Rauan: Seattle’s a polite town. Everyone’s super polite, cordial, in a way, cool in their dealings. But not so warm all the time. Seldom even maybe. What do you think of this? And do you think Seattle’s writing (poetry, etc, whatnot) suffers and/or benefits from a similar sort of politeness? Coolness?

Rebecca: Seattle used to be considered a “friendly” town but Seattle grew up and is now a Big City. Seattle suffers from a kind of passive/aggression. I’ve seen people at six way stops get out of their cars and start fighting over who goes first. We also have a lot of homeless displaced people here but they are mostly ignored or hidden so the city will look prettier. Seattle is famous for leading the way in cutting down its carbon footprint but the city’s largest private employer makes airplanes. No one (at least publicly) acknowledges how jet fuel which emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an alarming rate contributes to the acceleration of global warming. And yet you can no longer get paper or plastic bags at Seattle stores because it’s bad for the environment.

Seattle writers are friendly among themselves those writers who write similar poems those writers who are polite whose poems are polite whose work doesn’t take risks whose poems are widely published in polite poetry journals. It’s an easy place to be a poet. You can’t swing a contrabassoon without hitting a poetry reading in Seattle. This city has supported poetry on buses poetry readings for the city council poetry readings in museums and offers all kinds of grants and opportunities to poets who write polite non-threatening poetry. Sometimes Seattle gets lucky and brings in outside poets to read but mostly it’s the same circle of poets making the rounds being passive aggressively nice with their nice natural fiber clothes their hybrid cars their little hemp bags in which to put their shopping and their polite nice poetry.

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Seattle Author Spotlight (10)

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Okay, so that was the first part of my latest Seattle Author Spotlight, the 11th, featuring Rebecca Loudon. Several years I did an interview with Rebecca regarding her excellent book Cadaver Dogs (which you can read here, it contains info about her being a violinist as well as some of the very personal elements of that book) but this time I had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca in person. Rebecca claims to be a sort of hermit, but we got along great, intensities coming and going. And Rebecca’s work as I’m finding out is getting stranger and stronger READ MORE >

“Seth Abramson” is a Google Alert.

 
 When I was six or seven, I skinned my knee. It’s an experience that’s never really left me. This is a poem about that. And the magic of poetry. It’s called “Ars Poetica,” which means “small gift” in Latin. This poem owes a significant debt to Dottie Lasky and also to the magic of poetry. 
 

 

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

A Good Titty Is Hard To Find

Reb Livingston has amassed 2250 Facebook friends, 876 Twitter followers, 625 Google+ circle inclusions, 568 Goodreads friends, 309 Pinterest followers, 234 LInkedIn connections and has been awarded an impressive 60 Klout score. Upon turning 40, Ms. Livingston was unanimously declared the champion of the Male Series of Middle Aged Poets, the first woman to achieve this honor since the award’s inception in 1919. She resides in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, dog and a solitary fish named Wolverine who just won’t die.

by Reb Livingston

O if I had two titties to rub
together I would rub them
together until together they
created one good one

and I’d strut around with
my one good titty
that I’d push up with my firm palm
imagining that it was your firm palm

and I’d keep it in place with packing tape
imagining that it was your packing tape
and eventually my one good titty
would spill over

my custom one-tittied tape bra and
disappear into my scoop neck crop top
but before it did
I’d use my one good titty to pound your face

like my titty was some soap in a sock
participating in a retribution

my sweetness, please, give my one
good titty, a little more time
to settle and

stretch into a lithe hand of delight.

 
One morning I woke up very sad. So I decided that since I was a poet, I would express my sadness in poem form. This poem explores the concepts of friction, combination, sexuality, gender, aging, gravity, fashion, metamorphosis, violence and love. The titty works as metaphor for a much larger idea. 

I take out my iPhone to start filming us in bed. Turned on my side, with my elbow bent to prop my head up with one of my hands, the other hand holding my phone. Through the screen I can see a close up shot of Adam’s nose and mouth. I pull back to see his entire face. I look beyond my phone to see his full body laying out in front of me. Adam starts to perform:

“Hi Lucy”

“What? [laughter] She’s not going to see this.”

“Isn’t this a Snapchat?”

“It’s not a Snapchat”

“You’ve been making Snapchats all morning and then you go and switch it up on me!”

“You can’t be so presumptuous”

“I’m hiding under here… For forever or until your battery runs out.”

“I brought my charger today”

“Ok, until your phone runs out of space.”

“My phone has unlimited space for embarrassing videos of you.”

“Oh my god… you’re adding this thing to our life. It’s like this wild animal. A barracuda.”

“I don’t understand.  The camera’s a barracuda?”

“Yeah”

“There’s an interesting passage about cameras in this [Immortality by Milan Kundera]. There’s like this whole chapter about being watched and how when you’re filmed your self is taken away from you and put in the control of someone else.”

“You’re stealing my soul.”

“I mean, your self exists in the camera now. It’s fragmented.”

“I don’t know… I think people change when the camera comes on. You’re not the same.”

“I think so too but I think that’s part of yourself. I don’t think that change draws from something outside of yourself.”

“Yeah, but it [the camera] obfuscates it.”

“I feel like whenever I feel obligated to turn on a personality its always based on something I wish I was naturally, or how I think I need to be in the situation, and I don’t think that… I think that the fact that I’m able to draw on that personality and bring it out on command says that its always been a part of me. I’m relying on scripts and commands that I can recall for specific instances.”

“But that’s only if you’re a good actor. I feel like I just shut down. I’m not as good.”

“Yeah?”

‘The part of me that’s not as self-conscious is gone.”

“Oh here it is…

[From Immortality by Milan Kundera]

‘It was a meaningless episode: some sort of congress was taking place in the hotel and a photographer had been hired so that the scholars who had assembled from all parts of the world would be able to buy souvenir pictures of themselves. But Agnés could not beat the idea that somewhere there remained a document testifying to her acquaintance with the man she had met there; she returned to the hotel the next day, bought up all her photos (showing her at the man’s side, with one arm extended across her face), and tried to secure the negatives, too; but those had been filed away by the picture agency and were already unobtainable. Even though she wasn’t in any real danger, she could not rid herself of anxiety because one second of her life, instead of dissolving into nothingness like all the other seconds of life, would remain torn out of the course of time and some stupid coincidence could make it come back to haunt her like the badly buried dead.’

Is that how you feel about this video [laughter]?”

“I mean, I feel like its definitely ruining my life. Slowly.”

“That’s funny. I feel only positive about being recorded and documented.”

“You were like a theatre major! This is like your shit! You’ve got your reading voice on, you’re good to go.”

“Am I doing my reading voice right now?”

“No, but you were.”

“But that’s different. I was reading.”

“Remember when you turned on the camera the other day and immediately went into your recording voice?… Are you still recording?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh no…”

“I think its different though.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m the one recording you. Not some omniscient, malevolent entity. Its an intimate moment and we have control in it.”

“But its not an intimate moment.”

“Just because the camera is there?”

READ MORE >

WEEKS: A lot can kill you in a week. Even more can eat you at your weakness. A whole week of hair growth depends on, uh, genetics? Weeks contain a finite series of burritos and an infinite burrito of choices. Hoopla, regrets, collapses, dancing so hard you have to pour a cup of ice water on your dome, other times that feeling like you have to drag yourself so hard by your own collar your shirt might tear. Huge trucks at night carrying turned-off, unblinking versions of those normally blinking signs that say CONSTRUCTION AHEAD or SLOW LANE ENDS, except the signs are big so the trucks themselves say OVERSIZED LOAD and are blinking, themselves, even though their cargo’s dark. What I would like to do is nominate Sampson Starkweather to rewrite the entirety of America’s highway marginalia, to be the official roadside spokespoet for all of America’s restless feelings. I don’t have shit to do with those decisions, so what is happening instead is that this week will be Sampson Starkweather week here at HTMLGIANT, aka STARK WEEK.

THE BOOK: Sampson’s debut book of poems, The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, is out now from Birds LLC. It’s really big. Like almost 400 pages. Who does that? It’s what it says it is. 4 books. All the feelings enacted in the opening paragraph happen inside of its four books, which are categorized as “poetry/life.” Sure, yes, yeah.

WHAT’S IN IT: It’s a book I’d give to someone just coming to poetry and to someone who feels totally burnt out on poetry. Those are kind of the same readers, I think. That’s why the whole week. Starkweather’s poetry is the existence of a nonexistent photograph of Andre the Giant jumping off the top rope. In his introduction, Jared White mentions “bass-voiced sexy soul-singer slow jams” and “punch-drunk Harlequin-robocop masculinity.” The poems have angry leaked dreams and love before roads and a pistol-whipped desire and the world’s saddest TV and offensive hurricane names and corpses wrapped in huge tropical leaves on islands named after them and that’s just in the poems you can read on the excerpt page.

WTF IS GOING ON: Over the course of this week, we’re going to feature a series of guests talking about Sam’s work in each of the books within T4B—1) King of the Forest, 2) La La La, 3) The Waters, 4) Self Help Poems—and also we’re going to hear from the awesome artists who made the covers for each of these four books. There will be criticism, talk of process, grand sweeping theories, tiny insightful scalpels. You’ll get to read some of Sam’s poetry. There will be some talk of what goes into, in 2013, putting out a 400 page book of your poems that is actually 4 books. Maybe there will be some interaction, multimedia, surprise. Buy a copy of the book if you want to follow along closely. I promise it won’t feel like being stuck on a brokedown bus at a rest stop in Connecticut. There are poems that feel like that, but not in this book. Here’s a list of who’s coming at you: Matt Bollinger, Ed Park, Bianca Stone, John Cotter, Melissa Broder, Eric Amling, Elisa Gabbert, Jonathan Marshall, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, and Jared White.

WHO IS SAMPSON STARKWEATHER ANYWAY, IS HE THAT GUY WHO DID THAT THING GUYS DO: The reason a lot of people want to share and talk about Sam’s huge ass tree-killer is because he and his work (which are impossible to unspoon from each other, which is how it should be) is like getting the best high five of your life from Teen Wolf. He is loved and easy to love and easy to mistake in rural supermarkets for Javier Bardem. He’s a longhaired poet surfer with a heart of messy pizza and manic kindness. Thank the exhausted fucking stars he is with us and with poetry. Enjoy STARK WEEK.

HOW DOES STARK WEEK BEGIN: To begin STARK WEEK, I talked to Starkweather:

1) Hi Sam. Welcome to Stark Week. This is how it starts, with an interview of you. Our interview starts with the “who is Sampson Starkweather and what’s going on, what is this stuff all over my arms, is this sap” portion of the interview. So let’s start at the start. Four books? Why? Why buck the prevailing model of slim little precious supermodel books? More importantly, why buck it in this beautifully thunking doorstop fashion?

Sorry about the sap “this forest / is unusually horny.”

In the end it came down to precisely the opposite of your question: “Why not?”  Why not 4 books in 1? Why not a 328 page monster poetry collection that sounds like a seminal lifetime work by some famous, award-winning, about-to-die poet who now tends a garden, published by some big-ass conglomerate press like Penguin, but is actually by some dude with a ridiculous name that no one has heard of (and sounds like a character from Game of Thrones) and has yet to publish a full-length book, on a small indie poetry press that, oh yeah, he just happens to be a publisher/founding-editor of? It seemed ridiculous, audacious, absurd, unheard of, taboo, laughable—in other words, perfect.

READ MORE >

We get a ton of books for review consideration on my desk for The Volta. Even though we tried to run weekly reviews for a year, that still didn’t seem to touch anything but the best stuff off the top. So, I’ve pulled out a dozen or so that I’m really excited to read this summer:

Rae Armantrout’s Just Saying is the follow-up to the follow-up to Armantrout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, so I won’t be surprised if it gets less attention than Versed or Money Shot—though it shouldn’t. I’m halfway through it, and it’s just as good:

A woman writes to ask

how far along I am

with my apocalypse

What will you give me

if I tell?

READ MORE >

With the last of the SUMMER READS, the wonderful Anna Joy Springer tells us about her summer reading:

(in case you missed any, check out all the SUMMER READS here)

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For many literary arts and criticism professors, winter break is the time to read yummy light novels, while summer is time for texts that ask for more interaction. This summer I will read some things that require fuller attention than I can give during the school year, when I’m reading and analyzing student drafts.

I will read Hannah Arendt’s The Life of The Mind, finally. I’ve read the first two chapters, and I’m so glad to have saved her til now, so I can remember what boldness of inquiry and depth of offering look like.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Emptiness of Existence: “This cannot possibly be true says The Heart and even the crude mind after giving the matter (not-being for thousands of years, then being alive for a few decades, then not-being for thousands of years again) some consideration.” Because I recognize that sense if spiritual befuddlement and want to know more about possible connections btwn Germam Romanticism and Buddhism (and which Buddhism?)

Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of The Doves, translated by David Rosenthal, a Spanish civil war novel by a beloved Catalan lyric prose writer, called “the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in early 1980’s and recently given to me by Aaron Cometbus because it illustrates an overlap between our very different literary tastes. (Graywolf Press)

READ MORE >

Such Times by Christopher Coe

I read Coe’s I Look Divine earlier this year after reading about his connection to the Lish workshops and deciding he seemed like my kind of writer. With his first book, I was absolutely correct; it’s a spare portrait of two brothers via one’s memory, and the prose is some of the tightest and most touching I’d read in months. Such Times is Coe’s last book, and its primary concern is the AIDS epidemic and its effect on the lives of three young gay men. It’s a tragedy because Coe himself died of AIDS in the 90s, and I have no idea why this book is so attractive to me at the onset of summer. (…)

#2 of The Quarterly

Again, because of Lish, I started buying up old issues of The Quarterly on the internet from time to time and have been making my way through them. There’s no preamble in these, no discussion of authorial intent, just a nice slim edition from Vintage that immediately thrusts you into the most powerful short storytelling voices in the late 80s. I recognize hardly any names in this one, which will probably mean they’ll all meld together even more so than the last, but I don’t care. The stylistic efforts being made between these pages are fucking huge.

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

This year was sort of fucked in the face by an extremely fast reading of Cooper’s George Miles Cycle—I intended to write something about it and continue to fail immensely—followed by an equally quick reading of the first Grove Press paperback edition of Sade—the major face-fucking then being done by Philosophy in the Bedroom. I’ve been a fan of Cooper’s for quite some time now, and have read most of his books except for this one. I saw a list somewhere of books that sort of warped Ariana Reines’ perspective, and this was on it, so I’m real excited.

READ MORE >

Jen Hofer gives us her summer reading list:

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The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison and Fighting for Those Left Behind, Safiya Bukhari, ed. Laura Whitehorn (The Feminist Press, 2010)

WITH

Pantera negra. El arte revolucionario de Emory Douglas, ed. Sam Durant (Alias, 2012)

A phenomenal collection of Black Panther Party newspaper covers and BPP posters and graphics by Emory Douglas, all translated into Spanish along with essays by Bobby Seale, Sam Durant, Kathleen Cleaver, St. Clair Bourne and Colette Gaiter. The history of the Black Panther Party and its tremendous power to instigate autonomous structures of mutual aid and community solidarity, accompanied by the history of the state repression that sought to obliterate The Black Panthers and other groups like them is absolutely relevant to contemporary struggles around race, class, incarceration, immigration, access to resources, and government repression today. If you have any question about that, or about the complexities of working within radical movements, The War Before should help to reinforce the sense that questions will abound always.

Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007, Aaron Kunin (Letter Machine Editions, 2013)

Here you will find at least two worlds, and then some. In an interview conducted by Tom Fleischmann in Seneca Review, Aaron Kunin said: “Is my interest in the gesture of withdrawal from the world compromised by the worldliness of the speaker positions in my writing? That is a real problem. The solution is dualism. Where in the world can I go that isn’t in the world? I can’t. To get out of the world, I need at least two worlds. That is the paradox of misanthropy: in rejecting society, you project another one.”

Fair warning: Aaron Kunin’s notes are totally addictive.

READ MORE >

What Melissa Chadburn is reading this summer:

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An oldie but goodie that I can’t wait to return to this summer:

THEM by Joyce Carol Oates

Because it’s sprawling and epic and takes it’s time and the tone of it all feels like the hottest day I ever had in Shreveport Louisiana, where the bugs gave me blisters and time passed like molasses and sometimes you want books in summer to never end like that –it’s an infinity book

One that’s been out for awhile that I look forward to cracking open for the first time:

A HUNDRED DEMONS by Lynda Barry (Sasquatch Books, 2005)

Because I can’t believe I haven’t done it yet and because Lynda Barry makes me feel safe to be me and reminds me the why of it all—that it’s fun and life affirming and an act of love.

One I’ve read recently that is perfect perfect for the beach:

THE BEAUTIFUL RUINS by Jess Walter (Harper Perennial, 2013)

Because half the time you’ll marvel at the thing, how the hell is he doing this you’ll say with it’s mind bending structure with it’s POV twists and turns, it’s trans genreness. Then other times an honest passage like,

“This is a love story, Michael Deane says.  But, really, what isn’t? Doesn’t the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk, just as the Housewives live for catching glimpses of their own Botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors, and the rocked-out dude on ‘roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on Hookbook, and because this is reality, they are all in love—madly, truly—with the body mic clipped to their back buckle, and the producer casually suggesting just one more angle, one more Jell-O shot. And the robot loves his master, alien loves his saucer, Superman loves Lois, Lex, and Lana, Luke loves Leia (till he finds out she’s his sister), and the exorcist loves the demon even as he leaps out the window with it, in full sorrowful embrace, as Leo loves Kate and they both love the sinking ship, and the shark—God, the shark loves to eat, which is what the mafioso loves, too—eating and money and Paulie and omertia—the way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar, and sometimes loves the other cowboy, as the vampire loves night and neck, and the zombie—don’t even start with the zombie, sentimental fool; has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? This too is a love story. “

— these passages get you to throw down the microscope and pick up the mirror. Oh it’s me he’s talking to. Me. Me. Me. READ MORE >