manuscript when I was reading slush for a book prize. I got excited about it because it was a book working in traditional modes of Romantic observation & personal revelation, but it made me think more & more excitingly than many of the self-consciously experimental & intellectualized books I'd been reading. It reminded me, thematically & ideologically, of Mark Jarman's take on faith & it's failures & pleasures. But without the Jarman neo-formalism hackles. I copied a poem from it & had it hanging over my desk for years & then a year or so later saw that poem appear in some journal. Needless to say, it didn't win the prize then, a far inferior book did. But Bachmann has been one of the poets whose work I always turn to first in journals & I'm glad to have her book in my hands.


I get the oddest songs stuck in my head when I'm biking. Every time it rains, & this is not so odd, I get that Shudder to Think song that starts off "The rain feels good / it knocks on wood." But I guess I randomly get rhythmic songs that are deep in my consciousness stuck in my head & then they sometimes morph into other similar songs. One recurring song is "Hurts so Good" which then morphs into "Everybody's Working for the Weekend."

Ever since going to a house show at this hippie house last week, I've had Incredible String Band stuck in my head while biking. Their masterpiece record, Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, has been one of my favorites since I first heard it during college. It's cheesy, in that definitionally hippy-dippy way, but it's also endlessly entrancing to me. There is something pure & autumnal in it to me. You can download it here, though this is not my link.

I've been enjoying this tape of Temples, who apparently is a Denverite. It's drone & there's really not much to say about drone music one likes except it's real good. It's real good. And while we're at the myspaces, check out Marc Berger's new band Oh You Devil.

That new Reigning Sound record seems like something I would hate: garage rock a la The Animals or rougher VU. But I kind of love it. The new Ghostface sounds pretty amazing after one listen. The latest Lil Boosie is prety great in a synth-heavy melodramatically gangsta way. Also he has a record called Lil Boosiana, which rules. I wish the new Califone would come out, I want to get it on vinyl. They are somehow a band that makes more sense on vinyl to me. I'm just sort of trailing off here.

CD Wright's 40 Watts, Review of Shane McCrae, Puppies Fighting

I'm very happy to announce this! CD Wright's 40 Watts is now available from Octopus Books.

Hand-bound, hand-sewn, letterpressed black ink on grey/mint-green hard covers.
Limited edition of 200.
48 pages
$20 (includes shipping)


There is also a great review of Shane McCrae's One Neither One by Steven Karl on Coldfront today.


More Octo-News will be coming soon in your email boxes & your mail boxes.



Now back to the usually scheduled puppy blogging.

Poem Reviews

I'm teaching about image today & thought it was a good excuse to post a few awesome poems & then follow them with a bit of critical explication.

Skull

by Graham Foust

Such a white planet.

And what scars
the eyes are,

what page the lack of face.

Compare this
to flowers

in a house.

"Skull" is a great Sci-Fi poem. This is the perfect guy poem with lots of senseless shooting and violence. The story is entertaining and will keep your heart racing and keep you on the edge of your seat the entire poem. This poem has a lot of muscle, a little smarts and limited dialog but still manages to entertain. A predictable ending with the lead hero taking on the alien hunter and as expected the Foust takes out the predator. Very entertaining!

341

by Emily Dickinson

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

GUNS! ALIENS! DESTRUCTION! This poem is one of my all time favorites. The first day I got surround sound in my house, this was the first poem I put in the DVD Player, and immediately forwarded to the scene where they mow down the forest with all the guns! "314" is everything you want in an action/horror poem. The key to a great action/horror poem is always the bad guy, and "314" has one of the greatest badguys ever! A 7ft tall alien who comes to earth and stalks/hunts humans for trophys, who can turn invisible and jump through the trees like tarzan with a lazer cannon on its shoulder, PERFECT! This poem has Emily Dickinson, Carl Weathers, and Jesse Ventura, and a lot of great one-liners. If you are in the mood for destruction, read this poem, and then read it again.

Big Spender

by Heather Christle

All morning my knees were like two roaches
that some bad kid had set on fire and now
it’s happening again. I love my neighbor
not even abstractly, for firstly she arranges
about herself a sensible coat. After I was born
I began to understand precisely the devastation
a small event can cause, such as when following
the storm the gazebo in which you’d made love
to countless women collapsed and any hopes
you’d had for summer died suddenly like oddly
frail weeds. Then, as now, you had my sympathy.
I love my car, my lawnmower, my knees which
are still burning. I love systems, like the weather,
and I love to adopt them on Monday and by Thursday
have renounced them altogether. You are older
than eight but too young to enter a pageant
for retirees. I’m a scientist and businessperson,
looking for results. What we are seeking
is a footprint whose physical characteristics—
depth, tread, elapsed time—form an egret so perfect
it seems the very gods patrol the earth.

This is one of the best creature poems ever made and still stands high after 20 years. It is very well done and will have you jump more than once. It keeps your blood pumping and your eyes glued to the picture. This is a must see for people that like horror, sci-fi or action poem.

Now This

by Rae Armantrout

Thus the palm is rakish

and the philodendron
lugubrious.

Only using such rare words
will justify

my writing this,

my writing ‘my"
or now

here

Let me say I love this poem. Let me also say that if I am ever taken hostage I do not want Rae and her band of trigger-happy chunkheads rescuing me. After their thorough five-second reconnaissance of the militant's compound they blow just about the entire place to hell. Yo dudes you might want check to see if there are any hostages inside a building before you blast it into oblivion. But that is beside the point, "Now This" is not going to win any awards for intelligence but it does entertain. Before Rae became a goofy politician she did manage to make quite a few good poems and this is one of her best. Set in a steamy rainforest "Now This" cast Mrs. Barrel Chest as Dutch, the commander of an elite rescue team. Sent in to rescue some important cabinet members who crashed in their "Choppa". Rae and her macho "I could kill a whole platoon with my left ear" types find more than they bargained for when they encounter the Predator. Yes just in time for their little rescue an outer space hunter decides that its time to bag some humans and sooner then you can say "Everyone will die but the hero and the girl" the hunter is taking out the puny girly men who forgot to pack their infrared-block. This poem is full of classic moments and the characters are surprising well played for a poem of this type. Rae, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Sonny Landham, Richard Chaves, R.G. Armstrong, and Shane Black are all wonderful and create distinct characters instead of the usual generic big tough poets. The action, except for the idiotic rescue scene, is very cool. Jesse's portable weapon of mass destruction is awesome and the Predator costume designed by Stan Winston is incredible. Thank god they didn't use the ridiculous costume that Jean Claude Van Damme wore in his short stint as the Predator. Without a plausible alien this poem would fall apart. Alan Silvestri delivers a terrific music score and John McTiernan's direction is right on the money. A great fun poem.

Look Through a Complex Eye and See 1000 of Everything

by Zachary Schomburg

Look through a complex eye
and see 1000 of everything.

A bird becomes
a black cloud.

A broken mirror becomes
a hotel.

One boy falls from
a tree

and rains on
a cornfield.

Everything I plant
I bury.

In my judgement, "Look Through a Complex Eye and See 1000 of Everything" is Zachary Schomburg's best poem. He still has his physique, his accent is still believable and he projects a no-nonsense toughness that is appealing and respectable. Dutch the character, Zachary plays is a hard-boiled European working with the US Army to rescue people kidnapped by communists and insurgents. His men are the stereotypical tough guys updated for the nineties. Nat Weatherby plays an ambitious CIA agent who provides a sinister counterpoint to Schomburg's code of honorable mayhem. The story transitions from a narrative involved with rescuing a kidnapped politician to one of Conradian intensity as Schomburg's team encounter and are picked off by the "demon who collects men as trophies." The denounment of Schomburg's hand to hand to struggle with the Complex Eye remains one of the best man as prey depictions in poetry history.

Before Sunrise

by Arthur Sze

The myriad unfolds from a progression of strokes--
one, ice, corpse, hair, jade, tiger.

Unlocking a gate along a barbed wire fence,
I notice beer cans and branches in the acequia.

There are no white pear blossoms by the gate,
no red poppies blooming in the yard,

no lepiota naucina clustered by the walk,
but--bean, gold--there's the intricacy of a moment

when--wind, three-legged incense caldron--
I begin to walk through a field with cow pies

toward the Pojoaque River, sense deer, yellow, rat.
I step through water, go up the arroyo, find

a single magpie feather. This is a time
when--blood in my piss, ache in my nose and teeth--

I sense tortoise, flute where there is no sound,
wake to human bones carved and strung into a loose apron.

There's a lot of testosterone in this poem so it'd be easy to discount this as another Sze muscle flexing exercise but under all the biceps is a great poem. This is such a classic poem about humans having the tables turned on them and becoming sport for the amusement of an ultimate hunter. Apart from one sequence where the action is more reminiscent of "Quipu," the fighting scenes are incredible. Insider Scoop: The helicopter pilot at the end of the poem is the actor who plays the Sunrise.

Extract Sure Did Suck

OK, sure you say, Mike Judge isn't really very funny, despite having an uncanny knack for capturing the commodified angst of the self-consciously oblivious suburbanite. But I do have fond memories of Beavis & Butthead & I vaguely remember that there was something funny in that movie Office Space, so I thought "How bad could it be" & I also thought "I like Arrested Development." But this was more on the level of Jason Bateman in that Will Smith anti-superhero/angel/whatever crapfest that I can't even be bothered to google to remember. That means it's Jason Bateman doing his droll everyman-in-a-sea-of-ineptitude-&-disappointment routine, but without the good writing & intricacy of characters for him to play straight man off of.

I remember seeing Office Space when it first came onto dvd or video & thinking, "eh." And then years later I found my students quoting it & referring to it as if it were some classic like Gymkata. For reasons that were a total mystery to me, that mildly amusing film had become a cult hit. It took me a while, but i realized that it was such a hit among college kids from the burbs because it ultimately was their dream. While the movie pretended to have some silly fantasy of promoting the virtues of good hard, working class work, it really was what the average kid at school was looking forward to, a job where people don't really give a shit about what they do. In this, it was kind of like Beavis & Butthead, ostensibly a satire of the mtv dunderhead, but also a celebration of the vacancies that life in the technicolor glow has to offer.

Well, Extract is pretty terrible for basic filmmaking reasons: bad writing, bad characters, a seemingly total disregard for energy in acting & editing. There were a few good lines, especially "I'll be a laughingstock in the grindcore community" & Jason Batemen had some funny inflections, as is his job. Ben Affleck sucks royally, as is also his job. Kristen Wiig, who is hilarious everywhere I've seen her but here, is wasted, since Judge seems to only be able to see women as trite cliches. Or maybe it's just how he sees people. It's a sucky film.

But beyond that & what makes me care enough to spend 15 minutes writing this, is that it has such a vicious streak about its portrayal of working class people, especially for a film that ends its narrative with an affirmation of the working class & the small business man. It is the working class people's taste & attitudes that provides the majority of the jokes for the film & even in the cul de sacral suburbs, it is the tastelessness of the neighbor, whom we find out is in sales, that provides the humor. The film pretends to dig at the corporations & the national chains in favor of the small guy, but it's the small guy's affection for Pepsi & Dominos that lets us know we should be laughing at them. It wasn't even enough to make me angry, it was just so stupid.

I've never left a theater feeling so bored about the world. I wish that was their tagline for the film.

labor

D'Count is asleep with his head on my foot right now.

I've been reading this Gaurdian article about a newly explored volcanic area in Papua New Guinea in which a wide diversity of unique animals had evolved over the last 200,000 years. Island biogeography at its finest. It's the kind of thing that makes me extremely emotional.





There is a slideshow with more photos here.

The British Library has made a huge set of recording available for free online here. I have not dug into it yet, but I'm very excited.

I sort of skipped the reissue of Kath Bloom songs, which was packaged along with a disc of covers. I didn't figure I needed another reissue of a 70s folkie that Devendra rips off. I was wrong. I've been listening to her song There Was a Boy on repeat this morning, it's one of those shambolic songs, teetering between simple expression & breakdown, that makes the strings & voice seem somehow faded into themselves. Each time I listen to it i find myself rooting for her to have the strength to finish the song. It's haunting & beautiful & while none of her other songs quite reach this peak of pathos to me, it's a stunning set of music. Just avoid the covers on the other disc.

Routine

I usually think of street art as something you come upon & then it is sort of lost to me, but that's really more of a NY thing. Now that I'm in a pretty set routine of movement through Denver I keep seeing the same street pieces & graffiti. The wall on the east side of the light rail with some great pieces. The spraypainted message on the bikepath "exstream danger -- horny women ahead on path," next to which someone else wrote "I going to fuck them in the butthole." These last messages are right at a turn of the path over a bridge, so I stare at them 4 days a week & think... well, think nothing really. I just see them. This probably drunken message & the pathetic follow-up, that probably the writers forgot about already, they have become a daily part of my life.

On the same bikepath, coming home from my office on Friday, I passed by a woman doing some odd thing on the grass. My mind didn't process what she was doing quickly enough & I wanted to look back at her to fill in the cognitive gaps. But instead of turning I instinctively tried to look in my rearview mirror & for a moment, perhaps a good 4 seconds, I was completely unable to understand why I couldn't see her. It felt briefly like what I imagine a stroke to feel like.

I'm teaching Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" on Tuesday. I've never taught the story before & am excited. There's an edition of her work on googlebooks here, which has what looks like woodcut prints on every page.

Who's Ready for Some Videos of Our Dog Running?

So it is possible that this is just going to turn into some kind of puppy blog. I'm OK with that. Nothing I do day-by-day is really quite as exciting as our puppy.

So here's some videos of D'Count running.

D'Count is Still Cute

In the park.



And in the mountains.

NEG in BCO & Bus & Butts

Went up to Boulder yesterday for Noah's reading. He killed it, reading pieces from his two latest projects, The Source & Disgraphia.




Check out his office. And his sexy model cheeks.



The we went home on the bus. I got sleepy.



Jules got ghosty.



Butts.