Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Calming down


Time was, not so long ago, when I that poems that didn't have "dirt under the fingernails" were without value. I insisted that life as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting , more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made to read in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was an undergraduate at the time, in the mid to late seventies, an earnest poet trying to be relevant who, incidentally, was having problems in literature courses requiring same said anthologies. There might have been a worthwhile insight somewhere in my whining for a polemic I could write if I cared to take the time, but it suffices to say that I was lazy, too lazy to read the poems, too stoned to go to class, far, far too stoned to read the secondary sources to be prepared for class discussions or for the papers I had to write. I did what anyone genuine undergraduate poet/radical/alkie would do; I blamed the system. So there.

It took a bit of doing--sobering up, bad grades, failed relationships--for me to get wise(r) and actually read the work I thought unworthy, and the remarks of critics who've done their own work considering the aesthetics at length, and I've since backed away from trying to shoe horn all poetry into a tight fitting tuxedo. What was learned was relatively small, a revelation for the truly dense; poetry works in many ways, and the task of the critical reader cannot be merely to attack and opine but to make an effort to weigh a poem's elements on their own merits, studying how effects are accomplished, and then, finally, lastly, to offer a judgment whether the poem works. Not that I adhere to this prolix method--I shoot from the hip and often miss the whole darn target--but I try. Now the issue, from Slate's Poems Frame, is whether a poem can work if it lacks the glorious thing called "heart".

Anyone seriously maintaining that a work of art, be it poem, novel or painting is doomed to failure because it lacks this vague quality called "heart" has rocks in their head. Artists are creative people, on that most of us can agree, and by definition artists of narrative arts make stuff up from the resources at hand. Whether the source is actual experience, anecdotal bits from friends or family, novels, biographies, sciences, all these are mere furniture that goes into the creation of the poem. The poet's purpose in writing is to produce a text according to some loosely arranged guide lines that distinguish the form from the more discursive prose form and create a poem that arouses any number of responses, IE feelings, from the reader. "Heart", I suppose, would be one of them, but it's ill defined and too vaguely accounted for to be useful in discussing aesthetics. Confessional poetry and the use of poetry books and poetry readings as dump sites for a writer's unresolved issues with their life doesn't impress me generally, as in the ones who do the confessing never seem to acquire the healing they seek and instead stay sick and miserable and keep on confessing the same sins and complains over and over. Journaling would be one practice I would banish from a poetry workshop I might teach. We are writing poems, not an autobiography.

I would say, actually, that one should suspect that poet who claims that every word of their verse is true, based on facts of their lives. I cannot trust the poet who hasn't the willingness to fictionalize or otherwise objectify their subject matter in the service of making their poems more provocative, worth the extra digging and interpreting. Poems and poets come in all shapes and sounds, with varied rationales as to why each of them write the way they do, and it's absurd and not to say dishonest that "heart", by which I mean unfiltered emotionalism, is the determining element as to whether a poem works or not. My goal in reading poems isn't to just feel the full brunt of some one's soggy bag of grief or splendid basket of joy, but to also to think about things differently.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Frank O'Hara figures it out

The only thing wrong with  Frank O'Hara's The Collected Poems is that so many of them are virtually perfect as they are, as I think he had several styles he could muster up with ease to get across the energy and inspiration the city could provide. His was the nearest I've come across where a genuine bit of writer discernment--that is, the writer as someone who arranges and chooses the words that best convey his ideas, or even the lack of them --that could make me think of someone talking to me, at length, at great speed, enthusing with a dozen splendid configurations of language about a subject that has given them great and subtle joy.  

The aftershock of reading his poems is that you feel as if you've been in a chat where you didn't mind at all the sleep you were missing, and still don't regret missing the morning after at the job when you cannot stop yawning at customers, clients, and bosses. This was writing of its time, but the work survives far beyond their period and is read to the current day largely because few others have been able to write about a thrill or convey their idea of kicks, sadness and still collect a response on re-reading.


WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER 
 I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's 
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

There is here the spirit of flow, a runneling rush of words that seem informal and unusually direct in their lack of meaning-disguising metaphors and other involved techniques, but what O'Hara here is working toward, with deliberation and a discriminating eye and ear, is the perception of the experience. He starts to explain why he is not a painter but rather a poet and winds up, in digression, recalling an incident with his painter friend Mike. It ends as if it were a conversation stopped before it reaches the final resonance--it is a conclusion deferred. All that remains of this recounting are the details that lead up to it, provocative clues to what a larger epiphany might have contained. The insight, though, is that art is not so much about what you set out to accomplish but what you actually wind up with after you've scrambled your senses for the right brush stroke or fanciful allusion.  What some call casual and toned down, I'd call a mastery of the informal voice. There are a great many writers who write in a manner meant to suggest a voice, a character, actually speaking words that form quick and fascinatingly original abstractions of everyday matters and erudite issues at hand with a spontaneity that intended to seem miraculous. Still, there is, I think, a trace of the study, the practiced, the idealized in the stanzas that attempt to dazzle the reader with brilliance in a chatty subterfuge. The surprise they intend to furnish our psychic domiciles with gets stuck in their own pretension, like a couch too wide to fit through an apartment door too thin. O'Hara, though, gets the mixture right, the internalized form of the language, the easy access to construction, syntax,  and the naturally relaxed rhythm of someone finding the right words for the right things, said to the right person, the receptive audience that inspires the poet to further, more elevated articulation, exaggerations, exclamations, and declamations. In fact, I often read O' Hara's poems just to have what I imagine to have been his reading voice--yes, Theatre of the Mind-- grace the oftentimes sterile terrain of my own imagination with his lyrics that found excitement in buildings, maddeningly brilliant, paintings, his own emotional highs, and lows; there is a manic pace to O'Hara's work as if there is only a short time to get to the point, to make the connection between how he felt, what he saw, what he did, who he met, what happened after his best thinking led him astray as if he was aware that jackhammers, telephones, arguing lovers in the next apartment, loud music from third-floor windows, gunfire or the cacophony car horns and diesel engines might sound off and drown him out, destroy the moment of self-revelation with a world demanding attention. There was a need for speed, a rapid response to the faint germ of an idea or the perception that could reveal some interior truth or irony if meditated on just a bit.  O'Hara's gift to us was that he could make it all fit more often than not.

Several shy poets rent a room



Who are these scribes and pens, coughing up balls of dust each time a floor board creaks underfoot or a cat on the porch meows and scratches doors, looking for a family to move in with? Handwriting is a trail of tears and terror under the singing springs, there are bills to pay, stamps to lick, a metaphor to ponder as fingers stroke pens to remember an address while cramped under a mattress .What shall we write about, oh yes, half a bird on the sill, a lone cup on the far table, ankles defacing the knot holes with unforgiving heels, but now, is the coast clear, is there anyone watching?

We leave them their food on white plates with clean silverware, paper napkins at best, and then leave room where we can hear all their furious scribbling about the truncated view proceed as if it were a race, the tips of pens and assorted quills tearing across pages of journals and the lines of otherwise blank pages, riots of images of strange sights, a world espied through mail slots and around the corners of doors left ajar.

We leave them their food and then leave, closing the door, and suddenly there is laughter up and down the hall, cartoon soundtracks, sound effects of things bouncing and springing from wall to wall, pies in the face, Splat! We walk away and mind our own business because the rent check cleared and that's all that matters on day full of sunshine and screaming two year olds who have harried moms with hairless arms and penciled eyebrows who refused to buy them fifty cent pieces of candy wrapped in tri-colored tinfoil. The day is too nice to get jacked up on sugar, some little person needs to take a nap, nothing     on earth right now rhymes with serenity and steady nerves, let us go to the beach and stare at the waves that collude with the pipes that bring it the runneling waste of the city, let us consider the poets as they look through the movie times and menu prices of what this town brings to their table.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Guitar chords

Nice feedback shower he thought, choice choice of major chord and amp settings mused further, his head bowed and his hands raised as if hold a guitar, the musician on the precipiece of either genius or calamity. It was the Who's "Happy Jack" coming from the speakers, a positive keranggggg of harmonies and colliding chords, nothing complicated, just forward momentum, a force pushing down a wall that was ready to crumble from it's own un-mortared weight anyway; Keith Moon's drums ricocheted and hammered down beats and quick measures of counter attitude against Peter Towsend's guitar work, which was primal and aggravated like some youth who finally finds his voice when a bad teacher's graceless bromides become too rank to take.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Quadrophenia

Image result for QUADROPHENIAThe Who's Quadrophenia is one of the dullest albums ever released by a major rock band; it marks the spot where songwriter and guitarist Peter Townsend's abandoned (or lost) his genius for composing witty rock and roll and wicked power chords that were the cornerstone of all things anthemic in the grinding morass that largely was rock and roll when bands sought no longer to be fun or entertaining, but significant.  There is nothing wrong with significance on the face of it, but that quality is generally the result of inspired work and an unmediated commitment to a creative surge that cannot, truthfully, be duplicated by force of will. Townsend, in my view, opted to make significant states in his lyrics at the sacrifice of the light touch he could frame in the context of a four chord song. 

Where the previous double album, the rock-opera Tommy was buoyant, rocking and didn't want for guitar hooks or the riffs, Quadrophenia got as serious as a ditch with songs that were bloated, wooden, humorless, positively no fun. It merits a mention that the theme was incomprehensible and that this is where Daltry's voice finally gave out. The guitar chords, once crashing, smashing and slashing in all the old descriptions of youth rebellion, were now leaden, robotic, rusty. All that was left was a cracking bellow that made you think of nothing except an old building collapsing under its heft.  Ambition is fine, but not without an idea of what you're doing. Someone told songwriter Peter Townsend that the modernist tradition demands a diffuse narrative, broken up in sharp pieces, and lacking resolution, techniques I fancy myself, given my devotion to the poetry of Eliot, Stein, and Silliman, but there is a knack to doing things that way, an "ear", if you will.   Sentences and ideas that don't necessarily follow one another inconveniently logical, causal order require arrangement, a sense of what doesn't go together the right way: there is a reason why Bob Dylan's surrealism remains powerful five decades later and the more recent writings of Springsteen, someone clearly influenced by Dylan's turn to obscurity, are hardly quoted at all. 

 Another problem as well might have been an inferiority complex; he stopped being an artist, writing and recording wonderful, brilliant, ingenious rock and roll songs the moment he started to try to be an artist on other people's terms.  It's a self-conscious artiness that has made his music frightfully didactic, incomplete and a chore to bear.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The Man Who Was Not There

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has it's share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd, but I thought it was the least interesting of their films.

The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. He portrays his emotionally somnolent barber with less expression than a pair of pliers left at the bottom of a over-stuffed drawer in a typically crowded work bench; like the pliers, this is a man who is forgotten, anonymous , virtually invisible despite being part of the everyday scenery.His flat effect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorish  style that you can well imagine the character relishing the burn in the throat and the coughing and hacking that result in  the excess because it is one of the things that might penetrate his otherwise impenetrable numbness.

He he clips hair, sweeps up the clippings, and chain smokes his way through the film, Thorton's already sunken cheeks and general skull-hugging features take on the grisly isolation of a long abandoned building under the movies effectively baroque use of high contrast black and white. Still, this has the feeling of an exercise, a project to keep their hands in the game while the brothers Coen finesse their next major project. Visually gratifying, but the movie bombs over all because there is nothing inspiring in the plot to make the movie seem like another more than an empty stage.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com: "The basic problem is that there is only Nobel Prize for literature and there many thousands of published writers who fancy themselves suitable and deserving of the award. It's not unlike the billions (and billions) of sperm swimming upstream madly to fertilize an egg that will only take accept one. Ninety nine percent of the those contending for what the prize simply don't make it; given that the Nobel Committee has to consider writers from a fairly broad range of poets, novelists, playwrights internationally, we are a bit too sensitive about not having a winner in a good many years. We are in competition with writers of other countries, after all, not merely with other American writers. It does, though, make for convenient news copy that will attract readers to the presence of whatever advertising happens to be lurking near or hovering over the editorializing about the continued "outrage". Our lazier arts commentators can then enjoy themselves with the Full Nancy Grace, sneering, pouting, whining, insinuating about America being passed up for the prize and cash reward the comes with it.

I do believe, though, that the Nobel folks do not like American writers in particular and that the remarks that have been made in the name of the Nobel Prize is dumbly Eurocentric; as the specific qualities a writer's body of work needs to have has never been articulated beyond the misty generalities of helping humanity understand its soul and its true self in the best and worst of conditions, the idea that American scribes are too insular, too narcissistic to be considered worth considering as a higher class of literature seems capricious at best. Writers are self absorbed, period, no matter where their bloodlines come from; it is the conceit that each of them has that theirs is the voice and the insight that makes them different from their fellow citizens. The task, though, is to judge what they do with the self-concentration, something the Nobel Committee is unwilling to do; contempt before investigation, I believe. The Nobel Prize, though, is one thing above all else, and that is worth remembering; pointed bullshit and frippery . We could all do better and just read our literary discoveries , shared them with our respective communities, and passed on the the amount of smoke a batch of self appointed Deacons of Taste are producing .


Saturday, November 19, 2011

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Gawker suggests Lindsay Lohan should die and cash in

It's tragic enough that some parts of the media make a profit following the downward movement of the hapless Lindsay Lohan, but it is morally criminal, I think, for a publication even as ethically freelance as the Gawker to infer that Lohan ought to kill herself as a means of reviving her popularity. There is only a limited amount of schadenfreude any of us can justify; Lohan was not an incredibly rich, powerful, influential figure setting herself up as moral paragon.

The self-righteous without their trousers on in the presence of small children and bankers with their hands in the till should be made to do a long perp walk and given an extra kick. Lohan was not one of those, but rather a minor league actress with small measure of success who , through her own decisions and compulsions, succeeded in screwing the good thing she had going for herself. She had it made, she messed up, she couldn't change her ways , seem contrite , she may well be one of those people who is incapable of understanding what part she played in her undoing. We all know people like this; we have had our laughs, our snickering around the coffee table, but it stops being funny. It becomes pathetic.

All you can do at the moment when you realize that your witnessing someone in the thralls of unmanageable complication is wish them well, hope things improve, take whatever moral you might construct from someone else's misfortune and attempt to have a constructive , helpful day after that. For Gawker to make gratuitious remarks about Lohan's appearence, ie, her "prematurely aging breasts", and to suggest death,self delivered or as the result of further misadventures, as a credible option for rebranding makes me think that these folks are themselves are bored with the story, bored, perhaps, with the whole task of sniffing the ground for whatever droppings and scat celebrities might have left in their wake. I imagine an office full of incredibly unhappy and bored people in front of computer monitors indulging a shrill, false glee, the kind of elation that seems little more than a thin curtain between them and The Abyss. They , perhaps, considering death to be one of their options as well when the volume on their self-congratulations subsides for a moment; they are, perhaps m Bored to Death and cannot help but project that onto the celebrity mishaps that are their stock and trade.

Perhaps they have a wish to end it all. I would accept Gawker merely ceasing publication, going offline. Going flatline would be extreme, even in Gawker's case.

Monday, November 14, 2011

linda's donuts




    • Barry Alfonso This is the home of the WARM HAND-OFF...
      November 2 at 5:51am · 

    • Ted Burke There's a HOT ONE with name on on it waiting for you to rest your dogs inside
      November 2 at 6:36pm · 

    • Barry Alfonso Are those radioactive cooties lighting up the pink sprinkles on your cruller?
      November 3 at 7:24am · 

    • Ted Burke Those are the donuts with the Magic San Onofre Glow Sparkles.
      November 3 at 7:27am · 

    • Barry Alfonso One bite and Ed Clark's forehead will grow another three inches!
      November 3 at 7:29am · 

    • Ted Burke They are going to use those donuts to make their new sign
      November 3 at 7:30am · 

    • Barry Alfonso Japanese donuts line the runways of Lindberg Field and can be seen from Mt. Laguna.
      November 3 at 7:33am · 

    • Ted Burke Linda is a massive thirteen tentacle mutation that lives inside the lean to in the alley
      November 3 at 7:38am · 

    • Barry Alfonso True fact: prior to the Jack in the Box restaurant going up at the corner of Garnet and Lamont, there was a burger stand that had a big sign proclaiming 'HOME OF THE TEXAS MONSTER." I guess there have been a host of fetid, horror shambling about this region for eons...
      November 3 at 7:45am · 


Take this and thrive, Pal.

Since writers are in the habit of making up stories as a matter of habit and profession, each of them, not just the beats, "faked" everything. 

That shouldn't be surprising from a class of folks we look to for tales, fables, metaphors and such that we might use , in some loose way, in making our own lives fit our skins better.

 The question is how well ,uhhhh, how artful one is in manipulating language towards the creation of fiction or a poetry where the world as its spoken resounds with suggestion and portents of secret knowledge.

William S. Burroughs was the one stone-cold genius among the Beat writers ,was the most interesting and successful destroyer and re-creator of literary form, and maintained what Mailer called a "gallows humor" that allowed him to explore the gamier side of human personality without mythologizing the journey. 

Ginsberg's early poems , as well, were filled with the bulls-eye hitting jeremiads that were such an exact fit for the condition he described that it still comes off as a fresh and blistering criticism of a culture that seems interested in no more than conformity.

 Fakery is what one expects and demands from creative writers. Beat enthusiasts might blanch at the notion, but comes down to the skill of the writer to get away with the imaginative tall tales he's putting forth. 

 The issue, it seems, is how well do we remember the lies that we've told others over the years when we might have otherwise kept it easy and simply told the truth.

"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.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

you walk over the bridge
early fall, leaves curled and dry as the air
that falls between us,

between us is a river
that rises
before the storms
and recedes
during the rain
that cannot satisfy the thirst we have,

the thirst we have
leaves our throats
in empty mugs
we put to our lips
in case we have anything interesting to say
after the rain
on the bridge
staring down to the slick rocks and mud
where watered flowed
an hour ago.