Posted on: September 18, 2011
Bang on the Chasm
by Robert Mueller
I am wondering about new jazz and new art music, and separating them entirely for the convenience of entertaining these thoughts. I am thinking about consorting with a difference even though what I have to say about one has to be true of the other (again assuming for the purpose that they are separate). Specifically as a matter of degree I want to distinguish new jazz as a living production that arrives currently, spontaneously in the club or spontaneously also at a jam session or recording session, from the same scenario for new art music, which comes to us as a product, or object, that, when it arrives, may arrive in a public performance, but not currently. Rather, there is a delay, for reflection to take place, and even if it were to take place in the few moments after the performance has ended (that is, right then and there), it nevertheless arrives in the mode of delay.…
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Posted on: June 23, 2011
Review of
Alan Gilbert, Late in the Antenna Fields
by Robert Mueller
The writing in Alan Gilbert’s volume of poetry, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011), feasts on sarcasm and dispirited bitterness, not to mention a certain snagging anomie. Putting it better or worse, the reader might think to assimilate it to some kind of art adhesion. One is led, or profited, to hear, and to sense and to pick at, a general vaguely petulant and vaguely disinterested and yet persistent patter of ambient petrified displeasure. There is thus less of a danger than a foregone captation in this approach, inherently. So far so good if it sticks; so far so good so long as it educates even, guides, charts and winnows. But when notes of whining and griping swirl in, as they sometimes do, the reader may well wish to give pause.…
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Posted on: June 20, 2011
wanderlust
The sand would scrape itself
I heard it whisper
as i breached the whitewashed torrent
with my chest
emerging forth everclear and green
drench-dripping in the first
positive moment
hungry for the textures
of earth and flesh
the mortal opacity.
I carved a monument, an easel.
Then portrayed a pastoral.
I will try to find you there again
around and behind every root and knoll
into the craters of every erosion and explosion
straining
the furthest inherent peripherals.
The wind separates my limbs, it tousles
the hair of the soldiering trees
I lie on my back and shape cloudshapes
around your name
I lie here barren in your memory.
Spinning under the moon, hand in hand
with the animals
into the torn lace outskirts of evenings
the blue the pale the pagan
suckling an entirely different oxygen
and I saw you there
your arms flung open
the mouth of churches
spilling light.…
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Posted on: June 20, 2011
newspaper hats before we could read them
pirate ships were easier to build when
digging our way to China salvaging
larvae for insane hatchlings in our heads
our hair cropped for summer like the thorn hedge
chest-naked Pan-like young demiurgers
craving malteds and double cheeseburgers
we were the ones to win the nymphs of creeks
with slingshots and water-guns we’d lay siege
Spiderman’s webs spun tall tales by midgets
treehouses, tall Coke machines, vacant lots
all the buddies I never had now here
my mind the unlikely phởtographer
on bikes, skateboards, barefoot on hot asphalt
the peachfuzz of Spring in our hubris caught
nudie Mags found in pinestraw pile, my first
full glimpse at a woman’s form a new thirst
and I standing between two pines arms spread
into kudzu vines where skein becomes aged
where peripherals are blurred, birds flurry
a boy’s mind can like a squirrel scurry
the forests of my youth don’t look the same
sentry-like, teeming with too many names
in the creek-beds now there is too much said
between my ears no ships, just dry salvages
– by Joseph Milford
Copyright© 2011 by Joseph Milford.…
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