“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” —Freud
I) Out Of The Black
America is, after all
a nation of immigrants—not
a nation without a culture, but
a culture without a past, and so
America builds itself
from its one remaining natural resource:
coolness, for lack of a better term…
Excuse my abstraction;
let’s talk about me as a
child, my parents rich enough,
barely, to buy a house, but no
Megatron for me,
and the whole point of teasing girls
is to evade pretending to like them…
So many of us children
thought we found the final
after-school special
that finally freed us of the
burden of being cool;
but then one day—maybe
the day Nirvana t-shirts and pre-shredded jeans
showed up in Orange County malls—one day
even being uncool
cost more than any of us
could afford…
Let this be the story, then,
of the kids who just wanted
something of their own,
who paid for this
but instead got that,
who wait outside the
blessed circle—
faces faintly forming
out of the Black.
II) Disappear On The Wildside
And first there’s Kyle
who somehow didn’t believe
the 72-hour-hold nurse
when she assured him that
being raped by his dad at eight
isn’t necessarily what’s making him gay;
an endless string of sugar daddies and
down low married men
compose a tired rebuke
to the past…
Next there’s Jessie
who always thought
his parents wasted their
beach-house, being so busy…
Twenty years old and slinging weed
three blocks from the Ocean Beach Pier;
I honestly don’t know
where the tar heroin came from
—doing it off tin foil sheets—
and you can almost smell the sea air
from the ocean Jessie no longer
visits…
Finally, it’s Natalie,
the ultimate punk rock chick:
“that which does not kill me
just makes me angrier,” and again
I don’t know what happened
but after ten years it just
seems kind of hollow, she
composes her horizon
upon marrying the guy
with the union job and
finally finishing an Associate Degree
in Nutrition.
(Maybe I worry that I’m
somehow just like her…)
III) A Certain Lonely Heart’s Club Band
So the local venue crowned Dimitry
King of the Punks
having mastered the art of screaming
over the same three guitar chords;
Dimitry decided to write a song,
in secret, for his girlfriend,
a perfect punk ballad
to make her immortal, to make her happy;
it did neither. Two weeks later
he called me from the lobby of
the Capitol Records Building, having
already traded in for a silicone sister.
But what to name the band?
“Could you get away with,” I asked,
snubbing out a joint into an empty soda can,
“Sgt. Pepper And His Discontents?”
VI) Jane’s Recovery
Jane woke as blinds
cracked lines
of sunlight
across her bedspread;
the day is new and
the air is new and
she finally knows—
after holding her best friend’s
hair all night so she
could throw up chunks of
guilt and retribution—
Jane finally knows
this Sunday morning she can
put on her grandmother’s dress and
step out onto a pathway of moments
unencumbered, forgetful
of her mom and dad’s divorce
of who got the BMW
and who paid for the school
she dropped out of…
Free from her mother’s dreams and
her father’s drugs—
lost in their Woodstock mazes,
let them find their own way.
You know the sap
in trees is content
to wait the Winter, but
“Practice every day” you say
OK OK—
(But yesterday I slept all day
so it doesn’t count.)
So is poetry like going to the gym:
a necessary ping of time passing?
I’d like to think it’s more like a video game—
you need not play every day
but when you do, feel free to get obsessed:
forget to take your mental shower
stuff your soul on Cool Ranch Doritos and Mountain Dew
until you pursue your corporeal
non-thought to the end of its maze…
And writing the end of the poem is the boss level—
don’t forget to save your ammo…
Pre Script: If you’re here for the poems, and don’t want to read my rambling, occasionally ill-informed essays, just use the drop-down navigation on the left of the page; select “Brian’s Poems”…
I’m not talking about my own performance; yes, I read tonight, but I wouldn’t presume to assume to know how I did.
But anyway, yes, at the New Poetic Brew in San Diego’s South Park neighborhood, there was an awesome set of people reading tonight. Even someone I normally find pretty tedious (I won’t name names) was actually pretty awesome in their own right, tonight.
There were also a bunch of kids from SDSU. Not that they weren’t awesome too, but I got the feeling they were there for extra credit or something? Still, I guess it’s all good, because they read and listened politely to everyone else… It will be interesting to see if any show up next month.
I also really should be cool about the SDSU kids, because they seemed to be the biggest group interested in my new chapbook (yay!)… I left out six copies, and only one remained as I left. Maybe I should have put down a couple more…
If you’re in San Diego, and you’re interested, every third Tuesday of the month the reading is at this coffee house.
Finally, there was also this awesome dude there who is often there, and who is always awesome, not only because he recites his poems rather than reads them. I feel kind of douche-y for not remembering his name, especially since he was also interested in a chapbook. Well, anyway, if/when I see him again I’ll ask if he has a poetry blog to add to my blogroll…
EAT PUSSY blared the bumper of the car next to me;
someone had taped out the message in block letters,
then spray painted the bumper, then removed the tape, to reveal
EAT PUSSY,
and at first I was annoyed,
I bristled at the banner on the bumper, but then
I caught myself, realized myself, and
realized a fundamental truth about men.
At this point in history the mighty Western penis
has become so perfunctory as to almost be cliche—
I’ve nothing against penetration (believe me)
but it takes real skill to communicate
with just a tongue and quivering lips
and the difference between a man doing oral
and a woman doing oral
is the pure abstraction of manhood
(tasting great, filling less).
EAT PUSSY, then
on a sun-bleached Honda Civic bumper
is a radical act of straight male reclamation—
a mini-pride parade with every trip to the gas station,
the video game store, or yes
with every date…
If you’d like to spend money, but can’t stand the thought of laying out a whole $2-$3 for an actual physical chapbook, Amazon has my chapbook on Kindle for $0.99…
You know what? It took me longer to get the formatting “just right” for Kindle than it did for print! Of course, it would have helped if the InDesign plug-in wasn’t buried deep within their Kindle self-publishing resources.
While I guess this is “selling out” in some abstract way, you can still read all my poems for free here, on brianthedell.com; I opted-out of signing up for Kindle “exclusive” just so I could keep them up. They’re just not all pretty-fied and Kindle-ready on this website. Also, reading on this site, you have to pick through my sucky poems to get to the decent ones, (but I’m sure you know that).
So I have a Chapbook: “A Sudden Taste Of Blood On The Lip”
Yay! I know I barely have enough (good) material to make a chapbook, but after discovering how easy it is to lay them out in InDesign, I decided to give it a go. A few hours and $30* later, I have 20 copies, each with 16 pages (double sided) + cardstock cover! They’re folded over into half-size of 8 1/2 x 11. The poems included are:
Second World
Desert Traveling
A Space Cadet’s Coloring Book
Momentum
Weight
Light And Time
With Apologies To Jethro Tull
A Bit About Love
April’s Cruelty
Battle For The Author’s Soul
Ripping Out Pages
Of course, all of these poems are already posted here, on BrianThedell.com; if you’d like something (hard) published, or would like to show your interest/support, or whatever, then donate** $2-$3 to cover printing and postage and I’ll send you a signed chapbook. Or you can show up to May’s New Poetic Brew, here in San Diego, and get a copy for free!
*They gave me a discount, actually… Thanks Copy2Copy!
**Using the handy new “Donate” button at the bottom left of the menus…
“Are you famous under the skin?
Familiar with the things you wanted?
Able now, to take it all in,
making peace with every hole in the story?”
—Sonic Youth, “NYC Ghosts & Flowers”
Please, someone reading my previous essay, please come to me with an example of a programming language structured so as to be readable as poetry! You will only prove my point, which was never to deny that there are certain creative connections between poetry and code, nor to deny that there are certain superficial similarities. However, if code is, ontologically, poetry, then necessarily the act of writing a better poem will produce better code. Ah, but this necessity is not the computer science reality: the more efficient and code-like code becomes, the less it looks like anything anyone would term as “poetry.” Every programming-language-as-poetry exorcise I’ve ever seen has been a clever mangling of computer science: yes, you can base computer code off almost any structure, but there has yet to be a computer science programming revolution based upon poetry-like programming languages.
In other words, BECAUSE code is beautiful, it is ontologically not poetry—as it reveals its true beauty, its power and efficiency as logic executing within an essentially physical system, it becomes less and less essentially linguistically beautiful; if anything it becomes more universal, approaching the a-linguistic Truth of math. Processing database fields more efficiently will not reveal truths about your first love, and being profoundly self-aware of the “selfness” of one’s self will never make you better at writing efficient, well-thought-out code.
I will admit, again, however, that taking a class in logic will make you both a better programmer and a better essayist. But then, I fundamentally don’t believe that poetry and essays are the same; they compliment each other, oftentimes, but essays never have that bite where you feel an overwhelming chill, and neither does code.
I was about to come on here and write an essay about how code is not poetry, and about how tired I am of hearing that old cliche trotted out again and again, especially on Slashdot. My original argument went something along the lines of, yes both code and poetry rely heavily on language and semantics, but they are essentially polar opposites: just as you cannot run a webserver from a Shakespeare sonnet, you cannot discover any poetic (i.e. aesthetic, philosophical) truths from computer code.
But then, I realized something. Slashdotters, stereo-typically, are really into hating on deconstruction. They especially love the Skoal affair, and hypocritically enough many ignorant Slashdotters feel as though all of deconstruction was “disproved”*. The funny, truly profoundly ironic fact lying at the heart of all this posturing and hating on, though, is that deconstruction is essentially the ONLY literary theory or philosophical method that would SUPPORT the idea of code as poetry. You see, in the deconstructionist world, EVERYTHING, every act of expression, is essentially a “text.” A poem, therefore, is a text, and so is software code. Taking the culture and background of coders into context, and realizing that they have a community and set of traditions all their own, and transmuting all of these facts into an “artistic” enterprise is, essentially, a post-modern project.
So, which is it Slashdotters? Do you believe in a post-modern mash-up of meaning, whereby “mundane” things like software code approach the vitality and beauty of poetry, fiction, and literature in general? Or do you reject post-modernism on its face, and by extension admit that the act of directing an electronic logic platform via a series of pre-programmed instructions has nothing to do with the act of revealing beautiful truths about the nature of being?
I, myself, am growing ambivalent about the issue. Part of me suspects that all of this posturing just comes out of some deep-seated self-hatred on the part of Slashdotters: society reviles geeks as spending all their time sitting at a desk puzzling through highly-esoteric, theoretical concepts. So, now the (computer) geeks get to spend time reviling literary and philosophical geeks: “what *I* do is important geek stuff, not like those LITERATURE geeks!” But then, at the same time, they feel “left out” somehow, and want the ontological prestige of being poets; hence, code is poetry (or should I say, computer.code() == literary.poetry()).
It’s really quite a silly position: on the one hand, poetry is usually dismissed by Slashdotters as a vapid, out-of-touch, ivory-tower pursuit, yet then conversely, the “rock star” aspect of poetry—being a savvy artist skilled at self-expression—somehow applies to writing code (though not to poetry itself). Ultimately, while I have a hard time being SO post-modern as to literally equate code with poetry, I do respect programmers as the essential engineers of the 21st century. And isn’t there a simple, plain dignity in being an engineer? Do you have to be a poet, as well?
* This is hypocritical, for those too slow to keep up, because just as self-important post-modernists couldn’t “disprove” science using literary theory, literary theory was never “disproven” by science or Skoal. In the end, Skoal simply pointed out the hubris and ignorance of SOME post-modernists; as I have noted earlier, he was forced to remove quotes from Derrida from his “quotes of shame” because it was shown that Skoal was taking them out of context without really understanding their background—the very same charge he leveled at post-modernists who attacked science.
Post Script: If anything, I find that essay writing—a rhetorical practice that demands close and careful linking of logical statements—is much closer to writing code. Poetry is all about open-ness of meaning, all about the vague contours of the soul; it is primarily quantum, if it’s anything scientific at all. Essays, though, yes I can see that… I guess you could deconstruct poetry as being a form of essay, but again, at that point why don’t you just reduce everything into texts…you know you want to, you post-modernist you.
…this domain, brianthedell.com, used to be my “personal” blog. That is to say, I used to come on here, in a different WordPress installation, and shoot the breeze about various things on my mind. After a year or so of doing that, I found it tedious and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Towards the end, I got rather political (and attached my Twitter account to the mess). The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
Don’t get me wrong. I still feel very let down by Obama. I still resent being called a racist just because I disagree with Obama continuing many of George W. Bush’s policies. I still believe that the idiot writers over at Pragmatic Obamabots Unite are at best profoundly ignorant of (gay) civil rights history, and at worst are actively homophobic. In a nutshell, in a Sophomoric attempt to back up Melissa Harris-Perry’s argument that anti-Obama criticism is racist, POU argued that gay rights, essentially, was just created to make Obama look bad. Also, there was something about “why can’t gays just wait for their rights,” which is, of course, profoundly hypocritical coming from any blog that purports to advance the rights of the oppressed. But I abandoned the whole enterprise, and all my posts “arguing” against POU, for three reasons:
First and foremost, I felt it wasn’t spiritually productive. There are so many ignorant people on the Internet; my time is better spent producing something positive for potential audiences sympathetic to what I have to say, rather than Quixotically attempting to educate those who insist on being ignorant.
Secondly, I reversed the situation, and was disappointed in myself. Let me explain—if I found an African American-rights focused blog that I enjoyed, but then found that the ONLY gay rights blogger they ever quoted or addressed happened to be some ignorant racist they managed to scrounge up from the Internet, I would be disappointed in that African American-rights blog. Yes, pointing out racism in the gay community would be relevant (just as pointing out homophobia in the African American community is relevant). But to make ignorant people the centerpiece of your response to an oppressed group is, in a subtle way, a form of bigotry on its own.
Finally, as someone who can at least recognize that he is ensconced in white privilege, I thought about how homophobia in the African American community affects me. Frankly, it doesn’t. Furthermore, I am not doing anything to actually solve the problem, to actually advance the rights of those who are truly hurt by homophobia in the African American community: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender African Americans.
So there you go. I’m not retracting anything. I’m not going back on any of my positions. But I’m not continuing a “fight” I no longer feel productive, either. If I have something to say about Obama, and I can’t be thoughtful enough to put it in a poem, I’ll just say it on some random political forum somewhere, like everyone else. And I only leave the option open because I believe politics should be open to critique from poetry; I don’t anticipate having anything poetic to say about Obama at all, except maybe in passing.
Also, reading on this site, you have to pick through my sucky poems to get to the decent ones, (but I’m sure you know that).