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2016 Of the Out of Style Jeff Hipsher
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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
OF THE OUT OF STYLE
By
JEFF HIPSHER
A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts
2016 Jeff Hipsher defended this thesis on April 15, 2016. The members of the supervisory committee were:
David Kirby Professor Directing Thesis
Barbara Hamby Committee Member
Andrew Epstein Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
for Sarah
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Poems in this manuscript previously appeared in or are forthcoming from The Boston Review and The Common. An early version of this manuscript was one of three finalists for the Poetry Society of America‘s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship.
I am deeply grateful for the patience and love of my wife, Sarah Cassidy Hipsher.
My parents, Paula and Everett Ison, for putting up with me. Don and Margaret Cassidy for the same. All my Hipsher, Cassidy, Ison, Garcia, and Chavez families.
Much love to Timothy Donnelly, Chuch O‘Neal, Adam Day, A.H. Jerriod Avant, Mikayla Avila Vila, Yolanda Franklin, Cocoa Williams, Gary Jackson, Chris Michaels, Dan Sack, Hannah Gamble, Douglas Kearney, Nick Sturm, Jeremy Clark, Nick Sturtzel, Rob Johnson, Wendy Xu, Alexis Orgera, Michael Miles, Tristan Child, Mark Hensel, Muriel Leung, and Josh & Jessie English for their invaluable insight, guidance, support, and friendship.
Many thanks to my professors David Kirby, Andrew Epstein, Barbara Hamby, and Virgil Suarez for their help through this whole process.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract vi
THY CLEAN WHITE HAND IS OPEN WIDE, 1
I SO KINDLY AM SERVED 2
A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSHERS 3
RESEARCH FOREST 4
SURFING WITH THE ALIEN 5
ALL IN THE REALM OF DEATH 6
ESCAPE FROM THE UNDERGROUND FORTRESS 7
OF THE OUT OF STYLE 8
ZENN-LA IN THE COLD WASTE 9
THE FULL FLOOD OF A CONTRATERRENE 10
NEW VOYAGES OF THE MICRONAUTS 11
IN THE VALLEY OF THE PALEST THING 12
PEARL HAIRED GIRL 13
SMART WATER 14
HEAVENS TO MURGATROID 16
AMERICAN PALEOCONTACT 20
MOUTH TALK CON-JOB 21
AFTER YAKUB WRESTLES THE ANGEL 22
YOU REACHED THE FLYING GLOBE 23
HOW FAR AM I FROM CANAAN 27 PLEASE DON’T PLAY THAT SONG 28 KATHOOM IN THE STERLING RIDGE 29
ASLEEP IN THE RETREAT AT TWIN LAKES 30
SLOW BOAT TO CHINA 31
THE WILL HAS BROUGHT NO FORTUNE 33
THERE USED TO BE A GREYING TOWER ALONE ON THE SEA 34
MONTEZUMA TO HIS MAGICIANS 2 35
TO ENDURE AN INTRODUCTION 36 IT WON’T BE VERY LONG 38
Notes 39
Biographical Sketch 44
v ABSTRACT
Of the Out of Style takes its title from Jimi Hendrix‘s afrofuturist proto-prog rock masterpiece ―1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be).‖ As a collection the poems, as Hendrix puts it in song, ―take a last look / at the killing noise / of the out of style.‖ That killing noise in both Hendrix‘s lyrics and hopefully these poems can be understood as white domestic, political, and poetic space. And as such, the poems attempt to address their own role in the demarking of that space. And so again like Hendrix the motifs of science fiction are employed to refuse, alter, or abandon those spaces all together. Informed greatly by Susan Sontag‘s writing on science fiction film, at times even quoting her directly, the poems adopt and co-opt the many tropes of the genre outlined in her essay ―The Imagination of Disaster.‖ However, throughout the collection science fiction is positioned as both a form of resistance literature and a proponent of white capitalist patriarchy. Subversive works by Mina Loy, Douglas Kearney, and Andrew Joron are cited just as canonical stories by HG Wells, HP Lovecraft, and Jules Verne are critiqued. This juxtaposition is key to the project of the manuscript as a whole, as it reflects the complex relationship between the white male speaker‘s love of an inherited canon, in both literary and popular culture, and the desire to resist it. This agitation is borne out in process, as most of the poems appropriate language from these various and often oppositional sources. Poets including the aforementioned as well as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Adrienne Su, Catherine Wagner, Wanda Coleman, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Fred Moten appear alongside dialogue from Jack Kirby‘s first volumes of The Silver Surfer and The Eternals. Excerpts from the screenplays for Planet of the Apes („68), AKIRA, The Shinning, and Interstellar are also included as well as lyrics from The Eagles, Kanye West, Sam Cooke, Busta Rhymes, and the astroblack jazz of Sun Ra. This act of sampling is at once in conversation with the methods of production in both the literary avant-garde and the traditions of hip-hop, while also attempting to interrogate the role of appropriation, or theft, as well as the erasure of the other in the creation of white art. The title poem opens with a line from Ashbery‘s ―The One Thing That Can Save America.‖ Often cited as the poet commenting on the seemingly impenetrable and private nature
vi of his more abstracted poems, the line ―I know that I braid too much on my own / Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me‖ is used here instead to comment on the white perspective often privileged in contemporary poetry, indicting both Ashbery and the speaker of these poems. However I also view this act as one of salvage, as the poem goes on to steal from another great personal inspiration, the Californian punk band Bad Religion, who also failed to address issues of race or gender in their thirty year career as white male activist musicians. And so the poem both equates them with Hendrix‘s ―killing noise / of the out of style,‖ while appropriating their language to address it. In this way, through many of these poems, I attempt to reclaim genuinely admired yet undeniably problematic white art and put it in the service of dismantling the privileges from which it benefits. This range of sampled material helps to give the poems‘ form a texture reflective of the various tensions in the source texts by creating in their accumulation an array of polyvocal speakers struggling to reconcile their personal cultural interests, aesthetics, and politics with the paradoxically invisible yet ubiquitous and central position of their identity.
vii THY CLEAN WHITE HAND IS OPEN WIDE,
Lord, & thou are just, Lord, just very tired. I spent twen ty years there one night. Y‘all‘s woods were full of policemen, ya‘ll. But y‘all, y‘all just talk trees All Day In the riven troughs, the splay- ed leaves pile up. Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Had to move my family out the country, the sunken fields of hemp out from under the shade of the trees, the crazy hemlock ‘s point, before, the sentinel of the grave, All Day, turnt out the way it were, turning out to greet y‘all.
1 I SO KINDLY AM SERVED Self-Portrait at Thirty and Thirty-One
Try to be penitential like, the enervating dusk settles into cylinders. Who gives a shit. If we blow this we bogus. Standing at the sliding glass door describing your wife to herself. The enervating dusk like “I‟m living my life, live yours.” But you‘re just one little white whining beast appropriative in the ante diluvian dusk, who came way too late, but, baby, I‘m on it, like, “Dear Heart how like you this type shit that‘ll call the dusk as it truly behaves in all that danger so as to not just give you this bread out my hand?‖
2 A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSHERS
I had got, finally, thru my plant‘s uninhibitedness. I lost my coat. I had no idea I had no pants. Way out here there‘s no color lessness, Grand Inbetween- er. The power cosmic remains unavailable. Look ing back thru the forest, into my motives, I think, ―Good grief, like, really, what‘s his difficulty?‖
3 RESEARCH FOREST
The farms, calm, preternaturally, are witness to a great put-on. ―Out here, on the patio, things matter,‖ I tell her father, the two of us watching the jungle as seen through a dense envelope of radio-waves, atop a distant tableland— the estuaries full of rich yellow water. The phone is for me, it‘s my brother, and he says, ―Its like this and like that, and uh.‖ We‘re never done. Or rather, ―Momma, I‘m so sorry, I‘m so obnoxious.‖ Then he and I see it, our one clean thought. The moon awash in the black tide of the parking lot. Over the mountain and across the sea, it‘s like that and like this, and uh.
4 SURFING WITH THE ALIEN
I say now Timothy, about myself in the future, there‘s none of it. And in that awful hour, The Lord roamed as hands, accidentally delivering the bad news deep into my scalp. And whoever was tapping the phone heard us and became weak must reach controls before the monstered water folds against us, purpled with conditioner, a tired and stung
hibiscus like not being in the express lane (cash only). He‘s cool, and he knows exactly what I am, and, so what
‗s more bad news, in the doctor‘s office where miles of magnetic tape wait to be erased you sit in the waiting room, staring into the blond face of junk mail and it says ―If this is the way it is lets leave‖ And it's all a mother fucker, don't you know like the pale blather in the lazy sea that suds up your hair, your stupid face.
5 ALL IN THE REALM OF DEATH
A great sneer of buildings about me stood in the pale hiss of how the quarter went to move the grime move the grime grime move the grime through the mildew and boy every night I am con stant ly th inking of you clear and distinct in the dis pensed order of things and alliwannasay is the bleating of sheep, the hum of insects the impossible speech of com modities all that was over worked into the stir of the background that loud thing that thi ng that thi i i ing.
6 ESCAPE FROM THE UNDERGROUND FORTRESS
I think about your mother visiting the grave of the son we lost in the video arcade. The time I told him there was no intelligent light, pink or otherwise. Together, we try to imagine being nothing. But the land, and its weather, occupies us. And then our lunches sour. And the junior college empties. Our hot water heater breaks. The heavens, too, grow cold. Or do you not think so far ahead?
7 OF THE OUT OF STYLE
I know I braid too much my own snapped off perceptions of things as they come, televised from that pasturage of dishwater where soaks an opulence of bridges, electrical grids, clandestine tunnels, and so forth. That immense tract of dazzling whiteness, its hand rising through the terrible science of clouds over this place that leads to all others. And having enforced its will would have all of it tremble at their coming, the only accepted celestials of the new and unknowable intelligence that fills my mind like cold milk, until all that‘s left is something so anomalous to my function, I could not immediately detect it. And when I do, it shifts to something else altogether, not for itself, but for the self it has tended for so long. And it must look pretty appealing, the acreage of might flung far out on the land. An entitlement of damp plains. The pale and foggy freeze that sometimes it feels like in this morning that has seized us again. But baby, I‘m amazed I don‘t feel I can negotiate disinheriting such a thing, unafraid of the savage and continuous disorientation of losing privilege. And it knows there‘s so much we want to say, but also how easy to lay under its invisibly open spaces broad waking in a mood of remote orchards, soon forgotten.
8 ZENN-LA IN THE COLD WASTE
Conquering the long schematic of a day. The best war to do. A country we only understood mathematically as it filled our instruments with shame. My ship vaporizing the pink sand into treasures sweet with trouble. We know who is sending the fax to the machine by its ring alone. So what‘s the sense in going just to escape again, what‘s so horribly violent when you‘re miniature. And the Lord that clumsy shoplifter who shaped me in inequity did smell and was pleased by the aroma and in his heart said look away look away.
9 THE FULL FLOOD OF A CONTRATERRENE
Praise for him falls short of what himself can give but baby it‘s what ever there is written, your fair neck round about: a four page letter and he better get it on time or oh well we‘ll just call the doctor doc tor doc tor as well as I, one of them that farthest cometh behind in the enervating dusk, get in the ride, the left hand is steering the other is gripping your thigh yet may I by no means my wearied mind don‘t love very little our two miseries in the sunless afternoon but baby, when I get the nerve to come to you how some white men let you tell them what to do, you can‘t tell nobody, I‘m talkin bout nobody.
10 NEW VOYAGES OF THE MICRONAUTS
We had all we ate then. The corn collected in the tesseract. A certain endurance had been exhibited, reimagining the day as warm and pleasant. It was now the great back then, where my entire white life had been a séance to communicate with my cock. And so the plantation (kind of) floated into a future. On and on. Hey, on and on and on. How intelligence (I s‘pose) rises up in the past. Now the way back when, white life collects itself into the terrarium. A certain control wants to be exercised, reimagined as corn. My cock, older now, is convoked into winter. We are all we ate then.
11 IN THE VALLEY OF THE PALEST THING
From my car passing under the stars‘ slow proto-cinema, I thought I heard a voice sweep through the thorax of our cave. It‘s hard to think as your mind fills with that five- sided fist-agon. Set white fire to the canebrake. Coming to in the recent past, outside the ultra- modern department store, to turn on the radio. The city is divided into prefectures. Eating trees, fence posts. Two kinds of water. Ambu latory. Unknown in their own par ticular way. Said, my mind goes, naw, fuck it, turn it off. Hot stones rising from the purple gums of the swamp. Hoggs in the supermarket come to feed. To kiss my ass, like every thing else. From my car, out of the gr ey hills inherit, I hear ‗em. ―Bow down, bow down. Come home.‖
12 PEARL HAIRED GIRL
Once, as Spanish soldiers, in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, we went to sleep on a deep green lake, and as she pitied us, a girl came across the water, with pearl hair like data in the wild, it‘s pink beams of bitter light warm on our foreheads And as she left behind the mountains, they pushed through our galleons, now just fire off the shoulder of Orion. Their dreamless yawn of sprawl rolling into the plains. What a killer. La-la-la (twice)
13 SMART WATER
The morning is always stubborn and beyond it colludes the thing with the kitchen or bathroom and although it tastes no better for it I still sigh down an appeal into the glass at the black fish the fat rain the very good road of the bank that they might not fill me up so quickly like a theater seat with their more complete histories the ones melting over and through the dam or from my tub spilling into the empty catacombs of unlit spare rooms except unlike my dad
14 or my dad‘s dead dad I don‘t mean it the walk in the hallway at night is a dare to all the violence that has and continues to miss me to stop it but don‘t really stop it but only in a way that might keep me some favorited lust spared away like the sudden pleasure of not being accountable for such requests as they move slowly through the departmental plane.
15 HEAVENS TO MURGATROID
1. The future settles down superlatively fair and blessed yet unable to lug the unknown burden of its possessions‘ varying care like the unnavigable mud of a lone day of honesty inspection and repair Wait Professor, someone‘s on the telephone or else, O self-born mockers, y‘all all fall back as the chrononauts‘ deadly rays go zap zap zap
2. And that want is one‘s if one wants it or not who is himself killed or possessed by the thing don‘t do it again but also do and then stop it to death but white like for once, then, something at the same time, hold me down baby, chop chop I discern, as I thought, ―O black limousine, O 5% tint, help me to see deeper back beyond the buzz of your loud white speaker.”
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3. And that the earth must be as young as we feared Me myself in the summer heaven godlike give back a picture with nothing to modify it (make weird) plain to see and account for it is no long er that, at the antipodes, I like the Whopper fuck the Big Mac All surface cashiered O my sweet belvedear, know itll be there when it say, it thought nature but a spume, a ghost that sang.
4. I used to think about immature things (quick fucks in the hall / way of wite america‘s mind) an obligatory scene of panick ed space same problem my father had that does all this time all he had hurt him bad ran dick down the picture, a something wrong, the first cause is to act on the desire for something of the source for one‘s own for once then something no matter how coerced.
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5. The dinner dishes had been cleared away death ‗ll have your brains up under your feet O holy untamable sales force, there‘s only five years left to shake whatever the way art draws slowly us into a circle of complicit mess with the thing represented, death‘ll saytothee (here a hunk of red jell-o that can crawl across floors) fuck what you heard, you aint heard this before
6. ―They all think the same‖ like ―What was that whiteness‖es ―that they are no longer saying the same‖ stuff ―And yet they too break hearts—O Presences‖ ―those that do so to excess inflict enough‖ of a ―South‖ ―that through a kind of swank violence‖es ―make‖ love to ―everybody‖ ―the police handcuff‖ ―As laughing cadets say, "In the evening ―from authority‖ ―comes a distinct offering‖
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7.
Dream and through much of the debriefing I wake to things, rather than people, as sources of power that was the new greater storm‘s enervat ing dusk, almost beyond the bearance of matter, and said I just want to feel liberate d I, I, I picture myself outside of it, the magnetic center of the clouds‘ part icular dialogue, condensed in a chart.
8. And thinking of that fit of grief or rage a something white, uncertain, in a landscape in your feelings, tremendous scenes of rampage (private n always will be) bloom on videotape released over the city as just more language and record what you get from the convex shape unfamiliar light, to you, places unknown to them it‘s a tidal wave, it‘s a thunderdome.
19 AMERICAN PALEOCONTACT
I've been in a grocery store too long too late at night. When you look out over the nectarines and see nothing, nothing is there. We have a hard time with that. That and not being psychic.
——
I'm throwing a tennis ball at the wall in the room where the computer sits. On the wall is a Native American tapestry that looks suspiciously like a group of rockets about to be launched. I'm like a caretaker, or fog, or that word ―meanwhile.‖
—— A great cloud of witness has blown over the hotel, freezing the pink champagne, already on ice. We lie facing each other. I'm thinking of the moon and if there as well, the past no longer exists. ―All the best people have done this before,‖ you say ―but not us.‖
20
MOUTH TALK CON-JOB Adina Howard, Emily Dickinson, Fugazi, Harryette Mullen, Mina Loy, Kanye West, Fred Moten
are we really sure we wont stop But I might moor all through the night till the early morn come on and I will take you around when stirring for belief‘s delight my bride had slipped away her sweet weight on my and we can anytime of cause I will be a until theit day feel And we can and I felt the alternator in my head scarcely until the dawn just like me or if myself were dreamed of deigned her to lie or go back instead ta stop walkin around till then we everybody sing the cock to confirm as twas real cause we don‘t give a damn about a thing if twas a dream made solid said saidaint I married need some consummation when space began to trill wanna know how does and all the heavens were a bell not now and then but until the end the commodity overcome the impossibility of speaking on the enervating dusk without me. nary hep male rose sullen and I sorely and I silence and some strange race oh yes I do down andcongenitally down throwed fractured on the anyway couch when I finish knowing then they’ll have been there being but an ear
21 AFTER YAKUB WRESTLES THE ANGEL
How‘d those feet, you ask, walk Patmos‘ laboratories unseen? Our apartment looms up among the dark Satanic hills. Can‘t get the surveillance video to stream. Black top, behind the planet arium, cover me. Under cover detective work. O! Ancient specimens go berserk. Clouds unfold. Brand new burning gold. Bring me air conditioning. My freshly cop pped memory. Privatized para normal industries. O! Improbable TV snow at dusk, like you, my white ness spreads effortlessly.
22 YOU REACHED THE FLYING GLOBE
1.
Soon after the undersea craft speeds away from the sunken ruins of what was, of that disastrous brush with the gods, we still quake. There they live in this great reflector.
From the sunken ruins of what was, what can they do to an unsuspecting earth? There they live in this great reflector, monitoring the noise from the pool at noon.
What can they do to an unsuspecting earth that not even an eternal can get out in time? Monitoring the noise from the pool at noon, ha! We have won our delay, that not even an eternal can get out in time! We shall see them now and learn about ourselves. Ha! We have won our delay! It was gained by those who came before us.
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2.
We shall see them now and learn about ourselves! And yet, what is that ahead of me for? It was gained by those who came before us, and Shalla Bal, the lovely faithful Shalla Bal.
And yet, what is that ahead of me? For a paradise unearned is but a land of shadows. And Shalla Bal, the lovely and faithful Shalla Bal, like you I approach the museum of antiquity afraid a paradise unearned is but a land of shadows. A hunger for that which I can never give you. Like you I approach the museum of antiquity, afraid. A dazed and confused titan like a monstrous cavern unfilled.
A hunger for that which I can never give you. Perhaps the taste of danger is what we need, a dazed and confused titan like a monstrous cavern unfilled by the total energy of our hapless world.
24
3.
Perhaps the taste of a danger is what we need. Something draws me to it like a magnet by the total energy of our hapless world, emerging from the very mists of nowhere.
Something draws me to it like a magnet. On the great field outside, a pylon rises emerging from the very mists of nowhere, as something that is more than voice echoes on the great field outside. A pylon rises and I‘m glad to die here than join those deviants as something that is more than voice echoes, scorned and misshapen but powerful in ways that surprise.
And I‘m glad to die here than join those deviants. So be it, there is risk in solving mystery. Scorned and misshapen but powerful in ways that surprise, we humans have a lot of history to catch up on.
25
4.
So be it, there is risk in solving mystery. But as one problem evaporates, another lies aborning. We humans have a lot of history to catch up on. Shalla Bal, would I have left you had I dreamed this end?
But as one problem evaporates, another lies aborning. Tho the others have eyes, they are unseeing. Shalla Bal, would I have left you had I dreamed this end? Your lips would not taste as sweet were I not worthy of them.
Tho the others have eyes, they are unseeing. Why are you so different, Norrin Radd? Your lips would not taste as sweet were I not worthy of them, tho we loved each other such a short while.
Why are you so different Norrin Radd? Soon after, the undersea craft speeds away. Tho we loved each other such a short while, of that disastrous brush with the gods we still quake.
26 HOW FAR AM I FROM CANAAN
They came along this way, feeling for drafts of air, emanating from the sidewalk, indicating the presence of caves. If found they'll hope for bear tracks or skulls or drawings of bears in yellow traffic paint, preserved deep in the car garage. They'll stand silently, humbled by the abyss that fills the stairwell where you found that dead dog tied to the hand-rail, when you were fifteen or sixteen — you forget.
27 PLEASE DON’T PLAY THAT SONG (CIRCA REGNA TONAT)
Careless as it thunders through the realms accountant high and tally low and dither wide and puddle deep waste water drink the deer under palms behind the property where by proof I say there did I learn like fuck alright okay that‘s fine with me just surveil all its muchness like shock and cock and buzz and buttery. Tho these bloody days have broke my heart, a large and blind desire in the air snaps and activates like toucan and candy egg and trumpeting of innocency to plead or prate inside the colonizer‘s non-transferable estates. Blithely, my lust my youth did them depart slowly slipping so deep underground where love and usher guide my hands wit helpeth not defence too yerne cause they said can you keep it down I said aint no music on they say all that bread is loud.
28 KATHOOM IN THE STERLING RIDGE
When the thing is tangible, the house will be elaborately barricaded. We can cut them off at the pass, Oh Great
Beyonderer of the Admin- istered World. Come here willya and go miscalculated into the countryside, where I can be your sweet little stuff maker.
29 ASLEEP IN THE RETREAT AT TWIN LAKES for Trayvon Martin
You can‘t quite see it, but they say at night, as you lie on the pullout couch all the things you've failed to understand push themselves back into their own neighborhoods. A place, if we're being reductive, called The Wilderness. Still, out in that unmappable distance, you imagine them. Under the imported palms shading the car port. A dark rumor spread across your lawn. Inside, you turn to face the drywall. Its certain white ancientness. Its cool vibrating drawl.
30 SLOW BOAT TO CHINA
The sensation seemed to be creating an unanticipated fortitude that made the objects in the room take on an unclouded definition as it was sweeping over them, the slightest traces of an indefinable stirring out of the full throated roar of generators, their weird opalescence even more pronounced now that we looked upon their naked glory and thought How many of these memories of the current period of wakefulness would the intelligence erase, the suck of a magnetic tide drawing them away into the great bays of darkness and as the bulletin came through blurred with fear it mingled with something like a sentiment of worship as other engines drew up behind it and all around the room objects were in motion however with no crowding or jostling among them and sure that used to mean something to me but they had imitated almost everything there was to imitate afraid of something
31 in their unlikeness and so all these unrelated incidents didnt make sense until I started putting them together — some group trying their best to protect me in every conceivable way, but it seemed that it had too much to bear for it appeared now to go crazy as the boundaries of the sphere swept outward, slowly at first then at an exponentially increasing rate of speed expanding over the empty houses that lay open to the night, the steel colored rain falling on the black hills drawn into the chamber of the instrument till there were no seas on it but the rolling surface rough with forests of some kind
Anyway, I believe there is still hope for our original plan of action to forget and let the intellect dream that somewhere in the great vault above something lurked through the pearl grey light.
32 THE WILL HAS BROUGHT NO FORTUNE
Whenever those went, these went and History ‗ll eff up time and space in the community center so that it looked dreadful and I cried out O‘ wheel, watch out for the Lord as he‘s conquered daily by his mysterious fear of the weather walkin beggin back mamma I don‘t care anyway, O‘ wheel just telepathic ally sweep me under the rug where when ever these stood still, those stood still as a minor, cherry wood on the vinyl got a way of making me feel ssosorry for this boon that‘ll collapse the air around you O‘ wheel into chemtrails above not home but the blood on the range.
33 THERE USED TO BE A GREYING TOWER ALONE ON THE SEA
Dogs that‘ll chew a fuckin hole through the wall come bearing joy so much news such noise
Blast, Blast, Blast! everything fouling up the builded altar in the evening dews and damp ickyickyickyickyickyickyickyy Like that sometimes man ridic ulous if ya pretend ya can‘t see the speaker‘s white face read a right eous sentence at the table by the lil lamp.
34 MONTEZUMA TO HIS MAGICIANS 2
All those hours spent reading our neighbors has led my children to the woods, where apparently a noiseless thunderbolt, ugly as solid television snow, will reveal to them the turbine responsible for all these white rumors on the back of magazines they have come to find so troubling upstairs. If there be gods, we hope they don‘t find them too, lost in the aluminum oubliette of the football stadium.
35 TO ENDURE AN INTRODUCTION
After harmony jammed the outermost transmissions our appropriateness refused to corroborate, we pushed back through what I knew to be undetectable coincidence
and into the city, a renewed ubiquity beyond your mileage like we deserve it cause we miss something
I‘m missing something
some other unfelt factor and I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there where what appears to me can only refer to itself in regards to what I know
as spiritless elements I admire in so much as I see my ubiquity in them as they know what more about than be- coming a single realization
36 of another‘s everywhere- ness, smiling and waving and looking so fine when there was no color but really color was just alone and I pretended I was right
with ‗em.
37 IT WON’T BE VERY LONG
The plains end. But I have made great progress. I set out underneath the valley, a lovely desert of pink stone buttes and pinnacles. Boy, I sure used to be a hard head, but I was never this messy. The sharp distance. You know contacting me puts us in the utmost danger. Standing on the Jordan I can hear our time together, deepening. Hallelujah then, Shalla-Bal. Hallelujah.
38 NOTES
The poems in this manuscript borrow significant language from the following sources. A multi- media archive of all sampled materials can be found at jh13u2.wix.com/oftheoutofstyle .
THY CLEAN WHITE HAND IS OPEN WIDE, Allen Tate - Ode to the Confederate Dead Alethea S. Burroughs - Savannah Kanye West - All Day, New Slaves Dick Gregory - quote Bertolt Brecht - quote John Ashbery - The Chateau Hardware
I SO KINDLY AM SERVED Sir Thomas Wyatt – They Flee From Me Mina Loy – Human Cylinders Kid Cudi – as featured on Kanye West‘s Gorgeous Andre 3000 – as featured on OutKast‘s Liberation and T.I.‘s Sorry
A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSHERS Amiri Baraka - A Poem for Speculative Hipsters Selected phrasings from The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 2
RESEARCH FOREST 1968 Planet of the Apes screenplay Clipse - Momma I‟m So Sorry Johnnie and Joe - Over the Mountain, Across the Sea Dr. Dre - Nothin But A G Thing. Susan Sontag – The Imagination of Disaster John Ashbery – The Chateau Hardware
SURFING WITH THE ALIEN Sun Ra – Nuclear War Wallace Stevens – Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores Terrence Hayes – What I Am John Ashbery – Pyrography Joe Satriani – Surfing with the Alien
ALL IN THE RALM OF DEATH M. Sayyid on Anti-Pop Consortium‘s We Kill Soap Scum Ghost Town DJs - My Boo Lauren Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing) Sun Ra – All in the Realm of Death
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ESCAPE FROM THE UNDERGROUD FORTRESS is named after the song Exodus from the Underground Fortress as written by Geinoh Yamashirogumi for the film AKIRA Adrienne Su - Escape from the Old Country Larry Levis - Boy in a Video Arcade Philip K Dick - VALIS Andrew Joron - Le Nombre Des Ombres Frank Ocean - Thinkin Bout You.
OF THE OUT OF STYLE Jimi Hendrix - 1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) John Ashbery - The One Thing That Can Save America Bad Religion - It Must Be Pretty Appealing, Sometimes it Feels Like, You Jethro Tull - Auqualung Selected phrasing from Marvel Comics‘ The Eternals as written by Jack Kirby
ZENN-LA IN THE COLD WASTE takes it‘s title from the Silver Surfer‘s home planet. Jean Folain – Loners H.P. Lovecraft – Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath Daniel Decatur Emmett - Dixie
THE FULL FLOOD OF A CONTRATERRENE Catherine Wagner - White Man Poems Aaliyah - 4 Page Letter, Are You That Somebody Sleater Kinney - Call the Doctor Mina Loy - Human Cylinders Sir Thomas Wyatt - Whoso List to Hunt Bryson Tiller - Don‟t
NEW VOYAGES OF THE MICRONAUTS Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. Marvel Comics‘s New Voyages of the Micronauts, Vol. 1 John Ashbery - Pyrography and The Chateau Hardware Busta Rhymes – Everything Remains Raw
IN THE VALLEY OF THE PALEST THING An inversion of Phil Levine - They Feed They Lion Rage Against the Machine - Bulls on Parade, Vietnow Point Blank - My Mind Went Blank
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PEARL HAIRED GIRL is a transliteration of the song of the same name by the Hungarian progressive rock band Omega. Neil Young - Cortez the Killer Roy Batty‘s Tears in the Rain monologue from Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner.
SMART WATER Jean Follain - Loners The American spiritual Follow the Drinking Gourd
HEAVENS TO MURGATROYD Kendrick Lamar - untitled 02 | 06.23.2014 Mina Loy - Human Cylinders Timothy Donnelly - The Cloud Corporation Slim Thug - Still Tippin Z-Ro - City Streets Kanye West- Father Stretch My Hands pt. 2 Switch - I Call Your Name Marianne Moore - In the Days of Prismatic Color Robert Frost - for once then something WB Yeats - Among School Children Sonia Sanchez - blk rhetoric Hannah Barberra’s Snaggle Puss cartoon Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock - It Takes Two Susan Sontag - imagination of disaster Douglas Kearney - Repetition and Revulsion Plato‘s account of Atlantis Busta Rhymes - So Hardcore, Everything Remains Raw Rickey Laurentiis - Of the Leaves That Have Fallen Terrance Hayes - How to Draw a Perfect Circle John Ashbery - Two Scenes, The One Thing That Can Save America
AMERICAN PALEOCONTACT Ada Limón - During the Impossible Age of Everyone the documentary Room 237 The Eagles - Hotel California.
41 MOUTH TALK CON JOB Adina Howard – Freak Like Me Emily Dickinson – 269, 280 Fugazi – Forensic Scene Harryette Mullen – SP*eRM**K*T Mina Loy – Human Cylinders Kanye West – Devil in a New Dress Fred Moten – In the Break
AFTER YAKUB WRESTLES THE ANGEL William Blake - Jerusalem Amiri Baraka and Sun Ra‘s - A Black Mass The story of Yakub‘s creation of the white race as told by The Nation of Islam.
YOU REACHED THE FLYING GLOBE – compoased of lines from The Silver Surfer Vol. 1, 1 &2 and The Eternals Vol. 1, 1 & 2 Emily Dickinson – Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
HOW FAR AM I FROM CANAAN Reverend W. Herbert Brewster – How Far Am I From Canaan Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
PLEASE DON’T PLAY THAT SONG Kid Cudi – Please Don‟t Play That Song Kid Cudi and King Chip - Just What I Am Black Thought as featured on the Roots‘ The Dark (Trinity) Sir Thomas Wyatt - V. InnocentiaVeritas Viat FidesCircumdederunt me inimici mei
KATHOOM IN THE STERLING RIDGE FKA Twigs - Pendulum.
ASLEEP IN THE RETREAT AT TWIN LAKES is named after Travyon Martin‘s gated community in Sanford, Fl. It is for him.
SLOW BOAT TO CHINA – composed of lines selected from A Space Opera: An Anthology of Way Back When Futures edited by Brian W Aldiss. Inspired by the Paul Thomas Anderson film, The Master.
THIS WILL HAS BROUGHT NO FORTUNE Wanda Coleman - American Sonnet (91) Michael Jackson - Leave Me Alone, Who is It Ezekiel 1:16 - Ezekiel‘s sighting of the wheel Yungstar on DJ Screw‘s June 27th
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THERE USED TO BE A GREYING TOWER ALONE ON THE SEA Seal - Kiss from a Rose Battle Hymn of the Republic Missy Elliot - I Can‟t Stand the Rain Kanye West - So Appalled John Ashbery - Two Scenes Vol 2. Issue 1 of The Eternals
MONTEZUMA TO HIS MAGICIANS 2 is the unauthorized sequel to a poem by Timothy Donnelly.
TO ENDURE AN INTRODUCTION Timothy Donnelly - TheNew Intelligence Harryette Mullen - Any Lit Fred Moten - Wait for It, The Salve Trade Marriance Moore - In the Days of Prismatic Color David Bowie‘s - Five Years
IT WON’T BE VERY LONG S.R. Crain – It Wont Be Very Long The 1968 Planet of the Apes screenplay Yes - Heart of the Sunrise Vol. 3 Issue 8 of The Silver Surfer.
43 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Jeff Hipsher‘s work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from The Boston Review, The Common, Phoebe, Forklift : Ohio, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and others. Poems will also appear in the anthology It Was Written: Poems Inspired by Hip-Hop. In 2015 he was one of three finalists for the Poetry Society of America's 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. He is the founding editor of Catch Up, a journal of comics and literature.
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