an obtuse 4th of July

Barry Goldensohn tests our patience with his poem on slate, Old Home Week, an attempt to undermine the kind of Norman Rockwell America of quaint small towns united on simple and compelling virtues that withstand the faddishness that is promiscuously described as the tide of history. We have imagery taken from greeting cards, brochures and old Colliers magazine covers and photo essays, small business people, farmers, you people old gathered together pay tribute to the native sons who have fallen in war and those who have returned to the homes they protected. It's a wobbly construction with too many loose parts piled atop each other--there is a surfeit of detail and characterization that places this poem squarely in that phantom zone between poetry and prose, which is to say that it is an amorphous blob that neither satisfies nor convinces as poetry or prose. A mixture of the two, poetry and prose, can potentially be an exhilarating and daunting experience, of course, but it success depends on the completing the third part of the dialectic, the synthesis that is wholly and entirely new where elements of both the thesis (poetry) and antithesis (prose) are violently combined and the results are a means of expression that extend the senses and add to our perceptions. Goldensohn, though, plays it straight and attempts to enliven this antiquated diorama with an oh wow turn, a visit from the world unseen

Two brothers dead in one campaign
mosey over, AWOL as usual, for beer
and to read their names on the brass plaque again
fixed to an obelisk in the square..

Despite references to recent and current wars and some details that place contemporary things in the company of older generation's legacy, Goldensohn is remarkably obtuse here, first with the Norman Rockwell set up he attempts to expand upon: with decades of well publicized bad news coming from small towns , revealing small towns as places of moral certainty and stable relationships is itself unconvincing. This is a tableau that might have been convincing fifty or sixty years ago, before the dismantling of the middle class was a common discussion topic. Now it is just quaint and false to the aware reader. Goldensohn means well, of course, and there is a logic here that is appealing as a consideration, if not as poetry.?I would say that Goldensohn, though an inconsistent poet, is still a patriot for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom about great wars America has been fortunate enough to win. It is not the poet's task to co-sign bullshit, patriotic or otherwise; while one can be grateful for the sacrifice of those who fought to preserve our freedoms, one must be clear that such celebrations produce an unquestioning group think that will use the rhetoric of the 4th of July and of World War 2 as a moral obligation that justifies bad wars, like Vietnam, and Iraq. The praise we shower on the brave men who died in the first two mentioned wars becomes propaganda when applied to more current, questionable adventures. Goldensohn's point, blunted by poor execution, is that we have to remember the history of the wars we commerate; the causes, the stakes, the righteous reason why we fought. And that any war, good or bad, is involves untold amounts of tragedy,grief, bitterness.

The dead brothers, soldiers both, appearing at the get together and reading their names on the honoring plaque is cornball on the face of any already reliably predictable motif. This would have been fine, I suppose, as an idea for a Twilight Zone episode, but I think even Rod Serling would have rejected it because it's such a thick slice of audience-baiting hokum. It's the same thing as the Surprise Twist Ending  You Know is Coming in Every M. Knight Shyamalan Movie. This poem, in fact, reads like a hurried precis, a pitch for what turns out to be an under imagined fantasy. It's untidy, hackneyed and string pulling. It is not a good poem.

July madness

Yes, San Diego is hot in July, beastly sometimes, that insects chew your collar kind of heat that feels like a combination of itches and small bites as you tough out the day in a smelly t-shirt and a bottle of tap water that has the chill of room temperature coffee. Tell anyone who lives elsewhere in the contiguous United States that you're unhappy with the way the July climate of San Diego has taken to expressing itself on your particular day off and you're likely to be laughed at, slapped, spit upon, mocked with sock puppets questioning the legitimacy of your family line. Worst, someone you care for dearly, or at least took to be someone somewhat sane and not given to hasty reactions, would slam the phone down on you make you disappear from her Facebook simulacra. Horrible things to ponder while you stand over a retail sales counter in that smelly t shirt ringing up sales of nicks and nacks and varied  punk bric an brac made in China, but alas,  cooler climes.

"My testicles  are in a twist, bitch" is what my ex girl friend in Detroit told me.  She's now fifty seven years old and now works in the Cass Corridor where she manages a Swedish Black Metal Cafe called Bub's.

"All my studs are rusted and no ointment cools the irritation, motherfucker". I said it was good to hear her voice and wondered aloud if her Swedish  Black Metal Cafe was making any money. Money was the reason I called, as I lent her train fare to Amtrack her way back to the D after she visited me in Pacific Beach five years ago, both of us staying in my walk in studio apartment; it was the same thing as locking two hungry baders in a dark , empty sardine tank.  "Jesus , Ted, your tunes are lame" she said at one point, "I mean, where are your Skull Drag discs, where's the killer Fist Taco Grope Technique jams? No one cools a hot day like Slit Tongue Manicure, fuckin A, Jack..." It went on like that, ugliness and snarls. Even the garbage complained about our noise.

"You ain't seeing no goddamned money til you say something clever about the weather" she declared, and then she yelled to someone "Gapper, make me a Psychotic Break,  extra lemon".

I had another call coming in just then. I told my ex to hang on while I got the call. "Hold on just a second. But remember, I can really use the money."
"Eat a crab apple: she said, " hurry up". I answered the other line. It was Mike from Detroit calling.

"BURKE YOU FUCK FACED TRAITOR!! DETROIT IS THE ROCKING  CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, MAN IT'S HOTTER THAN A SPENT CAP O JAVA GRUNION, ACE. FLIES AND SKEETERS AND BIRDS THAT LOOK LIKE WINGED FITS OF HARD TAR ARE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY, ALL OVER LIVERNOISE, ALL OVER EIGHT MILE, COVERING JOY ROAD, FUCKIN' A. I am coming out there in couple of days and I need you to know one thing; WHERE'S MY  MONEY...!@!@#!"

Great.

Doom Patrol

The super hero movies of summer have been awful so far, X Men First Class feeling as rote as a instructions on how to  use make noise with a doggie chew toy, Thor turning Jack Kirby's peerless, dynamic design from the original comic book  into designs rejected from The Little Mermaid, and Green Lantern looking like a bad compromise amongst a handful of mediocre fan boys. I honestly don't hold much hope for the pending release of Captain America. I am afraid the unthinkable has happened to  Fan Boy Nation: WE ARE SICK TO DEATH OF SUPER HERO MOVIES, or rather, we are tired of discovering that the super hero adaptations are substantially sub-stellar, ie, not super . The irony of it all, it seems, is that as a teen reading my big fat share of DC, Marvel , Charleton comics, with occasional excursions into Gold Key and Dell titles, I read my comics as though they were movies and I was sitting ina theatre  during a Saturday matinee watching them; the artwork, the paneling, the crashes and destroyed cities were all perfectly fluid and dynamic, all the bombastic dialogue and simplistic exposition was perfectly plausible. The thrill of seeing "live" depictions of these tales comes down to little else than that the novelty has worn out, that there are not enough Sam Rami out the with the genius to make a comic book come alive on the screen with all the elements being seamless, balanced, without a worried conceit . We are perhaps simply tired of seeing directors try to shoe horn actors into fantastic bits of computer generated animation:  we wind up nagging about the surface details and miss everything of those old matinee adventures when the tale carried the rest of the afternoon. I wonder : why not just make a Superman reboot using nothing but computer animation? The technology is good enough.

Hip hopping to the punch line

Vanilla Ice.

In 2009, Slate's Jody Rosen had finally  gotten tired of the joke that 'White people can't rap", and good for him. I wrote and slim rant a couple of years ago that whites are the last minority group one can make safely make fun of, free of the fear of being condemned outright and en masse. Rosen's  blog entry is  here  .On this matter, it would seem an effort on the part of purists to more or less undermine the idea that anyone of   pale countenance'  can have  hip hop street cred; not an organized conspiracy, just a habit of ridiculing the possibility . This , thought, constitutes the proverbial that has left the barn years ago.


Rap has been around for decades, it has saturated the mainstream culture it was trying to undermine and has, in fact, become the common expression of impatient self-gratification. Rap is no longer a black thing exclusively; while it remains an created by black musicians and whose architects and innovators remain predominately black, the style has been absorbed by young white people who've taken it as their own. White people can rap, some of them can do it brilliantly, many others succeed to lesser degrees. This is something black-centric exclusivists need to get over; music evolves, music changes, music is taken up by others who hear and adapt to their experience and sense of what makes musical and emotional sense; this is how musical forms remain viable, that is to day, dynamic. This has been the case for jazz, for blues, for soul, for rock; change or become an oldies act.

Was E.E.Cummings racist?

A previously unpublished poem by E.E.Cummings was recently discovered by literary professor James Dempsy in the course of researching Scofield Taylor, publisher of the influential magazine The Dial. The Awl as published it, a brief, spare observation that leaves you scratching your head, a typical response to Cummings best and worst writing. This poem, though, is different; the language makes us asks if Cummings were a racist. The start of the poem gets your attention quickly:

(tonite
in nigger
street
the snow is perfectly falling,
the noiselessly snow is
sexually fingering the utterly asleep
houses)

The entire poem can be viewed here.

You can feel the hair rise one neck of those modern critics already defensive about the politics of a number of  Modernist poets. This was another era, a good while ago, and it wasn't an uncommon thing for otherwise smart and perceptive people, Cummings included, using the word "nigger" without intending to judge and subjugate an entire segment of the population on the basis of race. That is to that I doubt Cummings use of the word was used in a racist manner; from readings of Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner and Van Vechten, the use seems more idiomatic than hurtful. "Nigger", though, has morphed in the many decades since Cummings' quizzical poem, as the history of the Civil Rights movement reveals the insane, hateful cultural undercurrent from which the word emerges.The word is loaded with the freight of every racist thought, judgment, and agenda that has been enacted in this country and it has become something that none of us can use with any authority other than to be hurtful. The other explanation for saying or writing "nigger” in light of what the word has come to mean is the kind of weak-kneed "irony", that one needs to use the word in light of the pain we allow them to cause. Lenny Bruce maintained that these are only words and it is our forbidding the use that gives them their hurtful power; expose the words and the lies behind them and we neutralize their power over our emotions. Lester Bangs, contrarily, wrote years later in an essay titled "White Noise Supremacists", that he had tried Bruce's prescription and uttered and wrote "nigger" in what he meant as irony--he was attempting to empty the term of the potential to cause pain.

Bangs, though, gauged the response of readers, editors, and friends and discovered his humanist reasoning wasn't assuaging anyone. The roots of the pain were too deeply embedded in our culture's worst sustained tendencies: this word, and words like it, hurt.  Cummings, as a poet, can be excused in part because I suspect he meant "nigger" to be a synonym for "night" or a term equally nocturnal; A quiet winter night in winter, snow on the houses, the lights are out. There is subtext s here, to be sure, the obvious ones being the sexual attraction of whites to blacks, but there are nearly always subtexts and ambiguity in poems; Cummings purpose is to create tension between terms denoting abstract virtues of black and white and force a reader, perhaps force himself, that one is drawn to the other and that , in fact, one needs the other in which to exist, thrive, to find happiness in the many layers of grief life-as-it-is will hand you. This is a reading, though, that is lost in the sweep of history, save a protest from an apologist arising here and there.  Cummings fans will no doubt make like this poem had never emerged.Is Cummings a racist for using this odious term? No. Could he have gotten away with writing this poem today? Not on your life.

a hum dinger

What I like about TR Hummer's poems is that he writes like he hasn't yet figured out the poem was going to end, or what he would wind up thinking as he arranged his line breaks and dashes. His tone is vernacular, characteristic of a true voice addressing you directly.   There is no flatness here, no monotonic hum droning on in a pretense of everyday speak. We have poet who frequently presents his narrators as being in the middle of something, in the thick of things that do not make sense just yet. There is a suggestion that he likes to ponder the nature of what he doesn't know in such as way that he seemingly departs from earth's gravity and skips , instead, on the rings of some oblivion bound orbit, as I believe he is doing with "Ooo Baby Baby", a poem I like quite a bit. That context and set up isn't furnished in the poem are not important here, the glory and grace of the poem begins after the opening line, two people, a speaker and his girlfriend/wife/lover, staring at a blank, black vastness after dark, he speaking in an all allusive way along a string of what-ifs and why-nots, the edge of nothingness seeming to made concrete . There is a sensation here, a mixture of exhilaration, fear, attraction and vertigo as the speaker dispenses with his knowledge of the given--this is a lake we are looking at after dark, those are paper lanterns, you and have history --and I would say that what Hummer is considering are the kinds of seductions that commence once the active mind is t taken with an incredible , unthinkable idea.

Hummer has emotion aplenty, and the sense of longing and yearning for less nuanced times is tangible; he is, however, an artist, and combines a writer's restraint with the emotion he is trying to convey. This, I think, gives the reader more to discuss--the art of what was almost, the art of what was skillfully suggested--than a boiler plate expression of unremarkable poesy would.

This is very much a poem of over thinking a situation but that, I believe, is precisely the point, as these thoughts are not an argument made with metaphors to support a supposition toward a metaphysical construct, but instead a fluid stream of associations that are precisely liquid, seamless, seductive in their idea that just as we can imagine that what we know of the world might, in some twisting of the language, can be made to be composed of materials other than what's assumed to be the fact, it is equally as powerful to conceptualize existence being constructed on nothing what so ever . This world, Hummer's narrator appears to be getting at, is composed of those comforts and solaces we find and remember and manage to construct a life worth living out of it, paper lanterns, beach sex, Smoky Robinson and all. This poem is a nicely contained abstract of an imagination that seems entirely capable of being seduced by its manic swerves into the illogic of  a less interesting conundrum/

CLARENCE CLEMONS, RIP

I have never been a Bruce Springsteen fan, but neither have I  been one of the over-stating haters who've seen the last three decades decrying the man and his music. Although I think The Boss's music, overall,  hyperventilates to the extent that the version of rock and roll passion seems appropriate for a musical than a bar band with roots in a working-class community, I never thought there was a phony nor malicious bone in Springsteen's body. I approached him with a grudging yet growing respect. For all the promiscuous use of cadenzas, the solemn and unsubtle lethargy of his message tunes, the crazy blending of Dylan lyrics, Van Morrison vocals, and the greased pulse of urban rhythm and blues that never, never really moved to do anything other than changing the channel or to look elsewhere in the record bins for a more spurious excitement, I simply had to resign from the debating team and admit that  I didn't get it. Not that I rescind my former criticisms--Bruce almighty was and remains more rock and roll spirit and drive than I will ever be, even if I don't care for his accent. Springsteen sang about the things all writers of songs marketed to teens talk about, the desire to get away from the parents and find a place of their own; this runs through Elvis and Chuck Berry through the Ramones and upwards to the Foo Fighters and Tool and their moody ilk. It's not that I resisted "getting it," as it were; it's more that I wasn't convinced by the songs he wrote and sang, in large part. It's just as likely that I had turned toward literature, steep reading in American and European traditions, as a means of examining the further reaches of a bad mood and that intractable sensation of feeling apart from, set aside, and put upon by forces one could not control--love?hate?politics? Vanity? Cruel gods? Songs are a snapshot of the mood, which is fine, but Springsteen over-packed them like he was going on a long trip with only a split-seamed carry-on. I respect him for trying and cheer him on the occasional successes --"Tunnel of Love" is an incredibly taut, pared-down exploration of the aforementioned bad moods. At the time, though, I wasn't in the mood for pop tunes: I wanted the dense fugues given me by Mailer, DeLillo, Pynchon, Burroughs, et al. To quote Danny Glover, I was too old for the shit that came beforehand. Not that I didn't think of it fondly and at times sneak back in through a bedroom window.

6:37 AM PDT