Scoplaw

Poem

Tiger-lily Arms

Tiger-lily arms – luminous in the dark.
Our sleeping face, as we sleep,
is hidden from us always.
In the dark, quarter-dawn, our hands compose
ourselves with collarbone and throat,
open mouthed hollows,
the haven of desire,
between sleep and adrenaline.
In the meeting of dream and not-dream,
to the sound of breath and skin,
when one crests into
another – was and is
have no connection, no division.
The knotted past has driven us – here
where one thing turns on another,
between adrenaline and peace: her languid hair,
brushing tiger-lily arms, a strand
paused on her nipple. Sometimes it is enough
to listen to the sound of breathing, sleep,
and more than enough to kiss, and kiss,
and kiss in a fierce tangle of arms, even if desire
is distrusted, the heart wanting caution, wanting
not again to be caught. It is enough:
her languid hair cresting
from the dark, to the arc of her neck,
as though she formed herself
a haven from night, from dream,
from not-dream.
Face flickering from sleep to wake,
reveals itself, as every living thing
engages, fluidly, through itself,
every living thing,
luminous in the dark.

Poem

Inbound

Past the walls of flesh,
the choreography of sex,
past weightlessness, the breath
of the bronchial angel, ‘round
the stringy heart unbound,
which from gust to guest
begs its news along,
one throbbing thing
unrestable, its tongue in
the vale of the mute, its
singular voice muttering
its darkly iambic forgive,
forgive, forgive, as for
Give, for
Give. Listen. With tips
of fingers at your throat,
feel for the second pulse,
the Give, which you’ve
gotten wrong before.
You hear it shift
from word to word,
mistranslated as Live,
some other singular
command, and there –
it shifts, like music
fading from an afternoon,
the house empty, dead,
the piano long sold, but is
such less than
the concrete records
of words and watercolors,
that which can be stored
in attic trunks, passed down,
diminished, from the is,
the now, the moment
which is this one beat
and this one beat,
and this one. And this.

Poem

Memo Dead!

Small poem to celebrate -

The man on the far end

means nothing to me – I do not read
to know of him; the colors from his brush
could be from any other’s. His code of laws -
perhaps discarded. The habits in his vocabulary –
dated. Whatever I imagine of him limps along
on the crutch of myself. The man on the far end
means nothing to me, and my love for what he has made
is like all loves wherein one loves the fixed and dead
to avoid the living truths: those changeable
who care less than you.

Poem

I dust off my funeral shoes –
black, their thick soles soft, near
noiseless, their semi-glossy tops
dew and damp earth repellant.
Too stiff for dancing, dinner,
or just walking to the store,
they’ve slumbered in my closet
underneath the charcoal suit. The one
light enough for summer, the one
with dull buttons, like ants
on a headstone, just plain enough
to fade into everyone
if worn with the black tie.
But even more than their functional comfort,
I hate the face, the funeral face,
which I unfold from my bowties
and winter gloves. It was given me
a long time ago: the tears gone dry,
so not to invite too much sympathy,
eyes still swollen, suggesting I’m no shallow
bastard. No matter how much talc I use,
it sticks to whatever it touches,
chin and cheek bone, for it is quick
judgment to your life with the dead,
for it is called to be so by the living,
for inside it are written
the seven names never
to be mentioned casually.

Poem

Glasgow

I was in my best white shirt.
You put something on; the hissing scratch
of needle across dust settled
into something swirly and Latin.
It was a time when the burdens
of poetry and medicine were exotic.
We had eaten pears and wine;
it was the close of summer.
There was someone who had hit you,
someone I used to swim with at night,
someone who praised your beauty in three languages,
someone who crossed a room of strangers to listen to me,
someone who wouldn’t cost you anything,
someone who was in thrall to a dead lover.
It was the close of summer
and we danced in socks and stockings
across the floor of a kitchen that belonged
to neither of us.

Poem

Sometimes you're just a rag-doll in the jaws of the muse.

The Corpse Flower
(titan arum)

One does not see, first,
the immense crowning bud
above the velvety, blackened flesh
colored bloom, large enough
to engulf a man. Rather, one smells
week-old meat, something
simply gone wrong. Rather, this scent
spikes into you as this single leafed wonder
pulls the bit players of death into itself –
the flies, beetles, that which lives
on carrion; and as such is no worse
than any of the other false-promisers,
the more beautiful flowers,
their ephemeral but brightly colored
attendants; and from this
makes life, a sort of life.

Poem

A Poem to What the Body Remembers

To not-thought, the breath motion, to what has become
myself: be it sitting, my absent twitch of fingers, my cough
and sneeze, my laugh, my run – legs pumping and no need
to ask how long my stride, when and which foot planted
for the leap, to things half-learned, to things done
many times, long ago: the waltz’s glide and turn
to knitting’s rhythmic click, the wrist flicked fly-cast,
to the drone of a file on the blade of a skate, to the proper step
step step –so- before, theoretically, the killing blow,
to the now fully forgotten, the unmade: the muscles which would
fumble the blank into the lock at Laurel St.,
the purse of my lip on reed, my leg lofting across saddle,
and broader even: my body’s whole stance and shape,
its carriage through the summer of nine wine crates,
its firm-kneed lean into smooth moguls, and to the never:
to dreamed-done, to my voice whispering into her ear,
her ear shaping around it, to the grip not made –
the tips of my fingers kissed, as something I had so much wanted
missed and gone, into this world without end.

Poem

Someone belts it out badly –
and frankly, it does not matter.
Sure, let the pure musician’s ears
twitch over technique, let the poet’s
mouth purse over content, let the actor
shake his head at delivery. But it’s the burn
at the back of the throat, the bliss,
the kiss of saying
nothing, sweetly, over and over,
or singing, “I held her in these arms,”
or not even that, images abstract, without concision,
the dark rooms of wander and maunder,
or it was something crafted in unison
with another – the highest matter
of one opening into another, or
scrap all that: what I’m asking,
for myself, is to be unburdened.

Poem

Am - Was

Must one always be once-something? Once-
hater of dogs, once-racist, once-husband?
Can one be undone in this moment, having no name
but the politics of the day, no heart
but the weather, nothing but is?
Can one shed what was? Those dim moments
of whole-hearted self approval, Before,
we think, we really knew what we were doing?
The never-new flaws, hopefully,
hopefully diminished, but always
the same, as they are in-grained, as they are
with us always: a hesitation in our ankles,
a tremble in our questions: our black eyed
younger selves: the fucked-up, the fuckers,
the fucked.

Poem

3am

The fifth car draws closer, transmission
switching as it climbs the hill towards me
and passes. It is not you.
You are not coming.

Have I been sleeping?

Is that a car door squeaking open down the street?
I wait. Not you.
A foot on the pavement?
I wait. Not you.
The mistaken sounds:
the cat rustling grass under my open window,
is not you creeping with a handful of stones.
A branch’s creak is not you shifting your
instrument case across your back. Not you.
Neither the settle of the house masks your walking,
nor the cool invasive rain, just begun, overlays
any kind of the four happy sighs you might
have once made on seeing the things of mine,
of seeing where I am.

You, who I hope are not dead,
that you have chosen
to drive past, following your love
of your cold ghosts of possibility,
or even, simply, indifference.

Poetic Beliefs, Creation.

They’re difficult things to discuss, but I don’t feel like working on the new tattoo design, or doing the last last minute packing things. I can throw all my crap in a crate if need be.

Normally, it’s difficult to find a peer environment (the EPG and Ghoulless Guitar are noted exceptions, along with The Third Son and some others I may have mentioned on the blog) to discuss these issues in, and you take a different tone in speaking about the rawer and more subjective elements of writing with your peers, your students, those vaguely interested in what you do, and those who go their own passionate way about things. I think I’d like to follow up on Steve/Ess/GG’s comments from below and talk a bit about creation as a poet. I’ll try to do so with a minimum of equivocation.

I’m not a mystic in the sense that I believe, as some poets do, that the poem exists “out there” in the ether, fully formed, and that I have been chosen (from among all humans) to receive that poem, to let it pass through me into the world. This view, which always struck me as perhaps being dismissive of the very real artistic effort it takes to make poetry, sets up the poet as medium – and while Coleridge said Kubla Kahn was a work of spontaneous genius, well, he lied. There’s evidence he worked that poem and shaped it, recited it to friends. Perhaps the core element of the story is true – he had a brief glimpse of what “could be,” worked furiously at it, creating a largely unchanged first draft, until interruption, at which time he lost “the moment.” However, I believe that Kubla Kahn came from Coleridge, it was of him, rather than it was given to him or arose through him. Well. Sort of. It gets complicated. But I’m at heart I guess I’m a Horatian – I believe poems are made. Generally made by one person, laboring alone, shaped by all their subjective understandings, limited or freed by their skills, constrained or opened by their chosen “bent” as people. (Now there’s an argument that will get you in a heap of trouble, one which is almost never articulated: “You produce shallow poetry not because you lack skill born from technical understanding, but because you are a shallow person.”)

I’m a fuzzy Horatian though, somewhat Zennish. I think that in poetry, so closely tied to the spoken language, of which we’re all unique and subtle users (some more than others as evidenced by El Presidente), there are several stages or levels one moves through, or at least they’re useful makers on the continuum of experience in writing. The first would be “the beginning” where you don’t know all that much about what you’re doing and hence you’re free to make all kinds of loopy mistakes and connections. The poetry that’s generated at this point is uneven but often brilliant (a phrase here, a line there) and I enjoy reading such. You can generally spot real talent at this stage. The second stage is a kind of intermediate ground where the budding poet begins to lean the rules, however, these rules constrain as they shape. Introduce someone to Breton, it opens doors and shuts others. Often the poetry is boring, not risky – people complain they loose their voice and can become overwhelmed by the art. The last stage(s?), is a kind of master/actualized stage, where you’re free to discard the rules because you know them; you’ve internalized them to the point where you’re making decisions swiftly in the nascent stages of the composition (even on the validity of “the rule” for that particular poem).

How to write poetry is hard to teach to students since there’s so much that happens in such a short time. The easiest way to learn how to balance all these things is to “write slowly” – i.e., make the student do draft after cold draft of a poem, then hope, after the slow doing, that whatever element you’re teaching incorporated into earlier and earlier drafts. Hence, when I say I’ll draft something 20 times, that’s the literal truth (more on the “hot” stage of composition in a bit), although only 4 of those drafts might be after the fact polishing where I tweak the poem into final shape. The beginner might barely get the poem down on the page, then might push through only a few drafts before deciding the process is too painful, the goal too elusive, the emotion spent.

Now as to what makes us create – that’s the interesting thing, the very subjective thing. I’m fairly good at a number of making things, regardless of my current technical levels of skill. I used to draw well, sculpt better. I can make bicycles and passable furniture (ah! for a real wood-shop!). I can cook (some things) well. However, I’m best in the narrative arts. Poetry, essays, plays, graphic scripts – that’s where I’m at. Now the odd thing is that I’m compelled to do almost none of these. Poetry though – I get itchy if I don’t write. The words buzz around in my brain and I must, must get them out.

How did I get this way? Was it something I chose or made myself into? (Oddly, I’ve always “been” this way with writing, so perhaps I really can’t say I’ve ever done anything but encourage/discourage the tendencies I’ve inherited with cognizance.) Luck, or fortune, or the gods made me so, what I do, what I must do, is write. I suppose I’m lucky that I’ve realized this and that I’ve gotten a fairly good education built around it.

So where does the base impulse come from? Who knows? I can’t answer it, and I think it’s often dangerous for a practicing artist to try. What if you come up with the wrong answer? What if you come up with the right one?

Individual poems are easier to trace – they have their seeds: a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, the vague shape of a poem, a color, a mood, an anecdote, a taste, a moment, an awareness, a dream. . .all these and more. In a way that’s the easy part. Ask me about any poem and I can usually tell you where it comes “from” – which may have little or no connection to the poem’s final shape (or should we say “shape of the final poem,” implying more than one poem arises from each seed.)

When I start the poem, I enter a “hot” period, when the muse is with me, when things are malleable. A quick word on the muse – she’s sometimes in the background, sometimes knocking on my eyelids; one does not attempt to describe the spirit of inspiration (ha!) more closely than this. To do so is to court disaster, much as inquiring into the ultimate roots of things. One may come up with a dozen plausible explanations as to the driving spiritual or psychological forces behind each, and, indeed, dozens more plausible (and documented) results of grappling with either or engaging either – but to settle on one! Well, now that would be sacrilege.

Generally, that lasts for an hour or so, or until the poem finds it’s “basic shape”. I don’t subscribe to Ginsberg’s “first word, best word” idea – when the poem is hot I’ll draft and redraft, consider and discard lines and images, generally rework the poem entirely.

I work aloud – meaning I compose aloud. Even when I’m composing “silently” I’ll “say” the words in my head at reading speed and with full inflection. That wasn’t an easy thing to learn. You just can’t fully appreciate all the factors any given poem balances until you read it aloud and let it rattle around in your ear. “Necessary” changes to the sonic structure impact form, which impacts content. “Necessary” changes to content (even the addition or exclusion of a single word) change the rhythm of that line, which changes the cadence, which impacts form (and overall sonics). Basically, as you go, you surrender your freedom to the poem and let the poem write itself. To put it less mushily, once you establish the matrix of the poem (or think of it as a complex equation) your choices, given that matrix, become limited. In a place where you have the choice between, say, 4 options, only one of them might resonate on all the levels of the poem. Thus, it’s your only choice.

When I write I spend it all – one of the “tricks” (like reading aloud – it seems so easy, so obvious, but so few actually do it). I don’t hold anything back. If the poem can hold whatever it is I’m thinking about, well, that’s another matter. But I ladle everything into the poem at hand. I’d rather have some kind of secondary thing working deep in the poem than sit on an idea or a phrase or a movement in hopes it might find a home later.

Some people keep notebooks full of images, thoughts, lines from failed poems: things to spark them. I don’t. If I can’t hold it in my head, I figure it’s not that important – mere decoration or exoticia. (I don’t memorize my own poetry – part of me just thinks that’s arrogant, part of me is afraid that I’ll get locked into patterns if I start doing so.)

It does not matter where or when I write. I can write outside or inside, in any season, with pen, paper, keyboard, or what have you. I don’t have to be drunk or sober or anything in particular. It’s in that way a very flexible art. Speaking of sobriety – I do all my best work stone cold sober. Although – and this is again something you’d never say to a student, I’m a firm believer in mixing things up, in deliberately deranging your senses. I’ve written blindfolded, I’ve written naked, I’ve written in the water, I’ve written in trees, I’ve written only what I could hold in my head on a long bike ride, I’ve written drunk, I’ve written in the center of a crowd, I’ve written alone. Patterns, for me, are to be avoided.

***

Someone asked me not that long ago, “What I thought made a poet?” I think a poet (as opposed to a lyricist, or someone who writes verse, or does poetry now and then, et. al.) has to have complete humility (absolute and complete humility) before the word.

That means, for example, the poet understands there’s no such thing as a synonym. The poet says it “just so” – and when saying, balances all levels of the poem equally. The poet fully understands Wilde’s half joke about spending all day considering whether or not to put a comma in a line. There is nothing so small in the language that the poet does not love it, dwell on it. You should be able to distract a poet for a good ten minutes by asking, “What is the best verb for ‘umbrellural plum’.”

Well, that’s enough for now.

Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate

A “loyal reader” asks for my opinion on Ted Kooser, our new Poet Laureate.

The Poet Laureateship is a more or less flexible position – the PL is chosen by the Librarian of Congress and serves a year long October to May term. The PL hosts a few readings, collects a modest stipend, and is generally tasked with “promoting” poetry to America at large. Some of the more effective PLs (in terms of their outreach function) like Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins serve more than one term. There's no correlation between the "kind" of poetry a PL writes and how effective they are. For example, Collins and Pinsky both served three terms - and no one would ever confuse their poems. Personally, I prefer the structure of the American position to the “serve for life” English Poet Laureateship.

Kooser’s one of those Iowa/Nebraska guys. You’d probably call him a “regional poet.” He’s never won a major award (which may be to his credit), nor has he garnered any of the plum positions (say, a chancellorship at the Academy of American Poets.) He has gotten a couple of NEA grants and, I think, a Pushcart. He’s fairly well published periodically and has 10 or so books, including a “New and Selected” which is now a days becoming the kind of high water mark for poets (in terms of book publication).

His poems (well, the ones I’ve read at any rate – which certainly aren’t any great number) tend to be shortish, first-person, quasi-lyrical, somewhat didactic. They’re of very modest scope, and always seem to avoid exploring any of the implications they might open. His subjects are usually contemporary American ones – suburban, day to day stuff, set in somewhere in the Great Plains, nothing you couldn’t find if you walked around town. His strongest assets as a poet are probably his eye for detail, and his unhurriedness. If he were a painter, he’d do landscapes, moderately pastoral, perhaps a grim element for color. He’s got a nice one on Garrison Nebraska. This might be Kooser at his best. As you can guess, he’s not a poet who greatly impresses me from a technical/craft standpoint, nor from a philosophical one, nor from an emotional one.

But that’s not to say he’s bad. He’s a very ‘safe’ middle of the road poet, very accessible (which I think is an often overlooked virute) which could make him an excellent choice for PL.

Also, I’ve never heard him read. That makes a huge difference. Of the previous PL’s, I’ve met Dove, Kumin, Pinsky, Kunitz and Collins. Dove won me over with her reading, whereas Pinsky confirmed all the suspicions I had about him.

I’ll pop in when I’m in DC, say "hi," attend a reading and let you know what I think of Kooser.

Poem

The Words Go Wrong

You’d think a poet would have some control,
but the words go wrong, drunkly sprawling
across page, telegraphed across face, when spoken,
when speaking. That phrase (I’d meant
to be a compliment) drags up somethings
from the underbelly of those best-forgotten-days,
becomes invective, a curse, and what can one say?

That my mouthings are too broad, the net’s
cast too wide? It’s just accident, or
the listener’s fault for picking
the worst possible option?

I have to wonder; my trained ear
(paired with trained tongue),
what subtle things it does: it makes glass splinters
in water, adds a molecule of sour to the mix,
picks words that signal with the twitch of a flagging smile,
makes the eyes’ corners dip, blank-flatly condemning,
and the mouth – ah, it always comes to the mouth –
its hesitation and drawl, its lingering just
a bit over a word, its choice of words.

Whatever escapes, wherever it escapes from,
it favors the barb, the quill, that which when launched
sticks, the memorable scar as opposed to
the clean cut healed, forgotten. Is this the edge
I wanted back? The bitter tongue, the power,
the one I have no control over.

Poem

Sick of wishing after what never comes,
locked in the studio with my scraps of dead language,
here, an O - the shape of a woman’s mouth,
there, a string of sound attached to nothing.
What is it we love? The way someone twists a wrist,
or more winglike, planes a palm against the air
rushing outside the car. Cigarette-ephemeral,
dark eyes in a bar; a woman half-drunk sings
about her true love, the one
who’ll take her from this, who’ll take her from me.

Rilke - the Season

Rasputin and I were talking about this poem this weekend. I'll post it here for all my fellow 0Ls, or for all those who are going back to school or making some kind of large change in their lives. It's an amazing poem - focusing on a shattered statue, reconstructing what the whole would have been like from the perfection of what remains (which does not seem defaced). And then, the marvelous turns of the close – when the consciousness of the speaker realizes how connected (via the “brilliance from inside”) the archaic torso is with everything else and what that implies – namely, that he is connected to everything, that everything can “see” him (that every point on the statue can see him). Then the pause – the self examination, the reflection, the conviction which results in the final five words.

Archaic Torso Of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

***

English Poetry Girl (EPG) just sent me a new translation from Don Patterson's latest book, 'Landing Light'.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

after Rilke

You'll never know that terrific head,
or feel those eyeballs ripen on you -
yet something here keeps you in view,
as if his look had sunk inside

and still blazed on. Or the double axe
of the breast couldn't blind you, nor that grin
flash along the crease of the loins
down to the low centre of his sex.

Or else he'd sit, headless and halved,
his shoulders falling to thin air -
not shiver like the pelt of a wolf

or burst from his angles like a star:
for there is nowhere to hide, nothing here
that does not see you. Now change your life.

Words That Stick In The Brain

I don’t know if I’ll be a litigator. I might be. Who knows? But I think that if I do become one I’ll have a few simple but difficult-to-pull-off tricks which I can use in my favor. Just sayin.

Anyway, that suspicion arises from part of my recent musings on repeated words. Recently the Ghoulless Guitar pointed out that I had returned to a few words in a recent poem, meaning that I had “reused” words from an earlier poem. He further pointed out that I had used these words in almost completely opposite ways. I tend to do that – it’s just a thing I have, a private need to torque, to have a running meta-dialogue with myself across poems. GG’s a great reader, both attentive and balanced, and I value being privy to his take on things.

But back to repeated words - I do think some words stick in the brain for whatever reason, and I’ll notice myself using a few of them for a span of several days. “Twitchy” was a recent one – used the same way to describe a bike, a cat, and a woman. But I also used it as a verb for a kind of halting yet driven social dynamic (someone wanted to do something but felt constrained so they went about it fitfully.) Twitchy – Fitfully.

Although the linguists will howl, there are strong correlations among the sounds of monosyllabic words in English – twitch, fit, skip, jit(ter), skim, stitch. In each case we have a kind of spastic, repetitive, quick action that’s part of a greater pattern. (Much like using words again and again for a short time?) Sometimes it’s not a matter of formulating watertight laws, but using what’s there. Even if what’s there only mostly holds true, it can be a powerful tool – in this case linking sounds to each other, using those correlations to create, on the broadest level “favorable” and “unfavorable” chains of connotation. In a sense, poets (and others who use language to influence) who seek “proven rules” or hope to find the poetic playbook on a library shelf are, well, doomed. God – I hate to make the “organic” argument, as I’ve railed at it often enough when it’s used as an excuse to avoid hard analysis, but there’s a lot to be drawn out of fuzzy theory, organic form, especially when the equally elusive (human emotion, reaction, judgment) is involved.

Poem

The form for this one came out of some thoughts on refrains (there are different kinds of refrains).

The Insomniac Falls for the Narcoleptic

People seldom know what they see in each other:
in this case, the narcoleptic dreams herself along
the dozing shallows while the insomniac watches.
Rhythms and patterns – the rising cycles of chemistry
which dictate: sleep, eat, all the pulls of the body.
All of its loved tastes and thoughts. For it is the body
which loves idea as much as it loves sheets
sliding across entwined legs, as the eye loves
gliding down the curve of cheek, as the mouth
loves the mouth like and unlike itself. When healthy
the body wishes to go and go and go, to not
stop, even for itself. To do what it loves, wholly,
even for a single thought around which the body turns,
even for a single name of which the body
longs to speak aloud, the name of who you are
not, this name the body loves, the name which
shivers the ears of the body, this name which
wakes the body into sleep, this name which is sleep
gained and granted, which is dream, for and of, which
becomes wake: the eyes on the planes of faces,
the languid stretches, the paired lips which twitch open,
which, one and one, speak.

questions quesitons

Here are some questioned posed by Awake at Dawn on Someone’s Couch. AS is a promising young poet who has a delightful independent streak insofar as it’s coupled with an honest sense of curiosity and inquisition. I thought I’d give my two cents on them here:

1. How good can a critic of poetry be if he/she can’t write good poetry?

Loaded question. I’d say, essentially, not a very good one. Granted there have been insightful critics who apply essentially non-poetical concerns to poetry, or who attempt to use poetry to “justify” their theories, largely sociological – Vendler, for example, or Bloom (whom I disagree with often but is usually a good read.) However, the best criticism on poetry arises from the poets themselves. I’d say this is because it’s the poets business to think about poetry hard and often, to examine what’s out there in light of their own writing. If we can borrow a few terms from linguistics, the most accomplished poets take a more “descriptive” rather than “proscriptive” approach, in the sense that they inquire into all of the categories of poetic endeavor (which can be broken down into the two most encompassing groups of “sound” and “sense”) – even if they strongly disagree with what they find (say, Pound on the Victorians). While non-poetry-writing critics aren’t excluded from taking this approach, it seems that few do so, and that poets have the most interesting things to say about poetry – about its composition, its craft-sense, its wider ranging literary and humanistic implications, whether it’s Coleridge or Johnson clashing over Shakespeare, or Charles Olson on the Black Mountain Poets. Honestly, I can’t think of a non-poetry writing critic off the top of my head who lets craft knowledge, the “real world” balancing of choices enter their analysis. (Although there are many fine literary critics who don’t write poetry, and still other philosophers whose work has some resonance to the project of poetry – Nussbaum, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Althusser, Dworkin, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Baktin, Todorov, Chomsky, Wittgenstein, et. al.) One of my favorite collections of critical writings on poetry is “Modern Poets on Poetry.” The perspectives are radically different, but it’s well worth listening to Pound, Thomas, Auden, Stevens, Eliot, WCW, cummings, et. al., as well as older and more contemporary poets.

As Pound asked in The ABCs of Reading:

If you wanted to know something about an automobile, would you go to a man who had made one and driven it, or to a man who had merely heard about it?
And of the two men who had made automobiles, would you go to one who had made a good one, or one who had made a botch?

The fist list of names above include some mighty minds who have fascinating insights – yet I think Thomas might have known a bit more about what he was doing (poetry) than Foucault did.

The counterargument (that writers don’t know what they’re doing) always struck me as arrogant and foolish. Generally it’s put forth by “academics.” I think it’s best illustrated by Harvard’s rejection of Nabokov to teach Russian Literature. Linguist Roman Jakobson gets high points for stupidity by opposing the appointment, arguing, “Even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?”

Jakobson was an important figure (structuralism) but I think you only need to read a short sample of his writing http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/Jakob.htm (particularly point #17) to get a sense that his analysis does not dwell within the lines of the poems, does not take into account each and every word/syllable/phoneme (which you’d expect from a structuralist, yes?)

And come on – this is Nabokov!

2. Should critics write mostly about poetry that they love? Poetry that they hate? Both? Neither?

Another loaded question. I think critics ought to spend most of their time writing about what discrete poems (or collections of poems) accomplish within the parameters of their school and style. It would probably be easiest for them if they focused mostly on poetry they loved and let in a few examples of poetry which they find popular but awful (one does not castigate the irrelevant).

In short, I think literary critics should function like theatre critics and music critics and prose critics: explain what they’re analyzing, explain the good and bad points (including broad points that anyone experiencing the poem(s) would most likely register), explain how it fits into the general poetic tradition, the genres, the sub-genres, and other works by the same poet.

I’ve been assuming we’re talking about “critical reviews” of works. For criticism, i.e., literary analysis, I still prefer the poets as indicated above, although many poets work in light of critical theories elucidated by non-poets.

3. Is there any merit in shock-value critical writing? Should we dismiss critique just because it is caged in explosive/offensive language?

No.

No.

But I think one must question the use offensive or explosive language when attempting to accurately and (one hopes) relatively unbiasedly evaluate a piece of literature. Why is it there? What rhetorical function does it serve? What does that say about the framing of “critique”? – namely, what assumptions does it rest upon.

4. What kind of relationship exists between “uplifting/selling” poetry and critiquing it?

Well, perhaps we ought to (or I should already have) made some distinctions between:

“blurb-age” – short pithy reviews pointing out the strengths of a poem/book, usually designed to arouse interest and promote reading/sales.

“critical review” – slightly longer reviews examining the strengths and weaknesses of a poem/book, which attempt to provide some context for the reviewer’s evaluations.

“literary analysis” (of a single author/book) – the same as the above but longer and more detailed.

“literary criticism” – which might touch on an author but often uses many authors to make it’s relatively abstract points/define it’s approach to the subject at hand.

There are also “negative reviews” – normally, I think these are designed to showcase the wit and intelligence and well-readness of their author more than provide any kind of functional utility to the reader. The object is not to arrive at a balanced and transparent judgment but to promote either the review’s author or school or camp or viewpoint via an adversarial argument which ramps up the flaws of the work at hand and dismisses its accomplishments. It’s hard to come up with an objective test for distinguishing between this kind of review and an honest inquiry – however a) we don’t need to, and b) the outliers are pretty damned obvious and are really the only one’s we’d be concerned with anyways – Todorov v. Logan to mix modes.

So, leaping back – I think honest explication and analysis will “sell” well written poetry (in any mode). The same will discourage the sale of mediocre or poorly written poetry. Anytime you have “political” elements creeping in, partisan poetics, it’s just a matter of marketing and rhetorical effectiveness (in terms of promoting or discouraging sales.)

5. Is “forgetting” a text you don’t like enough? Is displacing a text into the great vacuum of “nothingness”enough?

I’m not sure I entirely follow this – should texts you don’t like be held up for criticism? Yes, I think so. There has to be balance in the critical community. However, there’s a difference between honestly inquiring as to what you find off putting in the text (and being honest about your reasons for finding it so) and deciding you dislike a text then using the review/critical response as an occasion to frame an argument to torpedo the work at hand.

6. What kind of critical statements/languages are appropriate when reviewing poetry? What kind are most effective?

Depends on the mode the poem is written in and the mode the critic is writing from. I don’t think you can ignore parts of the poem/book which are “difficult” to write about – meaning that if you really want to be taken seriously as a poetry critic you have to meet Neo-Formalism, LANGUAGE poetry, and mainstream contemporary (free) verse on their own terms. Meaning that if you don’t understand the why and how of LANGUAGE poetry (or cannot or will not explain such in your writing), you probably have no business writing a critical response to it since your isolated opinion is relatively worthless (Houlihan). If you have no understanding of traditional foot-metrics and inherited form, there’s little point in holding forth on a Neo-Formalist collection. If you have no ear for Free Verse and do not understand what regulates and governs it then please, keep your opinions to yourself. Which gets us back to Question #1, I believe, which could perhaps better be framed as, “How good can a critic of poetry be if he/she does not understand poetry (and the practice of poetry) well enough to write at least adequate poems in the mode at hand?

Lunch

Native blueberries and fresh whipped cream, sumatra coffee.

I might even try to feel bad about it later.

Maybe.

Auden Gets It

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

W.H. Auden, "The Poet and the City"

Poem

Sometimes you don't know where they come from - sometimes you do. In this case I was thinking of Dobyns' Santiago Poems ("a conductor of kisses"), Breton, the argument against surrealism, the argument for it, my own abandonment of it (sometimes a mode with a strong "tilt" to it just becomes impossible to steer - you end up playing to your strengths all the time which results in a lack of scope and a particular kind of weakness in execution.) So I decided to go back and dust it off.

Quick word on the form, the major divisional unit of the poem is the "-" mark. I suppose I could have lineated it with one image/thought per line, but I liked the connectedness of the block of text, the stronger segue between each unit which is suggested. For non-poets - when you read lineated poetry, you're generally supposed to pause ever so slightly on the break, give a hint of emphasis to each line's last word. (Or at least that's the basic way to read poems, there are all kinds of variations on that.) Thus, tall skinny poems (lots of little pauses, lots of emphasis) are read aloud slowly, while fat and wide poems are read aloud more quickly. That seems counter-intuitive, given silent reading of pr(d)oze, but poetry is a different beast. It's probably also why people are so intimidated by Whitman. But Walt just *moves*: there's such a drive across the poems, across the lines (cadence).

So this, aloud, should go fairly fast, the pauses falling on the "-" marks, but not as full stops, more like half commas, just enough to catch your breath. The idea is to glide through at an even pace, layering, layering, building up the range of the poem while keeping a kind of balance in the grounding idea of "the kiss" (what is "a kiss" exactly?) and the repetition of the form, which is something of a litany. When reading, just go, don't stop. You can always go back later to pick something up or dig in - but the point is to complete the arc.

The Kisses

- the blessing of brushed eyelids - the kisses of fallen temples - the draw and quarter you kisses - the kisses of the bell tone in the throat - the kisses of the heavy night air - the kisses of no sympathy whatsoever - the nipple flickering kisses - the watchspring kisses, toothpick precise - the slow sucking engulfing kisses of circled lips - the wild laugh of drawn-blood kisses - the pulse kisses – the nape kisses - the quick lash of tigerish tongue across teeth - the kisses which are the mistresses of the exquisite instrument of the body, its sails of skin, its glorious bones which can be driven to, kissed down upon - the kisses of not-having – the kisses of pocketed candy - the lightning bug kisses - the kisses of the taken chance - the algebraic kisses - the kissing of hands and the kisses of fingertips - the bad-ass, full hipped kisses - the kisses of one language - the kisses of the circuit of throat and neck - the sauvingnon kisses - the kisses of the season of the slender hell - the sloshing kisses - the kisses of the unnamed color of seashells - the kisses which hold off dawn - the kisses of leather - the missed kisses, the kisses into a word or a moan - the kisses of the single breath - the kisses of the extinguishing world - the kisses which pay the price - the soft flutter, the just breath, smooth as her name, barely bending the small hairs, nearly invisible, of my ear - the no - the yes - the yes - the sweet sweet kisses of the kissed -

Poem

This is kind of an odd poem for me, a brain clearer. I wrote this recently – it came from a “real” situation, a player who had stopped playing after crazy personal stuff happened. The image of his father in his coffin and his horn in his case was just something that kept circling around to the front of my poetic consciousness. So I thought I’d muse on it awhile, let things build, but they never did. So I wrote this, put it aside, and then wrote the rest of the poems that had built up behind it. I’ve been sort of fascinated in recent poems by the mobius strip idea – the final line of the poem is the lead line of the poem as well – not often literally, as in this case, but thematically. Metaphor for my life? Hmm. Sometimes the poem does not get developed – or can’t be developed since the scope is so narrow; as a general rule you don’t want to write a long poem that keeps saying the same thing over and over if there’s a punchier way to do it. Say it once – it’s done. H and Elegante were caught up in the Trombone Player craziness, so the poem is back in my thoughts this morning, but I still don’t see anything I can do with it; I like its smallness, its short lines, its flatness, which makes it something of a modest poem.

TP was in a pretty damn good ska band –you probably saw at least one of their videos– but they folded due to lack of cash. He signed on with one of the flagship ska bands, one which I thought had early promise but ultimately was bad for the genre (it got to the point where it seemed like they were almost afraid of ska, as though they thought no one respected it and so developed a heavier, quasi-thrash sound at points. Gimmie TP’s original anyday.) Anyway, the flagship band folded too, his dad died (a damn bad month), and TP hasn’t played since. Which is a horrible thing to me. I’ve seen him 3 times in the past few weeks, part of “the silent blog” of things that I want to jot down and never get around to. I hope TP gets back on the horse soon - he's got too much talent to keep it away from the world.

The Trombone Player

Father in his coffin,
Horn in its case:
He does laundry,
Plays video games,
Listens to what
He once played,
Plays video games,
Does laundry:
Horn in its case,
Father in his coffin.

One of Rockstar J's Songs

Download artist_track_2.mp3

This is one of the poem-adaptation-songs. Not an easy poem to pull off, I think. It's all Rockstar J though - just her on all vocals and instruments. Girl's gotta get herself an 8 track at least. I don't know how long I'll keep it up on the blog - file size and all that.

Poetry, Ghosts, the Ephemeral

Another surprise from RockstarJ – two more poems made their way into songs. One I wasn’t surprised about, but the other (a very old and odd poem), well, I just wasn’t expecting it. Both were really good – the fiercely sweet leg-moving one sounded fiercely sweet and leg-moving, and the spidery damp-palmed one sounded spidery and damp palmed. I fear I am becoming spoiled. I’m also, with my limited musical knowledge, just amazed she’s doing this on a 4-track. That’s not a lot of tracks.

I had a good conversation with RockstarJ about poetry and ragas (and Vedas), which branched into a discussion of slant sound and how I write poetry. For example, when composing I generally “go after” something that’s not on the surface level of the poem, that may not be addressed by the poem at all – say, a color, a mood, a phrase from a piece of music, an image. The “meaning” of the words is sometimes a distant second – which surprises some people because my poetry is very linear, very progressive, very narratively rational. I just happen to think you can have both the wildness and the precision – depending, of course, on which categories mobilize each quality. So the “spidery” poem really is spidery sounding – had a spiderish quality – the “subject” in a sense, does not matter. Well it does, but not insofar as I’m making the poem be a spidery thing.

I also told RockstarJ about somewhat unfairly critiquing an on-line poet whom I very much respect; tremendous phrase making ability, sharp intellect, excellent analytical skills, subtle reader. But there’s a quality to the poems which is sometimes constrained, in an overly rationalized randomness/deliberately fragmental kind of way. I’ve wanted for awhile now to give this poet a little push, but I couldn’t figure out if it’s appropriate to do so. So I just rolled the dice, which is generally what I do in those situations. I think it has cost me a number of potential friends and acquaintances over the years. No word yet on how it went.

(Poetic aside - I can’t figure out why so many people think my poetics are so rigid. Perhaps they’re used to people trying to take down anything outside their sphere. I suppose I’m like that sometimes, but mostly, I simply go with what works and have little patience for that which does not work – i.e., “experimentation” which is never then analyzed or built on to an end. I still love Steve Kowitt’s line: “I had written enough high-flown nonsense to know its seductions.” Not that that is precisely what’s going on here.)

I guess the broader question is, “Do people delude themselves willfully?” Meaning should you not push – just keep silent until someone asks something, or should you make something happen, force an issue, even if the person in question may not be “ready” for what you have to say? Personally, I’m the kind of guy who’d rather just be told. Then I can deal with whatever it is. I think that makes me come off as personally aggressive sometimes. Hmm. Anyway, the broader question, reflected palely in the poetry pushing thing, arises from a shared situation RockstarJ and I have regarding a mutual acquaintance – do we tell someone (quite in denial) something, or do we wait until they’re “ready”?) Big questions/dilemmas are often easy to resolve, despite their cost – the little and middling sized ones suck. I’m in favor of pushing, J is not. I think I’ll listen to her advice and wait on this one.

So, anyway, back to the trivia of my life: I have kind of a poetry project/mission now – J’s going to record me reading some of my poems and would like me to do a few more sing-able/adaptable poems; namely shorter lines, more sonic alignment, less “scatty” rhythms. It’ll be an interesting challenge for me because I’ll have to fight my tendencies – always a good thing to stay fresh, I think.

This morning, driving over to H’s to try to catch her for breakfast, I found a short note taped, open, to her door. Elegante is back in town. Actually, she’s living in a nearby town, having moved back, I think, permanently (she’s been here for a month.) Elegante, briefly mentioned in the T-Rex posts is an ex of mine. We had a tempestuous on/off/on/on/off thing. Elegante’s note indicated that she hadn’t talked with H in awhile, since it was addressed to H’s ex-boyfriend who used to live with her. That ended this past winter. So I don’t think Elegante knows that I’m around, in the sense that H and I are spending a lot of time together.

This is completely distracting me this morning – after things last ended between us, E and I had some social contact and spent part of a summer with a group of mutual friends. I had thought E and I were on fairly good terms, but afterward I found out that I’m the devil – and that she really enjoyed hearing about some bad things that happened to me. Then again, this is third-hand info, so who knows? E, like me, is famously stone-faced about certain things. In any event, I’ve been trying to figure how this might play out. I’m certainly not going to surrender H. to her for the rest of the summer if it can be at all helped. On the other hand, I’m not so selfish to try to claim H as my own to her detriment, nor do I want to mess with E’s vibe if she really needs to reconnect with H. Which means E and I might just have to get along. We’ll see. I certainly bear E no kind of animosity whatsoever. Part of me thinks she just might need to hate/blame me, regardless of what I did or who I am. Sometimes you need a devil in your life. It can be, um, motivational.

The Cost of Poetry

I have an odd sort of fascination with my friend Gabriel’s life. In many ways our lives were switched – if you had asked anyone what his life would be like our senior year of college, they’d have given you a rough outline of what my own turned out to be and vice versa. I was supposed to be the married college professor hosting a small circle of creative friends and artists. He was supposed to be the wandering poet type, laboring in obscurity, moving from job to job and maybe expecting some kind of fame/compensation in his late 50s. Actually, in that way I’m kind of close to Skellum.

Things I love about Gabriel – his ease around people. Drop him into any situation, any social or educational strata and he’ll get along just fine with anyone. (I by contrast am often prickly.) I love his creative force – he’s one of the clearest and most innovative thinkers I know. His mind ranges from complex creation myths of his own devising to subtle poetic analysis (a Romantic studies scholar, he attended Oxford). With Gabriel, you just get the sense that he does things with his whole heart, that he does not let one thing or another hang him up. That’s a rare and valuable thing.

I’m also a bit jealous of his relationship with CaptainC. The Captain is a formidable gal – a lawyer, a pilot, a former metal girl. They made their crazy relationship work despite incredible geographic and financial odds, and they’re something of an inspiration to me.

I, on the other hand, have had a frustrating mixture of ending relationships because of the poetry (a demanding thing) and/or being with people who just, at heart, don’t want me for myself, as opposed to what they think I am and do; let me tell you, while it’s easy to fall for the mystique of “the poet,” the day to day of being a poet is not glamorous – it’s work, it’s isolation, it’s being in your own little world at breakfast and talking to yourself as you cook.

I suppose I need to accept that I’m just never going to find someone who can a) accept the demands of muse and b) still really wants to be with me anyway. I had a long talk with the EPG about the kind of person that a poet could be with, in a long term, open ended way, and the list is frighteningly exclusive.

First and foremost, they have to respect the writing, not only in and of itself, but the demands that places on you, both in terms of time and emotion. That’s so difficult for people to do. Many say they can, but they really can’t; they’ll have some kind of secret (and very cool) plan for Thursday night and, even though that’s the one night you’re free, you have to tell them, “No – I need to write.” Then you watch what that does to them (the little crush thing in the eyes) and, if you honestly care for them, your disappointing them affects your own writing, sours it, which in turn starts to place intolerable pressure on the relationship. It gets more complicated because sometimes “writing” does not involve writing at all – it’s reading or following an idea or continuing some kind of project with your hands that lets the whole poetic process gel. I think EPG had some of the funniest lines I've ever heard in this regard, such as, "I really respect what you do, what ever it is," and "I'm really impressed by your writing, just don't expect me to read any of it."

I think the key is to find someone who does something similar, who has a kind of first, non-human love or demand, but only if that love is a creative love, if that person is a maker, not a consumer or a follower. Or maybe that just makes the time issue more difficult. Who knows? I think I’ve only ever dated 2 people who “got” the poetry thing – and those relationships ended for other reasons.

So that’s part of the burden of poetry – another large component is that poetry makes it very difficult to lie to yourself. The truth has a way of coming out in the poems, which is both a good and bad thing – but it means if you’re to have any integrity as an artist, you need to go into dark places, places you’d much rather not go, it means that a lot of things (including cherished ideas about yourself) lose their magic, that mysteries do get cleared up. More mundanely it reflects your flaws back at you every time you sit down to write: I’m something of a tentative chatter-box who when he does finally decide something is rather inflexible about it. Unfortunately, my solution to this is isolation, which is no solution at all. I see this in the poems all the time: for example, I’m fascinated by moments when two people communicate or understand something in a flash – especially if that understanding bridges traditionally large divides.

Sometimes poets (or would be poets) lie to themselves via the poems: who they are, what they want, how they really view themselves and others – after awhile you can spot it in their writing. It’s a bad thing – poems are not arguments which control the world.

Someone recently described the difference between Verse and Poetry as akin to the difference between an actor acting a character and an actor becoming a character. Which is why we have a lot of verse (necessary and touching and wonderful and cathartic and clever and heartfelt and witty verse) but so little poetry. When you ask actual poets about poetry, the interesting thing is that all of ‘em respond with a relative statement, not an absolute one. For Dickinson, poetry made her feel “as if the top of her head was taken off,” Larkin described a poem as “an emotional machine,” Houseman said it made him cut himself shaving, Stevens called it “the necessary angel,” and Coleridge’s famous dictum was that poetry is “The best words in their best order” as opposed to well written prose or verse which would merely be words in their best order. There’s a reason why it’s relative – there’s a reason why it’s hard to write. As Rilke advised – if it’s at all possible for you to be happy without writing, then you shouldn’t write.

Anyway, enough random rambling and kvetching; it’s a tough and often lonely road, and I get tired of it sometimes. But then I write a good poem and learn something in the process and remember what it’s all about.

Duende

I've been thinking a lot about the Duende. The Clash had it in spades. In fact, I’m listening to Sandinista! during my lunch break. It’s really a remarkable album.

If I had to pick a single band to take with me to the proverbial desert Island, it would be The Clash. They were so so good at what they did – and they did it with fire. I think a lot of artists compromise – with The Clash, you never get that sense. They kept churning out odd album after odd album, without knuckling under to anyone’s expectations.

Segue Duende to poetry - I went through a lot of older poems today. There are spots of Duende here and there - sometimes, if I'm lucky, it's an undertone that the whole poem resonates to. Technique only gets you so much. . .

I should be working on a poem, but the current one in my brain is a real bear and I don’t want to let it go just yet. It’s not quite like wrestling the angel of death – more like wrestling the angle of the sprained shoulder or the broken toe. Sometimes you just can’t find a word in English that has the sonic and denotation qualities you want. Then sometimes you can’t find 6 of ‘em. Blah!

Dead Poems

Per my last post, for giggles, here are four seductive failures from the Scoplaw’s past. They’re all 7+ years old. These kind of poems go into a “Not Done but Dead” folder, as there’s something wrong with tone, voice, scope, approach. . .bleck. They’re not horrible, I think, but the line between good poetry and near misses is at once small but profound. It’s a question all poets have to deal with – is X worth it? At what point do you abandon the poem?

She Plays It For Someone Else

Should’ve known we’d end like this: me
watching her wait for the rest of the band
to uncoil. She pretends not to see the small crowd,
and taps out a rhythm with her nails
on the wood of her guitar. It’s new, dark wood
under the shellac. There was a time I’d care,
need to know what guitars are made of
and I’d pester some craftsman, musician,
just to learn something about inlay, fretwork,
and I’d come up with some odd bit of story
how a famous so-and-so made bone flutes in his old age.
Nothing’s too foreign: the new guitar’s still riding
in the old bus-station case, with its sticker
Musicians Need Food Too and the blue
fuzz inside the battered shell. If
I squinted, I could just make out a dime-sized
stenciled heart: across it, the scrawl
of a poem in black marker. Now it reads,
nothing, nothing, nothing.

For Brother Dennis in Egypt

In your dry cell, a striking bell punctuates
flat day. You rise from your pallet
not sure of your ears, the tone
wasp-like, drifts.
You have waited for days.
Is this what you have waited for?
You step out from the dark mouth of the hillside,
step out onto the blast shale, into afternoon’s
hour of trembling boulders,
and your jasper eyes recede under
the tutelage of the sun. On the wide canvas,
you seek the one fragment of horizon
smudged by reeds. Why do you
always hope to see someone there?
You consider calling.
But it’s too far for a voice, one human voice,
a spun and hazy vibration.
The sun makes no noise.

In Providence, on Forrest St. you climbed the blind-stair
towards the sculptor’s attic, rooms of music
and the love of making. A hidden noise
wending out of a dark nautilus, you paused
under the stair’s sentinel, a plaster palomino:
its upraised hoof, hung like an evil crab,
a crescent slash in the air before you. And then,
it was not a dusty sculpture of a horse,
not the spirit of depression personified, but a warning:
your heart will trick you, beat normally,
even when you must give up, go back
to not-singing. . .
But beyond the horse,
beyond the shadowy start,
you were our conductor; for in your song,
the love bower never woke to the glare of the salt plain.
You told us, disaster won’t happen,
we wouldn’t be gathered into its glistening shell.
Upon the throbbing base was built a wonderful
bravado. Your music welled within the walls,
flooded the blanketed compartments,
and let itself be gathered,
a telling resonance inside raincoats
piled by window. The music trickled
along the houses’ foundations,
dissolved across the wet sidewalks
of the East Side.

But from that house
both music and the spirit
of the music receded from us.
With the certainty
of a young woman in love,
it eluded our ears,
flowed across the youth center,
left us for the observatory.
And without the music, what holds us
to this particular attic? Everything
resumes. You see? Mike now shoulders
his battered and borrowed case, as Joel
descends the stair, singing. Singing himself
under the horse, down the old steps to where
Matthew and I wait. For we left
when the music moved outside, followed
its expectation as we would follow
a faith, leaving
Dennis in Egypt.

Breakfast at the Newport Creamery,
Providence, RI

A little girl sits wide eyed drinking her water
as Tony says, Fuck dem gooks- I hate em
I'd kill'em all.

The waitress slides a plate in front of him,
Here you are sir- and did you want more coffee?

Rick says, Hey Tony- if you choke on your eggs
you'd do something useful today.

Rich flips throught the Bulletin and
with a wink at the girl, asks, Ya didn't torture animals
as a kid, did ya?

No, I like animals.

Good- then I'm safe.

Christmas Wishes

Alright God, time to start lobbing
some lighting to that 'ole Jehovah thunder. Here
an "officer of the state" jabs a bound man's
testicles with a live electric wire. There
a corporate manager gives the nod
to another land-mine factory.
Make it unsubtle - crude: plagues
of chewing locusts, rains of fire,
boils, sores, bears wandering out
of the woods. Show that zeal from early
in your career. Random train accidents
approach it- but whatever happened
to obvious fire-for-sin, your world
(I was taught) that was?

Thoughts Prompted by a Chat with The Third Son

One of the things I’ll have to do over the next year or so is consciously revise my diction. In the past few years, I’ve moved away from using an “academic” mode of expression in favor of one that’s far more colloquial and laced with phrasal idioms.

My current vocabulary is a deliberate move away from (as Orwell said) “the soft mass of Latin words” which, in poetic composition, instead of precisely demarcating concepts, tended to drain my poems of emotional power. Through striving to use a more “Anglo Saxon” vocabulary, “AS” meant only insofar as it attempts to use pithy and punchy words instead of Greco-Roman imports, I think my poetry has improved to the extent that it’s more “readable,” more parseable, on a first pass. Then again, I favor “lucid” poetics, poems which readily divulge the “basic information” of who, what, where, when, and (hopefully) why.

However, at times I fear I’ve gone too far, that in my pursuit of the unnamed (which necessitates abandoning names, lest I inappropriately dismiss something via mis-naming) I’ve lost or suppressed useful terms and formulations. Even in casual conversation, I’m conscious of fumbling for words, rejecting abstract formulations in an attempt to present something more imagistic. It’s a delicate balance I think – maintaining a series of “stock” expressions which other people are comfortable hearing and interpreting without overly relying on them in a way which might cause them to unduly influence my own thoughts.

In some ways I suppose people who have a consistent primary mode of discourse are able to rely to a great extent on idioms (of speech and thought) native to that mode, and can with relative ease “export” them to general social interaction via anecdotes, expressions, etc. (And so we can say that Teachers sound like Teachers, even in personal interaction, while Medical Doctors sound like Medical Doctors, and so forth, given the categorical (social) impositions of class, education, audience, and subject under discussion.) Yet I think poets who would not descend into parodies of themselves must strive “to sound” like everyone and no one – and that from this space arises each poet’s unique “voice.” I don’t know if that theory is correct, but I'm attracted to it as a practitioner.

Over the next year I’ll have to come up with a method for balancing a more rhetorical and end-driven mode of discourse (legal), with a more open-ended and questioning form of discourse (poetic). One formulation of these two perspectives is that attorneys use language as a means to an end, that language is simply a tool for thought, while poets use language as an end in itself, that language creates new thought. That one is concerned with moving toward a fixed goal (even if the goal is clearly presenting ambiguity) while the other is concerned with creating an environment which allows for the realization of several ends, many of which are not, can not, be precisely defined in relation to other things. I’m not sure I agree with these formulations, but then again I’m naturally suspicious of dichotomies, and have a fond love for the tertium quid.

Poem

The Greening

in the clear light of early summer
in the impossible tangle of leaves hishing with each other
in the strike of mallet on wind chime
the strike of chime on mind
in the profusion of instruments, resting in their cases
the easy kitchen-table talk
in rolled shirt sleeves and forearms
in the clink of ice in glasses
the tart dart of alcohol over tongue
in the cat distractedly watching with his yellow eye
in the settling of night around the house
the settling of the house into the night
in the catalogue of friends
in the many loves past, the brickish loyalty
to the dead and gone
in the throat, the deep arterial pulse, the tone of voice
in the song hummed for humming's sake
in the clear eye unafraid of eyes
the easy laugh which is grace
in flaws acknowledgement
in the lock of hair cut and buried
in the future, more felt than thought
in the heart green without jealousy
in the heart green

Abraham Lincoln's Poem

Via a New Yorker article.

Scoplaw's analysis: Sometimes famous people write very very bad poetry.

"Bad Poets"
by Randall Jarrell

Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem. A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.

1953

Poem

Forgetting My Dead Brother

A town I have never lived in.
A street down which I have not ridden
in years. And the gates, a sudden nostalgia
of the time I said your name daily, prayed.

I am ashamed to say I have not thought of you,
perhaps for years, that I have asked nothing
for you, and have let slip the childhood pact
I fashioned from surviving your death.

I cannot recall what I had promised
always to do, to sacrifice that you
might be safe, whole. I tell myself we
are meant to continue and continue, to live.

But, oh Ryan, just once – once, to have
the branch break, crash down in front of me
without my looking up, wondering
why I hadn’t seen it.

Denise Levertov is da bomb

Was da bomb, I should say; she died in 1997. That was a bad year for poetry. We lost William Matthews that year as well. (And Larry Levis died in 1996.)

“The Poet in the World” has been one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in quite a while. I’ve always enjoyed “Some Notes on Organic Form,” which is perhaps her most well known essay, and whenever I teach I assign her essay on line breaks (“On the Function of the Line”), which I believe is one of the more cogent formations of contemporary lineation strategies. I have no idea why it’s taken me so long to read the rest of her essays.

I believe I am enjoying them due to my own recent (past 5 years) poetry endeavors: I adhere to a kind of rigid poetics, and due to my volunteering workshopping time, I spend a good deal of energy re-articulating those poetics (ad nauseam) and in general trying to lead horses to water. So it’s immensely refreshing to read someone who is coming, much more so more than less, from the same angle, someone who does not argue the outliers and miss, so the cliché goes, the forest for the trees.

For example, I cannot say how many wearying times I have attempted to subtly slip the following into some student’s skull. (From “Notebook Pages,” all italics hers.)

2. Note to a student: What you have been showing me is a kind of poetry, the poetry of ideas (as one says the poetry of motion). It does not discover itself in words, in sound patterns, in actual verbal textures; it is language-oriented insofar as it is probably not possible to dis-sociate philosophic thought from language (though the physicist and mathematician and musician – and painter and architect—do think nonverbally). If you had an adequate language of symbols (in the sense of signs, referentials) at your disposal, you could define/express, these ideas in it as well (better) than you can in poems. The material of a poem must need to be a poem, not something else (an essay, a story, or whatever.) “The material of a poem is only that material after the poem has been made,” says T.S. Eliot (in his introduction to the Selected Writings of Paul Valery)—which is perhaps the same thing inside out, as it were. Your notes [to which the Scoplaw appends, “explanations”] are often more interesting than the poem itself, which seems mere shorthand notes for the notes. You must get the material into the poem, making the explanatory notes unnecessary. Or else, you must recognize that certain material does not really depend on language, not, that’s to say, on the full resources of language (as those resources are manifested in poems)—but only on a kind of utilitarian recourse to language faute de mieux, as signs representing ideas; in which case you should be prepared to write prose, and learn to write a prose as transparent, as unobtrusive, as you can, a pure medium for the ideas. What I've been saying might be mistaken for a statement of belief that there are poetic and nonpoetic "subjects.” No, I don't mean that. It is not the subject, ever, in itself’ it is the way the individual responds, relates, to it. When I speak of the material “wanting to be” a poem or an essay or a story, or whatever (or an equation), I mean the total material—i.e., the “subject” plus the perception of it. One has to learn to recognize the tendency, the pull, of this conjunction, this inscape.

I believe Levertov is articulating one of the most difficult things to “teach” in creative writing (sadly, it’s also one of the most difficult things for non-writers to lean – this often unfortunately includes reviewers, professors, and editors): that a poem is Sound AND Sense, Form AND Idea, and that in a well-made poem each and every syllable, each and every phoneme, pulls “double duty” as it contributes to a sonic pattern and an ideational pattern (or thematic pattern, or narrative, if you prefer). The poem must, like our experience in the world, be at once abstract and concrete – it must faithfully present the sensorial world of ducks and dander, while at the same time inviting the abstractions of delicacies and danger. Also, most difficutly, the poem must harness or yoke the one to the other – the sonic patterning must reinforce the themes of the poem, and the themes of the poem, the ideas they present, must ground themselves into the sonic pattern.

In other words – it ain’t just about your sensitive creativity dude.

I think that the current generation of adult Americans have had their love of poetry mostly beaten out of them by the secondary educational system. Sadly, the collegiate system’s approach is little better. Both often focus on “the ideas” or “what the poet was trying to say” rather than the poem itself. As if the poem itself were discardable – a crossword to be solved or a cipher to be interpreted. The gorgeous and necessary play of language is often lost in the silence of the mind - and the language that mind subsequently produces is, sadly, flat and often dead.

Well, enough of that.

Here’s a Levertov poem from 1992. It's a deeply political poem - but notice how the form, the sounds, reflect and enhance the themes, how the pacing dictates the emotional inflection. (You have to read it aloud to notice this. Trust me, I'm a professional, I read aloud.) It's great to pick up on such clever things as "bushes" but it's not just an isolated data point - it's integral. Pens beget puns, what I can I say?

In California During the Gulf War

Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink--
a delicate abundance. They seemed

like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year's events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.

To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.

Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches
more lightly than birds alert for flight,
lifted the sunken heart

even against its will.
But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy
as our resistance to the crimes committed

--again, again--in our name; and yes, they return,
year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy
over against the dark glare

of evil days. They are, and their presence
is quietness ineffable--and the bombings are, were,
no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophany

simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.

Denise Levertov

Some Notes on Organic Form by Denise Levertov
(excerpt)

For me, in back of the idea of organic form is the concept that is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet discovers and reveals. There are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones-people who need a tight schedule to get anything done, and people who have to have a free hand-but the difference in their conception of "content" or "reality" is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be given form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the word inscape to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other; and the word instress to denote the experiencing of the perception of inscape, the apperception of inscape. In thinking of the process of poetry as I know it, I extend the use of these words, which he seems to have used mainly in reference to sensory phenomena, to include intellectual and emotional experience as well; I would speak of the inscape of an experience (which might be composed of any and all of these elements, including the sensory) or of the inscape of a sequence or constellation of experiences.

A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such a poetry is exploratory.

How does one go about such a poetry? I think it's like this: First there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. Suppose there's the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long ago thought or event associated with what's seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history; and what he has been dreaming-whether or not he remembers it-working in him. This is only a rough outline of a possible moment in a life. But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross-section, or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand, the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes from "templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur." It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is "to keep the mind in a state of contemplation''; its synonym is "to muse," and to muse comes from a word meaning "to stand with open mouth"not so comical if we think of "inspiration"-to breathe in.

So-as the poet stands openmouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the Poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs as words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won't work. These words sometimes remain the first, sometimes in the completed poem their eventual place may be elsewhere, or they may turn out to have been only forerunners, which fulfilled their function in bringing him to the words which are the actual beginning of the poem. It is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows those first or those forerunning words to rise to the surface: and with that same fidelity of attention the poet, from that moment of being let in to the possiblity of the poem, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes.

1965

My Evening

Middle School Concert

A short while and their long year will be over,
will become summer. But for now it’s ties and carnations,
a flurry of slightly off-tempo foot-tapping against
the legs of their transplanted cafeteria chairs.
Their families, who have endured scales and scales
are watching. Their bodies, newly long-boned,
bear the marks of their awkward formation:
glasses, braces, acne. They play with
the fretful vitality of the young for whom nothing
is fast enough. Eyes locked
on their music, caught in the spotlight (literally),
some pray to make it through without stumbling,
without calling attention to themselves,
hope a kind of blind grace will settle in their fingers,
for the music, frankly, is beyond them,
and they must settle for playing, imagining
a perfect music could one day be theirs.
But the one I think the most interesting, for she
is meeting my eye, the second clarinet,
is the one who will go the furthest
out on the branch of true creation;
she is the one who is looking outside herself,
watching for what the music,
flawed as it may be, does.

Poem

Tag Sales

The chipped and dinged, the nicked,
torn, and faded. That which the owner’s eye
skips over, the detritus of lives. Some sellers
wish to supplement a fixed income, others,
to clear boxes out the garage. Old bicycle tyres,
dulled kitchen implements, spotted mirrors,
the graying sheets and shams. Each promises to be
what it once was – for those handy
with bleach and thread, a soldering iron
or glue gun. There is a joy to mending
something someone-else gave up on:
a spliced wire and a fan, model no longer made,
cools a room. Some dye and salt
and a black jacket again drinks in light.
One learns to pass on that which is past
repair – threads rusted off, cracked glass,
or that which should be burnt or buried:
a diploma and a photo from an estate sale,
resting next to some salt shakers on a table.
I knew this woman, her devil-may-care grin,
which I once thought was for me alone.

On Being Misunderstood

I’ve gotten a lot of hits off of searches for “poetry about being misunderstood.” Which kind of begs the questions – does poetry help you become understood? or give you insight into your misunderstoodness?

To twist the topic, poets took it on the chin in Plato’s Republic and were banished for, among other things, telling lies about the gods. In one sense, they were “misrepresenting” what Plato saw as cold fact, corrupting the youth with their emotionally moving lies:

He (the poet) resembles him (the painter) both because his works have a low degree of truth and because he appeals to a low element in the mind. We are therefore quite right to refuse to admit him (the poet) to a properly run state, because he stirs up and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the mind at the expense of reason.

Poets, it seems, are chronically misunderstood. (And you have to wonder what Plato would have made of television.)

When you write poetry, there’s a fine line between coming out and just saying “what’s on your mind” and presenting to the reader in some way that might enhance that thought (or thoughts) to make them more memorable, or more repeatable. That’s a grossly simple way of looking at it, but one which I think has some merit. A more subtle approach is to view poetry as “an emotional machine” which, via an “artificial” situation, evokes real emotion in the reader, provided the poet gets enough details right and has a firm grasp of the basic emotional truths involved. In a sense, this is simply using rhetoric to the poet’s ends (via the specific form of the poem). Certain schools of contemporary poetry run screaming from this formulation of poetry, seeing, as Plato did, poetry of this vein as manipulative of the reader. But what isn’t?, I have to ask.

On the whole, poets have been pretty open about what they do – the need to fudge detail to present a greater truth, the need to present that truth clothed in appealing garments (via metaphor or just a kind of general applicability.) I like using the word “applicability” – Tolkien was the first to suggest it (as far as I can tell) in his forward to the second edition of the Lord of the Rings, in which he writes:

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

One could build off this and suggest that specific exegesis is an example of the purposed domination of the critic/interpreter of a work, but that the general readership will approach a work within certain boundaries. Jockeying the initial inspiration of a poem between those boundaries is really how the poet produces most of their skull sweat.

So here are three poems that address the art of telling it not quite like it actually was, in the hopes that it will make a more memorable telling of what is, and that readers will fill in the corners on their own.

The first poem, hopefully, is “applicable” to the dynamic that the next two poems comment more openly on (double switch “poet” for “pitcher” and “reader” for “batter”). Or you can just read it as a baseball poem. It’s interesting that each of the poems have a few precisely worded and somewhat confusing lines – where you actually have to slow down and pay attention to what the poet is actually saying – which in itself is applicable to the overall dynamic.

The Pitcher
Robert Francis

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

**

1129
Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

**

Poetry Is A Kind Of Lying
Jack Gilbert

Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.

Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.

Degas said he didn't paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.

Language

Well, while I’m not a Basic English proponent (here’s a listing of the 850 words which comprise Basic English – please note “Basic” and “English” are not among them) I’m certainly in line with the standard CW philosophy that one ought to use clear and simple English which in some way reflects current usage. For a still quite relevant essay on the political implications of language use, I’d recommend Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

One of the things that contemporary speakers tend to do is use “their/they/them” as a singular, i.e., “I sent a spreadsheet to a representative from the company, and they’re going to respond by Friday.”

Often this is decried as “improper English,” but it’s actually very well established usage. To make a long story short, “proper English grammar” is something that arose in the 18th century, and the formulation of grammatical rules relied heavily on the importation of various Greek and Latin grammatical rules. For many reasons, not the least of which being that English is not an inflected language, this isn’t a good fit. This is brought home particularly forcefully to those who study poetry via classical foot metrics. Speaking of inherited/imported systems, there’s the whole issue of English phonemes and spelling.

Anyway, I’ll just veer away from those soapboxes and refer you to a top level of a site which discusses the their/they/them issue: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html

There’s also a good excerpt from Pinker squirreled away in the site. Pinker was recently taken apart for his book on the blank slate mind, but when he sticks within language and grammar, he’s a great read.

Ruminations

Every so often I like to go through my old files, looking at things to help me gain a perspective on where I was a year ago, two years ago, etc. I came across a copy of my first chapbook, now out of print. In it there’s a poem which has some unexpected resonance for me today.

Although I wrote it in 99, I think, as a poem, it’s still relevant. Some poems begin and end fairly close to you – this is one of those. I’m tempted to explicate, but I think the poem can stand on its own.

I’ll post it here. I had to X out my name though.

Visiting my Grandmother Before Surgery

When I arrive they both try to feed me
rolls and sweets from her unfinished dinner;
she sips ginger ale while my grandfather pops
chunks of pineapple in his mouth.
I lie: say I've eaten, my drive was short, I like her room.

He tells her (best physician voice)
she needs to keep eating, to get ready,
and she pretends not to hear.
Where are my glasses? she asks.

As he turns to look on the counter
she grimaces at me
over her tray of cold potatoes and peas.
He rolls his eyes, says she's always
the center of attention as she fusses
her hospital gown over royal blue blotches,
her harness of tubing and wire.

After the nurse clears the tray,
he sits next to her bed and we watch TV.
I may visit you at my convenience tomorrow,
he says with a wink, absently cleaning her glasses
(which have turned up in her purse).
Eh? she says.
I'm going now, he projects, X is here.
Then go already. . .

As he stoops to kiss her,
Dan Rather reads of King Hussein's impending death
and she confusedly mumbles
Joe, please, come see me. And he,
saying nothing, holds her hand
and their heads bow to each other,
as they had when I was a child sitting between them
while Walter Cronkite signed off
and on a blank screen
white names of American dead scrolled silently,
rose from the black margin
and ascended to nothing,
as though no living voice could accompany them,
as though no living voice were worthy.

Farewell Poetry Month, Farewell

I’m going to close out our national poetry month with some poems that make me smile (various kinds of smiles for various reasons).

Nothing on the poets (some mentioned before) but to say that they’re all still alive. They are the poets of our time and place. If you like anything here – find them. Read them. It’s nice to know the dead ones, but in many ways it’s better to know those who are being shaped by the same forces that are shaping you.

Refrigerator, 1957
Thomas Lux

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles
Billy Collins

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.
"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"
is another one, or just
"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"
"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner,
cross my legs like his, and listen.

The Cusp
Ellen Bryant Voigt

So few birds—the ones that winter through
and the geese migrating through the empty fields,
fording the cropped, knuckled stalks of corn:
all around us, all that's green's suppressed,
and in the brooding wood, the bare trees,
shorn of leaves or else just shy of leaves,
make a dark estate between low clouds
that have the look of stubborn snow.

In a purely scientific exercise—
say you came from the moon, or returned
like Lazarus, blinking from the cave—
you wouldn't know if winter's passed or now beginning.
The bank slopes up, the bank slopes down to the ditch.
Would it help if I said grieving has an end?
Would it matter if I told you this is spring?

I Knew I'd Sing
Heather McHugh

A few sashay, a few finagle.
Some make whoopee, some
make good. But most make
diddly-squat. I tell you this

is what I love about
America---the words it puts
in my mouth, the mouth where once
my mother rubbed

a word away with soap. The word
was cunt. She stuck that bar
of family-size in there
until there was no hole to speak of, so

she hoped. But still
I'm full of it---the cunt,
the prick, short u, short i,
the words that stood

for her and him. I loved
the thing they must have done,
the love they must have made, to make
an example of me. After my lunch of Ivory I said

vagina for a day or two, but knew
from that day forth which word struck home
the more like sex itself.
I knew when I was big I'd sing

a song in praise of cunt---I'd want
to keep my word, the one with teeth in it.
Even after I was raised, I swore
nothing but nothing would be beneath me.

Meditation At Lagunitas
Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided lgiht. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Early In The Morning
Li-Young Lee

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

Topography
Sharon Olds

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly form the left my
moon rising slowly form the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Joys of Quotation

I’ve been lucky enough to have my work (poems and essays) quoted. I admit, freely, that I’m lazy about publication. The majority of my work has been solicited for publication by people who are familiar with it. Sometimes it’s a mainstream subject sought by a mainstream publisher, say, an essay that’s re-published in one of the electronic Nortons. Most of the time though, it’s the quirky and esoteric that I get called about, probably because there’s not a lot written about the quirky and esoteric (or at least those q and e subjects that I write on.) Often these requests and solicitations vanish – someone wants to use a poem in a paper that never materializes, someone else wants to use an essay in a class (which may or may not actually happen.)

I had a nice surprise yesterday when a man wrote me to say that an article he was working on for awhile had been finished and published. He had (over a year ago) requested to use one of my poems in the article, and I didn’t really think he’d ever finish it. The subject is so unusual, I can’t really mention it here. Only a handful of people have written on it in the past 30 years or so (Google brings up 80 hits in English on the subject, 30 of which refer to me or my poem), although the event (and events that led up to it) was quite important, back towards the beginning of the century.

I was particularly pleased because I had made an intuitive leap when I was writing the poem. How to say this? Hmm. The historical event that the poem uses to mobilize its concerns took place after photography was fairly common. During my research, I had read an allusion to something physically odd happening in the course of the event. I ran the scenario through in my mind, and constructed a mental picture of it. I realized that a very noticeable result would have most likely come from this odd physical thing, and I thought, given the morbid nature of humanity, that someone would photograph it. However, I was never able to find a photograph. Nonetheless, when I wrote the poem, I assumed one existed (rather, I assumed the noticeable result existed and that people would flock to view it, but when I was writing I “saw” the photographic image in my head.) Imagine my surprise when the article showed a period photograph of the very thing I had imagined! It was different than what I saw, of course, but I had largely gotten it right, and the small details I took from it were correct. I realize this is all round about, abstract, and moderately geeky, but it’s small things like these that make poetry (and the research) completely worthwhile. Brain-work vindication!

***

BTW – to respond to an e-mail, yeah, that’s me, yeah, my blogging style is very different from both my poetry and my formal writing, and yeah, “surprisingly sloppy” is as good a way as any to describe it. But alas, old friend, dear reader, with the deepest affection I say, “Tough cookies – for I am not writing for you!” LOL!

Random Poetry Observations for Non-Poets

Someone pointed out that my poetry selections were largely about Sex and Death, which in my poetry circle is something of a fond old joke – “Poets write on two subjects, sex and death.” It’s a chestnut, but an insightful one, as the opposite of sex and death would be self/solitude and life, and there are plenty of poems that touch on those themes. In fact, poets (the most interesting poets to read, imop) can generally boil their poetry down to: how we live this life. But Sex and Death sounds more fun, even if it’s so broad a category as to be useless for the purposes of practical analysis. (Quick – think of a novel that does not involve sex (or the opposite of sex) or death (or the opposite of death.)

Another open joke is ‘The Muse,’ which stands in for any personal kind of inspiration, that creative spark, the “why” of your entire poetic endeavor. However, it’s fun to joke about the white armed goddess visiting your apartment. My favorite muse line comes from a fiction writer, Megan Lindholm, “My muse was a fickle bitch: she drank all my wine and gave me two pages a day.”

Note to self: I’d like to write about the process of writing poetry in future post.

**

It’s difficult to generalize about poetry in America because there are so many conflicting schools of thought, so many poetics. Two of the most extreme, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and Neo-Formalism, raise a lot of interesting arguments and points to ponder. Personally, having spent a few years with each one, I have to boil down their complexities to this: despite over a decade of work, neither school has really delivered on its promise of producing interesting, affecting, lasting poems. However, each has had significant impact on the dominant mode of poetry, which is Free Verse.

Free Verse is something of a misnomer. It’s not really free. It’s full of all kinds of subtle constraints. Perhaps the best way to look at it is this – in the smaller more radical poetics, there are usually a few overtly stated (or unstated but prevalent) “rules.” For example, Formalism demands that you write in form – meaning, for most, inherited European forms with a strict meter/rhyme scheme. In these poetics the form (in the broadest sense) is privileged over the content, the “rule” is privileged over the unique merits of any particular poem.

Free Verse turns that on its head. In FV, the content is primary and the form is secondary. This means that you’re “free” to use any poetic device at any time. You’re “free” to vary your line lengths, to establish non-classical rhythms and cadences (or classical ones, for that matter), to use or not use rhyme, to employ or not employ just about anything you please.

But here’s the catch. FV demands that you consider all of these (and more) categories in light of the content. Another way to express this is that each FV poem, given its content, themes, tones, etc., has an “ideal shape” or “perfect form.” Each poem is a unique and individual construct (although one can still group “types” of FV poems broadly).

In Free Verse you are not free to ignore the effects of line breaks. You are not free to use random words. You are not free to write willy-nilly. In short, you are not free to make poor choices. Granted, the poet (or would be poet) is free as an individual to do these things, but will nearly always (one of a few thousand poems might be the exception) produce deeply flawed poems.

This makes Free Verse one of the most demanding, wide-ranging, and subtle art forms.

**

I’ve done a lot of poetry teaching over the past 8 years or so. I’ve taught High School kids, College students, private paying students, public/charity workshops, and have moderated several writing groups and workshops of various levels. I’ve been told my approach is innovative, and have been paid the deep compliment of having former students tell me that certain things I’ve said have stuck with them for years afterward.

I believe you can teach almost anyone to be a better writer than they currently are. I also believe you can teach almost anyone to write poetry of a fairly decent sort. At the same time there are some things you can’t teach but can only hope to nurture, like empathy or the metaphor-making skill. When poets speak of “promising poets” or “natural writers,” they’re usually talking about people who have these more subtle qualities, not someone who has memorized the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics.

The most difficult thing in teaching writing is student resistance, established by their own expectations and lack of writing experience. Many people can’t bear to hear that their own poetry, perfectly clear and deeply affecting to themselves, is obscure and boring to a reader. Many people also can’t accept that it simply takes time and practice (and many flawed poems) to develop poetic skills.

The common argument/assumption must go something like this: I love reading; I am a discerning, penetrating reader who is capable of subtle analysis and insight. I love writing; I have consistently gotten very high grades in school and can express myself cogently. Therefore, I will make an excellent creative writer/poet and will write a fine poem on my first or second try.

Unfortunately, it just does not work that way. Creative writing requires a completely different mental perspective and skills set than exegesis does. Usually, this idea is met with howls of indignation.

To fall back on the musical analogy for illustrative purposes: I love music; I am a discerning, penetrating listener, who can minutely categorize and comment on music all the live long day. I love singing; I sing in the shower and in my car every day, and have been told I have a good voice. Therefore, I will make an excellent musician/vocalist – Hand me the microphone, book the local bar!

Hmm. Think of your 20 favorite vocalists – do think they just followed the above pattern, or do you suspect more might have been involved, say, something along the line of literally thousands of hours of considered practice?

One of the other large pitfalls is those fractious schools of poetry I mentioned earlier. The more radical ones like to suck in converts – and it’s pretty funny to watch the orgies of self-praise that some of them indulge in. It’s tempting to more than a few young would-be poets. I mean, why bother to go through all the hard work of learning to write poetry when you just have to “re-label” what you’re doing right now?

**

Hmm. I’ll close with a poem from Tony Hoagland, which touches on some of these things. It’s funny, touching, and truthful. Hoagland is a Boston based (or was, haven’t checked up on him lately) poet, who by his own admission is perhaps a better essayist than he is a poet. I can’t give Tony the whole hearted endorsement I’ve given the other poets I’ve posted here, but I can recommend him without flinching and his most recent book is better than his first (which does not always happen). I don’t mean to sound down on Hoagland as he is, in a few ways, what I consider to be a solid “journeyman” poet. In some ways he’s also what I consider to be a “gateway” poet, since his poetry is often (Sorry Tony!) prose-like, in that it leans on prose cadences and thus works well “on the page” in a way that the more sonically nimble poems often do not. Hoagland also writes from a “male perspective” and tends to be popular with men who otherwise wouldn’t read poetry.

I think the poem below touches on some basic human dynamics (beyond the overtly stated ones in the close which should touch on the idea of talent and practice fairly obviously) but from a largely male perspective. The situation is funny – yes, but there’s something familiar about a guy like Bruce, specifically in how he reacts to the class and gender dynamics. Hoagland (like any poet worth their salt) uses detail in the most suggestive way possible. We know that Bruce’s girlfriend is wealthy, that her parents' have multiple homes. But even that detail is telling – Bruce does not envision his girlfriend as wealthy, rather, it’s her parents who are wealthy. Bruce is living in a plaster walled apartment (with parents, alone?). At the same time, Bruce is in some way cognizant of his girlfriend’s wealth, as he imagines their future as a “mansion.” We’re not really surprised the girlfriend dumps him (nor is the narrator), but Bruce is. Don’t we know people who do these kind of things?

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

The Women

Girrrl Power. Or Girls X 4.

Dorianne Laux has done it by herself. She was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952 and , as her bio says, “worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988” which she put herself though as a single mom. The thing I like best about Laux’s poetry is her clear intensity. She sees what’s right in front of her. Generally the poems are conversational – they come across as one person speaking to you, not to an audience. “How It Will Happen, When” is my choice of the day – it’s a kicker of a poem, she hooks you in with a little bit of mystery and the end thunks down, as inevitable as an ax. The lines are long – but it’s not prose.

Joan Larkin lives and writes in NYC – she’s one of those quality over quantity poets (we need more of them) who puts out infrequent books. She’s active in gay and lesbian organizations and is often unfairly pigeonholed as “a lesbian poet.” “Inventory” is a poem “about” AIDs . The form is something between a litany and a list. Each separate person listed has their own line. Some of the lines are very long and have to be bent around on the page – the convention for doing this is to indent the bent line. So if you see a line sticking out on the left with a block of “shorter lines” under it, well, usually it’s a very long line. (Formatting didn't work - I'll try them as long lines and see what typepad makes of it.) This poem also has an ending that just cuts at you. I think it took me a few reads to realize that all these people are probably now dead. Very sobering, very sad. Every line begins with the word "one" But I suppose the question is "One what?" - how do you name these people, and what does the name you choose tell you about yourself? Like the Christoper Smart poem I posted earlier, this poem uses an constrasting list of individuals to round out a general class of people. (Smart used a list of specific qualities to flesh out one cat, which stands in for all cats.) It brings home the humanity (good and bad) of all involved, and you get a feel for vast numbers of people - those unnamed in the poem.

Sharon Olds is a poet who lives and dies by her excesses – at times she’s almost a parody of herself, but when she’s on, she’s on. She’s uncomfortably popular for the academics and is absolutely unflinching when it comes to looking at herself and her loved ones. Sometimes poets fall into the regrettable tendency of trying to be nice and admirable in the poems – i.e., they avoid saying anything controversial or too insightful, so not to disturb the reader. This nearly always results in mediocre poems – but it’s nothing you can accuse Olds of. She’s also one of the best public readers I’ve ever heard. I chose “Coming of Age 1966” - certainly a lucid poem, unflinching and therefore self-critical. (I don't want to suggest that there's not an element of fictionalization that happens in even the most "personally based" poems - Who knows if the speaker "is Sharon Olds?" Regardless, I want to express my admiration for the poet who'd construct a speaker like this.)

Lucille Clifton is another famous poet (among poets!). She’s earthy yet intellectual – one of those people who will simply “say it like it is.” She’s also got a foxy sense of humor – I went to one of her readings in Atlanta and she remarked, “I have nothing against white people. Some of my best friends are white people. My daughters married white boys. I let them in the house all the time.” Like her humor the poems open windows to complex vistas, often looking out over the landscape of gender, race, culture, and religion – which Clifton has the self-restraint not to walk through and labor over. Sometimes the reader has to do things on their own. I chose her most well known poem, “Homage to My Hips.” Perfectly lucid. You can hear her read the poem via this link.

HOW IT WILL HAPPEN, WHEN
Dorianne Laux

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,
the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,
half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry
anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear
and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,
and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be
different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows
shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax
on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird
spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,
for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before
gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:
flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word
you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is
and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language.
Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's
when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not
coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

Inventory
Joan Larkin

One who lifted his arms with joy, first time across the finish line
at the New York marathon, six months later a skeleton
falling from threshold to threshold, shit streaming from
his diaper,
one who walked with a stick, wore a well-cut suit to the opera,
to poetry readings, to mass, who wrote the best long poem
of his life at Roosevelt Hospital and read it on television,
one who went to 35 funerals in 12 months,
one who said I'm sick of all you AIDS widows,
one who lost both her sisters,
one who said I'm not sure that what he and I do is safe, but we're
young, I don't think we'll get sick,
one who dying said They came for me in their boat, they want me
on it, and I told them Not tonight, I'm staying here with James,
one who went to Mexico for Laetrile,
one who went to California for Compound Q,
one who went to Germany for extract of Venus' flytrap,
one who went to France for humane treatment,
one who chanted, holding hands in a circle,
one who ate vegetables, who looked in a mirror and said
I forgive you.
one who refused to see his mother,
one who refused to speak to his brother,
one who refused to let a priest enter his room,
one who did the best paintings of his life and went home from
his opening in a taxi with twenty kinds of flowers,
one who moved to San Francisco and lived two more years,
one who married his lover and died next day,
one who said I'm entirely filled with anger,
one who said I don't have AIDS, I have something else,
one with night sweats, nausea, fever, who worked as a nurse,
one who kept on studying to be a priest,
one who kept on photographing famous women,
one who kept on writing vicious reviews,
one who kept going to AA meetings till he couldn't walk,
one whose son came just once to the hospital,
one whose mother said This is God's judgment,
one whose father held him when he was frightened,
one whose minister said Beth and her lover of twelve years were
devoted as Ruth and Naomi,
one whose clothes were thrown in the street, beautiful shirts and
ties a neighbor picked from the garbage and handed out at
a party,
one who said This room is a fucking prison,
one who said They're so nice to me here,
one who cut my hair and said My legs bother me,
one who couldn't stand, who said I like those earrings,
one who with a tube in his chest, who asked What are you eating?
one who said How's your writing? Are you moving to the
mountains? who said I hope you get rich,
One who said Death is transition,
one who was doing new work, entirely filled with anger,
one who wanted to live till his birthday, and did.

Coming of Age 1966
Sharon Olds

When I came to sex in full, not sex
by fits and starts, but day and night,
when I lived with him, I thought I'd go crazy
with shock and awe. In Latin class
my jaw would drop when I would remember
the night, the morning, the in the out the
in, the long torso of the beloved
lowered lifted lowered. When he wasn't
there, when he worked 36 On,
8 Off, 36 On, 8 Off,
I'd sit myself down to memorize Latin
so as not to go mad--my brain felt like a
planet gone oval, wobbling out of
orbit, pulling toward a new ellipsis,
I learned a year of Latin in a month,
aced the test, made love, wept, when he was
working all night I'd believe that a burglar might
actually be climbing the wall outside my window,
palm to the stone rosette, toe on the
granite frond, like the prowler who'd scaled the first
storey next door, been peeled from the wall
and kicked in the head. And every time
I tried to write a love poem,
giving the lovers their flesh on the page,
the child with her clothes burned off by napalm
ran into the poem screaming. I was
a Wasp child of the suburbs, I felt
cheated by Lyndon Johnson, robbed of my
entrance into the erotic, my birthright
of ease and joy. I understood
almost nothing of the world, but I knew that I was
connected to the girl running, her arms
out to the sides, like a plucked heron, I was
responsible for her, and helpless to reach her,
like the man on the sidewalk, his arms up
around his head, and all I did
was memorize Latin, and make love, and sometimes
march, my heart aching with righteousness.

Homage to my Hips
Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Three Fun Pieces of Mouth Candy

Mixed Bag of Poets

I had started to write a long post, touching on poetry in America, the general poetic stereotypes, the factionalism of the various poetic schools and the division between literary critics and poets. I’ll probably post that at some time, because I’d like to have a record of my thoughts on these matters. However, it’s a subject that I’ve thought so much about (and written so much about elsewhere) that it bores me – actually writing on it is a chore.

So I’ll blow off that personal assignment and turn (yea!) to poetry itself.

I’m glad that people are enjoying the poems, but someone wrote me and pointed out that I have two male poets, but no female poets. (Look for the Bishop poem!) I already had some poets queued up for today who happen to be male, but tomorrow I’ll post some living-chick poems, which is certainly not hard to do given the number of excellent women poets writing today. I don’t think I’ll post a lot of poetry beyond the end of April, so I’ll try to catch some good ones before then.

Three poems. The first is by Thomas Lux. Lux is something of a sleeper – he’s not an active climber of the social poetry ladder, he just keeps churning out good work. This isn’t to say that Lux hasn’t received his share of accolades. Lux’s poetry is generally tonally edgy – black humor-ish, bitingly sardonic, ironic. He seldom writes in the first person, and his subject matter ranges perhaps more than any other contemporary poet I can easily think of. The speakers in his poems are generally complex, often mouthing arguments that the reader should see clearly through. I’ve chosen “Sex in History,” which is a sociological/political poem. It should function as “lucid” poetry.

Gerald Stern’s poem, “Behaving Like a Jew,” is another social/political poem. Stern’s poetry tends to have a kind of Whitmanesque, running sentence structure. He tends to locate himself very strongly in the poems and make a lot of declarative statements. Contrast this to Lux, who’ll tell you just as much about “what he thinks” without using an “I”. Both approaches are very difficult to actually pull off, but I think each works in the poems below. I'm not sure this poem is perfectly "lucid" - there are some movements, some phrases, which function something like neologisims. But on the whole I think it's clear enough for any reader.

The last poem is by Robert Hayden, another social/political poem – an homage to Frederick Douglass. This poem has sense of “high” or classical oratory to it, and while all three are sonically deft and fun to read, Frederick Douglass is probably the most accessible mouth candy. If read this aloud and don't feel the impulse to read it again, then again, well, I fear for your soul.

I'll resist the temptation to talk about these three poets as people (Robert Hayden, alas, is dead.) But let's just say that they're (were) good and quirky guys - it's hard to be an asshole and write anything like the following poems.

A quick word for any and all non poet types: the easiest way to deal with the line breaks in almost all of the poems I’ve posted is to give the final word of the line a bit more stress than you normally would, followed by a slight (every so slight) pause. The idea is not to “chant” the poem – the voice should sound conversational, not tortured. But if you were giving the poem as “an oral argument” and weren’t sure just which elements to place stress on, the linebreaks can often guide you. For example, in the first poem, the first two breaks might give you slight stress – but the third and fourth picks up a good deal of stress, which helps establish and reinforce the tone. There are a lot of different theories on, and strategies for, lineation, but the above should give you a workable quick and dirty handle on things.

Also, no one ever gets a poem inflection-perfect on the first go through. Stumbling, odd emphasis, running out of breath are all normal. Usually you have to read a poem at least twice to make sure you anticipate what shifts there are. It's just like reading a monologue in a play.

Here's a brain tease: Poems (like music) exist best in the mouth and ear – the poem on the page (just like sheet music, or a play on the page) could be viewed either a record of what was said, or a plan someone can follow to activate the poem.

Sex in History
Thomas Lux

Only the Pope partook, the cardinals, priests, monks,
and nuns, it seems,
when you read the revisions. How the peasantry
reproduced itself despite
the bans is a mystery: no sex
on Thursday, the day of Christ's arrest,
Friday to honor His death,
Saturday in honor of His Mom,
Sunday, He has risen,
Mondays to honor all who have not risen. . .
It seems, given festivals and fasts
around Easter, Pentecost, Xmas,
that there were two to three days a year for sex if:
1) You did not enjoy it.
2) It was conceptual, heterosexual, man and wife, man
on top. Chronic
food shortages were make more bearable
by penitential fasting (bread
and water) for infractions: 7 days
for wet dreams, 20 days
for masturbation, 2 years
for interfemoral connection (penis
between thighs of passive partner). . . .
And despite inbreeding
as an offshoot of snobbery, the nobility
did not believe the priests either
which is why today there are so many sterile, dumb,
educated, and vacantly lovely humans
sitting in outdoor cafes
along the famous shopping boulevards.
Sex was sex: flesh
to flesh, eons of it, say one thing,
do another -- fast, furtive,
fearful and God
was always watching,
with His big wide eyes,
watching what He had made.

BEHAVING LIKE A JEW
Gerald Stern

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds -- just
seeing him there -- with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
-- I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

Frederick Douglass
Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the guady mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Stanley Kunitz

Another poet for poetry month, another 3 poems.

Stanley Kunitz is another older American poet. Born in 1905, he’s still kicking, still writing poetry. In his 99 years, he’s served as our Poet Laureate and has a wealth of honors. Not bad for a Harvard alum who was flatly told to his face he wouldn’t be back to teach there because he was Jewish. Stanley splits his time between Provincetown and NYC, where he helped found Poet’s House. It’s easy to find Kunitz books in libraries – he has a wonderful collected book of poetry. Although part of me just wants to stick with the poems themselves, I have to stay that Stanley is just one of the few beautiful human beings I have had the privilege to meet. To know him is to love him.

He’s one of our most important poets – one of the few mystic poets our country has produced. The ones I’ve chosen for today aren’t so much in the mystic vein.

“The Testing-Tree” might violate my “lucidity” rule somewhat. It’s “about” his imagination and experiences as a boy, but contains dreamlike sequences which might throw some readers. I love the little Rousseau-like bargain with the stones and the tree, and the last 9 lines still cut me when I read them. They’re worth the price of admission.

“Robin Redbreast” is something of a sadder poem – but I’d like to include it here for an important reason. The best poems (it seems to me) have a kind of metaphorical applicability to them. That’s to say the entire poem functions as a metaphor, but the metaphor isn’t reductively nailed down. “Robin Redbreast” might stand in for any situation in which we’re mislead and helpless, in which our sense of power and ability is taken away from us by “greater events” or elements over which we have no control.

We'll close with “Touch Me,” which should be completely lucid – it’s a wonderfully fresh and mature love lyric.

The Testing-Tree

1

On my way home from school
up tribal Providence Hill
past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
I scuffed in the drainage ditch
among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
rolled out of glacial time
into my pitcher's hand;
then sprinted lickety-
split on my magic Keds
from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
with my flying skin
as I poured it on
for the prize of the mastery
over that stretch of road,
with no one no where to deny
when I flung myself down
that on the given course
I was the world's fastest human.


2

Around the bend
that tried to loop me home
dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
riddled with rabbit-life
where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
and a stringy old lilac
more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
remembered a door in the
long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
brushing the stickseed off,
wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel's hair,
spotting the print of the deer
and the red fox's scats.
Once I owned the key
to an umbrageous trail
thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
gave me right of passage
as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massassoit
soundlessly heel-and-toe
practicing my Indian walk.


3

Past the abandoned quarry
where the pale sun bobbed
in the sump of the granite,
past copperhead ledge,
where the ferns gave foothold,
I walked, deliberate,
on to the clearing,
with the stones in my pocket
changing to oracles
and my coiled ear tuned
to the slightest leaf-stir.
I had kept my appointment.
There I stood in the shadow,
at fifty measured paces,
of the inexhaustible oak,
tyrant and target,
Jehovah of acorns,
watchtower of the thunders,
that locked King Philip's War
in its annulated core
under the cut of my name.
Father wherever you are
I have only three throws
bless my good right arm.
In the haze of afternoon,
while the air flowed saffron,
I played my game for keeps--
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life--
after the trials of summer.

4

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl's face
and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
I pass through the cardboard doorway
askew in the field
and peer down a well
where an albino walrus huffs.
He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
staining the water yellow,
why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
That single Model A
sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
where the tanks maneuver,
revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones!

Robin Redbreast

It was the dingiest bird
you ever saw, all the color
washed from him, as if
he had been standing in the rain,
friendless and stiff and cold,
since Eden went wrong.
In the house marked FOR SALE,
where nobody made a sound,
in the room where I lived
with an empty page, I had heard
the squawking of the jays
under the wild persimmons
tormenting him.
So I scooped him up
after they knocked him down,
in league with that ounce of heart
pounding in my palm,
that dumb beak gaping.
Poor thing! Poor foolish life!
without sense enough to stop
running in desperate circles,
needing my lucky help
to toss him back into his element.
But when I held him high,
fear clutched my hand,
for through the hole in his head,
cut whistle-clean . .
through the old dried wound
where the hunter's brand
had tunneled out his wits
I caught the cold flash of the blue
Unappeasable sky.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Jack Gilbert

Here are three poems by Jack Gilbert. Jack's an older poet, but still living. If you like these, you can find a good collected book of poems called The Great Fires which is still in print. Jack’s famous, but only to poets. He won the Yale in 1962 for his first book Views of Jeopardy, from which I have selected “The Abnormal Is Not Courage.” The poem is an exploration of courage and features his particularly deft handling of shorter sentences and fragments in a halting but powerful progression. It’s one of those poems I read every year. “Married” is an elegy for his wife Michiko Nogami. It’s a later poem, full of a deep emotion, but very restrained on the surface. “Married” is only four sentences long, but it captures the entire process of grief. “The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart” was written even later in his career and combines the elements of the first two into what I believe is a mature, accessible style.

I think all three poems are more or less transparent (though complex!) and should get your brain and you emotions churning. These are not poems you read and then ask, "What are they about?" You just dive into what they are about. Again, meant to be read aloud, you do yourself a disservice if you don’t at least whisper them at your monitor.

I had the good fortune to meet Jack after a reading he gave at an ivy league school. I was a sophomore attending a nearby mid-sized liberal arts college, and had gone to the reading with a few of my friends. Somehow we got up the guts to ask him out to a bar after the reading. He dithered a bit, explaining he’d love to go but he had a dinner to attend and a speech to give. Lucky for us, a black-clad ivy boy slid up and tried to ask Jack (no shit) if he thought his work was too hermeneutically inviting via his use of classical allusion; should he not actively resist such pre-determinacy? We got Jack (and his notebooks) to ourselves for the next six hours. He missed both the dinner and the speech. I’ve hung out with a lot of older poets before – but Jack was certainly the most generous, the most entertaining. He actually asked our opinions about poems in progress and debated our proposed changes with us, pimply undergrads that we were.

Second (and much better) story about Jack. Apparently, he was giving a reading somewhere (I’ve been told in Pittsburgh) when a man entered a bit late. He stood in the back of the auditorium, wearing a black overcoat and not visibly reacting. It made Jack a hair nervous, but he continued with the reading. When he was finished, the usual line formed of people wanting to go down to the front and say hello. The man in the black coat strode down the line and walked right up to Jack. He looked him in the eye and said in a quiet but firm voice, “I just wanted you to know, your poetry saved my life.” Then he turned and walked out, apparently not wanting to explain things further.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
reporting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Poetry Month

I keep starting blog entries on poetry, but they keep spiraling out of control. There's simply so much there.

In part I had wanted to discuss why poetry is not read in America. The quick and dirty version of my analysis is simply that I blame the schools and the literary critics. I think people are socialized out of poetry in secondary schools, largely because they’re taught that a poem is a) a puzzle to be solved, and b) that they’re usually wrong about "getting" the poem, or "getting" what “the poet was trying to say.” Poetry is taught to be intimidating, esoteric, and largely not relevant to “the now.”

One of my ‘clarifying moments’ came when I used that awful phrase in my Jr. year High School class – “I think that Whitman was trying to say, X.” My very formidable teacher looked at me and said, “Mr. Scoplaw, I think that Whitman was trying to say this - ” He then recited the poem to me, word perfect. Then he paused and said, “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but it’s important to understand. What he was trying to say was probably what he actually wrote. He is, after all, one of the great poets for a reason.” Ting! The light goes on.

In honor of poetry month, I’d like to post some poems that “say what they say.” Now, this is not to imply these poems are not craftworthy – that each and every word has not been carefully chosen in relation to its neighbors per Coleridge’s famous definition of poetry as “The best words in their best order” (as opposed to prose, which is merely "words in their best order"). I also don’t mean to imply that by being straightforward, these poems are not intellectually challenging, or spiritually resonant. A poem can be fantastically complex and utterly transparent to the reader at the same time. Of course, this is difficult to do and risks a certain kind of failure on the poet's part. This may be why (to crib a friend’s cribbed phrase) all to often it seems like some poets “are more worried about being understood than being misunderstood.”

Bishop is a poet who is not afraid to be understood. The Filling Station (below) is one of my favorite Bishop poems. She displays a great eye for detail – those details are perfectly chosen to help us flesh out the image of the filling station in our mind. I’m also drawn to the voice in this poem, which is in some ways characteristic of Bishop’s later, more mature voice. It’s “ironic” in the sense that it holds conflicting emotions in it, detachment, engagement, dismissal, admiration. The voice seems warm and genuine, colloquially American, and inquisitive. (For those of you who are interested in writing, you might want to examine how she pulls off the trick of making it seem like the voice is "in the moment" - that the speaker's realizations occur as the narrative progresses.)

Poems like these are national treasures. Or international treasures. They take three minutes to read and can stay with you for a lifetime. They can be read by anyone, transported across borders, and once you have it, no one can take it from you, although you can freely give it away.

Filling Station
Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color-
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Just Another Asshole Until He Kills Someone

Busy days.

I took out the mountain bike on Friday after work for a final field test. I decided to do a few trails up by the reservoir – and the bike worked almost flawlessly. Except for the tire bursting thing – which resulted in the scraped shoulder blade from a lovely head first roll. But any day you keep your spine intact is a good one I think.

When I got home I swapped out the wheel with another – and presto! the bike was good to go.

I’ll have to re-evaluate my thinking on mountain bikes. I’m really enjoying this one, particularly the dual suspension – more on that in a bit.

Saturday morning I went tag-saling. I picked up a few domestic and kitcheny odds and ends I’ll need when I move into what I’m already thinking of as “the law school palace.” One house was particularly depressing – I’m not sure what the story was, but the house was a ranch in which everything was being sold by someone who didn’t live there. It looked like an adult and at least one child lived there. The basement was packed with literally hundreds of books (most on sociology) and had a few bicycles propped on the rear wall. Normally, that would be something of a gold mine for me, but I’m already feeling my brain shifting into its more academic mode, and all I could think of was how much those books and bikes would weigh, how much of a pain it would be to arrange storage of all my things, how I was already well stocked in these areas, etc. Still – there were all those books. So I started pulling a few from the shelves – when I switched to a new shelf, I looked down at what I had chosen: “Z is for Zachariah” (From O’Brien, who also authored the excellent “Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH”), “1984,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “A Civil Action” – all of which I had already read, and all of which have a decidedly depressing effect on me. I put the books down and left.

**

Later that morning, I decided to take the bike out again, this time to the Hop River trail. To get there, I have to bike though a moderately busy area – although there is one nice one way access road that takes you out of the bustle of traffic. The access road is fairly wide to allow for parking and I rode down it close to the right side curb, glorying in the bike absorbing the pot holes, but wishing I could get some real road traction. I saw a flash of sunlight off metal in my peripheral vision and heard someone give a prolonged honk just behind and to the left of me.

When something like this happens (assuming you’ve been biking long enough to encounter this type of thing) your brain kicks into a different gear. You don’t consciously think – “Well, there might be a car that’s going to hit me any second, and if I leap up on the curb and cut even further to my right, the worst that can possibly happen is I’ll cut off a possible bicyclist behind me, who would either brake or also cut to the right – but even so, it’s the correct thing to do, even if I lose control of the bike and donate some skin to the bicycle gods.” But that complete scenario just pops into your head.

So I unweighted the bike, hauled the wheel right, hoped the rear tire would hold on the sand, lifted the front wheel just over the curb, pronged the back wheel into it, and, now on the sidewalk, swerved past a parked car that would block me from the possibly out of control car behind me. I shot a look over my shoulder and I see this guy tooling down the right-center of the road. He had more than enough road width to pass me on the left, but apparently that would have been beneath his dignity or something.

But it gets much better. He immediately slows down and makes a right (ahead of me) into the parking lot of an antiquarian bookstore. Normally, I have a good deal of patience for people who patronize independent bookstores, but let’s just say I wasn’t feeling very appreciative of this guy’s economic choices at that particular moment.

All bicyclists know that you seldom have a chance to confront misguided motorists, and those chances are not to be passed up. Granted, you have to keep your head (I generally pass imparting any kind of wisdom to the thuggish or possibly armed.) I pulled up next to his car (about 8 feet away) and waited for him to get out. He very leisurely drank some bottled water, made a notation in a book, then climbed out of the car and looked right at me. “You know,” I said, “honking when you’re right behind a cyclist is an excellent way to cause an accident – some cyclists might have swerved right into the path of your car.” He smirked at me and said, “I’ll be it is,” then turned sharply and walked toward the book store.

So what’s to make of this? I don’t think an over-legislated society is something I’d like to see – but the price of that is dealing with people, who, for whatever reason, engage in potentially destructive behavior that they can’t be called on. No harm, no independent witness, no foul, right? Perhaps I’ll have more knowledge about this kind of thing in 3 years or so. However, I can easily picture this guy honking at cyclists for the hell of it – which could well result into someone going down, or veering off the road into a tree (collarbones and skulls), or panicking and looking over their shoulder which would pull their bike into the path of the oncoming car, etc. One way or another, in my book this guy is just another asshole until he kills someone.

**

The rest of the day went much better. I rode solo and did the first loop of the trail (it’s part of the Rails to Trails program.) It seems like spring is finally coming to New England – the air is warmer and smells of growing things. I saw a garden snake, a few chipmunks, a turkey, two deer, and the usual legion of squirrels.

I also spent some time on a hillside composing poetry (how romantic – blah). I figured I should eventually post up a poem or two of my own to the blog, and this one seems to fit what I’m looking for in an “introductory” poem. I tend to write in three or four modes, having made the tour of contemporary aesthetics. I started as a more or less a language poet, meandered through neo-formalism, and wound up embracing a particularly lucid sub-genre of the Iowa School which meshed with my own ideas about clarity, accessibility, and sonic texturing. The following is a short lyric, meant to be read aloud. There’s a lot of “ear rhyme” in this one – meaning, sonic correlation that’s not necessarily visually apparent. I tend to favor assonance and slant rhyme in my poetry. My syntax is generally muscular – meaning that it’ll usually take the reader two passes to catch (hopefully) the tone of the poem, and how each phrase interacts (in a rhythmic sense) with it’s neighbors. For the grammar mavens out there, yes, the poem contains sentence fragments. Hopefully what the poem is “about” is clear enough; it’s about what it “talks” about. No need for deep mysteries or bamboozling the reader with a bunch of highflown nonsense.

That on which, once, the movies were played

was not some magic substance – the drive-in screen –
just trussed I-beams fronted by a wooden lattice
over which was nailed plywood painted white,
a shell now sloughed off. Windflung timbers
are half sunk into the sandy lot, thick with birches.
The bones of a leviathan of fantasy,
over which the beetles make their way
into the glass strewn grasses.
The celluloid dims in memory, flickers,
and is forgotten. The decade-old ticket stubs:
cosigned to trash, without which
someone forgets that once
upon this screen was Paris,
the most improbable kiss.

**

Saturday evening was spent having dinner with J and H and getting my ass kicked, as usual, in Scrabble. H is my regular Scrabble goddess. J is a nutritionist who thinks little or nothing of discussing just what happens to the food you’re eating (at that moment) when it hits your colon. Which makes her a very odd dinner companion, but a very amusing one in crowded restaurants.

**

Sunday morning, I got up early and biked to meet H for breakfast at our fav. local breakfast place. H and I went to High School together, along with our waiter Flamboyant-J. Flam-J is great – he openly mocks customers he dislikes and picks out choice coffee-mugs for us from their mix-n-match collection. We got into a long discussion on Shakespeare and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations. I have a theory on KB’s films, which I will share. I call it Scoplaw’s Kenneth Branagh Nipple Theory – namely any movie which KB directs and exposes his nipples in is just a vehicle for his middle-aged ego, and hence a bad film. Frankenstein: nipples = bad film. Henry V: no nipples: good film. Hamlet: nipples = bad film. Much Ado About Nothing: no nipples = good film. I think it’s seamless. I don’t think anyone bought it though.

The rest of Sunday (today) was spent on the bicycle (mountain bike again). H and I did 28 miles and made a noteworthy and disastrous departure from the trail, which I’m afraid I’ll have to take full blame for. It took us awhile to get back on the trail.

I’m starting to feel the winter rust, to say nothing of my longer standing and medically-driven slothfullness, coming off. Sometime during the summer, I’d like to make a Hartford to Providence run.

Album of the evening (which further dates myself) – Bim Skala Bim, “Live at the Paradise.” There's an MP3 of "Paraguayan Sun" from that album here.

The Sanity of Cats

Today we had a lot of early morning fog and mist in Central CT. Which is the worst driving condition to be found here – largely because in snowy or black ice conditions, you’ll never find yourself stuck behind a school bus or a manure tractor on a state route.

Last night we had a ton of rain – heavy unrelenting rain with thunder and lighting. Normally I like storms, but only when they’re in sharp contrast to the rest of the week’s weather. My cat, however, does not like storms. Any kind of rainstorm makes her edgy and irritable. I wonder if she has sinus problems or had cracked a bone as a kitten. When she was little she was always climbing things – in fact, she was picked from her littermates in an adoption shelter because she was the feistiest, most exploring kitten of the bunch.

I am certainly a cat person, although not a militant one. My childhood friends had dogs and my parents got one (a golden retriever) when I was in High School. I like dogs, but find them too high-maintenance for my life. I don’t think a dog would enjoy me going to LS. My cat will eat it up though. I’ll be reading at home a lot, which will give her the opportunity to hang out and supervise this kind of activity. When I compose poetry, I do the vast majority of it aloud (there really is no other way for me) – and when I edit, I do much of that entirely aloud. There is no better way to spot weak words, sloppy constructions, or to prompt a modification that reinforces or brings out a sonic pattern.
(As an aside I find sonic strings in my raw prose all the time now – say, the assonance of “little/kitten/litter” prompting the on-the-fly choice of “picked” over “chosen.” As a further aside, I spend much of my workday editing technical environmental engineering reports – so I’d hope that I’m moderately well-braced for legal writing and have a separate “mental compartment” ready to go. That said, much technical/legal writing seems to be a pointless exercise in avoiding terms – but how difficult it is to demolish a text?)
In any event, I expect that I’ll be spending lots of time reading legal briefs aloud to my cat which I’ll expect she’ll love just as much as the poetry.

I expect she’ll help keep me sane too – in the sense that cats have their routine and I won’t be allowed to work straight though her feeding time. Nor will I be allowed to skimp on the evening head rubbing activities.

I’ll copy three of my favorite cat poems below. It would be easy to spend hours on the technical nuances of each, but to keep my comments broad:

The first is a translation of the Old Irish (9c.) manuscript poem, “Pangur Ban” by Frank O'Connor. It was most likely written by an Irish Monk, and describes the relationship between a scholar and his cat. It’s a light, playful poem, one which picks up a lot of energy from the back and forth comparison of the scholar’s work and the cat’s work. In some cases the comparison is obvious – in others, the poet gains a nice reflexive quality (for example, implying that the work of the scholar is at once sustenance, play, and destructive of its object.) I have done my own translation (there are hundreds –it’s a very popular one to work on), but well, I think I’ll wait on my own poetry a bit.

The second is a translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Cats” – I am unsure of the translator of this version (web-plucked). The poem, I think, captures the wonderful self-containment of cats. Usually an ode is a sustained poem of praise - how appropriate that Neruda simply gets to the point, as do cats.

The third is a passage from the manuscript Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart. Smart led a difficult life – JA was written in the 1750s or 60s when he was committed for mania: he would pray spontaneously, loudly, and publicly. Johnson had this to say of Smart: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it." The JA wasn’t published until 1954. It’s an amazing and difficult poem – a true neglected masterwork. The first link up above will take you to a copy on the web. I’m sure some will find the religious tone off putting, but I’d urge "the lay reader" (a.k.a. not-poets) to stick with the poem, or at least skip along to whatever catches your eye. The poem seems headlong, but Smart displays a carefully considered and deep love of life and the world (when he’s not peering off into the mists of named allusion.)

The passage I’ll include below is about his cat Jeoffry – it’s a cataloguing masterwork, in which the poet deftly shifts and changes the categories in through which he considers his cat – and all of them turn in some way on his religious conviction, which, of course, reflects his own condition. Smart has a true poet’s eye for particularity – and it’s easy to sense the joy that Jeoffry’s freedom brought him in his confinement.

I'll close with my usual injunction to read aloud. It's worth it.

“Pangur Ban” trans. as “The Scholar and His Cat”

Each of us pursues his trade,
I and Pangur my comrade,
His whole fancy on the hunt,
And mine for learning ardent.

More than fame I love to be
Among my books and study,
Pangur does not grudge me it,
Content with his own merit.

When a heavenly time! we are
In our small room together
Each of us has his own sport
And asks no greater comfort.

While he sets his round sharp eye
On the wall of my study
I turn mine, though lost its edge,
On the great wall of knowledge.

Now a mouse drops in his net
After some mighty onset
While into my bag I cram
Some difficult darksome problem.

When a mouse comes to the kill
Pangur exults, a marvel!
I have when some secret's won
My hour of exultation.

Though we work for days and years
Neither the other hinders;
Each is competent and hence
Enjoys his skill in silence.

Master of the death of mice,
He keeps in daily practice,
I too, making dark things clear,
Am of my trade a master.

Ode To Cats

There was something wrong with the animals:
their tails were too long and they had
unfortunate heads.
Then they started coming together,
little by little
fitting together to make a landscape,
developing birthmarks, grace, pep.
But the cat,
only the cat
turned out finished,
and proud:
born in a state of total completion,
it sticks to itself and knows
exactly what it wants.

Excerpt from Jubilate Agno

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--
Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

Poetry

I suppose I need to start saying something about the whole poetry thing.

Poetry is an art - but it's also, like music or painting, a way of life, or a profession to some few. I think this conception of poetry as a way of living (thought to be exclusionary) is probably why so many of my friends are having difficulty with the idea of my going to Law School. Oddly enough, the more experienced poets that I know all think it's a great idea. Granted, there might be some vicarious motivation in that sentiment, but I do think that the more one grows into poetry, the more one is freed from it.

Let's put it this way - in poetry (and probably most "consuming" activities or disciplines) there's a beginning phase where the fledgling poet eagerly embraces writing, but does not really know what the hell they’re doing. They might show immense promise, and might have a natural talent for certain things. Beginners often make odd or unusual choices that work sometimes in isolation. Some people never leave this stage – they are content with their “creativeness” and their poems.

Others start to realize that a good poem is more than a random collection of individual "good things." The poem as a whole has to be a "good thing," which requires picking up “rules” and structure (poetics) to help make small choices that work locally and are harmonious with the greater intent of each poem. (I’m trying to keep this very general and simple to account for the various aesthetic schools of poetry. These stages aren’t inevitable, and there are dozens of little plateaus your skill and understanding can stake out camp on.)

By the time they start to think about the rules actively shaping their poems, they're into the intermediate phase. While being closer to the end state, intermediate poets are often enough, simply boring. They're bound by rules (whichever those may be) and tend to write "safe" poems in an accepted mode. Their criticism is also usually pretty boring and full of bizarre prejudices - they often simply point out things that they feel conform or fail to conform to the set of rules they're struggling to master: "I don't know about 'The Fish' by Bishop - she did use the same noticeable word twice in close proximity."

Then, usually after at least 5 years of few years of writing and thinking about poetry, in one magic poem, you internalize ”the rules.” You're no longer bound by them in the sense that you think of them consciously as you write. Instead, they have solidified into a background pattern that you're working in front of. There's still "work" required for each poem, but it's drastically less work. Your understanding of the craft and your place within it allows you to begin again. Your subject matter frees up, you regain a huge amount of flexibility, you become self-aware as a poet. You understand just why Bishop used "wallpaper" twice - because in the matrix of that particular poem, there is no better way to do it. (Simple to state, difficult to understand fully in the context of alternate choices).

Having been in this place for awhile, I know that nothing can take poetry from me - that I can't be socialized or professionalized out of it (or in an odd, non-logical extension, “myself”). It is, as Hayden wrote of freedom, "as necessary as air." So I’m not really afraid of Law School “sucking out my soul” or changing who I am.

Somewhere, I’m sure that’s prompting a lot of head shaking.

I realize LS is going to be an intense experience, one which will have vast social pressure to conform to a median. But I’ve endured vast social pressure before (including death threats at my undergrad school due to my politics and, believe it or not, hair style). I think that retaining my perspective won’t be too difficult as I’ll be a slightly older/non-traditional student looking in. I’ve done the intense self-examination, I’ve had the life shaking experiences, I’ve seriously considered issues from all different perspectives. I’ve judged myself, favorably and unfavorably, and I know what I want and what I don’t want.

I also understand that I’m a beginner – that I may be randomly insightful, but I won’t have any idea what the hell I’m talking about (on legal subjects) until I learn those deep rules and patterns. And I’ll have faith that even if I feel constrained and overwhelmed by those patterns, even if I feel that they’re pointless and stifling, that I’ll be able to eventually digest them – and to keep myself moving.

I haven’t yet decided if I would post any of my own poetry to the blog. Probably. We’ll see. But I’d like to turn to this poem by Whitman. (Always read poetry aloud, Aloud, ALOUD – because it is made, consciously shaped, for the mouth and ear, not the eye):

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself;
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near—for I knew I could not;
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away—and I have placed it in sight in my room;
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them;)
Yet it remains to me a curious token—it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,
I know very well I could not.

There’s something very human and bittersweetly affirmative about this poem. The fourth line is almost a joke – you can hear the speaker expecting us to at least smile at his audacity as he says it. Yet at the same time, it’s appropriate – why not celebrate one’s self, or celebrate “the human” as something as magnificent as the growing tree? Why reserve our praise for other things?

Whitman then turns quickly to the difference between the tree and himself – namely, that he’s human, that needs others.

In many ways LS is going to dictate many of these others, these friends and lovers – who you interact with, how much time you have to interact with them, etc. And I think it (from all I've read) can often be a threat to one's humanity, one's connectedness with others.

I suppose I'm going into this with a kind of bunker mentality. But I never wanted to be "a law student" - I want to be a man who can (and will) practice law. Learning the rules is a means to an end.