Just One Puff…Piece
Sunday afternoon finds me straining to grasp at a subject I’d like to exploit for another weekly installment of the Polish Hammer Poetry Corner. After fifty-something odd columns I’ve written for “In Conversation,” have I finally exhausted my mental filing cabinet of petty grievances and wry observations? Not fucking likely. But I’ll be damned if I can find something interesting (to me, anyway) to pontificate upon.
Usually, during the course of the preceding week, something unbearably goofy will occur, forcing me to write with incredible wit and furious insight. This week, nothing. Milt, my soon-to-be eighty-one-year-old, live-in father-in-law has been fairly docile since I switched out his Prevagen for sugary vitamins. He hasn’t even noticed his pills now come in multi-colored hues shaped like Fred Flintstone and Dino. My knuckle-headed son has largely abandoned his knuckle-headed ways. He still works at Hydra. I wouldn’t say he’s thriving, but he’s at least paying his own bills which frees up my money to be spent on stupid shit like Mark Spears’ comic books, and signed, first edition novels from the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Derek Raymond, just recently. Bippy the Clown has been leaving me to my own devices, my devices being antithetical to Hydra’s best interests, of course. The wife still believes society remains on the verge of collapse and only water tablets and tomato plants can save us from devolving into highway marauders. So, you know, nothing that cries out for the devotion of an entire column.
Let’s see where this keyboard takes me.
National Poetry month has finally ended. Some folks felt the need to attempt to write a poem a day during the thirty-day expanse. Back in my feverishly productive, though mostly untalented younger days, I might have been tempted to take a good, hard gaze at my navel and carve out thirty poetic diamonds to add to the Moleskine coffers. I just lack the motivation, anymore. Poetry is exhausting. But the muse hasn’t completely abandoned me. I wrote a handful of poems, the best of the bunch probably being “Cuck of the Wok” based on a recurring dream disrupting my sleep. The dream involves my wife having an affair with a hibachi chef, forcing me to call out that egg-spinning bastard and challenging him to a knife fight in the parking lot of Shoguns. It’s crazy because I haven’t had shrimp-fried rice off the Teppanyaki in a decade. But I’m likely to fight any Oriental I see catching an egg atop his stupid hat, just on principle.
I did read several collections of poetry this April, and, let me tell you, they were uniformly excellent. The first one being Dan Denton’s “Fight Songs for the Underdogs” published by Luchador Press. This book is mighty, all killer and no filler. If you’re reading this column, you’re likely familiar with the work of Dan Denton. If you came to this column through a link on my Only Fans page and only possesses the vaguest notion what constitutes fine literature, allow me to enlighten you. Dan didn’t have it easy coming up in the blighted, urban hellscape of the Midwest. Poverty, addiction, homelessness, mental health challenges. Think of something that sucks, he dealt with it. He surmounted the type of shit that destroys most people. Through sheer force of will he made a life for himself, a family, a career, and took that indomitable work ethic and applied it to his forever love, literature. And he writes about the ugly corners of life, beautifully. I recommend all his books and chapbooks, especially his book “The Dead and the Desperate” published a few years ago by Roadside Press. “Fight Songs for the Underdogs” collects his very best poetry from the last several years. Every line is riddled with hope. No matter how deep in the gutter the poems delve, the words are always fixated on the stars.
My wife saw Fight Songs on my nightstand and instantly recognized the name. We had previously met him during our Toledo excursion.
“He’s the guy that laced his marijuana with LSD,” she said.
“He did not lace that shit with acid, I promise you that. I think.”
“Then how is it I got so fucked up on just one puff?”
I’m fairly certain it’s because she grew up smoking Alabama ditch weed, but I inherently sensed this was not the time to insult her lack of marijuana sophistication.
“Well, with Dan… when it comes to weed, like his poetry, he just doesn’t fuck around, you know? Anyway, I’m almost done if you want to read it next.”
“I don’t read poetry,” she scoffed. “I take one hit off one joint and now you think I’m some kind of poetry reading beatnik. I think not. I’m reading ‘The Housemaid’ next.”
Anyway, I read Fred Voss’s “Someday There Will Be Machine Shops Full of Roses.” It’s a testament to the poetic spirit of a man who toiled fifty years in west coast factories and shops as a machinist. Now, I’ll have you know, I work in a machine shop. Worked at plenty of them throughout the duration of my adult life. Never really learned how to run one machine. I’m what you might call “willfully ignorant in the ways of labor.” Nobody at Hydra is a machinist in the Fred Voss sense of the word. You could give Fred Voss a hunk of steel and a blueprint and he could machine it to whatever specifications you needed with professional precision. He did the same with language, crafting soul-baring, gorgeous poetry with words you could find anywhere.
Meanwhile, I’m over here just pressing buttons, hoping for the best. If there’s a blueprint, I sure as hell haven’t seen it.
Fred passed away recently, and it’s a tremendous loss to those who shared their lives with him, and all of us who knew him only by his art. He was a huge talent. In his poetry, he writes that those who knew him through work had no idea he wrote poetry. If he worked at Hydra, I would have sussed it out. I wrote two poems last month. You know who heard about it? Every motherfucker I worked with. Several times a shift.
The final book I want to mention is the Roadside Assistance, Roadside Press Reader. A collection compiled and edited by the illustrious Michele McDannold and Dan Denton, whom we’ve already established trucks in some excellent weed. Roadside Assistance is a compilation of poetry and prose from forty-eight varied authors who have had work published by Roadside Press, most small press luminaries who have been bringing fantastic work for years. I’m proud to say I am among the contributors, but don’t take my involvement as an invitation to show any bias. I assure you, it takes more than a Polish Hammer byline to suspend my hyper-critical nature (not to be confused with my hypocritical nature which I suspend for no one). The collection is uniformly excellent. I can say without the slightest hesitation, it’s got The Housemaid beat all to hell. Purchasing a copy of the Reader will help fund Roadside Press. Read the book, the authors you enjoy, reach out and order their books from the Roadside Press website. There are some great voices here telling vital stories.
Of course, the economy continues to depress us all to the point where my very own wife is deadset on curtailing my rampant book buying excursions. As though my lust for literature could be so easily contained.
Even as I write this, my wife’s watching doomsday prepping videos on YouTube, making lists of what we need to stockpile. Beef bullion, evaporated milk, honey, alcohol of the seventy percent variety, activated charcoal, coffee filters, tomato paste. It’s going to be expensive to survive the apocalypse. It would have been a lot cheaper to just not vote for Trump. Anyway, I just spent a stupid amount of money on “Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting” written and soon-to-be-autographed-once-I-get-my-ass-to-Galaxycon by Dr. Peter Weller. You may remember him as the OG Robocop. He’ll always be Buckaroo Banzai to me. He’s also a scholar and an expert on Italian Renaissance art. He wrote his dissertation on Alberti for his doctorate. I had to have the book for my signed, first edition collection and paid the sort of money that could have kept us in vegetables for the next six generations. How this book will protect my family in the advent of the dissolution of society remains to be seen. Likely this book once it’s signed by Dr. Weller, will only make me a prime target for all the scavenging bands of cannibal bibliophiles sauntering through the wastelands of rural Alabama. Who knows, it might be one of you, I’ll have to beat down with my burlap sack full of Matt Dinniman novels. And God help you if you come at me wearing a toque blanche atop your head.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
