5 books I read recently & loved: Michael P. Daley Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld, Kay Gabriel A Queen in Bucks County, Emily Zhou Girlfriends, Charles North News, Poetry and Poplars, Fernando Pessoa A Very Original Dinner

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‘This book is not only a fascinating and richly detailed biography of a wily child of the Great Depression who at an early age drifted into a life of serious crime and serious punishment, it is also an intimate portrait of his complex emotional and intellectual life. Bobby BlueJacket. The story is as good as the sound of his beautiful name.’ — Ron Padgett

‘I hefted Daley’s weighty book (trade paperback, 773 pages) and wondered what on Earth someone could find to say about a small time criminal in Tulsa Oklahoma. Even Truman Capote might find writing so much about so little to be a challenge.

‘But the titular character, Bobby BlueJacket, is much more complex and wide-ranging than your common street thug. A child of the Shawnee, he grew up in 1930s Oklahoma, a toxic stew of virulent racism and ineffectual bureaucrats who wondered what should be done with the noble red savages. “Solutions” ranged from genocidal to condescending, particularly in Tulsa, a town notorious for the viciousness of its racial relations.

‘Out of this mix came BlueJacket: killer, author, politician. The life he led was brutal and cruel – a scene all too common in post-Depression America through the age of Obama. Based largely on BlueJacket’s own anecdotes and somewhat light in corroboration, the narrative may give the subject a rosier and more substantive presence than reality might dictate. Nonetheless, the reality of BlueJacket’s versatility, ambition and malleability is there on every page – this portrait of a man refusing to be ground down by a system that exists for little else.’ — Bryan Zepp Jamieson

 

Bobby Bluejacket Site
Selected Drafts & Manuscript by Bobby BlueJacket
Trial Transcripts & Court Records
‘Bobby Bluejacket’ @ goodreads
Buy ‘Bobby Bluejacket’

 

Michael P. Daley Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld
First to Knock

‘Bobby BlueJacket illuminates a neglected history of American crime, identity, and politics in the 20th century. This is the extraordinary true story of a man who went from career thief and convicted killer to celebrated prison journalist—ultimately becoming a respected Eastern Shawnee activist and orator. Bobby BlueJacket draws upon 5 years of interviews with the subject, long-buried law enforcement and trial records, prison archives, news accounts, and interviews with others such as photographer Larry Clark and veteran reporters of Tulsa’s crime beat.

‘Born in 1930, BlueJacket came of age as a Native American in white Oklahoma—passing through teenage rumbles, scheming pool halls, and Midwest safecracker crews. While incarcerated, he remade himself as a prison journalist. By the 1970s, he would act as a political impresario, used tire salesman, prison rodeo emcee, and later as a venerable tribal elder. At each turn, BlueJacket sought out success and self-definition by any means necessary. More than just an underworld tale—Bobby BlueJacket is an in-depth exploration of one man’s experience in a brutal post-war world.’ — FTK

Excerpt

Perhaps Tulsa’s most notable safecracking professors were the Wilson brothers: Ted, Paul, and Ray. Ted Wilson had come back from World War II and used his G.I. Bill opportunities to attend safe and lock school. “Before [Ted] died he showed everybody how to open them safes,” BlueJacket noted. “These guys were big time.”

Many of Tulsa’s burglars came from the neighborhood around Pine and Utica, an intersection marked by the Rightway Skating Rink and Morris Pastry. “Everybody out there went to prison, was in reformatories and things. It’s where they all come from in Tulsa. It was a real hard neighborhood. If a kid got out of the neighborhood, he could get out but he was still scarred,” BlueJacket described. “Most people didn’t come down here unless they was goin’ to go skatin’.” The area was also where out-of-town thieves and bank robbers rested their heads.

BlueJacket utilized a number of safecracking methods while apprenticing with older crews, but punching safes was most common in those days. “Most of us around this country, you know, was punch n’ hammer, you see?” BlueJacket said, “We got into peeling ’em at the end, but I started out with the old punch.”

BlueJacket, with his young boxing squad, also took part in a less technical style of safe burglary—taking the entire safe with you instead of trying to crack it on location. This was where that old stretch limousine came into play. Besides its inherent flashiness, the automobile happened to have a wide enough passenger door to fit a large safe through. “We had snatched a couple of safes around town, where you couldn’t really beat ’em open there because there’s traffic and people livin’ above ’em in apartments and things,” BlueJacket explained. “So we’d snatch ’em out of there and throw ’em in the back seat of that car and drive off.” They would take the safes out to empty fields in rural areas, “and beat ’em open.”

Targets were identified based on the potential for cash-flow. In the first months of 1948, BlueJacket’s crew hit the Osage School Gymnasium, the East Admiral Boulevard Bar, Hamburger King on West Third Street, and the Kid Cola plant at Third and Guthrie. The Cozy Theater was hit three times. The boys also got $120 from the Triple J Café, whereas a burglary of the Little Mayo Café reportedly yielded only 15 cents.

Towards the end of March, BlueJacket had a line on some gambling money. “If anybody was gambling, I usually knew about it,” he said. This job involved two different Greek diners across the street from one another on Boulder between 4th and 5th. One side of the street had a small, six-stool café called Purity Lunch. Across the street was the Boulder Café at 415 S. Boulder. Between these two places a lot of gambling was going on. Because gambling money can’t go in a bank, the Boulder Café had a mighty safe underneath the counter, stuffed full of cash and built into concrete.

On March 24th, BlueJacket, Rafael, and Chub made out for the Boulder Café. They didn’t have the limousine that night, but had access to a ’48 Plymouth four-door thanks to a boy named Griffin who would drive. The plan was to chip and pry the safe out of the concrete with bars, and then use Griffin’s Plymouth to cart the thing off. Punching or peeling on site would be too loud.

Griffin parked across the street. The others approached from the alleyway, where a big, inactive ventilation fan was. “We bent the blades on that fan and went on in,” BlueJacket described. “Took pry bars and beat that safe out of the ground. Pried it enough to where we weren’t making a lot of noise.”

When the chipping and prying was done, Rafael flashed a lighter in the window. That was the signal. Griffin pulled his Plymouth around. The boys came plowing through the front door with the safe in their arms. The plan was to throw the thing in the Plymouth’s back seat, like they usually did with the limousine. The quicker the better as it was heavy as hell. But there was a problem. The safe wouldn’t fit in the Plymouth’s backseat. BlueJacket said, “The reason the son of a bitch won’t fit is we was goin’ by that big Buick seven or nine passenger limousine we had with the big wide door.” They were confused, now stuck out on the sidewalk holding the Boulder Café’s safe. Their arms were growing real weary. A cruiser could roll by any second.

The boys decided to set the safe down in BlueJacket’s lap and figure out a backup plan. “There on the curb, I’m holding the safe in my goddamn lap and I’m pinned to the ground, can’t move,” he said. “It pinned me to the ground.”

After further consternation, they dropped the safe into the trunk, bringing the back of the car down low, nearly scraping the pavement. Now it was time to move. The boys jumped in. Griffin hit the gas. The Plymouth peeled out, porpoising like a speeding motorboat through the empty streets.

In 2014, BlueJacket revisited the location of the Boulder Café, which is now a parking garage. Thinking back on his times as a safe burglar, BlueJacket said there was a lesson to be learned: “The moral of the story is don’t try to put a goddamn safe in the back seat of your car ’til you measure the door.”

Extras

Trailer

The Legendary Oklahoma Outlaw Bobby Bluejacket

 

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‘Turner’s life revolves around six things: “men, poems, rent, work, disgust, and transit.” Turner writes letters to friends in the interstitial times of commuting or after hook-ups; the reader intercepts them in between Turner’s work and leisure. Turner dilates on all of those themes, which might circumscribe the world of the contemporary educated, urban, queer, millennial misfit. Turner, whose name sounds “fake, like porn-fake,” is our queen of Bucks County. …

‘Attempts to elevate sex with highfalutin language inevitably fall into banality, but by doubling down on banality, Gabriel makes sex both visceral and delightful—a tongue is compared to a Swiffer, an orgasm to a drain unplugged. Not a commonplace but a commons of flesh and its urges. “Everybody gets to be sexy like everybody gets to die.” There’s a contradiction, and Gabriel doesn’t shy from it: “a white queer in Flatbush is a walking icon of rent going up.” A counter-economy of desire feeds the commodity economies of fashion and real estate. Queer desire alone is not enough.

‘In a delightful phrase, the book parses its own aesthetic as “dicking around in the afterimage of modernism.” You could read Bucks County through its poetry, but I choose to read it as prose. Some of its influences I know well: Marx meets Rimbaud, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz. Some seem there in the shadows: Baudelaire and Benjamin; some are maybe yet to meet up at the afterparty, such as the Situationists and their great slogan “Another city for another life.” It’s a question of what to do with radical wanderers like Turner in the era of gentrification.

‘The Turner heteronym, busy getting busy, makes a fine vehicle for ugly feelings. It’s a particularly pressing contemporary cultural problem: what to do about resentment. Turner “used to stack the crud of this world in grids and lists.” But “now I put it in sentences, and interrupt them with a knife.” Many of the conventional avenues of recuperation of intellectual energy are blocked. There’s a brilliant generation who know it and whose art refuses to hanker after or mourn what it has been refused. Turner: “My imaginative lusts riddle bullet holes in the side of the achievable.”

‘That there may not be much future at all is no reason to give it up. One can instead stake everything on “future” as what is always-already here, in the negative. Another city for another life. “In the future we’ll shed our rent like onion skins. I want to blow the roof off the world as much as anybody, with half the spite. I also want to get fucked. What do these have to do with each other. This is my nasty, gentle gift.” Men buy Turner things, but Gabriel is giving.’ — McKenzie Wark

 

Kay Gabriel @ instagram
A New Kind of Trans Poetics
A Conversation with Kay Gabriel
KAY GABRIEL: THE ART OF ILLEGIBILITY
Buy ‘A Queen in Bucks County’

 

Kay Gabriel A Queen in Bucks County
Nightboat Books

‘In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.’ — NB

‘What if Elsa Triolet had forbidden her suitor to write her, not about love, but about being trans? What if whorishness and camp were uncanny for celebrity? for commodity? for New Jersey? Oh wait… I loved reading Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County because it is a committedly horny book, an epistolary roman à clef, in sometimes verse, a pornotract blowing up (or blowing off) the parallel trajectories of identitarian capture and belle lettrist tokenization laid out for queer and trans writers and writing under the sign of literature. Like its protagonist, Turner, it is also a hot mess of the best sort, lolling about and luxuriating in the fruits of the hustle, hungry for the next, marinating in and musing on friendship, ruins, The Valley of the Dolls, Jack Spicer, and gossiping with Gabriel’s loves about what distracts, amuses or revolts, or could.’ — Trish Salah

Excerpts

PERIPHERAL XO

TURNER Are you two dating or just BFFs who show up at the same parties?
MME. LA TERRE I am always by his side, at Red Lobster, in Port-au-Prince, in an oil flume.
M. LE CAPITAL And I by hers though I rearrange them day, night and weekend.
TURNER Your mustache looks familiar, have we met before? You look as if distorted by a screen.
M. LE CAPITAL You will have encountered my deputies in the Bureau of Aesthetic Difficulty. You may be deputized yourself.
TURNER I don’t quite follow.
MME. LA TERRE He means tenure, short stop. What can you get in this watering hole?
TURNER Anything with a twist. Anything with cinnamon or bitters. Anything prone to breaking so long as it is also prone to liquidation.
MME LA TERRE [rapping on the bar] Tonic water sloshed over a cherry. His tab.
M. LE CAPITAL Naturally. [Explaining] We cut loose after hours.
TURNER I remember now. You walk your dog Träger on the Home and Garden network. He has his own cooking channel, his own tree in the park.
LYLE [shrugging] Little pets. [Then.] Am I on glue or is that a chorus of middle management?
TURNER Probably, it’s the right zip code. Round that bend there’s a peripheral utopia except the springs run continually with matcha.
[MME LA TERRE lifts herself from her stool. She unwraps her caftan and removes a miniature chapeau, from which cascades a tangle of impeccable finger-waved curls. She resembles an object of Touchstone Pictures intellectual property, simultaneously vengeful and implicated.]
JESSICA RABBIT You never know when you’ll need backup. Only here the content denatures the form. I’d like a martini, very dry, and a seat for my personal saxophonist.
LYLE You two make for mildly suspicious company, more an object of envy than opprobrium.
TURNER At least until your roots start to show.
JESSICA RABBIT Don’t start with me, you little monkey. You’d kill for this ass.
[Turner’s continual smirk melts off his face and goes on vacation. He is replaced by a toy.]
TURNER As it should be, I feel much more casual. Who wants to take me for a spin?
LYLE I’m out. The doctors turned up with a new speculum I am just yawning to try. [To M. Le Capital] Get me a cab?
TURNER Don’t strain yourself. Anyone else?
MIA INTEREST, THE TOY Me! Or actually I’ll ride shotgun.
TURNER And I drive stick. Beyond that bend a ribbed morain, a recess of gay villainy.
PERIPHERAL UTOPIA First I was a blank extension in an office. Then I was an institution, divided against myself with rail lines, much of it reserved for freight. Then I was a much admired site of abject physical beauty, fishes without smell, collectives without guarantees. Totoshka never made it back from Oz, and my devouring earth conceals his dung into the present.
JESSICA RABBIT Party.

 

“STOFFWECHSEL”

rudely I am, Andy, addled with cold and this is an occasion
say for naps and dreaming as it turns out I dreamt about you,
the occasion of my poem, which is the reason for telling you
the epiphany of a poem called STOFFWECHSEL
this poem was by you in fact it was penned in your hand
it showed the evidences of your formal niceties say
deliberate refusal to break the line on
a fifty-cent word like “niceties”
indeed the cheeriest philologues could have
established to a skeptical audience it was indeed
your poem written by you
which you read to me by my feverish bed
in which I dreamt (U.S. English “dreamed”)
of things like STOFFWECHSEL
the Frankfurt am Main wannabes’ theoretical
centerpiece I’d prefer at a wedding or sickbed
Andy get ready for the good part
though I pause in relating the poem
to take Advil and water to continue relating the poem
called “STOFFWECHSEL” in which you intoned
GET UP POET IT’S TIME TO INGEST YOUR THEORY
the capital letters hammering even on the Starbucks
windows of my stuffy nose GET UP POET you said again
IT’S TIME TO INGEST YOUR THEORY
at which point conveniently there appeared in the poem
Advil and a glass of water to hand
the debt to Eliot is clear, even those
cheeriest of philologues agree:
Andy, your poem is superior
Eliot chose not to supply the reader with any
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs at all
or acetaminophen, yours is an apothecary
more receptive to business which is how it comes that
this poem “STOFFWECHSEL”
is among other things manifestly yours not Tommy’s
David’s or even Kay’s
not written by the four-piece suit
I metabolize nothing it comes right back
out with a child’s persistence
Andy I tumbled out of the dream into the insistence
of a whole bottle of Advil I will never again have a headache this Feb.
a month in any case when I shall bear up in hopes of
the epiphany of your poem redux
the instructions on the bottle stipulating it is to be taken with food
toast eg or flavored ice or oyster crackers, say
in the Stoffwechsel of the age I’m feeling good enough to hurry up

Extras

Kay Gabriel at the 2019 Lambda Literary Retreat

Dr Kay Gabriel – “Classics Transfeminine Object”

 

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‘Girlfriends is a collection of seven short stories that individually follow transgender women as they explore the full spectrum of what life has to offer them, from college parties to first sexual experiences to post-graduation crises and everything in between. The stories are especially compelling because they grapple with the challenges of having to discover or rediscover oneself during early adulthood after everyone around you seems to have already found themselves and their respective paths in life. The vibrant, rich collection takes readers from the suburbs of Ann Arbor to the boroughs of New York City, following a diverse cast of women who, while sharing the identity of being transgender, are entirely singular in their hopes, struggles and experiences.

‘Zhou explained that she didn’t expect the editors of LittlePuss Press to show interest in her stories when she submitted them as a partial manuscript after her friends pushed her to do so. When they did express interest, she felt pressure to meet a high standard, which led to a lot of revising and second-guessing throughout the editing process. At this time, Zhou said, she found she had to start taking herself, and her stories, more seriously.

‘Despite any doubts Zhou felt during the process of refining and publishing her stories, her voice remains clear and strong throughout the collection, in which she brings seven startlingly authentic voices to life. It was easy to forget while reading that these were not real people and experiences.

‘Perhaps one of the many reasons why Zhou’s characters feel so real is because she loosely drew inspiration from some of the people in her own life.

‘“I feel like I did start writing people who are familiar to me,” Zhou explained. “(But) I feel like, a lot of the (time), the characters would just reveal themselves to me through the course of writing. By the end of it, (they’d) become real people.”

‘Regardless of how they came to be, the protagonists in Girlfriends prove Zhou as an emerging expert in the art of character building.

‘The collection is a phenomenal debut. Its digestible and incredibly intimate prose coupled with impressive character development and worldbuilding establish Zhou as an author to look out for. While she may choose to begin every story with the same premise of transgender (and mostly white) women entering early adulthood, Zhou manages to take each story in a different direction, making every protagonist and the situations they find themselves in feel fresh and unique with each story.’ — Graciela Batlle Cestero and Camille Nagy

 

Emily Zhou @ instagram
Interview with Emily Zhou
‘Girlfriends’ @ goodreads
Reading with… Emily Zhou
Buy ‘Girlfriends’

 

Emily Zhou Girlfriends
LittlePuss Press

‘Beautifully rendered and utterly compelling, Emily Zhou’s stories remind me of late night phone conversations with a dear friend—a space that always feels fresh, no matter how many social triumphs and dysfunctions are nursed and examined—and where despite impossible ambiguities and distances, love strikes.’ — Dodie Bellamy

‘In seven light-filled prisms of short stories, Emily Zhou chronicles modern queer life with uncompromising and hilarious lucidity. Attending to the intimacy of Gen Z women’s lives, these stories move from the provinces to the metropolis, from chaotic student accommodation to insecure jobs, from parties to dates to the nights after, from haplessness to some kind of power.

‘Funny and devastating, like a trans Mary McCarthy, Zhou depicts with shocking precision the choices and shifts through which we work on each other and ourselves. Tender, merciless, and gracious, GIRLFRIENDS is a breath of fresh air.’ — LPP

Excerpt

Sara was short and femme and had pink hair, Fern had been taking low-dose testosterone for six months, Rebecca had jet-black hair and bangs that hovered high and skeptical above her thin eyebrows. And then there was me, the only trans girl in the group, just sort of towering over them. We formed some piece of the inevitable scenery in the part of Brooklyn centered around Broadway and Myrtle, doubtlessly connected in some people’s minds with raising rents and the encroachment of cafés like the one we worked at, which in addition to overpriced coffee also sold a random assortment of books, dried flowers, crystals, tarot decks, incense, and so on.

When we got back to the apartment it was about eight and it was pitch dark outside. Rebecca reheated some leftovers and disappeared into her bedroom for the evening, flicking on the lamp that scattered pink light around her room before closing the door with her foot. I ate some crackers and arranged myself in front of my mirror. I heard the beginnings of some HBO show through the wall as I did my makeup, and then she found her headphones.

It’s taken a year of living here, but I think I finally like my bedroom. It’s narrow — my queen-sized bed takes up most of it, and the only other piece of furniture is a small table with a big mirror with lights around the rim. I found it on the street a while ago — obviously, the lights didn’t work, which is why it was on the street, but those can be fixed with a soldering iron, a few trips to the hardware store, and some patience. I had one window, with bars over it, that gave a good view of the brick row houses with arched windows and beautiful tall stoops on Wyckoff Avenue. I had hung a translucent purple curtain over it, which fluttered a bit because I always kept the window open just a crack, even in the gross, wet winters. When I sat there, my face brilliantly illuminated, with the sounds of the street filtering up into my little, cell-like room, I felt calm and protected in the way a bird must feel in the ample knot of a great tree.

I took a little orange pill — Adderall XR, 20 mg — from the bottle I kept in the drawer of the vanity. I considered taking two, but it wasn’t going to be that kind of night. A visit to a meaningful ex, then a house party, no afters. I had to be at my best, but one was enough.

Then, clothes. I slid open the door to my closet, which was overflowing with stuff I got from sample sales and online. Clothes are my one serious vice. I couldn’t afford to buy any of this stuff new, obviously, and even buying it resale made dents in my bank account I struggled to justify to myself. But, you know, being trans, you have to put in a lot more effort to be taken seriously, or that was what I told myself. After some deliberation I chose an Eckhaus Latta top with an opalescent, sequined texture like fish scales, and some high-waisted black pants I had thrifted and tailored to add pleats around the hips. Over top of it, a green leather trench coat. This would turn heads, I thought, angling my body in my mirror, feeling slightly giddy as the amphetamines kicked in.

An hour later I was standing in front of a row house on Bedford, shivering. It had gotten colder and somehow damper, and it felt like the streets were being scooped out by wind. The door opened.

“Come in, come in,” Ambrose said before I could even see his face clearly. I followed him as he scampered up the steps.

The first time I met him was at a party uptown, back when neither of us had transitioned yet. He was wearing a white lace dress, and had his eyes closed and was spinning in circles around a stripper pole installed into the middle of a living room floor. I walked up to him and placed my hands on his shoulders, and he stopped, opened his eyes, and looked up at me.

The eight months we dated were disastrous for both of us. We were both mentally ill and violently in denial about being trans. We wanted to preserve our sense of being normal, functional, heterosexual, pre professional; when that didn’t work out, we resorted to becoming codependent, talking about getting married, having bigger and bigger fights, clinging and clawing at each other like the proverbial drowning people. Finally, one night he stabbed me in the arm with a fountain pen and I had to get it removed in the ER. He went with me and apologized the whole time. When I got discharged at four in the morning, I finally just told him that I needed to not see him for a long time, and that he should lose my number. He sputtered and wailed on the street, his long red hair plastered to his face with snot. He said I love you I love you I love you over and over and it felt like he was stabbing me again. I walked away from him, feeling weightless, not sure how I was supposed to feel beyond that I was “making the right decision.”

Two years passed. We maintained sporadic contact as the two of us separately transitioned and moved to Brooklyn, aware of each other in the archipelago of queer friend groups that were offshoots of the same queer friend groups from when we were in school. Then, one day, he texted me.

I sorted through my feelings and decided that I wanted to see him. I had forgiven him by that point — I guess by then I thought about the things he did less as “ways he hurt me” and more like biographical data. Both of us had in all likelihood spent long hours processing the relationship, which I knew was formative for both of us, talking about it with friends and therapists and subsequent partners. Then, probably, we had started to think about it again, in a somewhat different light, once both of us made the difficult decision to transition.

I couldn’t tease him, or lie to him, or try to smooth over anything, the way I might have when I was younger. Those were the games college kids played; we had to be, at minimum, honest with each other now.

I looked up at his ass as he led me up the stairs to his apartment. It was the same ass, just in bigger pants. This reassured me.

Extra

Watch here

 

_________________

‘Charles North is the quintessential poet’s poet. James Schuyler confidently named him “the most stimulating poet of his generation,” while Harry Mathews possibly took it one step further to claim that Charles “belongs on the summit of our American Parnassus.” To say that Charles North is a cornerstone in the home of contemporary American poetry would not be an exaggeration.’ — Amanda Nadelberg

‘Charles North one of the great poets associated with the New York School, going back to John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler, and including Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Joe Brainard, and Bernadette Mayer.

‘There is a sensuous luxuriousness in North’s writing that is comparable to memorable passages found in Ashbery, Schuyler, and the great, underrated English poet F. T. Prince, about whose work North has written beautifully. For over 40 years, North has occasionally written about art for Art in America. His engagement with art also connects him with the first generation of New York School. He has reviewed artists as different as Aristodemis Kaldis and Richard Tuttle. His clear passion for modern and contemporary art has led him beyond being a purely literary poet — one for whom Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art hold no interest. From the artists associated with these movements he learned that writing did not have to be narrative, tell a story, or reiterate a meaningful anecdote. It did not have to limit itself to description but instead could aspire to music and abstraction.

‘North’s embrace of art surely deepened his understanding of process, and what was meant when critics asserted that the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock are a record of their coming into being. See, for instance, this sentence from “Elevenses”: “Pale green celery leaves and the smaller, whitish hearts that signify narcissism in the unmediated sense–but I only recently learned that narcotic has the same root, which might explain to some degree those mornings when fog, for want of a better term, is unrelieved.”’ — John Yau

 

Charles North Page
The Writer as Citizen of the World
An Interview with Charles North
Charles North on Bookworm
Buy ‘News, Poetry and Poplars’ here

 

Charles North News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems / Selected Prose
Black Square Editions

‘NEWS, POETRY & POPLARS, Charles North’s 20th book, contains both poetry and selected prose (essays, interviews, memoirs and tributes, and smaller pieces). The poetry includes translations real and “fake,” baseball lineup poems, prose poems, poems written for collaborations with artists, and other experimental and lyrical works. A two-time NEA grantee, North has also received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. His recent EVERYTHING AND OTHER POEMS (The Song Cave, 2020) was named a NY Times New and Noteworthy book, and his new and selected poems, WHAT IT IS LIKE (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), headed NPR’s list of Best Poetry Books (2013).

‘The poet James Schuyler called North “the most stimulating poet of his generation,” and the poet/novelist Harry Mathews said, “[North] belongs on the summit of our American Parnassus.” Of North’s prose, the poet and critic John Yau has written: “This is criticism at its best: a passionate, sympathetic reading that acknowledges the poet’s limitations while clarifying the particular strengths. You are not apt to read criticism this sensitive and analytical by well-known academic critics such as Helen Vendler or Marjorie Perloff…”’ — BSE

Excerpts

EYEFULS

Small ones from the 96th St. crosstown bus

to be boarded if the aggressively cantilevered building

racing to enclose the sky over Broadway the way Enclosure

invaded England as early as the 12th century

is the world view.

Doucement por favor.

 

FOR DAVID SCHUBERT

Grief doesn’t have all the answers

yes or no.

Nothingness that trio sonata

across the leafy street with the four o’clocks

simmer down.

 

LINER NOTES

5/18. (5:10 AM). Not such a strange time to be up when you
think about it. Not littered (not all there, but what is).

5/29. What do window treatments really know? However Edward
Hopperish or even Vermeerish.

6/2. Dizzy Trout, Harry (The Cat) Brecheen, Hippo Vaughan,
Rabbit Maranville, Moose Skowron, Goose Goslin, Ducky
Medwick, Catfish Hunter.

Fenton Mole!

6/3. A messy day not sloppy. Almost no room
anywhere—clouds, hedges, paint, captions, etc.

6/6. The heartfelt peonies and their unavoidable connection
to the inner life. The paint thins out the closer you get.
Paper, some posterboard—unlike thought and its thin bed
(romaine, leaf lettuce, spinach). Restless as a side street
or the thinly quilted afternoon wondering (obsessing?) about
coffee and whether to have an early dinner rather than wait
till after the movie. The mourning dove underneath the A/C
practicing the tune, how hard can it be.

6/9. A Renaissance Progress. Make it a Convoy.

6/10. All the reds including blood oranges to give a hint of
the future which isn’t that far away. You have the right to
remain unlike anything nameable or not. Freight elevator
with faux brass paneling, the afternoon of the coleus,
superhero chess piece (knight) with folded cape and
surprisingly heavy boots.

6/21. Stadium lights by 6:00.

6/23. How do you know it hasn’t ended already? (How would
you know if it had?) Snoop the cat has a leg up on
dream-time. The orange hawk—more of same—came back along
with its hand-painted background, barely visible through
soot streaking the window pane. Quivers in her sleep. Waltz?
Polonaise? Mazurka??

Polonaise.

Extras

Video: Charles North

Charles North Poetry Forum at The New School

 

______________

‘If ever a writer was fated to bear a particular name, it was Fernando Pessoa. In Portuguese the word pessoa means “person”; in Latin it means “mask” or “character.” Pessoa spent his life adopting personas, masks, and characters from almost the moment he began his writing career. These alternative personalities were still Pessoa, even when he signed his works under a pseudonym. Many of his alter egos were poets like himself, although only a few were Portuguese. One was an anti-Fascist Italian critic, another a psychiatrist, a third studied engineering; the others included monks, an assistant bookkeeper, a 19-year-old hunchbacked girl who suffered from tuberculosis, a translator of Portuguese literature into English, an inventor and solver of riddles, a French satirist, a toga-wearing lunatic obsessed with Greece who lived in an asylum, and even a Voodooist. As Pessoa explained in 1928, “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs.” His works were what he called “heteronymous”; they were “by the author” but “outside of his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.” Pessoa’s heteronyms were people with birthdays and deathdays; they had the whole gestalt—passions, fears, dreams, and clearly traced literary paths. As for him, he was a fingidor: a feigner, a pretender, an impostor who believed he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon.”

‘Did Pessoa truly control his alter egos? Or did his creations, in fact, control him? The layers of identities and personalities that make up Pessoa’s writing career are what draw readers in, and yet they also make it hard at times to have a sense of who he was and what kind of writer he aspired to be. The mystery of Pessoa is at the center of Richard Zenith’s magnanimous new biography, which charts the author’s life as well as the many lives he “performed” as he indulged in repeated “projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses.” Should we take seriously Pessoa’s claim, which Zenith invites us to question, that “he had no personality of his own, that he was just a ‘medium’ for the many writers who welled up in him and whom he served as ‘literary executor’”? Or, Zenith asks, should we see all of these eccentric scribblers as manifestations of Pessoa and the writer he sought to be—a true “they” inhabiting the “he”?

‘While scores of writers, from William Butler Yeats to Jorge Luis Borges, used pseudonyms or noms de plume, or else made writers their protagonists or created characters that were manifestations of their alternative personalities, very few have done so to such a degree as Pessoa. His most developed heteronyms were Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos, followed by dozens of others like Raphael Baldaya, Vicente Guedes, William Jinks, Devid Merrick, António Mora, Dr. Gaudêncio Nabos, Frederico Reis, Alexander Search, Bernardo Soares, Baron of Teive, António Mora, and Maria José. (Only the last of these was female.) Some wrote in Portuguese, while others delivered their poems, stories, philosophical studies, linguistic theories, self-analysis, automatic writing, or astrological charts in English or French.

‘Pessoa’s experiments in form and substance were always bold and difficult. They were also not his alone. He was a representative, like Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and Musil, of modernism. His unstable personality wasn’t a symptom of schizophrenia but a statement of the anxiety at the heart of the modern sensibility: He was obsessed with being at a time when its meaning had become increasingly transient, precarious, dizzying, unmoored from the absolute truths that had once reigned uncontested. Pessoa’s biggest, most vigorous response to this panoply of apprehensions isn’t, in my view, the writing he channeled but himself—or the selves he articulated—as a creation.’ — Ilan Stavans

 

Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act
Fernando Pessoa BY ROBERT POLITO
The Literary Games of Fernando Pessoa
Buy ‘A Very Original Dinner’

 

Fernando Pessoa A Very Original Dinner
Sublunary Editions

‘Herr Prosit, President of the Gastronomical Society in Berlin, has perhaps grown complacent with his elaborately planned banquets and artistically prepared meals. Noticeably lapsed into melancholy as his guests—including five young gastronomers with whom he has developed a bitter rivalry—discuss the decided lack of originality in cooking during a time of a general decline in the arts, Prosit suddenly comes to life, inviting those seated around him to a very original dinner, the likes of which they have never seen. He challenges them to uncover just what makes the dinner so special, a game that soon takes a mysterious and perverse turn.

‘Clearly under the influence of Edgar Allen Poe and the nascent field of degenerate psychology, “A Very Original Dinner” was written in English by Fernando Pessoa under his proto-heteronym Alexander Search in June of 1907. It was never published during his lifetime, and only came to light in 1978 when photocopies of the typescript were reproduced in Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa’s book Fernando Pessoa e a Literatura de Ficção. The version in this volume first appeared in A Very Original Book, a bilingual collection of Pessoa’s writings as Search edited by Natalia Jerez Quintero. This is the story’s first appearance in a trade volume in North America.’ — Sublunary Editions

Excerpt

Extras

The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness | Fernando Pessoa

The Wild Imagination of Fernando Pessoa

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Wayne Kramer (MC5) ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, my pleasure, of course. I love LA, for sure. I think you do need to drive a car to really get/enjoy it. Or have the dough to afford many Uber rides, I guess. And spend more than just a few days ‘cos it’s gigantic. But yes. I like contests. And I like a SCAB contest in my head. I don’t know, maybe give it serious consideration. Or, I don’t know, I guess it’s a lot of work though. I have literally hundreds of these immediately obviously fake spammer places that email me all the time. They usually go in my spam, but because my stupid email account likes to accidentally let real emails fall into the spam folder, I have to keep emptying it. Alas. House cleaning and pharmacy visiting count as victories to me. My bookshelves are so dusty they look like furry rectangular animals. Love drinking champagne from a Doc Marten boot, G. ** Misanthrope, Thanks. We have sun for the moment but it’s a cold sun. Which is fine with me. Wtf, play the scary miniature golf tonight. What is wrong with you?! Are you insane?! Did “Young Elio” make an appearance? I forgot about that. I hope so, or I hope he’s okay, at least. Nice to know there’s a 20 year old who’s an expert on 52 year old men’s quality level. I think I’m going to try to be a ‘side’ with the weekend. Maybe with slight ‘top’ tendencies. ** oliver jude, Very happy Saturday to you, and a retroactive happy Friday as well. Two weeks of winter. Growing up in LA, I know that schedule. I need to not be sober. I feel like I’ve been sober for decades. Post is going pretty okay. No, lots of sound left to do, but we’re getting there. Then color grading starting in a week. I can’t believe we’re finally going to finish this thing. Really, after going through eight months of just trying to find a way to actually do the post due to the hideousness of our producer, it feels kind of heavenly. So far. Thank you! Other than not being sober, what else did your weekend do for you? ** Bill, He’s an oddball. I was going to ask you how the Pineapple Express — how the fuck did they come up with that title — was treating you. I know LA is supposed to start drowning on Sunday. I don’t think I know Stanley Crawford unless I’m blanking. I’ll look up that book. Bonnest Saturday and Sunday to ya. ** Guy, Hi. There should be, like, an international slave convention, but instead of flashy high tech booths run by video game makers, I guess it’d be spooky, lascivious looking booths with slaves displayed or something. Actually, that’s kind of a fantasy idea too far. Anyway, yeah, Slaves World Tour. I … don’t think I saw your poem. When did you send it? It seems to have slipped past my consciousness. Shit. How can I find it? Or can you resend it? Sorry, my email ability is pretty dodgy. I want to read it! Sorry, sorry if my lax attention was the culprit. Oh, favorite Landers? Hold on. I do like that bear one I put at the top. I like the one with words carved in the tree trunks. I like the writing ones in general. I like ‘Say Your Goodbyes’. To start with. What were you up to this weekend? Were/are you writing, or …. what exactly? ** Steve Erickson, I’m so sorry about the anxiety, Steve. It’s sadly very understandable given the here and now. Of course, yes, about the media’s precariousness regarding your work in it. That is a real anxiety booster, for sure. But you have a new single at least! Everyone, Steve has released a new single under his callinamagician moniker. It’s called “Bond Villain Motivational Music”/”Loro Piana Caps Erupting in Fire”, and here’s the link. Join me in luxuriating over there. I think I’ll do a gig this month, yes. I haven’t done a new music gig in a bit. Hakuna Kulala sound up my alley, I’ll have a listen, thank you. No film work per se this weekend. The sound mixer is laying in the film’s ambience, etc., and then, starting on Monday, we’ll meet with him and go through his mix with a fine toothed comb and approve or correct as necessary. ** Uday, Hi. I wrote to you, but, to reiterate, I love your drawing. I feel kingly. Thank you, thank you! Monsoons are good. I don’t think I’ve ever been in one, Oh, wait, once in Hawaii when I was a teen. Very violent but lush. Kind of a perfect sound really. How’s everything, and what’s your latest? ** Ника Мавроди, Well, we are looking for an idea that will cost a lot less than our current film did, so who knows? ** Darbhhjfjf.mljuoiykstrae🏭, Are those three little wooden soldiers? My eyes aren’t sharp enough to be sure. Pretty. Thank you for the link. That film looks really interesting. I’ve bookmarked it. No, I’ve never heard of Cadillac, France. Was a strangely non-French seeming name, although I suppose it’s probably pronounced very Frenchly. Huh. I’m going to check with my LA roommate today about the package as soon as he wakes up, which means about, oh, 6 pm my time. He smokes a lot of pot, so you have to remind him to remind himself to tell you something sometimes. Exciting to think about! There’s a Monster in my fridge that belongs to Yury who’s out of town so you could’ve had it if your arms were long enough. ** Right. This weekend I present to you five books I’ve read of late that I believe might be of interest to you or to some of you. See you on Monday.