Frankenstein vs. the World

I don’t mean to scare you
You’re leaving soon
But the wallpaper’s melting
& thoughts turning blue
The light bulb is giving out shots in the dark
& the mad clarinets run away with your heart

Do you remember that old tune
The one that you cried to
When you fell
It felt like you’d lost your mind

You were not twenty-one when he first saw you
How his melody pleased you, pitch rang so true
Placed your lips to the mouthpiece, struck out a part
Now the mad clarinets run away with your heart

Do you remember that old tune
The one that you cried to
When you fell
It felt like you’d lost your mind

When he received you
Your hopes simply fell through
So you cried
It felt like you’d lost your mind
– Graeme Jeffries, “The Mad Clarinet”

Tags: cakekitchen, graeme jeffries.

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“You cannot understand what Alan Greenspan calls ‘irrational exuberance’ if you don’t reflect on the simple fact that millions of cognitive workers took tons of cocaine, amphetamines, and Prozac during the decade of the ’90s.” — Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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Q: Poets are thought of as very flowy and peaceful and . . . I don’t know, dressed in linen all the time. How would you say this stacks up to your own personal flowy, linen-wearing peacefulness?

Eileen Myles: I think we take the hit for language in any era. To decide to do “this” as a living is to invite barbs that generally pile up around gender and power. The poet is a fag, the poet is a drag, the poet is righteous. But really I think people resent our freedom. Our choice to keep doing something they may have done badly when they were younger and were full of feeling and to keep doing something that supposedly anyone can do – making something out of something as practical and mundane as language is to brand oneself as a lifelong fool rather than merely a fool in her youth. People feel sad about what they disavowed to become who they are now. Poets are human of course and have disavowed plenty, but to stand behind this nonetheless significant or foolish act – it’s a kind of self identifying, self categorizing act (like language itself) that enrages people exactly in the place where they’ve made choices and need to assume you haven’t. This – to be a poet – was the biggest choice in my life, and I suffer fools gladly and have a great life. Look at this. I just wrote a book called snowflake, for god’s sake.

Tags: eileen myles.

My life is complete now that two of my poems are appearing in my favorite magazine, Hedi El Kholti’s Animal Shelter. Issue 2 also features fiction, artwork, conversations, & essays by: Dodie Bellamy, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Moyra Davey, Ben Ehrenreich, Matt Fishbeck, Veronica Gonzalez, Bruce Hainley, Chris Kraus, Rachel Kushner, Sylvere Lotringer, Alistair McCartney, Slava Mogutin, Eileen Myles, Jed Ochmanek, George Porcari, Michael Rashkow, Shlomo Sand, Margie Schnibbe, Sarah Wang, and others.

Started in 2008, Animal Shelter 1 summoned the underground press sex culture of the 1970s as an intellectual conduit. The new issue evokes the suspended atmosphere of a world drifting in limbo; analysis laced with an undertow of oblivion. Desublimation, digression, negative monument, catastrophe, shadows, horror and sexiness, Gay Sunshine, blue line . . .

” . . . At the Liberation . . . I discovered a coast that had been off limits during the entire war. For a child, the discovery of that seascape was an extraordinary moment, the end off the world, the finisterre; the discovery of freedom as well as an endless, negative horizon where there is nothing but the horizon, nothing but fluid dynamics.” — Paul Virilio, The Littoral as Final Frontier

The issue is available from Ooga Booga, where there’ll be a release party this Wednesday.

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Tags: penny arcade.

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Tags: mitchell syrop.