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.
“The bad word and the bad word and
The word which glamours me with some
Quick face it pulls to make me let
It leave me to go across
In roughly your direction, hates
To go out maybe so completely
On another silence not its own.”
from “Approaches to How They Behave” — W.S. Graham (thanks to Heather Christle for the spot)
“Blotting out the stars / Was only compositional.” — from “Painting” by Jared White in Sink Review. Long but worth it. HBD JW.
It’s easy to ignore a heat wave when you’ve got the big questions. Such as: can’t people be wrong about why they believe things? But even big questions aren’t foolproof. There are storytellers, fuckers, etc. Get caught in the wrong heat and you turn all hymn of the yawn you. Swedes start calling things thigh cookies, and others engage in the practice of mapping and naming lunar mountain ranges. So this is a heat for you to fit yourself under yourself, for green honey in the heart. For us to start saying things like “When I say you are my one and only I mean it in the way I mean it when I say I know how to change a tire.” For ramming into the blank and unblinking of heat with a wishful thinking wrought in anti-oppression declarativeness: “The quality of rain is that it occurs first of all where we are.” Wingspans become appetites, the future becomes a mystery school for adults. The grocery store becomes the grocery stores from all your favorite movies. Your horse becomes a horse you would like to have pictures with, and cereal bars a stand-in for affection. Last time I checked, this is an upturned-pocket kind of world, and why would you keep your matches in a world like that?
After reading the new issue of iO, I know some new things. Like some people will forgive you right to your face. Like every pier is out to get you. Like animals get into the distillery just fine. Like one thing you do is you want to hear someone say “that’s the one I want.” And the other thing you do is you know that, as you age, your desires start to feel less unusual. Then the way you know it’s real is when no one’s dreamed about you so much, or told you they dreamed about you so much, and in such detail. The way it is is a sad song about oranges. No one really cares about germs. The world moves even if you don’t take it out for a walk. My cereal tastes funny does your cereal taste funny? Some things I still don’t know, even with iO to help me. I still don’t know what roll tide roll means. Or how many corporations does it take, anyway, to make a dark that shreds the citydark like a bed of incriminating documents? How many years does running in the wrong direction become, if not right, at least something people stop niOticing?
Okay, so Derrick Rose will maybe never again play basketball like such a firefly, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in the triumph of the canny and soulful: for example, friend of the GIANT Heather Christle has won The Believer‘s 2011 Poetry Award for her book The Trees The Trees. Congratulations, Heather!
The other night I was doing my taxes and commiserating with softballers and wondering why the water was still running behind a locked door and getting shoved passive-aggressively by a woman whose love of darts I was unconsciously interrupting when the guy to the right said that he liked it when I used to post on HTMLGIANT about new issues of online magazines, and I was like “You mean the only thing on HTMLGIANT I was ever good for?” and he was like “Yeah, exactly,” and then one thing led to another and the Yankees got swept in their opening series by Tampa Bay, so I figured what the frick I would tell everybody about:
)) People who think they have secrets over at Sixth Finch, but actually they just have the word DOOR superimposed like a crosshair on their smallest confession.
)) People who meld heads and flood banks and steal mother scarves over at Dark Sky, but really they just stand around covered in hair in the mammal room.
)) And if that’s not enough for you Yankees fans, you can take a NAP, and when you wake Up, you can conduct enough electricity to become a diode. The important thing is that every time you read an online literary magazine for the rest of your life, you should also imagine the gangsta in the woods reading along with you.
“If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.” — John Waters in the Wall Street Journal on the debate between transparent and topographical sentences.
“My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If poetry doesn’t strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will.” — CAConrad, in an amazing (duh, it’s CAConrad) and even downright rousing interview with Thom Donovan at The Academy of American Poets, excerpted from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Conrad’s new book of (Soma)tic exercises out April 1st from Wave.
Hey Mike is there a one stop poetry megasite where I can 1) go to read cool poetics essays by everybody from C.D Wright to Laura Glenum, 2) catch up on reviews of books out from presses like City Lights, 3) watch videos of shit like Joshua Clover getting kicked out of a bank, 4) scan all the current poetry news that stays news and otherwise, 5) dive into a nicely manageable monthly poetry journal that features one poem by three people per issue, especially if those people are like Noelle Kocot or something, and 6) speaking of people also maybe find smart interviews with people like Tyrone Williams? Also it would help if this online poetry megasite were based out of the American desert. Like not the proverbial American desert but some actual sand and shit. Like also if the site were designed to be as clean and navigable as a desert highway.
Oh cool, I like them. What is this thing called?
Awesome. Also why is there a light on your water pitcher that flashes different colors depending on filter age?
I have no idea, but it’s terrifying and soothing in equal measures.
Yeah, yeah, ‘equal measures,’ boring, whatever Mike, if you’re so fucking smart why don’t you go talk to yourself using some bloated smart person prepositional phrases like ‘that which’ while I actually do something with my life like checking out The Volta.
=(
Sorry just kidding Mike I know how you need relentlessly undiluted adoration all the time so don’t worry I still love you.
=)!!!
Wow I didn’t think you could put exclamation marks after emoticons, that’s really kind of a new low, please don’t ever talk to me again.
[Matchup #25 in Tournament of Bookshit]
DECLARING ___ IS DEAD VS. NATIONWIDE FACEBOOK INVITE TO LOCAL READING
-OR-
HOW I SPENT MEAN WEEK MAKING A POST SO STUPID THAT AFTER YOU READ THIS POST THE POST WILL HAVE A CHILD NAMED “GOOBER T.L.D.R” BECAUSE THE POST ISN’T EVEN GOOD AT COMING UP WITH NAMES FOR ITS CHILDREN
On the one hand, nothing really dies. Like I have this receipt from a movie I saw right here in my pocket. What good is it doing anybody? The movie was about the financial industry. We were made to feel sorry for people because they buried their dogs just like everybody else. In one scene, Snapple showed off its brand of bottled water. The best scene was when a guy who used to make bridges explained that money wasn’t a bridge, e.g. it didn’t save anybody in traffic. Adam and I saw the movie in NYC. Driving home, Adam and Joe and I got stuck in traffic. The reasons were mysterious. Adam’s chips were locked in the trunk. I wasn’t really hungry because I’d eaten two breakfasts and Adam’s tiramisu, which he gave me to shut me up after we argued about the relevance of the bridge scene. The tiramisu was delicious and sort of ridiculously conceptualized, just like NYC. -+-+-+-+-+- Listen: READ MORE >