TED BURKE, like it or not

Defending John Updike

2012-01-27T07:45:00.000-08:00

Writer Katie Roiphe does a wonderful job of defending the late novelist John Updike againstthe onslaught of posthumous nay saying regarding his reputation in her current piece in Slate. Cheap shots , sheessentially declares, quoting the more notable snipers like David Foster Wallace and James Wood. Thebiggest complaint isn’t that Updike wrote badly; in fact he is pilloried forwriting too well, too often. Roiphe puts the lie to the accusations. Another charge is that the departed novelist wrote the same novel over and over,for decades, decorating his narrownessin ornate language; the sheer perfumearound the prose was meant to distract us from the paucity of ideas, the lackof variety. One wonders how much Updike these critics have read. There areadvantages to reading deeply, and slowly.

Updike has writtennovels that resemble one another in many respects over the years, but this notissuing the same novel "over and over". I would say that he isthematically less repetitive than Philip Roth, who is often cited as theAmerican writer most likely to be our next Nobel Laureate in literature. Updikehas themes and ideas that he works in his many novels and short storycollections, but there are usually new variations, nuance, new ironies toexperience. Most good novelists you can name do this, Updike, though, wasespecially keen at setting his ideas--spiritual aridity, infidelity, the denialof death through manic activity and material acquisition , the eventual ironyas Life trudges forward unmindful of character pride or expectations--in settingsone would associate with him.

The astonishing thing about Updike is how much and how oftenhe experimented with form and subject, purposefully and with success strayingfrom the nice little container his critics try to place him in. We can also had"Gertrude and Claudius", his lively prequel to "Hamlet","Terrorist", an especially intense character study of anAmerican-born jingoistic, and "Brazil", a favorite of mine, an inspiredturn at Magic Realism. These novels, as well the novels “The Coup”, “Witches of Eastwick”, and “Seek My Face” , demonstratean impressive range for any novelists, regardless of how high their currentliterary stock might happen to be. An especially irksome , which is to say knee-jerk charge leveled against the novelist is that he is an egotist and an unreconstructed narcissist , someone who fashioned a high literary style to glide through a narrow range of matters that reflects a self absorption bordering on psychological defect. That charge essentially consists that Updike failed at a supposed grand responsibility to connect with a community of readers who expect the characters to be sufficiently sympathetic who retain the possibility for redemption.

This is patent nonsense, since the principle duty of the novelist, the poet, the artist isn't to second guess their talent and attempt a version of accomplishment and truth find as someone else might imagine it, but to explore their own perceptions in some detail against and within a variety of different situations and to see precisely where their ideas, concepts, fears take them. Calling this narcissism is a convenient way of avoid the task of understanding Updike's fictional world. I would also substitute the word egotism with confidence--the artist worth paying attention is the one who commits themselves fully to a style that allows them to attempt many different things to the fullest degree; to the degree that Updike wrote a considerable number of novels that are not your typical mainstream inventions--he dared to experiment with his famous style--and in doing kept his persistent themes viable and capable of yielding more nuances to his tales of the frailty of the human will, he is a master. No less than Henry James, no less than Faulkner, no less than Nabokov. Updike's stock should be much, much higherthan it is, and Roiphe's article makes a persuasive argument in Updike'sdefense. Updike was the best American novelist while he lived, I think, and itsticks in the craw of his detractors that there are not others who demonstratedsuch a brilliant consistency over many decades of writing.

2 poems by Charles Harper Webb

2012-01-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

I suspect we all know something about trying to convince someone we'd just harmed that not your aggression but rather their erring behavior that brought on your abuse. As it goes in this culture and through the great tales told in the best surviving literature and histories, humanity has developed many an artful ways of allowing the powerful and the belligerent various rationalizations, elegant and crude, to absolve them from blame. It's tantamount to making the person you just gave a black eye to apologize to you because his face got in the way of your fist. Charles Harper Webb's poem "Weapon Salve" is an alluring and yet insidious investigation to how this form of mind-fucking works.

I am inclined to think that the poem plays on the theme of blaming the victim for the injury they sustained and giving pity to the one who inflicted the harm by way of extending the over used trope that medieval medicine was , in our modern view, arcane, insane and deadly to the patient. As in the notion that various ailments, diseases, fevers and other varieties of cootie problematics could be relieved or cured outright by the application of blood sucking leeches to the patients' body in an effort to balance out the "humours" that it was thought to flow and swirl through an individual's body at the time.

The over riding theme I read is that a firm application of a cosmology wherein conditions, causes and relationships between all things, human and otherwise, are firmly in place, intractable and factual is liable to warp our perspective and approach the unexpected, the unplanned for , the catastrophic with precisely the wrong sort of action needed. We treat the victim as if they had been asking for the punishment they had received and give our salve and our sentiment to the weapon and the person who wielded it; what was the trauma that forced the attacker to resort to such harsh resort, what blunt force did the sword suffer as it was deployed, issuing the unspeakable?

What I find implied is that the victim blames them self as well, wondering what they had done to merit the punishment. This is a land Foucault wrote about with such clarity vigor, that punishment isn't just written on the body, it is inscribed; it becomes part of our genetic material as populations, sensing no right to grace, feel ashamed and expect punishment as a something designed by divine agencies. The weapon that God had given masters the genius to harm has been damaged during the infliction of punishment ; the damage to the sword must itself be avenged.

Web does an interesting thing at the end, after taking us through a tour of a world where weapons and the wounds they create exist, past the ritual healing and hobbling in the crippled aftermath, by extending the metaphor to language itself; every criticism and insult and carping complaint at your expense was uttered for your own good; one anticipates the lash and dreams of God in heaven and his endless bounty, one looses a limb and thinks they are reclaiming their soul, one minds themselves abused in horrible, humiliating and convinces themselves that they are ascending toward a superior state of being rather than being degraded. Pain is treated with more pain, the technology is repaired and burnished, the victim is killed by the cure. Charles Harper Webb's poems is a grisly, if elegant tour of seduction and submission. Potent poem.

_________________

There was a suggestion by one of the posters responding to the poem "Mummies to Burn"that poet Charles Harper Webb seemed to be on a creaky anti-West riff, using the anecdote
as reason enough to rehash a favorite harangue. There was a further suggestion that since the poem is a critique of Western technology strip-mining a culture for the sake of economic expansion, Webb wouldn't be inclined to criticize Egyptian history. Their record, it was asserted, wasn't Edenic and absent of cruel events. Had I came across the sentence that he had, I too would have been struck, surely, but the irony of the fact--white people converting human corpses into fossil fuel--and would have been motivated to write my own mediation on the severely negative side of Imperialism. His concern wasn't whether Egyptian history was noble or ignoble, but that European exploration into the area was intended not to learn but to discover exploitable resources.

What he gets at, his intent and success, I think,is that the mentality is a pervasive attitude in the invading culture, and that the psychology extends to a narrowly set pragmatism; short of coal and timber, need to save money. Blimey, burn these bandaged cadavers, there not doing any good just laying around as they are. The fault with Cameron's visually magnificent Avatar , is that it relies on tropes that are too obvious, especially on the Pocahontas / John Smith tale. Webb, on the other hand, is riffing on an historical fact, and provides a provocative argument that it's not an isolated instance. I don't think he's anymore anti-West than , say, Jonathan Swift or , say, H.L.Mencken, two writers we praise for their critical eye and caustic wit, as well as their willingness to speak an unruly version of Truth to whatever gathered assemblage of thugs happen, at the moment, to constitute Power.

You could say that Webb is a satirist in someway, a wiseacre, but whatever he is in spirit, he still notices how things that are said clash with things that are done, and that, like George Carlin, he has a willingness to push codified interpretations to the point where they become absurd. He is a poet, I think, who is keen on exposing contradictions and revealing the lies and embedded evasions we use to ease ourselves through the daily dose of cognitive dissonance.

Chet Baker and Archie Shepp

2012-01-23T07:30:00.000-08:00

This track is attractive because the famously relaxed trumpeter Chet Baker is performingwith Archie Shepp, who is an outstanding example of the experimentalimprovisation termed "free jazz". We have here a fascinating andexciting jam highlighting a brilliant practioner of a what we'd call a mellow,melodic style with an Avant Gard genius of the period. Shepp, of course, isfiery and unpredictable with what his solos will contain even in a context thiscomparatively conservative; I find it amazing to here him in a chart-driven,swinging context and realizing he can more than cut the mustard. He brings hisown thing to it, his solos are his alone. Baker, to be sure, appears energizedby Shepp's presence--his phrase remains hushed and frayed around theedges--there are few perfectly round notes in Baker's playing--but it issomething else again when he double and triple times his riffs against therhythm section. Baker's playing gets an unfair rap, I think. At his best hecould do much more than many give him credit for and , when alert and prepared,was in perfect control of all his gifts.

Tree of Life with Shallow Roots

2012-01-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

There's much one cansay about a movie's beautiful , lush photography when it works with astructure--a good script, a graspable plot and ideas an audience can takeinterest in, credible, complex characters--but pretty pictures by themselvescannot save a film like Terrence Mallick's "Tree of Life" from comingacross as a bloated, pretentious attempt to evoke a sense of human existenceand beyond what the director seemingly considers the petty concerns ofindividual characters.

It is a mess, with awhispering, hushed narration that cannot seem to rise above a mumbling buzz,and sequencing of story lines between a family tragedy set in a 1950's Americansuburb, the pensive rumination of a soul sick business man in current dayDallas, and images of dinosaurs hunkering, squirming, swimming, wanderingthrough their various versions of flora and fauna in search of food and , wecould assume, significance beyond their appetites and survival instincts.

This would all beinteresting in the right proportions, but this film is not the tone poemMallick wanted it to be; it is is not mesmerizing, poetic or suggestive of thesort of secret-of-life conceit the film hints at. What is infuriating , beyondthe rhythm-less, shambling length of the film ( two hours and 44 minutes) isthat for all the wonderful images Mallick and his crew manage to bring us, verylittle of it is effectively mounted or framed; we are not allowed to becomeengaged with any seen nor permitted any sense of continuity . It seems to havebeen edited with a lawn mower on a foggy day.he constant riff of showing usvarious trees, in various stages, topographically believable for conceptuallybaffling, with light coming through the branches was irritating, as was theconstant visual cues of running water from rivers, lakes, streams andshorelines. These are meant to function as a leitmotif, no doubt, butrepetition does not equal effective emphasis. This results in symbolism withoutan actual "thing", an idea, under the metaphorical disguise. It doesseduce into thinking about one thing only to discover that something else wasbeing arrived at just under our perceptual radar.

There is, I'm sure, ametaphysical aspect that I've missed through this ,but closer to the truth, Ithink, is that I merely noticed what's missing from the film. I don't knowquite what those elements were as to what was intended, but it seems clearenough that no one thought to bring them to this project.

a fine poem by Joshua Rivkin

2012-01-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

More than a few of us, I wager, have sat with friends in cafes and bistros stealing occasional glances at the people seated at the table just across the room and wondered what it was like to be them, to be with them, to live in their skins, in their world. Sudden bouts of sagging self esteem are not unfamiliar nor uncommon among a good many of us, who we are and what we have done with our lives suddenly seem so trivial and irrelevant in the presence of someone we think is the cooler variety of human. There is no logical, sensible reason for this to take place among normal, successful people who have interesting lives and accomplishments; the downward spiral of degenerating self regard hits us all in a culture that treats even personality as a material asset to be built upon, used as barter, currency, the cause for bragging. What wouldn't we give, what wouldn't we trade for just a small slice of that karma those we momentarily see as obscenely blessed have far too much of. Poet Joshua Rivkin considers this in his poem, "New Economy", a savvy and sleek lyric, expressed in self contained sections, that present a variety of situations where seekers are beseeching the people , places and things they covet with a variety of propositions that attempt to coax a bit of better luck from the flesh or the mortar of a superior Other:

NEW ECONOMY / Joshua Rivkin

A man offers to trade his guitar for a city bus.
My pick for your passengers. Six strings for sixteen wheels.

A bride on her wedding day exchanges her love
for bright weather, a groom exchanges his hands for hers.

A father offers to trade his family for a hotel’s worth of sleep.
A sailor offers the Pacific for a hotel’s worth of sex.

Tonight, the shirt from my back, my singing mouth,

my endless praise, for your skin or company.

I’ll give you my stethoscope for a red barn: a doctor.
I’ll give you my right arm for your left: his patient.

It’s the inequality of pain a sleepless woman wants
to give away. Here, take mine, she offers to freight trains

whistling their replies through Houston’s poorest wards:
Jealousy gets you jealousy. Rage gets you rage.

"What wouldn’t you offer?" a man asks the pawn shop window.
"What wouldn’t you take?" replies the glass.

There is a nicely surreal tone through this poem, a series of odd remarks and offers that end up in unexpected resolutions. A man is willing to surrender his gift of music in exchange for a city bus with it's human cargo and considerable tonnage, a bride prefers a sunny day to a wedding night, doctor and patient negotiate for things they cannot have in exchange for the things they do not want to do; Rivkin's transitions, his eventualities are not jarring but make sense in a manner suggestive of how dreams work against expectation and interrupt a narrative line regarding the pursuit of lust, escape or pleasure with a complication of some sort, an element a dreamer has perhaps forgotten about but which reappears as an issue that needs to be resolved before any fanciful living can be had.

This does, indeed, sound not a little like dime store Freud, but Rivkin isn't here to analyze or instruct or even critique; the task of the poem is to put the reader in the center of all the mood, with their bittersweet undertone of regret. Interestingly enough each section reads like it were the start of a short story or a joke, something lightly suggestive of the way Rod Serling introduced his episodes of his old "Twilight Zone" television series--this prevents the poem from becoming ponderous, from succumbing to the temptation to describe poetry's limitations on describing emotional states that are fleeting and otherwise described in terse cliches or psychiatric jargon. Rivkin defies this and displays a superb craft, a sense of balance between the proposals he highlights here; this is the state of mind where some of us find ourselves so critically bored with the people, places and things of our daily existence that cause absurd and dangerous change appear briefly desireable . This is an evocation of a delusional on the most dream like and banal level, the bored sigh or the frustrated "oh hum" translated in an exhilarating rush of chaotic abandonment, not even concerned with trading up for a better kind of life but instead obsessed on an instinctual level only with escape from what tethers toward a future containing either possibility or oblivion.

JOHNNY OTIS

2012-01-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

Band leader, songwriter, singer and producer Johnny Otis has passed away. was an American Master, a truly great man who helped bring a fantastic number of brilliant rhythm and blues artists to greater fame and acclaim. I had the pleasure to meet and interview him back in the Seventies, when he had just become a minister and opened up his home in Los Angeles as his church. He was gracious, sane, civilized, believing that the spirit of God blesses all of us and our best talents; he though it was his calling to help his fellow humans become their better selves.

The service that my associate Barry Alfonso and I attended in his South Los Angeles home back in the Seventies was a long one, with a choir of splendidly tuned vocalists revving up the already considerable spiritual energy in the room while Reverend Otis, citing Gospel, citing the Jesus of his understanding, gently but firmly exhorted his congregation to be more Christ like, that is, to be kind, helpful, loving of others. In attendance was famed jazz organist Jimmy Smith and singer/actress Della Reese, both of whom performed musical numbers at the Reverend's request. Later in the service, Otis asked us to turn to the person on our left and the person on our right and say "God loves you and I love you to." On my right was Barry, whose hand I shook. We exchanged nods, trying, I suppose, to sustain a veneer of journalistic cool, but on my left was Miss Reese, who took my hand and said with a wide smile that God loved me and that she loved me to. On instinct I return the greeting, feeling that I had just shaken hands with someone who was genuinely connected to the message of love that Otis carried and preached. In some circles, in certain cliques, in specific venues, this view of God and his purpose for us on this planet seems naive, but it occurred to me decades later that Johnny Otis had tapped into a theological proposition more profound than one would at first think.

It was so subtle that the majority of the religious celebrities miss it, that life on earth matters a great deal most of all; we are not here merely to perform perfunctory good deeds as if existence were merely a test to get into a celestial graduate school. Rather, we were here to love , nurture and help one another, to create joy and happiness through creative acts and the practice of a kind of selflessness that brings us a new freedom. During our talk with Johnny Otis in his office before the service, the musician spoke at length about the gift of music and the connection it gives him to the lives of others. about how he could feel the real pain, joy and struggles in the voice of Esther Phillips, the searing saxophone of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. It was art as a spiritual calling, a manifest destiny to let people know that a surrender to the God and Jesus that Johnny Otis and his brethren spoke of could not only make life on in this existence bearable, but better, tangible better. That is the power of love Johnny Otis spoke of and that is the glory of the music Johnny Otis made.

Muscle poetry

2012-01-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

The poem "Richard Noel" is Harry Thomas' slap atobscurantist modernism in all its forms, resisting the lure of diffuse and theoblique for the clipped, staccato version of Rudyard Kipling, although Kiplinghimself would have furnished the fife and brass to accentuate and enliven therattatatat of the military drums. Thomas' poem is a rhythmic straight jacket,the confined emotionalism of someone trying to keep their bleeding heart to asteady, unexcited beat. If only if he'd actually let it all go to provide uswith something fiercer, more explosive than this soggy parody of Hemingway'ssuccinct, staccato effusions about aPersonal Code.

To finish the long profile

**his grade depended on,
the afternoon before
**the surgery, alone,
he worked late in the library.
**I saw him typing away.
On my desk were his ten pages
**the first thing the next day.
Over the years I, too,
**have had hard things to face.
But when did I once summon
**such fortitude and grace?

It is admirable, one supposes, that a student gets theirhomework turned in on time despite an affliction, but this tribute, with itshushed bathos, seems very, very silly indeed. There is something remarkable inthe attempt to overstate a point using such a crabbed rhetoric; the clichés andthe conventional wisdom toward the sick and the afflicted area boiled , chippedand chiseled to their irreducible essences, leaving only a salty residue ofuninteresting thinking. There is ossification here, there is poet tasting, butthere is no poetry, such as we understand it. So what does one do to mend thistendency of amateurs to compose and distribute this stanza'd insult to theeyes? Exactly nothing. Nothing can be done to cure the lagging tastes of thenaive.

There is that large faction of the otherwise diminutivepoetry audience that likes its verse rhyming, rocking in a cadence thatsuggests a three-legged clogging competition, stanzas that are morally coherentand as comprehensible as a stack of pancakes, and the seldom discussed aspectamong the rest of us self-declared elites fighting back gag reflexes is thatthis more or less a permanent state of affairs in this odd and contentiouscorner of the literary world. For all the chatter some of us offer up aboutbeing ecumenical. inclusive and appreciative of the broadness contemporarycontains with regards to style, aesthetics, and the subtly differentiatedconcerns each of the coexisting schools collectively undertake to have theirrespective poems achieve their results, many of us choke with contempt anddespair over the obvious if unacknowledged truth that doggerel, poesy, poettasting and all the loutish rest are permanent fixtures in the literary culturethat thrives beyond the ramparts.

There are no mass conversions forthcoming when it comes toconvincing the rest of the poetry world that they’d be better off reading thestronger stuff. Consumers know what they want to read, and the amateur poet,not beholden to particular school of poetics or allegiances formed while theywere a graduate student, will write exactly how they see fit, daring, strangeenough, to write poems that make sense.

I don't think there is anything subtle or understated about"Richard Noël”. This set up is basically the plot line of the old ABC-TVdisease-themed "Movies of the Week", where the usual tragedy wasintroduced in the first act, the resolve of the afflicted is tested as he orshe struggles to get on with their life is shown in the second, and the thirdact concludes with the victim teaching a doubting observer a lesson amountingto the life can be lived fully even with a hindering, perhaps fatal ailment.These soapy melodramas were churned out week after week, and what theirpopularity attests to is that this sort of by-the-numbers approach to conflictand resolution is what the public accepts as the height of dramatic action.

What's off putting to me is the patronizing tone Thomastakes toward his subject --the whole Kipling "Gunga Din" tone ofImperialist paternalism (where there is the narrator's surprise that what heregards as "civilized" virtues emerge from a heathen subject) weighsthis down with a sure paving of the narrative line to a limited series of genreconstrained conclusions.

It might be interesting for a writer to use this situationas a reason for soul searching and critical self-examination, but that is atricky balance to achieve, the getting the details of the afflicted's situationright with a delicately deployed tone , and having the narrator's introspectionnot overwhelm the poem and make the poem a bottomless confession. And whatought to be achieved by the third act, that final part of the dialectic, wouldneed to be an insight, an image, a phrase that is somewhat apart from theprevious two elements, something unique and not facile, as Thomas' finishingstanza was in "Richard Noel".

The execution is competent enough, although there isn’t aninteresting rhythm anywhere in the poem. It’s hemmed in by its lack ofdistinction or character. While I don’t the poet’s sincerity, this rhymes ofthe sing-song variety; each time a line alights upon a previous line’s phonictwin, there’s a perceptible crash, or a thud. It’s not that I’m opposed torhyme, but it is certain that in these days following the post modernistinsurrection a poet who rhymes should be exceptional. Thom Gunn gets the craftwrite with his verse, bringing in associations that surprise the readerexpecting a vague gloss of the subject matter due to the presence of rhyme. Hiswork is wonderfully controlled, musical, artfully constructed withoutindicating the labor it takes to compose with such a tuned ear:

The Man with Night Sweats
By Thom Gunn

I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

There are other poets who write a fine poem in moretraditional modes who haven’t sacrificed their wit; one may argue onideological grounds that the formalism one comes across is a reactionarymovement linked in spirit and practice to a more rigid culturally conservativeimpulse, but for my part I prefer to judge the poet by the work. Eliot, Poundand others where profoundly nasty people who did work that with stood theirpropensities toward bigotry and general “A”-holism. It’s a simple matter ofjudging what works in the poem, and what doesn’t.

Stop Internet Censorship

2012-01-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.stopthewall.us/?gclid=CODZjdXs2K0CFQ9qhwodEDP5mw

There is little else but ill will circulating through the tubes of the internet

2012-01-16T21:32:00.000-08:00

There is little else but ill will circulating through the tubes of the internet this morning, general grousing, gripes and jeremiads about little of consequence, although I would have to lend credence to the notion that a lot of anger is generated by site specific fears of losing one's financial security. This means that a good number of us in the work force, from upper management, mid management and the guys who wash out the trash dumpsters in the back of the stores we can't afford to walk into are worried that they might be invited into the boss's office and asked to close the door behind them. Not a fun way to start the morning, so I force myself to think only happy thoughts. La la la la la la is what I sing to myself, and I imagine pink ponies with ribbons and rainbows and smiley faces all over the landscape. Next I turn to my Facebook page where one of my friends posted a video of Brit punk band The Exploited doing the least ambiguous song I will hear all month: FUCK THE USA.

The rainbows evaporate, the pink ponies eat some toxic ragweed and fall over and die. Red robins drop from the sky. The smiley faces are now flipping me off.

Great.

Later this morning there is a mood of subdued insanity as each of us smile tightl

y, the corners of our mouths jagged like upended hangers, boomer rang creases pushing the eyes and eyebrows into the leering slant of a deranged carnival clown. Everything is fine and all of are going to heaven in a white boat with Black sails, that seems to be what we are dreaming while awake, a promise of deliverance tempered with an omen for perpetual disaster. Free floating anxiety that wakes up ten minutes before you do and starts pressing the proverbial buttons on the control center that constitutes your dreaming self. Oh dear, oh my, the worst has already happened, although neither the West nor the East coasts have slithered into an angry, boiling ocean. That boiling sound is more of a gurgle, the coffee maker that has stopped working, producing scratchy gurgling noises; it gave me half a cup this morning and did nothing else other than engage that death rattle. Another fine day to begin the day, especially on a Sunday. And now here I am, wondering, what? What am I wondering?

I was reading a piece by Peter Whitmer about Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro” while on the bus coming to work this morning and noticed that the day so far had the hue of a dingy wash rag. I lifted my eyes from the twitching pages I was trying to read to see someone standing at the bus stop where the bus had paused to pick up new passengers, spying a guy in a grey hoodie standing on the side walk looking into the bus, straight at me where I was seated.

Alien twelve tone gangster movie theme songs emerged from my pocket just then, my cell phone was ringing. I answered, staring into nothing but an interface crowded with blurred icons. "This is me" I answered, "Who are you?"

The voice didn't bother with an explanation or an introduction or a confession of any kind, rather, he issued a command,

"Let me talk to the other guy" he said. There was a burst of static, a high whistling shriek. And then the phone became very hot in my hand.

After lunch I turned off the computer and noticed that there was a tickle in the back of my throat, the sort of irritation that makes you think of wet sandpaper being the universal standard for raw flesh and blues hysteria. My throat felt the way Tom Waits sounds, amplified aggravation in the center of the soft tissue, red and familiar like a bully's smirk before he knees in the nuts and bitch slaps you more time when you try to sneak out of school via the custodian's entrance. There was nothing I could do about the damn condition at the moment, but I did have a half bottle of Tustin, some generic syrup for the alleviation of sore throat, cough and yet manly enough to expel the grubbily greased mucus from the deepest of chest resonating chambers. I drank it one gulp, a semi sweetened version of the cruel cures your grandmother used to force down your throat with a funnel and the business end of a high heel shoe. It was awful, and all at once the store room started doing jumping jacks, my stomach declared itself a sovereign nation, my eyes saw through the thickest walls of the building and could the lips of cops writing crime novels behind billboards when they weren't getting hummers from bums who need one more dime for some Blue Nun. I was stoned on something, and suddenly the phone rang, or I thought I did. All I remember, really, was that I answered something.

"Gewekeekek" I said into the receiver.
"Hi, I need a red rubber octopus..."
I paused.
"Don't we all" I answered.
And then the sun exploded.

Robert Coover

2012-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Coover is one of the most interesting writers from that generation of metafictionists--he is what I think of when I think of a writer taking apart a narrative strategy and making the parts fit in new and maddening ways.Spanking the Maid was deliciously skewed where Coover retells, reshapes, reformulates a hackneyed seduction scenario which adheres, in all the twistings and colorations, to the classic line of erotic writing; the excitement isn't in the getting , but in the anticipation of getting, in the suspense between subjects. Coover makes the suspension that space where the senses are no aid to one's idea of self-empowerment.The Universal Baseball Association is a book I consider to be as close to a Great American Novel as anything of worth that's been published in the last fifty years. That I've read anyway. Origin of the Brunists is especially potent, and I think his writing on end-of-the-world cults is as potent as DeLillo's or Pynchon's, maybe even more so."

'via Blog this'

Marianne Moore

2012-01-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Marianne Moore's "Poetry" is widely anthologizedand often cited, and it shouldn't be a mystery as to why this poem among thehundreds she wrote is the one that an otherwise indifferent audience remembers:it's a poem about poetry. She rather handily summarizes an array of clichés,stereotypes and received misgivings about poetry a literalistic readershipmight have ,feigns empathy with the complaints, and then introduces one craftyoh-by-the-way after another until the opposite is better presented than theresolution under discussion. This is not a subject I warm up to in mostcircumstances--poets, of their accord, have demonstrated the sort ofself-infatuation that many of them, left to their means-to-an-end, would removethemselves from the human scale and assume the ranks of the divine, theoracular, the life giving, IE, develop themselves into a priesthood, theguardians of perception. Moore's poem, though, presents itself as a contractingstring of epigrams that seem to quarrel, a disagreement between head and mind,body and spirit, and a larger part of her lines, as they seemingly across thepage away from the statements preceding the line before it, is that no reallyknows what to make of poetry as a form, as a means of communication, as a wayof identifying oneself in the world. It frustrates the fast answer, itsquelches the obvious point, and poetry adds ambiguity that would rile manybecause of lines that start off making obvious sense but which leave the readerin a space that isn't so cocksure. Little of the world seems definite anymoreonce a poem has passed through it, and the reconfiguring of imagination , theretrenching, the retooling of perception a required of the reader to understanda bit of the verse (the alternative being merely to quit and admit defeat) is boundto give a resentment.

Moore's poem seems to be a response to Dorothy Parker's ironic declaration"I hate writing. I love having written". The reader may hate notunderstanding what they've read, but love the rewards of sussing through a poem'sblind alleys and distracting side streets.

POETRY

Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea,the base-

ball fan, the statistician—

nor is it valid

to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make adistinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

"literalists of

the imagination"—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall wehave

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.

The agony, the contradictions, the dishonest sleights ofhand that deceive you in the service of delivering a surprise, an irony, anunexpected image, all of this is worth resentments a reader suffers through.One is, after all, made better, made stronger by the exercise of the will toread and confront the poem on its own terms. Moore is a shrewd rhetorician aswell as gracefully subtle poet. Clever, witty, sharp and acidic when she needsme, Moore is clever at playing the Devil's Advocate in nominally negativeguise, saying she dislikes it but mounting one exception to the rule afteranother until we have an overwhelming tide of reasons about why we as citizenscan't exist without its application.

It works as polemic, indeed, crafted as she alone knows how, and it adds yetanother well-phrased set of stanzas that want to turn poets into more thanmortal artists, but into a priesthood, a race of scribes attuned to secretmeanings of invisible movements within human existence. It sort of stops beinga poet after the first jagged stanza, not unlike all those pledge breaks on PBSthat tirelessly affirm that network's quality programming while showing littleof it during their pleas for viewer money. It's not that I would argue toodramatically against the notion that poets and artists in general are thosewho've the sensitivity and the skills to turn perception at an instinctuallevel into a material form through which what was formally unaddressable cannow find a shared vocabulary in the world-- egalitarian though I am, there aregeniuses in the world , and those who are smarter and more adept than others invarious occupations and callings--but I do argue against the self-flattery thatpoems like Moore's promotes and propagates.

I wouldn't regard this as a polemic of any sort, nor a manifesto as to what thewriter ought to do or what the reader should demand. Reading it over again andagain after that makes me think that Moore was addressing her own ambivalencetoward the form. After one finishes some stanzas and feels contented thatthey've done justice to their object of concentration, some lines appearcontrived, other words are dull and dead sounding aligned with more colorful,more chiming ones,

Poetry that however grand , beautiful and insightful theresulting poems are in a host of poetic attempts to resolve the problem thedistance between the thing perceived and the thing itself, we still have onlypoems, words arranged to produce effects that would appeal to our senses thatare aligned with this world and not the invisible republic just beyond oursenses. Poetry is a frustrating and irritating process because it no matter howclose one thinks they've come to a breakthrough, there is the eventualrealization of far one remains from it. Poetry as Sisyphean task; one iscompelled to repeat the effort, and not without the feeling that they've donethis before.

The commotion of the animals, the pushing elephants, therolling horses, the tireless yet immobile Wolf, seem like analogues to restlessmind Moore at one time might have desired to have calmed by the writing ofpoetry. There is the prevailing myth, still fixed in a good number of peoplewho go through various self help groups, that the writing of thingsdown--poetry, journaling, blogging, writing plays or memoirs--is a processthat, in itself , will reveal truthful things one needs to know and therebysettle the issues. Writing, though, doesn't "settle", finalize orcement anything in place, it does to set the world straight , nor does itresolve anything it was addressing once the writing is done with. It is,though, a useful process, a tool, one may use as a means to get one out of thechair, away from the keyboard, and become proactive in some positive way.

The expectations of what poetry was supposed to do--createsomething about the world that is permanent, everlasting, reveal a truth who'sveracity does not pale with time, whether a century or hour-- are crushed and aresentment when realizes that the world they're attempting to conquer, in amanner of speaking , will not bow to one's perception, one's carefullyconstructed stage set where the material things of this earth are props to bearranged on a whim, and that the mind that creates the metaphors, the similes,the skilled couplets and ingenious rhyme strategies is not calmed, soothed,serene.

The world continues to move and change, language itselfchanges the meaning of the words it contains, the mind continues to tick away,untrammeled. Moore's animals, in the restless paradise, are themselvesrestless, non contemplative, instinct driven toward species behavior that isabout propagation and survival, creatures distinct from the contemplativeconceit of the poet who thinks he or she is able to sift through the underbrushfor secret significance. I've always heard a weary tone in Moore's poem; a mindthat in turn wrestles with matters where poetry doesn't reveal what's disguisedbut only what the poet can never get to. Her poem echoes Macbeth's famousspeech rather nicely

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

She seems not a little dismayed that poetry is only part ofour restless species behavior and that the language we write and expound tobring coherence to the waking life are only more sounds being made in analready noisy existence.

TR HUMMER

2012-01-12T13:59:00.000-08:00

This is a piece from 2009 about one of T.R.Hummer's poems that was published in Slate. I run again here because I am still making sense of the current poem that Slate has on display,and because Hummer is a superb poet more of us should know about and read.--tb

______

There are those I know, friends and former friends alike, who know it's well within my personality to become a fire-breathing jerk; though I prefer to regard myself as having an even temperament most of my awake time, there are those moments when something gets to me that will not let up. An annoyance, a complaint, the site of something ugly or something said that was offensive to my closely held (and improvised) standards as to how reality and it's subjects should arrange their affairs. Bear in mind, please , that I am seldom right when I go off on a toot, and my universal declarations about the exact nature of the world's wrongs are inappropriate, over stated, bigoted, unfair, the rantings of a salivating asshole. Even at my age, with the wisdom I've garnered from decades of mistakes I've learned from, I still have to make amends, apologize, repair the damage I've done during my lashing out. That said, bear in mind as well that these moments of rage binging are much scarcer than they were , say, twenty years ago. The point, I suppose , that knowing better is not enough.

But anger, being in a state of pique is seductive; quite suddenly, as the adrenaline flows and what had been a passing social glitch becomes a World View, the world gets smaller, I get larger, and all matters at hand and hidden, all business , entertainment, love and remorse become intertwined, connected, the world suddenly makes sense. The small irritations that had been collecting in the recesses of compartmentalized personality show their full fester at last and everything that one knows becomes a chain of related failures, betrayals, breakdowns, recriminations, all of which seem to be headed to one end, a single source for the source of the world's (nee my) discontents. It's much the same as being on a drug, and there is something awesome as one calms down and realizes the stress they'd just put themselves through--one wishes they could rage more and sustain the fleeting unity, but it is illusory. It's proof , for me a least, that my brain isn't my best friend when I've exhausted my wit.

What I've marveled at, though, is the associations that come to you when you've revved up your mind to function at the sharpest point of a perfect snit. Seamlessly, effortlessly, without resistance and without contradiction , you find yourself being like Hamlet equivocating brilliantly as he ponders a conspiratorial heaven that draws an ill map for him, or Lear, for that matter, going insane as he strips himself in the rain of the vestments of his power, real and symbolic, because the actual relationships so revealed to him are too much. It's poetry, the power to begin with the instance and utilize language to extend a psychology that places human worth below the philosophical certainty we might have been raised with.

Poet T.R.Hummer gets at this beautifully with his poem "Bad Infinity", a ram-rodding crash course of sensory overload that begins with a colonsocopy as a starting point and soon compresses the raw cycle the narrator speeds along:

During the colonoscopy, orbiting through twilight sleep,
***she felt, light-years distant in the interior darkness, a thump
And a dull but definite pain—as if someone were dragging,
***at the end of a rusty chain, a transistor radio through her body,
A small beige box with a gold grill, assembled by a child in southeast Asia
***in 1964—and she woke in groggy panic till the nurse made soothing noises
For her to sleep by, like a song in an alien language heard through static
***beamed from the far side of Arcturus: The Dave Clark Five's
"Glad All Over," maybe, tuned in by a boy in Thailand. Such a drug,
***the doctor said. Everything you feel you will forget.
Amen to that. Amen to plastic and silicon, amen to a living wage,
***amen to our tinny music, to the shrapnel in the IV drip,
Amen to the template of genes that keeps the body twitching
***and the wormhole in the gut of Orion I will slip through
When the chain breaks and the corroded battery bursts, its acids eating
***all the delicate circuitry that binds the speaker to the song.

Wonderfully done, powerfully done, this gets that state of helplessness as the subject, a woman under examination, feels the effects of the drug and the invasion o of her body, attempting to balance between a giving in to the process she's volunteered for and an attempt to maintain control, dignity, a small measure of power that couldn't robbed for her. Hummer has an ear for interesting coinages and odd juxtapositions , and understands the irrational references an addled thought process can take.

The probes feel like a cheap transistor radio playing a Dave Clark 5 song ironically called "Glad All Over" as the probes search for cancer cells,
and concludes, violently, hauntingly, with the tale of the imagined radio become personified and wearing out, the battery leaking acid, corroding the sheath that contains it. This language stream, equal parts brutal fact and drug enhanced delusion, combines what I hear is fear and anger meeting head on in equally forceful bursts, the result being something between acceptance and the last act of defiance . The beauty of it, of course, is that Hummer conveys this as a state one is currently in, with little in the way of set up, nor a clue as to what the post-examination results might be; this is not unlike walking into a room you thought was empty and finding someone in there alone, confessing secrets from some isolated area of their being to the shadows. Hummer makes us feel ill-at-ease and maybe a little as if someone had just walked over the spot where we'll eventually be buried. Or scattered. Not many writers do that for me.

Walking Backwards

2012-01-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

The construction of this poem, consisting of so many dependent clauses revealing previous events and perceptions after the poet commences to speak of his walk, makes me think of someone attempting to conduct a tour of a neighborhood while walking backwards, spicing up his odd stride with a monologue that is unfocused at best.

Song of the Unseen Bird / HL Spelman

To walk so long with her in so much quiet
Then hear that unseen bird, whose name
I don’t know, wouldn’t know where to find,
Singing somewhere among the leaf sheen,
Was to realize why, when his beloved hero-killer
Resolves at last to die, Homer gives us
Not the laments the sea nymphs wail
But the nonsense song of their limpid names
He makes up: Limnoreia and Doto and Proto
And sometimes there are no words
And Kallianassa and Kymodoke and Maera
And sometimes no words could be sad enough.
Ashwing, Seedquit, Spotted Larmer:
Tee-way tee-wee tee-wooo you sang to us.

The walking companions , he hopes, continue to be interested in the bits and pieces of facts and mythical factoids even as he falls backwards, tripping over a rake, a tree root upending a chuck of sidewalk, a rake left by a homeowner gone to the backyard to fetch a basket for the leaves he's raked up. This poem stumbles greatly and does easily blend the informative, the mythic and the incidental and the mythic, say literary, into the sort of casual, seamless streamlined elegance we praise Billy Collins or, even better, Thomas Lux. There are too many grace notes for this poet to include, I think.

This is less about what the poet found out during a walk or what they saw that they hadn't seen before than it is about the poet's education; this is a world where everything he sees reminds him of something he's read , a tendency that seems like a condition rather than a bad habit. This poem is another bulging, overstuffed suitcase of intelligent chit chat, not a matching sock in the lot.

A writer making use of other writer's work is not a tragedy in itself, but it is something that is fraught with risk. It's a delicate operation, as it goes, and it seems to work best when used with only the lightest, glancing touch, and the effect that works best, that is, seems the less preposterously over-thought, is when it produces an irony that might reveal how idealized and fallible our initial takes on people, places and things happen to be. Ideally, it achieves some insight about one's place in the world that does not bend obediently at the altar of art. Too often, though, the mentioning of other poems, poets, philosophies, spiritual precepts, traps the writer in an large, sealed container; he or she tends to mistake the sound of their voice echoing a stream of heady names and quotes to the the task at hand.

Spelman uses only one allusion, to Homer, in the work, and one can the problematic and brilliant TS Eliot as a poet who courted toxic levels of literary reference in is masterpiece "The Waste Land".One allusion this manhandled is too many, and I think the Homeric turn is a decisive move to force readers to consult old Penguin editions or Wikipedia. A poet as tin-eared as Spelman , as least tone deaf to euphony in this piece, seems to have a reflexive action that compels the writing to become about what he has read before, not about he is ostensibly trying to address . Harold Bloom has the idea of the anxiety of influence, a life long theory of his that states, simply expressed, that all writers are writing in the shadow of Great Writers before them, and that every poet, bar none, is writing in the shadow of Shakespeare. What makes the difference, though, is to what extent does one stop using literary allusions like badly planted foot notes along the stream of assoication and instead use the ideas as tools to tangibly pierce the veneer that cloisters our responses to events and circumstance. I would imagine greatness as being those writings that aid readers in imagining reality, life-in-itself, outside Plato's fabled cave. TS Eliot, with all his allusions criss crossing each other in his non-linear lyrics, was obsessed with seeing the world as no one else had seen it;l he had a vision of it being arid, sexless, full of the dessicated ruins of religious , political and aesthetic dogmas that failed to keep the world vital , full of purpose, meaning and order. Antisemitic and racist though he was, his poetry is a beautiful expanse of mood and dour music. Unlike so many others, including Pound and the majority of his American and English contemporaries, he had grit, he had gumption, he had an ear for a world he heard spinning off it's gears.

2012-01-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.anthologysd.com/index.html

Visionary Bombast

2011-12-29T20:04:00.000-08:00

I like the idea of Vachel Lindsay rather than the practiceof reading his work, or even listening to it, the often made apologyof some of his defenders who maintain that his works are meant to be performed,not scanned in anthologies.As Lindsay was entranced by song and its subversive adeptness of slipping past a censoring intellect and infest and and infect the soul with all manner of radical and subtle emotional stirrings, his work was meant to be exclaimed and dramatized for their power to be fully felt and fairly surmised. Fair enough, I say, but too often what I find inhis work is the cadence of a creaky gate swaying in a steady wind, or a swingrattling on its chain.He seeks to grasp the moment of when he discovers theunchanging difference between right and wrong; he wants to create an emotionalresponse in the reader that will not tolerate injustice nor stand forsuffering; he wants the poetry of the period to influence the listener to ceasewith their odious doses of bad faith and to instead live genuinely, fully, nottaking a breath nor another life for granted. All this is well and good, but tome it is hokey.

His task was to grant everyday things and ordinary lives a dignity theyhadn't been given before, but in doing so he manages to add yet another thicklayer of metaphorical tonnage that keeps us further from the metaphysicalpresence he is longing for. I have a difficult time even considering hiswritings the evidence of a fevered imagination setting up and alternative universe,of a sort, in his quest to unearth and reveal the true nature of the everyday. The Congo, I think, is racist bombast, pure andsimple, an example of a well intentioned progressive in spirit trying to payhomage the culture of a people whom whites kidnapped and subjugated withslavery; he comes off as condescending and half baked. I think he only added tothe problem he wanted to remedy.

There is a difference between VL attempting to write something he called a history of the negro race and Duke Ellington, a black composer and intellectual, taking ownership of his own ancestry , traditions and , most importantly, the stereotypes of his race and culture and creating some astounding art.Good though his intentions were, VL's poem is paternal , presumptuous and racist by attitude and application; there is the fundamental assumption that Africans and those of African descent were incapable of telling their own story. Ellington , along with a good amount of the work of Langston Hughes coming out the Harlem Renascence , redefined the terms. VL's attitude is simply hard to sit through without a session of exaggerated defenses and hearty condemnations. Spirited debate is fine, of course, but it seems to me that Ellington's "jungle music" is the superior work of art becomes the genius, verve and timelessness of the composer and his singular orchestra's work puts one in the center of the music, not a field of footnotes and gutter sniping. The seeming irony of a black artist using the world "jungle" to describe his own music seems irrelevant at best.

I understand the interest Allen Ginsberg hadin Lindsay, since VL would, at the time, be the closest America had to aWilliam Blake. Blake, however, gave into his visions to the extreme and allowedthem to cohabitate with him in his daily life; there incredible things hemaintained in his public life about his visions and his dialogues with angelsthat he spoke of matter -of -factly.

The further evidence is Blake's work which is truly unique,ungainly in syntax, but completely unforgettable as to how the universe wasstructured, at the core, rubbing against the flesh of the god or gods thatcreated the heavens and the earth. Blake zipped past the clichés and readymadeparadigms that available to him and created something from whole cloth. Hiswork broadened and became denser as he grew older; he wasn't much interested ingetting others to change their behavior so much as he was in creating a vividsense of what it is everyone man, woman and child will have to face. Heconsidered himself a poet of the Inevitable. Lindsay, of courAn intriguing intersection of influence and cross influence;you can see how Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were attracted to Lindsay not just as apublic poet , but a public visionary, someone who could capture the public'simagination with broad , sweeping movements of image and colorful narrative.Lindsay did, of course, argue through his career a series of conclusionsinformed by a firm sense of what was right and wrong in society and wrote insuch a flamboyant fashion that he might seduce, persuade, cajole thoseattracted by his theatricality to change the limited way they came to regardthe world. He desired to instill in his listeners (and readers) the notion thateveryone has a humanity that cannot be reduced by economic oppression orremoved by harsh laws. It was the idea, a powerful one, that the morallyupright thing to fight for--fairness, justice, equality, democraticvirtues--were self apparent, or would become so once the best case was madewith the most persuasive language only one who is touched by the muse can writeand recite, compose and exclaim.

Dylan and Ochs perhaps had an easier time,being songwriters connected with a host of progressive causes--civil rights,anti-war movements largest among them--and it was their skill at composingbrooding, simple, compelling melodies to hammer away at their inspired rhetoricthat kept their songs, their lyrics in the public mind.

puffery one suspects zealots contrive in their desperation to raise the importance of a hero they've embedded deeply into the soft tissue of their consciousness. This is something that we find with writing about Dylan--so many elaborations and comparisons that the apologetics are more nuanced than Dylan's actual work. All the same, there is a strong connection, an awareness, a deliberate alignment on Dylan's part with a tradition other than rock and roll. The claims that Dylanwas influenced by Lindsay, the Beats, Whitman, or "the usual Modernistsuspects" are far from fantasy. The influences are traceable, noticeable,conspicuous in a great many songs, like "Desolation Row","Visions of Johanna", "Memphis Blues Again", "Gates ofEden"; surreal though rock and roll geniuses Little Richard, Chuck Berryand Bo Diddley may seem and have been in their work and personas, the aforementionedsongs definitely came from exposure to a good number of modern poets, rangingfrom the Symbolists through Whitman, Eliot, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg.

Thoseinfluences are in Dylan's work; how much he absorbed of what he read is thewrong question, but rather how well. Dylan, as any good artist would, took whathe liked and what he found useful in musical styles and literary modes and madethem his own. Dylan’s accomplishment, his singular bit of real genius, wasblending Chuck Berry with his personal version of street level surrealism.Nothing like it existed in lyric writing before it--and I am not insisting thatDylan is the one who made song lyrics poetry, a notion I've railed against foryears--and to diminish or dismiss literary influences in the creation of thisbody of work is, I think, short sighted. This is the kind of ruthlessness ofthe creative process no one really likes to talk about--it is the cliché ofthe amateur borrowing as opposed to the professional, who steals, who literallytalks ownership of what he came across. VL is part of the circle of influences,more for inspiring a public persona and purpose than for direct influence onthe work. Like it or not, VL did set the groundwork for what a public artistwith literary/musical inclinations would be, and Dylan is among the generationof songwriters who adopted JL's conceit for their own purposes.

Along with Ginsberg, who desired to become a the voice of a perceptions that found expression before a conservative superego diluted whatever power might have been had in the first thought, songwriters who had grown up with Lindsay's work were inspired to write about things that were meant to resound beyond the music hall,wrote for his audience, which is valid on the face of it, but his temperament is closer to that of a songwriter than a poet on the grandest scale. It was, for Lindsay about what would sell, in a manner of speaking; his is also a cautionary tale against pleasing an audience too well, as there is the threat that will not let you change. And that is the frustration that kills a talent that has the potential to evolve.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

2011-12-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

Finally got a look at Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and I will have to agree with what's been mentioned that the movie has no script, or even the semblance of a plot. What it seems to have, though, is an outline, a diagram of a sort, like a football plays scribbled on a notebook page; there is never a point where you didn't get the feeling that Cruise and the other performers--one hesitates to call what they do in this movie "acting"--huddled together between location shoots, breathlessly improvised the next improbable scenario and then frantically making it all happen, frantically.

The only thing I remember regarding the rhyme and reason of all this hustle and bustle were about the Kremlin blowing up, a rogue nuclear scientist/philosopher in possession of Russian missile codes, and the occasional speech from the same about how nuclear catastrophe has become part of the natural evolution of existence; complete devastation is needed for the planet to start new life from the burning cinders. It would have been a clever and intriguing investigation to see the peace-on-earth paradigm reversal explored more thoroughly and cleverly, but that is a matter for another movie, a better script and a director who can balance brains with action. As is, though, this a fine series of brilliantly orchestrated action sequences, one unbelievable scenario, whether prowling through the bowels of the Kremlin, climbing up the side of the tallest building in the world in Dubai, or desperately trying to get the metal suitcase containing the said codes while combating the villain in a robotic parking garage in India. I enjoyed it as pure spectacle, at the sacrifice of losing all impression of the film once the auditorium lights went on.

There was a lasting image, though, that of the ever youthful Cruise looking his age; at 47 years old, the star remains fit, but there the evidence of the sort of body transformation that comes with increased years. The chest muscles sag, the gut isn't the toned washboard it used to be, one detects a hint of loose skin under the biceps that were formerly tight as drum heads. I mention only because Cruise wore wife beaters during the prison sequence when he first entered the film. This is the sort of extreme form fitting shirt that can flatter a physique that is fit and muscular in classical terms, or which can belie the wear, tear and aging a body has undergone.It was not flattering. Perhaps he thought no one would notice.

Tom Cruise remains what he has always been in his action films, a five foot something windup toy that springs into frenetic, limb-splitting contortions when the director blows his whistle. I liked it for the action set pieces, which were spectacularand truly awesome. The problem, though, is one that no can simply ignore, that thatentire glorious spectacle is in service to making an aging narcissist lookvital and youthful. Bruce Willis is more appealing as an aging action hero,especially in the Die Hard movies, because he feels pain, expresses trepidationas he goes into action, and is obviously tired, haggard and operating onreserves that are near depletion. Cruise wants to suggest that his energy isboundless, without end, and this becomes sad, very sad after a point. Even theflashiest editing and loudest car crash can't distract you from that. This movie was enjoyable as pure light show, a shadow play performed against white bedroom linen. It was, be assured, monumentally idiotic.

Writing about death will kill you

2011-12-22T13:58:00.000-08:00

A dubious perks of being an older poet is that you are allowed, it seems, with each year you add to write about death regardless of subject matter or choice of images. Death is everywhere, the world is fraught with things that are symbols for the lack of pulse or heartbeat, the bowel of cereal you just poured milk in stares back at you with big, sad eyes, as if to say farewell as you lift the spoon of Wheat Chex to you lips.

Always death, that subject and intangible menace in the deeper shadows of the alleys, in the cracks between the shelves of the used book stores, seeping blackness dribbling in from old hotel hallways under grey doors, death, ever present, a fact that is a bider of time, a patient representative of perhaps an even vaster gasp of the Unknown, death is always there in the things and the places and within the people one encounters. It becomes a habit of mind, I suppose, to look into the rubble of architectural ruins or the long pauses between moves in a chess game between two old men and to visualize the void that awaits them and finally ourselves, and there is something to be said in the meditation on the subject of approaching the end of the line where one's ticket is punched , once and for all;indeed, I sometimes regard the day to day activities as performances of a sort, scenarios acted out, improvised upon, and I am the critic, assessing how well I met the standards of appropriate response to the world or getting keen on far I fell short.
The thought that my life would be no more,that there would no more matinees or encores leaves one breathless and in a vague panic if I park my ride in that neighborhood too long.

Lucky for me that I push on, get on with the day, write a poem about those feelings that pushes death , that shadowy enigma, that uncompromising lack, to the margins and emphasize the life that is with me. Tragedies are constant and we consider their impact, we measure the loss, but we take stock of what we have still and stop watching the clock. For the moment, for this day, we stop fearing death, we learn to live with it, we move on and call a friend, we help a neighbor, we excel at our jobs, we create meaning in the life that still engages our senses. We find joy.

Not that we ignore death, of course; I am leery of poems, though, that too quickly shifst the focus of their lines from what begins as one of a limitless prose description of a an urban locale into a bit of self-estimation that evaluates the present life against an imagined calendar that is quickly running out of pages.Alan Williamson's poem "No.1 Piazetta Calamandrei", wants something to be delivered to him with a bang, a crash of cymbals, an orchestral fanfare; his details too readily ooze the impending arrival of his private end of days.

Does being you still mean walking your own mind
as if it were a tightrope? With anger rising
against those nearest you, as if they were depriving you
of some dearest hope?
What is the thing, the flaming-up or darkening,
that brings you peace?
No answers. But why does a sudden joy
go through me, at this thinning of the veil
between me then and now?
For a moment I no longer fear the death
that waits for me,
as if it were no more than the drawing of a just sum.
Pausing, as if to enter,
my hand on the great knob of the street door. ...

This too readily finds dread in the everyday things around him, which would have been a good way to go had he not chosen to lard up the proceedings with so much thinking. The deliberation is too deliberate; Carl Sandburg or Emily Dickinson this is not, two poets who recognize Death, with a capital D, as a the huge bag of nothing ness it was. Williamson's poem is bothersome because it dredges up so much worry and reflection triggered by trivial details, nicely designed and symmetrically pleasing as they might be to the eye; poetry , among other facets, concerns itself with finding significant things, images, notions in unexpected places in unexpected moments, but Williamson's writing finds too articulate; the dualism of a young man compared against his older self laces whatever irony that might be had into a supremely literary echo chamber and cheats the subject out of the element of surprise.
The poem's tone that reads as if it has been practiced, that is too say, rehearsed. I realize the poem is Williamson composing his thoughts about his own death and that he is attempting here to establish a believable objective correlative, providing a backdrop of physical things in the material world to enhance a poem about a moment in his interior life, but I think this fails because the poem the first person narration, all the references to self, put this in the league of whining complaints about encroaching infirmity. Any one can complain about their fading light, anyone can express regrets festooned with first person pronouns--a good poet, though,should have the craft,the instinct, the ear to get that across by removing themselves from the discussion almost entirely, to not pad what is already poetic.

Has anybody noticed...

2011-12-21T22:41:00.000-08:00

I was relieved to find out that I wasn't the only one who thinks Tom Cruise looks bizarre when he beats a hasty path. After seeing the new film Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I came across someone who asked on Facebook if anyone else thought if Cruise ran funny, a stylized herky jerky scramble, very kinetic with the arms making piston like moves up and down. He makes me think of toy that had been wound up too tightly and was thrashing about until unwound, or the the spring snapped. The only thing missing was the key in his back. Cruise is a problematic actor , of course, rigorously stylized, overly assertive with those gestures and quirks of the head: the laugh is too quick and barking, the smile is too fast to appear and too tight besides, the eyes are bright and attentive, but you cannot shake the feeling that he thinks you're a mirror he's staring into.

Not that he doesn't try to do good work; his fans would cite Eyes Wide Shut with director Stanley Kubrick. To tell the trurth, I didn't much care for Eyes Wide Shut, which I thought was a stiff , creaking attempt at necro-erotica. Cruise isn't the actor I would have cast for a role like this, but I think the main fault lies in what I suspect was the movies incomplete status. Despite what the studio and Stanley Kubrick's might claim, I doubt this film was finished. The editing is especially ragged and arbitrary, not something you'd expect from a Kubrick project. It was a supremely pretentious swan song from an already pretentious director.

Cruise's career work is slick, commercial and slickpromotion, and it is one of the truly embarrassing things an audience memberwill ever have to do than to watch this two-dimensional action toy try toconvey complex emotions or states ofmind. But he is, like a good many otherscreen personalities, effective as a presence if he is in the right project.The secret, I think, is to keep the story going moving along at a brisk pacethat doesn't sacrifice coherence or allow Cruise the opportunity to get Hollywoodon us. Spielberg, for all the griping one may do about him, knows how to keep amovie brisk and made Cruise the perfect protagonist in Minority Report.Interestingly enough, I think the pair also did good work in War of the Worlds.

got a letter from the IRS

2011-12-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

I got a letter from the today IRS saying I owe them money from last year. Stunned by this, I rooted around for my return and my W2s and other paperwork together, and tried to make sense of this rude how do you do. I remembered filing everything that was given to me by my various employers for 2010, and yet here is they are, giving me numbers on particular lines in the 1040EZ form where they said I presented erroneous information.

Now what?

I didn't have a stiff drink, although the thought occurred to me; I remembered that I tried doing that many times before, over and over, over many years, and all those things that I wanted to make go away went away for only a little while. When I woke up, or emerged from the bog, as it were, there was three things for certain, a hangover, more wreckage from previous night's events I barely remembered, and those boogieman I tried to dissolve with a string of stiff drinks. I gave myself over to the IRS .

So I surrendered the whole game and gave them a call, waited a half hour on the phone, got a representative finally, he brought my return, did some work with a pencil, and said my return was correct, discovered the source of the problem, and told me what to write back in response. the upshot is that i don't owe them anything from last year. i didn't need to call suicide prevention nor change my sobriety date. I won't go into the insanely banal error on my part which caused the IRS computer to kick out a change in my 2010 return with the message that I owed them,but I will offer this one tax tip: make sure you enter the various amounts of income on the right lines so designated. Don't lose two hours of a perfectly beautiful afternoon fretting more than a guitar assembly line.

__________________

Christopher Hitchens is Dead

2011-12-16T12:42:00.000-08:00


Christopher Hitchens holds forth at D.G.Wills Books in La Jolla, California, 2006.

Christopher Hitchens is Dead: Iconoclast and public intellectual passes away at a Houston hospital after battle with cancer.:

The recently dead Christopher Hitchens was an ornery son of a bitch . That said, I have no doubt that he will be remembered perhaps the last of the great gadflies, a brilliant and fluid essayist who was fluent in the subjects of politics, history, art, literature, philosophy and, indeed, pop culture itself who could then effortlessly, it seemed, essay forth and parse the particulars of his subject with a quick, subtle read, reaching conclusions that pleased and displayed hundreds and thousands of readers world wide in equal measure. He was a contrarian, a supporter of the Iraq War, an aggressively eloquent atheist, a discoverer of elegance, grace and integrity in unexpected places, from unusual sources, defending his positions with a moral consistency that was rare, founded on a bed rock of values he developed as a young man active in the British New Left of the Sixties.

One wishes that he hadn't allowed his hatred of dictatorship and brutality to support a war that was immoral from the get-go; Hitchens argued as much that although the rationale behind the war was a calculated stream of falsehoods, the intentions were honorable none the less --to rid the world of an evil tyrant--and that we might as well go ahead and instill a Western sense of justice on a country that had not attacked the United States; that there were no facts presented by any credible accounts in our intelligence agencies connecting Iraq to terrorists , nor evidence nor discovery of the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction Saddam Hussein's possession mattered not at all to the intransigent Hitchens, who conducted his pro-war argument on a slippery slope; his willingness to ignore an immoral premise for a war of no coherent purpose , favoring instead a Higher Morality that has yet to justify itself in terms of an arguable Good Result that has been achieved is the mill stone that will hang around the memory of Hitchens for years to come. There will be embarrassed silences when this comes up, heated debate,exaggerated praise and gross condemnations. Eventually , of course, many things will be overlooked, forgiven or forgotten altogether and we can again appreciate the sheer brilliance of Hitchens the journalist, the gadfly, the pundit, the scintillating essayist, the uncommonly astute literary critic.

At his best , Hitchens despised cant, bullshit, received perceptions and championed intellectual honestly fiercely, fearlessly. He did not pussyfoot, he did not apologize, he presented his case, he bulldozed his opponents with hard reason , deep reading and seemingly perfect recall of vetted facts in their sources. One may have disagreed with this Hitchens on various matters and be on solid ground with their opposition to his views, but shame on he or she that dares confront him with a sub-par set of counter moves. You had to up your game to engage this man, you had to up your game to Olympian heights. You also had to succeed in not passing out in the thin air of Hitchens' altitude.

Christopher Hitchens, a damnable son of bitch, and a pleasure to read over these past twenty years.

humbug

2011-12-15T16:14:00.000-08:00

Humbug.

A consistent gambit in the postmodern bag of tricks andpranks has been the idea of pastiche, the piecing together or the layering overof unlike elements, a mix and match of contrasting aesthetics and purposesthat, when rendered successfully, are supposed stun and bewilder the audience;the more grandiose hope, in a generalized apology from academic critics, isthat an audience member is supposed to confront the limitation of the filtersthat. The suggestion was that consumers would become aware of how our populararts present a conveniently small and cozy version of the world where there isstructure and rationale for all events, but this is a reach, at best, for mostof the practicing post-coders out there that have made the laziest of ironicart.

It always occurred to me that allthis pastiche making was producing were sometimes amusing, too often ugly andpointless poems, films, and artwork. It seemed more the gesture, the offhand flick of the wrist instead of thestylistic signature of an intelligence that was shrewdly weight the materialsat hand. Sometimes, of course, it is nothing more than two things joinedtogether in willful defiance of whether anything makes aesthetic orintellectual sense; the result is more primal, cynical, and vindictive even,such as Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs. The conveniently avant gardish in our ranks might claim genius for Dylan's scruffy vocal and equate it with the thorny rasp of the best blues singers, certainly artists in a style that has redefined the modern ideal of good singing.I wouldn't compare this to an oldblues singer: they can at least carry a tune.Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Bessie Smith , even genius spawn Tom Waits can rise above the melody line with their rattled vocal equipment and lend the lyrics the qualities of nuance, texture, rhythmic interplay with the instrumental arrangement. What's most notable about Dylan's singing, once you get past the oddness, is the flat reading; this is grudgingly workman like.There isn't a traceable sense of joy, spiritual uplift. Even the comfort of ironic distancing, the Brechtian alienation effect, is lacking. This is simply awful, sad comingfrom a man of his genius. This is something that was conceptually brilliant in1970 when he released his four sides of deliberate schlock "SelfPortrait", with different vocal affectations, orchestral arrangements,vocal choruses, odd song selection and a host of other purposefullynon-Dylanesque elements.

That was precisely the point, I think, as Dylan neverhad much patience for those who would make a religion and a politicalphilosophy from his songwriting; it was like he wanted to confound hisidolaters and see if they could perversely turn this mash up into a furthermessage from the godhead. I understood that immediately when the album cameout, but the listening stopped being funny long before side one was over with.It is a one idea that depends entirely on the ironic effect it's trying tosustain. It was a burden to listen to, MOR; it was a prank that did not paydividends for taking it seriously. The concept has not aged well, and repeatingthe gimmick here just strikes me as a near tragedy. It is schlock, and itdoesn't matter whose name is on it. Dylan, I think, is up to his old game of screwingwith the heads of people who take him too seriously. He may love this tune,love singing it, but I still think his intention is to throw another wrenchinto the mechanics that insist he is something more than a brilliantsongwriter.

GEORGE WHITMAN, RIP

2011-12-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

George Whitman at D.G.Wills Books in La Jolla, California

To Boredom by Charles Simic

2011-12-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

TO BOREDOM
I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.
A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.
The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.
I know Heaven’s like that,
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed. -
-Charles Simic, New Yorker 12/10/07

A fine, chiseled odehere. Boredom is those moments when you find yourself that seems to make youheavier with a lethargy that seems to have grown hands attached to big, brawnyarms that grab you around the chest and drag you to the floor;ennui turns toterror, as you're too lazy to fight and a passing thought turns into aconcrete, concentrated panic over teh notion that the floorboards andcheckerboard tile might fall away and the metaphorical hands and arms woulddrag to a hell where every second of the eternity to come is the precisely theagony you felt on the worst day you ever had while wandering those years in thematerial world. Time stands slows to an inch worm's slither and there is thefeeling of being suspended between dimensions. Charles Simic is a great poetand gets it right about heaven as well; eternal perfection is without dynamics,variation, a constant state of equilibrium.

Some times a loud mouth is just a loud mouth

2011-12-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Some of otherwise bright pop culture journalists reveal in the frequent over rating every entertainer who displays a spark of independent thinking and an unwillingness to stick with the status quo. Such is the case in a recent Slate article staking a claim for anti-magician Penn Jillette as being a public intellectual, ala Chomsky,Vidal Christopher Hitchens or William F.Buckley.

It makes me imagine that some desperate cabal of Internet editors, eager to have ready material on which to fill up their web pages with the daily requirement of sniping, toadying, salivating gruel, decided that Jillette was a public intellectual because he had a loud mouth, was a libertarian, and an aethiest; being a contrarian, though, does not a credentialed Big Thinker make, although it is ideal for the tell-tale Swelled Head . A bellicose sort, Jillette is the kind who considers his opinions--routinized contrariness all--are made brilliant and more nuanced if he both shots them in hoarse bombast and laces the points with various "fucks" and "shits".

But really, when was the last time you read something from this guy that was worth quoting?I suspect that Jillette would stiff if he were to a sit down discussion with these writers. Jillette is a moderately funny provocateur who can from time to time get you to think in meta-terms about the whole issue of images and appearances and or willingness to surrender our skepticism for some sense of living in a meaningful universe. Fine and dandy, but that is as far as his discourse goes when one listens to him at length, and extending his nihilism to media corruption and seduction of its audience false paradigms presented by entrenched political concerns , all through the clever metaphor of his magic act strains after awhile, and is reflective of the usual grousings of a self-appointed

Everyman who has found a pitch that can be applied to nearly every subject that comes his way. Jillette is less a public intellectual than he is crank with a malleable script. Not that he's alone in this guise of being a "public intellectual"; Gore Vidal, more knowledgeable by far than Jillette in the Humanities, none the less manages to reassert a particular number of notions that he's been carping on for several decades. I will say that Jillette is as much a public intellectual as Orson Bean was. Or Dick Cavett. In defense of Bean and Cavett, though, both realized that they were paid entertainers, not pundits credentialed with degrees and teaching positions, and honed their curiosity about more worldly and abstract affairs by knowing how to ask interesting, knowledgeable questions to those who were the professional experts. At best, this skill gave the curious audience better answers than they would have expected. Charlie Rose does this. And again, Jillette is not Charlie Rose. Penn Jillette is a bellicose fool in a perpetual state of irritation. He is a man in search of a stroke.

A bomb from Bosch

2011-12-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

Daniel Bosch gives us a parody he
s written of Mikail Lernmontov's poem "The Triple Threat" with his own "Dream (After Lermontov)." As you might expect, this poem is as successful as the reader's familiarity with the source of inspiration. Bosch's poem is a car that will never get out of the garage.The problems with parodies is that an audience needs to be familiar with the object being mimicked and thus ridiculed. Otherwise the snickering, guffaws, belly laughs and general knee slapping is reduced to polite attention or a wandering gaze. So it is for Daniel Bosch's send up of Lermontov; it adheres to the sinewy formalities of the original poems, but the zany intrusions of transgressively contemporary items, like an Ipad and a GPS, is too determined for my taste to catch me off guard with an unexpected combination of things that should not normally be in the same narrative. Bosch is a wonderful poet in most respects, but this sort of dies in the dungeons of literary self-reference, that part of the Prison House of Language where poets continually fail to write poems that can make it to the streets of the city the writers live in. This is to say that it is, again, another poem about poetry, and it is a tendency that drains spark and a spontaneous sense from the poetry we too often read. Bosch is , again,a wonderful poet , and I hope, I hope very much that he hasn't decided to unpack his bags permanently where the stories are about the stories he's read, not the life he has experienced or felt close to the bone, close to the heart.

Paragraph about a being a paragraph

2011-12-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

The paragraph you're reading.

We will call this a paragraph and pray to the gods of limitless expansion that there is enough energy to bring this sentence another two lines further down the space I have given myself to type a coherent , albeit self aware sentence that serves no purpose other than to stare back at the reader in an expressionless, unblinking stare--metaphorical expressionless stare, of course--and qualify that stare with an equally suggested shrug of the language defined shoulders, a skinny, surly punk of a paragraph sentence that could care less what your trying to read into it now matter how powerful your readerly intents and desires, a sentence that is cool and impervious to what needs to be confirmed in our world, a sentence that will win because it will not let the air outside it's self referring walls inside; we can almost detect the faint reek of dust mites that have gathered on the shuttered spines of the books that have not been read for twenty years or so which have been squared away in unmarked boxes and grey shelves that are exposed to whatever moisture and elemental tears a store room gathers after the will is read. This paragraph divides into two sentences and a gratuitous image simulating a snap shot you think you saw once in a family basket holding hundreds of other Polaroids is tossed in for confusion's sake--a young girl, age four, standing in the middle of a snowy street bundled up to her small face except for a left boot, which is missing, stuck in and removed by a muddy incline she tried to walk over--and this becomes the point where the paragraph begins a long spiral upward, like ashes up a smoke stack from some merciless incinerator, up the concrete tubing to a sky that is not clear as this paragraph might have been, but is encumbered with clouds and thick flocks of birds crossing the face of the moon.

Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters

2011-12-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

Graphic by Alex M.Bustillo

The 70's were made a lot easier to take due to two albums I owned, both from blues harmonica genius Paul Butterfield, It All Comes Back and Better Days. I spent dozens of hours breaking down and learning his harmonica work on "Broke My Baby's Heart" and "New Walking Blues". Wonderful, wonderful blues playing, with perhaps the best band he ever formed. If you haven't already, check out the obscure Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. The album is a revelation, as it has Waters stepping a few steps back from the rocking , Chicago style back beat, raw and blistering in a fashion only genius can achieve, and here taking up a swing upbeat. Save for the rumblings of Waters' voice, always a place of deep echo and lean-close innuendo, some of these tracks would fit in well with the suited urbanity of B.B.King.

It is a gem alright, a rousing, spirited transitional session placing Waters beyond his stylistic comfort zone. But not too far. Pinetop Perkins provides a bright piano throughout, and former Band utility musician Garth Hudson is a triple threat here on organ, saxophone and accordion; his accordion work, surprisingly, is a wonderful blues instrument, as can be heard on the sturdy workouts on "Going Down to Main Street","Caldonia". Whatever jokes the instrument and it's players have suffered at the hands of one comedians over the decades abates somewhat with Hudson's finely fingered boogie and sparkling fills. What caught my ear was the harmonica playing of the late Paul Butterfield; perhaps among the handful of truly important blues harpists , his playing here equals his best efforts.

Punchy, fleet, gutty and clean in the same breath, Butterfield demonstrates his mastery of tone and phrase, combining a moaning raunch and inspiring single-note runs for maximum effect. Butterfield fans ought to acquire this disc straight away; it's an essential addition to your harmonica player collection. This is a terrific addition his previous collaboration with Waters, the stomping Fathers and Sons. For Waters, he is relaxed, at ease, in full command of his singularly masterful voice; within that limited range he can raise the voice to it's breaking point , emphasing a point, highlighting a hurt, suggesting a rebellion against what brings him down, and then slide to the lowest corner of his range and provide the gritty realism that is his hallmark as a blues artist.One is also served a generous portion of Waters' slide guitar work, a perfect compliment to Bob Margolin's stinging bends and blurs; Waters touch is sure and spare, producing a thin, nervous, clear line . It is a wonderful texture in a full bodied, hard swinging band. A battler, a lover, a philosopher of the hard road, never with self pity, never without wit.

On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . . | Nicholas Payton

2011-12-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . . | Nicholas Payton:

Nicholas Payton is a grumpy man with some spiky opinions geared to get readers to first read and then decide which side of the polarized divide they want to pitch their temps as regards agreeing or disagreeing with his opinion. This is definitely a man after my own heart, and it is something valuable in having an African American intellectual cut through the decades of codified crud and crust that has passed as jazz-criticism, mostly written white critics. In this case I happen to disagree with Payton's unsubtle declaration that jazz is dead and it died in 1959; I think the music , as all art must do to survive generations beyond it's origins and first bursts of creativity, must enter a larger tapestry of a dominant culture: it needs to belong to everyone over time. That is a argument that could on forever, I realize, but let me cut to the quick here and say that I understand Payton's point, that "jazz" is a corporate label over all, and that being called a jazz musician identifies who you are and dictates, sans black jacks and brass knuckles and rabid white cops, what you can do.

Facebook

2011-12-05T06:58:00.000-08:00

All you have
is your face
after your name
appears in letters
that arrive from
machines you don't recall
meeting or speaking to
in any dialing tone of voice.

Your face
on t-shirts
and billboards
and internet banner ads
that sell you the idea
that all you
have is is your face
until gravity
reveals itself
in the morning mirror
that cannot tell a lie
no matter
how hard you wish it would.
From then on
that face belongs
to someone else.

I remember your face
from every
imagined camera angle
my dreams
would give me,
the last frame
being your profile,
your head half turned
toward me
as you walked out the door,
your hair
an insane corona of electric morning sun.

From this window
from this height
on this day
there are many buildings
with windows
full of faces
staring out to and beyond
the skyline,
to the river
that seems
like nothing but a
slow gray streak,
a thousand faces, perhaps,
drumming a lower lip with an index finger,
scratching where it doesn't really itch,
faces with vague frowns propped up
with hands
that should be busy
with the time someone else is paying for.

David Cronenberg: It's as if my old movies don't exist - Movies - Salon.com

2011-12-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

David Cronenberg: It's as if my old movies don't exist - Movies - Salon.com:

David Cronenberg may insist that his old movies don't exist, metaphorically, as he seeks to be taken seriously by mainstream critics, but his previous horror films are a stain on his resume that will not come out: he is almost alone in being among the dullest and most pretentious film makers of his generation. He has had a William Burroughs fascination for years, an obsession actually, and many of his films are obviously modeled on the author's novels for themes and imagery. What Cronenberg never got, though, was Burrough's gallows humor, being too busy conceiving of humans merging with the machines they build to help them rather than take a cold look at the charity we dispense that winds up assassinating us with procedures and protocol. Cronenberg got the fear, but never the punchline.

Lawn Sprinkler

2011-12-03T12:45:00.000-08:00

THE BEAUTIFUL LAWN SPRINKLER
by Howard Nemerov

What gives it power makes it change its mind
At each extreme, and lean its rising rain
Down low, first one and then the other way;
In which exchange humility and pride
Reverse, forgive, arise, and die again,
Wherefore it holds at both ends of the day
The rainbow in its scattering grains of spray.

I know a coupleof folks who expressed opinions approachingoutrage that a poet would dare write a poem to a Grecian urn; the situationthese views where these viewsarose turned out, finally, to be one of the worst poetry discussions I everhad. The protesters, professed Marxist sorts who thought John Keats was guiltyof gross objectification by subjugating Human issues to the realm of metaphor and abstraction. Absurd,I think, but I think my earnest opponents were disguising personalissues—perhaps they didn’t like having their sense of humanity even vaguely equated with a receptaclemany of us would associate with being a repository for spit, urine and feces—witha vulgar political stance that was quick to criticize and condemn before itunderstood what was being said. That is the problem of knowing everything.

I resist demanding that the poet obey anyone’s list of do’s and don’ts.My only requirement is that the poem be interesting. Personifying allowthe poet some room to imagine a man made device in non-material terms;offensive as it may seem to those who've no use for powers greater thanthemselves, associating a lawn sprinkler with such abstract things asdemocratic spirit and the great chain is a sure way to get someone to thinkharder on a subject and ease their burden. Every action starts in one directionand yet completes itself by returning from where it came; the rain rises andthen falls again across a community of grass, humility and pride change places,a mind that is dedicated to one direction begins to see wisdom and need inareas that it might not earlier have imagined as things that mattered. I seethis as about equilibrium, of things coming toward the center even as tensionsseek to stray and take apart; the center grows, it adapts, it changes itspremise for being in service a greater good. Individual greatness does notmatter if there is nothing the brilliance is connected to and interacts with.

NEW CHAP BOOK available as FREE DOWNLOAD

2011-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

I have a PDF of a new chapbook of poems, and it can be downloaded free at Google Docs,

If the link doesn't work, just send an email to tburke4@san.rr.com and I will get one to you straight away.

notes on Quentin Tarantino

2011-11-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

Quinten Tarantino, like Brian De Palma, likes to dress up inthe old clothes of directors he admires; unlike De Palma, this cut and pastestyle has for Tarantino, resulted in occasional brilliance and one legitimatemasterpiece, Pulp Fiction. The energy and playfulness, however, has becomewearisome as this fellow repeats and reiterates his moves, stylistically andintellectually. "Death Proof", his contribution to the "GrindHouse" collaboration with Richard Rodriguez, was something of a "PulpFiction" knock off, overly stylized dialogues about not much in particularslowing down the narrative momentum like a big thumb on an old turntable, and"Inglorious Basterds" was this film maker at his most hollowed-out,glib, verbose, lazily constructed, scenes drawn out and shocks and surprisestwists slipped in along the way as a means to distract us from the fact thatTarantino's bag of tricks was a small one to begin with.

Tarantino fatigue has set in ; what made him hip now makeshim seem like a gimmick prone stylist living up to fan expectations; I think ofgood amount of Fellini when the subject of Quentin arises. Is destined to makea million motion pictures the contentsare familiar to the point of contempt? There is a strong chance, unless Hollywood runs out of money first. EvenPulp Fiction, his best effort, seems dog eared just as Citizen Kane seems over stuffed. PB movie will hang around Tarantino's head for as long as he livesbecause it will be regarded, always, as the best thing he's ever done. Itremains a powerful film for the most part, full of wicked laughs and andre-convolutions of seamy paperback action novels, but it does shows it's age.The dialogue is something... else altogether, but does anyone really think he'sdone better than the Master, Elmore Leonard?The dialogue ,as such, are extendedriffs divorced from the violence and action, a sort of virtuosity that is moreobtrusive than revealing; the beauty of pulp fiction was that its minimalistdiscussions, compact, jargon filled, quirky and redolent in references thatsuggested a sub culture beyond the melodrama of ...the basic plot, were modelsof sledge hammer concision. The dialogue here merely stalls, stops, occupiestime like it were a waiting room. Seeing these characters again go on about thedifferences in burger joints between Amsterdam and America, the finer points offoot massage and revenge, on changing one's way of life due to a revealed miracle,makes you wish something would happen that was gratuitous and withoutjustification. Anything to get on with it.

The irony about the matter of Tarantino is that while hemaintains the loves, admires and discusses eloquently the elegant leanness andclean procedural logic of genre films, he cannot make films near theirperfection because of his verbosity; as Duncan Shepherd wrote, he likes to hearhimself write. It's not that action genre films cannot have compelling orintellectually compelling dialogue; the problem lies in Tarantino's deficienciesas a screen writer. What he thinks are layers of ironic misdirection,whereabsolute monsters or amoral reprobates are given reams of well -honed speechesto recite between spasms of bad-doings are, in fact, padding and time wasting.

Even Elmore Leonard,the king of dialogue, knows to tailor his exchanges to advancing the action andthe surprises.Leonard has sage advice tothose younger writers who desire to have readers finish the books they write orthe movies they author:"

Quentin Tarantino makes me think increasingly of the brightmusician of generous technique and dexterity who forsakes sheet music, or evenhead arrangements and insists instead of improvising, from a cold start. KeithJarrett comes to mind, superb pianist in group contexts who, somewhere in theSeventies, elevated himself to a concert soloist, literally, with a series ofmulti-disc live releases highlighting his ability to extemporize melody anddevelopment. Tension and release is the key to keeping any soloing alive, anelement that requires pacing; the problem with Jarrett's elongatedimprovisations , it seemed to me, that he too often went frameworks that supportedhis configurations and offered up, at extended rates, a form of noodling,riffing, a repetitive set of rills and streaming, gutless variations thatlacked adventure, daring. Jarrett, unknown to him and ignored by his fans, hadturned into a New Age pianist, a verbose George Winston. I couldn't wait forthe man to ease himself back into band situations, which he has, and good forhim,and good for us. Inglorious Basterds , writer-director's Tarantino's homageand ramping up of the Men On a Mission war drama , is a flashy, occasionallygripping bit of now dated mannerisms characteristic of the film maker who, asDuncan Shepard has remarked, loves to hear his voice emerge from the mouths ofcharacters he creates. The characters , though, are no more than sock puppets,and what used to pass for style in this man's work has become shtick. One getsthe feeling through the movie that the generic plot points Tarantino writesover are not notes to a melody he would lovingly embellish , but are consideredas little more than a chord progression over which he has another excuse toblitzkrieg us with dazzling technique.

Shtick, though, can still be fun if deployed in a livelyway, and there are moments when the predilection of long monologues orconvoluted stretches of dialogue that lead , at snail pace, to an expectedburst of violence grabs you by scruff and bangs you around some, the obviousexample being the performance of Christoph Waltz as the charming, effete, wellmannered and murderous S.S. officer Col. Lada. Waltz is inspired as he embodiesthe self aware elegance of a man who likes nothing better than to exterminateJews for the Nazi command. He cannot, though , balance Waltz's performance withan effective counterweight; Brad Pitt, of late the most interestng Hollywoodactor with the roles he's taken --Burn After Reading, The Assassination ofJessie James by The Coward Robert Ford-- but in Basterds he's only on screenless than half the screen time, and he is impaired beyond belief by acartoonish Arkansas accent. Pitt has the appealing skill of vanishing insidethe character's skin and letting his physicality become inhabited by anotherpersonality , full of ticks and twitches. Unlike Al Pacino, say, who battles toconquer a writer's character with his trademark rages and rasping , rantingstyle, Pitt's portrayals strike you as people you wouldn't look at twice; thisis the talent to seem insignificant until a series of gestures and reactionsreveals an unannounced agenda. Except here, significantly; Pitt looks like he'spracticing his accent in a mirror while he studies the smooth curves of hisface. It never becomes a comfortable fit.

The Lada speeches go on for extended lengths,reprisingfeints, indirections and nuanced deceits of past Tarantino movies. Tarantinohadn't an outline for this film, a structure to hang his best ideas on; rather, he improvised from the outset, the result that his worst tendencies show upas often as his best virtues. Which made Inglorious Basterds a dull, grinding,unpaced endurance contest.

He reached his saturation point with steroidizing moviegenres with his two part masterpiece Kill Bill, with all it's seamless andbravura conflations of different action film styles, but he has based hisreputation on this one knack, or , more accurately, this habit. Death Proof wasa chatty, grinding bore, with the fabled Tarantino dialogue sounding like leftover material that didn't make into Pulp Fiction or True Lies. IngloriousBasterds continues the downward spiral despite the generous reviews fromcritics eager to crown him an auteur, continues the downward spiral.

His sleights of hand, his post modern conflations, hispromiscuous homages to film styles that drag down his narrative momentum--hardrock guitar riffing in a WW2 movie? Whoa, cutting edge stuff-- fail to liftthis bit of labored pandemonium . Eccentric liberties with formula plotstructures made items like Pulp Fiction and the pair of Kill Bill movies funthings to sit through, a superb blend of film making panache and a young man'senergy to jack up the action; even his incessant references to other movieswere endearing because you sensed the director had shoved two generations offilm theory to the side and resolved that movies were fun; aesthetics were amatter of making the entertainment more intense.

What hasn't happened the maturation of the approach; fun canstill be a value in itself, but there is the expectation that an artist hasdeveloped an finer sense of what that entails; themes ought to transform overtime. The aging wunderkind remains on the same playground, though. As withDeath Proof, Basterds isn't an improvement on an original idea, but rathersomeone of limited ideas determined to tell the same jokes over and over. Itwould be one thing if he were developing his themes, but Tarantino loves hisriffs and mulled-over mannerisms too much to alter them, to play with them.Heloves them way a thief loves his stolen booty. No matter how lovingly hepolishes and resets these things, you are aware that they don't belong to him.

Calming down

2011-11-29T16:27:00.000-08:00

Time was, not so long ago, when I that poems that didn'thave "dirt under the fingernails" were without value. I insisted thatlife as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting ,more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made toread in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was anundergraduate at the time, in the mid to late seventies, an earnest poet tryingto be relevant who, incidentally, was having problems in literature coursesrequiring same said anthologies. There might have been a worthwhile insightsomewhere in my whining for a polemic I could write if I cared to take thetime, but it suffices to say that I was lazy, too lazy to read the poems, toostoned to go to class, far, far too stoned to read the secondary sources to beprepared for class discussions or for the papers I had to write. I did whatanyone genuine undergraduate poet/radical/alkie would do; I blamed the system.So there.

It took a bit of doing--sobering up, bad grades, failed relationships--forme to get wise(r) and actually read the work I thought unworthy, and theremarks of critics who've done their own work considering the aesthetics atlength, and I've since backed away from trying to shoe horn all poetry into atight fitting tuxedo. What was learned was relatively small, a revelation forthe truly dense; poetry works in many ways, and the task of the critical readercannot be merely to attack and opine but to make an effort to weigh a poem'selements on their own merits, studying how effects are accomplished, and then,finally, lastly, to offer a judgment whether the poem works. Not that I adhereto this prolix method--I shoot from the hip and often miss the whole darntarget--but I try. Now the issue, from Slate's Poems Frame, is whether a poemcan work if it lacks the glorious thing called "heart".

Anyone seriously maintaining that a work of art, be it poem,novel or painting is doomed to failure because it lacks this vague qualitycalled "heart" has rocks in their head. Artists are creative people,on that most of us can agree, and by definition artists of narrative arts makestuff up from the resources at hand. Whether the source is actual experience,anecdotal bits from friends or family, novels, biographies, sciences, all theseare mere furniture that goes into the creation of the poem. The poet's purposein writing is to produce a text according to some loosely arranged guide linesthat distinguish the form from the more discursive prose form and create a poemthat arouses any number of responses, IE feelings, from the reader."Heart", I suppose, would be one of them, but it's ill defined andtoo vaguely accounted for to be useful in discussing aesthetics. Confessionalpoetry and the use of poetry books and poetry readings as dump sites for awriter's unresolved issues with their life doesn't impress me generally, as inthe ones who do the confessing never seem to acquire the healing they seek andinstead stay sick and miserable and keep on confessing the same sins and complainsover and over. Journaling would be one practice I would banish from a poetryworkshop I might teach. We are writing poems, not an autobiography.

I would say, actually, that one should suspect that poet whoclaims that every word of their verse is true, based on facts of their lives. Icannot trust the poet who hasn't the willingness to fictionalize or otherwiseobjectify their subject matter in the service of making their poems moreprovocative, worth the extra digging and interpreting. Poems and poets come inall shapes and sounds, with varied rationales as to why each of them write theway they do, and it's absurd and not to say dishonest that "heart",by which I mean unfiltered emotionalism, is the determining element as towhether a poem works or not. My goal in reading poems isn't to just feel thefull brunt of some one's soggy bag of grief or splendid basket of joy, but toalso to think about things differently.

Frank O'Hara figures it out

2011-11-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

The only thing wrong with Frank O'Hara's The Collected Poems is that so many of them are virtually perfect as they are, as I think he had a number of styles he could muster up with ease to get across the energy and inspiration the city could provide. His was the nearest I've come across where a genuine bit of writerly discernment--that is, the writer as someone who arranges and chooses the words that best convey his ideas, or even the lack of them --that could make me think of someone talking to me, at length, at great speed, enthusing with a dozen splendid configurations of language about a subject that has given them great and subtle joy.

The aftershock of reading his poems is that you feel as if you've been in an chat where you didn't mind at all the sleep you were missing, and still don't regret missing the morning after at the job when you cannot stop yawning at customers , clients and bosses.This was writing of it's time, but the work survives far beyond their period and are read to the current day largely because few others have been able to write about a thrill or convey their idea of kicks, sadness and still collect a response on re-reading.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

There is here the spirit of flow , a runneling rush of words that seem informal and unusually direct in their lack of meaning-disguising metaphors and other involved techniques, but what O'Hara here is working toward, with deliberation and a discriminating eye and ear, is the perception of the experience. He starts to explain why he is not a painter but rather a poet and winds up, in digression, recalling an incident with his painter friend Mike. It ends as if it were a conversation stopped before it reaches the final resonance--it is a conclusion deferred and all that remains of this recounting are the details that lead up to it, provocative clues to what might a larger epiphany might have contained. The insight, though, is that art is not so much about what you set out to accomplish, but what you actually wind up with after you've done scrambling your senses for the right brush stroke or fanciful allusion. What some call casual and toned down I'd call a mastery of the informal voice. There are a great many writers who write in a manner meant to suggest a voice , a character, actually speaking words that form quick and fascinatingly original abstractions of everyday matters and erudite issues at hand with a spontaneity that intended to seem miraculous, but there is , I think, a trace of the studied, the practiced, the idealized in the stanzas that attempt to dazzle the reader with brilliance in a chatty subterfuge. The surprise they intend to furnish our psychic domiciles with get stuck in their own pretension, like a couch too wide to fit through an apartment door too thin. O'Hara, though, gets the mixture right, the internalized form of the language, the easy access to construction, syntax, and the naturally relaxed rhythm of someone finding the right words for the right things, said to the right person, the receptive audience that inspires the poet to further, more elevated articulation, exaggerations, exclamations and declamations. In fact, I often read O' Hara's poems just to have what I imagine to have been his reading voice--yes, Theatre of the Mind-- grace the often times sterile terrain of my own imagination with his lyrics that found excitement in buildings, maddeningly brilliant, paintings, his own emotional highs and lows; there is a manic pace to O'Hara's work, as if there is only a short time to get to the point, to make the connection between how he felt, what he saw, what he did, who he met, what happened after his best thinking led him astray, as if he was aware that jackhammers, telephones, arguing lovers in the next apartment, loud music from third floor windows, gunfire or the cacophony car horns and diesel engines might sound off and drown him out, destroy the moment of self-revelation with a world demanding attention. There was a need for speed, a rapidity of response to the faint germ of an idea or the perception that could reveal some interior truth or irony if meditated on just a bit. O'Hara's gift to us was that he could , more often than not, make it all fit.

Several shy poets rent a room

2011-11-27T07:26:00.000-08:00

Who are these scribes and pens, coughing up balls of dusteach time a floor board creaks underfoot or a cat on the porch meows andscratches doors, looking for a family to move in with? Handwriting is a trailof tears and terror under the singing springs, there are bills to pay, stampsto lick, a metaphor to ponder as fingers stroke pens to remember an addresswhile cramped under a mattress .What shall we write about, oh yes, half a birdon the sill, a lone cup on the far table, ankles defacing the knot holes withunforgiving heels, but now, is the coast clear, is there anyone watching?

We leave them their food on white plates with cleansilverware, paper napkins at best, and then leave room where we can hear alltheir furious scribbling about the truncated view proceed as if it were a race,the tips of pens and assorted quills tearing across pages of journals and thelines of otherwise blank pages, riots of images of strange sights, a worldespied through mail slots and around the corners of doors left ajar.

We leave them their food and then leave, closing the door,and suddenly there is laughter up and down the hall, cartoon soundtracks, soundeffects of things bouncing and springing from wall to wall, pies in the face,Splat! We walk away and mind our own business because the rent check cleared andthat's all that matters on day full of sunshine and screaming two year olds who have harried moms with hairless arms and penciled eyebrows who refused to buy them fifty cent pieces of candy wrapped in tri-colored tinfoil. The day is too nice to get jacked up on sugar, some little person needs to take a nap, nothing on earth right now rhymes with serenity and steady nerves, let us go to the beach and stare at the waves that collude with the pipes that bring it the runneling waste of the city, let us consider the poets as they look through the movie times and menu prices of what this town brings to their table.

Guitar chords

2011-11-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Nice feedback shower he thought, choice choice of major chord and amp settings mused further, his head bowed and his hands raised as if hold a guitar, the musician on the precipiece of either genius or calamity. It was the Who's "Happy Jack" coming from the speakers, a positive keranggggg of harmonies and colliding chords, nothing complicated, just forward momentum, a force pushing down a wall that was ready to crumble from it's own un-mortared weight anyway; Keith Moon's drums ricocheted and hammered down beats and quick measures of counter attitude against Peter Towsend's guitar work, which was primal and aggravated like some youth who finally finds his voice when a bad teacher's graceless bromides become too rank to take.

Quadrophenia

2011-11-23T19:10:00.000-08:00

The Who's Quadrophenia is one of the dullest albums everreleased by a major rock band; it marks the spot where songwriter and guitarist Peter Townsend's abandoned (or lost) his genius for composing witty rock and roll and wicked power chords that were the cornerstone of all things anthemic in the grinding morass that largely was rock and roll when bands sought no longer to be fun or entertaining , but significant. There is nothing wrong with significance on the face of it, but that quality is generally the result of inspired work and an unmediated commitment to a creative surge that cannot , truthfully, be duplicated by force of will.

Townsend ,in my view, opted to make significant states in his lyrics at the sacrifice of the light touch he could frame in the context of a four chord song. Where the previous double album, the rock-opera Tommy was buoyant, rocking and didn't want for guitar hooks or the riffs, Quadrophenia got as serious as a ditch withsongs that were were bloated, wooden, humorless, positively no fun. It merits amention that the theme was incomprehensible and that this is where Daltry'svoice finally gave out. The guitar chords, once crashing , smashing and slashing in all the old descriptions of youth rebellion, were now leaden, robotic, rusty.

All that was left was a cracking bellow that made youthink of nothing except an old building collapsing under it's own heft. Ambition is fine, but not without an idea ofwhat you're doing. Someone told songwriter Peter Townsend that the modernisttradition demands a narrative that is diffuse, broken up in sharp pieces, andlacking resolution, techniques I fancy myself, given my devotion to the poetryof Eliot, Stein and Silliman, but there is a knack to doing things that way, an "ear", ifyou will. Sentences and ideas that don't necessarilyfollow one another in conveniently logical , causal order require arrangement, a sense of what doesn't go togetherthe right way: there is a reason why Bob Dylan's surrealism remains powerfulfive decades later and the more recent writings of Springsteen, someone clearlyinfluenced by Dylan's turn to obscurity , are hardly quoted at all. Another problem as well might have been aninferiority complex; he stopped being an artist, writing and recordingwonderful, brilliant, ingenious rock and roll songs the moment he started totry to be an artist on other people's terms. It's a self-conscious artiness that has made his music frightfullydidactic, incomplete and a chore to bear.

The Man Who Was Not There

2011-11-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has it's share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd, but I thought it was the least interesting of their films.

The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. He portrays his emotionally somnolent barber with less expression than a pair of pliers left at the bottom of a over-stuffed drawer in a typically crowded work bench; like the pliers, this is a man who is forgotten, anonymous , virtually invisible despite being part of the everyday scenery.His flateffect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorish style that you canwell imagine the character relishing the burn in the throat and the coughingand hacking that result in the excessbecause it is one of the things that might penetrate his otherwise impenetrablenumbness.

He he clips hair, sweeps up the clippings, and chain smokes his way through the film, Thorton's already sunken cheeks and general skull-hugging features take on the grisly isolation of a long abandoned building under the movies effectively baroque use of high contrast black and white. Still, this has the feeling of an exercise, a project to keep their hands in the game while the brothers Coen finesse their next major project. Visually gratifying, but the movie bombs over all because there is nothing inspiring in the plot to make the movie seem like another more than an empty stage.

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com

2011-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize - Salon.com: "The basic problem is that there is only Nobel Prize for literature and there many thousands of published writers who fancy themselves suitable and deserving of the award. It's not unlike the billions (and billions) of sperm swimming upstream madly to fertilize an egg that will only take accept one. Ninety nine percent of the those contending for what the prize simply don't make it; given that the Nobel Committee has to consider writers from a fairly broad range of poets, novelists, playwrights internationally, we are a bit too sensitive about not having a winner in a good many years. We are in competition with writers of other countries, after all, not merely with other American writers. It does, though, make for convenient news copy that will attract readers to the presence of whatever advertising happens to be lurking near or hovering over the editorializing about the continued "outrage". Our lazier arts commentators can then enjoy themselves with the Full Nancy Grace, sneering, pouting, whining, insinuating about America being passed up for the prize and cash reward the comes with it.

I do believe, though, that the Nobel folks do not like American writers in particular and that the remarks that have been made in the name of the Nobel Prize is dumbly Eurocentric; as the specific qualities a writer's body of work needs to have has never been articulated beyond the misty generalities of helping humanity understand its soul and its true self in the best and worst of conditions, the idea that American scribes are too insular, too narcissistic to be considered worth considering as a higher class of literature seems capricious at best. Writers are self absorbed, period, no matter where their bloodlines come from; it is the conceit that each of them has that theirs is the voice and the insight that makes them different from their fellow citizens. The task, though, is to judge what they do with the self-concentration, something the Nobel Committee is unwilling to do; contempt before investigation, I believe. The Nobel Prize, though, is one thing above all else, and that is worth remembering; pointed bullshit and frippery . We could all do better and just read our literary discoveries , shared them with our respective communities, and passed on the the amount of smoke a batch of self appointed Deacons of Taste are producing .

2011-11-19T07:26:00.000-08:00

TONIGHT

D.G.Wills Books
7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla , CA.
(858)456-1800
www.dgwillsbooks.com

Gawker suggests Lindsay Lohan should die and cash in

2011-11-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

It's tragic enough that some parts of the media make a profit following the downward movement of the hapless Lindsay Lohan, but it is morally criminal, I think, for a publication even as ethically freelance as the Gawker to infer that Lohan ought to kill herself as a means of reviving her popularity. There is only a limited amount of schadenfreude any of us can justify; Lohan was not an incredibly rich, powerful, influential figure setting herself up as moral paragon.

The self-righteous without their trousers on in the presence of small children and bankers with their hands in the till should be made to do a long perp walk and given an extra kick. Lohan was not one of those, but rather a minor league actress with small measure of success who , through her own decisions and compulsions, succeeded in screwing the good thing she had going for herself. She had it made, she messed up, she couldn't change her ways , seem contrite , she may well be one of those people who is incapable of understanding what part she played in her undoing. We all know people like this; we have had our laughs, our snickering around the coffee table, but it stops being funny. It becomes pathetic.

All you can do at the moment when you realize that your witnessing someone in the thralls of unmanageable complication is wish them well, hope things improve, take whatever moral you might construct from someone else's misfortune and attempt to have a constructive , helpful day after that. For Gawker to make gratuitious remarks about Lohan's appearence, ie, her "prematurely aging breasts", and to suggest death,self delivered or as the result of further misadventures, as a credible option for rebranding makes me think that these folks are themselves are bored with the story, bored, perhaps, with the whole task of sniffing the ground for whatever droppings and scat celebrities might have left in their wake. I imagine an office full of incredibly unhappy and bored people in front of computer monitors indulging a shrill, false glee, the kind of elation that seems little more than a thin curtain between them and The Abyss. They , perhaps, considering death to be one of their options as well when the volume on their self-congratulations subsides for a moment; they are, perhaps m Bored to Death and cannot help but project that onto the celebrity mishaps that are their stock and trade.

Perhaps they have a wish to end it all. I would accept Gawker merely ceasing publication, going offline. Going flatline would be extreme, even in Gawker's case.

linda's donuts

2011-11-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

- Barry Alfonso This is the home of the WARM HAND-OFF...
  November 2 at 5:51am ·
- Ted Burke There's a HOT ONE with name on on it waiting for you to rest your dogs inside
  November 2 at 6:36pm ·
- Barry Alfonso Are those radioactive cooties lighting up the pink sprinkles on your cruller?
  November 3 at 7:24am ·
- Ted Burke Those are the donuts with the Magic San Onofre Glow Sparkles.
  November 3 at 7:27am ·
- Barry Alfonso One bite and Ed Clark's forehead will grow another three inches!
  November 3 at 7:29am ·
- Ted Burke They are going to use those donuts to make their new sign
  November 3 at 7:30am ·
- Barry Alfonso Japanese donuts line the runways of Lindberg Field and can be seen from Mt. Laguna.
  November 3 at 7:33am ·
- Ted Burke Linda is a massive thirteen tentacle mutation that lives inside the lean to in the alley
  November 3 at 7:38am ·
- Barry Alfonso True fact: prior to the Jack in the Box restaurant going up at the corner of Garnet and Lamont, there was a burger stand that had a big sign proclaiming 'HOME OF THE TEXAS MONSTER." I guess there have been a host of fetid, horror shambling about this region for eons...
  November 3 at 7:45am ·

Take this and thrive, Pal.

2011-11-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

Since writers are in the habit of making up stories as a matter of habit and profession, each of them, not just the beats, "faked" everything.

That shouldn't be surprising from a class of folks we look to for tales, fables, metaphors and such that we might use , in some loose way, in making our own lives fit our skins better.

The question is how well ,uhhhh, how artful one is in manipulating language towards the creation of fiction or a poetry where the world as its spoken resounds with suggestion and portents of secret knowledge.

William S. Burroughs was the one stone-cold genius among the Beat writers ,was the most interesting and successful destroyer and re-creator of literary form, and maintained what Mailer called a "gallows humor" that allowed him to explore the gamier side of human personality without mythologizing the journey.

Ginsberg's early poems , as well, were filled with the bulls-eye hitting jeremiads that were such an exact fit for the condition he described that it still comes off as a fresh and blistering criticism of a culture that seems interested in no more than conformity.

Fakery is what one expects and demands from creative writers. Beat enthusiasts might blanch at the notion, but comes down to the skill of the writer to get away with the imaginative tall tales he's putting forth.

The issue, it seems, is how well do we remember the lies that we've told others over the years when we might have otherwise kept it easy and simply told the truth.

"Sandwich Notch Road, Two Days Before Christmas" by John W. Evans

2011-11-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

I like this poem in theory , as it satisfies my currentinterest in poems that have a sparer, even skeletal structure, but Evans couldhave done something global here. What it does with the localization ofgrief--the stunned incredulity, the trudging past familiar and unfamiliarthings--works well enough, but it seems to stop short. In fact, it stops rightat the point when there's an opportunity for the narrator to make caste somelines of the world at large, in this time of grief, seeming spectacularlyirrelevant:

Wanting to live

after your death

is like waking

in an empty room:

too much space.

I like this analogy because it hints at the seeming futilityof our desires and goals when the worst thing finally happens, that the petty, homemadephilosophies that gave us comfort and a sense of continuity through a chaoticworld are flimsy premises once the unavoidable fact of death encroaches onone's most intimate sphere of association. This could have been a spare,concise King Lear moment, where a few lean stanzas describing the tone and moodof the universe after the bad news is learned and being processed could havebrought a deeper, icier sense of psychic remove. It's not that Evans needed toadd an onslaught of language to expand his view, but one does get the feelingthat he was just getting warmed up before pushing his wits to another set ofconsideration; the entire poem reads like a set up that ends unconvincingly.Evans follows up his rich metaphor of comparing of living beyond your time towaking up in an empty room with a sign off that is quick and cliché,

All day I sleep off
the crude hangover.

There is, to be sure, the suggestion that the narratorsought a temporary death through an aggrieved drinking binge, that he wanted toblot out and remove an accumulating mass of emotion that will inevitablyoverwhelm him and that this fits in neatly with the previous image, but it ischeap disservice to an evocative phrase. There is a point where the vocabularycould have expanded, swelled just a bit, that the metaphors could have gonebeyond the tics and aches of the narrator's hangovers and dulled senses anddemonstrated the external world at large, pieced together by senses that arederanged with sorrow.

I suspect Evans submitted these poems for publication toosoon. While I like the style of the poem, it seems tentative; where he presentsan interesting springboard to some inspired metaphors, he stops and this, I think,is the poem's failure. In the two poems you present, he is a bit more talky,and he edges closer to monologue, to prose, instead of poetry; they remind ofthe leaden open pages of Rick Moody's overwrought, hand wringing novel PurpleAmerica, a string of run on misery that irritated me rather than feel sympathyfor the man who must know care for his aging mother. Evans, I suspect, is stilltoo close to his material. I am a fan of ambiguity in poems and I rail againstthe idea that a poetic narratives , by necessity, be a righteously craftedthing that is a finished product, self contained, which ties up the loose endsof a poem tidily the way a situation comedies end with a episode concludinglaugh line. I think Evans is obliged to be honest to his emotional progressionand leave this story unfinished; otherwise it merely becomes another Lifetimemovie of the week. What I didn't like was the convenient, easy, lazy bit aboutrecovering from a hangover; it does not sound earned. Hence, I wanted more fromthis poem; it was building credibly, and then he stopped at the point when Ithink he should have pushed further. The poem is premature, I think; he shouldhave set it aside and come back after some days had passed.

"Flea Circus" by Tomás Q. Morin -

2011-11-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

Tomas Morin seems to be going for a dreamscape here, situated primarily in a circus context, a bad dream where apocalypse , grotesque distraction , deformations physical and emotional weave and curve through the narrator's attempt to unburden himself of deeply buried traumas that compel him to speak of the world in Big Top imagery.

It's a bad dream he's trying to get across, and a bad poem is the result, starting with the grown-over and obvious gimmick of using a circus to expose an internalized ugliness--the reader quickly gets the idea of the inversion under construction, that the surface elements of the circus promising joy, wonderment, entertainment is naught but a chipped and curling veneer barely concealing the opposing qualities, despair, isolation, hunger, pain, a permanent and ongoing depression in the trudge toward death.

This is an idea that can still be made to work if there had been a sharper focus on the particular images; Morin attempted several associative leaps here, asking us to link fleas, dog meat, cheap theatrics, empty philosophy and the desire to make the marginalized, the mongrelized, the pathetic and starving among our population into a freak show, an audience to which bogus cures can be sold to and who can, in turn, be turned into a commodity who’s misery can be made saleable to a pop cultural predicated on perverting and selling a consumer's reality back to them at a steep and exacting price. Morin's imagery ought to have been cold, clear, spare and sharp as glass shards in their seeming isolation; dreams needn't be a flow, as he seems to believe, they can also be sharp, abrupt and jarring. What we could have used here was the sense of something broken that cannot be repaired. Morin mumbles instead, and his connections, something a reader can intuit, are just garbled in transmission.

The problem with "Flea Circus" isn't that it doesn't make sense, but rather that it doesn't give you a visceral sense of any conflagration of emotions struggling to come to being. There is a potential for dramatic tension here, of clarity and relief being thwarted by the many-headed demons and intractable issues of character, but it is defused by language that leaves the reader with the idea of someone who fell asleep on an arm; the awakened person knows the arm is there, but it is dull, prickly, and nearly lifeless. All one can do is hang it over the side of the bed and pray it comes alive before one arises to face another day and chance to find inspiration to write another confused poem.

Tommy Emmanuel - Guitar Boogie - YouTube

2011-11-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

There is no denying that Tommy Emmanuel is one hell of a good guitar player who and that he gives a good show pulverizing acoustic guitars with his clawhammering virtuosity. He is a crowd pleaser, the sort of flashy musician that gets audiences with only a passing familiarity with musicians and the instruments they play, and it is not surprising that he is a PBS favorite, frequently featured in concert specials during their periodic Pledge Weeks. He annoys me after a point, since everything he performs seems engineered--and "engineered" is exactly the word I want--to demonstrate how hip, slick and cool he is. Regardless of the musical style--folk, Irish, Latin grooves, hard rock, blues or swing or country (the man is versatile), the effect is same nearly all the time. There is a slow, almost lugubrious build of diminished chords , tasteful fills, harmonic overlays, efforts showing that he is capable of a light touch. But, before you know it, without warning or logic, he steps on the gas, runs the red lights, takes you barreling through the city streets with riffs that are speedy, precise, impressive, and sterile once your jaw starts to hurt from saying "oh wow" for some minutes. Emmanuel can, it seems, play anything he chooses on his guitar. Anything except music.

MTV loses its weenie

2011-11-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

The odd headline for an otherwise good article chastising an attempt by big media to make a dollar from the Occupy Wall Street movement reads as follows:"MTV Loses Its Street Cred". That was something of a jolt. When did MTV ever have street cred? The thing that sold MTV to the masses was that it did not even try to represent anything alternative or non-corporate; their job was to absorb anything new, fascinating, interesting into the mainstream and make it salable.

That is to say, it neutered the power of any trend or idea it got its hands on and made it inconsequential once the audience was saturated and bored with the new toy it was given. Politically and culturally, MTV is the epitome of the gutless wonders, spineless hustlers of distractions and minor key naughtiness. It is suitable that they abandoned music altogether in favor of more profitable reality shows, stemming from the extended run of its program "The Real World" , which has demonstrated for over two decades that eighteen and twenty year olds randomly selected and placed into a large house well stocked with alcohol are more than capable of being an unpleasant , whiny , self-obsessed bunch of know-nothings who you wish would dissolve into some corrosive ether.

It is a sad, pathetic thing to see that MTV desires to make a corporate buck off the Occupy Wall Street ; perhaps next they will bring the survivors from "Jack Ass" so see how many unemployed will allow their nuts to get wacked for a fifty dollar debit card. My hope is that the movement is more resilient than any media presence's attempts to have it contribute to a bottom line.

Obiter Dicta

2011-11-05T06:41:00.000-07:00

Talking to people about their problems makes for frequent miscues of speech and grammar, a habit stemming from something no more profound than that most of us don't know how to talk about ourselves and our personal problems to another human being. Hence, we come to the habit of trying to sound clinical, distanced, as if we have some clear grasp on what's the matter with our inner lives or internal organs. Either way, it makes for low grade comedy, and it is struggle not to laugh out loud or lecture someone on sloppy usage. I want to keep the friends and acquaintances I have.

One of the most egregious uses I can think is the promiscuous use of "potentiality" when the simpler, punchier, less ambiguous "potential" would do a better job. There's a confusion of the number of syllables in a word with the precision of expression; the more trills the tongue has to
glide over, the clearer the communication.

Another coinage that sends static crackling through my ear is the frequent use of the bizarre formation "uncomfortability". Again, there's that self-conscious nervousness that mistakes terms with centipede rhythms to be superior to more succinct words, but this instance is even more problematic,(that is to say made more confusing) by an unintended, unEmpsonesque ambiguity. Are we to think the speaker is in a state of "discomfort", which is what one arrives at through context, or is he addressing his ability to be uncomfortable at will?

The literary possibilities are rich, but this is of no aid to someone who needs to make it clear that he needs an aspirin, a therapist, or a licensed saw bones to alleviate the particular disorder, physical or psychic. It's not that I object to multi- syllabic words in everyday use, since one needs certain words to convey more elaborate ideas, but I do require that the words exist, in the dictionary if not in nature

Ugly coinages wind up in dictionaries each year, complete with the varied pronouncing keys and definitions of the different uses the term can have, but they are awkward words all the same. My favorite personal tale of someone being needlessly (and unwittingly) unclear in stating what should have been straight forward was a when I was a graduate student asking a department chair if a particular Shakespeare sequence had vacancies. He told me the classes were "impacted". I considered myself a smart guy who was fairly keen with words and their meanings even in the Seventies, but this was unclear to me; it was a strange application of a word associated with other meanings. I asked what he meant, to which he said "The classes are full." What I took from this was that there those folks who have a fear of being caught saying simple things simply; their obscurity seems to them to be a source of power.

Homepage - Slate Magazine

2011-11-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

Homepage - Slate Magazine:

'via Blog this'

This is some recent nonsense from Slate, which , besides trying to be the most current and genuinely contrarian magazine on the we, slavishly goes after the celebrity gristle that the low brow, porn addicted knuckle busters in their readership seek and consume with the constancy of a drunkard with a key the liquor box. The headline, 'Are Virgins More Virile than The Rest of Us?" makes me think of only one thing; if they are virgins, indeed, untested, untried, barely aware of what it is they are itching to try, let alone know how to scratch that itch, what criteria do we then use to judge their virility?

Hermanuetics

2011-11-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain is dangerous because he does not seem to realize how gargantuan a moron he actually is. He has the ability to contradict himself and issue forth such a persistent stream of nonsequitors and still maintain a straight face. Indeed, he seems to not have any other expressions save for that smirk that seems to just a centimeter or two from blossoming into a grease-dripping leer. Odd that it is the GOP that has become the party of Practicing Surrealist; between the fumings, rantings, jeremiads and proposals for the nation that are severely divorced from any kind of vetted reality you and I can speak to , we are witness to what seems a gaggle of folks who've made themselves drunk with fear and resentment who have cures that can only kill the patient. The saddest truth of it all is not that perhaps they are not aware of how insane they are, but they just do not give a FLAT FUCK.

2011-11-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

you walk over the bridge

early fall, leaves curled and dry as the air

that falls between us,

between us is a river

that rises

before the storms

and recedes

during the rain

that cannot satisfy the thirst we have,

the thirst we have

leaves our throats

in empty mugs

we put to our lips

in case we have anything interesting to say

after the rain

on the bridge

staring down to the slick rocks and mud

where watered flowed

an hour ago.

A GOOD HEART ( for Tom Marshall)

2011-10-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

Handy in a fix I dash off

and join a legion of honor

divine of dishes served on spreads of bread best toasted

in a heat of passion locking

the jaws and ambient teeth

squirreling away better roots for the future.

Yet the filial rifle I was given jams

and again the walls are raging

with the threat of new cracks upcoming,

but there! those were not the remarks I was making.

The sands of tine clog my crank case,

anger rears its rumored beef,

what was said gets twisted,

and honor rolls over and plays dead.

Better I should have an oily complexion

to ward off a future so rank, given the weather;

I’d be busted for sure if my left boot knew

where my right boot was tromping.

ALICE THE GOON

2011-10-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

There are only the branches

I tore from my hair to give you

when the night goes churlish

and retires in whispers cluttered as vapor.

Our lives as something resembling

ice packs on a bad knee scraped and

scratched with branches bearing

reasonable wounds for part time warfare.

This is a hat trick I pulled in a carnival game, a stick joint hawking English pool shots to nit wits groaning with local beer, the dime toss across the way was knock about and the flattest store I ever saw, some guy, old and gnomey in his money belt and raincoat, bellow to the moon, drowning out the gasoline purr of the generators before and after the flash goes on and off the fish net.

I lived around here

when there was a barber shop

with magazines that hadn't been

changed since the switch from daylight

savings time some thirty years earlier.

The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made for These Times - YouTube

2011-10-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Beach Boys - I Just Wasn't Made for These Times - YouTube: "http://youtu.be/TFZYi1aUAqM"

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TFZYi1aUAqM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The old and admittedly stale joke about the positive side of having Alzheimer's is that you're always meeting new people. Too often it seems I have forgotten the old joys of tunes that lie in my record collection , only to have a pleasurable re-aquaintence with the music decades later, out of now where.

This Beach Boy tune, from their landmark album Pet Sounds , is one of those songs, significant because principle songwriter Brian Wilson had begun to wander from the teen beach-babes-cars-surfing tropes that endeared he and the Beach Boys to the world and began to write material that contained a telling element of introspection. This melody is gorgeous, the peerless harmonies gliding along like light feathers on the breeze of a tentative and ascending melody, the odd intervals combing for an effect of naive plain speak, a young person aware that there is something more to this world than distractions.

What is one supposed to be in this world? What others expect him to be? Or to be his own person, ignoring advice, constraints, societal mores and laws? Or a combination of all these things, somewhere in the middle, defined, distinct, whole, happy, productive, creative? The song is not profound in message, it is not even poetic or artful in any way rock critics would desire,but it is beautiful in terms of being that moment when the music softens,the drummer lays out, and someone removes them self form where the action is to some other space inside their soul, reflective for a moment, perhaps indicating a prelude to a searching, innovative life. Nice jam/

2011-10-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

dgwillsbooks.com

Paranormal Light-Painting Activity

2011-10-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Paranormal Light-Painting Activity:

'via Blog this'

An interesting piece in Slate tells us of an emerging photographic art called Light Painting; the appeal , I suppose, is that the photographers eschew computers for the most part and create their effects "in the camera". There is the thrill of zen purity and existential exactness of the manipulated image being formed at the precise moment a shutter opens and shuts. Heather Murphy describes the process rather well and enthuses over the results to the extent that she and other fans of the form have witnessed mountains being moved and skies being opened.

Hyperbole, of course, gets you only so far and the article reminds of the times that I've read brilliant , favorable reviews of novels, movies, albums only to be let dramatically disappointed when the item itself is presented, either through purchase or as a gift. Prose sounds mannered and unnatural in their literary styling, movies drag or become helplessly vague in their attempts at atmosphere and suggested emotion, the music on the record albums makes you think alternately of different kinds of cream, too thick or too thin, neither of them satisfying.

Murphy's article didn't sink me into one of those minor-depressions-bordering-on-untoward rage, but there was the let down all the same. The slide show of the light paintings described were nifty indeed, strange swirls and circles of light suggesting sorcerer's light or neon lights enacting their own form of back lit mitosis, but there seems to be a limit to what you can achieve here. The accumulated effect is something like coming to an end of view of a grand son's collected finger paints; so many bold swirls, splashes, dashes in so many rich, crashing colors. Your jaw begins to hurt from all the polite smiles and a bad taste develops in the back of your throat, something acid and burning like a coarse guilt over telling even polite lies about how wonderful something is when it is, in fact, awful and killing you by the inch.

I hope Heather Murphy actually likes this kind of thing, because I would rather not think that professional writers of any sort can in good faith string so many rosy descriptions over what appears to be junior league surrealism.

Don't bank on this poem

2011-10-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Ed Hirsch is one of those poets who runs hot and cold; when his idea is served by fresh language that eschews cheap irony, is develop with restraint and is not burden with the crushing , arbitrary banality of social significance, we get some real lyric verse. This is a set of instincts I wish he would take better care of, because when his bad , the birds fall of the powerlines His poem "Lottery" is a lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, who's books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressed tales. The failure of the poet, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience.

This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie being broadcast after hours when the house is quiet and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water are too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection. Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book length;his types of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, are not the things that make for a lyric poem. This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his prerogative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion. The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife

This poem is nothing but lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, who's books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressed tales. The failure of the poet, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience. This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie being broadcast after hours when the house is quiet and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water are too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection. Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book length;his types of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, are not the things that make for a lyric poem. This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his perogrative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion. The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife .

Dreams for Barking Dogs

2011-10-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

The thought of barking dogs
at the center
of the intersection,
doing what they do
when the tires
are turned to the curb,
blunts the pure memory
of having hands to
direct populations to
matters clean in
their marrow,
serene
in the middle of a man-made lake
as the boat drifts without oars
to a shore
on a tide even the
scars of the moon
cannot disrupt,
it's pay day all over the globe.

It's dogs that bark
all night
on the way home from
a friend's apartment,
how the tires
sing on the wet
asphalt,

My name cruising like a hiss of a low leak that starts loud as a squeal yet fades as the words find their form and meaning from a dead language that was killed with a stick, dogs who've heard me thinking in musical alphabets behind each utility pole in the city, howling at jokes I didn't know I was telling, it's yelps and nips at the heals of enterprise, love comes undone like cheap sandals, grace is rubbing the feet where all the dog days have been lived.

I should say that I still love every excuse I've ever worn, all the women's eyes
show green flecks and blue radiances of dances dogs could bark to when I brought scissors and carpet rolls to the prom, long limbs and tips of index fingers dotting eyes on
soft shoulders begging for cuts in line for school meals that are dead on arrival on paper plates and plastic forks, I love every eyes I fell into not knowing either the dead man's float or the breast stroke, I am still in love with faces I can't see yet whose profiles I trace with tips of all fingers while hands find populations that always need a chaperon, a mysterious other,
punk dogs
at the side of the pools
and sleeping on
the beach on the clean towels
I brought,

Some one I love is leaving town,
some one I love has left the
house,
some one I love has left the planet,
some one I love has left the earth,
some one I love is with the earth,
some one I love is adding to the future,
some one I love
hears dogs at her feet
and dances despite corners
and wet paint ,
dogs who smile
insanely bright
starry night
or halo or a phone call away,
some one comes home whose feet are too heavy,
the night caps are loose,
the bottles clink together
but no lights come on,
is everyone still asleep,
are you
awake dreaming of me dogging it again
or are asleep seeing me crawl
through the window
under the grace of
stars and head lights
and spill on to the
rug like molasses
from bottles?

The dogs
are barking
and trees
are their address.

Dreams of Milk and Honey

2011-10-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

What song is going through my head? An old one, real old, "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album Flowers of Evil, recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in 1971. It is one of the great moments of Hard Rock guitar, with a great, lumbering riff that distorts and buzzes on the low strings with crushing bends and harmonics squealing at some raging pitch that might make one think of natural calamity, a force that cannot be withstood. West, never the most fluid guitarist , had , all the same, a touch, a feel, a sense of how to mix the sweet obbligato figures he specialized in with the more brutal affront of power chords and critically nasty riffing. The smarter among us can theorize about the virtues of amplified instrumentation attaining a threshold of sweetness after the sheer volume wraps you in a numbing cacophony, but for purposes here it suffices to say , with a wink, that is a kind of music you get and accept on it's own truncated terms, or ignore outright.

There is an aesthetic at work here, but it might as well come to saying that you had to be me , at my age, in 1971 when I was struck by this performance to understand a little of why I haven't tossed the disc into the dustbin.He is in absolute control of his Les Paul Jr., and here he combines with bassist Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing in some theme and variation that accomplishes what critic Robert Christgau has suggested is the secret of great rock and roll music, repetition without tedium. There are no thousand-note blitzkriegs, no tricky time signatures, just tight playing, a riffy, catchy, power-chording wonder of rock guitar essential-ism. I've been listening to this track on and off since I graduated from high school, and it cracks me up that my obsession with this particular masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a number of my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem." I might have even lit a Bic lighter for this tune.

Innocence, in a sense

2011-10-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Innocence, it seems, is a nice way of saying ignorance,which would imply that the gaining of wisdom is a hard process, full of rudeawakenings, startling revelations, melodramatic shifts in cosmology as onecontinually learns that the neat scenario one had while younger , with theirneat and simple relationships predicated on convenient cause and effect, isgrossly inadequate. God gave us senses so we may learn from our experience andcobble together as we go along, a practical philosophy of everyday life.Wisdom, if you like.

It seems that one is likely to realize that they are avictim whether they like it or not, and that the blissful sleep of ignorance ofone's state of being exploited and abused is illusory at best. Norman Mailerhad once said that he thought stupidity was a choice people make , andignorance, likewise, often enough seems a willful defense mechanism thatrelieves one of their obligation to use their senses to grow and work withinthe world as an active, creative agent. This is the crucial issue for William Blake, tobelieve in a God will intercede and make everything okay with a kiss and afeather or a promise of endless bounty on the other side of this life, or thatone is here with the senses a Creator gave him or her, with a brain that canprocess and organize experience into a framework, narrative perhaps, the keepsthe world that is both fluid and coherent. The final belief is to believe in afiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.

The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and thatyou believe in it willingly. --Wallace Stevens

The belief in a fiction, I assume, is that one believes lessin the fiction's generic outline of the relationships between personality andthe delicate details of the atmosphere , and more that the fiction works as ameans that enables individual and collective imaginations to commit themselvescreatively to what other wise would raw, unknowable data. We are the author ofour own book, so to speak, we are all writers of a particular fiction thatenthralls us, and the key to a belief in an malleable storyline is to realize that we can change, alterand modify the fiction as needed. Not that it's an easy thing to toss off, asan after thought. But we make our narratives from the things we do , and thisreminds me of the oft-quoted line from Vico, paraphrased here: Only that whichMan makes can Man know.

Dry City

2011-10-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

Only sometimes the city fails to amuse
strangers just off trains with the hard recesses
of its skyline, a profile of brow, nose, jaw
on a pillowed mesa staring up toward
radio waves the million eyes of open windows
cannot view but which can be heard as songs
by regular citizens driving cars or else walking to work,

Every corner seems empty for mere minutes
before lunch and after the whistle blows again,
factory life and gleaming towers amuse strangers
just off trains that there are the remains of decent seats
where band stands stood inside auditoriums composed of bricks,
for mere minutes only the leaf blowers and the radios of the hired help
fill those gaps in the recesses between the buildings and factory vents
while most everyone else hunker in their cubicles dialing clients
and crunching numbers like ice cubes under tenderizing mallets,
everyone else, mostly, unless it's their day off
or they died trying to have one,

On occasion there is no last bus
which means you stand there
on the corner next to the bridge
and Marine Recruitment Depot
until the end of time because
this day cannot end
and no one goes home
because the whistle
will not blow
and the elevators do not work
yet there is talk of angels in the machinary
who will turn off the lights
and make the engines steam up again,
the strangers will take their leave,
and from the corner of your eye
you think you
saw horses
crossing the tracks
horses stubborn in their equine poise
rearing a head, eyes insane
and on fire, a train approaches,
one air blast, now two,
citizens in parked cars cheer and unwrap candy bars,
nay, nay,
this all ends tonight,
the way out of town
is on our backs
if you can catch us,
nay , you can't
and we are gone

And gone
too are the last bits of rubber
yet to fall off your tires,
you look about
and let loose a long held breath,

the traffic lights
continue to change
red to green to yell and back
all night
and forever
when no one else is looking.

22 SHORT PIECES

2011-10-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

one:Nothing yet to be made of the day but some wethair clinging to the nape of the neck, coffee that's too hot to power down, agroaning neighbor regretting last night's play-making. I type a bit, reach intomy pocket and come upon a to-do list of things to finish. It was folded a dozentimes, it seems, each crease deep as wrinkles in an experienced skin.
I made the list a week ago.
Every deadline has lapsed, every task isincomplete. I hate myself for some minutes, sip at the coffee, cringe at thecold hair teasing the wet locks adhering to the back of my neck.
Time to go.
two:Hair cut, short, bristles. Cold wind cuts throughthe spiky clump like a lawn mower taking out a large section of unruly grass.Chill of the night as the night sky falls over a line of roofs that vanishesagainst a black tarp of starless sky, replaced with strings of lights that burnlike the head lamps of stalled cars on a strange road that curls around amountain range no one has seen from the air.
Why did I get a haircut. Yeah, that's right. Thatwoman on the bus asked me if I watched Jerry Springer.
No, I said, I don't.
Well, she said, breathless, breathless, you lookjust like Jerry Springer, and I got on the bus and you were sitting therelooking out the window and then you turned around and I said Oh My God, there'sJerry Springer.
I'm better looking, I said.
And my god, she continued, you look just likeJerry Springer, and I'm looking for cameras and a microphone, but you said youdon't watch Jerry Springer...
I've seen it once or twice, I said, but no, Idon't watch Jerry Springer...
But I said, Oh My God there's Jerry Springer, butyou said...
And so the woman who cut the hair wrapped thetowel around my neck and asked me what she could do for me.
You know the kind of hair cut middle aged guysget when they're trying to hold on their fleeing sense of youth? Short and spiky, almost punk rock...
So you don't mind if it sticks up?
Nope, I said, let's bring it on home.
Number three clippers?
Yup.
Okay...
And a fine hair cut it is, I thought outside thestore, feeling the bristles with the tips of my fingers. Strange to the touch,soft, and grey. Grey as the sky was that day. Wet. Drops. Rain. A downpour.Rain.
three:Tapping a finger on a hard counter top does maketime move faster, nor convinces others in line that your cause is greater thanthe needs of the others in line. He looks at his watch, the third time in underthree minutes and ponders what is at stake as the bank line crawls, inch byaggravating inch, toward an open window. Everyone seems calm, collected, eventhe children hanging on to their mother's hands are quiet , eyes wide andseemingly transfixed on a puppet show that is playing for them in a dimensionon their eyes uncover. Tapping the folded paycheck and deposit slip against thewatch he just looked at makes matters worse; now he knows what time it is, toolate to ditch the line in order to be in the office on time, too late to evencall a taxi , too late to do anything but wait.
four:Down time, and she thinks of the city thatunfolds before her from the hotel window, and thinks of all the people and alltheir histories in the buildings she can spy from the writing table she sitsat, people with families sitting at desks of their own or standing, runningbetween rooms with important papers or calling some one with news of eitherbusiness or of home life or maybe even plans to be made for when ever leisuretime evinces itself, she thinks of lives trapped in jobs in careers ormarriages or cars on the freeway going to the suburbs after five or to thecenter of the insanity near the break of day, when the sun is still cold andthe coffee is too hot to sip without a burn on the tender upper or lower lipthat quiver at the thought of another day smiling to clienteles that arethemselves people trapped in their concentric circles of routine, longing for atime when they might only have to stare from hotel windows in a city not oftheir residence, abstracting the lives of residents and keeping them at bay, atonce, in the distance of a long fog that circles around the end of an imaginedpeer while small white and yellow lights illumine what remains of a visiblecoast line, vanishing toward Mexico, ah , she thinks, it's time to leave, ah,she thinks again, adieu, farewell...
five:On most nights after most days I stay sober longenough to make it without a drop to midnight, when the whole thing startsagain, though I might nap for three or four hours about things that fill theemails and answering machines with an unaddressable fear of what waits beyondthe next recognizable landmark, a school or burger franchise, a dread thatcreeps up behind the words and sends a tremble through the hand either holdinga pen or motioning over a keyboard, a panic takes invades the language we useto tell the world, our friends, our bosses and lovers that we are ready, that Iam ready for what intensity this day andthis day alone brings me,

"This machine never sleeps, it's allwaiting, again, the sadness and stresses of the bad coffee and miscountedchange for the pastry, the news about all the missing children after bombschange the face of cities that don't have a chance against the results ofadvertising, there is no sleep, I think I would be thirsty but for..."
But for other dreams, perhaps, that I have whereI am drinking all the time from endless streams from silver faucets, and I onlybecome thirstier, hungrier, more aware of a world that still spins andcomplicates itself."
I don't know what any of that means, but this isanother morning, it seems a good time to put on a shirt, clean socks, pantsthat still have a crease, thinking through the shave and the ride to work andthe endless faces with an infinite selection of expressions to match thebottomless contents of their respective packaged miseries, of your face aloneat home in a light that makes your entire head a sphere of such cloud-clearingjoy that all such hours of slog and trod are worth the hassles with pricechecks, gift certificates, phone calls from amnesia victims , you offer me asoda and a steak, a kiss, something like that, that's what I think when I don'tdrink,
and I findthat I miss you all the more.
  six:Joe Lavano and company are playing a sweet set ofnotes on the player, linked saxophone choruses that skip beats and chaserhythms that crack and break and then regroup in a wonderful, witty, winsome apparatus that configures each grunt and growl through the reeds into acontinent of pitches, dialects, musical communities that keep their accentswhile the borders stretch and the dialogue gets more exciting, profound, thedifferences falling aside like clothes that are useless in the hot climate,where only similarities are noticed, distinct, memorable, a democracy of crazytime keeping.
seven:I like my coffee in the morning with a newspaperfrom a work before. It's so stimulating to be always catching up with the news,to stroll up to head line rather than have it run me over with an urgency onlyneurosis can sustain. I drink the coffee, I rustle the pages, and findsomething satisfying that what I'm reading is no longer news, but history, overlong enough to make sense in a world where mornings are an hour of warningshots saying beware of the day ahead, go back to bed, go back, go back…
eight:Good morning, good morning, ah silly me, yes, anewspaper that is a week old, how quickly, how fast the days are enshrined infoot notes and commentary, our Instant Boswells have entombed is in print thatis already fading and turned brittle to the touch, the microfilm is cracking asI turn the wheel in my memory of the graduate library looking up the majorincidents of Bernard Shaw's great New York City adventure, I was yearning forcoffee while in the stacks, a newspaper that at the time would have been onefrom the same day I woke up, that, a cup, a paper , and table on a patio toread and sip and opine into a nearby wood on a vacation that doesn't have acalendar to contain it, no work, no phones, just me and a cup, a paper andclear skies, and I might as well say, some birds to fly over head to cry outand leave their mark as my mind attempts to unmoor itself and drift with theeddies of current events, I wake up, yes, startled, an electric jolt, and shakemy fists at the birds, five clenched fingers against the clouds, no good, Iwish she were here, I look for a phone book, a phone, I wonder how it is shecan get on with her life after the history we've had...
    nine:Sometimes I wonder if I was born or merely setaside in another dimension of newspaper grey and was launched into this worldbecause what ever the case was running low on the premium designs.
Its a habitual thought, a shudder of doubt whenstaking hands or crossing streets or visiting people who and which are sofamiliar, so complete in intimate nuances and shared knowledge that they seemalien and strange, like specimens under glass in a museum I keep visiting for alesson that just keeps turning the corner to the next gallery when my hardshoes hit the tile. Everything I looking for is just out of focus, short of thedesigns I see and have drawn.
Believing the world is seeing beyond the boxscores and trusting what it says on the certificate; the biography has alreadybeen started, a page of facts that have gotten absurdly complicated, in lovetheir own inventory of details that are pressed now in their uniqueness,creased and pleated, ready for rough waters I imagine await at the end of themap, where boats fall off and drift with sails full of solar wind until I wakeup and yawn and scan the items on the table, the newspaper, the dirty bowls,someone else's pack of Marlboro 100s. The universe is reassembled, seamless asdeath itself.
Years ago I wondered if there was life on otherplanets precisely at the time when she left me, or asked me to leave, Iwondered who else in this darkness knows this hurt as well as I?, and I staredfor hours at her apartment\ as if trying to make the walls fly away, to lifther off the sofa, away from her meal , and bring her into my arms where I stoodin the dark, next to a payphone, with out change to call out far enough to thewilderness where there is only wind and tall grass, maybe houses at the bottomof canyons that you see from jets leaving your home town before you enter theclouds that will drag on the wingspan, I would stare and the walls would staywhere the carpenters intended them to remain, there was nothing to see, but Istared harder, right through the building, to the stars I knew were there,receiving radio waves, TV shows, thoughts of strong desire translatable only byaction, hear me, hear me, who else shivers in a dark corner in unique misery,genius of articulated regret, who else speaks when no language gets the purityof the idea right, just right, thus forcing one to live in craziness, at theend of the alley, drinking from bottles I've pealed the labels from?
As usual , the stars don't answer, they don't saya word
ten:In front of things adorning the lawns of ourtown, I abjure to squint of cranes and deers, jockeys with faces white as thewalls of empty gallery stoic as they are in their enameled resolve,
Not here or there nor on any brush in sight canrelief be spelled in a flick of the wrist , a motion that captures the tone andtwist of a minute in this day when all the frustrations seemed they might justdissolve like thin sheets of sugar under warm tap water and just wash away,there is not a gesture that lets me let go of things short of releasing allfingers from around the neck of the idea that is old, inert, unable to beredefined or made new by new paint on old boards.
The doors of the houses are wide open , dogswhimper and yelp their routine protest about weekends out of the town, in theback of the truck, it’s broad daylight, the sunlight is spread like miles ofsmiling bed covers over the happenstance of my moods in this moment, the newsboypitches my newspaper to the roof, again, it’s business as usual, a fullschedule of things to do or lie about doing.
Should I continue with my walk to the beach in aconstricted stride, suffering the thoughts of phone calls that seemed to beabout everything that was never said until the night past and hysteria goesback to sleep, my mind seems a cave with deep, blurred echoes of what we talkedabout, the impossibility of the desire, the attraction to fires, bright lightsat the end of cigarettes?
Damn these animals and doors, damn this daylight,damn the world and it’s orderly progression.
eleven:Not hereor there nor on any brush in sight can relief be spelled in a flick of thewrist , a motion that captures the tone and twist of a minute in this day whenall the frustrations seemed they might just dissolve like thin sheets of sugarunder warm tap water and just wash away, there is not a gesture that lets melet go of things short of releasing all fingers from around the neck of theidea that is old, inert, unable to be redefined or made new by new paint on oldboards.
  twelve:My tie cuts off the blood to my head and my sockshave holes in them that are as old as toe nails that continue to grow yearsafter clipper ships found new shores to set foot on, you imagine watereverywhere along with the music of pipes ringing during hot showers, you hearthe streaming sirens of lost songs glide along your body, slide down yourbreasts, your hands find a motion that is fine for trilling along the unsaidsyllables that fill the room with steam and then you discover and aredumbfounded by the fact that your panty hose vanished during the night andthere's no telling where it went, now there is steam coming out of your ears,come, I say, and let's have our usual breakfast, black coffee and twocigarettes, any style.
thirteen:Morning light crawls over the street as the fogrecedes back to the corners of the earth that are invisible in the glare ofspring and summer days.
"It's a beautiful day in theneighborhood" is song I hear coming from the next room.
A devastated newspaper is spread over thebreakfast table.
"Nothing beats a great pair of legs" Isay, and this gets your attention. You're walking around in your underwear,toothbrush in your mouth, feeling around the lunch counter for a pen so you canwrite a check to the School District to coverthe cost of a class field trip to the Zoo. You tilt your head, and try to grinaround the tooth brush.
"Nothing beats a great pair of legs exceptmaybe a full house" and you laugh; grab the first pen that appears from alayered surface of bills and memos, and then yell "Emily, turn off the TVand put on your shoes, I have the check and I'll be ready in a minute."
The TV doesn't go off, and you go into the otherroom, and the yelling commences again, more threats, tears, the beams of thepitched roof raised with threats of no desert, movie or field trip if Mr.Rogers doesn't vanish from the TV screen, Emily stands her ground and you pullon a skirt, a hand made shirt, two shoes from the prop department, you're readyto go.
"Won't you be my neighbor...?"
Emily turns off the TV and sings to herself asshe readies herself for school from a time zone only six year olds live in, shesings lyrics that have never been written and won't be sung again, she abidesby rules that are correct, substantial and relevant only to this instance andthen no more and never again, I can hear you drumming your fingers on the door,I can almost hear you tap your toes in those drama department shoes that aretoo small even for your ballerina feet.
I'll be at the hotel all day, answering phonecalls from all over a shrinking world where everyone says hello and good bye inaccents that sound like their ducking gun fire in towns baking under crueldesert suns or from penthouses or office towers that try to reach the sun andconquer it with incredible piles of theoretical money that catch fire in theglow of hubris,
All I can say is "One moment please"and connect everyone to Room Service, House Keeping, The Bar on the Roof, roomswhere the guest hasn't emerged from for three days, or, sadly, tell everyonewho wants to stay that we are sold out, every room has a paying customer, sosorry, no please don't threaten me, sorry, I cannot take your money, pleaseunderstand, the rooms are all occupied, so sorry, please don't threaten me,lower your voice, sir and madam, please stop screaming,
I realize my joke has it wrong, so wrong, a fullhouse never beats a great pair of legs.
fourteen:Too many minutes have dropped off my watch inline at the movies buying tickets.
So many minutes are lost as the microwave beepsalong it's growling, turning, chirping away, turning the food inside intosomething that's hot as guns in Duck season but unrecognizable as anything I'dwant to put in my mouth.
The library shelves bear their spines with titlesthat allure and beckon from under their fine dust patina, but all I can do iswave them on, bid them goodbye, there is not enough time left in the week afterall that fast food and instant coffee, so many rapid distractions keep me on myfeet, spinning in the spot where I ought to be sitting, passing out when Iought to be absorbed in small print, foot notes, facts that didn't exist untilI read them, but there is no time left after doing all the things that save ustime, This is an affliction I don't have time for.
Could I have THE 24-hour flu instead?
fifteen:The lust of italics is obvious, the wake of rosestaken seriously, off-kilter are the fingers making a path through your hair, anew part where a comb finds the soul under the brain that keeps you wonderingabout the world,
Those nights, half asleep, a small fist raps yourback, you say it wasn't you, but floorboards groaning the way they do in oldhouses that sag in fall, swell in summer, contract in winter, and all that'sleft for spring is laughter and fear when everyone goes out doors again afterdark, testing door knobs, it wasn't you , you say, only the house or some suchthing,
Shared chills or beads of sweat, the double “s”molding prevailed, every position and posture on the mattress a buried languageof what wasn't said any of those times when working was more heartache to keepfor an idea of love that seems to choke because nothing seems funny anymore,nothing weighs less than an unwanted ton, we change positions as if speakingtoo fast for court reporters,
"I hope I don't dream" you say. "or if I do, let it be of a big black wall with nothing on it, just blackness,blackness..."
The apartment is so quiet that it is therefrigerator that sings us to sleep, a high and ghostly whistle coming fromit's deep frozen stillness. We drift off as headlights flash across the ceilingand car radios play music pulled from the air from other states, we drift offwhile the house sinks deeper into an earth that wants it all back.
sixteen:She crosses the street after standing at thecorner for minutes that seemed nothing less than hours. He watched ,thinking oflyrics to write. She stood at the corner, jabbing the button of the pedestriansignal box, looking across the street as if to see if perhaps a store shewanted to get to before they closed might have flipped the sign over in thedoor, from "open" to "closed". As if she could see throughall that traffic.
I know, he thought, a song about a guy watching awoman trying to cross the street while he tries to imagine a lyric he might ormight not write. The irony, he thought, or was it just laziness? All thesebagels are cold and hard as tile. He lights a cigarette, dumps the match in hisash tray. The woman is across the street, and vanished into a parkingstructure.
"May I have another Latte?" he asks apassing woman carrying a tray to the cafe service station.
"I don't work here" she says withoutbreaking her stride.

seventeen: Your tastes are sweet and deep in the dish of everything a library shelf can give you, yet there are no poems nor pieces of prose that tell you the elusive truth that someone else has walked over that same patch of ground, that same square of cement where you felt the ache of falling in love quite literally, off a cliff and into a void that seemed a swarming mass of mist moving in gyrating tirades of insanity as your head just spins with a name and the blurred countenance of hair, lips, eyes, pouting lips streaking by like finger paints left in a drizzle, your heart just fizzles and calms down, it rests a beat after so much running up and down the same stairs where to visit and leave the footprints of where you've been, yes, it seems no else has walked in shoes quite your size nor entered the stream in precisely the same spot where you might have slipped on the rocks and seen death in a flash of melodrama that the same cartoon we remember seeing when mornings were merely black and white TV and screaming clowns pouring glasses of milk for a silent, frightened room of children who were mystified why anything like this was happening to them.

eighteen:You and I have watched lightning explodingsilently behind the dress grays of twilight and we’ve kept on saying that theworld just doesn’t work anymore and then laughed, drank more rum, sang anatonal riff before a garbled, tongue clucking solo, and then watched thelightning again for hours while it lime—lighted the small patch of trees andthe few blocks of curving intersections you and I called home and thoughtdiseased when we had a good buzz while walking past displays windows in shopswe couldn’t afford to browse in on the blocks getting torn down, buildingscoming down and nothing left standing but firewalls and brick chimneys, theworld didn’t work anymore around the sidewalks we walked, you and have stood inthe rain nursing paper cups full of Pepsi and Meyers, sad to see theneighborhood go because some one was getting rich while we were getting drunkerluxuriating in the melancholy that the turf no longer reminded us of why wewere angry about being cheated and being different from the rest, our miserywas a shadow that followed us that even the lightning couldn’t cut through andremind us again what it was we were drinking to forget.
nineteen:There is only the other side of the road when youcome over, the other side of the tracks even though we live no where near atrain yard.
I bow to your good looks and great legs and themeals you’ll make before you even notice that You’re tired of the sound of myvoice on the voice getting real close to the speaker, becoming a grainy whisperalone the wireless sky, “Maybe we shouldkeep our apartments” you say, “just so that both of us have some place to go,you know, if all this turns out be only a mess, a mess...”
You drop a fork in the kitchen sink as the waterruns over the lettuce, birds alight and fly toward the sun that is going away,“I give in to you’re wisdom” I tell you, “Whatever you think is the right thingto do...”
Across the street is a million miles away and thebedroom doesn’t exist at this precise minute, my magazines stack higher thanany man’s ever seen,
But not every night is heaven when there somethings missing from around the house when I look around,
This side of the street seems to be sliding offthe face of a cliff that is losing the earth that gives in a severe inch witheach storms that comes from the south or the north, each blast of electricguitar, every plane you took up to know when there is only me in an empty roomolder than I planned on being, more alone than what the law allows.
twenty:What I’m not saying is that youought to park campers on your front lawn, tire tracks deep in the mud that isslowly becoming merely mire with each rain that happens by.
Nor do I endorse leaving oldcouches and refrigerators in the alley three garage doors down or dumping in onempty lot where combinations of abandoned furniture and appliances can stare atthe world that passes by them, mute as if in unending astonishment thatanything comes to a finish..
What I am saying is that youdon’t have to give away all your clothes because churches don’t fill the pewsas do movie theatres or ball games during a series where so much depends onball being hit by a stick that might fly over the cheap seats and into awindow, into history that is.
Religion hasn’t been as good asthe movies in decades anyway, and those kinds of ball games are rare , being ,as it were, miracles true and factual, the only place where prayer makes senseand the game is more important than what any man or woman wants to with theirappetites.
Find yourself a face to kiss andleave the Laundry undone just for day, wait until the net day off to sharpenthe knives for battle (while I pray that day never arrives for that reason),stop for a moment and think about what you’ve been thinking about.
and when you’re confused enough,come see me, when I’ll put on some coffee and we can read each other from anybook the house, my treat.
Twenty one: Lawn
It is just another day of lawn mowing inlethargic shoves, sweating under the arms under the sun's smarmy glare whilethe blades stroke and grab and cajole armies of sodden leaves to relinquishtheir height, their standing, their destiny for the good of the land, the gloryof the hedges.The smell of cut grass piled up becomes thelegacy of the day, futures are based on what aromas filter from the back of thegarage where blades of another kind turn to compost, break down into theiressentials compounds and trace results, energy dons a new suit of clothes andleaves a trail for more life to come.
I stop pushing the lawn mower, lean on thehandle. Pretty girls in summer dresses of bright, corpulent patterns walk by,hand bags and head phones waving free.
Part of me wants to wave back; part of mewants to be left alone.
The kid next door works on his car in thedriveway. Engine parts are strewn about his feet.
The oil stains soak the cement. The leaveson my crescent hedge are turning brown as mud.My mouth is dry and I crave water.It's astounding what can happen when nothingis going on.
That's why I am not a painter; I neverdeveloped the art of not-getting-it-right. Rather, I'm still amazed of thingsin and of themselves, doing nothing, undressed of human perception or ideas,things just falling apart of their own accord unburdened with conceits of glory,glee or horrible, terrible, inconsolable sadness and terror.An uncle of mine worked a farm his entirelife and all I remember were several generations of farm machines left out infields or behind sheds, rusted out and useless years after they rolled from thefactory, and when I asked him about what he was going to do about them, he justlaughed and said he planned to do exactly nothing because there was nothing tobe done, no emergency to attend to."Those parts aren't hurting anythingwhere they are" he said," I have a farm to run, not a garage.
My job is to make things grow, notgo..."
Our fathers and their fathers knew somethingabout things in this life running down, new things appearing as if out of theether.
Swallowing hard, I push the mower onwardin the path we've been blazing through the deep, molding grass. Onward, saysthe general, to where the sky kisses the edge of the earth/
twenty two:Just tell the band to strike up a song that blends well with the color of acrowd whose faces blur in swirls across a whirling ballroom floor, high hatsand tom-tom drums and cowbells filling the city blocks with locomotion thatdoesn’t stop until the clock hits the last minute of the last hour.
Everyone stops swirling to get their coats and then their cars to return totheir homes and apartments that stopped seeming so extraordinarily alive withthe things they brought to the rooms and hung up on the walls.
The music stops at midnight and the only thing you can think of now is howyour feet hurt, how many hours to sunrise and the start of your term on theclock and in the customer’s face with service you know you wouldn’t hand yourdog after the biggest mess he could produce on the rug you brought home from anenclosed mall.
But it’s late on the road, rain falls with an even temper, small fists bangthe roof since the start of history, there are fields of applause your goingthrough in the city on this drive, you drum the steering wheel as she leansagainst the glass, humming lightly, racing drums and quicksilver trumpets growwinged feet and chase one another from station to station to station on the AMdial.
She starts to sing something you don’t understand as the wheels seem tohydroplane over the asphalt, saxophone blasts a whole in the clouds and themoon is on you as you slow down the car coming to the apartment house,
Love seems to lasts forever in ash-silver light, you think, coming to thegarage, the music cutting out and static going off like firecrackers on astring under the stars of a night full of train wheels singing along the railswith steel wheels
Clouds meander over the moon once more, the light is gone, there is only agarage full of tools and dirty boxes of unpacked stuff you never want to find.
Her eyes are closed, her head against the door, oh, to dance across the cityin top hats, long sideburns, and long white gloves like we used to dream itwould be always, this is what you’re thinking,
She sings a song without the words, nonsense syllables filling in spaceswhere lyrics used to be crooned,
“Do you know the words”, she asks, “do you know the name of the song?”
“Sure do” you said, switching off the ignition and tapping your forehead,“it’s up here somewhere, lost forever.”

poetry , with prayer and without

2011-10-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

Rapture or rupture?
There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've sober nearly twenty years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

The distinction between poems and prayers are that poems are almost invariably written from within experience, and as a form, is under no obligation to detail and highlight it's rhetoric toward any obligatory pitch or prejudice. The poet, distinct from the praying person, has the freedom to invoke God or invoke him not at all; the poet might even insist that the wonders he or she comes to write about are phenomena in and of itself, independent of anything divine.

Poetry allows for the religious, the agnostic, the atheist and the indifferent with regards to God. The single requirement is that the poem meet the needs of literature, however the poet lands on the issue of the divine; what constitutes literary value, of course, is subject to a discussion that is nearly as abstruse and premised on unprovable suppositions as theology, Literary criticism might be said to be it's own sort of religious dogma.

Prayers, in contrast, start outside human, terrestrial experience and beseech a higher power to intervene in human affairs. While poetry , in general, glories in all things human and is obsessed with the mystery of perception (finding that miraculous enough ), prayer assumes human experience is flawed, in error, and needs a strong hand to right itself to a greater purpose. Prayer in essence is an admission of powerlessness or one's situation and one's instincts to cope with the difficulties presented; the varieties of spiritual inspiration vary and are nuanced to particular personalities and finer or lesser nuanced readings of guiding sacred texts, but prayers share a default position that human existence sans God is incomplete and in need to surrender itself to the Will of a variously described God.

It is possible to write a poem that addresses god that is not an entreaty, finding His presence in the world as we already have it, not as we think it was.
"Question" by May Swenson does this.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
It's a fine poem, and Swenson is speaks from experience, finding something wondrous in the world as it is. Her poem is about finding God in the details of this existence, and does not beseech a higher power for guidelines about how to live a more righteous life according to
scripture. Prayer assumes that human life, in essence, is merely an audition for a seat in Heaven. Swenson assumes we already have our seat and seeks God's inspiration in making the place where we live purposeful and fuller.

poetry leaves its sleeves rolled down

2011-10-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

Basil Bunting's poem below follows up on Oscar Wilde's assertion that"All art is quite useless". But where Wilde would decree that thatwas the glory and significance of art--that humans have a need for beauty andharmony in order to engage the sense that would other would be limited to thedrudgery of foraging and merely getting by--Bunting plants us smack in themiddle of a rant by corporate head for whom profit is the end all and be all.Bunting's little survey of the others in the room outlines their hobbies aswell as their useful , real world skills, with the emphasis being toward thosepaper shuffling tasks that can bring a pay check.

The one being addressed, thepoet, Bunting himself we imagine, is seen as having no marketable abilities,nothing that can benefit an employer, nothing that can make a dollar in themarketplace. Poetry is confusing, nasty, incoherent, a self indulgence, and thepoet who takes himself or herself seriously is an unfinished citizen, barelyhuman to any niche-ready degree. Bunting's satire is full of the harrumphingwindbaggism of the Babbits of the world who, again in Wilde's phrasing,"know the cost of everything and the value of nothing".

What The Chairman Told Tom
by Basil Bunting
Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You dont sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a shcoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.

David Lehman's New Barbaric Yawp

2011-10-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

David Lehman gets a tip of this writer's hat, if I wore a hat. Poet, critic, biographer and an editor who has done more good work in bringing the the problematic pleasures to a wider audience than anyone I can think of. Among the things I respect about is his refusal, as a erstwhile popularizer of an art the public steadfastly resists (and one who's poets resist being corrupted by something as defiling as popularity) for refusing to write consumer -friendly verse.

His work is not the work of a Billy Collins, who composes one masterful bit of middle brow irony after another. Lehman rather likes the idea of using words as if they were things, malleable and ready to be shaped in mode and manner that makes the interested reader do a little bit of their own work. He gets respect for not dumbing down the poetry he writes, or the poets he presents in the anthologies he brings to the world annually.

David Lehman’s poem “November 18”, from his collection Evening Sun, was the subject of a dispute among some fellow poetry readers, half of whom liked the poet’s disjointed connections, and others who thought the poem was dated because of a seeming lack of unity and the use of dead American artisan’s names. The conversation became rather steamy. All the same, the poem is hardly dated.

Because it mentions people, places and things that are equated with the '50's? An arbitrary habit of thinking, I think. Lehman essentially creates a medley of voices, different streams of language that melt into one another, and with he balances the texture of associations the references bring; this is very much in the modernist mode, especially as practiced by The New York School, who, through the work of O'Hara and Ron Padgett, made a city poetry from an every day language of the noise of the city, it's billboards, magazine stands, grand hotels, loud radios and sports extravaganzas.

November 18 By David Lehman
It's Johnny Mercer's birthdayfrom Natchez to Mobilein the cool cool cool of the eveningvery cool with Barbara Leesinging Marian McPartland playingthe greatest revenge songs of all timehooray and hallelujahyou had it comin' to yaand a bottle of RodenbachAlexander red ale from Belgiumwith cherries and "Tangerine" inthe background in Double Indemnityhe had a feel for the lingo, "Jeepers Creepers"as Bing Crosby sang it on my birthdayin 1956 I just played it three straight timesand an all-American sense of humor what doesJonah say in the belly of the whale he says manwe better accentuate the positive that's ithappy birthday and thanks for the cheerI hope you didn't mind my bending your ear

It is a particularly American sound that Lehman lays claim to here, starting with Whitman's barbaric yawp, coming up through William Carlos Williams, and finding itself resting next to other high art forms that found much to use, exploit and find glory in from popular culture. It had been mentioned that Langston Hughes did this sort of thing” infinitely better”, but that’s an assertion meant to distract. Hughes never did anything remotely like what Lehman succeeds in doing here, I'm afraid. He sought a blues cadence, a gospel resonance, and a voice based on an idealized African American idiom, but what his brilliance is a separate set of accomplishments. They are simpatico on a number of points, but to weigh over the other on the merits of a fictitious objective standard is spurious. The terrains are different -- Hughes rural and black, Lehman white and urban -- and the motivations behind the experiments vary dramatically. Lehman is an inspired heir to the mood and tact of the New York poets, and what he is able to do he does cogently, with humor and a love of making language behave in ways that are poetic for the sheer ingenuity that cogent barbarism can bring.

Hughes was quite a different case. the poem can't make up it's mind as to whether it wants to be urban jazz or rural blues. The poem is about, among other things, the thriving, buzzing, and churning diversity of noise and music and tempos that one finds spread out across the American landscape, and what happens is a nice medley of musical emulations. If you've driven across country with the radio on all the way, you'll have an idea what the poem manages, the layering of music, voices, references all on top of one another, some fading to the background, others picking up as you near the transmitters, everyone in competition to be heard on the limited band width. Charles Ives once hired two brass bands to march into the center of a town square from different directions, both playing entirely different pieces of music, just so he could sit there and find out what it all sounded like. You pick up this curious, adventurous, experimental verve in his brilliant music. Lehman is in much the same American Grain.

Have you been there? Now, Natchez to Mobile certainly gives us a slice, but few would say that it's a particularly urban slice. Yes, I've been there, and as I've said prior the poem is about creating a feeling of the vastness of America; part of the way you create that feeling is with place names, time honored and effective. One has the feeling of pointing at a map, seeing an odd sounding name that has native-sounding exotica, and telling your traveling companion "let’s go there." It's texture, and it adds this pieces city/country/city layout. The poem I argue is not outdated because it deals with the 50's (a straw man argument you create for me - and by the way I wish there were more historical poetry), it is outdated in style and tone. Hardly outdated, I think, since lyricism in any guise that effectively makes a reader forgo reason and engage emotional, more "felt" associations from what the language highlights cannot be said to be antiquated; it is always timeless. This poem is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who cares to read it with open ears. The language school you reference is petering out - Ashbery and Graham, the two best known poets to emerge from the school, no longer associate themselves with it - Ashbery always (wisely) kept a careful distance from the label.

Well, I didn't reference the Language Poets in reference to this poem , because it adheres to the New York School of Poets, a group of poets known for their friendships and alliances with painters during the late fifties and early sixties, a food decade and a half prior to the emergence of the Language Poets. John Ashbery is not a language poet, as he believes, however obscure and private may be, that there is a core personality at the center of his poems, a diffuse "I" perhaps, but an "I" none the less. The Language Poets, many of whom are cursed with a theoretical baggage they've borrowed from Marxist criticism and French structuralist linguistics, deny the capacity of language to accurately present the world through an egocentric notion of "the author". Some of this work and theory is interesting and brilliant, but Ashbery isn't in their company. He's an aesthete, and has produced a brilliant body of work in his life time. Not for the last ten years, perhaps, but his strong work is plentiful. Jorie Graham I find just abstract and dull and unable to write an interesting line or image. There is perhaps some hope for it in a handful of figures, some of which you've noted in a previous post. You left out there the individual who I think holds the most promise - Lyn Hejinian. Last point - The point on the contrast between Hughes and Lehman is that both have the similarity in wanting to use an idea spoken cadence and musical phrasing of a sort in their writing, areas where they are simpatico in the abstract. What each poet has produced, practically, as writing, is vastly different, in style, range, notions of place. All one need do is read them side by side and become aware that each are doing different things, and that a qualitative comparison is tenuous. Better you match Lehman against O'Hara or Kerouac, two poets who are stylistically coherent with Lehman for the purpose of critical contrast. The Langston Hughes option is merely strained, and requires too much fancy footwork to make an argument stick even loosely. The fact remains that Hughes and Lehman are miles and miles apart in their approaches toward what one might call common goals; theirs are different methods to similar, but not identical ends. Belaboring similarities or the lack of them as a way of attempting to hoist one over the other simply accentuates the meaningless of the comparison in an attempt to discover which poet has more merit. Both got to what where they wanted to go, accomplished what they wanted to accomplish in decisively different ways.

Another, better poet ought to be mentioned before this aspect of the conversation goes anywhere useful. What Lehman does in the spirit of Whitman, and there are traceable stylistics in this and other poems he's written. Loose limbed, ready to take a barbarism and make it poetic in spite of its vulgar intent, colliding impulses, drives, ego, instincts, pleasure zones. The poem has the senses reeling, on the kind of overload that Whitman neared and reached in the few truly amazing works he composed. This a poem about spreading oneself over the map, to assume the personality and vibration of all that makes up the world one is surrounded by; it is an impulsive bit of lyric acceleration of the spirit that strives to know things in a hurry, to understand the life and style of the obscure corners of America in a manic flurry of celebration that life itself is vital and finite and cannot be curtailed or compromised by form or structure. One can argue if they wish with the irrationality of this idea, with the informing subtext that drives the glancing mentions and riffs drawn from the music of place names and advertising coinages, but this is a universal spirit none the less and well worth expressing because it is a poem, ultimately, of witness. Whitman claimed he contained multitudes, Lehman's smaller set of provisions asserts that he is multitudes.

This is a fine, concise and swift waxing on the fury and rapidly changing shape of our National Self Image. Everything here comes together in one gasping , groaning, singing, chanting, snare drum rattling orgasm that says everything in this life, the only thing we can be certain, is needed and wonderful and full of lessons we've barely the time to learn. It's a textured and rushing chorus that says that all we hear is music, and all music is beautiful if our ears are open enough to allow the notes to hit the heart and revive the memory of all the things that make life worth living, which might be songs of love, lyrics of love, choruses about love found, lost or broken, but it is these thoughts that however perfect or malformed our notions of affection, belonging, attraction, love finally have come to be, it is the final idea that it is love in anyway that makes life worth living, and that it's the lack of love that kills it. Lehman chooses to remember and to love and live in the sunshine of the moments that pass and will never be again. There is music in every crowded line, there is music in every broken rhythm, and there is music in every car alarm and train whistle and blast of radio static. There is music everywhere. do believe that music exists in ways we've yet to discover, but I’m speaking of Lehman's intent with the poem, not my personal and unbending view of the world. Poetry can be written in many ways, in my many styles, with many different criteria for a successful work; it's a versatile medium, yes? Criticism needs to also be as flexible in how work is read, in order to make a coherent statement about them. I am not hard-and- fast in any regard about how I want poems to work, just as long as they are successful in their uniqueness and provide a sense of the predicaments they might be addressing. My critical practice is pragmatic and my ears are wide open to the sorts of sounds a manipulated rhetoric can make. The validity of any idea is in how it works, to crib an idea from William James. I can like the idea that "music is everywhere" - but I cannot live it and so cannot truly hold on to it as a valid tenet in my own critical approach.

I believe that a good critic ought to be willing to suspend their disbelief ala Coleridge and expose themselves to some forms they might not otherwise be prepared to have truck with. As an argument for the musicality of November 18, you essentially claim that everything is musical. Sorry, I made no such claim. Rather, I was talking about the operating psychology I sensed in the poem, a Cage /O'Hara/Mingus/Ives stream of ideas that finds tonalities, timbres, pitches and harmonies in city and country, and what I further described was that there is beauty in the clashing, contrasting sounds; composer, improviser and poet can find the music in it all and place it on paper, and can further exclaim their work into the air as a celebration of the amazing forms available in the 20th century.

The same amazement, as typified by the poem, is no less contagious for many readers in the early part of the 21st century. In any case, my remarks were poem/poet/styles specific, and I've already made clear that although I think this is a nave way for one to approach the practicalities of life as we must live it, it remains a successful tact to lure the lush and lyric from our ambiguous language. The claims for what is, after all, a very modest piece, might seem hyperbolic and grandiose.

So be it, guilty . I'll accept sounding momentarily grandiose and perhaps hyperbolic; under the overstated is the truth about Lehman's poem, which is that it's good, successful, and works in its neatly modest way. It's that odd layering of references, one on top the other, like shards of per of varying colors, shapes and grades of translucence, that gives me the aha! sensation, something accidental in it's arrangement but stunning in how the plain and inane is made into a configuration that stops you, makes you turn your head, and requires you process what's been seen/written .I think Lehman himself would blush as the poet deliberately eschews that high prophetic voice of poets like Whitman and Ginsberg. My guess is that Lehman would appreciate the fact that I picked up on the poets who've influenced him, and continue to motivate his best work. I thought it was about Johnny Mercer - more a tip of the hat than anything else - a brief acknowledgement of a musician who "had a feel for the lingo,” and who was therefore simpatico with the poet. Mercer is the starting point, but the poem moves on, along the roads, through the towns, the meals, the intriguing place names. Lehman addresses Mercer's lyrical, vagabond spirit. In doing so, the poem, like travel itself, moves from where it starts, and becomes about something much larger, and harder to define. Final definition is impossible, more than likely, but what we have is the realization of one of my favorite clichés, it's about the journey, not the destination.

Who else ?

2011-10-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

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In line with his discussion of Edgar Guest under way in hiscurrent column in Slate, Robert Pinsky asked the question about who we think among currently popular poets might suffer a similardiminishment in estimation , say, fortyyears from now. It would be a long list, but some things have to gotten tofirst off, pronto.

There remains a respectful silence on the matter of quality,but I think in a few years readers of poetry will gain enough spine and admitthat the poems of the late and truly tragic Mattie Stepaneck were spectacularlywretched. I well understand a dying young man's desire to remain optimistic andstrong and courageous and to show all this is some painfully earnest poems offaith, sunshine, flowers, spiriituality and such, but Stepaneck's fatal malaisemade him immune to criticism.

The media, with its instincts for human interest storiesthat can be exploited indefinitely, turned the boy into a poster child for AllOur Lost Innocence, and made it possible for the woefully amateurish andsub-literate cracker barrelisms of his poems to be published and become bestsellers.

There was stonysilence as to how dreadful the work was; no one said a thing. You bit yourtongue and didn't argue the idea that Stepaneck's popularity would fade soonafter he passed away. No one wanted to be accused of saying mean things aboutthe poems of a young boy dying from a fatal condition.

Still, someone with nodog in the fight , with no emotional ties to the increasingly distantrecollection of Stepaneck and the context of his verse, will come across hiscollected poems and become numb with incomprehension as to why anyone, anyoneat all thought that such a specimen of slithering sentimentalism qualified assomething worth publishing. The futurecritics of poetry will regard poetry fans of this day, as we regard poetryreaders of Edgar Guest, as rubes for making the relentlessly mundane ahighlight of our aesthetic experience.

Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore: the task of the modernist poet

2011-10-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

There's a smart,concise essay by Robert Pinsky contrasting the styles of poets Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore in the current edition of Slate online. It is of value because he more or less isolates the reasons why no reads Guest these days, the poet who was once the most famous poet in America, and why the formerly obscure Moore continues to gain readers the many decades since her first publication.

Edgar Guest was not an incompetent writer, of course, butthat does make him a good one. As with the faded phenomenon of Rod McKuen inthe Sixties, Guest's singular ability was to take on a persona that reduced agreat heap of cracker barrel wisdom, cliché and hick town wisdom into anattractive speaker who would seem to come along an endless string of life'sevents just after they happened and reveal the moral that only required a clearsighted commoner to brush the trail dust from.

By the time McKuen emergedduring the Sixties a perhaps more poet archetype had filtered through massculture and, abetted with the then current notion thatrock-lyrics-were-poetry-- was able to take the idea of Poet as TragicallySolitary Romantic Hero and reduce it to appealingly two dimensional depictionof a Man Too Sensitive for Life's Many cruelties who was consigning himself totravels far and away, usually on boats , usually arriving at coastal cities indeepest mist to choruses of foghorns and sea gull cries. His universe , with all it's references to anonymous and genderless others in the form of the familiar sounding yet effectively distancing pronoun "you", was solipsism with the worst social implication; although others in McKuen's imagined travels and romances are indeed present, although they have names and histories unique to them if one chose to investigate the sources of McKuen's muse, it is only McKuen's emotional state that matters. The essence of Hemingway's code --live by your own rules, do not impose your pains, wound and heartbreaks on to others , and seek experiences that are vital and apt to increase your appreciation of the Life You Have--is boiled down to a shriveled, grayish root . Where Hemingway's thinking was that one had to be prepared for others to follow their own consul as well and and summarily at conclusions and actions that are likely contrary to one's internalized philosophy, McKuen's premise is merely a set up for failure; the man's poetry leaves you with a feeling of unearned fatalism and acting out. This is a middle aged man writing as a sensitive teenager who desires experiences his body has yet to know. McKuen equates defeatism with the poetic spirit; Hemingway, in a manner of speaking, tried to show us how to take a punch and then get back into whatever game it is we've decided to take part in.This was perfectmaterial for the teen ager who wanted to graduate from Bob Dylan records. Theirony is that it is the lyrics of a songwriter that have survived the decadesbetter than the generically defined page poetry of either Guest or McKuen.

Guest, it should be remarked, made a living cleverly rearranging,rephrasing, re- branding what it was his audience already believed in; there wasnothing of surprise in his work, but rather a steady path toward a conspicuousset of resolutions. He was, in practice, a propagandist for the Way ThingsOught to Be, a softly reactionary set of ideas that were not, in his writings,revealed as remarkable realizations as the result of following a string ofcontrary ideas to their metaphorical commonality, not a perception that iscaught in composition and shared, indeed, his ideas are not even personalstatements of any faith-based belief; they were, flat out, something akin tomarching orders, talking points, instructions to a readership to take comfortin their reticence to challenge conventional wisdom , to resist straying fromthe compound, to be suspicious of education and nuance. Comic and technicallyskilled as Edgar Guest's pieces might have been his poems were by and large thedisguised dictates of what Nietzsche referred to as "slave morality".

In essence, Guest is instructing his audience not to budge and to instead on a collective memory of a past that never quite existed, certainly not in the static , perfected, perfect balanced paradigm where a man,his family, his neighbors and the world about all of them existed in a common sense, "natural" harmony. He does this to nearly toxic degree with his homily "Home" , where the corniest of cornball American dialects informs the presumably willing readership a set of conditions , drawn from the baldest and least convincing of stereotypes about rural life, that are required for a house for a house to gain the legitimizing and ennobling essence of being a "home". Pain, suffering , catastrophe are suggested as those things that make you part of an Order of Things that cannot be dismantled; new ideas, new technologies, new kinds of neighbors from different ethnic groups are not just suspect, they are wrong to be. Guest's hackneyed verse, filtered a meticulously contrived speech of common man wisdom, was contemptuous of modern ways, of being seemingly cut off at the root from a past that was, until then, continuous , coherent and seamless, generation to generation. There is something to be argued for learning lessons through our own history as a people, but Guest turns into gummed up rhymes seeking easy places to land to launch a sinister agenda of mediocrity:

Ye've got t' sing an' dance fer years, ye've got t' romp an'play,
An' learn t' love the things ye have by usin' 'em each day;
Even the roses 'round the porch must blossom year by year
Afore they 'come a part o' ye, suggestin' someone dear
Who used t' love 'em long ago, an' trained 'em jes t' run
The way they do, so's they would get the early mornin' sun;
Ye've got t' love each brick an' stone from cellar up t'dome:
It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home.

Simply, Guest discouraged the impressionistic view of theworld, detested the subjective, was annoyed to great extent at those poets whodecided that their responsibility was not to their audience's need forwalled-off security but rather to their own sensibilities as they sought togauge the interaction of their personalities with the flux and flow of a worldoutside themselves, entirely separate from their wishes. Moore ratherbrilliantly had the quality of actual thought in her poems, and the best poems,such as her most famous "Poetry" or this poem "Silence",read as skillfully, artfully distilled notions, half thoughts, material items,memories that are tracked as they culminate into an eventual perception.Something other than what the writer wanted to see or say is revealed; therecollection of her father's speech about the virtues of short visitscontrasted against his final offer of "make my house your inn" bringus neatly to Moore's terse knockout punch:" Inns are not a residences".

In the brief span she brings together a father's personality where he wasat a remove from those he ought to be close to, that he would preface hisdesire to have little to with others with the flattering comparison with greatpoets and their stoic virtues, that he would open up his house to his daughtermerely as a place to stay temporarily, not as a home. There is quite a bithere, voiced in simple language, linked implication, not rhetorical gestures.Where readers had read Guest, quickly understood what he had to offer and soonenough boxed up his volumes as attitudes in American culture began to change,Moore and others of her like remain the ones we can re-read and discuss withoutembarrassment .The best poems remain relevant, and it might be said here that atruly modernist work remains modern long, long after it first finds the lightof day.

Cootie farm

2011-10-02T21:15:00.001-07:00

If on a winter's night a traveler...
Italo Calvino
Calvino can be an intriguing fabulist, but there is a limit to how often one can keep interrogating the very medium<br/>they are writing in before one drops the book and fixes themself a strong drink. Self-reflective art in excessive doses and abusive combinations with other dislocating devices of retired experiments makes you complacent about the value of literary writing itself; what Calvino has going for him is an elegant style that engages you even as he performs the old tricks of revealing what's behind the curtain. For my taste, one should investigate the more recent novels of Paul Auster, especially his New York Trilogy. He essentially manages to have us step back from the linguistic artifice of fiction just enough to makes us aware of just how arbitrary the beginnings, middles and ends of plot outlines are when they are confronted by the irritable unpredictability of reall events; and yet even with this conceit going for him, he does not lose connection with his stories. These are characters who suffer, laugh, revenge, connive in all their circumstances, quirky and believeable, like we the readers, trying to make sense of situations that defy every template we can attempt to tame them with.