ALL AT NOTHING BY DC DEMARSE

One time I asked Dan how many full length books he'd written and he told me around fifteen. He seems to put out twenty or thirty new pages of writing every week, and he's been doing this pretty consistently for years now. I find DeMarse inspiring because it doesn't seem like anything could ever stop him from writing and doing creative things. I respect him because it's obvious that writing is something he needs to do, and need is everything that matters. I like him because he's a relentless weirdo, and because I feel that he pours all of his guts into whatever he's currently working on. His writing is frequently very abstract, but there's a deep feeling there that always comes through for me.

I chose to review All At Nothing because it's my favorite DeMarse book that I've read so far, but really this is a recommendation to check out everything DeMarse has written.

Download All At Nothing for free HERE.

FRIEND HIM ON FACEBOOK to catch his most recent work.

Buy his book Furthest Agent HERE.

Watch this video of him dancing in a parking lot:

If I could be God, I would replace all movies and tv channels with neverending loops of DC DeMarse videos. 

All At Nothing is 174 pages of prose. If you enjoy reading experimental writers like Sean Kilpatrick, Vanessa Place, Darby Larson, Dodie Bellamy, M Kitchell, or Blake Butler, then you will probably like DC DeMarse. These are some excerpts from All At Nothing:

***

The large and passive body of a cloud looses a rainy current like blood through the deep wound. The current muddies the tulips, and saturates the dry bark of the oaks with water. Much taller than the oaks are the buildings, and the buildings are dusty with exhaust. The rain sloshes heavy and thick across the streets, and sidewalks rose from the streets and they lay flat and bloated like sponges. The one cloud would still cover the town and surrounding valley, even after the shower had stopped; and he was under the cloud that made everything grey, so the building lay there in grey pallor.

***

once we detach from the need to perfectly explain, we lose a layer of self-consciousness, and the world around us becomes not so needful, and the perfection comes and goes throughout, us never knowing, perhaps the observer knowing. and we sully the joke of life, once we are aware, once we observe ourselves, and find something so serious in our forgetting to forget.

***

We fell together into a cloud of roses, our feet wrapped, our tongues wrapped, kissing together, a hot breath or two. A coo, a pinkest of sighs from the girl, as your pale white neck stretches, inviting me to kiss you there, too, and your limpid eyes roll backwards, blue, blue and wide.

***

I have felt something of chaos in the wind. But if I knew once if at all what possessed air to move I do not know now. This is an airless place. Compressed, damp. What I thought I understood is understood and yet it is so much blankness against more pale void. And yet nature is no poverty it is I who lack the words. If there were such a thing as life I would only too easily ascribe meaning to the air I breathe.

Wind changes direction though and so then I do not have much to say besides that I would rather be or you know exist in a vacuum if only for the sake of perspective. If only for the sake of knowing that I need air to move and change and need to feel this motion and its everaltering velocities.

To be hermetically sealed is to be safe indeed however I am become more obsessed in the chaos as of late and like to express such things in a mannered way so that I may at least see this contrast in airless language, if I cannot be robbed of wind.

***

There are many different things that language can do and one thing I like for language to do is fuck me up. When you smoke weed, you think of things you never thought before. That also happens to me when I read DeMarse's writing out loud to myself. He fits words into arrangements that I haven't seen before.

I'm definitely not the first person to make this comparison, but reading experimental literature can be like taking drugs. Sometimes you take drugs because you want to get fucked up and change how you look at everything. You want to get at the edge of things. Taking drugs is a risk--you might have a good time or a bad time. You might take acid and come back with something very wise and insightful, or you might just drool and see a lot of colors you've never seen before. Reading experimental literature is better than doing drugs. Instead of doing acid, try reading something by DC DeMarse for an hour or two, that is my advice to you today.

This is something that Rimbaud said:

"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences."

I think that describes DeMarse's work pretty well. His writing is extremely dense and it frequently doesn't 'make sense' in a conventional way. But I keep coming back to DeMarse's writing and drawing inspiration from it because I can feel so much emotion and energy in it. There are intense moments of pain and joy and revelation that come through many of his lines. 

Eileen Myles said that 'The material of poems is energy itself, not even language,' and DeMarse is bursting with energy. For me, he's easily as good as Sean Kilpatrick or M Kitchell or any number of contemporary experimental poets that are working today, and I recommend checking out some of DeMarse's writing as soon as possible.