Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife
I spent about $400 on books in Denver. This was the first I read the second I got home: Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife. It is gorgeous, mysterious, and moving, in a way I haven’t felt of a book in a long time. I’m keeping it by my bed.
Pigafetta Is My Wife enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan’s hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.
Praise for Pigafetta Is My Wife:“A genuinely fine work, moving beautifully between Magellan’s voyage—the ethics therein, with language informed by discovery literature—and a series of epistles, taking the notion of circumnavigation to an unforeseeable confessional level. I like the work very much—that making necessary of history—and see it as one of lyric poetry’s responsibilities. The epilogues, too, are beautiful.”—Dan Beachy-Quick“Almost impossibly grand in scope Pigafetta Is My Wife is a rare achievement and quite a debut. Hall’s poetry crosses contemporary love and ancient epic, folding inward and out by motion derivative of the sestina and pantoum, so that whether via image or address, beautiful shards fall: ‘A chrysanthemum blossom sails across a bowl of milk.’ Emotion accretes in accordance with ambition. A treatise on the action of discovery, this is a book to be taken in whole.”—Sally Keith
Read some poems from the book here.
Read a poem not in this book here.
Buy this book direct from Black Ocean here.
Sommer Browning Stand-up
Hey I just discovered this. Sommer Browning–poet, comic book artist, editor of Flying Guillotine, and host of the Pete’s Candy Store series–has officially added stand-up comedy to the list of things that she does or has done. It is very funny and you should watch it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFS1KPxJcbg
Also, since I’m still in Denver even though AWP is over, I thought I’d share this. It’s a pretty bad recording of a pretty okay song, attached a dead celebrity tribute video that doesn’t relate at all. If you get bored, just shut it off and watch Sommer’s thing again. Enjoy!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLcfz8jMKzM&hl
FOLLOWUP: Ariana Reines in Haiti
Tents and makeshift shelters
Greetings, friends, from the great state of Colorado, where I am at the AWP conference, passing long and happy days in the meatspace company of many wonderful people I usually only type at, including Gene “the Machine Levine” Morgan, Blake “Lively” Butler, and Ryan “Last” Call, which in this town is apparently 12:45. For all of you at the conference, I hope you’ll come say hello if you haven’t already. And if you’re in the Denver area but not registered for AWP, know that the bookfair is free and open to the public on Saturday April 10, so the same goes for you, too. But I digress. The true news I bring comes from much further afield.
About a month ago, I posted a call for funds to help send Ariana Reines on a UN Mission to Haiti to serve as a French-English translator for a team of trauma clinicians. Well, she went, and upon her return sent a note of thanks to those who donated, as well as a handful of photographs from her trip. All of these things are reproduced in full below the break.
Critics on Criticism: Dryden and Pope on the Evils of Hating, Loving Parts
Apparently something about the Restoration, after all the Charleses and Jameses and Cromwells and who is Catholic and who is Anglican or Puritan, got poets to thinking about the whole versus the part, w/r/t criticism. Thus John Dryden, who was politically moderate but eventually found he had some inclinations toward Rome, on critics who “think this or that expression in Homer, Virgil, Tasso, or Milton’s Paradise to be far too strained”:
Tis true there are limits to be set betwixt the boldness and rashness of a poet; but he must understand those limits who pretends to judge as well as he who undertakes to write: and he who has no liking to the whole ought, in reason, to be excluded from censuring of the parts. (from “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Heroic License,” 1677)
This seems a good rule. I perhaps unfashionably quite enjoy reading good criticism for its own sake, and I believe a person can display a purely critical genius, though their work ought to follow Wilde’s dictum of being a creative act in its own right. I think, here, that Dryden makes a key distinction. He is taking to task critics who profess no taste for any muscular poetry, for the “the hardest metaphors and the strongest hyperboles,” and who then critique individual works of heroic verse that by definition display that muscularity, hardness, and strength.
Harry is a world, laced with rivers of wizardly blood.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPVhmZodaLA
fuck
1. Fuck that story by that guy. Read something else. I wanted to introduce you to this new writer anyway and this story will make you pant-pee and laugh like a photogenic butcher.
2. Has anyone seen the fucking new Hayden’s Ferry? Number 46 is re-donk. I can’t link it’s so new. What’s up with these people? In a short time, they have made their magazine crisp, beautiful, full of bad-ass writing, crazy. I mean they stepped up their Slay and are not looking back. My mind on their magazine has gone from throw-me-a-bone to ranch-style nacho pie. Fuck yes. Get it.
3. fuck you. punk.
4. Yesterday walking the hallway and I see a lady at a table and advertising a free raffle. A FREE RAFFLE. What the fuck?
5. Heroin. Sex. Scientology. What do you want? NSFW pics, so sorry if you work on Saturday. I include this because I think the guy’s write-up was CW techniques all glow (He uses Tao Lin quotes and all types of solid pacing, transitions–“This is where things get weird.”) Also I’ve been drinking fake absinthe and it fit well in my “fuck” theme I have going here.
Last Thanksgiving I was staying at a friends house for a few days before a trip to South America.
Stories that begin this way always end up with heroin and Scientology, this we know. A lot could be learned from that opening sentence. If you say friends should be friend’s I’ll punch you in the spleen. It is Saturday. relax.
6. Kristen Shaw with a great fucking flash at decomP. It includes the term fuck.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect.
Stupidity is a talent for…
Drunk after one glass. They say I am susceptible.
State everything twice: once when sober, once when drunk.
I was drunk so was carried ashore. So what?
The fellow with the plum-pudding face. He sold me a cask of gin!!
(Written to Poe.): Sir. If you should come to Richmond again, and again should be an assistant in my office, it must be especially understood by us that all engagements on my part would be dissolved, the moment you get drunk.
Words are like carriage wheels. They move.
I am upset by little things.
Folks. Folks. I feel. I feel I have drunk something. This lecture cannot be given.
5 paper antlers of god
1. Sixteen drinks named for authors (with recipes)
2.Harry Smith sort of rambling a bit, sort of blowing a few joints. Cat’s cooler than buckets of toad.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdfCx13S5aI
3. Holy shit Sonora Review flash fiction contest will give you a sweet grand! That’s like 90 ecstasy tablets or 13 Poking Boxes. Joe Wenderoth will judge.
4. You edit an anthology. Do you include your own work?
5. Happy Easter!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIl9rO9sURE