Everyday Barf

"Everyday Barf" is an essay by Eileen Myles. Better than that essay, though, is her poem "Snakes". 

Her book, Inferno, is pretty cool, too. It's a little scrambled, but there are some vivid NYC poet moments and fun takeaways. Takeaways like James Schuyler saying to Myles that she has to put objects in her poems -- real things, like cans of Pepsi. 

Anyhow, I've had barf on the mind. Yesterday, in the afternoon before a show (that's how the day seemed, leading up to the show), Brianna, with kindness, stopped the car because after Munchie's birthday event, I had to throw up. I'm a thirteen year old boy. I forgot to have a good dinner and did not take enough water. So I splashed all over the road with my whole core clenching up. It is so weird when I puke. Every part of my body gets involved. One of my eyes started watering, just one, and my crotch, if I even have crotch muscles, they also winced and lurched into the effort.  

So the sun was out shining on gray snow and I emptied myself out onto this angular slice of Kedzie with people passing and our friend Paul in the car getting a good view. That's OK. I like to watch my friends sing, and I don't mind seeing them throw up. As long as they're better afterward and don't do it too often. Just part of the getting-to-know-you experience. 

Paul and I just finished a song a few days before and called it "Everyday Barf". The song crept along to get ready for it's 9pm showcase. Since we had to write five songs in three weeks, I hustled the lyrics and the title together. If it were to be submitted to an institution I would count it as plagiarism.

The words come from the maxims of Herakleitos and one William Carlos William poem, "Pastoral", and the title is Myles. I like the circular quality of Herakleitos' phrasing, and WCW is just so cool in his knowing the neighborhood type of thinking. 

Some lines I took and rearranged and mashed to meet syllable requirements ("ingenuously", whoa), and messed with for setting purposes.  

• The river we stepped into is not the river in which we stand.
• The bow is alive only when it kills
• The little sparrows / hop ingenuously / about the pavement / quarreling / with sharp voices / over those things / that interest them. / But we who are wiser / shut ourselves in / on either hand / and no one knows / whether we think good / or evil. 

When I think of what I'm doing when I'm not sitting with my friends talking it is usually writing a zine. When I was 15 I remember wearing thick corduroy pants and my blue St. Rita polo. I was leaving school on some stupid February day with definite gray snow crusting the landscape and I kept telling myself, you are a bass player, you are a musician. After maybe 13 years I know bass playing is something I do but the comfort or patient carelessness I feel for zine writing I do not feel with songwriting. 

How good is a good song? A comic artist told me I should not think of ideals when I work on a piece. There are no ideal songs or books or paintings. Still, you play a set, another band goes on, you think, whoa, now that's a song. I get a little fussy about and start babbling in the 20mins leading into and out of a set, but I'm excited by the prospect of trying to not take it seriously. Most of the time, I think, the songs I shake out are accurate representations of where I am. 

When we were finishing the set list for last night's show, I kept thinking of the Bob Dylan interview in a 2012 issue of Rolling Stone. I'm not a true or devotional Dylan fan, I only know his hits, but I love to hear longtime artists talk about songs and music. If Diana Ross or Joe Strummer would go on record about these topics, I'd read that, too. 

RS - Before we end the conversation, I want to ask about the controversy over your quotations in your songs from the works of other writers, such as Japanese author Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza," and the Civil War poetry of Henry Timrod. Some critics say that you didn 't cite your sources clearly. Yet in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. What's your response to those kinds of charges?BD - Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get – It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.

RS - Seriously?BD - I'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.

Cool Poems

A poem for vipers

BY JOHN WIENERS

I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with

Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me

Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us

shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom

chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels

of a strange car is his stash—The ritual.

We make it. And have made it.

For months now together after midnight.

Soon I know the fuzz will

interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and

I shall be placed on probation. The poem

does not lie to us. We lie under

its law, alive in the glamour of this hour

able to enter into the sacred places

of his dark people, who carry secrets

glassed in their eyes and hide words

under the coats of their tongue.

 

6.16.58

My friend Vicky says she only reads some poets b/c they make her want to write more, not exactly because the poems are good or moving in a deeply emotional way, just that they cause her want to wear sunglasses and go for a walk. 

This John Weiners poem makes me feel similarly. I love the sounds of "up the street under" and other preposition entrances, and also the moments in writing when people sit around scheming things and then lift off like geese or bombers to go and cause them, successfully or not. The title coming at the end, I like that, too. 

Here is something you might like to play in the background while cleaning your filthy kitchen or bedroom, too. --> Poetry Foundation: Short Oral History of Frank O'Hara w/ John Ashbery and Others 

Prose Poem #5

Here is another piece I wrote, this one about 

the neighborhood on 111th and Western.  

"Beverly"

The rosary in my Grandma’s hands holds Oh My Gods in the beads: slinks to life on the table, shivers when she turns away.
          My one grandfather is in the cemetery. The other chops ox tail in the kitchen. He has dim eyesight, he has not told me of his friend who suffered from severed head, which Latino parks I am not to visit, or that my oldest uncle’s wife has left him for an Argentine florist. “Infidelity is the risk of the entrepreneur,” my grandfather will say, tapping his union pin. 

Prose Poem #4

Below is Carl Sandburg's "Wilderness." I am typing this from Sandburg Court, an
apartment complex in Chicago, how about that. There is a rough sketch of him in
the security office by an elevator I take, but I can't see any other note of this place
being his namesake.

Anyhow, this is a longer one, I guess. But Sandburg's phrasing is always evocative
of bodies and primal things, so reading him moves quickly. His sense of balance
with these paired "A & B," "sniff and guess" moments is great. I feel like he had a
slim secret dictionary full of power words when he wrote. Check out "The Mob,"
too, if you like this one.

*                  *                *  "Wilderness"

There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red  tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this  wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will  not let it go. There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I  pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and  take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and  loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for  eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the  sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will  not let it go. There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates  … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with  porpoises … before land was … before the water went down …  before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced …  yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here  are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and  blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting …  ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting —I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle  flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights  among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird  warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles  in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the  blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the  mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony  head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a  man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother  and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to  God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and  no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from  the wilderness.

Prose Poem #3

Here is a short thing I wrote about a CD release party in 2005. A guy bit me, and I scared coworkers.

 "My Education"

            Bobby the night engineer would call at 4am to confide things. “I do not like my job,” “Whiskey leaves a bad smell.” 

            Once he told me he'd been thinking of faking his death. I asked how. 

            “It will look like an overdose…” he whispered. 

            “People will believe it,” I said. 

This, the year of my education. I learned to stop kissing my boss, be fearful of the Halsted street police who struck me in their cars and mourned the death of tsars, and soon after I lost my limp Bobby returned to become our shitty Lazarus, threw a revival party in October. Everyone came. Leaves hopping from trees made us cinematic. Denim boys smoking outside with neck tattoos made me nervous. As I ascended the stairs I heard a thud, and I arrived in time to see everything begin.

“That’s no way to treat a lady!” – the last thing Greg said before his nose was shattered, a milk carton exploded against Bobby’s chest, a man with a swallow on his throat bit my thumb while friends leaked through the window onto neighboring roofs. This went on for some time.

Prose Poem #2

Here is another prose poem, this one by Charles Simic, a Serbian-American poet
who grew up next to a slaughterhouse. His collection The World Doesn't End is
tiny and glorious. The untitled piece posted below has the great absence of context,
just this shimmy from moment to moment.

(I used a line from this untitled poem to end one of my own, which I'll post tomorrow.)

Prose Poem #1

A form I like to play with is the prose poem. One teacher I had said it was a haunted house, a poem story, or a weird box. These things are true in that context is cut, things always take on this spooky "how did it happen" quality. I think from this Thursday to next, all my posts will be prose poems. Or maybe, maybe each Thursday I write one. It's hard to say.

This one comes from the Frenchman Charles Baudelaire, who famously looks pissed off and deranged in all of his portraits, which is true of his life, though he did have portraits made of himself, so maybe things could have been worse. Still, there is nothing worse than telling people their lives are not tricky.

Click on this fellow to read him. You may need to steal him off your screen and enlarge, or else hit "command+" to zoom.

November Weather

What Next

BY FREDERICK SEIDEL

So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.

It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty.

The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees

In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.

But daylight saving is over.

And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover

Is over. And it’s altogether November.

And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.