POETRY DEBATE
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 015 // SEPTEMBER 21, 2024
CHARLIE ZACKS:
The smartest dressed man in the room wears a zoot suit. He says something or another about the end of art.
Art. It used to be about beauty. Now… now it’s all about
Something else entirely.
Ugliness maybe. Or
Policing.
The police are in the room. They aren’t dressed as smart as the smartest dressed man, but they have big guts and guns, so whatever they say, it will be listened to.
Art used to have meaning to it. Now all these kids
All these damn kids
Want to make art about nothing.
Boom. He said it. What we’ve all been thinking.
Right there.
Put it all out there.
Ha. It looks funny like that. All curled up in a ball.
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU:
It’s funny, or I don’t know if it’s funny, nothing is funny, but when I read the first line there, the words “The smartest dressed man…”, because I’m from Sweden, you know, my mind imagines a man that is dressed, you know, in a really intelligent way, like IQ-wise, like, maybe that’s what it means, but it sounds ridiculous, you know, to dress like that, it sounds dumb, but then again i don’t really know what a zoot suit is, you know, and that’s my take on this poetry debate. Nah, just kidding. Nothing is funny. Girls own the void and nothing is funny, you know, but yeah speaking of the police… I once wrote this poem, which I included in my first novel, you know, because poems belong in novels and vice versa, you know, and it was called “good manners are sexy”, I wouldn’t call the poem that today, like, over my dead body, but this was like ages ago, this poem is like… the dead sea scrolls, or something, the dead sea scrolls… yeah, imagine them like deep fried over my dead body or something, I don’t know, I don’t know if my reference library resonates with you, but anyway. Where was I? Yeah, right. This ancient poem, let’s call it “good manners are redacted”, it goes like this:
a cop came in
at work
and said
i am a cop
i have to get up
one floor
and get a view
of downtown
And yeah, like, you know, nothing is funny. And that’s why irony is such a blessing and a curse, I don’t know, you know. To paraphrase that quote from Björk, like, I don’t know, maybe you should let poets lie to you. I can only speak for myself, but I want some of the poets to lie to me, you know, because that’s what I deserve.
CHARLIE ZACKS:
The smartest dressed man in the room is starting a magazine.
It’s about
Nothing,
he says with a smile and a puff of a cigarette.
Nothing. Ha. The crowd goes wild, but he’s alone.
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU:
Yeah, nothing is funny, right, and that’s why we love it? I don’t know, you know, I have to ask my three year old daughter, but yeah, I did this other unforgivable thing this other time (I wrote a poem), and that poem had a central line, I’m trying to remember it now, as we speak, it was about the fact that in Sweden (and let me stress this: I hate Sweden), in 2001, when Haneke's adaption of Jelinek's “The Piano Teacher” came out I was furious. I was nine years old and I went fucking mental you know. About what, you may wonder? Let’s decide that you wonder that, yeah, well it had nothing to do with the movie's age limit in swedish cinemas (you had to be 15 years old), I had my way around those things, as a nine year old I looked much older than I do today actually, no it had to do with the swedish translation of the movie's title. In Sweden, and let me remind you that this is a country that gave Jelinek 984433,60 american dollar in 2004 (which is why I love Sweden, I don’t remember the name of the prize though), but yeah, in Sweden they changed the name of the movie “The Piano Teacher” to “The Pianist”1 and that made me, as a nine year old literalist from Stockholm, furious. It destroyed my childhood in a more devastating way than getting cancer did, you know, but then again, I didn’t get cancer until my teens you know, and my teens had nothing to do with my childhood. Where was I? Yeah, that’s my take on the poetry debate, and here is a new poem, which is like an event that looks like a thought:
when Erika Kohut reprimands
one of her piano students
and says "exactly there,
the tone changed to irony"
I felt that,
I have a tattoo under the ribs
on the right side,
a motif from The Piano Teacher
that I can neither explain
nor justify
nor problematize
or contextualize,
I should have tattooed Erika Kohut's knife
in my heart instead
CHARLIE ZACKS:
Big guys with big muscles are all oiled up and flexing.
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU:
And this is why I’m giving this year's Nobel Prize to Megan Boyle for long and faithful service, you know. She can share it with Garielle Lutz and Michèle Bernstein. I don’t know how much money it is these days, you know, inflation and so on, but you get some nice food and you get to speak to the king and queen about iconoclastic perceptions. You should check out some early songs by The Tough Alliance, by the way, it would do you good. I really, really miss those guys. And you should read that book by Perec with like postcards that are made up, but still very generic and boring. I love that book with those crappy, lame postcards. They pull the pants down on the imagination, you know. Fantasy always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. If it’s true (and it has to be), what Harmony Korine (whose surname I made my daughters first name, inspired by the confusing, worthless swedish translation of Haneke's Jelinek-adaption) said, that IShowSpeed is, you know, the new Tarkovsky, and it has to be true, you know, because he wouldn’t lie to us, right? He’s not a poet right? If that’s true, then, I don’t know, maybe Oskar Korsár is the new Lawrence? I’m not happy, you know, before the whole world shares the same reference library. Give peace a chance-style, you know. No one is free until everyone is free and part of the same, big, glittering inside joke. Let’s mutilate that last sentence so it looks like, what’s it called, yeah, a poem, that’s it:
no one is free
until everyone is free
and part of the same,
big, glittering inside joke
in swedish, sweet and death
are almost the same thing
fantasy always repeats itself,
first as irony, then as slapstick
then as tragedy, I guess, I don’t know
1. When I was nine years old I was a confused literarist, immature one could say, I didn’t know that Jelinek's book in the original from 1983 was called “Die Klavierspielerin”, I didn’t know that the german-french movie adaptation's original title was “La Pianiste”, years later I discovered that “The Pianist” is actually a more accurate translation of the movie’s title than “The Piano Teacher”, it was the fact that the Swedish version of the book was called “Pianolärarinnan” that fucked me up, it really fucked me up, but that’s what your supposed to be when your nine years old, I guess, fucked up.
maxwell norman’s album of the week
cindy lee-diamond jubilee (only available on YouTube and a Geocities link) [2024]
You’re walking into a diner late at night, on some dust-fucked road connecting one shell of a town to another. It’s been hours of driving, and the world beyond the restaurant’s warm glow could be a dream or a nightmare, teeming with starlight and monsters. This album can cocoon you in that diner, in a two-hour wash of surreal pop and rock that could have been beamed in from another planet or dug up from our own. Melodies dance on phantom feet and Pat Flegel’s lilting croon spins yarns of love found, lost, and decayed. An island of uncanny comfort in the night’s black ocean. Don’t worry too much about individual songs; just start from the beginning and float into the (dare I say?) Lynchian expanse of the Diamond Jubilee. One of this year’s best.
get hip
STIMULANT READING EVENT. LE FRIGO VERT. SUNDAY SEP 22 @ 7:30PM. FREE/PWYC.
Read “ROMANIANS” and “GIVE ME SOMETHING SO I STOP SHRIEKING” by Max Shoham.
Read “The dangers of working for fruit companies…” by Johnny Carter.
Purchase a copy of Becoming Press’ (Berlin) Issue Two: Becoming-ÊT/RE.
Get a copy of Ethics 02 by Ethics (Brooklyn) featuring work from Amalia Mairet, Charlie Zacks, Dana Dawud, and more.