One for the Books

REMEMBER ABOUT A MONTH AGO?

Well anyway.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS ONLY A SUMMARY

Additional important information is available.

WHEN IS A PLAN NOT A PLAN?

When it is afoot.

AND THERE IT WAS

A ten-foot pole.

DON’T TELL YVONNE OK?

And don't text Rita.

THIS IS WHERE MY MIND GOES

Much thanks.

DO YOU EVER LET YOUR MIND GET TO THAT PLACE?

Which I like their cider, actually.

ACCURATE TO TWENTY DECIMAL PLACES

That's one of the huge pluses.

DOES THE NAME BUD DORRANCE MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?

Well even if it doesn’t.

THE SITUATION IS FRESH

The suspense yes.

IS IT?

Aww.

WE SAW A THING

Own vs. on-demand.

WHERE’S JORDAN?

There’s Jordan.

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

Living off fast food gift cards and grocery outlet wine.

YOU KNOW HOW KIMMI HAS REALLY GOOD SKIN COLORING?

Well.

NO NO THAT’S OK

Yeah no.

THIS LADY CALLED

Is that crystal ball working?

SOMETHING IN MY GUT TOLD ME

I’m like damn.

THEY’RE NOT STILL DOING THAT ARE THEY?

Oh they are.

AND IT JUST IT

I tell you what.

HEY DO YOU GUYS GOLF?

There’s a golf tournament in Dodge City tomorrow.

HOLLYWOOD IS FUMING

Studio heads are flipping their lids.

THE HORSE LAID AN EGG

Right?

AND LIKE I TOLD HER

It definitely could.

THAT’S HOW IT WORKS?

My word.

www.randystark.com

Did You Get My Text?

DIFFERENCE MAKERS

They may be Haitian.

They may be Croatian.

FACEBOOK

It got to where

I’d rather watch

Street fights between chicks

On YouTube.

Or infrared images of rats

Getting their skulls bashed in.

Watching them twitch.

SHITSVILLE

You’ll find it in world statistical tables

Look under fucked places to live.

PLYWOOD

A very common window treatment in the neighborhood.

BEDSHEETS AND ALUMINUM FOIL

Also popular.

LA CHAMBA

She’s a beast.

WHITE GUILT

A discontinued line.

PLUS

Get the lowdown on what to do if there's a nuclear attack.

MEMORIES

Drain ‘em and dry ‘em.

Then fry ‘em.

They’re really good.

FASHION CANYON MALL

You heard me.

TRAFFIC

It is amazing we live like this.

PROPELLANT

Ostriches playing soccer.

SHOPPING

There is no death.

CUSTOMER CASH BACK

Friend of the friendless.

GORGEOUS PENDANTS, SCONCES AND LAMPS CAN BE LIFESAVERS

In Dynamic mode.

SHOOT IT

And save!

HURRY

More choices.

INSTANT CANOPY

Just add water.

CLINICALLY PROVEN

Save a buck.

Feel like a billion!

THEY JUST WENT ON SALE

We got ours boom.

DOCTOR RECOMMENDEDx

Doctora Nocaut!

BILLABLE HOURS

Me being me.

WELL WULL WOLL

It’s up to you.

CON FELIZ

Con permiso.

randystark.com

Double bill: Drive Time + The Future of Humanity

Drive Time

MASTER BLASTER FROM OUTER SPACE

Your main boy with the joy toy.

TO THE BEAUTIFUL GHETTO CALLED EARTH

On such a winter’s day.

BRUCKNER TOP TO BOTTOM

Like hunting deer and wild boar.

BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER KILLED IT

They slayed that shit.

THE EARLY 70’S

Back then they didn’t have all the makeup.

AND WE STARTED OUT THE SET WITH

Bricolage for Late Stage Dance Hall.

Title track of the new release by Good Pope Bad Pope.

SAY FOLKS

How many times do you catch yourself

Complaining that your feet ain’t right

Due to all the pills and alcohol?

PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR

Jhonny Soy’s Golf and Ammo Shop.

THE FIRST AND ONLY

Quick and easy.

Safe and effective.

TRAFFIC AND WEATHER

Everyone is 100 percent OK.

ALL LANES WERE BLOCKED

But not anymore.

FORECAST

A high of 260.

A low of minus 280.

COMING UP

Ninety minutes of commercial free scherzos.

The Future of Humanity

THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

Depends on the outcome of  this meeting.

I BASICALLY SAID

You know what?

AND I’M BEGINNING TO THINK

Oh wonderful.

YOU KNOW HOW YOU LIKE

Believe in your heart?

IF I HAD TO GUESS

I’d say unauthorized.

SO MEANING LIKE OK

How much more to go all the way big?

IF I’M HIM

I’m thinking hey.

THEY’LL

What’s?

YEAH

Yeah no.

I REMEMBER SEEING IT

And thinking huh?

SO SHE SAID OH

And then uh.

OH WERE YOU?

That’s super.

WELL TECHNICALLY

But yeah.

I KEEP TELLING MYSELF

It’s OK.

And I keep asking myself

What’s OK?

A SHARED SENSE OF

Uh.

OH GOD

It’s like what?

SO I SIT THERE

For a good maybe 30 seconds.

NOW?

Was it now?

I DON’T KNOW WHAT ANY OF THIS MEANS

But yes.

OR DID I TELL YOU

And not her?

I NEVER REALLY

Thought.

Wow.

UH YOU KNOW WHAT?

Absolutely.

www.randystark.com

Labor Day Weekend Reading Roundup

The 80/20 reading to writing ratio assails me like a geomagnetic storm, and there were four prose pieces I had to finish reading before I could start this post: stories by F.X. Toole, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Monica Arac DeNyeko, plus an essay by Dubravka Ugrešić (translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac). One author from the USA, two from Uganda, and one from Croatia. The writing is excellent and goes from cynical to horrifying, heartbreaking to satirical.

Onward. Here is 2017’s Labor Day in the USA’s 80/20 reading roundup:

1. A poem by Alejandra Piznarik:

DISTRUST

Mama told us of a white forest in Russia: “… and we made little men out of snow and put hats we stole from great-grandfather on their heads … ”

            I eyed her with distrust. What was snow? Why did they make little men? And above all, what’s a great-grandfather?

2. A poem by Jan Wagner (translated from German by David Keplinger) is dope. Click here.

3. CA Conrad is a crazy wild treat. Check out the blog.

4. Highlights from urban lit is a regular part of my shop talks, the uninhibited energy and linguistic mashups of the street coloratura that I love so much, and this knockout is from the recently released Ratchet Wives Club: Atlanta Edition (N'Dia  Rae).Here are a few choice bits: 

• wasted like a drunk white bitch on vacation in Cancun.
• especially since a bitch was still fly.
• Now the cops are going to be all in my shit! he barked.
• My pussy became drench.
• I was doing all of this for my husband and damn it, he better had survived.
• You’re a fraud ass bitch.

5. By way of compare and contrast: here’s Willa Cather describing “one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty.”
Or Anais Nin: “The (eyes) had in them the roving gaze of the mariner who never attaches himself to what he sees, whose very glance is roving, floating, sailing on, and who looks at every person and object with a sense of the enormous space around them, with a sense of the distance one can put between one’s self and one’s desires, the sense of the enormousness of the world, and of the tides and currents that carry us onward.”

6. After reading a long poem by Walt Whitman (originally untitled, later known as “Song of Myself”) I explored the genealogy of the style I use, the seminal innovators of Language, minimalism, conceptualism, imagists, call it what you will. I’ve written elsewhere about working in the wilderness until I started to notice and clues and markers of others who had been here before me. It encouraged me, as I would hope mine would someday encourage others were the tables to be turned. And so for the record I’m just going to name some names: Craig Dworkin, Robert Grenier, Aram Saroyan, Clark Coolidge, Brian Joseph Davis, Monica De La Torre, Joseph Kosuth, Harryette Mullen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Ara Shirinyan, Jonas Mekas, Larry Eigner, Jeff Derksen, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein.

7. It was pure fortuity that a second exploration enhanced and expanded upon the first. I came upon a book, a collected poems, in Spanish, by the Mexican Efraín Huerta. My Spanish being poor, I read what I could as I paged through the volume when voila: the poemínimos. Late in Huerta’s career, he developed a new short form of poetry called poemínimo, which combined elements of aphorism, epigraph, and haiku with humor, irony and cynicism, culminating in a book 50 poemínimos (1978). Come to find out these poems belong to a Latin American tradition of short poems by writers including fellow Mexican poet José Juan Tablada, Un día (1919), the first collection of haiku published in the Americas; the cosmopolitan Ecuadoran poet Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Microgramas (1940); Ana Rosa Núñez, Cuban-American; and Flavio Herrera of Guatemala. There are more, you are invited to go deeper into short poems at the international level, including haiku and similar, short forms. Charles Trumbell has written extensively on this.

8. Unexpected business had me in Alhambra, California, and it turns out that the city is named after a book by Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra.  Based on his travels to the Moorish palace in Spain, Irving published his book in 1832 and revised and completed it in 1851. It is a beautifully written travelogue that gives a good description of Spain in the early and mid 19^th century, as well as folklore from centuries prior.  The “Tales” and other writing by Irving that I discovered in the “complete works” gave me a new appreciation for a writer who’d I’d previously known only for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” 

9. On this site, a gallery of texts and images, comes a collection of dreams by Maureen Miller presented as emails, a hilarious and inspired commentary on our digitally interconnected, self-obsessed culture. Even the footnotes are LMFAO funny. (Reminds me of Rafael Pérez-Torres now at UCLA, but I studied with him at UC Santa Barbara. He loved footnotes.)

10. OK. Gotsta pay the rent, so here’s the link to my Randy Stark Amazon Author’s website, where you can find my most recent book. It’s only a buck!

Before I go, a tip o’ the sombrero to Jerry Lewis—he owned Labor Day weekend with his telethons. 

www.randystark.com

Your Gaze Has Been Forwarded to an Automated Staring System

POET

All station stops are brief.

GROM

Staying stoked.

CONFESSIONAL

Box office.

PEACHES

Taking a vacation this week.

UNIVERSITY OF WEATHER

All the degrees you need.

PUGILISTS AND FOOTBALLERS

Acting queer and poststructural.

CONSENSUS BUILDING

That’s my jamm.

Gets me deep in the feels.

A GIRL NAMED BOY

You were friends in Head Start.

BODY COMPOSITION ANALYSIS EVENT

Folks if we could form one line please.

BIG LOTS

Sick dope lit.

SEEKERS

Best available paradise.

CALIFORNIA

In name only.

ICE CREAM MAN

Approaching the makeshift morgue.

WOOLY CATERPILLARS

Boogying.

GHOST GNAT

Laughing girl.

INSTANT SAVINGS

I’m never alone.

ENTRÉE

Head on, rear end, or T-bone.

DRINKING FROM THE MIRAGE

Grinning like a Cheshire coyote.

VIOLIN STUDIES

String theory.

STRING QUARTET

Gridiron glory.

FIVE KIDS

Free puppies.

THE TRUTH?

I can’t handle the truth.

REGULAR COFFEE

I can’t drink regular coffee.

THE FLANEUR

Languor is his business.

TRENDY BLOCKS

On-air personalities.

ARE WE READY?

Say bye guys.

www.randystark.com

Lines From the Tri-County Area

Five Halls of Fame You Probably Never Knew Existed

COIN LAUNDRY ON MOTHER’S DAY

He jumped up and changed the TV.

I MEAN HEY

Don’t get me wrong.

BEFORE MY SURGERY

My breasts were saggy and lumpy.

Now they are round and pretty.

BUT I THINK

You know.

Motor sports.

SECURITY GUARDS

Him and his wife.

BASICALLY HIS WHOLE THING WAS

Globally inspired, locally sourced.

HE PLANS TO MAKE MONEY SELLING SHAVE ICE

First you get yourself an 800-gallon tank.

And then you take

And fill it up

With 800 gallons of water.

OVER TIME

New whip.

New crib.

HE TELLS ME HE’S IN FIVE HALLS OF FAME

You probably never knew existed.

USED TO BE A HEADLINING ARTIST

Gone misdocumented and ununderstood.

THAT’S WHEN YOUR AUNT CALLED

I said to her.

I said.

HEY WHERE YOU AT?

Andale pues.

America’s Favorite Sweeteners

SWEETENERS BRING US TOGETHER

Along with sugars white and brown.

SURREAL

Really.

MIND BLOWING

In many ways.

SPLENDA IS YELLOW

And Sweet’N Low is pink.

YEAH

Yeah exactly.

EVERYBODY

It’s just.

You know.

THERE’S A BLUE PACKET

That’s Equal.

IT MUST BE

At least I hope it is.

IS IT?

I thought it was.

randystark@yahoo.com

Three Sequences

Le Chat

YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE IT TO A HUMAN FOR THIS GAME TO WORK

She tells the cat.

HE’S BEEN A CAGED LION

For a long time.

RESEARCH?

Is that what you’re doing?

WE WERE GONNA BUILD A HUGE UH

Remember?

A huge.

Like a.

HE BROUGHT IT TO YOU

He wants you to throw it.

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO THROW IT

With spitties all over it?

JENNIFER WAS GONE TO PODCAST CAMP

Our daughter.

She kind of liked it.

WE GOT EIGHTH ROW

Just awesome awesome awesome tickets.

HEY

No claws.

THERE

See how nice you can be?

BOUGHT THEM

Super last minute.

I’M NOT AN IDEA COMER UPPER WITH

But I’m an implementer sine qua non.

YOU LITTLE SWEETIE

Yeah you’re a sweetie.

Such a sweetie.

No claws.

No claws

No claws goddammit.

WHAT DID YOU DO TO UNCLE GARY NOW?

What did you do?

Did he get you?

IF THEY’D THOUGHT ABOUT IT

They would have got married and that would have been it.

ANYWAY SO YEAH

Keep on rocking in the free world.

A Sighing Guilt Thing

AFTER THE PLENARY SESSION

I was talking to a lady.

WHEN CAN WE OR YOU OR I

The life coach training thing?

IT WAS TWELVE AT NIGHT

She’s like it’s twelve at night.

As far as I know and from what I understand.

THE FUTURE?

No, not really.

OH THAT’S RIGHT

You’re from.

You’re from.

SHE SITS

And does a sighing guilt thing.

UNTIL I REALIZED

Wait a minute.

BUT THAT’S WHAT YOU DO

Like people step off a curb.

WOW I KNOW

They had it on the news.

Lines from a Glad Bosom

I TOLD HIM

I said hey.

HE LOOKED AT ME LIKE

It was the swamp cooler talking.

HE TOLD ME I SHOULD WEAR IT MORE OFTEN

So what do you think?

Do I look good in black?

HE’S A FRIEND OF YOURS

I don’t know his name.

He said he was looking for you.

HE WENT AND GOT A HOTEL ROOM IN ALPINE FOR THREE NIGHTS

Hey you’re supposed to be in Alpine.

www.randystark.com