Category Archives: Poetry

Books Poetry

George Hart and Robinson Jeffers

August 26, 2013 – 11:01 pm

Hart – Hawk

Hart – Hawk

Monday, August 26, 2013

It’s been several days since I’ve had time to give much thought to my blog. A week ago, one of my three younger brothers in San Diego called on the phone and said I should drive down to review my 91-year-old mother’s situation. The next day, my wife, Linda, and I were driving her up to Long Beach. I’m afraid that what is happening in my family is more fit for a diary or a piece of fiction, so entries in the coming weeks may be too few to retain even the few people who check on this blog. By the time I get back to it on any kind of steady basis, perhaps it will have become nothing more than a diary posted on-line. If this entry is the way-station to a mirror held up to the form and pressure of my age (going on 66), then let it be a note that reflects my sense of good fortune in having a chance in the fifth act of my life to become part of a scholarly community.

Classes started at CSULB today, and the best part of arriving on campus was spotting George Hart on my way up to my office to prepare for the first of the three classes I’ll teach this semester. I first met George at an American Literature Association conference in Long Beach, back when I was still a grad student at UCSD and I subsequently had the pleasure of organizing a panel in 2003, when the MLA was in San Diego, in which George presented a paper. He has a major book out on Robinson Jeffers, which everyone interested in 20th century poetry should get a copy of. The good news is that it is fairly affordable. In fact, it’s even on Kindle. I myself may not have a chance to read it until after the semester’s over, but it is at the top of the list of the books I want to read before then.

Perhaps I am wrong in suggesting the following connection, but I’m going to put it out here and see how it, in fact, plays out. One of the Beat poets I’ve long admired is Michael McClure, who summed up his ecocritical stance with the declaration, “I am a mammal patriot.” My guess at this point is that Hart’s book will help elucidate McClure’s espousal of a biologically-based consciousness. I look forward to finding out if my hunch proves correct.

Here are the details:

Title: Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness

Author: George Hart

Publisher: Fordham University Press

 

 

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Baseball Books Poetry

Kirk Gibson and Charles Olson

August 19, 2013 – 10:03 am

Monday, August 19, 2013

The approaching 25th anniversary of Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run has coincided with the Los Angeles Dodgers winning an astonishing number of games in the second half of this season. Although it’s been decades since I’ve cheered with any enthusiasm for the Dodgers, I am pleased to see the team doing well, if only because Vin Scully has endured more mediocrity in recent years than any Hall–of-Famer broadcaster should be saddled with. For his sake, I would be pleased to see the Dodgers do well in the postseaon playoffs.

In the drumbeat boosterism that is beginning to build towards what the local economy hopes will be a Dodger triumph in the World Series, this quarter-century celebration of Gibson’s limp-off dinger is an all too obvious item on the restaurant menu. Sure enough, the Los Angeles Times trotted out a long column by Bill Plaschke the other day that reviews some of the background contributions to Gibson’s sole at bat in that series. Most of the key elements in the story, however, are not particularly insightful revelations. In particular, Gibson’s use of a scouting report to anticipate the pitch that Dennis Eckersley was going to throw is fairly common knowledge, and anyone who has followed the game at all knows that Gibson has previously credited Mike Davis’s steal of second base with helping him settle in at the plate and focus on the basic task of getting a single and simply tying the game at 3-3. A pinch-runner could then have been used to finish off the job of rattling the Oakland A’s confidence in their odds-on status of being the team favored to win the Series.

There’s been at least one game this year, in fact, in which a similar comment to the one Gibson made years ago about how Davis’s steal affected his equanimity at the plate. In mid-May, the Cleveland Indians were playing the Seattle Mariners in Cleveland in an extra-innings game that was tied at 3-3. According to Jordan Bastian’s coverage of the game, a two-out walk to Drew Stubbs (who has struck out 113 times in 354 Abs this season and drawn only 28 bases on balls) proved to an unforgiving extension of the inning by the Mariners’ pitcher. As with Mike Davis’s two-out walk in the 1988 game, the subsequent stolen base altered the approach of Jason Kipnis, whose comment after hitting a home to win the game was very similar to Gibson’s recollection of his most famous at-bat: “I knew that I had to go up there and just get a single — just slap it,” Kipnis said. “That approach may have helped me stay back on his offspeed.”

In other words, as with writing a poem, don’t try to do more than needs to be done to resolve an immediate adversity. That’s easier advice to follow, of course, about a conservative game, such a baseball, as opposed to choosing a course of “self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event / is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal / event.” Furthermore, the hyper-masculine environment of professional baseball remains a problem in drawing any analogous permutations of potential choices with outcomes. The word missing from Olson’s reminder at the end of “A Later Note on Letter #15” is one of gender assignment: Are “the poetics of such a situation … yet to be found out” patriarchal or matriarchal, or is there a new androgyny yet to articulate its plural capacities? (In one of the poems called “Elements” in “Great Slave Lake Suite,” Leland Hickman included a slight variation on Olson, describing his context at Fort Providence in Canada as the “poetics of this situation not yet figured out.”)

Nevertheless, the intersection of familiar cycles with a seemingly infinite variety of personal circumstances makes both baseball and poetry prime subjects of my daily meditations.

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Books Performance Photography Poetry

“Who is She?” — Terry Braunstein’s show in Long Beach

August 17, 2013 – 11:51 am

Saturday, August 16, 2013

In the late 1970s, I worked at a bookstore at 11th Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It had been launched by three young fiction writers who were eager to join that decade’s lively independent book store scene in Los Angeles (and in this case, I mean the county and not the city). By the time I started working at the front counter and running the reading series, only one of the three fiction writers was still involved with the store, which served as the entry point to Los Angeles for one of its most prominent literary spokespersons, Michael Silverblatt. He had recently moved to Los Angeles and was living in an apartment, slightly north of Wilshire, several blocks west of the store, Michael didn’t drive, but he was in a perfect neighborhood to get around without a car. One afternoon, when business was slow, he happened to walk in and we began talking about poetry. I was putting together my first anthology, The Streets Inside, at the time and ended up inviting him to my apartment for a combination publication party/New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1978. It was there that he met Jim Krusoe, who became one of his enduring friends. Though Michael and I did not remain confident acquaintances, I am happy that he eventually found a niche where his specialized acuity continues to flourish.

Among the people I met at the store who turned into long-time friends was Dinah Berland, a photographer and critic who was beginning to write poetry. (The opposite move was being made by another visitor to the store, Peter Schjeldahl, who went on to write one of the classic poems about Los Angeles, “Pico Boulevard,” but would soon begin to focus on writing about art.) Dinah eventually introduced me to her best friend, Terry Braunstein, with whom she was an undergraduate roommate at the University of Michigan. I reviewed a show of Terry’s at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the late 1980s for the Long Beach Press-Telegram and have continued to admire how she retains her commitment to local activism even as she has exhibited her work on an international scale.

Terry sent out a notice the other day about her most recent project. The first weekend after Labor Day is traditionally a very busy occasion for visual artists, so I want to post her invitation well in advance so that any reader can plan her or his visits to various openings that weekend to include her event, “Who is She?” It will take place at a vacant lot in Long Beach at the corner of Anaheim & Walnut Streets. Terry’s installation/sculpture will be placed into dialogue with a choreographed piece by Cyrus Parker-Jeannette at both 5:45 and 7:45 p.m. The second performance will also feature projected animations by David Familian.

This event is part of a larger project called “A LOT,” in which vacant pieces of property in Long Beach are temporarily appropriated to present free arts experiences. It is sponsored in part by an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information on both Terry and Dinah, please go to their websites: terrybraunstein.com and Dinahberland.com.

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Books Poetry

Translations of my poetry

August 15, 2013 – 9:08 pm

THURSDAY, August 15, 2013

This past Sunday I received a list of three dozen poems that Jose Rico and Robin Myers have proposed as the core of a book of poems to be translated into Spanish and published in Mexico. I first heard about the possibility of this project a couple months ago through Jose Rico, who has already translated some of my poems for a magazine called Circulo de Poesia. I have had other translators work on my writing over the years, but this is the largest scale on which this kind of work has ever occurred.

I have to confess that it feels a bit odd having a collection of my poems being translated into another language. It’s not that I haven’t written during the past 45 years with the hope of such a book appearing in my lifetime. I have found too much encouragement during my life from poets in other languages not to hope that my own writing might be able to do the same for a poet in another country. When I consider how many other poets are deserving of this honor, I’m somewhat surprised that my poems have managed to become the focus of a translator’s imagination. The list of poets with whom I have read at the Idyllwild Poetry Festival would certainly provide any aspiring translator with a score of equally worthy candidates:

Chris Abani

Ellen Bass

Christopher Buckley

Lucille Clifton

Wanda Coleman

Brendan Constantine

Richard Garcia

Eloise Klein Healy

Yusef Komunyakaa

Suzanne Lummis

Tom Lux

Harryette Mullen

Marilyn Nelson

Naomi Shihab Nye

Holly Prado

Doren Robbins

Aleida Rodriguez

Natasha Tretheway

Cecilia Woloch

Robert Wrigley

 

I hope all of my comrades can someday experience my excitement at the onset of this translation of my poems. Something must be astir in regards to my writing because I also recently received an e-mail from Zachary Payne in Spain, who spontaneously decided to translate some of my poems into Spanish. With his permission I am posting them on today’s entry. His translations are followed by the list that Jose and Robin sent me of their first pick of my work.

(translations by Zachary Payne)

three poems from Bittersweet Kaleidoscope

            tres poemas del Bittersweet Kaleidoscope

 

THE ORIGINS THAT MEMORY CONSIDERS

 

Objects linger when they move,

unaware of the day´s alignment

between your death and mine.

 

LOS ORIGENES QUE LA MEMORIA CONSIDERA

 

Objetos persisten cuando se mueven,

ignorantes del alineamiento del día

entre tu muerte y la mía.

 

WEIGHT

 

My brain weighs the world and the world weighs stones

and rocks and trees. I know the world weighs more,

 

but my legs and back and neck insist raindrops

hanging from the needletips of a pine tree-

 

one I stood beside twenty years ago-are heavier

than thought, which adds no more weight to its origin

 

than a flower to a bee passing over damp petals.

Mysticism exaggerates, but so does the literal.

 

And to think the truth is in between

ignores the abyss that holds them apart.

 

PESO

 

Mi cerebro pesa el mundo y el mundo pesa piedras

y rocas y árboles.  Sé que el mundo pesa más,

 

pero mis piernas y espalda y cuello insisten gotas de lluvia

colgando desde las agujas verdes de un pino-

 

uno que paré al lado hace veinte años-son más pesados

que pensamientos, que no incrementan el peso de su origen

 

que una flor a la avispa volando sobre pétalos húmedos.

El misticismo exagera, pero también lo hace lo literal.

 

Y pensar que la verdad está entre medio

e ignora el abismo que los mantiene separados.

 


 

ONE MIRACLE

            For Bob Flanagan

 

Stunned by tequila from the night before,

I remember poking at embers as dawn

puffed its mist into a clearing. Bob sang

and coughed, sang and coughed. Even then,

I wondered how much longer he had.

Every time his body jerked, I winced.

I loved his improvised, contaminated genius.

Tonight he´s in the hospital again, alone,

and this poem is like a waitress who deserves

a big tip-half the bill-for telling me

it´s time to stop drinking coffee and drive over

and rescue him, perform the one miracle

I´m allowed in this life, but I´m not,

because Bob´s not the one I´m supposed to save.

 

 

EL MILAGRO

Para Bob Flanagan

 

Atontado por el tequila de anoche,

recuerdo atizando las cenizas mientras el amanecer

sopló su vaho en un claro. Bob cantó

y tosió, cantó y tosió. Aún entonces,

me preguntaba cuánto tiempo más tenía.

Cada vez que su cuerpo sacudió, me agonizaba.

Me encantaba su improvisado, contaminado genio.

Esta noche está en el hospital de nuevo, solo,

y este poema es como una camarera que merece

una propina grande-la mitad del cuento-por decirme

es hora de dejar de tomar café e ir

y salvarle, hacer el único milagro

que me es permitido en esta vida, pero no,

porque Bob no es él quien yo debería salvar.

 

 

 

 

POEMS CHOSEN BY JOSE RICO AND ROBIN MYERS

BILL MOHR – New & Selected Poems (1978-2012)

 

From The Headwaters of Nirvana

Why the Heart Never Develops Cancer

Cro-Magnon

Dream Drain

The Bump

Wrinkles

Ars poetica

The curiosity of Marlene K. Section 7

Compared to what

The restoration

The trolley problem

The foot bridges

Death’s real job

One miracle

Complexities

Real days off

The ghoul convention

Reincarnation slaughterhouse

In the ocean of nothingness

The headwaters of Nirvana

 

From Poems from the 1980s

The Ambiguity of Motion

Naked chef

 

From Hidden Proofs

Vallejo

What allowed me to live to see this cat?

Scorpio in the summer

After rain

 

From Bitersweet Kaleidoscope

Milk

Weight

After many years of love

Bittersweet Kaleidoscope

The origins that memory considers

An answer

The offering

Elegy for Roy Orbinson

Eye chart for an orbiting space station

On the poetry of barbarians

How to quit writing poetry

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Music Performance Poetry

“A POSSIBILITY”: MUSIC AT THE SANTA MONICA CIVIC AUDITORIUM

August 8, 2013 – 10:27 am

“A POSSIBILITY”: MUSIC AT THE SANTA MONICA CIVIC AUDITORIUM

Thursday, August 8, 2013

News outlet reports that the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium would be shutting down its operations cited surprisingly few of the famous music groups and bands that performed at that venue. I was astonished, in fact, that so many substantial figures were left out of the Civic’s history, and began to wonder if the reporters actually had any knowledge (other than newly minted press releases from Santa Monica’s bureaucracy) of how many significant musicians had played there.

Before I had ever gone to a concert there, though, I had heard one of Harry Northup’s early poems, “Listening to Savoy Brown at the Santa Monica Civic.” Harry has graciously given me permission to include his poem, which is dedicated to Paul Blackburn, in this post.

if

if i if i

if i can       can get

can get       into       in-

to the rhy

rhy

rhy     the

rhythm of this

of this

of this

 

of this song

 

if i can get into the

rhythm of this song

if i can get

can get

can get

if i can get into the rhythm

if i can get into the rhythm of

this                 of this

of this song

if i can get into the rhythm of this song

there is

there is

a possibility.

 

aug 21, 1971

By the end of that decade, Patti Smith would be singing on the Civic stage the imperative to “seize the possibility.” The most underappreciated period of recent American poetry is the 1970s on the West Coast. The struggle to comprehend and subsequently seize the possibility of self-definition through small press production has only been partially documented in my book, HOLDOUTS, and a new generation of scholars needs to begin work on excavating the multiple layers awaiting their close reading. Along with the writing of his poet-spouse, Holly Prado (who is also an extraordinary poet). Harry Northup’s poetry needs to have a prominent space made for its vigorous, yet subtle audacity.

I asked Harry about other bands he heard at the Civic and he supplied me with the following list, in which he first praised in particular the music of Savoy Brown:

“I remember clearly how great the band was & in particular,
Kim Simmonds, the lead guitarist.  A great working class English blues band.

“I went to so many shows at the Civic from 1968 to 1973, including “Traffic,”
where I saw & talked with Jon Voight; Bob Marley, whose show was for some reason
transferred from the Shrine — it was like he was running in the sands of time;
The Allman Brothers; The Kinks; Steve Miller; Humble Pie with Steve Mariot —
what a beautiful voice; The Faces with Rod Stewart; Freddy King — the best blues
player — he looked like he had done time; & Van Morrison.  My first wife Rita &
I went, along with a bunch of surfers.” Harry added in a follow-up note that “Stevie Winwood of Traffic had the prettiest voice in rock and roll.”

The Civic was a venue that Harry and I both agree possessed great sight lines. There truly wasn’t a bad seat in the house. There were (and are) very few outlets of that peculiar capacity. Most venues are fairly small or huge stadium affairs. It’s not that easy (for performer or audience member) to find a stage that gives the both sides of the equation a chance to feel comfortable with its size and yet large enough to give a sense of occasion. The Civic did that.

I lived within a half-mile of the Civic for over 20 years. One advantage I had in attending concerts there was avoiding the hassle with parking. It was fairly easy to walk there or to find parking in one of the side-streets, that were blocked off enough from through traffic, so that only those who lived in Ocean Park would know about it.

Harry and I are hardly the only ones, however, who have affectionate memories of the Santa Monica Civic. Dennis Cooper’s diaries (at Special Collections at New York University) record his attendance at a concert by Iggy Pop and the Stooges at the Civic that Cooper regales as one of the highlights of his young life. When Bowie comes on stage as part of the encore, pandemonium (his word, if I recollect correctly) broke out. It wasn’t a riot, however, (or so it seems from Cooper’s description) so much as a moment when the carnivalesque took over, and there was (however briefly) an instance of collective liberation. The entire audience got a glimpse of what Northup had proposed: “a possibility.”

I want to close today’s post with the following list of 30 or so of the memorable concerts I’ve attended in California. Over a third of them were at the Santa Monica, McCabe’s Guitar Shop or Beyond Baroque. Obviously, there are dozens of musicians and composers whose work I never heard in a live setting, but wish I could have heard. I especially wish I could have seen some of the Motown groups. One treasures what fortune has provided. For instance, I only ended up attending the recording of Waits’s live concert because I walked into McCabe’s Guitar Shop and saw free tickets on the front counter. All I had to do was call a number and say I had picked up a ticket at McCabe’s, and I had a seat at a table less than 20 feet from Waits’s piano. I grabbed two “tickets” and called a new friend, Cher’rie Lawrence, and off we went.

 

Chrissy Hynde and the Pretenders – Santa Monica Civic (Her voice was even more full of timbre than on record.)

Minutemen – Beyond Baroque (as part of Jack Skelley’s Beyond Barbeque Series)

The Residents – Pasadena Concert circa 1984

Elvis Costello – First American Tour – Long Beach Arena; Los Angeles Sports Arena

(“Pump It Up” was his final song in these sets.)

X – The Whiskey A-Go-Go; with the Avengers – summer, 1978.

Among numerous other places I saw X were Club 88 and Santa Monica Civic (with Dave Alvin).

Exene Cervenka – The Alligator Lounge; May 30, 1995; The Prospector (Long Beach)

XTC – The Palladium (“Living through Another Cuba”)

David Bowie – The Forum – Summer, 1978; Anaheim Stadium (with the Go-Go’s)

Paul Simon – Santa Monica Civic – 1973/1974

Hollywood Bowl – Etta James & Solomon Burke (Summer, 2008)

B-52s and The Blasters — Los Angeles.

John Hiatt – Hollywood.

Solomon Burke and Etta James (Hollywood Bowl, 2008)

Tom Waits –  July 30, 1975

Rolling Stones – The Forum – June 11, 1972 (Stevie Wonder opened, and did not get as much applause as he deserved.)

Bill Evans (1929-1980) – San Francisco (with Harley Lond). This concert was in the late 1970s, and when I heard about his death not that much longer after hearing him live, I realized how fortunate I had been to have this one encounter.

Harry Partch – University of California, Los Angeles. Delusion of the Fury

Bob Dylan – Long Beach Civic Auditorium – 2008

(I once walked out on a Dylan concert. It was at a venue in Hollywood in 1978. I can’t recall what he was playing, but it was most certainly not songs from Blood on the Tracks nor his mid-1960s albums. He was listless and seemed merely to be going through the motions.)

Deborah Iyall and Romeo Void – Eureka, CA 1981

Stan Ridgeway and Wall of Voodoo – Santa Monica Civic, 1982

Rickie Lee Jones – Belly Up Tavern, Salerno Beach.

Beck – University of California, San Diego.

Bo Diddley – Redondo Beach club, summer, 1969

Wim Mertens – McCabe’s Guitar Shop (one of my favorite musical performances of all time).

Ray Manzarek  (with Michael C. Ford) – McCabe’s Guitar Shop

Chick Corea – Santa Monica Civic.

Talking Heads – Hollywood Bowl.

Patti Smith –the Roxy (her first show after Horses came out). Santa Monica Civic and Beyond Baroque.

Oingo Boingo – I’m quite sure I saw them live, but can’t remember where. (“Dead Man’s Party” is a classic.)

Suburban Lawns – Santa Monica Civic.

Bruce Springsteen – at least a half-dozen times. Santa Barbara, where he ended with an incredible version of “Jungleland”; Santa Monica Civic; Los Angeles Sports Arena; and the Coliseum.

Of course, there are also concerts I almost heard, but ended up having to leave before the music started. In particular, I was invited by a poet friend, who had an extra ticket, to see Neil Young at the Forum in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, this person was prone to substance abuse and became ill once we were at the Forum and I had to drive her home before the lights came down.

 

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Poetry

CLOUD ACTION

August 6, 2013 – 8:08 pm

CLOUD ACTION

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

In the early 1980s, Eva Poole-Gibson managed to pull together enough resources to have poets come from all over California to participate in a large-scale poets-in-the-schools program. Some of the poets who were part of this event were Gail Newman, Kit Robinson, Katherine Harer, Jack Grapes, Duane Big Eagle, John Oliver Simon and myself. I don’t remember off-hand whether this gathering happened two or three times. At one of the meetings, all of the poets contributed to a group poem, which was run off on orange paper without much of an attempt to establish consistency. Some line start with capital letters; others don’t. I’ve tried to reproduce the poem’s wording as accurately as possible. This collaboration remains one of my favorite instances of working as a poet.

 

CLOUD ACTION

 

That fleck of snow especially

I can ride my purse like a butterfly

The seconds watching the sky and the clouds

trying to find odd pictures

My home, where, in the theaters, the audience is

the performers and the performers, the audience

I smell what people are thinking

Clocks like to tick and tock helplessly for people

Air like whisper of cloud but not very loud

Animal land is as big as ten football stadiums

It’s actually a figmentation of your imagination

Planet 1981 is old and fake

Mountains look like clay shaped objects of glass

Your voice crying out in a dark closet

Listen to the birds sing and cheer

I’m battered by the question

My chair is hot and tired

I feel like needles

Some feelings I have never talked about in my life

The cat whips by as fast as the noises

of an ocean a million years ago

Because he is very very skeleton

this bed has an eye I’ve never seen before

the size of the rag is 20

executing the unknown through passion

a shaver for Bob Hope

inside this balloon I have a big safe

made of grey steel

the iron wings of time

nausea is a season, it’s winter

my book loses its letters

inside my heart it’s the shape of a fist

my days will be exciting

as big as a young world

it smells like a dog’s breath

with no color, it’s just glass

beside barracuda Connecticut come a cut

a cake of half a cab

he always would turn ten times and spit

a bucket is like an image in the grass

to tease a nervous grandmother is like a neon sign

my feelings are the color of the walls

a screen burst out, a hint to a mystery

we wallpapered the house and found the key

a murmur is heard as a flavor seeps through

a black rose, its thorns tearing at your heart

salamander stilt damsel flies

tunes, tunes that name

waves, waves of yards

what we feel is real

I’m a big one in space

running fingers stumble, cry out, talent, no!

yes yes YES!

baseball feels like tension in the worst degree

if she’s running from the sun, what’s she doing

living in a lightbulb?

and then the eagle turns back to a statue

I then lit a bulb and saw thousands of hands

mountains looking down upon the people like bald eagles

unneeded horses munching contentedly

it has no hair and funny symbols like this: SUN WORLD

my hair is stubby because I have to shave it off

when I wear shorts

I believe in dinner

I sit in a chair and look at the door

my flat ball feels like a rotten smashed egg

the right eye keeps getting in the left eye’s way

like a curious giant they bend across the path

at the beginning it was joyment

it was the truth of my mind

in the back of the truck a carpet on top of the mattress

I can sleep without blankets

blankness freezes your mind to an embarrassment

poems taste like ice cream

the spider says, until I have a cobweb I will not eat

the bushes have clouds in them

Two birds lift an interchangeable color

MY OUTSIDE SELF is as flat as can be

I poured popcorn on the lion’s head

Watermelons are growing through the

windows of your house

a single fragment of nature’s imagination, yet so am I

shadows that talk harshly

cowboy likes his sister’s horse

he was getting tires at school

all I do is watch a white horse run

through orange poppies

my special power is the way I live

my hair is blowing like a tornado

leaving behind the song of walls that go

to and fro over the places of room

maybe nobody is magic but it wouldn’t hurt!

heat ripples in the air and sand

hitting the glass of my helmet

I see sun birds

a lady with antennas in a glass rocket

having those stars twinkling in your beautiful face

my dreams are in a bottle with 100 red doors

many lost games led to perfect perfection

nobody knows except the spiny shadow of the moon

my face is in trouble, red is the mask of reality

I feel like I have a bone in my head

the dinosaurs were good at first

I want the world to turn faster

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Music Performance Poetry

Michael Hedges

July 30, 2013 – 1:17 pm

MICHAEL HEDGES (1953-1997)

TUESDAY, July 30, 2013

The longest single job I’ve held was as a typesetter at Radio & Records, from 1985 to 1995; every couple years the tedium of production work on a weekly newspaper would be reinvigorated by the brief appearance of a famous performer or songwriter. A few of the “stars” who dropped by included Tina Turner, Julian Lennon and Michael Jackson. Jackson was perhaps the biggest surprise in terms of his personal presence. As he made his way around the large production room with its paste-up tables and camera equipment, he seemed to acknowledge each of us without any sense of distraction or yearning to be elsewhere with someone else. In making eye contact as he shook my hand, he held as tight to the brevity of our greeting as anyone in his position could possibly manage. He seemed guileless in doing so. He had nothing to gain from extending himself even that much and he earned my respect for that as much as for his slithering choreography and the soothing turbulence of his music.

One week we all received an invitation to attend a performance by Michael Hedges at A&M studios.  I’m not sure what the occasion was, although it was obviously an event intended to be an industry gathering. No tickets were for sale nor was it advertised. Hedges performed his compositions with a passion and verve that I have rarely encountered in any artist in any medium. I would not trade this memory of hearing Hedges perform for being at any performance by any contemporary musician. At the time, I was working on the title portion of my long poem, “Barely Holding Distant Things Apart.” While Hedges was playing, the only words I could come up with to describe the effect of his music were “Tibetan / marching / band.” Afterwards, Cathay Gleeson (my first wife) and I went to a back room to talk with him. We were complete strangers, but he listened to our comments on his music as if we were friends from his days as a student at the Peabody Conservatory. My recollection is that Cathay spontaneously gave him a small crystal assemblage she was wearing.

He was in his mid-40s when he died as a result of an automobile accident in 1997. In the decade and a half since, I’ve thought continually not only of his music, but of the integrity he brought to its expression. I’ve always been dismayed at how few poets seem to know his work. Anyone who is reading this blog should immediately start using their computers to become familiar with the musical visions of Michael Hedges.

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Poetry

“some coffee” and “some more coffee”

July 23, 2013 – 7:26 pm

“some coffee” and “some more coffee”

TUESDAY, July 23, 2013

Note from the return journey: About seven miles from Pine Cove, on the way up from Banning, the pavement turned wet as if the heavy mist had dragged a soggy curtain right across the road and trailed it all the rest of the route into Idyllwild. The rain had stopped an hour and a half earlier, according to a young woman working at the counter of the grocery store in town. By the time I checked in at Idyllwild Arts, a very light rain had started up again. Ed Skoog told me that almost two inches fell yesterday, and every bit of it helped squelch the fire.  It’s difficult to believe not only that the evacuation order has been lifted, but that there is a town to return to.

There are several blogs I enjoy reading: Harry Northup, Amy King, Oriana Ivy, and Brooks Roddan are among my favorites. Brooks posted a short play yesterday; the ping-pong dialogue and his citation of the reader’s suggestion about a time-gap reminded me of Ted Berrigan’s poem, “In the Wheel.”

In Berrigan’s poem, the gravidity is not an ornamental detail, but suggests how the image (“an emotional or intellectual complex in an instant of time”) shifts with the passage of time in the narrator’s subjectivity. The question is not about the desire or need for more coffee, but whether he would genuinely “like” the arrival of more coffee, as if the drink were a friend who wanted to join the table. In affirming her request, Berrigan picks up his cup and hands it to her so that she doesn’t have to bend to pour the coffee. It’s seems like an infinitely minor kindness, but one that is not taken for granted by the waitress. Perhaps one of the most subtle differences between the play and poem, however, comes in the opening question:

“Would you like more coffee?” (Roddan)

“Would you like

Some more coffee?” (Berrigan)

The presence of the word “some” suggests a portion of amplitude. I must admit I never before noticed that word in this poem by Berrigan. I would like to write some more about that word, but I can’t quite break through to it yet. It does strike me, though, that WC Williams’s poem, “This Is Just to Say,” would be quite different if it had begun:

I have eaten

Some plums…..

 

Two People: a play in one act

Monday, July 22, 2013

Me: Would you like more coffee?

She: No thank you, I’m satisfied with what I have.

Me: Then I’ll be unsatisfied with what I don’t have.

It’s a short play, :09 seconds in a normal reading, though several actors who’ve performed it draw upon the nuances to give it a more leisurely pace. One reader suggested that the time-gap between the female’s answer to the male’s question and the male’s response be elongated to the degree that more dramatic tension might be wrung out of the exchange.

In The Wheel

The pregnant waitress asks
‘Would you like
some more coffee?’
Surprised out of the question
I wait seconds ‘Yes,
I think I would!’ I hand her
my empty cup, &
‘thank you!’ she says. My pleasure.

Ted Berrigan

 

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Poetry

Diane Wakoski’s Idyllwild Lecture

July 15, 2013 – 10:05 am

Diane Wakoski’s Idyllwild lecture

July 15, 2013

In continuing to think about Diane Wakoski’s lecture about the secret within the secret of a poem, I’ve reminded myself of how long it took me to find the “secret” that W.C. Williams retained in plain sight in his “Poem” (“As the cat / climbed over ….”). In thinking of that poem again, and of Wakoski’s lecture, I’ve also wondered if one of the sources of Wakoski’s imperative is Yeats’s comment about poetry being rooted in a quarrel with ourselves. If the challenge, according to Wakoski, is to reveal one provisional secret while retaining an essential secret, then perhaps the quarrel grows most contentious when the poet confronts the question of how to disguise their antipodal feints at each other. The more vivid the constitutive metaphor, the more likely the reader’s conviction that the disguise itself has a secret of which even the poet is not aware.

 

 

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Performance Poetry

Idyllwild Poetry Week

July 14, 2013 – 7:01 pm

IDYLLWILD POETRY WEEK

July 14, 2013

In the summer of 1999, Cecilia Woloch organized a week-long poetry conference at the Idyllwild Arts Academy. Over the course of the next nine summers, Woloch managed a rotating line-up of poets that could serve as an idiosyncratic model for that endangered species of literary projects, the anthology of contemporary poets. The following is not a complete list of those Woloch selected to give featured readings at Idyllwild, but it’s sufficiently comprehensive to provide an accurate survey of her curatorial sensibility:

Chris Abani

Ellen Bass

John Brandi

Christopher Buckley

Marilyn Chin

Lucille Clifton

Wanda Coleman

Billy Collins

Brendan Constantine

Richard Garcia

James Baker Hall

Eloise Klein Healy

Peter J. Harris

Terrance Hayes

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Galway Kinnell

Carolyn Kizer

Ted Kooser

Yusef Komunyakaa

Maxine Kumin

Suzanne Lummis

Tom Lux

Bill Mohr

Harryette Mullen

Carol Muske-Dukes

Marilyn Nelson

Naomi Shihab Nye

Sharon Olds

Holly Prado

Doren Robbins

Aleida Rodriguez

Maurya Simon

Gerald Stern

David St. John

Natasha Tretheway

Quincy Troupe

Ellen Bryant Voight

Charles Harper Webb

Cecilia Woloch

Robert Wrigley

Of these 40 poets, half are women; one-fourth of the total represent a range of poetics within African-American poetry that is difficult, if not impossible, to find embedded in current anthologies. On a number count alone, Woloch deserves considerable recognition for going far beyond an all too prevalent tokenism that still seems to operate within American poetry, especially within the academy.

Unfortunately, the Idyllwild poetry festival had to scale back its programming after the international economic debacle in 2008. A week of workshops and readings still takes place in July under the direction of Ed Skoog, who brought in Diane Wakoski and Richard Kenney as featured poets this year. David St. John was originally scheduled to lead a workshop, but had to drop out at the last moment and Kenney took his place.

As in past years, I am only able to attend the poetry programming in the evening because I teach a day-long class in fiction writing at Idyllwild’s summer arts camp. This past Friday, however, I managed to catch the final quarter-hour of a lecture by Diane Wakoski. The culminating trope of her talk involved the layers of secrets intermingling in a poem’s undulations. She emphasized that the crucial tension in a poet’s work involves the knowledge of a secret that must be addressed in the poem but cannot be revealed. As Wakoski cited examples of how this oscillation works out in poets such as Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, I thought of the way I explained poetry to young students in the San Gabriel Valley in the early 1980s: “A poem does not solve a mystery; it creates one.” I remember that at one school my comment was reported by the classroom’s teacher to the principal as a “dangerous” idea. I kid you not. On one hand, I was dismayed that what I was teaching grade school students about poetry could be categorized as insidious knowledge; on the other hand, I felt gratified that my work in various poet-in-the-schools programs was doing more than simply reinforcing the predictable habits of literacy.

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