colorful literary sites

“Blue in Green” by Ben Macnair

NEW POETRY

c/o coloredvinylrecordsdotcom

It is 3am in the morning,
in a student house.
Someone is playing an old Jazz LP,
but it means nothing to them.
They are just playing it,
because they think they have to.
The students are out reading poetry.
They talk about their journey,
and their voice,
and how 40 year old poetry is really, really,like cool,
but Shakespeare is nothing to them,
because they forgot about him when they left school.

Miles played Blue in Green,
in the 1950’s, but it still speaks to me.
More than the students whose voices are new,
digging away at the same old ground.
For all of their talk of breaking boundaries,
they are getting headaches from banging
their young heads against old walls,
and in a few years, when new students come,
and talk about their journey, and their voice,
Miles will still talk to me,
because there is something to be said
for keeping it simple.

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and play-wright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair.

An Excerpt from “The Ghost of Camp Hero” by Shelby Raebeck

NEW FICTION

Basketball basketball basketball. We sit in class all day thinking about it, then practice for two hours or maybe have a game, and drive home talking shit about who busted who, and I drop ’em both, Higgins and Sonny, in a fucking trailer park. And though my father’s life insurance got us a house—split level ranch in the center of Freetown—the place was too big for us to heat, half the rooms sealed closed with plastic. Every day same as the one before, until Coach comes up to me after practice and asks if everything’s okay and I say Sure, why wouldn’t it be? And he says, You’re not playing like yourself, keep it up and you won’t get a scholarship, and I shrug my shoulders, thinking, Fuck a scholarship, and take Higgins and Sonny home to the trailer park and go driving.

It’s another of those cold gray East End days when I pull up to the first beach, Maidstone, only half mile or so from home, and see this figure standing out at the end of the jetty that sticks into the harbor, wearing this purple hat and scarf. On days like that everything blurs into gray – water, land, sky—except now there’s these two soft spots of color. Then the figure holds its hands out to the side and turns slowly in a circle, and I realize it’s Joany. She spins again and I can barely make out her mouth is moving. I roll down my window but the wind is whipping in off the water too loud to hear anything, yet I see the headphones poking out beneath her hat and her mouth opening and closing like she’s singing. Hasn’t said a word to anybody in almost a year and she’s standing out there on the jetty singing.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

The Prisoners of Dwight MacDonald

A RANT

(photo of chateau d’if prison c/o travelfrance)

We’re imprisoned by our own attitudes.

We’re held back by the preconceptions, prejudices, and stereotypes with which we address the world. They become invisible jail bars around our minds. We construct a fortress around our accepted ideas– stone walls that an army couldn’t break through.

One sees this in every aspect of life– including in the literary realm. Writers and critics cling to rules laid down sixty-four years ago by a handful of intellectual pundits, most notably Dwight MacDonald in his 1960 Partisan Review essay, “Masscult and Midcult.”(An earlier essay by Clement Greenberg in the same publication, edited by Dwight MacDonald, set the tone.)

UNBREAKABLE RULES:

No Kitsch! Whatever kitsch is. Anything which might entertain the public.

Beware the Public! No masscult, midcult, on the edges or in-between.

Allowed: Completely inscrutable, alienating, pretentious and goofy examples of upper-class overeducated posturing known as the avant-garde.

Whither the fate of the prisoners of Dwight MacDonald?

They sit cautiously in their antiseptic modernist-designed offices and rooms. No art adorns the walls– only a single beige baize stripe (the walls themselves are gray) in the style of Barnett Newman, and a distorted portrait of a sparrow, meant to symbolize one of their captured-behind-glass idols, Proust.

The prisoners wait for: something. Not commutation of their sentences. They love their sentences– both kinds. They sit carefully at cold metal tables writing sentences on laptops, well-written one-direction sentences– always very well written, carefully screened: they rigidly police this– more and more sentences, always more of them, long ones, jammed impressively together in ever-longer paragraphs on more and more pages– Infinite Graphomania– and the sentences are acceptable if they’re intellectual, not passionate or emotional; not too much plot or excitement; no outbursts or melodrama– that would be kitsch– the sentences are permissible, approved, allowable, laudable just as long as they don’t engage the stray incautious reader in any way.

-Karl Wenclas

(These thoughts to appear someday in a planned book on the technocracy.)

“Tide” by Ken Kakareka

NEW POETRY

(c/o thespruce.com)

i was
sitting
underneath
a great
big
avocado tree
throwing a
pity party,
drinkin
& thinkin
what’s the
point?
when one
dropped
& clunk me
square on
the noggin.
i looked
around
startled:
who else
saw that?
no one!
it was
a sign
from god.
then
a sexy woman
and her
beautiful dog
walked by
smiling
at me.
my god!
another
sign –
how quickly
the tide
can turn!

Ken Kakareka’s latest novel is Summer of Irresponsibility (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His words have appeared or are on their way in numerous rags including Gargoyle Magazine, The Gorko Gazette, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. A list of selected publications can be found at kenkakareka.com.