Exhibit 1.6.6

Teaching Autobiography of Red This Week

Wrote about it when I first read it five years ago here, favorite lines here.

Now my favorite lines might come from the opening translations:

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red
How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against
Their hobbles in the red wind
Burrowed himself down in the red dawn jelly of Geryon's
Dream

Geryon's dream began red then slipped out of the vat and ran
Upsail broke silver shot up through his roots like a pup

Secret pup At the end of another red day

Exhibit 1.2.20

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme
for a Tiger Electronic Baseball Handheld

Dante
Commedia


Run: the straight way was lost
Swing: the love that moves the sun and all the other stars

Exhibit 27.23

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme

for a Sega Game Gear

John Milton
Invocation Beginning Book III of Paradise Lost

Up: The rising world of waters dark and deep
Down: The void and formless infinite
Left: Revisit'st not these eyes, that rowle in vain
Right: Re-visit now with bolder wing
1: Purge and disperse
2: Shine inward
Start: Seasons return, but not to me

Exhibit 27.13

Things

* In honor of yesterday's National Coming Out Day, you'll want to read Dave Madden's coming out story on his blog here. It's touching stuff though, I have to admit, I'm a little bummed to discover his "You will never, ever amount to anything..." sign was somehow indicative of his unhappiness. Who knew? That used to be my favorite thing about Dave. Maybe it still is.

* It's not exactly a coming out story--more self discovery?--but coincidentally I am teaching David Sedaris's "I Like Guys" from Naked in my class this week. Hadn't read/heard it in awhile but it's one of my favorites and students always seem into it. You should listen to him read it here. It starts about 3 minutes in.

* There's a new issue of the Denver Quarterly out and it's powerful awesome. I've only read around, but Shane McCrae's stuff is, as always, fantastic.

* I also was a big fan of Nathan Hill's very sweet story which includes this moment, "After she falls asleep, she stirs and rolls over and yawns widely and a small white mouse crawls out of her mouth."

* By the way, have you looked at the books the Poetry Center at CSU has out or forthcoming? Um, wow. Michael Dumanis and the rest of the folks there are...I don't know. What would the kids say? Killing it? They're killing something, that's for sure. Despair. They're probably killing despair.

* Next time I feel like saying something about MFA programs, I'm just going to buy one of their books. You should do the same thing. This way we won't be horrible people.

* O, and I have a few short shorts in the Denver Quarterly but you really shouldn't worry about that. They're mostly notable for including one that no one can tell my grandma about. It has nothing to do with her, I just, um, maybe borrowed her name. And maybe I said everyone with that name has extra toes. Maybe.

* But in my defense, it's a good name and I'm very sorry. My grandma does not have extra toes (as far as I know).

* Seriously, don't tell her.

Exhibit 27.8

Despite the Fact

...that this blog clearly peaked with that last post about would-be cat abortionists, I suppose I must go on. I'm not really sure why either.

After reading it for two weeks, here's the bulk of my commentary on The Faerie Queene: That Spenser really liked parades.

You can't go two cantos without knights running into a parade. Usually it's just long lists of sins or love emotions or whathaveyou. This is what Bart Giamatti called the "pageant¹" and what I would call annoying. Look, we all love parades, even knights allegorically representing chastity love parades. But not every demon has to have one.

Or at least that's what I thought before. I've completely come around on parades being written about in Spenserian stanzas:


Macy's parade every Thanksgiving Day,
Woody Woodpecker flies! Behold the morn
as red McDonald's haloed head allays
the guilt of Snoopy's sins no longer worn;
afloat with charity a dog newborn
to angel heaven. Good this grief they surf
in currents rising high; but cords untorn
are sinful men assigned who owe the turf
a soul they claim by holding bound a balloon Smurf.


And that's what I spent all morning doing. Not for the first time, I'm really glad I don't write Elizabethan poetry. Fiction!

¹ Pete Rose is hereby banned from baseball.

Exhibit 25.14

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme
for a ColecoVision Game

Edgar Allan Poe
"The Bells"

1: Bells
2: Bells
3: Bells
4: Bells
5: Bells
6: Bells
7: Bells
8: Bells
9: Bells
*: Bells
0: Bells
#: Bells
Left: Bells
Right: Bells
Joystick: They are Ghouls

Exhibit 25.4

Everyone should subscribe to Gulf Coast or at least go to the website where you can read this great poetry discussion featuring Hannah Gamble, Zach Schomburg (himself a thing that is sometimes in Nebraska), Heather Christle, and Matthews Rohrer and Zapruder.

There's no getting around it, Zach's final quote is amazing:

A poem is not necessarily more surreal according to how far it sits on the dream end of that spectrum, but perhaps more surreal if it confuses the spectrum, if it confuses hurt and light, meaning and meaninglessness, just good warm sad blood spilling out in the forest.

Damn.

Exhibit 24.20

Basketball Coach

UH Hires James Dickey as New Basketball Coach



I honestly went to sleep thinking UH had named a deceased poet their next basketball coach. No, somehow they did worse.

These Dickey lines seem to sum up the situation:

To be dead, a house must be still.
The floor and the walls wave me slowly;
I am deep in them over my head.

Exhibit 24.2

Books You Need

Like a Sea by Samuel Amadon




The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs



I'm fortunate enough to know both of these guys, and while I don't have the books yet, they're both writers I trust. I've ordered them. Your turn.

Exhibit 23.25

Journal

The new Open City is all kinds of awesome, and you should go out of your way to support them. Right now. The first story from Sam Lipsyte is hilarious and not just because there is a character named Vargina which--I'm surprised and ashamed to say--made me laugh almost every time I read it. There are some nice looking debut fiction pieces I'm working my way through as well though I had to put off finishing them because I kept giggling about poor Vargina.

I have a few Flasher pieces in it which are only notable for continuing to exist. He buys a painted turtle among other things. That (still) nutty Flasher.

Exhibit 23.10

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme
for a Neo Geo Game

William Wordsworth
"The World Is Too Much With Us"

A: Getting
B: Spending
C: For this
D: For everything
Up: Up-gathered like sleeping flowers
Right: Given away our hearts
Down: It moves us not
Left: Standing on this pleasant lea
Select: A sordid boon!
Start: Great God!

Exhibit 23.3

Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina

I don't think there's another writer that I stole as much from when I was deciding what kind of writer I wanted to be. If Mathias weren't so nice, he probably would have punched me in the face by now. There's still time, honestly.

I remember how blown away I was when some of the "Creation Myth" pieces that make up the bulk of Destruction Myth started appearing on his blog (I did not steal his blog's tendency to be interesting though he recently appears to have borrowed my blog's commitment to dog photography). A combination of verse and prose, of birth and death, Destruction Myth is a book I have spent years waiting for and it does not disappoint. It is hilarious and smart and sad, and it is the 3rd amazing book of poetry to have come out this year from someone who was in Lincoln during my tenure there. Naca, Zach, Mathias. I was very, very lucky.

If you haven't ordered the book yet, watch Elisabeth's video interpretation of one of the book's best pieces and become convinced:

Creation Myth from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

Pick the book up from CSU here or Amazon.com here.

Oh, and if you haven't gotten it--Mathias's Play from The Cupboard is super great. That series is the full-length I want to see next.

Exhibit 22.12

Heather Green's No Omen
Now Available from Love Among the Ruins

You've got to get it. Here's how:

$12 each or $20 for both. To order simply send an email to daniel@loveamongtheruins.com with your name, mailing address and choice of books. We’ll send you books and a bill.

It begins with this poem which I'm borrowing from Sixth Finch:
Awesome, no? Go order.

And if you're in New York, you can attend the release party tonight, November 4th, at Melville House Books. 7pm. Be there.

Exhibit 22.3

Bird Eating Bird

Today's post leans toward the poetry side of this blog's stock photography/dog pictures/gross food/sports/poetry theme. I have plenty more to say about street signs, but that will all have to come later. Naca's book is simply one that you shouldn't wait to read.

A National Poetry Series winner, these poems lend themselves to a variety of readings but for me it's a book of distance. The poems here span the globe and cross languages and what makes it such a touching experience to read is that in all the traveling there never seems to be a home here, something that becomes clear long before the book's center section "House" which agency to the object itself (the house, naturally, chooses to wander). Instead it's a book of vagabond poems, poems that speak in different tongues and argue with each other, poems that seem anxious when forced to settle for even a moment. From "One Foot":

Each footstep, I mill bones to chalk.
Then, sink in soot wherever I stand.
I dream I give up my cane and walk.

But it's not a sad book, not exactly. The disconnection that gives the book a sense of longing gets used just as often for humor. A grandmother struggling with the 'h' in English cries, "My art, my art!" A girl receives junk mail offering her a 'chance' to become Miss USA. The house argues its own pronunciation. These same failings of language, half understandings and tortured vocalizations, can be as universal as they are isolating when with a guide and a funny poem like "Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian" sees itself undone by a poem like "Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh" which loses any Virgils. It ends:

And then, if I choose to speak like this
who will listen?

The book travels to answer this question from Pittsburgh to Mexico City, from the present to the past, from English to Spanish and back again. It's an impressive journey across great distances done with a remarkable amount of care.

Get here

Exhibit 21.24

Scary, No Scary

Zachary Schomburg's new book begins with a choice between scary and no scary. Wisely, it advises you to choose no scary, but it's an empty question. There is only scary here--scary jaguars, scary wolves, scary spiders, scary wolf spiders, scary black holes. And so it's easy to say this is a book about fear, about a darkness in the world we recognize in our youth and, most of us, forget as we grow. Take the poem, "The Old Man Who Watches Me Sleep," which ends:

If you have a soul
it may have been put in there backward.

There's something so innocent in that "there." After expressing uncertainty about the existence of the soul, the narrator accepts it as something physical with an intended space and, as a result, something malleable, something corruptible, something to be inserted, possibly incorrectly. Just like the old man who has wings coming from his chest rather than his back ("a mistake"), the easy readings here are warped by wonder. The old man is not an angel, he's something else entirely, something terrifying not only because of his presence but because of what his flaws mean about the uncertainty in the world he shares with the narrator. This, then, is a fear that rises from imperfect comprehension and incomplete metaphors, the world as a cipher, its symbols dark.

Outside of a poem titled "This Is What You Need to Know about the World, Pretend Son," the book pushes furthest in this direction during a section titled "The Histories," an escalating series of short poems which sever understanding. Here's "The Floor Age":

The chandelier crashes.
There is no chandelier.

There is, of course, also something child-like in this sort of a game which seems to push into those dark places of the world to see how close one will allow themselves to get (like a child keeping a flashlight off for the rush of fear until they just can't take the darkness). But the poems here create a beautiful, haunting world out of this fear and, ultimately, build toward a final long poem, "The Pond," where the world is all the more scary seen through mature eyes. Our comprehension has never been made perfect nor our metaphors complete. We may not be afraid of darkness, but that does not mean we are not afraid of what we've become:

I haven't done everything I've wanted.
I haven't made one of those Viking ships
with a dragon the bow.
I haven't raided Europe.

It's a very different sort of fear, but, I think, equally capable of creating the horrors of the world here as ultimately these gaps in language and meaning are what give rise to imagination. And good lord is there imagination here. It's a funny, brilliant book about how we can't choose no scary. Ever.

From Black Ocean

Exhibit 20.21

Things That are Good

Octopus 12


Interview with Christy Call


This Recording's 100 Greatest Authors
(So far they've done Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3)

Exhibit 20.12

I Don't Know

Osmosis has me writing poems
or maybe
waiting for lunch is what
makes every thought
sound like it's being spoken
slowly
meaningfully
into a microphone
but I won't take your meter
never
William Logan
can I have your fortune cookie
tomorrow

Exhibit 18.5

A Canonical Poem Adapted into a Control Scheme
for an Atari 2600 Game

Emily Dickinson
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes"

Up: The letting go
Down: Recollect the snow
Left: The feet, mechanical, go round
Right: The stiff heart questions
Fire: This is the hour of lead

Exhibit 16.6

The Match Array
Heather Green
dancing girl press, 2008
$7.00 (includes S&H)
Here

I can assure you: it is a good idea to read this.

This one was originally in Octopus, but I don't think I can link to it. I'm going to borrow it.

THE BRIDGE

No memory, no myths,

no myths,

few before the forest,

no fixed words for colors.

A red cup looks like blood.

Extract a red dye.

The first year tutored herself,

listening slightly.

The room could be locked.

The second year borrowed a boat

from the river soon before joining him,

the joy beaten to death.

That’s what you do for God.

Exhibit 16.1

Octopus 11 is now live right here. Read it instead of whatever else it was you were going to do this morning.

I like this by Rebecca Guyon:

• 
  COLD
  
  I like my shadow when I’m in this coat.
  
  I look like a Russian soldier or I’m wearing a dress.
  
  I need to be more friendly. I need to treat Estonians better.
  

*****
I've also been reading the new Southeast Review. This is normally when I'd mention that I have something in it but my piece is awful and you should pick up the journal despite it. Not this time.

My piece is awesome.

Okay, that's not true. My piece is maybe okay, but if you'll allow me a moment, I'd like to do some avenging.

My piece, "Hope's Dancing Fancy," is a short short that takes its title and vampires from a longer story I wrote in graduate school. A story, I should say, that got a very odd reaction from the workshop. Honestly, it would have been better if I'd written a choose-your-own-adventure novel for class or just passed out handfuls of leaves and called it my story. Even months later I'd meet people and they'd say, "Oh, you're the guy who writes about vampires."

And I'd say, "Um, well, they weren't even real vampires. They just sort of wanted to be. That's why they had their teeth filed."

This would not make things better.

But I persevered and you'll be happy to know the first line of the short short is, "If we hadn’t decided to become vampires, this man wouldn’t be filing our teeth."

I will now cease avenging.

Also in that workshop were friends and non-vampire-focused writers Dave, Chris, Mark, and Naca. That's a good group. You should definitely watch that Naca video.