My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

Yet another selection from Ryan Adams’ Infinity Blues.

Joy

by Ryan Adams

When you say a thing that I write too much
I dream myself a thousand-plus
more books I wrote myself
and imagine them in a swinging stack
fainting
and collapsing onto you
as they crush your bones
in the name of art
in the name of american idealism
in the name of the future
because
fuck you and your sleeping wordless criticism
and
that path before me is lit with possibility
and lore
and my cup is not full because it is not a cup
it is a life
it is a heart
and me
I am trying to show you something
about yourself
not me
that a person can do anything
and
that is what hope is
so,
with all due respect,
fuck you if you dismiss this
because it is a process
and
I accept
if you discount what it has to say
but if I draw a line
and say
what have you done today
be prepared
because while you are sleeping
I am with the sunlight
and the life
and joy
joy will rise in the names

Given its “by the people, for the people” punk roots, indie’s most relevant definition would seem to come from its fans, its most fervent believers. But take to the Internet — the homeless home of this decade’s most important scene — and you’ll find that any definition set forth has been swiftly and furiously countered.

Paste Magazine posed the question: is indie dead?. A good article that addresses an issue that needed to be explored at length. Rachael Maddux treats the subject well, addressing it from several perspectives.

Her final conclusion (not to spoil it for you; you should read the article to see a fine journalistic specimen regardless) is that yes, indie is dead.

She makes her point in a roundabout way, but abuses the term “dead” in my opinion. Indie is not dead, it’s just become a singularity. Much like the Nietzsche-posed question “is God dead?,” which she addresses, which more states that “God” means too many things to mean anything. Which is exactly what “indie” is: too much to be something any more.

I have friends who say “indie” when they mean independent. They’re usually the ones with a grasp on the recent history of pop culture. But to the rest — generally the less history-aware — it means “quirky” or “authentic” or a hundred other things.

Or they don’t know what indie means at all, so wrapped up in a world of the mainstream that they’re entirely unaware something else exists outside a world of corporate-sponsored entertainment based on market research. They probably don’t even know that market research exists.

Maybe indie is no more dead than any other thing that was never alive in the first place; I suppose the real issue here is deciding what “dead” and “alive” mean.

My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

This week’s poem comes from Ryan Adams’ Infinity Blues.

Becausewhy

by Ryan Adams

because we are bored
We War
Because we are bored
We Fuck
sexy or not
and
Because we were born to fight
inside
we know
our children too, eventually will die
this is how it is
in the universe of ours
us against time
and
in this place,
show me where god stood up
and said otherwise
i say he does not speak
and may be everything
inside that thought
you are allowed
but may not keep
for the growing
of things
immeasurable
i have not seen him
while i have been alive
and regardless
heaven
that would not work
if men and women
were anything like this
someplace else
especially an elsewhere
of brights
and
if so
that is not a good place to go
i would not dine there
how could one relax
infinitely
in a place like that
so why?
becausewhy
that’s what
that’s what they say
right before
“shut up”
and i’m like
ok
no
never.
Fuck-Face.

It’s no secret that I’ve had a thing for pretty much everything Ryan Adams does for quite some time. I own a good handful of his many albums, I read his blog, followed his Twitter, watched him on Tumblr, and wherever else he chose to publish his words, videos and songs for 10 days at a time before deleting it all.

It started when a good friend introduced me to his album Love is Hell — one of the saddest and most beautiful collections of alt. country and piano ballads about heartbreak ever put to tape. It started a snowball effect that has slowed down but I doubt will ever stop until he does. (Coincidentally, he stated a while back that he’s on an indefinite hiatus from making music, so maybe that time has already come.)

So it comes as no surprise to most that I finally got around to reading Infinity Blues, his book of poems that he wrote a year or two ago.

Adams has undergone what seems to be a significant transformation in the last few years, having given up several addictions, getting married and, generally speaking, doing everything he can to shed the asshole image he had created for himself during several years of self-destructive actions on stage and off.

If nothing else, Infinity Blues is a look into the mind of Adams at the age of 33. It’s frantic, thoughtful, funny, sad and all over the map from one moment to the next. He talks candidly — and yet still with a shroud over names and events — about his broken family, lost loves, life in the city, art, faith and everything. In one poem he claims that he wrote anywhere from 3 to 17 poems a day for the book which, knowing his prolific creation schedule, isn’t too surprising.

If you like free verse poetry or watching Adams “find himself by losing himself,” Infinity Blues might be worth a read.

A few years ago a friend of mine and I started making a playlist for every month, in a sense to act as a piece of nostalgia, as something of a musical fingerprint of a moment in time.

February. A pretty dang good month. Aside from some fun health problems and getting my wisdom teeth pulled, that is. So it must have been pretty awesome otherwise to make up for that.

Most of these tracks are random perusals back through my library, a couple new releases (Beach House and Magnetic Fields, mostly) and a step back into exploring dubstep a bit more.

And then there’s that 30 Seconds to Mars track. Can someone explain to me why it’s not cool to like them? Listen to the song in the attached playlist (and all the others, of course) and tell me it’s not a solid pop song.

1. The Gaslight Anthem – “The ‘59 Sound” (The ‘59 Sound)
2. Wilco – “Theologians” (A Ghost is Born)
3. The Gaslight Anthem – “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” (The ‘59 Sound)
4. Ryan Bingham – “Change Is” (Roadhouse Sun)
5. Yeasayer – “Ambling Alp” (Odd Blood)
6. Beach House – “Zebra” (Teen Dream)
7. Beach House – “Walk In the Park” (Teen Dream)
8. Magnetic Fields – “You Must Be Out of Your Mind” (Realism)
9. Wu-Tang Clan – “Deep Space (Jay Da Flex & Yoof remix)” (Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture Vol. 2: Enter the Dubstep)
10. Wu-Tang Clan – “New Year Banga (Rogue Star remix)” (Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture Vol. 2: Enter the Dubstep)
11. DJ Hidden – “Death at a Distance” (Death at a Distance)
12. 30 Seconds to Mars – “Kings and Queens” (This is War)

My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

The following is a poem titled The Kingdom of God by Francis Thompson. I know nothing of Thompson other than when he was alive; or this poem, other than that it was quoted in part in The World’s Religions, a book I recently read.

The Kingdom of God

by Francis Thompson

O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Huston Smith is best known for this, his book The World’s Religions, and a miniseries he hosted that inspired the book, called The Religions of Man. His 90 years of experience and lifelong pursuit of knowledge about the world’s major paths of faith are what he is known for.

This book is perhaps one of the most all-enveloping and well known explorations of the major religions of the world. For me it was highly educational, filling in many of the gaps about what I knew of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and others.

But perhaps even more impressive than the sheer facts was that Smith, despite his own upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries, treats each religion with the utmost respect and honor. Apparently he’s taken up multiple faith practices throughout his life and, in so doing, understands multiplicity better than most, and that honoring differences of faith is the perhaps one of the healthiest things we can do in a society that seems to be more splintered day by day.

This is not a book for wimps; it took me a solid two months to read, completely throwing off any reading momentum I’d had up until I started. It’s dense but readable and, if nothing else, is challenging to anyone with preconceived notions about any one religion. Having considered myself to be fairly open-minded until reading this, I’d venture to guess it’s going to be a challenging book for most, but worth reading despite that.

Certainly I have my own struggles with relative and absolute truth, and I have yet to decide if this book helped or harmed in my exploration, but I appreciate all that I learned in the process. If nothing else, it opened me up to more of what humanity as a whole believes (and doesn’t believe) about what is true regarding morals, time, life, death, nature and love. And that is valuable, regardless of the journey.

Yes, I’m well aware that it’s February. This list of albums has been sitting in my drafts since January 8th and I’m just now doing something with it. It seems I took a break from ye olde blogge for much of January in favor of trying out Tumblr. (I can’t decide if I like it or not. It seems to steal my longer-form writing thunder).

My varying tastes in music from day to day would make it pointless to put these albums in any best-to-worst order. So I went with the time-tested alphabetical order method, which is completely arbitrary if you think about it, but that’s a thought for another day.

Read on for my favorite albums that came out in 2009 (or thereabouts; I fudged a little). If you’ve been checking out my monthly playlists (you’re forgiven if you haven’t), most of this will not be a surprise.

And if you’re patient and make it all the way to the bottom, there’s a prize for you, in the form of a few select songs from these albums that I particularly enjoyed.

WARNING: This gets a bit lengthy, so get comfy.

Read on for my album picks for 2009!

It takes a hell of a lot of energy, courage, thought and faith to take your foundation, drop it off a cliff and start over. It’s the biggest undertaking any of us will ever attempt. And, for some reason, I’ve discovered that continually doing so is what keeps me motivated to keep going. I’ve never felt so satisfied realizing that I know so little.

It’s not so much that I enjoy freeing myself of my beliefs, philosophies and values. It’s more that, when I look at those who don’t go about this process, the cancer of complacency is written all over their graying faces. Challenging my own ideas is what I do best, it seems, and the one habit I can’t seem to free myself of when shedding my ball and chain is judging those who, knowingly or not, do not deny themselves — mind, soul and spirit included — for the sake of their own personal development and enlightenment.

Today, the concept of Universal Truth is on the table.

To those who deny it, it sounds like the product of fundamentalist rubes. Only one Truth is possible. One timeline; one explanation for life, the universe and everything; one way we’ll experience the afterlife, if an afterlife exists at all. It’s impossible that you and I could experience two very different things in the very same circumstance, and even less possible that two contradicting beliefs can both be right. It just makes sense.

But relative truth certainly has its appeal. A world where we can justify our actions by claiming relative truths sounds much fancier and full of options, but it’s hard not to wonder if the motivations still boil down to one enveloping universal truth: we don’t want anyone to challenge what we believe. In other words, selfish individualism (which potentially leads to the death of community and tradition).

On the other hand, universal truth denies the gray area of differing cognitive realities. Part philosophy, part neurology, we can’t prove that what I see is what you see. Somehow (if I’m not just imagining you all exist in my own self-created universe) we all manage to get on the same relational wavelength about whether or not that blue rubber ball just rolled off the table and bounced into a corner. But hallucinations, misinterpretations and crossed wires in the brain can’t be overlooked either, therefore invalidating the mind from being an entirely trustworthy vessel of Truth.

What it comes down to is the fact that it’s hard for me to shed the weight of 25 years of dogma — which I find increasingly full of cracks — when I’m trying to pragmatically explain why I know that, despite the billions of people that disagree, my truth is the Truth.

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism. If there is one Universal Truth, why are we all so split on what we believe? Why is there no clear front-runner with the vast majority of the votes? What gives me, a WASP if there ever was one, the right to think that what I believe is right? If I were born and raised by Iranians in Iran, I’d be a Muslim. No doubt about it. My core foundation, that I continually push off a cliff — and eventually dive after to retrieve every damn time — seems more a product of my environment than some spark of inspired awareness imbued in me by a greater power.

Maybe I lack faith. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe the only Universal Truth is that every venue of faith is true and, despite the overwhelming list of contradictions, they all converge into one path in ways that are beyond our ability to understand. (It should be just as easy to use what faith we have to accept plurality as it is to faithfully believe in only one way; the attempted use of empirical evidence to pick one over the other will continually fail.)

But I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m somehow satisfied with not knowing. It’s surprisingly easy to relate to people when willing to admit to knowing nothing. And I like it that way.

In case you haven’t been reading these for long (or at all) and you’re wondering why the heck I post a list of songs at the end of every month, perhaps I should explain: A few years ago a friend of mine and I started making a playlist for every month, in a sense to act as a piece of nostalgia, as something of a musical fingerprint of a moment in time. It takes very little effort and is one of my favorite ongoing musical projects.

That said, here’s January’s list, which chronicles the new Vampire Weekend album release, hitting 100,000 listens on Last.fm (the song was “Last Dance” by the Raveonettes), listening to albums from people’s year-end best-of lists, mourning the loss of Jay Reatard and the end of These Arms Are Snakes, seeing Cross Canadian Ragweed live and remembering that I like Jimmy Eat World a hell of a lot. And bands with swear words in their name.

And, to start the year off right (hey, we’re only one twelfth of the way in), I’m going to be posting the songs from one of the many handy streaming music services that let you embed playlists. Check out the player below or go here to listen.

1. The Dead Texan – “A Chronicle of Early Failures, Part 2″ (The Dead Texan)
2. The Low Anthem – “Charlie Darwin” (Oh My God, Charlie Darwin)
3. The Big Pink – “Velvet” (A Brief History of Love)
4. Vampire Weekend – “White Sky” (Contra)
5. Vampire Weekend – “California English” (Contra)
6. The Raveonettes – “Last Dance” (In and Out of Control)
7. Mastodon – “Crack the Skye” (Crack the Skye)
8. Metric – “Sick Muse” (Fantasies)
9. Jay Reatard – “Faking It” (Watch Me Fall)
10. Cross Canadian Ragweed – “17″ (Cross Canadian Ragweed)
11. The Antlers – “Sylvia” (Hospice)
12. The Decemberists – “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid” (Hazards of Love)
13. These Arms Are Snakes – “The Shit Sisters” (Oxeneers or the Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home)
14. The Very Best – “Julia” (Warm Heart of Africa)
15. Infinite Body – “Dive” (Carve Out the Face of My God)
16. Native – “Backseat Crew” (Wrestling Moves)
17. Jimmy Eat World – “Big Casino” (Chase This Light)
18. Jimmy Eat World – “Chase This Light” (Chase This Light)
19. Fuck Buttons – “Olympians” (Tarot Sport)