“If you didn’t go back to school this year, you’re really not groovy.”
A special message from Otis Redding.
‘He is an important critter’: Walt Whitman on proofreaders.
What a tribe the tribe of proofreaders is! I think some men, some writers, owe a great part of their reputations to the excellence of their proofreaders–to their vigilance, their counsel. Who can do justice to the [a]cute, keen intellects of men of this stamp–their considerate patience, their far-seemingness?
Very few people know–very few readers of books–literary people–what we owe to proof-readers–the indefatigable proof-reader. I knew one–Henry Clark, a man not of extraordinary appearance–plain–but a man who seemed the deeper, more expansive, the more a fellow looked. He was a Boston man–the reader of the final proofs of the Boston edition [1860] of Leaves of Grass.
He is an important critter–the most important, I often think, in the making of a book. It easy enough to have good material–a plenty of everything–but to put all in its rightful place and order!–oh! that is another thing!
I have a great respect for the decided opinions of good printers, proofreaders–am disposed, every time, to yield to them. Long experience has taught me their wonderful [a]cutness. Accent and all that is always a foggy latitude to me. I never feel certain of myself in it.
…
I have great emotional respect for the background people–for the folks who are not generally included–for the absentees, the forgotten: the shy nobodies who in the end are the best of all.
From Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1982, edited by Gary Schmidgall, The Iowa Whitman Series. The “accent” Whitman was referring to in the third graf there was concerning the word “finale.”
Nothing happened.
From NOTHING HAPPENED by David Foster Wallace:
Imagine if you were at a large, fancy, coat-and-tie dinner or track banquet with your father, and if you all of a sudden got up on the banquet table and bent down and took a shit on the table, in front of everybody at the dinner — this would be the kind of look that your father would be giving you as you did it.
Long-overdue book report: Sarah–Of Fragments and Lines by Julie Carr
As a reader, I tend to like all styles of poetry. Maybe I’m not all that discriminating. I like what I like. I can enjoy a poem just because it has fun with words, or because it cuts me to the quick. I am partial to those that do both.
This book, Sarah–Of Fragments and Lines by Julie Carr, is filled with poems like that. It is like something pieced together from shards. The fragment poems include “Waiting Fragments,” “Pregnancy Fragments,” and “Death Fragments.” There are “Lines for the New Year,” “Lines of Defense,” and the title that grabbed me around the neck, “Self-Loathing Lines.”
These are poems of grief, and expectation. They are poems of words. These are pondering poems.
From Metaphor Poem:
A bit of food on the floor of her thought
Not sure why that line gets to me so, but it does. Nice book.
Procrastinator’s note: This “book report” is one of some books that were sent to me shortly after AWP last year. I’d raised my hand and said “sure, I’ll blog about them” and then guess what? I didn’t. I’m not going to make excuses. Sometimes life is what it is and you don’t always get to things when you say you will. But dammit! I’m gonna get all these mentioned before this year’s AWP rolls around. Even though I’ve never been and I’m not going this year. My apologies to these authors.
If I wrote a poem about Michael Bolton, would that make him cool?
“(They Long to Be) Close to You,” the first Carpenters hit, arrived on New York’s WABC-AM (“Cousin Brucie! Cousin Brucie!”) when I was a high-school freshman. The single resided in the Top 40 alongside fare more to a 14 year-old’s taste, like Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” and Santana’s “Evil Ways.” To my ears, the song was the revenge of Aunt Norma’s music. Follow-up singles like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” sounded as if they oozed from the same Dairy Queen soft-serve machine. It was music for a prom in Des Moines.
But something curious happened a decade after Karen Carpenter’s 1983 death from anorexia. Sonic Youth, Shonen Knife, Matthew Sweet and other underground types recorded a tribute album to Carpenters (not The Carpenters, as everyone refers to them). The brother and sister with smiles borne of Trident sugarless gum were officially hip.
Karen and Richard crossed my mind as I read Chris McCreary’s enjoyable collection Undone: A Fakebook (Furniture Press Books, 2010), specifically the third of the book’s eight sections, “The Diamond Sutra.” The adjective “Diamond” refers not to Buddhist text, but to Neil. “The Diamond Sutra” comprises eight short poems, each of which is named for a Neil Diamond song. I’ve always thought of Neil Diamond as two distinct individuals. First, there’s the Brill Building songwriter who hustled to pitch his tunes, the Brooklyn Jew who flavored his 60s recordings with a few tablespoons of gospel fervor (e.g., “Holly Holy,” “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show”). He’s the 10 p.m.-corned-beef-sandwich-at-the-Carnegie-Deli Neil Diamond. Then there’s the arena-scale entertainer who wears ruffled shirts, wouldn’t think of performing without a 50-piece orchestra and sang “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” with Barbra Streisand. He’s the $26.95-all-you-can-eat-buffet-at-Caesar’s-Palace Neil Diamond.
McCreary pays homage to both men in “The Diamond Sutra” by titling his poems after songs from either Diamond’s career. The NY-streets Diamond (aka the Diamond I like) is represented by “Solitary Man” and “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” whose cool quotient was ratified when Uma Thurman danced to Urge Overkill’s cover in Pulp Fiction. The Vegas Diamond has “Longfellow Serenade” and “Song Sung Blue.” McCreary doesn’t write about the songs overtly, though he does drop Urge Overkill’s name in “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Rather, he uses the titles as prompts. In “Song Sung Blue,” for example, he writes:
The car alarm was not
the ice-cream
man was not the missing
ATM pin & when
the key broke off
in the lock, I opened
your diary
using a rock …
The one “Song Sung Blue” inspired another, more doleful, song sung blue. I will say I prefer McCreary’s “Song Sung Blue” and think the other is tepid schlock unworthy of the songwriter who bestowed on the Monkees and UB40 a pair of really good hit singles.
I’ve written and published poems about Nico, Edith Piaf and British guitar master Davy Graham, all artists whose hip credentials are incontestable. I have yet to come across, either in print or at readings, a poem about Seals and Crofts or America. Could that possibly mean they’re due for at least one haiku apiece?
Endnote, from the Great Minds Think Alike Department.
“The Great American Songbook” section immediately follows “The Diamond Sutra.” Here, McCreary proffers an appealing blend of prose poetry and rock criticism. In one piece, he posits two Rod Stewarts. The first is the one I’ll call Mod Stewart, the rock ‘n’ roll singer who knew John Lee Hooker’s records. I’ll call the second one Sod Stewart, the old guy who decided he’d like to be Perry Como. McCreary’s assessment is that the two Stewarts are not the same person. I have to agree.
An interview with Jonathan Selwood.
Jonathan Selwood captured our attention a few years ago with his debut novel The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse. The book was a wildly funny, shaggy dog tale of the LA art world and the end of our own world.
His latest, Die Like a Girl, works together Selwood’s singular wit with his home city, Portland, OR, drug dealings, movie stars and a surprising amount of violence. (The book opens with the heroine/dope dealer, Fiona Blacklock, being punched in the face).
Selwood answered our questions about writing women well as a man, making the leap from major publishing house to self publishing, and how killing bad guys on a page takes the edge off child rearing.*[It's also worth noting there's an eerie coincidence between the recent finding of a head in a bag in LA and Chapter 75 of Die Like a Girl. Yikes.]
Q. What would be the test of corruption?
A.–Becom
ing really insincere–calling myself ‘not such a bad fellow,’ thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood–she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
This Side of Paradise/ Fitzgerald
Long-overdue book report: Sightseer by Cynthia Marie Hoffman.
Procrastinator’s note: This “book report” is the first on some books that were sent to me shortly after AWP last year. I’d raised my hand and said “sure, I’ll blog about them” and then guess what? I didn’t. I’m not going to make excuses. Sometimes life is what it is and you don’t always get to things when you say you will. But dammit! I’m gonna get all these mentioned before this year’s AWP rolls around. Even though I’ve never been and I’m not going this year. My apologies to these authors.
These will be no particular order. I’m just pulling them off my shelf. They’ll all be short and sweet. And first up is…
Sightseer
Poems by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. Winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Persea Books. I knew I’d like this as soon as I opened it up to the first poem, “Dear Fluorescent Pink Jumbo Finger Starfish,” about our love of souvenirs. A travel journal in poetry, I enjoyed this even though I’ve never been to any of these places. Always meant to look them up online, but didn’t. A nice book.
“I wish my poems could wave.”
I made this meat collage from a microwave cookbook. It makes me really want to read this.
Books by Ariana Reines and Paul Legault showed up in my mailbox today. You should get them in your mailbox, too.
Anatomy Courses, a new novel by Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick, is out on Valentine’s Day from Lazy Fascist Press. Blake Butler’s sentences make me feel like someone is watching me and Sean Kilpatrick’s sentences make me feel Republican, so I can only imagine the kind of fucked this book is going to make me.
Eric Morris interviews Marc McKee at Barn Owl Review. Marc McKee is what happens when you fill a muppet with firecrackers and douse it with dark, ancient magic. Like, he insists you love everything.
At Flying Object, the illimitable Ted Powers reviews Michael Earl Craig’s new chapbook from Factory Hollow Press, Jombang Jet. There’s this line about touching a banana shake that is one of best epistemological statements I’ve ever heard. I made applesauce last night in celebration of these poems.
Part 5 in my “What do we mean when we say a poem is a machine?” series is going to be all about Jack Spicer. Reading his collected lectures to make sure that happens right.
Dean Moriarty played by a CGI dachshund.
I don’t normally get worked up over books becoming movies [As in, I will let you adapt mine into a movie for about the price of a ruben sandwich], but this got me.
It’s probably old news to many, but On The Road is becoming a big budget movie. That dead body who plays the girl in Twilight is apparently on board, too.
This can’t fail.
