In Which We Highlight a Young Poet Of Some Merit And Accompany Her With Songs That Have Nothing to Do With Her Work

 

PLEDGE WEEK UPDATE AND FUN NEWS

OK, so pledge week has been going great so far. Thanks especially to my grandmother Beatrice, who dropped a cool $300. My grandma loves the blog a lot, you don’t have to contribute as much. That’s correct, we are looking for a contribution of $10, the price of one movie ticket. The series I have planned in which I fictionalize Danish’s college days will be worth that alone.

I mean, I came up with a title, I’m calling it Sloth. This will be huge.

Ever really wanted to be a part of something? Then you know why you need to join us in our quest to redefine everything that’s important and educate ourselves by Camille Paglia and Robert Creeley and [insert famous name of obvious but unclear importance].

Thanks also goes out to John Starks, the former New York Knicks player and a devoted reader of This Recording. He donated $20, which is twice what we asked for.

Also, we will randomly draw from our pledge-ites ONE LUCKY READER.

Yes.

This LUCKY READER will receive a full library composed of…

…wait for it…

BOOKS OF GIRLS WHO NO LONGER SPEAK TO US BUT WE ARE UNWILLING TO RETURN THEIR BOOKS!

Just imagine yourself reading such classics as

The soft-core Western porn that I received as a joke gift

John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany

A collection of poetry inscribed, “I hope you die inside a little soon”

Twelve (12) copies of To the Lighthouse, none of which I have read. Ladies, stop giving me that book.

You can be the LUCKY READER who wins this bounty.

Back to your regularly scheduled recording.

Elisa Gabbert’s chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available here.

We are always on the lookout for new talent, but in this case it was sort of dropped into our laps. Kitchen Press put out a wonderful chapbook of poems in February of this year. We liked the cover and it arrived at our home looking as cute as button but it was sitting next to my copy of the Isherwood diaries and so it accidentally fell out when I was grabbing Isherwood’s diaries in a fury trying to get another post done.

Once we picked this slender volume up, we were charmed to the core by its Blogpoems, and want to show you two of them. Enjoy them with your loved ones.

Blogging is a very angry and ultimately unsatisfying process, that is probably why we are having our pledge drive this week. Everything I write I want people to read and savor and maybe write little nice notes to me like, Sweet blog, and If it wasn’t for your blog, I’d probably go all Owen Wilson on everybody. Those notes would be in turn relayed to Molly, whose life would go from an ironic consideration of every single facet of 21st existence into a state of Dionysian joy. We can’t give Molly her childhood back, but we can blog.

“The Kiss” — Tristan Prettyman (mp3)

“Love, Love, Love” — Tristan Prettyman (mp3)

We’re particularly lucky that we never have to actually make sense, nor do we really have to caption photos if we don’t want to. It’s your choice to read or not read, and when you don’t, I send Danish e-mails about how he’s not living up to his responsibilities.

I had this great idea for a piece and I ran it by him in a very excited way recently.

He responded,

You have no clue what is going on in my life right now. Back off about the Kanye piece, or I won’t write it at all.

I was like, Whoa. Hold on. Dude.

It’s a dirty business, and no one understands this more than Elisa Gabbert. She blogs and these poems that constituted her wonderfully entertaining manuscript were first featured on the poet Chris Tonelli’s site, The Steinach Operation. We find they are the embodier of something rather alluring.

Blogpoems Are Ideas

by Elisa Gabbert

Time capsules are so retro I want to send one back
into the past, with a note on each item of kitsch–
some popular snack package or a poignant hat–
that says Totally you, or You go like this. Maybe
I could fool the reverse-archaeologists into thinking
I’m their future king. People were stupider then,
less evolved than us because they didn’t have to learn
how to overcome cancer or master the joystick.
They had simple concerns that didn’t require calculus
or metaphysics, like ridding mice from the pantry
and putting out occasional house fires. And yet,
as far as we’ve come, technology still lags behind
our desires. For instance science hasn’t solved
the problem of weather: how much of it there is
and how it is literally everywhere.

Gabbert at RealPoetik.

Elisa in Shampoo.

Blogpoem for April

by Elisa Gabbert

You can’t invent a color, only name it,
like how I just namd those contrails Benjamin
and then the sky behind them Benjamin II.
Now, retronymically, I refer to Ben as Ben I.
If he becomes famous, they’ll stop calling
clouds “clouds” and call them “nonlinear
clouds” or “pre-Benjamin” for clarity.
I can think about fame all day, and
compose apologies for my friends’ friends
who I’ve variously snubbed, write them
into e-mails with personalized P.S.’s:
P.S. My love for you extends forever
in all directions, or sometimes seems to.
P.S. I incude a swatch of Yves Klein blue.
P.S. If the sky is a piano store and clouds
are baby grands, we just hang out in the back
and listen to a Casiotone’s preprogrammeds.
P.S. This P.S. is my e-mail’s last will
and testament. It’s leaving everything
to you. P.S. Like my love for you,
like the infinite crystalline watchface of
God of the sky, my email will never die.

Buy Thanks for Sending the Engine here. It’s only five bucks, that is unbelievable to us.

“Evaporated” — Tristan Prettyman (mp3)

“Just Like Heaven” — Tristan Prettyman (mp3)

Prettyman’s Miranda July-esque website.

Prettyman

If you enjoy this post, forward it onto a loved one or sexual partner. We need all the unique IPs we can get.

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