We Go On, or Off, for Solace

I have one specific memory of discussing the writing of a poem with Dad. It was during a period where he was writing short, playful and often collaborative poems on blank postcards which had been supplied by Ken and Ann Mikolowski for a project for their Alternative Press. About a 100 of those poems would later comprise Dad's last completed book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight, published posthumously by Leslie Scalapino's O Press. Our upstairs neighbor Megan Williams, who was designing and making clothes, had drawn some dresses on one of the cards. I suggested to dad that he write a poem about dresses for mom. He agreed and wrote the first line down: “We are the dresses for Alice.” I suggested a 2nd line, but he countered with “We go on, or off, for solace.” I was dismayed by my choice being rejected and expressed that, to which he pointed to the line and reiterated, “No, ‘We go on, or off, for solace’.” There was a persuasiveness in his tone, a sonic assurance that it was the correct choice, and I relented. I think I recognized that the word had become an anchor for the poem and a source of mystery—the very definition of the word "solace" was a mystery to me—and also that a sonic choice was being made, though I couldn’t have expressed that. Now I see how the word bears a weight of expectation beyond its placement and context. It draws out the need derived from its definition by simply existing in a space, seemingly innocuous, while the longing for solace expands outward. While I’ve always thought of this as a funny poem, I don’t think I’ve ever recognized the weariness or loneliness behind it. There’s almost a bluesy quality to it:

We are the dresses for Alice.
We go on, or off, for solace.

Looking back at some of my first poems from when I was a kid, I can remember now how some of the line arrangements came from Dad's advice. Another point of intersection was that he would sometimes do my homework for me when I asked for help, because he wanted to see if he could imitate my handwriting. Dad had managed to make his handwriting into a kind of drawing, using it boldly, sometimes awkwardly, but accurate enough to be consistently expressive in his collaborations with artists Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, and Donna Dennis. A Certain Slant of Sunlight includes reproductions of some of the postcard, including a collaboration on the cover with George Schneeman. George told Anselm and me about making the poem years later, saying that he had begun the card by a drawing of a windshield and had written "windshield" at the top. He handed it to Dad, who then astoundingly wrote, "There is no windshield." It was plainly true, a pun, a metaphor, and a reversal of the previous collaborator's intent. And the whole poem was only five words, title included. His handwriting of the phrase was succinct, nothing elaborate was needed. Some of his earlier collaborations with George had been quite a mess.

In the summer of 1993, I worked in an electronics warehouse in Williamsburg, expanding shelving units. The owner had bought the place from a junk collector and let me keep a few nonessential items. I stumbled across a set of blank postcards, and I brought them with me on a bus trip to San Francisco with an artist friend from college. It was a perfect plan, modeled on Dad's work: He'd make drawings, and I would write on them. But what to write? I had also bizarrely found a book in the warehouse, titled A Practical Spanish Grammar Guide for Border Patrol Officers, which had been issued by the Department of Justice in 1951 and reprinted a few times. It included sample bilingual immigration interviews, and strange lists of phrases to memorize. I copied phrases onto the postcards, imitating the typeface from the book. It included seraphs, and so I began drawing seraphs on the cards. I enjoyed it, and eventually took the practice to my notebook writing, adding a clearer feeling of writing as drawing, reinforcing the joys of just writing with no plan but to be expressive. My friend and I never finished our collaboration.

"I used to be sentimental about myself, & therefore ruthless." Dad had written that in the poem "I Used to Be But Now I Am" included in Red Wagon, published in the mid 70s by Yellow Press. It was good advice for a teenager. This was one of the first books of dad's that I had started reading. My attention to these poems, as well as my mother's book from the same press, Alice Ordered Me to Be Made, was reinforced when one day I found a cassette copy of Mom and Dad reading together at Naropa in 1976. They were both introduced by Anne Waldman, as was Jack Collom, though unfortunately Jack's reading was not included on the cassette. Mom and Dad both read from their new books. Mom launched right into her reading. Her poems were extremely musical and precise in their phrasing, with lines like "music conducting the sky" and "a splash alive forever." She ended with "January," a long poem centered around motherhood, and full of utterances by my brother Anselm and m. How strange it was, sitting around listening to this cassette in later years, propelled forward from some magic moments I don't remember, but preserved in a recording I stumbled across in a bookstore in Colorado.

Dad's reading was full of improvised humor, beginning with a false ending to the reading after the first poem, "L.G.T.T.H," followed by an inability to find the second poem, prompting Mom to return to the stage and help him look for it to no avail, to Dad introducing that poem: "The next poem will be called 'The Delusions of the Insane'. Unfortunately I don't get to read it." The reading progresses and Dad settles in, reading some of his best work from the book, including "Things to do in Providence." "Things to do in Providence" is also a family poem, but about Dad being in his hometown, talking to his mother, and his Grandmother is passing away. The poem has a passage that describes the pain of revelation of a death with such a balanced accuracy that it's been used by his friends at funerals. I was struck by Dad's range in that book, and at how such an honest sentiment could sit well beside by a variety of types of poems, and by lines like "I used to be a little fairy / but now I am President of the United States."

Dad's cowboy novel, Clear the Range, had also caught my attention. It took awhile before I finally had the right kind of curiosity to read it. It was as if Dad had taken the phrase "Baffling combustions are everywhere" from The Sonnets and made it into a western. The book had been made by crossing out words and letters in a western pulp novel—Twenty Notches by Max Brand. The result is a western-themed metaphysical odyssey involving characters named The Sleeper and Cole Younger, in an unsteady sequence of events that have just enough coherence to maintain a philosophic bent while wildly switching up physical and conversational probability to absurd and humorous ends. Further distorting the original story, Dad didn't actually use the first and last few chapters of the book, beginning his cross-out a few chapters in and stopping before the end of the book. He wove the remaining chapters together in a different order. The project was begun in the sixties, and sections of it were finished for publication in magazines, but he only finished the book when Larry Fagin offered to publish it for Adventures in Poetry in the mid-seventies.

Clear the Range stuck with me for some reason, it seemed to be at the heart of something that I was trying to get to in my writing. It had a defined mechanism, but the importance of that didn’t overshadow the content. On the other hand the content started at a point of structure but then slowly dissembled, with subsequent interactions somehow rendered new by tweaks in language. Characters made unexplained gestures, could fly into a rage, or undergo a metaphysical transformation with little prompting. Cole Younger might die in one paragraph only to begin talking again in the next paragraph and continuing onward.

This was sort of what life was like without Dad. He had died, and our family core was forever disrupted, but because of the writing there was always a way to re-engage. Mostly I was looking for it, but sometimes it would arrive unexpectedly. Sometimes it seemed like he still lived between the lines, and I had recordings of him reading and speaking that I could listen to, in order to try to discern what it might be like to talk to him as an adult. In my own writing, I could say my part.

When I moved back to New York in 1999, I was ready for a deeper writing engagement, wanting to try bigger projects than the one-page discreet poems I had been mostly writing in previous years. I needed a writing project and decided to try to write a novel. But not just a novel, it would be a collection of interchangeable chapters, a book you could read out of sequence, like a book of poems. In fact, the chapters could be poems, or a short play, or a journal or just descriptions of memories. I didn't have a plot in mind, I just wanted to create pieces.

I tried some prose exercises to see what I could accomplish. I didn’t have a stable home yet, sleeping in an office space generously provided by my friend Elinor. Mom and my step-father, Doug, had moved to Paris. I decided to do a deep dive one day, writing about the day Dad died. My recall of the key chain of events was spot on, though I’d later flub one of the dates prior to publication, in a moment of doubt. All of my identity in writing was tied into Dad, and many of my writing experiments were also tied to his. I kept journals of specific trips, based on the knowledge that he had done something similar. I wrote prose and poetic pieces, and employed cut-up techniques, but using computer methods and endless rounds of editing, rather than scissors and glue. It opened up other possibilities. I’d type out a paragraph, then copy it and paste it 20 times beneath the original paragraph, reduce the view to 10%, highlight random chunks of copy, and move them around with no predetermination. Then I’d run a spell check and accept all changes without vetting them. Then I’d print it out and go through it with red ink. There was no particular point except distortion, but the repetition and variation enhanced the musicality of those chapters and made them fun to read in public.

After a year or so I had written out the primary pieces for the book, but more aspects of life began to change. Doug was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 and died in April of 2000. A new grief cycle was beginning, but I wasn’t a child this time. Whatever was supposed to comprise a care-free youth was long gone, and I needed to be a full-time adult now. I incorporated a diary about our last Christmas and New Year’s with Doug, and passages about his funeral. The book now had the burden of two deaths of father figures, making it harder for me to look at. My editing wasn’t up to snuff, though I had just taken my first copy-editing job for a weekly magazine that tracked the chemical industry. Those skills would eventually sharpen. I began a couple of other projects, one a cross-out of a novella about an obscure military figure from World War I, the other a cut-up and disfiguration of an article on William Burroughs. Both pieces were heavily edited over several years and would eventually be included in the manuscript. The working title of the book was "Woods," focusing on a chapter that was an abstract tonal piece based on processing the heaviness of previous events in the woods in Westchester near my college. It didn't seem ready though, and I didn't know how to revisit it.

I made progress on the manuscript from time to time, and showed it to a few people, until finally Letter Machine Editions was looking for manuscripts in that kind of gray area and asked to see it. I developed a couple of new chapters to bring it up to the present, but still needed a title. One day my brother Anselm came back from a trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Ken Mikolowski had handed him a few leftover postcards from Dad’s project that had produced A Certain Slant of Sunlight. I opened up an envelope, producing a postcard in Dad's amazing scrawl with a title "Song for the Unborn Second Baby" and underneath in all caps the words: CAN IT! It was perfect, a direct communication from Dad, a command to cease communication, a permission to finish my book, and a title that reflected mechanization. I hadn't intended for it to be a book about Dad but giving it no direction had pointed it back at me and what my writing motivation had always been. How do you make a space for someone who's gone, but who still stands behind everything you do? Writing poetry for me for a long time has been about connecting to the impossible, living and observing inside of it, and hoping that something interesting might wander back in if I leave the right kind of room between lines.