Dani Spinosa : on A Mean, Mean Thirst

 

 

 

“Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst
after a hard day of nothin' much at all”
           -        The Replacements, “Here Comes a Regular”

 

I often think about how what we as readers and scholars see as movements in literary history are, so often, just writers writing to/for/about/with their friends. I often think about literature through community. Most of the work I do is about connection and the communal. I do not, ever, want my writing to be a solitary act. My dissertation was written as a blog and I incorporated my friends’ comments as footnotes. My first collection of poetry, OO: Typewriter Poems, is titled after all the poets who I read and was influenced by, several of whom I count as friends. My press, Gap Riot, is run with/alongside my best friend. Today I sent a friend a copy of my latest manuscript. It was in response to an email of hers where she sent me her latest revision of her novel. Poets are my friends. I am constantly reading and writing back to my friends.

When my friend Kate Siklosi launched her beautiful book, Selvage, she asked me to read at her launch. I read a poem called “we, out here.” that I wrote specifically for the event. It’s about friendship, really, and the idea that we have to do our work in consultation and communion and community support. Then when my friend Eric Schmaltz asked me to read for the launch of his incredible Borderblur Poetics, a book about friends and writing and community in the avant-garde literary arts, I wrote him “OO! And I Luv the Valley,” a poem about Stardew Valley, which is, at its heart, a game about friends. Oh, also, the title is a Xiu Xiu reference. When my friend Andy Weaver launched his amazing new book, The Loom, he asked me to read and I wrote him “sequence dress,” a poem titled after a ridiculous Roxxxy Andrews flub and written in the style of Weaver’s above/ground chapbook, Concatenations. And, when my friend Stephen Cain was set to publish his truly excellent new collection, Walking & Stealing, he asked me to be his editor, and I wrote him “Torn Ontology Part Two,” a retelling of the birthday poem I wrote for his birthday collection that is made up almost entirely of music references he better get, or else. The first one is Minutemen, but that’s all I’ll give him. When I hold these four poems together in one place I feel very full.

You can see it right there in the epigraph; I called this chapbook A Mean, Mean Thirst after the first line of the Replacements song “Here Comes a Regular” off the truly incredible album, Tim. Paul Westerberg wrote the song about the C. C. Club in Minneapolis where the band used to drink. I used this for the chapbooks title because we, uh, we drink a lot together. There’s evidence of that in the poem. And because it reminds us that we’re getting together to drink again soon. And that even though we get pretty far away sometimes there’s always this thirst of the common, for friendship, for community, and for many several choice beverages, that will bring us together. Plus I’m not actually sure if Stephen and I have talked about the Replacements yet so it’s a good reminder that we probably should.

 

 

 

 

Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media. She is sometimes a professor, sometimes a web developer, and all the time a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry, one long scholarly book, and one pink poetry book. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

Andy Weaver: Two poems

 

Askesis

To stay outside a system is
the only way to know the system;
the poem strives for the untouched
sophistication of a 1992 Star
Trek commemorative plate,
unspoiled by use or usefulness.
Self denial becomes self transcendence
if we allow the fading meaning
to befit, to be proper to. Even today
there are people who train raptors, who
keep words like jess and creance alive,
who become austringers and learn of
bechins, cadges, and the terror of the hallux.
We each embrace with fanaticism what we learn
we cannot live without, as my three-year-old
will explain to anyone, to everyone that
velociraptors do not die, they change
into birds, and so the hawk is a site
of complication rather than exclusion,
caring not at all for either
our interest or our belief, not even
for the imperializing nature of our reading.
Yet there is no rupture with the past,
only a radical rewriting, so we speak
loaded with hope yet always in danger
of it being too clearly understood.
So we seek, not so much error as
deviation, to carelessly stray from the path,
which is the only way it widens.
Still, we end up as stuff to be utilized,
exploited, manipulated, processed,
all with the greatest efficiency. We are
forgotten just as we forgot the presence
of the words we spoke, to listen to them
in such a way that we let them tell us
their saying. Perhaps mathematics
is the truest discourse, the only
language of pureness, but who the fuck
wants to speak in the immaculate
monologue of purity? Call it the Night
of the Long Knives, the Röhm Purge,
or Operation Hummingbird, it is hard
to trust what a Nazi tells us. So choose
your own adventure: We must allow
what we dare not embrace; we must
allow, but we dare not embrace.

 

 

[In response to Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, pp 117, 118, 131, 133, 135, and Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp xv, xvii]

  

 

The days of aesthetic knife fights

and drunken pub nights arguing over poetry
are over for us. Now, we are the indifferent middle
-aged professors sporting growing foreheads
and faster growing paunches, mortgages,
deadlines, hardening livers. We have published
and now we have realized we will still perish.

Now, (now, now!) we dream of escaping
the university salt mines, of writing mysteries
under the noms de plume Pierre Frenchstone
and Pomley Applegarth, creating fluffy plots
where the distinguished Professor Emeritus
saves the day by knowing the difference
between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets,
rescues the beautiful young grad student
from the new tenure tracker’s terrifying dangling
modifiers, of selling millions so we can finally sell
out, retire to the Mediterranean and cultivate
into our daily conversation old-timey terms
like noms de plume, Professor Emeritus, now-now,
and perish,
                    perish,
perish.

 

 

 

 

Fully vaxed and slightly relaxed, Andy Weaver teaches poetry, poetics, and creative writing at York University. He has published three collections of poetry, including this (Chaudiere, 2015). His most recent publication is the chapbook Haecceity (Gap Riot, 2018), part of a collection of poems thinking through love and fatherhood.