Tag Archives: writing

Campbell’s Soup I

William S. Bur­roughs used to say (via Brion Gysin) that writ­ing was fifty years behind painting.

I’ve been test­ing that.

A half cen­tu­ry ago, Pop Art framed the visu­al media environment.

Andy Warhol’s “Camp­bel­l’s Soup I” port­fo­lio of silkscreens was print­ed in 1968.

Fifty years lat­er, edi­tor John Tre­fry selects an abridged ver­sion of my “Camp­bel­l’s Soup I” for Burn­ing House Press.

The Kurt Cobain Game

Sui­cide is tricky. For the indi­vid­ual, it promis­es an absolute end to a cer­tain kind of tem­po­ral pain, sure — but then, just as quick­ly, it trans­fers that pain onto oth­ers. And accord­ing to its alge­bra, the mul­ti­pli­ers can be huge.

In the absence of Mr. Cobain there’s a lit­tle game I’ve played, The Kurt Cobain Game. I wrote about it for Hobart today: “Kurt Cobain Does­n’t Know Much Of Any­thing.”

Midsummer Threnody

New poem, “Mid­sum­mer Thren­ody,” in the lat­est Hawk & Whip­poor­will.

This is, more cor­rect­ly, a very old poem — writ­ten a decade ago, sub­mit­ted nine years ago, moments before H&W went on long-term hiatus.

The hia­tus is over. And so is my old approach to poet­ry. Free verse is tol­er­a­ble, and can even be occa­sion­al­ly good, if you look at it as not poet­ry but prose — lazy prose.

It’s the sol­stice, and I know that gen­res are shift­ing their bearing.

Instant Writing

Obsessed about a new kind of writ­ing, some­thing more inter­est­ing, and imme­di­ate, than what’s hap­pen­ing in social media or any­where else, cer­tain­ly books—and it was seen in the thrim and shim­mer of the ligh­trays and lush at a dis­co loft par­ty last night. There for a sec­ond, a mir­rored moment alone, when my ancient idea of “instant writ­ing” was haunt­ing me hard, some of it came out quick­ly in great nat­ur­al clarity—it was strong, ver­nal, and maybe the only way out that was rea­son­ably possible.

Because look: I’ve cre­at­ed a moun­tain range of backed-up work in jour­nals and files and piles of pock­et note­books all to tran­scribe, and there’s sim­ply no way to gath­er it en masse togeth­er and orga­nize it with­out stop­ping, and time, and mean­while more—the ideas keep gush­ing forth in their fast-flow­ing froth and I know that the most like­ly way of fin­ish­ing these big leg­ends and books is maybe to write them all out in real­time just as they hap­pen, and instant­ly with fast strokes & brushthought life is trans­mut­ed to word.