Over Cooked

Discussing how unfunny Dane Cook's rubber-limbed stage pacing and artless mugging is to belabor the obvious after a paragraph. What he has is that callow yet bottomless self confidence of a Drama Club President who convey every character with the same mannerisms , ticks and gestures without giving off any sense that they've bothered with their presentation beyond the creation of a shtick. I watched his HBO special and kept waiting for his monologues to connect with an idea , a perception that hadn't occurred to me, a laugh to smack me upside the head. All that I got was his voice rising and falling, accelerating and slowing down crazily to instill some sense of comedy momentum and urgency, and that face of his, smirking stupidly,
oblivious. Perhaps he'll do better with a film career. Cook's freakish presentation of self --all mugging, no set up, no timing, no payoff or punchline in the slightest-- makes it clear that the only thing funny is his apparent conviction that he can get a laugh that isn't a nervous reflex.

Frank Bidart;Homeless on the Range

Frank Bidart is a poet of intangibles, someone who can creep on the edge of the inexpressible and make it a felt presence. Reading Poem Ending With Three Lines from Home on the Range was gave more than one instance of having a slight chill and tremor course up my spine, as if I touched the hem of a stray ghost's ethereal vestment, or someone having walked over the place where I would eventually raise a family, bury a parent, or be buried myself. It's a poem that deals with the expansive, miasmic core of getting older, when one has more experience and fewer years to live, and what there is in one's community and the larger world outside it seems more like a series of triggers, cues for the barely dormant unconscious to give forth a rush of intense, abrupt, rapidly faded remembering.

It's as overwhelming, for those scant seconds, as any drug I've taken, and it's after effects are a permanent condition. The veils separating past deeds and pleasures and inane bits of sordidness are continually lifted , and one's concentration is diminished. Sometimes it's nothing less than a sucker punch against expectation.


Barred from the pool twenty-three years ago, still I dove
straight in. You loved to swim, but saw no water.

Whenever Ray Charles sings "I Can't Stop Loving You"

I can't stop loving you. Whenever the unstained-by-guilt
cheerful chorus belts out the title, as his voice, sweet

and haggard reminder of what can never be remedied,

answers, correcting the children with "It's useless to say,"
the irreparable enters me again, again me it twists.

The red man was pressed from this part of the West—

'tis unlikely he'll ever return to the banks of Red River, where
seldom, if ever, their flickering campfires burn.


Clipped, epigrammatic, crystal clear, Bidart's recollection is less a stream of conscious than a fast, pulsing rill,
accenting the power of the memory with the concomitant knowledge that the past cannot be regained. You loved to swim, but saw no water centers the opposing the strands, the desire set against the cold awareness of unsentimental fact. The conflation of these elements--the pool, the Ray Charles song, the lines from a campfire chestnut-- are a skillfully arranged collage, remindful of the work of pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. Bidart, like Rauschenberg, seems fascinated by how a world of contrived , manufactured things ,designed for our use, entertainment and diversion, become a litter of our old selves and conceptions as we we pass over them, reflect upon them, as we consider our progress from relative youth to deepening middle age.

The poem suggest all these things without pretense, without tangential ramble; this is the way John Ashbery, a poet I admire, would write if he were more discriminating with what he wanted to bring into his writing. Besides brevity, though, what makes Bidart distinct from Ashbery is an engagement with the events of his life. Although not explicitly stated, there is something beyond mere resignation here; he can live fully if he stops trying to rekindle the campfire at the Red River and instead transform his present condition.

Overload on a brainwashing

Does reality sometimes gang up on you
when you sleep too long and finally walk outside on a bright sunny day? This is a poem about that feeling.-tb
______________________


Overload on a brain washing

You enter an idea of light
just beyond crass ivy walls
and find a room full of coats
tossed on the bed, rising and falling
again as if breathing deep
for snows, blizzards, a stream
of convertibles whose drivers
wear party hats, cell phones in one hand,
driving with a light wrist on the wheel.

At noon a bell sounds
and then the streets
are flooded with the sound
of hands rustling through paper sacks
digging past sandwiches wrapped in
cellophane and the apple or banana ,
proceeding until the fingers, holding pencils
or phones or typing orders, under orders,
just moments before wrap themselves around
a candy wrapped in foil that clings against
the rough textured chocolate like taut, tanned skin.

You put your hands over your ears
because the birds sing too loud
when the riot of color occurring in
the flower beds that stand guard
in front of each and every home
on the block reaches a pitch
which makes you feel to swoon
and brace yourself against
a brick wall in a side alley
tagged and pasted with graffiti
and torn concert posters,
these seems so much like a movie,
you think, and squinting just so imagine
you can see the edge of the film,
edge of the Earth
Columbus couldn't find
if you drew him a map
with arrows telling him where
he was and where he was going.

Threading the Space Needle

Space Needle by Kristin Fogdall is one of the finer poems that Robert Pinsky has presented for Slate readers, and it wouldn't be fair to him to not say that his choices have been more interesting of late, better conceived, less pretentious. Not everyone would agree, but I thought last week's poem Fourteen Final Lines by J.Allyn Rosser was a subtly drawn parody of "well made poems" and their last lines of neon-lit irony, the last words that encapsulate the insolubility of knotted circumstances with phrases that operate more as puns than as summations or
truth delivered.

Rosser, like myself and no doubt a generation of other readers have tired of these facile , clever, gutless conclusions, considering them as escape pods rather than fit conclusions, and have considered doing much as Rosser had done; string a series of 14 snappy last lines (or at least sentences that resemble parting remarks)together with nary an addition of connecting tissue
and then let it set there , impenetrable, a sonnet that makes an archaic and problematic form made even stranger by its refusal to let you in, to offer up a clue.

It's an inside joke, yes, and a poem about poetry, a habitual gripe of mine, but it's a joke I get and appreciate for the way it stands as both parody and protest against the ceaseless stream of shallow, gimmick prone verses that try to justify their vacuity with an entirely mechanical cleverness. Meaning is a useless thing to sift through this poems nooks and folds for; the meaning is locked in the sound of this thing, the rhetoric of adroit phrase making that attempts only to sound crystal clear. I consider "Fourteen Final Lines" to be like a gratuitous musical flourish, a sustained cadenza when none was required, a virtuoso bit of business. A fine send up.Kristin Fogdall's Space Needle is one of those rare instances where an author gives vent to a personal bit of vanity and succeeds in writing in a vivid, image rich language that retains clarity and succeeds as well in breaking beyond the suffocating solipsism of their own perspective and
taking into account an audience that would find empathy with his wondering.

If each foot took us back a year,
the dark below would be
immaculate, like a hole

in space, instead of stars,
or a jar of colored glass
someone shook

and scattered in a dream.
But from this height,
our childhood town

spreads out, a silver galaxy,
and tourists peer
into the giant metal scopes.


It's a neat trick of setting up perspectives, wondering how far one would need to step back in both time and space to see the odd connections of community and private behaviors that are the currency that binds us together. At first the vantage point is theoretical , abstract, a magic precipice one can still deny and and swiftly return to the drudgery of paying bills and wondering what secrets to reveal to one's wife,
husband, partner, but the wondering, the sheer heights make the narrator, and he or she gives themselves over something approaching rapture and imagines visions of roads looping over hills and through towns, every familiar detail of a life laid out in doll house fashion,

I scan the towers, walls
of windows, one small pane:
sofa, tiny people

face to face—a man
and woman talking,
as they may do every day,

or perhaps this is
the last time, or their first.
The lamp she crosses to

dims the room a darker gold.
It's like watching movies
on the wall at home

where we cavort across
some stretch of sand:
I want to step inside the frame

and take my own hands,
and look into my eyes,
and see what's true

and what's idealized.


It's an eternal gag, a joke of celestial origin, the human need for meaning, coherence, to be part of a narrative where events unfold and are connected and where each occurrence is part of a
meaning that is still coming into being. Fogdall connects this fantasy perspective of one's own life and the convoluted relationships and their implicit agendas with Hegel's version of the dialectic, that the secret purpose of one's life and actions is forever in flux, evolving, never static. All this can become rather ponderous, and better known poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery have tilled this soil to produce some of the most brilliant verse in English written in the 20th
Century. The soil, though ,is hardly arid, and what makes Space Needle as well as it does--I think Fogdall's accomplishment here is phenomenal-- is the poem's poise, balance and symmetry. Fogdall is a writer of grace, and is well capable of navigating abstruse ideas and odd perspectives with a style quite at ease with the difficult task of rendering an alluring self-critique of one's blinkered-concept of reality with a sense of place. Fogdall is sure and precise in her images of things that she has seen and remembers vividly, if imperfectly:

The wind is off the Sound,
and makes no sound

except a ruffle
at the rail edge.
On the tiny street below,

a man is working on the road.
Alone behind his truck,
lit by a magnesium haze, he turns

a little orange wheel,
some apparatus out of sight.
He is the perfect

model of a man, which means
we love his task in ways
that he cannot, and wish

to close the shutter on
the stars, our years, with something
like his gesture of repair.

This might have been written by Carson McCullers in Ballad of a Sad Cafe, or
John Cheever at the start of The Wapshot Chronicle; the beauty of the writing is that we recognize what Fogdall's poem shares with the writing of the other two writers, which is melancholy. For all the power and ferocity of dreams, aspirations and desires to make one's
place in history, there is the ceaseless dread of loneliness that colors each word we speak and every gesture we make. The never that Fogdall touches is that for all the language we use to define and justify ourselves, we are finally inexplicable alone, separate, with only memories to console our standing.

Smitten by fame

I know I railed against the worship of celebrity in the previous post, and be assured I meant every word of what I had to say regarding the general view that such
mindless adoration reduces us individually and diminishes us collectively. There's been thirty years plus of reading a wide swath of social criticism, from Marx, Adorno through Mills, Mencken and Vidal that's given my gut feeling a theoretical, if
densely phrased base. None of what I've said is original, I might say, though a phrase or paragraph might keep the torch lit a while longer. And yet I have to confess that tonight I am working an event at a local bookstore here in San Diego,
and that for all my objections against the the religion of fame that I am looking forward to meeting the acerbic and beautiful New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
She'll be appearing for the paperback edition of her recent book Are Men Necessary? My integrity is comprimised, and I am willing to be a slave, at least temporarily, for the smart and funny lady.

A week without Celebrities

It would be a fine Holiday gift if print, broadcast and internet media gave us a week without celebrity "news" or gossip and give us a chance to consider lives of less mythical proportions.

After all is said and done, someone like Jennifer Aniston is no more interesting than the bowl of cereal that sits in front of you each morning. Probably less so. But given the way this obsession with the increasingly banal coverage of the famed and moneyed, are we that far from stalking celebrities should paparazzi chance upon JoLo tying a shoe, or Matt Damon being told by counter help that the CD he wants is out of stock and then foaming, fuming and gasping at the impossibly demanding pressures celebrities have heaped upon their special lives? The possibility of seeing or reading about the over-renowned having tantrums , among other things, gives us the thrill of seeing ourselves as others would see us if we were given to
having breakdowns in ridiculously public places. I might guess that it assures us
the melt down and other egocentricities are okay after all. The inner child never takes the afternoon nap.

Why is it that we anguish collectively over whether Robert Downy is able to revive his film career and forget our personal obligations as citizens by failing to show to vote in elections, or offer our services to projects in our community that can really improve the lives of others. It comes down to selling papers, of course, but the level to which our obsession with celebrity has advanced suggest a religious intensity, a love of icons and their status among the heavens, which is precisely what corporate powers want us to become, passive investors in entertainment and distractions to keep their means of production running and in their firm control and to forgot about how to change the reality that confines us in grim and grey banality.

Shame on Alfred Corn

"Windows on the World", a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003,is an ill conceived poem commerating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissts who think everything in the world is in play in order to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the goddamned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find, and worse, it is beyond anything useful to others.

This is a wandering and traipsing along the subject matter like a drunk tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage. Connecting the ruin of the WTC with the crashing of Windows operating system is a ploy him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sene of.

Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagistic reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else.

This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor bound to donate the sum to a cause that actually gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he as in the instruction of writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift store.