lit journals, & coming to terms with modern poetry, or with poetry in general, or with life in general, as far as understanding, life, poetry, everything, as, of course, all reflects all (INI)
i struggled a long time with reading poetry. i still do, by and large. what helped, and this is just me journaling here, is trying to recall what helped me to understand rap music, particularly slang and culture outside of, coming from a small honkey ass town in the middle america of middle uhmurrikkkah. i spent a great deal of time as a pre-teen going through cd liner notes, scanning the thank yous, in which rappers would more often than not not only shout out their little crew or whatever, and their ma/pa dukes, but also many of the major rap artists/groups of that time. Wu-Tang (this was during 36 Chambers) led me to Redman, led me to EPMD, led me to K-Solo, and so on. The Mystic Tongues of which A Tribe Called Quest constant shouted out consisted of Leaders of the New School (see: Busta Rhymes pre-solo career), the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, then Prince Paul and all of his oddities... furthermore, that rappers and their producers had to footnote the artists they sampled in the liner notes of each song led me to, as the internet was first becoming available in towns such as my childhood, artists like James Brown and Isaac Hayes, but more so those like David Axelrod, Grover Washington JR, Screaming Jay Hawkins, & Lou Rawls, amongst an enormously impossible to name group of musicians. Shaggy ripping off Let's Get It On is the obvious, but the way that Dr Dre contorted a handful of Parliament songs just to make the perfect verse to chorus bridge breakdown (which was all of maybe a second and a half) on Let Me Ride opened me up to a world far bigger than Chillicothe, Illinois could afford on its own. what i mean to say is that, watching Saul Williams perform Amethyst Rocks for the first time undulated a process of ferverous adventure towards understanding literature in the same way that Snoop's cover of Lodi Dodi led me to Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh. eventually coming to blows with Rimbaud, Stein, Kafka, Pound, Barth, and later DFW, Roberto Bolano, and Michel Silverblatt interviews with Ariana Reines, helped me do the most contorted reactionary essays of Ashbery's "Tennis Court Oath" that could rival anyone's (just because it exists). I, like many other beginning writers of literature in an academic setting, at least to begin with, before becoming shitfaced with dumbass personal retorts to meaning (which is all there really is, when it comes down to it), thought i was above having to read. of course my brilliance was so bright -- due to being unnecessarily fellated by professors and crowd members at local readings (many of which were just looking for attention in return) -- that i didn't need all that shit. all that understanding. whether i needed it or not is beyond my inquiry here. in the sense that one can write without ever experiencing "Illuminations" quite contently. but experiencing "Illuminations" (as microcosm, certainly) made way for neuro switchboarding that could not have happened otherwise. this is experrience, necessarily. and daniel quinn was right when he said "there is no one right way to live." however, there are lazy ways to live. which is to say there are ways to supress one's possibilities. all of this is meant to conclude, more than encouraging the reader of this to read as much as possible, like a mad person incapable of exiting the literary life, that i had been waiting to read a certain literary journal for quite some time. The journal i'm speaking of is LUNGFULL!. you can visit them at lungfull.org. They print rough copies along with the more polished (perhaps) version of the printed works in their magazine, and all the stylings of handwriting, comparing process via text as much is realistically possible in the here and now, is exploited to great ends in their journal. I strongly encourage anyone with 12 bucks to go to their website and paypal Mr. Lorber yr cash money to become more endowed than perhaps any other literary experience (other than realizing, through a book titled "The Kafka Problem" that everyone who interprets Kafka thinks they have the ultimate understanding of his work, a destination i am certainly guilty of). There is so much that one becomes involved with on a daily basis -- static or dynamic -- that taking one's fate away from the pseudo-g-ds and divesting one's intellectual inefficiencies towards as much expansion of interconnectedness as possible... Lorber's essay in issue 19 is about how the act of encouraging art against culture-at-large (even if that means embracing that status, in a convex mirror, so to Ashbery) is the act of assassin. I'd reply that, while I agree with his stance, I'd further it by saying that it is also a rebellion for culture-at-large against against by maintaining latent wallflowering. Keep yr head up, nose to the lines, fever for the flavor of intergallactic upheaving heaving up anti-. irony may be disgusting, but it's necessary. at least for now. <3
