Inspiration: Balcony on Demand by Bloomframe | Apartment Therapy Re-Nest
…than answers given.” Blake Butler, author of the Scorch Atlas, came to New College this weekend for a reading/lecture/Q&A. He rocked. The lecture was about allowing story to emerge out of language rather than being shackled by some ill-conceived notion of “what the story’s supposed to be.” By being truthful to the language itself, by treating the sentence as a distinct object, you can build the most honest, most true story imaginable out of an emotional, psychic narrative (versus the old plot point narrative). I’ve be feeling the same way about poetry lately, so his lecture really hit home. (I keep saying lecture, but it was really a chill, funny, informative conversation on the back porch of the Four Winds Café. We propped the projector up on a dirty plastic table with feminist theory books and old notepads left by students.)
Blake also read an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Eerie and delicious. Can’t wait.
Also, props to Alec Niedenthal who 1. orchestrated this shebang and 2. introduced Blake this way, “He’s a really good eater like I’ve never seen.”
Father
When my father wants to read the paper
he says,
“Paper, walk to me.”
When he wants to smoke
he says,
“Cigarettes, walk to me.”
Then
my mother stands up to bring them to him.
–Urakawa Yuriko, age 6
from There are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan, ed. Richard Lewis, trans. Haruna Kimura
It happens when I listen to Sigur Rós or Mogwai, Low, Mazzy, PJ Harvey’s White Chalk. Call it slowcore or atmospheric, ambient or whatever, there are bands whose aesthetic forces you to be quiet and listen. In the listening you find the build-up, the arc, the narrative equivalent to jubilation and/or heartbreak.
It’s Saturday morning. “The Piano” from White Chalk plays in the background: Nobody’s listening nobody’s listening nobody’s listening. I read in an interview a while back (one I can’t find now) that Harvey’s purpose with White Chalk was to strip away all the vocal tricks and to sing as though she were standing next to her grandmother at church. I love that the songs came out strange and haunted and near perfect.
I’m on the porch, at the big baby-blue farmhouse table, reading Lola Haskins‘ book of poems Forty-four Ambitions for the Piano. This is a quiet book about music. In general, I have to force myself to be still, calm my head enough to read the silence around the words. I gravitate towards a poetry that sparks and crunches and makes noise, bombards the senses. I like the feeling of wanting to scream and run out the door as if my body’s on fire. I like when shit’s just a little crazy, a little apopheniac. I listen for it. But then, when I force myself into silence, when I’m alone on a Saturday morning reading lines like the second stanza of “Why Performers Wear Black,”
Because they have agreed
not to talk with their mouths.
Because they know that sound
carries best at night
I remember that this kind of quiet can be like ear-training. As a kid I did the Suzuki piano method, which focuses, in the early stages particularly, on listening. I’d close my eyes while Mr. Silverman played the four or five variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or various folksongs, and when I opened my eyes I could put my fingers on the keyboard and play the songs, following the legato or staccato motions of my teacher’s fingers (red-apple-green-apple, mississippi hotdog, bum, bummmmm, bum). They were simple songs that demonstrated simple techniques, and they taught me how to listen. Another excerpt from Haskins: “A mordant is suspended time, languid // as absinthe spreading in a glass. / Lifting it to his lips // a man believes he can live forever…”(from “Mordent”). I don’t like where she goes in the next line, but those few couplets are so still and feel like they’re hanging suspended in resin so that the reader can see them from different angles.
One of my favorite Low songs is “Murderer.” It’s 3 minutes and 43 seconds long and the lyrics are these 13 short, unrepeated lines:
In poems I want the language, the space around the language, the cascade, the bursting-open, the slow-burn, the mania, the deep sleep. But sometimes, I appreciate just a little bit of quiet.
1. How do you find time to learn everything you need to learn?
2. How do you make a business out of the thing that pursues you?
3. A list within a list, from Zachary Schomburg’s “Full of Knives” in his book The Man Suit. I published a first-person version of this poem during my ill-fated time at Swink. Schomburg’s book version is way better–he told me as much back then.
2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself.
3. He has difficulties with metal detectors.
14. His back is running out of space.
16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him.
17. He is difficult to hold when he cries.
4. Matt Hart says this at InDigest (but definitely not only this): “and I am brittle with thingness / and coming to conclusions, // or forgetting all existence”
5. Brittle with thingness. Did you read that? I want to eat that line.
6. Ron Silliman keeps a listy blog full of full-ofs. You could click-and-link all day and all night over there.
7. Procrastination sounds like instigation sounds like bored pollination.
I hate seeing and hearing myself on video, so I’m not sure why I’m advertising this–probably because it’s such an excellent idea. Incliner, the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s journal of the arts, has an excellent series called Seeing is Reading in which a poet reads something on his/her desk and then writes about his/her relationship to that piece of writing. I chose to read a poem-in-progress called “Time to Collect Those Good,” another reason the video is hard for me to watch. It’s not easy knowing you’re sharing something that feels incomplete!
Other poets to participate so far are Brett Price and Nate Pritts. Too bad my name isn’t Alexis Prorgera.
This is a site to peruse, particularly the window frame artwork in the gallery. Jónsi (of Sigur Rós fame) and Alex make the pieces together, and they are hauntingly lovely. Screen shot of the gallery:
They have an instrumental album called Riceboy Sleeps that sounds great, too. And don’t forget to watch the recipe videos!
1.
…blank space have been filled by a book I found at Daedalus Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA, on a recent road trip. I was at the register, ready to buy a forgotten poetry anthology and a book about southern folklore, when I looked down and found There Are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan, edited by Richard Lewis and translated by Haruna Kimura. The poems in this book are direct and strange, honest and off-kilter, beautifully simple and utterly complex. They are a master class in poetry’s potential to illuminate the human condition. I’m not ready to write about the poems yet, as they somehow feel too special. Josh read many of them to me on one of the legs of our road trip. We found ourselves crying on I-95.
2.
Went back to Murrell’s Inlet, Garden City, Surfside Beach area for the first time since I was 18. I couldn’t find anything familiar for the longest time, as streets and parks and tiny plazas were dwarfed by side-of-the-road water slides and beachwear shops with 3-story-tall sharks plummeting from roofline to parking lot.
I finally found Fuller Park where Ryan jumped out of a swing to catch a branch and, inevitably, broken his arm. I found the subdivision where we lived twice, each house indistinguishable from the next, and the lake where the terrorist white duck held court. I found Wacca Wache Estates off of Wachesaw Road where the Waccamaw Indians once buried their dead, where in the woods Ryan and I hunted bad guys with kitchen knives. The Intracoastal. I found the marshes where I collected oysters for a science fair project in an attempt to prove the Worldwide Church of God’s adherence to the clean-and-dirty animal lists of Deuteronomy (or was it Leviticus?). Could I have grown up here? Could I have crossed that bridge every day on the long drive to swim practice? Could I have pushed my toddler sister in a stroller around this mall? Was that the shop where we bought my prom dress? Could I have eaten fresh-caught whitefish and flounder at this pier? Are those nurse sharks part of my memory or someone else’s?
1. When all you want is quiet, there’s a nest from which to breathe.
2. Kudos to Nutella, the dog not the spread, for her stellar job keeping up with Ruby today. She partied with the young folks and is now a lump on a log.
Back before Nut was a graybeard.
3. Went to a bar last night I haven’t been in since I was underage. They didn’t card me this time either. I saw more fake breasts and skirts on women over 40 last night than I did during my whole tenure in L.A.
4. Who said Saturday afternoons were about being productive?
I just read Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas (thank you Alec Niedenthal) and it’s just great, so full of beautiful sadness. Read a review at the Tarpaulin Sky Interviews and Reviews blog here.
Here’s what Jesse Ball says on the back cover:
Scorch Atlas is a series of maps, or worlds, “tied so tight they couldn’t crane their necks.” Everything is either destroyed, rotting, or festering–and not only the physical objects, but allegiances, hopes, covenants. The sole glimmer of light come in recollection, as in: “a bear the size of several men…There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you.
But somehow the blurb doesn’t do the book justice. Butler has this knack for getting at the psychological horror of being alone, or nearly alone, at the end of the world. The inhabitants of this book are literally crawling with degradation and despair, but their stories are written so poignantly that the muck caking everything is almost beautiful.
