DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK

HATCHET JOB XVI

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:21:54 -0400

Hatchet Job XVI is happening on June 4 at Suburbia. It’s heating up out there in the streets. Show up at 7:30 and talk to everybody. The barn is felled, you don’t care. It’s Cynthia Cruz, it’s Alex Dimitrov, it’s Jacqueline Waters, it’s Eric Amling. It’s thirteen days away. Like you.

THREE IDEAS IN THIRTY SECONDS

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:24:00 -0400

Why don’t you head on over to Suburbia and click follow, which allows you the esteemed privilege of following Suburbia, which is now home to the Hatchet Job poetry series. While you’re there, check out these shots of Hatchet Job XV at the new venue, courtesy of Emmanuel Villanueva Cruz. Doesn’t it all just make you want to put your feet up and hear some poetry in June? Stay tuned, renegades. Stay tuned.

THE EARTH YOU CAN'T STOMACH

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:18:46 -0400

I would like to share with you my favorite newspaper correction of the past ten years. And I would like to share with you a poem I wrote called “Correction,” which is published inside the new issue of Gulf Coast. Because sometimes America’s finished and so is your brother.

POSTCARDS: GONE TALK

Mon, 13 May 2013 06:01:38 -0400

Acquired: City Reliquary, Brooklyn. 2013.

DEATH MAKE ME A PEASANT

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:53:00 -0400

You all remember how much you loved the first installment of the Selected Movies series over at The American Reader. So awake and sing, ye faithfuls. Here’s Selected Movies: Part Two, with poems written (and erased) via two films: Poetry (2010) and Orpheus (1950). It’s the seventh month of a little thing we like to call The American Columns.

HATCHET NIGHT

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:37:43 -0400

Hatchet Job starts a beautiful new life tonight at Suburbia, with Susan Wheeler, Brian Foley, Lindsay Kathleen Turner, and special guest Mark Leidner. Because sometimes you need a special guest to come read and celebrate a new venture and Mark’s like yeah I’ll celebrate that. It all starts at 7:30PM. Let’s raise all the glasses, shall we.

HATCHET JOB HEADS TO SUBURBIA

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:23:22 -0400

One day the men with the money will bang on your door and say we want to make money. You’ve given us fourteen months of good, hearty work now we want your work to make money. We want the room in which you work to make money. We want your money to make money. These are the words the men spoke to me when they banged on my door. And so ended Hatchet Job’s run of poetry readings at Public Assembly.

And now the people sing: what will a poetry series do for a home?

It will call its home Suburbia. It will stride back into the basement where it was born. It will let you the read the poems you came there to read. It will never argue for time. It will sell the booze low how it should be in Brooklyn. I’ve said it each month and I’ll say it again: Hatchet Job will never cost money.

Suburbia is a DIY punk venue and Hatchet Job is a DIY poetry series and now we are married.

Hatchet Job XV is next Tuesday, May 7, from 7:30-9:30PM and it’s our first reading at Suburbia. Join Susan Wheeler, Brian Foley, Kathleen Turner, and a very special guest, and let’s throw the after party at our venue, where we work, and let’s cheers to art that won’t take money for an answer.

SELECTED GHOST

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:47:30 -0400

Well we mailed the first pamphlet all over America (and even a few to Paris) and now they’re all gone, comrades, but Greying Ghost Press has saved the day once again and printed this new edition of the pamphlet, which is covered in burdocks. You want one? Scuttle your address my way and you’ll get one in the mail, along with a handwritten postcard.

A THUNDER FOR JULY

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:20:42 -0400

Found out last week that Eileen Myles picked my poems as one of the winners of the Summer Literary Seminar in Lithuania this year, which means I’ll be working for two weeks with Eileen and Ariana Reines, two poets whose work has meant so much to me in the last year, and congratulations to CAConrad and Jenny Zhang who were also selected, and I’ll celebrate my birthday while I’m walking in Europe, and one of my best friends in the world, Soren Stockman, he’ll be there writing poems too, and I would like to say thank you to the world in which this will happen I would like to say thank you.

IF SUN WON'T SHINE ON NOTHING NEW

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:22:53 -0400

We met in the hills and he has no way of knowing this, but yesterday was a doldrums where you pass the blossoming trees, it’s sundown, it’s sundown and you stop yourself, you can’t bring yourself to photograph the trees because the people you love who love the trees are gone, the citizens on the train are citizens of hate, they smell the slack in your skin, and Zachary Pace has mailed you an envelope, please don’t bend he’s written on its face, and inside he’s censored the first page of Beckett’s Molloy, yes you met him in the hills, you found each other again in a poor man’s town, you fled to the city and embraced in how many apartments, he has no way of knowing this, but many times in his life Zachary Pace has called you away from a sadness, a gloom that wants you to wear its shoes, and these are the letters you grew up writing, and this is the correspondence that will never go bankrupt, and once in your life if a person will hear you, if he will let you hear him this closely, then you will dance on the skull of the trapdoor with the people you love and with love.

HATCHET JOB XV

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:11:44 -0400

From far and wide they come with hatchets glinting. On May 7, at Public Assembly, Lindsay Turner, Brian Foley, and Susan Wheeler are coming from Tennessee, Massachusetts, and the doomswamps of New Jersey to plunge into some poems. 7PM begins the cork-popping.

POSTCARDS: RUIN VALUE

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:30:09 -0400

Pensionnat Notre-Dame.
Postmarked Brooklyn, NY. 2013.

To Dot Devota, who wrote this sentence & changed my day: “There was very little energy for a kid of his age to be in a house of such degeneracy.”

DEATH IS NO STOPPING YOU

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:03:30 -0400

They Will Sew the Blue Sail published my poem “Thunderhead” this past week. Thanks, blue sailors. The poem is a collaboration with Federico Garcia Lorca, who was shot in the Fuente Grande in 1936.

SEVEN HUNDRED & FORTY-FOUR HOURS

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:17:00 -0400

I wrote down my life and what happened inside it during a period of 744 hours. There were cities, and readings, and people, and poetry. I took as many photographs as America would let me along the way.

744

This hole as big as a quarter in my shoe and it’s raining. Spend the afternoon in Dumont with J. drinking coffee, talking about Brueghel, eating a burger. We’re outside of time and they bring us beignets. We eat chocolate in bed and rummage through poems. Taxi to the reading at Molasses gives me a rotten stomach. S. writes me during one of the poets: “if you need me to yell something weird and walk out, let me know.” J. walks in from the rain, first time she’s seen me do this in years. I speak my poems, I wear a leather jacket. Bartender buys me a beer and shakes my hand. J. says: “this feels like when we first started dating.” Her sheets are white, like a starched collar. Leave work early a few days later to read in the basement at Cornelia. Skin crawls in that room. Like I’m in an airplane. S. is sitting there with her cat grin and C. shows up in a terrible jacket. Feel myself sea change a little during these readings. More oil, more conviction to pour on the heap. Tell S. I’m afraid people will think I’m mad at women or don’t love my family. S. says: “you don’t exist, the voice exists.” Think she means it’s honest work to be an ugly American.

Everybody starts saying blizzard blizzard in New York and a few days later standing in Penn I see A. and E with their bags. Stow away in the quiet car on the train to Boston. Have to cancel the reading with A. because of the storm. Thresh out a few lines and photograph some grass out the window. Head back to the loud car to sit with A. and drink beer. Shows me her drawings of guitars and straight lines. When we pass through Providence the snow starts talking. Taxi to the hotel with A. and E. and another guy who seems like he’d be good in a fight. Inside I head straight for L. Somehow she walks up behind me, doesn’t want to hug me. Throw my bags down in her room and L. hands me the watch that I left at her house in Portland and my dead grandfather’s gold ring that she wore from her neck. Doesn’t look me in the face when she does this. Trespass into the convention. Everyone all milked up for the next few days of lights and noise. Work exactly 0% at the PEN booth, pay too much money for a beer and head back to L.’s room. She puts on a blue dress. Room’s on the top floor of the hotel and I take a few pictures of Boston. All the snow on the buildings. Cab to L.’s reading in the basement of a bar with no sign. Sit with a sweetheart, another L., and talk about sandwiches and poems. Read this one, read that one. Order my L. mashed potatoes because her stomach is rotten. Drink however many beers out of plastic. I meet N. and W. and C. and E. for the first time. N. seems less impressed with me than I thought he would be. W. says she loves my work then asks if I’m a poet. Talking to C. I feel like he’s just come from his friend’s wedding and had to threaten to kill the wedding planner. He has a hat and a voice like that, and a face. E. seems like a person with whom it would be great to eat soup in bed clothes. L. reads her poems but she reads them more low than I wanted. Always this vague feeling of want to build her a shack on a hill and we’ll unstitch the hardships of our lives together. I take L.’s picture in a crowd. Z. shows up to read with M. and B. in the poetry basement. Night starts to feel like the fist is closing. L. tells me I need to eat dinner and scowls at me. I see S. in the crowd holding the hand of a cross-dresser. I love him, my S. That night we ride the T out to his mother’s house in the snow. We tramp in the streets in the dark smoking cigarettes. He feeds me rice and pork and I thank him too much. I sleep in his brother’s water bed and wake up the next morning thirsty.

Walk, ride the T, take a cab back to L.’s room and shower and drink coffee and run into B. in the lobby. Impossible to talk to L. without seeing someone we know. Work at the PEN booth for a few hours and talking with M. about poets who were punk in the 70s. Take a few sips of whiskey out of the flask C. gave me for my birthday. Time to rot on a panel and talk about translations of poems. Dreading it but S., who I’ve just met, brings up Mandelstam and Logue. Feel a slight pang of love to be among strangers and poets and we all crave this work in our way. Drinking whiskey cut with cranberry juice and M. introduces herself after the panel. Her eyes keep staking out my face and I wonder is she comparing how I look in real life to how I look in fake life. Taxi with L. to the museum for postcard exhibit. Argue about our failed love and sit in a marble room. I take a picture of a postcard of flooded Paris and send it to J. The past year of my life like it never happened, and L. and I kiss in the gallery and whisper about the postcards we love. Her favorite is a restaurant menu where you tear a postcard off the top and send it to someone. We kiss more and look at medieval art. Take her picture standing next to a bust of gold. There is a weapon called an elephant goad. There is ancient jewelry under glass. In the gift shop I find her prints of the postcards she loved and we buy them. Taxi back to the hotel and eat burgers and talk about let me build you a book. Want to build you what you won’t build yourself. We decide to sit in the hot tub instead of seeing our friends read poems in Boston for a few hours. Reminded me of being on Mount Hood with L. a few months earlier and snow falling in the morning as we sat in the hot tub outside in the winter and that was one death.

Here in Boston a man is grunting and talking to us in the hot tub. Feel ashamed that L. thinks I dislike people. Want to tell her that all I dislike is having no freedom to choose. We put our clothes back on and head to the bar where J. is throwing a party. I won’t be kissing you anymore, says L. Inside the bar she dances and I drink. I talk to C. and we crack jokes. One of the few people I believe understands a handful of chaos like this. D.J. invites me to read when his book comes out. E. mistakes L. for C. and a stranger invites me to read back in Brooklyn. L. is dancing with J. who puts his hands on her hips and I turn away. The bathroom would be a good one to bleed in. B. says his friend killed himself in this city. I decide to sleep on L.’s floor that night. Taxi to the hotel with E. and E., and the one who is female has a laughing fit the whole way home. L. kisses me in her bathroom and I pass out drunk on her floor. I wake up shivering. Working the PEN booth the next day I drink whiskey and talk to M. about schadenfreude. I buy S.’s book and L.’s book and meet J. and see B. for a minute who asks me why I’m not in school. There is my ex girlfriend M. with a guy I don’t talk to anymore either. I eat a raggedy sandwich and tremble. S. invites me to lunch at Coda. Everyone at the table is from Portland and I wish they all knew the story. Boston is a great fucking sag of a city, isn’t it. Our waitress disperses us to a new table and I sit with L. and D., who hosted me in his series last time I was in Portland, and J., whose book is out today though I don’t realize who he is until later. S. and T. are behind us at the other table. She gets the turkey club like me. We walk and there’s a 21% feeling of being underdogs. In a few hours L. and I sit at a table surrounded by shouting men and try to talk. She says words like I don’t love you and the angry bird inside her is fluttering. I’m crying ladies and gentlemen and drinking a beer from California. Twenty minutes later I bring all my luggage to a bar and read to the largest crowd of my life. B. buys me a beer. I put on my watch and my dead grandfather’s gold ring. I accidentally strike a sweaty man in the face while I’m reading. M. tells me there’s “drama” in my voice. I’m wearing a scarf. A lot of people in the crowd clap me on the shoulders and shake me and say celebratory words and carrying all my bags I feel like a man being led to the gallows. L.’s friend says I made his dick move. Sitting upstairs in the bar and I drink a lot, waiting for T. Knowing this is the last time I’ll see L. for god knows how long we hold hands and kiss in front of her friends when we say goodbye.

Outside the bar I see A. and M. in the street and kiss them goodbye too. T.’s car is bourgeois and we talk the entire drive back to Brooklyn about T.’s boyfriend and my failed love. Halfway through the trip we park at a rest stop and T. watches a person masturbate in the bathroom. I’m drinking whiskey and we listen to X-Ray Spex. Within ninety seconds of being back in my apartment I read a letter from S., drop my bag, and walk to the bar to meet the old friends and we close the place out. The next day J. thinks she’s overdosing on drugs so I rush out to see her. Calm her down with the story about how C. once drove me to the ER because I thought I was having a heart attack. Just nerves, it’s always the nerves. We entwine in the dark and get some sleep. Walk to the village after work the next day for drinks with T. and Z. and M. and B. and D. and A. and G. before they read poems in a gallery. Asking me questions about L. he makes me feel sick when Z. talks to me. Want to call her up and obliterate. Drink at the reading and take photographs instead. D.’s poem about breaking her dad’s plate is so good I walk up to her and say can I publish that. Seems like a woman who makes a life beautiful after a period of upheaval. Drinking more at Home Sweet Home with Z. and we have a good talk in front of a gun under glass. You are my friend now and you don’t even know it. The next day barely happens. When Z. writes to ask if he can sleep at my apartment I say of course. We drink beer with E. at my bar and talk more about L. It’s like interviewing someone’s hair about their own face. I walk Z. down to the piers and he says wow and takes photographs of New York. The city is defiant. The next day Z. runs into M. at the Strand and brings him to my office and we record them reading poems. I get paid to do this, think of it.

Find out an hour later I’ve come within an inch of winning a big American award. It gives me a black mood. My failed love, my ambition. Fight about my spirit with L. on the phone. The doctor has taken my blood. J. won’t take my calls. Two days later it’s a reading at Culturefix for the launch of Parallax. A. is late to meet me and I don’t realize the beer I’m drinking is 9% alcohol until about two hours later. Former PEN intern who got trashed and told me I’m a man and therefore a coward is here. A.’s parents are here and I want them to be my parents. K. who moved to Thailand is here. My brother E. is here and his fiancée K. I stomp on the ground before the first word of my poem because I think someone is talking and to my dismay this works. After the reading me and S. and E. and K. go to an art show in a basement. It’s boring and leave with S. in a taxi. We drink too much and worry about our poems then we don’t. Next day I fight with J. and we try to hash it out over dinner. I lose my wits against myself and fall apart forty-one times at once while looking at her. The burger is unbelievable. She lets me stay the night at her place. So rattled I have to call out of work the next day and the night after that we’re reading at Public Assembly to launch J.F.’s book. The same morning X., who publishes books in a town far away, writes me to say the reading in Boston was knockout. Do you have a book she says. Yes I do, want to read it, I say. I try to read a family saga for J.F. His hair is long. His wife is beautiful. The reading is forever and I can’t sustain myself. I kiss S. goodbye and lie in bed. X. and X. publish chapbooks and they write to say let’s publish your work. Wake up feeling full of potholes. B. writes to ask if I’ll read in Amherst. M. writes to say will you come talk to my students. Another B. asks me to read at the anniversary. A. wants me to interview him. She won’t take my calls and J. doesn’t call me to see if I’m dead. C. says send me reviews of these two books by April. A. says we’re moving your deadline. I ask L.’s advice on Amherst and she says go. But I have no money. You have no choice, she says. Reminded of other choices L. hasn’t given me I haul off on her. Anyway my boss says no you can’t go I need you to build the pages.

Think about suicide roughly eleven times the next day. J. asks me if I’ve planned out how I would execute it. Worried if I say no she will note this as evidence of my incompetence. Also strikes me as perhaps a strange and heartless question. I owe the government $534. I have no memory of the $5,000 I took with me when I left Oxford last year. Stare at the banker in disbelief and he shows me the checks. Where did the money disappear. Where did the year disappear. Mother calls to say she doesn’t trust my friends. Keep up that attitude, she says, and I’ll put your belongings in a storage locker. Where did mother disappear. The next day it’s Public Assembly again and D. is in town from Portland. Have to set up the chairs ourselves when we arrive at the reading. I’m starved and want to throw up. Eating a bag of carrots with C. in the dark after she reads in her charcoal skirt. Talking with M. about what to name his kid while he smokes. Don’t recognize his wife E. because she’s so pregnant. R. makes me read last and then trashes my neighborhood and mispronounces my name. Thinking: you’re at a free poetry reading. In this neighborhood. That I booked for you. You know what really is terrible is getting thrown in jail for six years for writing a poem. L. writes but I no longer know how to write back. 73% feeling of no one believes in America anymore in this room. J. is nowhere where I am. Off to Amherst the next day without me is D. When will I see him again I have no idea. Feeling in my gut that the west is a fire sale with a big sign that says everything must go. If I ever end up there again it will be boarded up. I write this down and stare at the wall. I drink alcohol and tea to put me to sleep. And the next day when I wake up it’s the worst day of my life.

POSTCARDS: PINK SLEEP

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:11:35 -0400

Madison Square.
(Acquired: Manhattan, NY. 2013)

Years ago I ate a bag of carrots with a girl and her sister once in this park.

POSTCARDS: CLEFT

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:06:13 -0400

Joszef Diveky, Vase with bouquet of flowers, 1911-1912.
Boston, MA. 2013.

HATCHET JOB XIV - APRIL 2, 7PM

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:57:00 -0400

Hatchet Job can’t be certain, but Hatchet Job has heard April is a month where people try to turn poetry into a dog and pony show. You know what will always demolish that? Poetry.

April 2nd, 7-9pm at Public Assembly, come see Joe DeLuca, Amy Lawless, Sampson Starkweather, and Dara Wier.

And if you think this flier is about you, it is.

POSTCARDS: NEVERENDER

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:01:21 -0400

To the unconquerable Stacey Tran. Postmarked Brooklyn, NY 2013.

THE ROOM IS NOT LAWLESS

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:59:32 -0500

My sixth month of columns for The American Reader is all about poetry readings, pitch meetings, laws, genitalia, punk, and going hoarse. What’s it like for you? Here’s what it’s like for me. Tomorrow on the train to Boston I’m gonna read to myself in the quiet car.

SHEARS IS SHEARS

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:03:01 -0500

There’s a new issue of Loaded Bicycle out and it’s got three poems from Torch Songs stuffed all up in its guts like $3,000 taxidermy.

One of them is 50% this:

“Nothing she says I want to / know why I’m scrubbing tar / off my dress (in the next life / I light the stove & blow it / back out) instead of nothing.

Read them and reap.