Liner Notes to *The Materialist*

On October 2nd, I will be releasing a spoken word recording on Bandcamp: almost 60 minutes of poetry from my last 20 years if writing. As a bit of a preview/teaser, here are the liner notes. Won't make much sense out of context, but that's ok. Previews never do. I will, of course, update on this site when the album drops.

The Materialist: Selected Poetry 2000-2020

NOTES

 

You’ve heard the phrase “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”? Well, I’m neither. I’m the Materialist. I write immanence. Some will have you believe poetry is spiritual, but I write the dirt of existence. I have no interest in castles in the sky.

·        Slipping Perhaps the oldest poem of the batch, it originally ran three pages. Those three pages said nothing more than these five lines.

·        Eileen Myles She’s a swell poet. For real; if you don’t know, check out Not Me. First published in Industrial Lunch no. 1

·        RONA Fragment The bourgeois denouement, the soft apocalypse. 

·        Wallpaper Fires are lit & graves are filled by the kaleidoscopic moods of old white men staring into mirrors.

·        Strangers Talk Only About the Weather (poems 5-25) You may hear that in Tom Waits’s voice, I will always hear it in Marianne Faithfull’s voice. Or sometimes I hear it in Lotte Lenya's voice, though to my knowledge she's never sung it. Not much to be said that wasn’t said in the spoken intro. All poems are untitled & identified by their first lines.

·        from The Bridge God, this one makes me sound old. Charley Anderson staring down into the swirling gingerbread river in The 42nd Parallel, only older and more alienated than lost.

·        John Cage One of the few surviving Desert Poems from the early aughts.

·        Recasting an Elliot Prelude That night not long after the operation where I accidentally doubled up on Percocet.

·        Variation I: Ezra Pound Driven Batshit Crazy For Want of Sound Money Seriously, dude goes on and on and on. The Lyndon LaRouche of modernism.

·        Variation II: Ol’ Ez Thinks Them Could Be Useful, After All Essentially a mildly altered version of a chunk of Canto XXXII. Don’t try to pin this shit on me.

·        Man Who Loves Scenery A true story. First appeared in Industrial Lunch no. 4

·        Darkness & the Percocet In-Between A cut up: sources Hardt & Negri’s Empire; Raymond Rousell’s Locus Solus; and Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically. Probably see this one overhauled at some point . . . still feels a little like raw material to me.

·        Moving Into Lent Ash Wednesday is the last Catholic Mass I attended of my own volition. I have a handful of Lent/Ash Wednesday poems.

·        Busted Loop Really wish I had a recording instead of a poem.

·        from The Ethics Another long poem that will likely remain unfinished, starring Spinoza as Zarathustra. Root source is a cut up of Spinoza’s Ethics, though this section is virtually unrecognizable as such.

·        A New Kind of Television I was on a poetry-writing binge during the early RONA days, as I recovered from my first knee replacement. I had a few lines of this in the notebook . . . and then the murder of George Floyd, the news of Breonna Taylor’s murder, the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s assassination . . . I could no longer write. I had to speak, I had to face these atrocities, but I could not bury them under artifice: so you get it straight. I did my best with the names; I looked up pronunciations on all I could find. I sincerely apologize for any that I did not get right – the last thing I would want to do is profane your memory.

·        A Small Thing From Industrial Lunch no.1 . . . there is always a spring.