January 2004 Archives

I left early last night to attend a John Edward's rally at Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop in St. Louis but still arrived too late. The site just couldn't hold all the people who had come to support Edwards. A few hundred of us lined up behind barricades and waited in the cold for an hour. Not a New Hampshire kind of cold, certainly, but it had iced and snowed earlier in the week and all of us were standing on an icepack. Feet got cold. Then Edwards arrived, the media with lights glaring swarmed toward him, I held up my sign, being a fellow Tarheel, and shouted, "Senator! Wilmington says, 'Go, Tarheel.'" I don't think he heard me, he didn't even look my way, but hopped up on a van, blinded by the lights, and shouted a few words of thanks, then made his way into the warmth of Blueberry Hill.

All of which made me think about presidents and poetry. Carter wrote poetry, but I think after his presidency. Lincoln wrote poems. "Memory" sometimes appears in books of inspirational verse. I think he wrote his poems while in office, most of which reflect his longing to be at home in Illinois. Oratory, speeches, when great, approach being poetry, but other than Lincoln, I can't think of a president who wrote his speeches. Most presidents have speechwriters to do that.

I wonder how the act of writing poetry would ef/af/fect a president's politics. Recent presidents have said certain poets have influenced their ways of thinking. Sometimes during inauguration a president will invite a poet to voice the soul of the country. But I don't know of any recent presidents who have written poetry to help them find their souls, to help them create their vision, to help them find their flaws, to help them rise to higher levels of understanding, acceptance, love, vision, and other altered states of mind and body made possible not by the reading of poetry, but by writing it.

I say all presidential candidates should be required to take a college course in poetry writing. They can come here to Meramec.

In today's NY Times: Pedro Pietri has stomach cancer and is trying to get to Mexico for holistic healing. He founded the Nuyorican poets. This is where my academic training has left me stranded . . . in the canonical towers of western European (and to some degree, Pacific Rim) literary tradition. I am, as my friends and former teachers know, a devotee of the New York School. So small a crowd it is for the noise it once made in that noisome city, and still makes from time to time. This term "nuyoricans," I was familiar with, if only vaguely. But Pedro Pietri? Never heard of him. Despite his "fame" and world reknown. And his most famous poem, "Puerto Rican Obituary," why, I know absolutely nothing of it. The Times quotes the opening lines, of which these are the first few . . .

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
passing their bill collectors
on to the next of kin
All died
waiting for the garden of eden
to open up again
under a new management
All died dreaming about america . . .

Pedro went to Vietnam in the '60s, then donned all black clothing to mourn the loss of self he endured there--a self that finally saw no enemy in the Vietcong but only in the powers that invade small countries on the basis of lies (sound familiar?). Well, you get the picture. He came back to America to live the dual life of the Carribean in the northern city, and to write about it. Not his, or not just his, but of his fellow Puerto Ricans in New York: nuyoricans. And to found a literary movement which, to paraphrase the article's author, is no less a movement for being Puerto Rican, for not being western European or PacRim.

The photo of him in his Bronx apartment is disheartening. Go to today's Times and look at it. Look at it. Not just the poetically black garb, "applejack" hat included, but the apartment. Look.

I've said before how difficult it is to find a blog with intelligent talk about poetry. Well, I just found one: One Good Bumblebee. The writer's from Texas, a soon to be graduate, who hopes to go to grad school for an MFA. Good luck! But I hope she maintains her blog.

What I like about the blog is that the entries remind me of what it was like to be young with dreams of making it big in the world of poetry. There are entries about the pain of rejection, there are transcripts of chats about the author's intention in a poem. There are poems, too, but the blog doesn't seem self-serving but instead like a space where the writer is working to articulate her life as a poet.

BLESSINGS TO DADDY, FROM SOPHOCLES

Your train wheezes into Penn Station
After all the most elegant torque
Of Greece has eaten the skin off its olives
Piglet blessings, dear, blindly offload
See? They pitch, they veer, they don?t see
Some fall stupid on the tracks, they do
Others grip the slats of their failing moment
And won?t let go, must be dragged away

Let?s hang the lot of ?em in a window
Someone, you, was overheard muttering
And then another elegant word or two?
Let?s take some pictures, let?s take me
Dancing among the mysteries, the unexplained
Lessons learned from the flea of Colonus
From that dancing flea: how everyone?s innocent
Who, looking backward, unsees the sea

I didn't intend to post the last entry on can we have our ball back without at least a couple of poems from it. I, of course, hit the wrong key and posted anyway. At any rate, here are two poems which I absolutely adore. The first is a sestina, which I like so much because it's, well, a sestina without all the philosophical noise that typically accompanies sestinas written post-Renaissance . . .

Non-stop
by Jo Ann Wasserman (from Issue #9)

um, the pictures, the ones she is wearing make-up and stilettos
something bigger than the city or choosing fresh cut lamb chops?a rootcanal
the kind performed over and over, a building from the inside, a real-life
morality play, no one gets out free, not the smokers or the wintergreen
gum chewers, not much forgiven, raincoats all deeply resembling the newest
color and winter shapes, shaped like a few winter?s ago, only gray

if I saw cosmetic or the small cosmetics bag she often had, but too small, it was gray
shoes, gray and silver waffle-iron steps, the moving faster her in stilettos
it isn?t easy to say how far we had walked, she was silent, mourning the newest
way of losing it, it was booming all around and he had been booming, ?it is only rootcanal?
not the Holocaust? which of course nothing really was, chewing Wrigley?s wintergreen
gum I was aware that nothing in my life would be the Holocaust but what was that? in real-life?

the Holocaust? we wouldn?t have been able to tell you, riding that train was real-life
her hand (right) offering the green papered bit, emerging from a bullet of leather-gray
glove was not as soft anymore or she could have said, with wintergreen
gum disappearing and reappearing, ?my hands are not so soft? tapping stilettos
against the grim-gray slide train, "don?t let this happen to you, this awful rootcanal"
which was said not to be the Holocaust but reaching into her life, pulling and newest

pulling out of the station and pulling off her heavy coat, I am pulling off my newest
best coat, a coat I hate and have tried to lose on buses and skating trips taking it out of real-life
to make it someone else?s life, I left it at Mrs. Gage?s house, but it was a singular, ugly rootcanal
of an overcoat but like Sunday, rootcanal, fists and yelling?no Holocaust, just real-life
she read a magazine folding the square of silver paper, flaking away the shine until it was gray
she was the prettiest almost ever in her gray sweater and clicking a slice of wintergreen

gum, ?you can?t say a word about this,? (she is laughing) ?about this wintergreen
candy to your sister, she is too young and could choke easily? choking becoming the newest
non-Holocaust event but still bad and I promise and she crosses her legs, the stilettos
point forward dangerous, a pain is through me, is thinking these shoes are more about real-life
than anything , her hands feel soft, her sweater is soft but wiry and mossy gray
I look at her too long, she says, I sense I have learned something on the way to rootcanal

If I was looking to learn something on the way to the rootcanal
I knew I had learned to chew gum and not swallow, put it back into the Wrigley?s wintergreen
paper but we were not looking to learn something and the final station floor was sad and gray
it snowed and I had hot cheese sandwich later, in Union square, in my newest,
best, coat, with a ripe pickle spear and my mother only smoked after all it was real life
and ate a frosty, dish of yellow vanilla ice cream she said, I have to get out of these stilettos

she removed the stilettos, on the train home from the rootcanal
sitting with me just like real-life and eating lifesavers?wintergreen
She fingered my newest and best coat, laughing, ?this is terrible, even if it?s gray?

. . . It's something of a love poem, in the Troubador tradition, and so not only technically a sestina. But it's more than that. It's an ambitious experiment with six words. If you've not tried out the form yet, you must. Find yourself six good words and have at it. Alternatively, write a six-line poem, then keep going, using those six words again. And again. If writing poems is discovery, the sestina is a great form for discovering where the poem will take you.

Here's another poem I like . . .

THE EMPTY THEATER
after photographs by Gordon Parks
by Arielle Greenberg (Issue #2)

Chapter 1. We are big as the china and alone.
Chapter 2. We are bristles and the scum.
Chapter 3. But smiling. An electrical problem --- cord xzzz cut ---
what that truck --- is xxzz two braid zz the --- back up
to --- xzz black now si --- silv wave face xzz silver --- gone
Chapter 4. Flags of weary, stripes and stars.
Chapter 5. Do we live among the blind?
Chapter 6. We are the career of the empty theater.
Chapter 7. Circus peanuts. Baptism. Pool hall. Junk truck.
Chapter 8. Whitewash, swing low, church-go, thumb suck.
Chapter 9. Now the wheels are still and our souls taken.
Chapter 10. All souls. Boxers. Fluff-headed girls.
Chapter 11. Arise, old fedoras! Arise, light-skinned girls!
Chapter 12. Arise, new Moslems bent forward as women!
Chapter 13. A call to arms, and the newest hands.
Chapter 14. The blind house of snow.

What's to say? I am struck--no, make that fully charmed--by the line "we are the career of the empty theater."

Clark's comments about canwehaveourballback led me back to the zine to take another look at some of the authors there. As Clark says, you'll find poems by famous writers. For example, this one by Charles Bukowski, reprinted with permission from Black Sparrow Press. Another example of a reprint, without permission as far as I can tell, is a poem by Wallace Stevens in issue 5.

I don't mean to swat canwehaveourballback, but online zines that reprint poems do more harm than good for online publications. The reprints give the impression that the zine is unable to collect new work to fill its online space. (I'm not sure why canwehaveourballback would add Bukowski to its long list of mostly unknown writers, unless he's there to impress readers.)

A zine could print an anthology issue, where it's obvious that the poems are reprints, but to mix reprints with original poems, especially when the permission, if there is one, is buried in a link, seems like a sleight of hand. A reader could possibly think the author has submitted to the zine. But a dead author, like Stevens? The impression still exits that the poem is new, published online for the first time.

Every online journal covets established, well know poets. Some get them. But as I have said elsewhere, the majority of poets publishing online are those who are just now knocking at the door of reputation. There's really no need, to mix my metaphor, to pretend to be the pool when the diving board is good enough.

Being the springboard to another destination is a good thing to be. Though being a legitimate pool would be nice.

What a zine is can we have our ball back? It's not so much a pub as a project, and a secretive one at that. The home page is plain to bland, the editors clearly favoring the poetry over the presentation: a line of issue numbers linking you to a page of names linking you to poems . . . and absolutely nothing else. No masthead, no contact address, no editors page, no submission guidelines, no invitation to submit. Oh, and no design. That is, no icons, no graphics. Each issue is set up with a different color background (most are psychedelic reds, pinks, dark-room blacks, tie-dyed-LSD-tripped-out color swaths). No nothing but the poems.

Now, whose idea was this? No mention. Who maintains it? No mention. What are the editors' perferences, biases, standards? No mention. You have to figure these things out from the poems. One clue is the (ultra) inclusive list of contributors, living and dead, avant guardist and standard, Established and unknown, serious and quirky, technical and sentimental, celebrated and ridiculed. Among the better known: Anselm Hollo, David Lehman, Naomi Shibab Nye, John Tranter, Amiri Baraka, Rod McKuen, Ira Sadoff, Claude McKay, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Pinksy, William Corbett, Kathleen Ossip, Charles Bernstein, James Tate, Dara Weir. Among the weird: Mickey Z, JFK (a poet, and apparently not one of the dead Kennedys), mIEKALaND (a license plate?), Jumper Bloom, Christopher Shit.

There are names that pop up in more than one issue: Buck Downs, Andrea Baker, Murray Moulding, Anselm Berrigan(?), Joseph Torra, Chad Parenteau, from just a quick scan. Suggesting what? Pals? Is that what this is? An anti-pub made by pals in some New York pub project? Through three years and 17 issues (counting the .1 release)? And then there are the "guest edited" issues simply labled "Tuscon," "Montana," "Western Massachusetts."

I admit it. I am thoroughly left behind. One of the most eclectic and inclusive online pubs on the web with absolutely no invitation to join in!

can we have our ball back?, apparently, launched in 2000. Its most recent issue, #17 (which is indistinguishable from #16), was posted in March 2003. Just about the time the U.S. invaded Iraq. Hmmm. There is an issue "X" and an issue "8.1." In this way, the pub is like an online poetry version of Adbusters Magazine, determined to call forth and then violate every publishing convention.

So you've really got only one purpose to go poking around can we have our ball back? The poems.

Speaking of which, here's a sample or two:

Here's a version. But a second is under construction . . .

BLESSINGS TO DADDY, FROM SOPHOCLES

I want to kill you
plain and simple
graveyard dead, if I can
you pimple?
so they told me
just now at temple

oh the blood pounds on
it?s like an invasion
along the curvy route
of trivial evasion
Suppose we drink a cup of it
on this wine-dark occasion

New Year's Eve was conducted about fifty paces from home, at our neighbors' house. About 10 of us crowded around a large, wondrously set dining table. A bottle of good red wine at either end through the whole affair. Our hosts--Arnie and Christy--worked like professional restauranteurs all evening. But they were in their element!

There were Cornish game hens (two dozen of them!) plus two sea bass dishes for Ann & me, since we don't eat the Standard Meats. Out came bowls of wild rice and steamed asparagus and something with pearled onions. At one point a luscious potato-leek soup. And baguettes of bread. We closed with a chocolate souffle under a sugar-butter sauce that one shouldn't eat except on one's death bed or as a last meal request prior to execution. It was that sinfully good. And then of course coffee--not just any coffee, but cappucinos and espressos, all the hand-made varieties.

Conversation veered from one topic to another, as it always does. I wonder whether a cultural theorist has ever studied the ebb and flow of dinner conversation around large tables at special events? One might begin scientifically by cataloguing the assorted topics: literature & film, work & play, travel experiences & destinations, fashion (i.e., what we were wearing that evening--I chose a black suit, open-collared tuxedo shirt, and my once-a-year black-and-white suede Hush Puppies, which generated considerable conversation, as intended. Ann was elegant and beautiful, also all in black, as is her custom.), vocations and avocations. Standard dinner table material.

Eventually, someone asked about my writing, with the typical question, "Are you a poet?" I hesitated, so Ann replied quickly in the affirmative. This sort of thing always makes me nervous, since often the next question is "What kind of poetry do you write?" And I am nervous because I've too many times embarrassed myself or completely mangled an answer. These friends may count themselves among the intelligentsia, but they'd stop short of describing themselves as the literati. They are bright, thinking people who don't read poems, as a rule, and so wouldn't actually think about language as the material cause of verbal art, or about a poem as a verbal artifact.

So I steered the subject toward blogging, which most had at least heard of. I described my experiences here and the delicious newness of the medium for me. Some of course want to visit to see what all this stuff is about, which I guess is okay. (I'm still experimenting with blog etiquette.) This too was probably a weak choice as I am hardly equipped to answer the technical questions that ensued. I was throwing "URL" around like I knew what I was talking about!

I only drank diet coke last night, so I'm awake this morning with no more than a slight buzz from a triple cappacino, and since it's a new year, I'm wondering what I should resolve to do to improve 2River.

I like the layout of these blog pages. The navigation bar is wider and thinner than on other pages. I can make the layout throughout the site more consistent.

Web del Sol says the poetry at 2River is among the best on the web but that the presentation is dilluted. I've thought long and hard about this, about technology and print, how the presentation can dazzle (or not) with technology. Somewhere in my thought I've settled on simplicity. But maybe I should try to add a little dazzle.

I'm thinking about adding a feature where readers can review a poem. That would be a neat interactive feature. Read a poem, then leave what you think about it for others to read. Then the poem would also be become a record of its reading.

Finally (my coffee buzz is wearing off) I'd like to expand this blog. Clark has been a great writer. I especially like the blogs of his that focus on poetry and poetics. A couple of other similarly good writers would be a great addition.