Mark Jarman
I mentioned The Reaper during Mean Week. Mark Jarman was one of the editors. He was a teacher at the place whereat I got my (insert name of sometimes maligned writing degree that ends in an A and begins with an MF) and I liked his readings a lot.
(Did I say that about him already? That his were my favorite faculty poetry readings? Mary Reufle was good, too. Maybe I’ll write about her later. She had a lecture that was both really good and it gave me the fucking creeps.)
Anyway.
I have Jarman’s book Epistles sitting here next to me. Sarabande published it. I really like it. This is a little from a poem called “Listening to you”:
Got to the burnt out bulb to study the beauty of failure. There in its violoated space, the arms raised but the filaments incinerated, the flashmark like the feathery white face of a moth, it is no cool and detached, the ruined throne room of a dead sun king.
Here’s an interesting thing. Jarman is a religious poet. He writes about his faith quite eloquently and quite surprisingly. I am, on the other hand, happily agnostic. But I still really enjoy Jarman’s professions of faith.
(O’Connor came up early in the week. Same thing, there. I haven’t read it cover to cover, but I’ve enjoyed some of the letters in A Habit of Being. Somewhere she refers to someone buying a new car as getting a “hale automobile” and for some reason that’s always stuck with me. I have no idea why. And some of the Mystery and Manners essays have been really helpful to me.)
All this to say go buy and/or get from the library a copy of Epistles.
***
UPDATE:
Ah, here’s a weird moment of synchronicity. Google Video has a 2 hour debate about the existence of God between two philosophers. Arguing against the existence of a Christian God is Clancy Martin. See a comment by pr in Jimmy’s last post to see Mr. Martin’s first appearance on this blog today.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3780702651936909797
In Profile: Rachel B. Glaser
Kelly Spitzer’s ongoing writers in profile project is always a fun one: this week she tackles the badass Ms. Rachel B. Glaser, who if I continue to harp on about how good her PEE ON WATER story in the new New York Tyrant is, somebody will probably think I’m obsessed.
My PEE ON WATER tattoo is on my ass specifically so no one but the real reals get to see it. And whoever’s at the bar when I get happy.
I like Rachel’s attitude about messing around with people in writing, and so forth. Her blog has some archived writing and etc. Do it.
i am a sucky piece of shit and i suck at writing
i feel perhaps my last post misrepresented my meanness. sure i hate everyone, but the person i really hate, and towards whom i am most unfair in my meanness, is myself. you see, i totally suck. and so here is some meanness directed towards the real piece of shit garbage asshole in the internet community, me:
you are an unhappy fuck who will never have kids or anyone to smile at without being accused of creepiness. you are an ugly man. you have never benefitted anyone’s life aside from leaving it alone. your best writing, if there is anything whatsover of any quality, is behind you. you are basically a sperm that flipped out of your dad’s underwear and grew legs after one of your dad’s wet dreams. you sleep on the floor of your apartment and sometimes you feel too destroyed to even drink water. you have lived in over eighteen homes so you cannot form a lasting relationship with anyone. you are a failure. you will probably live a long life but accomplish nothing. maybe you will be on tv once if you accidentally walk by where a reporter is filming. you feel terrible when you see other people smiling and you see no difference between a person and a sock except when you come in the person you know for a fact they are not happy, the sock maybe but you’re not really sure, i mean you know. you will be found in a closet somewhere surrounded by garbage and you will disappoint everyone you have ever known. plus you suck at all video games created after golden eye. you use slang that is just outside of cool, like “that’s the bomb yo” or “see you on the flipside, mac”. you are terrible, you terrible person you.
Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them
“Critics are the sum of their biases—they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way round). You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley—poets are Rorschach tests.”
And just to keep the MEAN WEEKness nice and fair, here’s Brian Henry at Verse Magazine, trashing William Logan’s then-new collection of criticism. Here’s a taste: “Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews.” OOOOOOOOOhhhhhh.
Author Spotlight / Comments Off on Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them
October 13th, 2008 / 4:23 pm
October 13th, 2008 / 4:23 pm
the meanest soldier in the woods
My first Mean Week post is totally cheating because I’m not going to be mean and, instead, shall direct you to my favorite Mean Poet: Joseph Massey. Joe lives in the woods in Northern California where he is like a gentle Swiss bear. He drinks taco beer and sculpts word machines of fern-smelling delicacy. But on the internet! O Lord. On his LiveJournal blog, Mr. Massey is a cranky son-of-a-bitch and not afraid to take it to your ass with a whip made of questionable meat products. Witness this gristle he dropped recently into a favorable review of Peter O’Leary’s memoir:
It’s an antidote to so much of the bullshit that counts as what it seemingly must mean to be a poet these days, thanks in huge part to the MFA android machine. It’s a palate cleanser after spending too many hours — shame on us! — reading blogs where you come away disgusted, as if you had just eaten a pillowcase full of cotton-candy washed down with generic cola, as if poetry can be reduced to the ego-bloated emptiness of notices of acceptance and rejection by journals and magazines that are mostly amorphous blobs of visionless shit, mirroring the very system that supports them, and the endless crowing over the scramble to get books published that no one will read because their only audience is a CV.
Joe’s even got a poem coming out in The Nation, so you know his agenda is like political and shit. That’s right, Blake, political.
Peter Markus is a monk I think
Brother Markus’s interview on Detroit radio WDET is now posted in its entirely with a backup photo montage have now been posted on Youtube for our enjoyment.
Peter talks a lot about writing his new novel BOB, OR MAN ON BOAT from Dzanc Books, including inspiration, rejection, and an excerpt read in Peter’s highly incantatory speech.
“Nothing’s conscious for me, Greg.”
I really enjoy listening to Peter talk, on paper on from the mouth, I think he would be capable of hypnotizing babies in a way that made them smarter, if I ever have a baby I will ask Peter to come down and make the child’s head fattened in the good way.
I got tits too motherfuckers
Sorry, just gearin’ up for Mean Week
Kissed By…
I road the bus to work this morning, and 1) listened to Disintegration Loops by William Basinski and 2) read a random story from Kissed By by Alexandra Chasin.
The story was called “They Come From Mars” and in one of those all-too-common moments of synchronicity, that story is essentially a disintegrating language loop. It contains only—until its surprise ending—four letter words. (No, not profanity.) There are twelve words a line. The font is Courier, I think, which is a monospaced (fixed width) font, so all the words are the same size.
What begins as an incantatory: They come from Mars they come from Mars…gives way to a discussion of the arrival of visitors from Mars. Chasin abbreviates. “There” and “their” become “ther.” When we speak, we abbreviate without realizing it, and she uses that to her advantage. “Suspect” becomes “spec.” (Unless she means “expect,” but, she uses that ambiguity to her advantage as well.)
The long columns of twelve word, monospaced lines, the paranoia in the prose (they come from Mars, for Heaven’s sake!), the flatering, disintegrating prose loops—it reminds me of Howard Finster a little, outsider art. The text on the bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap.
And, as I said, it dovetailed nicely with the Basinski, a recording of a long, old tape loop repeating and repeating and repeating and slowly falling apart moment by moment in such minimal steps, you miss it.
Blake sent me this book. Thanks, Blake.
Today is J.G. Ballard Day
over at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings.
For folks who don’t know, Cooper runs one of the greatest blogs on the net. He organizes his posts into massive, theme-driven “Days” and posts a new one daily, Mon-Sat. Topics range from literature to cinema to art to professional wrestling to gay porn to music to whatever else you can think of. He’s also a big advocate of collaboration and participation, and is always eager to have members of his blog community to guest-curate a Day of their own devising.
A semi-random sampling from the blog archives:
October 8th was David Ohle Day, guest-curated by Jeff
October 2nd was John Ashbery Day
On September 22nd we checked out some male escorts
On September 19th I curated a day of pictures of my friend Maggie
On June 7th we reviewed some of the history of Queer Punk
On May 6th we looked at 10 squats
March 13, 2007: A Basic Layout of David Lynch’s ‘The Air is on Fire’
Peter Markus
Always looking forward to what Peter Markus is doing with his words, I decided to ask the man himself what we can expect from him in the future. A few great things to get everyone pumped:
-A new book of brother stories to be published by Dzanc in 2011.
-A limited edition book from Cinematheque Press called “The Moon is a Fish” that he describes as “a sort of novelty project that will have illustrations, maybe even maps, other odds and ends and assortments—fish bones, fish teeth, fish scales, a broken off piece of the moon, etc” to be published sometime next year, but not definite yet.
-A manuscript of three long stories where “every word is monosyllabic.” One of these will appear in the next issue of Unsaid.
And if all that is too much of a wait, Peter will be on Detroit radio this morning at WDET 101.9FM on the show Detroit Today at 11:00.