Justin Hamm

You Should Buy How to Say Goodbye by Jim Valvis. Right Away!

2012-02-04T09:47:00.006-06:00

Hey, everybody. Just wanted to pop in to tell you about a book I’ve been reading that’s really, really great, Jim Valvis’s How to Say Goodbye. It’s a big book, as far as poetry goes—no, a monster, really, at almost 200 pages, but there’s no filler.

In some of my favorite poems, Valvis recalls the pleasure of sucking moisture out of a mitten as a child; the flippant attitude of his younger, soldier self toward the duties of soldiering; and the difficult occasions when friends have leaned on him for serious help. He also deals with fatherhood from numerous angles, even confronting the uncomfortable fact that what we love most—our daughters, our wives—is no less temporary for all that love.

Occasionally you’ll find narrative poets whose leaps in thought seem fabricated and forced. That’s not Valvis. His poems radiate authenticity in waves. His voice is trustworthy, self-deprecating, absolutely built of integrity. He finds all the convergences, coincidences, ironies, tragedies, and hard truths about life, and then delivers them firmly, often with humor, but never with malice.

This is the kind of poetry that makes me believe poetry can still reach people. It’s poetry for the professor and the plumber to talk about over beers. You're missing out if you don't buy it.

The NFL Playoffs . . .

2012-01-07T13:00:00.001-06:00

So, no Bears. I really thought they had a legit shot at the title this year, but you can't win NFL games without a quarterback--which leaves me without a rooting interest for the playoffs.

But it's no fun to watch without a rooting interest, so I'm going to let my intense, almost irrational hatred for Brett Favre guide me this year and I'm going to root for the Pack. Why not? I'm a die-hard Cubs fan, and yet, after the way the Cardinals played this year, I found myself rooting hard for the them in the World Series in spite of myself. Here's the way I see it: if Aaron Rodgers wins another Super Bowl, that's just another smear on Favre's legacy. And that's something I can pumped up about.

For maximum drama, I'm hoping to see a Saints/Packers matchup in the NFC Championship Game and a snowy New England/Pittsburgh showdown in the AFC. Oh, and if the Lions and Broncos just happen to get embarrassed along the way, I wouldn't mind that at all.

2012: The Year of Woody Guthrie

2012-01-07T09:44:00.005-06:00

As I mentioned just before the new year, I've been excited about the resurgence in Woody Guthrie interest as we find ourselves in a new world of protest, fighting social justice battles that should already have been won. This year will be Guthrie's centennial, and it looks like there's quite a bit of fanfare planned. Here's hoping the attention will move a generation of new songwriters to take up the cause of social justice and leave the future a powerful musical record of what it meant to be an American in this age.

Christmas Presents and Book Recommendations

2011-12-30T12:37:00.007-06:00

No Christmas sweaters or fruitcakes for me this year. My friends and family are far too cool and tuned in for that. Instead, I got retro Super NES games, a Blaze Foley record, a Nook, some Game of Thrones comics, and subscriptions to two of my favorite literary magazines, River Styx and Natural Bridge. Then, just because I was in the mood, I decided to supplement the haul by ordering a handful of books/chapbooks by my online writer friends. I’ll be mentioning them as they arrive in the mail and I get the chance to read them.

Before Christmas, I talked about music I loved from the past year. Now I want to point out books worth passing on. Again, I don’t really do the ranking thing. Figure it this way: if I mention it, I’m saying I believe it’s worth your time.

Let me begin with The Samaritan by Fred Venturini. Fred and I were two of maybe five or six majors in the tiny English department at MacMurray College, and more than a decade later, I can still remember in detail one fairly brutal and disturbing short story he wrote about a school shooting that pointed to exactly what sort of storyteller he would be. The writing in that early piece was like a horrible car accident, and I mean that as the highest compliment. I'm saying it was a little raw, over-the-top, almost perversely grotesque, and for all that, you just couldn’t stop reading it. And somehow, in the middle of all the horror, the story even managed to make you feel something, too. Fred had talent.

I remember thinking, If anybody here is going to write a book I’ll want to read, it’s going to be this guy.

Well, he did it. Like that first short story I remember so well, The Samaritan is somehow both a painful read (in a good way) and page turner at the same time. Here’s a story of a social outcast, kicked around by life, who finds he has a supernatural ability to regenerate limbs and organs. But of course he can find no peace or happiness in his power because he cannot regenerate what really matters to him, the people he once loved who were cruelly taken from him.

Where others might look at certain plot elements or combinations and say, Naw, this is just too crazy--it’ll never work, Venturini is flat-out unafraid of any move, his wicked imagination unfettered by wimpy conventions. He sets his book in both small-town Illinois and Hollywood. He mixes satire of the reality-TV culture we’ve become into a novel that at the same time appeals directly to that culture by killing and maiming at will. And it works.

The Samaritan's a wild book--definitely different--and worthy of a read, for sure.

Here are some other books that were memorable for me in 2011.

Fiction

*George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons (and the rest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series)

I picked this series up in 2011 not because of the HBO show, which I hadn’t even connected up with Martin in my mind, but because of a student who tried to get me to read the series three or four years ago. He did an author report on Martin, and I remember politely explaining to him that I didn’t really enjoy "fantasy." It was all I could do to not roll my eyes.

I came to my senses in October, read A Game of Thrones over a single weekend, spent the last two months of the year reading the other four books. What can I say that hasn’t already been said about A Song of Ice and Fire? I’m an idiot for letting snobbery keep me from reading Martin sooner, and one of my goals for 2012 is to make up for my sore lack of reading in the fantasy genre.

*Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol

Dead Souls was my favorite classic of 2011. It lacks what you would call a proper ending, but what’s there is bizarre comic genius. I want this to be on record: If the Cohen brothers end up making this one into a movie someday, you heard me suggest it first. Dead Souls was made for their sensibilities.

Poetry

Good Poems, American Places edited by Garrison Keillor

This is the perfect book of poetry for summer; it was made to pack along on road trips and vacations. And for me, a self-consciously regional poet, it has been a lesson in how other poets celebrate place. The poems aren’t obscure or remote. They engage the reader with warmth. When my friends tell me they don’t like poetry, this is one of the books I pull out. It’s like a book of contemporary folk songs, some funny, some sad, some revealing—rather than Greil Marcus’s old, weird America—the new, weird America that surrounds us today.

I’d also like to mention Northerners by Seth Abramson, Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison, Here and Now by Stephen Dunn, and Fall Higher by Dean Young—fantastic 2011 poetry collections that entertained and educated me, all of them.

Nonfiction

*Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey

Humphrey’s book tries to explain consciousness through the lens of natural selection, arriving at the somewhat disheartening conclusion that it’s all a big magic trick our body puts on because it confers a survival advantage: namely, the desire for life. He finds this to be no less a “miracle” (in its own way) than the existence of a soul. I didn’t necessarily buy into all of his conclusions, but the idea that distinctly human consciousness could be a survival advantage opened up a lot of philosophical ideas for me about the practical value of art. Humphrey seems to be of the opinion that the purpose of consciousness is to allow us to love life, and art seems fairly important in that context.

I appreciate the depths Humphrey goes to contextualize his "discovery" for the reader, and I appreciate that he supplied me with what feels like a genuinely new idea about how my world works. This is a book that isn't George R.R. Martin to read, but it isn't overly thick and it will leave you with plenty to chew over while having a few beers with friends.

Recommendations -- Music

2011-12-18T12:23:00.005-06:00

A week ago, maybe two, a friend of mine asked me to recommend a few books he might find interesting. He’s a smart reader with wide tastes and an appreciation for the unconventional, and I figured he might dig Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, but a couple days after I loaned it to him, he brought it back to me, said it just wasn’t working for him. I was more disappointed than I had any right to be. It isn’t that I want people to like the same art I like; it’s just that I take requests for recommendations pretty seriously. There’s something deeply gratifying about considering a friend’s personality and trying to match that friend with art they’ll fall in love with. I’d say it’s probably the same gratification matchmakers are after when they set up dates between single friends. And when the match doesn’t turn out so hot, there’s disappointment. It's only natural.

In this case, I gave my friend Sixty Stories and Forty Stories by Don Barthelme, and he told me he stayed up late into the night reading them, so it looks like I redeemed myself—or, rather, Don B. redeemed me.

I wish I could spend the same effort to make individual recommendations for all of my friends, and I vow to do just that for more of my face-to-face friends in the new year, but what I’d like to do over the next week or so here on my website is a little more general. I’d like to talk about some of the music, literature, film, and other art that has moved me this year. I won’t do a numerically organized “best” list because I am utterly incapable of rating one thing I loved at the expense of another thing I loved. So instead, I’ll just talk about what I liked in various mediums, and briefly say why, and hope you find something here that will keep you up late into the night.

I'll begin with music. I’m not the sort of music fan who knows exactly what albums are coming out in a given year and then goes out and buys or immediately downloads them the day they’re release. I dig old music and roots/blues/Americana influenced music the most, and there’s so much of it out there already that I don’t have to worry about getting the newest thing; there’s always something waiting to be discovered. But there were a couple of albums released in 2011 that I’d been jazzed up about since I’d heard they were in the making. The first is Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes. This was, apparently, a fitful album to make and record, but you wouldn’t know it by the finished product. I like that it represents a progression—it’s a little funkier and more philosophical than Fleet Foxes—but doesn’t turn away from the sound and strengths that make Fleet Foxes distinct.

The other record I couldn’t wait to get my hands on was the Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings album The Harrow and the Harvest. The Harrow and the Harvest is the best kind of music—-acoustic folk—-written and performed at the highest level. Gillian—-for some reason, I just have to use her first name when referencing her—-brings up Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes in a recent interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine, and I think that’s an interesting connection to draw, lyrically at least. Maybe the The Harrow and the Harvest doesn’t contain the same alchemy of noise that Dylan and The Band cooked up at Big Pink, but like The Basement Tapes, its lyrics work on their own terms and seem to take place not in our world but in some long lost folk world that calls out to our world from across the great reality divide. And Rawlings’s distinctive guitar is that world’s atmosphere.

I was also fortunate enough to run into some good bootlegs this year, but one really stood out. Fans of Neutral Milk Hotel will already know this, but Jeff Mangum decided to come back from the dead in 2011, and he brought live versions of his awesome songs with him. For those who don't know much about Mangum, imagine Kurt Cobain defied mortality and managed to give a handful of shows in 2011. Mangum isn't as well known, but he's every bit as important a songwriter.

The Live in Toronto bootleg gives an idea of what his tour has been like and makes me hope that there's some kind of new record in the works.

And finally, because I spend so much time listening to old music, I couldn't let any talk of what I loved this year pass without mentioning a discovery from the past--a record I'd maybe overlooked, undervalued, or flat out missed. Junior Kimbrough's Most Things Haven't Worked Out is one of those records. It's full of broiling, hypnotic summer blues that all bleeds together into a single 48-minute mood piece. It's amazing music for long solo drives and digging deep into your own head.

Also, I want to give a shout out to Woody Guthrie here. I can't say I really rediscovered him since I've never really stopped listening to him or loving him, but this year, the year of the protest, the whole world seems to be resdiscovering his music and his ideas. Songs like "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Jesus Christ" and "Do-Re-Mi" are as relevant now as ever.

Tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday, I'll talk books.

Three Things . . .

2011-12-03T07:31:00.002-06:00

One thing: You may have noticed, if you are/were a friend of mine on Facebook, that I've disappeared. That's by design. I've also emptied the feeds in my Google reader. Those are my two biggest time wasters on the internet, and so, for a time, at least, I'm going to see what life is like without them. I'm always amazed and grateful that I'm able to write at all--being an artist at any level of recognition is a blessing--but this year is the first in three or four that I've honestly felt I could/should have written more. I wrote a poem a day for a good little stretch early this fall; I want to get closer to that year round.

Another thing: You should read George R.R. Martin. You really should. You should also buy local and American-made stuff. And you should send some real hard-copy letters through the USPS this year.

And a third and final thing: Atticus Review was kind enough to nominate my poem "The Everyday Parade" for a Pushcart. It's always an honor when a publication believes your work ranks with the best they've received. And especially one like Atticus Review, which is doing really cool and interesting work.

The Scrapper Poet on Illinois, My Apologies

2011-11-26T09:03:00.003-06:00

Blue-collar poet Karen J. Weyant posted her thoughts on Illinois, My Apologies on her blog The Scrapper Poet the other day. Among other kind words, she had this to say about my chapbook:

All in all, Hamm’s collection is more than just a thoughtful volume that explores an American place. His poems are full of barfight sweat, churning rivers, industries that stand stark and ugly on horizons. Such descriptions may make a reader wonder how a speaker would even want to try to love such bleak landscapes. But I can guarantee that any one who reads this collection will gain new appreciation for the Midwest and the people, especially men, who toil there.

You can read the rest of her review here.

Thanksgiving Day Playlist

2011-11-23T10:05:00.003-06:00

Lonnie Johnson -- "Sweet Potato Blues"

Neil Young -- "Harvest"

The Avett Brothers -- "Nothing Short of Thankful"

Bob Dylan -- "Million Dollar Bash"

John Lennon -- "Cold Turkey"

Levon Helm -- "Golden Bird"

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Carolina Chocolate Drops -- "Cornbread and Butterbeans"

"Everybody Eats When They Come to My House" -- Cab Calloway

Distance From a Subject Frees the Imagination

2011-11-15T14:08:00.000-06:00

I've been asked on more than one occasion how moving away from where I grew up has affected the way I write about that place in my poetry, and I've always answered that for some reason the distance allowed me to feel comfortable letting that setting reveal itself metaphorically in ways that interacting with it on a mundane, day-to-day basis seemed to discourage.

Now I see there's actually evidence that this is how our brains work. Interesting.

From an article in 99% called "The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk." by Jocelyn K. Glei.

As Jonah Lehrer writes in a recent Guardian piece, “Several new science papers suggest that getting away – and it doesn't even matter where you're going – is an essential habit of effective thinking.” Certainly, we’ve all experienced the feeling that work concerns are just less important the farther away we get from the office. Now there’s proof to back up the classic “out of sight, out of mind” expression.

Lehrer goes on, “The reason such travels are mentally useful involves a quirk of cognition, in which problems that feel ‘close’ – and the closeness can be physical, temporal or even emotional – get contemplated in a more concrete manner. As a result, when we think about things that are nearby, our thoughts are constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful – it allows us to focus on the facts at hand – it also inhibits our imagination.”

Going even further, another study sparked by the productivity of expats like Nabokov, Hemingway, Yeats, Picasso, Gaugin, and Handel showed that not just traveling but living abroad for an extended period of time can improve our capacities for problem solving and creative thinking.

Anybody out there want to bankroll a four or five-year adventure to Europe for the family and me?

A "poem i love": Evan Kennedy's "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine"

2011-11-13T10:50:00.003-06:00

Sometimes other concerns get in the way of poetry for a little while and the break is refreshing. The solutions to all the poems I'm trying to write seem to have arrived during the hiatus, so that the reunion with my notebook is intense. Other times--and this is hard to admit--the break leaves me sluggish and unmotivated. I feel frustrated by poetry's small audience and dubious about the importance of art at all in a world full of so much injustice, in need of so much direct action. I even begin to doubt that anything about my life is really that different just because I didn't write any new poems.

For these occasions I have a Word file on my desktop titled "poems i love." And that's just what it is. If I read a literary magazine, or a new collection, or an anthology, and a poem sticks with me or compels me to read more than once, I'll type it into this document. Then, when I begin to question why I would want to spend so much time writing poetry, I scroll through the poems I've collected, randomly stopping and reading.

I found myself needing to visit "poems i love" this morning. And there I found Evan Kennedy's "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine." It appeared in The Captain's Tower anthology --published in honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday--that I was lucky enough to place a poem in earlier this year. "Most Likely You Go . . ." was immediately my favorite poem in the anthology. I like it because it is about Bob Dylan, of course, and I like it for a hundred little reasons that might only make sense to other Dylan obsessives--the perfect rendering of the Chaplinesqueness of the character "Bob Dylan" in the poem, for instance. But the main reason I like it, the main reason it is among the poems I turn to for reassurance as a poet, is the playfulness. It reminds me that writing a poem can be a hell of a lot of fun.

I don't know anything about Evan Kennedy, but I'm pretty sure he must have had a hell of a lot of fun writing this one.

I'm never sure what's appropriate to excerpt from a single poem, but since Kennedy's is a long one--it contains five sections--and since excerpting it is in the spirit of promoting his work, I don't think the following is too much.

4

Bob Dylan pulls up a chair at the only bar
he has never been to

Its lamps please Bob Dylan’s eyes
so much he is prepared to comment
until he realizes his thoughts of the lamps
in another bar
a bar he frequents quite a bit
are influencing his current impressions

So much for the lamps he thinks
The bartender mistakes Bob Dylan
for Reggie Jackson
greatest New York Yankee
ever to play right field

What’s your poison Mr. October he says
though it is clear to the patrons of this bar
that this man is not Reggie Jackson
but rather Emma Goldman
greatest American anarchist
ever to play right field

Bob Dylan does not correct him
but instead asks for a bowl of grapes
to which the bartender replies
that this is not a fruit stand
but a bar and that no grapes can be sold

Thinking he was not understood
that perhaps the bartender is new
Bob Dylan requests a second time
the bowl of grapes
to which the bartender replies that if
there is a third request for the grapes
he will nail Bob Dylan’s beak to the bar floor
and roast him
The bartender is clearly mistaking this patron
for a duck that waddled in

Bob Dylan waddles out of the bar
only to return the next night and request
from the bartender surely the same bartender
a bowl of grapes

Yankee or not
the bartender replies
this is not the establishment
to serve you a bowl of grapes
as he reaches into a dark cabinet
a cabinet good for storing a hammer and nails
to which Bob Dylan gets off the barstool
and leaves
not quite offended

Show Opening in Carbondale

2011-11-05T08:51:00.002-05:00

Read about the opening of "Past to Present: Poetry and Platinotypes from the Great Midwest," a photography show/poetry collaboration that I did with my buddy Mike Chervinko, in the Southern Illinoisan.

Autumn

2011-10-23T19:50:00.002-05:00

What My Record Collection Taught Me About Chapbooks

2011-10-13T18:00:00.001-05:00

At a reading a few weeks ago, an undergraduate creative writing major who had been turning my chapbook over in his hands for about five minutes came over and asked me about the format. He wanted to know if "[the poems in a chapbook] all have to be connected together like this." I told him what I'd read while researching to submit manuscripts and what I'd learned from reading chapbooks myself: they don't have to be, but a lot of presses like when they are. And that made me think about why I like the chapbook format so much. I'm a big fan of the music album as a work of art, and while I don't necessarily think an album has to have a 'concept,' like, say, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, to be great, I do think it has to have some kind of thematic and aesthetic cohesion. I think about this a lot. I listen to an enormous amount of music, and I'm always constructing playlists, organizing by different themes or motifs, thinking about how songs play off of one another to create a larger effect.

To me, the chapbook is the poetic equivalent of an album. Sit down and read a chapbook aloud all the way through. The approximate read time is probably similar to (or maybe just a bit shorter than) the run time of an album. So it makes sense that the chapbook could be structured in the same way as an album, and when I was arranging the poems in Illinois, My Apologies, the point at which I finally figured out a cohesive arrangement was the same point that I began thinking in terms of albums and playlists.

Fast forward to the last couple of months. I've been tweaking a new chapbook manuscript for fall submissions (and soliciting the opinions of a few generous souls along the way). Structure has again been a battle. But as I was thinking about what I told that student, and about how chapbooks operate so much like albums, the answer sort of jumped out at me. This new chapbook wants to be an album. Every poem references music or sound in one way or another and it is deeply indepted to my love of music and musicians.

Only problem is I can't sing. Or play anything, besides "Hey, Jude," badly, on the harmonica. Then I remembered a copy of American Poetry Journal that was published face-to-face with The National Poetry Review, and it dawned on me. There's no reason the chapbook couldn't recreate the physical act of listening to a record. So I've structured it with a Side One and a Side Two, just as an album would have a Side One and a Side Two. Each side is organized the way albums used to be, when the artist had to consider the fact the listener would be flipping the record (or maybe just stopping after one side), meaning the opening, closing, and cohesion of each side had to be carefully considered in addition to how it fit into the whole record.

The idea is that if a chapbook press picks this thing up, they'll print Side One going from page one to page 11 one way and Side Two going from page one to page 13 going the other. So the reader will have to "flip" the chapbook over to start a fresh side. The break between sides (hopefully) reinforces the thematic cohesion within each side without downplaying the fact that both sides are of a whole.

I'm sure this is how the chapbook was meant to be done. But my fear is that an editor or contest judge is going to read my note on how the assembly/printing/presentation and think I'm an idiot. Which I may well be, but I'd rather it not get around.

Poetry in Photo Exhibit Collaboration

2011-10-04T20:05:00.006-05:00

Just wanted to get the advance notice out about a little collaborative project I'm doing with my buddy, photographer Mike Chervinko. He has a showing of his platinotypes, or platinum prints, at Fern Fair Gallery in Carbondale, Illinois, beginning in early November, and he's been kind enough to ask me to pair about a half a dozen of my poems to hang with his photographs.

To give you an idea of the nature of some of these photo/poem pairings, check out "Window Jamb" and "Rebekah Just When the Drought Was Ending" below. If you're anywhere near Carbondale while the show is hanging, I hope you'll stop in and check it out. More details when they become available.

Window Jamb

Rebekah Just When the Drought Was Ending

But the best thing about Rebekah
was the way she floated always
beneath the scent of woodburn
and dusty Middle America,
her keen ranch-queen convictions
slicing deep and deeper into
the tiniest of daily miseries
with skepticism, demanding always
some proof before she'd concede
this life He pieced together for us
cell by cell with ever shakier Godfingers
contained even one malignancy.

Every bow-legged young bull rider,
every sunburnt farmer of someday
who stopped by to mend a fence
or just to offer genteel salutations
would see her backlit by sunset,
dream her into his own mother
and pray to the essence of the prairie
to do what old bones could not.
And it worked. She survived well enough
to give of herself four more seasons
among luckless kinfolk who every one
drank greedily the blood she squeezed
and felt the cracked lips of dry times less.

As long as there was some great need
into which she could empty herself
she could will the heart to continue
and none of the rules of dying applied,
but she must've seen that the new rain
wasn't baptismal or meant for her restoration.
When those stormclouds finally swelled
and burst into fat miracle drumbeats
she must've felt the change was coming on.
Why else open the windows so wide
with no thought for the evening chill?
Why else cut a hundred wildflowers
and arrange them into fiery clusters
but pour no water into their vases?

---from Illinois, My Apologies (first appeared in Nimrod)

A Big Thanks to Referential Magazine

2011-10-01T10:50:00.002-05:00

Just want to send Jessie Carty and Referential Magazine a big thanks for nominating "Small Town" for this year's Best of the Net anthology. If you don't know about Referential yet, then you should. It's built on a clever concept that exemplifies the idea of a cooperative literary "community." Every piece published in Referential refers from another piece in the magazine. It encourages contributors to not only read the work in Referential but find in that work the inspiration to create something new.

Last Week's Reading

2011-09-28T15:37:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned here prior to the event, last Thursday afternoon, I had the opportunity to read with local writer Daren Dean (Mercury in Retrograde) at William Woods University. Daren and I read from a naturally-lit corner of a dank, moody former campus pub called Woody’s. Scorsese would love this basement dive, with its teal flooring and the dark wood surfaces, which were, well, everywhere you looked. Listeners who weren’t early enough to grab one of the vinyl-upholstered retro sofas or armchairs were seated in dark wood booths, on dark wood barstools beside dark wood tables, or on a dark wood bench directly in front of the reading area. Definitely a distinct atmosphere, and highly preferable to an academic setting, in my opinion.

As for the reading itself: I opened with a few newer poems, including this one and this one, and few older ones, like those found here and here, none of which were included in my chapbook, for thematic reasons. I finished up with a handful of selections from Illinois, My Apologies. Then Daren put on his glasses and proceeded to read a fabulously bizarre gothic piece that included, among other things, the theft of a baby in a jar of formaldehyde and teenage boys obsessing over the term “homo erectus.”

So, a good time, for sure, and much thanks goes out to English Professor Matt Dube, our host at "The Woods," for organizing the event.

Reading September 22 at William Woods University

2011-09-17T09:56:00.006-05:00

If you're in the neighborhood, drop by William Woods University at 4:30 PM on Thursday, September 22 to hear me read with local writer Daren Dean. I'll be reading a mix of newer work and poems from my chapbook, Illinois, My Apologies. The reading will be held at Woody's, on the lower level of Tucker Dining Hall. Hope to see you there.

Blogger's Sense of Humor and A Couple of Announcements

2011-08-27T14:09:00.007-05:00

Well, friends, I just spent an hour and a half crafting a little personal essay for you about this new notebook I bought and how I recently began writing stuff down that nobody would see for the first time in my life--trying to get my values and beliefs together.

And . . . nobody is going to see that post, since when I clicked "save" it didn't save and I don't have the time or energy at the moment to recreate my train of thought.

So instead, I'll just smile and mention that I have poems forthcoming shortly in Atticus Review and Emprise Review, that Red Lion Sq. will record a couple of my poems for a fall episode, and that I'll be reading at William Woods University in mid-to-late September, in case you're local and want to check it out.

More details when they're available.

Some Photos I've Shot Recently

2011-07-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

Changing Classic Book Covers

2011-07-18T09:15:00.038-05:00

I was browsing aimlessly through Barnes and Noble yesterday and stumbled on a paperback copy of one of the most indispensable books I own, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. It has apparently been redesigned since the last time I saw it, probably for marketing reasons after Johnson won The National Book Award back in 2007for Tree of Smoke.

The only copy I'd seen for the last five or six years is the last one I purchased--my fourth copy overall, three of which were loaned out to friends and never recovered. Jesus' Son is just one of those books people "forget" they borrowed. (In fact, the first copy I owned was one I borrowed and never returned).

The cover of the copy I own has the title in a yellow handwritten font that looks like chalk on a chalkboard. "Stories by Denis Johnson" appears in thin, purple font below that. The bottom half of the cover appears to be a torn away scrap of paper with a handful of discernible words--a paragraph from the book's opening story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking"--in gray, typewriter-style font. Much as that story sets a tone for how we read all the stories after it, the words we're able to make out on the cover do the same: fed me pill[s] . . . veins feel scrap[ed] . . . new every raindr[op].

There's certainly a gritty look to the cover--the design, purple and yellow and black and torn and messy, has the same aesthetic that personifies The Joker in the The Dark Knight--but there is also, in those last three words at the bottom, softer than the words that come before them, a hint of (admittedly chemical) transcendence.

In short, I've always thought it was the perfect cover for the book.

And then there's the matter of format.. This edition of Jesus' Son is smaller than the standard paperback, which compresses each line and forces line breaks so that it reads just a little bit more like poetry--which of course fits since the stories in the book work so much like poems.

And then we have the cover Jesus' Son is being sold under these days:

This edition is a full-sized paperback, which eliminates the compression of lines, and while it still promises something off-kilter, which is accurate, it's lost some of the grit. It changes the book for me is what I'm saying, and I don't like it. This is a book I'll probably read twenty or thirty more times in my life; I hope I never have to own a copy that looks like this.

So here's what I'm interested to know: what book covers do you have powerful attachments to, and for what reasons?

Illinois Poetry Vacation -- Part I: Edgar Lee Masters

2011-07-16T12:18:00.002-05:00

Happy summer, everybody. Just thought I'd drop by to tell you a little about how we've been spending our busy vacation time in the Hamm family.

After the madness of refinishing our basement in June--the upshot of which is that I'm typing this out in my brand new office--Mel, Abbey, and I spent the first ten days of July back in Illinois, relaxing and celebrating with our families. We do this summer trip every year, drive from Missouri through central Illinois all the way up until we're nearly in Wisconsin, and every year it turns out to be important in that it reconnects me visually and emotionally with the places that have moved me to make my best poetry. This year's trip was especially meaningful from a creative standpoint, since I decided last minute to make it all about digging into the roots of Illinois poets.

We started with Edgar Lee Masters. I first read Masters in middle school and didn't love him, or any poetry, at the time. But what he was doing, characterizing the people of the small towns in my little part of the world, did have a real effect on my conception of what an Illinois or Midwestern poem should do, and when I reread Spoon River Anthology years later, I formed an attachment to it the way a New Englander might form a special attachment to North of Boston.

Our first day back in state, we drove over from my hometown, Bloomington, to Petersburg, where we saw the house the poet lived in as a child and his grave near those of his grandparents in the local cemetery. Masters had a deep love and respect for his grandparents, which is evident from the way he personifies them--they're Lucinda and Davis Matlock in the book.

From Petersburg we drove just a couple of miles to New Salem to trace the history of another Illinois poet who also happened to be President of the United States.

You probably didn't know Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry; I didn't, at least not until I read some of his verse reprinted in an issue of Spoon River Poetry Review that one of my poems appeared in back in 2009.

We stayed in New Salem a few hours, long enough to get a sunburn and see a few cabins and listen to a fellow visitor--he seemed like a retiree who'd dedicated his post-work life to reading and thinking about the Civil War--deliver an impromptu lecture on the mindsets of Northern and Southern soldiers. The temperature was well over 90 degrees, and what the man was saying wasn't that interesting, but there was something in his eyes that said he really felt his words were important. When somebody has that look, I just can't walk away, no matter how much I might want to.

Finally, before heading back to Bloomington, we drove forty-five minutes up to Lewistown, crossing the Spoon River itself, which was pretty flooded at the time. Lewistown is where Masters lived as a teen; it's also the home of Oak Hill Cemetery, model for the most famous cemetery in American literature (although the cemetery in Petersburg was certainly an influence, too).
At Oak Hill I got out to take some pictures and see if I could get a hold on what it was that might have made such an impression on a teenaged poet to be. I don't know if I found that, but I did find myself scribbling down a poem about the visit on the drive back home.

Below are some more of my favorites from Spoon River Anthology. Read them in order to get the interplay between them.

"The Hill" (By the way, the pictures of Oak Hill Cemetery are taken of or on "The Hill")

"Benjamin Pantier"

"Mrs. Benjamin Pantier"

"Reuben Pantier"

"Emily Sparks"

"Minerva Jones"

"Doctor Meyers"

"Mrs. Meyers"

"Trainor, the Druggist"

"Nancy Knapp"

"Barry Holden"

Collaboration

2011-06-07T20:44:00.002-05:00

I'm reading a book about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and as I learn more about how the two of them existed and composed together, I'm struck by the similarities between their relationship and that of another famous writing duo. Consider the following description:

'Kubla Kahn' was anomalous in being written in isolation. Most of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poems dating from this period were composed by one poet under the critical eye of the other. Once can only surmise at the extent of their co-operation from the odd anecdote, and from influences scholars have detected in the texts themselves . . . A single anecdote exemplifies the kind of co-operation that must surely have happened in other, unrecorded cases. Wordsworth's 'We are Seven' was largely composed while he was walking to and fro 'in the grove' at Alfoxden, and many years later he gave an account of how it was completed.

When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr. Coleridge and my Sister, and said, 'A prefatory stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task was finished.'
I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza . . .

from The Friendship: Coleridge and Wordsworth by Adam Sisman

Now compare the above description to what Wikipedia has to say about the Lennon-McCartney songwriting relationship:

Although Lennon and McCartney often wrote independently — and many Beatles songs are primarily the work of one or the other — it was rare that a song would be completed without some input from both writers. In many instances, one writer would sketch an idea or a song fragment and take it to the other to finish or improve; in some cases, two incomplete songs or song ideas that each had worked on individually would be combined into a complete song . . .

As time went on, the songs increasingly became the work of one writer or the other, often with the partner offering up only a few words or an alternate chord. "A Day in the Life" is a notable and well-known example of a later Beatles song that includes substantial contributions by both Lennon and McCartney, where a separate song fragment by McCartney ("Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head...") was used to flesh out the middle of Lennon's composition ("I read the news today, oh boy..."). "Hey Jude" is another example of a later Paul McCartney song that had input from Lennon: while auditioning the song for Lennon, when McCartney came to the lyric "the movement you need is on your shoulder," McCartney assured Lennon that he would change the line — which McCartney felt was nonsensical — as soon as he could come up with a better lyric. Lennon advised McCartney to leave that line alone, saying it was one of the strongest in the song.[7]

Clearing Out the Cobwebs

2011-06-05T15:57:00.001-05:00

From late February through late May, I'm a baseball coach, and that along with the English teacher's late-year grading load keeps me from writing anything for the three months leading up to summer. Like a lot of teacher/poets, I romanticize summertime, when the living's easy and there's more than enough time to read and write. The reality, of course, is that it's summertime. There are just so many other things to do:

Plus, when you take three months off from writing, there are bound to be some cobwebs to clear out, and that's where I am right now. I'm lucky in that I was productive in the first couple of months of 2011, which means I've got about twenty poems that are ready to make the rounds, and I'm slowly starting to get them out there to face the inevitable judgment.

I'm also finally finding the time to celebrate some of the publications that have carried my work this spring. The contributor's copies and links have been piling up--Nimrod, Sugar House Review, Willow Review, Eclectica, The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at 70, The Village Pariah--and I haven't had a chance to even acknowledge or announce them, much less delve into the rest of the fine work they contain. I plan to do that soon, and I'll let you know what I find.

I'll also keep you posted on what happens as I face the blank notebook again. Wish me luck!

Happy 100th Birthday, Robert Johnson

2011-05-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

In honor of Robert Johnson's 100th birthday, here's something I wrote some time ago about the King of the Delta Bluesman and Townes Van Zandt, their similarities, and their influence on my poetry.
--

What the Troubadours Teach Me

A typical midsummer night: It’s late, after midnight even, and the wife and baby are both sleeping the heavy, carefree sleep that only the true innocents of this world can sleep. I am not sleeping this sleep; instead, I’m down in the office, pounding away at a keyboard, trying to tune up a set of poems. But my mind wanders. I know what I want out of them, the atmosphere, the tone, but the problem is, I’m not feeling these elements myself anymore. It’s been four or five weeks since the original date of composition for these particular poems, and I can’t rework them from the perspective I have at this exact moment. I sigh. I need to find a way to get back to the emotional place I was in when I first wrote them.

When I first wrote them I was thinking about the hard lives people live, people I've known and deeply loved—and I was especially thinking about the kinds of things these people would do to themselves even when they knew better. I want to get inside their minds and portray the justifications they invent, the emotions they feel.

So I put on Townes Van Zandt and wait to be instructed on how to proceed. Van Zandt was the master of this kind of thing.

Listen: if you don't already know about Townes Van Zandt, you must find out about him immediately. Van Zandt was a blues-inspired country singer whose career spanned from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties, when the four decades of almost superhuman substance abuse finally did him in. I'll give it to you straight: Van Zandt was one tortured dude. For more on this, check out the excellent documentary about him called Be Here to Love Me. You’ll learn that in addition to the myriad of addictions he battled, Van Zandt was clinically depressed and even underwent electroshock therapy at one point. Later in life he drank a pint of vodka every day and admitted to hearing musical voices in his head. His demons probably had demons.

But the man channeled this pain into some of the most heart wrenching music I've ever heard. In his best songs, he put hard, clear, often discomforting human emotions out there for the listener to--not enjoy, that isn't the word for it--but cope with is I suppose the best way to say it.

But for a long time, not many people choose to cope with it. Van Zandt's albums, all excellent, have often been out of print, and he was considered only an underground celebrity, despite constant touring and the fact that hugely successful mainstream acts like Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris had recorded his songs. For his part, Van Zandt seemed to like it that way, seemed to be personally opposed to the idea of becoming too popular. I wonder if it worried him that he'd have to behave himself if people came to know who he was.

On the night I started to tell you about, the song I'm listening to is called "Waiting Around to Die."

The characters in this song--the narrator and the people around him—are, like Van Zandt himself was, constantly on the move. They drink and gamble and steal and even kill, but most of all they keep on moving. The reason they keep on moving--indeed, the reason they act at all in the song--is that it's "easier than just waiting around to die." This is the perfect phrase to describe what motivates both Van Zandt's characters and many of my own. They engage in self-destructive behavior out of a sense of hopelessness. Then they flee because they are human and irrational and therefore continue to hold out hope even in the face of hopelessness. If they run, at least they aren’t dead.

But if they remain fixed in one place for too long, they're liable to be overtaken the Reaper for any number of reasons, some of them justifiable. "Waiting Around to Die" makes you feel that death is an ever present stalker, that its cold breath is always imminent regardless of where you may be, what life you might be living. It makes you feel that the only way to dodge this menacing stalker is to ramble on and on and on--otherwise you're a sitting target and you'll spend the rest of your days on edge, always expecting the hard luck to send you kicking and screaming into the nevermore at any given moment.

Thematically, the song reminds me a lot of Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail," in which the greatest Delta bluesman of them all sings, "I got to keep moving/I got to keep moving/blues fallin' down like hail/blues fallin' down like hail . . . hellhound on my trail."

Now I'm listening to Johnson. His narrator, too, is stalked by some evil doom shadow that threatens to overtake him if he slows down for even an instant. We may or may not assume that the narrator brought this "hellhound" on himself, just as Van Zandt's characters usually bring their troubles on themselves.

Both songs make me feel panicky when I listen to them closely. It's the same kind of panicky I feel when the tornado sirens go off in town on a stormy day. In fact, that's what both songs remind me of: warning sirens. They remind me of warning sirens to the human race.

I'd like to figure out how to render this feeling of dread in the poems I’ve written. I, too, would like to write warning sirens to the human race.

Publication News

2011-04-26T10:05:00.001-05:00

If you have a minute or two, check out the latest issue of Eclectica Magazine. Among other goodies in the issue, you'll find a micro fiction piece of mine called "Home Again."

Also, the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum's literary magazine, The Village Pariah, will soon be publishing a poem of mine called "The Whiskey Kids." You should subscribe. Not only will you be getting great work to read, you'll also be supporting an important historical landmark.

Easter Weekend Adventure -- Southern Illinois Petroglyphs

2011-04-25T17:38:00.006-05:00

While we were down in Carbondale for Easter weekend, I had the chance to spend some time with my good friend Mike Chervinko, who is beginning to get some recognition for his photographs of Southern Illinois petroglyphs. In fact, some of these photographs will be appear in a show at Longbranch in Carbondale from May 18th to June 27th.

If you're local, you should definitely check it out. Mike works entirely in film with old cameras, some antique, and he painstakingly creates his own prints, too. The effort certainly shows in the detail, the texture, and the tone of the final product. He does exceptional work to honor the little-known and the forgotten art of his home region.

Here's Mike's photostream, so you can check out what he does. And below are a few pictures I took of Mike and one of his cameras as he worked his magic.

Below are photos I took of the petroglyphs on the site we visited over Easter weekend. The first is my favorite. In its own way it has a Renaissance-fresco feel to it. I also like the deer in the last one a lot. It's much larger than it appears here. The life-sized prints that Mike makes give a much better idea of the scope.

Photos from Last Sunday's Reading

2011-04-24T17:06:00.001-05:00

I'm a little behind on posting, but I wanted to make sure a couple of these pictures were up on the front page before I move them over to the "EVENTS" section. Last Sunday, I read and signed books for local supporters of Illinois, My Apologies in the banquet room at Coach's Pizza World here in Mexico, Missouri. The room has this great coffeehouse vibe to it, and I was digging that, and all the attendees really seemed to enjoy the poetry, plus I made a handful of talented new friends -- so I'd have to say the event was a success. Big thanks to everyone who came out to participate in this gathering, and also to my little sis for snapping these pictures.

NewPages Reviews Illinois, My Apologies

2011-04-14T12:28:00.000-05:00

A review of Illinois, My Apologies is among the latest from NewPages. It's highly favorable, and naturally, I'm pumped about it. Hope you'll check it out.

Happy National Poetry Month Part Two

2011-04-10T15:11:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago, I saw the movie Howl. Not long after that, an older gentlemen who was a dead ringer for Allen Ginsberg began working at the local Wal-Mart, and I took the convergence of the two events to mean I ought to finally learn something about him, so I got lost in his biography and his poetry for several weeks. I also wrote a beat-style poem about seeing his doppelgänger. It's called "A Wal-Mart in Mexico, Missouri" after his "A Supermarket in California," which is one of my favorite poems from Howl.

Sooner or later I'll get around to sending that one out. In the meantime, here's "A Supermarket in California," read by Ginsberg himself.

Happy National Poetry Month

2011-04-03T11:46:00.000-05:00

When I have a chance, I'll try to pop in and share some of my favorite poetry-related videos to celebrate National Poetry Month. Here's one I found while preparing to teach Whitman to my American Literature classes. I love the way the reader is frank about his experience with poetry and how he feels when he's read and understood a poem he's "accomplished something."

Join Me Sunday, April 17th

2011-04-02T18:25:00.002-05:00

Anna Clark Interviews Me for Isak

2011-04-01T22:45:00.000-05:00

I recently did an interview for writer Anna Clark, whose website Isak is a grab bag of interesting items on writing and the arts. I hope you'll check it out. She has some really wonderful things to say about "Illinois, My Apologies," too.

Fiction in Eclectica; I, MA at Left Bank Books; April Reading/Signing/Reader Appreciation

2011-03-26T21:51:00.001-05:00

Just popping in to make a few small announcements. First of all, since the first of the year, in addition to poems, I've been trying my hand at flash fiction for the first time. The pages keep piling up, and for the first time in a long time, I haven't been in any real hurry to get new work into the hands of editors. My patience has never been higher. That said, I did send out three flash pieces to a handful of places, and I recently learned that Eclectica is going use one of them, "Home Again," in their next issue, due out April 15.

I owe my buddy and flashmaster Chad Simpson a thank you for suggesting a single line edit that made a huge impact on how the piece hits the ear.

Speaking of Mr. Simpson, he also introduced me to one of the coolest independent bookstores around, Left Bank Books in St. Louis. If you happen to be in St. Louis sometime soon, stop in and check out their excellent selection of chapbooks. Illinois, My Apologies is now among the titles they carry.

Other news regarding Illinois, My Apologies: on April 17th I'm going to be having a reading/signing/reader appreciation gathering in the banquet room at Coach's Pizza World here in Mexico. I'll be sending invites to everybody who's purchased the book. The plan is to have some free pizza and poetry to say thanks to the people who have already supported I, MA -- and to give all the procrastinators a chance to pick up a signed copy, too. It's a cozy venue, the food'll be good, and so I really hope you can make it out to celebrate with me.

More on this as details are finalized.

Happy Saint Patty's Day!

2011-03-17T08:23:00.006-05:00

I'll never tire of this poem. Happy Saint Patty's Day, and enjoy!

Interview in greatest lakes review

2011-03-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

greatest lakes review recently asked me a few questions about being a Midwestern writer. Click here to read what I had to say. And while you're over there, read some of the poetry and fiction, too, in support of a publication that wants to draw attention to good Midwestern literature.

My Poetry in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 Anthology

2011-03-07T20:20:00.000-06:00

On the coolness scale, this one has to top the list of acceptances. My poem "Blonde on Blonde" is going to appear in the anthology The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70, the proceeds from which will go to Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, which Dylan himself supported with the sales of Christmas in the Heart. My poem will appear alongside the work of several generations, from original Beats like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and McClure to contemporaries likeTony Hoagland. The best part? I'm Johnny Cash's replacement. My humble poem snuck in when the rights to Cash's work couldn't be secured.

The Captain's Tower releases in May. Hope you'll check it out.

The Tree

2011-03-06T15:50:00.000-06:00

I see this tree every day when I drive home from work. Every day I think, I should take a picture of this tree. So one day I do. I like this tree a lot. It's a stoic tree. It's been mistreated and it doesn't care. It wears its scars without shame.

It's a rough tree but a good tree, know what I mean? ]

I think I'll take another picture of it sometime and post that, too.

Wuthering Expectations Talks Illinois, My Apologies

2011-03-05T09:32:00.001-06:00

Before I started writing poetry seriously, and after I experienced a post-MFA creativity block, I thought for a time I would go back and do a Ph.D in literature, and in preparation for that, I spent a couple of years trying to fill in the gaps in my reading. I used my readings in classic literature as entry points into a couple hundred pages of what I now refer to as messays--sloppy but sincere reactions to great books with personal reflections thrown in from time to time. Some of those messays eventually morphed into ideas for poems, and some of those poems eventually appeared in Illinois, My Apologies.

But the best part of that experience wasn't the writing I produced or even the books I got to read, though I wouldn't be writing now if not for both; instead, the best part of that experience was the dialogue that I had with other bloggers who were seriously taking on great books--not professors or writers but readers, a species I'd once thought to be entirely extinct. Dig this: here were actual people, operating outside of academia, who thought literature mattered enough to dedicate some part of their lives to it.

Which is why I'm so pleased that one of those readers, the author of the outstanding 19th Century literature blog "Wuthering Expecations," took a couple of days to talk about my modest chapbook. You can the first entry here and the second entry here. I'm flattered and a little embarassed every time someone mentions having read my work, but in this case I'm doubly so, since this fellow put down the Tolstoy, set aside the Hugo, and bookmarked the Austen for a few days in order to spend some time with my poems.

I hope you'll check out what he has to say--both about my book and about the classics. It's a blog worth following.

Dylan, et cetera, at the Grammys

2011-02-14T18:42:00.000-06:00

Follow-up to yesterday's post on Maggie's Farm. Below is the video. Mumford and Sons just rose in my esteem. The Avett Brothers were awesome, as usual, but they might have chosen a faster song. And Bob Dylan--well, I love Bob Dylan no matter what he does.

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Dylan, Avett Brothers, Mumford and Sons Playing Grammys Tonight

2011-02-13T14:52:00.001-06:00

To be honest, the Grammys don't usually do anything for me. Tonight's ceremony, however, is one I'm really excited about. My current favorite band, The Avett Brothers, will be performing--which in itself would be enough to convince me to tune in for the first time in several years. But they aren't just performing--they're performing with Bob Dylan. Those who know me well and have had the, ahem, pleasure of listening to me hold forth for hours on the topic of Dylan's role in American music can guess how excited I was to find out about the serendipitous union.

Reports are in from the rehearsals, and it looks like Dylan, backed by the Avetts and Mumford and Sons, will do "Maggie's Farm." So I thought I'd gather together a few videos to lend context this interesting collaboration. I apologize that the html won't let me put the videos right next to the commentary, so you'll have to scroll down after you read each description.

The segment in which the three artists will appear together is billed as a tribute to acoustic music. So it makes sense to give you "Down on Penny's Farm," which appears on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and from which "Maggie's Farm" seems to be descended. As you'll discover from that first video below, when Scott Avett and Winston Marshall strap on their banjos, they'll be taking Dylan's classic of defiance closer to where it came from.

Another reason for Dylan to choose this particular song: the late soul singer Solomon Burke will be honored at tonight's ceremony by Mick Jagger. Burke once covered "Maggie's Farm" on record (second video below).

Like any good trickster, Dylan loves irony. Which is a third reason I love that he'll belt out "Maggie's Farm" in front of such a huge audience in a tribute to acoustic music. The song is forever linked with one of the great legends of his career: going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. So Dylan will be going acoustic with the song best remembered for when he "went electric" (third video).

Of course, this won't be the first re-imagining of the song. Dylan is well-known for changing his presentation and delivery on classics. The fourth video is one the best takes on "Maggie's Farm" from back in the Rolling Thunder days.

Others have noted that the song speaks to the recent events in Egypt and the spirit of protest. I also think there's a bit of a torch passing to another generation of folk-fed musicians. "Maggie's Farm" reinforces what bands like the Avetts and Mumford and Sons are doing by using the folk tradition but creating something new. Plus, let's be honest--many in the general audience are going to be put off by Dylan's grizzled voice, and perhaps there will even be more articles by this one in The Wall Street Journal calling for him to stop playing music. What better way to respond?

This is a complex and interesting song choice in so many ways.

And just in case you aren't a fan and don't know why The Avett Brothers might have been asked to take part in a tribute to acoustic music, the last video ought to show you everything you need to know.

Maggie's Farm -- Dylan, Avett Brothers, Mumford and Sons Tonight on the Grammys

2011-02-13T14:36:00.001-06:00

Thoughts on Ginsberg

2011-02-11T10:00:00.027-06:00

Just finished I Celebrate Myself, an exceptionally detailed year-by-year biography of Allen Ginsberg that likewise turns out to be an excellent biography of the Beat movement, too. What's great about the book is that it places Ginsberg's poems in context by listing in a sidebar exactly what he wrote while the events described were unfolding, so I also ended up reading or re-reading a large sampling of Ginsberg's poetry as I followed his life, and it was an informative way to encounter his work.

My renewed interest in Ginsberg started a couple of months ago, when an older gentleman who was a dead ringer for the poet in his old age began working at the local Wal-Mart (which, I know, is just begging for a poem in the style of "A Supermarket in California," isn't it?). Then I saw the James Franco movie about Howl and decided to find out how accurate the portrayal was.

I'll admit that I never knew what to make of Ginsberg in the past. I knew a little about his life from various content about Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and a few short, generalized introductions to the Beat genereation. I'd also read Howl before and found the language and the feculent counterculture dreamworld intoxicating for the same reasons I find Jesus' Son intoxicating. But some of Ginsberg's other work seemed underdeveloped and didn't really move me. And a lot of it just seemed dirty for no good reason. Apparently this was a result of the high demand for Ginsberg; later in his life he was too busy to revise properly, and coupled with the fact that he could publish anything he scribbled down, this meant he put a lot of sub-par work into print.

But I was able to use I Celebrate Myself as a guide to the strongest work. The contextual support opened up the really good poems even further for me, and while there's still Ginsberg I don't much care for, there's also Ginsberg that I'm in love with.

That's how I feel about the man himself after reading this book, too. His generosity, his loyalty, and his perseverance were saintlike. His narcissism, his obsessions, and his lifestyle could be really troubling.

I always know a biography is good when I'm left with strong opinions both in favor of and against its subject. It means the biography has confronted us with a real human being, and as in real life, we have to decide whether to accept the person, flaws and all, or reject them.

I've decided I like Ginsberg, for the best of his poetry, for his support of so many artists I love, and for never hiding anything but remaining open and honest and real.

"America"

"The Ballad of the Skeletons"

Photos at Midwestern Gothic

2011-02-08T21:21:00.002-06:00

Midwestern Gothic is a new print journal interested in publishing "work about or inspired by the Midwest." In other words, a journal after my own heart. You should check them out, and when they release their first issue, you should buy it and read it. Especially if you are from the Midwest. I hate to resort to guilt, but there you go.

And in the meantime, you should check out the website, where a handful of my photos can be found. Scroll over them to see the photo credits and click on them to see them full size. Mine are the last two in the third row and all four in the fourth row.

New Cold Mountain Review Includes my "The Flour Epiphany"

2011-02-06T18:12:00.063-06:00

Forgot to mention that the new issue of Cold Mountain Review arrived in the mail the other day. It includes my poem "The Flour Epiphany," which also appears in Illinois, My Apologies.

But enough about me I also want to mention another piece that I really loved from the issue. The creative nonfiction piece "Hunger," by Harmony Neal, reminds me a little bit of Andres Dubus's classic short story "The Fat Girl." Both are about emptiness, about the uncontrollable urge to eat. But "The Fat Girl" maintains a distance from me as a reader because it's filtered through Dubus's distinctive voice--and don't get me wrong: I admire it for that voice above all else. But at the same time, I like "Hunger" because it feels somehow more colloquial, more personal, perhaps because it is nonfiction.

When I read Dubus's story, I feel like the main character is rendered believably and I feel for her, but I'm never under any illusions: it's clearly narrated by a force outside the story, even as it relays the main character's thoughts. "Hunger" is a first-person account, and it feels as if the reader couldn't possibly be closer to the story. I love that about it.

"Hunger" is a great piece, and to be honest, it's probably worth the price of an issue by itself. You should check it out.

Kind Words for Illinois, My Apologies in Referential Magazine

2011-02-04T18:09:00.001-06:00

Rose Auslander has some kind words to say about Illinois, My Apologies in Referential Magazine. Hope you'll click over and check it out.

Blizzard Recovery Reading -- Copper Nickel

2011-02-03T17:30:00.003-06:00

Well, we're officially canceled for school again tomorrow, which means every day this week was a snow day (and every day during spring break will now be a make-up day). Since I haven't been able to get out of the house, I've been fighting the cabin fever by catching up on some of my favorite literary magazines.

Copper Nickel is a publication I've been meaning to compliment for a while now and when the new issue (which I'm currently reading) arrived recently, it reminded me that I wanted to say something about the last two issues for a while. I'd seen an issue early last year and was so impressed by the layout and a brief look at the content that when I had a few extra dollars to spend on subscriptions last fall, CN was the first order I placed. The format is large and highly readable and really makes the work inside look fantastic.

Copper Nickel 13

I want to say that I especially love the artwork CN chooses. In the January 2010 issue (#13) the featured art is a series of collages by Krista Franklin that play off of iconic period imagery from African-American culture to create a really challenging overall effect. They're arresting and yet at the same time troubling as you begin to peel away the layers to get at how the various parts work together.

Franklin's collages were inspired in part by the poetry of Adrian Matejka, which is also in the issue and which -- like his book Mixology -- absolutely levels me with its catchy rhythms and perfect juxtapositions. These, along with poems about Ike Turner and Skip James by James Thomas Miller, are some of my favorite parts of the issue. But really, the whole thing is fantastic. Bob Hicok has a poem called "Life Could Be a Dream, Sweetheart" that I loved. And there's another by Karen J. Weyant, "How To Be a Rust Belt Feminist," that's was really memorable for me, too.

Copper Nickel 14

The October 2010 issue (#14) is also fantastic and includes one of those poems--Joshua R. Helms's "Boy is Winter's Tongue"-- that you read and then immediately read again four or five times, never quite ready for the language to leave your head. I also fell in love with David Keplinger's translations of a series of mysterious prose poems by the Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielson. I liked them enough that I felt sorry I couldn't read them in the original language (in which they're also published, alongside the translations).

Wish I had time to talk about every piece that moved and entertained me. I don't. So I'll get to the point: I'll continue to spend my money on Copper Nickel without hesitation. They produce a beautiful and worthy publication, and if you don't check them out, you're missing something.

Pictures from the Blizzard

2011-02-02T13:57:00.001-06:00

Watching the Snow Pile Up

2011-02-01T14:41:00.001-06:00

They've been building this one up as a "potentially historic storm," and I'm buying it. We're under probably ten inches of snow already, with another eight or nine on the way. The wind is going absolutely nuts out there. I went outside to snap a couple of pictures an hour ago and I couldn't see three houses down the street. There's even a chance I'll get to experience lightning and thunder snow for the first time. There have been several reports around the area.

So it's a good day for drafting some new poems, and I'm in a high productivity period right now. Last year, as I was revising my manuscript (eventually cutting it to chapbook length), I started the year in slow motion when it came to writing forward, and while I ended up with what I thought were some decent poems, I wished I'd made a lot more of them. It took me six months of 2010 to write as many poems as I wrote this January alone--and that doesn't count the fiction and nonfiction I've also been working on.

But what's been even better is the patience I feel for these pieces. I haven't been in any rush to get them ready to send out to journals at all. Instead, I've enjoyed having them hidden away in my notebook, sometimes in three or four different forms--all these private little secrets that I don't have to tell to anybody if I don't choose to. It makes me feel like I'm truly focused on the rewards of the writing itself, and that's always when I'm the happiest. And then there's the future payoff: who doesn't love to look up one day and realize he has a bunch of good poems tucked away and didn't even realize it?

I would've loved to be at AWP to see how people are reacting to the chapbook as they pick it up, thumb through it, and -- hopefully -- buy it. To all you who made it/will make it despite the weather: have a blast, and please stop by the RockSaw Press table (assuming they make it). Check out Illinois, My Apologies, and while you're there, shake Jorge Evans's hand for me, too, since I can't, and be sure to tell him he did a great job putting together this year's books.

Me, I'm going to go watch the weather some more. I'll try to post some after-storm photos later on. Probably be some ludicrous snow drifts if the wind keeps on like this.

Carl Sandburg

2011-01-29T17:09:00.005-06:00

Picked up Carl Sandburg's Selected Poems today, and I've also been busy personalizing and sending out copies of the chapbook, so I have been thinking about home again. Of course, because we were Illinois children, the schools made us read Sandburg, but I didn't feel anything for him then. And the list grows: yet another beautiful aspect of home that I missed, another reason to offer my apologies.

--

ILLINOIS FARMER -- CARL SANDBURG

BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect.
He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.
Now he goes on a long sleep.
The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero
mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,
The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.

1918

Love From the Local Press

2011-01-22T11:18:00.001-06:00

If you have a minute, click over to The Fulton Sun and read their article on the upcoming release of Illinois, My Apologies. It's nice to live in a place where the local press supports an interest in the arts.

What's Going On

2011-01-13T21:16:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to pop in to point you at a couple of things I'm involved in. First of all, Referential Magazine has used a few of my photographs alongside newly published pieces over the last few weeks. I hope you'll check out "Wing," "Landing," and "Into the Woods" and, more importantly, read the excellent pieces they accompany.

Also, JMWW Anthology V is now available, and I won't talk my way around it: you should buy a copy. The list of contributors is excellent, and I'm pretty stoked to have my work included.

On Censoring Twain

2011-01-09T14:02:00.003-06:00

Riverboat Pilot

I'm against it. Of course I am. Huckleberry Finn has always been one those unforgettable novels for me; I've read it at least ten times at various points throughout my life, and in fact, not long after Mel and I got together, we took turns reading it aloud to one another and talking about it -- bonding us to the book the way some couples are bonded to a song that was popular around the time they started dating.

View from Lover's Leap, Hannibal

Later, after we were married, we moved to here to Mexico, Missouri, just a short drive from Twain's hometown of Hannibal, and we've made two or three pilgrimages each year so I can search for whatever remains of the magic the old river boat pilot found in such abundance around these parts. And Twain has been in my mind especially often over the last couple of years, as I worked to put together a poetry manuscript that dealt in no small part with the place where I grew up.

Twain's boyhood home
reflected in window
of Becky Thatcher House.

So, no, I don't want anyone to change a word in Huckleberry Finn, but for selfish reasons that don't say all that much about whether doing so is really right or wrong.

I have thoughts on that, too, but for the most part they've been expressed by others, particularly here and here and here and here.

But what I've found heartening is this: even if a censored Twain gets released, this debate, which has been popping up all over the place, has made Huckleberry Finn important and current in a way that it had never stopped being important or current for me on a personal level. I'm sure the publicity has made at least some people go back and read the book again, or read it for the first time, in its uncensored state.

Sign near the Mississippi River

And it feels like vindication for years of defending the book against critics, some of which have been fellow teachers. I've been telling my students that they should pay attention because they live somwhere important, even if the media doesn't seem to think so. I've been telling them the setting of their lives--small-town Missouri-- is the same setting that nurtured the most American book ever written. Now that people are standing up and talking about that book again, maybe they'll believe me.

Preorder Illinois, My Apologies From RockSaw Press!

2011-01-06T16:28:00.001-06:00

I got home around 7:30 last night after the latest session of my community creative writing course to find a package on the doorstep. In it were the first few copies of Illinois, My Apologies. Mel and I toasted with unopened New Year's champagne (of which I took barely a half a sip because I'd just swallowed a couple of NyQuil, but I supposed it's the symbolism that matters). Today I took a copy to work to show my students, who were thrilled. I'm usually a person who is uncomfortable expressing pride, but I'm genuinely proud of this slender little volume, and I'm not finding it hard to say so at all. Jorge Evans and the good folks at RockSaw Press have made a beautiful book, and I feel lucky that it contains my work.

Remember, official release is February 3rd at AWP in D.C. But if you won't be there, you can preorder a copy right now and it will ship on February 1st, along with an attractive 8 X 14 broadside and an audio CD.

A Year-End Reflection

2010-12-31T16:15:00.000-06:00

If you believe the neurotic narrator from Barry Hannah's classic short story "Water Liars," then what you do in your thirty-third year--the age Christ was crucified-- is "especially important" and "holy with meaning." Well, I couldn't say for sure if that's the case, since I'm not there yet, but I can say that I sure felt like this year, 2010, the year I turned thirty, was up there in terms of important years. I sort of knew I'd look back at my first year as a thirty-something and ask myself some big questions about where I stood.

See, I got an unexpected gift when I started writing poetry seriously a couple of years ago after a complete creative collapse. And then there was 2009, a year that felt like an entire lifetime of joy and pain and stress and release crammed into twelve short months, a year that, finally, turned out to be immensly fulfilling as I learned to be a father and appreciated things more and rediscovered the satisfaction in being artistically active again, in getting my work out into the world, in having goals and ideas and--for the first time--an authentic voice to pursue them.

So not only was 2010 the first year of my thirties, but it also had a pretty eventful 2009 to compete with. When you look at it that way, it has turned out pretty well. This year hasn't been one of sudden epiphanies as last year was. Instead, as befits the first year of my thirties, it has been, personally and artistically, about routine and the practical application of what I learned from earlier epiphanies. Life was a little gentler to all of us in the Hamm household in 2010, and in the end, that's just what we all needed. If there were a few less instances of pure discovery, there were far more instances of satisfaction in a job well done.

I helped my daughter learn her ABCs and her shapes and her colors and a million other small, astonishing things.

My wife and I entered our fifth year of marriage and our tenth year of couplehood, and we somehow love each other more now than we ever have.

I kept in better touch with friends I love and miss.

I helped my English students and baseball players acheive their goals and was rewarded in the best way possible: with honest-to-God thankfulness.

I came up with the idea of teaching a free writing course for local writers, then went out and made it happen from scratch.

I organized and hosted--albeit a little nervously--an open mic that had a great turnout and has the potential to become a regular event in our small town.

I wrote a little less but published more: eighteen poems published or accepted in 2010, plus--and this was big for me--my first chapbook accepted.

If this is how my thirties are going to go, I can't wait. I'm proud of my small accomplishments-- personal, professional, and poetic--and I hope to keep doing what makes me proud in the future, whether the year is one that is supposed to be "holy with meaning" or just another candle on the cake.

And I sincerely mean it when I say I hope all of you continue to do whatever makes you proud of yourselves as well.

Happy New Year!

Three Books I've Loved Recently

2010-12-31T10:08:00.001-06:00

If the Coen brothers are looking for new material, they really ought to consider taking on Gogol's Dead Souls. Everything about the books seems custom cut to fit their particular sensibility. Even the plot, which at first I thought would have to be adapted to fulfill the expectations of contemporary film, falls in the line with the meandering plot of O Brother Where Art Thou? (probably because Gogol, too, had Homer as a map). There's the appropriate level of depravity and gallows humor as the main character wanders around the Russian countryside tyring to buy up deceased serfs. And, in a time and place where greed and corruption are real issues, it might turn out to be rather timely and relevant, too.

Anybody know how to get a message to either of them?

Benjamin Percy's The Wilding starts a little slowly, but kicks into stride halfway through, and the last seventy or eighty pages are about as exciting as nonpornographic writing can get. The writing is flawless--clear and precise and yet artful and inventive at the same time--and what Percy does at the sentence level--his metaphors and similes and gorgeous descriptions--will knock you for a loop.

Plus, you know, it has a weird guy in a hand-sewn hair suit, and that in and of itself is worth the price of the book.

I'm also floored by Reginald Dwayne Betts's Shahid Reads His Own Palm. At first, I wasn't sure if I'd be interested in what Betts was doing. I once read a book full of poems by female inmates because it had been edited by a wonderful, supportive professor whose poetry class I'd taken. It was a great idea. The only problem is that the poems just weren't that good. I wasn't sure if Betts's book would be like that book, a collection more about concept than content.

It wasn't anything like that other book. Yes, these are prison poems--poems about inmates struggling to understand their past, about the two-sided nightmare that is a violent crime, about the symbolism of contraband, about the secrets prison inmates don't want to discuss when they get out--but Betts's skill with language gives them a vast dignity. They aren't poems published just because they are about prison. They are really damn good, forgoing sentimentality and pop culture-y overdramatazation in favor of honesty and meditation and the potential of language.

There are a couple of excerpts here. I especially love the way "Two Nightmares," one of my favorites from the collection, describes the after-effects of the crime forever connecting the convicted and the victim through their respective sentences: "look now, the two men tied/to doors, one the unnamed can’t/open, the other a door the/one called victim can’t close."

Eight questions I'm pondering while relaxing over my break

2010-12-28T17:42:00.001-06:00

1. Do I really have to take this Christmas tree down or could I just hide it in a closet?

2. If my daughter insists on feeding Elmo-shaped crackers to her Elmo doll, should we worry?

3. How awesome is Barry Hannah?

4. Since my wife bought me a camera bag with storage for about six different lenses, is that her way of inviting me to buy them?

5. Is True Grit going to be worth paying a babysitter?

6. What should be my writing goal for 2011?

7. When is the new Fleet Foxes album going to come out?

8. Why did I eat all that stuff?

The Right Book at the Right Time

2010-12-15T22:56:00.004-06:00

I'm not a particularly superstitious person. I figure you make your own fate, and while I believe in true love, it isn't the cosmically predetermined version in which one soul is the yin and the other soul is the yang. In my view, true love is work. It can be created and it has to be nurtured and you certainly don't "fall" into it. True, I grew up Pentecostal, so I've been close enough to religious transcendence not to entirely discount it as a possibility, but, while I find comfort in rituals, it isn't because they hold any supernatural power. I value them simply for what they do, for the very fact that they provide comfort. Beyond that, I have no illusions about them. What I'm trying to say is, I'm open minded, but when I spill salt on the dinner table, I don't sprinkle it over my shoulder. I say, "Shit! I spilled the salt." Then I clean it up.

But I'll admit, there's one aspect of my life in which I feel there are greater forces at work. See, every so often I get the slightly eerie feeling that I'm meant to read a certain book at a certain point in time, and for reasons I'll only recognize at some future point I don't yet even know I'm hurtling toward. This only happens with books I pick up on a whim and only reveals itself to me once I'm about halfway finished. I'm like the speaker in Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue": suddenly "Every one of them words r[ings] true/and glow[s] like burnin' coals/pourin' off of every page/like it['s] written in my soul."

The books that have this effect aren't necessarily the obvious ones. Case in point: when I read The Brothers Karamazov, I had one of the best reading experiences of my life. I moved slowly and allowed myself to be emotionally affected and philosophically affected at the same time. But, for all the enjoyment I got out of it, I didn't feel as if I'd been fated to read it at that particular time in my life. This book hadn't been sent to me.

Yet, when I read St. Augustine's Confessions, or Woody Guthrie's biography, or the letters of Vincent van Gogh, or Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl, or Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, to name just a handful, I felt as if each unlocked mysterious things I didn't even know were locked up inside me. They turned out to be exactly right for a given moment, so right--and yet in such unexpected ways compared to how those book were "right" for other people--that I feel at some level it couldn't have been accidental that I happened upon them, and I recognized this, and in each case I came out with something personally or artistically that has proven enduring and central to who I am.

As recently as this summer I had this experience again with a newish poetry collection by Michael Walsh called The Dirt Riddles, which made me look a little more closely at the rural landscape on my way to work every day. And it happened again this week when I checked W.S. Merwin's Migration out of the library and read some of his winter poems and remembered what seriousness means. I can't help but wonder what future point I'm hurtling toward this time that Merwin is going to help me reach.

It's crazy, I know, but I've come to trust my reading fate, to believe that when I hit a funk, the right book will just fall into my lap at the right and get me on course for where I need to go.

Encounters With Santa Claus; Christmas According to Sufjan Stevens

2010-12-11T18:09:00.001-06:00

This is the first day the holiday spirit has really set in around our house, though we've been cultivating it for a couple of weeks. It's cold outside, cold as it's been so far this season, and there are a few stray snowflakes twisting and tumbling in the streetlight out front of the house right now. The weatherman says we're going to get a couple of inches overnight. This morning we had breakfast with Santa, and then we ran into him again while we were out grocery shopping an hour or so later --nice guy, that one; he put down his Subway sandwich mid-bite and came outside to greet us in the cold -- and since we were already planning on spending our afternoon watching a Christmas movie, we figured it was only natural to pick up a copy of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." So we did. And when we got home, we wrapped a few presents and ate more than a few reindeer sugar cookies and watched the Burgermeister Meisterburger wage war on toys, and now we're calming down for the evening.

A good day, is what I'm trying to say here, and I'm in the mood for a few songs from my favorite Christmas collection.

What I love about Sufjan Stevens doing Christmas songs is that he manages to sound holy and sweet and reverent and traditional and yet completely idiosyncratic at the same time. I know this sounds lame, but I really don't care. The sound this song makes is the feeling Christmas makes in my chest when I'm finally moved by the spirit of the whole thing.

Want to Hear Me Talk To Myself?

2010-12-02T12:15:00.000-06:00

If so, you have a couple of options. You can sneak up behind me while I'm trying to pretend I'm handy and fix some household item or other, probably with the wrong tool. Or you can visit the official page for Illinois, My Apologies and read my self-interview.*

Did I mention Illinois, My Apologies has an official page now? Well, it does.

And we have audio samples, too, from the companion CD. Just click on the CD-looking images at the bottom of the page.

Pre-order information is forthcoming.

*If you choose the first option to hear me talk to myself, I can't vouch for the quality of the language. If you choose the second, I can't vouch for the value of the thought.

Listen to Nic Sebastian's Take On "Uncle Fat Elvis" on Whale Sound

2010-11-27T00:00:00.001-06:00

Not long ago, I discovered one of the truly cool poetry destinations on the web, Whale Sound, for which Nic Sebastian records poems previously published on the web. Sebastian has a great voice and a sensitive ear, and she treats every poem carefully and lovingly. Which is why I'm so excited to have her record my poem "Uncle Fat Elvis," which first appeared in The Battered Suitcase earlier this year.

Cover Design for Illinois, My Apologies

2010-11-25T14:17:00.001-06:00

Thanks to my buddy Mike Chervinko, who took the photo, and RockSaw Press Editor Jorge Evans, who made the design, we now have a cover for Illinois, My Apologies.

Intersection, Turning Left

2010-11-23T15:20:00.001-06:00

Rust With Vivid Colors

2010-11-21T14:06:00.001-06:00

Not the rain, not the November chill

2010-11-17T23:36:00.002-06:00

Heck, not even the fact that I was late arriving to unlock the door to our meeting place, leaving them all to huddle together in the aforementioned ill conditions, could bring down the core members of my community creative writing course tonight.

This time around, we talked about Hemingway and publishing on demand and the open mic we're planning for the first week of December. Fantastic group. I can't believe we have just one more official meeting for the fall session.

Early Christmas Present (and my birthday and next Christmas, too)

2010-11-15T13:00:00.008-06:00

I sold my golf clubs a few months ago to get a head start on a new camera. I got about halfway there and my wife, either because she's the greatest wife ever, or because she was sick of hearing me obsess -- hard to say which -- decided we could match what I saved and take advantage of zero percent financing to pay off the rest. So this is one of the first pictures taken with my new toy.

Current Reading -- Michael Chabon

2010-11-14T16:08:00.005-06:00

In graduate school, after having read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I stopped reading Michael Chabon altogether. Not because he wasn't any good; on the contrary, he was too good. I'd read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys already and thought they were good books. But Kavalier & Clay was the kind of masterpiece that could make a young writer stop writing altogether, think to himself, I could write my whole life and never be able to do something that good, so what's the point?

Now that I write far more poetry than prose, and now that I seem to have found a small niche in considering regional and domestic matters, I picked up another of his books recently, figuring I am probably no longer at risk for being completely demoralized by his talent.

Well, maybe I figured wrong. Turns out Chabon does domestic issues better than anyone else does, too. In Manhood for Amateurs, his most recent book -- a collection of personal essays -- Chabon comes off as smart, balanced, honest, and disarmingly human as he reflects on a myriad of subjects, some of them highly personal, like the talk he had with his kids about drugs (and his own drug use in particular), his relationship with his first father-in-law, and his manly compulsion to pretend competence at all times--even as it puts his family in danger.

And the writing itself is Chabon, of course, through and through: stylish and distinct and generous to the reader and, yes, occasionally demoralizing to the rest of out here who are putting our pens to paper or hammering our keyboards, trying to publish and earn a few readers and preserve our crude best for the ages, as if the ages will care when they have Chabon to read.

Join Me December 8th at Open Mic in Mexico

2010-11-08T20:04:00.004-06:00

DECEMBER 8th, 2010

Duck walks into a bar . . .

2010-11-07T12:52:00.003-06:00

Duck walks into a bar and sits down. Bartender says, "What can I get you?"

Duck says, "You got any raisins?"

Bartender says, "What do you mean? This here's a bar. We don't carry raisins."

So Duck leaves.

Next day, Duck walks into the same bar. Bartender says, "What can I get you?"

Duck says, "You got any raisins?"

Bartender says, "Look, pal, I told you yesterday, this is a bar. We don't carry raisins."

"Right," says Duck. "Right." And he leaves.

Day after that, Duck walks in again. Bartender says, "What can I get you?"

Duck says, "You got any raisins?"

Bartender says, "You got a hearing problem or something? I'm telling you, Pal, you walk in here and ask for raisins one more time and I'm going to nail your beak to the wall. I already told you, we don't carry no damn raisins"

Again, Duck leaves.

Duck walks in again the day after that. "Well," says the bartender, "what can I get you today?"

"You got any nails?" Duck asks.

"No," says the bartender.

"Good" says Duck. "You got any raisins?"

.

Cover Art for Illinois, My Apologies Companion CD

2010-11-06T15:28:00.009-05:00

Courtesy of RockSaw Press editor Jorge Evans -- the designer (and, I presume, the hand in this here image) -- and my good friend Mike Chervinko -- who took the initial shot of the cornfield -- here is what the companion CD to my forthcoming chapbook will look like. I think it looks great and only hope that the quality of my readings and recordings can live up to it. The cover for the chapbook itself is forthcoming.

Because we're doing so well on production right now, it appears that we will be ready to officially release at AWP next year. I won't be attending the conference but I will be having a small reading/release party of my own here in Missouri in February.

Stay tuned for details.

A Charmed Day

2010-11-04T20:24:00.004-05:00

Today was one of those charmed days that happens only every so often. Absolutely everything went right. Then, I check my email and find that Cold Mountain Review will be publishing my poem "The Flour Epiphany" in a future issue.

Oh, and I forgot to mention a week or so ago that Referential Magazine (founded on one of the coolest concepts for a literary magazine I can think of) will use my poem "Small Town," which "refers" from a poem they published in their May 2010 issue, "Watching Arturo Sandoval on PBS at 2 A.M." by Jonathan K Rice.

Also, I want to recommend a really cool short story by Tim Wirkus that I read in the latest issue of Cream City Review. It's called "Thirteen Virtues of a Colonial Detective," and it's structured around the thirteen virtues Benjamin Franklin advances in the "Moral Perfection" portion of his autobiography -- but that's misleading. The story imagines a young Franklin embroiled in a Colonial-period crime drama and reads like pulp fiction. The juxtaposition of style and setting/character is way fun. But the story is print only, so go and buy a copy.

Three Things You Should Listen To Right Now

2010-11-02T20:54:00.005-05:00

I'm Youtubing some music while I grade, and I thought I'd drop in and point you to some interesting stuff I've encountered.

First, here's Bruce Springsteen singing a track from his new record, comprised of Darkness on the Edge of Town leftovers.

This is Sufjan Stevens live in Kansas City this October -- singing a song from his wicked, kind of out there new record The Age of Adz.

And this is Tom Russell doing a rambling tribute to folksinger Dave Van Ronk.

Good stuff, all of it.

The Value of the Self-Interview

2010-10-30T14:27:00.004-05:00

I'd been sitting on a little project I needed to do for RockSaw Press, publishers of my forthcoming chapbook, for several weeks, and I finally finished it up this morning. I was asked to conduct a self-interview about the book for their website, and at first I thought it would be a cinch. After all, I was going to be both interviewer and interviewee, so it wasn't like I was going to be facing any hardball critical questions.

Turns out it wasn't as easy as I thought. I wanted to answer questions I really thought people might ask about the chapbook. And in some cases, even at this point in the game, I hadn't even answered those questions for myself. But by buckling down and just doing the thing, I was forced to answer them for myself, to really figure them out, and now that I've done it, I feel like I better understand what I was and am trying to with my poetry overall.

In fact, if I'd done the self-interview earlier, I think I would have had a better idea how to organize the poems sooner.

I'm sold on the activity now -- to the point I plan to begin doing these self-interviews at earlier stages in the manuscript process. I may even force myself to answer interview-type questions about individual poems from time to time. There's something about imagining yourself having to articulate the answer to questions about your work that helps clarify what it is you are even trying to do.

Speaking of RockSaw Press, you should check them out. They're doing really great stuff to bring you worthy Midwestern poetry.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2010-10-22T12:57:00.006-05:00

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to update. I've been teaching and grading and writing new poems and sending out new poems and working on coordinating various aspects of my book -- cover art and blurbs and audio recordings and format and possible readings -- while promoting the act of creative writing in my community CRW course Write Now! and reading Philip Levine and listening to Fleet Foxes and watching my daughter change every day and having an anniversary with my wife and planning a trip back to Carbondale for the Devil's Kitchen Literary Festival and -- well, you get the idea.

Oh, and I almost forgot. I've even found a little time to trespass in the name of a good photo. This is the view from so many places in the Midwest these days.

Songs That Make Me Want to Write -- "Highway Patrolman" by Bruce Springsteen

2010-09-19T13:06:00.019-05:00

I have a lot of friends who hate Springsteen, and I suspect it's because they, like most everybody else, get stuck on the overly upbeat, glossy, self-consciously catchy Americana he serves up on Born in the U.S.A. Or else they hear his nickname, "The Boss," and can't help rolling their eyes. But when he's not trying to sell a bazillion records, Springsteen has it in him to tap the deepest roots of American music in a way that both hearkens back to and builds upon the tradition. The album that immediately precedes Born in the U.S.A. is a perfect example.

Nebraska is Springsteen out of time, quiet, acoustic--nothing but a guitar, a heart-piercing harmonica, and a controlled voice with just enough echoey reverb to underscore the loneliness of the songs' narrators, who, we guess, must be relaying these stories to us from empty rooms. What comes out in the performances is the honest depth of feeling Springsteen has for the hard-luck cases that populate so much of America. It's this compassion, more than anything else, that ties Nebraska back to the Dust Bowl ballads and protest songs of Woody Guthrie and gives it an uncontrived authenticity. Even on great rock records like Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River, the workingclass details come off a bit too much like literary tropes at times. Plus, on these records, we're always divided in our attention because of the arrangements and the production--and that's not meant as a knock in any way; those albums are great because of their sound. But on Nebraska, every detail seems organic, and the sound quietly and effectively does its job, inviting but not demanding attention so that the stories themselves are what we remember.

All of the songs on Nebraska move me in one way or another, but for me "Highway Patrolman" is the pinnacle in both emotion and realism. Here Springsteen gives a truthful depiction of small-town America and of the everyday impossibilities that can crop up in the life of even the most good-hearted man.

The song is about Joe Roberts, the highway patrolman of the title, whose brother, a vietnam vet named Frankie "just ain't no good." There's an implication that Joe has always gotten the better deal in life -- in the beginning of the song both are "takin' turns dancin' with Maria," but it's Joe who gets "a farm deferment" and "takes Maria for [his] wife" while Frankie goes off to fight in the war.

Springsteen's delivery brings the narrator to life. He has Roberts' voice down, all the "ain't"s for "isn't"s, all the "done"s for "did"s, without sounding in the least bit forced, and there's a perfect mixture sorrow and quiet defiance in Springsteen's tone. Roberts wants us to understand why, every time his brother gets into trouble, he "looks the other way," including the last time, when Frankie shoots, and maybe even kills, a man in a bar fight. Roberts is clear: it may be his responsibility to uphold the law, and he may want more than anything to do so, but blood is the most important thing. And yet, beneath his defiant, that's-what-you-do-for-your-brother message, you can hear Roberts questioning himself. For him, and for so many real Heartlanders, there's no right choice, only two wrong ones. He sticks to his values, and yet, in doing so, he violates them. The layering to Roberts's character is subtle and striking.

Sometimes, on a stormy afternoon, if I can spare an hour or so, I'll go for a drive through rural Missouri and I'll put on Nebraska and let it soak in, let myself believe I'm driving through the landscape of the record itself, and when "Highway Patrolman" comes on, that's when I'll feel completely transported. Later, when I'm back home with my notebook, I'll remember the feeling and I'll think, That's what I've got to do.

Here's a video of Springsteen performing "Highway Patrolman" live. It doesn't have the same ambience as the Nebraska version, but it still shows what's great about the song.

"down home" nominated for The Best of Net

2010-09-18T13:59:00.002-05:00

The good folks over at decomP have been kind enough to nominate my poem "down home," from the April issue, for the 2010 Best of the Net Anthology. A big thanks to editor Jason Jordan for the nod and a hearty congrats to all the other nominees.

"down home" was also featured on the Indiefeed: Performance Poetry Channel during its April feature on decomP, and you can hear that episode here.

RockSaw Press Will Publish My Chapbook Illinois, My Apologies

2010-09-12T09:45:00.003-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that RockSaw Press will publish my chapbook, Illinois, My Apologies, in the spring of 2011. RockSaw does a really nice job with their chapbooks, and they're committed to Midwestern poetry, so I'm obviously really happy to be working with a press that cares about the same things I care about. But they're also interested in doing a companion CD of me reading, which means 1). I get to play with recording software, which is lots of fun; and 2). the chapbook has a chance to be a little bit different experience for those who buy it. So that has me even more pumped up about the project.

This is still pretty fresh news, so I'll drop more details on you as they become available.

WRITE. NOW. -- An Eight-Week Introduction to Creative Writing -- Join Me!

2010-09-10T17:18:00.001-05:00

Outside the four walls of my own classroom, I haven't been as vocal an advocate for the value of poetry and fiction writing as I should have been over the last several years. I've had a lot to figure out about where those activities fit into my own life, but I think I've done that, and now I want to make up for lost time. So I've decided to get out there and share what I love with my community by teaching a creative writing course for adults who might not otherwise take one.

Below is the ad for the class. It's free. If you're local, I hope you'll sign up, or at least drop by and say hello.

--

You always believed you had it in you to write something great. Well, what's stopping you?

Presser Performing Arts Center presents . . .

WRITE. NOW.

An eight-week introduction to creative writing course with local poet/fiction writer Justin Hamm.

WEEKLY CRAFT LESSONS & DISCUSSIONS

TIME TO WRITE & SHARE WITH OTHERS

FICTION, NONFICTION, & POETRY

Wednesdays, Oct. 6-Nov.24

6:00-7:30 PM

Interested participants must be 18 years and older.

Advanced workshop and individual tutorials also available for students interested in seriously pursuing publication.

To register, or for more information, please call 573-581-5592 or email lois@presserpac.com

--

Justin Hamm earned his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His poetry and fiction have appeared, or will soon appear, in Nimrod International Journal, The New York Quarterly, Cream City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Red Rock Review, The Brooklyn Review, and numerous other publications. Recent work has also been featured on the Indiefeed: Performance Poetry Channel and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Me on Irving Toast's Poetry Shorts

2010-08-30T16:20:00.000-05:00

If you're near a computer tomorrow at noon, two, or four, check out the internet stream of KRUU-LP 100.1 FM out of Fairfield, Iowa to hear Irving Toast's Poetry Shorts -- a branch off of Rustin Larson's excellent poetry show Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost. Tomorrow's short will be me reading a poem called "Residual Hauntings."

Writer's Block

2010-08-12T22:20:00.004-05:00

This is the view on certain days -- days when the words just won't come. Every letter another giant obstacle that seems impossible to overcome.

Nimrod and Willow Review Acceptances; Radio Reading

2010-08-06T20:00:00.016-05:00

I'm just stopping in on a spare minute to report a couple of recent successes with the poems I sent out late this spring. Willow Review will publish "the autobiography, nearly" in their spring issue, and Nimrod International Journal will use "Rebekah Just When the Drought Was Ending" and "Illinois Route 3" in a future issue TBA.

Also, later this month you'll be able to hear me read "Residual Hauntings" on KRUU-LP 100.1 FM out of Fairfield, Iowa or if, like me, you live outside the station's range, live on the internet stream as part of host Rustin Larson's Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost's poetry shorts. I'll post a reminder after I know exactly when my reading will air.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Live in St. Louis

2010-07-23T15:34:00.003-05:00

Setlist
Listen To Her Heart
You Don't Know How It Feels
I Won't Back Down
Free Fallin'
Oh Well
Mary Jane's Last Dance
Drivin' Down To Georgia
Breakdown
Jefferson Jericho Blues
Good Enough
Running Man's Bible
Takin' My Time
I Should Have Known It
Learning To Fly
Don't Come Around Here No More

Encore
Refugee
Runnin' Down A Dream
American Girl

As I noted in my last post, I saw Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers last Sunday in St. Louis. They played an excellent set of what essentially came down to the greatest hits plus a few songs from Mojo. In the past, I've heard the group knocked for playing so many well-known songs and/or for playing them so true to their original recordings. After seeing their live show, I can't see how anybody could criticize them.

I guess the idea here is that we shouldn't pay good money to hear what could be heard on an MP3 player for free at home. I understand that view, but I think it misses the point. I think we ought to celebrate that, at sixty, Petty can match himself as a singer on tunes he wrote thirty or more years ago. In fact, his voice has deepened ever so slightly and certainly sounds warmer, if not flat-out better, these days. Not many acts who have been around so long can lay claim to so many top-of-the-line tunes and still perform them at the highest level.

That's probably the biggest argument in favor of playing a show full of the hits: they're all really great songs, and the Mojo material is no drop-off, so why wouldn't you? You can hear how the band has confidently incorporated a lifetime of influences--Dylan, Roy Orbison, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Muddy Waters. Yet, they're still distinctively The Heartbreakers. And unlike some seasoned rock bands, they don't get bored, mail it in, or play on auto-strum, confident in their legend. If that were the case, then Mike Campbell, who had heat exhaustion and fainted on stage near the end of the show, wouldn't have gutted out a wailing three-song encore before heading off for a stay in the hospital.

A tour like this in support of an excellent late-period record like Mojo is also a chance for Tom and the boys to add a little something to the legacy, which is another reason to play those hits: to bring the full force of their career accomplishments back into public awareness. I'm glad they made the record, I'm glad they're touring, I'm glad they're playing some of the best rock songs ever, and I'm glad I got to see them own their material.

Here's a video of the closer that night, "American Girl."

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Tonight in St. Louis

2010-07-18T08:20:00.003-05:00

The wife and I and one of our best friends will be spending our Sunday night with Tom Petty, superstar guitarist Mike Campbell, and the rest of the Heartbreakers. Their body of work speaks for itself, and they're newest record, Mojo, is top-notch.

And they can still get it done on stage after all these years--check it out.

"First Flash of Freedom" (from Mojo)

And here, an all-time classic, "Refugee"

Yeah, I'm pretty stoked. I'll report on the quality of the show when we get back from our road trip next week.

Reading The Dirt Riddles by Michael Walsh

2010-07-17T19:36:00.001-05:00

I happened across a copy of the Michael Walsh's The Dirt Riddles at the library recently, and I've been reading it in spurts and finding myself deeply interested in what Walsh does with his rural settings--especially the details on which he tends to train his eye. He's teaching me something important, and I'm not yet sure what it is, but I have the feeling it's going to matter to the work I've been trying to do this summer. I think this may turn out to be the right book at the right time.

There's a poem in the collection called "Inheritance" that I can't stop reading. It captures the reality of rural decay perfectly:

Rust blooms across my land:
Spots like mold on white cars,
Their spark plugs cold as insects
Poisoned in orange powder

I'm not sure what state Walsh had in mind when he wrote "Inheritance," but this is what it is to drive through rural Missouri every day. Ditto the rest of the book. Like the speaker in his short poem"Field Junk," about junk objects that stand in for a child's Legos, Walsh is constantly "harvesting bolts," finding new ways to use "[c]ord, hinge, tube, and bone" throughout The Dirt Riddles. I'm really feeling what he's doing, and I can tell that this is one of those books I'm going to return to the library and then order right away.

Happy Birthday, Woody Guthrie

2010-07-14T12:11:00.004-05:00

Ninety-eight years ago today, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. The next fifty-five years would take this restless little man from Dust Bowl refugee to wandering hobo to folk performer to newspaper columnist to recording artist to memoirist to radio host to Communist social activist to U.S. Merchant Marine to proto-hippie to mental patient to American hero.

Along the way, he would write some of the best, most important songs in American history.

I've been fascinated by all things Woody for several years now. In fact, I have a poem in the forthcoming issue of Cream City Review, due out any day now, that deals in part with the misfortune that seemed to stalk him throughout his life.

The truth about Woody is this: like any other living, breathing human being, he had more than one facet to his character. He both felt and caused a great deal of sadness in his life. He was an inspiring man and he was a difficult man. He was a hero and he was an occasional scoundrel. His songs were plain-spoken, outwardly aimed, and socially conscientious, and yet he wrote other lyrics, personal correspondences, poems, et cetera, that showed artistic experimentation and deep introspection. He was a genius and he was insane. He was a lucky man and he was a victim of fortune.

But what truly endures about Woody, what causes so many to feel a deep personal connection to him, at least in my view, is his sincere love for his fellow man--and especially for the downtrodden. Woody hurt for people and he hated inequality and he was defiant in his absolute need to express those sentiments, and we can hear this in his outlaw ballads, like "Jesus Christ" (ironically based on the outlaw ballad "Jesse James"), and his protest songs, like "1913 Massacre."

But one of the best examples of Woody's defiance can be found in the often omitted verses of his most famous work, "This Land is Your Land," a song most of us probably learned was an unapologetic love letter to America's perfection , accompanied by guitar. But there's more to it than that. Woody also wrote,

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the back side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

and

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

This is the Woody I love. He can fill your heart to overflowing with love for America, for the "sparkling sands of her diamond deserts" and her "wheat fields waving," but he isn't going to let you escape your conscience.

Here's Woody performing "Jesus Christ."

This is "1913 Massacre."

And this is "This Land is Your Land.”

For an account of the first half of his life so charming it talks its way out of the shackles of fact, read Guthrie's own Bound For Glory. For a more balanced view of the man's whole life, read Joe Klein's excellent Woody Guthrie: A Life.

New jmww Live

2010-07-01T22:00:00.002-05:00

Hey, all. I'm breaking my web fast only long enough to say you should go read the summer jmww, which is now live and includes three pieces from one of my favorite fiction writers, J.A. Tyler (who I've mentioned here before, and whose narrative voice, for those who haven't encountered it, is a joyous, baffling wonder), plus tons of excellent work in every genre. You can also find my poem "man weeps in the presence of pumpkin guts" -- here I owe a thank you to Chad Simpson, who helped me understand something important about this poem and change it for the better.

Updates and News

2010-06-28T10:32:00.001-05:00

My computer's been kind of haywire for the last month or two, but I've been able to tolerate the occasional freeze-up here and there. Over the past two weeks, though, the situation has gone critical. Sometimes I can't work for more than ten minutes without the system shutting down and giving me this weird blue error screen. Actually, this hasn't been all bad. One upside is that my wife and I have decided it's time to put this seven-year-old dinosaur to rest. And I've talked her into a brand new, top-of-the-line PC that can perform all the cool new tricks--plus I get a netbook as part of the deal. The downside is that until these machines arrive I'm severely limited in what I can do. Luckily this isn't the heart of submissions season, because I can't even get my printer to work. Even updating the blog is a pain in the rear--as you can probably tell by my infrequent updates recently.

On the other hand, without blog posts to write and other online distractions, I've spent a lot of time writing new poems in spiral notebooks--this may be my most productive stretch since grad school--and I'm convinced I'm doing the best work I've ever done right now. So there you go. Maybe these new computers aren't going be as great for me as I think.

Regardless, I'll have more here in the coming weeks. I have a couple of more entries in my "Songs That Make Me Want to Write" series drafted out, and I also want to talk about Chad Simpson's masterful little chapbook of flash fiction "Phantoms," which I've read about fifteen times in the last month.

In the meantime, let me update you with some recent publishing news:

First of all, I have fiction in the inaugural issue of Revisitaions, which went live this month.
I also have two poems, "meander" and "Stars Will Crunch Underfoot Like Autumn Leaves" forthcoming this summer in Forge.
The new issue of Cream City Review--due out day now--will contain my poem "personal day."
And the always-awesome jmww will use "man weeps in the presence of pumpkin guts" in their next issue.

I've also chopped the manuscript of Illinois, My Apologies into smaller, chapbook length manuscripts that are making the rounds at several contests right now, and I've collected a handful of thematically-linked stories into a chapbook length collection--three full-length stories and two flashes that act as connective tissue--and I plan to send that to a couple of contests in the near future.

So wish me luck. And good luck to all of you out there who are putting words on the page. It ain't easy work, and I admire all of you.

Study in Contrast

2010-06-17T14:36:00.009-05:00

How about some poetry for a Thursday afternoon? Here I read "Study in Contrast" from the Winter 2010 issue of Chaffey Review.

Songs That Make Me Want to Write -- "Greensleeves" by John Coltrane

2010-06-07T12:38:00.003-05:00

When I was in graduate school, I had a memorable conversation with a writer I really admire about the way inspiration reveals itself to him. He said that as he wrote he saw a motion picture in his head--like John Gardner's "vivid and continuous dream," straight from the muse through the imagination and down onto the page.

I remember feeling a mixture of jealousy, curiosity, and awe at this description. I have never seen a moving picture while writing, not even when I was primarily a fiction writer. I see still images here and there, but mostly I just hear the cadences of the lines, the sound each makes in relation to its fellows as it elbows its way in and joins the rest of the chorus. Fiction, poetry, emails to my college buddies--it's always been the same. Over time I've become a more visual, image-based writer, but these effects are always ornaments of later addition, the results of a conscious effort to be a more visual, image-based writer.

For me, everything grows out of sound.

Which is probably why I can really check into the creative zone when I'm listening to certain favorite jazz records. It doesn't work with every piece--nothing too structureless or avant garde or the trance will be broken--and it doesn't work every time--I have to be in a certain mindset to begin with--but if it possesses the right mix of mood and melody, a composition can blow open the access to that unconscious place where I store all my sentences and lines, so that they come pouring out almost without effort on my part.

John Coltrane's take on the English folk song "Greensleeves" (from Africa/Brass) has that combination of mood and melody. Begin with the steady rubberband bass and tinkling piano, which connect us to the song's history and create a familiar atmosphere. Here is where some fragment of language or kernel of truth might whisper itself to me. Then Trane turns it on and starts to do his thing, and this frees up the imagination. He begins with the familiar melody but soon cuts loose, and suddenly the language begins to shoot off in one direction then another then another--and somehow still remembering--just like Trane and his sax--to loop back and reconnect with that familiar center.

I'll play "Greensleeves" three or four times in a row when I'm hot. It's like freewriting, only better; I'm able to completely let go because I've convinced myself Trane is the one in control.

If I were more educated about music, I could probably better explain the relationship between compositions like "Greensleeves" and the work I ultimately produce under its influence. I suspect it has to do with helping me to time different moves and control the repetition of tropes, to establish the familiar territory, push out toward something different at just the right moment, then return to the familiar territory again. But I'm not sure I really want to know how or why it works, so long as it does. Aren't some things better because we don't understand them? Because our ignorance allows us to pretend there's an underlying magic to certain aspects of this world?

Here's Trane doing "Greensleeves" at the Villiage Vangard. Not exactly like the Africa/Brass version I usually listen to, but you get the idea.

And here's a more classical arrangement so you can hear the source material Coltrane was working with.

"Uncle Fat Elvis" in The Battered Suitcase's Summer Issue

2010-06-05T20:00:00.002-05:00

Check out The Battered Suitcase's Summer 2010 issue, which includes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork, as well as a poem/character sketch of mine called "Uncle Fat Elvis." I think you'll be impressed with the quality of work throughout the issue. I'm especially taken with the artwork of Nancy Calef, whose "Check Please" is the cover of the issue.

Steve Martin's Personal Letter To a Fan -- From Letters of Note

2010-06-05T12:05:00.000-05:00

Some literary magazine ought to adopt a variation on Steve Martin's personal letter to a fan for its rejection slips. This is flat-out hilarious!

Goodbye, Pindeldyboz, and Thanks a Ton!

2010-06-04T22:45:00.004-05:00

I'm a little late on this--got the email about a week ago--but I want to mention it anyway. In case you haven't heard, Pindeldyboz is closing down shop after ten years.

They were in on publishing online fiction long before the current explosion and gave a home to some excellent work by a myriad of different writers over the years. For this they deserve no less than a standing ovation, so I'm going to give them one, and since I'm in alone in my basement office right now, I'm going to pretend like you're giving them one, too. That way I won't feel quite so self-conscious.

Thanks, Pindeldyboz, from a contributor and long-time reader. We'll miss you.

The Art Institute of Chicago Museum

2010-06-03T13:17:00.029-05:00

I wanted to write a sort of mini-essay about my experience at an art museum this week. But then I read Rick Bass's striking piece "Two Museums" in Ecotone 9 and realized I'd be doing a greater service to you as a reader if I simply linked to that essay, compared to which my own meanderings would seem like unbearable hackwork. So read "Two Museums." But at the same time, I do want to share select aspects of what was a weighty experience for me.

While we were in Chicagoland visiting family this week, Mel and I decided to take advantage of the fact that spending time with grandma and grandpa had made our little Abbey all but oblivious to her Mommy and Daddy's existence, so we spent a day in the city visiting the Art Institute Museum.

I'd been to the museum before and enjoyed it, but this time around was different. The first time I wasn't yet tuned in to the experience of engaging a masterpiece. I wasn't yet ready to look past the first layer of a painting until I could perceive the difference between, say, a well-rendered but ordinary portrait and a honest-to-God breathing Rembrandt.

I guess It was kind of like what Wesley Snipes's Sidney Deane says about Jimi Hendrix in White Men Can't Jump: "You can listen, man, but you can't hear him." I've been into art and art history for a qhile now, and this time around I felt more prepared. I felt like I wasn't just looking but--trying at least--to see these paintings.

Some of them I had been anticipating ever since we planned the trip. Seuret's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," for instance.

Or Monet's haystacks paintings, which are arresting when viewed in progression for what they do with lighting.

And "The Woodchopper," which shows that main quality of Millet--his deep reverence for peasant life--which made him such an early hero to van Gogh.

There were also great paintings/painters I knew but didn't necessarily set out to find.

Delacroix, whose color is really something when viewed in person.

And Peter Paul Rubens.

And the iconographer of the American West, Remington.

I took a great deal personally from the American landscapes and genre paintings of the 1800s because they relate to the creative work I'm doing right now.

Thomas Cole's "A Distant View of Niagra" was a highlight.

As was George Inness's "Crossing the Ford".

And I felt a quick affinity for the "Bar-room Scene" of William Sidney Mount, as Mount's work shares many qualities with that of my favorite painter, Missourian George Caleb Bingham.

But easily the best part of the whole visit was discovering work I didn't know but that I'm sure I'll want to return to see again and again. There were several works that surprised me in this way, but I especially want to show the two below.

"Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket" by Eastman Johnson conjures up a lost world I long for--a world in which whole communties come together to share in the chores of survival. It shows how these people mitigated the harsh reality that, as the greek poet Hesiod would put it, hard labor is the lot of mankind.

And finally, there is "The Vision of Life," by Ralph Albert Blakelock. This ghostly depiction of a Native American dance manages to capture simultaneously all that is majestic, mysteries, and sad about Native American culture at a time when Native Americans, like the dancers in the photo, were fading away." It's a powerful, powerful image.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

2010-05-23T08:54:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading Brady Udall's phenomenal new novel The Lonely Polygamist, and now that I've caught my breath and jammed my bleeding heart back into my chest, I want to drop in and let everybody know how great a book it is.

Udall gets a lot of comparisons to another of my favorite Dickensian disciples, John Irving, for the scope and tone and sometimes bawdy twists found his work--and this book's no different on those counts. But Udall possesses sincerity in abundance and a sense of humor that pulses like a softly plucked bass line beneath the narration, always present but never threatening to overwhelm the story. This trademark balance is what I think sets Udall apart. Irving seems to be writing something halfway between self-plagiarism and self-parody these days, his humor and violence increasing in outrageousness so as to outdo what he's done in the past. But not one of the strange or naughty or ultra-violent bits in Udall's The Lonely Polygamist feels forced or indulgent. Instead it all seems to develop naturally and believably out of the flawed humanity of his characters.

Seriously, with apologies to Mr. Vonnegut's statement about Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," I consider anybody a twerp who doesn't go out and buy The Lonely Polygamist right now.

The Recent Past

2010-05-17T21:34:00.008-05:00

One of my favorite books is the classic Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. The technical virtues of this book are endless. Not only does the nonlinear structure fit perfectly with O'Brien's themes, even the construction of individual sentences themselves screams out metaphor. These sentences often take the form of overlong lists; O'Brien piles on detail after detail after detail until the reader can feel the weight of what the soldiers carry with them through the jungle, both physically and emotionally, in the course of the war. The droning endlessness of the sentences reinforces the droning endlessness of war. O’Brien’s novel is a perfect example of how an author can utilize style and structure in order to create metaphor.

I was lucky enough to have been assigned to read The Things They Carried for a college class. Believe it or not, this was the first time I had ever learned anything about the Vietnam War in the classroom. Let me repeat that for emphasis: The first time I ever encountered the Vietnam War in my entire education was not in any of the U.S. History classes I had taken, but in a literature class during my sophomore year of college!

Which, I suppose, is why I know infinitely more about the composition of sentences in a novel about Vietnam than I do about Vietnam itself. Or, at least, why I used to. I’ve read enough books and seen enough movies to piece things together for myself over the years. But it certainly would have been nice to have had the benefit of discussing all of this in a classroom. By the time I knew anything about Vietnam, I was already old enough that I could have enlisted and fought in a war of my own, and if I had been inclined in that direction, I certainly think an understanding of Vietnam and the soldiers' post-war experiences would have helped me make a more informed decision.

Apparently I am not the only person to have had this experience. James W. Loewen talks about this phenomenon in Lies My Teacher Told Me. He says that history books shy away from things that have happened in the recent past because they are controversial and illustrate how history is open to interpretation, whereas the distant past is easy to write about with finality since there is no one with direct experience left to call the accuracy of an account or the validity of a judgment into question.

This is why none of my American History teachers ever got past the early twentieth century. It was easier to preach absolutes than to ask questions and wade through murky discussions searching for new answers. The teachers probably feared that by critically examining the recent past, they'd breed pessimism about or disillusionment with the state of the world, or worse, they'd look like they didn't know the answer. So they chose to leave more recent topics alone.

Which is a shame. The recent past is a more direct influence than the distant past on what happens today, and if we don’t understand the recent past, then we don’t understand the mess we're getting into every time we dress ourselves and step out into the world in the morning.

I'm always a little uncertain about myself during this time of year. I wonder if I have graded fairly, if I have been the best role model for my students. And most of all, I wonder if helped anyone learn anything that will stick-- even a solitary idea of value that might burrow itself down into the core of their minds, hopefully to emerge twenty years from now as something new, so long buried that it feels like an epiphany when it reemerges and enriches their lives.

This year I spent more time on the recent past than any year prior and I think -- not coincidentally -- my kids really seem to have gotten more out of my class than just a bookful of state standards or the right number of graduation credits.

Inconceivable Wilson by J.A. Tyler

2010-05-15T17:11:00.004-05:00

Rain. All week. No baseball. No grilling out. But, on the bright side, I've been able to catch up on some reading.

I just finished J.A. Tyler's Inconceivable Wilson, a magical little collection of accumulating fragments written in a stream-of-consciousness-esque style that conjures Joycean and Faulknerean modernism but also pushes into some other, stranger territory. The book is part Picasso painting, part jazz composition, and all poetry--though it calls itself a novella and is written in a series of vignettes.

I puzzled over its meaning in places, imposing sense and simplicity where I'm not entirely confident sense and simplicity belong, but ultimately I ended up loving the book for its mesmerizing language, built around stylish repetition, and for its central metaphysical conundrum, which Tyler develops through a continuous exploitation of the ambiguities created anytime one chooses to employ a particular verb tense--exist, existing, existed, for instance: where does one leave off and the other take over?

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Inconceivable Wilson, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you check it out.

You can read a fuller review by Spencer Drew over at my favorite online literary destination, decomP.

Indiefeed: Performance Poetry Spotlighting decomP and Featuring My Reading

2010-04-30T22:07:00.001-05:00

Hey, all. If you have a chance, check out the Indiefeed: Performance Poetry channel. All during April they've been spotlighting literary magazines, and this past week has been all about one of the coolest venues for literature online, decomP.

Anyway, today's podcast features me reading my poem "down home" from the current issue of decomP. So click over and have a listen, and while you're there, go ahead and check out some of the other podcasts from this month, too, featuring readings from PANK, Rattle, and Barrelhouse, as well as more great stuff from decomP contributors.

Songs That Make Me Want To Write -- "Tennessee Jed" -- Levon Helm

2010-04-05T14:09:00.002-05:00

It shouldn't surprise anybody that Levon Helm makes some of the best Americana music out there today. After all, it was his Band-mates (and, later on, himself) who in 1967 disappeared into a pink house in New York with Bob Dylan to essentially invent the genre.

What the music that came from those famous sessions and Helm's current music have in common is that they both manage to wear the strange ethos of their primary influence--American folk music in all its forms--like a good pair of overalls. Helm, like Dylan and The Band on The Basement Tapes, sounds like he's performing from somewhere deep inside The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, even as the music itself stretches out far beyond the simplicity of those recordings.

The result, on records like Dirt Farmer (2007) and Electric Dirt (2009), is that the listener is completely transported into a lost existence for a while.

Part of this effect is created by Helm's voice, which age and a bout with throat cancer have transformed into something from audibly different from its Band-era sound. Embellished with a particular diction and phrasing, it now sounds eerily like a mixture of Dock Boggs and Clarence Ashley, all country cragginess and rural rust--and, honestly, what could be more perfect for the kind of music he's making?

Helm also picks the perfect material to cover. For instance, on Electric Dirt he does a Robert Hunter-penned Grateful Dead tune called "Tennessee Jed," a song full of playful images--"I dropped four flights and cracked my spine/Honey, come quick bring the iodine"--and backwoods vernacular--"A rich man step on my poor head/when you get back better butter my bread"--that could have come straight out of The Basement Tapes, and Helm gives it an arrangement it deserves, too, all the way down to the honking horns that drop in here and there just for kicks. In short, the whole recording sounds like it was a blast to make, and the joy of it rubs off on the listener.

Here's the thing: Folk music is dark and strange, yes, and it should be, but we often forget that it was meant to elicit joy. It was entertainment, escape. You weren't really supposed to get the blues from listening to the Blues. You were supposed to get a release. Same for banjo and fiddle music. It was made for dancing. As the old song goes, "There's a dark and a troubled side of life/but there's a bright, there's a sunny side, too."

The same thing is true of poetry; it ought to grow out of playfulness sometimes, and reflect the joy the poet felt in composing it, even as it remains honest about the darker aspects of life. I listen to "Tennessee Jed" and the rest of Electric Dirt when I need to remember that.

April decomP Now Live--Check Out "down home"

2010-04-02T11:01:00.001-05:00

Hi, all, and happy National Poetry Month!

If you have a minute, check out the new issue of decomP, which includes more than a dozen excellent writers and poets: Gabe Durham, bl pawelek, Alexandra Seidel, Kristen Shaw, Donna D. Vitucci, Eric Hansen, Michael Keshigian, Thomas Patrick Levy, Lyn Lifshin, Corey Mesler, Camilo Roldán, Scott Stoller, and Megan Thoma .

This issue also includes my poem "down home," which you'll be able to hear me read when the Indiefeed: Performance Poetry channel spotlights decomP later this month.

If you enjoy the issue--and I guarantee you will--be sure to drop a line and congratulate editor Jason Jordan on decomP's sixth anniversary.

I Finally Understand Robert Frost's "The Pasture"

2010-03-27T20:29:00.009-05:00

The Pasture by Robert Frost

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

----

Children change everything--everything. Even the way we read. The obvious example for me is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Before my little girl was around, I simply couldn't relate to the depth of feeling the man in the story has for the boy. I could know it intellectually, but to know something intellectually is not to have it detonate like a hand grenade in the place just behind your ribcage. Now that I'm a father, I can barely stand to open The Road. It hurts too much to even look at the words, let alone consider what they say.

Here's a more recent example: In preparation for teaching my poetry unit, I've been rereading Robert Frost. His "The Pasture" is a poem I've glossed over in the past as I gravitated toward what I'd call his darker material, stuff like "Fire and Ice" or "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The subject of "The Pasture" just didn't strike me. I didn't understand the love that might lurk below its seemingly ordinary lines.

But now that I'm a parent, I find that I notice everything a little more vividly. It began shortly after Abigail entered the world: every season felt a little more pronounced, a little more meaningful. Every meal, every trip out of the house became an occasion. I realized how badly I wanted my child to feel the importance of the seasons, too, and wonder at this world we live in, and find the joy in the small, daily acts of life.

Just the other day I realized that's exactly what "The Pasture" is about: the desire to introduce our children to the best parts of this world. It came over me all at once. The tone of the speaker as he invites the unnamed bystander to follow him into the pasture--in particular the tone of the line "I sha'n't be gone long--You come too"---clearly indicates that that bystander is a child. The speaker has a special understanding of the importance in small things like newborn calves and streams that flow as they ought to flow and he wants to pass that understanding on so the child will get the most out of the experience of living.

Of course, I never recognized this before because I'd never used such a tone myself. I had no idea what could be so important about somebody asking somebody else to come along while he moved some leaves or grabbed a baby cow. The poem was entirely lost on me. But now that I have used such a tone--"Here, baby, you pet the kitty cat" or "Daddy touched the ladybug, does Abbey want to touch the ladybug?"--the poem has opened up for me. I can grasp the emotion that must have driven Frost to make it, and I'm deeply moved.

Like all good poems, "The Pasture" suggests more than what it merely says. It is the first poem in my copy of The Poetry of Robert Frost, which seems to indicate that the poet is also inviting us, his readers--and so in some ways his children, too--to tag along and see the beauties of this world contained inside the rest of his poems. But I'll always think of it as having a more intimate meaning and be thankful I had a chance to share in that.

Short Piece I Love -- "Hang Up" by Sarah Layden in Wigleaf

2010-03-20T14:05:00.003-05:00

I'm a sucker for he/she stories. Always have been, dating back to my worship of Raymond Carver ten or twelve years ago. Later, Rick Bass and his triangles taught me to love he/she/he stories, and later still other writers taught me to love he/he and she/she stories, too. I suppose what lures me about examples in this genre--which block out everything else to focus solely on the intimate understanding of a single relationship--is there is always another interesting way to do them. The emotional part goes without saying-- hey, we've all been there, right?--which frees the author up to play around with unique, to stretch out and try to grab hold of something really compelling.

In Sarah Layden's "Hang Up", which appears in Wigleaf, the fresh element is a series of long-distance telephone calls that continue for fifteen years, even after one of the parties involved has married. Layden somehow manages to render both the man's and the woman's condition in just a few paragraphs--and by using solely narration, too, and none of the characters' own words. But the narration is so good that the frailty of these people gets under your skin and into your heart quickly anyway. The loyalty the man shows by continuing to carry the phone number, to call; the way the woman cries in bed and pretends not to; the way both seem to simultaneously want and not want the other--it isn't hard to feel what they feel.

"Hang Up" has everything that's great about the he/she story genre but still strikes me as unique. In addition to the phone call element, I think a lot of that has to do to the writing itself, which is pretty outstanding. For instance, about the couple who are not really a couple, Layden tells us,

They had punctuated one another's lives at a distance, over the phone they had made each other weep with near-identical histories of loss, they had winked into the mouthpiece, imagining they could be seen. They were seen. She made up for him a series of stories about an elephant who could speak, a bandit who stole ladies' undergarments, a couple searching the world for a person who allegedly had died, but might still be alive. She had been recovering from a storm of death swirling around her, young death, and the stories helped. I'll take care of you, he said. She invisibly tattooed his words on the inside of one wrist, which she stared at with longing when he failed in his promise.

Then, at another point later in the story, the woman tells the man a story in which there is "a newspaper umbrella, which was covered in headlines of sorrow." The irony and sadness in that image move me.

Really, all of "Hang Up" moves me. Check it out and I think you'll see what I mean.