latenight poetry session...

UPDATED BELOW

lately I've been getting some questions about my good friend Hosho McCreesh, poet. I first read his work back in late 2000 in a magazine called Rattle (no link because I think the poetry editor there, Stellasue Lee, is an idiot and mildly retarded when it comes to the making of a poem), and then again in a magazine called The American Dissident, which published my very first poem in that issue. I was intrigued. I'd not read anyone with such heavy lines outside of Bukowski. I'd been trolling thru the small press for about a year before I started sending out work in 2000 and found it to be relatively thin, one note "reportage" poems, more like broken lined journaling and less like universal poem making. then, as I perused Rattle for the first time, thumbing thru the pages in a Borders or some other giant soul crushing box store, this poem leaped off of the page and kicked me in the balls:

8 Nights & Their Subsequent Sunrises

Christ, it's enough to make you wanna
sit in a lukewarm tub with a
strait razor,
the terror of it all,
the agony, the realization that you'd better
play the game,
get in line,
plug into the grid,
do what they say
or else...

& you think, "Fuck it,
I don't need what they got!"
& you wage yr little war against the
American Dream.

& it costs you,
severely.
You get no ladies.
You get no livable wage for too-hard work.
You only get the food you can afford, the kind that makes you
sick and fat.
& for the brightest, the ones
furthest from the rest of the herd,
it's the crosshairs -
in some form or another.

& if they don't kill you they just
take it all away from you,
keep everything else from you,
make it so damn hard to
live
that you consider not doing it
anymore.

Over a handful of long LONG nights
our tiny little lives can be decided.
I'd say you get about 8.
8 nights that can truly end you,
nights where a decision must be made,
one way or the other,
yes or no,
which will it be...
Nights where you're sure you've walked your last cold mile,
nights where you're convinced that this world
ain't exactly the place for you.

& if you slug through all 8 of them
then maybe you come out
on the other side of a long, dark tunnel &
wake to find yrself
middle aged, or in yr 70s, or maybe yr early 20s
because who's to say when they come, or how.

& in those 8 evenings
you've learned more about life
than in the remaining balance of all yr other tiny little years.
8 nights.
Maybe more, maybe less, but I'd say 8, on average.

& you ain't never seen a sunrise
like the ones you see
the day after
one
of
those
nights.

- Hosho McCreesh

so I rounded up his email from one of his editors, I think G. Tod at Dissident, and wrote asking if he had any books, etc. he replied that his book Something Random & Tragic To Set The Guts Aflame, now out of print, was on the way from Australia where it was published, and that he'd send me a copy. thus began a correspondence between him and I that has lasted for six years and covered some...jesus...maybe 8,000 or more pages of letters, letters that have both inspired me and sustained me thru some of my bleakest "8 nights."

here are a couple from the web:

Virga

& the fucking problem is (scroll down about four poems).

and I'd like to leave you with one more from his second book that may or may not have ever actually appeared (the trouble with a few small press operations is a level of unreliability that often reaches assholery), As The Dust Plumes Rise From The Blood-Spattered Face Down Nostrils.... this poem is one of my many many favorites:

Van Gogh Only Sold 1 Painting

What
for any of us
is there to do
with any of it
but
move
forward?

Safety & immortality
have become
comical
as of late -
people broken up &
twitching,
wondering when it'll
get better,
when it'll
relent,
wondering if there's
anything
anyone
can do.

There isn't.

So laugh as the earth
cracks
under the weight of us,
of our brutality,
laugh as the oceans
boil,
as the forests burn &
the mountains crumble into dust,
the mud of it sliding
into the
sea.

Laugh up to the end
&
through it.

- Hosho McCreesh

his third book Deep Surface Fissures Revealing A Furious Molten Core is still available from McCreesh. if you want a copy, click on my profile and send me an email with the subject line: MCCREESH. he's the real fucking deal, kids, and me and my little poems, my little books, my thin fingers curling over my humming typewriter, we fear for the very structure of the small press when this guy loads up his machinegun and lets loose.

UPDATE: go here and make sure to check out the comments.

more later from The Compound.