Interview at The Burning Bush 2

I am interviewed at the site of the online literary journal The Burning Bush 2:

http://burningbush2.com/2013/09/27/interview-with-poet-critic-michael-s-begnal/

Review of Sarah Hayden's Exteroceptive

My review of Sarah Hayden's chapbook Exteroceptive (Wild Honey Press, 2013) is now up at the Burning Bush 2 site:

http://burningbush2.com/2013/08/29/2029/

I really liked this poem series, and Wild Honey is a small press well worth your while.

Review: DJ Dolack, No Ser No

Greying Ghost is a really great chapbook press that uses real, old-school print techniques, and thus looks amazing. Nice paper on which you can sometimes feels the indentation of the type. There is texture in this kind of production. For DJ Dolack’s No Ser No, there is also black ink on black end-papers and a mysterious clipping from an early twentieth-century boating magazine stapled into the pages of this volume.

All well and good, you say, but does the poetry itself live up to that yellowed clipping? Yes indeed, and more. I ordered No Ser No kind of randomly — I wanted to support this press, and the Dolack chapbook looked the best to me of what was in print at the time (these are short runs and seem to go quickly — this one is numbered 150 copies). I’m glad I did. Dolack’s work is both surrealist and contemporary, both engaging and allusive, both New York and new mind.

This is not the kind of work whose meaning immediately jumps out at you, but it puts forward moods, works on the memory (even if the memories aren’t yours exactly), gives an idiosyncratic take on the modern world. The first poem, “Industries for the Blind of New York State,” opens, “Come from above / Are all in the trees” — an intriguing couplet. Syntactically, “come from above” is the subject of the sentence, which the verb “are” implies is plural somehow. “In the trees” sounds like the “industries” of the poem’s title, but perhaps that is coincidence. It is a conundrum, but the fact that it opens the collection seems to give it some weight. Clearly, Dolack expects the reader to do some work, or at least to proceed in a kind of Keatsian negative capability where rational meaning is not always a major concern.

“Where Our Data Live” segues into childhood memory with a speaker who this time draws some clear conclusions:

. . . people are no good.

Even as a child I had the feeling.

My grandfather tossing

a fresh nail gun cartridge

into the fire. Even then

I knew I wasn’t ready.

This is one of the more straightforward passages, including an arresting image. Perhaps my favorite poem in the collection, however, is “NYC Postcards (In Dollhouse Leather Jackets),” with its pleasant, O’Hara-esque evocation of Manhattan scenes and affirmation of life:

When You Are

In Love With The World

it fucking hangs out

The two of you

fucking

hang out And slowly. . .

I really like that idea, that you and the city can “fucking” hang out together, the city as an entity in itself, a friend. There is also something interesting about Dolack’s idiom and tone here — the voice sounds natural, similar perhaps to the way a certain American of the early twenty-first century, who is cool (of course I have my own definitions of what is cool now too), thinks and speaks. Refreshing to see it in poetry. And dig the capitalized words, providing emphasis: “When You Are In Love With The World.”

I’m not covering this whole collection (don’t want to ruin it all for you), even though it’s just 13 pages not including the old magazine clipping. But I also really liked the closer, “You Are the Most Difficult Kind of Happiness,” which plays around with space and typography. It is also in a sense the title poem, as it includes the lines “No serial number // no ser no.” This is a highly paratactic piece, so the relation of these lines to the rest is hard to get, at least initially. But there are associations to be had with the phrase “no serial number” — a kick against the cataloging and controlling of data in our world today, a rejection of the conformity and big-brother-type surveillance it implies? Maybe. In any case, Dolack’s poetry requires that the reader think critically and pay attention. “What’s worse?” he asks as the chapbook come to an end, “Bad eyes. // Now open them.” That is poetic advice good as any right now.

Review of Kimberly Campanello, Consent

My review of American expatriate poet Kimberly Campanello’s collection Consent (Doire Press, 2013) is online at The Burning Bush 2 site:

http://burningbush2.com/2013/08/02/begnal-reviews-kimberly-campanellos-consent/

Future Blues reviewed at Tarpaulin Sky

My collection Future Blues is reviewed by Billy Mills at the site of Tarpaulin Sky:

http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/2013/07/michael-begnal-future-blues/ 

Mills is a fascinating poet himself, and I’m quite flattered by his essay. He picks up on some interesting themes, especially to do with the question of Irish “diasporic” poetry. There are a couple of minor points I think I could reply to, but this is really such a good review (feel free to post your thoughts below; I’d be interested to hear). And, my many thanks to Mills and TS.

Here is the full text, reproduced from the TS site:

FUTURE BLUES

Michael Begnal

Salmon Poetry/Dufour Editions Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-907056-90-1
5″x8″, 86 pp., pbk., 2013 $21.95

Reviewed by Billy Mills

In his 1986 introduction to The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Thomas Kinsella introduced the term ‘dual tradition’ into the critical vocabulary of Irish verse, a concept he expanded upon in his 1995 book of that name. Kinsella was referring to the twin linguistic inheritance of the Irish writer, who could draw on both Gaelic literature dating back to the 6th century and English poetry from the time of the Anglo-Saxon scops.

Interesting and useful as Kinsella’s insights are, they do not exhaust the many, varied and often contradictory dualities that inhere in Irish poetry. Given the troubled history of conflict between the Catholic and Protestant traditions on the island of Ireland an outsider might imagine that one such division would be sectarian; however, our poetry seems to have avoided this particular schism. Indeed, the emergence since the 1950s of the so-called Northern poets as the dominant public face of Irish verse displays this absence of a religious rift quite neatly, with Catholic poets like Seamus Heaney being fitted into a constructed narrative that depends on Protestant forebears like Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt to lend credence to the idea of a Northern tradition. If anything, the North/South division is a far stronger duality than any religious one, and Kinsella’s own reputation has, I believe, suffered as a result of his being from the wrong side of the border and therefore not quite fitting into the accepted perception of what matters in recent Irish poetry.

Another form of the dual tradition, and one that again grows out of the unique circumstances of Irish history, is that which affects of the long and continuing stream of emigrants and the consequent growth of the Irish diaspora. There have always been writers who left Ireland for one reason or another and continued their careers abroad, Joyce, Beckett and Yeats being among the more noticeable examples. More recently there has been a growth of the number of writers who are returned emigrant or emigrants’ descendants; among the poets of this diaspora two of the most notable are Thomas Lynch and Michael Begnal.

Begnal was born in the States, has dual citizenship, lived in Ireland for a number of years, and has now returned ‘home’. During his time in Ireland he was deeply engaged in the literary life of the island, both through his work as a poet and as editor of The Burning Bush, one of the more adventurous of Ireland’s little magazines. His poetry, and especially the work collected in Future Blues, is infused with this particular version of the dual Irish tradition, both of whom are published by Salmon, Ireland’s most westerly dedicated poetry press.

There are three main groups of poems in the book. The first set comprises poems that celebrate popular culture, invariably American popular culture, through examinations of rock music, pinup girls and cinema. The most ambitious of these is the longish sequence called Homage to Allen Kirkpatrick. In this poem, Begnal captures the tone of 1970s art-house film and of the world it grew out of immaculately in passages like

rabbit eats TV-set close up on screen,
Pepsi Generation broken bottle knife fight
Black Panther molotov cocktails
glass dildo suicide pills commercial
the cavalcade of official limousines,
dignitaries at the inauguration

In For Ron Asheton, Begnal plays with language and with white space on the page to, on the one hand, mimic the simplicity and repetitive nature of The Stooges’ music and, on the other, to draw the reader gently into the mythologised world of popular culture, a myth without roots, one pole of the emigrant duality. In these poems Begnal produces some of the most technically interesting verse that you will read in any book published by any established Irish press in recent times.

          volume

                     volume    volume

             volume

                            volume

                     the

          volume     volume     volume

                  volume,

                            no way,

 

          chord      chord        chord

                   chord

                            chord        chord

          chord

                    chord

                              chord

The second sub-set of poems in the book deal explicitly with Irish history and legend. The poem Kells, for instance, celebrates those monks who created the illuminated manuscripts that helped preserve so much of Kinsella’s Gaelic strand of Irish literature. Another, Samhain, the Irish name for the harvest festival which, like Halloween, marked the line between autumn and winter, is dedicated to a semi-pagan 7th century chieftain Mongán. It opens:

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 before spoke
me

I trust language always

These ‘Irish’ poems are, on the whole, less technically adventurous than the American ones and this declaration of trust in language is somewhat at odds with the nervous exploration of the medium’s limitations in the Asheton poem quoted above. Begnal’s Gaelic trust even extends to publishing four poems in his adopted tongue, the last of which, Ollamh, ends with the line

agus mise i m’ollamh

On one level a straightforward claim, ‘I am a poet’, the specific weight of the Irish word brings other layers to the claim; an ollamh was more than a poet, he (and they were all men) was a master-poet, a learned man, one of the wise ones. Given Begnal’s claim to trust language, the reader is left with no option than to accept this claim at face value; it is one I cannot imagine his American self making.

At times, he writes with an awareness of this duality, as when in Dead Rabbits he weaves in the phrase ‘plastic paddy’ and a house where the 4th of July is celebrated and which contains one book, Kinsella’s translation of the Irish epic The Tain. Even the Kirkpatrick poem contains an image of ‘druidical Irish faces with sideburns’ as for a moment the world of Celtic myth intrudes on the world of American popular culture. Some of the other American poems also contain phrases that are clearly and self-consciously Hiberno-English. For the most part, though, it is as if Ireland had no popular culture, no Phil Lynott, and America no Coyote.

The third main strand running through the collection consists of poems that resolve this duality by simply ignoring it. These are primarily nature poems of one kind or another, with many of them being either being named for or featuring animals. Begnal displays both a respect for our animal neighbours and more than a little anger at the frequently appalling lack of neighbourliness in our treatment of them. This anger is often based in a sense of identification with the suffering animal; in Thylacine, for example, an image of the caged cat on film melds into one of the narrator in an unwanted relationship:

I am forced into this room,
through the door, her insoluble angers

 In Primates, the anger is more straightforwardly political and aimed both at the hunters whose actions threaten the very existence of our closest relatives and the poet/speaker’s well-intentioned but futile determination to ‘kill the poachers’, a resolution that is deferred until ‘tomorrow’. This anger finds fuller expression in the final poem in the book, Manifesto an extended piece of political didacticism that is, for this reader at least, the one bum note in the collection.

This one cavil aside, Future Blues is a fascinating book that foregrounds one of the main questions to confront younger Irish poets; what does it mean to self-identify as Irish in an increasingly globalised world and in a time when many of those poets will not live, or will only partly live, in Ireland itself? Begnal’s work exemplifies the duality that lies behind that question and also points towards some ways in which it might be resolved. Just as the resolution to Kinsella’s problem is that both language traditions are equally available, there is no reason why diaspora poets cannot be both Irish and not Irish and create identities for themselves out of both their ancestral and new traditions. If the work that results from the effort is all as interesting as Future Blues, then the journey will be worth following.

---

Billy Mills was born Dublin in 1954. After some years spent in Spain and the UK, he currently lives in Limerick. He is co-editor (with Catherine Walsh) of hardpressed Poetry. His Lares/Manes: Collected Poems was published by Shearsman in 2009. His work since then includes Imaginary Gardens (hardPressed poetry 2012), Loop Walks, a work for choir in nine parts (hardPressed poetry 2013) and the free e-book from Pensato (Smithereens Press 2013).

Polish Hill Arts Fest, 7/21

Small Press Pittsburgh, organized by Karen Lillis, will have a small-press books table at the Polish Hill Arts Festival in Pittsburgh this Sunday, 7/21, 12pm-9pm.  Two of my books, Future Blues and Ancestor Worship, will be available there for cheap.  The location is the intersection of Brereton and Dobson, Polish Hill, Pittsburgh.  If you are around, stop by and help out a poet and the small press.

Avant-Post in Kindle Edition

The anthology Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions (Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), edited by Louis Armand, is now available in Kindle edition here. It includes my essay “The Ancients Have Returned among Us: Polaroids of 21st Century Irish Poetry” (in which I wade into various disputes and, hopefully, shed some light on aspects of recent Irish poetry).

Justin Kishbaugh, For the Blue Flash

I know Justin Kishbaugh, and he’s published me in an anthology that he put out, so if you are worried about nepotism in the poetry world, then caveat emptor. On the other hand, I don’t say that I like something if I don’t. And I do like Kishbaugh’s For the Blue Flash (DAT Press, 2012). It’s a compact collection consisting of three terse ten-page poems and a brief three-pager tagged on as a coda for good measure — thus, 33 pages of stripped-down, imagistic short lines. Kishbaugh’s bio notes that he is a scholar of Pound and Imagism, and these influences are present.

However, Kishbaugh does not simply recapitulate a hundred-year-old zeitgeist. The first poem, titled “A Gun and a Girl,” takes up film noir and (according to one of the blurbs) Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. Here he applies imagist principles to moving pictures and subverts conventions of genre, playing on noir clichés. For example, section viii contains the lines,

       . . . a Pandora’s Box

of cinema and jukeboxes

she questions the limits

of language she whispers

words cannot capture

the truth is all love is not

open or honest as her eyes

Not only is the medium of film foregrounded, but so is the awareness of poetry as a medium; they are intermingled here. The enjambment and lack of punctuation lend extra layers of meaning in this regard — “she” “questions the limits” of cinema, but also of language. It is the “language she whispers,” but also “she whispers / words.” Further, we have the statement, “words cannot capture / the truth”; therefore, what really is “open or honest”? Love? “Her eyes”? Now we are back in a noir film scene. Skillfully accomplished.

The second piece is “Letters and Landscapes,” which begins with an imagist observation, “How the eye lingers / over that which it loves. . . .” Interestingly, the scene in question is then revealed to be a postcard of a painting, and so once again the subject is the mediation of the thing rather than the thing itself. The poem is also about the dynamics of a relationship and references the myth of Sappho’s suicide at Lefkada. Kishbaugh clearly likes working in an oblique mode and, astutely, avoids the confessional. We don’t really need to know who “he” and “she” are, or whether they are even based on “real” people, in order to appreciate the poem. The moon metaphor is a bit familiar, perhaps, but this too might be an intentional subversion of poetic convention. There is nice metaphorical language throughout this poem (not just of the moon), whatever the case.

“Animals and Air” instantiates a Buddhist theme, but there is also another couple, lovers who express themselves through elemental gestures or moments — water: “her eyes catch the flash / of two fish that swim” (maybe an obscure reference to Amy Lowell’s “Wind and Silver”?); air: “like a kite he floats”; fire: “foxes from the eight / provinces carry fire”; and earth: “On a bent birch / weighted with snow. . . .” This latter line comes from section x, of a cardinal who sits on the aforementioned birch, seemingly reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s famous blackbird. I don’t want to read too much into it, but Kishbaugh’s scholarly interests open the door to this kind of thing. That said, he is certainly not aping his imagist forebears, but rather plays on them in interesting ways.

For the Blue Flash ends with “The Rule of Three,” the first two parts of which employ references to Scotch whisky, including a double-entendre about its “bouquet” (whisky, roses). It too is something of a love poem, this time wistful, forlorn. Section iii, the ending, reads in full:

Like a falcon

his eyes

the sun

and the moon

her eyes

for a moment

the ocean

between them

If I have any criticism it is of that very last line (“between them”), which seems to me unnecessary. But this is of course a subjective opinion from another poet. In all, Kishbaugh has produced a solid and intelligent first collection which impressed me with its acuity of perception and deft use of wordplay and sound devices.

Spencer Dew essay on Future Blues and Ancestor Worship

Spencer Dew has written a review/essay on Future Blues and Ancestor Worship for the online literary journal decomP (May 2013).  Here is the link:

http://www.decompmagazine.com/outofyourlanguage.htm

Here also is the essay in full:

“out of your language”:
The Poetry of Michael S. Begnal

Spencer Dew

Two things that make Michael S. Begnal such an impressive poet are his range and the delicacy—the grace—with which he expresses that range, balancing erudition with freshness, distilling broad learning in a sound like a baby’s scream. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who case up their smarts in a vitrine, for display, Begnal’s skills drop with wisdom and humility. Indeed, there is, in these two collections, a voice one could easily mistake for a much older poet, and each of these books reads like a “selected volume,” in which the library poems and alleyway poems, the rainy-window poems and post-coital hotel poems are all artfully arranged to give a sense of the scope of a long career. But Begnal is young: he’s just that good. In Ancestor Worship (2007), a narrator visits Montparnasse Cemetery in a piece that bounds from sex to shit in two pages, from suicide to the yeasty immutability of crotch. As an act of worship, an offering of the vernacular: “Baudelaire’s grave / covered with green Métro tickets, / many-coloured flowers, / and a sketch—/ Beckett’s bare— / Sartre’s respectable—.” Because the “worship” imagined here is

not like the imagined
rituals of an old old age
before iron or bronze,
the metal of our mythology,
. . .
but the warm blood
that flows through to this age, dangerous and violence in veins
. . .
the right hook of history,
the slow arc of the punch,
the strange figure
on a modern city street
who burrows into your eye
and says, “Who’re you?”

In these poems of street wandering and port wine, one ancestor being worshiped sure seems to be Kerouac, in the best sense, of child-like wonder at the sounds, at the endlessly fascinating task of describing the world, “Grab the polaroid / and head down to where they spray graffiti / on brick walls / and piss in alleys” reads a poem in Future Blues (2012), the more recent collection, wherein a No Parking sign is as likely—along with “piles of pallets / & another broad wall of brick”—to constitute the subject of a poem, or the raw material out of which a poem, about the act and function of poetry-writing, is constructed. That on each of the pages of these two volumes Begnal makes us see something anew—a fresh perspective on delivery trucks as well as seasons and wine and weather and libraries full of previous writers, from Li Po to James Liddy—is their great success. Yet here, amidst “my songs all of lonesome” and reevaluations of surroundings—an ancient “stadium of white stone, / cracked blocks of sun” where men eat tacos and sneak pills “and the peanut vendors never come around”—the major themes of Begnal’s work are advanced, these being language as a product of a given context—not only a place, but a time, a particular moment on a particular street, be it Galway, Derry, San Francisco, or Madrid—and the sense that through language not only are voices of the dead, our ancestors, preserved, but that a community is established in and through such reading and reciting. “Ancestor Worship” is thus the active establishment of a community of voices the enduring presence of which is a defiance of time and death.

This is a sophisticated concept, that, on the one hand “There’s no present / just a continual becoming / past” on the page, in the text—there is only ever that which has always already been written—and, as a result, poetry thus offers collective “resistance to certain fixities.” Begnal is here informed not merely by study of things written in English, but by global travel and—too rare among Americans, whom he refers to, in a poem set in Prague as “too many shorts-wearers, / oblivious to their own / incongruity”—serious engagement with other languages. Most importantly, this mean Irish, in which Begnal writes.

Both books under consideration here have poems that, to a non-Irish reader, remain—as Begnal writes about French television—inaccessible. “I am denied,” he writes, straining “to penetrate the sound barrier / extracting random phrases but no coherent sentences.” Yet there is a lesson here: that these are words still living; that here is a poet assembling community from more than one culture. This dual sense for language—again, one thinks of Kerouac—grants Begnal a blessed ear, a sense for the entanglements of imagination and place, memory and words. Here are lines set in Madrid: “I don’t really speak Spanish / just know a few words / but I can fake it pretty good.” “Because I, in my American, think of Mexico / I think Juárez while wandering . . . thin uphill streets lined with cervecerías, / eat tortilla yum egg patata onion, / wandering, restaurants full of pigs, / plates of fried squid in windows.”

As one can travel with language, one can travel through language, as well: “The closest I can get / right now to Mexico / is Texicanos corn chips, / ‘manufactured’ (not baked) / in Coolock.” Or dig this fantasy, tinged again with what I take to be the inheritance of Kerouac, and Kerouac’s San Francisco: “‘cause just up the street / was my Mexican place, Burrito Salvadoreño, / and a hot married Salvadoreña // I always got hot peppers, / always got hot peppers, / left impressive tips, / but feared the imagery / of the black Latin moustache, / murderous, / vengeful husband.” In the same poem, Begnal warns that “deep in the Mission / it was even more dangerous / ‘cause you were / out of your language.”

It is refreshing and useful to read a young American poet so aware of that sense of being in and out of language, whose poetry acts to “celebrate all the dead in their graves” in their own contextual voices, even while he also rhapsodizes about 25 cent porn booths and the neon pulse of a city rippling through the night. I believe Begnal’s bilingual status grants him a rare gift; that while he can write of “Solitary room freak-outs nobody knows the panic of” he never confuses the subjective experiences of the self with the limits of the world, knowing, rather, that the world inhabited by the living, reading, poet is one in which—as he writes in “Samhain,” in Future Blues, one exists in concert with those who went before. We are a compilation of our ancestors.

Indeed, Begnal roots what he calls the “rebellion” of poetry in language’s disavowal of temporality, that the written word maintains an “ancient revolutionary movement / forever.” To “trust in language always” is thus to “trust in a world, in a flicker, / in an echo, / speak, and they are present . . . they are there, in a word or line / you thought was your own.” Forget the spook-show metaphysics of Halloween, where the dead wander for a day: Begnal is interested in poetry as a particular class of engagement with language—“the poem is an action among / the most human (and animal) of actions”—which, in this reading, becomes truly revolutionary, a defiance of time and death and a revolutionary catalyst for an ideal community, “different but together and equal, / agency and valency, / multi- Multi- MULTI-.” The fantastical “city City CITY” of Kerouac is here given a new gloss, one of ethical and political urgency. The dead speak, and these subjective flashes from beyond the grave contribute to what Begnal sees as a resistance not merely against “stasis” but also the status quo of the capitalist “market.”

Not that the author—like certain still-singing voices from the past—is not also “freaking out” about the unknowable concrete reality of his own death, but simply that life itself, as experience through language and manifest in the process of writing poetry, is always collective, always involves our ancestors, acknowledged or not. The Irish pieces here represent one form of acknowledgement, as do the many references—from Goya to Ferlinghetti—sprinkled throughout, and even the recognition that we are our own ancestors, that our own writing represents some voice speaking from a moment now past, lost. I “cannibalize myself,” the poet says, “I wrote days ago some of these lines.”

The particular roots of the written word, testifying to a past by continuing to speak, the community of poets assembled through veneration and continued engagement with the voices of our ancestors. That these themes are engaged in two books so fresh, so multi-faceted, smelling of assorted street cuisines, desire and fear, drunken ecstasy and philosophical consideration—that is more than impressive. These are remarkable books.

James Liddy, On Irish Literature and Identities

A new volume of James Liddy’s essays, edited by Eamonn Wall, titled On Irish Literature and Identities (Arlen House / dist. Syracuse University Press), includes an interview I did with Liddy.  This interview was originally published in The Burning Bush number 8, Autumn 2002, and I am very pleased to see it finally reappear.  The whole book is great, in fact, and includes essays such as “Nationalist and Worker in the Poetry of Thomas Kinsella and Thomas McCarthy,” “Ulster Poets and the Catholic Muse,” and “How We Stood Our Rounds: Bohemian Dublin in the Sixties.”  The back cover sums it up nicely: “This is a book of literary-academic-and-bohemian witness written in an engaging, brilliant, and unique voice.”

Begnal Interview at The Reading Life

I was interviewed by Mel Ulm for his website The Reading Life.  Ulm asks me questions about literature, poetry, Irish literature, Ireland itself, and a little bit about my own writing.  Read the interview at:

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2013/04/micheal-begnal-question-and-answer.html

Free State Review

A new print literary journal is a rare thing these days it seems, with the lure of the internet growing ever stronger.  And it makes sense — web skills are not extremely difficult to learn, and the medium reaches so many more people than print can in this day and age.  So the launch of a new print magazine is, for me, simultaneously welcome and anachronistic (in a good way) (though they do have a website, here).  As someone who has edited a literary magazine in the past, I appreciate the attention to layout and the strong production values encompassed in the Free State Review issue one (including a cover painting by, but no poetry from, Mark Stand), which was sent to me recently in the mail.  The journal is based in the Annapolis, MD, area, but its contributors seem to be pulled from Anywhere, USA.  It is hard to distinguish a particular aesthetic focus or editorial policy, though the Editor’s Note states that “Every contributor centers his or her life around action — engaging the world, scratching surfaces.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it seems intentionally designed to lend itself to a broad interpretation.  Their website avers, “Our focus is place and experience. We look for authors who live the poem — story — essay before they write it.”  To me this implies that they are more interested in subject than language.

Thus, the FSR, as with any such journal that casts a wide net, with less of an emphasis on a particular poetics, is a mixed bag.  There is a lot of work here that I like.  Barbara DeCesare’s poem for Babe Ruth offers irony and imagism in lines like, “A thousand people swim dark water. / You take baseballs, glowing white, to the shore // and hit them, two or three hanging in the air at a time…”  Nikia S. Leopold’s “The Miracle” is a pleasant reflection on Italy, ending “We found a place / to lie together full length.... / I swear by San Gersolé / our murmurs / made that fountain weep.”  A couple of poets I liked happen to have been published by presses who have published me as well — Drucilla Wall’s “Laurel Oak” includes some strong nature imagery which is subverted by juxtaposition with technology and subtle humor.  Jessica Fenlon’s “seed station” subverts its imagism with popular culture: a cardinal is described as having a “tweed jacket [and] / feather mohawk.”  Edgar Gabriel Silex’s “Mother’s Day Poem” exhibits an interest in use of language more than some in this issue, as does Chris Toll, who, his bio note unfortunately states, recently died.

I can’t quite figure out why Tony Barnstone’s “Samsara” and “Wheel” are dubbed short stories in the Editor’s Note, when they appear very obviously in verse lines.  I’m all for blurring the boundaries of genre, but this didn’t quite seem to make sense — they appear as prosey narrative poems but would certainly read just as well as actual short stories.  On the other hand, I imagine Barnstone knows exactly what he’s doing and the matter is simply one of terminology.  Juliana Spallholtz’s “Strangers” works nicely as the prose-poem that it clearly is, its spare “sentences” emphasizing the piece’s sense of alienation.  Naturally, there are some pieces here that didn’t especially appeal to me, also.  Those who know me or read this blog know that I often tend to prefer work that is, as some might call it, “difficult,” and the Free State Review editors clearly are interested in more accessible work.  But this is a sturdy debut.  I would actually like to see the journal in future issues narrow its focus a bit, to foster more of a sense of identity for itself in relation to the type of poetics it is interested in, even if it were to veer further away from my own aesthetic concerns.

In any case, the Free State Review is an active force and is organizing a number of readings, including one in Pittsburgh on Wednesday 4/17 at the East End Book Exchange, Bloomfield (4754 Liberty Ave.), from 7:00-9:00 pm.  There will be four readers, and admission is free.  It promises to be a worthy event.

Heart of Darkness (the band)

I almost always write about literary matters here at this blog, with occasional political intersections.  But as long-time readers will know, I’ve also written a number of music-related posts, including on bands that I’ve been in myself (I was/am, mostly was, a drummer), such as Wasted Talent and Oblivion.  The band I was in after these was Heart of Darkness, based in State College, Pennsylvania, from about 1986 till our eventual break-up in Hollywood, California, in 1991.  We (self-)released three demo tapes and a 7” single (on blue vinyl), and at one point had some minor record label interest, but it seemed to me that the band’s impact was minimal at best, at least outside of a small but dedicated local following.

HOD’s original singer was Mike Scalzi, who went on to create the legendary metal band Slough Feg.  (Not a lot of people know about Scalzi’s pre-Slough Feg career, though he discusses it in an interview here.).  My brother, who was HOD’s founder and rhythm guitarist, is now in the New York-based punk band Chesty Malone and the Slice ’em Ups.  But HOD is virtually unknown in the annals of rock, punk, or heavy metal history — probably deservedly so, since no one has done much in this digital age to foster awareness of the band (we tried and I guess failed at the time).

So it’s interesting to me that all of the sudden one of our demo tapes (from 1988!) turns up in Des Moines, Iowa, of all places, and someone posts a blog piece about it: http://idontlistentopunkanymore.blogspot.com/2012/11/heart-of-darkness-leeway-usa-demo-tape.html, and kind of raves about it (at least some aspects of it).  I guess you never can tell what will resonate for people, whether now or in the future.

(The lead guitarist, by the way, who the reviewer loves, is Eric Borkovec, my brother is on guitar and vocals, the bassist is Rusty Glessner, and I am on drums.  The songs are downloadable.)

Easter 2013

 

James Connolly wrote, “An Irish Republic, the only purely political change in Ireland worth crossing the street for, will never be realised except by a revolutionary party that proceeds upon the premise that the capitalist and the landlord classes in town and country in Ireland are criminal accomplices with the British government, in the enslavement and subjection of the nation. Such a revolutionary party must be socialist, and from socialism alone can the salvation of Ireland come” (The Harp, March 1909)

The exact meaning of “socialism” I think in this time period is contested and up for debate, after the history of the 20th century, and I can’t subscribe to any such overarching theory, but his basic premise remains correct.  I am not sure what exactly the solution is, but Connolly is at least a good starting point for thought.  The British govt. may not even be the worst problem right now (though they certainly contribute to it).  The problem is both global and local; Connolly’s words are relevant everywhere.

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/