Harriet

Missoula, Missoula

By Linh Dinh — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:11:38 -0600

I hope you'll enjoy Missoula--it's an interesting place to live for a lot of reasons, particularly as the locus for various collisions and overlaps-- like the "redstate" libertarian / progressive-environmentalist overlap, and the liberal conservationist / hunter-fisher overlap, and the semi-wilderness animal habitat / suburban-urban development overlap, and so forth and so on. Makes the East Coast seem positively banal. [Youna Kwak in a 1/15/08 email] I think Missoula is a great little town -- it's also where I got the largest audience of my life, debating Baudrillard in front of 600 people. [Ron Silliman in a 3/5/08 email] Do poetry readings represent the dying or the mourning? Do they affirm the power of community? Or do they affirm the total indifference the world feels towards community, i.e. affirming the futility of gathering? [Brandon Shimoda in a 5/14/08 email]

I just spent four months at the University of Montana as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet, teaching two classes. Before coming to Missoula, population 60,000, I knew next to nothing about the town. The temperature was -4F when I arrived, but it was a dry cold and not really that bad. Except for a compact, walkable downtown, the town seemed spread out, a suburban sprawl surrounded by snowy mountains, smooth and moderately sloped, not rugged and vertical like those on Montana postcards. Arriving from flat eastern Pennsylvania, I thought they were dramatic enough. Say Montana and many people will think of General Custer, Evel Knievel and the Unabomber, but David Lynch was also suckled, awed and (de)formed by it. Born in Missoula, Lynch remembers growing up in the Northwest Inland Empire: ]]> My father was a scientist for the Forest Service. He would drive me through the woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads, through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very tall and shafts of sunlight come down and in the mountain streams the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods. There were odd, mysterious things. That's the kind of world I grew up in […] As a teenager, I was really trying to have fun 24 hours a day. I didn't start thinking until I was 20 or 21. I was doing regular goofball stuff […] There was nothing much going on upstairs until the age of nineteen […] My mother refused to give me colouring books as a child. She probably saved me, 'cause when you think about it, what a colouring book does is completely kill creativity. There are bars all over downtown Missoula, several to a block. You can start your evening at Charlie B’s, with its impressive gallery of heads, mostly of white men. Mounted in black and white by Lee Nye, they appear in a hopped up glow, wall-eyed, beer-battered and in a Stetson, fedora or baseball cap, often laughing, relieved and a little proud, perhaps, to have made it into middle age without leaving a chunk of themselves a dozen time zones away, Pusan, Khe Sanh, Kandahar or Fallujah, or just around the corner. After two Trout Slayers, you can stroll over to the Old Post for a crappy order of fish and chips, or the Oxford, where a bowl of canned chili is advertised as “best in the universe,” where chicken gizzards has been replaced by free wi-fi, and the blackjack table is always busy each evening. Round 'bout midnight and you feel like dancing? Then stagger to the Union Bar, a throw-down joint where good ol' boys, jocks and alternative types can all get trashed, crank the slot machines, play pools and fall down together. ("Those who were strange born,/Those who'll die tomorrow,/Dances here today"--Stanley Kunnitz, and I quote from memory, hopefully without messing up his linebreaks.) Quite by chance, I ran into an older, soft-spoken gentleman who introduced himself as Eric. It turned out he was Eric Newhouse, Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of Alcohol: Cradle to Grave. I haven’t read it but here’s a Newhouse take on boozing in Montana:

Hot off the dance floor, a young man in a white cowboy hat stands beside a woman perched on a barstool. She glances around, then begins unbuttoning his denim shirt and nuzzling his chest. Embarrassed, he flushes and backs away. Beside them, a middle-age man is asleep, the brim of his black cowboy hat just resting on the bar. Beside his head is his beer bottle. "We’re going to let him sleep until we close," says the barmaid, Laurene Lawson. "Then we’ll escort him out of here, make sure he’s OK and get him a cab if he needs one." With that, the band winds it up for the evening and the lights come on. "There’s a point where you have to exercise self-control," says Page Lutes of Bozeman, looking down at the sleeper. "When you can’t maintain control, you’ve lost it. And it takes a lot of control sometimes to maintain it." Off the dance floor comes a younger couple. They begin to arouse the sleeper. Finally, they get him to his feet and begin to lead him out of the bar. About halfway to the door, however, he lurches into a young woman and pinches her butt. Without hesitation, she whirls him around, crouches down, and bites the label off the rear pocket of his jeans. Laughing, she stands with the label between her teeth.

“We don’t have enough places to just loiter, squares and parks where people can just hang out without spending any money. People derive pleasure from just watching each other. It’s a natural need! In this culture, a bar is about the only place where you can socialize. That’s one reason why alcoholism is so rampant,” I ranted to Newhouse. He agreed but pointed out that in Montana, this problem is exacerbated by war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Of all the states, Montana has the highest ratio of active-duty recruits and ranks 2nd for military veterans (14.3% of the population). Once among the wealthiest, it’s now one of the poorest, with 70% of its children on Food Aid. Jared Diamond’s book about societal collapse begins with a chapter on Montana. A week ago, after the last meeting of my graduate poetry-writing workshop, I went with half of the students to the Double Front, known for its fried chicken and deep-fried battered balls of mac and cheese, served with a thin blue cheese dipping sauce. Drinking pitchers of Belgian beer, we shot the shit and heard Iowan Chris Alexander recount his experiences working for a 42-year-old quadriplegic, a man who had had a stroke at 19. With his mother's or Chris' help, he reconnected with life and inspired himself by watching porn videos. "You'd place his hand there, insert the film, push play, then wipe him up after about half an hour." What a sweet mother! Once, she rented a gay film by mistake. Chris' starting wage was $9/hr, raised to $15 finally. Chris also told us about an uncle (by marriage) who served four tours in Vietnam, returning with a steel palate, a knife wound on the side--"That hurted the most... I killed the bastard."--shrapnel-riddled thighs, one less nut and one more asshole.

"What do you do with an extra asshole?" New Mexican Lisa Schumaier asked. "Did you see this extra asshole, Chris?" I inquired professorially. "Yes, when I was a child, he showed it to me," Chris said. "You already have enough stories for a lifetime," I opined. "The trick is to get them all down." Chris is 24-years-old. "Sometimes I wish I could go to prison so I would have all the time to write."

A few days later, at Flippers, a bar in two double-wide trailers, welded together, I counseled Chris as we divided a pitcher of local amber, “After leaving school, you must learn how to hoard your time, you must force yourself to stay home while others are out drinking. That’s sacrifice! Otherwise, when will you find time to write?” I drained mine, poured myself a fresh mug, “But you can't stay inside all the time, or you won't have anything to write about. You must pace your drinking into old age...” My graduate students told me the biggest time waster among undergraduates, those they themselves were teaching, was not bar-hopping but hours being fixated by a screen, engaged with FaceBook, internet porn or some video game. “They don’t even get trashed!” At the Break Espresso, a coffee house popular among the Y (me) generation, most patrons sit alone, intent on a laptop, reading and typing conversations instead of hearing them. Some of these me pods were also earbudded to a billion songs, with a gazillion more coming. It makes you want to exhume Richard Hugo, a master at rationing his drinking and writing routines. I also admire how Hugo claimed his turf, made himself an authority and integral part, a folk icon almost, of his inland empire. One of my students, Matthew Kaler, was inspired to become a poet after reading these lines on Hugo’s grave: “BELIEVE YOU AND I SING TINY / AND WISE AND COULD IF WE HAD TO / EAT STONE AND GO ON,” from the poem "Glen Uig". Kaler was raking leaves at the Missoula cemetery as punishment for (underaged) drinking and driving. The founder of the University of Montana’s writing progam, Hugo wrote that “a creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.” And one of the first, I suspect, for a sensitive, poetically-inclined Montana kid, which makes Missoula a natural magnet for him and many other dreamers, misfits and malcontents. (I should add that the rest of Montana can't be too bad if it had the wisdom to elect the astute and straight-talking Brian Schweitzer as governor.) Take 24-year-old Travis Sehorn. Born in Wyoming, he’s spent the last 13 years in Missoula. A lead singer for various rock and folk bands, Sehorn’s also the author of these unpublished poems:

- I'd be a good father - digging a hole to take care of my children antique water buffalo knapsack contents: 2 mason jars of filthy milk: 3 dirty ginger snaps: 5, one foot long strips of dog: 7 holes, deeper than before for their children: 1002 condoms to save them: 1 aspirin for nothing: 3 pairs of shit: no pairs after that kurt or craig a hole is hole for a 60:40 homosexual reverend -- church of the lost dog debuting the new play "the continuing saga of colleen and murphy: episode 12, lost at sea" its a good distraction from your boredom with 43 year old lady thighs --a farmer, mongoose killer, pill inspector, pill tester-- those help but don't define. the starship enterprise tattooed on the prick of the farmer- the power-screw gun method of mongoose death- signing up for drug testing for the drugs instead of the money- i suppose a tailpipe a tea-cup a bugle are holes just as much as a vagina or a mangina

A cultural oasis with an attitude, Missoula is certainly happening. Having a vital local scene is very important for a younger poet. With this audience, he can test his unpublished work and receive the encouragement to go on. A poet shoud be a provincial and a cosmopolitan. If he hasn't traveled, he has no basis for comparisons, but if he's not intimate with any place, he's just a tourist passing through. Poetry readings in Missoula are well and enthusiastically attended, with most organized by Brandon Shimoda, a Brooklyn transplant who also edits Cutbank and co-hosts a weekly poetry radio show. A month ago, I emailed Shimoda four questions: 1) You are a central figure in a very vital poetry community in Missoula. Please give us an overview of your organizational activities. How long have you been doing these? 2) The internet allows poets to be more global, to make friends across the globe. Some may think they do not need to pay attention to what happens locally. How important is it to have a local poetry scene? Why do we need it at all? 3) Before you came to Missoula, you lived in Brooklyn. What are the differences between these two poetry communities? What are the disadvantages, advantages of living in a smaller city or provincial town? 5) Seeing how much you give to the community, a cynic will assume that there must be some hidden benefits. Are there? Brandon Shimoda's response:

[...] In sitting down to answer your questions, I was delving into a body of thinking that seemed completely embryonic, to my mind anyway --- pure flesh, no bones, not quite limbs yet. So, I thought through the questions, and ultimately felt like any answer I could provide would be mush, and that ultimately, I have no idea why I do what I do, except for some basic aneurysm that keeps widening. Here, however, are my thoughts (more questions, really), and I would love to hear your thoughts in return. I hope this reaches you well. Take care, Brandon *** I wonder, Linh, is it better to be the soil or the worm? Is it better to be the worm or the castings? Is it better to be the pile or the fork? Is it better to be the ground or the sun? It is better to be the seed or the shit? I wonder too, as I have been dwelling for the last two months on your questions related to poetry and the communities that form around poets, if not exactly their poems, their “poetry,” and I have been wondering what the value of these communities are, what value is, in general, and what we do once we’ve determined—perhaps arbitrarily, perhaps with an abacus of nostrils strung on a rack of stretched tendons—what the value of these communities are, i.e where do we go from these calculations? This dwelling has crippled me, which seems a sorry state during this election year, in which we’ve spent the last interminable-seeming nine months or so, watching balloon animals dance over gusts of dry air. Yes, isn’t community the constructive opposite of the race to lay waste to right(s) and reason? Isn’t community finger revolution on an organic micro-scale, functioning locally so as to evade the effects of a comprehensively unsustainable and debilitating global economy? Are communities aiming to be ataractic counter-options in their evasions? Or, are they the nightmarish grid itself, ultra-subject to the most rampant forms of perilous governance? Are communities vulnerable or impermeable? Are they open or closed systems? Are they rejections or perfections of? Are they the first suckers of an unwieldy jungle of political misdeed? Or are they the rhizomatous roots pressing ever deeper into the earth, never mind the rupture, let us multiply, subterraneously? Or, rather, who cares? What does this have to do with poems? What does anything have to do with poems? Are poems improved by their having been conceived and considered through a community’s generosity and commitment? Or, is community a system of mirrors through which the poem is but a posing artifact, a relic mistaken for pudding? Or, does the value of a poem reside in the thinking it incites? Or, are poems themselves incited thinking? Or, maybe, what do poems have to do with anything if they are incapable of considering the polis, society, our own neighbors? Like, what are your neighbors’ names? [And by this I am asking you: what are the names of your ten closest neighbors, in order of proximity to you?] Or, rather, what are my neighbors’ names? There is the guy who helped us cut a fallen box elder off our curb; we reimbursed him with a 30-pack of Natural Ice; what is his name? Kurt? Trevor? Daniel? Booker? There is the older man whose wife just died; he grows grapes. What is this older man’s name? Joseph? Alfredo? Hans? What was his wife’s name? Gertrude? Eloise? Patricia? Is this my community, or do I seek community among individuals who bend themselves with equal weight to the flowering of blood in an otherwise cohesive, illuminated face? When I lived in Brooklyn—and this goes back to one of the questions you originally posed, which was, to quote, “Before you came to Missoula, you lived in Brooklyn. What are the differences between these two poetry communities? What are the disadvantages, advantages of living in a smaller city or provincial town?”—I was obsessed with the dead pigeons scattered around my neighborhood in Williamsburg, in the streets surrounding the Tribeca Oven bakery, bloated as they were with risen dough. Each night, the bakers would dump the unused dough into the dumpster on the street, to which the pigeons would flock. In the morning, and as the day warmed, the pigeons, wandering sluggishly, would silently explode, the dough having risen in their digestive systems, shattering their hearts. Also, I love the movie Japón, directed by the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. There is a scene in which a man among a group of construction workers—I think they are construction workers; I don’t quite remember—is singing. I can’t paraphrase the scene in any useful way, except to say that it is vertiginous and uncomfortable yet powerful and inexorable—might this be the ideal community or community effect? A sense of disequilibrium rising to counter a pervading equilibrium that allows us to maintain ourselves as so even-keeled—what a wonderful trait—and compliant? Or horrific because verging away from any secure contact we might have with an already hazardous plane of existence? And, what does the community have to do with these sensations? Do we require a community in order to feel the elasticity of sensation, to be brought into a deeper understanding of our own discomfort, fallibility, idiosyncracy, mortal splendor? Do other people—as objects, images, things—reflect our own grievous and/or desirous shapes and sensibilities? And, anyway, how do poetry readings fit into this crush? Do poetry readings represent the dying or the mourning? Do they affirm the power of community? Or do they affirm the total indifference the world feels towards community, i.e. affirming the futility of gathering? Though, what is “the world”? Is there anything actually appreciable about “the world,” enough for us to consider it in anything but an abstract, who-gives-a-fuck sort of way? As with so much current lamentation over the decay of our linguistic faculties, as a world, as a nation, as people—do poetry readings—do community gatherings—require dissolution and decay, require crisis, in order to function meaningfully at all? Aren’t we compatriots—don’t we love each other and make unreasonable sacrifices for each other—because we stand, together, against something, some thing? Or is it because we like what we see and we want to get naked? Or, don’t communities strengthen the faculties of individuals against an astoundingly predisposition for fascism and fascist behavior and banding? If there were no war, would anyone have anything to talk about with total strangers? Would we be able to approach each other blindly in the street and whip up a rhetorical froth so thick the pigeons mistake us for dumpsters and start pecking our buttons? Or is it not the war that calls community into action, but a propensity to rally a tribunal on every corner, in every fragrant bush, despite the context of the day? Rather, isn’t there something comforting about knowing that right now, somewhere, in some art gallery, there is a poetry reading in progress—that poems are being read, that audiences are listening intently? Or, is the audience distracted from any intent, both by a sense of perceptible, if temporary, community, and the nagging desire to jump through the front window, shattering the glass into a million ears of perfect noise, and run into the cauldron of the setting sun—at least then one’s fate is known. Is it preferable to have a way out—that the poetry reading builds an escape into itself? Or, like community perhaps, relies upon self-sufficiency, regardless of extenuating circumstances, i.e. we just fend for ourselves, shut the door. Though, isn’t there something wonderful about a poetry reading gone wickedly awry? Isn’t it worth it to sit through the horrid lines for the incredible ones? Or, the incredible lines for the profound misjudgments? Are there not innumerable ways that life is radically unbearable, and everything we do just a symptom of a need to stave off a fierce and fearsomely selfish circulatory system? Or, to think back to the doughy streets of Brooklyn, maybe the scattering of exploded pigeons is the ideal community—maggots hung up in the pigeon’s beaks, reminding us, as human beings, of something particular, something about the people we surround ourselves with, or about the people we surround? Isn’t it nice to be reminded? —overstuff a form past satiety, past embarrassment, until the form is new as not before. Let the new form out under the sun, and wait as the overstuffing rises. If it does not explode, at least the heart will, and by replacing the heart with a different and, perhaps, untested organ of similar contractions and texture, you will have bested death, temporarily—or maybe, as the fragment of dough still clutching the beak, is worth behaving as if there is no turning back, i.e. death has already swept past; use the silence— I think that an ideal community—if an ideal community could said to exist or potentially exist—is one that does not name itself, that exists entirely without note, without warning, without coordinates, without a plan. The lesser, the more invisible, the more invulnerable, the more powerful—the soil or the worm or the castings or the compost or the shit? Which is “better”? Or, is the point that they all feed the same sustainable process? What does a poet care about that the average citizen does not? And where are the poems, exactly, in “poetry”? And where is the poetry? And yes, what are the disadvantages/advantages of living in a smaller city or provincial town? I’m curious what your thoughts are on this, having recently ended your time here in western Montana. I don’t know, Linh—I don’t know. I do know, however, this, and this by way of a final note on my time in Brooklyn, and the advantages of living here: I love fast-food fried chicken—Kennedy, Palace, Crown, especially—KFC, PFC, CFC. While living in Brooklyn, I attended exactly zero poetry readings, though I would attend, at least once a week, a glassed-in, fast-food fried chicken outlet—yes, outlet. We don’t have these in Missoula. The culture that I missed by not attending any readings I more than made up for by walking across the park to the closest PFC. These visits sufficed. Meals just might be the highest form of willful and essential community gathering—perhaps even if a person prefers to eat alone. Maybe all the work, all the organizing, all the circular, self-serving conversation and debate, all the diagrams fit over the squirming flesh—are simply to keep the self awake enough to witness the firestorms writ in the complex rain of the unconsidered self, and that nobody, anywhere, really wants to write—why would anyone WANT to write?—really wants to lift a finger, really wants to peel the eyelid back from a decomposing corpse—the visage in the diamond saying, kindly, softly, sufficiently enough, Let the community die.

[All photos taken by me in Missoula. Photo 3: Lucas Farrell and Greg Hill, Jr. Photo 4: Matthew Kaler and Lisa Schumaier. Photo 5: Chris Alexander and Scott Jones. Below is a YouTube video of Blood Factor 5's bassist, Jason McMacken, at the 24th annual Testicle Festival in Rock Creek, just down the road from Missoula.]

Shout Out to Latino Poetry Review

By Ada Limón — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:58 -0600

“To be of the air. I'm saying this to myself like a prayer, because I don't know that we can be free—of nationality, body, belonging.” —Miguel Murphy from Blood and Breath: A Conversation There is very important new member of the poetry world. (This odd world of beasts and bones.) He is brand new and he is very handsome. He is made out of the river’s ripples and green mesquite. His name is the Latino Poetry Review. Bienvenidos LPR…y gracias. With its first issue just now arriving, I’d like to applaud the little one and say first, you rock (that’s an official poetic term) and second, what took you so long? We’ve needed you.]]> Latino Poetry Review!

At the Cotton Museum

By D.A. Powell — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:51:09 -0600

The former Cotton Exchange in Memphis has been transformed into a loving tribute to the fiber that shaped the South: King Cotton. The museum is a fine combination of multi-media presentations and preserved artifacts. One of the display cases features a compendium of products made from cotton, including hair curl activator, disposable diapers and Laffy Taffy. Another display illustrates the various grades of cotton, from the “fair” to the “middling” to the ordinary. Memphis Cotton Carnival. The celebration was a de facto “whites only” event from its inception just following the American Civil War. The film tells us that African Americans were not welcomed at the carnival as participants, except to pull the parade floats like human mules. In response to the ingrained segregation of the Memphis Cotton Carnival, Dr. R. Q. Venson and members of an all-black chapter of the American Legion organized the Cotton Makers Jubilee, starting in the 1930s. These two events—one sponsored by cotton growers and traders; the other, by cotton workers and their descendants—ran separately and unequally alongside one another until the 1980s, when they finally merged into “Carnival Memphis.” A still photo that recurs in the film, and which graces the exhibit, shows the white “king” and the black “king” shaking hands. Actually, if you look closely at their gloved palms, you realize that they aren’t actually touching one another at all. And that is perhaps just the beginning of a story that isn’t told. Even now, the “kings” of Carnival Memphis appear to be mostly white, and the participation of African Americans seems to be marginal, especially given the ratio of blacks and whites in Memphis. If you only watch the film, you are given a fairly vanilla version of history. To wit: there was a carnival in which white merchants celebrated their product, cotton. There were African Americans who felt excluded by this celebration and who therefore decided to have a celebration of their own. The two celebrations are now one happy, variegated celebration. Just enough tension for the kind of shortstory you wouldn’t let your undergraduates get away with writing, because it simplifies a plot that needs to be told in its full complexity. Similarly, the story of the blues is summarized in a Cotton Museum exhibit: down in the Mississippi Delta, African Americans produced a unique music, as reflected in the compositions of W. C. Handy. Meanwhile, in the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers were singing tunes based upon the ballads and folksongs of their homeland. The two kinds of music grew into Rock and Roll, as epitomized by Memphis legend Elvis Presley. And the pure product of America went crazy… I don’t expect the Cotton Museum to truck out every injustice, nor to tell how the labor of some of America’s citizens was stolen by others. I don’t expect the museum to right the wrongs of hundreds of years. But I also don’t believe that an exhibit which sets out to tell the story of the crop that changed Southern Culture—“that white downy fiber [that] has weaved its influence into your life and world”—should present a watered-down, Hollywood version of history. In the gift shop (and I completely understand the need for a gift shop: museums have to fund themselves through a variety of revenue streams), one can buy a small packet of cotton seeds for a buck fifty. The label on the packet says, unironically, “Start Your Own Plantation.” Surely someone with a modicum of sensitivity can review the museum’s exhibits and merchandise. * * * * Walt Whitman, who knew this country to be a mass of contradictions, a symphony of voices sometimes in harmony and sometimes in opposition, celebrated the cotton field as a complex emblem of our national identity: Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands—my body no more inevitably united, part to part, and made out of a thousand diverse contributions one identity, any more than my lands are inevitably united and made ONE IDENTITY; Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral Plains, Cities, labors, death, animals, products, war, good and evil—these me, These affording, in all their particulars, the old feuillage to me and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union of them, to afford the like to you? Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also be eligible as I am? How can I but as here chanting, invite you for yourself to collect bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States? And, cutting their way out of the field of servitude, Jean Toomer’s “Reapers” strike at the oppressive shadows: Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done, And start their silent swinging, one by one. Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade. Whether it’s woven into the blues or worksongs or spirituals or poems, crazyquilts or painted saws or novels or folktales, cotton—despite (or even because of) its problematic history—has made America all the richer for its sorrows. One pair of manacles is displayed in the Cotton Museum: this lone set of fetters doesn’t even begin to tell our national history, its darkest moments, nor those moments when we decided—either individually or collectively—that we had to be better than our shared past. ]]>

The Fine Art of Mimicry

By Ada Limón — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:07:18 -0600

In fact, Roethke talked about this a great deal. He wanted people to obsess about poems and their favorite poets. He wanted them to write long papers about poets they loved. I know that students worry about copying and sounding too much like their influences, but really, your voice is always there. It can’t help it. Little voice just can’t be stopped. Mimicking can be good all around when you’re learning how a poem works, the syntax of another writer, the rhythm of another. When I’m working on a piece now and I’m stuck, I’m constantly reading and re-reading my favorite writers. Admiring them, cursing them for their perfection, memorizing them. It’s the only form of study that you can never do without as a poet: Reading. Oh yes, and obsession, you can’t do without obsession either. So (you see where I’m going with this), it’s the same thing. Karaoke actually taught me how to sing. I learned it by completely, at first, trying to sound like someone else. Now, I sound like myself (for better or for worse, I’m totally stuck with me). But at least I sort of know what I’m doing. So I think it’s okay to be a copy cat. That’s what I’m saying. Don’t steal, don’t plagiarize, but sometimes trying to sound like someone else is the only way to get to your own voice, right? Good luck M, I’ll sing a song for you.

Some Writings in English by Foreign Poets

By Linh Dinh — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:40:29 -0600

The dolphins from your rope by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl (Iceland, born 1978) I have come from Europe, bearing the dolphins! I tell myself: “Oh say can you see, you could have saved a lot of money - these are mere cinema replicas - the grocer is korean, the streets are hassidic and the skyscrapers are huge - the poets are playing dolphin-God, while showering in splendour the muffins have arrived” except of course if the animated Bambi debate arouses pastoral passions as dr. Jafre A. Dollar helps you develop godly character and the movies are cheaper soothingly, for lo I have come, bearing you all the dolphins!

]]>

america by Dương Tường (Vietnam, born 1932) I call you Miss Diagonal, babe _______________* __I met you, Miss Diagonal ______in Broadway the only artery which runs ______________________diagonal in the whole grid-like Manhattan ________and I realize ______you’re Broadway __________________so mesmerisingly long _______________* __________I look at America ____________through ___your perversely___di___tenderness ___your vulnerably_____a____gynecology ___your frustratingly_____g____sensuality ___your waywardly________o____friendliness ___your hopelessly__________n_____dynamism ___your puzzlingly____________al______pussy _______________* _________I met you, diagonal girl __________in diagonal Broadway ______________and I realize ___________you’re America ____________8/11/1995 __________New York City

from pleasu re of readin g this work by Gherardo Bortolotti (Italy, born 1972)

2007/05/03 ........................................................................... party parties party this lesson describes when and how to use exceptions # Pubblicato da bgmole alle 6:44 PM 1 commenti

2007/04/30 ........................................................................... no one has ever observed a dog produce a non-dog for some situations, this is also the realistic

she is acting normal and is eating and drinking just fine

how effective you are in your job /// Pubblicato da bgmole alle 7:14 PM 0 commenti 2007/04/26 ........................................................................... i am a composer, a violist, and a

mass hysteria

Pubblicato da bgmole alle 7:18 PM 0 commenti 2007/04/19 ........................................................................... welcome and thank you for your interest the smiling black advertising icon has been criticized part 2.1

Pubblicato da bgmole alle 8:47 PM 0 commenti

other than defendant

i've seen more obvious lies from police officers

Pubblicato da bgmole alle 8:33 PM 0 commenti

Slipping Out the Window

By Ada Limón — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:00:58 -0600

“I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.” —from The Renewal, Theodore Roethke This morning, I was reading Roethke on the train (I admit, part of me was trying to block out the news, having been chained to its great sorrow all morning). And the sun is out today in the city; spring is fully upon us and racing full-fledged into summer warmth. The weather and the blooms reminded me of when I was studying as an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle. It is the spring quarter poetry class that I remember most (I took it only in my senior year, having exhausted all of my other electives from drama to dance). The classroom we were in overlooked the quad where all the cherry trees blossomed in some unnatural frenzy of suggestiveness. We’d read poems and then most of us would stare out the window wide-eyed and restless. I was madly in love of course, as I usually am in the spring. (Aren’t you?) Anyway, my professor, Colleen McElroy, told this story of when Roethke was teaching there (the last place he taught before his death), in that same classroom on the ground floor. ]]>

The Pure Products of France

By Daisy Fried — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:14:12 -0600

This is a sad story. We noticed the posters from the first day we were in Paris. "SOS Doudou Perdu!!!" they said in boldface block letters above a photo of a baby's lovey--a stuffed white dog with an enormous nose, cute eyes and blue ears. I took a picture of it but can't upload it; the computers at this Avenue Parmentier internet point won't take my memory card. The posters are full color printouts, with all the elegance of a lost-cat poster and all the pathos of a lost-dog poster. We notice that the SOS Doudou Perdu posters keep disappearing and being reposted. For who could resist taking one home? French people like children. Not the way Romans like them, with extravagant, voluble bursts of enthusiasm, but by putting little playgrounds all over the place, and carousels and even trampolines in random squares and parks, and by giving everyone free health care and education through university level and a bonus to families that have three children or more. So I believe that many of those who stole the posters did so not only for aesthetic reasons--though that too--but because they fully intended to buy a new Doudou for the child and needed to take along the contact telephone number. Not realizing that the child didn't want any Doudou, but the Doudou--the only Doudou. ]]> chose--we might say, "Yo, throw me the fuckin' chose!" Jim and I joke that someday we'll go out at 3 a.m. and steal all the fuckin' chose in Paris. They're left out, not taken away after cleaning. Paris would be paralyzed. Capitalism as we know it would crumble. I saw, in the gutter on another corner, a little hoodie with the word Zizu on it. (Zizu is Zinedine Zidane, the sexy French soccer star who, in his very last game, head-smashed an opponent who insulted his mom.) I realized then that anything at all could, and probably does, wind up as a fuckin' chose on the streets of Paris, and this, this was the likely end of Doudou the baby's lovey. Someday, when the baby is too old to care anymore, she will come upon her lost lovely, her Doudou--only she won't recognize it--being used as a fuckin' chose in a backstreet of Belleville. She'll feel a pang the origin of which she cannot identify. Is this the pang that will make her a poet...or revolutionary? My first post to Harriet four months ago was called "The Pure Products of America Go Crazy." Is it only fitting to end my final post by noticing that The Pure Products of France Go to the Gutter?

Arson, a Recipe

By Daisy Fried — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:48:50 -0600

Last time we were in Paris, in 2004, we were staying in the 20th Arrondisement near Place Gambetta, an upscaling neighborhood on the edge of one of the more multicultural areas of Paris. It was winter and you'd see African women in long traditional dresses and flipflops and their elder kids in flipflops and their younger kids in regular children's shoes and it wasn't clear if that was how the money stretched, or if the older kids and mom had been born/grew up in Africa and didn't like closed shoes while the younger ones were conforming to Western footwear. New Year's Eve we planned ot go out and see what was going on. No specific plans; maybe down to Etoile for the fireworks, maybe not, but definitely out. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the hideous golden sculpted flame over top of the tunnel where Princess Di died, where to this day people leave notes in memory and dead flowers that wither and fray like autumn leaves all year round. There was a fancy schmancy street market nearby. Jim picked up a duck foie gras for our New Year's Eve dinner. He also impulse-bought a bottle of Chartreuse. Chartreuse is a spicy green 140 proof liqueur. It is not what makes Gervaise die in a sodden heap of rags under the tenement stairs in Zola's L'Assommoir (that's absinthe) but it might as well be. ]]> Tristram Shandy out loud to Jim. He prepares the rest of the meal first: Potato pancakes, haricot verts, black trumpet mushrooms that will cook in the foie gras fat after it's done. I'm sipping Chartreuse and reading the part where Uncle Toby is asking Widow Wadman if she wants to see where he was wounded (in the groin). "I can show you the exact spot." Then we eat, and decide to drink more Chartreuse and read more Tristram Shandy and drink more Chartreuse and eventually it's clear we're really not getting anywhere near Etoile tonight. Then, sooner than we know, shouts begin to ring out from all over the neighborhood. "Bonne Annee! Bonne Annee!" So we go out and around the corner and there are two little girls alone, maybe 8 and 12, on one of those mini-scooters piping "Bonne Annee," while across Gambetta and past the Mairie, siren rising and lazily falling, all of the 20th Arrondisement's sapeurs-pompiers (firefighters), and their wives and husbands, and their children, atop a single firetruck, drunker than us! man, woman and child. The truck looks like an enormous centipede. Now, the firefighters of Rome are beautiful, there should be a calendar. The firefighters of Paris are not. But it must be said, they can party. The moral of this story is, if you are a pyromaniac arsonist, the place to be on New Year's Eve is the 20th Arrondisement of Paris. Your fire will not be put out. Or, as EE Cummings said in "La Guerre": Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it

Opening Day

By Daisy Fried — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:45:42 -0600

A few hours before we left for Paris (we are here for a month), William Corbett's new book from Hanging Loose Press, Opening Day, came in the mail, so I stuck it in my carry-on bag. Our first full day here, we do something we like to do soon after we get off the plane and never again during a trip--walk out the Champs-Elysees from Concorde, sit in an overpriced cafe, and watch other tourists walk up and down in their brand-new Paris-bought outfits. Maisie napped in her stroller. I read Bill Corbett alternating with taking notes on fashions. All following poetry quotes are from Opening Day. Fortune Cookie Half moon over Fenway Park over Vermont's sawtooth trees one ear on the ballgame open book on lap moths lovetap the screen the houses are empty wine calms the jets, mud settles; mind unclenches unknots all who were here. Living is hard: art easier! Throw strikes! Walks always come back to haunt you.]]> The body is the soul too. I want to be in shape Like the women who do For others but look after Their trim selves. from "Fellow Passenger" *Dress with drawstring hem and bits of painted gravel hanging off the bodice. *All red shoes have been bought this week. ...no thought of where to go nor how I might get there. from "The Party" *The wife wears black and white diagonal stripes on a wraparound shirt; white linen pants; herringbone-pattern shoes with medium-low heels and a purple toe-bow. The husband is resolutely in clothes he brought with him--none of this foolishness--shorts, sandals, wide-brim canvas hat that reminds me of an NPR totebag to ?shield? him against the ?punishing? Paris May sun.... I will show you fear in a closed dry cleaners! from "CUE" ...until he gets close--I overhear him say "I feel sorry for Hillary at this point"--and I see he's wearing a brand-new Universite de Paris sweatshirt. And he seems to have taken up smoking again--Gauloise, as in his semester abroad 35 years ago--still as fit today! "Well," she says, adjusting her diagonal stripes: "You can always vote McCain. But if Hillary doesn't win the primary I'm sitting this one out." This rich man's city set for lunch and dinner seared foie gras, fruits de mer: It is only meaningful to eat and having eaten a nameless discontent old anxieties and new anguishes do not fit. Like a rapist fighting through a thicket police on your tail you wake to March snow. Or a dancer who no longer likes his steps; walks against the icy river wind half-turned to back in. Chairs up in restaurants naked floors swabbed by aliens. from "Isle of Manhattan" *The French weekly magawine Marianne's cover story this week is a pictur of Nicolas Sarkozy with the words "Putain; 4 ans." Which I translate as "Four Whore Years:" Sarkozy's approval ratint is lower than Bush's. *I count strings of under-shirt money pouches with adjustable knobs sticking out of necklines of new-bougth clothes: seven. *Interesting jewelry may mean ( warning: sexist comment ahead!) the wearer is looking for a boyfriend: "Interesting necklace..." he says: "I bought it in the market in Istanbul," she says, meaning we can travel together. ...American corruption is milk and crackers, is stainless pipsqueaks--a self-satirizing mouthful about which everything that can be said has been said and is being repeated, commented on, analyzed, doctored, spun, ground and sifted, sorted, graded, wrapped, packaged, signe, sealed, delivered... from "Backandforth" One...two...three...four...five... seven crows up to their shoulders in the meadow are beautiful. 13 pages later in "Backandforth" *The guys sitting next to us are from Philadelphia too. We don't talk to them, we just can't help hearing them. "They kept passing me along, nobody wanted to fire me, until Joe had to fire me and even he didn't want to, he just reduced me to 20 hours a wek which meant there went my benefits...so here I am." The guys stop to look at a passing woman. Her teeshirt says "Fuck Hello Kitty." On West Broadway for Tom Raworth Ahh, the girls Of spring wherever they Were all winter they've Returned wearing cardigan Sweaters or bare shoulders Tattooed firm flesh gleaming. They look good to me Plums from the icebox But one day Celtic Chinese Flames will dry like prunes. Life is like that Licking honey, the Hungarians Say, from a thorn.

Questions for Fady Joudah

By Daisy Fried — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:20:59 -0600

Fady Joudah 1. Your first book of poems, The Earth in the Attic, just came out from Yale University Press, the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, selected by Louise Gluck. How does that feel? It feels great, a life well dreamt or a dream well lived. I hope the book is received well, I naturally think its themes of exile and witness to refugees and displaced people in the world are an unusual event in poetry. I hope I was up to the task aesthetically (though I feel good about that with Gluck backing me up, after all she is not received as a socially engaged poet; although I beg to differ). Exiles (as a step up, descendants of the refugee) and, more urgently, the displaced and refugees are world historical individuals, in Hegel’s phrase…a disclaimer: I am not a Hegel specialist: to my mind they define the horrors of the nation-state, which is still a new concept in the world: 40 million displaced people (not counting the homeless and “disenfranchised” citizens of “stable” states) is a number that can not be ignored. These are people who define the other face of the mirror, the dark side that does not reflect us, or so we think. 2. Your son Ziyad was born on March 27th, 2008. What are you thinking about?]]> The Butterfly's Burden, published last year, got reviewed in the British newspapers The Guardian, The Independent, the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly, and in the on-line journal Jacket, out of Australia. Few American journals and newspapers have reviewed it. Comments? I am sure some of this is due to logistics, American enterprise-related; and some of it is due to a lack of awareness of Darwish’s artistic importance to the world of letters. Neruda was only translated and published in English in the 1960’s, only ten years or less before he died, for example. But bringing up Neruda begs certain problematic parallels in the world of poetry, a world that eschews politics but is, nonetheless, governed by it. What is more interesting for me is that whenever Darwish’s work is “discussed” it is not really his work that is discussed, but his circumstance and history (with a capital H), which does a lot of disservice to his art. Fiona Sampson’s Review in The Guardian goes beyond that, I think. It is a delightful review, albeit brief. I also was told recently that a couple of important literary magazine in the US will review The Butterfly's Burden, so…and I was short-listed for PEN’s Poetry in Translation award for 2007. 4. I heard the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott say, when asked about great American poets, something to the effect that an imperial power can't produce great art. Any response to that, and can an oppressed country or people produce great[er] poetry? And perhaps a related question, do you, as the son of Palestinian refugees, feel a responsibility to write political poetry? Do people expect you to be a Palestinian and political poet rather than just a poet who is Palestinian and political? Do you like that or mind that? Could you say something about the role of poetry in Palestinian culture/society as opposed to its role in the U.S.? In 10 words or less? (Kidding!) (You can have 20…) In his Mural (2000), his book-long poem, Darwish says: “There’s no nation smaller than its poem.” And “The earth is a festival of losers, and we’re among them.” Something here echoes what Walcott said, perhaps: there is only poetry of defeat, no poetry (at least not one that’s worth it) of victory, at least in the contemporary world, beyond the archaic anthropologic heroism of Greeks and Trojans, tribes and Kings. I don’t know what “political” poetry is, unless it is “bad” poetry, propagandist or apologist for injustice. Other than that, it is not “political,” rather it is dignified, humanizing. I don’t feel a “responsibility” to write political poems, I feel a compulsion to address that line where the universal is the personal and the personal, the universal. Being Palestinian almost becomes another’s question of me, and certainly not mine of myself. That question is in many ways one of power, of rewriting “the other.” Thus, what is called “political” poetry, for me, is to humanize the other without stripping them from the right to speak their narrative, or imposing on them my narcissistic projections as righteous poet. 5. You're an ER doctor and have done two overseas stints with Doctors Without Borders. Here are some lines from a section of your poem called "Pulse," from The Earth in the Attic, in which a baby dies in its mother's arms. The "we" here are the mother and the speaker: We walked back toward each other, we met, we Read verses from the Quran, Our palms open, Elbows upright like surgeons Which draws a connection between religion (and the poetry of religion) and the surgeon, who works to heal, but here, in this poem, fails to heal. What about poetry's abilities and failures in the area of healing? I think healing in poetry goes back to what I said above, perhaps, it lies in bearing witness, no more or less, in giving or making voice, without dehumanization: in calling a victim or a sufferer by their proper name without ifs, ands, or buts of political jargon. Ultimately poetry, like humanitarian medicine “makes nothing happen” outside the realm of hope (if one recalls how humanitarian medicine fails to treat the “root” of suffering, for example, although it seems a bit wicked to abstract human life in that manner, doesn’t it?)…In other words, one should never stop trying the impossible; and if poetry’s ability to make things happen were probable, then I’d be very weary of it. I think the discussion over the function of poetry is, to me, half-absurd. Poetry (like Medicine) is often linked to elite and power structures; it is these structures that often “write” us in poetry, and often participate in determining the poet’s “longevity” even if we’d like to think otherwise sometimes. And exceptions do exist, of course. Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic is a fascinating book about the relationship between science and power, humanism and institution; as is Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Yet poetry, unlike the novel, seems to be more independent of “victory.” As for your comment about the religious, take Gluck’s Triumph of Achilles, for example. It has more Biblical references than any other of her books. “Religion” does not pop up when one talks about her work. Or if it does, as it might with Franz Wright’s work, then it is “mystical.” I don’t think that this is an example of “the poetry of religion” as you put it. 6. Anglo-American poetic tradition, especially perhaps modern post-Williams, post-Pound tradition, tends to value not only concreteness and the temporal, but often anecdotal circumstance. My sense with Darwish is that, in his poems, a lover may not be a specific lover but something embodying lover-ness; a gazelle may not shit and eat so much as represent grace, or prey; a tree is there not so much to be itself, in all its type and genus and species, but to impart a sense of general treeness. You seem in your own poems to have a nifty way of incorporating both traditions into your poems, the lyricized and symbolic landscape, lets say, with the temporal circumstance. Can you give advice to the Anglo-America-centric reader (such as myself) on how to appreciate Darwish? I don’t think Darwish’s oeuvre is well known in English. I think of Darwish as a master of language, able to transfer between the gnomic, the absurd, the mythical, and the quotidian in a manner not different from Ashbery’s mixed diction or Palmer’s lyric. There is certain accessibility in Darwish’s poetry but ultimately it is a visceral accessibility. Trees in Darwish’s poetry have names and features and characteristics. When I read his pomegranates I immediately make sense of them (as those my father peels for us). When he speaks of olive trees…I think it is part of his magic, however, that all these specifics are written in a language beyond the specific, that is they encompass the specific yet they are not harnessed by the circumstantial. Others will draw parallels to Neruda’s work, or Walcott’s or Ritsos’s. Darwish writes about his poetry in his poems: “the mysterious incident” “that inexplicable longing that makes a thing into a specter, and / makes a specter into a thing. Yet it also might explain / our need to share public beauty . . .” I think it is unfair to think of Anglo-American poetics as limited to the concrete or quotidian. Examples of such poetry abound. In The Butterfly’s Burden the reader can see how Darwish’s language moves from the lyric of love poems as a private exile in “The Stranger’s Bed” (what an apt title) to the quotidian in “A State of Siege,” and then to a mixture of both dictions in “Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done.” All in the span of 5 years. This is what great art is capable of doing. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian physician living in Houston, Texas, and is an active member of Doctors Without Borders. He is the author of The Earth in the Attic, just published, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and is as translator of poems by Mahmoud Darwish the volume, The Butterfly's Burden. Mahmoud Darwish, born 1941 in Al-Birwah, British Mandate of Palestine, is a contemporary Palestinian poet and writer of prose. He has published over thirty volumes of poetry, eight books of prose and has served as the editor of several publications, including: Al-Jadid, Al-Fajr, Shu'un Filistiniyya and Al-Karmel. He is recognized internationally for his poetry, which focuses on his strong affection for his lost homeland. His work has won numerous awards, and has been published in at least twenty-two languages. The majority of his work has not been translated into English. He is known for his active work within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Once a member of PLO Executive Committee, he resigned from the Committee and broke with the PLO in 1993 to protest the continuation of the Oslo Accords.

I've never had a sad cup of coffee

By Nick Twemlow — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:16:16 -0600

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died Monday night at the age of 82. Obituaries can be found all over the place, so instead of adding another, here's a few interesting links that connect Rauschenberg to poetry. If you have more, please post them in the comments section. ]]> "I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's Howl, about 'the sad cup of coffee.' I've had cold coffee and hot coffee, good coffee and lousy coffee, but I've never had a sad cup of coffee." Full audio of John Cage reading his piece "On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work." Time magazine article from 1968, which describes a poetry reading in Rauschenberg's Manhattan studio. Poet Vincent Katz on Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing. Poet Rick Barot's essay "Rauschenberg's Bed," from the Yale Review. Download file

Shout Out to Literacy Through Poetry

By Ada Limón — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:40:44 -0600

I also wanted to add, that there are a lot of teaching artists programs, but one of the wonderful things that CWP offers is that they teach you to teach. They don’t just plop you in a classroom and say, “Well, you’re a poet, talk about poetry.” They gave us the tools on how to get a room of rambunctious eight year olds all sitting at their desks and quiet, before we began a lesson. (Okay, yes, I still use these tools in the office.) Then they gave us the tools on how to organize our lessons and really teach a class that would stick with them forever. Now, the poetry these kids would come up with. I could tear up just thinking about it. It was truly inspirational, we used anaphora, we wrote poems together as a group, we performed them with our little limbs and strong voices and in the end we made a mural. And they are still going strong. So, hats off. Happy big kid birthday. Double digits to The Community Word Project. Wow. I think that calls for a poem. Here’s one: I believe the sky cries because of what it sees in us. I believe complexities come to an end. I believe change is necessary to exist. I believe struggles don’t last forever. It’s never too late to reveal yourself to the world. I believe I can. Excerpted from 9th Grade Bronx High School of Writing & Communication & 7th Grade PS/MS 279 Community~Poems, Bronx, NY, 2007 CWP was founded to: empower students to develop reading, writing, public speaking, and community-building skills through collaborative arts residencies offer Teaching Artists' training with the only comprehensive 25-week Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program (TATIP) of its kind in the country provide professional development workshops for public school teachers, after-school leaders, and youth workers to help them to integrate creativity and community-building exercises into classroom and after-school curricula and programs. The dedication and ability of CWP teaching artists helps transform the lives of the students we work with. To ensure that our teaching artists are well-trained and capable, all of our artists participate in CWP’s 25-week Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program (TATIP), which includes 30 seminar hours and a 20-week internship. TATIP prepares new and beginning teaching artists in all fields—writing, visual arts, theater, music, and dance—to play an active role in communities that are in dire need of positive creative energy. We believe strongly that positive change happens best when people come together. Community~Word Project is the only arts-in-education organization in New York City that maintains a dual focus on both individual and collaborative creative writing and art-making. CWP has served more than 8,000 public school students and more than 3,000 public school teachers, future teachers, and teaching artists through our collaborative arts residencies and professional development training. The Community~Word Project In Collaboration With louderARTS Project present: My Voice is Music Wide as the Sun May 19th , 2008 7:30-9:30pm Bar 13 35 East 13th Street @ University Place, 2nd Floor $6 ($5 for students) 2 for 1 drinks all night A 10th Anniversary Benefit Reading & Mural Showing Featuring: Aracelis Girmay Ellen Hagan Matthea Harvey Lynne Procope Jason Schneiderman Patricia Smith Renee Watson & Fish as MC Come join us as we celebrate our 10th Anniversary of training and bringing artists into NYC public schools for year long multi-disciplinary residencies. All proceeds will benefit The Community~Word Project

Haloed

By Linh Dinh — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:14:23 -0600

Of the three poems below, guess which one was composed by a student:

Tears When the male prostitute started to cry, I knew right away something unusual was happening. Something I could not have foretold that morning, when I passed my toothbrush under water, before applying the paste, or zippered up my bluejeans or took the first crisp bite out of a hot toasted bagel, spread with cream cheese. I had been sucking him off, as usual, and his cock was wonderful, very hard. He was barely moving, as I had asked, kneeling and I, too, on my knees, bent. First I heard the muffled catch, loud gurrump in the throat I took for coming. A loud, clucked swallow—I stopped. No, he said, keep going—then gulped, slung low in the windpipe. My palms touched floor before I felt the cold droplet and looked up and he was crying. He cried, and cried and would not tell me. What, I asked him, what? He had said, before, his name was Todd. What, Todd, what?—I kept asking, but he only cried. I told him no matter what the dreadful thing was, nothing could be that bad and not to worry. Then looked around for my purse, which had Mace in it—I’ve read about these guys, who one day just snap, like a fist punched through the universe, and suddenly the world unstarred and awry and who knows whose neck they’ll wring next. Quietly, still crying. Gurgling din. Coursed polluted streams across the torso. Drone ribbon of the ages, what, Todd, what?—I stopped asking. And a cool shade of dullness set in, identical to the dullness before, the clean grey walls, bristled nonsmell of carpet, the dullness of even-tuft, sheerness of sheets, identical as before but for the low, persistent white caw of his tears.

]]> Poorly Matched Poorly matched the world and she or so her best self would say (knowing her well and making rare appearances.) But kingside she sits to post her fee to lumber locks and fucks the jocks. And the malodorous cell kept her solid for a while. The day came when she planted her feet elsewhere. With the suggestion of limitation–she drunk it all down and pushed and pushed her way to the source of the dinner bell–in her seat she asked: Who are you and what is this we are eating? What gown has draped this crapshoot? But it was winter and then summer before she got an answer. Now it was too late for her hanky to drop onto the centennial and nobody took her seriously. The drummer drums a march to the wicked world’s beating and we stop the poem from the real dream that stood underneath her–what she drank with what she ate. Awfulness only lasts a while, light to green, everything melts to the deep sea. After dinner she thanked her host–lank and benevolent for the kind creepiness and social visiting. Tomorrow the directory says to take up more rooms, more loves, no matter how unorganic–for Saturn’s last fires have kept her from the infirmary and her bad seed has turned good. Saluting now the uncool doves of St. Francis–of her childhood of the sanctimony of another family. She holds all meetings in secrecy–this for the greatness of chronoscopal times. Decadent and unyielding, never impairing the strength of a victim’s cry, she smirched the walls of her house with patterns–gross animal outlines, tulips, or the quick stumped fox who smiled and bleakly froze to blind her sky. Sea by Dusk Comes to gather you from clocks and says be moon, be progress. Gathers the bitter fact of chance and says change in every way. Depending on the harvest, a sadness glassed in autumn, depending on the sea. Shatters the lullaby, lush and drugged, that would settle in the downcast reaches. You who bear the light in you bear the deep compass, unending corrosion, an irreparable white meadow. Gather what voyage you can, a sound far into water, susurrous in the array of salt and drifting sunlight, what is left for us to live. Below water or close above, rhythms emptied in the flutter of Pacific, without limit, a human sound breaking hard against this air, endure, says become what you can in the summer fluency of waves. Sleep, saline, gathers the currents of blue driftwood, says a hymnal loose with eiderdown and light— and comes to prize you in the hour of your late undertaking, your new and precise fear. Listen, lean, that you might feel, in the warm blurring of waves, the opening and closing of flowers, a circadian call that pulls all desolation toward clearing, be ready, be shirred, task of light, a cadence of star and constancy, change, dropping far in pressured water, sails of shadow change in every way. As in the halls of night the swallows gather up whole acres of past error, vision into vision, printed in the last coral light spilled out across the tides, your arms, gathered and withstood in such arcades of stars and sleeping fish, within, without, pulling near—do I know you—issued in calligraphies of brine on darkness, turn, return. We are drifting out of phase, lost, calendar-sprung, and feel the wings slanting through air above these fleeting museums of the sea, held within a single note that moves in pain, pattern, scarcity and abundance, abide, turn and return, some small, far happiness— and the nocturne grows within each drowsy marine creature, rope, tack, slowing muscle of the heart, depending on the tides, depending on the air, a perfect mammal stillness beneath all flights of caution, the net cast far into space, who, clock, stopclock, falling lace, beautiful and slow across the warming skin, in the slipping borders, your body, shall be safe, unscheduled beyond the seatorn cemetery, gracious fields, the gardens, as in a true response to daylight, here, unearthed in cooling water, full of suffering, mirrors, moving countries of fish and floating grass, your hopes, receding terror, recognize you, it says, no loneliness, no more loneliness, open, it says, your arms. Before I give you the answer, let’s eavesdrop on a Ted Berrigan lecture, "Incredible Masterpieces":

It seems to me that anybody that writes a few hundred poems ought to be able to write a very good one. Probably should be able to write twenty very good ones. Because the first, if you start writing, the first couple of years you write quite a number of pretty good poems; it's just after that it gets a little hard. And then one wants to see what you do in the next three or four years, and if you're still around after that six or seven years, you're probably going to be around. You're probably going to be a poet. And everybody is rooting for you to do that, but if you don't, it's all right. What the hell. We get ours, you get yours. I mean, it's not quite that brutal, but in a way, it has to be. It's a full-time thing, and particularly the business of becoming a poet.

That’s an interesting phrase, “the business of becoming a poet.” I’ve encountered a surprising number of excellent poems written by students or occasional poets. What they lack in experience and polish, they more than make up for with a giddy excitement that comes from discovering a method, feeling or insight for the first time. Animated by an emotional urgency, their poems are not merely willed into being, an inevitable practice among those committed to the exasperating business of poetry. We know what Michaux means when he declares, "To will a poem into being is to kill it,” but that statement is also misleading and a little harmful, especially to younger poets, since many worthwhile poems would go unwritten had inspiration been an absolute prerequisite. If even amateurs can pen a few decent poems, why are there so many lame ones? Because, frankly, too many poems are willed into being by poets who are emotionally numb or beaten down by the ugly business of living. One has to be oddly fierce and a little naive to write inspired poetry into middle and old age. Octavio Paz dismissed Arthur Rimbaud as "heat, not light," but I prefer Rimbaud's "immature" genius over Paz's seasoned stuff. In "A Season in Hell," Rimbaud examines his loss of innocence, as translated here by Louise Varese:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

The genius of that first line is the qualifying "if I remember well." Here, a 19-year-old is speaking about his innocence as something he can barely remember, since it already seems so distant and unreal to him. With maturity, with the awareness of one's mortality and ongoing decay, one's appetite is compromised if not snuffed out altogether. It's one reason why aspiring poets give up, why there aren't many more poets out there. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke points out:

And I sit, and have a poet. What a destiny. There are perhaps three hundred people in the room now, reading; but it is impossible that each single one of them should have a poet. (Heaven knows what they have.) There aren't three hundred poets. [translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

We begin this post with a poem by Youna Kwak, a just-graduated student from the University of Montana, where I taught this past semester. The other pieces are by two of Youna's professors, Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink, respectively. At her best, Youna's work is already exciting. If she can add the depths of maturity to her youthful intensity and volatility, she'll be a special poet indeed. Remember her name. Here's another by Youna Kwak: Personal DWM 6’1” NS 43 entrepreneur turned consultant loves scuba diving, Mexican food, travel, romance, foreign films, keeping fit, Jesus Christ adventures, fun, walks by the beach, camping, real estate, money, laughing, Marx Brothers, Coen brothers, hiking, swimming, boating, fishing, hunting, stoning, jazz, picnics, whorehouses, Jews, blacks, fine wine, microbrews, exploring new places, Easter, Christmas, fireworks, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Rio, Afghanistan, Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, Bauhaus, drug-free zones, bomb shelters, world music, reggae, philanthropy, monkey blood, NPR, NYT, NYRB, MOMA, MOCA, COCA, POKA, SPIC, shivs, blunts, Macanudos, Jameson’s, Grey Goose, fair-trade, osso bucco, fireplaces, winter days, spring days, autumn days, summer days, Mondays, Saturdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays, January, August, September, February, March Madness, The Final Four, Proust, Frost, Hemingway, The Wasteland, theater, red, blue, violet, beige, oatmeal, jokes, funny games, silly games, serious games, horseback riding, drag racing, tennis, jogging, mischief, the outdoors, British Airways, finger fucking, Rockies, Alps, Smokeys, the Renaissance, Victorians, Modernists, photography, blood-soaked gauze, helicopters, yachts, BMWs, painting, sculpture, sailing, unwinding, pad thai, Riesling, Saint Bernards, Jasper Johns, oil.

Robert Redford Hearts Wendell Berry

By Elizabeth Stigler — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:50:54 -0600

Executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford turn to poetry in their collaborative venture, Laura Dunn’s documentary, The Unforeseen. The film, which debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, covers Austin, Texas environmental politics via interviews with environmentalists, real estate developers, a vocal local community, and everyone’s favorite ex-governor of Texas, while peppering excerpts of Wendell Berry reading his poem “Santa Clara Valley” throughout. The poem provides a reflective continuity to the film, making sense, at times, of what is a bitter and emotional battle for the area of Barton Springs in Austin, a battle begun in the '70s and continuing through the '90s. An excerpt from Berry’s poem captures the main arc of the film:]]> website, the poem has been a popular point of discussion in post-screening conversations across the country.

MEMPHIS AND NASHVILLE

By D.A. Powell — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:43:11 -0600

In Robert Altman's seminal film, Nashville, a third-party candidate named Hal Philip Walker is running for president on a ticket known as The Replacement Party. "I'm for doing some replacing," he says of the bureaucracy in Washington. ]]> Hal Philip Walker's speech runs throughout the film, piped through the megaphones on a roving minibus plastered with Walker's name. Because the speech is interrupted by the action of the movie, a few passages of it have been lost in the editing process. I'm traveling to Memphis tomorrow, and then to Nashville, so I figured it might be a good time to revisit some of the Walker speech that didn't make the final cut: "My grandfather had an expression. 'All talk and no do.' And I remember a story about his younger days when he had taken a farm with buildings so run-down a rat was afraid to spend the night in the barn. And the land so poor it wouldn't sprout whipperwill peas. And mostly with his own bare hands he made that farm into a near-showplace. Then one day the preacher came by to admire all the improvements, and he said, 'Isn't it wonderful what God and man working together can do?' And my grandfather smiled and said, 'That's right, Reverend. But you should have seen this place when the Lord was working it by himself!'" In this political season, it's perhaps good to think of the idea of "replacing." Also, it doesn't hurt to think of the kind of illustrative story that reminds us, we can't simply sit back and think that things will be taken care of. We have to take action. We have to make the changes that are necessary. God ain't going to do it for us.