Andrew Bartels — The Monarch Review
Lightening the Load – Andrew Bartels
Wednesday, June 3, 2015 12:19 — 0 Comments
It’s the end of the school year. College students all across the nation are tossing their notebooks aside and heaving sighs of accomplishment, relief, abandonment. As a teacher I feel the same, happy to be done with tests, grades, and lectures, for three months at least. For some it’s the end of a college career and on to, as they say, “The Real World.†So long to the dorm, that cozy hive. So long to all that crap I bought at Ikea with my student loans. That’s right. The end of the school year is a boon for dumpster divers, […]
The Monarch Drinks With Rachel Rosenfelt
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:09 — 0 Comments
I first read The New Inquiry—the magazine Rachel Rosenfelt directs and edits with a corps of co-editors and writers—in early 2012, the buzz of the Occupy Movement still in the air. I distinctly remember coming across the word Precariat then, a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious that describes a new social class subsisting on intermittent or insecure work, and therefore occupying life-styles that transgress typical social categories. In my understanding, the term applies as readily to migrant workers as to a generation of well-educated young adults who can’t find work in a shrinking academia. In an interview with the Los […]
The Way Thought Moves
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 15:59 — 1 Comment
I recently had a conversation with the poet Caleb Thompson about the difficulty of “following a thought,†of moving logically from a preposition to a conclusion. He had been reading quite a few essays and was perhaps feeling awed by the talent these writers possessed of cutting through the static of daily “thought.†I replied that good essays are not an accurate record of a mind in motion—the literary equivalent of Muybridge’s photographs might be the Surrealists’ practice of automatic writing—the mind works through tangents, association, gaps, false memory, distraction. An essay that is well-structured, revelatory, and dense with meaning […]
Called Back – Andrew Bartels
Friday, June 3, 2011 18:15 — 2 Comments
The Monarch Review’s own Todd Jannausch installed Gallery 206 in Occidental Park in Seattle, Washington on May 31st 2011. The Gallery is a re-fabricated phone booth exhibiting original work by Seattle artists on its 19 panels. There is also a phonebook that contains the work of 206 Seattle Artists. When the receiver is lifted to the ear, Dave Abramson‘s music comes through the line. Andrew Bartel’s “Erasures” and poems, titled “Called Back”, appear on one of the 19 panels. I had a chance to see the panel before the installation, and asked him to write the following essay. As both […]
from INTERVIEW FOR PRIVATE PAIN REVIEW – Andrew Bartels
Thursday, February 10, 2011 15:15 — 3 Comments
A: You must feel a little like the pieces aren’t quite fitting together, existing as you are on the periphery of your own life, no?
What am I?
Bioluminescent eye
That sees by the shine
Of its own light. Lies
Blind me. I am the seventh human sense
And my stepchild,
Consequence;
Scientists can't find me.
Januswise I make us men;
Glamour
Was my image then—
Remind me:
The awful fall up off all fours
From the forest
To the hours…
Tick, Tock: Divine me.
-- Richard Kenney
