Waking up is hard to do

In the days nearly next mornings
a casual flair of forlorn socks
that landed where
the chair used to be,

Never can this day open like fanfare
of crescendo day-breaking
so much glass imagined as applause
for a word kept mum, under a pillow,
asleep in unsaid lakes of whatever,

Could be but often cannot be
the same clothes and haircuts
gussied with oils and stray perfumes,

But please, no pleading with pleats
that could stand for themselves
against their formless contradictions,

A small , wooden box with art from cigar store windows
brims with quarters that find their way
to slots for a promise of life, a surge,
a basket of clean undershirts,

The suds
are a mountain range
we could smash
had we enough
to unload
in the dream life we've just left,


We could smell next door aromas
even under the damp bedding eaves,
scents that speak to nerve endings
and brings a sense of what's to be done
with a history that got undressed
the night before|
and crawled into the bed and commenced to snore,


Shoes tied, pants zipped,
we go out the door,
still snoring.

What to say after the worst has happened

The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there was expiration date on grief. Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life and relations comes to the for. Poetry will cease to being the  chatty, wit-leavened record of one's impulses, and will become more meditative, slower, a more considered rumination on those who've are gone yet whose presence remains felt and which influences the tone and direction of the living.

It's not about getting mileage from a tragedy as it is a species of thinking-out-loud. We speak ourselves into being with others around us to confirm our life in the physical world as well to confront the inescapable knowledge of our end, and poets are the ones writing their testaments that they were here once and that they lived and mattered in a world that is soon enough over run with another generation impatient to destroy or ignore what was here only scant years before so they may erect their premature monuments to themselves and their cuteness. We survived our foolishness and quick readings, a poet writes, we lived here and mattered to a community of friends and enemies in ways that no novel or epic production can capture, and we wish you the same luck, the chance to live long enough in this world you seek to fashion after your own image so you may write about your regrets, your failures, the things you didn't get around to doing.

Despair isn't the default position for poets to take as they get older; as I think is plain here, poets will in general treat their subject matter with more consideration, more nuance, more acuity as they age. The host of emotions, whether despair, elation, sadness, celebration, aren't likely to alter, but the treatments are bound to be richer, deeper, darker. One has aged and one has experienced many more things since they were in their twenties, and convincingly casting off the same flippant riffs one did in their fifties as they had while a college freshman is a hard act to pull off, emphasis on "act". One grows up, if they're lucky, and acts their age. Acting one's age doesn't necessarily mean one becomes a crotchety old geezer yelling at kids to get off his (or her) lawn; those character traits are formed long before the onset of old age. But what I think is a given is that an aging poet would be inclined to be more thoughtful as he or she writes. And why shouldn't they be. They have more experience to write about and to make sense of.

Iron Man 2 clanks on and on.

Iron Man 2 is out and more than ever I am seeing the Robert Downy Jr-Richard Dreyfus connection--both these actors cannot seem to leave a scene unchewed, a line unhammed with excess tics and twitches, both are completely incapable allowing a close up to be photographed without a smirk, a grimace, a tilt of the head, a believable tone of voice.

To paraphrase Duncan Shepard , both go about their business as if they had just sat on a cattle prod. That said,the follow up the brilliantly finessed first film tends too lag in the start, with a frankly tedious series of action/ fight scenes and a laborious origin story for Micky Rourke's Russian super villain. It is not a lean story line, as comic book narratives demand--we will make an exception for The Dark Knight--and spends equal amounts of time trying to gin up excitement for the forthcoming Avengers movies with a stalling segment with Nick Fury (curiously played by Sam Jackson).

The last forty minutes, though, tighten the slack pace , with chase scenes and nicely animated combat scenes bringing at least a video game excitement to an otherwise formless display. The voluptuous Scarlett Johansson has a good turn as an agent of the SHIELD agency; in a form fitting action outfit, she practices a sweet kung fu science against a troop of black clad henchmen. Her bad-girl is one of the truly good things in this oddly foot dragging action movie.

On the subject of super hero movies, it's remarkable how quickly people stopped talking about Kick Ass; it has less to do with the follow up release of Iron Man 2 than you might think; I would put with an audience boredom for the whole sub Tarantino irony-mongering as regards a movie reflecting upon it's own genre restrictions. The spectacle of an eleven year old hero named Hit Girl fatally bloodily stabbing, gashing, shooting and neck-breaking an army of henchmen --you wonder why villians keep employing ineffectual muscle-- is something offers something to challenge our moral expectations years beyond when such a thing would have created a fury of self-recrimination. It's that wild grab by someone who strives to out do someone they regard as a master--in this case, Matthew Vaughn tries to mimic Tarantino in the extreme as though wanting QT to pat him on the head and give him a gold star. It is deadening instead, providing yet another occasion for the perennially egregious Nick Cage to proffer another self-mesmerized performance. That he reads his line in a glacial cadence in obvious homage to television Batman Adam West only makes the the lethargy between fight scenes more apparent. This is like a long back seat car ride where the only thing you're looking forward to is the next rest stop.

Poem for conversations that die on the vine

Conversations that go dead, that figuratively "go up on the rocks" , are those moments in life that one has to consider the bright side of the current situation, wherever it may be: at least this isn't world war three, at least this isn't a deadly car wreck, at least I haven't had a meteor smash my city to bits. These are small consolations, though,while you're in the moment trying to make your starter phrases and topic offerings a means by which to make the time go by quickly and amiably. But there are those who will not be chatted up, as they enjoy their own company too much, and there are those who perhaps rather enjoy the spectacle of seeing you wrestle with your words. It's a maddening condition, these stalled bits; a video tape of any such protracted exercises in fruitless similarity-finding could be transcribed and staged as Beckett comedies ; long silences, words that refuse to stick to any object they are intended to address and define, blank stares into far off spaces. The greatest distances are sometimes just across the table.

Fitting that Kim Van Voorhees's "Sea Level" poem, an inspection of a such a comedy of failed reciprocity. The table is an unnavigable void where words seem nothing more than casual bits of sodden detritus that drift onto a stony beach with the foam and seaweed, a washed out version of it's original intent. It has the depressing clarity of someone looking at a situation they've spent precious energy on trying to make it a fulfilling experience only to realize that there is only a deadened air for all the effort. Stillness resonates with absurdity after a frantic attempt to make something catch fire.

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us

all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat

the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

There is that sense that the dry spot in the back of the throat is the point where one realizes that whatever else one will say is already hollowed of meaning; the absence of response, the failure of an nearby other to allow itself to be changed, in perception, from an abstraction to be solved and a more human presence with a personality one can negotiate a good time with, has rendered the power of one's vocabulary to a series of sounds one might other wise make in their sleep during a bad dream.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge

of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops

passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is

just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap

back into itself.

The other, the dinner guest sitting across the table, is aware of the power she has in this moment, limited as it is--the conversation can either brighten and instill in her companion a sense of worth, that one's choices haven't been foolish or self deluding during this day, or she can with hold response, keep her participation to a minimum, give barely perceptible clues that she is done with the ritual and that both the dinner and the host no longer engage their interest.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—

you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.

Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish

and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance

under any kind of light.

What Van Voorhees does with this awkward instance is her use of telling details, concrete things where her metaphors actually convey an experience where the failure of words are exactly the issue at hand. The metaphors themselves are concrete , and their aptness isn't freighted with the typical twin indulgences, autobiography and literary self-reference. Where another poet challenged with a subject that defies an agile writer's skill to essentialize and so dwell on the inadequacies of the literary form or inspect the fragments of otherwise flushed child hood traumas, Van Voorhees sticks with her idea and works through her conceit; the result is a bright , if discouraging, set of alignments of things that do not speak, still materials that give no hint of what the character's words fail to get to, and the characters  themselves, who ought to have remained silent all along.

What's revealed is that this is a conversation that has gone on too long , without a shred of engaging subject matter, a battle to see who can keep the chatter above and bouncing with the animated insistence of ridiculously assertive absolutes; trivial ideas, cast out fleetingly as two people try to distract themselves from their shared awkwardness , are over emphasized, assume great volume, and while the conversation for a while rises and crests with a excited pitch, it is followed with agitation; even as the small talk escalates, it is like a balloon being inflated with too much air; it either bursts or it deflates rapidly. Likewise, both of these dinner mates would quit the game and fall back into the awkwardness they tried to avoid, painfully aware of their lack of similarities. There is only the table, the metaphorical ocean between them, that remains

. .

The center holds ,and it's crushing us

Poet Mary Jo Bang has the unique ability to write a polemical poem that is both a superb example of straight talk-there is no mistaking her fevered sentiment for anything else--and an elegant sample of exquisitely placed simile and metaphor The power of "After the Fact" comes from the first lines, a narrator setting up the world he/she lives like it were subject to templates from which only tragic outcomes can result. The sin of this all, the source of the outrage, are the actors in the self-limiting melodramas--buffoons peacocks, egomaniacs, narcissists with trigger fingers mistaking the contrived circumstances of their cause for the way things required to go.

Sleep tight, you martyrs.

And you criminals who killed for a narrow share

of power and a few rotten spoils.

Enough is enough.

This is very tough stuff , an indictment with a sting, an x ray to the heart of the matters; while those who wage wars justify their aggression in the many slippery rationalizations that seek "justice" through a rhetorical back door , the results of their righteousness, their efforts to set the world right, only make the tragedies worse. The calamity multiply, the genocides continue, the planet darkens even more and becomes unlivable-the only thing that seems to renew itself is the rhetoric that proclaims a vision of aggressive human perfection, a heaven here on earth, while the heart grow harder, colder. The fatal schemes, the complete waste of what's best in this existence, contracts not just the heart, but makes the universe appear to shrink to a burned out cinder.

The corners converge, causing the globe to grow smaller

than all of time times space divided

by every petty difference.

The center would not hold for Yeats; it contracts for Mary Jo Bang, become a flaming ball of contentious bad faith . It's a simple morality tale, a simple but profound choice that each of us needs to make, to make decisions exclusively on the basis of self seeking, or to help others, create community, cooperation. Bang's poem/polemic provides the profound example of selfishness when it's codified with a language that adopts some of the leaner rhetoric of justice, peace and harmony and uses the terms to rationalize an institutionalized State of War. It is the tragedy of trying to make the mystery of life comprehensible by means of fear-- investigating the life and ways of a Villainized Other is to trade with the Devil.

The girl newly dead on the sidewalk says,

"Excuse me, but—

what kind of moral force is brute moral force?"

The poem can be said to lack subtlety, but a muted message in this instance could be so finely wrought that even an informed reader would miss the point in search for clues among the ambiguities. This has the brilliant, placard bearing power of Ferlinghetti's political poems, particularly "I Am Waiting"; it is a succession of one lines and witticisms that crystallize the crisis and makes it memorable. This is a poem meant to get you thinking about something other than whether it works as a poem. It does just that.

I don't think Bang's poems encourages passive martyrdom of any kind, if I understand your question correctly. It has more the feel of a scaled-back soliloquy delivered in the last act of a Greek Tragedy, the summation presented while the evidence is plainly visible, undeniable, to anyone who might have been involved in debating war and power-grabbing in the abstract. The poem operates under the assumption that the evil doers--politicians, generals, corporations--are shamed to silence while the damnable curses is cast, but beyond this minor suspension of disbelief --politicians, generals and corporations won't reform themselves and seek justice rather than justice as the result of a good scold--we realize the poem isn't intended for the perpetrators of misery, but the citizens who've been seduced by a well-oiled propaganda.

We are governed solely by our consent, and the further implication is that the governed population's failure to hold their representatives to higher , more consequential standard is just as responsible for the grim tales told here. Our songs, our campaign slogans, our policy discussions are geared to assure us that the greatest good is the intent ,and that it surely will be the result. Mary Jo Bang's speech--and that is what this is, finally, a speech--shows the reader that there are leaders elected in our name who are singing of their esteemed virtues while everyone else can see the devastation they leave in their wake.

A fine CD from Larry Coryell

It's been instructive to revisit jazz guitarist Larry Coryell after a decade or in other neighborhoods. A pioneer of jazz-fusion, this musician is, at his  best, wildly inventive, cranky, blistering and rapid fire, someone akin to Jeff Beck in ways of attacking an improvisation from unexpected angles of attack. Like Beck as well, his body of work is erratic, and one wonders if Coryell might have become stuck on the fence sometime in mid-career, performing an unsatisfying amalgam of mainstream bop standards, pop-jazz and thud worthy, unmotivated funk and rock blends. Fortunately, age and good sense has toughened the guitarist's technique; his album Tricycles and the more recent Earthquake at the Avalon, are both superlative examples of this man's ability to display a pristine delicacy on ballads, fleet-fingered flurries on the accelerated compositions, and a hard-nosed edge on the blues. Of the two albums, Tricycles gets the higher marks, as Coryell has a sweetly trio in bassist Mark Egan and drummer Paul Wertico bring off a varied set of styles with the ease of a unit that knows the strengths and nuances of each other's respective approaches. Coryell's guitar fairly bristles and sparkles through his rich chord voicings and pristine essays, with Egan and Wertico upping the rhythmic ante and lowering it again as the major and minor turns of the songs change the mood. There is a richness in the performance that suggests a larger group. Recommended.