Things On Which I've Stumbled by Peter Cole; All-American Poems by Matthew Dickman

Peter Cole, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions, 2008) (Buy it)
Matthew Dickman, All-American Poem (The American Poetry Review, 2008) (Buy it)

(originally published in Poet Lore Magazine)

Peter Cole (who describes himself as “a modern poet of a medieval kind”) wonders whether meaning can be made – whether one language translates into another – whether sacred ancient mysteries can transcend their own time – in his title poem, “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled.” But in the very opening poem of the volume, “Improvisation on Lines by Isaac the Blind,” a translation of and extension upon a verse by a 13th century kabbalist, Cole posits his own solution:

Only by sucking, not by knowing,
can the subtle essence by conveyed—
sap of the world and the word’s flowing

that raises the scent of the almond blossoming,
and yellows the bulbul in the olive’s jade.
Only by sucking, not by knowing.

Sucking, a quasi-devotional, not unerotic physical act, absolutely required of the human species, replaces knowledge as the way to take in the world. Cole also uses the villanelle’s call-and-response form to prop up his “winches of syntax and sense,” and to navigate Sappho-like fragments strung together with their more recent, but still ancient, commentary, and his own contemporary skepticism and imaginative improvisations. But he is always wary of translation’s claims on meaning: “Bad translation/is like drawing a bucket from a moonlit/well – and losing the silvery shine on its surface.”

The flow of the fragments, the ancient commentary, the messages scribbled around them, and Coles’ present-day musings, make his poems urgent communications from all time, and at the same, in his voiced poems, cries of anguish and despair over the difficulty of meaning, the ambiguous transport of language, the central unknowingness of god. I was reminded of Gary Snyder’s “Rivers and Mountains Without End,” his long poem about the ancient Japanese prints and scrolls that have comments scribbled on them across the centuries, commentary that becomes part of the text as the original context is forgotten. The poem is not set in stone. It is a time capsule, and a chalkboard – an opportunity for dialogue and commentary.

that beauty carried covers
more than just a flaw
or seam in being
that lets us see
what’s real,
but is itself a means
of conducting things concealed
that can’t, by nature, be revealed
(“Things on Which I’ve Stumbled”)

Besides the villanelle, Cole is confident in any number of stanza forms –
pantoums, ghazals, sestinas, as well as free verse. “Notes on Bewilderment” also concerns translation, and in fifty 5-line stanzas (abcda) it covers a dizzying array of subjects springing from translation, a full-scale inquiry on the range of human myth- and meaning-making: → love → God → politics (Palestinian) → art (Rothko) → philosophy → ethics → myth. Here he is on Love:

XXII

He wanted to know how love was rewarded:
true Love. That’s easy, the lover replied,
the prize for that great desire comprises
the absence of any distinction between
the pain and pleasure one is accorded.

and again on translation:

XXIV

It isn’t done with tracing paper. Things
signaled by words charged in a row begin
to converge, just as hope a single one
or pair might be rendered fades. So we enter
the sacred order from which translation springs.

His “Palestine, A Sestina” uses its form to reinforce the politics of repetition and renaming and giving and taking and retaking of the same land, coexistence. And in a short, limerick-like lyric, “Israel is,” he makes a macabre sportive metonymy of the difference between the spiritual and the true flesh-and-blood Jew, the substitution of the part for the whole, the citizen who stands in for the nation:

Israel is he, or she, who wrestles
with God – call him what you will,

not some goon (with a rabbi and a gun)
in a pre-fab home on a biblical hill

In part IV of the volume, Cole springs some free verse where lyrics and paragraph prose poems are interwoven, as the poet again questions commentators and scripture as a translation of one mystical poem into another. In some cases, the prose poems seems to be rhyming, as if they had once been in lyric, stanza form but had been stripped of line-break and lined up inside the paragraph’s box, another form of translation , perhaps, to look at lyrics disconnected and stripped of form, to feel their strangeness that way. The lyrics are more stately, more of the same: broken lines, part ancient commentary, part speaker sussing out what was meant then and what is meant now, about biblical imperatives for Israel and a chosen people and, at the same time, scriptural reverence for the moral and ethical equality of all humans. The prose paragraphs can be downright bizarre, but no less sense-bearing:

Making the empty desert bloom. Virgin soil. Although we
need just a little more room. All that oil; all those countries.
A narrow waist was once its pride. Now it’s wide and the
world’s against it. Nothing upsets it. Not apartheid in its
midst, not its lies, not the fence. Cutting the land like a local
Christo. It takes a village. Along the ridge. From whence,
says Scripture, cometh my help. Slowly but surely…

Peter Cole interrogates Jewish history by rewriting its literary sources, insinuating himself into the ancient texts as yet another in a long line of arguments. His irreverent, playful verbal games seem a devotional strategy: he wants to believe, wants to worship, wants to count himself among the faithful, a fervent link in the long tradition, but his rationalism and modern psychological grounding compel him to widen already gaping holes in the tattered, incomplete skeins of ancient learning and scripture.

Matthew Dickson, on the other hand, is into current texts. Whatever smelting of contemporary culture and mores drifts across his brain-pan is ripe for frying, fair game in the game of chance that makes Dickman’s meanings.

From “The Mysterious Human Heart,” the opening salvo in Dickman’s volume All-American Poem, where he resembles (among others) Walt Whitman: equal parts delight and hearty appetite and a serious intention to get it all in and still be hungry for more experience afterwards, all in the first person singular unceasing:

The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges
And cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates
With their hundred seeds, carrots and honey,
Walnut and thirteen varieties of apples.

Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and pére Kenneth Koch also hover around the table. And of course Frank O’Hara, whose Lunchbox poems seem to serve as household ghosts for the volume, and one need look no farther than O’Hara’s poem “Today” for an echo:

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

“Times Square looks like America throwing up on itself,” the speaker muses in the long title poem. Dickman is unafraid to sound positively like Alan Ginsburg Junior (who himself often sounded Whitman-esque):

Oh Mississippi, I worry about your boys.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, are you half empty?
Washington D.C., the sons of senators
are sleeping between flannel sheets.

It’s a tour of all fifty states, a jaunt through the history of the Civil War, an explanation of the American scene as set forth on Independence Day. Dickman lists and strolls and enumerates and builds rhythms the size of the wild wild west:

You can go from one civil war to another and still not be free

You can go from one state to another and pity will meet you at Grayhound Station.

You can go from one daughter to another
And eventually end up with your own.

As Dickman exclaims in the closing poem, “The Whole is Too Huge to Grasp,” “I like the world in all its incredible forms,” and what a list he compiles to prove it: his brother’s ashes, the sincerity of penguins, the mess we make of the roses,

And the psycho
Promise of there’s-always-tomorrow,
Of rent-to-own, the smell
Of carrots, the smell of gasoline, the mysteries
Of bread and wine, the sky
Of Montana with Laura beneath it…

Sometimes his comparisons are pure fun though– they don’t help a reader see or understand a thing, but one might just laugh out loud. Like this one:

your breasts were two drunken parents
coaching little league practice

There are some mis-shots sprinkled here and there, as one might expect in a poet who is so fond of metaphor and simile, often just the construction of metaphor or simile. Sometimes too many comparisons tend to distract from his meaning, which seems to be, “Isn’t metaphor liberating and fun?” He can work from the particular to the universal with dizzying speed and incessant good humor, stringing together metaphors and similes, but some are necessarily better than others, and he often builds his speaker’s case by quantity, if not always by the fineness and unity of sensation. A line like “the slow dance doesn’t care/It’s all kindness like children/Before they turn three” sounds better than it means, or in the poem “Love,” “I love you/The way my mouth loves teeth” also seems to be comparing for comparing’s sake.

Buried among the ecstatic reports of the quotidian (Dickman’s true singing, which fall from him in torrents) are confessional elements: the speaker’s brother darts in and out of many poems, as do lovers and friends. I was relieved when he turned more serious, and less ornate, as in the poem “Grief,” and delivers a quiet quick shudder of deliciously manipulated pain:

When grief come to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky…

tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
…
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
…
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

“V,” where the speaker sees a young girl with a tee-shirt that says “talk Nerd to me” is another strong confessional poem. The speaker ponders the girl’s possibly non-ironical reasons for wearing the shirt, and ends up feeling a connection to her,

and maybe this is not a giant leap into the science of compassion

but he flashes her the Star Trek Vulcan V sign anyway as he passes her.

Not quite so delicious a confessional is “Trouble” which follows “Grief,” and enumerates the suicide of more than 20 famous personages such as Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway. Every third or fourth suicide is followed with a short, plain, odd descriptive sentence:

Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.

I sometimes wonder about the inner life of polar bears.

I like
geese sound above a river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.

If you
traveling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train.

The last suicide is Larry Walters, who attached weather balloons to a lawn chair and flew three miles in the air, and twenty years later shot himself. After Walters’ suicide, the poem closes:

In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I was my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

I don’t quite get the point here: suicide is to be survived? The ordinary will save us? Whatever the lesson is, Dickman’s affect comes off as underwhelming.

Still, all is forgiven Dickman in the end. His voice is fresh and funny and incessant: his poetic synapses fire like a string of caps, one after the other, and one gets the sense that those caps would still fire underwater if need be, his thinking is so explosive. Newest in the notable line of American surrealist poets, if he is no Bruce Smith or Dean Young, Dickman to his credit is much more accessible, an excellent example of delivering quality to the masses, less discontinuous, and often, as I’ve pointed out, laugh-out-loud funny. That’s a plus in the current doomy market.

Synecdoche, New York

Das Truman Show. At a bit over two hours it's too long, that's for sure, there's an awful long soft middle to the film, which is where it tries hardest to become a German film, but then it's back to the hard wrap and American time again. After reading so many advance comments on the film (when it was still being post-produced), and then advance reviews, I thought I was fairly clear on the plot, and the whole constructing-a-small-scale-but-complete-model-0f-all-of-Manhattan, but the reviewers must have picked up all of that from the advance material distributed with the release, because if you didn't know that was coming, it would take you the soft middle -- about 75 minutes -- to figure it out, that the director (Hoffman) of the play was now directing not just his entire life, but all of existence. (Well, he goes abroad briefly to Germany, to try to see his lost child Olive, and that part at least, seems to be "off screen.") I can bitch and moan -- and will, if I find the time to go back and review it act by act, but it's a fairly extraordinary film nonetheless. There are some great performances (Hoffman, de rigeur it would seem at this point in his nearly faultless career), Samantha Morton, Emily Watson (small part but great) but then there are a million other actors who seem to be as confused as I was. The movie is about ideas, the movie is an idea, and although the vision is not seamlessly revealed to us, it's pretty powerfully delivered in part.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me

"Book Of Music" by Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

Lark & Termite by Jane Anne Phillips

The Sound and the Fury. Dalton Trumbo. The Miracle Worker. Tin Drum.

Funkdaelic, inside jacket, Maggot Brain, 1971

John Updike, R.I.P.

Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire. Entering an empty room, we turn it on, and a talking face flares into being: better than the burning bush. (Roger's Version, 1986)

I remember reading The Poorhouse Fair and The Centaur as a sixteen year old who desperately wanted to write fiction, especially enjoying The Centaur for the father-son relationship. At the time, I was also reading a book by a stern Easter European about how to write fiction, and didn't understand a thing he was saying, or what I was doing. I'd go into the basement laundry room and sit at a stern, uncomfortable table and stare up at the exposed beams and insulation and copper pipe and write badly in pencil in a steno notebook.

In such a moments of adventure he is impatient with his body, that its five windows aren't enough, he can't get the world all in. Joy makes his heart pound. God, having shrunk in Harry's middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind. Free: the dead and the living alike have been left five miles below in the haze that has annulled the earth like breath on a mirror. (Rabbit is Rich)

Reading Updike made sense, though, he wrote so clearly and brilliantly and complexly, but with so little sign of effort, that he made me feel smarter and gifted just to be listening to him.

I was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema - that of commiting deliberate abdominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God's forgiveness can magnificently play.

This is somewhat how I feel when I listen to Mozart, for example. Senior year in high school, we read Rabbit, Run. I gave an oral presentation on the short story, "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town," and was degraded for wearing a dirty raincoat, not making eye contact and picking at my face with my fingers. That said, I still got an A. How couldn't I? I loved the story, loved John Updike. "When Everyone Was Pregnant." One of the better short story titles I ever, I thought. His play, "Buchanan Dying," also inscrutable to me but part of his mystique, the cloud of his genius: he could write anything. He knew everything.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. (Rabbit Is Rich, 1981)

Then in college I read Couples in a "Contemporary American Fiction" class and figured that was it, I'd never be able to write. Of course, he also wrote a half dozen books of poetry along the way, always described as light verse by Updike himself, but often transcending that label. Here's a gorgeous sad one:

Another Dog’s Death by John Updike

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.

She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field.
The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
I carved her a safe place while she protected me.

I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth.
Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.

They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.

And the very ringing "Seven Stanzas at Easter," in which Updike, after his lifelong self-noted "tour of Protestantism" (the grandson of a Presbyterian minister, he was raised in the Lutheran church, but joined the Congregational church as an adult, though in his later years, he became an Episcopalian and dated a Methodist chaplain), seems to be professing his more Catholic incarnatory urges:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

"The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing" first came to my attention in a review of "children's book." My wife pointed out the article to me, and Octavian particularly, and said, "I'm not smart enough to understand this book, I don't see how it's written for children." True dat. It's about a child and that's the only child-like thing about it. Set in Massachusetts on the eve of the American Revolution, the novel is a full-blown examination of the cruelty and irony of early American slavery practices, where Africans were captured, pressed into agricultural labor and domestic service, and then found their chains bound even tighter when the American colonists feared the British were fomenting trouble by offering the slaves freedom if they would fight against their masters on the British side.

W. D. Snodgrass, R.I.P.

April Inventory

by W. D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned

All white; the cherry blooms once more.

In one whole year I haven’t learned

A blessed thing they pay you for.

The blossoms snow down in my hair;

The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.

The sleek, expensive girls I teach,

Younger and pinker every year,

Bloom gradually out of reach.

The pear tree lets its petals drop

Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now

I have to nudge myself to stare.

This year they smile and mind me how

My teeth are falling with my hair.

In thirty years I may not get

Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,

I made myself a little list

Of all the things I’d ought to know,

Then told my parents, analyst,

And everyone who’s trusted me

I’d be substantial, presently.

I haven’t read one book about

A book or memorized one plot.

Or found a mind I did not doubt.

I learned one date. And then forgot.

And one by one the solid scholars

Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.

I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;

One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.

Lacking a source-book or promotions,

I showed one child the colors of

A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,

To bark back, loosen love and crying;

To ease my woman so she came,

To ease an old man who was dying.

I have not learned how often I

Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie

Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;

That my equivocating eye

Loves only by my body’s hunger;

That I have forces, true to feel,

Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority

And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,

My eyes in spectacles shall see

These trees procure and spend their leaves.

There is a value underneath

The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,

We shall afford our costly seasons;

There is a gentleness survives

That will outspeak and has its reasons.

There is a loveliness exists,

Preserves us, not for specialists.

W.D. Snodgrass, “April Inventory” from Selected Poems, 1957-1987 (New York: Soho Press, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by W.D. Snodgrass. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Selected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987).

diary-esque

I have resolved two things for the new year: start drinking whiskey and start dancing occasionally. Will it be a lot of whiskey that I drink, with just a little dancing? Or will I dance a lot and drink only a bit of whiskey? Let's hope it's the latter. Also, I only have Bushmills, which is clearly not Jamesons and could get me in trouble with my Irish drinking ghosts. And that only kind of dance I've paid any attention to recently is the "Walk It Out" hip-hop step, which is dumb and I already am pretty awkward at it.

I like coffee but it's not like coffee is going to save my life. I remember a time when I thought flesh, not my own, would save my life. I like good beer but it is on no help, except in killing time, where it excels. I like reading books: ditto, a time-murderer if there ever was one. I like my children and my wife, but I'd like to give them more money and more things than I currently give them, instead of less. I don't like driving. I don't like meetings. I don't like waiting around for stuff. I don't like reading the newspaper much anymore, that is, I read it a great deal more deeply than I used to, but almost all the news me with dismay. I don't like the sun rising. I do like the moon coming out but lately it's been too cold to take much more than a quick look at the moon and then leave it be. It's hard to remember the moon the next morning and how it was particularly nicely.

Memory on the whole is harder. There is more and more to remember. Much of it I've already remembered at least more than once out loud: it's annoying to revisit and re-remember and try to do something different this time around.

about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari

2666 by Robert Bolano is an enormous, exhausting, depressing effort – but a wild ride at same time, his writing has this lyrical edge to it that never stops, and the form of the story (five short novels originally meant to be published separately) means the narrative target seems to keep changing: who do I care about here? Whom am I following? Under such a regime, it takes a beating, the idea of fate or redemption or just desserts. The endlessness of the infamous fourth section about all the murders and rapes, takes on its own unique beauty: part crime report, part Dosteovsky. Not for the unfortitudinous. If you’re not pre-disposed toward experimentation and indeterminancy (and pre-anesthetized toward numbing, repetitive, violence), I don’t think you’ll find much to admire.

That said, it IS one of those revolutionary books that forces you to slow down and read each word and each sentence as if they are the first words and sentences you have ever read. I don't know how else to describe the sensation. And it's certainly not altogether pleasant: there are boring stretches, there are flat stretches, there are obscure stretches, and over 900 pages, a stretch can sure stretch. But (and I use a favorite word here) those with great fortitude in their reading habit (fortitude at times verging on masochism) will gain by the effort it takes to read this book. And by gain I mean it ain't ever even going to show up on your permanent record how this book affects you, and what the narrative teaches you, but it is something large that will lodge within you. For me, the real misstep is the longest section, the fourth section, "The Part About the Crimes," which is nearly 300 pages long and feels more like 3000 pages, since it is a listing, a la a detailed, colorful, narratively-tuned crime report, of dozen and dozens of raped and murdered girls, building a little short story out of each one, with a rotating main cast of detectives, policeman and grieving (and not grieving) family members. It's withering to read, and takes on its own rosy sadistic glow, but was my least favorite. Not badly written, not at all, not in the slightest, just too long.

The near-deranged monologue by Amaltifano early on, about Mexican intellectuals losing their shadows when they go to work for the Mexican government, is a powerful example -- of something. I can only quote as much as I have transcribed so far, it's about six times longer in all:

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” said Amalfitano. “It’s an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power. I’m not saying they’re all the same. There are some notable exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or even that they surrender completely. You could say it’s just a job. But they’re working for the state. In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they’re laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state. It was like that under PRI and it’ll be the same under the PAN. The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn’t care. The state feeds him and watches him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure. Not that it’s always this way, of course. An intellectual can work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take Almendro – as far as I know, he does both. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follo me The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valery, possibly the writer most read by Medican writers, and then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things… Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television procscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting themselves. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language, can’t even enrich it themselves. Their best words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row."

Paul Newman

I picture my epitaph: "Here lies Paul Newman,
who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."

Always that same old story— Father Time and Mother Earth, A marriage on the rocks

I gotta tell you: I like this album! Byrne and Eno were so meaningful to me 25 (count'em!) years ago, between Fear of Music and Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the score to the Catherine Wheel, but neither of them have done a thing for me since then. So it was with time-lapsed dismay that I listened to this collaboration. But it's the shit. It's mostly about Byrne's voice (which it never used to be) but Eno's treatments and production creep up slowly and also end up singing by the end. No big favorite single yet -- I just did the whole thing -- and have tried desperately to try to hate it, which usually works just fine. But not here. It's so damned ordinary, the way Byrne sings it, even revelation, in "Home" and "Life is Long:"

The dimming of the light
Makes the picture clearer...
I memorized a face so it's not forgotten...
Come back anytime
And we'll mix our lives together

Heaven knows what keeps mankind alive
Every hand — goes searching for its partner in crime.

Home where my world is breaking in two
Home with the neighbors fighting
Home — were my parents telling the truth?

I'm sure it's just me, but I heard an echo of the Merrill poem, "The Broken Home":

"The Broken Home" by James Merrill

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.

In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.

I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.

Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or Jose María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.

Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,

Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,

And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It’s the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can’t stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you’ll bury us all!

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time’s child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

Grizzly Bear Chair

Out of the marvellous

I'm writing a review of Peter Cole's book of poetry, Things On Which I've Stumbled, and just came across this poem, “The Wrong Angle Righted” about searching as a child for a "skyhook." This is an old scout trick – I myself looked in vain for a "left-handed wind-strainer", the younger boys being sent out by the older ones to search for a gadget that doesn’t exist.

He’d point, and we’d trudge on, grumbling,
in search of that wondrous device,
the last word in wilderness dwelling,
which would make for us that immaculate crease

and yield, over our heads, a prize ceiling –
that weightless, matchless, unnerving and skyey,
legend-like feeling of being,
a last, held up from on high.

Something about the lines above remind me of the striking Seamus Heaney poem in Seeing Things (1993), about the men sailing in the boat in air.

"Lightenings"

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
`This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, `unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Superman and the Mole-Men, 1951

Recently saw this, the full-length Superman movie that come out of the TV series, for the first time in, oh, call it 35 years. Saw it with the kids: they were as creeped out by it as I was way back in 1973. Dismal lighting values and a cheap creepy soundtrack are all it takes, people, take it from me. The racial edge to the film -- the townspeople rise up in full riot configuration, with guns, chain, broken sticks, pitchforks, even BARBER POLES. and rush off to annhiliate the thus-far harmless, tiny, if odd and furry, Mole-men -- is pretty sharp for the early fifties. That's clearly what they are going for, and it's highlighted by the absence of anything other than white actors in the production.

Barbara Jordan, We The People

The amazing sound of Barbara Jordan's voice during the Watergate hearings. She struck me then and she strikes me now. Robert Pinsky has a strange, wonderful, strong, confusing poem about her.
On "Eve Tempted by the Serpent" by Defendente Ferrari, and in Memory of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas. It begins like this:

Rare spirit remembered with a pang
Of half forgotten clarity or density
A quality, quilled, a learned freshness

Unshattered though not perfect not Eden
No rippled meander through new islands
The parentless leaves and branches tender...

and then, at very end:

We fowl of a feather we feel we fail
And not that she made it look difficult
Or easy but possible and we fall

Playboy, Shadow of the Glen

Saw the extraordinary Druid Theatre Company's production of The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre Thursday night. 150 minutes plus of spell-binding language. Synge would be the Irish Shakespeare, if there were such a thing, but he's too Irish: not one word when a hundred will do, a black comedy that has your face splitting with a grin until the last fifteen minutes when it gets mighty grim might fast.

CHRISTY -- [turning to the door, nearly speechless with rage, half to himself.] -- To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to his life, and following after me like an old weazel tracing a rat, and coming in here laying desolation between my own self and the fine women of Ireland, and he a kind of carcase that you'd fling upon the sea...

WIDOW QUIN -- [more soberly.] -- There's talking for a man's one only son.

CHRISTY -- [breaking out.] -- His one son, is it? May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave. (Looking out.) There he is now crossing the strands, and that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world.

WIDOW QUIN -- [scandalised.] Have you no shame? (putting her hand on his shoulder and turning him round.) What ails you? Near crying, is it?

CHRISTY -- [in despair and grief.] -- Amn't I after seeing the love-light of the star of knowledge shining from her brow, and hearing words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant saints, and now she'll be turning again, and speaking hard words to me, like an old woman with a spavindy ass she'd have, urging on a hill.

WIDOW QUIN. There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop.

Then I went to Giant at 11:15 PM to buy coffee, not a soul in the store except one guy in the Coffee aisle, an old friend I hadn't seen in two years, about to finish his undergraduate degree at the age of 42.

Last night, cross-dressed at a Halloween party.

I'm exhausted.

Department of Words Failing

Standing on the Verge of Getting It On

Funkadelic, Houston, 1976

Sonnet to Liberty, Oscar Wilde

NOT that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,--
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,--
And give my rage a brother----! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved--and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.

The Roaming of Bacchus

This great phrase, the title of a drinking game, is from "Wingstroke," a story Vladimir Nabokov wrote in 1923, about a widower on a ski vacation, tormented by a beautiful woman staying in the room next to his, vistited by an angel-like apparaiion. The widower is drinking with another man at the hotel bar, who suggests they try each cocktail as listed in the drink menu, working through their way through the entire selection, circling their favorites, then going through the list again drinking only the circled items. "Some people approach their daily life the same way," the second man comments.

The picture, of course, has nothing to do with this. I just like the expression on the mouse's face. Rather, I don't like it, but there is something character-driven about its world-weary eyes: like a Malamudian sufferer.

More Nabokov. From the very sexy "A Dashing Fellow":

She's making up everything. Very attractive, though. Breasts like a pair of piggies, slim hips. Likes to tipple, apparently. Let's order from the diner."

from "Ultima Thule":

I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world.

my father read creepy books

... and now I have read them and become in his image also creepy and yet... and yet... somewhat lame. Would recommend Harrad first, pornographic cover nottotallywithstanding. And then Castle. And then... and then... Also, is there no end to the ways by which we must get at our parents? It is becoming positively joyful to remember him badly. Sometimes I look at my own son and think, And yet... and yet... Shan't let him read any of these. Although we own two of three, in original mass paperback glory. He disdains all of my books so far. In that way, we don't resemble one another. By my son's age, I had already taken a healthy bite out of all that was forthrightly pornographic or wrong or downright rude in my father's library.

So I’m at this like weird dinner party in Hollywood, sitting at a little japanese tea table with Benico del Toro

So I’m at this like weird dinner party in Hollywood, sitting at a little japanese tea table with Benico del Toro and he’s telling me about this rock climbing hike he took that ended up on a mountain cliff over a sea where he finds this little cave with all these gazelle bones in it, and just then Renee Zellweger comes into our little room ( a purple room, with black and brown lights, all the rooms in the house where the party is are very small and different exotic colors, like oxblood and purloin silk, and only a couple people are in each room), and I lean over to Renee (I’ve only just met her) and she’s got this cunning little video camera attached to her wrist with a delicate silver chain like it was a charm bracelet and she is recording the party and I know she’s just there to make time with Benicio but I’m like, Hey, I’m sitting with him, I’m trading stories (even though I don’t rock-climb or hike and am not Latin, I’m that weird suburban washed out white, part orcestra conductor, part pig, with grey buttocks and lank dry hair), but I lean into Renee and press my nose against her neck and feel thir coarse fabric sweater like coat thing she’s half-wearing and I murmur, Thank you, thank you, even though it’s not her house and not her party and we just met and she must think I’m del Toro’s little gimp white chimp drug dealer or something, but she squeezes me back and moans a little back at me and then floats on her with her outlandish clotted strawberry and cream complexion and Benicion lift his chopsticks at me like guys used to raise an eyebrow and I say, whatever, man, tell me about using yoga to fit through the crevice, and did you crack the antelope bones for the tasty, hieratic marrow? after we finish eating in about four mintues (the portions are tiny, it’s not like the suburbs where you eat until you’re sick and then go... click here for full story

DFW RIP

Devestating, blanching news that David Foster Wallace died Friday, apparently a suicide. Nothing swallowing its own tail. A brilliant, mischievous, warm and cold and hot and sterile, funny and deadly serious talent, Wallace hung himself at his home in California for his wife to discover. The story refuses to provide any hand-holds for meaning, any crevices for a joke to hang. I wrote to him in November 1997 -- one of the few writers I've ever written to -- as I was blown away by Infinite Jest and had a clipping, a fragment really, of an old Smithsonian article that seemed to echo a crucial part of Infinite Jest. My letter to DFW went as follows:

"The enclosed reminded me of the wonderful first broacast of Madam Psychosis in Infinite Jest, so I have to send it on to you. I don't quite remember the source, but suspect it was from an old Smithsonian magazine about a photographer of freaks, since the reverse contained the fragment '- unfortunate freaks, living or dead, afflicted with every kind of physical oddity. Graphic as they are, they radiate a sublime beauty, and have made Joel-Peter Witkins one of the most-'"

And here is the clip I sent him (click to see full-size image):

Full disclosure: I also whined to him about what I'd written and never published. DFW wrote back in December thusly (again, click on image for full-size):


Needless to say, I was thrilled at his response. Getting up the nerve to write had been my achievement: I didn't expect a reply. As Wallace has been lionized thus far in obituaries and notices and appreciations, both for his off-the-charts brilliance and ambition, and for his warmth and graciousness, I just wanted to chime in, enthusiastically if amateurishly on the first count, and from real life on the second.

the abyss between isolation and having one ally

"Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy." The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

This is one scary-ass novel, equal parts The Metamorphosis and The Third Policeman, with a little PG Wodehouse thrown in just to completely confuse you. It starts out about poetry, then moves to politics, and ends up being about divinity and metaphysics. It's an artlessly-almost-all-male book, stranger in concept than in fact, but unique.

"Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

The Playboy of Hoboken

Sligo Crumlin, the American narrator of The Playboy of Hoboken, is in seclusion on the Aran Islands, pursued by an Irish gangster for a mistaken bad debt and stolen drugs. Sligo has come to Ireland for two reasons: to pursue a mysterious Irish girl, Maeve, whom he fell in love with in New York City, and to try to break through his writer’s block and write a play that reflects his own life and adventures but is still, somehow, interesting. Sligo’s narration is funny, irreverent, bleak and sincere, often in the same sentence. A 1980s misfit, he hates Ronald Reagan and grandiose prosperity, cadging drinks himself any place his friends bar-tend, living on a shoestring, depending on his mother for occasional cash handouts, meals and laundry services.

In New York City, Sligo and a group of his college friends have started the Tool and Die Theatre Company and are planning a series of showcase performances to raise money – a “subway series” of scenes from various plays to be performed on-train and in the stations of the #1 train on the West Side. Sligo thrashes about, trying to start to write a play, doing his moribund standup routines at a local comedy club, and then packing it all in to fly to Ireland and pursue Maeve. There he does begin writing his play – an updating of Synge’s famous play The Playboy of the Western World about an ordinary young man from the country who invents a heroic life for himself and gets an entire village to fall in love with him – as Sligo pursues Maeve, helps out her ex-fiancé in his chip-van business, and eventually flees from the dangerous Liam Lott.

From a folk festival on the grounds of haunted Charleville Castle in Tullamore, to a bloody face-off with Liam Lott among the ancient granite spars of a prehistoric fort on the Aran Island of Inisheer, Sligo perseveres. When he finally returns to New York City, he arrives home on opening night of the theatre company’s triumphant premiere of Sligo’s new play, based on his adventures in Ireland, called The New Playboy of the Western World.

Total word count: 96,000 words.
First two chapters: click here.

Just Add Water: 49:00 of your Life

Paul Westerberg's newest release, 49:00, is a single (well, not quite) .mp3 file containing a dozen or so songs home-recorded and rough-mixed. (Westerberg plays all instruments: his young son adds vocals on the final track)He put it up on Amazon for sale for the price of either .49 or .99, depending on whether you added it to your shopping cart as a "song" or as an "album." Westerberg is reported to have said, "I figured about a penny a minute was what it's worth." One tends to agree with him. The initial .mp3 file was actually only 43:55 seconds long, and two weeks ago it abruptly disappeared from Amazon, and its place was a single .mp3 file of a song called, brilliantly, "5:05." (bringing the full release length up to 49:00: get it?) If it sounds like genius, or if it feels like rage, or it ends up being exhaustion, or laziness, or malice, you're probably having an accurate feeling. I started cutting up the original 49:00 .mp3 into songs but gave up after awhile: if Westerberg didn't care to, why should I? The first several songs are strongest: "Who Ya Gonna Marry," "To Be Risin'" and "Something in My Life is Missing," and the stand-alone "5:05" might be the best of all, but then it gets a little hairy (like most of Folker and Come On Feel Me Tremble, his most recent albums, which I didn't care for at all). With 49:00, all along the way, any time you start to get into a groove on something, it's liable to disappear into a hiss of overdubbed noise tracking or bleeds from other songs. That said, the production fits, and yet, and yet... almost everything about Westerberg's solo career continues to confound. As he himself once memorably sang, "Just add water - I'm disappointed."

And grateful too

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

by Louis MacNeice

Cocoon cocoon, have I come through too soon?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What to embrace -- a filthy ragtag cocoon? What style to wield -- cruel and ranting, cool and panting? Music? Musings? Muscularity? There's nothing that says something like... something.

from Netherland by Joseph O'Neill: ... the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world. That puts very fine point indeed on what I wonder about at my most successful instants of writing or teaching or thinking -- that I'm stirring up what's already hopelessly mixed, that I'm obscuring the already-obscure.

Greetings from Frontbutt, New Jersey

1. Alphonse Galway met Phoebe Slur at a reading in which they were both featured speakers. She was the only women under 60 in attendance, and wore a tight black jersey with the words Bone is bad printed on it in Chiller font. 2. He knew who she was, she did not know who he was, which was surprising. 3. They were both supposed to read for 20 minutes: he read for 18 and she read for 46. 4. Among the poems she read were “I’d Like to Pop Your Earhole,” “licorice, lavish, loutish”. 5. Among the poems he read were “1971” “1980” and “First Year.” 6. Alphonse had just won a chapbook contest for his thin volume of confessional verse which he wanted to entitle Greetings From Frontbutt, New Jersey, but which the publisher wanted to call 1971. Alphonse thought he could probably live with that. 7. Phoebe had earlier that year published an actual book of poems from an actual New York publishing house (no names but its initials were FSG) called Getting the Hang of It. Her poems consisted of transcriptions of letters she’d received from a man on death row in Houston. The letters were heavily pornographic and she had used a black laundry pen to censor the dirtiest words. 8. Alphonse’s favorite poets were John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Robert Lowell, Phoebe’s were Alicia Ostriker, Mina Loy, Cesar Vallejo and Amiri Baraka. 9. Alphonse couldn’t take his eyes off Phoebe: she had a flat steel stud in her upper lip and food in the corner of her mouth.

change is cliche perfecting itself

The Democrats are just silly looking. I know we're ascending. I'm glad. But still. The stage makes it seem like a great big people's church of cheering. Ted Kennedy sounded like he was going to keel over at any moment. [I have already been upbraided for this uncharitable remark about TK. I am a big fan, though, and he is clearly running on fumes. Perhaps I should have gone on to salute his heroism for even showing up, but that just didn't occur to me.]

There's a line from this great "list" poem by James Richardson called "Vectors 2.0: More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays." # 9 reads:

9. Most of what looks like change is cliche perfecting itself.

who wasn't born standing up?

Three years ago I posted my first blog, about how I didn't understand blogging. That was also my last entry. But now I back. And more ignorant than ever. I'm rediscovering myself here -- I have a lot to talk about, and little regard for hearing back from people, and an urgent need to self-aggrandize -- isn't that the Blogger raison d'etre? But first! NOT writing for a while. The way people use blogging -- as a diary, for instance -- is just mortifying to me. I could never do it. Even mentioning elements of my personal life makes me shudder: they're so context-less, it's just words. So then, more words.

Steve Martin's book Born Standing Up is great (pictured above is a fantastic photo of him marketing himself as a hippy-friendly entertainer in the early 1970s - even the Eagles wouldn't have stooped to that odd shell necklace!) -- I hated his two novels, but heard great things about his play about Picasso -- this is a memoir of his standup years and it's concise, detailed and very funny. [CB Ed. Note: 8/28/08: Just finished. Not that good. Early stuff the best. "no comment" picture best thing in book.]