Rauan Klassnik
http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.com
author of three collections: Sky Rat (Spork, 2014), The Moon's Jaw (Black Ocean, 2013) and Holy Land (Black Ocean, 2008) ... ----- @klassnik ------
Sounds of a Cowhide Drum // An Interview with Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
***
Look upon me as a pullet crawling
from an eggshell
laid by a Zulu hen,
ready to fly in spirit
to all lands on earth.
A few months ago I posted up some thoughts on Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali’s wonderful book “Sounds of a Cowhide Drum” in which I indicated an interview with Mr. Mtshali would be forthcoming. And, well, it took a while longer than I’d wished but here it is:
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Rauan: When we chatted you mentioned that the first poems you wrote were love poems, that you were writing to “impress girls”—-and besides the dark and serious subjects and moods of Sounds of a Cowhide Drum there is also a joie de vivre to it, a real sensuality.
I want to be adorned
by the silken suit so scintillating in sheen;
it pales even the peacock’s plumage,
and catches the enchanted eye
of a harlot hiding in the alley:
“Come my moulten bird,
I will not charge you a price!”(from “The moulting country bird”)
And, so, can you talk a bit about the poet as peacock? as shiny bird?
Oswald: A peacock is considered to be the proudest and most colorful bird in the animal kingdom. In the poem “The moulting country bird” the bird symbolizes a transformation of a country boy from the village of KwaBhanya on banks of Blood River in Northern KwaZulu to the bright neon lights of Johannesburg, the Golden City. The bumpkin sheds his garish and comical garments of country life and assumes the mantle of sophistication and “civilization” in a cosmopolitan metropolis of EGoli.
Once he has embraced the city slickers’ fashionable attire he goes back during his village to show off and strut his stuff like a peacock to the envy of his coevals and contemporaries who are still clad in their shabby garments of most clodhoppers in the country. His mannerisms and speech patterns are dramatically changed and he follows the trends of city life and discards all those things that define and remind him of his “backward” people, especially those of his same age group. The whole process is marked by migration from rural areas and transformation by life in the urban areas where he falls under the spell of many influences. His experiences and interactions with a polyphonic of cultures and Babel of languages READ MORE >
……..In the Dark like a Pig // Blah, Blah……..
***
part 1-– on my way back from Atlanta I was listening to Kylie Minogue and enjoying and cringing at her cruelty:
If love is really good
You just want more
Even if it throws you to the fire fire fire fireAll the lovers
That have gone before
They don’t compare to you
Don’t be running
Just give me a little bit more
They don’t compare
All the lovers
Basically what we have here is an insatiable sexual appetite inciting its lover the way a jockey uses a crop to get the last bit of zest out of its thundering horse. (or I dunno, I dunno, I mean I really like Kylie)
***
almost upside down
***
part 2— then, wrapped in the sky’s lust, I was thinking about Kill List which I think about often kinda the way I think about God a lot even though I’m a total atheist. I guess I mean I was thinking about all the fanatic reactions. All the foaming at the mouth. All the literal morons. Blah, blah, blah (yawn). . . .
. . .And then I thought perhaps I should write a Kiss List but before that even took root in my brain (shimmer, shimmer) I thought a Spank List might be better
CAConrad’s got a sweet ass
Greg Bem’s got a gorgeous ass
Reb Livingston’s got a sweet ass
Kris Hall’s got a sweet assJosef Kaplan’s got a sweet ass READ MORE >
Behind the Scenes & Random / Comments Off on ……..In the Dark like a Pig // Blah, Blah……..
November 10th, 2013 / 10:52 pm
November 10th, 2013 / 10:52 pm
POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#3)
The Penis List
Jim Behrle was recently featured in “Kill List” as a comfortable poet. It’s possible that he is the least famous poet to earn such a distinction. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. By day he wears a green t-shirt and a nametag at a university bookstore, fetching textbooks for people with bright futures. He lives his broken dreams, a famous internet poetry troll, he’s probably better known for crap like “Best American Poetry: The Cartoon”, “Stone Cold Poetry Bitches” and “What the Hell is Up With Your Author Photo?” Behrle really has to get more of that Ruth Lilly money somehow.
by Jim Behrle
Jim Behrle has a half inch penis
The Kill List Kid has a three inch penis
Vanessa Place has a six inch penis
Billy Collins has a four inch penis
The Poetry Foundation has a $100 million penis
But Poetry Magazine has a two inch penis
Your iphone is a mile long penis that’s
Always secretly fucking you
When you look at your iphone think “penis”
Google is a huge penis sticking out of
Everything everywhere
And where ever you go you bump into them all
Poetry is a huge warm wonderful vagina
But everyone treats it like a narrow
Tight, unbreakable asshole that only
One penis at a time can fit in so
You’ve got to out-penis everyone else
Manhattan and Brooklyn take an inch off
America’s penis is old and gross
But we’re working on it now
The internet takes a half
Inch off your penis, snip, snip
Let’s just cut off all penises
Or yank them all out by the root
What will survive is love
And penises usually fuck that up, too
Kafka once wrote “We are incapable of loving, only fear excites us.” Behrle quotes this all the time, it is the only thing he’s ever read from Kafka. And he wants to sound smart. This poem began as a long list of poets and their perceived penis lengths but once he got to the line about Billy Collins penis he lost his stomach and turned it into something else. Vanessa Place’s penis on the other hand kills poetry every night, aw yeah. Behrle. . .
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!
3 Comments
November 8th, 2013 / 9:24 am
November 8th, 2013 / 9:24 am
Rauan Klassnik—
over at her Tumblr Thais Benoit, answering a call from Alt Lit Press, offers up a kind of manifesto of thoughts about and definitions for Alt Lit:
“Writing that is happening outside of traditional publishing, mostly online and in digital forms.”
“Alt Lit fits in perfectly with historical literature context. Alt Lit is challenging the norms of the past, and can be compared/contrasted easily to the Beat movement of the 60s. We see authors using their lives as the set of their writing. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac did things (many of which seemed taboo or ‘wild’ or eccentric) and then wrote about them, and they wrote about them in a way that was real to their readers at the time. Please compare Taipei to On The Road: it’s fun.”
“More than anything else, Alt Lit fills a hole created by the commercial publishing industry. ”
“works by authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, do not connect with many readers today. . .
WE DO NOT IDENTIFY.
WE DO NOT IDENTIFY.
WE DO NOT IDENTIFY.”
read Thais’ entire post here
3
Seattle’s Cheese & Wine Poetry Community / The Cult of Henry Darger / etc / etc / (talking with Rebecca Loudon)
Rauan: Seattle’s a polite town. Everyone’s super polite, cordial, in a way, cool in their dealings. But not so warm all the time. Seldom even maybe. What do you think of this? And do you think Seattle’s writing (poetry, etc, whatnot) suffers and/or benefits from a similar sort of politeness? Coolness?
Rebecca: Seattle used to be considered a “friendly” town but Seattle grew up and is now a Big City. Seattle suffers from a kind of passive/aggression. I’ve seen people at six way stops get out of their cars and start fighting over who goes first. We also have a lot of homeless displaced people here but they are mostly ignored or hidden so the city will look prettier. Seattle is famous for leading the way in cutting down its carbon footprint but the city’s largest private employer makes airplanes. No one (at least publicly) acknowledges how jet fuel which emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an alarming rate contributes to the acceleration of global warming. And yet you can no longer get paper or plastic bags at Seattle stores because it’s bad for the environment.
Seattle writers are friendly among themselves those writers who write similar poems those writers who are polite whose poems are polite whose work doesn’t take risks whose poems are widely published in polite poetry journals. It’s an easy place to be a poet. You can’t swing a contrabassoon without hitting a poetry reading in Seattle. This city has supported poetry on buses poetry readings for the city council poetry readings in museums and offers all kinds of grants and opportunities to poets who write polite non-threatening poetry. Sometimes Seattle gets lucky and brings in outside poets to read but mostly it’s the same circle of poets making the rounds being passive aggressively nice with their nice natural fiber clothes their hybrid cars their little hemp bags in which to put their shopping and their polite nice poetry.
*****
Seattle Author Spotlight (10)
*****
Okay, so that was the first part of my latest Seattle Author Spotlight, the 11th, featuring Rebecca Loudon. Several years I did an interview with Rebecca regarding her excellent book Cadaver Dogs (which you can read here, it contains info about her being a violinist as well as some of the very personal elements of that book) but this time I had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca in person. Rebecca claims to be a sort of hermit, but we got along great, intensities coming and going. And Rebecca’s work as I’m finding out is getting stranger and stronger READ MORE >
4 Comments
November 5th, 2013 / 10:52 am
November 5th, 2013 / 10:52 am
POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#2)
“Seth Abramson” is a Google Alert.
What I Read When I Read “Monsters” By Dorothea Lasky (Which I Read)
This is a world where there are poets
by Seth Abramson
This is a world where there are poets
There are poets everywhere, neo-formalists and conceptualists
There are poets on Twitter, there are poets in my bed.
There is one poet. She is my little one.
I talk to my little poet.
I give my little poet some Stevia but that does not satisfy her.
I tell her, ssh ssh, don’t growl little poet!
And she growls, oh boy does she growl!
And she wants something from me,
She wants my soul.
And finally giving in, I give her my gleaming soul
And as she eats my gleaming soul, I am one with her
And stare out her eyepits [sic] and I see nothing but white
And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was nothing
but fog
And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of poets
When I was six or seven, I skinned my knee. It’s an experience that’s never really left me. This is a poem about that. And the magic of poetry. It’s called “Ars Poetica,” which means “small gift” in Latin. This poem owes a significant debt to Dottie Lasky and also to the magic of poetry.
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!
1 Comment
November 4th, 2013 / 12:01 am
November 4th, 2013 / 12:01 am
Rauan Klassnik—
here’s an excerpt from an update on the Facebook Page created to help gather support of Sandra Simonds’ call for the Poetry Foundation to do more to help poets in need:
“This afternoon Jenny Gropp Hess participated in a conference call with Elizabeth Burke-Dain, the Poetry Foundation’s Media and Marketing Director, and Ydalmi Noriega, the Special Assistant to President Robert Polito. Burke-Dain and Noriega communicated that the letter and petition introduced a real need for the Foundation to change and refine some of its processes, such as figuring out how to better support programs like Poets in Need and (more…)
Dreams of Amputation
Gary J. Shipley’s “Dreams of Amputation” is now available.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
The station is full of copies, thought-structures all breathing the same boxed air as him, screwed down into new estates, their borrowed movements vapour trails of the imperceptible multitudes that precede them, his forced embodiment a shriek he cannot hear, its explicit exclusion of human context conveyed in a series of smirks and titters causing him to wake repeatedly inside glimpses of himself, a reluctant conduit to spasms outside the insulation of a body, some dead agent without a face and him mad yellow escaping his dismembered endurance, expanding into nothing in the artificial disfigurement of their smiles until he finds an unsecured staircase, and unaware of any alien intent they carry it up after him, hands formed like mouths barking, their dreams of souls all shrunken cages in its swarm of dead beginnings, their every defect growing into holes, and up into the street and they disperse around him their brains once again made of the digitalised ooze of money and fucking and blood, his own voice coming back removed as if from a TV in another room, his limbs appendixes to an earthquake camouflaged by some Sadean baptism of puke and shit, and nothing and no sound, its hold fixed on the ends of unpronounced words, agitating images of string, an animated ossuary squeezed with rainless faces shining like simulated sick…
and
For a second or two there is the man, on his feet reaching for the back of his chair with his right hand, and then the dance of the vanishing begins: the flailing honeycombed limbs, naked bone READ MORE >
POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#1)
A Good Titty Is Hard To Find
Reb Livingston has amassed 2250 Facebook friends, 876 Twitter followers, 625 Google+ circle inclusions, 568 Goodreads friends, 309 Pinterest followers, 234 LInkedIn connections and has been awarded an impressive 60 Klout score. Upon turning 40, Ms. Livingston was unanimously declared the champion of the Male Series of Middle Aged Poets, the first woman to achieve this honor since the award’s inception in 1919. She resides in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, dog and a solitary fish named Wolverine who just won’t die.
by Reb Livingston
O if I had two titties to rub
together I would rub them
together until together they
created one good one
and I’d strut around with
my one good titty
that I’d push up with my firm palm
imagining that it was your firm palm
and I’d keep it in place with packing tape
imagining that it was your packing tape
and eventually my one good titty
would spill over
my custom one-tittied tape bra and
disappear into my scoop neck crop top
but before it did
I’d use my one good titty to pound your face
like my titty was some soap in a sock
participating in a retribution
my sweetness, please, give my one
good titty, a little more time
to settle and
stretch into a lithe hand of delight.
One morning I woke up very sad. So I decided that since I was a poet, I would express my sadness in poem form. This poem explores the concepts of friction, combination, sexuality, gender, aging, gravity, fashion, metamorphosis, violence and love. The titty works as metaphor for a much larger idea.
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!
5 Comments
October 28th, 2013 / 12:25 pm
October 28th, 2013 / 12:25 pm
I’m a Bad Feminist, etc – (Talking with Seattle’s Amber Nelson)
(photo by Jill Chmelko)
Rauan: When we chatted you used the word “Feminist” a few times. “Feminist,” a word that puts me on edge, and sometimes gets me crossing my legs, etc, because, well, some Feminist writers are quite radical (knife carriers probably). Can you tell us, plz, what Feminism means to you and explain about your being, as you said, a “Bad Feminist”?
Amber: I have to admit that your response to the word “Feminist” gets my hackles going…
Much like admitting to being a writer, more especially a poet, took some work on my part—it was something I, and I think most people, had to learn to admit or choose not to admit. I had to decide to admit to being a feminist because it garners exactly your reaction: that feminism means “man-hating.”
I think feminism, the truth of it, is and should always be equality for all–humanism. But there are varying levels and kinds of feminists. And there are thousands of road blocks, including a long history of white male privilege. That’s not an accusation, but a truth.
And so I point you to this essay by Lindy West (also a Seattle local and fantastic writer).
That said, I often worry that I am part of the problem. That I am a “bad feminist.” I worry because there are lots of things that I enjoy that are clearly problematic at best, or misogynistic and rapey at worst. I wouldn’t say these are the qualities I like about them… but they do exist. Take, for example, and since it’s hot right now, the Robin Thicke “Blurred Lines” song. (It’s gotten a lot-o-press.)
I get that the lyrics are evil, but man does that song make me want to dance.
That’s why READ MORE >