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.
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.”
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 19th
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.”
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.
