Apps on PennSound!

Proudly, a recording of me reading from my Apps is now up on PennSound. You can access this recording here.

Two readings coming up: I've been asked by Leonard Gontarek to read at the Green Line Cafe at 45th and Locust on February 23rd.

Also, I'll be doing Amy and Ana's Stain series again on February 26th at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

More soon.

The many levels of Kristen Orser

Kristen Orser’s Folded Into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm is just out from Greying Ghost Press. It is a chap that, in many ways, extends the multi-leveled, multi-layered approach I noted in Carrie Hunter’s Blog: A Winter Poem. Orser seems interested in “doubling,” in playing word games with phrases that take on multiple, simultaneous meanings. The prolific way that Orser deposits these doubles or triple meaning phrases throughout the chap makes Folded a head-spinning, somewhat mind-blowing experience. Rather than go into a minute analysis, it might be wise just to jump in at the deep end with one of the poems. This one is called Recently, The Fence:

A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth,
             the marrow of anyone. We keep

   the birthday party a secret:     Difficult
   to completely look like moon

   when Mother is asking the shape—

   A symbolic posture:     The robin
   is a story of existence.  My lower garments.

             I mean, I haven’t paid attention
             to rhyme recognition.   Which memory was first,

             the chestnut or the blue egg?           Winter

     is half measure. From your ribcage
     to your middle thigh, there’s a kind of radio silence.

              Decidedly unsayable—

                          The mouth opens,
                          has limitation. 

The word games here are extremely sensual and extremely intense. The first phrases alone (“A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth”) ricochet in several different directions. “Spooning in someone’s mouth” evokes a lover actually giving his/her mate a taste of something; there is also the unlikely image of two lovers spooning in a third person’s mouth. There’s a pun on the more graphic/literal “spooge,” which alters the perspective of the poem drastically. At this point, right in the first line, the reader must choose from a plethora of meanings, or make the tricky decision to engage all the levels at once. My next favorite mind-bending Kristen Orser moment in this poem is “We keep/ the birthday party a secret.” For the informed reader, “birthday party” immediately triples: “birthday party” could be a literal birthday party, or a sexual encounter (as in, two lovers in their birthday suits), or it could even refer to The Birthday Party, the cult-rock band from the early 1980s that introduced Nick Cave to the world. The doublings and triplings in Orser’s chap are not only mind-bending but hilarious. Orser has a unique sensibility, and the chap is magnified, power-wise, with each re-reading. Orser melds the hyper-sexual with the bizarre; I highly recommend this chap to anyone with an interest in sex, or word-games, or both (apart or together).

New Apps

#1562

“In Your Eyes,” the song goes,
“the resolution of all my fruitless
searches,” only what I see in your

eyes is fruitless, and what Shelley
might have called “luminous green
orbs” look like turbid wastelands,

capable of ruining any day I might
have you nipping at my heels. This
is what I think about her, but don’t

dare say, she’s too young to know
anything about wastelands, I’m an
old scorpion with mud of my own.



#1573

This guy thinks he knows
what’s really real, writes a
book, I do the same thing:
but whoever says this is in
a chain of unreality which
reality will quickly undo: I
know whoever says this is
lost in a maze of illusions,
which must be stymied: it’s
something you only say if
you’re deluded; but then it
means you know you’re in
a maze of delusions, which
is what’s really real: a bitch.



#1574

There you are: towel-headed,
toweled, milling through large
crowds, slightly self-conscious
but convinced of your uppity
superiority— this you is me, I
push through crowds (antique
book stores, solicitous clerks, I
can’t tell if they mean me when
they speak), stumble up stairs,
nobody notices the freakishness
of my appearance, as I am you—
having lived your life, I’m past
your death— cogs cut, dusted.



#1576

Who told poets to be poets?
Nobody tells anyone things
like this anymore— Poetess,
she comes to me with “this,”
it’s all wine and roses for two
nights, but I’m left dizzy— is
this the end of poetry? There’s
a war between poetry & sex, it’s
always sex’s dominance we fight,
she tells me this, but we still make
love. And it’s good & hard. I’m
pure in this, I tell myself. I know
what I’m doing. I do, too, in ways
limited by perspectives, of which
this is half of one. Is it enough?

Apps Inspirations: Carrie Hunter

Language poets like Ron Silliman often talk of the sentence as a unit of poetic meaning and signification. Historically, it’s been the line that has carried the most weight. For me, as a fan of good poetry as well as a publishing poet, I’m not particularly picky as regards what basic units are employed, as long as certain requirements are fulfilled by the poet or poetess in question: interesting, provocative usage of language (manifested in memorable turns of phrase), sharp images (which I insist, against dissonance, are worthwhile and mandatory for major work), deep affect (also mandatory for major work). Carrie Hunter’s Blog: A Winter Poem fulfills all these requirements. She is putting it out through her own Ypolita Press. It’s a densely written chap that plays effectively with the idea of the sentence as poetic unit. Many different formal and thematic tacks are explored: parataxis, elision of periods, sentence enjambments, meta-poetic fragments, aphorisms a la Barbara Kruger. There are also bits of Stein that flash here and there. This is one my favorite bits:

it is mostly a lover talking to himself about love while simultaneously examining the way he talks to himself about love while simultaneously examining the way one talks to oneself when talking to oneself about love, all of it constructed from literary fragments of lovers talking to themselves about love

There are so many different levels at work in this fragment that it’s difficult to know even where to begin. It’s meta-poetic because everything comes back to the “literary”; yet what “it” is remains mysterious, and the facticity of the mini-protagonist being a “he” in a poem written by a woman adds another layer of intrigue. This is another fascinating bit from the chap:

problems usually pass or get more complicated or morph into other problems or present themselves as not problems only to show up as a real problem when you don’t expect it

This is meta-language, rather than meta-poetic language, but in its own way as compelling and multi-leveled. This, also, is the kind of bit that brings to mind the work that Barbara Kruger was doing in the 1980s. It’s got all the punch of good aphoristic writing, joined with the fragmented Modernist sharpness of Tender Buttons. Hunter’s entire chap is compelling enough to get lost in, and I have already read it several times. Like Tracks, it’s a compelling little gem, and also (frankly) richly deserves a longer review than this one. But I’m highly intrigued with what’s come out of the Bay Area recently, and can’t wait to see what and who Carrie publishes next.

Apps Inspirations: Logan Ryan Smith

Carrie Hunter’s Ypolita Press has been putting out some impressive chaps lately. A few days ago in the mail I received Carrie’s own excellent Blog: A Winter Poem, and also Logan Ryan Smith’s Tracks. There are many things about Tracks I find striking; the most salient element that jumps out at me in this chap is the melopoeaic level it contains: music built into the language. Logan and Carrie are both San Francisco poets, and of course there’s a rich tradition, going back to the San Francisco Renaissance of the mid twentieth century, of Bay Area poets scribing richly musical texts. Smith’s chap fits squarely into this tradition, and there’s a particular affinity for Robert Duncan’s poems that is manifest here. What is most surprising to me about Tracks is how comfortably and seamlessly Smith fits rhymes (as well as assonances and alliterations) into his lines. A few brief fragments will suffice to demonstrate:

on the tracks
the wheels crush the rat’s head

if you listen
you’ll hear the crack

then Echo says it back
and all the lepers

glimmer, shake, and laugh

This chap seems to have a few thematic constituents: travel/movement, open/empty spaces, states of consciousness and perception attendant on these themes. There is also a subtext of sickness/illness running through the poems. This little fragment conveys all these things, and in a richly resonant voice that could not be as rich or as resonant if rhyme were not employed. This little nugget is just as rich:

At the station
The faces turn stasis
To dust in the places
The faces of lepers
Are facing

Notice how skillfully sharp the enjambment is between the second and third lines, how these lines twist into their own significations with grace but also with a kind of shock or charge. These “shocks” and “charges” are all over Tracks, and confirm for me its status as one of the most startling little gems I’ve come across in some time. While it’s clearly too early to opine that poets are ready to use rhyme extensively again, it’s a positive confirmation for me that I’m not alone in what I’m attempting with the Apps, and that others are finding similar solutions to problems we face as poets in a new, still inchoate century.

Mp3s from Beams

There is also a page with a podcast of different poems from Beams here.

This page has an mp3 of my Stain Bar reading in Brooklyn in March 2007. The poems read are mostly from Beams.

The e-book Beams received a review from Jeffrey Side in Galatea Resurrects.

The original Blazevox e-book is here.

This is the thesis behind the title series:

The BEAM is a short poem, 8-20 lines. It isn't necessarily impersonal or personal, but it must transcend mere subjectivity. "I" can't be played straight. The BEAM has its' roots in Surrealist and Objectivist poetics. Things needn't be what they are, but they must somehow be "seen" in a clear light. If you write, "she leapt burning through ashes," for instance, we know this isn't literal but it can be seen nonetheless.

The BEAM should be page-centered. A BEAM must not be projective, its' predetermined form must act as a conduit to content rather than vice versa. Centering the poem gives it substantiality, while its' imagery lets it float into the stratosphere. It's like a sonnet with more space, greater airiness.

BEAMs should generally be written in couplets or single lines. A BEAM couplet fulfills the role a beam does in architecture- it builds, structures, supports. Its' central position reinforces the impression of substantiality. Meanwhile, single lines interspersed function as "beams of light." They're pure shots into poetic space, flashes of imagery, insight, gist-phrasing, etc. Light-beams illuminate built-beams, built-beams support and buttress light-beams. Together, they posit the BEAM as a kind of "light-house" or "light-structure." A BEAM should blend concrete with ozone, specifics with abstractions, substantiality with ethereality. It's a form built to be seen.

Apps Inspirations: Anselm Berrigan

I’ve been tripping out for days on Anselm Berrigan’s Free Cell, out from City Lights Books. The poems are concise, compact, and pungent; more importantly, for me, they are quintessentially American. Berrigan’s voice is, in fact, as representatively American as any I’ve heard in some time; it nails the Zeitgeist of Aughts Urban America with aplomb. The refrain used for the better portion of the book (“Have a Good One”) seems ironic more often than not; though bittersweet nostalgia rears its head here and there, as in this piece—

17 watching Simon’s apartment
        summer of ’90; bought acid
            at Washington Square Park
  
            to peak under Times Square lights.
                 Would all be very different
      now had the shit been real. 

For those of us who have lived in NYC (and, unfortunately, been gypped where certain substances are concerned in Washington Square Park), these lines are easy to relate to; but the fact that the nostalgia of the poem is undercut by something that should’ve happened but didn’t (in this context) gives the poem an edge. The connection to my Apps is explicit (though Berrigan beat me to the punch, even to the extent that I published some of these on PFS Post a few years back); though the root of these poems does not seem to be Imagistic but interpersonal (as many of the recent Apps are turning out to be). In any case, its exciting to find a complete book of new poems that knocks me out, and also has a personal resonance and bearing on the work I’m doing.

Monday Apps

#1620

I’m looking
at the sky, writing
like a man writes
when the sister
lives in an apartment
with a husband
three blocks away,
casts her body over
here to do what
cannot be done
ad infinitum;
and that the evil
I saw in this family
was hers, the scourge
who ruined my life.
That night I had her
in summer’s sweat,
what it should’ve
been, what it was,
the sting of it lingers,
all in the sister, & for
once I don’t dare
bifurcate myself,
they do it for me,
naturally.


#541


Like the lamp by your bed
with no shade and the Stein
books you never read on
your shelf and the sweat
that rolls down the crack
of your ass when we fuck
(the smell of driven slush),

Like the granules these
things are or may be, as I
tell you what it is you like
about me discussing in bits
your bits that form a kind
of trinity hovering above
the places you place plants,

but it is not nor shall ever be
like anything else again, as
there is no simile for the
marks of incredibly bright
weakness around your eyes
as you lounge around in your
panties, two blues, guess which?


#1536

Facebook girls commit
acts of virtual adultery
every day, wanton acts
of exhibitionism, sucks
of minor stars in tiny
firmaments, I’ve got
them (Facebook girls),
in virtual corners in
virtual states of undress
virtually shagging my
arse off— stick it in,
like a screwdriver into
a keyboard, in & out,
in virtual light & heat.


#1533

So much gets involved with
this that isn’t this, that what
this is gets lost, whatever it
is, which no one knows, but
that “I” is in it somewhere
(no one knows where), there
must be a “you” (if it’s art,
as it may or may not be), so
two bases are covered, like
two breasts of a mother
weaning her young, and
whether or not we are made
young by this is another good
question: we may be, maybe.


Incidentally, some more Apps will be coming out in Jacket Magazine in or around March.

Matt Jasper's Evening

Matt Jasper put out Moth Moon with Blazevox in 2009. The poems brim with over-the-top, kitchen sink humor. However, my favorite moment in the book, a piece called Evening, flits away from humor into darker territory. In its five lines, the poem manages to paint a vivid psychological self-portrait. Like a (radically) compressed Prufrock, we are introduced to a narrator who does not dare disturb the universe, but wants to. Here’s Evening:

On the shore, desire for the stars to fall.

All of them from the sky, darkness

until I look to the ocean floor where slowly,

the stars reassemble.

(I am the one who has drowned)

The T.S. Eliot reference is, of course, overt. What I like about this poem is its subtlety, its ability to make a big statement without degenerating into bathos.

River Man: for Robert Kirby

Robert Kirby, who did the string arrangements for Nick Drake’s first two albums (Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter), died recently. Kirby met Nick at Cambridge University, where they were both undergraduates. Nick was already a fledgling singer-songwriter; he and Kirby became fast friends. When Nick landed a recording deal in 1969, producer Joe Boyd tried to set Nick and his songs up with another arranger; Nick insisted on using Kirby’s arrangements instead. It was a canny choice; Kirby had a great feel for the subtleties of Nick’s songs, and this particular song, River Man (the second track on Five Leaves Left) attests to it. This song is, in fact, arguably Drake’s masterpiece; the unusual time meter, intricate guitar work, cryptic lyrics, and the way the strings complement these elements, is unmatched in the annals of folk-rock. By this time, Drake had dropped out of Cambridge, and was pursuing a full-time career as a musician; unfortunately, he was ambivalent about live performances, and that meant limited exposure. His exquisite songs have only in the past fifteen years begun to see their due; Drake himself died of an overdose of anti-depressants in his childhood home in 1974.

I discovered Nick Drake roughly nine months after I discovered Big Star. It was the spring of 1996, a time when the rosy glow of alternative-rock ecstasy was only just beginning to fade. Smashing Pumpkins were still putting out singles from their magnum opus; Oasis had another smash on their hands with Morning Glory, even as The Bends began its gradual build up in the States, to give Radiohead an edge over their Brit-Pop competitors. Stumbling on Drake the way I did was like opening the door to a world at once familiar and timeless; songs that had the inevitability of dreams. I would sit in my dorm room (322 Holmes!) and play lead licks over the Way to Blue greatest hit collection; as to figuring out Drake’s tunings (as quirky and individualistic as Joni Mitchell’s), I soon concluded it was pointless. As has happened with Big Star, Drake’s work has seen action in commercials and movies: Volkswagon (I believe it was) used Pink Moon; Wes Anderson used Fly from Bryter Layter in The Royal Tenenbaums. I have yet to see an artful usage of River Man, however; to the extent that it may be Drake’s masterpiece, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before I do.

Apps Inspirations: Nicholas Manning

I thought it might be interesting to talk about this, to the extent that it doesn’t tilt over into self-fetishization. The Apps that I’ve been writing have, up to this point, a concrete connection to two poets: Susana Gardner and Chris McCabe. I had submitted several poems to Dusie (this was in 2006); Susana had rejected them, objecting to their overtly sexualized tone; she suggested I write poems for her of a more abstract or Imagistic nature; thus, I had the idea for the Apps; soon, many of the first batch came out in Jacket and Dusie. The structure and form of the series was heavily influenced Chris McCabe’s Progress Poems, which I first saw in Great Works, and which later appeared in Chris’s debut from Salt, The Hutton Inquiry. Over the past year the Apps have taken a new turn— erotic and narrative elements have returned, Imagism and abstract poetry are no longer the sole, primary influence. One central recent influence has been two of Nicholas Manning’s recent books— the Ypolita chap Hi Higher Hyperbole and the Otoliths full-length Novaless. In some senses, the poems in these books are derivative— the influence of Language poetry is overwhelming, and there are few outright innovations. Nonetheless, the linguistic gifts that Manning brings to standard Language techniques are extraordinary. To an extent, the sheer verbal proficiency Manning demonstrates reminds me of Tender Buttons-era Gertrude Stein; the attention to melopoeiac nuance, exquisite delicacy, fragmentation of potential meanings from juxtapositions that border on the paratactic. These qualities are especially visible in the fifteenth poem (untitled) from Hi Higher Hyperbole:

here *
at your hairs’ (hot) roots is water-
melon : mou is an ivory hue
of you * this too delicate
pink the rose’s * new
lank layerings : its
loveliness
which so softly shies
its secrets : out…as your openness
to * attentive ardour’s touch * to
squirm in (why) shy senses’
sphere
which we all
know * and * know
-ing find delicious lack
to meaning’s fact…save
in the act : mindless to your self’s
full all * the petals fall and folding
gently inwards sleep : tongues
which to my taste
drip deep

I’ve made a habit of reading Manning’s poems before I work on the Apps. The Apps are turning out to be more narrative— in some ways, more traditional, more connected to Romanticism. Nevertheless, Manning’s verbal acuity helps me to concentrate my energies.