June 2012
P O E T RY
100 YEARS The Regulars
POETRY June 2012
FOUNDED IN 2012 BY AMF NO. 6
For John Patrick Fox. These are his friends. This is his town. 5-28-1985 6-12-2011
POEMS
Showdown Recording begins after the basketball game: OKC V. San Antonio. OKC wins. In a small corner the readers arrive, drinks and cigarettes in hand, conversations put on hold. Poems are handed out in order printed. Everyone delivers a cold reading.
CMB Scythe When I was fucking. In the barn demoted to garage, the ax and cherry stump can’t be budged. Daylight perfurates siding despite the battered armor of license plates, Ow. corroded colors, same state: decay, their dates the only history of whoever tilled the soil and left, as a welcome, the skull of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail of lime to the torn sack No. in a corner where cobwebs Put it down here. festoon a scythe. Rusted sharp, it sings when he grips its splintery handle, swings, and crowns topple from Queens Anne’s lace. • the genuineness of first sight the simplicity of heart breakin it down -CMB
The Supplicant First for birds before an ancient icon, a stray cat. The inbred need to pray is that, is what makes God necessary, and not, she says, the other Hell no. way around. Beyond that it’s all mystery, so don’t question why man creates gods that demand sacrifice, Fuck you, man. condemning mortals to spend their lives trying to praise, trying to praise godhead into mercy. Better instead to ask the frog to bless the fly, and once the cheese is in this trap, to beg forgiveness I, from the rat to beg forgiveness from the rat. I like that!
SPM Their Story They [yelling] were nearing the end of their story. The fire was dying, like the fire in the story. Each page turned was torn and fed to flames, until word by word the book burned down to a, an unmade bed of ash. [yelling] Wet kindling from an orch-orchard of wooden spoons, snow stewing, same old Go to the car. wind on the gram-gramophone, same old wounds. Turn up the blue dial under the kint-kettle until darkness boils with fables, and mirrors defrost to the quick before fogging with steam, and dreams rattle their armor of stooovepipes and lah-ladles. Boots in the corner kick in their sleep. A jacket hangs from a question mark.
TOS Christmas Trees How Ok. Ok. Ok. should I now recall the icy lace of the pane like a sheet of cellophane, or the skies of alcohol poured over the saltbox town? On that snowy New England tablue, No, I get it. the halo of falling snow glared like a waxy crown. Through blue frozen lots my giant parents strolled, wrapped tight against the cold like woolen Argonauts, searching for that taalll perfection of Scotch pine from the hundreds Yeah, yeah. laid in line, like the dead at Gualdelcanal. The clapboard village aglow that starry stark December I barely now remember, or the brutish ache of snow burning my face like quicklime. Yet one thing was still missing. I saw my parents I KNOW. kissing, perhaps for the first time.
TAP Heraclition Una, where’s we might find that? Next week here? Cool. [music] In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairne, hairnet. In goes the philosophy teacher explaining the theory of internal return, and Anton Stanler, the clarinet, still, still [laughter] owwing mohoney to Mozart. In goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten. Every river, Leethin, so why should we care if it’s not the same river? No I don’t think. I hate how everything changes, tree to falling term paper, chatlin to beheaded plotter, drug d-dealer to nair. The heart volunteer [laughter] faster than cereal but then hardening to a relic. CHRIST! Change into another man. O depressed poetry to recite. O the next eager trainee anxious to be more than line. Going up, you’re also going down, so either way, as your mother said, be nice. [laughter] When she went in, she was very thin. Earth, air, fire, water, mother. Fish pulse slowly under the river ice cool. • reminessent ofl an ex-lover: I stepped in something today the smell reminded me of what you are so very full of -TAP
BYM Peach Farm I’m thinking it’s time to go back to the peach farm or rather the peach farm seems to be wa, wanting me back even though the work of pick, pickpicking Do over! two of them sticky perils and sudden swarms are done. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never been on that peach farm, just glimpsed from a car squat trees I assumed were peach and knew a couple in school who went off one summer, so they said, to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant, he didn’t have much intention, canvases of crushed lightbulbs n screws in paste. He gotten fired from the lunch counter for putting too much [laughter] meat on the sandwiches of his friends that ended up in Macy’s in New York selling caviar and she went home I think to Scranton, two more versions of never hearing from someone again. I’d like to say the most important fruits are within but that’s the very sort of bullshit one goes to the peach farm to avoid, not just flight from quadratic equations Hey, you guys. waiting for the plumber, finding out your insurance won’t pay. Finding much out from the spider’s stomach. Everyone wants to be part of harvest and stop coughing to death and cursing at nothing and waking up nowhere near an orchard. Looking at these baskets, bashed about, nearly ruined with good emploet. Hey! Often, after you’ve spent a day on the ladder, you dreams of angels, I didn’t say that! the one with the trumpet and free subscription, subscription I said Friday! to the New-New Yorker or the archer, the oink angel, angel of ten dollar bills found in the dryer or the one who welcomes you in work gloves and says if you’re caught eating a single peach, even at No! windfall, you’re be executed. Then laughs. It’s okay, kiddo, as long as you’re here, you’re one of us.
TDM Early Elegy: Smallpox One shot. The world has certified itself rid of all but the arguments, to eradicate or not the small sock of variola frazen, quarantined o, or a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile lens, HA HA HA. her glass slide a cleares, most becoming pane. How could it resist slipping away from her, whoa, with her, that discrete first pork? That’s good, yeah. Shot! Shot! Birthday shot! Alright! Birthday shot! Hurrah! Time. Time. Fuck you. Fuck me. Hey, twenty six only comes around once. I know. I know. Thank god for cabbies. Yeah! Ok. No one cares, man. Onto the next one.
Early Elegy? Miss, Head Mistress, Yeah, Yeah The word itself: prim, retired, its artifact [smack] her portrait above the fireplace, on her face the boredom sshhe abhorred, then perfected, her hands Nooo! held upward, then emptiness a revision, cigarettes and brandy sniffer painted, [laughter] Right? intolerabe, ow, to lead, to leave this lesser gesture. What next? Or shrugged whatever. Asshole! From the waist down she is never there.
And the Gauchos Sing Give me the first word at least. The first word? Catalapas? Catalapas blooming up and down Catalapa Street, car alarms blooming up and down Wave-Waveland Avenue, [laughter] an instant of nature without the narrative. O face in your morning juice, swimmer in an old wol, wool suit. We sit side by side on the steps smoking the same cigarette, watching children who live alone, woman married to the wrong men, women married to the wrong men. Here is your little dog roaming the alley. What will he do for love this time? The gauchos sing, [singing] the silver lights of stars hurl themselves against the open pampas of Clark Street. O tomato in a wwoman’s palm, one millisssecond following the nnnext millisecond. Heal thyself, the poems says, pick up your beggar’s mat and walk. You hurl yourself under traffic. You talk of the, to cops [laughing] and street and things. They smile at their smartphones. They strut in the sun like jackals and kitt, after the ki, after a kill. And the gauchos sing, every wwill finally leave you, sho, shoo. [laughing] A cloud of pignus cuts through the smog. Everyone will finally leave you. When the bus comes we sing like Alright, alright! soloists. A red sky ppresses you to its lips. [laughter] I tell you that everything has already been written. I didn’t say that! You say on a long, I can’t. difficult pilgrimage you’re mine Basho wrote on his hat. That was challenging. • [Written down on the original page]: Dislecksia, I see things as they are. Dyslexia has proved to be a blessing and a fautl, I can not see words and storyiss stories like Youdo but, I can read what you say I can not write what I think; but I can see It like you portray it! Happy Birthday to me!!
RMS On a Picture by, uh, Cézanne There’s no description [TV] in the braided stone, the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark, bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth. What are you crazy? The dog of work gnaws the [laughter] day’s s-short bone, snarls a mountainside into lavender and green. In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all. Woooo! Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, [TV] blank canvas plastic and vast in one off center patch. To copy what’s invisible, to improvise [TV] a soul of things and remake solid life into fresh Woo! anxious unlifelike form. Hey! Hey!
New Endymi-Endymion She visits still too much, dressed in aromas of fir needles, mango, mold. Allen! I still get lost knowing she’s close, me not getting younger or more conscious. Happy Birthday Tucker! Sometimes I fantasticate YAAAAH, OOOOOHHHH, YEAAAAAAH! OOOOOOO! I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked, freak-ed scenes. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I feel her frosty nite-nitrogenous hands and wrists vaporing nooses around my head and feet and genitals, conjuring my [laughter] drab hair into a party bar, bowl of oiled, desirable locks. She makes me nervous, but what would I do without? So long as I can’t have her, I want her and this alarming manic frequency. Then again, who wants to wake to change, its pulp-ed, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies? My night watch hot girl, moon maiden, mom, just let me get one night’s sleep without regret, released from you foxy ticklish fondlings, your latest smell of windy windblown fresh cut grass. Keep going er?
JLD Shirts and Slacks Right, right. The .32 Special, in Dutch Masters box, still in their closet bedroom CLOSET, days after my mother’s death, I had to fax it, plus my father’s thirty years ago. [takes a drink] I used to practice disarming, reloading, putting it in my mouth for fun. And so, here it is again, Oh yeah? but stupid women, Great Depression child scrolling tens and twenties in macaroni boxes loaded, uh, halfcocked. Oh yes, shoot the burglar in the closet, Look at that. Look at it. the cat in heat on the fence, and Calvin Coolidge. She rose, rammy, close to death, cocked up in the bed as if pulleyed by heaven, sometime past midnight. I was there to watch, WHAT? her eyes wake for a moment enraged and hateful toward me. Bone wooled with slights of flesh, what certainty in the body at its end? And between here and there? Breath stops, blood fades, the comic heads I’m lifting from the pillow feels too merely anatomical and heavier than before. • Ha ha. O, nah that’s no good. Uh, I won’t, I won’t cite the reference, but uh the best explanation of poetry I’ve heard is that it is, it’s uh, it’s inescapable for most artists, but for the layman there is always the question of like why fucking poetry you know? And the best explanation I’ve heard is when you are in an argument with your woman, like when you’ve done whatever to your woman, whether it’s been cheated on her or assaulted her in some way, you have about 12 fucking words left to explain, [clapping] to explain to your woman why she is important to you and why you like her and why she means more to you than why you fucked up, and that is where poetry comes in handy, in anyman’s life, be it a poet, be it a fucking janitor. It comes in, it comes in handy when you have to explain to someone with as few words as possible, painting a fucking picture, a watercolor of like hatred and disarmament and fuckedupatude and ineptitude, it comes in handy when you have to explain to a woman why you love her and why you can do better. And that’s poetry.
JNG Go? Whenever You’re Ready. The Shoe Box A high school mash note’s stammering lust. Father and me, shirts and ties, What? snapshot glare, and somehow graphed [sound of pool being played] into that air a young man’s foolscap poem when just, just, [laughing] when a just, whatever, OKC! Absolutely. Loose joinery of words was all that mattered. But then in last night’s dream, she mother, wife mash note’s love? tells me a box holding a secret life has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard, a wind-harp’s wwarp, words yarding across staves, fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes. And things, a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave, the heart hollows, the cannot do withouts, Wooo! the whens and whos, the frayed veils between death and here. OOOOOOOOOOO! [TV] I packed this box myself. [laughing] I packed it full of fear. The voices of my world were not tender and unquestioning. Conversations, especially among members of my mother’s family, were choleric eruptions. If by some accident a rational argument occurred, defeat was registered not by words of acknowledgment but by sardonic defia, defian, [laughing] defiant sneer. Anger, impatience, and dismissive ridi, ridicule of the unfamiliar were the most familiar moods. Everyone around me, it seemed spoke in the brittle, whateverness tones I still hear when my own voice comes ssnaarling out of its vinegary corner. • Tucker! Tucker! Tucker! Tucker! I hardly ever heard anyone in my family or neighborhood [laughing] say they were angry with or found of so-and-so. It was instead an aimless YAY! WOOO! but earnest. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TUCKER! WOOOOOOO! Theatrical and purposeless, a kind of roving sparkiness going off constantly in the universe at large, for it took in God and all His angels and His saints. My people always seemed to be picking a fight with circumstance, with the very fact. RETROGRADE! [laughing] cosmos would do. I didn’t know how peculiar this was until I left it behind and found outside my culture a broader and more pliable medium for moral feeling. Nor did I realize how deeply its music had settled in my heart until I heard in the poetry I came to write that saame extremity of unease and rage at circumstance. Did you pick this for me? [no reply ] Did you pick this for me? [inaudible sounds] Wow, I mean, it’s very fitting. I don’t wanna say this on tape. [tape turns off]
CWM Moving Things My aunts mentioned her just once, calling her my aunt, their sister, though she wasn’t. They mentioned the vinyl recliner in the kitchen, the I like Ike poster, the Sacred Heart, cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame. Before jolted by the gift that called through but never really for her, she became unpleasantly calm. Moments later, after she said, I don’t want this please, God love raced down the breath, er, raced down the pulse into her look. It was as if her things spoke back, a table leg scruped the floor, a fork wobbled in a drawer, knick knacks fell. She nearly died each time it happened. They said her mind just wasn’t there, or she wasn’t in it anymore. She sat helpless afterwards, papery when they lifted her from vision seat to bed. The might to move what her eye fell upon is the image of her I keep, her iridescent readiness. • Some poets believe Mother Memory isn’t irrelevant, isn’t relevant. A contemporary, responding to something I’d said in an interview, once remarked that I was some kind of Wordsworthian mooncalf, that poets who think aas I do are writing out of an obsolescent Rromantic presupposition, that one shouldn’t make such a fuss about poetry as recovered subjectivity. He had a point. Recollection of personal experience can’t be the only motor that powers the imagination; pragmatic invention is just as important. And yet to dish memory elaboration, falsifications, and crackpot inventiveness, along with the world of subjectivity it so critically shapes, and one that, and one which shapes it, is to give up radical curiosity about what we are, chemically as well as spiritual. Or spiritual because chemical. In the past fifty years, brain researchers have practically created an alternate universe seemingly as expansive and finely articulated as our own, except that it is really is our own, and it’s not only in our heads. We are what we network, or what our bundles of nerve cells and their extensive axions that shoot and hook them into other cellular networks make us. It’s where deity lives. • Getting older, I don’t so much want to remember things in poetry. I want to keep them. • Uh, so this kind of reminds me of, of, I have, uh, a weird experience wwhen I was younger. Um, I had this this uncle that was, uh, really into poetry, kinda got me my start into poetry. But we had a little a little weird weird inci, incident with
him where, um, once he took me to his basement and he had this kind of uh, I guess aquarium filled with gerbils and he afixed on each gerbil’s feet like barbie doll shoes. He kinda sscotch taped them on so they couldn’t get them off, uh, but he made them walk around in these barbie doll shoes while, while I read Walt Whitman poetry. Annd, and I never understood the connection.
ACJ Yeah, Brother Francis too Brother Leone In my dream I watched it from a windowsill. Come see this raptor’s shadow hushed down. Green brik tenments, bulk beak and feather sstruck and [laughter] tumbled asssault. The air with sparrow or chimney swift wilderness bbreathes wherever we are and haded nh to O’Hare. Late fall, I saw on its vague bare branch a goshuwk, a gwoha, grace, yes and auspicious terror. I should watch with him . I should be poorer, poorer than any wing of the air. H, h, if you could have seen, this is a different story, above us cloud studies out of constanoble Pec-Pescadro sandsto, Pescadros sandstone cliffs seeped and sheered by tide. I held Brother Antianto’s hand so afraid was he the cliff would crumble. What was that? As if then came had already happened the ospey’s sea foam breast sign we had of the Holy Spirit pounding the wind lift and save us it stormed up beneath our feet. Alone in Invers I saw a kenstral stop in the blue and sta, and toop and icy blowtorch points pecked my hands and feet. Blood fourthed from my side closer now my mind-ers watched and bear with me while I’m walking barefoot through a Tu-tucson ssub mesquite and prickly pear, a young vginesomethings sugarss me from the eye of [laughing] midmorning’s sun lay last night. [laughing] Easter Saturday I saw a deer enter a bare-chest Yaqui ancient who obeyed the dance danced through him with the poor, we think aren’t, ar, with us everywhere the deer dancer’s consintrayt ramdah beside the freeway and reservation projects. Brother Ash, the less I become of what God made me the more real I am in His heart. Let durable Gods be ashes to pour on our heads. Brother Wing keep me in my place on lower Market street with that bare-chested man bird beautiful wants searchifying clothed in cchhaps rat-flood blanket and cherry running shoes, lady poverty at his side I walked Avenue A knee deep in crowss spirit of mud, murderers and suicides choked. Whatever’s given I’ll take away, nh, drenched in a Jersey storm I tried to send my spirit to God. My core my sphere. I asked the hawk Who are you? But in some nameless place doubled up overcoats pushed oxcarts past me through mud and hurry gray children ate their cardboard name tags. Keep and bless such images of our own killing kind? Buzzards si-silence nd slice over our heads waiting for us their food song how little it takes to complete a world to find th-what surfaces To Brother Fire I offer our endless poor men’s wars, our starved ruined plan. • Whenever you are ready to leave. Get another. I’m sorry. It’s fine. He just poured a shot. It’s probably my deepest politicall conviction that there is in the things of the world an essential stilled singularity Fucking, man. that cannot be exporexporoated-oorrated Lime? seven by the mastering forms of the imagination. You are the one! The enchantments of representation are not true magic. Take a shot! Poetry doesn’t, The whole place is going up! transform the world, it embodies
the particular acts and feelings of being in the world. The things of the world resist words and wordness-eness-wordness. [TV] My instinct is the still childish one of [a chair scrapes the floor] taking what’s given in language and breaking it up, She is so fat, she is so. into phonetic pieces, ss-ss-el-syll-syla [laughing] each loaded with some nuisance of actual or desired feeling and the pied, scattered clues of sense. [turning away from the book] What the fuck?
EAB K. Miss Snooks, Poetess Miss Snooks was really awfully nice and never wrote a poem that wass not really awefully nice n fitted to a woman. She therefore made no enemies and gave no sad surprises Hey, Chris! but went on being awfully Chris! nice and took a lot of prizes.
From “The Hollow Hill� Smaller than pollen grain, smaller than seed of bittery, bitter berry [laughter] red, do not look for the small, the door has no size at all. Mine was a double. Some of sorrow have made a well and deep have seen in daylight far stars glimmer pale Whoa, whoa, whoa. in a nether heaven. I just read them through.
JBH Alright, the Title is Dreamwood In the old, scratched, cheap OH! wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, vined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, Don’t you change that song! a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering hole. Everything is too cold! If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, WHAT? of distance blue and purple by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, Oh man. mass produced yet durable, being her now, is what it is yet a dream map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report. • I liked the poem I would read it again, in my quiet thoughts, in my, in my head and not out loud. • I uh, I, I got nervous in the beginning and I probably mispronounced like one word, Tell him how many beers they’ve had. when I shouldn’t of, but I started to like the poem or whatever Alright, yeah. when I was reading it, and then I enjoyed reading it. I actually read it to myself rather than knowing that I was going to be recorded. I will have, like, this deafness in my ear. Oh, my god I love that! I cannot read the poem. You don’t have have too. I don’t know much about poetry, I mean read poetry alot, and I have my own books, but I know nothing about this book. I know nothing about who is writing, if they are all different authors, or if they are the same. I’m not educated on this subject. I only read it for pleasure, and, um, I didn’t know how to read it. And I read it just how I would have read it if I picked up the book at a book store and opened it to that page and read it. FUCK YOU! FUCK ME! That’s why I was confused if whether or not I should call it a poem, or if I call it an essay or I call it an entry of some sort. Have you heard of the magazine? No I haven’t. Yeah, no I’ve never, I’ve never heard of it. Yes, this is the first time YEAH. I’ve ever read anything from this. Whenever I read poetry it is from suggestions from friends and then I go get it. Or I am browsing in a book store [laughing] and I, I look at several books, and I open up to the first page FUCK! that I open up to and then I read it and then I decide if
I am going to buy it. Well, I have to read a couple, I want to break free! I have to read a couple. Because one should be good, but then I get the feeling I want to break free! of what the whole book is about and what it is about what the theme of the book is about. I want to break free from this life! Whether it is on daily life and just experiences through life, or whether it is on spring, or whether it is on, you know, whether it is about how I don’t believe in God or whatever it is. You don’t believe in God? I don’t know. I’m falling in love! I uh, I’m not religous and uh, I don’t worship satan. I’m falling in love for the first time. I am in between. I don’t really care. I feeel that my life is up to me, and if I die it doesn’t matter. I don’t think about that. I guess.
The MLK House A friend’s rented home. The TV is playing in the background. The History channel, the show called “Cities Underground.” It is cool inside. Four friends sit in the living room, those reading try their best to concentrate, the others only slightly paying attention to the words being read. The coffee table is covered with pipes, board game pieces, electricity bills, ash, and beer bottles. It is the same with almost all horizontal surfaces in the house. When a cigarette break is needed, the group sits on the porch and continues to record as people and cars pass by on the street. It is hot outside.
RDF Girl of Portland by Johannes Vermeer I’ll be however the fuck I wanna be, dude. Should I go? Should I go? He put the spirit essence the light pip not only in each eye’s alblbme concentrate of starlight but must have been taught how to do that by first finding it in the pearl. He posed then corrected in dusty studio light that pounced on the window behind which sits this cheeky gir. Fuck this dude I just looked ahead and its one sentence, this is one sentence long dude. Are you fucking kidding me? With us here today. Dusty studio light that pounced on the window behind which sits this cheeky girl pear and apple blossom cheeks a fake description naturally of their plain fleshne, fleshness drably golden and her lips from Haight Street’s darlings. Nose studs, jacket studs, girls with that kind of eye. One by the ATM machine casually juicy and so fair a Netherlandish type of pandhandling strangers. Pomegranate there was seed, ball bearings ahglum in her nose, pearls not sea harvested but imagined seen put there by certain need and fancy because love says it so. Picture that, picture this. • That was fucking stupid. You don’t sweat! The imaginative dimension? Oh man. I can’t get past that first fucking sentence. Duude. The imaginative dimension a poem creates, I don’t even know what I just read right then, like I just, word after word after word after word. I didn’t follow. Did you follow that? Did, did ya’ll, like, did ya’ll, like was that fucking anything right there? [no answer] Ok. The imaginative dimension a poem creates in language is like space in a painting, a one-time event, a unique local in which prop, in which poetry or image making activity can happen. Poetry’s space is composed and energized by formal dynamics. I’m not talking about rhyme and meter. Form is a poem’s internal ec-economy, the pattern composed of musicality, rhythm, and sense, created by whatever means. If, as the maxim goes, poetry teaches me how to live, it does so in its mysterious effects of completed form. If it teaches, it does so by shooting its formal fforce straight into the bloodstream of my consciousness, and it lives in life, in more, in me more as instinct than as moral awareness. So it’s not what’s said in poems that has been so exemplory, exemplary to me, it’s poetry’s charged, whole, instantaneous pattern of form that is simultaneously a pattern of feeling. Little dot on the center of the page. I think it’s not so crucial to have a signature manner as it is to have a signature form fee. I think it’s not so crucial to have a signature manner as it is to have a signature form feeling. Then just about any line or stanza or phrase will enact a miniature the weave of the entire poem, and it frees a poet into changing ways of writing. Such freedom can lead, as the mannnerisms of plainstyle discurv-discur-siivness cannot. I don’t know half these words or I’m just really fucking stoned. To the borderland where the unconscious squats through the finer tones of consciousness.
You’re saying that this valley, what I’m seeing now. The end. Cool. So. That’s, that was that. That was crazy. I don’t. I think. I mean I couldn’t. I wass very, uh, wanting to just read it, and not think about it as I read it. And I think that was throwing me off. That first sentence is what did it to me. The first sentence, it made me want to continue to read and not to analyze and so when I got to the paragraphs on the right side of the page, I didn’t get to analyze and I just kept that feeling of wanting to continue to read, and had no idea what I was reading. That first sentence threw me off so much, I couldn’t, I couldn’t think after that. And it might be cause I’m high but, I mean what happened, it was a, it was a, it was a time when I was, when I had no gain, I just read, out came the words. It was simply, it was an interpretation from vision to audio, I had, there, there was zero understanding. I tried to understand from the beginning but there was no pause and it was pushing me to read read read, uh, just to get through it, and I kept that thought with the paragraphs after those and I couldn’t even understand those. I have no idea what I just read. That was weird, it felt like a race. The church was built up.
TJK Big City Speech Not Alone Use me. Abuse me. Turn wheels on fire on manhole hotheads. Sing me. Sour me. Secrete dark matter’s sheenon our smarting skin. Rise and shine. In puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd sonabulists and sleepyheads. Wake us. Speak to us. Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits, the rats, voles roaches and right here outlivers of all, let’s see it, obscence ethic and politics. Crawl on us. Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber optic wrecks through drill brit dirt to bedrock. Beat our brows. Flee our sorrows. Sleep tight with your ultraviolets uh, righteous m-mica and drainage seeps, your gorgeous color-chart container ship and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist. The end. This place is.
The Green Man Rumbdumb from last night’s shrubbery tryst exhales soot, ferseed, shoots and vines, brings his hot breath from the cities park’s wood, saying a song we don’t understand through the bbriar and bay leaves of his beard. And in Philadelphia, 1954, American. Out of late autumn’s darkening he came, a junkman lugging a Penn Fruit cart, straww b-bristling his face, crying a name. Or from manholes in other cities, Don’t go up. his holographic ectoplasm greets us when traffic lights turn green. And now! That’s really weird. Un-uncover and there he is, membernous Caliban alone [laughing] with sewer rats, or stumblebum Puck, una-unnameable solids crusting nails and toes, bringing us his dark. Our neighborhood’s s-sused John-John, cobra down-lg-eh down boots [laughing] skiddling at my feet among the maddening jasmine, when I grab too late, when I grab too late to save him growls, [laughing] I can save you darling pigs. Behold, behold, and maybe I’ll help. • Call now for your free information packet. A-a city bears an identity pressured into being by those who lived and work there but also by externally generated forces, by hearsey and expectation. Visitors s-say San Francisco is the most EuropEuropean of American cities, More out of life. though no one who lives here knows what that means, a certain familiar style, a speed or mood, or its smallness, Call now. I suppose, but even they’re are bell jar considerations. The actual place has its own Call now. res-respri-respiratory rhythms, and its breath can be vile. For generations Delivers. city administrations have been helpless to transform a stretch of Market Street that seems mysteriously and irrevatably, re, sorr, irretrievably lost. 1-800. Uh. [laughing] West of the dolled up downtown area, Union Square, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, the street frays into porn shops, grind houses, army surplus stores, and shop windows stuffed with hundreds of knocked-off electronic gadgets. Beyond those, despite the presence of a few tenacious upscale restaurants and et-antique dealers, Market Street feels edgy and crumbly, listening toward skid row. Get free samples of these inovative. The man was liquefying before my eyes, his body had a runny fuddle of dark bundled clothes and sooty skin. His pud, hanging [laughing] from the, from open pants, had spread a glistening delta of piss[laughing]that was almost iridescent in the early evening [laughing]li-ight. Now. The media this week is making high hhhohosannas to the memory of the recently [laughing] deceased Ronald Regan. Great man, great optimist, great communicator. We cling so hard to whatever falsehood will sustain us in our American exceptionalism, Free DVD. that in the me, Call right now! that in the media only the odd spoilsport is reminding us that the former Under a month and more. president shredded the social safety net and “de-institutionalized” the mentally ill. Images slip and slide. The smiling [laugh-
ing] Ggipper, the man with the peacock piss-streak, [laughing] semi-comatose, a word I learned when my father was dying, his legs in sour bedsheets spread the very same way, as if he’d never, as if he had never stirred again, like that Market Street stumblebum, who reminds me of the Your time. Call right now. des-uh-desdestitute mother and child whom hero in Melvill’s Redburn sees day after, er sees the day after day in Liverpool alley, until one day he finds them replaced by a pile of lime. This is going to be once in a generation. That was crazy, that was intense. Saturday, page two. Nice to see a man. Whenever I was reading it was really hard to focusse cause I just wanted to laugh as soon as I started reading it, I guess the wording about the stumblebum was humurous. On the cliff and deep inside a mysterious holy object of ancient Christian faith. The ancient Ehtiopian Orthodox Church. [music] [laughing] The church carved into a sandstone cliff 900 feet above sea level. To get to it you have to climb a few hundred feet. I, that was hard to understand, a little bit, the top is an essay about it and this is concerning it? It’s like a drunk on the streets, and is Market Street, is that by the bay? Yeah. You wanna read another one? I don’t know, that was intense. I have to run to the bank real quick, just to go grab some, uh, money for rent. This one is about cigarillos. Hey! I believe it. Come over here and read it.
RDF [Repeated Snapping] Check Check, Test Test, Check Test, Check, Check, Check, Check, Test, Solo R&B Vocal Underground, Oh Hey, That Fit Right There. Woow, That’s, That Worked out Well. It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay trains strung-out hoo, deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby [traffic] rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wined darkening, of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tilled dome: his deter, he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue, while we all wait to be chuted to cart let, to car lot or home, [takes a drag on cigarette, exhales] closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like leaves crossed, lives crossed every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint. • I was sitting in the Upper West Side studio of the painter Paul Resika. We’ve known each other nearly twenty years. I’ve seen a great many of his paintings and he has read my books. He’s been wwanting to paint me, but since I didn’t have days to give [traffic] up for an oil portrait, we spent a long afternoon talking, smoking cigarillos, and drinking sherry, very Phil-Phillippe de Montebelo, beyo, Montebeyo, while he drew. An hour or so along I was confiding secrets, which is not my habit, and relating long-ago events that hadn’t before snagged in my consciousness. I monologued, also not my habit, I couldn’t shut up, I was being a real chicaron is that how you say that? Is that chicaron, chicaron, chicaron, chicaron, chicaron, that is, that’s how it spelled out right there, chicaron as my family would say, wagging their hands as if flicking w-water from their fingertips. Roy Eldridge boiled from the CD player while I related n anecdote from my childhood, about a time when I briefly and uselessly took muusic lessons. You should write about that, Resika said. And a year later, I do, but in the writing the originating anecdote turns into an essay on how my youth in music became insseparable from physical pain. [birdsong] It’s self, it’s pure selfportraiture. But what is its truth? Meanwhiile, it’s three hours later and Paolo has finished two drawings, one on, one on ss-savy, one a suave, light-handed, rather fair likeness. Not bad, this one, he says. But I think I got something here. What he got was a portrait that snapped and roared at me, an angular, anxious head that looked not so much drawn as struck. He had found, or reimagined, animal quickenings in my inner life which only I, I thought was aware of, [takes drag on cigarette, exhales] the image also coined a sensation very familiar to me, a crude blending of idiotic irrational joy and fevered fear of living in a world of harm. Boom! [throws book onto ground] [traffic]
TBG Um, [Cartoon Music in Background] Josephine Miles, Increment Now in the nude. So populous the region that from the next region the c-crowing of children, barking of cars could be heard, so that a [laugh track] continuous linkla, linkage of sounds of living ran in the limber air, district to district, Woodlake to Montclair, Freestone [laugh track] to Smithfield, and [bleeped cursing on TV] other [laughing] child’s cry was not concealed from any trade route, or passer by, or upstairs island, Klondike Christmas, of thought withdrawn, or basement, Criminal, of submerged magnificence [bell rings]. One crow welkened the evening sky, [bell rings] bark blasted the dark, like an assertation in a time of assent, What would you do ooo oo for a Klondike Bar?, or an increase to astonishment. [ funky music on commercial ] Definitely not my strong suit man, doing that in high school really choked me up alot, you know, I just, when you don’t think about it as much it’s not a big deal. What the? It’s my turn, mac and cheese, mash potatoes and gravy. • Editor’s note: the poem “Desert,” remains unread. Within the days after this poem, TBG ingested a concentrated drug that remains unnamed. He has since been unable to reach.
MCS Dusting [birds singing] We’re on the road to nowhere. Every day a wilderness no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, On the road to nowhere. the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. We’re on the road to nowhere. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael, something [birds singing] finer. Each dust, each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to [birds singing] the stoove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before the father, before father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean promise, the desert in peace. It’s alright! Long before the sahdow and sun’s accomplice, It’s alright! the tree, Maurice. It’s alright! That’s a nice poem. [birds singing] Living in the south would be kind of a trip. One of the last places to [sigh] desegregate. We’re on the road to no where. Yeah. It’s true.
Restless, Winds The bar is filled with older inviduals, all past college age. A small group plays shuffleboard at the far end of the room. A small group gathers to read in a corner by the empty pool tables. Occasionally a waitress stops by to check on drinks and empty the ashtrays. The music that plays overhead is quiet. The bar is relatively empty and dark.
CDP Alright, Should I Just Read This Shit? Alright. So This is by Ruth Stone, I’ve Never Heard of Her. It’s Called The Pear. Alright. Ok. There hangs this bellied pear, let no rake doubt, meat for the tongue and febrile to the skin, wasting for the mil-drew, mildew and the rot, a ta, ah fuck I don’t even know the words, a tallow rump slow rounded, a pelt thin Have ya’ll been helped? and for the quickest bite, so, Yeah. orchard bred, I’m fine. heaviest downward from the Can I get another gin and tonic? shaking stem. Whose fingers curve around the ripened head lust to split so fine [laughing] a diadem? diadem? diadem. I feel like I am singer, er like, the music, like saying it towards the music, that’s freaking me out. [laughter] There is the picker, stretches for the knife, there are the reavening who cla-claw the fruit, more, those adjur, more of those adjuring wax that lasts a life, and foxes, freak for cunning, after loot. For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wrists, wits, but husbandom, Fuck! husbandman will dry her for the pits. December 1951. Jesus that was like hard. I have to do that one too? Fuck. I don’t like reading this.
Uh, to Mother. Is This the Same Person? Uh, here where the rooms were dryly still who is this dustily asleep while juicy children [laughter] run the field? Where is her even, where is her every deepening well whose buckets to the, to a fullness dip for needs com-passion must fulfill? Times are more! Like freshets, fresh, damn what are these words? Like freshets they themselves may yield a little to the turned up cup, but death is in the long dry spell. Run children, run, the light, the light grows dull, and she who keeps the well must sleep, and rain is unpredictable. And I think it can show. December 1951. That’s all rhymey and shit. Poor man, picking on the wrong guy. I gotta like keep going? That’s bothering me. That is long. I don’t want to read that one, I wanna read this one instead.
The Pear Snow would be the easy way out, that softening sky like a sigh of relief, fuck off with that, at finally being allowed to yield. No dice. We stack twigs for burning in glistening patches but the rain won’t give. So we wait, breeding mood, making music of decline. Thanks. We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in light that is already leaving. Don’t mention it. We ache in secret, memorizing a gloomy line or two of German. When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, winds, with your cargo of zithers! November 1981. I like that one better than the last one. Probably because it is shorter than the last one. • Do I have to do this? What else do you want? [tape turns off, turns back on] I don’t know why. I didn’t like the first two because I couldn’t read em. Cause I was nervous. Be, well, cause I’m nervous already, and because of this probably [gestures to the tape recorder] and because I don’t like reading in front of people, that is like something I do on my own and I’m a slow reader. Like I read slow, so when I’m trying to read in a bar, I don’t know, I like speed up cause I’m nervous or whatever. I don’t know, it freaks me out. Its weird. It’s like an anxiety thing. It’s like. I can read my own writing quickly, but not, because I’ve written it, obviously, that. It makes me weird. It makes me nervous. Like this makes me nervous. No, no, no. Not in like a bad way. Not that, not like ugghh. Like, just like, it just makes me nervous. Things make me nervous. I think the worst is going to happen everytime. So, like reading that, perfect example. I start reading it, and I start, I’m not even reading, like I’m just looking at the words and saying them and I think in my head like I’m going to fumble over the words and then I fumble over the words. And then like shit, I think like, fuck, I fumbled over the words and I keep fumbling over the words because I’m fumbling over the words and it just spirals out of fucking control. Until I’m like ok, stop, stop. Just chill out, drink more, you’re fine, it’s ok and then I try a little bit. And then like the third poem or whatever I liked a lot better, it’s ok. There probly. Well it was different. But I think that you are going to start judging me because I’m fumbling over the words and shit. I’m wearing this god damn shirt. [laughing] You look awesome though. I don’t know I get nervous about, it makes me, half the worst of it, is that like it makes me upset, like, a lot of my anxiety comes from being anxious. That sounds stupid but like you know what I mean, maybe you don’t. Like I get anxious and then I get upset about the fact that I’m anxious in certain situations. Like for instance this situation, there is no reason to be anxious. You are my really good friends, I love you guys, you’re awesome. I feel comfortable around you than most, more comfortable around you than most people. But I’m still like, I get anxious and then I get upset that I am anxious in this situation. And then I get even more anxious cause I am upset about being
anxious, it’s fucking backwards, man. It blows my fucking mind. I don’t know what to do. It’s like ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. [laughter] I feel like I’m going crazy most times. Because it’s like, it just goes on and on and on. Cause I get anxious and then I get anxious about being anxious and then I get anxious about being anxious about being anxious. And it just goes on, it’s just like a spiral. And then I start thinking about getting AIDS cause I stole a fucking smoothy. [laughter] I don’t know what it is, dude. [laughing] It’s fucking ridiculous, man. Ohh, my God.
DEB Ok. I Have Performance Anxiety All of a Sudden. This is weird. We were just talking about that. Have You Really? [laughter] Knowledge I don’t mind. Now that I know that passion warms little of flesh in the mold, and treasure is brittle, Yeah. I can’t get high. I’ll lie here and learn Oh, that’s mine. how, over their ground, Thanks. trees make a long shadow They have really good songs. and a light sound. They really do. Yeah. Have you, uh, ever heard iron horse? • Ha, ha, ha. I talked to you guys and I really don’t need to say it, but. Let’s hold off for now, until I have a drink or two. What’s the next one?
The Bluebonnet House A friend’s house, soon to be vacant. Most of the rooms are empty of furniture, save the kitchen and living room. The reader sits on the couch while a young archeologist, pursuing his PHD, sits at the kitchen table sipping coffee. We have just finished breakfast, compliments of the would be Dr. and the chickens in the back yard. A radio is playing in the background, but it is too quiet to hear.
SPB I am Reading the Northlumberland House. North-umber-land House I was always a thoughful youngster, said the lady on the o-omnibus, I don’t know what that word means. I remember Father used to say, you are more the thoughtful than us. I was sensitive too, the least thing upset me so much, I ussed to cry if a f, if a f, bwlublbw [laughing] I use to cry if a fly stuck in the hatch. Mother always said, Elsie is too good, there’ll never be another like Elsie, touch wood. I liked to be alone, sitting on the garden path, my brother said he’d never seen a picture more like faith in the arena. They were kind-ly people, my people, I could not help being different, and I think it was good for me mixing in a different element. The poor lady now burst out crying and I saw her friend was not a friend but a nurse for she said, cheer up duckie the next stop is ours, they got off at Northumberland House. This grey house of the Peirces is now a lunatic assylum, but over ther, over the gate there still stands the great NortherNotherumberland Lion. I suck at reading. [laughing] This family animal’s tail is peculiar in that it is absolutely straight, and straight as a bar it stood out to drop after them as they went through the gate. November 1964. [sigh] [laughter] Was I good? [laughter] • From that area there, I mean come on. I’ll be good. I mean last time I went in the winter I was freezing. I was like. So cold! It was only 68 or 71, but it was like cold. I was like why is it cold? Ugh. But um, I think. You know it will be good. It will just be the adventure of a life time. Definitely pretty crazy, I mean I have only had my bike a few months obviosuly. I can’t even imagine. I can’t even imagine riding my bike to San Antonio. Really? I think I might be able to do ten miles right now. My knees are pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. I rode my bike to Kerrville and back, so that was pretty good. I guess I just, I just like, overactive imagination. And talked myself into this. Have you been training? Yeah I have. And that was part of your fundraising right? I probably didn’t train as much as they told me to. You know. They had this whole map out. But I was riding at least ten miles a day and then, I, probably like, I would do long distance rides to Wimberley or Austin. I would try to do that every other weekend so, it wasn’t like what they were asking. But I work on my feet all day. I work three differernt jobs and I get there all on my bike in the Hill Country. Yeah. So I’m going up huge hills every single day. So, I don’t know. I feel like it will suck the first two weeks. I’ll probably be like holy shit, this is really fucked up and then my body will be like, you’re so awesome, you got this. And then like I’ll be done. You’ll be done before you know it. The next three months are going to be crazy as hell. I know. I just think. I think you just learn to do it. I feel like my body does whatever. I really try to respect my body and it ends up doing really well for me. And I really try to reward it too, so. I love my body. I know I can do it. [laughing] It’s telling me that I can do it. That’s what this
kinda whole thing taught me. I did put myself in this situation where you have to perform in order to do it. • I always wanted to climb the tower, but once I heard about John dying, I just, I just couldn’t even think of it anymore. I had planned to do it with my boyfriend, before we got together. But after I heard. I don’t know. It makes me sick just to see it.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Jo on the Go Recorded on the empty stoop of a local coffee shop. Occasionally people walk past to go to the hair salon or the nearby restaurant. Grackles and the sound of traffic perforate the reading.
GÁB On the Road with Wallance and Wwystan I accepted a correction from Wallace Stevens with only a bit of quibling. Apparently he hadn’t realized how evocative and olfactory [snapping] the word brewing could be in the idea of order at Key West, where he had used heaving instead. In committing the poem to memory I had repeated sscores of times: It would have been deep air, the brewing speech of air, a summer sound repeated in a summer without end. When I finally looked at the text and saw heaving it was a bit wrenching, but I let Wallace have his way. My [laughing] emendation, [traffic] or, if you insist, my mistake, came from having memorized the idea of order by glancing at its lines handwritten on the backs of business cards while cruising east on the Ohio Turnpike. Memorizing and reciting was a way I passed some hours of the bi-weekly Hello? commute in the company f-350, slouching toward Buffalo loaded with the steel construction paraphernalia that my ironworking colleagues call ten pounds of shit in a five pound box. The truck Hello? and its boxes might of looked, might look like a mess to strangers, but I’ve worked to keep some sense to it. The order of a tightly crafted poem has the same kind of appeal to me. [birds singing] The job site might be dirty, noisy, and cold, losing money and behind schedule, but I feel better knowing which box holds the three quarter inch drive sockets. Maybe Stevens speaks to similar needs No, work. when he writes about the sense overwhelmed by theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on high horizons, mountainous atmostpheres of sky and sea, and about humans wanting to find or manufacture order in an untamable nature, like his narrator, who recalls the lights on tilting fisihing boats as the stylus of a giant compass, maybe even a wand, fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, arranging, deepening, [turns page] enchanting [birds singing] night. Well, my truck was not as wild as Stevens’s Caribbean cense, nor is my crafty arrangement of gear equivalent to the transformative art of the po-poem’s heroine, who when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker. Ironwork is often artful though, if not arty, there are many reasons that carrying longish poems in memory has some of the same satistfactions as completing a difficult weld or fitting a steel handrail [birds singing] to a curved stail, stair. For one thing, when you haul out a poem from the brain’s back room, it feels like you own it. Each time you run through it you see different inflections you might use. Though the copyright owner might disagree, you share in his or her creative expression. On a long walk, for exsti, for instance, you might try out seven different ways to enunicate Stevens’ image of the willful, senseless sea like a body wholy body, fluttering its empty sleeves. This possessing of poems [traffic] may have benefits, but probaly not social ones. You might impress people at certain poems, but they’re likely just literary types and trying to impress that bunch is what got me into this manual labor mess. So I’ve heard myself say as I’ve pondered, whil clinging to some icy, skinny beam with my fingers, how differently life might have turned out if I’d
studied harder, for my chemistry final instead of pulling an all nighter on that Yeat’s paper. On the other hand, I dared once to start reciting W.H. Auden’s the shield of Achilles on a construction site, because the young guy dragging welding cables with me was mouthing one of Eminem’s clever raps. After a couple of lines, I saw Auden wasn’t matching my partner’s Red Bull rhythms, so I switched over to subterranean homesick blues. The kid wasn’t listening to that ancient stuff either, but it didn’t matter, Now. because the floor grinders started their machine and nobody could hear anything. So I still haven’t [birds singing] impressed anyone beyond family, but reciting from memory has other benefits. A good soli po, a good solid poem in your cortex can be almost like ballast in a ship’s hold. If turbulent mental activity surges, speaking a poem to oneself can be a way to even out the waves. I first learned this through my practice memorizing Psalms. But even nominally secular, secular poems recited aloud soothe, and not merely by providing a distraction from disturbing matters, but by the steady rhythm of their sound, and their effects on the breath Hey, Drew. Consider even the dark words from the shield of Achilles, and unintelligible multitude, a million eyes, a million Yes.boots in line without expression, waiting for a sign. What, whatever. Column by column in a cloud of dust they marched away enduring a belief whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. In speaking the poem’s sixty seven lines you restrain yourself from that familiar flurries of contemporary mediaspeak and follow phrasings that come from a deeper place. But pleasure [traffic] may be the main reason I keep memorizing poems. The intense familiarity of a work known by heart allows happy moments of sensing the poem as a whole and in details. This pleasure is not simply the kick of solving a puzzle, nor my ironworker affinity for structure [birds singing]. There is also pleasure in sounds and rhythms, [birds singing] even the mouth pleasure of unintelligible multitude [birds singing]. But at its best the experience of a good poem has to do with t-trying to apprehend a deeply known truth that another person could communicate [birds singing] only with a precise set of words. Probably I like both the shield of Achilles and the idea of order at key west because each in such a valuable perception underlies the art, making them not only good company on a long drive, but worth the effort to learn. • Um, [birds singing] I thought that it was really cool, um, I don’t know, I never really felt that sort of, [birds singing] uh, what’s, cathartic feeling, from memorizing a poem and reciting it, um. But I’ve never really tried to memorize poems unless you include [birds singing] Shakespeare from when I was in acting. Um, [birds singing] but uh, it was really cool. it made me want to re-read the shield of achilles,
it’s been a long time. [birds singing] It’s really well written [birds singing]. I also do understand thewhen he says [traffic] the mouth pleasure of certain words, like unintelligble multitude. There are ceratin words I really enjoy just because they are fun to say, [birds singing] like copacetic. It’s, starts with a hard sound, ends with a hard [birds singing] sound but in the middle it is just sort of flowing. But then again that’s also one of those types of words that when I use it people are like, mmm nerd. But it is in a rock song though. [birds singing]
Showdown, revisited Friday night close to “last call.� The bar is filled with students. Everyone is heavily inebriated. The recordings take place in multiple areas of the bar.
GBW O Delmore how I miss you [After a reading without recording, GBW finally presses the right buttons] I never watch Wimbeldon. I’m repeating myself. I’m not going to repeat myself. Some thought him drunk but really it was a manic depressive WOO! which is like having WOO! brown hair. Twice. Probably. You have to take your own shower, and existential act. You could ss-lip in the shower and die alone. Or you could slip in the shower or on a bicycle hand grip or a plastic soldier. Hamlets starting saying strange things like that. A woman is like a cantaloupe Horatio, once she’s open she goes rotten. Violent mother fucker. Well that’s just mean. He wanted to put it right there. Women are like cantoloupes in so many other ways. That’s wrong, Lou Reed. O Delmore where was the vaudeville for a princess. A gift to the princess from the stage star in the dressing room. The duchess stuck a finger up the duke’s ass and the kingdom vanished. No good will come of this. Stop this courtship. Sir you must be quiet or I must eject you. It’s a four door Ford. Delmore understood it all and could write it down impeccably. Shenandoah fish. Asterisk. NO. Foot note: character in several Schvaartz text. What? You were too good to survive. What is that? We aren’t doing a footnot anymore. I think it is better. You were too good to survive. Yeah. The insights got you. The fame expectations. So you taught. And I saw you in the last round. I loved your wit and massive, knnoowledge. You were and have always been the one. Shit! You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think. Hah. I wanted to write. One line as good as yours. My mountain. My inspiration. WOO! You wrote the greatest short story ever written. In dreams. Lou Reed. Andrew! In your dreams. It’s like your life is better without.
CER The Necessary Fluster You make me feel crazy, crazy! Though I do not have a favorite of many things, I do have a favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s one art. Its words on loss are so even keeled for five stanzas that I immediately became, a devotee of its matronly, metaphysical advice. But only suddenly, in the sixth stanza, the poem cracks open, leaking vulnerability. I love the poem for its timeless subject, its progression, We should order a pizza. and espeically for its title, which I consider a pun on my own professional interests as a curator. Alright. When I mentioned this to an English professor friend, he commanded I work for a lawyer. I recite one art like a pop quiz. I consented and got through four lines until my friend interrupted me, Elizabeth Bishop would never use the word fluster. An argument ensued. Google was consulted, and eventually I was vindicated. Our argument was essentially an ac-ademic one about Bishop’s practice, but it mirrored ongoing debates about what type of language and forms are appropriate for poetry. In this case, fluster, was common, colloquial, too close to slang, and for my friend, inconsistent with Bishop’s lyricism. He told me he loved me. It’s as if poetry’s only function were to embellish erudition. My own notions about what constitutes poetry veer toward the decorative as well, but when I think back on the poetry that first grabbed my imagination, YES! we real cool, we left school, it’s diction was akin to slang. We are over here! The monosyllabic words, the idiosyncratic meter, the creative verbs to jazz June, these weren’t simple aesthetic choices for Gwendolyn Brooks, they were linguistic portraits. Like Brooks, I lived for mmuch of my life on the South Side of Chicago. The familiarity of her ca, caneces primed my young mind for poetry. The familiar or colloquial isn’t base but inspirational, and I would argue, necessary. I’m pretty sure too. Over one hundred years prior to the pool players, Charles Baudeliare stated that art must find its inspiration in the urban street, in the everyday, in the nineteenth-century version of the pool hall. Baudelaire was known as much as art critic as a poet, and his ideals, ideas helped engender the cultural shift from the Romantic age into modernism. Visual art and poetry have continued along seperate aesthetic tracks, but I often return to poetry when I think about Right. contemporary visual art. For instance, Kenneth Goldsmith’s cooncept of uncreative writing, Goldsmith, a true heir of Baudelaire’s dandyism, advocates for wholesale borrowing or repurposing of jewels language from any source rather than creating new text. It is a radical notion in the world saturated with cliches and nostalgic references. Goldsmith’s uhhhhhh view is about making lateral moves rather than justifying what language is appropriate for poetry. It’s a vision of language that accepts fluster. What are you doing? I also see Goldsmith’s ideas in direct conversation with visual art’s notion of the found object. An artist NO. utilizing appropriation or a found object forces her audience to look anew and ciritically at the world. Artists and poets who do this go beyond style to pose conceptual quesitons. What does it mean, like Brooks or Baudelaire, to engage directly with
the world surrounding you rather than looking toward the academy? How do you take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising? These questions are now my guiding principles as I consider my contempoarry art. Horrible.
PYF To Hell with Drawers Andrew! The differences between lyrics and poetry is that I don’t understand poetry. You said it. So whatever is picked up. I don’t understand biology either. Ditto. Drink that whole thing! Someone must be there to guide me through the meanings of things. Lyrics, recorded and sung, have the opportunity to sink long and thoroughly; they can work on and with the subconscious. We have long ago passed the time when poetry is memorized without such aid, and sitting there on the paper a poem makes me feel ignorant and insane. All of it. And a little bit faggy. Even recited, words expressively coded and adjacented are like a miracle of phonetics but do not mean what they should. It’s about the structure, but a poem holds nothing up and nothing in. It sits there. Tell him! And in a public space, a read poem fills the air with signs that I cannot use to direct myself anywhere except the restroom or the sidewalk, or inside of myself. Recently I read a review of Shame. Ahh I totally fucking saw that movie, and I’ll tell you what, it was fuuucking awwwesome, if a little bit weird. Ok, like in the movie, like Michael Fiste, no Michael Fastbender, ok he is like a German guy right, he was raised in Germany, but then, like he plays an American You’re not reading! and then he plays a sex addict alright. So in the first fucking sequence, it’s like a five minute long sequence of him walking round naked, and he’s got a huge dick and it is a big deal to people. Anyways, so, like he is there and walking around. And you can see his dick, and it’s oh like the thing, but you don’t care. But then you see him piss and you see his dicker out. And you can actually see his naked body urinate. And it was controversial. It was really controversial. You probably should see the movie. It was the only movie I’ve seen where I got to see a noted actor eat a bitch’s ass out. She got her ass eaten out! He ate a bitch’s ass out! Ok. Alright. I recently read a review of shame movie about sex addiction, aww, he says about in quotations, sex addiction, and the reviewer boldly and awkwardly quoted a Shakespeare sonnet in order to say something about lust. Quote: all this the world well known, yet none well knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. It made me, it made complete sense to me, and got me searching for the full, the full sonnet. Unfortunately, the full sonnet made no sense to me, and even that quoted couplet became scrambled and indecipherable, like a, like a Phillipino, have you ever noticed a Phillipino? They are fucking inscrutable. You have no idea what they are fucking talking about. You can’t trust them. Ugh! It’s indecipherable without the guidance of a critic to give it meaning, because it is poetry, and poetry is something that points to something else. I also do not like drawers. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. There must be shelves, there must be shelves where the contents are visible. When things are hidden in drawers, they do not exist. Doors must be open. Prose is shelving. On lust, Iris Murdoch, about whom I know nothing except that her writing is mocked in a weird British movie I vag, vaguely recall seeing, wrote, quote, the absolute yearning of one human body for another particular
one and its indifference to sustitutes is one of life’s major mysteries. And that is a shelf with its contents quiet viewable. It’s like, yes. Whereas the fir, the fir, the versed lines of the bard are more like, ouch. Man, this is so fucking pretentious this is killing me. Here is the deal. Hey! This is Will Oldham trying not to be pretentious but failing miserably. And he sounds more pretentious while trying not to be. Coding is fine, Andrew! but mostly when given a clue or some other assistance to its solution. This can be done by setting the words to music and then singing them. Leonard Cohen sings. Ok, listen. I met this Jewish woman in LA and she met Leonard Cohen. Ok, get this. Leonard Cohen is like 80, and this Jewish woman was like, yeah I totally almost fucked him at the Buddhist temple. Are you kidding me? Having sex with Leonard Cohen at a Buddhist temple? Talk about fucking epic! Talk about fucking transcendant! Talk about Narnia! Talk about Nirvana! Talk about Valhalla! Talk about etcetera! Birthday. Perfect. Woo! Anyways, Leonard Cohen sings, I needed so much to have nothing to touch, I’ve always been greedy that way. What a fucking asshole. I have heard that line so many times in my head that it functions like propoganda. It becomes a part of my laang-scape [laughing]. Take Cohen’s book death of a lady’s man, in which each piece is juxtaposed with a counterpoint to shed light on both. I can read that shit. I can read that shit. I can read. I can read! [laughing] I can read goddamnit, I’m a man! Give me a melody, give me, better, a harmonized melody, and those words will become a part of me. This is what I, a child of the age, need. She didn’t mean that though. I’m ready for a return to epic balladry when it all comes grumbl, grumbling down, grumbling not crumbling and we must actually use these memory cells we’ve been given. I am always crying inside to have things integrate and interrelate, blah bla blah. Mind is a sponge. My dick is a pillar [laughing] at least that is what it feels like in the end. My mind is kept in a drawer, in the end. And the drawer hides its contents from view, like a poem. Fucking kill me.
Burleson’s Dam An earthen fill dam built in the late 1800’s. The dam holds back a spring-fed lake. Their are two spill ways that surround the reader with rushing water. A small group of friends and strangers sit underneath the trees. Everyone is drinking beer, a few smoking joints or blunts. The drugs stay within their groups, as does the seperate conversations. A loud local, noticeably drunk, sits and rants to a young group about predator drones and privacy in the United States. JLB decides to read next to him.
JLB Inky Binky Bonky As far as the poetry I like, uh I sometimes feel like a cranky old man. But it’s interesting I turn to old, formal poetry, or the super famous poetry of the twentieth Uh. century, Eliot, Auden, I’m sorry. Yeats, et al. I’ve lost my train of thought. I don’t think time is a distiller. Poems that emerge after passing through time are not necessarily more pure or more fundametnally true But going back on what I was saying. than the poems that disappear. But I do think that through the evolutionary dodgeball rounds of taste and fashion, population migrations, religious movements, library fires, world wars, and natural disasters, being a good poem is a trait that increases the odds of survival. I do sometimes read recent poetry, especially if it’s recommended by a friend. Project that I thought about, But I don’t have that many friends was photographing people through their windows reading recent poetry. What they are doing inside Poetry I like their house and poetry that affects my life are slightly different sets. The poetry important to me is random. Random in time period, topic, length, style, author, even quality. It is a weird area, It’s not a question of liking like, what is public or what is private? or disliking it’s just that there are bits embedded deep in my brain grooves. Sometimes this poetry comes out on specific occasions. They fly over. I will be out on a walk And you really can’t say. and will round a corner And you really can’t talk to them. and the sun will be thinning down in that golden hour before sunset, You can physically stop me. and a distant bird will loose a cry and nature will confront me with all her majestic wonder. You can’t reach up and grab a predator drone. What a strange bird is the pelican, We think that it is private. I will think, its beak can hold more than its belly can. I always thought this was a couplet by Ogden Nash. It’s really insane, uh. But it’s a slightly wrong quotation from a limerick by Something I’ve heard from a friend. some poet named Dixon Lanier Merritte. Regardless, I heard it when I was a kid, and ever since, all of nature has seemed a little ridiculous to me. They are equpied with thermal mapping. Sometimes, thought, an idyllic nature scene will raise deep unease. Or I’ll look out a hotel room window at a still city and get the willies. If you have a grow operation, they see the hot houses. Occasional fear of silence is a fundamental human response. For me, this feeling is tied up with the phrase, as idle as a painted ship upon painted ocean. Which is a prelude, in the They can see what houses are growing. rime of the ancient mariner, I mean, they can see what you are doing. to everyone dying slowly of thirst, and slimy things coming out and crawling with legs upon a slimy sea. The pelican may be zany, I hate to use, but the mariner’s albatross is a little terrifying. you know, it is cliche to say, I once bought a book of Big Brother, Chinese poems because I liked the cover. But for ever and ever we are encroaching, It was one of those seventies Penguin editions, on our privacy. not with the orage stripes, but with a Police officers can monitor our cell phones, beautiful wallpapery graphic. I read this even without a search warrant, poem, in these days I am every where, you know, befuddled with wine, but it is not for nourishing my nature and soul. When I see that all men are drunk, how can I
bear to be the only one sober? Monitor cellphones. I don’t know a lick of Chinese, but that translation seems stiff. Still, whenever I start complaining in my head about how everyone in the world is crazy, I see this Chinese poet, Wang Ji, totally wasted and grabbing an American stranger by the arm fourteen centuries in the future. I don’t draw a moral from the poem, it just takes me out of myself, and that’s enough. Where, you know. When I was a kid, my dad paid me seven dollars and fifty cents for memorizing if by Rudyard Kipling. even companies that do require, Seven dollars and fifty cents was the inflation there is no law for this. adjusted one dollar my grandfather was paid by his father for the same task. If is not attached deeply to my sould. I don’t turn to it in times of trouble. But I can still recite it as a party trick. What sort of party? Ok, you got me. Almost all of society purely relying on it. There has never been a party where I have been asked to Where is privacy anymore? recite Kipling. Unless you count Patriot Act. Thanksgiving as a party. With the ability to read emails, Which it is. It is an awesome party. But there is it a purely public life? is other Kipling. My dad’s parents would sing versions of his poems, like the ladies, which has not aged well, Social networking, for she kinfed me one night cause I wished she was white and I learned about women from er and the road to Mandalay, by the old Moulmein Pagoda, My great grandparent’s age, looking easteward to the sea, there’s a Burma girl a delivering a letter. settin and I know she thinks o me. You know? Mandalay moves me. That lost actual paradise, I’m a sucker for nostalgia. My dad’s family is made up of sailors descended from sailors, and the devolution of the sea He couldn’t leave his property cause of the roads. from the realm of freedom and mystery to a playground for rich sporty types is an ache I’ve inherited. Generally, I’ll shed a tear for any yearning poem that mentions the sea. Tennyson is good for that, too. I could list more. I haven’t yet got to George Herbert, or the poems of my imporessionable teenage years. Or that epic of chance and loss, inky binky bonky, daddy had a donkey, donkey died, daddy cried, inky binky bonky. You know it’s this emotional thing. Some of this poetry is carved in quick, deep cuts. There are poems I can’t help but remember. The world is smaller now. Some are like ghosts I hear mumbling, something important, in the next room. I have to go to the page And you kinda, kinda freak out now, to summon them and shut them if no one replies to you in five minutes. up. It’s a mysterious mechanism, how the words stick. It feels different to me than words and music, where so much of the mystery is bound up in the music itself. And it’s different from ideas I want to pass on, or stories I want to relate, in which the words fall however they fall. I’ve thought about it. I have no idea how the brain works.
The Readers CMB: female, 24, 1 bowl, 1 beer, 1/2 of a Four Loko SPM: male, 22, 3 beers TOS: male, 29, sober TAP: male, 22, 2 double whiskeys BYM: male, 27, 1 beer TDM: male, 26, 12 beers, 2 bowls RMS: male, 25, 5 shots of gin JRD: male, 25, 12 beers JNG: female, 25, 4 single gin and tonics and 1 double CWM: male, 23, 4 beers, 1 shot, 1 joint ACJ: female 25, 2 beers, 1 joint, 15mg of Adderall EAB: female, 22, 5 drinks JBH: female, 26, 3 beers, 1 bowl RDF: male, 1/2 shwag joint, 1 bowl, 1 bong rip, 1/2 beer TKJ: male, 24, 1 bowl, 1 bong rip TBG: male, 24, sober MCS: female, 23, sober CDP: male, 22, 2 bowls, 1 joint, approx. 10 drinks DEB: male, 29, sober SPB: female, 25, sober Gﾃ。: male, 26, caffiene GBW: male, 42, 5 beers, 2 shots CER: female, 29, 3 shots, 1 beer PYF: male, 29, 1 bowl, 5 beers, 2 shots JLB: male, 24, 7 beers, 1 joint, 1 bowl
I didn’t follow. Did you follow that? Did, did ya’ll, like, did ya’ll, like was that fucking anything right there? AMF