Went from
the tiredest I've been
having pushed past the point of
brokenness
to the short films of Charles Burnett
to the short stories of Breece D'J Pancake
to Bill Fay
and all the while
an imaginery year
in Exeter
seems more real to me.
In the short films
they fail to move
a washing machine
and the movie ends,
or a horse dies,
and this takes me
to Breece
who is like
Hemingway
with a Vallejo twitch.
But the real champion
is Mr. Fay,
the real loser
all the ideas I've lost
or just smiled about
as they waved at me
like my son
who
heading for a bike or a playground
forgets where I begin
which is
how it should be
except for Pancake's death,
the self-in-need's
finger
twitching on a borrowed or bought
shotgun.
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5 comments:
First, let me say, this is a good poem. In fact, it's so good I feel moved to react--not just to parts of it, but all of it--and what it sets off in my mind.
It may be the coffee. I'm on my third cup. But I'm in the mood to tackle some larger points.
For a few months now I've been getting the impression--or maybe it's just how I've been tending to interpret things--you've been reading some of the sentiments appearing in my poems as extensions of my current feelings, or worse, fixed judgments on things. This may be revealing of my own intentions, but this is how I've seen it: I write a poem, then no sooner feel an imaginary brace, over there, in New York; then in a day or two a poem bristling with affirmative and common-life-appreciation appears from your end of the screen. Gradually, I began to sense we were becoming pawns of a readymade argument, as if our offerings were tracking two opposing viewpoints as they jockeyed around and erased each other.
This began to bother me, because you were getting to advocate all the nice stuff.
Moreover, reading your poems, beautiful utterances that they were, had a funny effect on me. It was as if, reading them, I was being pulled into a position or regard for life that I didn't necessarily uphold. Radical, ugly skepticism. Self-referential insularity. A kind of classic, subtly overexaggerated ruthlessness. The sort that is as common as grass these days.
Granted, of late, tonally my poems have been a mixed bag. There have been unappealing sentiments. But there have also been vibrant ones. Or even more confusingly: both, often braided in the same line. Increasingly I've realized this is a form of realism. Having pulled myself, we may as well say it, relatively recently out of a long, uncharismatic depression; during which my sense of balance and sanity--yes, no stretch of claim here--was winnowed to a cold, starved point, it may well be my duty and privilege to render the mixed-bag effects of what it's like to earn and live one's way out of an impoverished state of being. No way around it. That's how it was. Hence, in this most recent poem, Exeter. And in your previous post, what bolsters and soothes--the fullness.
But the thing is, Steve (and I say this explicitly, so nothing gets lost in lyricism) that every poem I write now has the vibrancy and specificity of bread crumbs thrown to water. It serves that function. You may be balking or arguing--if
indeed you're balking--with the wake my mind has been leaving, as it moves to a more mature holding ground. Consider these poems as bread crumbs bobbing on the waves or ripples. I'm moving--that means I'm alive. And if there are dissonances in the sounds I make, those are dissonances making little, necessary echoes as they leave my mind. Depression you'll know by how little sound it makes. It's the gradual leeching of the ability to even make the slightest squeaking noises, actually. Depression marks an inability to throw bread.
Not that I've committed myself to direct explanation, not to mention a third cup of coffee, I might as well go whole hog and indulge in specifics. Or a demonstration. Maybe I should explain my moves so you can understand them, at least from my perspective.
I'm sure you noticed that poem, "The Perfect Human", possibly the most unappealing, unpleasant poem I've ever written, kept appearing and disappearing on the blog. I kept posting it, then pulling it down. Clearly I was on the fence about it. Not about what it said, so much as about the fact such a harsh poem could emerge out of such a healthy rhythm, the kind I've been having. Here's the quandry, laid bare: when I wrote it, I knew it was resonant, right; but the sentiments were harsh, skeptical to the point of abuse. Or so they seemed. And then I realized, well, I didn't write that first line. The whole culture that only attributed to my pained hesitancy over the past few years wrote that. The tenor of our political climate, the tenor of what passes for social science and philosophy; the tenor of LANGUAGE poetry and, more influentially, its poetics: that's what wrote this line. The contradiction of my mind was telling the lie to contradictions inherent in these larger spheres of culture. An undistilled, venomous embodiment of their methods and habits: how even their claims to affirmation are compromised by the negativity of their method, their tonal stance.
This was a very important problem. I learned something by working on this poem. It guided me toward some significant revisions, none of which you've seen.
First, I added an epigraph. Which could well be an epigraph in autobiography and retrospect, the past few years: "elegy for pathos". That's what this poem is, it's an elegy for pathos. It speaks from a bleak control of engagement with others, all without the messy risk of trusting investment.
But read it all the way through. It begins there, sure. The opening sentiment's a distillation of hagworn weariness, spreads teeth, extroverts into unnegotiable, calm aggression. No feeling. No nobility. Trusting with reserve the give-and-take of emotional availability leads to endangerment of one's stability--is an investment in lies, the illusion of connection. Most people are innocents batted around by agendas burrowed deeply in their emotions, none of which are as noble or even respectful as they'd care to believe. To this, a solution. Only cold, clear, rational carefulness can spy the sad needs at best, at worst ugly backroom motives, that drive the passions and needs of most people--that, in the end, are either destructive of others or oneself, or both.
That's where the poem begins. But there's development. I felt it before I could parse it, which is a good sign. The more I re-read it the more I started to notice how this received voice begins to unravel and question itself; in fact, it was almost too subtle to notice at first. But it's there: the method announced in the first two stanzas begins to turn on itself. Distrust of others begins to follow its tracks to its motivating tendency--a distrust and fear of self. "...having failed in the simplest of tasks, that is, being themselves,/ assholes want more than they can give/ and we are".
This reads like an admission of vulnerability, helplessness in paralysis. Which the final stanza opens entirely. "the hole is the shape of the human, but largely." Not the same as claiming the hole is large. It is the SHAPE of the human. But largely. (Someone coughs, mutters: "the void".) Aggression against one's exposed, small, vulnerable sensitivity becomes exactly the kind of consciousness which could mint and utter this first line.
Not to mention the ambiguity of titling all this, "The Perfect Human". The search for the perfect human is cruel; merciless judgment assumes a position of authority, an implicit claim to slighter grades of perfection. The search to be the perfect human depends on identifying (read: inventing) and disparaging the imperfections of others. It's the classic move of an intelligence that is soured by the very thing it is doomed to embody and deep down doesn't really want: to be a monad, strictly clean, safe, and alone.
It may help if I floated the title of this summer collection I just finished.
"Another Lazarus Moment"
Time for breakfast now, Amen.
Still chewing on the thoughts you sent before breakfast...
I imagine that maybe I should show some of my cards, but I will have to speak in pieces
my life, it seems, in pieces:
1. Poetry as breathing tube
2. Poetry as friendship
3. Seeing a checkers match, not a chess game
4. Maybe I have been playing the wrong game
5. Reading (K) too slowly (still deep in the last
6. manuscript.)
7. Writing too quickly
8. Imaginary Exeter means I found a way
9. in. That Friday
10. When the other poem came
11.
12. Oh man!
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