Review of Destruction Myth

Phil Estes has a review of Destruction Myth in the latest issue of New Letters. You can download a pdf of it here or order the journal. The review is actually far better than the book, so if you don't want to waste your time reading my book, you can just read his review.

Pretty Good Thing for Ears

So I was having lunch at this local place that has a tasty vegan Vietnamese sandwich, grading papers, minding my own. The guy sitting next to me was chatting with the bartender about his band & such, but happened to mention that he was doing shows with a band which one of my friends from high school is in. I said something stupid to him like "Hey my friend from high school is in that band." And then we talked for a while. I packed up my stuff & headed off to teach class. His name is Nathanial Rateliff & he's a Denver local who is signed with Rounder Records.

Sometimes it feels like everyone I meet is an artist, musician or writer. And while it would be kind to do so, I don't always track down their stuff, partially because I don't want to be disappointed. But after a bit I checked this guy's music out & I ended up really liking it. He does a kind of roughneck folk of the Guthrie via Springsteen tradition that someone like Greg brown trades in, but with an indie arrangement that would not be out of place on Saddle Creek Records in the mid 00s. Here's a couple of songs that are on his most recent record.





Then Saturday I just happened to run into a free show he was playing outside for a local music fest. While I thought his recordings were pretty strong, his live set was truly wonderful: emotional & sincere with strong supporting arrangements & a ton of heart. I felt pretty lucky to have run into the show like that.

You can hear more of his stuff here & he's touring from Illinois west, so go check him out.

Some Pretty Good Things for Eyes

I just received Tada Chimako's selected poems, Forest of Eyes, translated by the always awesome Jeffrey Angles. You can learn a bit more about the book here.

The UC website says this: "One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature."

I say that it is somewhere in the space between Notley, Calvino & Ceravolo & that it is some of the best writing I have read this year. Check out this first section of her eleven-part poem "From a Woman of a Distant Land":

In this country, we do not bury the dead. We enclose them like dolls in glass cases and decorate our houses with them.

People, especially the cultivated one from old families, live surrounded by multitudes of dignified dead. Our living rooms and parlors, even our dining rooms and our bedrooms, are filled witt our ancestors in glass cases. When the rooms become too full, we use the glass cases for furniture.

On top of where my twenty-five-year-old great-grandmother lies, beautiful and buried in flowers, we line up the evening soup bowls.

It just gets better from there. I'm only part-ways through the book right now, but I already keep paging back to re-read previous poems. This is good.





Hey, remember this awesome recovery project essay by Matthew Henriksen about William Heyen's Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences?

Well that book has now been reissued by H_ngm_n books & it is pretty wonderful. His longer lined poems I enjoy but his brief poems in series are spellbinding. You can fill in all the obvious reference points of Neidecker, Creeley, James Wright, haiku, but these poems happen more fully than almost anyone else i can think of doing these instantiated evocation poems. Check out the opening two sections of the title series:

1.

A friend dies.
Another,
forcing the lilac to flower.

2.

In a corner of the field, wild
grapevine climbs a lightning
groove in the ash trunk.
Where are the dead?

That's pretty badass. I recommend you read the whole series out loud as soon as possible.

Pretty Good Thing for Ears

I Like David Schnell & I'm Not Afraid to Say It

Want to read a weirdly small-minded article about a pretty cool contemporary artist?

Read this.

I think that article might be 4 or 5 years old, but it's age doesn't lessen the fact that it is mean & dumb. The Rauch comparison is apt in regards to palette & political origin, but to my mind it ends there. The David Schnell works below fit in far more evidently with the explosively architectural concerns of Julie Mehretu & Matthew Ritchie.


(click on this for a much larger image)


(click on this for a much larger image)

These are paintings about the relationship between landscape space & architecture. They expand violently the perspective through order, making what is planned seem wild & exploratory, rather than controlled & restrictive.


Here's a link to a flickr set of, I presume, a gallery show of Schnell's.

Here's a link to a gallery that seems to represent him.

Here's a link to some more of his paintings, which seem to be of a different time or style.

Here's a more interesting discussion of Schnell's work from Wash Post critic Blake Gopnik. Again, though, it bangs away at one reference point a bit too much. Though in this case the reference point is a bit more entertaining.

My favorite part of Gopnik's discussion is this: "Schnell's perspective paintings convey the unnatural order that the German state once attempted to impose on things. And, in the very fact that Schnell's orderings fail, may act as a rebuttal to the state's attempts."

Yes, I know "unnatural order" means nothing, but i think you can get the idea he was going for. Mehretu's works architecturalize experience with the attempt to create a globalized canvas. Schnell's blasts open the potential of the order, sketching out the possibilities, the visions in a way that makes what could or will be orderly again chaotic. I'm hesitant to say that an artist must be in reaction to the political epistemology of his homeland, however, I kind of want to say that as well. Seeing Schnell's visions in relation to German orderliness is reductionist but kind of interesting as well in that it doesn't have that Germans-still-apologizing-for-WWII bullshit to it, but instead attempts to explore the functions of the relationship to space that are stereotypically indicative of German engineering & design. It's more of a way of re-invigorating the ideas of those who built the cavernous right-angle landscapes of the pomo urban world & its creative ontology.

But then again, check out the simple beauty of this print of Schnell's:


That's just really cool.

If you happen to care, that print is on sale here.

Best Stuff for Ears

I Like Nicola López & I'm Not Afraid to Say It

At the Denver Art Museum I saw an installation piece of Nicola López's that I enjoyed. I think I'd seen a similar installation of hers somewhere in NY, but I can't remember where. The piece, with its seemingly mad organization of roads along the floors, walls & ceilings of the room, fit especially well with the no-right-angles Libeskind architecture.



It's a pleasurable piece to sit & look at in the room, following the roads around the space & laughing at the ridiculousness of the design. But a lot of the work succeeds on its intelligence, the visual equation of the roads & veins is important to the work, but also the metastatic overgrowth of the roads is, to me, part of its effect.

Looking through her website, I was interested to see this theme explored in a number of directions, each with their own aesthetic & art history reference points. For instance this print seems to take Escher's whimsy of crowding repetition & darken it through the use of pomo industrial/urban images.



And this lovely print works its organic blend of order & biological chaos within the rhetoric of antique maps:



Here's a quote from her mission statement on her site: "As with the evolution of the human-built landscape, there are moments in the construction of my world where the building proceeds according to plans that have already been laid and there are moments when the building precedes its own planning, expanding unpredictably and organically towards an order of a very different sort. Our world is full of the tension between just this order and disorder and my work focuses on that tension, creating images of landscapes that struggle against themselves, that strive towards order and beauty as they verge on the edge of spinning beyond control or comprehension."

I think I interpret her work more cynically than she perhaps intends.

Check out her site here: www.nicolalopez.com

The Outbursts of Everett True

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the lichen presents with intent

Some poems of mine are part of this art show in Lincoln, Nebraska at the gallery The Lichen.

The focus of the show is on ways artists respond to politics. It was curated by Sam Rapien, who is an awesome designer & artist as well. (He did the web design for Octopus 11 & has done design for many of the Octopus Books chappies & full-lengths.

Sam took my poems & laid them out & designed them -- I think they look pretty cool.