What Flip Side?

As a matter of habit, I posted this poem to one of the discussion boards on Slate magazine’s forum The Fray. I thought it was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes something does. I was hoping for comments on this slight effort:

Sonnet 16


A sign of the cross and a sign on the door or just sign
yourself out if it’s a weekend pass you’re dealing with,


sign yourself up for a moment in the sun when you
have your tax refund check in hand, give us some cash for


the diversions that approach the distraction level
of morons who get their exercise reading the labels

on records as they go ‘round and ‘round on the
phonograph, signs of life in a living room, your parents

house and sofa, I am hiding behind a chair before the light
switch is flipped and a panic like business plans that come


undone where you signed a dotted line that ends up
being a perforations around your wrists, like you see


on butcher’s charts, you know, under the sign that reads
NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.

Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at more structured verse. A poster with the moniker Th Paine asked

How many people will understand what you mean when you refer to record labels spinning around on a phonograph?

Good question. Who would have thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on the flip side". He looked puzzled as we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and briefly explained that before CDs records had two sides, side A and side B, and that the phrase meant the other side of the record. It was no big deal , of course, but it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to younger adults. The larger irony is that my poems, whatever I think of them, most likely strike adults, young or less young, as incomprehensible in turn, and that it ought not surprise me that someone who read the poem above responds to a detail they recognize and have a good question about. Some years ago I was enamored of "reader response theory", promoted by Stanley Fish, which had as one of it's implicit ideas was that a text wasn't particularly "finished" until a reader had read it and interpreted it with the resources and associations their unique community would afford them. There is a finer, more subtle theory than I've let on, but let us say that the fancy that someone's response to a poem is , no matter what it is, is as interesting (and important) as the poem itself is under a momentary reconsideration.

"Houseflies": big warning comes on small wings

"Houseflies" by Kevin Barent is a perfectly realized minature, a rapid string of thoughts linked cohesively where a series well sketched images get across a life lesson that's learned in a sudden flash of self awareness.This is a confession of one's limitations without the autobiography that would weight it down in details of incidents that would be problematic for the poet to make interesting or pertinent to the mission of having the poem work. The tone is converational, the addressed other in the poem being the collective houseflies as they swarmed over and around him, and he admits his folly of thinking he could vanquish with conventional means:

I knew you all when you were young.
I tried to drown you in the garbage bin

with bleach and hose-water, but you floated up
and swam, jerking little grubs,

like bloated rice, or someone punching
from inside a tiny body bag.

There is the well used comic touch of having the narrator sound paternal and pompous, substituting "garbage bin" for the unsaid 'though rhyming "play pen", an introduction that introduces a couple of items of "off stage" interest". We have here the emerging suggestion that Barent is voicing the secret and self-horrifying desire of some young parents that they could make their babies go away, perhaps even murder them, so they, as young people, might return to their days life of self-absorbed consumption, a desire one struggles with and buries in the farthest reach of the conciousness as one accepts the new responsibility, the life long task of parenting.

Second, the off stage implications are global, as when America's habit of underestimating the foreign entanglements it commits itself too, convinced that a big army and a finely honed rhetoric could solve another country's internal problems and make the source of irritation vanish, the lesson being that the enemy , created by our fumbles and arrogance, returns to the battlefield, stronger, angrier, readier than ever. Barent does not lecture us on foreign policy and keeps the situation local, although there is an intriguing inversion here, if one considers the implicit political critique a bit further; the centered powers of American strategy making regard their foes as subhuman, as other, as insects feasting on the misery we're trying to fix, while Barent's smaller scale war forces him to anthropormorphize his flies as he gives them their due. Quantity changes quality, the standard line goes, and the more intimate struggle with the flies makes possible respect for the facts as their revealed. The larger scale of war against an enemy we've underestimated brings us up against pride, vanity of the worst, most murderous sort, a trap where an action cannot be changed because we cannot admit we were wrong in the first place.

And now you circle overhead—
small, neat, glossy with newness,

helping yourselves to what was mine,
angels from the man-made world.

Vanity is the ultimate theme here, the grossest sin of the one creature who is self aware enough to develop culture and a language with which he many rationalize his supposed supremacy and omnipotence, and it is these man made things, both the conceits and the material items we've made with our genius for fashioning tools , industry and commerce prove to be more a source of ruin and destruction than we would have thought. The flies are the sarcastically referred to as "angels" taking possession of what was once the property of a single man, or the whole of society. In this small, ironic image, Barent adds the additional and final insight that we too often fail to take responsibility for what it is we do in the world, of what we introduce into it , and that we constantly fail to see a larger picture and see what it is we've done that gives us so much garbage to manage, so many wars to fight, so much death as a result of both. The point of the final lines seem to be that the source of our problems often as not originate with our most brilliant ideas.

No Country for Old Men on DVD

No Country for Old Men, now available on DVD, is one of those Coen brothers films that doesn't miss a beat, doesn't miss a trick, and which makes use of each rhythm it invents and each trick it employs in service to the story with the sort of mastery that makes you forget that you're viewing something that was meticulously constructed. Seamless, in other words, as was their Fargo, a comedy that worked in broad, slowly applied strokes of the brush that inspected the ticks and quirks of the characters as they headed for their eventual comeuppance. But for all the joy the brothers have given me , there is something a measure overdone, over the top and overwritten in their movies, brilliant as they may be. The aspect of homage is never far from most of their efforts, and there was a lingering hope that there might be a project they'd undertake that wouldn't have the knowing wink, the grotesque elaboration on genre iconography. The Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name was the ideal choice; like the Coens, McCarthy has a world that becomes meaningless and cruel once the vanity of elaborate expectation are violently removed, but where the Coens allow the distance and the space to appreciate their joke and fall into the comfort of being let in on the joke, McCarthy gives no quarter, no comfort, and sees nothing to laugh at. It is a tragedy remains tragic, intended for the reader (and viewers) to appreciate what they have for as long as they're privileged to have it.The Coens in turn offer no quarter, which has effect of ramping up the tension, the creepiness. This film is a wonderfully constructed work of unnerving verve. Hubris is a striking theme in the Coens' movies, and it appears again in their new thriller, where one has the simplest of conflicts, a trailer-living Vietnam vet comes across a bloody drug deal gone bad and tracks down the two million dollars that was meant to seal the deal, and finds himself, through random occurrence, sheer chance and whimsical decision, being tracked himself by a hired killer.

The center of the film are these two characters, the vet (Josh Brolin) thinking he can outwit and kill the stalker seeking to put him on ice, and the killer (Javiar Bardam), a force of nature who cannot die, will not be deterred, detoured or delayed. His character, oddly named Antoine Chigurh ("Soo-gar"),fulfills his task required by the detection of the unwarranted pride a protagonist assumes for himself; he is the force that one does not see coming, that thing that cannot be stopped nor will wait for you. Chaos and carnage are his sole purposes. Brolin's character, named Llewelyn, has no idea what he has decided to go up against, and from here one is aware that the stage is set for the inevitable tragedy that will come and cannot be halted. The Coens have an outstanding sense of being able to slow down and draw out a scene, to have a thumb on the turntable, so speak, as they prolong an agonizingly nerve rattling sequence --Josh Brolin's character is chased across a river by a hell hound pit bull which comes mere seconds from tearing his throat out, a scene causing audible gasps both times I saw the film--and still keep to intrigued with the goings on and the detailed bits of business the characters involve themselves in.

Clarity with an unforgiving reality principle one theme in play, with this movie being a four way split between those who have no idea the cruel game they're in: Chigurh’s citizen victims, those like Llewelyn who think they can avoid or change what is inevitable, the uncompromising destructive force that is the killer Chigurh; and , in a moving and subtly, softly underplayed performance by Tommy Lee Jones, the growing awareness of a cocky sheriff who realizes that the murders in his district are without reason, logic or even passion, and that this represents a sacrifice he is unwilling to make. Destiny is another theme here, and Jones' sheriff loses his nerve and retires. Late in the film, restless and not sure of what to do now that he's left an occupation he was fated to have by family tradition, he recounts recent dreams with their vague symbolism of what direction his life was meant to take. One wonders on this aspect of the tragedy, the correspondence of action creating purpose and definition. The sheriff may have saved his life by retiring, but has he robbed himself of his purpose in the life he wanted to keep. He is caught in an ambiguity, and it's a toss up at this point which is worse, a death in service to professional duty, or living with an unsettled issue no consoling will allay.

The encroaching despondency on Jones' face as he tells his wife of his dreams, where a wise ass smirk once was now replaced with a tight, brave smile that cannot disguise a man who voluntarily relinquished his grasp on self-certainty, is its own unique tragedy. Only the craggy and creviced face of Tommy Lee Jones could have evoked the inner broodings that tear at the soul, and only his voice, cracked, rough, and choked on dust , could have managed to bring out the melancholy contained in his elliptical monologue without once raising his voice or gesturing wildly. Javier Bardem's virtuoso turn as the psychopath Chigurh , as well, is among the most memorable presences to inhabit the screen in awhile. Self-contained, virtually expressionless, given to odd bits of logic and rituals, he is not a character but a personification of every foul thought of vengeance and fury one has ever imagined in their life. He is not someone you meet, but rather a catastrophe that happens to you and hope you survive.

A poem for Easter, sort of

We have our crosses to bear and we have our means of taking a load off our feet and our minds; of mine is writing furious notes to the margins about matters that matter little in
any time line you can conjure. Tending to irrelevance seems my fate, and so be it. The other method is playing lots of blues harmonica, relishing the sound of those bent notes and staccato riffs as they seem to hammer out the worrisome kinks and dents in the armor surrounding an other wise fragile ego. But today is Easter, and we are to rise to the task, rise above our petty concerns, and find a greater purpose than our relentless self seeking. Some of us seem natural to the calling, while others of us wait years for something to happen as a result a dedication to the rituals of faith.

Therein lies the problem, an inversion, a misreading profound and simple; the faith is in the rituals one was instructed in, not the act of faith one performs with no guarantee that any good will come of one’s winging it, sans script. Hence this poem, written this morning, a sketch, a monologue short changes the power of observance by interrogating ritual while one is ostensibly observing sacred rites.

Arisen (revised)
Today we roll away the stone
and find there's not a bone
we can pick with the stems and
blooms of seeds that have
breached the soil
after the long nights
of cold, dreamless slumber.

Tonight we bless ourselves
and dust our shelves
and curse under our breath
that wasn't more on the table
nor more praise
for the calluses our hands took on
hammering each nail
into the joists
for the roof over our heads
that keeps the food dry
on the table
that's set bread and wine,
our own flesh and blood.

Tomorrow we rise and
make noise
that’ll upset our poise
as we stare out the window
and curse the sun the rising again,
cursing the moon
for sleeping until dark,
scratching behind our ears
as we struggle to remember
over toothpaste smears
each and every step we took
to get where are,
arisen and angry,
a rough patch of unshaved chin.

I think the narrator is joking, as in being bitterly disappointed in his inability to make his actual life and the good fortune he believed devout faith would befall him. The over riding idea of grace, revivification, and joy in being alive in service to God doesn't match his feelings about his concrete experience. Nothing he has tried, I'd imagine further, has lessened what he considers the excessive load he bears. He is arguing the opposite of what he paraphrases the promises of faith to be, and this, I think ,is his problem; he hasn't the patience to allow his culminated experience become into wisdom.

He is someone who will remain, most likely, a grumbler, a complainer, a bitter smart ass. I share some of these qualities; he would rather be right than wise, a habit of mind that certainly winds up more dejected that raptured. Galway Kinnell is definitely an influence I called on when writing this morning.

Jason Ricci Hits the Sweet Spot

Rocket Number 9
Jason Ricci and New Blood
(Eclecto Groove Records)

Anyone with a strong need of hearing some of very fine and blistering blues harmonica work by a player dedicated to extending that small instrument's capacity to surprise a listener, I'd recommend getting the new disc by Jason Ricci and New Blood, Rocket Number 9. Ricci is one of those musicians where you can here the influences of players he's "gone to school" on (sounding to me like a sweet blend of Paul Butterfield, Little Walter, Sugar Blue, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howard Levy , and a smattering of mainstream saxists ala Paul Desmond )who has blended what he's learned into a vigorous, original style. Rocket Number Nine is a glorious and tight blues rock album, with plenty of sharp guitar work, a rhythm section that balances tightness and an an appealing , shambling kind of looseness , all of this highlighting Ricci's serpentine harp improvisations and ragged-but-right vocals.

What becomes obvious is that young Ricci is not stuck for an idea, and it's a wonder to hear his solos rage and soar and then transform into jazzier lines; one would have a hard time to finding another harmonica player with a better grasp of his technique and imagination or who makes as much of an effort to present fresh notions, configurations and twists into his playing.

There's a naturalness to what he brings forth, a sensual joining of his lines that is remindful of Butterfield at his most prime; rather than seeming like an upstart perfunctorily playing his warm-up licks before launching his super chops too soon and too often, Ricci, like Butterfield, has a jazz-players of dynamics. There the rare skill of building and releasing tension that keeps on the edge, motivated by the band's virtuoso rhythms and the lead man's sober unpredictability. New Blood, as I said, is a tight, rocking, funkified band. Everyone, take a bow!

Poetry and Ice Cream

The whole issue as to what makes for a "moving poem" is as subjective as what the best ice cream flavor is, and the delineation of these differences are what makes discussing poems , at times, a great pleasure. I might have qualified this further by saying that I was moved by the poem and had assumed that Pinsky was as well, but no matter. "planting daffodils" is a lyric poem, analogous to music, and there is something in the sound of the words and the spaces between the images they've formed that gives me a clue to several ideas that are tangible yet beneath the surface of what the poem describes; the art of what was almost said. What comes into play is the reader's task, if they're interested in the task, to complete the poem itself; thre is a meaning the poet intends, yes, but there is meaning the reader has of their own that can possibly make for a meaning even more fascinating than what the original author had thought possible. One is moved by the sounds of the words placed together who's musical properties, their very sounds, act as a trigger for some of us who would then quite suddenly experience something of a revelation as a sequence of memories, fragments of recollection, piece themselves together and give the poem that's beheld on the page even more resonance than if one were merely trying to deciper the author's private intentions. Boulay has the ear to make these things happen. One is moved by public expression and the private reactions the words , together, stir.
Charlotte Boulay's poem, spoken of in the last post and in a discussion here is a useful illustration of how our concepts of life and death are layered in a sheer set of metaphors and analogies that contrast our routine lives with our idealizations, and warns, at the margins, that we will be surprised, shocked and saddened at the end if we think we've gained control of our fate beyond our final day.
The strange thing about personal tastes, whether it applies to ice cream or poetic styles, is that while a collective of interested folks might agree in the abstract what constitutes quality, the more specific , localized elements become dicier the closer we inspect.
There are folks I know who cannot stand chocolate, strange as that might seem. Nonetheless, they are adamant in their aversion, and can sound off with varying degrees of articulation as to why chocolate is vile, or at least undesirable. What interests me isn’t whether I’m converted to their thinking, but rather that they make a good argument for their belief; while I might not be convinced, I might learn something in the exchange about conflicting tastes, and enhance my own appreciation as a result. Ideally speaking, of course.
The first thing to accept is that some folks will not have their minds changed about their tastes and their prejudices; it becomes, then, a search for those with whom you might disagree but might learn something from.

"planting daffodils", a fine lyric poem from Charlotte Boulay

Charlotte Boulay's "planting daffodils" is among the best poems I've read in the years since taking an interest in Robert Pinsky's weekly and mostly quizzical selections, and it is here where I commend on an expert choice. One might have spoken too soon if there was a suggestion that the former Poet Laureate has a tin ear; I'll suggest instead that he might select what moves him as often as he chooses what merely engages his curiosity. "planting daffodils" ponders the relentless fact of the cycle of life and death, linking them to the seasonal changes, that what comes from the earth returns to the earth and is again reborn changed, elevated, seasoned with wisdom and a hard won spirituality. Boulay gets my attention because she brings together the literary and the material, the reference to the priest giving Juliet the potion that would put her into a temporary death-like coma, and working in a garden, planting bulbs.
*******The Friar tells her, drink this
potion and for a time you will be
as dead.***What? she says,
*Are you kidding? Only the earth
knows that faith. But this love is of the earth,
so when she sleeps, it's in darkness,
******a round weight curled in a papery shroud.
This fall, digging little graves, I can smell
******winter approaching like the war
that already rages, not with drumbeats and shots
but more ominously silent, a great lack
of lucidity and grace.**

This is a strong poem, I think, and I don't think there's a false or strained remark or move anywhere in it. The language is unpretentious without being self-consciously barren as, say, David Mamet's or Paul Auster's poems can be, and her elisions , the pause and unspoken link between the imaginative (Juliet) and the material (the garden in fall) is done with just enough spacing to surprise a reader with the association. The obvious connections between them are presented well--there's no sense in the images being overdressed for the occasion, so to speak--and I rather like the darker implication about human vanity being under-addressed, almost not at all, but implicit all the same. It gives you the effect of a delayed shock of recognition. I think it wise of her as well to avoid mention of Easter and keep this poem within the scope of what man imagines and what man must actually contend with.


There is anxiety, fear, the shivering dread that matches the chill of cold earth being dug up as one enters into the cyclical ritual of preparing for a rebirth of life and a bountiful garden in distant months to come. Juliet must trust the priest and allow her love for Romeo to give her the strength and blind faith to drink the potion and hence and “ for a time be like death”. In the fall, the gardener sets upon tilling a hard ground, “digging little graves”, knowing the bloom the spring will bring but made to think all the same of war, carnage, desolation. The gardener continues to plant what she has come to set into the earth, knowing at a level of gut instinct that life emerges anew from a soil that would seem incapable of yielding nothing at all.
So is a rooted bulb a record
of a promise kept through winter. This is the truth we only half
believe:**that each hoary, twinned sprout becomes,
in the moment before she sees him,
*Juliet, waking to a clasp of arms,
*******yellow trumpets crying.

And so bulbs grow, break the soil, rise toward the soil and to new life, a life coming from what appeared to be a despoiled earth which had, in truth, nurtured it through the cold months. What was planted wasn’t dormant, but in fact growing and being readied for a life on the surface of things. Appearances are deceiving, we realize, but there is more, a twist; Juliet awakes from the tomb from her death like slumber and finds the dead Romeo next to her, Romeo, who hadn’t known of the conspiracy between the priest and Juliet and thought her dead when he beheld her in the tomb. Boulay’s ironic reversal of fortunes here is perfect and finely fitted, and intimates that appearances that are contrived to deceive to advance an agenda, whether nefarious or inspired by the hot, exclusive intensity of teenage love, can work against the intended results. The irony the poem contains is that despite the seeming devastations nature foists upon us and, seemingly, itself, is that new life is nearly always the result; volcano explosions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. What existed before is tossed aside, displaced, destroyed, but not discarded, as their seeming waste becomes the materials that make a new life possible. A diminished note in the poem is the suggestion that the vanity that we can control nature and change its function is an illusion that we have continually smashed. It is a lesson we refuse to learn, however, precisely because we have the curse of turning our strong feelings into world views and applied philosophies that often as not result in ironic ruin. The eternal cycle of seasonal change and life and death goes on unconcerned, churning, destroying, upsetting, recombining, giving birth, a process cannot be stalled, deterred or manipulated. The underlining point here is that these great forces are matters we may struggle against or attempt to adapt to as we must, but there is a vanity in our nature that thinks we can usurp or avoid what confines and directs existence because emotions become fever pitched with raging love rage and we mistake the transcendence that effects the world that furnished our niche.

Boulay was probably told early on that political poems about specific situations don't often work well as poems after the catharsis they provide passes; even the readers who agree with the sentiments are not likely to read the poem again as a verse that might add value to their interior life as they accumulate experience. The lack of specificity adds power to her gradually accelerated insight to the vanity of think that nature would defer to our desire, be they fearful or arrogant. Nature just is.

I have a feeling that the "reversal" aspect surprised her as well, that it came from the writing and wasn't a conceit apriori to the writing; if so, she shows good instincts to maintain the secondary emphasis. This would have been an instance where a poet with a less keen ear and sense of balance between image and idea would have turned the notion into a lecture in an erring attempt to mine more insight from the surprise. Boulay didn't try to improve on her fortuitous dialectic, fortunate for us.