Poem-A-Day #301 : Cheapen

I was looking at old posts and came across THIS one from 2009. In it I talk about the unexplainable sadness that I get at poetry readings. Then I wrote a poem about Abraham Lincoln and how we are all reduced to the images we leave behind and eventually not even that.

I think I can explain my issue with readings better in 2016.

They render the work dead. A thing to recite. They are dull and boring and not much fun. They are staid and quiet and people nod their heads as readers render language into stupefying meaninglessness. They ivory tower. And most damning, they are not interesting.

Before you think I'm advocating for slams...I am not. They are hooting and hollering for buzzwords. They are waiting for the speaker to say a thing in that voice that indicates sass and skepticism. They are equally dead and equally ivory tower.

I think the reading as a form of delivery system for written things is not really worth much outside of a self-aggrandizing need for claps and book sales. That said. They are a thing that is done. Because how else do the words get into the faces? People don't read journals really. And few buy books unless they know the author or happen to find something randomly that they are into.

It's an issue. My solution is to do readings in non-traditional ways. At bars. Online. I don't think it fixes any of the issues with readings. But it means I don't have to go to a book store and stand at a mic and stare into nodding faces going 'mmm' at obnoxious points in the evening.


Cheapen

We break ourselves for what -

          There is a sense that we are ships docked together
     but what exactly are we afraid of

The drift into horizon -
A sound that is the collapse of self -

          We are paper rotting in the hold of night
     the only thing to be done is to take that and be it

Poem-A-Day #128 : Green

I was just as obsessed by colors and light as an 18 year old as I am as a 35 year old. Below the poem in my journal is one of my favorite bits of poetry. From David P. Young's The Man Who Swallowed A Bird:

Once I swallowed a bird,
felt like a cage at first, but now
sometimes my flesh flutters and I think
I could go mad for joy.

The original:

Green (3/17/99)

Calm, cool

The color of springtime country

Makes me long for tall grass

to run through

roll in

Lay and look at the sky

Surf the endless

fields of ocean

Calm, cool

Next to anything it is

perfect

Always relaxing

Nature in color

The edit:

Green

Long for the tall grass - the shade of big land

the stalks - thick and whip-like

The sound of speed - of knee high by the fourth of July

the thickness of summertime maple leaves

The sky bleaches against all this boiling pigment

all of this dampness - this scent of grass

The most restful of states - run in it - let it stain your jeans

the feeling of wet - the prime of your life

Foundational

Edmund Dulac

I said something deep today while talking on the phone with JAA. The discussion was about ourselves as writers. A notoriously douchey conversation topic, but we are writers so we talk about that thing a bunch.

We had stumbled into a discussion of looking backwards at our old work. Seeing what it was about. Learning from it. Personal archeology. JAA writes in journals all the time. Every few months he takes a journal and moves the work onto a computer and begins to edit. I tend to not write things down. It means I forget a bunch, but the written word is like concrete to me and I don't like to set things too early.

I mentioned that I do have a pretty rigorous computer filing system. It's by year and alphabetical. I even put draft numbers in there.

I mentioned that I was sifting through poems from 2000 recently. That it felt like a gift to be able to go back to that time and rethink the work. Edit it. And here's where I got all deepish. I said:

As writers, we get to rewrite our pasts. Erase it. Rework it until it's perfect.

And thinking on that, I realize that I meant it. But not in a erasing the past to pretend it didn't happen way. In a way similar to a cover-up tattoo. You will always remember that there was something else there, Always. And maybe only you can see it. But it exists. Foundational. Underneath.

I've been thinking a lot about foundation lately. Being back in NM has led me down paths I walked 12 years ago. My early 20s were spent writing a lot and working only on weekends. It was great in the way only your college years can be.

My foundation as a writer is in that space. That work. Re-reading it, I am struck by how of that space I was. Writing angry anti-war poems. Aping Ginsberg's voice. Trying to write a poem about body image form a woman's perspective. A few slightly questionable sex poems that border on being rapey. It's all very young man of me. Very Bush V. Gore of me.

At the same time I've been reading a few actual foundational texts for my Pub Weekly review gig. I read a new translation of One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan-al-Shaykh. And then this week I did the new Wole Soyinka translation of Forest of a Thousand Daemons by D. O. Fagunwa. The Fagunwa book is only from 1939 but is deeply foundational to modern African lit. 1001 Nights is obviously foundational to most lit.

They relate to each other in tone, in topics, and in structure. They both are about someone telling stories. They both rely heavily on morality and on a readers pre-known knowledge of certain tropes. They 'teach'. And they both have deep, problematic sex politics.

Foundational literature - Aesop. Plato. 1001 Nights. Forest of a Thousand Daemons - is a thing we often don't think about. That little hidden thought in the back of our head. It only rears up when we actually reopen the file saved away somewhere. When we stare into it long enough to see ourselves in there.

The ugly and the beautiful.

Reverse

Reverse (Billy Collins Directions) 7/25

Piercing the ground with your stick
heading up toward the hill
into the crowd of maple and ash
to the house, until you disappear
I will watch after you and not turn back
with one hand on your shoulder
I will walk with you as far as the garden.
Come knock on my door.
Let me know before you set out.

Taking the vast outside into ourselves
where we stand in the tremble of thought.
Passing over the hills and the ground
through a meadow and the shadow of clouds,
greener than ever, spring water flowing.
The entities that continue to return
will soon be gone. Rregard
its breast made of humus and brambles,
how the earth holds us painfully
and begin to recite their stories,
how the voices of light enter the body.
It is hard to speak of these things.

Driving overhead toward some destination
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
and if this is your day, you might even
fall a cone through the trees.
A sprig of birdsong or leafy
things and you will hear nothing.
Breaking into the shapes and tones
the light pouring down into the woods
to sit on, you will be able to see.
And, when you find an agreeable rock
the columns of trees, you are hiking up.
When the sun strobes through.
The best time for this is late afternoon.

A good enough place to stop.
Which is as high as you can go.
Ridge with a border of pine trees,
you will eventually come to a long stone.
When the going gets steep, you
might have to grab on a sapling
and if you go beyond there you arrive at
the small footbridge with the broken railing
and farther on, you know…
Against the light-brown fallen leaves
and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now.
Down, during the horrors of the Ice Age,
to a heap of rocks.
Walk into the woods, you come
and you know how if you leave the path
where all the yellow primroses are
the ones that bend around the far end of the garden
the ones you see from the kitchen window.
You know.