Incendiary Lit

Viva-gasolina! (or, Damn Some Chicken McNuggets Sound Good Right Now)

I can’t watch the burst pipe anymore. High-
definition webcam (recently spammed,
though long monitoring the dirty gey-
ser) streaming now 24-7. Hi-Def cam:
be damned. Be peed upon. Why crack that bit
of three-mile-deep terra-digestive hose?
All that dead, digested and processed shit
of dinosaurs and ferns and mosquitoes
tucked so tightly in the tummy of Earth.
Beneath gravity-susceptible rock
and water and so much sustained pressure.
The answer: we’re smartish assholes. We knocked
a new rectum mid-gut and sucked. What else?
We’re not about to walk to McDonald’s.

…

-by Zebulon Huset

I was trying to think of a grabbing title, what do you think? Of course he means it, and he doesn’t mean it. Like we all do. Emotional truth right? Capsules of time and spheres of existence and…. Yeah. Anyway, I was flipping through the new New Ohio Review and saw one of Bob Hicok’s lovely long titles in the table of contents: “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry” and thought Hmm. I too feel like picking on an oil company, the Deepwater Horizon’s spill still fresh (sadly, even while writing this right here, still gushing).

Also, is it just me, or does the name Deepwater Horizon sound, at least in retrospect, like Event Horizon? About the ship attempting a form of travel (drilling) never tried before, to a place never gone before in space (the ocean) and after a mishap a dark presence is making its way toward our homes. How did we not see it coming?

Anyway, Hicok’s poem begins “Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.” Of course, British Petroleum is the essential parent company of Transocean, operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Now comes the part where I say the ironic tone of the poem perhaps rings even truer in the light of the current gulf spill. The poem is anchored very well in a time not far divorced from the spill (present) with other lines referring to current events such as:

…Isn’t a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren’t I technically a person
and responsible?

which seems, at least to this reader, to be very much a comment on the supreme court ruling allowing corporations the rights of citizens, and therefore the right to donate to political campaigns (which gets chosen politicians, law/policy makers in a place of actually deciding law/policy, with a debt of sorts to that corporation).

Hicok critically questions his own actions, his own ineffectualness, at the same time as asking the reader to consider their own global ineffectualness without getting preachy. How? Well, because he’s a magician, mostly, but also by building a strong case of self deprecation before laying into the ubiquitous you with: “How far would you walk for bread? For the flour // to make bread?” And, as promised, the poem goes awry at the end in a very organic way. From destruction to apathy to well, what’s next? I was going to quote his line about how gently BP planned to drill for their oil, but I’ll let you discover that as it was intended, within the poem, which New Ohio Review’s graciously produced not only in their pages, but also on their website as a pdf.

Read Bob Hicok’s “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry”

MMS

please help me
regulate
the cocaine
on this toilet seat.

Love Song: I and Thou

by Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
 the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
 any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
 dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
 I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
 for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
 hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
 at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
 Oh I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
 It held. It settled plumb.
level, solid, square and true
 for that one great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
 skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
 but I planned it I sawed it
I nailed it and I
 will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
 to the left-hand cross-piece but
I can’t do everything myself.
 I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

—

Ain’t crucifixion romantic? This was pulled from Poems Seven, New and Collected Poems by Alan Dugan. Check it out. It’s cool. Preview at google books here.

I think I’m watching too much news. It’s beginning to frustrate my everyday life. I think, however, if I try to release with a poem every few days about my news watching, it may ease the tension. Being a Monday, the good stuff hasn’t aired yet, so I wrote a haiku about Rachael Maddow, as, you know, Republicans see her. Well, republicans who like Richard Pryor movies. Scott Brown, here’s lookin at you.

The GOP watches MSNBC

Maddow, red-necked, sly-
worded hipster. Campaigning
Like Monty Brewster.

A woman wanted to sell one of her knuckles….
Tell me, she said. How many carats do you think it is?
But it’s not a jewel, said the jeweler.
Nor are you, said the woman, Much less a gentleman.
If you insist, said the jeweler as he put her knuckle to his loupe. Hmmm, he said, It’s certainly not a clear stone, a lot of cracks. I hope you didn’t pay much for it.
It was a gift, mother gave it to me. What do you think it’s worth?
Not very much, said the jeweler.
Maybe the setting has some value? said the woman.
It might, said the jeweler, If it includes two tits and a cunt…
I love you, said the woman.
Let’s get married, said the jeweler.
You go too far, said the woman….

—

This is from The Rooster’s Wife. Buy it. Enjoy it.

Vital Signs
Emily Van Kley

Of many hometowns, this is the bleakest: main street
gap-toothed with abandoned buildings, three restaurants,
two gas stations, hockey rink, bakery, lakeside foodstore
where there may or may not be potatoes

at the end of a dust-scarved shelf. There are those of us
who drink ourselves to death and those who take a lighter hand,
but even teenagers know better

than to believe in immortality. The evidence is everywhere:
field by the church named for Johnny Mazes whose snow machine
defected in the close woods, whose helmet split

down the middle where there was no seam. Anne Fear
whose young body pin-balled the cab of a flipped van
and who woke with a cheesecloth memory. Softball
tournament named for the beautiful Ahonen twin

whose twenty-year-old heart fell away in the shower, halved shell
on the shore of an inland sea. For the misanthrope, there are
Superior’s silt-blasted wrecks, water so cold even wood won’t rot
decently. Flooded mine buildings thrusting their acidy tongues down

and down. Too many deer make for a starving winter,
which means you clutching your rifle in thin fall snow
are an instrument of some vital love.

—-

Emily Van Kley grew up in Northern Michigan, and to be honest, I couldn’t find a whole lot more out about her. Here is a story that she had published in Boston University’s Republic of Letters, also, buy the Winter 2009 (Volume 34.2) issue of the Florida Review. It’s another enjoyable read from FR, and includes 2 more poems from Van Kley (or is it just Kley?)

A New Path Will Bring Rich Rewards

by Jynne Dilling Martin

Make no mistake about it, slime molds are
the most interesting organisms on Earth.

Chop one’s body into little orange pieces
and strew it throughout a labyrinth:

the chunks actually find one another, slither
back together, reclump and glop their way out!

Why not take a page from their book, folks?
Our homogeneity is becoming alarming:

a dutiful child with shined shoes arrives
every thirty minutes for a pianoforte lesson,

the awkward herd in the women’s room
take a simultaneous piss at intermission,

we all seem to sit on our asses, look up
at bright things exploding in the sky,

give no thought to sleeping upside-down,
to shooting ourselves in both shoulders,

or to living full-time under the sea! Christ
tried to set a creative example: he was like

hey, heres a bunch of crazy things to try,
you can even put nails through your hands

and end up totally cool in just three days.
But two millennia later, no one eventually

lives on the moon. He must be disappointed.
Without eyes, wheels, hammers, or phone lines

slime molds have transcended vastly more
challenging circumstances; if they had brainstorm

as well as a sense of humor we’d be the punchline
of every lame-ass slime mold joke. How many

humans does it take to figure out regeneration?
Dunno Bob, shall we sprout fingers and count?

—

This wonderful poem was in the TriQuarterly guest edited by David Kirby and Barbara Hamby and dubbed “Ultra-Talk”. Those familiar with people like Charles Harper Webb, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux, Albert Goldbarth, Campbell McGrath et al. will definitely enjoy this issue of TriQuarterly.  Just a couple notes about this very entertaining poem which opened up the wonderful world of slime molds to me. The tone is very consistent and believable, glop (L6) is an amazing verb. The poem does bring up a good question– what next? For humans, how’re we evolving now? Not that I’m about to get into trying to answer that, it would really just devolve into a lame ass slime mold joke I’m sure.

For more poems by Jynne Dilling Martin check out this bit at Boston Review,  and these four at Perihelion. (Don’t miss “An Animal With Claws Should Use Them”.)Word.

The Apples of Recollection
by Morri Creech

Once, stumbling into the twilight kitchen, drowsy, leaning above
the ripe fruit on the countertop, hearing only a moth thump
against the fluorescent light and a slight breeze swell the curtains,
I had a vision. There was a long path to the apple trees
my grandfather grafted when he was young. They shed their leaves
in the cold light. I walked there and found my father, twenty-six,
bent on a ladder, hoisting a half-full bucket toward the boughs.
The sunlight fell in columns through the biggest branches.
I knew somehow that my mother had been gone five months,
and still he picked apples for the pies she would never make.
One fell groundward and rolled toward my feet. I was sure
that if I picked it up, if I lifted it to my mouth and took a bite,
I would remember nothing of what I saw. And for a time,
there was nothing else, just that moment, a father busy at work
among the trees, picking the swollen apples no one would eat,
and his child beneath him, holding the one piece of fruit
he was strictly forbidden, for memory’s sake, to taste. All of this,
I knew, might pass through the gates of ivory in an instant.
And then I woke. I stood there alone in the fluorescent light
of the present, in the kitchen, holding the unbitten apple in my palm.

—

Indiana Review rocks. They’re one of the few magazines that actively keep an eye on their subscription list, and updated my address! What a wonderful surprise to get the newest IR in my mailbox. I’d been wrapped up in the Ultra-Talk issue of TriQuarterly, so definitely a slight change of pace, and perhaps it has something to do with the juxtaposition of the two journals over the holiday break, or maybe because I have a soft spot in my heart for a poem of my own, about a vision of my father and a piece of fruit. So, universality or coincidence? The Indiana Review liked it enough to print it, I was drawn back to this poem a number of poems while flipping haphazardly through the journal, so, anyone? What do ya think? You can’t deny that “Twilight Kitchen” and “in the fluorescent light of the present” sound sweet. Yes, they produce saccharin synesthesia. Anyway, subscribe to the Indiana Review. This issue’s cover looks very nice too, and they don’t have it online yet, so tah-dah. Here we go.

Teacher’s Lament

by Alan Dugan

The sidewalk says,
in chalk, that he
loves her. What a joke.

So fall is here
again and school
forces the issue: to sow

at harvest. It sits
the sexes side by side
to learn the mysteries

as if they could. Then
they can drive out
on first cold Friday nights

to learn their first delights,
pay later, and dream love.

—

Yes. It’s fall again. And what says fall like fallible youths?

 A quote from David Mamet’s essay “Hearing the Notes That Aren’t Played” about a certain trend/type of writing.

 Yes, it is true that life would be better if we were all a little kinder, and it is true that paint splattered in the air will fall to the ground. Both are true,but who would have suspected that they were notable?

which reminds me of a little selection from “James Dickey’s Dream” by David Kirby:

…………………….that makes me think of the remark
Jane Smiley made about how much better it would be

if American literature had sprung from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
instead of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Roy Blount, Jr.’s reply that that’s like saying
it would be better for people to come from heaven
than from sex.

Why? The two quotes are related, but I flipped through House on Boulevard Street like a madman til I found the quote which is follow (and preceded) by the idea of mimicry and homage. Coincidence? Heck yeah. But probably influenced by little memory ticks from studying the (Kirby) poem.

And now for something completely different. (borderline nsfw, but in a good way)

The Smiles of the Bathers

The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow
and old:
The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and
public endings–
Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and
quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are
involved.

by Weldon Kees

–

The consumption by a project is a feeling I am altogether too familiar with, as are many people. The energy and excitement of that to-the-instant occupation, whether its the currency of a breast stroke, or in the swimmer’s case a flutter kick, the loss of that occupation allows the mind to settle back into the inevitabilities of life which is why on my IRS form I just wrote: No taxes, writing!

The Sour Aftertaste of Dinner

by Richard Fein

The couple that was at the next table wore wedding rings, surely they were once in love.
But were they still soul mates or just two souls sitting side by side.
Menus covered their faces, avoiding the eye-to-eye.
The waiter took their orders and while they waited each kept behind a paperback novel.
From soup to salad to entree there was silence and neither shared from the other’s plate.
They both skipped desert so nothing sweet was on their table.
Only when their bill was being paid did their hands touch, accidently
They apologized, actually apologized to each other.
And as we watched, our own romance cooled to lukewarm.
But somewhere, sometime, on our way home,
we looked at each other and our eyes screamed not us, not us,
as we kissed deeply to wash away the sour aftertaste of dinner.
–

322 Review is the literary journal published by Rowan University’s MFA program. They publish 4 online issues, and 2 print issues (though the first print issue is the only one out yet. The next print issue deadline is August 15th, and electonic submissions are preferred at submissions@322review.org (up to 3 poems, each not to exceed 36 lines / Fiction up to 6k words, or 3-750 word stories, or you can tack a short-short onto a regular story in a submission). They also sound very open to mixed media work and hypertextual documents. Check out the website and see if its your cup of tea. I also really liked the poem Misplaced by Jill Jones. I had to read the line “placed after before / in the evening” a few times to get it, but I liked that. The method mirrored in the content of the poem. Or the other way around, whichever it is, it made me think a bit. A great indication of their ecclectic tastes when compared to the more straightforward Fein poem.

But the month is very, very young. But here’s a link if you’re bored. Follow Iamzeb on twitter to read my daily <140 character poems. Message me if you want to try the exercise of writing a poem a day that fits in the twitter format, and I’ll follow you.

That isn’t a real name. It sounds dumb, but if someone heard a rollerblader talking about their Full Truespin Fishbrain, which actually is a trick/spin combination, they’d think someone hit their head, and it may be true. But yeah, If anyone who stumbles on this post and feels like following me on twitter (IamZeb) to read my daily (or more frequently) posted twitter poems, by all means do it. If you too want to join in on the month’s exercise, send a message @iamzeb or whatever you do, so I can follow you and read your poems as well. Get a little network going.

Why a Twitter poem?

Why than you for asking. I personally think Twitter is kind of silly. I, personally, don’t need minute to minute updates on someone across the country petting their cat (then FEEDING it!). However, the Paper Hearts challenge to write a twitter poem struck an ‘exercise’ note for me. I’m not entirely sure why, but I flashed back to a class I took with Steve Kowit at Southwestern (if you’re in San Diego, DO IT! While you can at least, there’ve been rumors that Kowit may be retiring, and that will be a sad, sad day for the San Diego Poetry community) about the American Sentence.

What is an American Sentence?

Why I’m glad you asked that. Look it up. Or just take my word that it’s a poetic form originated by Allen Ginsberg as an adaptation of the Haiku to a more ‘American’ form of consumption: all at once.

What?

A prose-haiku. Listen already. An American Sentence is a 17 syllable prose poem. A (for lack of a better name) twitter poem will have to be 140 characters or less. Similar, eh? Why not. A variation of an American Sentence from syllabics to character length (remember, that includes spaces and punctuation).

What do I do?

Go to Twitter and start an account (quick process) or sign into you account. Send me a tweet *gag* [if you want to take part in the little Incendiary Lit Twitter Poem Month, updating whenever you feel like, but keep your poetics in mind. I really don’t care if you went to the grocery store unless you see Mark Twain poking among the meats in the refrigerator.] or just follow me for a little reading now and then in case you get bored, or to perhaps help spark a poem of your own, regardless of form.

Yes, the TV channel JWTNY is to blame for this bit of entertaining eye candy while Billy Collins reads his poems slightly drone-like.

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On Fire

Having been taught by fools, how else could I have ended up
but as I am? a man who panics at the sound of his own voice,
a blusterer, afraid that within the five-pointed maple leaf there lies
another name he never knew; ready, always, to be found wrong.

Listen: in my tenth year they put me in a room where one plane
watched another plane fly over a city. It was morning in both
places. In black & white at first the explosion looked like water
rising. Captured, they say, on film, as in: pulled out of time

so we can rewind it and watch it happen again, as in a memory,
as in: this is a memory we all have, these are our family pictures.
There was that kind of shame. As if the fire really had been stolen.
And sitting on the floor there was one boy who even earlier

that year came home to find his mother hanging from a rope
in the kitchen. What didn’t he know that he needed this film
to teach him? Already what he knew was enough to terrify
the teachers, so that they couldn’t look at him. But they also

couldn’t not look at him. As if he was an obscene pleasure.
And he was beautiful. Complete. But what he carried in him
seeped out as hate for anyone of the same sex as his mother.
It was that simple: even a fourth-grade mind could understand.

So the girls stayed away. And from the other side of the common
room, where the books full of numbers being added, subtracted
and divided were kept, our new teacher watched, helpless, knowing
he also needed this knowledge, but she couldn’t give it to him.

Which might be why she let me touch her. Because she couldn’t
get near him and my head against the antique white lace of her
dress was a good enough almost. Her hair was light brown, if I
remember correctly. Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt

but it can also mean you don’t know what you’re doing. As when
I felt that touching her wasn’t enough and I wanted to press closer,
until someone felt pain, or until I passed through her dress and found
myself inside her. It didn’t matter if she was an adult and I was ten:

what I wanted wasn’t sex. Or not what I have learned to think sex
is. Her dress was made of a material called vintage, which meant
that although it had managed to avoid all the minor catastrophes
of red wine stain and hook snag, along with the major disasters

of history, no one had treated the cloth with chemicals, to make it
flame retardant And on the whole length of the hand-sewn inner seam
that started at her wrist and ran all the way down to her ankle,
no one had remembered to place even one small label warning:

if you touch the sleeve of this garment to the still-hot coils
of an electric stove, it will explode. Which is what happened.
There’s the land of scream you hear in movies. What I heard
twenty-seven years ago didn’t sound anything like that. It was

sharper and can’t be recorded. No matter how many times
you rewind the film. You keep going back and each time
there’s a little less there. Until the memory has become
the event. And how you feel about the memory. The materials

have burnt away. There was so much fabric and all of it on fire.
Her hair too, which was long, as I remember. She came running
from the faculty kitchen, as if she could escape what she was
turning into. But all she did was excite and encourage the flames.

by Andrew Feld

The flow of the narrative in this poem reminded me very much of a David Kirby, or Cambell McGrath poem, but mostly Kirby. The long compound sentences and the ands and the ands and the movement from one topic to the next. But one line really stuck out to me as an epigram of sorts was actually split between stanzas, and I think expertly so. One must be careful with statements of general fact in poetry. There is such a great risk of “Love is all you need” poetry gooeyness to infect direct observations, but this one got me (L21-22). “Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt // but it can also mean you don’t know what you’re doing.” Friggan Word. The duality of words is a great tool of the poet, and this duality was well put to match the poem.

Willow Springs is a sweet literary journal from Eastern Washington University that publishes accessible and excellent poetry and prose. They’ve recently started a feature on their website that has the poet writing (at decent length) about their poem. Dorianne Laux is one of the best contemporary poets, and you should all be more familiar with her work. Dagnabbit. Here’s her feature at Willow Springs for her poem “S. Sgt Metz.”

ENJOY

This is a much larger issue than I could even claim to be able to address without decades of further reading, however, I can offer an amateur’s perspective. Whenever there are formal constraints on words

( first of all, of course, the non-spoken must be rendered into the spoken{written} which is a constraint, and into one language over another unless the poet and readers are sufficiently bilingual to understand slight linguistic/cultural characteristics of said un-translatable words, and then is bound by the constraints of grammar (unless you really feel like throwing caution to the wind or want to write in vernacular) and spelling and ARGH. When you REALLY look at it, poetry is a horribly constrained style of writing. Line breaks can’t be arbitrary, titles, punctuation and capitalization. What a friggan mess. Ignore ALL THIS)

the meaning of the poem can take a backseat, or be totally lost. And really, the meaning, or at least the moments of the poem are what’s important (if the meaning is less of the life-changing and more of the distraction-from-life genre), and form is the container of the words, not their meaning. You could kind of look at it like Bonsai Kittens. With photoshop (and grammar and poetic license) you can shove that kitten into a nearly imposible vase, but it’ll often lose the reality– the concreteness and the power of the words. There are two types of one dimensional poems (well, thousands, but for now lets go with 2) those which try to say too much, and those that don’t know aht they want to say.

What does this mean? Well damn. It’s tough. I like to off-quote TS Eliot and say poetry isn’t about the poet’s emotions but the poet’s ability to call up particular emotions in the reader. But it’s 2009 and TS Eliot is long dead. However, the actual quote is pretty apt still, so I’ll end with that:

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” - T.S. Eliot

 

Here is an audio recording of Herni Cole reading his poem “Birthday” from a couple years ago. I liked it best when I listened to it with my eyes closed. The last image… no spoilers for that minute or so, and you know what, I’m not even posting the poem. No cheating. Even subconsciously, meandering eyes scanning ahead without you even realizing. Listen to the words in the exact order they were intended. Ch, ch-ch-ch, check it out.