APOCRYPHAL ROAD CODE by Jared Randall

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Charles Bukowski’s bluebird

 On The Road  No Responses »
Jan 172012
 

Bukowski & his little bluebird. What gets me about this poem is his reference to “book sales in Europe.” Is this really what he cares about & can’t share with the world? If so, there’s not much to like about him, or, to grant distance between him & the poem, about the poem’s speaker. And who can’t he share his feelings with? Family & close friends? No, with the “whore and the bartender.” So, the bluebird is just more hiding, a sentimental red herring to keep the real questions from being asked: externally, perhaps, but internally especially. The poem, then, is the actual bluebird here, with its pretending to sing a sad song it never quite touches. It is this distance between the attempt & its target that is sense-able in the poem & that touches without expressing directly those feelings of grief. Language, the elusive bluebird, cannot ultimately encapsulate either grief or a bluebird. Both ultimately escape it…

My latest over at Montevidayo: Thinking, Words, and Filling the Spaces of the Subject’s Dead Cavities

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Sep 062011
 
Ontheroad-Kerouac-(theroll)-4876145

1) I have been thinking, about a lot of things. Thoughts, disembodied words, pale ghosts in chains, tied down, heavy though unlettered, each thought a death, single, unattached yet threaded, woven of many deaths, many names, many thinkers, oppositions [...] 

In such a state, I revisit old touchstones. From the Foreword of Cathy Park Hong’s Dance dance revolution:

hongcover My latest over at Montevidayo: Thinking, Words, and Filling the Spaces of the Subject’s Dead CavitiesThe language [in the Desert], while borrowing the inner structures of English Grammar, also borrows from existing and extinct English dialects. Here, new faces pour in and civilian accents morph so quickly that their accents betray who they talked to that day rather than their cultural roots. Fluency is also a matter of opinion. There is no tuning fork to one’s twang. (Hong, 19) (read more)

An interview with Cathy Park Hong is here: http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_cathy_park_hong?cmnt_all=1

New Post on Montevidayo: On Proliferation, a third helping (or, the pleasure of the search and the gesture)

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Aug 122011
 
Ontheroad-Kerouac-(theroll)-4876145
mole hand 300x225 New Post on Montevidayo: On Proliferation, a third helping (or, the pleasure of the search and the gesture)

Mole Hand

Maybe (and I’m sure it has been said before) poetry proliferates exactly because of and in spite of its interaction with silences, boundaries not really there except they are drawn by some hand or eye or ear, by perceived absence. I always think poetry describes absence by the presence of the missing, the chalkline often referenced in this webspace. Poetry exists alongside silence, the differences between persons, the necessity to communicate, the inability to speak, to know ahead of time what one means to say, to elaborate after the time has passed or in absence/death. (more)

My new post on Montevidayo: On Proliferation Part B, Having to do with 3.141592653589793238462643383279…

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Aug 062011
 
Ontheroad-Kerouac-(theroll)-4876145

Why to stop where we stop? Why break it off where it’s broken? To round up or down? By what standard? To what place? Pi to the millionth place and still going…this post a continuation that will only trail off after digression, implication, circulation…

There are many aspects to proliferation and its dampening, many faces it shows us in the mirror, but there appear two basic and opposing sides: the impulse to proliferate and the impulse to control. It is maybe a reflection of what we often call “the human condition” (the human dis-ease?) that we fail to notice proliferation until the impulse to prune takes hold. (read more)

My new post over at Montevidayo, On Proliferation 1.xxx

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Aug 022011
 
Ontheroad-Kerouac-(theroll)-4876145

Having just seen our fifth child into the world, my wife and I have some experience of proliferation:

1. The growth or production of cells by multiplication of parts

2. A rapid and often excessive spread or increase

Maybe not an exact description of having children, but when you’ve hit the number of five kids and look back at the relatively short time (that nevertheless feels like a long time, a profusion of times both alike and particulate), that short time it took to get from 2 adults to 7 human beings is (to me) proliferation. (read more)

Captured 2007 04 05 00049B My new post over at Montevidayo, On Proliferation 1.xxx

Rain Dogs Revisited

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May 242011
 
Captured 2009-09-30 00180(1)_guestbook_edit

wpid rain dogs2 Rain Dogs Revisited

[Tom Waits getting the tribute treatment, coming to a continent near you...]

(photo Anders Petersen)  Dates have been announced for an unforgettable evening as a stellar cast of singers and musicians revisit Tom Waits’ classic 1985 album Rain Dogs. The record has emerged as an object of fascination… 

http://www.tomwaits.com/news/article/144/Rain_Dogs_Revisited/  Shared via my6sense

The proof of my book cover (Apocryphal Road Code)

 On The Road  1 Response »
Aug 092010
 
Captured 2009-09-30 00180(1)_guestbook_edit

Update:

It’s here (or nearly so)! You can now pre-order Apocryphal Road Code at Salt Publishing.

Contact me at ragnbookshop[at]gmail[dot]com for publicity and review materials (complimentary PDF copy for internet reviews, print copy for print reviews). Sample available here.

Official release on December 1! If you have an event and want to spruce things up with some entertainment, I’m looking for reading opportunities in the Midwest region and beyond.

~ ~ ~

My debut book of poetry is due out in December from Salt Publishing. Having a book published can be a long process, but once the wheels start turning toward the release date it carries a certain amount of inherent excitement, even for one like me who doesn’t get outwardly excited about much of anything.

~ ~ ~

Here is the initial cover proof (click to see in full resolution):

screen 300x225 The proof of my book cover (Apocryphal Road Code)

There are a few things that will likely change before publication: I’m having them take my middle initial out of the by-line, and I don’t like this particular “J” for the start of my first name (a little wimpy, to me, not clearly an upper-case “J,” almost a lower-case “g,” though I really like how this typescript renders the rest of my name).

Very interested in your comments! Overall, I could not be happier with this cover. It’s striking, rather dark without being oppressive, and I think it will catch the eye of potential buyers on the web and in any bookstores I can convince to carry it. It just fits. Kudos to my publisher, Chris Hamilton-Emery at Salt, for his excellent designwork!

Notes on “The War for Drugs: Sarah Hill on how Juárez became the world’s deadliest city”

 Jungle Voices  1 Response »
Aug 062010
 
hobos, walking and talking down the road

Seems Detroit (and the Midwest in general) isn’t the only town to lose auto industry jobs. Mexico has also been hit, according to this article by Sarah Hill, and the consequences are at least as devastating.

~ ~ ~

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer[...] 

Ah, the trickle down of the past two decades (two, or more? is “this time” really so different? can it validly be removed from the Cold War? The World Wars? The Great Depression? Etc?). The economic stupidity, brought home by the fact that one of my recent students—a middle-aged woman who is now getting her degree after having long done the work of a college graduate—lost her job of some twenty years to Mexico’s cheaper labor.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned[...]

detroit2 300x187 Notes on The War for Drugs: Sarah Hill on how Juárez became the world’s deadliest city

They give, they take away, and they give to someone else only to take away again. Perennial cost-cutting combined with constant overproduction targeted at the folks whose wages you’ve cut and whose jobs you’ve shipped elsewhere in order to drive down the costs of the products you need those same folks to buy in order to keep the whole thing going so that you’re left peddling an ever-increasing glut of credit just to oil the gears equals unsustainability. Is this even debatable?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity[...]

Propping up unsustainability in a world about to crash anyway? Necessary insanity (supposedly). Excuse me if I don’t think it’s an objectively great system, despite the current lack of an obviously better one. Any other system about to emerge seems unlikely to do so apart from a violent upheaval that already probably cannot be stopped but only put off a while longer.

Does that sound absurd? I’m sure people thought the same before America’s Civil War. Before each of the World Wars. Voices no one wants to hear. That which you cannot read in the news but only sense somewhere between the headlines.

detroit 266x300 Notes on The War for Drugs: Sarah Hill on how Juárez became the world’s deadliest city

Surely some revelation is at hand[...]
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun[...]

When you set forces in motion…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
…equal and opposite reactions do occur.

 detroit7 300x209 Notes on The War for Drugs: Sarah Hill on how Juárez became the world’s deadliest city

[Link to Sarah Hill's Article] http://bostonreview.net/BR35.4/hill.php
 
Poetry quotes from W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” 

Hello world!

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 062009
 

Site Under Construction

Blog and fencepost sounding board of poet and freelancer, Jared Randall.

Jared Randall’s bio:

Jared Randall received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame in August 2009. During his time at Notre Dame, Randall enjoyed working on the staff of various journals. He served as a reader of slush piles for the Notre Dame Review, and as a copy editor, editorial assistant, and, most recently, as co-editor of The Bend 2009, the annual journal of poetry and prose from present students and former graduates of Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program. His poetry was nominated to represent Notre Dame in the 2009 AWP Intro Journals Award Contest and the 2009 Best New Poets Anthology, and he has twice been a finalist in New Millennium Writings’ semi-annual literary contest.

Randall’s first book of poetry, Apocryphal Road Code, is due out from Salt Publishing in 2010, and his work can also be read in Controlled Burn, Crucible, and the online journal Bull: Men’s Fiction.

Randall currently resides among family in Michigan, where urban sprawl cramps old farmhouses. When not writing about tourist attractions, roadside diners, aging factories, and the folk who frequent them, he makes his living as a substitute teacher and freelancer.