Albums that mean Everything to Me

Or, albums that changed my life. I've been listening to a lot of music this summer, and I'm feeling thankful. So here's my list:


Wings Greatest Hits – OK, so now, 30 years later, I don’t have much Wings or Paul McCartney around anymore, but in the mid-70s, when I was barely a teenager, this album hit me like a brick. It was the first album I purchased.

History: America’s Greatest Hits – I still listen to this album probably as much as just about any album in my collection. It’s shifted from “life –changing” to “guilty pleasure,” but it’s still there. I tried buying some of their regular albums, but none of them really hold together for me. They, like Paul McCartney, just get a little too plastic-feeling for me now.

Deacde – Neil Young – It just floored me, and made sense of the universe. I instantly became a huge Neil Young fan. I think it’s really because of the two sides of Neil Young, what I’ve since termed the Blue and the Black. After Decade, I purchased Comes a Time, and then Rust Never Sleeps, and ever since, I’ve purchased each album as soon as it’s been available, even if the 80s got a little rough here and there. And, of course, I went back and got the earlier ones as well, which made the 80s bearable.

John Lennon – Shaved Fish – I heard so much Beatles music on the radio, I never really felt like buying it, but I was interested in their more recent, individual things. This album cemented for me that John was my favorite Beatle, less so for his hits, than for his other stuff. I quickly moved to buy his solo records. Walls and Bridges was my favorite for a long time.

And then the flood gates opened, after getting a few more Greatest Hits albums (by Dylan, Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen):

Bob Dylan – Highway 51 Revisited (which has possibly become the most important single album to me). There’s very little else to say, really.

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Perhaps it’s a little dated now, but when I came across Pink Floyd around ’79-80, it was as if everything I was feeling suddenly had a voice.

Ian Hunter – All American Alien Boy and You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic. I still don’t really know why I’m such an Ian Hunter fan. Perhaps it’s the same with many of the artists I admire. There’s a softness, a vulnerability paired with a certain immaturity and lack of completeness that brings me back to Ian Hunter. I like those same things in The Replacements, and in some ways Neil Young, as well.

Leonard Cohen – Songs of Love & Hate (I was already a fan by the time I got this album, but it still seemed to change all the albums around it). What to add to that? He seems to know something the rest of us can only trace the limits of.

Jumping a little ahead, there are some albums that more recently have really shaken me back into music:

Talking Heads – Remain in Light, and then again with Stop Making Sense. Remain in light just floored me. I didn’t know what to do with it, especially when I flipped it over to side two. And then, when I found Stop Making Sense, I just felt like everything had changed.

The Replacements – Don’t Tell a Soul. This album was a perfect combination of electric and acoustic elements. It felt like a complete world.

The Waterboys – Fisherman’s Blues. I was already a fan of The Waterboys, but this one just completed their lyric and musical elements. It seemed there was nothing new to do after this.

Son Volt – Trace. I couldn’t believe how timeless this one felt the first time I put it on. It remains for me the definition of the genre, whatever you want to call that genre.

R.E.M – Automatic for the People. I was never a huge R.E.M. fan, but I had a few of their albums, but this one really exploded all over the radio and my consciousness. It took me awhile to be able to listen to it as an album, and when I did, it got even more important.

Cracker – Kerosene Hat. Similar to Son Volt’s Trace, this album stands as larger than life for me. For a time. A sound. And subject matter. How can one not be changed after hearing “Eurotrash Girl” for the first time?

Lucinda Williams – Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. This one came from country side of the same genre that Neil Young (ok, maybe others had something to do with it too) created in 1971 with After the Gold Rush. It brought me back to the ground, and instantly wiped away the pops and bleeps of 80s pop. Thankfully.

Kristin Hersh – Hips & Makers. With just an acoustic guitar and tons of attitude and twisted observations, this album has a purity that isn’t the least bit “acoustic.”

Sparklehorse – It’s a Wonderful Life. What to say? I feel I’m saying the same for each of these albums: It took me to a new place, lyrically and musically.

The Jayhawks – Rainy Day Music. For me, this album was the perfect “pop” record. It’s SO singable and worth singing along with.

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. How to go into the studio and make it still sound somehow still like a junkyard. What a beautiful overproduction.

Aimee Mann – Magnolia (and Bachelor No 2). I think Aimee Mann is one of the best lyricists currently writing songs. Just amazing, spot-on, observations. She skewers relationships from inside of them, setting a benchmark for what concise lyric writing is.

The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin followed by Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I’ve been a Lips fan for many years, but these two albums, back to back, just turned everything on its head. A veil was lifted shortly into The Soft Bulletin, and it keeps lifting every time I go back to either of these albums.

In the early 90s, as I was searching for instrumental music to study by, I discovered how much I really loved Bebop, but that’s a whole other list, just as long, so I’ll skip it for now.

The Creativity Business

Creativity 101

I’m reading the June/July 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind, and I just came across the panel discussion, “Let Your Creativity Soar.” In the discussion, Robert Epstein discusses his version of the four “core competencies” of creative expression.

OK, so this won’t really be new to writers and teachers of writing, but I really enjoyed his neat encapsulation of the creative process.

So here they are, with just a bit of gloss.

Capturing – “preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them”

Challenging – “giving ourselves tough problems to solve . . . in tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas”

Broadening – “the more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting your interconnections”

Surrounding – “the more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become”

* * *

Capturing. Making notes without editing. Carrying around a little notebook. Easy-breezy. We all do that.

Challenging. Is this the idea behind writing prompts? I’ve never much liked writing prompts. Challenging, though, could be other things as well. Writing a poem a day. Writing in form. Proposing AWP panels. La la.

Broadening. Well, this part is easy. We already all read a bunch of poetry and other literature, but it’s also calling us to read a bunch of different things. Science. History. But we all do some version of this already.

Surrounding. This one is easy for a bit, when one is in school. But then comes more hard work. Community? Readings? People to talk to.

* * *

Maybe these are too basic to be of much use, but it is a nice reminder. One can awaken in the morning, and check one’s four core competencies. Maybe one could even make a graph. Interesting thought, he says, half joking.

Erasure Fun

The pshares blog mentioned my daughter Natalie’s poem that I put up the other day, which was very nice:

http://pshares.blogspot.com/2008/07/young-guns.html

But, what the post also contained was this:

“While we’re on the subject, check out Wave Books’s erasures machine. Up with strangely arranged minimalism!”

I’ve been having fun with it today, when I should have been doing other things. Still and all, a great use of time. Fun fun fun.

George Carlin - The Last Interview

George Carlin, from The Last Interview

Full text can be found here:
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200806/george-carlins-last-interview

Do you go around observing and trying to collect funny things? Or do you just live your life and then say how you feel about what you happen to have seen?


I’m 71, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 50 years, doing it at a fairly visible level for 40. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine that works a certain way: the observations, the immediate evaluation of the observation, and then the mental filing of it, or writing it down on a piece of paper. I’ve often described the way a 20-year-old versus, say, a 60- or a 70-year-old, the way it works. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data they’ve experienced, either seeing or listening to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer storage area, the matrix inside is more textured, and has more contours to it. So, observations made by a 20-year-old are compared against a data set that is incomplete. Observations made by a 60-year-old are compared against a much richer data set. And the observations have more resonance, they’re richer.

So if I write something down, some observation—I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already—the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression. The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that's when I bring the craftsmanship. That's when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that? And then as you write, you find more, 'cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.


Do you think that the richness you described comes from just being able to access more experiences, having information on file? Or is it judgment?


Well, that's true, too. The machine that does all this learns what it is you want—it learns what it is that serves your purpose and it begins to tailor the synthesis. It synthesizes these observations and these comparisons. Comedy’s all about comparisons and contrasts and congruities and incongruities and heightenings and understatement and exaggeration. The mind has all of that stuff built in, and it learns which ones pay off the best for you. It's probably related to the pleasure center. You get so much pleasure finding good observations and finding which things are the richest things you can say, that probably the brain remembers how that happened and learns to provide the best stuff. Maybe you have a little silent editor in there.


You talked about how comedy's all about incongruities, contrasts, exaggeration. Do you think about those techniques or those principles of humor consciously?


It happens automatically. Sometimes there’s a conscious heightening, you'll recognize you've just chosen an image to make a point. Then your mind will just suddenly throw something at you that's stronger—a heightening, to raise the stakes, a stronger word, a more visceral image, something that lights up the imagination, much better than the original thought. So you’re aware that you’re heightening and exaggerating further but you don't use the word exaggeration or anything like that. All that stuff is just happening. And sometimes, afterward, I’ll look at something and say, “If I were giving a comedy lecture, that would be a good example.” I often think in those terms.


You talked about how wonderful it is, this feeling of writing. So what is your process like?


I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I'm not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder. Most of the note-taking happens while I’m watching television.

Because the world is undifferentiated on the television set. You may be watching the news channel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of American life and the human experience. It's gonna go from suicide bombings to frivolous consumer goods. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception—if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.

When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can't use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me.


Do you mentor other comedians?


No. I’m not collegial, I don’t hang out. I’m soloist, I like my solitude, I don’t really hang around with comedians—this person I talked to today [Jerry Seinfeld ], I now have his phone number. I have maybe five phone numbers. I’m not in show business because I don’t have to go to the meetings, I’m just not a part of it, I don’t belong to it. When you “belong” to something. You want to think about that word, “belong.” People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don’t care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can’t quite pin down.

2008 CSU Poetry Center Contest Results

2008 CSU Poetry Center Contest Results

OK, so I’m posting the full list of names here, in part, because it’s the fullest list of finalist names I think I’ve ever seen. And, as well, it reveals just how interesting CSU Poetry Center is getting.

So next year we’ll have new books from Allison Benis White, Liz Waldner, Allison Titus and Mathias Svalina.

CSU is now, officially, the press to watch.

And not just because of what they’re publishing, but the list of finalists and semi-finalists shows just how strong their selections will run. Seth Abramson, Adam Clay, Julie Doxsee, Chris Forhan, Nils Michals, Carrie Oeding, Maggie Smith, Roy Seeger, Malinda Markham, Mary Ann Samyn, Matthew Thornburn, Tony Trigilio, and on.

This is really good news.




ALLISON BENIS WHITE of Irvine, California, was selected by final judge Robert Hill Long as winner of our First Book Competition for her manuscript SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON, to be published in Spring 2009.

LIZ WALDNER of Oakland, California, has been selected by the Open Book Editorial Committee (Kazim Ali, Mary Biddinger, Michael Dumanis, and Sarah Gridley) as the winner of our Open Book Competition for her manuscript TRUST, to be published in Spring 2009.

We have selected two additional manuscripts for publication in Fall 2009:

SUM OF EVERY LOST SHIP by ALLISON TITUS of Richmond, VA
DESTRUCTION MYTH by MATHIAS SVALINA of New York, NY.




We would also like to recognize and congratulate the following runners-up, finalists, and semi-finalists for the 2008 awards:


FIRST BOOK COMPETITION RUNNERS-UP (as named by Robert Hill Long):


Allison Titus, Richmond, VA, Sum of Every Lost Ship
Jesse Nissim, Oakland, CA, Diagram Her Dream of Flight


OPEN BOOK COMPETITION RUNNERS-UP (as named by Open Book Editorial Committee):


Dora Malech, Iowa City, IA, Make, Break, Or
Seth Abramson, Iowa City, IA, Final Boy


FIRST BOOK FINALISTS:


Erica Bernheim, Chicago, IL, The Mimic Sea
Michele Bowman, Brooklyn, NY, Cowboys
Katherine Dimma, New York, NY, More Rooms than Doors
Suzanne Heyd, New Haven, CT, Breaking & Entering
Laura McKee, Seattle, WA, Uttermost Paradise Place
Marc McKee, Columbia, MO, Fuse
Katrinka Moore, New York, NY, Thief
Sarah O’Brien, Iowa City, IA, Catch Light
Mathias Svalina, New York, NY, Destruction Myth
Mathias Svalina, New York, NY, I Have Chosen You & You Have Chosen Me
Lauren Smith Traore, Whitewater, WI, Birdello
Julie Wade, Barnesville, OH, Six


OPEN BOOK FINALISTS:


Adam Clay, Kalamazoo, MI, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World
Adam Clay, Kalamazoo, MI, Nowaday River
Julie Doxsee, Istanbul, Turkey, Of Unsuspended Suns
Chris Forhan, Indianapolis, IN, Black Leapt In
Kirsten Kaschock, Philadelphia, PA, A Beautiful Name for a Girl
Patrick Lawler, Liverpool, NY, Breathe: A Word of It
Erika Meitner, Blacksburg, VA, The Contact Notes
Nils Michals, San Francisco, CA, Theory of Shadows & Perspective
Maggie Smith, Columbus, OH, Hush Now


FIRST BOOK SEMI-FINALISTS:


Katherine Lucas Anderson, Annunciation
Tracy Jo Barnwell, Houston, TX, Monsters in Repose All Kinds
Kiley Cogis, Fairfax, VA, Lightproof
Noah Falck, Dayton, OH, The Snowmen Are Losing Weight Christopher
Matthew Gavin Frank, Buffalo Grove, IL, The Morrow Plots
Emily Kendal Frey, Portland, OR, Dear Jalapeno
Carolyn Hembree, NewOrleans, LA, Skinny
Kyle McCord, Amherst, MA, The Nesting Doll
Gary L. McDowell, Portage, MI, Young Teeth
Carrie Oeding, Athens, OH, Our List of Solutions
Nicholas Regiacorte, Galesburg, IL,Voice Human
Roy Seeger, Kalamazoo, MI, The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds
Brandon Som, Pittsburgh, PA, Hearsay
Jeanine Walker, Houston, TX, Water Beneath the Foundation
Nicole Zdeb, Portland, OR, The Friction of Distance


OPEN BOOK SEMI-FINALISTS:


Laurie Blauner, Seattle, WA, Entertaining in the Room with All Kinds
Steve Fellner, Brockport, NY, The Weary World Rejoices
Noah Falck, Dayton, OH, The Snowmen Are Losing Weight
Christopher Howell, Spokane, WA, Gaze
Malinda Markham, San Jose, CA, Complicit
F. Daniel Rzicznek, Bowling Green, OH, Divination Machine
Mary Ann Samyn, Morgantown, WV, Incredibly Small and Impossibly Lovely
Matthew Thornburn, Riverdale, NY, Like Luck
Tony Trigilio, Chicago, IL, Historic Diary

Poetry as "Wise Pictures"

I’m in Pennsylvania for another week. And I’ve already taken my daughter, Natalie, through her homework that her First Grade teacher sent with her, so we decided to try writing poetry.

She said she wanted to write “wise pictures.” I decided that was the one of the best descriptions I’ve heard of what poetry can do.

Here’s her first try. (She wrote all the words, but I helped a little with the order of the sentences.)


The Snow Falls
by Natalie Gallaher



The cars are talking about snow
in the other room.

We all come down to this moment
with snow.

The snow is talking too.

I wish for snow
inside my head.

The snow looks like shining glazing
of glass.

The trees have no leaves
all afternoon.

I am cold.

The winters are wise
in the future.

John Ashbery on Video

Just because you might stumble across it or not. And just so that I can come back and watch them again later.




Much On The Cliffs: The Philosophies of John Ashbery



The Poet’s View – John Ashbery

Joe Cocker - With a Little Help From My Friends

Joe Cocker!

OK, so if you’re like me, you might have always wondered what Joe Cocker was singing during his version of “With a Little Help From My Friends.”



Here you go, thanks to YouTube.

I don’t understand the birthday wishes at the end, but leaving a little bit of mystery is always a good thing.

Four Way Books June Reading Period!

2008 Four Way Books
June Reading Period

Submission Dates: June 1 - 30 2008
by email or regular mail


Poetry
Novellas
Short Story Collections



For Complete Guidelines please visit:
www.fourwaybooks.com


Four Way Books
Celebrating 15 Years

Issues: Day 4,982

Here are a few of the things dogging me these days:

Follow this link to Justin Evans:

http://utahpoet.blogspot.com/2008/06/business.html

So, what is the issue here, really? Is it knowing one’s own value as an artist? Well, no, not really. It’s more trying to figure out this world of writing and publishing. What is there to say about it? One writes. Yes. That is the important thing. But then what? One thinks about publishing. One has to think about publishing. One cannot not think about publishing. But, thinking about publishing is potentially very bad for one’s art, right? Because it makes one think about audience? But what if thinking about audience makes one write better? And who is to define “better”? Charles Wright once remarked that when he writes a poem he thinks of writing it for his friends, the poets Charles Simic and Mark Strand. Is there a difference? These days, whenever I write a poem, I write it to send to G.C. Waldrep. Is that any different than thinking about “audience” as, say, some journal or press? Does this mean one is “selling out” in some fashion, or to some fashion?

Perhaps a strategy would be to think of sending one’s poems to Vladimir and Estragon? They seem to have a lot of time on their hands.

Speaking of G.C. Waldrep. He’s a friend of mine, and a person whose poetry I admire. We’ve been writing poems back and forth for a few months now. Long enough that we both have well over a hundred poem each. Waldrep was calling it his pile, in conversation, his “Accidental Book.” I’m thinking of it as a very large pile of things on my desk. As many of our poems riff off each other’s images and poems, it makes me wonder what we’ve done, and what we might possibly do with these things in the future. Are they one huge book together? Are they an “experiment”? Are they an interesting accident that we’ll each take in other directions?

As artists, we all follow whatever thinking occurs to us, but then what? What do we do with all these things? Well, back to Justin’s questions, perhaps . . .

All of this leads me to Jorie Graham. I’m currently reading her newest book, and I’m having a difficult time. Jorie graham used to mean just about everything to me, circa 1990 – 1995. What has happened since? I think it was while reading Swarm, that I began to find myself arguing with the poems. Perhaps this is a mark of strong work. I took the time, and I still take to time, to buy each new book, and then argue my way through it.

Does she see the world differently than she used to, or do I? I think that is the question. That is my argument with her recent work. And who prevails? Or is prevailing the wrong question?

For whom is she writing? Is it no longer me?