Eros Among the Americans

My friend Chris Cessac is a man of many talents.  We went to law school together, played in a band together, and did lots of immature things together.  And throughout all of those times he showed himself to be a scholar, an innovative songwriter, a talented visual artist/cartoonist, and just a funny guy.  And when law school ended and we went our separate ways, he remained true to himself and his muse(s), returning to Texas and finding a way to not only practice law, but to continue his artistry through poetry.

He received the Kenyon Review Poetry Prize for his first book, Republic Sublime (a now-unfortunately-out-of-print collection of staggering poetry).  He has returned with his second book, entitled Eros Among the Americans, a collection of nineteen poems each named after a town in America.  And as much as I loved Republic Sublime, I fell for this one even more.  And not just because he dropped a reference to my hometown (Lorain) in the poem entitled “Laura, Ohio”.  I loved this one because I think it shows growth in his writing style — growth, believe it or not, in the form of simplicity.

Republic Sublime was a gorgeous read, but being the simpleton that I am, I couldn’t profess to truly “get” all of the biblical, mythological, and historical references; I loved the words, but I can’t say that I understood all of them.  Eros Among the Americans, on the other hand, is quite simply an ode to America and to all of the love and longing that its residents feel.  Cessac’s gift for language is evident in every one of these poems, and I often found myself taking five minutes to read one short page because I wanted to concentrate on every single word, because every one mattered.  I think it is somewhat of an injustice to pick apart any of these poems and try to break them apart for the sake of quoting portions of them, but I’m a hack and so I’m going to anyway.  A few samples:

• We feel deceived and our own deceptions thus justified.  (“Amor, Minnesota”)
• The goal is to be loved not loveable and they are not the same.  (“Ovid, Michigan”)
• We keep poor records.  What matters most happens so slowly no records are kept at all.  (“Romance, Wisconsin”)

I’m not sure what more I can say.  The book is published by Main Street Rag and is not expensive.  For anyone who loves poetry, and for anyone who’s forgotten how beautiful poetry can be, treat yourself to this.   Check out poem length samples here.

Sharp Teeth

So, you’re looking for something different to read this summer.  Have I got the book for you.  Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow is simply the best epic poem about lycanthropes that you’ll read this year.

Come back! What?  You’re not a fan of werewolf stories or long poems?  Generally, neither am I.  On the poetry front, Barlow’s verse is not rhymed or metered.  It’s not Beowulf.  It certainly doesn’t have the formal constraints that Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions rigidly imposed on its self.  Instead the free verse feels stripped away of everything that’s not central to advancing the story in a timely manner.  The brakes have been removed from the narrative.

The story revolves around Anthony, a down on his luck schlub who gets a job in L.A. as a county dog catcher.  We are introduced to rival packs of werewolves around the L.A. area.  Some gangs are criminals; some gangs are white collar businessman led by a lawyer.  I suspect that Barlow is trying to tell us something. The fighting within gangs and between the rival gangs can be fairly graphic and bloody.

Sharp Teeth is not simply a horror novel/poem.   It’s also a book about modern relationships, urban life, the single-mindedness of enterprises both legal and illegal, and survival in the modern age.  At its heart, Sharp Teeth also tells the love story of Anthony and the woman/werewolf sent to keep an eye on him.

Anthony in love is unlikely

in its grace,

like a drunk with a magic trick.

There’s no reason it should work

but it does.

Like Anthony in love, Sharp Teeth just works.

An aside: While reading the novel, I went to see the L.A. punk band X at the Variety Playhouse (30th Anniversary tour?! Yikes!).  One of the songs that they played was their classic The Hungry Wolf.  The very next day, I began a chapter that had a line from the lyrics as an introduction.  I love when things like that happen.  I’m just telling you this story so I have an excuse to add the song to this post.  Check it out.  The vibe in the song is similar to the mood of the novel.  Says me.

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The Hungry Wolf – X

Links of distinction:

• The author reads an excerpt with cool animation and spooky music
• Barlow is interviewed at The Onion A/V Club
• The author talks music in Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes
• The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Sharp Teeth
• as does the Washington Post
• Omnivoracious interview the author in verse

Republic Sublime

I just finished reading Republic Sublime, by Christopher Cessac, for the third time. Chris is a friend of mine who lives in Marfa, Texas, with his wife and little girls. I was lucky enough to befriend him while we were in law school together, and I even got to play in a band with him during that time. Anyway, I digress. The point of this post is to share the power of poetry.

This book won the 2002 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, a very prestigious honor that goes to one — count ‘em, one — book each year. That should say something right there.

There’s been a lot of hype recently about The Raw Shark Texts, including the local hype surrounding Steven Hall’s reading here at Wordsmiths in Decatur. I loved that book, and I loved Hall’s reading; the reason I mention it here is that Hall really tried to look at the text of his book as more than just words — he wanted to examine those works as visual imagery (hence the allusion to the Rorschach test in the book’s title). Hall did this through the use of several devices, including presenting the words on the page in a graphical format.

Cessac’s work demonstrates, at least to me, another device that makes words more than just words — namely, well-constructed poetry. And by “well-constructed”, I don’t mean that it rhymes. I mean that the words he uses, and the way he lays the words out on the page, are awesome. He uses countless biblical, historical, literary, geographical and mythological references, most of which are completely lost on me, but the beauty of his writing can withstand my ignorance. I don’t need to know who Christopher Smart is to appreciate his poem “Fragments of a Letter to Christopher Smart”, which includes this passage:

. . . much of madness is nothing more

than devotion misplaced, a passion of loss:

for widows, monks and lunatics concur

nothing hurts so much as loving too much

that which doesn’t move among this world –

a dead husband, a god, idea or cause . . .

I urge anyone who’s got the slightest passion for poetry, or who’s willing to invest a bit of themselves to see if one’s there, to read this book. It truly is remarkable what Cessac does with words, even when you don’t know what those words mean; the sound of them, the look of them, the flow of them, have given me a new appreciation for an art that I can’t claim to have cared for.

Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Cafe

Browsing the aisles this week, I stumbled on a volume titled Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Café. The Nuyorican is a cultural center for writers in New York. It began in 1973, in the living room of writer and professor Miguel Algarín. His goal was to provide a venue for emerging writers and artists to showcase their work. By 1975, Algarín realized that his living room salon was much too small for the large number of new artists in the city, so he rented an Irish Bar called the  Sunshine Café and converted it into the Nuyorican. Over the course of the last 30 years, the café has hosted innumerable emerging writers, musicians, and filmmakers as well as established artists, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Amiri Baraka.

The Nuyorican is located in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that has seen significant changes. In 1975, the Lower East Side was certainly not among the most sought-after neighborhoods in the city. Now, the LES houses young professionals and the few remaining artists who haven’t been priced out of Manhattan by skyrocketing rent. But when asked whether he believes this transformation will have an impact on the café, Algarín has asserted that it will not, because the café was never intended to cater to any particular group of artists, but rather to provide a meeting place for artists with a wide range of backgrounds.

(photo by Raúl)

Aloud is a comprehensive collection of poems that have been performed at the café and works by artists who have appeared there. True to Algarín’s philosophy, the poems vary widely in style and theme. They’re edgy, personal, and often experimental. It’s an eclectic anthology with a history just as diverse, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re a fan of poetry that’s honest and emotionally unfettered.

The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours

With the success of Jill Scott’s recent album, The Real Thing, Words and Sounds Vol. 3, and her concert tour now at an end, I thought it was a good time to revisit her book of poetry. The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours gives readers a glimpse of the R&B singer as she was at the beginning of her artistic career.

Before her work with the band The Roots, Jill Scott was a spoken word artist, performing her work live at poetry readings. Of course, her beautiful voice and her experience in a Canadian production of Rent didn’t hurt when she was discovered by Amir Thompson of The Roots, who invited Scott to collaborate with the band. She contributed to the writing of the band’s song “You Got Me,” which won a Grammy in 2000.

I am a long-time fan of Scott’s music and a new devotee of her poetry. What has always affected me most about her music is the raw honesty of her lyrics. Listening to a Jill Scott song, you feel as though she’s in the room speaking to you as she would a close friend. Her poetry has the same unembellished honesty. The cadence of her poetry has a distinct lilt, carrying one word right into the next, like natural speech. Scott speaks about the issues that are so crucial to experiencing life fully – relationships, spirituality, self-identity – and brings to them a new and very personal outlook. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman argues that the goal of the poet is to see life and humanity as they truly are and to convey those insights honestly, without sentimentality or disingenuous decoration. Scott certainly accomplishes that.

For example, she begins a poem discussing something as seemingly banal as her experience with being potty trained and, with the concluding line, “I don’t even think of you now,” abruptly turns the poem into a sharp and biting portrayal of her relationship with the parent in question.

Jill Scott appeared on last year’s premier episode of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. I highly recommend checking it out on You Tube:

It’s emotionally raw and somewhere between an a cappella performance and spoken word. Clearly, Jill Scott is as much a poet as she is a singer.