The Spoils: April 2013

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.

1. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists by Gideon Defoe (third book in a series but this and the fifth book on the Romantics are the ones I’m really interested in)
2. The Dream Archipelago by Christopher Priest
3. The Stain on the Snow by Georges Simenon (published in the US as Dirty Snow)
4. Midnight Plus One by Gavin Lyall
5. Before, During, and After: Poems by Hal Sirowitz
6. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
7. The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard
8. The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation by Fanny Howe
9. The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 by Michael Palmer
10. Thread by Michael Palmer (reviews from Jacket 2, Lana Turner, The Constant Critic, Poetry magazine, and Publishers Weekly)
11. Conjunctions 37: Twentieth Anniversary Issue (Fall 2001)
    

The Spoils: March 2013

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. 

The Spoils: February 2013

The Trees Around

Goat in the Snow

The French Exit

Either Way I’m Celebrating

Kings of the F**king Sea

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):

1. The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli
2. Goat in the Snow by Emily Pettit
3. The French Exit by Eliza Gabbert
4. Either Way I’m Celebrating, poems and comics by Sommer Browning
5. Kings of the F**king Sea, poems by Dan Boehl, images by Jonathan Marshall

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.

The Spoils: January 2013

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:

Madame X by Darcie Dennigan

The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard (Cole Swensen and Rod Smith, trans.)

I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid

Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner

Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death by Caryl Pagel

Crash Dome by Alex Phillips

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood

Hider Roser by Ben Mirov

Dear Jenny, We Are All Find by Jenny Zhang

 

Top row: Canarium Books

1. Madame X by Darcie Dennigan
2. The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard (translated by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith)
3. I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say by Anthony Madrid

 

Middle row: Factory Hollow Press

1. Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner
2. Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death by Caryl Pagel
3. Crash Dome by Alex Phillips

 

Bottom row: Octopus Books

1. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood
2. Hider Roser by Ben Mirov
3. Dear Jenny, We Are All Find by Jenny Zhang

The Spoils: December 2012

1. A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (excerpts here and here, introductions here)
   
2. Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon (reviews here and here and here and here)
3. Elegy by Mary Jo Bang (reviews here and here and here and  here and here)
4. Skirmish by Dobby Gibson (review and Book Notes track list)
5. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (excerpt here and here, review here and here and here and here and here, essay here and here and here)

Pleased to Meet You: Joshua Corey

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:

1. “More nakedly than any American poet I know of, Hugo writes about the task and function of poetry from a position of sheer abjection.”
2. “…Hugo also implicates the reader in his vision of the poet as awkward failure.”
3. “…any poet, even the most successful, is likely to feel herself an outsider in a culture where most literate people are cheerfully oblivious to poetry…”
4. “That need, that state of abjection, is Hugo’s given, and if you take it as your own, he can teach you how to write a poetry that transcends your inadequate self.”
5. “Read at the right angle, The Triggering Town can help bridge the gap that now yawns so wide between a poetry of subjectivity and a poetry that foregrounds the operations of language, that seeks to demonstrate the fragile constructedness of our selves and the world.”

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.

The Spoils: November 2012

 

1. Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 by Pierre Joris (a review, a second, a third)
2. Best-selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems by Wayne Koestenbaum
3. The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg (a review, another, a story from the book, another that isn’t)

The Spoils: October 2012

1. A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (I’ve never really read this straight through, but this was cheap, and I liked the idea of having an old battered copy–it’s the eighteenth printing: I wonder how old this actual copy is)
2. The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems (my thesis adviser is big on Milton, and I’ve been meaning to get into Milton as well, given how important a figure he is; I just hope there aren’t too many other errors in this one, especially one as big  as “When I consider how my life is spent…” OH MAN)
3. The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers (not just the first novel I bought in ages but also the first one I read and finished in around that time: my self-justification, apart from how it’s a cracking good story, was that I was doing research for my thesis since Keats, Byron and the Shelleys are in it)
4. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (yes, at last I’ve bought this! I’ve mentioned Hopkins several times here, so I just want to link to commentaries on “The Windhover”: Mlinko’s study guide, pieces by Kwame Dawes and Carol Rumens, and this attempt at memorizing it)
5. Shoulder Season by Ange Mlinko (reviews of the collection, poems by Mlinko, a critical essay on language acquisition, a conversation between her and Michael Robbins)

In some ways, especially with the first two, I feel like my October purchases have to do with poets I should have studied in school but didn’t.

The Spoils: September 2012

Rather like National Poetry Month this year, I bought only a single title during “Book Fair Month.” But what a book:

Clicking on the picture takes you to the publisher’s page, which links to several reviews and interviews that don’t include the following:

1. Eliza Gabbert’s blog entry, who identifies the speaker in the book as “a delusional loser who drinks Natty Lite and plays video games”
2. the Frontier Psychiatrist interview with Magers where he talks about the persona, what he really feels about Billy Collins, and other matters
3. a conversation between Magers and Farrah Field where, among other things, they draw up the formula CHAOS + LYRIC = ACCESSIBLE EXPERIMENTATION

Shabby-Old-Man Poetry, Etc.

This morning I woke up badly wanting to listen to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman“–most likely triggered by its being the first of many wonderful tracks in the mind’s-ear-blowing playlist at the bottom of this fascinating piece on the “alternative scene” in 1990 Durban, South Africa.

Instead, I listened to “The Building” by the Mekons (and then the rest of the Lipstick Traces CD that accompanied one of my favorite books of all time, the same book Michael Robbins calls “the best book ever written about pop music”)–most likely because of how the experience in sound “O Superman” is seems to me to fit with the “sound poetry” that comprises the Lipstick Traces CD.

And then I remember discussions I’ve had with the friends I’ve made in the Creative Writing program I’m attending. Specifically, I remember talking about how my poems tend to contrast with those of my friend Shane, whose poems I feel are often intimate and quietly erotic whispering (although the two QLRS poems don’t quite demonstrate this as well as some others I’ve read).

My poems, however, I describe as the ravings of a madman on a street corner. Specifically, I’m thinking of what Greil Marcus calls in Lipstick Traces the “shabby old man with a tin whistle, standing in the rain trying to make himself heard (94)” a figure embodied in the desperation that seems about to destroy itself at the same time is is preserved in “The Building.”

Reading what Greil Marcus says about the song makes me feel both inspired and exhausted, reaching toward an ideal I can’t ever fulfill.

+++++

I’ve just discovered Brian Joseph Davis, whose most recent project is visual: The Composites, which are images of literary characters using “police sketch software.” I find that very exciting but not as much as his earlier sound-driven work, which includes a response to Marcus’s discussion of Theodor Adorno.

In Lipstick Traces, despite characterizing Adorno as “no doubt [understanding] the Sex Pistols as a return to Kristallnacht if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die in 1969 (72),” Marcus nevertheless asserts that “you can find punk between every other line of Minima Moralia (ibid.),” and that

After 1977, a spoken rant lp could have been made into an album called Big Ted Says No and it would have made perfect pop sense, and for that matter it did: listen to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post-Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins. (72-73)

Davis, in his words, “take[s] this pop wish and make[s] it come true” with four songs that use Adorno’s aphorisms as lyrics howled along to the backing of music from such songs as, say, Minor Threat’s self-titled song. Davis’s Minima Moralia is mentioned here, albeit all too briefly.

Davis’s other recordings include:

1. Voice Over (a single track composed of 5000 movie taglines),
2. a women’s chorale performing the End-User License Agreement on Sony/BMG’s notorious rootkit CD releases,
3. 22 songs by the Carpenters played simultaneously as part of Greatest Hit,
4. 10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played (from Stravinsky and Mahler to the Dead Kennedys and 2 Live Crew),
5. passersby trying to remember the lyrics to the Beatles’ “Yesterday,”
6. an Original Soundtrack of 20 television sets and DVD players playing the “endlessly looping musical cues” from DVD menus