Hamlet's Ghost Catches the Late Train

Alan Shapiro tries to drop us in some one's thoughts midstream in Wherever My Dead Go When I'm Not Remembering Them , an attempt, I gather , to show us what a mind doing casual housekeeping when the ruling personality isn't focused observing himself being poetic. There is impatience here, the anxiety of the wait : the narrator cannot be engage the world as he would wish, to exert a measure of will on to his stage. The imperatives of free will, imagination, self-definition , following of one's bliss are for a time suspended, or at least irrelevant because our figure is here waiting for a train that will take him some other place he needs to be; this is a schedule not his own and this leaves him virtually nothing to engage but his own thoughts , inspired by the scene of the wait, the grind and mechanized stutter of the city the whirrs determindedly past him. The idea is an attractive one, I guess, the conceit of what a personality, normally fitted for turning their life's experience into miniaturized melodramas, would do in the off hours, when the mind is "off duty".

Impatience , though, implies something  like  film maker jump cuts, the jagged, abrupt , yammerng intrusion of one thought upon another, the overlay of images and opinions, the irrational mixing of personal history and visual detail from the present moment: the effect should be one similar to walking into a room where radio, CD players, televisions, internet and cell phones are all blaring at once, at full volume, with the same shrill , monotonous insistence. Shapiro's poem sags under the weight of a conventional narrative construction, weighed down with a string of specifics that kill the sensation:

Not gone, not here, a fern trace in the stone
of living tissue it can quicken from;
or the dried–up channel and the absent current;
or maybe it's like a subway passenger
on a platform in a dim lit station late
at night between trains, after the trains have stopped—
ahead only the faintest rumbling of
the last one disappearing, and behind
the dark you're looking down for any hint
of light—where is it? why won't it come? You
wandering now along the yellow line,
restless, not knowing who you are, or where,
until you see it; there it is, at last
approaching, and you hurry to the spot
you don't know how you know is marked
for you, and you alone, as the door slides open
into your being once again my father,
my sister or brother, as if nothing's changed,
as if to be known were the destination.
Where are we going? What are we doing here?
You don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations
we're racing past, the others out there watching
in the dim light, baffled,
who for a moment thought the train was theirs.

This is more an impatient explanation by the poet of what he was trying to do with the poem than it is an a particular set of impressions of standing alone on a train station platform as thoughts invade awareness and then recede. The not so faint shadow of Hamlet attempting to speak to the ghost of his slain father isn't far off, and the poem suggests that a good many of us have incomplete conversations with our dead parents or spouses that we find ourselves conducting when the real world obligations are, for the moment, done with. But for all the emphasis on what rattles in the brain when it's tired and feeling rushed, the poem doesn't convince me. The writing sounds rushed, though, and in fact feels more like a convenient and easy to contrive self-dramatization than anything composed with assurance.


Where is the feeling of the world falling in? The nausea of the ground giving way under your feet? The lightheadedness when , in public, a host of repressed emotion and unresolved issues press upon you suddenly, severely, mercilessly? What's missing is the alienation effect, the familiar "made strange", in Bakhtin's phrase; the trains, the buildings, the cars passing by should be bereft of their normal assurances, including the easily conveyed sense of melancholy; this is a world that should seem, at least for the moment, possessed and defined by the dead. Shapiro, however, uses them as props instead to reinforce a conventional poetic sensibility, and misses a chance to write something genuinely strange and memorable.

Birthday Note

Today marks my 58th year on the planet, another way of saying that it's my birthday, and there is less reflection on how I've spent my years than before, replaced, I suppose, but a low-murmuring astonishment that I'm still here, breathing, writing, whining, celebrating, arguing , laughing along with the rest of the community. It's not that I'm about to go soft in the head and the heart and profess reams of  steamy, flatulent prose about being grateful and such--even when I understand the awesomeness of an occasion, confessions of unending thanks make me instinctively--but I would like to briefly remark that at one point in my life I didn't expect to live this long. Good fortune intervened in my travels, however, and one might say that I am over two decades past what I expected to live until; that fact still astonishes me , the profundity of the fact has never escaped my thinking. It's in view of this fact that I go forward with what little real humility I have , secure in the knowledge that the miracle that I might have been waiting for in the past has already happened, and ,indeed, continues to unfold.

School of Defeatitude

"Wissahickon Schist" by Karl Kirchwey is a poem that practically brags about it's failure as a poem. The brutal upshot is that the poet is not able to complete his self assigned task of bearing unaffected witness to a natural situation.The poet ponders the nature of nature and starts to write a line to crystallize his emerging perception and then stops, catching himself in the act of attempted epiphany, realizing at some point that for all the skills with words he's attained in many years of reading , they alone cannot avail him the unattainable essence of things before.So he stops writing, stares at the formations around him, the birds in their habitats, the plants and their reactions to the changing weather and realizes what it is he is missing. And later, turning himself into a second person "you", writes a poem about being overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of the nature he was trying to make even more extraordinary.

Ergo, another poem about poetry, or worse, a poem about being not being able to write a poem; this is a poem about the writer's impotence to get to the heart of the things that make up his world, those things no human , motivated by imagination and the imperatives of free will, had a hand in designing, constructing, arranging in situ. The imagination is reserved, finally, for creating a mythology for how all these things arrived in the states and ethereal essences that are their allure--the narratives of what is already visible, complete, and unto themselves. Myths, poems, epic dramas used to be the way we explained to ourselves the formations, disruptions, and inevitable continuity of the world, that a creation of metaphorical structures could link us to a grand design greater than ourselves; our task was to abide by the revealed law of the poetically evoked and make our place within the narration.

Science , though, has hollowed out the myth, made the metaphors mechanical, reduced mystery to the level of the lost cell phone we will eventually find if we look hard enough. We know the connections between natural phenomenon, we realize the power of metaphor exists only in the arenas where the concrete facts and their theories are unknown, unimagined. So the metaphors are empty and the poet realizes he has no power to contain even the contents of his perception, and he stops writing and seeks rather to vanish back into the library to lick his wounds with another poem that confirms the sheer futility of being a poet in the first place. This poem is a stinker, a dishonest, whining stinker.

Pulp Fiction yellows

Tarantino fatigue has set in ; what made him hip now makes him seem like a gimmick prone stylist living up to fan expectations; I think of good amount of Fellini when the subject of Quentin arises. Is destined to make a million motion pictures  the contents are familiar to the point of contempt?  There is a strong chance, unless Hollywood runs out of money first. Even Pulp Fiction, his best effort, seems dog eared  just as Citizen Kane seems over stuffed.  PB movie will hang around Tarantino's head for as long as he lives because it will be regarded, always, as the best thing he's ever done. It remains a powerful film for the most part, full of wicked laughs and and re-convolutions of seamy paperback action novels, but it does shows it's age. The dialogue is something... else altogether, but does anyone really think he's done better than the Master, Elmore Leonard?The dialogue ,as such, are extended riffs divorced from the violence and action, a sort of virtuosity that is more obtrusive than revealing; the beauty of pulp fiction was that its minimalist discussions, compact, jargon filled, quirky and redolent in references that suggested a sub culture beyond the melodrama of ...the basic plot, were models of sledge hammer concision. The dialogue here merely stalls, stops, occupies time like it were a waiting room. Seeing these characters again go on about the differences in burger joints between Amsterdam and America, the finer points of foot massage and revenge, on changing one's way of life due to a revealed miracle, makes you wish something would happen that was gratuitous and without justification. Anything to get on with it.

Coen entropy

As usual with Coen Brothers films, The Man Who Wasn't There is visually stunning, and has its share of odd touches and sublime moments that set the film makers from the rest of the herd . I think it's the least interesting of their movies, though. The varying elements of a James Cain flavored noir thriller filtered through Camus-toned existentialism and the zany insertion of UFOs makes me think of bright guys brain storming against deadline; much of the meaning of Coen Brothers movies is open ended and deferred, but this film just couldn't merge the oddities. Billy Bob Thorton, though, needs special credit for maintaining his granite faced deadpan in a film full of eagerly demonstrative actors. And his flat effect is so consistent and untouched by a hint of actorly style that you would swear that his chain smoking is a real life death wish.

Gallagher , foamy and bitter

Gallagher is that sledgehammer wielding comedian who smashed watermelons between dry-heaving rants and bad jokes . Not a few of us considered him the rankest of all the post-George Carlin comedians, an energetic yet grating presence who's demented insistence that you pay attention to him was never mitigated with a real laugh. It was nervousness, actually, an anxiety -induced set of giggles disguising  the obvious desire to have him return to the clinic he has a day pass from.

Now we find out from Salon that the comedian has turned into a right wing hate monger. He has found new things to smash with that sledge, ie, Obama, lesbians, Muslims, illegal immigrants, the unemployed.  Who would have thought the Tea Baggers would need yet another comedian to mouth their confused crib sheet of screaming points?

Gallagher always seemed like he had a lifetime supply of bus tokens to Crazy Town even when he was  in the mainstream of American comedy. Now that he's a foaming hate monger only makes him a more grotesque version of what's always been, an odd, strident, unfunny attention seeker. He is the guy we all know who wants to be famous no matter what it takes; smashing watermelons used to do it, and now he thinks he's upped his game by bringing talk radio into his repertoire. I suppose he's maneuvering to replace Dennis Miller on Fox News as their resident hack comedian yock monger, or perhaps a position on Andrew Breitbart's board of policy advisors. Should he get a job with Breitbart, I hope he can adapt to the company uniform, clown shows and a big red nose.

"Going to Zero" by Peter Balakian

Going to Zero is a poem that contains a familiar echo, a trace of another poet.My guess is that author Peter Balakian takes his cue from Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died", another narrative about a man making his way through New York City:

The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.

This is New York City from the eyes, ears and walking feet of a man who knows the city and loves the many distractions and cluttered blocks of relentless activity, the commotion and hustle to get from one place to another. It is, of course, a poem of some knowledge and emotional response being contained under the surface, but when he arrives at the 5 Spot and listens to Mal Waldron open up on the piano, all the facts hit him in a hard rush. Billie Holiday, the singer who's experience-cracked voice could unlock the buried emotions of listeners all over the world, has died sadly, and O'Hara's response, deferred in the noise and hustle of city life, comes at him at last, as Mal Waldron plays, the truth comes out; he cannot listen to his beloved jazz quite the same as he had . (I; had the pleasure of listening to Mal Waldron perform live--he is an outstanding musician).

Balakian's narrative is longer, the effect is more accumulative than O'Hara's grief epiphany. There is the same set of distractions and sights the poet travels through to his destination, but while O'Hara seemed to be trying to sustaining a buoyant optimism, the events in Balakian's line are shaded with hints of a gathering melancholy, a sad state of affairs about to be revealed:

wanted to buy the Frankenthaler, a modest, early print,
minimal, monochromatic; surface and perspective in dialogue;
on 24th off 10th –the gallery still smelled like wood and plaster—

but I didn't stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange
the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington
was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now
like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab
until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm.

It's hard to take in the sites and attractions of a city when you happen upon the site of the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history. There is numbness, a nagging sense that all the galleries, restaurants and marvels of classical architecture that New York City is famous for are no longer significant in dimensions that make our humanity seem insignificant, a lust shared by Ayn Rand and Albert Speers
At Broadway and Liberty

the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising

over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows—
I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river.
I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot,

as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief.
Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds
in wet clay and baked them for posterity.

At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing.
At miasma people weeping. Anna's Nail Salon, Diakichi Sushi,
the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows.

Something blasted from a boom box in a music store,
something, in the ineffable clips of light,
disappeared over the river.

In another context "pizzas of disbelief" would be a perfect phrase to use when ironic whimsy is the mood, but it fits here beautifully, a skillful detail illustrating the silent, choking grief as the process of cleaning up the carnage of ground zero proceeds; the chaotic clamour and ecstatic in-your-face atmospherics that make O'Hara's New York so appealing from the outset of his poem, until the brilliant timed emotional collapse of the last line, becomes, in Balakian's poem, the groan, crash and hammering of a city laboring to bring itself together after an unimaginable calamity; the life of the city goes on after the loss of thousands of lives because it has to, and amid the cramped genius that is New York City a collective despair falls on those day timers who watch in various states of lingering shock. The mania of "The Day Lady Died", but without the ecstatic propulsion brings to his mean streets; O'Hara gives a picture of himself when he isn't poised or positioned to the talkative life of the party continually ranting about the genius that live in Manhattan. His shell has cracked, and even the sweetness of city life cannot keep him aloft. Balakian's narrator, I think, isn't trying to sustain any illusion of being up or feeling honored to be in a world class city--all else is scenery and distraction that must fade from concern until one contemplates the very air that incredibly, brutally changed around them.


Yes, one might say, we are clawing our way from under this rubble, but where are we going?