The Minutes

The final two installments in pt. 1 of The Mintues.

IX

Let’s begin: the loathsome
Italian popinjay’s back,
scapegracin’ across
the crotchety old world’s front lawn
& conductin’ a train on
your moms’
too rare, too rare country yields,
her hillockyhaystacked rack & buttocks.
Bottom lines
& bethonged bottoms:
gold stock holds, banana folds rise.
Catch a falling knife,
which advances a sharp mind
& sizable Swiss account.
Everyone’s complicit,
slippin’ the high hard one
hitherthither-inkybinkybonky --
except (wink wink)
you & your friends, right? That’s what I thought.
Decadence & decedents.
From the headless (acrania) head-
lines of O Canada (arcadia):
MY DAD IS DRUGGING ME; WANTS
TO BECOME A BAPTIST MINISTER;
STAR OF A HOLLOCAUST SUSPENSE-THRILLER;
BIOGRAPHY INCREASES SQUIRREL
MEAT SALES; PURCHASE HYPERBARIC
CHAMBER NOW; FLOWER THERAPY ADDICTS.
My friends, my enemies,
fishnets
on knickerless nymph-soubrettes
ain’t sui generis; & the goat Heaven of
shepherds is, in fact,
Made In China. Get real, get fake.
The poet names
the thing: a spade’s a spade.
Sometimes, a cigar is just(ly) a cigar, sugar-tits.
Other times, a moustache
is prison-pussy.
The ideal shall be real to thee.
Careful with the china,
it’s fragile.
Like you, like me.
Meeting adjourned.

*

Let’s begin: dear poet,
congratulations, your freedom
of expression has been
pre-approved. It’s a credit -- I guess --
to feelings
that they leave you, by language,
in debt
& inconsolable: “My heart aches”
with compound interest,
sd Keats, boo-hooing endlessly like
a broke jamook.
Inevitably, enamel wears thin,
& sensitivity toothpaste’s
only a stopgap to the
aches of tubulous lives exposed to
the cold.
Smile, or grimace -- what’s the diff’?
Fuckaduck, there’s no relief,
comic or otherwise.
The torrent of the long hand’s tick-tock
against my shorthand cribs.
A baby falls,
his brain is the scrambled rhyme of
discrete & discreet,
but this time the skeet’s
on us.
There’s no flower no more that I
might lay on your eye-lids,
willing you to dote puckishly on
me in a crotchless-panty-filled dream.
In dreams
begin responsibility.
The question, then, is unavoidable,
and it’s one you
must answer to & for:
“Who brought the alligator?”
-- my bad, I mean,
“Who brought the donuts?
Chocolate glaze is my favorite.”
I am rotting from the inside
out. Meeting adjourned.

Dear Readers -

it's the new year. Work and travel will make blog communication sparse (next to none, really) from now till late spring / early summer -- I'll be dissertation writing, travelling to Denver and Louisville for conferences, and visiting Harvard and Cornell special collections / archives for two week-long trips. (I won a research grant to visit both schools, which is exciting).

Over at Maisonneuve online, there is a "Our Most Read Stories of the Year" article by the staff -- I have two of my "In Extremis" hip-hop columns on the list. Honored. Thanks to those of you who read 'em. Also, over at OpenBookToronto, if you haven't already, you can still check out my article "Duty Free: The Canadian Poetry Festival (1980)". (Btw, I'll be writer in residence at OpenBookToronto in the month of June; during my tenure, expect more work akin to "Duty Free.")

Just received in the mail my copy of Daniel f. Bradley's The Murder of Semiotics -- a 120-page plus book of poetry, published/xeroxed in Sept. 2009, b&w stapled 8 1/2 x 11 pages. The first four or five pages have me giddy to continue forth into the wreckage. If you liked T=I=D=Y Language, then The Murder of Semiotics'll be up your alley, too. There are only 6 copies in existence -- well five if you subtract mine. I'm honored to have it. Have to purchase a protective cover for it.

Over at ditch,, John Goodman has produced a wonderful, easy-to-read electronic anthology of poetry, which includes work by the aforementioned Bradley, Alice Burdick, Gary Barwin, Judith Copithorne, Stephen Cain, Jordon Scott, etc. I have a couple poems in the anthology as well. Please do take a look.

Last, but not least, you can now pre-order copies of Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey at Amazon.ca (for Canadians) and Amazon.com (for my American friends). It's published by Palimpsest. Cover image coming soon. Here's the description from over at Amazon:

Since the early 1990s, Montreal’s David McGimpsey has been producing his unique, pop-acculturated poetry and fiction, indebted in equal parts to TV shows such as Hawaii Five-0 and Charlie’s Angels as well as Shakespearean tragedy and the Miltonic elegy. His poems and performances have garnered a wide readership and popular acclaim across North America. Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpsey’s poetic practice. The collected essays (by lauded poets and scholars such as Nick Mount, Jason Camlot and Elizabeth Bachinsky) examine McGimpsey’s various positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humor, love, and aesthetics, all of which are often mutually imbricated in McGimpsey’s work. The book concludes with an entertaining and enlightening in-depth interview with McGimpsey, where he discusses, with all the wit and keen critical acumen we’ve come to expect, everything from his early experiences growing up in Montreal’s East-End to the prospect of sympathy in and through poetry. Population Me is a timely addition to Canadian letters and a collection that makes clear McGimpsey’s significant contribution to contemporary Canadian literature.

New "In Extremis" Column

Dear readers,

here's a new "In Extremis" column; it's one of those "Best of..." year-end lists. Enjoy!

See ya in the new year,

A

Recommendations

Hey-o, Blogobuyers,

make sure to pick up a copy of Richard Owens's new book of poetry, Embankments, published by Interbirth books. Buy it here. Also, while you're at it, check out his Delaware Memoranda, published a couple years ago. Richard Owens's is where it at, you should be too.

Another excellent (transplanted) Buffalo poet: David Hadbawnik. Go search out his Ovid in Exile (also from Interbirth [see above link]) and SF Spleen (from Skanky Possum).

That's all till next year,

Peace

A

The Minutes

XI.

Let’s begin: son, if you want
to succeed -- I mean, really
want to succeed -- in this company,
to advance up
the corporate ladder,
you’ve got to look & sound
the part:
get yourself some fancy suits & ties
(preferably Eye-talian);
pepper your talk
with the fanciest disjun-
ctive syntax non, sequiturs, jizzbooby,
& protosemantic
gobble,dy. Gook. Coercion
can buy.
Put it in your mouth, lose 7 pounds,
is all I’m saying to you.
Like Fate, fat rarely calls upon
us at the moment of our choosing
(i.e. humpin’ under mirrors).
You’ve got to entice, sexify cuz
success’s as
ontological
as ambrosial vanilla crème brulee;
as au naturale as a pig
going down on a high-end hyena
in Yorkville.
Now, son, son, listen,
I’m not -- I repeat, not -- I repeat, not --
saying you’re going to enjoy it
at all, & I’m definitely
not saying it’s going to be easy:
the late nights’ll
make your eyes feel like
scrambled eggs, don’t ask me how;
& your existential screams’ll pierce
like harpoons through your earlo-
bes. But morals
go boom, when you’ve got a gaggle
of awards to gag on.
Deep throats, deep pockets, happy poets.
Meeting adjourned.

The Minutes

X.

Let’s begin: on a sad note,
the voice is over. Listen to the
voice-over, spilt milk, banana split,
nipple slip,
my maddened double,
my deranged master of the song & dance
shtick. The stank
corrosive yack-up
of the vulture in a top-hat & tap shoes --
shuffle ball change,
slap, flap,
scuffle, scuffuffle --
with scavengeous vocawcawls.
The nebulous daemon anchoring the news from inside my noggin. Go on
with yo’ bad self.
(Please, take my wife!)
By the balls of Jove his voice’s true or false
& inexorable; his suit’s snazzy.
So long, Poetry.
Eon & eons ago,
Hesiod on Helicon, holla, tending
his flock, up-rockin’!
A muse
with a big mouth & fat ass, sd. Homer,
you ‘member, “rosy-cheeked,”
after he hit that Dawn’s nonny.
Oooooh-eeeeeeeee.
As per the memo:
there’s going to be cake at your goodbye
party. We’ll eat it & miss you.
(“Shoot, what’s his name again?”)
There’s no shame in growing
old, only in growing ugly. Go sing that.
Meeting adjourned.

The Minutes

IX.

Let’s begin: the minute’s
the measure in which “ruthless
warfare is to be waged” --
that’s Archilocus.
(Are u with me? Yeah).
I have my grip on a glaive of
light & I’m ready to fight,
as is “the gaggle of galloping
ghosts” at my back --
that’s a litter of Scooby Doo
alliterative “g”litter
to boost the morale of troops.
(Are u with me? A little less).
History leans on me &
Death puts the squeeze on me,
so I long
for the “luscious clusters,” i.e.
mammajamma mammories,
of a “nectarine” dream, i.e.
to put ‘er in the buck, spit, split it, & split,
in a garden, i.e.
of earthly delight. For a memory,
in other words.
“We think that they would
be deeply moved by the death
of a young poet in combat;
don’t you agree?”
The politics of form & feeling.
(Do u feel me?
I feel you like a Foley catheter,
motherfucker).
We’ve been expecting you.
Meeting adjourned.