THE NEW UNREAL OF BEAUTY

"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

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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"?

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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)

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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.'

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

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I COULD BE ILLEGAL

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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

I.

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

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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

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AWP: A JOURNAL OF THE TIMEWARP: 2010

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.

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