From Bruce Springsteen’s “Black Cowboys” (from the 2005 album Devils and Dust):

In the twilight Rainey walked to the station along streets of stone. Through Pennsylvania and Ohio his train drifted on. Through the small towns of Indiana the big train crept, as he lay his head back on the seat and slept. He awoke and the towns gave way to muddy fields of green, corn and cotton and an endless nothin’ in between. Over the rutted hills of Oklahoma the red sun slipped and was gone. The moon rose and stripped the earth to its bone.

Okay — lame pun on the bad ’80s comedy They Call Me Bruce? aside, the new Springsteen album is (I think) the best he’s done since the underrated Tunnel of Love (1987). I’ll post a review later.

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Should have. Checked. My e-mail. Sooner. (And to think it was on the auction block for 6 hours! And it ended via “Buy It Now!”)

For the low, low price of $9.99: check it out.

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So a bunch of us in blogland have been keeping quiet about the Poeta’s big secret for maybe over a month now — but now the secret’s finally out (scroll to the bottom).

What the Poeta didn’t link to on her blog entry, however, was the list of former James Laughlin Award winners — the only proper response for which is “daaaaaaaaaang.” Have come, am here indeed.

And so I thought I’d pull out my old comments from almost a year ago on a slightly different version of the now-award-winning Poeta en San Francisco; I’ve boiled them down from a rambling six-page, Lorca-ignorant, Ezra Pound-foolish letter that rather lamely begins with:

Hello Barb,

I must confess I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing on your committee… I don’t think I’m equipped at all to examine line breaks, or to be able to see how your work draws from specific literary traditions (or doesn’t). All I can do is read it as if I were “analyzing” it, so take what I say with a grain of salt…

and my puzzlement continues from there.

But I think I’m equipped to recognize a crucial, essential work of art when I see one (one you can bet my students will be reading once it comes out), even if I completely failed to identify the Clash lyrics she quotes. As you can tell, I loved the poem, which by the end achieves a kind of dirty, ragged transcendence. The poem is an obviously contemporary one, though with an odd timeless quality, as if it dealt with some ancient humid corruption.

So here goes:

—-
What makes your poem important in my eyes is its direct, poetic confrontation with colonialisms. In that respect, the poem functions — even on a purely linguistic level — as a critique of conquest. But it’s an epic, catholic one, encompassing different places and times, Vietnam and some stand-in jungle in the Philippines, the churches of Rome and Hollywood. It’s a deeply (dare I say quintessentially?) Filipino American poem, one that interrogates (not just in the lit-crit sense of the word, but in the fist-shaking, confrontational, bare-bulb-hanging-from-the-ceiling sense), on multiple levels of the colonial. And the title is excellent. (I was actually thinking of something of a return to San Francisco at the end — a reminder that the procession at the beginning continues.)

I love it. It’s head and shoulders over your previous work (which is already really saying something), and I think it’s great that the reader is, in a way, under no obligation to love it.

It’s a terrific, hallucinatory, corrosive read. Its tension / descent is almost unrelieved, and there lies both its virtue and “problem.” (I put “problem” in quotation marks because it’s not really one.) Tonally it reads like, say, a Diamanda Galas album, a long, keening shriek in the jungles of the colonized. But it’s also the reason why listening to a Galas album all the way through is difficult, enervating and sometimes even painful, but pierced with many moments of beauty. Like Poeta. It’s unapologetically hard work, and in a way it’s hard for the reader to take pleasure (in the ordinary sense of the word) in reading it, and as I wrote earlier, she or he isn’t under any obligation to “like” it.

The pleasures of language, however, are another matter; there is an awful lot to like.
—-

There are various excerpts scattered around her blog, but you folks might as well wait for it once it comes out from Tinfish Press.

And once again, Poeta: congratulations.

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From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

I listened, making suitable responses. I heard no more than half of what she was saying. Not that I disliked listening to her talk about these things. Contents of the conversation aside, I loved watching her at the dinner table as she talked with enthusiasm about her work. This, I told myself, was home. We were doing a proper job of carrying out the responsibilities that we had been assigned to perform at home. She was talking about her work, and I, after having prepared dinner, was listening to her talk. This was very different from the image of home that I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.

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Some of you folks might know that in a fit of relative turmoil about a year ago I ransacked my entire music collection for The 1100 Greatest Songs Ever. (It has now swelled to almost 1600.)

The songs on constant shuffle on my iPod — at least before iTunes 5.0 destroyed my smart playlists — are drawn from that pool of 1600. As one can imagine, from looking at my Last.fm / Audioscrobbler page, it would be heavily weighted towards certain artists, so Puffy, Guided By Voices and the Carter Family would inevitably show up on the list; not sure why this list contains a disproportionate amount of women with guitars though. So here are the answers, with the songs that happened to be on random shuffle:

1.
Arvo Pärt, “Spiegel im Spiegel”

2.
Prince and The Revolution, “Pop Life” (though this is obviously a still from “When Doves Cry”)

3.
Guided By Voices, “Echos Myron” (my favorite GBV song ever)

4.
Beth Orton, “Central Reservation”

5.
Yo La Tengo, “The Whole of the Law”

6.
Alex Chilton, “Don’t Be A Drag”

7.
Richard and Linda Thompson, “Withered and Died”

8.
The Carter Family, “The Wonderful City” (cheated a little here, since this is actually performed with Jimmie Rodgers)

9.
Puffy, “Long Beach Nightmare” (my favorite Puffy song ever)

10.
Jonatha Brooke, “Nothing Sacred”

11.
Nine Inch Nails, “Head Like a Hole”

12.
Slayer, “Angel of Death”

13.
Gillian Welch, “By the Mark”

14.
Daryl Hall and John Oates, “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”

15.
The Velvet Underground, “What Goes On”

16.
Nat King Cole, “Somewhere along the Way”

17.
Captain Beefheart, “Moonlight on Vermont”

18.
Bruce Springsteen, “Independence Day”

19.
Stereolab, “Outer Bongolia”

20.
Laura Cantrell, “Not the Tremblin’ Kind”

(I wasn’t keeping track of who got more correct answers — answers are posted publicly anyhow — but thanks to torn, Dan, Rebecca, J-Lu, JP, juan tamad, skipscada and krangsquared for sending in their guesses. No one got Slayer!)

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