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Album Review: Jonathan Livingston, UNTITLED

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:16:00 -0400

by Tommy Jacobi

There is a definite mystique to Jonathan Livingston’s second record. It’s nameless, it’s self-released. Its cover is a cartoon of the Red Sea parting and has nothing written on it. Sonically, it is full of voice cracks, guitar buzzes, neck creaks, and closing doors—the sounds of one microphone set up in a bedroom—and the songs themselves consist of only a voice and a guitar. This frame probably sounds familiar: one man alone in a room with some acoustic instrument, singing raw into a cheap microphone, seemingly unembarrassed by imperfection, yet somehow surrounded with personal mystery. In early blues, it was Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James. Then, after Bob Dylan, there was Nick Drake, John Fahey, Daniel Johnston, and Houston’s own Jandek. In recent years, there’s been Will Oldham, Jeff Mangum, Phil Elverum, and Elliot Smith. To different extents, they have been called reclusive, insane, disturbed, unstable, solipsistic, grandiose, dangerous, mythic, and brilliant. Their strangeness, isolation, and singularity are powerful commodities. Documentaries and biographies have abounded. For so many listeners, the myth is more enjoyable than the music itself.

Luckily, Jonathan Livingston makes music, not myths, and he makes it out of the angry, egocentric dirt that this tradition of the “reclusive man” has stamped into the ground. He treats loneliness, alienation, hopes, dreams, and death with a dark joy, a blunted grace, a painstakingly simple beauty that sways in hard passions between lullaby and chant. What’s more, he deals with love, belief, prophecy, confusion, pain, doubt, Adventist doctrine, and Christian faith with a clarity and depth that I’ve learned to never expect from “Christian music”.

Livingston constantly toes the line between the religious and the secular. His songs range from the sludgy, anguished “O My Mighty God”—which commands, “Lord, tell me that’s a lie”—to the chanted a capella of “John 4:1” (“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits…”). He sings of the darkest moments in scripture—“when the end is truly near, the folks are all full of fear”—gently and without irony. He sings about spiritual triumph with a tone of defeat—“Jesus walk in my heart, and Lord, guide my thoughts.” He is harsh and existential in his evaluations—“boiling blisters that cover your sister’s holy body—she must not be holy.” Some lines even seem to verge on sacrilege, like the sudden C-major blast of “Father can’t be bothered, he’s judging the dead.”

Indeed, there is a palpable tension between the impulse to mourn and the impulse to praise, to scream gospel or to growl the blues. But this tension isn’t destructive. It feels like real human ambivalence. Even at its most forceful, the album hisses with microphone static, and we are reminded that it’s Livingston who has made these songs. This, for me, is the album’s greatest beauty. Like those reclusive bluesmen before him, Livingston uses songs to confess, but to hear convictions break and grow, to hear a voice physically change over the course of a song and finally accept what it’s saying—that is why I keep listening.

To get a copy of Livingston’s second record, email me at tommyjacobitommyjacobi@gmail.com.

Interview: Poet David Kirby

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 14:47:00 -0400

by Taylor Gorman

David Kirby is a poet, critic, and professor of English at Florida State University. He has published over 20 books, won four Pushcart Prizes, received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is in rank with the funniest of American poets. His collections include Sarah Bernhardt’s Leg, Saving the Young Men of Vienna, Big-Leg Music, The Ha-Ha, and The House on Boulevard St. He is a Delta-published LSU alum and will be reading Friday, April 23, 6:30 PM at the Old President’s House, with Taylor Gorman.

TG: Poetry, on the whole, is rarely seen as a humorous medium, yet most of your poems have a clearly humorous and playful tone to them, such as connecting “S’il vous plait” and “Sylvia Plath, ”or suggesting that someone named Stan should be in charge of hell, rather than Satan. Is humor something poetry is in desperate need of?

DK: Yeah, people are always pointing out to me that poetry’s not really funny. Thanks a lot! But usually they’re the same people who complain that poetry doesn’t rhyme any more, even though it does. What I’m saying is that people who misunderstand or miscategorize poetry usually don’t read poetry; otherwise, they’d know how wrong they are. Barbara Hamby and I just co-edited an anthology called Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else. It’s 400+ pages of poems by great American poets over the last 60 years, all of whom are serious and funny at the same time. That’s pretty natural, don’t you think? When you’re talking to your friends, don’t you lament, joke, celebrate, rue, and get pig-biting mad, all in the same conversation? I do.

TG: While your subject matter tends toward the comical, it often counteracts comedy with dramatic moments, such as in “My Dead Dad,” where you talk about the death of your father and wonder whether he is on the moon eating cheese. How important is this balance to you in your work, the need to counter humor with drama?

DK: Again, that’s just the language I speak; that’s my voice. I don’t think, “Okay, I’ve got too many jokes in this mix — time to add a couple of dashes of misery!” Anything worth listening to is going to offer the full roller-coaster ride, with plenty of peaks and lots of valleys. To say poetry should be one narrow thing is like shouting, “Okay, Pierre, enough with the French already! Everybody says you have to speak German!”

TG: After your first two books of poetry, “Sarah Bernhardt’s Leg” and “Saving the Young Men of Vienna,” you began writing poems almost exclusively with saw-tooth margins. What inspired you to do so, and what has kept you from shifting to prose poetry, which might also fit in with the voice and speed-of-delivery in your poems?

DK: I used to have a dozen reasons for those margins, most of which I’ve forgotten. One simple reason is that I love long, compound sentences, and the sawtooth effect keeps from getting too many of what editors call “word stacks” down the left margin, such as a bunch of “ands” piled on top of one another. I guess each poem is a kind of reading script, too; even if the reader isn’t listening to me, she gets a kind of jazzy aural effect from what she sees on the page. Plus it’s a signature look, isn’t it? Nobody else is doing it. Or if they are, it looks as though they’re stealing my stuff, which makes my stuff worth stealing. But prose poetry? Nope, not for me. Prose poets give up all semblance of rhythm, whereas I want to stay highly rhythmical.

TG: You have a very non-pretentious and “blue jeans” style to your poetry, which starkly contrasts with the “difficultly” one usually associates with contemporary poetry. Do you feel poetry would benefit from being more approachable?

DK: Hey, it’s show biz, isn’t it? Emerson said the first thing you want to do is not hide what you want to say, and if that’s good enough for Emerson, it’s good enough for me. I don’t get the whole I-wrote-this-poem-and-if-you-don’t-understand-it-you’re-stupid school. I heard a poet recently say she wanted to be “the queen of the inaccessible.” Seemed to be working for her! Nobody in the audience had the slightest idea what she was saying.

TG: How much of the voice in your poems would you say is your own and how much would you attribute to a persona of David Kirby?

DK: Is there a difference? As with all of us, I think, what you’re getting in the poem is a dressed-up version of me: not me when I hem and haw or have gravy stains on my sweatshirt, but me clattering across the floor like Fred Astaire, singing and dancing and throwing Ginger Rogers around at the same time. I presume that’s the David Kirby you want to see, not the one asleep in front of the television.

TG: Following up on that—do you ever worry that, should a zombie apocalypse ever actually occur (as pop-culture so badly wants it to), your father will arise and, assuming zombies are as literate as their former selves, see that you have dedicated a poem to him entitled “My Dead Dad” and try to seek revenge by eating you and your family’s brains? Is there a chance he would just chuckle, assuming zombies laugh and take things light-heartedly?

DK: My dad and mom were the most loving parents you could imagine. They weren’t very demonstrative, but they supported everything my brother and I did. If my dad came back today and asked me how it’s going and I said I was tired of the high-stakes, high-risk, high-reward poetry racket and was thinking about going to firefighting school, he’d lend me the money to buy my Dalmatian.

TG: You are married to the wonderful poet Barbara Hamby. I dated a talented writer once and, after the first month, I started becoming glad for the first time that the 2nd amendment exists. Just in case. My question is: how do keep your lives balanced and not completely tangled?

DK: Yeah, I get asked this one a lot, too, and as with the humor question, I have to say it’s a baffler. Why people rush out of the room with their hands over their mouths when they find that two poets live under the same roof is beyond me. We get up, we drink coffee, we take a walk, we talk about what poems we’re writing, we go teach our poetry classes and come home and make dinner and take about how our poetry classes went, we go on trips together, we get ideas for poems on the trips, we write poems about the ideas and show the poems to each other… . Where’s the pathology here? This whole scene obviously drips with horror, but I’m not seeing it.

TG: Someone from my generation would find it hard to not associate you with Kirby the pink…thing, the Nintendo character:

If you could swallow anyone and take their powers, who would it be?

DK:That’s easy: Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitman. I have a big bowl of those boys as often as I can.

p(art)y

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:18:00 -0400

Delta Journal is hosting its biannual Delta Art Party on LSU’s campus in the beautiful and newly renovated Shaver Theater in the Music and Dramatic Arts Building. The art party is a preview of this year’s Delta Journal with original poetry and prose adapted for performance by the authors. Collaborating with videographers, musicians and artists, the authors have refashioned their work as a one-night-only event celebrating the cohesion of the arts. The event is accompanied by a reception and silent art auction. All proceeds go to support Delta Journal.

Where | Shaver Theater, Music and Dramatic Arts LSU, Dalrymple Drive, Baton Rouge, LA here: http://www.lsu.edu/campus/maps/MDAB02.html

What | The poetry and prose of Delta Journal adapted for performance.

When | March 31, 2010 6 pm

How | Free and open to the public

The performance starts at 6 pm sharp and includes the adaptations of Lara Glenum, Lester Tisdale, Jade Benoit, Lucie Monk, Taylor Gorman, Blake Stephens, Robert Hudson, Jennifer Tamayo, Maureen Claffey, Chris Prudhomme, Julia Terese, Taylor Pate, and Chris Lott.

Come support Delta Journal and p(art)y.

Literary Events in Baton Rouge March 16th – 21st

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:03:22 -0400

Four regular readings in Baton Rouge this week—something for every humor!

For the choleric, Readers and Writers offers a larger scale of reading with an excellent array of professional writers recognized internationally. The Underpass offer indulgence for all the sanguine appetites: innovative local poets and prosers, amazing food, and an excellent bar. The melancholic will find comfort (and caffeine) at the Highland Coffees Reading Series, and may they emerge better for it. The River is the only place for the phlegmatic and the nocturnal.

In addition, Perks Coffee and Tea hosts a St. Patrick’s Day Irish Writers’ Celebration & Reading for all the acknowledged hiberniophiles (the supine, ha) out there. All these readings are free and open to the public, but do yourself and the kind people who host you a favor and buy some coffee/beer/books.

RIVER WRITERS | march 16th | 9 pm | boudreaux and thibodeaux’s (balcony bar)
Contact: Vincent Cellucci

Night-owls:
James Claffey
Maureen Foley
Andrew Banecker

IRISH WRITERS’ CELEBRATION & READING | march 17th | 7:30 pm | perks coffee
Contact: James Claffey

Irish people:
Bill Yeats
George Shaw
Sam Beckett
James Claffey (double-header)

HIGHLAND COFFEES READING SERIES | march 18th | 6 pm | highland coffees
Contact: Laura Smith

LSU Undergrads:
Laura Smith
Jalissa Bates
Lindsey Hopton
Jade Benoit

THE UNDERPASS | march 18th | 7pm | chelsea’s cafe (small bar)
Contact: Susan Kirby-Smith

LSU 2nd Year MFAs:
Lauren Tussing-White
William Burke
John David Harding
James Claffey (triple-header!)

READERS & WRITERS | march 21st | 5 pm | dodson auditorium (on the lsu quad)
Contact: Maureen Foley

LSU Alumni Authors:
Clarence Nero
Ethan Gilsdorf

“In celebration of the University’s Sesquicentennial and the MFA program’s first 25 years, novelist Clarence Nero brings his bold urban fiction (praised by Maya Angelou) to the Dodson Auditorium. In New Orleans, Nero grew up in the infamous Desire Housing Project surrounded by drugs, violence and poverty. His first novel, Cheekie: A Child Out of the Desire, is loosely based on his childhood experiences. The book was selected as “One of the Best First Novels of 1998,” by Library Journal. His screenplay “Temptations of Desire” was recommended to Sundance Lab by Jonathan Demme, Academy Award Winning Director of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Beloved.” Nero’s second novel, “Three Sides To Every Story” was endorsed by the late E. Lynn Harris, who the author credits for jump starting his career in mainstream publishing. Nero has an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University. He teaches at the Baton Rouge Community College. Visit http://www.clarencenero.com.

Joining Nero is Ethan Gilsdorf, whose gaming memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, has been called “poignant and hilarious…disturbing and entertaining.” After playing Dungeons & Dragons religiously in the 1970s and 1980s, and getting an MFA in poetry from LSU, Ethan Gilsdorf went on to become a poet, teacher, and journalist. He’s worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film and restaurant reviewer. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, his travel, arts, and pop culture stories appear regularly in the New York Times , Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor, and have been published in other magazines and newspapers including National Geographic Traveler , Psychology Today, and the Washington Post. You can follow Ethan’s adventures at http://www.ethangilsdorf.com.”

Interview: Stephen Blades

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:31:57 -0500

by Chelsea Lewis

Mountain Ring
1 1/4” x 1” x 3/16”

Stephen Blades, sculpture senior, LSU, is a craftsman and metal-worker concerned about the decline of hand-made, personalized “every day” objects. Pulling from fantasy culture and historical imagery, Stephen creates jewelry and objects that are beautiful and humorous, hard yet delicately detailed.

Manchac Magazine: Where are you from and what brings you to LSU?

Stephen Blades: Baton Rouge. This is just where I ended up. I already knew that I was going be in the art department. I had originally planned to do the metalsmithing program here, but the semester I transferred they stopped taking applications. So, I got thrown into the sculpture program.

MM: Why metalsmithing?

SB: When I was in high school I had an apprenticeship with Tom Lorio – he’s a local metalsmith – basically just working with him and making some, you know, really bad beginning work and learning tools and process. So, even before I got to LSU, I already had projects going. So, I learned and started from him [Lorio], and I went to BRCC for two or three semesters and transferred here. Now I’m here and finally graduating.

MM: Let’s talk about your most current work…

SB: All the imagery has a lot to do with fantasy and history. I’m interested in reclaiming history, reclaiming lost culture and lost heritage because the barely-remembered traditions that we have today came from somewhere, along with all of our folklore and modern fantasy. I also have an interest in the history of Europe, warrior culture, the Norse gods, and all those kind of things. That’s what I think about whenever I’m making things.

Shamrock Canteen
8” x 7” x 2”

MM: What about the kiwis, are they a metaphor for something?

SB: The kiwis are kind of…I guess it’s my power animal. That’s probably not the best way to describe it. I find animals really interesting, and they’re [kiwis] just one of the weirdest animals. I really like playing around with how they’re shaped and stylizing their form or adding arms to make them look more human or putting them in armor. I like that they’re kind of an awkward bird, and they’re going extinct. These birds are going away just like a lot the people in my profession. People who do metalworking of all forms are still around and still practicing, but for a large part, we’re either having to rediscover things or it’s being lost.

MM: What’s up with the armored kiwi?

SB: I like the absurdity of it. I like animals a lot. I think they have really nice forms. After I made it, I came across this jeweler whose MFA show was all cat and mouse armor. Everything was just beautifully made. It’s not really supposed to have animals in it. It’s supposed to be a little joke.

Armoured Kiwi
13” x 6” x 6 1/2”

MM: What do you parents think that you do?

SB: They know I make stuff, but I’m not saying the understand it. My mom understands it from one point of view, my dad another. Both of them are really supportive, My mom comes from a very arts and crafts point of view, so she looks at my work and goes, ‘oh, that’s really cool,’ and just doesn’t get the rest of it. But, I feel like my parents are supportive.

MM: So, you’ve done a lot of jewelry, what do you enjoy about it?

SB: That’s actually what I did my apprenticeship in with Tom [Lorio]. That’s what I was interested in making at that time, and that’s my background. I like doing it, but I also like doing other types of work. I like the personal aspect of jewelry. People put so much energy or love into their jewelry, it’s part of their routine, like if they don’t have their ring on it throws their stride off. People put a lot of energy into jewelry of all kinds, especially when it’s inherited or specially made for them. That’s why I like making objects far more than sculpture because it has that personal connection. Objects kind of change people’s realities.

Lily ring
silver
3/4” x 3/4” x 1/4”

MM: Do you like to use mediums other than metal?

SB: About four years ago, I got really intensely involved in ceramics. I really enjoy slipcasting because you can get the same object over and over again and just go insane with how you address the surface. My background is about addressing the surface of things.

MM: What’s your favorite medium?

SB: I like steel a lot more, but metal in general. Vessel making is a lot of fun. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while.

MM: What about techniques or processes?

SB: Repousse and sandcasting. One of the things I really enjoy is inlay work. It’s a technique I learned about a year and a half ago. If you look at historical objects, there are a lot of inlay objects throughout Western civilization, but it went from inlaying wire and sheets to using super thin foil. In Japan, they still do it today, but they had a strong tradition up until the 1800s of using chisels to carve channels and then setting wire or plates. I really enjoy the process because it’s really controlled, and you can do such a range of materials together. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of time.

Skull Vessel
1 5/8” x 1 1/4” x 1”

MM: You seem to like precision…

SB: Precision and intention. I try to have intention in everything that I do even if it’s an experiment. I want things to look clean and purposeful.

MM: Any favorite artists or craftsmen?

SB: David Huang, he’s a metalsmith in Michigan, and he does a lot of intensely patina-ed, textured small vessels. His use of textures and colors and gold leaf, and his figurative vessels, too, are just amazing. It’s very inspirational. Tom Lorio’s another one. He does amazing things with textures, and all of his work is just really precise. Patrick Thaden, he was a professional armorer for a couple of years. In my lineage of craftsmen, he’s like my grandfather.

MM: What images inspires you in general?

SB: Armor and, recently, historical architecture. Historical objects, lots of fantasy writing. Tolkien – lots of Tolkien. It depends, but for the most part, those things.

MM: Do you have a favorite historical era?

SB: 14th century England, when full plate harnesses were just starting out. Then, right before the Vikings started coming over pillaging and killing everybody, and also feudal Japan – the warrior mindset of the samurai.

Skull Vessel, detail
1 5/8” x 1 1/4” x 1”

MM: I get the impression that you’re trying to bridge the past and the present…

SB: There are things that I make for reenactment, and then there are things that I make for myself, like a body of work. I try to fuse those two because I think that if we rediscover part of our culture in the past and bring it together with the present, we’d do better overall. I try to recapture those things that are lost. My work is more process-focused, and it has to do with looking back at culture and making artifacts. I consider myself more a craftsman than I do an artist. A lot of artists don’t think this way, and they don’t make things this way. I like making objects. It’s relevant. I’m not going to say it’s fine art, but it’s still important. Craft is its own thing; it has its own value. I’m trying to bring a little beauty into people’s lives, trying to connect handmade objects with people. I’m not trying to view my work in terms of art even though I’m in art school.

MM: For you, what’s the difference between art and craft?

SB: It’s intent and execution. For example, academic jewelers make jewelry that is not really meant to be worn every day. It’s meant to interact with the body, but it’s more meant to be looked at. When I make things, they’re handmade, but they’re meant to be worn every day. When I make other things like ceramics, they’re meant to be beautiful, to invite people to touch them and hold them and want them in their homes. I guess that’s the difference.

MM: What do you have planned?

SB: This is my last semester, but I have a book full of junk to work on – stuff that takes way more time than I have now. I have a couple ideas for these elongated, forged figures really and a lot more jewelry.

Review: Heather Christle, THE DIFFICULT FARM

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:14:00 -0500

by Tommy Jacobi

Heather Christle, The Difficult Farm, Octopus Books, 2009.

ISBN: 978-0980193831

A little over a week ago, the second edition of Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm came out, from Octopus Books, with a revised bunny and some dropped poems. I want to mark the occasion by remembering my old, outdated copy of the book, released September 2009, and how Christle’s poetry started acting like a part of my nervous system.

I’ll be as objective as possible. Here’s what my copy of The Difficult Farm looked about a week ago: bright, bee-yellow cover with a sketch of a one-eared rabbit; “THE DIFFICULT FARM” above Christle’s name written in a shaky, watery font; two blurbs on the back from James Tate and Dara Wier; and about 77 pages of book with a few little gaps from dog-ears. Certainly, it looks like it’s as “joyfully imaginative” and “surreal” as the SPD website has said, and as “fun” as Blake Butler and Chris Hosea have said. Slowly, I’ve made my marks. I drew a fat pen line between “DIFFICULT” and “FARM,” put a small, dense spot in the bunny’s leg. The corners are rough and upturned. I underlined parts of the back, like Dara Wier writing “urgent” and “careful” and “a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all,” circled James Tate’s “This is serious.” Inside, I can’t even count the number of brackets, stars, and “holy shits” I’ve penned in, writing mantras, creeds, and a few knock-off theses on poetry in general. Yet for all this digging, I still feel like I’m not taking Christle’s poems—marvelous, immense, beautiful, literally wonderful—seriously enough. It’s like trying to hold a farm in the hand, easier to imagine as a cartoon than as the actual dirt, blood, and crops it is. The Difficult Farm offers us all the full, raw communication that we’d never expect from an animated bunny, and all the honesty and giving we don’t expect from poetry.

There’s no doubt, though, that this poetry has sheen and surprises, and is intensely pretty. From “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” here are the book’s glamorous opening lines:

Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s
reflection—lightest grey on golden floor—
I finally understood painting. I was irate!

Just following the lines, moving immediately with the narrative, we get a nice familiar cinderblock, some dazzling flashes, a golden floor, a painting, and a crazy shift in tone. It’s a bright montage, a film—it could be enough. But there’s companionship, darling animals, and romance too—it could be a movie:

I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen and there were
a few who even fell in love with me, but because
they did not understand I was under a powerful
spell they could not help me…

The turns are heartbreaking in the cutest, most teen-movie way. They leave you wanting to take the speaker out to some local diner that plays Joy Division at three in the morning. This brand of cuteness certainly abounds in The Difficult Farm, whose very title, very cover suggests a poetic catalogue of MTV movie originals and fuzzy little animals. I—and the poems too, I think—want to get past this, way past this, but these warm bits are worth looking at. Poem number two, “What Is the Croup” (a title I’ll never stop guessing at), reads almost like a cento or collage of these Polaroid moments. “Monday evening I took out/the garbage. Nobody/saw me but I looked beautiful.” Like something from the Xanga archives, the lines don’t seem to do anything but document a life we pretty much already know. “Like you/I live in the area. I live/on the second floor. Even/though our altitudes mismatch/I hope you will think of me.” It’s darling enough to make me stop breathing, and then it goes on. “A good time to think of me/is now.” All this has a kind of deadpan, Wes Anderson quality to it—the quick, slightly predictable line breaks—that any twenty-something could grin at. “Like you/I live in the area” is charming because it’s flat, like forced conversation, like weather-talk, which Christle cites constantly (“and listen, the weather is good”). It’s charted territory. It’s like poetry written on bright red 8^th grade valentines. This reading is, sad to say, especially easy and automatic for me, having half-met her and seen how beautiful she is. However, it hardly gets at the poem’s careful, careful work. Note the strange, unmapped space this seemingly sweet and familiar poem enters, without flinching. The flat, dumb enjambment gets even flatter, and the cuteness dies hard: “In my brain I use the town hall/as a landmark and then I make/my way. In my way I am/keeping an order. I killed/the insect after I was born.” These lines aren’t tricky. They aren’t magic. They aren’t charming. The pictures fragment and collide and stack up in jangly piles. “Make my way” is treated like it’s supposed to have some surprising turn, and then, boring as hell, the “way” continues straight into a Foucaultian keeping of order through death, taxonomy, and birth. This weirdness is beyond personality. It’s beyond my theorizing. This is straight-up brain country, and it’s very, very scary.

Christle alerts us constantly to this issue of personality, in a book full of trees, suitors, and animals. The book’s third poem, “Variations on an Animal Kingdom,” starts out goofy, but swinging:

People love to come up to me and say

Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird,

but they are just confusing me

with my invention, an invention

I regret.

Indeed, it’s weirdly easy to read these poems in terms of traits, quirks, and habits—to put (at least in my case) an attractive human face behind it. That could be the bird here. But even without this context, the images here are stunning—poet as huge, probably multicolored bird, confused, surrounded with the test tubes, light bulbs, and beakers called up by “invention.” Then there is the gendered reading. The speaker/poet is reduced to a sexy parrot (or even just bird/dame/crone/chick/girl)—one we nonetheless meet and experience, despite the fact that it’s her own regrettable creation, her own part-deliberate performance. How much of the author’s plumage—real or mistaken—do we put between us and the poem itself? Christle’s bird could just as well be a literal invention, mechanical and creepy. Either way it’s confrontational.

Miraculously, Christle’s poetry is generous enough to let all this go on without stopping the poem. Even when I feel like a patriarchal shithead, there are countless nicer paths to take through the language. Christle seems to sacrifice the personal—her image, her mythology—in the name of the poems. “This is a televised/attempt to bring myself to justice,” she writes. “A way of reaching up to touch again/the harmless, feral sky. I won’t stoop/to demonstrate the birds’ small and frantic/black eyes, but you can probably/imagine and then probably stop.” And we can.

The Difficult Farm almost always reaches out and up, even when its peculiar language—forests, geese, historial fact, line break jokes—is most limited or limiting. Like Jack Spicer said in his 1965 Vancouver Lectures:

Now, if you have a cleft palate and are trying to speak with the tongues of men and angels, you’re going to still speak through a cleft palate. And the poem comes distorted through the things which are in you. Your tongue is exactly the kind of tongue that you’re born with, and the source of energy, whatever it is, can take advantage of your tongue, can make it do things that you didn’t think it could, but your tongue will want to return to the same normal position of the ordinary cleft-palate speech of your own dialect.

Since the Farm’s major cripple would probably be too many adorable bees or too many trees, this might sound a bit harsh. But Spicer’s examples get a little kinder and more to the point. “It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message,” he says. “This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.”

The unique virtuosity of The Difficult Farm is in how it works beauty into this very resistance of language. Take “Acorn Duly Crushed”:

Dear stupid forest.

Dear totally brain-dead forest.

Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest

full of nightingales

why won’t you shut up.

What do you want from me.

Even as Christle crushes her lovely, idiotic trees—through address, the same way she was converted to a vibrating bird—the nightingales emerge. They punctuate her total, justified rage, making it glimmer a glimmer she then, too, snuffs.

Dear rapid bloodless forest

you are talking all the time.

You are not pithy.

You are like 8,000 swans.

With every thrash comes a new, insanely gorgeous sensation. “Dear rapid bloodless forest” is really a poem in itself. The trees sprout 8,000 otherwise graceful heads, which we feel in the chest. It goes on: “Blunt international forest./Forest of bees and of hair.” Every iteration of forest rebirths a forest. Despite the anger, the letter blocks remain. However, through combination and rearrangement, the forest’s genetic makeup seems to change with the poem. Sure enough, it becomes something active and dark, something not fully a forest:

You should come back to my house.

We can bag drugs all night.

You can tell me

about your new windows.

How they are just now

beginning to sprout.

Christle wrote recently on her blog, “Trees happen to be the furniture in my room, but they’re not real trees. They’re figures. They’re the nouns that I need to do the real work, which is all the stuff between the nouns.” The Difficult Farm isn’t here to trick you. It’s here to literally work the old tricks into real magic, to fix poetry’s lame old tools by using them again.

Given this, it’s strange that Christle would frame the book with a title like The Difficult Farm, which suggests exactly the kind of easy, domestic surrealism her poems shake off. It’s also strange that she’d wrap it in bright, cleaning-product yellow (though it’s now available in Robin’s Egg Blue). For an answer—or really, a working solution—we’re offered a poem uncannily titled “Stroking My Head with My Deception Stick.” After a weird arrangement of hair, police, and conversations with the elastic-lipped dead, it comes.

And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.

In the difficult farm—“the difficult/farm”—the screaming half-emerges, its other half in a pot, and everything is black, and the farm is propositionally explained as a snowglobe, maybe bounded by its own legendary terror. This happens. The darling snowglobe on the darling bureau gets blown up into something that contains screaming and ash, yet somehow still burgeons. Growth becomes possible in the most charred and cold of places, even a troped-out, boring farm.

Under this new construction, which comes three-quarters of the way through the book, Christle gives us some avalanching moments as sublime as anything from Harmonium or Some Trees, and with their same emphasis on processing and simultaneity. Here’s the ineffable last third of “Pale Lemon Square.”

I feel like I’ve been studying
to become a doctor forever and now, faced
with a real-world pandemic, I’m full
of unmitigated lust for business—as though
I were sitting in a high school classroom
watching the morning’s snow foster impending
cancellations and all the attendant policies. Soon,
if not at once, the library and gymnasium will be
redubbed infirmaries, and you and I will drift
among the cots like swans in ever-wider grids.

The lines pile up like sophisticated, readable snow. There is both immense clutter and immense organization. Narrative works alongside the total change in frequency happening with every enjambment. When one thing happens, another will happen “soon, if not at once.” In the space of one written poem, snow can become policies, become swans, get dropped into a high school campus, then a storm shelter, get seen from the window, then from the sky, then get forgotten among the sweet, familiar cots. We are endlessly propelled toward the bottom, yet resisting propulsion.

And indeed, Christle’s poetry is smart enough to recognize our ability to experience all this, and generous enough to give it all to us. The brain is miraculous and immense, even sacred. On her blog, Christle writes,

If anyone would like to dress my poems in some kind of outfit, it should be a cognitive blouse. When I sit down to write, that is where I am facing, toward the brain. The brain is linked to the earth and to the past, but I can’t head straight toward them. I’d miss too much on the way. Everything is there for me in the brain. It gives me everything I need. And you have one too. And it seems likely to me they have much in common. So that, I think, is where I start.

If there’s an ethical or political project behind the book, then, it’s less capital-F Feminist or capital-S Surrealist or capital-E Environmentalist than it is an Ashberian project of being pleasant with whatever masks, voices, animals, and ceilings strike the mind. Whatever can be thought of is fair game, whether it’s schematic or moral or boring or black and white. Christle also shares with Ashbery (and Stevens) a masterful awareness of poetic momentum, her final lines often turning with the weight of everything that came before. Tough, irritating poems become worth the struggle in their last moments, exploding beautifully. “Now stand and shake that butt as though/some god were shaking it for you.”

Where Christle and Ashbery differ, though, is their framing. The Difficult Farm’s first line, “Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s/reflection,” doesn’t toy with the same hard, unbending, patriarchal authority that Some Trees does, opening “We see us as we truly behave.” The potential power of the cinderblock gets undercut as a reflection. Presence is lost, the glossy mirror takes over. Farm, with its big white bunny, seems to accept classic feminine associations the way Some Trees accepts the masculine—that is, it performs them, bends them, lets them energize the poems, then forgets about them and writes. Still, Christle’s poems, with their frequently TV-like pace, tend to hurry us along through their deepest, murkiest territory, in moments when we need most time. The book seems acutely aware of this, and its response is the poem “Television.” It begins, “People like surprises./Surprise! I am your uncle./And that kind of thing.” The joke is on us, I guess. But the poem goes further than mere acknowledgement. Its arbitrary surprises wind up at an overdetermined end: “Car alarms surprise/nobody. Nobody, you surprise me,/how you are always sneaking in./Ladies & gentlemen, Uncle Nobody./Nobody, this is your life.” Somehow, the speaker seems to be suddenly telling the hard, hurting truth.

These last lines, along with many other closing lines throughout the book, work to put some faith back in the line as a unit, as whole. In poems that undoubtedly reward close attention, this is an important reminder. Difficulty takes time. We need to process the poem. Like difficult Stevens, Christle’s poetry looks both backwards and forwards, communicating without warning across the page, in the faith that you’ll try to keep up. Once we make the effort, big things happen. Here’s a second look at that particularly paisley-dress-shirt-esque passage from “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” the book’s first poem:

The density of the action is incredible. With its near-uniform line length (a feature we see throughout the book), the poem becomes this space where door opening, wing flapping, total absorption, and physical witchcraft can happen at once—not one after the other, but at once. That The Difficult Farm can offer us this explosive mania alongside a softer, more mediated narrative, is remarkable. This, I think, is what Dara Wier meant by “awfully generous”. There is so much joy in jumping the bright, beaming hurdles Christle throws at us. Maybe that’s the poor rabbit’s secret message. When we accept our compulsion to hop, Christle’s landscape goes past itself, past its pleasant sunlight, and almost touches some harmless, feral sky.

But the compulsion is still primarily to think, and to feel oneself thinking. These are poems that read themselves as they move. Whatever strength it takes to process a word or phrase ultimately gets absorbed, recycled, becoming a part of the poem’s language. The book adds up and expands and implodes and reconstructs, while somehow containing itself. Christle seems to have opened her brain to us in the straightest, most honest ways possible. She’s even lit up and wallpapered the tunnels to get there.

The Difficult Farm is just as difficult as it is a farm, but in it, things happen in spite of the world, and in spite of the poet, and in spite of the reader, and they happen quickly, “and it is the Fourth of July/and it has been for months.”

(Spicer quotes come from The House That Jack Built, ed. Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Review: Graham Foust, A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:00:00 -0500

by Michael Glaviano

Graham Foust, A Mouth in California. Flood Editions, 2009.

ISBN 978-0-9819520-1-7

My first awareness of Graham Foust was, appropriately, brief and in quotation marks— a friend whose blog I read thought this sound bite worth saving: “I sample to keep my poem company.” It’s a good quote, one that piqued my interest, and I read the interview from which it was excerpted in its entirety. The interviewer’s first question addressed the fact that Foust’s newer poems are significantly longer than his older ones. In the interview Foust mentioned the 30 page poem he had just finished. He sounded like a man who, having had his way with the short lyric, was off to chase something else: “When I began to write poems, my goal was to pare things down to the fewest possible words, because, well, that’s one useful way of thinking about what constitutes a poem. … Now I’m feeling more like I can get carried away, not in the hallucinatory sense, but like I can go long distances or many rounds with a particular idea or emotion or a particular set of ideas/emotions.” At the time, I could, like, so feel him on this.

So I, utterly unfamiliar with his work, imagined A Mouth in California, which I had just been charmed into ordering by Foust’s snarky-yet-thinky interview persona, to be a careening, exhaustive, and all-around maximalist affair. After getting the book in the mail and reading “The Sun Also Fizzles,” a veritable banger of 23 lines that opens A Mouth in California more entertainingly, perhaps, than is in the book’s best interest, with two line breaks that had me laughing out loud, I thought, “I cannot fucking wait until I get to the long stuff.”

As it turns out, I was already reading the long stuff. Sort of. “Poem Beside Itself” weighs in at 47 lines, “My Graham Foust” at 36, and “Poem for Jack Spicer” at 43. I believe these are the only poems longer than the opening one. Maybe one or two more in the twenties. But who cares, right? This review is starting to read like I’m trying to meet a certain length quota by blowing 500 words talking about how many lines are in each poem.

But I would venture that pretty much everyone who reads this book cares. Particularly those who, like myself, are encountering Foust’s poems for the first time. If one thing can be said about A Mouth in California, it’s that there are no throwaway lines, and certainly no throwaway poems— there are hours of unpacking to do here— but the arrangement of the poems is such that after a poem like “Morality and Temporal Sequence,” which begins

Funny. Night after night you’ve trouble
sleeping without your glasses. Every
noise upends you— the click of the tooth-
like lightswitch; the window blinds gnashing
in the small, hot wind; a fan churning fast
and close.

I was totally spoiled and had little interest in reading the brick-dense 26 word poem that follows it, entitled “The Call”:

Windows. Where
do you not want
to go today.

You. You.
You. YOU.
Regret’s not letting up.

Reason wants
a lift from where
you left it.

It’s a haunting, beautiful little wonder that, because of the breakneck pace of the preceding poem, has the effect of a stop sign on the interstate, not unrecognizable or uninterpretable, but bewildering still, and somewhat objectionable. Indeed, my only real complaint about the book is that the poem order necessitates a serious schizophrenia of reading tendencies.

A persistent source of tension in A Mouth in California is the unwanted authority bestowed upon the poet-speaker by the tradition. Foust uses numerous little devices that help him shrug it off. Take, for example, the first stanza of “The Sun Also Fizzles,”

What’s this place, between
geography and evening? The sun
also bludgeons; a car has three wheels;
and what’s the wrong way to break
that brick of truth back into music?

Here we dive headlong into the poetic. We have a rhetorical question, two poetical assertions, and another rhetorical question. The most important word in the stanza, however, is “and.” It’s a list. A list the members of which have only one shared characteristic, i.e., that they are somehow poetic. This same stanza without the conjunction would be nothing alarming; with the conjunction, however, it becomes a sort of fidgeting beneath the gaze of a reader who expects something big and smart of the poet; it’s a stutter; it’s throwing the stanza against a wall to see what sticks. Some similar things go on in the last stanza:

Swallowed whole, a songbird might
could claw through the hawk—
or so I’ve thought.
The choosing of a word
might be its use, the only poem.

In addition to being a spectacular line break, the use of the might-could construction is the first instance of many in the book where the speaker rails against his place in the tradition by juxtaposing a long string of syntactic structures acceptable to, and possibly even rare outside of, the academic environment (“Twice, I’ve been evidence of, / if anything, my breathing.”) with language that one would be hard pressed to find in an academic periodical unaccompanied by quotation marks or italics. In this case Foust borrows dialect, in other cases it’s anyone’s ineloquence: “This ocean, I just assumed it would / look bigger.” Another, more easily elucidated example of the authority-fidget comes with the line “or so I’ve thought.” Pretty self-explanatory. Assertion followed by hedging. This device really comes into its own in “Poem for Jack Spicer” (“The more I pull it all to pixels / the more to sleep the radio goes, / right? And to be dead would be to be / modern?”).

The last thing I’ll note about this stanza is that, through the use of modal operators, Foust masterfully asserts without compromising his position of non-authority. By coyly suggesting one possibly-maybe teleology of language, he’s getting us to take for granted that a word has a particular, possibly ineffable, but definitely weirdly aristotelean use. Likewise with “What’s the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?” Foust manages to utilize the question in such a way that the notion that there are right ways is asserted. These are by no means no brainers, and Foust’s ability to slip us these pills in the concealing bolus of indecisiveness is cool stuff.

Contrary to what the back-cover blurb wants you to think, this book is often not funny, does not seek to be funny. This book is actually pretty fucking serious. This book talks about being funny in a way that makes being funny sound like a total cop-out. From “To The Writer”:

Quiet
and furious dots of distant rooms—rooms,
I would add, through which you’ll never move
or sleep—begin to mean. In one of them,
humor, collapsed in a painful curl, an odd
head at the back of its throat. It’s what to bleed about.

In giving humor some semblance of a body, Foust allows it to become a creature that gives joy but does not experience it, a creature doomed by its nature to always divert any attention that might otherwise heal it. Humor, then, is an inherently sad thing that must not be mistaken for anything other than a distraction from what is important, born out of that important thing. It is closely related to truth and yet inhibits truth’s attainment.

These features of the book— its rejection of its own authority, and its indictment of humor— are not so much its themes as its backdrop, against which Foust’s preoccupations come to light. Quiet critiques of capitalism and religion seek center stage, but to critique is to assert, and in this book unadulterated assertion is intellectually expensive. In “Save As Save the Last Dance for Me”: “I live plural-biographically, / torn up between Kant and some dove.” That is, between the pure commentary of the thinker versus the pure presentation-without-comment of much postwar poetry. For Foust, “the facts aren’t working.” But what’s the alternative? “My disappointment in the poem’s voicey / noise is too easy.”

Graham Foust has a reputation of being a collage poet, an arranger of found language. This is a very sexy, contemporary reputation to have. ‘Sampling’ has been at the forefront of both the artworld and popular culture since Dada (see: L.H.O.O.Q., Fluxus, Warhol, hip-hop, flarf, ‘chillwave’), the reappropriation and reclamation of cultural detritus has everyone feeling pretty boss. In a very old (2005) interview, this exchange occurs:

Q: In the balance between found language and created language, where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?

A: I’ve never created language. You want someone to create a language for you, call Christian Bök. (And really, you should—he knows where all the good used bookstores in Toronto are.) Sometimes I look for language, but on the rare occasion that we actually hook up, it’s usually language that’s found me.

This is the kind of word-mincing that makes literary interviews fun to read. It’s also evasive and annoying, considering that pretty much anyone interested in reading Foust is also interested in where he falls on this spectrum. It’s a pretty good, standard question to ask someone whose writing is so heavily allusive (a quick flip through the pages yields Hemingway, Jack Spicer, Bob Creely, Margaret Atwood, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and many, many others). What Graham Foust does in response to this question, exploiting the polysemious relationship between different instances of the word “language,” is quite precisely what the allusions and misquotations accomplish in his poems. His sources are really of no import. Wordplay for Foust is more musical than anything else. It’s what puts the pleasure in his poems. The laugh out loud moments I mentioned in “The Sun Also Fizzles” come at dark moments in the poem and serve as little happy pills to help you sustain the effort these poems take to digest. The twisting of the familiar to humorous effect is what’s catchy, not what’s essential. When the interviewer, poor, unwitting soul, asks his question, Foust leans in with an attentive, warped ear, and hears what he needs to hear to get at what he wants to get at.

On second reading, my annoyance with the book’s short lyrics subsided, but the process could have been lubricated with more careful sequencing. Quibbles aside, the book is a muscular and essential contribution to a genre continually under fire. Though Foust’s concerns are primarily the concerns of a poet, they have big implications regarding the role of the entire genre in intellectual discourse. With seemingly infinite generosity the author lets us look on as he humbles himself over and over before the questions that disturb the sleep of artists the world over, and as a result a definite exhaustion pervades the work: “There should be more works of art like those / on which I wrote no dissertation.”

Foust is among the best breakers of line and turners of phrase writing today, and his skilled manipulation of the poetic toolset alone is reason enough to read the book. What makes the book essential, however, is the author’s willingness to puzzle and thrash until he’s totally stumped and eviscerated of ego, because ugliness and injury and embarrassment are the price of seeing just a little more of what poetry can do.

Interview: Stacy Kranitz

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:53:00 -0500

By Chelsea Lewis

Angola

Stacy Kranitz is a photography graduate student at LSU. Her work is diverse, ranging from landscapes to portraiture covering themes of violence and the ‘gray’ area of life. Kranitz’s photography has been featured in several publications including ESPN magazine, the New York Times magazine, and Spin.

Manchac Magazine: Where are you from?

Stacy Kranitz: I grew up so many places it wouldn’t be fair to say them all, but I’ve spent the last ten years between New York and Los Angeles and Louisiana, like a triangle.

MM: What brings you to Baton Rouge?

SK: Well, it’s my love affair with Louisiana that started about five years ago. It sort of got under my skin, and I knew that I had to come back and seriously focus on things that I really wanted to do here. I moved to a small town up above Lafayette two months before hurricane Katrina.

MM: What do your parents think that you do?

SK: I think they do think I’m a photographer. They get incredibly excited when I publish something in magazines that they know about. So, if something’s in ESPN or Entertainment Weekly, my father will run to the store and buy twelve copies. He couldn’t be happier. Sometimes I haven’t even seen that actual tear sheet, so it’s really rather sweet, but beyond that they choose to ignore a lot of the more challenging things that I work on.

Bashful

MM: Let’s talk about your work. What are some common themes and inspirations?

SK: In some ways they’re one and the same. I’m really interested in the murky gray area between right and wrong, black and white. So I’m always looking for things that on outside appear to be very wrong, but yet when you get into them there’s a real mixture of values. It’s kind of about empathy and tolerance and understanding. I think the largest theme in my work is violence. It’s always been a very overt subject for me, the theater of violence, but I’m now trying to pull away. So much of my work is very aggressive, and I’m trying to pull away from that a little bit while I’m here. We’ll see it’s very hard for me to step back

MM: Where do your inspirations come from?

SK: Growing up I was very righteous as a child, and I think that was something that I always found very problematic and very painful. So it led me to really want to look into that area in between. My first role model was Leni Riefenstahl. I liked everything about her life, even the fact that she had a boyfriend forty years her junior for many years. He was maybe forty, and she was eighty. She got married to him right before she died, but they were together for thirty years. She’s very easy to love and hate.

Untitled, (Target Unknown)

MM: Do you have a favorite subject matter?

SK: Violence. Louisiana. I’m definitely drawn to the portrait and the human image, just always been that way, but I’ve always implemented landscape on some level, and animals, plants, food.

MM: Let’s talk about your processes. Do you stage a lot of your shots?

SK: I’m very nerdy in the sense that I read a lot of newspapers. I just love the utopian aspect of that kind of journalism. I clip stuff, and I have this elaborate file system. It’s very creepy. I love lexis nexis, and I just get lost, you know. That’s really how it all starts. I read a lot of non-fiction books and fiction, as well. Then I come up with an idea that I really like, and I make all these ridiculous lists. Then, if it comes back to me, you know, and I keep thinking about it – It’s like when I first came here to do the cock fighting story. It had been three years and I was just driven and driven and driven. It would just come back to me, haunt me. I had to go. So, I just got in my car and drove straight to these towns, just hoping that there would be the cock fights. It’s like the same thing with Louisiana, too. I couldn’t get it out of my system.

Untitled, (Cock Fights)

MM: Do you think you’ll ever get it out of your system?

SK: No, but I don’t know how long I will stay as a permanent resident. I’ll hopefully be able to live here for a time.

MM: What is it that inspires your infatuation with the state?

SK: I mean the simplest answer would be this backwards South, but when I first came here I was introduced to this state through cock fighting. There’s this innate like backwoods violence that was really appealing and this brilliant Cajun culture, which is the smallest minority in the United States. Something about that idea was just so potent. I was out on the bayou, and I was just like, “this is the most romantic thing I have ever experienced in my life.” I couldn’t really let go of that idea.

MM: Any favorite artists?

SK: The writer William Vollmann. He’s wonderful, writes both fiction and non-fiction, and he wrote this tome on violence. That’s been a huge inspiration. And, Peter Matthiessen, he wrote the Watson trilogy, and that work’s been a really big deal to me. The photographers Jim Goldberg and Delahaye, and the film makers Chantal Akerman and Sharon Lockhart.

MM: You seem pull from all different genres…

SK: Yeah, I mean, when you have something that you’re so fascinated with, like Louisiana or violence, it’s really easy to find everything from music to painting to be inspired by.

Untitled,(The Island)

MM: What do you have planned?

SK: I’m working on four projects for the next three years, and they kind of run in a cycle. So, there’s this epic love poem to Louisiana. There’s this story about a sinking island that I’m in the middle of, as well. I do a trip along the [Mexican-American] border, and I’m really obsessed with Juarez and all the very romantic notions about that divide, this ridiculous line. I’m also working on a story about an anarchist compound in Ohio. That’s my summer. I like to be working on so many different things that I can’t keep my head straight. I love what I do so much that I can’t imagine filling my days with anything else.

Highland Coffees Reading Series | Thursday, March 4th | 7 pm

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:09:24 -0500

Blake Stephens, Julia Terese, Brad Gruezke, and Darrell O’Neill read at the Highland Coffees Reading Series, where caffeine and poetry are both heavily drank.

Blake introduces you to an old childhood friend—that discomfortingly insightful who knows far too much about you. Julia’s fiction feasts like poetry, smacking its lips to distant clinking and swearing. Its gestures are rhythmic and undulating. Both Julia and Blake featured in this year’s Delta Journal, available at Cottonwood Books in April. In addition, this is the first reading of the series that begins to branch out from Delta Journal’s core staff into some new voices from Baton Rouge.

“Darrell and Brad are really terrific,” according to LSU professor of poetry (and official Friend of Delta Journal) Lara Glenum. “Darrell spins dark and sensual dreamscapes in which existential questioning is tinged with gothic horror. Kafkaesque, yes, but totally contemporary. His poems burrow and squirm their way through landscapes of decay.” And of Brad, “[he] produces hilarious (and intensely visceral) narrative sequences that chart calamitous topographies. His poems often perform masculinity in cheeky or explosive ways. A total delight. I want to eat his poems.”

Ava Haymon | Baton Rouge Art Gallery | Sunday, February 28th | 4 pm

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:05:09 -0500

Baton Rouge’s unofficial poet laureate Ava Haymon reads from her latest (and third!) collection of poems this Sunday at the Baton Rouge Art Gallery.

The book, Why the House is Made of Gingerbread, centers on a woman named Gretel encountering midlife crisis in the form of a man named Hansel. According to its publisher LSU Press, “Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread is … not a book for children.” The reading is a special preview, with the book coming out in March, available here: http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/bookPages/9780807135853.html.

Interview: Seana Higgins & Jon Pacheco

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:57:00 -0500

by Chelsea Lewis

Jon Pacheco
Untitled, 2008
porcelain

Seana Higgins, BFA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Jon Pacheco, BFA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Chicago natives, Higgins and Pacheco are primarily ceramic artists currently searching for “what’s next” in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Higgins is completing a post-baccalaureate program at LSU. Primarily a figurative artist, Higgins examines femininity and the body as it mediates our experience of the world. Her figures are plump, and her use of fabrics, clay, and glaze give the sculptures a warm softness reminiscent of grandma’s bosom. Pacheco has a background in jewelry-making and ceramics. Currently, his work focuses on processes of making and expressing the passage of time. From his “wearable sculpture” series to his drip ceramic tiles, Pacheco shows an intense interest the interactional essence of art.

Manchac Magazine: Where are you from?

Seana Higgins: I’m from Chicago.

Jon Pacheco: A west suburb of Chicago.

MM: What brings you to LSU?

SH: The ceramics program. Although I came here for Mikey Walsh, Andy Shaw is amazing, and Leanne is my new professor. She’s been working in ceramics for ten, fifteen years.

JP: I’m here to explore different mediums and also help Seana out.

MM: What do your parents think that you do?

SH: Well, my dad thinks that I just make art, end of story. My mom understands more of what I’m about. I think that I’m a lot like her in that we’re both thinkers.

JP: My parents like that I like art, and they know that I’m really into it. I think they also appreciate art. They like going to gallery shows and museums. I know they’re trying really hard to connect with me because my mom will be like, “Hey, Jon, I got this idea for you. How about you add Obama’s face to one of your pigs?”. She’s just trying to make help me by giving me these ideas, and my dad really wants to help me display my work. He makes these structures to display it. He’s like, “Yeah, all I did was stick a piece of wood in it, and now it stands.”

Jon Pacheco
Pig #29, 2008
porcelain, wood

SH: Jon’s house is a gallery of his work, not that my parents don’t have my work displayed, but it’s not like his house.

JP: They’re really trying to be part of it, be supportive, and I like that. Sometimes I feel like they don’t…not that they don’t understand, but critique it as well as art students. But, they’re doing well, for parents.

MM: Do you consider yourselves primarily ceramic artists?

SH: I think we both use multiple materials. I’m really interested in mixing clay with other materials, and I always have done that when I’ve made independent work.

JP: She did a lot of found objects.

SH: Yeah, things like that, but I feel like the community that I surround myself with is the ceramics community. So, I would consider myself a ceramic artist.

JP: I would also consider myself a ceramic artist, but I also did a lot of work with jewelry. Although, I didn’t really fit in with the jewelry community. They were very fine and precise, and I experimented a lot. I was doing a lot of paper, the keys, and things like that. I do mostly ceramics, though.

MM: What about your most current bodies of work? What are some themes, inspirations, favorite subject matter?

SH: Mostly I work figuratively. This semester I’m going to work out some imagery by making pots. I’ve never made pottery, and I figured while I’m in school I might as well. That’s a departure, and it’s not somewhere I’m going to be for very long. In the work that I’m interested in pursuing in the future, and have been making, the figure is a prevalent theme. My undergrad work wasn’t always [referring to] a body specifically but alluding to a figure. I like to deal with themes of femininity, and I’m trying to include myself in the work without being too explicit.

Seana Higgins
One Potato, Two Potato, 2008
earthenware, table, acrylic

MM: Seana, can we talk about the materials that you like use?

SH: Sure. Over the summer I took a doll-making workshop, and I was pretty interested in how I could work with fabric because it was the first time I had played with fabric. I was trying to figure out a way that I could mix fabric and clay without it being too disparate. I use similar colors and use the fabric similarly to how I would mold clay. In the past I’ve used furniture as a mixed material and altered it sometimes. Most times, I made ceramic pieces to fit the furniture in some way.

MM: And what about your work, Jon?

JP: I have two recent bodies of work. One is wearable sculptures where I made ceramic pieces to go onto the body. I made these huge pieces, but what I really wanted to do was photograph them on the body because my problem with jewelry was that I never considered it on the body. So, I really wanted to concentrate on including the body, and I did use ceramics. When you think of ceramics, you think of teapots, fine china, and when you look at the wearable sculptures you don’t think about that. You don’t see porcelain in the same way when I put it on the body.

Jon Pacheco
Wearable Sculpture (Head Piece), 2009
porcelain, silver leaf

My other interests are drips, and more specifically I was inspired by a graffiti artist named Krink. He really likes drips, too. I like how the actual drip and the surface interact with each other. It shows the history and this new, shiny, hard drip against a worn-down wall. I tried to replicate that with ceramic and glaze by making these square or rectangle tablets on the wall with colorful drips on them and having little structures or a path or terrain for it to interact with.

Jon Pacheco
Drip #7,2009
salt fired porcelain

MM: Any influences or favorite artists?

SH: It’s hard to say because it’s more like who do I look at and go, “holy shit, that’s amazing.” I guess Tip Toland. She’s a realistic ceramics artist. Judy Fox is also a hyper-realistic ceramic artist and Cristina Cordova. We’re looking to do a workshop with her this summer, and she does very psychological figurative work. It’s really quite creepy but in an awesome way. I’m very interested in the psychology of things. I started college in psychology, and I’d like to get at that in my work. Another one of my influences is Louise Bourgeois. She’s a sculptor. A lot of female artists, for sure, because I am so interested in feminine imagery.

JP: Right now I really want to do the figure, too, and Cristina Cordova is really intense. The sculptures are huge, larger than life-size sculptures.

SH: She’s also young, and that’s kind of inspiring.

JP: I like her [Cordova] and Beth Cavener Stichter. I really like her work and surface treatment. She combines animals with the figure. Also, drawings and paintings by Egon Schiele. He and Cristina Cordova have these same kinds of twists of the body, and I really find that interesting. The paintings and drawings of Alberto Giacometti: he has these lines going over and over for the eyes. I really like that history of his work.

Seana Higgins
Untitled, 2009
earthenware, fabric

MM: So, Jon, process, specifically seeing the whole process, seems to be really important to you…

JP: I have so many interests, and process is one of them. The figure is another. I can’t settle down.

MM: Are there different aspects that draw each of you to the figure?

SH: I’m really interested in the nude figure, specifically. I don’t really feel drawn to any figures that are clothed, and I think it has a lot to do with the physicality of humans. I like the flesh. I like the folds, and a lot of times when I build female sculptures they are, you know, voluptuous. What I’m hoping to work through this semester, well, at some point in my life, is the experience of living inside a body instead of like looking at one. That’s been more framed by professors here, but I think that’s really what I’m trying to get at. We all have a body, and it’s very relatable.

JP: I’m interested in the muscles and tendons and how they take different shapes when you’re moving, how the lines are made by the muscles and tendons. I took life drawing twice in college just because I liked it so much when the model was moving. I don’t know if I’m interested in the nude figure itself. It’s very interesting, but I’m more interested in the limbs.

MM: What do you guys have planned?

SH: In the short term, we’re moving back to Chicago. My plan is to try to figure out what’s next for me in terms of where I want to go with my education. I’m figuring out where I fit with studio artists and teaching; I’m trying to decide what that balance is. I think academia’s really sheltered. It’s great for making work, and it’s great if you want to be a professor. I, personally, don’t want that. I want the world to be part of my practice, you know. I know that I want to continue making art work, but I feel a little bit of a lacking when I’m just in the studio, not interacting with people and using my teaching skills. We’re both planning to find space, at least for the next year or couple of years, where we can make [art]work and do something else, whatever that is, to make money.

Seana Higgins
To be fancy, 2009
earthenware, fabric

JP: Yeah, just to make a base back home. I’m trying to figure out how to balance work and studio time, and I wish they could be the same thing. Personally, I don’t think I’m ready for grad school. It’s going to be six or seven years for me to be ready. In the mean time, I want to do workshops, like we’re planning on doing this summer, and residencies. I’m hoping that with the workshops and residencies I’ll get more knowledge and more experience with other people, and I hope to build a base within myself and my artwork with that.

Interview: Ben Cockfield

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:24:00 -0500

by Chelsea Lewis

You can’t let em change you, 2009
acrylic, spray paint, sharpie
10x10 inch wood panel triptych.

Baton Rouge native, Ben Cockfield, senior, studio art: painting, LSU. His work is eclectic, ranging from large, abstract paintings that envelope the spectator to intimate, spiritual renditions of mountains. His work is intensely introspective, spiritual, and multidimensional. He is the recipient of the “Best Artist Award,” which he received in first grade.

Manchac Magazine: Where are you from?

Ben Cockfield: I was born in Baton Rouge, and then I moved to Seattle, Washington. I spent three or four years there and then moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. I stayed there until fourth grade and moved to Ascension parish. And, now I’m here [LSU, Baton Rouge].

MM: What do your parents think that you do?

BC: They’re befuddled. I invited them over to the studio the other day, and they were shocked at what they saw. I don’t think they knew how deep into it I was, how dirty I got with it.

Skillet-Oar, 2009
acrylic, spray paint, dye
2.5x4.5 ft. wood panel

MM: What are you working on now?

BC: My idée fixe right now is mountains. I don’t know why, and that’s why I’m doing it. It’s also parallel to me trying to represent all dimensions, not just three dimensional space, but all dimensions of life, any kind of experience that a human being can possibly have. It’s more about the universe within and transcending the one illusion. Most people function on one illusion at a time, and there are points in life where people break out of their perspective. That’s what it’s about.

MM: This reminds me of some South American cultures that have a spiritual link to mountains. Does that influence your work?

BC: There are so many references to pull from. I definitely dig the Native American point of view, but I didn’t make that connection at all. What I’m actually going for are these connections that reveal themselves to me later. I’m finding out every day there’s so many things about them that I like that I didn’t know.

That night we took that trail, then came back, 2009
acrylic, dye
3x4.5 ft. steel sheet

MM: You have these large-scale controlled pouring paintings in your studio. Is that current or older work?

BC: Yeah, there is some older work in there [the studio]. Those pieces are about providing a space that is totally arbitrary and totally ambiguous. I didn’t want it to just look like paint but to look like a space, pieces that you could arrange in any way. I was going for no object, no ground, but a space that wasn’t confining or defining.

MM: Let’s talk about your process. How do you paint your mountains?

BC: Each time I try to do it differently. I’m trying to get good at it. Mountains are hard. Actually, they’re extremely easy. But a real mountain, each one is a unique force of nature, one of the most powerful forces that we can see.

MM: Have you been to many mountains?

BC: I have this picture of me in front of Mount Rainier that I really like. I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail, and that was really cool. Besides that, no, but I plan on visiting lots of mountains

MM: Who or what influences your work the most?

BC: Peers and locals have the biggest effect on me because they’re so close, and you can’t help but feel the proximity of it. It’s more than a competition, and it’s not a community. People say art is a community, but it’s not. It’s like a little love-network. Besides that, there are some crazy artists out there: Glenn Brown, a British painter; Tlingit, Northwest Coast American Indian art. I like a lot of different cultures, especially aboriginal tribes. Asian, too, has had a badass influence on me since I was a little kid.

Without percieving me she opens the door
and with a step and a leap I am inside with her.
I remember having lived.
like myself, you are all far less serious
than you care to admit,
and just as perverse, 2009
mixed media
4.5x4.5 ft. stretched canvas

MM: How has your work changed?

BC: Well, at first this whole serious note got struck. My stuff from high school was so silly, and it didn’t care at all. It didn’t have any kind of message or statement at all. It was just for fun. But, then it became this career move because it was under the guise of a college program. It took a swarthy turn. Conceptually, it just got better and better. Going through art history and learning about all these people who did all this stuff – my concept is controlled by all of those. Now I’m left on the edge of not having one at all or having something really on the edge.

MM: What is your medium of choice?

BC: My favorite so far is mixed. I’m mixing a lot of spray paint and a lot of acrylic latex.

MM: Tell me something that people don’t know about you.

BC: I really, really liked Where The Wild Things Are. I didn’t like many other movies besides that in my whole life time of seeing movies. That movie was a perfect analogy for any human growing up and becoming lost.

MM: Is that a theme in your work? Being lost?

BC: I think so, definitely.

Caps, 2010
mixed media
3x4.5 ft. wood panel

MM: What’s next?

BC: Next is to perfect making mountains, totally making new ones. Destroying the image of a mountain; completely make it mine; make it a portal to losing one perspective.

MM: What’s your Plan B?

BC: To travel, go to an island and hide out, or go to the river hills of China.