Basquiat's Body Possessed by Media

I wrote a post about one of my favorite artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, up at Montevidayo.com.

Actually a funny thing: The first time I saw one of his paintings it was in an interior decorating journal my girlfriend at the time had bought. She said: "Look at this picture, it looks like what one of your poems would look like as a painting." I was totally blown away even by the picture in a photograph of some modernist home in a magazine and I immediately looked up his name and found that there was a show at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in Soho (this was around 1997 or so). I went to the gallery and stayed for hours just staring at the pictures. Anyway, the post isn't about that, it's about spasms and grotesque anatomies.

On David Lynch, Spasms, Body Possessed by Media

Nathan Lee has written a great article about David Lynch in the new Book Forum. I've blogged about it on Montevidayo.com.

On Gaga, Gurlesque, Betraying Modernism

I wrote a post about the immorality and decadence of Lady Gaga.

And the virtues of betraying modernism.

On Montevidayo.com.

Lara Glenum on "cunt gushers"

Lara is writing abut "cunt-gushing" on Montevidayo.

Sarah Fox is writing about dead animal detrius and Baudelaire.

SKAM, Paglia, Gaga, The Canon

On Montevidayo, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa has written a follow-up to her Swedish Gurlesque post, this time about the feminist group SKAM. Also, there's some stuff about Camille Paglia and Lady Gaga and Joyelle McSweeney writes about the Canon.

Selander, Lady Gaga

I have a post about Lady Gaga and Stieg Larsson's insufferable detective trilogy, more specifically the character of Lisbeth Selander, on www.montevidayo.com.

New Books from Action Books

We have two new books out from Action Books on sale on our web site:



Songs For His Disappeared Love
by Raúl Zurita
$12

“Raúl Zurita is, with Nicanor Parra, Chile's preeminent living poet,and his "Canto a su amor desaparecido," here in Daniel Borzutzky's superb translation,is a shattering cyclotron of compact epic. Written in wake of the poet's experiences of imprisonment, torture, and underground resistance, Zurita offers, in the poem's opening half,stuttering, heart-wrenching testimonies of political and personal loss, followed by a tour de force sequence continental in scope-- a kind of Canto General "in negative," drained of any of the consoling teleologies. It is a brave work that conjoins the major and the minor, the vatic and the humblest--and most courageous--orders of the quotidian. Giving no quarter to abstract aesthetic, it's a poem whose traumas jolt us awake and demand we remember.”

-Kent Johnson




Hank
by Abraham Smith
$12

"In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's Hank risks a caterwauling quagmire both epic and lyric in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paen to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated, puncturing burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving , and raw. Hank is an "elegy for gravel" along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry."

-Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Also: If you buy these two plus Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting! you get them for half price off ($24).