Hip-Hop Lessons for Renato Gómez, part one

This will probably be the post that gets me kidnapped by some record label's ninjas and shipped off to Copyright Guantanamo, but fuck it. Here we go. Renato, my friend, you cannot tell me that you do not like hip-hop and then mention the name Warren G. You must take the following introductory course and then, if you tell me again that you really didn't like any of these songs, then fine, you don't like hip-hop, and I feel very sorry for you.

I myself cannot understand how any poet could be anything other than completely obsessed with hip-hop. Most, if not all, of the best American poets of the last 25 years have been rappers. While poety-poets became more and more grammatically asinine, rappers maintained the importance of statement. As poety-poets abandoned basic things like rhythm and rhyme as impossibly corny, rappers continually found new ways to use them well. As poety-poets got all fake-Marxist-ivory-tower, rappers kept their feet on the street, usually in very expensive sneakers. The result is, or at least was, a responsive, populist, cool form based mostly on the artful use of words. Here, in no order of any kind, are some classic examples of how awesome it is, and I defy you, Renato, to dislike them all.

1. Nas, "NY State of Mind"

When I first moved to New York, I took the train out to Queens and as it came up from under the river I looked over at the Queensbridge Projects and I was so thrilled to be looking at the place where Nas grew up. It mattered more than the Empire State Building or whatever other nonsense. The intricacy of the verses in this song continues to stun me, and I've listened to it almost every week for more than ten years. Crime narrative, gangster shit, basically, but aestheticized by that DJ Premier beat until it winds up cooler than a Jean-Pierre Melville movie. I saw Nas live once and I felt like I went to Rap College.

2. Gang Starr, "You Know My Steez"

The summer this record came out I heard this song 4 or 5 times in a row at every single party I went to. Nobody could believe how great this song was. Another DJ Premier beat, the always-reliable Guru, a really weird THX-1138 video, and "the illest warlock tactics," which are so necessary. The problem with Gang Starr is that it's hard to pick a single song. The album this is from, "Moment of Truth," was the last in a string of 4 consecutive records that were simply incredible, so fuck it, here's "Soliloquy of Chaos" too.


3. Wu-Tang Clan, "Da Mystery of Chessboxin"

This record came out the summer I started smoking pot, two facts that would go a long way towards determining the unfortunate direction of my misspent youth. I would come home, eat everything in the house, think no one could tell I was high, and watch this. Every day. There's going to be a whole graduate seminar on the Wu, obviously, but this remains the best general introduction. Everyone's verse is good, beat's good, and in general this video makes them all seem like the most dangerous, grimy bunch of rap assassin motherfuckers in the history of murder. All of which is good.

4. Ghostface Killah, "Daytona 500"

Thanks to the RZA beats, the first four or five solo albums by Wu-Tang members were all really great, but over time this one by Ghostface, "Ironman," has really stood up. This song's so good even Cappadonna sounds like he speaks English. There are all these skits on this album about how Ghostface is the true and living God who creates all reality with his mind, which sounds about right to me. The man used to have a gigantic gold eagle bracelet, but then he melted it down and had other things made from it. He's also the king of dying sneakers different colors. Blue and cream.

5. Oukast, "Player's Ball"

You'll have to click the link above to see the video, but it's totally worth it to see how young they were back then. This was also in heavy rotation on Rap City when I was a young pothead, and Outkast was really, outside of the Geto Boys, the first of what would be a huge wave of Southern hip-hop. The concept here is pretty basic: everyone's a pimp and it's awesome and they love it, etc. Play on, players, play on.

6. Juvenile, "Ha"

Again, click the link. More Southern stuff, this time from New Orleans. I went there for the first time shortly after this video came out, and we promptly took a wrong turn off the highway and wound up in the neighborhood where this video was shot. Everyone had their doghouses chained to trees and fences. I was amazed at the idea that doghouse theft could be such a problem that a whole community would move against it so aggressively, but New Orleans is like that: full of civic spirit. I was at several parties where this kind of bounce, as they call it down there, was the only music played, and they were the best parties ever. Every time I saw a convertible full of girls standing up ass dancing their way down the street, this was the song they were dancing to. Again, tremendous civic spirit.

And so concludes part one. Coming up in part two, we visit the West Coast then jet back to Brooklyn to pose the question: Gangster intellectual or intellectual gangster?

Shit you can read.

I spend a fair amount of time here talking about things in Spanish that haven't been translated, and that's fine and everything, but there's a bunch of shit that has translated (or even, imagine it, written in English that are totally worth the trouble.

I am, however, feeling really fucking lazy right now, so just imagine you see images, pictures of book covers and things, weird author photos, and everything's linked and I don't expect you to just open another tab and cut/paste whatever name your curious about into a search engine.

Also, it's after 4 a.m. and I just got off work two hours ago, my mental state is about what you'd expect, so this is a totally random list.

1. Joe Ceravalo I bought a selected poems of his the other day and it kicked my ass. Joe was from Astoria (Queens get the money) and seems to get kind of written off as a "second generation New York School poet" which is your fucking loss if you care about shit like that. Most of his work was originally published on Ted Berrigan's C Press, and he took workshops with Koch and O'Hara. Much more abstract than any of those poets. Very light touch.

2. Steve Carey Another New York poet, his Selected Poems came out recently and came highly recommended. Totally awesome weird wry poems that kick up a considerable atmosphere.

3. Luis Cernuda One of my favorite poets ever. Steve Dolph brought me back a Complete Poetry of his from Spain and I'll probably have that book until I die. Cernuda was Spanish, part of "Generation of 27" with Lorca and Vicente Alexandre (who I think won a Nobel) and a bunch of other really good poets. But Luis has it over all of them, as far as I'm concerned, Lorca included. He left Spain after the Civil War there, lived is Massachusetts for a while, hated it, then went to Mexico on vacation once and then immediately moved there. That's when the poems get really good, for whatever reason. There's a lot of terribly corny poetry written about sex and related topics in the Spanish language. Cernuda's one of the only poets I can think of who writes about it well, especially totally hopeless lust. White Pine Press recently put out a collection of Cernuda's poems translated by Stephen Kessler. We had some of these in Calque, and Stephen is a good friend of mine, so I can't really claim to have no horse in this race, but I think the translations are exceptionally good.

4. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa I have compared this translation to the original at great length, and read both versions more times than I can count, and I am convinced this is the greatest translation ever published.

5. This goddamn Geto Boys song, which is basically just Scarface going off about how to behave when you're under indictment.

I'm doing a reading on Saturday, in Brooklyn: 298 Eckford, Apt. 1R off the Greenpoint G train, 8PM being the time. The bill looks as such:

ART:
Emily Zuch
Hanna Jayanti
Austin English
Katya Tepper
Jake Brower
Maria Doubrovskaya
...and many more....

Literature:
The Magnificents
Laura Jaramillo
Brandon Holmquest
Pavel Lembersky


Alcohol:
Henny
Cristal
BYO

There's this facebook invite, if you like that sort of thing.

I've made a fair number of copies of a book. It looks like something I would have made when I was 17. I can't stop laughing everytime I look at it. It's called Electric Blimp. Four poems and one story. Here is a piece of that story:


No hay una pena más grande que una casa sucia

He swung the hammer down and porcelain shattered. Again. Again. Again. The hammer fell and shards of glass leapt up then fell in arcs onto the counter, the floor, and the hammer rose. Again. Samuel swung from his heels. Came off his feet on contact. Hand thrown across his face to shield his eyes.

When it was done the kitchen lay littered with small sharp glass. Every dish in the house smashed except: 1 plate 1 bowl 1 glass 1 mug 1 fork 1 knife 1 spoon 1 pot 1 pan. These were dripping dry, freshly washed.

Samuel stepped back. Let the hammer fall to the floor. The sink: full of broken glass, bent and twisted silverware and knives. How would he get it out of there? He began to question his decision.

It had taken time to find the hammer. From thought to deed, no mere instant. He had searched, drawers and closet, before finding it. There had been a moment: on his knees rummaging violently under the sink, he had thought perhaps this is not the best idea. He had ignored it. But now he was certain: this had not been the best idea.

But it had been necessary to do something. The dish situation, a long standing irritation, demanded to be solved. He would wash them. Then dirty them. Then put them in the sink. And they would gather there birthing a strange grey sludge that filled all small gaps, those between fork tines for example, and clogged the drain. All dishes would need to be removed, the drain cleared, before washing could rightly commence. This would disturb the insect’s nests. The air would grow thick with them. Some sort of gnat or fruit fly in mass exodus toward the sky, their homes destroyed. Clear the drain. Clean the sink. Wash the dishes. Then make dinner. After dinner: dishes in the sink and Samuel would think: he didn’t want to wash them today, he had already chored today, and anyway he had just eaten, wanted to relax, read a book, smoke a few cigarettes, etc. In a matter of days the insects were again laying eggs.

This had often bothered him. He had often felt powerless against it. But today a simple question asked itself: why did he own so many dishes in the first place? There was no answer, and the way forward was thereby glimpsed.

First thought: Donate them to a thrift store.
Problems: The dishes would have to be cleaned. They would have to be boxed up and carried. There were no thrift stores nearby. There was no one to borrow a wagon from. This meant taking the subway. Taking up two seats or the entire aisle. Disrupting the already harrowing commute. For this becoming an object of scorn universally loathed.

Second thought: Put them out on the curb.
Problems: The dishes would have to be cleaned. They would have to be boxed up. A sign would have to be made. Free dishes. This would attract the scroungers. They constantly combed the city in search of just such a windfall. He had seen them. Sad and lonely men, on bicycles with unnatural payload capabilities, in haggard pick up trucks, pushing jalopied shopping carts. They would swarm and return every day, believing the best place to find something free was a place where they’d already found it. If they were out there, milling about, Samuel might feel guilty. He might begin to give away things he needed.

Third thought: Throw them away.
Benefits: The dishes would not have to cleaned.
Problems: In the dumpster, anyone might see them. Garbage pickers, yet more sad than scroungers, or anyone else. They would see perfectly good dishes in the trash and wonder: what kind of a jerk just throws dishes away, why not donate them to a thrift store, or put them out on the curb, why throw out perfectly serviceable dishes? Unbroken dishes?

Fourth thought: There was a hammer somewhere.

+ Poesía, - Policía, or, The true tale of how Cecilia saved me from the overlong arm of the law

This is something I wrote for the book party for Cecilia Vicuña's new book, V, pictured left. I was out of town, so the ever gracious Renato Gomez, who published the book through the tRpode imprint he runs, read it for me.


I used to smoke in my apartment, in the kitchen, sitting in one weird yellow plastic chair, my feet up on another, reading a book and listening to the Yankees on the radio. Finally, my girlfriend won the argument and I started smoking outside, in the courtyard in the middle of our building. And suddenly I knew my neighbors, I knew what the weather was like, and I got a lot more reading done, because it's hard to follow a book and a ballgame at the same time, especially if the book is in one language, the ballgame in another. More than not minding it, I found that I actually liked smoking outside. I did not tell my girlfriend this. Her response would have surely been, Well, imagine how much you'll like quitting!

It's not even a problem when it rains, since there's a covered passageway about fifty feet long leading into the courtyard. If there happens to be water falling from the sky, that's where I go. I stay dry, my book stays dry, the cigarette gets smoked, everybody's happy. So that's where I was about a week ago, in the passageway, avoiding a light rain, reading Cecilia Vicuña's new book V. I finish the cigarette, put the book under my arm and I'm stubbing the cigarette out against a wall, so I can throw it in the trash rather than leave old butts lying around all over everywhere, when I hear the distinctive crackle of a police radio.

They're supposed to turn those things down when they sneak up on somebody, but they never remember. So I look up and here come two cops, a man and a woman, both somewhere in their early twenties, walking very carefully toward me. And the he-cop says, Excuse me, sir.

Let me just step aside from my narrative here for a moment to say this: I don't like cops. Not even a little bit. They make me very, very nervous. I've had guns pointed at me by cops and I've had guns pointed at me by muggers, and the muggers were less frightening. Pathologize me how you will in light of this information, I offer it simply as background to the incredible fear that seized me at the sight of these two people who, in jeans and T-shirts, would not have drawn a second look.

So, Excuse me, sir, says the he-cop. And I try to stay calm, look casual, and I say, What's up? And he asks me if I live here. I say that I do. He asks if I have identification, I tell him it's inside, in my apartment. He-cop is now very suspicious. He looks over at she-cop, and she's suspicious, too. He-cop asks me my name and I tell him it's Brandon. He says, Can I ask you what you're doing here, sir?

I was having a cigarette, I show him the butt in my hand, And reading a book, I say, reaching under my arm for the book. The cops flinch. Both of them. It was really, really cute. I show them the book. Yeah?, says the still suspicious he-cop, what's the book about?

I tell him it's a book of poems, so it's not really about anything the way a novel might be, but it's...well it's by this woman from Chile named Cecilia Vicuña. I tell him I met her a few nights ago, at this gallery in Soho. I describe her: she's about this tall, she has hair like so, a face like so, a voice like so. I'm basically just scared to death and I can't stop talking, just rambling on, hoping that something I say is going to convince him that I'm harmless-crazy, as opposed to whatever kind of criminal he considers me to be at present.

I show him the book so he can see that it's in Spanish. I say the book's kind of about language and how it works and how poetry and what we call religion now but what we used to call magic were basically all the same thing once. How a long time ago poetry and religion and magic and art and maybe science, too, were all a single thing and that thing was called poetry. I tell him the book is mostly about how poetry is still that single, weird thing, still magical-religious-word-science-art, but we've gotten so used to it not being that, to those things not being the same thing, that we forgot, so Cecilia is here to remind us.

And my hands are shaking, my heart is pounding and I can't really breath I'm so freaked out by these cops, so I just keep talking, about how last year I was working as a proofreader in the Financial District and they gave me this dictionary that had a section in the back on paleo-linguistics, which is when word scientists use modern languages to figure out what ancient languages were like. Specifically one ancient language called Indo-European, which is the ancestor of many, many languages. And these word scientists know that the people who spoke this ancestor language had horses, and lived where it was snowy, and had kings and poetry and that's really all that was known about them when that dictionary was written back in the early 80's. I start talking about how these word scientists have reconstructed the words of this ancestor language, and how in the introduction to the dictionary of reconstructed words it said that every word was originally a poem. Every word was a successful attempt to capture something in the world and turn it into language, and every word became a word, rather than something weird someone said once, because it was a successful attempt. That the magic was that: the attempt being successful, and when that happened it was so amazing that everyone remembered and started saying it and so a word was born. That's how every word was born.

He-cop is looking at me very quizzically now, so I tell him that at that gallery in Soho the other night Cecilia wrapped everybody there in yarn then told us all that the Mayas believed the gods made humans because they wanted to hear some poetry for a change. I say that if that's true, which it obviously is, and if the word scientists are right that every word was once a poem, which they obviously are, then Cecilia's book is about getting back to that moment: getting back to when every word was an awesome piece of magical-religious-word-science-art, the creation of which is the whole reason we're on the planet in the first place. Gods or no gods.

Suddenly I realize I've been rambling on about poetry and paleo-linguistics to a New York City cop for I don't know how long. This seems bad, so I try to swing the conversation back down to earth, to me, and how I'm not insane or illegal enough to arrest. I tell him that Cecilia was nice enough to sign the book to me and my girlfriend, who won't let me smoke in the house anymore which is why I'm outside, and I show him Cecilia's signature, which is more a drawing than a signature, ranging all over the title page, and I point to my name, Brandon, right there in Cecilia's handwriting.

And he-cop has the weirdest look on his face. It takes me a minute to figure out that he's trying not to smile. He's kind of wrestling with a grin and losing. She-cop is openly giggling. And now they're behaving very differently. They're not nearly as suspicious. He-cop apologizes for disturbing me. He says, It's just that there have been a lot of burglaries in the area recently, which is a standard cop lie. I've heard that line at least a dozen times. What really happened was they mistook me for one of my neighbors, one of the guys a little younger than me that hang around the building looking kind of gangsterish, smoking weed and bothering nobody.

But now he-cop is trying to extricate himself from this situation. They're sorry for disturbing me, he says, and they're really sorry but they kind of have to take down my name, if I don't mind, it's standard procedure. He-cop's in a tight spot here, caught between the regulations and his concern that I might go inside and call the ACLU as soon as he leaves. I say, Sure! No problem. I spell my name out, give them my DOB. I even ask them if they want my social security number, but they don't need it.

With all that written down in she-cop's little notebook, they shake their heads, apologize again for disturbing me and are about to leave when, just to be a jerk, I ask them if they want to hear one of the poems. They're really good, I assure them. He-cop laughs like now he thinks I might be more than just harmless-crazy. That's okay, he says, we don't speak Spanish anyway. Thanks all the same. You have a good day, sir.

Highbrids, or The Curmudgeon Chronicles, Vol 2

This recent essay by Ron Silliman and Jonathon Mayhew's Apocryphal Lorca have dragged the idea of American poetry as this deeply divided thing to my attention, more or less against my will.

On the off chance you're unfamiliar with the concept, let me go ahead and ruin your life by explaining it. (Inuit to missionary: If you'd never come here and told me about Jesus, would I have gone to hell? Missionary: No, of course not. Inuit: Then why the hell did you come and tell me?)

On the one hand you've got "mainstream" poets. They tend to be a little precious, sometimes they rhyme, and their poems are often corny and tend to have "wise" little observations, some sort of epiphany, emotions, and/or some type of personal confession. Robert Pinsky is one. So is Billy Collins.

On the other hand you've got the other poets. There's debate on what to call these folks. "Experimental" is sometimes used, as is "avant-garde," and there are other terms as well. Silliman's got a whole vocabulary list but I decline to use his terminology for various reasons. Let's go with "avant-garde" because it's the most problematic, shall we? These poets tend to do the opposite of whatever the mainstream poets do. So their poems avoid preciousness, never rhyme, and eschew epiphany, emotions and confession as though they were contagious. Barrett Watten is one. So is Jena Osman.

Obviously my characterizations of these two camps are broad generalizations. Don't write me letters about Helen Adam or whatever. I know. But, as rough sketches of the general outline, I'd say this is fairly accurate. These two groups have been in state of civil war for damn near a hundred years now. I'd place the start of it in the Ezra Pound/Amy Lowell feud, which by the way is an entertaining story (See Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era).

The mainstreamers are hugely dismissive of the A-Gists, as when Donald Hall dismisses Charles Olson as an imitator-spawning demagogue. The A-Gists are likewise dismissive of the mainstreamers as a bunch of candy-ass hacks. Both sides regularly claim that the work of the other side is "not even poetry." It's a really boring, banal debate which, like most of the conversation around poetry, serves mostly as a way for people to get their pundit on, which is tiresome. Anybody talking about this at all, me included, would be better served by just forgetting about the whole thing and writing a new poem instead.

My feeling is that the division is largely phantasmal. Certainly, there are differences between the two camps. But there are differences between the Republican and Democratic parties as well, and yet somehow some Ivy League asshole is always President, and anybody who's poor is still getting shit on.

Point being, whatever the aesthetic differences are between the mainstream and avant-garde, they're not what gives rise to the conflict, which is really about competition for resources, in this case publication, grants, and teaching jobs. In a word: money. In another: fame, at least the lame sort of fame that exists for poets. One group denies the validity of the other, tries to erase the other, because then all the goodies can be kept for them and their cronies. How fucking boring is that. And anyway it seems pretty obvious to me at least that the net effect of this nonsense is to drive both camps into defensive postures in relation to one another, which backs poetry as a whole into an isolated position in relation to the larger culture. Which is bad for both poetry and the culture. Simply put: it's a Phony War that is a form of marketing, aimed as much at potential patrons as at potential customers. The people that wage it have more in common than they'd like to admit, and like in politics this dialectic bounds the debate, excluding voices and methods that are dangerous to the mutual interests of the two "conflicting" parties.

One of the big weapons in the Phony War is anthologies. It's a great trick. You put everybody you like and agree with in a book, slap "American Poetry" somewhere on the cover, and there you go. I have a mainstream anthology called The Contemporary American Poets, edited by Mark Strand, that pulls this trick. The Donald Allen anthologies and Silliman's In the American Tree do it for the avant-garde.

The Cole Swenson/David St. John anthology Silliman writes about in the linked essay is interesting in its attempt to step over this whoo-ha. I haven't seen the book yet, but I was immediately reminded of what has unexpectedly become one of my favorite poetry anthologies, The Voice That is Great Within Us, edited by Hayden Carruth, published in 1970.

I got the book from my friend Bettina Drew. It was in a box I helped unpack and I was checking it out, started freaking out and asked her where she got it. She says it was the text for a poetry workshop she had (in which Sparrow was also a student) at CUNY in the early eighties. It was assigned most likely by Ted Berrigan, though her recollection is a little fuzzy and it may have been Joel Oppenheimer. But she's reasonably certain it was Ted, who gave assignments from the book like "Pick a poem and write about it."

First of all, corny ass title, right? And Hayden Carruth was hardly a stalwart of the avant-garde. Here are some of his poems, check them out, pretty much textbook mainstreamism, though the man did write a book called Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, which gets him a point in my book. Carruth was an editor at Poetry and Harper's. The book's title is lifted from a poem by Mr. Stuffy, Wallace Stevens. All of which is to say, when I first got my hands on the book, I reasonably expected another Phony War bit of revisionism of the mainstream variety.

I flipped to the table of contents. 1. Robert Frost. 2. Carl Sandburg. 3. Vachel Lindsay. 4. Wallace Stevens. Then, right as I'm about to fall asleep I turn the page and find 5. Mina Loy. HOLY SHIT! Mina fucking Loy, are you serious? Mina Loy isn't in any anthology. Awesome. I mean, it's only two poems, but two poems is better than be totally forgotten, no?

And that's basically how Carruth's anthology works. It's full of the usual suspects from both the mainstream (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath) and the avant-garde (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky). This in itself is remarkable, since every other anthology is one or the other. But then the book is also full of people who are doubtless avant-gardists, but who the avant-garde itself often overlooks, leaves out, or ignores. Like Mina Loy. And Lorine Niedecker.

Which raises what is, to me at least, an interesting question. There are all of these "forgotten" avant-garde poets who have had collected poems published in the last ten or fifteen years. Mina and Lorine. Stuart Perkoff. Helen Adam (great book, edited by Kristen Prevallet). Jack Spicer. Etc. But, who's doing the forgetting here? It's implied in the discourse that somehow the mainstream has forgotten these people, but how can that be, if the mainstream never gave a shit about them in the first place? It was avant-gardists who were into them, and it was avant-gardists who forgot about them and let them go out of print and fall into neglect, often because of petty personal grievances and factionalism. And it seems to take, on average, about three generations for anybody to get over this bullshit and read the poems and say, Oh, this is great stuff, and get it back in print. Then everybody loves it. Or at least acknowledges it.

But back to the Carruth anthology, you've got hand it to the guy. It really is an anthology of American poetry, i.e. poetry written in this country. Hayden apparently understood that he had to include examples of both camps and he did a great job of it. I think half the book is boring, and probably so did Hayden, but that's beside the point. It's an accurate reflection of the national poetry, in its totality. I have a hard time believing that some avant-gardist, given the same job, would have made the same good faith effort to be as inclusive as possible.

The book is, in its way, something of a forerunner of the idea of what Ron calls "Third Way" poetics, which means not exactly mainstream or avant-garde, but not not those things, but maybe something else too. Problem is to even use the term "Third Way" grants this division more validity than it really deserves. Call me crazy, or anything else, but I see this division having a net negative effect on poetry, especially on avant-garde poetry.

In reaction against the mainstream, the avant-garde has been pushed into this area where it's poetics can tend to resemble a long list of "don'ts". Don't rhyme. Don't just left-justify your lines, write like you're using a typewriter even though everybody uses computers now and they don't lend themselves to open-field writing like a typewriter does. Don't have emotions, or at least dissemble the hell out of them. Don't write about yourself, or things that really happen unless, again, you dissemble them a lot. Don't have ideas, have theories. Don't be performative when you read. Don't ever ever ever confess anything.

Snore. Most of this stuff is based on misinterpretations of Olson, O'Hara and Creeley. The rest is just boring, a way for derivative, imitative writers to elevate derivation and imitation as writerly virtues and suppress the things they lack: originality and talent and anything at all to say. And if you do anything outside of this, then they've got to undercut it, name it and spin it so that, while it may be interesting, it's in no way as valid as what they're doing. Oh, "Third Way" yes, isn't that quaint, now back to serious Poetry.

All of which obscures the fact that what thinks of itself as the contemporary avant-garde is in large part the new Formalism, the new New Critics, the new institutionalized academic nonsense that's as boring to me as Robert Lowell was to Frank O'Hara. Anybody with real taste can tell that Robert Pinsky is lame and uninteresting. It does not then follow that some contrived anti-Pinsky will be interesting.

What's interesting is someone off the scale, like CA Conrad, for example. Someone who writes really, really well, like Eileen Myles or Frank Sherlock. Somebody totally unexpected, like Dan Sociu. Somebody who lives in the real world, like Ryan Eckes or Laura Jaramillo. And yes, these are all my friends, and they're my friends for a reason.

Revolution Time

Twenty years ago my dad woke me up in the middle of the night. We were living in Missouri, alone together in a dirty brown trailer. The trailer park was called, with that picturesque necessity, Blueridge Estates. It had room for maybe twenty trailers, but contained only six, the empty space given over to weeds and empty beer cans. Point being: American poverty bleak. And he woke me up and he said, You've got to come see this.

If I asked him now why he did it I'm sure he'd say something blahblah freedom democracy Ronald Reagan. But that's not how it was at the time. At the time I doubt he had any clear idea why he was waking up his almost eleven year old son and dragging him into the living room to watch the Chinese Army put down the Tiananmen Square revolt. What he said at the time was, It's history, you've got to see it. All-day all-night news that enabled you to see such a thing as it was happening was still a relatively new thing back then. We were all pretty impressed that it even existed.

So I got up, and I watched an army murder nonviolent protesters in a public place in full view of many cameras and a worldwide audience.

It's odd to think back on that period in history. There were a few years there were there was something like a revolution on TV every day, happening all over the world. I don't have the chronology straight in my head, can't remember what order it all happened in. Poland and Germany and Czechoslovakia and China and Romania and Russia and so on. Some of them alarmingly easy, in Germany they just tore the fucking wall down and there it was. Some of them incomprehensibly tangled, Russia with the attempted coup, Gorbachev under house arrest, the parliament building under siege and then Yeltsin, drunk on top of a tank, fist in the air. Some of them were violent, as in Romania where they shot Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife live on national television. And China, which was just a goddamn plain and simple tragedy. My dad woke me up every time and we watched every one of them on CNN.

This was when I first realized that there was such a thing as the world, the first time I really understood the reality of other countries as actual places. Before this the world had been basically what I could see, the places I'd been. It was also the first time I understood the idea of a government. Needless to say, these were decisive experiences for me, a redneck kid from Nowhere, Indiana living in Nowhere, Missouri.

As time has passed and my dad has settled into his Missouri Republican persona, he has come increasingly to see (or to say he sees) these events as the heroic actions of Ronald Reagan in defense of freedom democracy blahblahblah. Well, I watched the Berlin Wall come down on live TV and Ronald Reagan was not there. A lot of ordinary Germans were, and I'd imagine that they'd all be surprised to learn that they were merely agents of the star-spangled Reagan will.

The legacy of these events has hardly been as pure, free and heroic as my dad would like to think, anyway. To my knowledge there was nothing like the modern sex trade in Eastern Europe before Communism fell, for example. China, of course, has totally changed since Tiananmen Square, morphing from a classic Stalinist police state into a classic capitalist police state with Communist design tropes. Not long ago I saw an episode of Frontline where a reporter showed some Chinese college students in their early twenties the picture of the man standing down the tanks the morning after the army cleared the Square. None of them had ever seen it before. None of them will ever see this post or any other writing about that event. China has secret policemen in Tiananmen Square today opening umbrellas in front of news cameras.

That Frontline episode was called Tank Man, it was a history of/attempt to find out what happened to that guy in the picture. My money's on dead that same day. I can't even think about that guy without getting weepy. Fuck Ronald Reagan. Give me the Tank Man. Attaching the word "hero" to a guy like Reagan, who was a mass murderer, strips it of all meaning. So what do you call the Tank Man?

I don't know, but I do know that my dad has spent the last twenty years wondering why his son turned out to be such a godless commie liberal blahblahblah. Hey dad: it was all the revolutions on CNN late at night. It was the goddamn Tank Man. I wanted to be that guy when I grew up. I still do.

Party over there, as opposed to here

Clicking here will take to you to a fabulous party that represents all the effort I can muster right now. A book review. A poem. Both long. I'd say sorry to the haters but really, why?