By now you may have guessed that this tumblr -- this whole project, really -- has stopped functioning as a press and started functioning as an archive. That’s a nice way of saying that I, its sole owner and proprietor, have relinquished the duties of a publisher to continue to seek out, solicit, edit, design, promote, organize, and publish work by poets that I admire, at least in the ways that this project demanded.
This happened slowly, and for several reasons, and I’ll admit there are occasional moments when I think of this project as being ‘on hiatus’ or ‘in transition.’ With the new year upon us, however, and in the interest of shining lights on all mysteries, and in an effort to ceremonialize the work that so many incredible poets have entrusted me with, I’m taking this opportunity to issue a formal goodbye, as well as an enormous thank you, to everyone who made this project such an incredible one.
Today, I’d like to officially announce that Black Cake will be preserved indefinitely as an audio archive, and to invite you to continue to listen, share, download, and donate to the incredible poets who comprise our catalog. From 2013-2015, we published 22 albums of original poetry and sound experiments by incredible artists like Chelsea Hodson, Bianca Stone, Wendy Xu, Brandon Shimoda, Danniel Schoonebeck, Rachel B. Glaser, Sampson Starkweather, Zachary Schomburg, Emily Kendal Frey, and many others.
When I first started Black Cake in 2013, I envisioned a place where poets could experiment and sing, beyond the two-dimensional confines of the page. I felt there was something in the voice of the poet, and in the performance of a poem, that was entirely different from the experience of reading a poem in silence. I wanted to hear them, and I wanted them to be heard.
I believed, and still believe, that art should be both accessible and accessed, and that the function of art should be to make space for shared action, not individualized production. For this reason, every album in the Black Cake archive will continue to be made available for sharing, streaming, and downloading, in perpetuity, for free.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you’ve followed along, poetry appreciates you. If you’re inspired by this project, I encourage you to take up where it left off. We’ll be here, though silently, and we promise to keep the lights on as long as you’d like.
Big thanks to the cool kidz at the Willamette Week for this awesome nod to Black Cake in their annual Best of Portland issue. We’ve been on hiatus to finish some personal projects and are excited to be getting some new releases underway in the next few weeks. Stay tuned and thanks for listening!
ANNOUNCEMENT: Our two newest releases are still spinning over at Black Cake Records! Imagine a Fire You Can Wear As a Coat by Anthony Graytone by Mike Young & I AM AN ORCHID by Rachel B. Glaser are now available to listen to, download, & share for free at blackcake.org. Enjoy, babes.
“Confessionalism gets a bad rap, but what else is there?” Today at the Fanzine, Jon-Michael Frank & Chelsea Hodson in conversation about obsession, devastation, Diana Ross, & their recent poetry releases at Black Cake Records. Read the whole brilliant thing here.
Stacey Tran, editor of Portland’s Poor Claudia press & all-around amazing human, recorded this 30-minute track of this weekend’s Octopus Books double book release party & group reading, featuring ten local poets reading from the two newest Octopus Books: Chris DeWeese’s The Father of the Arrow is the Thought & Marisol Limon Martinez’s Via Dissimulata. Featuring performances by Tyler Brewington, Stacey Tran, Liz Mehl, John Beer, Travis Meyer, Kelly Schirmann, Emily Kendal Frey, James Gendron, Drew Scott Swenhaugen, & Hajara Quinn.
Big thanks to the Portland Mercury for this awesome write-up on Black Cake Records & all of its amazing contributors. Read Pitch Black by Joshua James Amberson to find out what we do & why we do it (hints: love, & art).
A stranger to me at the time, Joseph Thompson wrote to me last winter and said he’d been reading my poems and feeling the berserker feelings. We ended up writing back and forth for a year, asking and answering questions, and now that interview lives over at Cutbank. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever made a friend via the weird woods of an interview, a new kind of gratitude for me.
Here’s some words I said to Joseph:
“It’s important to me, especially in interviews, to state that I think America is a misnomer. It’s like dry tongue, the word itself is a kind of barricade. It marks an entryway, a path through the trees, but it also bars you from that entry. Because the U.S.A. is one of the least boring ideas in the world, at least on paper, and that’s exactly what we seem to want from nationalism. To be the center of the boring universe. To have all the soldiers and pop music and sporting events and blockbuster movies and our poetry scene. So it’s fun, kind of pissy and campy at the same time, to adopt the attitude of one who’s bored with the U.S.A. It’s like how dare you, you can’t tire of paradise. And it’s even more interesting when you start outright calling Americans losers.”
ANNOUNCEMENT /// Night Redacted by Chelsea Hodson & Puritan Landfill by Brian Foley are now available to listen to, download, & share for free at blackcake.org.
"Very little, if anything, actually exists for us. Trees didn’t decide to grow because they knew we’d eventually come along. The impetus is to identify sensitivity. Whatever technical device—writing or machine—is really not the issue. I don’t even think this is what constitutes “recording”. Recording, and The Record, is something much more insane. An imprint larger than the artifact."
Today at The Volta Blog, Dot Devota & Brandon Shimoda answer none/all of the questions we have ever had.
Evading The Corporeal: An Interview with Jon-Michael Frank
When I read Jon-Michael Frank’s poems, I am often confronted with a feeling similar to hearing a recording of your own laugh, or seeing a photograph of yourself in the middle of explaining something while blackout drunk. There’s an uncanny similarity to your own thoughts there, & a sense of deep authenticity, but the safety rails have been removed, & to be honest, it makes you a little uncomfortable. I wrote to tell him as much, & since then he has been an invincible sounding board for my ideas about what poems are, what grunge is, what rivers do, & how to find meaning in & around the rubble. His recent release from Black Cake Records, Diana Ross & The Supremes, is a lot like a brand new friend who always lets you know when you have shit in your teeth. Thankfully, JMF is too.
Black Cake: Hi Jon-Michael! I'm sitting in a motorcycle-themed coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, watching the rain out the window & listening to your record, Diana Ross & the Supremes. It's foggy this morning, but this album feels like it is bringing me out of something & into something else. More about that later, but first: Hi, how are you?
Jon-Michael Frank: Hey Kelly! Thanks so much for allowing me to steal Diana Ross & The Supremes for Black Cake. I loved the process and adding to the whole enchilada of The Black Cake Sound. Such an honor! I hope you are enjoying your fog. I haven’t been to that motorcycle place but I was in Portland once for a Fiona Apple concert. I don’t think our generation has yet recovered from her reproach of the world’s existence as bullshit on the 1997 MTV music awards. And I don’t think I really want it to. (That image is the cover to my next next chapbook, by the way). But, yes, Portland and motorcycles. While I was there I saw an idol in the woods and what I imagine is a river of flowers interrupted by the stagnancy of the world. I bought a donut and ran three miles down the sidewalk because I felt immense consternation about seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. There’s something depressing about seeing water pooled into one place. It’s like what hope do we have then. Either way, I’m doing well, life is okay, even kind to me: I’m now the acquisitions editor for Birds, LLC, I’ve got the Diana Ross & The Supremes chapbook coming out from them sometime this year, an acceptable tax return, and viable and possibly gratifying ideas for the future. How’re you?
BC: I’m great, but more importantly, I’m now watching the video for ‘Criminal,’ so thank you very much for that. Speaking of music: When I listen to this album, I feel an incredible tension between these voices -- that is, your voice & Diana's voice, Motown & Blue Velvet. To me it seems there is something very moving, sinister, frustrated, joyous & wounded about the juxtaposition of these voices. What is your relationship to that voice, that era, those intentions, these messages? Why these voices? What’s this tension?
JMF: I’d be half bullshitting if I gave you some kind of belabored list like: black bags of trash left in a wheatfield, or better yet, Shiki’s “the body of a dog / thrown away / in the winter river,” 80s UK Batcavers, 90s bummer goths, millenial mall goths, the way Francis Bacon mechanizes mouths in his paintings, the one minute of silence in Bande Apart, the flags of blonde hair trashing the winds via the troubled summer girls from my childhood, an anti-shock CD player with a NIN sticker on it, suicide sodas, the sun gleaming off of Tanya Harding’s knee, or the warmth and repose found in Vicodin, but some of that is probably true. That, and the aleatory. I think the aleatory is the bulk of it.
I find that when I sit down to write, just like playing cards, it’s mostly luck. Sometimes I come up with good shit, most of the time I don’t. It rains, and it doesn’t. So to bring David Lynch into this, there’s that one Blue Velvet scene right after Jeffrey finds the spoiled ear in the field where he presents it to the detective and the detective says, “that’s a human ear all right.” I suppose that’s what I can say about the poems. As for their origin, in some sense, I can ascertain that they were found decomposing in a field (the field being whatever the impetus, inspiration, or force was i.e. the Vicodin, the wheatfields etc.), but I’m more enamored by the “strange world” they were plucked from. So I suppose the ear is merely an inventive attempt to enter a world where Jeffery, and we, the viewers, don’t really belong. I write poems as an in -- I suppose that’s where they come from, the feeling of outsiderness that comes from being an autonomy in an ostensibly interdependent world. Jeffrey’s ear in a field. Diana Ross goes along with this, she’s the reminder that a) things could be better, and b) that the love she sings about, or conjures, in some songs, is greater than the subject of her love itself. That to me is devastating, and beautiful, and an ideal venue to gift your life to.
BC: Wow. I totally agree, & am now going to think about the love song as a more powerful & accessible object than love itself for the rest of my life. I’m not sure if that’s sad or relieving. But I did want to tell you: one of my favorite things to get in the mail this year was your new poetry / comics chapbook from El Aleph Press, Here It Is My Beautiful Fucking Heart. You've also done visual art collaborations with other poets, are an editor for Birds LLC, & run an amazing little online print shop. How does working with multiple mediums influence or inform your art, writing, music?
JMF: Ah! So kind! Can I publish the fanatical prolix love/fan letter I sent to you when I received Boyfriend Mountain? It’s great to possess and be witness to a release of literature that actually wants to maim and take hostage its readers through blood, eruption and brains. So verily, thank you and Tyler Brewington for that. But to answer your question:
It’s so weird to hear about yourself from other people, they tell you things you’ve accomplished and done in a way that never seems real to you which kind of explains why most people still feel like like sad fuckers through this all. Working in multiple mediums is a reprieve for me. Boredom is the indomitable enemy, and diversifying expression is a kind of placebo salve against that. It gives the impression that I’m never doing the same thing, that what’s achieved is varied in some way. Another way of saying it is, I hate writing because I have to employ the labor of thinking to do it, and I like painting and drawing because I get to think in a different way that seems much more organic, or protean in a sense. Great work has a way of rivering right through you, you don’t have to get in the way of it, or fuck with it at all. It feels good to be a conduit in this manner. Affection works similarly, I think. But thinking bungles everything. It makes everything feel derivative to me; it’s like plagiarizing your own intuition in a way. Intuition is what spurs important work, so to answer your question, succinctly, working in different mediums reminds me that thinking is bullshit and the more you do it the worse your art turns out.
BC: WORD. I would like this tattooed on my neck forever. In fact this is maybe the most therapeutic interview I’ve ever participated in, so pressing on: I am permanently obsessed with the relationship between poems & songs, or songs & anything else. For purely selfish reasons: what does that relationship mean to you? What are songs? What are poems? What's the difference?
JMF: Like Maude says in Harold & Maude, anyone who doesn’t make some kind of music in/of their life is an utter waste. Until that point, I think people should find hero-types to coffin themselves in: Blaze Foley, Freddie Hubbard, Annette Peacock, Kath Bloom, D’Angelo etc. The thing I love most about music, or find as some kind superiority to the genuses of art (if that’s even possible) is, quintessentially, there’s nothing human about it. It’s one of the few human products that isn’t made by/or in the image of humanity. It quite literally transcends us and our bullshit meddling of interjecting our own simian-sculpted perspective on the world, despite the fact that it is adapted to the utility of the human ear and is interpreted to resemble emotions in some shape or form. But on its own, it is capable of being a vacuum: the most privileged echelon any masterwork aspires to. When I was a teenager, and the face behind various AIM handles such as glittersolitude, now_im_nothing and vapidity, I had this fantasy of answering a phantom interview question of Why do you write? with Because I can’t play the piano. Which really hasn’t changed, considering I’m still unable to craft music worth shit, hence Ben Valdmets-Harris' inimitable work on Diana Ross & The Supremes. But I envy the capacity for music in everything. I don’t understand people who are capable of creating music and devote their sole use of time to writing. Who the fuck wants to write? I only consider writers writers because they don’t generate music. Through some kind of calamity or punitive agency, they are stuck with words. What a terrible fate; it’s like living your life out as a fucking tombstone.
I’m glad you brought up songs though. I wanted to make this album an actual album; I didn’t want it to sound like a poetry reading. Most poetry readings are the fucking worst. It’s like when you go see a band, you are going to hear the songs sung by a body and not a speaker, so the experience should be novel. If it sounds exactly like the album, what’s the point of the live show? A form should be evolved or abandoned, if not, it becomes a statue, a fixture, as corporeal as money. And the whole point of making something should be to evade the corporeal. That’s why when Dylan started his electric set in 1966 he said, play it fucking loud.
I hope that’s the way people play this Diana Ross & The Supremes album.
You can listen to Jon-Michael Frank's album, Diana Ross & The Supremes, at blackcake.org. Order his chapbook from El Aleph press here, follow his artwork & book updates here, & read his dismal ass tweets here.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Two brand new albums by Sommer Browning & Jon-Michael Frank are now up at Black Cake Records. This very special release includes No Intro, Sommer's first stand-up comedy album recorded live in Denver, Colorado; and Diana Ross & the Supremes, a dark mashup of Motown hits & Blue Velvet kinda vibes. As always, these albums & more are available to listen to & download absolutely free over at blackcake.org. Check 'em out, tell your friends, don't talk to strangers, have a great weekend.
Black Cake Records is celebrating its first birthday this month. To celebrate an incredible year of poetry & recordings, I've put together an anthology of all the poets & artists that released records with us in 2014. The Year One // Anthology is a mixtape of sorts featuring fourteen tracks of poetry, mashups, field recordings, collaborations, & sound experiments by our amazing authors: Robert Duncan Gray, Cassandra Gillig, Sara Woods, Emily Kendal Frey, Danniel Schoonebeek, Lisa Ciccarello, Amy Lawless, Zachary Schomburg, Wendy Xu, Nick Sturm, Dot Devota, Brandon Shimoda, Bianca Stone, & Sampson Starkweather.
It's been an incredible year & we have many more projects from more artists to come. If you have been meaning to check out our site, this anthology is a great opportunity to get to know us. If you know us & like what we do, this is also a great opportunity to consider donating a few bucks to Black Cake to ensure that these experiments continue. We will work hard forever to keep our recordings free (& ad-free), & your donation goes to support that.
Thank you everyone for your continued amazing support & for every person that has contributed to this project. I am grateful & awed & inspired by all of you. Happy New Year & enjoy! <3
So proud of our girl Wendy Xu for making Time Out New York's list of 10 Chapbooks to Read Now with her Black Cake album, Phrasis. Also featured: Flowers of Rad, a killer Factory Hollow chap by BC label-mate Sampson Starkweather. Check out the whole list here, then go hear Phrasis for yourself over at the Black Cake site.
