Sunday, December 13, 2009

Best Books of the Decade

Strange, it seems, that this December we must consider not only the best books of 2009 , but the best books of the decade, and shudder at the thought that the last ten years have gone by so quickly. Or have they? Thinking back on the events gone by, personal, political, economic, literary, through each bit of bad news, good news and indifferent reports, one does realize, finally,that it's been a full decade in the passing. It's as though one had fallen asleep in the backseat during a long, tedious trip , only to be woken up with a start when the car finally stops. Coming out of the fog, one hazily asks "Here already?"

But we are here, ready or not for the next decade, ready or not in one's attempts to secure a sound employment ( too much detail, perhaps, but I was laid off my job last week, but I'm in noble company). My best guess to that matter is that we are ready; there have been some terrific books written over the last ten years , some brilliant writing, intriguing tales, illuminating accounts of emotion and fancy, all of which serves the central purpose of literature, to help us think about ourselves in the world.

These books have kept me out of the vacuum of merely sitting in front of a computer grazing off the headlines --they have kept me engaged with the world for the last ten years and have given me ample reason to talk to old friends and make new ones. We have something to talk about, and that seems to be the point of reading books and sharing what one enjoys with others; books are the grounds through which our different lives find a common set of metaphors , through which we can discuss surmount of differences and frame our similarities.

My best books of the Last Decade. These remarks, of course, are culled from previously posted reviews.


My Vocabulary Did this To Me

poems by Jack Spicer

Spicer is an interesting poet on several levels, all of them deep and rich with deposits that reward an earnest dig. He is , I think, on a par with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams with the interest in grilling the elaborating infrastructure of how we draw or are drawn to specialized conclusions with the use of metaphor, and it is to his particular brilliance as a lyric poet, comparable to Frank O’Hara (a poet Spicer declared he didn’t care for, with O’Hara thinking much the same in kind) that the contradictions, competing desires and unexpected conundrums of investigating one’s verbal stream are made comprehensible to the senses, a joy to the ear. No one, really no one wrote as distinctly as the long obscure Spicer did, and editors Gizzi, Killian and publisher Wesleyan Press are to be thanked for restoring a major American voice to our shared canon.

Bear v. Shark
a novel by Chris Batchelder


Bear V. Shark
by Chris Bachelder is post-modern hoot. Don't let the tag "post modern" put you off, because Bachelder gets it exactly right as he skews his target, television and the culture of Total Media Saturation. Bear V.Shark is a great, wild read for anyone who enjoyed Pastoralia or the work of Mark Leyner. There is a vaguely described though loudly trumpeted Big Event forthcoming that's precisely what the title suggests, in a future time when TVs have no off switches and whose soft ware can sense a viewers boredom and flip the channels for them: TVs are everywhere in this world, in the kitchen, the furniture, bus stops, train stations, and in such a society, the idiom of everyday language is subverted by commercial patois and jingles. America, here, is subtly insane and in a constant state of distraction.This is the America that Baudrillard absent mindedly ruminated about, only much funnier, edgier, and smarter in the evisceration


Cosmopolis

a novel by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around the events of an eventful day in Manhattan. Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it. The brillance here, as with White Noise and especially Mao ll is the way characters seek to reconfigure their metaphors, their assuring base of references , once their world view is rattled and made less authortative by unexplainable events and human quirks. This is semiotics at its best, an erotic activity where DeLillo probes and glides over the surfaces of ideas , notions, theories and their artifacts, things intellectual and material emptied of meaning, purpose. It's a hallmark of DeLillo's mastery of language that he gets that psychic activity that constantly tries to reinfuse the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck. His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negoiation with death. His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the the hydra-headed strands of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself.

The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers

This amazing novel by Richard Powers. an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.

Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles
a memoir by Kate Braverman

Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles is a memoir, of sorts, about growing up in Los Angeles, and then the eventual moving away from that famously center-less city. Writing in a high poetic and semiotically engaged style that recalls the best writing of Don DeLillo (Mao ll) and Norman Mailer (Miami and the Seize of Chicago), Braverman deftly defines isolated Los Angeles sprawl and puts you in those cloistered, cul-de-sac'd neighborhoods that you drive by on the freeway or pass on the commuter train, those squalid, dissociated blocks of undifferentiated houses and strip malls and store front churches; the prose gets the personal struggle to escape through any means , through art and rage, and this makes Frantic Transmissions not unlike Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wherein the prodigal son or daughter deigns to move up and away from a home that cannot keep them, with only raw nerve and the transforming elements of art to guide them. What Braverman confronts and writes about with a subtly discerning wit is the struggle of defining the place one calls home, and what roles one is obliged to assume as they continually define their space, their refuge. All through this particularly gripping memoir there is the sheer magic and engulfing power of Braverman's writing; I was fortunate to receive an uncorrected proof of Frantic Transmissions a couple of months ago, and I was knocked out by what I beheld. Sentence upon sentence, metaphor upon simile, analogy upon anecdote, this writing is rhythmic and full of stirring music. There is poetry here that does not overwhelm nor over reach; this is an amazing book, and it is one of the best books about life in Los Angeles , quite easily in the ranks of Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, and John Fante.


HIP:The History

non fiction by John Leland


John Leland's Hip:The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an indefinite essence that makes the reader of the book appear, well, hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become real blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the the jazz canon besides gimmick.

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium. For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy. For all the appropriation,experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many.

The Silver Dazzle of the Sun
poems by Paul Dresman

The speakers are shaped by language that accommodates the vastness of region, The West, both as a physical place and collective social construction, looms large in a good deal of the present poems(as it is in Dorn's long lines), and it is the marriage of voice and location that gives the poetry in The Silver Dazzle of the Sun a life that is absent from too much published poetry. The world climbs through the language and appears through deft description fresh as a moment of first perception; style is content, to beg an old question, but it's a worthwhile distinction to make clear. Dresman's work brings us a world of felt experience that can be addressed in useful ways. There are no epistemological quandaries here, no rueful mediations on malformed vowels. There is , though, plenty of wit, anger, flights of lyric speculation, writ with a sure composing hand.There is something of a medley of voices at play in these works, where a terrain on which innumerable generations of have written on emerge in a layered and subtly orchestrated music. The poetics of wonder, rage, joy and sorrow are harnessed with extraordinary skill. Above all else, the poems come from a voice that is speaking to you;
there are moments when the candor and unreticent wit of the writing makes you ponder again the incidents in your own experience that you might not have regarded for years. The poetry is that good.


Big If
a novel by Mark Costello

This is a superb comedy of contemporary American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who finds she must get reacquainted with her computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid turns and twists of her job. This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, almost invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book , is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If on line game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costellos' prose is quick with the telling detail,the flashing insight, the cutting remark. On view in Big If are different models on which characters try to contain , control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with it's fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle, but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic. Costello is a modern master, and fans of White Noise and The Corrections will enjoy the emergence of a master.


It's Go In Horizontal: Selected Poems 1974-2006
poems by Leslie Scalapino

Laying out a poem like it were a trail of bread crumbs a reader would to the bigger feast of The Point Being Made is not how writer Leslie Scalapino writes. As we find ourselves in a time when the popular idea of the poet and their work they compose seems slanted toward the lightly likable Billy Collins and others witing poems that can be grasped, shared, written out in a fine hand on perfumed paper and preserved between the leaves of a dictionary of quotations. Scalapino requires not the casual gaze but the harder view, the more inquisitive eye. Scalapino brings a refreshing complexity to her work, a sanguine yet inquisitive intelligence that is restless and dissatisfied with the seemingly authorized narrative styles poets are expected to frame their ideas with. The framing, so to speak, is as much the subject in her poems and prose, and the attending effort to interrogate the methods one codifies perception to the exclusion of details not fitting a convenient structure, Leslie Scalapino has produced a body of work of rare and admirable discipline; the writing is a test of the limits of generic representation.Her work as well is an inquiry in how we might exist without them. In as series of over nineteen books over published since the seventies, she has been one of the most interesting poets working , an earnest inquisitor of consciousness and form blurring and distorting the boundaries that keep poetry, prose, fiction and auto biography apart.It's Go in Horizontal is a cogent selection from three decades of writing. The distinction blurring is not a project originating with her, but there is in Scalapino's work the sense of a single voice rather than expected "car radio effect", the audio equivalent of Burrough's cut up method that would make a piece resemble an AM dial being moved up and down a distorted, static-laden frequency. Leslie Scalapino's writing is one voice at different pitches responding to an intelligence aware of how it codes and decodes an object of perception. The work is fascinating , interrogations that wrestle with the act of witnessing.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
poems by Ted Berrigan

It's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing incomprehension of the why of the invisible world.

The Age of Huts
poems by Ron Silliman

The Age of Huts brings together several books he's published as a long standing project. It makes for alternately exhilarating and exasperating reading. Those who stay with Silliman and his task are rewarded with what is really the most thorough on going examination of the American vernacular since William Carlos Williams composed and assembled his central epic poem Paterson in 1963. Silliman’s is the language of a place, and there is a logic as the streams and eddies of unassigned sentences the blended variations at once rich, dissonant.

The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers


This is an amazing novel byRichard Powers. an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there. 

The Plot Against America
a novel by Philip Roth

Novelist Philip Roth, always a spiky and unpredictable story teller, creates an alternative history for America, a fascinating and troubling fantasy of "what if": Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero and Nazi-sympathetic isolationist, is nominated by the Republican Party in the 1940 presidential election, and handily defeats FDR. Using his own family as the center of this fable, Roth has written a novel with the impact of a memoir of hard and terrible times,speaking to how easily a homegrown fascism could take root and grow. The power of Roth's novel lies not only in the impressive historical research he brings to the novel, but especially in how creeping Totalitarian persecution effects the lives of characters who are complex, sympathetic, argumentative. This is not a dry recital of dates, events, names from fading ledgers and indexes, because the novel is a family saga among its several formations, and what Roth has done is highlight a family's struggle between each other and their inner lives while the nation prepares to give in to its worse fears and lay the land for fascism. Several instances -- the family listening the radio during the convention, a hapless father become less powerful in the children's eyes as political forces move against American Jews, the subtly advanced symbolism of the fictional Philip Roth's stamp collection-- gives a reader an vivid accounting of the things that disrupted, destroyed, lost by systematized evil.

The Plot Against America is a masterpiece of the first rank, as relevant as morning headlines, timeless as great literature, qualities that place him, unexpectedly, in the same league with Sinclair Lewis.This is art as a form of truth-telling, of an acute paranoia made comprehensible through a focus of literary skill that gives voice to the unspeakable. Roth was obliviously raised to revere democracy , and this work, tempered by experience and the history of human kind to go wrong and become complicit in evil, sounds off a warning for the reader that is hardly an original thought but meaningful resounds even still: the price of freedom is constant vigilance because the enemies of our rights as citizens are snakes sleeping with one eye open.


The Body Artist
a novel by Don DeLillo


DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork Underworld made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age. The Body Artist has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud. A short, haunted masterwork.

Crackpots
a novel by Sara Pritchard

Brief, beautifully written book about an awkward young girl being raised by an eccentric family. Note that there is no child abuse or other hot button stuff engineered in to make the book appeal to the Oprah book clubs, just a humorous and bittersweet novel of a girl, beset with any number of glum circumstances and embarrassments, maturing to a resilient adult with soft irony that gets her through the day. Pritchard is especially fine as prose stylist.

Half Life:Poems
poems by Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke,poetry editor for The Paris Review and a cultural editor for Slate,is also a poet with unique ability to get a nearly intangible notion, an inexlicapable sensation into words. Giving voice to hunch, making the half-idea a textured, tangible thing, hers is a poetry that completes sentences we cannot finish ourselves. Precision and morphological accuracy aren't the point, and the words themselves, the images they create or suggest, are more like strands of half remembered music that is heard and triggers an intense rush of association; any number of image fragments, sounds, scents, bits of sentences, suggestions of seasonal light in a certain place, race and parade through the mind as fast as memory can dredge up the shards and let them loose. Just as fast, they are gone again, the source of quick elation or profound sadness gone; one can quite nearly sense that streaming cluster of associations that make up a large part of your existence rush onward, going around a psychic bend, scattering like blown dust in the larger universes of limitless life. All one is left with is memory of the sudden rush, the flash of clarity, and the rapid loss, the denaturing of one's sense of self in a community where one might have assumed they were solid and autonomous in their style of being, that nothing can upset the steady rhythm of a realized life.

Dry and Brittle Poem: stale toast?


Intertextuality , the notion that text, whether poem, novel, third grade reader or medical textbook, can refer only to other text gets an awkward expression with Linda Gregerson's poem "At The Window" ,a poem published in Slate in December of 2006. selection. The reader, it seems, finds themselves locked inside the gloomy room of perception, wishing there were a window. And some air. It fits the would-be verse, a writerly and clustered screed on religion, death, the purpose of events and the objects within those experience. It's more a theory of a poem, really. Dry. Brittle.

This is a dreary reconfiguration of Augustine's
stalled obsession over the
state of his body's
peculiar refusal to adhere to God's all inclusive
bitcheness, and the use of a substantial quote (to be polite) from the sainted
theologian against a
memoir of personal loss, the death of a parent, is
a
stretch and a strain.

It's pretentious and dishonest, I think.The intoning of the successive suppositions, each intended to make us pause and consider the limitless minutiae in which God's animating force resides, becomes, as both reading and writing, a grind.What works well for a rapturing Confession does not make for a poem of the sort Gregorson attempted here; giving the section eccentric line breaks, to suggest rhythm to which the conditional phrases might hint at swaths of thick , slow liturgical musical will not give the borrowed writing a lift. Gregorson should have better paraphrased what she borrowed and have it better mirror the deferred narrator's sad recollection of his (or her) mother passing away at an early age.

There was an opportunity for a revelation, when words written in complete abandon in an effort to sense a deity's essence and purpose for the world slam up against real feelings from actual experience, with the glory of the literature is found wanting. Perhaps the transition from the uncited Augustine usage to the parallel scene where the dying mother announces "I do not know why I am here" less jarring. This is film school stuff, a quick cutting between past and current scenarios, and while the method is sometimes effective in the right writer's hands, it is ineffective here.

The stitches from joining these uneven parts together show. You realize that the author has a time of it reconciling losss in clear language; the generous use of of cumbersome syntax with the high-falutin' references and rhetoric sounds unnatural . What we have are strange sounds rather than feeling at all. Gregerson attempts is a pastiche between an t established text and and a recent memory, with an unsuccessful result. It would effective if , perhaps, if there were a suggestion of unexpected continuity between the past and present, and that there is a reason why we use similar narrative schemes through the periods to account for our interior experience. There can be something provocative in such a blur, with poetic resonance being a result.

We get instead a theory of a poem, an outline. The flaw here seems to be that Gregerson chose erudition for it's own sake rather than use her reading as an enhancement to her senses, creating distance between her and the subject she sought to explore; the poem is self-reflexive in an uninteresting way, waxing on about literature's limits. It's a tired trope, really, and it's time that more poets realize that most of us realize that literature is, of course, imperfect in getting to the distilled reality of experience. Perfection is not and should never be the intent in writing about something , just as literature ought to avoid itself as subject. It is the attempt to get to the heart of things that interests us.That is the essential goal of poetry, the expression of the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable (to borrow from critic John Ciardi).

Saturday, December 12, 2009

More on "Dead Mother"

I talked to someone earlier today about the Henri Cole poem "Dead Mother", and it was remarked that the poem read more like a rehearsal of a response rather than a gathering of the conflicting emotions a parent's death unleashes on you. It was remarked that that his may be the reason for the seeming foliage Cole circles his subject with.I agree that Cole is attempting to inoculate this poem against criticism by making the language abstruse, as opposed to abstract.

Abstruse , for me, means clutter, vagueness, a grandly arranged set of unconventionally phrased ideas that have the sound of a hollow tin can once their noise is made. Abstract language, in contrast, leads back to a referents, and everything can be discerned in an intricate network of relationships; the associations, obvious and less obvious, emerge from a careful reading of how unexpected things become analogies for unstated irresolution , or as metaphors for a larger theme the specific topic is only a symbol of.

Even in the tight reins of a sonnet, I suspect Cole sometimes lets his imagination get the better of him and leaves a personal association, a private pun , linger quizzically in a line on the pretext that a scholarly critic might catch it, inspect it, run a gamut of philological tests on the wording, and uncover a deep vein of insight and erudition that would make some latter day jaws hit the floor. It's laziness, I think. The poem seems not an account of viewing a dead mother and experiencing a traumatic reaction than it is the work of someone trying to perfect their reaction; this seems about grief as gristle for the literary art , and that I think is this poem's downfall. It's over-thought, and not thought through.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Flanders in the dark


Night never seemed the time to get sentimental about the way the world never becoming what it was you wanted it to be when you were young, so thought Flanders, but this night, this very night, the lights on the wet streets making slurred rainbows and hissing sounds as the tires rolled over the pot holes in the asphalt, he thought, why not, this night of endless dreaming when there is only he and his cigarettes, the bottle of hooch in his back pocket, the clubs along the avenue up to the old water tower where he’d been in trouble on nights like this years earlier, earlier, faster as the rush of speed hit the brain and the tongue swelled and dried as ideas and impulse came into their own just then, this night of cigarette smoke in is lungs, a dry and parched pinch of burning charcoal filtered blackness that roasted the pink design of nature’s idea of breathing, Flanders took a drink, he wanted to talk he fingered his change and lounged against the wall of the door way he was in, cracking his knuckles, rattling the coins in his pocket, thinking he’d love a blues jam to break out in front of him right now, a long and searing guitar solo ala Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter, none of this po’ sharecroppin’ Negro shit where the notes were all wrong, the coarseness of the singing too beat up, chafed, scuffed up , none of that at all, he wished it would rain, he thinks that would help the way he isn’t feeling about this world and how it never comes around to his way of thinking, anyone’s thinking when there was a time for him to be alert enough to ask someone, why couldn’t he just drink like the other guys, just be like the other guys, just drink and sit in a bar and smoke the cigarettes, endless butts crammed in an ashtray, get drunk, pick up on some swing shift cootie cutie and fuck his brains out, be in some place warm, worn out, fucked up, fucked and asleep, oh yeah, not outside on a rainy night, looking at the traffic, all his teeth grinding something fierce, molars going like trains passing each other in mountain towns where the coal and the axel grease comes from, to the shelves of California, Flanders took a drag off his smoke and felt his back pocket for the bottle, wanting to slow down, the cars came to the intersection and just roared by when the lights changed, when the lights changed, the cars just roared by, big radio speakers cracking the promise of dawn and early returns of bus lines up and at ‘em and really alert to the cause of what the fuck am I doing here, oh pleaseeeeeeeeeeesssee man oh god in heaven this is such a bad bad badddddddddddd buzz, fucking A man, bad bad bad, Flanders was awake enough for an invading battalion, the white crosses had him marching, ready for anything, just alert, nothing moving but notions about what he might have done in former times, the chances he passed up , the chances, man that guitar solo smoked!!! I went down to the cross road, to hack a ride , oh yeah..

What we talked about

The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there were an 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 tend to cease being the bright and chatty record of one's impulses, leavened with fast wit and snappy references, 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 hardly a matter of 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.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Dead Poem

There are some poems make you want to scratch an itch that isn't there.Henri Cole's Dead Mother reads like an attempt to garner a bit of that mausoleum erotica Edgar Allen Poe so masterfully spread across the pages of our national anthologies, the distinction being in Henri Cole's effusion is that he cannot resist inserting the surreal. It's not an unusual tact to assume, as gazing upon one's dead mother, laid out in an unusual pose that is unread precisely because an earnest mortician attempted to make her appear "natural", is not a daily practice; excluding the intervention of the bangs, clicks and rumbles of alive things to bring you back to a presence of mind, one's thinking will guide you through an odd narrative of what the eyes reveal.He sounds uncertain whether the dead mother is indeed a corpse, and projects, it reads to me, a wish that something tangible about her regrets be revealed, five or six tears—profound, unflinching, humane—ran out of her skull, This quickly takes on a tone of an old EC Comics stories as the long dead citizens of a town, victims of foul deeds and anonymous murders, arise from their crypts , rotting flesh and bulging eyeballs dripping from their skeletal frames, march to the home of their betrayer to administer a delayed justice. It gets a little much , and Cole speeds up the narrative with crazier associations, .

and tenderness (massaging the arms, sponging the lips) morphed into a dog howling under the bed, the bruised body that had carried us, splaying itself now, not abstract but symbolic, like the hot water bottle, the plastic rosaries

I like associative leaps , the abrupt insertion of an image that although seeming unlike the conversation that preceded it will, on review, suggest a larger emotion, or a larger set of conditions a narrator has yet to realize. This would be the shadow poem, the text of what the writer hasn't said or referred to, the unspoken thing, names, that demands an airing. Cole's dog image is doubly hindered,though, first the near comic placement of the dog under the bed--these are the bits of country songs and stale jokes--the next being that it's a cliche. Anthropomorphising an animal to convey complex emotion is a trick that's been used up in contemporary literature--although the poems of Ted Hughes and some of John Hawk's novels are notable exceptions-- that has become an animator's tool. Unreality isn't a sin in poetry--we insist on it, generally--but a poet's lack of conviction is. The rhetoric swells, the sentences turn into an unemphatic stream :

like the hot water bottle, the plastic rosaries, the shoes in the wheelchair ("I'm ready to stretch out"), as dents and punctures of the flesh—those gruesome flowers—a macabre tumor, and surreal pain, changed into hallowed marble, a lens was cleared, a coffer penetrated.
It seems sometimes that a poet realizes he starts out with one idea and realizes the punched up ending they envisioned won't be plausible given the arrangement of items he's already written, and that they are too lazy, too much of a hurry to start over and make their conflicting ideas cohere. This last stretch is an effusion without a destination, a string of odd combinations of qualifier and noun --"macabre tumor:, "surreal pain", "hallowed marble"-- that, as such, is meant to give a sense of closure through implication, reinforced with reportage of acts that rely more on the whispered hush of that suggestion than on something more concrete. What lens had cleared? What coffer was penetrated? Cole closed the door and forgot to turn off the lights behind him. "Dead Mother" reads more like a rehearsal of a response rather than a gathering of the conflicting emotions a parent's death unleashes on you. It was remarked that that his may be the reason for the seeming foliage Cole circles his subject with.I agree that Cole is attempting to inoculate this poem against criticism by making the language abstruse, as opposed to abstract.

Abstruse , for me, means clutter, vagueness, a grandly arranged set of unconventionally phrased ideas that have the sound of a hollow tin can once their noise is made. Abstract language, in contrast, leads back to a referents, and everything can be discerned in an intricate network of relationships; the associations, obvious and less obvious, emerge from a careful reading of how unexpected things become analogies for unstated irresolution , or as metaphors for a larger theme the specific topic is only a symbol of. Even in the tight reins of a sonnet, I suspect Cole sometimes lets his imagination get the better of him and leaves a personal association, a private pun , linger quizzically in a line on the pretext that a scholarly critic might catch it, inspect it, run a gamut of philological tests on the wording, and uncover a deep vein of insight and erudition that would make some latter day jaws hit the floor. It's laziness, I think. The poem seems not an account of viewing a dead mother and experiencing a traumatic reaction than it is the work of someone trying to perfect their reaction; this seems about grief as gristle for the literary art , and that I think is this poem's downfall. It's over-thought, and not thought through.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

D.G. WILLS BOOKS LITERARY EVENT VIDEOS NOW ON YOUTUBE



D.G.Wills Books in LaJolla, California is a long time mecca for book lovers who crave a shop with a varied and deep selection literature, poetry and philosophy sections .Owner Dennis Wills, whom I've known (in full disclosure) since he opened his shop in 1979, has besides keeping his doors open , presented San Diego with an impressive roster of world-class literary events over the last few decades. Lucky for the rest of us that some of the most notable personalities were taped for future reference and are now available on D.G. Wills Books' own YouTube Channel, thanks to the curatorial efforts of bookstore associate and media specialist Bill Perrine. More of these remarkable events are being added. Meanwhile, enjoy the plenitude of what Wills hath wrought:Norman Mailer ,Allen Ginsberg,Oliver Stone, Billy Collins, Gore Vidal, Lawerence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder. I recommend checking back with channel from time to see who else has been added to this amazing and important archive of literary figures.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Pound or Frost?

I'm not a fan of either poet, but of Pound intrigues especially me . His fabled difficulty seems more willful than inspired , more determined than originating from a flash of an idea that would spark a firestorm in how poetry is read. His theories, his proclamations as to the duty of the writer to lead the race to a higher standard of perception, were the writings that galvanized and polarized a generation or so of writers who followed or argued with his lead; his poems, though, were stuck in an abstruse inertia. This is distinct from abstract, a quality where there is an actual idea being deployed and which, in turn, can be parsed by a reader with due diligence. There is no argument with how important Pound is to the reformation of literature and advancing the Modernist aesthetic, but some one who was so obsessed, in theory, with reconfiguring language arts so that a new generation of readers can have fresh perceptions of reality and discover means with which to change it, Pound seemed seduced by the legend he was making for himself and delved headlong into his admixture of projects without a sense of how his materials and sources would come to make a generalized sense of themselves.

It seems obvious to me that he reveled in the difficulty of his work. His innovations as poet, for me, are worth studying in line with his critical pieces, but beyond their importance in establishing a time line, the language , the style, the attitude has not traveled well through the decades. He seemed like the brilliant critic and tireless promoter of new talent who put himself in competition with his fellows, IE Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, et al. Pound believed art was the process through which a substitute priesthood of painters and poets can perceive the world, and it was the artist who could correctly provide the inspiration and spiritual means to change the way reality was constructed and lived in. He was attracted to strong leaders with pronounced visions of a Better Future, was attracted to the notion of violently blowing up the artifacts of the past in order to forge a new order from the ground up, and it was apparent to everyone that he aligned himself with such leaders. He desired to be considered among the scarce select who would show the way to the new dawn, whether they wanted to or not. Pound was fascinated by chaos, turbulence, severe intrusions of alien forms usurping dictions and definitions of older ideological husks and having them be transformed to some strange array of notions that are a vision of a Future not all of us will be able to live in. Frost , although over- estimated, is an acceptable minor poet and a canny careerist, neither of which are offensive to anyone who understands the need to make a living. He was content to be a passive witness to the state of things built by hand running down, subsuming a cynicism in a lyric version of sparely detailed plain-talk that could, at times,produce a stunning insight into the feeling of how the body aches as it ages.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Sourpuss Virtuosity

This week, Robert Pinsky's monthly discussion poem in Slate is Ben Jonson's poem "Ode to Himself," wherein we are to consider the artful side of complaining. Kvetching, though, is a limited art, and one who thinks they might wish to make a career of being the nag-as-truth teller should think of the monotony of the guise promises. There comes a time when you can no longer notice any shortcomings you haven't already mentioned in previous columns, plays, novels, essays, poems even, and the things you come to critique fall into template mode.

 You notice this quality sneaking into your writing. I call it" hearing yourself talk."That means that you find saying things you've said many times with utmost conviction, but now have noticed that your verve and sureness of position are badly flagging of late. You can predict the following clause and condition in a review you're composing--and the understandable is to make your language more elaborate, that Bloomian anxiety that makes one try harder to make their ideas unique. The uniqueness that a reader will notice, though, particularly readers a generation or so removed from your aspiring lifetime, will be the structure, the style, the antiquated rhetorical and vocabulary of your complaints against the way things happened in your period. All else become a matter of explication, a humbling thought when one considers that our quest to obey the critical rule of writing--be straightforward--will not likely withstand a few decades of changing lexical usage. For the Jonson poem, we have a reverse Whitman here, a savaging self-appraisal that might provoke you to punch another man had these exact words been spoken by him. 

The problem, though, is that these words aren't told but written, and they rhyme. They clamor and clash and ring in harmony when the author's skill is so determined. They are an elaborate construction whose rhetorical infrastructure has traveled, to my ear, not well at all. The saying goes that no one can insult us to the diminishing degree that we're able to run the same number on our egos, as our own stories are the ones we needn't research; it's an intimacy with which one can elaborate upon at length, with examples of personal unworth becoming expressed in evermore clever disguises and unexpected twists in one's trail of self-criticism. What is left, through the decades, through the revolutions, assassinations, changes in convention and tastes, is a museum piece, a textbook example, an intricate, well preserved yet lifeless husk whose meaning has to be explicated, which is to say that it cannot be felt due to the brilliant configuration Jonson brought to bear on his attempt to lower his ego's profile.

 The poem is more evidence of the playwright's fabled assholism. It does much the same thing as the title character in Edmond Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac, when the hero, blessed with a big nose, responds to a weak insult to his beak with a series of sweetly stinging jabs of his own, at his own expense. This is a particularly effective little device of plain-spoken, self-directed invective that reveals a purposeful defense. If you're going to insult my nose, your barbs had better be this sharp... One might also consider that Rostand's story gets underway without a conceit-cluttered obstacle course slowing the traction and that the bittersweet ironies surrounding De Bergerac's temperamental genius--poet, wit, swordsman--doesn't get caged inside a fanciful virtuosity of the tongue. This is something akin to a grand statue one sees erected in town squares all over America and Europe, baroque creations that are admirable for their scale and technique, but whose existence is faintly ridiculous given that the passion of the inspiring event as ebbed from the collective memory. 

It's not just yesterday's Avant-Garde that ages poorly, but also proficiency that, in time, only outsmarts its topic. Jonson's ode is like those statues, grand, impressive against history's stacked bulwark, but tarnished, battered, dinged, and leaving you what audiences saw in work that was so busy trying to provide its own musical score as well as idea that could spark a debate among the readership (amongst themselves or with the author) that was beyond the vain convolutions.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Burroughs: yeah, thanks...




The alternative view of the holiday should be represented, and there's not a better voice for the embittered, the disenfranchised, the decrepit, the perverse, the sardonic, the brilliant, and the ecstatically marginalized than William Burroughs. While the rest of America, we assume, gives thanks for what they have in a world that demonstrably avails them nothing and is winnowing away any localized genius part to imagine and creatively act toward better, more interesting lives, Burroughs elevates sarcasm to the highest level, beyond nose bleeding to the peak wear strokes occur and tells us some grim truths in reversed salutations. It sticks in the craw, yes, but it ought to. To paraphrase Marx, in an instance where he happened to be right, the task isn't to thank God for the luck we've had, but rather to use the brains he gave us to use in order to change our luck. Happy Holiday. -tb


Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs

To John Dillinger and hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986"

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.


Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.


Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.


Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Bad vibe

This is one of those situations where a boss can find fault with your failure for providing "a good vibe" although you may be hitting all the marks for civility.

I was in a job where where a control-freak hotel manager refused to let do the job he was nominally training me to do--he took over tasks I started, reduced the number of things on my checklist--and took me aside to tell me that he didn't like the tone in my voice when I said "Please", "Thank you" or "you're welcome" to our hotel guests. That was exasperating , of course, but I just nodded, contained my impulse to scream, and assured this guy that I would try harder to have less tension. I hadn't a clue to what he was getting at, and nearly quit, thinking I wasn't paid enough to have a moron take a dump on me like that.

The next week , following a nightmarish Sunday morning checkout, the same manager asked me to step inside his office and to close the door behind me. I sat down while he sat on the edge of his desk, looking down at me, his glasses pushed like flight goggles around his forehead.

"Ted, I get the feeling that you're happy working here" he started, but I didn't let him proceed to what he wanted to discuss. He could save the speech for the next wage slave.

"I'm not" I said,"and you can take my name off the schedule right now. I don't work here anymore..."

I punched out and went home and eventually found work as a bookseller, a trade I never strayed from since the mid eighties. I still don't make that much money, but at least it has benefits that pleases the soul, if not the bank account or health plan.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Nabokov gets burned


There was a today about three years ago as to whether the estate of novelist Vladimir Nabokov should publish his last, unfinished novel posthumously. After a bit of hustle and heat in the literary press and blogosphere, the publication of that manuscript,The Original of Laura, has appeared between covers. It's a rare instance where I will skip a new book by a favorite author. From the description supplied by Amazon.com, I have no desire to see this esteemed master of English prose reduced to flash cards. I said three years ago that they should burn the manuscript and be done with it. I wish they had. I’m not a fan of posthumous for the simple reason that most of what surfaces after a famed scribe’s death suffer in the goriest possible terms. 

After the fact manuscripts by Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson and (most grotesquely) Ernest Hemingway are less than the respective geniuses. who commanded our attention in the first place. Their genius, that is, and the insistence of English teachers and professors of literature. Rough drafts, juvenilia, awkward early writings where one was working toward a mature style, and copious late-career self-parodies are all things I‘d have preferred to remain in the drawer, or in the box; it’s embarrassing to have a book in your hand who’s publication wasn’t approved by the author in which there’s writing that falls below the superlative standards the author set for himself or herself. 

Hemingway’s reputation as a stylist diminished in the view of critics of critics and readers with the surfeit of previously unpublished manuscripts. Mailer fanatic that I am, there’s no thirst on my part to read incomplete and unpolished prose from the late writer set between book covers; it seems immoral to let the less tidy writings be presented as “unpublished gems” , or “lost masterpieces”. It’s a dishonest cheat, a fraud laid upon the readership. Nabokov was painstaking in his craft, and it’s his judgment I trust if he deemed the manuscript unpublished. Burn it and allow us a genius unspoiled by erring scholars and eager publishers.

What gets me about what's been done with the unpublished work of dead writers is the way in which they're presented; one is nearly always promised that what we have in our hands is a "lost masterpiece" . In any case, the marketing promises writing on a level of these writers’s best work, but this seldom the case. There are exceptions, though, as with the publication of The First Man, the posthumous novel by the brilliant Albert Camus. Critical consensus is it's the equal of his best novels, and I agree. Honesty in these publications would ease by dis-easae with the matter, perhaps, if the emphasis discussed were more historical than aesthetic. The fact remains, though, that there are thousands who want to get a thrill equal to the jag they felt when they read Miller, Thompson, Hemingway, et al, the first time, and it remains a good bet that readers will disguise their disappointment with posthumous efforts with a further elaboration of the mythology--all the cant, clichés and truisms that clog up a cult writer's reputation--which will make this phenomenon a permanent vex.
  
My  friend Barry Alfonso brought up the pertinent example of Max Brod, who published Kafka's unpublished manuscripts against the author's explicit dying wishes.



It  be a challenge, but I suspect I would have done as Max Brod did and published Kafka's work. Brod claims to have told his dying friend that he would not carryout the last request of publishing the manuscripts. True or not, it is known that Brod had encouraged Kafka to publish during his lifetime, to little avail .Being an editor , publisher, author in his own right, he likely couldn't stand the thought of having what he thought as a major body of writing going up in smoke, unread. It was a matter of establishing a deserved reputation for greatness for a writer who wasn't able to judge his own validity; Nabokov had a major reputation and publications at the time of his death, and was, I think, using sound judgement when he requested the last manucript to be burned. It was a practice run, a series of notes, not a book. I think Nabokov was the best critic of his own work.


Friday, November 27, 2009

Poetry and lying

Some time I posted a poem I wrote concerning a blurry childhood memory of my Mom sobbing over a stove, the conceit being that I'd first give hints that this was going to be a melancholic memoir and then reveal, through a clever alignment of detail, that her tears were not from a spat with Dad. It was revealed by the last stanza that she' chopped raw onions for what the meal . Someone asked in a response how the memory was so clear, and I explained that the story was not wholly true; I manufactured the narrative thread I couldn't recall, and produce an entity that had a punchline, not a grievous irony. The response was fairly psychotic; I was called a liar and worse with my method revealed, and the inconsolable assailant couldn't get it through his (or her) head that not every poem is factual, therapeutic, journalistic. My response was defensive, of course, and typical of the accused bard.It's called imaginative literature, after all.Not a good reading habit for someone who says they love poetry. No, my friend, I didn't lie to the readers, I just told them a story.Poetry is imaginative writing, my brother, and there are those who err in reading this as an attempt at autobiography. The offended party didn't seem to accept any of this and cranked the vitriole higher, at which time I stopped talking to her (or him),You wonder what they missed in grade school when reading and writing was taught ; poets are liars by habit of mind when it comes to their craft; they make stuff up when they feel the need. Critic John Hollander has a useful essay on the matter,The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions. That should give us something to consider.This is a slippery slope, and what it underlines it your unwillingness to admit that poetry is the practice of writing in imaginative, figurative, fictional language. Writers employ metaphors, similes, and varied tropes at times to get to what one can call the "larger" truths,"greater", which is to say that writers, poets especially, try to get at matters a straight forward prose style can't get at. The hidden moral of the story, if you will.Part of this is creating scenarios that are not necessarily factual (autobiographical) or plausible in the conventional sense. Coleridge has a useful principle he calls the suspension of disbelief, which roughly means that a reader needs to leave their suppositions and stipulations at the door as they enter into reading a poem; you need to stop arguing that a poem is obliged to fulfill your personal requirements and instead read it as is, inspect what the writer does. Bandying about words like "lies" blocks us, meaning myself, from the sunshine of the spirit.An impatient man can't possibly get all that poets and their work have to offer. Exactly what they have to offer is debatable, but that's part of the pleasure of reading poetry,or writing it. It's better ,I think, to leave people wondering for themselves than to try to tell them the facts , Joe Friday style.

Thomas Lux, the Poet Laureate of Unintended Results


There are those poets whose mastery is so inspiring that one feels a need to cease writing verse themselves lest the master comes across a slovenly stanza one has written and commence to laugh deeply, richly at the grammatical incompetence. Paranoia, I know, but that's the feeling I get sometimes after reading the poems of Thomas Lux. The ease with which he's able to merge plain speaking with unaffected turns of phrase, dark irony with darker humor, hard realism with lyric sweeps which make me pause in my own work and consider the next line I'll write harder than I normally would. Great poets inspire that. Lux is one of my favorite poets--I can't think of anyone else who crafts a free verse poem with better care and intriguing twists of perception that he does., He is exactly the poet people should read when they want more from comprehensible poems than Billy Collins' unceasing tours of his neighborhood. Lux is the Laureate of Unintended Results. He will show you how matters invade expectation and undermine a grand view of how one's life is working through the weeks.

CUCUMBER FIELDS CROSSED BY HIGH-TENSION WIRES.

The high-tension spires spike the sky
beneath which boys bend
to pick from prickly vines
the deep-sopped fruit, the rind's green
a green sunk
in green. They part the plants' leaves,
reach into the nest,
and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.
The smaller yellow-geren children stay,
for now the fruit goes
in baskets by the side of the row,
every thirty feet or so. By these bushels
the boys get paid, in cash,
at day's end, this summer
of the last days of the empire
that will become known as
the past, adios, then,
the ragged-edged beautiful blink.


An agrarian scene, we assume at first, made dense and surreal with Lux's painterly descriptions, but there is something subtler, deadlier underneath. This poem for me addresses invading armies, albeit disguised in fruity metaphor. Overwhelming forces invade homes, destroy homelands, cart off citizens and vital resources, and then are gone when use is exhausted, in a blink that Lux fuses with Yeat's "terrible beauty". This poem has more to do with the metaphorical devices nations and electorates will use to distance themselves from the real damage their country inflicts for some greater, glorious good. Suffering is discounted, and the blood on one's fingertips is said to taste like honey. This is a provocative poem from Lux. He is so skilled in his language that it gets scary. Of all the poets with a realist bent, Lux I think is the one who is truly subversive of his own and, by extension, his reader's assumptions of the world. It is a neat and meaningful leap for him to go from a narrative that mimics, shall we say parodies Hemingway's hunting persona that reveals , at the end, a bizarre twist in Papa's Romanticism masculinity, equating the resemblance of the monkey's small hands with those of children, and fantasizing in the last instance that monkeys "can be taught to smile."You smile, indeed, you chuckle, you get the joke and wonder how on earth he came up with this unexpected yet fruitful turn, and then there is the additional, delayed realization that what Lux has offered up is a brief and cutting critique of hunter mystique. Rousseau himself would shiver at what comes up with. Lux is one of our best.

Refrigerator, 1957


More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.


Like Don DeLillo in his novels, Lux gives the history of a consumer culture's love affair with the objects they purchase and attach their happiness to, only to fall out of love when a wire is too frayed, a motor stops running, or a newer, sleeker design replete with more gadgets hits the showroom floor; so much history, family is contained within this refrigerator, memories that grow faint as children grow, parents die, people move to places out of town. A poignant picture this is, a deserted refrigerator on the back porch for years, something you pass daily, perhaps, knowing there are history and stories attached to its existence as a working machine, all of it unknown and unrecoverable like singular drops of rain into a stream."So You Put the Dog to Sleep" is one my incidental favorite poems of the last ten years. In it Lux categorizes within a routine, if excruciating ritual of middle-class life, the skewed habits of mind, suggesting here the weirdness John Cheever could get at with his tragi-comic stories about New York suburbs. He additionally subtly indicates how we handle the minor tragedies in our lives.

SO YOU PUT THE DOG TO SLEEP
Thomas Lux

"I have no dog, but must be
Somewhere there's one belongs to me."
--John Kendrick Bangs

You love your dog and carve his steaks
(marbled, tgender, aged) in the shape of hearts.
You let him on your lap at will

and call him by a lover's name:Liebschen,
pooch-o-mine, lamby, honey tart,
and you fill your voice with tenderness, woo.

He loves you too, that's his only job,
it's how he pays his room and board.
Behind his devotion, though, his dopey looks,

he might be a beast who wants your house,
your wife; who in fact loathes you, his lord.
His jaws snapping while you sleep means dreams

of eating your face: nose, lips, eyebrows, ears...
But soon your dog gets old, his legs
go bad, he's nearly blind, you puree his meat

and feed him with a spoon. It's hard to say
who hates whom more. He will not beg.
So you put the dog to sleep, Bad dog.
Cheever might be the best writer to compare Lux with, as the two of them have established the elegant yet clear-eyed tone of a narrator who can affectionately, intimately describe the conditions and contexts of the scenarios and yet remain seemingly detached , uncommitted, reserved if only to not break into laughter or tears as to the outcome. With "Dog" the situation begins with love, affection, an owner's dutiful care for his pet in exchange for the animal's unqualified love and loyalty. Later, as the dog grows older, his love and loyalty turns into dependence as he ages and becomes infirm, while the owner's affections sour into resentment. It constructs how thinking is geared to allow us to dodge guilt. As with farts, missing homework and soiled carpets, blame the dog for his own demise.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Los Angeles

Los Angeles


Stars glisten over the alley
after we pay the bill,
dim white glow on cracked brick
and every twine of a rainbow.


You say there’s nothing to cry about ever again,you say, I am dry as the gulch
that runs between my heart
and the trembling mouth
I might feed and die
the grievous wounds.

These hands stay
in my pocket,

this wallet is closed,
each old dollar sheds a tear.


I like blues guitar and
walks along the river, I respond,
but only at dusk so the broken windows gleam
like gold teeth under a jeweler’s lens,


static smoke stacks looming
over the oily wakes
freighters leave for
the shoreline rocks
is my idea of perfect harmony
and balance in the cosmos.
Little else feels
as fine as seeing
a planet behind exhausted
one fossil at a time.


In the car
radio voices argue
about stats and gun control,
the skyline recedes,

we’re on the freeway,
concrete corridors
as far as these keys
can take us.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Paul Blackburn and the Hard Gaze


The late poet Paul Blackburn reads at times like a writer who could watch himself in action; he seems enthralled by what is said and the consequences that follow .A good bit of his writing grasps the contradictions of seduction and lust on the male psyche more effectively than most contemporary authors can handle. He didn't, for one, thing , attempt to atone for his lack of basic virtue; the appeal for me is that he isolates the hang up, and arranges the tension as a witnessing of a rationalization that rings tinny, even false. He catches himself in his own lie. In an especially good discussion of his poem "The Once Over" in her book Break, Blow Burn, Camille Paglia , for once not parading her own arrogance, gives an excellent analysis on Blackburn's skill in precisely evoking the Summary Gaze that judges women (or men) as potential sexual partners as they pass by one's view; a predatory behavior that gives into lust, with a guilty pall hanging over the nearly as soon as it passes.
 
 Blackburn can turn these cruel bits of revelry into hard, sharp lyrics, the theme, perhaps, being a man who desires the right things to do and the decent person to be who , none the less, is driven at odd hours by a leering intent. It is painfully masculine and heterosexual and contradictory in confounding ways, but it is something beautifully, honestly expressed. Like Mailer's obsession with the experience and meaning of male experience, the result is literary art. I might find it unnerving at a moral level, but I suspect I'd be a less interesting had I not discovered Mailer or Blackburn.

Ambivalence is the word for this poem, really, and it's not dated at all, considering that men and women continue to be complicated creatures who continue test given scenarios of gender-interaction and continue, as often as not, to end up with problematic results. Blackburn traces his own thinking on this encounter, attempting to enter into the mind of the woman who is with him, trying to disguise his hubris under some thinly offered assurances of gallantry and caring physicality--the male seems to be offering up some sort of Lawerence/Mellors version of Reichian sex technique the would bring both of them into some heightened awareness and effect a profound change in both of them. Blackburn, though, is too good a poet to take the ideology at face value and recognizes the delusional aspect of addressing a dis-satisfying experience in wholesome, all inclusive terms; depression sets in ,inevitably, and one is left with little else but to self-loathe, rationalize and second guess motives. The real world is what we start with here, setting the scene Blackburn's poem
One Night Stand: An Approach to the Bridge gets even closer to the baser facts of someone who cannot relate to women without a poeticized rationalization to fuel his intentions.
Migod, a picture window,
both of us sitting there
on the too-narrow couch
variously unclothed
watching sky lighten over the city.

This is a quizzical stew of conflict that Blackburn's brooding male attempts to reconstruct the event, his motives, the second-guessed emotions of the unnamed woman. In the replay he minimizes her protests with assurances that the two of them would merge into one another and become one through the coupling. Fine, one would think, if one were in a tightly wound narrative where actions and larger consequences played out against a universe concretely, if discretely determined dramatic principles, but this is scene, for all the male's diffuse philosophizing, is composed of actions, not theories, and the awareness that one has entered into intimacy with improvised passion looms again. One is brought back to the world from which they started, depressed somewhat from the reveries. The world intrudes again, as it always will on the fantasies of otherwise sane people":
The coffee does not warm
there is an orange sun in the river
there are blue lights on the bridge
Animal tenderness and
sadness is all we salvage, is
all the picture window
mirrors and maintains.

This is a brave poem, an unblinking study of one's less-savory motivations and the mental convolutions one would employ to escape the guilt of behaving badly, perhaps criminally. Told sparely, concisely, with a wonderful grasp of how to join a finely honed image and a swift bit of lyric intellection , I enjoy the poem for it's honesty and lack of self pity. The detours Blackburn makes around the verbal equivocations one expects a poet to make use o is refreshing and a large part of why the poem packs the punch it does. There does exist  the wrong headed idea that stalling and expanse are the keys to ensure the impression the writer has sussed through his issues, topical and submerged, for a considered period and comes up, through naked honesty edified by craft, a poem of deep feeling. Poets with decades of favorable from critics who's praise influences the bequeathing of cash rewards do this more often than anyone , it seems, desires to be honest enough to admit. Blackburn here has a poem that casts you into a stammering response, a reaction actually, something akin, it seems, to being caught staring at an attractive too long and having to admit the conflicting tensions of lust and public courtesy. It's a hard jolt, a slap in the face, a pitcher of ice water poured over the head. It's a shock to the system that cannot be ignored , although, realistically, it can be rationalized away after the fact, minimized and justified with the reams of self-vindicating articulation the smartest and eloquent among us have practiced in the bleaker corners of our interior lives. One feels that Blackburn is telling secrets out of turn, revealing those things that is understand in the comfort of other males lusting after the objectified image  of a woman. He seems to be confessing why it is poets in particular read so beautifully on the issues of love, intimacy, great and abounding empathy for human suffering  and who themselves wind up being such emotionally neutral sorts in their waking lives and relationships. It is a brave poem indeed, one that reads as if it's goal is to destroy the disguise that being a poet provides the prowling author of superficially nuanced verse.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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.