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.

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

Man on the Dump 2

Because I need to start closing tabs on my Web browser:

1. Benjamin Friedlander‘s One Hundred Etudes and Citizen Cain (Friedlander interviewed by Nada Gordon)
2. Bryan D. Dietrich’s “Gotham Wanes,” Chad Parmenter‘s Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book, and Stephen Burt’s essay “Poems about Superheroes.” Samples of Parmenter’s work, though not all are sonnets:
   1. “Batman Leaves a Sonnet on Selina Kyle’s Voicemail”
   2. “Batman in the Garden of Eden”
   3. “Batman vs. Osiris”
   4. “Batman in Mr. Freeze’s Glacierworks”
   5. “Batman’s Closing Time”
3. “These Great Sentinels” by Geoffrey Nutter is a contemporary nature poem I like. And yes, I initially thought it was about these Sentinels.
4. Caryl Pagel’s Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death
5. notes on Umberto Eco’s “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” and “Living in the New Middle Ages”
6. “To Be Not Stupid” (great title) by Amy De’Ath (great name) from her collection Caribou (great song). Earlier collection: Erec & Enide.
7. Susan Schultz’s “Memory Cards: Oppen Series” (prose poems that begin with a phrase from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems)
8. I actually first came across Oppen’s “lyric valuables” through Hank Lazer. Here’s a review of his essay collection Lyric & Spirit.
9. excerpt from Andrew Mossin’s Drafts of Shelley
10. A blog entry displaying a collection of vinyl from Dischord Records.

The Spoils: May 2012

Slowing down, slowing down, this blog is slowing down. I have a Tumblr account, so why do I keep reblogging here? (Answer: Because there are a lot of good entries being posted on WordPress by other people.)

So May saw me double the purchases I made in April; instead of one book last month, I bought two. In a couple of months, my book acquisitions will make a huge comeback, but I’d like to uphold quality over quantity once again:

To be honest, that Keats is just a “placeholder” until I can get a more definitive and complete edition. (I’m considering the Stillinger.)

Here’s my other book purchase for May:

This is my third book by Muldoon. The first one I bought was the Oxford lectures collected as The End of the Poem, and the second was Madoc: A Mystery. I’m not sure I like Muldoon as much as I do Ciaran Carson, but I do love what little I’ve read of Muldoon. He’s definitely someone I’m interested in exploring further.

The Spoils: April 2012

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I bought one book. That would be sad if that one book wasn’t:

the cover of Timothy Donnelly’s debut collection

It’s a great book though, even if I’m beginning to realize that I can’t read Timothy Donnelly‘s poetry straight through unlike, say, Graham Foust, John Beer, and Michael Robbins.

Anyway, Donnelly has gotten a lot of buzz, especially since the release of his second collection The Cloud Corporation a couple of years ago, so I’ll just link to an interview where he talks about what it was like “before he was famous” and this link has one poem and a short piece on what one might call his poetics, at least circa 2003, when Twenty-seven Props… was released.

David Shapiro

I brought a few poetry collections to work today. Three of them (Spicer, Stevens, Palmer) are omnibus volumes, “meta-collections” gathering collections that were previously published as separate books. The Lauterbach is a selection culled across several volumes, none of which are represented in its entirety, with a possible exception being the 1997-2000 poems in the section entitled The Call, which were gathered here in If In Time for the first time, as far as I know.

While I already have my hands/head/heart full with these writers (hands…literally!), there’s another book I meant to bring today but forgot to grab before I left. It’s a single collection, the only one I have by David Shapiro, and it’s ironic to think and write about this absent book when its title is After A Lost Original.

I first found out about Shapiro when a Google search for either “Ezra Pound” or “John Berryman” led me to this piece about difficult poetry collections, with The Sonnets of Ted Berrigan (one–two–three–four!) now joining The Cantos and The Dream Songs. The comments were even more helpful by pointing to poets I was already familiarizing myself with (Hart Crane, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting) and Shapiro, who I only found out about through a comment that “nominated” A Burning Interior.  Another Google search, for Shapiro and his “difficult” collection this time, led me to a fantastic set of articles and interviews on Jacket.

I’m fond of quoting lines from After A Lost Original, such as the last two lines/sentences that end, um, “Sentences,” which I’ve always found heart-tugging in its evocation of a link between author and reader, one based on an experience not founded on understanding and knowledge:

The reader loses his way richly, but it is not certain that the reader loses.
Nevertheless, you found your way about, though I do not know you. (31)

I also like Shapiro’s “Prayer For My Son,” a response to (parody of, rewrite of) Yeats that offers advice like:

Be concealed
Like a conceptual tree
And when you need to be explicit, be (18)

and (cited here)

Forget what you have earned
Learn to know what you have not yet learned
Until you confuse the good
With the beautiful
Don’t seek out the wise, be wise
Never abandon the beloved
Just close your eyes
To the world and open your eyes. (ibid.)

In fact, and this is why I’m a bit irritated about not having my copy of After A Lost Original at hand, I like the lines Michael Leddy cites in his review, such as this one from “You Are The You” (the 8th poem in the Broken Objects, Discarded Landscape section):

To look up into your face
Is like looking into the devastated stars (33)

and, from the third stanza of “Dido To Aeneas” (4th in the same sequence):

I am a city and a statue and a wall and a revenge
It is a recent cut like an accident in a forest. (29)

and, from “The Mistranslation,” the third poem in the sequence entitled Voice:

The mountain hears bright shadows shine.
A mountain brightens; shadows shine.
I hear the mountains; bright shadows shine. (57)

I’m moved by how seemingly ordinary language in lines becme dramatized by a line break that turns a verb into an imperative (again, from “You Are The You”)

To whom does the you in your poem
Refer (33)

I wish I could say something more coherent about Shapiro’s collection, but I’ll just leave it to William Keckler who blogs about Shapiro’s After A Lost Original here and also includes “You Are The You,” the source of the last lines I’ve just quoted. And over here, Keckler has Shapiro’s “A Night Of Criticism,” another one I often plunder for lines to cite.

Here’s a PDF of Thomas Fink’s critical essay on Shapiro’s New And Selected Poems, which I’d go ahead and order if I wasn’t so fixated on buying each of Shapiro’s other collections, so as to get as much of his poems in my hands/head/heart.

I’ve linked to Joanna Fuhrman‘s interview with Shapiro before, but here it is again. I just enjoy reading it now and again. From its evocative title (“pluralist music” sounds like something that calls to me as an ideal to aspire for in my own writing) to so many gems and insights, it’s well worth reading again and again. If I had a hard copy of it, I’d be highlighting most of the text.

Finally, here are some aphorisms from Shapiro that dance around how he “makes it new — with stickers.” I’m not as skilled in that kind of papercraft, but here’s something to look at and think about:

W.S.

WordStars, word processors:

Wallace Stevens
W.S. Di Piero
W.S. Graham
W.S. Merwin
W.S. Gilbert
W.S. Rendra

Word Stew. Warning Sign.

Five from iO Poetry

From the latest issue:

1. Nate Pritts (“Today’s sunlight is entitled ‘Crisis.’ // It plays gentle havoc with the soft parts / of me…”)
2. Natasha Kessler (“You are an outline, a strand of light draped across a new bone.”)
3. Matthew Guenette (“You Hank like Williams. / Johnny like Cash. / Kiss like kissing.”)

(More Guenette. More Kessler. More Pritts.)

From an older issue:

1. Anthony Madrid (“If I play favorites with my holy books, I hope I may be forgiven. I’m /Lately immersed in the Sex Code of the New Hammurabi.”)
2. Franz Wright (“Massive languor, languor hammered; / Sentient languor, languor dissected;”)

Boast, Freud, Bozicevic

I met up with my thesis adviser yesterday (hello, sir!), and he told me about how his fellow postgrad at the University of St. Andrews won the Forward Prize. I looked up Rachael Boast and found these three poems rather engaging.

I glanced at my adviser’s bookshelf and found an Annie Freud collection, and because that surname always get me to perk up, I looked her up online and found four poems I enjoyed even more.

And finally, because I follow Ana Bozicevic on Twitter and really like her poems even if I always have to look up her surname, I’m linking to these three poems, the first two of which are especially resonant to where my mind is these days.

 

UPDATE: Another two poems by Bozicevic. Great stuff, though I once again had to look up her name as I typed it. *shakes head*

Tweet Lookup

When I hit Google with a search string from the tweets that appear on my timeline, it leads me to wonderful wonderful things. To wit:

http://twitter.com/#!/ClaireAkebrand/status/111288773232435201

Read Paul Celan’s entire poem here.

http://twitter.com/#!/MichelleMcGrane/status/111131540926365696

From the W.S. Merwin interview conducted here.

http://twitter.com/#!/TheOpenField/status/111094482899963904

Palmer’s poem is at the bottom of this blog entry and Jorie Graham talks about Palmer and poetry in general here.