there is something sad and lonesome
in the near-total certainty
that the guitarists of the nazi black metal bands
liked aerosmith when they were kids
back when they were kids
listening to aerosmith.

but then I was forced to confess to myself
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that such a poetry will never be and cannot be:
or that it exists already,

and that it is the poetry of the blood,
the blood unvanquishable, author of all true songs
and also of songs that shrug off the term
like the howling of wolves

or early Slayer records.
I wanted moreover to beat back the urge
to tell you about this album,
because at present I suspect it is very nearly secret:

and that those who hear of the secret and go on
to investigate won't get it anyway,
because they are more interested
in the present state of black metal or whatever;

whereas everything about this record by Of Antiquity
screams Not for you, not for you:
to almost everyone it screams this
in its nearly invisible midwestern way.

And yet I must tell you, as a solemn duty,
that the true blood lies here
and not elsewhere:
that real ambition

comes now cloaked in the garish colors
of desktop publishing
and broken CD spindle teeth.
I wanted to begin by saying

that someday a poetry would come to be
in which the praises of the album Nocturnal Grind
might someday be sung
but that poetry cannot come

or else it exists already
in the smallness
in the sufficiency
in the resistance.

I really can't stress this enough
we play a low-stakes game

a trillion years ago power metal might have meant
a paycheck

now it's craft for the love of craft
which means that if you're going to do it

you have to be willing to bleed for it
or else why bother

those of us who respond to what you do
with hearts still keen to feel wonder in this world

are offended by these digital pianos
seriously

get a studio with a big honkin' grand
and unleash your inner Liszts

put a candle on the damn thing
and let the wax drip

do the damn thing
do the damn thing all night

but of this patchy depthless grand-piano-setting style
let us hear no more

and meanwhile
tell your vocalists who think we don't notice little autotune fixes

that I will have words for them
in Hell

& I can't help noting that you have ignored my explicit instructions, to wit,
that you play The World, the Flesh, the Devil by In Solitude
when the day to put me in the ground has arrived at last, i.e.,
today. So from my hawk's view of your rebellion against a dead man's wishes,

let me just take one deep breath before I tell you
that I hate you all, however much I may have loved you in life,
which I in fact did; but the World etc is the music I wanted playing
as you lowered me into the earth, and I told you as much,

and if you will not start playing it now—
now, as the coffin that holds me descends on its hydraulic riser—
then I hope, and I pray,
to Satan if necessary,

that my stiff body reanimate suddenly, and punch through the box
Bruce Lee style, if Bruce
had been a more morbid person generally speaking,
and I pray that those of you who believe in the devil

feel great fear as I levitate
and start singing "Serpents are Rising" to you
in a voice intended to strike dread and panic into the hearts
of you gathered here to mourn me:

I, who evidently did not die entirely, but kept some portion of his essence back
in order to let you know how much I loved this record, how quickly it came to mean
quite a great deal to me really,
more than I'd expected a record

of dark melodic metal songs to mean to me
in 2011, when I walked the earth
full of life, smiling, whole, with cares great and small and sweet to have,
my step lightened by rare songs such as these.

do you see the corpse risen before you?
are you having a bad funeral?
did you even bring the damn CD? attention everybody at my funeral:
it's time.

there isn't any band I feel about the way I feel about
them; there isn't any time in the world
quite like time alone in a dark or lit room
or a half-dark room or a lit one
spent listening to them, to this; they sound like some things
that they heard once,
and then heard again many times over,

but it's fair also to say
that there's never really been anyone like them.
they have chosen near-silence
as goal and grail
both within their practice
and as part of it;
the last song they shared with the world
was ringside suite

that was four or five years ago
it was one of two songs they've released
since 1997
I choose the word released
for lack of a better one.

I listened to ringside suite and it summoned
the vague and wondrous glory of its title
slow waltzing salute to images hard with grain,
living images, live things;
and I thought about the last plane to jakarta
leaving the airstrip in the cooled cobalt blue
of some night local to somewhere,
God knows where and isn't saying

and I looked down at the ocean through the window of that plane
whose engines run sometimes loud and sometimes silent

and I thought
I don't do this very often any more
but this, this song, this view from this window, this
is why
I do
this.

breaking that rule
just because
one
I don't get around to writing about music
much these days

which is largely because
there's a surfeit of people sharing
music and their opinion thereupon
whereas when lptj started
there was kind of a deficit

just feel like adding
to an already blurred cacophany
is only occasionally
valuable
and besides

I'm mainly listening to Russian classical music
which I'm not qualified to speak about
and to heavy metal
which I am qualified to speak about
& have already spoken a bit

(I eventually arrived at three conclusions,
if you missed them:
1. death metal
2. death metal
3. power metal)

so anyway
words without borders
are funding their next issue
via kickstarter
you know the money raising thing

literature in translation
is the absolute
lifeblood of literature:
translation is how
literature grows greater

without translation
literature stagnates
when literature stagnates
it sucks for everybody
I think we can all agree on this second claim here

so do me & yourself & the craft a solid
and slip these people a fin or a twenty if you've got it
and then they can publish some afghanistani literature
and then maybe somebody can tell tell me
why it's afgahnistani & not afghani

in the meantime
let me just recommend
that after you donate a little something to words without borders
you buy the master's hammer boxed set
as soon as you can

they're
from
czechoslovakia

wonder if I wrote at all about
that finnish band ride for revenge

probably I did & probably
I could check the archives

but to my great surprise
we now live in a world

in which the archives have become:
if not the problem then a pretty potent symbol of it

ii.

I have a double gatefold ride for revenge record
that kicks my ass every time I listen to it

not listening to it right now
listening to anwynn right now
they're only ok

plenty ok
it's not like I'm going to go over there and turn it off
kinda like the vocals
despite myself

but ride for revenge
this is a band who
when I think of them
I hear the record and remember it
and feel it in my body

the problem with the metal now
is that people will go to bat for stuff
that's really quite fine
and is utterly unmemorable
and could not grow a barnacle
if it sat in wet dock

for a thousand years
and another thousand
and then several more thousand
unrotting
stable
post-everything
no barnacles

it's fine and all

but ride for revenge

you may not love them when you hear them

but you will remember them

which was the thing
which was supposed to have been the point

iii.

still wonder if I said all this before
or something like this
could probably check the archives

anybody who's right now checking the archives
or about to:
no offense
but you
are symptomatic
of the more general problem

you say it's no onward to golgotha
that's what you say
and you're right, you're right
but like don't be a dick about it

decimate has a vibe too you know
it's that four friends in a basement
who've they've just learned
they're locked in and are going to starve to death vibe

let's play those riffs
we were all working on
before we all go crazy
and start biting off our own fingers

I know, I know
onward to golgotha
no one can deny it
I'm just saying

some of you guys
ought to lend an ear
to decimate christendom, that is really all
I'm saying

didn't know who hawkwind was
didn't quite get what was going on
can still sing some of the songs though
that dude moorcock is a deeply weird singer
gets
in your head

2010 continues along its unusual wallhanging tapestry way
I think I've heard more music I loved this year already
than I heard last year and the year before combined
lots of complex gimmick fighters coming through on the circuit
will explain
what that means
some other time

anyway
christofer johnsson
has a vision

it's not the vision he started with
which appalls people who loved therion
when their choruses were grander
their riffs starker
and when you didn't
under any circumstances
have a guy break in
with a harmonica
and then a guy with a flute

but I think it's opened up
onto a weird celluloid field
in which gleams
the new therion
honestly one of the finest albums I've heard
in a year when odd things hold me fastest
it reminds me of that deep fix album
both in terms of the scales johnsson's favoring
and the vibe he squeezes from them

I don't want to tell you too much about it

it'll be more fun if you go explore and make
your own peace with it

it will help
if you remember
that everything eventually refers
to things you heard once
and then
forgot
all about
until something conjured up
what was left of them
in you

but minor chords and towering fifths
like enormous crystal sculptures
in far-flung fields

where the wind blows
and the rain turns to ice
and the traveler squints

but continues on
the solos meanwhile on the new blind guardian album
are cleaner than ferraris

yes
the singer still sounds like he's afraid of a monster
and yes

his subject matter still comes
from science fiction and fantasy books
and there's a dragon on the album cover

and then what's more get this
this dragon, flanked by two dudes with axes,
is emerging from a fucking pyramid

you've seen that bumper sticker,
"real men worship jesus"
go ahead

keep telling
yourself
that

along with esplanade
which remains among the most beautiful things I've ever seen

phantasmagoria
brings half a dozen different things into the frame

and lets them sort of collide
except collisions break things

whereas what happens here
is an absolute harmony

in which the old yeats question
becomes totally incomprehensible

it's tremendous
but esplanade

man
I'm pretty sure that's one of the greatest things ever attempted by anyone

I've seen it twice now
and I like vivaldi & all

but I think you could perform this piece
without any music at all

and I'd still end up in the same condition
awed

wrecked
shouting with joy

I knew but didn't know
a guy who shot himself last summer

I feel like somewhere in esplanade
is the truth that would liberate the suicides

we all grow up
and endure partings that separate us from more things than one

our younger selves
our sense of play

the spectre of some internal divorce
from the self that makes us who we are

looms
and threatens to capture us in spreading shadow

we can't let that happen
we have to feel everything as deeply as we can

let it run through us
and then having taken in

as much as we can
leap into the air

with our friends by our sides
and if not with friends

then with the audience before us
knowing they're there

whether we can see them or not
in the often

blinding
glare of the footlights

suspended there in the final iteration of all seeing
like the cover
of some trippy science fiction
paperback

and since I am feeling emboldened to describe things
seen by few and remembered by fewer
let me further speculate that there is a record player inside the building
and speakers in the windows on the second floor

the speakers point out toward the small field
whose terminus is the void;
the turntable to which they are connected
plays a ride for revenge album

the album is called wisdom of the few
its sleeve is on hi-gloss stock
and it's an awesome record
no matter what anybody tells you

if you listen to it now as many times as you can
then when you arrive at that final floating island
it will feel very familiar to you.
on the other hand

if you wait
then you'll be really surprised
the choice is yours,
as mr. case, my algebra teacher, used to say

but the prairie if asked:
"where was your origin?"
wouldn't answer, not because it has no mouth to speak of or with

but because neither it nor any of us on it
have any idea
the question resembles "what is zero minus zero"

some places when you're there
make a point of quietly and effortlessly erasing
all that preceded them

when we emerge from these places
we find that they have congealed around a point
somewhere in our thoughts

and the point resembles a stone
with rippling or mottled colors
running from surface to core

do you want to know something
I think Destroyer's Trouble in Dreams
was an underrated record

if only you believe in miracles,
so would I
even as a spirit in the trees you 1) can't get your tenses straight and
2) have a super pretty voice

but here is the thing about marty balin in the trees
and the children who shrug off his little ghost game:
they all listen to the same new record when they go to sleep tonight
on the floor of the forest

that record is by jacob newman and it is called reflections and diffusions,
available on the earth mantra label which gives its records away for free
about that title by the way
one day

I will hire some death metal guys
to write titles for the albums of the new age guys
to stop the new age guys
from using words like "reflections"

and then we will all walk through the dark woods
meditating on what we've learned
cut it out marty
we know it's you

i gave myself a present.
i flew to tennessee to see amy grant
who was touring the twentieth anniversary
of her album lead me on, which was special to me.

i have been meaning to write an article about the whole experience
for some time now
maybe pitch it to some of those magazines
that run personal-narrative articles

you know the kind of article i'm talking about
they begin in medias personal res
and then gently flesh out a few details
and toward they end they circle some greater truth

like a dog who's worried there's a trap somewhere near the food dish.
i wrote the intro to the article and tucked it away.
it was going to take a long time to process
how i'd felt seeing those songs played by the band that recorded them,

or most of that band. today i learned that will owsley,
who played on that record, is dead by his own hand.
mourn for his family, mourn for his friends,
mourn for the darkness so deep that a man can see no way out.

will owsley, you are gone and can't hear my voice.
i bear testimony that your music, while you were here,
made an enormous difference to lots of people.
i was one of them and i'll remember you.

who among us has not stood near the abyss that claimed you,
and heard in its roar some ghost of a liar's promise,
and wondered how hard it it would be to find out, at last?
let those few of us count themselves blessed indeed.