“How white everything was, from / neighbors to church, to storybooks— / like on cloudy days when / the sky is all glare.” – Han VanderHart, “Partial List of Hauntings”
One more thing about AWP—what do we want life to made of? As long as I’ve known I wanted to be an artist of some kind (so since high school), basically all I’ve wanted is to both create art and be around art all the time. Go to shows, go to movies, go to poetry readings, go to museums. 16-year-old me might be disappointed to learn that Fat Wreck Chords never signed my band and we never headlined Warped Tour, but would be pretty stoked to learn that my life consisted of cool poetry readings in churches and street food outside Dodger Stadium and dropping cash at the Grown-Up Scholastic Book Fair For Indie Writers. Idk man. Been feeling lucky lately.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
It’s National Poetry Month! What a thing, to have AWP right before National Poetry Month. You know, I make a reading schedule in advance. Thanks to AWP, there are all these new books on my shelf, and they’re all junkball relievers, tossing screwballs and knucklers and 68-m.p.h. changeups at my schedule. First up, though, is friends’ books, and this one actually came in the mail a few days before the conference. Gotta have something to read on the plane, right? I didn’t want to lug around the other book I’m reading, because I can’t seem to do National Poetry Month without taking big swings. Anyway, this week, I was overjoyed to read Larks by Han VanderHart and plunge into the first 101 pages (first 4040 lines) of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford.
Larks by Han VanderHart: Han’s poems agree with me very much. Most of these are as concise as a honeysuckle. There’s something ineffably Southern in not just landscape and subject matter, but diction and syntax. That said, heads up for some heavy subject material here, including child sexual abuse and incest. What Southern literature exists without some heavy, uncomfortable subject matter, though, right? Read these poems out loud. I mean, always do that. But read these out loud.
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, pages 1-101, lines 1-4040 : what a thrill to dive into this poem with the intention of actually finishing it. I’ve feinted into these lines three or four times, but never gotten even this far. I’ve also picked the book up and read 1-2 pages out loud when I was stuck or needed inspiration (that’s happened way more often). One thing I’ve never done is read the forward by C.D. Wright, a phenomenal poet in her own right and St. Francis’s friend. Exciting to learn the whole thing is self-consciously trying to emulate epics of old (kinda feels obvious, after having it pointed out to me) and that the self-styled “St. Francis” hero of the poem is an enthusiastic anti-segregation crusader who just wants to put a knife through every racists’ eye.
What has always attracted me to the poem still holds up after 100 pages: Frank’s ecstatic, thrillingly unpunctuated language, the righteous Southern anger and dialect, the Tom Waitsian cast of misfit characters and alternating beautiful and desolate landscapes. Talk about lines to read out loud. To call this poem maximalist is underselling it. This poem is an explosion, it’s trying to wring as much use out of language as can be wrung. It wants to be read quickly, and yeah, sometimes it’s fun to take your hands off the wheel and holler. Slow down, though.
I will note that you sort of have to keep in mind that this poem was written in the late 1970s. There are some terms we no longer use in here, as well as some transphobia from an early character in a traveling circus.
BONUS FRANK EPIGRAPH:
I know the rich are the only ones that had any good old days
I know the black swan
I know the pas de deux
I know drunk women shooting their husbands on Saturday night
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Why not check out Cola, a band I’m almost certain has been recommended to me, but I just started listening to now. Here’s “Tracing Hallmarks.”
Hard to remember if I’ve mentioned on this newsletter how much I hate Shaquille O’Neal. That has a lot to do with how much I love Steph Curry, Nikola Jokic, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, all of whom The Big Jagoff seems to think are unworthy for some reason. Tom Ziller, in his daily newsletter, has a breakdown of historic nights from Steph and Jokic, with a reminder that Shaq sucks.
Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare with the surprise-to-nobody-but-still-needs-to-be-said piece at In These Times on how the Free Speech Warriors that made huge careers in the last 10 years talking about how censorious and dangerous the left is are now silent as ICE is kidnapping grad students off the street for blog posts or sending makeup artists to prison camps because of autism awareness tattoos. The actual bad shit is here, but the Bari Weisses and Jeffery Goldbergs of the world don’t care.
Let’s do a poem. It’s poetry month. Here’s Chicagoan Benjamin Niespodziany in Bennington Review with “UNCLE TIME”
Depressing read in 404 by Jason Koebler about how AI slop is an attack on reality itself, especially if we’re relying on the internet to inform us about reality. Which—we are. Remember: Miyazaki thinks your Ghibli lookalike knockoff Snapchat filters are “an insult to life itself.” (bonus link h/t to Emanuel Maiberg and Matthew Gault at 404)
Let’s end on a high note with a piece in Block Club by Lily Carey about Rodeo Farm in Little Village and how they’re reviving native prairie plant life. Climate solutions are available, if we are willing to do the (not even all that) hard work. Also a great reminder in this article that USians need to get over the judgy misperceptions about “neat” gardens and “weeds.”
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Remember to always swim at night. Swim to the forest of honor with the moon over your shoulder. Make friends with some freaks.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris