Sunday Service: Anthony Madrid Poem
GIRLS WHO ARE UNFAITHFUL AND AT THE SAME TIME RELENTLESSLY HONEST
Girls who are unfaithful and at the same time relentlessly honest
Are not operating in accord with the Darker-Than-Any-Mystery.
Only she who is relentlessly faithful and meanwhile full of lies
Can be said to be in accord with the Darker-Than-Any-Mystery.
The madness of love takes many forms. In me, it’s the illusion
I am Abul-Majd Majdud ibn Adam Sanai Ghaznavi.
Hé wanted the whole universe to be an unconjugated verb.
I won’t say which, I’ll let you guess. Ha!—right on the first try.
Yet, to me, “love” is not even a noun; it’s merely a case inflection.
Any name in the D-L triple-X can be inflected for Ishq-e-Majazi.
So, don’t say “God is great.” Say “God is glamour”—it’s what you mean.
The Almighty bottoms the bhakti. God is the ultimate top. And that’s why
The Tibetan Fuckmaster King says if a halt were put to all coupling,
The human race would end, not after a generation, but that very instant.
And if I am impenetrable in this and my other verses,
It is only because you can’t penetrate | a wall that is not there.
I am the poet Mardud; I had no childhood. Whoever wants
To get at my meaning will have to turn her back on her childhood.
Anthony Madrid lives in Chicago. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Poetry, and WEB CONJUNCTIONS. His first book, called THE 580 STROPHES, will be published by Canarium Books, spring 2012.
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Death x 3: Frances Bay, Curtis White on lit’s (lack of) future, & “Why Originality Isn’t All That Important”
1. Charles Napier isn’t the only one who’s left us: Frances Bay passed away last month. No creamed corn was served at her memorial service.
2. My mentor Curtis White wrote something pretty pessimistic at Lapham’s Quarterly about the future of literature.
3. I wrote something a little more optimistic about why originality isn’t all that important.
Nick Antosca—
If you want to read a remarkable and very short piece of writing, click here and scroll down to Bill Buford’s recollection of drinking a bowl of warm pig’s blood.
Unfenced Existence; The Circuits of the Negative; and, What Is Grace?
Ordinary Sun
by Matthew Henriksen
Black Ocean, 2011
120 pages / $15 Buy from SPD
Matthew Henriksen’s book, a beautiful yellow with a lovely orange orb on the cover, is aptly named, and when I first read it, I thought: “Blake! William Blake!” And of course, I was not entirely wrong, for Blake’s vision, his sense of wanting the writer to be essentially Romantic, revolutionary and ultimately Christian (though in an idiosyncratic way) is part of this book’s ethos. But to assume that one poet—now just a name to many—can influence a complex and intricate book about waking and sleep, vision and its oblivious counterpart, is perhaps misguided. On rereading, I find echoes of the canon and what also is not included there; I find places where Henriksen’s guided eye finds a way to relish the negative, and I think of theory, just a little: the series of “short-circuits” that someone like Slavoj Žižek would want us to find in something like a parallax view, the view “from both sides” of a picture or a noetic gap. This is what I think Henriksen is doing, ultimately, and I relish the intricacies of such poems that wonder with presence and absence inextricably connected by the beauty of the images that Henriksen employs. “What is love but a negative collaboration?” (“Afterlife Ending as a Question”).
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October 7th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
October 7th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Reminder! HTMLGIANT Meetup: “Two-Lane Blacktop” (Chicago)
Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, and James Taylor in "Two-Lane Blacktop."
This weekend (October 8th & 9th), Chicago’s Music Box Theatre is screening Monte Hellman and Rudy Wurlitzer‘s 1971 masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop. Long overlooked, Two-Lane has for the past five years or so been enjoying a critical renaissance, and is increasingly regarded as one of the greatest films of the ’70s. (Click here to read some of my own thoughts on it.) And right now is an especially opportune time to see it, what with its grandchild Drive currently killing things in theaters.
There are two screenings, one Saturday, one Sunday, each at 11:30 AM. I’ll be attending the Saturday 11:30 AM show. Anyone care to join me? The movie is 102 minutes long and I was thinking we could grab a coffee afterward, before peeling out onto our nation’s highways.
(Yes, Two-Lane Blacktop really does star James Taylor and Dennis Wilson—in their only film roles! No, they don’t sing, nor is any of their music used in the movie. Yes, they’re both incredible—though it’s Oates who really steals the show.)
… And here’s Chicago Reader contributor Ben Sachs’s Cine-File write-up:
Little Chris on Writing
thx RAINBOW SATAN for the tweetip
Christle/Schomburg West Coast Reading & Tag Sale Tour
Heather Christle & Zachary Schomburg have hit the road up the west coast for a week-ish to bring your words and things. Do a look and do a go!
October 6-11
poetrytour.tumblr.com
Before/after readings the poets will have second-hand objects for sale, including small kitchen appliances, cassette tapes, athletic equipment, sweaters, and issues of National Geographic. Items will be sold with a unique collaborative poem by Christle & Schomburg. No early birds.
Dates as follows… READ MORE >
Matthew Simmons—
File this under “Making Shapely Fiction”: A Tea Party protest attracted Birthers and Libertarians and Constitutional “Originalists” and Anti-Abortion Activists and Christian Homeschooler Dominionists and Second Amendment Loyalists and Anti-Immigrationists and Anti-Socialists and Race-Baiters and Mainstream Republican Activists and people who want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare AND people who think they are Taxed Enough Already. If their message seemed “cohesive,” (see also this, this, or any of these) maybe that was because they had a corporate-funded lobby and an entire news network dedicated to shaping the message into a cohesive one for them.
[Those in Pacific Standard Time, click on image if you want to fucking rock out with me, and turn it up you fags.]
Teaching Creative Writing: Syllabus as Story, Story as Scaffolding
A syllabus tells a story. The story I work to make mine tell is, It all fits together.
When I teach an introductory creative writing course, I try to make every one of the course’s components “belong together.” I try to design and arrange these components so that they’re engaged in “conversation”—so that they not only usefully complement one another, but lead to and precede from each other in ways that model process. I’d like, above all, for my students to become consciously and unconsciously aware of how these components are “aware” of their fellow components.
By “course components,” I mean first-day activities, readings, close reading, freewrites, exercises, workshop/peer review, annotations, presentations, conversations, student-teacher conferences, grading rubrics, teaching persona, and the like—anything a teacher builds, administers, moderates, and is responsible for.
But course components that “belong together,” that “converse,” that are “aware”? You might be thinking, “Joe, that’s vague.” Or, “Duh.”
To ground these metaphors, I’d like to offer a term employed by pedagogical scholars, a term you might already be familiar with: scaffolding.