I saw the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band in Detroit, 1966 or 67 at a no age limit folk and blues club called the Chessmate in Detroit Michigan, and this was an event that changed my life forever. I bought my first harmonica soon afterward and have been playing ever since. Detroit is a fantastic town for Black music, with lots of soul, blues, jazz and rock and roll, and the exposure to these kinds of music at an early age influenced my harmonica playing. I listened to saxophone players like Coltrane and Sonny Stitt and Coleman Hawkins, I listened to guitarists like Johnny Winter, Clapton, John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, I listened to harmonica players like Butterfield, Musselwhite, James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williams, Norton Buffalo, but mostly I just played all the time, all the time, with bands, played to records, played alone, all the time. I played until my lips bled, literally. My parents thought I was eccentrc . I didn't care. I play everyday.

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I played even at my worst drinking; i have been sober now nearly t wenty five years. I am now trying to figure out the way I play so i can do some instruction videos. I play entirely by ear and really have no idea how to convey my style to others. I would love to read or hear someone describe what is I do. I thank all of you for listening to me and your kind words. he only harmonica players I studied closely and made a concentrated attempt to sound like, ie copy, are Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite. Butterfield and Musselwhite were the first guys to introduce me to blues harmonica playing and elements of their respective styles remain in my own style 46 years later. What really helped me, though, was just listening to virtually anything I could get my hands on; in my case it was an ongoing obsession with guitar players. In fact, I picked up harmonica because I couldn;t learn how to play fast like Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter fast enough--I was just all thumbs and no patience. But it was with the harmonica that I found a voice, my voice, and it was with the harmonica that I found myself being able to duplicate riffs and effects from harmonica players and from a good number of guitarists and, especially, many, many jazz musicians, like Coltrane, Bird, Coleman Hawkins. This is not to say that I sound anything like the jazz musicians I just mentioned--their techniques and their vocabulary are certainly more sophisticated than what I currently have--but the point is that giving these guys hard, concentrated listens influenced my sense of phrasing, gave me ideas and notions as to how to skip around during an improvisation and not merely rattle off scales, how to be precise in executing my ideas, in how and where to bend, to slur, to insert chord textures, trills, triplets, octaves. I do tell others who are learning their craft to listen to as much music as they possibly can and to learn as many different styles as possible, to learn riffs from blues, country, swing, classical and to mix them all up, and to practice, practice, practice and after that, practice some more. And more after that. I place maximum emphasis on  practice and playing in live situations because for me this is the most effective means of sloughing the most copy-cat aspects of your influences and moves you toward your own style.Having never had a lesson, having never learned music theory, having never learned to read nor write music,  how I learned was by an obsessive preoccupation with listening closely to harmonica players, rock guitarists and jazz improvisors by the score and woodshedding for hours for decades on end. It's always been a one day at a time thing.  Everyday in every way I get just a little bit better. On good days I even myself when I say it.

late in this life

late in this life
in the night that surrounds me,
I check my email
and find you speaking
in italicized fonts,
asking me what time it is
and when does
life begin, after the sheets slide to the floor
or is after the
leave blowers heave wind and fumes
to no good purpose?

TASTES

The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but  because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of  real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop. In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant garde has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with language, I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us.

This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiters , fragments,clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.

I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there  is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

THE POETRY OF BOMBS

                                                                            —~---                                                                                                                            —----

What kills me

aren’t the guns

you tote but your thinking

that’s  in the chambers

and clips, the magazines

no one else can read

but still dread on hearing

what they report.

Language created the world

where tools can be made,

and now language lives inside

the spare parts

whose instruction manuals

are a poetry of rage and revenge

translated into an idiom of

technology that surveys the

outcome of another

kind of  Big Bang Theory..

It’s not about being

left alone any longer,

your message, inscribed

in manufacturer’s short hand

on casings spent  faster than

a drunk’s last dollar,

Bullets whistle

the language

of your rights

as they pass though

the skulls of anyone
who happens to be there,
expecting nothing but
the  light to change
and cold meal
warmed later in a microwave.

“Watching the Telly With Nietzsche” by C.K. Williams. - Slate Magazine

A sad fact is that we are a nations of shut ins, finally, no matter how much our media informs us that we love to go places and see things and get to know the doings of the indigenous in neighborhoods not our own. Perhaps we are, to a large extent, desperate for vacation and the illusion of having enough walking around money to spend some days in a generic hotel room, visiting corporate water parks in all fifty states. Millions  are the sort who just channel surf until the end of the day, from time we get out of bed to the conclusion of all things concerning the twenty four hours that has just ebbed away like so many dust motes floating half seen on a breeze in a darkening twilight.

This where millions of us have our discussions of things going on, things that have happened, the political low down, the double crosses,the trends and the fads that make us stupider and less likely to call bullshit when bullshit is served. This is , perhaps ,a rich source for monologues among discontents who are on their  way out the door to the Big Room, and it has been explored to wonderful results in the work of Beckett--he had the genius to verbalize the death rattle in which the significant parts of a man's life is reduced to a repetitive , percussive stammer that never articulates as a memory truly forged.

C.K .Williams , though,in the grouchy poem linked to in the post title, merely seems in a hurry to deliver caustic comment on everything his gaze glazes over; everything is a target, nothing is sacred, nothing is revealed but a crank with a remote control and a room full of books. I imagine the cliched image of someone in a study full of books , piles of them, and and unsorted papers, unfinished writing assignments. The windows all have the shades drawn, save a tear or too that allows a thin beam to play intensely on a picture of an insane German philosopher who could never quite make himself understood.

"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine

"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine:

Poetry makes nothing happen, of course, but that this the point of it all, to have a medium that is the verbal concentration of the human mind struggling along in the world outside an individual's innate sense of exclusivity. Stumbling, bumbling, jaw dropping in amazement or reacting in horrified disgust, poetry in the modern sense isn't a means of argument, the vehicle for proving yourself right about how existence should be arranged and what those results would be. 

Poetry undermines the permanent hubris that is humanity's great curse and introduces again to the grain of the cement that meets us when we fall.  

It makes nothing happens--planes still fall from the sky, celebrities commit suicide, genocide rages everywhere, babies are born with or without soft music playing--but it does stake the sting from the Sucker Punch of Irony we meet when we turn the corner while looking other direction.

Poems about poetry making nothing happen, though, are nothing to be proud of; clever poems about being clever and concluding, outright or by implication , that one's verbal brilliance is inevitable, instinctual, an unstoppable music we make in-spite of group consensus or occasion, is the lamest, shallowest of vanities. It is, so this poem subtly implies, the condition of being human. No. It is the condition of having a bankrupt imagination.

If there are no ideas in things you can find, don't write.

_________________

"All poems are about poetry," or so the claim goes, but that has never been a convincing line of defense. In that sense, poetry is always about poetry the way all writing is about writing, in that a writer cannot advance the form unless he actively works against the standards and practices--even the theory of practice--that came before him. This view is deconstructionist, an old hat evasion that use to sufficed when a critic didn't want to discuss author intention nor technique. But poetry is a writing above all else and writing in general has the purpose of communicating something that regular discursive writing cannot--to take in the world and describe experiences in, whatever that happens to be. I think that we have a good many poets who would rather preen on the page than write something memorable. 

The ticket is punched and you're leaving, goodbye

The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there were an expiration date on grief.Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life and relations comes to the for. Poetry will tend to cease being the bright and chatty record of one's impulses, leavened with fast wit and snappy references, and will become more meditative, slower, a more considered rumination on those who've are gone yet whose presence remains felt and which influences the tone and direction of the living. It's hardly a matter of getting mileage from a tragedy as it is a species of thinking-out-loud. We speak ourselves into being with others around us to confirm our life in the physical world as well to confront the inescapable knowledge of our end, and poets are the ones writing their testaments that they were here once and that they lived and mattered in a world that is soon enough over run with another generation impatient to destroy or ignore what was here only scant years before so they may erect their premature monuments to themselves and their cuteness.We survived our foolishness and quick readings, a poet writes, we lived here and mattered to a community of friends and enemies in ways that no novel or epic production can capture, and we wish you the same luck, the chance to live long enough in this world you seek to fashion after your own image so you may write about your regrets, your failures, the things you didn't get around to doing.

Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” is marred by his anger about David Foster Wallace

Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” is marred by his anger about David Foster Wallace:

.It is the writer's job to be interested in his responses to events around him, but there is such a thing as creating a style that makes one's intense self-regard a bearable  thing for a reader who otherwise might care less. Jonathan Franzen is a the author of several important literary novels and he does a fine job, over all, of casting his own personality as the model from which his characters find their motivating nest of bad habits and rationalizations; he is much better at it than ,say, Philip Roth, too often cited as the Next American Nobel Prize winner, who's creations sound more or less sound like the same person , albeit each with particular scab to pick. Franzen gives you the feeling that his characters , although different versions of his established personality, are actually the sorts of people who naturally be attracted to each other, for good or ill. His fictional universe is whole enough to add dimension and texture to gripes and rationalizations that would otherwise seem self serving.

Franzen, however, is way too serious to be considered a serious writer of non fiction; what he finds time to write about between novels makes it sound that just being Jonathan Franzen is a burden.  He treats his job as a novelist not as gift, or even a craft, but as task, an endurance of miserable labor done with  the obligated resentment of someone charged with raising the masses from the murk that is their collective habit of mind.Franzen the nonfiction writer appeals to that part of the audience who thing quality writing is a stream of associations, metaphors and similes that defer the point the author assures us he is reaching. All the divergences and deviations from the stated topic seem to me to be a ploy to makes us think that there is more going on than we thought, or that the scribe has done their homework and rigorously considered his expression. That is a problem with having a superficially elegant style; you're generally able to wing it, inserting any notion that occurs to you, making their intrusion seamless, seemingly, because you've mastered transitional devices. This is the reason I prefer Franzen the novelist, because it at least it a form where making stuff up is required. Fiction, literary or popular, is the next best thing for the compulsive fabulist, aka liar, as all the narrative inventions are contained in a form where the contents have no fidelity to actual events. Not that I think Franzen is a liar or a trader in shaded accounts.

Writing about your life as if it were fiction make for remarkable reading experiences; there are number of writers who even went so far as to refer to themselves in third person--Julius Caesar, Henry Adams, and Norman Mailer. Melville fictionalized his persona in is expansive poems in order to give a sense of how America is singular historical and cultural personality made possible by an unprecedented diversity in the population--he took on himself to speak for the collective Us as no one else could. The light touch is needed, however, and one needs to know how little to talk about oneself having an experience and how much they need to speak to whatever facet of their world their guise as a fictional character brings them. In any event, it is a device to bring a writer's ideas to the world, shame free.


It's a musty theater adage, one actor telling another, that you shouldn't let the audience notice you "acting". In that sense, Franzen is vainer about his status as a writer that he cannot help but seem as though he's preening even in his uncertainty. His persona is too large for the true stories he wants to tell; the art of writing literary memoirs, I suspect, is knowing when to drop the personal pronouns and concentrate instead on what one has witnessed. This is a key element in what has made travel essay writing, from Henry James, Mark Twain upward through Paul Theroux and beyond, a generally pleasurable experience. Franzen never actually convinces me that he forgets his status while composing --I suppose this writer regards his material the way a construction worker regards a large stack of bricks that need to be carted to another location on a work site. This should be done without fretting. Franzen frets and it seems he can't help himself.

His problem as an author of autobiographical pieces is his attempts to make his life, the writer's life, more interesting and dramatic. The writing has the faint aroma of perspiration, the kind of stench that arises when you overwork the body. Franzen is unfailingly elegant in his prose writing--for purely stylistic reasons, he is one of the best writers currently committing words to a page ,  whether paper or computer screen.  Beyond that, his writing grates because his default response, or reaction, to matters that occur in his life are that they are things that happen to him and that beyond his ambivalence as to how he should react/respond , there lingers a resentment that these events have gotten in his way, slowed him down, ruined the symmetry  of his timeline. Franzen the non fiction writer is the kind of person you want to avoid because you're afraid you'll become more like them, a nervous dweeb who wants to be left alone and yet forever feels resentment because he feels good folks are ignoring him. He makes you nervous reading him because you worry  that you might be more like him than you already know.

oh, come on now

“Foundling” by Billy Collins - Slate Magazine:

Former American poet laureate Billy Collins has a skill for writing about the small things that go on in his life, finding an effective means, more times than not, of tying the details of the banal and mundane into a more significant idea, lest those who assume poetry ought to be about “heavy things” feel left out of the conversation he starts. Collins is careful, though, not to get too profound and smartly lets the intellectually perplexing elements of his poetry recede and become texture in favor of something arresting, something cute being revealed, a sudden perception that wasn't there when the narrator started his discourse. It is a formula Collins uses well; the downside of it all is that it is clear that the good poet won't be digging deeper into the soil anytime soon.

Meanwhile, he is allowed to wallow and offer his readers the laziest example of his approach, in this case, a poem called "Foundling." The narrator strays across the page writing in mock wonder that he is given a life of writing things down, things seen, heard, felt, with it in mind to compose a poem for an audience that wishes, presumably, that they had the depth of perception the man holding the pen possesses. It proceeds as a typical poem-about-poetry, that retrofitted banality  that serves the writer well when they have no clear idea of which way to do with a poem they've started--it is the equivalent of a jazz musician's fake book--but it becomes ridiculous by the last stretch.

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
jotting down little things,
noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
then wondering what will become of me,

and finally to work alone under a lamp
as if everything depended on this,
groping blindly down a page,
like someone lost in a forest.

 Aspects of Collins' audience-ready poetry bordered on the trite and ephemeral sentiment of greeting cards and books of spiritual feel-good, but there was a slight trace of cynicism. This realism kept the poems from becoming merely therapeutic. Collins remembers clearly, with snapshot clarity, being a baby perturbed at being abandoned, outside, on a winter's day, in a sewing basket, defiantly sticking his tongue out at the sky, his first act of defying fate and all other Higher Powers. Then the clever ending, the response of the invisible gods, a snowflake falls and drifts toward him. However, this conceit is unbelievable even for a form as permissive as poetry, where the only real rule is whether you have the chops to pull off an idea. Collins has chops, but they need sharpening. Cute, of course, but this is a cartoon, and not a funny one either, not clever, not thought-provoking, just time filling. I think of doodles one draws on notepads and then tosses into the trash can when the boss enters the workspace. This should be shoved in a drawer and then forgotten about. Billy Collins can do better, we know. He ought to have known better as well.

More Nugent: I'm 'a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally'

msnbc.com Entertainment - More Nugent: I'm 'a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally':

I grew up with Ted Nugent, literally, having seen he and his band the Amboy Dukes for a few years in Detroit during the Sixties, and later when he broke out nationally during the Seventies.

He was always a motor mouth with a reputation to live up to and, being one who apparently needed to be noticed in any easy way he could devise, made it a habit of saying outrageous contrarian things that were geared to upset the easily distracted and bring happiness to the frustrated, the stupid and the permanently gullible.

He is a fine and distinctive guitarist, to be sure, but his claim to artistry is made irrelevant by his self-creation of being a cartoon character and carnival barker disguised as a political demagogue.

Nugent is a narcissist and sociopath who hasn't the slightest hint of decency in him--he will only double down and triple down on his bombast and stupidity so long as he and not ideas are the center of attention. I would have more respect for this gun-infatuated, faux survivalist fruitcake had he, for all his big talk about supporting our troops, had actually gone into the Military and served his time in the Vietnam war.

Nugent the Warrior  has no backbone other than the crusted coating around his ego.Nugent is another gasbag fraud, a member of the loathsome GOP crowd of Chicken Hawks, IE, tough talking warmongers who haven't served a minute in uniform. Nugent made  millions as a famously sex-crazed rock star while other young men were getting shot up in Southeast Asia. Ted Nugent is a cowardly, repulsive fraud.

GUT PUNCH