Long Time Hiatus!!! Zine Tour!!! Life is Crazy!!!

So I’ve been absent for a while. Yes yes. But I’m back. With a new midwest/east coast tour to boast! Me and my good friend Richard Wehrenberg Jr. are doing some readings around the area in the coming days. Locations and dates are:

APRIL 16 – MILWAUKEE, WI @ Cream City Collectives (632 E. Clarke St.) w/ James Payne, Sean Arnold, Boop, Andrea Lutz, Jeremy Behreandt, Cat Ries, & Matt Plain.

APRIL 17 – MADISON, WI @ Mother Fool’s Coffee House (1101 Williamson St.) w/ James Payne, Chris Taylor, & Jason Schiller. 7 PM.

APRIL 18 – MINNEAPOLIS, MN @ Psychic School of Dream Actualization w/ James Payne & more.

APRIL 19 – CHICAGO, IL @ 1622 S. Allport St. w/ James Payne, Wendy Spacek, & Cassandra Troyan.

APRIL 20 – GRAND RAPIDS, MI @ TBA

APRIL 21 – DETROIT, MI @ TBA

APRIL 22 – CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, OH @ Mac’s Backs (1820 Coventry Rd.) w/ Jordan Castro & Mallory Whitten. 7 PM. Donations.

APRIL 23 – KENT, OH @ The ARM House (formerly the Vineyard) for A.R.M. FEST II (154 N. Depeyster St.) w/ American War and many, many more.

APRIL 24 – BOSTON, MA @ TBA

APRIL 25 -DAY OFF

APRIL 26 – NEW PALTZ, NY @ 14 Mulberry St. w/ Kate Larson, Lepidoptera Puppet Opera Co. 7PM. Donations.

APRIL 27 – PHILADELPHIA, PA @ Wooden Shoe Books (704 South St.) 7PM.

APRIL 28 – PITTSBURGH, PA @ Cyberpunk Apocalypse (5431 Carnegie St.) w/ Andy Folk. 7PM.

APRIL 29 – COLUMBUS, OH @ Monster House (115 W. 10th Ave.) w/ Ryan J. & Saintseneca. 9PM. Donations.

APRIL 30 – BLOOMINGTON, IN @ The Owlery (212 S. Rogers St.) w/ TBA.

So come check us out at those places and times.

In the meantime, I’ve got a new location in Chicago. So stuff sent to my old address isn’t gonna get to me. Any zine orders and letters, hold off on sending. We don’t really get mail here. But I’m going through the bureaucracy of getting a po box, so that’ll be coming soon.

New zine coming whenever I finish it.

Life is crazy.

Still Kicking Up Dust!!!

It’s been a while, but I’m still here. I was working two shit jobs until I quit the second one, now there’s just the one. In the meantime I’m spending a lot of time in my backyard inside my head, making frequent trips back and forth to Milwaukee (prospective move), sleeping late and waking up confused, etc.

I did manage to finish an issue of my zine, though.

All you faithful subscribers should start checking your mail in the next few days. If yr not one of these, pick up a copy at Quimby’s or mail me 4 bucks at:
Matt Whispers
1743 N Mozart APT 2
Chicago, IL 60647.

Here’s a snippet, the first section of a poem called Work Poem.

I am seated on a stack of crates in the alley behind the restaurant in chef’s whites, smoking, shoulders slumped and dead, staring down into the grit and grime that collects here. I can hear the muddle of the Division Street farmer’s market around the corner as it reaches its mid-afternoon peak. It is a Saturday and I have been here since the sun came up. I look deep into the puddle that collected after the 20 minutes of hard rain–how brilliant and contained, the reflection of criss-crossed wires and blue and building tops in the shallow murk mingling with gum, sand from spilt sand bags, and way too may cigarette butts–and with my formerly-grey-now-turned-to-grey-black sneakers teetering on the edge of this new lake, it is a near-perfect image, one that puts me at ease for this moment, that I am tempted to try and photograph as if that could capture any of the resonance this smoke break holds, but know that it would fall short, would not speak to anyone of the overwhelming sensation I have, that even this poem is a fallacy, trying to crunch in all the complex and resolute things flying inside and around me all the time, to squeeze it into words like “melancholia” or “defeat,” or “the sheer weight of it all.” No, sometimes things seem too beautiful for it to matter if anyone else sees them.

Before The Storm

Most of my writing attention has recently been devoted to a screenplay I am working on, which I considered posting an excerpt of on here but then rethought it better not to. Here’s something else, though–a poem about my old job.

Before the Storm

We are throwing a baseball from
opposing corners of Richmond and Cortland,
outside of Richard Yates elementary, me and
Nate Cornrub (the name is a long story).
It is early October, Nate’s wearing a
sandwich board sign we made earlier
this afternoon that says “Last Day to
Sign Up!” in English and Spanish on
the front, a crude drawing of a hurricane
on the back. Parents are hovering,
standing by entrances to the school, talking
in warm and low voices. They ignore us.
We have been here since September,
pitching our after school program
over the others, handing out flyers and
answering questions, always in our
yellow shirts, and they know us by now,
and so we nod, say hello, don’t
even bother with the push. We dick around,
play baseball, talk about movies. After Nate
gets tired he comes over to my side
and we sit on the curb. Next week
we will be working down in Berwyn,
then door-to-door in the suburbs.
This is an end to our time here. We
don’t know now that we will soon lose
our jobs, that the Department of Education
will put a freeze on secondary educational
spending, meaning in the city of Chicago
almost all after-school programs will
shut down or be seriously undercut,
that we will not be staying on
as tutors through the spring, and that
most of these kids we have convinced
to sign on with us, to keep them off the
streets until their parents or guardians
come home—the same streets where
one morning, arriving here close to 8 AM,
at the same intersection we now are seated,
we came to three men beating a fourth,
kicking and punching at him as he lay on
the concrete, one of them striking him
with a board with a nail stuck in it,
the three of them running off at the
sight of us, to leave the bloody
crumpled mess on the sidewalk, which
we learned later that though we called
an ambulance the man was dead before
we even got there—most of these kids
will not get placed in the program.
Things will get bad, but maybe
because of our naivety, we have pride
now—the four of us underlings here—
me, Nate, Alora, Ben—all working a job
most people wouldn’t touch, begging for
more hours, going door-to-door in the rain,
knowing that the people we talk to
are uniformly bothered by us. When
the freeze comes we will go our
separate ways, and in a month
two of us will be back in with our parents,
I will spend most of the winter
weathering unemployment and depression,
and Ben, well, he probably made it out alright.
This will all come later, anyways. For now
we are in good spirits, unified by our
stature as unemployable, on the cusp
of failure. We sit here, tired,
and a couple of white flannel-clad
ride by on fixed gears, and Nate jokes
“that’s gentrification for you,”
and when the parents disperse
we walk slowly home.

Map of My Experience

My writing has slowed down a bit the past couple months, but I’m still working on some stuff. This is a poem I finished just yesterday. In other news, I’m doing a reading for Audrey’s birthday up in Milwaukee this Friday, over at the Laundry Chute. Ask me for details.

Map of My Experience

Bike over to the lakeshore at North,
cross lakeshore drive on the foot bridge
you have to walk through the park to
get to, arriving at the beach over where
there’s that lakehouse that’s shaped like a
boat built into the pavement. Go southeast
from the boat, past all the couples and small
groups playing volleyball, fresh tans and
blue-rimmed coolers, and walk out onto
the pier about 30 or 40 steps. When you sit
down, legs dangling over the water, you
will be facing several points of note:
( 1 ) the Drake Hotel, right at the bottom
of this stretch of the lakeshore’s crescent
moon, which faces you, distinguishable by
the gothic print sign saying “The Drake”
in white about ten floors up on the buildings
faded tan façade, the perfect size for someone
at this distance to read it, as if this moment
was curated for you; ( 2 ) the Van Der Rohe
building, (at least, you think that’s what it’s
called, though it might not be) only skyscraper
east of lakeshore drive, a black amorphous
chute that stands off on its own, on the top
floor of which Oprah lives (or so you’ve heard),
but as yr sitting there trying to imagine Oprah
on the street calling a cab you notice the split
of lakeshore drive, traffic slow over the hill
at that spot, where someone at this moment
is driving over the crease and noticing the
field museum sitting there, as you have done
before, another of the curated vistas that can
make the chaos of Chicago seem like someone
has a hand in its design; ( 3 ) behind you, when
you turn your head rightways, you can see the
diminishing slope of lakeside condos along the
drive, each smaller and more separate than
the last, Evanston being marked off as the first
suburb by where they slowly end, replaced at
this distance by trees, the imitable sprouts of
much smaller condos, and sky beyond, which
for once makes the city seem small, manageable,
something you can mark off, categorize, and
define limits on, rather than being swallowed
up whole by its overwhelming vastness.

Addendum to “Map of My Experience:” Field Notes

The previous night I had stayed up late watching
the Talking Heads live DVD in my room. I drank
some Polish beer and woke up with a headache,
and for no real reason on this particularly warm
spring afternoon I decided to go and see Date
Night, which wasn’t very good, so on my way
out I thought to kill some more time before
heading home with a Four Loko (the blue one)
and a Chipotle burrito, and so I biked over to
the lakeshore to enjoy my moment with them.
As I was sitting in the spot described in the
previous poem eating and taking slow sips
a helicopter appeared at about 2 o’clock in the
sky, hovering just above the split between two
tall building over there, and in the course of me
sitting there hatching out my poem it slowly
moved over to the southeast, just above the edge
of downtown, and started on southwest from
there. There was also a whole party of seagulls
in my vicinity, one of which was particularly
loud and had a small white head, and kept tugging
his head down towards his belly when he called
out. This is all important, for some reason, to note
to get a closer account to the verity of that moment.
How can you, for example, feel this sense
of smallness when you are not working a mere
six hours a week tutoring for a kid who you find
spoiled and ungrateful, who some days you sort of
want to fail just because he probably never has
been allowed to before, just so he can know what
the rest of us feel like, the hours of which job
afford you not much money and a whole lot of
idle time, which you try to fill with things that
relieve you and take your mind off of where you
are and what you are doing, even though the total
cost of the six pack of beer, a matinee, a burrito
and a can of malt liquor ($26 and some change)
feels like a real luxury expense, and means you
will probably eat only dry pasta and toast for
the rest of the week, again—in fact, you can’t
remember the last time you’ve made a nice meal
for yourself—but so instead of spending the
afternoon inside your head, or writing letters
to faraway friends, or struggling to write until
you give up and watch TV on the internet, you
give yourself this moment of peace, outside,
where of course of all things to be thinking about
you are looking for some sort of design and care
in the city you’re stuck in.

Effigy 7 Finished!!!

Explanation for my e-absence: Life, as always, gets in the way. I apologize to all and especially to my subscribers, who will be seeing this issue very shortly, that it took so long for me to finish this issue. But it’s done, and I’m very excited about it!

This issue is especially exciting because it’s the first that features guest poets! I asked Richard Wehrenberg Jr, Anthony Marvullo, Rosy Phinick, Ryan J, and Ben Block to be a part of it, and they all responded in kind with wonderful poems. I also included some of my own poetry in the collection, as it wouldn’t be an issue of Effigy without it, would it?

As usual, send me 3 or 4 dollars at:
1743 N Mozart APT 2
Chicago, IL 60647
And I’ll send you an issue. You can also find them at Quimby’s Bookstore here in Chicago or through any of the poets themselves.

Samples of Richard, Ryan, and Rosy’s poetry was posted on here as the last three items I posted during poetry month. Scroll down to see those. Here’s a poem apiece by Ben and Anthony.

Cemetery Bike Paths
Ben Block

fall in elm grove wisconsin means biking to school in fog and that my kitchen floor is always way too cold to walk on in barefeet. biking to school ends up being me vs. the groundskeeper at the mt zion cemetery on the north side of north avenue. it sits right before that bridge that i always wonder if any trains actually go on as i pedal super fast down one row of hedgestones and he rides his dump truck thing down the other one. i beat him to the end. i dont think he thought we were racing anyways.

i always wonder if its disrespectful of me to bike through that cemetery with nothing on my mind except that girl i like or that test i might have just failed or how many times do i have to bike down this wooded path before the ground just swallows me up whole, and leaves nothing but a rustling of the leaves and a semi legible headstone with a semi inspirational quote and a dying bouquet of flowers.

A. Marvullo

If the math of the Universe is such that
25 brief minutes with you must be followed by
18 hours stranded in the airports of the Midwest,

then I accept,

and if I have to repeat the process
over and over again to
uphold this theorem’s integrity,

until Infinity erodes me to dust
and the only way to travel
is for someone to sneeze me off the mantel,

then I accept–
are you listening?
I’m cool with this.

Even the Non-Bearded

To continue with the Effigy 7 guest poets, here’s something by Ryan Eilbeck. Ryan features a lot of his great writing and his show streak, which is writing about his experience of every show he goes to, on his blog. His writing is a good mix of humorous and hard-boiled.

Even the Non-Bearded

Everyday, I will decide one person I talk to is Jesus
Finally back on dirt; round and normal. A few less
Pounds in the face to notice (or not); closed toe shoes,
A haircut, measly 5 Oh Clock shadow like some Halloween pirate
Or shaven clean like a wedding day groom. Could be a lady even.
I will improve my listening skills expecting
Parable words, valuable like scrolls unscrolling.
The gas station clerk who said, “Careful out there on the road, Yaw’ll,”
Was hinting at a much bigger road. The acquaintance who said, “Take care,”
Meant, “You’re a Sheppard. Learn to wrap a sheep cast.”
Come-back Jesus. Number 45. All he/she says will be
Of the utmost importance and I may be Jonas-ed into relaying
It or advised to store it for my own (long term) good; even if it
Sounds like nonsense or fervor. My attention span will grow
From post-it-note limits to biblical lengths, with wisdom bounding
Like a Doctor Seuss drawing.

Gimme gimme this.

Rosy Phinick is another one of the five poets I’m going to be featuring in the forthcoming 7th issue of my zine, Effigy. Rosy’s work has a certain attitude to it that she does well. She’s very ambitious and unafraid in what she says, which is a very good quality. Also, who doesn’t love a poem about punk rock?

Gimme gimme this.

A record crackles fuzzy in the living room, where three guys hunch
over a ceramic plate of powder, taking turns sniffing and
bleeding into their sleeves.
My guy’s wearing a white denim jacket that
stretches tight across his shoulders when he crouches down.
There’s a hole fraying in a corner.
I can see his hips and a straight line of blood crusting over.
On the couch next to me, slashed-stockinged legs cross upside down, and
I wonder whose they are.
The record’s skipping now, Darby bellows “That! That! That!”
until a girl in one high heel knocks the player over.
The room feels thick with sweat and bloody noses, spilled beer, hairspray,
I smear my lipstick across my cheek with the
heel of my hand and no one will notice.
Someone puts on “Rocket to Russia” and cheers, nostalgia for a
time we were never around for.
I remember the first time I heard the Ramones.
Three years ago, thirteen, dreaming of four leather jackets and
bubblegum spat on a New York street, believing that
three chords meant revolution.
My guy slumps into the couch, lays his bleached head
in my lap, sniffles, coughs.

ideology (1)

I’ve been doing a lot of work to get the seventh issue of my zine out. This one’s going to be a compilation featuring myself and five other poets. I’m still putting a good chunk of my own writing in there, for the people who are getting it for that, but I also wanted to feature some other poets whose work I respect and like. Today’s poem is by Richard Wehrenberg, who will be featured in the issue. This is the first part of a three-part series that will all be in the issue. It’s good!

ideology (1)

quite frequently i have visions
of ‘capitalists’ and ‘anti-capitalists’
relieving themselves, so-to-speak,
of their animosity towards each other
in the form of two or three of each type
huddled in a quiet apartment with a dimmed lamp
massaging their genitals together like bonobos do,
reconciling their disparate ideologies
in this sexually rudimentary way,
collapsing the binary of themselves
by coming together like this.

i am seeing them in this environment
as though through plexiglass,
like some jane goodall-slavoj žižek
amalgamation with glasses and clipboard
taking notes like—

friedman mounts marx
with determined facial expression
or chomsky and goldman,
after heated ‘foursome’ with rand and reagan,
share some oatmeal.

and of course, if you construct a category
you will find people to fill it—
you will be able to tuck them in tight
and tactfully assign them ‘essential’
characteristics and expectations—
you will reduce them to necessaries
and sufficients, causes and effects,
essence before existence—

but when we speak of each other,
let it be of our innards, of our collective
biologies and consciousnesses, of the mutability
and clayness of our days, of the pieces of each other
we have gifted away and taken in simultaneously
to be made a part of our-loamy-selfs,

to be made a part of (and here, i cannot resist positing this)
our hearts, those overworked and rusted signifiers,
which we seem to have shackled, which we seem
to have assigned straight-jackets for the times

when they have raised their pickaxes to the layers
and locks we have bricked around them
to chip away, however slowly, at whatever
myths, presuppositions and simplifications
we might have made up in our relations.

i have been imagining myself waking up quietly,
emptied of fallaciousness and facade, insistent upon
identifying the totality of our epoch and dismantling it,
re-positioning the tiny truths that remain into every
mud-crack of my step, every trap-door of my syntax,
until it becomes easier to love each other again.

Moses Yellowhorse…

So I missed a couple days of this. I was up in Milwaukee and not really around the internet very much, and returned and had to take a sick day. It won’t happen again. Today’s poem is by B.H. Fairchild, a very vivid poet who writes largely about experiences of growing up and working deep in the rural Midwest. This one is called “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Ballons from the Hotel Roosevelt,” from his book Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Who doesn’t love a poem about baseball?

Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt

The combed lawn of the Villa Carlotta
cools the bare feet of my aesthetic friend
cooing Beautiful, so beautiful, a dream …
beneath the fat leaves of catalpa trees,
and my Marxist friend—ironic, mordant—
groans, Ah, yes, indeed, how beautifully
the rich lie down upon the backs of the poor,
but I am somewhere else, an empty field
near Black Bear Creek in western Oklahoma,
brought their by that ancient word, dream,
my father saying, you had the dream, Horse,
and two men toss a baseball back and forth
as the sun dissolves behind the pearl-grey strands
of a cirrus and the frayed, flaming branches
along the creek so that the men, too, seem
to be on fire, and the other one, a tall Pawnee
named Moses Yellowhorse, drops his glove,
But I wasn’t a man there, and there, I know,
is Pittsburgh, and man means something more
like human, for as a boy I had heard
this story many times, beginning, always,
He was the fastest I ever caught, the fastest,
I think, there ever was, and I was stunned
because for a boy in America, to be the fastest
was to be a god, and now my father
and his brothers move behind a scrim
of dust in a fallow wheat field, a blanket
stretched between two posts to make a backstop,
a stand of maize to mark the outfield wall,
while their father watches, If an Indian
can make it, then by god so can they,
and so it goes, this story of failure
in America: Icarus unwarned,
strapped with his father’s wings, my father
one winter morning patches the drive line
of an old Ford tractor with a strand
of baling wire, blood popping out along
his knuckles, and then in fury turning
to his father, I’m not good enough,
I’ll never get there, and I’m sorry,
I’m goddamned sorry, while Moses Yellowhorse
is drunk again and throwing water balloons
from the Hotel Roosevelt because now
he is “Chief” Yellowhorse, and even though
in a feat of almost angelic beauty
he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri
with nine straight heaters, something isn’t right,
so one day he throws a headball at Ty Cobb,
then tells my father, He was an Indian-hater,
even his teammates smiled, and now, trying
to explain this to my friends, it occurs to me
that, unlike the Villa Carlotta, baseball is
a question of neither beauty nor politics
but rather mythology, the collective dream,
the old dream, of men becoming gods
or at the very least, as they remove
their wings, being recognized as men.

$600,000

Here’s another one by Denise Duhamel. I posted about her a little while back. This is from a series in her most recent book, Ka-Ching!. The series is all poems named after an increasing monetary denomination, all printed sideways as if on a dollar bill. While the poems are not all about money, they all use money as a buffer for getting the poem going. This is the sixth poem in the series.

$600,000

In 1986, my roommate talked me in to getting my first ATM card. We both had checking accounts at Citibank, which became known as Shitibank because it wouldn’t divest its South African assets. I stood in a long line with other New Yorkers—but when it was my turn, the sun shone on the screen so I couldn’t quite see it. I squinted, took off my sunglasses, then put them back on. My PIN didn’t work—maybe I was doing something wrong? I tried my code again, along with several variations, until the machine swallowed my card. For one of her gallery shows, Sophie Calle photographed people through the security cameras at Paris ATMs. The baffled, the frustrated, the blasé, the elated dad with his toddler on his shoulders. I was inspired to do a spin-off project about PIN numbers—not simple birthday codes, but the codes of obsessions: bingo2, leather88, Whitman13. Of course, my project stayed conceptual. Who would tell me their passwords? Even if I convinced them that I was an honest person, that more than one time in the early days of ATMs, I’d walked up to a machine that read Can I help you with anything else? because a customer had left too soon. A few times I pressed yes, but only to check a stranger’s checking account balance—I never attempted to withdraw even twenty dollars. At some point, my roommate started being late with her rent, which terrified me, as my name was the only name on the lease. She started borrowing my sweaters and stuffing them, smelling like smoke, back in my drawer. She’d come into my room in the middle of the night, crying about the abortion—she still owed me for that, too. She’d lost her job as a receptionist because two lines rang at once, and she just shut off the ringer. When she was three months behind, I told her she’d have to leave. She said I’d go far in this world because I was a conscienceless bitch, even though I’d changed from Shitibank to Chemical. When she moved out, she took everything we’d bought together—ice cube trays, the shower curtain, a throw rug, a teakettle. When I mopped her empty room, I found a red mesh bag filled with candy coins covered in gold foil—the chocolate was cheap, a bit waxy, but the foil was sturdy—and when I was careful enough, I could pull off one of the serrated paper sides without ripping it and hold what looked like a gold bottle cap in my palm.