Paragraphs for Mark Strand

There was a joke told by Rodney Dangerfield about trying to catch your own profile as you walk by a store window, thinking that you could you see yourself, if only for a nanosecond, in a state of not being aware that you're being observed. All in vain, of course, as all you catch is a snapshot of you pouting somewhat, puckered like a lovesick fish, grimacing with downcast eyes, annoyance tempering the disappointment of not catching your reflection unaware.

In the meantime, you bump into people you didn't see coming the other way. You mumble apologies, get of earshot of profanities, careful not walk into traffic when you come to the corner. On the other side of the window are the people who have already arrived to where they were going, seated at tables over glasses of water and wine, looking at menus; you imagine yourself already at the location you need to get to, safe in a seat with a wife, watching television, anonymous in the shadows of your own making. On the coffee table are the glasses you thought would aid you in seeing the pure profile of you perfect jawline, the certitude of the chin rising to like the prow of a ship cutting a path through aggravated waters, next to the iPod and the ear pieces you wore to make the world sound less like a city at war with it's mechanical parts and more like sound track for an under-lit porno.

The clown shoes are off, the tie is undone, the television nags at you with come ons for shampoo and retirement accounts, prescription drug plans and limited edition gold coins and commemorative plates, your wife is already asleep , you cannot stop thinking of what it is you need to do, your fingers twitch, move in motions like warm up exercises , you want to write something that will put the light back into the day that get darker the longer you stay alive, you want clarity, you don't want to vanish as though turned off with a remote control, reduced to something less than the white do that used to dominate the television screen when the last credit scrolled by and bed time was immediate, irrevocable. You might miss something, you might miss lending your voice to the running stream of remarks that make up the news of the moment, you wanted to write history as it happened, the evidence of your senses keen enough to define the tone and temper of the good and bad things that make this existence such an exciting thing to stay awake for.

Four sonnets

For those who think these sonnets are an inferior expression of a venerated form, I sympathize with you. Formal poetry is not my strength. They do have their appeal, though, in as much as they force me to constrain my signature turn of mind ; let us use a musical analogy and say that I like these because they amount to me performing my old sicks over a new set of chords. Sonnet 1 You turn your head, you cough  and recover,  hand at your throat, the mike buzzes but not before you shuffle your poems and read yet again, you go on in a room where everyone has a first line, I would read about your eyes, wide as they are as saucers cups that are deep as pans of bread that come from the oven and into my heart, and that’s a start, I think, you fold your hands as you read; you’ve got this memorized, yet it all seems extemporized from the bottom of your heart  which hasn’t a bottom at all, now some one else reads, a guy with tattoo of his tongue across his left cheek, he  screeches to hip hop clicks of the tongue but he’s young and not far from done as long as his homies thrown their signs with fingers that cross a language of quieting the flutters of the immature heart, I will read you later, on the phone, with every court and hand gesture, you wave goodnight, I know the line, you’ll see me in the funny papers.   Sonnet 2 Not this day nor that one but the one after all these, rather,  when we come into town  with pockets full of matches and cigarettes in a sock, we rock the nation with big beats  in hock to no groove other than the tire tracks that criss -cross the oceans on trade winds that carry notes   like saints carrying a crucifix to the next thorny hill under a sky that opens only for any spirit that slides  up the ladder like plumes of smoke, we toke in gasps  and get out of the car, unload, set up  amps, take up a collection  for a room to split five ways, give or take the extra guitarist,  a girl friend who snores, a nice place, we say, this world is ours,  while over the bridge, in the other life where phone lines connect, there are meals to eat before the meat gets cold, moms to kiss on the cheek,   girl friends to lie to because we love them too much to be ourselves on a dare.   Sonnet 3 Extra candles at the table mean that there will be more bread to butter, more sin to absorb even as we see a motorcade and a pope in a unbreakable box on the screen when the first spoonful of hope is served from bowls that a heat that escapes logic and cold fingers, bless everything that gets in your way, says Dad, do the sign of the cross and make the world tremble? work your voodoo somewhere else, he hisses, hand me a roll and turn off the set. The screen goes dark, millions of button-down faces in crowds that line streets and make the stadiums sag under the human pounds are gone in a small white dot against a dark green field, and Dad smiles again, snapping his fingers, and chews his bread with his eyes closed, face framed with kitchen lights and lacy steam. Sonnet 4 A fevered dream gives up its dark corridors and invites me to stare at the ceiling instead,  with music of laughs and grunting keyboards filling the dim sleepless niches that make up the sky  that is now filled with circling birds, black and crying, hypnotized by advertising about home loans and  travel clubs to the farthest end of a Pacific Island where there are no dull, all-night parties and robot music that  grinds away at  unsmoothed nerves, I pick myself from the bed, kiss your forehead, slip on my open toe sandals  and sit at the edge of the bed, the edge of my wits, the end of what feels like the earth Columbus  must have feared all three of his ships would drift over in a delirium born on a black, sleepless sea.

Best American Writer of the 20th Century?

No protest against the greatness of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allen Poe, but really, their time is past, and this thread is about this century. Kurt Vonnegut easily matches Twain , I think, Updike, at his best, surpasses Hawthorne on the same range of issues, and for Poe, virtually everyone has been influenced by him, but the best of his students have found more graceful, lyrical ways to deliver their work.  

 Simply, one may yearn for the richness of a glorious past as a kind of Heaven to be aspired to, which is fine, if that is the way one learns to cope with the uncompromising pace of the current time, but our writers, truth told, tell a fine tale or two. Literature is also about where we're going, not just where we've been.  DeLillo,Toni  Morrison, William Gaddis, William Gass, Updike, David Foster Wallace, Mark Helprin, Joyce Carol Oates, Sontag, and dozens of others whose work, in varied respects, struggles to be about something larger than memoirs put forth under the name of fiction. Not that I like all the above: rather, just to say that not every novelist these days is hung by their own confessional rope. Ultimately, hindsight is everything, and I wish I could see , who of our scribes will be discussed at the end of the next century.  

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 notwithstanding, 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.  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 Updikes "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 mixture 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. It seemed like so much bluster and blarney toward the end , after 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. He didn't cure himself, and his prose hasn't reminded me less of  piles of smashed concrete over the decades.

"The Irises" by Lisa Russ Spaar

Although I think I get the general drift of the poem, this verse does not work in any pleasurable sense. Dickinson, the obvious model here, is a difficult poet to emulate; he cribbed and dashed poems, notes and asides were a massive examination of her particularly stationary existence , private notes, in a sense, and since she made little or no effort to have work her work published, it's not far afield to think her technique, revolutionary as it was, was a private language that was  an ingenious way to have a conversation with her muse, the linger suspicion that all is not settled on matters of appearance alone.

Dickinson's writing, compact and profound when it wasn't merely odd and stoically twisted, was a subtle interrogation of a conspicuous yet minor metaphysical concern; what is the stillness beneath the still of things like? Only posthumous publication and the creation of a critical language of her poems made her peculiar syntax a public matter. Lisa Russ Spaar tries to extend the style to a longer poem that contains ,say, two or more layers of inference than the two or three Dickinson dealt with and the result is a lack of poise or balance between the disguised intangibles.

Dickinson's dashes had the effect of revealing a mind that could contain two fully formed thoughts simultaneously and offer up a larger irony regarding the size and weight of first impressions being modified with a witnessed passage of time. Spaar could have well dealt with the mysteries of a garden and the creatures that inhabit the tilled terrain--she appears envious that while she takes away beauty from the plot, the fly takes away something tangible, seeing how her aesthetic gratification none the less keeps the mysteries of the garden a secret and that what the fly scurries off with, busy, busy, busy, is likewise a mystery to her--in more direct language, less fussed with, less cloaked under a thick sheet of allusion.

This reads as if it were worked over much too long and too hard; neither the idea nor the images flow easily. Perhaps it was tweaked mercilessly in the rewriting, altered, pruned and substituted to make a clear idea seem opaque and hard to follow. The obscurity sound willful. This was not fun , it was not inspiring. Spaar has written better. 

Gil Scott-Heron, RIP

I was saddened to read that poet-singer-musician Gil Scott-Heron has passed away at the age of  62. He was one of those musician-writers who was a pioneer, someone who Had Done It All First and from whom generations of younger artists still take inspiration and work in his shadow. Along with the work of the Last Poets, it is possible to opine that what we acknowledge as the art of Rap/Hip Hop would not exist. It's possible to debate the merits of  hip hop over the long run, but it is indisputable that Gil Scott-Heron was instrumental in changing the way musicians and writers  viewed their artistic mission. Not many people are game changers to that degree,and that,  along with the intensity of the actual work, commands respect. Without the work of GSH, what we would have would be something quite different and , I think, quite less potent. What I found especially powerful in Gil Scott-Heron's work was that he was one of the very few at the time to harness his rage , his anger into a art that , beyond being a powerful joining of minimalist musical and rhythmic forms and street-level irony, was his tendency for self-criticism. "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" is as powerful piece of truth telling as has ever been created in musical formation; to this day , the message rings true, for us all not to be distracted by the dog and pony shows centralized corporate media throws at us, to get off our couches and get busy creating the change we wish someone else would bring us  and entertain us with.

We have to be our own Messiahs. so said Gil Scott-Heron.

Music for trick knee

The late Jim Dewar, the fine lead singer
for Robin Trower's first two albums.

Old guitar riffs do not die as long as I live, as they are the soundtrack of many a routine and daily walk up the stairs to work, treks to the stores, adventures in scattered beach area parking lots, the journey to the forbidden and familiar knowledge behind a girlfriend's front door. Or the entrance to a doctor's office, for that matter. I had often joked  that each of  us requires a “signature riff”,  a power chord mini-anthem  ourselves that with which we have on constant mental standby as we go about our routine tasks and  past times; I often imagine the open  assault of “Mississippi Queen” commanding a room's attention once I enter, if only to perform the mundane obligation of paying a gas bill.The theme song changes, to be sure--there is no channel changing that's faster  or more assured than what goes on the car radio dial of the mind--and there are those days when what I carry in my imagined soundtrack in my imagined movie are the genteel whispers of Paul Simon's three-hankie whining, the grating,  rusted scraping of  early Velvet Underground, the  guitar amnesia of  Larry Cor yell. It varies according to mood and what lies on the to-do list that day. (Not that I actually have a to-do list. 

It's actually what I remember to get around to accomplish, get over with, or finish from an earlier, half-hearted attempt. I am not so organized. I am a fifty-eight-year-old man, almost fifty-nine, who has the personal habits of, say, your average 17-year-old, just in college, in his first off-campus apartment, with a room of his own). That said, the last few days have been one of stupid-making idleness, since I tripped in my apartment earlier in the week and ran my already-game knee into something hard and unforgiving. The last four days have been missed work, icing the swollen knee --no breaks or fractures, thank goodness-- and diving into an old record collection. Some of this stuff does not sound so bad;

Robin Trower, for example; the former Procol Harum guitarist, is very possibly the only Hendrix inspired fret specialist who fully established his own distinct approach to guitar melodrama while still maintaining the ethereal quality of his Mentor's style. Twice Removed from Yesterday, his debut, was a wonderful tone poem start to finish, emphasizing mood and atmospherics, by way of the dreamier parts of Electric Ladyland. His choice of Jim Dewar, ex of Stone the Crows, for a lead vocalist was inspired, a gritty, soulful belter whose lower register gravitas gave the core idyll ism of the lyrics something very solid to wrap around. "I Can't Wait Much Longer" is that rare breed of power ballad that actually manages to make you feel the ache of heart that hungers for a love that won't reciprocate. 

Bridge of Sighs veers from the mystical tone and lands on a hard rock style, with a solid grounding in r and b grooves: solid riffs and rhythms, charging solos, veryyyyyyyyyyyy fluid guitar work. Where the first album was strong on thick overlays of guitar tones and coloration to produce a spaced-out elegance, Bridge shifts more towards hard rock and rhythm and blues, up-tempo, hooky riffs and blockbuster vocals. Dewar and Trower are as fine match of lead singer and guitar hero as we've seen emerge from the cantankerous era  of Sports Arena rock, as finely twined on production and material on their these two releases as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were on Led Zeppelin's entire body of work or, more appropriately, as Paul Kossoff, guitar and Paul Rodgers, vocals, were in their seminal blues-rock band Free. The secret might be that the two of them are aware of each other's strengths and weaknesses--they compliment each other with nuance, style, a  bit of emotional reserve that makes the tension of their best songs here--"Day of the Eagle", "The Fool and Me", "Too Rolling Stone"--continually satisfying. Trower is a blues guitarist at heart and knows the value of fluidity and restraint; during his solos,  he continues the vocal line established by Dewar and seems to continue the tale in choice selected notes, not words. Dewar himself is perhaps the best of the British blues vocalist, a rich, grainy baritone with a supremely dark texture.  This band, to be sure, had a penchant for writing the phony-baloney Dungeons and Dragons fantasy lyrics that laid waste to two generations of budding Ira Gershwins, a subject and concomitant imagery wholly unsuitable for the quality of Dewar's voice--imagine  Little Milton singing "In the Court of the Crimson King". In these instances, Dewar sounded silly, blustering, bombastic; this is a lesson that bad songs happen to good singers. Ironically, the supreme example happens with this otherwise fine album's title tune. Overall the swirling guitar melodrama, Dewar intones with his best game face and sounds more like a dog barking at car lights casting across a garage wall rather than a strong bluesman. I vote for the bluesman every time.

Fuck Dylan

Bob Dylan is 70 years old, and I say so fucking what? It is time to stop worshipping this guy. I don't care how many good songs he's written, no one deserves the kind of sycophantic , unquestioning adoration this man has received. We are critical of all other things in our popular culture--rap music, Lady Gaga, name your pet annoyance--but Dylan gets a pass despite the over praise and reviewers over exposure. The molding heaps of cliches of what's already been written about Bob Dylan over the last give decades and ponder some as yet unremarked upon essence about the songwriter. What this was, though, was a bit of head scratching , a desperate attempt to force some enthusiasm for a subject while at the same time avoiding saying what everyone is painfully aware of: Dylan has had it as a live performer, and that his genius is something that is long ago, left in another generation's hey day. What this cliched-clogged "review" is saying, in essence, is that Dylan gathered a paycheck with little regard for presenting the music as his audience remembers it, and the faithful kissed his ring and gave him fresh roses. It's a sad thing that Dylan has become a professional celebrity. He has become a bore, and it's painful to read reviewers who insist that he hasn't.The alternative is up to each of us, individually. It is one thing to have a hero while young because he or she sets an example of how to be your own person, apart from the creature comforts of conformity. This, however, should be the transition point where we discover our own interests, trust our own instincts and take the risks that are of our choosing; we should become our own heros. We should have grown up and embraced an interesting world of music and art quite beyond Dylan; we genuflect to him, however, even as we gain speed into our sixties. We cannot get over our youth , we have aged badly in some regards. Our worship of Dylan , for good or ill, becomes the same thing as claiming that Lyndon LaRouche is merely misunderstood. This strips Dylan of his true worth and makes him merely another dime store cult hero. Enough. Fuck Dylan.