Three Things #7: Online Reading
Hello! This is your periodic reminder that you forgot to unsubscribe the last time I sent you a newsletter, so here we go again.
Also: I am, incredibly, almost out of copies of my chapbook, This Folded Path (except for the ones I'm reserving for in-person events), so if you still want one but keep forgetting to anything about it, hit reply and we can maybe work something out.
One: Literary Nights
Next Wednesday, May 29th, at 7:30pm CDT, I will be one of the featured readers at Literary Nights, hosted by my publisher, Unsolicited Press. It will be live-streamed on Youtube here.
I’ll be reading some selections from the forthcoming Vessels, and I promise to be every bit as inarticulate, bristly, and stand-offish as you’ve come to expect of me. It should prove to be an extremely awkward trainwreck of an evening for everyone!
Two: The 25 Club
Five of my poems were published in talking about strawberries all of the time last month.
Most of them are fairly recent — written in the ten years or so — but one is quite old. I wrote “The Far Country” in 1998–99, during the same stretch that produced “January” and the poems of “The Light’s Agitation.”
Whereas “January” was accepted after six rejections and “Agitation” after only three, “The Far Country” racked up twenty-five rejections over the last twelve years before finally appearing in talking about strawberries…
Other than some small alterations to the punctuation, “The Far Country” is essentially the same poem I wrote in the late twentieth century. It doesn’t necessarily follow that a poem needs to be revised after receiving a rejection; there are too many other reasons why a poem isn’t accepted which have nothing to do with the work itself. If you believe in the work, keep sending it out as it is.
That said, I did in fact make a fairly major change at one point.
Its original title was “The God Hypothesis,” and I wondered if this caused it to lean a little too heavily into the didactic. I mean, yes, the poem is didactic — I am, after all, taking a pretty firm theological stand which might be a little hard to swallow if you aren’t, say, a Daoist.
But if a poem is going to fail, I’d rather it fail from too much ambiguity than too little. So I wondered if the title was coming on too strong by suggesting that “God” isn’t even a theory but merely a hypothesis, a first guess based on a hunch, something to be tested, potentially found to be wrong, and discarded; suggesting, furthermore, that we’re just out here, all by ourselves, completely unsupervised… In my experience, people are delighted to shitcan God as long as they can replace it with something comparable — the Goddess, for example; or a bickering committee of daemons; or a blind watchmaker; or sex, drugs, and rock & roll (or some sweaty combination thereof). But to replace God with… nothing? To throw down Sauron and replace him with… nobody? Inconceivable! (I do not think that word means what you think it means.)
So I renamed it, pulling a phrase from the core passage of the poem, which is a reversal of a line by Meister Eckhart: “God is at home here; we are in the far country.” I disagreed. It seemed to me that he’d gotten it exactly backwards, so I flipped it, rendering it closer to what I think is the truer, or at least healthier, statement. And the poem grew out from there.
The name change, it turns out, made absolutely no difference. According to my records, it had been rejected only five times as “The God Hypothesis,” and was then rejected twenty more times as “The Far Country.” Insert “shrug” emoji here.
And at some point, I started actually wanting it to get rejected. How many more could I collect? As it passed twenty, I set my sights on twenty-five — a nice number — but really I wanted to get as close to fifty as I could.
I’ll have to consult my spreadsheet to see which of my poems are the runners-up for most rejections. I think there are a few with maybe fifteen or so? Can they break this record and join the 25 Club?
Three: Speak To Me
I’ve been listening to Julian Lage’s newest album, Speak To Me, a lot recently. Here are some Youtube videos of live performances of four songs from the record:
While Lage is clearly a Jazz guitarist, his style embraces many different genres. His technique is impeccable, rarely indulging in flashy pyrotechnics. Just clean, fluent playing with an excellent sense of melody and song craft.
If you watch his hand on the fretboard, it may look soft, almost accidental, like he’s just brushing against the strings as an afterthought. This is deliberate. Early in his career, he suffered from something called focal dystonia, which, at its worst, caused his hand to cramp if he so much as touched a guitar. The exercises he developed to overcome this led to this light, delicate touch.
Here’s a ten-minute clip of Lage being asked about why his principal guitar is a Telecaster, the “wrong” guitar for Jazz. (It’s a segment from this delightful eighty-minute interview with Rick Beato.)
I have striven to include something local as one of the three things in every newsletter. This time I was coming up blank — until I remembered that Julian Lage’s drummer, Dave King, was born in Minneapolis and is a member of the Minnesota-based group, The Bad Plus.
(Okay, if that seems like too much of a stretch, how about this: An interactive tool that answers the question: What's Under Your House?)
Until next time!