Billy Pilgrim

Courage

Gabel was, in the plainest language possible, confiding in the listener, and virtually everyone who heard it assumed it was fiction. When asked about the song at the time it was originally written and recorded, Gabel dodged it because she wasn’t ready to come out as transgender, which is perfectly understandable. But still, this makes me wonder how often we’re listening to singers tell the truth in unexpected songs, and where we assume they’re singing the truth in pure fiction. We think we can tell, that we can suss out the difference between contrived narrative and confessional, but “The Ocean” shows us that sometimes we have no idea what we’re actually hearing.


So moved by the courage of Against Me!’s Tom Gabel for coming out as a trans woman as a prominent figure in alternative (specifically youth-oriented) music scene. Not only will this serve as a eye-opening moment for many young people to the diversity of experience and identity all around them, but it offers an excellent opportunity for the discussion of truth in narrative songwriting, taken up expertly, as always, by Fluxblog.

Dorothea Lasky

—The Poetry that is going to matter after you are dead

(Source: alexdimitrov)

The Moon in Your Breath
by Amy King

Man acts as an antenna for the sun
and then: a trout in the milk,
men who wear kilts after darkness.
Build a bottle of fish with a few dried figs.
Dear Shadow,
when did I become that person?
I mean one who says “plastic glucose”
without wondering what
rotten-sweet is? The one who teenagers
represent? There’s a room in your breath
I crawl into, eating the wallpaper’s yellow,
looking out for the man on the stairs,
his knife in hand, poise incarnate.
I am your minimum envelope,
your string between tin cans and
cannot stop the talk between us.

In Berlin, they lay buildings on concrete
slabs that look straight back at us.
The windows of the soul seek to err
on the side of humanity. Put a piece of glass
between us for less resistance.
Invite rococo scrawl in heated breath upon it.
The moon appears in a cinched waist.
Stand penance atop her curvature’s axis,
above a hill where headstones claw up
through the clouds, pulling their fibers
into blankets across us.

The sleet and silver smiles loom, gauze-thin.
We slip from a reel of translation back
into how we cater to loneliness,
how we move our mouths and mouth
our meals, engorging entrails where
even foodstuffs give off energies.
I am that uncontrollable,
fear in a mesh of moonrock’s lapis soup.
We demons are in love and afoot.
As in the primordial diary, time will come
to take the hem in, tether the ether
that dreams become from, and examine
our ankles as the sugar washes over,
disappearing. As with everything,
that’s the body he works on. She also
knows honey lasts best in the future.

—What she said.

—

After all these years Mark Kozelek’s voice still makes me breathe a little deeper. No other singer resonates this way for me. His is the sound of driving home along the rivers leading upstate, 5 hours blending like meditation, timeless. I’m happy to hear him returning to more straight-forward songwriting, closer to his Red House Painters days than anything he’s put out under the Sun Kil Moon name. His voice is perfectly suited to this sort of storytelling, and I’ve always thought any abstractness in the lyrics was distracting and unnecessary. Can’t wait for this new album and my next trip home.

Spirit Animal

Spirit Animal

“I think a lot of the apparent resistance to women’s writing or queer writing and definitely writing that doesn’t conform to desires for its genre to be clearly this thing or that—or even look like “hybridity”—what does that look like—is just a fearful projection of some imaginary reader’s horror at being dropped into a vat of female thoughts and sensations that they would naturally recoil from.” Poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles discuss the past, Myles’s novelInferno, and Modern Maturity. Love this. Love them. Get into it. 

“I think a lot of the apparent resistance to women’s writing or queer writing and definitely writing that doesn’t conform to desires for its genre to be clearly this thing or that—or even look like “hybridity”—what does that look like—is just a fearful projection of some imaginary reader’s horror at being dropped into a vat of female thoughts and sensations that they would naturally recoil from.”

Poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles discuss the past, Myles’s novelInferno, and Modern Maturity.

Love this. Love them. Get into it.