Montevidayo

Because comic strips and comic books were in childhood (and remain today) such a great love of mine, I was so happy to be invited by Ki Russell and Chun Lee of Southwestern Review to have one of the chapters of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold be given to an artist for a graphic novel themed issue. They have kindly given me permission to place the images here, as the journal is distributed mainly in-house at ULL. I had no contact with the artist, Jeff Darwin, for this, which also lends the experience a certain supernatural glow: like having my mind read in pictures.
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[When I was down in Louisiana over spring break, this undergraduate student James Bellard got picked up by campus police because a copy of his poem imitating my poems had come to the attention of the authorities, so I asked him to write up his own version of the events.]

Luck of the Irish

It was late at night when I got the e-mail for the assignment to write an imitation of Johannes Göransson. I was sick and really didn’t feel like writing a poem that I wouldn’t finish till 11:30 that night, but I hated being sick more and to change my routine would be to let the virus win. So, I read a few of Johannes’s poems. I picked out some elements of his style (killing, doll penis’s, and demons to name a few). The overall feel of his style was that it was quite disturbing. I set out to make my imitation even more disturbing—like the ramblings of a schizophrenic before some terrible act—and after the events that transgressed shortly thereafter, I’d say I’d surpassed my own expectations in that. This is the poem:

Dear, Lucifer

i opened up my refrigerator, and thought, who should i kill today, or maybe someone should kill me because something really only has meaning when its wrapped up, because there needs to be a moment that sUMmarizes it all up. so give me the super-freaky super-nunchuck from outer-space. let the death-scythe Carve my pain into my soul. but i didn’t have a death-scythe in my refrigerator, only a bottle of tooth-paste that i could use to slowly slit my wrist, only I couldn’t do it because that wouldn’t be as sexy… not that i want to be dead, but to die. Hey, look there’s a doll in here with a penis.

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[From Crispin Sartwell:]

“Totalitarianism – whether Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Suharto’s, or Saddam Hussein’s – is not only a political system; it is an aesthetic, a style of art. Or: aesthetics is politics; the way things look is an aspect of what they are. Forms of power generate symbols, styles, visual vocabularies. As we tear down the facade of Saddam’s Iraq, we’re getting further insight into the aesthetic principles of classical twentieth-century dictatorship.
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Lisa L. Moore blogs about Kate Durbin and Gregory Orr’s ambivalent feelings about the relationship between fashion and poetry:

“Throwing fashion, a business run by gay men that caters to women, into the mix, risks undoing all that good masculinizing cultural labor. You know what? Too bad. And go Kate, Marina, Linda, and all the other genre-mixing, high-low culture-combining, irreverent and brilliant women artists who make David Orr and his ilk nervous.”

This relates not just to the gurlesque anthology’s invasion of “unsuspecting” readers with their “lowbrow” (C-level) poetry, but also to a recent post I wrote about the horror of ornamentality (which is always “excessive”) in modernism.

Sometime Monteviday-ean Jeffrey Angles has a new book out from U of Minnesota Press, Writing the Love of Boys.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

“Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the fin de siècle Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological.

Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.
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Is anyone else as obsessed as I am with PJ Harvey’s new album Let England Shake?  It is a soundtrack to Western decadence.  It is historical poetry about what happens when empires fatten, slacken, and die.  It is necropolitical.  A war necropastoral.  In “The Glorious Land,” the album offers the only possible caption to the photos of dead bodies taken by the Kill Team of American soldiers who murdered, among others, an innocent 15-year-old Afghan and kept his severed finger:

“What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children.
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children.
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is orphaned children.
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children.” (continue reading…)

Younger feminists tend to begin on the defensive. Routinely criticized for lack of political engagement, reactionary domesticity, or capitulation to girly-ness, “third wave” feminists—roughly, those emerging in the 1980s and beyond—must confront the stereotype that they are complacent and ungrateful slackers.

In their new anthology Gurlesque, poets Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg suggest that this criticism is misplaced. Those who scoff at the third wave fail to recognize the variety of ways a feminist can appear in aesthetic contexts of adornment and display, contexts that bear complex relations to norms for women in the culture at large. In other words, a feminist can be a badass in a dress. Assembling an energetic collection of work by poets and visual artists in their twenties, 30s, and early 40s, Glenum and Greenberg define a “Gurlesque” aesthetic as “a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy.”

Make sure you check out Carina Finn’s blog, which is one of the best blogs out there:

“intense pain is “language-destroying” so destroyed language is melted makeup a collapse of pain or violent language a weapon of the revolution as a sublimated form of fucking :”

A prose translation by G.J. Racz of a sonnet by Lope De Vega:

To feel faint, daring, furious, surly, tender, generous, evasive, encouraged, mortal, like a corpse, alive, loyal, a traitor; a coward and also brave. To feel disoriented and ill at ease away from your beloved to show yourself happy, sad, humble, proud, angry, courageous and in cowardly disappointment, to drink poison as if a sweet potion, to forsake gain in favor of harm, to believe that heaven in a hell can fit, to give up life and soul for inevitable frustration, all of this is love; he who has tasted it knows it well.

It’s part of Yale’s incredible Margellos World Republic of Letters series, a translation series that “identifies works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers, canonical works of literature and philosophy needing new translations, as well as important contemporary authors whose work has not yet been translated into English.”

Please come experience my poetry live @ Flying Object on Sunday, with Dredd Foole. Should be a good time — here’s a sneak peak of what you’re in for: