Friday Links: Repent For The Sun Shall Be Blotted Out Edition
"What are their bodies made of, rock or iron to block / your tearing bronze? Stab them! Stab their flesh" - Homer, The Iliad
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with “Flesh and Blood” by Manaly Talukdar dragging our literary Nostromo to the underworld.
There’s an eclipse Monday! We’re going to Indianapolis to see some totality. My kindergartener has gotten really into his STEM class (separate from classroom science and math, they go weekly like with gym, library, or art), and the STEM teacher is very friendly if I see him at pickup, so I suggest, “hey, tell your STEM teacher you’re going to see the eclipse!” And the kid says sure, he will. Pickup comes on STEM class day. I go “hey, did you tell your teacher about the eclipse?”
“I forgot.”
You already knew. I was (am?) the same way.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Already tipped my hat with Wednesday’s column—yes, I’m reading Homer this week. Rage on, Achilles! Man-kill, Hector! But it’s also National Poetry Month, so I didn’t want to not do some small press or at least capital-P Poetry in this, our National Month. Hey, break Homer into two parts and it’s normal novel-sized. Seeing my parents one weekend and then seeing them again the next weekend gives me an opportunity to steal a book off their shelves without them knowing and give it back in a way that makes them say “wow, quick turnaround.” So of course I took the debut collection from not only the inaugural Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN, but also a “close family friend” and “my brother’s friend’s mom.” That’s right, along with not quite half of The Iliad, I read Sugar Fix by Kory Wells!
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, Books 1-9: yikes, was supposed to read 1-12 this week. Hey! I was doing my taxes. It’s good so far, for all the reasons I said on Wednesday, but definitely not quite capturing me the way The Odyssey did. Adventuring is far more interesting than warring, at least to me. It’s loads better than that miserable pickled tripe Triolus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s worst play, which I got tricked into seeing at The Globe and don’t care if I’m spelling right. In fact, I was primed to kinda hate everyone because of that nightmarish play, which is just Closer (another movie that completely sucks) for Elizabethans. Shakespeare’s overrated. I do get why HomerHeads hated Troy. Personally, I don’t hate Troy (here’s me at Cracked pining for a The Odyssey with Sean Bean reprising Odysseus), but I do now think it’s an actively bad adaptation.
One thing that keeps hitting me: how did they keep all them names straight, just telling this story around a fire? Sure, maybe “Diomedes” is the ancient Greek “Dan” or whatever, but this text rattles off some many names of recently killed bros, complete with little eulogies for them, family trees—it’s impressive. I’m going to write more about this specific thing a little later. How the poem honors the dead. For now, the verdict is “worth reading, but if you must pick one, pick The Odyssey.”
Sugar Fix by Kory Wells: to be clear, while my family knows Kory really well, I confess that I do not. She’s my aunt’s best friend, but by the time my brother and her daughter became good friends, I was already in Chicago (speaking of her daughter, check out the roots music the two do together). So the two of us have spoken, but never about poetry, and whatever interactions we’ve had were probably clouded by my interminable shyness. The phrase “you know our friend Kory is a poet” has been uttered to me before, but I missed when this book came out (most likely because my kid was not quite a year old). This book has a lot of things I like—softness, tenderness, sex, interrogations of genealogy and meditations on the one-drop rule—y’know, stuff I like in poems. It also is very much a Book Of Poems In Murfreesboro, and to know me is to know that I have a wildly love-hate relationship with Murfreesboro (people still in Murfreesboro are skeptical the “love” side exists, but I assure you, it does). So the times when a line wouldn’t land for me or I’d think “the Murfreesboro is showing?” That’s not Kory’s fault, that’s my own hang-ups.
So let’s do a quick half-breakdown of a poem that, because it takes place on a plantation tour, I was hesitant about, but ended up really enjoying.
“Between Past and Present I Never Moved So Freely” captures Murfreesboro’s sometimes perverted and often euphemistic attempts at honoring its history with some remarkably well-placed line breaks and alternating right/left justification. The speaker, a teenager, is reading a script for a living history gig in an antebellum house, taking us on a mini tour (“a young lady / playing the harpsichord / (sir, I must ask you / not to touch) original / to the house,”) that is full of finery until we get to “Imagine / the servants / my script called them / servants” and then, after a few stanzas, the speaker’s script directing tourists to imagine “soldiers on the lawn, / the occupation well underway.” We already have “slaves” or “enslaved people” softened into “servants” before getting to the Invitation To Imagine Persecution—a sacrament for white Southerners, particularly the ones at some of the churches my friends would take me to in high school—and then the speaker says “Never did I say / imagine / acres of cotton so endless. / Never / did I think / to say / imagine / welted backs, / unfree / fingers, / how they would bleed.” There’s a volta I wish a lotta people in my hometown could have, imagining people who aren’t white as people—print this poem out and staple it to the Oaklands Mansion front door like Martin Luther’s theses.
LINKS!
I was traveling last weekend, I’m traveling this weekend, and in between, I’ve been doing my taxes. It’s gonna be a YouTube videos week. Since it’s National Poetry Month, it’s gonna be a “YouTube videos of cool poets” week.
Back at the reading series my friends and I co-ran out of our homie Quin’s apartment on Columbia Ave in Rogers Park during college, someone—Quin, other reading series co-founder Charles Gabel, someone—told me about this video they saw of Alan Ginsberg reading with a jazz band and like, running up walls as though he were Bo Jackson. Finding that video is still something I’d like to do one day, but it requires experiencing more Ginsberg than I’m willing to consume at once. Here’s him reading “America” set to music by Tom Waits.
One of the great filmmakers in poetry is Zachary Schomburg. Here’s his film, From 1977-2050. If I’m not mistaken, this poem ended up in his collection The Book of Joshua.
If you’re a reader of this blog, the name Joshua Marie Wilkinson is familiar to you. Did you know that in addition to being an incredible poet and bonkers novelist, he’s a great filmmaker, too? It’s true! He did a whole documentary on Califone. He also did this project, Rabbit Light Movies, a series of poems set to scenery (check this retrospective in Tupelo Quarterly). Here’s some scenes from the north side of Chicago (hey I live there) with Terrance Hayes’s poem “Fishhead for Katrina.”
One way to find poetry videos is by typing “[Your Hero’s Name] reading” into the YouTube search bar. I did that with Eve L. Ewing, and got this short film from Button Poetry, starring Khadija Shari reading “I Come from the Fire City” (from Electric Arches) and having what seems like an incredible day.
Aw hell, let’s go out on another Zachary Schomburg film! Here’s Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful, with excerpts from “Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful” by Mary Ruefle from her collection Traces of the Blast.
Aw hell, who said we had to go out at all? Late addition bonus sixth link because I had to double-check something and found this. Wanna hear Kory read some poems from her book? Yeah, you wanna hear Kory read some poems from her book.
What’re you still doing here? There’s an eclipse coming up! It’s a sign from God! Run for the hills! Read Vine before we all die!
If you work in the service industry this weekend, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Especially if you’re in Indianapolis or San Antonio or Buffalo or anywhere else that a bunch of eclipse-seekers are going to descend on. Hey, I’m one of them! If we go out, you know we got you.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
