Category Archives: music

Caleb Thompson

Posted on by
Reply

Apartment Music Box

If, in the evening’s lull of twilight thoughts,
one takes to resignations, turns inward,
lets go the world its hints of suppler form,
it’s no surprise to find sublime the dots
upon the ceiling, or the line along the floor,
or, that across the room is far too far—
and that, in a fact of feeling, distance grows
of infinite measure everywhere,
and in all things, and to itself is sworn,
in silent oath—how melodies disclose:
the heart impaled upon a star, the ear.

 

 

Caleb Thompson is a founding editor of The Monarch Review. He lives in Seattle.

Joe Milutis

Posted on by
Reply

[ Hear Joe Milutis sing licorice.]

 

licorice

like is like life is like loaf is like kettle is like line is like inert is like link is like ink is like kink is like kick is like lick is like like is like Ike is like psych is like physical is like hysterical is like America is like amorous is like amoral is like amorphous is like Orpheus is like endorphin is like dolphin is like Dolph Lundgren is like Ralph Lauren is like Sophia Loren is like dinosaur is like so are we is like sour tea is like sortee is like sorted is like sordid is like so did is like soda is like Yoda is like ode is like node is like knowed is like now is like snow is like rain is like fog is like hail is like mail is like letter is like litter is like lighter is like lighter and lighter is like ever after is like love is like like is like not-like is like dissimilar is like simile is like metaphor is like analogy is like analog is like digital is like finger in ass is like Fingal’s Cave is like Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture Opus 26  aka Fingal’s Cave is like allusion to another text is like illusion is like ill is like i’ll like all your posts is like aggressive sort of is like like but only sort of is sort of sort of like like or just like like like just as is like like sort of without like is like was is like as like is like so is like not like is as is has have and ‘tis is like forsooth like truth is like truant is like rue is like street is like avenue is like transport is like boxcars moving on the horizon is like a pretty girl is like a melody is like a song like from long ago is like just yesterday is like today is like tomorrow is like tomorrow is like tomorrow is like an island like an islet like Kate Winslet like to let this apartment like your roommates is like room is like moon is like June is like a limpid pool is like the problem with like is like link is like hyperlink is like the demise of analogical thinking is like dot com is like dot org is like dot edu is like dot net is like the blog is like the twitterfeed is like the book club is like the talk show is like chicken is like like “ing” is like liking like is like linking likeably is like wow is like let’s just like everything is like Hitler in reverse is like Hitler still like alive in South America like in that movie in which everything is not like you think like nothing turns out how you’d like is like your worst nightmare is like if this went on and on is like forever is like fever is like river is like reverse is like verse is like poem

 

 

Joe Milutis is a writer and media artist, and author of Failure, A Writer’s Life.  He is the author of many hybrid works including the fiction-performance-installation The Torrent, and various web-based non-fiction experiments.  He teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell, and as faculty for Bothell’s new MFA in Cultural Poetics.

Milutis will be launching his new book Failure at Elliott Bay Book Company in a launch event with Amaranth Borsuk on January 25 at 7.

He will also be reading a new experimental translation of a German translation of Robert Creeley’s number poems (which emerged from a collaboration with Robert Indiana) as part of the Henry Gallery’s Now Here is also No Where show.  The reading will be on Feb 28 at 7 pm, and will be followed by a discussion on collaboration in the work of Frank O’ Hara and Willem de Kooning.  He will be joined by Gregory Laynor.

 

Hannah Faith Notess

Posted on by
Reply

Meditation on the Divine Blueness with Two Pop Songs
Rishikesh, India

 

It’s just that in “My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
sounds so Jesusy, with his platoon of earnest handclappers
and strummers on backup, transparent

like the Maranatha choruses of my childhood
slapped verse by verse onto the overhead projector.
And so I start to think it’s really still 1968 here.

I got the song’s joke the first time, but here
I hear it for myself—in the Rishikesh German Indian
Chinese Israeli Continental Bakery—Hare Krishna

is just two syllables away from Hallelujah
and “My Sweet Lord” is not even two notes away
from “He’s So Fine” (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

and Jesus is just two notes away from Krishna
but in flesh-colored makeup, too shy to show us
his true blue skin. It’s 1968, and the Beatles

are decked in saffron garlands,
posing in a row around the Maharishi,
this gleaming green river behind them,

under a god’s skin blue February sky. It’s 1968
and I’m staring at the same green February water, wishing
the Australians upstairs would just

put the damn sitars away. Any minute now
it’ll be 1971, and George’s new backup singers
will get out their tambourines and start clapping

like some scruffy kids picked up at a beachside revival, squinting
at the transliterated mantras Rama Rama Hare Hare.
It’s 1971 and—really, I’m not stoned—the Chiffons

are suing George Harrison for royalties
(doo lang doo lang doo lang) and incidentally, Krishna
is suing Jesus because he thought of incarnation first.

Jesus swears it was an accident; he didn’t mean to copy,
but the court doesn’t care. And anyway, it’s 1975 now and my dad,
long-haired, is sitting cross legged in a work shirt

and bell bottoms with a guitar
on somebody’s living room floor in Virginia,
strumming the same chords, a mimeographed

scripture song. I really wanna see you Lord, but it takes
so long my Lord. It’s 1975 and the Chiffons are recording
My Sweet Lord (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

as a joke: the magic’s over. We missed the real thing.
I know there are so many Indias, but this is one
of mine. It’s 1975 and night is falling

on the hill above the bakery, where the hostel
owner—just a girl—leads us into a room
the color of Krishna, the color of Shiva’s throat

when he swallowed the poison. There we lay down
our bags. The posters on the wall—a parade
of Krishnas, the fat baby stealing the milk,

him posing on a lotus with His blue rolls of baby fat,
then Radha and her blue boyfriend
wrapped in two versions of the same green sari

so close, so fine you couldn’t call them anything
but Radhakrishna (doo lang doo lang doo lang)
taped to the ceiling, the way the world’s teenage girls

taped the Beatles to their ceilings, till the corners yellowed
and peeled, till the magic faded. We’ll sleep there, safe under
Krishna’s gaze, so peaceful in God’s blue belly.

 

 

 

Hannah Faith Notess is managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine and the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, So To Speak, The Christian Century, and Floating Bridge Review, among other journals. She lives in Seattle.