The Miracle Shirker

Mixed Messages

2007-04-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

I was searching unsuccessfully for a Mexican soccer match on TV one recent Wednesday evening and I found I couldn't avoid seeing simultaneous gossip shows covering the so-called story about Alec Baldwin chewing out his daughter over the phone. The next story was also about some father/daughter relationship gone wrong, and so forth until I realized that there was a poem in there somewhere. So far so good.

To complicate matters, however, I'd also been meaning to write a poem entitled "Blood and Treasure" since that's suddenly the buzz-phrase for why the Iraq war is such a waste. I hadn't figured out what to say beyond that, though, so the poem hadn't progressed beyond its title. And although people will publish a poem with no title, they won't publish a title without a poem.

Anyhow, I sat down at the computer to compose the first poem, but got stuck once I'd tinkered with ways of describing not-so-smart Alec's situation. So I started in on "Blood and Treasure" instead, but didn't get any farther than "Expended in a wasted effort, by definition."

Enter the genius of the cut and paste tool in Microsoft Word. I decided to combine the little false starts to both poems, and suddenly there was a new thing: a commentary on politics as well as on our current obsession with fatherhood. The thing sprouted wings, though I'm not sure where it's flying. I did switch the opening sentence around a bit, to suit Alec's spoiled-brat version of paternalism.

Blood and Treasure/Father and Daughter

Wasted in an expensive effort,
by definition, Alec Baldwin
bullies his ten-year-old daughter’s
insolent answering machine.
Iraqi Freedom is too precious
to account for all families in crisis;
so Blackwater and Halliburton
investigate the parentage
of Anna Nicole Smith’s newsworthy offspring.
Jenna Bush writes a book on AIDS
because her father likes to make war
promiscuously. Tom Cruise invents
a missile, and then finds a woman
to convert to an acronym.
Lynn Cheney is forced to don
a burka at gunpoint; she smiles inanely.
Britney Spears plays Guantanamo Bay
where Johnny Cash winces paternally
and gives her some pills.
Lynndie England’s daddy wouldn’t
undress in front of her. Jessica Lynch
had to be rescued from the river
one fateful picnicking Saturday.
Donald Rumsfeld stalks his little girl’s
unwitting prospective boyfriend, who paints
a frog, absentmindedly, on a sidewalk
near her Arizona home.
Saddam Hussein fathered many children;
some of them are now presumably women.
Do they miss him? Does it even matter?
Blood and treasure, father and daughter:
they always seem to go together
like peace and war, or oil and water.
No love that hurts so stupidly
and innocently can last forever.

I'm not sure what to make of this strange experiment in grafting two poems together; I suppose it's possible to see post-Saddam Iraq as the USA's disobedient/recalcitrant/resentful/righteously indignant daughter...

My friend Victor Schnickelfritz would no doubt say that such a defamiliarizing strategy is long overdue in my work. In any event, now there's a poem where previously there were two little nubs of nothing. I'm not sure if or when I'll try this again, but it was worth an attempt.

Here's the url for an article co-written by Katrina Onstad (a friend of mind from my college days) on the topic of lousy celebrity fathers, just for fun.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/baddaddiscussion.html

Poetry Out Loud

2007-03-31T07:47:00.000-07:00

I can't keep silent anymore; I have to blog (or brag) a bit about Poetry Out Loud, the high school poetry recitation contest that I'm involved with here in Sacramento. The brainchild of Dana Gioia, this nationwide contest gets kids to memorize a classic or contemporary poem, recite it (with dramatic gestures, if possible), and compete for prizes including a college scholarship. It's a great idea, and it has brightened up the last two winters for yours truly. The Sacramento Bee published a little write-up just before the California state competition, and I followe up with this poem, written just after it was over.

I get to participate in the event in my own way, too: when I go and visit high schools to publicize the contest, they usually want me to give a demonstration of how to recite a poem, so I oblige them. Anyway, here's the poem that tries to sum up the experience of a performance.

The Recitation

First, the shyly confident greeting,
then the poem’s title and author.
Deep, deep breaths. Head up. Begin
with words, clearly enunciated,
projecting subtle determination.

I am a presence and a person
to be reckoned with. I open
my heart to you, syllable
by syllable. Pay more attention.

May I offer you this gesture
as proof that I’m not just up here
floating bodiless in space?

I do have hands, arms, wrists,
shoulders, elbows, fingers, teeth.
Don’t look now, but my young face
is staring at you, an imperious mask
forged out of vowels and consonants.

I’d eat you alive, given half a chance,
but thankfully, these sounds control me—
and they need you for their performance.

Endings are for the audience,
and so I slowly withdraw my life,
leaving you, at last, with this:
the object I have memorized—
to leave, or take; to kill, or kiss.

If you have any questions about Poetry Out Loud or would like to get involved in next year's contest, don't hesitate to email me.

Walkabout

2007-03-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

i haven't been writing all that much this past month, but there is some news to report: I'm going to have a broadside of 8poems about my daughter released this month. The release party and reading is at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St. between J and K, Sacramento at 7:30, Wed Mar. 14--I'll be featured alongside Steve Williams, who is having a chapbook released as well. So I thought I'd break my usual policy of late and post a poem about Nora here. She's nearly all I write about these days, I must admit, but I don't want the blog to become monotonous or saccharine, so I've been seeking other themes when blogging.

Her Walks

Outside at last,
at any cost,
she ambles purposefully,
dressed
for a day twice as windy
and half as warm.

Persuaded to let go
of my hand
and avoid the street,
she's still determined
to cling too tightly,
or else to climb
each set of steps,
accost every bush
and pry loose
every piece of gum
from here to the corner.

She falls, and then
picks up sticks and rocks
as she wends
her endless way
on the return
and roundabout trip
which now begins-
half an hour
and one whole block
from home.

I know I should supplement this poem by posting a cute picture (of which there are hundreds) but I don't have the web knowledge to do so. I can offer a url with a picture of her, though: http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d58/katewashington/pageturner.jpg

American Dissidence?

2007-02-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting rejection notice in the mail last week, and I thought I'd share it with whoever chances upon this blog. I'd sent a few moderately political poems about Iraq, the President etc. to a magazine called "The American Dissident" run by a gentleman called G. Tod Slone. Here's what he wrote back to me:

"As a poet (untenured!) myself, I hate to tell you this—or maybe actually I love it—but your cover letter listing your miraculous publications credits + your poems mirror many other professional submissions I've received. In other words, it is an easy thing to criticize afar, while a RISKY and tough thing to criticize near as in the English Department [...] Capiche? Dwell, reflect, the try me again if you have any COURAGE. Careerism vs Truth and Real Excellence!
Best, G. Tod"

After getting this remarkably self-congratulatory missive, I revisited the submission guidelines for "The American Dissident," and found that the journal is intended, to "amongst other things, provide a forum for examing [sic] the dark side of the academic/literary industrial complex". Well, I thought, no wonder he is so delighted to have the opportunity to reject my work! That's the whole point of the journal, it would appear—to reject work by poets who make a living as teachers, and who manage to find things outside the "academic/literary industrial complex" that are politically relevant. I just wonder what "other things" Mr. Slone wants his supposedly "engaged" publication to deal with, besides his personal grudge against the academy he no doubt feels has somehow snubbed him. My big mistake, clearly was in overlooking his (entirely reasonable if somewhat peculiar) demand that poets who submit to his journal should include a "cover letter containing not credits, but rather personal dissident information and specific events that may have pushed you to reject indoctrination..." By indoctrination, he seems to mean higher education, since for him the "academic/literary industrial complex" apparently acts as "Ministry of Information and Entertainment for the nation's ruling families, Republican and Democrat, white black and Hispanic." Pretty paranoid stuff, I think you'll agree, and possibly motivated by the fact that (as the flier he included with his note complains) "The NEA, NEH and Massachusetts Cultural Council have all refused to accord the American Dissident grants." Sad, no doubt, but sadder to see another self-professed poetry lover confuse official rejection with political relevance or artistic integrity. My advice to Mr Slone, should I write back to him (I'm still debating that) would be (and I borrow his majestic all caps): "GET OVER YOURSELF!"

Nevertheless, I was moved to read over the enclosed flier touting the journal's agenda and immediately composed a haiku using some of Mr. Slone's favorite epithets:

Happy-faced fascists
hogging the copy machine;
God, I'm radical!

That seemed like a rather thin poetic offering for this month's blog, though, so I'll tack on another Iraq poem, sort of a sequel to last month's offering. I'm not sure if it has COURAGE or not, but here goes.

Saddam Hussein at the Gallows

  I approve of the noose you placed around my neck. 
It has long been anticipated. 
I approve of the trial you offered me, 
where I could match your lies with mine, 
where I could shout, “Long live the nation!”
and “God is great!” as you read out my sentence.
 I approve of the fact that you captured me, 
and I offered no resistance.
 I approve of the speed with which you convinced 
yourselves that you had defeated me, 
and then forgot the power I will possess in death. 

Everything you thought were my mistakes
 were moves in a much greater game
 than you could possibly understand.  
You will notice that I am the only one
 on this platform without a mask. 
Everything has been explained to me; 
I will stand where you want me to stand 
and test the strength of your rope with my weight. 
If it holds—and why should it not? 
I trust you are not quite incompetent— 
I will die in the manner I would have chosen 
for myself some time ago, if given the chance.  

Perhaps my approval will give you pause, 
and make you question your vengeful ways, 
but do not stop the procedure now; 
I would be less prepared to go with each interruption, 
each show of human decency, 
and I might even begin to pity
those who are doomed to execute me, 
and that would scarcely befit a man
 such as you have made me, such as I will become.

Happy New Year?

2006-12-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

Well, it's now creeping up on 2007 and the issue that seems likely to matter most again this year is Iraq, so I couldn't resist offering my version of the "way forward" that Bush and his clueless cronies are seeking. I've tried to avoid naïve finger-pointing and cheap shots, though some of that is inevitable, given the unbelievable scope of the stupidity and arrogance the American administration has displayed. The disastrous consequences of their epic miscalculation are obvious to all by now, it seems, so I'd like to get beyond that and offer a broader critique of the mindset behind the assumption that we can "win" anything in Iraq or achieve any goal whatsoever by exporting our political ideas (forcibly or otherwise). So I've tried to put aside my personal outrage at Bush's moral blindness and obnoxious folly, and to articulate my (perhaps very Canadian) scepticism about what I see as a larger American view (and not exclusively the property of Bush/Halliburton/Cheney).

The Way Forward

Maybe we can get beyond this mess
by blaming the worst of our problems on
unlucky generosity,
an incompetent twit, a dire enemy,
or a slight historical maladjustment
resulting in crossed purposes
at the core of our culture. But maybe it all
boils down to something more elementary:
you can't force other people to share
a smugness which they neither admire
nor understand. The real way forward
would be to admit there is no such thing,
only a less horrendous sameness,
a kind of passionate coexistence
under duress and in disgrace.
That's why we should not come through this time
as best we can—instead we should learn
the full extent of our self-delusion
and not pride ourselves so much on the laws
and lessons we have written down;
we should try to live as if we'd forgotten
the secrets that made us wealthy and crass.
Which may include someday burning this...

I guess from my perspective if "progress" can be said to happen it occurs unconsciously, almost subliminally. Any explicit order or forcible suggestion is usually counterproductive, especially when crossing cultural or ethnic lines, because people resent being told they're not doing things the right way. That view may be a bit self-serving, since it opens up a space for art to operate as well: things like poems usually just assume a norm without making it into some sort of law or commandment. This poem violates that rule, though, and that's why I suggest it might be worth burning some (better) day, just to show how fully its ideas have been followed and transcended.

Pandora's Language

2006-12-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

I haven't been writing much, so this morning I set myself the task of writing something that would work as a blog entry, and the only thing that seemed remotely inspiring was the list of my daughter Nora's favorite words which is included in the poem. I was initially going to call the poem "Her Favorite Objects" but somehow the image of Pandora's box kept creeping in as I was writing, and so I'm provisionally going to go with "Pandora's Language," just because it forced me to think a bit more about what I was saying about the things and words in the poem.

Pandora's Language

Her favorite objects are also her favorite
subjects, so she has learned them well:
box, birdie, fish, and bubble;
shoe, hat, apple and ball.

She bounces the box and unlaces the bubble,
wears the fish and chirps at the apple,
picks the birdie from a tree,
watches the hat swim in the sea,
bursts the shoe with a poking finger
closes the ball at the sign of danger—
she needs better words or a different world;
I can't tell which, because I'm old.

Her favorite subjects must renew
themselves in objects like clothes or clocks:
ball, hat, apple, and shoe,
bubble, fish, birdie, and box.

I suppose I'm picturing Pandora before she lets the chaos of the box loose on the world (after all, she mistakes a ball for the box here). The myth lets me play around with the otherwise slightly cloying list of words and discover some hidden sinister or merely inevitable significance here, but I'm not sure how it works for the reader.

So this poem is less than an hour old, and I'm letting it loose already. Perhaps I have a bit of Pandora in me.

Hallowe'en Candy

2006-11-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Even though I'm a day late, I've decided a poem for Hallowe'en. I guess a few apologetic remarks about the limited nature of "occasional poems" like this one would be in order, but frankly I've always felt that most if not all poems are "occasional" in some way. Most poems (for me, anyway) come from a particular place and time, and so a poem about a holiday isn't necessarily at a disadvantage.

The Humans on Hallowe’en

We light three candles, put a bad face on
our lunkhead pumpkin, scoop out his brains
and pop his eyes right back into his skull
with the clumsy end of our carving skill...

Ready to take the easy way out
before the tricksters expected at eight,
treating them to a handful of what-
ever chocolates they want to grab,

we’re scary good at playing the really
hospitable couple; we spring at the shuffle
of feet on the doorstep, chuckle at greed
and tolerate ingratitude.

In the lull between each demand
for candy, we sit around at loose ends,
emptying pockets of Snickers and change,
watching the street for the lurching return

of goblins, demons, pro wrestling fans...
We’re lonely for ghosts, peering out at the moon,
and our greatest fear is that no one will come
to haunt this undisguised night we call home...

Even a pretty much completely cheapened holiday has a certain emotional power, for those who still try and participate in them (this year we vacated our house for the evening, so we were off the hook), and I guess that's what I was trying to get at here.

I'm wondering how many people out there have favorite "occasional" poems. I vaguely remember T.S. Eliot's Christmas poem for his wife, and a few elegies for dead famous people (Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is probably my favorite), but none about Hallowe'en.

Title Poem?

2006-10-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again (I just got Poet's Market 2007), so I'm putting together a book-length collection of poems just in case I want to wast $300 on poetry contests this Fall and Winter (after taking last year off).

I've been struggling with titles for this very optimistically projected volume, and want something that sounds more active (or at least gerundive) than "The Miracle Shirker". So I've gone from "Drowning by Letters" (too cute for its own good, perhaps) to "Swimming the Mirror" (too obscurely narcissistic) to "Selling Home." This latest candidate is still my favorite, partly for its simplicity, and I think the poem to which it as attached is pretty important to the volume itself.

Here's the poem:

Selling Home

Cut your losses as short as you can:
the tiny place you grew up in
was gone long before it was disowned.
You sold it out by knowing better,
by leaving town, by living larger
than its little rules had room for,
by getting bored with the games it hid
in child-sized cupboards. The thin plywood
basement ceilings barely withstood
the fits of toy wars thrown for friends,
the force-fed parties, the odd cake-stains
on the walls, that hardened just like sins
or cynicism, till your parents noticed,
cleaned them up, and blamed adolescence.
They were only yours while you took
them all for granted. Still, an ache,
possessiveness in retrospect,
a hunger for the unreal estate
of youth, soon forms a second thought
after the small property is bought
by some new family starting up
the narrow path to the threshold of hope,
their plans so tall they forget to stoop.

So, what's the verdict? Too poignant? Too nebulously nostalgic? Does the title seem like it could carry a whole book on these same themes (childhood, growing up, having kids)?

More broadly, what are some exceptionally good titles for books of poems you've encountered lately? I'm still partial to "Hello Serotonin," Jon Paul Fiorentino's book (mentioned in the 8/01/06 entry here ("Doomed Fan Letters"). That title grabbed me and the book didn't relinquish its hold for a while.

I've also always loved Hart Crane's "White Buildings." Elegant, with a touch of textual self-consciousness (what are poems but buildings on a white page?).

Poetry and Pop Music

2006-08-31T20:26:00.000-07:00

This month I'm going back into the archives for a strange and as yet unrepeated experiment: poetry about listening to the radio (station-hopping late at night, basically). I've always been intrigued by the connections between poetry and music. Since I tend to write poetry that sort of rhymes, I take pop and rap's use of rhyme as proof that there is an inherent pleasure in hearing repeated sounds, even in our postmodern age. But few like-minded poets (even the New Formalists like Dana Gioia) who tout pop as reinforcing their ideas of poetry write much about pop music itself (though Gioia does have some poem about the Beach Boys, I think). So I'm exposing myself to ridicule by showcasing my own attempt in this area.

Prizes to those who guess more than 3 of the actual songs by the artists I've named.

Pop Music and Poetry: An Essay

i) Overture

John Cougar Mellencamp sticks up for small towns;
Seal shares the joker’s apotheosis;
Rod Stewart pimps in 80’s hotel rooms;
a woman conveys her own intricate crisis;
Annie Lennox barely gets by on recognizability;
Elvis Costello menacingly impersonates insincerity;
(finally nothing breaksa my stride);
Don Henley knows what it’s like to ride the same cruel wave till it gets too deep;
Edie Brickell, who really tried to wake us up, puts me to sleep;
Joan Jett’s alarm clock was preset— she wears its mechanism out
nearly explaining Ray Davies’s rut and Supertramp’s escapist route;
Fleetwood Mac seem circumspect (their mottoes are all the more corrupt);
Marvin Gaye’s tormented flight of confessional fancy brings no light but heat;
Michael Hutchence caps his act with even more posthumous threats, a fate the deejay seems to represent;
the music bristles as we speak;
Stevie Nicks is back to remind me why I try to soften the break with imagination’s anonymous riff when I learn to sing. Or rather if...

ii) Encore

Up and suffering, dark and early,
knowing that’s no excuse to feel holy,
I turn on the radio, find morality
getting static but shaking off artistry.

[Play Carlos Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” then the Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane”]

Yes, I’m a prisoner of my culture (Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is torture) but something tells me the adventure of guilt and anguish isn’t over... Trust Bette Midler and “The Rose” to get the last word... You refuse? Well, then Billy Joel serves you right— “My Life” it is, though much too late. Our demographic hits its peak and dies...

I listen to Dick Cavett preparing himself to orchestrate
a classical dirge but the Stones resurrect
the play-by-play I am doomed to conduct...
“Satisfaction” deserves respect.
I pay it like penance and find myself blocked,
like any transmission... Time to reflect
on why, suddenly, Sir Elton John
is unlistenable...

So much for that plan.

iii) Prestissimo

Tom Petty, obviously gone to some trouble
just to remind me that drugs were a feeling
I got used to responding to on the double
unplugging my ears to the sirens’ wailing
recalling what it was like to watch
TV when stoned— the old bait-and-switch:
what ends in hell faster, this world or my oyster?

Dire Straights informs me show biz is no better
but Cutting Crew, who once had a future
show me the ways of a one-hit wonder:
the acid of childhood I’ll never recover.

The Beatles’ notion of forever
seems like such an admission of failure—
therefore they intone with mannered
insolence, like a dutiful lover
confronted by endless prospects of sex...
“Thanks but thanks anyway”...— tight-assed hacks...

iv) Allegro

Gerry Rafferty tells me why
my parents are still married (happily).
The next song mentions the games people play
when their kids are grown up. So long certainty.

It doesn’t add up, despite the Femmes;
Steve Miller’s guide to success resumes—
his criminal couple are free, he claims,
while Mom and Dad are still serving their terms.

The Police at last interrogated
by hip-hop beats, words substituted...
Squeeze’s Eden adulterated
pleas for mercy reiterated
Limbaugh’s theme appropriated
opposite frequencies modulated...

v) Adagio

CSN wonders if it’s Y’s;
Queen decides it’s time to praise
the girls its savvy bassist lays
whenever his sexy line deploys;
The Who creates a hero’s noise
for blindness or he who can’t think
what he sees on British Rail is traditional
though the Shondelles are supremely real.

Jefferson Airplane met John Glenn
and decided to fly closer to the sun
but condescended, for just one song,
to threaten the unloved, outstrung
products of doing one’s only thing...

The Guess Who? also come on too strong
for such an enigmatic name—
The Who Asked You? would suit the wrongful
orchestra suggesting fame.

vi) pop haiku (and bored game)

buy your graffiti
with a shiny plastic wrap
rebel like crazee

(paper, scissors and classic rock...)

vii) Andante

Paul Simon, overfamiliar but fair,
holds deprecating thumbs to the fire;
I realize I’ve been overhearing
people having sex on the air.

Reruns predicted what I would admire:
the same song over and over and o’er
determined... Christopher Cross reimagined
a bathos as precious as Dudley Moore...

A woman seeks her self-control
in the finger I move on the dial;
Bono also includes my whole
mission of listening in his appeal.

Soon enough all radio’s goal
will be to absorb the signals reeled
back in from the pond about which
Sting is singing— listen to that...

The B-side of every record shall
soon exercise its receptive whorl...
Will Smith will be gotten jiggy with
by whatever it was. You do the math...

viii) Grave

Paranoid anthem with selfish pretensions:
“People are strange”...—an apt intervention
if unexpected... Dialogism?
I hardly think so. Beck is too random
a moralist for this dimension.

The chance to interpret as we progress
(vocals irrevocably lost)
the chicks too clean-cut, even in black;
they want to sing— that’s their tough luck...

Ventriloquists for a nervous wreck,
their wooden lips have gotten stuck
and shattered chords implode and ache
in bodies hanging from a hook.

Talking Heads reverberate
(they know I felled them at a stroke)
and Fine Young Cannibals react
with rubber-legged fits of pique.

ix) Coda

Rick Astley is still putting out,
as advertised, if you care to check.
I, for my part, am kaput
and going to bed. I won’t be back.
Prince pretends that he has no money—
those sound effects admit he’s a phony:
“We’re listening on borrowed time
but that doesn’t mean we’re broke”— Explain.
I suddenly hear the Doctor Who theme
on every station. Hey Twilight Zone—
my homies and I have gotten the hang
of other freaky-incident tunes...
What was it took my breath away?
An entire continent? But why?
Quaint Hibernian Vociferation:
“Pissing the Night Away: An Oration.”
That’s as much as any person
needs to know about my origin.

Doomed Fan Letters

2006-08-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

Have you ever written a literary fan letter that you really, truly believed deserved an answer? Well, neither have I, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I wrote a whiny, begging letter to Phillip Levine about 10 years ago, after reading an article of his about the state of poetry that struck me as both perceptive and encouraging. Here was a man who would immediately see the merits of my work, I thought, so I sent off a few sample poems with some soothing flattery to help the medicine go down.
Did I hear back from the illustrious Mr. Levine? Sadly but unsurprisingly, no.
So this summer, ten years later, I decided to aim a bit less high. I’d been in Montreal and had picked up a pretty darn good book of poems (entitled "Hello Serotonin") by a semi-hipsterish-looking dude named Jon Paul Fiorentino. Not a major literary celebrity, that’s for sure. I mean, he’s from Winnipeg, though he rails violently against that fact, and claims Montreal as his second home.
I am still willing to say that the poems are pretty good, though I will now add the caveat they’re somewhat marred by an excessive use of theoretical jargon (he sprinkles in the word "performative" a bit too often for my taste). They hooked me by their skewed lyricism; the speaker knows he’s in bad shape, but can’t resist making a poem to celebrate that fact. A poem about singing with a throat full of strep is representative.
He also manages to seem quaintly rebellious without really offending my sense of social decency. He writes in tongue-in-cheek fashion about burning down Westmount, Montreal’s wealthy Anglophone enclave, where I lived for a year before deciding it was too anal retentive for me.
I’ve misplaced the book, so I can’t quote from it. Sorry. J
So for this month’s blog entry, I’m going to post the verse letter I emailed him. Qua poem isn’t not my finest effort, and qua fan letter it’s probably infuriating, but as a blend of the two genres it’s at least faintly readable.

Fan Letter
(For Jon Paul Fiorentino)

I bought your book on a whim,
on a wager with myself:
I offered to stop hating poetry
if I could read three pages without feeling
insulted, prodded or coddled.

I saw that you were as good as me,
maybe. Good enough not
to be threatened by me. And to say so.
Maybe even good enough to help me
get my difficult next book published.
(Forget I just said that,
but let the suggestion operate
on a nagging subliminal level.)

Let’s start our own school
of hypochondriac, narcoleptic poetry,
with honorary correspondence degrees
conferred on unsuspecting students.
Let’s read each other’s work and compare it
to what we thought our own could be.
Let’s be thankful for the silence
that distance enforces.
Let’s keep the secret of our perfect sanity,
insulated and apologetic.
Let’s respect each other’s jargon of innocence.
Let’s compare influences
and gauge their collateral damage.

Two men haunted by Sylvia Plath
are made for each other, in a medical sense,
as if growing alternate, duplicate organs
for sudden and gratuitous swaps.
This is not an emergency yet.
But do answer instantly, just in case.

Now why would anyone fail to respond immediately to this mixture of impertinence, grudging admiration and presumption? I ask you. No doubt I happened upon a dead email address. Though it never bounced back to me.

Feel free to share your experiences with this frustrating genre. See you next month (summer hiatus is over)

Brad

Villanelle

2006-06-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

This form is one I've tried more often than any other fixed form, maybe because the repeated lines suggest the sort of obsessiveness that poetry necessarily involves, for me. The problem is: how can you write lines that are meaningful yet versatile enough to last the whole poem? My solution here is to write on a pretty universal and recognizeable topic: lost or unrequited love. The two repeated lines are a bit ambiguous, and suggest the sort of ambivalent mood of a half-regretful, half-nostalgic speaker, looking back on mistakes and missed opportunities with a mixture of regret and irony.

Villanelle for the Headstrong and Heartbroken

How can you grieve for what you hardly needed?
It’s much too late. Just lose and let it be.
You never know which way the heart was headed.

Some good advice was not meant to be heeded.
I wouldn’t show the world my jealousy.
How can you grieve for what you hardly needed?

I almost thought that we must be related—
Resemblance was the only thing to see;
You never know which way the heart was headed.

To give myself was to become depleted;
My love was always more than intimacy.
How can you grieve for what you hardly needed?

Fighting for you, I might have been defeated,
Or worse yet, made to woo an enemy.
You never know which way the heart was headed.

Despite it all, our lives might have been wedded
One afternoon, when you asked after me.
How can you grieve for what you hardly needed?
You never know which way the heart was headed.

Does the mixed usage of "you" (meaning both everyone, and the significant other) confuse irreparably? It's something I tend to do a lot, and can find no way around. Here I like the way it gives the option of having the last lines addressed to her, not just to the ether, or to myself. But I'm not sure the situation is clear enough to the reader.

The Stone Balancer

2006-05-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

Well, here's another poem I thought was pretty good when I wrote it, but which remains unpublishable (or so it seems) despite much agonizing and multiple revisions. I brought it to the writer's workshop I attend about a year ago, and they suggested a few useful changes, some of which I have duly made (but none of which have made the poem work for any of the editors I've contacted). It's a bit of a bear because of its length (I've started editing a journal myself and know that the 2-page poem is harder to deal with), but I have no notion of what to cut.

The Stone Balancer

i

He wants to pile stones up into tall,
precarious totems, to cheat the earth’s pull,
but the wind makes the thing impossible.
He stops and squints—
along the sea wall,
a bicycle leaps on a bench, holds still,
and bounces down, bored with its own immobile
momentum.
He gets the drift of its spun
wheels and faces the current that sweeps overland
with more polished resolve.
The rocks in his sandy,
transforming hands turn inwards, find
equilibrium, slowly, where he places them
one on another, till six of them lean
together.
Like ships that spring up from their helms
that point to an origin, hulls run aground,
but sails still mounting,
as if they were each bent
on flying, their magical ballast ascending,
side-stepping, wayward, keel over keel, tending
to mount, all in separate directions, they stand.

ii

Their only miracle, patience, hoards
its treasure thinly, like houses of cards
whose gravity is let down by the words
that people speak as they pass him.
Stared at,
staggeringly denied, ignored,
he is asked to prove that what he has dared
to build is real.
He sends the stones
clattering, their illusion gone,
their catastrophe disbelieved to the end,
their balance dismantled.
So that's how we learn:
through equipoise that endures, but wins
applause when it fails.
Still, the hardened mind,
convinced of what it no longer beholds,
need not outweigh the wonder that swells
like canvas sails in a rising wind.

iii

He knows that he can float farther next time,
and starts setting stones up all over again.

My main problem with revising this (and cutting parts out) was that I had fallen in love with the "ars(e) poetica" aspect of the poem; the guy I watched setting up these stones in weird piles really did seem the perfect metaphor for what a writer tries to do with each piece. So everything seemed to fit; my main revision has been to ad some set-up lines at the start, so people will know I'm not primarily concerned with the bicyclist (who originally began the poem).

So kill my darlings for me, please. But be specific; needles, not axe-blows.

The Fall

2006-04-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what to say about this one, but I've gotten quite a few positive responses about baby poems lately, so here's another one. Our daughter Nora is just fine, but she did take a small tumble a while ago (when I should have been watching her). After the initial panic and subsequent relief were over, writing a poem seemed inevitable. There have been more harmless mishaps since, so this one feels quite far off in time, and I'm not sure the comination of pathos and naïve disappointment at the end still works for me.

The Fall

The moment before she fell, the world
stood still—uncertain as to little girls’
relationship to gravity.
Her father, sleeping, had set her free
to question the laws of the universe.
She felt the light, sustaining force
of pillows, fought inertia, turned
her energy to velocity, warned
the edge of the bed that a massing urge
to roll over once more was emerging.
The empty space permitted this
experiment, so she persisted.
She tumbled, but the tears didn’t come
until we found her, lying on
her belly, and picked her up to see
what happened, why she couldn’t fly.

Pomp and Circumstance

2006-03-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes any feedback is good feeedback, but I was somewhat dismayed to find the following comment posted about "The Stepford Widow" last month: "The language seems pretentious and too academic. Try to unveil your language. You are a professor but you don't have to keep reiterating this fact in your poetry. Your comments about Stepford Wives also lends to an air of pomposity..."

I guess it might be unfair to suspect that people who can't manage to quote the poem's title accurately or organize correct subject/verb agreements ("comments/lends") in a sentence might have a grudge against academics. It's also probably pedantic to ask for specific examples of "pretentious" and "academic" diction in the poem (I did inquire for examples, but got no answer). Finally, I have no idea what "unveiling" my language might mean. I mean, that's a metaphor, right? So the poster was using a metaphor to tell me to...stop using metaphors? Or stop doing something that confuses him/her, at any rate. Which is not a meaningful criticism, really. I generally try to say what I mean, and not to "veil" the "meaning" of the poem unnecessarily. In the case of some poems, though, the meaning isn't quite clear to me, because the idea or metaphor originated in a dream (this is true of both "Stepford" and "Meadowlarks")

All these defensive objections aside, though, it is, of course, inherently pompous to have a poetry blog, and to make and invite comments about one's own work on that blog. What could be more pretentious than thinking one's poetry matters?
So guilty as charged, and proud of it. Sort of. I will also happily confess that I have written more than my share of pompous poetry, though I try to use my own b.s.-detector to avoid foisting it on the public. But after our friend the anti-academic critic's denunciation, I went in search of recognizeably pompous or pretentious balderdash I have written, and came up with the following two examples. You think I'm pompous now? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

On Defacing Library Property

A butterfly lands on my book—
suddenly, illustrated work takes shape—
but the new page, folded up
and whisked away before I can think,
casts its frontispiece on the concrete walk
of an autumn garden.

The slippery cat hunts publication,
with no luck. A spotted folio edition,
black and orange, flaps wide and shut,
a hinged portal onto print...
I tear a leaf from spine and root,
blot words, then fling them into art.

It IS pretentious to make one's bad habit of damaging library books into an artistic credo. So this poem has stayed safely buried in the computer files, until today.

From the Unreported Plane Crash

The white birds circle and rise to perform
a sudden, poorly synchronized swim
above the airport, then settle down
between the runways on the pond
they had abandoned almost as one...

We take off in our jet and burn
our separate beeline slowly, straining
disparate horizons, only
joined for moments until the end,
the choreography of feathers
melting as we tilt to the sun;
but if by luck this scrawled page flutters
down into your expectant hands
we will have gone the birds one better—
publish all my important poems...

This one is maybe even worse, though it has a quasi-plausible defense. I was very much afraid of flying, post-Sept. 11, and this one was written on a plane just before takeoff. But how lamely self-conscious can you get? THIS is pompous, my friends, even if it's paranoia too.

I invite you to comment, post your own pompous musings or effusions, or name famous and pompous poems. Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" comes to mind:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I just love the sneaky, gloating yet obscure tone of "from what I've tasted of desire." I had a friend read this to me once and could never take it seriously again.

Wonders Never Cease

2006-02-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

Well, since I posted my lament for the apparent unpublishability of "The Stepford Widow" the unthinkable has happened. A Canadian publisher, Mercutio Press, emailed me absolutely out the blue to tell me some bad news and some good news. First of all, they couldn't publish my book submission, sent over a year ago. Well, that was too bad, but not entirely unexpected. (After all, nobody ever wants to publish a book of poems if they can help it, right?) However, the editor liked one of the sample poems I sent him (guess which one) and wants to do a broadside edition of it to the tune of 150 copies. So maybe my wail of despair resonated in the stratosphere and produced this bizarre result. "The Stepford Widow" will be issued as a broadside in purple or dark green ink, much to my amazement.

So the moral of the story is: don't give up, even after you've long since given up.

Anyway, it's been a lean month for poems as far as I'm concerned, because I've been writing a children's book that no parent would ever want to give their child. Still, I did manage this one. It's essentially a dream written down after it happened, and as such may have little or no meaning to anyone else. We'll see...

The Meadowlarks

Puppies scrambled across your face—
I couldn’t stop them, though I was close
and clinging still more tightly to you.
The brush of our hands, considered truly,
contained a kiss; there was holy urgency
in our touches in the back of a car.
We were first thrown together as others drove
that dreadful and delightful road
to the merciful meadow. We lay in grooved
oblivion—your dark hair in my lungs
waiting for those to whom we owed
our love to forgive that debt and leave.
And then the tiny, almost fluttering
earthbound butterflies—the puppies, caressing
your absent face with faint paws—velvet
vermin cuckolding me before
I had ever known such open air,
such an unexpected, dreamlike lark
whose wings folded up even as they took flight.

(Fire away, Doctor Freud.)

The Little Poem that Couldn't

2006-01-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Have you ever written a poem you liked a lot, but that nobody would ever, ever publish no matter how much you tried? Well, that's the theme of this month's entry. I always put a fresh batch of magazine and journal submissions together in January, and instead of trying one more time to get the poem below published, I'm giving up and choosing to post it here instead. Basically, I want to know why nobody wants it.

The Stepford Widow

After the dollmaker’s death, we tried
to find his suicidal wife—
under every high window there
was a life-sized porcelain model of her.
A decapitation in the kitchen,
torso on the floor and head in the oven,
all clothed in Victorian lace.
Hard whiteness under a veil of light—
a dead man’s ideal of womanhood
from which the widow banished herself.
Who can live on when the man
who played god, or Pygmalion, enters
his own perfection, no longer mediating
between the human and pristine beauty?
She hangs in effigy from the rafters,
but she has vanished all the same.
Had she been a prisoner all this time?
Or was there a narcissism that kept her here
till her charmed admirer was gone;
and was she ashamed to be left alone
with her twins and an archaic dream?
And will these dolls, suddenly reminded
of their firm, artificial limbs,
rise and let themselves be guided,
like Stepford wives, to unbroken homes?

Is it obscure? I thought most would know what a Stepford Wife was, and thus could imagine a Stepford widow. Perhaps I'm wrong, or perhaps the poem just doesn't work on some other level. It's weird, because for me it was all very compelling: the images were vivid and commanding as I wrote, and the ending unforced.

I suppose there's a danger in writing an obviously "feminist" poem like this one, especially if you're not a woman. And especially if the message isn't entirely clear, which it may not be here. If I had to boil it down, I'd say the poem's about the dangers that being an artist can pose to other people (one's "Muse," for instance).

The Relapse

2005-11-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been remiss in not posting here in a while, so I'm going to make one last post in 2005 and then collect myself for a few weeks until Jan 1, 2006. My New Year's resolution is to post a new poem at the start of every month, so people won't be wasting time wondering if there's anything fresh up here or not.

There are some developments on the poetry front to report; first of all my book has been reviewed in a couple of places, and here are the urls: http://www.newsreview.com/issues/Sacto/2005-11-24/mixbook.asp.
and http://whimfetishandblogorrhea.blogspot.com/ (scroll all the way down).

I'm also hosting the second go-round of my radio show for writers on KSSU, the Sac State student-run radio station. Don't bother looking for it on your dial (it's 1580 AM), the signal is very weak. Your best bet is to get live streaming audio from the website at kssu.com. Clear as a bell. The show's times are a bit funky, due to limited scheduling options, but here they are:

Wednesday Nov. 30, 9:00 to 10:00am

Thursday Dec. 1, 10:00-11:00am

Wednesday Dec. 7 6:00-7:00pm

Tuesday Dec. 13. 9:00 to 10:00am

Anyway, the poem I'm posting for today is something inspired by a National Inquirer cover story about George W. Bush's (alleged) renewed drinking binges, apparently caused by the fact that suddenly everyone hates him, including his own father and many old cronies. I was having trouble coming up with a title for this one, so help on that score would be especially appreciated. I had originally thought of "The Madness of King George" or "Bush's Madness" or "Bush's Relapse" but I settled on "The Relapse" as the least over the top.

The Relapse

By night the President stumbles disheveled
and muttering down the White House halls,
strung out on the dishonest habit
of governing those his work appals.
The conscientious self-destruction
he once pursued now follows him,
like journalists investigating
a charge of corruption and falsehood. A grim
belligerence sends in its chemical weapons—
new habits die hard and old ones are reborn.
Unguarded, he tastes a treacherous foreign
vintage: mortality. Those he won't mourn
come back with a scornful toast on their lips
and move him unwillingly to partake
of their restless oblivion, washing his hopes
down with every fresh boast that his sober foes make.

If this sounds like a misanthropic exercise in schadenfreude, that's because it is. I wonder if it has much value besides personal satisfaction; Bush has caused a lot of unnecessary grief and death in this world, in my opinion, and it's only fair that some of it should come back to bite him, but perhaps this isn't my finest hour as a humanitarian either.

See you on the comments page, and then on Jan 1, 2006!

Ad Hockey

2005-10-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

Well, the NHL has finally gotten its act back together, and the hockey season has started, not that I'll be able to see any of it for a while (at least not without begging local barkeeps to locate the Outdoor Life Network). Still, there's a certain puck-happy feeling in the Sacramento air, for some reason, so I've decided to post two hockey poems in celebration. The first is a fairly straightforward account of what it's like to play goalie (though of course it's also about writing poetry, in a sense):

Tending Goal

To keep emptiness immaculate,
I practice an old and reactive art.
This frame is solid, webbed and ready
to take whatever my selfish body
will not smother, absorb or deflect.

I crouch on tiptoe, turning my back
on what I protect, assessing the streak
and sinew of play, the likelihood
of facing an as yet invisible shot,
cramped in the moment’s crowded, tense
uncertainty— sometimes my stance
is justified, sometimes erased
by chance or intention’s quick release.

The best is when I’m already down
and in danger of letting a weak one in
on a negligent rebound— I offer my hands,
my face, my chest, I invite the wounds
instead of the guilty ghostliness
of goalies, their untouched irrelevance.

I ask for the unintended gift
of inaccurate desire— the long shift
drawing to its natural close

with a point-blank effort, a drive to the glove
hand side, high enough for me to wave
at it, flag it down, hold it, make the lucky
save even better with a snatch and a look
at the fruit that even bad netminders pluck
every now and then.
But this garden, the game
cannot go on if I don’t give my charmed
and tarnished prize back, straighten up and turn
to what was missed— this form, still aligned
with the crease in the mind to which all my dreams tend.

Yes, I get a bit self-conscious at the end there, and slip in a justification for my formalist leanings. But think about it: all games have their rules, and why shouldn't poetry derive its pleasures in the same way? All right, that's enough. I hope you enjoyed the experiential side of the piece, before the medicine went down.

The second one is much more abstract and ambitious; it's an attempt to use hockey to offer my Canadian version of what Tim Kahl (aka Victor Schnickelfritz) calls The American Myth. It's about the brain drain, the hockey drain, the lost hockey season of 2004-5, and the greatest player ever to lace them up. Excuse the clichés, they're part of the pleasure of sports for me too.

Gretzky in Exile

Driveways, drained pools, parking lots,
church gymnasia, tennis courts,
sunken playgrounds, dead-end streets,

bunker-basements, backyard rinks—
the sport that sends us up the snowbank
into the ditch, that stretches the length

of the neighborhood, makes these places ours.
The sponsoring world sees its new garage doors
spotted and dented. The caged crowd roars.

The semi-official national game
is its own invasion, the training ground
for mercenaries, eminent domain

in a country conquered, reclaimed and now free
to follow this ritual anarchy.
It sends its warriors out, not to die

but to fight for a rebound, cleanly but hard,
till the final minutes of a lopsided hour
when anything goes. Our border’s ajar

like a penalty box waiting for the returns
of the hard-nosed goalscorers, skilful goons
and crafty veterans nobody owns

anymore. This arena’s horizon extends
as far as the referee’s whistle resounds,
and as long as it takes to step out of bounds

or stray offside. If we do leave,
we carry the play to the people we love
however belatedly they may arrive

at our sanctuary, our testing place.
This is the wound we know we must nurse
with fiercer pride the longer we chase

a final cure. When we lose, our own blood
deserts us. It hurts to be this good
and not always the best. If there were hockey gods

they would keep us together, demand that the rest
of the world try to beat us here, on our home ice,
but we can’t wait around for that breakaway pass,

so we colonize the world with the game
that transforms us. Spaces that keep us young
with their lucky limits, their structured time,

these curbs and obstacles, gaps and slopes,
are worn spots where private fantasy slips
into common dreams. Every phenom escapes.

In writing this one, I asked myself: if W.H. Auden were alive and a hockey fan, how would he approach the subject? Well, not really, but maybe I was looking for that kind of sophisticated-yet-innocent tone you get in middle Auden.

So I'm looking for comments, of course, but also suggestions for other great sports/hockey poems. I myself can recommend Steven (Stephen?) Scriber's "All-Star Poet," despite its title. It's very earthy hockey writing, and very anecdotal. More like highly compressed stories than full-dress poems, but well suited to its subject.

Aftermath

2005-09-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, and I want to say thank you to all those who've posted comments or emailed me about poems posted here. You've been more help than you can possibly know, and I've been revising some of the poems that seem worth keeping in my to-do pile, with an eye to your comments. For instance, in "Icarus, from the Breakfast Nook" the phrase "envious mothers" has become the more neutral and universal "earthbound mothers" which is a major improvement. I've struggled with the clichéd "bright eyes" in that same poem, and have altered it to "dim eyes," which produces an alliteration with "distant." I'm not quite as happy with the second change, but once more, it has helped.

This time I'm posting two poems, both of them dealing with Hurrican Katrina and its horrendous aftermath. The first is an impressionistic reaction to the first picture I saw of any of the refugees: a boy was running across the turf at the Superdome. looking very much like he was pretending to be a football player going in for a touchdown. Here it is:

The Runback
(New Orleans, August 29, 2005)

Spotlit in the Superdome,
the boy catches a punt
at the thirty yard line
and breaks upfield.
He evades the first wave
of tacklers, breaks
a rough grip with a move
like a fish slipping free
of a shark’s harsh resolve.
Staggered by his own
sudden escape,
he spins, and drifts past
the fifty, skips
on crouching tiptoe,
imagines a wedge
of blockers in front of him,
skirts their bursting
barricades, saves
his bare feet from the surge
of a last-ditch, diving
rescuer. He dances
to freedom in dark surf,
a gale of cheers
in the end zone,
then he runs away
from the jealous hands
dragging him to sit among
crowds which will engulf
him with thirst
as they drown.

I guess I wanted to capture some of the innocent excitement of a boy trying to maintain some sense of freedom and individuality in the midst of catastrophe; I'm pretty sure the tragic tone comes in strongly at the end.

The next poem I'm not quite so sure of, since it begins in a bitter, ironic tone and ends with what I think is a more balanced, affirmative statement. Both might seem inappropriate to many readers; after a tragedy like this one, simplistic pieties are usually the only acceptable commentary, especially from a mere observer. Still, the media's amazing blindness to (or wilful disregard of) the obvious socio-economic inequalities exposed by the disaster, and the Bush regime's criminally negligent response to it, makes me feel like poetry has an obigation to be as scathing as possible. I can't pretend it's a masterpieces, but it was satisfying to write (and I hope will be satisfying to read as well).

Disproportionately

The victims of the tragedy
were disproportionately
hopeless in the face of their loss,
inarticulate when asked to describe
what happened. Statistics suggested that they
ought to have been more composed, more prepared,
more affluent, more fearing of God,
more trusting in last-minute warnings, more varied
in their education. This lack of proportion
suggests errors in our data collection
or natural bias against those among us
who seem most defenseless, most deperate to fit in,
who will not abandon the places they've learned
to call home, even for terrible hurricanes
that happen, predictably, and remind
us of each other, and what we've come
through together as humans, though only some
unknown percentage of those left behind
will be lucky enough to remain unchanged.

...Well, what say you?

Paternal Poem

2005-07-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Most of you will already know that our daughter Nora was born in perfect health on July 1 (Canada Day, as it happened), and you'll all appreciate that we've been utterly absorbed in her normal needs and our new responsibilities. The good thing about poetry, though, is that it usually happens quickly and intensely, sort of like a diaper change. I've been writing some fairly earnest stuff about how wonderful she is etc., as expected, but the last poem that she's inspired is more light-hearted, so I thought I'd post it here.

The Bubblegum Baby

Her cheeks are so full
of themselves, they blow
up to such succulent shapes,
so pink and palpably delicate,
packed with a truculent
sweetness that bursts
when her breath tears its shell,
that we must choose
not to chew her too hard;
meanwhile she gives us
such jowls for our kisses
that it’s deliciously possible
to forget there are any
bones in her at all,
though she gums her own fist
and finds there are limits
to malleability, even in girls.

I suppose there is a slightly sexist overtone in the last few lines, but I'm not sure it spoils anything, or that it's entirely unjustified. I've broken up the lines (which began as four-stress lines with many kinds of feet switching in and out) to disguise the regularity of the rhymes (slant though they are). I suppose it could work just as well to have the poem read as follows:

The Bubblegum Baby

Her cheeks are so full of themselves, they blow
up to such succulent shapes, so pink
and palpably delicate, packed with a truculent
sweetness that bursts when her breath tears its shell,
that we must choose not to chew her too hard;
meanwhile she gives us such jowls for our kisses
that it’s deliciously possible
to forget there are any bones in her at all,
though she gums her own fist and finds there are limits
to malleability, even in girls.

To me, the longer lines here seem unnecessarily ponderous; I prefer the first version, I think, but wonder what others might say.

Sorry for the lack of baby pictures; I'll try to rectify this soon with some help from the baby's co-author.

In a Dry Month

2005-06-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

The baby-on-the-way poems have stopped, for the time being, so I thought I'd switch gears and post something completely different. The idea first occurred to me while I was moving the lawn (and blistering both thumbs, by the way—never say I didn't suffer for a poem).

Grass, Again

The grass isn’t working.
There are pale, bare spots,
and it’s fraught with weeds.
Tire marks turn to sand.

My antique lawnmower’s blades are blunt
and clog to a stop every three or four steps.

The trimmer I also use is unsteady:
a dipping stab,
a slash that goes slack
in the thicker tufts, a frail cut that moves
me around like a mine-sweeper,
hovering gravely,
as if dowsing for buried water
or for valuables on a beach-head.

Still, I even it out where I can,
smoothing it over to call it a lawn
and not a nearby vacant lot.

The greens-keeper of this inadequate plot,
I rub my hurt wrists, and contemplate
pesticides, herbicides, leaving it here
untended forever, losing the war.

If only the grass would keep its promise
of humble renewal, of mournful acceptance,
of democratic independence,
of peaceful remembrance.

How much is its famous fertility,
its precious baseness, worth to me?

How long can I stand to mow it down to nothing
and hope it will always return?

How do I know what frail blooms belong
in this wilderness, which I happen to own?

How do we lose the control that kills
and cultivate idleness, unless
field-mice may rejoice?
When the human world falls
will death rediscover the innocent grass?

It's a strange one, since it starts out pretty low-key, and unrhymed, but then ramps up to a rhetorical finish, and uses rhyme pretty heavily at the very end. I'm not sure how this hybrid form works, to be honest.

I'm also wondering about the effectiveness of message in the poem, which for me is pretty important. You may have noticed that the words that begin the poem are inspired by Carl Sandburg's poem "Grass" which is about war and forgetting (the poem ends "I am the grass, let me work"). I guess I'm also engaging with Whitman's image of grass as a symbol of the American democratic ideal, which, in this current period of Diebold voting machines, mass disenfranchisement, and general electioneering chicanery (not to mention plain old stupidity and dishonesty) is almost as bedraggled as my back yard. I'm wondering how clearly these ideas are conveyed here, without this little blog footnote.

next installment

2005-05-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

Despite the interesting suggestion that I should wait for the child to be born to start writing about it, I persist in thinking that poetry can and should be an anticipation of experience as well as a way of remembering it. After all, I haven't died yet, but have written many poems about death, and plan to write many more. Besides, there have to be some rewards for choosing poetry over journalism...

So, in stout defense of my right to jump the gun, this is another part of that ongoing poem. It works with some newly aquired diction about childbirth itself, in perhaps the same way that "The Fighting Horses" was leaning heavily on anatomical terms:

iv

Expand on the contractions, lend
a voice to the cries that are heading your way,
crown those shudders with an aura of calm
that comes from speech, whether truth or lie.
Shift your position as often as needed
to satisfy the emerging statement
of hope, the faithless fidelity
of expecting a child who can only die
at last, who makes you live faster, to choose
that early oblivion for your own
to get there before someone you love enough
to leave in charge of the world you saved
by putting it into words, maybe like
these, or maybe completely other-
wise. Let that separate wisdom breathe
its own amazement, catch some airs
from nowhere, wait for the shape to flop out,
slippery, powerless, covered with wax.
Unseal the message and let it uphold
its limbs like a herald’s trumpet, unfold
in the light to stretch once and resound
with a rival’s arrival—the name that precedes
us wherever we go. Let the last word follow
her closely, become who she’ll be till she finds
someone else who swear himself blue in the face
for her peace of mind, for the sake of next birth.

Now that I've typed it up and reread it, it strikes me that may just be a complete poem I haven't managed to title yet and so am tempted to tuck into the larger structure I've committed to here. So I'm hoping that a) I'll get some suggestions for a title and find ways to make this stand on its own as a separate poem or b) that I can make this work within the same frame as the foregoing 3 sections. It may be too abstract for its own good, but in some ways I think that longish poems can stand some more rhetorical intervals; such pieces tend to lose their lyrical intensity anyway, and don't need to be mere narrative.

P.S. I already have a poem called "The Expectant Father" so that title is out.

Ongoing poem(s)

2005-05-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, my wife Kate and I are expecting a baby, and this prospect has sent me into a tizzy of emulous creativity. The trouble is that I'm finding that the things I write about impending parenthood are frequently fragmented or simply incomplete. I'm wondering if this is just due to a weak grasp on the real tasks I'll be undertaking, or a natural unwillingness to sum a new life up in a tidy package. So what I've decided to do here is post the bits and pieces of a long, unfinished and ongoing poem I'm going to call "The Birthing Suite" (this is both the place where the birth will happen, if all goes as planned, and a way of suggesting that it's meant to be a series or collection of poems). This tactic goes against the grain for me, in some ways, since I've always believed Edgar Allan Poe when he said that a long poem was a contradiction in terms (lyricism shouldn't have to be kept up for a long time, or else it gets formulaic or mannered, or what have you). I still mistrust any poem that takes me more than 30 minutes or so to write; it had better be really good and ambitious (leaving me lots of things to tinker with and agoinze over), or else it's just going to seem, well, stillborn.

Anyway, here's what I have so far:

The Birthing Suite

i

Bullet-headed, the baby wounds
its exit, bulling a way to the light
with its skull, it breaks, storming.
Ducking and covering its own retreat
from untenable spaces, self-effaced
through the whole bloody show, at action stations,
flushes its foxhole out, with mushroom
clouds behind it, like parachutes.

ii

A tumbling comet nearing the tip
of its closest orbit, ready to start
another lap around the stars
before the recoil from this trauma
wears off and becomes a homing
signal calling it to swing gently
past the same catapulting bone
that slings it like a stone, whose arc
has bent as soon as it is released,
a shot that won’t stay where it’s put,
but squirms and clamors for far-off life.

iii

Welcome the average insanity
of caffeinated parenthood.
Welcome the tuned-up birds on their morning
searches. Welcome the freedoms that do
very little good to anyone.

I've numbered the sections purely for convenience; they don't need to be in this order, or even the beginning of the poem. I am sure I'll be writing more along similar lines, and may happen upon a better opening.

I'm curious what you think, of course, but also about whether any of you have done this kind of thing: an interrupted poem with a common thread or focus (though not necessarily a narrative). How does it end up working out? Do you find you need other people to help you structure it or edit it? I suspect I will, and that's why I'm choosing to post it here. In general, I don't let unpolished, unfinished or potentially badly flawed material see the light of day, but the very long-term nature of this experience (the baby isn't even due until the end of June) makes collaboration seem worthwhile.

Finally—are there good poems out there about fatherhood? I've drawn a blank. Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" is almost inhumanly remote, and she always said she hated it for putting some kind of ancestral, abstract pressure on her to live in a heroic yet airy fashion, so I'd prefer to avoid alienating the child I'm supposedly celebrating.

The Experiment Continues

2005-04-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

Like the fickle obsessive I am, I've decided to work on avoiding end-rhymes in the opening lines of all my poems for the foreseeable future. Internal rhymes are OK, and some rhymes toward the end can be tolerated (I notice this happens a lot in supposedly "free verse" anyway). In other words, I have pledged to write only things that stand a chance of being read to the end by the editors of the prestigious American journals that have thus far closed their doors against me. My poems will open like "normal" contemporary poetry, at least. They might actually have to hear me out, and not just flunk me for being old-fashioned.

Cynical, you say? Well, in fact, this pledge has produced some blissfully naïve and almost childish results. (I'll spare you the poem on kissing, for now.) It's as though I can escape the perhaps overly intense and self-conscious personality I've created for myself and see the world all over again, as if I were someone else. This may have to do with impending fatherhood, I admit, but it's also based on a kind of awareness of how effortless poetry can be if you strip it down to its minimal ingredients, we're done over the last century or so. Poetry is EASY, if you let it be easy, at least in its first stages. An individual poem usually becomes hard work if you let it go on long enough, and that's where rhymes and other formal strategies come in handy-- as Russell says, they help you flesh out the thoughts that aren't fully formed until you put them into words. But, insofar as it can have its roots in any one of the everyday "acts of attention" we perform instinctively, a poem can (and probably should) begin in a simple, concrete situation or observation that is dictated to us by the world. "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to the tree, it had better not come at all." So why not begin in a more conversational, unbuttoned, laissez-faire style, even if you know you'll end up clustering sounds together in formal-sounding ways by the end?

So here's an example of this new kind of poem I'm writing. It's the one that came the easiest and stopped the soonest, so it's emblematic of the effortlessness I'm talking about. If it communicates at all, it'll be a wonderful surprise. Maybe I've been too concerned with communicating in the past, anyway.

Icarus, from the Breakfast Nook

Light stays aloft, but illuminated
objects fall to us to be known.
A leaf is briefly sustained, on its slow,
erratic flight, as if flaming with grace
on its way to the damned. So we come to grief—
ablaze with amazement, weighed down by the looks
of expectant mourners and envious mothers
who see in their children’s bright eyes the distant
reflections of suns that desired and died
in a life-giving moment, afire, unaware.

The title irks me mildly when I read it here, since it endorses the lazy habit of transposing mythical figures into contemporary situations, but I like the juxtaposition of tragic falls with cozy domesticity. It seems apt for the tone of the poem, somehow. I'd be glad of alternatives, however.

Second Thoughts

2005-04-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

Is it my imagination, or does blogging breed rapid changes of mind?

I've been mulling over my remarks from "Fighting Words" and wondering if I was really telling the truth when I said "I just don't know what to say in a poem unless there's a rhyme to lead me from one line to the next". Perhaps I simply haven't tried hard enough to imagine what a non-rhyming poem by me would say. Maybe I was just too pleased to be writing anything resembling a poem to question the devices that were generating certain lines in my brain and excluding others. Maybe I have been living for too long in the prelapserian world of Dylan Thomas and Willy Shakespeare, and failed to grasp the nettle of historical reality. Maybe it's time to join contemporary poetry as it limps along in Dick Cheney's America, purged of ecstasy but mature in its limitations.

So I've written a poem that avoids rhyme for the most part. Of course, it also comments on itself as a non-rhyming poem. If you can't be self-reflexive in a blog, where can you be? Here it is:

Wasted Gifts

The album you never had to hear
because I forgot it on my way
to see you (when your birthday came
around again, it was out of style);
the book I ordered in advance
and later saw you'd bought for yourself;
the box of chocolates I ate
alone in my bedroom every evening
for a week, until I knew
there was nothing to do but hide
the fact that it had ever existed;
the three thousand poems I wrote in rhyme
when nobody wanted to hear those echoes
in those places, then or ever:
I'd like to send them all out now
to find their destined recipients
at last. At least those absent tributes
will no longer be an excuse
to see myself as a generous man
misunderstood, or thwarted by fate.
My wasted gifts will be recognized
for what they were: self-portraits in miniature.
Vanishing and indistinct,
they were half-way to oblivion
even as I called them mine
and martyred them in a lopsided trade
with someone I would think about
at night until I'd found the objects
I could give them to be at peace.
Then I stopped my conscious concern—
it was an effort, distracting, most
of the time. I could rest, having found my offerings
and made them bear that burden of dreams.

This time, I'm not going to do any of my friend Victor Schnickelfritz's critical work for him (see the comments section for his response to "The Fighting Horses"). Besides, I think my concerns will be obvious to anyone who's tried a new way of writing.

Fighting words

2005-04-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'm finally publishing my first book of poems. It's called "The Miracle Shirker" and it's coming out in a very small run (100 or so to start with) from a press in Stockton, California, which is an hour or so from where I live. I'm paying for the printing myself, which makes me a self-publishing loser, I suppose. I'm tired of entering semi-rigged contests and whining to underfunded presses, so I'm finally putting my money where my mouth is. By the way, if you want a copy of the book, feel free to email me at bradwb2002@yahoo.com. It'll cost you $15 US, $18 CDN, plus some shipping.

So I must think I'm a pretty decent poet, right? Well, maybe I am; I'm pretty damn prolific, anyway. I'm written approximately 3625 poems as of April 15, 2005, and I've published in more than 100 journals (including most of the really good ones in Canada), though no major American magazine (the New Yorker, Poetry etc) will touch me with a ten-foot pole. Why not? Well, maybe it's because I just suck after all, but maybe, just maybe, it's because I like some rhymes here and there in a poem. Frankly, I just don't know what to say in a poem unless there's a rhyme to lead me from one line to the next. It's just that simple. If I have a sermon to write, or an essay to compose, or an argument to win, I'll write prose. I guess I still think that's what prose is for. Poetry needs some slide in its step, for me. Rhymes just grease the skids that get me to the bottom of the ride. Call me a formalist pig, if you like.

Anyway, the point is not to complain endlessly. The point is to write more and write better, so I'm starting this blog to get comments on poems I'm still working on and fiddling with, and hoping to put in my second book someday. I'm also making this part of my commitment to visiting other poets' blogs and commenting constructively on their work. I value and try to offer criticism that goes beyond a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, that points to specific lines and phrases as well- or ill-chosen, and suggests alternative strategies or words.

I do want to make this a place where people can post their work and make comments, so please feel free to add a poem or two in the comments section and I'll post it with my own remarks in due course. This blog isn't going to go away; I write almost every day and comment on others' writing for a living, so I have an endless capacity for producing and processing words.

So here's the poem I wrote last night and this morning, with the aid of a dictionary that pointed out the parts of a horse's anatomy.

The Fighting Horses

One, embraced by the other, nips
a throatlatch taut, its stifles flexed
with fetlocks cocked at pointed hips
and straining neck. The movement vexed,
the horses part and prance, rear back
on hock and tendon, spring from croup
to cannon, curvet to outflank
the other barreling beast. Hooves scrape
on shoulders, pummel pasterns stretched
with whinnying, flail to winnow blown manes
bravely, fight free. Forever unhitched,
they canter back blamelessly, limping and game,
to live together beyond human terms,
their bodies gone awkward: hostile yet disarmed.

My concerns are:
a) that it smells of the lamp (i.e. sounds bookish and over-technical)
b) that it is confusing
c) that no one will get the point, because it's a bit obscure (without people on them horses seem awkward, and their violence kind of monstrous, despite all the military-sounding names we've given to the parts of their bodies).

What do you think?