happy 75th birthday, sylvia

ha ha ha ha ha

the cannibal poet

“Mexican police report findings of a dismembered corpse and fried flesh in the apartment of a would-be writer. Inside a chilling tale of murder.”

cannibal’s soup

There is a soup that
eats kids when
they’re sick. It’s
called Cannibal’s Soup.
It is not the so-
called “chicken soup
for the soul”;
it is the human soup
that rises, godlike,
from its bowl.
It is not everything
I needed to know I
learned in kindergarten.
It is avoid kindergarten
at all costs. There
is a soup that will
kill you, a very
backwards soup.
Avoid it at all costs.

note in artvoice

“[Belz's] poems have the remarkable ability to turn the mind in multiple directions, line by line. The subsequent dizziness approximates euphoria rather than chaos, as Belz’s energetic verse charges on to the next line, the next take, the next punch, the growing mystery masked by layers of representation. The Bird Hoverer is prolific in its use of proper nouns, incorporating utility infielder Tony Graffanino with distant cousins with Hollywood into the folds of the poems. In this way, the work appeals to the dreamers who have cable TV and high-speed Internet at their disposal. His poems are brought to us in HD-quality resolution. Within the layering, Belz often uses overheard speech in these poems, like: ‘I’m all about hidden microphones,’ or ‘Unless you’re a hotshot African ambassador/It just ain’t happenin’, no how, no way.’ Belz here is throwing the party; times are weird, God is a mummy, so let’s dance!”

http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n42/invisible_stuff

my kind of preacher

“Revelation 19 [teaches us that] the new world is a city. The new world is urban. The universe starts in a garden, but it reaches its full flower in a city…

“We get to the very end of the book of Revelation and…we see God building a city… and do you know where God’s going to live in that city? Downtown. Read Revelation. God lives right in the middle and we all live around, he does not live in the suburbs and commute in to work. Why?

“Imagine all the great things that happen in cities that just don’t happen in small towns or out in the country. Imagine: it’s in cities where different kinds of people living in very close quarters enrich each other and interact with each other and cooperate with each other and learn from each other. And it’s only in cities where all of our talents when they come together, as a magnifying glass focuses the rays of the sun, so the city brings all of our talents together, and they stimulate each other, and they collaborate with each other, and the city creates an explosion of human creativity. The city creates an explosion of human achievement. It’s the city where our talents are brought together and the best is brought out of us. That’s why the city’s so exhausting and we have to get out every so often. The city brings that out of us.”

     —Timothy Keller, December 11, 1994

sherlock’s voice

Frank Sherlock is a very good reader of his own poetry: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Sherlock.html

signal versus noise

For Norbert Wiener
a signal was something
that ought to be filtered
from noise, but for God,
at least in this life,
the signals merge with
the noise, and although
maybe that’s just God’s
way, it’s possible God
is more like Gwen Stefani
in that he expects us
to hear, over the din
of the hip hop club
of this world, him shouting
“Holla back, girl!”
and wants us to holla
back somehow, through
prayer or maybe just
lives of self-sacrifice.

works of the flesh, emended

Idolatry
Witchcraft
Hatred
Variance
Emulations
Wrath
Strife
Seditions
Heresies
Envyings
Murders
Drunkenness
Revellings
“Barney and Friends”

photograph

Peter Davis and Daniel Borzutzky after last week’s Observable Reading.

the king of kong

Must see this right away…

alberto vo5

The thing I like best
about Alberto VO5
Extra Body Shampoo
is not that it contains
nutrients, nor even
that it contains shine-
enhancing nutrients,
but the graceful way
it contains them—
which is the same way
you carry bitter regret,
my love, invisibly,
allowing it to work
its way naturally
through my hair.

new review of my book in boston review

The Bird Hoverer
Aaron Belz
BlazeVOX, $14 (paper)

The impressive, loopy poems in Aaron Belz’s first full-length collection are touched by a raw grace of mind and nimble phrasing. The poems stage deft quarrels with the same pop complacencies that inspire them, as in “Hidden Microphones,” where the speaker’s enthusiasm about surveillance culture overwhelms him and he can’t help but exclaim, “I am all about hidden microphones.” Readers will find themselves rattled, delightfully, as Belz juggles the gods of the past with the gods of celebrity culture—always wired to an ethics of spectacle that resists becoming “all about hidden microphones.” The Bird Hoverer does not simply embrace its gods or only work to displace them. In “Things That Tend Not to Collapse,” for instance, readers are encouraged to test how far Belz’s ebullient metaphysics allows for things to fall apart. Similarly, “For Walt Whitman” celebrates the transcendentalism of Whitman and Coleridge while its self-reflexive underbelly admits nothing beyond the reality of the five senses. “I glare at a brick of grass,” he writes, “stunned at its insouciance.” These poems suggest that the most effective way to render subjectivity is to dramatize its deeply felt otherness—to write, as in the book’s opening poem, from “a lone bench in the dark” behind the locked gates of a park, desiring to restore everything that is unwanted. Only then, perhaps, can we see the “gorgeous sparkle” of “Michael Landon as a Melville Character” or make sense of the genius and recklessness that frames the subject of “Polanski’s Panopticon.” Belz asks us to be lucid enough to get the facts right and also to make the facts more grand than they really are: a poetics that is masterfully strange, weirdly comic, and as innovative and conventional as Aristotle’s plausible impossibilities. With their ethics of alterity, their faith in the strangeness we see in each other, these poems hover, bend back against themselves, and with charm make no pretense but to remind us that life “is a dirty secret / that literature exalts” and to wish us best of luck in everything we do.

-Tony Trigilio

[Online here.]

three readers… one destiny

Here are the three readers reading at Bottleworks THIS THURSDAY NIGHT. Check out their work at their websites. You won’t want to miss it…

Daniel Borzutzky
http://www.danielborzutzky.com

Peter Davis
http://hitlersmustache.blogspot.com

Richard Newman
http://www.vacuumpacked.net

+ + + + + + +

Location: Schlafly Bottleworks (in Maplewood)
Time: 8 PM
Cost: FREE as always
More info: http://observable.org