A story of mine appears at Pure Francis

THE DEVIANTS

Photo: Greying Ghost











My new chapbook of poems, The Deviants, is now available from Greying Ghost Press.

Visit The Greying Ghost here for more information. Now for some vital signs.

VITAL SIGNS::THE DEVIANTS

HISTORY: The Deviants artifact was written by a nondescript young man accustomed to the feel of small rooms, during the period spanning early spring of 2007 to the early spring of 2008, spring being the young man's preferred calendar season. A few adjustments were made in the summer of 2008. The Deviants was written in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Jackson, Mississippi, and Austin, Texas.

CONSTRUCTION: The artifact contains 23 small pages of poetry, or small rooms. Though it does not espouse an architecture.

MUSCULOSKELETAL: Carl Annarummo designs very fine paper-skeletal objects.

INGREDIENTS(?): The poems in the artifact have something to do with some pirates or something. And some militants and a nomadic theater troupe. And government rain. A flooded village (unrelated to gov't rain). The abandoned International Space Station. And the world's first officially privatized state. Also spices, artificial flavoring, xantham gum.

THE CRITICS SAY: The artifact is, at the time of this writing, already being mistaken by local scholars for a variation on Merton's strain theory, the confessional memoirs of a defunct cult's charismatic persona, and the lost travelogues of Genghis Khan, among other vicious wonderful claims.

THANK YOU: to anyone who might read this thing. Pick its mind organ like you would a grizzled sea captain for stories of what it is like to dress up like a grizzled sea captain every night at a casino gambling establishment designed to look like a clipper ship in the deep south.

ERRATUM: the fourth poem in, "My Summer Job," got some unintentional splicing during some reformatting of the text. This new version is kind of interesting, but also maybe not. You can read the original here on page 27.

THANK YOU: once more. You are a good mood, whoever you are.

Horror of the Infinite Laugh Track

Here is a great conversation about the role of humor in poetry:


It's lengthy, and not really recent, but I want to put it in the official dissemination pod because I think it's important, and an interesting conversation to listen in on.

I got the link from Gabriel Gudding's blog, at which he looks back on the conversation and topic and gives a few selections of his views on the subject, among them:

"If damage, flaw, hamartia, is a given, I think humor is a means of dealing with damage by appreciating suffering as just another form of change.

Humor seems to be a method of equanimity. It seems to be a means of practicing and exercising that kind of equanimity some people call detachment." - Gabriel Gudding

YES. But the round table discussion features other views of what humor does or fails to do. Which reminds me of this excellent article, "Serious Art That's Funny" by Matthew Rohrer, which is an old standby of mine and which takes yet another view of what humor can do in a poem. It is sort of a defense of irony, in which irony is portrayed as a democratizing or unifying, community-bolstering force, not as a mode of alienation or cynicism.

From Rohrer's essay:

"Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it."

John Keats the Time-Traveling Surrealist

"What is more soothing than a pretty hummer
That stays for one moment in an open flower."

-from "Sleep and Poetry."

Even though "hummer" isn't capitalized in the above, my mind first read it as the vehicle rather than the bee. For like less than a second.

Marginalia

I'm going to write some words on marginalia - uselessness, pointlessness.

This is just a reminder to write or not write those words.

For Fans of Heart and Horns

The first track found here, Mario Bauza and Machito's "Afro Cuban Jazz Suite," is really amazing. Hearing it for the first time a few days ago (it's from the late 40s) startled me because it wasn't what I expected from any of the genres or eras of jazz referenced: big band, latin and mabmo, and early bop (Charlie Parker solos on this suite). It's a weird and lively hybrid that doesn't sound exactly like any of those reference points. Most of it is pretty wham bam (I have no clue what I mean by that), but the slower parts remind me a bit of Miles Davis' similarly orchestral Sketches of Spain.

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With lots of new reading and new writing happening, I haven't felt inclined to write any reviews or "interviews" in this space. I think the fake interview could become big though. Genrefied and canoninzed. What if every one wrote poetry, especially iconic figures in popular culture, is a bad question.

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The Deviants is available for pre-order here.

Interview With Dr. Phil About His Poetry

So, I interviewed Dr. Phil about his poetry. I was inspired by reading the title of Blake Butler's Blog, "Gilles Deleuze Committed Suicide And So Will Dr. Phil." It's true that Dr. Phil's poetry "travels" to some dark places, and I wanted to ask him about that. What follows is just an excerpt. I expect that the whole thing would probably come out in POETRY magazine, I mean, I don't see why not.


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DB: Dr. Phil, in a sense I suppose my question is really about your comeback to American letters (laughs). But first, can you tell us why you decided to quit writing poetry?

Dr.P: Well, it was a hard decision (laughs). I think it was just...you know, I'd made all this money. I think it happened once I started getting really really rich off my poetry...that I just, you know, started feeling disillusioned about it. I mean, that's not why I started writing in the first place. That's not why I invented the "image-based/epiphany-at-the-end" lyric poem. You know I invented that style of writing a poem. But again, that check at the end of the day, that's not why I wrote Heart to Ass (Dr. Phil's 1974 debut). I wrote that book and I invented that type of poem to help people reduce complex and nuanced emotions into simplistic aphorisms, which they could then conquer by repeating aloud in front of a mirror. At the end of the day, I guess it was all about pain (laughs).

DB:Really. And was that pain an influencing factor in your decision to write again?

Dr.P: The only factor, I would say. ABC wanted me to start doing happy poems and poems about the backstage intrigues on the show. I said are you kidding? So I turned down their advance and I'm publishing my next edition with a small house out of DC, Edge Books. I'm excited about it. It comes bundled with my weight loss product. It's my most gothic work yet. It's about ghosts in my native Oklahoma, and when I say ghosts I'm talking about mules and Indians and the little people who work at the Wal Mart and that sort of thing, I guess.

DB: Um.