National Poetry Month 2018: Justice Ameer

Photo taken from PoetryFoundation.org

Unless the spirit suddenly moves me, this will be the last poem for National Poetry Month this year, I always like hunting for new poetry, or putting up old classics, and I'm really pleased that I was able to make this a weekly occurrence unlike previous years. Today's piece is Justice Ameer's "(After God Herself)" which just absolutely astounded me with the force of the subject and the flow of the words. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and Justice has put it into words in a way I doubt I'd ever be able to. Keep reading and writing, dear reader, and let us all bring more poetry into each other's lives.

(After God Herself)

Adam ate an apple

it got stuck in his throat

and they called him Eve

the progenitor

the creator of all things

the mother of strength

and fortitude

and sadness

Adam ate an apple

choked on it so hard

a rib popped out of his chest

and they called it Eve

the progenitor

the creator of all things

the mother of strength and fortitude

and sadness

it takes the hacking of a body

to make a woman

Adam hacking up a piece of his body

it was just a piece of fruit

they called me fruit once too

they called me fruity

before they called me flaming

before they called me faggot

before they called me woman

i thought i would have

to hack this body into pieces

woman, a name stuck in my throat

right under the apple Adam tried to eat

choked on it for years

waited for my ribs to pop out

my chest to explode

for my Eve to be created

from the fruit i couldn’t swallow

they called me fruit once

until they called me woman

and then they just called me fruitless

as if it took a womb to be

progenitor

creator

mother of all things

strength and fortitude and sadness

they reckon God looked

at the image of herself

and called it Adam

they still don’t call me woman

they still don’t birth me Eve

even though they cast me out

my throat shrunken close

with the fruit still stuck in it

like Adam

before they called him Eve

and suddenly i am a stranger

to Eden

i am a stranger to this body

as if it hadn’t always been mine

i reckon God looked

at the image of herself

and called it me

but i don’t know if that

was before or after the apple

before or after Adam choked

which came first

the progenitor or the mother

the apple or the rib

the strength or the sadness

this body was God’s original creation

but they called it sin

they called it Adam

I reckon God looked

at the image of  herself

and called Adam Eve

after she choked on his name

some fruit that bloomed

in everyone else’s throat

but she could never quite swallow

the fall of man was an apple

hacked up from a fruitless body

a woman learning what evil was

like a man forcing his name upon you

the fall of man was a rib

being torn from a chest

and men calling that violence holy

naming a woman based only

on the body parts she’s made of

the fall of man

was the beginning of Eve

Eve casting out Adam’s name

Eve discovering who she was

the progenitor

the creator of all things

the mother of strength

and fortitude

and sadness

the fall of man

was Eve becoming a woman

with or without Eden’s approval

and now

every time someone

tries to call her Adam

tries to force the apple

of his name down her throat

she laughs

she swallows

she looks at God herself

and she smiles

New Music Sundays: 4/22/18

The Soft Moon: Criminal

It's been a while since I listed to some straightforward, Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial dance music, but Luis Vasquez, as The Soft Moon, embodies the genre's best qualities while avoiding any of its usual pitfalls. In a way, Criminal is a complement to Gazelle Twin's astounding 2014 record Unflesh, in that both use the trappings of techno and industrial to tell personal tales of anxiety, isolation, and private mental torture. One thing that obviously helps the proceedings is the fact that Vasquez's command over his instruments is impressive; on songs like 'The Pain' and 'ILL' he makes his banks of synthesizes roil and howl like past memories that claw at your brain...this is anguish that you can dance to, after a fashion. Listening to Criminal is a window into a very private, tormented world, and if it lacks the feminist tension of Unflesh, it makes up for it in a more general sense or tortured longing. We all have days where we need a record like Criminal that speaks to our own fears and discontentment, and in Vasquez we have someone using his own negative personal experiences to bring us an album we can all relate to.

Mamuthones: Fear on the Corner

And now for something completely different: Italy's Mamuthones are a bizarre, motorik jazz(?) group, and their album Fear on the Corner is one of those records that's nearly impossible to categorize. The closest point of comparison would probably be Faust, in the kosmische-inspired grooves and the amateurish vocals, especially on the pure krautrock grooves of 'Show Me'. But then songs like 'Cars' and the title track utilize instruments like marimbas and tribal style percussion to dip into the always-fertile fields of Eno/Byrne/Hassell style faux-ethnographer soup that sadly didn't make much traction in the weird world of '70s German experimental music, outside of maybe an Amon Duul album here and there. The album always starts to stretch way, way out at the end, with the twin titans of 'Alone' and 'Here We Are' taking up over a third of the total running time, feeling like leftovers from a recent Goat album left to bake and expand and grow rancid in the sun. Like Re-TROS, another band I hadn't heard of before who seriously impressed me, Mamuthones take their influences from a lot of different places, but blend them into such a unique porridge that they transcend the starting beats and become something wholly unique.

National Poetry Month 2018: Mina Loy

Photo taken from PoetryFoundation.org

Mina Loy was a early 20th century modernist poet contemporaneous with T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, etc. She wrote more in like Eliot's 'everything is terrible' style than WCW's 'maybe everything isn't THAT terrible' style, and her work had a strong feminist streak to it, even before the Flappers made the scene. "Parturition" is a strong example of Ms. Loy's work, a vicious, ice-cold condemnation of women's lot in life. 

"Parturition"

I am the centre

Of a circle of pain

Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun

Has no affair with me

In my congested cosmos of agony

From which there is no escape

On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations

Or in contraction

To the pinpoint nucleus of being

Locate an irritation            without

It is                                           within

                                                 Within

It is without

The sensitized area

Is identical            with the extensity

Of intension

I am the false quantity

In the harmony of physiological potentiality

To which

Gaining self-control

I should be consonant

In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force

Pain calls up in me

The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice

A fashionable portrait painter

Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment

Sings

        “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly

         All the girls are nice

         Whether they wear their hair in curls

         Or —”

At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization

The conception                       Brute

Why?

        The irresponsibility of the male

Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.

He is running upstairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony

Incidentally with the exhaustion of control

I reach the summit

And gradually subside into anticipation of

Repose

Which never comes.

For another mountain is growing up

Which          goaded by the unavoidable

I must traverse

Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night hours

Confuses while intensifying sensibility

Blurring spatial contours

So aiding elusion of the circumscribed

That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast

Comes from so far away

And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth

Is no part of myself

There is a climax in sensibility

When pain surpassing itself

Becomes exotic

And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative   poles of sensation

Uniting the opposing and resisting forces

In lascivious revelation

Relaxation

Negation of myself as a unit

          Vacuum interlude

I should have been emptied of life

Giving life

For consciousness in crises          races

Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

Have I not

Somewhere

Scrutinized

A dead white feathered moth

Laying eggs?

A moment

Being realization

Can

Vitalized by cosmic initiation

Furnish an adequate apology

For the objective

Agglomeration of activities

Of a life

LIFE

A leap with nature

Into the essence

Of unpredicted Maternity

Against my thigh

Tough of infinitesimal motion

Scarcely perceptible

Undulation

Warmth           moisture

Stir of incipient life

Precipitating into me

The contents of the universe

Mother I am

Identical

With infinite Maternity

    Indivisible

    Acutely

    I am absorbed

    Into

The was—is—ever—shall—be

Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious

Impression of a cat

With blind kittens

Among her legs

Same undulating life-stir

I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious

Impression of small animal carcass

Covered with blue bottles

—Epicurean—

And through the insects

Waves that same undulation of living

Death

Life

I am knowing

All about

     Unfolding

The next morning

Each woman-of-the-people

Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet

Doing hushed service

Each woman-of-the-people

Wearing a halo

A ludicrous little halo

Of which she is sublimely unaware

I once heard in a church

—Man and woman God made them—

                                               Thank God.

National Poetry Month 2018: Jesse Ball

Image Taken from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

With this week's poet, we jump ahead a couple hundred years and change to a modern writer, Jesse Ball. I first read Ball's The Village on Horseback when trying to figure out how to sequence my own multi-genre work, along with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, and those two books have always had a soft spot in my heart since. My brother died on Friday the 13th, a long time ago, so when it rolls around I always have brothers on the mind.

"Inside the Stove"

Inside the stove, he found 
a passageway, leading to a set of stairs.
This caused him a great deal of worry
as well as elation and gladness of living.
He did not, however, venture
into the oven, but sent his little brother in
in his stead. This seemed at first 
a good idea, but when the brother
had been gone three days, he began 
to second-guess the wisdom
of his rash choice. He’d go in after him,
he decided. But the passage
had shrunk by then, and no normal-sized
person could fit through. Yes, that’s it,
I sent him in because, from a purely physical
standpoint, I myself could never have gone.
And besides, he mumbled to himself,
it’s probably nice in there.

New Music Sundays: 4/8/2018

IG Witzelsucht: Sometimes Puns are the Sign of a Damaged Brain

IG Witzelsucht are Dominic Robertson and Lukas Simonis, the once-and-future Ergo Phizmiz and the director of Rotterdam music lab WORM, respectively. With Sometimes Puns are the Sign of a Damaged Brain, the duo fuse Robertson's usual warped take on '60s pop b-sides with a harder, punkier edge, like Herman's Hermits tried to emulate the Sex Pistols in the late '70s. Despite the slight veneer of viciousness, though, this is still very much a pop record. Perhaps more than anything else either of these men have done before, Sometimes Puns... gives itself entirely over to the melody; every song on the record has an enormous hook that is ridden just long enough to lodge itself into your brain. In this way, this becomes the premier pop expression these two have put out so far, just astoundingly crunchy candy that deserves to be heard far and wide.

Trembling Bells: Dungeness

Dungeness is an album that tricks you. The first single put out for the album, the sublime 'Christ's Entry into Govan', is reasonably straight Fairport Convention style '70s folk rock, a lovely and forceful tale of misplaced religion. But then you get the album itself and you're greeted with the funk suite of 'Knockin' on the Coffin' and you realize this is something much more surprising than you at first thought. Dungeness still wears it's British folk influence on its sleeve, but it's turned and mutated, dosed with almost postpunk sheets of guitar and long, suitelike tracks that morph throughout their durations. All of this makes Dungeness much more interesting than a well-made but staid genre exercise, and all of it is anchored by singer Lavinia Blackwall's frankly stupendous voice, which can reach for the sky just as well as drip with menace depending on the situation. This is an album I had to put right back on as soon as I finished it, and with each spin you realize it's less Fairport and more Sandy Denny fronting Led Zeppelin.

National Poetry Month 2018: Herman Melville

Image taken from The Chiseler

Once again the Earth has revolved around the sun long enough that it's that most magical of times, National Poetry Month. This year it also lined up with me finishing my somewhat bi-yearly listen of David Blight's incredible lectures on the Civil War and Reconstruction, so to start NPM, here's Herman Melville's lovely and heart-wrenching take on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Melville's prophetic words weren't really borne out by the events in history, but they're still a snapshot of rage at the death of his president. I'm ashamed to say I really don't know much about Melville as a poet, Clarel is one of those works that I've thought about reading for a long time that I haven't picked up, but his prose is so poetic in its own right, of course he translates well to verse.

"The Martyr"

Indicative of the passion of the people
on the 15th of April, 1865

Good Friday was the day

    Of the prodigy and crime,

When they killed him in his pity,

    When they killed him in his prime

Of clemency and calm—

         When with yearning he was filled

         To redeem the evil-willed,

And, though conqueror, be kind;

    But they killed him in his kindness,

    In their madness and their blindness,

And they killed him from behind.

              There is sobbing of the strong,

                   And a pall upon the land;

              But the People in their weeping

                                    Bare the iron hand:

              Beware the People weeping

                   When they bare the iron hand.

He lieth in his blood—

    The father in his face;

They have killed him, the Forgiver—

    The Avenger takes his place,

The Avenger wisely stern,

         Who in righteousness shall do

         What heavens call him to,

And the parricides remand;

    For they killed him in his kindness,

    In their madness and their blindness.

And his blood is on their hand.

                    There is sobbing of the strong,

                        And a pall upon the land;

                    But the People in their weeping

                                    Bare the iron hand:

                    Beware the People weeping

                        When they bare the iron hand.