The Elvis Machine – Memphis Flyer

Book cover art and design by Joel Amat Güell

The Elvis Machine

After a long incubation and a series of canceled and postponed pre-publication readings and panel talks (put on hold thanks to the coronavirus pandemic), Memphis poet Kim Vodicka’s The Elvis Machine (CLASH Books) is set to be released Tuesday, July 7th.

“All of Memphis is a Heartbreak Hotel,” Vodicka says to describe The Elvis Machine, which she started writing shortly after moving to Memphis from Louisiana in 2016. The collection, with its focus on the men, music, and mythology of Memphis, sparkles with the perspective of a transplant. Memphis is Vodicka’s adoptive home, and she embraces it — but she throws her heart-shaped rose-colored glasses over her shoulder first. Vodicka pulls no punches when she writes, “It’s so easy to be a groupie in this town, so hard to be a wife.”

Vodicka, author of 2018’s Psychic Privates, says that The Elvis Machine is more dangerous. “It’s a lot scarier,” Vodicka says of her new collection. “It’s a lot darker.” Her words ring true, as throughout the collection, Vodicka rages and repossesses the language of the patriarchy — or, more often, laughs gleefully as she recounts illicit encounters and risqué rendezvous.

“Because The One makes Kodak moments,” she writes. “Because rarely do us bitches make his story.” Vodicka’s seemingly casual use of patriarchist language makes clear that, in a world defined by the colonization of the male gaze, for a woman, self-love is by necessity an act of creation and destruction.

Kim McCarthy

Kim Vodicka

The through line, though, is the poet’s undeniable sense of humor. Vodicka bleeds on the page, but her bloodstained hieroglyphics spell out a dirty joke. She has an endless supply of memorable one liners, which she lobs at prudes and the endless parade of self-obsessed rocker guys. The Elvis Machine is like Dan Penn’s “Dark End of the Street” — but from the woman’s perspective. It’s an orgiastic exultation and an excoriation of mansplaining rock-and-roll heartthrob wannabes.

“This is the eternal return of the 1950s,” Vodicka writes in “Boy Boycott,” bemoaning a romantic partner whose … stamina leaves something to be desired. “Where insanity is going to the same sock hop, testing the same A-bomb, over and over again, and expecting something better than this.” Vodicka — or the personas she inhabits — breaks down barriers between socially acceptable feminine behavior. If she contradicts herself, it is to be expected; she contains multitudes. She’s a seductress, a valley girl, a witch, a so-called “tough woman,” a sexpot, a pop culture aficionado, and a keen observer of humanity and history. “This man is your man. This man is my man. This man was made for you. But, like, mostly just me.”

[pullquote-1]

“Babylon Fantasy” is one of the most open poems in the collection. Though the author doesn’t abandon poetic license or her beguiling knack for wordplay, she speaks more plainly, the rapid-fire machine gun ratta tatta of rhyme and pun slowing enough to let Vodicka’s word bombs find a direct route to the reader’s heart. There are echoes of both ancient sacred prostitution cults and of J. Robert Oppenheimer when the poet writes, “Now I am become the county whore, destroyer of monogamy and all sanctity.”

The Elvis Machine is also available as a spoken-word EP with musical accompaniment by Memphis multi-instrumentalist Jack Alberson. The EP is available via Bandcamp, and it may serve fans as a substitute for Vodicka’s high-energy poetry tours, unfortunately placed on hold while the country struggles to combat the coronavirus.

Kim Vodicka’s The Elvis Machine is to poetry collections what Tav Falco’s psychogeography of the Bluff City, Mondo Memphis, is to town histories. The Elvis Machine spits on pretensions and politeness as Vodicka revels in her humanity. She rages, rhymes, lusts, loves, mourns, and cackles like a mad scientist drunk on wordplay. Welcome to the machine; may your freak flag fly ever high.

The Elvis Machine is available via CLASH Books. The Elvis Machine EP is available at Bandcamp. Kim Vodicka can be found at kimvodicka.com.

Kim Vodicka is a poet with a penchant for the provocative, but even she won’t risk tangling with the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Though she was gearing up for a busy spring to promote her new poetry collection, The Elvis Machine (Clash Books), Vodicka read the signs correctly and changed her plans.

Vodicka, author of 2018’s Psychic Privates, was one of the first of a slew of Memphis writers, artists, and musicians to change travel and promotion plans when she canceled a stop at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in San Antonio, Texas. The conference was held on March 4th-7th, and though some events were canceled, it went ahead as planned — just before concern over the coronavirus meant a slew of cancelations, closures, and postponements across the country.

Kim McCarthy

Kim Vodicka

“I was aware of news about the virus even though it really hadn’t hit most of North America yet,” she says. “But by no means did I understand the gravity of it. The Monday before we were supposed to leave, AWP had an emergency meeting about plans.” Vodicka says the announcement of an emergency meeting kicked off “an entire day’s worth of tremendous confusion.”

“At that point, to my surprise, a lot of people were saying to go ahead and go but just take precautions,” Vodicka says. “It wasn’t sitting well with me so I decided not to go.”

The next week, coronavirus got very real for people, as schools began closing or extending their spring breaks, and businesses were forced to adapt in real-time.

“I was scheduled to go to the New Orleans Poetry Festival to be on a panel,” Vodicka says, adding that she had been looking forward to participating in the panel discussion about witchcraft in poetry. Vodicka says that while she does not practice traditional magic per se, the act of creation and all art-making have roots in magic. She is also scheduled to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which has been postponed in light of the global pandemic.

“Fortunately I had not planned a full-on tour,” the writer muses. “I do have some events scheduled for May and June that have not been canceled yet, but we shall see.”

Vodicka’s tours are part poetry reading and part performance art, where she is often accompanied by a musician live-composing music to her readings. For a poetry reading, they are never short on spectacle — exactly what one would expect from a poet who sums up her work by saying, “The lines are zingers, and truth bombs are atomic.”

Book cover art and design by Joel Amat Güell

The Elvis Machine

“All of Memphis is a Heartbreak Hotel,” Vodicka says to describe The Elvis Machine, which she started writing shortly after moving to Memphis from Louisiana in 2016. She finished the collection in 2018, and it was submitted for publication in 2019.

“The official release date is July 7th, but the preorders ship in May,” Vodicka says, adding that pre-publication events, especially in the small press world, are of vital importance for a book’s success. Still, even though The Elvis Machine has been four years in the making and Vodicka is working to adapt to a coronavirus-shaped wrench in the works, she isn’t exactly checking into the Heartbreak Hotel over delays caused by pandemic panic. “I haven’t been moping about this or trying to make this all about me because I’m more concerned about humanity and society crumbling.” She promises that, though the collection promises not to skirt past the dirty or grisly aspects of relationships, “no names are named.”

Kim Vodicka’s new collection The Elvis Machine is scheduled to be released via Clash Books on July 7, 2020, and readers can preorder copies at this link. Stay up to date with Vodicka at kimvodicka.com.