Heart-Shaped Box

If David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video is (arguably) the greatest rock video ever made, this video, that accompanies the Nirvana song Heart Shaped Box, has my vote for best original video of the 1990s. The images and basic schemes employed in the video were all devised by Kurt Cobain, and brought to realized form by Anton Corbijn. The meeting of sensibilities worked, and produced a piece that is haunting, disturbing, and as confessional as any single song Cobain wrote during his stint as Nirvana front-man. The main images seem to be: a wooden cross, on which a gaunt old man wearing a Santa Claus hat ties himself; a young girl wearing the regalia of a Ku Klux Klan member, strolling slowly through a field of poppies; the band itself, miming the song; and the band in a hospital room, visiting the self-same gaunt old man, lying on a hospital bed with an intravenous needle stuck in his arm. Minor images include fetuses hanging from trees, a fetus stuck in the old man’s intravenous apparatus, and Dave Grohl holding up a heart-shaped box that reflects light right at the camera.

All these images seem to be tied to what Cobain’s main concerns as a songwriter were in 1993: birth and death, the substance and frailty of bodies, addictions, feelings of fatigue and agedness, innocence being corrupted by bloodshed and impersonal forces. That all of these concerns can more or less be squarely tied to his position as perhaps the biggest rock star in the world at the time is arguable. But the strange, cathartic imagery in both the lyrics of the song and in the video’s imagery cuts deeper than mere rock star angst. It seems to be Cobain’s admission of powerlessness to defeat or even confront the issues that were facing him. Yet, importantly, the song is not solipsistic, it is directed to someone else. Most people have assumed that this someone else is Cobain’s spouse, Courtney Love, but who the muse happens to be doesn’t matter much. This sounds like a last ditch attempt by Cobain to establish a meaningful human connection. The song is not triumphant; in many ways, it feels like Cobain doesn’t succeed. But the Confessional nature of his attempt makes the song riveting in its own right; combined with the potent, perverse imagery in the video, the song enacts its own devastating level of sickness, decay, and helpless downward spiraling. And, together, they make a damn good work of art.

New Apps

#1635

Dad’s scared about his stocks, he
keeps telling me about the markets,
I know all about the recession and
stuff but I don’t follow this stuff too
closely, anyway he sends a few checks
this way and I appreciate it, in fact they
make my days (on the days they come)
because it proves that blood really is
thicker than water, all my friends come
from these horrible broken homes where
everyone hates each other (not that I
approve of Dad’s affairs, it’s really almost
despicable that he still does his secretaries
but it’s not like theirs’ anything I can do
about it), but I won this, like, jackpot, we
all love each other now that Mom died
and me and Jeff are still friends and at
least Erin calls, like, once a week, and
I always use the checks to buy fun stuff,
I got the new I-phone and I laugh at all
these desperate artist guys with their
primitive little Verizon phones even though
I guess I shouldn’t because at least they’re
doing something creative with their lives
while I just sit around smoking my shit,
watching shows, but I think those guys
just do their paintings and their books
because they don’t have families, that’s
really the only thing that matters in life,
the people you love, it’s not about what
you do, and because I’m being taken care
of by all these guys I feel loved all the time
so that’s it, I win, game over, over & out.


#1637

You wouldn’t think they could tell me
to leave. I’ve been coming to these clubs
since I was seventeen. The first guy I ever
slept with I made out with in the bathroom
behind the end of the booths. These guys
that have been, not only my friends but
my partners in crime, and here they are,
all dying off, and these new kids with chips
on their shoulders about history, pomp
and fucking circumstance on their fucking
high horses and here we are all into our
third beers and he’s just that’s it, we leave?
I mean really, after all these years, that’s
it, we leave? It’s like one of those little
poems that’s just too short to do any damage,
that’s what our lives have been, that’s what
we got turned into, Dave is so fat and old
and Brian is so out of it and suddenly decides
to come out of the closet, and that’s it, these
two-bit kids want us out and that’s it, we
just have to accept it? Art is cruel, it really is,
and I watch this whole bullshit thing happen
with a certain amount of restraint but it
stinks to high heaven if you ask me, it really
does, as Dave waits for his heart to stop and
eats another box of Chips Ahoy and Brian
whacks off to all the new chosen ones who’ve
taken our places and while I don’t think it has
to go on like this (it’s not going to go on like this, I
still have fight left though Henny is still talking
about blowing her brains out and we all have to
find out after the fact that she plays sex games
with guns), still it’s like getting kicked off the
mountain and trying to climb up again once you
have kids and responsibilities, and there’s all these
little kike girls hanging around these guys and, yep,
here I am out in the street, it’s a cold night and I’m
forced (for once) to walk home on my own and
I don’t like it one bit, shit, where’s my purse?


#1631

There are stars in the dirt:
this star shines in lineage from
bombs in shells, freighted with
yellow tops, blue eyes, in a way
it’s a cliché to be in the dirt with
this star as what burns in her is in
a mess on my flesh. Teeth, I tell her,
not really talking to myself, are what
make stars real, you either have them or
you don’t, sink yours in (she does, so that
her lineage erupts, meeting my lineage in
tongues), but she’s not listening, as she
carries millions in the images that heave
all around her torso, it seems so simple.
That’s how I marvel. Nothing coy, just
this collection of pristine atoms that
heave, this wet goddess, that if you
call blonde, merely blonde, or only
blonde, you are doing a major disservice.
We make love past the millions twice.

Jacket/PennSound Merger

As a proud, magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I am excited to hear that, as of the end of this year, Jacket and PennSound, perhaps the two dominant outlets for contemporary, international experimental poetry, are merging at Penn, specifically at the Kelly Writers House. It is a move that makes permanent the work of myself and the many poets who have contributed to these outlets, and consolidates these outlets in a way that will preserve all of our traces into the twenty-first century.

Five Questions

Is the twenty-first century waking up?

Is this Recession a blessing in disguise: is it effacing all the traces of the twentieth century that need to be destroyed?

Is this to be a better century for poetry than the twentieth, if we admit that much English language poetry of the twentieth century was degenerate?

What are the great narratives of the twenty-first century being born?

Why is the narrative impulse still so compelling?

Byron and the Byronic Double Pt. 1

As has probably become clear here, I have become very fascinated with the idea of “doubling.” The idea of doubling, in literature, is relatively simple: presenting a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or entire piece that has more than one precise, clearly rendered signification. You do get this is rock; Ray Davies, David Bowie’s characters that he created between1972 and 1976. However, the rock song generally is not sophisticated enough, lyrically or musically, to allow much doubling. The impoverished American poetry of the last fifty doesn’t offer much in the way of doubling. Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus is a crude doubling; so is the persona behind Anne Sexton’s Her Kind. Back further, the New Critics saw a specific kind of doubling in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land; that it simultaneously represented a secular world and implicated it for its secularity. Yeats is doubled by a desire not only to live in the present but to encompass the future and the past simultaneously. It seems to me that Stevens and Auden come next; I am still in the midst of trying to configure what their level of doubling is. Pound’s doubling seems to me to be a minor version of Yeats’; Williams, I would argue, is not double enough to maintain major stature for more than another generation.

I have my own reasons for valorizing the British Romantics. However, I think it’s fair to say that of the major Romantics, the poet most obviously involved in doubling (in its literal, concrete sense) is Lord Byron. Byron created a plethora of doubles; however, three stand out to me as both the most famous and the most representative; Childe Harold, Don Juan, and Manfred. Childe Harold is both the easiest and the most difficult to address; within the confines of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, no screens seem to be thrown up to separate Harold, and a protagonist, represented by “I,” who seems to be Byron himself. Careful, scrutinizing readings of Childe reveal that the markers separating Byron’s protagonist and himself seem to be non-existent. Of the three, this is Byron’s crudest doubling. But Byron is a major poet, and Childe is a major poem, so the doublings do not only occur between Byron and an assumed protagonist that is not him. This passage is the 33rd stanza in Canto the Third:

Even as a broken Mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies— and makes
A thousand images of one that was
The same— and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise; and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

The image of the heart as broken-mirror is deceptively simple, and less romantic than its constituent elements might suggest.

Apps on PFS Post

I have decided to "go meta" and place some Apps on PFS Post. You can read them here.

The levels of Lola

Talk about “doubles” and “triples”: there are very few poems I know of, and perhaps no rock songs, that play the games that Ray Davies’ does in Lola, a smash single on both sides of the pond in 1970. There’s also no way I can do these lyrics justice in two paragraphs, but I will try. Let’s start (in true Davies-like fashion) from the end and work backwards. The last lines in the song are these: I’m not the world’s most masculine man/ But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man/ and so is Lola. The first level, which everyone knows (and that Davies makes obvious) is that Lola is a transvestite. Okay, that seems simple enough. The ambiguity is all in the relationship the protagonist has to Lola, and what does or doesn’t (or might, or might not) happen between them. That the protagonist is not the world’s most masculine man might or might not imply that he, himself, is gay. On the other hand, he “knows what he is,” which means he may or may not tell us if he’s gay or not. Clearly, a man of any sexual persuasion can be glad to be a man; the levels hit with and so is Lola. Lola can be either one of two things, for either one of two reasons: she can also be a man, or she can be glad the protagonist is a man, and can be glad about either, or both together, or just one. This leads to the most crass question (and the second possible reason for Lola’s gladness), that the song doesn’t answer: did they do it or didn’t they (if, for once, we know what “it” is)?

There are other outrageous bits in the song. Why, for example, is Lola’s voice “dark brown”? It could be because her skin is dusky, or her voice is husky, or both; but the more sinister interpretation is that her voice is (pardon my bluntness) shitty, or somehow has “shit” in it. The bridge offers a vignette that is (comparatively) direct, and hilarious: I pushed her away/ I walked to the door/ I fell to the floor/ I got down on my knees/ well, I looked at her and she at me…. This vignette indicates that, whether consummated or not, his attraction to Lola is (or was initially) a discomfort to him. But we are reminded in the later part of the song that I’d left home just a week before/ and I’d never ever kissed a woman before/ but Lola smiled, and took me by the hand/ and said, dear boy, gonna make you a man. So the protagonist himself doubles again: he was this, when the song happened, he is now this (whatever “this” happens to be). These games go round in circles, and the biggest game at all (for Davies fans) is that the vast majority of people who listen to this song don’t even get what the game is to begin with. Simply, this song, like Waterloo Sunset, is not just a rock masterpiece but an art masterpiece, that some of us hope has a continued life into the new century. Any writer who knows how to effectively “double” or “triple” should have a continued life, and Ray Davies does.

Cake Train 01 on Issuu

The first issue of Cake Train, a fine Pittsburgh-based print journal, appeared in 2004, and included two of my poems, Coca-Cola and A Feast of Halloweens, both written in 2003. The entire issue is now on Issuu, and you can view it here. My poems are on pages 23-26, and many other fine poems are included in the issue.

Musical Telepathy: When the Music's Over

This is something I’ve (regrettably) never experienced: to work with a group of musicians, and to feel that I have a certain amount of telepathy with them. Musical groups that are successful artistically (and this is more true more often in jazz than in rock) often are able to read each other’s thoughts as they play. They can sense who is going to do what when, how the number they happen to be playing is going to unfold, what turns might be taken by each member, and what musical vista they want to open up next. The Doors are one of the few rock bands that do, to my ears, demonstrate the kind of telepathy that the great jazz combos had. This particular song, When the Music’s Over, was originally released on the Strange Days album in 1967. To me, it is the Doors’ masterpiece, a stunningly ambitious, mostly successful attempt to take the rock song into the realm of the Modernist collage. Jim Morrison is the obvious visual focal point of the band’s performance; Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek are off to the side; John Densmore is in back. People often talk about Jim and Ray’s particular closeness (they attended UCLA for film at the same time); Robby and John were also good friends. However, something else seems to be going on to my eyes: it looks like the predominant psychic current in the Doors (at least in the context of their performances) runs from Morrison to Densmore and back again.

This is interesting for a number of reasons: Morrison was very vocal (at least in private, according to Doors biographies) in his dislike of Densmore, while Densmore has publicly written, in his excellent book, of the discomforts he felt in Morrison’s presence. My own particular gloss on this is that Morrison and Densmore were simply too close for comfort. Look at the way Morrison stands right in front of Densmore during the instrumental breaks, staring him down. It’s almost a master/servant stance, and it’s somewhat ugly to witness. However, there are levels on which it is noticeable that the dramatic fills Densmore throws into the performance have the power to make Jim flinch, and even disrupt the flow of his delivery. It seems to be a psychic war going on between Densmore and Morrison, but a war that produced the pungent volatility that made the Doors, at their best, one of the most exciting live bands in rock history. I have my own feelings about this: that the Doors were a group of four equals, and that the fact that Jim’s star-power has overwhelmed John, Ray, and Robby is unfair and unwarranted. This is particularly true for Densmore, as drummers generally do not receive as much credit as other instrumentalists (especially vocalists). It’s my contention that this is part of the psychic war between John and Jim, and that this psychic war makes this one of the most exciting rock clips I’ve ever seen.