Apps on PennSound

Proudly, recordings of me reading from my Apps are now up on PennSound, and in four segments: 1, 2, 3, and 4, or my Author Page. Recorded at the Eris Temple. Thanks again to Matt and to PennSound.

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As of February 2017, here, also, are the Cheltenham Elegies on PennSound. 

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 Orser's earlier work. Orser displays a penchant for “doubling,” playing semantic games with phrases which take on multiple, simultaneous meanings. The prolific way Orser deposits these doubles or triple meaning phrases throughout the chap makes Folded a head-spinning, hallucinogenic experience. Rather than pursue 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 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/gutter-minded “spooge,” which alters the perspective of the poem drastically. At this point, directly 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. The next, characteristically 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). The doublings and triplings in Orser’s chap are phantasmagoric, and also amusing. Orser manifests a unique sensibility, and the chap is magnified, gravitas-wise, with each re-reading, even as the mood is comparatively light. Like Kristy Bowen, she melds the hyper-sexual with the bizarre. I recommend this chap to anyone with an interest in sex, or word-games, or both (apart or together).

Apparition Poem #1519

She says she
wants babies

from me, she
sends this to

me, nudging
my body in a

straight line I
recognize for

its blue streak,
I’ll give her a

baby, I say, it’s
part of a plan,

indecipherable—

Apparition Poem #555

#555

Wood-floored bar on Rue St. Catharine—
you danced, I sat, soused as Herod,
sipped vodka tonic, endless bland
medley belting out of the jukebox—
you smiling, I occupied keeping you happy,
un-frazzled— suddenly sounds behind us,
the bar wasn't crowded & a patron
(rakish, whiskey-flecked big mouth)
lifted a forefinger at beer-bellied
bartender bitching back, soon a real
fight, violence in quiet midnight,
I, scared, got you out of there

but you had to dance, you said,
had to dance so we paved Plateau, tense steps,
found nothing, you started crying & stamping
your feet like a child, I grabbed you & dragged
you back to our room you stripped, curled
into fetal position, beat your fists against
the mattress, in this way you danced
through the night, dozed & woke ready for more—



More Apps (including 1345) will be coming out in Jacket Magazine sometime this spring.

Apparition Poem #1180

I went with her on
a daytrip inside her
head; there were kids’
toys, storybooks, red
monsters, fire trucks,
silver streaks, stairs,
rooms everywhere, it
was a funhouse, but
in each mirror she
looked different, and
I couldn’t see myself—

Essay in The Argotist: "On the Necessity of Bad Reviews"

Jeffrey Side has published a new essay of mine, On the Necessity of Bad Reviews, in The Argotist Online.

Also in The Argotist Online; an interview with me, as editor of P.F.S. Post, on Net publishing.

To Jeffrey, many thanks.

Apps for Winter

#1649

Oh you guys, you guys are tough.
I came here to write about some
thing, but now that I came, I can’t
come to a decision about what I

came for. What? You said I can’t
do this? You said it’s not possible
because it’s a violation and not a
moving one? It’s true, you guys

are tough. You know I have tried,
at different times, to please you in
little ways, but this one time I had
this student that was giving me head

and she stopped in the middle to tell
me that I had good taste and you had
bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed
her. She was your student too, maybe

you’ve seen her around. She’s the one
with the scarves and the jewelry and
the jewels and the courtesy to give the
teachers head who deserve it. Do you?


#1603

"Be careful what you handle,"
I told her, "you can get to me
even if you touch another," it
happened in an office shaped
like the foyer of a huge hovel,
built of mud, etchings of bugs
on the wall, perfect perverse
kids scampering among clods.

"You know what I want, and
how I can get it," she replied,
as she took another out, put
me in, but only inside a brain
used amiss to find a level that,
shaped like a foyer, was past
office, into brick, sans mud.


#1341

Secrets whispered behind us
have a cheapness to bind us
to liquors, but may blind us
to possibilities of what deep
secrets are lost in pursuit of
an ultimate drunkenness that
reflects off surfaces like dead
fishes at the bottom of filthy
rivers— what goes up most is
just the imperviousness gained
by walking down streets, tipsy,
which I did as I said this to her,
over the Schuylkill, two fishes.


#1488

liquor store, linoleum
floor, wine she chose
            was always deep red,
            dark, bitter aftertaste,
            unlike her bare torso,
                       which has in it
                       all that ever was
                       of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
            she thinks she must—
            exquisite torture, it's
            a different bare torso,
(my own) that's incarnadine—

Posit: 2 editions

Posit, print chap pdf and e-chap, as a first edition, 2007, from Dusie Press. 

The Posit Trilogy, Argotist Online e-book, 2017, boasts the second edition of Posit. 

Apparition Poem #1335

#1335

terse as this is, it is
given to us in bits
carelessly shorn
from rocky slopes,
of this I can only
say nothing comes
with things built in,
it’s always sharp edges,
crevices, crags, precipice,
abrupt plunges into “wants,”
what subsists between us
happens in canyons lined
in blue waters where this
slides down to a dense
bottom, I can’t retrieve
you twice in the same
way, it must be terse
because real is terse,
tense because it’s so
frail, pine cones held
in a child’s hand, snapped.


P.S. A new interview with me on Goss 183.

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Apparition Poem #1571, from Cricket Online Review 6, extends, illuminates this meta-terrain.

New in The Argotist Online

Several of my new Apparition Poems (more added in '17) have just come out in The Argotist Online, the excellent online UK journal edited by Jeffrey Side. Thanks to Jeffrey, who has a new piece in PFS Post.

Apparition Poem #565

#565

Battle for deliverance,
struggle for salvation,
Christ's passion condensed
into ten fluid seconds,
sections of flesh leaving,
sense of "Geist" overhead.
Yet you've shrunk before
Romance into "post-
everything entropy," so
even the love of one's
life becomes another show,
rigged like a government's
actions, glommed onto
deadly ennui. Christ.

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Earlier Apparition Poems, from Beams/Jacket 31, in The & Now Awards Anthology: The Best Innovative Writing, from Lake Forest College Press, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press. And being taught at the University of Oregon by John Witte.

The White Album: 2 editions

The original 2009 Ungovernable Press edition of The White Album.

The 2018 emended 2nd edition of The White Album from Eratio Editions. 

Apparition Poem #1223

She was seated at a desk,
giving a dramatic speech
(pronounced with acidic
bitterness), glaring at me,
I was punching a telephone,
trying to reach Dominique,
who had given me a phony
number, while two young,
androgynous sprites made
love in a chair, Leonard
joined my committee—

she was seated at a desk,
her voice rose to a pitch I
couldn’t tolerate, but also
it brought me to the verge
of orgasm, because she was
sucking myself out of me,
doing it psychically, when
I woke up, she was updating
her Face about lost sleep—

Apparition Poem #1553

I see her head, not yours,
on my pillow, dear, but I
don’t really see either one
of you except as you were
when you had no interest
in my pillows: isn’t it sad?

Death Paintings by Dario Argento

What would happen if Bonnard (or Heller-Burnham) decided to paint the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The result might be something like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, a cult classic dating from the mid 1970s. The average horror movie has, as its foundation, two elements: death and the revelation of secrets. Suspiria expands upon this to include two other key elements: space and color. Ultimately, it is Argento’s use of space and color that lifts Suspiria out of the realm of the banal and into the realm of art. The most stunning cinematographic moments in the movie seem to revolve around corpses and death scenes; Argento crafts gorgeous “death paintings” from gore, blood, and lurid lighting. He also repeatedly evokes Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. In short, like Messiah of Evil, this movie is a visual feast, and almost every shot has a painterly quality. So much so, actually, that (for me at least) it’s a little hard to take in all at once. The only criticism I have of this gem is that it sags in the middle. But it would be pretty hard to beat either the first or the last fifteen minutes for pure ambience, gorgeousness, tension, and death painting ecstasy.

John Carpenter's The Thing

I'm not sure why I seem to be going through a horror movie fetish. Is it the horror of dealing with insurance companies? Is horror built into the Zeitgeist of 2009? And will someone please tell me where good horror poetry is being written (besides Philadelphia)? In any case, John Carpenter's The Thing is a classic of the genre. Kurt Russell gives a riveting performance as MacReady, a true hero in a genre that produces few true heroes (unless you want to valorize Jason Vorhees). The story involves courage, reserve, and deep strength; it transcends some of the movie's garish special effects.

Twisted Limbs: 2 editions

Twisted Limbs in Melancholias Tremulous Dreadlocks.

Twisted Limbs in Big Bridge's "Death" Anthology. 

Ungovernable Press: The White Album, etc.

The new Ungovernable Press e-book by Adam Fieled is The White Album. 

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This weekend, I was in New York to do a reading in Brooklyn, and I got my first chance to talk in depth to Nada Gordon, a member of the Flarf Collective. It was a stimulating, if invective-laden, conversation, but my opinion remains unchanged— I don't think that flarf makes for the creation of memorable (or even coherent) poetry, and I fail to see how it adds (as Warhol and Koons don't add) to the Duchamp paradigm (of the "ready-made") that was put into place one-hundred years ago. It's presented again here, in a mystifying fashion, as something new: anti-art. It's an NYC racket. Anti-artists always seem to envision themselves on the crest of a wave towards a new shore where durability doesn't matter anymore; but how retrograde is it to want to produce a durable body of work? Most manifestations of a post-modern sensibility encourage a sense of ephemerality, transience, "positive obsolescence." Post-modernists often tend to adopt the opinion that any other mode of perception is backwards; though, if the tide turns in my direction, this theoretical approach may itself be perceived as junky and corny. Anti-art is junky and corny. Who wants a permanent ticket to watch the empress & emperor wear no clothes forever? Philly knows better. 

Jacket 37: 8 Pages on When You Bit...

You can read an eight-page review of my book When You Bit... written by UK poet/Argotist Online editor Jeffrey Side, in Jacket 37. 

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New Beams-style Apparition Poems in ekleksographia #2.

Brooklyn Copeland: Longing/Belonging

Longing/Belonging, the new chap from Brooklyn Copeland, is a collection of ten brief poems that seem to focus on the natural world as a metaphor for a troubled marriage. The edges we see in this collection are what could be called natural edges. A natural edge could be a number of different things, but in this collection natural edges manifest in three ways: as something broken or fractured in (raw, pastoral) nature; as some kind of remnant of life/death processes; or as anything odd or disfigured. Natural edges function here to represent a failed or failing relationship; as a way of expressing frustrated sexuality indirectly; and as a reflection of internal/cognitive discord. A look at some of the particular poems will help to elucidate what I am talking about, where natural edges are concerned. This is the seventh fragment in the piece:

A robin's egg, shocking
blue. Inside, the yoke is green
as snot. The egg did not
fall: it was pushed
from the eaves. Husband,
a nest is no
mere rustic thesis
to nail above
our apartment door.

The exquisite delicacy of these lines is reinforced by assonances and rhymes: robin's/shocking, not/snot, eaves/thesis. The yoke of the egg being likened to snot is, indeed, "shocking," and what gives the fragment its peculiar edge. Once the edge is in place, the dissonance of the situation (and the dissonant affect behind it) becomes clear. Eggs are a symbol of fertility; here, we see a cracked egg. There are overtones of waste and the squandering of natural resources, that seem to have a personal resonance. The "nest" functions on a dual level; it is something seen outwardly by the protagonist, and also something referred to indirectly, in a suggestive way. Whatever the protagonist is living through, it seems that the comfort and safety of a nest is inaccessible to her, something that either her husband is not providing or that she herself is unable to create; a tangent to Jordan Stempleman's crafting of a domestic landscape. This usage of eggs is a prime example of what Eliot calls an objective correlative, a concrete symbol that embodies an inward reality. What is surprising (as always) in Copeland is how deftly she manages to present her objective correlatives, how seamlessly interwoven they are in her constructs. Yet Longing/Belonging is quite laconic, and this is how it ends:

You aren't discouraged by how little
I have to say? Be furious,
instead. Be the winter
sun, the unlit white
flare. My heart's not where
I feel this little
towards you, for you've
shattered me back years.

The final three lines take us to a rather different locale, as we see the protagonist "a happy trauma shivering/ down Peru Street/ on my banana seat." Though this is not overtly stated, it seems like the happiness of the trauma has to do with the protagonist's ability to express herself. Notice that the Other never finds a voice; Copeland either silences him or does not deign to repeat the things he says. In Mary Walker Graham, this has to do with solipsism and self-contained sexuality; Stacy Blair leans more towards coyness; Kristy Bowen willfully bends the Other into surrealistic shapes; Equations explores relationships-into-philosophy; there is an element of all this here, but there is more affective vulnerability at work with Copeland, a sense that a maintained silence is a way of keeping control (perhaps on/for both sides of the relationship situation.) In any case, the poet's sense of Longing/Belonging has much to do with finding ways to represent the reality of longing and the perceived inability to feel a sense of belonging in marriage. There is a bravery at work here, the courage to tell a certain kind of truth, not only with raw data but with imaginative imagery. The positive retreat into imagination reminds me also, and again, of Kristy Bowen. "Be the winter sun" sounds less like a threat and more like a sort of resigned encouragement, the protagonist's way of being generous with someone who is not being generous back. The poems ends with a "shattered" protagonist "shivering," but awash in liberation. It is the achievement of Copeland's chap, its terse prosody, which shows us this deliverance into liberation.