Linh Dinh

Trickster Johnson

04.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Daisy Fried

Ooga-Booga

It has gotten harder and harder to write well about Iraq and the current administration. One feels helpless, and furious. One jeers not to weep or become apathetic. But none of these responses makes for good poetry. Politics tends toward sloganeering, solutioneering, and declarations of right and wrong; good poems generally require ambivalence and irresolution.
One of the poets I’ve been reading a lot of recently, though—Frederick Seidel—solves the problem by writing the way he always has, attacking pieties and simultaneously declaring his own culpability. Seidel’s poet-persona seems half-crazed, quite dire. The first poem in his 2006 book, Ooga-Booga, “Kill Poem,” seems like one of the best things written in at least the last 25 years. Here’s a piece of it:

04.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Daisy Fried

Joseph Torra’s Call Me Waiter

Joseph Torra
Taxes (a year’s worth of receipts to sort out and tally up), poems I’m trying to write, a day-long gig up in North Jersey, Maisie’s 15 month checkup, laziness because it’s finally spring: My excuses for not posting for over a week. I read though, and particularly liked Joseph Torra’s new “autobiographical novel,” Call Me Waiter, just out from Pressed Wafer, a Boston-based small press run by the poet-editor-impresario Bill Corbett. Pressed Wafer publishes limited-edition broadsides and postcards and chapbooks of prose and poetry, which you can order directly by writing to 9 Columbus Square, Boston, MA 02116. I make a yearly donation to the press and get everything Corbett publishes; it’s a great deal for a lot of very good, handsomely-designed stuff coming at you in the mail all the time.
At 133 pages, Call Me Waiter is small for a novel, but no chapbook in scope. It’s an account of 20 years spent working as a bartender and waiter. Torra, who’s also a poet, writes wonderfully about work. Ron Silliman called one of his previous novels, Gas Station, “an extraordinary document…[Torra] has a real eye, not simply a literary one.” There are two kinds of writers, those who want to imitate literature, and those who want to imitate life, and the second kind are better, and Torra’s in the second category.

04.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)