Record Store Day

So, yeah, I realize that this is the logo for last year's Record Store Day, but the Sun Records-esque logo is too killer to pass on.

This year, tomorrow -- almost today -- is Record Store Day, celebrating the renewed success of vinyl as a medium. If you are fortunate enough to live next to a 45 rpm emporium, go down for a visit and see what's going on. You may encounter special sales, rare collectibles, impromptu concerts by a slew of performers or pre-listening parties for records set for release in the weeks to come. And if you live in New York City, the mayor has even deemed it an official holiday.

National Poetry Month: Martin Espada

Martin Espada is may favorite Latino poet. I mean, just look at his beard. Also, he teaches at University of Massachusetts-Amherts. Before I even knew who Espada was, I wanted to go there to study with James Tate, but now, no matter how great Tate is, I admire Espada's work more. His poems cut to the core. They are always working on at least two levels, often more, and are always engaged with the broader world around him. Espada cares little for self-expression, but instead relies on political commentary and social critique.

I was blessed to have the opportunity to teach a healthy portion of Espada's poetry while working in an Upward Bound summer program a few years back. I admire several of his poems, but my favorite is still the one that first floored me back when I discovered him. Alternatively titled "Late Night at the Pawn Shop" or "Latin Night at the Pawn Shop," the poem begins with a group of kids looking at the instruments in a pawn shop window and imaging themselves in a salsa band. The poem turns dark though, as the children realize that social class has killed their dreams, or as Espada puts it the instruments have "price tags dangling, / like the city morgue ticket / on a dead man's toe."

National Poetry Month: William Stafford

Another important Kansas poet, Stafford has an interesting history. A conscientious objector during World War II, he would go on to be named Poet Laureate of the United States, or Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress as it was called then. I was at a reading once where someone, perhaps Stephen Meats, editor of the Midwestern Quarterly, told an anecdote about how Stafford would not get up out of bed in the morning until he had completed a draft of a poem; the 20,000 pages of his daily writing donated to Lewis and Clark College in 2008 bears out that claim. He was certainly prolific, publishing four separate volumes in 1978 alone.

"Traveling Through the Dark," perhaps Stafford's most famous poem, has the feel of Hutchison, KS, where Stafford grew up and would call home for much of his life. The poem is about finding a deer dead on the side of the highway, and making the decision to push its carcass off the road to keep cars from swerving. The decision becomes complicated whent he speaker feels a baby, still alive, within the doe's belly. The speaker must "think hard for us all," coming upon the decision with no romance, with nothing but feelings of regret and solitude.

National Poetry Month: Jonathan Holden

To really get a good feel for Jonathan Holden, Kansas's first poet laureate, you should hear him read. The way he phrases his poems is so skillful that when reading poetry on the page, his is the only voice I hear other than the voice in my head -- and perhaps the poet's voice if I know what they sound like -- reading the poem. When I read Charles Simic, it is often Holden's voice I hear reciting it. Also, the introductions he gives to his poems and the bird calls he imitates in "Western Meadowlark" enrich the poetry that much more.

Many of my favorite poems of Holden's, such as "An American Boyhood" and "How To Play Night Baseball," deal with the experience of growing up, of boyhood in the Midwest. My favorite is "Why We Bombed Haiphong," a poem that personifies the B-52 bomber, cleverly nothing the "B-52 was voted 'Most Popular' / and 'Most Likely To Suceed.' // The B-52 would give you the finger / from hot cars. It laid rubber, / it spit, it went around in gangs, / it got it's finger wet and sneered / about it."

I will lave it at that. Holden once told me that the best you can do is quote a poem and let it speak for itself, so that what I'm leaving his work to do.

National Poetry Month: Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound has long been criticized for his anti-Semitism, and in a way rightfully so. Pound should have been smart enough not to rely on cultural assumptions and stereotypes about Jews. That said, I don't think Pound hated Jews outright. Certainly, he did support Mussolini, but it seems as though he supported fascism because fascist leaders were interested in nationalizing specific industries and in restructuring banks, something the far left also takes an interest in. Specifically, Pound was railing against usury, the loaning of money at inordinate interest rates, such as is done by banks and credit card companies. The cause of usury is greed, and looking at the current economic state we can see where that got us. Banks weren't content to simply charge outrageous interest rates that made it difficult for working families to put a dent in the principle, but they also loaned out to everyone, figuring they could earn more money that way, and when they loaned out to even those unable to pay their rates, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. In Pound's time, the attitude toward Jews was that they mostly made their money off of usury. Pound should have been able to see through that, but the impulse to be against usury was a good one.

As a critic, he came up with better ideas, and expressed them in a more direct way, than almost any other writer I can think of. From editing Ernest Fellosa's "The Chinese Character As A Medium" to The ABC of Reading, Pound's theoretical work is fascinating, infused with wit and consistently thought-provoking. As a poet, hiw work is also strong. "In A Station of the Metro," arguably Pound's most famous poem, was cut down from dozens of pages to just two single lines, two contrasting images that form the verbal equivalent of an Eisensteinian montage.

Pound's "translations" of Chinese poetry recreated their ideas and feelings using his own ideas of how Imagism should be practiced. The peak of this, perhaps, is in "River Merchant's Wife," when the wife's entire emotional complex is embedded in the line "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead." Later, Pound's Cantos were revolutionary as intertextual creations, like an extended Wasteland that effortlessly represents a plurality through blending multiple systems of linguistics. They are among the most challenging poems in any and all languages, but all the more rewarding because of it. And to hear Ezra read them, with one of the most intense recorded voices in history, is to be shaken straight out of your bones.

National Poetry Month: T. S. Eliot

Here is Eliot, looking rather Prufrockian, to nab an adjective coined out of one of his most famous poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." That poem imagines an older, balding man arguing with himself, attempting to justify his own social anxieties. The poem is one of his easier poems to get around, and his density had made many readers fail to attempt understanding him.

It is worth known Eliot's work, if only because it is omnipresent. As Eliot himself said, "good artists borrow, great artists steal," and without stealing something from Eliot, we'd be a much poorer world. Can we imagine Watchmen or "Desolation Row" without The Wasteland, or The Great Gatsby without The Hollow Men? If we want to get technical, can we have "Too Much of Nothing" without Eliot's two brides, Valerie and Vivian?

Certainly, as the references to "Desolation Row" and "Too Much of Nothing" attest, Dylan was heavily influenced by Eliot. In the first attempt I made at writing a scholarly article, I researched charges that Eliot was anti-semitic, which I'd thought he was, and then wrote in defense of "Gerontion." In the poem the reader is presented with a Jewish landlord, referred to in the poem in the opening lines as "the jew." Due to Dylan's "Dear Landlord," I immediately thought of the Jewish landlord as Jesus and the building as the world. I read the poem as religious allegory, and the choice to not capitalize "jew" as more of a comment on how Eliot viewed Jesus' place in culture at the time than on the Jewish culture.

National Poetry Month: John Donne

When I first studied John Donne, I was told his poetry could be broken up into three types depending on when he wrote them. The first type of poem was that attempting to wildly seduce a young woman, such as "The Flea," a poem in which the poet tries to equate intercourse with a bug bite in order to lure a young virgin into bed. After he met and married his love Anne, Donne wrote highly erotic, yet devotional poems chronicling his love for her. After she died, Donne turned his attention toward God, loving God with the same passion, resulting in work like the Holy Sonnets. In truth, its not quite that clear cut, and a poem like "The Canonization" seems to eroticize the church, further complicating matters.

What is true is that with a list of poems that includes both minor classics like "Go and Catch A Falling Star," "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" and "To His Mistress Going to Bed" alongside essential classics like "Death Be Not Proud," "For Whom the Bells Toll" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," it is hard to go wrong with a good collection of Donne's works. Van Morrison didn't ask him to rave on for nothing.