Meet the Editors

The third installment in our "Meet the Editors" series (see 1, see 2) is from Brian Barker. Brian is the author of The Animal Gospels (Tupelo Press) and a former editor at Gulf Coast and Center as well as a new member of the UC-Denver faculty.

57 minute mix

1.) Man Man, "Against the Peruvian Monster"--These guys like to stomp & holler & bang on the drums. I'm sure they make Tom Waits proud.
2.) TV on the Radio, "Wolf Like Me"--I give this song four paws. It's got a beat & you can dance to it.
3.) Wolf Parade, "Dear Sons & Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- Monsters, wolfish men, hungry ghosts. . .A theme emerges.
4.) Split Lip Rayfield, "Devil"--One of the best live shows you'll ever see. Speed bluegrass. They sweat blood live onstage. The mandolin player burns through string after string, & the bass player wrestles an upright bass fashioned from the gas tank of a Chevelle. It's affectionately called "The Stitchgiver."
5.) Sufjan Stevens, "They Are Night Zombies!!! They Are Neighbors!!!"--Zombies are the new black, & they seem to be slimming down and getting faster. If I was a zombie, I'd like to eat Sufjan Stevens' brain. He's such a nice boy. Clean cut and so talented.
6.) The Mighty Underdogs, "Monster"--Gift of Gab, Lateef the Truth Speaker, and Headnodic. Rap super groups are so much better than rock super groups.
7.) Kool Keith, "I'm Seein' Robots"--If you're not listening to Kool Keith, your life is bad & you should feel bad.
8.) The Pixies, "Dead"--In which Frank Black screams loud enough to wake the dead.
9.) Aesop Rock, "Keep Off the Lawn"--In which Aesop Rock tells a bunch of ghosts to get off his lawn.
10.) The White Stripes, "Little Ghost"--" The first moment that I met her / I did not expect a specter / When I shook her hand I really shook a glove." Jack White raises grass fed ghosts on his lawn in Nashville.
11.) Neutral Milk Hotel, "Ghost"--See my note for #7.
12.) Tom Waits, "Heigh Ho"--When the Disney execs heard Waits' cover of this cheery Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs song, they issued a cease & desist letter claiming he had changed the lyrics. He hadn't changed a word.
13.) Skip James, "Devil Got My Woman"--Skip is metaphysical!
14.) Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "Stagger Lee"--Don't listen to this before going to bed.
15.) The Mountain Goats, "Lovecraft in Brooklyn"--"Woke up afraid of my own shadow / I mean genuinely afraid / Headed for the pawnshop / To buy myself a switchblade / Someday something's coming / From way out beyond the stars / To kill us while we stand here / It will store our brains in Mason jars!"

Book

Larry Levis' Elegy--No book has taught me more about pushing the envelope, about the imagination, about how a long poem can work, circling a subject and coming at it from different angles while keeping several ideas and images in the air at once. I didn't get it when I first read it, so I read it again, and I've probably read it at least a hundred times since. This book never fails to transport me.

Shoes

John Fluevog Angels. Black with white contrast stitching. The classic Fluevog super swirl on the side. Stamped on the sole: "Resists alkali, water, acid, fatigue, and Satan." Who doesn't need a pair of shoes that can resist Satan? Amen.

Tameca Coleman, our current blogista, provides the second installment in this "Meet the Editors" series, which she conceived.

Tameca is a woman of many talents—writing, creating music, coming up with interesting plans for all of us. She's a student at Metro State, coming soon to a graduate school near you.

Your 57-minute mix?

[Find this on iTunes]

1) Roar and the Wolf "Leave Me Out." -- I just think this is a heartbreakingly pretty song by a little duo you probably have never heard before.

2) Lhasa de Sela's "Anywhere on this Road" -- I love folk songs. I love the way lyrics work in music, tell stories, and take the listener away. This song feels a lot like a folk song, and yet it has a new feel. Many of Lhasa's songs, especially the ones on the album The Living Road, hit home for me.

3) John Coltrane "Stellar Regions" -- I highly recommend the album Stellar Regions to anyone who loves jazz, loves horns, beautiful music and/or Coltrane. Coltrane's sound is an explorative force on the whole album.

4) Bjork, "It's Not Up to You." -- I often feel this way. It really isn't up to me, or so it seems. I fit in where I fit in when I am not being stubborn about it. As Bjork suggests, on my "broken" days I "just lean into the crack."

5) PJ Harvey, "Reeling." -- PJ Harvey is a long time favorite. I love how raw she is, and how I have never grown out of her since Junior High. She doesn't take the feeling out of what she does, and she doesn't do what anyone else does, either. I love that. Here's a track from her 4-track demos. You can't get much more raw than this. I love rocking out to this at home and touting that "even Aphrodite...'ll have nothin' on me."

6) Sonic Youth, "Side2Side" -- I have included this track because of what Sonic Youth has done with Kim Gordon's voice. It is rhythmic, earthy, overlapped and spare. Despite the spareness, the track still tells a story.

7) Múm, "K/Half Noise." -- For awhile I kept finding all of these neat bands from Iceland like Amiina, The Apparat Organ Orchestra, Emiliana Torrini, and these guys. The first time I heard the band was on one of the many online radio sites. I knew I wanted to hear more of their stuff right away, so I bought just about everything of theirs I could find. Best effect I have ever received from Múm's music was while reading Sharon Old's book The Wellspring on a long bus ride to band practice.

8) James Brown, "Make It Funky." -- When I am blue, I put on my dancing shoes and make-pretend I can boogaloo.

9) Steve Reich's "The Desert Music III: Part 2 - Moderate." -- I love Steve Reich's work because it is meditative, cyclic and it completely engages my senses. I can't get enough of his work.This particular track uses lines from William Carlos Williams' poem "The Orchestra," which is an added bonus.

10) The Lounge Lizards, "Yak." -- More people should be screaming, and writing yaks into songs.

11) Charles Mingus, "Strollin'" -- Featured here are two of my all time favorite instruments, bass and voice. I don't know if you can tell yet, but my favorite music has a bit of earthiness to it. It's deep, dark, gritty and full of experience.

12. Cassandra Wilson, "Throw it All Away" -- This is wise counsel I have been trying to implement into my mindset for a long time, now. Cassandra Wilson carries this song forward after Abbey Lincoln, but in her own way. Both versions of the tune are fantastic.

13. Meridith Monk, "Panda Chant II." -- I recently found out about this artist in the last few months. Meridith Monk is a performance artist and musician who has been creating work for a long, long time now. What she does is often disturbing, but utterly captivating. She often uses no words, but sounds to portray information. She also utilizes movement on stage and in short films. Her work cracks my brain open and makes me still.

What book do you wish you had written?

Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue (Harper, 1999). A slew of other novels come to mind, but I don't think I could have written them. Peter Suskind's Perfume, for example, or Gita Mehta's A River Sutra, are two books that I absolutely love, but I don't have the proper background or knowledge to be able to build something like that. Kissing the Witch was written using stories I know. What I liked most about Donoghue's book was the revision of traditional fairy tales which were told from a women's point of view. I also enjoyed the way Donoghue linked what are, traditionally, separate tales into stories of a single community.

What sort of shoes are you wearing & why?

I am wearing a black slip-on shoe. I'm not really sure what the shoe is called, and the brand name has worn off the heel. The shoes are a little worn, but still useful. They are easy, which is just what I needed this morning when I ran out the door to my appointment at Copper Nickel.

We're starting a new web series, entitled "Meet the Editors," that will let you do just that, get some idea of who we are. Whether or not that gives you any sense of how we edit or maintain the journal is another question.

These are basically brief e-mail interviews, in which an editor can answer one or more questions in order to give you the flavor.

We begin with faculty Editor Jake Adam York, who's been here since the beginning of Copper Nickel in 2003. York is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Colorado Denver. He is also the author of three books of poems, Murder Ballads (2005 Elixir), A Murmuration of Starlings (2008 Southern Illinois), and Persons Unknown (2010, forthcoming).

He answers all three of our internal interview questions.

Your 57-minute mix?

1) John Lee Hooker's "I Need Some Money" -- I'm going to start here. Hard to find someone more enjoyable or more primal than John Lee Hooker. And why beat around the bush: buy some Copper Nickels already!

2) The Minutemen, "Shit From An Old Notebook" -- we get some submissions that would fall into this category. Sadly, the authors of these submissions should be listening to The Minutemen more directly: "Let the products sell themselves."

3) Funkadelic, "Funky Dollar Bill." Do I really have to explain why you should like this one?

4) Hank Williams, "Rockin' Chair Money." Best poet to come out of Alabama, so he's got my regional vote, and the song raises the question of earmarking. If Hank has "Rockin' Chair Money" where is the "Poetry Money" or "Short-Story Money."

5) Nappy Roots, "Dime, Quarter, Nickel, Penny." It's out of order, but I like catalogues that change the running order. Also, I dig the Nappy Roots. As a Southerner, I go in for anything with a kind of twang and hats off to Nappy Roots for getting a Southern flavor into Rap in ways very few others have done. Something about this album makes me want to read Frank X. Walker poems.

6) Townes Van Zandt, "Dollar Bill Blues." Another classic for me, so it goes right in.

7) The Dexateens, "What Money Means." Here's a genre-bending band, moving between country, country-rock, and punk. This one's more of a country-rock song, bringing in some Skynard flava here and there, but you can hear a harder distortion that explains why The Dexateens type themselves as a punk band. (A note to authors: I, personally, like to see this genre mixture.)

8) O. V. Wright's "A Nickel & A Nail." Is this the saddest song ever written? At the very least, it has some of the best imagery I've heard, ever. When do you have a nickel and a nail in your pocket? This has never happened to me, and now I want it to.

9) Dudley Perkins, "Money." I love everything Stone's Throw puts out, and Dudley Perkins's "A Lil' Light" is one of my favorite ST releases of all time. There's a nice blend of funk and hip-hop here that draws into the question some of the money-folding motifs in Gangsta and makes them, almost, more enjoyable.

10) Tom Waits's "On the Nickel." A theme is already visible. I don't need to explain this one either.

11) Duke Ellington & Charles Mingus, "Money Jungle." Awesome. One of the best if not the best musical collaboration between artistic giants who normally don't work together. I think the delicacy Mingus achieves on the bass here is mind-boggling: the quick flutter of the fingers. Mingus is so precise, and I think in ways we normally don't appreciate. Ellington actually makes Mingus better here, and I like this when artists challenge each other and make each other better.

12. Madvillain, "Money Folder." See #9 & #10 above.

13. Sun Ra, "Next Stop Mars." You can figure this one out, too.

14. Bumble Bee Slim, "No Woman No Nickel." You won't catch a rapper with a name like this, but maybe we should bring some of this back. Almost comic, but pathetic as well. A fine, historical mixture of modes and emotions.

15. Johnny Cash, "Delia's Gone." Classic -- or near-classic -- murder ballad. The seed of this song goes back to the early years of the 20th-Century, maybe even further back, but here Cash is keeping the classic lines and updating them. I dig the play of tradition and innovation. (See #7 & #9 above.)

16) Nirvana, "Pennyroyal Tea." Who thought unplugging Nirvana could make them rawer?

17) Alvin Youngblood Hart, "If Blues Was Money." An underrated revenant performance, I think. Hart's still working it, but this cut, from his first album, is really remarkable, in terms of the tone he's able to bring out. (See #15 explanation, too). And this rounds us back to the John Lee Hooker opening, suggesting something of the kinds of arcs I consider when putting an issue together.

What book do you wish you had written?

Probably Joshua Poteat's Ornithologies. When I read it I was transfixed: Poteat seemed to answer most of the technical questions I think about when writing a poem: how much story a poem should have, how much music or good-sounding language. I always learn something from a Poteat poem, and I feel smarter for having read it, but I also come away with the feeling that I just watched someone very careful draw something extremely pleasurable and exact out of language, which too often seems like a tool rather than an opportunity for beauty.

What sort of shoes are you wearing & why?

Camper Peu with a red sole (featuring these foot-massaging circles that look like tiny manholes) and red elastic laces. These are maybe the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn. It's almost like being barefoot in terms of the kinds of maneuvers I can execute in these shoes (good for walking, OK for running, good for skateboarding and mass-transit negotiations), but better since I don't actually hurt my feet by touching anything sharp. Score.