New Poem in Grain Magazine

I’m pleased to announce the publication of Grain: the journal of eclectic writing, which features my poem “Hard to Get.”  In due time, I’ll post the poem to this website, but for now, I’m proud to be in the fine company of the poets Alissa Gordaneer, Andrew Torry, and Laura Trunkey, all with amazing illustration from Cate Francis.

This is a pretty little magazine whose print runs often sell out: rare for an art journal, but there it is.  If you’d like to get a copy, I suggest ordering one from directly from the publisher here, or, if you are lucky enough to be near a bookstore that stocks such things, support them by picking one up.

Favorite Things: Rdio

There are heaps of great music-steaming services out there, now that, apparently, music is free.  Really, they should be used as over-qualified previewers in determining which LPs or CDs you really need in your collection, if permanence and sound quality matter to you. Among them,

• Spotify: of which I might be a terrific fan, where it legal in Germany, where I am currently living, but alas, it is not. 
• Pandora: the great pioneer and game-changer that plays a virtual radio station built on a matrix of similar-sounding artists.  A great service, but it won't play an entire album, and I've never been much of a singles guy. Also illegal in Germany.
• Naxos: this is the largest classical record label in the world, and they're buying up smaller companies by the cello case to add to their online streaming service.  It is a subscription service, so you pay for access to their 800,000+ tracks but can stream them at CD quality, if you have the bandwidth. They also have a pretty deep bench when it comes to jazz.  

But my favorite of all, by a good long way, is

• Rdio: Another subscription service (my plan costs something like $6 a month), Rdio features the best interface of the lot, tons of obscure recordings, a social feature that is (for once) actually useful--I'm not talking about updating one's facebook automatically every time a new record comes on, but the "playlists" feature, where some pretty tasteful people put together great jazz mixes, Christmas tunes, KEXP-based melodica, and other turn-ons for this traveller. 

I came to Germany with 3500+albums on my iTunes, but sometimes--however absurd it sounds to say it--that's not enough.  I don't know how I managed to cross the pond without a copy of Straight Six, by Poor Old Lu, or with the better of the two perfect Mineral albums, but I did, and Rdio was there to rescue me.

In addition to turning me on to bands like Wye Oak, and Cults, Rdio has been a treasure-trove of old favorites: Jeterderpaul, anyone? Joe Christmas? The mind fairly reels. 

Year's Best

 Last year, one of my favorite musicians ever, Iron and Wine, released their new album on my birthday, which felt like a gift from the world.  The year before, the band that has taught me more than any other (about art, about life) Bright Eyes, released two albums on my birthday.  It seems fitting then, that I should offer something back, in the form of a Best-of list, since this year's birthday has just passed without fanfare from the musical community.  Here then are my favorite albums from 2011, offered in a spirit of generosity rather than contention, for those of you with whom I no longer share car rides or mix tapes.

Girls- Listen Here

Iron and Wine- Listen Here

The Antlers- Listen Here

Youth Lagoon- Listen Here

Bon Iver- Listen Here

There was a lot of good work this year, but these are the masterpieces.  For those of you who don't hate Christian music, you might look seriously at the new albums by Leeland, and Sixteen Cities, which are the best things in that genre this year.  And if you don't hate screaming, you should check out the hardcore rock-opera by F**ked Up, which is breathtaking and holy in an entirely different way. 

On the Town

My wife and I were missing our hometown (Seattle) the other day, as we are exiled and adventuring abroad for the year, and counting its many glories, not least among which is the thriving theater scene.  "Remember that one play?" she'd say, and I: "that was great; remember this other one?"  Suddenly it seemed like we'd seen a lot of plays during the last two years.  Suddenly it seemed we should try to make a list of those we remembered particularly.  

Comedy of Errors

dir. George Mount for

Seattle Shakespeare Company

: we saw this Shakespeare-in-the-park production twice, once at the show's open, and again at its close, as a treat for our out-of-town wedding guests.  

Julius Caesar

: Another Shakespeare-in-the-Park, this time at Seward, and a season before. 

Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World

 dir. Anita Montgomery for 

ACT

: Staring my good friend Carol Roscoe in a breakout role. 

The Tempest

at Seattle Shakespeare Company: featuring, on the night we went, live music by

Jesse Sykes

, composed especially for the show.

Crime and Punishment

Intiman Theater

: one of the only competent productions I've seen at this beleaguered, (since closed) regional playhouse more concerned with furthering a sociological agenda than with making good art. 

Othello

Intiman: Officially the worst play I've ever seen, despite (because of?) the cast's having been shipped in from New York, to the understandable pique of Seattle's own talented acting pool; we walked out at half-time and were dismayed for weeks. 

On the Town (a musical)

at 5th Ave: the actress/singer/personality Sara Rudinoff enlivens everything she touches.

39 Steps

Seattle Repertory Theater: disarmingly charming and British.

Jude the Obscure

Erikson Theater: My own entry in Book-it's Novel Workshop Series; actors reading from stools on stage hasn't been so entertaining since Dylan Thomas' reading of

Under Milkwood

in New York, which I unfortunately missed, having been born forty years too late for the premier. 

The Cider-House Rules

(parts 1 and 2): an epic production full of moving performances, which addressed, I think, social problems we're not really having.  It made terrific sense when they staged it 15 years earlier, to general acclaim. 

Great Expectations

Book-it Repertory Theater

: Unbelievable directing, a terrific supporting cast, and Jane Jones (as both Havisham and Betsy) in a performance I think I'll always remember.

Oh Lovely Glowworm

dir. Roger Benington for

New Century Theater

: A flawless production of a flawed but terribly-inspiring play.  Magical in nearly-every way: this was one of those rare (for me) pieces of art that made me want to do everything differently.

Hunter Gathers

WET

: This tiny theater is (was) the most important thing happening in the Northwest for the last decade. The ambition and level of artistry on evidence was just stupefying.  Then, they lost most of their ensemble, artistic directors, and lighting designers either to New York or to theaters with bigger budgets, and have since become a gay teen youth center that sometimes does plays.  

Twelfth Night

Seattle Shakes: A Christmas production! So fun and Dickensian!

Two Gentlemen of Verona

: A mod-production that used technology in a smart way: characters texted each other and we could read their screens via subtle projections. Sounds fishy, but it wasn't.  Definitely the coolest production I've ever seen of this play.  

Electra

: This was kind of a play, but mostly a vehicle for the emoting of its female lead Marya Kaminsky.  She's a phenomenal actress, but it was unsettling to basically watch someone hurt for two hours straight; like watching

Passion of the Christ

, that. 

Those were the big ones anyway.  Added to the concerts (notably, the XX, Sunny Day Real Estate, Rufus Wainwright, and Mark Kozalek) and dance shows (importantly Nacho Duato,

Hubbard Street Dance

--which may be the single best thing I've ever seen--Pacific Northwest Ballet's

Romeo &Juliet

and year-end

Gala

, Seattle Opera's

Don Quichotte

, and the powerful modern company Sonia Dawkins' Prism Dance Theater), well, we were busy.  Still, what a city. 

New article on Bernini at Curator Magazine

Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for that monstrous marriage...

Full Article Here

Letter to the Editor

A letter I sent to the Editor of Poetry Magazine in response to a review written by (the usually very good) D.H. Tracy, about what is probably my favorite poetry book of all time. Read it on their website here:

Letter to the Editor by Mischa Willett.

Poetry Reading Poster

In August, I gave a poetry reading at the Phinney Ridge Community Center whose advertisement was designed by my talented friend Mark Selander at Machines and Humans. Several people commented on the poster, so I thought I'd post it. Check out more of Mark's work here: www.machinesandhumans.com

Places: Versailles

As with nearly every other spot on the ever expanding tourist map, Versailles is a place no longer to be beheld, still less to be awed by, or disgusted by–depending on the strength go one’s constitution, and the romance attached to her sense of history–but a place to be captured, recorded, digitized, and filed: less under the heading I was here, than under veni vidi, vici. 

It is not a matter of course, though perhaps it is not surprising to hear the Versailles defies such capture, if not by its opulence, which can be rendered through a pictorial study of it’s minutiae, but by its sheer size.  Even 1300 frames of similarly-proportioned gilt chambers do not convey the monstrosity, the monotony even, of winding through its miles of royal residence. Still, ten million visitors every year try, and if the mob on the day of my visit is indicative, 95% do not remove their eyes from the viewfinders of their handheld recording devices.  

Versailles is an interesting place because for all its attempts at intimidation–it was a state headquarters designed in large part to reign in rogue nobles–it is surprisingly un-monumental.  For all its marble and gold, it is surprisingly homey; cute even.  Given all this, Bernard Venet is a pretty smart choice as this year’s artist-in-residence to display on the grounds.  Unlike the Jeff Koons exhibit last year, which was, as always, an awful, tacky, and wierd-ly perfect sprinkling of the proverbial confettii (life is a cabaret!), Venet’s work seeks first to understand and then to participant in that enormity.  

Aesthetic intimidation isn’t much a tactic the modern mind is overwhelmed by anymore…seeing the Sun-king on a gold horse at the entry of the gates feels kind of royal, but not exactly impressive, still less god-like, or sublime.  Venet has gone about his project in a smart way then, by re-interpreting the scale of Versailles in standards that still provoke: if 1300 rooms in a row doesn’t make the jaw drop, 1300 tons of unfinished steel still can.  A rusted arch large enough to cradle a suburban house says something about scale that was once conveyed by two enclosed stories in stone.  In the age of the discount skyscraper, no one thinks “wow!” when confronted with the spectacle of a three story building, no matter how much gold tops the fence without, but set in the lens of Venet’s concentric arches, piled up in corners of the gardens like Valhallan horseshoes, one shivers with the original excess thinking at once, all that weight, all that waste, what’s the point and wow, which is what you’re supposed to have been saying all along. 

Things I'm Happy About: King Street Station

King Street Station in Seattle’s once-glorious and much-neglected Pioneer Sqaure, is a beautiful, classic train stop whose clock tower is modeled on San Marco in Venice.  It was grand and lovely until the 1950’s, when, in a misguided attempt to modernize, they put in a drop-ceiling, covering the height, windows, and terra cotta carvings on the ceiling.  Instantly, the place felt like a bus depot: a cramped and criminal bin for only the most-desperate travelers.  Ridership dropped to a trickle.  Thanks to some heroic Democratic legislators, spending political capital, and standing up to virulent, inchoate, spittle-flecked, rage-driven opposition, we’re getting the money to update the station, bringing some decency and grace to an area that badly needs it, some jobs to a town that does likewise, and some future-planning to a region that could use it.

This update came out today from the department of transportation.

Review of Michael Dickman's "Flies" published

My review of Michael Dickman's book Flies is up on the Books and Culture website now.  You can read the whole thing here.

If there's anything that the onset (or is it an onslaught?) of e-books should teach us, it's that books themselves matter. For the most part, if the publishing industry crashes, I say they deserve it for keeping the public trust so poorly.

Case in point: the publication of Michael Dickman's new book of poems Flies, recently out from Copper Canyon Press, is one of the major events of the year for people who care about poetry. His first book, The End of the West, was the bestselling debut in the long history of that press, and if it was filled with a sagacious quietness that suggested an author twice Dickman's age, it was also filled with promise. Many of us reacted with a compound clause: that's amazing; I can't wait to see what he does next.

Part of that feeling comes from the fragility of Dickman's lines. His verses seem weightless at the same time that they feel enormous and heavy. That's not a hyperbolic contradiction: think of a blue whale and you have it—this slow, gigantic force. Or, picture the cover of that first book: a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Untitled, 1960) depicting a hanging victim, who, due to the camera's trick and limit, seems to float, or even to fly up off the page, when he should be dropping.

The cover of Dickman's new book...

New Essay Published by Mellen Press

Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in Europe and Asia During the Romantic Era: Charting a Motif Across Boundaries of Culture, Place, and Time is available now from Mellen Press, featuring a chapter I contributed entitled “Theatricality and Imaginative Failure in Keats.”

This chapter is part of a larger project I have in mind called “The Vanishing Point,” which will begin seeking a publisher sometime next Fall.  Meanwhile, you can find this book on Amazon, or straight from the publisher here.

Abstract:

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek writes that “sublimity gives us simultaneously pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to the thing-idea, but precisely through this inadequacy, it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the thing, surpassing every possible phenomenological, empirical experience.” Keats’ “Ode of a Grecian Urn” may be one of the language’s greatest poems, but it also contains some of poetry’s worst lines. Those lines, especially “More happy love, more happy, happy love,” are not mis-steps; they are failures, and, I’m arguing, active failures in Zizek’s sense, a kind of theatrical dive, meant to claim for the poet a documentable experience of the sublime. In what thereby becomes a discourse on imaginative limits, Keats discusses the form’s ability to “tease us out of thought,” connecting that lack of thought with silence, and ultimately to a breathlessness he enacts in these passages. As the poet demonstrates the failure of the poetic faculty in the face of the sublime encounter –making a spectacle of the climb, failure, and recovery– he also hopes to induce a similar reaction in his readers, attempting to move us out of breath and to the same pitch of delirium he has exhibited, to make his private imaginative environment a public one wherein his theatrical swoon is contagious.