41 Endings: Cheever [with comment (mixed)]
I gave this to Ralphie and went home. [Only I didn’t say “Fudge”]
Then he went away, and, although the race was beginning, she saw instead the white snow and the wolves of Nascosta, the pack coming up the Via Cavour and crossing the piazza as if they were bent on some errand of that darkness that she knew to lie at the heart of life, and, remembering the cold on her skin and the whiteness of the snow and the stealth of the wolves, she wondered why the good God had opened up so many choices and made life so strange and diverse. [Pretty damn 19th century and pretty damn good. The next ‘experimental writer’ will actually write like Thomas Hardy]
She was always on the move, dreaming of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. [That’s very Brautigan, sir]
“I’m walking the dog,” I said cheerfully. There was no dog in sight, but they didn’t look. “Here, Toby! Here, Toby! Here, Toby! Good dog!” I called and off I went, whistling merrily in the dark. [I use this same tired move, only I say I’m “returning the movies.” A friend of mine “goes for donuts” and returns tired, with gin on her breath]
“Oh, we thought, signore,” he said, ‘that you were merely a poet.” [Like Yeats?]
The touchstone of their euphoria remained potent, and while Larry gave up the fire truck he could still be seen at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, the 8:03, and the Chamber Music Club, and through the prudence and shrewdness of Helen’s broker they got richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily. [I got nothing. Excellent fucking ending line. That’s why you are you and I am me. Well done]
Then he put his head back on the pillow and died—indeed, these were his dying words, and the dying words, it seemed to me, of generations of storytellers, for how could this snowy and trumped-up pass, with its trio of travelers, hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream? [Conrad? I hope a PhD is studying how long these ending sentences—dissertation, dis?]
Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border. [A bit Hemingway, but it’s cool, we all do that]
Mark Leidner on Collaging
on the occasion of the release of Mark’s second book, Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me, which is absolutely the shit (for a taste, two of the poems appear here), and available now from Factory Hollow, and for which the cover appears as such:
The Time I Read a Lot of DeLillo Books and the Things that Happened
It was winter, and I took the bus home, or maybe it was the train, from Massachusetts to New York, so “home” is up for debate, and then a subway, probably, into my little apartment thing with a kitchenette and a big bathroom and no bedroom. Actually, maybe my sister drove me. It’s unimportant. I’d read Part 1 of White Noise, a copy I’d borrowed from the library over winter break. It made me feel happy, the descriptions, the opening chapter which I’d read on the internet several months earlier on a slow day at work. I already knew it was the novel I’d wanted to write the previous summer, the novel I’d abandoned at 30,000 words and character names that seemed true, but also false, and a number of edits that seemed confusing. I laid down on my bed. I think it was mid-morning, or mid-afternoon. The sun was in my window somehow, giving me natural light, but not enough to read by. I read Part 2, and it was about some sort of chemical disaster. I read it in a sitting that day, with the space heater from the bathroom on full blast. Then maybe I slept.
I’d returned from Vermont. We’d stayed at a bed and breakfast, and that week I would announce I was single and she would go to Germany, and I would be unable to read Part 3 of White Noise for several months, glancing through chapters on the subway to Bushwick, feeling drunk after zero beers. By this time, I’d returned my copy to the library and been gifted one from a friend who’d found the author underwhelming. I wondered if I should feel the same. I didn’t. I looked at the words. The sentences. The long paragraphs and the short, sparse dialogue. The radio and the television saying postmodern things. Things I’d later discuss with a friend that seemed similar to Updike’s “A&P” despite his distaste for “postmodernism.”
The semester passed. I was back in the former relationship. Vermont, but actually the next time we went to New Hampshire, stayed in a tent, drank PBR and bourbon and pickle juice. It was 90 degrees and we sweated in a pancake house. This was about two weeks after I’d finished the novel, back in Massachusetts, on a rainy afternoon, within a rainy week, the week before I would start work on a farm and listen to first Blood Meridian on my iPod, and later two other McCarthy novels.
A Conversation With Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three poetry collections: Lucky Fish(2011); At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award and a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. She has won a Pushcart, an NEA fellowship and many other accolades and she is a faculty member in the English Department at SUNY-Fredonia. Her most recent book, Lucky Fish, blends the political and personal and is a really exciting and textured collection of poetry. I had a chance to talk to Aimee about her poetry and what influences her writing.
A lot of your poetry is deeply connected to the natural world. What is it about nature that you find so poetic?
Hmmm…I guess I love to let nature do the talking for me, so to speak. And why not—she has a much richer palette than I could ever conjure up! When I first started writing seriously in college, my subjects weren’t very broad: I basically wrote these sappy love and un-requited love poems. As I learned about the power and loveliness of metaphor (and as I began to get bored with myself!), I started to draw upon nature as an alternate lens to re-imagine ‘relationshippy’-issues and what it was like growing up Asian American in predominantly white towns.
Growing up, my father always took the time to make sure my sister and I knew the names of constellations, tree names, and most types of rock, etc. He did this on what now seems like these luxuriously long nature walks in the desert foothills of central Arizona and in the rich greenery of western NY—basically anywhere we lived, he found ways to make sure we didn’t just stay parked in front of a television. Many of those places have become gentrified and paved over so now in particular, I feel an urgency to witness and celebrate the natural world in my writings.
A Consciousness of the Luxury of Art: An Interview with Jon Leon
Last month I received a copy of the first issue of a new project by publisher James Copeland called Content, a series that releases uniform length and shape books each filled with “content” from an individual author without restriction. The first issue is by Jon Leon, a piece titled Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta, which is at its most basic a series of photographs of the three famous women referred to in the title, manipulated and arranged by Leon throughout.
I didn’t quite know what to make of the book at first. I think I immediately thought, Why? But the book stayed out on my desk and I found myself continuing to look at it, and to think about the things Leon mentioned in the one page letter that accompanied the volume (reproduced here on Leon’s website), which includes the lines, “I wanted to talk about ‘the demented power of the lights,’ how literature is evil, the end of my ‘career,’ the end of the artists editions, my conceptual death, my simulation of life, my meltdown in print and on tape, my public facade, my disappearance from Los Angeles, my disappearance from the Atlanta scene, my disappearance from New York in the holiday of 2009. My resolution to ‘end this shit’ in 2010. To kill off the poems.”
Last week I had an email correspondence with Mr. Leon regarding the concept of the book, its assemblage, the context of creation and aging with creation, Lindsay Lohan, modeling, and disintegration in general, among other things.
much more interesting than this is whether or not UFOs are real: an interview with Matthew Rohrer
I feel like there’s not much I can say about Matthew Rohrer that hasn’t been said already. He is a poet. He is the author of several books. He teaches at NYU. His poems are funny and sad and familiar and strange. There’s a liveliness in their voice and a deep reverence in their construction. They take place outside and inside, in the city and nature, alone and with others, somewhere where the imagination and concrete reality intersect. Despite all of Matt’s experience and worldliness, his poems also have this remarkable ability of never seeming “above the reader,” while at the same time never resorting to familiar tropes. His poems always level with you and remind you what’s good about poetry.
His new book, Destroyer and Preserver, was released this year by Wave. You can read poems from it here, here, and here. We emailed over the past few days to talk about the new book, other people’s books, punctuation, and hurricane Irene gets a shout out too.
30 Beginnings: Mary Miller
My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding.
Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher.
He shows you his drawings, sketchbooks full of naked women.
The whole time I was manipulating him I was telling him how it was done.
Now that I’ve finished grading, finished everything here that there is to finish, I’m in bed, watching the occasional big-winged bird fly by, listening to the crackheads smash their words together.
File his stories in your head: Homosexual experience, Threesomes, prostitution, Asian girls.
They were talking about their diseases.
Denis called his fiancée my old lady.
There’s a leak, I told him, it’s right over my bed.
He had an air gun, a beer box set up to shoot.
You’re making out with a stranger in a trailer when the bed breaks.
I went to a wedding reception at the house of a man who painted with his ass.
It was a summer program.
The Last Days of Slash Lovering
Slash Lovering (1970-2008) was a Seattle poet whose work focused on the Internet. His work has been labeled “grunge” however his actual association with the music scene is not well established. He was however, confirmed as a freelance writer for Microsoft, writing marketing materials. He traveled in many software-related circles. In 2008 Slashed died in a bike accident while going home to his new house in Redmond. The bits of conversation that follow are based on notes.
“One of you fags buy me a beer,” said Slash. We were at a Belltown bar in 2007, a year before his death. I was underage with a fake ID. Slash was loud and he seemed extroverted, for once. We were celebrating his retirement from Microsoft.
“I’ll get you a beer,” I said. I met Slash at a dinner party with my parents in 2004. It was a street-of-dreams style house on the Sammamish plateau, outside of Seattle. It was the house of some Microsoft VPs, who my parents also knew from mingling with the parents of my classmates at the Overlake School in Redmond. Redmond is the home of Microsoft. I grew up about a mile from the main campus.
I would not have discovered Slash’s poetry at all except for a burned CD he gave me shortly after our first meeting. He was hanging around a punk show at a place called Dog City in the University District. I had driven out there on some desolate high school Friday. I was depressed and I didn’t know anyone at the show, so I left early and put the CD in my parent’s computer. The poetry was dense and short and almost always included elements of graphic design. I had always assumed that he posted his work to obscure forums, but to this date, the CD is the only evidence I have of his poetry.
“I gave this company my life. And they gave me a way to live, but not a good way. I had to make my own way,” said Slash. READ MORE >
“as a human being living amidst a civilization’s collapse”: Mathias Svalina talks about his new book & gives away money
I’m pleased to present the following interview I conducted with Mathias Svalina, author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), & one book of prose, the newly released I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious Press).
To celebrate the release of I.A.A.V.P.E., Mathias has decided to give away money.
One dollar to be exact, but a very special dollar…
To win, post a word from the dictionary in the comment box below. Mathias will randomly select one of the words as the winning word. To the writer of the winning word, Mathias will write a unique business plan on a dollar bill, which the winner can then showcase (or spend) to commemorate their first dollar earned.
Contest ends Friday at noon.