Joe Wenderoth's No Real Light

I don’t get to read much anymore; or, when I do, it’s more often scholarly texts such as this. This is all fine and good until I can complete my doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, which will enable me to find a job somewhere far far away and buy loads of nail buffers.

Still, as a non-academic academic, there is a cultivated divorce in me, and I miss my people — the first time I walked into a Borders (ha) after my initial PhD semester and picked up a poetry collection, I actually wept.

Recently, though, I hid under my pink desk and found Joe Wenderoth’s collection No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007.) Wenderoth is best known for his Letters to Wendy’s(Wave Books, 2000), which sold a legendary fuckton of copies and contains things about thick drinks and meat all like:

May 20, 1997

I’d like to have my muscles removed. Resume the inanimate. Wendy’s allows me to extract myself from the retarded narcissism of animal thrivings. I sit still in a warm booth and get thought. All movement wants, in the end is stillness. The animate is just the failure of movement to get what it wants — one sleeping body. The road to heaven is paved with meat: the road to meat is not paved at all.

Reading No Real Light is a different experience. Rather than being flashy miraculous as Letters to Wendy’s can be, this book gently and quietly peels the skin from the face in layers. You don’t even know. Given my schooling, I found this particular piece wildly appropriate:

 Advice To The Dissertator

Quit the brilliant dream plot and stand on knives
until all the god-costumes have been lost
and hang in Museums.
Exercise, then, upon the Museum Grounds,
knowing more or less what hangs inside
and why.

And on the nights when you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and you’re all appetite or lack and my my, whose house is this that you’re living in, poems like “Luck” will save your ass with pretty screaming and you will be grateful. Really. Just get to it:

Luck

So a screaming woke you
just in time.
An animal’s scream, or animals’.
What kind of animal it was
doesn’t matter, and cannot,
in any case, be determined.
The point is you are saved.
Your mouth has been opened.