Getting Started in Poetry

Thought Balloon
 
The cloud is green
My head is empty.
It is spring
Inside this penny.
I meet Jenny & Kid.

This poem is a collaboration written with my mother from 1982. We sat together and wrote it line for line. Once in a great while I still read it at readings if the occasion is spontaneous enough. It wasn't my first poem—that was called "The Fat Budgie," a poem about the startling effects of seeing an imaginary creature. It was written in two parts, each a moment of interaction and imagining of the Fat Budgie's appearance. Most of the poem was written by me, but there was a passage that I couldn't quite articulate, given that I was seven years old, so Dad showed me how to word it. Mom had given me a blank notebook to write poems in for my eighth birthday. My parents wrote constantly, so this was a normal household activity, and I had no context to think of it otherwise. Susan Cataldo, a poet in the Poetry Project community, published "The Fat Budgie" in Little Light 5, alongside poems by both my parents, Eileen Myles, Jim Brodey, and a handful of others. I ended up with a dozen or so poems, which were then typed up and printed in an 8 1/2 by 11 edition, titled Dinosaur, published by Instant Editions, aka our friend Peggy DeCoursey. I even gave a reading, telling the audience it was okay to throw money on stage. I should have retired at eight, a perfect poetry career completed.

About a year later, Dad passed away, which created a whole other kind of world to have to live in. I was still too young to recognize it. I kept writing poems intermittently. Mom and I would collaborate, and occasionally we would get a "hit." There was one poem, "The Beast of Each," that we read together at readings, at least until I became too self-conscious to keep reading poems I had written with my mother. In high school, I attempted to get a driver's license. Pre-internet and fast computers, Mom and I waited online at the DMV for five or six hours, writing two or three collaborations to pass the time. These poems were more adult, and I was starting to get a handle on how to make lines without the childish knack for spontaneous language. One poem ended: "We groom ourselves like cats/and we end our poems with lives."  I submitted these poems, and a couple others to Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse magazine.  He accepted them for the "Corpse," and later included them in a compendium of the magazine, Thus Spake The Corpse.

Writing poems had been easy so far, and fun. That joy has never left, even while the problems of becoming an adult human often steal away better attentions. Around 1990, Mom had given me another blank book. I had it in hand, sitting in front of the TV, watching Quantum Leap, a show starring Scott Bakula. In an experiment gone wrong, his character's personality is flung across time randomly, arriving in other people's bodies, whose own consciousnesses become subverted. The manly face and body of Bakula would suddenly appear in a dress with makeup on, but when a mirror was shown, it would be the face of a petite woman. Or maybe a marine. Or an astronaut. In this episode he was just some guy, and his purpose was to convince a young woman who had recently read Jack Kerouac's On the Road that she shouldn't also go "on the road" to become a writer. He had to do this to keep history from imploding. So he looks up Kerouac in the phone book, visits his home, and attempts to convince the wine-drinking author that he should go tell a random woman to keep her waitress job and write about her customers instead of going on the road.

As I sat there watching, I remembered that the bookcase beside me contained several poetry collections by Kerouac: Mexico City Blues, Poems All Sizes, and Scattered Poems, which I had been reading. I shut off the TV, appalled but amused, and walked out towards the West Village with my notebook, writing poems along the way. I returned after a couple of hours with four or five poems, which seemed enough of a start, along with a conscious decision that I was a poet.

The next step was to buy a few books of poetry. Mom and I walked out to St. Mark's Bookstore to buy books one day. Mom showed me the Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. I was aware of his prominence, but he was entirely naked on the cover, except for a pair of black socks. I wasn't yet ready for that level of responsibility, but I opened the book. They seemed interesting, but the poems were laid out oddly, a new poem beginning immediately after the previous ended, distracting from the visual form of each poem. I shook my head and put O'Hara back on the shelf. I found a smaller volume, Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems. To my great relief, each new poem began on the top of its own page. Beyond that the language was weird and musical. I didn't quite understand it, but it sounded right—and that was the general feeling I came away with from poetry readings at that time. It was comforting.

I carried that book with me everywhere, memorizing the poem "The Hand that Signed the Paper," an anti-war poem protesting the horror of WWII, with the title referencing the Treaty of Versailles. The first Gulf War had started. I was upset that another war had begun, the first new one for my generation, and one that seemed to be about oil wealth. I remember seeing a news segment on TV saying "Up next, the luckiest man in Iraq" followed by a press briefing by General Norman Schwarzkopf, showing video of a bridge. A driver crosses a bridge, and shortly after he passes, it is destroyed by a missile. The audience of journalists laughed, a reaction that seemed so cruel at the time. I was an editor of the literary magazine at Brooklyn Tech, and I sat in the office between periods, disturbed that a war was happening and that everyone just continued.

My next purchases of poetry were more pointed: I decided I needed to buy a book by a woman and a black poet. I chose selected poems volumes by Marianne Moore and Claude McKay.  Moore's book was pink, she seemed to have an affinity for great hats, and her poems included references to Elston Howard and Yogi Berra, two of the all time great catchers for the New York Yankees. That seemed like a no brainer. The jacket of McKay's book said he was part of the Harlem Renaissance, which sounded like something I ought to know about. I opened McKay's book and was struck by a poem, "December, 1919." It was an elegy for his mother ending with the stanza:

'Tis ten years since you died, mother,

Just ten dark years of pain,

And oh, I only wish that I

Could weep just once again.

I felt like I understood what that meant, so I bought the book.

I had the beginning of my library, and as I sat there endlessly watching TV, I also began to read the books on that shelf. There were books by my dad: The United Artists edition of The Sonnets, a bright yellow book called Clear the Range, with a drawing of a demented cowboy on the cover, and there was also the reprint of Great Balls of Fire by Ron Padgett. I kept reading the Kerouac as well, and it made an impact on me. His poems had a sonic edge, similar to Dylan Thomas, but with a different approach to language. Where Thomas's poems always seemed to have a finish, Kerouac's poems seemed more like an incomplete structure, a song that was forever starting and stopping, like his choruses in Mexico City Blues.

That idea of a sonic shape became a template for the kind of poems I wanted to write. My moments of writing would happen at once, but it wasn't just letting everything out, it was a controlled and consciously but quickly edited flow of words. It felt like a trance and it was fun to access. The vocabulary in mind was influenced by words I had just heard, that I had just read, but also with words that were more deeply embedded. I'd write them out to see my words reflected back to me. It might not be obvious, it might even be wholly untraceable, but the relationships in those choices had their own light.

I began going to more readings at the Poetry Project. I would show my poems to my adult poet friends: Elinor Nauen, Simon Pettet, and John Godfrey. I showed everything to my mother, and now I had a step-father, British poet Douglas Oliver, who had moved from Paris to come live with us. I would listen closely as Mom and Doug discussed poets and poetry. Poet X was only reading books that were in fashion. Poet Y had an overcompensated need to live in academic glory. Poets Z only liked Ted's 60s poems and misunderstood the later work. They would discuss important poets who were being ignored, friends like Joanne Kyger, who was still being left out of Beat conversations. Doug had his own contemporaries to consider: Jeremy Prynne, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, Andrew Crozier, and many other British poets.

I went to college, and co-hosted readings there. I took a trip to visit the Summer Writing Program at Naropa for two weeks and received a deluge of information and influence. Mom and Doug moved to Paris. My brother Anselm began writing poems when he went to SUNY Buffalo, which seemed to evolve from writing music reviews for a school publication. We started exchanging poems. After he graduated he moved to San Francisco, and two years later I did the same. He had met a rather large number of San Francisco poets and prose writers there, many of whom were students and faculty from UC Berkeley or New College. Hoa Nguyen was the very first poet I met when I moved there, introduced to me by my brother at a bar on Haight Street called The Mad Dog in the Fog.

I continued writing, often typing poems on a manual typewriter, and would sometimes take trips to Paris to visit Mom and Doug. There was a show of Kurt Schwitters assemblages at the Pompidou Centre in 1994 that made a strong impression. The blocky and colorful works seemed like physical manifestations of the sonic template I had been thinking of and offered some kind of permission to treat poems more abstractly. A trip to the Picasso Museum, which is arranged chronologically, seemed to show an outcome of how an artist might gain confidence in practice, in materials, and eventually become a master of one's own internal symbolism. I had already had Cubism in the back of my mind as a source since I was in a teenager, not in a studied way, but as a sense of mystery. Inspired by the trip to the museum, I began to write a set of prose poems, feeling like the form gave me more room to improvise and try out grammatical shifts. I wrote a short sonnet sequence made up from lines from Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House. I was working as a foot messenger for California Overnight, and would take short breaks while on my pickup route to sit down, read a few chapters of Bleak House, and then draw lines from what I'd read, based on the ambiguity of feeling conjured when they were put together. All my poems ended up in a manuscript that became my first book, Disarming Matter, which poet Albert DeSilver was kind enough to publish as the first book of his Owl Press. It was a little strange, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to be putting more objects into the world, or if I really wanted to continue down this path. But I did, and so I moved back to New York at Anselm's suggestion.

My plans in New York were simple: become a performing musician, compile a selected poems manuscript for my friend the late Steve Carey, write a novel that was also a play that was also a book of poems that was also a journal, and then get on with my life. That part has taken about 20 years with its own separate joys, complications, and sorrows. On the brighter side, I often have band practice now in my home office next to the book case where my copies of the Selected Poems of Steve Carey and my novel/play/memoir/book of poems, Can It! live. I'm also waiting for a new book of poems to come out from City Lights, publisher of all of those Kerouac books I was reading 30 years ago. It's a positive outcome from a devotion to all these weird personal and poetic fractures and invisible cubist frequencies. It's also about my cats.