I would tell you that Johnny Cash's new album A Hundred Highways is great but I can't get past the second track, "God's Gonna Cut You Down." Over simple, hypnotic accoustic guitar lines, Cash does his apocalyptic thing but what blasts this off is the backing tracks: all handclaps and footstomps, it's completely arresting, the sort of stylistic thing that have made the American albums such pleasures. You just have to hear it. Get thee to iTunes.
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So in thinking how best to decline the other press, I began to wonder how many poems I had between new work written this year and poems just lying around, forgotten. I find a lot of the time I'll write a poem that doesn't strike me in the right way immediately, so I forget about it; I never do anything with it. So I get to rooting around, throwing things together, and soon enough I have a 60 page manuscript of poems written during the same period as Notes. Many of them need some revision, but lots are perfectly fine, and some I'm even tempted to cart over to Notes, though I won't do that. A lot of these poems have even been published. I'm such a dummy. So I don't know what I'll do with it; I offered it to the editor and they're going to look at it but I can't imagine them switching gears.
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Nice 4th here. You?
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5 comments:
Nice 4th here. The Astros won. Soon as I get a chance, I'm off to Best Buy to get the new John.
Perhaps your Notes doppelganger (Even the book has a double) will emerge in the same way Sufjan Stevens' states project has suffered a hiccup (or hiccough, if you prefer--Do you?) after only two of the proposed fifty albums. He worked up so much material about Illinois that he's released a second Illinois album.
Make it work, kid.
All things go,
-cK
The title of this "manuscript" is One More Theory About Happiness.
I've no idea what to do with it.
send one more to the press you're declining?
see if your press will make it book 2 of notes and run it all as a big single volume?
put me down for one of each?
The Cash album is wonderful.
"God's Gonna Cut You Down" is haunting. Elvis Presley recorded his version in the early 60's as "Run On," but his cut can't touch Cash's. My favorite on V is Springsteen's "Further on up the Road." Good album.
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