Further Thoughts on Guided by Voices' "Echoes Myron"

I wanted to revisit Guided by Voices' song "Echoes Myron," in particular the lines about old songs. Here is the full "stanza"/verse:

Most of us are quite pleased
With the same old songs
Then all of a sudden I'm relatively sane
With everything to lose and nothing to gain
Or something like that

Robert Pollard's lyric, in my previous post on "GBV," suggested the way in which he seems to embrace the love of the old, the "same old"--but this song, as with so many others on Bee Thousand, intimates a kind of disaffection, the disaffection of bourgeois prosperity and adult "sanity." Pollard articulates how sometimes, like Ivan Ilych in Tolstoy's famous short story, someone wakes up to the reality of their life and it terrifies them. This realization is not mere midlife crisis--it is a psychic battle against the kind of complacency that habituates us to everything around us. Pollard's speaker/voice comes to inhabit the worrisome place that worldly success brings us to.

K.Silem Mohammad's "Chicks Don't Actually Dig War"/Flarf's Teen Years

Kasey Mohammad's response/homage to Drew Gardner's "Chicks Dig War." Two flarfists trying to outdo each other in flarfosity.

Guided by Voices' "I Am A Scientist"/Why I'm Not Avant-Garde

This video, from Guided by Voices, features footage of the old band along with the ringleader, Robert Pollard--Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Jim Pollard, etc.--a bunch of Dayton garage rockers who found their way to pop genius. On another song from Bee Thousand, Pollard sings, "most of us are quite pleased/with the same old songs." What GBV has always done so beautifully is to trash-compact the same old songs into these little cubes of something new. I get tired of hearing how our avant-poets can't stand the "same old songs," and feel the need to destroy them, and every bit of themselves that loves that stuff. The revolution is dead. Modernism killed it. I much prefer the poetics of recycling--another kind of resurrection.

Vahan Tekeyan's "Forgetting"/Remembering the Armenian Genocide

This poem is for Raz, which I found in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche. Apparently, Tekeyan avoided the genocide because he happened to be in Jerusalem on a business trip. Yet the memory of what did not happen to him becomes the memory of what his people suffered--mass displacement and death. To forget means, at least in the span of this poem, to lose a sense of the future.

"Forgetting" by Vahan Tekeyan, translated by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian

Forgetting. Yes, I will forget it all.
One after the other. The roads I crossed.
The roads I did not. Everything that happened.
And everything that did not.

I am not going to transport anymore,
nor drag the silent past, or that "me"
who was more beautiful and bigger
that I could ever be.

I will shake off the weights
thickening my mind and sight,
and let my heart see the sun as it dies.

Let a new morning's light open my closed eyes.
Death, is that you here? Good Morning.
Or should I say Good Dark?

Utopian Poetic Statement from the 1960s That Will "Blow Your Mind"

This was an interesting piece from New Poetry, a contribution by Tad Richards. It provides a window into the revolutionary and utopian rhetorics of the late 1960s. Was this the voice and style of Robert Duncan? It shares certainly traces of a Ginsbergian ethos and style (notice the occasional absence of indefinite articles). What to say? It's impossible to imagine such a statement written today; part of the reason is that the rhetoric of the peace movement itself has shifted, has toughened into a kind of thinktank pragmatism. Are we better off for this shift? What do you think? As for me, time to get back to my robot pedagogy...

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007
From the Hot Whiskey Blog

I was just searching around in The New York Review of Books' archives and found this collaborative letter from 1968:

To the Editors:

We assembled poets respectable enough to travel across the planet to Stony Brook hereby announce to the public that we are all victims of closed vision, crippled mechanical consciousness, and bad poetry mouthed by all governments and propagandized thru controlled mass media.

That police state military tyranny, sexual repression and laws against expansion of consciousness by joyful music naked dance and high natural herbs threaten further evolution of the race. Joy to all poets' wives and lovers in every country (Herbert).

That no government except the invisible commune of poetry has become conscious that man's usurpation over all nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms thru ecological disruption of the planet surface.

That revolutions of consciousness manifested in human society by younger generations present should be protected from armed dinosaur repression and black magic violence perpetrated by the state; that everywhere Stony Brook to Vietnam the state is the cause and source of violence, state violence is preventing peaceful change. Student violence exacerbates some people (Cooperman). Poets fighting on suburban lawns drunk is also real. (Ginsberg).

That Black Power is the active American conscience, the African soul rising within our nation to force the European soul to love and the marriage of races in a new humanity. We must all work for the wedding of Asia and our continent. For Asia sulks in rejection and pride and only begins to roar in pain (Duncan)�that Black Power is an ideal vision of African Divinity resurrected to save the white rational races from suffocating the entire planet in dung colored gas�We ask return to true tribal structure in which men use society rather than be used. (Oppenheimer)�

That the U.S. utopian* war against attempted state* utopias in China and Cuba as well as Vietnam is a bring down for the entire human race�that good old Dr. Spock and friends have made pure poetic statement aiding and abetting younger bodies to avoid War Theater, that the assembled poets commit the same holy deed.�

That the new consciousness articulated by longhair revolutionary student generations Prague New York Paris Madrid Santiago everywhere on earth begins the fulfillment of human anarchy (withering away of state [Guellivic]) and communal utopia prophesized by poets for millenia�Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells�Bless the Universe!

Robert Duncan G. E. Kimball III Stanley Cooperman Holly Stevens Donald Hall Jerome Rothenberg Ed Sanders Joel Oppenheimer Eduardo de Olivera John Logan Mackson MacLow T. Weiss Anthony Hecht Denise Levertov J.D. Reed Donald Justice Allen Ginsberg Louis Simpson Nicanor Parra George Hitchcock Robert Vas
Dias Tim Reynolds *Zbigniew Herbert *Czeslaw Milosz Anselm Hollo Clayton Eshleman George Quasha George A. Williams Tom Gatten Milton Kessler Jim Harrison,Dan Rowe Allen Planz Ann London A. J. M. Smith Ron Loweinsohn

Is this possible? Would Don Justice have signed a letter like this? Would Ted Weiss? Anthony Hecht? It seems out of character. Anyway, it's quite a list (even if you include Mackson MacLow). -- Tad Richards

David-Baptiste Chirot's "Dead See Scrawls"

" A perilous drive/welcomes visitors." Where are we going, and who's driving the car? "No one to drive the car." Who's putting their shoulder to the wheel, and will they awaken out of this nightmare?

David-Baptiste Chirot's "To Absorb Darkness Until All that Remains is Light"

This poem appeared in GAM No.1, Fall 2003. Thanks to the poet and the journal for sharing it.

"One Voice"/Why Peace is Possible in the Middle East

I came across this event only after it happened, which makes me wonder how well publicized it was; yet seeing the parade of faces, both Israeli and Palestinian, committing themselves to being part of the peace solution, doubtlessly rose my spirits. Every year, I teach a course on Israeli and Palestinian literatures, and I've found that the literature from both nations offers some dramatic and imaginative attempts to leap into imagining the "other." Though literature has also clearly played a role in nationalist exercises in demonizing the other and focusing on one's own pain, there are so many examples of that ethical leaping required to begin reconciliation and coexistence.

Even Steph(v)en on the War

Corpse Watching by Sarith Peou

During its five year reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-1979), the Khmer Rouge killed between 20 and 25% of the nation's population; estimates range between 850,000 and 1.5 million citizens were killed, in an auto-genocide of surreal proportions. Some historians have argued that the destabilization wreaked by U.S. bombing in the Vietnam War is partly to blame; others demur.

What is doubtless is that many haunted survivors and refugees came to the United States in the wake of this genocidal regime, including the poet Sarith Peou, who now serves two life sentences in a Minnesota prison. In Corpse Watching, a chapbook of selected poems from Tinfish Press, Peou offers a window onto the killing fields--one that will leave the reader shaken by the ghosts that continue to visit Peou.

Beautifully handcrafted, the chapbook has an appealing 5"x8.5" wide format, in which two bullet-sized fasteners hold together the poems on the broad side, and photographs on the smaller spine side. One flips through the photographs in a flip-book style--an invariably pleasing act--only to realize (as the end of the book tells us) that this gallery of photos is of Cambodians shortly before their execution.

Peou's poems are the linguistic equivalent of those numbered and unnamed faces, caught before the moment of their deaths.

Amazingly, despite the numbing experiences survived by Peou, the poems deliver a remarkable range of tones--from the elegaic to the comic absurd, as in "A Bad Shooter":

...In the dark and drizzling rain,
I must inspect the ropes.
Before me, a flash of light:
BANG! My right arm swings backward.
"IT'S ME, MOTHERFUCKER," I scream.
Is someone urinating into the river?
No, my arm is pissing blood around
its shattered bone.
Who says a bullet doesn't hurt!
I ask my friend,
"Why did you shoot my arm?"
"Sorry," he says,
"I aimed at your chest."

In "Scars," Peou's description of the brutal labor conditions employs the language of war, in which the starved and scarred body becomes a bombed landscape:

While working, our wounds open and bleed.
Flies swarm at us like dead bodies.
One hand works the hammer;
One hand swats at flies in our wounds.
The flies suck blood and pus.
The flies lay eggs in our open sores.
Our wounds are infested with maggots.

When our wounds widen,
We call them craters:
T-28, F-111, or B-52
Based on size and depth.
My B-52 didn't heal until the Khmer Rouge fell,
When we had enough to eat.

The sense of grim humor here--to call one's festering wounds the names of bombing planes, whose "payloads" offer different sized craters--may suggest how Peou came to survive. Other poems in the collection are poems of witness, functioning as much as exercises in memory as exertions of poetry. Yet they are the first steps, for Peou, in reconstructing a life which he lost in those lost years of the 1970s. According to the introduction by Ed Bok Lee, this chapbook "represent[s] only a fraction of the author's writings," which includes an autobiography in progress. This won't be the last we hear from Peou, which is a good thing. Some thirty years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, we're only now--through Peou--beginning to make sense of what happened.