THINGS TO BUY then READ or LISTEN TO:

Zachariah Wells (Editor), Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. Many excellent, excellent little rooms of song.

Daniel f. Bradley's Return to the Valley of the Chrome Plated Megaphones. (I scored my copy in March at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. I'm also looking forward to his forthcoming T=I=D=Y Language.)

Lorenzo Thomas, Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music in the Black Intellectual Tradition (Edited by the unbelievably great Aldon Lynn Nielsen). (I just got my copy and it's so great -- I admit to immediately reading Thomas's essay on hip-hop, which is the penultimate essay in the collection).

Kevin Thurston, Kevin Thurston is Running Late but will be in (recording). It's wickedly awesome, though there aren't many copies and I'm not sure how you can pick one up -- my guess, just contact Kevin.

April's edition of In Extremis, my hip-hop column, is available at www.maisonneuve.org. It's titled "The Return of the Repressed: Hip-Hop Horrorcore."

Please do take a read and enjoy (tell your friends). The more hits the better -- I'm really looking to build a steady readership for the column! (Plus, it's free; can't beat that...)

A

SCENE MAGAZINE (564) - April 10th 2008

AUGUSTINE IN CARTHAGE, AND OTHER POEMS by Alessandro Porco. Reviewed by Kane X. Faucher.

In his Confessions, VIII.vii, Augustine proclaims, “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (“grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”). Much prior to his becoming an influential neoplatonic bishop and Church Father, it would be an understatement to characterize his life as being immodest. Under the auspices of studying rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine gave full range to his appetite for hedonism and debauchery, taking on a concubine and living what passed for a seedy existence in the 4th century.

Porco’s svelte offering is a bawdy, modern-day raconteur of such excesses, fêting sex, jazz, ontology, and drugs with poetry that actively courts prose. With a delectable and saucy style, Porco does not fail to astonish by performing a tense merger between items of high scholarly reference and pop culture. Latin phrases and invocations of Kant, Gogol, Pasolini, Eliot, et al are tastefully appended as they shoulder for dominance among an Arcanum of ribald subjects such as whores, dildos and pole dancers. What makes this collection of poems wonderfully vertiginous reading is the obvious breadth of the poet’s knowledge and deftness in crafting these to suit contemporary subjects of delightfully dubious moral standing. Porco takes us on a dark journey into strip clubs, across the fields of dirty limericks, and all the while acting as a harlequin Virgil. To gain a fair appreciation of Porco’s style, one would have to picture a frenzied hybrid of Burroughs and Bukowski as filtered through Umberto Eco. With the sharp wit of Voltaire and the echoes of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Porco’s work is highly deserving of all the acclaim it receives.

Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems is, at long last, complete, beautifully printed , and available for order wherever you purchase books. Please do order, if you're interested. My book and I would be appreciative. Again, there is this interview at Popmatters, which describes some of the motivations/ideas behind/within the book.



With the publication of a new book, obviously it's an exciting time for me. But it's even moreso because of other things going on simultaneously: most notably, as of next week, I am officialy the monthly hip hop columnist for Maisonneuve Magazine Online. The column is titled "In Extremis." I'll post the link to the column once it goes up. (The first column explains its aims as well as the title and its relation to hip hop -- so I'll just leave it at that).

For those in Toronto, I'll be reading at STRONG WORDS on April 7th at the Gladstone. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

That's all for now. Oh, I have a review of Stuart Ross's I Cut My Finger up at Northern Poetry Review. Check it out, if you like Ross.

Popmatters Interview

My forthcoming book, Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems (ECW Press, 2008), is at the printers as we speak and my publisher tells me should be back and ready to go within the month. Fittingly, over at Popmatters there is a preview-interview for the collection, titled "The 5-Minute Interview: Alessandro Porco." Enjoy! (Ps. Yes, I probably could have shaven for my author photo...)

Recent Reading:

T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
T.S. Eliot, Poems (1920)
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
T.S, Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop
Michael Eric Dyson, "The Culture of Hip-Hop"
Tyrus Miller, "Introduction: The Problem of Late Modernism" (from Late Modernism)
Theodor Adorno, "The Meaning of Working through the Past"
Mos Def, Black on Both Sides
Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star
Mos Def, True Magic
Mos Def. The New Danger
(yes, a massive Mos Def kick -- I pulled em all out and hit play -- the guy's fantastic!)

Finally, I completed a couple of new review: on Sunday, I sent off a lengthy (close to 3000 words) review of David McGimpsey's Sitcom (for Books in Canada), in which I'd like to think I make some bold and elucidating points about David's writings thus far in his career. Also, a review (very late, but finally done) of Stuart Ross's I Cut My Finger (for Northern Poetry Review). Through it all, I've been listening to DJ Spooky. Awesomeness!

Now, for any American readers of this blog (sorry, Canada), does anyone here watch Rome is Burning (ESPN, 4:30, Monday to Friday)? -- I sort of do and sort of don't, by which I mean, I watch Around the Horn at 5 on ESPN (it's one of the few things I watch regularily on TV) so I usually have the TV on beforehand, sometimes catching some Jim Rome. Have you ever noticed how awkward and painful it is when a guest-host is always forced to continue using certain "Rome-isms" like "Here's what I'm burning on..." or "I'm out..."? I don't get it. I don't understand why. It's so awkward. They never look comfortable doing it. Whatever. A small and irrelevant point but it's so bizarre.