Monday, November 5, 2007
RUN RUN RUN
Take a drag or two"/LOU REED
NOW, POST-MARATHON, THE STREETS ARE JUST FLATTENED GREEN GATORADE CUPS AND POLICE BARRICADES. I FORGET WHEN I TALK TO PEOPLE THAT I DON'T HAVE ANY HAIR. THE LIGHT IS BECOMING PALER. THE NEW YORK TIMES SHOULD HAVE COMICS. THE BOOKS OF POETRY I READ SHARE THE SAME TONE.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
RUPEY
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Saturday, July 28, 2007
BUNNY
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
SOAP DISH
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Vacation
Friday, July 13, 2007
BIll Knott
Answer : "Me. (Huh!)"
Bill, it has not (sorry about the pun). The work holds up.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
TAKING DRUG TO MAKE MUSIC TO TAKE DRUGS TO
The Spacmen 3: english, pre-shoegazer, minimal, droning, soft or thunderous, spoken (almost sung) vocals psychedlic rock band.
Think Velvet Underground sleeping with Sun Ra who in turn invites Muddy Waters for further yesyes and having only the voice of Bob Mould to describe the experience.
I recently borrowed this album from the public library. What a “gravelly” plunge of deep nod. I can remember more than I thought I could.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
LINES BORROWED FOR YOUR USE # 3
"Shiitake mushroom emotional milkshake.": BUCK Downs
"Refuse ephemerally": Jesse Seldess
"I have a pile of logs and nothing to compare its shape to": Julie Doxsee
"Sometimes metaphors seem lazy": Chris Tonelli
"It's important to remember we left paradise on purpose because the soil was dirty and the actual was vague": Jane Gregory
"Amusing how the river begins with me and ends at you" Jen Tynes & Erika Howsare
"When nervous, I eat things and want the fault to be Connecticut": Samuel Amadon
"I want no paradise only to be drenched in the down pour of words": Charles Bernstein
"Or did we toast the militant roses": John Yau
"Awakening is the parachute jump from the dream": Tomas Transtromer
Monday, July 9, 2007
Mitchum plays the character Max Cady. Max Cady is a criminal who serves 8 years in the penitentiary, jail, slammer, pen, big house, cooler, joint, can, hoosegow for attacking a young woman. He spends those eight years (presumably) thinking about the testimony that convicted him, and the man who testified against him. Revenge, baby, revenge.
Director J. Lee Thompson whose directorial career included such cinematic gems like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and some Charles Bronson flicks: 10 to Midnight (1983), and The Evil That Men Do (1984), among many films in four decades or so of some of the most critically-derided filmmaking. Cape Fear was his magnum opus.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
CORPORATION IS SEX
Monday, July 2, 2007
ASK AND YOU SHALL.....
Robert Hass's first book in ten years, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, will go on sale this October.
Here's one of the shorter poems near the beginning of the collection:
"Winged and Acid Dark"
A sentence with "dappled shadow" in it. Something not sayable spurting from the morning silence, secret as a thrush. The other man, the officer, who brought onions and wine and sacks of flour, the major with the swollen knee, wanted intelligent conversation afterward. Having no choice, she provided that, too. Potsdamerplatz, May 1945. When the first one was through he pried her mouth open. Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials. If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it and no one to say it to. I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied swarming of insects near a waterfall. Pried her mouth open and spit in it.We pass these things on, probably, because we are what we can imagine. Something not sayable in the morning silence. The mind hungering after likenesses. "Tender sky," etc., curves the swallows trace in air.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
SOO SQUEEZEY
Saturday, June 30, 2007
THAT'S DRIVEN INTO
"All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies.We talked about it late last night and in the voiceof my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is fullof endless distances. I must have been the same to her.But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. "
Monday, June 25, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
OTHERHOW
And to the poems.
"How, sometimes towerable, meaning sings to us"
Where I work is three short stops into Brooklyn on the J or M line. Every morning and every dusk, I keep my eye out for this one particular building or should I say this idea of a building. The building is only a structure, apparently gutted by fire? (there are black stains on what is left which is some support frames gossiping with a collapse of brick glass and other dubris.) I love looking at it, even glimpsing at it at subway speed. Men have been hired to "clean it up" presumably to build on it again (this is Brooklyn). I love looking at this building because it keeps me wondering what it was/is/will be. Somehow this building is seductively complete in its dismantlement.
This brings me to Mr. Schuldt's writing.
A lyrical temperament that works in phrasal units, Otherhow is a collection or a "sum of destructions" that brood and bloom in the cracks or slippages in language. The poems seems to focus on "meaning" i.e. relationships: semantical, romantic, artistic, philosophical etc. Otherhow shows us how meaning is restless and promiscous, and that paradoxically, sometimes instability may be the only force that keeps everything together.
"Meaning to. Meaning hot too--a blamed
span stammering, the stammered stearing
between this & that, which is the spade-work
of seemultanaity."
This excerpt (also made manifest in the other 15 pages of the chappy) is an example of what I find so rewarding in the chapbook as a whole: how your understanding is constantly shifting word to word, and within the word; how syntax separates and divides continually offering revised conclusions and new beginnings; how playful the word play is by utilizing punning, entendres, alliteration, assonance, amongst many other strategies.
It seems to me that those that may describe this style of poetry (and it can be frustrating) as preoccupied with its own machinations and kinking, but those people are readers that are unwilling or unable to put forth the time and concentration that this poetry demands.
There is always the question of influence. I see traces of Charles Wright, Volkman, Hopkins, Celan, Mullen, Berryman, and McHugh. But Otherhow is its own beast. Many of these writers Mr. Schuldt has written critically and eloquently about in the past.
I know Mr. Schuldt has a book length manuscript forthcoming in the fall entitled Verge (Parlor Press: Free Verse Editions, 2007)
I look forward to reading the full length and to see which direction in the years to come Mr. Schuldt will take his writing. For now,
"Little red likelihooded
that I lust so much."
Friday, June 15, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
QUOTE # 1
MATT HART
Saturday, June 2, 2007
LESTER SHUE'S BOOK BAG AND SOUNDTRACK
Book Bag:
1) Morgan Lucas Schuldt: Otherhow
2) Michael Gizzi: My Terza Rima
3) Elizabeth Willis: Meteoric Flowers
4) Jonah Winter: The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear
5) Henry Rollins: Get In the Van: The Story of Black Flag
Soundtrack:
1) The National
2) A Sunny Day in Glasgow
3) Of Montreal
4) Beach Boys
5) Handsome Furs
Apologies for my non-verbiality. I just seemed to feel better without words.>>>>
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
LESTER SHUE'S MUSINGS # 7
"America your head's too big, Because America, Your belly's too big
And I love you, I just wish you'd stay where you is
In America, The land of the free, they said, And of opportunity, In a just and a truthful way
But where the president, Is never black, female or gay, And until that day
You've got nothing to say to me, To help me believe."
Sunday, April 22, 2007
LINES BORROWED FOR YOUR USE # 3
"Refuse ephemerally": Jesse Seldess
"I have a pile of logs and nothing to compare its shape to": Julie Doxsee
"Sometimes metaphors seem lazy": Chris Tonelli
"It's important to remember we left paradise on purpose because the soil was dirty and the actual was vague": Jane Gregory
"Amusing how the river begins with me and ends at you" Jen Tynes & Erika Howsare
"When nervous, I eat things and want the fault to be Connecticut": Samuel Amadon
"I want no paradise only to be drenched in the down pour of words": Charles Bernstein
"Or did we toast the militant roses": John Yau
"Awakening is the parachute jump from the dream": Tomas Transtromer
W.C.W.
Friday, April 20, 2007
LESTER SHUE'S MUSINGS # 6
Sunday, April 15, 2007
LESTER SHUE'S MUSING # 5
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Chocolate Jesus
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Weather Wherever
Friday, March 16, 2007
Walt Says..........
Be Among the men the women the multitude for.....
Jennifer Michael Hecht, Theresa Sotto, Julian Billups, Tony Mancus and
Mark Horosky
This Friday--March 16th-- 7pm
FREE!
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of books on philosophy, history,
and poetry. Her most recent poetry collection, Funny (University of
Wisconsin), won the Felix Pollak Prize; her debut The Next Ancient
World (Tupelo) was awarded the Norma Farber First Book Award by the
Poetry Society of America. Her newest book of history and philosophy,
The Happiness Myth (HarperCollins), is due out this April.
Theresa Sotto's recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spinning
Jenny, Coconut, Shampoo, Typo, and ZYZZYVA . A chapbook of her poems
will be published in the Coconut Chapbook Series in Spring 2007. She
lives in Santa Monica, CA.
Julian Parke Billups' poems have appeared in Colorado Review, AGNI
online, Barrow Street, Salt Hill, and others. His manuscript, 'The
Repetition of Which,' is, he thinks, with just a couple more deleted
words and tightened line breaks, with an added article or two, and the
complete omission of the capital "I," finally finished. He lives and
works in Manhattan.
Tony Mancus writes with an eye trained on the glaringly obvious. His
work is consistently uneven. He teaches and works as a part time
editor and lives in Sunnyside, Queens. He sometimes wears a beard
while he writes, other times he takes it off and leaves it sunning on
the windowsill.
Mark Horosky is mostly like an elusive gray fox.
Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-3770
"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
THE GIFT, THE GIVING
Also a plump porkchop of Congratulations to Adam Chiles on the publication of his first book of poems. Details Forthcoming.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Post, Toast, Boast.
It is worth mentioning some upcoming events:
The Burning Chair Readings Brooklyn Poetry Bazaar will take place Saturday March 10th, from 2;30-7 at Galapagos in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The event will feature Fanny Howe, Rod Smith, Anselm Berrigan, Karen Weiser, Christian Hawkey, Jess Mynes, Farid Matuk, Susan Briante, Anna Moschovakis, Matvei Yankelevich & Ben Mazer, with music from I Feel Tractor.
Directions to Galapagos:
70 North 6th Street
between Kent and Wythe
Detailed directions available here: http://www.galapagosartspace.com/directions.html
AND PETE'S CANDY STORE:
March 16 – Mark Yakich & Jennifer Michael Hecht & Theresa Sotto
Saturday, March 3, 2007
REUNIONERS
Friday, March 2, 2007
THE DAVID BYRNE MEDITATIONS
There is no reason for posting David Byrne's face except that it strikes me as very clean. After rain that came to my attention after sleep, a hard rain full of witnesses, scenarios, taxis and utterances and a warning that said its a violation of Federal law to use in a manner inconsistent with its labeling, I walked outside into sunshine so bright: rude. But who would think that the sun is rude? Think of photosynthesis, tanning, solar powered machinery, rainbows in soap bubbles, and shadows. With the sun bearing down on me like a daydream the weight of a kitchen, I generated face. My face was just accepted that that’s the way it would be.