I was at a poetry party. Pretty big party--Eileen Myles was the guest of honor, so there was lots of factional crossover. 21 Grand types, flarfers, 4th gen langpo--I feel embarrassed listing them because I'm so out of it now that I can't recognize the categories, let alone the players. Where's my scorcard? But it was pretty comfortable--or as comfortable as parties can be, for me. I thought, I'm a poet, they're poets, lots in common. But---
Talking to a younger poet--I really like her work. She's read in the series I curate, knows me as a buyer for the store. But said--"I didn't know you wrote poetry." Seemed quite surprised. She knew about the novels.
I realized that I haven't published poetry in years--except for two exceptions, David Brazil's mag, Try, and one chapbook on Blue Press. I've wanted to publish more, but my poetry seems miles behind (or ahead, or just outside) what other poets are doing now.
Lateley (to quote William Talcott) my ego's been barking. I've been rewriting old poems, and writing new ones. Would like to have a "New and Selected" published, but doubt there would be much interest. So--I'm going to post stuff as I finish, starting with early rewrites. Next party--I'll just point 'em to my blog.
Hallowed Rewind
new and selected poems
Loose Ends
We were on the roof gray day
The sky blended in with it
Saw a bird kind of slate
Said maybe we could go out
Get a drink or something noticed
A gray pole and a broken antenna
A rope wound around knotted
At the end knot made a clanging
Saw some blue beyond the clouds
Then didn’t you said what movie
Is this something foreign judging
By the slowness of the plot your
Head was in your hands then
You straightened stood stretched
Drifted to the edge
Secret Agent Man
People who wear exotic clothes
Often have conventional minds
I’ve decided to dress like a clerk
For the rest of my life
I once considered taking a vow
Of silence but feared I’d attract
Too much attention as a mute
I go to an office and file until lunch
Go for a sandwich at a sandwich place
Return to the office and file some more
I Wish They All Could Be
God only knows what I’d be without you
Shiver bow my head walking the avenue
Where people routinely bounce off the walls
Like bumper cars then fall in heaps
At the end of the street just like the plague
Only to be carried away in flatbed trucks
Crying 96 tears into 98 wounds
Monday, November 16, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Reviewers speak--all two of them
we all come into this world
with our little egos equipped
with individual horns now
if we don't blow them who
else will
--George Sanders
Tough to get reviewed these days--especially hard for small press writers.
The New York Times passed--also TLS, New York Review, um--SF Chronicle, Rain
Taxi...but a couple of nice feature pieces the Express and Daily Planet.
Garrett Caples' review in the Guardian got bumped:
Double Penetration
The Incredible Double
by Owen Hill
PM Press
review by Garrett Caples
Poet, bookseller, reading series curator at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Owen Hill is among our under-recognized literary talents. Like Kenneth Fearing before him, Hill has turned to the detective novel as a genre befitting a poet’s love of phrasemaking. The Chandler Apartments (2002)—an actual building around the corner from Moe’s—introduced readers to book-scout-turned-unlicensed-PI, Clay Blackburn, who returns for a new novella, The Incredible Double (PM Press, $13.95). This phrase, initially referring to sex when a man comes twice before withdrawing, accrues many significations, from doppelgangers to double agents to group sex, suggestive even of Clay’s bisexuality (much meditated on, though consummated in Chandler, not here).
She was a bundle of clichés, but again, I wasn’t noticing. Or maybe it’s that in Berkeley we live with a different set of clichés.” Here Clay announces Hill’s great achievement. For Berkeley seems a recalcitrant city for noir aesthetics. Yet Hill finds what he needs; Telegraph bums become informants, anarchists gun-toting muscle, Trieste a suitably low-key clandestine rendezvous. A trip to Orinda evokes all the disdain of Marlowe’s visit to Burlingame in The Big Sleep. Hill’s style is tasty but not overblown: in the first paragraph, on Route 24, Clay “wagged a middle finger”—a phrase so wrong becomes more right, like the dog that “screamed” in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”
The plot—involving a Wal-Mart-like organization’s attempt to penetrate the Bay with evil retail—isn’t quite perfunctory, though it’s more a premise for Clay to muse on his obsessions: poetry, sex, wine, espresso, etc. As it grows more fantastic, the book heads in the direction of David Meltzer’s Agency Trilogy, a fine direction indeed, exceeding pulp much as Meltzer amps up pornography to where it explodes. All in all, Double is an excellent contribution to the tradition of poets’ pulp fiction.
Also, a review/post on Andrew Goodwin's excellent blog, Professor of Pop:
Owen Hill's first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was a page-turner, read literally in one frenzied Saturday morning. Declaration of (minor) interest: Owen is a friend of a friend (& once kindly gave me discount @ Moe's but don't tell anyone that.)
Here's the opening para from his new novel The Incredible Double, words that will draw you in like a punter to a strip club -- ok then problem drinker to a dive bar -- if you read them aloud:
+++
"My '87 Tercel is in great shape, only a hundred thousand miles and almost new everything, but it does have trouble with the Bay Area hills. Coming out of the tunnel on 24, leaving Berkeley, heading toward the suburbs, I was losing speed and the SUVs were losing patience. I shifted it down into second and wagged my middle finger. My best friend Marvin says that driving slow in a small car is a revolutionary act. Maybe's he right. A woman in a Hummer, no lie, who probably weighed in at 97 pounds, half of it hair, gave me a look that could kill and, waved her phone at me. When you think of spoiled little brats in military vehicles careening through the 'burbs, you know how rotten the twentieth-century will be."
+++
Most important 2 words: no lie. That gives you the genre for cert & tells you that while our narrator has some ironic distance on Marvin, they are perhaps (or were) ideological cousins. Owen isn't afraid of cheap shots if they're funny & tell you something ("half of it hair") because he knows he's been freed by genre. The prose never drifts into agitprop but it's constantly hinted at it, as if this were an Op-Ed piece in Socialist Worker, written by a poet with an acute sense of humour. The first para immediately sets up the dystopian world we are about to enter but you don't feel trapped in it exactly. You just know that the mise-en-scene for wherever our story & our narrator are headed is going to be "rotten".
And this rotten-ness dear voyeur from cyberspace is happening right here right now in river city as Berkeley gets increasingly comfy with being a rich town (a security guard asked Susan to move her bag from where it might be stolen last night @ about 6pm... on a main throughfare in mf Rockridge) where even the south side (site of the Historic POP Homeland) has monster homes and monster cars and of course therefore monster peeps.
Like The Chandler Apartments, The Incredible Double captures a time & a place perfectly: here, now. But that would be boring because it would be too obvious, so Hill never forgets that you make it interesting (& significant) if you pepper the story with nostalgia for times passed.
He does, after all, drive an '87 Tercel.
Raymond Williams once described literature as a record of lived experience which is of course not always the case since neither lived nor experience are really the correct terms for a lot of contemporary fiction. But in the case of the savvy crime-thriller, if you can set the noir against the nostalgia then you have one powerful vehicle (if you're a poet) for evoking the time & the place that is the fag-end of Berkeley as we now know it.
And anyway, whether or not you care about that (& you should), Owen Hill has written another page-turner.
+++
with our little egos equipped
with individual horns now
if we don't blow them who
else will
--George Sanders
Tough to get reviewed these days--especially hard for small press writers.
The New York Times passed--also TLS, New York Review, um--SF Chronicle, Rain
Taxi...but a couple of nice feature pieces the Express and Daily Planet.
Garrett Caples' review in the Guardian got bumped:
Double Penetration
The Incredible Double
by Owen Hill
PM Press
review by Garrett Caples
Poet, bookseller, reading series curator at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Owen Hill is among our under-recognized literary talents. Like Kenneth Fearing before him, Hill has turned to the detective novel as a genre befitting a poet’s love of phrasemaking. The Chandler Apartments (2002)—an actual building around the corner from Moe’s—introduced readers to book-scout-turned-unlicensed-PI, Clay Blackburn, who returns for a new novella, The Incredible Double (PM Press, $13.95). This phrase, initially referring to sex when a man comes twice before withdrawing, accrues many significations, from doppelgangers to double agents to group sex, suggestive even of Clay’s bisexuality (much meditated on, though consummated in Chandler, not here).
She was a bundle of clichés, but again, I wasn’t noticing. Or maybe it’s that in Berkeley we live with a different set of clichés.” Here Clay announces Hill’s great achievement. For Berkeley seems a recalcitrant city for noir aesthetics. Yet Hill finds what he needs; Telegraph bums become informants, anarchists gun-toting muscle, Trieste a suitably low-key clandestine rendezvous. A trip to Orinda evokes all the disdain of Marlowe’s visit to Burlingame in The Big Sleep. Hill’s style is tasty but not overblown: in the first paragraph, on Route 24, Clay “wagged a middle finger”—a phrase so wrong becomes more right, like the dog that “screamed” in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”
The plot—involving a Wal-Mart-like organization’s attempt to penetrate the Bay with evil retail—isn’t quite perfunctory, though it’s more a premise for Clay to muse on his obsessions: poetry, sex, wine, espresso, etc. As it grows more fantastic, the book heads in the direction of David Meltzer’s Agency Trilogy, a fine direction indeed, exceeding pulp much as Meltzer amps up pornography to where it explodes. All in all, Double is an excellent contribution to the tradition of poets’ pulp fiction.
Also, a review/post on Andrew Goodwin's excellent blog, Professor of Pop:
Owen Hill's first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was a page-turner, read literally in one frenzied Saturday morning. Declaration of (minor) interest: Owen is a friend of a friend (& once kindly gave me discount @ Moe's but don't tell anyone that.)
Here's the opening para from his new novel The Incredible Double, words that will draw you in like a punter to a strip club -- ok then problem drinker to a dive bar -- if you read them aloud:
+++
"My '87 Tercel is in great shape, only a hundred thousand miles and almost new everything, but it does have trouble with the Bay Area hills. Coming out of the tunnel on 24, leaving Berkeley, heading toward the suburbs, I was losing speed and the SUVs were losing patience. I shifted it down into second and wagged my middle finger. My best friend Marvin says that driving slow in a small car is a revolutionary act. Maybe's he right. A woman in a Hummer, no lie, who probably weighed in at 97 pounds, half of it hair, gave me a look that could kill and, waved her phone at me. When you think of spoiled little brats in military vehicles careening through the 'burbs, you know how rotten the twentieth-century will be."
+++
Most important 2 words: no lie. That gives you the genre for cert & tells you that while our narrator has some ironic distance on Marvin, they are perhaps (or were) ideological cousins. Owen isn't afraid of cheap shots if they're funny & tell you something ("half of it hair") because he knows he's been freed by genre. The prose never drifts into agitprop but it's constantly hinted at it, as if this were an Op-Ed piece in Socialist Worker, written by a poet with an acute sense of humour. The first para immediately sets up the dystopian world we are about to enter but you don't feel trapped in it exactly. You just know that the mise-en-scene for wherever our story & our narrator are headed is going to be "rotten".
And this rotten-ness dear voyeur from cyberspace is happening right here right now in river city as Berkeley gets increasingly comfy with being a rich town (a security guard asked Susan to move her bag from where it might be stolen last night @ about 6pm... on a main throughfare in mf Rockridge) where even the south side (site of the Historic POP Homeland) has monster homes and monster cars and of course therefore monster peeps.
Like The Chandler Apartments, The Incredible Double captures a time & a place perfectly: here, now. But that would be boring because it would be too obvious, so Hill never forgets that you make it interesting (& significant) if you pepper the story with nostalgia for times passed.
He does, after all, drive an '87 Tercel.
Raymond Williams once described literature as a record of lived experience which is of course not always the case since neither lived nor experience are really the correct terms for a lot of contemporary fiction. But in the case of the savvy crime-thriller, if you can set the noir against the nostalgia then you have one powerful vehicle (if you're a poet) for evoking the time & the place that is the fag-end of Berkeley as we now know it.
And anyway, whether or not you care about that (& you should), Owen Hill has written another page-turner.
+++
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
"Revolutionary" Letters
"I think I'm so educated
and I'm so civilized cuz
I'm a strict vegetarian..."
never felt so normal
as at the anarchist
demonstration
steps of sproul
tried to read
your crazy shaved head
attracted in spite
if you took the factory
it would stink
in that great
unshowered
tradition
like Henry Miller's
crotch
tarzan tarzan make
me a home in the trees
ape man fantasies
the pure joy
of the coconuts
as they fall
in imagined
slow-motion
split some lousy
skulls
in the room the women
come and go
(and the guys
too) the names
of six big
commie theorists
dropped in as many
minutes in my own
living room
if we took the factory
we couldn't make shit
I think I get it
go slowly
eat locally
seems somewhat
revolutionary
one last tomato
please oakland
grown no more
mozzarella di
bufala unless
they milk those
poor beasts
in golden gate
park
and that's
a different
kind of bufala
anyway
at the Claremont
farmer's market
in the DMV parking lot
no lie
I suck on a nectarine
dreaming of imported
cheese
I have suffered like Che
Pancho Villa and Malcolm
O give me a home where di
bufala roam
and the prosciutto is cured
down the block
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Personal Poem
catching the rise
of the rhythm wave
out the door
wind hits left side
of my face
turn left on the avenue
a walk among the bogus
of the rhythm wave
out the door
wind hits left side
of my face
turn left on the avenue
a walk among the bogus
Friday, July 10, 2009
Running on Fumes Part 1
There are a couple of places in The Long Goodbye where Marlowe has nothing to say, and Marlowe as narrator says just that--I let it ride...I didn't say anything at all. Other places where the hardboiled wisecrack is called for but passed over--as if Marlowe (or Chandler) was tired of the sound of his voice.
The similes are also less frequent. I just started rereading the middle novels--not sure how the the progression works--but between Big Sleep and Long Goodbye you can feel a difference in the rhythm. There are more similes per page in Sleep, making for a boom-boom-boom forties give-and-take--William Powell, or Bogey.
Long Goodbye is sick, sad and world weary. Chandler working on fumes. The movie was just right--Gould/Marlowe is tired in that I can't go on I'll go on way.
The color of stepped on gum
is the color of our times.
The light of our times is
the light in the 14th St.
subway at 2 a.m. The air
of our times is the air of the
Greyhound depot, Market
& Sixth. It is prime time. A passed
out sailor sits pitched
forward like a sack of laundry
in a plastic bucket seat
his forehead resting on
the movie of the week. The Long Goodbye.
Tom Clark
I'm trying to understand why that's so appealing. There's
something that Tom said once--we were talking about F.A
Nettelbeck, and Tom said that he writes like he just doesn't
care. I almost took it wrong, then understood--Nettelbeck
doesn't seem to care what the reader thinks--he seems
beyond career goals, proving a point, or doing the right thing...
I think the thing I hate most about contemporary writing
(when I'm hating contemporary writing) is the earnestness--
poets "care" too much. The caring disease seems to infect
all schools. The chips aren't allowed to fall, even (or especially)
in the most "avant" work.
A key word: Anymore. As in, "I just don't give a shit anymore",
or, "I can't go on anymore, I'll go on." (apologies to Beckett).
Why/how does that feeling of exhaustion--universal, open up the soul (ouch!),
somehow let the light in. And the word anymore, which has a sad
open-then-closed, three beat sound to it.
What I'm reading: Obviously Chandler, Tom Clark's blog
Beyond the Pale: tomclarkblog.blogspot.com, proofs of the
new Lethem novel.
The similes are also less frequent. I just started rereading the middle novels--not sure how the the progression works--but between Big Sleep and Long Goodbye you can feel a difference in the rhythm. There are more similes per page in Sleep, making for a boom-boom-boom forties give-and-take--William Powell, or Bogey.
Long Goodbye is sick, sad and world weary. Chandler working on fumes. The movie was just right--Gould/Marlowe is tired in that I can't go on I'll go on way.
The color of stepped on gum
is the color of our times.
The light of our times is
the light in the 14th St.
subway at 2 a.m. The air
of our times is the air of the
Greyhound depot, Market
& Sixth. It is prime time. A passed
out sailor sits pitched
forward like a sack of laundry
in a plastic bucket seat
his forehead resting on
the movie of the week. The Long Goodbye.
Tom Clark
I'm trying to understand why that's so appealing. There's
something that Tom said once--we were talking about F.A
Nettelbeck, and Tom said that he writes like he just doesn't
care. I almost took it wrong, then understood--Nettelbeck
doesn't seem to care what the reader thinks--he seems
beyond career goals, proving a point, or doing the right thing...
I think the thing I hate most about contemporary writing
(when I'm hating contemporary writing) is the earnestness--
poets "care" too much. The caring disease seems to infect
all schools. The chips aren't allowed to fall, even (or especially)
in the most "avant" work.
A key word: Anymore. As in, "I just don't give a shit anymore",
or, "I can't go on anymore, I'll go on." (apologies to Beckett).
Why/how does that feeling of exhaustion--universal, open up the soul (ouch!),
somehow let the light in. And the word anymore, which has a sad
open-then-closed, three beat sound to it.
What I'm reading: Obviously Chandler, Tom Clark's blog
Beyond the Pale: tomclarkblog.blogspot.com, proofs of the
new Lethem novel.
Friday, July 3, 2009
the fish in this barrel lack flavor/part one
OK
... so I'm following along--reading the poetry blogs. Slo-po-con-flar-po, whatever--happy to not have to take sides. Telling myself that I don't care but after coffee and the Times I'm reading the blogs. All the various arguments are old news but the personalities are an interesting study--I've met the players, most of them have read at Moe's. I think they see me as the guy who sets up the mic, I don't push my own work--don't think they'd be that interested. They're mostly a generation or two younger than me, and I can't help thinking of them as nice kids. They're all quite professional, have good manners. You couldn't tell a flarf from a slowpo if you saw them coming down the street--mostly from the middle classes, or if not they've learned to "pass". Lefties, intellectual, socially concerned. Hard working--teachers, tech writers. Can talk the talk and for all I know they walk the walk (throw trash in the right bins, bike to work, eat locally grown...). The kinds of folks I like, feel comfortable with. And yet...something's not quite right.
Too good to be true...
Remember Teflon? Been replaced by other nonstick surfaces, but I'd bet that the new ones are just as toxic. Teflon still works as a metaphor, though, esp. now that we have another Teflon prez.
There's something that I believed when I was younger (and gave up on) that is coming back around to haunt me now--will (possibly over) use the Teflon meta. to try and explain: good poetry comes out of the gunk, the stuff that sticks to the pan. Great poetry comes when the pan isn't properly cleaned. Stuff grows there, and it smells bad--unpleasant, sickening maybe--but it changes perception--could even cause ecstatic hallucinations--but, also, fever, sickness...
I don't want to believe this--want to write it off as a late-middle-age (temporary) return to romanticism. I've kept my nose clean--kept those nasty bits hidden away, washed the "pan" whenever possible--
Troubling...
Maybe I'm working with too little information. Maybe there's an Artaud out there, a real loose cannon who will break away and be brilliant--and who won't be invited to the parties.
related note---Trying to work out why I'm so bored with found texts. Looking back at my own poetry, it's full of the stuff--and I used to really love that feeling I'd get from finding the perfect goofy/scary/poignant line buried somewhere--"I get my best lines from stupid people" -Burroughs. Nowadays I couldn't care less. Perhaps it's the fish in a barrel quality that comes from all the googling (jesus, I do it too--who can resist?). No shock of the new there--on to something else?
what I'm reading: We Did Porn by Zak Smith, Artaud Anthology (ed. Hirschman),
Slanted and Enchanted by Kaya Oakes
... so I'm following along--reading the poetry blogs. Slo-po-con-flar-po, whatever--happy to not have to take sides. Telling myself that I don't care but after coffee and the Times I'm reading the blogs. All the various arguments are old news but the personalities are an interesting study--I've met the players, most of them have read at Moe's. I think they see me as the guy who sets up the mic, I don't push my own work--don't think they'd be that interested. They're mostly a generation or two younger than me, and I can't help thinking of them as nice kids. They're all quite professional, have good manners. You couldn't tell a flarf from a slowpo if you saw them coming down the street--mostly from the middle classes, or if not they've learned to "pass". Lefties, intellectual, socially concerned. Hard working--teachers, tech writers. Can talk the talk and for all I know they walk the walk (throw trash in the right bins, bike to work, eat locally grown...). The kinds of folks I like, feel comfortable with. And yet...something's not quite right.
Too good to be true...
Remember Teflon? Been replaced by other nonstick surfaces, but I'd bet that the new ones are just as toxic. Teflon still works as a metaphor, though, esp. now that we have another Teflon prez.
There's something that I believed when I was younger (and gave up on) that is coming back around to haunt me now--will (possibly over) use the Teflon meta. to try and explain: good poetry comes out of the gunk, the stuff that sticks to the pan. Great poetry comes when the pan isn't properly cleaned. Stuff grows there, and it smells bad--unpleasant, sickening maybe--but it changes perception--could even cause ecstatic hallucinations--but, also, fever, sickness...
I don't want to believe this--want to write it off as a late-middle-age (temporary) return to romanticism. I've kept my nose clean--kept those nasty bits hidden away, washed the "pan" whenever possible--
Troubling...
Maybe I'm working with too little information. Maybe there's an Artaud out there, a real loose cannon who will break away and be brilliant--and who won't be invited to the parties.
related note---Trying to work out why I'm so bored with found texts. Looking back at my own poetry, it's full of the stuff--and I used to really love that feeling I'd get from finding the perfect goofy/scary/poignant line buried somewhere--"I get my best lines from stupid people" -Burroughs. Nowadays I couldn't care less. Perhaps it's the fish in a barrel quality that comes from all the googling (jesus, I do it too--who can resist?). No shock of the new there--on to something else?
what I'm reading: We Did Porn by Zak Smith, Artaud Anthology (ed. Hirschman),
Slanted and Enchanted by Kaya Oakes
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