the last blowing past

I first heard/got into Vic Chesnutt on an R.E.M. tribute album from the first half of the 1990s. "Surprise Your Pig," it was called, and his contribution was a groovy mashup of "It's the End of the World as we Know it (& I Feel Fine)." Being the dilligent music fan, I did my research and got into his work. He'd been writing songs since childhood, came from a musical family. Played a mean guitar from a young age.

I next really got into Vic's music with his 1998 album, "Is the Actor Happy." Vic wrote a mean lyric & did the most interesting things with the basest chord progressions & the most creative & spare arrangements. His "The Gravity of the Situation," from that album, is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard.

In the '80s, when Vic was 18, he was paralyzed in a car accident. He re-learned the guitar with his now-limited arm/hand movement, which forced his songwriting hand to the simpler. The simpler, you know, is the more tried and true way, at least in the music I like. This past summer, I had a dinner party and a friend of mine, himself a survivor of a tragic car wreck, confided an anecdote about meeting Vic at a show at Schuba's, requesting a song Vic's band didn't know, sharing his own car wreck story ... Vic played him the song, in spite of his sidepeople being out of the loop. Nice guy, I thought. I know it meant a good lot to my friend.

Vic released a great album, "At the Cut," this year. He recorded it & toured in its support with Fugazi's Guy Picciotto and a number of other fine musicians. In the past, he worked with great bands like R.E.M. and Lambchop. He received accolades from *everyone* who matters. In a town like Athens, Ga., where *everybody* plays in several really good bands, that means a hell of a lot.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon an interview with Vic & Mr. Picciotto a week or so back, on NPR. Vic was as intimate as his songs, honestly and humbly discussing his accident, his addictions, his past suicide attempts (there were many). As had been the case as long as I've known the man's music, I kept liking him more the more I heard.

Vic passed today/yesterday, 24 December. He'd overdosed, intentionally, and left a note, instructed the authorities who found him to contact his friend, Kristen Hersh. The first reports were that he was comatose, but soon enough, his death was confirmed.

All that has ever been cool in music or the arts for that matter lost a very, very good one this holiday season.

Things I Learned Reading Hemingway

-- Don’t be impressed by one’s titles, accomplishments, etc (“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that ...”).
-- Don’t live vicariously. Just live.
-- A good man may know his limitations, but that’s no excuse to walk the line as long as you’re honest with yourself and others.
-- Tell it like it is. Don’t sugarcoat it. Don’t go around comparing her to a summer’s day. Save your breath. She knows that’s bullshit. “She was damned good-looking” takes less time and space and says miles beyond any archaic, verbose sonnet.
-- Keep your writing friends separate from your tennis friends.
-- When in doubt, best to trust balls and grace. My late friend, Carl, put it that way once, but he was paraphrasing Hemingway.
-- Your art/craft above all else. When cash-strapped, buy books, not clothes. Gertrude Stein’s edict, adopted by EH.
-- At the end of the day, when it comes to you, it’s your way or the highway, and stay the hell away from mental health professionals.

Pleased to Meet Me

i.


he sits
translates Rimbaud
cheap desk from Ikea
a dark studio by the lake
he sits

egged on by Spanish red
a semester of French in college
seduced by his TA to guarantee

an easy B, resorts
to search engines to assist
w/the trickier parts, but is surprised

bemused (Breathless)
what he’s retained
perhaps from subtitles
in films from Jeunet & Godard
Breathless (bemused)

I is
the other is not

the author & does
protocol for
meeting oneself

exist
only in dreams
unrequited maybes
riff away on Walter Mitty
exist

Breathless
to the author’s
Masculin Feminine
-cigarettes & idealized selves
breathless






ii.


born
in a barn

on the S. side
of a steeltown

way of thinking
takes to drinking

like his daddy
(his daddy . . .



His old man’s Charger is all stale smoke & sticky old beer. The old man perspires Miller. Exhales Chesterfields. They see each other weekends since the divorce. Stay up late to watch Hee Haw and Benny Hill. As a man the child stays in most weekends. Never marries. Comes to associate sweaty beer aromas with country and western from the ‘70s. Acquires an affinity for tight-clothed redheads with curves. Southern accents. Lowbrow humour. Waylon. Willie. )






iii.



Ridge of his N. Mediterranean
nose the airs put on to his toes tapping
lines into stanza those Bohemian
shades so as not to catch his self napping
the newly-formed crows’ feet & blood-shot eyes
keep the sun away the critics at bay
nobody knows his poker show the yes
he promises & blindly looks away
tweaked on LSD he loses his mind
on too much Nietsche in college a fraud
in Chuck Taylors in the Bowling Green wind
& recalls reading something from Rimbaud:
if you see yourself coming cross the street
anyone else would be better to meet













iv.



I has Johnson’s Love in Vain
I meets ladies on Amtrak, paints

w/his cock in the rain & writes ghazals
to loves lost on trains easy as I finds it & improvs

Sonatas to weather patterns, rhapsodizes galaxies, jungles &
stillframes, all the while

I is me is
sane

is an artist
feels pain is
homeless, orphaned tumbleweeds
on greasemonkey summer pavement joneses

for James Brown loud on headphones is
I’s opiate throat-rush enough &

dirty-fingered & minge-mouthed
Heartbreak Hotel & Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak

unafraid to sleep alone, I whinges
anyway, at the thought of it, but I

is alright
won’t complain
gets tight & recalls something
his old man used to say: even the best
wine stains.

pleased to meet me, before the clustered corpse

so, on Sunday, at high-noon, I'll be reading with some friends at the Bucktown Arts Festival. It's a collective piece ... basically we each were given the prompt: what happens when you meet yourself? and then we each pieced together our own lines on the idea and then Mr. Barton cut and pasted lines from each of our pieces into a finished corpse. It's pretty cool to see that process unfold, and should be a good time throwing it all together at Holstein's Park in a few days ...

Things to do around Hyde's Park

1. Grow a beard.
2. Build a bar in my bedroom.
3. Go bowling across the street.
4. Chill w/Clarence Darrow's ghost in Jackson's Park.
5. Shave my beard.
6. That silver-haired, Harry Morgan-looking regular at Jimmy's who always gets 4 or 5 burgers for takeout ... yeah, that guy ... get all the regulars to start calling him "Hamburger Joe."
7. Grow a beard.

some emails from 4 years ago

Scott DeKatch to Kristy
18/06/2005

did you pay CJ $20 to appear in this? he emailed me that the $20 would be mandatory this year.
Reply Forward
----------------------------
Kristy Bowen: Seriously? WTF?...
I emailed him back the day he sent out the call and said I was in, but nothing about paying the $20....I was going to anyway, just to support the thing, but if that's the case.
-------------------------------
From : C. J. Laity
Sent : Saturday, June 18, 2005 9:38 AM
To : Scott DeKatch
Subject : RE: ATTENTION: 2005 CHICAGO POETRY FEST BOOKING
Hi Scott. In order so that I don't lose my shirt again this year on the fest the $20 anthology donation is required of all poets who want to participate. I'll put your name down on the pending list. Send me a poem w/ the donation asap as the slots are disappearing fast. --cj

=============================================
Kristy Bowen:
oh boy, this is going to be ugly.... I just sent an e-mail to CJ withdrawing my participation. It's just so WRONG. I was more than willing to cough up the 20 bucks, but the whole pay to play thing is a little slimey....at least for a reading. What we'll end up with is a whole bunch of poets who payed the 20, not because they are good and were chosen for the fest based on that, but because they paid.
I’m seriously hoping he'll just quietly take me out of the line-up. Either that or there'll be an entire juvenile article on the website trashing me in a couple days. Hopefully, outside of attacking my mother or something, he doesn't have anything on me..
And I can't be the only one who's told him where to go..

Kristy Bowen to me

Fuck, here we go....Here was the response I got...we may BOTH be in for the wrath...

****************************************************************

Kristy,

Please share this letter with whoever is concerned.

Your letter simply makes me sad.

I think of the fest more as joint venture among the poets. If we all chip in the $20 we can buy some advertising and cover the expenses of something this major. It is not fair that some poets chip in, and others don't, when all the poets take advantage of the fest.
The use of the word "required" or the _expression "lose my shirt" was only sent in one email to one poet, Scott DeKatch, so I'm assuming that this email was somehow shared with you and possibly with others. I am utterly disappointed that Scott did that. I have done nothing but support Scott DeKatch and his work, so for him to make a big deal out of a lousy $20 is to me, well, pretty damn icky.
I also feel rather let down that you will not appear out of protest. In order to make the fest a success I'm asking the poets to chip in this one time. So far nobody else has complained. You consider this "pay to play" but I think that is a rather unfair accusation that you are making. I do more "free" work than anybody in the poetry community. I did not get paid for my work with the Printers Row Book Fair. I do not get paid for all my work with ChicagoPoetry.com. I am constantly promoting other people's shows and books. Many times others make money off of my work, but I don't. That you or others have decided to make a big deal this one time that I am forced to seek funding from the participants, is again, extremely disappointing.

***********************************************************************
Kristy Bowen:
He claims that no one else has a problem, and yet, I recall another e-mail asking (practically begging) for features that went out a few days after the initial one..perhaps the glut of people he was expecting wasn't quite as large as he initially assumed....and why would it be, who pays to read for gods' sake?

dogging neruda

I did a reading, I think back in December, maybe on my birthday. Read an older piece of mine. At the end, Chris says, "are you *really* comparing Pablo Neruda to Rod McKuen???"

"No," I say. "The speaker in the poem is doing the comparing."

"But, really ... the speaker was calling them both 'hallmark hacks.' Do you really *mean* that?"

I've read Neruda, I told him. In spanish, even, and my spanish is pretty decent ... however you slice it ... it may be great and heartfelt and magical and musical, but there's still a hallmark thing happening ...

anywhooo, I had a reading a few weeks back ... I was pretty stoked for it, because I knew I'd have some long-lost friends hanging at it, a few of whom are big Nerudites ... so, i took a well-travelled Neruda piece & did my own translation, direct from the spanish text (keep in mind -- there is no spanish equivalent of words like "to do," and that it contains untranslatable idioms). Not tooting my horn, just stating it, and it follows:


-------------------------



I Can Write the Saddest Lines Tonight
by Pablo Neruda
trans. S. E. D.



I can write the saddest lines tonight
cld write the night is starry
the stars, afar, shiver blue

the wind of the sky in the night sings, circles
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, Jack, &, sometimes, she loved me, too.

on nights like this I’d hold her in my arms
kiss her countless times beneath the endless sky
she loved me, Jack. I loved her, too, at times

how not to love those big, still eyes
I can write the saddest lines tonight,
to think I don’t have her. I lost her.

to hear the vast night, greater than she
verse falls to soul, is dew to pasture
what matters my love can’t keep her

the night is starry & she’s gone
far off, somebody is singing, far off
my soul is sad from losing

closer to the vest
my heart looks for her -- she’s gone
the same night whitens the same trees

we no longer are the same
I no longer love her, but how I did
my voice searched for the wind to touch her ear

& now, kisses from another, as before from me
her voice, her body clear, their eyes endless
I don’t love her, that’s true, but maybe I do

so short, love, & forgetting so long
b/c on nights like this I’d hold her in my arms
my soul is sad from losing,

even though this is my final pain
& these are the last lines I’ll write
I can write the saddest lines of all tonight.