Diss Haiku

.
.
.
.
.
.
get some
new dreams
dude

Why Do I Keep Writing Poems, Anyway?

I was at a party the other day
full of really nice Jewish people.
I thought it was going to be a
Christmas party. But when I
got there with my ten dollar
bottle of wine I couldn't help
but notice the menorah and the
kid in the corner playing with
the dradle. This guy brought

a guitar, though, and ruined
everything by making us listen
to a few of his songs. He seemed
like a nice guy. But it's never
a good sign when someone prefaces
his stuff by asking, "Does anyone
want to hear a song about Jesus?"

I made a crack about Jesus and songwriting
that made Ginger fly across the room.

Kind of a sin now that I
think about it--
that I had a chair while Ginger had
nothing but the floor.

What was Jim doing sitting there in the E-Z chair, anyway?
That's how you can tell
a couple has left their
honeymoon period:
the guy has no qualms taking the chair.

Jesus never had to deal with these kinds of nuances.
All he had to do was die on a cross.
Not sit at the foot of it
listening to all that mess and groaning.

M
E
R
Ry

C
H
R
I
St
M
A
S

HUNTER

CHLOE

AMY

&

my dad just said
"it's going to
take us a while
to get ready

because mom looks like
phyllis diller"

H. Contemplates the Old Masters

Picasso: Belly laugh from a boy with no belly.

Kandinski: "That's a pretty nice pirate ship, but I don't see any pirates."

Michelangelo's "Last Judgment": "Look! Look!"

And then we came to Dali, the melting clocks in the desert, a strange sky blooming:

Him: "What's wrong with the clocks?"

Me: "They are melting."

Him: wordless, unsmiling,

Me: "Which means time is melting, too."

Him: Seems to be bracing himself as a small weight climbs up on his shoulders. It is

a piece of me, I wouldn't know
what to call it--the beginning of
a long commerce? failure?--I am not
an Old Master.

Him: White legs disappearing into the green
room.

New Collection

Title: GOLDEN TRASH
Poems: 31
Repeated heads: love, people, sex, loneliness
Guest appearances: Serge Gainsbourg, Nicholas Sarkozy
Texture: abrasive tenderness, tender abrasiveness
Personal grade: somewhere between a C minus and B minus
Page length: 51
Written: mid-September to mid-November
Closing lines: "...on both eyes, kiss them./ Relieve the world of proof."
What's new: psychadelic explosions; simple love gestures
Will: not send out, put in drawer.
And so: on to the next one...

And Yes That's a Strong Recommendation

Heaters that clank and moan like a junkyard drum set,

thick pea soup,

smashed garlic (use the back end of a heavy knife),

parking tickets,

the daily twelve or thirteen
clouds in suits
hustling to the train,

a child's art, a photograph of Derek Jeter, the walls gaining
clarity and shape,

an old coach, old Irishman, bounding out of the past
for a conversation, a real drink, we go back a long way
to when my consciousness was just
a drowsy frequency, a yawning Idaho
radio,

keeping two cars on the road,

arguments with my old man about
is it gravy or sauce? and
my mom's opinion, my sister's,

the classical music station, but only when the violins are playing
mostly alone or totally alone

a light out in the hall, an argument with a landlord,
a relationship and its variables,

loving one's wife as a form of church or prayer
or just plain fun. Today I am calling all this

Trout Fishing in America.

Provider, Squanderer

A child awake, bubbling over her body, and another deeply sleeping, tumbling black over black. A mother on a treadmill life pocked with time. A father considering the woodpile, settling for a cup of blackest earth. He will chew through it, pass some of it on to the others, and they will cheer for the gift, the man who gave it, but know him a little bit better.

A way of remembering

what it would impoverish us
to forget:

Poetry / Frost

The way the winter sky is both sunny and ominous, this is good. All things that are ambiguous but reliable are good. Foods that take decades to be appealing, like turnips and beets, are good. Records that you hate at first are good. Paintings that you don’t understand for years, but which then reveal their intensities, very good. The weird ebbing and surging of long friendship is good. Things that disappear and then reappear are good, socks being one example. Things seen backwards through binoculars are good. Waiting is good. Waiting even longer is better. Extremely long, dull waiting periods when you imagine you will never do anything but wait, these are hellish, but sometimes good. Sleeping with someone and forgetting about the explosive part of it, this is often good and refreshing. Remembering that there was a thing you wanted to do, and then forgetting it, this is often very good. Youth is good when you are young, but middle age is much, much better, much more good, and in middle age youth seems vain and self-satisfied, except in certain exceptional cases. Blurry photographs are better than photographs that are distinct. Stories in which the narrative is all but absent are extremely good. Indistinct narrators are good. People who come back into your life after long intervals, with apologies, are absolutely good. Pieces of music that do the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, until in the repetition you begin to see that the repeated thing has infinitely more variety than you hitherto believed, these pieces of music are so good that we need to laud and mAGNIfy them. The repetition of the word “good” until it is drained of all meaning is good. “Good,” since it is overused by children early in the learning curve of language acquisition, needs to be made good all over again. Virtue is good and virtue stippled with failure is even better. The acknowledgment of earthly failure is always good. Ideals are essential, but lapsed ideals are nearly as good. Good is perhaps derived from Sanskrit gadh, to hold fast, which implies that uniting is good. Bearing things together when they are apart is good; finding the order in the disparate is good; people with extremely large eyes are good, laughing in the dark is good, and whispering is good and all silences are good, as are the times after silence. Plato is good, Aristotle is less good, Nietzsche is good in some ways. Fear of death is very, very good. Making up things as you go along is a good way of working and then rearranging the order of these things very quickly without looking is also good. Your insides are good, your organs and viscera, and you should let them be outside, this would be good, at least in some metaphorical way.

I Think

that echo below
might be in the

spirit of Christ.

There is no west
without an east.

There is no person
without what's

left out of the
person. Nor sounds

without a common
air we breathe through.

Echo

I’ll be leaving all the west we found.
The disparate parts that could not wish
will be as useless as underwear then,

and the pitch that felt up to me when I heard
the selfsoft love of the trueloved

will cast in its secondary range for something bitter:
a second choice to be far from home, among them.

I’ll leave believing we keep all we lose and love.
The disparagements that came and went
Will be as useful as underwear then,

And the pity that felt me up when I saw
The self-harshness of the unloved

Will cash in its secondary rage for something better:
A second chance to be at home, between them.

American Treasure, Volume 1

A Hugo Nickel

Not my hands but green across you now.

I'm in a town
where children get hurt early.

I'll leave believing we keep all we lose and love.

I want home full of grim permission.

And may you never be dispossessed, forced to wander
a world the color of salt with no young music in it.

____________________________________
"The Lady in Kickng Horse Reservoir"
"Letter to Leveretov from Butte"
"Last Day There"
"The Only Bar in Dixon"
"Place and Ways to Live"

Best Gong of 2009

31 Letters and 13 Dreams

This is the Hugo collection that has really moved me. The letters hold up better than the dreams. I sense a writing assignment, personal or shared, coming on.

After Reading

Richard Hugo again this morning,
and liking it a great deal,

I wonder if I've turned some kind of corner and am
now heading back home.

The Information

Send me your flight information, etc., via email.
A brief questionnaire will follow.

I Just

wrote my first short story.

Always wondered what that felt like.

By and About Ted Roethke

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.

He died of a heart attack after diving into a swimming pool.

All of a sudden I am reading

Bukowski again, and for very different reasons than I did when I was 20.

He throws away a lot of lines, but then he says something like

"God is a lonely place without steak."

He's honest, even when he's lying.

Closure Plaque

Q.

What would such a thing
look like or, if you snuck
a lick, taste like? What would it
sound like
if you hit it, gently,
with a child's spoon?

A.

Metallic
powder, or
a hush
after fighting
about the appropriate
lip gloss
for the event,
"and if I change that,
I have to change
the shoes, too,
you just don't
understand
people, what
they'll say . . ."

Interesting Proposition

A predominant theme of Ellory's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."

Interesting Distinction

INTERVIEWER
You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?


ELLROY
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was.

Universal Love Story: Belinda

Charming and honest--a rare
enough combination. Combustible.
Burns the face they mix behind
into little floating frays.

This was the best and most
immediate clarity about her:
she was foremost a person
before she was a woman.
Personhood, she told me
once, blotto and hanging her
big smile over the railing,

was what she'd negotiated
from the weird biological
tumult of womanhood.
I never knew what that meant,

except this, belatedly:
the consequences
of me being a man.

Her arm around me
was like being carried
by the rolling force
of a wave. Summon up,
arch, one collapsing step
forward, down. The

dissolve the terms of her gorgeousness.
Which she left behind, with
the utmost affection,
to curl up full height
and shatter her
growing shadow, again.

To shine in use and quietly achieve what others dream

Trip to NJ, oct

Hey, was it the weekend of oct 9-11 or 16-18th that's best for you? If you're still up for it, i'm going to buy the tickets soon.

[these are outtakes from Saul Bellow's Nobel acceptance speech, which is a real barnstormer by the way]

There he said that art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: that it tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer's method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."


I told myself, therefore, that Conrad's rhetoric must be resisted. But I never thought him mistaken. He spoke directly to me. The feeling individual appeared weak - he felt nothing but his own weakness. But if he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself intensifying his loneliness, he discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.



And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this. Disintegration? Well, yes. Much is disintegrating but we are experiencing also an odd kind of refining process. And this has been going on for a long time. Looking into Proust's Time Regained I find that he was clearly aware of it. His novel, describing French society during the Great War, tests the strength of his art. Without art, he insists, shirking no personal or collective horrors, we do not know ourselves or anyone else. Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides - the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can't receive. Proust calls these hints our "true impressions." The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."



At such a time it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift. We must hunt for that under the wreckage of many systems. The failure of those systems may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from an over-defined and misleading consciousness. With increasing frequency I dismiss as merely respectable opinions I have long held - or thought I held - and try to discern what I have really lived by, and what others live by.

shyku to cincinnati

green wrestling
on either side
of this poem

--

vehicular pinatas
minivans
assfulls of children

--

kudzu
growth of
the glove
over the land

--

catullus cried once
and even he
never knew about it

--

that hole
in his mind
people walk through

--

holding hands
for something
that might be
themselves, or besides it

--

even clint eastwood
stole speed from
the road golden
with problems

--

phil collins
wades the air
we drive through

--

who made these trees
anyway
no one swings from

--

what more can be
known about clouds
that you won't remember

--

how far you've
had to tumble
to be indistinguishable
on my windshield

--

driving with my
ashes in tow
to the city
last century called
porkopolis

--

note to self
when there's coffee
in one hand and
Ice Mountain in another
drive with yr knees

Boggs

"Boggs is a performance artist and monetary draftsman who exchanges original renderings of paper currency for goods and services. He will go into a bar, order a drink, and present a drawing of, say, the back of a five dollar bill in payment. If it is accepted, he asks for a receipt and change, which he then sells to his collectors, who track down the original drawing and try to buy it. The complete transaction--drawing, change, receipt--constitutes Boggs's art. One Boggs transaction was auctioned for $420,000 . . ."

-Robert Boynton writing about Lawrence Weschler, who wrote about Boggs.

It may be stupid

to write a list
as simple as this,
but to get here
takes years:
New Jersey night,
nine windows
open, Yo La Tengo
softly strumming.
If you know me,
you know the rest.

they put us in
to forget about us

the trees don't
repeat
as they grow

but better yet, just try
outpacing
your own sunlight

when scuffed underwear
deflated on the
back of an old
wicker chair

is their only
clump of light

all paths sneak behind
ahead of them

Wearing their stars
inside-out
rendered even the
disasters
kitchens

They were content
To balance themselves
With the wrong
lives, corrected
by the right problems

Poetry Infests Brain of Japan's First Lady

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32659678/ns/world_news-asiapacific/?gt1=43001

"My work

was always
fact of any day's instance--"

[Robert Creeley explaining
how he made Oppen's
Selected Poems
and so much more]

First Saturday morning in the new apartment
I'm in the middle of the second movement
of some classical piece
as this box pours itself
into that corner and
that corner starts to look
like my family's fingerprint.

Steady rain now for three days straight
didn't stop a walk last night
out to a friend's and back
with a little tipping
in the middle.
Cicadastreets gone quiet
then suddenly loud
then quiet--a negotiation of sorts
with the rain and the night and the older
neighbors who have a seat
at the table.

Do me a favor and
some day collect
all the lines we've ever written
about crickets and cicadas.

Things I Have Seen or Heard Lately That Delight Me More than Ice Cream

1.

A man leaning out the window of his pickup at

Bloomfield Ave & Valley Rd.

He's way, way out as the red light eats time and god-
damnits.

He combs his mustache.

2.

A woman's dog shits on my lawn. She prepares to walk away but then

sees me watching,

finds a tissue or something
in her purse

(probably intended for sobbing at an opera or
Jersey pizza shop),

and cleans it up.

Incidentally, I was shirtless when I did
the apprehending.


3.

In an argumentative meeting today

someone's neck muscles got really tense

and through tight, white lips
he said something about

"750 dollars worth of comedians." This

phrase then proceeded to bounce around the room
angering some and causing a few to even sound as if

they had been punched
hard
in the guts.

_____________

Times like these
I know not much has changed
from an age of bicycle gangs
and first kisses,
headlocks and black eyes. I put my
body in places
and its very being
blesses me with
all I can take in. It won't always
be this way, but these days
the world is numerous and young
and I am of it, one of it, a close cousin.

_____________

I didn't get that right, but
wanted to say it. At worst this makes me
some kind of poetry pig,
alone in my slop.

"The defeat

of presupposed expectation of unity may be itself
a pleasure. Music
which pleases
by doing what we expect
('coming home') may also please us
by failing to do so."

So says Iris Murdoch

and of course
everything new
about a new "home."

So that leaves us with . . .

[ahem, kick them feet]

Before judging a piece of music as
great
we would have to separate
the music from the particular
stereo
from which we
eat it.

Restate as: the problem of all
this speaking
of beauty anyway,
I guess. The work is the breaking
of difficult
horses.

____


Ease up, she says,
motherly(?) and
stern (she calls people who look at art
"clients."): "[There] are innumerable points
at which we have to detach
ourselves, to
change our orientation, to redirect
our desire and
refresh and purify our energy,
to keep on looking in the right direction:
to attend upon the grace that comes through . . ."

Why Apartments Are Good For You

1. An inheritance of chipped wood
and inebriate notches
awaits you.

2. The sounds that split the walls are sometimes
sweetened with charity. Someone's,
for example,
shower voice.

3. That breeze like those skinned knees
are only rented.

4. A renter's eyes are closer to a
criminal's--
which means a certain hunger
and its attendant
skinniness
stays in your pockets.

5. The walls don't belong to you so
you can't break your hand on them.

Yes, and to prove it, I am currently on hold

w/ PSE & G
to hook up electric,
gas, oil, waiting on
a call back from
the old tenant
to pay him
for his oil,
still have to walk through
to inspect cracks
and other holdovers
to make sure I'm not billed
a year from now
when I'll be doing it all
over again.
A man's back
is made broad
as the beloved
in which he buries
work and
rest.

Did you find an apartment?

How to Move Out of An Apartment

[This will be ongoing for the next few days]

1.

Listen to the Silver Jews in reverse--starting with the new albums (that you probably only listened to a few times anyway) and go back, back, back to the early, ramshackle stuff that was recorded on, basically, a glorified answering machine. This will ensure that when you've boxed up all your stuff and only the small, uncategorizable things are clouding the corners, you will feel like you did when you lived in Virginia--and you'll trust yourself because you trust that guy.

2.

Number 1, like all my sentences these days, are proposal for a life experiment.

3.

Keep saying the word adventure. You want to come out of this with a new definition for family life. With so many competing definitions, you have to learn how to unlearn swiftly and radically.

4.

Things to pack last (learned in unpacking): salt, coffee and coffee maker . . . [expand as needed]

5.

Push boxes. Run for 20 minutes as fast as you can. Order pizza. Push boxes. Eat it. Live of/in/by the body.

6.

Run out of steam as the boxes choke off your air. Give up this thing you couldn't make live. Try a new space in the morning.

7.

Topped . . . by . . . Rufus . . .

An Account of the True Economics of a Low Budget Motel / Film

In 14 Rooms

1.

Sitting in my office one day about a year ago I got a call from my old friend Joey “Chin-up” Christiana. Last time I saw him, he was breaking the neighborhood chin-up record at the local playground. Hence the nickname. Joe had heard that I was working in “high finance,” as he called it, half reverently and half irreverently, and he needed a favor. Why he would call me—an old mook from the block—was no mystery to me. Joe has always liked to work with members of his own family, his close friends, friends of friends. I imagine that even when he finds his way to LA with a multi-million dollar budget and a huge set, he will work this way. And me—I’ll be happy to go along for the ride. I joined his bicycle gang when we were ten, and I’ve kind of never left.

Joe had an interesting proposition for me.

“I need an accountant for my next film,” he said.

“What’s your budget?” I asked, warming to his game.

“Nothing. Or barely nothing. A few hundred here and there. We’ll be running a deficit from the start.”

I knew not to ask the question that most professional bean counters would have asked—why do you need a god damn accountant if you have no budget?—because Joe’s logic has very little to do with capital L logic. It’s more like dream logic. The oil dripping from the hoagie you bought from the parakeet reveals a face, the face starts telling the funniest joke you’ve ever heard, but the punch line needs a little vinegar and suddenly you say, “exactly, precisely, that’s it!” Or you don’t. You’re either with him or against him.

“I’m in,” I said. “When do I start?”

And that’s how I ended up on the set of these little films that became a great big, film.

As for the notes and my authoring . . . “You were our accountant, so account for what happened,” is all Joe said post film.

“Okay,” I said, but he was already off the phone and on to the next thing before he could hear me. Enthusiasm burns clean and pushes its vessel quickly forward.

2.

Joe, Billy, and Benjamin made these movies like an old peasant woman haggling over the price of a chicken bone at the local market. The wild gesticulating was part send-up, part pragmatism, part soul-building exercise. They showed up at the motel fresh from jobs or family headlocks, with cars full of film equipment, actors, doughnuts, sandwiches, and newspapers, and then they headed straight for the front desk. While the rest of us stood in the parking lot drinking coffee, introducing ourselves, smoking cigarettes, and figuring out how we all ended up outside a motel in Jersey, Joe, flanked by Billy and Benjamin, negotiated through bullet proof glass the price of the room in which we would be filming. Sometimes he would call me in, as his official accountant, and spit some numbers at me, asking, “can we afford this?” I usually tried to look grim and shook my head no and then left, and I’m told the shtick usually helped us shave a few bucks off the price.

3.

By way of background: Since its emergence as a cultural institution in the 1940s, the motel promised respite for the weary traveler who had no need for the formality and expense of the city-centric grand hotels of the day; a “home away from home,” as the slogan goes. But almost from their inception, motels were perceived with suspicion, as a “place between places” where the potential for unlawful activity loomed large. Published in The American Magazine in 1940, J. Edgar Hoover wrote: “Behind many alluring roadside signs are dens of vice and corruption;” and though Hoover’s paranoiac proclamations should always be taken with a grain of salt, there must have been something to it. A more reliable source for the reality of America’s early perception comes, ironically, from fiction. The opening lines of Nabokov’s Lolita: “...I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love.” Thus, two characteristics factored into the emerging notion of motels as harbors for the illicit: First, motels were anonymous. Second, they were located outside city limits, beyond the force of municipal law.

4.

The title Motel Americana merits careful study and attention, the kind of close reading you might have performed on a sonnet back in high school. First off, is the word “motel” a noun or an adjective? If it’s a noun, it creates a phrase that’s a stand-in for a place (either real or imagined). For example, you might physically check into a motel. “Which one?” your family or business associates might ask. “The Motel Americana, off Route 46,” you might say, “you can look it up online.”

Or it could be the kind of place you could not look up online, the kind of place you could only imagine, putting it in the category with expressions like, “he’s in a brown study” or “he’s in his cups.” So you might ask, “what’s wrong with that guy.” And someone might answer, “oh, he’s just been spending a little time in the Motel Americana.” Meaning what? This is just one man’s opinion, but I’d say that “spending time (of which you can only spend too much) in the Motel Americana” means you’re in a particular kind of trouble, one brought on by a mix of personal stubbornness and impersonal absurdity. Man vs. World stuff, you know.

Flipping the coin, if we consider “motel” an adjective, we have a whole other set of options because “motel” Americana is a very particular kind of Americana indeed. It implies a particular set of artifacts—Gideons Bibles, ashtrays—a particular set of scrimshaw—stiletto heels, airplane bottles.

And either way, as I was saying earlier, “motel” anything means it’s beyond the force of law.

5.

“Beyond the force of law” is a characteristic that Hollywood loves, and so it didn’t take long for the industry to embrace the motel for its dramatic potentials. The roles historically written for it can be broken down into roughly two categories: 1. A retreat for society’s outcasts, and 2. A surrealistic den of horror. As a last refuge of the desperate shoved to the fringes of society, the movie motel provides the frame for voyeuristic gratification. Propelled by impulses triggered by real-life motel experiences—guttural noises emanating from beyond paper-thin walls, rooms inhabited by derelicts, transients, prostitutes and other dubious types (imagined or actual)—cinema sets out to do what it does best: allow entrance to those worlds. From the darkness of the theater Middle America is free to identify with dramas that are all but impossible in the neighborhoods and predictability of suburban life. It is the desperate who act with no regard for societal norms and it is in motel rooms where their triumphs and tragedies play out.

6.

In real life, the motel room is a kind of set. When it is actually a set, in reel life, it’s a set within a set. So this can happen: A sound guy and a screenwriter are drinking coffee in a motel. They have no history together, but they both kind of knew a guy who knew a guy who made films. They are brought together over the canvas of film to talk, tango, or arm wrestle. At one slow point (of which there are few on such outings), the sound guy tells the kind of story you could only tell to someone you just met. Something about his grandmother’s sure fire cure for pain. “My grandmother was a big Italian grandma kind of lady. When she got mad, she used to bite her own fist. Hard. But it took care of the pain. It calmed her.” And the story went on, but the screenwriter was doing his best to hold onto that detail—the fist biting—to resist the torrent of words that were trying to infiltrate his memory and steal the very particulars of the scene he had begun constructing. Later, the sound guy will hear a bit of his grandmother’s story coming out of the mouth of an actor portraying a two-bit gangster; the sound guy will hear his story, which he dressed up a little bit to begin with, dressed down, rehearsed, rehashed, and put on film. If it survives the editing room, it will be fully mythologized. It might be quoted, reinterpreted, called on for laughs. So yes, even in motels, myth can begin its steady trek through the lives of men and women.

Oh, and here’s one more.

The crew is shooting a scene with their clown. He’s supposed to march into the hotel, led by his clown shoes, trailed by his clown suitcase. The light’s really disappearing fast, and the meter’s running on the room. They’ve got to get this shot or they might never make it back. (Honestly, with this kind of film process, one slip up might translate into a shoddy film because you can’t pay your way out of your mistakes. Your mistakes either enhance the film or destroy it.) At one point, Joe rushes out from behind his camera to straighten something on the set. Or, that’s normally what he would be doing. Not so this time. Instead, he grabs the clown’s suitcase, rips it open, pulls out a toy, and hands it off to a young girl who, at that precise moment, is walking through the set and into the impending evening. Lesson # 1 of the low budget film: Sometimes you make the myth, and sometimes the myth makes you. And that was one beautiful mistake.

7.

Billy and Joe approach the lighting of the set like two guys arguing over a parking spot in New York City. (When you park in New York City, it’s your job not to give an inch and to take every inch you can. The suckers who try to be kind, who try to let people pass, cause the whole system to shut down. There’s a ruthless efficiency to it. You cut me off because you can, not because I let you. But that puts me an inch closer to my own parking spot, which I will lift out from under someone else’s nose.) Joe and Billy have been working like this for years. They understand the history of lights, the lore of lights . . . and neither one is prepared to give an inch. It’s not an argument so much as a wrestling match between brothers, the most primitive form of play. And, to skip back to my metaphor, this allows thousands upon thousands of cars to move in and out of the city, to park for delightful rendezvous or to pick up groceries, to drop off kids and pick up nannies. Or in the case of my two wrestling brothers, to allow light itself to be born again as if for the first time.

8.

In True Romance, Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette break violently from the pattern of their everyday lives and, in turn, concoct a scheme to escape societal constraints entirely. Their quest finds them holed up at The Safari Inn Motel with half a million dollars worth of the mob’s coke. There the adorable Arquette undergoes her final rite of passage—a merciless beating by a hulking James Gandolfini. When Slater finally drags her out to safety she’s beaten and bloodied, and as they stumble down the corridor, cocaine in tow, the tenants peer from doorways with looks that say this is nothing new. Here the motel is the heroes’ final stopover before achieving complete freedom.

The motel also serves as “gateway” in Thelma & Louise where the heroines seal their shared fate. It’s in a motel room where Thelma symbolically leaves her husband by sleeping with a two-bit transient thief. In the next room, Louise breaks irrevocably from the man she loves in order to pursue a higher state of being—independence. And it was in the motel room where their escape plans are revealed to the thief, information that eventually corners them on the lip of the Grand Canyon, poised for their ultimate break from the oppressive patriarchal society from which they’re fleeing.

9.

To reduce it to a simple formula, Motel Americana multiplied by any numeral equals: Doubles. Edges. The complete flip of a personality. And then the flop. Shaving off a beard. Growing one. Living up to the most deep-seated expectations of our mothers. Throwing a mustache against a wall. Being clowns at heart. Gentle men who go too far. Damaged men who do damage. Life reduced to what you can fit in a small, spare room. Mirrors. Night reduced to a small fee. Love running on a meter. A rent you can swing as your money runs out. Broken beasts walking Spanish down the hall. The proverbial fight or flight position. A man in a corner and another man coming at him. Bodies crashing against each other. Men, women, tight spaces, bad lighting.

10.

Sometimes Joe would send Ben Valentine out for coffee and he would come back with dialogue from the night clerk—and no coffee. We’d be complaining until the cameras started rolling and the new dialogue would start to crackle and catch in the perfect lighting and the actors would hear themselves tramping new ground and the scene would creak along like a pump organ or an accordion or anything that breaths to music. Lesson # 2 about the low-budget film: when you burn a new fuel, you find a different kind of action, one you didn’t expect, one that redefines your typical categories (efficiency, aesthetics, acting, etc.).

11.

One sub-category of motel films should be noted—that of motel as low-rent movie studio for indie pictures. Motels are easy to shoot at—rent a room and you have a location. The two most notable films in this sub-category are the brilliant films Bug and Tape but a quick internet search will return more DV motel film titles than you can shake a stick at.

Motel Americana is one such film at which the stick aims its shaking. As I contemplate the history of the motel in cinema and consider how this little film fits into the bigger picture, I realize that over the past year or so of production, each short shot at this seedy hideaway has not only explored (desperate) characters and their stories, but has simultaneously investigated the motel space as related to the mechanisms of cinema itself. Each film in the collection utilizes its own genre–noir, horror, absurdism, surrealism, documentary—to present its tale. It occurs to me now that this group of filmmakers instinctively toyed with the idea that the physical experience of entering a motel is akin to the psychological experience of entering a film. Through the motel room door or through the shimmering movie screen we (as guests, as audience members, as filmmakers) anticipate and create new worlds born into our imaginations. It seems to me that the mythological conception of motels and the need for the magic of movies work harmoniously to that end. One nourishes the other.

12.

And nourishment is at the heart of the economics of the low-budget film. Back at my desk job as word leaked out that I was spending more and more time “keeping the books” for a project that would never officially compensate me, I ate my fair share of shit. My colleagues, useful sharks that they are, absolutely could not understand how my hours away from clients and billables could possibly pay off (especially as the economy took the dive that crushed the lives of so many financial folks like myself).

Economics. You trade this for that. And if you understand economics, you learn how to get more this for less that. But I was paid in better wages. In the tedious, groin-thrashing game of duality, the freest man sometimes finds a way to go beyond the game, to turn his back on the game. “You go ahead and balance the scales,” he says, “I just have to use that restroom over there.” And as he turns the corner, he breaks into a slow jog and never looks back.

13.

The most famous movie motel, of course, is The Bates Motel, (Psycho). The film itself has been psychoanalyzed ad nauseam but it’s important to note that this, the most notoriously Freudian of all films, is housed in a motel. Hitchcock defined the motel as a mysterious netherworld (beyond city and societal limits) where inner psychological urges can be released and permitted to reign free. When Janet Leigh enters the room of The Bates Motel it’s as if she’s entering into the mind of Norman Bates himself. Once inside, she’s ensnared in his private traumas, subject to his secret urges. The investigators, representative of “functioning society,” spoil all the fun when they enter with all their righteous, self-imposing normalcy.

14.

That the motel staff was rarely accommodating and extremely, deeply uninterested in the film, put the economics of the whole endeavor in the proper perspective. Nobody stopped and looked. The staff and clientele in this particular motel didn’t care to see or be seen. They had no use for the romance of the artistic process. To be personally reminded of this during almost every moment of the filming process was perhaps the best thing that could have happened in the evolution of the film and the filmmakers.

For, at least to my eyes, maybe the most important thing a filmmaker can learn is also the thing that sets him finally and fully free. Lesson # 3: It’s highly likely that nobody outside your small circle of friends and family cares about your film. As such, the film isn’t for anything. Except itself . . . its very nature and the nurturing it takes to unfold it.

Under these conditions, the range of a filmmaker’s decisions becomes very clear and clean. So these filmmakers followed their own logic and the discipline implied by it; followed the rant only as far as it needed to go; let the drunkard walk only as far as he could go without falling down.

Far from being economic-less, the economics of the low-budget film reside in the spiritual realm, they transact beyond the limits of the body. You put in time, but what do you get? What’s your bottom line? Primarily, it’s the chance to see and hear what you imagined. To live alongside it as it learns to breath and walk and even waltz.

I’m telling you what I could never tell my colleagues at the accounting firm. These filmmakers, like all passionate individuals, paid the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears for the privilege of living alongside their imagined worlds. Then, when they walked off the set and back into their lives, they reaped the reward of a lifetime: wakefulness . . . being fully open to participation in the entire human affair.

You become what you do, what you are. As you practice the art of making film with no money, you work the basic mines, extracting pure minerals. You tend to dialogue, making sure it says what it has to and no more. You look at faces, really tending to them. You paint on walls and bodies. You straighten the light. You think deeply about exactly how long a lover should mourn the loss of her loved one . . . and what this might actually look like and sound like.

From this doing, this making of free and passionate films, you bring new existential skills to your own free life. You learn to tend to story—your own and others’. You learn to act with grace when that’s called for or to perfect anger, which is also sometimes called for. When you practice over and over again crying over loss or kissing under wildest gain . . . when you coach someone to punch more honestly, to love the rough edge of a curse word, to hold another body better . . . you yourself get better. You can’t help it. Making low budget films is making life, inch by everloving inch.

Or at least that’s what I learned when I spent a little time in the Motel Americana.

On The Rappahannock

It's the first sea-worthy
body of water
I pulled from
the nonsense morass, my
brain's fink
pretend memory.
So here and only here
we'll begin...
Because you are,
and such the nearness
of the closeness
of most forgetting,
so when I hear from you
water makes such clear obscure patterns
in places neither of us know,
I can feel it, and you can feel it
too, little hays of straw
in some Virginia
barn are nervous with a bit of breeze
and trembling. A mom
of the workplace
spun this lore from
the river I've just
loved at random:
since it's a saltwater
spider, jellyfish
often couchpotatoswimwander
inland, and the
swimmers, mostly
country girls, from
my co-worker Nicole (name
also of my most recent
great love) sprays the
fact of it through sound
to the maybe of believing it:
the summertime divers
get stung, and badly.
They rub aloe on it.
They scrape the scum
off catfish asses
with credit cards
and mortar-pestle
the stuff to numb
the blooded skin.
The lonesome keen
nods its head. A mason jar
of bourbon plus
a can of Coke, plus
truly human saliva
confounds it. When
drinking, it dreams
of itself and others.
When sober, it
parses the conscious
sound of it. Each
caught thought flounces
into a town. The
sheriff perverts
with his fancy star heart
the mayor. Bonnets
bustle and float
like magnet dandelions,
in the clearly unsteered air.
There, in the flax expanse,
was our past. Two Virginias
dumbing port wine
while riding the empty
aluminum baseball
bleachers in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The virgins were sheer flame.
One found a flopped bottle
of pink champagne in
the rectum of an
ivy league tree. A wedding
was corrupting in
a nearby place.
Big titty bells
were shaking.
The men were
solemly fondling.
White fetched
the problem of the
double cummer. Honeymoon
on the fire veranda.
A catalog of the gorgeous
calm filled by blinking:
a swallow-beyond-begging,
a woman, blonde naked,
smiling in a straw
cowboy hat, cicada
crackling muggy heat,
sashaying to the
kitchen to
disappear with a
fresh farmer's market
tomato fetched into
an upended palm. She
juiced the jelly fizz
of biting it. Then kisses
the idiot who relaxes
into just laughing. He
has a miser's welcome
of lonesomeness now,
but he knows--herein
lie his riches. The clear
path of fitty connections,
like a talented afro's
split ends, frays
through the foolishly
coolless first, last
in a lingo of laters,
the girl, the mid-curve, the
woman, the boy, the
bit-prom, the man
in hood, the New Jersey
of corrupt politicans
and capital rabbis
importing internal organs
like Jimmy Smith
on his, to the
childhood copping
poprocks from his
pappa, Walt Hudson,
who I embrace
as a heathen
with one toe
on the foot
on the flick floor
of the forsaking keen complete
ness, and a sweatbead, the living.

On the Hudson

Having lost
my cell phone, your number, any chance of
immediately recovering them,
I walk down to the old, trusty Hudson
to toss in earfulls of youngtalk
that will influence some butterfly or something
and make a little wave in your beer. Then, suddenly,
I give up on that idea, it
will never happen. Forgetful of geography,
instead, and having spent too much time with a toddler,
I will build a skiff
to haul me from Hudson to Mississippi to
Ohio . . .
and I'll buy that beer, yes
I'll buy that beer
and the next
and pump the jukebox full
of songs that make of
night a common destiny
for a little while.
I wonder what we will talk
about then
in that abhorrent vacuum
where we bang our fists
to prove heaven is earth is
empty, and can we
have another?

Some of the Deepest Stuff Ever Caught on Tape?

http://www.myspace.com/jamesbookerpiano

click on "Medley Slow Down Grapevine"

On The Ohio

At the dinner party
last night
he made a classic mistake...
When the host and his
wife said, well do
you want to take
your bourbon home
and he remembered the
wife offering liquor earlier
in the evening but
said, well, we
can't have any
ourselves, we're
trying
to get pregnant, he
said to himself, a social
bachelor, well
so am I,
and before all the
guests with
instinctual tackiness
said, sure,
and there they
brought out
his Early Times
untouched in the
brown bag that
lady had wrapped it
in. In this way
does the
universe
bottle its
rivers. Nothing loves
a hobo with his
own manners
like a river. And
he, he loves them
too, the
middle-classers
and young professionals,
the poor luck scrapers
and college clumps,
the elderly rising
like yeast from their
chairs. Why else
is he on this boat
but to drink for them?

On the Mississippi

I watch the steamboats
tick by
like inches
on a long mile,
and since the heart, too, abhors
a vacuum
I shutter my eyes
on the photographic
swell: a bridge unfolding
in afternoon, children
sledding down a grass slope
on crushed cardboard
boxes. These photos
are for my son, I miss him,
and because they are not
caught on an i-phone
and texted to a blog
or even
twittered, I coin a term:
mystic media,
that is
something social
published in a blind
book whose
lines you pass
at the dinner table
or when you spoon
just the right amount
of brown sugar
into a bowl of oatmeal
some Sunday morning.
Everyone everywhere
is doing it differently
so that aptures
of ideas
travel quickly
before they can be
considered or cared for
all that much. They blink
their phones
and the street graffiti
or clownish figure
travels
to the ones
who connected or
chose to follow
such floatings. This makes
of life
a game
of tag,
you're it.

Motel Americana

The American Dream has been beaten and kicked long enough. He quits his job, fires his attorney, and leaves a wife who won’t notice he’s gone until she has no one to dance with when the ball drops on New Year's. With a case of Ancient Age and a trunkload of cigarettes, he checks into a motel to write a memoir about the rise and fall of an elegant, though deeply flawed idea—his dirty life and times. All of them. He begins, I am going to turn this prince back into a frog and croak frog songs into the gravel pit of midnight. Ah, New Jersey, you son-of-a-bitchen crotch puncher, I’m here. Meet me by the flag pole after school. Hence this bloodstream of anonymous drifters and wishers. Strivers. Near Missers. On paper, they sound like every other character who ends up in a motel story. There’s the man paying his debts the hard way and the man avoiding debts. There’s the woman on the run and the woman who treats her body like a garage sale. There’s the immigrant who hears the land making promises and the upstanding citizen at war with his unpretty instincts. And of course there are plans that double as schemes and bad ideas. And killing. Lots of killing. But remember one thing about these ordinary driftings . . . a frog who used to be a prince is singing about them . . . and he knows no one is listening . . . and he’s brushing his teeth with whiskey . . . which leads to a certain boldness, for which you will have to forgive him. After all, he used to be a prince. We were going to call this The Frog’s Opera, but we promised our backers not to get too fancy. Motel Detritus felt a little cruel. We settled on Motel Americana after we lost a better title in a card game. Secretly we loved it.

Revivalist Shyku

Busy man
bows to
even busier
man
O nakedness
what a room

The Mason Will Be Out of the Office From July 1 - 7th, If You Need Your Requisite Fix of Juice Just Read the Poem Below (A Beaut)

Brickmelt

"The whole glacier
does some things
with time that I
can't really describe..."
Days with H. are like that now, too.

Highlights from Wednesday:

1. The dustbowl near the Hudson is an ice skating rink. I'm not allowed on the ice until I put on my skates. Even then, I am clearly second string. But he's kind about it.

2. A giant piece of train is buried below the West Side Highway, must be off 59th street but--and, yeah, this goes without saying--all maps dissolve. We go there every Wednesday, my summer day off, to see if it is unlocked. I know it will never be unlocked, the locks have rusted, someone has forgotten, some lawyer has ruled and run off... But he can imagine his way past the locks and I am learning that trade, which means I'm not lying when I say, "yeah, let's go there, things might be different this time."

3. On the way we sit under a canopy tree. It's a rainforest. We have planted three dinosaur eggs there. At night, before bed, we do a little harvesting, but not too much.

4. Conversation. Me: "You know, you have to be a little careful with all this talk of farting. Farts are actually kind of gross. People don't like them." Him: "No daddy. Farts are good. They're a little funny. I'm going to have to check with mommy on this."

5. At night he says, "I've never been out at night. I wonder what it would be like." So we go out. Late. After 10. When mostly it's just people walking dogs or heading out to have drinks. He observes (everything): "There are no clouds . . . Actually, there are a few clouds . . . It's beautiful . . . Where are the stars? . . . I haven't seen a sunset in so long . . . What do they do in the supermarket when it gets night-night out? . . . Those dogs, where are their mommies?"

Time means I am falling in love with a poem carved in smoke.

Bricklore

A pretty interesting
brick fell from the sky
yesterday--
Downtown '81.
When it struck earth
it smacked open
into a diorama
of NYC, complete
with graffiti artists,
strippers, pushers,
some live footage
of bands from
fanbrains long ago.
James White and
the Blacks were a
highlight--and DNA.
The whole glacier
does some things
with time that I
can't really describe...
you'll just have to
watch it. Creates the
illusion a day can be
as long as you
want it to be, in
this case, almost
endless. Jean
Michel Basquiat
is the main character...
and while watching
him ease like a
tumbleweed around the
rough angles of Manhattan,
I'd pause every now and
then and say, So that's
what his voice sounded
like. Curious, relaxed.
Innocent all the way
down to the undertones.
But after the day was
finished, I checked the
DVD notes and noticed--
the original audio tapes
for the movie were
lost some time between
the 80's and late 90's,
when the directors
reclaimed the rights,
so they had Saul Williams
re-record it. So the film,
the day-sized man, the
lackadaisy painter
you're watching
is really only a
visual ghost
to verbal flesh,
or the past,
overdosed, reliving
the best intentions
of the present--which
can only approximate.
That's not a problem, though.
I liked the scenes best
when he was simply
walking.

Brickwork

From a purely
workmanlike
POV
I embed these lines
to push down
what's below
and also to see
what images fluster
(like one in love,
not a bad thing)
my mind when
the words
are actually.
(Remind me
sometime
to quote from the first
page of
How Buildings Learn
and I'll make
all the connections
necessary.)
So, for example,
now I see two
great hicks
skipping work
to go fishing
and talk shit
about people
who don't use
live bait. They can be
forgiven
for almost anything,
these two
(except their handles):
Smokemonster & Flyswatter.

Leaping Poetry

The Hot Boys of Washington...?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23730.html

Bitte Orca

Wow?

Dear Whitefish

You appeared
as carrot cake--
fish thoughts buried

in your flour and fiber.
Only I was laughing, playing
out the high

comedy. It's like
an architecture, really.
We strew the lines

with whatever
material we can fluster
into joining.

No. It's like great laundry
blowing in a black and white
wind. Almost slow mo.

The Whitefish Speaks

So, did I at least taste good? Digesting
into the cosmos, like Alan Dugan
among a potluck of stomachs, maybe
only to be this one subtle flourish:
to taste as good as they feel. Each
and every one--man and child
and woman, and woman with baby
slung on her hip alike. Virginia
in the summertime. Enzymes. Intestinal
travel. Lightyears. Nutrients.
To glow out of the faces
that only hours ago
looked on me
as a stranger.
Where else did they earn this yen for the urge to dive out and make water move like swimming? What you taught me:
wherever it's at,
it's mostly in the fins, homey.

Love Vigilante

Virginia Silver

The pot luck party
starts in fifteen minutes.
I plan to bring something funny,
a smoked fish, head attached, maybe,
but mostly just to be able to tell K. the story.
This is a way of being friends--first
foreshadowing, then completing,
a kind of comedy that winds its way
back to Virginia nights
where we traded time
like two hapless drinkers
paying each other
with the same silver dollar.

Wenting Agin(g)

poetry
as (if)
by dream

the collected
disappearances
of a fierce
friend
of the universe

the boy
gave birth
to the marriage,
right?

I think I've
got it
wrong
but it felt like
a beautiful
home
movie
played back-
draw
into time-distance

and there was
something about
a flowerpot
flowering
and such
with said slant
it stood
perfectly slant
ed

what's funny
and started this
is this morning's
antics: H.
woke up
screaming
MOM
and when I later
asked him
what happened?
what
happened buddy?
he said,
"the lines
on my pillow
were there
and then gone
and then came back
again"

planting
a certain kind of
brief habit
of mind
pulling
thread from
thread

you
two knuckle-
heads
meeting in tween
two dreams
call that
the life that held
two (at least)
clouds
lovingly,
I hope.

Exhaust

The suburban ecstasies beckon,
and I am still
at work, preparing
to drive away from them. NYC
you dirty son-of-a-bitchen crotch
puncher. Everything else says
my children. I hope my car
behaves, the night
does not
slam down too hard
on the daylight ivories, I don't
forget
to forget
silly combat.
I have been studying
economics
the way an old,
dogged, Red
Auerbachesque, cigar-
chomping high school
coach,
in search of his 300th
win, studies his opponents.
All they say
so far is: you trade
this
for that; all I know
so far is:
I haven't got
much this,
I need more
that, bad poetry
costs
just as much
as good
when you weigh it
on the same
slimy scale
that weighs
a pound of ham, quarter
pound of swiss,
and throw in a few
rolls for my girls.

T. Roethke said

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

Chloe Grace Past & Present

BABY PHOTO HERE

Fanny & John Were Here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/15/jane-campion-bright-star-cannes-film-festival-review

Tomorrow

all the world
begins again

There is some evidence that Rembrandt was at times irascible and whimsical. According to Houbraken, "One day he was working on a great portrait group in which man and wife and children were to be seen. When he had half completed it, his [Rembrandt's] monkey happened to die. As he had no other canvas available at the moment, he portrayed the dead ape in the aforesaid picture. Naturally the people concerned would not tolerate the disgusting dead ape alongside of them in the picture. But no: he so adored the model offered by the dead ape that he would rather keep the unfinished picture than obliterate the ape in order to please the people portrayed by him."

Breathing Tubes / Whitman

distillation . . . mouth . . . forever . . . smoke . . . have you reckoned a thousand acres much . . . entretied, braced . . . quaker . . . art and argument . . . wormfence . . . heaped stone . . . adjunct of an earth . . . sparkle and scud . . . killing clothes . . . organloft . . . songs and behaviour . . . true sustenance

My Father in the Night Commanding No

[This is a poem by Louis Simpson]

My father in the night commanding No
Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;
He reads in silence.
The frogs are croaking and the streetlamps glow.

And then my mother winds the gramophone;
The Bride of Lammermoor begins to shriek--
Or reads a story
About a prince, a castle, and a dragon.

The moon is glittering about the hill.
I stand before the gateposts of the King--
So runs the story--
Of Thule, at midnight, when the mice are still.

And I have been in Thule! It has come true--
The journey and the danger of the world,
All that there is
To bear and to enjoy, endure and do.

Landscapes, seascapes . . . where have I been led?
The names of the cities--Paris, Venice, Rome--
Held out their arms.
A feathered god, seductive, went ahead.

Here is my house. Under a red rose tree
A child is swinging; another gravely plays.
They are not surprised
That I am here; they were expecting me.

And yet my father sits and reads in silence,
My mother sheds a tear, the moon is still,
And the dark wind
Is murmuring that nothing ever happens.

Beyond his jurisdiction as I move
Do I not prove him wrong? And yet, it's true
They will not change
There, on the stage of terror and of love.

The actors in that playhouse always sit
In fixed positions -- father, mother, child
With painted eyes.
How sad it is to be a little puppet!

Their heads are wooden. And you once pretended
To understand them! Shake them as you will,
They cannot speak.
Do what you will, the comedy is ended.

Father, why did you work? Why did you weep?
Mother? Was the story so important?
"Listen!" the wind
Said to the children, and they fell asleep.

Like a good hunter, I should track

how anxiety moves through
the body,

when and why it appears, disappears. Is the body

radically available

or does anxiety
talk its way in the door,
slipping the bouncer
a twenty?

Who would dance with
such a selfish animal
that wants the world
to want to run from
its visage?

And then lives in what's left . . .

Vulcan Obama

Holy Crap!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/06/nick-cave-rejected-gladiator-script

Insult (It & It) Blossoms

of all the ways
to be poor
you had to choose the one
where you work
80 hours a week
and leave your best stuff
in the butterfly nets
of the young--

that disappearing
buddhist
crap
wandering-in-the-woods
lonely-man
breaking-barriers-
into-song
stuff
hooked me
the way Europe did
in my early
twenties--

but now
today
this minute
and forward
you wouldn't catch me
sharing a room
with 16 cots full
of Germans and Swedes
itching and sweating
for the perfect
black & white
photograph--

you know
the one that looks
like a version
of the truth
by any other name--

So where's that leave us?
Jersey, I guess

Ghost & the Cloudless Kettle

[ Apology, if that's needed. ]

Prologue to the Book of Meetings

These thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, 'till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions . . . and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.

~Ben Franklin to Joseph Priestley

From Agnes Martin's "Writings"

Many people think that if they are attuned to fate, all their
Inspirations will lead them toward what they want and need.
But inspiration is really just the guide to the next thing
And may be what we call success or failure.
The bad paintings have to be painted
And to the artists these are more valuable than those paintings
Later brought before the public.
A work of art is successful when there is a hint of perfection
Present—
At the slightest hint…the work is alive.

…To feel confident and successful is not natural to the artist.
To feel insufficient,
To experience disappointment and defeat in waiting
For inspiration
Is the natural state of mind of an artist.
As a result praise to most artists is a little embarrassing.
They cannot take credit for inspiration
For we can see perfectly but we cannot do perfectly.

The Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band, Louisville, KY

For Your Failing Pleasure...

http://failblog.org/

Challenge

Remix the advice from CW, a few lines/phrases at a time. Once we settle on a final list (10 - 15), write a poem that fits the remixed criteria.

Notes Toward an Article about Charles Wright

“Now the Fathers were not even sufficiently concerned with the nature of this rest to speak of it in these terms, except very rarely, as did St. Anthony, when he remarked that ‘the prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer realizes himself or the fact that he is praying.’ And this was said casually, in passing. For the rest, the Fathers steered clear of everything lofty, everything esoteric, everything theoretical or difficult to understand. That is to say, they refused to talk about such things. And for that matter they were not willing to talk about anything else, even about the truths of Christian faith, which accounts for the laconic quality of these sayings.” (9) ~ from the intro to the Cloud of Unkowing…

Certainly there’s a connection between these laconic sayings and the sayings of Charles Wright…

The approach, or delivery.

Inching one’s way into spirituality. Sliding, doing the half step. This is [to be] as much an essay about poetry as it is about man, a man inching his way toward his own spirituality, and doing it in poems…a man teaching others how to write poems…his approach, or way…his way of shuffling.

Speaking out of the corner of one’s mouth. In order to glance a rip shot off the truth…it’s the only way to get at the truth…you must be moving along with it. You can’t stand still and expect to hit a moving target…something like that…Zen Bhuddists…surprised by Enlightenment…snuck up on their students…Koans break into our minds by surprising us, by taking unique angles…All of Wright’s poetry works this way, a half muttered music glancing off the landscape, or the object of devotion. His teaching was the same.

Wright’s sayings from a class a long, long time ago:

• Every stanza needs to be one line less.
• Some stanzas need to be two lines less.
• Stick to the event.
• Come out of the blocks fast, and if not fast, at least graceful.
• Essence is not all but almost all.
• Allow the readers to invent the narratives themselves.
• Underwrite the narrative, beneath the cargo of images.
• Let the detail ignite the imagination.
• Think about the line length, the way it looks on the page.
• When you tie the knot, make sure it is the most interesting way.
• Innuendo vs. Inflection.
• Say what you need to say to get to the end of the poem.
• Understatement is key.
• Intensity, scrutiny, discipline.
• Poetry as hidden language, as language inside of language.
• The poem in itself could just be talking to itself: images, echoes, calls, returns.
• Mostly we over-elaborate the explanatory moment.
• Remember, people who read poems are always looking for more than is there.
• It’s more important what you leave out than what you leave in (says Hemingway).
• The reader’s unraveling the story will usually be more interesting than your own explanations.
• Don’t overwrite.
• Everybody has his own level of minimalism.
• If you can describe something accurately and precisely and it’s the right thing, then you have done it.
• Charles Bronson’s real name is Charles Bushinski (pair this with the quote about fasting and writing…two of the only
things Charles ever wrote on the board.)
• Free verse: you can’t just chop up the prose.
• Labor, listen (Pound)
• The Cantos: a great wreck on the shore of human ambition.
• Keep the metrical contract, the rhythm the same from the outset.
• Keep the reader happy.
• The close you adhere to how you start out, the better off you’ll be.
• Think about end stop vs. enjambment: you don’t want to bother the reader with too many stops.
• All good poems are made up of good details.
• All great poems are made up of great details.
• But the details have to add up to something more, make them come together in some whole.
• If you’re going to rhyme, it’s best to keep the lines longer (4 stresses instead of 3)
• Think of it as a riff, as a line of jazz.
• Often all you need of narrative in a poem is the title unless the poem is a narrative…then you only need a few words.
• To be asyntactical, use short lines to create rhythm.
• Williams: the flower was just there to write a poem about.
• Get at the significance of the experience.
• Writer as a force of nature: think about it.
• Images should move down the page.
• Listen to the sound the poem makes.
• How is the speaker changed by the end of the poem?
• Words take on a greater weight in poems.
• Immitative fallacy: when you describe something boring or uncomfortable, don’t be boring or uncomfortable.

Working Draft

Here are some poems of yours written over the past 9 or 10 months that seem to be working together. There are a few I want to include that don't seem to fit. "The Ballad of Impossible Diogenes" and "Jersey City-Portland in the 1st Style of Fire" are two.

Once I polish off a clean draft of these poems I'll e-mail them to you. Until that sunny day,

On the Last Night at the Beach...
Art of the Snowday
2/24/09 on 2/25/09
Letters to Someone Else #1
Letters to Someone Else #2
Correspondence Abandon
__________

From The Family Notebook
__________

Letters to Someone Else #3
"You Are A Coward"
Eight Good Songs, One Good Meal
They Used Time
Downgraded To Hurricane
Blood Bank
The Understudy
Correspondance Abandon
Mis En Scene
Smoke & Monologue

Elvis

has left the building.

James McIntyre, "Canada's Worst Poet"

"...This included his masterpiece and possibly best-known poem, 'Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds,' written about an actual cheese produced in Ingersoll in 1866 and sent to exhibitions in Toronto, New York, and Britain:

We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze;
Thy fair form no flies dare seize. "

"Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river,

the soul a dream and
mist, life
is warfare and a journey
far from home, lasting
reputation is oblivion."

. . . but don't worry
you're only disappearing
because sparks disarm
their makers:

and that that
sounded nice
doesn't mean
it's true,
doesn't it?

This Is By A Poet Named Richard Hoffman, Called "Summer Job", and It Reminded Me of What Your Poems Are Always Saying

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

&

Hardy, you have stunned us
into silence you have numbed us.
I guess this is kind of how it was
all around you, mostly.
I read you once at Oxford.
You were sturdy and dull
as a board,
but your sadness was
the lasting kind.
It didn't tip the balance
only showed new shades
of black in the black.
How to live as we grow older.

The Most Bizarre Love Poem Ever?

"1967" by Thomas Hardy

In five-score summers! All new eyes,
New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise;
New woes to weep, new joys to prize;
With nothing left of me and you

In that live century's vivid view
Beyond a pinch of dust or two;
A century which, if not sublime,
Will show, I doubt not, at its prime,

A scope above this blinkered time.-
Yet what to me how far above?
For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love!


16 WESTBOURNE PARK VILLAS, 1867.

I'm in mourning for the integrity . . . I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.

the missing #3

"the epistemology
of the loving intellect".
someday, with
luck and work, maybe

Swaths of Ham, Harms of Swats

1.

The early results are in.
I'm loving your manuscript.
For reasons I'll try.
To articulate gladly.
At some later date.
But it does.
The trick.
Of walking for you.

2.

Everywhere they are talking.
The gray talk of industry and.
What passes for friendship.
To put this manuscript.
In the middle of all of that.
Ordering more salami.
Less artichokes.
When oh when.
Will my niece get married.
What about the rain.
They are poor predictors.
All of them.
It's brightening theses.
Also.
Like attending a good barbecue.
Where real things happen.
With you.
I guess the articulation is already.
Kind of happening.
Too.

4.

or
thank you for breaking
the lines
where you have
for remaking
wilderness
only
kinder
and with more
eyes

5.

he heads toward the George Washington Bridge
with not only
knowledge of new caves
(dug inward)
but
lights for spelunking

6.

because the poet
is free
all the dancers
are free

7.

light-shifting
is
upon us
and all the heavy lifting
exposed
as heaven
lifting

New Manuscript

title: "Women From Men & Women"
written: Jan - Feb 2009
assessment: flashes of clarity, some leaps, some stretches of rough uncharismatic stuff
all in all: getting better

TOC

1/

Proof of Less / 2
Women and Men and Women / 3
Changed By The Eyes That Mix Him / 7
Exempt Are The Truly Careful / 8
By The Red Mile / 10
A Beautiful History / 13
Encounter With A Woman Not Alice / 14
Girl Stories / 15
Innocent of Lawyer / 18
Man on the Quick / 20
Villainesque / 21
Possession / 22
Ten Thousandth Eclogue on the East / 24
The Enthusiast / 25
Terminals / 27
Four Generations and Ten People and Two Floors, One / 32
Working Bathroom




2/

These Kinds / 36
Regardless of Rank Age or Sex, Pope Innocent the Third / 39
A Mythologically Fit Economic Thunder / 41
The Man From Pessimonia / 42
These Lacustrine Feelings / 44
Portrait That Bears No Modesty to Semblance / 46
Italian Comedy / 49
Of A Moral / 51
The Boring Rose / 53
Golden Living / 55
What the Parse-Master Admires Most In Himself Is the Mirror / 57
Like Dostoyevskian Lemmings / 59
The Enlightenment / 60
The Prophet / 63
In Helsinki, The Novelist / 66

The Art of the Snowday

It wasn’t hard to master.
Before children it was one way.
So many things seemed filled
and content. The hum
of so many: i.e.,
the refrigerator,
how it opened
and closed, startling the air, the washing machine,
all its hands
through clothes; a good blanket
extending bedhead permission —
and the cigarette
silk of the talk radio voices.
This is Craig
Shankman. This is Radio Lab. This
is what happened
to the Knicks. This is
what happens
to mole rats when they forget their young.

Since then in gaining
I have lost something everyday.
Not door keys or a mother’s watch.
I lost all of the Pittsburgh
I once owned
and a song
that belonged to everyone. I had
the last copy and sometimes
when you kind of glare at me
for no reason
I know a reason.

Before the job
got serious, and the marriage . . .
but wait—
I once used a snowday
to write this line: Buried world,
pray for me . . . that I never leave my life
in a place where I can’t find it.
Okay. I admit. And there’s no easy way
to say this:
I did leave it somewhere. My life.
I can’t find it.

I’m sorry. This was supposed to be a snowday,
not a poorly written
SAT prompt
crying out from the wilderness
like the abominable snowman:
What on earth are we for?
it asks, impolitely,
answer this question
on the lines provided. You have
twenty minutes:

We are here for Time, its flights and fancies. As its sketchpad and scuttlebutt. Its placeholder. We are not here to ask questions. Bookends and ashtrays. Its unwashed grapes. And since, dear reader, you have to read this and calibrate the score with someone else, I’ll ask: Time, why must you drink so much cheap whiskey? We were your children. You passed out and forgot us into adulthood. Stop shaking me like some Polaroid you snapped so you wouldn’t forget me. Time, you harlot, you slept with all my friends and not me. Why?

2/24/09 on 2/25/09

It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena.

~Albert Einstein in a textbook he wrote with a colleague.

In any case,
I can't remember much. Each day turns
into a memo, each memo
a found sound, a sounding.
What was 2/24/09?
Brushfire and fiddle,
maybe not the usual twaddle,
maybe not the usual pattern
we get so good at resounding.

Other things I don't remember:

. . . the lunch table
and its usual six-layer sandwich
of talking. J. to B. to
D. about C. The pure
algebra of it
where, masterfully, they insert X
when they don’t want to
say it, or better yet,
don’t know it. Time playing like
an old, slightly warped record
in the corner, or
a Blues singer
who holds up a harmonica,
then a guitar, then
an old time saw,
and finally says, the hell with it,
I'll just use the goddamn
voice
god gave me.

. . . teaching anyone
anything, I think
they taught me
again:
restraint, restraint,
how to guide them
in their fumbling,
how to look away
before the blush bruises
or the thing that cannot be taken back
is given too freely,
how to hardly forget
that the classroom
is a field
in the field mice sense
and the Einstein sense
and the one the children
play well in

and it gives permission
for any day
to be seen and not seized,
not blinded into memo.

To: All Faculty
Re: Time

let the days be misrememberd appropriately
like the day the Internet went down
and the lost arts of whistling
and pinochle
and the found arts of timekeeping
by analogy
rose, rose, rose

Haiku for a Disappearing Window

Clearly I am not fast enough.
I was slowly chewing that one.
I liked the second proposed title.

Mis en scene

1.

Only bits of time now
flecks--
[to find fullness
is banished, counted out.]

What wandering odor of death
could [be] sweep[ing] us forward
so fast we count to[. . .]

Only bits, flecks,
only tired light.

But there [is and] can be
crude awakenings in such scenes,

if only to trace [everyday]
some kind of [now] pulled down voice.

2.

Current conditions combine to deepen,
and in bursts.

They sit down, catch up, begin to talk about cancer.
Someone's aunt comes in, sits.
The conversation turns, grudgingly, to
pumpkin soup, cousins, they ask early
for the tab, ask early how we ever
end up just here,
just where we are.

3.

Still some things
cling
to a fullness
they hammer
a dawn
to their sleeves, drag
it to work
and bed
the trouble
like poetry
for God
is not where
to begin
but to end
where to end

4.

2% broken
open and noiseless.
6 piles of vomit,
seemingly unrelated.
They spit up the flames
they once swallowed.
1 taken with song.
3 asking for something:
directions, to please watch a cart.
I tell them I am lost,
too, I am on someone else's
time. This makes no one happy,
but when has honesty
ever been as much use
as approximation? I kick
a pile of glass outside an Irish
bar a hairpin turn from
the Westside Highway.
A few hours earlier
4, at least, pounded each other
with their fists.
I once heard honest description
was a form of the Good,
was moral and all of that.
Having earned the right
to be trusted, the man who said
that cited Thoreau's vision, latticed
on its thick, study prose.
In 8 or 9 hours
someone else's drinking
will begin to add up.
The man who just
brushed against my life
really wanted me to know
that Fairway there
is a terrible place
to shop. I asked
"have you ever tried
their whitefish," becoming
an example in a story
he will tell in the dark.

5.

We go on, the family turns
and grows and we learn to say
"we are blessed."

Although someone, somewhere is older,
we name the wandering light
and surrender.

What happened was that he broke off.
I could feel him tensing rhythmically
as the crowds passed.

I couldn't afford nameless violence
or even the kind that has a name.
When they snapped my photo
I could never write victim.

Only a mistake-mishapen love
that grows a meaner wilder.

We gain on pushing them out.
The world only drags in
on my shoes
which I quickly retire.

6.

My old friend works for murderers and drunks now.
My other friend sells enemas to China.
I have an old friend who sends me postcards
from mountaintops in Tibet, he is only
a traveller now. I have a friend who
mainly does yoga. He is better than me.
My other old friend is a Captain in the Army.
Some government type once asked me
if I had any reason to believe that someone else
could blackmail him, any dirt whatsoever,
and I said no and meant it.
I have a friend who, whenever he gets drunk,
talks about quitting his bank job and working
for the discovery channel and I try to coach him
to maybe combine his business background
with a career in science or television, but that's
not really what he wants to hear.
I have a friend who, if such a thing existed,
would be called an animal saint.
Three of these friends have had
serious breakdown, they scared me so much, and
we never find ways to talk about it.

7.

This engine balks because the wife is beautiful.

That fish, reaching his teenage years, refuses
to swim properly and is eaten.

The stubborn will of the earth is hardly noted.

"If you're going to be a scientist, you'll need these,"
she said.

Surfers dream on their bellies, on a board between
two slipstreams. Believe me,
approximately.

Students dream in their seats, a lesson blurring by
like a bad film that is sometimes funny.

My friend writes, "tell H. to dream big,"
and I think that is the nicest thing anyone
has ever wished for him, but then I think
of Don Quixote and three breakdowns,
the difficult life of the dreamer.

Success is ruby red to the grapefruit
growers, green to bankers, and colorless
to me. But my wife is beautiful and kind,
and I understand what children become
and the earth, and I have the safety glasses
she gave me when she took my whim
seriously, and I know both surfers and
students, and somewhere, someone
is cradling my son in fine thoughts

and all of this has to mean something.

8.

Landing here a man with four
purposes
and ways. If he heads out
for light and fortune
or light fortune
or long ways. . . . He has four,
five purposes, six. He trembles
a little, remembers reading
something serious about the man who
splits himself
into too many men.
It was pitched as sin, this splitting.

He does not want goodness to be
a mere conceit he pays a brief homage to
on his way somewhere else.

Why the perpetuation of selves, this
circus act of juggling
on a highwire . . . is he simply trying
to impress the bearded lady or the man
with the tiniest head?

9.

Then, what we cling to
clings to us
just as much.

The tiny gods hardwire their upkeep into creation.

What is the great theme--
or will you simply be
counted off?

Will your body serve another's
story, the one
all the lined up bodies
tell? Who will judge
such events,
such tiny calibrations:
the turning towards, the turning away,
prayer that straightens the spine, prayer that . . .

Wanting to make a grace
of tiny, unkempt things

so that my desire grows
small as a keyhole,
not large as a cage,

I will cover the miles today,
and the miles will cover me up,

and when I come home and
play with my son and cook
and worry and forget and
turn out the last light,
I will put my hand
on the small of my wife's back
and know the joy of luck and limit--
as a near wall sends me back with speed.