Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
Last weekend I read Norwood by Charles Portis on a Peter Pan Bus from NYC to Northampton, Massachusetts. Tremendously funny and sharp, a pre-cursor to the Coen Brothers. And not just hee-haw, but vivid to the point of effortless grace: one man is described as “holding out his tongue like he was waiting for a coin.” Everyone in Norwood is breezy and distinct, even the people “driving the conflict,” which makes it kind of avant-garde, right? For one or two sentence characterization and all-around deft awesomeness, I’ve not read much better recently than Charles Portis. Why is this post a snippet? Because Ed Park already wrote an awesome essay about Portis. Now let’s all read everything Portis has written and gab about it.
A friend recently sent along some wondering for submission to GIANT discussion. Their question (skip down to the blue if you want to avoid me getting off topic with brain science) maybe intersects Lily’s post yesterday about the definition (and neurobiology) of creativity. Is there “hardwiring” involved in our expression/communication motivations? Is that expression/communication goal-based or process-based? Do we need intense pompadours? I’m getting farther afield with each question I add to the question I haven’t even shown you yet, but I’ve been reading Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, which proposes (among many things) that emotions and feelings are different (emotions are in the body, feelings are the mind’s awareness of emotions), and that we evolved consciousness in order to be aware of our having feelings. Not just feelings, but our having of them. In other words, we have a mind in order to know how we feel. I can’t help but make lazy/lyrical connections between my anonymous friend’s question and those ideas, but I’m feeling too lazy/lyrical to do much besides wonder. I invite you, kind people, to do more. Here is my friend’s question:
In 1903, a nineteen-year old poet by the name of Franz Xaver Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke to ask for that illustrious writer’s opinions on his poetry. To which Rilke famously replied, in part, to the now misremembered enquirer:
“No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”
Say, today, you weren’t forbidden but were encouraged. Say your writing was very aesthetically impressive, quite observably good. Say you wrote for yourself and no other. Say you had your reasons to write, including the reason that there were no inherent reasons to write, and you felt these very deeply, all the way to the heart. What if the question remained. Must you write?
Spooky kudos to Nick Antosca, whose book Midnight Picnic is a finalist for a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category. If you’re wondering how to deliver your own congratulations, Nick likes swimming and Cuban sandwiches. Good work, Nick!
Today’s Natalie Lyalin Week bon bon is a guest post from Erin McNellis, who wrote this terrific review of Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat for NOÖ Journal [11]. Animals abound!
You studied ecology in seventh grade, memorizing the biomes for your science test: the chaparral, the rainforest, the tundra. You learned about the delicate balance of life, you imagined yourself into each exotic environment from your cold, smooth desk under the fluorescent lights—but you never imagined any place quite like Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat.
Today at the tree-tucked magic barn of Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, I bought for $8 the very first issue of Genesis West, the magazine Gordon Lish edited pre-Quarterly, so we’re talking on the fun bus with Neal Cassady and not out to lunch with Raymond Carver. Grey Matter Books had the entire set of Genesis West, all seven volumes, except now they don’t, because Nat Otting owns six and I own one.
In this 1962 issue is an interview between Lish and Jack Gilbert, whose book Views of Jeporody had at the time just won the Yale Younger Poets Series award. After the break are two cool excerpts from the conversation, one about that old hobbyhorse of poetry’s relevance, and one in which Gilbert takes to task the aesthetics of the Beat movement. The whole interview is terrific, and I post these excerpts not to signal unequivocal agreement with Gilbert’s grouching, but to air for the consideration of contemporary relevance some pretty solid gnashing from the early mouth of a major poet.
Really astoundingly good new story from our friend Matthew Simmons at The Nervous Breakdown: “We Never Ever Went to the Moon.” It’s got plot and heart and floating. In a self-interview, Matthew says that the story’s from an as-yet-unpublished collection called Happy Rock, all about people who believe in things even while other people are watching them. Somebody needs to make that collection appear, if you ask me.
Looking for tic-tac-toe with yourself? When you are not even sure you have a self, when it feels more like a rumor shivering in a cathedral? Then hustle like a clod. Keep the night like an arm-around. And check out your new favorite poet, Jack Christian, who paints his boats to display the night and take you to it. He is all over the internet: featured at Ink Node, live at Sixth Finch, Thermos, and Gregory Lawless’s blog I Thought I Was New Here. He’s a poet of the fairgrounds, the airport, and the goodbye-for-real. I think his poem “I Am Yours” from Sixth Finch is my favorite of this web blitz, because it is true in the way that true-making is the only way true happens.
Here is the first paragraph of Dan Hoy’s essay, which Justin links in the below post and I won’t bother linking again, since it is, obviously, the only thing you need to read about Flarf, which is that thing, full of poems, poem things, but you only need to read an essay, about them, the poems, about making them, uh huh, yeah.
Google is not a spontaneous manifestation of the zeitgeist in the virtual realm. That it is often misconstrued as such is due to a passive acceptance of its process and mythos, from its humble beginnings and benign-sounding name to the embedded cultural belief that the Internet is the great democratic frontier in which all information is equalized — the user, instead of the disseminator, is the arbiter of what is useful and not useful — and the residual PR advantage this gives to in utero virtual corporations like Google and Yahoo! over preexisting technocapitalist transplants like Microsoft. Google is considered an organic entity only marginally different from a construct like Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia in which users define the content by continually creating, altering, contesting, and amalgamating entries.
Now here is most of Drew Gardner’s “Why Do I Hate Flarf So Much” from the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry:
She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING. AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters.
Hey my little Lisbon doorknob: one has one’s house, where one might hum a song from a 1970s sitcom, one’s face gold for the stream, locking one’s doors with the lack of an erection, the erector sets no one would steal, then leaving, taking a sip every time one passes a crow on a fence, while another new rain dumps from the complicated sky, while you staple Clint Eastwood’s face over your own, while another sits on a bench and stares at the bridge, moonlight spiking off his belly, and that’s just the fiction in the new Alice Blue Review, which you’ll want, a want conjoining with your want of the Blue Collar Sun under which it takes place, and in the next seat over is the poetry section, where Jordan Stemplemann—among fine companions—burrows into you with the following: “No matter who / takes over the world, // they will build / within us one stiff // twin called astonishment, / unable to ever unlive.”