the belief that one word is as good as another.
a rage i have yet to give into,
a reaction nobody sees.
going back and removing myself from everything
in an absurd attempt to appease my ego.
deciding against doing something, anything.
leaving a small mound of powder
on somebody else's countertop.
mumbling something witty into a sandwich.
hefting any weight at all,
walking another lap around the mall,
making a small child sit in the corner
for a length of time while you
watch music videos.
writing a poem which no one reads
and everyone understands.
reciting someone else's poem to a
room full of deaf grandmothers
and receiving a thunderous applause.

saying something someone else writes down.

refusing to sleep when she's waiting, and warm.

there's something i (and many others, of course) find resonant and haunting in the films of David Lynch, and so you can imagine my pleasure at hearing that editor Ivy Alvarez was putting out a collection of poems concerning Lynch's Oscar-nominated film Mulholland Dr. through independent publishing house The Private Press. of course, living up to the artistic and aesthetic standards set by the eccentric and solitary Lynch is a daunting task.

many viewers of Mulholland Dr., especially those who are not fond of Lynch's films or are unfamiliar with his work, find the movie to be byzantine, confusing, and largely incomprehensible (even though some of his other works are decidedly more abstract and contorted) which makes for a less-then-pleasing moviewatching experience. those sort can rest assured that there is no such difficulty in the poems found in the small chapbook we don't stop here, the title being derived from a line occurring early in the film. the six poems that comprise the collection are largely accessible and straightforward, and derivative of the film in a very direct way.

before delving too much into the innards, something must be said about the charming little sheaf itself, with a lustrous little metallic blue cover, well-chosen fonts, and a size that fits nicely in the palm even though it sometimes neuters poems at unfortunate places.

the first offering, by Atlanta author Collin Kelley, is a poem that reads quick and hard (thanks to lots of short words with stops at the end) and falls into the familiar confessional first-person style. it's written from the perspective of the film's main character and features a few nice lines ("all it takes is one twist, tell me" and "[...] you are the dream that i made real,/[...] when no one else would listen,/ I told every little star") but is oddly punctuated, cluttered up with commas that seem redundant at the end of lines and devoid of periods even when they would help signal shifts that are crucial to the poem.

the second poem, Karen Head's Amnesia, isn't written from within the film as in Kelley's poem. instead, Head writes (again in the first person) about the experience of seeing the movie "at the Starship theatre" and the reaction of the elderly women at the film. Head's commentary about the stereotypical reaction of the women is wry and amusing, but falls prey itself to stereotyping by referring to the women as "grayhairs" (twice!) and thus removing any connection we could have to them as real human beings and instead rendering them as caricatures of 'batty old biddies' or something of that nature, foolish to be offended by the lesbian sex scenes of Mulholland Dr. That being said, this poem is one of the stronger pieces in the book.

No Hay Banda. There Is No Band is the third piece of the collection and features wordplay that evoke the Lynchian sensibility better than the two preceding poems, but is also replete with unfortunate filler that marr the impact of otherwise adroit and adept lines. two gems like "The carpet in the room is too still." and "she can count out her/ real name in hundred dollar bills." have a weak cliche like "Betty is as sweet as a peach." nestled between them, and the line comes across as impossibly fake as the character of Betty (Diane Selwyn's idealized dream-self) does in the film. this is also one of the longer poems in the collection, so it could perhaps loan some of the unnecessary lines...

...to Daniel Lloyd, who provides six lines and no title. The lines capture both the exuberant melodrama of the characters which dominate the majority of the film and the snide commentary about how canned Hollywood can be, but couldn't possibly be more lacking in the heady atmospherics of a Lynch film. if Nabisco made a Mulholland Dr. brand cookie, Lloyd's poem would be written inside of a neon sticker on the package.

Lloyd's contribution gives way to Lip Synching by Juliet Cook, an author who has visited Lynch's film as a subject before. it shows. the same haunting imagery and mysterious symbolism which shrouded her chapbook The Laura Poems, based on Lynch's Twin Peaks, is evident here in the form of phallic keys and and domestic detritus that seems to be falling apart around the poem's inhabitants, which are vague sketches of the movie's characters. her limbs are "splintered", her bathrobe is "unraveling", and "shape-shifting". Cook employs a lyrical technique oddly reminiscent of Ginsburg, in which certain words appear again and again to keep the beat: "with", "blue", "off"; she also repeats certain phones in ways both end-rhyming and word-initial to much the same effect.  another odd twist is that Cook blows her load early, with the most dramatic line kicking off the poem, echoing its importance in Lynch's film: "This is the girl.", offset as it's own stanza, turns a bland line into something powerful by drawing on the film's emphasis, something every poem in we don't stop here should do so well.

the chapbook concludes with Esther Johnson's Untitled, five three-line stanzas that are simple and yet evocative of many of the more haunting scenes in the film. "You believed her name was Rita/The jungle of your heart" is a great final pair of lines not only to this poem, but to the collection as a whole.

there's a lot to like about we don't stop here: it will look great on your coffee table and the fact that it can contain poems as different as Juliet Cook's and Karen Head's makes it impressively dynamic for such a short volume of poetry, and for those who are film geeks and cinephiles, or those who have small shrines built to worship David Lynch in their homes, this is a must-have item. the most glaring flaws are the aforementioned size of the chapbook (it's almost hard to believe a book with only six poems warranted a printing) and the necessity for a reader to have seen the film to truly appreciate most of the poems in the collection. nevertheless, i'm glad i managed to acquire a copy during the first print run before it sold out and would still advise picking up a copy of the second printing when it drops.

visit The Private Press website for more info.

special spring discount this weekend at Blood Pudding Press! my poetry chapbook "wing'd" is on sale for only 4$ per copy!

visit www.bloodpuddingpress.etsy.com to pick up a copy if you haven't done so already.

i'm getting married. may 30th, 2009.

neither one of are very religious, so we're getting married at an episcopalian church where i have spent a lot of time in other capacities: i took karate lessons there when i was a kid. i went to AA meetings there for the first year or so after i got out of rehab. it used to be my precinct's voting place. also, my parents go to church there, and i have been on a number of occasions as well.

the reverend is a very nice lady who officiated my grandfather's funeral.

we have to attend a handful of pre-marriage counseling sessions. they're fairly informal and not at all dogmatic, but rather practical and pretty beneficial, actually. in the first meeting, we had to fill out a long compatibility questionnaire. this weekend, we had a meeting and got our results back, which of course were great, because, duh, i wouldn't marry someone i didn't mesh well with. i'm not the sort to delude myself (at least, not while sober) and so knew we were pretty much on the same page.

but! and here's the reason for this entry:

we scored highest on the sexual relationship category. 

i told the reverend i wanted a plaque to put on the front door.

we talked about marisa tomei's tits while we drove home.

in case you were wondering, i think we scored lowest on spiritual relationship (with god, not each other).

that's an awful triumphant wind,
the bitchinest breeze in all of breezedom,
a triumphant little Hot Pocket batch packaged
inside an envelope of that which is not,
what isn't, it's not;
what this means is that all that matters is mass,
her sweet, sweet mass crammed
dwarfish inside of wrap that can't contain
her fragile gravity, her misshapen bulk
buoyed by an outgoing blast wave,
compressed gas cloud at critical density.
relativity demands this ascension is
a slow process, else the rest of the universe
is just falling fast. awesome is a word
best reserved for ski slopes.
starbirth is decidedly dry and the death
ain't much juicier, a flattening like
a potter's palmed vase falling back to the wheel
without ever kissing the kiln.
these are just bipolar jets with
artificial color, a nebulous cough of
primo particles and a degradation into carbon.
she's a cloud floating through the galaxy
but a really charming cloud with a great
personality. everything stills. the brightest
flame burns quickest. it ain't much,
but they name the new formation,
mostly just dust blowing out into nothing.