kingsoftrain

January 21, 2017 / barton smock

On the Morning of the March (by my brother, NC Smock)

On this morning of the March for Women’s Lives, we should take 2.5 minutes to adjust our bullshit filters for high-volume processing. A fair amount of it will hit you from all sides. But don’t let the sheer volume fool you: A lot more bullshit will be coming from the Trumpeters. They’re known for their volume and vitriol, which is positively and rather unfortunately correlated with their ignorance. So get your goggles on!

Below are some handy critical-thinking weapons for marchers and kind people across the nation to keep in your front pocket at all times.

In response to anyone who thinks you are marching because you’re a sore loser:

1) Remember that they think they’ve won a game. They think the election of Trump is the victorious end of that game. They view the inauguration as the medal ceremony. This is the sorry soup in which swims their brain. It is a very poor arithmetician who thinks the bottom of the ninth inning took place in the wee hours of November 9th, 2016. Remind the poor souls that we’re actually in the top of the first inning when it comes to The Donald. Remind them that Trump and company haven’t governed for even 24 hours. As for the ‘winning’ mentality, that belongs to a game with innings or clocks, not the continuum of history. They bear a striking resemblance to an arrogant third-grader who ‘won’ the first ten feet of a mile-long race then started pounding his chest and pointing at the ‘losers’.

Now here’s where we may lose some people because there is no sports metaphor to apply: We’re actually not in any race or inning or quarter because we’re not playing a game. For the sake of digestibility, if you must make your point fit into some kind of sporting metaphor, tell them to save it for the Super Bowl, where there are two obvious rivals and only one victor.

2) Ask them to take responsibility for their vote. Bearing in mind that quite a bit of ‘winning’ is yet to be ‘won’, let them know that you have recorded their strong preference for Mr. Trump and the Goldman Sachs crew and that you’ll be following up with them every year from now until he is no longer the crowned king of our democracy. Tell them you’ll be taking their temperature next year, the year after that and (if we get that far) the year after that. Assure them not to worry–we’ll be taking all temperatures orally. Indeed, we’ll do so by watching words and spittle fly out of their mouths and see if it isn’t reduced to a drooling mumble in years to come.

3) Remind them that you are marching for something, not against someone. I know what you’re thinking: ‘I’m marching against Trump!’ True enough, but only inasmuch as he actively stands against something that you stand for. We were not born haters of Trump. We weren’t even born Democrats or Republicans or anywhere in between. These are things we’ve decided. We have evidence for our decision, our dislike of Trump–which makes it legitimate. Blind hatred of someone based on artificial qualities is from the other camp. We go with reason.

4) Opinions are not equal. This is a myth that’s been peddled to you by someone who either doesn’t have the capacity for critical thought or thinks you do not. Now here it gets tricky again for anyone who isn’t good at words or big thinks, but opinions are only equal mathematically. That is, you have one and I have one and the Trumpeter has one. And 1 = 1 = 1 . But thereafter, the balance of the equation tilts to the opinion that is informed by evidence. There’s a temporal order there: Evidence first, informed opinion after. Without reasons to embrace a conclusion, my opinion is not equal to yours. It’s just noise employed to loudly assert an inductive worldview, typically because I am frightened (which makes me angry).

For example, I am not a doctor. If I stood side-by-side with a doctor and we suggested different prescriptions you could take to cure your myopic conjunctivitis, would you take my word or hers? My prescription or hers? Are our opinions equal? Why yes–we both have one! Very good. So it doesn’t matter which prescription you take because opinions are equal. Right? No?

Knowledge matters. Facts matter. And even in a time of fake news, facts can be cross-referenced and shown to have merit. I know, it takes EXTRA TIME to create a factual basis for why you should be flailing your arms right now, but if you’re unprepared to back up your opinion with logic or even attempt to do so, we ask that you please lay down all sharp objects and repair to the other room while the adults talk things over. And stop voting already–you’re making a hash of it.

5) Remind them that Donald Trump is President for all Americans. This tidbit is much more likely to come your way from the other side. Welcome it! It provides the perfect segue for pointing out that if The Donald doesn’t deliver on his vague promise to make America great again, it’s bad for Americans–even his most rabid fans. Especially his most rabid fans because of liberal pricks like me who have long memories. Yes indeed: We are all in this together, whether we like it or not. That includes you and me and him and her and them. That very point is why so many people are marching today.

To circle back on the ‘we won’ mentality, you could point out that the concern of the marcher is not that one side lost an election, but rather that we have all lost a country. And the ‘losers’ here are not just those who stand up for minority rights (otherwise known as civil rights that pertain to all). If Trump doesn’t succeed in making this country better, or if he makes it disastrously worse, we all lose.

6) Remind them that we don’t have to give Donald Trump another chance. His ‘chance’ to impress us came in the 500+ days leading up to the election when his stupid mug and ‘best words’ were pasted on every media outlet you could shake a stick at. We’ve had ample evidence of what he stands for. We don’t need to wait to watch him govern. We take him at face value after a very prolonged exposure. If he pivots 180 degrees, we’ll be the first to welcome him into the fold of reason. Where he has any true success, we will benefit and cheer. But we fully expect him to keep up his idiotic fits of crybaby vitriol and political vengeance. We gave him a chance: he failed our fair test. The last time we tried to draw water from a rock, we came up short.

For anyone who insists you give Trump a chance, perhaps they misunderstand what it means to be President of the United States: It’s on him to give us a chance. All of us. Americans.

Today’s marcher is worried that everyone has already lost and some of us just don’t know it yet. That’s why we’re in the streets, proclaiming that we won’t let protections for all Americans be subject to the whim of a narcissistic blowhard– President or not.

So march with calm strides of reason and compassion. March safely. And have patience: The Trump honeymooners are heading home. Now the governing begins. We’re all watching, even the critical-thinkers. We’ve got the numbers and time on our side.

And hey, maybe Donald Trump’s first 70-some years of privilege and dumb bluster were all a big bluff to get here so he could start his master work to enhance freedom, equality and prosperity for all Americans. You don’t think so? Well hey–that’s my opinion! Looks like we’ll have to call it a draw.

~NC Smock

https://www.facebook.com/notes/nc-smock/on-the-morning-of-the-march/10154040912265764?comment_id=10154041599510764&notif_t=comment_mention&notif_id=1485021076343306

January 21, 2017 / barton smock

secret

I occur only to the animal that wants to die

January 20, 2017 / barton smock

overture

curfew, pregnancy, dream-

this plan
to stop
talking

January 20, 2017 / barton smock

{pictures of god don’t sell / surprise for me a crow}

15% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of RESUPPLY15

recent:

[pictures of god don’t sell]
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/pictures-of-god-dont-sell/paperback/product-22977531.html

[surprise for me a crow]
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/surprise-for-me-a-crow/paperback/product-23034353.html

poems from {pictures of god don’t sell}:

[themes for arrowhead]

if the damn thing is a boy, let it have a knot in its stomach. if it’s not one twin, it’s another. if a girl, find a woman who’s been to nothing and back.

bring me a fat tick from the dog of baptism. owl from the hair of god.

[inocula]

I put my sense
of taste
behind me
by placing
a sick child
beside one
sicker.

a crow is not a star.

loss
is the salt
of now.

[race]

poverty, father, mother:

/ someone
at this table
has nothing
to hide

/ touching
a UFO
can cure
frostbite

/ open the stomach of the winning monster

[attic radio]

the fattest baby in the nursing home can’t chew with its eyes open.

it’s a slow day.

looking into the future
a skeleton’s
dog
sees only
sticks.

lightning
marks
the robot’s
church.

[white mother]

the holder
of stomachs

licking
clean
the doll
of a depressed
ventriloquist

[nebula]

sister has her tail

brother
his paints…

satan’s baby can clap underwater

poems from {surprise for me a crow}:

[bring spoon]

dream won’t have me

kid says
they eat
hypnosis
the extras

of silent
film

[bring roach]

how long might satellites mourn? sickness took the lord. a scarecrow the pulse of a cricket.

not every image was worth the effort.

[zoo notes]

under hypnosis the boy becomes nostalgic for its opposite. we are having for the hole in your brother a funeral. at sea the haunted cage. in a fish the robot’s rib.

[void notes]

/ is here that our dreams of incarceration begin to overlap

[their language]

clown fog, road head, gas mask

–

I can work
with anyone

–

two boats
per animal, horror

–

is dead
but had

a farm

[country more]

as if night
knows when
to sleep

January 19, 2017 / barton smock

{updated: about}

is married, has four children. Columbus, Ohio.

interview:

http://www.gazinggrainpress.com/#!Poet-Barton-Smock-on-Trauma-Feminism-Self-Publishing/cxj4/56063dbf0cf2f0ed7a222fa8

youtube channel readings, bad lighting:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WuSKK8yNnngtdNlb5NfwQ

author spotlight on lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

all book previews on site are the viewed book in its entirety. will send free PDFs per request. also, all titles will be sent free in hard copy to those interested in writing a review. inquire, request, here: bartonsmock@yahoo.com or bartsmock@gmail.com

most recent work:

eating the animal back to life
10.00
315 pages
published July 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

of which Kazim Ali says:

Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, kingsoftrain.wordpress.com. He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself and so the only place you can get his books is here. All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.

(from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)

Drone
& Chickenhouse
6.00
84 pages
published October 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html

earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/earth-is-part-earth-and-theres-a-hole-in-the-sound-i-made-you-from/paperback/product-22503167.html

MOON tattoo
9.00
114 pages
published March 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/moon-tattoo/paperback/product-22621263.html

…The result of this type of work is that a poem might seem fractured, when it is not. Smock works with both image and symbol in order to create poems that are iconoclastic, alpha and omega…

as reviewed by Krystal Sierra:
http://krystalsierra.blogspot.com/2016/05/between-language-and-narrative.html?m=1

infant*cinema, Dink Press, April 2016
6.00 (first non self-published work)
http://dinkpress.bigcartel.com/product/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock

of which, the some that said, say:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.
~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.
~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

review for infant*cinema, by Forage Poetry editor Emma Hall:

https://foragepoetry.com/2016/12/02/review-of-infantcinema-by-barton-smock-emma-hall/

shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/shuteye-in-the-land-of-the-sacred-commoner/paperback/product-22744790.html

FOUR
12.00
340 pages
published June 2016

~ this is a combined publication of these four collections: earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from / MOON tattoo / infant*cinema / shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems] ~

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/four/paperback/product-22756947.html

depictions of reentry
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/depictions-of-reentry/paperback/product-22811652.html

hick lore rabbit hole
9.00
124 pages
published October 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/hick-lore-rabbit-hole/paperback/product-22914385.html

pictures of god don’t sell
12.00
378 pages
published December 2016

(newer poems and poems selected from eating the animal back to life, as well as collections depictions of reentry and hick lore rabbit hole in full)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/pictures-of-god-dont-sell/paperback/product-22977531.html

surprise for me a crow
8.00
104 pages
published January 2017

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/surprise-for-me-a-crow/paperback/product-23034353.html

other praise:

Barton D. Smock’s poetry speaks with a complex and implicated simplicity, it speaks a world somewhat surreal and intellectual, but nevertheless imbued with all the complexity of these strange rages of human emotionalism that strike us at inconvenient or strange times…

~ David McLean

The work of Barton Smock, a prolific mid-western poet, modifies the meaning of Christian Wiman’s idea in that it seeks unceasingly for the spaces between those ‘annihilative silence[s]’ that would pursue us, and for the watchful reader opens some door into human experience in a way that is at once intensely personal and detached. Through the manipulation of both common and cerebral language Smock’s poems maintain a dance between the familiar and the unspeakable. They act as a shout to the silences that curl up in experience- offering some view from the inside of that experience, but never in an expected way.

…The themes of family, abuse, poverty, and alienation figure heavily in the book, but to call this confessional poetry seems a bit out of keeping with what is traditionally considered confessional. He speaks of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers while also utilizing the first person, but the reader can never be exactly sure who these characters are. They are changeable, and often engaging in nearly surreal activity that might confuse more than enlighten. The key seems to be finding some language to quantify suffering, or some way of qualifying experience out of context – which at moments brings it ever more sharply into sight…

…Smock has found a way to speak for those who don’t perhaps know that they have something important to say; to share. The marginalized child, the grieving mother, the ailing child or sibling- they will all find a voice here, and though it might not be the way they would voice the affliction that rests within them, they are sure to recognize their faces. Whether this is a burden or a blessing remains a judgment to be formed by the individual reader, but I find the poetry…to be full of the intensity of experience in a way that I can’t help but identify and empathize. Something preserved so as not to be forgotten, and perhaps repeated.

~Emma Hall

January 19, 2017 / barton smock

{surprise for me a crow, poems, 104 pages, Jan 2017}

new self-publication. available on Lulu. book preview on site is book entire. share with or shy from, no matter. free hard copy to those interested in reviewing- message me at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

as such:

surprise
for me
a crow

~ 104 pages

poems, Barton Smock, January 2017

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/surprise-for-me-a-crow/paperback/product-23034353.html

January 18, 2017 / barton smock

model

scarecrow
the shrinking
man’s
nest

–

the ugliness
of horse
corrected
by deer

January 18, 2017 / barton smock

{co-}

20% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of SURVIVE20

my most recent…is [pictures of god don’t sell]…December 2016…selections from previous collection ‘eating the animal back to life’, collections ‘depictions of reentry’ and ‘hick lore rabbit hole’ in full, and newer poems…link below:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/pictures-of-god-dont-sell/paperback/product-22977531.html

recent and not so recent poems:

[toothache]

wrapped head-to-toe in toilet paper, he’d still ask for a cigarette. does this kid scream suicide to you? it’s not sexual. the name of my animal

is shape. remember the face we saw in the bruise?

[minutes with my son]

a harp
is the imaginary
secret
a spider
keeps
in the clockmaker’s
eighth
dream

[axiom]

I am the weakest person my brothers don’t know. I go with them under a blanket we won’t all come out of. hell of a word, hovercraft, but not a sucker for meaning. god torches the bathroom then speaks farmhouse to the father of the accident that never happened. I have a tooth or two knocked in by a footprint. a tick I call dust.

[mooning]

disappearance, firecracker
you never
get past it.

in the angel’s book on animal visitation

a deaf clown
bombs
a flower.

[test]

all things fish, I suspect, have forgotten to worship the devil.

/ riggers of cow-country staring contests. bread’s ruin.

[coeval]

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

[no wolf]

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured. moon of the blind.

[forgets]

the nude’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat. the suicide of the copycat toddler. nine types of catfish. a worm’s tongue. god’s last name. the orphan’s timekiller.

January 17, 2017 / barton smock

rain notes

I go through a whole pack of candy cigarettes while listening to my father shower with his clothes on. the bedroom window is stuck and sister is on the roof. I can’t move. mom is my dream of suicide

skipping
a generation. thunder my gutted church.

January 17, 2017 / barton smock

I’ve asked my younger brothers to forget

the age of my exit wound

the order
in which
we die

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kingsoftrain

On the Morning of the March (by my brother, NC Smock)

secret

overture

{pictures of god don’t sell / surprise for me a crow}

{updated: about}

{surprise for me a crow, poems, 104 pages, Jan 2017}

model

{co-}

rain notes

I’ve asked my younger brothers to forget

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