The Birth of Medusa

Earlier to today Stadiums & Shrines premiered what you see above—The Birth of Medusa—my inaugural attempt at combining my love of sound, motion, and poetry. It also marks the first (non-live) collaboration with audio researcher and sonic wav manipulator, RxRy as well as, the first film I’ve produced using my own footage. I hope the outcome is as much an experience for you as it was for me during its creation.

Glitter Pills

Glitter Pills

by Ben Fama

To live a serious life
that’s a fucked up thing
I would have to rent out a cabin
beneath terrible angels
if I get old wipe the dust off my tits
I should have a serious log cabin
the cabin’s name is Ben Fama.
find directions on the internet
when you want to leave you can
I’ll stay there just me and my heart
bigger than the sun

 

What Ben Fama won’t tell you is that he lives a serious life, and it’s fucked up. Most of us do. To live a carefree life takes a lot of business savvy. Ben’s got a lot of business savvy, but his life isn’t carefree. It’s meticulously crafted by outside forces, by fate. And for Ben, fate is a serious thing. Position oneself as best one can. Consult the Tarot like some people consult Oprah. Know the characteristics of the Zodiac as if they were family members. It’s no wonder that Ben’s wrote a collection of poems named Aquarius Rising.

“How much do you rely on planets?” Ben asks, almost capturing the theme of Aquarius Rising (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) in a single blow. The collection is an astrological love letter, read like a divination, the collection of poems being a sort of arcana: the celebrity, the paparazzi, the juvenile, the suitor, the broken-hearted, the cynic. Aquarius Rising is also a play on Kenneth Anger’s own Scorpio Rising, and its themes of idol worship factor heavily in this book. There is humor in this book too, though of a self-deprecating kind: “Woman of Tractus / I come bearing .gifs”. The pun turns the bearer into a voyeur. Other times when Ben is making light of something, it’s as though he’s cracking a joke during a break-up, alleviating it’s emotional upheaval: “o mountain, how did you become so serious?”. And what at first seems facetious can appear, upon closer examination, to be Ben casting a sort of spell to turn the circumstances of life in his favor, as in these lines from “Cub”:
 

How To Hide an Elephant

How To Hide an Elephant
by Emily Pettit

All over town footprints are flying.  When walking
on tiptoes we ignite suspicious minds. Hovering,
hanging out nowhere near the ground.
I’m on my way to the end of the world again.
Thirteen red barns in a row.  A story on the news.
A mouse has died in the wall. I have a box
full of porcupine quills. I have a box full of
tiny tools. A box full of bees. Becoming information
is not necessarily a choice.  A chance meeting
is not necessarily enough to change things.
If your reflection went missing what would you do?
Feel like a spider who has forgotten how to weave
a web.  Try to remember where you last leaned,
where you last left no trace.  Here is a tiny elephant.
Put it in your pocket and it can be the elephant in the room
that no one ever talks about.

How to read Emily Pettit.  There is no easy explanation. Or rather, there is no correct way to read Emily Pettit. Just do it. Read Emily Pettit.  If that’s not enough instruction, Emily tells you how in her aptly titled book How (published by Octopus Books), a collection of poems with titles like “How to Stop Laughing When You Laugh at Inappropriate Times” or “How to Carefully Consider Space Travel.”  If you are like me, then this is the instruction manual you have long sought in your adult life.  The time has come to leave those Nintendo manuals in a Rubbermaid bin tucked away in your parents’ basement.  You won’t need them anymore.

What we learn from How might be what we would learn about ourselves if we were to dive into a pool of paint wearing a football uniform.  You simply have to try it to find out. Emily’s poems are like following steps to becoming telepathic.  There is no right answer, but if an offered solution causes people to say, “I don’t believe you” then Emily’s How is one giant retort: “Then I guess I’m unbelievable.” Can we really find out how to find a robber by reading “How to Find a Robber”? It’s as if these poems mask a greater sense of instruction, how to mislead a world that might be after you, creep up on you, toss you a doozy. Think of the movie Commando, when Arnold Schwarzenegger breaks into the weapons depot and arms himself with a ton of firepower. Then think “what was a weapons depot doing in downtown LA?  In a mall, no less?”  We shouldn’t think of the sense, but of the urgency.  Arnold needed a weapon’s depot, and LA provided.  This is How. This is Emily covering all her bases, throwing in lines like When it comes to performing some of the most difficult and laborious operations of abstract thought, I fail when instructing us how to find robbers. This is handy information.  Take for instance these sagacious lines from “How to Hide a Fire”:

The curtain is blowing though
the window is closed.  People are
doing magic and blushing.  It’s a bad day
for chickens.  Disco is dead.
And this is why one shouldn’t talk shit.

Her knowledge and know-how isn’t limited to her own work. Emily also does double-time as an editor for Factory Hollow Press, runs the online poetry zine Notnostrums, and helps at her brother Guy’s amazing book mecca, Flying Object, in Hadley, Massachusetts. Given her exposure to so much poetry, and her love of sharing it, I don’t think I’ve ever come within handshaking distance of Emily without receiving a new chapbook. Her enthusiasm for new poetry (and by new I also mean young) is not unlike many a music blogger’s enthusiasm to post new songs on a daily basis.  She carries it with swagger and keeps her tastes refined.  Hers is not  “A Flower in Springtime” type of poetry.  Enter her world and you’ll soon know what I mean.

Art: Nathaniel Whitcomb

Introducing a new poetry feature curated by contributing writer Michael Barron

This time last year I was just beginning to put the final touches on my ideas for Think or Smile. Sketching thoughts on what kinds of things to share, what feelings I wanted people to take away from it and the voice it should have. For someone who gets bored quite easily, I think a year is a long time without a change. So a couple months back I returned to the sketchbook, jotting down thoughts with the hopes of bringing in some new ideas to the site. Something not only different for the site but for me too. I realize that I’ve drifted towards postings things I’m familiar with, music, art and the areas they intersect. Lately one of these areas for me has been literature and poetry, I find it’s a wonderful launching pad for creative explorations. But I know very little about the subject and typically gravitate towards the classics. Well I aim to change that, dig a little deeper and hopefully take you along for the ride. And the best way I know how to get good quality is to ask someone who lives it, breathes it. So that’s what I did.

I’m delighted to announce the addition of a monthly poetry/short prose feature curated by writer, editor, drummer, ex-acrobat, Michael Barron. Each post will be featured along side art created in response to Michael’s selection, either by myself or other guests artists. We hope you’ll join us on our explorations.

You can read more about Michael on the about page and see his first poetry feature here.

Join Me on a Walk to the Recycling Bin

The Pigeon
Tired of changing, I slid off my chair and landed
in a pile of old food. Something nice
began to happen to my bones. Knuckles
softened and dislodged. Wads of material pleasure
traveled around my veins like swedish fish,
as I gazed outside at the sidewalk and its environment.
A burgundy glow was climbing the side of a building,
ejecting sparrows from their darling nooks,
and it was exactly like the difficult concepts exiting
my face. I don’t know how to endure this prognosis.
A sedan of great sorrow will arrive in the city.
Trees planted in rows will shake off their bark
to show off repulsive holes. The excess lust
expended into the space around our beds
will freeze into a more perfect megalith,
its magnetic rays shooting up into the night.
But it hasn’t happened yet. We can still be ourselves.
Please, join me on a walk to the recycling bin.

-James Copeland

I forget how I first met James Copeland.  But the first I heard of him, or heard anything by him was a poetry/music event for the poetry collective, Ugly Duckling. in March of 2009.  It was his first poetry reading, and by some strange cosmic coincidence, Holy Spirits’ first show.   There were four poets reading that night, all well in their own right, but James’ reading stuck with me.  Here was a man dressed in soft, forlorn clerk attire, with a relaxed book-on-tape voice reading work with memorable lines like “Danger spelled backwards doesn’t spell Undanger // that’s just not the way things operate // in this version of time”, and “somehow the moon looks just like a nostril.”

I didn’t become friends with James Copeland that night, but I started following his work of which, at that time, was scarce.  Or there was plenty, but he was not sharing it.  Sometime later, he self-published his first collection of poetry titled Why I Steal. He wouldn’t let me buy a copy, instead he made an obvious turn of his head implying that perhaps I should grab one and walk away before he “noticed”.  Reading Why I Steal was like reading an extended Far Side comic.  There was a strange silly sort of humor that hinted at something deeper and more telling.  His poems creep up on you the way an existential crises might set in while washing your car or eating a bowl of cereal. For this reason, I find his work terrifying in the most relatable way possible, the terror of benign everyday occurrences and objects.

James is now on working on his third collection to be titled The Pigeon, a sequence of untitled but separate poems. Above is the first poem out of twenty-five. Perhaps you might purchase the collection when it becomes a physical object, or perhaps you might see it performed live with me on drums and another musician creating ambient sounds. It’s like a band but with a poet as the vocalist instead of singer. Perhaps visions of beatniks from the 50’s wearing ugly berets and black turtlenecks while beating on a pair of bongos comes to mind. But rest assured, we are a far cry from that.

James is currently the Managing Director for Ugly Duckling Presse and has an art blog dedicated to found trash “walter scott”.

Accompanying art: Nathaniel Whitcomb