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This blog is a parrot. Or perhaps it’s the pet shop.
(Whatever it is, it’s not going away, just like the other one didn’t.)
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This blog is Dick Laurent at the start of the film (which is its end) and at the end (which is its start).
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this is here, but where is there?
A bookstore sale allowed me to pick up loads of titles this month, namely, the first seven titles in the list below. The last three came from a much-delayed online order.
March was a dry month for buying and reading books, mostly because I was working on my thesis and had little time for shopping and reading. Still, I’m grateful a friend gave me my first Bukowski: War All The Time: Poems 1981-1984.
I also managed to pick up a copy of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic: The Story and the Screenplay. While I’ve read the story several times, since my battered Burning Chrome paperback gets reread relatively often, I’ve never seen the film. I bought the book on a whim: it was cheap and I’ve always been curious about it, after seeing so many mail-order forms for it attached to old paperbacks.
And now…suddenly there’s news about a possible Johnny Mnemonic TV series.
Aphorisms from Mark Leidner, whose Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me I loved.
This month, poet and old friend of THERMOS Mark Leidner has published a book of aphorisms, called The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover. Put out by Sator Press— a self-made pay-what-you-will indie publisher— the book is available right now. Go get it! Here’s a selection of work from inside:
the purpose of love is to gain so much of one person’s trust, that when they are dying you can tell them it will be okay, and they will believe you
the period of time beginning halfway into the previous second, and ending halfway through the next, is what is known as the “fiscal second”
early on in his career, the poet sold his soul; he then spent the rest of his life trying to redeem it; as a result, he was highly motivated, and all of his ambition was sincere
missing someone is like what the…
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Five titles from Birds LLC, who published Partyknife by Dan Magers, one of my favorite books published 2012 (the other is Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins):
So far, the only Birds LLC title I don’t have is the just-released Rise in the Fall, with poems by Ana Božičević and art by Bianca Stone. I’ll most likely order that when they also release The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather.
2013 began in a state of panic and pressure, as I struggled to finish my thesis, at least in a form ready for defense. At the end of my efforts: a 24-page poetics essay for an introduction and a 13-page appendix with some “notes on composition” bracket 56 poems. If that seems short, the prose section especially, it’s only because I had to wrestle all sorts of ideas out of my paper in the hopes of streamlining what was an unwieldy beast I could barely control back then. Now I can somewhat breathe again, this draft of my thesis with my critic, who will point out any revisions that have to be made before giving me the green-light for defense. Now I can finally rave about the great titles I received in January:
Useless Landscape or, A Guide for Boys by D.A. Powell
and, part of my wife’s Christmas gift to me, three books each from three small presses:
Top row: Canarium Books
Middle row: Factory Hollow Press
Bottom row: Octopus Books
Bad news, Brevity fans. You aren’t going to win the lottery**, a fact made clear in Eric LeMay’s addictive essay in Diagram 11.5 and in Hannah Ensor’s appreciation of LeMay’s essay found on the Essay Daily Advent Calendar. Here is Ensor on LeMay’s essay (which is indeed a Flash essay, but of a different kind):
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I’m pretty sure I’ve read a blog entry from Cahiers de Corey before, but I can’t remember which. I promised myself I’d regularly catch up with the Arcadia Project Web site set up to supplement the 600-page anthology of “North American Postmodern Pastoral” Corey edited with G. C. Waldrep, but I haven’t done so. And I’ve definitely read Corey’s essay on Richard Hugo before (I’m re-reading it now), because of the sentences from it that stick:
But I’ve never actually read Corey’s poems before this morning. Big mistake.
I like how News of the Blazing World” opens with “This is the church of Aspartame,/ caffeine, nicotine, and winter through// that window, stripping branches bare,” and ends with “He imagines a world/ as a king might, scientifically// from kingdom to phylum to species,/ from general death to the life of the concrete.”
Here’s another great opening, from “A Fine Romance”:
I can explain: the sea is not ice. It is a salinity that resists
slippage, that cannot thaw or be resolved,
that will not stalk its own surface,
that can’t extratheistically transform its peculiar substance
without alluding to buggery, misconduct, pandered memory
Here’s another great ending, from “Cognitive Deficit Market”:
The skin is a glove that wrinkles as it tightens.
The cerebellum’s the same. A game
of chess between walking sticks—I mean the insects
made up to resemble wood. I say we dissemble
from photos and repetition
our stakes in these weightless names.
And here’s a great middle from “Stage Blood on the Mouths of the Eumenides” (which appears with another poem called “Dissolved Soviet”):
Press star seven seven for additional privacy.
Press star pound star to disappear utterly.And reappear at a pinched cry from an alley—
The map unfolds in traffic.
Context requires wrinkles,
even digital context. Context
is one of the slower-deploying
airbags.
I think I’d like to pick up Severance Songs (be sure to download the PDF of the “study guide” linked on that page), his collection of quasi-sonnets. Samples can be read from that link, and there’s another here (“Yours the face aglow in the cold,/ precarious thriver in the song-stung dark./ With glance and lip you collected me.”) and here (“Put on your hat and gloves, it’s poignant out./ Carry your own chill separate from the air’s.”).
The one I like best is the one from this review, a poem alluding to Icarus, William Carlos Williams, Led Zeppelin, Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Yucca Mountain, etc. BRILLIANT.
Editions Of You 