I Do

As we’ve mentioned, our fearless leader is getting married this weekend. Bells and rice all around; it will be a beautiful affair in a quaint Southern setting. However, it will be nothing like Caddy Compson’s tumultuous one, but we’ll be enjoying the “sassprilluh” like Benjy. The Guardian listed their Top Ten weddings in literature. What are your favorites?

It's Friday I'm Drinking

Friday is here and for us that means we’re getting ready to Do Nothing But Read  All Weekend. You may think we do non-literature related things in our spare time but that is untrue. We enjoy a get-smart-quick scheme that involves trying to read as much as humanly possible in under twenty minutes. This is comparable to college binge drinking and is considered illegal in 26 states.

Late Friday evening, check out a few local publishers in your area. We like Future Tense Publishing which hails from Portland, Oregon cuz it’s a small press but a big deal. From there, we suggest catching an imaginary red-eye plane to Scotland to visit  The Scotland Poetry Library. Why? They have one of the best podcasts on poetry and that accent is just so dang charming.

For breakfast, there is nothing more delicious than a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. You agree, no?

(more…)

The woman who used to be our aunt
—Amid burning dust in Ciudad Juárez
Outside a cinderblock home
Where I had to use the busted toilet—

She & her friends cradled & cooed
Over a lifelike doll of the Christchild.

Inside, the faithful propped
Their relics on a card table,
Went to pray in the corrugated
Shade of the patio.
Came back to blood
Raised from the icons & rosaries.

The second miracle was the dancing sun
—If you stared into it
It would leap & zigzag.
Faith healers wired for sound call the truly

Infirm to rise, & they do.
Language adheres to itself only, yet shrouds
Our littlest gasp.
There are accounts of cousins
Getting laid before the funeral.

There’s our origin before oceans
& our brains that flesh
Out—sniff, peep, tongue, etcetera—

The only world amid
Odd relations & an unstable
Deep star, amid atmospheres
Of absolute dust.

The next miracle made the papers.

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Daniel Luévano’s work recently appeared online with Verse, and more poems will appear soon in The Shattered Wig Review and The Saint Ann’s Review. He lives in Fort Collins, CO, with his wife, daughter and son.

Bright Lights, Big Stage

We’re going to see My Morning Jacket tonight. Not long ago our interstate system made it difficult to see a band we like. See, Charleston, SC is located at the end of one interstate (the east-west 26) and an hour and a half from another (the north-south 95). This is not convenient for a traveling act unless they are from Charleston, which is not your Seattle, Athens or Chapel Hill of music. In the meantime, we read, and, naturally, we come to some links for you, including what NPR is recommending this week. A wrap up of a PEN discussion on women and fiction is next. Random House gives some of the digital rights to William Styron’s works to his family. For the first time on the internet, here is Dennis Dutton and Michael Palencia-Roth’s epic interview with Jorge Luis Borges from 1976. And, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the announcement of cursed W’s memoir. Rock on. – Andrew Geer

Ed Skoog talks like a poet. Even if you’re in a loud bar and on the TV Barrack Obama is delivering his State of the Union address, Ed Skoog still makes you feel — in a very good way — like you’re attending a poetry workshop.

Skoog uses the silences in conversations without creating awkward pauses. He gives you such rad responses it’s hard not to sit there kinda speechless and wonder if he’s, like, rehearsed everything.

Much like his poetry, (his first book, Mister Skylight, Copper Canyon Press, came out in 2009) Skoog is approachable and has a voice that carries enormous poetic endurance. Take for example the last poem in Mister Skylight, which stretches on for 17 pages. When asked how his poems manage to sustain such lengths — haven’t we all wanted to write that long poem, the one that is wonderful and long and doesn’t resemble a haywire novella? — his reply is that writing a longer poem is a natural occurrence, and one that takes place over time.

“Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or partner or someone else where you continue to talk about the same thing for days and days? My long poems are like that. Sometimes conversations aren’t just ended, they carry on, wandering. It’s another way of processing the world.”

That comfortably gnawing curiosity — we go to bed thinking about it, we wake up thinking about it — is exactly how we’d describe Ed Skoog’s poems. They’re sustainable, rock solid, muscular. Their vigorous physicality isn’t easy to come by or mimic.

That said, what are Skoog’s “rules” for the long poem?

“As with short poems, there aren’t any rules except that every line must be come by honestly. Long poems are works of the body as well as the imagination. They can also be symphonic, in the Mahlerian desire to include the whole world in each of his works, thunder and stones. I also think of concept albums, the big psychedelic prog rock masterpieces of Hawkwind and the Flaming Lips.”

Skoog uses the symphonic element to refer to the questionable “I” in his poems. There isn’t just one speaker, but rather a tapestry of narrative voices.

“I try to follow ideas and feelings as far as possible in a long poem, and to give myself the authority to go farther than is perhaps appropriate. At a certain point in the long poems I’ve written, the process moves from writing to listening.”

Skoog’s style is anchored in his belief that “poets are sole practitioners, and it’s not useful to generalize about what poets do, who they are, etc. And yet we do. The more I write the more I see the obligation to take the simple and personal path.”

And that, my fellow poets, is a path each of us should follow closely.

The World Is Bound With Secret Knots
by Ed Skoog

The different key is a terrible diving.

All of it rides across the bow, always beginning,
and your design ashes, gnashes, radishes

the half-finished process              bom bom bu ba bu
Celebrity of returning beauty, coming back
unable to believe a couple nights,

she falls off the stage in front of the label guys

in a funk to cover the body with.
Handclapping resists the machine.

After the record store he lives in the stone house
heightened. His feet catch themselves.
His head was interrupted.

I, on the other hand, admire the butcher

who has to win back his store in a fist fight
over and over. I would window into her shadow

blue as images of hanged beef
in parade rhythm through room
of tobacco and sweat, the poetry

inside my lone best ear,

silent living and its itinerant smells.
I keep the streets clean, that rise and fall,

repeating themselves. Sandman, meet me
at the turbulent window. We’ll shake
hands with all the groundhogs

shipping out. The sky is her eyes’ rascal

stranded by the creek at ten degrees,
an adhesive cold that nourishes me,

that blames and forgives.
Cowbell is the dominant sound of evening
at crest of loss in the dislodged country,

the same thing, bent, then, doubled,

a notional geography
what it sounds like is a steamship

crossed with wolf. The last standing tree

is her face looking in, her last message
smiled from her roe coat.

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Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and individual poems in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Paris Review.