PUNGENT GRAPPLING: BARRETT WHITE INTERVIEWS SEAN KILPATRICK
I went buck with Sean Kilpatrick for his new book Gil the Nihilist: A Sitcom, now available from Lazy Fascist Press as a Secret Summer Release. I don’t know anyone who can splurge a word like Sean, and, as expected, things went batshit crazy. Gil is a mushroom cloud of splayed out wreckage, a garbled mess of Hummers and tacos and Kmarts and smegma. It’s as close to getting a surgeon general’s warning as a book can. This text is a health hazard. It’s a beautiful rind of pitch black beef.
fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick
fuckscapes
by Sean Kilpatrick
Blue Square Press, 2011
85 pages / $12 Buy from Blue Square Press
“O you cancer victims, O you hemorrhoid sufferers, O you multiple sclerotics, O you syphilitics, O you cardiac conditions, O you paraplegics, O you catatonics, O you schizoids, O you paranoids, O you hypochondriacs, O you carriers of causes of death, O you suicide candidates, O you potential peacetime casualties, O you potential war dead, O you potential accident victims, O you potential increase in the mortality rate, O you potential dead.” – Peter Handke, Offending the Audience
Reading Sean Kilpatrick’s first full-length poetry book fuckscapes is an experience that brings to mind Hart Crane’s dictum to create “a new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate.” Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry gives me that feeling. It is the feeling of a new language. Of expression so impossible I can barely begin to put into words how it makes me feel. But I can tremble before it. This book is insane and suggestive. Its brashness smolders like a confluence of spirit. He says, “bitch I doggy paddle the stars,” and “motherfucker my stains dance.” No thought is too outrageous, no obscenity unspoken. “Did you get your hysterectomy at Toys R Us?” This is not just poetry with an edge – no, it is beyond all edges, from the other side of the abyss, like gazing into an obsidian mirror at your non-human self.
“I am the temperature of sound
a carbon monoxide ballroom
dreaming public toilets in Sicily
I am the pauper of glows
fraught with bow wow
I am the furnace of every disorder
Saying Christ inside a toy”
a carbon monoxide ballroom
dreaming public toilets in Sicily
I am the pauper of glows
fraught with bow wow
I am the furnace of every disorder
Saying Christ inside a toy”
What makes Kilpatrick’s poetry really outrageous is its annihilation of meaning. This is nothing new, but under Kilpatrick’s eye it is totally alive, and puts shame to the “half-assed English majors” and other beholders of vision. In lines like, “time for sanitarium gods to moisturize the day,” it’s like he’s sabotaging the nature of expression. Words like ‘absurd’ and ‘surreal’ come to mind, but they are historical commodities, and in no way adequately describe the wild violence Kilpatrick demonstrates.
9 Comments
December 14th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
December 14th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes
This is a book you need. Language reset. Guidebook.
“The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.” – Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
“Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.” – CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank
{LMC}: An Illustration of one line from Sean Kilpatrick’s “The All Encompassed Drowned”
Ed: You can read a PDF of this story, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant. If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.
POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#10)
Sean Kilpatrick is currently writing an extended script for Out for Justice in which the villain, Richie, is not simply tossed at kitchen appliances with cheap judo, but has his bastardly say, including the following commercial stint
Ode to William Forsyth
by Sean Kilpatrick
I asked my friend Gerard Breitenbeck to portray
sublime crack-smoking mafia rampage screen icon Richie, who is brought down way too quick by Steven Segal in Out for Justice. From an ode in progress honoring actor William Forsythe.
note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!
4 Comments
January 7th, 2014 / 10:14 pm
January 7th, 2014 / 10:14 pm
2013 Holiday Shopping Guide: Fiction Recommendations
Last week I did a Nonfiction Shopping Guide. Now I’ve got this list of fiction titles published this year, for all you last minute shoppers.
When compiling the nonfiction list I limited myself to twenty titles, even though I could’ve easily made it thirty or fifty with the amount of good material published this year. For this list I bumped the number to thirty, but could’ve easily exceeded it. I’ll present them in no particular order. (N.B. I’ve omitted works published by fellow giants, which was hard considering the awesomeness of Baumann’s Solip
These obviously represent my own interests and therefore omit plenty of titles I’m sure were great. Also, in the interest of transparency, my click-throughs use my Amazon Affiliate number, which means that I receive pennies when you click on the titles and end up purchasing something, pennies I save up and use to buy baby supplies.
Fall Semester Reading List: 21st Century Horror
For those of you who might be interested, click through for the reading list I’ve assigned the students taking my “Contemporary Literature: 21st Century Horror” course this fall.
Crushed & Filled with All
“I’ve dipped a stranger’s sores in my fat; they require brute force because I love them.” — Sean Kilpatrick
Here is the scene: episode three, season four, Breaking Bad. Jesse Pinkman pulls up to his house, gets out of his little red Toyota Tercel, and walks up to the front door. Exterior. Night. White guy with dreadlocks exits Jesse’s house carrying a red toaster oven. “Check it out,” the dreadlocked white guy says to Jesse, “score, yo!”
Preceding this scene, another scene, the two scenes form a sequence bridged by Fever Ray’s “If I Had A Heart.”
My fear arouses me: an interview with Dennis Cooper
The odds are decent that you know Dennis Cooper better than I do. After hearing about his work for years and constantly promising myself that I would try a little someday, I found myself graduated from the MFA program with time to read books of my own choosing again, and so I finally started reading his novels, and I haven’t stopped in the few months since. You’ve already read in this space about his latest book, The Marbled Swarm, a ludicrously powerful book that you really need. After reading The Marbled Swarm I had to send him some painfully earnest fan mail, and he received this note with a grace and generosity that will surprise no one who has read his blog. I asked if I could interview him. He said yes. His answers are more than worth your time; the book demands it.
So I had a really frustrating experience buying The Marbled Swarm at a local independent bookstore. I saw that they had two copies of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year shelved where you would expect, and I figured it would be easy from there because a) you share a press and b) “Butler” is alphabetically pretty close to “Cooper.” After a long search, I had to go ask one of the bookstore employees. She said that your book was supposed to be shelved in gay fiction, with a question mark at the end of her statement. (I was there with my wife; the employee seemed skeptical that I would want a book from the gay fiction section. I was sort of furious about that whole interaction.) And it was there! Do you like being shelved under the category of gay fiction? Do you think it’s been helpful for your work, commercially or otherwise?
I’m always surprised and disappointed when my books are cordoned off like that. I can’t speak to the reasons why that store in particular shelved The Marbled Swarm there, obviously, but, in general, I think it’s the result of a longstanding habit.
When I published my first couple of novels in the late 80s and early 90s, there was this vogue among critics and publishers regarding the notion of ‘gay literature’. I think that was the point where literary arbiters first cottoned onto the idea that there was a historical trajectory involving the work of authors who happened to be gay that had been largely unexplored and was ripe for a thinkfest. Also, there was apparently a decent sized gay male readership of fiction at that time. I remember people in the publishing industry saying that any gay-themed novel was pretty much guaranteed to sell around 5000 copies, so quite a number of writers who happened to be gay were being swept up by major publishers and given small advances based on the logic that the books would at least earn back if not even make everyone involved a bit of money. I’m not sure if that was actually true or not. READ MORE >