THE NEW POEM 3: garden varieties

take eyes from the rise of roof lines
jagged with antennas.
guttered with tennis balls
lobbed and lodged in
gravitated paths that
feed the garden, the weeds,
the casual twig on the asphalt
cracked and crooked,

lift hands to top shelves
where medicines and poisons
mix their warnings,
lower head to tiles
that greet any saddened visage
witnessing the dust
and razor blades
that circle the cistern,

perch an ear to the window
as the blowers clear the debris
with gusts of gasoline combustion,
there is talk of
needed things, precious moments lost in awful hobbies,

yes, one remarks, I was online until work came along
and I was still in pajamas
without lunch money,

no, says the other, such a thing never happened
because you still have your tools,
that torch that sears through the pipe,
what you need is a shave and to dig in
like a weed as all these matters form coalitions,


run a comb through the hustle of hair
a hirsute God left one with,
study the ravines the face achieves,
button the shirt,
smell a rat in the works
when a signature impends a happy ending,

listen to theroom,
wood matches striking,
clean plates being stacked,
drying in the March air .

.

The New Poem 2: Dualism

We go equally under twin ladders


rung with gears and tinsel repose,

one of our days

has waned

after the river exhausts the last

of the gold dust

a scent of scribe discerns,



Buckle up your jacket

or care , oh! whack a molester migraine

riven with funnels

that could drain a swamp on the Devil's half acre,

because yes, you could squeeze into those

pants if I squinted long and Asian like,

but that would leave me blind

and searching for code

that would unzip

the back of the dress

every womanly guitarist

desires to wear,



My desire is

seat behind

the steel beam

in the nose bleed seats,

sending you messages

with an Etch a Sketch,

a maze of straight lines

and no joke

to finish the phone call with.

The New Poem: Hat Rant

My hat fits like a glove
strange as that remains
even as the bus passes my door
fireworks in my pants
requested like premium saltines
crispy like insurgent solo takes
on chords we chortle together
carousing to the chorus
crowded with sheets stained
with a rain of notes that stick
to the music whispered hence
and since when do we grab all the free matches
from the sugar bowel
thirteen years after our last smoke?
Rope shadows give me Attica pause
in narrow passage suitless
in the hallway , expecting a sock in the drawer
or a Navy Blue wrist watch timeless as a temperature
scorching the browned grass
for the days left before
an exit appears in the gambling hall,
it's time for rewrite, a retrofit,
a glove that fits like a hat
on the coldest region of famiiar flesh,
I know what I said last year
while wearing shirt sleeves in January shelters,
I am cold NOW
and my feet ache like the dogs the are.

Thomas Lux passes it on

I once told Thomas Lux that I considered him "the Poet Laureate of Unintended Results", a description he rather liked. He took it for the compliment I intended it to be because ,I think,he understand that the "unintended results" that make up the material of his work allows him a way to achieve any number of effects--comedic, dark, tragic, bizarrely funny or horrifyingly sad, his is a body of work that investigates the latter day consequences of hubris.

What I mean, of course, is that what Lux specializes in is the detailing of plain facts and events of matters we can recognize, with a protagonist's attitude conspicuous and anticipating a set of desired results as their agenda is set out, only to find himself (or herself) confounded and contradicted by interventions that changes the meaning of everything. The beauty of his style isn't that he starts with an abstract, clouded inference toward an infernal contradiction, then working his way to a clarity from which one might suppose the characters should have started. He reverses it and starts off simply, clearly, adding layers of incidental detail, skipping over days, years, through significant events and celebrations and attending tragedies, bringing the reader (and his character) to a situation where nothing is like what they thought it would be.

It's a beautiful technique he's developed; he may be one of a handful of poets who understand irony as an effect achieved through a carefully moving around of narrative elements that come into conflict.

A LITTLE TOOTH by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

Beautiful. The image is on the tooth, the joy of watching a young child being able to eat solid food. The next you know she's eating meat from the bone and learns the language to make her mischief , and before it's all over, late at night, you realize you're old and tired and you wonder what happened when you were young and at what moment did your baby start developing the skills to have a young, vital life you can hardly keep up with. I love the last line, the second half, when what was a simple memory that lead through a fast-forward to the current moment: "...It's dusk. Your daughter's tall." The shock of recognition, you could say. You wonder where your youth went and then see it in front of you, on your child's face and in her arms and legs, full of the energy you gave her. The implication is clear; we don't lose our youth, if we're lucky. We just pass it on.

The open ended quality is the beauty of the poem. It does imply that it will be the formerly teething daughter's turn to do all those things now that she is taller, full grown, almost an adult. But I also like that it's suggested and not spelled out. The resonance of the last sentence "Your daughter's tall" comes at us as revelation, the startled response to a bright light coming on in a dark room. It's a sentence that ends the poem and yet demonstrates how this small moment is profound in that it summarizes a life that has been and forecasts a life that is yet to be lived at length.

The poem continues off the page, something like a conversation you've been listening to as you walk the street and then the people you've been following turn the corner or enter a building, cutting off the discussion in mid sentence. One can only imagination the possibilities that might yet emerge from a host of plausible guesses, and this inconclusive quality is what makes this a fine poem.

Music notes

I remember reading in Rolling Stone in the early seventies of a drum battle between the late Elvin Jones and former Cream percussionist Ginger Baker. Baker, then touring and hyping his rather lead-footed big band Airforce, had taken to baiting Jones, the usual young gun sass about his elder being over the hill, slowing down. Long story short, and hazy on the details on my part, there was a concert with the two of them in New York, culminating in a drum battle between Jones and Baker. Baker had his post-Cream hardware, double bass, double toms, double snares, double everything, and Jones had his regular kit, simple and to the point. After some standard trade offs, you guessed it, Jones proceeded into rhythmic areas Baker couldn't follow him into: Baker received, to borrow from Howard Cosell describing a fighter just out-gloved by Ali, a drumming lesson. What Jones did on the drums was apparently beyond Bakers' nail hammering sensibility. It was one of those write ups that made me wish I was there.

____________________
"JC On The Set" by the James Carter Quartet, a stylistically wandering CD  but frequently fused effort from the saxophonist's. Nice reading of 'Sophisticated Lady'--Carter's phrases are sure and undulate with a blues cadence even as he extends his lines over a sublime melody. In other areas, he sounds tad brackish and barking-- blorts and grunts at times when he really didn't need them, as if to establish some kind of credibility that admirable technique alone cannot . He sometimes grates. Still, his work here is compelling for the most part,and Craig Taborns' piano work is a handy and deliciously quick-witted foil for Carter: elegantly, giddily fast up tempo, meditative and yearing as he scrolls over the ballads. Funky but chic.
_____________________________

THE COMPLETE 1961 VILLAGE VANGUARD RECORDINGS, Disc One--John Coltrane

Coltrane--tenor sax

Eric Dolphy--alto sax, bass clarinet

Ahmed Abdul-Malik--oud

McCoy Tyner--piano

Jimmy Garrison--bass

Reggie Workman--bass

Elvin Jones--drums.

From the four cd set, the first disc alone is mightily impressive for sheer stamina , and many sections of sublime improvisation. Jones rattles the traps in brisk rhythms, while Coltrane sets fires through out the side. There times when 'Trane gives in to his worse impulses--but these are brief enough, as Dolphys' alto playing, and his work with the bass clarinet is enough to make me almost believe that there is a heaven. What had seemed alien to mainstream, bop-preferring audiences as radical and un-jazz like at the time is now a given in the repertoire of younger improvisers, and there is not a musician today who can match  John Coltrane for the furious ingenuity that came from his soul by way of his instrument. Modal and operating on a rhythmic principle that  makes me think of W.C.Williams alluring yet elusive notion of the 'variable foot" of rhythm--cadences and stresses are constantly changing into nearly perfect accents based on the vocalizations of a words arranged in spontaneous combination that convey meaning and purpose in sound as well as strict definitions--Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman construct an ever evolving foundation , a brooding firmament on which 'Trane, Tyner  and Dolphy overlay a delicious and difficult weave of odd moods and desperate beauty. This is the kind of music that makes me think sometimes that I was born twenty years too late.

Poetry and the mirror

Seems that Slate proper is catching on to something I've been complaining about on these threads for the last ten years or so, poetry about poetry. It is, however, not a situation isolated to The New Yorker, as it is a habit of mind that filters through the versifying consciousness regardless of politics, preference, or where the poet thinks they are in the relative standards of quality. Save for the few instances where the habit results in a brilliant gem of cadenced self-reflection, it is the worst sort of naval gazing, to employ a cliché. To employ a fresher simile, it's the drone of a specialist of who cannot talk about anything else. Poets are supposed to have mastered their craft and then enter the world. Too many of the writers that find sanctuary in the journals have reversed the process. I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing- down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic. The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of its own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflectivity tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most beautifully oblique poet America has produced, can be said to have written poems about poems, but I think that misses the point. Our latter day mainstream reflexivists are enamored of the their own broad readings and wind up standing outside of poetry thinking they have a better idea to what a poem should be. The concern isn’t the poem, but the abstraction, an inversion that has the erudition outsmarting the inspiration. Stevens was smart enough to familiarize himself with the philosophical propositions regarding the problems associated with the world we see and the world as-is; his genius was that he created a metaphorical systems that could deal with poetics-as-subject and still give us something beautiful and wholly musical. I am beginning to suspect that the problem might not be that poets are writing too many poems about poetry--the tradition for the bard to reflect on his craft and his relevance is very long established in world literary history--but that of the tendency of editors to select or solicit these sorts of works. If one looks further into the works of the New Yorker poets cited in the story, one would notice that they respectively manage to engage life outside their craft ; the body of work is not always as suffocatingly one-idea as it may seem here. Editors, I am tending to think, need to be more open ended as to the subject matter they consider suitable for the magazines or journals they write for.

NOTHING FOR BREAKFAST--a poem

She picks up her brush

to place it where

stars would awake

amid the downstairs clatter

of spoons dredging the bottoms

of cereal bowls,

Though still asleep

in allegiance to grace under clouds

swimming over the bedposts bearing

a rain of brass bands and animal farms,

she rises from her covers

and goes to the windows,

wonders what it is the birds sing about

when there's no family

left in the nest and a cold sun

blows their feathers in the opposing direction.

Her father shaves with the door open

and he's only a half Santa Clause today

as she walks down the hall,

her brother has both his shoes untied

and he's taking a hammer to his favorite plastic airplane.

Mother sits at the kitchen table

holding a cigarette in her left hand,

raised as if though holding a tray full of drinks

 the other  hand flat and

smoothing  a newspaper page 

and she frowns at a photograph

of  men in overcoats and wide brim hats

saluting missiles and soldiers

who've all found the same dance step.

She says she wants pancakes

but her mother says

there is no flour anywhere

except in the garden

and no pans except the ones that

movie cameras make from

the top of every hill overlooking

a Grecian city next

to an impossibly blue bay.

Her mother laughs ,  an ash falls.

The room is full  of smoky circles.

She helps herself

to the corn flakes

and the milk carton,

wonders why the coffee smells

like  strange,  bitter medicine.

Rae Armantrout wins National Book Critics Award for Poetry

(A hearty congratulations to Rae Armantrout, winner of the National Book Critics Award for poetry  for her collection Versed .She has been writing  superbly succinct poetry and elegantly pared lyrics for decades, and it is with some satisfaction that a poet who enthralled during my years at the University of California San Diego has achieved a well earned notoriety.This is a re-publication of a review I did of  an older book of hers, Next Life .'Tis time to sing the praise of Rae.)

NEXT LIFE

poems by Rae Armantrout
(Wesleyan)

Rae,Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively.A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an on going inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title,what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence;

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.


“Happen” and “now”
have been smuggled out,

to arrive safely in the past tense.



We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.

--"Reversible"

Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion.

1.

"That's a nice red" you said,

but now the world was different

so that I agreed

with a puzzled

or sentimental certainty

as if clairvoyance

could be extended to the past.

And why not?

With a model sailing ship

in the window

of a small, neat house

and with a statuette

of a s table boy

on the porch,

holding a lamp up

someone was making something clear--

perhaps that motion is a real character.

2.

How should we feel

about "the eraser"?

"Rampages" wears one expression

while "frantically" wears another:

conjoined twins,

miraculously separated

on Judgement Day?

Then "only nothingness"

is a bit vague.

But words are more precise than sight--

increasingly!

3.

The very old man shuffles very slowly

not between

the white lines of a crosswalk

but down one of them.

Like a figure in a dream,

his relations to meaning

is ominous.--

--"Agreement"

These are voices of of a consciousness that surveys several things at once;time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, hard. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the the things one considers late night, when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit?This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that small and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our own dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare , ruminative volume by a singular writer.

Break Out Video

Quentin Tarantino loves exploitation movies, shown through out his body of work, an affection that's especially visible in his effort Death Proof. That homage to grind house movies was QT running on fumes, though--does anyone else suspect that the longish chat between the characters echoed too many familiar cadences from other movies the man has directed? He hasn't made enough movies as an auteur to be already plagiarizing himself. On the subject of exploitation archtypes, this video from Lady Gaga and Beyonce beat Tarantino at his own game, and has the added advantage of being short.







What saves this video for me is the sheer brio of the set; while you do feel that you've seen this trash-can pastiche before, Gaga and Beyonce take possession of what they've picked up and own it outright. The video is an expression of their combined sensibilities, not an exhibit of artifacts tenuously on loan. Years ago there was a video of Bowie Moreand Jagger dueting on "Dancing In the Streets",and what ought to have been a Cultural Moment was instead a graceless stomping of a perfectly fine Motown song. So more power to LG and B!

The deer hunter

Robert Wrigley ventures into Hemingway country with his poem Wait, an intriguing mediation that makes me think of one of many faux Zen vanities where one tries to observes themselves in the world, in this case, observing yourself wait for the perfect micro-instance through the elapsing moments and seconds when you sense that perfect alignment to squeeze the trigger and take down the deer. Wright goes for the glass-like clarity of that moment, the intangible perfection within a moment that is about to fade , and remains, within his descriptions of the forest, the deer, the consequences to come and the consequences that result, hard in his images. A smart decision--it's a temptation to lard this kind of subject of with didactic screeds that only obfuscate with cracker barrel philosophy where clarity is crucial for success. It makes me think of the severely pared down vision of Michael in Michael Cimino's film The Deer Hunter, where a terse discussion of being ready for The Shot comes down to a verbless distillation. Michael, prompting an unsure Nicki about his fitness to make the kill, tells this:  " You have to think about one shot. One shot is what it's all about. A deer's gotta be taken with one shot".

Hemingway, Mailer, Faulkner, Cimino, and now Wrigley, it's a paradox that a particular facet of the male personality  finds, in  stories from the these writers,  it's unity with something greater than itself in the ritualized effort to kill a living creature. The hunt becomes a spiritual practice of a sort, where concentration, seemingly conflated here to equal an intense meditative discipline, brings one from the noise, clutter and vanities of the world of ego and brings them in an uncluttered relationship with the thing they are observing. The senses are alive and the mind becomes rich with the details and minute stirrings in this niche, this particularized bracket of time. Everything is noticed and inventoried, the relationships of things,natural and man made, are revealed and in the sensational rush of waiting, breathing steadily, intensely aware of one's posture and purpose in this scene, you feel directed, a part of the chain of nature , acutely aware of one's fatal but unavoidable purpose and aware, as well, of consequences, results, the continuation of a natural order beyond the killing of the deer.