Thursday, March 21, 2013

Lamplighter Magazine Reviews The Apple Juice

Sarah Tibbling from New Jersey's Lamplighter magazine was kind enough to review my book, The Apple Juice, for their December 2012 issue. As the magazine is only in print, you may read below her thoughts on the epic poem of rollerblading. You may purchase the issue here and visit Lamplighter's website here.


Poetry Reviews
The Apple Juice
Jason Greendyk

I never thought these words would escape me in this permutation: it appears that Jason Greendyk is the Allen Ginsberg of rollerblading. Greendyk’s The Apple Juice is a dreamy, sprawling epic poem about the unique and overlooked sport of rollerblading. Spliced with color photographs, The Apple Juice fervently explores a world whose inhabitants grind along the rails of broken down east coast, run from the cops, and become their own gods. Greendyk writes, “[Rollerblading] is an act of creation, and an act of freedom…that is, it is to play God, to create something out of nothing.”

In The Apple Juice, we find ourselves submerged in what feels like an urban wasteland. Greendyk, a life-long blader and poet, lives in Jersey City, “on the fringe of the ruins of industry,” and this quality makes itself apparent in his work. Allusions within the first few pages hint at local Jersey spots – “Riverside Hill’s steep dirt rails,” “Cross the GWB / To lurch the fine dining cliffesque slopes of Edgewater.”

While The Apple Juice exposes us to the unique subculture of the wheel-footed, the manner in which Greendyk chooses to write these poems is additionally intriguing. The language used in the book was intended to tie “the loose strands of language into knots, yet maintain their identity, as is the current state of cultural diversity, and tend towards a united existence, bridging gaps of class in its numerous denominations.” But the piece seems to fluctuate between the colloquialism of a teenage boy and the verbosity of a highfalutin beatnik: “Fuck man it’s all for the sun’s rising in love at the sun’s setting in hate.”

However, when we comb through the expanse of The Apple Juice, we are left with nuggets of insight and a new kind of truth. One of these truths seems to be that it often takes courage to do the things that we love, and that this is particularly relevant for the sport of rollerblading. “We are the pussiest men of all you see … Fighting for acceptance … This acceptance is being drowned / We need air.”

Many moments within its pages are big and brave; ultimately, The Apple Juice calls out to us in its own way and shows us how we can sculpt our own lives into meaning and, barring the cliché, to grab life by the blades. It keeps us guessing – it is injected with the kind of youth that both alienates us and draws us in, that at some moments feels grandiose but at others is truly poignant.

//Sarah Tibbling, Lamplighter


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com
 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Soul Theft (The Highest String of Freedom)

From the darkest of your furthest reaches
The sun came arising in bitter jest
Grit your beautiful heart
And smile for the camera
As the open shudder of the black angel’s wings
Steals your soul clothed
In the white music of the spheres
The collective voice of the ages bellowing white noise
At the pinnacle of Reason
The church bell tower
Hiding behind the clapping shutters of imaginary numbers
The black angel snapped for a moment
And let in only enough light
To cast a brief shadow on the wall
A silhouette against Reason
Veiled in the transparent curtains of corporate etiquette
Shrouded in voices not your own
An ideological commitment to the poetry in vogue
And embracing the poems in law
I do accept your hand in the marriage
Of work product and the soul
Corporate persons with intellectual property
Standing as individuals of the collective
And how does it feel to be off the wall?
Hors catégorie
The free spirit in a branded world
Harping on a poetry left to the shadows
From a higher plane of cognizance
Trimming the byproduct selvage of the machine loom
Stamped by the signature apathy of contemporary denim
On the highest note of the seven string lyre
Strummed closest to the player
To sound some harmony of the spheres
In the black angel’s forsaking the morning star
And donning the façade of white wings
Through the guise of feminine power

The digital mode of production
Gave validity to the minds of the cloud
Those individuals who reached in singular e-motion
Towards the shining communist star in the sky
The equitable distribution of wealth
As determined by the bellowing voice of Reason
The latent judgments of a God
Buried in the history of philosophy
And deep in the bellowing grey echo
Of the moonlit cumulus sky
A parasite spawned in the brackish waters
On the midnight river’s sheen of noire
And bred in the late light of the morning star at sunrise
It was the lingering desires of starry nights
Buried in the glitched troughs
Of the dark zeroes of streams
Always moving forward
The abyss grew and expanded
Long wide and deep
Dreams like morsels of light
Reflected in the watery crests
That danced in knowing of their return to the sea
So long the many rivers of the night flowed uphill
Filling the dried nostalgic cuts through the desert of language
And moistening the coagulation of black hearts
In the arid land of your soul to flow again
Through the vibrant and lush growth of your corporate entity
A crepuscular moment cast your shadow on the wall
Larger than life at the rise of the new day
The ambitions of imaginary numbers
Leapt over the wall and through the cloud
And stitched stars into the fabric of the universe
Like silent sheep thinning the herd
Taking the light for themselves as celebrities
If you can walk on the cloud in a corporate heaven
And stare into the blinding desert sun
There’s a black star shines darker
From along the banks of the midnight river
Stare through the façade of corporate etiquette
And enlighten their black hearts
The midnight river froze them in their thoughts
As they took you for the sun
A black sheep shining in the darkness
The guiding light of the herd upon the second coming
Stare through the kindnesses
To the deep pools of amoral judgment
In the black pupils veiled as students of the light
Just use the eye and face the strange
And let the river take them away
The natural smoothing of the raw edges
The natural polish of the selvage
A heartstone drawn from the midnight tributary of the sea
And your shadow on the wall was looking back at you
As the sunrise hallucinations of a driven mind
Retreated in the stark daylight
And the absence of the cloud had hung over the night
The revolution of the sun
Like the revolving door of bureaucracy
Déjà vu au courant
They took you for the change they wished to see in the world

And frozen au courant
Along the surface of the midnight river
The waters beneath their dreadful shallows
Held the guiding stars of the sea in their depths
An ocean within
And you sailed along and watched for many things
Like Reason and Freedom
And you traced the source of the stream
To their soullessness
A sacrifice in spiritus mundi
As if they had been some liquid light
Flowing out from the legalese
And plain English was the air
That tried to keep you inside yourself
Contained
The midnight river of your thoughts
Reflected the constellation of your soul
That wandered the arid land of your corporate entity
A tributary merged into the post-contemporary copy
A communist utopia
The polished cut of manic striations
Run raw cut through the free marketplace
And the flakes of white snow ran perpendicular
To the flight of the black angel
In the direction of constant progression
Be boundless energy

The copy mill was rigorous
And the freeway was your relief
Chasing freedom all the way home
In the crepuscular setting of the desert sun
Your shadow rising off the wall
At the theft of your beautiful soul
And the bitter taste of poor quality
Lingering long after the sweetness
Of the imaginary numbers’ curves
Were revealed as a façade
Like the devil’s kiss on a wild fox
Out damn’d spot!
Out you say!
As the morning star was looming
The light at the end of the tunnel
On the waters of the midnight river
Journeying ever on
A blanket Freedom pulls up over Mother Earth
In Her divine pregnancy
And through the reflections of the stars
You can still see the sun
In the kind of exhaustion that feeds your stolen soul
In spiritus mundi
And in backwards revolutions
In spiritus fakey
Branding the adventurous spirit become
Le Madonna Noire


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com