Saturday, June 30, 2007

THAT'S DRIVEN INTO


I am on vacation, a new key signature. It is sunny and less than crashing down. Shortpants Romance gave me my first summer bouquet: a book on ray johnson's work, a throbbing gristle album, a vitamin water, and a one sentence speech on why the world needs another Robert Hass book of poems. He said, "because he finds..."


Soo...............................



"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. "

Sunday, June 17, 2007

OTHERHOW

Morgan Schuldt, editor critic professor, sent me a copy of his new (and first chapbook) entitled Otherhow. Otherhow was published by Justin Marks of Kitchen Press. "Kitchen Press is a micro-press run out of Hell's Kitchen, NYC, and is a member of CLMP. It's purpose is to publish quality handmade chapbooks by emerging poets." Side note: it heartens me to pink tickles knowing that presses like Mr. Mark's exist and are, in fact, flourishing. Having been raised in the tradition of punk, the whole d.i.y. philosophy is something I encourage. Mr Schuldt also was in town for a reading with Keith Newton, Chris Tonelli & Dustin Williamson at Jimmy's No. 43 Stage* 43 East 7th Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, the East Village where he read poems from 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

BEEN IN THE STORM SOO LONG....


IT IS GETTING TO THAT TIME WHEN I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Monday, June 11, 2007

QUOTE # 1

"The fact is I’m really bored by contemporary poems that are just playing with language for its own sake. The notion of a poem as merely an aesthetic object, to be dissected by a few robots in-the-know—robots who’ve read X,Y, and Zukofsky—seems not only played out, but irresponsible."

MATT HART

Saturday, June 2, 2007

LESTER SHUE'S BOOK BAG AND SOUNDTRACK

Summer is here and the time is right.........................................

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.>>>>