Three poems in FRiGG

FRiGG Magazine's Summer 2009 issue is out. I have three poems in it. I have an affection for the first poem--I worked on it a long time and I love the comics of Fletcher Hanks.

You know it's a Jean Luc Godard movie when a couple commits an act of violence at a gas station

Barnes and Noble has a 50% off sale on Criterion DVDs and I bought Pierrot Le Fou for $20 on Friday. My sister would say I had an "Artfag weekend." She is not homophobic. Artfag and scenester interchange in her vocabulary--the biggest difference between the two is that the former is more endearing than the latter and almost comes off like a nickname. What makes my weekend an artfag weekend is that I bought Pierrot Le Fou and Poetry Magazine's Flarf/Conceptual Writing issue.

I am suseptible to Criterion and any movie they put out--I mean I'll give any film a chance. My dad joined the Air Force in 1967. They stationed him in Okinawa for 18 months and he spent a good chunk of time in the local movie theaters--he saw a lot of spaghetti westerns, Japanese gangster films, stuff similar to the Nikkatsu stuff Criterion puts out, and Kurosawa films. He saw Planet of the Apes with Japanese subtitles along the left side of the screen. Ditto The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. I grew up watching Janus Film releases on videotape--Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ugetsu, Ran, Kagemusha Seventh Seal, Virgin Spring, Solaris, Andrei Rubelev, etc. The rift with my father involves French cinema. My dad likes Jean Renoir, Jean Gabin, and Jean-Pierre Melville, but never really got into the French New Wave. He liked Breathless, Godard's first film, but didn't like the narrative experimentation and Brechtian shit in Band of Outsiders, Weekend, and others. These are the things fathers and sons bond around when the father was tortured by basketball players in a rural Indiana high school in the from about 1962-1965. Hence, my personal interests and interests fostered by my relationship with my dad become inverted--sports the guilty pleasure I don't really share with him. My dad tends to mock sports and identifies it with non-intellectualism--like how most dads mock/fail to understand/question the sexuality of their sons for reading Larry Levis and watching 400 Blows.

Jean Paul Belmondo plays Fernando, an upperclass Parisian disenchanted with his life. Anna Karina plays the babysitter, actually a former lover of Fernando's, who convinces him to run away with her. We learn quickly she's a gunrunner chased by gangsters. I will not give a full synopsis of the film--you can watch it for yourself--but I will say I liked it a lot and identified with Fernando/Belmondo and the tendancy for Frenchmen who feign art to destroy themselves. Karina impassions Belmondo, drives him nuts. She also inspires him--on the lamb in South France and living on an island with little money, Belmondo reads copious amounts, fishes and is inspired to write a novel. Karina is bored by books and wants to listen to records. She wants Belmondo, at times, to fuck her too. There's an exchange, I can barely paraphrase, where she complains he thinks too much and she feels too much. They end up destroying each other. I didn't have this complete experience lately, I didn't destroy the person and she didn't destroy me, but I tend to sympathize with French cinema post-relationship. It's pretty awesome.

The issue of Poetry is pretty good too--I liked the flarf stuff, particularly K. Silem Mohammad's, "Poems About Trees" and Nada Gordon's "Unicorn Believers Don't Declare Fatwas." Kenneth Goldsmith's essay Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo gave me a better idea of what flarf consists of. Goldsmith's opening--"Start making sense. Dysfunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building"--resonated greatly with me, even though the author, as Ron Silliman pointed out a while ago, might've built a reputation on the fragment. Robert Stewart, the editor of New Letters, has always emphasized the poet's need to learn syntax and grammar. The need to write prose first before poetry. He refused to let us write in fragments in workshop--only complete sentences, the poem must be grammatically correct. I like this idea. I write, and think, in complete sentences when it comes to writing poetry. I don't write flarf, though, I don't think.

If there's a big hoopla around flarf, what about conceptual writing? I think flarf should get a little more cred because it knows not to take itself seriously. Conceptual writing shouldn't be so serious. When I read Christen Bok I feel like an idiot and I feel like he wants me to think of myself as an idiot. One person in the blogosphere--I found through Silliman's daily lists but can't find now--noted Fitterman's "Directory" was better commentary on consumer culture than Hogeland's didactic "At the Galleria Shopping Mall." I don't like either poem. Hogeland tells us what we already know--shopping can serve as a drug/sport/activity that diverts us from reality--in a way that isn't interesting. Fitterman's poem is just a collection of stores, a play around with a mall directory. It doesn't resonate with me. If saw old mall directories--ones from the structure's peak--I'd get chills of nostalgia, not thinking about consumer culture. It doesn't work either. Where's the work in "Directory"? I don't see it.

I'm still new to this stuff, and I'm trying to hone my poetry. As I've written more, and have studied the process, what makes poetry art, and not play-time, is the work involved. I don't see a lot of work in Hogeland's poem either--it seems too easy--but I don't see a lot of work in "Directory," or Craig Dworkin's "Fact," which consists of the ingredients required to print the poem. I understand the idea--"It’s a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language." Other than pouring over science documents for the ingredients of the material, what else is going on? I don't see the process. I guess that's my problem with conceptual writing. Where are the other drafts of "Directory" and "Fact"? Do they exist? I understand the desconstruction of narrative, the need to find a new way to communicate, but it feels like this goes too far in the other direction.

I see what flarf is doing sometimes--what Mohammad and Gordon are doing. It makes more sense. I'll figure this out at some point probably. That's when I'll die.

None of this is meant to be academic.

I miss seeing baseball diamonds on football fields early in the NFL season.

Rejected by McSweeney's: Other potential arcade game nicknames for athletes in wake of the release of Pac-Man Jones' "Make It Rain" stripclub video

Asteroids Rodriguez
Dig Dug Wilson
Joust Reynolds
Mappy O'Neal
Time Pilot Meyers
Q*Bert Rose
Burgertime Thompson
Bump 'n Jump Simpson
1941 Davis
Space Harrier Bouton
Yie Ar Kung Fu Sabo
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting Sosa
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Matsui
The Typing of the Dead Kosar
Mike Tyson's Punch Out Canseco
Simpsons Arcade Game Richardson
Mario Andretti

by Jason Frisbie, Robert J. Baumann, and I

Kitwana Jones, defensive end of the Edmonton Eskimos, on stopping a purse snatcher

I just see this guy running with, like, two purses
in his hand. And I seen this little old lady,
she’s just running behind him and screaming
for dear life, yelling ‘Help, Help, Help.’
So I was looking and said, ‘Oh man,
is this woman really about to chase this guy?

Nobody was going to stop this guy.
It was just women and old people out.
So it was just like Hey KJ, you gotta do
What you gotta do. I just took the initiative,
jumped out of my car, ran him down
and tackled the guy.

It was mad early in the morning.
I was upset. Fort real,
I didn’t even get a good stretch in
or nothing. I had to chase this guy,
and I’m mad, and I’m like Why you out here
trying to rob old women who are really trying
to make an honest living going to work?
And he just laughed. I gave him another arm
to the head, and kick to the side.

(found poem)

My favorite Sin Fang Bous song

Yeah.

Here there's nothing! D'you remember Dan Forest?He wore a black headband. He had found magic markers,That he sent to Las Vegas, because we'd always talked about that.About the Chevy Convertible we wanted to drive until the tires fell off.ln one of these barns a kid came to us with a kind of shoe cleaning box.
''Shine?''

I still don't know how to use blogs

Daniel Silliman has a really cool post about hyperconsciousness in relation to David Foster Wallace.

This makes me re-think my last post.

Is it still viable to write poems about Delta Burke?

I realize certain cultural commodities must brandish "best if used by" dates.

For instance, Snake Plissken is still viable--as are Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian's wall.

Rain in Kansas City right now, maybe like this all day--happy birthday America

My friend Greg Lamer has a show tonight at First Fridays here in KC. "Species of Spaces" will be from 6-9 pm tonight (7/3) at the Keyhole Gallery at 1903 Wyandotte. He has a chapbook of photographs that will be on sale as well.

Responses from journals have been positive--encouragement to send more work. Hadara says to send out 30-40 a month. Kerry Evans, a recent Southern Illinois-Carbondale MFA graduate, said to me once he tries to have stuff out at 80 places at a time. Work feels slow, I have revised a bit. I daydream I live off royalties sometimes--this causes increased depression and my work doesn't become work, but some bullshit device to drive idleness. Not that this daydreaming is horribly self-involved. Writing poetry is a bit of a sickness, like I have to do it. I think that's accurate of most people I admire. The rain helps with productivity.

I don't know how many people read this stuff.

When I hung out with Rob last weekend he showed me a draft of Chicken Boa: Notes on Skrilla. The format of the anthology will use different paper I think. I liked the poems in there--they read well, like poems do. K. Silem Mohammad's and Mo Burford's especially. I liked Zac German's too.

Everyone is beautiful.

Autobiographies about non-famous people

Feathertale has published "I have not had several women, never flew them on jet planes" on their website. The poem is rough, like how I like to write.

Bill Simmons' podcast has a good two part discussion with Chuck Klostermann. Klostermann constantly constructs arguements through the conversations--my friend Lewis has considered using Klostermann in his composition rhetoric classes as examples of assembling a thesis.

You can search for an older Simmons/Klostermann podcast about print culture and the NCAA tournament. Also good stuff.

I sound artifical right now I think.

Sorry.