Rupert Wondolowski's Blog, page 11
July 4, 2012
Happy 4th!
In the spirit of the new Tea Party and Libertarian America of freedom meaning freedom from all empathy towards other human beings and all humans for themselves, I'm spending this 4th of July watching the Colonel and his droogs shoot off Heckler Koch Machine Guns and beat up on homeless people. I'm pretty sure unbridled sociopathy is exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
June 28, 2012
"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls for Revolutionary Love
Well, the danger in saying yes to writing a book review for a magazine you've never heard of by a guy you've never seen or heard from before is that you'll write the review and never hear back from the editor ever again. The upside - especially if you knew you loved the book anyway - is that you write a book review and force your (my) feeble brain into forming some kind of passing logic for why you love what you love.
"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls For Revolutionary Love in his The Disinformation Phase
Chris Toll's latest book, The Disinformation Phase (Publishing Genius Press, Baltimore), is awash in the baptismal, transformative fluids of tears and rain: "The rain,/heart in ruins,/staggers out of town"; "Rain sits/in the evicted easy chair"; "Raindrops are calling to the last in love./Them tears are a school that consoles."
The outside rain mirrors the tears of the protagonists and cast extras in Toll's heartfelt lines. His freely running tears are the lubricant of a soul constantly searching for love - human to human, between nations and interplanetary - and rebirth: "How long can I stay at the inn in innocent?/Love is so hard/and it's all we came to do."
Of course pleading a case for no holds barred love, is not new in Toll's writing, one of his older books is entitled "Love Everyone" after all, but there is an extra crisp sense of urgency to this collection. Due in part to the compact size - most are from 14 to twenty lines long, only running about an inch across, a few like "National Poetry Month" (5 lines) and "I Expand Before Nebulae" (6 lines), even less - but perhaps also due to the world around Toll in "reality" mutating and rocking ever harder with catastrophes that his "fictional" world of Everything At Once, Batman fighting it out with vampires, worlds teetering on collapse, makes even more emotional sense.
A day doesn't go by now it seems without a major earthquake devastating a population, a tsunami reducing humanity to chess pieces swept off the board by a raging loser, droughts, floods, war after war. Recently the news was so full of cannibalistic violence - a college student eating his roommate's heart and brain, a teenager in Florida eating the face of a homeless man - some people blaming it on the over the counter drug called "bath salts", that the Center for Disease Control felt they had to state that we weren't in a zombie apocalypse since they had jokingly posted on their website over a year ago "How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse". It truly does feel that anything could happen at any time and it's hard not to search the skies for some kind of winged hero.
Because of the naked yearning and whimsy in Toll's writing and the interweaving of lowbrow/pop culture with his more erudite side, I've always thought of him as The Emily Dickinson of Mars. "The Queen of the Vampires" assembles her "army of zombie shamans./They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus./No cross is is erected on top of Golgotha." He is as familiar with The Bible as he is with Marvel and DC Comics, Poe and Plath sit comfortably in the mad swirl of zombies, vampires and werewolves.
After all, who's to say that in a hundred years sitting in some wretched post-apocalyptic bunker there won't be a surviving tribe of humans passing around Iron Man comic books as sacred text, like the worship of Punchinella in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker?
Although most of the pieces in Disinformation Phase are not radically different from those of other Toll books (why is "try in Poetry", "why isn't destiny in clandestine" - examples of the kind of pop linguistic deconstruction that he's been doing since I first became aware of him in the '80s ), but more terse and urgent, this book does herald a new form by him.
In the pieces "What Have You Done for Global Warming Today?", "My Ruby Hat", "1776", "Money Never Weeps" and "Writing Groups of the Future", Toll introduces a rich, playful conceit of never before read poems by old masters - John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Dickinson again, Poe and Sylvia Plath respectively - being found under arcane circumstances and then translated by Toll himself.
The prose introductions to these pieces are transcendentally effervescent and the first time I've seen fiction written by him: "Correspondence from Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud was recently discovered in a farmhouse in France. The three letters were hidden beneath the false bottom in a china cupboard. Emily and Arthur were both Farsi scholars, and they particularly loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." (from "My Ruby Hat")
Of course part of the humor and twists of these pieces is that after Toll sets up extravagantly bizarre circumstances to how these lost poems of masters are found, he then claims himself as the translator of these works and unleashes wild Tollisms in them, like in "My Ruby Hat":
"I love in 256 Dimensions.
A Prophet devours a Candle -
A Leopard sleeps with a Lizard -
The Word is on the wing."
Toll's goal is beyond and he wants to reach your heart at any cost, with any tool. "The moon recites the same prayer over and over./Find me soon."
The final lines of the final poem in the book, "Perfect Love", are a call to break down all walls, including gender, to reach divine love:
"O giant in chains,
O darling ,
let the eternal divine feminine energy
awaken within you."
I've often heard Chris Toll speak of how "Giants once walked the Earth", like in describing seeing Bob Dylan live during his Highway 61 period and putting the words "Giants will stride the Earth again" in Dickinson's letter to Rimbaud in "My Ruby Hat". Every impassioned and well crafted line he writes is a call to bring to life the giant that lives in each of us.
"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls For Revolutionary Love in his The Disinformation Phase
Chris Toll's latest book, The Disinformation Phase (Publishing Genius Press, Baltimore), is awash in the baptismal, transformative fluids of tears and rain: "The rain,/heart in ruins,/staggers out of town"; "Rain sits/in the evicted easy chair"; "Raindrops are calling to the last in love./Them tears are a school that consoles."
The outside rain mirrors the tears of the protagonists and cast extras in Toll's heartfelt lines. His freely running tears are the lubricant of a soul constantly searching for love - human to human, between nations and interplanetary - and rebirth: "How long can I stay at the inn in innocent?/Love is so hard/and it's all we came to do."
Of course pleading a case for no holds barred love, is not new in Toll's writing, one of his older books is entitled "Love Everyone" after all, but there is an extra crisp sense of urgency to this collection. Due in part to the compact size - most are from 14 to twenty lines long, only running about an inch across, a few like "National Poetry Month" (5 lines) and "I Expand Before Nebulae" (6 lines), even less - but perhaps also due to the world around Toll in "reality" mutating and rocking ever harder with catastrophes that his "fictional" world of Everything At Once, Batman fighting it out with vampires, worlds teetering on collapse, makes even more emotional sense.
A day doesn't go by now it seems without a major earthquake devastating a population, a tsunami reducing humanity to chess pieces swept off the board by a raging loser, droughts, floods, war after war. Recently the news was so full of cannibalistic violence - a college student eating his roommate's heart and brain, a teenager in Florida eating the face of a homeless man - some people blaming it on the over the counter drug called "bath salts", that the Center for Disease Control felt they had to state that we weren't in a zombie apocalypse since they had jokingly posted on their website over a year ago "How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse". It truly does feel that anything could happen at any time and it's hard not to search the skies for some kind of winged hero.
Because of the naked yearning and whimsy in Toll's writing and the interweaving of lowbrow/pop culture with his more erudite side, I've always thought of him as The Emily Dickinson of Mars. "The Queen of the Vampires" assembles her "army of zombie shamans./They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus./No cross is is erected on top of Golgotha." He is as familiar with The Bible as he is with Marvel and DC Comics, Poe and Plath sit comfortably in the mad swirl of zombies, vampires and werewolves.
After all, who's to say that in a hundred years sitting in some wretched post-apocalyptic bunker there won't be a surviving tribe of humans passing around Iron Man comic books as sacred text, like the worship of Punchinella in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker?
Although most of the pieces in Disinformation Phase are not radically different from those of other Toll books (why is "try in Poetry", "why isn't destiny in clandestine" - examples of the kind of pop linguistic deconstruction that he's been doing since I first became aware of him in the '80s ), but more terse and urgent, this book does herald a new form by him.
In the pieces "What Have You Done for Global Warming Today?", "My Ruby Hat", "1776", "Money Never Weeps" and "Writing Groups of the Future", Toll introduces a rich, playful conceit of never before read poems by old masters - John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Dickinson again, Poe and Sylvia Plath respectively - being found under arcane circumstances and then translated by Toll himself.
The prose introductions to these pieces are transcendentally effervescent and the first time I've seen fiction written by him: "Correspondence from Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud was recently discovered in a farmhouse in France. The three letters were hidden beneath the false bottom in a china cupboard. Emily and Arthur were both Farsi scholars, and they particularly loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." (from "My Ruby Hat")
Of course part of the humor and twists of these pieces is that after Toll sets up extravagantly bizarre circumstances to how these lost poems of masters are found, he then claims himself as the translator of these works and unleashes wild Tollisms in them, like in "My Ruby Hat":
"I love in 256 Dimensions.
A Prophet devours a Candle -
A Leopard sleeps with a Lizard -
The Word is on the wing."
Toll's goal is beyond and he wants to reach your heart at any cost, with any tool. "The moon recites the same prayer over and over./Find me soon."
The final lines of the final poem in the book, "Perfect Love", are a call to break down all walls, including gender, to reach divine love:
"O giant in chains,
O darling ,
let the eternal divine feminine energy
awaken within you."
I've often heard Chris Toll speak of how "Giants once walked the Earth", like in describing seeing Bob Dylan live during his Highway 61 period and putting the words "Giants will stride the Earth again" in Dickinson's letter to Rimbaud in "My Ruby Hat". Every impassioned and well crafted line he writes is a call to bring to life the giant that lives in each of us.
June 12, 2012
Before Work
With each question, the doctor's voice drops
to a wispier whisper.
Soon you'll be curled together motionless
on that perfectly stiff paper covered recliner,
forgotten to all but the clicking tick hands of clocks.
There are already two crisp gowns in the room.
The little blood pressure station wheeled in perky
is like R2-D2 in its robot pal appearance - bright\
new light industrial rubber and chrome and
padding and gauges. A thermometer attached
that only needed six or seven
seconds of your time to let you know
your factory was not overheating.
With your finger in that pressure
clasp you are the Toscanini of pointers
or perhaps a starter superhero.
The vibe at the desk is mellow, man.
This is not where the shit goes down, this is
where we find out if you can take the shit
coming down. You're ready. Promise.
to a wispier whisper.
Soon you'll be curled together motionless
on that perfectly stiff paper covered recliner,
forgotten to all but the clicking tick hands of clocks.
There are already two crisp gowns in the room.
The little blood pressure station wheeled in perky
is like R2-D2 in its robot pal appearance - bright\
new light industrial rubber and chrome and
padding and gauges. A thermometer attached
that only needed six or seven
seconds of your time to let you know
your factory was not overheating.
With your finger in that pressure
clasp you are the Toscanini of pointers
or perhaps a starter superhero.
The vibe at the desk is mellow, man.
This is not where the shit goes down, this is
where we find out if you can take the shit
coming down. You're ready. Promise.
June 11, 2012
"To Think It Started With Laurel"
Finally got my new acrylic monster to the point where I felt it was "done". It started out as an attempt to catch in some form of portraiture of Everly's sweet little niece Laurel from a photo I had taken of her. Of course it soon degenerated......
May 23, 2012
Taps by Barrett Warner
Barrett Warner is a Baltimore cultural warrior of longstanding. He served some time in the trenches of the fledgling Shattered Wig Night nights when they were held on Tuesdays, featured four or five poets, 3 or 4 bands and went on until 3am. But he still speaks to me, as does, surprisingly, Laure Drogoul of the 14 Karat Cabaret where the Wigs are held.
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Taps
When they ask about the leg
I don't answer, don't open the window,
Never say, there's a kind of darkness.
A black bruise stains the mind,
The good hurt I hope will mean
I've come far and done something big.
Such sweet aches, loves labors,
The harrowed acres inside,
Ditches dug with pick-axe and spit.
I haven't moved in twenty years
Except to clamber on life's unfinished ledge
When the chair limps into the bathroom.
Changing the light bulb, right?
Those damn blue sparks
Wired to a fault. The truth
Is that I like the view from here,
Two feet above the rest of the world,
A slip, a jostle from the endless
Swing and sway. Sometimes I put
Rocks in my shoes if my heels
Aren't sore enough.
Even after I close the window
And nail it shut the red bird
Will not stop pestering the glass.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Barrett Warner's chapbook Til I'm Blue in the Face was published by Tropos Press. His new poems make appearances in Southeast Review, Slipstream and Quarter After Eight.
May 18, 2012
A Preview of An Upcoming New Book By Megan McShea
Dear cultural warriors, the forthcoming existence of a new meaty book of Megan McShea on Publishing Genius Press jolts me with the volts of Beyond. It's like there suddenly being an unearthed "new" Lungfish record, finally "discovering" Chicken Rico for the first time, inhaling ocean air on a windy night, walking down a city street and taking pleasure in how your legs feel and there are actually smiling people nearby.
Here is a little preview to whet your brain whistle.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Appointment
The place was flatter than we had imagined it. We thought it would be a squat tower. But we knew it was the right building from all the friendly notes we'd received on how to make-believe, how to drop things dramatically, how to check our pulses. We rang the bell. The intercom, responding, confused us. It sounded like the ocean, but in a very high resolution, with cries of birds and shouts tossed by waves and even sand under our feet. A young, alert woman finally answered the door, holding it open for us and peering around in the street behind us, gesturing for us to enter the warm foyer.
By the time she shut the door, we had already removed most of our clothing. A pack of dogs startled us and then changed into a flock of soldiers, chasing us into the next room, where a plate of lemon bars and a tea service awaited, only, it was made of wax. "This is nothing like I expected," said my mother, who had persuaded me to join her in coming here. "Well, what did you expect?" I asked. "I thought it would be rosy, like a womb," she said. She sounded sad.
"Change your rabbits!" came a shout from up the stairs, ad then again, descending closer, "change your rabbits immediately!" A man in coveralls appeared with wide black eyes. "Oh, pardon me," he said when he saw us there. "You're not the people I thought you were."
But it was too late, for mother and I had already changed our rabbits.
- Megan McShea
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Megan McShea is a frequent contributor to the legendary Shattered Wig Review, and has work in the i.e. reader, Topograph: New Writings from the Carolinas and Beyond, and the forthcoming WORMSBOOK. A collection of her writings entitled "A Mountain City of Toad Splendor" is coming out in late 2012 from Publishing Genius Press. She is also editor and contributor for a book of collaborative writings due out soon-ish from Thingy Press called "Ancient Party". She resides as peacefully as possible in Baltimore.
Here is a little preview to whet your brain whistle.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Appointment
The place was flatter than we had imagined it. We thought it would be a squat tower. But we knew it was the right building from all the friendly notes we'd received on how to make-believe, how to drop things dramatically, how to check our pulses. We rang the bell. The intercom, responding, confused us. It sounded like the ocean, but in a very high resolution, with cries of birds and shouts tossed by waves and even sand under our feet. A young, alert woman finally answered the door, holding it open for us and peering around in the street behind us, gesturing for us to enter the warm foyer.
By the time she shut the door, we had already removed most of our clothing. A pack of dogs startled us and then changed into a flock of soldiers, chasing us into the next room, where a plate of lemon bars and a tea service awaited, only, it was made of wax. "This is nothing like I expected," said my mother, who had persuaded me to join her in coming here. "Well, what did you expect?" I asked. "I thought it would be rosy, like a womb," she said. She sounded sad.
"Change your rabbits!" came a shout from up the stairs, ad then again, descending closer, "change your rabbits immediately!" A man in coveralls appeared with wide black eyes. "Oh, pardon me," he said when he saw us there. "You're not the people I thought you were."
But it was too late, for mother and I had already changed our rabbits.
- Megan McShea
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Megan McShea is a frequent contributor to the legendary Shattered Wig Review, and has work in the i.e. reader, Topograph: New Writings from the Carolinas and Beyond, and the forthcoming WORMSBOOK. A collection of her writings entitled "A Mountain City of Toad Splendor" is coming out in late 2012 from Publishing Genius Press. She is also editor and contributor for a book of collaborative writings due out soon-ish from Thingy Press called "Ancient Party". She resides as peacefully as possible in Baltimore.
May 17, 2012
Cort Bledsoe's Wonderful Review of My Mole Suit in "Murder Your Darlings"!
Review of Rupert Wondolowski's The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit, poems by Rupert Wondolowski. Baltimore: Publishing Genius Press, 2008.
I met Rupert Wondolowski at a reading in Baltimore hosted by Artichoke Haircut, a local literary journal which hosts amazing readings. (Seriously. Kazoo solos. Sex with octopi. People taking their clothes off without even putting it in the context of a Matthew McConaughey vehicle). This night, Publishing Genius Press was featured. Wondolowski read with Joseph Young (author of Easter Rabbit, a flash collection I blurbed a couple years ago.) Wondolowski blew me away. His poems balanced absurdity with hard-hitting truth. Someone once asked me why I write some of my more absurd pieces, and the only answer I had was that they are more real than most of my straight realist pieces. There’s an oft overused saying that writers ‘lie their way to the truth’ and, in a similar vein, absurdist writers ‘stand their way to the poof.’ Wondolowski brings to mind a line by John S. Hall from “It’s Saturday”: “Sense cannot be made. It must be sensed. And I, for one, am incensed by all this complacency.”
There’s so much humor in these poems, it’s hard to pick out one piece to focus on. A good start is “Steve Fischer Continues,” a poem about the pulp writer of I Wake Up Screaming, and many other pulp books. Wondolowski lampoons the melodrama so often seen in this type of writing while simultaneously paying homage to a master of the genre: “I wake screaming./I scream scratching the dog’s belly in bed,/ scream seeing the third pillow has fallen to the dusty floor.” (lines 1-3).
And what is a heated mole suit? Obviously, it’s uncomfortable and awkwardly unattractive. And if one were wearing it, others would probably react strangely, leading to paranoia. I can’t help but think Wondolowski is talking about the body, the meat suit. In the title poem, Wondolowski waxes melancholic about his childhood (or at least of a child-like narrator): “It’s the loneliest Halloween ever, Charlie Brown. I’m packing my bags for the Patsy Cline Institute for the Emotionally Disabled as chunks of nations are being swallowed or washed away like mashed bananas in a baby’s cereal bowl.” (12-16). Towards the end of the poem, as the narrator sits in his mole suit, he has “an epiphany. All I want is some flatbed truck resonance, a slightly burned picnic table, a clean giddy life of grass stains.” He yearns to return to a more innocent time when he wasn’t concerned about global war, self-image, and the horrors of the world.
The reason that Wondolowski’s poems work isn’t just that they’re funny, or full of pop culture references, or so strange that they instantly invite consideration; plenty of poets are filling their poems with these things these days, juxtaposing Papa Smurf with drug dealers. To be honest, that’s not that difficult to do. The reason Wondolowski’s poems stand out is that there’s something inside the mole suit. And that IS difficult. Wondolowski’s narrator feels like he’s in a mole suit and mocks himself and also mocks that mockery. This is complex stuff and human but Wondolowski refuses to let it sink to the level of melodrama without getting in a few good laughs first. It’s rare for me to find a poet or writer whose work I truly admire, but I admire what Wondolowski’s doing here. His language and imagery are startling, fresh, and insightful. As a matter of fact, before I wrote this review, I ordered his other books. I can’t wait to read them.
-CL Bledsoe
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Bio: CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight, three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year, and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. A minichap, Texas, was recently published by Mud Luscious Press. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 3 times. Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.
May 16, 2012
"Increasingly Virtual Worlds" by R.M. O'Brien
Increasingly Virtual Worlds
RM O'Brien
Tonight I am prolifig. I turn all my tears into ashes.
I got famous for once successfully cramming five years' lonely into one night's drunk and I
couldn't kiss anyone when it was done.
I shatter a bottle everyone stands up and removes his hat.
I am the brightest thing for miles moving around Baltimore in the most powerful machine I
own.
Do you know why I pulled you over?
b/c I get hard driving the interceptor and the lights and sirens help me make it
b/c you are wanted for the unlicensed transmutation of tears into ashes—you fit a description
b/c it's unlawful to shine brighter than the sun
b/c there are a lot of crazies out here and I wanted to make sure you were wearing yr seatbelt—
Robert you are a sacred child yr heart & lungs & light are precious to me
b/c someday you will choose a body for yr lover—it may not be the body she chooses for herself—
we live in increasingly virtual worlds
(I wanted to tell him about transcendental numbers & luminescent animals—breaking a bottle
our new nat'l anthem &c.—this is how I protect my immortality &c.)
Come on out here and touch yr nose and I'll let you go
& if you would, touch my nose
for it is lonely in this car at night in Baltimore & I am a warm body under these cuffs and gun and
telescoping club
The ashes are still glowing.
The flowers are blooming out the passenger window.
I am prolifig, obvious, it's like I am making a movie.
O Nanak! I could smear these ashes on a baby's belly and she wd become a god
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R.M. O'Brien, 29, was born in Oswego, New York to a jeweler and a nurse. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and son, where he blogs for money and curates the monthly reading series WORMS. His chapbook, Ant Killer & Other Poems, exists. Birds Blur Together, a collaboraçion w/ poet Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, is forthcoming this year on his own WORMS Press.
RM O'Brien
Tonight I am prolifig. I turn all my tears into ashes.
I got famous for once successfully cramming five years' lonely into one night's drunk and I
couldn't kiss anyone when it was done.
I shatter a bottle everyone stands up and removes his hat.
I am the brightest thing for miles moving around Baltimore in the most powerful machine I
own.
Do you know why I pulled you over?
b/c I get hard driving the interceptor and the lights and sirens help me make it
b/c you are wanted for the unlicensed transmutation of tears into ashes—you fit a description
b/c it's unlawful to shine brighter than the sun
b/c there are a lot of crazies out here and I wanted to make sure you were wearing yr seatbelt—
Robert you are a sacred child yr heart & lungs & light are precious to me
b/c someday you will choose a body for yr lover—it may not be the body she chooses for herself—
we live in increasingly virtual worlds
(I wanted to tell him about transcendental numbers & luminescent animals—breaking a bottle
our new nat'l anthem &c.—this is how I protect my immortality &c.)
Come on out here and touch yr nose and I'll let you go
& if you would, touch my nose
for it is lonely in this car at night in Baltimore & I am a warm body under these cuffs and gun and
telescoping club
The ashes are still glowing.
The flowers are blooming out the passenger window.
I am prolifig, obvious, it's like I am making a movie.
O Nanak! I could smear these ashes on a baby's belly and she wd become a god
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
R.M. O'Brien, 29, was born in Oswego, New York to a jeweler and a nurse. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and son, where he blogs for money and curates the monthly reading series WORMS. His chapbook, Ant Killer & Other Poems, exists. Birds Blur Together, a collaboraçion w/ poet Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, is forthcoming this year on his own WORMS Press.
May 12, 2012
Mark "Pappy" Hossfeld Returns!
My work day started wonderfully last Wednesday morning when I received a call from my old friend and writer/artist extraordinaire, Mark "Pappy" Hossfeld, from China. He's been there for getting close to a decade perverting their youth and devouring their kimchee. He and his wife had been talking for a while about returning to the states and now it looks like it's becoming a reality.
Sadly, maybe not in Baltimore because he was shocked at the rent increases after serving time here in the wartorn but dirt cheap '80s and most of the '90s, but most likely somewhere on the East Coast where I can draw him into a Shattered Wig Night.
He has been an inspiration and a contributor to Shattered Wig since its inception and we played in a Russkie/anarcho/circus punk band named Kneeling on Beans together. He had never really played an instrument before, but with the Beans he played an incredible truly psychedelic slide bass (employing an Elvis coffee cup for slide) and literally every show we played some wild-eyed youth would come running up to him and ask where in the hell he learned to play such awesome Hendrix licks on bass.
Pappy, being half pickled after a set and a humble, reasonable man, would get angry that they could be so deluded by his "naive" playing magic. He would curse them and then wrestle a drunken Amazon.
Ever since the latest, biggest Baltimore arts/poetry renaissance, I've been dying for Pappy to view and partake all the new wonders. He labored long unpaid brutal hours for the shortlived BAUHAUS (AKA The Astro-Chimp Impact Crater) back in the pioneer days of the early '90s when the 14 Karat Cabaret was about the only good venue going.
His projected arrival is late June and as soon as I know for sure when he'll be in the area I will set up the biggest, grandest show possible for him to share his new tales.
May 10, 2012
Words I Use Too Much by Lily Herman
Here it be - the final installment of the L. Herman trilogy. It turns out that Darth Vader is not indeed her father, but just a seedy uncle with hair plugs who runs a used car lot in Hyattsville. --------------------------------------------------------------
Words I use too much
Depending on the context
conspiring or conspiracy, usually
in a positive light, like two people
pitching a tent in their own bedroom
just to have somewhere to put
their heads closer together, inhabit
where live would do just as well,
altar, not like change
but in a blood-of-the-lamb
edited-for-PBS kind of way,
He says she says
like after a decade of poems
I still can’t let a brother know
that someone is speaking
without having them say
She instead of I
in all the places di Prima said poets
are explorers, but not necessarily
brave
Pussy twice over
because wimp is weak
and cunt reeks too much of poets
with both hands in their pockets
trying to ignore the climate
of the fifties, listening to Lady
Day, and calling men cats
I try to avoid bringing cats
into it, even when one
is the benevolent critic
warming my lap
as I write, and we both
know life is a simple series
of variations on trying
to get fed
Methodist, because their Christ
is not duty-bound to spend all
his time up like a public service
announcement on the cross
but will walk a little way
down the street with you
if you’re headed the same
direction, never trust a poet
who has to
disclaim confess reveal
because it means there’s
something they’re withholding
during all the sober hours
of their day, and they want
the reader to serve as their
incidental heir, which is a bane
that keeps on giving,
Benefactor because
to keep working I must be convinced
that somebody up there digs me
Heart as a physical object, not
the tacky wood-paneled room
in which one’s spirit animal dwells,
hips when I really mean
I feel fat, or I mean fucking,
or young women are a curse
all their glorious own, love
when I mean tailspin, or sea-
sickness, or an excuse
to stay up late
Drunkenness
for excessive kindness, or excessive
unkindness, the train tracks
that I grew up next to and haven’t
been able to grow up from
and their many romance tongues
cargo freight boxcar
train-hopping or commuting,
depending on who I observe
in flight, the tunnels they conquer
and men who died burying their spikes
none of whom I knew personally
but if it was personal
I wouldn’t be writing about it,
intimate
in any room where two people manage
to hear each other while speaking quietly,
God, as a placeholder for any
really gorgeous sky or void or drug
like the useless zero you leave in after
the decimal point to keep the equation
balanced, math analogies
I don’t even understand, analogies
for heaven, for madness, for men,
a hundred burning bushes sounding off
like desert clockwork when the poem calls
for a fireworks display,
Solitude sounds better
than loneliness, Petrarch is the only man
who’s said, soul, without making
me gag, and I have no muse
so I don’t dare say it myself,
even though I am arguably
always writing to you, you
the most frequent flier of all
these words, who spend all your time
like an overnight security guard
watching me write and occasionally
when I’m gasping for air, you (dear)
grab the pen and with two hands
steadied by each other,
we finish the fucker off
with a period like a single shot
to the head
------------------------------------------
Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.
Words I use too much
Depending on the context
conspiring or conspiracy, usually
in a positive light, like two people
pitching a tent in their own bedroom
just to have somewhere to put
their heads closer together, inhabit
where live would do just as well,
altar, not like change
but in a blood-of-the-lamb
edited-for-PBS kind of way,
He says she says
like after a decade of poems
I still can’t let a brother know
that someone is speaking
without having them say
She instead of I
in all the places di Prima said poets
are explorers, but not necessarily
brave
Pussy twice over
because wimp is weak
and cunt reeks too much of poets
with both hands in their pockets
trying to ignore the climate
of the fifties, listening to Lady
Day, and calling men cats
I try to avoid bringing cats
into it, even when one
is the benevolent critic
warming my lap
as I write, and we both
know life is a simple series
of variations on trying
to get fed
Methodist, because their Christ
is not duty-bound to spend all
his time up like a public service
announcement on the cross
but will walk a little way
down the street with you
if you’re headed the same
direction, never trust a poet
who has to
disclaim confess reveal
because it means there’s
something they’re withholding
during all the sober hours
of their day, and they want
the reader to serve as their
incidental heir, which is a bane
that keeps on giving,
Benefactor because
to keep working I must be convinced
that somebody up there digs me
Heart as a physical object, not
the tacky wood-paneled room
in which one’s spirit animal dwells,
hips when I really mean
I feel fat, or I mean fucking,
or young women are a curse
all their glorious own, love
when I mean tailspin, or sea-
sickness, or an excuse
to stay up late
Drunkenness
for excessive kindness, or excessive
unkindness, the train tracks
that I grew up next to and haven’t
been able to grow up from
and their many romance tongues
cargo freight boxcar
train-hopping or commuting,
depending on who I observe
in flight, the tunnels they conquer
and men who died burying their spikes
none of whom I knew personally
but if it was personal
I wouldn’t be writing about it,
intimate
in any room where two people manage
to hear each other while speaking quietly,
God, as a placeholder for any
really gorgeous sky or void or drug
like the useless zero you leave in after
the decimal point to keep the equation
balanced, math analogies
I don’t even understand, analogies
for heaven, for madness, for men,
a hundred burning bushes sounding off
like desert clockwork when the poem calls
for a fireworks display,
Solitude sounds better
than loneliness, Petrarch is the only man
who’s said, soul, without making
me gag, and I have no muse
so I don’t dare say it myself,
even though I am arguably
always writing to you, you
the most frequent flier of all
these words, who spend all your time
like an overnight security guard
watching me write and occasionally
when I’m gasping for air, you (dear)
grab the pen and with two hands
steadied by each other,
we finish the fucker off
with a period like a single shot
to the head
------------------------------------------
Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.
