13 Jun 10

Donald Hall, “The Child”

He lives among a dog,
a tricycle, and a friend.
Nobody owns him.

He walks by himself, beside
the black pool, in the cave
where icicles of rock

rain hard water,
and the walls are rough
with the light of stone.

He hears low talking
without words.
The hand of a wind touches him.

He walks until he is tired
or somebody calls him.
He leaves right away.

When he plays with his friend
he stops suddenly
to hear the black water.

~ ~ ~

From Old and New Poems. I really love how the simple language in this poem describes the fierce, innocent, ignorant independence of childhood. “Nobody owns him.” Simple. One might say obvious, maybe, but if it is so obvious why am I struck with such an intense moment of clarity when reading that line? Why does it resonate so deeply?

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12 Jun 10

Charles Simic, “Navigator”

I summoned Christopher Columbus.
At the hour of the wolf,
He came out of the gloom
Looking a little like my father.

On this particular voyage
He discovered nothing.
The ocean I gave him had no end.
And the ship – an open suitcase.

He was thoroughly lost – I had forgotten to provide the stars.
Sitting in the dark with a bottle in its hand.
He sang a song from his childhood.

In the song the day was breaking.
A barefoot girl
Stepped over the wet grass
To pick a sprig of mint.

And then nothing -
Only the wind rushing off with a screech
As if it just remembered
Where it’s going, where it’s been.

~ ~ ~

I’m just starting to read some Charles Simic, a poet I have always heard of and seen referenced but never read. As the back of his Selected Poems 1963-1983 informs me, he is “critically recognized as one of America’s leading poets,” so. I like his brief, quiet style, each word precise and used for maximum effect. I think about how long-winded so many poets can get in trying to explain a thing, and then over-explaining it in the end, and then I look at the fourth stanza in this poem (“In the song…”) and how exquisite and simple it is. “A barefoot girl stepped over the wet grass to pick a sprig of mint” is so close to an absolutely perfect sentence. Beautiful.

P.S. In classic Half-Price Books form, I discovered when I came home that this book was filled with little penciled-in notes. At the end of this poem, underneath the last line “Where it’s going, where it’s been” the note-taker had written past=future. Haha. Zen-like and insightful!

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7 Jun 10

Approximately “Queen Jane Approximately”

These days I usually just listen to the iPod at home and in the car, picking my own music instead of letting some unknown DJ pick it for me, but there are a few things on the radio that still make me sit down and listen – Mischke at night, The Current (though sometimes you can be to indie for your own good), Country Dave’s honky-tonk show on WOJB, and of course, A Prairie Home Companion. Yes, hi, I’m from Minnesoootah. While the format and gags on the show are usually pretty funny – but also pretty standard – the show excels at presenting great musical acts in a setting that promotes quality musicianship and – so important – quality sound.

One of Keillor’s favorite acts, it seems – and deservedly so – is the duo of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. For me, these guys sink right to the heart of everything that is good and true about American music. It also helps that Gillian has one of the best voices around today, and Dave Rawlings is perhaps the best and most innovative folk guitarist alive. They appeared on the show Memorial Day weekend to perform some songs from the excellent Dave Rawlings Machine record and a couple extras just for the show. One of those extras was a rendition of “Queen Jane Approximately,” a criminally underrated Dylan song from the Highway 61 Revisited album. Lost somewhere in the shuffle between “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row,” where “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is your signpost guiding you along, the siren squeals of “Highway 61″ jolt you from your reverie, and “Ballad of a Thin Man” just creeps you out, there are the thick tones of organ, fuzzed-out guitar, and jangly upright piano of “Queen Jane.” Listen again with some fresh ears: it might just turn into one of your favorite Dylan songs, as it has for me.

Naturally Dave and Gillian strip away all that, leaving just the simple, lilting chord progression and melody intact. And from that they build a new masterpiece: one filled with subtle but powerful harmonies and waterfalls of arpeggio scales, cascading over and over again as if from a dizzying height down to earth. The intricacy of the guitar work belies an emotional simplicity that is easy to latch on to as the song carries you forward.

Dave Rawlings Machine - Queen Jane Approximately

(Sorry for the squawks at the beginning – you can also listen to the original audio at the Prairie Home Companion website. Also you should definitely give Gillian and Dave some money for their music!)

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31 May 10

King of Summertime Twenty Ten!

Hey gang! Can you frickin feel it?! It’s Memorial Day, sun’s out, weather’s hot, the girls are playing badminton next door, the air smells like charcoal and cut grass – summertime baby! Forget this solstice junk (sorry Pagans). Everyone knows summer starts today. And you know what that means – another fresh batch of summer jamz from yer boy Mixmaster Jack. (I don’t know why I’m talking like this.) Anyway, no big theme here like the last few years – just a bunch of good summery songs smooshed together just for you. So I hope you guys out there enjoy my selections this year. And, if this is your first time stopping by for some of my summer mixery, I’ve got seven (seven!) mixes from previous years just waiting for you to rock out with.

Download. Have fun. (if the link doesn’t work just by clicking, right click and then select “Save As” or “Save Link As” and it should start downloading.)

King of Summertime 2010
1. The KoS Intro
2. The Replacements – I Will Dare
3. Vampire Weekend – Cousins
4. Cake – Stickshifts and Safety Belts
5. She & Him – Riding in My Car
6. Phosphorescent – Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)
7. Fang Island – Daisy
8. John Fahey – Daisy (A Bicycle Built for Two)
9. The Anomoanon – Kick Back
10. Surfer Blood – Floating Vibes
11. Camera Obscura – Honey in the Sun
12. Neko Case – Magpie in the Morning
13. Josh Ritter – Snow is Gone
14. The Avett Brothers – At the Beach
15. The Thorns – Long, Sweet Summer Night*
16. Big Star – Watch the Sunrise
17. The Tallest Man on Earth – King of Spain

*(totally stolen from this excellent summer mix by my friend A Small Good Thing)

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25 May 10

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, #4 from “A Coney Island of the Mind”

In a surrealist year
                            of sandwichmen and sunbathers
                                dead sunflowers and live telephones
        house-broken politicos with party whips
        performed as usual
        in the rings of their sawdust circuses
        where tumblers and human cannonballs
                                          filled the air like cries
                        when some cool clown
                                          pressed an inedible mushroom button
and an inaudible Sunday bomb
                                          fell down
catching the president at his prayers
                                                    on the 19th green

      O it was a spring
                            of fur leaves and cobalt flowers
   when cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain
            drowning the meadows with madness
while out of every imitation cloud
                                 dropped myriad wingless crowds
                                               of nutless nagasaki survivors
        And lost teacups
        full of our ashes
        floated by

~ ~ ~

In a surrealist year, indeed. From the Beat classic A Coney Island of the Mind, a bizarre and beautiful set of poems.
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17 May 10

B.H. Fairchild, “Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest”

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

From the book of the same name. And a beautiful book at that.
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14 May 10

B.H. Fairchild, “The Himalayas”

The stewardess’ dream of the Himalayas
followed her everywhere: from Omaha
to Baltimore and back, and then to Seattle
and up and down the California coast until
she imagined herself strapped to the wing
just across from seat 7A muttering
little homemade mantras and shivering
in the cold, stiff wind of the inexpressible.
It could hardly go on like this, she thought,
the unending prayer to nothing in particular
whirling around in her head while she held
the yellow mask over her face and demonstrated
correct breathing techniques: the point was
to breathe calmly like angels observing
the final separation of light from a dead star,
or the monk described in the travel book
trying to untangle his legs and stand once more
at the mouth of his cave. The stewardess
delighted in her symmetrical gestures, the dance
of her hands describing the emergency exits
and the overhead lights that made exquisite
small cones in the night for readers and children
afraid of the dark. As the passengers fell asleep
around her, the stewardess reached up to adjust
the overhead whose cone of light rose over her
like some miniature white peak of the Himalayas
as if she were a cave in the Himalayas,
the cave of her own body, perhaps, in which
she sat patiently now, looking out, waiting.

From his book The Art of the Lathe
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25 Apr 10

Book Review: Kafka On the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Man I’m really on a roll with these book reviews! This one’s pretty easy, though, check it out: WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?! Review over.

Just kidding. Actually, here is my reenactment of the entire novel (SPOILERS?):

Kafka: Are you my mother?
Person who may be his mother: No. Yes. Maybe?
Kafka: Should we have sex?
Person who may be his mother: Sure.

Kafka: And you, are you my sister?
Person who may be his sister: No. Yes. Maybe?
Kafka: Should we have sex?
Person who may be his sister: Why not?

Kafka: And you, are you a boy or a girl?
Person who may be a boy or a girl: Boy. Girl. Both?

Kafka: Am I dead?
Everybody: No. Yes. Maybe?

Kafka: Seriously, what is with this book?
The Reader: An excruciatingly psychoanalytic look at the angst and existential nature of the pubescent teenager?
Kafka: Maybe…
The Reader: Modern retelling of Oedipus Rex?
Kafka: Eh…
The Reader: Japanese writers are crazy?
Kafka: That’s the ticket.

You just keep being you, Mr. Murakami. And I’ll keep reading.

4 Comments Posted in book review, prose, reading by jack
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23 Apr 10

For Whom the Hemingway Tolls

I am reading my first Ernest Hemingway novel. For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is good so far. It takes place in Spain. I have read all of his short stories which I love, never any of his novels. People are shocked to hear this, however it is true. Yes, not even The Old Man and the Sea. I know I was supposed to read that in high school like everyone else. I did not. I am not sure why. His style takes some time to get used to but is a welcome change after the rambling sentences of so many other books I have read lately. Did you know Hemingway stood up at a desk to write? This seems appropriate to me. When you think about it it just seems right.

I went to Hemingway’s grave high in Sawtooth mountains of Idaho once. It is a slab in the ground with his name on it. This also seems appropriate to me. Further on down the road there is another memorial to him, a bust resting on a pillar in the woods, next to a creek. All the lands and people he visited in his life, and he is buried in Idaho. This is all I have to say about Hemingway for the moment.

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20 Apr 10

Book Review: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

The tale is simple: Paul Chowder is a poet. Unassuming, quiet; rather boring, actually. Paul Chowder has collected an anthology of rhyming poems, and is now tasked with writing the introduction to this anthology. He’s having a tough time of it. And his live-in girlfriend has left him out of frustration at his listlessness. He spends his days in the barnhouse loft thinking, singing made-up songs to himself, reading poetry (though unsure he even still likes poetry), doing anything but writing the damned introduction. This is the scenario Nicholson Baker drops us into. Perhaps not the most electrifying plot for a novel, but I’m not so sure this is a novel anyway. In reality it’s more like a fake memoir; something closer to Jim Harrison’s Wolf, except with less drinking and sex. I think making this distinction is important to understanding and liking the book as well. If you go into it expecting something in the way of plot, climax, resolution, etc., well, you’ll probably come away feeling a bit cheated. If you come to this book expecting a good story, however, you will feel sated by the end, full of life and good poetry.

The Anthologist is a rambling, free-form book. This line from the book sums it up quite well, actually:

It’s hard to hold it all in your head. All the different possible ways that you can enjoy life. Or not enjoy life. And all the things that are going on.

It is hard to hold it all in your head sometimes. This book is one person letting it out of his head. I hesitate to even approach the phrase “stream of consciousness” because nothing turns off a casual reader (or even an avid reader) like a STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS narrative. Gah! Get away! Make it stop! Baker’s book has much going for it though that should make you consider adding it to your book list. 1) It’s pretty short. 2) It’s pretty funny. 3) Paul Chowder is simply a likable character. He’s nice, sweet in his own way, and has a sort of innocence to him that you don’t usually see male lead characters carrying. Even when he mucks things up, it’s hard to stay mad at him. This makes the book pleasant to read and think about.

And most importantly 4) it’s about POETRY. Yeah poetry! While the book doesn’t require an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry to enjoy, it insists on an appreciation of poetry and all the fun things that go with it, like language, wordplay, rhyme, meter, and melody. Yes melody. Read the book, you’ll get it. Our Mr. Chowder spends a lot of time talking about poetry. You’ll fall in love with the writings of poets you’ve never read before, like Elizabeth Bishop and W.S. Merwin, and then you will spend a Saturday afternoon collecting their collected works. Probably half the book he spends talking about poetry. Yikes, you say. But don’t worry, you love poetry. If you don’t, this book is not for you. But if you didn’t love poetry, you wouldn’t read my blog, and here you are reading it, so you must love poetry, therefore you will love this book.

Find The Anthologist here.

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