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'True to its title, the playful craft of Mike Young’s poetry does execute a kind of trick: progressing from levity to solemnity and back, creating distance only to later extinguish it. Its poems conduct a series of experiments; they bring us closer to what we love and the absence we feel when we cannot possess it.
'Sprezzatura has a simultaneous quality to its lyricism: while some poems end by beginning a new thought, question, or conversation at the last minute, others remind us how panoramic and overlapping our experiences are simply by naming one. (“The page with the lyrics you searched for/starts to play a different song.” (“Turn Right at The Bridge You Make By Lying There” pp. 11)) ...
'The pace and motion of Sprezzatura reminds me of the story of Scheherazade: its witty, complex weavings carry us through the book and transport its speaker past any single despair, want, or image. Often, these poems begin with a question, only to later renounce the question/answer format, or praise the ponderous sensations that unanswerable questions inspire in us. Ultimately, even the answers we are given unravel into image. Information is abandoned in favor of the fleeting, luminous instability of sensory experience.
'If the book itself is a “sprezzatura” device, it serves the author as much as it does audience. There are moments when we almost understand things. Then, it turns out to be an echo, or it slips away. Or anything else. That’s all I want from poetry: that moment when something is so close to crystallizing, that for a second you believe it actually won’t go. Then, it does, and you’re back to thinking about an ecologically sound way to dispose of your dead cable box, or you can’t not imagine neighborhood youths being cruel to your furniture and why does it actually hurt you? I like art because I like being taken away from all the banal shit I feel bad about it. Like most of the art I admire, Mike Young’s Sprezzatura doesn’t take me to a single specific place or move like a safe or viable vehicle. Its poems revel in inconsistency; they move like weird little ships. They keep changing direction, but it’s never annoying or difficult or the same as the time before. No one is thrown overboard or gets a maritime disease. The passengers are happy, and ready for a change, and each time, it feels like going in the right direction.'-- Lucy Tiven, Fanzine
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Mike Young Sprezzatura
Publishing Genius
'Mike Young’s bristling new book is about love and fear and money. How do we know our feelings and feel our knowledge? It’s about stupid contemporary immune systems and being left to our own devices. If you’re on a bus or plane, you’ll be happy to hear there are a lot of those. Rollerblading, Lord Byron’s clubbed foot, pyramids, falafels, bridges, trains, buses, nightshade, mustard, tattoo, antlers, innovation, nerves, guilt, blood, strawberry cops, conclusive gameshows, moody strangers, and “the yes that keeps watch / over and under my breath.”'-- Publishing Genius
Excerpts
taken from Vice
ENOUGH TO HASH THINGS OUT
I like it when the audience camera accidentally catches
the kid who doesn’t give a shit about the home run.
Carolyn says you need to wait ten seconds before
CPR, which is a delay never depicted in movies, I feel.
Imagine living as a rollercoaster critic. Some people like
certain frozen meals so much they learn how to make
real versions of them. A Pop-Tarts restaurant opened in
Times Square. You can buy Pop-Tarts sushi. When you read
a lot of news stories about these kinds of things, you realize
that only one kind of humor is allowed in contemporary
journalism. The world suggested by this humor is something
distant, like a card trick you get in the mail. Do you ever take
overheard advice? Like if one stranger swears by coconut water
to another stranger, will you try coconut water? What can it hurt?
Aren’t there many people you have failed to thank? One of my
stronger memories is sitting in the Blueberry Twist, realizing
who made his living off poker. One girl who worked at
Blockbuster was always negative. Even when I saw her
excited about something the other day—maybe a coupon
for paper towels, maybe a new color of berry—she seemed
more anti-complaining than actually expressing happiness.
Speaking of anti, the father insisted bats weren’t real and tried
to get everyone in the car. One time Chris said he had nothing to
do on Christmas Eve and he was planning on driving by my house,
but he didn’t. He told me this around March, I think.
CAN WE GET ICE CREAM AT THIS HOUR?
I am not that smart. Or that sad. So where do I get off
with your attention? Dear those who buy the salsa
suggested on the chip bag. Sons who ate caterpillars
when Dale Earnhardt died. Friends are the ones who
wave at you. Is your heart a bundle of shoelaces stuck
together by honey? Dear muumuus and instant potatoes.
We are all pretentious. Consider the flavors we choose
for bathroom aerosol. Dear Saran Wrap and gulch mud.
Is your life a milky dumafidget? Do you care about the word
in German for your loneliness? Let’s arm wrestle in the pantry
and straight up fuck this shit. My bros want poems to rap more.
Their fathers want less cussing. How do I explain that I have
bros who say bro in quotes? If it’s cold, there’s a blanket in the
pickup. This poem does not star a robot suit. Or a talking top-hat.
Those poems have all the nice clues for rain, but my dreams
are clogged with Folgers tins. Coupons for Hamburger Helper.
TV trays and powdered eggs. Dear aunts of shopping networks
in the dark. Dear coaches who still don’t quite understand
vitamin water. It’s like you fiddle all the ones you love across
the couch so they’ll each fit in the photo, except it never works
because it’s not their photo: it’s always just a photo of your love.
Dear men who conceive of suicide only by motorcycle,
you would have the most awesome beard if you would just
read poetry. It is true that I value their thermoses above others,
but why? Didn’t I break up with Amber over her use of the
word weird? Then there was the daughter of a Democrat who
sprayed his wife’s perfume behind the couch. Thank you
Pell Grant for the people I have met through you. Witty
dress shoes. The luxury to be congratulated for my loneliness
when I explain it through a fantasy of several million lonely
YouTube videos compiled together to form the definitive
trailer for The Season of Big Loneliness, which is a let down and
too long. It is true that I have friends and different friends and
rap videos we all watch. Except with certain friends I fall asleep
scuffling of feelings (as we are doing here, thank you) and others
who talk about how Egypt was built by the aliens and God alights
upon Kraft singles. Let’s hear about Hunter. He’s in Europe,
but only because of the Air Force. He dips Red Man and calls girls
biddies. We don’t keep in touch, and his mother believes he has the
soul of a deer outside the hospital, the one she heard shot dead during
labor. In the middle of the night she Googles his Wiccan horoscope.
I am not making this up. Dear sunflower seeds. Dear Superball tickets.
If I could make this up, wouldn’t I be the one who knows you?
NINERS WIN I LOVE YOU, NINERS LOSE I LOVE YOU
for BC after Portland 2009
They’re behind, but it’s not over.
38-25 and the Niners are driving.
My throat still hurts from fritter and lyrics,
while my search engine claims “Memoir of
environmentalist Greyhound driver”garners
no hits. Are we to believe they haven’t invented
themselves? In last night’s fog and cattle, I stole
a nap from my fever on the bus, chanting head songs
more sick than I really was, because a song’s the
epic you dust stir, and a body’s just an eep to sire.
What if you replaced the day part of on-the-road-
don’t-know-what-day-it-is with people? The Niners
tied it. There’s the going on, the went, the want, the we,
the shower you dream of, and the bath salts given to
me for Christmas that interact with my mistaken belief
that all gifts are instructions on how the giver wants to spend
time with the givee. Giraffes don’t play football. Environmentalist
Greyhound giraffe—his right-parted haircut sticking out the top,
plexiglass guarding him from passengers with chainsaws
and trail mix—screeches the bus to a stop in the desert, dust
muzzling the tires in a temporary cloud, all the yellow flowers
no passenger can name. Interstate stubble. No passenger knows
why we’ve stopped because no one looks up to see our driver,
the giraffe, coughing blood. I miss all my thieves. I miss my own
heart when it sneaks out, borrowing my cough syrup and windbreaker.
Three out of every eight readers are currently tolerating this poem
out of concern for the Niners. Sorry. I forgot. OK, there goes
a commercial. When the Niners come back, I will tell you
the score. Love is a giraffe with blood parachuting from its height.
Whoops. Arizona intercepted a pass. It’s all over. We blew it.
Our coach was too busy whispering into his playbook: You never saw
the pills that stole your friend. Pretty soon people will take photos
of you and call you after where they found you, because they can’t
remember how to call you what you are. That’s nobody’s fault.
When we say our own names, we make a weird face. Sure, even
the quarterback. Even the draft pick. Even the other team.
Mike Young "Can We Get Ice Cream At This Hour?"
The Collected Poets Series: Mike Young
Mike Young-Let's Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone is Listening
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Cassandra Gillig:I think we both might agree that swagger is a very important thing to consider when writing and reading a poem. (We do, right?) How do you define swagger?
Dorothea Lasky: Oh, a poet’s swagger is so important! I think that the most “successful” poets have always been ones who manage to navigate between arrogance and humility with ease. Arrogance often makes the poet, and it isn’t necessarily that the person herself is arrogant. It’s simply that she knows when to employ it to her advantage. I’m thinking back to when Walt Whitman made his dick bigger in a reprint of Leaves of Grass. Or when another poet came up to me at a bar and told me he bought a gold chain to “rebrand.” There is a vulnerability that manifests in both of these actions, but they are also statements of self-importance. These small moments and small statements frame a poet’s body of work; these engagements with the public sphere. So when I think of a poet’s swagger, I think of exactly that — arrogance mediated by humility. Also, I love the whole “poet be like god” thing — the idea that poets speak on behalf of the gods and are ordained by the gods, themselves. Engaging with this tradition — this idea — creates the kind of poet swagger I love to see. Poets need to recognize that they aren’t gods, but that they need the power and importance of gods to get their messages across. I think that if you aren’t important to yourself, you will never be important to anyone else.
CG:Do you think the New York School poets in particular are kindred of hip-hop artists? I have always thought this: the naming of names, the elements of gossip, the surprising breaks into high lyrics abruptly from the mundane, the conversational, the everyday. Do you think there will ever be a New New York School? And if so, what might this look like, and do we even want this to happen?
DL: I think about this a lot, actually. Rappers and poets are similarly self-referential and intertextual. Like, there’s a similar way of being “in the know” — being able to decipher allusions to people, places, and things. And this is something that makes the study of poetry, or the study of hip-hop, really rewarding. For example, it is pretty common to read one of O’Hara’s most famous lines, “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” and not pick up that “Grace” is a pun on his friend Grace Hartigan’s name. You lose out on the cleverness. Similarly, if you listen to the song “The Language” by Drake, there’s this bit where he talks about eating dinner with Italians. Ostensibly nonsense, but if you are up on your Drake friendships, you would know that he hangs out with Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli. Anyway, the craft of hip-hop songs and poems, in that way, can be so intricate and impressive. And these things really make me want to listen to more music and read more poems — they make me care about the artists. These works are beautiful creations even if you can’t fully understand each and every facet, but if you do, it’s such a weirdly satisfying and exciting thing. It feels like detective work. I think the New York School’s passion for the boring, and the quotidian, and the conversational lives on in both hip-hop and poetry. We are all living in the shadow of Frank O’Hara. New York will be a closed door to all artists in 10 or 15 years, and even then there will be a New York School. The NYS taught us that we can talk about ourselves and talk about the world in a way that glorifies our own banality. I don’t think that will ever go out of style, nor should it. That idea is sometimes what keeps me going, because it is an idea that is so real. What do I have if not myself and other people and the world around me?
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Dorothea Lasky Rome
Norton/Liveright
'Dorothea Lasky has been hailed as "undoubtedly one of the nation's most talented younger poets" (Huffington Post). From her first book, AWE, Lasky has been crafting her hallmark voice, a mixture of language that is "boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human" (Timothy Donnelly), presenting her readers with poetry full of "blood-red realness" (Boston Globe) and haunting lines that "recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg" (Chicago Tribune). With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems have kept gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of new poets, fusing the transcendent vision of the New York School with a kind of performative confessionalism, bringing the force and power of the classical world into the everyday.'-- Liveright
Excerpts
I WANT TO BE ALIVE
More than anything I want to be alive
I want to jiggle
I want to jiggle on you
And gurgle
And urinate on your backspan
I want you to eat my menstrual blood
And soft juices
I want to eat your shit until I dream
I want you to come shit all over me
I want to bury my vomit in your shit
I want you to kiss me hard hard
In the nighttime
And not give up
I don’t want to be a thing
I want to be becoming
The nighttime
I want to be the nighttime with you
You know, I loved you
I loved you
I was wrong
POEM FOR MY FRIEND
Is it possible that it is grief that brought us together
Yes it is
It is possible
Dear friend, we sat on the sun-soaked fields
But I would have a strawberry with you anywhere
Or when they said of Julius Caesar: that his life was gentle
Dear friend, I would paint your eyes anywhere
The elements so mixed up in me
That Nature might stand up and say: Now this is a man!
And when they burn me up into the trees
I hope you are the trees
The set of neat green things
Come waiting for me
I hope you are the bushes
I hope you are the neat green bushes
There waiting for me
I AM A CORPSE
I am a corpse
And you are a corpse
And in the nighttime
I see your arm on me and it is dead already
And my arm is dead already
And I look at my belly, already blue
And it is barren and empty
And my lack of pain is also a kind of death
And I drift off to sleep and then I wake
And it is all dying
Why? Because a demon is after me
And he she it has been
Since the day I was born
What an unrepentant ass I must have been
In my past lives
Or what a soulless fish I must have fished
In this one
I can feel the endless stream of words
That are not flesh
They might as well be
Dreams and too
It is the work of corpses
Not ghosts
Come on all you corpses
Just dance and fuck
I just don’t want to animate
This rancid flesh
Like you do
Anymore
So I will say goodbye
And say
Fuck you
And I love you
And I never did
I never knew what feeling was
I only felt the pain
The sun the moon the trees the stars
The animals the birds the words
I only felt the pain
The things the you inflicted on me
Dorothea Lasky reading @ The Renaissance Society
Dorothea Lasky "I Like Weird Ass Hippies"
Dorothea Lasky live at 851
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'Monster House Press recently published Mallory Whitten’s debut book, Collected Poems & Stories. At first I felt like the Collected Poems & Stories was a title befit for a more “established” author, but after reading the book, it’s the only name that fits. There is a reason why Mallory has garnered co-signs from indie lit icons like Tao Lin, Sam Pink, and Noah Cicero. Her writing is certainly a unique voice in indie lit, one that is so refreshing, unpretentious and authentic that it demands respect. Mallory may speak softly, but when she speaks, everybody listens.
'Mallory covers topics like mental illness, drug addiction, social isolation, feminism, high school, relationships, etc, throughout her book. Her style is warm and kind—a Midwestern drawl rising from the page—but there is often a punch, a sharpness, at the end of her poems: a fist through the reverie, right into your jaw. See, for example, how she ends “Adderall Diets, Switching From Beer To Wine, & Monitoring Your Pizza Intake Vs. Everyone Else’s,” the first poem in the collection: “the loch ness monster is telling me / that i will become more sexually and socially desired / the easier i can fit into a laundry basket / the easier i can be picked up and thrown.”
'Mallory’s style and stories have a dreamlike quality to them, and dreams figure prominently into Mallory’s writing. She alternates between real-life stories, half-remembered dreams, and childhood memories—blurring the line between them all, giving them a soft, pillowy consistency, even when they turn into nightmares.
'In broad strokes that blur the line between poetry and prose, Mallory tells the stories of herself and others, the weirdos of suburban Ohio: an autistic girl who brings a knife to school; a masturbating great-grandpa; an anxious, overweight algebra teacher; a school janitor whose only day of relief is when he gets to go on the roof and throw the kickballs that have accumulated there over the course of the school year to the students.
'These stories are sad, and there is no resolution. Great-grandparents die. Autistic kids get bullied. People break up and never get back together. But the humor that is there, the laughter at the absurdity and sadness of it all, is resolution enough. There is an odd sort of invisible closure that one feels at the end of a Mallory Whitten poem.'-- Zach Schwartz, Fanzine
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Mallory Whitten Collected Poems & Stories
Monster House Press
'MALLORY WHITTEN’S POEMS & STORIES take such unique note of the strange & depressing aspects of contemporary American life that they often feel like dreams. At the same time affectless & deeply emotive, these poems & stories take account, with something like a stenographer’s prowess, of the anthropologically immense complexity & absurdity of everything happening all at once: prescription drugs, great-grandparents, the judicial system, upper middle class candy stores, elementary school janitors, gentrification, iguanas, binge drinking, anxiety attacks, vague social structures, ad nauseam.'-- Monster House
'Mallory Whitten is easily one of my favorite writers. She painted a steak for me once and covered it in rhinestones. She called it the disco steak and I hung it on my wall. Every morning I get up and it sparkles and shines. This is her book. It’ll make you sparkle and shine after you read it. I hope you’re ready to sparkle and shine. I hope you’re ready to say that Mallory Whitten is one of your favorite writers too. She made this book just for you. You’re welcome.'— SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Excerpts
recreational drug use
i’m sitting on a couch with five people
there is an obese dog named rufus on the floor
i’m sneezing & walking to the bathroom frequently to blow my nose
seems what i need is an allergy pill
i have asked
& no one has one
but there is adderall
& xanax
& alcohol
& weed
& mdma
& morphine
& ketamine
& ecstasy
BALL DAY
i told you the janitor at the elementary school i went to had a red mullet & a motorcycle
you told me the janitor at the elementary school you went to had long hair & was named wayne
i imagined the janitor at the elementary school you went to cleaning up puke in hallways & poop next to toilets
you said twice a year your long-haired janitor would go on the roof of the school & throw the balls that had collected there during the school year down onto the playground
you said those days were known unofficially as "ball day" by the students
i imagined the janitor at the elementary school you went to cleaning up your puke in the hallway & your friend's poop next to a toilet while feeling defeated then having a faraway feeling of ball day
starfish
when starfish eat
their mouths extend from their bellies
in the shape of a tube
the tube sucks up food
then reverts back to its original belly shape
where it holds the food until it is digested
if i were a starfish
i’d swallow a creature
then look down
& see the creature inside of my tube stomach
& feel it wriggling around
i’d take a knife in one of my five starfish hands
cut my stomach off
then cry with the creature i started to eat
Trailer: 'Collected Poems & Stories'
young exzackly reading "food anxiety" by mallory whitten
jordan castro & mallory whitten laughing to the bank
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Sarah Carson:What was the impetus for this play? What made you choose this content matter + this form for communicating it?
Joyelle McSweeney: This play germinated from learning that Abduwali Muse – the teenage Somali ‘pirate’ who was tried in NYC a few years back—is imprisoned in a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana—the state where I live, the Rust Belt state whose name vaguely refers to a genocided people. That’s how misery moves around the globe and always finds its Target ™. Like many citizens of the Internet, I remember Muse for the movie-star grin he flashed at the cameras upon arrival at trial in New York. The charisma of that moment floods all through this play. I wrote it as a spell for his protection and an effort at occult communication.
In my play, a benevolent Julian Assange has hijacked a containership full of Dead Youth, a plural character made up of (un-)dead, saucy, track-suited teens who have died all over the planet from contact with violence: gang warfare, pharmaceutical industry predation, environmental toxicity, drones, suicide, johns, etc. He is steering them to his childhood home Magnetic Island where he will reboot them/upload them to the Internet. Muse and a female Saint-Exupéry (representing The Law) board the ship and attempt to wrest control from Assange. Their fortunes are all controlled by a female deity played Henrietta Lacks, the African-American cancer patient whose cells, harvested without her consent, at Johns Hopkins in 1951, have led to many important medical (and consumerist) discoveries and are used in research settings all over the globe.
This may sound like heavy stuff, but it’s actually a farce, given the many political figures who collide in this inside-out Tempest. There are many press conferences, song and dance numbers, show trials, etc, and lots of campy banter. The farce form makes your belly shake and then sticks you with its blade. Yikes!
SC:What was your process like? Where did you begin? How long did it take you? How did you know you were finished?
JM: I forced this out over just a few weeks to meet the deadline. I knew what I wanted to write about and why—as a play of advocacy for Muse and Assange, and a chance to elevate Henrietta Lacks to a position of absolute power. I had a lot of urgency driving me to write. But I also wanted to write a real play, not just a shorty poet’s play of 10 or 15 pages. So I went back and made every draft longer. This also allowed me to carry certain motifs (bees, computer code, cancer, green) from section to section.
SC:What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into writing experimental plays like yours? Are there any authors you’d recommend?
JM: My advice is just to read like hell and write that which gives you perverse joy and which you are somewhat humiliated to present to the world. That’s a sign you are writing stuff no one else but you could write, which usually makes for the most delicious and devilish work. To write my play, I really drew on an array of plays and performances I love: Langston Hughes Scotsboro, Ltd.; Amiri Baraka The Dutchman; Suzan-Lori Parks America Play; Shakespeare Tempest and Merchant of Venice; Soyinka, From Zia with Love & A Scourge of Hyacinths; Durenmatt The Visit; Genet, entire body of work; Jack Smith, entire body of work. I researched Assange and Lacks and, to the extent I could, Muse. I made up the Exupérystuff. I had also read CLR James The Black Jacobins earlier that year and became obsessed with this short note written by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in (I assume) James’s translation here:
Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in San Domingo. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
The self-announcement of this note stops the show and initiates revolutionary time. I have used its tone, syntax, and cadences in all of my plays because they are works of revolution and vengeance. When Henrietta Lacks says her name in this play, it is a declaration of war. When Julian Assange says, “Hello, I’m Julian Assange”, it continually resets the play’s clock. I recite this letter to myself while driving around South Bend or whenever the spirit wavers.
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Joyelle McSweeney DEAD YOUTH, OR, THE LEAKS
Litmus Press
'In this farce set on a hijacked containership on its way to Magnetic Island, Julian Assange attempts to “reboot” a troupe of DEAD YOUTH—teenagers from all over the globe who have died in violent circumstances from sweatshop labor to environmental poisoning to war—but must grapple with two other would-be hijackers: a young Somali pirate and a female Antoine de St-Exupery. Described by its author as a “badly-wired allegory,” Dead Youth, or, The Leaks brings to manic light the veiled violence that makes life in capitalism possible.'-- Litmus Press
Excerpt
from Hyperallergic
[Note: Dead Youth, or, The Leaks finds a benevolent Julian Assange piloting a stolen containership, the SS Smirk, on his way to Magnetic Island. His mission is to reboot a pack of DEAD YOUTH, tracksuited teens who have died by a variety of Anthropocene causes, and upload them to the Internet. The ship is boarded by two other would-be hijackers: Abduwali MUSE, a teenage Somali “pirate,” and a female ST-EXUPÉRY, representing the LAW-in-travesty. In this passage, MUSE is being tried by ST-EXUPÉRY, while the dubious YOUTH oscillate between taking the MUSE’s side and that of the LAW.]
DEAD YOUTH 1: O this island. It’s a pit.
DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s a dump.
DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s a mass grave!
DEAD YOUTH 2: Without the masses. It’s deserted.
ASSANGE: Not at all. It’s just the off-season. You boys play the part of the unseasonable youth. Untimely plucked. Watch out or you’ll be juiced. [his tail switches like a lazy cat]
ST-EXUPÉRY: (from office area) ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE!
MUSE: I recognize the representative of France.
ST-EXUPÉRY: You are not the judge!
Nor president pro tem!
You do not recognize me.
I myself am JUSTICE.
I recognize you.
YOUTH TO YOUTH: HUM, blind Justice recognizes Muse!
YOUTH TO YOUTH: That’s what, in science, we call a double-blind.
TOUT YOUTH: A very pharmaceutical pursuit! Forsooth.
ST-EXUPÉRY: Silence, youth! It is golden.
It has a mouth, but it’s fixed.
Like a clock, or a neutered cat,
or suit brought against an emperor.
In other words, can it.
YOUTH: Silence in other words! That is strange science!
ST-EXUPÉRY: Let the interrogation proceed. Now, Muse, I don’t want to have to take out my carburetor or my salad tongs. So answer my questions. Sing, muse.
MUSE: I won’t.
ST-EXUPÉRY: Then prattle.
MUSE: The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor de glace
MUSE: the only emperor is the one who stands naked
YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor sans pants
MUSE: and communicates to youth, directly in his nakedness.
ASSANGE: O dream of a crystalline communication.
Flap flap to dirty ears. The pidgins of pigeons.
The germs they smuggle in their penates and pinions.
The germs they share for a puddle of crumb-ions.
Good pigeons, grey matter, rats with aspirations!
O rank mass, its rank communicants! Its holy communications!
YOUTH: We Catholics believe in transubstantiation.
Our uncanny valley runs on circuits of revulsion.
MUSE: How like a thing, how like a paragon
YOUTH: how like a think, how like an epicure
MUSE: how like a stink, how like a pedicure
YOUTH: how like bacteria that thrive in the footbath
MUSE: how like a strand of flesh-eating staph
YOUTH: how like the society ladies hobble on no feet
MUSE: until they realize Jimmy Choos fit better with no feet
YOUTH: how they then occupy the lotus position
MUSE: how like a bath salt
YOUTH: how like a bidet.
MUSE: What a piece of…work is man
YOUTH: Le seul empereur est l’empereur de glace
MUSE: Caveat emptor
YOUTH: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
MUSE: Follow your leader. That’s called dictee.
ST-EXUPÉRY: I see you are a very learned man.
MUSE: Maleducated. Malaparte. That’s why we formed our bande à part. Before the Little Emperor could pursue his destiny, he flipped the ‘Malaparte’ to ‘Bonaparte’. A visionary must also have a literalist’s heart. And wear it like a medal on his chest.
ST-EXUPÉRY: O what a fine speech! O medals all around!
YOUTH: [affixing metals by driving pins into Muse’s torso. He now resembles a Sebastian] That’s tantalum, that’s for capacity, in hearing aids, jet blades, and telephony. There’s cassiterite that’s for circuit boards. And there’s wolframite that’s for ‘green ammunition,’ i.e. bullets with less lead. So children who eat bullets won’t get lead poisoning and perform poorly in standardized tests. Also good for making your iPhone vibrate.
ALL: What?
YOUTH: I kid you not. Wolframite is a very right metal. People mine each other for it. I’m talking about a combat mine, mined by gangpressed soldiers. I am not even talking about a data mine.
ASSANGE: O MUSE, you are a bouquet. You are a very directory, a very index, the very body of contemporary miseree.
ST-EXUPÉRY: That’s enough. Don’t encourage his vanitee. Second question. MUSE, when brought to trial in New York, why did you smile for the cameras?
MUSE: Because I have a face.
[rimshot]
[rifle crack]
ST-EXUPÉRY: WHAT’S THAT?
MUSE: Because I have a face.
ST-EXUPÉRY: OBSCENE ANSWER!
MUSE: It is the opposite of obscene. The obscene must be hidden from view. My face I show. It is a black face, but it is not in blackface. It comes from a black site. It is a leak.
ST-EXUPÉRY: O OBSCENE! O how his teeth gleams, his smile, and his eyes, his charisma, and his native talent for being alive. O obscenity. What a felony! Youth tar him with petroleum products. Then he will know what it means to be in capitalism’s embrace. IN THE BOSOM OF THE LAW!
(YOUTH tar ST-EXUPÉRY instead)
WHAT? What is the meaning of this?
YOUTH: Are you not the font of Justice? I recognize you, I met you so many times on the other side of the bench. You sent me to juvie for a decade, took the kickback to buy golf clubs. Luckily I OD’d and was thus released from my sentence, albeit to the morgue. Now you wear the black robes you wore in life, which shows you have been invested with gravure as in the grave.
(read the entirety)
10th Annual SLC Poetry Festival [Joyelle McSweeney]
Joyelle McSweeney: Bryant Park Reading
Joyelle McSweeney reading @ the revolution
*
p.s. Hey. ** ASH, Hey there, man! How's it big time? Wow, I'm really glad you shared your 'I Am A Tree'. Hold on. Oh, man, I just let myself have a minute with it, and I'll give it full time later, and it's great -- version and video! I'll imbed it below for the folks. Everyone, down at the bottom of this thing you'll find a video of/by music-conjurer and d.l. ASH and his band burninghouse doing a cover of the great Doug Gillard-penned Guided by Voices song 'I Am A Tree' complete with awesome, mad video made by ASH himself. Give it a spin when you down there, okay? You'll be very, very glad. Incredible coolness, my friend. Thank you a lot! ** GucciCODYprada, Hi, C! Thanks, man. Wish I could eat that stuff you're making, like ... a lot of it. Tons! I will (tell you), yeah, when I finish reading, but do check in again in a bit 'cos you know my spaciness. I like Nicolas Jaar's stuff, what I've heard, but I don't think I know that one, so I'll go get it. Much love back to you! ** Keaton, No tail bone? Um, how does he ... ? Never mind. I think the days when rape was rampant in the Marais are long past, like centuries past even. I don't get Jesus and Christianity at all, which I guess was probably more than clear yesterday. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Ayn Rand made multiple appearances here yesterday, weird. I know about her only slightly more than I know about Jesus, which is borderline squat. ** Steevee, You like your Jesuses pistol-packing. Cool: the review. Everyone, Steevee has reviewed the most intriguing sounding if apparently let-downing film 'A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness', which has as its turf Black Metal in Norway, and hence its theoretical promise. Anyway, go read what he has to say about it here. ** Sypha, Why did I know the word Biebz would be in your first sentence today? I read 'Lord of the Rings'. I liked it. Not my thing in the slightest, but it was very well done. I've read part of 'The Tunnel', and I need to go back and finish it one day because I thought it was pretty great. Why are people talking about Ayn Rand? It's so weird. Because some far right top dog politicians like her? I don't get it. ** Kyler, Oh, wow, thanks, man. My ignorance is bliss? ** Kier, Hey! I like being surprising. It's fun. Yay, on the Lukas Haas collages. I love the collages you've been sharing on FB lately. Ah, that's where I saw the Johnny Gosch film, on Mr Waters's list. Mystery solved. You day of doing nothing sounds plenty productive to me. My day was almost entirely occupied by film editing. Not very interesting to recount. Meticulous, repetitive work, but we got quite far. If we're lucky, we'll have a solid rough cut of the scene finished today, and we can move on to Scene 1. We may have found a guy to organize the footage on scenes 2, 4, and 5, which we sorely need if we're going to get the edit done in time, and I'll find out if we scored on that front this morning. Other than editing, which was a giant gulp of the day, I conferred about tech stuff with the guy who's helping with my eBook/novel project, and did almost nothing else. Ate, worked on blog posts, blah blah. I fear today will sound a lot like yesterday, but I will look everywhere for interesting details, I promise. What happened during the stretch of time popularly known as 'today' in your life? ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks for letting me/us know about Morrissey's forgiving side. ** Etc etc etc, Hi! Yep, 'weird conversational jargon moving with the speed of music' has a giant place in my heart too. And in my head. And even maybe in my mouth on extremely rare occasions that can't be triggered consciously or predicted. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Rich news there about the beginning of your spate of days off. Luxuriate, man. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, none of those Days you say you need are going to happen, or so I predict. However, 'one never knows' should always be everyone's dictum, so ... Right, about beards. I don't really have a problem with them like I do with mustaches unless they're really trimmed and designed looking 'cos I can look at bearded guys and think, 'You didn't shave for a while', makes sense. No, I didn't know that about his mom. Why, dare I ask, does it make sense? You mean because it explains him acting wild and stuff? ** Hyemin kim, The first gif of Jesus barely has hands even on a somewhat fast laptop. Thank god he is/was not a writer, no? I don't think I'm going to prepare for the 23rd event. The cool thing about the 'being interviewed onstage' format is that I feel like the interviewer has to do the preparation, and I can just sit there and react spontaneously. Which is probably a really bad method on my part. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Jesus, San Francisco, I mean ... really. I guess Paris must do things that conform to foreigners' preconceptions about what Paris would do all the time. 'Mumbo Jumbo' is awesome! I'm guessing your voice is all regular and gloriously yours again by now? ** With that, I tell you what you already know, namely that there are four books up there that I recommend to you. Have at them. Off I go to edit a film. See you tomorrow.
b u r n i n g h o u s e - I AM A TREE
'True to its title, the playful craft of Mike Young’s poetry does execute a kind of trick: progressing from levity to solemnity and back, creating distance only to later extinguish it. Its poems conduct a series of experiments; they bring us closer to what we love and the absence we feel when we cannot possess it.
'Sprezzatura has a simultaneous quality to its lyricism: while some poems end by beginning a new thought, question, or conversation at the last minute, others remind us how panoramic and overlapping our experiences are simply by naming one. (“The page with the lyrics you searched for/starts to play a different song.” (“Turn Right at The Bridge You Make By Lying There” pp. 11)) ...
'The pace and motion of Sprezzatura reminds me of the story of Scheherazade: its witty, complex weavings carry us through the book and transport its speaker past any single despair, want, or image. Often, these poems begin with a question, only to later renounce the question/answer format, or praise the ponderous sensations that unanswerable questions inspire in us. Ultimately, even the answers we are given unravel into image. Information is abandoned in favor of the fleeting, luminous instability of sensory experience.
'If the book itself is a “sprezzatura” device, it serves the author as much as it does audience. There are moments when we almost understand things. Then, it turns out to be an echo, or it slips away. Or anything else. That’s all I want from poetry: that moment when something is so close to crystallizing, that for a second you believe it actually won’t go. Then, it does, and you’re back to thinking about an ecologically sound way to dispose of your dead cable box, or you can’t not imagine neighborhood youths being cruel to your furniture and why does it actually hurt you? I like art because I like being taken away from all the banal shit I feel bad about it. Like most of the art I admire, Mike Young’s Sprezzatura doesn’t take me to a single specific place or move like a safe or viable vehicle. Its poems revel in inconsistency; they move like weird little ships. They keep changing direction, but it’s never annoying or difficult or the same as the time before. No one is thrown overboard or gets a maritime disease. The passengers are happy, and ready for a change, and each time, it feels like going in the right direction.'-- Lucy Tiven, Fanzine
Mike Young SprezzaturaPublishing Genius
'Mike Young’s bristling new book is about love and fear and money. How do we know our feelings and feel our knowledge? It’s about stupid contemporary immune systems and being left to our own devices. If you’re on a bus or plane, you’ll be happy to hear there are a lot of those. Rollerblading, Lord Byron’s clubbed foot, pyramids, falafels, bridges, trains, buses, nightshade, mustard, tattoo, antlers, innovation, nerves, guilt, blood, strawberry cops, conclusive gameshows, moody strangers, and “the yes that keeps watch / over and under my breath.”'-- Publishing Genius
Excerpts
taken from Vice
ENOUGH TO HASH THINGS OUT
I like it when the audience camera accidentally catches
the kid who doesn’t give a shit about the home run.
Carolyn says you need to wait ten seconds before
CPR, which is a delay never depicted in movies, I feel.
Imagine living as a rollercoaster critic. Some people like
certain frozen meals so much they learn how to make
real versions of them. A Pop-Tarts restaurant opened in
Times Square. You can buy Pop-Tarts sushi. When you read
a lot of news stories about these kinds of things, you realize
that only one kind of humor is allowed in contemporary
journalism. The world suggested by this humor is something
distant, like a card trick you get in the mail. Do you ever take
overheard advice? Like if one stranger swears by coconut water
to another stranger, will you try coconut water? What can it hurt?
Aren’t there many people you have failed to thank? One of my
stronger memories is sitting in the Blueberry Twist, realizing
who made his living off poker. One girl who worked at
Blockbuster was always negative. Even when I saw her
excited about something the other day—maybe a coupon
for paper towels, maybe a new color of berry—she seemed
more anti-complaining than actually expressing happiness.
Speaking of anti, the father insisted bats weren’t real and tried
to get everyone in the car. One time Chris said he had nothing to
do on Christmas Eve and he was planning on driving by my house,
but he didn’t. He told me this around March, I think.
CAN WE GET ICE CREAM AT THIS HOUR?
I am not that smart. Or that sad. So where do I get off
with your attention? Dear those who buy the salsa
suggested on the chip bag. Sons who ate caterpillars
when Dale Earnhardt died. Friends are the ones who
wave at you. Is your heart a bundle of shoelaces stuck
together by honey? Dear muumuus and instant potatoes.
We are all pretentious. Consider the flavors we choose
for bathroom aerosol. Dear Saran Wrap and gulch mud.
Is your life a milky dumafidget? Do you care about the word
in German for your loneliness? Let’s arm wrestle in the pantry
and straight up fuck this shit. My bros want poems to rap more.
Their fathers want less cussing. How do I explain that I have
bros who say bro in quotes? If it’s cold, there’s a blanket in the
pickup. This poem does not star a robot suit. Or a talking top-hat.
Those poems have all the nice clues for rain, but my dreams
are clogged with Folgers tins. Coupons for Hamburger Helper.
TV trays and powdered eggs. Dear aunts of shopping networks
in the dark. Dear coaches who still don’t quite understand
vitamin water. It’s like you fiddle all the ones you love across
the couch so they’ll each fit in the photo, except it never works
because it’s not their photo: it’s always just a photo of your love.
Dear men who conceive of suicide only by motorcycle,
you would have the most awesome beard if you would just
read poetry. It is true that I value their thermoses above others,
but why? Didn’t I break up with Amber over her use of the
word weird? Then there was the daughter of a Democrat who
sprayed his wife’s perfume behind the couch. Thank you
Pell Grant for the people I have met through you. Witty
dress shoes. The luxury to be congratulated for my loneliness
when I explain it through a fantasy of several million lonely
YouTube videos compiled together to form the definitive
trailer for The Season of Big Loneliness, which is a let down and
too long. It is true that I have friends and different friends and
rap videos we all watch. Except with certain friends I fall asleep
scuffling of feelings (as we are doing here, thank you) and others
who talk about how Egypt was built by the aliens and God alights
upon Kraft singles. Let’s hear about Hunter. He’s in Europe,
but only because of the Air Force. He dips Red Man and calls girls
biddies. We don’t keep in touch, and his mother believes he has the
soul of a deer outside the hospital, the one she heard shot dead during
labor. In the middle of the night she Googles his Wiccan horoscope.
I am not making this up. Dear sunflower seeds. Dear Superball tickets.
If I could make this up, wouldn’t I be the one who knows you?
NINERS WIN I LOVE YOU, NINERS LOSE I LOVE YOU
for BC after Portland 2009
They’re behind, but it’s not over.
38-25 and the Niners are driving.
My throat still hurts from fritter and lyrics,
while my search engine claims “Memoir of
environmentalist Greyhound driver”garners
no hits. Are we to believe they haven’t invented
themselves? In last night’s fog and cattle, I stole
a nap from my fever on the bus, chanting head songs
more sick than I really was, because a song’s the
epic you dust stir, and a body’s just an eep to sire.
What if you replaced the day part of on-the-road-
don’t-know-what-day-it-is with people? The Niners
tied it. There’s the going on, the went, the want, the we,
the shower you dream of, and the bath salts given to
me for Christmas that interact with my mistaken belief
that all gifts are instructions on how the giver wants to spend
time with the givee. Giraffes don’t play football. Environmentalist
Greyhound giraffe—his right-parted haircut sticking out the top,
plexiglass guarding him from passengers with chainsaws
and trail mix—screeches the bus to a stop in the desert, dust
muzzling the tires in a temporary cloud, all the yellow flowers
no passenger can name. Interstate stubble. No passenger knows
why we’ve stopped because no one looks up to see our driver,
the giraffe, coughing blood. I miss all my thieves. I miss my own
heart when it sneaks out, borrowing my cough syrup and windbreaker.
Three out of every eight readers are currently tolerating this poem
out of concern for the Niners. Sorry. I forgot. OK, there goes
a commercial. When the Niners come back, I will tell you
the score. Love is a giraffe with blood parachuting from its height.
Whoops. Arizona intercepted a pass. It’s all over. We blew it.
Our coach was too busy whispering into his playbook: You never saw
the pills that stole your friend. Pretty soon people will take photos
of you and call you after where they found you, because they can’t
remember how to call you what you are. That’s nobody’s fault.
When we say our own names, we make a weird face. Sure, even
the quarterback. Even the draft pick. Even the other team.
Mike Young "Can We Get Ice Cream At This Hour?"
The Collected Poets Series: Mike Young
Mike Young-Let's Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone is Listening
_________________
Cassandra Gillig:I think we both might agree that swagger is a very important thing to consider when writing and reading a poem. (We do, right?) How do you define swagger?
Dorothea Lasky: Oh, a poet’s swagger is so important! I think that the most “successful” poets have always been ones who manage to navigate between arrogance and humility with ease. Arrogance often makes the poet, and it isn’t necessarily that the person herself is arrogant. It’s simply that she knows when to employ it to her advantage. I’m thinking back to when Walt Whitman made his dick bigger in a reprint of Leaves of Grass. Or when another poet came up to me at a bar and told me he bought a gold chain to “rebrand.” There is a vulnerability that manifests in both of these actions, but they are also statements of self-importance. These small moments and small statements frame a poet’s body of work; these engagements with the public sphere. So when I think of a poet’s swagger, I think of exactly that — arrogance mediated by humility. Also, I love the whole “poet be like god” thing — the idea that poets speak on behalf of the gods and are ordained by the gods, themselves. Engaging with this tradition — this idea — creates the kind of poet swagger I love to see. Poets need to recognize that they aren’t gods, but that they need the power and importance of gods to get their messages across. I think that if you aren’t important to yourself, you will never be important to anyone else.
CG:Do you think the New York School poets in particular are kindred of hip-hop artists? I have always thought this: the naming of names, the elements of gossip, the surprising breaks into high lyrics abruptly from the mundane, the conversational, the everyday. Do you think there will ever be a New New York School? And if so, what might this look like, and do we even want this to happen?
DL: I think about this a lot, actually. Rappers and poets are similarly self-referential and intertextual. Like, there’s a similar way of being “in the know” — being able to decipher allusions to people, places, and things. And this is something that makes the study of poetry, or the study of hip-hop, really rewarding. For example, it is pretty common to read one of O’Hara’s most famous lines, “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” and not pick up that “Grace” is a pun on his friend Grace Hartigan’s name. You lose out on the cleverness. Similarly, if you listen to the song “The Language” by Drake, there’s this bit where he talks about eating dinner with Italians. Ostensibly nonsense, but if you are up on your Drake friendships, you would know that he hangs out with Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli. Anyway, the craft of hip-hop songs and poems, in that way, can be so intricate and impressive. And these things really make me want to listen to more music and read more poems — they make me care about the artists. These works are beautiful creations even if you can’t fully understand each and every facet, but if you do, it’s such a weirdly satisfying and exciting thing. It feels like detective work. I think the New York School’s passion for the boring, and the quotidian, and the conversational lives on in both hip-hop and poetry. We are all living in the shadow of Frank O’Hara. New York will be a closed door to all artists in 10 or 15 years, and even then there will be a New York School. The NYS taught us that we can talk about ourselves and talk about the world in a way that glorifies our own banality. I don’t think that will ever go out of style, nor should it. That idea is sometimes what keeps me going, because it is an idea that is so real. What do I have if not myself and other people and the world around me?
Norton/Liveright
'Dorothea Lasky has been hailed as "undoubtedly one of the nation's most talented younger poets" (Huffington Post). From her first book, AWE, Lasky has been crafting her hallmark voice, a mixture of language that is "boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human" (Timothy Donnelly), presenting her readers with poetry full of "blood-red realness" (Boston Globe) and haunting lines that "recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg" (Chicago Tribune). With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems have kept gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of new poets, fusing the transcendent vision of the New York School with a kind of performative confessionalism, bringing the force and power of the classical world into the everyday.'-- Liveright
Excerpts
I WANT TO BE ALIVE
More than anything I want to be alive
I want to jiggle
I want to jiggle on you
And gurgle
And urinate on your backspan
I want you to eat my menstrual blood
And soft juices
I want to eat your shit until I dream
I want you to come shit all over me
I want to bury my vomit in your shit
I want you to kiss me hard hard
In the nighttime
And not give up
I don’t want to be a thing
I want to be becoming
The nighttime
I want to be the nighttime with you
You know, I loved you
I loved you
I was wrong
POEM FOR MY FRIEND
Is it possible that it is grief that brought us together
Yes it is
It is possible
Dear friend, we sat on the sun-soaked fields
But I would have a strawberry with you anywhere
Or when they said of Julius Caesar: that his life was gentle
Dear friend, I would paint your eyes anywhere
The elements so mixed up in me
That Nature might stand up and say: Now this is a man!
And when they burn me up into the trees
I hope you are the trees
The set of neat green things
Come waiting for me
I hope you are the bushes
I hope you are the neat green bushes
There waiting for me
I AM A CORPSE
I am a corpse
And you are a corpse
And in the nighttime
I see your arm on me and it is dead already
And my arm is dead already
And I look at my belly, already blue
And it is barren and empty
And my lack of pain is also a kind of death
And I drift off to sleep and then I wake
And it is all dying
Why? Because a demon is after me
And he she it has been
Since the day I was born
What an unrepentant ass I must have been
In my past lives
Or what a soulless fish I must have fished
In this one
I can feel the endless stream of words
That are not flesh
They might as well be
Dreams and too
It is the work of corpses
Not ghosts
Come on all you corpses
Just dance and fuck
I just don’t want to animate
This rancid flesh
Like you do
Anymore
So I will say goodbye
And say
Fuck you
And I love you
And I never did
I never knew what feeling was
I only felt the pain
The sun the moon the trees the stars
The animals the birds the words
I only felt the pain
The things the you inflicted on me
Dorothea Lasky reading @ The Renaissance Society
Dorothea Lasky "I Like Weird Ass Hippies"
Dorothea Lasky live at 851
_________________
'Monster House Press recently published Mallory Whitten’s debut book, Collected Poems & Stories. At first I felt like the Collected Poems & Stories was a title befit for a more “established” author, but after reading the book, it’s the only name that fits. There is a reason why Mallory has garnered co-signs from indie lit icons like Tao Lin, Sam Pink, and Noah Cicero. Her writing is certainly a unique voice in indie lit, one that is so refreshing, unpretentious and authentic that it demands respect. Mallory may speak softly, but when she speaks, everybody listens.
'Mallory covers topics like mental illness, drug addiction, social isolation, feminism, high school, relationships, etc, throughout her book. Her style is warm and kind—a Midwestern drawl rising from the page—but there is often a punch, a sharpness, at the end of her poems: a fist through the reverie, right into your jaw. See, for example, how she ends “Adderall Diets, Switching From Beer To Wine, & Monitoring Your Pizza Intake Vs. Everyone Else’s,” the first poem in the collection: “the loch ness monster is telling me / that i will become more sexually and socially desired / the easier i can fit into a laundry basket / the easier i can be picked up and thrown.”
'Mallory’s style and stories have a dreamlike quality to them, and dreams figure prominently into Mallory’s writing. She alternates between real-life stories, half-remembered dreams, and childhood memories—blurring the line between them all, giving them a soft, pillowy consistency, even when they turn into nightmares.
'In broad strokes that blur the line between poetry and prose, Mallory tells the stories of herself and others, the weirdos of suburban Ohio: an autistic girl who brings a knife to school; a masturbating great-grandpa; an anxious, overweight algebra teacher; a school janitor whose only day of relief is when he gets to go on the roof and throw the kickballs that have accumulated there over the course of the school year to the students.
'These stories are sad, and there is no resolution. Great-grandparents die. Autistic kids get bullied. People break up and never get back together. But the humor that is there, the laughter at the absurdity and sadness of it all, is resolution enough. There is an odd sort of invisible closure that one feels at the end of a Mallory Whitten poem.'-- Zach Schwartz, Fanzine
Monster House Press
'MALLORY WHITTEN’S POEMS & STORIES take such unique note of the strange & depressing aspects of contemporary American life that they often feel like dreams. At the same time affectless & deeply emotive, these poems & stories take account, with something like a stenographer’s prowess, of the anthropologically immense complexity & absurdity of everything happening all at once: prescription drugs, great-grandparents, the judicial system, upper middle class candy stores, elementary school janitors, gentrification, iguanas, binge drinking, anxiety attacks, vague social structures, ad nauseam.'-- Monster House
'Mallory Whitten is easily one of my favorite writers. She painted a steak for me once and covered it in rhinestones. She called it the disco steak and I hung it on my wall. Every morning I get up and it sparkles and shines. This is her book. It’ll make you sparkle and shine after you read it. I hope you’re ready to sparkle and shine. I hope you’re ready to say that Mallory Whitten is one of your favorite writers too. She made this book just for you. You’re welcome.'— SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Excerpts
recreational drug use
i’m sitting on a couch with five people
there is an obese dog named rufus on the floor
i’m sneezing & walking to the bathroom frequently to blow my nose
seems what i need is an allergy pill
i have asked
& no one has one
but there is adderall
& xanax
& alcohol
& weed
& mdma
& morphine
& ketamine
& ecstasy
BALL DAY
i told you the janitor at the elementary school i went to had a red mullet & a motorcycle
you told me the janitor at the elementary school you went to had long hair & was named wayne
i imagined the janitor at the elementary school you went to cleaning up puke in hallways & poop next to toilets
you said twice a year your long-haired janitor would go on the roof of the school & throw the balls that had collected there during the school year down onto the playground
you said those days were known unofficially as "ball day" by the students
i imagined the janitor at the elementary school you went to cleaning up your puke in the hallway & your friend's poop next to a toilet while feeling defeated then having a faraway feeling of ball day
starfish
when starfish eat
their mouths extend from their bellies
in the shape of a tube
the tube sucks up food
then reverts back to its original belly shape
where it holds the food until it is digested
if i were a starfish
i’d swallow a creature
then look down
& see the creature inside of my tube stomach
& feel it wriggling around
i’d take a knife in one of my five starfish hands
cut my stomach off
then cry with the creature i started to eat
Trailer: 'Collected Poems & Stories'
young exzackly reading "food anxiety" by mallory whitten
jordan castro & mallory whitten laughing to the bank
_______________
Sarah Carson:What was the impetus for this play? What made you choose this content matter + this form for communicating it?
Joyelle McSweeney: This play germinated from learning that Abduwali Muse – the teenage Somali ‘pirate’ who was tried in NYC a few years back—is imprisoned in a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana—the state where I live, the Rust Belt state whose name vaguely refers to a genocided people. That’s how misery moves around the globe and always finds its Target ™. Like many citizens of the Internet, I remember Muse for the movie-star grin he flashed at the cameras upon arrival at trial in New York. The charisma of that moment floods all through this play. I wrote it as a spell for his protection and an effort at occult communication.
In my play, a benevolent Julian Assange has hijacked a containership full of Dead Youth, a plural character made up of (un-)dead, saucy, track-suited teens who have died all over the planet from contact with violence: gang warfare, pharmaceutical industry predation, environmental toxicity, drones, suicide, johns, etc. He is steering them to his childhood home Magnetic Island where he will reboot them/upload them to the Internet. Muse and a female Saint-Exupéry (representing The Law) board the ship and attempt to wrest control from Assange. Their fortunes are all controlled by a female deity played Henrietta Lacks, the African-American cancer patient whose cells, harvested without her consent, at Johns Hopkins in 1951, have led to many important medical (and consumerist) discoveries and are used in research settings all over the globe.
This may sound like heavy stuff, but it’s actually a farce, given the many political figures who collide in this inside-out Tempest. There are many press conferences, song and dance numbers, show trials, etc, and lots of campy banter. The farce form makes your belly shake and then sticks you with its blade. Yikes!
SC:What was your process like? Where did you begin? How long did it take you? How did you know you were finished?
JM: I forced this out over just a few weeks to meet the deadline. I knew what I wanted to write about and why—as a play of advocacy for Muse and Assange, and a chance to elevate Henrietta Lacks to a position of absolute power. I had a lot of urgency driving me to write. But I also wanted to write a real play, not just a shorty poet’s play of 10 or 15 pages. So I went back and made every draft longer. This also allowed me to carry certain motifs (bees, computer code, cancer, green) from section to section.
SC:What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into writing experimental plays like yours? Are there any authors you’d recommend?
JM: My advice is just to read like hell and write that which gives you perverse joy and which you are somewhat humiliated to present to the world. That’s a sign you are writing stuff no one else but you could write, which usually makes for the most delicious and devilish work. To write my play, I really drew on an array of plays and performances I love: Langston Hughes Scotsboro, Ltd.; Amiri Baraka The Dutchman; Suzan-Lori Parks America Play; Shakespeare Tempest and Merchant of Venice; Soyinka, From Zia with Love & A Scourge of Hyacinths; Durenmatt The Visit; Genet, entire body of work; Jack Smith, entire body of work. I researched Assange and Lacks and, to the extent I could, Muse. I made up the Exupérystuff. I had also read CLR James The Black Jacobins earlier that year and became obsessed with this short note written by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in (I assume) James’s translation here:
Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in San Domingo. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
The self-announcement of this note stops the show and initiates revolutionary time. I have used its tone, syntax, and cadences in all of my plays because they are works of revolution and vengeance. When Henrietta Lacks says her name in this play, it is a declaration of war. When Julian Assange says, “Hello, I’m Julian Assange”, it continually resets the play’s clock. I recite this letter to myself while driving around South Bend or whenever the spirit wavers.
Litmus Press
'In this farce set on a hijacked containership on its way to Magnetic Island, Julian Assange attempts to “reboot” a troupe of DEAD YOUTH—teenagers from all over the globe who have died in violent circumstances from sweatshop labor to environmental poisoning to war—but must grapple with two other would-be hijackers: a young Somali pirate and a female Antoine de St-Exupery. Described by its author as a “badly-wired allegory,” Dead Youth, or, The Leaks brings to manic light the veiled violence that makes life in capitalism possible.'-- Litmus Press
Excerpt
from Hyperallergic
[Note: Dead Youth, or, The Leaks finds a benevolent Julian Assange piloting a stolen containership, the SS Smirk, on his way to Magnetic Island. His mission is to reboot a pack of DEAD YOUTH, tracksuited teens who have died by a variety of Anthropocene causes, and upload them to the Internet. The ship is boarded by two other would-be hijackers: Abduwali MUSE, a teenage Somali “pirate,” and a female ST-EXUPÉRY, representing the LAW-in-travesty. In this passage, MUSE is being tried by ST-EXUPÉRY, while the dubious YOUTH oscillate between taking the MUSE’s side and that of the LAW.]
DEAD YOUTH 1: O this island. It’s a pit.
DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s a dump.
DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s a mass grave!
DEAD YOUTH 2: Without the masses. It’s deserted.
ASSANGE: Not at all. It’s just the off-season. You boys play the part of the unseasonable youth. Untimely plucked. Watch out or you’ll be juiced. [his tail switches like a lazy cat]
ST-EXUPÉRY: (from office area) ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE!
MUSE: I recognize the representative of France.
ST-EXUPÉRY: You are not the judge!
Nor president pro tem!
You do not recognize me.
I myself am JUSTICE.
I recognize you.
YOUTH TO YOUTH: HUM, blind Justice recognizes Muse!
YOUTH TO YOUTH: That’s what, in science, we call a double-blind.
TOUT YOUTH: A very pharmaceutical pursuit! Forsooth.
ST-EXUPÉRY: Silence, youth! It is golden.
It has a mouth, but it’s fixed.
Like a clock, or a neutered cat,
or suit brought against an emperor.
In other words, can it.
YOUTH: Silence in other words! That is strange science!
ST-EXUPÉRY: Let the interrogation proceed. Now, Muse, I don’t want to have to take out my carburetor or my salad tongs. So answer my questions. Sing, muse.
MUSE: I won’t.
ST-EXUPÉRY: Then prattle.
MUSE: The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor de glace
MUSE: the only emperor is the one who stands naked
YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor sans pants
MUSE: and communicates to youth, directly in his nakedness.
ASSANGE: O dream of a crystalline communication.
Flap flap to dirty ears. The pidgins of pigeons.
The germs they smuggle in their penates and pinions.
The germs they share for a puddle of crumb-ions.
Good pigeons, grey matter, rats with aspirations!
O rank mass, its rank communicants! Its holy communications!
YOUTH: We Catholics believe in transubstantiation.
Our uncanny valley runs on circuits of revulsion.
MUSE: How like a thing, how like a paragon
YOUTH: how like a think, how like an epicure
MUSE: how like a stink, how like a pedicure
YOUTH: how like bacteria that thrive in the footbath
MUSE: how like a strand of flesh-eating staph
YOUTH: how like the society ladies hobble on no feet
MUSE: until they realize Jimmy Choos fit better with no feet
YOUTH: how they then occupy the lotus position
MUSE: how like a bath salt
YOUTH: how like a bidet.
MUSE: What a piece of…work is man
YOUTH: Le seul empereur est l’empereur de glace
MUSE: Caveat emptor
YOUTH: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
MUSE: Follow your leader. That’s called dictee.
ST-EXUPÉRY: I see you are a very learned man.
MUSE: Maleducated. Malaparte. That’s why we formed our bande à part. Before the Little Emperor could pursue his destiny, he flipped the ‘Malaparte’ to ‘Bonaparte’. A visionary must also have a literalist’s heart. And wear it like a medal on his chest.
ST-EXUPÉRY: O what a fine speech! O medals all around!
YOUTH: [affixing metals by driving pins into Muse’s torso. He now resembles a Sebastian] That’s tantalum, that’s for capacity, in hearing aids, jet blades, and telephony. There’s cassiterite that’s for circuit boards. And there’s wolframite that’s for ‘green ammunition,’ i.e. bullets with less lead. So children who eat bullets won’t get lead poisoning and perform poorly in standardized tests. Also good for making your iPhone vibrate.
ALL: What?
YOUTH: I kid you not. Wolframite is a very right metal. People mine each other for it. I’m talking about a combat mine, mined by gangpressed soldiers. I am not even talking about a data mine.
ASSANGE: O MUSE, you are a bouquet. You are a very directory, a very index, the very body of contemporary miseree.
ST-EXUPÉRY: That’s enough. Don’t encourage his vanitee. Second question. MUSE, when brought to trial in New York, why did you smile for the cameras?
MUSE: Because I have a face.
[rimshot]
[rifle crack]
ST-EXUPÉRY: WHAT’S THAT?
MUSE: Because I have a face.
ST-EXUPÉRY: OBSCENE ANSWER!
MUSE: It is the opposite of obscene. The obscene must be hidden from view. My face I show. It is a black face, but it is not in blackface. It comes from a black site. It is a leak.
ST-EXUPÉRY: O OBSCENE! O how his teeth gleams, his smile, and his eyes, his charisma, and his native talent for being alive. O obscenity. What a felony! Youth tar him with petroleum products. Then he will know what it means to be in capitalism’s embrace. IN THE BOSOM OF THE LAW!
(YOUTH tar ST-EXUPÉRY instead)
WHAT? What is the meaning of this?
YOUTH: Are you not the font of Justice? I recognize you, I met you so many times on the other side of the bench. You sent me to juvie for a decade, took the kickback to buy golf clubs. Luckily I OD’d and was thus released from my sentence, albeit to the morgue. Now you wear the black robes you wore in life, which shows you have been invested with gravure as in the grave.
(read the entirety)
10th Annual SLC Poetry Festival [Joyelle McSweeney]
Joyelle McSweeney: Bryant Park Reading
Joyelle McSweeney reading @ the revolution
*
p.s. Hey. ** ASH, Hey there, man! How's it big time? Wow, I'm really glad you shared your 'I Am A Tree'. Hold on. Oh, man, I just let myself have a minute with it, and I'll give it full time later, and it's great -- version and video! I'll imbed it below for the folks. Everyone, down at the bottom of this thing you'll find a video of/by music-conjurer and d.l. ASH and his band burninghouse doing a cover of the great Doug Gillard-penned Guided by Voices song 'I Am A Tree' complete with awesome, mad video made by ASH himself. Give it a spin when you down there, okay? You'll be very, very glad. Incredible coolness, my friend. Thank you a lot! ** GucciCODYprada, Hi, C! Thanks, man. Wish I could eat that stuff you're making, like ... a lot of it. Tons! I will (tell you), yeah, when I finish reading, but do check in again in a bit 'cos you know my spaciness. I like Nicolas Jaar's stuff, what I've heard, but I don't think I know that one, so I'll go get it. Much love back to you! ** Keaton, No tail bone? Um, how does he ... ? Never mind. I think the days when rape was rampant in the Marais are long past, like centuries past even. I don't get Jesus and Christianity at all, which I guess was probably more than clear yesterday. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Ayn Rand made multiple appearances here yesterday, weird. I know about her only slightly more than I know about Jesus, which is borderline squat. ** Steevee, You like your Jesuses pistol-packing. Cool: the review. Everyone, Steevee has reviewed the most intriguing sounding if apparently let-downing film 'A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness', which has as its turf Black Metal in Norway, and hence its theoretical promise. Anyway, go read what he has to say about it here. ** Sypha, Why did I know the word Biebz would be in your first sentence today? I read 'Lord of the Rings'. I liked it. Not my thing in the slightest, but it was very well done. I've read part of 'The Tunnel', and I need to go back and finish it one day because I thought it was pretty great. Why are people talking about Ayn Rand? It's so weird. Because some far right top dog politicians like her? I don't get it. ** Kyler, Oh, wow, thanks, man. My ignorance is bliss? ** Kier, Hey! I like being surprising. It's fun. Yay, on the Lukas Haas collages. I love the collages you've been sharing on FB lately. Ah, that's where I saw the Johnny Gosch film, on Mr Waters's list. Mystery solved. You day of doing nothing sounds plenty productive to me. My day was almost entirely occupied by film editing. Not very interesting to recount. Meticulous, repetitive work, but we got quite far. If we're lucky, we'll have a solid rough cut of the scene finished today, and we can move on to Scene 1. We may have found a guy to organize the footage on scenes 2, 4, and 5, which we sorely need if we're going to get the edit done in time, and I'll find out if we scored on that front this morning. Other than editing, which was a giant gulp of the day, I conferred about tech stuff with the guy who's helping with my eBook/novel project, and did almost nothing else. Ate, worked on blog posts, blah blah. I fear today will sound a lot like yesterday, but I will look everywhere for interesting details, I promise. What happened during the stretch of time popularly known as 'today' in your life? ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks for letting me/us know about Morrissey's forgiving side. ** Etc etc etc, Hi! Yep, 'weird conversational jargon moving with the speed of music' has a giant place in my heart too. And in my head. And even maybe in my mouth on extremely rare occasions that can't be triggered consciously or predicted. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Rich news there about the beginning of your spate of days off. Luxuriate, man. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, none of those Days you say you need are going to happen, or so I predict. However, 'one never knows' should always be everyone's dictum, so ... Right, about beards. I don't really have a problem with them like I do with mustaches unless they're really trimmed and designed looking 'cos I can look at bearded guys and think, 'You didn't shave for a while', makes sense. No, I didn't know that about his mom. Why, dare I ask, does it make sense? You mean because it explains him acting wild and stuff? ** Hyemin kim, The first gif of Jesus barely has hands even on a somewhat fast laptop. Thank god he is/was not a writer, no? I don't think I'm going to prepare for the 23rd event. The cool thing about the 'being interviewed onstage' format is that I feel like the interviewer has to do the preparation, and I can just sit there and react spontaneously. Which is probably a really bad method on my part. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Jesus, San Francisco, I mean ... really. I guess Paris must do things that conform to foreigners' preconceptions about what Paris would do all the time. 'Mumbo Jumbo' is awesome! I'm guessing your voice is all regular and gloriously yours again by now? ** With that, I tell you what you already know, namely that there are four books up there that I recommend to you. Have at them. Off I go to edit a film. See you tomorrow.
b u r n i n g h o u s e - I AM A TREE