LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE THIRTY-THIRD

Café Rosetta | T. Kilgore Splake

T. Kilgore Splake is a creature of habit, drinking his coffee every single morning in a café and penning poems about the café's patrons. A fellow Michigander (Props to my home state!), he lives in the Upper Peninsula, where time moves slower, coffee is still meaningful and lends to prolificacy, and the winter sucks the life from a younger soul but caters to a slower life perfectly. These are the poems and full-color photographs, wrapped tightly in a nicely packaged trade paperback, that were inspired by the other visitors in the stubborn winter of Northern Michigan at a little espresso and vegetarian hole in the wall called Café Rosetta.

Most of the poems deal with the goings on of the café:

[ ... ]
early morning gossip
dishes washed
sinks cleaned
carpets vacuumed
wondering how to spend
rest of friday's hours
[ ... ].

Like the hustle and bustle of the café, these poems continue to flow seamlessly: no titles, no capitalization, no punctuation, just the ol' graybearded bard's signature style of short bursts of centered lines flowing from one page to the next like continuous sips on a familiar mug — yet choppy in places, like sips that are too hot against the roof of the mouth, so one must pause for a moment to ease the sting.

And some of the scenes do sting, too (If you are a plumpish person, this is not the book I would recommend for you.);

[ ... ]
obese rolling fat
small backpack
riding backbone flab
ordering rich pastries
feeding chubby face
like old ore train
car topped high
copper load to
tamarack smelter

some are rather sad,

[ ... ]
too early
for memorial day tourist
not a local regular
greyhound lost child
riding to highway's finish
seeing end of the world
escaping mother
ghost of distant stepfather
drinking rosetta coffee
[ ... ]

[ ... ]
home alone pause
before rosetta coffee
looking for a friend
older children grown
loose wedding ring
[ ... ]

and some, though seldom, are sweet:

late march
sun shining
winter sparrows singing
pretty young girl
[ ... ].

There are some repeated scenes, visuals, and lines in here — Ethiopian coffee, TV Weather Channel, the cliffs, Point Betsy, the poet tree, early morning — that could probably be condensed, but overall, the repetition gives the feeling and appearance of routine, of a daily journey and ritual that begins with coffee and ends at the cliffs. Be prepared to take that journey, and grab a warm cup of joe while you're at it.

The book is available from Music Shoe Press here.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE TWENTY-SECOND

Facebook | T. Kilgore Splake

Poetry
36 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” chapbook
Rusty Truck Press

I'm from Michigan, and I've seen what those cold, cold winters can do to you, up there in the U. P., where it's frozen for most the year. I've seen how it can freeze an old heart into believing there's no good in technology, but I disagree with this sentiment ... and not just because I'm an avid Facebook user ... and not just because one day T. Kilgore Splake was my Facebook friend, and then the next day he had vanished, profile and all.

No, not these trivial things, but I do find the things Mr. Splake says about our generation on these pages a tad bit insulting, with the recurring themes of “adult children,” “self-centered,” “nothing to say,” “no talent,” “look at me,” and “soap opera,” to name a few. But I digress. Let's first discuss the work before we get into the rebuttal of the work, shall we?

This current book, of the many, many books written prolifically by the man who never stops writing, is a comment on our society, a younger generation that communicates online, through the webbings of the Internets, tangled in this profile or that social scene, and keeping conversations going through text, rather than face to face. Perhaps Splake prefers everyone to sit and have a cup of coffee with him in his brisk Upper Peninsula local shop of choice, but as I have no taste for Upper Michigan (except to say that it is beautiful), and I reside quite far away in sunny California, where it is mild year-round and where I can't even afford a cup of coffee, that seems to be a bit impossible, especially constantly. Ergo, Facebook: a way that one can stay connected with friends s/he didn't even know s/he had.  Brilliant.

But Splake doesn't think so, in fact, really quite the opposite. There is so much negativity in this book, that I am quite disbelieving that he could find no good at all in the social device. He comments on it as one of a generation gone by, with talks of Kerouac and Ginsberg, as if my generation should automatically know who those people were, and quite disregarding that, while those authors are great, this is the now.  And we are the now generation that may or may not fit his lines:

adult children

that never ran away from home

circus long gone

That said: the poems. The poems are short, haiku-ish-style, although not following any rules, just following the whimsy of the moment, like they were all inspired by status updates that turned him off. As set in the series, they can read as one continuous poem or as separate tiny vignettes, like fragile sighs of discontentment. Most of them are clearly Facebook-inspired, commenting on people who've said too much or too little, who've given up information that he doesn't feel is appropriate or about which he thinks no one cares or should care, uninspired people who give every detail or who think they're great visionaries:

wannabe visions

narrow and provincial

talkers without frontiers

... Yet, I can't help finding some hypocrisy in these lines, as I think it may be just as narrow and provincial to criticize those who wish to make their visions known, whether those “visions” are awesomely mind-blowing or just untested conjectures. Just as I can't help thinking that, as an ex-Facebook friend of Splake's, these are directly or indirectly faced at me, as well. Not that I'm taking this personally. No, no, not at all, but I think he's missing the point of the importance of this communication — how we are connected now more than ever in this day and age, how writing a handful of letters or making a couple of phone calls doesn't compare on the smallest scale to the hundreds of people I can reach, to the hundreds of conversations I can have daily, with just a few keystrokes. It's true, the personal nature may be gone, it may be colder and less affectionate, but these are changing times, and this is communication, and it is important. All of it, even when we don't understand its importance at the moment.

Okay, so I don't agree with the message. The poems, however, are quite enjoyable, Splake-style in perfect form, loose and cryptic with repeating mantras and visuals in almost a Beat-style; and the book is put together beautifully with nice, thick, glossy paper, a full-color cover, vellum inlay, and saddle-stitching along the spine. If you're not a Facebook-fan, I recommend it as a tool to harden your beliefs; if you are a fan, then you may want to have the same conversation with the self-proclaimed “old grey-bearded bard” that I do.

•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE FOURTEENTH

Beyond the Cliffs | T. Kilgore Splake

Poetry, prose, and photographs
68 pages
5 ½” x 8 ½” trade paperback
Miskwabik Press
Calumet MI USA

This book is a series of old greybeard Beat-poet Bardic ramblings and musings from the master of writing such. It hails from my home state, full of beautiful full-color pictures that make me miss the spring and fall of Northern Michigan, about which most of this book is written. The writing style harks back to the Beat Generation, a mishmash of words and thoughts, line after line going on its own adventure, linear only to the esoteric author, often hard to follow as Splake throws visual after visual at you in speedball fashion; don't blink because you will miss the one ball that connects you to the next thought, thus losing the clarity in any lines that follow.

Beyond The Cliffs contains page after page of homage to the author's home, the cliffs of Northern Michigan, the outdoor life in the wilderness, and getting older as time passes, mourning the losses of fellow poets and long-gone artists, such as Marlon Brando and Jackson Pollock, through rambling poems and prose that travel on for pages. Splake throws grammar rules, punctuation, and capitalization on proper nouns (which I don't find strange in poetry, but it always seems awkward in the prose pieces) right out the window, and there are several misspellings in here, as well, which I hate to see in nicely bound editions. Speaking of bound editions — and it might just be my copy, as that is always a possibility — the binding in this book appears to be weak, cracking if I bend the binding too far back, enabling pages to fall out or come unglued if I were to crack it any further. I don't want to have to be that careful with my books, so I think that is unfortunate if it happens on all the copies and not just mine.

While on the technical side of things, I must also say that it is incredibly hard to tell where one poem ends and the next begins, with no distinct difference between titles (if, indeed, there are any?) or poem lines. It would definitely help if titles were bolded or set apart somehow, maybe in a different font; it might also help if the entire book were not center-justified, so just the titles could be centered, offsetting them from the rest of the poem. Sometimes I think there is a clear title, often randomly placed in the middle of the page in quotes, only to find that the poem still continues on talking about the same subject as the previous snippet, so I'm not sure if it is actually a new poem, or just a new section, or just a separated line that happens to be in quotes in the context of the poem. Perhaps there are no titles at all. On the plus side of this, however, I really don't know if it is necessary, in Splake's case, to need to have titles, as all of the poems are about only a handful of subjects, mostly dealing with the cliffs, the loss of his love(s), and the loss of a man named Jim “Andy” Anderson, who seems to run throughout this book in memoriam; from “part time poet”:

he boasted
with self-important posturing
writing soulless haiku
premature ejaculations

on weekends
writing thin banal verse
mental masturbation
self-help psychobabble
greeting card nice
[ ... ]

and “deafening”:

[ ... ]
failing to see
spoken word's emptiness
never reading best selling books
believing author's blurb ignorance
[ ... ]

Splake gets very sexy in some of the poems, even if it is quite non-linear, going from cooking

[ ... ]
tender pink trout flesh
cheddar tomatoes tangy shallots
[ ... ]

to

[ ... ]
milk naked breasts
nursing dry nipples
[ ... ]
honey wet pussy
[ ... ]

all in the same poem and breath, with no clear segue in between. One thing I will say, for sure, is by the end of the book, you feel like you know something more about Splake — learning that his third wife had a mental breakdown after the birth of their child and had to be institutionalized, among other personal stories — and you take away a sense that he has been around the block a time or two and has earned the right to ramble about it in volumes. My favorite personal line, from “risks”:

[ ... ]
changing wives and jobs
staying right with favorite teams
cubs celts michigan wolverines ny giants
[ ... ]

as if it's no big thing for wives and jobs to come and go, but, man, don't lose sight of your favorite teams. I think this sums up Splake's writing nicely, as the trooper inside still keeps trucking along. No fairweather fans here.



•This book was sent to me from the author because I have corresponded with him.•
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LETTER OF MARQUE: ARTICLE THE SIXTH

Cokefishing in Alpha Beat Soup: July 2009 | Various Authors

Poetry
2 pages
11” x 17” broadside
Alpha Beat Press
c/o Dave & Ana Christy
806 E Ridge Ave
Sellersville PA 18960
$1 each, $10 year

Cokefishing is a monthly broadside, or in self-description: “a Beat / Post-Beat independent poetry Beatsheet dedicated to the small press and the way it used to be.” It is old school cut ‘n’ paste as submitted, poems, letters, prose, and pictures; and has the feel of the early nineties zines, before the Internet revolutionized (although not everyone will agree on this word) the way the small press worked. The broadside, although sometimes sloppy from the cut ‘n’ paste, feels good to read, makes me feel like the small press is still alive and kicking and not some corporate whore, as its current state sometimes suggests.

Cokefishing is full of names the small press knows: T. Kilgore Splake, R. Emolo, The Poet Spiel, H D Moe, Normal, even my name in this particular issue, if I am to say the small press knows my name. The flaw of cut ‘n’ paste, of course, is that you take the product as it comes, which means typos, misspellings, commas in random places, all preserved on paper from the authors' negligence or poor judgment, but not a flaw of the one laying out the broadside, per se. As an editor, that gets to me every time, and while I understand it's the nature of the beast, I do wish writers would take more care with their work.

The standout poem of this issue is “in these final moments” by The Poet Spiel, a poem reflecting final thoughts of a passenger or multiple passengers aboard a September 11th flight doomed for the fate we know so well by now. Some snippets:

[ ... ] i wish for
thirty violins to lift me up and out
of here [ ... ]

for all of my life i wish
for greater bulk in my shoulders
for our united lunge forward
[ ... ]

right this moment oh how i wish that
i could just get filthy sick
directly into the foul mouths

of these arabic looking bastards [ ... ]

One copy, one buck. Can't beat that.

•This zine was sent from the editor/publisher because I have previously corresponded with him and because I have poetry contained in this issue.•
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