“living on a houseboat is a thing adults do / and the sky is full of helicopters.” – Amorak Huey, “Everything I Know About Life I Learned from 1980s Action Shows”
No time for an intro! We must talk poetry! Although I feel compelled to apologize for the excess in typos and unfinished sentences last week. It looks better now. Been a long goddamn month. Should also say up top that “Love In The Time Of Climate Change” is the title of a very good Amorak Huey poem that I read this week.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Poems! I am as a wet t-shirt contest participant in MTV TRL Spring Break 2001, and enjambed lines are coming at me out of a fire hose (not always with stanza breaks, either). The nipple-obscuring text on my increasingly translucent tank top reads EXTINCTION LEVEL by Amorak Huey, BOOM BOX by Amorak Huey, and The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, pages 302-383, lines 12,040-15,283, by Frank Stanford.
EXTINCTION LEVEL by Amorak Huey: what a perfect chapbook. Love, climate change anxiety, and short short poems. At AWP, I was keeping Han company while Amorak did a panel, they picked up this book, and we just started oohing and aahing over various poems and couldn’t stop. These poems are so readable. I told Amorak it would be a book—sort of like a mirror image of Matthew Rohrer’s They All Seemed Asleep—that I would read in one sitting before starting a day of writing. Last Saturday, I did exactly that in one 10-minute stationary bike session. I’ll probably do it again tomorrow. Here’s a whole poem, imagine stanza breaks after the first and third lines:
“Ars Poetica”
The words need context.
The world is on fire and I can’t stop
thinking about love.
What other context is there?
BOOM BOX by Amorak Huey: the book preceding Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy also deals heavily with heavy family issues. The speaker of these poems navigates cheating at Monopoly while his parents’s marriage is falling apart, anxieties at Little League, the mundanities of small-town Alabama, and growing-up-in-the-80s nostalgia. You would think, as a former Cracked.com contributor, that I might be burned out on 80s nostalgia, but man, I loved these poems. Amorak is not necessarily a narrative poet, these are definitely lyrics (complimentary), but he is really great at telling a story in a few lines. He also ends poems really strikingly, as in—I’ve written before about how the titles of poems are often hard for me to remember? Well, more than a couple of Amorak’s last lines stick in my brain. Absolutely check this one out. Sometime in the future, I will read BOOM BOX and Dad Jokes back-to-back, because they are excellent books about different types of and stages in fatherhood.
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, pages 302-383, lines 12,040-15,283: okay. I read Battlefield. It was an EXPERIENCE. When I was reading Homer last year, there were parts of both texts I kinda just had to power through, especially The Iliad. A lot of Battlefield is like that. I could not tell you who was speaking half the time, what Frank’s mission in writing it was, any kind of “it’s about God kicking Satan outta Heaven, obstensibly, but underneath it all, it’s really about Milton’s complicated feelings on the regicide he helped facilitate.”1 There were times, reading, when I wondered if maybe things have gone too far. If maybe 15,000+ lines of unpunctuated poetry with no stanza breaks and heavy Southern dialect2 was too much. Life is short in general, and Frank’s was tragically short. If Battlefield was, say, 5,000 lines, could we have maybe gotten another book like The Singing Knives?
On the very strong other hand, who the hell wants to think about utility in poetry? What an achievement this book is! I mean, Francis really goes for it, and the result is astonishing. There is such a poetic mind at work with these images and similes and the appreciation of the music of language as people speak it. That deep appreciation for common linguistic music gets at the poem’s key, which is the beating heart that cares about his friends enough to pull a knife on a racist theater owner and use sign language to warn other people about cops. Our man Francis Gildart is one goddamned heroic 13-year-old—there’s a lot of myth-making in this poem, which I read as a conscious effort to be in conversation with other epics—and he loves hanging out with outcasts and talking shit to fancy people. It’s like if Jesus, Holden Caulfield, and Oskar Mazerath had a redneck baby. The end result is something to behold and marvel at, something maybe not to read all the way through all the time but something to definitely pick through when your writing brain needs an ass-kicking. Long poems remind us that the form is limitless, that we can always push push push ourselves to do something wholly new, something unlike anything that’s ever existed before YET connected to those daring poets that came before. It’s a beautiful thing. Idk. I think I feel about long poems the way other people feel about space travel.
BONUS FRANK EPIGRAPH (ok these are the last three lines and not only do they rip, it is so so so funny to put these lines at the end of a 15,000+ line poem)
and the first time he used the telephone he yelled the reason being
so he said because my friend is so very far away and if you think I’m going
to tell you what else I saw you’re crazy as hell
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? We had some guy named Bob Sykora on The Lazy & Entitled Podcast to talk about his book and decide which utopian from 19th-century U.S. deserves Worker Of The Week (Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud) If you’d like some music? In celebration of all the 1980sness in Boom Box, why not some back-to-back-to-back shredding? I was gonna put Guns N Roses here—Appetite For Destruction is both named-checked in the title of a poem AND the only 80s metal album I can listen to straight through—but you’ve heard “Sweet Child O Mine.” If not while casually scrolling Instagram this morning, then perhaps in the grocery store yesterday. And sure, you’ve heard this song on this blog before, but not in a long time, and probably not while reading from BOOM BOX. Grab your copy of BOOM BOX, pick some poems to read aloud, and “Ego Death” by Polyphia feat. Steve Vai.
An extremely funny thing happened this week. Depressing and awful, but funny. The guy who founded Business Insider is launching a new blog or something, I don’t care what it is. He’s putting together a “staff” entirely made of AI “people” he “created.” One “human” issue remains, though: Henry Blodget apparently thinks there’s no way to compliment a coworker without incurring an HR violation (says a lot about him). Despite this known risk, Hornball Henry creates an “C-suite exec” and immediately starts hitting on her. “Her” being the doesn’t-have-a-physical-body Large Language Model that Horny Hank gave a name. What would Francis Gildart say. Matthew Gault at 404 and Albert Burneko at Defector both have good writeups. I could easily get a blog post out of this, but all I feel like saying right now is this: the way that many people choose to live life is so sad.
As penance for devoting so many column inches to AI on the first link, the rest of these are really cool stories about people and cities fighting climate change. Here’s Raphael Rashid in Guardian about the highway in Seoul that got turned into a stream with no ill effects on traffic BUT plenty of positive effects re: flood management and air pollution.
Here’s the blog Bicycle Dutch with the story of how a “motorway from nothing to nowhere” was destroyed and turned back into a canal.
Louise Schiavone in Forbes—yes, FORBES—on how Chesapeake Bay oysters are making a comeback. Love the Chesapeake Bay, protect the Chesapeake Bay.
Oh damn, how’d this trailer for How To Blow Up A Pipeline, available to watch on Hulu now, get here?
I recently learned about the very cool Wild Mile Project on the Chicago River. It’s the flagship project of nonprofit group Urban Rivers, and its aim is to create habitats that mimic wetland ecosystems. There are boardwalks, native wetland species, and gardens that let plants grow directly through the built materials to take root in the river. It rocks. Dear cities, treat your rivers with respect.
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. As a benediction, may I share a little more Amorak, from the poem “The Fathers at the Little League Field” (imagine this in couplets):
A foul out of play bounds toward the parking lot,
one man jingles keys and says too loudly,
Hoo boy, better move that ‘Bird, which he does,
giving the engine an unnecessary punch
before shifting into drive for the 200-foot journey
to safer haven. The unwritten ways
we call attention to ourselves render us immortal.
These fathers never had a problem disappointment couldn’t solve.
Once you accept that’s just how some customers are, well, I’m not gonna say life gets easier, per se, but your ability to deal with it in healthy ways gets easier. Later:
These men are thirty-three or forty-four,
their ties are loosened, they scuff nicer shoes
than their own fathers ever owned. They sell
and supervise, commute and count and keep score.
There is nothing they can’t have.
Well. Almost nothing. They can’t take the magic that makes you you.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
“it’s about vampires, ostensibly, but underneath it all, it’s really about the reunification of Germany” is the greatest line read of all time and it’s a crime that clip isn’t on youtube what is the internet even for
you could not write this book today, and that is more than fine. White writers, you never really had a pass to use the n word, but if you’re born any time after Frank Stanford’s 1978 death? You especially should not be hard-R-ing in your poems.