Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
The other night I watched a documentary called “Desperate Man Blues” about a man who is an avid collector of old bluegrass and blues records. By old, I mean 78s from the 20s and 30s. He had a room called the record room where these records lined the walls–25 thousand records. Most of them he got by combing the back roads in his area of the country, driving to farms to ask people if they had any old records to sell. The man he had a great time collecting in the fifties, because every house was getting a television and they were dumping records out with the trash. One record he found–I wish I could think of the title–had been stored for decades under an old mattress, covered with dust in a box filled with otherwise worthless records. This one though, he believes to be the only existing copy of the recording. He played it on his record player, and boy did it sound great, a voice calling to you out of time like that.
The record room, with its wood paneling and floor-to-ceiling shelves of records–indistinguishable in their smoke-stained sleeves–reminded me of Jim Whitehead’s study, where I spent many a Fayetteville afternoon attempting to redeem poems I had written.
It also made me think of the obscure copies of lit mages that I have piled up in my office both at home and and work–most of the copies are freebies, or contributor copies. I love thinking that one day down the line somebody could read a poem of mine in a print journal, which I fear will become a thing of the past, years and years after I’m gone–maybe read it alound to themselves and being my voice back like the voices on those records. And as much as I love the work of making poems, it’s hard to think the poems that took so much of my energy rotting in a basement somewhere, just like I won’t let myself dwell too much on the inevitable DEEP sleep. I’m young, but, on my family tree, I just passed the halfway part. And the second half always moves faster than the first.
I’ve been a fan of Carla Bruni since a classmate at UMass-Amherst put a few tracks of hers on a mixtape– fine, fine, it was a mix-CD. If Mme. Bruni’s name sounds oddly familiar, that’s probably because she’s the first lady of France as well as an international pop-star/former model. That’s got to be one hell of a resume.
Before you wonder where the poetry is in all of this, the lyrics on her 2007 album “No Promises” are credited to the venerable W.B. Yeats, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare,W.H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, and Emily Dickinson.
Does it always work?
Well, what do you think? The chosen texts are undeniably rhythmic, if not inherently musical. Bruni’s voice itself has all the fidelity of an old record (which is actually quite cool, considering how clear and worked so many songs come off these days), and part of the allure of the whole collection is that someone visible on the international/political stage has written a sloppy love letter to verse. In any case, it was a cool find. Hope you enjoy it.
Linebreak contributor Daniel Nester examines the movement to rewrite classic rock songs with Christian lyrics in a new piece at The Morning News.
I am a former altar boy who went to 12 years of Catholic school. It would be safe these days to call me aggressively secular, even a heathen. Still, there is a childlike glee I get when I listen to ApologetiX, like I am doing something naughty. When I blast “I Love Apostle Paul,” the group’s take on Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” I feel that same transgression as when I heard Kiss’s “Plaster Caster” and found out who was doing the plastering and what was being castered, or when fake blood sprayed on my shirt at GWAR show in 1988.
