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The King of Pop has passed. You could say he died a few years back when reports of his life outside of music became even more sensational than his legendary live performances. Over a decade ago, I heard a comedian quip that if MJ had passed away right after the Bad album he would have been remembered as the greatest of all time. Bigger than Marvin Gaye, bolder than James Brown, brasher than Rick James. Let’s see if that’s true. Can the legend eclipse the man’s failings? Can the music live on after the headlines have gone away? If all the buzz I’m hearing from folks in the street-their sadness, their shock, the music slippin from their lips-is any indication, the King of Pop will always live.

In between class breaks from my creative writing intensive I decided to hit the library for some more inspiration. Being at the library is a bit of a guilty pleasure. I have dozens of great books at home that I haven’t read yet and really should before my “To Read” list hits a critical mass and there are some great local used bookstores that give me access to print journals and some rare out-of-print books. But the library’s special, it’s one thing to be published but to be published and in a library is some real wonder to me. And that’s why I love hanging out in the library, it reminds me that I need to work harder and keep pushing to get to the other side. (A point that was reinforced in a recent library pick-up, Seth Godin’s The Dip, you should check it out.)

Yesterday’s random poetry pick was Larry Levis’ Winter Stars. I first heard about Levis from Rich and then again when I started reading up on Fresno poets a year or so back. I’ve picked up and put back his book a couple of times already but yesterday I went the whole nine and took Mr Levis’ book out for a spin. So here it is, Father’s Day, and I’m reading some of the best father poems I’ve ever read. The man Levis describes full of life, violence, tenderness, soft-spoken, uncommunicative, who’s always been there, then left, then is back again, the shadow, the measuring stick, the contradiction. I know this man and have seen him take on a whole block of rowdy teenagers armed only with a dozen eggs. I’ve also seen him buckle and fold under the weight of whiskey and a picture of my mother. Yeah, the man in Levis’ poems sure does feel an awful lot like my own father.

Pops jokes that I owe him some mean commission for the number of times he appears in my work, the translation help he’s given me and for all the stories I’ve borrowed from him. I tell the ole man that there’s no money in poetry. Pops laughs at me. He’s still looking for some payback. I intend to give it to him in the form a library card and hope he can use it to checkout a book with a poem that he’s in. One day, I hope that’s my book but for now it’ll be Levis’ book.

Winter Stars
by Larry Levis

My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, and with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.

I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.

Sometimes I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.

It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them,
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him.
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed…
If you can think of the mind as a place continually
Visited, a whole city placed behind
The eyes & shining, I can imagine, now it’s end—
As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at last
All of the travelers will be asleep, or until
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.

I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.

I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.

Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.

That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.

from Winter Stars

To MFA or not MFA? In my case, this question is entirely moot since I only have two semesters at (unnamed NYC engineering university) under my belt. Well, all that’s about to change for your boy in the Bay as I’ve signed up for a poetry intensive at a local city college and I am hella stoked.

The instructor insures me that the college poetry intensive will be very similar to the community workshops I’ve been taking for years so I should fit right in and hit the ground running. Still, I can’t help but be a little excited and somewhat nervous of being back in a classroom for the first time in 20 years. Like a proper word nerd, I’ve bought some new notebooks and have my day planned out to the letter. Huzzah.

So my expectations for this class are pretty straight-forward: I’m looking for a structured setting where I can produce a good amount of work that will be critique fairly by a group of readers who are all looking to improve their writing. Not much, eh?

More than anything, I’m hoping that being in a college environment gets me hungry for more. Some kind of minor degree in English? A chance to enter one of the Bay Area’s more rigorous writing programs? Something completely left field, maybe in Business or Mathematics? Who knows? Sky’s the limit. The point is I’ve been talking the talk about going back to school for years and now I get to walk the walk.

See ya on the other side.

Two films, one trying to spin a new twist in the unstoppable alien monster comes to wreck havoc and destruction everywhere and only one brave warrior, his crazy cohorts and some bad ass fight scenes can end the carnage movie and the other aspiring to become the actual visual definition for Direct-to-DVD.

OUTLANDER
Damn, this movie was some good popcorn munching fun. How it does it without actually having a memorable monster, the main character having an extremely limited emotional range, and the fact that I thought almost every other scene I was viewing was liberally borrowed from every sci-fi/action film I’ve seen in the last two decades is really beyond me.

The plot involves an alien warrior names Kainan, played by James Caviezel, who crash lands in the middle of Viking territory unknowingly bringing a fierce killer monster with him. The Vikings find Kainan, the Outlander, and subsequently all blame him for the destruction the creature has brought but everyone including the Viking King (played with gusto by John Hurt), his daughter Freya, the heir apparent ultra-prime-alpha male Wulfric, the council of warriors, and an (almost) mute boy all grow to love and respect Kainan cuz that’s what happens in these movies.

I felt like I was watching clips of Planet of the Apes, Rambo, Aliens, Pitch Black, The Edge, Pathfinder, The Last of the Mohicans, King Kong (1976), The A-Team, Waterworld, The 13th Warrior, Braveheart, The Road Warrior, Beowulf and (thanks to a character named Boromir) The Lord of the Rings all rolled into one. And anytime I saw Caviezel getting tied up and wooped, I, of course, thought of The Passion of the Christ, except when he was emoting and then I thought of (insert a movie where Christian Bale plays the hero and is trying to be a badass and tender dude at the same moment).

The film almost gives up any chance of being good when the warriors gather in the hall and welcome Kainan into their brood by having him proves his worth by challenging Prince Wulfric in a fierce round of shield dancing. Luckily, Ron Perlman comes in at this moment to do what he does best: wear makeup and kick monster ass with two iron hammers. Ok, not so much on the hammers part but you know Perlman can elevate almost any sci-fi film.

A nice plot twist (that as far as I know the writers did not steal from any previous sci-fi action film) emerges to make the Outlander just that more interesting so we can care what happens to him as he goes on what may be a suicide run to save the Princess, the Kingdom and get back his manhood (end sequence liberally borrowed from just about every macho flick ever made).

Outlander tried real hard and delivered in all the right place with just enough scares, blood and testosterone to keep me happy. A high recommendation for rental but don’t hold your breath for Outlander 2.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
If you saw the YouTube trailer, you’ve seen it all. This movie is bad. Not Jackass bad, not Scary Movie bad, not the trailer to Australia bad, this film doesn’t even try to be any good. Sunny already has posted his thoughts and he’s right on with the fact that only Lorenzo Lamas (who now looks more like a guy trying to bag chicks by claiming to be Lorenzo Lamas) is fully embracing what could have been an Ed Wood like classic. Other plus: Deborah Gibson gives it her all and actually makes the movie semi-watchable cuz at least I can start singing “Only In My Dreams” and “Shake Your Love” whenever she has a bad line.

On the writing, if you read the Wiki entry for megaldon (aka Giant Shark) you’ve already read the almost word-for-word exposition from one of the movie scientists.

Barb’s thoughts on this new low point in America cinema and Lorenzo Lamas are here.

Recommendation: I would only buy this DVD with someone else’s money and would only see it again to punish my eyes. Put it to you like this, if it was between this movie and Kanye West’s new book, I would choose neither.