Banango Lit
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Banango Writers
Justin Carter
Rachel Hyman
Diana Salier
Matt Margo
Katey Metcalf
Thom James
Jackson Nieuwland
Guest Posts
Say, Poem by Adam Robinson
This book was out of print for a while but now it is back in print and I think you should buy a copy because. It. Is two poems. Or a lot more poems. Depending on how. You think about. It. One poem. Is called Say, Poem. It is like the _ of a poetry reading. It includes the between poem. Chit chat. I am interested. In structure. I like the idea of poetry books that are not just a group of poems but things that are connected systems in which each piece interacts and supports the others and they create some sort of narrative together. Or something. Say, Poem is that. The other poem. Is. Say, Joke. It is a series of failed jokes. I am interested in jokes. As literature. And I think that failed jokes are always funnier than successful ones so I was bound to like this poem. That is what this book. Is
- Jackson Nieuwland
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
I read The Autobiography Of Alice B Toklas last year. I read this this year. I watched Midnight In Paris last year. Every thing is different. Facebook is the new Paris. Jackson Nieuwland is the new Jackson Nieuwland. Jackson Pollock. I was named after my dad’s imaginary friend. There is nothing to say about this. I don’t have a lot to say but I have a lot to like. Everything is fantastic. Everything is fantastic. Erverything is fnatiastic. Everything is fantasitv. Everyhting is fantasticv. Everything is fantastic. Everything si tfantasitc. Everything is fantasitc. Everything isfancatastic, everveything is fantastic. eveyrhting is fance .,ra eveyr thinfs is scfantasitvc, eveurhting is fnatics evyerhting is fantics. Everythgin is fantastic
- Jackson Nieuwland
Jackson Nieuwland: Yo Mike is it cool if I interview you?
Mike Kitchell: totally
JN: Sweet I’ll just jump right in then.
This is Noah Cicero’s first book. It came out in 2003. Nine years ago. It is about the hours preceding the Iraq war. It’s political. Noah is a political dude, but he is also a man of the people. He writes about political and philosophical theory in terms of the lives of people from Youngstown, Ohio, who do drugs, go to strip clubs, and struggle to make enough money to survive and support their families. He makes it interesting. I met Noah earlier this year and he was nice to me. We talked about his imminent move to South Korea. He is now in South Korea teaching English. I have a South Korean friend who recently finished his military service. I doubt Noah and my friend will ever run into each other. Since The Human War, Noah has released five further books of fiction. He is highly relevant. I read this book topless because Noah has videos on youtube of him doing things topless.
I have read this essay five times now. It is important to me. I think that what David outlines here is the ideal way to interact with other human beings. I have not read a lot of David’s other work. I have attempted Infinite Jest twice. I enjoy that book but I never have the stamina to continue through to the end. I appreciate the conciseness of This Is Water. I am a fan of books with not much writing on each page. I think that all books should have pictures. I would love it if this book had illustrations of fish in it. I enjoyed reading this book sitting outside in the sun this morning
- Jackson Nieuwland
Ever by Blake Butler (read by Jackson Nieuwland)
Ever is Blake’s first book but it makes a lot more sense to me after reading Scorch Atlas (the book of stories that came after). Much of Blake’s work is set in the same world, a world that takes time to get used to. I believe Blake has improved with every book but that is not to say that this one is of low quality. This was one of the very first indie/alt/whatever-we’re-calling-it-now lit books that I read. The language was like nothing I’d read before and it carved out a space in my head where it still remains, never to be forgotten. The use of brackets (which doesn’t come across in my reading at all) still fascinates me. I realised during this rereading (now knowing more about Blake) was how personal this book is and how much more there is for me to discover in it.
Jordan Castro is a writer living in Ohio. He is the co-author of Cute (Thumbscrews Press, 2011) and author of Supercomputer (Deckfight Press, 2011) and the recently-published KADIAN (hiphiphooray press, 2012). Banango writer Jackson Nieuwland interviews him here.
Jackson: How is college so far?
Jordan: I like it.
How long have you been there now?
Since August 25, 2011.
What are you studying?
I currently don’t have a major and am enrolled in 7 Ideas That Shook The Universe, Media, Power and Culture, Understanding of Music, and Intro to Creative Writing.
Once I get my GPA up I think I’m going to major in English and maybe minor in Marketing.
Can you tell me a memorable anecdote about college?
Oh man. I don’t know what to type about. “Every night is Valentines, every day is Christmas” I guess.
The weekend before classes started I showed up at my friend’s house, high on Xanax, to a roomful of females and one male - my friends - eating a roast, sitting around a table, topless. We drank alcohol and ate Xanax and danced then went to a party and drank alcohol and ate Xanax and danced. I threw up ~15 minutes in the only bathroom in the house, ~10 minutes on the back porch, and ~10 minutes in my friend’s house after we left. One of my lesbian friends sat near me while I was throwing up the third time. I brushed my teeth. At some point, we had a threesome with my gay friend. I sucked a dick and had my dick sucked by a male for the first time in my life. After he came, my lesbian friend and I went upstairs and continued. I don’t remember many specifics except for her saying “You don’t want to be friends with anyone who cares about getting cum on their face.”
What do you hope to gain by going to college?
I currently view college as “like a job” - my parents pay for me to live and eat because I go to school. School also takes up less of my time than a job that would pay for my rent/food would, so I have more time to focus on my writing/music grind and other things.
I also like learning shit and want to get a degree.
Gotta be somewhere doing something I guess.
Do you think that writing will be your ‘career’?
Yes.
Do you think that music will be your ‘career’?
Yes.
Do you plan on doing any more acting?
Yes.
What was it like acting in the Shoplifting From American Apparel movie?
http://muumuuhouse.com/jc.fiction1.html
Can you tell me a memorable anecdote filming the movie that you haven’t mentioned online before?
While filming the trailer in Youngstown someone decided that we should skateboard in this abandoned building they came across while filming The Human War. I fell hard - like, really hard - and cut my knee on dirty glass. Mallory [Whitten] helped me hobble through to her car then drove me to Noah [Cicero]’s house.
Did acting have any similarities to writing or performing music?
Everything I ever do is different than anything I’ve ever done before that. Acting felt similar to writing/music/[life] in that it sometimes felt “meaningful,” like I was actively participating in the creation of something potentially sweet, while other times it just felt like a chore. I don’t know.
Can you describe your acting ‘method’?
At first I just let my anxiety and self-consciousness consume me until it was time to film then I’d just try my hardest not to worry about my how my face looked or whatever.
Eventually I focused on other things besides myself (the cause of my anxiety, etc) and just did what I needed to do.
The director told me that I could either say and do what Tao would do in [scene] and try to emulate Tao or I could be myself but just do and say things that Tao (the character) does and says, the former being harder and less believable because if I did that, I’d always be a person acting like another person, not a person, which is what the audience is supposed to view me as, or something.
You have a number of books forthcoming, some of which I believe have been ‘finished’ for a long period of time. Why has there been such a long wait between books being accepted and being published?
In my experience, certain publishers wait to publish certain manuscripts for a period of time for any number reasons.
In terms of my books, it’s because of the presses already having a certain number of books set for publication, needing time to layout/design/edit, and [other things].
Can you tell me a bit about each of the books?
if i really wanted to feel happy i’d feel happy already is a full-length poetry book forthcoming from Black Coffee Press in 2013. It was initially accepted for publication on February 21, 2011. Here are some links to poems previously published from the collection…
‘*‘
YOUNG AMERICANS is a full-length poetry book forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2013. It was initially accepted for publication sometime in late November, 2011. Here are some links to previously published work from the collection…
‘EXTREMELY HIGH IN DARK ASS ROOM‘
‘SELECTIONS FROM JORDAN CASTRO’S TWITTER, EDITED BY MALLORY WHITTEN’
What are the differences between them?
if i really wanted to feel happy i’d feel happy already currently contains 34 poems and 1 story.
YOUNG AMERICANS currently contains 55 poems, a ‘SHOUT OUTS’ page, selected tweets, and other things.
Have you continued working on them since they’ve been accepted?
Yes.
Are they being published in the order that they were written?
Yes.
Is the print edition of Supercomputer still happening?
Yes. It’s not finished yet. I’ve been editing the stories/collection ~1-3 hours a day recently.
What is the difference, to you, between writing prose and writing poetry?
Poetry, for me, has always been more of an internal experience, if that makes sense. Like, as opposed to prose, where I might be writing about something that happened between more than one person - a dialogue, sex, an observation - most of my poetry is just like, me, my brain, freaking out inside of itself, or something, generally speaking.
Either way, the fundamental desire is to create something. To remember something, to reflect on or think about something to a certain degree, to relate something, to work my thoughts out in a manner that feels like I’m a functioning human being.
Does one of them come more naturally?
I don’t think one comes more ‘naturally’ than the other. I don’t know if anything ‘comes’ ‘naturally’ to me or anyone except maybe everything, or something, maybe. I don’t know.
To me, everything I do is ‘natural’ or nothing I do is ‘natural.’ It seems impossible to me to discern what ‘natural’ is or means in the context of writing poetry and prose.
Do you plan on/have you begun writing a novel?
In 2010 I wrote ~10k words thinking it’d be my novel then deleted it.
In 2011, I wrote ~20k words thinking it’d be my novel then deleted it.
I currently have ~35 words written from late 2011-[now] of a working outline of what I currently think my novel is going to be.
Can you rank poetry, short fiction, novels, and non-fiction by the amount of time you spend reading them?
Poetry, Short Fiction, Non-Fiction, Novel
Is everything you write based on your life/’true’?
Though much of what I write is based on my life, I tend to view all writing largely as fiction, via one’s (invariably subjective) perception affecting words on paper, etc, and don’t feel confident in saying that the way I remember things is the way they ‘actually’ were.
I edit things in a certain manner, ‘from an artistic viewpoint,’ that may or may not affect the ‘truth’ of the thoughts/words/actions in my writing, even if it’s based on something that ‘actually’ happened.
What is the difference between a piece you would submit to a literary magazine and a piece you would submit to somewhere like Bulk Culture?
I don’t really submit things to literary magazines anymore unless I’m asked, in which case I’ll usually send poetry, prose, or an essay or something explicitly dealing with something re literature.
For websites like Thought Catalog or Bulk Culture, I tend to write/send more journalistic-type writing, I think.
What is the difference between Bulk Culture and Thought Catalog?
I encourage you to see/decide for yourself.
In terms of me and what I’ve discerned via my involvement with both, Thought Catalog and Bulk Culture are two entirely different websites with different goals, audiences, and brands. The only thing they have in common, to me, is that I like both of them and I like a lot of people who write for them. They also both want to monetize and reach out to as large an audience as possible, I think, without compromising a certain aspect of ‘themselves,’ or something, maybe.
When you read KADIAN now do you agree with the statements you expressed in the poems?
I don’t think I agree or disagree with anything I’ve written in the past. I’m constantly assessing/reassessing myself and don’t view much of what I think/write/do as a ‘way of thinking/writing/being’ or with any sense of permanence in general.
I don’t really think there is much to agree or disagree with in KADIAN, to me, as none of the sentences have periods at the end (except for the last line of last poem, which was intentional and which I still agree with), and weren’t written with the intention of expressing any sense of long-term permanency, ‘truth,’ or anything like that, just the thoughts/feelings/actions of a moment, of a collection of moments, or whatever, that I want to document in a certain manner for certain reasons. ‘Agreeing with’ or ‘Disagreeing with’ the sentiments in KADIAN, to me, is irrelevant - they don’t exist to prove a point; they ‘simply’ exist. The poems in the collection frequently contradict one another. They’re like an assortment of recipes for dealing with the person you’ve become. Excerpts of existential despair and self-deprecation/doubt. If a friend said “I had a fucking shitty day today” or “I want to do something different with my life,” it wouldn’t make sense to agree or disagree with him/her. That’s how I view my poetry. I don’t know.
Are the poems in KADIAN your most recent poems?
No - I write poetry daily. The poems in KADIAN are my most recently published poems though.
Why did you choose KADIAN as the title?
I the poems in KADIAN on a couch in my friends’ living room in Kent after ingesting various quantities of Kadian, Adderall, marijuana, and alcohol. My friends were in the basement playing music. I was alone, in the fetal position, writing poems on the Notepad app on my phone rapidly for ~45-60 minutes. I think I wrote ~30 poems originally then cut the collection down to 12. I’m using some of the other poems in other collections.
Many things came out on Valentine’s Day 2012. Most of them will be reviewed here. Some of the bigger things will be given due consideration and reviewed at a later point. Read on.
OKSTUPID by Walter Mackey
reviewed by Justin Carter
Walter Mackey wrote a story about love for Valentines Day. It is about Sarah and Greg. They meet through OkCupid. They are both depressed. Greg is in an emo band. They talk on AIM. They meet at a library. They discuss things like ‘being straight edge’ and ‘being vegan’ and ‘Skype sex’. The story is told in a very deadpan way. It reminds me of Tao Lin sometimes. It uses details to draw emotion out of the characters and the story.
I think the story here is interesting. I think the writing might be a little rough in spots but there is clearly a lot of emotion in the story. I think that the emotion and the way that Walter pays attention to small details and uses them to build up the characters is good. I feel like you should read this. I feel like Walter Mackey has a good grasp on human emotion. I am unsure how to comment on the Paul Cunningham controversy surrounding Walter because I have never read Zachary German. I don’t know. There is a gchat excerpt from Spencer Madsen and Stacey Teague at the beginning of this ebook and I find that interesting.
Pretty Flowers by Gabby Gabby
reviewed by Rachel Hyman
Gabby Gabby wrote a chapbook called “Pretty Flowers.” Pretty Flowers blows the Black Dot Series out of the water. True to its name, the words in the chapbook are pretty. They’re also conversational, and evocative, and sweet. I read the chapbook and imagined Gabby Gabby sitting on her bed, or maybe by a window, with a faint smile, speaking half to me and half to whatever’s out there. Pretty Flowers is wry but quiet in its beauty.
She says:
I don’t think I really like state fairs but I like the idea of being the type of person that likes state fairs.
I think if I tried hard enough I could really be that person.
She speaks of buying a corn dog just to hold it at the top of a Ferris wheel.
She moves from state fairs to the 50 states, wondering if the people on one side of Michigan miss the people on the other side.
She thinks about the square states in the Midwest, and how she would spend her whole life trying to be a circle if she lived in one of those square states.
She shows us, with a picture, how Virginia slopes upward or downward, depending on your point of view.
In one of the last few lines, she admits, “Maybe I am an optimist. At least for today.”
Reading Pretty Flowers makes me optimistic for the future of alt lit. It’s casually pretty, effortlessly touching, without being overly quaint or twee. Highly recommended.
Love Stories/Hate Stories by Russ Woods and Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland
I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while
because Russ Woods has been one of my favorite poets for a while.
Once I made a facebook status update about how awesome Russ Woods is.
I don’t know anything about Brett Elizabeth Jenkins.
The concept is simple:
Russ wrote love stories
and Brett wrote hate stories.
These stories are in the form of poems.
These poems are my favorite type of poems.
They are short.
They are witty.
They are fun.
They are funny.
They explore the concept of the joke as poetry, which I am very interested in (the joke form is just begging to be utilized in poetry, right? Especially since failed jokes are always funnier than successful ones, right? (shout out to Adam Robinson)).
They are spare/minimalistic.
They are beautifully balanced (I love a poem that uses line breaks well like so many of these do) (the collection as a whole is also really well balanced because the two writers play off each other wonderfully. Maybe a few poems could have been cut though because a few jokes/references were recycled).
They are not obvious.
They are well laid out.
They are making me write a review that is so overwhelming positive that I want to think of a few detractors to throw in to make it seem more balanced…
Ummmmmmm
…
Nah
Everything is fantastic
Kimbra by Zack Schuster
reviewed by B. Barrera
B. Barrera attends an MFA program in fiction at a university in America
“Love is like a silhouette in dreams.”
When Kimbra sings this line in a hot pink dress in the official Youtube video, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Zack Schuster, in his story Kimbra, however, manages to turn this idea into something palpable in a relationship between two characters. This story is made up of tiny moments, wiping a stray hair from across the face of a beloved, feeling the cold on bare feet, and these tiny, stolen moments are all this couple has to work with as a relationship. They seem to be “Cameo Lovers,” able to share only night time with each other until one of them is pulled away from their bed into the unremarkable realm of the awake. There does seem to be something else hinted at about their relationship. At one point the man leaves his sleeping lover voluntarily for—what? an affair perhaps? With such sparse prose it’s difficult to really tell what else is at the heart of their hurt, besides just never being awake at the same time, but there is definitely something deeper at work.
The prose, while sparing, is lovely. The atmosphere of Kimbra is wistful and romantic, everything colored in black and white. The warm, dark fullness of his lover’s hair and their bed together vs. the cold room, the man leaving the bed in his “tidy-whities,” a color palette worthy of Kimbra’s own signature look. And the setting where the lovers finally meet, awake at the same time when their love becomes something real and not just a “silhouette” is suitably colored “brown.” The use of Kimbra lyrics in between sections of prose is lovely, the black-and-white atmosphere of the silhouette love the characters have is perfectly heartbreaking, I just wish there had been a few more “brown” moments with the characters interacting, that they had really “opened up [their] heart to me,” instead of kept me at a distance.
I’m going to fuck. And that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb by Pancho Espinosa
reviewed by Walter Mackey
If there is one thing Pancho Espinoza is good at, it is creating imagery. This little collection of poems completely blew me away when it comes to translating words into images in my fried little brain. From lines like ‘I’m like a Windows ‘98 screensaver at [night]’ to ‘I know there’s people lined up outside of Best Buy right now’—you really get a sense of how Pancho’s words form these beautiful pictures in your brain that you would have probably not even thought of if you hadn’t read this collection entitled ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb’.
I thought it was really funny that Beach Sloth in his review decided to do some further research to find out if there was actually a place called ‘Fuck’. However, he states that ‘The title is incorrect. There is no place with the name ‘Fuck’. A town in Austria is called ‘Fucking’. Unsurprisingly that small town in rural Austria has a serious problem with people stealing its signs’ [Beachy Beachy Sloth Sloth 2012]. Nevertheless, I think there should be a place called ‘fuck’. I mean, in my province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, there is a place called ‘Dildo’. Yeah, I’m serious. Look it up. In the excerpt from the Dildo, Newfoundland wiki page, I think it’s really funny that it states ‘It is located on the southeastern Dildo Arm of Trinity Bay about 60 kilometres west of St. John’s’ [Wikipedia 2012]. I mean, I think ‘Dildo Arm’ just sounds a Hell of a lot worst than Dildo. Right? Upon hearing Dildo Arm, I just recall my first experience to a sex shop and being emotionally damaged for weeks.
The poem ‘yes, I am mulder and this is scully’ really reminds me of a Steve Roggenbuck poem. I can really picture Steve shouting in his Mr. Bean voice ‘i am like a retarded seven-year-old when I am with you’. Also, I think the poem at the end of this collection is Spanish. However, I don’t effing know because I’m from Canada and French is my second language. I’ll have to ask Jacob Steinberg about this because I don’t know if I could even have a conversation with Luna Miguel. I always click on the ‘view translation’ links on her statuses and they always appear in really broken English.
Overall, this was a really great collection. I felt depressed after reading most of these poems but I feel that is okay. I am depressed. I am really content with being depressed. It gives me character. It’s part of my ‘brand’. Being ‘depressed’ is totally ‘in’ these days. Feeling depressed? Pop a Xanax. Feeling depressed? Write a poem. Feeling severely depressed? Read ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place, you little asshole and not a verb’.
Oh, also, Pancho Espinoza, I think your writing is incredible and your blog is even more perfect. I luv u, lil bb.
the moon looks red and the sky looks black by Keegan Crawford
reviewed by Justin Carter
Keegan Crawford completes the trifecta of the new emerging voices that I am about to, at this moment, dub the “Screaming Seahorsers.” (The others are Walter Mackey and Gabby Gabby). Keegan’s v-day release is in the form of these tiny little vignettes. The “forward” and “back” links in the collection function as part of the text also. There is a self-awareness in Keegan’s writing that I really like. Here is an example:
Sometimes I wonder if wearing enough black will make me completely invisible, and then I think about how that’s really dumb.
Every piece in this feels like it has strong emotions, but the language is very concrete, for the most part. The emotion in the text comes more from how the reader interprets the writing than from the writing itself. I hope that makes sense. Keegan shows very good control over the language of these pieces. They are easy to understand. Here is another example from the text:
Slow song and I hold you and you put your head on my shoulder and we kiss by a tree and try to find some other place to go but we go home instead and a couple years go by and I still have the ticket in a box in my closet and I still kiss you the same way.
Whereas, I think, other writers in the ‘alt lit’ scene would have a tendency to try to focus more on how these characters are feeling, Keegan gives us the details. He uses language that makes the details clear and forces the reader to understand perfectly what he is trying to say.
*****
Other things that dropped on Valentine’s Day include:
-NAP Issue 2.3
-Pank Issue 7.2
-UP Issue 2
-i’m not a slut, i’m a romantic by Jacob Steinberg (paypal jrs542@nyu.edu $1)
The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail (Mud Luscious Press) by Gregory Sherl
