MC5

"Kick Out the Jams" was a regional hit when released in 1968, mostly in Michigan and Ohio, where the band did most of their touring. The single charted on the local top 40 lists distributed in the Detroit area by WKNR and WXYZ (the "brothers and sisters" version). It classifies as a hit , though a small one at the time.They were considered for years to be one-hit wonders after they broke up. While the rest of the world kept its eye on Iggy and praised the Stooges (rightly so) for their genius and influence, fellow Detroiters MC5 were pretty much ignored by virtually everyone , excepting a few hearty encyclopedists, who even then didn't give the band their due. The 5 were not a hip band to admit to liking. Revisionism is a wonderful thing sometimes, and in the last 9 years or so the MC5 have been rehabilitated by some thoughtful writing.  The release of their three albums pretty much solidifies their reputation as creators of punkoid sound thats' been influential years beyond their time. Now everyone seems hip to the MC5, and is willing to admit their importance.This was not always the case, though, as it wasn't that long ago when their name and music seemed consigned to the the filthiest portion of the dumpster.

Hemingway at his best./

Ernest Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of posthumous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment.  There is the issue that Hemingway’s obsession with masculine stoicism and the adherence to a personal, difficult to communicate code of honor as a means to transcend the stumbles, betrayals and petty grievances of a rudderless world is a set up for a  bad end.A man who holds himself to a standard he knows he cannot live up in the least is essentially giving himself permission to seek a twelve gauge solution.

We witness that in the string of post humus novels where the famous style turned into self parody, but at his best, his absolute, crystallized greatest, it’s precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction, is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.  Stylistically, I prefer the spare evocation of Hemingway's agony over the auto didactic fumbling of D.H.Lawrence, another writer of mixed blessings. Where Lawrence wanted to be a philosopher more than a storyteller, a lecturer rather than a sympathetic ear to his characters, Hemingway had an intimacy in his work, the sense of being within the innermost circle of a community  who, among themselves, needed the fewest phrases to convey the most complex of emotions. The dialogue between Jake and Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises  in clear yet oblique reference to the war  injury that left the protagonist impotent is a a brilliant exercise in getting across what was then unspeakable in way that couldn't be mistaken. We could say the same thing for the love scene in To Have and Have Not, a tired, grinding, ritual grudge fuck performed from habit rather than desire; this is not to say that I prefer the grim and gruesome expressed in sparing terms, but that I admire the particular finesse  Hemingway had in creating scenes that resonate loudly with as few effects as possible. It was a limited roster of techniques, of course, but what he did with it was beyond the instincts of most other writers seeking to become a voice for something greater than themselves.Let us say that at this point I am more likely to pick up Hemingway's books for another go round, since he fulfills the most important requirement; he is a good read  after all the issues are , for the moment, set aside.
Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.

Hemingway at this best

Ernest Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of posthumous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment.  There is the issue that Hemingway’s obsession with masculine stoicism and the adherence to a personal, difficult to communicate code of honor as a means to transcend the stumbles, betrayals and petty grievances of a rudderless world is a set up for a  bad end.A man who holds himself to a standard he knows he cannot live up in the least is essentially giving himself permission to seek a twelve gauge solution.

We witness that in the string of post humus novels where the famous style turned into self parody, but at his best, his absolute, crystallized greatest, it’s precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction, is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.  Stylistically, I prefer the spare evocation of Hemingway's agony over the auto didactic fumbling of D.H.Lawrence, another writer of mixed blessings. Let us say that at this point I am more likely to pick up Hemingway's books for another go round, since he fulfills the most important requirement; he is a good read  after all the issues are , for the moment, set aside.

Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.

BB STYLE BLUES FOR d HARMONICA.AVI

Keeping it dumb in black and white

"...democracies are fundamentally anti-artistic. "

A door without a frame is not unlike a question without a desire to know.

That's what I heard , just walking by the patio , a man and women geeked out on wine and Sherman cigarettes discussing whether free elections are hindrance or a boon to the artist. They seemed to think that the contenders for power appealed to the primordial fear of a hypothetical Mass Man in order to foment their unspoken desire to consolidate their resources; only the black and white world need apply. But , in truth, it is  ;ess that democracies are anti-artistic than they are resistant to the notion that aesthetic concerns and artistic expression are reserved for a cultivated elite.

Democracy rejects this sublimated priesthood on principle, and opens the arena, the galleries so that more who wish to do so may engage in the intuitive/artistic process and keep the activity alive in ways that are new and precisely relevant to the time--this is the only way that the past has any use at all, as it informs the present day activity, and allows itself to be molded to new sets of experiences. Art is about opening up perspectives, not closing them down, and that is the democratic spirit at its best. 

Otherwise, the past is a rigored religion, and history is an excuse for brutal, death wish nostalgia.

Tucked out

The times have changed to the degree that women who wear revealing clothing are no longer offended when you make note of what they're revealing. Everything is permitted , it sometimes seems, and the surfeit of goods and the lack of time for concomitant indulgence renders all those options invisible. Our choices become more than a distraction, they become a hindrance, and how you judge whether a day was a success or not was how well you resisted, no, ignored the allure of what used to drive you crazy with yearning.

MUSIC FOR CASH REGISTERS

I could sing all night
if the lights never changed
and if the radio played this song
again and again,
it’s a riff that rubs me
the right way in traffic
it’s a chorus making downtown
a party of long ribbons
and faired tap shoes,
the motor purrs and growls
with each keyboard grunt
and grunting guitar,
this car just rocks
when there’s no one I have to
return it to.

This is the curse of
owning things
that merely own you in exchange,

Cars, toasters, hand guns and
and magazines hug your
face with a deep kiss of need,

What I receive is nameless
and elusive, some music, some smoke,
dry ice vapors and a wallet that
floats away,
that’s how light it’s gotten,

Money is air, invisible but potent,

I owe money I’ve never seen
to people I’ve never met,

Like you, shuffling your debit cards
and saying prayers that don’t seem
to soar as high as interest rates
or blood pressure,
you should be dancing
for all the coin we owe,

This moment , right now,
on the street that vibrates
with orders on how to drive
when to cross and what to smoke
the thirty yards from the public entrance,
the world can stop and we perk our ears to
listen to an imagined needle scratching
the surface of percussive vinyl,

The bass line and the grunts of soul singers
are all the advice we need; they called decades ago
when we started to toss our cash out from
Wall Street Windows,

They advised

Do the jerk, baby,
Do the jerk now!M

A sonnet I wrote

I thought this effort   was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes something does. I was hoping for comments on this slight effort:

Sonnet 16  

A sign of the cross and a sign on the door or just sign

yourself out if it’s a weekend pass you’re dealing with, 

sign yourself up for a moment in the sun when youhave your tax refund check in hand, give us some cash for 

the diversions that approach the distraction level

of morons who get their exercise reading the labels 

on records as they go ‘round and ‘round on the

phonograph, signs of life in a living room, your parents 

house and sofa, I am hiding behind a chair before the light

switch is flipped and a panic like business plans that come 

undone where you signed a dotted line that ends up

being a perforations around your wrists, like you see

on butcher’s charts, you know, under the sign that reads

NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.

Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at  more structured verse. A poster with the moniker Th Paine asked How many people will understand what you mean when you refer to record labels spinning around on a phonograph?

Good question. Who would have thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on the flip side". He looked puzzled as we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and briefly explained that before Cd's records had two sides, side A and side B, and that the phrase meant the other side of the record. It was no big deal , of course, but it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to younger adults.

FALLING ON DEAF EARS

 I  like loud and distorted guitar, old school, in the form of jamming power trios, those guitar-bass-drums shootouts where the downbeats started at debated counts and the length of improvised middle section was undetermined and unpredictable. Improvisation, riffing, vamping, monochromatic chord mongering, the center portions of this species of spontaneous noise took it's stylistic cue from several generations of black American blues geniuses and took their clear, elegantly expressed formulations of anger, pain , dread and joy and tweaked the pentatonic elements to a narrowed strain of white male rage, performed at volume levels beyond endurance levels , with the nimble, simple, eloquent rhythms and solo configurations of guitar , harmonica, banjo being replaced with a waves of distorted notes bent to their furthermost pitch of emotional credibility.

It was perfect for the smoky ballrooms I went to in the late '60s, where the likes of Cream, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore and Mountain belched, groaned and assaulted a beleaguered audience of addled brains with their instrumental abuse; on some nights the commotion and clamor reminded you more of a demolition derby instead of a unique engagement with a fleeting muse. The impact was more important than configuration. There was joy when, in Detroit where I lived, I came upon the MC5 and the Stooges. The 5 were every car Detroit had manufactured being tossed off the top of the Penobscot, the tallest building in town; they had a speed and power only the fury of an accumulating gravity could provide, and half the fun of watching these guys batter, abuse and flail their instruments while the wiggled and wrenched themselves in hip-thrusting deliriums was the expectation of their metaphorical car crashing, smashing into the hard, metal strewn concrete below. The Stooges were, on the other hand, the guitar that was tossed off with a violent fling at a bad rehearsal and left on, still plugged into the amp, humming and crackling the whole night; Ron Ashton's guitar work was perfect, imperfect, with a wood-chipper rhythm, a perfect three and two-chord background for Iggy Pop, who's psycho-sexual explorations into the outer areas of teenage impatience would make you think of a zombies severed arm. It still twitches across the blood, the hand is still making grasping motions for your neck, you realize that even death cannot stop this force that requires your attention.

Reading Bei Dao

Bei Dao is an especially fine poet , and I thought it would be a relief to read some work from a contemporary Chinese poet who better brings together a modern diction with the tradition of image clarity found in traditional Chinese verse. Pound's translations are so loose in their relation to the original tongue and intent that many specialists consider them to be not translations at all but wholly original poems instead. This perspective makes the poems a bit more approachable, and presents us with the idea that Pound's misreading of Chinese aesthetic led him, all the same, to develop his notions of a twentieth century poetry where the image prevails over sentiment and empty rhetoric. Bei Dao, of course, has the sure-footedness I don't think Pound ever achieved in this area. While Pound was busy mimicking an old old style (or what he took to be what an older style would sound like) ,Bei Dao neatly builds surely, delicately, all things in balance, indeed, not an idea but in the thing.

Branch roads appear and disappear
in the hands of trees.
Where did the fawns go?
Only cemeteries could assuage
this desolation, like tiny cities.

The thinking comes after the poem, for the reading to resonate with. Our fine poet here performs his art beautifully, the presentation of the perception.Here are other poems he's written,scaled back to a sparkling essence of perception,
translated by Eliot Weinberger :

June

Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in time

note this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these words

note these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the sea

and loudspeakers loyal to the sea's
deep bass say June

___________________________________

Teacher's Manual

A school still in session
irritable restless but exercising restraint
I sleep beside it
my breath just reaching the next
lesson in the textbook: how to fly

when the arrogance of strangers
sends down March snow
a tree takes root in the sky
a pen to paper breaks the siege
the river declines the bridge invites

the moon takes the bait
turning the familiar corner
of the stairs, pollen and viruses
damage my lungs damage
an alarm clock

to be let out of school is a revolution
kids jump over the railings of light
and turn to the underground
other parents and I
watch the stars rise

Sketches drawn with a broken hand

Striking images alluding to opaque , disquieting personal episodes used to be the thing I insisted a poem be, a constantly streaming series of broken bits rendered in sufficiently harsh terms that seemed to want to perpetuate a pain. I am lucky to have had a series of professors and poets who suggested, even required me to read far beyond my reading preferences; I would have small poetry collection had I not broadened my horizon. It is unreasonable to demand that poets write with the same depressed acuity as Sylvia Plath, and I think equally irrational for poets to attempt the mimic her singularly downcast genius.

Leslie McGrath's poem , "The Mouth of the Mind", nonetheless treads the excessively forged confessional path in order to offer up a scenario that recalls Mark Strand's "The Dreadful Has Already Happened". Strand, whom I don't care a great deal for as a poet, does however have a lyric ability where a musical of how to start a phrase, what to make of it in mid turn, and where to finish up, and his poem is a masterpiece in how to convey wordless woes and worries without sacrificing flow. McGrath , odd to say, is no Mark Strand (at his best); her emphasis , blunt and less willing to provide a reader with a verbal ease to segue between the clashing elements of her nightmare, seems to reduce the ratio of what can be understood on an intuited level and make her awful recollections into garish totems , a bric a brac of crummy self image. Strand's poems features the poet leaving the baroque verbal garnishments in the spice cabinet for a change and crafting instead a scenario of  fluid strangeness, creating the most effective surreal effect;  a narrative line that seems that it ought to resolve itself but which only deepens ever so slightly in its contradictions the more one re-reads to see if they've missed something vital. It's meaning is undecidable, but the presentation is compelling.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh   

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them   

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.   

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered   

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search   

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

This is something of a silent film, significant family members and friends involved in a ritual that is required for reasons that are with held. Every small thing finds negation, each gesture of warmth and security is undermined by sullen looks and currents of anxiety; what we're made aware of, though, is that through the  temperamental extremes there lies those short moments of peace, serenity, the lack of the nagging noise that converts the banality of the world into storm warnings and shots over the bow. The sadder bit of it all is this calm that requires the most effort to arrive at.

Bear in mind that I enjoy a surrealistic, non-sequitor style; even with that, though, a certain playfulness is expected, a particular joy in presenting the world and memory of it in alternative versions of What Happened is required, if only to prevent the odd bits of phrase making from becoming a humorless shelf of unfocused melancholy. Her imagery is heavy handed and lacks a memorable phrase or unusual. The segues from baby bunny rabbits, alive or dead, dinner tables, stray bullets on a counter salads full of wasted money are not especially convincing that this was anything worth writing a poem about; it seems more an unrefined extract from a dream journal that is intended for a therapist or an astrologer than it is for a readership who are interested in how the language might again escape the truism that everything worth saying or expressing in verse has already been said. McGrath's crabby, snippy, self satisfied anguish does not express the inexpressible in terms of the forgettable. It is, though, a confirmation that writing a good poem is not something just anyone can do.