Kevin Sampsell Week (5): Unedited Cover
The original cover for A Common Pornography included “Hank,” a harness compatible silicone flesh-tone (Caucasian, wtf!) dildo resting in its intended vector on a retro 70s wool lounge chair. Sampsell, who gave up minimalism when they said “negate the wieners,” propagated his living quarters with various intra-orifice objects, though he prefers to name them after country singers. “Johnny Cash,” a real doll who looks strikingly like, well, Johnny Cash, is not pictured, but lies supine on the floor outside of the camera’s frame. Thanks to Sampsell, Cash’s plastic sphincter is now a “ring of fire.” Jonathan Ames, as his blurb will tell you, calls the book “heartbreaking”; what he fails to mention is that the heart is not the only thing being broken — so if Sampsell should sit down with a grimace for his next interview, please note that it is not any qualms of the mind which cause such facial strain, but rather tribulations of a more bodily, self-inflicted sort.
Let’s All Love Molly Young
In fact, some of us already do. I know I have linked/mentioned her before, but it feels like this is the right time to make things official, and so I invite everyone to join me in declaring our Official Love of Molly Young. But just what is it that we love? Well…
Here she is at the Poetry Foundation (thanks for the link, Travis), writing on Frederick Seidel.
Like that of Miller and Bukowski, Seidel’s style is one of incriminating self-exposure coupled with an exacting (and therefore imitable) aesthetic. But here’s a funny thing. Writing a poem about lust, pride, imprudence—about ordering a call girl or staying at “literally the most expensive hotel in the world” or racing a bike at 200 mph—has a way of neutralizing the unpleasantness of that vice. To write a good poem about an ugly thing, as Seidel does often, is not to write an ugly poem.
And on Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder.
Romanticism as a cultural force, Holmes points out, is generally regarded as “hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity.” Yet both pursuits followed the same imaginative principles and notions of wonder that fueled their advancements, and it is Holmes’s contention that a Romantic science exists in the same sense as a Romantic poetry, and both flourished during what he calls the Age of Wonder.
You can also find her all over This Recording, and n+1 (including “Kickstart my Heart,” the adderall in the Ivys piece, and a more recent double-review of Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds and a Hefner biography) and she tumbles! And she collaborates on art books. The new one is called TROUBLESHOOTING . It also says she blogs for Urban Outfitters, but I didn’t actually click that one. Instead I clicked on “Rules on Writing” at More Intelligent Life. And now I know the rule: which is there is no rule, which is just what I’d always hoped. Molly!
Amy McDaniel—
Yoko Ono answers questions posed by her twitter followers. Some are funny, like
p_oem: If I were a wave would you surf me? Ono: If I saw a big wavelike you, I will flee
Others are dumb, like
sugarspeak: Who is your favorite female, contemporary poet? Ono: I don’t read poetry. I imagine.
6
Blake Butler—
1. Another excellent interview by Kimball at the Faster Times with Christopher Higgs.
2. Artifice Magazine is selling a special edition of their first issue, as well as beautiful screenprint illustrations of the works inside it.
3. The most majestic Matt Jasper’s Moth Moon is now live on sale, some of which you may have seen, or should now, in his chapbook from Publishing Genius.
Kevin Sampsell Week (4): A Common Interview by Michael Kimball
Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and works at Powell’s Books. He started the press, Future Tense Books, in 1990 and has published many writers including Mike Topp, Zoe Trope, Chelsea Martin, Susannah Breslin, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith. His own books include Portland Noir (as editor), Creamy Bullets, and A Common Pornography. Harper’s Magazine says, “Sampsell’s talent for observing the ordinary….is perhaps best displayed in chronicling the cringing inelegance of adolescent sexuality: the embarrassing hookups, the acne-cream-flavored kisses, the obsession with pornography, and the preoccupation with discarding one’s virginity.” And Jonathan Ames says, “This is the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive.”
Michael Kimball: One of the most striking things about A Common Pornography is the way you lay yourself bare on the page. There are so many awkward, funny, difficult, honest, and maybe embarrassing episodes in the book. How did you get to a place where you were able to do that and what was your mindset as you approached each episode (maybe especially as compared to your mindset writing fiction)?
Kevin Sampsell: It’s mainly a matter of time going by. I’m 42 now. You just get to the point where you don’t really care if other people are bothered or feel uncomfortable with whatever you’re writing. I always think it’s weird when people say, ‘I didn’t like this book because it was so depressing or so dirty.’ I don’t think an author should treat readers like children, or like they have to protect the reader. Personally though, it was hard sometimes to let go of some of these things that I didn’t tell anyone about. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend, now my fiancé, about the prostitute stuff until a couple of years ago. The dilemma I think most writers have is that they don’t care about embarrassing themselves but they do worry about how their family or co-workers or lovers will react.
Compared to fiction, it’s maybe a little harder. At least with fiction you can say to your mom or whomever, ‘Oh, I just made that up.’
If You Like It Naughty
Poetry. The anthology GURLESQUE: THE NEW GRRLY, GROTESQUE, BURLESQUE POETICS brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital–perhaps viral–new strain of female poetics: the “Gurlesque,” a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. (New Release — order from SPD)
penta-gram
1.) Weather by David. “Blue skies but covered with streaking thin masses of white clouds.”
2.) Probably the most glow “new” Andy Warhol book here.
3.) The PEN/Faulkner Award finalists announced today. Tao Lin is not on the list and that is fucking cocksucker horseshit fuck. Fuck. Sherman Alexie (the Man we all be-sweet-on) and that snarky L. Moore book are thick, gray, cement-like children educated in Switzerland. I mean goooooooooooold.
(The PEN is America’s “largest peer-juried prize for fiction” but I thought that was American Idol.)
4.) The Heavy Rain reviews drizzle on in now. Dripping.
5.) Will someone do something about contributor notes? Jesus H Lard. If you are 1.) trying to get laid, 2.) have the self-esteem of an ID badge, 3.) ever owned a dog, 4.) have a spouse you very, very, very much love, got it, you are in love, the real thing, you can’t believe you found this supportive, caring…5.) have once in your life been president of anything, 6.) have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
OK this is cool. And this.
But if not…just tone it down, I’m trying to read over here.
Thanks
Adam Robinson—
Laura Ellen Scott gives 21 writing tips, including, “13. Write what you know, especially you white people out there” and “17. Italics, italics, italics. Especially for flashbacks.” This is the sort of sharing the Internet was invented for.