Thursday, December 24th, 2009...11:22 pm

todd moore | writing with your wounds: a reading of the broken and the damned by jason hardung

If

you are a poet, you write poems with your wounds. It doesn’t matter if you write with a number two pencil, a cheap ball point, a beaten black steel Royal, or a computer. If you are a poet, you write with your wounds and you know you write with a certain amount of authenticity because the words you are drilling down on those pristine white pages you are putting down in your blood. Rimbaud wrote poems with his wounds. Lorca wrote POET IN NEW YORK with his wounds. Charles Bukowski definitely wrote BURNING IN WATER, DROWNING IN FLAMES with his wounds. And, he had plenty to choose from. All you have to do is take a look at Bukowski’s face. Most of his best wounds are displayed prominently right there in that tangled map of skin.

When I opened Jason Hardung’s THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED I knew I was reading a raw, wounded, modern version of A SEASON IN HELL. And, Hardung has learned well from his predecessors. He knows how to use a declarative sentence as though it is a dangerous weapon, a switchblade that can make deep stab wounds and slashes in your psychic being. My best guess is that all of Hardung’s best poetry comes out of those slashes.

mister misery

Elliott Smith stabbed himself in the chest
with a twelve inch butcher knife.
Between the ribs
a sharp tongue poking through hot teeth.
A tiger mauling a tourist
through the bars of the cage.

He caught his final reflection in the blade.
The kitchen was a mess that day.
The dishes were piled the drain dripped
like the hands of the clock ticked
the last minutes of love.
The space shuttle Columbia taking off.
Three two one.

He died of a broken heart.
I wish I could have told him
the monsters are in the head.

Kurt Cobain knew
but a shotgun doesn’t leave any room
for self-improvement.
I always tried a big shot
of dope
a warm train that always ran on schedule.
My heart Promontory point
the needle the golden spike
in my transcontinental railroad.

At least that way
I would have a few seconds
so I could feel
what it is like
to never have
left the womb.

Reading Hardung’s poetry is almost like making little straight razor slashes in your wrist. Nothing so deep that it hits the mortal gusher, but instead carving the little red lines just deep enough to make the suicidal heart beat that much quicker.

hardungdetail

slow suicide

Window shopping in the grocery store
I watch a Mexican lady sweep up
dirt and food wrappers
into a small pile
another lady holds the dust pan for her,
together they discard the remnants
of the American Dream
into a trash bag.

My stomach shrinks at this typewriter
and I think of
the men picking beets
out by the highway.

The only difference is –
I’m writing
down my
slow suicide
as I go.

Window shopping in a grocery store means you don’t have the money to buy much, so the next best thing is to look. Hardung looks the way Baudelaire looked. He sees the misery of the world and he knows when he writes at his typewriter that a little piece of him dies back into the poem. Little pieces of him get buried in the spaces between the letters.

THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED could have been written by David Goodis or Jim Thompson if they had tried their hands at poetry instead of novels like DARK PASSAGE or THE KILLER INSIDE ME. Hardung has an unerring sense of failure in the democracy of the lost. He knows both the tortured ecstasy and the sweet pain of living among the lost.

without chaos

I don’t know how
to attain inner peace
without chaos

my impulsive nature is that tornado
that leveled the whole town
of Greensburg Kansas

it rages through the common-sense
part of my brain everyday –
and still I rebuild
because they say I have to

I look down at my hands
then the holes
in the wall in my eyes,
the scars on my thin crooked fingers
stand out iridescent in the light
of Los Alamos, churches stand
on every corner along the banks
they are both named First
Assembly or National
and I don’t enter either one.

I go in a gas station where I
always feel welcome –
cigarettes and gasoline,
coffee and lottery tickets;
a small boy waiting
in the parking lot
pulls the wings
off a butterfly,
looks up with blue eyes

and laughs.

Hardung’s poetry is shot through with an enormous sense of being lost in america that he neither understands nor really wants to be part of. And, yet is. In certain ways, he is the quintessential american. He knows you cannot be an american without some kind of chaos. For Hardung, there will always be that violent tension between those small towns that have been tornadoed into the earth and the sense that things have to be rebuilt for the next round of apocalypse and destruction. The little blue eyed boy in the parking lot picking the wings off a butterfly is a contemporary version of Peckinpah’s children stirring a tangle of red ants toward a wounded scorpion in THE WILD BUNCH. Murder lies at the heart of the american dream. And, Jason Hardung knows this only too well in his first major book. — TODD MOORE

THE BROKEN AND THE DAMNED by Jason Hardung, published by Epic Rites Press, 2009, is available through Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org and www.epicrites.org

some related articles are listed below: