I'm Better Than You Because of Stuff I Like

I know how this feels - it used to be me.

The Selfishness of The Poetry Reader

Dick Allen

Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America
who reads poems
and who walks at night in the suburbs,
calling the moon names.


And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns
a house with bookshelves,
who drives to work without a CD player,
taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.


No one else, in all America,
Quotes William Meredith verbatim,
cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;
keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed.


Sometimes I think no other man alive
is changed by poetry, has fought
as utterly as I have over "Sunday Morning"
and vowed to love those as difficult as Pound.


No one else has seen a luna moth
flutter over Iowa, or watched
a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,
and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.


This country wide, I'm the only man
who spends his money recklessly on thin
volumes unreviewed, enjoys
the long appraising look of check-out girls.


How could another in America know why
the laundry from a window laughs,
and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck
feels like-and craft?


I think I'm the only man who speaks
of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;
for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who can't
stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest.


The only man, in all America, who feeds
on something darker than his politics,
who writes in margins and who earmarks pages-
in all America, I am the only man.




When you're growing up, planting the seeds of who you're turning to, it's hard to see how small your world is. Your family, friends, people you see at school or work or church, that's your entire society. When I didn't find anyone who devoured poetry like I did, I just assumed no-one else in the entire world would. (It's just you and me, T.S.!)


You can feed on that kind of solitude and solidarity with people long dead. You feel like you're their only true reader, nobody understands them like you, and that works the other way around, too. It's a secret shared, a ritual performed, a hidden society no-one can ever revoke your membership from.


But as usually happens, I got older. I found kindred spirits who wrote poetry but weren't dead. And eventually I lost most of the chip on my shoulder about poetry. Now I can appreciate that it's not something everyone reads or even likes, but quite a few do. Not a lot of people I know are into knitting or fly-fishing or mid-eighteenth-century harpsichord music. But some of them are, and that's great.


I found this editorial by former poet laureate Charles Simic, who made a shocking discovery: the state of poetry in America is as healthy or more so than it has ever been. So as much as I appreciate the loneliness of the long-distance poetry lover, I don't feel that way anymore. I love the things I love, and you don't have to, it doesn't make either of us any worse.


Now back to tasting plums from the icebox, mending walls and daring to disturb the universe.

I Don't Deal Well with Joy

Or at least what's supposed to make me happy. It just gets to be too much and I can't deal. Maybe it's the frenetic 21st-century pace with multitasking hyperthreaded intertextualizing, but when there's stuff that I know I'm going to REALLY want to take notice of, I keep putting it off with a hint of guilty hesitation.


It might be the newest album by the Really Important Band I Am Hardcore Crushing On, or The Book by a Hip Author That Seems Like Exactly What I'm Looking For, or even just A Website I Should Take Closer Notice Of.


It's almost like the whole world is a checklist of things I'm supposed to see, hear, feel, experience, watch, embrace, critique, and the big things are just slowing me down. Better to do a whole bunch of little things, the satisfaction of the red pen crossing items out so that even if I'm no closer to the goal at least I can point to something I did. 


Case in point: poetry and the contemporary world. I'm way more comfortable with dead people. I don't think they're any better than us, they just tend to talk back less, have more accepted interpretations, and most importantly, I can come to them with my own biases, approaches and decisions and they don't get to tell me what to do.


I know that on the Internet every single vice, subculture, interest, hobby and permutation has its own usergroup, flagship site, splinter cells and memes. Same with poetry. But I hesitate to dive into that pond: it's big, I'm unsure of the temperature and especially what animals or organisms might have gotten there before me. Even this blog was something of a leap of faith, meager as such a hop is.


I found an interesting discussion tonight on enjambment and line breaks. Well thought out, civil, some good points and some very personal ones. The kind of thing you might imagine I'd leap to wade into. Instead I have to hang back. 


A friend of mine posted this link to a "weird corner of the internet" which seems to be an alley of Craigslist where users post and respond to haiku like the traditional haiku contests in feudal Japan. Cool, right? I want in, right? Nuh-uh. 


I'm happy to lurk, browse, muse, respond in private. But setting up an account I've got to keep track of, monitoring responses and new topics, keeping abreast of the developments and feuds and politics...


Or maybe I'm avoiding what the real issue is: I've been burned. Whether the topic is Maya Angelou, Pedro the Lion, Battlestar Galactica, health care reform, Creative Commons Licenses... It always seems to devolve into the bullies, the cowards and the cops, where beatdowns, shakedowns and crackdowns rule the day. I've got enough drama with the people I know. I don't want to get into a pissing contest slash arm wrestle (I believe that's the indigenous Alaskan pastime) with people I'll never meet on subjects that aren't life or death.


Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps my refusal to become a member, "be a joiner," sign up for groups or activities is just more of my misanthropic introversion. It's easier to feel good when you pity yourself, unconstrained by other people's thoughts or feelings, assured of the rightness of your own cause and the universal dirtiness and infamy of the rest of the world.


Or maybe I just don't want to have to keep up with one more username and password.


Regardless, here are a few of my favorites from Haiku Hotel, the aforementioned Craigslist poets' corner.

fire safe cigarettes 

mistymoon

april angst 
smoking 2 cigarettes 
at the same time 

baby baby baby

pukindog

It's nothing fancy 
just God's honest truth from a 
slightly askew postulation 

m 

rytis

slapping mosquitoes - 
their blood trickles 
with mine 

Rubbernecking in a Garden of Sorrows

When I started this blog idea I was pretty sure it'd be a trip down memory lane with a lot of my favorite poems, with a few new discoveries along the way. Instead, it's really been an avenue to discover things I'd never read, especially contemporary poetry (with which I've had a complex and not always happy relationship). 


A lot of it is finding new ways to encounter poems: podcasts (Curtis Fox's "Poetry Off the Shelf" is especially tasteful and fascinating), websites (poets.org has got great mini-bios and samples of work both text and audio) and I'm still looking into several iPhone apps that seem promising. 


I found this in the Poetry Foundation's podcast series "Essential American Poets" - check it out on their website or via iTunes.

There She Is

Linda Gregg

When I go into the garden, there she is.
The specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.
There is blood on her face.
I can see she has done this to herself.
So she would not feel the other pain.
And it is true, she does not feel it.
She does not even see me.
It is not she anymore, but the pain itself
that moves her. I look and think
how to forget. How can I live while she
stands there? And if I take her life
what will that make of me? I cannot
touch her, make her conscious.
It would hurt her too much.
I hear the sound all through the air
that was her eating, but it is on its own now,
completely separate from her. I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.




The mystery and ambiguity are a little maddening in their being so elusive. It's like there's an analogy being drawn to something so obvious, but I can't quite make out what it is. 


I don't think it's as simple as a ghost story or an image from a penny dreadful. There's something deeper at play here, but I can't parse it out. An animal chewing its way from a trap? A bird caught in the garden feeder? Suicide or self-harm or something else entirely?


I keep returning to it because I can't look away.

I Speak on Behalf of Madonna and Robin Wright

Man, I love this. It's funny, wise, bored, existential, silly, pedantic and most of all lambasts Sean Penn, giving him his just desserts for being way too Sean Penn.

Sean Penn Anti-Ode

Dean Young

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb
so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.
Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.
Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up
and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.
Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,
regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,
internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment
of laboratory animals.
Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.
Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.
Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.
The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.
Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.
The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.




And lest you think this is too much, try this too much of a muchness on for size.

Clichés

Here's something that's not very good, but it was worth working on. It's a villanelle, which is a very strict form involving a lot of repetition and rhyming words. I listened to a podcast which in passing mentioned phrases they hated, just trite hackneyed things people say to fill up time and space. 


So I made a list of ones I could think of for myself as well as ones I researched online. I used that master list to pull phrases from, and this is how things ended up.

At the End of the Day

Matt Quarterman

Long story short, the difference is the same.
No offense, let’s not and say we did.
It is what it is at the end of the day.


When chips are down we put the ball in play:
For all intents and purposes it’s my bad.
Long story short, the difference is the same.


It’s sick and wrong but still too soon to say
So girlfriend, no offense, talk to the hand.
It is what it is at the end of the day.


But here’s the thing - we do what it takes
So one thing leads to another, it’s said.
Long story short, the difference is the same.


Good times, good times, when all’s done and said.
But bottom line, with all due respect,
It is what it is at the end of the day.


All things considered, there’s nothing to say.
You know what I mean. You catch my drift.
Long story short, the difference is the same.
It is what it is at the end of the day.

Saturday Suck: Screw You Guys, I'm Going Home (To My Mansion)

Respect my authori-taaaaay!


That's right, ladies and gentleman, you heard it here first, Charles Bukowski is Eric Cartman. Proof, you say?

"But Matt," you may say, "that's just a terrible Photoshop job, not actual proof!" 


Is it? Is it merely that? Or is it evidence of SO MUCH MORE?!?!?!

gold in your eye

charles bukowski

i got into my bmw and draw down to my bank to
pick up my american express gold card.


i told the girl at the desk what i
wanted.


"youre mr. chinaski", she
said.


"yes, you want some
i.d.?"


"oh no, we know you..."


i slipped the card into my wallet
went back to parking
got into the bmw (paid for, straight
cash)
and decided to drive down to the liquor store
for a case of fine
wine.


on the way, i further decided to write a poem
about the whole thing: the bmw, the bank, the
gold card
just to piss-off the
critics
the writers
the readers


who much preferred the old poems about me
sleeping on park benches while
freezing and dying of cheap wine and
malnutrition.


this poem is for those who think that
a man can only be creative
genius
at the very
edge
even though they never had the
guts to
try it.




Let's break this down. As always, the line breaks are completely arbitrary. The rhythm is too erratic to be poetry and too stilted to be prose. And yeah, that's right, he's too cool and too rich for capitalization. But there's something far more distasteful and actually kind of tacky about the whole thing.


He's awesome now, he's not a drunk or if he is it's by choice not out of necessity. He's the celebrated hero of the counter-culture, a literary lion who can't be bothered with "street cred" or "doing good work"  because the business of being ridiculously amazing takes up far too much of his time. Hey, he's too fantastic for his own name, deciding that in his poems and stories he'll call himself "Henry Chinaski" in the hopes none of us will notice that fast switcheroo he pulled.


You can't judge him, you're not Bukowski enough! Walk a mile in his rotgut-soaked hobo shoes, throw up in the gutter, sling some words around Mickey Rourke and get rich, THEN you can judge him for the true genius he is!


So all snark aside, I've come to hate Bukowski's work. I was all primed to like it in high school, having heard of him third-hand: he's debauched, degenerate but still literate, influential on my early heroes like Bono. So I asked my mom to pick me up a book of his when she was back in the States on a trip. She went to Books-a-Million and chose one more or less at random. (It was "Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems," if you'd like to know. And by the way, having your poetry available at Books-a-Million is indeed a warning sign.)


So all excited, I started in and found myself having to grimace through the book, acting as though I liked it. Sure, it was literate, in that he knew some big words and had read a thing or two. It was debauched and degenerate, but not with the mystique of Baudelaire or Mallarmé doing opium or absinthe. It was more like Lee Marvin getting trashed with his horse in Catballoo, which is to say sad and comical (mostly unintentionally) and a little disheartening.


Bukowski has come to represent much of what I dislike in contemporary poetry, but especially the myth of contemporary poets. You have to be an outcast, an outsider, a rebel in order to make something of worth. The proper response to the world around you is flipping the middle finger to the man as you ride off half-stoned on your motorcycle, sporting aviator shades and a black turtleneck under a bomber jacket.


It's all so hackneyed and boring. It reminds me of this.

Yeah, Chuck or Henry or whatever you're called, you're so different and special just like all the other toolbags who think being a jackass and drinking copious amounts of lager is the same thing as poetry. For some reason, a comparison with John Mayer springs to mind. If John Mayer thinks being a fratboy womanizer makes you a credible songwriter and artist, why shouldn't Bukowski think being an alcoholic egomaniac turns you into the finest wordsmith of your aging generation?

And then he has the gall to turn around and say, "What? Me? Naw, man, you've got it all wrong, I'm rich and well-known, loved by most everybody, total upper-class bourgeois bohemian and STILL I write the way I used to! Being poor doesn't make you a great artist." 

Well, sure, unless you've worn that like a placard around your neck at every step of your career, and then discarded at your convenience. It casts doubts about his sincerity and hungry drive in the first place. You either get to be sloshed tortured genius Henry Chinaski or aging-celebrity-poet Charles Bukowski, but don't turn on a dime and tell me it's a nickel.

My moral for this story? Whether in an alley or a penthouse, being an oversized UPS delivery of douche doesn't de facto make your writing worth anyone's time.

If you're so rich, why aren't you good?

Battle of the Bards

Just got done playing a show with Star Called Sun, and we had a fantastic time. I managed to completely botch a song or two, which added to the fun for me. But I thought of this tonight.

The Guitarist Tunes Up

Frances Cornford

With what attentive courtesy he bent
Over his instrument;
Not as a lordly conqueror who could
Command both wire and wood,
But as a man with a loved woman might,
Inquiring with delight
What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she, to play.




Oddly enough, to my tastes music and poetry don't go together very well. Poets are fascinated by musicians and especially composers, and quite a few composers love setting poetry to music. But rarely is the result successful. It's like the two musics compete with each other and the reader loses both.


I think Cornford manages to have one of the few excellent verses that seems to say something about both music and poetry without harming either. I've often thought of taping this to my electronic tuner, although it'd be mostly symbolic considering the font size I'd need to use. 


I'll end with an interesting bit of trivia: Cornford was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin.

Fitting and Delicious

I heard Donald Hall read this on a podcast tonight, and I love the way he speaks his verse. I get so tired of poets who run their sentences on and on with an up-and-down lilt like they're sibyls intoning meth-head nonsense. It literally sounds like Dylan Thomas with vocal coaching by the Monks of Santo Domingo. Hall reads like he actually knows what the sentences mean, assigning necessary weight and depth to each line and each word. 


This is perhaps his most well-known poem, and rightfully so. Compare this with goth/emo "Death is in love with us" poetry and tell me which you find more convincing. (For further reading, check out "Christmas Eve in Whitneyville.")


Here's audio of his reading the poem, together with a brief, somewhat disingenuously self-effacing introduction.

Affirmation

Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

How Not to Be Seen

Found another by yesterday's poet, David Wagoner, can't help myself. Especially since, like me, he's a transplant to the Pacific Northwest and Seattle in particular who can't get the place out of his head.

The Principles of Concealment

David Wagoner

If you’re caught in the open
   In an exposed position, alone,
      Disarmed, and certain you may be
Attacked at any moment, you should settle quickly
   All your differences with whatever lies
      Around you, forcing yourself to agree
With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,
   Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris
      To find what you have in common. You no longer
Want to seem what you are, but something
   Harmless and familiar: in a landscape
      Given to greenness and the cold pastels
Of stubble and field stone,
   Protective coloration may be too much
      To hope for, beyond your powers
Like the beatitudes of browsing
   And those conspicuously alarming colors
      That declare you’re poisonous
Or taste terrible—all may be doomed
   To fail with an enemy equipped to kill
      From a distance. Your shape betrays you,
And you should try to break it
   With disruptive patterns: if an enemy sees you,
      Not as a whole, but as a head distinct
From a torso, as legs or arms
   By themselves—he may ignore you
      And let you have your moment
In the sun as an abstraction gone
   To pieces, as a surface mottled and dappled
      Ambiguously by intercepted light
Like a man cancelled. But all these efforts
   Will come to nothing if you move: one gesture
      May catch all eyes. If you stand
Still then, or stay seated
   If you’re sitting down, or go on lying
      Down if you’re lying, an easy solution
May occur to you, cheek to cheek
   With the hard facts of inorganic life:
      That you have no enemy,
That no one is hunting you,
   That all your precautions were a waste
      Of attention better given to more rewarding
Evasions and pursuits. If so,
   And you take your place again
      As a distinct departure
From your foreground and background,
   You should know it’s possible
      For you to feel, after all,
At the first step, at the first crack
   Out of the box, that lethal impact,
      That private personal blow marking your loss
Of the light of day, the companionship
   Of the night, and the creature comforts of home
      As you become a member
Of that other civilization spreading itself
   Around you, ready and able and still
      Called the natural world.


It does bring to mind this, however.

Unerotica

Once again, I'm alerting you to the fact that there are adult themes and situations in tonight's post. I can't see how anybody could really be offended by this, but there are some people who love nothing more than taking offense. Go ahead, take all the offense, don't leave any for the rest of us!

Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love

David Wagoner

She's like a singer straying slowly off key
while trying too hard to remember the words to a song
without words, and her accompanist
is metronomically dead set
to sustain her pitch and tempo, and meanwhile,
under their feathers and springs, under their carpet,
under my own ceiling, I try to go on
making something or other out of nothing
but those missing words, whose rhythm is only
predictable for unpredictable moments
and then erratic, unforeseeable even
at its source where it ought to be abundantly,
even painfully clear. A song is a series of vowels
interrupted and shaped by consonants
and silence, and gifted singers say if you can
pronounce words and remember how to breathe,
you can sing. Although I know some words by heart
and think I know how to breathe (even down here
at work alone) and may be able sometimes
to write some of them down, right now it seems
improbable they'll have anything much like
the permissive diction, the mounting cadences,
now, or then, or now again the suspended
poise, the drift backward, the surprise
of the suddenly almost soundless catch
of the caught breath, the quick
loss of support
which wasn't lost at all as it turns out
but found again and even again
somewhere, in midair, far, far above me.




Man, the descriptions are so imaginative yet completely apt, nothing forced or strained. (Except the obvious.) Again, I don't know and don't care if this actually happened to him or he conjured it up out of whole cloth - it's completely true regardless of the facts.


I heard this on a podcast tonight as I was out on a walk and it made me literally laugh out loud to myself. Most sitcoms, stand-up specials and YouTube teenager-injuring-themselves-in-an-appropriate-twist-of-fate videos can't make me do that. I guess I just wasn't ready, especially when the punch lines are up front and the weight is at the end.

Lorca and the Frantic Guy Outside My House

I'd already found this poem to post for tonight, so I'll share this first.

Casida of the Dark Doves

Federico García Lorca

Trans. W.S. Merwin

Through the branches of the laurel
I saw two dark doves.
The one was the sun,
the other the moon.
Little neighbors, I said to them,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
And I who was walking
with the earth at my belt
saw two eagles of marble
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was no one.
Little eagles, I said to them,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun,
in my throat, said the moon.
Through the branches of the laurel
I saw two naked doves.
The one was the other
and both were no one.




Apparently, a casida is a Persian form, a longer poem with a particular structure featuring a single rhyme. I'm not sure why, since even in the original Spanish there are multiple rhymes, and the poem itself is quite short. But the repetition, the imagery, the silence all around the poem is pretty stunning. 


As I was on the porch reading this, someone walked by across the street proclaiming, almost yelling. I don't know if he was agitated, crazy or just on a cell phone. But he said this.


"Shake your ass all the way to the hospital!"


It's a great line, a little Beat, a little Bukowski in it (not my favorite poet but we'll deal with that another time). It just drove home the point that there's poetry all around us, but only if you're listening. And only if you make it poetry by the way you listen.