"You can see everything from where you are standing"-- Some thoughts on Brian Oliu

This is what Oliu and I do: we hold up the ends of people groups! We so strong!

Terrific is one of those words that gets shoved into the pockets with the pennies because it is like great and awesome, with their exact meanings all wuzz? and relative, but I’m here to say no no no bozo this word terrific can be used for real. For me, terrific, like stoked or bummer, has specific criteria you wouldn’t wanna mess with, man. It’s a feeling. It takes a big booyeah. Here are three things: stoked-worthy, attentive, and unignorable. Brian Oliu’s lyric essays in Come See For Yourself are terrific, absolutely terrific. Lyric essays, and Oliu if you don’t know is an the funnest instruction manual, combine the personality of connectable CNF, the lyric love of poetry, and the descriptive elements of fiction. This is where stoked comes in for me, that uncontrollable joy, feeling of wanting to talk and talk with, about, to, inside of, beside of, never instead of. Attentiveness, awareness, a lens that matters is becoming more and more vital to me, and Oliu in every piece of his that I’ve ever read is a worthy lens as he moves around the state that these places matter. The memories, the planks of a bridge, they well up. And like his other writing (The UA Rec Center one from So You Know It’s Me comes to mind), the essays I’ve read from Level End, I can’t shake these, person reading this. I return to them for that feeling of knowing someone else has it, someone else gets as caught up in moments, memories, people, places, as much as I do. How I can’t pass Cody’s old house in Muncie (those nights a year ago, sitting on his porch, drinking forties, surviving the months after Sara left) or that one swing in my hometown (where Zach slammed me down to impress a girl, leaving me in the mulch, the girl I’d later kiss after my high school girlfriend broke up with me, the kiss that Zach would bring up as he dumped our friendship, the same swing I’d see two girls kiss for the first time, and I thought Eh.). As I now bounce around between towns and beds and couches, this collection reminds me why we have places, communities, locations at all. Invisible lines on the ground where shit happens. Little boxes in the brain to store all this goodness.

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My favorite pieces from Oliu's collection:

Burlington Country, New Jersey: oh how lovely how it expands out, the body of this story growing larger, stronger, more and more into this struggle. And those sentences, they stretch and unfold, remarkable.

Somerset County, New Jersey: "There's the woman who tried to cut her wrists into ribbons with the fragments of a soul disc, and so now there's no songs except the ones we try to sing to make the days go faster"; this essay one beauty hunk of a sentence brings beauty out of the sad, out of the unfortunate. I'm mesmerized by how it twinkles in the strangest places.

Warren County, New Jersey: I keep looking at this one, less than a page, the last one of the collection, and re-reading, perplexed at its weight, how far it travels on that tiny hardcore page. It goes from opening "According to this logic, everywhere we are is a gap in the water..." to ending "I should have never tried to put you behind me, and yet I have--the errors of my youth are here and you carry them graciously, hopefully, while I spin wheels in the mud hoping that the mystery never finds me." This is what Oliu does better than most people writing today: he both thinks and feels on the page at such a remarkably high level, a trait that is both inspiring and touching.

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It’s an honor to have my poems housed next to Oliu’s essays. He’s an absolute champion of the genre, the small press scene, and a lovable dude as well. I met him last winter when he visited Ball State with some Alabama students, and saw him again when I visited Bama with some of the Ball State crew. Whether in person or online, he is a stellar supporter and true-to-self human. I’m so stoked to see him again, to read with him, to see him DJ in Tuscaloosa.

THEY CALL ME THE BUMP

I put this record on and I wanna drink whiskey and high-five pals and stomp my feet. What I am saying is that this is a great record post-bad-shit-that-looked-like-good-shit. I saw the light. And I ran like a fool. Records for me as a whole are about that booyeah moment where alone or not I wanna holler YES THANX. It is like when I was a silly fifth grader and I finally pronounced my Rs right and finally I could say Rachel’s name! You ask me if I love you. Don’t ask a question with such a funny word. That is one of my regrets, not telling that girl at age ten what was up. Also, bunkering up in my sorrow bed the last few weeks, never learning an instrument in that best period of life for such things TEENHOOD, being an idiot to my ex-wife like all the time a lot of the time. LETS ALL GO TO THE BAR. We need to admit that is okay advice sometimes. Speaking of which, I listen to this album and the lyrics are more straightforward than other Deer Tick albums and I know that is all right. Heavy is heavy. Sadscary is sadscary. And the devil is living in my basement. I’m trying hard to hide him from my wife. Hey man, the idiot was in my attic, but whatever. I get it. Sometimes, I crave for that old friend to yell STOP BEING SUCH A PUSSY in my face. Loud enough to hear! Louder please! I can’t hear. I can’t use my ears. Miss one speech and you’re uninformed to tears. This album has been unshuffling my cards for a while. not in that fix it! kind of way, but in the live it! way. Drugs and terror, which ones better? Oh and check out that cover art. Gorgeous in that rad way that screams I AM GONNA. You give me something to brag about. I said Ludacris made me feel tougher. I say Deer Tick makes me feel rambunctious and rowdy and somehow more sincere. I need that. Sometimes I’m a chair in a bar that no one sits in because it is so close to the door. I cut my way to the back of the line and I found you. I heard Deer Tick for the first time at Village Green Records, another place with a heavy door to the wind. Travis says you will like this. And I did! I’m not gonna stand around playing make believe. I didn’t buy it but yes I should have right then. I think I was hanging with my ex-wife (and already said how I behaved mondo lame, another lighter example). When I finally bought it I was hanging with another cute blond I thought would go WOW THIS RECORD but she liked that country station my dad bobbed his head to until he discovered that big classic country box set. We could be our invention, running from letting go. I think I wanna talk about this record as an example of who I am today March 8^th, 2012. I’m on a dating site and I kind of wanna write LISTEN TO THIS RECORD (along with Stale Champagne by State Champion, We Make Our Own Luck by In The Face Of War, and Recovery by Away With Vega, not to mention read these poems blah blah) to know who I am. I need you to make me shout. That line should be on there too. I’m tired of being anxious and lame and a sitter. Someone I think is the knees bees told me I was a charmer. I think she misspelled idiot. I hope she misspelled PERSON I LIKE LOTZ. Maybe GET IN THERE MAN. My therapist is making me write a list of what I want in a woman. Someone to make me warm and loud at once. Come on Miss K., wrap your lovin arms around me.

there is but one fence

Abraham Smith spits up rural life in beautiful fragmented songs in his debut collection, Whim Man Mammon. Exactly where it comes from, I can’t say. I know it reminds me of my Grandpa Gobble and his porch, that old shack at the end of the dirt road in North Carolina. And his whiskey in the fridge and the stories of my Dad’s youth.

Wherever he comes from and whatever he’s been through, Abraham Smith has shaken it loose and tossed it on the page. He speaks and it’s the trembling sound of the self, of throwback, of removed in America. Smith hopes, “may we live live live/forever far from walmart, among/the husk and husky peas and husky voiced singers/who ring among rusts and thrive on good boot gals.” He is not speaking from beside me in Central Indiana but broadcasting in his loud spoken word. A removed throwback self. These poems strike the sense that beg COME OUT AND PLAY. The best kinds of poems pull me out of my apartment, off my couch, away from the computer; Smith’s poems taunt and punch me out of my comfort hole. You want experience? Take this:

in work jeans

patched four ways with pants
I ripped the ass on

kneeling to my first
still warm deer

my knife just so
my hand slid in

and all the plates
began a claim

on hopeful
blues

vultures and crows
sky-locked

waiting
to fall to steaming

Abraham Smith is not shouting the gospel of a distant way of life. He’s breaking open the bottle to prove there’s whiskey inside. In these moments, Abraham Smith knows the knife is more than a knife and the blood more than blood and those pants and their patches remind him (and us) that those bits live on. And he can pull close to himself, to others, to us remembering a grandpa:

it goes without saying
my grandpa’s head is one helluva circus
never was religious man
people say he walked with deer
tickled their chins
flipped kernels of field corn
off his thumb
in and down their dog nun hatches
alzhimer’s now sad because
never would have wished to live this far from deer
happy when he doesn’t pine
happy when is bed is
cut from skin of moon
how much you need?

This collection isn’t easy to talk about because this isn’t a man sitting down to write the next great American poem, this is the man cutting his poems from the mud and muck of the American rural. Though some of the poems blew themselves into too small of bits or rattled too far, Abraham Smith’s first collection is one to be reckoned with, the work of a man possessed by the where as much as the what.

It's always better to hear Smith read his poems.
It's always best to see Smith read his poems.

(SPECIAL THANKS TO LAYNE FOR BUYING ME THIS BOOK ON HER RECENT TRIP TO NYC)

MATTHEW LIPPMAN

Yesterday, I'm eating this awesome Panera sandwich on like Rye bread with turkey and some fancy cheese and EVEN lettuce at the final Writing Center staff meeting. Todd comes in to swipe a sandwich (ITS OKAY HE IS MARRIED TO MY BOSS) and plops this book in front of me, all confident I'll like it.

HE WAS RIGHT. The New Year of Yellow by Matthew Lippman was a fun, nice, cool book. I gobbled it up in a day. HAR HAR HAR GOBBLE.

Lippman was one of those names that I've heard thrown in the poetry world, but I didn't know what was up with him. Here is what is up with Michael Lippman in three sentences: He rocks with the "here is what I'm doing" stuff, kind of like O'Hara, but not like this dude is totally being an O'Hara fanboy/ripper/chump. Rather, Lippman gives me that feeling that he likes O'Hara lots lots lots, but definitely Hoagland and Young and probably like Milosz or someone else foreign. Yeah, he whips up some cool meshy influenced poems that have a political bite to them on top the personal (WE ARE ALL A MESSYMESH OF INFLUENCES I THINK) and does it well because I like to read these poems as I'm doing my day to day stuff too.

Some of my favorites:
And Everywhere It's Florida
Blonde and All
Everyone Wants A Monkey
Insurrection
Excellent Still
I Suppose The Sadness of Things

ACTUALLY AND EVERYWHERE IT'S FLORIDA IS AT DIAGRAM READ IT READ IT PAL

YEAH YEAH QUICK POST ABOUT A GOOD BOOK QUICK READ NICE COMFORTING FINALS WEEK POEMS

Words For Empty And Words For Full by Bob Hicok

I stormed through this book, or is it two books, stacking up at nearly 120 pages. Still, I was stomped and stirring and laughing and sighing on buses, in between classes, on my couchbed over the past week, doing all I could not to stop and copy this voice this man these poems.

Some people might say the title is lame or something bad, but I like it, as it feels appropriate tabbing through all the stored parts of these poems in my head.

One thing that struck me: the control, even in his quirky wildness, that Hicok shows with really chewy topics, like the Virginia Tech shooting (ADD IT TO MY MFA LIST) and global warming. These poems make shapes like humans, so I'm not all GOSH ANOTHER KILLING IS DUMB POEM.

"Man to man" is definitely not my favorite poem in this book, but I keep thinking about it. Repetition, one of Hicok's go to tactics, gets smacked around here.

Thirteen killed by a man in Germany
and then himself.

Ten killed by a man in Alabama
and then himself.

I have killed no one, I am behind.

How do I take this? I am not sure, but I'm intrigued.

Are they out there
and we just don't hear them, stories
of men who go crazy
and mow the lawns of strangers?

What we he like, the interviewer would ask
a neighbor.

Kind of quiet, she would say.
You know: kept to himself.
A nice man, really.
And then he was just like, you know, mowing.
Mowing and mowing and mowing
and mowing. There were grass clippings
everywhere. It was horrible.

So here is Hicok, the Hicok I like, that makes me open this book instead of do my homework or watch Patrick Swayze surf again. He is serious, but not a stooge. He is funny, but not a jerk. He feels like a person here on the page.

Skipping ahead a little in the poem (COPYRIGHTS; ALSO I GOTTA WORK SOON):

A man gathers all the men in the world
and asks why rock paper scissors
won't do, why rock paper scissors
fire won't do, why rock paper scissors fire
atom bomb won't do.

The sound of all men shrugging
sounds like the sound of all crows
taking off from all trees, like the day
flying away from itself.

I'm digging how this poem unfolds. I don't think these excerpts do that justice.

But yes, I think the reason this poem keeps coming up in my head is the fact that it writes about some important (and often overwritten/poorly written/blahly written). Often, I write and read things that are cool or interesting, but why does it matter? It's just me whining or about a t-shirt, and yeah those things are okay, but the world's got big stuff going.

I like this book; it isn't afraid to be wild with touchy/important things.

Two books I've read like in the past month or so and forgot to talk about much so I wanna do that now thanks.

actual air by David Berman

and

The Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis

David Berman, in the author photo on the back, has this serious look (AND BEARD!), but maybe about to smile, and on his t-shirt is another dude with a serious look/beard.

Larry Levis, his face is right on the cover with his burly 'stache and parted hair. He looks like a scientist I think.

But these words got something to say I remember. Let's open them up.

"Snow" is the first poem in the book and the first I dog-eared. Woah, good ratio there. 1-1.

I wrote in the side something about the cool "simple weighted lines." Here are a few maybe fitting that maybe not:

"When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room."
"We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence."

Then, Levis has this first poem that's pretty cool too called "Self-Portrait With Radio."

Four and a half pages good stuff, like the first line "Sooiee, pig pig pig..." That's interesting.

Levis likes to get subtly loud it seems into his words and recollections and the brain space between us:

Oh night with only three scrawny stars,
Oh Holy Dark in which
Someone robbing a convenience store
Feels momentarily free,
Thank you for this great inner calm
In which the gambler places
HIs bet, &the Quakers watch, undisturbed,
The snow fall

I don't think these books mesh well, like read this one then that one, or look at the influence here.

No, I just read them around the same time and saw them and though hmmmmm they were nice books, let's blog.

One thing I really liked about Levis: his repetition of ideas and images

One thing I really liked about Berman: the longish poem "Self-Portrait at 28" is enough reason to buy this book, as it pushes and pushes boundaries and language and eats the speaker and eats me and spits me up and puts me to sleep feeling a little better than now.

I'm hoping someone reads these books, because they can help someone I think.

IT WASNT FOR ME EITHER

Two New Things Of My Words On The Web:
Review of Peter Davis' new book
Guest Blog Post About Chapbooks

Some thoughts on Who's Who Vivid By Matt Hart

I found this book at a used bookstore in Ft. Wayne. What? How? I did thanks. Wait, back up, I read this book in December of 2009. According to goodreads, I didn't think highly of it (three star rating, some dissing on the untogetherness of the individual poems). Wait, back up, Matt Hart is a Ball State grad. Cool. Wait, fast forward, Matt Hart is coming to read at Ball State soon. All of the stuff online I've read recently tells me I was stupid in December of 2009.

I WAS I WAS.

This poembook, though still some down points where I don't care/get lost in the gaps, rides well, like a sick-wit-it rollercoaster.

Oh Matt Hart forgive me for I was young.

Here are some lines that I underlined in the book:
"One way to move a reader/ is to smash a bottle across the bridge/ of her nose. Another is through the careful use/of methodical, un-dramatized langauge." (p.14)

"I don't want to/destroy anything, not even a paperclip." (p. 17)

"Nowadays, everybody knows:/you've seen one drop of blood/you've seen an ocean." (p. 42)

"At once/I am a body and nobody" (p.67)

Now I am going to talk about my two or three favorite poems from this book:
"For The People Who Know Better, Let Me Say In My Defense"

A little different than most of the other poems, small little stanzas, this cool idea "I am," gets wild like "I am/of the testicles" and near "I am my own/dish rag", love the movement, awwwwww/ahhhhhhhhh, "I am awaiting/your reply" is the ending, and oh halt the poem, stop the poem, but still it drags on in my head, nice stuff really.

"Only A Transmitter"

Most of the time it seems that Hart's style, with the great language piling up, works better as a big blob of text, but hey, couplets here work, longer lines, helps the control, like the complex beginning couple+some: "Now that I've stopped shouting and started listening/to the radio, I'm understanding more and more the ways/to unfold myself..." I like that. It reminds me of growing up, past and present, and how sometimes I wanna be real loud, but no calm down Tyler.

A lot of animals come up many many times: rabbits, elephants, sharks, etc. I think that is cool. One time, I did a mini-interview with Hart and he said how it was interesting to him, better even, to use animals. Those are my words. I hope that was his idea. That's what I remember.

Matt Hart works at The Art Academy of Cincinnati and one time I looked up that school to see what the heck it was about. INTENSE ART PEOPLE THERE.

But really, this book is something to look at, to ponder, to read aloud. It rips through normal thought, like a brain is real and open.

Good Job Matt Hart. Sorry it took me almost a year to realize that.

SCORCH ATLAS BY BLAKE BUTLER AND SYNONYMS

Scorch Atlas bakes the world in this coating of horror and filth.
Scorch Atlas blackens the corners of language, making everything crisp and bitter.
Scorch Atlas blisters page after page of tight story.
Scorch Atlas broils human flesh in a pan of THANK GOD fiction.
Scorch Atlas chars a little something in side the reader that forgot destruction is inevitable.
Scorch Atlas cooks up a tasty dose of image-based fiction.
Scorch Atlas melts my desire to write fiction. I COULD NEVER DO THAT.
Scorch Atlas parches the saliva within our mouths, us readers unable to close them, unable to take a deep breath.
Scorch Atlas roasts humanity and doesn't care.
Scorch Atlas scalds the eyes, like AM I REALLY READING THIS?
Scorch Atlas sears language tightly to the inner thigh of fiction writing.
Scorch Atlas seethes a realness that it shouldn't be able to.
Scorch Atlas shrivels the souls of its characters and simmers the souls of its readers.
Scorch Atlas singes its corners its cover, it seems, the beautiful damn artifact, one of the most attractive books I've ever held.
Scorch Atlas stews up a big batch of BOOYEAH.
Scorch Atlas swelters off the page, my hands are sweaty, thank you.

When you think about me, do you think about me as a kid?

The members of the Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective & Casserole Society wrote these series of poems—(Almost) Sonnets, Q&A poems, Retellings, and something called Spookles—topped by a cool dose of casserole recipes. This little book shouts about the allure, the power, the possibilities of collectivity.

Fourteen people and now one voice, as the members admit on the acknowledgement page that they don’t recognize their own voices in the poems. Just words and images and ideas, so many ingredients melting, boiling, and baking together, leaving me originally unsure of how the product would taste.

Finished! Some tasted like they were missing a spice or two, and others were just a little overcooked. However, many of the poems in this collection satiated me in my poetic hunger. These poems push the boundaries of collective writing, connected language, and beautiful lines.

Sometimes, I was thinking, “Man, I have no clue what’s this is supposed to be/mean/amount to/tell me/emote/connote.” Seems a problem could come tossing all these minds’ juices into one pot: who says what is enough. In the poem “What We Call Awe” (sweet sweet title by the way), I can almost feel where a different hand comes in, where one or many kept coming in until we end up with this poem that pushes several directions, but pulls me none.

But woah, the moments these voices balance, control each other, the results are what I call awe. Take “Familiar Things” bleeding with sadness, loneliness, but also comfort in these, in the familiar. As it begins, “[s]itting unsuspecting, and then the doorbell/chimed through the kitchen,/the casserole left out. I stared/blankly. I felt nothing: peas, carrots, a void,/a void,/a void.” This isn’t boo-hoo I’m lonely. This is detailed, beautiful emotion. Then, we get it in the last line, the boo-yeah: “Everything shrinks to the size of your face.”

Moments like these abound in this collection, poems that pull on the edges of emotions before bringing the whole stack down. Like in the Retelling poem “The Odyssey: Color,” the poets take the familiar and connect it with emotions, new and bold. Just look:

I have to pretend that I miss my home,/that I miss my wife. My son/would certainly want me to miss him./ But out here on this boat things feel more infinite./The last tree I can see is not the last tree there is.

When I read those lines, I just blinked and blinked, like “What?” → “Woah” → “Wo-woah.” Yes, we have heard of longing, we have learned of the difficulties of space, but continued, continued, this poem does the length of the page, concluding “[b]efore Cyclops/I was a different guy—/my beard had no gray in it. But now/I know better than to account for color.”

While the emotions are familiar, yes we all feel them, the way these poets carve them into these words is just a glowing light. “The Space Between Stars” is one of those poems that hits you with ideas that are incredibly bold, emotional, purposeful. “Stars don’t shine bright, but they could always start/shining brighter” is cute and hopeful, okay, we get it. But then, it unfolds, unloads: “I spelled/your name wrong but I’m not sorry,/since you were kind of a dick/when you shout that clay pigeon I loved/and turned the rest loose in my aunt’s yard.” I’m thinking, HARSH BUT COOL. For real, think about the feeling, the dare-I-say-it fresh feeling here.

As this poem closes, the speaker says their GRE scores are no longer valid and they have friends that are bald and others living in Wisconsin and Texas. Reading these poems, I began to understand how collective poems can work (as well as not work), how they can cut gaps, how they can pull and push heaviness. As “The Space Between Stars” concludes, “I never knew how to travel between them, from here to the Southern heat in a slip of a day.” I get it, I feel it, the feeling is mutual.

WHAT?!

HEY LOOK I HAVE A REVIEW OF ADAM ROBINSON'S COOL BOOK SAY, POEM UP AT OTOLITHS. WOAH. I'M ALSO ON VACATION. WOAH.

Matt Bell's Wolf Parts

I say WOLF, but of course there are various kinds of wolves.

When I found out Bell was releasing a minibook retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood, I knew this story would not be one for my mother's 1st grade class. Rather, Wolf Parts is a collection of fragmented flash fictions that took me to sights I wish I wouldn't have seen, but at the same time, feel like a different man for seeing. Stories, I believe, should do something to me. These flashes frighten me, enliven me, rage me, touch me with their haunting metaphors and visual descriptions.

The image I can't get out of my head is Red laying naked on the skinned fur of the Wolf, after her dad has killed him to prove a lesson about protecting his daughter. When Bell writes, When she howled, it was with her mouth against his unhearing ear, her lips close to his stretched and taxidermied jaws, full of the teeth she had just once felt so lovingly against her skin. , I was at once disturbed and also moved by Bell's ability to capture such haunting moments with his pitch perfect language.

My mind is full, I said, in a previous post, from processing images like these: predatory, daring, truthful. In these stories, the predator changes: the Wolf of course, but also the grandmother as the wolf, the woodsman as a killer, Red and other girls as wolf-slayers. We are all wolves, it seems, or we have the chance to be.

I can't quite say enough about this collection as a whole. Each story shouts with a such ferocity and diversity that I will have trouble sleeping tonight, not from being afraid of the Wolf, but rather from being afraid of language and all its power.