CONVERSATIONS THAT DON’T TAKE PLACE BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO WILL NEVER MEET: A CONVERSATION WITH BUCK DOWNS

by Dan Gutstein & Buck Downs

"Dan (L) and Buck (R) disassociated and rokken, ca. unknown"

DAN: So I’ve been going back and forth with Jeff & he’s like, I’m spozed to axe you about the Corin Tucker (I know not these) poems but after that, he wants you to axe me some questions, too. So, I’d axe you a question, then you’d answer all Buck Downs and then you’d axe me a question, if that makes sense.

BUCK: That shouldn’t have to count as your first question—we think a lot about what counts, huh? the riddle of where jump ends and rock begins, stuff like that—but Jeff refers to “I Wanna Be Your Corin Tucker”, a series of poems from a few years back. Parts of it appeared in Altered Scale last year, is why he asked, & you can look them up there.

The title plays on a Sleater-Kinney song, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”, and so there’s a pantheon renovation or upgrade project referenced there. 90s rock stays on my mind at least as much as “classic punk”, odd phrase to type. The poems more or less happen there, taking place in some Black Cat of the Mind.

So I met you after you moved here, I guess? ten years ago, more? then you moved away for a while, and then you came back, & you’ve been here for a while, but moved around within DC, and now make the commute up Baltimore for work. I was at your place to hear Cathy Wagner & Susana Gardner read a few months ago, and it seems to me that you’ve had to make a lot of “no” decisions when it comes to keeping stuff. So different to me—I’ve been living in the same house for almost 20 years, and the house is just piles of stuff. So what about moving, getting rid of stuff? Do you miss any stuff? What does that mean?

DAN: Ah, I just read the Corin Tucker poems at Altered Scale 2 and I dig. They seemed a little bit different in tone for you—praps cuz I’m used to hearing your voice thunder through a reading space, I’m used to getting personal problem postcards in the mail, I’m used to your Florida armadillo-kickin’ persona, and I really enjoyed them. We kinda go “I Just Wanna Be Your Dog” to Joey Ramone to Corin Tucker just like that!

It’s true, but I do live very minimally, and it’s a thoughtful observation for you to make. I don’t have much furniture, just about the only luxury I allow myself is a huge bookshelf of jazz CDs, and I only keep about 100 or 150 books around. Part of that has to do with the ‘temporary’ feelings that I’ve always had as a writer, who constantly has to worry about where his next dollar may be coming from, but my Baltimore job has been very stable over the past few years, and so I’m like, humph, why no clutter? It is good, as with the Cathy/Susana reading, to have some central space, and I enjoy hosting parties, as well. I’ve held a few legendary shindigs over the years, including the one (in my Kalorama Rd apt.) where Rod poked his head in through the hatch and in asking Tom for a match, somehow, psychically collapsed the chair from underneath Mr. Orange. But I digress. Yes, I think you and I have known each other for 15 years, at least. I used to work for you over on New York Ave!

Part of our shenanigans as friends, has involved the Gus Burger. We’ve both eaten one, and we both know the record for eating Gus Burgers—3 Gus Burgers in 8 minutes. Do you think you could beat that? How much mayonnaise have you seen in the hands of a dude who just sprang out of the floor? I think what I’m getting at is—you’re a writer who (among his many gifts) can synthesize the oddities and humor and human behavior, etc., around us, and make it ‘everyday accessible’, thoroughly unique, and at that, revitalizing to the spirit. At least for me it is. What are you after, as a writer? What drives you to say what you say? What are the internal guide-posts that meter or free your language?

BUCK: The Gus Burger from the White Spot in Charlottesville, Va., involves a lot of mayo and a fried egg. It seems conceptually suspect, but is tasty enough to make anyone (well, at least you & I) think that eating three of them in 8 minutes would be pretty easy. FWIW, you can get something similar at Mr. Henry’s, on Capitol Hill; they call it a “hangover burger” and features egg, cheddar, and bacon. Kind of a two-fer, in case you missed breakfast.

What is the deal, that I am after? I have been a person who has intrusive thinking, racing mind, conversations that don’t take place between people who will never meet, and some other related stuff going on more or less all the time. It’s quite a show, up in here. If I don’t write it down, it gets pretty tiring. So that’s what the source material is—the end result of trying to cope with a semi-continuous crypto-discourse that’s going on in and around me.

That stuff fills up notebooks, and when the notebooks get filled, they get typed up, making something like a 150pp. answer to the question, “dude what *were* you thinking?” Reading back through, cutting and pasting, rewriting: I get to set what I am thinking today alongside what I was thinking two years ago; a kind of parallax view.

And so, two questions for you: up until a few years ago, the highly varied kinds and numbers of jobs you’ve done seemed to be a significant source of material or ground from which your writing grew. Now you’ve had the same job for quite a while, and actually have kind of homed in on the specific kind of writing/teaching job you do at MICA. What does it mean for you, not to be doing a variety of jobs for the time being, and what does it mean for the writing you get to do?

And second, are you the editor who added “Gus Burger” to the Urban Dictionary?

DAN: The Squirrel, our after-readings haunt, offers the possibility of an egg atop a burger—as a “fixin’” but not as a formal sandwich with a name. I mean, I think about that guy, Gus, who must’ve been so well known for his eggburger fondness that the White Spot bemonikered its eggburger, or, you know, it could be that generic Get off the Bus, Gus, kinda thing, so it may be an Everywhere Gus sitch, but I doubt it. Lo, I am not the editor who placed Gus Burger up at Urban Dictionary. I’m responsible for a few other things there, but, alas, not the Gus Burger dernit.

There is Buck Downs the writer, and I’m grateful for those insights into your writerly machinations, but there is, to be sure, Buck Downs the reader-aloud. Anyone who has been to a Buck Downs reading, will remember it. You holler, you sing, you cool it off, you speak the words. I kid you a little bit, by calling you The Champ, but actually, I mean it, you have impressed audiences for quite some time, and there aren’t too many poets who soar like that—who also bring content to the table. Did this style just erupt or did it evolve? Did you study any literary types or peeps from other worlds?

Also, somewhat up that alley, what is the status of the Buck Downs Smile? It is the most disarming smile in American letters. I mean, I think it’s doing just fine, but could you give a few examples of people, situations, explosives, rhetorics, etc., that you have disarmed-by-smiling?

As for my work situation, yes, I’ve been commuting to Baltimore for more than 5 years, mostly on the MARC train. It’s the second position in a sequence that, by now, represents about eight years of full-time employment, whereas I, like many writers from time to time, used to have (and enjoyed) holding as many as 3 to 5 jobs at a time. It sounds chaotic, but actually, if done properly, it would save and create time ... for writing. So, does the one-job full-time system work, as a writer? I think so. Like any schedule, you just got to get wise to it. It’s true that the many-jobs system usually did produce a host of characters to study and perhaps capture in a piece of writing, but this has been replaced by my exploits on the MARC, as well as in the streets, gutters, alleyways, pubs, and byways of Baltimore.

BUCK: Having a good set of teeth is a blessing, so I can’t really take much credit for that. Of course, there’s more to a smile than just the teeth, but again, there’s not much that’s original with me. More than a little of my life philosophy comes from or sounds like bumper stickers of the sort they used to sell at e.g., Stuckey’s, and maybe still do; for example, “SMILE—It Makes People Wonder What You’re Up To!”

There are a lot of models to list that I heard & who gave me license to follow the sound of the voices in & out of my head. There’s a cassette anthology Watershed did from the Naropa Archives, where I heard Anne Waldman’s “Light and Shadow” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Ego Confession”, among many others; there’s the Exact Change Annual, which included “Imaginary Elegies” by Jack Spicer and “At Night the States” by Alice Notley. There’s Lenny Bruce Live at Carnegie Hall, and Rant in E-Minor by Bill Hicks.

But before and after all the models have been chased down, there is a matter that I call something like cultivating a basic sense of friendliness toward yourself and the work you do. What could come out of that is as numerous as the people who are seriously working at writing and reading their work. For me, it comes out as free changes in tone and register, from joke to admonition to verbal hard bop, across the space of the poem. The freedom to really let that out comes from a practice that involves reading my own work to myself, aloud or silently, hundreds of times, as part of an everyday writing practice, to develop a friendly and thorough familiarity with the work as it is.

It’s something that came into its fullness in writing the books of Pontiac Fever, which is to say it took twenty years of writing poetry to get to a state where I was writing poetry that I wanted to read and reread every day, and still do.

It’s good for me to remember the very long time it took, because it’s easy for me, listening to someone read their poems to think, they don’t seem to like their own poems much, or even know them particularly well.

The idea of a daily practice and personal development doesn’t come naturally to me, lazy guy that I am. I kind of stumbled upon and stagger through it here at middle age. But I think for you, it is something that, if not innate, was picked up much earlier than it was for me, since your story has included and still includes a regular athletic regimen. I think now and then that you could write “Strength Training for Poets” and really change the MFA world, by reintroducing the P.E. class, in a friendly way, to our peers who grew up hating gym and gym class and gym rats and all that.

So tell us a little bit about your practice as an athlete, and where it comes together or pulls away from your practice as a writer.

DAN: Man, I couldn’t agree with you more, about an author who just “goes through the motions” during a reading. It happens more often than not, and it’s perpetrated by “some of our most famous authors”, and the implication seems to be that the audience must acknowledge this funereal drudgery as unavoidable and necessary. All too common and ugh.

When you mention great comedians like Bill Hicks, and also touch upon the jazz genre, hard bop, it brings to mind the many forays that writers make into other art forms. I know, for instance, that you’re very active in the DC Arts community, given your many associations with spaces like DCAC, as well as the many bands who play at your readings. What do the terms “multi-genre”, “collaborative activity”, and “artistic cross-pollination” very literally mean to you and your writing?

In a bit of a related vein, why do you gravitate toward certain writers? Who are some of your favorite dead and buried writers, and who are some of your favorite living writers—that is, who are breaking ground in a different way?

It’s interesting that you bring up my past athletic travails. There are, as you suggest, positives and drawbacks, alike, to that past. The positives are probably obvious enough. The discipline of training establishes a certain regularity, and so, it was never hard to sit down for three or four mornings in a row and write out a bunch of crap. To sit there, as tedious and painful as it may have been, and really delve. A healthy body also makes for an active mind. I really believe that. John Coltrane, one of the most brilliant Americans, spent too much time, by his own admission, strung out on various substances, and admitted that he was rarely productive in those stretches.

The down side to the “athletic past” is the kind of “locker room conservatism” that once attached itself to me. When I began writing poems, they were really, really dreadful. They were narrative, and confessional, and they were wimpy. When I came back to DC in 1995, and began to meet a few people in the DC Poetry scene—i.e., Mark, Rod, you—was when I really began to see a host of different possibilities. Whereas the physical nature of a sport and its attendant ‘worldview’ influenced me on some level to craft predictable narrative works, the avant/experimental crowd really threw me into a new mindset. For which I’ve been very grateful.

BUCK: The topic of favorites brings me back to the idea of cultivating a basic sense of friendliness towards yourself and the writing you do. It sounds pretentious, I’m sure, to say “I Am My Favorite Poet”, but at the same time, if I didn’t like what I was doing, I hope I would either change or quit, and in fact, I have.

Here in DC we have this great little scene that continues to remain happily and substantially sub-rosa. It has been good to me, and has waxed and waned for some 40 years, before I got here, even. I am specifically thinking of the poetries that came about under the moniker Mass Transit, which is a great example of a self-supporting, mutually-sustaining creative community, and the waves of creativity have spiraled out from it since the 70s. Mass Transit is so great to me that it is completely beside the point and actually very nice that it is not more widely known, and has been allowed to grow and play in the shadow of power, undisturbed by institutional care.

And I was typing the part above yesterday, and Tina Darragh walked by the window where I was! and I completely lost the bead of what I was thinking/typing. So yeah, mad obeisance and lifetime membership to the Mass Transit/DCPoetry.com continuum for me.

From time to time I get into a string of correspondence with a writer who’s not in DC, and they almost always remind me how great it is to have landed in DC and wound up in this poetry constellation (Joe Ross, I am thanking you today!). By comparison, it seems like it kinda sucks to be a poet almost everywhere else in America, and I am at a loss to understand why that would be. But then I’ve been living here for 25 years now, and my perspective is probably challenged. What do you say, Dan—is DC the best, or what? If So,Why? If Not, Why Not? & you can have the last word on all these things, unless something else comes up.

DAN: I think that poetry communities will thrive for a few good reasons. The biggest one is—there must be cheap-enough quarters in town for young, interesting writers to inhabit, and in so milling-around, find a scene such as ours, hang out with us, give readings, attend readings, and slay us with their mayhem. And I think that we have a cadre of excellent young energy in our midst: folks recently enough like Ronan the Barbarian, Fitz, ‘The Voice’ Marston, the other Fitz, the second other Fitz, and Pook, and so forth. I realize that one of them Fitzzes is about my age, and I’m just goofing around.

Then, I would say, the writing has to be excellent, and boundary pushing, and innovative, and languagey, and so avant that it’s Cossack, and it is, it is all of those things and more.

I’ve always argued that we have enough for a ‘School’, i.e., an anthology that could become famous, but folks with level heads have properly thwapped me on that front, which is probably for the best. Still, I do believe that the Mass Transit/DC Poetry.com reservoir of writings could be condensed into a major anthology, and so—yes, DC is among the best, and I don’t think there is a city fulla poets who could take us, simply put. I’d like our chances vs. Enny-City. 

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Dan Gutstein and Buck Downs both appear in AlteredScale.com issue 2. (Link is to contents page.)

Blood and Gutstein, Dan's blog.

Dan Gutstein at wikipedia.

Buck Downs at Lulu.com

DCPoetry.com

“WHAT THEN?” SANG PLATO’S GHOST: CHRISTINE TOBIN’S SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

by Jack Foley

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

            —W.B. Yeats, “The Scholars”

To write for my own race

And the reality

            —W.B. Yeats, “The Fisherman”

On the way to Berkeley radio station KPFA and on the way home I listened to Irish, London-based jazz singer Christine Tobin singing her versions of poems by Yeats. The CD is called Sailing to Byzantium and it came out from Trail Belle Records. I think it’s not at all a CD for Yeats critics, but it is entirely a CD for lovers of Yeats’ poetry—though they have to be lovers of Yeats’ poetry who are also interested in new sounds. For such, Sailing to Byzantium is an amazing experience.

Tobin has an ear utterly fearless of dissonance but also tuned towards harmony—with free jazz flavorings. What she brings out in Yeats is the wild, reckless, utterly subversive quality of his imagination. I doubt that Yeats would have liked what she does—and, personally, I’m not sure that I “like” Tobin’s voice— but I found this CD an immensely rewarding experience.

I think you first need to know the poems in Yeats’ own terms—the way one finds them in the collections—and then to see what Tobin brings to them, what light she sheds. Even when you disagree with her emphasis—“Their hearts have not grown cold” in “The Wild Swans at Coole” is, in my view, “Their hearts have not grown cold”; “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, / The falcon cannot hear the falconer” in “The Second Coming” is not an image of chaos, as Tobin imagines it, but an image of escape—you cannot deny the immense passion Tobin brings to the poems or her brilliant recognition / re-creation of aspects of the poet that are almost entirely covered over in the immense padded mattress of the critical enterprise that has grown up around his work. “Do you think you understand Yeats?” Tobin asks. “Listen to this.” And we’re off on a wildly imaginative, utterly stunning, utterly disturbing roller coaster ride that, amazingly, brings us into the very heart of this mad, reckless, brilliant, crazy poet.

Who but a non academic, free jazz, woman singer—put an emphasis on the “non,” the “free,” and the “woman”—could possibly have achieved such a thing? You’ve never heard Yeats presented in such terms, and yet—once you’ve heard them—the terms seem utterly appropriate. It is not a desecration of his work but a revelation that drives you back into it, ready to see it anew, ready to re-experience the dangerous newness of these much-recognized, much-praised, much-memorized, much explained verses.

Oh, the chances Tobin takes! “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is one of Yeats’ most beautiful poems, and one would expect it to be set as a delicate folk tune—something to be sung by Joan Baez at her purest:

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Instead, Tobin notices that this poem is about someone hallucinating, having a spell of madness, and the music reflects that: after a haunting, deliberately “strange” flute introduction, everything flies apart into various layers, dissonances, vocal riffs, all whirling together. Perhaps the most complexly beautiful of all the pieces is Tobin’s setting of Yeats’ wonderful “In Memory of Eva Core-Booth and Con Markievicz”:

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossoms from the summer’s wreath;

The older is condemned to death....

On three of the tracks, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Pity of Love,” and “The White Birds,” Gabriel Byrne reads the poems relatively straight. Byrne has a lovely Irish voice but the readings have a slight Poets Corner feeling. One can see why Tobin included these readings—Can’t we have someone just reading these poems?—but Byrne’s renditions do little to illuminate the work. (One remembers Yeats’ own vowel-mad  reading of one of the poems Byrne recites, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”)

It goes without saying that when a poet is welcomed into the enormous, fame-granting

academic apparatus, much is gained. Where would we be without the literally thousands of books, theses, articles, classes and websites that deal with James Joyce—who in point of fact courted such attention. (Joyce is reputed to have said during the writing of Finnegans Wake, “Wait, this passage is not yet obscure enough!”) And yet something is lost as well. What is lost is the sheer strangeness of the poetic gift, its out-of-bounds quality, the fact that it always takes us elsewhere, whether to the cottages of the peasants Yeats visited or to his séances or to the wild speculations of the immensely talented, simultaneously genuine and phony con(mystic)woman, Madame Blavatsky. Even at his most bourgeois, celebrated, or medaled, the poet remains some sort of ausländer:

            The children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty year old, smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledean body....

            (“Among School Children”)

Fifty years ago, Paul de Man took on the Yeats Industry—with little success. De Man was the only critic to determine exactly how Porphyry’s essay on the cave of the nymphs (De antro nympharum: referred to often in Yeats’ work) functions in Yeats’ poetry, and his essays remain ground-breaking, maverick explications of Yeats’ work. (Yeats critic Thomas Parkinson once told me that he was “sorry” de Man wrote about Yeats.) Christine Tobin’s work is of another order of illumination, but illumination it is.

Make no mistake about it, however: Tobin may be Irish and London-based but her vowels and consonants are thoroughly American. The work on this CD is jazz.  But it is jazz showing as clearly as in a Miles Davis solo that no one really knows where this art form can go, what its boundaries may be:

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but Time.

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till Time catch.

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know:

We the great gazebo built;

They convicted us of guilt:

                                    Bid me strike a match and blow.

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Jack Foley’s radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard on Berkeley, California radio station KPFA every Wednesday at 3; his column, “Foley’s Books,” appears in the online magazine Alsop Review. He has published 11 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, and Visions and Affiliations, a chronoencyclopedia of California poetry. In 2010 Foley was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. A webfestschrift celebrating his life and work can be found in the Fall 2012, vol. 5, no. 1, Tower Journal (www.towerjournal.com; go to Archive).

Website: www.jack-adellefoley.com/ 

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Foley_(poet)#Biography.

Jack Foley contributes regularly to this blog.

Unbound by Law

by Susan Lewis

& its antecedents, with synesthesia & justice for ill. Mastered, digitally + analogously, a matter of enfolded dimensions & simultaneity spontaneously irrupted, inter- if not co-, exogenously layered like that sexy cake you sport to shield you from the reign of expression ― impressed as any empress, avec or sans portfolio. Neither assembled nor dissed, this despite your itch to micturate, whence I stall you in the morning. No thanks to our piddly rituals ― like that mourning shower, the like of which can never cleanse our stubborn sorrows. 

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Susan Lewis is a regular contributor to this blog. She guest-edited a gallery for AlteredScale.com 3, and  her poetry appeared in another one.

cats go bananas

by Jefferson Hansen

welter by Jake Berry

Click to isolate and enlarge.

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Jake Berry is a regular contributor to this blog.

AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Launch Reading

The Book House in Dinkytown, Mpls, MN

The Screen Pounds

by Mark Fleury

The screen pounds

Like a heart. The blue dot

In the middle

Is a puddle

Soaking through my shoes

As I try to take flight away

From TV’s charming smile.

It happens. Sky’s clear

And from high up St. Paul

Looks smaller than me.

Now my shoes, once white, are

Blue,

And the city fits on my t-shirt.

My neighborhood is a cloud,

The way sound forms

In a breath,

Accepting, in time, the death

Of all other names and creations. 

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Mark Fleury lives in St. Paul Minnesota. He has recently had poems published in "Counterexample Poetics," "UFO Gigolo," "The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology," "ditch," "The Medulla Review," "Haggard and Halloo," "Transcendent Visions," "The Storyteller," "Ruah," "Ceremony," "Poet's Haven" and "Down In The Dirt." Mark has a chapbook called "Spirit Light Naming Sound," published through Scars Publications and Design in 2009, and three full-length poetry books published through Scars: "In Your Heart, The Apostrophe's Teardrops of God" (2010), "Angel's Syllable Is Good Boss of Devil's Spine" (2011) and "The 4D Window" (2012).