sofa cat morning

 
               cat
               mountain
                               sunlight
drape       window      drape
   sunlight
               cat
               mountain
sofa         sofa           sofa
 

Skywriting

Min(d)ing the gaps and reading between the lines for sure: An alphabet formed of buildings and sky: Type the Sky.

Thoughts rise like gas

Thoughts rise like gas as I sit on the can. White walls dull as the technical faculty, or facility I guess, of a poet. Who couldn't take quickly to the counting, and variation, of feet? How many years wasted before the epiphany of full-bodied beat? Could be a lifetime, this lifeline, or you could get away without it. Spring and all, against the grain. As if any work could be without it. To mind the line but not to toe it. The line is a plank but it's not. The poem is not a pirate ship, but it is, as it sails with its stolen cargo below deck, sails ever under the sign of skull and crossbones. The lines, canons. Galleys charged with forgetfulness. Samples composed of dummy text . . .

This is a line. This is a line
break. This is a line. This
is a line break. This is a line. This is a line break.
 

Lightning splits the sky

Lightning splits the sky, crash lands behind the mountains on the horizon as we drive back from Ridgefield where we spent the day with relatives at the house KC's sister's housesitting. Long, skinny road leading to a long, skinny driveway, heavily shaded by trees tall enough that you nearly have to cock your head back all the way parallel to the ground to see their tops. KC said I would like the seclusion and, yeah, it's not bad. Vaughn gets to spend twenty minutes or so in the pool before it starts to thunder. Swims the length of the pool a few times, with the help of floaties. She already swims better than her old man. And that's not that much of a lie. She joins Papa and me in what I would probably call a den, harking back to an earlier time, but what seems to be universally referred to as a family room. We catch the end of a show on Animal Planet, some tanned, brave soul helping to save the elephants of Borneo. I'm holding Dash to keep him away from pulling on the dogs' tails while KC helps her sister with preparing supper. It's not long before Dash is about to doze off. I walk him around and check out the art on these strangers' walls. It's almost all abstract. There's something off, I think, with likening poetry to visual art when talking about its reception or the expectations of its audience, and how much more radical visual art is allowed to be. With so much contemporary poetry, the reader is expected to have a familiarity with the last fifty or so years of literary theory. As often as not it's all the reader is given, no flotation devices to strap around the arms. The art viewer doesn't need to rely on theory, doesn't need to take a stand, interpret or otherwise engage the work, all the viewer needs is to be struck by the piece, some quality of the piece, and have sufficient cash to purchase it or a print. Art and music don't invite scholars exclusively, so why should poetry? Not that poets should be making poems for those who don't like it. But it should be clear to anyone who steps outside of the insular nooks of the poetry world for even a short time that something is wrong with the way many poems are made these days. Even more wrong are the mechanisms, the industries, around the poems. We have burgers and hot dogs and pasta salad, and a special dessert, one-bowl chocolate cake, made by KC and Vaughn in the morning. Everyone loves it, except Vaughn; she likes it, but prefers the chocolate chip cookie Auntie Joss gives her. We stay long enough so that Vaughn can help feed the two dogs, scooping the dry food, and then the wet food, into their big ol' steel bowls. And then we pack up and head home, not realizing till we get there that we forgot the leftovers we were going to take. Driving north on 35, KC tells me about a house she knows in Ridgefield she wouldn't mind owning one day. If we could. I shake my head. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. "I used to have negative associations," she says, "but it's really nice. If we had a windfall," she says. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. We merge onto I-84 in Danbury, rain pouring down on the windshield, broad flashes of lightning lighting up the dark sky. "I like Washington," I say, "if we ever have a windfall." She knows this already. "Washington—or maybe Kent." She doesn't say anything, but places her left hand on my right, which I don't regard until now when I'm writing this down.

Four clocks

Four clocks on the first floor and none of them show the same time. Slow-moving Sunday morning. Sitting on the sofa reading about bonobos. The hippie commune ape. But it's not just the love and sex and sharing of the hippie commune, but the other parts, too, like when a couple of the guys got a little overexcited and gnawed off a toe—was it really a toe?—from the girl they thought was edible flowers. Except, in the bonobos commune it would be the females chewing up the males. But these stories are rare and not to be overstated. There's much yet to learn about the bonobos and their sexy, feminine society. But it's hard not to see how anytime, anywhere, anygender, power exists to be abused. And how the antidote is power diffused. No way to pinch or douse or otherwise extinguish this particular fuse. I set down the magazine and bring my empty mug to the kitchen sink, stepping not-quite-gingerly between Candy Land cards, plastic plates and silverware, Duplo blocks, and Thomas the train and other toy vehicles. Dash in his play-yard chewing on his hand. Vaughn picking up her crayons from the floor and explaining to KC, "When Dashiell and I are grown-ups, too, we'll all make the rules and no one will have to listen."

John Ashbery's Birthday

Do you remember how it was in the beginning when the rain was an understatement and the maintenance man inside you brought his lunch pail to work every day? Do you remember his name was Charlie and he ate fried chicken three times a week and he had two missing teeth, one upper, one lower, at the front of his mouth. Like a vampire, he couldn't be seen when you looked in the mirror. But if you buried yourself in sleep long enough, if you woke with a start and immediately forgot why, then you likely were only moments away from having shaken his hand. And sometimes you sat down on the floor together, played cards till dawn, with B movies playing on the TV in the background casting a gray-blue light. He always wanted to eat, but whenever you offered him a snack he refused. Said he was on a diet. But you could see his bones almost through his skin. He was young and wrinkled and spoke to cats and dogs most freely. He didn't have a preference. He was like an angel in that sense. An angel without wings digging a hole under the fence to get to the other side. Fried chicken in his eyes, he was as much at home in the east as in the west. And his daughters played outside, skimming over the ground less like rocks over water than like sunset over the slopes and treetops on the horizon. Of course, he's childless, so when his youngest daughter crashes into the bird-feeder, he doesn't run outside. Sunset can't upset the man who does—not at the moment at least. The man who remembers how it was before the rain became hyperbole. Who after washing his daughter in the bath, cleaning her scrapes and bruises, brushes the invisible calloused fingertips away from the top of his spine. Who puts his daughter to sleep and picks up his son, takes him downstairs and starts swaying to a song called "Maps." His ten-month-old bundle of Ashbery in his arms, fallen asleep, barely.

Dirty Yellow Chair

"Dirty Yellow Chair" is a song I was going to write. It was going to be full of sounds like shallow water and charity dollars. Change, you know. The lawnmower next door turns off. Vaughn says hi from our front porch, my stomach feels groggy, someone says hi back to her. Man or woman I can't tell. I hear things from the back room. I hear things not so well. The AC whirs. We destroy the planet. I stand up, turn off the light; it's not needed at 3:45. Pull the string. I was going to write down lines like "Sitting in her cute yellow chair / the chair doesn't tell me who she is" and "Leaning back into the face of the electric drops / her words doesn't tell me who she is / She's the dirty little angel I'm strapped to / her face like a triangle and her fingernails." It's found language. It's not me but it is. I can't decide if I want it so I don't write it down. Until now that I'm typing what has been happening. I fall into it like an accident. That has as much meaning.

Constantly reoccurring

Constantly reoccurring sound of cars surging by outside. Hounding sound of morning breaking sleep, not unlike the cracks of sunlight through the vinyl mini-blinds, sound and light breaking sleep open. Half-reluctantly I kick the sheets off, stand up, and half-stumble to the toilet bowl, lift the seat, aim, and shut eyes for not a long while. Step downstairs, into the morning routine. Heart to Heart and Silk, read the headlines—news helicopters crash while following a car chase in Arizona, a suicide bomber is sought in Pakistan, a dubiously convicted man is executed (twenty-seven years later) in Alabama. KC upstairs getting Dash to sleep, Vaughn insists on playing. I pour hot water for tea, let it steep, sit down with Vaughn to play Candy Land. She asks me, "Which one do you want to be: blue or red?" "I'll be blue," I say. "I go first," she says, which is true, the rules clearly state the youngest player starts. She gets sad when I land on the Rainbow Trail shortcut. "I never get to take the Rainbow Trail," she whimpers. I remind her that she's landed on Gumdrop Pass many times, but she insists she "never gets to land on the shortcuts anymore." "I want to win," she says. And she will, as she always does when we play, except for a couple of times when she was happy not to win, preferring instead to hang out around Peanut Acres or Lollipop Woods. Game over, back sore from sitting on the floor, tell Vaughn I need a break, let me finish my tea. But she wants to play something else. Sitting on the sofa in the living room back to the east-side of the house, I see all the way across our main floor, to the back room, Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds facing out on one of my bookshelves. I point to it and ask Vaughn if she remember the three birds on the front cover. Excited she runs over, grabs the book and brings it over to me. "Read all the names of all the birds," she says. I ask her to first identify the ones on the cover. She knows the Cardinal, that's a given, doesn't remember the ones we learned last time—the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak and the Evening Grosbeak. When we get to the Great Auk she remember this is the one that "has extinct." And when we get to the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon which appear on consecutive spreads (I typed "spears" at first), she asks if they're the only ones that have extinct—for each one she says "has extinct," I tell her "is extinct, is extinct," she says "ok, is extinct," but then goes back to "has extinct" next time she says it—I tell her they're the only ones in this book, but there are other birds that are no more. "Which ones?" she asks, and I pause a moment before at least one comes to my still sleepy mind, "the Dodo bird," I say. KC comes downstairs, dressed for the day, tells Vaughn it's time for her to do the same. They'll be heading downtown for the Village Fair Days. I'll be staying home with Dash who sorely needs his nap. Vaughn rushes around to get ready. I bring my empty mug to the sink.

Morning of revisions

Morning of revisions and submissions. Morning of keeping the house clean for company. Morning of pros and cons of InDesign's paragraph composer. Morning of wasted words. At noon there's lunch, a garden salad and Boboli pizza with meatball and lots of garlic. Espresso chip ice cream for dessert. Vaughn will have strawberry shortcake later with her friend Lexa when she visits. I head out early for work. Vaughn insists I take something, she gives me a small green E magnet. I get in my Civic, put my supper bag down on the passenger seat, and set the E down in the small plastic tray under the emergency brake. Mini-van mamas must be the fastest drivers on the road. I wonder if they could all be married to Nascar papas. Probably Nascar papas wouldn't drive so fast. And it is a fast ride into work. Light traffic for a summer Friday. Pulling up onto the new bridge off of White Turkey Junction in Danbury, the clouds catch my eye. Clouds over and on other clouds like layers of white paint on a blue canvas. Against this mountainously cloudy sky a red balloon moving sideways more than up. Moving at a good clip, too. Moving while I'm stopped in my car at a red light. Alt rock lending a soothing crunching tune to the tiny mosquito banging against my driver-side window. Try to flick him dead with the back of my hand. Again. And again. Got him. Later at work J____ will be cleaning a graphic the publisher referred to as a mosquito, but for which the file name is wasp.tif. When she's done she stands up in her cubicle, turns around toward mine and asks if that's a wasp or a mosquito. After we joke a bit, I finish with "Look at that long body; it has to be a wasp. A mosquito's just dust with wings."

You pass a lot of flags

You pass a lot of flags on a ride into work through Fairfield County. I suppose it's that way in a lot of places in this country. At the corner of Ironworks and route 25 I notice an American flag slouching toward the ground. Limp and not proud. Curved stripes of lipstick red, so unlike lipstick nothing red in the world is less like lipstick. New York Yankees flags, it's that time of year. In winter they'll be Huskies flags. You used to see more novelty flags. Before 9/11. Golf flags, flowerpot flags, Hello Kitty flags. The world really wasn't much different then. The world here really wasn't much different then. Was a hell of a lot different in Iraq. Now it's almost all American flags. Remember some production editor at Morrow in the days after 9/11, she told our CSR how pushing back some due date was no problem, how they had different priorities now. Yeah, those priorities lasted a week. No one believed her when she told us. Could she really have believed it herself? Probably she was a mid-westerner who got a job in New York City out of college, probably she temporarily slipped back into who she was, or wanted to be, before becoming herself again. It's all so complicated. I've been wanting to read Alice Notley's In the Pines for a couple of weeks now. Since the last of the important edits were made. I mean, really, who cares about the Penguin Poets back ad? It's fluff to fill a signature. Some of her lines will stick in your eye, like "I am losing my because." Or, "The vending machine has lit up / to tell us it’s empty. / What did you think you ever had to sell me?" Or "Your eyes are like times / your eyes are like people / your eyes are like failures to see." Your eyes are like failures to see. Talk about putting the pedal to the metal. I don't put the pedal to the metal, but thinking about that line I notice I'm driving faster than I normally drive. Faster than I normally drive since becoming a dad. The person driving the mini-van behind me is an ass who wants to drive faster than my faster-driving speed. There's a red light up ahead. She should be happy we made the last one. Nothing on the radio but ads. It's a conspiracy. The first time I heard the Nirvana cover of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" it made me want to dig a hole for my soul like a dog digs a hole in the ground for his bone, made me want to believe for the first time in a long time that I had a soul, that there might be such a thing. I pull into the parking space and gather myself, my things, for work. As I step from my car I want to take off into the ground. Remembering Notley again: "I’m going to find your soul / I’m going to find your soul / / This is the oldest song."

Parts of the vacuum

Parts of the vacuum scattered about the house like pieces of Osiris. One attachment in the half-bath. Another between my office chair and a crate stuffed with old literary journals in the back room. The body of it down in the basement under the utility sink. The smaller attachments also in the basement shoved back on the low shelf of KC's old computer desk. Dash upstairs in his white crib sleeping his light sleep. Can't start the chore yet. Vaughn just picked up by Nana. They'll do lunch then spend the afternoon painting and working on crafts. Earlier, KC at the grocery store, Vaughn and I built separate towers with the Duplo blocks. A green home for the penguins, Chalk and Dot; a blue home for one Little Boy; a red home for the other; a yellow home for Sea Lion. Poor "Little Guy" missing and we didn't even notice. The Little Boys drove their red and blue cars. Went hiking Litchfield hills. Tea with Sea Lion. Checked out the cars at the Penguin place. Hit the grocery store, picked up milk and ice cream, hot dogs, hamburgers, and buns. Went back to the red house and grilled themselves some lunch. I took a break to use the potty Vaughn didn't need to, then I got some water, came back. Vaughn was watching out the window for Nana. Playing our "We're not waiting for you, you're just a stranger" game every time a car not hers drives by. But it's KC's white Saturn that pulls into the driveway. Vaughn runs to the side door. Vaughn startles her as KC pushes open the slightly-jammed door. We're there to help carry the groceries in. KC's thankful. Flurry of activity. Milks to the fridge; vegetables, too. Meat for the freezer and ice cream cones, mmm for the cabinet. Soon Nana arrives to pickup Vaughn. Hugs and kisses goodbye. Vaughn won't leave anymore without them. After a few moments of looking around, remembering the dust bunnies and tangled strands of cat hair on the floor near or under the furniture when Vaughn and I were gathering up the blocks to build with, I ask KC where the vacuum is. "All over the place," she says.

I bring my empty mug

I bring my empty mug to the kitchen sink. Through the dining room where Vaughn is eating raisins and cranberries and coloring with crayons of those same colors—purples, maroons, a deep crackling red. Soft beige light reflecting off the neighbor's vinyl siding and shining in through the north-side windows over the kitchen sink where KC is washing a plate or peeling a food. I stop beside her. She is focused on the task in hand, or more likely exhausted from baby-interrupted sleep. The whale clock ticks on the window sill. Full-nostrilled clementine smell as I lean in to kiss the Manneristic curve of the left side of her neck.

Hunter green surface

Hunter green surface of the Housatonic River. Sun not so bright on the water for some reason on this clear day. Driving south on Grove Street. Look to the other side of the street, rows of trees, rows of heavy green shade. Some guy wants to build a couple-hundred condo units on the hillside. And a convenience store. And a restaurant on the river. Makes me want to hurl the fried turkey patties, eggs, roasted potatoes and carrots I had for lunch. Not "want to," of course. Is it a privilege to want? I turn left up onto Pumpkin Hill. Good god: when's the Suburban on my Civic ass going to realize I'm not driving through the little Subaru in front me? It makes the ride that it makes the ride that much makes the ride much longer into work. I get a kick when at the stop sign I turn right onto Ironworks and the Suburban speeds straight ahead on Long Meadow, right onto the Subaru's ass as if he really didn't see the Subaru the whole time. What an ass. Driving means a lot of ass. Jesus rode an ass. I remember in third—or was it fourth?—grade when me and my friends discovered the Bible used the word ass. We went around for weeks saying ass this and ass that because "it says ass in the Bible." Proto-South Park we were. Tuning out the priest and into our stupid joys. But there's nothing on the radio for most of the drive. I settle for The Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter," for the last minute or so. KC's favorite Stones' song. I can never remember what mine is. It used to be "Paint It Black," but I outgrew that. "Sympathy for the Devil?" Maybe. I liked the Jane's cover a lot. Who knows? The ride started so promisingly with the hunter green surface of the Housatonic River surprisingly not shining. But even after I shook that Suburban from my Civic ass, I noticed nothing. What the heck did I think about? I take off my sunglasses, put on my eyeglasses, grab my supper bag, and head into work. "Hey" and "Hi" and "How's it going?" Computer booting up; I am shutting down.
 

Time of lifting spiders

Time of lifting spiders on the garage door. Time of filling the Yard Machine with gasoline. Time of pulling the string. To Sartre everyone had a string to pull. I'm skeptical. Unsure of the "every," unsure of the pull. In lives so pulled. Time to pull becomes time to push. Time of waist-high weeds along the edges. Time of the neighbor's treacherous fence, jutting at us through his property-line-speak smoke screen. Time of know your rights. Time of swallowing allergen-induced post-nasal drips. Remember the time of action figures in exotic jungles of not extraordinarily tall grass. Remember the time of die-cast metal cavalry. Outlaws and marshals and Texas rangers. Sioux, Cheyenne, and Apache. Brown patio of the mid-western plains. Surreal fields of freshly mowed grass. Father and son animating cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians meeting their demise by the roll of the dice. Sgt. Pete Stone fires at Painted Horse. Storm Eagle wings an axe at Wes Bonner, the great scout. Rain Hat positions his rifle from behind a petrified tree, taking aim at "Shotgun" Crawford. Remember the names, remember the time. Worlds we leave behind. But who's that in the make-shift saloon behind the walls of Fort Larame? G . . . W . . . Bush. Don't remember him.
 

Weather Top Stories

With a slight little push

With a slight little push of her plate, Vaughn leaves the table for the living room. Climbs onto the sofa, kneels, tucks her head down close to her knees, and rests her hands over her head. "Nobody loves me or likes me, I guess." This is her thing to say these days whenever she's disappointed. KC continues to feed Dash, I keep eating my leftover tuna casserole, having finished off my few pieces of leftover chicken. Vaughn wouldn't eat her leftover chicken, she wanted tuna casserole, which KC explained is going to be her supper, and so now Vaughn's on the sofa—now leaning on the top of her head, little butt sticking up in the air, peaking at us upside down through her legs as she sings, "Nobody loves me or likes me, I guess. / I'll have to do everything for myself." She repeats this dozens of times. KC and I trying not to laugh. Finally she offers some variations, such as "I'll have to do everything for myself, I guess, / because Daddy doesn't love me or like me / and because Mommy doesn't love me or like me." Oh, how could something like that not warm your heart? Finally I tell her that excusing herself and singing on the couch is a good response to disappointment, much better than pouting, whining, pushing, biting. Yeah, she's a fierce one. We invite her back to the table. She'll eat some of the chicken and have some casserole. If I were a confessional poet, I would be escaping this mundane domesticity via alcohol or amphetamines or sleeping with prostitutes, and KC would be an adulteress or an agoraphobic home-shoppig addict. But no, all I have is about a gig-and-a-half of worthless frankenverse that thoroughly avoids my biggest confession, which I guess is that every weekday I go to a job I can't stand and every day I do nothing to change that. What a waste of time to be thinking all this when I should be enjoying the moment. Suddenly everyone's on their way out of the house. Them on their way to Nana and Papa's and me on my way to work. It's a slow half-hour ride into work, the alt rock on XCI is a soothing soundtrack, leaves me drowsy as I take off my sunglasses, put on my eyeglasses, pocket my wallet and head into the office. Eight and a half hours later I step out of the office. Last night I had been struck by how the wet green ground, usually a mess of ugly broad-leafed weeds, along with the fluorescent office light shining out the tall windows seemed to conspire to make the perfect field turf. With everything that lay to the sides of the thin strip of bright green blocked out, it almost seemed like a place to lie down. To sink down. To be covered over. An easy erasing of self. Painless. But tonight nothing stands out. It's right into the Civic. Right onto the road, and the next road, and the highway, and the long state road that leads to my long road. XCI's "Folk the System" show is on. There's a woman fluttering her hands across a guitar, with and against her Billie Holiday-influenced voice. It's a sad song I can't quite judge. Makes me realize I'll always be a sentimentalist at heart. I note the "always." The language I can't escape. But when I do—
 

Like surfing the Web

Writing, like surfing the Web. You're reading a webpage and notice a link, in a sidebar, say, and you think you'll click on it when you finish what you're reading. But what you were reading has led to a different link. You click on that one, read that webpage, and click a link there to some other site, etc., until you end up someplace very different from that first link you noticed when your surfing started. But that link not followed is as much a part of your reading as the links followed. What's the difference between a link not taken and a link taken but mostly forgotten? The browser history won't show the link not taken, but it's in you, like a little black rock. Shakes loose and gets stuck in an interior nook of you, like a bit of dirt in your shoe. And so writing the writer is struck by an idea, or image, or series of words. An angle, a slant, a take. A nuance. Phrase mentally noted but not set down. Not yet. Not yet. Till not yet becomes never. But it's always there. Even if it's eventually forgotten on the surface. There in the authorial mind at least. A parenthetical of the unconscious mind. Less parenthetical (like this) than parenthetical like this.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
by Frank O'Hara

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 SARDINES?"
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.
 

What about the lyric

What about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry? I wake up with the same thought I left off with. The last thought I can at least remember. There were others. So much of life is forgetting. Hmm, into the morning routine, except I eat and have my tea before brushing teeth. Jazzy morning. Vaughn buzzing around the living room. KC tottering along, room to room, with Dash in her arms. Room to room? There are only three-and-a-half down here. Plus a half-bath. Is that four? Never fully comprehended the mathematics of realty. Would a phenomenological lyric be called phenomenolyrical? Why care what it'd be called when I can't say what it is? Saying, saying. I hate saying. Intuitive movement through the lyric. Silence in the words. Between the words. Of the words. Constituted but not chained. KC sets Dash in his crib upstairs. She's "in the shower" before she's in the shower. Vaughn building Duplo towers in the living room. Chatting to herself. Taken over the years by the idea of "phenomenological lyricism." Taken over by the illogical impingements of connotations. Formerly in the full phrase: "a phenomenological lyricism which recreates the texture and logic of interior experience." Redundancy. The interior is built into the phenomenological. Texture in necessarily a result of the dynamic process of person-al experience, of self-reflective consciousness, of being in time. The lyric as synthesis of the minute analyses at work in the self-reflective moment. The moment is a movement. Jargon and redundancy led me to an ill-conceived, half-understood concoction of surrealism, cubism, beat, post-langpo, etc. quagmire, futility. The need to start over. Recognized over the years, but seeking articulation in order to act. Damn articulation. But is that right? The "free world" is riding piggyback on the inarticulate speech of a not particular president. A president of the Word. Who doesn't understand the Word is a black stone. Whose white stone is black with oil and blood. Whose white house is invisible black with oil and blood. Whose home is a mansion, but whose room in the house of being is a half-bath the size of a public bathroom stall. Who eats and sleeps in the oil and blood of his own shit. Empty mug of tea. Where's my family—they're upstairs. Black stone words. That "language is the house of being" is the poet's challenge, not his or her sentence.

Where were we

Where were we? I was sitting with my back to the windows that line the south wall in the dining room. Back to the gray light on the rainy noon. Vaughn sitting across from me. KC sitting to her right. Dash in his high chair to the right of KC. Between me and Vaughn, the tuna casserole she helped her mom make. Different this time because they used elbows instead of bow-ties. This is as good as it's ever come out. We talk about how we haven't had it in a while, and how maybe that's why it seems so good. Or maybe it's because we're all so hungry. KC cuts up tiny pieces to feed Dash. As much tumbles out of his mouth as stays in. He likes it too. It's quiet, now, across the street. In the lot being excavated in preparation for a new two-family house. Rain coming down hard enough it forced the work to stop. The rain as benevolent force. Vaughn's through and ready for dessert. Today she chooses Edy's orange & cream low-fat fruit bar. What we used to call a popsicle. I get it for her before either KC or I are done with our meals because she's been good today. She'll be upstairs setting up a party for her stuffed animals before KC and I start on our dessert. But now, where were we? We were all at the table and KC was shooting glances at me as Vaughn was chatting away at us. KC could tell I wasn't registering a word. My mind more than half elsewhere. I'm thinking of Dale Smith's Black Stone: "What we are to each other is locked into language—" and there may be a sense in which that's true, that bears closer inspection. Language may be, as Heidegger had it, "the house of being," but I refuse to believe we're locked in. On a hot day, where I'm sitting, I can feel the sun through the window behind me as its heavy rays shawl my shoulders. I could turn around in my chair and see the house next door, the rain flowing out the gutter, dropping to the driveway and running down garageward. I could see the cars blurring by over the glossy black pavement with its shiny yellow demarcation, blurring by under branches with deep green leaves drooping under the weight of too much water. I could see the empty, muddy lot across the street where more and thicker trees used to be. I could turn knowing that KC and Vaughn and Dash are turning with me, and it's not quite because of language. They are with me inside me, beyond where words can go. What if we could kick down all seven doors in the house of being, what would it be? Now what about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry?

Rock and dirt pour

Rock and dirt pour into a dump truck across the street, like ice cubes into a cooler amplified. The dog next door barking at god knows what. Vaughn downstairs singing her "I love being a mermaid" song. Cars brush by outside, the harsh hushing sound of tires rushing over wet pavement. Must have rained overnight. KC talking to Dash in the bathroom but I can't hear what she's saying. Dash grunts his small joyful grunts. Kick off the top sheet, into the morning routine, which starts, properly, with putting on a ratty T-shirt and a pair of shorts, hit the bathroom to pee, wash hands, splash cold water on face, and then downstairs, turn on the computer, make a bowl of Heart to Heart, sit down and start to read. Ron Silliman blogs on Barrett Watten's list of books "most 'essential' to [him] as a poet." I remember I made a top ten list like that when I was considering a low-residency MFA program which asked that question on its application. That must have been 2000. Made the list; didn't complete the rest of it. Don't remember the exact list. I'm sure Revolution of the Word was there, and The Birth of Tragedy; they'll always be there if only because of their primacy in my personal reading history. Same deal with Rimbaud's Complete Works and The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Charles Bernstein's Conent's Dream would have been listed in 2000. Would it be listed now? Probably, but if so, possibly only as part of a development. I pour myself some tea. What else? The Tennis Court Oath, definitely in 2000; definitely not now. Selected poems by Ted Berrigan, definitely on that list, and still, even though there's now a Collected. The Green Lake Is Awake? Probably. Collected Creeley? Probably. Selected Patchen? Probably. Is that ten? Who's counting? Who cares? Vaughn's in the living room watching Sleeping Beauty. Dash upstairs asleep in his crib. KC stepping out of the shower. Last night she finished The Deathly Hallows. And now the rain's pouring down outside. Where the cars keep zooming by. Us in our brown, little Arts & Crafts style home.

Why should it be

Why should it be so hard to remember supper? The uncooked, golden strips of chicken breast looked so perfectly sliced, breaded, and spaced on the baking sheet. They looked the way pre-processed chicken nuggets are intended to look but never do. I sit down at the table to read the paper. Over-the-fold is dominated not by a headline but a photograph of an attractive young swimming instructor teaching a six-year-old boy. Next to the photo is a story about how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency broke up a Danbury family with no warning and after a number of seemingly-routine previous visits. Good, hard-working people. Honest. A seventeen-year-old honor student who gets to stay because she was born here, while her parents and two older brothers get hauled off to a holding center where they await deportation to Brazil. Proud to be an "American" my ass. I flip the paper, below-the-fold the mayor of our town will be seeking a third term. I voted for her last time even though she's a Republican. I think I'll vote for her again. The only other time I voted for a Republican was when I was young, when I still had strong libertarian leanings, and putting a guy from my then hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut in the Governor's seat seemed like it could help things in the Brass City. Not really proud of that vote, one of the few times I voted for the eventual winner. The other front-page story is about a pharmaceutical plastics pioneer who lived in the town south of here and died in a car accident two towns south of here. But soon Vaughn wakes from her nap. She gets herself settled in a seat at the table. KC still in the kitchen sautéing broccoli, onion, and garlic, and reheating steamed carrots in the microwave. I shake out four or five cheesy crackers on a plate for Vaughn to tide her over. Why should it be so hard to remember supper? What we talked about I mean. I remember Vaughn ate all of her chicken and most of her carrots. She earned dessert, which this time was a few vanilla wafers. I remember KC's disgust with the wafers, saying she'll never buy them again because of the ingredients. I pickup the box and my sight zooms right in on the partially hydrogenated oil. KC says there's not even any vanilla in them. Vaughn says she likes them and wants to get another box when this one is gone. We drop the topic and I shake out a few wafers for myself. Dash had that late nap. I think he sleeps through supper, but I'm not really sure.

Into the morning

Into the morning routine, Heart to Heart and Silk, quickly followed by black tea, drink it while watching The Backyardigans w/ Vaughn. "Ski patrol to the rescue" on a muggy July morning. Out of the morning routine quickly, outside to mow the lawn, just the front and the sides today. Do it fast before allergies go bonkers. Peel allergen-laced clothes off in the basement, head upstairs to shave and shower. Steam in the shower. Thoughts are like this, rising out of nowhere not nowhere really but the hot water, as a body is mostly water. Thoughts are like this steam rising only to disappear. I think of Dash's ten-month-old vocab stuck on two words for at least a month now: mom-ma and dad-da. First words of a person. First words of a poet. My first poet words, worthless as they are, ain't ever gonna slip outta mind. "As I walked alone / down the long, abandoned road / I saw a bird. / It was dead." First stanza of not literally the first poem I ever wrote, but really the first poem I wrote. At fifteen and never having read any real poetry before. It's redundant, not concise, and easy generalities (road, bird) are substituted where specifics could have added something (synagogue parking lot, starling—not actually sure of the bird, didn't know birds at all then, but I recall speckles, definitely darkness, and possibly iridescence). This is the poem my head-bangin' friends took notice of, the one they showed to the class intellectuals who surprisingly also approved, even my English teacher, who at one point had told me I shouldn't be in the school, put it on the front of a collection of class poems at year's end, though my piece wasn't from an assignment (otherwise I probably wouldn't have done it). Simple vanity of people excited by your work, who can escape that completely? What strikes me about that opening stanza now, almost twenty years later, isn't it's faults, but that at fifteen and with no experience of poetry, and with the rest of the poem, IIRC, falling into exact-rhymed quatrains, I would resist the temptation to do the same to those lines. However bad the writing is, the poetry isn't terrible, the poetry is in the sounds: the consonance, assonance, and slant-rhyming all work pretty well. An accident, of course. But still. The steam keeps rising. I take long showers. I have to owe the early comfortableness with free verse to Jim Morrison's Wilderness which I had picked up from a Waldenbooks not long before writing the poem, brought home in secret, and stored away in a bottom drawer as if it were porn or a pint of Majorska, because it was "worse," it was poetry. Porn was an unspoken given, vodka a rite of passage, but guys weren't supposed to read poetry. By this time I'm out of the shower, in bedroom getting dressed, thought replaced by other thought: gotta get going, KC needs to get to the grocery store. She takes Dash; Vaughn stays home with me. She wants to "read" the bird book. It's been a month or two since we've done this last. We'll look through the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds and I have to tell her the name of the birds on every page. Males and females. Summer plumage and winter. Overhead views. Everything. When we get to the Great Auk I tell her, this time, that it's extinct, and she asks what that means. I tell her that means there are none left in the world. None on the earth since 1844. "They all died?" she asks, and I tell her "Yes, they all died." We move on. But after a dozen pages or so she wants to return to "the extinct one." We go back to that page, "There's not even one left?" she asks. "Not even one," I say. And after looking awhile and talking about how "pretty" that Auk was and the shape of his beak, we go back to the page we were on. But before we can even get to the Herons, she wants to go back again to the Great Auk. She points to one of the Auks above it, the Thick-Billed Murre, says "Let's give him a new name." "OK," I say, "how about Billy?" "No," she says, and then after a moment she asks, "What's this one's name again?" She is pointing to the Great Auk; I tell her the name. "I want to call this one," the Thick-Billed Murre, "Great Auk," she says. "Alright," I say, "that's the Great Auk now." We'll go through the same motions later, the Monk Parakeet is renamed the Carolina Parakeet; the Mourning Dove, the Passenger Pigeon. These changes don't make her happy, but they will do, it seems. Reading through a bird book with a three-and-half-year-old I worry about some of the bird names, hope she doesn't repeat them at the wrong time. There are Boobies, Tits, and Cocks, and people might not know what she's talking about. The rest of the time before KC gets back from shopping, Vaughn and I build "separate towers" out of the Duplo blocks: one yellow, one red, one green, one blue. When KC gets home we help her unpack the groceries, Dash goes in the play-yard. Vaughn return to our towers, but instead of playing with them, we spin the Duplo creatures (two penguins, "Chalk" and "Spot"; one sea lion; and "Little Guy" who is nothing recognizable) on their heads. We keep track of who spins the longest; whoever spins the longest wins that round. By time lunch is ready, all four are tied with three victories. Lunch is Boars Head skinless beef franks, KC also has leftover pasta, we both have a garden salad, and Vaughn has some carrots. KC feeds Dash, I don't know what. Dessert is a big deal, Vaughn's first time with an ice cream cone. I plop a couple of scoops of bright green Edy's Slow Churned Rich & Creamy mint chocolate chip on a Keebler sugar cone. She's all over it and doesn't make a mess. For myself, a couple scoops of Edy's Grand espresso chip. Nothing makes us smile so much in this house as a good dessert, I think, but that's not exactly true. We clear the plates, load the dishwasher, and then KC nurses Dash. And then KC and Vaughn head out on the hour-long round-trip to pickup the pink watch at Rosy's. Pink watch KC told me today doesn't even work, needs a part, but it's a gift from Auntie Joss Vaughn's gotta have. I scoop up Dash, push play for disk 5, Sonic Youth, A Thousand Leaves. Five tracks that work for Dash: 2, 4, 5, 7, 8. All we need. Five tracks, and over a half-hour worth of music. Big f'ing anti-pop balls of Sonic Youth (or, with Kim Gordon there, I'm reminded of an old L7 lyric: "Got so much clit she don't need no balls"). Before we even get to the Hits of Sunshine (track 7) he's conked out. Curled into himself and my chest. Ball of a boy in my arms. Here's the universe squeezed into a ball. I carry him upstairs, place him down in his crib slow-motion like—so tough to get him down, he sleeps light like his mom. Not in that regard at all like me or Vaughn. I head back downstairs. Decide to let the music keep playing. "Yellow girls are running backward," Thurston sings, just above a whisper. Time for me to take a shit. Over the music, I hear the house shake—no KC and Vaughn aren't home yet (the side door sometimes requires slamming), it's just the dishwasher, rinse cycle kicking in. Same five disks in the CD player for three or four months now: Tom Waits, Bone Machine; Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell; Neil Young, Harvest; Morphine, Cure for Pain; and the Sonic Youth one. Before that it was months with The Beatles, Abbey Road; David Bowie, Singles (disk 1); xmas CDs by John Denver and Johnny Mathis; and Vaughn's favorite, The Beastie Boys, Ill Communication. We danced to that one so often, KC and I got tired of hearing it, but sometimes it was the only way to get Vaughn to nap. She would go around saying "like Vaughn Po-tee" because of the line "like Vaughn Bode, I'm the Cheech Wizard." One time, around the holidays, I was talking to someone and said the word "communication" and Vaughn came out with "like Ma Bell" (I'm just glad that was all she came out with—it was time to start skipping that track.). "Hard to believe they'll go away, these sure and steady days," writes Dale Smith in Black Stone. I can't help but believe there are some who feel this more painfully than others. Is that wrong? The neighbors last night setting off fireworks past ten o'clock, seventeen days past fourth of July, Dash finally gotten to sleep: that's wrong. But now KC is home. Vaughn asleep in her arms as she carries her upstairs. I've been typing too long. Time to do something more productive, I suppose.

I click on the time

I click on the time at the top right corner of my screen to see what the date is. I never know the date on days I don't work. Today was Saturday, July, 21, 2007. As tonight is. Up at 8 a.m. Stagger downstairs. Into morning routine. But Vaughn's excited about yesterday, so filled with joy at telling me what she did while I was at work last night, and I have no idea what she's saying. Half-closed eyes are half-closed ears. I'll catch up later, I think, but never do. Is this the birth of tragedy? But there's no music this a.m. Into routine, a bowl of Heart-to-Heart with Silk. Grab a spoon, sit at the computer, read the news. Maybe the president's problem is in his ass, since that's where his thoughts seem to originate. Into routine, fill the kettle, boil water for black tea. KC tending to Vaughn and Dash. Getting Vaughn ready for big day out with Auntie Joss in East Chester, NY. Dash not just hanging out wherever we put him down anymore, but crawling all over the floor, drawn to cords and cabinet doors. KC will drop Vaughn off at Nana and Papa's who will drive her to New York. Then KC and Dash will head to Borders and pickup her reserved copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What do I do during this time? Try to write, go back to a poem from last year, revise it, try to get it right. Turn it inside out. Discard and rewrite. Sever ties with a darling or two. Creep back into the poem. Make it new. Ha. Will it feel like wasted hours when I'm through? Yeah, probably. That's the gamble. KC returns with Harry Potter and yesrerday's mail. I have a new book, too, Black Stone by Dale Smith. We won't argue who gets the reading time today, it's her day, that's okay. We take turns with Dash t/o the day. We have tuna for lunch, eat in shifts, and when Dash finally naps we both lie down to read. We eat supper in shifts, we have egg salad, I have a garden salad and she stir-fries or steams or somehow cooks up some veggies for herself. When she leaves to pickup Vaughn I play with Dash the entire time. We bang the xylophone, we spin Duplo blocks and the Duplo people on their heads, I toss the football in the air and he claps when I catch it, he tries to throw the soccer ball, sometimes he does, he climbs all fourteen stairs, in his room we play with monkeys, and his stuffed pony I call Pinto. When he gets fussy I change him out of his little person clothes, draw him a bath where he can play with his smiley cup, and a little red boat, and a red lobster. He loves the water. For a while. Time to get out. Wrap him in Vaughn's old yellow ducky towel. He likes the way I muss his wet hair dry. Gaping six-toothed smile. When KC and Vaughn come home, Dash and I are listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs trying to sway him asleep, which usually works, but tonight, he misses his mom. Vaughn tells me about the pools in East Chester, and playing with Daniel, and how Mr. Nobody was there, too. He left clues. Footprints and matching colors. Matching colors of what I never get told. And for the first time she mentions a Mrs. Nobody. And we brush her teeth, and we read about Maisy, and Arthur, and two boys who experience a hurricane which knocks down an old elm which they get to play in for a few days until it's chainsawed apart and carried away and they're bummed, but they learn to appreciate the elm that remains. And before Vaughn falls asleep she tells me I need to call the Rosie's in New Milford because Auntie Joss gave her a new pink watch but she left it there at the restaurant and she's about to cry, and I tell her I will. We live in New Milford. There's no Rosie's in New Milford. Vaughn puts one hand on my chest. She drifts into sleep. By the time I get downstairs her mother has called Rosie's in Danbury. They have the pink watch. We will drive there tomorrow—some of us or all of us—pick it up and bring it home.

P.S. Results of our reading: KC, halfway through her 800-page book; me, halfway through my 80-page book.

P.P.S. Those results are tainted though. I also read today the new issue of E•ratio, issue 14 of Alba, some of issue 6/7 of The Germ, various poetry related blogs, some pages of Time, a handful of poems from Hoa Nguyen's Red Juice, and not a small number of web pages researching some details for my writing this morning. So I can't complain.

Bush cedes power to Cheney— temporarily?

Dubya's colonoscopy is big news because he will temporarily be ceding power to Dick Cheney. How does a story like this get reported without irony? It barely seems possible. Is there anybody out there who doesn't believe Cheney has been pulling the strings all along? Seriously, and partisan politics asisde, the Republican party should offer some kind of apology to the voters duped into thinking they were voting for Dubya-Dick, not Dick-Dubya.

Nail File Nite

How cool is it to be able to search for keywords within files? How the hell did I find anything before? Anyway, to follow up on yesterday's post, here are some notes from 2003, when I had a slightly different take on the implications of the "cat / book / city" form . . .

Unlike the one-word typo poems, or the one-word repetition poems [crickets, silence] the form [of "cat / book / city"] is not "self-extinguishing;" instead, it is, like a sonnet, a form to which future Minimalists may turn and utilize for their own purposes, tweaking as necessary.
            —•—
What about a poem of three one-word lines, each consisting of one syllable and three phonemes? The poem could tell a story, but also have a strict form where the second line repeats a phoneme from the first line and the third line repeats a phoneme each from the first and second line, leaving a total of three unrepeated phonemes. These leftover sounds should then form a word to be used for the title, which will be set phonetically to focus attention on the fact that the poem’s sound has been carefully considered. And that phonetic spelling will form another word, also directly related to the content. This will provide a cultural, or culture-value, context in which to interpret the three words of the poem. As with the title, alternative spelling should be considered for at least one of the three words, perhaps the last. A “misspelling” that reflects commercial advertising, a synechdochal linking to popular culture; for instance, “lite” or “nite”—which might imply the false shame of being home, filing one’s nail’s (for what?) when everyone else is out consuming fun.

But that was just a setup for a poem made in early ’97 (a brief time then experimenting with typewriter composition), reproduced here with FontShop's very cool, though for years now overexposed, Trixie typeface . . .


 

Cat Blog City

Hard to find time to get around to longer posts, been wanting to do this one since May (already). In a blog post on Aram Saroyan, Ron Silliman noted that Saroyan's "cat / book / city" "depends entirely on scale of referents for its impact." I don't see scale as the only thing going on in this poem, especially if we're willing to grant that there's a person behind the list. But this is less a response to Ron than it is a rundown of observations toward a defense of a poem I care about and that many might dismiss because of its brevity.

In the simplest reading, Saroyan's poem sketches a familiar type: the urban cat and book lover. But the starkness of the three words, the leap from the intimate cat and book to the anonymous city, and, paradoxically, the emotionlessness of the objective list form, all suggest a lonesomeness, if not a loneliness. And the author's "why bother with it" choice not to expand on the list could reasonably be assumed to hint at an alienation from the culture in which this cat, book, and city exist.

My own first response to this poem took it as a kind of recording of a pre-reflective consciousness. Of course, that's impossible, since recording implies reflection in this sense. But with its simple words the poem evokes an experience of the referents in the way they might be highlighted during a fleeting moment of being or existential awareness. The feeling is emphasized, yes, by scale, but also in that there is a direction to the moment: a movement outward from the company of a pet, to the company of a book, to the company of that anonymous city.

While a conventional reading is not going to like all of this openness of meaning, suggestion arising from general words rather than detailed description, a postmodern reading embraces such openness, and the minimal poem, like its cousins the conceptual poem and the concrete poem, belongs to the postmodern tradition(s). Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets is open to more than a few criticisms, but there's a reason "cat" is chosen as one of six poems to represent Saroyan; in that small selection of his poems, it's either the best or else a close second to the "crickets" running off the bottom trim, and it's placed last suggesting the editor viewed it as one of the stronger pieces.

So even what we have so far—a kind of haiku carved down to a list poem of three words, four syllables, ten phonemes—ain't so bad. The poem is accomplishing quite a bit within the constraint of its form. But there's more. As if to stick with its postmodernism bent, the poem privileges metonymy over metaphor. To see best how it functions at the metonymic level we have to invoke another pomo favorite: intertextuality. The context comes from another of Saroyan's minimal poems:


Impossible ever since I read "ocean" not to look at Saroyan's other stacked three-word poems and see what they yield as equations. While "ocean" is a piece of minimal surrealism, "cat" makes it easy to see an assumed plus sign and equals line because it functions literally. In the language of metonymy: animal nature + intellect = civilization. Obviously this isn't a brilliant realization, but it's another layer to the poem. A kind of sophisticated easter egg. More importantly, it's a grand counterpoint to the quiet, personal matter of this person regarding cat and book, seemingly alone in the city. Along the same lines, you can take the first two monosyllable words to equal the disyllable final word; while this might not seem to add much to the poem, it aurally grounds the "additional" reading above and underscores the poem's brief rhythm.

Readers who approach the text without a preconceived notion that this is going to be an insignificant poem because it's three words long or because it does nothing typographically (beyond being three words in the middle of a page, not a common sight—unless you're reading an early Aram Saroyan book) to draw attention to its concreteness, should be able to recognize that there isn't a wrong note. Poet-critics of almost any stripe talk about the exact word in the exact place. That's the case here. Only two sounds, both consonants from the first line, reoccur: the "c" in "cat" is picked up in the second line with the "k" in "book;" and the "t" from cat is picked up in the third line with the "t" in "city." But despite the minimal repetition of sounds—suitable as that is for a minimal poem—it's enough to keep the poem audibly together.

Some simple substitutions can show how right the words are. First, substituting for meaning:

dog        bird        fish        cat        cat        dog
book      book       book      zine       book      blog
city        city        city        city        town      suburbs

And now substituting for sound:

bat         bat         rat         rat         rat         cab
book       cook      book       cook      cook       hook
city        city        city         city        pity        kitty

None of these has the resonance of the original. None of them get it right. In fact, look at Saroyan's other three-word poems and you won't find one that nails it as well as "cat" (I haven't yet got hold of the recently published Complete Minimal Poems, so there are probably some I haven't seen. My memory is augmented by the books on Ubuweb and my copy of The Rest, which I just discovered is also on the Web). The minimal poem, like the found object in art, is something of a self-extinguishing form. It's relatively easy to exhibit a urinal or a shovel—it's something to do it first—but it's impossible to repeat it. At the very least there needs to be some new slant introduced. Just as there's not likely to be another one-word typo poem on the level of "lighght" or "eyeye," a three-word poem must introduce a new slant or do twice as much as "cat" by the mere fact that it's made after.

"Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid"

UPDATE (Aug 3,2009): This poem, "On the Beach," is now on Tom Clark's blog. Check it out.

Point

Over at the International Exchange for Poetic Invention, Linh Dinh has translated and posted a couple of Tran Da Tu's war poems.

. . .
The blind and deaf bullet will be dug up
Will be dug up and awaken
In the middle of this happiness
As the children shriek and crow
The bullet will wake up
Wake up and open its eyes
. . .

from "Toy for Future Children"
read the full poem
 

Working Conditions

by James Tate

Because you are the bridge for me
to cross over into myself
you stand there in a curve of lace
holding white carnations,
your face shining in laughter
like a waterfall over my head.

I love you, I love you
full of wasps and spring air,
full of travels through stormy nights
in Balkan countries, taking the whole world
inside us; because we never learn,
because we stumble, we fall hard—



and the balance of chaos
has given us this chance
love dedicates its strife to us.
 

Poetry.gov

So the Library of Congress is seeking poets with poems on the themes of either love, or magic and magicians, or names, for the Poetry at Noon reading series. If it were worth the time and paper and postage, what might be appropriate? Something with a little magic and a whole lotta love?

Nuremberg, U.S.A.
by Bill Knott

In this time and place, where "Bread and Circuses" has
become "Bread and Atrocities," to say 'I love you' is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase . . . 'defoliation'
        . . . 'low yield blast'.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime.

Or else something that ditches magic altogether, but still sticks it out of love:

"And When Freedom Is Achieved . . ."
by Kenneth Patchen

You have used a word
Which means nothing.
You have given a word
The power to send men to death.
Men are not free who are sent to die.
Only those who send them are 'free.'
You should have freedom stuffed down your fat throats.

 

The Real JC

A whole lotta love going on at the Poetics List for the real JC, Joseph Ceravolo. In 2004 I blogged a little on JC and also posted a rare poem of his. In the spirit of what's shaking now, here's another bootleg from his unpublished manuscript Mad Angels:

SONNET
by Joseph Ceravolo

In the midde of Autumn
early when the skies
show the dawn
still hovering in trees
and the geese, a series
of arrows break form
for another unknown bird
that catches our eyes,
I can't return.
While overhead one storm
in the bird's neck feathers carries
the dampness of the journey

soaked with our laughs and whispers
in the subterfuge of happiness.
 

Coolest Blog in the World

This week's Coolest Blog in the World is Shimmy's Blog. The wonderfully intense Shimmy, see profile photo, gets the nod primarily on the strength of the three-part series "The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein." Here's to more where that came from—cheers!

July 4, 2007

Woohoo, it's National Kick a War Supporter in the Balls Day (metaphorically of course). The trick is to get them after they say "I was for the war at first" and before they get into their "now we just have to get out as best we can" spiel. Maybe if the press had taken more seriously Dennis Kucinich's plan for getting out of Iraq in 2004—you know, if they like covered it (damn liberal media)—and not dismissed him because he's short, skinny, single, and has a bit of a squeaky voice, there might at least have been more pressure to get out of there four years ago. Oh well. Here's to short, skinny, single guys against war.

Coolest Site in the World

This week's Coolest Site in the World is KenwardElmslie.com. It's an interactive art extravaganza! You'll dance to the music, laugh at the drawings, and cry all night to the words! Be sure to visit the Nite Palais. It's better than Cats!

1000 Films To See Before You Die...?

The Guardian has compiled the list. But any claim to usefulness, which such a comprehensive list should have, is undermined by the inclusion of such wonders as Dumb & Dumber and Pumping Iron over, you know, mindless fare like Dead Man and Henry Fool. And no way is Sleepy Hollow, or even Silence of the Lambs, more "essential" than The Straight Story.

Some Lookin' Back

Been looking back at some early stuff, like from ’94 and ’95. Here’s a superficial impression (because it’s based purely on a photo in The Young American Poets published in 1968) of Tom Clark from the fall of ’94, from a piece called “The Young American Poets” (Tom Clark is great and genuine human being and I don’t think I did him justice here):

Clark is not McClure. Did he play guitar for the Doors?
In any event he blushes in his somnambulant state.
He looks like the ragged October leaf he'll write
About in twenty odd years. Such is the sleepwalker's fate.

More “impressions” from “The Young American Poets”:

Bell stands punctuated by parenthetical light.
He's not the shadow behind him. His buttons live
In Torrington, or Middletown, New York. Oh, sure,
Everyone's heard of the Iowa ring. But gasoline?

Benedikt lives in wood; he eats and lives in wood.
He moves between cities in archetypes and adverbs.
. . .

Berkson sits half-inflated by the shadow's corner.
. . .
                                 The book
Doesn't tell upon whose knee he's silently propped.

Berrigan is potential electricity, yet a still life
With pitcher and paper cups. It's all in the Mormon
Beard, or else it's all in the lines his pants drop
To the floor. He's off the top of his head.

Good god, could I have done anything less with that?

Gluck works in a diner downtown, but she dances when
No one is watching. She's the independent rebel of
Saint Petersburg, Florida with an elbow grease attitude.
She reminds the fish bones of madame Sosostris.

Hass has been standing on the shore for years
And still no letter from D.H. Lawerence.
Sometimes he believes in the land he stands on,
But mostly it is the ocean he feels under his feet.

Yeah, that might be as good as any of this gets.

Marshall is the uncle the whole family avoids.
His folksongs twang in the suburbs of Paris.
He comes out of his shell like midnight
A disfigured moon fingering the eye through the larynx.

If you think that last line is bad, imagine how awful the stuff I'm cutting out is.

Padgett is mad as heaven help us, which he holds
In his hands. Death radios from his metallic rims.
He's father A holding baby B in world XYZ,
Against the pivotal question, "Which leg first?"

IIRC, what Padgett is holding is one, maybe two, of his children. And, hey, that last line might actually be worth something.

Geraud is obvious: a dreamer who dreams in italics.
He was born in the back of a Ford pickup and
Immediately tried to kiss the sun. He eats books
Pensively, absently. His face is still burning.

Geraud is this Saint Geraud, a pseudonym at the time used by Bill Knott. Don't ask me how you eat a book if your face is burning. Or if the book-eating thing wouldn't have been better saved for Mark Strand, who instead gets this treatment:

Strand looks older than he ever will in his continuous life.
Wisps of unpenned dramas hang limp over his dexterous eye;
His sinister one casts lines of intrigue into his hair.
His tie is made of canvas; at night he shapes it into colors.

Just a few more...

Torregian is a still life with empty bottle.
The emptied milk has blossomed into a flower
Upon his lap. He sings the blues in Nova Scotia.
The pale cut of remembrance falling into place.

Towle has just stepped out from The Dead
Poets Society. The girl of his dreams listens
To "April in Paris." His eyes rolled into black air,
He leans into adjectives. In light by a nose.

Alright, let's just skip to the big finish:

Charles Wright is probably thirty-three.
He hasn't yet regarded the nails
                        spitting in the eastern night.
He doesn't appear with The Young American Poets here;
In this version of 1968
                                  he doesn't exist.

Yeah, guess who I was just discovering and thought was the bomb?