Wehle's Tales

"Consciousness" by Ellen Wehle takes us, it seems , to the backstage area of our awake personalities, the place where our prop-worthy similes and figures of speech are readied and positioned, the hope being that the word combinations match the shape and tone of what the eyes perceived. Better, it's a spat among the workman to cues and timing of lines; still, the play must go one.The concrete and the abstract meet here, in some figurative back alley, seeming to mime each other's meanings and movements in parallel movement and lexical simulation, like some tense discussion that is all but a yelling match underneath a sighing, impatient surface civility. Representation , simulacra, codes of various types call attention to the events of the real world, and one learns rather quickly that existence , as is, hasn't a storyline it lives up to or a script it follows, but rather goes it's own way. It is our need, among the systems of narrated coping, to give these symbolic virtues to things that happen all of a sudden, or inevitably, but both beyond our expectation and control.

Sack of rocks we drag.
Telescope dish turning.

Engine-hum in back
Alleys where all night

Trucks idle their load,
Whomever the Devil

Would destroy … how
Does that saying go?

Yes, how does that saying go, what was said once by a wise man, where was it that I read...? Narrative , often enough, comes after someone--a writer, poet, a writer of computer games--has had enough life out of their parent's home and has something of their own biography. We have our goals, we have a sense of what we've so far leading up to the current moment, and we expect a certain trajectory for the rest of our being--we expect our lives to have a coherence and a legacy our grandchildren would enjoy hearing. But things go wrong, the material of the planet and the accumulation of forces reach their tipping point and our paradigm is upset; we forget our homilies, who combine our cliches and abandon ourselves to an every-man's fatalism: "such is life". But even with the plot lines we've assigned and assumed for ourselves cracked, stalled or limping, we hold on to the different parts, we adjust, we try to mend and repair the straight road we were on, we carry those things we cannot use. Just when we most need to drop the rock we hang on to it most.

Ellen Wehle's poem confront us with the machinary that gets us through the day, and here rather nicely, sparely, jaggedly reveals something in people who will argue with themselves and those they are close to about why their assumptions hadn't turned out as they thought it would. This, even as they plough ahead, accepting, in some grudging act of survival, that one must press on and linger on dreams that didn't get fulfilled. One does not surrrender to the hard facts of bad weather and no money, one keeps on with whatever sources they have--optimism, hope, anger and spite, different motivations for different people to get to the other side of their despair.

Can we not silence
It even half an hour:

Slip off our headset,
Forget the last ship's

Tinny SOS, break out
Champagne and party.

Palace of a thousand
Lamps left burning

Far below the waves.
… he first makes wise.

Conciousness seems to the result of our need to see ourselves in life as automonous beings making their way through an existence that would otherwise be absent of purpose. Wehle gets to where this connection fragments, and underscores with an interesting filtering of soured sentiments emerging from solid facts one cannot expel from their storyline. Conciousness is more a matter of continually waking from what guiding principle and learning to live life on life 's terms, not on your opinions on how things should go. Conciousness itself isn't a single state of being; it changes constantly, not unlike the mountains and oceans and bad weather it's fluidity of perception tries to help you understand.


What doesn't kill you makes you smaller, and you discover that wisdom is the knowledge of what won't work out. Ellen Wehle is a fine poet of the simply addressed dilemma; her ability to catch the deep, exhausted breathing implied between these sharp, bitter missives demonstrates something that Hemingway understood: an experience worth relating needn't be talked to death.

The urge to convert the unruly undulations of our collectivized speech into a hard, condensed verbal thing that makes the dull, if loud noise of lazy inference has crept it's way into a few poet's habit of phrase. We come to Wyn Cooper's poem in Slate, Daily Threads. I liken this to the way my younger brother treated radios, battery powered toys and alarm clocks when he were both the ages of 7 and 9 respectively. He would take the devices apart, typically toss out those pieces he seemingly didn't like the looks of, and then reassemble , to his own liking, what it was he'd dismantled. It didn't matter the radios or the toys didn't work as their advertising promised, my odd and brilliant brother preferred his own idea of this things in his world. Cooper looks on his narrative stream, in turn, and rids the sentences of any phoneme that doesn't make a grating sound. In surer hands this technique works, if only because the writers I'm thinking of--William Burroughs, WC Williams, Rae Armantrout-- intend their works for audiences who live in this world.

Thepoem, is Twitterdism incarnate, and it's most striking accomplishment is that it's taken brevity beyond the conservative deployment of articles, adjectives and other connecting tissues that made Hemingway the still-pilloried genius and made the style a crabby, grandstanding assemblage of barking alliteration and crash-dummy conceits. Some of this might have been effective had it suggested another medium, a painting in the style of Stuart Davis. In his canvases, a city scape on a typical walk does seem to pile on you, which makes his best work a nicely clustered terrain of icons to walk through. But Davis hasn't the curse of feeling required to be literary. Cooper boils the sentences down to the grunts, but what remains isn't believable as speech

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.

He might have veered closer to the old WC Williams' notion of writing to the rhythm and bluntness of speech as it's actually spoken, without a bookish filter to bring the impressions through. Sonnet like? Maybe, but the best sonnets get to an effect that makes you consider the technique and limitations after the emotional content registers and becomes felt by the reader. I can't get beyond this poem sounding like someone attempting a unique way of expressing itself. That is exactly the problem--it does sound unique, and it's the kind of singularity you hope remains a single instance.

Slaves to do These Things: Amy King

Slaves to do These Things
poems by Amy King

Amy King's writing is at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptible sensuality, are among the best of the post-modernist, post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated surprise that our native tongue is, in essence, slippery when it comes to addressing our experience and who has gotten on with an interrogation of both the templates one has absorbed from birth and the ones accrued through living long enough to modify one's narrative.

There is no defeatism here, no smallish voice sighing over disappointments, no staccato -cadenced anger replaying old wounds. Amy King comes through these poems, not as a survivor nor someone inclined to obscure the bare facts of her life and the reading she brought with her, but rather a poet with a firm grip on the co-agitations of joy and subtler anguish.

The wonder is that there not a place one senses that they've come across someone who thinks it's time to address themselves in a disguised past tense; these are the wonderings, inspections, musings of someone too enthralled with the discussion underway to worry what the final word will be. What hasn't been said yet is nothing to worry about, but to anticipate as a hard-verbed, sexily ironic entree to what one doesn't already know.

King's verse is sharp, witty, moving in ways that are made powerful by the emotional nuance her line breaks contain; there is the sense that everything one knew is wrong, after all, and yet it stands as a reasonably reliable filter through which one may continue their negotiation with the metaphysically inclined whispers--the ghostly reminders objects, places, faces can awake and send a chill down your spine. There is an analytical rigor here, but not cerebralization of one's history. One witnesses the sort of appreciation of personal multi-valence; the meaning of King's life has changed due to the texts she's absorbed, and her experience, in turn, has changed the meanings of the books she has been given.

Choice and recommended.

Spirituality after all the hair cuts

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

The key distinction between poems and prayers are that poems are almost invariably written from within experience, and as a form, is under no obligation to detail and highlight it's rhetoric toward any obligatory pitch or prejudice. The poet, distinct from the praying person, has the freedom to invoke God or invoke him not at all; the poet might even insist that the wonders he or she comes to write about are phenomena in and of itself, independent of anything divine.

Poetry allows for the religious, the agnostic, the atheist and the indifferent with regards to God. The single requirement is that the poem meet the needs of literature, however the poet lands on the issue of the divine; what constitutes literary value, of course, is subject to a discussion that is nearly as abstruse and premised on unprovable suppositions as theology, Literary criticism might be said to be it's own sort of religious dogma.

Prayers, in contrast, start outside human, terrestrial experience and beseech a higher power to intervene in human affairs. While poetry , in general, glories in all things human and is obsessed with the mystery of perception (finding that miraculous enough ), prayer assumes human experience is flawed, in error, and needs a strong hand to right itself to a greater purpose. Prayer in essence is an admission of powerlessness or one's situation and one's instincts to cope with the difficulties presented; the varieties of spiritual inspiration vary and are nuanced to particular personalities and finer or lesser nuanced readings of guiding sacred texts, but prayers share a default position that human existence sans God is incomplete and in need to surrender itself to the Will of a variously described God.

It is possible to write a poem that addresses god that is not an entreaty, finding His presence in the world as we already have it, not as we think it was."Question" by May Swenson does this.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will
I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without
roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I
hide?

It's a fine poem, and Swenson is speaking from within experience, finding something wondrous in the world as it is. Her poem is about finding God in the details of this existence, and does not beseech a higher power for guidelines about how to live a more righteous life according to scripture. Prayer assumes that human life, in essence, is merely an audition for a seat in Heaven. Swenson assumes we already have our seat and seeks God's inspiration in making the place where we live purposeful and fuller.I don't think God ordains prayers,since they commence with the human subject starting a conversation with his maker in the search for guidance, inspiration, hope. Prayers (and poetry writing) are voluntary, as humans always have the choice not to pray at all and to neither seek nor have an interest in spiritual matters. God does not micro manage what human beings do,

Twitter poetry

The commercial has a Twitter addict gleefully thumbing his message, "I am sitting on the porch." It seemed to me, momentarily, we might enter a time of New Brevity, with the language being composed less of phrases that build their way to more complex meanings and more by lexical equivalents of shrugs, sighs, head gestures, rolled eyes. The limits on the number of characters you could use for the tweet you had in mind forced you to boil your idea down to a point where even essence is seared away, and only the proverbial grunts of need remain. It would, it seem, be a potential source of making one's recognizable language do interesting things, the irony being that one begins with a coherent series of things to say but who, made to observe limits they cannot modify, are made to reduce their communications into something akin to tea leaf readings. Read between the lines, fill in the blanks, assume the Tweeter hadn't made a thumb-inclined typo and, in fact, meant something significant with an odd string of visual glottal clicks. Someone came up with the idea here, where an endless stream of Tweets is amassed, stanza style, in what reads like Modernist poetry feeding on its own armor-plated tail. There was a rule applied to the otherwise random nature of the project: each line, from different tweets, had to rhyme. A sample from today

digg this stuck downstairs... at least i have computer, TV, food, and potty!!! Mind pelicans and dropped cell phones when driving your Bugatti... gay fags put it on twilight and changed the whole song in the process. This class is becoming more and more pointless as the weeks progress. I'm about to go to the gym with my sister and brother.. Got lunch on my top so had to nip out and buy another. praising God for my life and the life of others Robin Williams and Bono look like brothers. I have a twin, and she's bad at everything. Just ate breakfast.. and i cant taste anything!! Tim McCarver is making my ears bleed and my brain hurt You might say I'm such a flirt, lipstick on my neck and shirt. you're such a mystery, i just want to stand and stare. i can't wait to go home today and smell some new air. Just woke up and I'm still thinking of you. Fuck my life. Now where did I put my hockey mask and butcher knife? Im so tired. I'll take the walk and clear my head and Star Wars was fun Awesome. I'll budget and rearrange my room and I may get one. is pumped to see what Jesus has in store for my life and my band. Good morning everyone! Got a day of fun and craziness planned!

In The American Grain, the lingua franca William Carlos Williams had faith in the metronome-smashing, multi-headed parlance. Endless lines of concern, emphasis, interest, and obsession coming at us through the air, joining up with other odd phrases and fresh banalities that give everyone who wants one a voice to spend their two cents as they please, the only limit being 140 characters at a time. Our collective conscious, it seems, seems to be something that is now ruled by an impatient twelve-year-old with remote control. Not that this is an original idea for poetry, visual art, or writing in general--William Burroughs did as much with his cut-up method, his slicing up of various texts, his own and others, and reassembling them in striking phrase combinations that would, despite their nonsequitur essence, forced you to consider the implications; it was something of a peek into a hell you denied being afraid of. The Twitter aesthetic, or the lack of it, is that now anyone can play and do so fearlessly, unafraid of the swirling materialistic signifiers that threaten to distract and dilute their ability to ask for a glass of water at the coffee shop and also at what the results of the jerking language combinations suggest. They suggest nothing and only reflect on the emptiness at the heart of a personality that hasn't anything worthwhile to do. Hell has been redefined as a life without Twitter, without Facebook, without a cellphone to broadcast one's face and quirks across the receiving universe,

From the captain's tower

T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound weren't friends of democracy,but they did their own style of the mash up --classical and pop styles and a preferring a diffusion of coherence rather than writing a series of unifying metaphors--in ways that would better express their idea of the fracturing of reality and the destruction of purpose in culture. Someone had said that poetry was "news that stayed news", and some of us in the later decades saw fit to use that a declaration about the merging of Art and History , in the immediate guise of the New Journalists, our recent examples being Mailer, Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese.The New Journalists weren't really the mob--mobs cannot , by nature, be democratic nor fair nor be able to devise a fair and just politics. I'd say they were more the guys at the end of the bar who stopped opining about the way things ought to be and got off the bar seat to enter an argument that started without them; they were going to straighten folks out. As it goes, they did provide an interesting altnerative narrative line to what gets called the Movement of History, a choice , up close view of the insanity, the ugliness and the egomania that was chewing at the margins of the Great Society and it's aftershock.

Realty is both an indvidual and a collective endeavor, yes; whatever it may in fact be in God's mind, we , as a species, cannot concieve of reality without a narrative line, a script. We are all stars in our own movie and everyone else is from central casting; reality is close to being a multiplex theatre with very thin walls between the auditoriums. Dialogue and sound effects bleed into each other's plot lines. Pound and Eliot are interesting contrasts, one a windbag, a blowhard,a buttinski, a motor-mouthing gab-bag who happened to have some brilliant notions of how poetry can be made aesthetically and personally viable again, the other being a depressed, crabby, self conciously rigid individual who's view of the cracked surface of culture gave us some haunting images that perfectly convey the despair and longing decades after they were written.

Both were closet autocrats, of course, and very conservative--neither was a fan of corporations nor capitalism, and it wouldn't be so hard to imagine the current strains of the right wing characterizing these fellows as left wingers. A strange set of long-view bed fellows; two anti-semetic, totalitarian inclined poets who wind up writing stuff that dovetail comfortably with a Marxist analysis on the effect of capital on human relationships. Everyone brings their own dynamite to this party, blowing up the same thing for the same reason, but with each with a Jesus of a different name.

a paragraph with general praise for David Lehman

I enjoy David Lehman's mosaics of place names, mad jazz and painterly effect; there is an fabulous improvisation in his lines that performs an activity I think is poetry's core province, which is testing language's ability to accommodate experience and offer up perception in a manner that merits a second, third or a hundredth look at the daily things that surround us.There is what sounds like genuine surprise and glee when his pieces are at their best set of finessed pitches ;the interruptions or clipped notions work as layers of many references Lehman decides to associate; it's a sloppy process, I suppose, but it's one I'm partial too, taking Frank O'Hara as my foil. There is not enough time in this life to bemoan and decry what cannot be undone. You're use of another writer's phrase merely passively agrees with him. Lehman's technique is more adventurous, more artful--he makes his borrowed references perform as he wants them to.