Poetry Is Dead / Arte Factum

(I meant to post this up here a few weeks ago but life had other ideas)

I have piece in the new issue of the mighty Poetry is Dead.  It is an honor to have my work appear in one of my absolute favorite publications.  This is their "resurrection" issue, just in time for the Spring thaw (though here in NYC nothing ever managed to freeze).  Personal favorites from the volume include bits by Amber Dawn, Sean Howard and Stephen Collis's To the Occupations.

My contribution is a Self Portrait, one in a series of experiments using found language to attempt to unlock the dynamic between the internal and the external.  This one pilfers from the I Ching and Bob Ross for a touch of hopeful melancholy. 

The folks at PiD are having a special poetry month sale, where can get a years subscription for a steal at 6 bucks.

Also, my chapbook Music for End Times is part of the gallery show Arte Factum, which is dedicated to the art of the chapbook.  It is up now at Project Space in Vancouver and curated by Poetry is Dead editor Daniel Zamparelli. It runs for a few more weeks, so if you find yourself in area stop in a check it out.

Carl Sanburg - The People Yes

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

from The People Yes by Carl Sanburg


Recently the word Socialism has been batted around by protesters and political pundits. Carl Sanburg's Socialism is not the perverted straw man of modern media shouting. It is instead something deeper, sharper and more meaningful. It is an acknowledgement of the glorious, primal drive or perseverance that human beings share at their most basic cores. It bears witness both the the glory of a modern world built from the brow sweat of resilient men and women and to the soul crushing hardships that the same world rends from their flesh.

Sanburg's words are terse, honed for maximum impact, not a syllable wasted. There are no victim's here, only those who have been done wrong, time and again, and who yet continue forward no matter how clumsy, mongrel and idiotic their stubborn progress may appear.

I had though about this poem since grade school. Then, in 2006, I was listening to n recording of Sci-fi author / futurist visionary Bruce Sterling's annual SXSW speech. 2006 was a pretty grim year and Sterling was bringing the The Fear™. Then, as a quasi-benediction, he closed by reading the above section from Sanburg's book length poem.

The conviction and emotion in his voice struck me like a cold slap across the face. A man for whom The Future was his stock and trade was read a poem from the depths of the Great Depression, the words resonanting as if they were crafted that very morning, was chilling. Since that moment this poem, sadly, becomes more prescient with ever passing year.

Buy The People Yes

Bruce Sterling reads from The People Yes at SXSW 06

Roger Robinson - Misuse of Magic

"14. The magician destroys an object only to restore it back to its natural state"

Roger Robinson reading from his excellent book Suckle.

Of course Robinson is best know as the vocalist for the mighty King Midas Sound but don't sleep on his written poetry. It is full of warmth and spirit while still cutting clean through to the emotional bone.

Check a nice post by John Eden on all Robinson's books: here

Tristan Tzara - dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love

XIII

DADA is a virgin microbe
DADA is against the high cost of living
DADA
limited company for the exploitation of ideas
DADA has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president
It changes ? affirms ? says the opposite at the same time ? no importance? shouts ?goes fishing.
Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self?interested change.
Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada.
Dada is not a literary school, howl

from dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love
- Tristan Tzara


If I have ever been seduced or corrupted by a particular dogma or orthodoxy it was the anti-dogma of Dada and if Dada has an (un)holy scripture to rival the Psalms it is the poems and manifesto's of Tristan Tzara. The austere earnestness of Tzara's emphatic declarations coupled with the puckish absurdity of the wordplay yields a novel sensation of extreme emotion borne of intellectual discourse.

Tzara demands that you join him in zealotic commitment to a cheap joke and in so doing liberates the reader from the mundane and conscribes her in his plot of poetical terror.


dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love

also check out: How To Make A Dadaist Poem

W.S. Merwin - Youth

Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

from W.S. Merwin's collection The Shadow of Sirius.


For me, it is all about that final line; so full of insight that breeds wonder instead of complacency. The line is just on the verge of sounding cheap and clichéd. I wonder whether I would feel the same way about it if it had been written by the author in his twenties rather than his eighties? Either way, it lights my eyes every time I read it.

I'm a pretty young man but I feel I am on the cusp of the moment Merwin is invoking here; that place in one's lifetime where the adventures of youth become "part memory part distance".

There is a great Bill Moyers interview where Merwin, who has won Pulitzers in both 1971 and 2009, shares some wonderful insight into craft and process. This quote is a personal favorite:


"Poetry's really about what can't be said. And you address it when you can't find words for something. And the idea is, is that the poet probably finds words for things. But if you ask the poet, the poet will tell you, you can't find words for it. Nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust. Nobody found — finds words for real anger. These are things that always escape words."


Youth and Good Night at Writer's Almanac

Buy The Shadow of Sirius

Interview with Bill Moyers

LBR8 in Popshot!

I have a new poem, cleverly titled LBR8, in the new Liberate issue of Popshot magazine. Contrary to images the name conjures, Popshot is not a pornographers trade mag. It is a wonderfully designed zine determined to drag poetry away from the stuffy university presses and into the 21C.

Each issue, twenty five short poems on a theme are chosen and handed over to twenty five brilliant illustrators who give each piece a visual accomplice. My poem is coupled with a fittingly irreverent illustration by the excellent David Sparshott.

More Popshot info: here

Excellent interview with Popshot's Jacob Denno: here

Cyrus Cassells - Beautiful Signor

Hear me when I say
our love’s not meant to be
an opiate;
helpmate,
you are the reachable mirror
that dares me to risk
the caravan back
to the apogee, the longed-for
arms of the Beloved—

from Cyrus Cassells - Beautiful Signor


There are two things in particular that I love about the work of Cyrus Cassells and this poem in particular. The first is the asymmetric lyrical quality of the verse. The rhythms are not straight forward, the line breaks and punctuation clip, join or contextualize thoughts and imagary with a seemingly free form liberty. Yet the words resonate with glorious lyricism. The lines undulate with a rhythmical freedom and a sensual richness of tone that perfectly accentuates the subject matter.

This lush sensuality in Cassells' poems is intertwined with a revelatory spirituality in a way that opens up both aspects to unique insight. At its best Cassells' work, especially in the book Beautiful Signor, melds the sensual and spiritual into one ecstatic sensation that is primal and familiar yet surprisingly revealing.

I got turned on to Cassells by artists/poet William Allen during a workshop he was teaching. At the time I was obsessed with the interaction between the spiritual and profane. However, unlike Cassells I was interested in smashing signifiers of both concepts together and documenting the shrapnel. By introducing me to Cassells' work I think Allen was trying to show me another way to get at the problem. I only sort of understood that at the time. It was one of those lessons I did not fully learn, or at least did not put in to practise, until years later.

In an effort to get both the blogging and poetical juices flowing, I'm going to try and share a few of my favorite poems over the next few weeks. There will be some canonical classics, some fresh unkowns and a few obscure artifacts but they will all be pieces that I have a personal affinity for.

Buy Beautiful Signor

also check out Cassells' Soul Make a Path Through Shouting

Bloom's Day Cut-up

As Scores Perished In The Waters of Tomorrow:

Blooms Day Cut-up (June 16, 2009)

I first heard of the 23 enigma from William, the ferryman of the dead, Hermes of the Nova Express, etc.  

According to Burroughs, the souls of the deceased, he ferried them with Clark, around 1960 in Tangier.  

Hell, only the dead who are probably years without an accident have that very day silver coin enough for their passage, him and everybody else aboard.

Ancient Greek burial rights make the corpse a crude example of irony in the Church of 323 Sixth Street.

The Radio announced the crash of an airliner that will be found to have 1,000 victims, all welcomed by Capt. Clark aboard flight 23 this morning.

Fire Chief Croker shared love for me enough to have perished at 3:30 O'clock.

What, as they say, was the cause of 69 more bodies laid in the morgue? Just scandalous revelation and not a single lifeboat burned beyond recognition.

What I can't understand is how inspectors at North Brother Island can bring totals of straight talk from Mr. Crimmins about the disaster that stands unparalleled among those who are without doubt.

Well now, look at that, wiped out, in many instances a father is left smiling as his prick starts to twitch at him.

America, I said, quietly, just like that in the end, spread out on the floor, looking at every country even our own.

Isn't that knowledge? Cold cold water in the bowl. Well, of course there's money to be made all hours of the day.

And the old man smiled, I saw him looking at my frockcoat and dress.  

Women were roasted to death, their blood burning and turning as scores perished in the waters of tomorrow. Wondering from which table came their doom in the river after 23 years and a day.

Taking the heroic work of the waterman to Spain. Looking at coffins in a line.

The bombardment of machine guns and howitzers on the ground. Some Kildaire street club toff chops-off the prayers of the dying infantry.

She, the manager of the Hibernian Bank, she gave me a can whose pressure seemed inexhaustible to fellow knights of the road.

"Gentlemen... and Metzger" she moaned, and sank her teeth in to the high color, of course, laughing at his grizzled mustache made of sharkskin.  

Everything smelled like hairspray as she bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet that bounced away, leaving silvery reticulate on Lambert's brother Sam before it all fell jingling into the sink.  

The windscreen of the motorcar in the sun has a flash just like that, like him, the Rev. George C.F. Haas with his vitals and his breath.

A good drop of gin in the morning for the pastor, in the sunshine of his fat strut, down there with two pilots and some of members of the Greasy Black Rope.

Dogs lick at the blood as the fire starts with an explosion from heaven's imperial state as attests the honor and custom of the cup.

Are the unhappy crew deprived of old sayings from the north wall and Sir John Charon, the buried host.

He sailed westward, sailed a skiff, a transport vessel, cross the waves of fairy wash. Elijah is coming Mr. Kernan.

Against your throat it could only be me. You will see.

Is he buried in Michan's or no? 

The old man smiled, just the same way as before, as the corpse was brought in through a secret way making his business neat and tidy now.

Went out in a puff. Well well, better turn away as the world ends with a whimper.

Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Guinness's visitor's waiting room.

- - -

The cut-up an amalgamation of Dadaist absurdity, occult ritual and high school slumber party collage.  My mind has always made peculiar connections between the Gen. Slocum tragedy of 1904, it's use in Joyce's Ulysses, the infamous tale of Capt. Clarke that was the catalyst for Burroughs theories on the 23 Enigma and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (as well as RAW's Illuminatis Trilogy but really what text does not have tangential connections to that work). So I decided to use these texts in a writing experiment using a variant of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up methods. A favorite method that I have developed over the years uses the repetition of the number 5. This includes using five separate sources so along with the three main text I added a NYT article on the Slocum disaster and for bonus randomness a passage from Virgil in which he describes Charon the ferryman on the river Styx (see what I did there?).

There is always a moment when you are working with random chance that you question your sanity and become convinced that nothing of any sense is going to rise from all the gibberish. This experiment was no different but once I read the line, “Women were roasted to death, their blood burning and turning as scores perished in the waters of tomorrow.”, I had suspicions that it might all come together. In the end it’s a pretty fun piece of surrealist poesy with a few great lines, and yes some awkwardly formatted nonsense. I also like how there is just enough hint to some actual narrative, distinct from that of the component parts. I am certainly considering chartering a secret society called The Greasy Black Rope.

If your interested in cut-ups and other experimental forms of writing I highly suggest tracking down a copy of The Third Mind, its pretty amazing stuff and if anyone is interested in the details of the method I used here drop a note in the comments or send an e-mail, I'd be more than happy to share the technique with you

We Go To Work

"Use night to wake your clarity.

Darkness and the living water are lovers.
Let them stay up together.

When merchants eat their big meals and sleep
their dead sleep, we night-thieves go to work."

      from What Hurts the Soul by Rumi

"Not strong
Only aggressive
Not free
We only licensed
Not compassionate, only polite
Now who the nicest?
Not good but well behaved
Chasin after death
so we can call ourselves brave?
Still livin like mental slaves
Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice
Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice"

     from Thieves in the Night by Black Star