Salmon Poetry raffle

My publisher Salmon Poetry is holding a raffle. The prize is of all Salmon’s 2011 titles, signed by the authors. The draw will take place at Salmon’s 30th Anniversary Celebratory Event at the Unitarian Church, Dublin, on 1st November 2011. This is an opportunity to add considerably to your literary bookshelf with some great titles (it is a pretty good prize, I think — 31 books) and to support Salmon Poetry at the same time. 5 tickets for €5, 12 tickets for €10. For further info, including the list of books to be won, and to order tickets, please go here.

Oblivion

Oblivion is a band I was in in Philadelphia from 1984-86, playing drums. The other members of the original lineup were Steve Lukshides on guitar, Marc Fernich on bass, and Todd Cote on vocals. Lukshides had previously played in YDI, and Fernich had been in Kremlin Korps, while Cote was a fanzine editor and a well-known figure in the Philly hardcore scene. My claim to fame was having been in the band Wasted Talent. Oblivion quickly came to prominence in Philly, playing a lot of shows and beginning to record. These recording were never released at the time, but two songs are now available to download from Amazon here (for cheap, and the sound quality is very good).

Cote left the band in 1985 and was replaced by another well-known figure in the Philly scene, Dave Wynter, while a second guitarist, Fil Černý, was added to the lineup. Fil was originally primarily a metal guitarist, and, as a lot of post-hardcore bands at the time were doing, we had added something of a metal sound to the basic feel of punk rock. The recording sessions were finished with the new lineup, and there was some discussion with a well-known West Coast independent record label about doing an album, which all fell through due to an unfortunate set of circumstances.

By the term “post-hardcore” I do not mean that Oblivion had anything in common with the lame Warped Tour type of bands who are often described by that term today, but simply mean to say that we were coming out of the original hardcore punk scene while attempting to do something just a little bit different from it musically. The primary influence, though, was always punk, and I would say that we took some cues from bands like YDI, Ruin, Black Flag, the Stooges, and Motörhead. Oblivion finally ended in late 1986. (Incidentally, a few other bands have used the name Oblivion, either by itself or as part of their name, but I think that we, the Philly band from ’84 to ’86, were the first.)

Below is a video from Oblivion’s first show with our second lineup in October 1985, introduced by roadie and friend of the band Lou Perfidio, who used to announce us as being “from Kensington” (the Philly neighborhood where he and Fil lived and we practiced for a while). Oblivion is the first band in the segment:

David Stone, The Hogbutcher Poems

Following on from David Stone’s previous chapbook The Bloodhound Works of last fall, Propaganda Press/Alternating Current has released his newest installment, The Hogbutcher Poems. Though Stone is based in Baltimore, both of these collections are set in Chicago where he has spent time, and the title of this latest must certainly be in part a reference to Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, who famously described the city as “Hog Butcher for the World.”

That said, the term “Hogbutcher” here can have other resonances. Where Stone’s previous chapbook dealt with our present economic upheaval, this new one seems to focus on the environment, the food industry, and our alienation from the processes by which we glean our own sustenance, all of it poisoned and redolent of death. In one poem, “The/ incandescent DEAD/ ...splash/ & crispen/ on the oily griddle.” In another, the water supply is full of sulphur, benzene, radioactive waste. In “In Hogbutcher City,” “Odors/ of death/ ...prepare carcasses/ with seasonings/for family picnics...” “Production Scheduling” is perhaps a comment on the factory farming system — baby piglets are slaughtered according to a production model, and, “Wait, one is alive/ and blinking/ OK, I can fix that/ with my tire iron.”

Stone’s vision is often violent and apocalyptic, but it is little details such as these that make us see the connection between the horror and our daily lives. These are not poems for the faint-hearted, but both subject and form (often clipped, prose-like, philosophical iterations of ideas and images) force us to reexamine contemporary society and the wider world in which we live. Highly recommended.

Addendum: Stone’s previous book The Bloodhound Works has been translated into Serbian by Ivan Glišić as Krvožeđe. Further information can be obtained from: ivangl [at] sbb.rs

Review of Liam Mac Sheóinín, Mid-Eternity

On this Bloomsday, I am pleased to be able to write a few words about Liam Mac Sheóinín’s novel George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity (Serving House Books, 2011). I know Mac Sheóinín (indeed a brief blurb from me appears on the back cover of the book), so I can’t say this is an impartial review, but my admiration for his work is genuine. As editor of The Burning Bush, I published a couple of excerpts from Mid-Eternity, yet reading it in full book form is quite an amazing experience. Very few people are writing like Mac Sheóinín now. With the ascent of creative non-fiction, memoir, crime fiction, and the like, literary fiction of this sort has largely been shunted to the sidelines. As the Western world’s collective cultural intelligence quotient continues to drop daily, and our universities are turned into degree-printing assembly lines for business majors, fewer and fewer people are being equipped to read a novel such as this. James Joyce himself wrote in Finnegans Wake, “Wipe your glosses with what you know,” but today many people seem to know less and less. All of which is to say that Mac Sheóinín’s Mid-Eternity will not be a bestseller, but nevertheless it is to my mind a welcome addition to the corpus of poetic-prose novels in the mode of Joyce, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Djuna Barnes.

The novel’s main character is an Irish-American Jersey Shore coke dealer named Brian Jordan. It is the late 1980s. Jordan is an anomaly as a coke dealer — he is interested in Joyce, philosophy, linguistics (oh, and anal sex), and intersperses much of his speech with obscure (to those around him) literary references. Jordan runs a bar and a strip club with his partner Dentelupo, is seeing the girlfriend (Rachel) of an acquaintance, and spends part of his time in the local library (à la Stephen Dedalus), where at one point he runs into the novelist Martin Amis — or is it Martin Amis the character in Money? Mid-Eternity is sub-titled “A Menippean Satire,” and Amis certainly is satirized — enough to, as was the power of the poets in ancient Ireland, bring boils to his face. Harold Bloom the literary critic also makes an appearance and comes off only slightly less scathed than Amis. The Bushes, both W. and H.W., tend to be described in simian (the former) and sinister (the latter) terms, and the scene from which the book derives its full appellation is hilarious.

Jordan is also given to visionary moments, which may or may not be encouraged by drugs and Jameson, and further he is seemingly abducted by aliens (Zeta Reticulans), who supply the coke he sells. In a parody of the detective novel — or is it in homage? — there is a murder. Such is the plot. The blurbs tend to portray Mid-Eternity as a rollicking, madcap good time, and they are not at all wrong in that. But I think there is something further going on here. Neither Menippean satire nor the modernist / postmodernist novel is really about plot. Mid-Eternity is about character and language, and puts forward ideas in something of a stochastic manner. “The true writer has nothing to say,” conjectures Jordan in one internal monologue, “It’s the fucking way he says it.” This may not be the first time it’s been suggested but it bears reiterating, and while it may sound coarse as presented, it suggests a deeper and possibly mystic sensibility. Clearly, this is a novel that is conscious of a tradition — not just of the 20th century, but going at least as far back as Scotus Eriugena.

Jordan, and Mac Sheónín himself, have actualized “A world where poetry is legal tender.” For Jordan, it may be in the form of his own wishful thinking, but Mac Sheónín really does create for the reader who understands his references a cosmology based on Joyce, poetry, and all of the above. Finnegans Wake, “the eternal book,” is Jordan’s “passport” to “sráid na réaltaí,” the Zeta Reticulans’ Irish-language term for the otherworld (meaning “street of stars”). The aliens have decided to intervene in human affairs because “your race has, largely, rejected Finnegans Wake.” These are wry strokes, but at the same time is this really so off in its sentiment? Mac Sheóinín is (if it is not obvious at this point in the review) an unapologetic Joycean, and Mid-Eternity takes Joyce as a given first premise. It is a work which builds on this premise; it is in dialogue with Joyce. Joyce is the greatest novelist of the 20th century. The literature of the 21st must of course continue to become itself, but I would be happy for it to spring from Joyce (in some way). And so Mac Sheóinín’s book is significant not only as an eminently worthy 252 pages of writing (and reading), but also because it is a marker of one possible direction for contemporary fiction.

An Túaille Scanrúil

Is mór an clú atá ar na Pittsburgh Steelers, an fhoireann péile Meiriceánaigh, ar fud an domhain. Comhartha naofa do thacaithe na Steelers is ea an “túaille scanrúil” (an “terrible towel” as Béarla). Feictear an túaille buí seo go flúirseach ag cluichí na foirne agus i ngach áit i mBaile Phitt. Go spéisiúil, tá leagan Gaeilge le feiceáil sa chathair sin anois. Ar an drochuair, tá botún mór déanta air — tá an chomhréir ainmfhocal-aidiacht as ord.

Kali’s Tongue (The Vinyl Press)

I am included in a chapbook homage to the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. The book is called Kali’s Tongue and is published by a new imprint, The Vinyl Press. Each poem responds to a song on the album. My piece, a mixture of poetry and poetic prose, is on “I Got the Blues.”

Editor Justin Kishbaugh has written this explanatory note:

Kali’s Tongue is the first in series of Vinylist texts that offer poetic interpretations of the songs on a particular artist or band’s album — in this case, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. As a text, Kali’s Tongue attempts to build upon the general public’s willingness to apply meaning to music by using it as a bridge to poetry. Ultimately, Kali’s Tongue sutures the wound that exists between the art of poetry and mainstream consciousness, and seizes upon music’s fundamental imprint to create and present a poetic record of a song’s event and the fuller context, or album, within which it exists.

Copies of this sharply-designed little volume can be purchased at the pop-up bookstore Fleeting Pages in Pittsburgh through the first week of June. It can also be ordered for $5.50 postage-paid. For ordering info, email: thevinylpress[at]gmail[dot]com

“Manifesto” in TINGE Magazine

My poem “Manifesto” appears in the inaugural issue of TINGE Magazine, the new online literary journal produced by Temple University’s MFA program. TINGE is really well done. My poem is a recent piece. Check it out.

Mairéad Byrne’s The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven

Mairéad Byrne sent me her latest book The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius, 2010) a while back, and foolishly I let it sit for a long time in the pile of books that I have been letting build up for ages now. Somehow I assumed it would be tough to read, and it is 208 pages, and I’ve just been so busy, etc., etc. Bad choice, and how wrong I was, because I could have been talking about this one, recommending it, rereading it, for so much longer, because it’s that good that you’d want to. On the other hand, I get to right now experience that jolt of discovery, having read the whole thing in a day, and am still in the mode of enthused response.

The poems herein first appeared on Byrne’s blog Heaven (thus the title of the book), and so the question arises, why a book, can’t these poems just all be read online? Well, the reason why a book, or one reason anyway, is because this book is a great little object, an excellently-designed artifact in itself, with a sharp cover (by Stephanie Barber) and layout. On top of that, it has one of the best back cover blurbs ever, supplied by Luke Kennard, who ends by saying, “…it’s a beautiful, angry, generous collection and if you don’t like it you’re a fucking idiot.” Yes indeed.

Personally, I like books better than the internet. I like the feel and smell of them, and am interested in their construction and structures. The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven is divided into sections, rough thematic chapters — “Calendar,” “Everyday Lunacy,” “Found,” “Interviews,” “Numbers,” “War,” etc. Byrne is an experimentalist of sorts, though I realize a term such as this may be restrictive. Her work is actually very wide-ranging, from short imagistic poems like “Fall” (“Now when I come home at night/ I take my pate off/ & watch the gold & auburn trees/ surge & blow”) to imagined interviews with a figure like the poet Charles Reznikoff, to found poems, to political poems (there are a number of anti-war pieces here with titles such as “Rubble,” “Baghdad,” “Headlines”), to the surreal poems of the section “Everything Is Unlikely.”

I suspect that Reznikoff is important for Byrne, because the found poem is to the fore in this collection (as has been the case in other of her books). In this regard, I also see an affinity to the work of Caroline Bergvall, not only in the manipulation of found texts (be it through erasure, addition, collage, cut-up), but in Byrne’s similar interest in the interplay of languages and cultures. “An Educated Heart” is a play on the poem’s title phrase in several different languages (I can see Spanish, Irish, German, French, and Chinese, but I think there are others), sometimes rendered phonetically. “Mount Pleasant” celebrates the neighborhood of the same name in Providence, Rhode Island, which seems to be the location of a number of Latino businesses (e.g. Tiende y Panaderia Guatemalteca) existing alongside places like Family Dollar and Print-It Plus. Byrne herself is Irish, having immigrated to the United States “for poetry,” as her bio note at the end of the book proclaims.

As I stated above, I was initially under the mistaken assumption that this would somehow be a difficult book. And in fact I do happen to like difficult poetry, so that would have been just grand too. As it happens, this collection is quite substantial and by no means trivial, but there’s a whimsicality to it, a conversational feel, which allows the reader to enter into Byrne’s poetry with ease. Her work includes much in the way of personal detail, yet it is not “confessional.” It is humorous but never trite. It is experimental but not hermetic. It is of the world, of life. Byrne’s poem “Donald Hall Would Hate Me” is a sort of manifesto, an ars poetica, and articulates her own approach to poetry better than I can at the moment:

Donald Hall Would Hate Me

if he knew me
I don’t want to be great

it takes me 10 minutes
to write a poem

sometimes
& then

I want to whisper or
shout it about
town

My poems are usually brief
they resemble each other
they are anecdotal
they do not extend themselves
they make no great claims
they connect small things to other small things

I LIKE SHORT!

I just want to kick the leaves
& have done

Part of me in a way feels like I should be doing a more in-depth, disciplined “criticism” of this collection — I don’t want to give this short shrift — but right now I really just want to say how much I liked it. And you probably will too.

Alan Jude Moore review in JSTOR

Here is another of my book reviews in Poetry Ireland Review, through the JSTOR database. This one is on Alan Jude Moore’s first collection, Black State Cars (Salmon Poetry, 2004). The review appeared in PIR No. 82 (2005). PIR was then edited by Peter Sirr.

If you have a JSTOR log-in, you can read the whole thing at the first link, above.

Begnal in Pittsburgh Magazine

The April 2011 edition of Pittsburgh Magazine features an article about a recent New Yinzer poetry reading I was part of at ModernFormations Gallery in that city, along with Alan Jude Moore and others.

While I’m not mentioned in the online version, the print version features a photo of me reading on the night. For those with good eyesight, though, I am also in the audience in the photo that accompanies the online article (photo by Jim Judkis, reproduced above) (Kevin Finn is the reader here). In any case, if you’re in the Pittsburgh area, do go out and pick up a hard copy. The article, by Kris Collins, is an interesting overview of the present state of Pittsburgh’s literary scene.

Reading at Duquesne University, Fri. 3/18

I will be wowing audiences — or at least an audience should hopefully be present — this Friday night, reading poetry as part of the Duquesne University English Department’s graduate Echoes Conference. Also on the bill are John Fried (fiction), Craig Bernier (fiction) and Christina Rawls (poetry). The proceedings begin at 7:00pm at the Duquesne Union Africa Room.

Interestingly, I just found out that Duquesne’s campus includes a building (Mellon Hall, pictured) designed by the great architect Mies van der Rohe. It’s right across from the Union, where the reading takes place.

Begnal i bhFoinse an tseachtain seo

Chuir an nuachtán Foinse agallamh orm mar chuid d’alt a fhoilseofar Dé Céadaoin faoi Ghaeilgeoirí atá thar lear. Tá cóipeanna ar fáil saor in aisce i bpáirtíocht leis an Irish Independent gach Céadaoin. Mar sin, pioc suas é!

The Irish-language newspaper Foinse will publish an article about Irish-speakers across the world in this Wednesday’s edition. I will be part of this, having been interviewed for the piece a few days ago. Copies are distributed free with each Wednesday’s Irish Independent, so if you’re in Ireland pick one up!

Review of Somhairle MacGill-Eain et al. in JSTOR

Another old(ish) review of mine in Poetry Ireland Review, this one being from No. 75 (Winter, 2002/2003) — and it’s online through JSTOR. This one is of three books: Dàin do Eimhir by modernist Scots Gaelic poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain (a.k.a. Sorley MacLean), ed. Christopher Whyte, Furnace of Love: A Selection from the Religious Poetry of Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin (the somewhat earlier Irish Gaelic poet), trans. Pádraig J. Daly, and the collection Mis by contemporary Irish-language poet Biddy Jenkinson.

Review of Catherine Walsh, Optic Verve

I have written a review of Irish experimental poet Catherine Walsh’s most recent book, Optic Verve (Shearsman 2009), now online at Todd Swift’s blog site Eyewear. The review suggests that, rather than engaging in wordplay for wordplay’s sake, Walsh actively critiques the way in which language may be employed in the service of dominant hierarchies, and that the pressures that cause language loss and even media censorship are, as Walsh notes, “a crucial determining factor in how people choose to interact socially, what they aspire to attain.” Perhaps, though, Walsh also explores (enacts?) possible ways around such language oppression. But there’s much more to this, so swing over to the review itself (linked above) and check it out.

Mac Lochlainn review in JSTOR

Tá mo léirmheas de Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues le Gearóid Mac Lochlainn (in Éigse Éireann Uimh. 73, Samhradh 2002) ar fáil tríd an bunachar sonraí JSTOR anois.

My review of Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, in Poetry Ireland Review No. 73 (Summer 2002), is now available through the JSTOR database. The full review is available to anyone with a JSTOR log-in.

Salmon’s Off-Site Reading at AWP 2011

I will be taking part in Salmon Poetry’s off-site AWP reading in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this great press. It takes place on Friday, Feb. 4th, at 8pm, at Pigment Art Studio, 1848 Columbia Rd. NW, Washington, D.C.

This is a blockbuster reading, also including the launch of 10 new poetry collections by Andrea Cohen, Christoher Locke, Allan Peterson, Philip Fried, Drew Blanchard, Drucilla Wall, Simmons Buntin, John Fitzgerald, Alan Jude Moore, and Patrick Chapman.

As well as the above, readers include Kevin Higgins, Susan Millar DuMars, Stephen Powers, Patrick Hicks, Eamonn Wall, Helene Cardona, Devon McNamara, William Pitt Root, J.D. Smith, Pam Uschuk, Adam Tavel, Irene McKinney, Jeanne Wagner, and, as I mentioned, myself.

The event is supported by Culture Ireland. Hope to see you there....

Oh, and Salmon will also have a table at the AWP Bookfair. Its location is Table E26, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Exhibition Level. My book Ancestor Worship will be on sale, as well as Salmon’s other books, so please stop by. The Bookfair runs every day during the conference.

New Yinzer reading, Feb. 2nd

Mark your calendar, call the newspaper, there’s an upcoming poetry event! I will be giving a reading in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, February 2nd, as part of “The New Yinzer Presents” series. It takes place at ModernFormations Gallery, 4919 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, 8 p.m. Admission is $5 or, if you can cook, free with contribution to potluck.

Reading with me is Alan Jude Moore, a fellow Salmon poet, who is coming all the way from Dublin, Ireland. Moore is one of the best of the new generation of Irish poets, and this is a great opportunity to hear someone one might not always get to hear. Also reading are Pittsburgh-based poets Ellen McGrath Smith and Kevin Finn. It looks like it’s going to be a good time.

Click here for more details, to check out the author photos, bios, etc.

Review of Best Irish Poetry

My review of the Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions) now appears at Todd Swift’s blog Eyewear. Books of this type are handy snapshots of the contemporary poetry of a time and place (country, region, etc.), but can’t really pretend to be objective, can they? I mean, so much of it comes down to who’s editing the thing. So, what of the contemporary Irish poetry as seen here through the lens of editor Matthew Sweeney? You are just one click of a link away from finding out....

James Liddy, Fest City

Photographed above is James Liddy’s latest poetry collection, Fest City. It has just been published by Arlen House (launched last month in Dublin) and features cover artwork by Kyle Fitzpatrick (click on the photo to zoom in). It is also worth noting that it’s Liddy’s first posthumous collection. Because I wrote the Afterword for this book I’m not in a position to review it, exactly, but I will say that for me personally I think it is some of James’s best work.

My Afterword, titled “In James Liddy’s Country,” begins like this:

It’s been two years since James Liddy’s death. But with Fest City I return to Liddy’s country, as I often do through reading his work. Liddy’s country is a wondrously singular place. It is not Ireland, as much as it often resembles it, and it’s not America either, as much as it resembles the latter as well. But that’s one of the reasons why I like Liddy’s country so much – because it reminds me of these familiar places, and yet it’s something distinctly else. Liddy’s country is poetry. A poet has to make his own country. His country is self-created, or recreated, through the medium of poetry. To put it another way, the poet creates himself through poetry. I’m sure that something like this has been said before, but if ever there was a poet who exemplified this dynamic, it was Liddy. In fact, in many ways, his life and his poetry were virtually indistinguishable. Both his everyday speech and his written work, at least by the time I got to know him, seemed to me to occur on a similar plane; it all seemed to come from the same place, from his own country of poetry. His letters too were like poems, with gossip and tidbits of news included. And his poems sometimes read like letters (often they are addressed to particular people), delivered via the Muse from his mind to the page stamped with international postage....

To read the rest, but especially to read these great poems, do please order the book. It is available from Kenny’s Bookshop in Ireland, and distributed in the U.S. by Syracuse University Press.

Wasted Talent

From 1981-early 1984 I was in a hardcore punk band called Wasted Talent. Without going into the whole history here, we released a tape, a sort of cassette album, called Self Rule, in 1982. In 1983, three of the songs from that recording were included on the compilation album The Master Tape Vol. 2, released by Affirmation Records, a Midwestern label, in 1983.


Wasted Talent is mentioned a couple times in the American Hardcore book by Steven Blush, our symbol/logo (which I designed in my bedroom as a 16-year-old kid) is included in the flyleaf of the book, a flier drawn by my brother for a WT show is reproduced there, and the band is also represented in the American Hardcore film.

Writer of both American Hardcore projects, Steven Blush, has also put up a web page called 24 Hours of Hardcore, which includes streaming MP3s of a ton of hardcore bands (911 songs!), including Wasted Talent. Titles are listed alphabetically (though one can sort by title, band name, year, or album title). Scroll down to the song “Off to War,” and click the link to play. Tracks can also be downloaded.

A blog site called Noise Addiction has a brief history of the band and links to rare Wasted Talent recordings.

[Incidentally, American Hardcore incorrectly lists the band as being from Harrisburg, PA. In fact, WT was from State College, PA.]