Monthly Archives: April 2013

Poetry, C & D

Posted on by

And now for the second installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry Month A-Z series…

C is for Coleridge, and also constipation

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

ColeridgeWere you forced to memorize lengthy bits of the dead albatross saga in school? Has this experience left you with less-than-fluffy feelings toward Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Let me offer you a little fecal schadenfreude (a phrase with exactly zero google results—until now!) by sharing with you poor Mr. Coleridge’s bowel tribulations.

Coleridge’s addiction to opium inspired some of his most famous poetry (like Kubla Khan, another poem you may have learned by rote), but it also caused terrible constipation. Here’s Coleridge’s diary account of a particularly gruesome bout, which occurred on a sea voyage from Gibraltar to Malta aboard the Speedwell:

Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labour, & fruitless throes, of costiveness—individual faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress.

The following day, “a day of horror,” the captain of the Speedwell had to flag down a passing ship and request that the ship’s surgeon come on board to tend to Coleridge:

The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God!—What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!… At length went: O what a time!—equal in pain to any before. Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter & after a while was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.

Lawks-a-lawdy! Alas, the enema—and its attendant humiliation—was to become a regular occurrence in Coleridge’s life. He knew the constipation was a side effect of his opium use, but he couldn’t kick the habit, and thus he came to see his rectal misfortunes as a punishment for his addiction.

To weep & sweat & moan & scream for parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality: for Sleep a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past Life from earliest childhood all huddled together, and bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-torture. O this is hard, hard, hard.

D is for Davis, Olena Kalytiak

From the ridiculous to the sublime: I can’t say enough good things about the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis, and in particular her first collection, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, which won the 1997 Birmingham Prize in Poetry. Her poems are funny, brutal, and brilliant, and she manages that trick of conjuring universal meaning from something deeply idiosyncratic.

In Defense of Marriage

Marry the black horse stuck
Dumb in her humble corral.

Marry the white fences; marry the fenceless
Moon and the defenceless sky.

Marry the feedlot and the threshing
Floor. Like the northern heaven to the southern

Stars, marry the kitchen table, its three strong
Legs. Marry the gate and the small intricate

Cuts on the key and the view spreading
Outback. The streetlamp

Weds the morning light, like that, take the
Nomad. Promise to forsake. Give in

To the cistern full of asters.
To the way the beloved

Story goes: her body from a bone.
And her soul out of nothing.

In a slowly spoiling month find out
You have married the house worn

Blue on the yellowing hill: each of its
Slow budding bedrooms. Marry one or two

Or three varieties of light, in three or four
Different lifetimes. I meant, windows.

Mate, be forsaken.

I married the way moths marry.
I married hard.

A Brief Introduction to Speaking Kiwi

Posted on by

NZ StampFirst up, you have to master the New Zealand accent. You must sound pleasant, earnest, and a bit dim, and you should probably mumble, because you are at all times discreetly dissolving that giant lump of mutton at the back of your throat. You should also speak with a rising inflection, so that everything you say sounds like a question. (Certainty is terribly impolite.) And keep your lips as close together as possible when you talk; remember, you are trying to keep the flies from entering your mouth.

This man’s excellent impression of Prime Minister John Key will give you the idea:

Selecting an appropriate topic of conversation is important. You may talk about rugby, the road toll, mangrove swamps, birds, pig dogs, and the rain. And speaking of rain, you should memorize “Rain,” the nation’s most beloved poem.

Finally, you need to learn the vocabulary. If you are fluent in Kiwi, you will be able to parse a sentence like this with ease:

When Bruce and Tasha hooned it up the boohai, their ankle-biter got crook and chundered in the chilly bin each time they went over a judder bar, which made Bruce throw a wobbly.

(Translation: When Bruce and Tasha drove quickly and recklessly to a remote place in the middle of nowhere, their small child became sick and vomited in the cooler each time they went over a speed bump, which made Bruce lose his temper.)

Also note: in America, something is “quite nice” if it is very nice indeed, while in New Zealand “quite nice” is a gentle way of saying that something is not very nice at all. If a Kiwi tells you your banana cake is “quite nice, eh?,” I’m afraid your banana cake is rubbish.

And never mention toilet paper in polite company. Call it skindywoo, as in “I just had an epic chunder in the back of your van, mate. You got any skindywoo?”

Poetry, A & B

Posted on by

It’s April, which means it’s National Poetry Month. It’s also National Anxiety Month and National BLT Sandwich Month (“the second most popular sandwich in the United States”), and this trinity of nationwide awareness can be no coincidence—so let’s fix ourselves a bacon sarnie, crack open the Xanax, and settle in for the first installment in Malvern Books’ arbitrary and occasional Poetry A-Z series.

A is for Aubade

troubadourIf a serenade is an evening love song, an aubade is its early bird equivalent. Aubades often recount tales of adulterous lovers who must part company as the sun comes up, and they were quite the thing in the freaky Middles Ages, when troubadours roamed the world, playing their annoying fiddles and reciting aubades to anyone who would listen. The aubade then passed out of fashion for a while—sixteenth-century poets preferred to bang on about unrequited love, which meant very little romping at dawn—but the form enjoyed a brief revival in the seventeenth century, with John Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” in which the poet chastises the “busy old fool, unruly Sun” for disturbing two lovers in bed. Now that reciting poetry under someone’s window at 5am is likely to get you arrested, the aubade has lost much of its appeal. Still, the marvellous Mr. Larkin gave it a go; here’s an excerpt from his “Aubade”:

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

A is also for Auden, W. H.

Creative writing teachers love the “poem about a painting” exercise, in which you take your class to an art museum, dump ’em in front of a Jackson Pollock, and then chortle to yourself as they spend the next twenty minutes trying to come up with synonyms for drip. In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden stares hard at Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and shows us how ekphrasis should be done:

IcarusAbout suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

B is for Bly, Robert

I know, I know. Robert Bly. Mr. Iron John. He’s just so… embarrassing. Whenever I hear his name, I picture a gaggle of chubby accountants standing in a circle in a moonlit forest, howling pointlessly at the moon. After a while they grow tired, these lardy, booming babies, so they lie down in the mud and share tales of man-sadness. Now that I no longer kill wildebeests with my bare hands, my life has lost all meaning! Now that my wife has been promoted to Head of Marketing at Zappos, my penis has stopped working! They are sheepish at first, ashamed, but after a while they grow bold. They are men, damn it! They paint their faces with mud and admire one another’s terrifying pubic hair. DUMB. Still, men’s movement nonsense aside, Robert Bly writes some lovely poems. He’s very good at birds and seals and weather. Here’s an excerpt from “August Rain”:

The older we get the more we fail, but the more we fail the more we feel a part of the dead straw of the universe, the corners of barns with cow dung twenty years old, the belt left hanging over the chair back after the bachelor has died in the ambulance on the way to the city. These objects ride us as the child who holds on to the dog’s fur; these objects appear in our dreams; they are more and more near us, coming in slowly from the wainscoting; they make our trunks heavy, accumulating between trips; they lie against the ship’s side, and will nudge the hole open that lets the water in at last.

I recommend Eating the Honey of Words, a collection spanning fifty years of his work. Just ignore the icky title, and skip all poems featuring spirit horses.

Might of Megadeth

Posted on by

This week Adam introduces us to the masterful Megadeth…

MegadeathThere are four different bands that are generally referred to when discussing the origins of thrash/speed metal. This group has been given the nickname “The Big Four.” The four bands consist of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. These bands are responsible for the birth of speed metal, as they were the first of their kind to emerge from the glam rock scene, which had consisted of more radio friendly, pop oriented groups such as Poison, Motley Crue, Cinderella, and Twisted Sister. When the Big Four began releasing their more aggressive, harder sounding style of metal, they gained a tremendous following in the metal underworld, which was growing tired of bands whose members were cross-dressers who would always sing about having sex or being in love. Of the four bands that make up the Big Four, Megadeth was the most prominent.

Megadeth is fronted by guitarist/vocalist Dave Mustaine, who is worshipped and idolized by thousands of heavy metal connoisseurs and admirers. What makes Mustaine such a prolific figure in the birth of thrash metal is that not only is he the front man of Megadeth, but prior to forming Megadeth, Mustaine originally played guitar for Metallica when they were first formed. He was later fired, however, because of his drinking and ongoing reckless acts of unpredictable behavior. Metallica’s front man James Hetfield is quoted in the Megadeth Behind the Scenes documentary saying the following about Dave Mustaine: “We started to all feel that he was on the road to killing possibly all of us.”

When Metallica moved from San Francisco, where they originally formed, to New York, where they were set to record their first album, their first order of business was to get rid of Dave Mustaine. According to Mustaine as well as the members of Metallica, their chosen method of firing him was rather deceitful, if not cruel. The three members of Metallica at the time, James Hetfield (guitar/vocals), Lars Ulrich (drums), and Cliff Burton (bass), woke Mustaine up as he was sleeping on a mattress in the back of their tour van and told him he was fired, without offering any explanation or a second chance for him to change his ways. They then told him they were going to drop him off at the bus terminal where he was to take the four-day ride back to San Francisco by himself. When he returned to the City by the Bay, Dave Mustaine’s first mission was to form another band to get back at his former band mates of Metallica, thereby creating Megadeth.

The first line up for Megadeth consisted of Dave Mustaine on guitar and lead vocals, Chris Poland on lead guitar, David Ellefson on bass, and Gar Samuelson on drums. Mustaine at first only planned on playing guitar for Megadeth, but during auditions for lead singers, it was felt that none of the potential singers could match Dave’s intensity as a front man. It was from there on that Mustaine would become the lead singer as well as guitarist of the newly formed Megadeth.

Megadeth’s first album was entitled Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good. This album immediately grabbed the attention of metal fans, who were more than eager to catch a glimpse of the band fronted by the man who was too maniacal for Metallica. As successful as their first album was, Megadeth would prove themselves as titans of speed metal even more so with their next album, entitled Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? This album consists of legendary metal tracks such as “Wake Up Dead,” “Devil’s Island,” and the title track “Peace Sells.”

“Wake Up Dead” is the opening track to Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? and it instantly kicks off with the intense ferocity and musical attitude that would become Megadeth’s trademark.

Dave Mustaine’s guitar solo at the end of this song is played in the Phrygian Mode, giving it a sound that would be used by many other metal acts that would follow. The song is about a woman named Diana, who Dave Mustaine was cheating on his girlfriend with at the time. In the song, Mustaine sings about coming back from a night on the town with his lover Diana, and his attempt to get back in bed safely without his girlfriend at the time figuring him out. The opening lyrics to this song portray this:

I sneak in my own house
It’s four in the morning
I’ve had too much to drink.
I’ll say I was out with the boys
I creep in my bedroom, and slip into bed
I know if I wake her, I’ll wake up dead

Megadeth has gone on to release twelve more albums since Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?, but Peace Sells would arguably be their most astounding album. Megadeth has been around for over two decades and have still managed to stay together, despite numerous line up changes and the near fatal overdose of Dave Mustaine himself. They continue to this day to stun the metal audience with their musical integrity and extraordinary playing.