NICE IS A WEAPON

Yeah Yeah Yeah

2011-11-18T14:01:00.005-06:00

I.

I am teaching creative writing for the first time and my students' writing has been good, a little strange--they have taken to flarf, some to short-shorts. My friend, H, said: "you let them weird stuff and they will absorb it." He is teaching too and has had his student's reading confessionalists. Now all their work consists of confessions.

II.

I watched Woman is the Future of Man about a month ago and there's an introduction by Martin Scorsese raving about new Korean film: how it shows him something new and exciting, shows him what cinema can be.

Call it where I live; call it the malaise of the lower-Midwest, where I have been trained, but I never hear old poets talk that way about new poets. That new poets are doing something new and exciting, showing them what poetry can be. They just seem to think new poets make no fucking sense. I think about this all the time, almost too much.

What I just wrote is sort-of bullshit: I've been taught by Robert Stewart and Lisa Lewis don't think that way; I just feel it sometimes--almost all the time--and I hear it from people who don't seem to care about what poetry and art does because they can't figure it out. They suffer from some sort of bumpkinitis.

Why write, or read, or watch when you close yourself to anything that falls outside of your comfortable expectation? Just because you think you speak clear and know how to write a sentence; just because you live in a place where a "handshake" is all you need for a business transaction. Why think you know anything about art and can determine, easily, that other people who make art you don't understand aren't making art? There is no craft, there are no rules. Don't be around me and keep saying "what does that mean?" when a Past-Ronald Reagan gets a time machine and becomes a future Reagan and rides a robotic horse. Or when you hear a Ratatat song instead of an Alice in Chains song at the bar. There are no binaries, just middle-space. Stop fronting, admit you are wrong about everything, everybody. This includes me. I know I'm wrong most of the time; I know I make terrible first decisions. Art isn't a used car. Especially poetry isn't a used car: you won't feel screwed over if you take it on its terms; the lemons don't look like lemons usually.

III.

Maybe I am hypersensitive.

New Poems, Films

2011-06-16T22:41:00.002-05:00

I.

I am in Oklahoma, so I have had a quiet summer. Some of my friends are out of town so I don't know. I have been watching a lot of movies.

II.

I just watched Gigante; I always want to be a quiet strong guy with empathy, but ain't got shit. The hero is weird, but I rooted for him.

III.

Here are some poems at ACREAGE. I met Bayard, Sara, and George McCormick at Scissortail and they are cool people.

2011-06-01T00:12:00.001-05:00

MMMMMM-HMMMMMMM

SUMMERRRRR

2011-05-18T13:52:00.004-05:00

1.

My friend told me: When people asked James Tate "how to do it (poetry)" Tate refused to say. If you tell everyone how you "figured it out" you lose everything.

2.

It is at this point that I think I've a-HAed the narrative enterprise: you keep explaining yourself, you stay sincere all the time in the work, you become insincere; you become as "elusive" and "frustrating" as a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet.

3.

I can't talk about this stuff too much; then, I think too much; then, I fall apart and revert to watching Steven Segal movies.

Amazon.com's poetic statement

2011-05-18T13:29:00.001-05:00

"It appears that it's National Poetry Month again, and I would be a poor servant of poetry (SOP) indeed, if I did not do my own small part in extolling the virtue and nobility or this ancient and noble art! So, in defense of poetry and of poets:

-Poetry is more efficient than fiction. Why read 500 pages of fiction (Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for example) that belabors a point that a really good poem can make more memorably in one or two pages.

-Poetry is more complex, more difficult than fiction. It is more comprehensively moving than fiction. As an art of sound and rhetoric, it involves you totally.

-Poetry is for adults.

-Poetry doesn't sell. Pardon me, but the bestsellers list doesn't exactly speak to the superiority of fiction! Fiction, when it's not so painfully earnest, is downright silly! That poetry doesn't sell is no - I repeat, no - point of shame to poets or poetry!

-The world of poetry is small and intimate. If reading fiction is like being in a sports stadium, reading poetry is like being in a mid-sized conference room. You can mill around and soon meet everybody.

Let's see... that's about it, I think. Thank you for the chance to discharge of my duty as a SOP, because truly we need a National Poetry Month (as we need a Feline Cancer Awareness Month or a Recycle Your Beer Bottles Month). Pace Frank O'Hara, who said that let the children eat candy, he doesn't give a yam whether people read poetry or not - poetry does continually require institutional promotion and support.

Oh yeah, this book - it's terrible!"

Summer readin' list

2011-03-28T23:37:00.003-05:00

Things have been stressful but could be okay in a couple of weeks (god willing). I have formulated a summer reading list in the event things are okay and will be:

Camera Lucida Roland Barthes
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon
Flies Michael Dickman

That's all so far. I've watched some movies and want to talk about them--actually write about them, I am done talking about them.

I will get to that soon.

Also, check out the new Greensboro Review. I am in there with Ted Kooser, better known to his friends as TK.

I need to work on my empathy

2011-02-16T20:17:00.007-06:00

1.

Last Christmas my dad stopped me when I was outside, warming up my car, and he stressed that I must "work on my empathy." My relationship with my sister had started to break down and I barely talked to her this past Christmas; I never talk to her now. I'm not sure how to do it either.

I also treated a woman here in Stillwater very poorly and I rarely see her around now. My friend asked me if I have ever been hurt, we were drunk, and I said "fuck yeah, I've been hurt," or something like that. Probably not as funny or visceral. Probably, I just said "yeah."

2.

I kept thinking I've been writing poems from this "character" named Tommy but they all sound the same. I need to ditch the artifice and realize this is just my fucking voice. Every poem I have written since I moved down here has been me and only me. With the exception of a few early ones (I've tried to bring in this feminine voice, but she sounds like me too, or my sister). I don't know what I am doing sometimes.

3.

I tend to get pegged as a "funny guy." This is fine sometimes but most of the time I wish it wasn't, and I know it's partly my fault. Boisseau used to recommend Old Male Poets to me she thought I'd like him. I kind of did, well, I liked half a book, but I finally came to the realization his work lacks ghosts.

Boisseau kind of pointed to this and so did Hadara: poems contain ghosts, or ghost words of the Real Poem you're trying to write. There has been this intangible aspect to people's poems I either like or I don't like and it's because that most the language of most people's work is so polished it is dead--think of the Poet as the big furry thing in those Warner Bros. cartoons strangling the life out of a pretty thing, desiring to name it George. Their poetry lack ghosts. The poem has been busted.

I don't know if I have any right to say this--I can't write for shit most times and my work is fairly clear and accessible.

I guess I try to keep ghosts in it--one way to do this is to stay messy I think, if just a little messy. I don't want to be beautiful all the time; I always think of anti-lyric (not so much prosody as "how would I say this").

When I'd go back to Boisseau and tell her I didn't like the Old Male Poet she recommended, she somtimes would say "I don't either." I liked this a lot: she knows there is something of worth in people's work she doesn't agree with. I miss that right now.

4.

My friend Andrew's daughter Eleni did. She drew Tommy and called it "Tommy is sad."

Andrew asked her why Tommy looks up. She said "most people look up when they are sad."

New Book Bonanza; Carta Blanca; Army of Shadows (1969)

2010-12-02T14:55:00.003-06:00

These are all quickies.

I bought some books:

Alan Dugan Poems Seven: New and Complete Poems

(Haesong let me borrow this for a while but I just bought a used copy on Abe.)

Jack Spicer My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Ben Mirov Ghost Machine
Lucas Farrell Birds Any Damn Kind

II.

My friend Karen's mom got me Carta Blanca from just across the border. I drank three last night I drank them while I talked to my friend Jason Frisbie. I got kind of buzzed, it's all 3.2 beer in Oklahoma, and I talked about Dugan--like how I like him and how he is a middle-class Bukowski, someone much more relate-able to the young male rust-belt mind set. Dugan went to college, not great colleges, and worked office jobs I think. At least the work points to that. Some of his poems are about ad agencies, but he is the Peggy, not the Don Draper.

III.

I also watched Army of Shadows (1969), which was the saddest film I think I have ever seen. It is amazing.

Man...

2010-11-12T11:18:00.002-06:00

I only ever talked to C.D. Wright once and she warned me that the worst thing that will happen to me is that I will imitate myself. That seems to be happening right now.

Like, I am trying to use Takashi Shimura in a poem. Or the feeling of being Takashi Shimura (he is in the blog pic). I don't know how to write those eyes.

Dang.

Thinly veiled marketing; movies with dick jokes; White Male Heterosexual Poetics

2010-10-24T11:28:00.005-05:00

I.

I've never lived on the coasts or went to a liberal arts college and I've never lived in a "college town" until now, and I have picked a hell of a place. Stillwater is okay, but I don't travel around it much. People outrage over two Wal-Marts and Chili's and that stuff and that all sucks, but I don't know, the weather bothers me most. 82 during the day and then 40ish at night. There's no middle ground. It overcasted yesterday and stuck around the high-60s, which was nice, and Nebraska-OSU meant the town was easy to navigate. I don't like using the word "happy"--who knows what that means, but I do like driving around on Saturday/Sunday afternoons in the fall. South and East KC provided that opportunity pretty regularly. Stillwater doesn't: the town is small and everybody is out, so it's kind of miserable trying to get downtown or on Perkins--the big strip of Wal-Marts and Chili's. Everybody's out and having a good time and I hate it.

Best thing about football games, though: the town dies. I drove to a coffee shop and met with Haesong and Andrew Terhune and we talked about the first year exam and conducted a "team-building exercise" by watching Jackass 3D. Sometimes, people take movies too seriously but not seriously enough. Jackass 3D was pretty good--I look forward to True Grit and Tron Legacy.

II.

I think white male heterosexual American poets should stop writing about jazz, one thing, and another thing: we should not try to write about our vacations to third world countries; we confuse sympathy and empathy for the locals. I think the one thing a white male heterosexual American poet can take on in a political sense, and not sound like a retard or a colonial, is in the context of class. That's the one grief a white male heterosexual American poet can experience first-hand that doesn't involve relationship heartbreak.

III.

I am reading with Justin Runge on November 5th as part of An Actual Kansas.

This all I have right now.

MARKET SYNERGY

2010-10-10T23:52:00.005-05:00

PANK Magazine asked me some questions.

Jellyfish 3.0 is up with two prose poems.

My friend suggested I try anacoluthon. I always thought my work is inherently messy/strange. I don't know if I can get away with that.

Lifted Brow Online

2010-09-28T13:06:00.001-05:00

Ronnie Scott, editor of Lifted Brow has started posting short-shorts on the mag's website. The first of two short-shorts/prose poems is up right now.

A student told me about a week ago she liked Twilight a lot. I said that's fine.

Poetics? Blah

2010-09-23T12:50:00.004-05:00

I.

Stephen Colbert talked to Guillermo Del Toro about the monsters in the latter's films last night. Particularly, the variety in Hellboy--how the monsters, all together, look wildly different yet consistent in terms of "Del Toro's artistic influence." That, intuitively, Del Toro designed the various vampires and monsters with cities growing from their faces, and that he put them all in the same space, created consistency. I found that interesting because I like the second Hellboy and Cronos for intuitive reasons: nothing looked like it existed in this world, but still sort of did. That it all exists in Del Toro's head, and that he places all these "inconsistent" images together, creates the consistency.

II.

That got me thinking about Mary Jo Bang's Bride of E. I tried to read it in the Spring, to review it for New Letters, but I got sidetracked. At the time, I found the book not so much boring but almost too much in terms of high and low culture slammed together. I re-read it for workshop on Tuesday and I think I "get it" now and I think it's excellent. At least I think some of the poems are some of the best I've read in a while.

K as in F Blank Blank K

The friction. The fire. Without the breathless wonder
In front of you. The swimming suit,
The sand.

The book on the nightstand.
In the old way. Open the book.
Here's one beginning: the crab dragged its claws

Across the desert. Sad as sobbing. Sad as what
Our half feet felt as we crawled
From the shallow sea-salt water.

Here's another: Krazy Kat watches while Alice falls
Headfirst and catches a forward jar
Of marmalade in the dark.

Someone whispers, "You
Are surrounded by evil."
Then, "Christ,

Look at the way you use language here
In the common area." And believe me, I know.
Look away, look again.

At that, we can see
The art of the act of the moon
And the earth matching up on the plasma screen.

I'm mostly interested in the poem's title and the appearance of George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat lives in the desert and his friend Ignatz throws bricks at cops. Krazy also speaks in a dialect that at times is almost incomprehensible--Bang kind of plays on that in the title and definitely does when the "someone" steps in: "Look at the way you use language here/In the common area." What I like most about the poem, and the others in Bang's book, is that you don't need to know who Krazy Kat is to get the joke, but it's still cool. That they all exist together in Bang's world and that they're doing/not doing things in highly unusual ways is enough.

Not to say anybody can do anything they want: a logic has to exist.

The "someone" could represent different things: the voice of culture in response to Krazy Kat, the voice of culture in response to Bang's work and the unusual-ness of the book, the voice of culture responding to Bang's funny title. There's logic operating in the poem that makes it work and it only works because Bang is deliberate, either consciously or unconsciously.

III.

I don't know, I like the consistency of inconsistency: to be messy with art. I am still trying to articulate that and it won't happen here.

IV.

A pet peeve: I think, if I get the opportunity to teach poetry, I will say this. "If you bring in a draft and the story you give us about the poem is more interesting than the poem itself, don't fucking bother next time." Not: never write again. Just work at it harder. I get tired of that stuff. Is it still cool to be a curmudgeon? I think I feel like I am an asshole when it comes to the craft.

V.

It's unusually nice in Oklahoma today. That's all I got. 70s-ish.

Gem City/Fountain City

2010-08-31T12:11:00.002-05:00

Greg Lamer has copies of my chapbook Gem City/Fountain City still available. It's a classy looking chap for a decent price in the Black Sparrow vein. The poems are pretty strange and loose.

Melancholia Maybe

2010-07-28T12:30:00.005-05:00

For as much as I railed against this town, my body has shook from a heightened sense of awareness that I will miss this place; the Kansas City period is over and it hurts. I know the blah, blah: You don't what you got 'till it's gone, etc. I moved to town at age 26, when some or most people have started families already, a fucking kid, or at least juvenile of my craft. I went to college later than most, 22, so I still existed in an "undergrad" mode: Everybody is single, they all drink, have ample free-time, think of their futures as this thing in a fog. Hadn't worked or busted my ass in a while, save for six months in Japan. I lived in the "playtime" haze most people who want to write exist in early on--I thought product over process, did not consider revision. Daydreamed champagne and an office with walls of books never anything specific, but with colorful spines. Daydream I am handsome. That's not much different from the occasional daydream today, but now I think about the work, find myself in never ending process.

The move here and the program led to professional development I didn't expect.

I've also met a group of exceptional people I wouldn't have met if I didn't come out here. This includes a close-knit of friends who also will leave/left town: I said goodbye to Lewis in the Westport Third Watch parking lot at the end of June, Robin and Greg at Blue Koi on 39th street yesterday, Marcus--who is not leaving--at Dave's Stagcoach last night. This whole thing will continue to roll at least through Friday. It hurts in some ways, but I don't want to compare it to something big like death from a long-term cancer, or whatever. That would infer it was never a decision to come here three years ago; rather, it was inflicted on me. I'd rather think of this as an Elton John temporary farewell tour: far too long for it's own good, me dressed like Donald Duck in the end.

Needs more drunk Tina Fey

2010-07-18T11:31:00.005-05:00

i.

This move to Stillwater is coming up quick. I still need to finalize everything.

ii.

I saw three movies in the last 48-ish hours: Inception (friday), Ponyo (Saturday afternoon), and American Splendor.

iii.

Of the three American Splendor was the best--it's visually interesting like the other two movies, messes with story structure in a po-mo sense like the other two movies, but is very clear and easy to follow. That the film functions as biography probably creates that structure to mess around in. I also identify with the film's very Ohio-ness--I've tried to write about this before: It seems Ohio, and to a similar degree Indiana and Michigan, produces the working/lower middle class intellectual stiff. Examples include Vonnegut, Bukowski (who is from LA, yes), Michael Moore, and Pekar.

An early scene in American Splendor has Pekar showing his "comics" (mere scripts with stick figure drawings) to R. Crumb. Pekar talks about the potential to make comics very different from what we expect and compares his work to French filmmakers and the Italian De Sica. I liked this a lot. He doesn't see himself as a revolutionary--there's no manifesto--he's just trying to communicate the Incommunicable At Times, and trying to do it in the least bullshit way possible. There is no high-art/low-art with guys like that. Comics can be uttered in the same breath as new-wave European cinema. Pekar, and the others, mix all culture up, use whatever they can to reach as many people they can. It's an aesthetic I embrace but have a difficult time articulating. I probably won't ever be able to do it.

iv.

Call it general cinematic malaise, but people seem to confuse "intelligent" with "muddled." Human beings themselves can be intelligent and muddled--look at Pekar, Vonnegut, Buk, John Berryman, Einstein, etc. Films shouldn't be--Kurosawa, to paraphrase, said a great movie should be one that's clear and understandable for everyone. Inception doesn't seem clear to ChristopherNolan. An "auteur" I guess, this film and Dark Knight suffer from too many ideas packed into two and a half hours. Nolan needs to simplify his ideas--why not make Extraction, where the characters steal corporate secrets from the minds of billionaire CEOs first, and then make Inception in 2012?

The first third of this film is excellent. Nolan drops us in media res at a real-time pace--we get thrust into the process of infiltrating dreams for corporate secrets in a well crafted action sequence--before Nolan slows down and walks us through the "process" of infiltration in a quick, articulate way. The concept of inception--to place a thought into one another person's mind--is interesting, but complicates the dreamscape and the film's world too much. By the second half the rules established earlier fall apart and I wasn't sure what was going on anymore.

This could be Nolan's ultimate flaw. He makes interesting "intelligent" films but makes them in an era where we crave for any authenticity from Hollywood. That Nolan gives us a sharp-looking film with a cool idea is "good enough" when it's clear that it is not good enough. Nolan may never get feedback he really needs: to simplify his ideas, to focus better.

v.

Ditto Ponyo I guess. Not a lot happens in a narrative sense, but I like Miyzaki's films for their poetic intensity--his movie's small moments make them great. Read the synopsis here. Sosuke lives on a small house on a cliff with his mom (Tina Fey). His dad captains ships and is gone long stretches of time. Early in the film, Sosuke's mom expects Sosuke's dad to come home, but he bails--takes on a second shift. Mom's reaction? She opens a big beer, gets drunk, and angry, but not in a Maury Povich-mom sort of way. It's longing and it's something organic that I don't get from Pixar movies. It's hard to describe the great stuff in Ponyo.

It's easier to describe what kind of sucks about it--nothing seems to happen, there's a little tension but not much. The story is told from the perspective of Sosuke and, like stories told by kids, it's boring construction-wise. To quote my friend Robin, who watched it with me: All the parents respect me (Sosuke) and my Kindergarten girlfriend is jealous of this super cool/perfect girl from the sea. Ponyo drowns this town and everyone seems all right with it. The moon, somehow, has come very close to the earth and could crush it, but whatever: everyone respects Soskue and he'll figure it out because he's fucking five years old.

vi.

I hope this all makes sense. I hate when people write stuff and call it a "rant." That's not interesting.

Stuff Stuff Stuff

2010-07-09T12:41:00.007-05:00

i.

Willow Springs 66 is out. I have two poems in it. It's a solid issue.

ii.

When anyone says out loud "You know, lately, people ask me Hey [Name here], 'what do you think of [important topic to Name here]?' Friends, here's my take..." no one has asked that individual their opinion on the important topic. No one asks Bill O'Reily or Colin Cowheard their opinions on anything. Ditto Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart--though those two are conscious of the trope and exploit it. I only bring this up so that I can talk about LeBron James.

iii.

I'm from southwest Ohio so, like everybody outside of the Cleveland-Akron-Canton megalopolis, I never followed the Cavaliers before he arrived. So if people outside of that megalopolis mourn, it's probably crocodile tears. I got the Cincinnati Reds right now, I've never actually been to Akron, and I will move to Stillwater at the end of the month; so I'll just follow Kevin Durant and the Thunder (who seem to be setting people up for a 1996-1998 Utah Jazz-style disappointment: they will win, make it to the finals then lose to the Miami Heat--an easier disappointment because overcoming market economics to raise yourself up by your bootstraps only to lose to an unstoppable-team-of-destiny-touched-by-God is easier to reconcile, because you lacked control from the beginning).

LeBron, however, is not unlike any other lower-middle class/poor kid from a post-industrial, medium-sized Ohio town. You want to love your city, you want to represent it and share its great qualities with the world, but you will always leave. The only people who stay in Dayton: (a) come from money, (b) have an engineering background (that usually means they come from money), (c) lucked into a stable profession that keeps them comfortable, or (d) had few options and are stuck. If someone has the option to leave, they take it. I imagine Cleveland-Akron-Canton is very similar. It is accurate for similar kids from Toldeo, Mansfield, and Zanesville. Cincinnati doesn't count because it is Cincinnati. Columbus is cosmopolitan, a sort of Austin Texas-like aberration.

iv.

LeBron will miss northeast Ohio, and talk about it his first year in Miami. Annoy Bosh and Wade with anecdotes about how Sushi Rock on West 6th beats Toni's Sushi. Talk about how the Marlins bought a World Series in 1997 without any notion of irony. Guys from Ohio like to talk about how much they love Ohio, but don't want to live there. The only friends Guys Who Leave Ohio have left in Ohio are guys like Delonte West. LeBron will adjust and the Heat will win a title in 2012. And in 2030, he will cover the Cavaliers for FOX Sports Ohio. He will wear bowties and thick-framed glasses like the ones worn by dictators.

Super Arrow 2

2010-06-14T22:25:00.002-05:00

The new issue of Super Arrow is online. My contribution is here. I like Elieen G'Sell's poems--especially this one.

I try the jarring ending line but it never seems to work. She does this very well.

Poor White text via Project Gutenberg

2010-05-17T11:43:00.003-05:00

You can get Poor White here.

I read three chapters last night--Hugh McVey, a lankey Missourian, moves east to Ohio to find a connection with people around him. It's yet to work out. I've only read this and Winesburg but Anderson, and to a lesser degree James Thurber and Kurt Vonnegut, capture Indiana-Ohio male loneliness well. And Anderson wrote in a period of rust-belt prosperity too. Thurber wrote from the safety of New York. Vonnegut saw the tail end of it.

That's all I got right now.

I could've read Sherwood Anderson but went with Real Genius (1985)

2010-05-16T22:44:00.000-05:00

i.

Martha Coolidge's film works best when Chris Knight (Kilmer) and Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarret) deal with the alienation of work in a specific field. Creative writing students and scientists connect only at that point of alienation it seems; they both think in ways that dumbfound businessmen and communicators of the world. The two montages--an inappropriate number: You should have one or three, a golden ratio--of Knight and Taylor's adjustment seem particularly relate-able. To ride easy on talent only to be forced to use it. I hope I don't sound arrogant. My old roommate Ethan was a chemist. Most of our conversation revolved around tv shows and movies, but we also shared in the triviales of publication, funding, and "the right programs." Things other people in other fields don't worry as much about, maybe.

It's when the film gets silly does it suck. Building a five-megawatt chemical laser seems ridiculous but it is handled well. Val Kilmer and his friends jump the shark when they break into a secret military base to sabotage said-chemical laser and point it at Prof. Jerry Hathaway's (William Atherton) house, which they destroy by filling it with popcorn. The film's tonal shift from college-growing pains to espionage lacks the bite of wild tonal-shifts found in Korean movies like Old Boy--that we benefit from a culture that dictates form might be why we fail at shifting tones as easily.

I like Real Genius a lot though. William Atherton's character reminds me of Whitney Terrell. Not that Whitney's a villain. Both men exude a toughness/cockiness and Knight and Taylor both crave for his approval on different levels through the film. Knight barbs him but needs to graduate. Taylor, intimidated/admired that Hathaway picked him out, finds a mentor in him. All this shit gets thrown out the window when the duo creates a death machine. The white males in UMKC's program felt that way about Whitney--the desire to one-up him and receive approval. I was the poet so I was a bit outside of the admiration.

ii.

Robin took me to Arthur Bryant's for my birthday. The two things I know about Calvin Trillin are these: (1) he's from Kansas City (2) he called Arthur Bryant's the best restaurant in the world. I kind of agree on the latter. The sauce is excellent, a gritty-bitter difficult to emulate, but Gates has better fries and meet--except maybe burnt-ends, which Bryant's does a better job of.

The original is located at about 18th and is probably the furthest east any upper-middle class white people travel within the city. I don't think Trillin brings this up but I hear this addage from said white people: "Arthur Bryant's is the only place where you see all walks of life together, eating, joking, living happily," etc. etc. etc. This disregards the fact that black people cook and serve the food for white people. I never see any accountants with blackberries hanging from their belts eating with trumpet players in bright yellow suits.

An old guy and his wife ate at a table near us. Lewis and Greg were also there. The old guy wore what looked like a bushwhacker hat--Lewis joked that this guy's attire was fairly accurate of what white people think of east Kansas City: The whole place is a safari to them, the outback to them.

It's funny to see other white people order at Arthur Bryant's and Gates. They hold up the line, ask for extra-crispy fries or light sauce on short-ends. They then get what everyone else gets or nothing at all--like the soup nazi episode in Seinfeld.

iii.

Sean and Amy gave me Poor White, Anderson's novel after Winesburg, Ohio. I've read just a little. A young man lifts himself up from his bootstraps, becomes a great inventor. Anderson's prose works much like Winesburg's here. The omniscient narrator operates in exposition with few scenes. It seems to make more sense than in Winesburg--Lewis pointed out those stories are narrated by a periphery character who seems to have an exceptional amount of dirt on the whole town. A more sinister Della Reese or Bruno Ganz noting the inhabitants. Poor White's narrator is no angel or side-character. There's also not much going on so far. It lacks the paper pills, the strange images of Winesburg. The quiet desperation as well. Maybe it'll pick up.

2010-05-12T13:30:00.003-05:00

I went back to Dayton last week a broke-ass. Friends paid my bills at places--mostly cheap beer and chicken wings in hot sauce. I tried to leave as small a foot print as possible.

Dad and I get drunk at BW3s every trip I'm back now, it seems. It's cheap and near enough to the house he lets me drive. I'm much taller than my dad--he's 5'10, about 180. More stubborn than me and tough, an inner-city public librarian. We both drank until near blackout. He never drinks at other times, I think.

I told friends I'd make it rain for them one day. A reference to Fat Joe's song, because I'm still white and lived in a town that was technically a suburb. My Dad's response: "Are you the Kwisatz Haderach?" His question a reference to Frank Herbert's Dune and it's white male messiah with a poison knife. A messiah whose eyes turn blue after he's chosen.

Writing's been tough the last few weeks. I feel it might be coming back.

2010-04-28T13:59:00.002-05:00

HTMLGiant posited: Who is the Santana of literature?

I thought about that a bit too: Who is the classic hollywood filmmaker of poetry? B.H Fairchild=Billy Wilder. If Larry Levis was alive he'd be Nick Ray.

Also

2010-04-27T09:41:00.001-05:00

Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize by Elizabeth Marie Young

My birthday is May 13

2010-04-26T18:36:00.002-05:00

If you know me, here are some books I would like you to buy for me for my birthday. When I open the gift I will be surprised for real:

A Mouth in California by Graham Foust
The Difficult Farm by Heather Christie
Iowa by Travis Nichols
Pigafetta is My Wife by Joe Hall

Odds and ends

2010-04-23T15:49:00.004-05:00

i.

I saw Chang Rae Lee read at the Kansas City Public Library. Whitney Terrell brought him in. Lee signed books and then Lewis, Zac, me, and some others went to the Harry's Country Club to sit around and drink. I talked to Chang Rae about Korean cinema. He said something good and precise: The closest American filmmaker to the Korean style is Quentin Tarantino and even he is conservative. Where Tarantino ties himself to his aesthetic completely--Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, Pulp Fiction all operate chaotically, but still within a strict genre form--Korean filmmakers like Im Sang-Soo and Park Chan-woo deconstruct form and convention with exactness. They shift from slapstick comedy to ultra violence in a single scene. Such are Koreans--they work hard, then party as if they're ready to die. And only they can pull it off.

This is my problem: I blow up the form before I learn it. I run too much off of energy.

ii.

I think I can expand this idea through the metaphor of neighborhoods. Drive through an old neighborhood in a city and you'll see lots of different houses close together: Second Empire, Queen Anne, etc. Old trees envelope them. The yards are green but a little wild--they look like Woody Allen from the early 70's--and dandelions hang out in there and on the burns. My work always ends up like this; a unity in variety if that's possible (usually I fail at that, too, like this metaphor).

iii.

Now think of suburbia or better Kansas. No trees stand over big bright cookie-cutter houses. The yards uniform and wide, buzzed like R. Lee Ermey, they all look the same. If there's a variety in houses, it's a more explicit economic indicator. Bigger means you sell more and care less about detail. My work never ends up tight, but I must appreciate this approach: It is safer, can be fun. I could learn to play more golf in this environment. I will like driving through old neighborhoods more.

iv.

I'll be reading with Marcus Myers, Jeff Pollard, and Karla Deel Friday, April 30 in Lawrence, KS at Mirth Cafe, 745 New Hampshire.

v.

I will attend the PhD in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University this fall.

"Drawing"

2010-04-06T20:04:00.005-05:00

Tao Lin gave a lecture at KCAI on Friday. Part of lecture involved his drawing process--how he crafted his hamsters, etc. He had people come up and draw hamsters on a whiteboard to be judged. I didn't go up. I did try to draw something based on his process, however. Today I tried to recreate it in MS Paint:

It's supposed to be John Berryman. I tried to give him the neutral face and the "author-photo" pose, but I fumbled the eyes. The hair is off.

The lecture was cool. We ate sushi with him afterward and joked around.

Three journals that include my poems have arrived in the last two days: Harpur Palate, Hayden's Ferry Review, and West Wind Review. They are all mother-fucking bomb-ass. It's cool to be accepted with these people.

The gift for breeders

2010-03-28T17:35:00.005-05:00

Last night I stayed home and drank a little Svdeka, Lewis left it over here the night before, and watched a rerun of SNL featuring John Ham. It was terrible.

During the show they ran this Kindle ad:

Those people don't look like they read--maybe they do, but I'm pretty sure they don't. If they lived in Kansas City, they'd hang out in Broadway Cafe all day and hold Mother Night or Cheese Monkeys to their faces, eyes darting for others around the place. Maybe not Mother Night, but Everything is Illuminated.

They'd then come to Dave's Stagecoach and try to drink at tour table, commend Lewis for his jukebox picks, patronize the one black customer--the guy with pitbulls in his pickup truck, who loves thrash metal. The Kindle Kids will ask him if he loves Lil' Wayne.

I have a lesion on my face from something, that's why I'm crabby.

Jimmy Chen posted HTMLGiant's official Kindle Post a few weeks ago. It was funny and I never thought about the 1996 implication. Remember Newton?

I started reading Mother Night--a .48 paperback copy. The paper smells like cinnamon. About page 60, I met Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason Jones D.D.S, D.D and the other and the other "antiqued fascists." Jones praises Howard W. Campbell Jr., the Nazi propagandist/American spy, for telling the truth "when everybody else was telling lies." Clearly, Campbell told lies--the truth Jones and his friends embraced were not real at all. Campbell doesn't say anything. Yet, at least. I'm still working through it.

I wonder if Glenn Beck might be like Campbell in some way. What does he say when Mr.Upper-Middle-Class-Guy from Cincinnati, who threw dollars at Parkinson sufferers at a Teabag Rally, shakes Mr. Beck's hand and calls him a ray of light. Deep down, I want Beck to really be a sham, a guy who undermines the right in secret. A Kurt Vonnegut character.

I like the smell of cheap books. I like the sentences of the rust-belt intelligentsia.

Also, via HTMLGiant

2010-03-28T17:28:00.001-05:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/the-tea-partys-rank-amateurism/38077/

2010-03-20T13:53:00.002-05:00

I found Triple Canopy today thanks to HTMLGiant. The second piece I read came from Triple Canopy 5: Television for the People.

In high school, I took video production classes and hung out in the studio all the time. One video segment I made every week was Stag Beetle--I played a luchador with the power of the bug. Instead of a colorful mask, I used my dad's ski mask.

Nothing seems to work right now.

New Book Rundown, Hayden's Ferry Contributor Spotlight

2010-03-08T14:45:00.004-06:00

What I have new:

Motorman David Ohle

EVER Blake Butler

The Black Automoton Douglas Kearney

A Sunday in God Years Michelle Boisseau

Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane

I've also been re-reading Larry Levis--Elegy, Dollmaker's Ghost, The Afterlife. Have a bunch of Simic too. My reading of all these has been very buffet. I read a poem here, a poem there. Motorman became my focus last night.

I wrote a contributor spot for Hayden's Ferry Review. They let me reference Sam Bowie.

Maybe things are picking up.

Love poem to Mirjam Ott, Captain, Swiss Women's Curling Team

2010-02-25T18:40:00.007-06:00

(draft)

Let me sweep your surface with my broom.
Knock that rock into your circle
and score anything but a blank in your end.
Those brunette curls in my hands, your eyes
motherfucking crazy, my friend Jeanne
said your eyes were that. She wouldn't trust you.

Yell "go" in Swiss like we're in the Olympics.
I'll pashaw those Swedes and Danish
sisters, all blonds, all black tights, skirts.
Drop those Adidas athletic pants, please.

Men's hockey bores me. Your perfect shot
from your knees, your knock-out

percentage of 85%
(Olympic average: 68%)
do not bore me. Your face

I've seen before. In dreams
it is blurred when looked at
straight on, like you cover your face with silk
when I talk to you and everything--
the face, nose, those sniper eyes--
only focus in my peripheral

vision, when you're on NBC doggy style.
The rock in your hand, that clarity/
Deja vu sense comes back and I'm all right
again. I see you in high def.
Stay with me and fuck Canada.

2010-02-17T16:01:00.001-06:00

I'll be reading with Joni Lee, Lindsay Waples, and Eric Scott at Watermark Books in Wichita Friday night at 6:30.

In the beginning, everyone looked like Tim Tebow

2010-02-03T00:16:00.000-06:00

Writing this thesis has got me thinking about the intentionality my pop culture artifacts lack. If I use pop culture, it needs to be in a way to get to the image without distracting the reader. Robert Haas had a poem that used the climatic scene involving Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai. I over complicate and get to convoluted. I'm not sure how to get around that. My sentences all sound the fucking same.

I submitted to the Poetry Society of America's chapbook contest in December. I rounded up the poems I felt like were the most successful, further edited them, and sent the whole thing out at the deadline. Everything seems insurmountable. Even when I get work placed, and start to think about a chap or a book, the whole thing never feels done. I think this is why I don't have multiple chaps or a manuscript done. Who wants to read? Who will read it? I think I communicate clearly but everybody leaves, so I must not articulate myself very well.

I found Ron Silliman's post about contests this morning (scroll down a little for the post)--this made me feel a little bit better.

Keep truckin' right?

FRiGG Law and Order Issue 27

2010-02-02T10:41:00.005-06:00

FRiGG 27 is up now. I have a poem in it. Ellen Parker, the editor, asked me in the fall if I watched Law and Order. I said yes and she asked me to contribute something. Julianne Nicholson probably doesn't read poetry. That might be a good thing, because I think she's pregnant. Her husband's last name is Cake.

Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth is quite good and exciting. I have been reading it with the intention of reviewing it for New Letters. The last time I talked about wishing America would implode so I can write Tomaz Salamun or Charles Simic poems with greater authenticity--they write well, they're funny and they're beautiful. The mix of violence, surrealism, and hope, I thought, could not be captured by a white, male, American poet.

Svalina nails this feeling by using American cultural artifacts within the context of Judeo-Christian-American creation myth. It's violent, it's funny, it's beautiful, and it's sad. He's successful when me, and others, are not. He does not graft Eastern European images onto American sentiment. It never gets hollow. The form gets a bit repetitive, but the poems never die in the shell. He reminds me of the best of Simic and friends.

I hope that's accurate. That's the spirit I'm trying to capture in the review. I don't know how to review anything though.

On escaping America

2010-01-22T13:15:00.011-06:00

Robert Whiting lacks a "literary gloss"--his sentences clunky at times, with a focus on pure information--but his ability for providing the funniest and most relevant details makes him enviable. I read You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld, and The Samurai Way of Baseball (also called the The Ichiro Effect) when I lived in Japan. He is funny, clear, mostly precise, and informed. Japan Times is currently running a four part series about Bobby Valentine's managerial run with the Chiba Lotte Marines. I lived in Okayama, two hours west of Osaka, for six months from August 2005 to March 2006. Valentine's Marines won the Japan Series that fall, sweeping the Hanshin Tigers--the team from Osaka. Our friends felt much grief; the Tigers haven't won a Japan Series for 25 years now. The Marines hadn't won a series since 1974. It was Japan's equivlent of the Cubs sweeping the Indians in a World Series.

I see the maps of America broken up and kind of wish it would happen. Maybe I could make better art. I'd live in the Canada zone, so I would have free health care and could quit thinkings about how I should've been an engineer--you know, for the benefits, without the worry to pay for broken legs or heart attacks. The loss of country would help with generating grief. I could be a real Tomaz Salamun--a poet who has actually known cultural defeat, experienced a greater anguish than bear market-byproduct ostricism. I wonder if other white males who write think about this.

Sam Pink's I am Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat It has been picked up by a Norweigan press--they will call it I LOVE YOU. Pink posted a link to Flamme Forlag, the publisher. I looked around and found this book in the catalog. I loved the google translation of the excerpt:

There er'n, there he is, right? Du må slå'n me' brettet da, mæl til bakfra, prøv å få'ni bakken, så kan vi sparke'n. You must slå'n me 'board as, Mæl to the rear, try få'ni ground, so we can sparke'n. Eller du kan ta nosen, så tar jeg tailen, og så bare smeller vi ti'n me' trucken. Or you can take Nøsen, I'll take the tail, and then just slams we ti'n me 'truck. Ja, da kan'n faen meg angre. Yes, when kan'n goddamn regret. Ja, jeg er rett bak deg. Yes, I'm right behind you. Bare gå du, er rett bak deg. Just go, you are right behind you. Og så prøver du å slå her, ikke sant? And then try to turn here, right? Her. Here. Vi bare beiner før det kommer no'n, ta're me' ro. We legs for the upcoming no'n, ta're me 'ro.

Just go, you are right behind you. Why isn't this translated into English? I though 8-bit was in.

Gem City/Fountain City

2010-01-15T23:45:00.003-06:00

My friend Greg, through his press Rabbit Catastrophe, is selling my chapbook Gem City/Fountain City. You can order a copy at his blog.

If you're interested in reviewing it, please contact Greg through his profile.

Maybe we need a Diocletian

2010-01-10T12:31:00.005-06:00

My roommate Jeff bought Pepsi Throwback. This reminded me of a conversation with my friend Chris about the late Roman empire. He said in the third and fourth centuries, during the decline, the roman architecture became a collage of PAX Romana, Augustan, and Republic, styles. They no longer experimented, simply recycled old things from glory days. I love old Pepsi cans more than new Pepsi cans. I embrace their return, but I wonder if we're in our own crisis of the third century. This also could explain the success of Mad Men.

Also, in the future, I will be more dillegent in proof-reading my posts.

Bullet suspended for possesion of unloaded firearm.

2010-01-06T18:44:00.006-06:00

Gilbert Arenas' indefinite suspension from basketball will result in the NBA being further branded as a "thug league" with their players being branded, unfairly and uninterestingly as "thugs" (it's already started).

This, of course, further overshadows guys like Milwaukee Bucks' rookie Brandon Jennings. Jennings circumvented the NBA's draft rule--players need to be one year removed from high school or nineteen years old--by moving to Italy and playing there a year. Some credit the move to Europe for his rapid maturation as a player where he faced former, and future, NBA talent on a night-by-night basis. He's second among rookie's in scoring (19.0 pg), first in assists (5.9 pg), and tenth rebounds (3.8 pg). Not bad for a guard. That he opted to play in Italy is even cooler--the move of, say, a poet rather than a jock. I don't think jocks think much about the opportunities their talent gives them. Poets don't either really, I guess. They all move to New York, or Paris, which bores me and fellow lower-middle-class-background-artist-wannabes-in-student-loan-debt I know.

This makes Jennings not a jock or a poet, but a cool guy.

What I like most about Jennings is what I like most about Arenas--he's funny, seems personable, and is aware of his talent. Arenas proved to me he's not necessarily aware of his actions outside of games--especially joking about having a gun given the current cultural climate. I hope Jennings will be fine. He seems like he has a good head on his shoulders. I think Arena will be fine, too. This could open up the Josh Childress-esque opportunity of playing in Greece for $20 million over three years tax-free.

Customer response to "How sad if this is one of the great books from the 80's"

2009-12-24T22:52:00.001-06:00

Yeah, DeLillo doesn't rely on gimmick and shock value to pull in the mongoloid readers like Palahniuk does.

One-star reviews of White Noise from Amazon.com

2009-12-24T22:28:00.011-06:00

Verification, others

Warning--just stay away

I just a read a short story of his in the latest New Yorker and was reminded of this book, and it struck me how much he hasn't changed in 20 years. Fist of all academics writing about academics is as bad as writers writing a book about a writer writing a book. In general the book is condescending, obvious with characters who I had absolutely no interest in.

Infuriatingly Self Important

It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, obnoxious monologues that somehow equate buying apples with death (exemplified by the single most unbearable character I have ever come across, Murray); it doesn't have drama, only histrionics. What makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable and ultimately uninteresting is that it is a work that sags under the weight of its own importance; it is so persistently self-conscious that I can't take it seriously as a work of literature--it spends a couple hundred pages trying to convince me how great it is without actually being great. What's more, if this novel were a failure as a novel but still offered some genuine insight into the experience of the individual in a post-modern world, it would still succeed as a work of philosophy. But it doesn't; every sentence feels like a catch-phrase rather than a substantive statement.

The difficult thing about criticizing a novel like this is that defenses of it are always predicated on the notion that disliking it reflects a misunderstanding of postmodernism itself--that is, those who dislike this novel obviously are not sophisticated enough to untangle the dense threads of philosophic intent that make it what it is. But, I do understand postmodernism (don't like it but still understand it) and still feel this is a failure. While reading it I was reminded of the infinitely superior Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and thought that this is what that great work would read like if stripped of all its originality and craft. That is a successful postmodern novel; this one is several long hours of my life I will never get back.

God Did I try

For years I heard what a wonderful book this is. Finally I bought it to read. And read, and read, and read, even though my wife, a brilliant engineer said she hated it when she read it ten years ago and that I was wasting my time. It took me a month to finish, and every night it put me to sleep after about three pages. The Hitler studies concept was brilliant (except Mel Brooks had already done it) and there were indeed some amusing parts, but pretentious does not begin to describe this book. Thank God for... readers because I thought surely something is wrong with me if I'm the only person in the world except for my wife who doesn't like this book. Then I found out I wasn't alone--there are a lot of us on the sidewalk who see that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Not only that, he's butt ugly besides. I absoulely recommend this book. You will, like many, either love it and join the cult, or like many of the rest of us, be utterly amused that so little can be taken for so much by so many. One way or another, you are going to feel good about yourself, and so much smarter. In my case, I decided I am much too smart for this book. Definitely decide for yourself; it's a litmus test of intelligence, and you can't fail.

Boring as Hell

Books like this (and for the most part, many works of Pynchon and Vonnegut) provide social commentary and overblown allegories of life in the modern age. White Noise is trying so hard to teach lessons and issue warnings that the message comes across as subtly as a teacher holding up multiplication table flash cards. Along with Breakfast of Champions and The Crying of Lot 49, this is the kind of book that I will no longer feel guilty about not liking. Boring and unrealistic, with a plot that wanders like a donkey lost in the desert, this self-important book provides me with absolutely no reading enjoyment. It's like listening to a 20 minute guitar solo by some bored jazz musician who turns his back to the audience. I've left the concert, see you at the bar. Read William Vollmann instead.

absolutely unreadable - no, unless your teacher insists,

I'd tried to read White Noise a number of times, thrown it across the room each time. But this time, with a couple of transatlantic plane flights in my arsenal, I couldn't fail to finish, right?

Wrong. White Noise is terrible. It's full of dialogue that no one would ever say, precious, precious, gimicky, and gimicky. Every word is too clever by half, including "and" and "the." I take it the grating serial monologs making fun of consumerism (oooh - how unprecedented!) are meant to emphasize the disconnectedness of modern life. But instead they show only the consequences of writing an arid echo chamber of a piece drained entirely of humanity or anything remotely resembling any claim at accuracy. It is, however, tremendously effective at annoying its readers.

Fear not DeLillo haters. This will be off the syllabi before too long. And how we will celebrate!

Horrible read, weak characters, bad writing style.

Biggest problems with this book is the overuse of quotations to tell a story. The author might as well have writen a screenplay. The result is a confusing and choppy read. I would have prefered he reserves quoting his characters only when it would add something to the story. The prose itself is also weak. The author's descriptions of the characters' relationships with each other, the surroundings, the events are clumsy and weakly staged. He is also inept at pacing the events to keep the reader intrigue and hungry to read on to uncover the plot. Lastly, this book fails to draw the reader into the events taking place because we don't care about any of its characters. The writer would have created more believable characters we can sympathize with if he had taken us into the secret recesses of their souls where emotions like fear, happiness, self-doubt etc. reside. A writer should write for his reader in mind and not for himself. For a good book try Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, Ms.Rowling's Harry Potter books or Memoirs of a Geisha.

How sad if this is one of the great books from the 80's.

I read an article comparing Don Delillo and Chuck Palahniuk's writing style. What an awful comparision. I have read two Delillo books and both have been dreadfully boring.

In White Noise the characters are annoying and the conversations are awful. The book seems to have very little purpose and goes no where. If this is one of the great books of the 80's, I will not be reading any more books from the 80's.

The Beginning of the End of the Novel

Delillo's disese has been spreading ever since this novel was published. The redundent fragments, the uncomphrehensable descriptions, and the false meaning that is being controlled by his illiterate notions of the dreaded "conspiracy".
Delillo's attempt to debase literature and humanity is praised which makes it that much more ironic and ultimatley a pathedic sign of the power of publicity.

Sonically, Mall Cop sounds better than Mall Ninja, but I still like Mall Ninja more

2009-12-23T11:50:00.007-06:00

I read my winter reading list before I left for home, so I bought Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? for one dollar off Abebooks. The copy has this inscription:

March 2, 1989

To David,

Love and have fun with this!

Happy 19th birthday!

xxx [illegible, could be Mom or Lauren]

I feel like this inscription, if written on March 2, 2009, would appear in the opening page of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.

Tony Tost posted a link to HTMLGIANT's 25 Important Books of Poetry of the 00s. I've read work by most of the poets listed, but only owned one book--James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys, which I brought with me. Jennifer told me about the book my first year in grad school and gave me xerox copies of poems. Every time I try to read here in Dayton I get sidetracked by ESPNEWS HD.

Darrell and I watched Browns-Chiefs at Clancy's on Sunday, and he mentioned a state-owned gun range in Xenia. He wants to take me there--he owns an AK-47 and I said he could probably start his own dictatorship in Africa. He said maybe, but his gun is wussified, unlike the guns of Ugandans. His model does not hold semi-automatic clips, is not defined as a gun by the ATF. We may fire the AK-47 anyway and we may have Mall Ninjas ask us questions. He explained a Mall Ninja is what gun guys call the gun guys who work security jobs--the ones who dream of taking down terrorists in food courts. They know the most Darrell said.

2009-12-11T13:45:00.006-06:00

I will read with Fred Kirchner and Dave Nichols on January 2 at the Dayton Dirt Collective in Dayton, Ohio.

I finished my prose class, taught by Whitney Terrell, last night. We had an informal gathering at Minsky's, a gourmet pizza place in KC. I ate there the night Obama won the election. Whitney called us "the young intelligentsia" of Kansas City. It was cool to hear something like that.

I am applying to other programs now and so is my friend Lewis. Last night he said he sent his first few applications out. I said I just the same on Wednesday. He asked me what applications of ours "crossed-over"--both of us talked about UNC-Greensboro as an option. I told him I did not apply there, but I might since the date is farther off than the others (March 1st).

He has been my closest friend since I moved out here, and I wouldn't mind going to same place again.

My friend Marc Keinath is in a band called the Revilators

2009-11-28T17:54:00.001-06:00

I read Robert J. Baumann's Man About Town earlier

2009-11-22T23:49:00.003-06:00

I am excited about writing again.

Winter Break Reading List

2009-11-20T14:26:00.007-06:00

I'm taking these books back with me to Dayton:

Euonia, Christian Bok
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems, Noelle Kocot
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Paper Lion, George Plimpton

I never read Kurt Vonnegut in high school. He seemed reserved for 6'0, 160 pound boys who play guitar and have minds for math. Bukowski was more the speed for 6'4, 275 pound boys who watch Nicolas Ray and Sam Peckinpah films. Robin had a lot of Vonnegut. Last Christmas, she lent me Jailbird to read on the plane--she thought the way Vonnegut connected all of his ideas neatly together could be a good resource for my work. I liked it, and finished it quickly. As a 6'4, 236 pound man, I feel better about reading Vonnegut. I like his imagination and I like the ginger smell and the feel of the greened archive paper of Del paperbacks--they help his sentences. An hour ago, I bought the Del paperback of Breakfast of Champions over the hardcover version at Half Price Books in Westport.

If I get anywhere with my own stuff, I want my first book, at least the cover, to look like a Kurt Vonnegut Del Paperback from 1979--san-serif font, with a lot of reds, oranges, and yellows. A smooth painted drawing of a green skinned Don Quixote riding a donkey with no eyes and mouth.

Vonnegut supposedly always wanted to be a poet, but didn't feel up to snuff. I think, if he was around now, he could be considered an above-average prose poet simply based on his ideas and their general strangeness. Cats Cradle's chapters short chapters remind me of prose poems I see around the internet, or in small journals--inventive titles, short scenes. "The Girl Pool" (33-34) and "Vice President in Charge of Volcanoes" (23) come to mind.

I tried to teach Ball Four in my composition class--it did not go well. I've always wanted to read George Plimpton's Paper Lion, and I found a copy for $4.48 at Half Price Books.

I feel unhip in cheap bookstores.

I think I can read all of these this break.

Expect poems about the death of psychocars by plastic bats

2009-11-11T13:23:00.009-06:00

Instead of working on PhD applications and prose from the perspective of Pete Rose, I have played Earthbound Zero, or Mother, most nights.

For those unfamiliar with NES era RPGs, you can change the default names of your heroes to anything you want. For instance, in Earthbound Zero, the main character is named Ninten. I have renamed him Phil. His friends Loid, Ana, and Teddy have become Lewis, Robin, and Jason--my friends. Two nights ago, Lewis and I explored Duncan's rocket factory before an Old Robot murdered him.

The landscapes in Nintendo games appear so clean. No one leaves crushed Bud Light Lime cans in the grass or fuck in the street. The closest place in reality must be Singapore.

I saw Bukowski shrink in size, in perfect proportion

2009-10-26T22:58:00.003-05:00

Steve Richmond died--I never really read his work, I only knew of him through Bukowski's letters.

Silliman's blog, where I found out about the death, posted a link to an interview over at 3 AM. The interview at times is hard to follow, it seems to be a transcript of a recording, but there's some cool stuff about the Cali scene.

Working Words or Workin' Words

2009-10-15T11:33:00.003-05:00

Last Friday, I drank a bit at Chez Charlie's with Marcus Myers, a new MFA student in the program. Near the end of the night, I started to yell into his ear from all the noise of other people enjoying themselves. He's a cool guy. He's one of four cool guys reading at Working Words tomorrow, in the Plaza Library. Other cool guys include Glenn North (poetry), Eric Scott (fiction), and Scott Ditzler (fiction). Ditzler won AWP's student writing award in 2008.

you shall die by your own evil creation

2009-10-14T11:38:00.005-05:00

My friend Brandon showed me Fletcher Hanks' work in June 2007, shortly before both of us left Dayton, Ohio. I moved to Kansas City, he moved to White River Junction, VT to study at the Center for Cartoon Studies (comics college as he calls it). Brandon worked at a Donato's Pizza down the street to make money for his move--he banked most of it save petty cash for cigarettes, High Life, and the occasional book. He had bought I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and I only leafed through it, thinking the art and language was crazy. It looked great--Hanks worked in solid lines (partly due to production costs) with saturated colors. I bought I Shall Destroy... months later, after I moved, and read it more. Hanks language and images are great--I ripped off a golden octopus and invisible chemical men with pink day-glo claws for a poem. When I brought Hanks back up to Brandon, he said "Oh yeah, that's stuff is pretty fun. There's not much you can learn from it though." He's right. Sam Pink, Russell Edson, and James Tate (at least Tate's prose work) seem to be the poet equivalent of Hanks--it's crazy, it's weird, it's intense, but you can't learn much from it. They're all their own forces.

A new Hanks collection, You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation came out at the end of July. I got my copy last Friday. It's a good collection--just as odd as I Shall Destroy--but what's strong about this new collection isn't so much the work itself, but the supplements. You Will Die features an essay providing background info on Hanks--the first collection does not have one, instead featuring a "comic essay" by editor Paul Karasik at the back of the collection. The intro works better than Karasik's own comic essay from the first collection--we see examples of Hanks' correspondence school assignments, we get a better gauge of the man personally, (he's still painted as an abusive drunk and scoundrel, but we have more corroborating evidence) and professionally (we get an idea of Hanks artistic process in the early days of the comics industry).

We also get a bit of context of the work. Stories collected in I Shall Destroy are certainly vivid, wild, and colorful, but they're also displayed in a vacuum--it's hard to imagine Hanks' comics and characters come from 1939. The stories still have an element of the underground comics of the 60's and 70's (or at least my perception of them--my interest in comics stems more from Brandon's passion for them). What I find interesting with You Will Die is the intrusion of advertisements geared towards kids--these ads creep in at the end of some of the stories. These ads--"EARN YOUR OWN BICYCLE!/GET STRONG WITH THIS SUPPLEMENT/SPY WATCH AND DECODER RING"--put Hank's work in context. Ten year old boys, not hipsters or academics in theirs 20s and 30s, bought and read his work. There was nothing chic about it, no comics culture to counter, which makes it that much more significant and interesting. Whether Karasik intentionally leaves these ads in the stories isn't clear--I gather these were probably the best versions of the story available and the ads were kept in to keep the design of the book consistent.

You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation's stories lack the weird punch of the ones in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets. Stardust fails to fling gangsters into the clutches of golden octopi, Fantomah doesn't punish rich white hunters by making them giant green aliens and send them home on planes. The stories, while still drown in broad strokes and saturated colors, aren't as interestingly weird. Kind of like James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys.

I recieved Tomas Salamun's Poker in the mail, but I am watching Around the Horn on ESPN

2009-10-09T16:08:00.002-05:00

Tony Reali: "You wear ties mailed to you?"
Tim Cowlishaw: "It happens."

Gary Sullivan's Pet Peeves

2009-10-09T14:32:00.000-05:00

They are valid.

Process Article Excerise for Whitney Terrell's ENG 537

2009-10-03T13:50:00.004-05:00

The bits in a processor works like dots and dashes in Morse code--think of the zeroes as dots and the ones as dashes. I have never accurately described the dots and dashes, even when my Grandfather threatened explained the process. Ones and zeroes string together in pulses to create messages similar to code--they both communicate by rhythm. The messages are relayed to the processor, who notifies the monitor. TURN ON THE MONITOR. STOP. DOWNLOAD KANYE WEST. STOP. SWITCH THE BROWSER FROM EXPLOITED BABYSITTERS.COM TO YAHOO FANTASY FOOTBALL. STOP. THE USER'S MOTHER COMES DOWN THE HALL, SHE CARRIES HIS LAUNDRY AND IF SHE CATCHES THE USER SHE WILL CLOSE THE DOOR QUICKLY, PRAY TO MARY LATER. STOP.

If you live near Oxford Mississippi

2009-09-29T13:49:00.001-05:00

Tonight is the Kitty Snacks #2 release party. Check it out.

2009-09-28T20:25:00.002-05:00

I should not make fun of other poets.
I have not written much lately.
I pay to much attention to fantasy football.

When in Japan, in 2005, I was compared to a Bulgarian sumo wrestler

2009-09-22T14:58:00.005-05:00

Writing is slow and terrible right now. When I teach sometimes I have moments of fear that I will become what I don't want to become one of those white, middle-aged male poets who write narrative poems--descriptive purple prose non-stories with line breaks. I think that this fear is created because I am narrative. At least I will never write about fly-fishing. This comment should not apply to B.H. Fairchild, who I think is excellent.

Working Words went well--I read poems from my project about a suicidal minor league basketball player. I don't know how well they were received. We all bowled afterward, I rolled a strike during a 70. My second game was only 46. By this point I had stop paying attention, drank a lot, and talked to Michael Pritchett in between turns. I played air hockey with a new student from Charlotte, NC--her fiancee works as a mechanical engineer.

"Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic"

2009-09-16T11:35:00.003-05:00

I don't how often people wikipedia John Berryman, but in the outside sources at the end of the page someone provided a link to an interview that appeared in the Paris Review after his death in 1972.

As long as I live in the Canada part

2009-09-09T09:58:00.002-05:00

So if the U.S. does break up, then Ugly Duckling Presse will start producing cool looking American poet anthologies and books of Dean Young right?

I watched "The Big Bang Theory" last night and still lack a simple knowledge of science

2009-09-08T15:54:00.003-05:00

A panda suggested to a white middle-aged couple they eat Wanchai Ferry frozen Chinese food as opposed to going to a buffet. The panda eats sour chicken with them says, "I'm glad we decided to stay in."

Tony Hoagland enters the house and approaches the panda. "You lack the screen presence of Ling-Ling. All pandas who have ever appeared on TV are mere imitations of Ling-Ling--you are a part of the cult of Ling-Ling." Tony Hoagland takes a bite of the panda's sour chicken.

The largest outburst of mass violence in Canadian history involved box lacrosse.

One would susepct the larget outburst of mass violence in Canadian history would involve either Louis Riel or the Banjo Bowl.

In The Big Bang Theory last night ended with the scientist played by the actor better known for his role as David on Rosanne and the blond in the first role that I have ever recognized her in eat Chinese take-out together. They secretly love each other in the show's overall arc. In the episode, the blond goes on a date with the scientist's friend--a guy who works at a comic book shop. The scientist gives the comic book guy bad advice on how to treat the blond, because he is in love with her. The comic book guy goes on the date. The next day the scientist asks the blond how the date went--she stands in her doorway in pink boy shorts and a bathrobe, tells the scientist it's none of your goddamn buisness what goes on between me and the comic book guy. The scientist runs to the comic book store. The comic book guy says the date went well--they shared two bottles of wine and made out in his car and the blond got wet but shouted out the scientist's name, not the comic book guy's name. At the end of the episode, the blond asks the scientist to pass the orange sauce. She says scientist, pass me the orange sauce. He asks her what she called him--she says I called you the scientist. That's right, the scientist says.

Possible titles include "Spring Break Shark Attack"

2009-09-07T18:57:00.006-05:00

My friend Amy, she lives in Cincinnati, said I sounded pretty down on KC.

I hope I didn't sound too harsh. The women I know are pretty great--what I mouthed off about are women I don't particularly know very well or ones I don't interact with now. I don't think I would've learned anything about writing if I didn't come here.

Kansas City is still not what I thought it'd be.

My friend Greg Lamer made a chapbook of my work called Gem City/Fountain City for an Echos show I read at in Dayton in May 2008. He plans on making another edition--same poems, all older stuff (poems that appeared in Origami Condom and Feathertale) and a new poem or two, with a new cover. I'll give another update when Greg gets together the proof. It'll be available through this blog and his. It will release under his new Rabbit Catastrophe imprint.

I'm also working on a new chapbook that I sent to a press already and might send to contests.

How to avoid huge ships

2009-09-04T15:41:00.000-05:00

From Abe Books' Weird Room.

An Actual Kansas Reading Series

2009-09-03T10:02:00.004-05:00

An Actual Kansas Reading series returns Friday, September 18 with Stacy Szymaszek and Megan Kaminski.

Working Words, UMKC's graduate student reading series, also kicks off on Friday, September 18 at the NW corner of the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch. This month's Working Words will comprise of an open-mic format, with several graduate students showcasing their work.

Choose wisely.

I have realized that just because a city has multiple major-league sports teams, they are not a major city

2009-09-02T10:15:00.007-05:00

I've lived in Kansas City for two years--moved July 2007 to 40th and holes--and the only bar I ever felt comfortable in has been Dave's Stagecoach Inn on Westport Rd., east of Broadway. Their founder died in December 2007. They contested the smoking ban and recently just got a 3 a.m. liquor license to stay open. They might have a photograph of me on their wall soon--my friend Greg takes photographs. Now there's an ordinance proposed by the city to revoke liquor licenses of local bars, and to force people to come downtown to Power and Light if they want to drink past 1 am.

Kansas City has not been what I hoped. This is probably why I have been able to write at the clip I have the last two years, and why I have any publishing credits at all. My personal life has been minimal beyond a small group of friends. There's very little time to dick around, or very little opportunity to dick around--I just stay inside and read. The Kansas side, where the money is and where people don't pay city taxes, controls KC. Most come into town in their Escalades and party at Power and Light then go back across the border. Then, when the city--residents of Jackson County Missouri and KC itself--shoots down proposed taxes for upgrades to Arrowhead or Kaufman, the Kansas-side asks why they do it. Kevin Kietzman yells and almost cries on air. It's also a tough town to get laid in.

People in their mid-30s ask me about Dayton, Ohio--usually about Guided by Voices and The Breeders. They lived in Kansas and decided to move to Dayton in 1996--like my hometown was a proto-Portland, Ore. That, of course, has not lasted. There are moments, like this Pitch article, where I get kind of nostalgic for the rust belt and where I lived. When the economy fucks you, and GM fucks you, you soften up and become a better person in some ways. People in Ohio know that other shit matters--not to get too raw with it. You try to be better to other people and you go from a red state to a blue state. This doesn't happen all the time, but I feel it more when I'm back in Dayton. Also, the women in Dayton, like the men in Dayton, want to get out. They think beyond material availability sometimes. Girls in KC, and Kansas, seem content. They get enough of everything--KC has decent shows come through, has a lit scene based around poetry about cows and jazz (by old people--this does not apply to the people I've met from Lawrence since they're young and also not from KS), has college towns nearby, and bars made out of plastic in a downtown district that looks like the set of Pluto Nash.

There are good things here--like New Letters, and UMKC faculty, and the friends I've made. If I saw him again, I'd probably strangle my old poetry professor from undergrad. It's just not enough. This is not a cool town. No wonder Zach Greinke went insane and no wonder no Major League Baseball free agent in their prime wants to come here.

Pretty Head Football Coaches, Humorous post

2009-08-27T16:48:00.007-05:00

810 AM out of Kansas City has a hard-on for new Chiefs coach Todd Haley. On Monday, Kevin Kietzman, a guy whom George Brett is convinced doesn't go to Royals games even though he's supposed to cover them, played NFL edited--corporate recored, edited, and distributed online--audio of Chiefs training and proceeded to say "I love this coach." He then suggested buying season tickets. "You know I'm not a corporate schill, but there are plenty of good season tickets available at good prices."

I'm not convined Todd Haley will not be very good because he's too handsome. Lane Kiffin bolted for the University of Tennessee after a 5-15 record in Oakland. Steve Spurrier went 12-20 in Washington even after he lost his looks. Steve Mariucci works as a talking head for NFL network after going 17-31 in Detroit. Mike Nolan looked too good in a suit and went 18-37 with the Niners. My friend Lewis proposed the only one that does not follow this trend is John Guden--but followed that by pointing out that Gruden won a Super Bowl with Tony Dungy's team and against his old football team. We call this the "Jon Gruden exception." Sort of like grandfathering.

Guys who are successful, and won a Super Bowl, seem pretty curmudgeon or have a chip on their shoulder because of a lack of/or only possessing an a respectable amount of, handsomeness. See Bill Parcells, Geogre Seifert, Chuck Noll, George Halas, etc. Dick Vermeil had to age before he won one with St. Louis. Tom Landry was respectably handsome with a chip on his shoulder. We call this the "Tom Landry factor."

Kietzman seems like the sort of Kansan/midwesterner to deem Tom Flores too "exotic" and "passionate," which puts Flores in the latter camp--his looks unconventionally handsome when compared to the former group. Kietzman also seems like the type of Kansan/Johnson County guy who spends most of his day worrying about dying.

I wonder if this is true

2009-08-26T12:45:00.002-05:00

Because if it is, it's a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Why Your Stadium Sucks

2009-08-22T17:30:00.002-05:00

Deadspin's Why Your Stadium Sucks features are always hit and miss but I like their take on Fenway. As someone who grew up watching a team in a multi-purpose stadium, a team that beat the Red Sox in a World Series (and the Yankees a year later), I don't get old baseball stadiums in big markets.

I feel like an asshole every time I google myself.

2009-08-22T15:39:00.008-05:00

I'm one of Blog of a Bookslut's highlights of the current issue of NOÖ Journal. Like Michael Schaub says, though, it's all great. I liked Ron Padgett and Jason Bredle's stuff quite a bit.

Today I went to Half Price Books in Overland Park and looked around. They had old copies of Look from the early 1970's and a December 14, 1971 issue had a Doral Cigarettes ad. The best part of the ad was the picture of the new Doral filter with this text:

The new filter delivery system is so complicated
it would take an explanation by a scientist,
but Doral explains it in just two words:
"taste me."

I've been watching HBO's Rome. I'm near the end of the series with a few episodes left. Joni used to wear gladiator sandals, she probably still does, and I thought they were hot. I thought about her sandals in the history section of Half Price Books and about how Mark Antony ordered his assassins to cut Cicero's hands off and nail them to the doors of the forum. They also mounted Cicero's head and Antony's wife stabbed a hack-pin into his tongue over and over again.

I choose to use the pronoun We when talking about my alma mater's basketball team

2009-08-20T12:32:00.003-05:00

I graduated from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio later than most--2007 at the age of 26--and I covered Wright State basketball during their 2006-2007 Horizon League championship season for a paper out of Xenia, Ohio. We had a really great point guard named DaShaun Wood who was the reason that we beat Butler and made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 14 years. Pittsburgh stomped us in the first round. The Panthers had current Chicago Bulls back up center Aaron Gray on the roster. Wood plays for Benetton Treviso in Italy's Serie A--one of the top leagues in the world.

I think found his Twitter today.

PTI talked about Shaq's new reality TV show on ABC and its premier Tuesday night. Michael Wilbon talked about how funny and comfortable Shaq was and how in basketball, more than in any other sport, personality and the ability to articulate one's self matter as much as athletic ability--to be successful, one has to cultivate a personality. It's why Larry Bird and Tim Duncan seem like cold fish compared to Magic Johnson and LeBron James. Wood seems to be a part of the latter crowd, telling from the tweets. That may not be a fair assessment--you only get 140 characters to express yourself.

The semester at UMKC starts Monday and I finished my syllabus for 225. I'm using poems in the class for multi-genre projects--ones that use research. I got Albert Goldbarth, Lawrence Giffin, and Joe Wenderoth.

Maybe I could use the same prompt as Playgirl's requirements for their fiction (via Duotrope):

Be creative, wild, and uninhibited in your writings. Write what turns you on, not what you think turns other people on. All submissions considered must be sexually explorative fantasies that empower, enlighten, and entertain. Any fantasies that involve pain, degradation, or extreme negativity will not be published. Fantasies need to be in the first person, and from the female perspective using "I".

That might go too far.

Twitter.

I don't have Twitter for one offs.

2009-08-19T20:31:00.002-05:00

People in Olive Garden advertisements smile and laugh so easily.

My friend Greg Lamer's photograph appears with Kim Chinquee's story in NOÖ Journal [10].

NOÖ Journal [10]

2009-08-16T20:57:00.001-05:00

NOÖ Journal 10 is up. My poem is also on the right hand side under the publication link.

Yeah.

Really?

2009-08-12T20:40:00.001-05:00

The first time I ever got drunk with my dad occured in May at Bw3s in West Carrollton, Ohio. At one point he said:

"I don't give a fuck what you with this country, just give us free healthcare and affordable University education."

This image is for my friend Darrell

2009-08-09T12:44:00.002-05:00

Three poems in FRiGG

2009-07-28T09:57:00.003-05:00

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

2009-07-27T15:22:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-07-25T17:49:00.002-05:00

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

2009-07-23T08:57:00.002-05:00

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

2009-07-22T17:56:00.003-05:00

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

2009-07-19T12:26:00.001-05:00

Yeah.

2009-07-16T10:43:00.001-05:00

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

2009-07-15T18:47:00.002-05:00

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?

2009-07-06T12:53:00.003-05:00

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

2009-07-03T10:55:00.007-05:00

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

2009-07-01T13:35:00.005-05:00

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.

Quick shots, like how twitter works

2009-06-29T10:48:00.004-05:00

I'll be in Dayton twice in less than two months. There is a flarf issue of Poetry.

Inspector vs. Evader is pretty good--Rob let me borrow it while I was in Lawrence this weekend.

Bon Jovi sang a song in Farsi.

The effects of the revolution maybe greatly diminished.

That's it for now.

I thought everything might be okay but then I saw ductape on the car

2009-06-26T13:12:00.004-05:00

The prose poem draft's title is a line by Mark McKee from his poem "Jalopy Bellicose" from his chapbook What Apocalypse?

NOÖ Journal has their lineup posted for issue [10]. My poem "Junichiro Koizumi Doesn't Care About White People" will appear in that issue. Also, my friend Greg Lamer (that's his real last name, that's how you say it too) has a photograph in the magazine.

I met Robert Olen Bulter today. He's a very nice guy.

Sometimes we are fantasm vendors, a prose poem draft

2009-06-25T13:14:00.002-05:00

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) allowed ghosts inside him--this achieved automatic writing. If I lived and died before Yeats and he opened his mouth, waived his hands and said "come in, incantations, come in," I'd jump down his throat. Then I'd make William Butler Yeats draw penises all over the walls of his house and if he sat down with his pen and paper--or typewriter, however famous Irish writers write things--I'd still taunt him. "This is no country for old penises. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the penises". Napoleon (1769-1821) and former National League outfielder Mike King Kelly (1857-1894) would see what's going on. "I'm fucking with Billy, you guys should join in." It would be all right to make William Butler Yeats draw penises, mock the struggle for Irish independence, mock the convergence of art and death, until the ghost of my father would get involved. My father would wonder why I reverted to dick jokes in this prose poem. I don't have anything, to write about, I'd say. It's been a tough two weeks. He'd ask about King Kelly. I'd explain he was the first $10,000 baseball player and the first to be paid by an owner for his face and image, the first licensing deal in history.

My father and I are alive now though.

Calling this post No Country for Old Men may cause confusion. This is not about the movie or book. Sort of about Yeats, though.

2009-06-21T13:30:00.002-05:00

I've had an ear infection in my right ear since last Monday. On Tuesday, I took 6 ibuprofen in less than 24 hours--the box says that's the maximum you should take--and then I drank sake and beer with Joni that night. We walked a little bit and I felt high, like I existed in dream sequences from Save By the Bell. The little pink border surrounded by the scene. I guess with ibuprofen and alcohol your stomach lining can bleed.

Me and Joni ate at Blue Koi on 39th street. That's were we had the sake. We walked north, for a little bit into the neighborhood then came back to 39th and we crossed state line toward KU Med. I had the beer at Jaywalkers on their patio. She said she went out with her roommates last Saturday to a bar in Overland Park called Kite's to dance. Kite's had a UFC match on and the bar was packed with "duders." Joni's word for guys with buzz cuts and polo shirts. They all left after the fight. I said I didn't get MMA. She said it's kind of interesting, more interesting than boxing, which is legit since the only boxers people talk about haven't been relevant for 15-20 years (Mike Tyson, Evander Hollyfield, Ali, etc).

I went to the health center on Wednesday about my ear. They gave me ear drops and pills. The nurse practitioner thought I might have hyper-tension--my blood pressure was 130/90, then 142/90. She thought it might be from the pain in my ear. But it could be hyper-tension.

Writing has been tough. I've written about dog-men with giant scrotums and professional basketball in Turkey. It's been mostly miss with me. Though I have gotten positive responses from places on work that's currently out.

I only found Ron Silliman's blog recently--I know of the name, but it wasn't until I met Robert Baumann that I started looking at the blog. I always feel pretty lower-middle-class when it comes to poetic theory. That might be because of my background (only the third person in family history with a college degree, dad works as a librarian, in student loan debt up to my ass). During a night with people from Mizzou's program, at their favorite bar, I made a joke about how the hand dryer looked like the sex machine Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone use in Demolition Man. The dryer consisted of white plastic and had a blue light that flicked on when I put my hands in the machine.

Sorry, this is all to show my lack of confidence when talking about poetics.

Silliman's blog has links to conversations about accessibility in poetry. How do we open this stuff up to people outside of, or without access to, colleges and small press scenes. Blogs kind of function like that right now I think.

I read John Gallaher's post on accessibility. At first, I didn't like what he was saying. To identify being "accessible" with "crass commercialism." The second time around, as I read, I liked what he was getting at. We need to be "clear." Clear needs to be the term. This allows difficult work to be difficult, and doesn't create an economic term, or marketing "buzz-words" for poetry.

Bob Stewart always pushes for clearness and conciseness in writing poety. We need to learn how to write a sentence before we break it all down. Hadara says the same thing. I think a lot of the poetry I don't like doesn't think about that. The people who I don't like write guys like B.H. Fairchild off as conservative or boring (Gallaher does not). I don't know what poetry needs to be. I know if it isn't "clear" to me, it seems like a fucking put on.

There does, however, needs to be greater access to contemporary poetry, or the development of poems that could hit with a wider audience quicker. Get people to stop thinking of Shelley, Woodsworth, or Yeats and they rolling their eyes into the back of their head (no offense to the dead guys). I'm thinking of a poetry equivlent of the French New Wave. Or a movement outside of the academy. This going on right now, though, with poetry blogs and small press. The breakdown of old media meaning more people have access to audiences. Yeah.

I will say this about Gallaher's blogpost. I don't care about jazz, and I don't know why one brings jazz up. I think it's because I'm 28 years old and jazz seems old to me. Also I think it's funny when other white people try to talk about jazz to black people to make themselves seem cool. I probably do this with the NBA subconsciously. The NBA is cooler than jazz right now, though. I also like to think my love is genuine. I guess people who love jazz think the same thing.

I don't know what I'm talking about.

This could also count as a tweet if I tweeted

2009-06-08T10:03:00.003-05:00

My friend Aaron djs at the premier gentleman's club in Dayton, Ohio. He made a Dylan Thomas reference last night I guess:

Members, last time I checked it was Sunday. I know, I know. The weekend is almost over but do not go gently into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light by getting two fully nude performances for the price of one.

I don't really read Dylan Thomas. I probably should. I still think that's funny.

You have left footprints on the internet

2009-05-28T12:16:00.023-05:00

My parent's Dell fried at the hands of a hacker a couple of years ago. There is no Microsoft Word on this computer anymore--the computer wants to boot CD if I open a Word file. I have not written much and this was a terrible excuse.

When I'm bored, and have no access to word processing, I play the Wikipedia game. I call it the Wikipedia game. I read entries and click on links to other topics. For instance, I read about Pompeii yesterday and the secret rooms of the Naples Museum--the erotic artwork they found in the city. People fucking in various positions, Priapus with a giant penis.

Under the "rediscovery" section of the Pompeii Wikipedia page there's a story about people in the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries burying or hiding the erotic art of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum--one is a statue of Venus called Venus Kallipygos--"Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks." On that particular page there's a story about the buttocks thing:

"The people of those days were so attached to their sensual pleasures that they even went so far as to dedicate a temple to Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks, for the following reason. Once upon a time a farmer had two beautiful daughters. One day these girls, getting into a dispute as to which one had a more beautiful backside, went out onto the public street and by chance a young man was passing by, the son of a rich old man. They showed themselves to him, and when he saw them he voted in favor of the older girl. And in fact, falling in love with her, when he got back to town, he took to his bed and told his younger brother everything that had happened. And the younger brother also went to the country and saw the girls, and he fell in love with the other daughter. And so when the boys' father tried to get them to marry someone of the upper classes, he couldn't persuade his sons, and so he brought the girls in from the country, with their father's permission, and married them to his sons. And so these girls were called fair-buttocked by the citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his Iambic Verses: "There was a pair of beautiful-buttocked girls in Syracuse." And so these girls, when they got wealthy and famous, founded a temple of Aphrodite and called the goddess the Fair-buttocked, as Archelaus of Chersonesus tells us in his Iambic Verses."

Hyperlinks in the text exist on the page.

My friend Brandon graduated from the Center of Cartoon Studies in Vermont this month. He has no real internet presence. His work can be found here and here and in a few other places if you google him. I sent him a link to the story and wrote an email about how it reminded me of a classic Hollywood film from 30's. Sans the buttocks. I say that this sounds like a film starring Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins and directed by Preston Sturges, or maybe King Vidor, because the story is about beautiful farm girls and rich city boys falling in love. "You should draw a story based on this, set it in Syracuse, Indiana," I wrote him.

Brandon hasn't read the story yet, but we talked about basketball some--like how the Cavaliers have melted down. How getting caught watching NBA D-League webcasts by other artists is worst than getting caught watching porn. Brandon's theory no one likes the NBA is that kids who draw/write/perform etc. don't appreciate role players like Anthony Johnson or Daniel Gibson. We all want to think we are auteurs. I agree with him, but I still fantasize my work sells in Brazil and Australia.

I wonder how many rejections I have received from journals since I have been in Dayton. My friend Robin has keys to my place, so she can water the plant. I hope she has. I don't think she checks my mail. I didn't ask her to do that anyway.

Jason and disagreed that the story re-telling of the Venus with the fair buttocks should take place in Indiana. "There's a Syracuse, New York, already." I said they don't get it, but I was drunk.

Joni is in Ireland with her friend Erica.

Journals

2009-05-13T16:08:00.005-05:00

Kitty Snacks debuted their cover for issue #2. My poem "Desk Hours" was recently accepted and may appear in that issue or issue 3.

Abraham Lincoln #4 has been out for a couple months but I got my copy earlier in the week. K. Silem Mohammad read some cool work at a Fence-sponsored reading during AWP. He took the letters of a few Shakespeare sonnets and re-arranged them to make distinctly new pieces. They were excellent and stood out to me from the reading. I liked the work by Mel Nichols, Sharon Mesmer, and Elizabeth Bachinsky best.

Things to do in Dayton when you are not dead, but feel somewhat melancholy

2009-05-03T12:40:00.001-05:00

I will return to my hometown of Dayton, Ohio on May 19 and will visit until June 2. It maybe ambitious, but I will try to read three books during my trip:

The Public Burning Robert Coover
Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon
The Novel: A Poem Paul Hoover

Probably what will happen will be I am going to get drunk every night at Clancy's and watch playoff basketball and Hockey.

Hoover's name came up when I met C.D. Wright in March. She also suggested John Weiners, Jack Spicer, John Yau, and a few others. The University library only had Weiners and Hoover. I checked out Weiners Selected Poems, from Black Sparrow, and Hoover's aforementioned book. I also got two books by Stephen Dunn, who Hadara Bar-Nadav has mentioned in class, and Robert Pinsky's An Explanation for America, because I should've bought the $4.48 copy at the Westport Half Price Books and failed to do so.

Poetry Midwest 23

2009-05-01T13:31:00.004-05:00

My poem "Golden Baby" appears in the new issue of Poetry Midwest. Here. Stuff looks good in it.

Hawks-Heat game 6 tonight. I like Atlanta sort of. I like Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, and Al Horford. I want Cleveland to gut them still, though. My favorite time of the year is the NBA playoffs--it's spring time and my birthday (5/13). Lebron carries us all into competitive baseball.

I will use the line "to create the two most enduring battle axes in television history" one day. I'm not sure what the context would be just yet.

2009-04-26T23:27:00.003-05:00

I share my birthday with Bea Arthur and I swear to God I am only 27 years old. My sister is probably not happy right now.

Feathertale has a new poem, or an old poem, in this month's Egregious News Letter. I had a poem in the previous newsletter as well and have another poem forthcoming on the site. I am a hit in Canada.

Things, right now, seem all right. I always wait for a Kimera, or the ghost of Steve McQueen, to come shut her all down when things go well.

I am not a Kansas City native, but that's fine.

AHHHHHH

2009-04-21T10:39:00.002-05:00

I need to find new poets to read.

Ha-Ha

2009-04-16T15:25:00.004-05:00

Michael Prichett asked me if I was "twittering" yesterday. I don't exactly know what that means.

You don't have to twitter, though, to check this shit out.

When I was bored during winter in Ohio, I watched Cavs games on FSN. When I'm bored during winter in Missouri, I watch Blues games on FSN.

2009-04-13T13:28:00.007-05:00

Now the Blues are in the playoffs.

Hockey playoff TV schedule.

My Grandpa Lee loved St. Louis--he lived part of his childhood in the Ozarks before his father moved the family to Winchester, Indiana during the depression. He loved the Cardinals and drove to Cincinnati to see the Cards play the Reds in the 50's and 60's. He loved the gashouse gang. He didn't care about hockey.

That's all I got.

I read submissions at New Letters today--part of my graduate student duties, which I haven't been on top of the last six weeks. One person wrote in her bio:

When I was 16, I was published in the New Yorker.

I'm stealing that line for something.

Easter in Cowtown sucks

2009-04-12T14:30:00.004-05:00

It's raining and 45 degrees, maybe colder. One Easter back in Ohio, maybe in 1997, we walked out of the vestibule at Our Lady of Good Hope into snow. My mom credited it to a work of God.

I'm tired and have no options for today.

We read in the Green Chapel at Mizzou Friday. It went well, I think, but I need to work on my endings. I tweaked one poem--I gave Josephine, this girl in some of my poems, Joni's legs. Joni is a real person.

The only other time I've been to Columbia was 2007 for a Mizzou-Iowa State game with my friend Zac, his uncle, and aunt (she was referred to as "my uncle's wife," I think because the marriage was recent). The tickets were split--two in the alumni section, two in the student section. We sat with alumni. One guy asked "what year are you?" I said, "I've never been here." Zac said "'05." The guy said "'68." I must've been safe. Tigers won 52-28 or some such score. Gary Pinkel has pretty offenses, ugly defenses.

Both times have been fine.

This weather is getting to me.

Lewis just told me the Chiefs signed Zach Thomas.

I should talk more about poetry

2009-04-03T12:15:00.007-05:00

My hometown of Dayton, Ohio, is dying. The AC-Delco plant in Moraine shuttered in December and CNN ran a special report on the city. They compared us to Flint, Michigan circa 1989.

This post is mostly to say Dayton's hockey team will fold after 18 years. I wanted to write more about that, but lost interest.

Instead, because everybody loves Charles Bukowski and motherfucking babies:

I bought my friend Darrell's kid this baby t-shirt. It says BUKOWSKI 1920-1994: "Sometimes You Just Have to Pee in the Sink."

I'll be reading in Columbia, MO Friday, 4/10 with Piper Abernathy, Katie Clark, and Nicole Higgins.

That's all I got right now.

All the young dudes carry the news

2009-03-27T13:26:00.006-05:00

My friend Jason Frisbie, the subject of my friend Aaron's fiction, came into town. What Aaron writes about Jason is very accurate. Right now he's on the floor, filled with Pepto.

Thieves Jargon published my poem "Romantic Assault" in their latest issue.

I need to sound more humble in my bio.

I'm taking an antebellum crime fiction class--I think I've mentioned this before. We've been reading a lot of work by George Thompson, whose stuff has been termed "porno-gothic." You can find his stuff at Wright American Fiction. I highly recommend Gay Girls of New York and Catherine and Clara, or The Double Suicide.

My favorite moment from the franchise was when Reggie Miller told Spike Lee to sit his ass down

2009-03-13T13:32:00.007-05:00

this was also one of my grandpa Lee's favorite Pacers moments.

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio--I seem to remind everybody who knows me in KC to the point of clear annoyance--but I was a Pacers fan as a kid. My Grandpa live in Parker City, IN, and was a basketball nut. We watched a lot of Pacers games in the mid to late 90's and that weird period earlier in the decade when they should've been winning the East every year--those teams with Reggie, Jermaine O'Neal, Ron Artest, Jeff Foster, Johnathan Bender (to a lesser degree certainly--the guy must've been a Yugo since he broke down so much), Jaylen Rose, Austin Croshure, and Brad Miller (pre-Sacramento Kings). A rare balance of white and black talent (rare the state of Indiana has a balance of anything). Grandpa Lee died in May 2007, at the end of a disastrous season and an eight player deal that fucked the team.

I've found myself sort of following the Cavs much more--mostly because of LeBron and close friends from Cleveland who deserve a sports championship. Plus the Cavs are awesome.

Now just as this team looks like a young, pretty good, squad under the salary cap comes word that they're bleeding money and may have to relocate if the Simon Brothers don't get out of paying $10 million a year in operating costs of Conseco. That's what I've gathered.

Things like this have happened before. My Uncle Doug told me about how, in 1977, after the Pacers' first year in the NBA, they ran a telethon on channel 4 to save the team--they sold 8,000 tickets that year.

I mentioned this all to my friend Greg and he said "Bring them to Kansas City." No man. I don't want that to happen. They'd have some generic name, Lightning, and gay uniforms. Also, I don't know if I can trust the KC sports market. The Royals and Chiefs appear

I do like OKC's unis, and that team, but it's weird seeing that club on the floor.

Every year, UMKC brings a guest faculty member coming for a week in March--they alternate by genre every year. Last year Edward P. Jones (fiction) visited and this year C.D. Wright came. On Tuesday she gave a reading, Wednesday she came out to drink coffee with us, and Thursday I was one of a few students to meet with her individually.

Wright said the best poetry out there is online and recommended a bunch of writers I should check out. She also mentioned Ugly Ducking Presse. I ordered a couple of books--Lawrence Griffin's Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane, a collection of Slovene writers, and issue #17 of 6x6.

She helped a lot.

That's all I got right now.

Top City Poetry Series

2009-03-03T16:15:00.004-06:00

I'll be reading this Saturday, March 7, in Topeka with Piper Abernathy, Katie Clark, and Tim Volpert as part of the Top City Poetry series put together by Dennis Etzel. Info can be found here. Directions from KC/Lawerence or Manhattan.

Tim Volpert's blog is here.

An Actual Kansas Reading Series features Magdalena Zurawski, Aaron Kunin, and CA Conrad this Friday, March 6. You can find more info here.

Yeah, that's all I got.