I’ve been reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan in the last several months. I know he’s not the most fashionable critic anymore, but I admire his attitude toward culture. I’ve heard some call him a “futurist” but this seems to run directly counter to McLuhan as I read him. If anything, McLuhan is a medievalist who has adapted himself to our futurist culture in order to bring a rather old timey message. McLuhan created what he called a The general idea is that for every new medium, four things always happen. 1. The new medium enhances some aspect of us or our life. 2. The new medium obsolesces some aspect of us or our life. 3. The new medium, when pushed to its maximum, ultimately reverses some aspect of our life. 4. The new medium retrieves some past aspect of us or our life. For example, the car: 1. It [...]

(it’s scaffolding) (it’s supposed to be temporary) (the domino effect) (had been forgotten about) (it was in storage) (nobody knew where) (that’s a logging road) (you can see its gutters) (they leave handprints) (they shudder with dolor) (nobody could settle on any particular color) (they meant different things to different people) (for luck) (on the […]

I wanna know which friend will die young, so I can spend more time with them now by Rachel Glaser you hurt my feelings so I lie and say, I do wanna fuck my roommate I say, We’ve pushed our beds so they share a wall dirty dishes are inevitable when you were young and bumped your head on the table your father would make a show of hitting the table when you bumped your knee in the doorway your father would kick the doorway I wanna know which friend will die so I can surprise my other friends we climb into the car, lick the cd pick the mountain with the most views L e t ’s t r y p r i m a l s c r e a m t h e r a p y S c r e a m a s l o [...]

THEATER I dropped down against the mosque wall curled my shoulders in let my feet fall apart tilting toward the rubble-dusted floor tried to still my lashes as rifles came clanging in their muzzles smelling out scent heated off a pulse I was playing dead between the dead a beast caught sight of my breath blew off my face he said: “Now he’s fucking dead” - – - WATER sign of life: can hold a world of fleets at once: requiring a new OCEANOGRAPHY: useful to mimic waves in an assault and hit shore at same time: see also HELICOPTER WAVE: SCHEDULED WAVE: descends from garden hoses to rinse asphalt of brain matter: to rinse body on steel slab prior to shroud: streams on land: in gutters: excellent solvent: ask child you want a toy: then ask you want a grenade: watch him jump and startle: date fronds shaking with [...]

An extremely subjective best & worst of 2010 so far… Best Chapbook: by (Octopus Books) Some images from the original archive are unavailable. Best Full Length: by Ben Mirov Other Full Lengths of Note: Paul Killebrew – (Canarium Books) Dottie Lasky – (Wave) Kevin Varrone – (UDP) Aaron Kunin – (Fence) Most Overrated: Most Underrated: by Carlos Oquendo de Amat Best Book You Haven’t Read: by Rachel Glaser A Forthcoming Book You’ll Want To Know About: Natalie Lyalin – (UDP) Related posts: “While I was masturbating, more rainforest disappeared” a brief and not recent internet roundup “Waltz with Sticks” by Genevieve Burger-Weiser NOTES ON NOISE Briefly remembering

has an excellent radio show called , which is surprisingly high brow stuff. In particular, Ideas has been running a series based on . has been tracing for listeners the origin of the modern public. It’s worth listening to from the beginning, but if you’re short on time, the last three episodes on Dutch painting, Elizabethan/Jacobean theater, and the formation of public through theater have all been especially worthwhile. is worth a listen if you’ve followed some of my blog posts on Allen Grossman’s The Sighted Singer. Grossman uses J.S. Mill’s idea that the speaker in lyric poetry is “overheard.” He is alone in his own mind, his own reverie, yet the lyric poet allows himself to be overheard by the audience, his readers. Compare this with the discussion in the Making Publics podcast about . In this, too, Hamlet self-consciously reveals his inner thoughts to an audience he does/n’t [...]

Writers in the scattered nation of good poetry are, in general, perfectionists. Many greats have been known to be tight-lipped about their process and to publish only what they deem categorically best. , on the other hand, doesn’t seem worried about perfection. He publishes so prodigiously that it’s hard to imagine he spends any time revising his work. I remember standing in a bookstore a couple years ago grazing among the poetry publications and discovering that he had poems in approximately half of the literary journals—good ones, too. I remember feeling a mixture of jealously, skepticism of various stripes, and stunned admiration for Hicok’s unique voice. I’ve read a fair amount of Hicok’s poetry since then—and had many opportunities, as he remains a prolific poet. The unfair comparison that occurs to me is . But Hicok is anything but the James Patterson of contemporary poetry (if you feel like posting [...]

V. Art Appreciation Have you heard the Taoist tale of the Taming of the Harp? Once in the hoary ages in the Ravine of Lungmen stood a Kiri tree, a veritable king of the forest. It reared its head to talk to the stars; its roots struck deep into the earth, mingling their bronzed coils with those of the silver dragon that slept beneath. And it came to pass that a mighty wizard made of this tree a wondrous harp, whose stubborn spirit should be tamed but by the greatest of musicians. For long the instrument was treasured by the Emperor of China, but all in vain were the efforts of those who in turn tried to draw melody from its strings. In response to their utmost strivings there came from the harp but harsh notes of disdain, ill-according with the songs they fain would sing. The harp refused to [...]

I was fortunate enough to have a American Literature professor who blew off the typical survey class BS and just gave us some of the best literature of the 19th century: Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, among others… In that class, I read Moby-Dick for the first time. I believe I read most of it over the course…

Comrades in Verse, a few notes for your fine ears on this lovely Day of Matriarchs: 1) To those culminating their MFA coursework and Theses, CONGRATULATIONS! The journey begins now! Our eyes and ears await you eagerly. 2) May is behaving kindly. This is *obviously* karmatic, so everyone be nice, and write nice poems, and pet puppies on the street, and drink lots of mint julepy things. 3) Happenings in New York City this coming week to keep us all merry, together, and listening: ——————————– Monday, 5/10: My dear friend, long-time workshop mate and rockstar BRANDON KREITLER, winner of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, is being presented with said honor and reading from his poems at the 92Y. ——————————– Tuesday 5/11: Our own Adam Fitzerald & Bianca Stone’s LADDER POETRY SERIES with a killer line-up of Ashbery, Zapruder and Landau: ——————————– Wednesday 5/12: Columbia: A Journal Issue 48 Launch Reading Featuring [...]

for David Shapiro I PARITY Underneath the garden, loose stars stapled to ribbed snail shells in octaves of sky, the revised mistranslation of a black pool expects what an inveterate tuba suggests: a broken interflow inhabiting the honeysuckle– but diction is unlivable, a plastic replica stuck in low tides, the snow’s psyche nearby, and the pool, its live-in help, third-persons the loud night, its open mouth an analogy of vowels… Such fierce quantums ingest roman à clefs, gondolas drifting on changed names below rows of dead windows. Oh, the globe’s pallor is so themelessly narrow, its doors glamorous and blind. Messy cement, set by geometrics, cannot fix it, though music’s lost paragraph can. II EVERYBODY HATES LOVE… its pale-colored loops. mental and spiritual, its woeful exaggerations primitive as tequila resonated through salt in vacuums invented by thieves– lorry lingo, islets, milkweed– and, yet, its purple-and-silver drivers get a groom’s reprieve, [...]

In a poem called “Life,” which appears in his most recent collection, (Pitt Poetry, 2010), writes: “The feeling that mysticism / is the only way to be polite…. / While I was masturbating, / more rainforest / disappeared….” These disclosures feel true—and inevitable, given what at least I believe about climate change and humans continuing to be humans. Also, these tragicomic disclosures reminds me of the “Note on Method” at the opening of Aaron Kunin’s just-released, (Fence, 2010). Kunin opines: “…I really believe that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art.” I don’t know if this belief is always true, but I’m willing to read on because I really admire the poet who’s willing to publicize it (for other testimonials of admiration see, for one, the recent ). Thus it is with humble joy that I’m simultaneously reading [...]

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