Firehouse Neckbrace by Josh Spilker

                Josh Spilker distributes chapbooks and critiques music. These are two of my favorite things. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who feels music and poetry are compatible forms. While he appears to focus more heavily on literature now (also reviewing books at Impose Magazine) I can’t help but to feel a certain sense of a kindred spirit with him. Music reviewing is extremely difficult work as there are literally thousands of references to make, with roughly 8 of those being something most people would understand. I figure that’s why he focuses more on literature than anything else. Besides merely distributing work he creates his own. “Firehouse Neckbrace” is release 2.5 from Deckfight Press. 

                “Firehouse Neckbrace” reminds me of the quiet, disturbed nature of the suburbs. Growing up in the suburbs you don’t realize how strange it is. You see cars pass by on an infrequent basis most of the time. People on the sidewalks don’t have the same warm feeling they do in cities. Instead of thinking “How nice all these people on the sidewalks. Glad they are enjoying the nice day.” you grow paranoid about why they aren’t in cars. No rhythm exists in the suburbs. Cities have a natural rhythm to them. Suburbs feel artificial because they are. Suburbs were created for the sole purpose of escape making a false reality with a fake history about a rich developer who tore apart virgin land to make cookie-cutter homes with enough variation to make people feel like individuals. 

                I feel that needs to be said before getting into Josh’s work. For all of “Firehouse Neckbrace” gives me the impression of a creepy place where nobody bothers learning about each other. Rather you have a cast of characters who don’t seem to sync up or interact with each other properly. Every few pages you return to that desolate picture of a burned-out house. Occasionally larger fonts barge through almost shouting at you. The larger fonts appear to be flarf or flarf-like and break up the story with random interjections.  Dialogue is extremely, almost painfully realistic. Really I’m not certain exactly how to classify this as but I lean towards a short story or a particularly long-form poem. 

                A few character are introduced in refreshing slow way. Josh paces the story properly. I’m a sloth so pacing is pretty important to me. Sometimes I read stories where too many characters are shown to me at once. This can lead to confusion.  Having this pace makes it possible for me to care about these characters. Eventually the chapbook becomes more and more surreal (or real). Lines become blurred between what is occurring and what they are thinking. It’s an interesting mix and since the characters are made for us to understand them makes the experiment feel worth it. 

                Suburbs prove to be the main character in it at least for me. I enjoyed Josh’s description of the community right down to its shopping habits and various zones of control. Despite growing up in suburbs and reading probably an unhealthy amount of fiction and non-fiction about them, I haven’t seen them portrayed this way before. This is the way I talk about them, the way I feel about them and the way I felt living in them. I’m glad Josh Spilker literally captured suburban life for me so accurately and vividly, adorned only with the starkest of facts.

Frank Hinton

               I have focused on Steve Roggenbuck’s latest endeavor, Internet Poetry on this blog before. While the whole site offers a plethora of material yanked from the internet’s general indifference, one piece got stuck in my head. That was Frank Hinton’s piece, which apparently is called “unrequested livejasmin.com pop-up”. I thought about it a lot and decided to find out a little more about this person.

                Frank Hinton keeps busy. Halifax, Nova Scotia doesn’t really offer a great deal of activities, excluding an airline (Air Canada Jazz) which elicits some of the angriest emotions I can muster out of my near-uniform polite attitude. I reckon Frank Hinton is the chief exporter of poetry and literature for the general Halifax metropolitan area.  Besides writing her own poetry, she’s also an editor and founder of the online literary journal Metazen. Metazen is probably one of the best places to publish literature online, since they tend to curate the work and apply such abnormal things like standards. Originally it started as a place to post her drunken writing. As someone who created a Facebook group for this sole purpose, it is reassuring to know some drunken thoughts transform themselves into full-bodied literary journals.

                Obviously she is a female and writes under a male pseudonym Frank who she refers to as “A sad man, a pathetic man”. How she explains it is her enjoyment of ambiguity. Living on a gender pendulum, it allows a greater amount of freedom than simply being thought of as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ writer. There are countless articles explaining how this kind of perception (either as a male or female writer) can create a certain expectation. By using an obvious pseudonym, it makes things more interesting. Her online persona is extremely shadowy, mysterious. We don’t really know much about her besides her writing. Keeping mysterious yet accessible makes the work more interesting, as I find it can be easier to write something when I know I’m anonymous. The pain of writing something with your actual name attached probably contributes to a great deal of dishonesty within literature, as if the writer is trying to impress you in some small way. Frank Hinton’s writing is direct painfully so at times. 

                She has a few poems lying around in odds and ends. Apparently she also has a chapbook called “I don’t respect female expression” coming out around the end of April from Safety Third Enterprises. But I haven’t read it. So I won’t go over it. Instead, I’ll go over her poems she’s had lying around, whatever I could find basically. Most of these I found on her Spartan-style Tumblr which you can access here. Though I won’t review every one of these, I do recommend reading all of them. 

                Her piece for Lamination Colony, called “How to be Me, an Instructional Video narrated by Frank Hinton” shows a certain playfulness. In here you learn how to hate people on a bus, chew off your fingernail in public (which is an actual skill) and how to avoid negative thinking upon waking up. Since she does have this on the internet, she explains how to post online in order to flame or remain anonymous (both good choices). Along with these apparent instructions is the final sentence which states “You were once a child and you had it all”. That’s probably one of my favorite lines of hers. Children get lucky with the amount of happiness they get. Then come teenage years they grow overly angst-ridden and depressed. Finally, in their twenties they begin trying to improve themselves through questionable practices of self-help, self-improvement and other endeavors of dubious merit. 

                Relationships get a lot of attention in her poetry. Every word she uses has a distinct meaning or conveys a particular meaning. In “I’d be a Barbie without him” she takes on a female persona. Frank becomes one of the antagonists in this story/poem. Jumping between ages, you see the evolving attitude and increasing knowledge of sexuality. Some of it is humorous, like at age 17 when she tried to return the rock to Glenn but Glenn didn’t live there anymore. Other instances show Frank as a 12 year old, then what I’d think was a first-time at 18, I could be wrong. Everything is in shadows here. Nothing really is fully explained, but as time progresses; certain numbness sets in followed by a plea at the end. 

                Part of my joy reading these are how well she describes various feelings about love. Love is a difficult thing to write about without falling into the extremes of anger, sadness, despair, happiness, coy, and so on. Frank Hinton avoids these. She writes things with an honesty that’s hard to find. Being honest could be funny or tragic, it depends on the circumstances and often her work can be both.  Her chapbook will explore these themes even further.

Poetry Review: I am like October when I am dead

Poetry confuses me. It is one of those art forms where the purpose is often obscured. Usually the power resides with the reader than the writer. I have a few poet friends and I’ve mentioned how anxious I feel going through it. How should I react to this? Is it even good that I can relate to it? Am I supposed to understand what’s going on? Is this even a place for a poetry review, since most of my writing has to do with music?

I decided to try and push aside my natural prejudices towards this art form as I dove into Steve Roggenbuck’s chapbook “i am like october when i am dead”.  Apparently this poet had randomly been following me on twitter, with rather cryptic, bizarre tweets, so I decided to return the favor by reading his more full length work. 

His poetry reads like twitter poetry, since most of it is very brief. Most (but not all) of these poems are within the 140 character limit required. I liked some of these poems more than others, since I felt the minimal style worked well for him. Below is each poem, followed by my reaction. Note everything is lower case in his writing. And if you’re familiar with the likes of Tao Lin and his ilk, then this may be somewhat familiar to you, tone-wise. 

1.

i dont care about reading a poem

who do you think i am, robert frost?

i have never been in the woods and i hate walking

-Reaction: I thought this ended up being a tad bit too cute. Steve acknowledges the reader’s hesitancy in wanting to read poetry, but it came off as a bit too silly for me. Actually it took me another go before I decided to read the other ones.

2.

god help me im throwing my neighbor off a building

-Reaction: Liked this one more than the previous one, but it still made me anxious about what awaited me. 

3.

i drink ten gallons of rice milk and pull the headlights out of my car hood

now they are way gone

-Reaction: This one mixes what I think is his sense of humor with strange detail. Using “way gone” instead of “gone” gives it a funnier vibe. I started to become more interested in it, though I acknowledge beginning anything is always tricky.

4.

there is a show on the history channel about the mayan doomsday prophecy

jupiter is in the south of the sky

i love you in the south like the hurricanes of Jupiter

-Reaction: As a person who takes great interest in doomsday, I liked the meshing with it and love. There’s actually been writing about the destructive powers of love, so I feel the poem works on that level. 

5.

you are gone

for lunch i had peanuts

-Reaction: I like his shorter stuff. This seems to flow nicely from the previous passage, giving it a sense of continuity. Or I might just be reading into it too much. 

6.

i have two sunflowers wilting on my bookshelf

thats it

thats all

the poem is done, get out

-Reaction: Again, the referencing of itself bothers me a bit. I’m not sure if I’m the kind of audience he’s trying to appeal to though. Had he kept just the first sentence or simply removed the last, I would’ve liked it more. It is kind of strange for me to ask for edits in such a short thing. Oh well. 

7.

climbing onto this church

thank god

carrying a giant rake with me to scare walking individuals

-Reaction: This is funny. I enjoyed the image of carrying a giant rake. 

8.

last february i drove home from the library next to finch fieldhouse, sigur rós was on the cd player in the car with a tape adapter

i saw an elephant walking out of a circus truck into the parking lot of finch fieldhouse

-Reaction: Apparently the Sigur Ros reference was to improve the emotional content of the poem, since he felt for the poor Elephant. But my music snob tendencies went into overdrive once he said that the CD he was listening to was their “()” album, which I disliked. Ignorance is bliss I guess. 

9.

to my nephew on his birthday

i will choke your dad

i dont care

im not afraid

-Reaction: For whatever reason, this reminded me of the Doors song, perhaps it is that last line. Though he wrote “im” my mind reads it only as “I am”. It feels defiant. 

10.

if you call me, i wont answer

i am sitting under the moon inside of a wheelbarrow

-Reaction: Enjoyed this quite a bit. Despite the short length, it conveyed to be a sense of childhood, where our emotions take hold of logic. That still happens as adults, but the wheelbarrow confirmed it could only apply to kids. 

11.

i am like october when i am dead

there is my hand

i am like the killers of people

-Reaction: This one is bizarre. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. 

12.

i asked my dad if the corn harvest is over

it is way over, my dad said

-Reaction: I had no idea about this one. I didn’t grow up on a farm. Apparently Steve did according to his youtube video thing. His voice sounds American, he looks American, and he probably picked corn or milked cows or whatever in his rural town. I’m not as American as Steve Roggenbuck. Sorry. 

13.

the hymnal at my grandmothers funeral says 'wives be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the lord'

five months ago i saw a video of a dog being thrown into a garbage compactor

-Reaction: The darkest one in here. I don’t know whether or not I like it. Since it leaves me so confused, I’ll say that’s probably a good thing. 

14.

oh, you have a smock on

-Reaction: This reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s six word story. Obviously, Steve’s take is lighter. The choice of the word “smock” gives it a playful connotation, like little children or painters. I enjoyed this one a lot. 

15.

i rented a movie and recorded over it with two hours of myself

on the video i am shouting compliments at my family

i burn my car on purpose

it is january

i greet myself at the beginning of a great career

-Reaction: I liked bits of it. Steve mentioned in the commentary that the last line was re-phrasing Walt Whitman’s line of “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” (via his own commentary on his writing). This one feels chaotic, since he’s doing so many strange things. 

Overall: I liked this. Had he removed some of the more coy parts of it, such as the poem referencing itself, I might have enjoyed it a bit more but this might be a personal preference of mine. Hopefully I get to see more material of his at a later point in time. Since he seems keen on having this available to the public, it won’t be long before we see more from him. I’m strongly considering actually ordering one of these chapbooks from him. The use of space in the chapbook and on the website allows you to place your own ideas into them, various doodles and notes. Please keep up the work, good sir!