oh, lots of things

My intro for the inimitable Brandon Brown:

OK, so I like appropriating as much as the next guy.  Look, I’ve even got hair on my cut n paste fingers to prove it.  It’s normal, right? everyone does it.  But I have to say, when it starts to become a fetish, when it starts to seem as if everyone is just reframing this and reframing that, I feel, quite frankly, a little… unsatisfied.  “Is that all there is to a poem?”  (who am I channeling?) I find myself thrown back upon Pound’s trinity of poeias:  phanopoeia (image), logopoeia (meaning), and more than any other, melopoeia (sound) (have you never been melopoeic? have you never tried? to find the prosody insiiiiiide you).  To paraphrase ex-president Clinton:  “It’s the prosody, stupid!” Now before any of my fellow appropriators get all defensive saying all language is always/already prosodic, at least potentially, please don’t think that, duh, I don’t know that. I'm just sort of in love with idiosyncrasy and langue, with those qualities that are peculiar to individuals’ sensibilities and oralities:  in a word:  their style. And as Charles Baudelaire wrote (as did, it turns out, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, William Hazlitt, and any number of fashion writers, so it can’t be all that original of an insight) STYLE IS CHARACTER.

Brandon Brown is a CHARACTER who is all about STYLE, and who just happens to be translating Baudelaire.  He is from Kansas City, Missouri, where I hear they got some crazy little women. He has two forthcoming books, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya). He is currently blogging for the San Francisco MOMA, organizing literary and art events in the Bay Area, and publishing small press books under the irrepressibly enthusiastic imprint OMG!

And speaking of irrepressible enthusiasm, did I mention how totally jaw-droppingly great Brandon’s poetry is? That’s what you get, I guess, when you cross a classics nerd with a rap maven with a bon vivant neo-dandy gourmet.  Oh!  The subtle gabardine of the interwoven concepts in his texts!  The bright yellow flashes of his witty diction, ooh, they make me want to kick myself, like, why didn’t I write that?  The scrumptious umami of his cult references! He blends rhetorics like most of us do protein powder, works rhythm like he’s the Keith Moon of poets, and doesn’t ever ever seem to write anything that is more cerebral than it is bodily or more embodied than it is intellective, and therefore, he is, as one of my very deadpan Korean students always used to say about anything he approved of, not boring.  He is not boring!  His style infuses every word and line, endowing the poems with the personal investment of the-poet-in-the-writing, a totally noncloying intimacy and ceaseless cleverness, that is just utterly compelling and delightful.

I think that if I were any gladder to welcome Brandon Brown to Segue, I might just burst.  So, without further groupie-like raving, please let us welcome Brandon Brown!

Some lines from Liz Fodaski:

the way that sandwiches always line up

luminosity in the ear

a petitie rage is flying over the apricot sky

a tapestry of clouded speech at breakfast

our anachronistic preferences in sauce

the tangy hereness of the twinkie in mouth

Your rhetoric is all over my head

Why stop at imitation crabmeat?

And then from Friday night’s reading at Pete’s Candy Store:

Steve Orth

I have a raccoon for an arm… it bites my face every time I eat

I am a wise latrine

Astrid Lorange

multiple cheeses used prominently

he all ate veal

orange dogs pink dogs blue dogs

mutton pills

Davd Buuck from his collab wth Juliana Spahr:

Sometimes men spat at me when I did this.

Sometimes my lovers would exasperated scream at me to stop spitting.

I would imagine I had lovers in my chest

with lovers in my chest

and inside the cargo hold

Lonely Christopher

A poetry’s no conduit for beauty

beauty betrays its maintenance

Poets are awkward animals, I don’t know why

We do awkward work

I read poetry instead of dreaming

The fairy dust of his fantasy is run off by stern context

This is not from a  poet but from  the Russian shoemaker on DeKalb avenue I had to go to the other day when the sole of my expensive boot came off:

me: “These were expensive boots, they’re not supposed to break”

shoemaker; “Everything breaks.”

Then a customer came in and they exchanged some words about getting old.

shoemaker:  Everyone does.  I used to fly like a bird; now I can hardly get out of my chair.

After a couple of weeks of feeling really quite sanguine, I had a little mini-backslide yesterday, cried walking down the street in the bitter cold.  I hadn’t actually cried in weeks; I must have been repressing something awful.  The whole litany went through me:  he seduced me, made promises to me, took my ideas, my energy, my money, my years, betrayed me, lied to me, abandoned me, then tried to prosecute me.  OK, there I just said it.  I just have to get it out of my system sometimes, I’m not going to put it on eternal repeat.

The thing about being lonely, which I don’t always feel, is that you are always supposed to pretend you are not and be quite stolid about it. You know, I loved when Stacey looked me in the eye and said, you know, you don’t need to be with anyone.  She’s quite right, of course, and sometimes I feel that. I really feel whole and that I am queen of my castle and thank godz there is no one to disrupt me. Other times I feel longings and excitements and sadnesses that almost feel they are going to break me into tiny little homunculi, some of whom frolic about humping everything in sight, some of whom just sit down, put their arms on their knees and their heads on their arms and try to pretend nothing is happening, some of whom sit in front of computers and type until they cry long eyeliner tears behind their glasses.

My friend Peter is always on about Judy Garland, so I got some early Judy Garland movies from Netflix, and several  nights ago, watched the first bit of Babes in Arms. I had never picked up on this before, but early Mickey Rooney is so uncannily like Gary (especially the haircut) that I had to stop watching, especially when he sang this duet with Judy who of course I look nothing like except for the slight frizz in her hair and maybe our figures? I don't know.  Still, it reminded me of my old vaudeville team.

And that night I had one of those dreams that lasted, seemed to last, forever, in which Gary was conflated with my first boyfriend, Anthony, whom I also really loved, oh, so intensely. Anyway in the dream Gary/Anthony had run off with a girl who for some I reason I met in the dream.  She aid she was seventeen but looked like she was maybe… eleven?  twelve?  But with makeup?  She was miniature, unnaturally miniature, without quite being a different species… and blonde, with eyes of unearthly beauty.  I asked him… because she looked so young… does she have orgasms?  and he said no, she doesn’t… and a little while later in the dream he said he was coming back to me.

And then he came home.  There were all these situations in which we were trying to have sex, but I couldn’t come.  We were in some place that was India but also Bolinas… and also my old school in Japan… and Larry Price was working there… his hair dyed leopard camouflage,,, and he said something about how he was working with cattle these days….so OK, but there were still all these scenarios in which I was trying to come but couldn’t, and it was really important that I do so, because that was how I was proving my maturity and worth in the restored relationship… we (Anthony/Gary) sometimes had people watching us… a ring of rasta guys around us… or other people trying to fuck me, but I still couldn’t come. 

Oh god, horrible torment, this dream.  But no more of a torment than waking life I guess. I blogged yesterday, and then thought the better of it, about how he used to push down on the top of my head when we fucked, and I’d ask him not to because it hurt my neck, and then he’d do it again.  (I wonder if he does that to her.) Not that we fucked very often.  Because we didn’t fuck very often, I didn’t really want to give him foot massages, which he often asked for.  I also didn’t want to scratch the rash on the upper part of his arms.  (I wonder if she does these things for him.)  Anyway I guess I’ve thought the better of thinking the better of it. In general I would rather say things than not say them.

It’s a sunny day.  I went to yoga this morning.  Dante is sleeping like a prince as I type this.  I can see the adorable back of his head and imagine what it would feel like to pet him.  I could just get up at any moment and pet him.  I have the power and the right to do that. OK.  I did it.  I pet the fluff on his chest and smelled his face.  He smelled like a big fluffy milk biscuit. Najwa Karam is singing really extendedly about HABIBI, which I didn’t know included the possessive.  Her guy backup singers are hooting and hollering and ululating.  The drummers are going off like firecrackers.  I guess I need to get on with my day and stop writing love letters to myself to keep me company.