Poem for conversations that die on the vine

Conversations that go dead, that figuratively "go up on the rocks" , are those moments in life that one has to consider the bright side of the current situation, wherever it may be: at least this isn't world war three, at least this isn't a deadly car wreck, at least I haven't had a meteor smash my city to bits. These are small consolations, though,while you're in the moment trying to make your starter phrases and topic offerings a means by which to make the time go by quickly and amiably. But there are those who will not be chatted up, as they enjoy their own company too much, and there are those who perhaps rather enjoy the spectacle of seeing you wrestle with your words. It's a maddening condition, these stalled bits; a video tape of any such protracted exercises in fruitless similarity-finding could be transcribed and staged as Beckett comedies ; long silences, words that refuse to stick to any object they are intended to address and define, blank stares into far off spaces. The greatest distances are sometimes just across the table.

Fitting that Kim Van Voorhees's "Sea Level" poem, an inspection of a such a comedy of failed reciprocity. The table is an unnavigable void where words seem nothing more than casual bits of sodden detritus that drift onto a stony beach with the foam and seaweed, a washed out version of it's original intent. It has the depressing clarity of someone looking at a situation they've spent precious energy on trying to make it a fulfilling experience only to realize that there is only a deadened air for all the effort. Stillness resonates with absurdity after a frantic attempt to make something catch fire.

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us

all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat

the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

There is that sense that the dry spot in the back of the throat is the point where one realizes that whatever else one will say is already hollowed of meaning; the absence of response, the failure of an nearby other to allow itself to be changed, in perception, from an abstraction to be solved and a more human presence with a personality one can negotiate a good time with, has rendered the power of one's vocabulary to a series of sounds one might other wise make in their sleep during a bad dream.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge

of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops

passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is

just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap

back into itself.

The other, the dinner guest sitting across the table, is aware of the power she has in this moment, limited as it is--the conversation can either brighten and instill in her companion a sense of worth, that one's choices haven't been foolish or self deluding during this day, or she can with hold response, keep her participation to a minimum, give barely perceptible clues that she is done with the ritual and that both the dinner and the host no longer engage their interest.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—

you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.

Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish

and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance

under any kind of light.

What Van Voorhees does with this awkward instance is her use of telling details, concrete things where her metaphors actually convey an experience where the failure of words are exactly the issue at hand. The metaphors themselves are concrete , and their aptness isn't freighted with the typical twin indulgences, autobiography and literary self-reference. Where another poet challenged with a subject that defies an agile writer's skill to essentialize and so dwell on the inadequacies of the literary form or inspect the fragments of otherwise flushed child hood traumas, Van Voorhees sticks with her idea and works through her conceit; the result is a bright , if discouraging, set of alignments of things that do not speak, still materials that give no hint of what the character's words fail to get to, and the characters  themselves, who ought to have remained silent all along.

What's revealed is that this is a conversation that has gone on too long , without a shred of engaging subject matter, a battle to see who can keep the chatter above and bouncing with the animated insistence of ridiculously assertive absolutes; trivial ideas, cast out fleetingly as two people try to distract themselves from their shared awkwardness , are over emphasized, assume great volume, and while the conversation for a while rises and crests with a excited pitch, it is followed with agitation; even as the small talk escalates, it is like a balloon being inflated with too much air; it either bursts or it deflates rapidly. Likewise, both of these dinner mates would quit the game and fall back into the awkwardness they tried to avoid, painfully aware of their lack of similarities. There is only the table, the metaphorical ocean between them, that remains

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The center holds ,and it's crushing us

Poet Mary Jo Bang has the unique ability to write a polemical poem that is both a superb example of straight talk-there is no mistaking her fevered sentiment for anything else--and an elegant sample of exquisitely placed simile and metaphor The power of "After the Fact" comes from the first lines, a narrator setting up the world he/she lives like it were subject to templates from which only tragic outcomes can result. The sin of this all, the source of the outrage, are the actors in the self-limiting melodramas--buffoons peacocks, egomaniacs, narcissists with trigger fingers mistaking the contrived circumstances of their cause for the way things required to go.

Sleep tight, you martyrs.

And you criminals who killed for a narrow share

of power and a few rotten spoils.

Enough is enough.

This is very tough stuff , an indictment with a sting, an x ray to the heart of the matters; while those who wage wars justify their aggression in the many slippery rationalizations that seek "justice" through a rhetorical back door , the results of their righteousness, their efforts to set the world right, only make the tragedies worse. The calamity multiply, the genocides continue, the planet darkens even more and becomes unlivable-the only thing that seems to renew itself is the rhetoric that proclaims a vision of aggressive human perfection, a heaven here on earth, while the heart grow harder, colder. The fatal schemes, the complete waste of what's best in this existence, contracts not just the heart, but makes the universe appear to shrink to a burned out cinder.

The corners converge, causing the globe to grow smaller

than all of time times space divided

by every petty difference.

The center would not hold for Yeats; it contracts for Mary Jo Bang, become a flaming ball of contentious bad faith . It's a simple morality tale, a simple but profound choice that each of us needs to make, to make decisions exclusively on the basis of self seeking, or to help others, create community, cooperation. Bang's poem/polemic provides the profound example of selfishness when it's codified with a language that adopts some of the leaner rhetoric of justice, peace and harmony and uses the terms to rationalize an institutionalized State of War. It is the tragedy of trying to make the mystery of life comprehensible by means of fear-- investigating the life and ways of a Villainized Other is to trade with the Devil.

The girl newly dead on the sidewalk says,

"Excuse me, but—

what kind of moral force is brute moral force?"

The poem can be said to lack subtlety, but a muted message in this instance could be so finely wrought that even an informed reader would miss the point in search for clues among the ambiguities. This has the brilliant, placard bearing power of Ferlinghetti's political poems, particularly "I Am Waiting"; it is a succession of one lines and witticisms that crystallize the crisis and makes it memorable. This is a poem meant to get you thinking about something other than whether it works as a poem. It does just that.

I don't think Bang's poems encourages passive martyrdom of any kind, if I understand your question correctly. It has more the feel of a scaled-back soliloquy delivered in the last act of a Greek Tragedy, the summation presented while the evidence is plainly visible, undeniable, to anyone who might have been involved in debating war and power-grabbing in the abstract. The poem operates under the assumption that the evil doers--politicians, generals, corporations--are shamed to silence while the damnable curses is cast, but beyond this minor suspension of disbelief --politicians, generals and corporations won't reform themselves and seek justice rather than justice as the result of a good scold--we realize the poem isn't intended for the perpetrators of misery, but the citizens who've been seduced by a well-oiled propaganda.

We are governed solely by our consent, and the further implication is that the governed population's failure to hold their representatives to higher , more consequential standard is just as responsible for the grim tales told here. Our songs, our campaign slogans, our policy discussions are geared to assure us that the greatest good is the intent ,and that it surely will be the result. Mary Jo Bang's speech--and that is what this is, finally, a speech--shows the reader that there are leaders elected in our name who are singing of their esteemed virtues while everyone else can see the devastation they leave in their wake.

A fine CD from Larry Coryell

It's been instructive to revisit jazz guitarist Larry Coryell after a decade or in other neighborhoods. A pioneer of jazz-fusion, this musician is, at his  best, wildly inventive, cranky, blistering and rapid fire, someone akin to Jeff Beck in ways of attacking an improvisation from unexpected angles of attack. Like Beck as well, his body of work is erratic, and one wonders if Coryell might have become stuck on the fence sometime in mid-career, performing an unsatisfying amalgam of mainstream bop standards, pop-jazz and thud worthy, unmotivated funk and rock blends. Fortunately, age and good sense has toughened the guitarist's technique; his album Tricycles and the more recent Earthquake at the Avalon, are both superlative examples of this man's ability to display a pristine delicacy on ballads, fleet-fingered flurries on the accelerated compositions, and a hard-nosed edge on the blues. Of the two albums, Tricycles gets the higher marks, as Coryell has a sweetly trio in bassist Mark Egan and drummer Paul Wertico bring off a varied set of styles with the ease of a unit that knows the strengths and nuances of each other's respective approaches. Coryell's guitar fairly bristles and sparkles through his rich chord voicings and pristine essays, with Egan and Wertico upping the rhythmic ante and lowering it again as the major and minor turns of the songs change the mood. There is a richness in the performance that suggests a larger group. Recommended.

Michael Jackson and the fatal spirit of the true artist

A telling side effect of a celebrity's death is the degree to which it prompts some people towards autobiography, memoir, or to indulge the urge to examine their own history as a parallel course to the trajectory of the more famously deceased. Those of us over fifty have only to recall the unending tide of essays and books where Americans recalled where they were, precisely, the day and moment that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The effort, of course, was more than merely paying tribute the brilliance the departed embodied; more than that, it is a recollection of how they'd been made to imagine greater possibilities for a  world they otherwise couldn't challenge.It's the tiresome ode to a dream deferred . There is something to the notion that celebrities cease to  be human in our estimations once they acquire certain saturation in the culture--they become, in a sense, a personal god one measures their best and worst qualities against. It is a tendency that can become pathology  Patti Davis, daughter of the departed President Ronald Reagan and someone who knows something about growing up in a fishbowl, weighed in with a brief commentary in Newsweek last year  about the unexpected death of Michael Jackson. The piece isn’t as cloying as one would have suspected—she notes the similarities between Jackson and another child star, Judy Garland, reasonably speculating reasonable that these talents were essentially raised in a bubble by a horde of managers, executives and an unlimited variety of sycophants whose interests weren’t those of their nominal employer, but rather their livelihoods. There’s more than enough evidence to support for Davis to make her case, which we find in the case of Jimi Hendrix and certainly Elvis Presley, two major talents and money makers who , it seems, lacked the discerning voice in their midst to say “no”, or to give advice that was free of enabling. Davis, though, spoils her entry with a rationalization that absolves Jackson and a host of other bright unfortunates who’ve met with untimely demises of any responsibility for the odd choices they’ve made.

Michael Jackson, Jack Kerouac, , Jack Kennedy, Charlie Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jimi Hendrix, and the lot died of causes that had nothing to do with the fact that each of them had varying degrees of talent. People die daily who haven't distinguished themselves as singers, dancers, writers, poets, jazz improvisers; they drank themselves to death, they overdosed, they committed suicide due to untreated clinical depression, they were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one, though, latches on to a single name of the average anonymous drug casualty or suicide and speculates as to the nature of the sad, early death, no one really wonders about the soul of the everyman that just might be too sensitive to deal with the harsh facts of life and is driven to end the endless pain. Rather, we shrug, we say”ain't that shame" and then go about our business, mildly annoyed. We love celebrity hood, though, we are obsessed with as a culture, and indeed celebrity has become our religion--we create a mythology about the doings of the famous Gods and wonder about their inner lives, their moods, and their ability to cope.

Davis, a marginally well known artist/writer herself, picks up the stalest cliches around, the most exhausted of all tired tropes, the most insipid of perspectives by wondering aloud if there is something in the tortured psyches that compels the brilliant and the intensely gifted to short circuit themselves and bring an end to their lives. The implication is that sensitive artist types are sentenced fates even an enemy shouldn't suffer, an especially perverse elaboration that artists are not really the source of their talents and the inspiration that comes with it, but rather a channel of a Higher Power's wisdom and good graces. Davis not only gives absolution to doomed geniuses and near geniuses,but offers up the notion that for them Free Will is impossible. One always has a choice, though, and anyone of the people named in the second paragraph, not least of all Jackson, all the the ability to choose what their circumstances would be and the company they could keep; brilliant or not, they, like the rest of us, make bad decisions and they, like some of us, make choices that sooner or later prove fatal. Assuming without question that the tragedy was inevitable due to predestination only makes the tragedy deeper. What freedoms and insight the work might have provided us is negated by an overwhelming assumption that divine forces were at play. The circumstances, though, are human, all too human.

It's  irritating  enough that Davis concludes her commentary so insipidly, but it is also aggravating she's given such a big microphone from which to entertain her morbid hero worship. This is the same worship of the Celebrity Dead that had surrounded the discussion of the Confessional Poets for so many years, the not-so-subtly disguised attitude that a poet so categorized would only be regarded as great if they met with a tragic death, preferably by their own hand. Only in that instance do they become poets worth taking seriously. Serious as in examples to avoid , I think, and what's to be avoided as well is Davis' unfortunate comment, in a subordinate clause, that " true artists", by in large, are burdened by the creativity God or may not have blessed them with and lack the stamina to survive a life in any of the metaphorical food chains the celebrity culture creates. Davis handily enfeebles artists in general, poses no counter argument that art is more likely to make the artist more resilient in their daily struggles, and she seems willing to let the issue rest in a bed of sighing fatalism. This won't do.

Oil spill blame game

A casual scan of the news sites reveal that the right wing noise machine is working furiously to blame the oil spill currently threatehing the Lousiana coast on President Obama, terming it his "Katrina". Well, the point with the Katrina disaster wasn't whether it was Bush's fault, but rather his administration's lack of prompt and compassionate response to the plight of the people of New Orleans. The low priority the hurricane aftermath had on that White House's agenda couldn't be more clear considering that just months prior all appropriate agencies responded with what's been called \"brutal efficiency\" in response to a similar catastrophe in Florida, whose governor at the time was George Bush's brother Jeb Bush.

This difference was glaring and telling. Obama's response to the oil spill, by any standard, has been quick and decisive; it made short order of BP's minimizing assurances that the accident was something they could handle on their own and exercised Federal Authority. This does sour Obama's declaration that he is opening up more of the East Coast for off shore drilling, but that is merely an irony, not a source of blame. This ugly disaster , if nothing else, frames the argument for weaning America from it's dependence on oil in a new light. Chris Matthews remarked on Bill Maher's HBO program that the drive and demand for alternative, green energy technologies will likely increase, maintaining that this may be the best shot in the arm solar and wind power may get. This was a graphic and gross example of what oil consumption does to our planet and that we need to get ourselves away from the Middle East wells.


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M or M?

Miracle Whip has been attempting to usurp mayonnaise as the condiment of choice among sandwich makers and chewers with a gamy, faux-hip series of television ads featuring seemingly boneless teens and college freshmen flailing about to some click-track electronica while an announcer smugly declares that the new generation of brash alt-spreaders "Will Not Turn It Down!" Chief among my complaints would be that these crazy kids are a gooney bunch of waifs whose brains , collectively, have yet to develop that sphere that helps a nascent sense of "hip" into an appreciation for quality--I'd be offended, ticked off, pissed, angry and downright irritated if I were a generic young person, seeing my generation depicted as a graceless bunch of droopy trance dancers made to bounce like addled puppets on a string in the tribal worship of a product as truly wretched as Miracle Whip. It is an item that cannot decide what it wants to be--spicy? tart? sweet? tangy? velvety? It is an amalgam of the worst aspects of all these taste differentials--it ruins a perfectly good piece of sliced ham, it soils a fine piece of chicken if offends the tongue as it turns a chicken salad into a war crime. It's not that Miracle Whip "will not turn it down": it's more than the hapless among us, sans mayonnaise, cannot keep it down. So... why mayonnaise? It's the simplest math problem you'll encounter : it tastes good, and it tastes good on nearly everything you put it on, burgers, hot dogs, chicken salad, tuna, ham, cheese, oh god yes, it has the right texture, the alchemical brilliance of sweetness restrained by the right guiding hand of creamy texture, it is a pleasure on the tongue and the blend of oils, egg and spices compliments the flavors of the food it adorns, it meshes well with the bread it connects with, it is a condiment that makes the minute you take for lunch in an otherwise dreary day of bad news, late fees and bill collectors an island of sensual solution; nothing else matters for the fifteen or twenty-five minutes it takes to make the sandwich and eat it with a relish that reminds you that your senses are elements one must bring pleasure to. Mayonnaise brings joy to the lunch counter.

On Smoking

The genius of advertising is the way it can sell products to clients who have no practical use for products . One can get a fine example of how successful these geniuses have been with an online exhibit of cigarette advertising here, on a Stanford University web site. It's enough to make one salivate and to buy into the health claims the magazine notices claim for what has to be the most useless and dangerous product introduced into the consumer market. Ouch.I smoked for near thirty years , from the early seventies through 1997, less inspired by the barroom bathos of Bogart nursing his damaged romanticism between sips of bourbon , face obscured by ubiquitous laces of smoke, and more by rock stars, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and the like, odd-haired, angular and faces gaunt as the sides of sheer cliffs, musicians hanging out on the periphery of whatever mainstream their tour buses happened to be passing.

The period was, we know, still somewhat defined by the myth of the counter culture and the notion that things corporate were bad for the planet and yourself as well, but still few of us who grew our hair were willing to grow our own food, and still fewer were willing to forsake their Marlboro 100s or Lucky Strikes for ideological consistency. It was the ironic element of the drug taking of the day that many of us who dabbled in or became overwhelmed by chemicals often times defended our recreational use of illegal materials by citing that nicotine was a drug , it was fatal, and that it was legal, the same being the fact for alcohol.

It was hypocritical, man, and the squares, the man, the establishment had better rethink their pitch when it came to mewling forth about narcotics. Whether the nebulous collective I just named examined their attitudes again is unknown to me, but what I do remember was that the thinking insulated those of us in our denim'd cliques from some harsh facts and amounted to little more for us to flaunt convention and smoke, drink, toke, inject, drop, in all senses, imbibe. We were in the vanguard, weren't we?

In my case, rock stars died, friends got older or died, the music died, corporate marketing absorbed the particular tricks and whistles of all that hippie culture and the lot of us found ourselves in haircuts, with jobs, having our values sold back to us. And at the age of thirty five years old, divorced, fired, broke, I found myself still smoking two packs a day and drinking myself to a near grave. After an intervention in 1987, I went to a famous rehab in California, and smoking was the unifying thing among patients who other wise had nothing in common besides their addictions the resulting tales of wreckage they were attempting to clean up. We'd smoke during the meditation breaks, we'd smoke the five minutes we had between group meals and the next group therapy, we'd smoke on the dorm patio at night after the treatment day and exchange war stories of alcohol and drug fueled degradation while we puffed, exhaled, coughed, and continued with our stories. Deep wells of gasping laughter were had, and I do remember the desert night, talking to voices across from me in the dark, the only light being a full moon and the moving , cherry red tips of several cigarettes scurrying about like fireflies. Oh, smoking was the sacrament, it was the last link to a life I based on trying to imitate what someone else a bad boy was. Man, oh man.

In 1997, nearly ten years sober at the point, I was still smoking, frequently sick with colds that didn't seem to go away. I wasn't enjoying the cigarettes anymore, and was, in fact, tired of trying to be cool in any sense I thought it meant; I was too hold to get away dressing like a junkie guitarist, I wanted to act my age. I was on the bus in December, a rainy day, cold and miserable, and noticed various stores along the route where clerks were in the service entrances, standing in the shower, smoking away. Not unusual to note, of course, but no one looked happy or to be enjoying the drags they took off the cigarettes they lit in the cloud burst; they were smoking because they had to smoke, rain or no, cold or no, five dollars a pack or no, they looked like drug addicts, and quite suddenly I felt like one myself.Addicted to cigarettes. It was the "aha" experience. It was liberating. I quit that month, and haven't had a cigarette since.