JD dot com

The demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, ‘well-crafted’ poem has produced extraordinary uniformity.

…

…the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one.

…from Poetry On The Brink: Reinventing the Lyric by Marjorie Perloff in the latest Boston Review.

It’s great to see that someone else is bored to death with contemporary poetry. Always the same old tune, same old song & dance. Gone the rhythm, here comes the blues.

Do you think our literary progenitors ever foresaw a day when poetry would be separated from creativity? (Yes…they did.)

Good thing is though – now anybody can get published in the New Yorker. Just pay your tuition and follow the rules.

It’s funny how often lazy music journalists refer to Jack White’s guitar as a “three-headed hellhound.” Funny because it’s so unholy accurate.

So yeah…Blunderbuss leaked. And it’s live streaming on iTunes with a video directed by Gary freakin’ Oldman. Somebody’s not getting anything done in the office today.

…a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

…from You Should Date An Illiterate Girl, by Charles Warnke at Thought Catalog

Despite how only a guy who’s still in college, whether physically, mentally or emotionally, could write this piece…it’s still pretty brilliant. Reminds me of a guy I know…

Daddy says when I’m eighteen, I can hang out with Uncle Jordy & ride motorcycles & smoke cigars.

…my nephew

The mark of a good songwriter. Who can say if such a thing exists in any definitive way? I know I can, and apparently it hangs around in an artist’s genetics.

Take a song lyrics that’s beautiful on paper:

See my dreams before my eyes/ Shadows on the wall, I/ Ain’t got no place I can fall

Snowin’ in off the lake/ Punching holes in the dark/ Through the lonely streets of Roger’s Park

…Rogers Park, from Justin Townes Earle‘s damn near perfect album, Harlem River Blues

Now there’s a lyric that’s inarguable poetry in its own right. Punching holes in the dark? C’mon! Are you kidding me? But what makes ol’ JT a brilliant songwriter isn’t the lyrics. It’s how he drops the bottom out of that second line, wrapping it around the chord progression and hammering down on the minor chord. And man it hits like a sledgehammer. That’s brilliant, and not only because of my  obsession with wraparound lyrics. There’s a loneliness between the first and second lines you wouldn’t otherwise have, and what do you get for it? Take a listen…

Harlem River Blues was released in 2010 when JTE was 28 years old. His previous album was released a year earlier, so we can assume he was writing these songs at the age of 26 or 27.

Twenty-five years earlier, his old man wrote this song, which was released on Guitar Town when he was 31 years old:

…My Old Friend The Blues

Lovers leave and friends’ll let you down/ But you’re the only sure thing that I’ve found/ No matter what I do I’ll never lose/ My old friend the blues

Runs in the family, eh? The way that Daddy Earle opens a trap door beneath that D chord in the next to last line, letting the D7 sway around…you don’t realize that you’re the one hanging from the gallows. And then he resolves the final line with every songwriter’s favorite chorus-ender, the good ol’ IV-V-I turnaround…exactly how Rogers Park ends.

It’s haunting, and apparently, it’s something you’re born with.

So it turns out D’Angelo isn’t dead after all. Go figure. Then again, if ?questlove is correct and this insane cover of Soundgarden‘s Black Hole Sun is eight years old…who knows where ol’ Voodoo D is hanging at, or if his Chinese Democracy-esque follow up to one of my Top-10 albums of the last fifteen years will ever come out.

Either way, I’ve got goosebumps…

So it appears I’m a professional recording artist now…

Available on Amazon, CDbaby, and on iTunes tomorrow, though I’m not even really sure how this happened. Having music producer friends can be pretty cool, sometimes.

Overheard in the O’Hare Red Carpet Lounge:

Him: A hickie from Kenickie’s like a Hallmark card. When you only care enough to send the very best.

Her: Did you just…?

Him: Greased lightning, baby…

Her: I think I love you.

Oh America, sometimes I love you too.

….Repost from Prick Up Your Ears. Most tracks available here. Digging how the Keys went back to their oil-stained concrete roots with some elements, studiofied others. Dirty, dirty groove, either way. Know what I’m listening to all day tomorrow.

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                        looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
                      I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
                  Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
                                           up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

…Charles Wright, the Hank Williams of American poetry, from Chickamauga.


No sky dogs around here tonight, but my neighbor is walking a pig on a leash.