diggers digging, fingers typing, pages turning, noun verb, etc.

by sarah marine


I'm sitting in my library contemplating silence whilst diggers and dumptrucks do their thing in the parking lot next door. Ah, construction. It makes for a very unfriendly reading environment. Therefore, you get a blogpost about what I'm thinking, which is quite lucky- because I know it's what you live for.

The past couple days have been those lovely Wisconsin ones involving the harshest transition from 80 degree days to 50 degree days. Thankfully, I LOVE WINTER...and, thankfully, nothing says winter like Ander Monson. However with the season still much too far away from warranting Other Electricities, I picked up assorted fire events by David Means. It is the perfect foreword to its Monson Michigan companion (who I guess is teaching in Arizona now, which boggles the mind).



Means' description: "the wet mulch stench of the forest floor and the vast emptiness that the Upper Peninsula offers, that stony wilderness scratching the back of the of the greatest freshwater body in the world, a lake deep enough to swallow whole freighters..." geez. Why anyone would want to live anywhere but the glorious midwest is beyond me. It's beyond.

If I could have dinner with any five writers, living or dead, writers whose conversations could veer from the personality of freight trains, to various sounds of walking on snow, to the year-round cold of the Great Lakes it would be these:


1. Richard Hugo
2. David Means
3. Ander Monson
4. John Ashbery
5. Mike Balisle
*6. Bayard Godsave, of course.

Together with Ashbery's April Galleons and Frank Miller's Daredevil series, I have been very very pleased with current literary companions. Thinking about the future, cant wait for new Sarah Vowell and Chris Ware! Have also been obsessively checking iPage and IBID and everywhere for The Art of Recklessness, which is supposedly a prose collection by Dean Young that was scheduled to come out this year- I mean, literally mentioned in the same breath as Primitive Mentor(January 2008).

PS. IF YOU HAVENT REGISTERED TO VOTE OR NEED TO CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS OR DESIRE ANY KINDS OF INFORMATION REGARDING THE ACT AND ART OF VOTING, THE OBAMA-LAMAS HAVE MOVED IN NEXT DOOR THE DOWNER SCHWARTZ LOCATION!

At long last... Podcast!

After two-and-a-half years of stumbling through the wilderness, The Inside Flap brings you our first podcast.

And what better way to kick it off then with the Mighty Downer Poetry Night from 13 April 2006, featuring the brilliant and talented poems of Josh Bell, Matt Cook and Erik Beck.

Enjoy.

To get constant updates:

 Subscribe to our Podcast of readings, interviews and reviews

And excuse me in advance if this gets messy...

A Special Level of Obsessed: Ochester, Watt, Young

by Sarah Marine

Bayard and I took two book trips this weekend.
The first was to the secondhand behemoth, Renaissance Books. The second was to Half-Price Books.


Rummaging through a box of zines at Renaissance, which if you don’t do, you should.
I mean, zine box? Never heard of it or seen it or actually someone told me it’s a box full of baby alligators and anyone reaching into this mythical box will get their hand eaten off!

So anyway, was having this DREAM that I was going through this box and a particular chapbook jumped out at me. We Like It Here, poetry (Madison: Quixote Press, 1967) by Ed Ochester. Immediately I yell, "Bayard!"(yelling is allowed). He is, of course, in comic book land downstairs and instead a surly “employee” walks by. I’m not sure if they have employees or just bibliophile volunteers content to hang out among the dusty volumes. I sit on the floor, back against the shelf, "Who is Ed Ochester? Who is he? Hmmm…" I decide to buy it. The name is so familiar. In the end, I purchase the chapbook, a hardcover collection of modern poetry entitled 'some haystacks don’t even have any needle'- the cover is amazing, just series of hand-drawn lines covering the entire surface. Also bought a child's guide to mapping.




Later that day I went to work at the best bookshop in Milwaukee, Harry W. Schwartz on Downer, and google this Ed Ochester fella. Turns out that since 1979 he has served as general editor of the Pitt Poetry Series. If you don’t know, Dean Young has been published numerous times by Pitt including Skid and elegy on toy piano. Dean Young is the most prolific poet writing today. You should come to Schwartz on Downer and I will tell you in person how reading a poem by Dean Young is like standing inside one of your own red blood corpuscules, sitting on a pillow of hemoglobin, which is quite comfy and you imagine that the cell was designed by some Pangean filmmaker and all the controls are labeled with sharp foreign symbols and you’re looking out into your dark sea of blood and there are rainbow trout and license plates from Nebraska floating around and you forget that you are fantastically standing inside your own blood cell and instead you wonder “Why Nebraska?” you’ve never been to Nebraska, so you at that very moment decide that it’s high time you made your way to Nebraska. Forgive me if any parallel to that is unimaginable, you’ll just have to read something by the man.

The Ed Ochester includes a bizarre ode to Bob Watt. Bob Watt is a Milwaukee mainstay often seen cruising down the North Avenue Street bridge in his Folk Art Institute station wagon, the vehicle itself adorned with a variety of fake flowers, the horns of a bull and mannequin heads. Bob Watt is a poet/artist. It is widely rumored that back in the day he had public altercations with the likes of Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg.

It's April. Read some Dean Young!

by Sarah Marine

It is National Poetry Month. It is! Therefore, I will take this blog opportunity to express my deep gratiitude for the writings of Dean Young, Gertrude Stein, Richard Brautigan and Anne Sexton. I couldn't go a day without them.

I am currently mulling over an extended entry concerning Jenny Erpenbeck and Fleur Jaeggy. Soon, soon.

Also, if you're not listening to The National and Bon Iver...you should. really.

Drowning in Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley: Selected Poems, 1945-2005
edited by Benjamin Friedlander
$21.95, University of California Press

I continue to describe my discovery of the poet Robert Creeley as "drowning". I feel entirely sucked under the weight of his words, despite their simplicity and sameness. A number of his poems stand out for me for reasons having more to do with initial gut reactions than to anything I may or may not know about poetry.

He writes...

of the transience of subtle experiences in Things to Do in Tokyo

Begin at the beginning,
find the end.
Remember everything

forget it. Go on,
and on. Find ecstasy,
forget it.

of longing in A Form of Women

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

of enduring love in The Act of Love

How dear
you are

to me, how love-
ly all your body is, how

all these
senses do
commingle, so

that in your very
arms I still
can think of you.

And of old age, and impending death in Old Song

I'm feeling ok still in some small way.
I've come too far to just go away.
I wish I could stay here some way.

So that what now comes wouldn't only be more
of what's to be lost. What's left would still leave more
to come if one didn't rush to get there.

Then we have the poem which should be every writer's prayer: End

End of page,
end of this

company -- wee
notebook kept

my mind in hand,
let the world stay

open to me
day after day,

words to say,
things to be.

The number of shining, beautiful poems in this insightful collection is to great to share them all with you here. This is only a taste. Pick it up. Read straight through to experience Creeley's changing perspectives on life, love, loss and eventual aging and death. It is a timeline of a soul that will not leave yours unaffected.

The e-book VS. Christine Schutt

The new year has thrust me ever so abruptly into that intangible chasm of mystery and ephemera feared most by bibliophiles/booksellers. This chasm is the e-book.

Some background info: as a left-handed, lit-obsessed liberal I have naturally never excelled much in the area of mathematics. Not to say that it isn’t possible for a person with those traits to overcome the anxiety induced by numbers, I’m reaching for something to excuse my inherent disdain for the subject. In fact, even when stumbling upon a signed first edition hardcover of Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own, a novel which features a mathematician protagonist, I couldn’t get past page twenty. Purchasing it was natural because I’m a book squirrel, tucking those treasures away in little stores around the house. Read it, however? Nope. It’s about math.

So, anyway, I digress. I am enrolled in a Statistics of Africology course. I chose the course over others because although it is stats. I hoped to perhaps broaden my Africology course base, which is already solid in foundation. But, in the end it’s really just a statistics course. Even worse, the class required the purchase of an e-book. The e-book is by far the most inconvenient , ineffective learning tool I have ever encountered. I went to the doctor to get my eyes tested for glasses the other day, 75 dollars out of pocket and what did I leave the shop with? Nothing on paper, I assure you. No prescription. Just the advice that I should “spend less time on the computer”. Leads me to wonder, will I be in any position to sue the university if in ten years I am blind from reading hundreds of pages of statistics jargon in my last year as an undergrad? Also, unlike a regular textbook the student doesn’t have the option of recouping any of the excessive funds used to purchase the book. Instead, the “subscription” runs out after a certain amount of time. Thus my relationship with the e-book is doomed. I mean, why get attached to something that will just end up leaving you anyway. My professor might buy that defense.


In closing , I am involved with a couple REAL books right now. You know how I do.
They are:



Our Aperture- The new chapbook from Ander Monson, available only online from New Michigan Press. This slight work requires a few reads, as it works a lot to challenge your notions of memory, cyclical narrative and the manipulations of language and meaning.






All Souls- The forthcoming novel from Christine Schutt. I received this upon request after Bayard Godsave introduced me to her work through A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer, which blew me away. I have to admit that I will judge a book by its cover and All Souls really scared me upon first glance, for a second I thought, “Oh God, they’ve gotten to her.” But, upon reading, I can’t imagine Schutt could to turn out anything less than extraordinary.

Reading Christine Schutt is like entering a grand old mansion. A mansion built by some over-zealous speculator in early 20th century North Dakota, abandoned shortly after. Each sentence is a room in that house. You can just feel the potential energy. You look out the window, open and close the window, place your hat in the closet, take it out. You turn the light on and off. You take in the storied colors and smells. You know that this room is desperate for purpose and you feel comforted knowing that just standing there is fulfilling the wish and you start running from room to room until before you know it you’re out the front door again, outside marveling at this grand old mansion.


Verdict: e-books, bad. REAL books, best ever.

New Downer Avenue Kids' Section!

This selection of superb children’s titles, make up the breadth of my holiday kids recommendation list. They vary from hardcover picture books to intermediate, contemporary and classic. Mostly what they have in common is an indelible charm defined by quaint, universal narrative and extraordinary illustrations tailored to the specific texts. In this age of toddler marketing strategies, DVD parenting and extremely aggressive brand promotions, these books are standouts as prime examples of what should be at the center of story-telling for children- BOOKS.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo is shelved in the intermediate section of the children’s area, but is really very appropriate for children and adults of all ages. It tells the story of the porcelain rabbit, Edward Tulane. He begins a very vain little toy and ends up separated from his owner, proceeds on a very Homeric journey from a boxcar to the bottom of the ocean into a seaside village and eventually a home, generations later.

Toys Go Out: Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, a Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic, is also intermediate reading, but all-ages appropriate. The chapters are interconnected but tell separate stories about the adventures these charming little toys have when humans leave the house. One story is called “The Terrifying Bigness of the Washing Machine”- it’s awesome. This was also published in 2006 and was written by Emily Jenkins.

Pennies In a Jar by Dori Chaconas (Author) and Ted Lewin (Illustrator) tells the story of a young boy who promises to be brave when his father goes off to fight in World War II. The child lives in a world of air raid sirens and general wartime conditions. He, of course, meets a new friend who shows him that there are things to do for his father, even though he is so far away. Overall, this is great historical fiction for little people. Lewin provides great Rockwellian illustrations, very innocent. Chaconas is also a local Wisconsin author!

Crossing by Phillip Booth and When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer are also in this same classic narrative vein. An old-time steam engine rumbles past in Booth’s 1957 poem “Crossing” from his debut collection Letters from a Distant Land. The nostalgic illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline (also, illustrator for Edward Tulane) invoke a longing for the simple act of waiting at the railroad crossing, the rattling boxcars.

Walt Whitman lends his poetry to When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. Booklist offers a great synopsis: “Long's story-in-images makes a fine introduction for very young children. His interpretation of Whitman's eight-line rebuke of stuffy pragmatism tells a familiar story: A little boy obsessed with outer space has been dragged to an astronomy lecture. Unable to make sense of the speaker's pontifications, the fidgety youngster takes his toy rocket ship outside, where he marvels at the "perfect silence of the stars, casting a decisive vote for creative speculation over chilly analysis." I love this book so much, how rare to find a perfect adaptation of Whitman to add to a child’s important budding library.

The young boy in Wilfred Gordon Mcdonald Partridge spends his days in the retirement home next to his house. The relationships he forms with these wonderfully patient and wise elders are so darling. He is drawn on a skateboard mostly, weaving around the chairs. Wilfred’s favorite is Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who also has four names. Upon learning that she is losing her memory, Wilfred makes it his goal to give Miss Nancy enough of his own memories to take the place of what she has lost.

Finally, what I am most excited about this holiday season is the 10th-anniversary edition of Patricia Polacco's The Keeping Quilt, Polacco’s family story about a quilt made from an immigrant Jewish family's clothing from their Russian homeland. The story is very cyclical, chronicling the cross generational journey and multiple functions of this “keeping quilt.” The only color used is in the babushka and dress of Great-Gramma Anna, which become part of a brightly hued quilt. I love to quilt and recognize the importance of preserving one’s heritage through shared heirlooms. This book is beautiful.

Bonesteel. Then Ander Monson.

In preparation for my annual rendezvous with Ander Monson’s devastating work on the upper Midwest, the stark narratives investigating the smell of static that penetrates all winter outerwear, the line of communication labeled, Other Electriticites,

I have been gathering into myself the works of Richard Hugo and Mike Balisle. You may reply, “Oh, Richard Hugo, yeah, we know Richard Hugo- but, who’s that Mike Balisle?”


Well, curious reader, let me tell you, Mike Balisle penned a collection in 1977, entitled Bonesteel. It is self-published, held together by staples and yellowed by years. I found it in a box at the Renaissance Bookshop in downtown Milwaukee. The fiction at Renaissance is, for the most part, well picked over by Marquette bibliophiles, but the other sections, especially the children’s, are overflowing with yet to be discovered phenomena. So, anyway, I have been carrying this slight volume- Bonesteel- around for about two weeks, taking out and reciting any of the hundreds of amazing prose to whomever happens to be standing the closest- most often boyfriend type person. I have looked online and found nothing on the author or the collection.


"With Unknown Fever"
at that time the holy men of the upper Midwest would strip naked under the
northern lights and fight like angry blacksmiths until caving in gloriously

I imagine Mike Balisle as some silent small-town Midwestern boy, eating lunch at eleven and dinner at five like clockwork, plowing driveways or working construction, this book a brief foray into creativity. He was probably just some fashion vagabond, tramping around the country on trains or flatbed trucks, only to return to place of birth and ultimately become the aforementioned small-town personality. Or maybe he’s in some D.C. think tank or perhaps he lives down the street from me, muttering daily about the price of gasoline.


"The White Axes of Winter"
years inside a blizzard we awaken
to the questioning of the fact
that last night pale children were stalked
by images of ice

this morning it is seen
the white axes of winter whirled until all
oaths and prayers were split from our faces

there we fell
the cold hills
drifting our shoulders


Dear Mike Balisle,

You’re making it difficult for me to move beyond:

I will forget my sadness
and run with lengthening legs
to the tavern in junction city
where anna in her wheelchair
presents me with a grain belt
and
“the soul lives on----don’t you know that yet?”

I mean, this kind of language compounded with the new Weakerthans album (Night Windows may be the most satisfying devastation track of the year), is prohibiting me from doing anything but obsessively consuming them exclusively.

In conclusion, Mike Balisle, I appreciate your work, and hope that somewhere along the line, someone, someone not on an obscure book blog in 2007, someone you knew in the thirty years between Bonesteel and now, was smart enough to tell you that in person.

Dean Young, wine, Bob Dylan, rain

I would like to highlight the importance of a glass of good cheap red wine, The Free Wheelin Bob Dylan on vinyl and Dean Young’s Skid and Elegy on Toy Piano at my side. I would like to describe the rain pouring outside onto the Wisconsin landscape, like sheets drowning my garden vegetables- in the words of Richard Brautigan “programming flowers and keeping snails happy”. These are the framework into which this particular blog entry must be plugged into.

I discovered Dean Young in McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets.

I would have liked to include Brandon Som in this but alas all I could find was what is printed in the McSweeney’s collection. Mr. Young has succeeded in pleasing the poetic palate of me, an obsessed media studies student, a viciously loyal Anne Sexton, Brautigan and Adrienne Rich reader. I have little insight into what someone familiar with these aforementioned works might guess Young’s work is reminiscent of- all I know is that it achieves a perfect balance of popular culture references, sincere emotional observations and scathing well-timed wit. The essence of his work is one that craves a certain level of sentimentality framed by grand inflection on the influences of his insight and abstract natural reflections. I could present Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Craig Finn’s songwriting on The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday as prime musical parallels; and if you haven’t heard The Hold Steady, you must, it is real literary rock’n’roll energy.

from ‘Knuckles’ off The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me:

i've been trying to get people to call me freddy knuckles.
people keep calling me right said fred.
it's hard to keep trying when half your friends are dying.
it's hard to hold steady when half your friends are dead already.
taxmen coming around the back with the kevlar vests.
militia men cooking up a batch of crystal meth.
there's a war going down in the middle west.
there's a war going down in the middle western states.
the kevlar vests against the crystal flakes.


Dean Young, however, achieves a music all his own- not with banjoes or guitar, but with prose, with commas and line breaks. What’s important to me, what really makes me lose my mind is the story-telling. I want stories- need them.

(I can’t listen to ‘Girl From the North Country’ enough)

from the poem Fire is Speaking by Dean Young:

Fire is speaking again,
Everything belongs to me.
A bird flies over- not even a challenge.
A handkerchief, a window, a war.
A little girl helped up the steps into a train.
Two crazy winos arguing about the formation of the universe,
one says, Time folding, the other, You’re not listening.
A valentine out of paper doilies with blunt scissors.
It’s almost eighty years ago,
the tree wants to tell how far it’s come,
the mountain how fast it can run,
the past in the form of a locomotive
knows it must switch from coal to electricity
to ever catch up.

Perhaps I’ve spent too many nights in trainyards smelling aerosol paint or maybe I just really love wine but what’s above is so very handsome.