Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything is Quiet

After reading KGM’s Everything is Quiet I instantly thought of a Dylan lyric “Till she sees finally that she’s like all the rest, with her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls”. Malone’s book is unapologetic, she isn’t fishing for sympathy or pity for her actions/observations that readers may not agree with. Malone, a confessional 20-something is just that, there is no pretense, or difficulty, or technical show-boating. And this is what makes this book as good as it is. Malone’s poems, like her, do not try to be something they’re not.

Everything is Quiet is captivating because we get Malone herself, how she places herself in the world, her actions, her guilt, her inquiry. Descartes would call her a ‘thinking thing’ and St. Vincent Millay would be proud. She describes her existence honestly, bare boned and brutal. Malone shows us how horrible it is to exist, and how easy it is to be indifferent towards others, while trying so hard to be good to herself and others. Many people might have problem with Malone’s character, but that’s what makes the book engaging. It is REAL. And by real I mean believable. Even if her poems are complete lies we still want to believe them because we, as readers, know this is generally how people exist in the world around them.

Everything is Quiet is a book for the staunch existentialist, young rebellious women (though who says they have to be young?), or an avid Bukowski fan (who would notice the similarities in style). When I finished this book I couldn’t judge Malone; It’s possible to take a shot at her and say she doesn’t understand or care about the consequences, but she has to. The title of the collection alludes to this. These poems could’ve come out of the solitude she experienced following the experiences behind the poems. These poems are subtly guilt-ridden though they might not always speak to it directly. Everything is Quiet is Kendra Grant Malone coming to terms with herself and the world. This is a book that spits in the face of the technical or intellectual or multicultural or classical or academic or didactic, it is all that it is without trying to be anything else. There needs to be more poets and more books of poems like this, because a poet being honest and relatable is probably the biggest risk one can take.

fragment/section of something i’ll probably never finish but began tonight 11.30.2010

somewhat not a lark
but a spark lost
that i may lose

 

working sixty hour weeks

slinging cases of food

on handcarts heavy as building frames

 

it’s the porcupine of survival

gnawing, poking me awake

at each instant I close my burning sleepless eyes

 

there’s no rest if you want

to survive, to get more than just by

 

Portland Oregon 2009 Summertime reflection

While I was still fresh in Portland (within the first few months, when certain folks decided they wouldn’t constantly hate on me, just slightly hate on me) I remember riding my bike with people and I was normally always in the lead. It was always late and we were riding to a house or a place to drink or pass out or whatever (This happened a fair amount around this time). Most all of these times I would do a controlled swerve back and forth (kind of like something you’d see somebody do on a longboard/skateboard), not disrupting anybody, just doing my own thing. As soon as I always begun there were always people in back that begun to holler. To tell me to quit it. Maybe they didn’t want me to wreck? or wreck and they’d have to avoid/wreck into me? These are the same people that have no problem doing drugs (things harder than alcohol/cigs/coffee/pot). Their risk is much greater than mine, wouldn’t you say? What are the worst consequences of falling off a bike? Bone-break?

I never understood it. It functions as a great metaphor for my time in Portland.

Of course I remember one friend was visiting and I was doing it, and after the usual bitching, she spoke up and said something to the extent of  “just keep doing it, you’re fine. he’s just being a free spirit” to everyone else. At that point, when I had known her, she wasn’t one to speak up against a group like that, especially to defend me (it took some guts since I was the black sheep, the swerving cyclist among other reasons).

I never considered myself a free spirit, and certainly didn’t at that moment; at that moment, and generally when I am on a bike, sometimes I just want to swerve back and forth like I’m carving out my own little space forward. And that’s really all you can do.

How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

( i stole this)

Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the light bulb itself
symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a
netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin
cosmos of nothingness.

Question:

What is it about a depressive and analytical personality that draws it to existentialism? Is this a good fit? Should depressives stay clear of existential thought? Or is the cause for their angiush  elucidated best in existential terms?

Sartre excerpt

“I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. In order for it to come to my aid once more, I must remake it ex nihilo and freely. The not-gambling is only one of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is another of them, neither more nor less. I must rediscover the fear of financial ruin or of disappointing my family, etc. I must re-create it as experienced fear. It stands behind me like a boneless phantom. It depends on me alone to lend it flesh. I am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before. After having patiently built up barriers and walls, after enclosing myself in the magic circle of a resolution, I perceive with anguish that nothing prevents me from gambling. The anguish is me since by the very fact of taking my position in existence as consciousness of being, I make myself not to be the past of good resolutions which I am.” – From, Being and Nothingness (‘the origin of negation’)