Book Of Grief And Hamburgers , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Stuart Ross

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100 pages

English

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	05 avril 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773059556
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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The Book of Grief and Hamburgers
Stuart Ross

Contents Selected Other Books by Stuart Ross Dedication Epigraph Somebody give me a hamburger. Hamburgers crept into my poetry… My mother was an artist… If I was the kind of writer… Hamburgers are a device. When you call your dog Mousse… Although Franz Kafka was not a moose… Shavuot is about two things… Image #1 The British poet… It may be that I have grieved… I became closer with Nelson Ball… In the thrift store… Before I opened my eyes… Hamburgers to the right of them … In the last several years… My friend Michael Dennis… I sat with Nelson Ball… So, that book Mary gave me… I am the only person in my family… It is just two days into 2021… In stuff there is grief. Image #2 “Grief” is a postcard… Sometimes I feel like… I have this terrible feeling… Image #3 I was text chatting… The phone rings. CHICAGO Seeing so many people around me… A movie that no one ever talks about… This book feels like one big hamburger. I am a person who has… I spoke on the phone yesterday to Steven. Is the death of one person… Yesterday, we learned that… I am the only person left alive… Does Richard Vaugh have hamburgers… It’s stupid to search… I haven’t had a vivid dream in so long. I distract myself with news… The last time I saw Dave McFadden… Image #4 My mother never stopped grieving… My father promised my dying mother… I turn on the tap… I rarely speak with friends… My face is old. Michael messaged me this morning. One morning in June 2011… This afternoon I was editing… On Friday I visited Michael in Ottawa. In my 2005 poem… Here are some last words. At 12:30 a.m, on the morning of.… What did Owen think about… Probably I should have told you… Here’s something else I shouldn’t tell you. But let me tell you this. I was looking in my computer… My mother died on April 21, 1995. It’s Saturday evening… Image #5 I’ve been on page fifty-two… This is how my grief manifests itself. It is just after midnight… When, last April, Michael told me… At the end of her brief meditation… When my mother was in hospital… On the afternoon of June 2… The day before Christmas… Somebody give me a hamburger. Image #6 Coda Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright

Selected Other Books by Stuart Ross
70 Kippers (w/ Michael Dennis, Proper Tales Press, 2020)
Ninety Tiny Poems (above/ground press, 2019)
Sos una Sola Persona (trans. Tomás Downey & Sarah Moses, Socios Fundadores, 2019)
Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (Anvil Press, 2019)
Espesantes (above/ground press, 2018)
Eleven/Elleve/Alive (w/ Dag T. Straumsvåg & Hugh Thomas, shreeking violet press, 2018)
Pockets (ECW Press, 2017)
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016)
Sonnets (w/ Richard Huttel, serif of nottingham editions, 2016)
A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015)
Further Confessions of a Small-Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015)
In In My Dreams (Book*hug, 2014)
Our Days in Vaudeville (w/ 29 collaborators, Mansfield Press, 2013)
You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press, 2012)
Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (ECW Press, 2011)
Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009)
Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books, 2008)
I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press, 2007)
Confessions of a Small-Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2005)
Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press, 2003)
Razovsky at Peace (ECW Press, 2001)
Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid (ECW Press, 1999)
Henry Kafka & Other Stories (The Mercury Press, 1997)
The Inspiration Cha-Cha (ECW Press, 1996)
The Mud Game (w/ Gary Barwin, The Mercury Press, 1995)
The Pig Sleeps (w/ Mark Laba, Contra Mundo Books, 1993)
He Counted His Fingers, He Counted His Toes (Proper Tales Press, 1979)
The Thing in Exile (w/ Steve Feldman & Mark Laba, Books by Kids, 1976)

Dedication
In memory of Michael Dennis
“We are the lucky men.”

Epigraph
“I want to talk to my dad, but my dad is dead now. I know we can’t have a regular conversation so I am trying to stay open to alternatives.”
— Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate

Somebody give me a hamburger.
Somebody give me a hamburger.
And he balanced a hamburger on his head.
She deals in rubber bands and hamburgers.
For God’s sake, look after our hamburgers.
Who stole Grandpa’s hamburger?
Four score and seven hamburgers were how many.
After he shaved his chin, he shaved his hamburger.
Not with a bang, but a hamburger.

Hamburgers crept into my poetry…
Hamburgers crept into my poetry in my late teens, about ten years after I started writing. They appeared a few years after I’d discovered David McFadden’s poetry, and Stephen Crane’s, and E. E. Cummings’s, and Victor Coleman’s, and Joe Rosenblatt’s. I don’t know if hamburgers appeared in any of those guys’ poems. Well, maybe in David McFadden’s, but if so, probably not for the same reason they appeared in my poems.
Sometimes the hamburgers in my poems were actual hamburgers. Sometimes they were Frank Sinatra. Sometimes the hamburgers that showed up in my poems were rubber bands. Once they were onion rings. Sometimes they were Frank Stella and Joe Hardy. Or penguins.
The lines on the previous page are not lines from my poems. But they could be. Most of them would likely be last lines. Does a hamburger make any line of poetry better? I mean, better than it was before it had a hamburger in it?
Other poets put an angel in their poems to make them better — sometimes the tongues of men and angels. Or the moon. The moon is very popular among poets. Some people put love in their poem to make the poem a good poem.
When I worked with Dave McFadden on his volume of selected poems, Why Are You So Sad? , I thought we would reproduce the poems exactly as they had been originally published, and in chronological order. But first the order thing: Dave wanted them to appear in random order. He presented me with a random order for the poems in the book, but I think the order wasn’t entirely random. Dave was wily that way. But the other thing: Dave wanted to edit his poems for this new volume. He was a better poet now than when he had originally written those poems in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, and he could make those poems better. In several of his poems from the 1960s, Dave replaced the word love with the word thing. And it was true: it made the poems better.
So Dave was a poet who put the word love into his poems when he was in his twenties and took the word love out of his poems when he was in his sixties.
Here’s what I do: I put the word hamburger in my poems when things are getting a little too heavy. Because the word hamburger makes you laugh. So this manoeuvre makes a heavy poem lighter. You can lift it more easily.

My mother was an artist…
My mother was an artist, which she mostly expressed through being a self-taught interior decorator. She also made some clay sculptures. Two of them are on a shelf behind me right now, above the rows of old R & B and Black gospel records I used to spin on my radio show. One of the clay sculptures is of a ballerina, sitting cross-legged. Or perhaps she is just a woman in tights. The other sculpture my mother made and I kept is of our dog Mousse. Mousse was a toy poodle whose pedigree name was Parquet Ralphy of Russell Hill Road. We called him Mousse. The sculpture has Mousse sitting, with one of his paws raised slightly, as if he is hoping to shake your hand, or as if you had just said, “Shake, Mousse. That’s a good boy. Shake.” The sculpture, like Mousse, is mostly white but with a black nose and black eyes, and some brown flecks in his fur. It is covered in a glaze.
When I was six or seven years old, my mother took me to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see a gigantic hamburger made of painted fabric. It was taller than me. This sculpture is called Floor Burger . It was created by Claes Oldenburg in 1962. A burger nestled within a bun, and a pickle perched on top. Some of the paint was already beginning to crack and flake, even in 1966, when I first saw the gigantic hamburger.
A hamburger can be art. That is the first lesson about art I ever learned.
Claes Oldenburg was born ten days before my mother. He is still alive. My mother died in 1995. David McFadden died in 2018.

If I was the kind of writer…
If I was the kind of writer who worked hard, I would look through all the books I’ve written, read over all my poems from the 1970s until the present, locate every mention of hamburgers, and tell you which of my poems have hamburgers in them. A lot of my poems have hamburgers.
But I do not work hard and my standards are low.
Also, my books are scattered everywhere throughout my home, and it would take me too long to find them.

Hamburgers are a device.
Hamburgers are a device.
If my poems are getting too serious, I insert a hamburger. Hamburgers, like the word hamburger , make people laugh.
I haven’t eaten a hamburger since 1993. That’s when I became a vegetarian, but I forget why.
Oh yeah, I remember. I stopped eating meat and stopped adding salt to m