Jeffrey Z Rothstein

2015-03-14
Great use of concrete images to evoke the gist of a complex constellation of feelings and motivations...although I'm not sure that 'dreamlike,' as a strategy for invoking a deceptively clockwork reality equals bi-polar; but that's just an inside joke between us. Great work!

2014-06-19
"Cast in the beauty of nervous laughter like a zebra's camouflage

So fast I flew to meet the bullet I could never dodge your stripes

Burned me all the day through the patterned model of my human core"

I can't remember the last time I read verses this powerful!
Kudos.

2014-06-19
Chaucer,
I was too young to have actually seen he MC5 during their brief comet-like trajectory over the Midwest, but I always feel like I was there anyway; sort of like occupying two separate temporalities simultaneously, as if the membranous edges of adjacent dimensions keep intruding on each other, causing an unresolvable tension. I refer specifically to the way the MC5 hover ghostlike in the music of almost every worthwhile anarchic punk band, from the Dictators to X to Barbetomagus, and even the Ruins and Pansonic, that drove with Quaalude stained eyes down the very road that they plowed and furrowed with their anger-as-noise aesthetic--not to mention Fred Sonic Smith's angry-cartoon-hornets on fermented honey guitar. Rock and roll--which is always in a necrotic commercial trance--would be far more impoverished were it not for the Motor City 5. They arguably did for pop music what H.P.Lovecraft did for the art of the pseudo-history, and they have that same hair-raising resonance.
nuff said.

2014-06-19
Ken
That last line really clinches it--powerful stuff!

2014-06-14
Nice poem! Great image of simulacrum incarnated as 'Gargantua effigies,' preening before the cultural-fun-house mirror, and ignoring the machinations of power that probably created and inflated them in the first place. Sounds like the sort of Baudrillardian observations, of how cultural distortions emerge and take shape that people like Mark Dery and Erik Davis penetrate in their analytical interventions and toe-nibblings. The dynamic element of the process is captured perfectly in the disequilibrium of a "hot wired mass locked in chaotic revolutions of sick hypnosis." If Baudrilard's 'America' could be given a new epigraph to wear like a sparkling Burger King crown atop its multi-eyed head, this would be it. And yes, that is definitely intended as a compliment.

2014-04-16
Pete,
As I said last night, a really great read, and a lot of fun--sort of like a sea shanty sung on a johnboat by two rangy 19th century fellows in a George Caleb Bingham painting. The lilting cadence and stanzas reinforce that sense of pushing logs down the interior of a rough waterway; and the contrast between such simple and yet enaggingly physical work and the world of "smart phones and fax" has a wonderful rustic quality. And yes, for some reason it does make me think of Carl Sandburg,
Great stuff!
Jeff

2014-03-04
Ken,
You've captured something really quirky and personal in a grim situation--a vernacular expression of the unspeakable.
The image of men, "Hung up by shells, tossing them into remaining arms/of the trees of Plugstreet, recalls scenes and pictures of what is sometimes referred to as RTI (Response To Impact), where the forces of bombs and shells literally blows soldiers and civilians into strange contortions and pretzel shapes. I prefer the way you said it: it returns their humanity to them.
Well done.

2014-02-28
The way you structure the various self-referential echoes essential to such complex insight, mirrors the difficult process of trying to divorce oneself from another's often unjustified misrepresentation.
Similar things have happened to me, as they do to everyone; then again, I too may be taking something out of context.
Well done.
An enviable masterpiece of subtlety
Jeff

2014-02-28
Ken,
you have really caught something of the horrible necrotic subtlety of a battlefield. The level of human fear and self-abasement is made palpable here. It makes me want to go home and take long shower, and brings back disturbing personal memories of other events.
Kudos. First rate writing.
Jeff

2014-01-27
Excellent read about a tragic ecological episode. You make the charade of displaying the last Passenger Pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo too personal to ignore. This is often just what happens when a species is destroyed; those remaining are fetishized, as if preserving their remains, after they expire, is somehow the same as if the creature were allowed to thrive without such senseless intrusions. (We seem to do something similar with vanishing groups of humans as well--I think of those Remington paintings at the end of the Nineteenth century, that were so polura after the harsh overrunning of so many indigenous peoples and cultures; and I often wonder what that says about Western culture)

Of course, I am mindful of the desire to retain a gene pool where rare species are concerned. But, it occurs to me that I am rendering the whole episode in such oobjectifying terms that it is reduced to an issue of quantifiable measurements and other artifacts of human reasoning. You said it much better, and with a compassion that is often lacking in historical recountings.

2013-10-06
Really great condensed poem--says as much as an entire tome, without a word out of place. A pocket sized theory of entropy, made up entirely of the effect...Like a mini-french cookbook covered in Duck fat--the idea is transposed with the experience: visceral and delicious!