Category: Uncategorized (Page 432 of 1092)

 

‘Blood, Satan, the occult, fighting off zombies, social chaos, violence, death— on the surface, these descriptors sound like your average indicators of our favorite horror movies, however, they’re just as representative of horror’s musical cousin equivalent: heavy metal. Just like metal horns and concerts pair so perfectly, these misfit subgenres have been tied together for decades— even coming together as one in the form of “metalsploitation,” (yep, a real term) in which heavy metal music is exploited, satirized, and, most importantly, portrayed lovingly within its own, unique variety of horror films.

‘When metal crusaders Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and their bandmates axed their not-so-metal original band names Polka Tulk Blues Band and Earth for the darker, more favorable Black Sabbath after Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology of the same name in the late 1960s, heavy metal— and its match made in hell to horror— was born. Rejecting the more mainstream hippie culture of the time and wanting to create the musical parallel to horror films, Black Sabbath took inspiration from horror writer Dennis Wheatley and adopted themes of the occult into its lyrics. Other musicians of the era started walking the same, blackened path, as bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest arose in Sabbath’s horror-inspired, metallic wake, and we were then introduced to our first light wave of heavy metal-horror movies.

‘The 1980s saw an overtaking boom in not only heavy metal popularity overall, but particularly the heavy metal-horror subgenre. The crunchier, aggressive sounds of Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax were often opposed by an unrivaled number of mainstream, MTV-era, hair metal bands, including Motley Crue, Poison, and Ratt— which was naturally capitalized in the form of a major flux of campy, silly, cult metal-horror movies that are equally remembered for their of-the-time soundtracks as they are for their low-budget special effects. At this point, heavy metal had become a societal nuisance, as the Reagan administration spread fears of Satanic Panic and warned parents and society about the “corruption of youth” through “Satanic” music and horror movies. Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, and several others defended their music, as naysayers swore their lyrics contained “subliminal messages” and “influenced” young people to do bad things. Trick or Treat, one of the most beloved heavy-metal horror movies to exist, toys with all of the prudish allegations against heavy metal of the time, as a sweet, bullied, metal-loving teenager plays a heavy metal cassette backwards and inadvertently conjures up his deceased rock star idol, who isn’t exactly as heroic as he had cracked him up to be. With cameos from both Gene Simmons and Ozzy as a hilariously bemoaning heavy metal criticizer, Treat’s love letter to the heavy metal subculture laughed in the faces of those who simply didn’t get it.

‘Along with Treat, other ‘80s films that commented on the era of which they were set in came in the form of Heavy Metal, the animated genre hybrid whose cartoonish blood spills and decapitated heads fall under the horror umbrella; Paganini Horror, in which a Bon Jovi-sounding band becomes cursed by a piece of music they play; The Gate, the kid-friendly favorite that follows in way of Trick or Treat, as the young protagonists play a metal record backwards and unleash a hellish portal; and Black Roses, in which the new metal band in town corrupts kids by turning them into demons. We Summon the Darkness fits perfectly into this epoch of films, as the characters attend a heavy metal concert in the ‘80s while a “Satanic cult” is murdering people in the area. The Satanic Panic peddlers must’ve been right all along!’ — Julieann Stipidis

 

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Stills

 

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Movies

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Don Edmonds Terror On Tour (1980)
‘Someone starts murdering people and a rock band called The Clowns (a KISS rip off) are under suspicion in “Terror On Tour”. The film begins with a girl murdered right after the band performs on stage. At first I thought the main suspect was one of the band members who really enjoyed putting on the makeup, there was a weird scene in the band’s dressing room with him explaining that it’s easier for him to talk to girls with it on… But I don’t know, the film lost focus and I didn’t know what was going on half the time. In between all of the scenes with the band, we get some shots which show the rock and roll lifestyle (sex, drugs, alcohol, etc). No reason to have them in there. Anyways, it soon becomes apparent throughout all of the craziness that the killer is someone dressing up like the other band members. More murders take place during the concerts, and the cops begin investigating. All of this leads up to a silly conclusion.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Hans Hatwig Blödaren (1983)
‘On tour through Sweden, the all-girl rock ‘n’ roll band “Rock Cats” suddenly find themselves trapped in no-man’s land when their tour-bus breaks down. Soon they get to meet “the Bleeder”, an insane beast of a man whose sole interest is to kill them all off, one by one. The hunt is on…’

Horror Reviews with Junkmaster3: Blödaren (1983)

 

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Claudio Fragasso Monster Dog (1984)
‘Victor Raven (Alice Cooper), a famous rock star, returns to his childhood home to shoot a music video. Believing his presence is responsible for the return of a monstrous hound that killed folks when he was kid, the locals decide to do something violent about it.’

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Beverly Sebastian Rocktober Blood (1984)
‘A crazed rock singer returns from the dead to murder members of his former band.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Mats Helge, Mike Jackson Blood Tracks (1985)
‘A blood bath of terrifying violence is created when a group of rock musicians and their film crew venture deep into the snowy mountains to shoot scenes for their latest video. The group are left stranded after being cut off by a series of avalanches, and are forced to take refuge in a remote mountain cabin. The crew decide on a nearby disused power station, as the next shooting location, but soon discover that they are not alone as they and the group fall into the clutches of the wild, mutant like creatures that inhabit the power station. Fearing that their territory and existence is being threatened they unleash a bloody reign of terror upon their unsuspecting victims.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Krishna Shah Hard Rock Zombies (1985)
‘Hitler cultists kill everyone in a heavy-metal band but the lead singer (E.J. Curcio), who brings them back as zombies.’

Trailer

 

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Charles Martin Smith Trick or Treat (1986)
‘Rock and roll and horror meet head on in this 80s movie about a high school outcast who plays a record backwards and raises the spirit of dead rocker Sammi Curr, who promises to help him get revenge on the school bullies.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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David DeCoteau Dreamaniac (1986)
‘A heavy-metal musician makes a deal with a satanic succubus to make him successful with women, in return for the succubus being able to feed on the girls.’

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Albert Pyun Vicious Lips (1986)
‘Sometime in the distant future, a fledgling band gets an opportunity for a breakthrough, if they can make it in time to a faraway planet to perform in a very popular club.’

the entirety

 

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John Fasano Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare (1987)
‘At a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a hopeful hair-metal band seeking inspiration to record their upcoming new LP will soon find themselves in a furious confrontation against the Prince of Darkness himself.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Tibor Takács The Gate (1987)
‘Nerdy friends Glen, played by a young Stephen Dorff, and Al crank up the metal jams that help them unlock a gate into a netherworld where demons try to take over the world, but ultimately just end of trashing the kids’ house. Like it wouldn’t have happened anyway.’

Trailer

 

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John Fasano Black Roses (1988)
‘A small-town teacher (John Martin) saves teenage souls from a heavy-metal rocker (Sal Viviano) and his band from hell.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Dominick Brascia Hard Rock Nightmare (1988)
‘When John was a little kid, his grandfather would constantly tell him that he was a vampire, so he did what I would have as a child. He grabbed a stake and dropped that bloodsucker. Except, you know, his grandfather was just joking and as a result, John grew up in a mental hospital. But hey, things worked out OK. Now he’s in a rock and roll band and once the cops tell him they’re too loud for the garage, he heads to the house his grandmother left him. That said, his bandmates are getting killed off one by one, possibly by a werewolf who was once his grandfather, so maybe things aren’t so great.’

the entirety

 

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Dimitri Logothetis Slaughterhouse Rock (1987)
‘A man visits Alcatraz prison after having dreams about all the people who died there. When he gets there, his brother is possessed by an evil vampiric demon. The ghost of a female heavy metal singer who was killed there tries to help the man fight the monster.’

Trailer

 

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Jag Mundhra Hack-O-Lantern (1988)
‘A young boy named Tommy sees his father murdered by his grandfather in a brutal satanic ritual on Halloween night. Years later, as Tommy’s grandfather attempts to initiate him into the cult, a mysterious killer begins preying on the people closest to Tommy.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Donald Farmer Scream Dream (1989)
‘One of the girls in a rock band is fired from the band. She is, in reality, a witch, and possesses the body of the girl who replaces her in order to take revenge on the rest of the band.’

the entirety

 

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Ron Ottaviano & Steven DeFalco Heavy Metal Massacre (1989)
‘The whole premise of the film is that David DeFalco — starring as Bobbi Brown here — plays a serial killer who hangs around Metal bars, preying on women who have some apparent attraction to his flowing hair. But that isn’t established from the off. Instead, the actual opening is literally just still frames of this bloke set to metal music: After that, the movie pans around the outside of a building, before slowly panning inside what looks like someone’s living room. Everything starts flashing and spinning about halfway, like someone just discovered a filter in Windows Movie Maker.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Dennis Devine Dead Girls (1990)
‘A female band, who are exponents of “death rock”, retreat to a cabin for the weekend. They soon find themselves being knocked off by a masked killer who uses weapons they have mentioned in their songs.’

the entirety

 

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Mark Freed Shock Em Dead (1991)
‘Martin is a total loser who makes a deal with the devil to become the greatest rock star in the world.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Alan Smithee Raging Angels (1995)
‘Two young musicians (Sean Patrick Flanery, Monet Mazur) fall in with an organization that brainwashes followers while purporting to promote world peace.’

Trailer

 

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Todd Jason Cook Death Metal Zombies (1995)
‘Brad Masters enters a contest and wins an album by his favorite band of all time, Living Corpse. The tape has a special song called “Zombiefied”, which turns Brad and his friends into zombies at a party. Luckily, Brad’s girlfriend Angel misses the party and it is up to her to save her friends. She runs into Shengar (lead singer of Living Corpse and ruler of the dead world) , who attempts to stop Angel. During Angel’s escape, she teams up with her friend Tommy who learns that there is only way to stop the zombies. Now, Angel and Tommy have limited time to figure out how to reverse the zombie curse and save their friends.’

Trailer

 

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Henrik Myrdhen Terror i Rock ‘n’ Roll Önsjön (2001)
‘In the 1970’s, a group of Hard Rock loving teens take up the fight with a nazi-zombie.’

Trailer

 

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Alex Chandon Cradle of Fear (2001)
‘Helped by deranged angel Dani Filth, who leaves a trail of charnel house death in his crimson wake, the cannibal convict forces two Goth vamps to endure a one night stand from hell, two tough female robbers to see through each other, an obscenely rich coke-head to chop up more than a few lines and an internet surfer to descend into madness when he uncovers the ultimate web depravity.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Neal Sundstrom Slash (2002)
‘A rock band gets stuck on a haunted farm while visiting their lead singer’s family.’

the entirety

 

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Killjoy August’s Underground Mordum, (2003)
‘Hell-o, once again sick-os and scalers of the underground Horror scene. This is Horror at its most shocking, uncensored, brutal, depraved, sickening and realistic as one can get. To avoid fainting, vomiting and heart failure… Not only will you repeat, “It’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie…,”… You’ll beg, hope and pray for it to be.’

the entirety

 

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George Streicher Rock ‘Em Dead (2007)
‘A high school, death metal band face a ghoulish dilemma when they strike a deal with the devil himself in order to create the greatest song ever written.’

the entirety

 

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Richard Boylan Heavy Metal Horror (2014)
‘Julia, a disillusioned young prostitute hounded by an evil spirit, escapes her pimp and crosses paths with a heavy metal band, bringing their worlds together in a night of terror.’

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Jason Howden Deathgasm (2015)
‘After being bullied one too many times and failing to win the heart of the blonde lass, Brodie plays a song with his new band, DEATHGASM (all caps, of course), and inadvertently brings forth a demon force known as The Blind One, instantly plunging their normal corner of the world into bloody chaos. Can the rockers survive the end of the world?’

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Joshua Allan Vargas Hairmetal Shotgun Zombie Massacre: The Movie (2016)
‘The film is about a hair metal band that, while struggling to find its own identity, decides to record its first full-length album is a creepy cabin located in the middle of a notorious cemetery. Chock full of weed, coke, and booze, the band discovers a secret in the cellar and unwittingly open a gate that allows demons to possess the corpses in the surrounding cemetery. Forced to have to survive the night and with the odds getting slimmer, the band must battle hordes of the demonic undead and hope to get a record deal somewhere in the process.’

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. That would be great, yes, let’s meet up when I’m next back there. It might not be too long from now as I’m getting ready to shoot a new film with my collaborator Zac Farley in SoCal, and we need to get there soon to start doing the prep work. I’ll let you know. Mm, I guess a lot of music that seems appropriate springs to mind. Can you give me any sense of your general music tastes, or what you already know and like? There’s all kinds of stuff from, like, harsh noisy music to really spare, more folky music on the other end, with lyrics and without. Any coordinates you can give me? I’m happy to think of suggestions. Thanks a lot! ** David, Well, it’s over at least, but soup-only is intense. Ice cream? I hope your mouth is being hella friendlier today. I know there are plans to get the ‘Jerk’ film shown in the UK, but I don’t know what they are. I’m seeing Gisele on Monday, and I’ll ask her. ** David Ehrenstein, ‘Duelle’ has very slight issues here and there, but it’s so great. I’m in the Cecil Taylor was a genius camp. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I hugely recommend Tate. He was the first living writer I fell in love with back in the early 70s, and his poetry was a big influence on me, and I think he’s just incredible. I, of course, hadn’t seen any of those Chalamet films I listed. I just looked at their materials and took an educated guess. I’ll probably see ‘Dune’ at some point, but I hated that director’s ‘Blade Runner’ film with a passion, and it’s hard for me to imagine him making a film that isn’t similarly overblown, drawn out, empty, artsy hocus-pocus. Did your last pill perform a magic trick? I’m guessing not, but … ** Dominik, Hi!!! He’s great, great, great. That’s so cool about your friend who collects Tic Tac boxes. I love collector-itis stuff like that. I wish I collected something. I used to when I was younger. And what a novel fetish. Very cool. Dominzilla! Wacky dictionary you’ve got there. Oh, gosh, I hate to make love go there but … love causing Putin and everyone in the Russian govt. who supports him to spontaneously incinerate into tiny piles of ash, G. ** Ryan / ANGUSRAZE, Hey. Man, I’m so sorry to be slow. My brain has been elsewhere and swamped with stuff. I’ll write to you pronto Add my big-up to ‘Funeral Parade Of Roses’, yes. Interesting about the sensual fitness effect. I should think about my body. I never do. I just treat it like my automobile. This is a repeat from yesterday, but the recent films I’ve seen are Pedro Costa’s ‘Vitalina Varela’ (great!), Jacques Rivette’s ‘Duelle’ (great!), ‘Moonfall’ (guilty pleasure), and Bertrand Mandico’s ‘After Blue’ (very irritating). Any other films floating your boat of late? ** Steve Erickson, I hope you don’t get the lingering Covid after-effects thing. Yury still has some odd issues from his bout, nothing serious, but it’s been months and months. Thanks about ‘Jerk’. I’ll let you know what the US plans are when I know what they are. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Tate is truly, truly wonderful. In my book. My nephew used to smoke a lot of pot. The phrase ‘Dubstep is the future, man’ came out of his mouth not infrequently. I’m totally with you on the assessment of moviedom’s grim current status, and I’m not feeling glum even. Well your prof’s enthusiasm is, like, a good thing, right? You have a superb brain, so I’m positive you’ll come up with something extraordinary. Wow, I get the stressfulness, but it’s really exciting that you’re shooting your film today. But know that I’m crawling out of my skin with anxiousness to shoot ours. I hope it goes really well and smoothly. Did it? Pray tell. ** Bill, Hi, B. ‘Ghost Soldiers’ is dreamy great. If you ask me. How’s your weekend potentially hanging? ** Right. Something came over me, and I decided to check out what the Heavy Metal/Hard Rock + Horror Movie combo resulted in and then pass along the results of my investigation to you. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Years ago, when I asked him to contribute to a poetry project I was editing, he responded by saying that he was writing stories—and then he paused a long time, and added, “But they’re poems. They’re always poems. I just call them stories.” I have thought of this remark often, and now, I see its prescience in relation to the genre-bending we read so much of today; it’s true, I think, that in his writing he understood the narrative problems of the lyric (and the lyric problems intrinsic to narrative) long before most of us.

‘I have a lot of feelings about Jim Tate, first and foremost having to do with my gratitude for him as a teacher, and poet. Like so many others, I revered and loved him for being a sweet and gentle and stern and brilliant and complicated poetry father. I also have many private feelings, ones intimately bound up with the experiences I had when I was first starting to really write poetry, during those pre-internet years in the mid-1990s when I was studying with him and Dara Wier and Agha Shahid Ali in Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m not sure I can put these feelings into words: they seem to be located in Jim’s poems. I find them there and the poems seem not to express those feelings, but to conjure and enact them, inside and outside of time, in me.

‘No one had a greater influence on me poetically than Tate, though that influence has as much to do with how he worked and thought about poetry as the style itself, which was inimitable. I learned how to be a poet from Jim: how to sit down and work every day and be serious and patient and follow the totally free movement of the imagination as manifest in the material of language. Not because he taught me, but because he showed me. All of us who were near Jim and Dara in those years knew how they were working, and we saw the brilliant results.*

‘I would like to say this: don’t let anyone tell you Jim Tate was a certain “kind” of poet. Especially not a surrealist, which is how he is often described. To call the poems “surrealist” is incorrect, because the surrealists were really interested in something else, language as a kind of mind and soul changing substance. Jim wasn’t doing automatic writing or creating collages or merely juxtaposing images. In Jim’s poems, there is almost always some kind of situation, or organizing principle, along with a total freedom of language and the imagination. In other words, they are poems. If he is a surrealist, then we all are, or should be.

‘Jim could do anything in his poems, and did. Throughout his whole life as a poet, he was just as comfortable with narrative as with a lyric that is more experiential, present in and exploring a particular state of mind or orientation toward the word that is full of contradiction and humor and darkness. You will see what I mean if you read his first Selected Poems, as well as the newer one, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, which together will give you a sense of his entire body of work. Jim Tate was a great American poet, maybe even the greatest of the past 50 years. His influence is everywhere in American poetry, on those who don’t realize it as much as those who do.’ — Matthew Zapruder

 

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Further

James Tate Site
A Hypertext Tribute to James Tate
James Tate @ goodreads
In a seemingly absurd but all-too-recognizable world
James Tate is the Jerry Seinfeld of American poetry
James Tate @ Poetry Foundation
stories from ‘The Ghost Soldiers’
The Last Poems of James Tate
James Tate @ PennSound
James Tate, The Art of Poetry No. 92
Charles Simic reflects on what set James Tate’s late poetry apart
The Genius of James Tate
James Tate and American Surrealism
HELL, I LOVE EVERYBODY: A CELEBRATION FOR JAMES TATE
Remembering James Tate (1943-2015)
After Death, James Tate’s Poetry Continues To Delight
An Interview With Poet James Tate
Remembering James Tate
“It’s Not the Heat So Much as the Humidity” by James Tate
Buy ‘The Ghost Soldiers’

 

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Extras

Poetry Festival, 4/17/09: Fanny Howe, James Tate, John Ashbery

Writers On the Fly: James Tate

James Tate Reading “The Rabbit God”

Free Verse: Dara Wier & James Tate

 

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Interviewed by David Berman

 

David Berman: Do you see a lot of freewheeling North American mammals passing through your yard?

James Tate: [Laughs] Yes I do. I have a bear that frequents and deer. And fox. And I don’t know what else because they come late at night when I’m sleeping.

DB: From your writing desk?

JT: Yes, as a matter of fact, I can see them from my writing desk. Bears frequently frolic right in front of me. They climb trees. They slap one another. They’re parked right in front of my desk.

DB: Your essay, “The Route as Briefed,” seems to be an account of your Kansas City childhood. What brought you to write it?

JT: I really wasn’t consciously writing anything. I think I wanted to write that piece very much for myself. I wasn’t thinking about publishing it.

DB: Did writing it un-jam or release anything into your poetry?

JT: No, not really. In fact, what I wanted to do was clear it out of my system and make sure it didn’t get into my poetry.

DB: So what did the adults in your family do for jobs?

JT: Both my maternal grandparents were bankers. My grandfather rose up to be assistant treasurer of his bank, so he didn’t get too high up for spending an entire life at it. And my grandmother worked at it as a part-time job. My mother worked as a secretary to various companies. Chrome Fixture, for one.

DB: When your father died in WWII, did the government help the family survive?

JT: Yes, I believe so. I don’t really know the exact terms, but there was some sort of survivor’s stipend.

DB: Did you get to go to college on the GI Bill because of that?

JT: As a matter of fact I did.

DB: How was your father spoken of around the house? Was he mentioned every day?

JT: When I was very young, I’d say he was. He was very present when I was four or five or six. And then he drifted away as my mother started to date. Then on the other hand, in 1977, when I was thirty-four and she came to visit me in Europe, she said, “I sure hope we meet your father here.” She had the idea that he was still wandering around Europe.

DB: How did you feel about (the former) Axis powers when you were growing up?

JT: [Laughs] [Laughs more] Oh…I guess when I was very young I must have hated them. But you know it doesn’t take too long by the time you reach your teen years that you realize how nations get into wars, and you soon sort of forgive them.

DB: Did you play war with other kids?

JT: [Laughs] Yes, I did.

DB: Were you particularly popular or unpopular as a teenager?

JT: Oh god…I was kind of in-between. I wasn’t with the really popular kids, but I did all right with the slightly less popular kids.

DB: You mention a gang, “The Zoo Club,” that you were a part of in high school. What merited membership in the group?

JT: You just had to be a wiseacre. And succeed in amusing some of the tough guys.

DB: Were there other gangs?

JT: Yeah, there were other gangs around but in other high schools. We were the only gang in our high school. There was a gang at every high school in Kansas City.

DB: How big were they?

JT: They could be anywhere from forty to eighty.

DB: Did everybody have nicknames? Weapons? Who was the leader?

JT: Yeah, there were weapons. We didn’t really use them, but the leader of the gang stole a rifle from a police car and some of the rest of them had pistols, but no one ever used them.

Yes, everybody did have nicknames—animals and bugs and insects, things like that.

Oh, there was definitely a leader, one guy named Jeff Sharon who was just twenty times tougher than anybody. How he got to be that way, I don’t know. He was something of a gangster but a really nice guy. Last time I saw him, he had circus lions lying about on his lawn. When I met him last time, I asked him if he had any kids, and he said he had a son but that he was in prison, and I said that was too bad, and he said, no, not for what he did.

DB: Were those concrete circus lions in his yard?

JT: I never actually saw them, but my impression is that they, you know, could still eat a man.

DB: Are you still in touch with any people from back then?

JT: I wouldn’t say I was in touch, but I see certain people when I go back to Kansas City. Ron Stanley, known as Squid—he has a big ranch outside of Kansas City, and I see him occasionally. I also have a poem about him.

DB: Did you go to Fairyland Park?

JT: Yes, very much. Yeah, I really enjoyed Fairyland Park.

DB: When you left Kansas City at eighteen, how did the family take it?

JT: [Laughs] Well, I was going off to college and my gosh and that was a fantastic enough thing right there. It might have been the worst college in the world, but my family was pretty excited about it. And then I just kept going to college, and so they kept thinking it was pretty good.

DB: You worked in a movie theater? What films were showing that year?

JT: That’s a good question. It was an art theater in Kansas City. The only one. The Trial by Kafka was playing there for quite a long time. All kinds of art theater films were shown that I had never seen before. It was a feast to me. I was supposed to be outside selling tickets, but I was always in the theater sneaking peeks.

DB: I was an usher at a Loew’s in Plano, Texas, the summer of ’86. My Trials were Short Circuit and Sweet Liberty, starring Alan Alda.

DB: So where did you live in the years between leaving Kansas City and arriving in Iowa City?

JT: Three years in Pittsburg, Kansas, going to college, and then I went to the University of Kansas City for one year, and then I went back to Pittsburg for one year, and then I went to Iowa.

DB: What was Pittsburg, Kansas, like? What is it like today?

JT: [Laughs.] Oh god…. there were a couple bars that were about one hundred years old and two or three places to eat. Chicken Annie’s out in the countryside and a few places like that. Other than that, there wasn’t much of a downtown. It was just a small place. The professors I had seemed happy enough to be there, and I immediately found a circle of friends, a small circle of friends. They were all artists of one sort or another. They were jazz musicians that had gone to Yale and been kicked out and a play director and an artist and a fiction writer. Those were the only friends I had, but they were enough.

DB: What kind of new ideas were you picking up? What were you reading?

JT: I was picking up ideas faster than I could process them because I was reading like crazy every which way. I was reading Rilke and Rimbaud. I didn’t know much about contemporary poetry, that much is true, but I was reading all the European writers I could find, Dostoevsky…and I was reading them so fast that I’m not sure I was always getting the point.

DB: You said Dostoevsky. When I read The Underground Man in college, it was the funniest thing I’d ever read. My friends and I would recite passages and laugh hilariously. Was it funny to you?

JT: Yeah, it was very funny.

DB: Did you know you wanted to spend your life writing poetry before you were twenty-one?

JT: I knew when I was seventeen. I absolutely had a revelation the first month in college that I would spend my life doing this. I wasn’t thinking about university teaching. I was thinking more about riding rails and living on the road and sleeping by bonfires at night.

DB: How did you know to go to Iowa City?

JT: I had two teachers who had been students, and both of them urged me go there. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t even apply. I just drove up there and met the receptionist, and she said Donald Justice is just back from vacation, and she called Donald Justice, and he came over and interviewed me and looked at my poems and said OK. I was blown away by this, but I also sort of expected it to go this way. I didn’t know how the world functioned.

DB: Who were the writers around town then?

JT: Donald Justice, George Starbuck, Marvin Bell—and then later there was a visitor named Paul Carroll, who was kind of exotic and wonderful. And Kurt Vonnegut was there.

DB: What poets were you reading at that time?

JT: I suppose I read a generation that was then turning about forty, but I thought of them as older poets—James Wright and W. S. Merwin.

DB: Did you meet any personal heroes who surprised or disappointed you?

JT: Oh god, this was during the time of Vietnam protests, so there were huge gatherings of poets, and I often tagged along as a buddy of one of my teachers, and I would go to these gatherings, and there I would meet people like James Wright and Robert Bly.

DB: Did you give a damn about Ezra Pound?

JT: [Laughs] That’s a good question. You know I have to say in some ways I really didn’t. I mean, in the deepest sense, because superficially I did. I also knew he was crazy, and I also thought The Cantos was somewhat impenetrable, so I read what a lot of people read—the short poems and the so-called translations. In terms of really caring, no, I didn’t really care deeply about him.

DB: When did you first meet Charles Wright and Charles Simic?

JT: I met Charles Wright in 1965. He’d come back for an MA at Iowa, and my girlfriend was a friend of his girlfriend, and that’s how we met. We soon became great friends. I met Charles Simic in 1968 at a huge poetry festival in Stonyville, New York, and we became sort of fast friends almost immediately. We read everything the same, we seemed to be pursuing many of the same objectives. Although our poetry was different, we shared the same deep love for poetry.

DB: How about Russell Edson?

JT: Russell Edson and I were thrown together for poetry readings I would say as early as 1968, and I would say we hit it off. I don’t know what he would say, but I really loved him and included him in my tight pack of hearts.

DB: Was he reclusive? Could he relax in the world?

JT: Yes, he was reclusive, and no, he couldn’t relax in the world.

DB: What are your thoughts on Kenneth Koch?

JT: Well, he wrote a lot of stuff and a lot of it is really fantastic. I only knew him a little bit toward the end of his life, and he was very friendly and wonderful.

DB: Was Henry Miller important to you? How did he square up against, say, Jack Kerouac when you were young?

JT: Well, Henry Miller meant a lot to me when I was very young; his books were really exciting. I’d never read anything like them in my life, and I supposed they would be exciting today, but I never put him up against Jack Kerouac; they were in two different worlds.

DB: My favorite poems in your last five books are, for me, the best poems written during my own adulthood. Since I left grad school, you’ve written five books of poetry, and I’ve written one. I must have been sick the day you revealed your secrets for artistic potency.

JT: [Laughs] My love for poetry has never flagged since it first started when I was seventeen and that definitely includes writing, you know, almost every day that I can. Of course there are days when you can’t, but I try to write every day, and my love for poetry grows deeper and deeper with each passing year. So I say, David, get with it.

DB:What do you think it means that the common man can now get a hold of correct atomic time with cheap devices that get the time beamed in from somewhere?

JT: [Laughs] [Laughs a little more] He doesn’t have an excuse to be late.

DB: You’ve mentioned before your love of maps. Have you seen Google Earth or used a GPS?

JT: No I haven’t, but I know people who have.

DB: In a 1982 interview, you said, “The I, of course is never autobiographical.” Twenty-eight years later, I ask you: isn’t your poetry at least 5 percent autobiographical?

JT: I’d say 1 percent.

DB: You’ve often mentioned a mood a poet gets into where you’re very alert to language and the world at the same time, and suddenly, joyfully, commonplace things and situations can be discerned to have poetic implications to the active mind.

JT: Yeah, go on.

DB: What about the opposite? Where everything has nightmare implications, and the mind is highly suggestive to all kinds of dread, shame, struggle, fear. What is that? Can many of your mid-career poems be called, metaphorically, “bad trips”? “Deaf Child Playing” for instance?

JT: Well, I don’t think so, I think you probably ought to not write when you’re in that mood. Unless you know, you’re Arthur Rimbaud or something.

DB: Can you stop writing poems long enough to do things like put together a selected or collected, which you’ve never done?

JT: I don’t really want to stop writing poems, and I’d always choose to keep writing them over some greater task in front of me.

 

___
Book

James Tate The Ghost Soldiers
Ecco

‘Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate returns with his fifteenth book of poetry, an exciting new collection that offers nearly one hundred fresh and thought-provoking pieces that embody Tate’s trademark style and voice: his accessibility, his dark humor, and his exquisite sense of the absurd.

‘Tate’s work is stark—he writes in clear, everyday language—yet his seemingly simple and macabre stories are layered with broad and trenchant meaning. His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.’ — Ecco

Excerpts

THE CHOSEN ONE

When Shelley got back from town she opened up box after box to show me what she had bought—blouses, shoes, pants, boots, hats. It was quite a haul. I was secretly adding up the approximate cost, not too happy about it all, but I didn’t let on. Instead, I complimented her on each item. That will really look beautiful on you. That’s very stylish. She seemed satisfied with my performance. “There was this old man who kept following me around from store to store. He’d sit on a bench and wait for me to leave, and each time he tried to sell me this old piece of cloth that he said came from Jesus’s robe. He wasn’t drunk or crazy. He said it like he really meant it. I brushed him off the first few times, and then finally I stopped to listen to him. He told me a long story of how it had passed down to him through the generations, and it was surprisingly believable. And after much bad luck, he was finally destitute, and was forced to sell it. He had sat on the benches for days eyeing people, looking for just the right one who would cherish this relic with just the right fervor, and he thought I was that person,” Shelley said. She paused and looked at me. “And you bought it?” I said. “Yes, I bought it. What else was I supposed to do?” she said. “Well, I hope you didn’t pay more than five dollars for it,” I said. “For Jesus’s robe? It should be in a cathedral or a museum, don’t be crazy. I paid for it with my own personal savings, don’t worry. It’s none of your business what I paid for it,” she said. “Let me see it,” I said. “Okay, but don’t touch it,” she said. She had it carefully wrapped in its own package. Very delicately she removed layers of tissue paper. In the center of it was a two-anda- half-inch by two-and-a-half-inch square of dirty linen material. “That’s it?” I said. “Well, what did you expect? You can’t exactly wash it. So it’s been passed around for two thousand years. That doesn’t take away from what it is. I can’t believe I’m now in the direct line of all those who’ve protected this cloth all those years. I feel like I’m one of the chosen,” she said. “Shelley, they’ve got people over atthe university who could carbon date this thing, and then we’d know whether or not it was a complete fake,” I said. She looked at me, stunned. “I’m surprised to hear you say a thing like that, Gary. I guess you take me for some kind of fool, giving all my money away to a complete stranger. I guess you could say that it was an act of faith, that I listened to the man and I looked into his eyes and I believed him. I knew he was telling me the truth. I would have staked my life on it. Now what is this about your carbon dating?” she said. “Nothing, darling, I’m sorry I brought it up,” I said. “I’m really very excited to have this in the house. It feels so special.” “I wonder if we might have to start acting differently? You know, change our lives,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I said. But Shelley did start to change. She wasn’t as much fun as before. She had a faraway look in her eyes, and sometimes she couldn’t even hear me. I felt lonely much of the time, and hated the dirty little piece of cloth. It sat in a glassed-in case in our living room. I would sit and stare at it for hours trying to burn a hole in it. It seemed to be fire resistant.

 

PARADISE

After Ashley disappeared from camp, I was put in charge of gathering the firewood. I didn’t mind the job, because I got to be alone for much of the day and away from the constant bickering that went on with the others. I came back to dump my armload and then I would be off again. Each day I had to go a little farther out and this made it something of an adventure. There was always some wildlife to scare up, and some odd thing lost or left behind by hunters. I found combs and canteens and whiskey bottles and a keychain. And once I found a wallet with three hundred dollars in it. I didn’t tell anyone. The further I went into the woods the more peaceful I felt. Some days I didn’t really feel like returning to the camp. I couldn’t stand the thought of Raymond getting drunk around the campfire and singing the same song over and over again, and of Tammy eventually slamming him on the head with the skillet, all the old routine. One morning I slipped out of my tent with my sleeping bag before anyone was awake. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had a feeling I wasn’t coming back. I walked rapidly for what must have been a mile, then I let myself slow down. I stopped to pick a bunch of blackberries which were ripe and delicious. A doe and two fawns stopped to stare at me, then ran on. By noon I was further away from the camp than I had ever been. The forest was denser and covered with vines. I had slowed my pace considerably. At one point I thought I spotted Ashley up ahead of me, but the shadows were also playing tricks. I was using my machete now to make progress. I imagined a huge snake dropping from the trees and strangling me. I had gotten myself into a very inhospitable situation. It was too far to go back, and I had no idea how long it would continue. I was hoping for a lake or a meadow on the other side of this. I kept slashing my way forward slowly. There was a loud screech somewhere, but I looked around and could see nothing. I was convinced that Ashley was in here somewhere, lost and unable to extricate herself. I yelled her name several times, but nothing came back. A small snake dropped from a tree in front of me, nearly scaring me to death. My arm was tired of hacking, and I stood still and rested. I wasn’t going to spend the night in this terrible place. There was no place to lie down or build a fire. When I had rested for several minutes, I started again moving forward. It occurred to me that I was being punished for abandoning my friends, but I quickly banished that thought. Something wonderful was waiting for me if I could only get to it. I hacked and slashed with renewed strength. I saw more daylight. Nothing could stop me now. The air smelled fresh and clean. Finally I broke through the last stand of trees and I was standing on green grass. And there was Ashley standing there, naked. I said, “Thank God you’re alive! I’m so glad to see you, Ashley. But why are you naked?” “Oh, Buddy, I’m glad to see you, too. This is paradise, you’ll see. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamed of,” she said. I tried not to look at her body. “Well, it was hell to get here, but I guess it was worth it,” I said. I looked around. There was a dingy shack at the bottom of the hill. “Who lives there?” I said. “God,” she said. “Oh, that’s just what I call him. He owns me, and when he sees you he’ll own you, too. He’s not too bad if you follow all his rules.” “No one owns me,” I said. “Then he’ll kill you,” she said. He was already walking up the hill with his shotgun in his hand. He looked real friendly, and I was already starting to like him.

 

TO ADVANCE NO FARTHER INTO THE RUBBLE OF THE BUILDING

When I was in the grocery store a man came up to me and said, “My, I admire your hat. Do you mind if I ask you where you got it?” “I was in the Polish Army. I got it there,” I said. “Well, I was in the Polish Army, too. May I ask what regiment you were in?” he said. “I was in the 172nd Regiment, infantry,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was in. I never saw any hat like that,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry for you. Maybe you were sick or sleeping or away on leave the day they handed out these hats. But, you’re right, it is a fine hat, keeps you warm in all kinds of weather,” I said. “I want that hat,” he said, reaching for it. I grabbed his arm and twisted it. “You’re hurting me,” he said. “Don’t ever reach for this hat again or I’ll break your arm next time,” I said. He looked frightened and backed away from me. I threw some potatoes into my basket and moved on. A little while later a woman came up to me and said, “I just want to touch your hat. You saved my village. I think I even remember your face. You were so brave in the face of such a fierce enemy. You should let me buy you a bottle of the best champagne.” “I don’t think we saved anything. We were really outnumbered and outgunned,” I said. “No, that’s not true. You were so brave and courageous,” she said. “That was a long time ago. I have forgotten many of the details,” I said, and tried to push past her. I was at the meat counter, studying the pork chops. “I’ll have those two fat ones,” I told the man. “Are you Brownie Kaczenski?” he said. “No, but I knew Brownie many years ago. He was killed in the war,” I said. “Oh, that’s too bad. I grew up with Brownie, and I lost track of him after he joined the army. You look just like him, or what I thought he would have looked like if he had survived. I’m sorry to hear about Brownie, but glad you made it out alive. My family just barely got out,” he said. He handed me my pork chops. I picked out some bread and cheese and was about to head for the checkout counter when a man pushed his cart in front of mine and said, “I ought to break your neck right here in front of everybody, you low-down, vicious killer. You killed my brother. I’d never forget your face.” “I never killed anybody. I was on the run for most of the war. You’ve got the wrong man,” I said. “You’re a liar. I remember your face. I was just a little kid crouching behind the barn, but I know what I saw and it was you,” he said. “You’re mistaken, mister. I had a brother who was in the war and we looked a lot alike, but he was killed, too, just like your brother. I’m sorry, but it wasn’t me I can assure you,” I said. “Okay, killer, go on, but don’t let me ever catch you in a dark alley,” he said. I went up to the checkout counter and paid for my groceries. The clerk kept staring at me. “Is there something wrong?” I said. “It’s the hat,” he said. “Did you get it around here?” “No, I was in the Polish Army,” I said. “Oh, cool,” he said.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, that is quite an assignment. Potentially rich, though. How is it working out? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, I was munching on Matcha Pocky yesterday when I was doing the p.s., and I wanted some company. There are orange Tic Tacs? And they suck? I think I’ve only ever had the white ones. I’m so behind. Anyway thank you! I would never need to take an old fashioned shower ever again. Love building a perfect, extremely detailed scale model of Budapest and handing you a Godzilla costume, G. ** Misanthrope, Me either, neither hide nor hair re: either of them. I wonder if Matt still makes music. That little getting behind aphorism you spun there would make Yoko Ono green with envy. Only one of his films is shit? Ha ha. Let’s see … was it ‘Christmas with the Coopers’, ‘One and Two’, ‘Worst Friends’, ‘Dune’, … ? I hope that last pill was nuclear. ** David, Ouch! But soon you’ll have a new little valley in your mouth to poke at with your tongue when you’re feeling bored. ** Shane, Thanks, Shane. I’ll see if I can round up some shit, but you might have to wait for the next slaves post. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I never got into Spoon. I think I did try, I don’t remember. May your next few days zoom by. Well, you managed to create, so all was not lost. Everyone, maestro Steve Erickson has a new music track now available for your ears entitled ‘down4thesigil’. Yes, I saw ‘Moonfall’ in the theater, which is definitely the optimal way to see it. Need I add, it is what it is and only what it is. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. My nephew is in his 20s now, and sometimes I like to kiddingly torment him about his teenaged insistence that Skrillex was the greatest genius in the history of recorded music. Yes, that little insert scene of Donald Sutherland was completely bizarre. It was like he’d dropped by the set to say hi to someone and they got him drunk and said, ‘Would mind you sitting in this wheelchair and saying whatever you want for forty seconds?’ They’re saying China is over Hollywood, so I fear they won’t be ‘Moonfall’s’ saviour. It’s not the huge bomb in France that it is the US, but it’s no ‘Uncharted’. Kinuyo Tanaka, yes, that’s her. I’ll give you the scoop if I manage to see one of her films. Okay, … so … the Bresson/Fassbinder double feature … caused … ? One can definitely dream. Dreaming is high on my agenda today as well. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. Oh, great, that ‘Out of the Blue’ completely holds up. I would have thought. I’m going to have to hunt it down over here. You’re in Glendale, just over the hill from my pad. The last time I was in LA  they were still turning the Los Feliz 3 into the Cinematheque outpost. I’m really excited to check it out. The most recent films I’ve seen in a theater were Pedro Costa’s ‘Vitalina Varela’ (great), Jacques Rivette’s ‘Duelle’ (great), ‘Moonfall’ (guilty pleasure), and Bertrand Mandico’s ‘After Blue’ (very irritating). Awesome, take it easy, and I hope to see you again soon. ** Okay. Today the blog’s spotlight falls on a fairly rare and great book of short prose/prose poems by one of my very, very favorite writers in the whole world, the sublime American poet James Tate, and I hope you’ll give it your attention. See you tomorrow.