"On the Hunt for Foul Gatherings"
featuring occult markings, salmon beams, attentional rhythms, disheveled rabbits, Lovecraftian luridness, liminal orifices, some rowdiness concerning overrated Dostoevsy translations
/ New at AC: Josh Watkins, “I Await the Devil’s Coming”
Every full moon the juvenile probation officer cruises country roads on the hunt for foul gatherings; he slurps black coffee and scotch from a plastic Circle K cup; his hands tremor; he declares piercings of the male nose ear and eyebrow to be occult markings, heavy rock and metal to be occult music; his Cadillac idles in school parking lots, he drawls into a Dictaphone as the kiddies come bouncing out, mirrored and distorted in his silvery Ray Bans; his desk is fussy with teen probationary contracts, faith literature, colorful seminar pamphlets; he chickenscratches research onto pads of fine graph-paper; on his life, what darts across the road one night is not a deer…
The juvenile probation officer’s name is Jerry Blackwood Driver and upon entering any building he crosses himself to vouchsafe his soul; of the buildings in Crittenden County, his favorite are Cy Junior’s Q-Shack, Mercy Pentecostal Church, and the Package Store; a curse placed on him by a wiseass youth in Spring of ’91 has yet to matriculate; he declares skateboarding to be suspect behavior; on Monday, his subordinate, Steve Jones, gifts him a bushel of Bartlett pears; after lunch, he lets his staff knock off early; later in the week he’ll surprise them each with a baggie of pork fritters…
Look, the truth is we’re all thinking a little too much about the apocalypse these days, but maybe that’s because we’ve intuited that the apocalypse is already happening, has always been happening, is all around us? Maybe the medieval millenarianists were onto something—isn’t the world always coming to an end? Here, in any case, is Josh Watkins vision of a particularly American apocalyptic landscape, one that’s both shocking and, perhaps, not nearly as other as we’d like it to be: “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” now at AC.
/ From the Archive
LAW PLAY
staring at it at
IT AT
/the recording device
they will say nothing to each other
in the salmon beam
which had that fine look of a medical plastic
are you nice, with a zipper pouch
look at the sky now, fog made it
a uniform sauce
an animal that looks like a stain
it moves up the wall
it is
undiminished—the only thing i can return you, love, is a verdict
—verdict—designed to do something to a person
any
who enter it—
Kristen Ihns has studied attentional rhythms in long-form contemporary poetry and film. Don’t you wish you had studied, or were currently studying, attentional rhythms in long-form contemporary poetry and film? I once knew a poet who kept a giant scroll with him on which he was writing a book-length poem in the form of a long unrolling. He’d bring it to poetry readings in Chicago and let the end of it unfurl down the aisle between the audience members while he read.
Kristen Ihns’s 4 poems, including “Law Play,” appeared in AC in July, 2021, a time that also felt like the middle, or the start, or possibly the end, of the apocalypse.
/ Elsewhere
“If done correctly, and to be honest it’s hard to mess this one up, this should look like an absolutely pitiful rabbit. Tired, beaten, weak, disheveled—the ears droop, the skin sags—and most importantly: so hungry.” New Dolan Morgan at Heavy Feather!
Blake Butler’s Molly reviewed in the NY Times: “A few weeks ago, I realized that nearly everyone I knew was toting a copy around. People talked about it in unusual terms, as if it had given them a mysterious nosebleed.”
And maybe you need some Louis Armand in your week? Probably: “Rimbaud’s ‘JE est un autre’ applies nowhere so incisively as it does to the situation of this boundary, to the extent that we might say that this is all there is: that if the institution functions as the ‘content’ of the avantgarde, this is for the principal reason that it ‘itself’ has no content, it is solely an opening, an orifice, like a blackhole ingesting & excreting in a purely liminal phenomenon.”
/ Today’s Soundtrack
Somehow last night I got real rowdy on former-Twitter about Pevear and Volokhonsky. Not for the first time. Probably not the last, if we’re being honest. My take is: if Dostoevsky is really as boring as those two make him out to be, I’d rather read translations that fuck up by making him interesting. This is a minority position, I know. But it’s a hill I’ll die on.