Adam Robinson—
Don’t be crazy, damn, get yourself summa these summa books, 30% off, damn, like Urs Alleman, Blake Butler, Amina Cain, Lily Hoang, Peter Markus, Matthew Simmons, Joy Williams, John Dermot Woods, Andrew Zornova. I got the Amina Cain, I Go to Some Hollow and Eugene Marten’s Firework. What! Not to sound like a commercial but: great books, great prices and SPD is a great company to support.
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The Redness of the Blood
In the vampire movie Daughters of Darkness, scenes will often fade not to black, but to red. In The Beyond, blood bubbles up and spurts out of a women’s face, and chases a little red-haired girl across a room:
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June 18th, 2010 / 7:05 pm
June 18th, 2010 / 7:05 pm
God damn it
Hindu god Vishnu got eight limbs, and so does this toddler who they say is a reincarnated god, though science will tell you the extra four limbs are from a ‘parasitic twin’ (sounds like a relationship). Hindus don’t eat cow cos cows are holy, which is where “holy cow” comes from — Protestants wanting to curse, but not at their own god. Hindus won’t eat beef, Jews won’t eat pork, and I won’t eat pussy; yes, we are all self-absorbed. Christians see Jesus everywhere, mostly on toast. Toast is an example of its verb manifesting its noun. Let me help: bread → toaster → toast. The other kind of toast involves champagne and having to lie about liking someone.
Reading Notes
1. In grad school I took a wonderful course on the poetry (and lives) of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell taught by the poet Gail Mazur. I was fascinated, in particular, with Robert Lowell’s mental illness and how it affected his artistic life. Lowell’s poem “Eye and Tooth” is ostensibly about a cut cornea (“My whole eye was sunset red,” it begins), but in the end it’s about manic depression and how, duh, it tinges the way he sees the world:
Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body
From its first page, Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body presents itself a mesmerizing object of equal command and restraint. It defines, in the remove-voice of not a narrator, not a guide, but some black sound, the birthplace of the title, via 3 thin lines which crown a long white blank: “Theology of the Body is defined as the study of how God is revealed through the human body; this is also part of Pope John Paul II’s title for his collected lectures on the subject. It is being promoted throughout Catholic institutions as a sexual counter-revolution.” The remaining white that fills the page floods on, as does, often, the battered brain of the encroached.
Most of the body of the book itself continues on in this thick statement/relief shriek arrangement: as if someone has eaten through the mantle of the paper, leaving selected words and languages as would the aggressor leave the remains. Hillard does not require a lot of language to implant the tone of stroke. Many poems are a few calmly stated lines.
Winter, Michigan
you pinned me up against an oak in a park near where you were young and your hand
sang inside and you were the resurrection you were violent light behind the mountain
Go Right Ahead: It is Friday
A mind too active is no mind at all.
Drink at any dance.
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
A glass of beer first thing in the morning.
Grew wild, broke furniture, beat out windows.
His favorite bar: The Corner Unusual.
I may look like a beer salesman but I am a poet.
The garden is a river flowing south.
Racing the devil for Rainbow, a beer joint.
You smell like television.
WHAT’S YOUR FREQUENCY
Wednesday night at a reading/q&a hosted by The Nervous Breakdown and Rare Bird Lit, Bret Easton Ellis said he Googles himself every day. Do you? Is there any stigma attached to admitting that you do? Why?
Dawson & B.E.E.