{"id":24521,"date":"2014-01-05T12:56:15","date_gmt":"2014-01-05T18:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24521"},"modified":"2018-12-13T14:10:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T20:10:29","slug":"sunday-blog-read-joel-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sunday-blog-read-joel-long\/","title":{"rendered":"READ LOCAL First: Joel Long"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joel<\/a>

Joel Long’s most recent published collection.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Joel<\/a><\/p>\n

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READ LOCAL First<\/b> is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers.<\/p>\n

Today, 15 Bytes features poet Joel Long<\/strong> who provides two recently completed (and unpublished) poems below.<\/p>\n

Sunday Blog Read continues to collect a distinguished group of established and emerging Utah writers for your review and enjoyment. Past writers have included former and current Utah Poets Laureate Kate Coles Lance Larsen, poet Michael McLane, short story writer Darrell Spencer, fiction writer Larry Menlove, memoirist Christopher Bigelow, poet Shanan Ballam, speculative fiction writer Steve Proskauer, fiction writer April Wilder and short fiction writer Calvin Haul.<\/p>\n

So curl up with your favorite cup of joe and\u2026enjoy!<\/p>\n

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The Hedonist Apology to Heironymous Bosch<\/b><\/p>\n

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I admit the sin of pleasure.\u00a0 I find my skin<\/p>\n

against the skin of the world fills the dark inside<\/p>\n

with light I do not understand but by craving,<\/p>\n

the sweetness of the human form, abstract<\/p>\n

beneath stars and the empyrean fields, finds<\/p>\n

the sacred purpose of the eye, magnified<\/p>\n

in its intensity, gold in the glowing furnace.<\/p>\n

I am sorry that I have eaten strawberries<\/p>\n

in a bowl of sweet cream, momentary<\/p>\n

and gone, a bitterness and sweetness once<\/p>\n

on the tongue which lasts longer but longs for more.<\/p>\n

I find pleasure in the longing, pity for those<\/p>\n

who can love only what will last.\u00a0 It is evidence<\/p>\n

of God\u2019s capacious mind that he has provided<\/p>\n

an infinity of birds, stellar jay, shovel head, golden<\/p>\n

eye, and wren, that he made the calls to hang<\/p>\n

on air myriad of bells and chatter, and when the owl<\/p>\n

closes its wings over the light of the day.\u00a0 He gave us<\/p>\n

a thousand ways to dream so that pleasures<\/p>\n

in our hearts would not be confined to stones<\/p>\n

of our waking, the sun swinging its chain<\/p>\n

across the circumference of the one sky.\u00a0 Perhaps you<\/p>\n

would stitch my hands to the guts of the harp,<\/p>\n

confine me in the drum barrel, but first let me hear<\/p>\n

the violinist alchemize strings into twin elements, tandem,<\/p>\n

gold voices, illicit, raising the brute arch of the cathedral.\u00a0 I want<\/p>\n

your tongue to come alive in waters of the fountain,<\/p>\n

your mouth to return to its speech, to open the blackberry,<\/p>\n

the fans of salmon,\u00a0 the wine, the viscosity of a woman\u2019s mouth,<\/p>\n

so you can\u00a0 light your hell with a worthy light from true pleasure<\/p>\n

that led the damned toward the blessed stuff of life.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Cassette Tape<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Caught in the capstan caught in the spindle, the<\/p>\n

brown tape, bronze tape, magnetic, the filings<\/p>\n

of song, the voice of the one I love, who makes<\/p>\n

me stand, who makes me move inside like reflected<\/p>\n

light, like water, like sadness carried in a jar,<\/p>\n

the tape, caught, pulled out of its casing, keeps coming,<\/p>\n

keeps spilling out of its windows.\u00a0 It is not sound;<\/p>\n

it is not lyric, the wrecking ball where she meets<\/p>\n

her heartbreak, the port where he leaves someone<\/p>\n

who wants him more than he wants anything at all.<\/p>\n

The tape pours out in endless exhale as the mouth<\/p>\n

and the lungs could not contain the entire world<\/p>\n

but just half, the arteries and veins of a two-thousand-<\/p>\n

year-old man, woman, spilled out, those wrinkled<\/p>\n

half inches of voice, of guitar, smudged, erased,<\/p>\n

what could be played, what could be revived<\/p>\n

but the hiss of fracture, the sound of the catching<\/p>\n

in the machine that only wishes to play that song,<\/p>\n

that thing you love to hear, that only wishes its own<\/p>\n

indifference to the catching, to the quitting, the physical<\/p>\n

disinterest of everything mineral to what we care for,<\/p>\n

to song, to sadness, to this tape spilling onto the carpet,<\/p>\n

to the lost voices on the tape that we love to hear late at night,<\/p>\n

and it is always late at night when we need what was finally lost.<\/p>\n

#<\/p>\n

\u00a0Copyright, Joel Long, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

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Joel Long\u2019s book Lessons in Disappearance<\/i> was published in 2012.\u00a0 Knowing Time by Light<\/i> was published by Blaine Creek Press in 2010.\u00a0 His book won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published in Winged Insects <\/em>won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published in1999.\u00a0 His chapbooks, Chopin\u2019s Preludes<\/i> and Saffron Beneath Every Frost<\/i> were published from Elik Press.\u00a0 His poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly<\/i>, Ocean State Review<\/i>, Quarterly West<\/i>, Gulf Coast<\/i>, Rhino<\/i>, Bitter Oleander, Crab Orchard Review<\/i>, Bellingham Review<\/i>, Sou’wester<\/i>, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Poems and Plays<\/i>, and Seattle Review<\/i> and anthologized in American Poetry: the Next Generation<\/i>, Essential Love<\/i>, Fresh Water, <\/i>and I Go to the Ruined Place. <\/i>He received the Mayor\u2019s Artist Award for Literary Arts at the Utah Arts Festival and the Writers Advocate Award from Writers at Work. He teaches at Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s Upper School in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                        READ LOCAL First is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. Today, 15 Bytes features poet Joel Long who provides two recently completed (and unpublished) poems below. Sunday Blog Read continues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1566,"featured_media":24522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,35,2513],"tags":[1007,1807,1809,1808],"class_list":["post-24521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bytes","category-literary-arts","category-read-local-first","tag-joel-long","tag-lessons-in-disappearance","tag-rowland-hall-st-marks","tag-white-pine-press-poetry-award"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Joel-Long.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-23 15:56:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24521"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41625,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24521\/revisions\/41625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}