The Cult of Hot Air

I am trying to write a poem. But what I really want is to make something that makes no more sense than anything else we see happening on a daily basis in this abstraction soaked plane of existence—and to make it out of words that can heal. I am trying to write a poem but since the continuity of human life on earth is in peril, it’s no surprise that continuity from line to line, even from word to word, in my poem feels instantly dated. I don’t want to date, I just want to be crushed out.

This isn’t the first time humans have been in trouble. But this is the first time that we, those of us now breathing, have been in this much trouble. Some days it feels like it could all end in five years, others like we could all end up popping blueberries under wind turbines while the latest Nike ad crawls across the moon. Tall cool grass licking our cheeks.

We are taught from a young age to see words as a means to an end, but early on words are just sounds to us. We play with words because they vibrate and feel good to say over and over again, bending and smooshing them till they’re the opposite of dead lizards: Till they’re smears of crushed hyperalive sound juice.

“The naive delight of pure oscillation.” That’s how George Bernard Shaw describes Shakespeare on a roll. With extra pepperoncini. I’m not a kid anymore but I want yellow mustard just as much as ever. All of this sophistication! A lifetime of playing around with words, plumbing various depths of pulpiness and vibration . . . yes, I’m a sophisticated cat! I’ve got a lot more going on word-wise than I did 35 years ago. What if I could connect this word horde of gray age up with that naive delight of stomping mustard packets onto my best friend’s corduroys?

It’s amazing how long it took for me to see that it’s OK, better than OK, to make something for no other reason than that it feels good. It feels good to make something that makes other people feel good, too. A poem can be the name for a kind of energy that emanates from the mind making itself physical with exuberant effort: Good company for the fellow traveler on our long road through inevitable grief, terror and dementia.

$

Actually, I don’t even want to write poems anymore, I just want them to happen. The problem is, when I try to explain this to anyone I sound like a charter member of the Cult of Hot Air.

“So, do you write every day?”

“Hardly. I actually sit in my underwear next to the bed, harvesting the word mold from the edges of my brain with a butterknife.”

“Um . . .”

“It’s not exactly writing, you see. I am well beyond that phase in my initiation. I now simply allow poems to occur and harvest the mildly psychedelic mold to present in glowing sections of incomprehensible gibberish.”

“I see. Is that what you’re doing right now?”

“You mean right now right now? Here on the playground where our kindergarteners dash around after the last bell and the weekend flows down like the melted helmets of Roman legionnaires in Ethiopia? The opposite. Right now I am deigning to make sense so you will understand the radical senselessness I have been tasked by our existential crisis to produce.”

“Got it.”

“But do you? Or are you one of those people who thinks that a poem should have something to prove. Possibly, let’s say, about the poet’s identity.”

“Well, I suppose—”

“Or maybe the poet should be chained to the process of driving herself crazy by ripping into current political crises, like a demented newscaster in a dungeon? A newscaster with no audience but other poets rotting under the boards of 24/7 state capitol burlesque?”

“I’m not sure that—”

“Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. Someone must like it. Someone must be moved by it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the only thing anyone publishes. Aside from, in my opinion, asinine apolitical gibberish.”

“But isn’t that what you just said you were harvesting from the edge of your brain with a butter knife?”

“My gibberish is hardly asinine, though. It’s . . . if I had to paraphrase, I suppose I would call it the energy pulses released by a mind breaking through the eggshell of our language’s stratosphere.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say that at first?”   

The better a poem feels to write, the harder it is to explain why. There is no argument that justifies what you’re doing. It’s something that comes naturally to some people, like lying. There’s a kind of magical thinking at work that I find interesting, and if I could boil it down it would go something like:

“The poem will transfer the poet’s state of mind to the next person who walks into the room.”

So for a long time certain poets have been concerned with making the poem be the thing instead of describing the thing . . . and by extension, certain poets want the momentum of narration without the narrative. It’s a transformation, a kind of no-rent alchemy, and one could ask: Why? Why not just describe things beautifully in a poem, and why shouldn’t a poem just narrate an event? And it can. And it can still be good.

But then there’s this other thing: The desire to make a poem that transfers or conducts a state of mind, or some little zap of that state of mind, from the page to the mind. It’s not a story, it’s not a description, it’s more like a touch. The poem has a touch and it touches the mind of the person who sees it. The touch can be urgent, fearful, joyful, anything. It transfers the static electricity at the tip of the poet’s mind to the reader or the listener. Snap!

But for that transfer to happen—sometimes making sense gets in the way. Or maybe thinking gets in the way. If you could somehow write without thinking, the words might still come out making perfect and surprising sense without hauling out that phantom asterisk.*

* all words tested and approved by the poet.**

** no nonsense was harmed in the writing of this poem.***

*** despite all appearances no split atom tubas were blatted by the crustaceans of intellect in the sludge of manna from heavin’ on the bicoastal palimpsest of this pile of cola cans AKA poem.

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How do you become a poet? Think back to when you first started writing. Did it feel cool and private? You pack notebooks full of poems, they come to you on the bus or under the blankets by flashlight. You stick a picture of Dylan Thomas to your book—or of bell hooks. Or both.

By the time you’re 17, you can already clear a room.

And soon you stand at a crossroads . . . and the flesh-and-mortar poet you happen to meet there will make all the difference, for s/he will be your guide, like the thinly disguised Satan in a Chick book, for the duration of this exercise in futile pride which is a life in verse. Is it a louche salt-and-pepper Symbolist who rolls out his version of Verlaine & Rimbaud while pumping your balls in the hot tub? Is it a girl your age but twice as smart whose skinniness belies the fact that she’s devoured Gertrude Stein, eyeballs and all? Is it a street poet who looks like a cross between a sweet potato sitting zazen and a werewolf crowning in the glint of a poison-ring TV? Or is it me: Your only real friend in the poetry scene.

All the way up until I met Matvei Yankelevich in New York City, I was writing poetry with no goal beyond the poem itself. I didn’t even think about publishing poems anywhere, at least under my own name. Career? It never occurred to me that I could actually make a living writing articles like this one. No chance of making a dime on a poem—the whole thought of it was ludicrous. Reactionary even!

The poetry I read in magazines bored me to tears. Jesus Christ but it was shit! And yet my own poems, as it turns out, stunk—especially the ones I thought were going to change Poetry forever. 

It turns out that the best poems I wrote were the ones I didn’t even try to write.

When I met Matvei at Yelena Gluzman’s apartment with Filip Marinovich, we stayed up all night till the sun rose on 1999 Manhattan, plotting a new course in bookmaking. Of course it was an old course—the oldest in the book. Any small press is a detective agency looking for missing people; looking for the real poets in a figurative landscape made of nothing but conjecture, brilliant phrasing and mawkish goldfish-eyed cant, AKA language. Looking for the real in the land of the spiel.

In a sense, making books at Ugly Duckling Presse threw my lone-wolf radar out of whack, possibly for good. I wanted nothing more than to sit at Sunny’s Bar, frooshing beer cans and reading that day’s poems to each other, banging on guitars, walking through the snow in the superfund site that was millennial Red Hook. I only wanted my friends and my poet hairdo.

And everyone else in New York City—the whole scene at the Project, the whole new wave of the New York School—they were my enemies. At least until they bowed unto our reign.

Anyway, I can’t remember much very vividly but small insignificant details—

And maybe that’s the stuff I want to make my poems out of. Insignificant details . . .

Which, taken out of context, make a mockery of “sense” . . . undermining the running narrative that recapitulates state power.

Seriously.

If it’s a good image, it plays into the hands of Mike Pompeo. John Bolton sinks your metaphors into an off-shore hedge fund.

I want poetry that exists for no other reason but sublime terror of the deep. There’s no other reason to hang out here on earth, where even the pierogies are little shark homunculi in ecstasy’s event-starved ocean. Gawd, don’t even try to write a poem! Just let all this word-sound go through your skin like it’s a prism and come out the other side in 2-way shadow splatters of ditty, dirty dish, crow, magnolia, Spandex carnitas, android fleas.  

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When Joanne Kyger died, a little rail got pulled in my internal switchyard and ever since then the trains have been running to places I don’t have names for yet. The graveyard shift worker who threw that switch looked up at the satellite or two streaking through the light pollution of Megalopolis and said, “What’s the point?” I didn’t want to stop writing poetry, I just didn’t see any point in thinking about where it was going to get me.

Joanne’s was the last in a string of deaths of older poets I’d made friends with. Each time a poet died, I got a call from another poet. Cedar Sigo called to tell me about Bill Berkson. I told Benjamin Hollander about Bill, then Steve Dickison told me about Ben dying only months later. Patrick Dunagan called to tell me about David Meltzer, just a couple of days before David and I were finally going to meet for coffee. Then a little later, Cedar called again about Joanne. 

All of these deaths came in the midst of Mr. Ugly’s election. The stupidity and indignity of that election, which you’ll recall took forever to hatch, like some brain-sized insect that eats the smiles off of children’s faces, made each of these hammer blows almost comically painful.

Joanne’s memorial out in Bolinas was incredible. It took place in a huge well-lit hall full of wonderful and exciting and grieving people. Many of my friends were there, and many poets I admired but had never met read in her honor.

I missed the big party afterwards, which I still regret. I had some family business back home, forgotten now but more important at the time than drinking with the cult of Joanne. I wish I’d gone: It would be nice to be able to tell you about it. But also I was glad not to go. I would have felt out of place. I’ve never felt totally comfortable around other poets.

I was driving away from Bolinas through the Marin hills. It was spring and the pale gray highway was almost empty but the fences were stuffed with tall green grass and trees were sagging down with tiny yellow plums. I knew that somewhere along this road there’s an old abandoned house—a house the size of a mansion in a thought bubble remembering itself, and well more than 100 years old.

I pulled off the road into the crumbling driveway to its impasto mud lot. All of the ground-floor windows, set into a deep porch that must have once been a nice place to sip a mint julep, were covered with warped plywood.

The steps up to the porch were gone—I had to put my hands flat on the old white floorboards and hop up to get closer to what I’d spotted as I parked: Five apples hardly larger than the plums on those trees, no greener than mist with a pink blush. Someone had placed them in a curving row, starting at the porch pillar, ending halfway to the front door.

I didn’t touch them, just stood in the shade at the end of the apple ellipse, looking out at the lot in full sun, listening to my car hood tick in the heat, watching a roadside tree of big green leaves not move.   

And that will be our fuel into space. The leaves, a ticking sound, and five little apples.