(photo by Michelle McNeil)

Nothing bad happens to the other one, the one called Ben Mirov. I walk through San Francisco, stopping briefly to shove a burrito in my face or watch the crack-heads argue at the 16th Street BART Station: I know Ben Mirov from his facebook profile and the pithy comments he posts online or his bio in an obscure literary magazine. I like chapbooks, Sommer Browning’s Twitter feed, the taste of black coffee and first edition sci-fi novels by Delany: he cares less for these things and thinks of himself as the superlative reality. I wouldn’t say we get along: I’d like to destroy him so that nothing is left and I could write whatever I want without feeling like a dick. Obviously, without him, I’d be nothing. His sorry-ass life is my sorry-ass life too: I need him to construct my tweets just as he needs me to validate his existence. I guess he’s written a few things worth reading, but that doesn’t really mean anything, because the internet swallows everything, even the best poems, like a black hole. Besides, I am going to fucking die, and everything I do, I do for Ben Mirov and for his perpetuity. He is the only one of us that has a chance of surviving, though I am aware of the slightness of this chance and the absurdity of my efforts to make him famous. Day by day, I put my time into creating his persona, even though I know the composite can only be wholly inaccurate and ephemeral.

Borges knew that everything is an imitation of something else; every poem is an imitation of another poem; every novel an imitation of another novel. I, too, am an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, ad infinitum. Only Ben Mirov is Ben Mirov (if it is true that he exists at all) and I am just a ghost in his machine; a bong-rip rustling the pages of his sophomoric, experimental, small-press, poetry manuscript. Years ago, before the internet, he and I were one and the same and lived our life from one moment to the next without a sliver of disparity between us, but now the chasm is so large, it’s a static-filled oblivion. And so, my life has become a compiling of status updates, all of which belong to Ben Mirov, or to the goddamn internet.

Now that this is finished, I’m going to monitor the comments section while pretending I have more important things to do.

The first time I met Ben Mirov he asked me to “pound it” after I said something funny and ever since then I’ve been sort of unequivocally on-board with Ben Mirov and what he does.  I’m glad what he does is poetry.  His first two books I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) are books I recommend to people ceaselessly and re-read often for enjoyment, relaxation, and inspiration.  Now he has this bright yellow chapbook called Vortexts to be released by Supermachine this Friday alongside Ben Fama’s likewise brightly-colored New Waves from Minutes Books.

EVENT INFO HERE

TRAILER:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjEfQQE1F5o

When I asked Ben, after I found out the name of his new chapbook, why he likes Vorticism so much (Vorticism being this short-lived art/literary movement in the early 1900’s), Ben said something like “There’s nothing really about the movement I agree with, I just think it has a cool name.”  I laughed and thought that was funny – Vorticism is funny – but his answer feels pretty indicative of how Ben’s poems work.  The poems are approachable, they don’t take themselves too seriously, yet they are full of concern, intelligence, and a veneration for poetry itself.  Take this passage from “Light from Dead Stars Doesn’t Lie”:

Vortexts, to me, feels like the next logical step in the poetic lineage established in Ben’s earlier work.  It contains the hilarious thought progressions of the poems in I is to Vorticism and the brilliant lines of Ghost Machine (e.g. “I use my eagles to touch your wolf. / Try harder to carry your wolf, I say.”) but with new formal constraints (tercets) and something else, something harder to put a word to.  It feels like Ben pushing further into his Ben-ness in search of a more perfect Ben.  There is a welcomed maturity and lyricism to the poems in Vortexts.  He’s refusing to settle, and I really enjoy reading it.

BUY HERE

EVENT INFO, AGAIN

& that is a can of beans.

Ben Mirov
Ghost Machine
(not pictured)
Caketrain
Pittsburgh, PA — 2010

I read most of this book at the park that is in the book on a pretty much perfect day and it was a hell of a pairing I have to say. It has the kind of restraint my own work lacks a lot. Makes me jells but not bad way. Read the rest at my ex’s apartment who is no longer my ex while she made me dinner, which I could not believe was happening and yet there it was happening. I often felt breathless and thought maybe that’s not such a dumb name for a movie after all. So generally I have generally positive feelings towards this book, a lot of them. I bought it at Dog Eared Books and it is signed. Besides which fact it is great. The writing is like light as a feather touch as in duh, a ghost. Really it is: something else. “Ghost Drafts” is an epic burner of equal flirtation to the best Robert Fripp guitar solos. It has the best epigraph I’ve maybe read in that it actually conveyed some kind of insight into the work and was at the close of the book rather than the beginning, which when you think about it is a more logical place for an epigraph to be. After all, where is an epilogue? Anyway, I can’t say enough good things about this book so I will just have to stop. I think this is my favorite set of lines:

I want a relationship with noise. You people kill me with your blaah. Keep drinking water. We talk for five minutes. It’s shaped like sleep.

Kristina Born
One Hour of Television
Year of the Liquidator
Atlanta, GA — 2009

I haven’t had a chance to start in on this yet so I flipped through with my eyes closed and landed on this page:

In my depression my favorite movie was Erin Brockovich. When watching Erin Brockovich I would sit on the floor, very close to the television. I would wait for a scene in which Julia Roberts is speaking. Julia Roberts spoke and I would press my forehead against the image of her mouth and pray for her to eat me.

Mike Topp
Sasquatch Stories
Publishing Genius
Baltimore, MD — 2010

I read most of this while waiting a while for an Italian sausage calzone. I thought it was cheesy that I felt like I had déjà vu because that was the name of the place I was waiting. I realized oh it’s just that I’ve read some of this before. A lot actually. Oh well. I think I’m going to give it to someone I don’t know on the bus or maybe on the train. I took the calzone home and ate it on my roof. I watched the sun set. I went downstairs to my living room. I turned on a lamp and read the rest of the book. I felt pretty weird for a while, a little giggly. I felt like I had a bubble bath in my mouth and I was in my mouth being bubbly. Like I had been smoking salvia. The sun was not in my eyes. I went for a walk. I’m just kidding, it’s pretty funny though.

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
Today I saw a tanager talking to a stellar jay. Stupid birds!

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
Tr. Richard Zenith
Penguin Books
New York, NY — 2003

Nibbling on this thing a lot. I pick it up every now and again and I like it a lot. I think it’s about writing, mostly. I get this guy in my gut. I feel like it’s the kind of book that maybe will float around my head for years to come like a cold that doesn’t hurt. Pessoa, Joyce of Lisbon, from the age of 6 invented characters he called heteronyms, which he would later write as and into the number of seventy-two, according to translator and fanboy Richard Zenith. Seventy-two individualized characters with backstories and stuff, in which he wrote in the first person and which he used as pseudonyms: four of whom are named “Fernando Pessoa.” This book was found in a trunk after he died. It was written by “Bernardo Soares.”

296

The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness of the sad. Just as the normal man talks nonsense and slaps others on the back out of zest and vitality, so those incapable of joy and enthusiasm do somersaults in their minds and perform, in their own cold way, the warm gestures of life.

Graham Foust
To Anacreon in Heaven
Minus A Press
Berkeley, CA — 2010

Carrying it with me, waiting for the right time with nothing to do and a little world to unglue.
A random something: “I think of me sinking with a submarine’s weird quiet.”
Another: “I’m every word; the depth’s no worse for it.”
“My throat’s a muscle.”

Danielle Collobert
It Then
Tr. Norma Cole
O Books
Oakland, CA — 1989

This book is INTENSE. I recommend it if you want to read some INTENSE poetry a little along the lines of like Lara Glenum but way more emotional or in a different way I’m talking too much, by which I mean something INTENSE is like a mild to medium level of INTENSITY.  Bring your gaume face for this opening hook:

It — flows — it bangs itself — slammed into walls — it picks itself up — stamps feet — it doesn’t go far — four steps to the left — new wall — it extends its arms — leans — leans hard — rubs its head — again — harder — forehead — there — the forehead — hurts — rubs harder — becomes inflamed — not the forehead — from within — cries

Muriel Cerf
Street Girl
Tr. Dominic di Bernardi
Dalkey Archive
Elmwood Park, IL — 1988

I bought this randomly. It’s an early first edition Dalkey Archive, which is like Criterion for books; I figured how bad could it be and after all it is beautiful. First sentences of a random section:

Aside from life science, we didn’t learn anything about life in school. We were told lies. We were treated like real jerks. They fractioned us, rationalized us, divided the world up into samples. ANALYSIS in all its horror ran rampant. The obsession with dissection, the rage to nitpick around poets’ hearts with a scalpel, a madness which has affected mankind from the fifth century in Greece to the present day, passing through the good old Cartesian eighteenth century. We, on the other hand, suspected that the truth was intuitive, something lived, and the world, activity and beckoning, in which there existed antimatter and the square root of minus one, utterly irreducible to thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Tan Lin
Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004.
The Joy of Cooking [airport novel musical poem painting theory film photo landscape]
a book of meta data [standards] downloaded, recipes, with photographs from a flea market
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, CT — 2010

One day I will spend some time on this. Smells like Gertrude Stein on designer drugs.

FOUCAULT EPIGRAPH

There are no machines of freedom, by definition.

W.H. Auden
Nones
Random House
New York, NY — 1950

Read the first few poems. “In Praise of Limestone” is like really good. This is easily the most pristine sixty year old book I have bought. It looks like someone put it in a box before reading it and then forgot where they put the box. Silly book-boxers. Let’s face it, Auden can be a little corny but what of it.

“Their Lonely Betters”

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

No one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep,
Words are for those with promises to keep.

James Joyce
Ulysses
The Gabler Edition
Vintage Books
New York, NY — 1986

I’m on Episode 12: Cyclops. Want to go on a beer bust with this man. It seems as though the book itself is teaching me how to read the novel the right way, more than any book on reading I’ve ever read. Although I spied a rad looking one by Ezra Pound the other day called ABC of Reading that may well be a contender. Ezra was, after all, the reason Ulysses was serialized. I can’t even imagine reading the thing in 1918, it would have blown my head off as I’m sure it did so many. Obviously. It’s pretty easy I think for me to read now because I’ve read so much coming off of this flare in the dark.

Anne Carson
Nox
New Directions
New York, NY — 2010

This is a damned handsome book. It’s a box with folded paper in it. I’m not waxing metaphors here: it is a cardboard box which contains folded paper; a recreation, actually, of the epitaph she made for her brother: a messy collage of photographs, pieces of letters, stamps, and stories. It’s too bad I don’t know no Greek because there is some Greek and it is Greek to me. Going to get some help with some translation from a friend. A random page:

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

Stephen Moore
The Novel: An Alternative History
Beginnings to 1600
Continuum
New York, NY — 2010

I’m reading this cake a chunk at a time. The breadth of knowledge in it really makes one realize how few books most have read. But that’s okay. Because we don’t have time to read all of these books, Moore, who used to be an editor at Dalkey Archive, explains his findings from the land of forgotten words, breaking down walls re: book length, prose v. poetry, surrealism v. realism, etc. In general Moore’s attitude is pretty tight and I like his concerns about style over content. Can’t wait to read the rest, and the forthcoming completion. This is typical of the book:

MEDIEVAL ICELANDIC FICTION

While some Vikings were terrorizing Ireland and destroying books, Vikings of the better sort settled in Iceland and eventually began writing books. Icelandic literature developed much as Irish literature did: oral tales circulated for the first 130 years, from around 870 when the first settlers arrived until around 1000, when they converted to Christianity. As in Ireland, Christianity brought histories, and legal codes. Beginning in the 13th century, certain innovators began giving literary form to the old stories about life in pre-Christian Iceland in the form of “sagas” (from the verb sagja, “say, tell”), narratives based on family histories but arranged like tales. In doing so, Icelandic writers basically invented the social realist novel, some 600 years before Balzac introduced the genre in continental Europe.

Big thanks to Ben Mirov for sharing.

2. Post-Modern Drunkard is a blog you should maybe read. I guess. OK.

33. NANO Fiction flash contest ends in 15 days so go ahead and write the Lean Thang and mail it in like the time Favre gave Strahan the sack record or the summer you got fired from the poodle groomers and take the $500 bucks prize and buy yourself a spare spare tire. I’m good at three things, flash fiction and math. Etc.

14. The birth of Indie video games…Queens, NY?

5. Why does academia hate Sci Fi?

You can buy it from Caketrain for $8.

Hearty congratulations to Ben Mirov, winner of the 2009 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook contest. Read the press release–including exultant blurbs from Dobby Gibson and the great Elaine Equi–over here (pdf). That page also has a poem from the book, and an order form–you’ll want the latter after reading the former. Also, here’s Ben’s blog. Also^2, you can find even more Mirov in the premiere issue of Maggy, a sweet-ass new poetry journal that will be getting its own post later this week. (You’ll also find him in the next Agriculture Reader.) Anyway, congrats again to Ben, and here’s another poem from I is to Vorticism, which I was super-delighted to receive in the mail the other day, and have been happily working my way through:

Wind-Up Birds

Dear Mr. Murakami:

I am like that guy in your novel

who goes down in the well

and gets trapped there until

he finds a secret passage and escapes

or maybe someone lowers a ladder?

I don’t remember where he goes next

but I’ve wanted to tell you this

since I read your book in San Francisco

after a horrible breakup and discovered

a pale blue light behind my eyes

I had never noticed before.

I thought you’d written your book about me

without knowing it, of course.

I had the urge to write you a letter

explaining this but I didn’t want

to freak you out. I just wanted

to say thanks for being in my poem

and for the sense of wellness

that pervades my life these days.

P.S. I almost forgot to ask!

What should I do next?