The “Next Big Thing” interview

My friend and fellow poet Shannon Ward suggested that I do this.  This is a thing where poets send around these interview questions to poets they know (& I think fiction writers do too).  I’m not sure who started it, but it’s ongoing, apparently.

What is the working title of your book (or story)? 

My latest book is FutureBlues from Salmon Poetry (2012).  Also working on some new stuff.

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

I wanted to do something different from my last collection (in both above-mentioned instances) and push myself forward.  I didn’t want to just do the same thing over and over. 

What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters, in a movie rendition? 

It wouldn’t be the kind of film where there were actors, necessarily.  The closest analogue I can think of is the work of abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage (if that is not too presumptuous on my part).  He did occasionally film shots of himself, his wife, and poets who were friends of his. 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

“Inasmuch as any poet’s work is a continuing narrative defined by nothing more or less than chronological time, Future Blues is the collection that follows its immediate predecessor and so cannot help but be aware of it” (from the back cover description of Future Blues).

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

Future Blues was recently published by Salmon Poetry.  The next one is a chapbook-length thing that doesn’t yet have a publisher.  Poets don’t usually work with agents as far as I know. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Future Blues is poems 2003-2012. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

Muses. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

Future Blues cover art is a painting by Kyle Fitzpatrick called “Theater,” which is a dark-hued, red-hued, textural, surreal painting of a theater being flooded in a rainstorm, like out of a dream or something.

***

I’ll pass this along to (tag) a few other people at some point soon.

Books at Awesome Books

Pittsburghers and tourists: Copies of my books Future Blues and Ancestor Worship are now for sale at the downtown location of Awesome Books (929 Liberty Ave., Pgh, i.e. Liberty & 9th).  If you happen to be around, stop in and pick them up.

Update: Awesome Books has been sold to new owners and renamed Amazing Books (no kidding).  Same location, etc.

Reading in Pgh, March 7th

I will be reading some poems this Thursday, March 7th, 6pm, at Awesome Books, 929 Liberty Ave., downtown Pittsburgh.  The event is a book launch for fiction writer Spencer Dew, and Karen Lillis will also be reading.

James Franco, The Broken Tower

James Franco’s Hart Crane biopic, The Broken Tower (2011), has been criticized for all the usual reasons that people criticize abstract art of any kind — it’s supposedly disjointed, meandering, pretentious; in short, too “arty.”  Having finally watched it, I have to say I agree with some of this, but instead of seeing these as negatives, see most of these criticisms, these supposed weaknesses, as strengths instead.  Yes, it’s disjointed and somewhat non-linear.  But more often than not, I prefer that.  Most of the time, for me, plot comes off as contrived.  The film follows the basic trajectory of Crane’s life (as rendered in the Paul Mariani biography), but it is not given the over-dramatized treatment of most Hollywood biopics, thankfully.  Instead we get incidents or moments rendered beautifully (in black and white, except for one signal scene of Crane in Notre Dame cathedral — did Franco perhaps get the idea from another great overlooked film, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, which is mostly b&w but turns to color at the end?).  Okay, there was one lingering shot of the back of Franco’s head that made me laugh a bit, but on the whole the camera work is powerful and well handled.  The film unfolds episodically (in segments titled “Voyages”), but the emphasis is always visual rather than narrative.  Or rather, the narrative exists simply in the juxtaposition of the images.

There is also lots of talking and lots of poetry reading.  Critics have asserted that the film isn’t quite carried on the strength of Crane’s words being intoned by Franco.  For example, Stephen Holden writes, “despite earnest attempts, Mr. Franco can’t bring the fervency of Crane’s poetry to life in the extensive recitations.”  But I would say that this does indeed make a very strong contribution in the film.  The sense that I got from the scene of Crane reading “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” in some wood-paneled room maybe was something like what it might have been to actually be there.  Poetry readings can be dull, sure, but if Hart Crane is reading it’s going to be a different story, and Franco did a pretty good job at being Crane, I think.  This scene forces the viewer to become a listener, to hear Crane’s words, to tune into the poem itself.

In fact, it made me go and grab my copy of Crane’s Collected Poems and later read along to other poems while the film was still playing (doubly difficult as I didn’t want to miss the visual images before me on the screen).  Hearing the lines of “The Bridge” being read in juxtaposition with Christina Voros’s cinematography was amazing — to “see” Franco’s vision of the poem (the “Proem” specifically, I should say), whether or not it accords exactly with my initial sense of the poem, was something of a revelation.  Similarly, the scenes of Crane composing “The Broken Tower” on a typewriter in a lonely room were handled just as well.  In many places, Crane simply walks endlessly, by himself.  Forget about story — this is more important.  Since watching the film, I’ve had the Collected Poems lying around and have been dipping into them again.  If this film can do that, with a sense of like-mindedness and sympathy imparted to the viewer (rather than, say, a sense of needing a corrective), then it has more than accomplished its purpose.

Keith Gaustad, High Art & Love Poems

I know Keith Gaustad, and I also blurbed his recent chapbook High Art & Love Poems (Broken Bird Press/The Conium Review, 2012).   So I guess this isn’t a review, really, but I just wanted to say a few things about the book anyway.  My blurb reads, “Keith Gaustad’s poems are concise, deliberate in diction, at times terse — they are, as Pound would put it, ‘free from emotional slither.’ Yet there is deep feeling here, which emerges side by side with Gaustad’s subtle sense of satire.”  There is even more to his work, though.  As satire, it is often funny, and many of the poems turn on wordplay and puns.  The book’s title obliquely references James Liddy’s Art Is Not for Grownups, which, as Brian Arkins writes in his introduction to Liddy’s Collected Poems, is “the volume of Liddy that most obviously employs wit…. Here the target … include[s] literary pieties of various kinds.”  And so it is for Gaustad, whose first section in High Art & Love Poems is titled “The Poet Warrior” and begins with the quip, “I’m not afraid of paper cuts.”

Where the aforementioned Liddy collection is composed of short epigrammatical pieces, Gaustad gives us lyrics of a page, two pages, some even three pages in length.  The book’s structure of five sections seems to add up to a narrative of sorts, and the poet has told me that this is a conscious echo of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, each separate section representing a stage of artistic and/or personal development.  Gaustad, however, is not Irish like Joyce (though he was a student of Liddy’s and shares his idiosyncratic Catholicism).  Instead, he is Wisconsin German, living and writing in the poetry mecca of Milwaukee.  His satire, his own irony, works against the hipster irony that one encounters in any such American city. 

In “Philosopher’s House Party,” for example, he writes of “The men in the kitchen from the city with beer in their / beards” while in “Apollo the Cubist and Paul and Saul” he charges, “Post Modern lovers / you / never seem to fall off your horses.”  Many of these poems reflect a struggle with alienation and the desire for some sort of communal feeling.  Their speakers are alternately appalled by people’s displays of vapidity or posturing, and galvanized into seeking out a semblance of meaning, whatever that could be (here I’m reminded of the singer Jonathan Richman of the band the Modern Lovers [emphasis mine]).  He is serious about this.  Thus, his work will no doubt be rejected by about three-quarters or more of all current poetry outlets, since jokey, quirky, prosey stuff is what’s in now — there’s a difference between serious joking, which is what Gaustad does, and quirky/silly, if that makes sense.

Perhaps this chapbook’s subject matter is nothing more than the struggle to become a serious person in a hipster world.  But then, isn’t this similar to Stephen Dedalus’s struggle, only in a vastly different context?  And the poetry that springs from it here is both unique and strong.  Of that same struggle, Gaustad has also written to me, “maybe I’ll get lucky and leave that behind with the book.”  High Art & Love Poems is overtly what it is — a poet’s first book well-composed, a well-structured short collection.  It is a substantial book (that is, it has substance), though, setting the stage for what one can only hope will be a substantial, ongoing career.  Incidentally, it features cover art by the great Milwaukee painter Kyle Fitzpatrick, one of my favorite contemporary artists.

($9.95 from the link above, 37 pages including Gaustad’s humorous bio note, perfect-bound)

Review of Joseph Horgan, An Unscheduled Life

My review of Irish poet Joseph Horgan’s collection An Unscheduled Life (Agenda Editions, 2012) is online in the new issue of The Burning Bush 2.  Here is the link: http://burningbush2.com/reviews-essays/michael-s-begnal-reviews-joseph-horgan/

Poem in Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture

I have a poem titled “Uptown 2” in the new issue of Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture, which can be read here:

http://www.wakegreatlakes.org/content/poetry/michael-s-begnal-uptown-2

Future Blues reviewed in the City Paper

Future Blues is nicely reviewed in today’s City Paper.

The link to the online version is here:

http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/potent-verse-fills-michael-s-begnals-fourth-collection/Content?oid=1601533

Here is the text:

Potent verse fills Michael S. Begnal’s fourth collection

The poet ranges from Irish-American themes and empathy for caged animals to appreciations of protopunks the Stooges

by Bill O’Driscoll

Seeking to recreate the world in words, some poets spread their text purposefully across the page, with big horizontal or vertical stretches of white space. In his fourth collection, Future Blues (Salmon Poetry), Michael S. Begnal uses this technique more often than most. But it’s a measure of Begnal’s skill that all that white space never seems an affectation. Rather, it’s just another way he immerses us in his potent, often challenging voice.

Begnal, 46, was formerly editor of the Galway, Ireland-based literary magazine The Burning Bush. And indeed Future Blues often explores Irish and Irish-American settings and concerns. “Waterworld” limns an Old World street scene and a millennium’s arc of history in a handful of lines (“r e i n c a r n a t i o n back on the agenda”). The stunning “Dead Rabbits” captures in a page the immigrant experience from Potato Famine to third-generation Middle American dissolution. Four other poems are even in Gaelic (and defiantly go untranslated).

“Angles” — about Western European colonists planting “trimmed bushes regimented in rows” in new-settled lands — is built on a delightful bit of Joycean wordplay (“The Angles are coming”). And with “Application for the Provision of Catholic Beverages,” Begnal, employing a barroom stoicism, offers a detailed yet concise allegory on the Church’s defunction.

But there’s lots more to Begnal. His verse can be pleasingly visceral (“the canal flows nearby/ clogged with dead leaves of limitless autumns”), or delve into personal torment, as in “Shade,” about the speaker’s relationship with a man who “sick or dying pretends health / in a black turtleneck.” Begnal includes an “Homage to Li Po,” and indeed displays a special facility for Eastern-inflected poems simply depicting a physical scene in lucid detail — or even, as in “Homage to Allen Kirkpatrick,” merely describing a series of old photos.

There’s also strong political sensibility, with evocations of imprisonment, characterizations of poets as endangered visionaries (“Manifesto”) and deep empathy with animals caged (“Thylacine”) and threatened. “[T]omorrow I will kill the poachers,” the speaker vows in “Primates.”

Other highlights include takes on pop-cultural touchstones. In “Bettie Page,” Begnal goes a bit T.S. Eliot on pinup icon Bettie Page. And a series of poems on the Stooges includes a witty appreciation of their alternate-universe third album, complete with titles like “Fresh Rag” and “Big Time Bum.”

Review of Barbara Smith

My review of Barbara Smith’s collection The Angels’ Share (Doghouse, 2012) is online at Eyewear:

http://www.toddswift.blogspot.com/2012/12/guest-review-begnal-on-smith.html

Future Blues reviewed in the Galway Advertiser

In today’s (December 6 2012) edition of the Galway Advertiser (Galway, Ireland’s free weekly paper), my friend the poet Kevin Higgins reviews Future Blues, along with our mutual Salmon Poetry press-mate Patrick Chapman’s A Promiscuity of Spines.  The review appears on page 112, and can be read here (click link then scroll down).

Below, transcribed is the part of the text which deals with Future Blues:

Children of The Burning Bush

By Kevin Higgins

Michael S Begnal lived here in Galway for several years and was editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine. Mike was keen to push the boundaries of Irish poetry and impatient with well made but dull lyric epiphanies about family, church, or the field across the road.

Mike’s view has been that too many Irish poets are nice boys and girls with excellent degrees who write acceptable little poems more designed to impress the poet’s parents than do anything else. He’s interested in the wayward strand of Irish poetry typified by the work of the late James Liddy, whose poems are perhaps the place where Allen Ginsberg meets Patrick Kavanagh at his most raucous.

If you think poetry should rhyme and be about girls with flaming red hair going to school barefoot through the fields, then Mike’s new collection Future Blues (Salmon Poetry) is definitely not for you.

In poems such as ‘Dead Rabbits’ Begnal doesn’t take the easy route of obvious autobiography, but instead disturbs the reader with images and makes us think: “mouths stained green with chlorophyll,/ the corpses lined the roadside then// the economy warped in its spasms,/ died or passed to America.”

He really gets into his stride in the longer poems, ‘Homage To Allen Kirkpatrick’ – which runs to four pages – and the Ginsberg style ‘Manifesto’: “WHEREAS/ they want to kill us—/ even now when I stand/ with my back to the window/ it’s like I might get shot/through the blinds.”

Here and there Begnal shows he shares Ginsberg’s weakness for profound sounding, abstract words, such as “transmigration” and “genealogies”. All in all, though, a strong collection. If you like Tom Waits’ stranger albums, then Future Blues may well be the poetry book for you.

Reading at Duquesne University 12/4

I am doing a reading in Pittsburgh at Duquesne University, at their Barnes & Noble café on Forbes Ave., this Tuesday, Dec. 4, 7pm, with the renowned essayist Peter Trachtenberg.  I  will have books for sale and that sort of thing. . . .

Details here and here.

The photo is the Duquesne English Department’s very nice display for the event, with a Xmas theme!  See you there.

Poem in the City Paper

I have a poem in the Pittsburgh City Paper titled “Uptown, Pittsburgh,” which you can read here.

Shannon Ward review of Future Blues

My friend Shannon Ward has reviewed Future Blues at her blog (November 26, 2012):

http://shannoncamlinward.com/2012/11/26/michael-s-begnals-future-blues/

Here is the text:

Michael S. Begnal’s Future Blues

One of the pleasures of the writing life is getting to know the other people who gravitate toward that sphere. Writers are fun. They spend prolonged periods holed up with their creations, and then (with the exception of your Dickinsons and Salingers) they emerge from their caves into the bigger world, usually feeling somewhere between mildly disoriented and bat-shit stir-crazy. Excellent company, by my standards.

Among the other great pleasures are getting to watch a friend’s work evolve, to hear the voice in its varied contexts, and to notice the patina building over time. It’s such a long process that (for me, at least) it’s hard to envision the finished form. So I had no idea how delighted I would be when I opened my mail and found my friend Mike Begnal’s poetry collection, Future Blues, right there in my hands—so many of the loose pages we had pored over a few years ago in workshop all bound up in a beautiful, proper book:

Reading these poems feels a little like watching footage of fish in the deep ocean: their forms have evolved for purposes logical—particular to their terrain—but a little mystic somehow too. The images float by strangely, yet there is a sensibility in the negative space between them as well as between the lines and stanzas:

nothing will  be okay

nothing remains pristine for long

stretched out in a dark bed,

the spectacular lights of death

all this terror,

the flying humanoids in the air for real,

the sinister people who want

to come back from the past,

a leafless time

that wind shook.

(“Blues for Tomorrow,” 13-22)

The form and content are raveled together artfully here. The poem’s stanzas hover much like the flying humanoids, in some places vaguely threatening my ability to navigate the current of the page, yet never drowning me in it entirely. Although Begnal steers toward an abstract place, when I arrive, I get the sense that I have been there before, lying sleepless in that room, antagonized by those ghosts. The metaphor triggers an unsettled feeling a little like déjà vu, but the resulting tension is appropriate and complementary to the concept.

These poems not only reckon with the dead, but also commune with them. An informal ode called “Samhain,” for instance, pays tribute to those dead who “are there, in a word or line/ you thought was your own,/ and walk among us to/ night” (30-34). In this poem, Begnal is particularly conscientious of the line, as evidenced by the break between “to” and “night,” suggesting both toward our own demise and tonight, as in on Samhain (the Gaelic festival which begat Halloween.)

The central concept is broader in scope, though, and extends to the idea that we invoke the dead by simply speaking, so many of our words weighed down as they are with history. Fittingly, the poem is dedicated to Mongán, a seventh-century Irish chieftain whose namesake is a semi-divine figure from Gaelic literature. Such ghosts rustle through the lines, and in the introductory stanza especially, the rift between words reflects the rift between worlds:

for all the dead who have spoke before
me        spoke for all the dead who have before
spoke       for all the dead who have before
dead       for all who have spoke before the
me

I trust in language always.

(1-6)

This is a poetry that makes room for its ghosts. The intentionally muddled syntax of the worried line leaves an impression of language as an inheritance, something that (as those of us who teach freshman composition know all too well) sometimes comes in jumbled variations and barely decipherable waves. Just when the syntax pushes my patience toward its limits though, I am soothed and surprised by that single, simple line, “I trust in language always.”

Future Blues reviewed at Eyewear

There’s a very nice review of Future Blues now up on the Eyewear blog (posted 23 November 2012):

http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2012/11/guest-review-mayhew-on-begnal.html

Here is the text:

Jessica Mayhew reviews

Future Blues 

by Michael S. Begnal

Beginning at the end of this collection, Michael Begnal notes the poet’s refusal “to fix ourselves/ in time or ink” (‘Manifesto’), and this would serve just as well as an epigram to Future Blues. This is a collection aware of the fragility and harshness of time and language, and a refusal to be rooted in the stasis of either. Begnal’s poetry is fluid and immediate, and his use of textual play allows it to slip from being pinned to the formal.

In ‘Primates,’ Begnal explores the “conception of the word/ HUMAN.” This poem examines a photograph of a group of chimpanzees, comparing it to an early-morning glimpse of the self in a mirror, “a face so secretly and fiercely familiar,” which readers will be able to wryly identify with. However, this poem also goes much deeper than the “3:10 A.M” stunned and squinting eyes, and the knowing nudges of aging; the parallels drawn between poem and chimp highlight the “iron light of sentience,” the harshness of knowledge.

Begnal excels at finding just the right words to root a sentence. ‘Primates’ opens with the line, “His eyes intimate knowledge, this chimpanzee,” the deliberate choice of “intimate” suggesting both an ancestral closeness and the implication of communication, and from this, the poem works around suggestion. The poet guesses – the chimp “maybe the poet of his tribe,” and the speaker’s own “sapience” is “unknown.” This disturbance to the ability of language to express meaning builds to the final stanza:

tomorrow I will kill the poachers

                /I will murder the colonists

                /I will cut down the loggers

                /I will exterminate all the brutes  (‘Primates’)

What seemingly begins as a threatening wish to protect the chimpanzees of the first stanza begins to splinter, reflected in the use of the forward slashes, building to the Heart of Darkness climax. However, in Begnal’s poem there is no Marlow to act as editor and tear off the postscript. The speaker becomes a Kurtz-like figure, and the violent ambiguity of “brutes,” leads the reader back to deeper concerns of role of language as communication.

Darkness and language surface again in ‘Dithyramb.’ The pattern of the urban/ rural couplets are broken when:

...I enter the poem

and am immediately strong-armed

into a dark garage

where there are no shining mirrors,

no strains of deathless song...  (‘Dithyramb’)

The entry of the speaker disrupts the flow of the poem, and yet seems to begin the dithyramb, which is a wild hymn to the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Begnal attacks the urge to define:

they claim they can define

everyone, that I’m this or that,

a maker of cloudy cadence...  (‘Dithyramb’)

An urge which he ultimately defies, setting the poet alone in the urban/rural landscape:

and I’m out along the leaves,

olive-green under the

streetlight lampglow   (‘Dithyramb’)

Begnal uses the juxtaposition of the rural imagery against the streetlights to create a hallucinogenic rebellion which both harks back to the ancient poetic tradition and places it firmly in the contemporary.

The theme of the poet existing outside of the established order is revisited in ‘In an Unknown City, It Seemed.’ There is a distinct modernist atmosphere to the poem, not in form but in content. The poet becomes a flâneur-like figure, roaming through a disorientating city. Temporality is disrupted:

in this part of the city

were buildings

when you looked at them closer

were constructed of Mayan ruins…  (‘In an Unknown City, It Seemed’)

This sense of timeless isolation is shattered when the speaker of the poem encounters another figure. There is a sense of threat at the end of the poem, when another man emerges to see the speaker, “like a priest.”

One of the strong points of this collection is the shift of tone between poems. In ‘The Fluctuations,’ Begnal observes, “death & loss in your twisted black guts like shit,/ in the stark stochastic scald.” This sits alongside ‘At the Cliff,’ where death/ time sits in contrast, “time wilts and willows,/ residue builds sweet on the tongue.” Here, the softer assonance gives a much gentler impression of time ebbing and flowing, rather than the harsh sounds of the former. Throughout Future Blues, Begnal consistently compliments the themes of his poems with a studied ear to the sounds they make, which is apt for a collection at least partly inspired by music. This attention to the aural is particularly effective in ‘Bettie Page.’ The classic monochromatic pin-up image is created in the third stanza:

black her hair

and pale white skin,

the classic black/white

“raven” “porcelain”   (‘Bettie Page’)

The sound echoing through “black/classic,” and the half-rhyme of “skin/ porcelain” draws the reader into a poem which centres heavily on the notion of darkness, not just in colour (or lack of), but also in tone. This builds to the final proper stanza, in which decay is emphasised through consonance, and the final rhyme acts as an evocation of the pin-up herself:

and clay collects in the cracks below the window

and the furniture begins to show its age –

Bettie Page,

            Bettie Page,

                        Bettie Page  (‘Bettie Page’)

“Sexless” is scored through in this poem, an ironic nod to the epigram from Bettie Page, “I had less sex activity those seven years in New York than I had any other time in my life.” Begnal’s use of typography and textual play works well throughout the collection. In ‘Dead Rabbits,’ he introduces coloured print with the word “red,” emphasising the visceral nature of the poem. An image of a horn is added to ‘Horn,’ further breaking the text and bringing a visual element to a poem focusing on sound. This typographic play could be used more often to bring more of an impact.

Future Blues ends with a ‘Manifesto,’ summing up the poet’s intents and beliefs. This collection flits between deaths – death of the body, death of language, death of the self – and in this movement is the escape of expression. In ‘Manifesto,’ Begnal writes, “for death is stasis/ and poetry moves everywhere.” This collection looks to a mythic past, even as it passes through the present. In this poem, as in the others, there is a lack of concluding full stops, which serves to emphasise Future Blues as a continuous, supple body of poetry. 

Jessica Mayhew is a British poet, and reviews regularly for Eyewear.

Avant-Post on Goodreads

This by way of Litteraria Pragensia Books in Prague:

“As part of LPB’s tenth anniversary, we’re making a wide range of titles from our backlist available online via Goodreads, for you to download or read for free. Check out Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions, featuring Johanna Drucker, Michael S. Begnal, Lisa Jarnot, Ann Vickery, Christian Bök, Robert Archambeau, Mairéad Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne...”

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13578565-avant-post

My chapter in this book, “The Ancients Have Returned among Us,” is a study of recent Irish poetry, particularly its “experimental” strands.

Interview on WYEP’s Prosody

Recently I was interviewed for radio station WYEP’s poetry show, Prosody.  The show will air this Saturday, November 3, at 6:00 A.M Eastern time.  Yes, that’s 6:00 A.M.  Unfortunately, the poetry show is shunted into a crazy time-slot, but if for some reason you happen to be up at that hour on Saturday morning, you can listen live, either on the airwaves or by streaming it through the internet.  Start with this page, and there’s a link there to their live feed.

In the interview, I talk a lot about the new collection, Future Blues, and read poems from that book and the earlier Ancestor Worship.  If you can’t listen live, the episode will eventually be available to download as a podcast, though I understand there is a short delay in getting those podcasts up.  So, poetry on the radio at 6:00 A.M.  (That’s 11:00 A.M. Irish time, though.)

UPDATE: You can listen to the podcast here: http://prosodyradio.com/episodes/prosody121103.mp3

Review of Lavorato

I have a review of Wayworn Wooden Floors by Canadian poet Mark Lavorato up on Todd Swift’s Eyewear blog.  It was a tough review to write, in a way.  Lavorato clearly has a lot of skill as a writer, and this collection aims for mass acceptance.  The author seems to be under the impression, though, that the best way to achieve it is by being “accessible.”  But, for me anyway, as the book pretends to operate in ignorance of recent developments in the field of poetry, as well-wrought as it is, it ultimately ends up missing the mark.  I explain why in greater detail here.

Reading for the Butterjoint Variety Show

If you are in Pittsburgh: I will be reading a few poems tomorrow (16th October) at this new live variety show, the Butterjoint Variety Show, at the bar of Legume Bistro, North Craig St., from 9pm.  Aside from me reading poems, there will be blues from Leslie Addis and the Rusty Nails, “klezmer jazz” from the Average Beasts, lo-fi blues from John Cihon, and a comedian.  Promises to be a fun time. . .

John Menesini, endo

John Menesini, in many ways a quintessentially Pittsburgh poet, may have recently moved to New York City, but his latest collection endo (Six Gallery Press, 2011) still takes in the ’Burgh in poems like “Pittsburgh Khole,” “Larryville,” and “Blue Heart.”  That said, Menesini’s work has always looked beyond, beyond what place might predominate.  Some other standouts for me include “Rebirth of Pan,” “These Broken Flowers,” and the impressionistic “PGH Winter.”  And there’s much more still, including a number of sustained longer pieces.  I won’t do a full “review” this time because I worked on the book myself (did the layout of text).  But I know what I like, and good poetry is good poetry, and endo is very good.

Interview on Burdock Radio

I was interviewed by Keith Gaustad on his Burdock Radio show on Riverwest Radio, Thursday, 23 August 2012.  The interviewed is archived and can be accessed here:

http://riverwestradio.com/burdock-radio-august-23rd-2012/

Future Blues

My new collection, Future Blues, is now out from Salmon Poetry.  It is available on your other book-selling websites too, and probably at least order-able from most actual bookshops.  But it’s always best to go direct to the publisher:

http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=267&a=50

Thank you for your support.

     *

ISBN: 978-1-907056-90-1

Page Count: 86

Cover Artwork: Kyle Fitzpatrick, “Theater” (mixed media on canvas, 95” x 96”, 2007), www.kylefitzpatrick.com

Michael S. Begnal’s Future Blues is both a progression of and a break with his previous collection, Ancestor Worship. Inasmuch as any poet’s work is a continuing narrative defined by nothing more or less than chronological time, Future Blues is the collection that follows its immediate predecessor and so cannot help but be aware of it. Yet, as Begnal has written, “The best musicians, writers, and artists for me are the ones who, either steadily over time or perhaps in radical bursts, change their style or approach – each new work in part an effort to surpass the previous.” The Irish Literary Supplement described Ancestor Worship as “an attempt at reconstructing an obscured heritage.” While traces of such an impulse inevitably recur, Future Blues hurtles forward seeking out “new images and modes of being” (as one poem puts it), even as our collective future – death – looms.

Future Blues, in its title, lashes Irish poetry past and future into alliance – a desperate, daring act. Is that a space between “Future” and “Blues” or a caesura? Whichever, it offers a narrow stage for the uneasy demimonde of the present, where the Ghosts of Irish Poetry Past and Future meet, and merge. This is a poetry of trace and gesture, of tree and leaf, of light and surfaces, of haze and mark, drink, decline and persistence; a poetry of disjunctiveness which swells notably into cohesive poems in English and Irish – cohesive but still textured; a poetry of anomalies, stitched across time and culture from Mongán to Laurence Sterne to Frank O’Hara to Ron Asheton, often fragile, always intelligent, bristling with formal spice. –Mairéad Byrne

Sarah Bennett’s Article on the Irish Avant-Garde

A proto-avant-garde Irish poet

Sarah Bennett has published an interesting article on contemporary Irish avant-garde poetry in the online journal Wave Composition.  Titled “Love, Sorrow and Joy: Aubade for the Irish Poetry Avant-Garde,” the article traces the development of Irish experimental/avant/non-mainstream Irish poetry from MacGreevy though Devlin and Coffey, through the Sixties (The Lace Curtain journal and New Writers’ Press), through to the turn of the century and Wild Honey Press, up to the present.  I’m glad to see this, and it reminds me of the kind of work I have engaged in myself, with The Burning Bush and in an essay I wrote a number of years ago now (“The Ancients Have Returned Among Us: Polaroids of 21st C. Irish Poetry”) in the Louis Armand-edited Avant-Post anthology, that is similar to Bennett’s (I don’t imagine she’s seen it, though, so not to suggest she is in any way influenced by it).  Bennett references me in her article as “Poet, blogger and critic Michael Begnal, committed to the promotion of experimental writing in Ireland. . .”, and I am flattered.

It’s also nice to be kept up to date — I was not aware of Graham Gillespie’s collection Love, Sorrow and Joy (which is grandiosely subtitled “A New Voice in Irish Avant-Garde Poetry” and, strangely for a first collection, includes an interview with the author himself) (this book being the source of Bennett’s ironic title).  Bennett criticizes it as conservative and notes that “It’s difficult to conceive of an avant-garde — Irish or otherwise — in which Gillespie could rightly be accommodated.”  I can’t comment on this, as I’ve yet to read the book, but I’ve always been a fan of such critical jousting, and it will be interesting to see for myself.

Bennett rightly attacks Fintan O’Toole’s assertion that the work of Paul Durcan represents “an instance of the Irish avant-garde breaking into the mainstream.”  Durcan has never been an avant-garde poet, and personally I find his alternately jokey/cranky speaker persona to be merely irritating.  But, that is just my opinion.  Bennett, in any case, is percipient in observing the difficulty, due to socio-historic circumstances, in even approaching the mainstream v. avant-garde debate in Irish literature.

Debates on the definition of “avant-garde”/“experimental” writing rage continually.  Bennett briefly delineates a number of other critics’ positions, seeming to gravitate toward Alex Davis’s.  Still, I always wonder if a more specific critical context is necessary in a piece such as this — might she venture her own definition of the Irish avant-garde?  But then, arguing for this definition over that could be an article unto itself, perhaps a book, and so in this case I like that Bennett just gets on with it, knowing that we get her drift, and engages with the work in a way that reminds us why we ought to read and keep reading it.

Wave Composition as a whole, by the way, looks to be a worthwhile journal.

Poem for a James Liddy Book, at Lúnasa

Poem for a James Liddy Book, at Lúnasa

Book reviews must be analytical,

but I don’t want to be analytical now,

I just want to say that I like it,

this book, It Swings from Side to Side*

Why do you like it?

Because of how it makes me feel

How does it make you feel?

Not like prose (even when there is prose)

but like at Lúnasa

sad and celebratory,

a wave of something anti-logical

in the chest and/or bowel

Why is it sad?

Because James in this book

knows of his death, the lights of dawn

as the débauché loses consciousness,

vomits and the party goes black,

the body cannot keep up

with the convulsions

and the amber liquid finally gags him—

and thus, because James is my friend

Why is it celebratory?

Because as he imparts

in numerous languages—

Silver English, Silver Irish,

Silver Latin among them—

until the blackout,

drink makes us feel good

and our friends are here,

they are naked

and we are penetrating/licking

each other

and could fall in love

What swings from side to side?

I think it must be the parts of the body,

but also that when we reach one side

we move to “the other”

What is “the other”?

Like when you gather berries

on a hilltop

and bring them to the bonfire

and someone hands you a bottle

and you take a drink

and you begin to speak

in cadences art-technologic,

which are taken up

with fire smoke,

and the beings,

who are real by the way,*

say “hi” back to you,

and in the morning you proceed

around the well

in sunwise circles,

     in ludic laughter

*Read the book

           

                 —MSB

Review of Kate Behrens

My review of Kate Behrens’s collection The Beholder (Two Rivers Press, 2012) appears on the Eyewear site (link to review here). Behrens is a British poet who I had not heard of before.  Maybe the name sounded familiar, but that is it (and I think I am imagining even that).  I was happy to read something so good when I wasn’t really expecting to.  In the review, I kind of react to the description of the book given in some of its back cover material, versus how the book actually read to me.  I guess I could have ended up writing more about cover blurbs in general, or done some analysis of them, but that is perhaps an essay for another time.

The Burning Bush 2, No. 3

Photo: The Burning Bush 2 site

Though I don’t have any work in it myself this time around, the new issue of the online journal The Burning Bush 2 includes a poem by David Stone dedicated to me. My regards to Stone. The poem, titled “My Ancestral Memory,” has to be a reference to Ancestor Worship. The whole issue (number 3), edited by Alan Jude Moore, is well worth checking out and can be read starting here.