Author: John Winkelman

The Bottom of the Top #24

John Winkelman

 

1977: The Carpenters, “All You Get From Love is a Love Song”

Flashes of nostalgia or deja vu of traveling to the Kalamazoo area with Dad to visit his sister at her house on a small lake where we noodled around in his canoe while fishing for bluegills and whatever else would bite. Evenings catching fireflies and cooking hotdogs on a grill, and hanging out in a VERY seventies house with shag carpet, wood panelling, overstuffed couches and leather recliners and the scent of cigarette and pipe smoke and the remnants of the fire in the fireplace.

1982: Rainbow, “Stone Cold”

Definitely heard this one right when it came out. And probably saw it on MTV as well. “Stone Cold” brought up memories of that particular feeling of standing in the milking parlor while the cows grumble and chew and shit while we cleaned their udders and teats and hooked up the milking apparatus. The MTV would have happened when we flew down to Louisiana to visit Dad, usually around the middle of July. Louisiana in July doesn’t sound so inviting now.

1987: Jody Watley, “Looking For a New Love”

1992: Kathy Troccoli, “Everything Changes”

1997: Michael Bolton, “Go the Distance”

Longer Days Make For Some Long Days

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of June 5, 2022

As July approaches and everyone at work plans for vacation and holidays the entire industry moves into a brief crunch time made up of long days and tight deadlines, held together by the flimsiest of fraying nerves. This doesn’t leave a lot of time or mental energy for reading and writing, though the compulsion persists.

Only one new book-ish thing arrived at the house this week – the June 2022 issue of Poetry.

In reading news, I am finally caught up to present in my pile of unread Poetry issues. Thanks to an unexpected free evening, I read the remaining two issues, including the June issue which arrived earlier this week. So now, as noted previously, I am working my way through my back-log of unread issues of The Paris Review. I might get to the end by the end of the year.

On a side note, this is the first time since I started these weekly posts that I finished reading all of the books which arrived in a week before the end of that week.

In writing news, I am still transcribing my poems from April. With a little luck I will come across something worthy of reading at The Sparrows at the end of the month. If not, well, I am just as happy to sit and listen to other readers.

The Bottom of the Top #23

John Winkelman

Ah, the first week of June, and also the week which roughly coincides with my birthday, and the first week of summer break, and the first “official” week of summer, even though we still have to endure about two more weeks of spring.

1977: Alice Cooper, “You and Me”

I loves me some Alice Cooper, and I probably heard this song right about when it came out. When I played the video I had a burst of deja vu of being a young kid, probably hearing the song come from the radio of a passing car as I read a book on the porch, or something. As a bonus, here is Cooper singing the song with a Muppet.

1982: Huey Lewis and the News, “Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do”

This was playing when I was (probably) milking cows on the morning of my thirteenth birthday. The album which contained this song, Picture This, is good and entertaining, but didn’t make a splash like Sports and Fore! a few years later. Still, the song is fun and I likely heard it a lot more once I left for college and had access to e.g. culture and/or MTV.

1987: Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, “Rhythm is Gonna Get You”

Ah, my eighteenth birthday. A week after the end of school I hosted a graduation/pool party, which was probably the last fun thing I did before leaving for college in late August.  “Rhythm is Gonna Get You” (from Let it Loose) was certainly playing at the time, as was “Conga” from her earlier album Primitive Love. We played “Conga” in the marching and pep bands in high school, and probably college as well. So yeah, whenever I hear Estefan (and Miami Sound Machine) I get All The Nostalgias for being a geeky kid with a trombone playing pop music covers.

1992: Das EFX, “They Want EFX”

I don’t know when or where I heard “They Want EFX” the first time, but it was probably at a time when I didn’t “get” it. 1992 was all frats and rednecks and working third shift in a garment factory in West Michigan. So, not a lot of exposure to hip hop, and definitely not in an environment where it was appreciated. “They Want EFX” is brilliant, and I’ve listened to it about half a dozen times in the past three days.

1997: Various Artists, “ESPN Presents the Jock Jam”

Umm…yeah, I might have heard this in a bar somewhere.

53, or 1 x 53

John Winkelman

Me at 53

Oh, here it is, on the dawn of the first day of my 53rd year. I am still here to welcome you and receive the plaudits and hosannas which are my just due and proper.

Ha! I almost got through that with a straight face.

This is my third pandemic birthday, and so far life is as good as can be expected. The weather is beautiful and poetry events around town are starting to pick up. This past week, for the first time in years, I read at an open mic event, and it was wonderful! And yesterday I attended the reading by the winners of the 2022 Dyer-Ives poetry competition, for the first time since well before COVID.

Now that I am in my mid-fifties I can say that I am doing a lot better than many people my age. I am in a loving relationship with a beautiful partner. My health is good, though keeping the weight off is not as easy as it used to be. My career is stable, my mind is as active as it ever was, even if I am currently severely burned out and counting the seconds to my two weeks off in the first part of July.

There have been a few changes; I am now wearing bifocals (long, long overdue) and my hair has not been this long since, I think, 1998. Compare the selfie above to my birthday photo from 2021.

This weekend was the first Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts since 2019, and the city is full of celebrants. I plan to spend more time out in the world than in past years, though with proper precautions since we are still in the middle of a pandemic which has been exacerbated by some extremely reactionary interpretations of “freedom.” Still, most of what I like doing involves being outdoors, so I will have an easier time staying socially distanced.

I don’t really have any concrete plans for the upcoming year, other than to continue to read, write, practice, and love my partner, and enjoy the company of our two little orange maniacs. That’s enough for my middle-aged self.

June, All At Once

John Winkelman

Voices 2022

I almost made it through the week without adding anything to the library, but at the last moment I attended the reading for the 2022 Dyer-Ives Poetry Contest. The winners and runners-up are collected in Voices, the annual magazine of the Dyer-Ives competition.

The event was wonderful! Over a dozen of the contestants read their pieces. They ranged in age from 7 or so to probably the late fifties, though the readers definitely skewed young, with all except maybe two being under thirty. The high school students had some of the most powerful poems, and the adult winner wrote a very pointedly anti-capitalist poem, which warmed the cockles of my aging heart.

I didn’t recognize anyone at the event, other than the coordinator Kelsey May, who I met in my capacity as editor at The 3288 Review, when we published a couple of her poems back in 2019. The readers made me feel, well, old. Then again, I consider this a good thing, because if after three years away I only saw the same people as in the Before Times, and they were all Millennials or Gen-X-ers, then something would be very wrong with the poetry community in Grand Rapids.

Yesterday evening Zyra and I wandered downtown to the Festival of the Arts and attended the Love and Peace Jam at the Calder stage. It was fantastic! Several local and regional poets, including Dyer-Ives Finalist Naiara Tamminga and Lansing poet Laureate Masaki Takahashi read and performed, and for the first time I had the privilege of hearing our own poet laureate Kyd Kane read her work at a live event. The event was coordinated by The Diatribe, with Foster (a.k.a. Autopilot) and Kyd Kane hosting.

In reading news, I am caught up to 2022 in my backlog of issues of Poetry Magazine. It still feels good to read such a variety of poetry in such a volume.

I am almost finished with Kameron Hurley‘s excellent collection Future Artifacts, which arrived recently from Apex Book Company. I really like Hurley’s work. Her writing is lush and gritty and I sometimes detect echoes of writers like Jack Vance and Robert Howard.

So now that I am reading poetry and short fiction, my next reading project is to work through all of my back issues of The Paris Review, which is a quarterly instead of a monthly, so I should be able to put a sizable dent in the backlog by the end of the year. The Paris Review publishes short fiction and nonfiction, poetry and interviews, so this should be an interesting, varied,  and enjoyable project.

In writing news, I am still typing up my poems from April. I would make much faster progress if my handwriting was not so terrible. One more thing to work on, I guess.

IWSG, June 2022, and Some Poetry News

John Winkelman

Yesterday afternoon, for the first time in about three years, and the second time in over 20, I got up in front of an open mic and read some poetry. The reading took place at The Sparrows cafe in Grand Rapids, as part of their monthly “Poetry and Pie” event which takes place on the last Tuesday of every month. The poems I read, “Afternoon Traffic” and “Percussion,” had been previously published so I knew at least one other person had considered them worthy of public exposure.

Two other poets read, and there were at most a dozen people in the cafe, not all of whom were there for the reading. Still, I would call it a success, and the couple of people I talked to enjoyed the event.

I felt somewhat self-conscious, as (due to certain properties inherent in the passage of time) I have always viewed open mic readings as a young person’s pursuit. I have ample evidence to the contrary, of course, as the majority of such events I have attended in the past have included people older than I am now. Or maybe it’s because many of those events have also been slam poetry events, and the participants and audience therein definitely skews younger.

But I plan to read again as time allows, assuming I can come up with material worthy of being read in front of a live audience. If for no other reason than that it was fun.

So: The Insecure Writers Support Group question for June 2022 is:

When the going gets tough writing the story, how do you keep yourself writing to the end? If have not started the writing yet, why do you think that is and what do you think could help you find your groove and start?

I can stumble while writing a story for any number of reasons. Distractions from the mundane world. Suddenly not knowing “what happens next.” Suffering from depression, burnout, exhaustion, or some combination of all three. An acute ennui.

Any one of these (and there are so many more than I have listed) can act as a drag on the creative process. For me (and this is absolutely not a general prescription for all people in all circumstances), I take a step back and put some distance between myself and the work. I don’t necessarily try to solve the issue immediately, because if, for instance, the problem is burnout, that attempt at a solution will just make things worse.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” This is another way of saying that in trying to solve a problem, first put it in a larger perspective.

Is the problem with the story, or with me? If with me, is it because of something I have control over in any meaningful sense? If with the story, is it something that I can push through or do I need to retrace my steps and rewrite some or all of it?

If, for instance, the problem with the writing is personal motivation, and the lack of motivation comes from depression, then the depression is the issue which needs to be dealt with. Trying to force productivity at the cost of mental and emotional health never, ever ends well (I’m looking at you, managerial corporate culture and late-stage capitalism).

If the problem is with the story, then the story was either insufficiently planned, or (as is usually the case with me) I started writing one story, and halfway through switched to another, and now I have two stories which need to be separated and each dealt with individually.

(The same often happens to me when I write poetry, because most of my poems start out as stream-of-consciousness blocks of text in my journals)

So to sum up, pushing through the blocks when writing usually involves giving myself some space to discover why, exactly, I am having a tough time of it. Modern culture does not encourage, and indeed often punishes, time which is not obviously and specifically productive, but that down’time is essential and allows for healing, re-centering, and growth. And, frankly, for better writing.

On a side note: Being stressed and burned out is okay. We are still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and though the world seems to be stabilizing (or maybe ramping up the overall sense of denial), we are not yet “post-” anything, and the long tail of fallout from the past two years is just starting to make itself felt. The world is even more stressful than usual. Be kind to yourself and the people around you.

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

May 2022 Reading List

John Winkelman

What I read in the month of May 2022

This was another very poetry-heavy month, though I did manage to sneak in a couple of books about politics and the like. This quantity of poetry reading is putting my head in an interesting place, and I have written a couple of poems about the effect of reading so much poetry in a compressed time-frame. Perhaps this is what it is like to be an English major.

Two items of note here: Between Clay and Dust, which is the first fiction I have read since sometime in March, and Kameron Hurley’s short fiction, which is the first such I have read this year. 2022 had been like that.

Books and Journals

  1. Poetry Magazine #215.6 (March 2020) [2022.05.04]
  2. Poetry Magazine #216.1 (April 2020) [2022.05.05]
  3. Poetry Magazine #216.2 (May 2020) [2022.05.08]
  4. Poetry Magazine #216.3 (June 2020) [2022.05.10]
  5. Poetry Magazine #216.4 (July-August 2020) [2022.05.11]
  6. Poetry Magazine #217.1 (October 2020) [2022.05.15]
  7. Poetry Magazine #217.2 (November 2020) [2022.05.16]
  8. Poetry Magazine #217.3 (December 2020) [2022.05.17]
  9. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities [2022.05.18]
  10. Poetry Magazine #217.4 (January 2021) [2022.05.19]
  11. Poetry Magazine #217.5 (February 2021) [2022.05.20]
  12. Poetry Magazine #217.6 (March 2021) [2022.05.22]
  13. Poetry Magazine #218.1 (April 2021) [2022.05.23]
  14. Duncombe, Stephen, Dream or Nightmare [2022.05.24]
  15. Poetry Magazine #218.2 (May 2021) [2022.05.25]
  16. Poetry Magazine #218.3 (June 2021) [2022.05.26]
  17. Poetry Magazine #218.4 (July/August 2021) [2022.05.27]
  18. Farooqi, Musharraf Ali, Between Clay and Dust [2022.05.28]
  19. Poetry Magazine #218.5 (September 2021) [2022.05.29]
  20. Poetry Magazine #219.1 (October 2021) [2022.05.31]

Short Prose

  1. Hurley, Kameron, “Sky Boys”, Future Artifacts: Stories [2022.05.29]
  2. Hurley, Kameron, “Overdark”, Future Artifacts: Stories [2022.05.31]

The Bottom of the Top #22

John Winkelman

Memorial Day weekend never really meant much to me, as it was (in grade school) all about the parade through town and playing patriotic songs at the VFW and waiting for the National Guard howitzer to go boom, while in the back of my head I was simultaneously anticipating and dreading the school year being over. On the one hand, no more school for three month. On the other hand, three months of being even more isolated than usual on the farm. And once I was out of school and in the work force, during the years represented here I worked in restaurants or retail, so Memorial Day weekend was busier than usual, and full of entitled consumers taking out their frustrations on underpaid workers. As it always is.

1977: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Spirits in the Night”

This is a deeply groovy song, but I don’t remember when I first heard it. Probably sometime in junior high, because on first playing it while writing this post I had a definite hit of deja vu which put me in mind of sitting sullenly on a school bus buried under music instruments, athletic equipment, and homework. I mostly know Manfred Mann etc. from “Blinded by the Light” and “Quinn the Eskimo.” So this is another instance of the temporal shear made possible by and exacerbated by, oldies stations.

1982: Karla Bonoff, “Personally”

I might have heard “Personally” back when it was released. It has that early-eighties smooth vibe like the seventies have not quite been transcended, and were it released a few years earlier it would have fit right in. This is a pretty song, and Bonoff is a wonderful singer.

1987: T’Pau, “Heart and Soul”

This one made something of a splash when it was released, and I remember hearing it on the radio on my way to and from one of the worst jobs I have ever had in my life – working the belt at the Eaton Rapids pickle factory. Having fun music to listen to made things slightly less unbearable. To be fair, I only occasionally listened to the radio (Q106!); mostly I had David Bowie cassettes (Tonight, Never Let Me Down) on heavy rotation in the after-market tape deck in my 1977 Cutlass Supreme. Like every other song of the summer of 1987, this marked me treading water, counting the seconds until I left for college and put Springport permanently in my rearview mirror.

1992: Atlantic Starr, “Masterpiece”

I have probably heard “Masterpiece” more times at weddings than on the radio or on MTV, though it was on heavy rotation back in 1992. It doesn’t pull at any nostalgic threads, so I will say this is just one of those ubiquitous songs which seems to have always been around.

1997: Depeche Mode, “It’s No Good”

Depeche Mode keyboardist Andrew Fletcher died four days ago. Goddammit so much. I was never a DM superfan, but their songs and sound were the soundtrack of the 1990s, and “It’s No Good” was particularly popular among my group of friends, back in the day. 25 years ago I was at the cusp of a new relationship; I was hanging out with a group of renfaire types at Grand Valley practicing padded weapon fighting, and working at the low-paying bookstore and living in a crappy apartment and driving a crappy car and exhausting myself every day with kung fu and tai chi practice, as well as beginning the process of becoming a martial arts instructor. All of which is to say, for all the stress, it was a pretty good year.

A Long-ish Weekend

John Winkelman

New books for the week of May 22, 2022

Oh, what a month it has been. The days are longer, the weather is warmer, and we are not far from the halfway point of 2022. Suddenly this long year has become surprisingly short.

Three new books arrived in the past week.

First up is Kameron Hurley‘s new collection of short stories Future Artifacts, recently published by Apex Book Company. I met Kameron at the ConFusion science fiction convention some years ago, and she has graciously signed several of her books. I haven’t read any of her work in a couple of years, so I started reading it on Saturday.

Next on the stack is Issue 22 of the Boston Review Forum, titled Rethinking Law. I had let my membership to the Boston Review lapse, but they had a re-up offer which was too good to pass up. And since it’s only three issues a year, the additional weight in my house should be manageable.

And on the right is Bad Eminence by James Greer, delivered Saturday afternoon from And Other Stories.

In reading news, I am caught up to autumn of 2021 in my read-through of the pile of unread back issues of Poetry. Time and energy permitting, I may catch up to present sometime in June.

I finished Stephen Duncombe‘s Dream or Nightmare. Though unintended, it was the perfect follow-up to Benedict Anderson‘s Imagined Communities, as though the Anderson is about nationalism and the Duncombe about progressive political strategies, they both make the point that, when it comes to politics (which is to say, practically everything about society), people qua people don’t really notice or care about the minutiae of daily life outside of their immediate reach. What they notice are the stories, the narratives in which connect the individual to the people, places, ideas, and events outside of their immediate purview. This is how conservatives are able to convince their followers that fascism and freedom are synonymous, as long as the Right People are in the in-group. This is also why progressives and lefties are so much less successful at spinning inclusive narratives, as (a) progressives are much more grounded in facts and the real world than are conservatives, and (b) the 15% or so of the USA who are actually left-of-center tend to fail each others’ purity tests when it comes to the work of gathering a community.

To clear my head of modern stresses, I picked up Between Clay and Dust, a novel by Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi, which arrived at the house back in February of 2016 as part of my (now lapsed) subscription to Restless Books. I finished the book in three days, and it was beautiful. I rated it five stars, and recommend it unreservedly.

As stated above, I am now reading Kameron Hurley’s Future Artifacts.

In writing news, I haven’t done much lately. Too many other things taking up space in my head. I do plan to finish transcribing my National Poetry Month poems over the next couple of weeks.

The Bottom of the Top #21

John Winkelman

The end of May seems to be a locus for love ballads and smooth jams. It also, for the years represented here, was a week of transition from school to summer break. Even into 1997, when I had been out of school for a few years, that pattern followed. I spent 18 years (and one semester in Russia in 1994) being educated, and as they were my formative years, there is an emotional resonance with the end of a school year which will likely carry through for the rest of my life. It is not as strong an emotional tie as that which makes itself felt in late August/early September. But even into my fifties I feel a specific nostalgia as Memorial Day approaches.

1977: Barbara Streisand, “My Heart Belongs to Me”

I couldn’t say when I first heard “My Heart Belongs to Me.” I definitely did at some point, if only be the logic that popular music in 1977 was a small pool, particularly in rural Michigan, with parents who weren’t into anything harder than Manhattan Transfer. I’ve never had any particular opinions about Streisand one way or another, so if this song is familiar, it is only through osmosis. Then again, I would have been seven years old, just shy of my eighth birthday and near the end of second grade when this song was released.

1982: Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis, “Friends in Love”

I have certainly heard “Friends in Love” at some point in the past. Warwick and Matthis have beautiful voices and they work well together. This week in 1982 I was near the end of seventh grade, probably looking forward to a summer of milking cows and stacking bales, and maybe a quick trip to visit my dad, wherever he was living that summer. I would have been preparing for the Memorial Day Parade when the junior high band was conscripted to play with the high school band at the Springport VFW hall, to the indifference of the adults and the jeers of our classmates. So no particular nostalgia attached to this one, but it is a beautiful song and I appreciate it more now at 52 that I did when I was 12.

1987: Restless Heart, “I’ll Still Be Loving You”

I do vaguely remember “I’ll still be loving you,” and almost certainly heard it when it was on the charts. Restless Heart is a country band and so I likely heard it played on one of the several country stations which were more prevalent in the 1980s in rural Michigan. The MTV/cable era diminished the size of the slice of the pie which country music enjoyed, but it so greatly expanded the size of the pie that that rising tide lifted every music genre, including country, and made the birth of alt-country possible a few years later. Regardless, this is a fine song, though it doesn’t speak to me, one way or another. I would have been prepping for graduation in this week in 1987, so likely wasn’t paying attention to what was on the radio.

1992: Jon Secada, “Just Another Day”

The end of my fifth year of college I was moving out of off-campus housing at GVSU and into my first “adult” apartment in Kentwood with three friends, and just starting my brief career at West Michigan’s favorite Polish-Mexican restaurant, while prepping for my capstone classes. Which is to say, it was an exciting time, and busy, and though I have heard “Just Another Day” I don’t know if I heard it when it charted, or at some point in the future. I like the song, and Secada has a fine voice, though it doesn’t really stand out from the myriad similar songs which were released in the early 1990s.

1997: Heavy D, “Big Daddy”

I remember seeing this video on MTV more than once, though that could have been years after the song was released. I would have been working at the bookstore with nothing of note happening in my life, likely in a groove of working, working out, partying, and listening to folk, folk rock, and Tom Waits. I like this song, though and it looks like everyone in the video is having fun. Heavy D died in 2011 of a pulmonary embolism. He was born two years before me, and I remember hearing of his death and realizing that people who were my age are dying of the kind of things I used to associate with “old people.” And that was over a decade ago. So it goes.