Let’s get high talk about ‘90s nostalgia
Ben Fama, Los Angeles (via essence-form)
Stranger Things
dirt enthusiast
todays bird
YOU ARE THE REASON
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Peter Solarz

Love Begins

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available

#extradirty

@theartofmadeline

roma★

Discoholic 🪩

Origami Around
Misplaced Lens Cap
occasionally subtle

No title available

blake kathryn

Kaledo Art
ojovivo

seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Vietnam
seen from United States

seen from Vietnam

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

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seen from Spain
@benfama-blog
Let’s get high talk about ‘90s nostalgia
Ben Fama, Los Angeles (via essence-form)
“People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare.” –Norman Buckley, quoting Michael Connelly, in a tweet He’d kept ...
“Where it’s easy to be beautiful / And seen and new / In the glow / In the spell / I thought I was better” - Ben Fama
Good morning, internet!
xo, SPD
Frank O’Hara, from Meditations in an Emergency
(IRL Podcast)
I, like, crave you Doesn’t it ever just make you sad Plans you had with different people And how it all can’t come true? I want the extremes Of pleasure Boredom Watching my lovers cry
Ben Fama, from Fantasy (via mooneyedandglowing)
“Nothing is transcendent.”
A Conversation Between Poets Monica McClure and Josef Kaplan
To live sensitively in 2016, on or offline, is often to be brutalized. As Josef Kaplan, the author of Poem Without Suffering says below, “I think we can both agree that life as currently available to huge numbers of people on this planet is a nightmare.” Kaplan’s Poem Without Suffering takes on the US American reality of public shootings and the subsequent collective grief, subjecting it to investigation through a moving book length poem. In this conversation he talks with Monica McClure, author of the acclaimed book of poems Tender Data.
Their conversation sent me back to another text, Bifo Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Berardi concludes his intro to the book by writing, “Now, the task at hand is to map the wasteland where social imagination has been frozen and submitted to the recombinant corporate imaginary. Only from this cartography can we move forward to discover a new form of activity which, by replacing Art, politics, and therapy with a process of re-activation of sensibility, might help humankind to recognize itself again.”
What follows is a dense conversation about the political psychosphere, the arc of life, and the so-called “risks” involved with writing (Spoiler alert: the only risk is of fucking it up).“
—Ben Fama
I. A BIT OF A BUMMER
MONICA MCCLURE: I keep thinking about how Poem Without Suffering deals with a sequence of events in a backward and sometimes simultaneous manner. The last part of the book describes birth—with several pages spent on the outward passage through the liminal space between amniotic and conscious existence. And the beginning of the book is about abrupt, untimely deaths that show lives stalled out before they’ve even really started. In some ways the book is like a wind-up toy: you crank it backward to move forward. Even the fricatives sputter like the jagged movement of a mechanical soldier. In other ways, the poem spins its wheels in the ditch.
What interests me about the last part of the book is the conspicuous absence of choice in the matter of being born, especially given the shadow of murder-by-speeding bullet cast in the first few lines ("To have it happen, / but to have it not / be considered / tragedy…”) of Poem Without Suffering. Want to talk about the backward qualities of the poem?
JOSEF KAPLAN: My hope was that it could be a book that actually proceeds through contradiction. I thought the way its narrative would move forward would be through these “impossible” structural gestures, kind of like a trick or illusion. So, yeah, exactly: it starts at the end, with a death, and finishes at the beginning, with a birth—but the way we get there isn’t a reversal. Time doesn’t move backward. We’re always moving forward, but we end up somehow behind where we began.
Also it’s nearly a hundred pages, but because of the shortness of its lines it reads quite fast. It’s a long poem about a brief moment (a bullet being fired out of a gun) that gets described in this slow, expansive way that’s simultaneously experienced very quickly. It’s disorienting, which maybe speaks to how agency gets looked at in the work, where so much of it is described within a chaotic, digressive network of effects.
It actually reminds me of Tender Data. There’s a very well rendered tension in that book where you have voices struggling to articulate some sense of humanity or control in the face of an environment that constantly demands the forfeiture of both. But in your poems that forfeiture doesn’t just happen at the hands of overt repression, it also happens at the hands of pleasure. There are many horrible things about how we live that we enjoy, actually, because enjoyment can be inconsistent and furtive, but also because this world doesn’t just blackmail us with death or imprisonment or humiliation, it also blackmails us with delight. And that is terrifying. The things we love are in effect one way we are held in misery.
Keep reading
I cannot numb these vulgar emotions (…) Maybe you heard them in the original French version? As if falling in love were so uncool
Ben Fama, from Like (via mooneyedandglowing)
Ben Fama in Issue #075
(IRL Podcast)
(IRL Podcast)
IRL 2 is now available on soundcloud. Monica McClure and I continued our online talk series by having Sasha Fletcher on to discuss the process of being hired to write a YA book, from initial writing audition to completion. We also discussed romantic love, the singular achievement of the Renaissance (for some reason), and prolonged depression. cw: suicidal ideation
(IRL Podcast)
It is 2:16 pm and in a strip mall bubble tea cafe for a coffee and a place to sit while I wait for tires to be installed with the frantic pace I that necessitated my aimless walk down the underpass away from, and reading Josef Kaplan’s “Poem Without Suffering,” and turning the page the hook to Jessie J’s “Bang Bang,” feat. Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, is playing, and when I see this scroll continues thru this page, scanning down, and the full next, is when I notice, suddenly, the tears, quiet in my eyes.
My three color Riso print for Horizontal Press is online and available here ! Big thank you to Kaye Blegvad for having me. ☆╮
in which the poet
compares a bullet through the brain to a pedestrian pushing through a crowd, a politician orating away people’s fear, endless pardons to cut a path through strangers, the bullet’s streak across a tangled list of arteries, a body’s transmutation into hard, dead, crumbling parts, compares to the trauma of birth, the mother’s torn flesh, mother’s loss, mother and child’s nostalgia, the unfurling of maternal affection, compares to the stillborn spared all the above
in one, book-length, poem without suffering
Josef Kaplan’s new book is now in stock, and it’s 20% off all month