You Should Say Scary

If his first book The Man Suit sits on the borders of tender absurdity, Zachary Schomburg's newest book, Scary, No Scary, hovers on the borders of absurd and tender yet existential. The Man Suit explores costume and disguise, even going so far as to limit all man and woman names to Carlos and Marlene. (Both of which are so manly and so womanly; Marlene being particularly old timey). The poems pose a weird sort of ontology, discovering why things are the way they are and how things happen as reactions to other actions. Schomburg's, Scary, No Scary investigates smallness. Abnormally or obtrusively gigantic things dwarf small things that appear throughout the book--spiders (being stuck in between spaces like a wolf spider), hummingbirds, and eyelashes (piles of). There is also quite a bit of attention given to sex parts... pointing at them... wrapping fake intestines around them... and the sex that happens with those sex parts always takes place as a kind of reward. The sex seems to surprise, seems to happen in unforeseen places. I couldn't help but note the continuous references to babies and children, even a "pretend son," for that matter, and their nod toward thinking of oneself as adultish, as someone capable of taking care of someone else, someone with advice to give.

The poem, "The Black Hole," is a perfect example of how Zachary Schomburg's poems are composed of absurd, sort of silly action, at the heart of which sits painful tenderness and incredibly poignant language. Have a listen to "The Black Hole" here:

The poem's movement is so staggeringly precise yet informal. Feeling "as if our hearts had been switched" delicately and quickly moves into the moment after, an end-of-times scenario in which we pass each other with each other's hearts. This delicate balance happens moment to moment, at the start, recognizing that one would push someone else into the back hole, that one wants to jump into it oneself, wants to investigate mortality or something unknown.

I actually prefer this poem in its poem-film form, which Schomburg arranged himself. It's an incredible experience to read the words as they are given slowly on the screen (along with images and sound). It breaks up the boxiness of the prose poem as well as slows it down to it's inherent humorous heart break. You can watch "The Black Hole" as well as some of his other films here or watch it with me here:

Holy shit. Claire Hero.

I first heard about Claire Hero through Ross and we both agree that she is a damn fine poet of the body. (We've been emailing back and forth about her this week--more on that later--so please know that many of my comments here have surfaced from these emails). Saying "of the body" always seems a little weird to me, but she's really onto to something physically, more than physically, the bodily nature of everything. She's attune to animal-ness, the meat of it all, the violence of being so bodily body--the sexuality therein, caregiving, killing, the fluids of all that. "I knit a sheep house, I knit // a sheep house for my body..." She's so brilliant at combining something natural, something animal, something made from animal, and animal making. (Ross says this makes him think of "the wonderful opening to Lyotard's Libidinal Economy"). Doors come up quite often in Claire Hero's poetry and it's this sheep house, this animal world, this acknowledgement of being an animal that will be entered again and again. "Animals he takes apart" : "He knows what the meat wants".

In her poem, "The Night Was Animal," Hero wordbuilds through word splices: "owlmaw," "preyclaw," "meatbeasts". She addresses "Crackbone," a cowboyishness on the range, out in the woods type, a force of death and dismemberment. What gets established, what killers we all are, even in our night doings, even though these doings don't stop just because of night: "& still the forest continues, the linespeed never slows". The carcasses keep coming and coming. In Ross's words, it's the carnivorous grotesquerie--so beautiful and so gross that we can't look away--repulsed and attracted to what we are, animals and death, both yarn and kitty. We need this poet.

Have a listen to [The Night Was Animal], which you can find in her book Sing, Mongrel and her chapbook, afterpastures. Claire Hero is going to be reading here in Brooklyn this weekend for Yardmeter. You should come.

The Hat Box Has Come Down

I've been hunkering down with Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, which details how animals survive during winter. When bears hibernate, their heartbeats slow down to almost eight or less per minute. Some turtles bury themselves in mud and can hold their breath for thirty of winter's coldest days. The winter world of the book is focused on New England, as Heinrich resides in Maine and Vermont. (New England winters are easy to romanticize, especially if you're not from there. Have you ever been night skiing on lantern lit lanes? Sigh now). My only complaint about the book is that Heinrich often takes babies (a flying squirrel baby to be exact) from their sleeping mothers and takes nests home with him to study. Can't he observe without stealing?

Anyway, snowshoe hares change from brown to white during winter. The color change takes about a month, which can make hares a target for predators during early snowfall (and they are still brown) or late snowfall; the hares turn completely white by late November. Heinrich wonders if the hares know about their color change, that they are practically invisible once they are white. Heinrich writes, "I doubt that a hare knows whether or not it is invisible because the totally white hares I've seen on brown background made no apparent effort to hide" (26). I couldn't help but think about Rilke's "The Eighth Elegy," which addresses how, according to Rilke, animals aren't encumbered by death because they, more or less, aren't hampered by the world. He establishes the idea of the Open, an eternal/God-type realm, a forward sort of place that isn't the future. We are so apart of the world, we think, that when we die we leave this world. Only when we are close to death are we over it. Rilke writes, "For close to death one sees death no longer/ and stares out instead, perhaps with the wide gaze of animals" (lines 22-23). Rilke couldn't be talking about any real animals, just the animals of example, eating their berries and nibbling their hind quarters until they get hit by a car or something. Who can say what animals are and aren't aware of, but the idea that on the animals v. human scale, one of us contributes to a cycle of life while the other takes the Harold and Maud approach, to live life to the fullest because you aren't going to be around forever. Sounds as though it were freeing, right? But we know it's just a confident sort of fear, a fear with tree planting and hearse stealing...

Heinrich often reminds me that the chipmunks and the snowshoe hares will be eaten, will be the winter meal of another animal desperate to overload on calories before cozying up with its young somewhere safe. Have a listen to "The Eighth Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Duino Elegies translated by Edward Snow.

Dumplings and Trumpets: Chris Martin

To call a book of poetry beautiful is somewhat problematic, but I like problematic so I'll go ahead: Chris Martin's American Music is an incredibly beautiful beautiful book of poetry. The difficulty in calling something beautiful is that it's such an over-achiever of a word. What words are you supposed to say after? Calling something beautiful means you've been rendered speechless, that (fuck!) there just may not be a word to describe your reactions to American Music. Nevertheless, I am comfortable with being arrested (uh, in the poetry sense) and will carry on.

American Music is a book that drives in and out of art and film, in and out of daily routine, in and out of literature, of city and subway, the people around. If you're new to the city, you should read this book. If you're turning older, if your age isn't giving you leverage or grants you a kind of leverage that make young people call you SIR or MAIM, or if your age is a reminder that someday you will die because you will grow so old that you will die, you should read this book.

Perversion is a prevailing worry throughout the book. Is someone becoming a dirty old man? Dirty being there all the while yet brought further out by age or city life. Worse yet, being a dirty old man means there is no boys-will-be-boys boyhood anymore, that somehow everything must be accounted for. "...not often am I/ Prepared for violence," Martin writes in "Fertility for Dummies", "though I find it/ Natural, in me as in/ The World, and it remains/ Revolting, the brief/ Desire to trample something/ Living, loving certain/ Registers of collapse..." What you see in that there quote is the beauty prior mentioned and also the italics, the way Martin infuses all his poems with a long list of writers and artists.

Something else I'd like to point out is that the poems sort of wind their way down to their closings. Martin doesn't stop much for punctuation outside of a comma and a question mark, and the poems make their way, connecting phrase after phrase, either making long Faulkneresque sentences or doing away with sentences altogether, to make room for thought. It's easy to get used to and it's fun teaching myself how to listen to the phrase, how to make it work as I read, while somehow becoming a better writer and thinker because of it.

Have a listen to "Subcutaneous Concerns." There are two New Yorky references in this poem, the first being Neckface, the tag of a graffiti artist here in town, and the second being the Gowanus Canal, a canal in Brooklyn that five east-west bridges cross over. Chris Martin is going to be reading near there this weekend for Yardmeter.

I've Got Your Back, Flarf

My friends who don't write poetry and claim to "not get it" like to pull me aside, sit me down and have conversations about how silly it all is and why do I bother with it. The past two conversations like this, most recently, have begun, "you know, the thing about poetry is..." and "poets should be more assessable..." and I squish my nose defensively and if the old man is around, our eyes say O JOY. One thing I'd like to say is that I really never hear people attacking other art-generators as much as I hear poets being attacked (not that other writers/artists aren't questioned about their difficult material). For instance, I didn't understand one of my friend's paintings and asked him what it was all about. He said the image was from a film. I felt bad that I hadn't seen the film and put it into my Netflix que right away. Please note that I didn't say, "You know, Artist Friend, why can't you paint flowers to look like vaginas? Why did you have to make this so hard for me? Why did you have to make me feel as though there was something in the world I hadn't yet experienced?"

Anyway, what I eventually talk about with non-poets, after the definition for what is assessable has been established and pissed on, is that there are many different kinds of poetry out there and there is, I think, a poet that every person can feel comfortable reading. We're kind of like sweaters, really. The last two conversations I had, I mentioned Flarf because I knew those friends were pretty internet savvy and I thought they'd find it interesting, which they did. Luckily, Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale was nearby and the old man read "I Loved My Father." I like the way Flarf shuts people up while they are thinking. It's funny, watching the change come over someone's face when they find that something they thought was going to be meaningless is actually the opposite, is quite thoughtfully constructed and provocative. If (IF) most new poetry is disconnected, disjointed, and full of stuff because the world is, because we're going to die and we don't want it to be meaningless and we can't help it and we're hopeless, Flarf, at least for me, is a kind of poetry that has its own nook, its own unique gesture of meaning taken from information floating out there.

Sorry about the loud train! I didn't have time to unplug all my external hard drives to record in the bathroom, which is what I usually do. Listen to "I Loved My Father" here:

Dumplings and Trumpets: Ross Brighton

Let me introduce you to a gorgeous chapbook filled with beautiful illustrations. I was re-reading Ross Brighton's A Pelt A Shrub A Soil Sample for the twenty-something time, this time in the park by my apartment, and his tight phrasey yet lush poetry of an over-abundant natural world was an incredibly refreshing juxtaposition to the city stacked so high nearby. Do not think these poems are some cute la-la about trees or New Zealand (that's where Ross lives). There's so much sensual landscape, so much body, that you'd be foolish to miss the ache and thickness therein/thereof.

Ross Brighton's thready ambiguities leave me thinkin' and thinkin' hours over the so many multiple meanings he's able to conjure. It's like a match. In his poem, "Fauning," the title has quite a list of different meanings and connotations--birthing, exaggerated flattery--but I found myself enjoying the over-thinking of it--fauning as browning over, fauning as being so richly fresh and young, and (Lara Glenum did this to me with her "bullying") fauning as, well, you know. Faunin'.

He dedicates the poem to Claire Hero and you can order his chapbook from his blog. Have a listen:

Lordy, all the foresty sounds, so much onomatopoeic shh that you've got to hush yourself to hear how loud it is (rushy, thickish, underbrush). There's middle-thought rhyme like two deer chasing each other (dalebound the trail/ and uphill down) and repetition (warpaint, warpelt, warmth of fur) that makes this simply a damn fine poem to read.

At the heart of all this sound, cut and jazzy, controlled yet fluid, of all this John Keats meets Ronald Johnson language, there's flirty play with space and meaning. Just when I think I have it in my hands, a line drops or white space emerges. Something is going to be named, but instead meets space and something is finally being told "this is it," but more tab space follows before the last mention of "a path/ a way through". It's a comforting sort of tension. Refer back to what I was saying about the Ambiguity Multiplex and remember that "the-way-of-things" in this poem is the way of all things, the way of all flesh, death and sex, but the furthermore running from and chasing of both. Chasing: two deer, two dearie lovers, a restless reader.

Dumplings and Trumpets: Dan Magers

Last night I dreamt about a poem called "Indie Message Board" by Dan Magers. Dan Magers isn't like any poet you know. His aesthetic is young--in the sense that he knows more about the real world than the real world--and simultaneously aged--everything one needs to know about changes so awfully fast. His range of existential hopelessness and sexual promiscuousness/artful deviance conjoins pop culture and hipsterdom in a space of poetry that reassures you that you no longer have to feel guilty about all those weird Youtube videos you watched, that guy's dick you saw hanging out of his dress, or when you touched that sleeping girl's arm in the New Museum. Poetry as Antonioni (the old man said that). Poetry Foucault. Poetry as a long party. Poetry as Ecstasy, post-Ecstasy, with a hint of Denis Johnson.

"Indie Message Board" begins with a post by Pwn_X. Pwnage is a gamer sort of term indicating ownership. (I'm not sure if I pronounced it correctly). (Also, I accidentally said "Message Boards" instead of "Board"). Listen to the poem here:

There's a thread in this poem about being witty, being fast. Who can imitate the hero while "syphildick" is still funny, before it's tragic. Who can turn the next phrase. Then we all have to face our fear. What if all of this is empty: "women were handing him things," the posters ready to be taken down and claimed, and summoning energy. Yet emptiness doesn't grow to The Nothing size: "it should be fine," "the eager month," and "barrenness that announces itself, but isn't there." It's too plentiful to be barren. Dan Magers is reading this Sat., June 6th, right here in Brooklyn and I'm really sad that I can't go.   

Possible Concept Outfits Include But Are Not Limited To:

• unicorn t-shirt is all that matters
• hipster librarian
• tuxedo
• hipster mom with apron
• craft junkie with stamped, embroidered shoes
• floating ankle skater shorts
• exposed lace somewhere
• hammer pants
• perfectly ripped near all pockets and just above the knee
• dead swan dress
• something zebra striped
• two french braids and a red dress
• cowboy boots plus anything, nothing

Dumplings and Trumpets: Lara Glenum

In a very remote place in Northern California, the old man and I are staying in a small house that is completely off-grid. To get there, we have to pass through three gates, two of which are on properties owned by local cattle farmers. The land between the first and second gates is owned by an organic dairy farmer and after my reading at Moe's in Berkeley Thursday night, the old man was driving, so I got out to open the gate. Usually when we arrive at the house late at night, the cows don't want to move away from our car because they are hungry or curious, but most of the time they skitter away if we flash the lights or talk to them. Well, as I was unlocking the gate I noticed one breathing very loudly and heavily and did not like it at all when I said, "Hello, pretty lady." It stomped its feet, something the other cows do, but this stomp was harder. Then it took a bit shit and stomped on that with its back feet. Then it filled me with some sort of grunting low growl and it made eye contact, something the cows never do. I was face to face with a bull.

How interesting that earlier that night, I'd joked with a Moe's employee about bullshit being ubiquitous in every language. Furthermore, I'd recently finished reading Lara Glenum's Maximum Gaga (drooling... stop... composure... why composure I can drool on myself if I want to) and was twisting my mind around "The Bully Machine." 

I never thought so long and hard about the word bully--aggression as aggression, as sexual aggression also. I can't think of anything more aggressive then a bull, an animal that has to stay away from the herd except when it is allowed to reproduce, but this is not in any gentle manner, right? The valiant old man took care of the gate while I was allowed to drive safely through, looking at the bull scraping its hooves as though he were ready to charge the rental car. Why would he do that? What was the bull trying to accomplish? Why didn't he like us? Why is this animal pumped with violence, aggression, and a general dislike of all things not cow vaginal?

In Lara Glenum's poem, at least one cow is mechanical (but isn't all this mechanical too, no matter how aggressive it is), the bull is a simulacrum and this set up, letting the bull in the gate to mate, a rarity in farmland within all of our lifetimes. But in the world of Maximum Gaga, there is a miraculating machine, a sex machine and something of a lactating space, a decoy Queen cow costume, and the mechanical cow, "was a body without organs," the emptiness of it all, the rape of it all, the evolution of it all of being made taken and taken thoroughly. The poem finishes with the line: "the balling was grand" and I can't help but think about the word bullying, how Lara Glenum makes me think of words in a grody new light. Bullying is awful and haunting to think about on the level of the animal with its undeniably huge balls and ache to destroy anything in its way. Yet this is Maximum Gaga, the land of Catatonia, where this balling is grand, gross for its mechanics, gross because it's titillating. 

Listen to "The Bully Machine" here:

Dumplings and Trumpets: Ana Božičević

I've been admiring Ana Božičević's new chapbook God, Sebastian, Amy, but wasn't sure which poem I should write about until Alice Notley made a comment during her reading last night about a person's arms and how you know you're really with someone because you've accepted their arms. Božičević's "A Summer's Breeze," also printed in Forklift, Ohio, features the arm of a lover. Let's first think about arms, especially women's arms, how the elbow's crook is in general cahoots with breasts, how a hand on a hip makes a weird triangle, how the shoulder is a cliff for triceps. It is the arm that Božičević delves "inside," the arm that is a restaurant, a place for loneliness, a place for finding, a place for memories and getting full.

Listen to Ana Božičević's "A Summer's Breeze." 

I have to stop myself from thinking this poem is circular because of the kind of traveling, the kinds of giving and taking that are happening within the poem. Don't forget that Ana Božičević is to poetry what Jean-Luc Godard is to film. Godard once wrote, "You see someone in the street; out of ten passers-by there is one you look at more closely for one reason or another...A subject will emerge which will be the person himself, his idea of the world, and the world created by this idea of it, the overall idea which this conjures" (Godard on Godard 218). So after dining on a fish, younger and alone and in a varied rhythm, there is still another world climbed to on a tablecloth, the "picturebook" world that we all keep with us as we age, the one of doggie heaven, where loss is "simple," even though we know it's not. "Where is my dog?" and the tablecloths have aged and "my dog" has been replaced by "our dog." Božičević reminds us that the picturebook is for suckers, as is the story of a the fish (reminds me of something Jesusy here), and choirboys are just singin' their poor damn hearts out. 

Similar to Godard's style of films about film making, Božičević likewise grabs the collar of her readers and lets them know that there isn't anything she won't do. Godard said that in film, "...everything is always possible, nothing is ever prohibited..." (233). Božičević takes this license in order to ask what really does it mean to believe in someone, to accept someone, to have faith in someone. Božičević declares "...I was you, in Pisa. Now, since you're so smart..." "You" is the reader, is you, is the self addressing the self, is all y'all. She asks us, "do I tell this woman," but we don't answer yet because she/you/me/her has already decided. Several lines later, "I" becomes a choirboy, "That is, I'm you." This flip suggests something of faith, further adventures with "our," accepting the arm, the new dog. It wasn't easy because of the logic, because there is no act of faith that can't be questioned, investigated, and like a summer's breeze or perhaps oscillating fan, it will go gently by and you'll find yourself playing with the new dog once the air has settled. 

Dumplings and Trumpets: Mathias Svalina

Mathias Svalina has dada.

His poetry moves from the sublime to the ridiculous and onto the disturbingly heartbeaking and heartfelt. The painter Francis Picabia was opposed to seriousness because it limited what he could do with art, what he wanted art to do. So paintings of machines that aren't machines seem to make no sense yet we find what makes the most sense: that we can't avoid death and the violent nature of everything. In this vein, Mathias Svalina's poetry teaches you how to read poetry, how to make sense, as much as anyone can, in the dada way.

Listen to his poem "Creation Myth" from his chapbook, Creation Myths. 

In "Creation Myth" one act of violence leads to another worse act of violence that then implicates all of us. All of us have spilled blood because we've thought about it, thought about it especially while dealing with bureaucracy. We can't help but swim in it because it's unavoidable, medicinal, gross, and exciting. The myth, then, is that violence is supposed to be an exchange in which one has power over the other, but it is violence that inevitably has power over us, like our oceans and bureaucracies.