American Fecundity 2016

These are uncertain times.
Heat hangs heavy, unnatural,
skies cyclone-oppressive.
Hate thickens, alien-green.
The valley is still; not a blade
bends.   There is a highway out—
love actually—
but all stand stoic, lulled
by the static dreadful
blossoming impossible.

 © Steve Brown 2016

To Be or Not to Be

Today a student asked me,
“What’s a bard?”  I said, “a slice of bacon
placed on meat or game before
roasting.”

It’s true & if

you’ve explained you’re a poet

at a family reunion  
you know exactly
what I mean. 
 

©Steve Brown 2016

Stones: the Weight of Liberation (Neil Diamond's "I Am I Said," Bono's "Yahweh," and Bill Flanagan's Stupidity)

Somehow not even Bono can make it artistically kosher to love Neil Diamond.  I'm not sure how that happened. Diamond was once a respected songwriter whose music was covered by the Monkeys, Deep Purple, Elvis and UB40.  True, he did write one incredibly stupid hit about that little alien who wants to phone home.  But, come-on, he's not the only one whose sentimental heart lit up when that insipid green munchkin rode a bike across the silver screen.  Besides, we've forgiven Elton John for "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and Paul McCartney for "Ebony and Ivory."  Why doesn't the artistic atonement apply to Neil Diamond?  Why, despite all of his good works, is he cut off from grace because of one or two lousy mistakes?

Stones is an amazing album.  Perhaps one of the best.  Like the Beatles white album or Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, even the cover is art.  My copy, handed down from my mother who purchased it in 1971, has a subdued canvas colored background with a course linen fiber printed on it.  In the middle of it is a photograph of Neil Diamond sitting on a park bench in front of a massive stone Italian-styled garden wall.   An old and twisted tree stands in the right hand corner; a stone bust sits in a niche in the wall just left of center, just to right of Diamond, who sits stoically arms folded, his stone face looking out at the audience with no expression.  He is barefoot, which with his stoic look and the old-world setting, gives his form the feel of a statue, adding to the crumbling, classical feel of the mostly monotone photograph of gray and olive. The cover reminds me slightly of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" album with the crumbling wall and portrait of the old man.  There is the same heaviness about it.

The entire album is worth listening to, but I'll focus on side two.  I believe this one side of vinyl contains some of the greatest lyrics ever written, although Neil Diamond only wrote two of the songs.  I don't think that is a coincidence.  Like Elton John's Blue Moves, this album is, in part, a reflective evaluation of the cost of fame. Elton John dealt with that by returning to his classical, jazz and blues roots.  Perhaps, Diamond's decision to use other people's material is a reaching out to the void, hoping for an answer more significant than his own name.  "I Am, I Said," his own song, definitely demonstrates the desire to be grounded in significance.

First, we have the title track, "Stones," one of Diamond's own:

The song starts with a simple strum of the guitar, and then enters the line "Stones would play inside her head," a startling image of uncomfortable weight and solidity oddly placed within the mind.  He follows this up with the image of her bed being made of stones--no peace of mind and no rest for the body due to a solid mass that must be dealt with.

But, it's not a mass without meaning.  We are not shoved into the nihilism of Hemingway here.  This is not a world of nada y pues nada.  The stones may be uncomfortable; they may be there to be dealt with; but they also provide shelter and shade for new beginnings:

You and me, a time for planting
You and me, a harvest granting
The every prayer ever prayed
For just two wild flowers that grow

on stones.

There is beauty here, but it isn't an easy beauty.  It's more like the beauty the atonement brings, a grace that comes after the old has been broken down and something new takes root in the rubble.

This contrast of dark and light, of the jeweled flower among the rock, continues in the second song, "If You Go Away" written by Jacques Brel and Rod McKuen.

And then there's "Suzanne."  Ah "Suzanne," what to say?... Leonard Cohen's lyrical masterpiece, but Diamond brings a weight to song that Cohen just wasn't able to do.

The song starts in the sensual world of materialism:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

Cohen concludes the first third of the song with "For you've touched her perfect body with your mind."  Then, the song pivots from sensual world of light and aroma to the weighty divine:

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

Next, comes Randy Newman's composition, "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," which also swings on a fulcrum.  The first half of the song describes interior bleakness:

Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today.

Here, "Human kindness is overflowing" is sarcasm, as indicated by both the music accompaniment and the lines that follow:

Lonely, lonely
Tin can at my feet
Think I'll kick it down the street
That's the way to treat a friend

Human kindness is not overflowing.

Then comes the pivot.  The music changes, becomes upbeat, and similar words take on new meaning:

Bright before me the signs implore me
To help the needy and show them the way
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today.

Here, it's not the weather that will rain, but the human kindness that is overflowing, love filling the cup up to the brim and raining down on humanity.

Notice the repletion of imagery and themes here.  "Stones" starts with the hard imagery of rocks, but ends by noting that the stones provide shelter for "two wildflowers that grow."  "Suzanne" echoes the flower imagery:  "And she shows you where to look /Among the garbage and the flowers," here garbage providing shelter for the flowers.   "Suzanne" also repeats the imagery of stone in, "he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone".  Here, that weight is ambiguous, depending on how you read the lyrics.  The line could mean, his wisdom sank unnoticed by those that executed Him.  Or, as the "you" in the song seems to refer to the speaker, as we don't all know a "Suzanne," it can also mean his that His presence sank deep into the speaker's soul with great redeeming weight, which is how I read it.

Although Diamond is Jewish, I would argue that in purposefully selecting the songs he has chosen, Diamond is setting up Christ as a symbol for human redemption, which is carried to its climax in "I Am, I Said."

Diamond begins by comparing his new home of L.A. with his roots in New York, saying that he feels "lost between two shores."  Although this is clearly biographical and must be taken literally, I will argue that he extends the literal image out into a metaphor for the human predicament.  We are all lost between two shores.  We are here in this temporal world, "among the garbage and flowers" as noted in "Suzanne," but we also have a divine, spiritual origin that deep down we can't forget, which leaves us feeling lost, ghostlike, unreal, like Christ, "almost human" and yet "almost divine," "lost between two shores."

And so we cry out--not to other men--but to the void, the divine, the spark that brought us into being because the "emptiness deep inside" calls us back to our true home, that distant memory before we were here.

In U2 at the End of the World, Bill Flanagan makes light of Bono's claim that Neil Diamond is a serious song writer. 

Bono looked down his nose at my sarcasm and asked, "Do you know what 'I Am, I Said' is all about?

Flanagan spews out the surface meaning with the depth of understanding of a Pharisee, giving the literal background which inspired Diamond to write the song with little awareness that poetry gains weight as it is written that moves it beyond the initial impulse in scope.

Bono, not flinching, asserts, "God is described as the great I am.  So, in that song Diamond is calling out to Jehovah.  'I am, I said," means, 'God, I said.'  To who?  To no one there!  And no one heard at all, not even chair!  Do you see?  It is a song of despair and lost faith by a man calling out to a God who isn't interested!"

I agree.  Well, mostly.  If you take only "I Am, I Said" by itself  that is true.  It is Christ calling out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" before being transformed.  But, taking in all of Stones it is the calling out to God in pain the moment before rebirth.

It matters not that Diamond is Jewish.  Poets borrow metaphors all the time.  Christian poets tapped into Greek mythology for centuries.  Besides Jews do believe in Christ--they just don't believe he has already been born and died; but the idea of rebirth out of hardship is nothing new to them. 

In "Yahweh," Bono puts it this way:

Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing, sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still, I'm waiting for the dawn

It is almost as if Bono said to himself, alright the critics won't take "I Am, I Said," seriously because they won't take Neil Diamond seriously, I'll show them.  I'll write my own "I Am, I Said," and they will take that seriously because "I Am Bono."

Of course I don't really think Bill Flanagan is an idiot.   I think his U2 at the End of the World is a fine book.  But, Flannigan is just one among many who for some bizarre reason are out to stone one of our finest song writers, Neil Diamond.  Perhaps some day he will see the errors of ways and tap into the beauty of Stones.  There is certainly sustenance there for those willing to listen.

 

 

Worm Hole

I try to convince myself

this is the good time--

the music has stopped;
there is the rattle
of ice, the dangle of
                                 conversation.

There is you--

in that soft pink sweater
and dimpled smile,
eyes all a glitter,

but it's only sparks of light
dancing the surface,
everything below
is stone blue ice
that looms towards
my Titanic heart.

I'm jealous--of everything:
of your density,
that everyone here
knows you as well as I.
You, my wife,
the stunning white weight
of my life.

I'm jealous
of these painters,
these poets,
these writers
who flock around
your jeweled presence
to take refuge from the blue
abyss that is
our lives.

I hate how my words never
come together
with enough force
to implode
the lies.

Yet, I know
there is an unseen wonder--
a small but significant canyon
just beyond the endless suburban
sprawl and nylon skies
where a hawk
still does fly.

And there is a narrow wash--a slot
canyon carved through time.
A great myth is buried there
under the coral sands--the song
of a great flood, of a great
sacrifice, of a great love.

If the right poet
were to find it--the right
rhythms, the right breaths--
capture the terrible currents,
the great horror,
the tremendous sacrifice, especially
the Christ-like love displayed
in the aftermath--

well maybe, somehow
these empty evenings
of articulate conversation
would mean something.

Therefore, I
like the others
hang on & grasp
for the right line
to end the endless arctic
of our lives.

© Steve Brown 2016

Recently, for whatever reason, I've begun to dream alternative lives.  This poem came from a dream I had last night.  It evolved as I wrote it, so it isn't the dream, but it's not too far off.  The dreams are always centered around an imperfect world with lots of pain and heartache, but I always wake up feeling that everything is alright, it's just life. 

The Myth of the Dot ("Little Wonders" by Rob Thomas).

Photo by Rio Brown

 

Spring fever and heavy cold is not a great combination.  To make things worse, my brother asked me to go on a long drive deep into nowhere, but I have deadlines and commitments.  Not quite ready to face them, I went looking for a poem about unquenchable desire, what I used to call the forever search, captured magnificently in Bob Seger's "Fire Inside."

I found some old poems that focused on that theme to be sure.  My life was once driven by the need for escape, a constant hunger for something else.

But somehow I've stepped through that door and into another reality.  Sure, I still sometimes want to hit the open road.  I still long for quiet, dark corners of an empty bar, even though I don't venture into such places anymore.  Coffee always has a hand on my shoulder while it whispers in my ear, Go ahead have just one sip, which I don't do because I honor my religion.

But the void no longer calls me to fill it.  There simply isn't that much left to fill.  God has taken residence and I am satisfied.  So instead, I was drawn to a poem I'd completely forgotten about:

The Myth of the Dot

It's a dark and rainy day.
A line of twenty or more ATVs
roars up Canyon Road,
headlights dancing
off the splashing rain.

Everyone wears matching
green and yellow
fluorescent plastic.

Everest and I go outside
to watch the tourists
ruin our way of life.

When they are gone,
he shows me his bug bite.

"You got bit by a mosquito."

"No, it's just a dot."

"How did you get it?"

"It just floated down from the sky
and got stuck.

Then someone glued it."

The poem was probably written the summer of 2004, and so Everest would have been four.  O how I loved our long job-free summers at Dry Creek.  Some of the magic was removed when we moved here, as it is now our standing place in life rather than a carefree retreat.  Still, the magic of small wonders remains.

Tulips

I don't know what Charles Schwab was doing in my dream,
but boy was he mad at Obama.
I tried to make a few counter-points,
but he just talked right over me.
So I just thought about the beauty of tulips in spring.

October: A Garden Poem

The cool air,

the slight breeze,

the soft sun

& long drawn out

shadows on the last 

gold stubble

of summer's wild 

rye. Almost silence

sits outside the window,

the soft patter of dog feet,

the very occasion bird chirp,

crickets all but snuffed 

out by the coming 

cold.  A distant chain 

saw cuts wood 

for winter.

It's good to be done

with heat.

It's good to be done

with watering.

Hell, it's even good

to be done 

with the garden other 

than dumping piles

of leaves.

It is settling time.

Darkness and cold

cover the need to do,

allow time

Pulse (Love, Poetry & Paulo Nutini)

            for Marci

Listening to you listen

to music is a slow

unwinding, a deep

letting go, a blue

knowing, deep

and growing

underground.

There is soil here.

Years of experience

broken down by time

memories layered up, thick

black and real,

two trees

sending signals

underground.

Vibes.   Sounds cliché.

Sleek silver bullet train.

The way you move

through me.

If there was an empty

parking lot in a horribly large and unkind

city, and I found myself

staring down at moonlight

reflected in dreams

busted on the pavement

like so many vodka bottles,

the razor wire

coiled along the chain

link fence calling

my name

like long ago

before you came

into my life

wonderful

I hope

by some

unlikely

coincidence

a car would pass

playing

Paulo Nutini

letting go,

that primal yearning

unwinding so real

and rooted

that I’d

find my way

home to you

the only place

I’ve ever fully

belonged.

The Soundtrack of One Life out of 108 Billion: Entry 3: "Monkberry Moon Delight" by Paul McCartney (Nonsense Poetry, Writing and the Creative Process)

It's nineteen-seventy-something.  I'm in second grade, and I've ditched Lynn, my girlfriend, somewhere over by the POD, an octagonal lunchroom separate from the school.  We're playing kissing tag, and it's not that I'm so stupid that I don't know that the purpose of kissing tag is to get caught, it's that her cousin, Lucinda, is more into pinching, and she's very good at it.  So, I've split the scene.

It's warm and snow melting off the comparatively hot pavement creates steam that rises in thin clouds about waste high, and they are golden glorious in the noontime sun.  I've got spring fever and am feeling freaking high. I bellow out Paul McCartney's "Monkberry Moon Delight."  I don't have a clue what it's about, but I love the feel of the words on the end of my tongue:

So I sat in the attic, a piano up my nose,
And the wind played a dreadful cantata.
Sore was I from a crack of an enemy's hose
And the horrible sound of tomato.

Ketchup,
Soup and puree,
Don't get left behind.
Ketchup,
Soup and puree,
Don't get left behind.

I never did figure out the exact meaning of the song.  As I grew older, it seemed to me it might have been inspired by B-grade monster movies, but it also seemed a finger to expectations--artistic, social, political and otherwise, Paul McCartney saying I'll be who I please and do what I please.  It felt very revolutionary to me, and I loved its pure celebration of the sound of language.

Whenever, I'd get upset in high school or early years of college, I'd just fling words down on the page and play with them, make slightly irreverent, irrelevant nonsense out of them, like this:

 More Talk

... Instead I gnarl on a bark stick,
pour on the cats
and say,
"Gee this is very good,
this is very meaty for a stick of wood."

The termites tingle as they slide down my throat.
What would I do for a feast on fat goat?
I'd slit my mother's own throat!

I definitely had nothing against my mom.  I just had something against propriety.  I still do.  I just fight the impulse more.  I'm not so sure that's good.  I think real reverence comes about when you're at least a little open to irreverence.  Paul McCartney could write "Let It Be" and be sincere because he could also write "Monkberry Moon Delight."  If he sat around always trying to write lofty songs, they'd have the impact of Hallmark Cards or the music of Air Supply.

So, to quote Paul--sort of--if you want to write well, leave your cats to Billy Budapest and let your piano be boldly outspoken.

Life (Buddhism, Mormonism, poetry, the Creative Process & the Fixx)

I first came to poetry through music.  When I was a teenager, I would listen to groups like the Cure, the Police, the Fixx, and the music would drive words--not just their words, but my words and their words mingled together, and I would write poems that, although mostly mine, would never have arrived without theirs--a sort of strange dialogue, where both are talking, but only I am listening.   Here, I have gone back to my poetic roots, what I consider a righteous plagiarism--the spirit of one artist sustaining another.  Perhaps, it is more for the young, but I enjoyed the Fixx moving me once again. After all, I am definitely old enough to qualify for a mid-life crisis, if not a little beyond that right.

Photo by Rio Brown

Life

Rose red sunsets
and maggots on the bone.
Golden fawn
in the dawn dew meadow
or dead on the road.

Flower blooming,
baby breaking
forth blood-slick
and God-glorious,
parents joy,
gentle rain,
terrible typhoon,
get your ass to your room!

Bitter bite of frost,
the limb-snap
thundering down,
happenstance
blossoming
the end
of one stopping
by woods to
enjoy

silence, ah silence, that moment of stillness....

before the storm,

kneeling,
pleading,
begging,
no, no, no more!

Sun pours
through verdant green canopy
Everything taken
is restored.

The -ing Not Caught on Camera

Sitting in the recliner, watching 

Travel Bug on a dark day,

windows open to boiling 

clouds and spring green

trees, water bubbling

down ditches--

scent of rain,

scent cottonwood

from the water-rich canyon 

below--

three wild turkey making

their way up-slope,

watching me

watching.

5/5/15

Why the Universe Needs Poetry: "Touch Me" by Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

Sometimes a life-long devotion to the word doesn't seem worth it.  It's hard to create continuously and receive very little reward.  It's not money we crave, but readership, some sort of response to our calls out into the universe. Writers usually can spot other writers, so even if, like me, one is not well-published, most writers probably know a writer or two who are.  That was true even for Emily Dickinson.  That helps.  If we can't get recognition by the masses, at least we receive a little recognition by others recognized by the masses. But, writers are all so busy writing and promoting their own calls out into the universe, even that is limited.

Sure, we should be satisfied intrinsically.  We know when we've written something profound and when we haven't.  We know that magic moment when we say, Damn, the world should hear this.  Or the empty feeling having spent nine hours to produce nada.   But we're human.  We get angry, jealous.  At least, I know I do.  So, there are times we want to give up.  Perhaps some do.

But all that disappears when we come across language that touches to the core.  Then, the self, and all the fears, desires and jealousies that go along with it disappear.  We don't care who wrote that poem, just that it was written at all.  Once, in my undergraduate program, I won a poetry contest at the college, and a weird thing happened.  I was disappointed.  Not because I won, but because I had a friend who had written a better poem, which didn't even receive an honorable mention.  I didn't so much feel bad for her; I felt bad for her poem. I knew it was so much better than mine and yet the world--or that small slice of the world that was our creative writing department--had failed to recognize the profound need for that poem to be heard.

It is at such moments I realize that being a poet is worth it no matter what the psychological costs are.  I can't explain it, but words do matter.  They carry the weight and grace of God.

For weeks, I haven't been able to work on my blog.  The only thing I seemed to need to say is F-you!  And rap artists fulfilled that need decades ago.

And then tonight, while browsing facebook in order to avoid writing, all that changed when I came across a video on Bill Moyers page of Stanley Jasspon Kunitz reading "Touch Me."

Even though Kunitz was the 10th U.S. Poet Laureate, I'd never heard of him.  But, wow!--that poem reminded me of why I write.  The universe needs poetry.  Not everyone does.  And if it does nothing for you, fine.  But existence is not the same without small things said absolutely perfectly.

(This is a different reading, introduced by Garrison Keillor, not quite as powerful, but still amazing.) 

  

Yellow (Shyness, Richie Valens and Cold Play)

Soft yellow light backs
a horizon of gray clouds,
the last of a slight storm,
sodium white
fingering up
into the lightest
of blues,

all broken
by fine-limbed
trees smudged
green.

It's spring,
rock 'n' roll
over the Bose:
Richie Valens
sings, Well, come on,
let's go, let's go, little darlin'

Ah, and there I go
back to warm days
& the spread
of lawn across
the football field.

It wasn't the 50s,
it wasn't Richie,
it wasn't even spring,

but there she sat in the bleachers,
bright yellow overalls,
dark sun glasses,
blond hair feathered
back, blowing gently
in the lightest breeze,

days that stood tall
with potential
even under the squalid reality--

shyness an urban blight
(blinds pulled over
second story windows
to shut out fear
that thundered through
like a Chicago
elevated).

For one brief
moment--

the sun on
her cheek--

I forgot
who I was

and smiled back
broad as a billboard.

Moving from a Literature of Disbelief to a Literature Belief: An Open-Dialogue with The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Part I: I See Too Deeply (Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer)

There have been three times in my life when I did something irrational and brave:  I said, Screw it, I made a mistake, and I cut chords with the past and almost started down the path to the sort of life I wanted.  But the first couple of times, at the last moment, I faltered and clung to doubt and self-imposed limitations instead of walking out of the picture I was in and into the one I wanted.  Of course, it would not have been perfect, but if I’d had the courage to carry through, it would have been perfect compared to where I’d been.

Pure sunlight shines between two Austrian pines my brother and I planted back in ’96.  The snow, mostly in shadow, is cold, hard and blue.  It seems like the perfect day for reading, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting.  Marci even made Chili.

What I want to reflect on here is moving from a literature and life of isolation and disbelief to a literature and life of connection and belief.  I once thought I’d found my bible, The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  It described perfectly the void I was feeling and the literature I loved.  A window, even if accurate, is just one view of existence.  Having looked through other windows since then, I’d like to go back and look out that window again.

I think all of this will come to play in this dialogue, but I want to get right to the book, and when I found the book, and why it meant so much to me.

It was a cold winter, and during the week I lived alone in a dorm.  I’d dropped out of school and moved back to Dry Creek, this piece of family land that has never let me live fully anywhere else.  But there was nothing here for me.   The only jobs available were the type for college dropouts.  I ended up being a janitor at an indoor mushroom farm on the other side of town and decided a formal education might not be so bad after all, so I went back to school in a bigger town, two hours from Dry Creek.  However, I was twenty-six and really didn’t belong in an undergraduate program anymore.  I’d had some poems published, had been somewhat involved in a writing community in El Paso.  After returning to Utah, all I wanted to do was get my degree, so that I could get a teaching job in my hometown and live the rest of my days at Dry Creek, writing poems about stone, cold water, deer carcasses and drunken nights in the town’s two bars.  I had no belief beyond sight—to live and bear witness to a meaningless universe, which was at least bearable if I were there to witness a deer bounce down a gravel road covered in thin snow, the cottonwood along the creek a faint pink in the last day light.

Back at in college, I’d hear girls laughing outside my dorm room, but they sounded so young, so remote, like distant memories.  They weren’t even that.  I was incredibly shy and my romantic adventures were few and far in between.  Older, I still liked the giddy laughter outside my walls, but it was different.  It did not stir the restless hunger of a teenager.  No, it was more like the fondness of a father.  I had never had a real college experience, but I was mature enough to realize I’d missed that train.  If there was a world for me, this wasn’t it. 

So, during the week, I walled myself in my little cinderblock room to write.   On weekends, I went home, got drunk with a band of single and divorced Paiute women and a drop-out actor, and when not at the bar, soaked in as much of Dry Creek as possible.  The next week I’d start the process all over again.

When at school, I seldom ventured outside my dorm except for class and to go to the library.  My writing professors admired my craft, but as I was writing at a master’s level and most of my classmates had barely opened a book, I had no connection with my peers.  I remember Jim Aton would have us rate each other’s papers and then would give us his rating.  According to my peers, my paper was almost incomprehensible.  According to him, I should get it published.  So, I doubled up on my studies to get out of there.

The campus had a beautiful, new library, with a three story glass atrium, but hardly any books.  On top of that, they had all-but-illiterate undergraduate students weed the small collection they had.  As a result, I’d pick up collectible books on the discard rack for 25 cents.

One of the books I picked up--not a collectable--was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  As it so accurately named what I’d been feeling and capturing in my own writing, it quickly became my Bible.

I still have the book.  It’s the 1982 Tarcher edition from  Houghton Mifflin with a forward by Marilyn Ferguson.  The cover is simple: a black rectangle with a thin red border.  Centered near the top is the title and author, also red print.  It looks serious, revolutionary—and when first published in 1956, it was.  

Chapter One, “Country of the Blind,” begins as follows:

At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem.  He is the hole-in-corner man.

Damn, I thought, that’s me.

He then quotes from Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting.  Her dress, lifted a little, blows out.  But a block in the traffic separates us.  The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed.  It is not the woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one.

Defeated, I followed my impulse casually.  I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner.  Then we walked side by side.  We said a few words; she took me home with her… Then I went through the banal scene.  It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped.  An immense confusion bewilders me.  It is as if I could not see things as they were.  I see too deeply and too much.

I knew that feeling immediately.  It was my old friend.  I’d written poems about it:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn’t a bad idea, and I use to.
Nine o’clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he’d do that,
and I’d grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But then, I don’t know, something happened.

Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body,
but how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?

And how does she stand you,

both of you growing,
swallowing space?

All healthy things get bigger,

more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don’t have it so bad.

I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:

How do I make it mine?

At the time I wrote that poem, my mother thought the ending-line,“How do I make it mine?” referred to marriage.  And it does,  sort of, but not really, because prior to it “something happened,” which is the first fulcrum of the poem, a pivot between the secure fixed universe of youth and the open, uncertain universe of adulthood.  What I desired to make mine was life in all its complexity, but something had robbed me of that possibility.  What was that “something”?

When I opened The Outsider, I knew immediately my something was the same something  that makes the romantic encounter in L’enfer so banal.  Like Henri Barbusse’s protagonist, I also saw “too deeply and too much.”

Or so, I thought at the time.  In this series of essays, I will in fact argue that like so many of my predecessors,  even though I saw deeper than many, I actually didn’t see deeply enough.  But, I'll get to that later.

Is Etta James the Heart and Soul of Poetry?: Etta James, Van Morrison, and the Art of the Repeated Line

I dreamt that the key to poetry is the music of Etta James.  As I really didn’t have a clue who Etta James was, I thought this is either ridiculous or quite significant.  (Note:  a couple of weeks earlier I dreamt I would be the father of a major school of poetics, Rammed-Earth Poetry, so clearly my id is searching for some sort of significance here.)  Still, could a dead relative of mine, or Etta herself, or perhaps even God Almighty be directing my artistic pursuit from the other side?  I don’t know.  Part of me always wants to write off the muse as pure crap, but some of my best poems have come to me in dreams.  So, then I think, well, it’s just the workings of the subconscious.  But, when I put on Etta this morning, I thought sweet damn that lady do sing the blues so sweetly redemption is hanging out on the street corner just waitin to smile up at me with great big, black eyes that contain all the love in the universe!

And I thought there might be something to this crazy dream after all.  Now, I’m not ready to toss William Carlos Williams in the trashcan yet, but maybe there is something other, something just as real, but different than the right-on images, perfect line breaks, and plain ol’ American dialect--something that’s missing not only from my own work, but also the work of my heroes.

I know repetition draws me, the chant, and going back mid-step, before your foot is fully forward, like Van Morrison does:

 

 

But how do you get that on the page independent of the blues band?  If, I say if, I say, if it’s the ramble and the row, the slow winding out, then pulling back in, then bellowing out heart and soul that drives poetry, the eye has to be able to pick that up, line by line, so the music forms in the reader’s mind.

Is it doable?  I don’t know.  Or is that even why Etta James is the heart and soul of poetry?

But, I do know this: although I woke up thinking I had a crazy dream, after listing to Etta, I do believe she is indeed the heart and soul of poetry and I’m more than willing to explore possibility that some of her spirit can be captured in the unaccompanied line. 

Besides, it’s kind of like deciding that Julia Roberts holds the secret to acting.  Even if you’re wrong, after seeing her smile, quite frankly, who gives a damn?  After hearing Etta, my life aint gonna never be the same nohow.  And I thank whatever dead relative cared enough about to let me in on that secret.

 

 

 

The Broken

Sit in recliners
& watch
television
flinching
now & then
from pain
unfolding
like spring.

There are meadows
in the mind, but
the days are blotchy--
a brief moment
of yesteryear
in intense sunlight
before clouds
of reality
move across
the valley
& blacken
the front.

Prayers
are worn
like windbreakers,
always a little
too thin.

Without You, This Valley Is Immense (Poetry, Bob Dylan & George Harrison)

Without you, this valley is immense
and unbearably vacant.  Yet, I take
the long way home because
I fear the void that waits
with a cat, a rabbit,
two dogs, five fish
and six chickens
to jump
all over
me.

I go slow
down past
the dunes
and then
the water
deep
below the
surface
feeding
the thorn-
thicket
of Russian
Olives,

the black

mass
of the basalt flow
heavy in the
distance,
a scab
where
earth
broke
open
hot & living.

I never want a pain like that—

where to pulse and throb
and bleed molten rock
is the only way to sustain
against erosion at a profound level,
life always waiting to be
engulfed
by the sea.

No, an island

is no more the life
for me.

The dogs rush out to see me.

They too hate the house without you.
I feed the chickens; the dogs take a crap.
We go in.  Bunny Boy lets
me know he too has been alone
and wants attention.

Perhaps the fish

swim in bliss
oblivious
to this house
ceasing to be home.

I’m about to settle

into blue or fade
to sepia tone
when Lloyd shows
up & I’m glad
together we can hate
Republicans
until you get
home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Galveston, November, 1947 ("Heartaches" by Harry James and Marion Morgan; "Wanderlust" by Paul McCartney)

Glory

This is the second poem in a series of linked-poems I plan to write in Glory, a novel-in-verse based loosely on Visions of Glory by John Pontius, a spiritual account of “Spencer,” an unidentified individual who shared his visionary experience with Pontius.  Other than noting that Spencer's father killed someone while driving under the influence as a teen, that he was sent to war, that he married and left Spencer's mother, Pontius does not provide many details here.  This allowed me free reign of my imagination.  I thought, Where would a returning soldier be likely to end up?   Galveston.  Then, I picked a likely year.  When I typed in "Galveston, 1947" to get a feel for the place and time, I found '47 was no ordinary year for the big bay.  But, I didn't know how to finish the poem.  Then, as is often the case, two borrowed lines came to me--"light out wanderlust / head us out to sea"--that my mind heard wrong in order to fit the poem:  "light up wanderlust / head out to sea".    
   

Galveston, November, 1947 

It was gray day along the Strand

when my mother met my father.
She didn’t see the metaphor coming
even after they crossed the causeway
in his new Series 62 convertible Cadillac
to see the ruins of Texas City,

and later sitting on the bright red hood,

eating cheese and cucumber sandwiches
amongst the lingering empty car hulls
in a vacated parking lot a quarter mile from
the explosion.  It was romantic
holding each other fiercely
against the wind amongst twisted, ash-covered
metal exoskeletons.

My father skirted the war, his youth
(and no doubt the drunken episode
in Farmington, Utah that led to his sentence),
but reveled to recover
the day the Grandcamp, still moored at dock,
rocked Galveston Bay.

Mother sat transfixed by the thick,
short wave of his bangs
casting a thin, black shadow
across his brow, adding mystery
and excitement to details he rattled off
with the passion of a poet:

There I was, amongst falling bales of burning twain.
Hell, the anchor was hurled across the entire city.
Two sightseeing planes had their wings torn off.
Even in Galveston blokes were knocked to their knees,
in Houston windows shattered.  They even say
the shock wave shook Louisiana.
Hell, Monsanto bloody Chemical Company
never paid me enough anyway.
Damn well deserve to be wiped away.

And over the radio, came a warning,

from Harry James and Marion Morgan--

Heartaches
Heartaches
My loving you meant only heartaches...

 

But the daughter of a preacher,
my mother just couldn't hear it.
Light up wanderlust,
head us out to sea.