Event Recap: Matthew Simmons and Daniel Bailey at Ampersand

This recap is authored by contributor Karen Munro.  The Head of the UO Portland Library and a recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Karen discusses books, reading, and writing on her wonderful blog Munrovian.

A new reading series at Ampersand on NE Alberta kicked off last night with a shared reading by poet Daniel Bailey and fiction writer Matthew Simmons. Ampersand hosts Myles Haselhorst and Jennifer Lawrence laid out the wine, beer, and marshmallows (from nearby Don Pancho’s) for a packed house.

Matthew Simmons read two sections from A Jello Horse, just out from Publishing Genius in Baltimore, MD. The book is written in the second person, which makes it a little hard to summarize, but for the sake of convenience we’ll say it’s the book’s narrator (“you”) who takes a road trip across the Midwest for a friend’s brother’s funeral. What emerges from this is a portrait of roadside America: cheap, ugly, and franchised to the hilt.

As Simmons puts it, a “moat of shit” separates American freeways from American cities–a moat we’ve all seen. It’s made up of fast food joints, crummy chain motels, big box stores, gas stations, and parking lots. Road-tripping ain’t what it was in Kerouac’s day. Simmons’s narrator (again, “you”) survives the junky, depressing badlands of freeway culture by studying public access television to see what’s obsessing the local citizenry: cannabis laws, property disputes, and child custody battles. He/you also spends a little time in a surreal alternate-universe version of the American roadside. A herd of giant antelopes devours Madison, WI. At the House of Two Thousand Telephones, you can pick up any of the ringing phones with unlisted numbers, and you might find yourself talking to a woman claiming to be Amelia Earhart, or to your own brother (…or is he?)

A Jello Horse is short, and the sections Simmons read were funny and vivid. Simmons noted at the outset: “it’s a novella, or maybe a novelette. If it was up for a Hugo it’d be a novelette. But it’s not up for a Hugo.” But maybe it should be.

Daniel Bailey followed up with poems from his most recent book, Drunk Sonnets. Here’s the thing: poetry always suffers more of a transformation than fiction does when it’s read aloud, because typography matters more to poems. Bailey’s poems are printed in all-caps, which can signify a lot of things. In this case it signifies that Bailey wrote the poems while he was drunk–wrote them and posted them to a blog, where people read them and liked them. People including Mike Young of Magic Helicopter Press, who collected the poems and published them.

The poems wander the landscape of drunkenness with one shoe unlaced, a shirt untucked, a half-bottle of warm PBR held loosely in one hand. They’re by turns funny, loopy, morose, intense, impossible to understand, completely familiar, and involved in their own private jokes and half-pickled ideas. “I AM NOT A HEART ATTACK. / I AM A SHARK ATTACK,” runs one couplet. And, “I AM IN GOLDENEYE AND I CARRY THE GOLDEN GUN.” (At this point, Bailey laughed.)

A lot of what the poems have to share is the hard-to-refute, crudely-phrased wisdom of the totally hammered. “BEING A KID IS THE MOST RETARDED THING EVER / BECAUSE KIDS TURN INTO ADULTS AND THAT SHIT IS WHACK.” Tru dat. And sometimes there are flashes of more sophisticated wit: “GOD IS LIKE BONO. / SOME DICKWEED NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE.” Okay, maybe that’s not so sophisticated. But it made me laugh.

Both books are handsome little items, available from their publishers’ websites if not in local bookstores. I’ve assumed line breaks and punctuation in what I’ve quoted above, and may not have all my words perfect–to be absolutely sure, you’d better grab a copy of both books for yourself.