A Valentine's Day Poem

Those Goddamned Roses

They are talking with all
the fingers on their hands,

he motions down, finger
to the ground,


circles a finger at his
left temple,

he seems to say that
there is something

crazy about where
both of them are standing.
The woman pulls back,
I pass as he glares  up the alley,

scanning creeping vines that
festoon high cyclone fences.

I don't like the look of that
he says, his head vanishing
in the corona of a cold sun
coming between buildings,

what are you looking at? she asks,


he grunts, he coughs, my light
turns green, he says

those goddamned roses
are the wrong color
for that kitchen window's brown trim.


I cross with the light,
I mind my own business.

Ozzy Osbourne

James Parker has a fine appreciation of Ozzy Osbourne in Slate, inspired by Osbourne's new book I Am Ozzy. Less a review of the memoir than contained think piece that contemplates the essence of Osbourne's former band, Black Sabbath, and Osbourne's peculiar form of haplass genius, Parker does a good job of revealing why this pioneer of fuzztoned dystopia is the enduring guilty pleasure he is. Regardless of what one has read about him with regards to communing with Satan and the dark side in general, Ozzy is likable. Very likable.I interviewed Ozzy for my college paper in the 70s, and he was actually one decent guy, a decent sort and all.

It was the week of the mass cult suicide of Jonestown, and as I and the photographer asked Osbourne the usual questions about life on the road, groupies, drugs and guitar strings, the television in Ozzy's hotel room was blaring an update on the unspeakable tragedy. Ozzy turned to look at the screen where a news film clip showed a jittery scan of the bodies lying over one another in the fatal compound.

"How can anybody do such a fucking awful thing" he said, "forcing little kids to drink cyanide. You know what that does to your insides? It eats at you, it's a terrible way to die, fucking sadists..." His gaze drifted off for a few seconds and then he returned to the interview when his manager knocked on the hotel door to remind him that there were other media folks waiting to talk to him. We spoke some more about rock and roll in general, and when the photographer and I rose to leave at the end of our interview, a "Star Trek" episode came on. I forget which episode it happened to be, but what was certain was that the special effects were cheap and cheesy even then.

"Oh, man, this is the greatest fucking show" said Ozzy as we left, and that's where we left him, at the extreme ends of things, Jonestown and "Star Trek". Fucking Awful or Fucking Great. And that's how he remains.

Stress: a prose poem, sort of

There's nothing to say at the moment about which trends in popular media or literature please me or offer me a prickly kiss, but I did come across an old sociology book, from the fifties, called "The Stress of Everyday Life" at D.G.Wills Books . It was less the subject matter that made me pick up the used book than it was the title's type style; blocky, bold,all capitalized, one word up upon the other like a tottering tower about to give way to lethal gravity. The Word "stress", as you see it here, was askew, cracking under strain , as if , well, under stress.Suitably, I grabbed it and virtually yelled "STRESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" to ride the rest of the a-ha! wave. I bought the book, scanned the cover, and cropped the single word you see above. It's become a seasonal mantra, a one-syllable password to a fellow human being likewise feeling pressed upon by the Holidays and news events that have no real bearing on their life.

Now, stress is the operative term in this tanking culture of theoretical money and jobs that low dividends to one's self esteem. On a head set, taking calls from all over the country, hundreds of people call hundreds of customer service representatives trying to order gift arrangements at the best price, both client and representative aware of the need to save money and show a seasonal kindness to wives, kids and sick friends, hourly negotiations between common courtesties, polite refusals of service, a plea for some more room to move around in as the final costs are calculated , a poetically phrased paragraph denying service uttered by a voice that shows empathy but gives no promise of compromise, and then a silence, deadly , chronic silence that makes one think they here locusts in the background, swarms of obnoxious things come to feed on the leaves and the books and the last dollars in your billfold.

Everyone, of course, says thank you and forget about it or, biting the leather strap, let's go for it, and either hangs up the phone or offers up a charge card. One wants to conserve, withdraw, pull the sheets and electric blankets over their head on the worst weather of the month, but one goes on, one does not want this to be the day they die , alone, without having said a personal thing to a loved one, touched another's arm, sat in living room with friends watching football or a DVD cursed with swear words and explosions. The sword is over our collective heads, we check the ads, file our applications, we talk in falsely warm voices in temporary spots of commerce, the days drag on when the buses are late and the nights are crowded with rain. In the background, under the babble of the feuding dualism of isolation vs venturing further from the nest, we here the eternal grind, the phrase that equals the electronic chirp of igniting circuits, the buzzing SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSttttttttttttttttttreeeeSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSssss

that remains the soundtrack of the century. An infernal machine that does not go off.

WHAT I THINK

Literature, by whatever definition we use, is the body of writing intended to deal with more complex storytelling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single, intangible supposition. Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. Literature happens to be those stories that are written that do something no more and no less crucial than helping us think about ourselves. The goal of literary criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeeds or fails in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written. One can find a respite from interpretation with a long vacation in the archive of post-structural hideaways from comprehension if one were a lazy academic belatedly coming to the discussion with more cant than enthusiasm.B ut laziness is a choice enforced by a trend, and trends fade, ultimately, leaving the task of real interpretative work still to be done.
 Poststructuralism denies the ability of any language used to address the world before us: bluntly, that is the sum of their position. I think language, and literature by extension, does have the capacity to say authoritative things about phenomena, hence my emphasis in the how and why this form of language, books, works in giving us representations of the experience of the world, psychological, spiritual, and material, that have a corresponding effect on a broad, generalized readership over time. This is not skittering into structuralism; this is seeking further comprehension of the human experience. This project originates with a bed-rock faith that language contains an absolute ability to make accurate statements about the world and life in it. There are many things that make language produce it's communicating effects, gestures, and nuances, none of it so supremely simple, none of it arbitrary. I tend to think that these things are innate, by the best arguments, and that the language attached to them is geared to cross-platform expression. The task in criticism is to comprehend how these matters work in their use, and from there devise a workable aesthetic that's meaningful beyond the current moment.

Gail Mazur: a tourist at the Canyons of Your Mind

This seems a plain old case of someone falling into the mind/body divide, that time in any competent poet's career where they consider the intractable vagueness of the world their senses reveal to them, a cosmology tempered and flavored with the nuance of personal history and association, and the world as it is. Gail Mazur , with her poem "Figures in a Landscape", wandered too close to that precipice and falls straight to the bottomless bottom, perhaps stupefied by what amounts to the poem's punchline; our perception of a scene being beautiful and arranged in pleasing "natural" alignments are a frame we impose on the raw phenomenon, a meaning we assign it from our collective troves of useful metaphors and purposes. The scenery, though, is unmindful of our presence, has no use for our notions of beauty, harmony, or the disguised meanings our desperate symbolism creates. Nature merely is, constant, churning, violent in its cycles of destruction and creation. We are only elements among other elements, subject to the same conditions of survival and extinction as are forests, oceans, diminishing species. My principle concern here isn't the subject matter, relentlessly pursued as it has been and continues to be, but with Mazur's admittedly fine tone and style. Graceful and as carefully selected as her phrases are, something does not ring true:

We were made things, deftly assembled

but beginning to show wear—

you, muscular, sculptural,

and I was I, we were different, we had a story.

On good days we found comedy in that,

pratfalls and also great sadness.

Sun moved across the sky and lowered

until you, then I, were in shadow, bereft.

She describes the experience of what she witnesses from a distance,as if standing on a sidewalk and describing a store's displays through the display window, with some creative and overly acute details and glaringly "literary" words to shore up what the limited visage can furnish. This thinking, of making this phenomenological befuddlement make sense in a short verse, comes through a few stops along the familiar template, first with a not unexpected epiphany ("we were made things, deftly assembled..") that sets us up for the finalizing grand slam, that the scenery is real and not dependent on our scenario's to make them mean anything.

If no one looks at us, do we or don't we disappear?

The landscape would survive without us.

When you're in it, it's not landscape

any more than the horizon's a line you can stand on.

All well and good, I guess, but Mazur has belabored the obvious point that we cannot set aside our framing devices and see the world in-and-of-itself; as creatures of a culture through which we are compelled to achieve things with the knowledge of our own death, we need structure, continuity, community and the attendant virtues of purpose,love, unity of being. We create meanings that make the hardships worth the struggle; in short, we create of meaning-giving fictions to alleviate the constant dread that there is nothing beyond the biological imperative to eat, procreate, and die. Mazur , grace notes and all, reads more like a product tester's report. A brave face, perhaps, but this poem is territory others have been in as poets, with more interesting , intriguing revelations.

Would that more people read John Ashbery and ceased with demands that he make sense; the beauty of Ashbery's method of engaging the mind/body division is that immerses himself in, allowing his mind to navigate, with frequent brilliance, in the harbors and along the shorelines of Wallace Steven's world of Supreme Fiction. There are those stretches when the good Mr.Ashbery does not connect with an interesting line or a maddened mix of idiomatic and learned allusion--he does seem like he's treading water too often--but I more attracted to his willingness to explore the structures of the tropes he imposes on phenomena and the contingent wonder at how far his words fail to get to a mythical center of things. There is no "there", of course, but for Ashbery, if not Mazur, it's the journey that energizes the poems.

Are Americans Afraid of Poetry?

Kim Rosen of the Huffington Post wondered in a 2010 post if Americans are afraid of poetry; some of the essays is a warmed over a collection of the usual symptoms, and some of it is intriguing, worth a gander. I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry; rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead, one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created. Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a timeline, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche. This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and shadings, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases. 

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that, like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature, in general, avails the reader: to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans, I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit.

Americans are not introspective people, a national habit that infects all of us; it seems, regardless of race, skin color, religious choice, cultural formation or any number of things. I might suggest prevailing conditions of isolation, anomie, alienation and a host of other diagnostic words that have lost their punch and are now mostly free of meaning, but what it comes down to, basically, is that it seems most of us in this stew, within these borders don't like to think any harder than it does to make a peanut butter sandwich; we want things given to us in images, sound bites, we want things "broken down" into simple parts and not actually explained. Our psychic well being depends on how the world affects our material status; that is the equation we prefer, with a massively huge collective case of denial that there is any need to plumb the depths of the soul, those elements of imagination, spiritual worth, of being willing to consider one's place in the universe and how they might better live in it. Poetry, when the desire for poetry arises, is not the "aha" experience, but for the blandishments of "there, there", the mother or the nurse stroking your hair, feeding you chocolate, assuring you things will balance out and that one's bad dream will soon be over. It's not surprising the poetry that is the most popular, while routinely competent as crafted compositions and generically clever with insights and surprises you sense coming as one does traffic lights are therapy rather than art. We like the illusion of being deep while continuing to view the universe we are in as no complex than a daily comic strip. This is a bad thing, absolutely horrible.

We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

AVERAGE WHITE HARMONICA PLAYER GETS HIS GROOVE BACK

J.D.SALINGER IS DEAD

Not many authors have one or two of their books become a voluntary right of passage among the moody and quixotic generations of teens and young adults, but J.D.Salinger was such a writer, the author of  Catcher in the Rye, the singular book about growing up while dissatisfied. Holden Caufield, the book's narrator protagonist , is a moody youth , prematurely cynical, impatient with the ways of adults and their habits and institutions . The book has been discussed, analysed , inspected and interpreted over the decades that one wonders whether it can still be read as a fresh experience, and I would say yes, yes. Caufield is cynical with a acute bullshit detector, but he is not wise beyond his years; Salinger's particular gift was for to inhabit the skin of a young man masking his confusion with a collection of fiercely protected mannerisms and borrowed attitudes. He was, though, coming to the moment when more was revealed and his life was transformed, and his perspective altered far beyond his tight little world made visible. Attitude, awkwardness, good humor laced with a handily sense of melancholy, it was the work of a master regarding the slogging progress toward an adult sensibility.

Michelangelo's complaint

My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

Michelangelo was a sculptor and a poet, and Robert Pinsky has posted a poem of his regarding the aches and pains he experienced as he undertook the challenge of painting the Sistine Chapel.The sonnet is less interesting as poetry than it is a document of how Michelangelo felt about his labor over the commission he didn't want, the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. No offense to Gail Mazur's translations, but the fleshy descriptions that inform us of what appendages and what internal organs ache likely read better in the Master's original Italian, the advantage of the original tongue being that one could better ear the innate musicality of the nouns and their near rhymes. This seems just a tad strained, and reads as though Mazur had to create phrases of her own when some word clusters couldn't be clearly conveyed into English. This raises the question as to how much of Michelangelo we were actually reading. Or perhaps I'm just tone deaf to the whole matter. What do believe, though, is that we are getting an accurate reading of the great artist's pains and frustrations; what is flat as poetry is fascinating as document. This is a another cranky, self-lampooning poem from a genius who finds that possessing over-sized talent can be a large cross to bear, being, in this case, a great physical pain. I did enjoy the way in which Michelangelo described the way his body has been twisted and reconfigured in the pursuit of filling up an unlikely surface ; the canvas, as it were, and the artist's body , were in the least likely of locations. The poem is the venting of a man who angry with the moral and social authority of the Pope who is preventing him from working in what he feels is his true medium, sculpture; painting is a curse that visits a stream of punishments upon. It's as if an interloper is being punished :

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.

There's not the remotest suggestion of joy in this passage. Rather than being in the moment with the object he's fashioning, gather inspiration as he goes along and reaching a point where mere technical mastery comes to the service of actual genius, what is described here is someone trying to remember formalities of something he wasn't comfortable doing, guessing around the edges of the tableau as to where colors and their textures out to go. He is "blind and aimless" , unable to see the work in whole, unable to envision it as finished, save for scaled down drawings outlining the work in progress. Interestingly, this isn't the voice of the supremely confident artist we read about, but rather the self-denigrating venting of a trainee in a new job. The feeling of doing this job wrong comes across as a palpable fatalism.The poem that surpasses mere complaint, it reveals the acute pain that accompanies the unwanted commission. But for all the discomfort and twisting and bending and otherwise unnatural distensions and compressions his body must absorb during the work, a clenched teeth determination comes across; as much as I feel pain and degradation, as great as this ceiling will be. We've come to admire the spectacle of the ceiling, the detail, the ingenious solutions to problems that arose, but for the artist it seems merely something to be endured, gotten over with. The ceiling appeared masterful as if composed from a resentment; Michelangelo sounds as if he regards this as mere professionalism.


My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.The sculptor feels abused, made to perform an unnatural function for a client whom he couldn't refuse. His body and his art were prostituted in the service of another man's egomania, and so he calls for his honor to be defended. He is not a painter, he assures us, and the irony of it all is that it is the painting on the Sistine Chapel for which he best known. Likely he would've loathed the recognition and seethe mightily that the masses who adore the painting are fools and simpletons.He was not a painter. Frank O'Hara wasn't a painter either. But he was an excellent poet.

***

A discussion at Slate's Poems Fray forum, where this post originally appeared.

The Faith of Graffiti: a brief exchange

I've been re-reading Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti" , and it seems astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized , nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulse to transform the environment by adding a bit of one's personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso's vision. Nice polemic, this. What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.

BARRY ALFONSO:Some would argue, of course, that graffiti IS a form of violence against society: specifically, the aggressive territorial pissing of one segment of the population upon the sense of order of another segment. This is less an act of sticking it to The Man than dominating the sensibilities of the meeker, more sedate urban population, a transgressive act akin to screaming into the face of someone who will not (or cannot) raise their voice. It’s hard to see this as heroic, and I suspect that the artistic component – especially when we are talking about that lovely habit called “tagging” – is of less importance here than the sheer thrill of breaking the rules. I think even Mailer would agree that the upholding of SOME kind of rules is the only way to improve American society, particularly in the face of the corporate lawbreaking and governmental malfeasance he so often condemned. It may not be Mailer’s job to iron out the contradiction in this thought. But suppose a team of grafittitistas broke into his home and spray painted their art all over his face? This might prove instructive to his family and friends to see. It might even be a blow against some sort of oppression. But I don’t think Norman would’ve liked it very much.

Mailer would argue that modern architecture and the corporate power it represent is violence againsts them and their right to exist, and that graffiti is an aesthetic response to an economic reality that wants nothing to with individuals or their dreams or their latent talents. It creates an intimate relationship with the surroundings that other wise seem designed to urge one to end their lives anonymously. Mailer, though, was talking about a particular quality of prolific taggers , "writers" as they called themselves, and rather rightly discussed them that they were artists no less than the gallery variety. Without patrons, easels, formal training, their walls of the city became their canvas--in those canyons, in those tunnels, on those billboards, all things that hover over them and diminish them in stature, there is an opportunity to declare "I Exist".
-----------------

(Barry Alfonso, writer, critic, and storyteller and long time friend, weighs in):

BARRY ALFONSO:If this was indeed Mailer’s position, then it is the sort of elitist pseudo-primitivism that win followers for George Wallace, Glenn Beck and other champions of populist fascism. To say it plain, ordinary working folks think that scribbling your name all over the city they have to live and work in is just a form of childish eye pollution committed by bums who have nothing better to do. Apparently, Mailer would have us think that the proper way to protest urban ugliness is to make things MORE ugly, which is akin to making satirizing executions by chopping people’s heads off. (Any allusions made to Picasso is a red herring, with two eyes on the same side of the fish head.) It further appears that for all his later maturity of outlook Mailer never dropped his sweaty-palmed worship of anarchy that he glorified in “The White Negro.” Mailer the Liberal would cringe at the thought, but the tagger is just an Ayn Rand hero with a spray can and without the discipline, a rampant ego who celebrates nothing more his need to be noticed. Such activities give birth to firing squads.

The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both "White Negro" and "The Faith of Graffiti" is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues , essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same , whether it happens to be in European salons, SoHo Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklyn water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in it's dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amiri Baraka, Cornell West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer's treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations, has been codified as an aesthetic with it's own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously , on his own terms , about this. One can argue with Mailer's tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-primitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal, that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be "The Faith of Graffiti".

Terry Gilliam Gets it Right

I liked the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, although Terry Gilliam is far from my favorite director; for all his general flash and opulent imagery, he cannot tell a story, really, and he likes to crowd the frame. His movies tend be like a shut-in's apartment, cluttered with piles of undifferentiated stuff.Many appreciate his willingness to toss in everybit of historical aracana into his heaping constructions of detail, but this the very thing that stops me, nearly every moment , from appreciating the absurdity he purports to advance. Sticking through the impressive messes that are Brazil or Baron Van Munchhausen aren't without their rewards, but Gilliam's desire to fill each inch of his frames with his patisches is ,to use the former analogy, like making a nervous path through so much precariously balanced deitritus in order to get to the kitchen, or the bathroom. Simply stated, you get impatient for the payoff, if not the point. Heath Ledger's death, though, had an upside side, since it seemed to force Gilliam to stream line his storyline and create a structure justifying the additions of Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Collin Farrell to replace the sadly departed Ledger. Without giving too much away, it works more often than not. And, as usual, there is plenty of cool imagery to wrap your senses in.

I equate clutter with flash, and it's the case that Gilliam really does not allow us much time in his films to allow his designs to register or resonate. It's the kind of flash one means when they discuss carnival game decoration--lots of cheap prizes dressing up a joint (I am an ex-carnie, after all) meant to attract attention, not intelligence. I... See More often wished there was less ebullience and more discretion in his designs; his best visual ideas goto waste. In "Imaginarium", they do not, as the tragedy with Ledger forced Gilliam to limit his range and so lend his story a logic that made sense in the terms of the fantasy he was operating within; he paid attention to his idea and didn't overshoot it.