Cleaning My Attic

Dining

2011-05-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

Will I pay the check, I wonder
while you’re in the restroom or somewhere
risen to leave me to ponder
if I will pay the check.

Scatterings on this white-clothed table
and a squirt left of wine in each glass;
butter but no bread, the waiter
admiring his nails.

I will pay, I say to myself
but I will still owe someone somewhere;
for I have dined and not paid
a hundred or more times,

and my kindness to you
is no more than the dregs of the wine.

After reading Robert Creeley, "For Love in the Selected Poems: "Can I eat/what you give me. I/have not earned it. Must/I think of everything//as earned...."

...dedicated to the many I still owe dinner to.

Postcard

2011-05-19T20:38:00.000-05:00

This postcard is about the paragraph of gulls
over the seiner, especially its topic-sentence gull
trailing all the rest by the approximate length
of a second and invisible paragraph.

He is an argument perhaps for slowing down
or for returning to the pier or shoal.

At my feet lies a single days-dead gull
gutted no doubt by his own kind
or so I surmise from the ideographs of gull-
footprints pressed around his form;

or if not a non-alphabetic script
then choreography for this dance of death;

one foot it almost seems to have been,
a one-legged angry gull
repeating tarentellasmically the same
three-tined jot beginning where it ended:

such is passion at least in sand
until wind and rain remove it.

And now I have so filled my postcard
no room is left for the address
but who is where specifically
when your courier is the wind?

*

Different from the last poem -- more like what I really should be writing, perhaps: seeking a lyric tension, balancing with more risk between meaning and form.

After reading varied poets -- Billy Collins, who is good and fun when he isn't just imitating himself; Joshua Corey, a new book called Severance Songs that I am enjoying -- abstract verse to Collins' representational; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a Brit critic/poet who committed suicide in 1975 -- she was young, but very sharp; the poems are playful, often responding to Wittgenstein; they are a balance between abstract and representational, in a different way. Also, an interesting little find at Half Price Books -- Pierre Seghers, Piranesi -- semi-abstract lyrics inspired by the semi-abstract etchings of the artist.

So -- what I feel as a problem to solve: how to be clear (an urgency I feel in poetry), but also make it new (for myself, anyway); how to find the balance between the physicality of language and the security of making sense?

The gulls, though -- they came out of a very old notebook I pulled from the closet recently; notes and drafts from twenty or so years ago, most of it flailing about, abandoned. One of the poems in Mad Flights is a letter of sorts to Paul Bowen, a sculptor I knew in Provincetown. Yukiko (my wife) had sold some of his work in Japan in the early nineties; she arranged a lucrative commission for him, and asked me to write a poem in collaboration. Paul's work is native to the Cape Cod beaches; my gull was some of the discarded matter from the poem I wrote, tryign to capture the same smells and textures of Paul's work.

So in this new poem -- cannibalizing failed efforts from my earlier self, you could say (with a little animal cannibalism in the poem); combined with my own memories of Provincetown, long walks alone on the dunes and beaches -- a postcard, meant perhaps for that earlier self, who is truly in the wind.

Walls

2011-05-14T12:10:00.000-05:00

While I was writing on the wall some angry words
at whoever was in charge of things

someone I didn’t know but might have been related to
was writing angry words across the street

about the other guys – across the aisle,
“the opposition,” as if the guys in charge

weren’t equally to blame, no matter
which side of the aisle they claim.

We noticed each other across the street,
looking to see who was looking at us;

but it was only us, the street was still,
and we were angry only because we had

time to kill. I could have finished his line,
and he mine, and the intent would have been

the same – one wall for those coming
and the other for those going

to or from their work. I thought my opposite
something of a jerk for dirtying up

a perfectly good wall, whereas my words
were my wall’s reason for being.

As of now, however, it’s no longer standing.

Half-cocked rhymes, echoes of Ogden Nash -- a much-neglected Modernist poet -- and of course a simplistic, wise-ass political allegory. But the real trigger of this poem was simply the name of Robert Walser, about whose works I have been reading (as opposed to reading his works, which I will do as soon as the Amazon order arrives).

Being Alone

2011-05-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

No such thing as being alone; everyone
always has his own company and the voices
get incredibly loud the lonelier one is.

Loneliness depends on scene:
walking the edge of the pond I see myself
on the other side, a slightly younger fellow,
someone I wouldn’t mind having a talk with
if circumstance were as round as its name.
But my younger self is always slightly less
or more ironic than I am now, a falter
or veer, and so we are like hockey pucks
just missing each other: no ice, no players,
no spectators – just pucks and a swoosh.

In the library decades ago I slept
with a worn copy of Whitman in my lap
while outside the window a fern tapped the glass.
I slept into the Scotchgard of the couch-cushion
dreaming in parallelisms and beautiful
bird’s-eye views. Whitman was my own
TV movie, America a judgment on our loneliness
and yet we walked together and the fern
was our promising child. Tap tap tap
and the fern was heavy with rain drops.
Even the couch had a personality
for the first few seconds after I woke.
I remember its rasp on my skin;
I cherish its sameness from dream to waking
through all the cycles of aging to now.

Reading Bob Hicok's "How Origami Was Invented" (in Animal Soul, 2001), I noted a few lines in the poem on being alone; putting the book down, I doodled a bit on a poem of my own, and wound up with the above specimen.

The few acres outside, with its horses, trees, pond, cattle egrets (they come and stay from eight in the morning until four or five, then return, I guess, to their rookery at the lake about a half-mile away), frequently presents itself as a matrix for my poems, however abstractly they may start out. So it does here, for one stanza.

No idea where the hockey pucks came from.

Then, a memory; of the sort that has no apparent value as a seminal experience: more representative, and chosen by the mind to serve as an emblem for a categorical experience. As a student at Sarah Lawrence, I used to spend a lot of time in one of the several nooks the library provided (it was a great place to sequester oneself, like most libraries), and one such nook was in a small room with light from a window that looked onto a sort of Japanese garden -- some plants, but mainly rocks and pebbles, although I have probably redesigned it in memory. I sat with Walt Whitman in my hands -- maybe it was the first serious effort to read Whitman, I don't know -- and was caught up in the grand Americana of the poetry; then lulled to sleep by the afternoon quiet and the slight rain against the window, waking with book in hand and a dream just exiting the room of my mind, a fugitive figure, doppelganger, or the Poet himself.

For mood and to some extent the rhythm, I had in the back of my mind D. H. Lawrence's "Piano" -- a magnificent small poem, with a strongly captivating cadence, I have always felt. Also, it's unashamedly sentimental, nostalgic -- my weaknesses.

Some poems are touchstones, even when they're not great poems, but somehow connect. you'll carry them around, and they measure out a range of possibilities for poems not yet born. So, in the above exercise: a good poem, part of the current poetic discourse, the colloquial voice of now, though by a celebrated poet, initiating my own urge to write -- the trigger poem; then going out toward a familiar landmark -- the touchstone poem; and defining (awkwardly, perhaps unsuccessfully) my own space between them.

Keep trying! --

Last Will

2011-05-01T01:02:00.000-05:00

Granny, you had a great big house for decades,
then an apartment for a few years, a single room
at the home for a couple of months, now a coffin
indefinitely: smallest residence, longest lease.
You died of cancer but I blame the mortician
who wants to kill us all with inch-thick make-up.
Funerals are crap, burial is a waste of real estate.
When I come to this somebody burn me but
make sure I’m dead before you sell my books.
Put my last drafts in a random volume
then give my library away to anyone who knows
what a book is. I moved about all my life
but I lived well in books; so scatter them as my true
and long-lived if not entirely eternal form.

I was reading Stuart Dischell's poetry today, off and on while grading; but there's more of Alan Dugan in the above, at least from line five on. I can't possibly attain as stoical/skeptical/jaded or Brooklynesque a voice as Dugan, but I can try.

This poem hijacks a memory of my grandmother's funeral many years ago (well, one of my grannies -- I had three). I was remembering how disturbing her visage was, there in the casket; as if she had been hijacked.

But if the poem is elegiac, it's noting the loss of books, not grandmothers; a premature mourning, sure, but one worth worrying about in our digital age (he said, on his digital blog site).

Lying

2011-04-28T10:23:00.000-05:00

My lying winds like a river from one side to the other,
a force of nature meant to overflow, then taper back,
dry up, leave a trace; return in slightly different form.

My lying is to my soul as my smile to my face.
Falsehoods like small fires can be seen for many miles;
signs of presence, warm but dangerous, dying out.

My lying has tip-toed, shuffled, stomped
me through life; that lie was a sprint and lunge
around the corner, this one a dive and cower.

My lying leaves scars; it counts my digits
and comes up short or over. My lying isn’t clever
but gets me by when no one cares.

Your lying is night and the cracked ground
past the dead end. Your lies are vermin in the house;
mine are the house burned down.

I was browsing a book last weekend called Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, ed. Robert Crawford (OUP 2006). Some interesting essays, which I will ponder in the near future; also, a poem by Paul Muldoon which you can find here, with some discussion of the project that spawned the poem.

Muldoon writes long difficult poems, as well as short difficult poems; he also writes short delightful poems now and then that are fairly transparent, as this one is (meaning: its surface offers a definite reward, whatever underling complexities it might hold).

I look for concepts that feel as if they already hold the poem I want to write inside them -- as Michelangelo felt the stone already held the sculpture he wanted to carve? -- don't know; it's partly a form of laziness, partly a necessary superstition -- something that tricks me into writing. This Muldoon poem sparked in me the healthy feeling of poem-envy (gee, I wish I'd written that!), but the nice thing about a concept-poem is that you can write it -- steal the concept and off you go. All that's needed is to back up a certain distance from the immediate circumstances of the model. Here, it's more about MRI (as a synecdoche for "science") as a prompt and poetic figure, which, though I find it interesting, was less inviting than the broader motif of lying/truth-telling itself.

As with "Waiting," then, it is a phenomenological exploration -- and again, much more could be written as to the natural history, the anthropological details of lying than I have included, by far (the Wikipedia page on Lying, by the way, is fairly interesting). Once again, I might write more on the theme; lying, in particular, seems an essential aspect of personhood. (I recall the line near the beginning of The Great Gatsby -- "If personality is a series of successful gestures..." -- in my case, mostly unsuccessful! So many of my poems, lately, are songs of the id, perhaps because as I go through the world I am falling through the cracks, them climbing back to continue on my merry way.)

Waiting

2011-04-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

Waiting is a thing at first smaller than I am, then getting larger
the longer I wait, or perhaps I make it larger, it grows
from my growing anger and frustration, or I grow smaller
from losing control of my time which I had foolishly thought
my own, from the space of my waiting become a vastness,
end unseen, and for all I know I’m traveling backwards
through the space of my waiting, my destination nothing more
than not waiting, and that lies behind as much as before me.
In offices magazines are the windows of waiting,
mainly flipping from back to front without much reading
because they rarely have the subscriptions I want. Other people
are waiting, some from before me for God knows how long
because waiting drags us to the bottom of ourselves
within minutes and we are as drowned in it from thirty minutes
of waiting as much as from an hour of waiting, and anything longer
is not waiting in my book, but simple abandonment. Some people
come after and start their waiting on top of my own, I am sandwiched
between the elder and younger waiters and am struck by the fact
that I have no knowledge or wisdom to pass on except how long
I have been waiting, which is nothing more than the numbness
of numbers. Some people wait with children who are the demons
of waiting, or who are in my more generous mind bedeviled
by waiting on adults who wait and who often know no more
than their children exactly why they wait, but are more beaten down
by the concept and the rules of waiting, to wit: that one waits one’s turn
(such mindless equality, and yet I suspect there are people
who never wait at all nor use the same door, just as there are people
who never go to jail or pay their taxes); that one has the right
to complain after a certain amount of waiting but that
complaining does absolutely no one any good at all
and might even make one wait longer; that one should be resolute
about not waiting forever, but should instead leave
after a certain number of hours to preserve a modicum
of dignity and sanity no matter what one is waiting for;
that one cannot say when one is finally called: “My turn?
Really? Well! Now you’ll have to wait a bit for me, I’m afraid!”
as it would not be the least bit funny; that our waiting is compounded,
not shared; and that a room full of people waiting is a room
full of something short of despair, but that all the same
we wait in this world as we leave it, each of us entirely alone.

Poetry as phenomenological investigation; or, wringing what you can from the common experiences -- except that I tend to get distracted by the sound of the language, as do many poets, which subverts the phenomenology, I suppose...

This draft has a certain arc to it, suggests a particular archetypal scene of "waiting" (mainly, of course, a doctor's office), but as I wrote, I felt the possibilities of so many other forms of waiting: waiting for a bus, a particularly nightmarish form of waiting for anyone who has lived in a city like Houston and not had a car for any period of time; waiting on hold on the phone -- although that's much easier, now, with Speaker Mode; waiting in a clothing store for your partner to finish shopping; waiting for your meal in a busy and extremely obnoxiously trendy restaurant; many many more -- what would you add to the list? Maybe I'll do a series of "waiting" poems.

As for form: a much longer line, increasing the challenge of maintaining linear integrity (some sense of a regular beat, some sort of symmetry built around some sort of caesura or at least a strong forward thrust, helped along by a high frequency of enjambed lines), very long sentences over those long lines, all toward recreating the psychology of waiting, I suppose; and as always with me of late, a fugal pulse -- "wait" or "waiting" repeated thirty times in a forty-line poem, across all but twelve of those lines; creating, I hope, a kind of reverb, an aural environment that vibrates backwards and forwards in the poem -- because a poem, by definition, is a text that backscatters as it evolves -- like Antarctic ice, or Saharan dunes.

Meanwhile, I have this book on my To-Read list, but am waiting for the price to go down a little bit; but the Google Books preview is certainly a delight: On Waiting (Thinking in Action)

Toothache

2011-04-14T12:39:00.005-05:00

My tooth, as if I had just one, this one that hurts,
speaks to me, as do all addictions: Come to me, stay away,
return! it says; and I, a fervent listener, obey.

Closing my eyes to ease the pain, to study it and get inside,
I see it risen like a tomb or monument
without inscription, heavy on its mound,
backlit by steely bulbs
throwing shadows as from angry searchlights.

Soft-maker of my food,
masher, grain-grinder, jewel of my jaw
on fire now and I am melting –

your heart is one electric nerve
and you have lost your crown; your pain is eloquence,

though of one word only; I sit inside you,
you are all I am, my enameled brain
with its solo thought: here, here, here
that stabs and throbs –

pain, our most private possession,
making seconds into years.

What if all the air were nitrous oxide?
Each day we’d fall in love with nurses, every one
with Ethiopian or Irish lilts, and stardust
sparkling through their mascara.

Who knew God was a bald, ham-fingered tooth-farmer
with nose hairs thick as trees?

Mean molar, when you’re pulled,
I’ll bury you in a jar of gobstoppers
and they will eat you always.

*

Ah, Poetry Month! I have let you down. Too many essays to grade and students to console & shepherd through the spring semester, so I'll be fortunate to write one or two poems this season, in sad contrast to my 30 or so efforts of last year -- mediocre, mostly, but bravely posted, day by day through April.

It's already the Ides of Poetry Month, 2011, but here we go -- "Toothache," inspired by my chipped molar, now behaving nicely, thank you, through serious conversation between us, and so I will continue to evade the horrors of dentistry, as I have assiduously for many years. Why? Not from fear of the drill, but rather as an extension of my claustrophobia: being caught in that chair, unable to move for half an hour or more! Horrible, horrible. I have been known to shriek from panic when bound in dentist's chairs, so I try to eat well (I abhor sweets, in any case -- tarts -- little hussies!), I have a rotating, vibrating toothbrush, and I am a wizard with my Waterpik.

As for other inspirations, points of craft, etc: as always with me, an exercise in reiterations, echoes, nonce rhymes, fugal rhythms and all-around rhetorical self-consciousness. Also, hyperbolic, ecstatic address, peripheral faux-philosophical nods, and one or two beautiful women. (Once, when I had to endure the horror of an MRI exam -- I went in unaware of what tortures they intended to inflict on me -- it was the steady IV of Lithium, the panic bulb, and most of all, the attending Irish nurse that got me through the ordeal, So, I have paired her with an Ethiopian colleague near the end of the poem).

Poems can be meditations, addresses, invocations, exorcisms, curses (the Irish tradition holds the best examples of the latter), prayers, memorials -- I read Erasmus' De Copia and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, etc., for inspiration, even if it is misprisioned. Maybe I pull too far away from the plain style, but at least I'm having fun.

Brick

2011-03-23T15:45:00.000-05:00

Doorstop, tarp-weight, scorpion-killer,
half-brick of my heart – feed me visions
of violated glass and tied-on hateful notes.
How is it, faux stone, you have shed
but a few red specks? In one year
you moved millimeters on your own.
Heft of conscience, leftover masonry:
you are expendable but refuse to go.

*

Does anyone with a house NOT have a loose brick or cinder block lying about on the porch or in the yard or garage?

Anyway -- an exercise in focusing intently on the trivial. Anything can be an object for lyrical meditation. Cheap emblems: people I barely knew, events I was on the periphery of, that sit on the grand, wrap-around porch of my mind like bricks and half-bricks, decorations, coasters, unread paperbacks, fly strips, dirty ash trays, gas cans, broken curtain rods, etc. Possibly I am a stray brown leaf, a bit of lint or less, on thousands of memory-porches, myself. Also a broken chaise longue, a rarely-used exercise machine ("As Seen on TV"), an antique wagon wheel, or a genuine Navajo dream catcher with maybe one feather left intact: something once of value or at least utility, long ago, in numerous peoples' lives.

Whereas I am a mad collector, and tend to everything and everyone as carefully as I can, and my memory-porch is a sad though impressive museum with no theme at all (except lost love).

Dirt

2011-03-19T01:46:00.000-05:00

As a lad I rebelled against my mother’s torturous
ear-digging and washcloth abrasions, soap-blinding
and upbraiding me for not doing it better myself;
back in those days when grandma’s beads
darkly pearled my neck lines, and the grass
stained straight through my blue jeans
into the knobs of my knees, and cuts and scrapes
were debrided painfully by my mother’s hands
that one summer evening delicately plucked,
head and all, a tick from my five-year-old prick.
As a father myself, years later, without thinking a whit
I wiped snot from my son’s button nose
and flung it deep into the sands of the sandbox.
My wife, his mother, was known if he had a cold
even to suck at his nostrils when he was an infant
and spit the slime away. But mothers are mothers
and giving birth is not for the squeamish. That
nose-sucking custom, I should say, is something
they do in Japan, where my wife’s from,
and maybe in other far-off lands, but we do such things
with our own and not someone else’s little brats.
On the playground I watched their snot ball up
and string out as they played with their plastic trucks,
and their mothers chattered on as I grew annoyed
at the neglect, but the strings just dropped into the sand
and made tiny clumps not unlike brown-sugary nubs.

When I was depressed, I was a lackluster bather. I flossed,
I brushed with vigor, I wiped my ass until the tissues
came away clean, but in the shower I’d make a few
haphazard passes then pronounce myself done. My skin
was a screen for rotating horrors: rashes, permanent grit,
scabs and scab-shadows, blemishes, pits, scars, boils,
tar-flecks as if I’d swum in the Gulf, flea bites
from sleeping with dogs who also hated to bathe,
ant bites wet from rapid-fire scratching,
moles, flowering bruises, whole constellations of stains
and ugly wounds. Who needs to needle tattoos?
Stop bathing and grow your own. Dirt was my aura,
all my society as such; I confess I was insane.

Ok, I exaggerate a bit in the second stanza: I was feeling Rabelaisian, just for a moment.

Although it's been years since I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the novel passed through my mind the other day. I remembered how Esther Greenwood stopped bathing as she descended into her madness. When I was seriously depressed, repetitive chores seemed existentially dreary -- more than usual, I mean. Why bathe, change your clothes? -- you'll just have to bathe or change all over again in 24 hours, again and again and again. The healthy mind knows how to float above such small concerns; the ailing mind is trapped in them.

Donald Barthelme's Reading List ca. 1984

2011-03-10T00:13:00.000-06:00

I'm a pack rat; lately, I've become a digital pack rat. That is, I'm taking every scrap of paper I've saved over the years and scanning it. (It's something to do between grading stacks of student essays.) Here is one of the more pleasant finds from my roach-eaten old banker boxes: the reading list Donald Barthelme gave to his writing students back in the early eighties. The original is even more wonderful -- it's a mimeograph handout! (I used to love that smell).

So, the list is obviously dated -- everything's thirty years old or more. But it gives a sense of Barthelme's tastes (no big surprises for anyone who knows his work) and what he expected of his writing students. You can see works by colleagues and friends, too - but I expect he genuinely admired their works listed here. DB was a great teacher, a man of integrity, and someone who expected rigor of thought. This list was an invitation; what might he have added to it, had he lived into the current moment?

*

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER...

AT SWIM TWO-BIRDS, Flann O'Brien

THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Flann O'Brien

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, Isaac Babel

LABYRINTHS, Borges

OTHER INQUISITIONS, Borges

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Garcia Marquez

CORRECTION, Thomas Bernhard

NOG, Rudy Wurlitzer

GIMPEL THE FOOL, I. B. Singer

THE ASSISTANT, Bernard Malamud

THE MAGIC BARREL, Bernard Malamud

INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison

UNDER The VOLCANO, Malcolm Lowry

BECKETT ENTIRE

HUNGER, Knut Hamsun

I’M NOT STILLER, Max Frisch

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE, Max Frisch

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES, Isak Dinesen

GOGOL'S WIFE, Tommaso Landolfi

V, Thomas Pynchon

THE LIME TWIG, John Hawkes

BLOOD ORANGES, John Hawkes

LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, Grace Paley

ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, Grace Paley

I, ETC, Susan Sontag

TELL ME A RIDDLE, Tillie Olsen

FALLING IN PLACE, Ann Beattie

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, William Gass

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE, William Gass

THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORD, William Gass

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, Norman Mailer

CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Anthony Burgess

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT, Celine

THE BOX MAN Kobo Abe

INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvino

A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, Peter Handke

KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS, Peter Handke

NADJA, Andre Breton

CHIMERA, John Barth

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, John Barth

THE MOVIEGOER, Walker Percy

BLACK TICKETS, Jayne Anne Phillips

COLLECTED STORIES, Peter Taylor

THE PURE AND THE IMPURE, Colette

WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET PLEASE, Raymond Carver

COLLECTED STORIES, John Cheever

I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM IF I COULD, Leonard Michaels

COLLECTED STORIES, Eudora Welty

THE 0RANGING OF AMERICA, Max Apple

COLLECTED STORIES, Flannery O'Connor

MUMBO JUMBO, Ishmael Reed

SONG OF SOLOMON, Toni Morrison

THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ, Carlos Fuentes

BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, Milan Kundera

THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Wayne C. Booth

HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell

HENDERSON THE RAIN KING, Saul Bellow

THE COUP, John Updike

RABBIT RUN, John Updike

PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS

HOW WE LIVE, edited by Rust Hills

SUPERFICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy

PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGIES

THE WRITER ON HER WORK, edited by Janet Sternburg

MANIFESTOS OF SURREALISM. Andre Breton

DOCUMENTS OF MODERN ART, series edited by Robert Motherwell

AGAINST INTERPRETATION, Susan Sontag

A HOMEMADE WORLD, Hugh Kenner

FLAUBERT, Letters

SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, David Mamet

THE CHANGELING, Joy Williams

THE NEW FICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy

GOING AFTER CACC1AT0, Tim O'Brien

THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD, Amos Tutuola

SEARCHING FOR CALEB, Ann Tyler

THANK YOU, Kenneth Koch

COLLECTED POEMS, Frank O'Hara

RIVERS AND MOUTAINS, John Ashbery

TRAGIC MAGIC, Wesley Brown

MYTHOLOGIES, Roland Barthes

THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, Roland Barthes

FOR A NEW NOVEL, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Bookstore Days

2011-02-21T00:03:00.002-06:00

David Bowie came in once to buy The Origins of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I’d read it and was cool
at the register, declining to make small talk with the rock star.
He had a girl on each arm and they were a walking ménage a trois
in my healthy which is to say my sick young mind. Nervous-looking –
druggy paranoia maybe, or worried they’d be noticed or not.

Susan Sontag browsed and bought nothing, having read everything
already, I imagined. Two young men accompanied her,
photogenic bookends clinging to her every silent word.

Fred Gwynne came on a busy Saturday night, Sunday Times
night, ink stains everywhere in a frenzy of slapping together
and doling it out for a dollar – Oh how long ago it was.
Dear Herman Munster with a redhead on each arm,
decidedly unmonstrous ladies wrapped in murderous fur
for the trio had had a night on Broadway I am sure.

To the age of 25 or so, bookstore clerking was my main skill. The SLC campus bookstore, New Morning Bookstore in Soho (setting for the poem above), a midtown-Manhattan Barnes & Noble, the Brazos Bookstore and the River Oaks Bookstore in Houston, and Printer's Ink in Palo Alto (the Stegner fellowship I had didn't pay enough, so I taught ESL and clerked to make ends meet).

Spring St. between West Broadway & Thompson, NYC
ca. 1979

But New Morning was the best: a literary and all-around arts nexus, crazy customers, the occasional celeb, eclectic selection, and a wonderful bunch of folks on staff: Ron Kolm, Thomas McGonigle, Michael Labambardo, Chris Gresov, Ellen Cavolina, Maggie Vitagliano, Cathy Corrigan, Jeff Adams, Opal [?], Roz [?], Walt [?] -- briefly, also, Richard Edson and Adele Bertei. And who am I forgetting?

Tuli Kupferberg and Samuel Menashe were frequent visitors, holding forth for who would listen; various writers of course: Gary Indiana, Hal Sirowitz -- and the big-deal painters of the day stopped in now and then: Robert Longo, Francesco Clemente -- but no one impressed me as much as Joni Mitchell, who I swear was all in blue. Probably there were many others, but I was too ignorant to know.

I was there 1980 -- 1983, but with a couple of jaunts out West to try to work on fishing boats (got on one for a week in Oregon while staying with Vijay Seshadri, was miserable, came back tail between legs, as I have so often in life).

So, a nostalgia piece: my weakness, at this middle-aged stage of life. The structure is donnée: each notable mentioned in the poem did indeed come in with a pair of younger companions, so the poem has a sort-of do-see-do pattern..

For a little more, here's an interview with Ron:

http://www.litkicks.com/RonKolm

For Balance

2011-02-14T15:35:00.002-06:00

Two more, somewhat longer and essay-like, blog posts on the issue referred to below:

http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2011/02/rankine-at-awp-part-3-tony-hoaglands.html

http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-patronage-killed-social-activism-in.html

Change

2011-02-13T23:08:00.000-06:00

   - after the Hoagland/Rankine thread, Feb. 2011

In the Walmart parking lot
   a man walked up to me;

he seemed distraught
  and angry, and cried:

“That white man over there
  called me a nigger!”

which, although I heard
  exactly what he said,

I decoded inside my head
  as: “That white man over there

took out a knife
  and stabbed me in the heart!”

and I blurted out
  “let’s call the police!”

whereupon the man,
  the very sad man

put his hand on my shoulder
  and asked, “are you ok?”

to which I replied, “yes;
  yes, I think I’m ok.”

Then the man asked for some money
  and I gave him everything I had,

two dollars
  and some change.

*

The Hoagland poem is here. Rankine's post relating to her AWP panel presentation to the poem is here. A couple of blog posts about the matter are here and here.

Steamer Trunk

2011-02-08T20:21:00.000-06:00

Steamer Trunk

We had a steamer trunk that was a refrigerator
for old magazines and toys of our ancestors.

Someday I was to inherit the train and tin soldiery,
my sister the dolls. They stood in the trunk my mother cracked

to let us see our future in her past. The dolls and things
inhabited the steamer trunk like apartment dwellers

after an earthquake, but you opened the steamer trunk
like a reluctant fridge or a door that was one-third its house.

Only our mother had the key; she’d traveled once by ship
though it seemed the steamer trunk was a mode of travel

by itself: houseboat, space portal, even submarine –
conceived before they knew what one should look like.

When I wasn’t looking it was gone, the steamer trunk;
the toys and other things escaped as well. What test

did we fail to lose our inheritance? I forget whole years,
and even people and places, so of course

I might have had the toys and lost them.
But the trunk’s compartments are still here:

the must, the brown shadows, the rust of metal joints
and faded flowers of the lining: open the door,

smell the salt-sea air, wave to passing voyagers.
O fluttering, birds of eyelashes! Sleep; arrive.

*

Another of several nostalgia odes (as opposed to elegies). Things that counter the increasing virtuality of our lives.

Continuing as well, my effort to discover the fugue within each poem: three or four sounds that repeat, lull, anchor the poem --

There was a steamer trunk, somewhere: but perhaps not belonging to my mother. I remember the temptation to enter it; I remember its walls and rooms, and the attic light. But beyond that, this is made up. Or it is everyone's middle-class, early-twentieth-century childhood.

Stealing Gas

2011-02-01T14:25:00.000-06:00

Night, cars parked under the pines,
we’re sprinting the lanes with no sidewalks
along the swooshed curbs into the cul de sacs
with Big Wheels and barbeques in the yards,
looking for a left-out hose to sever a length
and siphon gas for our thirsty Chevelle.
Then by the grace of not getting caught
and the death-like sleep of the mothers and fathers,
we’ll drive onward aimlessly-ardently
past all the cul de sacs with all the girls
whose windows we throw stones at to wake
and tell come out come out we’re horny
and lonely and did we mention horny?
This teenage fuel puts us on our own small moon
but there’s always room for you, and you, and you.

Another one-sentence poem; varying between three and four beats per line. Still rather sadly revisiting the days of my youth, but I assume lads still do this sort of thing. This was about as rowdy as I ever got; and I was essentially a passenger. Still, essentially, a passenger...?

2010-10-05T12:45:00.000-05:00

Hawks or vultures, even eagles spiral above

and land here; I don’t mean to slight the other birds,

but I name the grand ones first, then the crows who alight

in twos and threes and are bigger than they seem.

Their wings become my lashes lapping the white air

and its margins, they make the moment’s punctuation

and every minute of looking is a sentence to live.

Live, I say to the birds and myself, phrase by phrase!

Each day’s a winding paragraph but as a working man

I can say that the week is my main measure:

spreading my wings I touch Sunday to Sunday,

a great bird soaring the days of the week,

hunting for what’s warm and digestible,

sampling everything that fits my beak.

Another faux-sonnet; the more important formal aspect (the generator, really, or the mirror of my mind-waves) is the linking of sounds/words. And again, the matrix of the field I live in the middle of, and its social activities -- yes, I think by now I should refer to the animal denizenry and their doings as "social." I don't much else of a social life! They star in this poem, the birds, as themselves, and as me. The poem is essentially a spreading of the wings I don't have except in a poem.

Sowing My Voice

2010-10-01T17:14:00.000-05:00

Scattering my voice everywhere, seeds for talking with new friends
I planted seeds for earlier, friends to replace the old ones long lost;
delicately watered and fed, friends in rows on vines and in brambles
with the softest spines that prick to interest, no blood, no hurt.
Talking springs up as blossoms of all sizes and hues, thoughtful, delightful,
all in one language though I have yet to learn it. The words
droop over my hand when I walk the field; some catch on my sleeve,
some sneak indoors with me in my cuffs and shoes.

I had words pressed like petals in books I would talk over with you,
friends cultivated far from here, in other worlds: words like family,
aging along with me, holding my place in lost books
that are ageless. Though the books are lost I remember
their most amazing passages; traces of every page I touched
travel upward in me like swirling snows. I close my eyes
even in summer and the snow is still falling, rising, settling;
then my eyes open and I see your faces. They are still young
and I see them vividly, hear voices, music and drunken laughter
when the light goes down into the rut the rains made;
the light goes down as if to drink the dregs of darkness,
but I stand looking a long time and the darkness prevails.

In form: fugal repetitions, concatenations of words/syllables. A central word or coloration in one phrase carries over to the next, and the whole thing is driven by a fairly even stress patten and accumulative grammar.

The field, my actual 4-acre property, that has (as mentioned before) been serving as a matrix for many poems lately. And I keep turning mournfully to the past, elegiac, or -- well, self-pitying, really. It's mainly a blues note: the sound patterns are far more interesting to me than the content, and I have been dabbling in this fugal mode so much lately, when I start into an exercise, it seems to write itself.

Bios Absconditus

2010-09-24T13:00:00.000-05:00

After the bees fled, birds followed.
People forgot how to do what the birds and the bees do.

We lost nest-knowledge, hive-knowledge; all eggs except Fabergé
and honey that wasn’t sweet talk disappeared. Ants left;

good riddance some said to the fire ants, but wherefore art thou
to the sugar kind, annoying though they were at times –

no trails of collective labor on our countertops,
no dynamic dotted lines on plaid to animate our picnics.

Someone tried to stroke her cat and cut her hand on cardboard:
a decoy, deployed how many hours since the feline went fugitive?

Dogs: taxonomic, glass-eyed, cold to all offers
of walks in the park or cheese-flavored treats.

Stables, barnyards, zoos, even the sewers where rats swam
in our filth – all fled; and the wilds,

quiet as an after-hours shopping mall. How could earth
be earth without insect, fowl, amphibian or furry four-legs?

The film had jammed in the projector; the flow of life no longer flowed.
An ark, a fleet of arks on auto-pilot had invaded;

creation was decreated, and consciousness, the human ray,
the flashlight into cosmic darkness: flailing and purposeless

without our companions. We fondled field guides, bestiaries, fables;
forgot which brutes had been real and which imagined;

mascots, manuals, and constellations, our only comfort and consolation.

*

Origins: first, I read a poem this morning by Tom Healy called "Beekeeper," in his collection What the Right Hand Knows What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009) which itself seemed to have its start in reports of the disappearance of bees (Colony Collapse Disorder). Second, I have always liked "slippery slope" poems, or poems that start with a concept and then mainly extend it toward the point of absurdity or collapse: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a classic example, but my favorite is Derek Mahon's "Matthew V. 29 - 30."

From there, I found myself working, as I have lately, with tight consonance and heavy alliteration; the inventions of imagery and idea came, at least as I observed myself writing, directly from the sound symbolism.

The title: continuing, indirectly I suppose, with my meditations on agnosticism: a play on Deus absconditus, of course.

Little Man

2010-09-19T18:44:00.000-05:00

In my wallet are several vital organs

made of plastic and paper.

My keys are worth more than my teeth

and my wedding ring weighs twenty pounds.

These contact lenses are miniature petri dishes

for an experiment gone wrong;

the cellphone is a nag, the wristwatch a spy.

The little man in me needs none of it:

he squats like an undiscovered arthropod

and bottom-feeds on my mutterings.

When he sits in the position known as Lotus

his knees point upward at forty-five degrees.

The supposed virtues are his zodiac

and when he’s naked, you’d rather not notice.

A simple sonnet, of a sort -- if you accept your sonnets with the turn at the midway point, instead of line nine or line 13.

I wrote a version of this months ago, but it was missing something -- the penultimate couplet, specifically -- until just a moment ago! So, I heretofore call it a new poem again.

One of many poems I've been doing on the subject of middle age; trying to be funny, as a way of not being pathetic, which is where the topic would tend naturally.

...and one of a few poems I've done lately that makes use of the homunculus.

Flying

2010-09-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

He flew across the room and the knick-knacks
looked like angry men and women in a landscape,
the furniture like unforgiving mesas and canyons.
It was a dream but not his: he was the detritus
in someone else’s sleep, and soon to lose his human shape.
Could we still call him the same? A dream forgets itself
and everyone you’ve loved is a chemical reaction.
My entire life is sparks and outright explosions;
but the sparks only tingle, and the explosions
never once wake me from this marvelous dream.

Chagallesque, perhaps -- in its opening; or just standard allegory. Confession, elegy, epitaph -- more and more, my way of inventing a poem is by thinking rhetorically (or by imitating; but that too, is a rhetorical device).

Also, often, the workspace is a matrix: an idealized room or field (and out here, I have my field just out the door! I've used it as a matrix for many poems over the last two years. Amazing what a difference it makes, having "nature" larger than a yard at your beck).

The room...some idealized space, in which the walls are white space for innumerable poems; and the furniture and such, props, characters, dramatic situations...

but I should open out to different interior spaces as crucibles: atria, cathedrals, long hallways, submarines...what else has promise for lyric discovery?

Liz

2010-09-06T21:46:00.000-05:00

Walking down Second Avenue, Liz and I

chanced upon a strikingly beautiful transvestite

at whom I prudently did not stare

though Liz, shamanness and anthropologist,

paused to study innocently if over-intently

and remark praisingly on the natural art and artful nature

of what we were then and there perceiving;

whereupon the brilliantly human

and over-dressed specimen of wigged postmodern

East Village goddess

revealed herself as many-colored flames of RAGE

from which appeared the fourfold arms of Shiva,

one with a cook’s knife pulled from Lord knows where

within her personhood of elaborate chiffonerie;

then charging forth on many tiny melting wheels

not towards earnest Liz but me,

as if I were Chief Instigator of the unasked-for staring/commenting;

both of us, Liz finally wakened and I,

sprinting north from the gender-squall of beauty

and many-fabricked choler, the flashing blade

clawing paperdolls of our demise from air.

From oh so many years ago now, when I lived in Manhattan; perhaps the same East Village apartment on 11th Street mentioned below. This poem had a counter-turn to it -- about a hyper-masculine fellow in Yonkers who similarly chased the two of us outside a Ho Jo's for some perceived slight -- but I haven't been able to get it right, and so have jettisoned that second stanza, so as to allow the poem to run more swiftly.

Here is Liz as I remember her, spectrally hovering outside my Slonim Woods dorm window, textbooks under her arm; juxtaposed with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the famous still from Meshes of the Afternoon:

Typewriter Ode

2010-08-29T18:53:00.000-05:00

Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired;

typing there rather ostentatiously my long poems that no one would ever read except me and, years after, the saintly Adam Zagajewski;

and interestingly, another Pole, the unknown sculptor Dariusz Lipski, whose wife, Monika Kulicka, I coveted, and who herself made strange books out of homemade paper and leaves, bark, and the dirt itself, which she tried valiantly to glue on paper and board;

and in those long poems, often given to deep digressions, I made and measured worlds; and you, cast-iron Royal, were the crucible, the forge, the many hammers, each embossed with the soul of a single letter, though you were yourself, I suspect now, illiterate and blind;

there before me, your reverse-amphitheater of symbols in packed rows, DNA of unwritten letters and novels! Strike, and the commanded soldier swings forward, self-catapulting, branding the onion skin I loved for its whispering gauze,

blank pages of ethereal fabric already suggesting a voice and aurora: scrims of my late-Romantic wandering lyric, always so wonderful before it was written, as if my mistake were in not having learned the art of writing backwards, from finished tome to the precious egg of invention;

onion skin, you were so like the many pale-faced girls I loved in college, a few microns thin but profound with possibility;

cast-iron Royal, I rubbed your black shoulders for inspiration; I scanned your exhausted ribbons for the masterworks I knew I had lost there; I thumbed your platen, thrust your carriage stage-right so many thousands of times, a slap across your faceless face! – and you kept working, and might work still, except that I gave you before leaving Manhattan to the painter Jeff Adams, who does not Google, so I can’t write him and ask for you back;

best if you lie like a wreck at the bottom of the sea, foundation and host to coral fantasies, the many polyps and skeletons forming themselves on your hull after letters in languages not yet invented.

Like "Telephone Ode" (below), a Whitmanesque effort. Composition by accumulation and rapid association, but staying close to the emblem: the object of memory explosively liberates its broad environs.

Here is the actual animal, ca. 1981; under my loft bed in an apartment on East 11th Street, East Village, which I briefly shared with the soon-to-be famous David Wojnarowicz (a third Polish name for this post). After he moved in, I came home to find the living-room couch upended; he said he needed wall space for painting. I said I needed couch space for sitting; he was amenable.

Entropy

2010-08-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

More than wear goes into things breaking;
more than mistakes, more than the roughness of earth
when machines match wits or witlessness with it.
More than poor engineering, manufacture, maintenance;
more than honest use, but less than atoms wearing out
or what’s inside them. (Nothing, too, gets tired -- tired
of being nothing, and so came everything,
and the first act was shattering, and all light is decadence.)
Machine and I meet at a fashioned edge: this is my hand,
I say, and mind; this is my design, a symphony of shapes,
abandoned to your need, it says. Machines are not slaves
and we are not masters. The doing lacks a narrative
and closure is a lie – pretty, like a satin bow or metal clasp.
Everything breaks; nothing dies. Design forsakes. Makers are unmade.

A bit serious for me, of late. Also, a bit discursive, but a philosophical poem now and then is fine. An agnostic's manifesto, perhaps with a bit of complaint belying the skepticism.

I spend a lot more time, lately, dealing with machines and tools, since we live in the country on a small bit of land. I am NOT by nature "handy," or good at fixing things, but have had to get better at it to avoid going mad or broke from hiring handymen for everything.

Agnostic? I'm more of an animist. Things are alive, they conspire against me; feel spite and sometimes pity.

The inner workings of some machines are better known to me, now: the balance, the cause-effect, the feel. But of course, "machine" is any device, including the human body, which also breaks down. And the poem; I'd like to be able to grow them, but they need making.

The Poets

2010-08-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

- Provincetown; a second-hand account

When Alan Dugan met John Logan,
a straight man and a gay-straight man,
one dead-dry and the other sickly-sweet,
the two of them drank everything
from the table and in the coolers
and stood there staggering drunk
like O’Dionysus and his cousin Paddy McSatyr
while everyone else sat staring
through the iron bars of a forced sobriety
at the two Irish-Americans
bookending an arm’s-deep shelf
of poetry good and bad between them;
and they said a great, loud poetry of curses back and forth
like the raw electricity of god against god,
incoherent, mutually cancelling,
sulfurous songs of self-love
and love for whomever you might let
under your thick, alcohol-oozing skin
one autumn night and the next morning and afternoon
of everyone else’s foul and unwarranted hangover.

*

I heard this story from Judith Shahn, Dugan's wife and Ben Shahn's daughter (all are dead now). Whatever it was she told me has of course been altered. Why write a poem if you're not going to lie a little?

This is, you'll notice, in the category of one-sentence poems (see Frost's "The Silken Tent" for another specimen -- quite different!).

Dugan escaped his alcoholism -- though fairly late in life; Logan never did, and died miserably.