Nick Sturm, I Feel YES, Forklift, 2013.
isaidokwow.tumblr.com/
It’s a chapbook. It’s one long poem. It’s freaking awesome.
It’s in a baggie because the lettering is made out of lemonade. It’s made out of lemonade because lemonade is an important element in the poem.
Listen to him read the entire thing here.
When Nick gives us the chapbooks I, like everyone else, take it out of its Ziploc and lick it. I lick too hard, with childish gusto. The letters of “YES” are lemonade mix glued to the cover, and my Y is blotched with a wet tongueprint—temporary, but obvious in the moment.
Later all of us splayed out on two hotel beds reading our stories, poems, and in-betweens. After I say and this sadness shall not prevail against it Nick kissbites my shoulder. It is really wonderful. There are so many places and gatherings of persons where doing even a little too much of the right thing is wrong. Their Yesses are not written in all caps, have no taste in their mouths or yours.
* * *
Sometimes this poem holds my face in both of its hands and it’s almost too much to handle. .
All this is a fist full of telephonesI mean just, Jesus—did you read that? At a reading I read at recently, another reader—a poet—talked about how he didn’t want to hear about some poet’s feelings and telling a former professor this story I half-jokingly addressed the guy: “Oh man, you are gonna hate the next forty-five minutes; I mean, you better get ready to frown.”
filled with the same immense voicemail,
an almost translucent string of sounds
resembling light more than language,
the basic message being: I feel fucking yes.
My heart making out with your heart in the mist
of sprinklers. our hips secret beaches sweet
with nonsense and campfire smoke and an illimitable
unspoken feeling that regardless of this being
a complete mistake it is, in fact, complete,
and amidst the ongoing collapse of laughter
my head fills with something that is not control
in favor of reciting sunflowers on some wet wet
interstate perhaps not so far from here where
this system is neverending sufficiently and I
might fall asleep in your daffodils with a smile
smashed against my face. .
But really, what are you doing in the space of a poetry reading or reading poetry if you’re not looking to encounter a heap of somebody else’s vital, genuine something? Yes language and form and so on but if it’s not serving some central vehicle of a desire to express then why should anyone give a sincere fuck?
Disconnect and detachment are easy to find and harmful, and I’m just not interested. Poems like this one, running and reveling like a goddamn stampede of joy are a huge part of why I’m consuming poems at all.
* * *
One night when I was fifteen I pressed my forehead to the rear right window of my friend Tina’s packed purple Camry and promised myself with all the fierce purity of a teenage promise that I would not forget that moment, the cold dew-dappled glass. We were surrounded by southern Indiana swells and corn ransacked by fireflies. I knew my heart was full in a way that seemed wrecked or exhausted out of most people I knew past a certain age.
Reading I FEEL YES is a small sadness in one way, in that its unabashed revelry makes apparent to me the myriad of little wrecks, tiny collapsings that have worked their way into me and people I love over the ensuing near-decade, how easy it was to get far removed from that precious internal space, because the ecstasy of it can seem distant. But it’s also an incredible joy, a lightning storm of wonderful news, in that one route back is so easily, poignantly available: a poem written and physically given to you by a friend. This is the best kind of grace, the kind knotted messily to you by a heart in a body with a mouth that can bite you, gently, that can tell you Yes. - vouchedbooks.com/
Nick Sturm, How We Light, H_NGM_N BKS, 2013.
Poem after poem of Nick Sturm’s is the embodiment of pure benevolence and joy. Filled with virtuosic surprises at every turn, this, my friends, is the poetry of the future. - Noelle Kocot
“Nick Sturm proclaims in the first poem of his collection, “I’m going to keep laughing until something gores me,” and proceeds to startle every page with his scaldingly funny, delightfully reckless linguistic breakdancing. How We Light is also a deeply moving book, a litany of heartbreaking assertions of what it means to be alive and mortal and surrounded and lonely and joyous and melancholy, at the same time, all the time. Sturm’s “basic guides” to autobiography, history, growing up, friendship, emergency, success, decision making, science, and truth will teach you more about how to be human than any self-help book. The instructions are that there are no instructions: “The pamphlet contains no information/regarding how little a bed can be or what/you are doing with those teacups.” Full of emotion and tenderness (and a kind of controlled anarchy), this is a book that will make the blood rush back into your brain.” - Michael Dumanis
“ … I haven’t even opened my copy of Nick Sturm’s How We Light because he is one of those rare poets that terrify me. I get terrified because I know as soon as I start reading I’ll be his, I’ll be within his vocal set, and it will take weeks to get out, to become myself again. It’s always an incredible experience, but it’s fucking scary, too. Just like all good poetry should be.”—Roberto Montes
In Nick Sturm’s latest collection of poetry, How We Light, we awake in a field, strange with knowing. Or maybe we “climb into the machine and spend / two days thinking about lemonade”. This is not your standard conversation. We are not here to sit down feebly and speak in a quiet monotone. There is something much more vibrant at work here, something more avian and endless yes. Because of this, we are indoctrinated into Sturm’s unusual world almost immediately. The second poem in this collection, “Red Car in the Future,” is formatted sideways, which forces the reader to hold the book sideways, to exist in an actual state of being sideways, of being unfortunate and unregulated, but for reasons that are justified, even if we are not cognizant of those reasons immediately.
This state, this system of existing within and adhering to the most improbable justifications becomes a constant theme throughout the collection. Bizarre scenarios that feel real, that capture a certain genuine finesse. From the same poem: “At the last second we are invited to a house party in Chicago where we learn / It is not possible to pour an entire bottle of wine into a violin.” These are intimate, eccentric scenes bursting with verve. They exist in such small, beautiful spaces, but stretch out across the page like the tiniest world wonders. Later, in “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!”:
I stand in the yard eating pie with my fingers
feeling uncertain about buying
another roll of wrapping paper when
everything is already such a mystery
But what is it that makes these moments feel real? What weight (or lack thereof) does Sturm write with that makes his poetry so relatable? There is a spectacular amount of unusual insight in his lines, as if he has lived in this world long before any of us and has a wealth of knowledge about lampshades and hobbyhorses that no one else could possibly possess. From “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!”:
My mouth automatically dismantles
the remarkable geometry of a tangerine
[...]
A threshold sounds like it should be
some kind of magnificent art
but it is only another boundary
between my body & the spacious day
And again, in “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!”:
I stand by the armoire & perform experiments
It is technical but not in a very French way
People are always trying to make things
complicated & sometimes that is not so beautiful
Though exciting and oft-surprising intuition makes up a better part of How We Light, it is not only the keen awareness of this strange and complicated life that carries weight. The tone that Sturm naturally employs leaves the reader in what might best be described as a pleasant funk. His lines (and situations) are one part tragic and fleeting, one part wildly playful, and one part ridiculous to the point of memorable. There is always something unexpected following the line break, whether it’s the speaker “taping pollen / back to the flowers” or maybe a community on the verge of liberating sexual discovery:
The town held a meeting
in the forest to discuss the issue over a PowerPoint
but there wasn’t an outlet so the people teamed up
and rubbed their genitals together to generate electricity
and afterwards everyone agreed that the forest was the best
place to rub genitals and they kept rubbing and getting high
until they fell asleep.
Even the punctuation Sturm uses often holds its own buoyant tonality: “It’s true, in Melbourne / We made terrific asses of ourselves! Sao Paulo was hot! We liked it very much!”
And again, in “I Feel Yes”:
Is that even possible? What part of the question
do you think I’m referring to and what do you think
I mean by “possible”? I generate hogwash
in my torso! The proper use of a hammer
is to wear a petticoat and be inconsistent!
A feverish joy scatters into the citizenry!
Where some poets rely solely on humor to guide their writing, Sturm recognizes this weakness and points to it willingly. He consistently pokes fun at his own craft in his characteristically backward fashion. In “The Fences,” Sturm frames the poem by repeating “I built a fence out of…” et cetera. Nearing the end of the poem, he alludes to this choice: “I / built a fence out of what was left after the war / nothing was left after the war but time to build / fences.” Later, in a bout of metacognition, he even addresses the abovementioned wealth of sensational punctuation in his poems:
It’s so great we have the capacity
to kiss each other’s faces It’s so great
I lost everything Even my sandwich
Even my exclamation points
In many ways, the title poem is the linchpin holding the rest of the collection together. The lines are clumsy, constantly running into one another, with endless movement being key. The tone is on point with the rest of the book, and the unusual insight comes in spades. It is in this extraordinary fusing of dissimilar ideas that we feel most at home, most comfortable with our own human discomforts:
an uneven faith peels off me Darkness like Keats basically
I’d rather be an Eagle and when he wrote Eagle
he capitalized Eagle as a way to believe
in the power of the nouns we are to save us
- Dillon J. Welch
Awful Interview: Nick Sturm
H_NGM_N Books recently released Nick Sturm’s debut collection of poems How We Light. Like most of Sturm’s work, the book exhibits a certain exuberance wherein the speaker makes claims such as:There’s nothingTo some extent, the book’s enthusiasm for life, for friends, for love, for poetry acts as a “fuck you” to the “Darkness” (41) that sometimes can envelop of our emotional and psychic states. But more than functioning as an antidote or counterbalance to negative aspects of thought and life, these poems also work as affirmation, in and of themselves. Take, for instance, the conclusion of the collection’s final poem “I Feel Yes.” The speaker champions experiences that are “both meaningful / and valuable”:
I’d rather be doing than having
elaborate hedonistic parties Than using
my mouth to love you (28)
because meaning and valueYes, these poems are just as much (if not more) about creating “happiness” than dismantling the “Darkness.”
are unbearably soldered to the meat
of living, so that we have nothing but happiness (88)
Over the past couple of week, Sturm answered some questions for me over email, so as to provide a bit more insight into the creation of his manuscript and offered some ideas about the writing found within his book.
Much of your first full-length collection of poems, How We Light (H_NGM_N BOOKS, 2013), contains material from four chapbooks that were released over the course of the past couple years. I was hoping you could talk about the process of re-imagining these poems in service of a broader context. By that, I mean, how did your relationship to these particular chapbooks (and the poems therein) alter or shift during the sequencing process? Did you learn anything new or different about them when considering their placement in the book? What types of resonances did you discover between them? To that end, were there any points of friction or dissonance that were problematic for you or need to be resolved? How did the publication of these chapbooks help you along, ultimately, in the development of How We Light?
Chapbooks deserve their own lives as chapbooks. They’re a vital publishing form – intimate, textural, concentrated, audacious. They put pressure on how we think about and about making books. Which is to say I don’t think chapbooks exist only to serve what we call, simply because of quantity, full-length books. Four chapbooks that come to mind as resolutely full-length, however you want that to mean: Matthew Rohrer’s A Ship Loaded With Sequins Has Gone Down, Bernadette Mayer’s The Helens of Troy, NY, Carrie Lorig’s nods., Dana Ward’s The Squeakquel. Thinking about this answer, it’s important for me to say that when the process of talking about the book began I did not have a “complete” book, not at all. Nate Pritts, the editor-hero of H_NGM_N, and I had a long conversation about this exact question: how do chapbooks come together into a book? At first I resisted dismantling the chapbooks to make a book, but the problem was exactly that I was thinking about the process as “dismantling” – the chapbooks have their own autonomy and time – it’s not possible to take them apart. But I couldn’t really account for the parallax between the chapbooks and the time of the book until I had newer poems to stand in. Once those poems existed, the shape of How We Light became intuitive. I realized I didn’t have to “make” an organic emotional structure – I had to grow it, get wet in it, be hurt by it, and that’s mostly a matter of failing, flailing, and having fun.
How We Light contains two long poems: the title poem, located midway through the book, and “I Feel Yes,” which concludes the collection. Could you talk a bit about long poems, generally speaking: What do you they offer you as a writer? What long poems by other poets have influenced your writing? Why and how? How does your process differ when composing a long poem? What are the difficulties inherent to that process? More specific to How We Light, how do you think the two poems in your book affect the reader’s experience, as well as alter or shift the manner in which we read the shorter poems?
For a while I was only writing poems that fit on a page, and that was necessary – I needed to write a lot of poems. As you’ve talked about, most of the poems in my first chapbook, What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!, play around the shape of a sonnet – they’re all quite dense. When it came out, my reaction to its material presence in the world was to write something sprawling and digressive. I had been reading Anselm Berrigan’s book-length poem Notes from Irrelevance and Padgett Powell’s novel of questions, The Interrogative Mood, and I sat down and in one weekend wrote “I Feel Yes.” At the time, it was a way of unbalancing myself. Going past the edge of the page over and over was exhilarating, if only because I was curious to know what would happen if I kept not stopping. Over the last year I’ve been mostly only writing long poems, which means I haven’t been writing many poems. But that’s not true. I have been writing a lot of poems, they’re just absorbed into larger patterns after the fact. The idea of writing a discrete poem on a single page is kind of impossible to me right now. And that’s not a choice I made. The radical shifts in the textures of the circumstances of my life made long form poems a necessity. As far as process, it means my thinking is more accumulative, disparate, open-ended. I never feel like I’m finishing anything anymore. That makes me anxious and unbounded at the same time. Sometimes it feels more like translating than writing, as if there’s an original poem somewhere, I don’t know where, and I’m slowly distorting it into this new thing. Nevertheless, I spend the time there because long form poems allow for collaboration with the indeterminate, self-reflexive mystery and magic of the forces that I feel most (non)human inhabiting. In How We Light, I imagine the long poems making the other poems forget they are poems. I mean that they might create the possibility of poetic potential that is greater than any distinct poem. No one wants to just read poems.
What types of projects or poems are you currently working on/writing? How do you see your newer poems working with (or against) the poems in How We Light? Is there a development or progression in your writing that engages or moves away from your previous concerns? How so and why?
I can’t seem to write if I’m not writing with someone else, so a few collaborative projects with the usual suspects have been underway. More than anything right now I’m just soaking in things. I’m taking three amazing classes, a theory survey, Postmodern Tragedy, and Žižek’s Politics, that are stretching and overlapping all the patterns, and teaching two classes, one on Postmodern Joy and another on short story and short film. Jeff Hipsher and I started a new reading series in Tallahassee called Dear Marge, Hello. I’m watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen movies. I read and loved Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan. I’m helping edit an essay-anthology of experimental female poets for The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. I’m eating more obscure fruit. I was lucky to be able to spend most of August doing a tour of readings from How We Light and after spending over 4,000 miles with those poems and friends I was able to see the shape of a new manuscript called Outside in the Aporia Days. It has an epigraph from a Prince song. I don’t know, but I want that to be a sure sign of progress. One of the new poems is here in PEN. Whatever this book turns out to be, it’s coming out of my obsession with long poems, which doesn’t necessarily mean my concerns are changing, just transferring. I recently edited an issue of NÖÖ Weekly focusing on long poems and sequences – I am letting those poems and poets permeate me. I’ve been working to be more permeable in general lately, more weather-like, amalgamated. I have a reading list for the winter that includes Alice Notley, Jules Verne, and Peter Sloterdijk. Other than that, I’m happy to watch so many other poets’ successes lately, like forthcoming books from Tyler Gobble and Alexis Pope, both from Coconut, and Mike Krutel’s chapbook Best Poems from Big Lucks. I’m just going to keep writing poems with these people until everything is a skylight. - vouchedbooks.com/
Nick Sturm, WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! iO Books, 2012.
- Nick Sturm’s work stumbled into my inbox as I was editing Stoked, these bold Basic Guides, to Truth, to History, to Home Repair, these radical poems that stretch the imagination and capacity to hold onto a poem, the poet behind it, this voice telling you something we hope is important.
- And I’ve stumbled around Sturm and his work ever since, flailed in the dark, in love with this style, this voice.
- And eventually I put my head on this pillow, okay it’s a chapbook, called WHAT A TREMEDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! (oh you wild child, all caps AND an exclamation point), each poem that same title, each poem that Sturm-booyeah of mind-energy.
- Three rad TREMENDOUSes at iO Poetry.
- The titles are repetitive, but more importantly they are reminders.
- I asked Nick once why not a long poem, or sectioned, or titles are necessary? or what? He said it is a series. I said a series of what? He rode off on stampede of horses. Or maybe it was a birthday cake.
- I think something I love lots and lots is the child-like fascination with the world. No, that’s not right, kinda dumb to say, rather I mean that unfiltered unbogged lens used to look at the surrounding glob, look within it, that thing lost with time of life, of writing, of cracks called sucky moments.
- Here is an example: “Take off that ridiculous hat & tell me you love me/is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved.” Then it trickles in the weirdness of the tongue, generations of crabs taking apart teeth, before circling back to all that in this youthful heart matters: “which is when the world was the size of a gazebo/with one undying heart at the center of our lives.”
- Have you seen that stop-motion video Sturm made for one of the poems. I watch it and think that is how these poems exist. They are tiny movements and wacky objects and the string holding it all together is an emotion that is not fleeting so much as it is fast, not silly as much as it is overwhelming for the speaker, for us, for everyone ever.
- What is forever? It is everything, man.
- The other day I told someone that I’m interested in poems that are sincere, but then I asked myself HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT OR EVEN WHAT THAT MEANS. I don’t.
- Charles Bernstein’s poem “The Republic of Reality,” specifically I’m thinking of the passage “mimicking maniacs like it was/going out of the question, when/you fall upon a fellow with/falters and a fit for a glove:/not the machine in your/eye but the ladder in your/mind…” seems to offer something about what I’m struggling to say here, a poem lending itself to a review trying to lend itself to a hunk of poems. What I mean is these poems are wisps of poetic identity, this chatter about the self, excluding not a thing, reaching and reaching.
- Maybe like a poem that starts wacky then punches you in the mouth, dude. “A whale is not a type of information/Neither is a ship’s rigging nor a peach tree/If you were not alive you would already/know this.”
- Maybe like the poem that ends it all, burrowing in that place where, yes it is okay to be silly with the lights on: “My dinghy can catch some wicked air/Let’s go to the carwash & chew on the sun/Let’s go to the capital & use our hands/Our hands which are a chance for music” and still get back to what we’re talking about, to never really leave what we’ve always been talking about: THE TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING
- Yeah, I know she’s talking about Edward Hoagland and his essay about turtles and about CNF in general, but I can’t get this sentence out of my head, from “The Situation and The Story” by Vivian Gornick, about how these Sturm poems tackle and tangle with objects, weird wild and real, yet there is that speaker, that voice I wanna hug: “The reader realizes that the man who’s using turtles as a stand-in for human intimacy has been there from the very beginning” (p.51).
- Maybe like a poem that worries about friendship and self-disappointment, “It is so embarrassing how nothing out there/stays together How playgrounds build up/in our jaws but we never learn to play right.” Or the ending of that poem “Sometimes I just want to give up & say/watch this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
- I like Nick Sturm’s poems for their awareness, how they go to the place, bounce around, the voice and its lovely echo, shifty lens, from the spot where it needs to be to the spot where it needs to be.
WHAT A
TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
When I am
drunk I feel globally positioned
I stagger into Denmark like a choir of swans
I awaken smelling vaguely of confusion & quinoa
My moist visage stares back at me The landscape
trembles & is covered in complex math
I remember to forgive myself for being
the opposite of correct Denmark is so lovely
I text my friend & say Hey man you should
really check out Denmark & he says Dude
these tacos have changed my heart forever
& then I say Potential apothecary bonnet
& he says Real people full of real birds
& then I drop my cell phone into a fjord
I stagger into Denmark like a choir of swans
I awaken smelling vaguely of confusion & quinoa
My moist visage stares back at me The landscape
trembles & is covered in complex math
I remember to forgive myself for being
the opposite of correct Denmark is so lovely
I text my friend & say Hey man you should
really check out Denmark & he says Dude
these tacos have changed my heart forever
& then I say Potential apothecary bonnet
& he says Real people full of real birds
& then I drop my cell phone into a fjord
WHAT A
TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
All
morning I linger in the courtyard
thawing amidst the knots of luminous weeds
I feel like an air conditioner emitting
a kind of stupid music for you but all I want
is to not be invisible In the courtyard
the sun acts like it is having a party
It is a small cathedral smeared
with intelligence I begin to ripen & know
I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth
So I will use it I open the door I step
inside & fall apart at your feet like a hand-
made piñata It is sad but also amazing
The way the light becomes drunk against
the architecture of your body The way
we use our mouths against one another
thawing amidst the knots of luminous weeds
I feel like an air conditioner emitting
a kind of stupid music for you but all I want
is to not be invisible In the courtyard
the sun acts like it is having a party
It is a small cathedral smeared
with intelligence I begin to ripen & know
I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth
So I will use it I open the door I step
inside & fall apart at your feet like a hand-
made piñata It is sad but also amazing
The way the light becomes drunk against
the architecture of your body The way
we use our mouths against one another
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
Take off that ridiculous hat and tell me you love me
is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved
My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor
It acts like a baby in a castle dragging one miraculous oar
& while you get smaller and smaller on the lip of the ocean
stuffing sand dollars in your fanny pack all I can do
is push my stupid tongue back into its stupid airport
& lay down in the tide where all the little crabs
take apart my teeth the way their parents taught them
& their parents before them & their parents before them
& their parents before them & their parents before them
which is when the world was the size of a gazebo
with one undying heart at the center of our lives
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
I live in a castle made of ten thousand things
sewn together to make an eye It is a heap
of light It is an adequate castle In the castle
I have made a small version of the world It is
realistic which I know is a mistake There is a pair
of scissors There is a government There are buildings
that break the clouds In the castle I am alive
like a horse My emotions want to make me say things
that will never come back out of you A butterfly
is licking my ear is what my emotions want to say
But the government wants me to tell you things
that do not make sense with my emotions
I have the feeling I am being watched I have
the feeling a flower is going to bite my hand off
My parents and the birds are always quiet
Sometimes I think the castle is not a castle
Other times I lay down in this little world
to make the trees not look like trees
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
My voice grew a secret face
Then my body evaporated I was intact
Solid as a harp At the dancehall we met
We were a simple machine abloom
floating in some astral luxury
When we met it was like a sunroof
The world thinks we are a mistake
We do not have documents to prove otherwise
Together we cling to my equipage
& distribute our love in the skymeat
Together We must work together
It is easy We buy a terrarium
We give a terrarium away
The desert unfolds before us like a desert
I couldn’t say where it came from
but there is enough lemonade for everyone
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
I wake up and muzzle my soul
with a kind of pale tenderness
My mouth automatically dismantles
the remarkable geometry of a tangerine
It starts to look like I don’t have a choice
My password has to contain at least
one special character A billion flowers
aren’t for sale anywhere in this world
A threshold sounds like it should be
some kind of magnificent art
but it is only another boundary
between my body and the spacious day
I have an overwhelming urge
to use a forklift improperly
I am not going to wear any underwear
One year ago today I planted a tree
Happy birthday Happy birthday
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
I wash my laundry in blue sauce
My tribe gnaws on the radio & speaks
misguided into the ether It is not clear
what we are singing or where we are going
to store this million pounds of ice cream
I am a sphere of light hovering over a sandwich
I have a slow colorful thought
blinking in my cortex An entire history of
beautiful people falling asleep with cats
is somehow irrelevant What the hell
do we think we’re celebrating
Sunflowers have the hospital surrounded
Everything I wear smells like the mountains
The part of me that is speaking is the only part
of me in the mountains
*
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
My head recently reported it has reached
a resolution to work towards a resolution
I stand in the yard eating pie with my fingers
& feeling uncertain about buying
another roll of wrapping paper when
everything is already such a mystery
Trees touching other trees
The morning air against my typeface
I spend all day stranded on this digital archipelago
liking everything My spirit animal is a bear
with a confetti cannon strapped to its back
The point is to surprise you & then maul you
into pieces of joy
*
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
Let’s head back into my head
to graze on the brouhaha Let’s get off track
& unfold into cathedrals Belief is more about
collapse than coalescence Every atom
a dance party made of tinier dance parties
& the cops knocking at the door of each one
like we don’t know what we’re doing wrong
or love each other more because of it
What good is a parade if it’s not disguised
as a landslide Every time I see an airplane
I believe in something I don’t understand
& that’s how I got here The dictionary
bathed in wite-out A moose alone
on the coast of Norway In the end
I’ll crash a golf cart into the lake & there
it will rest for a thousand thousand years
Nick Sturm, BEAUTIFUL OUT. Download here
Wendy Xu & Nick Sturm, I Was Not Even Born, Coconut Books, 2013.
"It's been documented that certain natural elements exhibit startlingly different properties when brought into proximity. So add these two sympathetic compounds to your list – Wendy Xu, Nick Sturm. Here, the special powers register well off the charts, the flames so transcendent that what's left after the burn isn't just dark evidence of smolder but a burgeoning catalog of what it's like to be human, and thus alone, and thus only ever one second away from contact with the other person who can light you on fire."—Nate Pritts
A BASIC GUIDE TO THE FUTURE
One future was talking to the other future about vitamins but the first future didn't much give a shit about vitamins it only cared about big blockbuster hits like the one with the guy who lives in the abstemious dumpster the other future wasn't offended but he definitely wasn't going to share his orange anymore then another future showed up dressed like a human holding a cell phone hey I got your text about the moat the new future said to the other future sounds pretty rad but the other future wasn't listening because the first future had just found the zipper in its skin and the skin was real and they all stood there looking like prairie grass not knowing what was going to happen next.
A BASIC GUIDE TO VERMONT
There goes Hans in his little boat oh Hans please come back the bed and breakfast will never survive Hans you are pure sex with your tusks shining in the sun in the future Hans I am a monster in this savage petticoat I don't know what to do without you I don't know how you found a boat out here in this wilderness oh Hans I am forgetting the smell of your hands please come home your little boat isn't going to make it and how will we ever again play ping-pong how we will we ever understand our grief here where we are very small and covered in trees
A BASIC GUIDE TO GETTING STARTED
Today I am going to the grocery store.
Sales on codfish and mangoes.
Five airplanes hanging under
the grey clouds over the highway.
I sit in the car feeling like a bag
of lemons. In my pocket my
cell phone is growling. Hello.
The river smells like pizza. I am
wearing a blue shirt. By the cart corral
an old man looks to the sky.
In an aisle made entirely of apples
I touch every kind thinking of the other
things I have touched today: a girl
with brown eyes, a strawberry,
a piece of yellow ribbon.
Hello. I am in an airplane made of blue
metal flying over a city I don't
know the name of. I don't know
how to work these controls. I don't
know how not to be feel good
about being bewildered. And that's
when I see it: the glistening broccoli.
A BASIC GUIDE TO POLITICS
I can't understand you through the meat and the exercise balls stop peering through the dark windows of your stagecoach your horses are tired and you haven't addressed the issue of the levee your hands are so dry you should think more about the needs of your body your hair is terrible turn off the industrial fans you look like a horrible kind of duck let's sit in this grass did you know it is spring and the people are opening their windows and sending their children into the trees the hills the offices the alleys when was the last time you listened to the ululation of the rivers ripping through the people are opening their windows and the windows are big and they can see your stagecoach and they know you are headed for the sacred tent but they could care less they are in love with the idea of not listening to you because nothing is more repulsive than you and your friends in the sacred tent never thinking about blackberries.
A BASIC GUIDE TO LOVE
Alice filled the refrigerator with grapefruit.
I looked out the window. "This weather
is really nice," I said. "Oh, don't bother
changing the subject," she said. Biscuit,
our cat, gleamed in the sun like a fish.
Alice looked at the floor. I coughed. "I wish
we could fly away together," she said.
We walked into our room to make the bed.
I coughed again. Alice smoothed the covers.
Something inside me broke. "Alice, please
quit being so apprehensive. I feel like a body
in my own body." Alice turned the color
of a dried leaf. Biscuit meowed, eyeing
my antennae, my little yellow wings
A Basic Guide to Truth
In Norway a child is holding a cloud.
Elephants are big and sometimes
small.
Everything would be different without
water.
Thank you water cycle.
Thank you dynamic natural systems.
We are friends.
Under the snow there is a green door.
You have three hearts.
One looks like a tree.
One looks like a cage full of water.
The other one looks like an elephant.
And it is very big.
And it is in Norway.
Speaking Norwegian.
Behind a door.
In the forest.
Alone.
A Basic Guide to History
The people put everything they had into the machine patio
furniture bleach symphonies the people needed a story that’s
why they built the machine the machine ate the blessings of the
people and infected them and divided them into quadrants one
quadrant was called The Island of Vague Agendas another was
called The Bureau of Choreographed Screaming and another
was called The Central Intelligence Agency the people did not
understand how the machine distinguished between blessings
or how it generated quadrants but it appeared logical and moral
and such appearances were important to the people some people
opposed the story generated by the machine but the discourse of
the machine made the people numb and at night their fingerprints
would burn and itch and so they ceased speaking of the machine
on and on it went the people feeding the machine magnolia trees
and foreclosed houses and the proletariat and the machine
dragging the torso of experience through its thresher infecting it
manipulating it into quadrants deleting as it wished once some
people filmed the machine and when they watched the tape they
saw that the machine was transparent that they could see inside
of it and this made the machine obsolete the machine was not
real the people were real the people with the symphonies and
patio furniture people began looking in the mirror and seeing
themselves people drank water out of drinking fountains and felt
it inside their throats people hung signs that said we are governed
by nothing we are governed by nothing but light
A Basic Guide To That Thing You Wanted So Badly
It is still impossible. How the horse never arrives. The way the kiss
stays locked in the machine. Yet here we are, still swallowing the furnace,
still accepting the dosage and saying it’s serious. Serious what? Serious
rabbit tied to a lamppost? Serious harmonious mass? What do you want?
Want a tomb? A tongue? A fishbone in your cultivated lung? Say
something broken. Take the murmur and make it yours. Be rabble.
Be flock. Be sun-drenched and fluid in the architecture of trees.
There is no late fee. No tidy wailing. Mobilize your fracture and find
camaraderie in contradiction. The authentic gesture escapes us. Little
amalgam. Little fuse in the think tank. Whilst roses! Torchèd syllables!
What happens is a growth in the filament. An ancient hunk of rain.
What happens is you die and become a cloud. What happens is you die
and you are dead. Your body takes the shape of a choir and flowers
photosynthesize your syntax. In your home the telephone throws itself
against the wall asking to be answered but your body is not there
to pick up. Some sound leaks out of the receiver: I remember what
I wanted. To be more than meat, it says. To be a mouth.
A Basic Guide To Home Repair
The faucet was running
away from us into the woods.
We followed the faucet
into the woods where I nestled
into a bird nest and nibbled
on tiny pieces of bright glass
and thought about the faucet.
The faucet was in love with me
in my dreams and we rode
green horses through fields of heather.
Because you were not in the nest
you forgot about the faucet
and for a long time you were an antler
that was eaten by little mammals
that lived mostly under the leaves.
When I died I fell out of the nest
and your ghost put me under the faucet.
Being not alive under the faucet
was unbearable so I woke up
and learned how to speak French.
When your ghost turned on the faucet
I stared at the faucet thinking
robinet robinet robinet robinet
which is what they call a faucet
in a place called France.
A BASIC GUIDE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1. There is
a lot of room in my mouth.
2. I want to be more confused.
3. I want to put up some wallpaper and do a little singing.
4. Little to no time will be spent considering the role of heavy weaponry.
5. Quinoa pillow.
6. I am patient, like a duck.
7. Many times I have eaten ducks not having considered if I should ask them how they feel about it.
8. I love some people.
9. I have tried to love some people.
10. I have tried to not love some people.
11. I cried, in the restaurant, with the war, and the waitress.
12. Sometimes I feel so close to strawberries.
13. Then it’s gone.
14. Then it’s not.
15. Driving alone is often an occasion to contemplate freedom.
16. Bird nest built with bottle rockets.
17. Stop making so much quiet.
18. Sunflower on the overpass.
19. On Sundays, I feel most in debt.
20. Don’t lick that.
21. Too much cake to feel comfortable.
22. I would like to do more with chainsaws.
23. I would like to do a lot more with chainsaws.
24. I’ve got a few questions.
25. Where is my mother?
26. A Basic Guide to Suffering.
27. That’s not an armchair. It’s a bear.
28. I’m worried my cat doesn’t dream about me.
29. Happy Birthday!
30. Anything beautiful will save you.
31. I am snow.
32. I am Tuesday.
33. I am the Constitution of Finland.
34. I must have been sleeping for a very long time.
35. There are oranges in my eaves.
36. I only vote out of guilt.
37. I’m not going to pay for this.
38. There is an owl in the bathtub.
39. Fine.
40. Don’t talk to me.
41. Peppermint temperament.
42. I have been cruel, and crueler.
43. I have oil reserves and I want to share.
44. I am full of bones.
45. I might want to have sex with you.
46. Experts say this is where I should /
47. A good thing to do would be to have fun.
48. New new new new new new sincerity.
49. After I threw the parts out the window it was easier to use them as I saw fit.
50. Consider the streets of Bruges.
51. The babysitter’s bra is blue.
52. I have a really big huzza.
53. I can’t feel my fingers.
54. You might want to close the blinds for this.
55. I’m a big fan.
56. My name is Nick and I’ll be taking your order.
75. From Sartre, The Imaginary, “[Y]ou will not necessarily grasp at a glance the sense of each line, but you will in any case know of each one that it is representative, that it stands for something and that this is the very reason for its existence.”
58. In Sweden the red balloon the red balloon.
59. Flaw machine.
60. Rhubarb.
61. Once, I took a look inside.
62. It’s a secret.
63. I am a fire hazard.
64. Shall I larkspur you?
65. “How necessary you are to me and how precious.” – Robert Desnos
66. Choosing the right weed whacker.
67. That’s my coat.
68. No, the rules are not clear.
69. Blogs are the most essential new form of communication.
70. Animal sweater.
71. She had thrown her grammar out of some nice red apples.
72. What I learned at school.
73. What I learned in the rain.
74. What I learned with my tongue.
57. Cell phone radiation is dangerous.
76. Neighbors are more dangerous.
77. I went to the store to be around other people and came home with a stone swan in the passenger seat.
78. There is a beehive in the air conditioning.
79. In Paris I fed a one-footed pigeon olives. I had an incredible headache.
80. Sartre, The Imaginary, “But the dream world is not so closed that the dreamer does not come to play a role in it.”
81. Sartre, The Imaginary, “It is simply necessary that the imagery of the dreamer produces an unspecified object that the dreamer can believe, whether immediately or after some time, is themselves, whatever else that object may be.”
82. The lawnmower on the Lawn of the Self.
83. Once, I was a waterfall.
84. How wonderful to know nothing!
85. Dark and full of horses.
86. Contrary to popular belief what you don’t know will hurt you.
87. There is a dead zone the size of Rhode Island.
88. All movements are immediate assessments of speed and direction.
89. The most honest part of the symphony is the tuning.
90. I ordered the buffet at the Mean Mollusk.
91. “My plan, as it stands, is to learn how to ski.” – Joshua Beckman
92. The future is a bowl of blood.
93. At the moment we really only have a vague insight.
94. Why am I lying?
95. Why am I hanging from this traffic light?
96. Most of it will go in the trash.
97. Butter to be bewildered.
98. It difficult to be fatal amongst cupcakes.
99. Here is a cupcake.
100. The hummingbird in my heart says hello.
2. I want to be more confused.
3. I want to put up some wallpaper and do a little singing.
4. Little to no time will be spent considering the role of heavy weaponry.
5. Quinoa pillow.
6. I am patient, like a duck.
7. Many times I have eaten ducks not having considered if I should ask them how they feel about it.
8. I love some people.
9. I have tried to love some people.
10. I have tried to not love some people.
11. I cried, in the restaurant, with the war, and the waitress.
12. Sometimes I feel so close to strawberries.
13. Then it’s gone.
14. Then it’s not.
15. Driving alone is often an occasion to contemplate freedom.
16. Bird nest built with bottle rockets.
17. Stop making so much quiet.
18. Sunflower on the overpass.
19. On Sundays, I feel most in debt.
20. Don’t lick that.
21. Too much cake to feel comfortable.
22. I would like to do more with chainsaws.
23. I would like to do a lot more with chainsaws.
24. I’ve got a few questions.
25. Where is my mother?
26. A Basic Guide to Suffering.
27. That’s not an armchair. It’s a bear.
28. I’m worried my cat doesn’t dream about me.
29. Happy Birthday!
30. Anything beautiful will save you.
31. I am snow.
32. I am Tuesday.
33. I am the Constitution of Finland.
34. I must have been sleeping for a very long time.
35. There are oranges in my eaves.
36. I only vote out of guilt.
37. I’m not going to pay for this.
38. There is an owl in the bathtub.
39. Fine.
40. Don’t talk to me.
41. Peppermint temperament.
42. I have been cruel, and crueler.
43. I have oil reserves and I want to share.
44. I am full of bones.
45. I might want to have sex with you.
46. Experts say this is where I should /
47. A good thing to do would be to have fun.
48. New new new new new new sincerity.
49. After I threw the parts out the window it was easier to use them as I saw fit.
50. Consider the streets of Bruges.
51. The babysitter’s bra is blue.
52. I have a really big huzza.
53. I can’t feel my fingers.
54. You might want to close the blinds for this.
55. I’m a big fan.
56. My name is Nick and I’ll be taking your order.
75. From Sartre, The Imaginary, “[Y]ou will not necessarily grasp at a glance the sense of each line, but you will in any case know of each one that it is representative, that it stands for something and that this is the very reason for its existence.”
58. In Sweden the red balloon the red balloon.
59. Flaw machine.
60. Rhubarb.
61. Once, I took a look inside.
62. It’s a secret.
63. I am a fire hazard.
64. Shall I larkspur you?
65. “How necessary you are to me and how precious.” – Robert Desnos
66. Choosing the right weed whacker.
67. That’s my coat.
68. No, the rules are not clear.
69. Blogs are the most essential new form of communication.
70. Animal sweater.
71. She had thrown her grammar out of some nice red apples.
72. What I learned at school.
73. What I learned in the rain.
74. What I learned with my tongue.
57. Cell phone radiation is dangerous.
76. Neighbors are more dangerous.
77. I went to the store to be around other people and came home with a stone swan in the passenger seat.
78. There is a beehive in the air conditioning.
79. In Paris I fed a one-footed pigeon olives. I had an incredible headache.
80. Sartre, The Imaginary, “But the dream world is not so closed that the dreamer does not come to play a role in it.”
81. Sartre, The Imaginary, “It is simply necessary that the imagery of the dreamer produces an unspecified object that the dreamer can believe, whether immediately or after some time, is themselves, whatever else that object may be.”
82. The lawnmower on the Lawn of the Self.
83. Once, I was a waterfall.
84. How wonderful to know nothing!
85. Dark and full of horses.
86. Contrary to popular belief what you don’t know will hurt you.
87. There is a dead zone the size of Rhode Island.
88. All movements are immediate assessments of speed and direction.
89. The most honest part of the symphony is the tuning.
90. I ordered the buffet at the Mean Mollusk.
91. “My plan, as it stands, is to learn how to ski.” – Joshua Beckman
92. The future is a bowl of blood.
93. At the moment we really only have a vague insight.
94. Why am I lying?
95. Why am I hanging from this traffic light?
96. Most of it will go in the trash.
97. Butter to be bewildered.
98. It difficult to be fatal amongst cupcakes.
99. Here is a cupcake.
100. The hummingbird in my heart says hello.
BABY HAMMER
for Joseph Boldensmith
Living is a matter of speaking
more often & adamantly through conch shells
Of knowing sometimes it’s best to throw everything
on the floor To cry through a closed door
& figure it all out later To get rid of
a few things in favor of keeping more
avocados around Dissonance & donuts
Spontaneous & incompleteness A great digression
in the form of ten apples on your head
It’s silly but what else would you rather be
basking in Running around like an idiot
for the sake of someone else’s happiness
You’ve got to believe it’s worth it
to give up every now & then How else
to use a see-saw than to laugh at the imbalance
we can’t help fuck the whole thing up with
New sounds in the morning New bar
around the corner Let’s take it all in
until nothing’s intact Or let’s cut it short
& love something It’s true what we do won’t touch
everyone But we can hit what we don’t know
hard enough it hits us back A little
reverberation A little book teaching you
what shoes & eyes are Learn to point
Pick it up & then point at yourself Learn
to say bye bye Say you never know
how things will turn out Repeat & repeat
Hit & hit again There’s no reason to cry
until there is & even then Even aflame
today is going to be a good day
COMMONWEALTH OF LONG BLUE FLOWERS
for Nate Slawson
Amorous & haunted Bitterness
& bells What kind of sorrow
is only yours One path leads
to the waterfall The other
to the trash heap & your soul is all
busted up for either Performing impractical
actions with impractical results Same old
feeling obsessively rendered Unraveling
& uncertain Mandible & stumble
I’m not sure a hatchet would help
what you keep in your blouse I want
to say I’m intact but my head is more
flare gun than firework A call for help
masked in oh my god that’s beautiful
Make a mess Read a book We all
might need to go to bed more often
together Put on & take off our
intentions without purpose It’s all good
as long as no one’s decent As long as
we end up loose & whipped by mist
into gladness The day picking up
to bash us immortal Nothing I feel
I keep for myself Everything I lose
I give back in flowers Promise & principle
Riot & grace Since I got here
I’ve been hugging everyone
NEW LOVE
for Emily Kendal Frey
It’s not up to me It’s always
upending me Leaving me soggy
& grateful & sleeping next to mountains
Soaked in a weird hue of whatever
the flowers need to get by Ask me
how many times I have to leave
before I’m gone Ask me what
is in these scones A little anarchy
& currants never hurt anyone I’m probably
wrong about that I’ve been wrong
for a damn long while now & even
fireflies in the courtyard give me a hope
I can’t hide from Tragedy & ecstasy
& a cup of coffee & the ducks
looking ridiculous just to get by
Me trying to extract the unknowable
from this tiny piano You on a train
with your questions & smiling I’m sure
I don’t have to tell you what’s new
isn’t the love It’s the way
you touch the window without caring
you can’t stop what passes by That’s it
The rest is shit & glorious
mercy Ankle in the light Note
on the windshield All this brutal
leisure Let me say it simply I need you
to help me finish this scone
for Joseph Boldensmith
Living is a matter of speaking
more often & adamantly through conch shells
Of knowing sometimes it’s best to throw everything
on the floor To cry through a closed door
& figure it all out later To get rid of
a few things in favor of keeping more
avocados around Dissonance & donuts
Spontaneous & incompleteness A great digression
in the form of ten apples on your head
It’s silly but what else would you rather be
basking in Running around like an idiot
for the sake of someone else’s happiness
You’ve got to believe it’s worth it
to give up every now & then How else
to use a see-saw than to laugh at the imbalance
we can’t help fuck the whole thing up with
New sounds in the morning New bar
around the corner Let’s take it all in
until nothing’s intact Or let’s cut it short
& love something It’s true what we do won’t touch
everyone But we can hit what we don’t know
hard enough it hits us back A little
reverberation A little book teaching you
what shoes & eyes are Learn to point
Pick it up & then point at yourself Learn
to say bye bye Say you never know
how things will turn out Repeat & repeat
Hit & hit again There’s no reason to cry
until there is & even then Even aflame
today is going to be a good day
COMMONWEALTH OF LONG BLUE FLOWERS
for Nate Slawson
Amorous & haunted Bitterness
& bells What kind of sorrow
is only yours One path leads
to the waterfall The other
to the trash heap & your soul is all
busted up for either Performing impractical
actions with impractical results Same old
feeling obsessively rendered Unraveling
& uncertain Mandible & stumble
I’m not sure a hatchet would help
what you keep in your blouse I want
to say I’m intact but my head is more
flare gun than firework A call for help
masked in oh my god that’s beautiful
Make a mess Read a book We all
might need to go to bed more often
together Put on & take off our
intentions without purpose It’s all good
as long as no one’s decent As long as
we end up loose & whipped by mist
into gladness The day picking up
to bash us immortal Nothing I feel
I keep for myself Everything I lose
I give back in flowers Promise & principle
Riot & grace Since I got here
I’ve been hugging everyone
NEW LOVE
for Emily Kendal Frey
It’s not up to me It’s always
upending me Leaving me soggy
& grateful & sleeping next to mountains
Soaked in a weird hue of whatever
the flowers need to get by Ask me
how many times I have to leave
before I’m gone Ask me what
is in these scones A little anarchy
& currants never hurt anyone I’m probably
wrong about that I’ve been wrong
for a damn long while now & even
fireflies in the courtyard give me a hope
I can’t hide from Tragedy & ecstasy
& a cup of coffee & the ducks
looking ridiculous just to get by
Me trying to extract the unknowable
from this tiny piano You on a train
with your questions & smiling I’m sure
I don’t have to tell you what’s new
isn’t the love It’s the way
you touch the window without caring
you can’t stop what passes by That’s it
The rest is shit & glorious
mercy Ankle in the light Note
on the windshield All this brutal
leisure Let me say it simply I need you
to help me finish this scone
The Whole Place is Dark
for Jason
Molina (1973-2013)
Today I walked past the magnolias,
which were wet, because it rained.
Today I nodded while one of my professors said something
about the rhetoric of atrocity, the terror,
and I didn’t think of anything in particular.
Today a door slammed and today a knot formed
in a radio somewhere outside of Cleveland.
Today the sun was a welcome bruise
on my responsibilities, which made me less tired
than usual, though I am tired now and trying
to stave off the wish for emptiness
ringing in my chest’s blue thicket.
Today I turned in an application.
Today I deleted the last of her voice from my phone.
Today I talked to Sarah and Jeff and Carrie
who are important to me for many reasons,
one of them being the feeling
that we are, especially in the snow, never alone.
Today it did not snow.
Today I got out of bed on time
only because I thought I heard something crash
like light in a glass of whiskey or a window being knocked out,
but I found only the dark, my cat, and all the things
I’ve hung my life around while the train whistles
through the floorboards’ imperceptible chasms
I cross to the kitchen every morning.
Today I read out loud from Mary Shelley’s journals
and my voice felt like a heavy, lawless river.
Today we decided whether to call it a creature or a monster
and I’m not sure we made the right decision.
Today prisoners were captured.
Today there were complications.
Today I didn’t do my taxes and today I didn’t have to
say goodbye, though I did, even to those I’ll see tomorrow.
Today the dust cracked.
Today the analog incantations flooded.
Today my hair felt like a guitar and I remembered what I thought
once about love in Oregon and once about home in Michigan
and in the other room I heard the lyrics
paved in eternal circles off the vinyl
at the same moment I read them from an article on my phone
which is how you know at certain hours it all breaks down.
Today the transmission and today the ghost.
Today the lightning on all our hearts
like a rusty, gone-to-fuck halo.
Today sprawls us and today
the volume seems to be catching every mountain in your throat.
Today I walked past the magnolias,
which were wet, though it hadn’t rained.
Today a deer got up off the highway
with the dead moon in its jaws.
Today I walked past the magnolias,
which were wet, because it rained.
Today I nodded while one of my professors said something
about the rhetoric of atrocity, the terror,
and I didn’t think of anything in particular.
Today a door slammed and today a knot formed
in a radio somewhere outside of Cleveland.
Today the sun was a welcome bruise
on my responsibilities, which made me less tired
than usual, though I am tired now and trying
to stave off the wish for emptiness
ringing in my chest’s blue thicket.
Today I turned in an application.
Today I deleted the last of her voice from my phone.
Today I talked to Sarah and Jeff and Carrie
who are important to me for many reasons,
one of them being the feeling
that we are, especially in the snow, never alone.
Today it did not snow.
Today I got out of bed on time
only because I thought I heard something crash
like light in a glass of whiskey or a window being knocked out,
but I found only the dark, my cat, and all the things
I’ve hung my life around while the train whistles
through the floorboards’ imperceptible chasms
I cross to the kitchen every morning.
Today I read out loud from Mary Shelley’s journals
and my voice felt like a heavy, lawless river.
Today we decided whether to call it a creature or a monster
and I’m not sure we made the right decision.
Today prisoners were captured.
Today there were complications.
Today I didn’t do my taxes and today I didn’t have to
say goodbye, though I did, even to those I’ll see tomorrow.
Today the dust cracked.
Today the analog incantations flooded.
Today my hair felt like a guitar and I remembered what I thought
once about love in Oregon and once about home in Michigan
and in the other room I heard the lyrics
paved in eternal circles off the vinyl
at the same moment I read them from an article on my phone
which is how you know at certain hours it all breaks down.
Today the transmission and today the ghost.
Today the lightning on all our hearts
like a rusty, gone-to-fuck halo.
Today sprawls us and today
the volume seems to be catching every mountain in your throat.
Today I walked past the magnolias,
which were wet, though it hadn’t rained.
Today a deer got up off the highway
with the dead moon in its jaws.
FAKE WHITE COUCH
for Anne
Cecelia Holmes
Hello anonymous harbor Hello
friendly people at the barbeque I am done
sleeping Thank you & now I would like
to hum a little Avoid meat with you Laugh
for specific reasons One being that I am saying
impossible things about couches Another being
the arc of complicated feelings How they
cover us with mistakes Very human things
Anchors & pieces of toast Anything to make you
empathize with me in a poncho That’s how
dumbly I feel Compared to me even
a small boat is bigger Always limited by shape
& a necessity for quiet people speaking loudly
about slinkies & whales For no reason
I love them In a dream This ability to smuggle
our hands into each other’s hair Hello quick
suffocating sweetness Hello somebody
with impractical wisdom about hand signals
I think your shoes are great Also the energy
we exchange How it is carried around
for a long time Even in the backyard Even
in a small boat going far away Everyone is like
wow With shame on my heart & lemonade
in my mouth This is my best disguise
Hello anonymous harbor Hello
friendly people at the barbeque I am done
sleeping Thank you & now I would like
to hum a little Avoid meat with you Laugh
for specific reasons One being that I am saying
impossible things about couches Another being
the arc of complicated feelings How they
cover us with mistakes Very human things
Anchors & pieces of toast Anything to make you
empathize with me in a poncho That’s how
dumbly I feel Compared to me even
a small boat is bigger Always limited by shape
& a necessity for quiet people speaking loudly
about slinkies & whales For no reason
I love them In a dream This ability to smuggle
our hands into each other’s hair Hello quick
suffocating sweetness Hello somebody
with impractical wisdom about hand signals
I think your shoes are great Also the energy
we exchange How it is carried around
for a long time Even in the backyard Even
in a small boat going far away Everyone is like
wow With shame on my heart & lemonade
in my mouth This is my best disguise
I WENT OUTSIDE AND THEN I DON’T KNOW
Many
different things have the ability to glimmer
and that is as much a reason for joy as for terror.
Do you think of the things you eat as having come from a carcass?
Does part of you not believe yourself when you call it making love?
I sometimes think of my cat as a small horse.
If I had a yacht and I wanted to go yachting
I would say I’m feeling pretty yachtish.
I say the word yachtish out loud to my cat.
He wakes up from what might have been a cat dream
which is a kind of dream I will never been able to experience.
And look at me trying to write this poem…
I’ll never really know anything.
Now bring that tiny amplifier into my kitchen
and tell me I’m on fire.
and that is as much a reason for joy as for terror.
Do you think of the things you eat as having come from a carcass?
Does part of you not believe yourself when you call it making love?
I sometimes think of my cat as a small horse.
If I had a yacht and I wanted to go yachting
I would say I’m feeling pretty yachtish.
I say the word yachtish out loud to my cat.
He wakes up from what might have been a cat dream
which is a kind of dream I will never been able to experience.
And look at me trying to write this poem…
I’ll never really know anything.
Now bring that tiny amplifier into my kitchen
and tell me I’m on fire.
Red Car in the Future
We awaken in Zurich! We go out for emotions and sodas! It is not correct
To stay anywhere for too long. Shall we go to the Moscow of flowers?
I don’t know. Perhaps, but we play tennis well enough and in Albuquerque
It is too easy to lose one’s jacket. Then a cloud collapsed on Brussels’ silly face.
The Ferris wheel was frightening enough. In New York the conversation
Disappeared into a pack of cigarettes and would not smile. The trees of Copenhagen
And the trampolines of Houston! Swans! Photic machines! The sky stops
For a moment to take a leak. Dear Reykjavik, trying to make sense of this
Unseemly sequence makes my roses hurt. Children in Tripoli ask us insensible questions
Because we are not angels, though we cry like angels, and in San Francisco, for once,
The world opened its heart and we removed the shrapnel. After that, Stockholm
Got us drunk and taught us to dance. We shared a sandwich in Delhi
But that was only the beginning. In Frankfurt, as chance had it, we did nothing of interest.
Cleveland, I stagger through your streets like “I am trying to get as far away from this
As I can.” We arrived late in Paris where we had headaches and sex and oranges. (How
Arbitrary! I feel like a cupcake!) What is the plan? What do you mean “genuine”?
Let’s rent an apartment in Helsinki and sell lemonade to beautiful girls!
Let’s read Swedenborg and ride jet-skis under the bridges of Amsterdam!
At the last second we are invited to a house party in Chicago where we learn
It is not possible to pour an entire bottle of wine into a violin. It’s true, in Melbourne
We made terrific asses of ourselves! Sao Paulo was hot! We liked it very much!
In Bruges our souls became great works of art as we fell asleep on the grass.
In Hong Kong we spoke into the ear of oblivion and wept in golden chairs. Tulips
Grew in the gutters of Beirut. We drank coffee and believed everything was worth saying
At least once, like in Jerusalem when the girl said, “Have you ever played tennis
In Albuquerque? You look so familiar!” or when we met an old man
By the pinball machines of Guadalajara who said, “I am the owner of a red car
In the future. In Auckland I discovered a cup of tea,” and we laughed at him
And asked him to add some lines to this poem (he wrote the ones about Frankfurt,
Sao Paulo, and Brussels, and might have written the one for Reykjavik, but no one
Is quite certain or cares). Oh sweet St. Petersburg where I eat tomatoes and create
Inexplicable machines in praise of accidents and laughter! In Dakar we sell cantaloupe
And are not sarcastic! We are unemotional in Istanbul! We open the dictionary
Rescuing flowers in Denver and suddenly we are staring at ourselves.
Oh never-ending stream of amusements! My zipper is broken! A kiss in Winnipeg!
The Fences
I built a fence I built a fence out of wood I built a fence out of fence parts I built a fence out of orange peels I built a fence out of satellite dishes and yellow paint I built a fence out of skulls I built a fence out of my love for you people said it looked like it would stand forever and I wasn’t going to tell them otherwise I built a fence out of daffodils and enchiladas and devotion to something larger than myself that I knew I could not grasp I built a fence out of coupons and statues of the Virgin Mary and maps of 16th century Holland I built a fence out of my friends and called it The Capital of My Heart I built a fence out of pornography and covered it in a black sheet which made everyone look and gasp and get very excited I built a fence lying on my back in the dark I built a fence with my tax return and it was the smallest fence anyone had ever seen I built a fence out of paintings that museums buy but don’t hang in galleries because of intellectual censorship I built a fence out of old cell phones and baby teeth I built a fence out of bullet casings and concrete I built a fence out of seagulls and key chains and teacups that have never been used I built a fence out of my powerlessness in the face of the absolute and had enough tears to build fences everyday for the rest of my life I built a fence out of blackened tofu and kale I built a fence out of pieces of fire and dull knives I built a fence out of my past and my pants I built a fence out of bacon and lack of compassion and called it the Republican Party I built a fence out of what was left after the war nothing was left after the war but time to build fences I built a fence out of all the ties that belong to the President of the United States of America I built a fence out of what was left in the apartment after you left me and laid in the vacancy of my bed and could smell pancakes the neighbors were making pancakes I built a fence out of red birds and ice and gravestones and ice machines and gravestone machines I built a fence
The Roost
for Leora
Fridman
It takes a little silence Some spit
to sing The way building
an altar of coffee & talk
stains us holy and un- Twists us
family My family
a bunch of birdhearts hurtling
into teenage lakes Our faces
sullen Our asses great
& great are the flames
that lick our engines Great are
the trees that floor us Love us
Render us wealthy with pleasure
When the sun turns off we assemble
into palaces of beer Into the trial
& error of this confounding
gala You tell me to keep
my eyes on the distant bodily
softness That we’re getting closer
together To bed down in
the inexplicable Which
is kind of hot Which is wet
& an actual belief system
Basically lemonade The shared
mist on our lips All of this is
maybe a mistake Maybe a joke
about going to the inappropriate
woods But either way
joy Either joy or
more joy All accident Our
little religion drunk on clouds
& la la la You know
what I mean Birds of a feather
fuck & fuck-up together
It takes a little silence Some spit
to sing The way building
an altar of coffee & talk
stains us holy and un- Twists us
family My family
a bunch of birdhearts hurtling
into teenage lakes Our faces
sullen Our asses great
& great are the flames
that lick our engines Great are
the trees that floor us Love us
Render us wealthy with pleasure
When the sun turns off we assemble
into palaces of beer Into the trial
& error of this confounding
gala You tell me to keep
my eyes on the distant bodily
softness That we’re getting closer
together To bed down in
the inexplicable Which
is kind of hot Which is wet
& an actual belief system
Basically lemonade The shared
mist on our lips All of this is
maybe a mistake Maybe a joke
about going to the inappropriate
woods But either way
joy Either joy or
more joy All accident Our
little religion drunk on clouds
& la la la You know
what I mean Birds of a feather
fuck & fuck-up together
Upstairs With His Sandwich
for Mike
Krutel
Instinct to assemble Instinct to hoping
things will turn out for the better
That’s how I got here With nothing to show
but this fixation on what can’t be fixed
Din & contradiction Shame & splendor
spilling into all the living rooms & dance floors
we’ve shared A belief in the ruins
of our own conclusions colludes us into battle
& crumble Screaming that you mean so much
to meaning Despite this acre of erratic light
I keep sinking into the same damn things
over & over In front of all these people
open & worse than ordinary Another guy
with a sandwich Another other at the edge
of the awful I’d be wiser to abandon this
vagueness & go talk to that girl in the green shirt
Ask her where fleeth the wonder What
kind of flowers I should fill this room with
to have her Beautiful beautiful Animal
animal It’s so great we have the capacity
to kiss each other’s faces It’s so great
I lost everything Even my sandwich
Even my exclamation points Though you know
I’m exaggerating now I’m miles away I’m
over there admiring your tomatoes Glee & grain
alcohol Happenstance & hopelessness
What I lost wasn’t everything
Instinct to assemble Instinct to hoping
things will turn out for the better
That’s how I got here With nothing to show
but this fixation on what can’t be fixed
Din & contradiction Shame & splendor
spilling into all the living rooms & dance floors
we’ve shared A belief in the ruins
of our own conclusions colludes us into battle
& crumble Screaming that you mean so much
to meaning Despite this acre of erratic light
I keep sinking into the same damn things
over & over In front of all these people
open & worse than ordinary Another guy
with a sandwich Another other at the edge
of the awful I’d be wiser to abandon this
vagueness & go talk to that girl in the green shirt
Ask her where fleeth the wonder What
kind of flowers I should fill this room with
to have her Beautiful beautiful Animal
animal It’s so great we have the capacity
to kiss each other’s faces It’s so great
I lost everything Even my sandwich
Even my exclamation points Though you know
I’m exaggerating now I’m miles away I’m
over there admiring your tomatoes Glee & grain
alcohol Happenstance & hopelessness
What I lost wasn’t everything
Actuals & Possibles
You say a
negative thing about pudding
& I simply cannot agree We throw our hands
in the air & spend all day discovering
our newfound handlessness It is liberating
but also frustrating to not agree About furnishings
About windswept plains About what to name
what we’re doing Is it debris removal
or a dream Is it a squirrel in the sun
or a squirrel in the rain When there is an idea
I hear it is easier to have your own idea
by saying no to the other idea I like that
A spoon jangles in a cup & a spoon
does not jangle in a cup One or more
things change & that is called life
O life O pudding Release me Let me
sputter in the grass all morning looking
for a way in A way into the party where
I’m told how long I’ve been sleeping
& I simply must agree So I wake up
& feel something
& I simply cannot agree We throw our hands
in the air & spend all day discovering
our newfound handlessness It is liberating
but also frustrating to not agree About furnishings
About windswept plains About what to name
what we’re doing Is it debris removal
or a dream Is it a squirrel in the sun
or a squirrel in the rain When there is an idea
I hear it is easier to have your own idea
by saying no to the other idea I like that
A spoon jangles in a cup & a spoon
does not jangle in a cup One or more
things change & that is called life
O life O pudding Release me Let me
sputter in the grass all morning looking
for a way in A way into the party where
I’m told how long I’ve been sleeping
& I simply must agree So I wake up
& feel something
Arrow
The system is thick with sparrows. I can only
say so much about sparrows. That they are not blue.
That they are a buffer against meaning. That they are
not arrows. When I want to be wrong I use sparrows
to make intelligent wounds. I call the wounds ears.
Through an ear it is possible to touch one’s own organs.
Through an ear it is possible to translate the phrase
nocturnal bundle to mean a piece of confusion grows
in the gesture machine. Through an ear it is possible
to have feelings because an ear is a primitive frame.
When learning to use ears it is good to hide vibrations
so as to hear disturbances in the pattern. When I walk
into the system I feel like a high-resolution mistake.
When I walk out of the system I am willing
to point at a sparrow and call it anything.
"Everything
Looks Smaller Today"
You
say We are not correctly
alone & that makes me feel
pretty champagne Gives me animal
focus Gives me reason to erupt
unregulated bramble A little
embroidered hooray Gathered
around the pizza we are inconsolable
with want It’s true There are enough
silly hats to go around There are
enough basements to fill with volume
But today I’m lacking the appropriate grace
to be good to this world I say
the stupidest things I take a piece
I don’t deserve I set important
things on fire because a cage
is a cage & if I’m to keep living I’ve got to
dismantle something beautiful I know
I’m not a worthy man All I’ve got
is empathy for a bee A smile
when your door finally opens Just
enough pressure Just enough lukewarm
coffee for both of us So please outlast
me Flatbed me Forget me
& forgive me my daily indifference
You’ve got the wild pony I’ve got
this sea Tonight that’s bigger
than both of us A smaller us
kicking at the biggest stars Dragging
the light back where it belongs
alone & that makes me feel
pretty champagne Gives me animal
focus Gives me reason to erupt
unregulated bramble A little
embroidered hooray Gathered
around the pizza we are inconsolable
with want It’s true There are enough
silly hats to go around There are
enough basements to fill with volume
But today I’m lacking the appropriate grace
to be good to this world I say
the stupidest things I take a piece
I don’t deserve I set important
things on fire because a cage
is a cage & if I’m to keep living I’ve got to
dismantle something beautiful I know
I’m not a worthy man All I’ve got
is empathy for a bee A smile
when your door finally opens Just
enough pressure Just enough lukewarm
coffee for both of us So please outlast
me Flatbed me Forget me
& forgive me my daily indifference
You’ve got the wild pony I’ve got
this sea Tonight that’s bigger
than both of us A smaller us
kicking at the biggest stars Dragging
the light back where it belongs
The Era of Confusion Begins
I want to be a smaller pony I want
to be a silver cup For the flowers to
stand up & furnish my life with joy
I don’t want to be a pile of duct tape
& sun I don’t want to be a candle
burning in a tiny temple No
I want to be some handsome
acoustic behavior All formlessness
& you & me wet with content The sea
overwhelming us A big fumbling
window collecting in the sky There’s nothing
I’d rather be doing than having
elaborate hedonistic parties Than using
my mouth to love you But now it’s just
me Me with my pony hands burning down
to rain The sun making noise all over
my pony face Your face telling me
from afar there is no smaller pony
I want to be a smaller pony I want
to be a silver cup For the flowers to
stand up & furnish my life with joy
I don’t want to be a pile of duct tape
& sun I don’t want to be a candle
burning in a tiny temple No
I want to be some handsome
acoustic behavior All formlessness
& you & me wet with content The sea
overwhelming us A big fumbling
window collecting in the sky There’s nothing
I’d rather be doing than having
elaborate hedonistic parties Than using
my mouth to love you But now it’s just
me Me with my pony hands burning down
to rain The sun making noise all over
my pony face Your face telling me
from afar there is no smaller pony
A Whorl That Ascends
My hands do not think They get
lit up The air just happy
something is happening Something
I can get my hands into Maybe make
some noise or attract your attention
using a foam finger A large finger
that I swing mercilessly Overhead
there are a lot of extra heads
belonging to birds
Also someone I am not sure
if there is a better way to say this
Someone looking at the cloud tops
from above Like what is a law
& how can I ever repeat this
using words At the exhibit I touch
everything with my mouth My mouth
does not attract much attention It acts
so unsure not of itself
but of the world The world
the shape of these colors What
an exhibit this is What a way
to believe in this world & its clouds
All open & a whorl My hands
when I land dressed in light Where
I land like my mouth
is not up to me
My hands do not think They get
lit up The air just happy
something is happening Something
I can get my hands into Maybe make
some noise or attract your attention
using a foam finger A large finger
that I swing mercilessly Overhead
there are a lot of extra heads
belonging to birds
Also someone I am not sure
if there is a better way to say this
Someone looking at the cloud tops
from above Like what is a law
& how can I ever repeat this
using words At the exhibit I touch
everything with my mouth My mouth
does not attract much attention It acts
so unsure not of itself
but of the world The world
the shape of these colors What
an exhibit this is What a way
to believe in this world & its clouds
All open & a whorl My hands
when I land dressed in light Where
I land like my mouth
is not up to me
"i went outside and then i don't know"
Many
different things have the ability to glimmer
and that is as much a reason for joy as for terror.
Do you think of the things you eat as having come from a carcass?
Does part of you not believe yourself when you call it making love?
I sometimes think of my cat as a small horse.
If I had a yacht and I wanted to go yachting
I would say I’m feeling pretty yachtish.
I say the word yachtish out loud to my cat.
He wakes up from what might have been a cat dream
which is a kind of dream I will never been able to experience.
And look at me trying to write this poem…
I’ll never really know anything.
Now bring that tiny amplifier into my kitchen
and tell me I’m on fire.
and that is as much a reason for joy as for terror.
Do you think of the things you eat as having come from a carcass?
Does part of you not believe yourself when you call it making love?
I sometimes think of my cat as a small horse.
If I had a yacht and I wanted to go yachting
I would say I’m feeling pretty yachtish.
I say the word yachtish out loud to my cat.
He wakes up from what might have been a cat dream
which is a kind of dream I will never been able to experience.
And look at me trying to write this poem…
I’ll never really know anything.
Now bring that tiny amplifier into my kitchen
and tell me I’m on fire.
I WAS NOT EVEN BORN WHEN YOU INVENTED MAPS
You had no idea where you were going.
You rode your bike through the blooming
bushes and knew the names of everything
amazing. Every morning I painted your portrait
and every morning I had a new painting of mist.
What I meant to do buckled under the weight
of what I didn’t and that is how we keep living
so ablaze. It is not as if we aren’t sometimes
moving in the wrong direction but what I mean
by wrong is coming up roses. If you want to find me
I’ll be in the other room translating my regret
into 25 years of cookies.
I WAS NOT EVEN BORN WHEN
YOU ASKED ME FOR A DIET COKE
We make complex commotion pretending
to be waves. Create some traffic against
each others bodies. Look at the snow until it turns
over into a tawny field. I get lulled into serious kinds of saying
until I look at the sky and the sky reminds me I am
just an ignoramus which is what a mammal is
that keeps looking at the sky. A flower might suddenly
leap up! and that is what I am smiling for. Also
because you can need something and I can be here
to say yes. To say I strung these lights in your trees
and I hope they flicker. Then we could be sitting here
and things would be happening. A bird might
kiss you. Your sweater might become very comfortable.
We might end up on the beach at the same moment
and neither of us would be thirsty.
Wendy Xu & Nick Sturm
I WAS NOT EVEN BORN WHEN YOU KNEW MY NAME
Sometimes when you mean hello I carry
you in my left ear for days. You go with me
to the grocery store for arguments
about the most beautiful head of broccoli
and salad. O, gorgeous bird, I dare us to go
on not caring. I have put down color all
over the map this week. Nobody has reached
me with their letters. I feel like two owls caught
with secret binoculars. Which is to say I
feel more than what I am. Which what
am I? Which does it hurt when two
people go on speaking? Call me and say
you are alive again.
Erasures:
Nick Sturm
Tallahassee, Florida
«1. I used to work Saturday mornings at the convenience store in the student union. Circa, 2009.
2. One of my first adventures when I moved to Florida, canoeing and swimming in the Wacissa River, culminated in a group prompt based on this idea and including these words. It's written on the back of a receipt for a veggie burger and a Yuengling. I wrote the poem that night and then went to the movies to see The Candidate, which was horrible.
3. This is written on a small, folded up piece of paper that I must have been carrying around in my pocket or thrown away and then pulled out of the trash. The inside of the paper has a list written by my ex-girlfriend of holiday plans from 2010, such as whose family's house we'd be at when. The list is incomplete.
4. A page from my current notebook that was written sometime in July sitting in Java Beach Cafe on Judah in San Francisco. I often use word lists to generate poem noise. Rod Stewart must have been playing in the coffee shop. A poem called "At Least There Are Windmills" is forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review.
Carrie Lorig & Nick Sturm, Nancy & The Dutch. Art by Camilla Frankl-Slater
Free download
A collaboration in erasure, expansion, redaction, rearrangement, re-appropriation, history revocation, history reallocation, language morphing, silencing, voicing, performing, ignoring, and prophesying the president of my childhood, Mr. Ronald Reagan, and his wife Nancy. It’s a beautiful estrangement
‘Nancy and The Dutch’ is a heartwarming tale about the power of Ronald Reagan. Carrie Lorig and Nick Sturm obviously have nothing but the strongest, most sexual feelings for America’s two term president. Using her awesome powers, Camilla Frankl-Slater captures Ronald Reagan at his most awesome pinnacle of success. With the writing and the drawings, the sense of a truly phenomenal president comes into view. Ronald Reagan convinced America to take responsibility for its actions. To improve this sense of wonder and magic about America, Ronald Reagan created the ‘Greed is Good’ mantra as basic social services were dissembled into little Lego Bricks.
The State of the Union address discusses Reagan’s plans for the future. Hands gone, Reagan didn’t touch a thing. Creativity was promoted by Reagan. During the speech Reagan challenged Americans to think of an America without him, one where people could have social equality without watching the chasm grow between average Americans and rich Americans. Nobody could do it. The American dream remained just that, because it was never actualized. Rather the American Dream teased Americans from Reagan’s time all the way into the present. Someday the American Dream will be of equality. Until then the American Dream gets its cues from Charles Darwin, like Ronald Reagan intended.
Lorig and Sturm point out Reagan never learned the language. Reagan didn’t have to, he had a language that was all his own. Speaking into TVs Reagan understood that he wasn’t understood. Weasel words were his forever. Looking at Reagan was enough. Taking a paternalistic approach to America while at the same time telling Americans that government was the problem, Reagan lived a life of contradictions. However Reagan always spoke the truth. When Reagan said the nine most feared words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ he was telling the truth. Reagan was trying to tell the country that it should fear him, in his own circuitous way, yet that country elected and re-elected him.
Despite his misgivings, Reagan did love Americans. Without Americans he couldn’t have bombs or himself. Reagan loved the bombs. The 80s were big into bombs. Reagan even loved the occasional conflict, whether in bombing Libya or invading Grenada. Everything was fair game to him. Reagan sat on his chair eating gourmet jellybeans watching American might take out the enemies of democracy. Liberals disliked Reagan but Reagan outright hated those turkeys. Thanks to Reagan American democracy went from ‘redressive-impressive’ to ‘passive-repressive’. All the time nobody even noticed. Noam Chomsky eloquently summarized America in the 80s ‘America sucks, but other countries suck even more’.
Reagan dreamed of becoming human one day. Sure he approximated human emotions but he couldn’t replicate them perfectly. Fortunately for Reagan he looked like a grandfather. As a result he got a pass on ‘acting human’. Making the simple stupid was Reagan’s main appeal. Negotiating was difficult due to Reagan’s extreme denseness. One of his greatest accomplishments was to help the USSR stay in business for a few additional years. If the USSR fell during his term then Reagan would have looked positively evil. Keeping the USSR propped up helped Reagan get some good sound bites about walls and to have the articulate response of ‘at least America isn’t the USSR’.
Toboggans worried old Reagan. As a child Reagan was a carefree child remembering his toboggan ‘Rosebud’. As an adult Reagan shot people in movies. As an old man Reagan destroyed the social fabric of America, all for the LOLs. Indeed nobody realized it at the time but the internet was being developed under Reagan. Reagan created countless amounts of internet slang like ‘BRB’, ‘LOL’ and ‘TMI’, the latter referring to things he felt better not knowing, like unemployment rates or how much milk cost.
Under the tutelage of doom, Reagan learned the language of despair. This was necessary. Putting a happy face on doom was the most difficult thing Reagan ever had to do. Bear pornography helped Reagan understand what doom really meant. Simultaneously hot and heavy, bear pornography taught Reagan that fears could be arousing. Hence Reagan could deliver sadness with a smiley face. Everybody loved those smiley faces Reagan thought as he continued to dither away, waiting for his second term to end.
‘Nancy and the Dutch’ ends with a heartfelt speech about the importance of dictionaries. Reagan loved knowing everything he didn’t know. It felt funny to Reagan to understand that he remained woefully inadequate for what America needed. Yet Reagan remained enormously popular and continued to be idolized long after all of his ‘ideas’ were disproven. Obviously this chapbook is a love letter from Lorig and Sturm to America’s greatest worst president. Posted by Beach Sloth at 7:04 PM - beachsloth.blogspot.com/
Vouched On The Road: Akron with Nick Sturm and Mike Krutel
In the first of my road trip posts, I visit with Nick Sturm and Mike Krutel of Akron for some rad hangage.
Here they are, our first hosts, our radiating poets, Nick Sturm and Mike Krutel, recent NEOMFA graduates, lifelong Akronites, rad dudes.
Sturm, you might remember, of his TREMENDOUS TIME (and will see him chapbooking again with his BASIC GUIDE that just won the Bateau Press Boom Chapbook contest). Krutel, you need to remember, from poems like these and this.
These dudes can write! But can they live?!
I asked them both a bunch of questions beforehand about their connection to Akron.
Vouched contributor, Ashley Ford, made this journey with me (and big thxxxxx to her for these pictures and videos). First big adventure was hiking in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Above Ashley and Sturm dance on a wobbly rock. These guys like to wander around, like to wonder about their surroundings. Sturm full of stories about finding horse teeth in a river, about the history of the land. Krutel the constant kind guy, the warning signal of slippery rocks, the teller of the whats-up.
If you’re paying any attention, you’ll be astounded by these two dudes’ sense of self, how they absorb and exist, experience and share.
Oh hey, Akron has some killer food, I’m telling you, like this awesome grilled cheese (with grilled apples! C’MON) and goldfish crackers from Lockview (rad Great Lakes beer not shown), like MR ZUBS where you can get a Mac and Cheese sandwich and tator tots!
How does one bring up Joshua Kleinberg? After the entire state of Florida had had enough, Kleinberg has been bouncing around Ohio and recently got stuck in Akron. He’s a cool poet too and a nice guy, putting together a reading for myself, himself, Sturm, Krutel, and Akron writer Alexis Pope (along with sets by local metal bands Rhomer and Gasmask).
Hey look, it’s Sturm ollieing over Ashley, getting psyched for his reading.
Basically, Akron felt like a big Fourth of July party, and that’s a good thing. I ended up getting a tattoo, my first!, at the Sturm/Krutel/Kleinberg-vouched Good Life shop in Akron. You can see a little more chatter about that here.
While this weekend was jam-packed with readings (the Akron reading on Friday, a Heather Feather Review reading in Cleveland that Kleinberg and I did with folks like Mary Biddinger and Aubrey Hirsch on Saturday, and Sturm’s reading in Dayton with Noah Falck and Matt Hart), the refreshing and rad thing about living some days with Sturm and Krutel is there sense of go-go hosting outside of writing stuff, the aforementioned hiking, a pre-Cleveland reading Lake Eerie visit (pics too sexy for here!), general goodtime hang. ABSOLUTELY A BLAST.
Here they are, our first hosts, our radiating poets, Nick Sturm and Mike Krutel, recent NEOMFA graduates, lifelong Akronites, rad dudes.
Sturm, you might remember, of his TREMENDOUS TIME (and will see him chapbooking again with his BASIC GUIDE that just won the Bateau Press Boom Chapbook contest). Krutel, you need to remember, from poems like these and this.
These dudes can write! But can they live?!
I asked them both a bunch of questions beforehand about their connection to Akron.
KRUTEL SPEAKSThe Big Big Mess Readings Series, ah yes. Held at the mega-cool Annabell’s, that glorious thing Sturm started last year, having brought in readers such as Matt Bell, Heather Christle, Jason Bredle, and many others. Krutel and Alexis Pope hope to keep those good times rolling next year. I had the pleasure of reading at a Big Big Mess in January and boy, they sure are fun fun fun, hootin’ and hollerin’ and clappin’ great time.
1. How long have you lived in Akron?
I have lived around Akron pretty much my entire life. It’s one of those cities that have dozens of other communities surrounding it in every direction (small suburban towns/”cities” and also areas that are more farmland). But I spent most of my teenage years hanging around Akron, running around the city with friends, and participating in the local music scene to lesser and greater extents. I have been an actual resident for nearly three years now.
2. What are your favorite pieces of Akron?
The part of town that I live in (North Hill) has a lot of nostalgia buried in corners of it, most related to being in high school and playing music with a good friend who lived in that area. Other than that, I enjoy going to Highland Square. It’s the only real neighborhood in Akron, that is, one that has a distinct culture about it. I have grown a bit tired of the Square over the years, but there are a few parts I’ll never get tired of, such as the local punk bar. There is also an amazing record store named Square Records that is a definite place to stop even if you are just passing through town. One last area worth all its weight is the Cuyahoga Valley National Park system on the edge of the city. There are good hiking trails, as well as the old towpath that is now a hike and bike trail.
3. What keeps you in Akron?
For one, Akron is an extremely affordable place to live. But other than that, I have yet to live anywhere else than in Akron or in areas around it. Though there is a college crowd around, Akron still holds onto it’s own identity without being wrapped up in college life, which can get old after awhile.
4. How has Akron influenced your writing?
I am really unsure how to answer this question. Perhaps the only thing I can think of is that having been settled in here for so long, and the affordability factor, I have been able to invest in traveling and experiences outside of Akron, which I then come home and digest. There is enough space in and around Akron that it doesn’t feel claustrophobic ever, as it might in other major cities at times.
5. If you could live in any city, what would it be and why?
I have the dream to live in some major city, at some time in the next few years (I hope), such as Chicago, New York, or some place like that. I’m not to picky, I just really want to experience that kind of life for at least a bit. Chicago is always nice because it is familiar, being a Midwest city. Basically, I would love to not need a car and just use public transit. Akron has pretty bad public transit in my experience.
6. How’s the literary scene in Akron?
While maybe not that great/thriving, it always feels like it is because of my friends and I and how stoked we are to be involved with the greater Lit community as well as each other. The Big Big Mess Readings Series has been really bolstered Akron’s connection to the larger community by bringing in awesome writers to read and hangout here.
7. Describe Akron in three words.
Salad, half cheese.
8. What are you most stoked to show me in Akron?
My porch. And maybe some hills.
Vouched contributor, Ashley Ford, made this journey with me (and big thxxxxx to her for these pictures and videos). First big adventure was hiking in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Above Ashley and Sturm dance on a wobbly rock. These guys like to wander around, like to wonder about their surroundings. Sturm full of stories about finding horse teeth in a river, about the history of the land. Krutel the constant kind guy, the warning signal of slippery rocks, the teller of the whats-up.
If you’re paying any attention, you’ll be astounded by these two dudes’ sense of self, how they absorb and exist, experience and share.
STURM SPEAKS
1. How long have you lived in Akron?
I’ve been in and around Akron most of life with short stints in Michigan and Oregon that always made me appreciate Ohio more. I’m actually about to move out of Ohio for a PhD program in Florida, so I’m finding myself looking back on my time here, getting nostalgic and way too fluffy, but really realizing how amazing it’s been. I was in Massachusetts a couple weeks ago and Christopher Deweese and I were talking about my upcoming move and he said something like, “How do you feel about leaving? Akron is your jam, right?” I said something about how it’ll be okay because the trees in Tallahassee are rad. But he’s right, Akron will always be my jam.
2. What are your favorite pieces of Akron?
52 Corson front porch. Kendall Hills secret creek valley in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Abandoned downtown roof spot. Skating down Mill Street. The Aqueduct garden.
3. What keeps you in Akron?
For the last seven years school has kept me in Akron, my undergrad in History and my just-finished MFA. But it wasn’t really that simple. I left Akron post-undergrad not really planning to come back soon. Went to Oregon. Got my certificate to teach English as a second language. Planned to go overseas to use that certificate. But then this girl happened. The best girl. So I came back for her, jumped into the MFA on a whim, and here I am. No more girl, but that’s how things happen. Realistically, there are only so many dance parties you can have in one city before moving on. It’s been a really good seven year dance party…
4. How has Akron influenced your writing?
I spent my undergrad reading Ginsberg, Whitman, and Blake and seeing Akron through their prophetic voices as a place that kind of embodied the line between the human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, hope and decay, pastoral and urban. So a lot of my terrible early poems were these ecstatic, pseudo-transcendental attempts to show how awesome it was to be alive while wandering through a continual mixture of sunlight and desolation a la James Wright if James Wright had spent a weekend camping with Kenneth Koch while they wrote all the songs for Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! I still feel the current poems connected to all that in ways, but I don’t think anyone would say my work is connected to Akron or any place really, though I know my environment does influence the poems. I wouldn’t have started writing the poems from my first chap, WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!, if it hadn’t been May and spring was just starting to set in and everything was turning over golden again. So Akron is there somehow. I guess you could say there’s an Akron glow over it, but you wouldn’t know unless you knew me in this place. I think a lot of people’s poems are like that.
5. If you could live in any city, what would it be and why?
Give me every city. I’m too curious to decide.
6. How’s the literary scene in Akron?
I think the literacy scene in Akron has, over the last few years, really started to become something, or at least it’s become possible that a poet in Northampton, Massachusetts knows what Akron, Ohio is. Is that even significant? I don’t know. A couple years ago when I was starting to become aware of the wider contemporary poetry scene I felt like Akron wasn’t really on the map. But not for any reason, you know. Somebody just needed to stand up and start saying, “Hey, have you been to Akron? What do you know about poetry in Akron? Pretty dope, huh?” Hart Crane wrote a poem that is dear to my heart’s heart called “Porphyro in Akron” where he talks about rubber workers on Main Street and our “smoke-ridden hills” and the etymology of Akron, which comes from the Greek acros, “high place” (Akron is in Summit County) and really shows how much of a working class town Akron was in the early 1920s, which is right when my family moved to Akron from West Virginia to work in the rubber factories, and then at the end of the poem says: “The stars are drowned in a slow rain, / And a hash of noises is slung up from the street. / You ought, really, to try to sleep, / Even though, in this town, poetry’s a / Bedroom occupation.” Throughout the poem Crane is both celebrating and lamenting the working class and industrial landscape he sees – these people are alive and joyful but they’re also doomed to the inhuman forces of a newly forming modern America – and I’ve always loved how Crane modulates between despair and a tired joy, like when they overpay the Sunday fiddlers “because we felt like it,” but I can’t deal with how he ultimately gives in at the end of the poem when “poetry’s a / Bedroom occupation.” I put my shoulder to the wheel with THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES trying to get amazing writers into Akron to read and to get people out of their bedrooms to see what new poetry is all about and I’m so happy that the BBM is now continuing under the control of Alexis Pope and Mike Krutel. Other reasons Akron isn’t a town where poetry is a bedroom occupation: Barn Owl Review, edited by Mary Biddinger (for real, if you ever want to know why Akron is awesome, ask Mary), and the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts. Become psyched.
7. Describe Akron in three words.
Pretty rad, regardless.
8. What are you most stoked to show me in Akron?
HOW WE’RE NEVER ACTUALLY APART.
Oh hey, Akron has some killer food, I’m telling you, like this awesome grilled cheese (with grilled apples! C’MON) and goldfish crackers from Lockview (rad Great Lakes beer not shown), like MR ZUBS where you can get a Mac and Cheese sandwich and tator tots!
How does one bring up Joshua Kleinberg? After the entire state of Florida had had enough, Kleinberg has been bouncing around Ohio and recently got stuck in Akron. He’s a cool poet too and a nice guy, putting together a reading for myself, himself, Sturm, Krutel, and Akron writer Alexis Pope (along with sets by local metal bands Rhomer and Gasmask).
Hey look, it’s Sturm ollieing over Ashley, getting psyched for his reading.
Basically, Akron felt like a big Fourth of July party, and that’s a good thing. I ended up getting a tattoo, my first!, at the Sturm/Krutel/Kleinberg-vouched Good Life shop in Akron. You can see a little more chatter about that here.
While this weekend was jam-packed with readings (the Akron reading on Friday, a Heather Feather Review reading in Cleveland that Kleinberg and I did with folks like Mary Biddinger and Aubrey Hirsch on Saturday, and Sturm’s reading in Dayton with Noah Falck and Matt Hart), the refreshing and rad thing about living some days with Sturm and Krutel is there sense of go-go hosting outside of writing stuff, the aforementioned hiking, a pre-Cleveland reading Lake Eerie visit (pics too sexy for here!), general goodtime hang. ABSOLUTELY A BLAST.
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