Weeks ago we saw each other
passing through the corridor, trying to move
with the walls, disappear like marble,
your eyes little lizards dashing under dead leaves
and mine, frozen
mouth barely moving
as I ducked into the feathered blue coat of the woman walking with me.

It’s been six months, at most, now,
and I’ve been afraid to count.
You gave me up like that,
left me on the living room floor
heavy with sleep & grasp & blankets
and a lingering taste, penetrative
you wrung around, thinking
If the firepit could be so beautiful,
I’d try to make it love me too

after I had waited outside the gravesite for you
someone
to come help me move
the boulder, for nights, for three of them,
only the applied visions coming to haunt me
when you came to wake me up, and I wept, and waited some more.

I am awake most nights.
I spend most my time alone, to others,
I am either a priest or a whore
which is still probably what they thought before
you came to me, wet, from a rainstorm
you invented as you watched me sleep
thinking of my dreams, of the reason
why I waited so long for him to come back
and why when it was you, you couldn’t take me,

wishing we had never moved the boulder,
that I had never waited, that you had never watched,
that we didn’t tell the stories like some god had been talking to us,
that I couldn’t be the undersigned, could be anything else,
and you could be, too, no more legends

like you were the door I was trying to open,
a slab of wood that would never know
who, exactly, had carried it on its shoulders—

I want to sleep unalone again.
I can’t until you get out of my bed.

Previously published in The Legendary. 

1. Lisa Robertson 

Last week at work I had the pleasure of creating a literary anthology section and came across dozens of copies of the Chicago Review that’d been sitting around the bookstore for years, probably. My boss let me have a copy of their Spring 2006 issue, a large portion of which is devoted to Lisa Robertson. Little did he know that I had already combed through her 20-page poem, “Palinodes,” and was primed to consume every piece of literature written and about her in the issue. One of the first lines in her poem is “Though my object is history, not neutrality/I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme,” which made me do the bookworm equivalent of a fistpump in my brain. I’ve read the whole poem through a couple times now and keep finding more and more to get excited about. Not to mention her statement on the art form is pretty intriguing, too (emphasis added):

I need a detailed account of passivity so I’m trying to make one. I have never completed an act of passivity. I built nothing. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I memorize in my bed at night and loose the words in my sleep. I record that loss. I started thinking about passivity by studying furniture. I picture here the sociality of cinema, but with no image–Derek Jarman’s Blue perhaps. I thought of a bed. I thought of a chair. I thought of a cupboard. I want to think about the shapeliness of reception, about expectancy recumbent. I wanted to participate in change. I was lucky and I was wrong. I’m not sure it’s identity.

She also has a great poetic essay on the history of clouds in that issue, an interview that explores her relationship with feminism and DIY art scenes, and a whole lot of other stuff that got me excited. At the risk of going on too long, I encourage you all to pick up a copy of Chicago Review Spring 2006 (we have a few copies at Powell’s in our amazing anthology section too!).
2. Britney Spears

My friend Megan Burbank read a hilarious and so-damn-true essay on Britney Spears circa 2007 at Bad News Bible Church on Saturday which had me knee-slapping for the entire eight minutes she was on stage (and every once in while quietly confiding in Julia, “I relate to that SO MUCH.”). Today her piece was posted on Pank Magazine, one of my favorite online publications. Despite the essay being pretty specific to Megan’s experience at Smith College, I think it capture the essence of what it was like to be a college-aged woman with ironic tastes in 2007, and the sudden awareness of that situation that Britney Spears evoked.

For better or for worse, Britney Spears was a mentally ill woman living out her nightmare in the pages of Us Weekly. She had also become human to us in a way that was identifiable. And if anyone could relate to a woman who was going a little crazy, it was surely the women of Smith College. We were a rare mix of estrogen and neuroses. Most of us were on antidepressants. We went to our six free counseling sessions every semester like it was our job. After about two days at Smith, you learned that if you saw a girl bawling on the steps of the library, you let her do her crying in peace. It wasn’t so much that we were unhappy as that we were swimming in age-appropriate confusion, and trying to be proactive in the face of our anxieties. And we were beginning to suspect that Britney Spears was one of us.

(Read the whole piece here! It’s worth it, I promise!)
3. Vermin Supreme

This whole Republican caucus thing has me really stressed out. Mitt Romney might be okay, but both Gingrinch and Ron Paul scare the shit out of me, and all of them are vocal opponents of women’s rights (and, let’s be real, human rights in general). Therefore it’s really comforting to me that I’ve finally discovered a Republican candidate who represents my best interests: Vermin Supreme, a self-proclaimed “friendly fascist — a tyrant you can trust.” Imagine a country where we work on a pony-based economy, adhere to a mandatory toothbrushing law, and the “awesome power of zombies” is harnessed by giant turbines. This video pretty much tells you everything you need to know:

And remember, kids, a vote of Vermin Supreme is a vote completely thrown away.

I’ve spent the past week or so trying to figure out what to write in honor of Roe vs. Wade‘s 39th anniversary today.  As anyone who knows me is already aware, it’s incredibly important to me.  And it wouldn’t take long for those who didn’t know that to figure it out.  … So I’m not about to pass up the opportunity to commemorate something so significant.  But I’m still unsure of what to say.  There are two reasons for this:

• I feel like we’re still trying to solve the same problems we were dealing with a year ago.  [...]
• This issue has hit particularly close to home for me this year, and I have a lot to say about it  (someone really important to me had an abortion just last week).  But I can’t talk about it publicly, because she has asked me not to.  [...]  She’s keeping quiet about it because society makes it really hard on women who speak up.

Experts couldn’t say whether more liberal laws led to fewer procedures, but said good access to birth control in those countries resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies. … About 47,000 women died from unsafe abortions in 2008, and another 8.5 million women had serious medical complications. Almost all unsafe abortions were in developing countries, where family planning and contraceptive programs have mostly levelled off.

“An abortion is actually a very simple and safe procedure … All of these deaths and complications are easily avoidable,” said Sedgh, the study’s lead author.

Abortion rates were lowest in Western Europe — 12 per 1,000 — and highest in Eastern Europe — 43 per 1,000. The rate in North America was 19 per 1,000. Sedgh said she and colleagues found a link between higher abortion rates and regions with more restrictive legislation, such as in Latin America and Africa. They also found that 95 to 97 percent of abortions in those regions were unsafe.

With that in mind, it seems absolutely crazy that abortion would become illegal. It obviously makes our country a whole lot safer. Then again, pro-life rhetoric can be overwhelming, and they have a strong web presence, not to mention what Amelia calls great sounding verbage (“You know, ‘don’t kill babies.’”). They have instances like this:

While we have instances of this:

It’s very clear that good verbage is not where the term “pro-life” starts and ends. I’m not concerned with the pro-lifer that thinks abortion is wrong but would prefer to end abortion. I’m concerned about the extremists who clearly are not as “pro-life” as they would suggest; not only do they not give a shit about the quality of life for mothers with unplanned pregnancies, but they’re willing to kill what they see as perpetrators of the “Abortion Holocaust.” Meanwhile, people with actually good ideas are getting shit done and reducing the amount of abortions by increasing access to birth control and sex education.

I can only hope that I continue to feel safe after the elections this year. All of the leading Republican presidential candidates are pro-life (or at least say they are). Having a Republican president could be a serious threat to women’s rights, especially as we struggle through issues like universal health care, not to mention that the poverty gap is widening. Overturning Roe vs. Wade would be a huge step backward for us as a country, and make life much more difficult for single women and families alike.

At the end of the day, while Blogging for Choice once a year seems like a good idea, a lot more has to be done. Being vocal is a great approach–educate people who aren’t aware of these issues. But also take action–organize, protest, write letters and sign petitions. Regardless of how you feel about abortion, I hope that in 2012 we can find more unity in taking action to keep our country safe for women while continuing to decrease the amount of abortion procedures necessitated. But also very importantly, to stop the demonizing of the procedure (as well as the women and doctors involved).

I’ll leave this with a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks–one of my favorites–written before Roe vs. Wade thirty-nine years ago:

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?–
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

By the time she called you only to hang right back up
she had become buried under the black permanent line
traced with insistency

The breath of pages dropped into my lap, pressed blue
like the ocean.
I asked: what’s the Puerto Rican word for ocean?

he said: she would have kept it in her hair
(if she pulled her hair back)
instead she left it in the pages of your favorite book
you gave to her

perhaps so that it could fall into your lap
as if she had whispers, as if she had
fallen cold
& asleep
so that you would touch
what was not given

shutter, instead
at the dead air that comes
after hearing the voice
you never wanted again:

what’s the Puerto Rican word for betrayal?

Blue, the color blue
ninety-five percent of the surface of the world,
most of the sky; blue—
what she left
for you, to find, in finding
with the dead dying leaf
in the turning pages
I watched him keep

what she put in place
for the hindsight, blue,
the foreigner, blú,
the backwash, the stab back, the whiplash
traded in for a skinny blond to be
so sweet
so
all
black
and
blue

The water: blue.
Her bloodlines: blue.
Silver bullets: blue.
Page turned: blue. Paper cuts,
blue. Glue on acrylics, also blue.
The skin under the line over her name

blue, blue, blue.

Blue like the ocean.
Blue like the word for
forget. Blue
like the color
like the collar
like the eyes
of someone new.

Previously published in The Legendary. 

Well, we did it. After several months of putting on our business pants and talking to professionals, applying for grants, sending emails, corralling volunteers and opening bank accounts, we did it. Most importantly, we partnered with a school, not only to provide us a venue, but a team to coach. So not only were we dark overlords of the arts organizing corner of the world, we were able to get directly involved with the young people we were trying to serve. It ultimately became the most important part of organizing for us, calling off our day jobs and sacrificing important rent money every week in order to teach these young kids everything we know about poetry and the art of performing it.

A little bit of backstory: Louder Than A Bomb is the world’s largest youth poetry festival, with roughly a hundred different Chicago-area schools participating each year, thousands of high school students, and dozens of poetry-related events. Louder Than A Bomb–LTAB for short–has spread across the country in recent years from Tulsa to Kalamazoo. It’s primarily a slam poetry competition–the word “slam” is known for sending poets and poetry appreciators across the world into a cringing hissy-fit. However, LTAB does an excellent job at building camaraderie, not just among youth teams, but among competing students. There’s an excellent documentary about Louder Than A Bomb that recently aired on OWN and will soon be available for purchase (educator copies have been available for a few years but cost a couple hundred dollars).

A little about me: I’m the same age as the kids in the documentary. I didn’t grow up in Chicago, but the youth poetry slam was a huge part of my life while I was in high school in Michigan. I loved writing poetry, and with my fledging background in theater and performance arts, the art form was perfect for me. I have little doubt that if it hadn’t been for slam poetry when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have a degree in poetry, nor doing something as crazy as organizing a massive regional poetry slam from the ground up.

A confession: I’ve never won a poetry slam. I didn’t win the Louder Than A Bomb College Indy slam that I took part in last year. I didn’t even place. Nor did I win the poetry slam in the Caribou Coffee of Decatur, MI when I was 16 and came in 6th (there were 12 other students, meaning I was decidedly average). And at the MSCI Poetry Slam, I came in 2nd to a poet who recited limericks while dancing around on stage. I’ve spent years rejecting slam poetry, for good reason–rules are arbritrary. You can’t assign a number to your reaction to a poem. Going over a three-minute time limit by just a few seconds can change your near-perfect score to place you dead last. There are many things that appear sloppy when read to oneself on a page that go over like Shakespeare if you have the performance chops. In short, there’s a lot about poetry slam that makes it a gimmick. Trying to be just a perfect-scoring slam poet has little to do with being an impressive performer, much less a good poet. But regardless, the slam has returned to be an important part of my life. Not only do I compete in them whenever I get the chance, but organizing and youth mentoring has practically become inseparable from my poetic process.

My team this year could best be described as an underdog. They had participated in LTAB the year before, but had done so poorly in their first bout that they didn’t even show up to the rest of their competition. The school itself was in a pretty rough neighborhood and only had students in grades 9-11, because it had only opened its doors a few years earlier. And the kids were new to slam poetry. Although a lot of them came in with notebooks already full of poems and a roster of favorite poetry books they’d read, the slam is a different kind of beast. Performance is equally as important, if not moreso, as the poetry. And getting up on stage and being judged on your presentation is horrifying to think about, especially if you’ve never done it before or tried it once and were mortified.

But Nate and I felt a connection with our students immediately. They responded to the readings and videos we brought in with insight beyond their years and wrote raw and insightful poems with imaginative wordplay. Winning didn’t seem to matter to us, already seasoned slam poets ourselves, when we knew that we would be able to make our kids badass poets. However, lingering in the back of our heads was the fear that when they got to the competition, they’d be ripped to shreds and never think of writing a poem again.

So the night of the regional competition finally came. The three other schools that came to the competition were clearly more practiced than our group of mostly freshmen and sophomores. I definitely don’t mean this in a negative way–the coaches obviously cared as much about their kids as we did, and the atmosphere in general at the competition seemed to be one of supportiveness. The students were cheering the loudest, even for competition who had outscored them. Nate and I sat on stage, keeping track of score and time with the best seats in the house.

Our team was not scoring well enough to proceed into the finals. Then, something crazy happened. All three of the other teams got massive time penalties, losing ~10 points a piece (and since scores in slam poetry usually linger between 7-10, it’s typical that one decimal point will be the decider between coming in 1st or 2nd). Ironically, back in the classroom days before, Nate and I were lecturing our students on how to stretch their poems to be longer since they were so short. Our team was the only one not to receive any time penalties–all of our poems were between 1 and 2 minutes long.

Our team won. After the initial victory cheers and high-fives, we felt kind of guilty, worried everyone would think we had rigged it. But in fact, we were just following the official rules that we’d provided to everyone well in advance. If we didn’t take into account the very rule regarding time penalties that we’d agreed on beforehand, then we would be actually throwing the game.

It’s an interesting moment in the paradigm of slam. There’s a saying in the competition originated by Bob Holman that goes, “The best poet always loses.” If you’re a good sport, usually it doesn’t hurt so bad to lose a slam. Another poet I know once told me, “A slam is good when it’s not about the competition, but the best show possible.” The slam should push you to be the best you can be both lyrically and in terms of delivery. Unlike a typical poetry reading, you’ll never find an audience member nodding off. The goal is to engage the audience. Well, the show definitely accomplished that, complete with a twist ending.

But was us winning really a good thing? We wanted our kids to learn from this experience, to push their poetic chops and grow some more. Would they get cocky? Would they get stomped on in the all-city competition and have their hearts broken? I guess these are all fears that Nate and I will have to do our best to confront. Then again, to me, the kids were already winners anyway. I know it’s cheesy, but it’s true, and I know first-hand that the only real way to do well in a slam is to make someone proud.

The slam never fails to fascinate me. But the youth slam is infinitely more interesting than the adult-circuit slam, where most people take the competition deadly seriously and strategize so much the art form becomes lost. Youth slam flourishes when its adults stay humble and community-oriented. It flourishes when the youth participating really start to care about poetry–something that, fifteen years ago, was reserved only for nerds and social outcasts. And regardless of whether or not the students stay on the path toward becoming a professional poet (most of them don’t), its benefits with community and confidence building are insurmountably important. Imagine if you were 14 and were able to get on a stage and share your strained relationship with your parents only to be met with wild applause, not to mention understanding and support from your fellow classmates. That type of safety and support is so important, especially at such a complicated age.

Giving teenagers a healthy outlet is so rewarding and beneficial, I can’t imagine more tangible benefits that poetry can give to the world. A poem isn’t going to overthrow the government any time soon, or end racism/sexism/oppression in general (although many attempt to do so). A poem can only affect those who experience it and believe in it. It can only go so far. But to a fledging community, it makes all the difference.

Now that myself and others who graduated high school under the first wave of youth poetry community building are old enough to start building that community ourselves, I’m excited to see what direction the form of slam continues in. Theoretically, it should move away from the competition a lot more and begin to manifest in more traditional poetry circuits–the traditional reading, the traditional poetry publication, etc. In Chicago, I think we’re pretty much there. Sure, there’s a competition aspect to slam poetry that many can and do approach with rigor–youths and adults alike. But the vast majority of us who are a part of slam are losers. We’ve never won a poetry slam, or only win because of flukes like time limit violations. But chances are, we’re not doing slam poetry to win in the first place. We’re doing it as a challenge to ourselves.

“Let’s write a new myth, one without fire.”

–Stevie Edwards, Good Grief

I met Stevie Edwards at an open mic a few years ago and since then I’ve been entranced by both her mind-blowing poetry and her undiluted spirit. Needless to say, I was totally amped when she gave me the okay to do a review of her forthcoming, first full-length book, Good Grief, which you can pre-order from Write Bloody now (it’s coming out in March!). Although I personally know Stevie, I’m going to put that aside so that you can understand just how badass this book is:

Stevie Edwards was one of a handful to win the Write Bloody Manuscript Contest this past summer, which in the poetry world, is the equivalent to being signed to Matador or Kill Rock Stars circa 1990. For those of you who aren’t nerdy enough to understand my indie music reference: basically, your career is set, because Write Bloody not only has an emphasis on publishing some of the best living poets today, but also on touring, requiring its artists to do 20 shows a year, which usually includes a round or two of well-paying colleges dying to get a WB Artist in its auditorium. Write Bloody has a reputation for publishing some of the most successful and iconic slam poets of the past 10 years (Buddy Wakefield, Anis Mojani, Beau Sia, Taylor Mali, among many others), which makes Good Grief all that more exciting to me–Edwards doesn’t give a shit about being a slam poet. Never has, and probably never will. Okay, okay–so admittedly, she’s actually terrified of slam poetry, but it’s pretty obvious the career boost that comes with being a successful competitive poet isn’t necessary for Edwards. Between being the editor-in-chief of Muzzle Magazine, and being one of four first-year Poetry MFA students at Cornell, she doesn’t need any sort of gimmick to promote her already fledging career.

With that in mind, the fact that she won this contest when pitted against a roster of  20-30 some odd slam giants should tell you just how groundbreaking the 24 year old’s work remains. Good Grief is a rarity among poetry books today. It doesn’t read like anything else I’ve read recently, from Pinsky to Wakefield–Edwards transcends that fueling debate that “spoken” or “page” poetry are genres at all, and what remains is an explosion of language that both defies academic standards while remaining consistently strong; each line and image, when isolated, remains flawless, obviously obsessed over to perfection, with an unmatched ability to penetrate readers and hit them in that poetry muscle that only flexes when in awe.  Louise Gluck once said that, when it comes to poetry, “Voice is not a pattern of speech. It’s a pattern of thought.” I have no idea if Stevie has ever heard this quote before, but her attention to structure and language makes it evident that she has mastered this concept.

Some of the overarching themes and ideas you may find in this book: how fucked up the world is, how fucked up you are, how fucked up every body else is, and how beautiful and singular pain is (an idea that harkens back to her chapbook, aptly titled Pain Needs to Remember). But even within these themes (which, I confess, aren’t necessarily a rarity in poetry today or yesterday), there is a diverse amount of subject matter and content that fuels a type of self-expression that is accessible while simultaneously constructing a personal narrative that is highly compelling and relevant, from being a 20-something in the digital age:

When there’s only condiments left in the fridge

and you join a free online dating service

so men will buy you dinner.

(from What I Mean By Ruin Is…)

to confrontations of death that harken back to Emily Dickinson in the best possible sense:

I wait.  There is a charge–

the drooling pool of regret

stinks the morning into blue

flowered sheets and yes,

I am in it [...]

(from Because I Could Not Belly Death)

There is a diversity and discipline in Edwards’ execution that is not often seen in poetry today. It’s like every poem in the book has been hammered into submission until it perfectly expresses its motivating ideas. It’s challenging, yet still accessible. Moreover, in Good Grief, nothing goes unscathed–the poems, the audience (that’s you), or the poet herself.

I wanted to make this review as objective as possible, but since I’ve already convinced you how badass this book is going to be, I do want to provide some personal insight into this book. I saw Stevie recently when she visited Chicago for the holidays, and we got a chance to talk a bit about the book, or, more accurately, to talk about the position of the “woman poet.” I was pleased when Stevie described her book as “poetry for women–but not just for women. For humans, but concerning the female experience.” I really feel like that sort of thing is important. Stevie is unafraid to confront the fact that she is, in fact, female, and that her poems will always address this aspect of her identity, sometimes critiquing it, or celebrating it, or admonishing it. But it’s bigger than that–she fearlessly confronts the complexities of identity (hers and others’) in all aspects:

I was fifteen when The Eminem Show came out—

a brace-faced, Michigan-poor scarecrow

of angst that the universe kept shitting on.

I horded cooking wine and Sylvia Plath,

pierced my own bellybutton with a sewing needle.

I was old enough to be angry at the litany

of nice things in the world that weren’t for me:

cars, college, Nikes, sit-down restaurants,

ballet lessons, vacations. You gave me an anthem

for being born into a life that comes complete

with a WIC application and carton Parliaments.

For practicing my alphabet at AA meetings

through the smoky depression of adults

bemoaning their childhoods and wondering

if and when it would be my turn to speak.

(from ”For Eminem”)

It would be unfair to dismiss Good Grief as a book of poetry for women. It stands a testament to poetry that has moved beyond that flawed simplicity. Edwards is unafraid to confront not just her own demons in her poetry, but everyone else’s as well, something rarely seen or executed in a way that doesn’t read as self-indulgent.  Instead, Edwards’ poetry reads more like an object being held up to a light, something illuminated for the first time to our eyes, and always dazzling, even when grotesque.

I came across this memoir at the bookstore one day, and I’m not sure what, exactly, made me want to pick it up. Maybe it was the front-cover blurb by Liz Phair, one of my all-time favorite singers. Or maybe it was Wareham’s sultry stare and slightly agape mouth. I certainly didn’t recognize him, or realize that the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna (whom I both enjoy) were related, but I bought it that day on impulse, and read through it rather quickly.

I often found myself at odds with Wareham throughout this book. He’s kind of a dick, which seems to be the only brand band frontmen come in. A good fraction of this book details his personal life, including his privileged upbringing and his years of cheating on his wife. Plus, I think he could have been helped a bit by a ghostwriter or a good editor, as there were a lot of very self-indulgent details that I didn’t care for… Really, dude? I don’t care about the relative dryness of the paella you ate in Spain. This isn’t too surprising to me, since Wareham also talks a lot about his process as a lyricist, and I’ve always found him to be a little lacking in that department (and which he seems to hold himself in very high regard to). But by the end of it, I felt like I “got it” a little bit more–the mundane repetition of details about touring and band member squabbles make so much of the book in such a cyclical sense because that’s so much of what being part of a band means.

That’s ultimately the great value of this book–a first-hand account of the “indie” music industry before that was an actual thing, how it’s changed over time, and the true strengths and weaknesses of independent vs. major record labels. There’s also plenty of personal drama, of which Wareham skirts the line of overstating. He consistently speaks about how unglamorous his “rockstar” lifestyle actually was, but includes every detail about the after parties and his love life from college to present, which I guess is probably more interesting to someone who cared about who this guy was before hearing about this book.

But regardless, Wareham’s music is incredible. I first got exposed to Galaxie 500 my freshmen year of college when I went through a giant phase of buying every used CD I could find of an independent release from the early 90′s (don’t worry, I cut that shit out, although I did find some really great albums that way, like the soundtrack to “Half-Cocked” and badass bands with frontwomen like Mecca Normal and Bettie Serveert). Galaxie 500′s songs sound a lot the same, but I specifically remember one night I couldn’t sleep, too upset over something to do with my boyfriend at the time, and so I sat up listening to their album On Fire over and over again. It was the only thing that helped.

It was particularly this song, “Decomposing Trees,” that really gets me. I learned from the book that this song is apparently written about one of Wareham’s friends with whom he dropped acid then subsequently took him into the woods to meet God. This song inspired a poem I wrote that night, aptly titled Bad Poem 500. Here’s a few stanzas:

I wonder what the world is made of
when all I want to know
are the names of children who don’t exist,
what’s the heartbeat that skips when I’m gone.
I bang my head on the floors and walls.
I turn up the volume.
I think I know my favorite song
but in two years I’ll probably forget it.

How do our voices become electronic impulses
transmitted through hand-held devices into the ear.
The reception cuts out. We stumble, we falter,
pulling apart, strings into threads in the wind.

The majority of the book focuses on the 12-year career of Luna, whom I was less familiar with. My old roommate got me exposed to them by showing me the documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me. I don’t remember most of the plot, but it’s filled with a lot of great live footage. Their music is great, and although I love Galaxie 500, Luna is definitely on another level artistically. Wareham details the differences between these two projects, mainly that when he started Galaxie 500 he was just a college student who could barely play guitar having fun with his friends, unsuspecting that it would be possible for such a thing to blow up into an album and tour within a year, while Luna was a more mature effort, for which it reaped the benefits by being ultimately more successful and possessing longevity.

I did find this book fascinating as someone who has been drawn to the era of music from which this emerges — when “indie” meant “signed to an independent label” rather than a money-making genre. Then, it contained a diverse range of sound without a singular unified style (it still does, in some respect, but has lost its original meaning; now a lot of our most lucrative acts get called “indie” while being signed to major labels). The bands didn’t make any money back then, but it’s good that during an explosion of commodification of music, some were more concerned about making a good album than making a big hit. In that sense, there are few more qualified than Wareham to provide insight into this pop culture phenomenon that today pervades major music conglomerates and record labels. Luckily the explosion of music pirating has hurt major labels more than bands like Luna and Galaxie 500, which have always mostly made their money off of live shows.

Today Wareham and former Luna bandmate/current wife, Britta Phillips, have put out a couple of cover albums together, which are also really good. You’ve probably heard their version of “Bonnie and Clyde” before, and after reading the book, I understand why it’s such an appropriate song for  this iconic couple to sing. Here’s a video of them singing the song together before their lecherous affair began:

Apparently during this particular performance, Wareham was too petrified to look at Phillips because he was so unable to control his attraction to her. Hey, she is pretty damn hot.

I give “Black Postcards” *** and recommend it to those who are interested in indie music or the music industry… if you’re not, you’ll probably not be able to get past Wareham’s ever-apparent self-indulgent style.

The Million Dollar Question: “Should I go art school?”

Speaking from experience and graduating from a horrible HORRIBLE school, I say if you INSIST on going to an art school only go if you’ve done your research on the school of your choice. Art Schools do have benefits to them I won’t lie, but truth be told the negative HEAVILY outweighs the positive in this day and age with more useless art schools that look nice but don’t have the quality info you need. … If you must take college courses then PLEASE do research and don’t make the same mistake I made by diving into debt and neglecting to look for other schools that have better information. Don’t be fooled by schools that say “THIS FAMOUS ANIMATOR WENT HERE!” because chances are the quality in the classes have dwindled since then. 1 Step forward and 2 steps back and falling down a flight of stairs. Unless you’re loaded then go for whatever school you want, I guess. …

I was immediately kind of incensed by this, as someone who went to art school and got a whole lot out of it. Art school is probably a waste for people like the OP, who apparently makes money off of doing anime commissions and mentions in his bio that he’s obsessed with “red pandas, squirrels, owls, sheep, racoons, foxes and crows.” Besides the point, I worked my ass off when I was in school and got a lot out of it. I graduated from Columbia College, which is notorious for its high drop-out rates–after my first semester, almost all of the friends I’d made out of the incoming freshmen pool had dropped out, and all that remained were a few friends I had who were upper-classmen. But also, a lot of them had good reasons, and one friend I’ve kept in touch with has gone on to be a successful comedian while I was toiling away over essays and portfolios.

I was mulling over things a bit working my real job at the bookstore. I have my college degree, and I am doing a lot–living in an art collective, teaching, starting a small press–but I’m not making a living off of it. Once school was over I made my living off of writing for a few months–as a freelance/ghostwriter, mostly writing for rich businessmen who wouldn’t even have cared to take a creative writing class in high school–and then one day I realized that I couldn’t afford the luxury of taking a client to court over rent money, and got myself saddled up at a sweet used bookstore. It’s nice, but I’m not using my degree in more than superficial ways to earn my income, and meanwhile I’ve watched my stress go through the roof and my social life dwindle as my time not at work is consumed by my “career” as a poet.

But the thing is, I still really like where I’m at. And unlike a lot of other recent college graduates in my position or worse, I don’t feel like the last four years of my life were a waste. But I’ve sacrificed a lot that I don’t think people are willing to sacrifice (my social life being only the tip of the iceberg where that’s concerned) in order to truly forge a successful career. One of my former clients, a business man whose memoir I was working on, once explained to me that you have to be crazy to try and start a business because you’d have to be insane to put something so intangible first in your life. I’m pretty sure he appropriated this knowledge from Steve Jobs, but I think it applies to a lot in life.

I especially think that it’s a question that weighs heavy on college-aged or soon-to-be-college-aged people these days, because you really have to care about whatever you’re studying. There’s little guarantee for a job at the end of it, but thousands upon thousands of dollars upon debt is typically a promise. But for me, there was never a question of what I really wanted to do in life, which was to be a writer–specifically, a poet. I realized this at a young age. And although it wasn’t always at the forefront of my life, at some point, long before college, I decided it would be what I live for.

It’s still very much an intangible thing to me. Some times I feel like I’m trying to skip across an imaginary pond, where the stepping stones are some times miles apart, and rarely straight ahead of me. I have no doubt that never changes for anyone. But I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and a large part of that is making the crazy and misguided decision to waste money at an art school (money no one will be seeing back in full for a very long time). College was certainly frustrating and trying, littered with professors I didn’t agree with or who were mean, and also curve balls that made it seem so frivolous to try to do anything with myself. But anyone who tells you that you don’t get anything out of studying what you’re passionate about is full of shit. It’s a tremendous privilege to be able to do so, and the benefits are something of which no monetary amount can equate.

But at the same time, not everyone can do it, just like my friends who dropped out their first semester, not because they weren’t talented or driven enough, but because they had health issues, or money issues, or family issues, or something bigger than themselves that they had to confront. Or maybe they realized they had made a poor decision. It’s definitely stupid to decide what school to go to because so-and-so-who’s-famous went there when so many of our greatest and most culturally innovative artists didn’t need to in the first place. One person I really admire, Patti Smith, couldn’t afford to go to art school, and almost became a school teacher. But last year, when someone asked her at a Q&A I was attending at Columbia, whether art school is a waste of time, she responded that we were incredibly lucky to be given the knowledge that we have, and that if she had been able to have that opportunity at our age, it would have helped her immensely.

Besides, all of these people we admire? They’re all, like, 30 years older than us. Or maybe only 10. Or maybe they’re younger than us but have more money. But, I figure, I got some time before I can officially announce my life a waste. You know, I think I’m doing pretty alright most days.