RETURN OF THE DARK AND SCARLETHEARTED DAWN

Tosca. Before it's too late. 

Before dawn. Before the blue burn and guillotined shadow walks.

Before the fall of June. High summer.

How much we wanted our Soprano to suffer for her Art, to really break her fucking leg when the dress she wore leapt toward hell to fight forever

to slit his throat again

to be taken in his arms against her will

to be told it is the only way 

to save her only love, her life

to flee into exile like a dove into morning

to slit his throat instead

to weep dark song to fly

to bury her face into her own warm breast and weep

to hear his cries in the wine-dark room

to look into the face of the police detective to refuse

to see into his jealous heated sneer the sparks of lust and power

to know it won't be enough to die

to hear a choir in the darkness

to become a bit of light, jealous as a candle spending itself to death

to find out in the middle of your goodness your heart is dark and loud

to love until you become this music

to murder him

And at dawn when you think your lives are saved they are in jeopardy.

And at the moment you are free 

the gunshots blackening are real

And the song you sang with him

in the blue heat before dawn comes 

back to you now because memory 

it is both forever and never too

And you perish over his dead body 

And the mob comes

And you promise not to return but to descend

And you climb the wall 

And the firing squad lends you its permanence

And your last breath is this curse 

Enemies are love.

. . . . . . .

Oranges and Lemon Blackout

Friends and Strangers, 

I'm posting my review of Alex Lemon's new book, first published in the new Oranges & Sardines, a literary publication dedicated to the relationship between art and poetry. You can buy it on Amazon, where you can also buy Lemon's book. 

I'm a ferocious fan of his and hope you'll run out and steal a copy. 

The Amplification of Heaven: A Review of Hallelujah Blackout by Alex Lemon

Milkweek Editions, 2008     $15

 

Perhaps nowhere in recent American Poetry has a poet expressed such intense mortal anxiety toward nature as Theodore Roethke. Famously tormented by waters, darkness, the mulch of roots and leafy fetor, he nevertheless succeeded in what might be called a “spiritual” verse that faces the awful reality of our corporeal struggle. Alex Lemon’s newest collection Hallelujah Blackout finds kinship with Roethke’s troubled sensitivity to nature, the relationship between the body’s collapse and an ecstasy of the spirit, in which affliction is elation. If pain is the doorway to consciousness, Lemon remains manically awake, fixed on the wild inanity of all experiences Americana. Whether he’s taking a bath, watching the trees bleed a little light, or giving mouth to mouth, Lemon grapples the contradictions of our mortal nearness.

 

The terrible urgency of Lemon’s work is driven by excess. One gets the feeling that experience is too much, that the poet can’t fit it all in, that he’s in pain and love simultaneously every waking moment. When he’s successful, Lemon balances consumerism: “I wanted more malt liquor / Time. I wanted Pac-Man and Hot Tamales” with the sublime: “The drips. Of blessings, / Unwrapped & tossed. Faces sunsetting, / Blurred windows. The streaks. The blessings.” Indeed, experience itself is the addiction of this book in which hunger is both spiritual and capitalistic. “I won’t lie. My walls smell like meat” he writes in “The Night Diego Maradona Tried”, and later, “oh, how the last bite / of a Big Mac makes you want to slit throats.” Who can forget Roethke’s assertion, “my meat eats me”? “Addicted”, Lemon responds, “verging on mourning, / we hope this is not what it feels like to die”. He ravages the junk of contemporary American life, the “Deli sandwiches”, the “bullet-riddled minutes on Cops”, the “ruined, fizzless colas” and achieves a transformative ecstasy: “the beauty of this place bursting before / and behind and blueblack through my eyes.”

 

The speed of these poems results in purposefully inconsistent syntax, brilliant broken phrasing, kennings, imagery both grotesque and tender. “This / is what happens” writes Lemon, “when all you can remember / of language is grunt”. When the body is possessed of its own awareness, when it is caught between kiss and kill, violence and intimacy irreconcilably affect speech. Lemon finds his breath “hiving in air”, his “blueberry- bushed insides / are graveled with want”, and his “hands wolf”. The light around him is “burstswept”, the day is “cherry lipped”, he “sings nectar”, he “sings blossom” and the “plum-glut sky” opens, filled with “jeweled-lightning”. Caesura and ampersand further highlight the immediacy of Lemon’s voice, as it chances vulnerable into the world:

 

I go mercy faced            & everything to me whispers                        no biggie

 

            Motherfucker                        we’ll break you too

            Infested finally      & terrible       in the knuckle-branched black 

 

This is tireless work that struggles to weigh morbidity with spirit.  “Please someone” he pleads, “tell me how / much flesh can // be tolerated / day after day—”  Indeed, this book is ripe with imagery surrealist and unsightly: “In the rain a man / ducks into his coat like the split- // ribbed chest of a dead horse / swallowing a wet-cheeked boy”. Things gross: “I once pulled // all of my fingernails off with my father’s pliers . . . you should have seen that salad” make way for things elegant: “I’m not asking you what you know / About yourself, but what’s on / The face of the one who follows you / Around handing out pieces of darkness / As you plead with the trees.” Ultimately, the danger of the body is not absence, but presence. “It’s the kingdom” Lemon writes, “of wandering around / in the dark & roughhousing—” The body, then, capably tends toward violence and vulnerability the same, an attractive mortality that in Lemon’s poetry breaks through to something softer, something musical and abstract so that “above the streetlights hissing / awake down the block, a cello-soft / glow opens like veins through the spruce.”

 

In his famous villanelle, “The Waking”, Roethke wrote lines that seem to characterize Lemon’s predicament: “This shaking keeps me steady. I should know / What falls away is always. And is near.”  It is this nearness that troubles Lemon into contemplation of the body’s now: “You / should have seen the sweat of still-being-alive”. So the rant of experience in this poet’s work is a rant of praise in which a painful existence is beautiful, “the lightninged hall of kisses / in the ballady veins”. Lemon is a poet so filled with human sensitivity he cannot seem to decide if this existence is heaven or hell. “Here then is amplification” he quips, “the cold cold / ground is rawboned on fire”.  Painful but celebratory, never heavy or self-pitying, Lemon achieves a mania of voice that powerfully considers bodily death.  “I remember,” he writes about a dead swordfish in “Yet I Ride the Little Horse”, “the dead thing really / whispered something terrifically soft”. And in the long poem “Abracadaver” he balances affection with pain: “in a knifing away / of the skin / your kisses appear—”

 

So much unapologetic ecstasy (“Come with me tonight, my chocolate- / Smelling love. Let’s whip white-hot coat hangers around // Until someone loses an eye”) can be overwhelming in such a long book. Lemon is unrelenting. At a whopping 144 pages, over twice as long as most poetry books recently published, he’s worked a strange, energetic balance between two sequential longer poems and three sections (30 pages each) of more “standard-sized” poems. Readers might wonder if a book so large might be better focused, if as a collection this might be pared down to a more direct and forceful grouping of poems. If perhaps either long poem might itself be developed into a book length work. But they will find themselves grateful too, for what Lemon excitedly delivers in lines both memorable and meant to be savored.

 

Ultimately, the size of this book is indicative of Lemon’s project, which seems to insist that experience itself is big, extravagant, unbearable, amazing. “I cannot get my head around this impossible light” he writes. One has to admire this author’s restlessness. Lemon struggles to face each moment as it might reveal something transcendent, as if through so much bodily suffering we might achieve joy, and thereby justification for our troublesome fates. (“So let’s elasticate!” he shouts in mad reverie at a scorched marshmallow.) This is a small bible of torture by orgasm and readers will surely find themselves numbed fantastic, forced to stop in the middle of their lives and breathe quick, having known the repeated momentary disasters of a life they still don’t want to escape. 

MISREADING THE BIRD

There's a saw like an angry bird next door. Good morning. 

I'm drinking something black, with a little moon-blue packet poured in.

I'm listening to NPR, a week old "This American Life": Jerry Springer's first career as a Politician--a very successful: "Bobby Kennedy/Bill Clinton type". Until he paid for a hooker with a check. And learned how unforgiving the world is. And became filthy rich. That's the way the world is. Good men and women, desperate to contribute something meaningful, failed by our inability to imagine them as men and women. Why don't we want our politicians to be as deeply wounded in the night as we are?

I'm playing footsie with my little bird. He's still pretending to be a little black dog. 

This week on my iPod: new Mariah. She ain't no Elvis, she ain't no Madonna, but she's fun. Also: La Lupe: the Cuban salsera from the 60's/70's. Think dark hard duende, a rougher Celia Cruz. This girl's got a blade and a tattoo on the shoulder of every song.

Reading: That sexy black collected of Zbigniew Herbert. I have to say, he's not my favorite. I prefer Popa's collected. But he's got some haunting things happening. I'm only into his third book: Study of the Object.  I'm a bit bored. I'm wincing to say that. It's smart, quiet. I guess I want a bit more lightning. So far I've been in love with Hermes, Dog and Star, his second book, most. The prose poems at the end are haunting. I'm worried that it's my misreading of them that haunts me and not the actual poems. I keep reading through my own failure as a reader, which is to say, my own failure to imagine, to love something from inside, because of poems like this:

Equilibrium

It was a bird, or rather a pitiful remnant of a bird, eaten away by parasites. Stripped of its feathers, its bluish skin shuddering with pain and disgust, it still tried to defend itself by picking with its beat at the white worms covering it in a milling mass.

I wrapped it in a handkerchief and took it to a naturalist I knew. He examined it for a moment, then said:

It's all right. The worms eating it carry parasites invisible to the eye, and in the cells of the parasites an intensified metabolic process is probably taking place. It is therefore a classic example of a closed system with an infinite particle of antagonistic interdependencies which are the condition for the equilibrium of the whole. Contrary to appearances what we see is a blushing fruit or if you like, the crimson rose of life.

We must see to it that the thick fabric of breathing and suffocation doesn't burst anywhere, because then we would witness something considerably worse than death and more terrifying than life.

I don't want to say too much. I'm just absorbing him. He's a dark prophet. He's a Moses who refuses to look into the burning tree. Because he already sees it in his head. What we know is this body in this life.

And life is strange. It's so much endearing flaw, cruel wonder, beautiful sickness, awesome mistake:

BABYBABYBABY MY GUN ES VERT!

Friends and Strangers,

The new edition of PISTOLA: A Literary Journal of Poetry Online 

now features:

new artwork by Fortune Sitole

new poetry by Bob Hicok / Xochiquetzal Candelaria / Ryan Courtwright / 

Jeff Encke / Diana Park / Gail Wronsky

a postapocalyptic love song and a discussion on the Macaronic 

by Alberto Ríos

Welcome.

. . . . . . .

MY GAYEST CONTRADICTION

Speaking of in-flowering contradictions, identity politics, and fun, this morning I read this post, relating Jay Leno's recent interview of actor Ryan Phillipe and an answer from the gay public. 

Ryan Phillipe's earliest role as an actor was as a gay teenager on the daytime soap opera, One Life To Live. Here's an excerpt from Leno's interview:

JAY: Can you give me your gayest look? Say that — say that camera is Billy Bob — Billy Bob has just ridden in shirtless from Wyoming.

(Your sycophantic audience hoots with laughter at the idea of a strapping lad like Phillippe giving a “gay look.”)

PHILLIPPE: Wow. That is so something I don’t want to do.

Leno's "joke" is "funny" because it asks us to insist on a stereotype we intuitively recognize as taboo.  That is, we must accept the idea that "a gay" is a strange and social abnormality, sideshow, the man-woman, the midget, the bearded lady. The genetic mistake, an aberration with a personality. Now, I'm a great lover of freaks, and in some dark way I love the sideshow, because it is home to my longing. 

But it's also true that this kind of humor reinforces a faulty stereotype. It's anachronistic to think that gays have a "look" that is defining. Caricatures are identity too, but by nature they are reductive, satirical, misleading, false. What's dangerous about the Leno interview is that he forces Phillipe--and in this way the audience as well--into a precarious moment of decision. What is the "gayest look" and how does one make it? There is a violence committed here, that Biblical Gideonse points out, quoting playwright Jeff Whitty's letter to Leno on his blogpost: "would you ask a  guest to make their 'blackest face'? Their 'jewiest face'?"

I like Leno. I've watched the show and probably will again. He makes me laugh, and I understand that comedy is based on the jester's ability to insult the king with the knowledge of himself. But in our reductivist political climate, considering the not too distant memory of the Don Imus incident, it seems inappropriate to incite the harmfulness of a stereotype and then relieve us of the responsibility of saying, this is wrong. At the same time, if you watch the clip, it seems to me that part of the point of Leno's jab is aimed at the nature of television, and the curious job of the actor to present a "gay face" without having to actually present a gay person, which--thankfully!--Ryan Phillipe acknowledges by his refusal.

I don't think we should picket Leno. I don't think his intent was to bash gays. But we can think about the nature of the language used. It's the nature of a joke to trick us, to make us uncomfortable by revealing what's underneath the mask of social etiquette. It's the shock of knowing ourselves as we are that is so funny. We are our best deceivers, psychic tricksters, psycho-comediennes. We should ask ourselves about this instance, What is being assumed for us, and What kind of trick does the language of Leno's "joke" play on us? As a nation, we should ask ourselves what joke television plays on us with its caricaturesque cast types. As gays, our ability to laugh at ourselves is important, but in this case, like Phillipe, we ought to remember that the stereotype amounts to an accusation of cruel inferiority.

A friend of mine who designs toys at Mattel recently told me that in a meeting one of his peers referred to a toy design by saying, "that's gay." Someone spoke back: "Gay as in creative, smart, well-designed?" No. Gay as in inferior, mis-shapen, deformed, and, with old misogyny, effeminate. We often forget the layer of sexism inherent to this trendy insult.

In response to Whitty's letter, this website was started to showcase the simple fact that we--gays, strangers, friends and family--acknowledge that stereotype is a caricature of the many-faced beast of us. It's wrong to assume your face doesn't belong here too. In the end, I'd say, this is fun!--I'm prancing! I'm butch! and mostly, I love Leno for this opportunity to post a picture of myself kissing my own middle finger to the sky.

Friends and Strangers, here I am saying it. American Me. Again. Wearing Whitman:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.

I am large. I contain multitudes.

YO SÍ SOY BANDIDO

Tonight I see that the new Latino Poetry Review is online, and I'm proud to be in it. Javier O. Huerta and I foamed at the mouth for a bit (well, I did, mostly. He's tremendously smarter than I am, so it was hard keeping up.) In any case, it proposes to be a great forum for literary criticism, essays and reviews concerning Latino Poetry. 

I have to say I have a natural skepticism toward group-think of most kinds. What can you expect from a Mexican Irish poet who mostly wants to see you undone. It brings out the fist-fighter in me, the revolutionary prisoner in me, stiletto bitch in me, the blood drunken heartbreak in me, the zapatista guerilla in me, IRA car-bomber in me, the limrick curseword in me, me da un chingo in me, the surrealist priest in me, the Sandra Cisneros like Walt Whitman in drag in me. 

I'd rather see someone fall and laugh out loud than pretend it isn't funny. I'd rather fall down drunk on the laughter of my own spilled blood. But

I'm unabashedly thrilled at this new website.  The promise of having interesting reviews, like Craig Santos Perez' on Alfred Arteaga's Frozen Accident, and more to my own liking, essays like Blas Falconer's in which he navigates what it means to be Nuyorican, even if you're living in Virginia and dreaming of a Caribbean Island. . . 

Friends and Strangers, I like to put on my cowboy boots and my mustache and dance a little banda too. Dos Mujeres un Camino, anyone? I'm old school. I guess what I like best about the site is that I can wear what I like with a little bit of home in it. A little bit my own animal. And what is home to any of us, except the variable of what we speak, to ourselves in the mirror like a bit of lost moonlight, or to each other when we're angry or in love and none of it comes out right? Or to the abyss, like an angry star? What else is home if not the style of a silver buckle lit by a ravenous godlike golden eagle? Well, that's what it is for me, no matter what the hell my poems are talking about. 

Identity is fun because it's fucked up. I mean, abstract. I mean, a carnival. Of unimaginable and astonishing versions of the self. I mean, a joke. A totem of galactic pranksters each with its own likeness to your haircut and your beard and your mischievous sexual smirk. I think the only danger on this site is taking our "selves" too seriously, and I'm hoping that we won't. That is, I'm hoping to see some daring, some risk, some hybrid thinking that's willing to get into a fistfight with itself. So far "we" are on the right track. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. We too are large. We too contain multitudes. We shouldn't forget. This site, for me, is about just that: an active remembrance of our in-flowering otherness.  I, for one, am very glad for it. 

Friends and Strangers, you should check it out.

SPRING SPECIMEN

"The Hanged Man is one of the most mysterious cards in the tarot deck. It is simple, but complex. It attracts, but also disturbs. It contradicts itself in countless ways. The Hanged Man is unsettling because it symbolizes the action of paradox in our lives. A paradox is something that appears contradictory, and yet is true. The Hanged Man presents to us certain truths, but they are hidden in their opposites.

The main lesson of the Hanged Man is that we "control" by letting go - we "win" by surrendering. The figure on Card 12 has made the ultimate surrender - to die on the cross of his own travails - yet he shines with the glory of divine understanding. He has sacrificed himself, but he emerges the victor. The Hanged Man also tells us that we can "move forward" by standing still. By suspending time, we can have all the time in the world.

In readings, the Hanged Man reminds us that the best approach to a problem is not always the most obvious. When we most want to force our will on someone, that is when we should release. When we most want to have our own way, that is when we should sacrifice. When we most want to act, that is when we should wait. The irony is that by making these contradictory moves, we find what we are looking for."

Basic Card Symbols

A man hanging by one foot from a Tau cross - sometimes from a bar or tree. His free leg is always bent to form a "4," his face is always peaceful, never suffering. Sometimes his hands are bound, sometimes they dangle. Sometimes coins fall out of his pockets or hands.

Basic Tarot Story

The Fool settles beneath a tree, intent on finding his spiritual self. There he stays for nine days, without eating, barely moving. People pass by him, animals, clouds, the wind, the rain, the stars, sun and moon. On the ninth day, with no conscious thought of why, he climbs a branch and dangles upside down like a child, giving up for a moment, all that he is, wants, knows or cares about. Coins fall from his pockets and as he gazes down on them - seeing them not as money but only as round bits of metal - everything suddenly changes perspective. It is as if he's hanging between the mundane world and the spiritual world, able to see both. It is a dazzling moment, dreamlike yet crystal clear. Connections he never understood before are made, mysteries are revealed.

But timeless as this moment of clarity seems, he realizes that it will not last. Very soon, he must right himself, and when he does, things will be different. He will have to act on what he's learned. For now, however, he just hangs, weightless as if underwater, observing, absorbing, seeing.

Basic Tarot Meaning

With Neptune (or Water) as its planet, the Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. This is a time of trial or meditation, selflessness, sacrifice, prophecy. The Querent stops resisting; instead he makes himself vulnerable, sacrifices his position or opposition, and in doing so, gains illumination. Answers that eluded him come clear, solutions to problems are found. He sees the world differently, has almost mystical insights. This card can also imply a time when everything just stands still, a time of rest and reflection before moving on. Things will continue on in a moment, but for now, they float, timeless.

Thirteen's Observations

Neptune is spirituality, dreams, psychic abilities, and the Hanged Man is afloat in these. He is also 12, the opposite of the World card, 21. With the World card you go infinitely out. With the Hanged Man, you go infinitely in.

This card signifies a time of insight so deep that, for a moment, nothing but that insight exists. All Tarot readers have such moments when we see, with absolute clarity, the whole picture, the entire message offered by a spread. The Hanged Man symbolizes such moments of suspension between physical and mystical worlds. Such moments don't last, and they usually require some kind of sacrifice. Sacrifice of a belief or perspective, a wish, dream, hope, money, time or even selfhood. In order to gain, you must give. Sometimes you need to sacrifice cherished positions, open yourself to other truths, other perspectives in order to find solutions, in order to bring about change. One thing is certain, whether the insight is great or small, spiritual or mundane, once you have been the Hanged Man you never see things quite the same.

. . . . . . . 

Walking my dog tonight I found this card. Am I this version of myself? Is this Spring a version of my death? Last week I had a dream that an X lover and I were at a guest house for the weekend. He suddenly began having stomach cramps, convulsions--he was naked and vomiting and I had to carry him to his bed. It had a lining in the darkness that was soft. Sleep's hard angle repeated me but

I haven't been able to repeat the dream. I haven't been able to understand a single bleeding sunset. Nor confess--

. . . . . . .

Read this week Susan Howe's essay about Emily Dickinson's poem "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun", My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985). This is a 140 page close reading of the poem that examines the artistry of a poetess who has long been neglected critically, or read more as a strange eccentric than a true scholar and disciplined author. Howe does Her a superb compliment, fascinating her famous letters to Higginsworth in relation to history: biographical, literary, religious, political and militaristic. Howe examines Dickinson's contemporaries as well as works Dickinson read, authors she admired (Shakespeare, George Eliot), including Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", Shakespeare's Lear, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, and early novels of western expansion like James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer in which the hunt becomes symbolic of conquests spiritual and sexual.  I am reductive, but my love is not. She traces Dickinson's vision to the banished minister Jonathan Edwards, whose "negativity, his disciplined journey through conscious despair, humiliation, and the joy of submission to an arbitrary and absent ordering of the Universe, presaged hers":

"Emily Dickinson's religion was Poetry. As she went on through veils of connection to the secret alchemy of Deity, she was less and less interested in temporal blessing. The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the incandescent shadows of futurity." (p. 49)

. . . . . . .

Recently in a letter:  "Guns are my gun." J.C.

"Destruction was my Beatrice." Mallarme

. . . . . . .

What is it we're after if not the unconscious part of what is felt, then said. Crush before reason--a sense before the light carves out the mountain, the window, the tree.

Tonight I walked my dog through the neighborhoods and back to the beach. At the last stoplight a sign: LOST! cute stubbly man. Then a sketch of a man in a baseball cap, a light beard, smirk on his lips. . . and hand-written descriptions: dark hair, stubble, gray t-shirt, mischievous look, "saw you on Abbott-Kinney March 17th. I'm the blond (Aussie) lad, always running late for the No. 1 Big Blue Bus. IF FOUND: I want to have coffee with you."

almost all--dream now 

all destructions Pink--retreat!

retreat!  I 

don't 

know how 

to answer you--Breathe

Deep Brother

on the shore 

that is 

your name to me--the sea 

between us--temporary--asleep 

the sunsets all

flutter & repeat--

caught between knowing your heart in 

hot want--what is human 

the wanting and the not 

knowing what we are--strangers and sleep 

to one another we

flirt & hurt--and destructions--

delights--like whispered prayers 

heat speaks to heat--here tonight the sky's 

torn pink--unspeakable--in Darkness

. . . . . . .

My own relationship to Dickinson is peripheral, or has been. She haunts me with her strange boxes. Phantom fathoms, meaning. I've felt so much more at ease with Whitman, but barbed darkly by her thorny passages. I like her brother, Simic. She seems to haunt us there, in those other boxes, given with such bleak sensuality,--or: with humor and sensuality despite the bleak world,--or: those little caskets filled with beauty's brief intensity, temporal, shadow-licked, gleaming.  

One of my last memories of my grandfather was a discussion of "that last Onset--when the king / Be witnessed--in the Room". I think he had her intensity. "No one can make me believe it," he said, "they've all tried, but I think myself for myself. I don't think God is true." Bold, eternity thinker. Like my Emily, who is also herself most and true. In spite of everyone, including me.

. . . . . .

Who is the Hanged Man? 

"Already worrying about the metaphysical puzzle of time, she knew by instinct what most of us take years to learn, that time lived forward is only understood backward, that social existence merely negates spiritual progress. . . . Splendor is subversive to the Collective will." (54)

I'd like to know Him, but the Dream repeats itself to my bones.

Friends and Strangers, Love Stalkers,

Tonight I have a crush on my own namelessness.

#1214:

We introduce ourselves

To Planets and to Flowers

But with ourselves

Have etiquettes 

Embarrassments

And awes

(1872)

. . . . . .

MY GUN IS HOT PINK

Friends and Strangers,

The new edition of PISTOLA is online NOW!  

Featuring artwork by CANDE, 

poetry by Molly Bendall/Jason Stumpf/William Stobb/

Todd Fredson/Peter Pereira/Sarah Vap  

and an essay by Rochelle Tobias

considering Gottfried Benn and Stefan George's use 

of a metaphorical star. 

WWW.PISTOLAMAG.ORG

Please visit us, forward us, link us if you can.

. . . . . .  

BLUE COMPLAINT IN THE DARK GARDEN

. . . . . .

But this complaint is a pleasure rocketing forth, bright then lost. The disappearance has a flavor, a blind tang.












EVIDENCE

Blue is the evidence of what I do,
the lies I'll leave behind, no more, no less.
This is the past, and so it must be true.

This stack of DVD's, of overdue
pornography, the titles meaningless:
blue is the evidence of what I do.

This is the coat from Saks Fifth Avenue,
charged to my old American Express--
this is the past, and so it must be true

that once I loved this wretched shade of blue.
I dreamt of men whom I could not impress.
Blue is the evidence of what I do,

the letter here that ends in I love you.
My prose was from the heart, my heart a mess.
This is the past, and so it must be true

I lacked the guts to send it off--I knew
of certain things that one should not confess.
Blue is the evidence of what I do.
This is the past, and so it must be true.


I spent one of my rainy evenings here in a pizza hut on Pico Boulevard reading Randall Mann's Complaint in the Garden, winner of the now defunct Zoo press' 2003 Kenyon Review Prize. It's fitting to wait out a hurricane while keeping time with Mann's work, filled with metrical precision and a lot of what many poets tend to sneer at--the rigors of strict form. David Baker's nice introduction says enough about his motifs (natural history of Florida and the Caribbean, gay life, and what Baker calls Mann's "engagement with poetics and poetic history"), but what I find most lovely about the book is its precision with regard to eros. It's as if form allows Mann to withdraw the thorn from the mark and leave us with the dissolve of emotion. 

Like Cavafy's work, many of these poems create a kind of distance in which the reader too suffers a memory, a wonderful nostalgia for a once passionate ruin. In them we are reminded that the lover's pain is like warm color, more a necessary idea, a place of struck imagining and awe, more a feeling we can consider as it leaves us than it is actual physical suffering.  Love in Mann is hurt pleasure, the nostalgia for an early abandonment, an early joy. In the poem "Blood" he remembers us: 

I drank the least expensive bottled beer 

and blindly followed kindly, foreign men 

into their cars, their rented rooms, their beds-- 

the rest of this is darkness now, is lost.

Desire in this book is greatly tempered by form, so that in the end we are not overwhelmed by visceral existence, but instead find ourselves reciting Mann's lyric attentions to the several weathers of our bewilderment. "And you will say the word love" he writes "as if it were not meaningless, as if / we were not dying." 

I left my pizza half-eaten, nourished instead by his satisfying equations. I hungered instead for old and memorable nights.

. . . . . . . 

RAIN YOU ARE WRITTEN

god I'm finding it more and more difficult to visit this spot. today

worked on my rain, my empty pockets, and broken loves

. . . . . .

a poem I wish I wrote, by Paul Guest, from his first book:

The Report From Home


Here is the topography of false starts. Here
a whole constellation is lousy with desire.
Here what passes for love is the same
as anywhere. Here no one has said
a prayer for the stars, and here no one
comes, except to leave, except to stay
long enough to bruise. Here the apples
do not fall and the theorems go unproven.
Leaves take root in the air, here,
and here the wind has stopped, waiting
for a word none of us know. Here
there are no dancers to love and dream of.
Here time is bearable in music. Here
it's our own hearts buried and beating
beneath the floor, and here the pages turn
in no order to no end to no avail.
Here the weeds in wreathes hang on doors.
Here the knife's edge has dulled
though no one can say how, daring it on skin
to remember itself. Here the rust
grows like moss. Here the truth is tired.
Here the castle of sand lasts longer
than the ocean is deep, and wide and blue.

. . . . . .

At some point an essay on apples, those stolen ones, like kisses in the garden.

. . . . . .

I think we are all brief light and seizure

there's probably a poem there, where the music hurts

. . . . . .

CONFESSIONS OF A GREEN LIGHT IN THE CITY: AWP NYC

. . . . . . .

1. Virgin America: pink mood and purple lighting, digital t.v. Early landing in NYC. "Seat 9F has sent you a message. Would you like to accept?"

2. "I laughed ambiguously. Deep night in the fireless temple. Cold knees. The great ancient pillars of the temple towered round us as we sat there huddled in our secret conversation."

3. Chelsea Hotel, corner of Lexington and 23rd. The darkness makes a scarf.

4. Michael Burkard reads a ruby. He touches my book. My shadow laughs.

5. Apizz. An Italian gnozzi. A walk to St. Marks. A mouth, a bruise before morning.

6. I sign my book and someone claps and says "passion."

7. A thief pursues his darkness. If you dare me to, I will exploit the underside of this beauty.

I've come home with these books:

Michael Burkard's Envelope of Night
Tadeusz Rozewicz' New Poems
Paul Guest's Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
Rigoberto Gonzalez' Butterfly Boy
Jane Miller Midnights
Donald Revell Thief of Strings
Laura Jensen's Memory
Dean Young's Primitive Mentor
Kazim Ali's The Fortieth Day
Juliet Patterson's The Truant Lover

and four chapbooks:

Sean Nevin's A House That Falls
Charlie Jensen's The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon
Mathias Svalina's Creation Myths
Stephanie Lenox's The Heart That Lies Outside the Body

8. Breakfast at 5 in the evening. 2 Girls and a Cup. A few hours drink themselves like smokes at night to absence. James Hall. Eduardo. A storm of black.

9. I get a Valentine Tattoo. She steals my pen, then gives me a nail file to make my great escape.

10. Eduardo you snore like a Godzilla. But first: "Did you feed him?"

11. Rathkamp, Pollack, Schnabel, MOMA. Winter, your blackbird is broken into pencil, green shadow.

12. My book sells out, thanks to Javi Huerta. His book is worth two of mine.

NY Fashion Week, I love your heels and glam!

14. I marry Kelly and B. A rip in time. Bathsheba is imagined, born, loved, loathed and sold into pornography.

13. On the white envelope we pay the bill. We eat the pizza next to a time warp. Time loves us, the way we love each other.

15. Two Aussies in Central Park. The high kick. I say, she's so demure. He says, you're not tall enough to model. Anyone call themself a mandarin?

16. Perseus has a great ass. At the Met more Rothko and Twombly. More gold mask. More than green rain.

17. I love to shop at Faconnable and split my feet until I eat some lollies. Wear flats?! You must be crazy--

18. Two bags, Whole Foods. Opera Singer, hurtling softly his Italian arpeggios through the late car toward the subway Bronx.

19. Mint Teabag. he Want, he got.

20. Snow. To return. Green foam is sprayed on each wing.

O, FRANK. MY LOVE IS COMING

TO GIANNI BATES

"Like a piano concerto your black
and white eyes, your white face and bright black hair.
And then, reclining in silence, you're there
with a hall of echoes arching your back
and forcing you to sigh. In me the lack
of sound is merely that I hear your stare.
And when you leave there isn't any air;
though I should stay aloft, I have the knack.
But you leave. There isn't any reason
to be silent; in halls the audience
disperses as the instrument's wheeled off
and through jet tears and wet mascara scoff
the year, boring heart-and-concert season.
Too, I've not been silent again, or since."

by Frank O'Hara


/ / / / / /

I've been wanting to see Schnabel's new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I miss whatever it is that flares into feeling. A bit of struggle, but with something deep. A small rip in the lining. A little ruin, a little beautiful desperation. Schnabel and a deep splash of color. O'Hara. Sold out. So to Francis Ford Coppola's YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, a slow, strange, philosophical fantasy. Friends and Strangers, I'm not romanticizing. You've got to prepare yourself for this one with a moody shore. You have to be receptive to the idea of yearning, the question of time. It's as strange as a lovestory by Calvino, and as creepy, in some places, as a medieval fear of the werewolf. Anyone looking for Shakespeare, beware. Anyone looking for the marriage of theoretical physics and eastern philosophies, welcome. Think Mishima's SPRING SNOW palimpsested over Adolfo Bioy Cesares THE INVENTION OF MOREL, or Wilde's PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY. Isn't the first line of that book pricked by roses? Aren't the dreams of lovers murderous?

////////






















/ / / / / /

Read Orhan Pamuk's MY NAME IS RED for my birthday this year. I'm going to try to say something substantive about this one later, because it's really too rich to explain. Love, murder, art. And the 16th century struggle in Istanbul to resist Western technique and religion. It's a serious novel, in terms of the balance of its characters and ideas, the sophistication of its plot and structure, and its gorgeous, daggering lyricism. My favorite novel of the year by a lightyear.

/ / / / / /

And two lines from Mr. Ancel, Paul, for the new RAT:

Nun aber schrumpft der Ort, wo du stehst:
Wohin jetzt, SchattenentbloBter, wohin?

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?

///////

PISTOLAMAG.ORG

. . . . . . .






















Friends and Strangers,

I haven't been here regularly lately, but I have been working. . .

Please check out my new online journal of poetry!   W W W . P I S T O L A M A G . O R G

If you like it, do me a favor and link it, or send it along to other readers.

ISSUE ZERO:

NAHUM B. ZENIL, JEN CURRIN, ALEX LEMON,
PAISLEY REKDAL, JAVIER O. HUERTA, MICHAEL BURKARD,
BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG, DIANA M. DELGADO

. . . . . .

LORD AND BOAT: JEAN VALENTINE

. . . . . . .

The title to Jean Valentine's new book LITTLE BOAT seems to me indicative of her work in which the domestic and the seen become fragment and artifact in memory. Valentine's poems enact the artifact of language, in which fragments, bits, sensual flashes bear the weight of metaphor. What is the "little boat" and what does it mean? The literal sure, but intuitively we expect--even understand--that it is also something more. The body that bears our spirit? The book that carries our voices and poems? Certainly. In Valentine's work, a fragment of domestic language delivers the weight of feeling, the spiritual weight, and still maintains ineffability. In Valentine, metaphor is mystery, like experience. In Valentine, furthermore, experience IS metaphor, and meaning--spiritual.

In the poem "La Chalupa, the Boat" her poetic strategy is clear: to mark experience with intuition, a blind understanding. Inside the "blue boat painted with roses, / white lilies--" she says "I am poling / my way into my life. [. . . .] It seems / like another life". Her poetry, for me, is experiential, phenomonological. She's not giving us narrative journalism, to record exactly what happened when she was twenty, but a kind of shorthand for intuitive experience, for an abstraction: spiritual memory. Even more importantly, she does so without granting us any kind of discursive understanding. We're not told what kind of lesson any experience should offer. If her poetry gives explanation, it is so she, with a blindfold on, can understand the perameters of intuitive knowledge, which Kant said should be inexplicable. Inexplicable knowledge? Ah, true poetry.

In some poems there is an elusiveness reminiscent of Williams, as in "Gray":

gray
"the order of the mother"
one degree Fahrenheit

News Armature:

Expect sleet or snow[. . . . . ]west coming east

[ . . . . . . ]You may not have wanted to be there
[. . . . . . .]It may have been because of the pain

helicoptor[ . . . . . ]on your left side
man asleep
child[. . . . .]on your right

But it is precisely the elusive nature of meaning that embues her work with such compelling and credible force. In very few lines, she insists on tenderness toward mystery. In the 6 line poem "All around the house" she describes the outline of a room, around which "they" are lying:

All around the outside of the room I was given
they were lying, uncovered
in plastic rags, newspaper, rusted tin;

lying right up against the aluminum siding
of the room I'd been given,
as if it gave off warmth, the siding.

Instead of explaining the literal moment, journaling the historical incident, here Valentine is explaining emotional memory--she is journaling spiritual incident. "They", "the room", "the siding", "the warmth", even the fact that the speaker is "given" the room, all begin to take on metaphorical import. The repetition of "the siding" at the end is a kind of carress; it announces love. The conditional "as if" helps to imply a larger meaning than the literal. It implies more than the literal when we ask ourselves what the poem refers to. That simple phrase supports another reading, for isn't this a poem aout the body and the spirit? A mother and children? A rented room and puppies huddling against it for warmth? Whatever the literal might be, the metaphorical certainly speaks to our desire for comfort, for kindness, for deliverance, for warmth.

Valentine's poems, moreover, seem to question whether there is any difference between history and dream. For Valentine, the daily spoken is the broken artifact of meaning, and even religious language takes on this weight. In her poem "But your touch", the "Lord" is an artifact of both Christianity much as it is of Eastern Hinduism throughout the rest of the book. Valentine often refers to Lord as "Madonna", one place directly to "Mary and Gnesh" and later in the book it becomes relative to other Eastern Buddhas. In this book we must ask ourselves what is the "Lord"?, much as we had to ask ourselves what is "the little boat"? Again, Valentine insists on intuitive meaning, and not dogmatic definition:

But your touch was everywhere, Lord
to be accomplished
though no one could see it
A great human thing was being accomplished
:[. . . . .]it drew every last part of him
into you

[. . . . . . . . . ] : the lost sailors, diving for mines
off Korea. Every white hair,
black hair, every invisible
threshold, course and fine.

In another poem, "Lord of the world!", we might even say that "Lord" is something gnostic, pagan, a being that witches conjure:

Lord of the world! [ . . . . .] soft
unconditional galaxies,
look at me look at me! [. . . ] faraway

animal made out of dots
up in the other sky, Woman! [. . .] please you
nurse my child, please

nurse my other child.
Rub my hand discovered
caught in the prisoner's hand, rub
with your milk his hand.

Here we experience the human consolations desired by the speaker: "look at me", "nurse", and "rub". But equally as important is the way the religious overture of the poem is driven into the prison. Who is the prisoner? In this, our era, we certainly feel a pang of history. Abu grave, anyone? This underlines the metaphorical prisoner that each of us is, each of us with a body. Valentine's poetry succeeds for me in reminding us that the political act is also a spiritual act.

Friends and Strangers, in her poetry we remember that experience is mystery, and that real memory is a kind of dream.



To my soul (2)


Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had
give away like coffee grains
brushed across paper . . .


. . . . . . .

RETURN OF THE NEW STORM

. . . . . . .



. . . . . . .

It's eleven thirty at night Friends and Strangers and I'm craving a cup of coffee. It's Friday night and I've got a French film with Isabelle Huppert in it and her two twin sons. Think quiet Cain and Abel meet Freud reading Shakespeare's HAMLET. I also have a stack of books here I'm madly in love with, though I haven't opened them. Bolano anyone? Or Ugresic's MINISTRY OF PAIN , or MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk? A small novel by A. Bioy Casares, or an essay, something by Batailles, or a chapter from Kristeva's POWERS OF HORROR. Pain, Horror, Beauty--my favorite spectors. It's a wonderful Friday night to be so alone. I haven't been here online in a month. The movement is moonlight, its musical touch and absence. How do all of my days and hours appear like this one drink? Oh speaking of Shakespeare,

(My younger sister--whose marriage I wrote this past summer--called tonight drunk out of her mind, listening to Rufus Wainwright croon some tune to impossible love and asked me what I was doing, how was my week? As soon as I said making coffee, reading, the gunshot of her silence fired! Oh I'm such a dork, so filled with instensity I'm lost to everything, to everyone alive. Why do I worry about it? Relent. What's the line from Rilke's sonnet? "What pains you most? To it assent. If drinking is a bitterness, be wine.")





Tuesday night October 23 I went and saw Ian McKellan and the Royal Shakespeare Company play KING LEAR. I couldn't begin to tell you what this night meant for me. Great theater changes you. This night changed me. Its small, unnameable levers pressed, lifted. The locks came unjambed. Something not, was. I lived longer than my oldest moment. I've watched every possible version of this play you can rent, and they all fall flat. Lear's anger with Cordelia in the beginning has always been something I couldn't understand, except mathematically. Except as plot. It's incomprehensible, even when Paul Scofield, or Lawrence Olivier, or James Earl Jones (a version I was hoping great things for) attempt the hurtle of this first scene.

Of course there is the question of nature and fate. The first time I cried in the play is in the scene of Lear's return to dignity, as he realizes himself, and finishes his tantrum: "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" Perhaps this is what we are, filled with dignity and failure and an inability to become either thing fully. Our lives are beautiful and flawed, and we don't get better than we are, and we struggle to know with any kind of real satisfaction, the necessary why of our existence. We cry, he sings to the blinded Gloucester, to know we have come to this great stage of fools.

So here is Ian McKellan each thing: royal, foolish, wise, mistaken, stubborn, divine, weak, angry, noble, transformed, modest, dignified, and failed. In the best sense, I believed in him. In the end of the play I was struck with something I hadn't fully realized before, something I can't fully explain. It's the difference between seeing Goya's sunflowers in a brochure, or online, and seeing them for the first time in a museum. Context--the performance of the thing, the LIFE of the thing--killed me. As Lear lays down his three daughters all in white to die, and Edgar speaks to us at the end--as Trevor Nunn's vision fills the stage with gold and white from above, and shadow and rubble behind, all dressed in a rising organ chord, raised minor--I had a new sense of what it means to feel that a play is cathartic. It's not so much having escaped a devastation, but the dark elation of facing the ruin of what a human life is--our own human life: this is what means that I will live and die, and in my skin know the difficult ardor of navigating one time to an other: "The oldest hath borne most. We who are young shall never see so much or live so long." Our skin will be torn into our secret life, and our failure as a person will marry our great ambition, and we will be beautiful and lost, singing our answerless songs and that, Friends and Strangers, is the sad fucking truth.

. . . . . .




. . . . . .

Since my last funeral I've been wearing a thumbprint, a gold leaf with two diamonds melted into it. A kind of amulet. A remembrance, but also a totem against forgetting that we leave here with nothing. What we've made is our brokenness, and this attempt itself is our meaning, our beauty. I think of Mishima and Plath, Crane and Arenas, Hamlet and Ophelia, and their two kinds of suicide. Any philosophy of suicide is divided between feeling and choice. What is bravest, noblest, most honest? Something different for me as the deaths of my two grandfathers. Two visions of being left behind: one grandmother who hasn't forgiven herself and so the world is meaningless ruin. One grandmother who seems to weigh the world with sorrow and laughter, memory and wonder. Which is the more orphan in her frailty? I'm not asking rhetorically. They both look forward as if it were the only past. I'm looking for an enemy but find my beloved. And I know that wearing my nugget of gold feels more Borges than Lowell:


The Enigmas

I who am singing these lines today
Will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse
Who dwells in a realm, magical and barren,
Without a before or an after or a when.
So say the mystics. I say I believe
Myself undeserving of Heaven or Hell,
But make no predictions. Each man's tale
Shifts like the watery forms of Proteus.
What errant labyrinth, what blinding flash
Of splendor and glory shall become my fate
When the end of this adventure presents me with
The curious experience of death?
I want to drink its crystal-pure oblivion,
To be forever; but never to have been.


Friends and Strangers, here is my cup of never, my cup of always, my coffee in the night. Here is my brief letter to you to sail the vast numb harm of the infinite, against which we leave only pieces of who we are, our art and satellite, our artifact, the ruins of a memory, the stage of it glowing still backward in the mind, and this--

. . . . . .