"Watch" BY Eamon Grennan: only impatience grows here

Writers who become mired in thinking and finally writing about their own composing processes are , in my view, spinning their wheels in the said murk and are perhaps denying the presence of that lurking suspicion that they've written all there is for them to write. So they keep busy, fuss about with their technique, advance or contract their formula, and find themselves alone in the messy living room of a mind thinking about writing and worse, writing about writing, about how hard it is to write a poem, to get it right.
Eamon Grennan's "Watch" is that sort of poem, a prose confession disguised with line breaks, a practice run that is composed more to limber up stiff muscles and assure the poet that the world flow is still there. The flow is in this poem, as Grennan is a choice phrase maker, but the phrase making here isn't in service of what's seen in the evolving garden. Grennan writes here as though he cannot talk about the garden unless he has his stamp on it, and so load the poem with the details of his material exitence.

Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you've pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn't fall too far short,..

The need to establish that he's at his desk watching his garden as he tries to write his poem about his inability to distill the essence of his ephemeral perception sufficiently in words begins the enterprise on a false and throat clearing note, the sort of harrumphing we note in blustering cartoon buffoons who haven't a real thought under their verbal exteriors. The poem isn't about the garden and the changes it undergoes in just a few daylight hours, and not even about Grennan having an experience; it reads more like it's about a poet trying to have an experience. Indeed, there is a the feeling of steroidal, vein-popping strain here, and there's even a bit of what one would call Sports Babble, the talent of sports commentators to prate continuously with statistics and incidental aracana while the game is being played.

Such matters can be dealt with in interesting ways if the writer is willing to accept a new sort of rigor and retire the centering "I" .He might then avoid the boredom of trying to revitalize old tropes and instead develop a style, tone and aesthetic method that can make the confounding multifacetness of subject/object split and the limits of narrative givens to break through the third wall and be in the presence of the world known only by God; Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, Ron Silliman and Rae Armentrout , among many others, have succeded in taming the self-conciousness that infects many a poet having difficulty with the final inadequecy of their poems to be more than figurations and writing interesting , frequently brilliant and bracing poems as a result. There goal among these poets, generalizing perhaps a yard or two too wide , has been to transcend the ego that thinks it's having an experience and and to bring to the craft some relevant rhetorical ideas that can help the writer actually accomplish what Grennan only flirts with here, to evoke, not define a world beyond the control of the speaking, writing voice.

USED BOOKS: Sartre, Italo Calvino Tim O'Brien

Nausea
-Jean Paul Sartre
Invisible Cities
-Italo Calvino
Tom Cat in Love
-Tim O'Brien

Sartre's Nausea is a gripping, twitchy little novella confirming the ways one person of unpleasant station can make them self sick , nervous, an odious presence by lingering long on the ambivalent shrug .No one else could write a better tale of an intensely self-aware intellectual whose physical discomforts translate into a changed worldview. Not a lot of laughs, but Sartre does insert his descriptions of bad faith of an intellect aware of his stagnation but whose dread saps strength, and will from him, makes him powerless to do even the simplest exchange. There is, of course, transcendence of a sort, but none are comfortable with its results. The peculiar interest here is the lingering on the problem and an inspection of the illness that infects the spirit as a cumulative consequence of an individual denying their potential and getting by with a bare minimum of engagement. Sartre’s fiction and his plays are for those who have an avid interest in those who live in just one room of the many in life’s vast mansion.

Still, we mut assume that some of us like to get out of the house, let alone leave our room, and enjoy a book reflecting a similar attitude. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino appeals to Universal wanderlust, the tourist who wants to transcend the visitor status and gathers an intriguing set of tales. Marco Polo telling tales of his travels to fantastic cities to Kublai Kahn, who is stupefied and enthralled, until he queries Polo of the veracity the tales, and the veracity of language, becoming, finally, a dialogue between not which representation is real, but which one is more useful in a scheme of things that presents itself only a line at time, charts on an unfolding map.

Spinning tales of where one has been and what one did while they were there is an fine , delicately balanced craft where the plausible context and the impossible coincidence must balance each other in that strange space of gravity that keeps the reader in suspense, wondering what is real and what is of made up of whole cloth. Tom Cat In Love Tim O'Brien ‘s novel of a very smart guy who’s incapable of telling the truth the first time he tells an anecdote, is a superb comedy of manners. A college novel, a grandiloquent professor of linguistics puffs up his chest as he brags of his genius and his conquests of the ladies, until he is exposed, over time, as a liar who has comic complications that might rival Harry Crews worst southern dysfunctionals. Funny, bitter. There is not, though, a sympathetic personality in the lot. O'Brien, however, writes a very fine, faux- Nabokov prose of self-puffery.

Tim Russert, RIP

NBC host of Meet the Press Tim Russert died today of a heart attack. He was 58 years old, too young.

He was a firebrand interviewer, famous for making Republican and Democratic politicians squirm with this jabbing questioning style. Anyone who'd watched Meet the Press couldn't help but feel sympathy for the guest who showed up unprepared, without a plan or a consistent history of policy thinking who found themselves being expertly dissected by Russert's questions; Russert's reputation as a passionate, thorough yet fair inquisitor was legendary, and one was left to wonder why any politico, elected or otherwise, would bother showing with less than their best game.

His effectiveness had something to do that he seemed to do his homework , and his staff was very good at finding past guest statements about issues that contradicting more recent utterances where opinions and agendas were at least mollified, softened, or at least soft pedaled. No one was better in revealing politicians who desired power for its own sake rather than use for doing the people's business.Tim Russert will be missed, and one hopes NBC has the good fortune to replace him with some of similar punch.

A kiss that cannot end : a blues poem

a blues poem

Pick gripped tween thumb and index finger
a curling current loops up the steel string,

a blues in an odd key on similar Saturdays
after the lights go down

tires roll in an adhesive hiss
like a kiss that cannot end on a bad note

nothing else that gets written
at the desk equals the soft, keening

note growing larger with each breath
one takes as the moon rises higher

over the bars that are locked and
the windows are dark,

a down stroke, a pass at the frets,
cat fight feedback creeps under the garage door,

lo, the rain and the fog
rolls over the distinctions,

a drug store, a parked car,
a street besot with an ashy patina,

Muddy Waters says he's ready,
Little Walter tells us everything's gonna be alright,

Mayall tries to bring it home
but drops the bag

and now there's only broken bottles
in a wet paper sack,

while upstairs
the radio goes off
a hand closes the window
and then pulls down the shade.

"Blue", a good jazz poem by Peter Balakian

I'd normally put this poem at the bottom of things to be read and evaluated, given that it is yet another poem in a long string of tributes to jazz legends; the results I've read or heard from thirty years of open readings, workshops, and editing anthologies are that most of the attempts to get to the core of the improviser’s art are ham-handed and none-to-fresh (nor particularly musical). Davis, Parker, Ellington, all have had their names evoked and their legends dragged through a white jazz critic's generalizations about music, suffering, and black folks and their innate "soulfulness" and rhythm, through which a sort of benevolent racism can be viewed, the mythical good intentions of the humane plantation owner who sought to be kind to "his children". It's not a topic category that's ever yielded much in way of revelation or poetic effect for me; the revisionist poems, ostensibly written by mostly white poets to honor a black American art form, made me think of the stale paternalism that was, after all, is said and done, merely another attempt to define non-white traditions within American history and defuse them of any quality a group might take to define their experiences in terms other than what the Caucasian canonThat said, I think Peter Balakian’s poem “Blue” almost works as the poetry equivalent of the sound of Davis’ trumpet. Void of the generalizations and ersatz sociology that have made this sub-genre in urban poetry a laughable species of verse, Balakian approaches the poem much the same as Davis might have approached his solos, focusing on the mood of the moment, the suggestive textures of a note bent against a modal piano figure and the quiet rumble of bass and drums creating a host of alluring shades, tones and coloration , a space that is about the problematic personality rising above and over defects of character and external hindrances to happiness and creating those series of moments that are sublime, pure, unaffected bits of harmony and beauty, albeit a loveliness tempered with the doings of a scornful cityscape. Balakian chooses interesting words for his impressions of listening to the Davis group; the city is transformed, it becomes something new, if briefly, for Balakian’s rhapsodic narrator and this must be the transcendence Davis himself must have felt when this music was played.

Light we pulled into a string of glass

that seeped out of the long vibration

of Miles' Blue in Green

like slow time in the empty lot

after soot and rain and rush,

the Ferry out of sight,

my bones electric with the hum

of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.

and the dying lights of the Bowery.

Bill Evans making the rain thin

to a beam of haze before the

horn comes back from underwater.

New York seems lovely and quite habitable even by the timidest of us; it becomes not the most sophisticated and elegant place in the world, but rather, with the music from Miles' transubstantiating phrases, is the world where each and every crook, thief, liar, cuckold, and cheat assumes grace, finds a place, blends in with a rich backdrop of wise, somber hues that make up the thick and awe-inspiring skyline. The city with its traffic, racist cops, crowds, posers, slums, jerks, geniuses, writers and money-grubbing capitalist becomes transformed, cast in a softer light, rinsed with soft rain, tall buildings seen in water puddle reflections and blurred neon nightclub signs burning away the mist just enough for you to who is furnishing the soundtrack. This is a cityscape that exists only in black and white photographs carefully framed to produce an effect, but Balakian is writing about how Davis’ music from this period made him feel about the quality of his life in a dense urban center. That he does it with a modicum of hyperbole is a wonder, and the final lines about Bill Evans clearing away the rain and Davis’ horn resurfacing after an absence is the subtlest description of a jazz group’s interaction I’ve read in years. Of course, it makes no literal sense. It’s a poem, and a good one.

USED BOOKS: The Gates of Eden

The Gates of Eden
stories by Ethan Coen (Delta)

A lifetime of reading means a lot of cheap paperbacks with busted spines that one must eventually take to the used book store, the idea being to clear space in both one's apartment and in one's head. One is moving out and moving on, but not without a summation of sorts of a few plot convolutions and the writers who typed them. Ethan Coen likes to take the convolutions one has left at the curb and smash to bits with a heavy, wicked hammer. His collection of short fiction,The Gates Of Eden, offers this collection of odd-lug short stories, collected from various magazines from where they've been published previously. Uneven, as with any collection, though there are some nice slices of dialogue, and some potent descriptive writing, but as a film maker, Coen's descriptions of things seem like film treatments at best, hurried and breathless, like the film pitches we witnessed in The Player, and our laughs are too dependent on our knowledge, even reference, of tired genre forms. But "Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator" is a Philip Marlow/ Sam Spade send up that results in some honest hoots, and 'Destiny" is a particularly vicious laugh at the boxing trade, with a Coenesque hero eating fists over and over as a direct result of his own miserably rationalized choices.

About The Noise

A screaming comes from the balcony of the apartment next to you, some one else is drunk under the summer moon again, the armies of the night troll the residential streets looking for the cars they parked for their pub crawls on the business strip three blocks away. More screams, yelling, every clumsy curse word you ever on the play ground said this time with no relish or daring, just animal sounds an animal makes when you poke it with a stick. I'd been working late, writing away on some issue or the other, Bill Evans playing sweet and brittle piano through my head phones as I let the screen swell with paragraphs praising Mailer, DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, yet again, for raising the conciousness of the era, or at least inspiring me again to write late into the evening.But then the writing is over and the computer goes off, and when I take off the headphones, helicopters swoop over the roof, police radios crackle along a wet, dank street, drunk males are scrambling over the fences to avoid the Long, Arthritic Arm of the Law.

 Thank god for His Miracle Invention of Ear Plugs. At a younger age I would be in someone's face, making threats, chest puffed for a fight.What can you do? There's a minute of satisfaction telling some to shut up when they've woken you up more than once, late at night. But then comes the idea, the cold and sobering realization that the only thing you've done is come off like a cranky old geezer who's ready to choke on his congealing sense of comfort. There's a principle at stake, yes, but it has everything to do with my sense of what's right for me, of what I think I'm owed in small measure rather than the application of any greater good.

I just want the nights to be as quiet as the likes mom and dad enjoyed before they decided to have us kids. There is the on going irony of aging, getting older, that the original night owl alkie is now a middle aged working stiff who requires his sleep, and feels the creaks and groans of the joints and the disposition if he hasn't the fabled eight hours, give or take. That much annoys the fuck out of me, and it's not uncommon to find myself using it as a way of making the noisy kids somehow correct in their pestering ruckus.

The facts remain, though, that it's most likely that I'll continue to wave my shoe like grandma used to , and make the harrummmmpphhing noise when it comes down to my will or nothing at all. Sometimes I wonder if I was born or merely set aside in another dimension of newspaper grey and was launched into this world because what ever the case was running low on the premium designs. It's a habitual thought, a shudder of doubt when staking hands or crossing streets or visiting people who and which are so familiar, so complete in intimate nuances and shared knowledge that they seem alien and strange, like specimens under glass in a museum I keep visiting for a lesson that just keeps turning the corner to the next gallery when my hard shoes hit the tile. Everything I look for is just out of focus, short of the designs I see and have drawn.

Believing the world is seeing beyond the box scores and trusting what it says on the certificate; the biography has already been started, a page of facts that have gotten absurdly complicated, in love their own inventory of details that are pressed now in their uniqueness, creased and pleated, ready for rough waters I imagine await at the end of the map, where boats fall off and drift with sails full of solar wind until I wake up and yawn and scan the items on the table, the newspaper, the dirty bowls, someone else's pack of Marlboro 100s. The universe is reassembled, seamless as death itself.

Years ago I wondered if there was life on other planets precisely at the time when she left me, or asked me to leave, I wondered who else in this darkness knows this hurt as well as I?, and I stared for hours at her apartment as if trying to make the walls fly away, to lift her off the sofa, away from her meal , and bring her into my arms where I stood in the dark, next to a payphone, with out change to call out far enough to the wilderness where there is only wind and tall grass, maybe houses at the bottom of canyons that you see from jets leaving your home town before you enter the clouds that will drag on the wingspan, I would stare and the walls would stay where the carpenters intended them to remain, there was nothing to see, but I stared harder, right through the building, to the stars I knew were there, receiving radio waves, TV shows, thoughts of strong desire translatable only by action, hear me, hear me, who else shivers in a dark corner in unique misery, genius of articulated regret, who else speaks when no language gets the purity of the idea right, just right, thus forcing one to live in craziness, at the end of the alley, drinking from bottles I've pealed the labels from? As usual, the stars don't answer, they don't say a word.