James Pate, The Fassbinder Diaries, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2013.
The gauze of James Pate’s nightmare, critical & cinematic beauty keeps rising & falling on a “crimson couch,” “a scarlet curtain” & a “crisp red light”—like Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn. & like Homer the language is measured, simple & deliberate. Noble. But detonates in “torturous rampaging music”—in the “the lemon of the pig. The glory and run-off of the pig.” The nightmare is inside. & the nightmare is outside. & the critic is a man. & the critic is a woman. & the Fassbinder film just keeps on playing—“in a haze of pink dust.”–Rauan Klassnik
Raised in the urban ruins of Memphis Tennessee, in the wake of riots and assassinations, James Pate’s fantasies and visions draws on the occult atmosphere of devil-blues, underground trash and gothic pageantry. His work inhabits a saturated zone of violence and artifice, hate and love. For the past 15 years he has been one of my favorite writers and closest collaborators.–Johannes Goransson
James Pate draws the veins together with this pulpy ode to Fassbinder. It’s burnt with shades of Klassnik & Kitchell, Evenson & Glenum, but it’s also its own night raid—these poems read like the transcript of a documentary about two sexless artists as they run loops of long-dead film stock through a haunted Arriflex, dying to record blood-slicked mannequins lit by meat locker fluorescents. Pate gets it.–Ken Baumann
Pig Beach
The noise in the pig. The pig in the noise.
The time for pig time.
The end of the start of pig time.
The time of the pig thorn.
The mouth drooling in the heart of the pig thorns.
The heart drooling in the shape of the pig.
The hour of the pig light. The arson in the pig dark.
The noise of the pig in the human head.
The noise of the human in the pig head.
The pig fever in the human brain.
The pig light in the human eye.
The pig eye in the dark staring.
The lemon of the pig. The glory and run-off of the pig.
The pig wall alone on the human beach.
The human sand pink and the pig wall burnt.
The human hand scurrying in the pig night.
The mouth drooling in a human night.
The hour of the pig hour.
The hour of the blood drool.
The hour of the pig drool slipping from the light into the dark.
The pig eye staring down.
The human eye staring at the pig eye stare down.
The human spew in the pig head.
The human dark in the pig light.
The peeled lemon of the pig. The hour of the pig lemon.
The crown of pig thorns on the pink sand.
The beach light bright in the pig eye.