Round Up: What I’ve Been up to Lately

Some good stuff happening on the internets and elsewhere. Enjoy!

Today my review of Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice is up at The Rumpus.

How Like Foreign Objects was reviewed in Ploughshares!

Two poems at Barrelhouse Online.

New issue of Parthenon West, in which I have a few poems.

Oh, and I’m reading the H_ngm_n Bks Reissue of Paul Violi’s In Baltic Circles. Buy this book, and read Matt Hart’s Afterword first. This is a treasure of a book. Nate, Matt, and crew: you’re doing the good work!!

Behind the Door

I was up until 2 a.m. watching back episodes of a new ABC show called Once Upon a Time, which isn’t nearly as cheesy at it sounds. This is how I know for sure that I’m a TV junkie. And I don’t just like the high brow shit. I’m all about The Vampire Diaries and Fringe, Prime Suspect and Grimm, Dexter and True Blood. (Umm, I vote that Dex and TB have the best music/image montage-intros ever made for tv).  The television drama, whether teen angsty, supernatural inspired (the networks’ new obsession is “the fairy tale re-examined”), or cop procedural, I’ll bite. But the same isn’t true for the sitcom. I’ve watched The New Girl a few times, which can be funny but mostly sucks. If you’re going to invest in television watching, you want some meat with your potatoes, no?. I want to be invested in characters’ lives because something important or meaningful is happening, not because they’re embarrassed that they accidentally flashed their roommate in the communal bathroom or burned the Thanksgiving turkey in the dryer (yes, this happened to overly quirky Deschanel in New Girl). I want life-or-death, even if it’s in the guise of hot teenage vampires or Snow White or parallel universes. Which is strange because I love to laugh–maybe we’ve outgrown the sitcom format as a culture, and what used to be funny is now just tired, even if it elicits a laugh here or there. Or maybe we want to watch culture at its fringes. Maybe we’re all tired of the hum drum we’re told existence should be. Normal hardly exists anymore, but abnormal does. Maybe, collectively, we’re more curious about what’s going on inside the imagination rather than behind the apartment door.

The Misanthrope Emerges (Binge/Purge)

Some days are worse than others. I’ll wake up fine, enjoy my morning coffee, etc. etc., but slowly the fist in my stomach tightens, my jaw clenches, my chest constricts. And BLAM! I hate people again. Seriously, I’ll be scrubbing the toilet and constructing scenarios about how I’ll embarrass people I don’t like. And I don’t like a lot of people it turns out, although there are one or two at a time I will demonize for various weak and dumb traits. Today, for instance, I hate people who try too hard to be liked. I hate cheesiness and manufactured sweetness. I really fucking hate attention grubbing behind the guise of philanthropy, and I hate when people get their feelings hurt because you’re not on board with their schtick. I hate soft voice–the one that people use when they’re trying to be diplomatic. I hate too skinny people and too fat people and everyone in between. I’m frowning and can’t stop! Already two people at Barnes and Noble have jumped out of my way, startled by my snarl. I hate you and your floppy dresses. I hate you and your sunglasses. I hate you and your niggling poodle, but only because you’ve ruined another creature. I am disappointed in humans. I hate how people act on fear. I hate how we can’t see past our own noses, if that. I hate your voice! I hate your Facebook posts! I hate your hipster friends with their faux-floppy hair and their dumb poems! I hate your artwork. I hate your fucking ballet flats. I hate your basketball shorts. I can see the outline of your penis, which I hate. I hate your perfect stomach. I hate when guys stare at girls with their tongues wagging, and I really hate when guys write about wanting to be violent to women. It’s not cool to be honest if you’re just a douchebag. I hate gluttony and arranging days around food. I cannot stand self-righteous bastards who condescend to people who are better than they are. I hate plasticity, physical and emotional. Who am I? Holden Caulfield? Fucking stupid. Fucking twelve-year-old bullshit. Fucking asshole sitting in a corner of Barnes and Noble fucking hating everyone, two or three fights going in my head. Oh, don’t even think about getting out of line with me, Mister. I will cut you. I will fuck your shit up, swallow you whole. I fucking hate small talk. Small time. Small beans. Small town thinking. But I love small animals. I love large animals. I love big love. I love people who are quietly friends, who don’t need to make a scene about anything. I like secret promises. I like being hungry. I like smoking cigarettes. I like swimming and walking the dog. I like people who do the work and shut the fuck up. I like tirades. I like the girl with lavender hair sitting by the window. I like the old woman reading Socrates by Paul Johnson; I like her because she’s defying my expectations. Also her purse is polka-dotted. I love my dog lying at home immovable. Depressed, lovely creature. My hatred is subsiding. I don’t necessarily hate you, it turns out. On the bright side, we might get to watch NBA basketball on Christmas day. I surely won’t hate you then.

Doodle

For Nut, Post-Tumor

Tonight I was rage,

a purple-hearted tuber,

a goat  with a sworn horn.

 

I danced dark’s two-step

swearing mad and breaking

the back of spider-

 

sense. Tonight, post-surgery

the Frankenstein details

of your shorn fur

 

prolapsing our years together:

you are my calendar, chocolate dog–

you’ve ferried me

 

across our country in zig-zags

and through landscapes of the heart.

How can a not-human rend

 

my fabric so close to dirt? Tonight,

I vomited an icepick from my brain

for you and all our years together.

 

Dear dog, tonight’s whimper

and stitches and loosened blood-

flesh is a makeshift

 

canyon. Cower in it

with me, lone wolf. I’m a howling

about to lose control,

 

what’s done is a decade.

What’s done, what’s done

is pounds of unmaking.

Fuck: A Sunday Prayer

It seems to me that seeing”fuck” in a poem today is like seeing the word “bird” in a poem a few years ago. Everyone uses it. It’s the universal signifier for edgy. Fuck! Its perfect consonant combo sandwiching the soft “u,” as in love, as in mother, as in hover, and other words that disguise their o’s as something a little risque. A u invites you in by its shape alone. Climb up my stalk it says. Take a dip. A u is Lorca’s lip of the wound. It doesn’t enclose you but lets you experience it and climb out.

As I’ve said before, to go on would be profane. So, too bad about fuck. Another word we’ve fucked up for posterity. Readers will look back on the 2000s and wonder why the hell so many birds and fucks. They’re great archetypes, so I suppose the actual words bird and fuck are just 21st century synecdoches for the larger themes of existence (and literature) always and forever. I will continue to say fuck with gusto. I will continue, also, to fuck with gusto. How else to live in this living? People still get uncomfortable when poems are littered, alternately, with fucks and hallelujahs. They get uncomfortable when you talk about fucking, too.  I like the juxtaposition of sacred and profane as an act of living. Say a prayer, suck a dick. We are both. We are always both. We’re the altar and the lion’s den, the birthing room and the torture chamber. Fuck. I fucking love this life.

Savannah Adventures, with Links

Firstly, read a few poems over at Barrelhouse Online, issue edited by Justin Marks. Thanks, Justin!

I’m sitting on the sunporch of writer Chad Faries’ house in Savannah. Oaks and pecan trees marbling the room’s morning sun. Black cat and fluffy rainbow cat on stand-by. Lat night I read for the Poetry Society of Georgia with a few other writers, and in the afternoon I gave a talk at Savannah State University about poetry-as-memoir, which is not to be confused as poetry-as-confession. The students were really excited and receptive–always a plus when visiting a strange place. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience.

Last night after the reading, we went to the courtyard of the Ships of the Sea museum to see Pokey Lafarge and the South City Three. I’d say go ahead and see them if you can. Good, old-fashioned Americana–done superbly. I bought a record with the money I made on book sales. See? Artists feeding artists! Pokey told me he loved East of Eden so much it made him cry. Here’s to musicians who ride the rails and hike the highways with great American novels in their back pockets.

Went to Bonaventure Cemetery yesterday, too, on Chad’s fancy bicycle. Maybe the most peaceful cemetery I’ve ever visited. It overlooks the marsh and feels more like a park than a cemetery–aside from the tombstones and monuments. Conrad Aiken’s tombstone’s a bench that reads: “Cosmos Mariner Destination Unknown” and “Give My Love to the World.”

Another shocker!

There’s a new issue of H_ngm_n up and ready for the world to devour–just in time, too. I was getting hungry for great poems and such. Go to, old chap!

GroupThink: A Self-Exploration

I don’t join clubs. I don’t join teams. No groups. No circles. Definitely no churches. So far, no unions. I don’t meet my crowd for lunch, though sometimes I have lunch with people. Sometimes I’ll go to the pub. Sometimes a dinner party. I have a hard time going to Bikram Yoga, where I see the same people over and over. The same people hanging out in a room together, sweating religiously: cultish. And yet I love doing it, so I’m denying myself the pleasure of the experience. No collectives. I tried the collective model recently. It made me want to scratch my eyes out. I’m not a joiner.  Is that it? Is it that I’m not a joiner? That I’d rather spend entire weekends speaking to not another human being? It’s pretty close.

I think people don’t understand this. It’s difficult to understand things outside your experience, I get it. For instance, I look at people who socialize more than once or twice a week and I think they are quite literally maniacal. I’m convinced they’re missing part of their brain, that their well of loneliness is so deep that it never fills.

GroupThink. I loathe it. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right people to group think with? I don’t know. I have no patience for self-serving in the guise of “what’s best for the group.” I have no patience for idle chatter. I have no patience for shared belief in fabricated events and stories or in future utopias.

I’ll go to concerts. I’ve always enjoyed a good show. But only when I was in my late teens did I get into the mosh pit. Then, one broken nose was enough reason to stand on the sidelines forevermore. Have you ever watched a humming, buzzing pit from a balcony? It’s a fascinating hive, a vortex, a freeze-burning energy.

Maybe my disdain for GroupThink is a result of growing up in The Worldwide Church of God  (lovingly referred to as the world wide web by my college friends), when it was still fashionable and lucrative to be cultish. Our edict was to stay away from

Merwin’s Follain: Color and color and color

I’m reading Merwin’s translation of Jean Follain, Transparence of the World. Follain’s world is like a transparency with drops of color, like ink, bleeding through it. Here’s a poem called “Evenings of Ink” :

Obsessive memory of first

contacts,

it was the rustling of twigs

and leaves in the garden

in the sullen days of ash.

Spots of ink

in the red evenings

while the beasts trembled;

spots that ran into stars

on the thin paper of cold notebooks.

Immense fogs around women,

they went

greeting the gnawed crosses.

Ink whose green salts he sees again

when his eyes grow tired,

when his throat is bitter.

Sumptuous ink

in the envious town.