Basic Programming - Megan Burns (Lavender Ink)

Today's book of poetry:
Basic Programming.  Megan Burns.  Lavender Ink.  New Orleans, Louisiana.  2018.

"there is no fairness in our world/ only lessons

that teach us how to be."

                                                                                                    from "200 Next Endings"

Megan Burns is operating at a level that Today's book of poetry is unfamiliar with.  Somehow Today's book of poetry has arrived in 2019 with nearly no computer skills or knowledge.  Burns knows everything and has decided to try and write new code for us all.

Burns loves Bob Dylan like a Saint, and shouldn't we all.  She lists thirty-four different Dylan tracks at various time throughout Basic Programming.  And then there's the Wuthering Heights influence, Emily Bronte gets her say but Megan Burns does not stop there either.  Burns is attempting to write a new code that will move us forward, help us understand.

Burns lists an entire troop of influences from Eknath Easwaran's translation of The Bhagavad Gita to Kathy Acker & McKenie Wark's I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995-1996.  There are a couple of dozen more.  

What does it all mean?  It means Megan Burns knows where she wants to take the reader and her poems and she is writing the code to do it through her poems.  The resulting rocket ship beauties soar.

60 NEXT FETISH

always being first to text (giving), attention whore (everything to do with it), believing

universe brought us together for special purpose (everything to do with it), confusing

healthy, safe partners for boring (everything to do with it), consult Tarot cards for advice

(everything to do with it), days of being ignored (receiving), dissecting text messages for

subtext (giving), empty (everything to do with it), exchanging sexual pictures of videos w/

a stranger (everything to do with it), fantasize future w/ lover (giving), ignoring intuition

about partner choice (giving), imagining perfect sexual scenarios w/ strangers (giving),

insert sexual language or flirt as a wall (everything to do with it), loving people who can't

love back (giving), mistaking anxiety for love (everything to do with it), mistaking coldness,

emotional unavailability or general disinterest for mysterious or deep unrequited need

other can't express (everything to do with it), playing role of perky, eccentric girl who

has no deep intentions (giving), pretending not to care (giving), not caring (everything to

do with it), rehash all details of minor interactions w/ friends for subliminal clues missed

(everything to do with it), relishing in rejection (receiving), scared (everything to do with

it), sex one time w/ a stranger (receiving), texts t/o day w/ strangers who want to meet for

sex (giving), waiting for others to make contact (receiving), unable to quell compulsion to

make contact to see how long until s/he responds (everything to do with it), unprotected

sex (receiving), ways of a devil sleeping in a lion's den (everything to do with it)

💫💫💫

Make no mistake, there were aspects of Basic Programming that confused the hell out of Today's book of poetry.  Our younger staff laughed, laughed, laughed.   They dialed into Megan Burns opus like they were laser sighted.

Of course it didn't matter because Megan Burns' Basic Programming delighted Today's book of poetry right down to our toes.  Electricity, like the kind that must flow in Megan Burns veins, is a rare commodity.

Today's book of poetry was listening to Laura Nyro in the office this morning.  That means everyone was listening to Laura this morning.  And somehow that seemed a good fit.  Nyro was genius personified, so ahead of her time that her work is timely now, fifty years later.  

Today's book of poetry is in a conundrum with Megan Burns name.  You regular readers of Today's book of poetry will recognize that "burns" is the verb of choice when describing poetry we like.  We threw it around the office, "Burns burns!"  But it was unsatisfactory.  We love, love, love Megan Burns last name and won't be deterred.  Burns does exactly that, Megan Burns burns.  

Electric and splendid.

160 GOSUB</SEDUCTION LETTER/>

shaped & unshaped by those who first care take

how did you learn a language of skin

I have irrepressible ideas about what I want

limits to love           we mean time and attention

learning to become what can be trusted

watch our world burn

don't corpse me     I eat dead   she said men    but delirament

ate her whole headed   I came back fiery sorry

for fallout from my fury

tell me what position you want me to take

sometimes I can't be patient or gentle    I need you

in my mouth/ my mouth needs to say things I can't choke back

how to screw an epistolary form into an object

poetry is the perfect lover / hardly anyone wants it

sounds symphony inside me

falling out of mouth / tongues move to produce

delitescent / patter of need / after he cums in my mouth

can't catch breath / taken by surprise / against other people

press your palms into me / do you know / how seductive timing is /

to take slowly what we want to coalesce

life always acting like that riddle

with corn, chicken and a fox

boating across and you can only carry two

I'm never good enough for myself

life breaks heart / daily

fighting for smallest / peace   count me in          whole

fucking haul / slippage, a state I solid against

that is what love promises

let me know what I am

when it all goes dark

💫💫💫

May 1, and we're expecting either snow or an ice-storm.  The rivers that run through Ottawa are over-flowing their banks.  The weather Gods are making an example out of us.  In a city that hasn't seen a tornado in all my 62 years, we had five in one day last year.  This year, for the second time in the last three years we are having "a 100 year event" flood.

The Today's book of poetry offices are safe and on high ground.  Unless the Rideau River overflows and then we'll have bigger problems.  All our staff are safe and dry.  And today Megan Burns brought down the house with her monster Basic Programming.  Another possible one hundred year event.

Basic Programming is an infectious read, once Burns gets into your system you want more.  Just like Laura Nyro.

And don't even get us started on the sexual firestorm Burns can bring down on the house.

CODA

once I ask Kali to consume us

mouth shaped to nothing

storied as any wuthering height

a traveling rogue runs off with a golden prize

a poet wakes up and pulls a world along beside her

touch this stone/ carved names are remembered

words to soothe/ lullaby hours

look, sit where you are to watch stories unfold

look, deeply enough until love

do you know how to brave

do you know about really cracking your heart open

to receive/ what are you afraid of/ stories will always call us back

you have nothing/ to fear/ nothing/ but fear/ to fear/ you/ nothing/ you/ love/ everything

how we are blind to a reciprocity of love as we narrow on one to one/ and forget that it

vibrates between all of us/ what you put out is your world/ a world

our world a mirror/two sided/flipped one way: good/evil:love/hate/hate:despair/joy: con-

flict/ resolution:blessings/ curse: throw them both away

throw them both away, a toss towards never being chained down again

one line of code is all it takes to run a completely different program/poetry is a constant

reaching / an only truth that matters

in coming generation: you must learn to live without these shackles

if you let go, what fills void: out universe abhors absolutes & is absolute

what fills is beyond a container

beyond worded

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry gets very excited when poetry this fine scampers through our lives.  Emily Bronte told me to tell you to "buy this book."

Well, have you ever known Emily to be wrong?

Megan Burns is welcome here at Today's book of poetry any time.  This poet burns, burns, burns.

Megan Burns

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She also hosts the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans and is the co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com). She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has four books, Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013), Commitment (2015), and Basic Programming (2018), published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: Dollbaby (Horseless Press, 2013) and i always wanted to start over (Nous-Zot Press, 2014). Horse Less Press released her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me, in 2016.

"Velocity" by Megan Burns (Poem Reel 2)

Video: Lisa Pasold

lavenderink.org 

753

       DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

This Will Be Good - Mallory Tater (Book*hug)

Today's book of poetry:
This Will Be Good.  Mallory Tater.  Book*hug.  Toronto, Ontario.  2018.

This Will Be Good by Mallory Tater could be a mystery, will our heroine survive the self-loathing of her childhood?  It could easily be a romance because Today's book of poetry dropped his jaw and a little of his heart when we started to see just how Tater navigated.

It is so hard for children to become the children of their parents dreams, or their own, hard for young people period.  It's a complicated world and of course you all know that.  This Will Be Good could be seen as Tater's coming to terms with herself, big deal...

                                                                                        but there's magic in these here poems.

The sheer number of young people, women and men and the rest, who keep journals and write poems, it is entirely overwhelming.  And for the most part justifiably not for public consumption for personal and qualitative reasons.  

But Mallory Tater has panache.  There are moments of pure electric joy in these sad poems.  These are poems of such tender honesty that you will want to reach out to the young people in your lives.

Tater goes bone deep.

All Things Wasted

Point Roberts, WA

Wind blows ocean into our yard

and Grandpa buttons his jacket,

says brennen zaun, let's burn the fence.

That barely remembered German

barnacles his throat. Storm will tear

the pickets down, wood half-rotten

and aren't we cold. Cabin pipes

good and frozen. Globe thistles,

gunmetal blue, die on my shoelaces.

Grandpa sucks a Lucky Strike, exhales

bats and bats. Spiked wings fall

from his lips, thread through

my loosened teeth, snag on my gums,

receded from griding in sleep.

Grandpa unearths our fence,

a simple pulling of teeth. We snap

each post against our knees,

chipped fangs tossed to the pit.

We are ready for the feel of fire.

The horses by the beach are starving.

Grandpa knows the man who aged

and tamed them, let livestock suck life

slowly from him. King tides have flooded

our street, have cured our fallen crabapples.

We feed them to flames, all fence and fruit,

and Grandpa looks so pleased, the scent

of all things wasting. A boy who once hid

in Steinheim fields, stole asparagus shoots

from farmers. The war was over, his mother

widowed, grief turned to endless

hunger. Sparks settle on the corners

of Grandpa's mouth. Fence turns to ash.

Next summer, we'll just build a new one.

Hearing aids off, all sound in his lap.

Neighbour's anxious flag, muted.

Grandpa says we have so much

and aren't we warm.

Later, he falls asleep and I watch

two horses drink hopelessly.

Their tongues push

under rocks for crab meat. Sand fleas

chew their spines as they spit

their wild minds on saw-tooth shells.

💫💫💫

Mallory Tater's fight against her eating disorder adds a particular slant to This Will Be Good.  It is a very intimate inside look, we taste what she does, understand her choices.  But Today's book of poetry is convinced that any subject Tater put her considerable talents to would result in the same intimate and clever tenacity.

What Today's book of poetry is so clumsily trying to express is that we think Tater has it.

"Finding your place in the world," as Book*hug suggests on the cover of This Will Be Good, is a universal struggle and Mallory Tater has turned her voyage into art.

Period

The winter my waist shed six inches,

my period stopped. My breasts depressed,

the skin around them slacked sackish

and loose. I became like burlap and this calmed

my hands. I no longer had a belly to pinch.

My throat withstood the aftermath

of meals. I sucked lemons after losing

to cool and clean cuts from biled food

clawing. All this to say that when it stopped,

I was glad. Tampons at the bottom of my bag

flattened but I kept them on hand

to hand to girlfriends in need before gym class.

I told my mother how sick I must be. She paid so much

attention to me we forgot my sisters, who held pencils

in their hands late into the night, who held hands

in church parking lots, laughing with communion

stuck to the roofs of their mouths. They did not take

the host from the priest, pretend

to swallow, slip it into their pockets. They wrote

nice letters to each other, slipped them under

bedroom doors, borrowed each other's blouses

and blouses forever. They loved Sunday night

strawberries and ice cream in front of the TV.

They did not feed the dog their breakfasts.

Mabel would learn to love French toast, get fat

and sick and her paws would shake from old age

but I would imagine it as all the sugar I gave her

and feel a wave of shameful indulgence. I would

no longer bleed and cramp and share in it. I would say

I hoped to be clean and thin forever like this

but in secret, I felt unabashedly dry,

excluded and light.

💫💫💫

Our morning read was taken over by our new intern, Maggie.  Maggie wears long-sleeved shirts all year long and she told me that she had some experience in the Taterworld of eating disorders and so on.  

The reading, as Maggie organized it, was sharp, crisp and crystal clear, the deeper we went in, the more everyone in the room leaned toward the centre.  Connected.  We were all in line, in tune, like we were singing backup to Laura Nyro, Patti Labelle Sarah Dash Nona Hendryx style.

Good work Tater.  Good work Maggie.

On the Train to Royal Columbian Hospital

We are told Grandpa will sleep his way

to death tonight. The infection in his pancreas

and lungs cannot be fixed with drainage

or prayer from the wandering chaplain.

We are told the father of our mother who built

cabin sheds and showers, drank mugs of ice milk

before bed, bought tickets to community magic

shows, will soon no longer breathe. The last

show he took me to before I became

a teen, a local widow who called herself

the Ta-Da Lady. Grandpa and I both raised our hands

and she asked us onto the stage. She held a sheet

to the crowd and we slipped through a trap door.

Beneath floorboards, Grandpa's heavy breathing

shielded me, thick as a coat. He said we were part

of the illusion, our bodies, thin air. His breath,

cherry cough drops and Dairy Queen cones.

We were beautifully gone together. Tonight I feel

the heat and weight and confusion of my sisters.

They conjure the same memory:

Grandpa swimming between sandbars

near our family cabin, bobbing up for breath

and flashing his teeth, sneering. He would become a shark

and would chase us. In our small blossomed

bathing suits, we used to run towards the shark,

never away, into his oceaned arms.

💫💫💫

A little bit of joy can go a long way.  It doesn't take much to make some people feel alive and worthy.  This Will Be Good stopped Today's book of poetry in our poetry tracks.  

Yesterday we were in Tamworth, Ontario, at the Book Shop, one of the best little book stores in the world, for a poetry reading.  Two men.  Both worth listening to.  But clearly male voices.  Mallory Tater poems come from a young woman's voice - but this old man needed to read these, these poems held this old man's poetry interest from the start to the end.

We will be talking about Mallory Tater's poetry again.  We are sure of it.

Mallory Tater

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mallory Tater is a writer from the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg Nation (Ottawa). Mallory’s poetry and fiction have been published in literary magazines across Canada such as Room Magazine, CV2, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Carousel, Prism International and Arc Magazine. She was shortlisted for Arc Magazine’s 2015 Poem of The Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizon’s Contest and Room Magazine‘s 2016 Fiction and Poetry Prizes. She was the recipient of CV2’s 2016 Young Buck Poetry Prize. She is the Publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a poetry chapbook press. She lives in Vancouver.

BLURBS
“This Will Be Good is a prayer, vicious and sweet. Tater’s dexterous language shreds the pink ribbons of nostalgia to remind that girlhood is both ‘sugared with fear’ and ‘diamond-hard.’” 

      —Adèle Barclay, author of If I Were In a Cage I’d Reach Out For You
“This Will Be Good details the truths of girlhood; how young women treat themselves with cruelty and tenderness, fend off and court desire, and brace themselves for a world that both expects too much of them and yet never enough. These poems unfold as stories girls tell each other as they make space to share, cope, grieve, and hopefully, heal.”

      —Dina Del Bucchia, author of Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items and Don’t Tell Me                                             What to Do
“Evocative and tactile as unearthed memory, This Will Be Good follows the history of a family through years, homes, seasons, and bodies. They’re death and grief, sex and religion. A reckoning with womanhood, manhood, and memory, these stories have a feeling of being passed down, kept secret, and slipped in notes and gestures between intimates whose closeness is felt on the skin. Press these words to your breast.” 

      —Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star and Sunshine State

bookthug.ca

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

The Game of 100 Ghosts - Terry Watada (TSAR Publications)

Today's book of poetry:
The Game of 100 Ghosts, Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai.  Terry Watada.  TSAR Publications. Toronto, Ontario. 2014.

Official notice:  ANYONE who writes a tribute poem to Laura Nyro is going to get serious consideration here at Today's book of poetry.  We adore her.  We give all our new interns a Laura Nyro CD on their first day.  If they don't love Laura Nyro - we can't use them.

Terry Watada, in this nuaunced poem about his mother, moves close to the pinnacle of the pantheon of Laura Nyro admirers with his lovely poem "By a Chinese Lamp."

By a Chinese Lamp

Laura
         Nyro
sang her siren
song
           softly
   upstairs

by a Chinese lamp
in
       my
mother's room

dragon red   oriental   yellow
and tassels  with
prisms
           of light
attached

the   colours, flavour
and smells
of  
      Singapore, Kowloon
      Macau

[long hair,
                 black pools
of luxurious oil on
the shoulders--
slanted-        inscrutable
      eyes, angled
sharp as knives]

mystery
             woman
in slitted cheong sams
intoxicating
                     smoke
and evil
fingers with needles
for
      nails   a 1930s noir
   poster  in art deco style

Chinatown, my Chinatown

so soon  too young
   she was gone
too     soon

the
      things  she
missed with
such a   short life

her impassioned breathing,
poetry
            on a
lover's tongue       children laughing
into
adulthood.  grand-  children
calling Buchan!
out of love and anticipation

the sauce of
conversation at dinner the loom
of darkness

    weaving
the coat    of daylight


and
        the music of Laura
      Nyro

upstairs
        by a Chinese lamp
i sit on the bed
to
         contemplate
the    glow of her
absence.

and when i die...

...

Terry Watada's The Game of 100 Ghosts, Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai, is full of poems that ramble in the most wonderful ways.  It's clear Watada has purpose because he always seems to wrap up these memory journeys with precision.

These "ghost stories" unwind something like those large connect the dot puzzles we used to do as children.  There is nothing random in Watada's adventures, we are gathering points on an invisible grid, Watada will connect the dots for us when he deems it necessary.

Today's book of poetry was touched by Watada's gentle nod to the great Canadian Roy Kiyooka in the poem "Kiyooka airs."

And we were utterly smitten to discover a genuine Tom Waits fan in Watada.  Watada borrows some pace and some vernacular from living legend Waits to dance out a couple of poems where Watada gets to show his chops as a storyteller.

The Vanishing Point

call him James Dean, Brando,
Cool Hand Luke  Bullitt;
just don't call him Michael.

we're driving towards coolsville
with Waits groaning with a
hang
              over
on the Blaupunkt

i see the blonde smile
in
    the shrine of the
  sun

rain    fell
like liquid sun-light

she came from Coolsville
a
    mythic town of ancient
dreams    but i saw her
her burnished legs
shown
             off
  by a miniskirt

and i fade away as Mike
goes on
his one-arm around June,
his best girl as she smokes listening
to Whitney                    on the radio
his other arm
on the steering wheel of
his dad's Oldsmobile

but then even she evaporates
as the white lines
converge &
point
towards a lonesome expresslane

and Kowalski smiles
as
      super soul
   on KOW 980 screams

out the eulogy:

the last American hero
the golden driver of the golden west
ripped apart   the last beautiful free
soul on this planet.


Coolsville is just round the bend
and up the road a bit


                                            ----

the one hundredth
story told   the one hundredth
candle
              snuffed

darkness falls with a thud
can't
               you see?
        can
      you not see?



a ghostly visitation

...

Watada is searching for Coolsville and he's using a lot of ghost, past, present and future, to do it.  Some of his ghosts aren't dead yet but Watada is undeterred.

For flat-out reading pleasure The Game of 100 Ghosts got my goat.  It was like a Blue Valentine, an unexpected kiss.

A Game of Ghosts

night
        crept like
  smoke in a forest fire

at sundown
                       the evening
             settled and everyone sat
             in
                         a circle
around
a circle of candles.

in the brilliant
splintering   demise of
the sun,
           the timid   wax'd flames

      before the story-tellers
      flickered

and sputtered
feasting
            on air, awaiting
the smoke-filled  capsule-
bodies of
              ghosts.

tell the first story, tell
the second,
            tell the one-
   hundredth

extinguish  each
candle with each story until
the remnant of    the past
re-  turns
and
       a last conversation

(precious and true)    takes place

between the mouths of the grieving and sorrowful
and
         the thoughts of the
     beloved dead     secrets are

revealed.

...

Terry Watada

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terry Watada is a Toronto poet, novelist, playwright and essayist, and historian, musician and composer, with numerous publications to his credit. Five of his plays have received mainstage production. He contributes a monthly column to The Bulletin, a national Japanese Canadian community paper. For his writing, music and community volunteerism, he was recently awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His published works include The Sword, the Medal and the Rosary (manga, 2013); Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes (novel, 2007), Obon: the Festival of the Dead (poetry, 2006); Ten Thousand Views of Rain (poetry, 2001); A Thousand Homes (poetry, 1995); and The TBC: the Toronto Buddhist Church,1995 – 2010 (2010).

BLURBS

“For Terry, applause and gratitude, because he has held the people in his mind and his heart, and because he gave them back to us.”
—Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan

"A tour de force literary and conceptual achievement, The Game of 100 Ghosts reveals and further illuminates the Japanese Canadian sensibility. Terry Watada's passion, indeed his life's work, is to discover, recreate, and uncover the past lost through the silence of his parents and community. His literary and musical career has helped define what is best in Canadian contemporary culture."
—Anthony B Chan, author of Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World

"Terry Watada's 100 Ghosts surprises us with tales and imagery that are both haunting and real… It creates a safe harbour, a beacon of infinite light to gather those shunned shadowy thoughts and guides them safely out of the dark recesses of history and time. "
—Jim Wong-Chu, Co-editor, Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Chinese Canadian Fiction

"In this piercing collection, Watada’s concrete images take readers to places and people familiar yet almost forgotten, to give order and dignity to the mind’s constant struggle for clarity."
—Paul Yee, author of Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter! and Other Stories

Terry Watada

reads at the Word on the Street Festival

Toronto, September 28, 2008

tsarbooks.com

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.