Incendiary Lit

I hope so. I’ve get a lot on my plate, including Campbell McGrath’s narrative prose poem book Seven Notebooks, Jim Krusoe’s Iceland, and Jose Saramago’s Blindness. I read his book The Cave a little while back and it was really really good, the formatting was a little difficult at first (no quotations or line breaks for exchanges of dialog) but you get used to it fairly quickly. Everyone else has their lists right? How else are you planning on spending your long, lackadaisical summers? You know, besides work, enjoying the sun and eating and breathing and whatnot. You should definitely have a back up plan. Go to Amazon now and poke around. They actually can get you pretty good suggestions. I also recommend Denise Duhamel’s Star Spangled Banner, an accessible, and very entertaining/good book of poetry. You won’t regret it.

The Cremation of Shelley
by Lawrence Raab

August 15, 1822

All around was scenery–
the ocean and its islands, watchtowers
along the coast, mountains
glittering like marble. Trelawny imagined
the spirit of his friend soaring above him.

And he thought, We’re no better
than a pack of dogs
dragging him back into the light.
Three white wands
marked the place where he’d been buried,

lime thrown over him, the yellow sand
shovelled in. And now
they had to dig him out. Who could speak?
Even Byron was silent.
When they heard the hollow sound

of iron on bone, Byron asked
if Trelawny would save the skull for him,
but remembering that he had formerly
used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined
Shelley’s should not be so profaned.

After the fire was lit they poured
wine over the body, causing the flames
to glisten and quiver. Then the corpse
fell open, and the heart
was laid bare. Byron turned away,

walked back to the beach,
swam out to his boat. Leigh Hunt
stayed inside his carriage. Everything
turned to ash, but what surprised us all
was that the heart remained entire.

The poet’s heart! Of course
it should resist the tire.
But why? As fitting that it burn,
if brighter than the rest.
Trelawny reached in and snatched it out.

No one saw him do it,
though his hand was badly hurt.
Every detail, he would write,
of the life of a man of genius
is interesting. But no more

about the heart–how much
he wanted it. I collected
the human ashes and placed them in a box.
Buried in Rome
with the appropriate ceremonies.

–
I really liked this poem from his awesome book The Probable World (under $1 used at amazon), and kept trying to remember where I knew the story from, years after first reading it. Then I kept mixing it up with Galway Kinnell’s wonderful poem “Shelley” which deals with Shelley’s life detached a bit from his work.

Writing exercise: Find a good biography of a favorite writer. Or check wikipedia. There’s a ton of authors with interesting biographical information available. Write a poem about that interesting fact. Poems that teach the reader something interesting that they didn’t already know are always more resonant.

Click here now. (audio file)

Kurt Vonnegut is sort of a religion to me, and if I didn’t have so much school to blame it on, I could very likely commit Hari Kari for not knowing about Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s new and uncollected writings. Mark relates a few anecdotes from his introduction the posthumous book. Never has an egg metaphor been so sad. Learn a little bit about American literature, listen to this excerpt. Then buy his books and read them all (but don’t start with Galapagos. You need to work your way up to that tremendous, but very odd novel). I’m a huge fan of Bluebeard, Player Piano, and Cat’s Cradle, and Siren’s of Titan too, but I’d say read one of the other three I mentioned first. Plus, if you don’t care which edition you get, pretty much all of the books I listed can be found for about $1. So spend the ten dollars that would use to buy a burger (without tip) at Chili’s, and get three books that will make you laugh a minimum of ten times, as well as have interesting and imaginative plots. Do it. Go Vonnegut.

This poem is from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems, and I gotta say beforehand that I love Charles Simic. I didn’t realize before I bought his newest selected and new that I actually already owned the majority of the books these poems are collected from, but it was definitely still worth it. Here’s a really cool poem from the “new” section of the book.

“Little Night Music”
by Charles Simic

Of neighbors’ voices and dishes
Being cleared away
On long summer evenings
With the windows open
As we sat on the back stairs,
Smoking and sipping beer.

The memory of that moment,
So sweet at first,
The two of us chatting away,
Till the stars made us quiet.
We drew close
And held fast to each other
As if in sudden danger.

That one time, I didn’t recognize
Your voice, or dare turn
To look at your face
As you spoke of us being born
With so little apparent cause.
I could think of nothing to say.
The music over, the night cold.

I just love how the last stanza turns the image for you to see another facet of it. Another perspective in the light of slightly different nostalgic circumstances. And the polarity of the emotions radiating from the two takes on the same little evening (through (perhaps subconscious) selective memory, though it could even be an entirely separate occasion) makes the second all that more tragic. Makes me want to say haha. Anyway, here’s a pretty good review of this book by Brad Luen.

Guerilla Poetry is just like guerilla warfare or guerilla adrvertising (stickers and posters a street signs, walls etc.) only with poetry. Guerilla Poetics is one group that does this, and Incendiary Lit would like to be another, but we’d need your help! We’re planning on making little photo bookmarks mostly (so very short lined poems are ideal), taking them into all the bookstores and libraries we (and anyone who’d be willing to help, we’d send the  bookmarks to you and everything) can find and hiding them in popular books, as well as some more traditional flyers, to put around various college campuses, malls, maybe solicitor style under windshields with a christmas poem at christmas time. Who knows. We’d like to see/hear your ideas or poem suggestions (yours or others’) to zebulonhuset (a-t) yahoo (diz-zot) com(edy). Hopefully that’ll avoid spammers, or just comment here. Word. Any photographers or artists who’d be willing to help with graphics would be greatly appreciated as well.

I have a bad habit, or a good habit, depending on how you look at it, of buying books that look interesting, despite the lack of time and already mountainous pile of books (I’m not even mentioning the nonfiction books on Easter Island, Peru, Oak Island, mythology etc etc) that I haven’t been able to read more than a little bit of, and it’s really annoying. Late night amazon.com shopping sprees are responsible for many of these, the rest are from discount shelves/bins. Today I’ll focus on poetry, and bear in mind, there’s a ton more in the stack of “to be read” beyond, and in some cases above these.

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems of Albert Goldbarth. (also include Saving Lives by Albert Goldbarth). I wrote a paper on Goldbarth in the Fall Semester, and it very nearly caused me to apply to University of Wichita to seek his tutelage. Yeah. He’s really, really good. Unfortunately MFA applications were a gigantic bust from my grand plans, so I may still apply… it’s just, you know, Wichita. But that’s one of the only things the program has going against it, so anyone who doesn’t mind the small town school, check out their MFA website here. Goldbarth’s the SHIT. Both of these books were the result of a late night Amazon spree.

Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele. Dr. Bill Mohr’s one of the greatest assets possible for CSULB. He’s been in the LA poetry scene for decades and with Momentum Press published many tremendous artists. He introduced us to Timothy Steele, who is kind of a neo-classicalist. Or something like that. He usually writes with a very well handled rhyme scheme, but the subject matter is more of a gritty everyday sort, similar to Phillip Levine. I think, at least, from the little of the book I’ve managed to find time to read. Very good stuff. He handles meter and rhyme with such ease, I’m hoping to take this book on the next roadtrip I embark upon and hopefully learn a thing or two about rhyme while I’m at it. This was a $1.50 bin book at school. Who can resist that?

The October Palace by Jane Hirshfield. She’s a buddhist, I think, and she’s highly acclaimed. I can’t quite remember which poems of hers I’ve read in classes or journals, but I know there’s been quite a few. I’ve picked this book up a few times and read a couple poems, but still, less than half probably, and never in ideal poetry reading settings. This was a $5 purchase in a bookstore outlet (which was located in a vacant supermarket in Santee, CA).

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. Again, Bill Mohr turned us onto Kees, a wonderful poet and his collected poems is, what I’ve read, a solid collection, but with school’s reading, and then my own writing and trying to keep up a little, at least, with journals, simply no time. This was actually not an amazon spending spree. I thought about this one before I was at a computer.

…to be continued…

It’s actually really cool. At the Donald Maass Literary Agency website there’s a list of possible books that each agent would like to read. They’re big on sci-fi, Donald Maass, for instance, wants the next Dune… they go into somewhat decent detail about what they’re looking for also, which is awesome, because it’s almost like a writing exercise on a very large scale, if you’re trying to figure out what your new novel about. Every month they update the list of novels they want to read, I believe. YA, fantasy, sci-fi, political thrillers,

I, for some reason, absolutely love Kay Ryan’s book Say Uncle, and though I can’t quite explain it (other than the move in poetry toward brevity may have gone a little past what you could call “generally enjoyable” into the realm of visual art) but Ryan’s very terse, jokey, rhymey poems toe the edge while giving you enough to keep you busy. They’re thinkers, but not because they’re incomprehensible. Here’s one of my favorites, which has already been much anthologized.

Blandeur by Kay Ryan

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

I’ve been slowly working on a novella/novel for the last 4 or so years. Or, I wrote a version that became more of an outline back then, and after 2 major overhauls, the last one just finished which added almost 10,000 words, it is finally just about ready to go out. It is a good feeling. An accomplishment. I’m definitely very happy to hopefully have the major work of my first long project done. I did kind of steal an idea for the formatting from the novel I just began, of telling it in short vignettes, which worked because it was already formatted like that with only an extra break to indicate a time break. OK, that’s probably more than you needed to know, but I just wanted to share, and offer the suggestion of vignettes to people who may also be struggling with formatting their own novels. It’s fun, and if you have any time breaks after something particularly poignant, by having that as the end of a chapter, meaning your reader has to turn the page to read anything else, and in that break they’ll be thinking a little bit longer about what just happened, which hopefully will ingrain your words a little deeper.

After the break, there’s one of the couple very, very short chapters pulled from the middle of my book, “The Smiles Are Killing Me.”
(more…)

Moving Water, Tucson

Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons. Warm rain felt good on faces lifted to lick water from the sky. We played outside, having sense enough to go out and revel in the rain. We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.

The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water. Kids gathered to see what it might bring. Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote, a doll’s arm, some kid’s fort. Broken bottles, a red sweater. Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.

We stood on edges of sand, waiting for brown walls of water. We could hear it, massive water, not far off. The whole desert might come apart at once, might send horny toads and Gila monsters swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks of the worst they could imagine and then some.

Under sheet lightning cracking the sky, somebody’s teenaged brother decided to ride the flash flood. He stood on wood in the bottom of the ditch, straddling the puny stream. “Get out, it’s coming,” kids yelled. “GET OUT,” we yelled. The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.

Land turned liquid that fast, water yanked our feet, stole our thongs, pulled in the edges of the arroyo, dragged whole trees root wads and all along, battering rams thrust downstream, anything you left there gone, anything you meant to go back and get, history, water so high you couldn’t touch bottom, water so fast you couldn’t get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn’t take it, water. We couldn’t step back. We had to be there, to see for ourselves. Water in a place where water’s always holy. Water remaking the world.

That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood. He stood and the water lifted him. He stood, his eyes not seeing us. For a moment, we all wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash flood inside us, the flash flood outside us. Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood. For a few drenched seconds, he rode. The water took him, faster than you can believe. He kept his head up. Water you couldn’t see through, water half dirt, water whirling hard. Heavy rain weighed down our clothes. We stepped closer to the crumbling shore, saw him downstream smash against the footbridge at the end of the block. Water held him there, rushing on.

—

Here’s an essay by Peggy Shumaker titled Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction. The 400 word story, flash fiction, narrative prose poem, short short, whatever, appeared in the collection Short Takes, which is a really cool book about the short-short in creative non fiction. Definitely a worthwhile read. It got me hooked on cnf short-shorts. Thanks also, to Sydney Brown. Word.

Holy crap, Li-Young Lee’s finally got another book of poems being released in just ten days! Behind My Eyes available on 1/21/08. And guess what, it comes with an audio CD as well! He’s the author of one of my favorite books of poetry Rose, as well as City in Which I Love You, and Book of My Nights. Be excited, very excited. Li-Young Lee’s work is easy to understand, but rewarding
on second and third reads, his images are wonderful, and there’s a great rhythm to his poems. You can pre-order right now, or storm the nearest bookstore with a halfway decent poetry section (and since it’s being published by WW Norton, it’ll be in the big stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble) the moment it opens and run flat out to the shelf to make sure you secure your copy. For those in warm areas, remember not to wear flip-flops, because those few seconds lost due to inappropriate footwear could lost that precious copy of poetry goodness.

Jesse Ventura’s new memoir/novel, “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me” is about as poignant as the title. Considering he rails on the Kennedy assassination, and about ’superspy’ activities like finding a ‘bug’ in their home, and other conspiracy theories and fantasies, including the one that ends the book, about him announcing his run for the 2008 presidency at Wrestlemania, ending in his own assassination. What a waste of tree pulp. If you’re more interested, buy it here and wade through it.

Junot Diaz’s first novel (following sensation short fiction collection Drown) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tale of immigrant struggles, a bone fide curse, a sci-fi fantasy dork (Oscar) and his tumultuous family. It was one of the most highly reviewed books of 2007, getting praise like “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel” from Publisher’s Weekly and “Propelled by compassion, Díaz’s novel is intrepid and radiant.” from Booklist, yet, its sales thusfar have been a mere 27,000. And it is highly likely to be nominated for a Pulitzer. Isn’t that scary? That your book can be wonderfully reviewed, there’s buzz of a Pulitzer (Junot has yet to cross over into his 40’s) and yet, your book, your baby, is left to be dusted on store shelves. Jeez.

Here’s a yahoonews article outlining other publishing failures, and successes of 2007.

That’s right folks, why give your friends and family clamoring for something “true” something intriguing and delightful like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Me Talk Pretty One Day when you can give them the intimate insights of Slash where in his new autobiography Slash, he writes “That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans,” ? A slew of other rockers have their autobiographies out this holiday season for the, at least sort of, literate rockers out there including Eric Clapton (The Autobiography), Nicki Sixx (The Heroin Diaries), and Ronnie Wood of Rolling Stones fame(Ronnie: The Autobiography). And yes, The Heroin Diaries would be the darker of the bunch. Any fan will be delighted to read about other pee soaked or handgun standoff with Keith Richards (Ronnie) stories. Raw is what’s selling now, so these rockers get a little grimier than they would’ve gotten in an autobiography a decade ago, when most of them were already fading stars anyway…

Not exactly sure what one’s to expect, “I love Brian Piccolo, still.” or I am Third part two,  but Gayle Sayers’ new memoir gets sacked by lack of insight. No new insight into the famed relationship oft played in Elementary schools nationwide, nor much more than self aggrandizement from the former football star. Pity. Here’s an Associated Press review.

So, I’m apparently the last person to grab this gravy-train, and I feel like I’m dressed in my best and covered in Thanksgiving sauce. Or something. But The basic plot of Nabokov’s Lolita is very similar to the earlier (1916 to Nabokov’s 1956) version, an 18 page ‘novella’ which sounds about average short story length, but hey, who’m I to tell those crazy Germans (and the author did become a prominent Nazi journalist) what to call their pedophilia? Anyway, here’s the opening paragraph of a John Lethem essay from Harper’s recently called Love and Theft…

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.

OK, paragraph and a sentence, big deal. Anyway, he gave the original author a different name than what I’d read on the St. Petersburg website, where there was an article titled “Nabokov was no plagurist, say his admirers” but seeing as the head of the Nabokov Museum offered such unbiased insight as “He couldn’t understand German well enough to read such literature.” But seeing as he lived in Berlin for 13 years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Museum officers are worried about Job security.

Jonathon Lethem’s essay goes on to talk about Cryptomnesia which is: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations. New word for today. Whee. Have a pleasant day.

How about $41,000? Last May one of the only 500 first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s for us Americans) sold for $55,000. This week another sold for $41,000. But, seeing as there are only 500 in existence, and many of those apparently went to libraries to be torn up from cover to cover by snot nosed kids eating purple popsicles, perfect copies (the $41,000 is also signed by JK Rowling) are getting to be almost as rare as Honus Wagners. Well, probably not quite there, but you see the parallel. After Harry made his trip to the Americas, the days of 500 copies were well over, the last installment of the series has sold over 400 million copies, in 64 different languages. JK Rowling is a billionaire. Second richest woman in the world, behind Oprah. And whereas Oprah only makes a monthly hobby of getting people to read who would normally just be watching daytime TV, Rowling’s spent the last decade plus getting people who would normally be watching Pokemon or Spongebob to reading long novels that will hopefully segue into other reading. Tip of the hat to both. Here’s more about the $41,000 book from YahooNews.

I pulled this old favorite from my shelf tonight and read over it again, remembering why it is an old favorite. Never heard of Campbell McGrath? He’s a MacArthur “Genius” as well as a Guggenheim fellow, a pushcart winner, Kingsley Tufts Award Winner among other prestigious awards he can claim as his own. Still unsure?This comparison may not be entirely accurate, it being after two and the eyelid lead is no longer being withheld my active muscles, making me look like I’m trying to see something far off, but I’d say Campbell McGrath is poetry’s Douglas Coupland. He has the cynical, sarcastic distaste for corporations and vast vocabulary of the young intellectuals in the ’80s. Equal parts Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and the Who (or Guns ‘n Roses perhaps). American Noise is McGrath’s second collection, after “Capitalism” which is long out of print, sadly. AN is probably one of my favorites. Favorite books period. There is such a vast, overwhelmingly American feel to his poetry, even when not describing things in America. He’s been a sailor, carpenter and alligator wrestler, but now settles with wrestling words in Miami, where he teaches at Florida International University’s MFA program. I had the good fortune of having been taught his poem Angels and the Bars of Manhattan in an early poetry class, and can’t help but think that I too will be teaching a poem from this collection when I’m teaching intro to creative writing to Freshmen. Right now I’m gravitating towards the wonderful Smokestacks, Chicago Here’s just the opening few lines, and you’ll understand:

“To burn, to smolder with the jeweled incendiary coal
of wanting, to move and never
stop, to seize, to use,
to shape, grasp, glut, these united
states of transition, that’s
it, that is it,
our greatness, right
there.”

The urgency of the poem, the mad-listing, and that “jeweled incendiary coal of wanting” how could you not love it. It’s also one of his much shorter poems (in line length, and only 2 pages, below the mean poem length of 3 pages for this journal) so it should, I figure, be easier to teach kids with shorter attention spans than my own. I should quote again, to give you another little taste for the book. Here’s from a poem directly linking him to the Beats- Blue Tulips and Night Train for Jack Kerouac’s Grave (y’all ridin the train? Woo woo!)

“This morning I see you slouched beneath the streetlight
on the corner, passing a bottle of tokay with the winos
from the last welfare dives on Belmont–the Julian,
the Bel-Ray, the Diplomat Hotel–a semaphore of cigarettes
and anachronistic neon, Transients Welcome
on the blink in rubific pink italic script.
October. Drizzle of elm trees and solemn flags.
Memories of the railroad earth kicked up on the wind
that squeegees fallen leaves along the back alleys
rich with the cast off declensions of our lives”

Pretty sweet, right? But did you see rubific? Declensions? Hopefully you don’t mind the out of the ordinary vocabulary words coming at you, because he digs deep into his pouch of words, and often. His poems are about celebration in the everyday, in roadside signs in the 7-11 burrito, “For his is the land of Salisbury steak and crinkle-cut fries,” for his are poems in which the questions and issues all of humanity deals with are dealt with: loneliness, alienation, mortality, but also camaraderie; celebration in a pint and a shot, a sunset in Brewster County, Texas, driving at night. At times life-threateningly urgent, at others meditative. Just, check it out already. Here’s a link for you lazy readers who might not buy the book if I don’t make it overwhelmingly easy for you. There are 3 copies under $6 right now, and another 3 under $7. I’ll leave you with one last quotation from Night Travelers:

“Rising from Newark I see the cars of the homebound commuters assembled

like migrating caravans.

Lush as glowworms, gregarious as electric eels in their dusty blue Hondas

and plush Monte Carlos,

they jam the tollways and access roads, flood the exits and passing lanes,

circle the sinuous cloverleaves

until they are nothing but rivers of dun and aluminum and butter-colored light”

So you have your poems collecting dust, the journals they’ve been in are sitting on your bookshelf, or worse even, in a box somewhere. Now what? Put together a book of course. But you don’t want to just slip through the waters of the poetry world and sink to the bottom, you want to make a splash! Well, that’s a lot tougher than it seems like it should be. But your first book winning a prize, that’s a little something extra to put on a resume. Here are some First Book Awards that are coming upon their deadline still in the ‘07 year:

The Gatewood Prize Deadline: October 1 (for only women between 18 and 39)
The Gerald Cable Book Award Deadline: October 15
Three Candles Press First Book Award Deadline: October 15
APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry Deadline: October 31
Patricia Bibby First Book Award Deadline: October 31
Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize Deadline October 31 (For only an American woman)
Walt Whitman Award Deadline: November 15
Yale Series of Younger Poets Deadline: November 15
Perugia Press Prize Deadline: November 15 (for only a woman’s first or second book)
New Issues Poetry Prize Deadline: November 30
A Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize November 30

Or time-tremors if you will. If we don’t have exercises or a joke for you in the course of the day, take that as a hint to pay more attention to your daily tasks, as the autopilot could go off at any second. For more on Timequakes read Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s tremendous book, intriguingly titled Timequake. Get your Kilgore Trout fix in these dark times without K.