midwest

I once wrote a blog post called “The Midwest: 5 reasons it sucks.” A tongue-in-cheek piece about the horrors of living in this wasteland of a region. Incidentally, this post got probably the most traffic of anything I ever wrote on that blog. If my Midwest intuition tells me anything, it tells me this is because many people love to hate the Midwest.

Detractors, beware! This here is an homage. I got love for this middle-of-the-map. What’s so great about this region? If you want to know the truth, the midwest does thunderstorms like no one else knows how. The beauty of those skies being torn open… gets me every time. Let’s go eat a tornado, boys.

John Mark Eberhardt works for the Kansas City Star and has a book of poetry out called Night Watch.

Farmers

Out here in the fields,
the distances can
defeat you. In our
pickup trucks, we
raise the dust on
gravel roads, looking
for signs of trouble–
corn smut, busted fences,
a daughter in the hay.

Now and then you see us, you
city folks in your rental cars,
when you take a wrong turn
off the interstate and onto
one of our country roads
that have no names or
numbers, just letters–
G or B or double A. The
roads are like us; they
don’t have much to say.

When we see you out here,
lost, your lips moving, your
eyes wide, looking for clues,
we’ll wave to you, or at least
lift two fingers off the wheel.
If you stop and roll down your
window, we’ll even give you
directions. We won’t ask
why you’re so quick to get
away; after all, you can’t
imagine why we stay.

Mental Graffiti, a slam team from Chicago performs a group piece: We’re from the Midwest. (The team’s 2008 incarnation was peopled by Dan Sully, Tristan Silverman, Alvin Lau, Billy Tuggle, K.Krown).

If what you seek a bit more self-derision from midwestern poetry, please see Kevin Young’s Ode to the Midwest.

For more Midwestern poetry read anything by B.H. Fairchild or the arm of the Cottonwood as it spits its dry storm clouds over a quiet town in spring.

summer

I am so fond of midwestern summers. I think it is very important to have something so universal for neighbors to complain about. “Oh, this humidity– can you believe it?” (Yes, I can, but my hair is still sticking up in disbelief). How fortunate we are to all be rallied against the same forces of sweat and stickiness and mosquitoes.

This brings me to a D.H. Lawrence poem. I think he is so well-known for his animal poems because his other more erotic works were too… um… erotic for polite Edwardian society. This is The Mosquito.

When did you start your tricks
Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon m,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilry
Into that translucent phantom shred
Of a frail corpus?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs
How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,
A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;
Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:
Invisibility, and the anaesthetic power
To deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air
In circles and evasions, enveloping me,
Ghoul on wings
Winged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanks
Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,
You speck.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air
Having read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
Man or mosquito.

You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.
Now then!

It is your trump
It is your hateful little trump
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:
It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?
Surely it is bad policy.

They say you can’t help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden liquor.

I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood
My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.

You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty
Your own imponderable weightlessness
Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a paean of derision
You winged blood-drop.
Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for me
Winged Victory?
Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

Poetry Off the Shelf is a weekly podcast. Here, they celebrate the darker side of summer in their Cruel, Cruel Summer Episode. Includes poems of Weldon Kees, Howard Nemerov and Jane Kenyon. Curtis Fox gives a bit of commentary.

Matsuo Basho was a famous poet in 15th century Japan. He wrote haikus which as we all know consist of 17 syllables in 3 lines. That is, 5.7.5. Translating haikus must be a pain… I can only assume this was once 17 syllables in the original Japanese.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

For another cicada poem, run on over to Poetry Foundation.

spoken word sucks

I love my friends. And as such, I want to bring them to poetry. I want to present to them a bouquet of microphones with a little card on it that reads: open mic tonight? But spoken word sucks. They tell me this, stone-faced and stubborn (“No, I will not pay a cover to hear mic-whining!”). Before I consider finding new friends, I have to admit, they have a sometimes-point.

After this year’s National Poetry Slam, poet Anis Mojgani offered some sage advice via twitter:

1. Slam Family: Dont slam what you THINK will score well or what you think you are EXPECTED to compete with.6:02 PM Aug 9th via web

2. Slam Family: Instead, write what you are inspired by, write what you want to hear, & after you write those poems, perform them.6:03 PM Aug 9th via web

“So…poets prefer good writing, but won’t do it in a real slam?”–Amy David. Truth. Ante up family.6:04 PM Aug 9th via web

Now. I’m sure we can all look ourselves in the mirror and see someone who has written crap poetry. That’s not the point. But the point is also not to write as many “issue” poems as you can so you can move an audience by your acute perception of the ills of the world. You’re a poet. Your pen drips sadness without trying and you can pass for reflective while writing a poem about a carton of milk or a cow’s tooth. That is your majesty.

Let me say this: I have no qualifications that entitle me to speak candidly and critically on this topic. Let me add that I have much love for spoken word, even some of that “issue” stuff, believe-you-me.

I do not think spoken word sucks. That is, I think it is capable of wonder and greatness. Extreme ingenuity can be found in the medium. But there is also the inadvertently ridiculous. It’s alright. The ridiculous exists in all things.

Now. I present to you some truly bad spoken word (don’t cry, poets– they just make fun of what they can’t understand)!

“Oh you’re reading at a poetry open mic, huh? Like in I Married An Axe Murderer?”
“Oh please, Muses! I hope not….”

Demetri Martin. Slam. Poet. Slams. Poetry.