Jul 04

Alan Catlin reviews THEY SAID I WASN’T COLLEGE MATERIAL by Scot Young

first published in http://misfitmagazine.net/

They Said I Wasn't College Material by Scot Young

Scot Young, They Said I Wasn’t College Material, Roadside Press, Magic Jeep Distributing, available on Amazon, 2024, 132 pages, $15

Young’s latest collection is a selected, mostly culled from before 2009. The title comes from an actual conversation with a guidance counselor who failed to see Young’s potential as a student. Scot, in addition to being the editor of the longstanding online poetry site Rusty Truck, has been an educator sensitive to the needs of students who often fall between the cracks as he almost did. His poems reflect a downhome in the Ozark’s personality who boozes, chases girls, is subject to all the foolishness of being young and feckless but who embraces a relationship that becomes a life partnership and mature adult. These poems are narratives told in everyday language of life lived  without pretention, often with humor and insight for those of us who like our poetry without garnishes, and a musical accompaniment you might find on your local bar’s jukebox.

THEY SAID I WASN’T COLLEGE MATERIAL by Scot Young is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/college/154

Jun 28

Steven Meloan reviews THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE by Dan Denton

The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton [hardcover book]Just got my signed hardcover copy of Dan Denton’s amazing memoir, The Dead and the Desperate, on Roadside Press. If you’re looking for a tale of personal purgatory but ultimate redemption, this is the book for you. There have been many literary takes on blue collar life in America—dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships, and often mixed with substance abuse or variations of mental illness. But as a deft and brutally honest storyteller, Dan Denton manages to make such well-trodden paths not only compelling, but literally a page-turner. You can’t wait to see what crazy shit will come down next.

And there is an overarching theme in the book of the soul-crushing toll that factory/blue collar life takes upon those trapped in grinding work hours, and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet amidst challenges and experiences that might have ended a lesser person, Denton manages a wry sense of dark comedy, mixed with an almost educational take on an American working class that has been ground down by our current corporatocracy.

Assorted short chapters of the book focus specifically on truly illuminating topics like the economics/psychology of sex work, the history of the factory as an institution, economic disparity, the rise of inner-city crack and associated incarcerations, mood disorders/SSRI’s/Big Pharma, the disintegration of “the American Dream,” and the social fallout of globalization.

But it is the all-too-human ordeals that drive the story—a descent into the depths, the road back, and then a “return with the elixir” (in the form of this book). Denton has come away with a hell of a life-tale, is now many-years clean and sober, and living the life of a full-time writer.

Not everyone has a compelling story to tell. And not everyone with a compelling story quite knows how to tell it. Neither of those things are the case with Dan Denton.

Read it and see!

—Steven Meloan, author of St. James Infirmary
The Dead and the Desperate [hardcover] is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/desperate/169

Jun 25

Alan Catlin reviews AND BLACKBERRIES GREW WILD by Susan Ward Mickelberry

first published in misfitmagazine.net

Susan Ward Mickelberry, and blackberries grew wild, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep, available on Amazon, 2024, 100 pages, $15

Susan is essentially a narrative poet reflecting on her past in the many places she has lived in and visited as an army brat, over a long and eventful life. A strong sense of loss attends many of these, especially that of her beloved husband and family members now long gone. There are exotic locations, scents, and sounds, and more staid, though still lush, at home poems in Florida. As life is a journey, Susan has a rich one to share touching upon locations and experiences many of us can only visit by watching travelogues or hitching a rich Rick Steve as he journeys from one exotic location to another. He may wax lyrical but he is no poet as Mickleberry most definitely is.

 

 

And Blackberries Grew Wild by Susan Ward Mickelberry is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/blackberries/155

Jun 24

Alan Catlin reviews CISTERN LATITUDES by James Duncan

first published in misfitmagazine.net

James Duncan, Cistern Latitudes, Roadside Press, Distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15

Duncan’s narratives often put me in mind of late 50s, early 60s cafés featuring traditional folk singers. These were usually solo acts playing acoustic guitar with artists singing traditional  ballads and the occasional original song. Not that Duncan is a balladeer, per se, but his subjects often feature a rambling man, crossing the country, usually alone missing someone, or searching for someone new as most of those songs did.  He is often lonely, close to despair but not a defeatist; there is always another day, another ramble, new places to go and see and hopefully, a new love to find.

Jun 23

JD Monroe reviews THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE by Dan Denton

first published at https://www.i94bar.com/reviews/books/3126-disaffected-dan-denton-must-be-your-new-fave-author

Disaffected? Dan Denton must be your new fave author

The Dead and The Desperate By Dan Denton (Roadside Press)

Way back in the New Wave/Post punk era, one of my only friends was a kid with a very similar name to mine. He was really into Depeche Mode and Tubeway Army, and he had a real hardk nock life with a dead father, abusive brother and corrections officer mother,

We met at some troubled teen diversion program. He knew some Kung Fu and kinda became my protector, as I was a scrawny-ass make-up wearing Ramone who was always targeted by bully dumb-fuck Ohio males for wearing eyeliner and being like totally into Bowie and the NY Dolls.

I always tried to get the kid to work on his keyboards so he could join my dirty punk band, I thought that might give him a productive creative outlet and elevate our sorta stupidly primitive Ramones/Cramps sound. He dabbled with it for awhile, but would always get sorta distracted by girls. He saw the two of us as rivals, whereas, I saw us as more like brothers. I really loved the guy.

I remember the first time he tried to kill himself. My own first love who looked like Brigitte Bardot went to visit him in the psych ward (he was always sorta chasing whatever girl I liked.) He hung out with the preppies at the downtown high school and sorta sucked up to the Thai immigrant “Karate Kid” Catholic school bullies.

At least three times, i relocated him outta that town, cause I understood innately that anybody with any sort of unique creative spark was just gonna get dragged through the gauntlet back there if they refused to join the military, it was gonna be nothing but bullshit pinballing back and forth between factory speed, DUI’s, churchified never good enough, forgive my sins hallelujah and the psych ward again. Always more Judge Judy fire and brimstone punishments and no reward forthcoming, ever. Ohio is where they manufacture the corrections guards, you know what I mean? Just brute Tarzan dumbfuckery and 24 Budweisers a day, “Guns & Ammo” magazines, hunting, Hooters, meat lover’s pizza, and NFL forever, Amen.

For some crazy psychological reasons unbeknownst to me, he always went back to his hometown tormentors, maybe like, better the devil you know or something? He was a real good lookin’ kid, with a fabulous poofy new wave haircut. Sorta like a cross between Bono and that Cory Hart “Sunglasses At Night” dude. So he did get to sorta be the big fish, local girl magnet well into the grunge era, before losing his hair. That was another reason he probably stayed there. He was always getting a lot of girl attention, but man. I knew it was not gonna go good for any working class weirdo in that Fascist-ass tank plant town.

He ended up killing himself a couple years ago, ya know he just never found any peace or real love and it was always another probation violation, or bad breakup, another spiral of some kind whenever he quit his factory job in another fit of artistic fervor, you know the old Clash lyric, “No good for man to work in cages, hits the town and drinks his wages”? That was his bad luck story for decades. Once you’re in the system, it’s nigh impossible to escape their sticky traps, ya know? His grandparents gave him a trailer but he’d work for like three days, then crash for two, then it was always back to the grind and you can never work hard enough to please all the Ohio women folk who absorbed all the Judge Judy/Sally Jesse Rapahel daytime TV propaganda in the 90’s about how men all need to get another job, a third job, job, job, job, “J-O-B” Mcjobby job job forever, cause they don’t want no scrubs and all that capitalism slavery bullshit.

Another one of our high school buddies was a barber/old school O.G. real hip hop battle rapper and he was dying of lung cancer but still trying to hold down a minimum wage hairnet and polyester shirt job at Bob Evans, a hick breakfast joint, cause the womenfolk back there kept telling him he did not deserve love if he was not working two jobs or more. If you are poor, you are always supposed to be on the clock, working, ya know, mopping. “ABC=Always Be Cleaning”. “If you have time to lean you have time to clean”, “If you wanna get started on changing those urinal cakes and hit the baseboards of the men’s and women’s restrooms, that’d be super”, they tell you work will set you free, but that’s just some grotesque Nazi lie.

I used to have to take piss tests for dishwashing jobs back there, you know? The bloody wet apron and hairnet and all that shit, while the rich dudes sat at the bar talking about when they were on high school sports teams and looking for approval from racist old coaches. If you stay in one of those hellholes, you will always be forced to slave and eat shit and grind and grovel, they will chain you to the hot hose and make you scrub in the basement of the tumor factory until you keel over and maybe say you were “a hard worker”. That ain’t much heaven to me, really. You never even make enough to do anything much but barely get by-everybody has hardcore addictions, they come with the gig of being born working class.

I don’t blame nobody for wanting to seek out some kinda fleeting relief from the gruelling, non stop agonies of their meaningless, deadend existence there. Scrub and scrub and mop and beg….All so you can become some kinda Employee Of The Month someday, or get promoted to like, lead snitch/”crew chief” or some shit, “team leader”, or like, “compliance officer”. Like that’s something anyone should ASPIRE To. So my rapper friend was mopping the kitchen of Bob Evans and collapsed there one day and was finally relocated to hospice where he died.

Ohio’s a real bad place for sensitive artistic human beings-  don’t go to Ohio, it’ll kill ya, or turn you into a cop, not much in between unless you’re like a born rich kid. I used to be pen pals with this underground punk goddess from L.A., and she used to encourage me to write a memoirs, I took a couple stabs at it, but always felt like it was “too soon” cause I never really wanted to cause harm by telling all my doomed friend’s stories, they all had kids and parents and we had a bad, battered, bruising, bloody youth.

Eventually, that lady publisher turned me on to some amazing poets-a guy named Rich Ferguson who was so gifted he made me reassess all my own song lyrics and shit, and this dude, Dan Denton, the author of the essential, “100 A Week Motel” and also this latest one, that’s miraculously even better, “The Desperate & The Dead”. I think he’s maybe funnier than Bukowski in some ways, mainly because he’s so courageous and self incriminating and all his descriptions of dive bars and dead-end Ohio factory life are just so vivid and poignant and instantly recognizable to me.

This poet soul brother, Dan Denton has a big blue collar heart and is smart as hell, and he’s been chewed up for decades by the same relentlessly damaging Honky Death Machine that killed all my childhood friends off, one by one. If you ever read Mark Manning’s (also known as Zodiac Mindwarp) laugh-out-loud books like “Fucked By Rock The Unimaginable Confessions Of Zodiac Mindwarp”, “Get Your Cock Out”, or “Crucify Me Again”, or ever read long passages of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Kingdom Of Fear” out loud to your loved ones, or if you resonated with the outlaw comedy of Bill Hicks, this unflinching truth teller, Dan Denton is your favorite new writer. He is my kindred spirit and even wrote me into the book.

He’s a genius and a semi reformed fuck-up, the unlikely product of the Divided Slaves Of Amnesia’s midwestern slavery plantations. I’m grateful he quit the factory life to be a full time badass.. Get his books as soon as you can, he’s got Eugene Deb’s soulpower and a rock ‘n’ roll heart, like a motherfucker!

Jun 22

Alan Catlin reviews INNOCENT POSTCARDS by John Pietaro

first published at misfitmagazine.net

John Pietaro, Innocent Postcards: poetry ciphers, verse, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 87 pages, $15

Moving back and forth throughout the Cold War years to the present, Pietaro’s unusual but affecting collection effectively renders a state of mind that was dominated by Cold War politics.  I remember as a young child watching a goon from Wisconsin conducting a mock trial of sorts as chair of the House Unamerican Activities and thinking this mealy mouth demagogue was someone to despise as was everything he stood for. I was maybe 7 then and I didn’t know what a demagogue was but I sure as hell could recognize a hypocritical, two-faced liar in a way only kids can.  Nothing that happened since has changed my original impressions.

I grew up doing atomic air raid drills, ducking and covering under desks or assembling in the hallway where there were no windows, wondering how was this going to survive as we lived well within the blast range of an atomic bomb drop on NYC. Those were the years of above ground testing in the desert, exposing troops to the aftershocks and the radiation just to see what would happen. Those were years of naivety and innocence and the worst kind of “we don’t know what the hell we are doing” years. Not really. And we still don’t. I used to think the MAGA folks wanted to return to the 50s, assuming it was the 1950s they aspired to. I was right only about the 50s, though recent events have shown I had the wrong century. Pietaro knows all this, lived through most of it and gives us a chaotic representation of the life and times of the Cold War era.  As Ed Sanders said in an informal discussion 15 or so years ago, “I’ll put my FBI file up against anyone’s.” By which he meant size and depth. And a few years later introducing a Fugs poem/song “CIA Man” that has the line “someone is tapping my phone/line….”: he claims, they are still tapping mine. The implication was the 50s/60s  aren’t over yet. I fear he may be right. Innocent Postcards is a book for anyone who shares the same misgivings.

INNOCENT POSTCARDS by John Pietaro is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/postcards/160

Jun 21

Alan Caltin reviews DISPOSABLE DARLINGS by Todd Cirillo

first published in misfitmagazine.net

Todd Cirillo, Disposable Darlings, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep Distribution and available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15

Reading Cirillo put me in mind of working in the neighborhood bar and hanging out with the regulars. When I dedicate a book, as I often have,  “to the regulars as they made life bearable and you know who you are,” these dedications were not idle or facetious gestures. Over 25 years I worked the last bar, regulars saved my butt, made me laugh, never failed to tip, bought me drinks when I was drinking, hung out, and provided moral support when I needed it. While Todd was not literally one of those guys, I can see him as simpatico, as a guy who would have been someone you could shoot the shit with, talk sports, or writing, or just about anything else that came to mind. Needless to say, his poems have the same kind of easy, vernacular feel to them. None of these are overly literary or self-conscious in a way that makes you feel like you are being talked down to. When he references himself, it’s as much to make you laugh along with him or share his pain. In short, Cirillo is a regular guy and that his high praise where I come from.

Disposable Darlings by Todd Cirillo is available here https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/darlings/158

Jun 20

Alan Catlin reviews ALL IN A PRETTY LITTLE ROW by Dan Provost

first published in misfitmagazine.net

Dan Provost, All in a Pretty Little Row, Roadside Press, Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 196 pages, 2023, $15

All in a Pretty Little Row, collects ten of Provost’s chapbooks published over the past 20 years. Some of these are rarely seen, extremely limited editions, so this recent trend by prolific poets to reissue previously obscure editions is a positive one. Dan tells us quite a bit of who he is: a common man, albeit a large one, as in a former football player (lineman), finding himself working jobs that require assertive personalities, though he is not overtly aggressive himself. Quite the opposite, in fact.  He was a kind of disciplinarian in a home for troubled youths, which is euphemism for a half way house on the road to hell/incarceration for crimes to be committed as an adult. These are vivid poems showing a means-well idea for dealing with youth in crisis that, in real life, rarely ends well. Having known people in this field, with the exact same job, who used to say, “The kids are getting bigger and tougher. One kid has a brother who is an NFL lineman but this kid is bigger and meaner. I’m getting older but the restraints are the same and they still work but it would have been a good idea to get out a long time ago.” Coaching football for 24 years was a much better alternative to thumb restraints.

Outside of work Provost is drawn to working class bars, unhappy women and bouts of insomnia that leads to more drinking,

“The sea still parts
ways with the waves
at 6:04 A.M., after an
all-night drinking binge.

Looking to the water for mental comfort

I still seem to be losing the battle.”
( from “Epiphany at Age 41”)

No doubt Provost is of a melancholic temperament, a borderline severe depressive at times, but beneath the minor keys of these odes to daily life, is the heart of a compassionate man who is driven to write, to clarify, to make the best of it, and to move on.

All in a Pretty Little Row by Dan Provost is available at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/row/150

Jun 09

“A Circle Amuses Itself”: A Review of Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet by R. M. Corbin

“… he clarified his intention, which was “beat” as beatific, as in “dark night of the soul,” or “cloud of unknowing,” the necessary beatness of darkness that proceeds opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.”—Allen Ginsberg

In some ways, Gregory Corso represented a darkness within a darkness: a beat within the Beat. His place within the inner circle of the Beat Generation (those he called the “Beat Daddies”: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and himself) was undeniable, but he’s frequently left out of the movement’s critical considerations. Who can say why? Ultimately, such critical summations and anthologies often operate as autopsies for literary movements: attempts to articulate some kind of unity or clarity out of the naturally disparate materials of a generation, a life, an oeuvre.

Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet, a new elegiac collection of essays and poetry released by Roadside Press, is at its best when it skirts any attempt to make Corso or his generation sensible. At its worst, it succumbs to a desire to elevate Corso into posthumous order or sensibility.

The collection’s opening essays are perhaps the most egregious examples of the latter, run through with causal platitudes (“We can only grasp Corso’s success by understanding the trauma of his childhood” [11]) and unapologetic psychoanalytic assumptions (“His memory of childhood became synonymous with his memory of defying authority” [18]). It may be that such examples are merely indicative of the biographical fallacy within literary criticism—that the narrative order afforded a dead poet cannot ever map cleanly onto the fundamentally immanent and elusive nature of their work.

This fallacy is particularly egregious in context given Corso’s own living desire to upend logic and explication. Consider the following anecdote from Kirby Olson’s “An Iconoclast at Naropa,” also in the collection:

Someone suggested we walk to a bar about two blocks away. At the bar, [Corso] began to talk about geometry in poetry. He discussed the poem by Jacques Prevert in which the disciples’ plates at the Last Supper are said to have been behind their heads. Corso began to talk about circles, and mentioned a line by Hans Arp. ‘A circle amuses itself.’ He then moved on to a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about a moat with shadows that are infinitely deep. He said that nothing finite can be infinite. He looked at me then, and said, ‘You’re going to ask WHY? Aren’t you? WHY? WHY? WHY?’ (119)

The self-amusing circle and the infinite shadows are effective metaphors for the immense risk tacitly present in any posthumous literary-critical effort. The finitude Corso cites may be read as the finitude of life itself, out from which the poet (and his critic) stretches hopelessly toward an imagined infinity. Biographical and psychoanalytic causality are the crudest forms of the circle—uncritical and artless invocations of infinity and totality—and therefore the points at which this collection falls short. Gerald Nicosia said it best in his “Poem for Gregory Corso’s Ashes in the English Cemetery in Rome”:

That only the truly

And forever dead

Would dream of

Digging up

Someone who is still alive

Underground. 

Luckily, these engagements are few and far between. Disinterested historicity soon gives way to something more intimate.

What ultimately makes this collection special are the personal narratives from those who knew Corso and have no interest in making sense of his life or his work. Each of these more effective essays offer a little window into a moment in the poet’s life: his charged visits to heroin dealers, his comical and erudite poetry readings, his world travels, his impromptu lectures on classical art around the dinner table, his insistence on reading the works of young poets… these fragments of a life steeped in art, tragedy, and a tenuous balance of street-level empathy and bon vivant elitism feel the most true to the man himself. More importantly, they feel true to the fragments and paradoxes of his work.

Robert Yarra’s “Gregory Gave Me the World” is a fine example of this even finer mode of remembrance. Perhaps it has something to do with Yarra’s somewhat outsider status within the world of poetry: when he first met Corso, Yarra was an immigration lawyer. Yarra quickly became a kind of patron to Corso, learning to “take the horrible with the sublime”:

I had dough and never turned him down for a fix. I remember walking into the office waiting-room and seeing Gregory among my bewildered clients, head down, sweat rolling off his nose, suffering, junk-sick but very patient. I quickly slid him a twenty and, without a word, he was out the door. (152)

Such an image is important and moving: a remembrance of the criminal and humane aspects of the poet. But this image only finds its higher articulation—its place among a synchronous and impossible whole—in a later anecdote regarding the night Corso met Allen Ginsberg:

Gregory told me that, in his profound innocence, he asked Allen if he would like to watch a man and woman screw. Gregory told Allen that every day at the same time he watched a man and women have sex through an apartment window and would masturbate. Gregory suggested that Allen go with him and check it out and masturbate too. By some fantastic twist of fate, it was Allen and a woman screwing that Gregory had been watching! Allen was gay, of course, but he had been seeing a psychiatrist who advised that he could “be cured” of his homosexuality by having regular heterosexual intercourse. By the synchronicity that brought Gregory and Allen together, Gregory first knew Allen through the window. (153)

One inflection of this synchronicity has to do with the stated nature of the Beat Generation: a movement which Jay Jeff Jones called “a criminal enterprise in itself” (36). It can be easy to forget that a criminal element is always reflective of a larger system of order: the language and culture of the street are always dialects of the state: chaos is simply a different pronunciation of order. The Beats, and Corso no less, brought literary and bio-mythological representations of the material relationships between the part (the lint brushed off a lapel, the ashes of the soldier, the woman screaming in the asylum) and the whole (the epic hero, the whitewashed Whitman).

But this synchronicity transcends materiality, which may speak to our opening inquiry: why is Corso’s name not carried on the same lips that would invoke Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Burroughs? And, subsequently: why does a critical and elegiac work about Corso run up against the risk of banalities of historicity? I feel that Corso’s own poetry, sometimes highlighted in this collection, offers not an answer but at least a meditation in response:

Existence as seen & felt by godhead

manhead analogous to it—

i.e., each part reflects the whole

god mind the mirror-man mind the reflection

each mind is like a cell in god mind

each cell of man mind

 

The whole can never be given whole

part cannot give whole (238)

Arriving at the end of Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet means arriving at the conclusion that there is no clear image of Gregory Corso or his Beat Generation. Biographers can psychoanalyze, literary critics can enact their exegesis, and archivists can unearth new details of a man’s life… but the poet and his works cannot be crucified on a cross of any such design. Read this collection—enjoy it as old friends around a fire relate memories of the dead. At the end of things that is all for which we can ask.

Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press) is available for purchase at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/corso/165 or most online retailers.

May 24

Susan Ward Mickelberry reviews: These Many Cold Winters of the Heart by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s These Many Cold Winters of the Heart begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson “I am out with lanterns looking for myself,” a perfect depiction of this collection. You will be riveted from the opening poem, “I Grew Up in a Brewery Town,” where the Molson plant closes down but “people survived, they usually do” although “everyone had to pay for their beer now/and they were drinking more than ever” to the powerful “wonderful bloody magic” in “The Butterfly Hunter” near the end. Flanagan has no shortage of acute observations on everything from a humorous pair of crows and the homelessness of tents in winter, to Bob Dylan and Lawrence of Arabia. A plentiful array of humorous, everyday usually irreverent pieces, also stunning moments of awe, and sometimes addressing tough subjects without flinching, from unexpected violence and death, to family mental illness, the loss of a brother, and the suicide of a childhood friend and an uncle and its after-effects. These latter poems will sneak up on you and take your breath away. Stylistically, Flanagan is firmly in control, breaking rules when he feels like it, sliding into a staccato surrealism, and dropping back into more traditional form when he swerves toward the profound. And he does that beautifully. A favorite poem “A Giant Bear Jumps Up the Rockface Outside Sudbury, Ontario,” begins “You never realize how helpless you would actually be/if the cards came calling.” I highly recommend These Many Cold Winters of the Heart and look forward to having the book in hand.—Susan Ward Mickelberry, author of And Blackberries Grew Wild

Cover Art by Shona Flanagan
Purchase your copy at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/winters/172