it is all voice--musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity. -Susan Sontag (whose novels, Crash Davis believes, are self-indulgent, overrated crap) on Robert Walser.
1. Assembling my first book. 2. The Cardinals making a push to the post season. 3. This reading: Sunday, September 21, 7pm – Mark Yakich & Johannes Goransson, at Myopic. 1564 N. Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60622 4. And this reading: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 6 PM - Peter Gizzi. Ferguson Theater Columbia College, 600 South Michigan Avenue. 5. And this reading too: Wednesday OCTOBER 1, 2008 6:00pm - Chicago-based series A and Wave Books are co-sponsoring an evening of political poetry, featuring readings by Suzanne Buffam, Lisa Fishman, Richard Meier, Srikanth Reddy, Chuch Stebelton and Catherine Wagner, at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. 6. The new Jack Spicer collected, "My Vocabulary Did This to Me," which comes out on Sept. 30. 7. Requesting another deferment on my school loans.
I know I've been dangling this particular carrot out there for awhile now, but I should have copies of Further Adventures Book 1 out by this time next week. It features both Aaron McNally AND Friedrich Kerksieck, as well as these tasty licks:
*** Tuesday night the girl told me that John Wayne's ghost frequents the ship he died on, drinking coffee on the upper deck. i.e. not whiskey. i.e. not in the saddle. i.e. not a cowboy.
*** Stitch me some boots boy My shoes are muddy And I can no longer walk Without the force of west at my heel The pa-rump of the absent parade A man needs some sort of weapon in this world
How 'bout them apples?
Check back over the next week to watch me put these books together...
So I read the two Frank Stanford books my parents gave me for my birthday. I think I messed up though. "The Singing Knives" was his first collection. "You" was one of his last. I read half of "Knives" at work on Friday and then accidentally left it there over the weekend. In its absence, I read "You." This after noon, I finished "Knives." Regardless, the books both share a connection with "Battlefield," as well as each other. These two books make bookends to "Battlefield" and are more appropriate as far as introducing Stanford the writer, and Francis the protagonist. One aspect that does separate the two texts is the immediacy of style. "Knives" feels as though it's building, reaching a climax with the fucked up, but beautiful long poem, "The Snake Doctors."
One thing about Stanford that I really love is his ability to frame violence within the adolescent mind. You know what I'm talking about... Think back to when you were twelve (well, if you were a boy, if you were a girl, imagine how gross twelve year old boys were), most summer afternoons were spent committing acts so psychotic, most of us refuse to talk about them later. There's a blood lust then that hasn't yet been restrained. I myself used to shoot squirrels and birds with a pellet gun. Anyway, this is the violence in Stanford's work: it is very real, very cruel and yet so outlandish, you almost laugh, or actually do, and it is there that your connection with the speaker becomes real, it's there that Stanford gains the credibility he needs to pull off anything he can imagine.
If "Knives" is the rising action, "Battlefield" the 500 page pinnacle, then "You" is clearly the decent. The poems keep reaching for bigger ideas, broader images. So much of this all too brief book is spent, unlike a good portion of the work I've mentioned here, looking beyond today. It's easy, knowing the biography of the author, to say that Stanford was thinking about and considering death, but fuckitall, that's what these poems are doing, and doing real well. A taste from "Instead,"
Death is a good word. It often returns When it is very Dark outside and hot, Like a fisherman Over the limit, Without pain, sex, Or melancholy. Young as I am, I Hold light for this boat.
Lego Villains Whipped cream on top of iced coffee beverages Milestones Pictures of the moon from a car window Pre-Season sporting events Seeing the inside of things I've only previously seen the outside of Effective lighting Walking home at night
Also, you should totally check out the new issue of diode. You will see it here. Be sure to read G.C. Waldrep's poems in said issue. Rather than knock your socks off, these poems come in while you're sleeping and sneakily peel them off. By the time you're done reading the poems, you're all, "Hey, where'd my socks go?"
My wife is making me go to a knitting expo this weekend...
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I really wish I would have had my camera for this, but on my way home today I walked past a couple sitting on the end of a bench in the park. He was reclined, his arms spread out across the back. She was leaning over, her elbows resting in that spot just above your knee cap where elbows seem to fit perfectly. She also had a cigarette in her hand that was just briefly showing all the places her wrist was dropping her fingers. She was talking, but I don't think it was specifically to her partner. Next to them, sitting side by side by side, were about 7 baby dolls of differing ethnicities, meaning, some were brown and some were rosy. Each one was dirty, but fully clothed; shirts, skirts, bibs, pants, shoes and hats.
Two parents and their 7 children.
In other news, Wilkinson has completely redone/updated his Rabbit Light Movies site. You should go check it out: http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com/
My birthday was last week, I got a few books. Here is a list of those books:
1. You, by Frank Stanford 2. The Singing Knives, also by Frank Stanford 3. whim man mammon, by Abraham Smith, who Graham Foust thinks is a lot like Frank Stanford, and whose book, at my admittance of not previously owning it, caused a certain poet initialed JMW to declare I was dead to him.
If you don't, you should own these books too. Buy the Stanford books here, and the ACTION book here.
was dialing this number (888-717-2243). The only business you'll do on the phone here is listen to Jenny Lewis' new single of her upcoming solo record...and you can do it while you're at work and nobody will say anything to you.
Here's a song by a band called Bodies of Water with a singer that sings like David Bowie. These pictures remind me of it, but in a quasi ironic, very un-epic way.
Once, when trying to win a girl's heart, I wrote a poem on fancy stationary and mailed it to her. Only, I didn't write it at all. Like many young men in love I copied song lyrics. There is nothing inherently shameful in this act, we've all done it, but what is shameful is that I copied the lyrics from an Al Jarreau record. A safe bite, yes, (what 14 year old listens to Al Jarreau?) but also totally embarrassing to admit.
Equally embarrassing? I actually owned that record, and I spent my allowance on it...
This here is the poster for the Frank Stanford Literary Festival (it's very Henriksensian, if you've seen the Cannibal cover art lately). Frank Stanford is the poet version Daniel Johnston. In other words, he's influenced practically everybody writing today and yet, he's no household name. In fact, he's not really even much of a classroom name, but thanks to a dedicated few (like when Kurt Cobain started wearing the Daniel Johnston t-shirt) his name and, more importantly, his work is finally being seeing by a lot of eyes. For those of you reading this who have never read Stanford, you must and thanks to the updated Alsop Review Collections page, you can have most of his out of print work broadcast directly into your retinas. Stanford's work is hopeless, in the Romantic sense, lunar, drastic, devastating, nightmarish, beautiful, but above all else, completely relateable, even when you wish it wasn't.
Please go read these poems, we are lucky that they exist, even luckier that we have such easy access to them.
Tarpaulin Sky's Summer issue is up...check it out.
Story time: When I was 23 I was really into the Dave Matthews Band. When I was 23 I was also really into tattoos. Unfortunately these two things crosses paths. When I was 23 I got a Dave Matthews Band tattoo. The only positive result of this? Now that I am almost 30, I'm really into wearing reef rash shirts to the pool, which saves me both from embarrassment and skin cancer.
The increasingly impressive Brandi Homan has an awesome review of Clay Matthews' "Superfecta," over on Gently Read Literature.
How awesome, you ask? Homan describes Matthews' poems just like you'd imagine hardcore Cure fans describing a live Cure show, saying the poems create"a gut-ache for the reader whose only appropriate response is either to cry or make out with someone really, really hard…or both."
In fact, that actually does describe my immediate response to the Cure show I saw back 1996. Ah youth, back when raging hormones made every emotion intensely arousing.
By the way, in honor of the final week of my twenties, every post up to the big day will include a reference to some gross, obscene and/or embarrassing moment of my life up to now...
Stay tuned. Well, not literally, go check out the shit I tell you to, but keep coming back.
BJ Love lives in Iowa. Additionally, he is an MFA candidate in the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the author of the chapbooks, "Michigander," and the forthcoming, "We are 2 Bastards."
