B O C A

THE ETERNAL GRATITUDE

2011-12-02T19:53:00.001-08:00

December, blazing and jovial--It's my season

and I spend my walks in the evenings staring obsessively at Jupiter early in the east, by midnight pulling its blue kiln toward the south. Waxing moon, thin and mean, growing farther and fuller the deeper into this first week we pursue. I can't help reciting Frost to myself, "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is." And though I'm obsessed with that beautiful sad lunatic John Clare, re-reading his descriptions of leaves, frosts, bees, thrush, autumn walks "Into the nothingness of scorn and noise / Into the living sea of waking dreams / Where there is neither sense of life or joys, / But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems" mostly because I feel as he does

in that late asylum poem: "I am the self-consumer of my woes, / They rise and vanish in oblivious host" I am also reciting a funnier Auden version to myself and to my little bat-faced dog as the Santa Anas pour a new chill through our nights in Southern Cali, "Admirer as I think I am / Of stars that do not give a damn, / I cannot, now I see them, say / I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time."

Auden makes me laugh as much as Frost makes me lonely, sleepy, agonistic, bruised.

I wish I was funnier on the page, but it's all so serious. What a reaper with this ridiculous grim! You'll have to forgive so much meandering broken moody recitation, I think it's the moon. I think it's Jupiter in my sights. I used to live in a second floor loft in Arizona, with windows open in every direction on the desert, night-ripe, thicketed with a sea-like blackness. I painted the walls an inner avocado--it had a golden quality, that antique green--and I littered it with silver bronze and Mexican painted crucifixes. All night I could mark the constellations, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter as they drew close threatening to poison themselves into the moonlight dissolve, and then retreat, flinching, pulling, struggling away on their separately entranced halcyon trajectories. The waves were furious and small. I lay awake, I lay awake, and stared to all that outer phenomena.

I've been thinking about hatred. Hatred as clarity. Hatred as insight. The criminal as heroic philosopher. Flannery O'Connor's Misfit, or the boy murderer in Simenon's Dirty Snow, two distinctly different kinds of villains, but who achieve a kind of brutal understanding of the world. I'm thinking of an episode of This American Life in which child rapists and murderers play Hamlet in prison, and the kinds of incredible insights they lend to these roles, insights that are nearly impossible to distinguish or to reconcile with the despicable violences of which they are admittedly guilty. How is it that good men are terrifically incapable of goodness. No pleasure but meanness? Perhaps it's the mirror

that is most true: men terrifically incapable of goodness are good men too. No meanness but pleasure.

We are alive between the aster and the star.

I'm thinking of my recent obsession with Thomas Bernhard, whose long monologues as novels remind me of Javier Marias' in that they proceed in a kind of real time, in which a whole novel happens in the course of a single night, and the internal monologues of a single character illustrate the many digressions of a mind at dis-ease. Except that Bernhard's characteristic tone is straightforward loathing, not faced with mystery so much as disdain, contempt for the unforgivable privileged masquerade of social mediocrity. What's amazing is that his characters, if you can stomach a whole novel filled with personal disgust, pay off in the most striking ways. The final sentences of Extinction, for example, are so stunning for the simple justice that so much hatred allows his character to mete, even at his personal expense.

More than reading Gottfried Benn or Thomas Mann, maybe only as much as reading Hamburger's translations of Celan, reading Bernhard makes me want to learn German. To speak it like a sex talk. Here's a long passage from Bernhard's Woodcutters translated by David McLintock: I've been opening the book almost daily lately, re-reading it aloud to myself, and then, almost as if in prayer, simply the one word over and over, negligence:

"And I told myself that this year alone, which was not a very long time, I had attended the funerals of five of my friends. They're all dying off one after the other, I thought, most of them by taking their own lives. They rush out of a coffeehouse in a state of sudden agitation, and are run over in the street, or else they hang themselves, or suffer a fatal stroke. When we're over fifty we're constantly going to funerals, I thought. People who were born in the country go back to the country to kill themselves, I thought. They choose to commit suicide in their parents' home, I thought. All of them, without exception, are basically sick. If they don't kill themselves they die of some illness that they've brought through their own negligence. I repeated the word negligence to myself several times; I kept on repeating the word--it was as if the word gave me pleasure as I sat in the wing-chair--until the people in the music room noticed, and when I saw them all looking in my direction I stopped repeating it. They were all friends of mine thirty years ago, I thought, and I could no longer understand why. For a time we go in the same direction as other people, then one day we wake up and turn our backs on them. I turned my back on these people--they didn't turn their backs on me, I thought. We attach ourselves to certain people, then suddenly we hate them and let them go. We run after them for years, begging for their affection, I thought, and when once we have their affection we no longer want it. We flee from them and they catch up with us and seize hold of us, and we submit to them and all their dictates, I thought, surrendering to them until we either die or break loose. We flee from them and they catch up with us and crush us to death. We run after them and implore them to accept us, and they accept us and do us to death. Or else we avoid them from the beginning and succeed avoiding them all our lives, I thought. Or we walk into their trap and suffocate. Or we escape from them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them whenever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life and accusing them everywhere of having us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves, I thought. We think our lives are finished, and then we chance to meet them and they rescue us, but we are not grateful to them for rescuing us: on the contrary we curse them and hate them for rescuing us, and we pursue them all our lives with the hatred we feel toward them for having rescued us. Or else we try to curry favor with them and they push us away, and so we avenge ourselves by slandering them, running them down wherever we can and pursuing them to their graves with our hatred. Or they help us back on our feet at the crucial moment and we hate them for it, just as they hate us when we help them back on their feet, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We do them a favor and then think we are entitled to their eternal gratitude, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years we are on terms of friendship with them, then suddenly we no longer are, and we don't know why. We love them so fervently that we become positively lovesick, and they reject us and hate us for our love, I thought. We're nothing and they make something of us, and we hate them for it. We come from nowhere, as people say, and they perhaps make a genius of us, and we never forgive them for it, just as if they'd made a dangerous criminal out of us, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We take everything they have to give us, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and we punish them with a life sentence of contempt and hatred. We owe everything to them and never forgive them for the fact we owe everything to them, I thought. We think we have rights when we have no rights of any kind, I thought. No one has any rights, I thought. There's nothing but injustice in the world, I thought. Human beings are unjust, and injustice prevails everywhere--that's the truth, I thought. Injustice is all we have to hand, I thought."

. . . . . . . .

CALACAS NEGRAS, FLORES BLANCAS

2011-11-09T18:45:00.000-08:00

Early November's a good month for painting your guitar like a bullfighter's suit of lights, black as the night sky littered with constellations. Throw in a few beheaded marigolds, a human heart pierced with a sword, a white rose laughing like a skull's head, and a rooster scratching a bit of fire into the dirt. Throw in a paletero like a blonde christ with wet wounds in his hands. Throw in the virgin wearing her headress of knives and bare tits and opened arms. You could be painting the velvet interior of my cousin's lowrider Impala, or the tattoo across his back. Let's write it in Old English, Vivir Mata.

Something about the new cold taste in the air. My Day of the Dead. And here comes Lila Downs' weeping singing in the lower register about a bolt of lightning that withdraws like a lover's betrayal:

quiero a dios a ti te pagen / con una traicion igual

para cuando t'emborraches / tu sepas lo que's llorar

songs on days like this have taught me / sorrow in revenge is true

love, or maybe it's all the badgood / telenovelas of my childhood.

. . . . . . .

"Who knew chopped bone could sing?"

It's a perfect day to re-read Rigoberto Gonzalez' new book of poems from Four Way Books: Black Blossoms. His interests remain romantic and grotesque, the fable that is not so much elegy as it is the song of the flowering undead visitations of memory, memory that rises "like lavendar, the fierce blossoming of beauty and mortality."

I still have my zombie fetish left-over from October, in case you couldn't tell.

The first thing you'll notice about this book is how carefully crafted it is. Each poem asserts a rhetorical force in its chosen form: poems of strict stanzas in tercets or couplets or quatrains. Also the recurrence of the sonnet. I can't help but remember Frost's complaint that free verse is like playing tennis without a net and Gonzalez' web here is built into the book itself. In four sections and 62 pages it's a focused read that offers the reader space to really appreciate the work. The third section is a single long poem, "Vespertine", and I love the weight of it there on its own, this elegy for a dead friend whose memory returns to the author while he's driving: "simple mercies / love silence though the engine / has its own sordid tale". The "tale" is of utmost importance to this poet, who never misses a chance to remember real experience into a kind of Grimm's fireside fable. But Gonzalez's fables are not tales of morality. They appear and revel in that horizon in which Eternal Enemies, as Adam Zagajewski has called them, get married. Love and Time play dead together.

It's the locomotion of Gonzalez' imagination in these poems that's so attractive, the dead have new lives spilling out of his enjambments, and they come back with all of the gruesome wreckage of their bodies, hopes, demons, their sense of humor, their lusts and dreams. The first section is a gathering of dramatic monologues or ekphrastic poems, the second a sequence of sonnets "Frida's Wound" and the final section a sequence of "Mortician" poems, a character reminiscent of say, Komunyakaa's Thorn Merchant, or Vasko Popa's The Little Box or Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito. What we find in each poem is the fact of Gonzalez' imagination peeling outward in re-creation. Metaphor in his poems is a doorway to the life of a fable, and the black flower is an inverted meditation on death as life. Death, Gonzalez reminds us, is something the living do.

. . . . . . . .

Flor de Fuego, Flor de Muerte

Los Angeles

Cempoalxochitl. Marigold. Flower,
the scent of cold knuckle delights you, as does

the answer to death's riddles:
What's the girth of the hermit tongue once it retreats

into the throat and settles like a teabag?
What complaints do feet make when they tire of pointing

up and fold flat like a fan of poker cards?
Where do the dead hide the humor of the ass crack

when the buttocks unstring their fat?
When you sprung into the earth, all other colors coughed

and gave you the gift of sick-bed
sullenness and the contagious texture of tragedy:

Once there was a widow who exchanged
her heart for your head, but you outgrew her body,

protruding from her chest like an unsightly tumor.
Despite that she carried you, cradling you in her hand

during mass, a solace in the memory
of her husband's scrotum. If she heard a hymn

in your petals it was the sound
of trousers unzipping. If she could name the smell inside

the folds of your corolla,
she kept the word wet against her tongue. The widow

held you tighter then. So you stung her
palm in protest and then crumbled when she flung you

like a shooting star--
all awesome arc and damned glory of evisceration.

To pay her back you pierced the shivering
heart she balanced on your stem. You loved her

all over again because she turned
yellow with death, because she was like you,

something dry to come undone
in pieces in the pitted ground. Flor de muerto, flor de fuego,

you humble down life
to the last ember. Even the phoenix tired of sewing

its bird bones together
and couldn't outlive you, oh mortality muse, oh end.

for Maythee Rojas

. . . . . . . . .

I've got the book under my pillow like ripped starlight under a stone.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can.

. . . . . . . . .

BELLES LESTRANGE

2011-11-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

It's a pale shield that stabs and shakes out of the dark moment of a tree. All the shrubs and armaments open in the rain and shudder. Little kings in the dull monotony of the rain. Limelight on the Glass. The moon is green. From what other galaxy.

I don't know why the rain brings me here. I love the bruised sky. The hysterical vanishing, and from the black streets a kind of dawn. The constellations in the grass are made of broken brittle glasslike mercury.

Listening to songs that sound like the names of flowers: Sweet Louise, Princess of China, The Sun Will Rise. Folksy fingered guitar-strummed stereo-licks. Loud. Roughly Petaled.

Norman Dubie's latest book The Volcano from Copper Canyon. I haven't yet read a review of his recent work that says anything I care to repeat--no one knows how to talk about his work. They talk up his intelligence, his historical gravitas, his visionary detail. What I love about his new book is his sense of fucking humor! The human being lit up by a bit of starlight is monstrously funny. He's intense and playful, and like a monk of something sublime, he knows the instant is to flash and perish, and we flash and perish to know it.

. . . . . . . .

It's November but it feels like Spring.

Poetry is a funny king.

. . . . . . .

"The Song of the Strangelet"

The sailors are proper envoys
to a picnic table, hard-
boiled eggs
rotating in a field of salt--
chrysanthemum petals
like a discharge in the trees
and the abduction in the evening,
whole stadia of magnets
showing teeth. Two swiss
playing basketball
with rifles and cigarettes.
The algorithm in an open field
abducted by a romance of wheelbarrows--
science like all superstition
fondles the grim ignorance
that is chance, chance
of course is the teakettle
waking father by the fire
that could be a particle accelerator
liberating its first ghost,
a machinist extrovert
standing at the end
of a lensing
twelve thousand galaxies in width--
he waves at the youngest of sailors
who shows
him the middling digit of proverb's three,
our very ether
ruptured by it. Who could
eat at Joe's
after this?

. . . . . . . .

I stole it, and I liked it

and I liked the secret hold of it

. . . . . . . .

The ragged white roses
grinning wet

and faceless in the growing darkness
have skeletal poses

on the corner of Olive and Fountain Boulevards

. . . . . . .

HARPSPEED

2011-10-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

Rain and ache. Today in Southern Cali the storms are in, though it feels like we leapt from fog to fall, with only a few bruisy bright summer days in between.

I've got my love locked down.

Antony and the Johnson's re-make of Beyonce's first solo hit "Crazy in Love" playing on repeat.

Gray, green, black, silver, neon and night. Little lightspeed harp of the rain.

Increasingly seasonless. And old. Honey. The lines, the lines . . .

Thomas Bernhard's my new saint. Reading Extinction, a booklength monologue of an heir who must return to the estate, to a family he hates and who hates him in return with a silent, submariner's loathing. Something about it reminds me of Howard Sturgis' Belchamber, a gorgeous, sad novel about another heir for whom it all falls apart, though that novel is filled with the poetry of a sad gay queer who lingers over every detail as if it were a cologne commercial, all incense and extreme close-ups of hemlines and sneers. It makes me think of Wilde's descriptions in Dorian Gray, they're fast, cinematic, piercing. Bernhard has the movement akin to Banville, without the dense fits of passion. Bernhard's character is a thinker, and a vain egomaniac. Don't trust him.

. . . . . . . . .

THE ETERNAL BLINDFOLD

2011-08-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

A bell rings in the middle of Dostoevsky's long story about a husband, a wife, and her lovers. Fast, energetic, moody types--and like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky is obsessed with types, the Suicidal Devil, the Crazy Karamazov, the Lovesick Idiot, and so on--I don't know how I've missed The Eternal Husband before, but I'm glad to find it again. It's a quick read to cover the kaleidoscope of human emotion: laughter and death, sweet admiration, friendship, hope, hate, beautiful lost love, fits of passion in a dream, and all as Mucholsky in his brilliant study of Dostoevsky's life and work asserts, in one of the most focused, and in the author's own words, "harmonic and balanced" structures he's ever been able to control.

It's fast and sweet. Boccherini's Quintet No. 4 in D, the fourth movement, a fandango for guitar and strings. Milos Karadaglic's recent recording. You can drink it in a day.

"The object in life of which he had had such a joyful glimpse had suddenly vanished into everlasting darkness."

Which reminds me of Eduardo C. Corral's poem up at Gwarlingo.

Corral's poem recalls Robert Frost's "Desert Places" in that a speaker looking celestially outward, gazing at the midnight external, finds himself staring into the center of the mortal self, into the center of a human night. Simic, while writing about the work of Jane Kenyon in Orphan Factory has said about the short lyric of 10-20 lines that the proof is in its voice. His assessment of Kenyon reminds me of both Frost and Corral: "the distance to her at times appears infinite, and that is the cause of her meloncholy. . . . Lyric poetry for her, to paraphrase Chekhov, is that illness for which many remedies are prescribed and for which there's no cure."

The locomotive night is falling fast, oh fast, and in Corral's little coffin for cut moonlight the speed of the vision, and the allure of the poem, relies on the malleability of his metaphor. Like the poets of the deep image in the 60's, or as Bly preferred, the psychic image, Corral is invested in visionary description, and seeing the crescent moon through the midnight window becomes wringing out a ghostly dishrag on his face. The human fever is relieved by the cold rag, and the field of white appears. Like in the work of great romantics, sickness is sight. Transgressively, we find the speaker looking into this white, bare kingdom, the inner landscape of bone. He plucks the thorn. The only truth available to a poet in search of beauty is death. The distance the poet finds is not cosmic so much as it is infinitely small and inside. Like Corral, one has to climb into his grave, sit cross-legged and close his eyes to see The White Nothing. In its Emptiness, Nature is the white night of the self. Even the voice has no where to hide. The elliptical pace of the poem is as necessary to its success as the metaphor, the deep image, the psychic transformation, but I can't get it to copy here. The speed of Corral's lines, breaths, and image-making is true of most of what I've seen in his forthcoming Yale prize winning collection, Slow Lightning.

I'm going to steal it.

I think I now I'm moving on to some Beckett, something with ominous constellation.

. . . . . . . .

OUR SIZE OF SORROW

2011-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Something somber and triumphant at the same time, something like Respighi's "Nebbie" sung by Pavarotti, who I saw at the Met once begin in a whisper, next to a piano, a lullaby that ended in a death cry, a silence that ended in a splendor, a galaxy-sweating supernova, black and robust and pouring painfully, a golden, wound-colored tenderness, enough for all of us. . .

The inevitable downfall of the ambitious, shrewd, daring, practical Queen Cleopatra, Pharaoh and Goddess Isis, who murdered her brothers and her sister and from whom we inherit the 12 hour day and monthly calendar, the census, our economic practice of using denomination marked monies, patroness of the arts, libraries, languages (having spoken 9 fluently herself), her city famous for its diversity and love of the theater and wit and laughter and dramatic celebrations and lavish Ptolemaic processions, its insurmountable wealth, gold and grain, all eventually taken as spoils and adopted by the Romans who wrote her as the historical villain of the ancient world and whose conquerer named the last month of summer after himself to commemorate his victory over her turncoat manic-depressive Dionysus, giving her children to his ex-wife his sister, August.

History is better than literature. Stacy Schiff's biography is a welcome read. It offers a portrait of a murderous family history, the impressive successes of the girl queen who was married first to Caesar and next to the greatest Roman general of his era, Mark Anthony. She was feared and loathed by the Romans, who were a developing nation of dogs, famous for brutality in war and public restraint, their misogyny apparent in both their philosophy and their politics. Monklike and without splendor. Or money. They needed Egypt, and her downfall was the rise of the western world as we know it. A culture that prizes the celebration of libraries, artistry, pageantry--a rebellion-free reign of education--sounds too good to be true, and it's shocking to imagine an ancient community in which 1/3 of all businesses were owned and run by women, in which women had rights to hold position and even take their ex-husbands to court. The difference between a history driven by the Romans instead of the Egyptian Queen is something like the difference between what anthropologists say is a lost evolutionary line--if we had only evolved from the the peaceful, maternal communities of the Bonobo, instead of from the violently territorial, paternalistic chimp.

What's even more striking in Schiff's book is the final chapter, in which all our particularly American sensibilities are defeated in the Queen's defeat. Her death is humiliating beyond belief. No amount of hard-work, determination, ingenuity or belief can help her. "The Secret" with its insidious message that your life is the outcome of your desires, that your suffering is your own fault, and that success is a result of your good wishes, the faux physics of the "laws of attraction", fails. Great men of our adored history are here painted in mediocrity and deception. Octavian, a lesser warrior than Mark Anthony, Cicero, bitter and grudgeful, Herod, scheming and weak, make a formidable alliance against the foreign lover queen and the sell-out general. Even Mark Anthony is moody and temperamental. Depressed when he is defeated in battle, even suicidal and in silent exile. The one unsung hero is perhaps swift Agrippa, whose January flight through the Mediterranean surprised Mark Anthony and whose arrow landed fatally at the end of that summer, changing history and making Octavian what he is to us now.

Shakespeare's play, I was surprised to find, is actually very accurate. I'm grateful though for Schiff's account, which abstains from making assumptions about Cleopatra's sexual ferocity, or her romantic desires, offering us instead a portrait of someone whose ambition and success were only matched by a terrific, a tragic, an impossible fall:

"She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at 18, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at 39, a generation before the birth of Christ."

Shakespeare's words speak just as magnificently for her death-scene as for her entire life:

"Give me my robe, put on my crown. I have

Immortal longings in me."

5.2.275-6

Steal it.

. . . . . . . .

LOBO

2011-08-10T09:05:00.001-07:00

Antonio Lobo Antunez, the Portuguese novelist with that Yaqui witch, my great-great grandmother's last name.

A few years ago I read that Faulknerian account of a drag queen and could barely sleep, it was so lush and panicked, disembodied, ranting, flooding, harsh, sublime.

America feels very far away from this account of a young soldier, furious, phantasmagoric, his re-telling of his days as a medic to a dozen or so prostitutes between and during his desperate nights of making love. The haunted and gruesome Land at the End of the World, which was nicely translated but literally The Asshole of the World. Why is the closest we've come to a novel like this Tim O'Brien's account, his Lt. Cross humping through Vietnam, anatomy and exhaustion, automotonic, the zombie-fevered syntax? Or the gruesome poetics of Owen, the sad sensuality of Komunyaakaa, bodies blown up, dismembered, sacrificed, the gruesome realities and painful lyricism of the young veterans who survive? But nowhere--maybe in Mailer's Naked and the Dead is there something angry, pervasive, maddening, something that changes language and sight too--perhaps in some of Simic's poetry--but where are the recent novels of war weathered soldiers, the furious, wailing, desperate, alive, demanding stories that blame us for our disengagement as a nation, for our myopic obsessions with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and our MTV "reality" fetishes, our hiccuping newsfeeds that hide the bloodandguts truth and spin our politics as if they weren't puppeting us against each other, relying on our sheep psychology to take hold and deflect the fires of dormant emotions and call our inherited moral codes all to inflate the 1%, the egos of the powerful, and deflect our rightful rage at the daily hungers, the daily dead.

"Do you believe in upheavals, great adventures, inner earthquakes, soaring flights of ecstasy? Forget it, my friend, it's nothing but an optical illusion, smoke and mirrors, a mere theatrical trick no more real than cardboard and cellophane of the scenery used to create it or the force of our own desire to give it the appearance of movement."

I gulped the whole thing back like a shot of expresso and my eyes lit up like a night H-bombed to shit.

Then I picked up Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, and started to read about the incestuous bloody chess game of ancient sibling rivalry. . .

. . . . . . . .

MIDNIGHT GREEN

2011-08-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

Bach this morning, and coffee.

The Trondheim Soloists' recording of violin concertos, whose recording of Vivaldi's 4 Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter, if you haven't heard it, is to die for.

Marine Layer, mountains deep. As in, all the way to Pasadena, white and gray. My face, peeking out from underneath a car tire. Bleak car.

Cars all crashing through redundantly and far, like the sea. The highways heave.

Then a fly wrecks my coffee like a dead asterisk. Exploded star.

Also with Wallace Stevens' last collection, The Rock, which, the more I read it, reminds me of Frederick Seidel. Unexpected arrows. I haven't sat enough, or stared vacantly enough, or walked enough barefoot over the grass, or got undressed and watched the nervous glitter of the leaves on the Chinese Banyan through the window, or lined up the bones of my dead hummingbird, or just sat at the bottom of the helix-hinging wild of the pool with my eyes closed to say exactly what I mean.

Take "The Green Plant":

Silence is a shape that has passed.

Otu-bre's lion-roses have turned to paper

And the shadows of the trees

Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer

No longer says anything.

The brown at the bottom of red

The orange far down in yellow,

Are falsifications from a sun

In a mirror, without heat,

In a constant secondariness,

A turning down toward finality--

Except that a green plant glares, as you look

At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,

Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green

Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

I wish I could think of a Seidel poem to read along side of this, because I feel the echo of it everywhere in his Collected, in his declarative end-stopped lines, his qualifications, his prepositional repetitions, juxtaposed with the momentum of that last 3 stanza sentence. . . Stevens predicted something like Seidel's work, if only by writing "the grotesque is not a visitation. It is / Not an apparition but appearance". Seidel appears, and plenty of critics have said how frightfully. He does murder well. He does it so it feels like a beautiful hell. But my favorite of his poems relate a cosmic brutality to some tender vulnerable weakling.

"Midnight"

God begins. The universe will soon.

The intensity of the baseball bat

Meets the ball. Is the fireball

When he speaks and then in the silence

The cobra head rises regally and turns to look at you.

The angel burns through the air.

The flower turns to look.

The cover of the book opens on its own.

You do not want to see what is on this page.

It looks up at you,

Only it is a mirror you are looking into.

The truth is there, and all around the truth fire

Makes a frame.

Listen. An angel. These sounds you hear are his.

A dog is barking in a field.

A car starts in the parking lot on the other side.

The ocean heaves back and forth three blocks away.

The fire in the wood stove eases

The inflamed cast-iron door

Open, steps out in to the room across the freezing floor

To your perfumed bed where as it happens you kneel and pray.

. . . . . . .

STURM UND DRANG

2011-08-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

"I've been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity--fundamentally unchanged after all--to our own. I feel as if my hands were imbrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars--of another faith altogether."

If the first 200 hundred pages were a difficult ascent, like the strain of the roller coaster as it locks and raises inch by inch upward, straining toward that briefest star-like peak, as the eye spills forward and the heart prepares, as the clock is felt and there is time to wonder that you're still there at all, the last 2hundred 70 pages completely fall out from underneath you as the floor imminently blushes, the angle slams, the blackness trembles from that supernal and mortal height--the body falls, and the mind is in flames. You yourself feel that you're a manifestation of the "sacred rage" of Waymarsh. (Or maybe the Adagio from Mendolssohn's Fmajor sonata for violin and piano. I'm obsessed with Anne-Sophie Mutter's 2008 recording this week!)

At the finish of James' The Ambassadors it feels as if everything in the world were at risk, all is lost, and yet nothing happens. It's as if we're creatures made of anticipation and failure, and that's the sad thrill of humanity. The comic dimension of the tragedy of feeling. Like that contemporary, if no less broken, Ophelia-haunted Maria Gostrey, who plays the part of the reader, the attentive inquirer, patient, even omniscient, who like us finds herself, protected as she was, singed now with a desire she's kept secret, perhaps even from herself, and willing, ultimately, inevitably, to reduce herself now for its fulfillment, to give herself to love as if to servitude, whom with, by the end of the novel, we "sigh it at last all comically, all tragically, away", mumbling as much to ourselves in the mirror of self-denial as to the myth of true love, "I can't indeed resist you." And there it is. The uncompromising, sensual Lucretian truth of it.

Steal it if you can.

. . . . . . .

THE HAPPIEST ENEMY

2011-08-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

So you wake up, and the light is there, like a bit of Mendelssohn's violin drilling sweetly from the other side of the black leaves in Eminor.

Stevens: "The fiction of the leaves is the icon of the person" but really he wrote: "poem".

This daylight's too concerto.

Started Henry James' The Ambassadors, last night, the first of his last three great novels, before the Dove's Wings and the Gold Bowl, and read until his sentences got so far ahead of me I was spilling into them. The dream came like a chess move and the other player was faceless. I'm somewhere between the winning Chad Newsome and the wiser, more useless, Strether. And then a few lines from Ashbery come again out of the breaking dark:

"Now it's years after that. It

isn't possible to be young anymore.

Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;

my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken."

The weather inside is controlled and bleak. It's a delight, really, to be safe here on the other side of the Chinese Banyan and watch the sunlight cut the throat of the street. I don't care how Eliot that is of me. Coffee in exile and basil. I could boil an egg.

I think I'll sit here and YouTube mens synchronized 3M springboard diving in Shanghai instead.

LOVE, WOUNDS and CLOWNS OF WAR: Dunstan Thompson

2010-08-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

Lately I've had some time to think about gay relationships and what they mean to me as an adult. How many of us have something like an extended family, a constellation of burning, sustaining friendships that carry us through sickness and happiness and the dark aches and sobrieties, and how often the myth of the "one", the idealized, if strange marriage that straight men and women seem to have a natural trajectory, a pole to which they are drawn to or repulsed by, a kind of moon that is a moon that eludes me. I feel more catholic than ever. Love, as Iris Murdoch philosophized, is the dream of something more than ourselves. Because we are compelled and we never find it. Human destiny, I find myself lost, like a character in Cocteau's White Book, or Reinaldo Arenas' Color of Summer, one of the many failed minstrels of longing and desire, one of the countless broken-hearted clowns on night parade, Picasso's sad version or Hernan Bas' sexy, heroine sheik hooker in the garden with a terrific and absurd belief in love.

So it is I come to Pleiades Unsung Masters Series: Dunstan Thompson, On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master edited by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer. Dunstan, a young poet in the 1940's and a vet from WWII, published two collections of poetry: Poems (1943) and Lament for the Sleepwalker, The Phoenix in the Desert, a travel book, and one novel, The Dove with the Bough of Olive. According to his ex-lover, he continued to write prolifically, though he never published again. Prufer, in the introduction, writes that Dunstan is "a poet weirdly attuned to the war even as he made moments of it complex, even baroque, beauty and sensuality. Here was a soldier who finds in the war not mere futility or valor, but desire, sensuality, and a kind of horror that is both deeply personal and all-encompassing."

I feel as though I come to Thompson's early sonnets through the lens of say, Yusef Komunyakaa's meditations on war which are both violent and lush, sensually stunning. Take these lines from “Songs of the Soldier”, for example:

Death is a soldier and afraid

Like you. If he could talk, he’d tell

The world how he was hurt. This sad

Faced, grave eyed, beautiful as steel

Young man, his sex a star, has pride

That sharp, unshadowed, surgeon’s light

By which heroes are turned inside

Out, their flamboyant guts put straight

Or lopped off. His dripping wounds bleed . . .

At the beginning of the poem he writes, “Death blows boys to ribbons.” We couldn’t ask for a better line to describe the eros of Thompson’s strategies. A blowjob is deathlike celebration. Blood and his disrobement. Flesh that is style, and a wound that is surprise.

Here is the first poem of the book:

This Loneliness for You is Like the Wound

This loneliness for you is like the wound

That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,

Smiling to soothe the general on his round

Of visits to the somehow not yet dead;

Who, after he has pinned a cross above

The bullet-bearing heart, when told that this

Is one who held the hill, bends down to give

Folly a diffident embarrassed kiss.

But once that medaled moment passes, O,

Disaster, charging on the fever chart,

Wins the last battle, takes the heights, and he

Succumbs before his reinforcements start.

Yet now, when death is not a metaphor,

Who dares to say that love is like the war?

The last 6 lines of this sonnet strike me for their contemporary echo of the AIDS epidemic. For me they have an eerie resonance not of the literal war, the Whitmanian attentions to the patient, but of a more recent consideration of men in love in a time of sickness. Mortality becomes a sobering charge for someone who realizes that the body fails, and its failure is an unpoetic reminder that we are alone.

There's something heightened here about the relationship between battle and health. Death is not a metaphor when it is death. This finality rips us from poetic reverie, the rivers of romantic idyllic intensities. Though Dunstan has his share of them in lines like, “Only the cold phantasmal rose burns out-of-doors. / Inside, the lamps are lit.” and “Too little time / Is left for love. When we come back, what welcome home / will he award our wounded eyes?” Some moments are wrought with beautiful melodrama and are arguably delicious and t00-heady, self-indulgent, as “That, lately lying altar for his ardor, / Uncandled, scandalizes him, afraid he / Has lost his lifetime in a moment’s murder: / He is the sinner who is saint instead”. But Thompson balances them with strikingly contemporary starkness: “the heart is worn / Out among whores and storefronts and the lack of you.” And “swear / Love to the dead. A war means this.”

Though the introduction makes an argument for the innovations of his poetry, one disappointment is that the folio of Thompson’s poetry is short, a mere 42 pages, and 20 pages of that is a late, previously unpublished long poem in sections, a meditation on the Biblical figure Mary Magdalen. Apparently, the reason his 2 collections have not been reprinted is a stipulation by Phillip Trower, Thompson's long-time lover and companion and literary executor, as per the poet's own wishes. The rest of the book is an involved collection of essays, both reflective and critical. Though I'm grateful for having all these voices in a single place, I wish I could get my hands on a xerox of a single collection. There's something sad to me that I can't get the poet in his own version of himself, even if he came to a point in his life where this version embarrassed him. Who can say who we are when we are unfathomable. I also lament the story of his born-again-Christian tendencies, the monastic celibacy he and his partner maintained through his later years when he wrote more “Christian” verse. I’d much rather read his accounts of growing old with someone, and what that must have been like after WWII, instead of his laborious account of a dead saint. I long for the version of himself that could have spoken more deeply to someone like Thom Gunn than Hart Crane.

THE NEW UNREAL OF BEAUTY

2010-05-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

"And it is in the middle of the night that we ourselves most resemble those events and those times which can no longer contradict what is said about them or the stories or analyses or speculations of which they are the object, just like the defenceless dead, even more defenceless than when they were alive and over a longer period of time too, for posterity lasts infinitely longer than the few evil days of any one man."

Javier Marìas, Fever and Spear

. . . . . . .

My grandmother lying in her hospital bed is the beginning of her great silence. A cancellation that sees into the faults of her eras, the great poverty of married women in the middle of the last century, fed "shit on a shingle" during the Great Depression, silenced by her parents and sent back to her husband like some smudged Ophelia, scorned by her grandchildren for being unable to become anything else, misunderstood by her daughters and sons, who want always to idolize her with vicious love and blame.

Why does life seem like such a waste, no matter what works are remembered, regretted, wished for, facted into being? Wearily. The hospital bed. The tubes and juices. All of it antiseptic, like a resort. Like being drugged up in an airport.

The last lover in his aphoristic monologue of blissful ego-mania, his infantry: "the most important, beautiful, amazing, wonderful thing is monogamy."

My one raised eye-brow in the dark: "I don't agree." Because I think the mask we wear protects us from the difficulties of our own inherent infamy. The skeptic heart beats because it must, as relentlessly as it must, until the final shocked rest robs us from us. "Lovers are boundaries." "Life is being able to see Contradiction Equals Beauty."

What is "Un-Beauty"?

. . . . . . .

How does a poet write history?

Adrienne Rich: "Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody--make into flesh--another principle. A complex dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair."

I hope I will grow up into stronger poetry. Re-reading Rich's Dream of a Common Language, because I like those love poems that refuse privacy, their brave considerations that admit despair without legitimizing or romanticizing it. Because I want to write something that has a necessary pulse, in letters that travel by newspaper, digital billboard, satellite, graffiti.

Also reading those Floridians, with their maniacal metrics. Especially Michael Hoffmann, whose blend of prescient vernacular, linguistic dexterity, and alliterative humor results in stark presentations of personal incidence and curious elegy. There is something so ash-like about his poetry that nonetheless offers us a generous intellect; facts in his work are graceful precisely because they do not seek to be more than themselves. I love that. I crave that. I fail that.

Max Beckmann, 1915

Nurse, aesthetician and war-artist:

not unpatriotic, not unfeeling.

Calm--excitable. Noted yellow shell-holes,

the pink bones of a village steeple, a heated purple sky.

Bombardments. Tricks of the light. Graphic wounds.

An aviator overflew him in the rose night,

buzzed him, performed for him. Friend or foe? Libellule!

A room of his own in a villa. Kriegsblick.

Medics intellectually stimulating,

one, from Hamburg, familiar with his work.

A commission to decorate the baths

--an Oriental scene, how asinine!--

deserts, palmettos, oases, dead Anzacs, Dardanelles.

A second fresco, of the bath-house personnel.

One thousand male nudes per diem.

A prey to faces. Went for a squinting Cranach.

A man with half a head laughed at his sketches,

recognising his companions. ('He died today.')

'Several hours' tigerish combat, then gave up

the assault'; his description of a sitting.

Some esprit de corps. Marching songs

weirdly soothing, took him out of himself.

Ha, the amusing pretensions of a civilian

trying to commandeer a hotel room.

English prisoners, thirsty mudlarks, plucky, droll.

In the trenches the men had kissed their lives goodbye.

A ricochet, a sniper. In the midst of life.

Crosses plugging foxholes, stabbed into sandbags.

A man with a pistol, head down, intent, hunting rats.

Another, frying spuds on a buddy's grave.

The Flemish clocks told German time.

Sekt and Mosel to wash down the yellow vin de pays.

Dr Bonenfant, with his boozy babyface.

'We poor children.' A commission

to illustrate the army songbook. Invalided out.

(Michael Hoffman, from Corona, Corona)

. . . . . . . .

But while his frenetic brushwork and highly complex, metaphysical iconography have much in common with German Expressionism, Beckmann's paintings never succumbed to the Modernist tendency to render the world abstractly. In his 1938 lecture "On My Painting," Beckmann explained: 'I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.'

. . . . . . . .

The question is not how does a poet write history, but how do we poets make the unreal real.

. . . . . . . .

I COULD BE ILLEGAL

2010-04-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . . .

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

. . . . . . .

SB 1070

Dear President Obama,

I write to ask that you take immediate action to (1) defend the people of Arizona and (2) reform immigration policy pursuant to your existing authority as President of the United States.

. . . . . . .

"I do not want the police here, there, Arizona, or anyplace else, pulling people over cuz you look like you should be pulled over."

Tom Tancredo

. . . . . .

Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be any thing else than the profoundest reason, whether it brings arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary . . . to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much pure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it forever. . . .

The proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Walt Whitman, Preface to the Leaves of Grass

. . . . . . .

AWP: A JOURNAL OF THE TIMEWARP: 2010

2010-04-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

I love AWP.

I love the plane, the sleeplessness, the sea of insecurities. I love the faces swimming out at you as if from the book jackets where they keep. All you famously shimmering minnows. I love your sweet glances and your rash, judgmental disappearances.

I love to smile like a thief.

Apples, oranges, coffees, chocolates, a sweater, 12 new books of poetry.

I don't love your turkey legs, your homelessness, your dry elevation sickness.

I love your blue horse Luis Jimenez.

Your convention center Blue Sex Bear.

I love your superciliously necessary cane, with its silver handle and its sealed blade.

"Everything is so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other, what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissable--it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it, the person who built a home finds himself barred from entering it, the merest contact, a touch so taken for granted it was barely conscious, becomes an affront or an insult and it is as if one had to ask permission to touch oneself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for could poison the air or provoke nausea, they must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition); the reverse is true too: what was once mocked is taken seriously and the person once deemed repugnant is told: 'I was so wrong about you, come here.' 'Sit down here beside me, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before.' That is why one must always ask for a postponement: 'Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!' I quoted to myself. Tomorrow you might want me alive, even for only a half an hour, and I won't be there to grant your wish, and your desire will be as nothing. It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there is only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still traveling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, insubstantial and unfinished me, no one should trust me either. . . "

Charlegne Place.

Gurl.

I love your Cake-up. Your Crazy. Your slumber party melt down.

Bitch, where my jackpack?

Who's DNA is this dangling on a floss outside my 29th floor window?

"How do you stay sane at this thing? I feel like's it's sucking me dry! I cried through that poem, that standing ovation, it's too much. How do you keep yourself from going crazy?"

I make my billion promises and then I break each one.

I skip as many poetry readings as possible. I walk out of each of 2,729 panels I sit down in.

I give lots and lots of kisses. I talk shit. I text message rudely and incessantly.

I ask Jean Valentine to sign me in a crevice.

I leave a day and a half early and sneak off to Boulder, Colorado, where a mountain boy has promised me raw sugar.

"The sad one doesn't know what to do or how to behave, trying first one thing and then another and then the opposite of each, racking their brains for ways of making themselves interesting again or forgiven even though they don't know what fault it is they've committed, and nothing works because they are already condemned, they try being charming or unpleasant, gentle or surly, indulgent or critical, loving or belligerent, attentive or uncouth, flattering or intimidating, understanding or impenetrable, but the result is confusion and a lot of wasted time."

I waste time, I waste time. With my dear ones, in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, all afternoon, all my wasted time is laughter, laughter, sushi, cab rides, embraces in the middle of a street because of cancer, because of the romance of not having a working cellphone, because my TCells are normal, because you licked my coat the color of a cherry ludenz, because your skin is Picasso-esque today and you're cracking up, old, bad, long gone, you're on your way out and you're here in my arms, the way the truth is, the same way I'm alone but I'm with you for a minute, too. I'm here for the monumental burning of these scarce islands, for a little fierce face time, to swim near you but not with you, with you but only for this Time as it blurs me from your sight.

Stranger, I don't care, I don't. Not about the sea filled with the frenzy of your reflections.

I'll park my ass in the back of Falling Rock Tap House on Blake street between 19th and 20th.

I'll gossip motherhood and primitive visions and WILLA I will read your story about stealing a car radio when you're ill.

I'll get lost and try to walk back through the black neighborhoods off Colfax, prancing around in my red leather belt and tight 7 Diamond designer jeans, while Gurl gets crazy tryn to pee in a church. Beware all ye slaves that enter here.

I'll hang on to that Oskar for dear life, for dear life, and watch my Self dissolve in the black mirror of my sunglasses as he puts them on and lays his childhood across my cashmered heart.

My press is dead, my beautiful book's press is dead. Long live my only fucking press!

Babyfucker. That's the book I wished but did not steal!

I did steal Fever and Spear by Javier Marias. He might as well be writing about all the refracted blisses of the timewarp of AWP, all the misunderstandings of the unwelcomed, the mindless and chattering self-inflations, the sheer egomaniacal endlessness, the bartalk and the insincerity, the good rough and felt affection, the brief reunions and intentionally missed elevator-encounters, the mask, the flutter, the yearning, the yawn, the flinch and sharp revolt, the spasms and spasms of laughter and true friendship, the straight-forward recognition of those I touched and held, touched and held, their finally palpable visitations, their small leavings, and the quake I felt at having been close to them for a time. Friends and Phantoms. With you. Time that is now fled. Time that is a hesitation now distorted into love. And an irritation that I never will deny.

. . . . . . . .

POET AI: Corpses, I Give You These Flowers

2010-03-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

January 2, 1947-March 19, 2010

When I was 18 I followed the poet Ai. She was walking across campus in Arizona and though I didn't know who she was, there was something so serious, so attractive about how sure-footed she was, that I instinctively knew I wanted to see where she was going. It is strange to feel so compelled, but there I was, following her on foot off campus and into a strip mall and finally into a small pawn/antique shop where she bent over the jewelry. I was struck by her look, her dramatic black and red outfit, jeans and cowboy boots, her hair pulled tightly over her skull into a dark bun, the large turquoise gleaming on her hands and ears. A figure so obviously of the Southwest desert, I was reminded of my mother, of the witch of my mother's childhood. I wanted so badly to say to her how much I loved her turquoise ring, though that wasn't it. What it is, I still can't say.

It wasn't for two years, until I was in Norman Dubie's office, which is more like a tibetan shrine, filled with smoke and photographs, old postcards, typed poems, dried blossoms, that I recognized her picture. I was in shock, because it was so clear to me that this was the same woman I had followed into the pawn shop, in whose silent peregrination I had been so mesmerized. He laughed, touched his white beard, and told me her real name, which he said she had never liked, and said I should have said hello, that she probably would have liked to have some tea with me.

Several years later she and I danced together at AWP in Palm Springs. She loved Moby. She loved wearing her black leather pants and blood-colored jacket. We struck up a kind of friendship, or at least that's how I will remember it--I was in my early 20's, mad and poor having just moved to the beach, and she had just taken a leave of absence from OSU and moved to San Marcos, Texas, where she held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing for a year--and we kept in touch over e-mail. She was always brief, direct, her sentences sparing, filled with affection and humor. When my first book was accepted for publication, she wrote simply, "Salud. Miguel." I will always love those two words, for what feels to me like a wine-heavy pleasure. She often wished me regular work and peace with my life, and we talked about the desert, which she missed and loved. Not long after her mother died, our e-mails became intermittent--I didn't know what to say to such a large and frightening loss, I was young and stupid, and we lost touch.

It's hard to say how important she is to me, because our friendship was so private and in some ways, too brief. She was older, accomplished, mysterious, attractive, and a poet! and I was terribly young, naive and ridiculous--Her poems were the first contemporary poems that I liked, for the audacity of their images, the ferocity of their voices, the musicality of their lines, which had for me an echo of the modernists and an unflinching sensibility that always felt thrillingly brave.

I first heard her work in an undergraduate classroom. We were to find a book of poetry and give an oral presentation of it to the class. One of my peers read to us "The Kid", and ever since then I've been her fan. When her last book Dread came out, I paid for it.

Today, finding out that she's passed, I'm quietly, intensely sad. I wish I could send her an e-mail. I wish I could ask her how's life. I wish I could open my mail and see her again.

The Kid

My sister rubs the doll's face in the mud,

then climbs through the truck window.

She ignores me as I walk around it,

hitting the flat tires with an iron rod.

The old man yells for me to help hitch the team,

but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder,

until my mother calls.

I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window,

but it falls short.

The old man's voice bounces off the air like a ball

I can't lift my leg over.

I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn't look up

and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.

Mother runs toward us. I stand still,

get her across the spine as she bends over him.

I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house.

Roses are red, violets are blue,

one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown.

They're down quick. I spit, my tongue's bloody;

I've bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back.

I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot.

The doll lands on the ground with her.

I pick it up, rock it in my arms.

Yeah. I'm Jack. Hogarth's son.

I'm nimble. I'm quick.

In the house, I put on the old man's best suit

and his patent leather shoes.

I pack my mother's satin nightgown

and my sister's doll in the suitcase.

Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.

I'm fourteen. I'm a wind from nowhere.

I can break your heart.

. . . . . .

CHILD OF A TEMPORARY BLOOD

2009-09-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

Dali said once that it took him his whole life to learn how to paint like an 8 year old child. I'm pretty sure he said this or something near it. This is during that last productive stint, he's wearing a white robe and a long thin white mustache that droops, and walks with a cane like some newage guru out of a sci-fi flick, hermit, guardian of the oracle, sage. He's near a canvas, swallowtail, cello-knob, black line on white horizon, swift, with all the force and grace of an accident.

I said in my last post I could accept Tomaz Salamun's work in a way I could not Ashberry's, though it is no less accessible or easy. I could be talking about my preference for Dostoevsky over Tolstoy.

Salamun is a kind of demon, and he calls upon passions in a manner to which Ashberry remains analytical and ultimately, as Vendler pointed out, comedic. This is really saying that Ashberry opens up moments of philosophical sadness that are redeemed by pleasures of critical and/or colloquial speech on the same plane. The effect can be deeply contemplative, if jarring. I'd argue that Ashberry is in this way more accessible than Salamun, who looks to history as if to flesh.

Stylistically, he's not as diverse as Ashberry, writing in successive short declarations that burst like fearsome fat berries. Sometimes they have that lyric intensity of a clean aphorism: "Heaven was conceived with a knife." "The grass is authentic." "Beauty of man is the furthest history." "Poetry is a martyr's hatchery." Sometimes their intensity feels symbolic, though their meaning remains oblique: "The foot is in the warmish place, secure." "Feathers in my mouth grow." "A bull's berry walks on a wire." "The crocodile stuffs my body into its tongue."

I think Vendler's assessment of Ashberry's writing--that it works on a horizontal level, equalizing different kinds of speech toward a surrealistic effect--is true of some of Salamun's poetry as well, though Salamun is a trickster of sorts and is not really funny at all. His vision is darker, and beautifully nihilistic. He reminds me of Breton's The Absence of Myth, in which he argues that a godless existence is the only one capable of miracles of attention. Here is the very center of Salamun's book There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair:

Eternity is

cruel and crystal.

It ruins

everything alive.

It replaces people and

loves and does not

open

the well. With your hand

you dust a glass

you do not

break it. Let every

love

die as

a man does. Death

protects us.

Here Salamun is working in a way much opposed to Ashberry, but it requires our attention to the relationship between the hand and the glass as elements: flesh and crystal. The domestic act of dusting a glass becomes a challenge: whether or not flesh is capable of "breaking" crystal. In the end, it is the cut that becomes mortal for Salamun, and what he wants to preserve is the possibility of the wound. Death is that barrier we cannot know beyond. We must care for it. There's also a finality to the end of the poem because Salamun has symbolic purpose, and I'd argue that unlike Ashberry, he doesn't believe that language is ultimately a joke of meaning. In this way, he's not nihilistic at all. He believes in a poem the way he believes in hot flesh. His is a reassignment of those religious doctrines that posit the body against the spirit--for Salamun the temporary blood is more valuable than eternity.

This allows his poetry to have an apocalyptic playfulness about it that invites both elegance and accident, and so leaps between them in an almost associative directness:

These are the islands of Vis and Hvar!

Two lullabies above the complexion of black golden

Saturns. Hills, charred long ago during

the bleating of sheep and lambs,

during the elliptical carriers of fire,

and rain forcing its way between

branches, without noticing the leaves, without

drinking them.

For years I felt that orange shovel.

I say "almost" associative, because though the locomotion of his brief sentences propels us into huge leaps, they are not exactly pulled from the unconscious the way lines from Breton's Soluble Fish might have been, leapt down, caught for their very strange, dreamlike elusivity. I saw Salamun read at AWP last year and I was struck by what I saw:

a boy. Reading to a tree. And in the tree a bird and a fox. The storm cloud was small. A head drawn inside a head. A black hairy raindrop on his cheek.

Strange, but that's what I saw. The outsider as a child. And I realized that what happens in Salamun's poems is what happens when children are serious, when serious children play. Things are said, described, in the simplest, most direct ways, but ways that are poetry, because they haven't yet learned the rules. When adults speak to animals, trees and storms, we call it witchcraft. We call it melodrama. We call it weird. But if my niece before bedtime says she wants ice cream, ("shoeberry ice cream" is her favorite) and we tell her it's too late she replies, "I'll brush my teeth with it." If you tell her no, she frowns and darkens and says loudly: "You make me sad--forever." Salamun too works in short sentences fraught with symbolic play, accidental intensity, but articulate with certitude and feeling. Though readers may find him difficult, inaccessible, even ridiculous, I'd argue there is an often overlooked relentless childlike simplicity to Salamun's work that affords him philosophical insight and descriptive prowess:

Nice Hat, Thanks.

Little burnt villages. Heavy drinkers.

Incredible! Such is my influence:

We're ducks.

I took the distribution and the title from Joshua.

Arms are a genuine feeling.

These are our mouths and palms.

Frogs are resoled.

O God, how near we are to each other.

I lick God's mind and roll over like a turtle.

The swallow's dome has pity and destroys.

Heaps of sand. Mothers, mothers.

The enemy is tortured and juts out.

Mommy carries the chapter.

. . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal him if you can!

. . . . . . .

THE SAME STUFF WE GROPED THROUGH

2009-09-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

I've never been able to fully enter Ashbery. Some Trees felt energetic but mysterious, especially for someone like me who arrived at contemporary poetry through those narrative confessional poets--James Wright and Ai--inheritors of Lowell and Jarrell. I can still remember the moment I first read Wright's "Small Frogs Killed on a Highway". Before this poem I sat in the library and memorized Shakespearean sonnets, eyeing the stacks for some answer to my loneliness. Instead I had lines that summoned some idea of the lover's brutality. I still remember them:

Sweet Thief, whence didst thou steal that sweet that smells

if not from my love's breath? Thy purple pride

which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells

in my love's veins thou has too grossly died.

I was still a virgin when I found Wright's poem, that I loved but did not understand. I still remember the first lines, that in retrospect sound like something from Gluck's Wild Iris:

Still

I would leap too

into the light,

if I had the chance.

It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field

on the other side of the road.

I was moved first by the line break, the confidence of that word alone, and then by the symbolic weight of that movement into a light which is death. I'm sure my Catholic upbringing had more than a little to do with that. His work is filled with this kind of directness, filled with music and symbolic intention. My copy of Above the River, Wright's collected, was the first collection of poetry I ever bought and it's rifled with scraps of paper of copied lines, versions, love letters to a dead man's meter.

So coming to Ashbery has been long, tenuous. I don't feel as though I can read him. Mostly. There are lines I love, and then they feel corrupted by the vulgarity of, I'm not even sure how to say this, the commonplace. I've bought several of his books, and most recently--this past winter--really lived with A Worldly Country, which I must say overwhelms me in much the same way a book by Michael Burkard does, porous darkness, the halo of a hidden thing. Ashbery's is a book I clutch to me, but without really knowing why.

For Now

Much will be forgiven those

on whom nothing has dawned. But I wonder,

does our polemic have an axis? And if so,

who does the illuminating? Isn't not as though I haven't stayed,

stinking, in the dark. What does this

particular mess have to do with me, surely

one or more may have wondered. And if he

or she suddenly saw in retrospect

the victimhood of all those years, how pain

was as reversible as pleasure, would they stand

for nothing selling in shops now, the cornucopias

of bargain basements open to the weather?

From pantry and hayloft spiffy white legs

emerge. A way of sitting down

has been established, though it's the same stuff

we groped through before: reeds, old motor-boat

sections, skeins of herring. We brought something else--

some enlightenment we thought the months

might enjoy in their gradual progress through the years:

"sudden realizations," the meaning of dreams

and travel, and how hotel rooms

can become the meaningful space one has always lived in.

It's only a shred, really, a fragment of a life

no one else seemed interested in. Not that it can be carried away:

It belongs to the decor, the dance, forever.

If Wright has light and darkness, nature and the resurrections, Ashbery has the city, filled with lives, fragments and trash. We might think here of Doty's memoir Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, really a kind of ars poetica that explores his interest in the object, the glitter of commerce, and the way human history is an inheritance of beautiful trash, how experience is marked by artifact. One cannot abandon the literal in Ashberry, since his philosophical meanderings ("Much will be forgiven those / on whom nothing has dawned. But I wonder, / does our polemic have an axis? And if so, / who does the illuminating?) easily reflect other subjective experiences. Isn't the reader forced into a moment of self-examination here, as we become the "he / or she" of the poem and must consider "in retrospect / the victimhood" of our own years, how "pain / was reversible as pleasure"? Ashberry's thinking in the first stanza is anchored to a consideration of the objects at the "bargain basement" of the second, "reeds, old motor-boat / sections", an event to which any of us, in any part of the human city, surely bring along our own '"sudden realizations", the meaning of dreams". This is the dance, that in a capitalistic culture, we are always faced with the awareness of our own insignificance--our loved things end up for sale to strangers, "the meaningful space one has always lived in", indeed our very life itself, is no more than "a fragment / no one else seemed interested in . . . forever".

It's not until reading Helen Vendler's essay (from Invisible Listeners) yesterday on Ashbery, "John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past", that I finally had some insight as to why I can almost never seem to reconcile Ashbery's meaningful insights with his crass Americana. In it she writes, "Ashbery's greatest formal contribution has been to bring into lyric a vast social lexicon of both English English and American English--common speech, journalistic cliche, business and technical and scientific language, allusion to pop culture as well as to canonical works. . . . In his syntax, as well as his diction, Ashbery juxtaposes the high . . . with the demotic."

Ahh, that's it exactly. Vendler makes me so wet. Whereas Wright's spiritual vision is exemplified by the way words in his poems have a hierarchic value, so that the literal is regularly symbolic, in Ashbery all hierarchy becomes horizontal, and the effect is at times a surreal relationship between different kinds of speech.

I think it will be a lifelong struggle with Ashbery's work for me, and I'm ok with that. I'm drawn to his poetry because it's so tonally rich, even if, as Vendler says, he's ultimately a "comic poet". Though I think he's doing more to return language to language, I struggle and mostly feel uninvited, which I know is its own kind of invitation. I'm much more attracted to poems by Tomaz Salamun, who's so much more aggressive about the inaccessibility of language and the juxtaposition of the symbolic with the archaic. Still

in my sleepless brine, I toss between the struggle of Ashbery and the lyric meditations of Wright-like prayer, poems say, from Michael Dickman's first book, The End of the West. Here's the first section of "My Dead Friends Come Back", something James Wright may have been saying to those small frogs killed on a highway at night:

If you want to

come back, just you

I say, it's fine

From the flattened universe

From His side

of the bed

Shave my head and put me in the ground with you surrounded by

trillium

Trillium or

something else

Shit and violets

. . . . . . .

PINA MORTE

2009-08-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

All summer, where have I been.

Amnesia of mediocrity. The walk again and again and again into a wall.

Then, school ends. I have a week off before I fall. To sleep. Read. Steal books. Touch my garden, pot fuschia, kalanchoe, kingshade. Reality as if it were a dream. The moon of a skating rink in the deep center of an abandoned mansion. The dead slump of a woman rolled into the darkening shawl of her blood--like the prey of a spider sleeping now in its raw cocoon. Dark glittering and cold. Half-eaten moon blurring over the sea. Night mist. Ghost mist.

Reading old news. Summer news.

Pina Bausch is dead.

. . . . . .

I saw Pina Bausch twice. Once ten years ago, in a performance of "Carnations". Then last year at UCLA in a performance of "Ten Chi".

"Carnations": dogs, men, and women:

Color, speech, and repetition:

Is the flower a grave.

Is Form the Burden.

And the threat of the body: Helene Cixous:

"a given love merits a given death":: Kazuko Shiraishi:

"a leap is already / a tragedy".

. . . . . . .

Come on, honey--if you've got a demonside, let's dance.

. . . . . . .

SUMMER DUBIE AND THE STORMS OF TWILIGHT

2009-08-06T02:55:00.000-07:00

It's after one and I can't sleep. I think it's the insomniac shellacked moonlight across the dark harp strings of the sea. I feel roped to the mast like one of Odysseus' crew. Stormed by blackness, rain, and the nightsong of a siren.

Pulled off my shelf Norman Dubie's The Insomniac Liar of Topo, and I don't know if he's my rope or my mad heart's need.

. . . . . ,

At Sunset

Fucking get back. I have cut

the white paper gasket

out of the apple. Yes,

it's a seed packet

like the wife's whalebone jacket

ruling the fat lamps of the Orient.

The faint straight lace of it,

sounds.

Ashes and wormwood

in a brand drawer.

The horses' testicles tossed

into straw for the cats.

Was it not mad John Clare--

that night, and it mad, last night Clare saying

it was a sound

going off in his head. A mainmast snapping.

The man standing next to you hears it.

Suddenly you're naked running through pasturage

like a woman's hair.

. . . . . ,

Dubie has this masterful phrasing that delivers a Frostlike alliterative richness to each sentence. His locomotion is matched by an unapologetic Victorian gothic sensibility, one marked by romantic visitations of a preoccupation for foreign exotic ware and a cinematic quality not unlike say late Francis Ford Coppola, Youth without Youth, imagery palimpsested over idea, as the camera pulls back upon the larger landscape of a larger historical scene. Small things carress their demons in his shadow. A remarkable intensity of the music makes his poems ever more intimate. He has Scarlatti's jealous intensity against the inevitable failures.

His eye is on the dream of history; History, like the dream inside each sleeper wakes.

History

like the linkage of the human nights of many strange and fragment visions.

. . . . . ,

The Tantric Master, Lord Marpa, Twice Dreamt of the Prophet, William Blake

The great translator thought

he had suffered the sleep of a cloudless day

in a boat of skins

on a cold and black inland sea.

Elohim, the eye of minor periphery

broke bread with him on the moonlit water.

He washed his beard and hair

and said your daughters are now stepping from furnaces.

But if we wake

by their drying looms

with a mountain of salt between me and them,

then the diarist wife

has taken these margins of yellowing shoreline

from us.

London sleeps with its cousins and sisters all winter

while naked surgeons cross through the city

bearing torches. . . well, citizens,

this is the cult of worms

who by physical inches of devotion are measuring a churchyard.

The owls forming a morbidly obese question

from Ovid.

The Word is always out weeping in the evening

refusing the hot custards, stealing

from sick and defenseless travelers.

The last Republic is out too, burning on the horizon.

Phoenician men sitting on the purple rocks

mending their nets, chewing

on roots, laugh

and then walk out across the water.

They've been doing it for centuries,

that is,-- mending their nets with laughter.

. . . . . ,

Dubie believes in ghosts, particle physics, quantum radioed spirituality. One gets a dizzy, wine-ful feeling when reading his poems. They are hallucinatory, and you don't seem to wake from them so easily. Suddenly daylight has dreamlike proportions, and personal history wormholes forward backward into the lives of artists, politicians, and other nameless lovers. Brutal, gorgeous, and playful with accident. I love these poems for their adjectives, their Shakespearean descriptions, and for their sonnetto echo.

. . . . . ,

Winter Rains off Pointe Du Hoc

The wind is a failure of forms

a calamity of content--it is

cutting the white peaks from great

green waves

making cold abbreviations of salt

that are the pith eyes on ghosts.

Across the cliffs

in the fields above the water

martyred dead rest in some soft

tropic of wind, some tropic of the hidden variable

that pierces sinew, neck,

or the helmet. The suits

praise his valor, the gunnery sergeant Nash

from Missoula, Montana, who says,

the bear nests up in the wind

with a smile of margarine,

has courage, and

the bear is my friend--

when the bear stumbles,

you ba-bas must understand,

the bear dies large

not like a pigeon at a Legionnaires convention.

. . . . . ,

My favorite poetry always brings me back to Lear. Lear and Odysseus.

Dubie is a kind of hybrid hero, Cause and Care of my solitude, my own heart's ruin.

He visits me tonight with mean wild storms.

. . . . . ,

SUMMER WITH AN OILY DARK

2009-08-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

This summer: school is not a childhood moon

California is dead cash

AKA shoot me now shoot me up my eyes

Night is a white drip

My war is thirsty

. . . . . .

"The Dull Flame of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Girls)" Bjork

"I'm In LA Trick" LMFAO

"Angel" Madonna

"Friend of Mine" Lily Allen

"Crazy In Love" Antony & the Johnsons

. . . . . .

"As of Monday, Aug 3, 2009, at least 4,330 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it begain March 2003, according to an Associated Press count."

Documented Iraqi Civilian Deaths: 92,519 - 101,006:

"Monday 3 August: 14 dead

Anbar

Saqlawiya: suicide bomber kills 5.

Babil

Iskandariya: car bomb kills 1.

Hilla: bombs kill 6.

Ninewa

Mosul: 2 killed in separate incidents."

. . . . . .

"I'm rockin' Vans / I'm in the sand / I got a rebel&vodka upin my han- / D!"

. . . . . .

Somewhere in my head is an essay that reads like an essay and not a schizolisting.

Still got a current for Fellner's idea that a good political poem should do certain things.

Still got a midnight like a white bat on my neck.

Somewhere I'm more than my blood's advertisement.

. . . . . .

A book I love: Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa.

A plant: Kingshade: bloodleaf before it's shot: that sootpurple, morbid cabbage

A dream: my grandmother dies but first she sews her pills into her pillow, and some buttons, and a gold cross, and some shapes the living cannot see but the dreamer can say thank you.

weepy falsetto: "your touch / got me looking so crazy right now / your look / your look"

. . . . .

"When our hands caress bullets & grenades,

or linger on the turrets & luminous wings

of reconnaissance planes , we leave glimpses

of ourselves on the polished hardness.

We surrender skin, hair, sweat, & fingerprints.

The assembly lines hum to our touch,

& the grinding wheel records our laments

& laughter into the bright metal.

I touch your face, your breasts, the flower

holding a world in focus. We give ourselves

to each other, letting the workday slide

away. Afterwards, lying there facing the sky,

I touch the crescent-shaped war wound. Yes,

the oldest prayer is still in my fingertips."

K's book is not so much a book against war, as it is a consideration of the warsome impulse.

His contemplation of the duality between murder and love is matched with kaleidoscopic flexibility by a muscular practice of poetic form. In three sections:

a sequence of (mostly) Petrarchan sonnets in which a historical or mythical war story as octet (Cain&Abel, Odysseus&Penelope, warriors counted by Homer and nameless tribal hunters) is mirrored by a sestet that contemplates erotic love as combat.

a sequence of more standard free verse poems that meditate on wartime implements in history (The Helmet, The Catapult, Grenade, Warhorses, Surge), Art (Guernica, The Clay Army, The Panorama, The Warlord's Garden) and Wartime places (The Hague, Twin Towers, Clouds, The Crying Hill)

a sequence of tiered couplets "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" in the voice of a bartender vet that illustrates with imagination and pinache the life of a soldier who murders, loves with desperation, loses everything, and must face the history of shame, prayer, loneliness, nationalism, hunger, and the frankly delectable brutality of his own experience.

The book is itself a sequence of variations on the theme of war in which Komunyakaa flexes his muscles, strikes with imagistic fervor, syntactical precocity, and with a direct, meaningful voice that both wonders that our human capacities for war and love are archetypal, inescapable, and violently beautiful.

"HEAVY METAL SOLILOQUY

After a nightlong white-hot hellfire

of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,

plugged into government-issued earphones,

hearing hard rock. The drum machines

& revved-up guitars roared in our heads.

All their gods were crawling on all fours.

Those bloated replicas of horned beetles

drew us to targets, as if they could breathe

& think. The turrets rotated 360 degrees.

The infrared scopes could see through stone.

There were mounds of silver in the oily dark.

Our helmets were the only shape of the world.

Lightning was inside our titanium tanks,

& the music was almost holy, even if blood

was now leaking form our eardrums.

We were moving to a predestined score

as bodies slumped under the bright heft

& weight of thunderous falling sky.

Locked in, shielded off from desert sand

& equatorial eyes, I was inside a womb,

a carmine world, caught in a limbo,

my finger on the trigger, getting ready to die,

getting ready to be born."

William Logan finds K's book overly sentimental, but I find his review of it rushed and insensitive. Who else is writing such viper-ed lyrics, with consideration for the line and a sensual rendering that takes the current wartime predicament seriously? Here, Bullet is well-reviewed and popular, but I don't understand the virtual invisibility of Komunyakaa's timely and more mature voice on the subject.

"Ah. Abu Ghraib.

Guantanamo. Lord,

if the dead could show us

where the secret graves are

we'd walk with bowed heads

along the Mason Dixon Line

till we're in a dusty prison yard

in Angola or Waycross,

or we're near the Perfume River

or outside Ramadi. You see,

the maps & grids flow together

till light equals darkness:

an eye, a nose, an ear, a mouth

telling a forbidden story,

saying, Sir, here's the skin

growing over a wound,

& this is flesh interrogating a stone."

. . . . . .

The dead body is a witness what

do the living see summers of

eucalyptus coastlines burning nightly

green soot in their mouths

bright shroud

skin

flag for my living

I'm addicted to the thought of your

absence color

of a sunset passing into ash

. . . . . . .

ELASTICATE ME

2009-07-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . .

In Defense of My Desire To Elasticize the Meaning of the Word Political:

I think there is an important distinction to make between Poetry as a political act, and an intentionally Political Poem, written with a clearly drawn purpose.

The call to my edition of OCHO was clearly driven by a political purpose. Many of the poems in it, were not.

I agree. It was the call to, and answer from, poets like yourself that was political. (Dear Prince of Pansies).

If you are going to decide to write a Political Poem, which you date, and in which you name historical events and in which you make clear your purpose which may very well be reactionary, satirical, and which you mean to demand of the reader a recognition of a political engagement, then I think you should be held accountable for that purpose.

If you are going to write about your girlfriend's death, as elegy, or exploration of that loss, you do so without considering the outside world. Precisely the reason Octavio Paz says that love is anti-social. Perhaps this lesbian's poem will live up to your expectation of a Political Poem, perhaps not. Hopefully it will live up to a consideration of itself as an "Elegy".

For that matter, if our poems, which may be driven out of "magic" into the beauty of form, have political resonance, and not a clear political statement, it may be because, though we are politically engaged poets, and though we are writing out of particular identities, we are not choosing to write in response to the burdens of the state, but toward the burdens of loss, say, love, or toward some other ineffability, some other magic. And yes, I think the state and the ineffable are odd magics. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.

I am large. I am a half-breed. I don't assume one multitude excludes the other. A Political Poem can achieve that "ineffable" quality, though most are criticized for having an overt agenda that fails it. Perhaps Reece's poem is NOT in any way political, but I still argue that Poetry, yea Art itself, IS--because it aspires to, and takes place in, imaginitive freedom. A place that can risk opposition in all manifestations.

Does this mean that politically minded poets who are not writing Political Poems should be asked to avoid considering the nature of their poetry as a political act--by which I mean, an act that cannot be governed by the state, by cultural expectations, politically rigid forces (thereby demanding that they consider their role as a citizen, even if they are not specifically writing about it)?

Does this mean that a poet writing Political Poems cannot speak to the philosophical nature of Poetry and Art at large? Or are you saying that this kind of poet thinks there is only one kind of good poem, the Political Poem? I simply don't agree with this kind of homogeneity.

Perhaps Reece is writing about his parents, and not his dying lover. Should his poem be held to a Political standard, or an Elegaic? Perhaps your final comments illustrate one way that Truth, that Gemini, is another Trickster of the Revolution.

I know that I am a gay, single, immigrant migrant worker 2nd generation American 21st century (did I mention poor? coalminer? Xmilitary, once catholic now atheist?) poet and I still feel the ineffable when I read Shakespeare, Tsvetaeva, Dostoevsky, Joszef, Hardy, Puig, Genet, Doty, Valentine, Bishop, Joyce, Sachtouris, Carson, Donne, Celan, Arenas, Keats, Virgil, Lispector, Lorca, or any number of writers whose work speaks to me, even if none of them are speaking to a Politically Specific Me.

The truth is that we need poets to act as citizens, and we need the wealth of their poems to contradict them: we need Political Poems, and elegies, love poems and murder poems, hate poems and guilt poems, prison poems and sex poems, spiritual poems and godless poems, eco-poems, ekphrastic poems, language poems, etc. and we need them to sometimes be just that. More often than not, we need them to be more than one at once.

The real question that interests me here is why Reece's relatively benign poem is, as you say, "the queer poem the New Yorker chooses to include". Why doesn't the New Yorker favor those queer poems that hold their political intentions with uncompromising and purposeful audacity? Is this evidence of a political cowardice on their part, or is this kind of political engagement something we should expect from them at all?

I don't know that we should expect every poem from a Queer poet in the New Yorker to deliver us an anthem. I do know I would like the New Yorker to print an issue that only prints Queer poets. An issue that only prints Hispanic poets. And I'd especially love an issue for Queer Hispanic poets. And why not? There are enough months in its history for a whole slew of elasticized We's. I love a good parade and I love democratic variety in all its annoying competitive dangerous splendor.

But the poet and the poem are not the same. Form can be described, approach to form can be described. Beauty is ugliness at rest. Or as Wilde put it: "All bad writing springs from genuine feeling."

I think there is room to expect both. More than both. Blooms of both.

yours, with ardor,

Miguel Murphy

. . . . . . . .

STOLEN SHALLOWS

2009-06-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

Solitude and twilight on the late shores. Cold blaze

of the waves' steady visitations. Footstep, hint of moonlight

into the soft dark sand: fist, or halo.

If I leave something white there, if I stand

my body against the night's three darknesses, ocean,

wind, and black calm . . . what

will I call this hour? Of my flesh broken

against the fleshless machinations the always resonant

flooding of time? Storm. Sickness. Waste. Belief. My frail

small human breath in the loud and emptied, emptying, gleam.

The night-flooding mind. Milkweed.

. . . . . .

I come inside and read Carl Phillips and know what it is to face that boundary between mind and world, the sensual boundary where sex and prayer collide. Speak Low, his latest book, in unafraid of the difficulty of describing human emotion, human mind. Our predicament, they seem to insist, whether it is love or history, is a metaphysical one. That is, it is faced with an understanding of abstraction hinged to experience. Plato thought that what exists lay beyond experience, but these poems use nature as a kind of relative explanation, a pathetic fallacy which helps us to try and understand our human considerations of time, love, history, faith. What I love most about Phillips is his unapologetic use of abstraction as a way to consider human experience--he uses a language most poets (perhaps schooled in the standard "show don't tell" arena of MFA programs) avoid for the most part altogether.

Patterns are of particular significance to this book: the physics of light, water, shadow, as well as the movement of animals, birds, and how the human mind might observe or interpret them. His poems have this almost archaic quality that allude to historical moments and intellectual movements of the Enlightenment at once. They are wrought, moreover, in a way that describes what is most familiar to us, though private, intimate, and even erotic: this, for example, is from the poem "Rubicon", a political point of no return, a river Caesar crossed illegally in 49 B.C., devoting himself to war against the senate, and also a game in which the loser's points are tallied for the winner:

. . . that moment in intimacy

when sorrow, fear and anger cross in unison the same face,

when at first can seem almost

a form of pleasure, a mistake as

easy, presumably, as it's forgiven."

History and philosophy here take on a life in the face of the beloved in the most alluring and attentive way. The more I read Phillips' poems, the more dissatisfied I am with a poetry of narrative(?) description. There is a weight to these lyrics that demands a secondary attention, our experience of the abstract world of emotion. How is it we've interpreted not just what we've seen in the world, but what we've felt?

. . . . . . .

Beautiful Dreamer

And when the punishment becomes, itself a pleasure?

When there's no night that goes unpunished? The larger

veins show like map work, as in Here winds a river,

here a road in summer, the heat staggering up from it

the way always, at triumph's outermost, less chromatic

edges, some sorrow staggers. Parts where the mud,

though the rains are history now, refuses still to

heal over. Parts

Untranslatable. Parts where, for the whole

stretches, vegetation sort of strangling sort of makeshift

sheltering the forest floor. To the face, at the mouth

especially, that mix of skepticism, joy, and panic reminiscent

of slaves set free too suddenly. Too soon. --Which way's

the right way? New hunger by new hunger? Spitting

on weakness? Raising a fist to it? The falling mouth falls

farther. Opens. It says, I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

. . . . . .

Eliot, in his 1929 essay, "The Metaphysical Poets" makes a distinction between the Romantics and their 17th century predecessors:

"it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

This is precisely what I love about Phillips: his thought is his experience. Symbolic, or fragmentary, the world takes place in his poem, and his speaker feels them. He does not fail, even if he does not explicate, the many disparate parts of his knowledge and identity.

I'm not a critic, I'm a commentarist--I read so that my inner life can save me from the brutal ugliness of this outer one. I write here about what I love, in a shameless way that a real critic has good reason to berate. A real critic may say something about Phillips' abstraction in that it goes too far for an average reader, that it obfuscates issues of identity, gender, race, class, all of those realms of experience we hold so specific and dear in this age. But when I read him, I feel that his poems teach me to read in a silence I had not before considered, a silence like prayer, a kind of devotion to an inner life I crave. I think if you read closely enough, you'll find these identities: the historical self and the fantasist: the poet and the philosopher: desired god and beloved flesh: all are given semblance. Yes, they are difficult to learn to read, especially, I think, for a novice reader, but they are deeply necessary in that they refuse to simplify the complexity in which the human mind renders itself.

Much more can be made of the comparisons between Phillips and Donne, nowhere perhaps more evident than in Phillips' collection The Rest of Love, in which the lover becomes a god of leather, commandment, relentless conditional belief. But this later collection seems more allusive to spiritual hymnals. Its tone is one of sad reminiscence for a spiritual freedom: to love? To understand death? To be free of bodily suffering? I'm not sure, exactly, perhaps all three. I do know that the joy of these poems comes from the middle of a pain, an isolation, that is basic, something Frost might have written about, inherent, too human, often unspoken for.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . .

Landfall

From here, I can see that ritual is but a form of

routine charged with mystery, and the mystery is faith--

whatever, by now, that might be. Twilight. The usual

eyeful of stars appearing, looking the way stars at first

always do: locked; stable.

My friend, to whom

sadness had once felt almost too familiar--Step into it,

he used to say, stare up and out from it--tells me now

he misses it. He wants to know does that mean

he's happy?

In the dark, he turns to me. The silences

rise to either side of us: silence of intimacy when

estranged from risk; of risk itself when there's no one

to take it--nobody willing to; silence, by which the dead

can be told more easily apart from the merely broken . . .

. . . . . . .

BEWITCHING HER BREATH

2009-06-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Read the first section of Jorie Graham's Sea Change after midnight. I don't want to admit this. Reading her poems aloud to myself. I cried. I don't know what for. Surf and sacrifice. They are not metaphysical so much as they are storm-full. Reading them aloud you get the feeling you are Lear, dethroned, naked, mad. Tearing your self against the elements.

I know she is unpopular to many poets who want a neat line, a nice stanza, the beauty of a clear image. I know I couldn't get through the book Never. But she's mad. She's on to something. These poems are daring for their risk in form, which I'll argue are not just pretentious, or didactic, or overly scaffolded. And if these poems are conscious of environmental politics, their politics is inward and not forced onto the reader like an agenda (much like another overlooked book, last year's Warhorses, by Yusef Komunyakaa: a timely, necessary consideration of our still warring nation.)

These poems are bewitching, I think, with a breath that reminds one of what it's like to read Whitman aloud. Whitmanesque is her breath, but not for any stylistic catalogues. Perhaps there is a likeness here in Graham's recognition that the body, in all its gross manifestations, is sacred fodder, but hers is no Whitmanian reincarnation of Blake's cosmic polarities. Graham's breath is large and contradictory and incantatory for its sheer expansiveness, its successive phrasings that are at once thought, description and prayer. Prayer, as in a seeking, a calling of the voice for a communion--with spirit, with the forces that are nature, the great instigator, the origin of movement, invisible, myopic prestidigitator, energetic, ionic, harp string. Hers is the human voice itself, thinking, moving, Joycean:

(I've copied the poem, including / to indicate indentations of smaller phrases at the right-hand margin and stanza breaks to indicate each new line at the left-page margin in her work.

Vendler remarks this is a kind of "brush work" in which each line ends with strokes of phrases. This kind of long line with "brush-stroked" finishes is stylistically consistent in Sea Changes, and one can't help but relate Graham's line to the crashing of waves, the tidal spill and suck, on and against, the shore of the page.)

Futures

Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own / whom. I look up. Own the looking at us

say the cuttlefish branchings, lichen-black, moist. Also / the seeing, which wants to feel more than it sees.

Also, in the glance, the feeling of owning, accordioning out and up, / seafanning,

& there is cloud on blue ground up there, & wind which the eye loves so deeply it / would spill itself out and liquefy / to pay for it--

& the push of owning is thrilling, is spring before it / is--is that swelling--is the imagined fragrance as one

bends, before the thing is close enough--wide- / eyed leaning--although none of this can make you / happy--

because, looking up, the sky makes you hear it, you know why we have come it / blues, you know the trouble at the heart, blue, blue, what

pandemonium, blur of spears roots cries leaves master & slave, the crop destroyed, / water everywhere not / drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human bodily

waste, & what, / says the eye-thinking heart, is the last color seen, the last word

heard--someone left behind, then no behind-- / is there a skin of the I own which can be scoured from inside the / glance--no, / cannot--& always / someone walking by whistling a / little tune, that's

life he says, smiling, there, that was life--& the heart branches with its / wild arteries--I own my self, I own my

leaving--the falcon watching from the tree--I shall torch the crop that no one else / have it whispers the air--

& someone's swinging from a rope, his rope--the eye / throbbing--day a noose looking for a neck--

the fire spidery but fast--& the idea of / friends, what was that, & the day, in winter, your lower back / started acting up again, & they pluck out the eyes at the end for / food, & don't forget / the meeting at 6, your child's teacher /wishes to speak to you

about his future, & if there is no food and the rain is everywhere switching-on as expected, / & you try to think of music and the blue of Giotto,

& if they have to eat the arms he will feel no pain at least, & there is a / sequence in which feeding takes

place--the body is owned by the hungry--one is waiting / one's turn--one wants to own one's / turn--and standing there,

don't do it now but you might remember kisses--how you kissed his arm in the sun / and / tasted the sun, & and this is your

address now, your home address--& the strings are cut no one / looks up any longer / --or out--no--&

one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river, / it

was sick, but it floated, and the eye felt the pain of rising take it in--I own you / said the old feeling, I want / to begin counting

again, I will count what is mine, it is moving quickly now, I will begin this / message "I"--I feel the

smile, put my hand up to be sure, yes on my lips--the yes--I touch it again, I / begin counting, I say, one to the swan, one,

do not be angry with me o my god, I have begun the action of beauty again, on / the burning river I have started the catalogue, / your world,

I speck tremble remembering money, its dry touch, sweet strange / smell, it's a long time, the smell of it like lily of the valley

sometimes, and pondwater, and how / one could bend down close to it

and drink.

Reading these poems quietly in your head is useless. They must be spoken aloud, they must be spoken for you to lose and catch your breath, so that the whirling can become dervish, so the austerity of the voice can grow into Whitmanesque proportions, so the prayer of being can recognize the human Job, faced with the impossible task of overcoming himself, knowing and not knowing at the same time, caught in the tempest that is human nature, troubled and vulnerable and fighting, the body poised against the storms, world and Self.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . .

STEALING THE DAYLIGHT

2009-06-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

. . .

Summer. Let's see what we can steal from our sleep.

. . .

Daylight, white fugue, my face is shadow. My name, my name.

. . .

It Is Daylight, selected by Louise Gluck for the 2008 Yale Younger Poets prize, and published in 2009, is filled with poems of strange, lucid elasticity. Not quite confessional, not quite associative in its sensibilities, Arda Collins' first book smacks of both. Her colloquial monologues are filled with the impressive meanderings of an apparent housewife, or single woman, or contemporary witch. Which is to say, a woman who does the cooking for herself, watches TV, looks at the weather in the yard, drives nowhere and comes home before dark, and probably has to take a fistful of Xanax to ward off her serious depressions. This is the character I imagine.

Her straightforward tone is deceptive in that it almost feels as though you're going to read some boring confessional prose, but you're surprised by her adept maneuvering. Collins' speaker attaches herself to the domestic, mundane details of suburban life, and skillfully delivers the reader to moments of contemporary dryness, humor, even irony.

Spring

I was making a roast.

The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room,

through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight.

Bread warmed in the oven,

and in my oven mitt, I managed to forget

that I'd ever punched someone in the face.

It seemed so long ago, I might not even have done it.

You can see in these lines a directness true of someone like Anne Sexton, without the imagistic flare. But in the confessional tone and in the volatile intentions of Collins' speaker there is something built over the feminism of the 60's. It almost feels as if you're reading the diary of a 1950's housewife, filled with, not quite restraint, exactly, but a politeness that neatly dresses some other psychological fervor.

There is a sisterhood too, to something like Frank Bidart's earlier poem "Confessional" in which his mother hangs his cat in Collins' longer poem written in sections, "Dawn". The title reminds me of William Carlos Williams' assertion that murder doesn't happen at midnight, that this is the classical error. Collins' poem surprises us with how it proposes violence and reason at the same time, with its psychopathic, calm invitation:

It's wrong to kill.

That's why,

he explained to the person,

he was holding the person's

face and throat.

Nothing was supposed to happen,

not death and not pain. No one

should be doing anything right now,

that was what he was demonstrating

to the person, who didn't know:

this was an explanation.

One gets the feeling that Collins' speaker is something from a Flannery O'Connor story, a philosophical criminal, but really they are like any of us, filled with an attention to beauty, that somehow feels so far:

11.

Gentle, painful sound,

it's coming from his face.

He doesn't want to talk,

hates the air; it moves toward the same things,

beautiful night,

beautiful night again, best missed

from afar. He thinks his personhood

in the dark in a room is the same as the dark

inside a small bag or a drawer.

Essentially, there is a deep distrust between Collins' speakers and the civility of the cultural business of waking up, having a home and family, cooking dinners, watching the light die nightly, only to start over and do it again, again, again. These are somnambulist monologues in which Collins attunes to the ultimate order of the universe, which burns us alive:

January

A night fire,

and this one really burns the house down.

At dawn it's still smoking

and I love it so much,

like the world has happened the thing

I wanted;

not like it loves me, but like,

"I know, I know,"

it says, "calamity,"

like, "why not for you, too?"

and I feel so included and ordinary

like I know what real order is

and like it exchanges a look with me

together as the sky gets lighter.

. . .

Friends and strangers, steal it if you can.

. . .

If you can steal the daylight from the daylight, you will know what fire means.

. . .

The dog, the tree.

Blind mountains.

The darkness is me. Pulled from me.

Strange, migrant.

My shadow getting up from my body

like a man climbing out of his grave.

. . .

BEAST OF TWO HUNGERS

2009-02-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

Henri Cole's latest collection, Blackbird and Wolf, has won him the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a purse of $25,000, from the Academy of American Poets.

I re-read the book last night instead of going to the bar. Imagine, in my black-hooved boots and dark jeans, touching the silver knuckle of my belt-buckle, having showered and slicked my hair, cologne on my bare neck, unshaven, satyr-rough, the spill of my hairy chest just before throwing on a shirt, and there it glanced at me from the table, there it appeared in the suddenly opened book:

Dead Wren

When I open your little gothic wings

on my whitewashed chest of drawers,

I almost fear you, as if today were my funeral.

Moment by moment, enzymes digest

your life into a kind of coffin liqueur.

Two flies, like coroners, investigate your feathers.

My clock is your obelisk, though only this morning

you lunged into my room, extravagant as Nero,

then, not seeing yourself in the sunlit glass,

struck it. Night--what beams does it clear away?

The rain falls. The sky is pained. All that breathes suffers.

Yet the waters of affliction are purifying.

The wounded soldier heals. There is new wine and oil.

Here, take my handkerchief as your hearse.

. . . . .

You can't get much better than that for a poem at midnight, especially when you're dressed for the promise of sex, like you're getting ready for new love or your funeral.. .

. . . . .

I was thinking the title to this collection is why I stole it. I was thinking the first time I read it, I wasn't impressed as I was with his pulitzer nominated Middle Earth. It seemed to me the title felt more focused than the collection itself. But re-reading it last night, perhaps I'm changing my mind.

The title isn't a reference to any phrase or poem in the book. It therefore seems to speak to some idea of the collection itself. But as you begin to read, you're not really sure what this book's purpose is--don't books have these? Don't we expect a book to deliver us? Why else give it a title and not just: Poems.

The first poems seem to be autobiographical. Indeed, the title to the first section is "Birthday" and the poems themselves relay moments of reflection close to the speaker's animal birth and mother, and then his father, poems that relay moments from childhood or reflections of it:

To Sleep

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand

that stroked my brow, "Come along, child;

stretch out your feet under the blanket.

Darkness will give you back, unremembering.

Do not be afraid." So I put down my book

and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,

the autobiographical part of me, the am,

snatched up to a different place, where I was

no longer my body but something more--

the compulsive, disorderly parts of me

in a state of equalization, everything sliding off:

war, love, suicide, poverty--as the rebellious,

mortal, I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,

my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.

. . . . .

I re-read this poem here, because I think it's secretly touching the title on the knee. Because it follows the speaker into some part of self that is not what he is, into the realm of sleep, that here in these lines is warm and corporal. Animal. A realm of instinct and not yet dream. Not yet narrative. No longer body, but being, blood in shade.

Blackbird and Wolf, two animals symbolic of two realms, wind and earth. Two predatory figures reflected in the water of the author's vision. As if the author were rapt in a caught wonderment between them, a beast between two reflected worlds.

I think part of this book's project--and I think to speak of a book's project is to speak about something found, and not necessarily intended, by the author--is a contemplation of human instinct in relation to human spirit, soul. In the poem "Ambulance", for example, Cole writes, "I felt like the personification of an abstraction". Many of the poems work as meditations that return us to an animalism that is as spiritual as it is un-thinking. Take these few lines from a poem in the third and final section of the book, "Dune" (as if this, finally, is a human realm, a place in flux, between earth, sky, and sea): "Eating the Peach"

Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.

Time and darkness mean nothing to me,

moving forward and back with my white enameled teeth

. . . . . . . . . .

Eating the peach, I feel the long

wandering, my human hand--once fin and paw--

reaching through and across the allegory of Eden

. . . . .

I don't generally like the word "soul", because it is an assumption I find self-indulgent, like using the word "God". I want to know what these words mean, because I think they do mean something that I can feel and relate to, but their religious connotations are too large, and churches have already destroyed any version of them we can believe in. But in Cole's work these assumptions don't work in any didactic sensibility. His poems work backward, in an almost Whitmanesque, even gnostic, manner, as he contemplates cosmos by considering vulgarities of the flesh. But instead moving in a Calvinistic approach, one that finds the body disgusting first and then the "soul" a thing that can redeem or save humanity from itself, these poems discover transcendent aspirations by stripping us down to the animal. They wonder that we are creatures first, with hungers, but with an ability for metaphor. Cole wonders that a Human animal can be this strange and hybrid.

In the middle section of the book, "Gravity and Center", aptly titled, as if the forces of nature affect both animal and spiritual hungers, comes the poem that best speaks to the question of the collection's title, and therefore the book's purpose:

American Kestrel

I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,

plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,

like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit

on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.

With your perfect black-and-white thief's mask,

you look like a stuffed bird in a glass case,

somewhere between the animal and human life.

The love word is far away. Can you see me?

I am a man. No one has what I have:

my long clean hands, my bored lips. This is my home:

Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,

as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,

trying to create something neither confessional

nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

. . . . .

So I've stayed up late, but stayed in, to read alone these modern sonnets. Half-dressed as I am, and ready with my own hungers. In this poem the murderous hunger of the bird is answered by the dog's contemplative, but instinctual, fear. And the human? A figure caught between confession and abstraction, "somewhere between the animal and human life". Nature and godhood, whatever that might be, loveless and literal, but drenched with selfhood, the cold, far indifference of a newly breaking but ancient moonlight.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can.

. . . . . .

I LOVED THE MODERNISTS BUT LATE

2009-02-22T01:23:00.000-08:00

On Facebook I was tagged to name 20 books that inspired or influenced me to write poetry.

Can't.

I took this to mean poems from the beginning, that woke something up. That wounded me.

Books is too hard for me, but here's 20 poems I can remember lines from, poems I am sure called to inside me some calling:

--in no order, and with, I'm sure, severe omissions I will regret later--

1. "To Small Frogs Killed on a Highway" James Wright

2. "Carrion Comfort" Gerard Manley Hopkins

3. "Letter In November" Sylvia Plath

4. "Batter My Heart Three Person'd God" John Donne

5. "Death" Federico Garcia Lorca

6. "The Kid" Ai

7. "Lamium" Louise Gluck

8. "To the Black Madonna of Chartres" Jean Valentine

9. "Hamlet" William Shakespeare

10. "Legend" Hart Crane

11. "Les Stupa" Arthur Rimaud

12. "Elegy" David St. John

13. "Herbert White" Frank Bidart

14. "Letter" Larry Levis

15. "The White Fires of Venus" Denis Johnson

16. "The Window" Lynda Hull

17. "Aubade" Philip Larkin

18. "The Waking" Theodore Roethke

19. "Take Me To the Airport" Yehuda Amichai

20. "Desert Places" Robert Frost

I'll throw in the Book of Job as a floating poem, since I went to church first and memorized those poems first, and surely learned my duende there. . .

and three from my teachers:

"The Good Lunch of Oceans" by Alberto Rios

"The Funeral" by Norman Dubie (but I love "Hummingbirds" more. Shit just read The Springhouse Poems)

"Monsoon" by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

. . . . . .

Well From Which My Name Is Drawn

2009-02-20T02:12:00.000-08:00

For all of the delicate crafting of his work, Li Young Lee absolutely fails the title to his latest collection of poetry, Behind My Eyes. I mean, really? Behind my Eyes? Why doesn't he just call it My Imagination? Is this Jill Bialosky's fault or his? What editor could let a ridiculous title like this go to print without some objection, some kind of innate scrutiny? Where were all the little red flags? Where were the voices and champions of this work?

Title: existing only in name, titulus

Title: a door into some unseen realm

Title: a wind through the darkness one can feel but not see

Title: what I call myself in a dream, curseword or ambition

Title: the question asked over again by the sea,

asked over again by heartbeat,

by fleeting absence, by flickering heat

Title: thirst without need

What I'm trying to say, Friends and Strangers, is that from a title what I want most is:

a provocative, compelling statement, that does the job of naming the true spirit of the book in all its repetitions, its ambitions, its direct and abstract mirrors.

I love this book by Li Young Lee, but I really have an aversion to its signpost. So much that re-reading it I felt compelled to do what I don't think either Lee or his editor at Norton bothered to do: ask the book for its name.

The phrase itself comes from the final poem of the book, "Station", a wonderful songlike piece that invents the names of places we might begin or end, a poem that demonstrates the kind of care, and even one strategy of Lee's book, that of poetic naming:

"Your attention please.

Train number 9, The Northern Zephyr,

destined for River's End, is now boarding.

All ticketed passengers,

please proceed to the gate marked Evening.

Your attention please. Train number 7,

Leaves Blown By, bound for The Color of Thinking

and Renovated Time, is now departing.

All ticketed passengers may board

behind my eyes."

You can see how playful is this lullaby of a poem. The imaginary and poetic titles of gates and trains and places offer us a human metaphor for distance, memory in time, death and love. Ultimately, it is a great satisfaction that the poem takes its game seriously:

"Please leave your baggage with the attendant

at the window marked: Your Name Sprung from Hiding.

An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue.

You may board at either end of Childhood."

But what works in the context of a ballad, fails as the title of a collection. As a title, this playful phrase reads obliquely, banal, and worse, it is completely forgettable.

Title: a gate upon the heart, a name upon the gate,

a street, a country, a number, a year

When I look at the cover of this book I have no intuition toward the collection, no way to read even the first poem. The book is doing all the work on its own to be itself, to be it's own naming, and it's frustrating. We are immediately displaced. As readers we feel as though we have not been welcomed. It's so unfortunate to be so unnamed.

Here are some titles of poems that at least sound like better names for this collection:

Self-Help for Fellow Refugees

Immigrant Blues

My Favorite Kingdom

First World

Little Ache

Changing Places in the Fire

The Lives of a Voice

Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics

Station

Some of them are better than others, some feel immediately more marketable, though some feel quaint, not right, but none of them are as bad as what's been printed.

On my own copy of this book I have scratched out Behind My Eyes

and pasted the letters of the poem I think best speaks to the book as a book:

gate: question: ambition: mirror:

My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey by Li Young Lee

I have done this so that I can love the book more completely, and so that it can belong to me. I have done this because the poem seems to answer the many reflections in the book--it is the book's compliment:

1. Lee's poetic obsession with childhood as a source of delight and mystery

2. Lee's ability to make an epistle of metaphor, the poetry between language and meaning

3. Lee's ability to make the question of childhood the question of culture

4. Lee's ability to write love as one poem, a metaphorical palimpsest that layers the difficult attractions between husband and wife, child and parent, refugee and adopted country, immigrant and home, human memory and nature, God and humankind, waking and dreaming.

In other words, we are each of us a refugee from heaven,

child of Time, an apple fallen from the arms of a dream, mother or father,

we are in this place of waiting, of naming, of praying,

of bewilderment and sadness and joy. Childhood:

Death and love.

We are refugees of heaven. We are home.

In this way, his political poems are love poems are religious poems are poems of memory and song.

The new title, the true title of his book: My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey, relays the humility of his work, his ability to speak to us quietly and directly, domestically, about the spiritual life, that is, the life of feeling in time. As in the journey that we make as immigrants from one country to another, from Childhood to Death, from time to memory, from love to history, from making the bed in the morning to talking in bed until we fall asleep talking. As in the poet's prayerful readiness to depart, all the while staying with us in his metaphor:

"My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey"

Dreamed some rain so I could sleep.

Dreamed the wind left-handed

so I could part its mane and enter

the dance that carries the living, the dead, and the unborn

in one momentum through the trillion gates.

Dreamed a man and a woman

in different attitudes of meeting and parting

so I could tell the time,

the periods of the sun,

and which face my heart showed,

and which it displayed to a hidden fold.

Dreamed the world an open book of traces

anyone could read who know the language of traces.

Dreamed the world is a book. And any page

you pause at find you

where you breathe now,

and you can read the open

secret of who you are. As you read,

the other pages go on turning, falling

through the page before you, the sound of them the waves

of the waters you walk beside

in your other dreams of the world

as story, world as song, world

you dreamed you were not dreaming.

Dreamed my father reading out loud to me,

my mother sewing beside me, singing

a counting song,

so I wouldn't be afraid to turn

from known lights toward the ancestor of the light.

It isn't the best poem of the book, and it doesn't have the best lines of the book. But it does act as a well from which the book's refracted purposes can be drawn. And just listen to what a fabulous, dramatic effect the new name has in relationship to the book's poems. One has only to consider the first poem of the book, My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey, in which a figure is literally caught in a posture between light and dark, considering his own existence, a kind of ars poetica in which the speaker must translate one darkness from another: mind from world: poetry from experience:

"In His Own Shadow"

He is seated in the first darkness

of his body sitting in the lighter dark

of the room,

the greater light of day behind him,

beyond the windows, where

Time is the country.

His body throws two shadows:

One onto the table

and the piece of paper before him,

and one onto his mind.

ONe makes it difficult for him to see

the words he's written and crossed out

on the paper. The other

keeps him from recognizing

another master than Death. He squints.

He reads, Does the first light hide

inside the first dark?

He reads: While all bodies share

the same fate, all voices do not.

What I'm saying, Friends and Strangers, is that I can't recommend this book enough.

Steal it if you can, but scratch out that terrible title (shame to his editor!)

and write in for him its true name.

. . . . . . . .

DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE BRAYLESS THREE

2009-02-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

I just read three stolen books, and not one of them is worth their weight in this poem by John Ashberry:

Floating Away

As virtuous men float mildly away

so do our minutes hasten toward the rain,

some speckled, some merely numinous,

and so it goes. The Traveler and his Shadow

find much to concur on. The wreckage of the sky

serves to confirm us in delicious error.

Congratulations on your life

anyway.

Not even doing it

makes up for the loss it guaranteed.

Only a 28-year water supply

shields us from the desert.

Sticker shock awaits plaid gutter boys

pissing out over a stream. Surely if you were

going to count that against him the others would befall too.

That's not what he was saying, Uncle.

We're going to have a friendly chat with him

in the belief that someone will vote for you.

Pleated regret that is easier

by the end of the war inhibits only cats.

Some other holy man was here before

and the eunuchs made much over him.

In the small garden a harmonica was heard braying.

. . . . . . .

WHAT I DID IN CHICAGO AWP, 09

2009-02-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

THURSDAY:

The Aphorism: Life Is Short

Union: A Conversation in Poetry

Diverging Lines: Understanding the Evolution of Contemporary Latino Poetry

The City: Real and Imagined

Six Ways of Looking at Stevens

Poetic Responses to AIDS

American Hybrid: The Meeting of Extremes

FRIDAY:

The Poets of the American Hybrid

The Poetry of Thom Gunn

The Academy of American Poets Presents: Frank Bidart and Mary Jo Bang It

A Tribute to a Stranger: Thomas James

SATURDAY:

Art to Art: Ekphrastic Poetry

Prison Poets: Teaching Behind the Razor Wire

Tomaz Salamun Reading

What I Really Did at AWP, Chicago 09

2009-02-17T00:35:00.000-08:00

Draped my black coat over the fast noise and names.

Best Manuscript titles: Cocktails with Hitler, Granny's Taco Needs a Drink and Other Children's Stories, and the Pulitzer prize-winner: Breakfast With A Wet Gun.

A lapdance in Starbucks, or just Starbucks.

Hot chocolate in Kitty O'Shea's. A gay couch. No I am Not a wet dream.

Sean you were my best accomplice. You're going to burn in hell.

In the French Gardens, Lips and I watched the servants interrupt the chandeliers.

My valentine with the breakfast guy, who likes to be peed on. For REALs.

Getting a nibble from Lemon. Pockets full. Eyes full.

Limon has secrets in her rainblack hair. Behave!

Moleface ruins my coffee but hands me his card.

In the bathroom I meet the mouth for later. Later the snow falls on our dream.

I defend the Eyepatch. The Eyepatch and I eat our miseries and then flee.

I text the leathergod, and he says Miguel.

Justice keeps her in line, good morning bitch. Did you sleep well? Good girl.

The books I wanted were already stolen.

If you tell anyone I'll deny it completely.

DON'T BE MY VALENTINE

2009-02-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

So I just got home from AWP, Chicago and opened my print copy. It's truly satisfying. This is a beautiful little collection and to see these poems in print is especially gratifying since I've had to endure some ridiculous criticism. Don't hate ladies. If you didn't bother sending anything in, then shut your hole. I read what was offered and listened to what was offered and turned things down and struggled over editorial suggestions and asked for more and asked for cuts and bled and cried with the worst and best of them, and in the space of my deadline these were my heroes. Not enough big names for you? Too many bloggers for you? Guess you should have passed around the notice. Guess you should have asked your friends and teachers and students to send something. Guess you should have sent something yourself.

In other words, I'm not apologizing. There are some very fine poems here and some very hard-working poets. I'm proud of it, and if you actually read it, you're sure to find a poem or two you like. What can you ask of any book of poems, anyway, except that it give you one or two memorable deaths?

OCHO #22

read it.

buy it.

A KISS IN NO KNOWN YEAR

2009-01-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

A night like being in love. The winter night in California, cool, not cold, bearable chill heightening the senses, the sunset over the ocean and not the mountain, Orion and the Dogs close, like the backdrop of some great play in the theatre dark, the planets bright, the stars failing like flames like the sound off the palm trees near the rooftop, like the ocean in the distance. Making ghosts of us. Someone's birthday, all the devastations. Someone spying us through the window.. .

Finished 2666 at the half moon. It hasn't finished with me. I don't even really know who to compare it to, and what's more, I don't want to compare it. Deliberately wrought. Satisfying in the way a Greek Tragedy is, yet the plot is unspoken, navigated by the constellation of outer lives. We draw close to the mystery of knowing who the murderers are. We draw close to the mystery of knowing, and remain in the mystery of not the known--though how we get there is through knowledge--we know what murder is, we know who murderers are (novelists, politicians, good fathers)--but we remain in the mystery of the unknown. How personal history delivers all there is of experience, and human experience can only go so far. Human knowledge, imperfect, filled with our own violent frailty, and still sacred for being our own, our total ability. We draw close to it, we misinterpret it entirely.. .

The mystery of the unknown. Outside of plot is the plot, which is to say whole lives are the plot, being lost and knowing all that being lost entails, our genuine loves and brutal lies and how the two seem to be two sides of the same creature we pretend we don't understand, alien, and true self, as in the dream side or the art side, where we are more ourselves. True to both faith and hunger, which are not the same things, like work and ambition. How the line between good and evil is a kind of mirror.

Then kissing him on the California rooftop, the palm trees burning madly, the grit of drug on his tongue, the perfectly awful swoon, the cold air and his hot face and a leg lifted up and an arm just pressing along the underneath of it firmly, it felt like I was a character in someone else's strange novel, I was inside a year traveling through the cosmos at the speed of light. I wanted all of my memories lit like this, like a chapter in the novel where two lovers bite each other in the castle, years before one of them is mercilessly murdered, years before they know what they've lost is remembered secretly and best, a wine in the darkness when you're old, very old, remembering what it is to be young, unspilled, old and still able to taste it, tang of salt and shit, of the infinite, a flavor beaten and devoured in the myth of ourselves, yielding the scarlet drops that mock us. I kissed him there, I bit him, I became briefly aware, I bled like an icon of eternity.

BIG MONEY LOVE AT THE PINK PONY

2009-01-07T00:24:00.000-08:00

All criticism is ultimately a nightmare

Roberto Bolaño

I started the new winter session this week and started some serious effortful hours for reading and writing every day. Have to to get some real work done and not be outdone by the world, i.e. work, sleep, and television. Did I mention cookies? Video games? Porn?

I've seen a few comments that Bolaño's 2666 is "weird", which is a comment I just don't understand, especially if you watch the nightly news. On the treadmill today in the gym I watched a program that was muted, silently flashing still photographs of a man in a cowboy hat and a black suit lifting two bottles of champagne into the air and a small building with absurdly large and silken neon lettering, a few green trees and an empty gravel parking lot, and read the transcript of the case of a lottery winner who carried a briefcase with 1/2 million bucks in it in the passenger seat of his Ford truck. Parked it at the Pink Pony where a stripper waitress emptied two blue pills into his second drink. Woke up the next morning with a rock through his pickup window and his money gone all except for a packet of 5 grand left out by the dumpster accidentally. I remembered the story from a few years ago when I worked in downtown LA for Transamerica Insurance and collected the best news stories every day purely for entertainment.

I think Bolaño recognizes the pure odd mystery of daily encounter. He doesn't even mention the murders of Mexican women until page 287. We're like his characters who use up our days with failed loves, elusive ambitions, familial poverties, crude humor. We don't see the myth we're living in. By this point we're traveling with a black american journalist who's mourning his fresh dead mother. Why not? The history of a person's experience doubled by the complicated tendrilic history of their nation, nailed down by the crimes of men, or, our strange relationships to good men, who are secret beasts, who commit crimes. He's in northern Mexico and he overhears a conversation of someone who's worked on the mass murder case:

"What does a child do when he's afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he's about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren't invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes."

There's more here, more importantly addressing the way we write the significance of crimes, murders, how slaves could be massacred by thousands but a murder-suicide of a married couple could make the papers Europe-wide. Ditto for the unsolved torture and murder of several hundred missing women in Northern Mexico, near a border town, a whole civilization itself lit with corruption and desperation and hunger. I like these pages because they seem to set forth one triumph of the book, to give us the new testimonies, to write the evil inside us, the madness of our existence, in a way that will strike us meaningfully.

This passage reminds me of my lecture last night on Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". What I love about Bolaño's work is that it's characters find themselves in "mad pursuits" of mythic proportions, and like us, they don't seem to know it.

I want other "weird" novels on the same shelf with this one, say

The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World by Haruki Murakami

Pubis Angelicus by Manuel Puig

The Assault by Reinaldo Arenas

My Mother: Demonology by Kathy Acker

They Call Me the Breeze by Patrick McCabe

The Castle by Franz Kafka

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter

It's a really imperfect list, I can't seem to make up my mind.s.

Well, I don't want to be a critic anyway.

I'm after a different kind of monster.

SIGNS OF THE NEW YEAR

2009-01-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

One dream: I wake up and realize that my teeth are made of wood. From the boatdock, damp, lightly frayed, bits of algae breathing in their ugly lacework. I inspect them in the mirror. I can't believe it, and I'm scared to chew anything or close my mouth. I don't want them to ruin.

On the way home from Arizona: I see three dead coyote. Roadkill, still wearing their black eyeliner. Asleep in their surprise anesthetic. You can't read their true faces until the fur mask is gone. Little baggaged death accidents.

Friends and Strangers,

What is this the year of?

MY LOVERS IN THE YEAR OF RAT

2008-12-21T01:41:00.000-08:00

OR A SHORT CONDENSED LIST OF TEN (OR SO) BOOKS I COULDN'T AND DIDN'T WANT TO LIVE WITHOUT IN NO, OR, IN A SUBLIMINALLY PARTICULAR, ORDER:

preluded by a few lines from Sabines' book, translated by Jeffrey Levine and Ernesto Trejo:

So here's how it's done: you put on your mask,

assume your voice, embroider your dreams.

Put on the face of a lover,

the wounded face,

the contented smile,

Monday and Tuesday, and the month of March,

and the year of human solidarity,

you eat on the hour as best as you can,

and sleep and make love,

and go on secretly rehearsing for the final act

that no one will witness.

Hallelujah Blackout by Alex Lemon

Little Boat by Jean Valentine

Tarumba by Jaime Sabines

Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart

Exceptions and Melancholies by Ralph Angel

Envelope of Night by Michael Burkard

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

Truant Lover by Juliet Patterson

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa

The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort

Theories and Apparitions by Mark Doty

Hagiography by Jenn Currin

Totem by Gregory Pardlo

A Worldly Country by John Ashberry

"he didn't look like a good loser, a dark angry expression on his face, his head down, and while the men, speaking French, scattered along the porch in search of glasses of ice-cold champagne, the lady went up to the little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse's reins in his left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho's father headed off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher, as the lady recalled, which didn't stop her from following him without protest when he took her by the hand and led her to the other side of the house, to a place where a wrought-iron pergola stood, bordered by flowers and trees that the lady had never seen in her life or which at that moment she thought she had never seen in her life, and she even saw a fountain in the park, a stone fountain, in the center of which balanced on one little foot, a creole cherub with smiling features danced, part European and part cannibal, perpetually bathed by three jets of water that spouted at its feet, a fountain sculpted from a single piece of black marble, a fountain that the lady and the little gaucho admired at length, until a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher had lost in the deep folds of memory), telling her in brusque and serviceable English that her husband had been looking for her for some time . . .

(I'm just in the watching the first petal of this novel curl black at the edge of its rose, but goddamn I'm drinking it, Bolano's strange year. This interlude is an excerpt of one sentence that dreams for five pages!)

2666 by Roberto Bolano

The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

The White Book by Jean Cocteau

Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Sea by John Banville

prologue: I did a bump or two of Heidegger off a mirror. In the mirror nearness is a gathering up of space, where we dwell among that absence which is our own, that we cradle, that we build to remark upon the abyss--only I have a Dyonisian tongue and would go a step further than Heidegger to say we dwellers seek monument and revolt. The boy was abducted by an alien, but they left the goat part behind. The poem was not abducted. It was a cup, a bridge, an embrace to frame that darkness which we know alone and fear and pray to. Darkness of the embrace that out of space and noplace beams us up into the Unseen. how Shadow drinks up loss. Chaos. Laughter like the sea. Liquid of the Year, I'll hold you here.

. . . . . .

BACK IN A WINTER INDEX

2008-12-20T00:55:00.000-08:00

Finished the semester, finally have some late nights to myself again, long hours for reading and listening.

Read handfuls, heartfuls, dreamfuls:

think there is a conversation between Adolfo Bioy Casares Asleep In the Sun and Kafka's The Trial, for their similar protagonists who can't believe their predicaments, though I think Casares has a better sense of humor. His outcome is not less disturbing.

Miguel is inside an index of slightly horrifying hardons, and he likes it. Guest's much slobbered over book is worth the rave, but for me his best poems touch depthless and so beautiful sorrows:

"But here in the night made of alarms

a train shambles

through the dark

and it's hard to hear the trees speaking

the language we made

for them. Or I did

thinking of you

who taught me regret.

There are nights when I dream

of stolen oranges.

How we ran away with the sun in our arms."

I like to think about his line breaks and what Freud would say about the anxiety of a line break. There's so much of Guest as a writer in them, impulse wefted into craft. Like too his joy in tangent, though in many of the poems I start to feel as if I'm reading prose, not because he's writing prose but maybe because what I want from a book of poems is not the same as what I want from a poem. One or two of these at a time last longer for me.

Playing a lot of video games too on playstation. Starwars I'm mindlightning and saberswift. Dead Space alien alone, mutations and weaponry.

Next week's my birthday, finding a proper silence for it. A proper descent. Listening to Bach arias and Brahms piano variations on a theme by Paganini, and Pink's new album too.

secret birthday: Dexter marathon. Bolano's 2666. Gifts to me.

Doty, am I your theory or your apparition? Goddamn that clapping poem, that cathedral of the imagined self that is real.

Glad--not the right word--helped by, affirmed, hopeful that in his New and Selected only two poems from his first book were included! And only five from his second!

Fire from Fire, marry me! You're homo-hot.

Speaking of marriage, Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy--symmetrical little novel built around the cold myth and death of an eccentric who gets herself disowned for love. Temperamental passions, I prefer Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy. But she blurts out little gems like this:

"Look for that little short one, about the flower that grows on the suicide's grave, die Armesunderblum, the poor-sinner's-flower. Oh that's the flower for me, Nellie; die Arme-sunder-blum! she drew the word out until it was a poem in itself."

Miguel is aspiring to be a romantic.

DREAMING THE COMMON LANGAUGE

2008-11-11T09:21:00.000-08:00

Friends and Strangers, read my piece about the recent struggles for gay couples to legitimize their marriages at Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet:

Tonight I am a parade of love and anger.

JOYSAD IRONY

2008-11-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm celebrating today.

I'm mourning today.

My state, my country, elected a person of color, a figure of change and real hope for the future.

My state has failed to oppose the bigotry of Proposition 8, now making illegal some 18,000 gay marriages.

My President has spoken to me personally in his acceptance speech, inviting "gays and straights", naming us, including us in the national discussion. I was deeply moved, and if I had any doubts or misgivings, this small phrase made him my friend. I found myself wanting to follow him, wanting to fight for a better country, wanting to believe in him.

I believe in him.

Today in California, my own gay married friends are now burdened by the fact that the great draws in voting by people of color, my people, who have come out to vote in historic numbers, have also come out to vote against us with Prop. 8.

There was a great rally downtown for those supporters of Prop. 8 last weekend that I found particularly offensive. All people of color. Of which I am one. My people. Latin American, Mexican, Korean, Chinese, African American. Signs in other languages. Crosses. A united front against gay marriage. Against equality. Against me. Their signs read: "A vote for Prop.8 equals freedom for marriage." But they cannot disown me.

The African American organizer for Prop. 8 said last night on television that Black voters want to preserve the family for children to have a mommy and a daddy.

If we want to protect children, why are we bringing them to hate rallies? Why are we having them stand on street corners screaming for Prop. 8? It's obscene. What exactly are we protecting? Those who support Prop. 8 are not motivated by mathematics, logic, empathy, and certainly not love, especially considering the divorce rates in this country:

50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.

According to enrichment journal on the divorce rate in America:
The divorce rate in America for first marriage is 41%
The divorce rate in America for second marriage is 60%
The divorce rate in America for third marriage is 73%

Prop. 8 is fanatical and filled with prejudice. Why trust gay men and women to cut your hair, write your television shows, do your banking, file your taxwork, drive your buses, serve as your councilmen, your senator woman, operate on your bodies, teach your children, write up your life insurance policies, pay taxes, bag your groceries, pour your coffees, sell you clothing, defend your legal cases, act as your shrink, and in my case, serve as your literature professor, why trust us to have civic responsibilities, to perform and participate in business, government, religious life, the arts, education. . . and then tell us that you don't believe we should be able to marry. Why wouldn't you trust us to believe in love, to choose for ourselves who to make lifelong commitments to, to pursue the sacred endeavors of a spiritual pursuit with another person, to make for ourselves family, to have a ceremony and to have legal rights that endorse that ceremony?

Friends and Strangers, what, really, would be so bad if you and your family were invited to my wedding to celebrate with me, to share in my happiness for a moment? What would be so wrong with fostering this joy and human friendship?

Come break bread with us. We'll eat cake. We'll get drunk for love. There'll be a D.J.

It will be a celebration, but not today.

Today we have to think about what to tell the children of 18,000 gay marriages in this state. What should we say, that we believe their family is a lie, that it does not exist? Do we tell them their parents of 5 years, 15 years, 27 years, 30 even 40 years of partnership are null, void, illegal? Is this our "civic" duty? It is a profoundly sad day. When our humanity is denied by our friends, family, country men and women.

Separate is NOT equal.

Haven't we learned anything from the Civil Rights movement?

People of Color, in my California, why do you H8?

. . . . . . . .

BARACK OBAMA, NUESTRO PRESIDENTE!

2008-11-04T20:04:00.000-08:00

""If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

"It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

"It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America."

. . . . . . . .

WHITE APPLES, GREEN APPLES, THIEVES

2008-10-28T00:54:00.000-07:00

On of the books I slept with last month is Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort, a bilingual text translated from the Belarusian by the Wrights (Franz and Elizabeth).

Belarus, if you don't know, was part of the Russian block, and it has a volatile political history. It has been a "part" of Russia ("White Russia") Lithuania in the 13th century, and Poland. It's been split between Poland and Russia, and in WWII the Nazis occupied it. Most of the fallout of the Chernobyl explosion of the 80's blew into it and since its independence in 1991, it's had a terrible time with the corrupt authoritarian leader, Lukashenka, who has cancelled elections, run a police "death squad", and been criticized by the EU and US for human rights violations.

That's a little history.

The author has published a single volume of poetry in Belarus in 2005, I'm as Thin As Your Eyelashes, a title that I find curiously confusing. Is it a problem of the translation or an abyss between us culturally? The poem itself is without title, a mere four lines, just the phrase. I'm not sure what it means, and though it feels provocative, it also feels melodramatic. Delicate, but dangerous. Vision, but with the silken threat of pain. Is it related somehow to the political history of the place? Despite my difficulty with her original title, and in contrast to my small frustration, here's the opening poem to this English translation, both morbid and archetypal:

Belarusian I

even our mothers have no idea how we were born

how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world

the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing

we couldn't tell which of us was a girl or a boy

we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread

and our future

a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon

was performing there

at the highest pitch

bitch

we grew up in a country where

first your door is stroked with chalk

then at dark a chariot arrives

and no one sees you anymore

but riding in those dark cars were neither

armed men nor

a wanderer with a scythe

this is how love loved to visit us

and snatch us veiled

completely free only in public toilets

where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing

we fought the summer heat the winter snow

when we discovered we ourselves were the language

and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes

when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands

when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes

when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes

and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive

we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers

as if into bomb shelters

to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future

was leaping through the fiery hoop

of the sun

. . . . . . .

I don't know much about V., whose name is vampiric and lovely, except that her bio says she lives in the states and a few of these poems reference U.S. cities: "Fall In Tampa" "Florida Beaches" and "New York". She's won a number of awards overseas and this collection is published by Copper Canyon. Thankfully this bilingual collection fares with a better title, one that reflects her work, or at least this collection of translations, to a much more satisfying degree. A work in which human suffering is partially the work of governments, human bureaucracies. I wonder, incidentally, what an "American" poem would look like, a brother to this poem, in which an American author attempted to mythologize the American experience. (In the peripheries I'm thinking of a line or two by Ai. . . )

What I love about this book: it thinks politically without serving up a "political" poem. I'm thinking of those poems with cities, or countries, or types of people as titles: those mentioned above and "White Trash" "Berlin-Minsk" "Polish Immigrants" and "Belarusian II". These are poetic portraits in which we get a sense of both being part of these places/people as well as the mythos of our experience there. Take these stanzas from "New York":

a gigantic pike

whose scales

bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke

found the fire that gave it birth

champagne foam

melted into metal

glass rivers

flowing upward,

things you won't tell to a priest

you reveal to a cabdriver

What we find in this stanza is true of most of her poetry--her sense of metaphor is energetic, a motivating force of the language. In fact, her best poems are lyric and satisfyingly difficult in their use of abstraction. We might call this surrealist technique, though it seems to me a way to pursue an archetypal truth about places and people. If poetry is a way to express the hidden experience, the experience hidden beneath the dull journalism of even our most difficult experiences, our politicized lives, then here is V. Mort pillaging the depths:

Hospital

when someone spends a lot of time running

and bashing his head

against a cement wall

the cement grows warm

and he curls up with it

against his cheek

like a starfish medusa

and senses

how the body uses memory

to bind it to the earth

and he waits there for the moment

when his eyes turn

into wobbling tops

and the whole colorful universe

appears like the deep

hole in the sink

. . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

A KING CAN MARRY A KING

2008-10-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

So in case anyone was confused,

of COURSE I'm voting!

I had a minute in those debates where I was shocked and offended enough to say it to myself (I'm not voting for these creeps I love), but it was short-lived, angry, and really not useful.

In California we're worried about Proposition 8, which tries to overturn the legality of Gay Marriage in our state. It's pretty important, since many couples have had their marriages legalized, illegalized, legalized, and now under the threat of being illegalized again.. . The whole thing really highlights the absurdity of the issue, and the idea of marriage itself. What's so offensive is the fact that a marriage can be nullified arbitrarily by the state.

The offensive have taken a lot of money to play these awful commercials constantly on our televisions: a small girl comes home from school with a kid's book: Kings and Kings. Mommy, she squeals delightedly, today I learned that a King can marry a King and I can marry a Princess! The mother's face darkens with concern and the law professor from Christian Conservative Pepperdine University steps forward to tell us that this scenario is already happening in Massachusetts and parents have no recourse to complain.

As if a child's book could make you gay.

As if schools teach anything about marriage in the first place.

As if children don't watch television and listen to the radio and use computers and don't know that there are different kinds of people all over the place.

I remember Crane's invitation:

Come, it is too late, too late,

to risk alone the light's decline.

Here's a youtube video I like, that spoofs the mac commercials in our interest:

DEAR AMERICA, DON'T BE MY VALENTINE

2008-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

So this has been bothering me since the Vice Presidential Debates:

Already upset by the Republican approach to just about every spectrum of the political agenda, I have decided to vote for Obama. It took me a second. I LOVED Clinton. Bring her back, I say.

O.k., then I got over it. The more I see McCain (fearmongering) and the more I see Palin (I mean, the first time she travels out of the country, she makes sure to get footage of herself firing an AK-47? Really?) the more proud and necessary and importantly I feel about my vote for the Obiden ticket.

Then in the middle of the Vice Presidential Debates: the gay question. The uncomfortable shifting in the room. The squirm on Palin's face when she insinuates that she has gay friends and family. The awful burst of laughter from the audience and the candidates to be relieved of talking about us, the gays. And that cold, sure, resonant NO, when Biden firmly responded that he does not believe in gay marriage.

Why haven't I read more about this?

Friends and Strangers, let me tell you, this HURT me. I am a tax paying, loyal, responsible citizen. I am trusted to teach college students how to think and write critically. I contribute to my community and to society in a significant, if not seriously under-appreciated way, poorly PAID FOR BY THE STATE. Here I am, an intelligent and involved member of this country, and my own party, who I believe in, who I've been fervently speaking for, arguing for, who I've sent my hard earned money to, has now openly and nationally disavowed their support for me. I've never felt so marginalized in my life. Growing up Chicano, I knew, was often told, but I never felt I was on the outside of anything. I had rights. And I knew it. I was different sure, but I felt in myself a sense of equal humanistic footing. I was shocked into disbelief when I was called a "spick" in the hallways of my traditionally white Arizona college prep high school. But my friends of color and I felt a sense of self-propriety. No one could mistreat us legally. We knew we were equal.

And with one cruel word, one coldly spoken, monolithic no, I suddenly felt that I did not belong, that those things I believed in did not qualify me to be held as an equal. I don't think a word has ever hurt me as much as this one, spoken so clearly and easily and awfully to our nation.

This whole conversation about the difference between civil and religious ceremony is a load of crap--it's a distraction, a way of saying we're not the same and that we shouldn't be treated the same. It's a way of minimizing the significance of the relationship and the idea of the relationship between gay couples.

I don't want to get married. I never have. But I do want to know that as a human being among others, I can be allowed the idea of a sacred pursuit. Not to mention the legal rights associated with that devotion! The great irony is that I've written and officiated three of my sisters weddings and one of my cousin's.

I don't know how it feels for gay republicans to be so openly refused by their party. For myself, I felt disappointed, orphaned, disavowed, broken-up with, abandoned, and alone. What a bunch of pussies! Or as they say on Dan Savage's Lovecast: what a bunch of scrotes! I really loved Joe Biden, trusted him, shit I even thought he should be the one running for president! But hearing that response, and the pat "well at least you both agree on something"--so that the ONE point that both parties can agree on is the ridiculous idea that gays should be able make a sacred pursuit together, to make and pursue promises, to create a kind of ceremony as monument, and to have the same economic rights recognized by the state as our neighbors and family and co-workers and employees, well

It made me feel like I didn't want to vote for anyone. I paced my room. I'm not voting. I am so not voting. Disbelief, and a realization. I mean, what are we? Persons criminal. Profane.

I've come around, but I'm not done being angry and in love.

So here it is. I was asked early this year to edit an issue of OCHO magazine, due out February 2009. Dear gay Friends and Strangers, dear Fags, Dikes, Trannies, Transvestites, He-she's, She-males, Tomboys and Mamas-boys, Lesbos, Fudge-packers, Muff-divers, Bears, Twinks and Closet Freaks, Butch and Lipstick, Hairdresser or Harley-rider, Republican, Democrat, Independent, Green--Dear family, dear people of color and other,

Friends and Strangers, please forward this to everyone you can. Please forward this to your friends, family, peers, professors and students:

This is my call for queer poetry, essays on poetics, and reviews of works by queer poets for the 2009 OCHO magazine DEAR AMERICA, DON'T BE MY VALENTINE issue.

Your work does not have to address the politics of this post. The purpose of this issue is to highlight and bring together a strong sampling of diverse work by queer authors in the contemporary American poetry scene.

Please submit your work as a single word doc attachment, pasting your cover letter and bio in the message itself, to: dontbemyvalentine@hotmail.com

. . . . . . .

FRIDAY NIGHT CONSTELLATION

2008-10-10T19:14:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . . .

Tonight I'm staying in with a book. Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl. I've loved him since his first novel, The Borderliners, about a boarding school in Iceland and the young boys who survived it. I think I even tried to write something about the boy sneaking out to the shed to steal gasoline and set the school aflame. . . swans on fire, swans of ash, or some such nonsense.

Haven't been able to put away my September Reads. They're littering my desk. I guess I'm not finished. Or they're not finished with me.

Re-read Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Thom Gunn's Boss Cupid

Frank Bidart's Watching the Spring Festival

Yusef Komunyakaa's Warhorses

Antonio Lobo Antunes' What Can I Do When Everything's Burning

Jenn Currin's Hagiography

Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles

Adam Zagajewski's Eternal Enemies

Jaime Sabines' Tarumba

Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears

A chapter from Georges Batailles' The Absence of Myth

and one from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror

They're a pretty noisy crowd here. Maybe in the next few nights I'll take on a few of them so I can put them away. Constellation of poems, lines, feelings. . . "This is how dead men haunt their murderers dreams."

Windy here, off the beach.

Up in the leaves, a storm. Not really,

just the eucalyptus acting like the sea.

. . . . . . .

DEATH GREEN KISSES

2008-10-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

. "If greenness

were woven into weather,

. into jackfruit & lotus

blooms, how could there be

. death in my mouth?"

Some lines from Yusef Komunyakaa's long poem, "Autobiography of My Alter Ego", from his new work WarHorses.

Today I spent about 3 hours trying to get a prescription about a month old. You wouldn't believe the disconnected, indifferent, careless, and hurtful experience. Phone call after phone call after impatient pharmacist after phone call. My prescription in her hands. White and cheap in the Long's CVS off Main and Rose. Two bottles 50 bucks I don't have. Finally, after the humiliation and argument, I pay what I don't have.

The death in my mouth is green. I'm raving envy. The war in my life is the body's restless privations, the infinitessimal clocks springing loose into dust and perfume. I'm flaring out, bluing to cold so slowly it seems like I'm a flowering corpse of a man. Walking around, trying to feed myself a few pills, a cup of strong coffee, some sweet black cake. Thank god there's a little chocolate to smear on my face while I cry.

Oh and the respite of the lovely, lovely fog, on the way home, blurring everything in its blissfully cool distortions. Mist to blur the green palm trees, the idiocy of the nuclear blue sea becomes the rain color over a tin roof, gun-softened and metallic. Oh rain, oh white. Voices of the homeless yelling over a shopping cart, the regular prostitute yelling she's gonna murder some bitch tonight, and my bicycle squealing past. oh good breath, pillow for my night. Good puppy to rush me with your little hot tongue, to cover my face in your small fervent kisses, joy-crazed, happy, home alone.

OBAMANOS

2008-10-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

FORM

THE

BURDEN

This is a spraypaint graffiti tag on the building at the corner of Brooks and Pacific, about two streets south of where I live. White lettering, caps, on walls painted dirty avocado. Feeling it today in my limbs, not my poems. The last two nights have been hypnotic, the fat half moon falling leaf-white then smoldering dark bronze. Tremorous flame, around midnight it crashes, hot torn orange peel snuffed into the ash of a black sea. A loud cold blackness. It's so rare to be so perfectly alone. You can almost taste your own satellite. To the north, the Santa Monica Pier, the new digitalized lighting on the ferris wheel computer blue, stutters and rolls. Outward, standing between two darknesses, say between two shores in a late Rothko. Not sad. Severe, enthralling. Speechless abyss, and on the edge of it a feeling. Where else does the blood tend, if not toward some crude lettering. I was here. I was here. I was here.

I'm voting for Obama.

I was watching the debates, worried by the McCainimal. I don't understand how a campaign virtually parallel with this administration--whose approval rating is at %16--can appropriate phrases for change. Their misguided passion over environmental issues seems to me indicative of their whole philosophy, that proposes something logical, even inarguable, and then insists that something destructive is the only way to achieve it. As in, Yes, we should be an energy independent nation--but as our awareness of global warning is at its peak, the last thing we should be doing is drilling for oil in our nation's nature preserves! Our politicians might learn something from taking a little walk alone in a darkness so big they are orphaned. They might learn something by reading McCarthy's The Road. When the son asks his father if they will ever have to eat another person, even if they're starving, he says, never. The boy understands. They are starving, but they're trying to save something in themselves. That something is what I think McCain loses sight of. He's so hungry for the win I think he's lost any ability to stop, to listen, to find a center, out from which any substantive help can be found. He's lost that silence in the middle that can nourish him. He's insatiable, spitting and salivating, wolfmad. He's in that ring of Dante's hell that is most American, the ring of hunger and no satisfaction, thirst and thirst and thirst. It's pure capitalism. Shallow, flooded, wasteful. The wet scraps of our romanhood falling by the cannibalistic wayside.

The boy in McCarthy's novel understands with an archetypal naivete, a primitive ethics, why they won't ever eat another person: "because we're carrying the fire." McCain's fire is literal, ravenous, and destructive. Obama's fire is metaphorical, spiritual. I like that he's slow to answer, that he's contemplative. That he weighs what's at stake in the long run. There's something handsome about a deep patience. Maybe I'm a romantic. I am. I need to be to care--I need a reason to pay higher taxes, I need an idea to believe in, I need to feel that I am part, that I participate, that I matter, that my money and my life contribute to something beyond what I can see and do on a daily basis. America, where are you? I'm dying to believe in you. McCain's a madman. Obama . . . a mystery. A myth. I want it.

And then today,--clearly biased, but still worrisome--this:

SEPTEMBER PISTOLA

2008-09-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers,

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

now features

new artwork by Hawai'ian surfer Heather Brown

poetry by Randall Mann, Juliet Patterson, Sean Nevin,

Paul Legault, Oliver de la Paz, Vidhu Aggarwal

and 2 poems as play-in-verse by Christine Leclerc.

Welcome!

. . . . . . . .

THE STOLEN LIPSTICK

2008-08-18T00:52:00.000-07:00

There's something reminiscent of James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies in Laura Jensen's Memory. Something so confessional and vulnerable, as if the poems can barely be spoken aloud. They have a private spell, one that memory casts, with its difficult but necessary moonlit weights and departures. Here's the last two stanzas of White's "Lying in Sadness":

"It's dark.

You exhale a fist of memory.

I love you like weathering wood

in a room of empty pianos.

When you return to something you love,

it's already beyond repair.

You wear it broken."

It's this sense of impossible return, the struggle of similes to find the right image to say the right feeling, and the nostalgia, the homesickness, that make me feel Jensen and White are related. I can't get one out of the other, even though White's book is filled with a lover's elegies and Jensen's is written to her self as a woman alone.

I haven't read her before. Oh I've listened to the myths, heard the stories of some crazy lady in a muumuu wandering AWP, been to the blog that is something of a bird's picking of lines, a nesting in pieces, straws, ribbons, facts. I've touched Bad Boats, and almost bought one when I was an undergrad, when the book was still in bookstores, but I hadn't the good sense to steal it.

Today I took Carnegie Mellon's new edition of Memory out to the beach, and though I was struck by the rooted feminism of the book, which Kevin Prufer points out in the foreword, I was more struck by how it results in witchy announcements from the kitchen, from the single woman in the world, from the girl-child. In fact, it's one of the quieter things I love about the book: Jensen's uncanny ability to return us to the woodlands, half-dressed. The woman alone, I think, is rare in books. I didn't even know I craved it until I read her. Poems like "West Window" ("It is all here in a cluttered cache / my luck, my dreams, and privacy.") or "Last Saturday of the Year" which ends with a description of a chair:

"I stop for coffee.

The chair seat is beautiful. It is round

with a pattern of water lilies, cattails,

flags, pale brown on a brown ground."

You'd never know, with such adoration and careful attention to the beauty of the chair seat, that the same poet wrote these lines just a stanza before:

"And it is noon. A cock crows.

Christ.

It is like a thin wolf crying."

Jensen is tonally masterful, and the ease with which she sees, with which her poetry moves from the adoration of a thing to its almost terror-full description, for me, is bewitching. She is the mother we fear. I say what I mean. Her poem "Lipstick", for example, ends in the terror of abstraction and recognition:

"Of me there were single hairs, brown with damp.

I was looking up. In the white air by me

there was printed an emblem in a black square,

a signature. I was what was there."

. . . . . . . .

I'm sure I should say more, but the waves are so imaginary I have to touch them, I have to hurl my half-nude body at their cool wall. Then, I'll walk out of the green foam like some new kind of wet discovery. I'll have to peel the dying seaweed from my calves. My skin will be stinging in all this light, cathedrals of salt and empty applause.

. . . . . . . .

Of course my favorite poems are always mythic entertainments and fairy tales, poems for children. My favorites get their children baked into pies and eaten. My favorites get lost and thrown into prison. My favorites are orphaned:

PACTHOULI

If every man were a clove and ginger

man, all smiles while the storm shook the glass,

if every cookie shaped like a horse

could tempt snow into cedars and paths,

if the candlelight looked down on

a real person made of flour and spice,

there he would be, all plaid and patchouli,

striking her harmless as gratitude,

harmless as a little chipping bird

at heart, that when he comes close, must fly.

She made her saints of bone, each multiple

and dinosaurian, all those fragments

enormous in possibility. The hands

of the scholar fell together in sleep,

spooned soup by daylight, lived and breathed

to die. The moon paused when she looked

its way, a mask on the sky. Light is not

a disguise for darkness, not yet, not

in her mind, not this day, in her present,

while out of a candle breathes his scent.

It is a waste of time, following men,

but what else can you do, if you do not

know the way to trap one? She followed him

out to the snow in her argyles, in that

town that had winter, knowing she was wrong.

But what is a little light in the window?

What is a circle of flour, little mounds

of soda and salt, recipes like prayers

but the old pursuit? He's the gingerbreadman.

You cannot catch him.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . . .

STOLEN REVELER

2008-08-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . . . . .

I finally have summer, which is more a feeling than a season. More morning sunlight without any ache, more hummingbird sewing the air, more eucalyptus hiding its bones in green tea leaves and yellow wood curls, the fringes embroidered by golden needles, more spiderweb and gleam, more crashing in the distance that isn't death, how softness arrives, more absence isn't. Blue.

I took Donald Revell's latest book, A Thief of Strings, out to the beach, not really sure that I'd read it. I loved the title and I love his third collection, New Dark Ages, which is mostly evenly written narratives and strict stanzas. Strings is an Alice James book, three sections, 68 pages. Lyrics. Visions. I read the book a section at a time, getting down on my knees to blow the Pacific, bodysurfing salt, his lightning and dark glare. Dug my feet in the sand and read some more. "The sky was very near" writes Revell, and I'm with him. Color is a guitar string. Sunset is the killing Adagio of our time. Revell, I think, is staring into the star of dew, and seeing

"A prism that is

Cool as a leaf, cool

And vaporous as grass

When grass goes home."

. . . . . . . .

I'm really surprised by how much these poems stay with me. I love their deep but playful contemplations. I like the lines I don't understand, even more when they're paired with lines I do:

"I want to go to the Garden of Eden to die.

Happiness and Despair are of one mind.

And the Devil is another evergreen burr-marigold gentleman."

I'm reminded in his work of Yeats' preoccupation with symbolism and myth. It's an oddly religious book, without being religious. Revell is at the core of something. The light transparent skeletons of leaves. White, rare. The soul of green, that is holy. "What is a good place" he asks, "to break down to die / To ask such a question / Is one heaven" In some ways Revell is interested in origins and human feeling. What drives us to experiences like love or spirit:

TO THE JEWS

I am the grass I dreamed I was.

Atalanta,

From inside a drop of dew

Comes the speed to outspeed you.

I have seen it.

Imagine something like a cloud, but like diamonds too.

The human eye began as grass.

In the first mornings,

Water raced out of the air

Becoming Soul, who is the speed of things.

I lay my head onto the ground.

Is my dog a god because he kills a rabbit?

I lay my head beside the broken animal.

Our eyes meet. The world belongs to him.

. . . . . . . .

One of my favorite poems reminds me of the nature of seasons, that depart with part of us forever. "It will be a glorious spectacle" he writes in the title poem,

"and I will be the only one there to enjoy it. No stems, no roots anymore, a glorious spectacle, and the meadows so many mirrors signaling with bright lights frantically. It has never been done."

Beauty and death are never far apart, inside one another, twin. My happiest poem in the book takes a religious holiday of a brutal death as its title and boyishly writes it. This is the entertainment of the dreaming self. We dream for ourselves our own dangerous, but good beginning:

GOOD FRIDAY

The clown is hurt between two trees.

His circus went far away, and they are happy there

With many animals, living by the sea.

Here, the low bushes are like little pigs,

And the flowers fierce, with great teeth in them.

I see no animals in the sky, but my mother does.

I see lights under the ground at night.

I hear them digging sometimes, and I know

One morning very early when the house is sleeping

Creatures no one has ever seen here

Will come up through the floors.

Their faces will be fires. Their fur will smell of earth

And of secret white things, buried a long time.

If I go with them, I will never die.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . .

STOLEN CROCUS

2008-07-30T01:58:00.000-07:00

. . . . . . . .

The first collection I ever read by Gerald Stern is Bread without Sugar. What I remember about it now is Stern's positioning of voice--that's too technical and annoying--his movement in the poem that is always marked by left and right sides. In his left hand an ache, in his right a fist of bright crocus. I love how these poems flex, in short and long lines, in great fat poems that are somehow bouyant:

"This is how I bent

my head between my knees, the channels and veins

pumping wildly, one leg freezing, one leg

on fire. That is the saxophone

and those are the symbols; when it gets up here

the roar of the waves is only a humming, a movement

back and forth, some sloshing we get used to."

Even in these few lines we see Stern's characteristic associative and nervy locomotions. Always anchored by the body, always made elegant by some mental abstraction that dramatizes large and small perspectives, always the sense of humor that weighs beauty with the grotesqueries of our mortal limitations in song. His books feel large and overwhelming, unrelenting, I go numb. It's rare that I could read straight through. They're heady, too perfumed, dizzying, narcotic. Strong.

I've been a deep, enthusiastic fan of his since that first book, and made myself studious admiring the longer poems, "Hot Dog" especially. So much so that I was shocked and bliss-hit by a few short poems in the New Yorker a few years ago--the poem "Sylvia" I immediately set out to memorize. These poems were thrilling for me because I found them surprisingly, even uncharacteristically short, though they don't lose any of Stern's gusto or sting. In his latest books, American Sonnets and Everything Is Burning, he's written some of his strongest, sharpest lyrics. Short bursting bulbs, little flowers, little suns.

His newest collection, Save the Last Dance, is a great collection that continues these short blossoms, surprising like a flock of crocus in a concrete alleyway. What I love about this book is how it flexes Stern's abilities. It begins with one of these harsh little beauties and ends with the longer poem "The Preacher", first published by Sarabande as a chapbook. In between are stout lyrics broken by longer poems of short singing couplets. The poem "Before Eating" is both fun and lovely: "Leave me alone, / I want to worry; // make me lamb chops / make me curry." This is not to say that Stern abandons any serious thought--this book is all brain: song philosophy. The first lines of the final poem, the long poem in the book, "The Preacher", are contemplative, elegaic lines that consider existence in a fashion relative to theoretical physics:

"As if the one tree you love so well and hardly

can embrace it is so huge so that with-

out it there might be a hole in the universe

explains how the killing of any one thing can

likewise make a hole except that without

its existence there was neither a hole nor not a hole"

It's true that the title to the book feels sentimental, self-indulgent. And it is! But in a serious, true manner. That poem, "Save the Last Dance for Me" is one of my favorites in the book. Stylistically it's reminiscent of poems in Stern's earlier collection "Last Blue" for the length of its lines. The poem concerns Stern's memory of saving a little Chihuahua from drowning in a sewer and being unable to remember the little dog's name:

"though he who weighed a pound

could easily fall into

the opening, such was our life

and such were our lives the last

few years before the war when

there were four flavors of ice cream

and four flavors only; I'll call him

Fatty; I'll call him Peter;

Jésus, I'll call him, but only

in Spanish, with the "h" sound,

as it is in Mexico;

Jésus, kiss me again,

Jésus, you saved me,

Jésus, I can't forget you"

. . . . . . . .

Speaking of dogs, song, and philosophy, the first poem of the book is another of my favorites:

DIOGENES

Diogenes for me and sleeping in a bathtub

and stealing the key to the geneology room

close to the fake Praxiteles and ripping

a book up since the wrath had taken me

over the edge again and you understand

as no one else how when the light is lit

I have to do something. I couldn't hold my arm up

for nothing, I couldn't stand on the top step

barking--I'll put it this way, living in a room

two cellars down was good, I got to smell

the earth, I carried a long red wire down

with a bulb attached--after that it never mattered.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . .

THE PRICE OF POISONED APPLES

2008-07-23T01:50:00.000-07:00

Friends and Strangers,

why are poetry books getting so expensive lately? After a long recovery of an early summer surgery, I'm finally up and around and rebel. Last night, instead of working on a resume I fled the beaches and ended up in a bookstore. Simic, Salamun, Graham, Zagajewski, Stern. A small stack of new books I'd love to buy, except their all 24-26 bucks! Not a little annoying is the strange but lovely fact that Doty's new collected is only $23! I understand that books are business, but who's really buying these things but us poor, idiot poets? It's also frustrating that Barnes and Noble is selling nice collected editions of classics for ten bucks a pop. Isn't there something wrong here? I'm complaining because I'm poor, not because I don't know how to steal.

Speaking of which, I got my hands on a copy of Graywolf press' Re/View series edited by Mark Doty, the great gay guru of glam, newest re-release of the cult poet Thomas James' first and only volume, Letters to a Stranger. In the introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido, she admits to her long obsession with the poet including both stealing his book from a library and stalking members of his family. Though yesterday I did pay for this edition, I also have a slender volume I unapologetically pilfered from my undergraduate library and I incant Yevtushenko's joy over boyhood's stolen apples:

Let slander pursue me;

love isn't for the feeble.

The odor of love is the scent

not of bought but of stolen apples.

For the longest time, James has been one of those poets I refuse to share, because I loved his poems so intensely. Call me Golum, hunched over his preciouss, his secret love, glowing dark like a bird over the hot jewel of a small opened heart. He, like Sexton, killed himself the year I was born, 1974, and for that reason alone I felt drawn to him. The number of the rat year of my birth is a hushed magnet to me. Reading him is another experience altogether. This new edition includes 13 uncollected poems, and like Plath, who he's regularly compared to, I mourn his unwritten life.

Here's one of them:

Gangrene

All morning I have been turning into jade.

Ambushing the semiprecious bone,

It takes me in my swivel-bed

Where I watch my toes go out one by one.

A Victorian lady changes the sheets every Sunday,

The pigeon-colored nurses leave me alone

With clouds fingerprinting on the grapeskin sky.

I nestle in these white, icy hillocks

As their razors clip me clean as a boy.

I am inattentive to their deepest looks.

Now I have whitewashed walls and a white pitcher,

Armloads of white, virginity that speaks.

Light blunders in rich and gold as beer

From a world where people wake and kiss,

Images shaken free on dark water.

I await the syringe, its needleful of brightness,

As my leg yields to a century of stone.

I am a fossil, hugging its dry rose.

I wake slowly, just at the outskirts of pain.

A light-winged lady rushes off into the dark,

Her beacon red as my garnet tiepin.

Nobody minds me at all now as I suck

Greedily at darkness, its flaky soot

Blown in at the window crack,

A mouthful of honey. Under my bedlight

I am a park statue, I am all verdigris,

Tenable as an old penny. Tonight

Nobody stops at the door. In the hospital garden

The moon rises like a white button out of a bed

Of brown chrysanthemums. Sickness

Begins to mount me like a bright counterpane,

Intractable and ripe as a middleaged bride,

And my head goes under. Dark is a sudden kiss.

The poems speaks for itself, ripe imagery run on the currents of iambic pentameter and an enjambment that creates a locomotion fit for candled midnights. In James, sickness is beauty. Perhaps this most attracts me to him. The emblems of mortality are "semiprecious" and darkness is either "a mouthful of honey" or "a sudden kiss". Here is the young heart's romantic: death cloaked by moonlight, and love, "Virginity that speaks". It's as if he's permanently vulnerable, as if gangrene is the only way we are loved in this body. How else are we so held alone, in communion with bones and moons, or a light that "blunders in rich and gold as beer"? Who else has said, with such tender, if not criminal and childlike clarity: "I suck / greedily at darkness"? Who isn't a child of the darkness into which "a light-winged lady rushes off"? This is the comfort of such morbid work: it reminds us we are small. We are Children alone in the darkness of our own body. We are children of the moon, stealing beauty from the pain of being awake, turning our rotting flesh to "jade".

. . . . . .

RETURN OF THE DARK AND SCARLETHEARTED DAWN

2008-06-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

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

And at dawn when you think your lives are saved

they are in sweet 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.

. . . . . . .

LEMON ORANGES BLACKOUT

2008-06-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-30T11:25:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

"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--how

to answer you--Breath

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 destruction

or your heart

hot want--retreat,

I retreat! All destructions

--what is human

the wanting and the not

knowing what we want--strangers and sleep

to one another we

leave our signs on the streets--we speak

to one another

how all

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

flirt & hurt--destructions

delights--

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

2008-03-07T00:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-23T04:42:00.000-08:00

. . . . . .

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

2008-02-20T01:10:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-06T00:15:00.000-08:00

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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

2008-01-01T22:15:00.000-08:00

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?

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PISTOLAMAG.ORG

2007-11-25T02:47:00.000-08:00

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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

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LORD AND BOAT: JEAN VALENTINE

2007-11-08T02:36:00.000-08:00

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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

2007-10-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

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. . . . . . .

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--

. . . . . .

PALOMA BLANCA

2007-09-30T01:40:00.000-07:00

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. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

THE DOOR IS FALLEN DOWN

The door is fallen down
to the house
I used to try & pry open,
in & out,
painfully,
stiff tears.

I sit underneath the cottonwoods--
Friends,
what am I meant to be doing?
Nothing. The door is fallen down
inside my open body
where all the worlds touch.

by Jean Valentine

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at--

Eternity lies in bottomless resevoirs . . . . its buckets are rising forever and ever,
They pour and pour and they exhale away--

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars--

Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and affectionate--

I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,
the whirling and whirling is elemental within me--

Walt Whitman

. . . . . . .

PEREGRINATIONS ONCE YOU WERE A FISHERMAN & YOUNG

Tata, the dark country of your eyes
still buries
your life inside of me.
Once you were a fisherman

and young, slinging your nets & spearing
Tilapia to sell at the coast-market. Old Man, when the Sea
violently swept your small boat back to her darkness,
La Lucia, you took up your guitar like the light

strumming those long helixes under
the waves. Pouring Tequila onto the rust of your last
coins, you started singing the coro: Cuidado, cuidado que te quema,
Candela. I hear you,

Paletero, Drunk with Amazing Sadness
while in your bare feet you went dancing

dust to chickens. The brother you loved fell down
stabbed in a knife-fight & died
for sleeping with another man's wife. The mother of your sons
has slept now these six
years in the earth, & you know too well that Here
sharp pains release intense joys

for now that you're old your face has grown stern with Musical Silence, Abuelo.
Don't forget us, tenderness
throwing your fist up laughing to Eternity
the sky, Old Odysseus

gesticulating your funny lament, Aye gente! Nunca,
Nunca vamos a llegar
a la luna! Tata,

the dark country of your eyes
still alive has been buried
here inside of me.

. . . . . . .