heart candy.

In preparation for the endless holiday season, New York’s Overlook Press has sent over a copy of Jerry Williams, Ph.D’s newly-released must-buy contemporary break-up poetry playlist:  It’s Not You, It’s Me.  Culled from poems that have consoled him through various states of distraught over the sharper edges of monogamous love, Williams and Overlook have created an anthology certain to provide comfort to purchasers of niche-collections everywhere.  Friend dumped?  Dumped yourself?  Dumping someone and don’t know how to say it in your own words?—

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Does it matter to you who's behind the pen?

I spent a lot of time on the couch and in front of the TV this past week and not because I’m unemployed (as was the case not so long ago).  A week into being a happy working person again, I catch some mystery thing that “could be meningitis, could be the swine flu, or maybe pneumonia” (thanks, Doc – lots of help).  As I struggled to recover what turned out to be one major asskicker of a flu, my stiff neck always managed to keep the remote just out of reach and I caught a helluva lot of commercials.  Now, it’s been some time since I’ve viewed TV commercials in their natural form (despite my love for the ad world) – like most, I only ever see them because I had to catch something on Hulu or needed to YouTube an ad that was actually hilarious and needed to be watched again.

It’s not a secret or even a great observation to say that advertisers and marketers have borrowed from the art industry.  Billboards, print ads, et cetera – that’s photography and graphic arts – things we can easily still call art in its most commercial form.  Jingles are (let’s not forget) the work of a composer and maybe even a lyricist.  And what about the snazzy slogans and zingy one-liners? Writing good copy takes a true talent with words – encompassing a product or service’s purpose and core in a single sentence is not an easy task.

So if advertising has already “taken” photography and fine arts from the art industry, is it that strange that poetry would one day find itself lurking in the ad world’s dark, dirty cells? Read more »

You don’t have to look too hard to find free fiction online these days, which is great, but it is slightly harder to find free contemporary fiction actually worth reading. So in the spirit of the holidays, here are 12 sources (because 12 seems to be the magic holiday number) for free, quality lit:

1. Featherproof Books‘ free mini-books are stories meant to be downloaded, printed out, and put together origami-style at home. Featherproof offers short stories as well as excerpts from larger works such as Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Amelia Gray’s AM/PM.

2. BlazeVOX is a free online journal of innovative fiction and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. They also offer a catalog of “weird little ebooks,” also available for free.

3. Jillian Ciaccia, a.k.a. thefictionist, offers four volumes of inventive and also slightly trippy short stories–entitled absurdities, peculiarities, Monstrosities, and Curiosities–as either a downloadable PDF or a paperback, signed by thefictionist and bound by hand. Both options are free of charge.

4. Read more »

I examine his square face.  He stands with a single arm outstretched, reaching out for something ever-changing.  With his vacant eyes and through gritted teeth he inquires, “Meep?”

I am of course talking about The Lit Drift Robot who resides about a third of the way down our home page.  If you’re a regular reader, you know that Robot just wants to learn how to love.  “Meep?” he calls!  “Meep?” he asks.  “Meep?” he pleads.  Though the word is unfamiliar to me, judging from his body language and the context of his statement, I can only assume meep to mean “Will you teach me? Will you take me under your wing? Is there hope for me?”

Rather than assume that I interpreted Robot’s statement correctly, I looked up the word meep online.  According to Urban Dictionary, meep is a word of many meanings ranging from “an exclamation akin to ‘ouch’ or ‘uh oh’” to an exclamation that “can be used for any purpose whatsoever” or “sums up everything.”  Its origins are believed to be of The Muppet Show’s Beaker.

Though a versatile word indeed, meep is not as commonly used as… let’s say, blurgh. Unlike the more flexible meep, blurgh has a negative connotation and is often used to express frustration or disdain.  There is no real instance in which you can use the word in a positive manner.  What’s craziest is that when you hear the word blurgh, there’s almost no question as to what it means.  It’s not even really necessary to be a fan of 30 Rock to have a full understanding of its definition and application.

How is it that made-up words are sometimes so much more expressive than the real ones? Read more »

I have a special fondness in my heart for bad poetry. Partly because I’m a terrible poet myself so I can’t help but identify with fellow terrible poets. And also partly because, as I’ve discussed before, I think there’s a lot to be gained by disregarding the rules of “good” writing–how else are you supposed to further your craft if you’re not willing to take risks?

So in the spirit of taking risks, and of totally missing the mark, there’s Very Bad Poetry, an online journal featuring such gems as these: Read more »

Poetry is sort of a curious object for me. I enjoy reading poems. I love spoken word poetry, though I know it’s not for everyone. I love how poetry is about the joy of language, the purity of expression, etc. But I have an utter inability to write it. And often when I’m reading a poem I feel like I’m being confronted with some cryptogram that needs to be decoded, which is fun, sometimes, and then again sometimes not. It can begin to feel more like a math problem than a poem. And feeding my complex still: rarely do I feel so inspired to write fiction as when I am reading a poem.

Am I the only one that feels that way? That is: confused?

Anyway, in light of these thoughts, I thought I’d share some of my favorite poems. Read more »

Ever fall in love with someone and then find out that they’re kind of an ass? Yeah…me too. The first Rilke that ever crossed my hands was Letters to a Young Poet, and I still remember the effect it had on me. I felt as if I had found my soul mate….if he had been in the room (and alive) I would have jumped him on the spot. There is a vibrant grace and poignant longing in every bit of Rilke I have read, and the first elegy of his Duino Elegies has the power to hit some g-spot deep in my heart and bring me to tears. So finding out that he was actually kind of a whiney, narcissistic brat was analogous to finding out as a kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.

According to Robert Vilain, the Rilke I’m having an affair with in my head is NOT in fact the same Rilke who inhabited this planet. Real Rilke was “vain, self-pitying, obsessive, narcissistic, snobbish, whining, arrogant, childish, demanding, lachrymose and neurotic, as well as being given to tantrums and panics.” However, apparently my g-spot is not the only one he has been able to hit; even though he was a bit of an ass, Rilke was also “magnetically attractive to a series of women.” 

So what does it mean when you fall in love with someone who isn’t a very nice person? And should you try to separate the artist from the art? And why doesn’t Rilke ever return my phone calls?! Read more »

A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man: Read more »

Because lines like “unicorn believers don’t declare fatwas” and “King Hussein and President Fabio, always just about to touch each other on their devolved sparkle-offs and Neil Patrick Harris appreciation pages” oddly inspire me, and because it’s Monday, I can’t think of a better way to start the week than some flarf, with some shitty illustrations drawn by me. “A” for effort?

Flarf, by the way, is not a silly word I made up (though I wish it was). It’s a controversial new avant-garde poetry movement, and I say “controversial” for two reasons: first, flarf is inspired by results from Google searches, like “grandmother’s explosive diarrhea” or “annoying diabetic bitch.” And second, because flarf started as a joke. Poet Gary Sullivan was intrigued by vanity presses, which were notorious for unfailingly praising your “exemplary” work and then accepting your poetry (and more importantly, your money) for publication. Sullivan wanted to see if they would still accept a poem that was really bad. Mind-numbingly, shockingly, irrefutably bad. So Sullivan wrote one. To get an idea of how godawful it was, here are the opening lines:

Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my “huppa”-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah

The poem was accepted. Sullivan subsequently dubbed his new style of poetry “flarf,” sent it to all his friends, and a movement was born. And like all movements, it evolved from something really bad into something subversive and actually quite good. Good, that is, as long as you’re not looking for pretty lines and stanzas that seem to be plucked from the very heavens. Because pretty, flarf ain’t. It’s wacky, and weird, and kinda funny-looking. But then again, that’s why I like it so much. It’s a refreshing break in an industry cluttered poems that are overly complex or sentimental. And like all avant-garde, I think it’s healthy to push at the boundaries of what you think is “poetry,” or “writing,” or “storytelling.” Even if your work is (relatively) conventional, pushing at the boundaries helps you to better understand what’s inside them.

So without further ado, here’s some flarf. With illustrations. Read more »

Check out IsReads, a biannual outdoor poetry journal that enlists volunteers to publish each “issue” by plastering the poems, printed on sturdy white paper, all over Baltimore, Maryland. IsReads favors experimental, playful prose–which probably reads either like it was written by an insane person to the people who don’t get poetry, or a tasty little morsel to the people who do. Anyone can submit poems via e-mail for consideration, and anyone can help publish the journal. Just contact the editors, and they’ll send back instructions and a PDF of the journal’s contents.

The journal’s emphasis on making poetry more accessible to the public has been hailed as something of a revolutionizing force for the languishing industry, but founder Adam Robinson has remained fairly modest. He says: “I don’t expect that by doing this I’m going to change anybody’s life. But for the ten seconds people stand in front of it, I hope they just kind of wonder about poetry again.”

Photos and poems after the jump.  Read more »