Metaverse Book Tours for a Southwestern Book Award Finalist

Very cool to see that our book was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 

Thanks to Tolsun Books for figuring out how to combine Jia Oak Baker's photographs and my poems in convenient paperback form exactly how we envisioned but better.

 

Since all of my celebrations are virtual, here are a few more of those "Poetic Distancing Reading Series" video sessions that I did instead of whatever book tour I was planning before the pandemic.

I almost had to give up on this one in the canal because every take kept getting ruined by screeching jets from the nearby airbase. Another example of the Military Industrial Complex budget squashing local arts. I will edit together a bunch of these outtakes that feature me cursing at the sky as if those pilots might be able to hear me. 

My poems in this next video address Portlandian hipster-ness, 90s album covers, fleeting punk fashion statements, and my longtime appreciation of Chris Cornell. The shadows reminded me of a classic Soundgarden video, so I wore one of those shirts that former Phoenix skater (and longtime friend of Chris Cornell) Kevin Staab put out for his 90 skate company, since Chris often wore those, as seen in their video for Fell On Black Days:

Maybe a few other times.

 

"Like God's Eyes In My Headlights" ~Chris Cornell wrote lines that shaped my superunknown.

I started trying to prepare for Chris Cornell's death in April 2016.
We all have artists who are foundational to our existence and when Prince died that year I immediately thought of one of my favorite poets, Scott Woods. I knew Prince's work was essential to Scott and reading his stellar essay "Prince & Little Weird Black Boy Gods" (just click that link if you haven't already read it) made me think about how devastated I would be if anything ever happened to Chris Cornell. I wasn't expecting to find out so suddenly soon.

I always resent seeing him grouped together with other contemporaries, because Chris Cornell had no peers. Nobody could do what he did. His voice was extraterrestrial and he knew how to use it across the spectrum to convey each and every emotion worth feeling, while also arranging haunting guitarscapes that perfectly framed dark poetic lyrics. Some of these lines ("like God's eyes in my headlights" for example) have always rattled around in my psyche and continue to influence everything I've created since. When I finally got my first book of poetry published in 2014, it was important for me to give a nod to Chris Cornell, so I included a "found poem" that I assembled from my favorite interview:

There are plenty of fans who were there before I jumped on the bandwagon in 1992 and plenty who went to many more concerts than I attended, so this is just for the record, not for bragging rights: it all started when my friend left the Badmotorfinger CD in my car and the song Slaves & Bulldozers wormed its way into my world. I still treasure getting to see some Soundgarden shows throughout that Badmotorfinger / Superunknown / Down On The Upside stretch as well as some Euphoria Mourning, Audioslave, etc. But Chris Cornell's later solo acoustic shows were staggering. It was pretty much overwhelming to be in the presence of such greatness. His voice somehow regained all the glory of his most powerful moments, but combined with technique and skill that had been honed over the past three decades. Those setlists made use of his entire catalog and exhibited what an incredible stockpile of brilliance he had created. 

I was also lucky enough to meet him after shows during the Euphoria Mourning tour in 1999 and his 2007 Carry On tour. Both of those experiences were more than I ever expected and I am forever grateful.
It makes me sad to go back and read my old blog post about that Euphoria Morning show (http://batteredhive.blogspot.com/2015/07/i-am-not-your-autumn-moon-i-am-night.html)

It took me more than a year to post this and maybe I'll post a bit more if I ever figure out what else to say. Just know that I have been listening to those Songbook acoustic recordings nonstop for the past year. The performances and sound quality are impeccable, it's like Chris is still in the room with you and it hurts like a soul breaking but I never want to get to a point where it doesn't still hurt.

To circle this post back around to Prince, this live Chris Cornell cover is gorgeous:

    

I am not your autumn moon, I am the night

I was excited to get great tickets for an upcoming Chris Cornell solo acoustic show at The Orpheum. It even looks like this Phoenix show will be the kick-off date for his new tour. I saw one of his acoustic shows a few years ago and it was amazing. One of my favorite songwriters and vocalists of all time.

But let me go back to an older show. It was back when his first solo CD came out. 1999's Euphoria Morning. I remember talking to my friend on the phone and we were commiserating about us both being such huge Soundgarden fans, but being too broke to go see the Cornell show that was happening the following week (partly, because my son was born a few months earlier which meant that I would likely be poor for the rest of my life). Just then, someone called on the other line and I put my friend on hold. It was Cornell's tour manager saying that I won two tickets to the concert and he couldn't make any promises, but he might even be able to introduce us after the show. Righteous! I clicked back over to inform my friend that I was no longer a loser who was about to miss out on that show and he could go ahead and have fun without me in Loserville: population him.

I expected one of those hurried meet and greet table lineups if anything, but after the show my wife and I were taken to the backstage dressing room. It appeared that we were the only people who didn't belong there with the musicians and crew but Natasha Shneider came over to talk to us. She and her husband Alain Johannes had a band called Eleven, but they helped Chris record his solo record so they were playing with him for the tour. She was immeasurably kind and even made us feel welcome, while Chris changed shirts before wardrobe got packed up for the bus.

I wanted to bring some sort of thank-you for the free tickets and backstage passes, so I did something embarrassing and gave him a folder of poems I was working on, in case he got especially bored on the tour bus. I was young and dumb and hadn't even had anything published yet, so I'm sure they were horrible, but it's funny to look back and realize that this was technically the first manuscript I ever put together. I doubt any of those poems ended up in the book that I finally got published 15 years later, but things had to start somewhere.

It's also funny that the first time we ever left our son with a babysitter was to go see this concert (he was about 9 months old), but soon we'll be taking our son with us to see Chris' show at The Orpheum.

Long years later:
when I went to read at the Long Beach Poetry Festival that I mentioned in my last blog, we visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. We noticed memorials for Johnny and Dee Dee from The Ramones and walked past the gravesites of Mel Blanc, Cecille B. DeMille and others...

But I got really choked up when we got here:

musician interviews make great found poems

I'm excited to go see Chris Cornell play a solo acoustic show in a few days. His music may have been the soundtrack to my life, especially during all of those deleted scenes that no one will ever see.

Speaking of whom, I was playing around with some "found poems" for a recent reading and this first one was originally posted over at Mark Young's Fishbones Poetry Review, but I thought I would also post it here to include some background context.





No Different Than Putting Lyrics Over A Soft Song




So loud. Like a little kid
spreading aggression with a really big toy.
So loud all over. Stage lights
coming from God. Is noise the wrong word?
So constantly loud.

I’ve tried. I wish I could. But musically,
I don’t think I learned anything
from anyone else. Except
there is one similarity
between a little kid from Seattle
spreading aggression with a really big toy
and Mr. Jimi Hendrix: his parents
live in Seattle and so
do mine. But it’s so loud.

The audience is wet. The weather is awful.
Thunder and lightning. Just try
to make sounds people might not
hear the rest of the day.
The lightning was kind of cool.
But does it have to be so loud? Noise
is the perfect word.





This was "found" and manipulated from one of my all-time favorite television interviews with Chris Cornell, as Soundgarden left the stage at the 1992 PinkPop Festival in the Netherlands. Try to watch this exchange and not think of Spinal Tap.

Cornell is no stranger to found texts, by the way. Back when Soundgarden was recording it's major label debut, their bass player Hiro Yamamoto wrote lyrics for a song he wanted Cornell to sing, but when Cornell turned the page over, he found a note that Hiro's girlfriend had left him and decided that it would be much more interesting to sing that over the song. If you look at the liner notes for that Louder Than Love album, the girlfriend even got a songwriting credit out of it. Here's the song:

The other found poem that I read that night was from a J Mascis interview and I will also post that one, sooner or later.