TRIVIA RECYCLE & MEDICAID UPDATE

MEDICAID UPDATE

Excerpt from eligibility interview with Indiana Family and Social Services Administration:

Caseworker: Sorry for calling so late, I had another appointment.

J: No problem.

Caseworker: So let’s get started.

…

Caseworker: Oh.

…

Caseworker: The program won’t load. I’ll call you back.

J: Ok.

FIN

No call back yet. This is a good thing. As long as my application is pending I don’t have to pay a very large medical bill. I hope to stay in limbo forever.

The system works.

Insiders Call It Assistance

INCOHERENT POETRY LIST

I’ve been busy rearranging my life, so I’m recycling a list  I posted on Facebook when people were posting lists something along the lines of the “20 Poets that Made You Fall In Love w/Poetry” .  My relationship with poetry got a little more sordid once I entered an MFA program, so this list is in, roughly, chronological order–leading up to then, MFA-dom.

So, you know,  highschool and college crushes (and not girlfriends or life partners).

1) Neil Young – Yeah. You listen to a song over and over, memorize the lyrics, hum them to yourself, write them down guessing where the line breaks are…

2) William Blake – Only poet I read in high school. The way opposites bled into each other always clicked with me, so did the epic wackyness of his prophetic books. That was what I was really into.

3) Phil Levine – I was programed to identify with working class values by my dad, so Levine opened a lot of doors for me in college. When he signed my copy of What Work Is, I told him I had been working at an industrial printing press and he said something witty and that was my Woodstock.

4) Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights – It’s real easy to be done with Li-Young Lee and feel silly for ever having liked him. And like a lot of the people I like, he writes some terrible, lazy poems, but I still think Book of My Nights is a solid book.

5) John Berryman, Dream Songs – It’s bigness, the way he’s both parodic and absolutely straightforward in writing about himself. And his music — this has got to be where I started thinking about sound.

6) William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel – Reading “Asphodel…” –one of the first poems I didn’t want to leave. Wanted to set up camp in its universe and just float there.

7) Bob Kaufman – This is a weird one given what has come before, but after I graduated from college I was getting done with the confessionals and was looking for something different. Found him in the Outlaw Bible of Poets and straight away ordered his New Directions book. Surrealism, the Beats, necessary stuff. He’s a tremendously under-read poet.

8) Paul Blackburn The Journals – Found a water/fluid-stained copy of this at a used book store in Wheaton, MD. A lot of people hate on Paul Blackburn if they even know who he is. But his book was so present, irreverent, learned–and he’s a textbook for what you can (unsubtly) do with the line.

9) Russel Edson,The Reason The Closet Man Is Never Sad – Epic in his own way–every poem he writes and has written in the around 30 years is the same. And funny. I kept this in a desk drawer when I worked in a patent payment office and read it on the crapper. Which was the highlight of my day.

10) Ron Silliman, What – A great friend and mentor of mine, Jeff Coleman, gave this to me saying something along the lines of “I don’t get this, but you might like it.” Also read this in that shit year between undergraduate and MFA. Of all his books, this was the right one for me in that moment. Lots of strange and beautiful things going on with sound and syntax. And because it was full of everyday images I stayed on board at the point where I probably would have jumped ship on some of his other works.

11) Octavio Paz – Another shit year poet. Something about the elemental images and line making. One of the poets on the list that I have trouble coming back to, but I was very excited about him at the time and have him to thank for leading me to our next entry…

12) Cesar Vallejo – Excessive, surreal, deranged, unrelenting.

And by this time I had put in my MFA applications. At which point my reading became more contemporary and diverse and my relationship to poetry become more complicated and somewhat angsty. I proceeded mostly arbitrarily and at the mercy of the one book store I could walk to, pretty much buying anything they had poetry related. This meant a lot of 70s gems–an Alan Dugan LP, not one but two Irving Feldman books, Daniel Berrigan, Diane Wackoski, Robert Kelly, oh my.

MIKE, KEVIN, & NICHOLE RISK THEIR SANITY IN A LABYRINTH OF ART.

Good Luck. Stay Pure.

BOOK NOTES: SHAKE by Joshua Beckman

Maybe I’m under-read in New York poets (and this is my first 15 minutes in the closet with Joshua Beckman), but this book felt like an updated Paul Blackburn / Ted Berrigan sandwich. In a mostly good way. Like Paul Blackburn in the getting up and pouring coffee and daily rituals in “Unslide the door” and how “New Haven” starts drifting into occasional sight stanzas without feeling mannered (okay, WordPresses’ text editor doesn’t seem to support text floating from the margin, but just *imagine* that these stanzas looks like unmannered sight stanzas):

Kneeling by the prayer wheel

I saw it again

3 follows 2

2 follows 1

and how best not to hurt anyone’s feelings

The spinning of plates on poles

Or the levitation of anything over a hand…

The second sequence, “Let The People Die” channels Berrigan in the almost pantoum-like repetition crammed into something sonnet-like, and then there’s the mix of soulful lines and, well, fun: “the dreadful bottom,” Coke,  dead surfers, marijuana, and sun.

Of course there are crucial differences. Where PB never met a jarring line break he didn’t like, here Beckman’s breaks are softer and draw less attention to themselves.  And where Blackburn’s hard breaks seemed to try to squeeze the last drops of significance out of sometimes utterly inane material, Beckman—particularly in the first and third sequences—let’s hi s poems shamble along. What I found to be a nothing line like “But the world betrays us all with its existence” isn’t the penultimate line, just as a “Surrealism is old, so everyone should get some” is just an affable way-station in the poem it belongs to.

Let me ride this horse to death. Paul Blackburn wrote some of his worst stuff around the time of In, On, Or About the Premises. These poems were characterized—and maybe worse off—by a particularly masculine kind of moroseness. The speaker recognized it in whatever he looked at. Beckman’s tone is often similar here: post-party, hungover, unhungry, jaded, where being a New Yorker is no longer sexy and incredible. He seems to be at his very best when he is self aware of this morose/acidic vein and dramatizes his struggle to transcend it / hold it at arm’s length for more objective inspection.

The dish hold the candy,

the candy hold the sugar,

and the sweetness of our people is gone

and in its place aloofness, ridicule and

a distant whisper we try to remember.

On sea set sail.

On land sit still.

Contrive a windy mutuality if you must

but the pills only make you pleasant to yourself—

and what is to follow is but weather and circumstance.

The day speaks of the night and the night speaks of the day

And always clouds elevate themselves into translucency.

Somewhere a willow sways above a pool.

Here is the pool.

Here is where the willow will go.

What I felt like was unevenness in this collection, characterizes a lot of what WAVE puts out. While I’ve been a fan of WAVE since I started reading contemporary work, I used to think that this unevenness was a liability, but now not at all.  It’s what they do—a substantial number of their authors walk a line between irony and earnesty and they sometimes transcend the question and go after bigger game. While some poems fall from the wire, I’ve found most of the performance compelling.

Bloody Nose 6 & Call For Bloody Noses

There’s been a strangely big amount of Bloody Nose traffic. Let’s go with it:

Bloody Nose Seekers! Submit your exquisite bloody noses–America caused or not, found or owned, true or false–to Jimmy.Hubris@gmail.com.

Nothing cruel, please.