the weather?

sit here like there's nothing there at all
while the cattle roams the mountain side
stressed for a stream and the long grass.
the moons have gone over the eaves
of houses sagging at the a frames
with the wood grey like the moon
we imagined for  days without end
as the pure grey tone of our meals in the dark.
cars are not the only things that stutter
on a cold snap.
electricity is the thrall of falling into
a ritual better than religion, a cigarette,
a barrel of burning refuse,
hands being rubbed together.
tribal concerns mean war on the steepest incline.
what shall we fight about?
the weather?

Jim Powell and William Carlos Williams

Jim Powell's poem "Dance Figure" resembles William Carlos Williams' poem "Poem (As the cat)" in it's sharp, curt delineation of a something observed; the difference, though, is that the Williams' poem is closer to the late poet's natural, evolved style. Williams worked a lifetime developing a poetics that would be about a poetry based on what he considered the American voice, a natural, un-embellished cadence that he considered the model for his imagist inclination. A direct treatment of the material thing perceived was the goal:

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

It's short and not so sweet; something here reminds me of the still photograph experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, in his continuous photographs of a single action that, when seen in rapid sequence, replicates motion. We can see the cat padding about cautiously as it tests its balance on a precarious edge, we can sense the progress, stanza to stanza, the halting placement of the forefoot, the comedy of hind leg stepping into an empty flowerpot. This artfully , succinctly condenses visual information to essential actions , creating the feeling of the excited, rapid commentary of one friend nudging another to view a comic vision. One nudges the other, whispers "get aloud of that ". Longer digressions are left behind, compound words and their alliterating implications are left on the work bench. Word selection and length are everything, and the goal for Williams, I think, was to create a sense of the event happening in real or recent time, detailed with words that are fresh and pure of post-reflective abstraction. He hasn't larded up the perception with  cracker barrel philosophizing.

Jim Powell accomplishes much the same effect as Williams, although he isn't as temperamentally taciturn as the late poet was. He does have, though, a strong sense of the lyric move and succeeds, in his his strongest work, of knowing when the lines break, when the image commands the center of the work, and when the narrator's rumination filters through the descriptive arrangements, an insertion of a personality that sufficiently problematizes his subject. It's a delicate balance of the objective, the correlative and the subjective. It's a nice seduction, when the writing hand isn't over eager to deliver a payoff.

Dancer Figure

He interlaces

his fingers

and stoops

to make a saddle

at knee level

of his palms

where she places

her right foot

and steps up

continuing to rise

while he straightens

to lift

and boosts her

springing from his hands

arms extended

overhead

fingertips pointed

arrowing skyward

as she leaps

higher

than either

separately

could

Ah, but this is a crisp description of a delicate scene; like Williams, the concentration is on closely observed movement, the cupping of the male's hand to form a lift, a bridge for the woman to place her foot, the slow rising from the floor toward the sky, the final, cascade-seeming leap. What Powell has assumed from Williams are lessons well learned; the brief lines are an internalized beat, a slowly wound spring tensing up until an eventual, ceiling-bound release--the motions here are a seamless stream without the bumps and segmented grating a stitched-in abstraction would have brought to Powell's elegant outline.

One element rings false, if only slightly, the additionally commentary at the conclusion "...she leaps / higher / than either / separately could." The narrator emerges from the wings , Rod Serling style, and offers up the summarizing afterward , and this an intrusion on the serene, zen-moment mood Powell had other wise established here; it takes the reader away from a simple, sweetly arranged music, remarkable for its brevity and absence of loaded terms and freighted associations, and places us in the realm of argument. It's a jolt , as it was both unneeded--did anyone really need to be told , at poem's end, that this was a feat a dancer couldn't accomplish without a partner? The abrupt turn, shifting from the evocative to the editorial, would suggest that Powell has things in mind that the dance partners are symbolic of , or symptomatic of , but I doubt that's the reason. He's too concrete a poet to become vague and allusive and allude to invisible concerns outside his actual writing if there wasn't anything in the work to give the insinuations a tangible presence. I suspect it's merely a case of the instinctual habit to sum things up; this is a habit that can be effective in longer works, where a brief paraphrase of a poem's tropes can illuminate how imagery and theme has been reconfigured in the process of bringing to an articulate expression, but "Dance Partners" is too brief for the effect. The minor failing of the ending illustrates my belief that a large factor of a good poet's working philosophy is the instinct of knowing when to stop writing--often times a poem is complete before the writer thinks he's finished with it.  The point of these tense, brief lyrics is to leave well enough alone

A sudden memory

Was making one of my constant vain attempts to clean the apartment when I came across a dog-eared mass market of Danny Sugarman's Jim Morrison/Doors  memoir No One Here Gets Out Alive. Sugarman passed away in January of 2005, and a little bit of a flash back was all I needed to drop the broom and delay the clean up. Sugarman had the fortune and infamy to have been hanging around with the Doors since he was a mid-teen, and spent a good part of his adult life cashing in on the fact. During the Seventies he was scheduled to do a college reading in San Diego, and the editor of a local music weekly I wrote for at the time gave my name to the events organizer to be Sugarman's "local poet" opening act. I didn't care for Sugarman's writing, but there was money in the deal, so I went and did the deal, and found old Danny to be a very nice guy indeed. Not a shred of detectable ego . It was the most enjoyable fifty bucks I've ever earned. I have to say that the least enjoyable fifty bucks I ever earned was having to read No One Here Gets Out Alive for a review for a local underground paper. Even as a young man who hadn't yet outgrown his obsession with the late Morrison's confused poetics and drunk posturing,I thought Sugarman's book was too much of a love letter, a mash note he couldn't stop writing. That said, I will add that I remember Danny Sugarman being a super guy, friendly, supportive in my own writing. He bought a copy of a chap book I brought to the reading. Alas. The apartment, you guess rightly, is still cramped with stuff and dusty as ghost town plates.

Still Holding

Still Holding
a novel by Bruce Wagner

There's something refreshingly unforgiving in Bruce Wagner's lacerating Hollywood satire; those readers who've had a love/hate relationship with the movie business, an attraction-repulsion dynamic that loves movies themselves and yet is sickened by the business culture that makes it possible, will find the nasty laughs here telling, truthful, and an overdue joy to read. Anyone else who desire something redeeming to emerge from all the bad faith, a kind act or sacrifice arising from some forgotten reservoir of decency would be better off seeking less severe wit. Wagner mines the old joke about Hollywood that "underneath the tinsel there's more tinsel", and obviously appreciates Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra, where the slavish and stylized impression has replaced the real; set this heady abstraction on to the business of celebrity lookalikes and the community that arises among them, we get a twisting , fun house mirror of Hollywood , a parallel existence that mimes the worst and most inane features of the stars they imitate. Wagner, in addition, writes like a wizard who knows where the garbage is dumped.

Big Three

A number of us were tossing around lit/crit topics the other night  and , as usual with conversations dealing with the less tangible aspects of the writing life, we began a breathless exchange of  writer names, mostly dead, of who the Best Three American Writers were. Names, critical tropes and beer-fueled endorsements and denunciations flew like so much hair in a military induction barber line.Why stop with three greatest American Writers? Think what you may, but the second half of this century produced a lot of major talent who have produced or are producing respective bodies of work that require the passionate reading and argument our already named personal bests have received.

Harold Bloom not withstanding, our canon is expanding with new and achingly good writers, and one would think that the male majority so far discussed will have relinquish room on their uppermost tier. This conversation, though, settled grudgingly on a Final Three , those who survived the worst insults a number of us could heap on them; the rationale, slippery as it was under the conditions this chat took place, were that each had written books that not only survived their time, but also the author's egregious personalities and  styles that progressively degenerated the more they wrote beyond their respective career high points.

On the point, Fitzgerald will make the cut because so few writers , then or to the current time, have managed the breathless lyricism contained in the "The Great Gatsby" or "Tender Is The Night". Some have come close, and I'm thinking of the resonating sentences from Scott Spencer's "Endless Love" or some keenly rendered pages in Updike's "Rabbit" quartet, but Fitzgerald at best gave us small masterpieces that gave an sharp view of the time. Hemingway, I thinks, merits a permanent place on any greatest list because his style, at best, was lean, and his sentences , constructed the way they are, convey pages of buried turmoil, lost hope, small idealism, bravery to pursue another day , to shoulder one's burden honorably. "In Our Time" and "The Sun Also Rises" accomplish this. At his worse, though, Hemingway was a boozing sentimentalist whose writing lapsed into repetitious self-parody, as we have in "Island In The Stream" or "A Movable Feast". But I am grateful for the good work he did.

Jack London, I'm afraid, pales for me personally. He was a lot of fun for me when I was growing up, yearning for adventure in Catholic School. But later, in college, closer and more seasoned readings had him sounding rushed, awkward. The admixture of Marx and Darwin that seasoned his writings seem showed a straining idealism that was not redeemed by a modifying style.I've just re-read "John Barleycorn" , and the book is ridiculous, amounting to being an extended attempt by someone thinking they will not drink in excess again if they stay physically fit and on course with the projects they have planned. Stay committed, in other words, and reap the satisfactions of a series of tasks consistently well done. Terrific advice , of course, but there are limits to the therapeutic effect, and there is value to "John Barleycorn other than London's attempt to create a solution to his alcohol problem; it does offer up a grim and gritty view of the life the practicing alkie, a redundant habit of progressive degeneration. It manages to convey Truth even as the author tries to deny his basic ailment. It seemed like so much bluster and blarney toward the end , after he vividly recalls his disastrous drinking career, that armed with this new self awareness, he would drink responsibly, that he was in fact only temporarily an alcoholic. I doubt the record shows that London cured himself.  But he left us with a vivid testimony despite his short comings, and this leaves him on the shortest of all lists of quality reads.

Waking up is hard to do

In the days nearly next mornings
a casual flair of forlorn socks
that landed where
the chair used to be,

Never can this day open like fanfare
of crescendo day-breaking
so much glass imagined as applause
for a word kept mum, under a pillow,
asleep in unsaid lakes of whatever,

Could be but often cannot be
the same clothes and haircuts
gussied with oils and stray perfumes,

But please, no pleading with pleats
that could stand for themselves
against their formless contradictions,

A small , wooden box with art from cigar store windows
brims with quarters that find their way
to slots for a promise of life, a surge,
a basket of clean undershirts,

The suds
are a mountain range
we could smash
had we enough
to unload
in the dream life we've just left,


We could smell next door aromas
even under the damp bedding eaves,
scents that speak to nerve endings
and brings a sense of what's to be done
with a history that got undressed
the night before|
and crawled into the bed and commenced to snore,


Shoes tied, pants zipped,
we go out the door,
still snoring.

What to say after the worst has happened

The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there was 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 cease to being the  chatty, wit-leavened record of one's impulses, 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 not about 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.