Peter Manso: notes of a displeased groupie

The 1980s saw the publication of a highly readable oral history of his hero and mentor Norman Mailer, titled "Mailer: His Life and Times", by author Peter Manso. Manso, a good writer in all other respects, has republished the book with a 44-page afterword in which he repays the insult Mailer had paid him when it turned out the biography displeased him greatly. Mailer and Manso were close friends during the eighties, with Manso admitting as much that he was, more or less, Mailer's acolyte.

The pair even shared a beachfront house in Provincetown, MA. Mailer had written to the local newspaper, stating that P.D. Manso is seeking gold in the arid desert of his inner life, where lies and distortions are the sole source of sustenance for him." Ouch. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digger irritated that this vein will yield no more.

The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes. I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've got a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like 44 pages of sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The issue with having heroes who embody every virtue and goal one desires for themselves is that they will betray you, whether they're doing it out of love or not.

I've no idea what went on between the two men while they occupied that beachfront property, but it's very possible Mailer had other things he wanted to do besides listening to the sound and sight of a dedicated fanboy sucking up; perhaps Manso crossed over from being a mere acolyte and exhibited a malignant sycophancy. Or maybe not; Manso would have served himself better getting over a three-decade-old slight and finessed his remarks a tad more. It was Mailer's particular genius to make himself, as subject, fascinating in ways a reader wouldn't have suspected. That same talent isn't Manso's. Would that he merely republished his worthy oral history and gone onto another book.

Paul Dresman

Full disclosure: Paul Dresman was a teacher of mine at the University of California, San Diego, and he was the nearest thing I had to a poetry mentor. He has a genius for the unexpected phrase to describe what would go unnoticed in situations and encounters, and he has one of the most perfectly developed ears I've come across; his free verse has a vital, rhythm,a sound of surprise. Here, he provides us with a comic scenario for the tensions between the animal and human kingdoms; what is revealed is that we are getting in the way, quite unaware that we share the planet and soon enough will experience a similar dilemma. -tb_____________

Speaking of Routes

By Paul Dresman


Behind the beaches, the plains
cut back into the red ochre,
yellow ochre canyons
and, in places, the torrey pines
have been slashed to the quick
to lift houses on pads,
rainbirds turning circles,
grasses ad ornamentals
where dry brush rattled pods
and the elfin forest went about
surviving each dry year
(rabbits love to come at dawn
and graze the fresh watered lawns).


Where the freeway cuts and concretes the access
the animals are funneled through the underpass
Nights in your lights (maybe one-eyed, returning from parties)
their eyes flash and they move hugely
--foxes coming into sudden new view


But they pass as fast as a pair of hips
in a party kitchen
moves around behind you, brushing you. lightly
inscribing a small intaglio in your imago,
a moment between car and animal,
between hello and where are we going to go?

But the onramp beckons, the empty lanes
lead to the cities of the plains
where animals are found in dreams
like a passing fancy of endless party people
dancing in circles, wanting…


The animals are wanting. One half
of our face caves away. We stand,
along the chain link, waiting
to cross the impassable highway.

SOME POEMS NEED TO BE TARRED AND FEATHERED

There are some poems I read that put me in a bad mood and keep me there; the insidious thing about that experience is that the mood isn't bad, it's mean, and a host of my anti-social impulses awaken and demand their satisfaction. "The White Skunk" by the lead-footed David Ferry is such a poem, offered up on Slate. Think of the Drama Club ham who treated every gesture or half sentence of dialogue into an audition in front of imagined producers, every poli-sci blowhard who couldn't jargonize obvious facts fast enough, a movie so long that sometimes you think you're still watching it. Ferry is one thing, a bore, a never ending cold potato.
White Skunk" , ironically, caused to remember a Little Rascals episode I watched when I was a grade schooler, specifically an arresting image among the usual film hi-jinx of one a young black five year old chasing a skunk into a the gang's club house, saying "HERE KITTY KITTY KITTY". The skunk darts into the building and, of course, everyone inside comes flying out of the windows. My memory, of course, is a bit hazy on the exact details of the scene, but the scenario is correct, and it's an apt metaphor for someone who gets fixed on a bad idea and labors until the end, the result a busy and messy assemblage.
David Ferry chased a skunk thinking he had a brilliant idea on his hand; the metaphor gets extended here, in that this poem stinks as badly as the maligned animal would if sufficiently provoked. The poet might as well have been a drunk lout at a party , pants around his knees, lampshade on his head, spelling "Mississippi" with the rich raspberry-tuned gases he could squeeze from between his cheeks. Musical he might have though this poem was, but with all the useless padding, the buffering qualifiers, the allusions to Homer seeming no less than a moneypit home addition that knows no end, Ferry's attempt to turn an interesting scene into a moment of dimension ripping revelation gives a wordy disaster, whole stanzas composed for a unifying theme that does not come.
Ferry makes the familiar mistake when things aren't clicking , which is to overwrite in determined fashion to compensate for inspiration. Too soon it's more than squeaking gases the poet is passing our way. Thinking of a groaning man inside a men's room stall who's sat on what's he's consumed for too long, straining for release. Ferry, though, was straining for effect, but the poem , not flushed with success, still has an odor one would normally remove themselves from.
 Ferryis a noted translator with some poetic instincts and precision when he brings his skill to reanimating Homer, should offer up this unedited mess as a finished work. The project would have worked if he made only the most oblique and distanced references to the classical poem he was paraphrasing and drawing parallels from. He needed to ennoble the skunk less with mythological freight and bring the interaction between animal and human down to a more plausible point. Similarly he would have done well to make the imperiled father and daughter less melodramatic; as it goes , it has the pitch of excited overwriting, an athletic effort to put words in place when narrative layering isn't working out.  Had this my poem, I would have pared this back to the point where the allegories all but disappeared and the reader would have instead a poem that could be read for it's own merits. Those astute enough to recognize the borrowing from Homer, well, good on them.  

Ferry wanted to do fine things with the overlays of this poem--a contemporary scene of animal v human tension segueing into an ancient Greek tale--but the result is ham handed and displays the unwieldy amateurishness of a writer unwilling to rid a work of particulars that don't enhance but only clutter and clog. There is a way to make this idea vivid and emphatic, and the first thing would be to de-emphasise the classical references; as is, it merely seems like the cultural window dressing that has more to do with bragging rights than usefulness. Second, the action should be sparer, mirroring Ferry's enamored tale, but making little or no reference to it. Third, the language can be cut back within an inch of its ideal intent. Ferry needs to spend less time telling us what's happening and more showing us.

The choice cynicism of Jack Spicer

By Ted Burke

Jack Spicer was an odd and inspired contrarian in place during the San Francisco Renaissance, who conceived poetry as "dictation" of a sort. He had gone so far as to refer to the poet as a "radio", a living device able to intercept transmissions from an other wise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, form. This is a unique way of insisting, again, that the artist is the "antenna of the race", and there is room enough in his thought to wonder if he considered the poet the one in particular who could touch Plato's Ideal Forms, or if thought he had te ability to peak behind the curtain to espy the furniture of Stevens' Supreme Fiction. Spicer was a troubled man, though, an alcoholic, someone at odds with the poetry community he lived in, but he was a serious, sometimes brilliant poet who could calm his erudition and gives us a poetry of propositions, what ifs, things thornier and much less sweet than the soft candy a few dozen celebrity poets win awards for. Here's a a fine poem, a brief lyric essay considering the likeness of some unlike things.

Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

A cynic's view, perhaps, where the picture that's painted first has the gasping awe of young love, perfect, endless like a circle, the world itself, and later, destroyed, cut at the vital moment of greatest vulnerability, merely a thick string that starts at one end and merely ends, absent glory or beauty, at another. Even after the twists and turns of the thing itself--love, the foiled circle--to restore itself in reactionary spasams, things just end, and rapture and passion are replaced by bitter memory, a bitterness that gives way to a mellowed skepticism, if one is lucky to live long enough to be a witness their own foolish expectations of people, places, things, and especially the foolishness one might have said about poetry in whatever earnest declarations one uttered in classrooms, dorm rooms, cafes where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and company.

Good poem.

More Pith than Poetry

I do enjoy apples, savor them, dice and slice them, eat them enthusiastically and wallow a bit in the crisp and sweet delight that . "Apple Economics", though, is enough to kill my taste for the prized fruit. Edison Jenning's writing misses the the whole savor experience and produces instead a set of regimented lines that neither make sense nor appeal to the senses. It might be that Jennings wants to give the sense of a listener coming into the middle, or the last third of a conversation, with all the signifiers connected to an emotion that was initially expressed at the start of the monologue but which as abated with the on going details.


Though livid and salacious, supermarket Red Delicious
don't deserve the name. But after bagging two or three,
I think of old-stock Staymans that grew behind our house
in weather-beaten, bee-infested rows no one ever pruned,
and all we had to do was reach. I must have eaten bushels' worth while balanced in the highest limbs.

This makes me think of those nauseating camera sweeps you used to see in Sixties adventure series like The Man from UNCLE or I Spy where the lens spins around a crowded terrain in the wan hope of getting in all of the incidental exotica with the fewest shots and manhours with little sense of how coherent the sequence might be. Jenning's method jumps from one stance to another, from euphonious memories of supermarket shelves to backyard harvests, with the only determinant being that apples had to be mentioned in each of the long and otherwise segregated lines.Each sentence seems like the start of a new poem, and I wonder if Jennings has read the notorious Language Poets, in the guise of Ron Silliman particularly. Silliman, an envelope -pushing writer who's unmoored referents are written with a rigorous methodology and purpose , uses images and image-born phrases in long succession that are seemingly separate from the sentence before it and the sentence that follows.Silliman's new collection, Age of Huts, brings together several books he's published as a long standing project. It makes for alterntely exihilerating and exasperating reading. Each line can well be said to be the start of another poem, and although the approach , which foregrounds language as subject matter, and while the aesthetic effect of Silliman's poetry is culminative--there is a cubist perspective that arises when one gets a hint that each of the writer's pieces, nonsequitur that they may seem, have physical locations, sites, real people with whom he's had real conversations, and there is stammering and stuttering rhythm which is oddly musical as he works through his variations of chosen icons--tone appreciates the length to which Silliman has continued his course of examining the dictions and tropes that constitute the way we address our experience in the world.

Jenning's aims are more modest and less successful, chiefly because he seems to want to transgress that troublesome line that separates poetry from prose and so produce writing that has the effect of a collage. The ambition isn't political as is Silliman's, it is nostalgic and quaint. We are meant to take this in as a series of associations , personalized with first person pronouns, as an epiphany, a rush of sensation that is elusive, powerful, and which makes us weak in the knees in the fragmented recollection.

With one hand full of apples,
the other swatting bees, I watched swallows tip
and skim the tree-rimmed skies already hinting cold,
the windfall left ungathered, the fallow years that followed,
and now this bag of garish fruit my memory grafts to vintage
among the rows of grocery aisles that green to fields of praise.

There are not many instances when I would invoke the name of Billy Collins as an example any other poet should emulate, but in this case I think Collins' transparent "writerly" stanzas would have been a perfect match for the ambivalent nostalgia Jennings tried to get across. The failure is what I see as Jenning's willingness to flirt with nonsequiturs to get his feeling across; it reads as arch and stiff, and the worst offense, dull. Collins has the benefit of not trying to be bold or experimental in his verse celebrating the mundane . He might be a hack, but at least he succeeds in what he's trying to get across in a poem. But this is stiff as as a starched brassire, unnatural sounding for an impressionistic chain of autobiographical images; the associative leaps between the lines would be more vivid with a tongue speaking with fewer words one has copied from a thesaurus, to be used in a poem when the muse is ready to motivate an idea. It reads as if it has been worked over, concentrated upon, with new phrases added, deleted, reworked, over-thought. Edison Jenning's would- be tribute to apples sounds forced and unappetizing. Nothing convincing of either apples or his experience of them comes across here, and that's a shame.

November 22nd

By Ted Burke

It seemed for years that we were caught in a loop of empty testimonials and evocations each time November 22nd happened upon the calendar page, an increasingly hallow chorus of platitudes and crumbling cliches centering around the promise of the late John F.Kennedy's administration and how that road to our destined Eden was bombed, blasted and dug up with his assassination. So much hope, but we trudge on, there was so much promise, but we carry on the work, the world has only become more insane, but we maintain faith in our hearts of our better instincts and work all the same towards that Paradise that is the American Dream.

We've been through these waves of self laceration, self-loathing, mumbled commitments to social justice, and we've trudged on instead, weighted with hostage crisis, nuclear brinkmanship, bi-polar stock markets, entrenched meanness regarding race and economic gain for the working class, our optimism stashed in a box, crammed in the back of a closet overstuffed with dashed hopes for a better existence.

Those of us in our fifties who embody the cocky retorts of a bright boy and the spite of the laziest who disguise their apathy with a pretense of cynicism roll our eyes when the fateful date comes again, the speeches and the hushed tones are read again, that our noddings of the head will suffice in place of expressed irritation less out of respect for the memory of John Kennedy and what he represents so much as maintaining a peaceful workplace. It's a sad fate to have one's internalized values become a source of venal aggravation. Irony, easy literary devices, earnest cliches become true; hoist by my own petard.

At the moment George W.Bush is giving a speech to an economic summit and it's the lowest of ironic effects that the President who presided over the evisceration of our economic system, our prestige as a presence internationally, and who launched an unjustified war should be lecturing anyone, at anytime, in any capacity about the right way to run a nation. So much hinges on the coming administration of Barack Obama--the liberal verities are revived, the multiple crisis are in place, there seems to be a consensus among many of us, even those of us who've surrendered to an extinct to an easy chair nihilism, that we can, as a country, face up to and face down the catastrophes that confront us. 2 million new jobs? Financial help for Detroit automakers with it in mind that they get their respective houses in order? A health care plan for every American? President Elect Obama has a full in-basket, perhaps the worst set of conditions an outgoing President has handed over to an incumbent at any time in our history. Yet Obama inspires that yearning to work with the rest of the nation toward solutions to our current states and the reemergence of a Greatness that can truly benefit the World. Time will tell, and sooner than anyone really suspects--history makes a lasting judgement much faster in our high velocity times.

History : a lost beach ball among smashed bottles

By Ted Burke

A poem describing an ambivalent response to a tepid commemoration of an important WW2 Omaha Beach by By Piotr Florczyk , is the sort of poem that almost succeeds too well towards the author's intended end. It's one thing to find yourself skipping pop cultural references you grew up with when discussing things with those thirty years your senior
-- your audience wouldn't know what you're talking about--and it's a quite another to realize the important facts and reasons of our defining moments greeted with a yawn. There is a surreal tone to how this is laid out, more Fellini, I think, than Dylan, but odd and quietly unnerving all the same. It strikes me as a situation where there is an on site ceremonial attempt to revive the memory of the Great Battle for a far removed generation that might well have the collective idea of WW2 as a backdrop for Indiana Jones movies, a comic bungling of Good vs.Evil.

We have, in fact, a site of a terrible and crucial battle where so much was at stake and the sacrifice of a generation dedicated to patriotic service was inestimable the memory of which is receding into the historical archive as references fewer and fewer recall first hand. The important fading event mingles with a drifting attention span that conflates matters, dithers and ponders an absurd connection between past horrors and the calming banality of what these beach now seems, dark, rained on, cold, only as violent as the weather and tourist attitudes

There is a tendency for collective memory to extend only so far after a generation's sacrifice for the good graces of their country. What had been vivid, immediate, absolutely crucial to be dealt with resolutely , what had been shared as a sense of urgent mission, inspires just a tad less with each succeeding generation, until the critical elements of a Great War and Vindicating Victory become like cliches and stock events from various pulp fictions and their derivative; young people coming up five or six decades later might come to know World War 2 as a template for old and new Hollywood movies, as a only a cartoon like battle between competing stereotypes. Dates are blurred together, names misplaced, place names of bloody struggle are widely known but fewer people these days know why , or care. The telling of the carnage and the stakes becomes a drone that invites quizzical responses.

Returning here, it hasn't been easy
for them to find their place in the black sand—
always too much sun or rain,
strangers driving umbrellas yet deeper

into their land. The young radio host said so,
speaking of the vets. When the sea had come,
some curled up inside the shells;
others flexed and clicked their knuckles

on the trigger of each wave, forgetting
to come up for breath.

There is the presence of one who remembers, of course, perhaps someone who'd been there as soldier, observer, or the adult child of a veteran who'd grew up with a father who came home changed and who managed to confer the profound events and consequences to his family. There is distance here, in the ears of someone listening to a radio voice intone deeds and dates while the eyes gather in a view of the beach and the events it once hosted; a lachrymose reading of the facts is the backdrop for a recollection of steely nerves coiled to the the breaking point.
The telling of this historical summation comes across suggests tedium, an over familiarity of a saga that's been told , glorified and considered from different ratios for so long and so often that there is a desperation for a digression, a distraction, a resounding need for the ceremony to collapse upon itself. It's a tale over told, a memory over burnished, further removed from flesh and blood recollection; though we all know the historical facts of the event, the bloodletting, fewer of us know what we're talking about. This is rather like an announcer's bored professionalism, full of false enthusiasms, make- believe earnestness, prop department gravitas. It's a pitch one hears and though realizing what emotions and sentiments the spoken cadences are supposed to suggest , none the less recognize the make believe emphasis that disguises an intractable boredom. The audience in turn is bored and considers the commemoration as bad entertainment instead of sincere tribute to those a nation owes a debt to. The poem, powerful as is, presents the irony that arises when even nostalgia fails to elicit a genuine response.

"Genuine response" , that fleeting issue of authentic awareness of the Great Good that was defended against the Great Evil, might well be impossible as generations roll on and history is taught and told in increasingly fragmented ways. Something is missing at the center of the tribute the well intentioned might bring:

But he didn't
give us a name at the start or the end.
Nor did he explain how to rebury a pair of
big toes jutting out from the mud

at the water's edge. In the end, it's a fluke.
A beach ball gets lost. And a search
party leads us under the pier, into the frothy sea
impaling empty bottles on the rocks.

The enormous inanity of daily life goes on, and as one moves along looking for the scars that marked a culture for decades to come there is , instead, dislocation of the facts ; history is an anonymous parade of shadows playing melodramatic charades against the wall of a collective memory. What we do find, though, are those things we make for our consumption and leisure and which we cannot hold on to either, a lost beach ball, smashed bottles. History, it seems, has poured out of the dustbin and gathers at a shoreline that cannot gain be made pristine.