Joe Wenderoth.
It is really only right to begin a discussion of Joe Wenderoth with a quote from Letters to Wendy’s. When I was first introduced to those work, I had never seen anything quite like it, and with each new reading I find something new and inconceivable to explore.
“February 8, 1997
Wendy will you not even poke me? Not even a slow poke? I wonder why you treat me so. Am I a wooden board? Am I to be thought of as a simple wooden board? Come on, just give me a slow poke. I’m not a wooden board, honey. Come on, just poke me like you used to. Just a slow poke. Look into my eyes—are these the eyes of a wooden board?” ~Letters to Wendy’s.
Wenderoth hails originally from Baltimore Maryland and is currently an Associate Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of California. (I site him with the hope that he has family still living in Maryland, and he could possibly use a trip to TCNJ as an excuse to visit family on this coast as well!)
Wenderoth has made a name for himself in many anthologies and has been called “one of the ten best writers under 35.”
Author and literary critic, Calvin Bedient claims that “Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' . . . But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary-a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible."
Besides my own personal fascination, Letters to Wendy’s (2000), Wenderoth has published several other works:
Disfortune (1995)
It Is If I Speak (2000)
The Holy Spirit: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self (2005)
No Real Light (2007)
An interesting tidbit: In 2007, Wenderoth performed in collaboration with Gibby Haynes (butthole surfers) in Brooklyn at the Issue Project Room.
“April 19, 1997
It is rare for a baby to be so bad that it is sentenced to be hanged, and even rarer for the sentence to be carried out, and yet, when a baby is hung, what a pleasant surprise it is for the passersby.” ~Letters to Wendy’s.
*Youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zTwb-F7Mtc)
The Gibby Haynes sessions are a litle muttled on youtube, the music is a little low (but the one with the glasses is Gibby) and the blonde man reading, looking like he came in after a night on the street, is Wenderoth.
*Here, I am including another video by Joe Wenderoth, from a collaboration he has made with several artists, including Gibby Haynes, where they are known as the House Crackers in their Jame sessions.*
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