John Casey

Three Ways To Screw Up A Biography

I

Single white poet, 28, seeks woman with beautiful penmanship for late night editing sessions, if you know what I'm saying. Me: Clean interior, exterior needs minor touch-up work. Low mileage, all original parts, blend of classic and modern styling, efficient and economical. Generally described as “practical,” if that means anything to you. Sounds damning to me. Once got up to 125 MPH. Pinstripes. You: A muse, or least the second cousin to one. Need to strike a balance between inspiration and distraction. Ability to put up with delusions of grandeur a plus. In my fantasy world, we met while stopped in traffic when we realized that we were singing the same song in different cars.

Yours for sufficient flattery OBO. jdcasey@vcnet.com

II

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Name? John Casey
Age? 28
Sex? C-
Gender? Shouldn't that come before sex?
Height? As of this writing, approximately 33,000 feet.
Weight? w = mg. By the way, gravity is a bitch. I could afford to eat more french fries on the moon.
Occupation? Engineer. Poet. Superhero. Consumer. Sheep. Above all, preoccupation.
Favorite movie? Rouge, the third part of the “Trois Couleurs” trilogy. It's so good it's not even on DVD.
Favorite restaurant? The Cheesecake Factory. It makes me feel American when I can barely walk out of there.
Favorite book? A tie between “Franny and Zooey” by J.D. Salinger and “Tender Is The Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Favorite board game? Boggle. Now, if only they'd turn it into a game show, I could retire early.
Favorite store? If I answer, I have a funny feeling I will end up on a mailing list.
Favorite city? Sandy Eggo. Beijing, if playing Scrabble, since it's worth a lot of points.
Favorite words? Sonoluminescence. Paradox. Effervescent. Onomatopoeia. Free.
Favorite scientific theory? Probably a tie between plate tectonics and special relativity.
What kind of a dork are you to have a favorite scientific theory? Guilty.
Favorite song? Which one?
How many CDs do you own? The answer to this question explains the answer to the previous question.
Are you saying that you're a music snob? I prefer the term “elitist,” thank you. It sounds more elegant.
Are you a cat person or a dog person? Pisces.
Sign? Steal.
If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? One of those unhealthy-looking palm trees along the 110 Freeway.
If you were an animal, dot dot dot? An elephant in that big stack holding up the Earth. (Ooh, clever inside joke.)
Left-handed or right-handed? Fork in left, knife in right.
Tastes great or less filling? Id rocks superego.
Republican or Democrat? I thought I was supposed to have a choice.
Heraclitus or Parmenides? Although you gotta give props to Parmenides, I gotta show my boy Heraclitus some love.
How did you get into poetry? I was too much of a pussy to get into other bad habits like shoplifting and hard drugs.
How do you define “good poetry?” Poetry is its own hangover.
Do you consider yourself a good poet? Watch me stagger and decide for yourself.

III

(An attempt to play it straight, subtitled, “How To Set A World Record For Parenthetical References While Communicating Nothing Herewith,” with bonus points, hopefully, awarded for excessive use of commas.)

John Casey has been writing and performing poetry in Southern California for approximately the last year and a half. (Actually, only the performance part is true. He has been writing for a lot longer than that, but he is too embarrassed to talk about his sappy high school love poems, or his sappy college love poems, none of which improved his dating life one iota. There are also several years of no poetry which are hard to account for and as we all know, gaps in the record are highly suspicious. However, John would like to cheerfully point out that he still likes “Minkowski” a lot, even though it was written in a college lecture hall while ignoring a lecture on special relativity, and that his haiku from those days are underrated, even – dare we say – tragically ignored.) As the legend goes, a co-worker utterly uninvolved in the poetry “scene” (although perhaps “scene” isn't the right word, it sounds better than “collective,” “clique,” “fraternity,” or “gang”) recommended a coffee shop in Redondo Beach called Coffee Cartel as a cool place to hang out, get a cup of coffee (well, duh), and listen to music and poetry depending on which night of the week it happened to be, Tuesdays being poetry night. (Not, of course, that this story is a “legend” in the typical sense of legend, as typically applied to, say, Hercules, Ronald Reagan, or Fat Elvis dead on a toilet in Las Vegas. It's a “legend” in the sense of “poorly chosen phrase used to segué to historical section of bio.”) That first night, John (by complete coincidence, not divine plan, or so we may hypothesize) was lucky enough to hear the legendary (like Fat Elvis) Derrick Brown perform as the featured reader. (Those of you who know Derrick can skip the next sentence, as it will not add to your store of knowledge.) Derrick's writing and performance were of the highest caliber, bearing no resemblance to anything John had ever imagined “poetry” to be, managing to be both funny and scathingly insightful, deeply felt and deftly phrased. The bar had been raised, and a challenge (of sorts) issued – could he ever reach that level? (The answer, sadly, is “no,” but thankfully life is not a timed test. There is still hope.)

After two months of regular attendance at the Coffee Cartel reading, John finally read one of his own original works (a well-meaning but poorly executed piece called “Pangaea” which had a nice idea about using plate tectonics as an image, but got lost trying to somehow relate that to playing hide-and-go-seek and getting lost while driving, leading the author to vow never again to try to write a poem about mind-blowing sex) and launched the modern phase of his poetry career to tepid applause and encouragement. The next few months went by in a blur of poetic development, as he learned to not mumble at the microphone (for a while, he tried to explain this annoying habit with the following quip: “Every poet has to find his inner voice; mine happens to be a middle-aged divorcee flirting lightly with a truck driver”), wrote a strange piece about men's bathrooms (which to date seems to be his most popular piece for ineffable reasons), and stumbled across a burgeoning group of literary guerrilas known as LitRave. (To this day, John probably accounts for more than 50% of the “hits” on the website, compulsively reloading the “Forum” page while working in the faint hopes that Wayman Barnes has posted new updates.)

The rest, as they say, is history. (Not “history” in the typical sense of history, like the fall of Rome, or Prohibition, or that stolen election in Florida, but rather “history” in the sense of “she's a nice girl, but she has some history.”) He started frequenting poetic gatherings outside of walking distance, attending readings with curious names like “Mia,” “Rapp Saloon,” “Two Idiots Peddling Poetry,” “Tebot Bach,” “Pale Ale Poets,” “Cobalt Café,” and “VCP.” (He even read – once – to drunk people at a French restaurant, but don't ask him about it, since therapy isn't cheap and he isn't entirely over the experience.) Eventually, he even saved up enough pennies to bribe Wayman to put him on the “Hello” page on the LitRave website, further swelling his already dangerously overextended ego.

In short, he is perpetually in danger of getting his poetic license suspended, and from an objective point of view, that might be the best thing for everyone involved.

John would like to use the remainder of this space to thank you for reading this bio, and also to make a few announcements. For one thing, he really has read all of the chapbooks he's bought, some of them multiple times. Also: Redondo Beach is not as far from civilization as you might have heard. “Poetry slam” sounds like a Denny's breakfast item, and just as digestible. (In a perfect world, Mindy N. would earn perfect 10s for reading a menu, much less a poem.) This sentence has been brought to you by the letter xi and the number pi. Collage is art. Life is diorama. Are you still reading this? Poetry hosts need hugs, but as with all strangers, it's safer to ask first. Come to think of it, “Pangaea” only got read once. Join the suicide kitty pact. Return your tray tables to the upright position. Hands inside this ride until it ends.

Finally: John would like to publicly deny ever having written a love poem about June Melby.