Patrick Lawler
Deb and I went to dinner with the poet Patrick Lawler last night before his reading at the local University.
I enjoyed talking to the guy, who has a sardonic, wise and environmentally conscious vibe to his work, yet still maintains his sense of humor when it comes to the absurdity of it all. He obviously loves to work and think in abstraction -- a cold drink of water after dealing with the users at my day job -- a world where I'm only allowed to present information in tightly bound packets of zeros and ones, lest the natives get restless.
I'm reminded that I need to spend more time around my kin and kind. I spend too much time online, surrounded by people who think in cages set on imaginary steel foundations.
Lawler tells us that if you Google his name, the second entry in the results is a popular online story about a man with the same name, who accidentally drove a four inch nail into his skull. Instead of constantly telling people "I'm not that Patrick Lawler," he sometimes will say he is -- and has also worked the story into his latest work.
I'm easily amused by artists who intentionally confuse their audience.
We'd lost several of his books when we were hit by the flood last year, and he offered to replace them free of charge.
His books Feeding The Fear Of The Earth, A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough, and Reading A Burning Book are all available on Amazon. A brief excerpt from Murray Bookchin and Susan Griffin Buy a House in Love Canal:
I want to buy a home at Love Canal.
I want to live inside the American Dream.
I want a wife out of a lipstick ad
with hair like cotton candy.
I want to drool over her.
I want to sit in the sunny kitchen
with the pink appliances and the microwave
like a coffin for one of those kids
who do their starving on TV for everyone to see.