August 3, 2017 On Poetry Satellites Are Spinning: Notes on a Sun Ra Poem By Paul Youngquist Sun Ra, taken during the filming of Space Is the Place. Courtesy the collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis. Sun Ra, the visionary leader of the jazz ensemble he called his “Arkestra,” once submitted a manuscript of poems to a commercial publisher, receiving it back with a curt editorial comment: they seemed written in an alien language. He took it as a compliment. Like most readers of his poetry, I encountered it first in a form other than book. I wish I could say I bought those old El Saturn records with poems printed on their jackets—that would make me so cool—but I came to Sun Ra late, after he’d left the planet (in common parlance, died) in 1993. I never saw him perform live, I bought only digital versions of the Arkestra’s recordings, and I confess I never bothered reading their microtype liner notes. Sun Ra’s poetry remained unknown to me until I heard it late one night. I was watching that glorious low-budget science-fiction blaxploitation docudrama, Space Is the Place (1974): The pulsating orange spaceship carrying Sun Ra and the Arkestra to planet Earth has just landed. Wearing a Pharaoh’s headdress, Sun Ra speaks quietly about music as “another kind of language,” not alien but concerned with other worlds. Cut to June Tyson, his favored vocalist, head wrapped in gold netting, eyes shaded by bronze aviators, mouth smiling as she sings, in silver tones, “The Satellites Are Spinning,” by Sun Ra: The satellites are spinning A new day is dawning The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening Oh we sing this song to A brave tomorrow. Oh we sing this song to Abolish sorrow. The satellites are spinning A better day is breaking The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening. Read More
July 6, 2017 On Poetry Queer Bubbles By Andrew Ridker How CAConrad turns ritual into poetry. CAConrad in a still from The Book of Conrad, a 2015 documentary by Delinquent Films. Last year, I attended a reading at Over the Eight, the now-defunct Williamsburg bar and performance space. Eileen Myles was headlining. But another poet, CAConrad, a close friend of Myles, captured my attention. He took his place at center stage, a large man draped in billowy clothes and what he calls his “war hair,” which he hasn’t cut since 2006, on the three-year anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Baghdad. He read from a piece entitled “Power Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.” It began with what sounded like a short story or anecdote: “I occupied a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said, “to bless children with bubbles that will make them queer.” He went on to describe the reactions of passersby as he blew bubbles, shouting that they had magical properties to “help rid the world of homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of stupidity.” The audience laughed. Some cheered. Conrad smiled. “Bubbles, of course, do not have such powers,” he acknowledged—but he was serious, serious about the act of standing on a corner blowing bubbles and watching how the world responded. After relating the anecdote, he told us that he’d taken notes on the experience. These notes became a poem, which he read aloud. The poem was completely unexpected—it was not in any way about bubbles, for one thing—but it was funny, angry, shot through with violence and informed by a reverence for nature. The first lines stuck with me: “I was naked / on a mountaintop / kissing someone / who loved me,” and the last: “there is nothing little about the cicada revving up while / we think our car horns / are so impressive.” The audience was rapt. You could hear the uninitiated whispering: Who is this guy? Read More
May 15, 2017 On Poetry Wax Poetic By Carson Vaughan Fonograf Editions brings poets to vinyl. To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl—the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls—is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator. “The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. “The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.” We were discussing Aloha/irish trees, a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions—a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy production process that marks most professional recordings. In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them; they didn’t know they were cutting an album at all. “It was like having your picture taken when you weren’t posing,” Myles says. Reading their poem “Sorry” on the first track, they trip on the line “let me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful”—restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, “Fuck, this is so hard.” They finish, but not well. “I think I’m just gonna read that one again.” Read More
March 30, 2017 On Poetry The Poetry of Pop By Adam Bradley Some poets pick some song lyrics worth reading. Farrah Karapetian, Soundscape 36, 2015, unique chromogenic photogram, metallic, 40″ x 45″. Courtesy the artist and Danziger Gallery. Most of us don’t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between “Talkin’ New York” (1962) and “Thunder on the Mountain” (2006). But let’s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: “Blue” Bland, Brown, Gentry. It’s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term “poet” is a kind of coronation, we’re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do. Perhaps Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning—of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The poetry in pop songs can be masterful or careless, disposable or timeless. It can be in the service of well-crafted narratives (like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”) or more abstract tone pieces (like Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw”). It can result in works that endure (like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s signature song “Turn On Your Love Light,” covered dozens of times including, famously, by Bob Weir’s Grateful Dead) or works that capture a moment and then recede into nostalgia (like Bobby Brown’s chart-topping 1989 hit “My Prerogative”). Read More
March 21, 2017 Poetry Now By Frederick Seidel Photo: Arun Kulshreshtha For Robert Silvers And you could say we’ve been living in clover From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama. Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes We the people voted in has taken over. Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover, From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times. It’s over. Read More
November 10, 2016 Poetry Don’t Make a Movie About Me By Johnny Cash This month, Blue Rider Press will publish Forever Words: The Unknown Poems of Johnny Cash. Compiled from a mountain of Cash’s handwritten poetry (all unpublished), the work in Forever Words spans the many stages of Cash’s career. “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” is one of many pieces within that reflect Cash’s “humorous strand,” poet Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction. It reflects “Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering.” From the cover of Out Among the Stars. Christmas 1982 If anybody made a movie out of my life I wouldn’t like it, but I’d watch it twice If they halfway tried to do it right There’d be forty screen writers workin’ day and niteThey’d need a research team from Uncle Sam And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham It would run ten days in the final cut And that would mean leaving out the gossip smutAnd I do request for my children’s sake Don’t ever let ’em do a new re-make The thing I’m sayin’ is, don’t you see, Don’t make a movie ’bout me Even for T.V. Don’t make a movie ’bout me Read More