| RIP |
[29 Apr 2009|06:20am] |
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This space is dead. Done. I might start another blog at some point for micro-reviews and links to things, but for now I'll stick to e-mail and what little social-networking I allow myself to indulge in.
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| My book, AREAS OF FOG, available now: |
[03 Mar 2009|02:39pm] |
 Ahead of schedule, you can now pick up a copy of Areas of Fog, my first large-scale collection. Six years of work, all from the same general landscape (coastal northern California). Lots of very literal blood, sweat, tears and other fluids were spent on its composition. I'm happy it's together, bound up, and prepared to live a life of its own beyond the confines of my cottage and the friends who've read it in other forms and in various other publications, now mostly vanished, over the years.
Go here for information about the book and for links to where you can purchase it (Amazon, Small Press Distribution, etc.).
* * *
"Joseph Massey sees with a composer's eye and sings in a microtonality all his own. Syllable by syllable phenomena miraculously unfold. This is fantastic work, understated, charmed, and open. The world simply happens in these poems and its moments are tuned marvels. You don't want to miss it." —Peter Gizzi
"These are poems of ear and eye, full of echoes and luminous images. With a sensuality born of melancholy, they attend to resonant details that hover at the edge of recognition, as when Pacific fog partly obscures the view. Everywhere in the poet's language one feels the pressure of a phenomenal world. It comes through without argument or elaboration in vivid glimpses and radiant debris, saturated with Eros and loneliness." —Devin Johnston
"With Massey, you always know where you are. On a shoreline, near a sea, sharing the air with birds, the ground with odd bits of trash, a lover: it's Anywhere, but it's also Home. And it's that contradiction that gives his words their saudade. Is he a traveler, "in the early morning rain," as the old sad song goes? Or is he the faithful espouser of an environment that is coldly shifting around him, with its own will to change? Either way, these are the briefest of elegies for that moment clair-obscur, poems strong as spider silk or the corpus callosum." —Ange Mlinko
"These poems are unmediated, beautiful meditations that belong wholly and sparingly to this world. Massey is a master at finding a poem's measure in the particular details of a day's unfurling. He knows how to bind words together at a level of quiet intensity that lets them radiate through this Fog Area." —Pam Rehm
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| Memories... |
[12 Aug 2008|01:25pm] |
Many people want to know what I learned in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Well, here are some bullet points:
- I discovered many contemporary poets, like John Donne, Basho, Anne Bradstreet and Rod McKuen. A lot of people liked Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Hulk Hogan (he and Jorie used to correspond, and he would send her these marvelous sonnets about life on the road, vitamins, and buttermilk); but mostly I found out about poets from The Home Shopping Network.
- Other poets my fellow students loved: Wilfred Owen, Ogden Nash, Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, Sappho, King Kong Bundy, Jimmy Carter, Ally Sheedy (I couldn't believe how much people talked about Sheedy! It was definitely pathological), Norman Bates, Phil McCracken, Edgar Lee Masters, Berryman (but not Snodgrass, not Long Dong Silver), Dale Smith, Ben Lerner (ugh!), Wesley Willis (perhaps second only to Ashbery). More or less the Jorie Graham Canon of Poetry. Very trance-like. "The double-penetration reading list" as I called it.
- Nobody read the cereal boxes, despite the communal breakfasts in the football field. Jorie would fill up a small pool with soy milk, Count Chocula, Golden Grahams, and Grape-Nuts, while screaming at us: "CARPE DIEM!" Ha, those were the days, buddy. We all had to share a single wooden spoon. Lyn Hejinian was the only person who encouraged me in my digestion (which I had just begun). (Except in the bath house of course, but that was a separate world entirely.)
- Certainly people's knowledge of The New Sincerity was scarce to nonexistent. Some of the female students had dated Anthony Robinson and Andrew Mister and spoke highly of their gourmet salami exploits. Joseph Massey was not in the acceptable canon. He told me recently he's never been invited to Iowa to read! I think this is of note. For some reason Jorie couldn't grease his canon. But she had no trouble with Sandra Simonds, even Jess Mynes fit in (he gave a reading the same day as a Gin Blossoms concert and a reading by Walt Whitman!).
- But I don't want to sound negative. Perhaps the single most important thing I got from Iowa were the JELL-O Jigglers spiked with Southern Comfort. It was all anybody talked about. It was all that mattered. People obsessed over them. People would even consume Jigglers from the other workshops (so you'd have strangers walk up to you and say, "your Jigglers are sort of strong" or something like that).
- At its worst this meant vomiting, hallucinations and hospitalizations -- "who's in the ER" replayed over and over. I think Jack Meoff was most generally considered the best poet and Jiggler ambassador in my class (by faculty and students, though the students would of course get their cues from faculty and the local chapter of the Freemasons). Tammy Wynette was considered "hard-working." (Because she was a woman, she couldn't fill the boy-genius role). I was considered "dysgenic, dyslexic, anal-retentive" and one of my favorite poets, Mike Hauser, was for some reason considered "flamboyant" even though he wrote mostly in heroic couplets. Basically the general opinion was well known, even to someone like me who was an outsiderish member of the community. I heard all these views repeated over and over. I don't know how many times someone asked me, what do you think of Mike Hauser and I would say "I think his verses are groovy, dope, and authentic" and the other person would say "yeah, but he's flamboyant." It was so strange. He could never get away from that label. Gina Myers was considered "uppity." (Again, gender mattered.)
- But at its best Iowa was genuinely exciting and inspiring.
This in short is what I learned in Iowa.
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