The Poetry Project
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Joanna Fuhrman & John Koethe
[This event took place February 5, 2010]
Report by Lauren Russell
Before introducing Joanna Fuhrman, Stacy Szymaszek called our attention to a “silver three” on the ceiling of the Parish Hall. Startled, I looked up to find an aluminum balloon of the flower shop variety, mysteriously emblazoned with the number “3.” The presence of this integer made me think of my high school English teacher, a former radio talk show host who marked me down for including original ideas in my essays and insisted on the intrinsic significance of threes — three witches in Macbeth, three Mary’s at the Resurrection, three parts to any story.
It was a relief then, to listen to Joanna Fuhrman’s poems, which constantly defy any such ordered explication. Wearing a purple blouse with a gold v-neck embellishment and matching pink and purple stockings, Fuhrman began with a poem from her third book, Moraine. A moraine, she told us, is the expanse created when a glacier has passed. As a poetic structure, it’s an excuse to throw all kinds of stuff together, which, she continued, meant that the poem she was about to read was not really a moraine at all.
“Moraine for Bob” is one of my favorite love poems, as it speaks not of what the self and the beloved are, but rather what they are not, through a series of wonderfully strange statements. If I hadn’t misplaced my copy in a recent move, I would cheat and type the exact lines, but at the reading, I scrawled down a couple: “I was never a paper doll in the pyromaniac sense of a pal” and “You were never a word in the mystic sense of an obstacle.”
Following “Moraine for Bob,” Fuhrman transitioned to poems from her latest book, Pageant — poems, Stacy Szymaszek said in her introduction, that “appreciate elaborate presentation while exposing artifice.” Fuhrman wrote the poem “You Don’t Mean that Gesture,” she told us, after the second George Bush election (I assume she meant the second election of the second George Bush….too many seconds.). The poem features a gleefully sadistic house. “Ha ha ha ha he he he he he, said the bellicose walls as they spun toward the walls of the dictator’s house.”
She followed this up with the poem “On Some Gossip Overheard at the Meritocracy Bar and Grill,” which generated much laughter from the audience. “Now the rich are no more real than the non-rich,” Fuhrman read, “who wait for the F train to take them to their jobs as pedicab drivers or Adjunct Assistant Blindfolded Archery Professors at nomadic colleges.” Fuhrman read with consideration for pacing and tone, one hip slightly cocked to the side. By the end of the poem, the rich have “dropped into the muddy puddle they like to call ‘The Soul,’ copyright 2006, patent pending.” As she read “The Soul,” Fuhrman’s eyes rolled upward, and you could hear the quotation marks in her voice.
Some Poems from Recent Issues of 6×6 vis-à-vis a Poem by Joe Ceravolo
by Vincent Katz
A poem by Joe Ceravolo…
Why would it make sense to analyze select poems by a disparate group of younger poets working today via one particular poem by Joe Ceravolo? Wouldn’t it be better, if one wanted to make the case that Ceravolo is newly relevant, to take his entire oeuvre as a reference field? And even if his poetry might presage formally (through its informality) some things some poets today are doing, surely there are many other ways they are writing that have nothing or little to do with Ceravolo, or have much more to do with a wide range of poets from diverse periods.
The fact is that there is something in the poetry of both Barbara Guest and Joe Ceravolo that is distinct from other poets of their time or later and which is becoming increasingly recognized and influential among poets working today.[1] Let’s call it musicality. It is a way of communicating that has little to do with logic, except as the logical mind extrapolates from given signposts. It is poetry that is non-linear; stories are not told. Settings, if anything, are intimated, not specified. The poems do not rely on humor, irony, or Surrealist surprise of detail.
And yet the poetry of neither of these poets is fragmentary. I believe that has to do with the time in which both Guest and Ceravolo grew up. In a pre-media, pre-multi-tasking, age, their poetics, aware though they were of tragedy, aspired to wholeness. I don’t mean their poems have pat endings, quite the contrary, but their poems have completeness. You can think of them as musical pieces. They begin with motifs, which are elaborated, and ultimately conclusions — musical conclusions — are reached.
It occurs to me I have been trying for some time to find a way out of the fragmentary. The more the fragmentary has been praised as the signal artistic achievement of the past century, the more I have realized I am uncomfortable with its ascendancy.[2] Ceravolo and Guest are excellent guides to poetry that is thoroughly modern without being fragmented. In their poetry, there is no desire to turn back to an earlier conception of poetry’s limits.
A poem by Joe Ceravolo, then, provides the springboard for thinking about a group of young poets, who have been published in recent issues of 6×6. Let’s take a look at a poem by Joe Ceravolo, and then bring it back with us to 6×6.
Stars of the Trees
and Ponds
stars. The night and the
distance of the lake.
The lake: mosquitoes, the
uni-inter air—the pond of
towering mosquitoes we float
through. Float:
the tents as we use
the lumpy earth under a
blanket. Cars: the
blanket of cars facing your
vision of stars and thoughts
never concealed to the lake.
Conceal: Thoughts are never
hidden, the mosquito cries to
the lake. And brings the
lake’s invisible man
Invisible: a woman rises into
the lake and out of the lake
Pond: you are left in the tent
and see the beige pond.
Leak: a woman stands over you.
Woman: the pond leaks.
You hear it.
[as published in The Paris Review 38, Summer, 1966]
This poem by Joe Ceravolo, “Stars of the Trees and Ponds,” accrues power through repetition. Not a description of a scene, nonetheless a setting emerges; the title hints at that setting, although the force of the possessive “of” is ambiguous, and the graphic separation of the word “Ponds” from the rest of the title seems to set it almost as counterbalance to the other terms.
Edwin Torres & Will Alexander
[This event took place Wednesday, November 3, 2009]
Report by Nada Gordon
Edwin Torres was stylin’ in his official MTA pop lettrist NY School subway socks and fine loud maybe zinnia print shirt in shades of burgundy, pumpkin, scarlet, neon cantaloupe, and 50s aqua on a warm cream background. I watched him psych up gathering energy to be, as Stacy quoted him in her introduction, “sincere in [his] weirdness.”
Once at the podium all that gathered and focused energy sprung out in his rhythms and, in the initial poem, in / ^ / sounds. It seemed an address or response to a child: sucking, cup, child, and duct were some of the phonemes he lingered over here. These were, in his words, “brokens laced together by brokens,” and I confirmed my sense that Edwin is the sort of poet-presence who could stand up and read a phone book, so attentive is he to language sounds and ways of performing them to maximize and energize meaning.
This first poem was in the mode of a kind of child’s story, but not in any kind of infantilized way. He intoned parts of it in keys that kept modulating upwards, and that was beautiful. “A shape snailed in the curries.” There was something, I thought, a little old-timey classic Steinian about Edwin’s way of working, its associativeness, how each line took a hint from the previous and transformed: “so I take another step.”
Next was his version of “I Remember,” but with a mischievous twist. Most memory-sections ended with some variation of the exclamation, “what a cute spic!” I loved how this was both discomfiting and true, for isn’t that kind of what one thinks encountering Edwin, although maybe not exactly in those terms? Can I say that? It’s a complex statement, auto-infantilizing, charmingly self-regarding, epithet-neutralizing, ironic but also not ironic, and I can’t imagine anyone but Edwin presenting and defamiliarizing it the way he did, never the same way twice, and always unexpected, nestled at the end of sections that included phrases like “I remember the audience levitating in the middle of a poem” and “wrapped up in the viral opportunity of a cute spic.” The lines were way too long to write down, but there was something about a writing machine, something about skin color; I couldn’t keep up with transcription, and I loved that, because, you know…
…subtraction and erasure and minimalism do very little for me (ha!). It is just my nature to always want more and more and more, and the whole evening, both Edwin’s and Will’s poems were exercises in, meditations on, agglutination and accretion.
What accrued in the next poem was moths, lots and lots of them, in this poem that was so visual it was almost like a screenplay. First there was only one moth and then several moths “eating special sidewalk bugs” then hundreds of them fluttering around on the sidewalk. I could tell that Lee Ann Brown liked the moths. I heard her make some noises indicating as much, and recalled a conversation she and I had had about the figure of the moth in Bernadette’s writing, how the moth is a kind of muse or symbol of muse, and the moth is also mouth and mother.
Next Edwin read a flarfed-up address to Allen Ginsberg celebrating their “unrequited bromance”; I wondered if this was Edwin’s translation of Ginsberg’s address to Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California.” The brilliance flowed thick and fast here: “Emily Dickinson bedsheets,” “unformed Unicorns,” and “Christian Bök umlauts”: again, too fast for transcription but not too fast to amuse and charm.
“Song of the Red Lamb” he read like blues or gospel, but not singing: on the edge of song: “who lives on that lamb red leg?” Echoes for me of blues masters, Tracie Morris, and oddly, Eraserhead, and it turned almost towards the end into a train beggar’s chant.
It got druggier. The whole evening was gloriously druggy, but the next piece Edwin read really put me into an altered state. He read a piece full of spelling mistakes, respecting the spelling mistakes and elevating them into some kind of other world, a space of druggy art: “What ig you had a privet club– What if yiz was a nark chen – Menartade the pump of my duz– your freebaloo” (these misspellings are of course approximated) everything half deformed, with just enough of something to hang on to. Towards the end Edwin moved into a funny whispery voice– every phoneme COUNTED even though only half comprehensible and I felt like I was underwater but perhaps I’m too easily inducted into that space, because I so much want to be there, near that “lamb red leg” because “Audrey has flat feet.”
If Will Alexander’s fashion statement was muted (black baseball cap with no logos, black jacket and pants, olive sweater), his poetry was not, and neither were his preambles to the poetry, which sounded to me like a combination of preaching and auto-consolation:
“We must break the plane… move with vertical insistence [toward the] …rediscovery of the human being”
“Words have energies in sound and look,” he said, that are sometimes “painterly” and it was in a 1957 dictionary that he found the word “loxodrome,” and he decided to make that word a name of a sailor. A few unconnected lines from the first section he read:
“a riddled scorpion typhoon”
“a stinging pottery of nerves”
“kino synthetic shockwaves”
“a body below the simulation of the trilobites”
“be it the pelvic whale or the caudal dolphin”
The sailor, I began to realize, was absolutely navigating through vertical layers of undiscovered planes – as Stacy had said in her introduction, on “a trajectory of potentia” and “[with] accretion through unprecedented structure.” Every line was exploratory, Loxodrome a kind of “vulpine” “oneiric” “sea wasp.” “He exists at nervous solitary limit.”
Will said in another interlude that poems come to him “not so much as flashes but as seepage… a murmuring always going on at the oddest times and the oddest moments… kind of like the cosmos.” (Here I heard Erica Hunt exclaim, “yeah, right!”) He continued… “That’s not outer space: we’re outer space…. most people don’t know where the Orion Spur is in the universe: we’re on it.”
Lines from “Nexus of Phantoms”:
“In a lorikeet cave”
“the swans looking back on solemn blood perusal”
“the scent of each lorikeet is consumed & brought to dazzling eclipse”
…and throughout I had the sense of cosmic (im)possibility.
The next preamble was on water and the infinity of water. We are, Will said, “always walking around with water,” and it is “all one flow.” He mentioned an “occlusionary consciousness” but I don’t know what he meant by that… perhaps that it is obstructed? or obstructing? and called water a “dysphoric medium,” but again I wasn’t sure why, as surely it is not only dysphoric unless we drown in it or are lost on it or if it is pressing on our brains and stressing us out. Anyway.
He stood with a wide stance, as if in second ballet position. I don’t know why I noticed that or what that meant, except that its rootedness was somehow in contrast with the wildly interstellar nature of his verse. He spoke of the “dark conduction of saliva.”
He continued, “Seepage transpires… beyond what you know…sometimes toward a deeper understanding of what you already know.”
The next poem he read was called “The Optic Wraith.” Some lines:
“tortured hummingbird’s sortie”
“a sun in a squandered maelstrom house”
“each of my shadows collects around a pole of a fierce & blazeless assessment”
“harems of spittle”
“pariah plunged through psychotic mirages”
and I thought to myself, you know, this poetry is very interesting almost as artifact. He writes as if Objectivism, the New York School, Language Poetry, and the internet had never happened. Its mysticism almost seems quaint. There is no body in it, nothing personal, no obvious intertextuality, and absolutely no irony at all. Instead it is a relentless orientalist surrealism, a grammatical exercise in endless appositives that aim to extend perception the way nested phrases in a diagrammed sentence send the mind off into various diagonal directions.
Another preamble: “we are taught not to think but to respond… poets and people of depth take this on, this energy.” He quoted Bob Kaufman, whom he called the founder of the Beats, as saying that the poet works a 24-hour shift, and said that we are “saturated with this whole continuum…this whole range of awareness.”
more lines:
“God a philosophical Torment”
“macropositional scalding”
“beyond the scope of oppositional turquoise”
“subsumed in the body with a rudderless experience”
“Poetry,” he said, is “such an intense listening experience… so I try to keep it compact.” Compact? No, that is the last word I would use for his poetry. He continued, “Nero went on so long one of the audience members had a baby.” Will did kind of go on for a long time. I almost had a baby, but instead decided to get up and stretch. Those chairs at the Project are a torment for me, sort of concave at the back, ouch. He went on speaking about the long poem, how it “speaks at different levels.” Poetry is, he said “a living conduction.”
More lines:
“ambit of an iris transcribing its folios in trance”
“a brackish melancholia”
“narcotic iridescence”
“an epileptic maharajah” [this rhymed internally with pasha and noxious]
“pre-Columbian gerbils” [Drew Gardner wrote this down, visibly delighted. He also wrote down “A mongoose can love,” which struck me as a perfect Drew line]
“abstract carking”
“a fetid indigo dalliance”
His last line pretty much encapsulated his poetics, uncharacteristically compactly:
“the electrical route of 100 solar masses”
Well, even if I did get a little antsy towards the end, this was truly one of those rare readings where I felt myself in the presence of two poets who are ALWAYS ON DUTY working that 24-hour shift, totally present to those “murmurings” and “seepages” that are the stuff of our art. To me, Edwin’s poems are more considered as form, in that they frequently have some sort of axis from which exude parallel but varying structures, and in that each poem makes a formal statement somehow different from every other poem. Will, on the other hand, seems to be tapping into one immeasurably huge poem, of which the shorter pieces seem to be sampled segments. Still, the force and immensity of his project are undeniable, and both poets managed, in only about two hours, to open multiple doors to multiple worlds. I salute them both.
Christopher Nealon & Catherine Wagner
[This event took place Wednesday, October 21, 2009]
Christopher Nealon and Catherine Wagner came together on this mild autumn night to read for a smallish but attentive audience. It was an auspicious pairing; both are confident, compelling readers whose writing styles complement one another.
Stacy Szymaszek started the evening by introducing Christopher Nealon, who, she told us, has been “compared…to O’Hara distracted by Bears Stearns.” When Nealon began to read from his books – first from The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions)– I could hear O’Hara clearly in them: funny, erudite, seemingly “off-the-cuff” but clearly carefully sculpted and bitingly insightful. Here are a few of the lines that hit me most forcefully; most of them drew laughs or little grunts of appreciation from the audience, too:
“I’m not crazy, right? The police are not the heroes?”
“Rise up, California. I’m tenured. I’m useless. I’m ready.”
“I enjoy the voice of the Prophet. It has a neighborhood feel to it.”
“I have this feeling that all my sexual fantasies are actually just breathing exercises.”
Nealon then turned to Plummet (Edge Books), his more recent book. Some of the gems I scribbled down from this book are as follows:
“I am not gay; I am from the future.”
“Dude, I’m not gonna steal your acorn.”
“I think your poem is hot.”
“You walk toward it wearing antlers, and on to Pennsylvania.”
And my personal favorite, a reference to Jake Gyllenhaal’s sexy naked-with-Santa-hat dance in the film “Jarhead”:
“Jake Gyllenhaal, you are inconceivably beautiful, even in that Santa hat.”
I couldn’t agree more. Nealon was charming and relaxed in between poems; he provided commentary only when it was necessary, and for the most part he allowed the poems to speak for themselves, which they did, beautifully.
The lines above, plucked out of their context as they are, may not do justice to the overall impression I had of Nealon’s work, but they should give a sense of the balance he strikes between a casual offhandedness and an attention to the careful tuning of the line. What I heard as an audience member were drily funny meditations (tinged with sadness, solemnity) on life in the modern urban world, and Nealon’s delivery style couldn’t have showcased the poems to greater effect.
Stacy Szymaszek, in her black Buddha-emblazoned t-shirt, returned to the podium to introduce Catherine Wagner. She talked about Wagner’s “singular[ity]” and her “removal of inhibitions” – hers and ours – while, appropriately, referencing Freud. She made an apt comparison of Wagner to Lorine Niedecker – if Niedecker “had…kept a secret sex diary,” that is – because of Wagner’s ability to use rough, raw language in tightly tuned lines.
Wagner started by singing “This Land is Your Land,” a poem from her first book, Miss America, as a way of thanking Lee Ann Brown (in the audience) for first suggesting that she sing some of her poems. She then went on to read (and sing) a few poems from Macular Hole.
Some of the lines that hit me were:
“I’m the control and the experiment bothly / you’ll never get a result out of me”
“My guilt is omnipotence erupting backwards”
“When you ask, when you ask / you pull back the healing scab / you permit the lie, you drain the bath / you air the unsealed meat”
Wagner’s reading style is both welcoming and unnerving; she has clearly (nearly) memorized most of her poems, and maintains fairly steady eye contact with the audience as she reads or sings. She reads at a carefully measured pace (as did Nealon), and she has complete control of the room. The only sound, in fact, was of her son, Ambrose, munching crackers (very quietly, but still audibly) as he watched her perform.
Wagner moved on to read from her just-released book, My New Job (Fence Books). I had just bought the book before the reading, so I didn’t know any of the work and was eager to hear it read.
She read from one section, “Hole in the Ground,” which begins with an epigraph (that Wagner sang) from a folksong: “Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down / I wish I was a mole in the ground.” She read some of the poems, sang others, and I felt that I was involved in this “singular” voice’s processing of the various experiences of the world – sex, love, work, motherhood, etc. – which she approaches with a dynamic curiosity and a rich and strange sense of humor. Wagner works language to the max. Here were some of my favorite lines from this section:
“Fill the / chick and filler well of ding ding dong.”
“Let me eat your face, neighbor / Who owns the Bagel and Deli on High”
“I dare you to give me pleasure. / THAT IS NOT HOW THAT IS NOT HOW / I’ll show you.”
Also from this section, Wagner sang “Song,” which is literally a penis and vagina song (and Stacy Szymaszek’s favorite poem in the book) that begins:
“Penis regis, penis immediate, penis / tremendous, penis offend us; penis / ferule us, penis, protrude from us”
Wagner finished with the poem, “My New Job.” She punctuated her reading with gestures at appropriate times, so that she was really performing the poem, not just reading it. I had the sense, from hearing and then later reading the poem, of the speaker transforming, floating away from her old body, her old self, and being born again into a strange new body that she herself has created, one that is mechanical, huge, and crudely made. But the poem also resonates with the strangeness of being in any body at all. Wagner makes the familiar new and unsettling in lines like, “I picked myself apart With a fork / Connected a wire Where my belly was / Coiled up the plug / The prongs poke hurt.”
Before Wagner read “My New Job,” she joked that it was “an hour long.” I would have happily stayed there for the duration, and I’m certain I would not have been alone.
-Laura Sims
Robert Glück & Eileen Myles
[This event took place on Wednesday, October 28, 2009]
Body language is useful. We submit and control through this – our tongues caught in the spin cycle. Yet the larynx seems to have the spotlight when it comes to text and sometimes the work can go to our heads – literally. In order to speak about connectivity and community, Robert Glück and Eileen Myles used text as body language. Each gesture they made was used to say something about our bodies and how we see our anatomies at work.
Robert Glück opened with a story from About Ed. The narrator says he was “made of glass”.
Not fragile, but that everyone could see inside of him – they knew just how badly he needed to be touched.
“We were the center”, he says, telling the story of Ed’s first sexual experience through Ed’s voice. His partner asking him (with his tongue still nestled in Ed’s anus) to “slit on ma ace.” Ed didn’t understand him until his partner paused, enunciated, “shit on my face”. Ed’s body followed as if to a “master”.
The room laughed.
The laughter wasn’t nervous, but joyous, reveling in what’s left of our bodies after wearing them down for so long with language – the common thread of a first.
We were in safe hands.
Glück smiled and continued. He moved into the next piece “The Moon is Brighter than the Sun.”
What happens when a body we knew is gone? What happens when a new body takes shape? The narrator’s body seems as if a stranger with the loss of Ed and the birth of his child. What is to be done with what’s left of us in his place, the ones in the middle of life?
Even earth seems suspect: “Earth does not mean our world, Planet Earth, it means dirt, burial – as death is full.” Glück becomes obsessed with a quote from Frank O’ Hara after Ed’s death, trying to parse out why it only comes to him now. He repeats to himself “Is the earth as full, as life was full, of them?” He grapples with what life means in this absence and how to write about it: “If language is alienating, that familiar alienation is who I am.”
This time the room was silent.
“You have to bear silence in the 21st century,” Eileen Myles said during her reading of “How to Write an Avant Garde Poem” from her newest book The Importance of Being Iceland.
After reading Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” I always think about how he compares death and silence, only the thought didn’t last long because with every jerk of the knee, foot swing, and hand gesture, Eileen Myles brought my focus back to movement, the body living. She spoke of the importance of reading with friends, but I don’t think she was only referring to Glück in the front row, although she did nod in his direction. She moved beyond the physical, in a similar way to Glück, also calling to O’Hara (he “sounded queer”), Andy Warhol (who “sounded dumb, and that was good”) and John Cage (the importance of “making a map for your piece”).
The New York City outside as well as the city of Myles’ work seemed like more than just an elaborate grid of klaxons and iridescent lounges – it was a community and it felt alive. The city, pulsating and transparent, needed to be touched.
Both poets made it seem like death might be just another change and that love is the concern here, but that both need to be written about. Together and at all times, if you can swing it.
It shocked me when death came through Myles’ poem. The young couple just out for a drive, then
the wood came off the truck. The coma. Then gone. And just as it came it left, quickly, but kept me in my seat feeling, but the city requires that you just keep going. She moved through her work and on to other subjects: grease, poetry, women, haircuts.
Life is in the stories we tell. We are made of narrative, or at least we live them every day. Our voices, accents, the flip of our hair, nudge of our glasses. We’re speaking and trying to tell each other something.
Before one poem Myles said, “You don’t need to know anything. I didn’t even need to say that, in fact.”
Just listen.
-Kelly Ginger
5 Poems by Macgregor Card
THE MERMAN’S GIFT
for Karen Weiser
Brother I need back my sticks
I hope you make it forward
Hope you learn to range
by grass depressed by possibility alone
One and every
actionable blade of glamor
in a ranger’s vatic underfauna
If we go there
I’m a total wreck my brother
carried off at totalcy
I need for you to wreck
upon yourself
the salvage you recover
from me
and I love you
I need back the sticks I loaned you
How else will I say I be
the sun’s own paned adjudicant
to the peal of shade rotation
around every quitter’s cone
if you can’t turn
the simple wrecking lamp on me
Remember anyone at all
who doesn’t know you is a quitter
and anything that doesn’t act upon you
is a quitter
almost any people, glass or metal
any mountain you could think to name
has quit beneath a quitter’s vegetation
not to mention
all those quitter leaves so many you would think
they never had a chance
almost any
furniture and window overlooking
every city’s quitter signal—
wish you’d come inside from their neglect
if it were even possible
to sit here with me in the broadest public
lost at sea, a bench in memory of strangers
placed through everybody’s moving rain
(pretend you could endure
a friend’s wide-open shower scene)
as if half-surf wherever
stranded as a cave-mouth weed
there’d be a time
to say my brother is survived by our merbrother
“Take care”
“Take care forever, no!”
Proverb not
you are your friend’s own family
but you are your friend’s own family
robinson
“Meet me in my chambers”
better “Meet me in my brother’s chambers”
Hit me in the folk
I am so high on you
When you weren’t succeeding
anywhere
not even by your standard
have my sticks I said
I hope they bring us closer now
they have to be returned
Just think of it as obligation
without flooring hesitation
(pretend you’re not ashamed
to dance in public)
I just want an understanding
that exceeds
without excluding unremitting favor
or favors accountability
over accessory to
(any single) fraud
I hope you make it forward
I need back the sticks
Ever see a merman put away
its roaming horn in tears
because you gave it all
no signal?
Hope you never do
on my account
I hope you honor all your debts
I’m so in love with you
POEM
Even spirits
have their
average signal
turned on you
simon tuesday
monday luke
goodnight
goodnight
in every way
you can imagine
fist on three
impress
the burning frost
pick up
where all these pistons
in the dove meat
left us
“all left riots”
welcome up
in arms
can’t service
all these
middle-magic doves
just let go
like that
“next volunteer”
thanks all weather
psalm machine
thanks forever
THAT OLD WOOLLY BLOODLETTING
In youth you tend to look rather frequently into a mirror,
not at all necessarily from vanity. You say to yourself,
“What an interesting face; I wonder what he’ll be up to?”
—J. M. Barrie, “Courage”
Here is how pussycat /
I will show you to carry /
your unframed Cortez /
the conqueror portrait /
out of your nursery and into the forest
you’ll kneel in to sleep
the cock of the walk
through falling of dead
unalterable leaves
you cannot yearn to ally
your friends with influence of law
Learn your Greek
You’re a hero to open your book to learn
Jupiter failed as a nation
Though made by the giants
Australian is English!
I’d fold the universe
shut with tears
choking my prize
four crosses of shirts and trousers
in my fist
and a poor fellow’s sword on my floor
Come from somewhere for a purpose
Go to somewhere for none
The angry burst into the room
The mad burst into the wall
as a victory poem
let it not be said
in the song that is so true
no ship moves up the one star night
without a plan to execute
in perpetuity, no no no no no no no
No, my boy, no no no no no no no no no no no
No no no, my boy, no no no no no no no no no no no
The ship is a natural ship
as the wand is a natural wand
as the Englishman is hearing the frogs
uplifted as the queerest antique stag
Don’t play with banker’s straw, my boy
but talk the penny down
from its smoldering cloud
into your cup
you are that human shape
of public statuary
not to be
that town crier
in a meat locker
(armies travel on their stomachs)
Everyone’s beloved
is a finite distance from your bed
Carry your portrait
close to the vest
leave your liqueur
set down by the fire
pick up the receiver
remember your Greek
and strum your important guitar.
You are doing what I tell you to do.
What more do you want us to do.
We will eat and then we will guard.
I want you to obey me willfully.
I do this to make us work.
The giants made me for this purpose.
We will guard and then we will sleep.
That is the action.
There’ll be enough trouble.
I’m a hero to open your book.
We will work on the same shift.
TO FRIEND-TREE OF COUNTED DAYS
A hurricane is stripping the woods
A key will be my dwelling
The feint of a fire the heart confirms
And the air whose capture seized it
—René Char, “Effacement du peuplier”
I am climbing a tree
too high for words
whose leaves are as green
as they ought to be
the only shade at night
that meets me is my own
Johnny Élan forever
I hate to confess
sometimes I feel
volunteered upon
by a formal quality of sky
cowed trust
in movement and volition
put to love
propensity itself to feel
a little black mandate
yes, for consent
and resignation
white cloud
black cloud
white goose
deaf goose
I wish I was not
on a burning tree
but a tree that was
really on fire
though the emphasis
is my own
it is anyone’s place
to be here, the view
I can only imagine
is probably astounding
if seen in generous light
though consolation
is that debt of love knows
infinite regress
I thought was said
that debt of love
knows infinite egress
and so the pines
are bright
because they are all
around me
white cloud
black wood
white cliff
black wreath
Johnny Élan was here
his knife as fast
as it ought to be
the tree he seized
grew high
the tree I sing
you know that way
it is the shade
that meets you
is your own
like any other feeling
spent apart
from green hard home
below red star
to shrill formality
one thing
I do not lack the sense in
to expire
How long is the comedy
about me?
How far to the barrier
I know?
What is there to sing
but a round?
What is there to seize
but a while?
What is there to counter
but fall?
EMPHASIS MINE
Along came a colossus, along came a colossus—
but if I can’t, but if I can’t, but if I can’t, but if I can’t
—Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni
All this blank tape here
All of it mournful
Any can blow
the long copper horn
in love with oneself
and so only blow
as anyone—
not one relation
to qualify
everything
that am called proud
a pure grammatical joke
to salt the handshake
and convert
free salutation into policy
Put to mouth my true true
ball and sing—
I got my own / Lorenzo!
mouth noises / Lorenzo!
I sing I got my own
tenderness—
Punitive early riser’s / capital first step
and experience of time
as incrementalized doubt
Lorenzo! / CHORUS Lorenzo!
Put to mouth my due restraint
Traitor in my applause crypt!
Bronze me twice / shame on me
Traitor in / SOLO applause crypt!
If you put out the hand
a little mince
Then put out your eye
a little stick
If you put out the hand
a little mince
Then put out your eye
a little salt, but if I can’t—
a little mince, but if I can’t—
a little stick
Macgregor Card is a poet, translator and bibliographer living in Queens. His first full poetry collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, will be out in November 2009 from Fence Books (selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series by Martin Corless-Smith). Recent work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Ink Node, Aufgabe, Lungfull!, Fence, Baltimore Is Reads, The Recluse, Puppyflowers, Whitman Hom(m)age and Best American Poetry 2007. With Andrew Maxwell he was co-editor of The Germ: a journal of poetic research (archives here). He is currently editing an anthology of New York School poetries with Olivier Brossard.
5 Poems by Claire Becker
By My Tongue
I live a day.
I don’t say anything.
I depend on,
don’t know how
to depend on.
I want to know I can
not have to.
I want to say everything
as if
I’m getting paid for this
consciousness,
stranger on the road.
But I like to do it anyway.
But I like to do it anyway.
I live a minute,
in that way
all others
unfolded inside.
The Werld
Enjoy your coffee,
white guy, I say after we smile.
I see all the babies
in stomachs and strollers,
the toddlers on scooters,
in helmets. You’re negative.
I forget to leave
the couch this morning.
I find my empty,
ugly notebooks,
get all the ugliness
out and give it as gifts
to other people.
You’re ugliness in my life
but the lack of you.
Wandering about
the unknown’s kind of beautiful,
kind of laughable
unless it’s you wondering
then it’s scary.
The man yells
in the dog park,
How do I get out of here?
Yells, Go fuck yourself.
Turning around,
furthering the sound of the echoing.
Twenty Eight
I’m out of touch.
I walk and touch
the soft shirts, felt hats.
You brush your hand
across my back
and leave a piece of it.
Contact
that makes nothing happen.
Black and orange for the game.
I want to be you
with a hand so natural.
Put my hand
provisionally on your back.
Just try, just put it
down, then we’ll fix it.
You get out to head
to the game. I look out
into a car.
Black swirl of hair.
I don’t know
eyes are there
but stare.
When I leave work,
I should go home,
take care. That’s where
people are.
As One Semi-Afloat
I whine inside as you
whine at my shower.
I’ll leave the house
with a white hair on my sock,
so it catches up.
Months change to months.
I’ll take your little hands in mine
and rate my summer,
sir. I’m less like her.
I’ll hold you good.
Come over and stare with me
to make some decisions.
I’ll turn you
while the clock snakes,
tuck your head
under your paw.
Pity’s the way
into relationships and motherhood.
I’ll walk down the leafy street
for a drink
and sit. Leaves,
wide street
with paint stores on it. I stake
myself
on the perfect triangle
of streets,
traffic lights keeping the traffic slow.
If you don’t know, you don’t
deserve to know
how, how
I’m doing the same thing, haven’t
let go yet.
I’ll put my head
over it and bag my head.
Flaneur, Voyeur
I’m exclaiming,
I love to ride a bike.
He’s exclaiming it below
on the street, through the cement blockade
between the trees.
High in the flat part,
I’m opening windows
with my whole body,
then hanging curtains
to break the sun.
Each morning, the dog swears.
Each good memory,
you tell until it spills in the air.
On the sidewalk,
he lifts our trays
from old ironing boards.
Why do we walk down the street?
The street’s for trash going down
gutters. Why do I change and love
garbage and gutters?
Claire Becker lives in Oakland and teaches in the high school mainstream program at the California School for the Blind. She co-edits the email/web journal RealPoetik with Lily Brown. Her e-chap Get You is available through Duration Press, and her first book, Where We Think It Should Go, is forthcoming from Octopus Books.
Review of HURRY HOME HONEY: LOVE POEMS 1994-2004 by Sawako Nakayasu
Published by Burning Deck / 2009.
Review by David Perry
Love poems? Of course you do. That’s why you’re IT, the human hockey puck from “Ice event: for 14 performers and one audience member.” Or maybe you don’t and you’re not. Maybe you’re the “angry man” who takes leave of his constipated woman, just as she is having a longish bout with her bowels while reading about the shipwreck of the Admiral Graf Spee and wondering vaguely if there are really people out there who “enjoy the smell of their own excrement.” Or perhaps you’re still not sure: You’re the ambivalent “I” of the (slightly shaggy) Franco-Cali-Steinian “Language barrier,” wandering between continents “with French dogpoo on your shoe,” wondering whom you prefer (dogs or men) and whether you might be in a movie (“One dog shoots some shit and this is a Western”).
Hurry Home Honey—a hat trick of a book, consisting of two previously published chapbooks, Balconic and Clutch: hockey love letters, and a third series, Crime to be quick—is a collection of prose poems, conceptual (sports) writing, poets theater, sound-as-sense associative riffing and artfully cracked lyrics that are cumulatively:
Not unlike
kissing
on a crowded train
you
then you
(“Hockey on the 20 m2 balcony”)
Throughout, love declares itself in registers alternately serious and playful, rueful and eager, personal to the point of a luminous opacity and “universal” to the point of transparent tongue-in-cheekiness, as Nakayasu’s language runs through the long oddness of being the one in six billion who is, was and/or will be in love with some other one-in-six-billion or another, replaying the experience of scanning a roiling crowd in hope of laying eyes on a missed or missing lover as time runs out on a last chance (imagined or actual) whose in-the-moment high drama is as likely to mellow over time into bemusement as it is to crystallize into enduring heartache.
Balconic is a serial meditation on the balcony as a liminal space that is both inside and out, closet and stage—and, of course, timeworn romantic mise-en-scène in which the irreducibly subjective experience of love continues to irrupt anew, even among the most jaded of us. The series is preceded by a TOC/index poem driven by the phrase “having been given” that gestures towards Balconic’s 15 existing poems as well as others that do not appear, effectively pointing at lack as the negative ground necessary for the experience of presence.
“Door #3,” the penultimate poem in the series, deftly traces by way of a speed-meditation on balconyness the shape of a love affair tethered to “…our first balcony on the tenth floor, the balcony from where we watched the orange lights light the campus in that horrid orange way as only orange light can, that balcony where we waited out my first dryer cycle and the balcony where we waited no we didn’t wait my second dryer cycle because I put my coins in the wrong machine . . . .” This set of romantic subjective particularities emerges from a blur of more abstract, Platonic and ironic considerations of “the balconic balcony the balconian balcony the balconesque balcony the poeticized balcony the fully committed balcony” before collapsing (though not without some hope of return).
Clutch further pursues speed, crowds, performance and collapse (once one loses speed or collides with another). Nakayasu played amateur hockey around the time of writing Clutch, and her joy in the game takes this series beyond the conceptual play of Balconic to a more concrete space, one in which bracketed segments of fragmented verse both visually evoke “puck” and in their rhythm reproduce the alternation between smooth grace and the disjointed, violent motion typical of a game of dekes, checks and slapshots:
[ ] altercate minute
degloved vs. fragility
enter who—on the board
join or immensify, leaving it up to
[with] [whistle]
“Puck” fragments stand between longer prose poems and lyrics that perform the wonderfully unlikely role of being part of the greatest hockey serial love poem we have, climaxing in the aforementioned “Ice event,” in which IT, the audience member installed in a huge hollow puck, is subjected to a game presided over by a Perverted Referee in which one player is a disguised Person of Motherly Concern tasked with the impossible job of protecting IT from harm as the real players do with IT what hockey players do. As conceptual theater (staged once to date) Clutch lends a lightness and sophistication to Hurry Home that Balconic hints at and which the final series, Crime to be quick, brings to fullness.
Crime shows off Nakayasu’s serious quirkiness across a range of forms, but it is here that the slowest pieces propel Hurry Home from very good to remarkable. “Everybody’s breaking point,” “Hurry home honey,” and a brace of shorter prose poems drive this pillow (fight) book into near-allegorical narrative space where “love poems” begins to feel like a welcome command issued by Poetry itself. By the end, one may find oneself one among a strange group of obsessive collectors (books, flowers, booze) drawn to the shores of an “odd-figured lake” in “Everybody’s breaking point,” a tale that centers on a man dedicated to a project essential in its uselessness as failed love affairs or poems: “One day he will run the Boston marathon in one single breath, and all of us who have ever been to that lake will cheer him on, throwing our books and flowers and booze at him as he whizzes by oh-so-very quickly.” Love poems? Toss something you love at Nakayasu (if you can catch her).
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