Monday, November 14, 2011

"Sandwich Notch Road, Two Days Before Christmas" by John W. Evans


I like this poem in theory, as it satisfies my current interest in poems that have a sparer, even skeletal structure, but Evans could have done something global here. What it does with the localization of grief--the stunned incredulity, the trudging past familiar and unfamiliar things--works well enough, but it seems to stop short. In fact, it stops right at the point when there's an opportunity for the narrator to make caste some lines of the world at large, in this time of grief, seeming spectacularly irrelevant:

Wanting to live
after your death
is like waking
in an empty room:
too much space.

I like this analogy because it hints at the seeming futility of our desires and goals when the worst thing finally happens, that the petty, homemade philosophies that gave us comfort and a sense of continuity through a chaotic world are flimsy premises once the unavoidable fact of death encroach like this poem in theory, as it satisfies my current interest in poems that have a sparer, even skeletal structure, but Evans could have done something global here. What it does with the localization of grief--the stunned incredulity, the trudging past familiar and unfamiliar things--works well enough, but it seems to stop short. In fact, it stops right at the point when there's an opportunity for the narrator to make caste some lines of the world at large, in this time of grief, seeming spectacularly irrelevant:

Wanting to liveafter your deathis like wakingin an empty room:too much space.

I like this analogy because it hints at the seeming futility of our desires and goals when the worst thing finally happens, that the petty, homemade philosophies that gave us comfort and a sense of continuity through a chaotic world are flimsy premises once the unavoidable fact of death encroaches on one's most intimate sphere of association. This could have been a spare, concise King Lear moment, where a few lean stanzas describing the tone and mood of the universe after the bad news is learned and being processed could have brought a deeper, icier sense of psychic remove. It's not that Evans needed to add an onslaught of language to expand his view, but one does get the feeling that he was just getting warmed up before pushing his wits to another set of consideration; the entire poem reads like a set up that ends unconvincingly. Evans follows up his rich metaphor of comparing of living beyond your time to waking up in an empty room with a sign off that is quick and cliché,
All day I sleep off
the crude hangover.
There is, to be sure, the suggestion that the narrator sought a temporary death through an aggrieved drinking binge, that he wanted to blot out and remove an accumulating mass of emotion that will inevitably overwhelm him and that this fits in neatly with the previous image, but it is cheap disservice to an evocative phrase. There is a point where the vocabulary could have expanded, swelled just a bit, that the metaphors could have gone beyond the tics and aches of the narrator's hangovers and dulled senses and demonstrated the external world at large, pieced together by senses that are deranged with sorrow.

I suspect Evans submitted these poems for publication too soon. While I like the style of the poem, it seems tentative; where he presents an interesting springboard to some inspired metaphors, he stops and this, I think, is the poem's failure. In the two poems you present, he is a bit talkier, and he edges closer to monologue, to prose, instead of poetry; they remind of the leaden open pages of Rick Moody's overwrought, hand wringing novel Purple America, a string of run-on misery that irritated me rather than feels sympathy for the man who must know care for his aging mother. Evans, I suspect, is still too close to his material. I am a fan of ambiguity in poems and I rail against the idea that poetic narratives, by necessity, be a righteously crafted thing that is a finished product, self-contained, which ties up the loose ends of a poem tidily the way a situation comedies end with an episode concluding laugh line. I think Evans is obliged to be honest to his emotional progression and leave this story unfinished; otherwise, it merely becomes another Lifetime movie of the week. What I didn't like was the convenient, easy, lazy bit about recovering from a hangover; it does not sound earned. Hence, I wanted more from this poem; it was building credibly, and then he stopped at the point when I think he should have pushed further. The poem is premature, I think; he should have set it aside and come back after some days had passed.es on one's most intimate sphere of association. This could have been a spare, concise King Lear moment, where a few lean stanzas describing the tone and mood of the universe after the bad news is learned and being processed could have brought a deeper, icier sense of psychic remove. It's not that Evans needed to add an onslaught of language to expand his view, but one does get the feeling that he was just getting warmed up before pushing his wits to another set of consideration; the entire poem reads like a set up that ends unconvincingly. Evans follows up his rich metaphor of comparing of living beyond your time to waking up in an empty room with a sign off that is quick and cliché,

All day I sleep off
the crude hangover.
There is, to be sure, the suggestion that the narrator sought a temporary death through an aggrieved drinking binge, that he wanted to blot out and remove an accumulating mass of emotion that will inevitably overwhelm him and that this fits in neatly with the previous image, but it is cheap disservice to an evocative phrase. There is a point where the vocabulary could have expanded, swelled just a bit, that the metaphors could have gone beyond the tics and aches of the narrator's hangovers and dulled senses and demonstrated the external world at large, pieced together by senses that are deranged with sorrow.

I suspect Evans submitted these poems for publication too soon. While I like the style of the poem, it seems tentative; where he presents an interesting springboard to some inspired metaphors, he stops and this, I think, is the poem's failure. In the two poems you present, he is a bit talkier, and he edges closer to monologue, to prose, instead of poetry; they remind of the leaden open pages of Rick Moody's overwrought, hand wringing novel Purple America, a string of run-on misery that irritated me rather than feels sympathy for the man who must know care for his aging mother. Evans, I suspect, is still too close to his material. I am a fan of ambiguity in poems and I rail against the idea that poetic narratives, by necessity, be a righteously crafted thing that is a finished product, self-contained, which ties up the loose ends of a poem tidily the way a situation comedies end with an episode concluding laugh line. I think Evans is obliged to be honest to his emotional progression and leave this story unfinished; otherwise, it merely becomes another Lifetime movie of the week. What I didn't like was the convenient, easy, lazy bit about recovering from a hangover; it does not sound earned. Hence, I wanted more from this poem; it was building credibly, and then he stopped at the point when I think he should have pushed further. The poem is premature, I think; he should have set it aside and come back after some days had passed.

Friday, November 11, 2011

"Flea Circus" by Tomás Q. Morin -

Tomas Morin seems to be going for a dreamscape here, situated primarily in a circus context, a bad dream where apocalypse , grotesque distraction , deformations physical and emotional weave and curve through the narrator's attempt to unburden himself of deeply buried traumas that compel him to speak of the world in Big Top imagery.

It's a bad dream he's trying to get across, and a bad poem is the result, starting with the grown-over and obvious gimmick of using a circus to expose an internalized ugliness--the reader quickly gets the idea of the inversion under construction, that the surface elements of the circus promising joy, wonderment, entertainment is naught but a chipped and curling veneer barely concealing the opposing qualities, despair, isolation, hunger, pain, a permanent and ongoing depression in the trudge toward death.

This is an idea that can still be made to work if there had been a sharper focus on the particular images; Morin attempted several associative leaps here, asking us to link fleas, dog meat, cheap theatrics, empty philosophy and the desire to make the marginalized, the mongrelized, the pathetic and starving among our population into a freak show, an audience to which bogus cures can be sold to and who can, in turn, be turned into a commodity who’s misery can be made saleable to a pop cultural predicated on perverting and selling a consumer's reality back to them at a steep and exacting price. Morin's imagery ought to have been cold, clear, spare and sharp as glass shards in their seeming isolation; dreams needn't be a flow, as he seems to believe, they can also be sharp, abrupt and jarring. What we could have used here was the sense of something broken that cannot be repaired. Morin mumbles instead, and his connections, something a reader can intuit, are just garbled in transmission.

The problem with "Flea Circus" isn't that it doesn't make sense, but rather that it doesn't give you a visceral sense of any conflagration of emotions struggling to come to being. There is a potential for dramatic tension here, of clarity and relief being thwarted by the many-headed demons and intractable issues of character, but it is defused by language that leaves the reader with the idea of someone who fell asleep on an arm; the awakened person knows the arm is there, but it is dull, prickly, and nearly lifeless. All one can do is hang it over the side of the bed and pray it comes alive before one arises to face another day and chance to find inspiration to write another confused poem.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Tommy Emmanuel - Guitar Boogie - YouTube

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There is no denying that Tommy Emmanuel is a hell of a  good guitar player who puts on a good show pulverizing acoustic guitars with his claw-hammering virtuosity. He is a crowd pleaser, the sort of flashy musician that overwhelms audiences who have, I believe, only a passing familiarity with musicians and the instruments they play.It is not surprising that he is a PBS favorite, frequently featured in concert specials during their periodic Pledge Weeks. He annoys me after a point since everything he performs seems engineered--and "engineered" is exactly the word I want--to demonstrate how hip, slick and cool he is. Regardless of the musical style--folk, Irish, Latin grooves, hard rock, blues or swing or country (the man is versatile), the effect is same nearly all the time. There is a slow, almost lugubrious build of diminished chords, tasteful fills, harmonic overlays, efforts showing that he is capable of a light touch. But, before you know it, without warning or logic, he steps on the gas, runs the red lights, takes you barreling through the city streets with riffs that are speedy, precise, impressive, and sterile once your jaw starts to hurt from saying "oh wow" for some minutes. Emmanuel can, it seems, play anything he chooses on his guitar. Anything except music. Of course, given every reservation I've managed so far, I know I will listen to him again, watch him the next he appears on television, and perhaps attend a concert if given the opportunity. This is not taking back my remarks about his propensity to show off at the sacrifice of music that allows reflection; Emmanuel is showbiz, a showman, a fine technician who has found a method to make his virtuosity entertaining for an audience that wants to experience skill without having to work for it. That deserves respect, if not praise.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

MTV loses its weenie

The odd headline for an otherwise good article chastising an attempt by big media to make a dollar from the Occupy Wall Street movement reads as follows:"MTV Loses Its Street Cred". That was something of a jolt. When did MTV ever have street cred? The thing that sold MTV to the masses was that it did not even try to represent anything alternative or non-corporate; their job was to absorb anything new, fascinating, interesting into the mainstream and make it salable.

That is to say, it neutered the power of any trend or idea it got its hands on and made it inconsequential once the audience was saturated and bored with the new toy it was given. Politically and culturally, MTV is the epitome of the gutless wonders, spineless hustlers of distractions and minor key naughtiness. It is suitable that they abandoned music altogether in favor of more profitable reality shows, stemming from the extended run of its program "The Real World" , which has demonstrated for over two decades that eighteen and twenty year olds randomly selected and placed into a large house well stocked with alcohol are more than capable of being an unpleasant , whiny , self-obsessed bunch of know-nothings who you wish would dissolve into some corrosive ether.

It is a sad, pathetic thing to see that MTV desires to make a corporate buck off the Occupy Wall Street ; perhaps next they will bring the survivors from "Jack Ass" so see how many unemployed will allow their nuts to get wacked for a fifty dollar debit card. My hope is that the movement is more resilient than any media presence's attempts to have it contribute to a bottom line.

Obiter Dicta

Talking to people about their problems makes for frequent miscues of speech and grammar, a habit stemming from something no more profound than that most of us don't know how to talk about ourselves and our personal problems to another human being. Hence, we come to the habit of trying to sound clinical, distanced, as if we have some clear grasp on what's the matter with our inner lives or internal organs. Either way, it makes for low-grade comedy, and it is a struggle not to laugh out loud or lecture someone on sloppy usage. I want to keep the friends and acquaintances I have. One of the most egregious uses I can think is the promiscuous use of “potentiality” when the simpler, punchier, less ambiguous “potential” would do a better job. There's a confusion of the number of syllables in a word with the precision of expression; the more trills the tongue has to glide over, the clearer the communication.

Another coinage that sends static crackling through my ear is the frequent use of the bizarre formation “unconformability”. Again, there's that self-conscious nervousness that mistakes terms with centipede rhythms to be superior to more succinct words, but this instance is even more problematic, (that is to say made more confusing) by an unintended, un-Empsonesque ambiguity. Are we to think the speaker is in a state of “discomfort”, which is what one arrives at through context, or is he addressing his ability to be uncomfortable at will? The literary possibilities are rich, but this is of no aid to someone who needs to emphasize that he needs an aspirin, a therapist, or a licensed sawbones to alleviate the particular disorder, physical or psychic. It's not that I object to multisyllabic words in everyday use, since one requires certain words to convey more elaborate ideas, but I do require that the words exist, in the dictionary if not in nature.

Ugly coinages wind up in dictionaries each year, complete with the varied pronouncing keys and definitions of the different uses the term can have, but they are awkward words all the same. My favorite personal tale of someone being needlessly (and unwittingly) unclear in stating what should have been straightforward when I was a graduate student. I had asked  a department chair if a particular Shakespeare sequence had vacancies. He told me the classes were “impacted”. I considered myself a smart guy who was fairly keen with words and their meanings even in the Seventies, but this was unclear to me; it was a strange application of a word associated with other meanings. I asked what he meant, to which he said, “The classes are full.” What I took from this was that there those folks who have a fear of being caught saying simple things simply; their obscurity seems to them to be a source of power.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Homepage - Slate Magazine

Homepage - Slate Magazine:

'via Blog this'
This is some recent nonsense from Slate, which , besides trying to be the most current and genuinely contrarian magazine on the we, slavishly goes after the celebrity gristle that the low brow, porn addicted knuckle busters in their readership seek and consume with the constancy of a drunkard with a key the liquor box. The headline, 'Are Virgins More Virile than The Rest of Us?" makes me think of only one thing; if they are virgins, indeed, untested, untried, barely aware of what it is they are itching to try, let alone know how to scratch that itch, what criteria do we then use to judge their virility?

Hermanuetics

Herman Cain is dangerous because he does not seem to realize how gargantuan a moron he actually is. He has the ability to contradict himself and issue forth such a persistent stream of nonsequitors and still maintain a straight face. Indeed, he seems to not have any other expressions save for that smirk that seems to just a centimeter or two from blossoming into a grease-dripping leer. Odd that it is the GOP that has become the party of Practicing Surrealist; between the fumings, rantings, jeremiads and proposals for the nation that are severely divorced from any kind of vetted reality you and I can speak to , we are witness to what seems a gaggle of folks who've made themselves drunk with fear and resentment who have cures that can only kill the patient. The saddest truth of it all is not that perhaps they are not aware of how insane they are, but they just do not give a FLAT FUCK.