from on .

______________________________________________
Grace Miceli is the author of American Girl Doll, ok cool, Feminist Art Coloring Book, and Teen Angel Sticker Bitch, among others. She holds a B.A. in studio art from Smith College. Her visual art has been widely acclaimed online and IRL, and featured in each just as thoroughly. Please visit www.gracemiceli.com to visit her world.

 

They Used to Dance On Saturday Nights
By Gillian Devereux
Aforementioned Productions, 2012, 34 p.
ISBN 978-0-9823741-4-6

The carnival performers in Gillian Devereux’s They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights (Aforementioned Productions) are always, like Robert Lowell’s prostitutes, “freelancing out along the razor’s edge”, always subject to the fatalities of their trades—knife throwing,  tightrope walking,  sword or fire swallowing. Entertainers are only as lucrative as the opacity of their parlor tricks and/or the chance genetic mutations of their tragedies. Freaks may “share a stomach or a torso”; may “frolic”, frighten” or “fold their bodies flat as farmland”, or an armless girl may have “a beauty in [her] strangeness that could ruin a man”. Images may be unexpectedly lovely, or transcendental: a dancing bear “soft as snow piled on pine boughs”, the salmon it’s tossed in its captivity leaping up into freedom and the constellations. Spectator and performer are a working system powered by the promise of newness, the momentary triumph of the illusory exotic.

There are also no dearth of “mutilated souls in cold morgues of obligation”, in Roethke’s phrase, variations of the quintessentially cruel ringmasters or mistress, whose

Children float in dingy beakers
Filled with blue-green bile: the dead stars
Of the dime museum, two-headed fetuses,
Stillborn monsters I carried like a thief…
To pay my way, I populated this carnival
Like Cronus, filled my belly with my own
Offspring, fed on small, disfigured bodies
Until, at last, I birthed my own meal ticket

Devereux’s text is most admirable as a metaphor for illness and survival. Many of her characters are examinations of Plath’s “magician’s girl who does not flinch”, professionals geared to stoicism and efficiency that is nothing like the seemingly effortless magic perceived by their audience. Performers themselves become spectators, housed in their own corporeality, captive audiences to the breakdowns of their own physical existences. But they are anything but passive observers. In The Act of Ignition, a girl whom “The sun hangs over [like] a tumor”

Stands
Alone in a field…
Then a flicker of light
Cuts through her, spills down
He arms and legs, chars her hair,
Crumbles her clothes to ash…
Her power developed
Suddenly: one morning she awoke,
Felt all her organs shift and spark
Like flint inside her…
She learned
To control this in time.
She learned
A single cell can incite a riot…

In Under the Big Top the limitations of the body—momentarily transcended by aerialism and dazzling feats of physical skill—are contrasted against the somehow-less-impressively powered (to the onlooker) accomplishments of nature and the cosmos:

No one notices the night sky…

No one sees
the backdrop, the shadow that shapes
_____and guards each delicate constellation.

Each star spins on invisible wire, falls
_____effortlessly into its assigned position
and not one person applauds….

I fall night after night,
_____netless and alone. I trained for this

my whole life, spent years in the air
_____learning to dive through the white
blare of spotlight; the physics of flight

_____swinging me over the bar
and farther, a solitary wheeling circle…

But nobody ever sees me…

It’s interesting to imagine copies of Devereux’s chapbook being handed out at the gate as carnival programmes; like Diane Arbus’ photographs, they tell us more than any mere propaganda ever could. Certainly this slim volume has something to teach us about magic and control, how indistinguishable the two often are from each other.

I became a teacher by accident. In 1995, I was asked to do a one day school visit in Paterson, New Jersey. I was phoned by Susan Amsterdam, one of the co-ordinators of The Passiac Community college Theatre and Poetry project. This is not the official name, I have never remembered the official name, but Maria Mazziotti Gillan founded and runs it, Susan co-ordinates it, and it is the only program of its kind in New Jersey, insofar as it serves strictly the urban population of Paterson and brings poets to the schools for one day visits. Susan works with the librarians of the various grade schools and high schools. Many noteworthy poets such as Lorna Decervantes, Gary Soto, and Sean Thomas Dougherty have participated.

Susan has one of the most affected mid-Atlantic accents of all time, fully as affected at Marie Dressler when she used to play the put-upon society lady in Marx Brothers movies. She is marvelous. Gillan’s entire staff is amazing, but Susan is the consumate professional, in the oldest, noblest tradition–organized, poised, with a voice somewhere between Winston Churchill, Ray Milland, and God knows who else. I sometimes call the number at three in the morning, just when I need a sense of majesty. I don’t leave a message and no one is there to be disturbed by it: “Hello… This is Susan Amsterdamn.” I am the only human being who has ever gotten the otherwise impeturbable Susan to shout. I have a gift for ruffling the utterly unruffable, but we will talk about this at a later time.

At any rate, I don’t know why I received a call to do a visit. I guess they considered me a poet. I ran a series, had published work, had read in the open at Maria Gillan’s Distinguished poet’s reading. Yes, I grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, so I’m urban, but I’ve never been street in the sense of having the cool. I am the anti-cool, Howdy Doody, El blanco. Yuppies from Long Island are way cooler than me. But the truth is I am arrogant–a wise ass, ballsy, without much shame, and I am a ham, and I like kids. I can talk to kids all day. They interest me. They will never pretend to like you. For that I am forever grateful. The moment a kid learns to pretend in that way, she or he is no longer a kid (usually, when they’ve learned to pretend to like you, they’re a “professional” in the worst sense–not like Susan, a woman I would go to war for). My first reaction to Susan’s voice was “This woman ain’t for real. No one sounds like that in real life. Maria made her up. (Gillan’s office is a Dickens novel–with Maria as the major character. All her staff can talk Maria speak. They know what she means even when she isn’t sure. It’s amazing.) So I met her, and she was real and had a kind heart as well as perfect and affected diction, and, every day, she was driving into the ghetto to do something good for kids who strangely enough, found her utterly affected voice, and inherrent dignity to be pleasing and comforting, just as I did. It was nice to know someone who spoke that well and was not a phony white bitch. Since then, I have played a sort of wayward Arthur to her Sir John Gilgud. (If you want to check out her voice call the center– but don’t you dare do it unless you agree not to leave a message. I’ll know and God will punish you). I think she is one of the ten rightous women of God, one of the holy forces standing between us and absolute destruction.

There’s another woman works for Maria called Arlene. Somehow, Maria Mazziotti Gillan ended up with 2 out of the 10 rightous women of God on her staff. Arlene is Armenian and once payed cash to get my car out of strorage when it had been towed from a street in Paterson. Arlene has been battling cancer for years now. Susan’s husband died, but they’re tough. Once, after a brutal break up (brutal for me, I got dumped), Arlene and Susan phoned me, without provocation, just to see how I was doing. At that time I was probably voted in Jersey as “most likely to commit suicide.” I am an opera, a sprawling mess. I admit it. Hello, I’m Joe Weil, and I am a sprawling mess. Thank God for those who are not.

So, I’m street in only one sense: if you ask me how I’m doing, and you seem to mean it, I will tell you my life story–like some lonely 80 year old neighbor (I am a lonely 80 year old neighbor). I will explain my love life, my lack thereof, my various aches and pains, the bios of my most interesting relatives, etc, etc. I will liberally extend reality or bend it to the shape of my tale, I may even tap dance, if it’s absolutely uneccessary. In short, I talk shit. While this is disastrous among middle class professionals who pretend to like you (You have done the one thing they can not abide–proffered a human exchange where none is called for), it is absolutely vital to entertaining, inspiring, and instructing kids. First law of any work with kids: “Don’t be boring. ” Boring is the job of parents and their regular teachers–to bore them all for the sake of a higher truth. My job is to offer temprary respite from boredom. I find the less kids have, the more easily entertained they tend to be. Honors students like being bored (Boredom in our culture is a sign of power and priviledge, and someone ought to do a study of boredom in relation to the class structure), and so I always cringe when teachers tell me I’m going to workshop with nothing but honors students. It isn’t that honors students are easily bored. That’s parents and teachers who kiss their little precious asses talking. It’s that honors students tend to be the “property” of certain teachers. It’s a sort of brain jock mentality, and they can be total introverts and assholes to the umpteenth degree. My favorite kids to teach are those who have been waiting for poetry all their lives, but didn’t know it: the smart kid who refuses to “work to her potential,” the wise ass who has been waiting to hear one thing on earth that doesn’t sound phony and then hears it in his own poem, those kids. I am also looking for kindness, and openess–the first criteria for whether or not a guest can be effective.

Wherever I have taught for an extended period of time, I may have bored someone. God forgive me, but the best teachers do not bore. They may terrify, insult, inspire, incite, confuse, or con the students, but they do not bore. A boring teacher is the death of learning. I am not to every student’s taste–especially for those students who need a touch of OCD and a rigid, predictable program of instruction. Hell, I would not want me as a teacher (Too much Irish chaos–the worst kind). Good, inspiring, life transforming teachers exist in every personality type, including introverted (I always preferred cool Alfred Hitchcock types with perfect lesson plans), but, in a 3 hour gig, where you do you hit and run, my style is probably best (except for those teachers who believe there is nothing worthwhile in life that hasn’t been planned down to the last syllable). I terrify the well-prepared. Hell, I terrify myself.

Anyway , I had no idea what to do, so I “talked shit” and the kids talked back and we enjoyed each other. Having read four books a week for twenty years and having memorized hundreds of poems and songs helped, but it still came out as a form of banter. I had some tough moments: once an angry kid called me “a gap toothed, no necked, red faced, bald headed white cracker,” and I wrote the phrase down on the board, and did a lesson on the two syllable put down. I was delighted by how he had said it. He was only in fifth grade, and already miserable for the rest of his life, but gifted in hate, a verbal wizard at making other people feel as bad as he did. I was truly in awe of his intelligence and saddened to the point of love by the utter damage and defiance it invoked. He couldn’t believe I was using his hatred as a lesson plan. Nor could the teacher, who hated the kid, had been the victim of his mouth, and wanted to send him to hell, but, being a coward like Hindley, let the kid run the class.

I gauged the situation. In any workshop situation in the inner city, you may have as many as four wannabe alpha apes: The teacher, the teacher’s aide, and the two or three kids who want to run the show. The teacher might be so anal, and burned out that you can’t even use the chalk, and she or he does her or his bills or study plans while you conduct your workshop. This isn’t “professional” distance. This is just bad manners. I have seen it done both in urban and suburban schools. It is the ultimate way of snubbing an unwanted guest. You are not a guest; you are a temporary intrusion at best. They go out of their way to pretend you don’t exist. Such teachers would be called “stuck ups” in my old neighborhood. Eventually, a kid or a parent would justifiably assault such a teacher. They have no place in our schools. If they think arts in the schools are a waste of time, they ought to speak up and make a fuss; otherwise, be courteous, at least. These are not always veteran teachers. By and large, they are snotty, fairly new teachers who are already smug and stupid. To treat a guest inhospitably in ancient Ireland was a crime punishable by death. Same in Italy and Greece, and in the Middle East. I think you should still be allowed to off the motherfuckers. But here, in corporate America, it is called “professionalism.” Spare me. There are two kinds of heroes: those who can fight, and those who can be generous. Sometimes they are combined. More often, they lean one way or the other. Look it up. A teacher like this can destroy hundreds of souls. I never minded nuns who hit me. I usually deserved it. I minded teachers who acted like prostitutes with a bad trick, who looked at their watches, who picked on and brutalized the same children the children picked on and brutalized. These people are scum. They destroy love. They dishonor Heaven. The best revenge is to realize how sad they must be to live with themselves 24/7.

When I first encountered such teachers, I tried to draw them in and found out they felt nothing but contempt. They were no different than this kid calling me a gap tooth, no-neck, red faced, white cracker, except that they weren’t as honest. They were just as hateful as that kid, but they would retire with pensions, and that kid would end up in jail. So I gauged the situation. This kid ran the class. I knew that. The other kids might not like him, but they obeyed him because he was smarter and meaner, more ruthless, and he spoke for their own anger, their own inner nastiness. They would abdicate the rights of hatred to him, in exchange for sitting idly by while he made sure no one learned anything except his contempt and meaness. I’m nuts enough to consider that his meaness and anger might have been useful, and if it was my school, I’d poll the kids. They could decide if he were elected teacher. I’d then put him on staff, give him a salary and benefits, with the proviso he make up an endless series of lesson plans, and fill out a ton of paper work. He’d be no better or worse than the asshole who was in front of the kids that day, but it ain’t my world, is it?

I had made a decision on the side of clever. I thought I could defuse the situation by turning his verbal insult into a lesson in rhythm and meter. This was a mistake. I hadn’t been honest about how pissed off and sad he had made me while at the same time he impressed me. His power over these kids was absolute. He was talented. I love talent even when it is aimed against me. I already felt inferior to this kid. When I first wrote his put down on the board, and started taling about syllable counts, he was shocked. I derailed him for a second, but I forgot a kid like this always has some side kick thug– aHimmler whose whole existence depends on sucking his master’s dick. This side kick threw a wet spit ball at me. It splattered on the board and the kids erupted in laughter. The teacher kept writing in her lesson planning book. So much for being one of these lame liberals who make excuses for meaness. There’s no excuse for being mean. This kid had been hurt in life, but he was an asshole, though a talented one, and he was going to ruin the day, so I said to the teacher, “What sort of teacher, sits there and acts as if a guest does not exist? You’re not doing your job, and I’m a taxpayer. Get up and take this behaviourly challenged person out of my sight. I got a job to do. I don’t need to take this.” Then I got on the phone and called the principal. I said this kid had to go and so did his best friend. The principal came up. There was the kid’s statement on the board. This kid spit on the principal.

The great “liberal” extreme is to let angry, ill-mannered children usurp the rights of other kids. I don’t believe in accomadating anger or meaness–in myself or others. I am also bone angry because of what has happened to me, but I know this anger is as much a liability and vice as it can be a virtue. I believe a person should run rough shod over others only when truly provoked. I won’t back down to anyone, but I also won’t be mean to anyone unless they are mean to me first. This is true street code. This is giving propers. Now you say this kid is only a fifth grader, but man, I know him–he’s older and sadder than Satan, and he needs massive help, and no one’s going to give it to him, especially his equally fucked up and mean hearted teacher. The kid spat on the principal, he was taken out of class along with his side kick (The teacher also should have been taken out of class), and I asked the principal if I could have an extra forty minutes with these kids since the next period was open. He said alright. I was able, eventually, to gain control, but I learned a lesson: you cannot con, compromise, or make peace with inpsired and intelligent, and sadistic hatred hell bent on denigrating you (This force shows up sometimes as a fifth grader, and sometimes as a contemptous teacher doing the lesson plan while you try to conduct a workshop). You must remove such evil from your presense, nuetralize it, or find someone who can.

Anyway, I was humbled and I learned the first sad, but pragmatic law of teaching: some kids are smarter and meaner than you are, and they don’t think you have anything to teach them, and they are probably right. You don’t, but if you want to teach at all, get them out of your class as soon as possible or be prepared to become that kid’s bitch.

Almost without exception, my experiences were good, because I was a neighborhood person talking to neighborhood kids–albeit, not the same ones I grew up with, but not that different. I enjoyed myself, something you should always try to remember as a teacher. I brought in my guitar and my harmonica or played a piano in the really old, crumbling schools that still had pianos in the classroom. I talked about my crazy relatives and then got the kids to write about theirs. They played my guitar, sang refrains, sometimes wrote poems that made them cry, that shocked them with their own beauty or truth. I had never even heard of a prompt. Honest. I would let the kids play my guitar, and when they thought I was a leprechaun, I didn’t take offence. Hell, I was short with a red beard, and I looked like one.

I learned the following rules of teaching, rules taught to me by my years as a shit talker, bar poet, and musician:

1. Don’t think your lesson plan is God. Leave some room for deviating, and for the flow of the moment. Teach in the moment, not in the system.

2. Kids want to be useful. Let them pass out the paper. Get them involved. Delegate authority–don’t cling to it. The truly pwerful give power away freely. Ask them questions. You’re not in a one day, one hour work shop to teach them poetry. You’re there to con them into thinking this poetry stuff just might be enjoyable. You’re an evangelist of the arts. Give stuff away. I gave a way books, drums, candy, once, I even gave away my guitar.

3. Teacher’s want “results” or the illusion of “constructive” work shops. Keep the joy, but learn to give the devil her or his due. Have a handy reason ready for everything you do–not for the kids, but for the teacher. Respect the teacher’s place. This is territory and many teachers, besides being control freaks, are also territorial. I sometimes bring my own paper and chalk. The less they have to do for me, the better. The less they feel their space is being violated, the better. Make them think you’re on their side.

4. Never read your own poetry until you are asked. I think it’s nice to read stuff that excites you (by others), but you aren’t the center of the universe. The kids are. You might change someone’s life. Be stupid and naive enough to believe that and realize, the first impediment to reaching someone is your own fat ass self. Get out of your own way.
5. If you are shy, use it. If you are anal, use it. If you are wild, use that, too. Anything used with good will, with true concern, can work. What does not work is contempt.
6. Know poetry well–not just the craft, but the joy. Trust that children are greedy for joy, that they are dying for lack of it. Don’t ever patronize them, even if they want you to.

Anyway, I went into my first gig with a guitar, a suit, and a purple ski cap. It was winter, but the cap was strange, and purple, and became an ice breaker. When the kids though my name was “Wild” rather than “Weil.” I didn’t correct them. I knew it was better to be “wild.” I let them play the guitar. I let them be the show. We performed the poems. Most teachers enjoyed it, and many wrote poems themselves (The best kind of teachers). After doing three of these gigs, I thought, “This is fun. I can do this.” I would work all night on the twelve to eight, take a quick shower in the locker room, put on a suit. When I first did this I showed my working class roots by wearing a three piece suit. This is how I was taught to give respect. You got dressed for weddings, funerals, and arts-in the-schools-programs. I had no idea how casual things had become in terms of school dress codes. Weirdly enough, this worked with the kids in Paterson who thought I might be a rich and famous poet because I was dressed like a funeral director.

I lived this double life for the next three years until, one day, I received an offer to work a steady gig at Arts High in Middlesex county, New Jersey. The job was only two days a week for six hours, but I could do it, as well as the Paterson gigs, and still keep my 12 to 8. I was building a rep. Maybe for the first time in my life I was doing something I loved as much as playing the piano or kissing a lover. I’d found my vocation. Like most such things, it followed the fate of my personality: I just stumbled into it while I was doing something else. It wasn’t planned. I am working class to the extent that, unlike most middle class people, I don’t think we really have all the choices we would like to believe we have. Fate enters. Grace enters. Shit happens.

So I was ready to evolve into a new life. It was the late nineties. The economy was booming. Even the American mold making industry was temporarily thriving. I had, in a sense , always been a teacher. For fifteen years, I had taught immigrants on the night shift to read and write English–just for the hell of it, because I liked them (not always, but most of the time). I had read my poetry. Many guys at work thought I was a nut job, but they were proud of me, too–especially when the Newspapers came to the shop to do a story on the “Poet as working stiff,” and I got a couple of them into the picture. I had no thought of ever leaving that world. It was a steady job. Work was always just work. I had no idea Bush and 9/11 were going to happen–that, one week after the Twin Towers went down, I would lose my job of 19 years forever. By that time, without any real effort, by the seat of my friggin pants, and certainly not the sweat of my scholarly brow, I was flying towards the sort of destiny I never dreamed of. What began with the perfect diction of Susan Amsterdam had grown into my full time occupation: free lance teacher, Dodge-Poet-In-The-Schools, Master Instructor in fiction and poetry at Middlesex County Arts High. Not even a bullshit artist like me could have made this shit up. Who said Proust doesn’t pay? Yes, I was all those things–and scared shitless, too. Without trying, without hunger or ambition, I was being forced by economic disaster, to be upwardly mobile. I had been failing to succeed all my life. I had no idea I was failing my way to the top.

Oh–my final rule of thumb: like kids, enjoy them or don’t do it because kids will kill you–and devour you–even if you love them, and especially if they love you. They have an inherrent sense of eucharist. Be sure you want to die for them. They will insist on it.

Leah Umansky: In your second book, Swoon, you have a sequence of poems around “Women.” Now, in Woman Without Umbrella, you have a similar sequence at work. Did you know when you finished Swoon, that you would have a similar sequence in your next collection?

Victoria Redel: The sequence in Swoon I saw in the way a visual artist might consider a sequence of gesture drawings—which seemed to me an extension of the overall notion I had for Swoon to try and render the many faceted and simultaneous aspects of a woman–mother/lover/thinker/daughter. In contrast I see Woman Without Umbrella as having a kind of narrative arc and so the thread of poems using the same titles is a consideration of time. And though “Woman” in the title is singular I think of this as a book inhabited by many women both contemporary and historical.

To answer the second part of your question—the sequence in this book was not anything I knew when I finished Swoon. It wasn’t anything I actually knew until I was well into working on this book of poems.

LU: This collection is full of intimate and tender moments in love and in loss. How would you say you avoided sentimentality in this collection? Do you ever consider it a risk? I think all love poems risk something of the writer. I’m thinking specifically of poems like, “Kissing” and “Almost Fifty.”

VR: Risking is central to poem making I’d wager for every poet. If the tightrope I walk in making these poems is that of sentimentality, I’m okay with that challenge–mostly because I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. These were the poems I needed to make here in the middle of my life. Death, illness, love, divorce, hilarity, hope, foolish hope–none of these are sentimental. The courage to get up everyday is not sentimental. Living is not for sissies. Or avoiders. If I “avoid sentimentality” that’s good–but it won’t be because of “avoidance”. I’d rather run headlong toward that difficult possibility.

LU: How do you feel about the state of poetry in the digital age of 2012? Are you a fan?

VR: Years ago when I was first asked to publish a poem on-line, I thought, who would ever read a poem on a computer? Well obviously, that question was pretty foolish. I’ve come to love the free flow of poetry across the world—the opportunity for poets in other countries to connect with readers here (and vice versa). In that sense a larger audience is wonderful. On the other hand, I hold books in my hand. It is what I like to do. I also like to make poems with pencil and paper. I kind of miss my typewriter. I’m such a lousy typist that I always had to retype to correct typos and when I did, I always found myself fixing, changing, and revising. I’m not exactly sure I let my hands off a poem quicker now—its just different.

LU: What advice would you offer someone who is just starting to find his or her footing in the poetry world?

VR: It would be to think as little as possible about the “poetry world” and to think and live as much as possible with great poems and great books and the vision and mind of other artists and thinkers. I’d tell someone starting out to think more about bugs and flowers and weather and the tributaries of rivers than about the “poetry world”. That’s the world to find footing in, that’s what will yield.

LU: I love your novel, Loverboy, because of its lyricism, its honesty, its directness and its heart. I always recommend it to friends. You’re one of the few poets I know who also write fiction. Where do you see the distinction between fiction and poetry?

VR: Thank you for that reading of Loverboy. Of course there are distinctions between the two but for the sake of brevity (in this question) I’ll assert that there are essential similarities—at least for me. I’m a poet more driven by the sentence than by the line, and I’m a fiction writer driven more by language than plot. In fiction I tend toward compression—sometimes that works to provide a lyric intensity but often I have to work hard to open a paragraph, a page, a scene. In Woman Without Umbrella I was very interested in having a many-charactered narrative and shifting points of view.

LU: Thank you so much, Victoria.

____________________________________________
Victoria Redel is the author two previous collections of poetry, Swoon and Already the World as well as, three books of fiction, most recently The Border of Truth. Her short story collection, Make Me Do Things, is forthcoming in 2013 from Four Way Books. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for The Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Redel is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Ralph

A dead dog.
A deep hole.
A piece of rope.
I tied one end around the dog’s waist,
the other around mine.
Ralph (I’ve given him a name)
went in first.
We didn’t make it as far as China
but we did come out in a strange city, a city
unlike any I’d ever seen.
Everything – the streets, the buildings, the doors
& windows – was made of polished steel, everything.
And it was bright, much too bright
for my weak eyes.
I soon went blind.
Ralph (who by some miracle has come back to life,
or perhaps he was only sleeping)
was not cut out to be a seeing-eye dog
but he’s doing the best he can.

______________________________________________________
Philip Hammial has had twenty-two collections of poetry published. His sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children, was short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2004, as was his fourteenth collection, Bread, in 2001. In 2004 Philip was awarded an Established Writer’s grant by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. He has represented Australia at several international poetry festivals: Poetry Africa 2000, Durban, SA; The Franco-Anglais Festival of Poetry, Paris, 2000; The World Festival of Poets 2000, Tokyo; the Festival International de la Poesie, Trois Rivieres, Canada, 2004 and the Micro-Festival, Prague, 2009. In 2006 an anthology of Australian poetry in French that Philip edited – 25 poetes australiens – was published by Ecrits des Forges in Trois Rivieres, Quebec and Le Temps des Cerises in Paris. He was a resident at the Australia Council studio at the Cité International des Arts in Paris for six months in 2009/2010

LUPE’S DIAMONDS

She had other nieces
at least eight
but mine was an expensive gift
to never lose
They were jagged freckles of light
My aunts said let her wear her hair down
no importa
burnt red lipstick and diamond specks
How I suffered from feeling blanched
in a world inhabited by amber
women who would never let me
run around like a wetback
in the snake high grass with heavy dust
in the shoes my cousins and I
hopped like grease
shed our skin and listened for rattles:
Have you seen my white son-in-law?
who went to the drugstore for me
The smell of the river is very old
and my back is slight from the liberty of it
When I suffered my aunt bought me diamonds
two flecks of cartwheeling light
to never lose
and when I lost them in the river
I got a second chance

________________________________________________________
Monica McClure is currently based in New York City, where she teaches at Bloomfield College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lambda Literary, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, Loaded Bicycle, Indigest, The Lit Review, Paperbag, No Dear and elsewhere. She is co-editing, with poet Brenda Shaughnessy, an anthology, Both and Neither: Biracial Writers in America. [Author photograph by Nick Parkinson]

We can enter a poem in an almost limitless number of ways–through its imagery, its social underpinnings, its meaning, its rhythms, its sentence structure, its line breaks, etc, etc. An arbitrary grid works like this: given these different ways of entering a poem, we can choose what we might want to steal from a poem: its line breaks, syllable structure, sentence structure, and use it to our own ends. This isn’t so much plagiarism as reclamation. We ransack the poem. We see it as a thing that has crashed down into our lives, as a whale washed up along our shore. We may as well use it since it is there.

Basically, an arbitrary grid is a way of using our reading for the purposes of writing.

Let’s take a poem from one of my former students: Brian Trimboli. One of the first things you might notice about Brian’s poetry is the kid likes metaphors. He also loves to personify abstractions and have them doing things. Hence the opening of his poem, “Apology”:

Dear reader, this poem has not yet been written.
I have been caught on the sticky tip
of amnesia’s swelled tongue.
I loaded my thoughts like shot gun shells
and fired them up at the sky.

Young poets tend to like being virtuosos. They have just developed their wings and want to do tricks. And Brian is doing a lot of good tricks here. The grid we might impose on the opening: direct address to the reader, followed by blunt statement of obvious lie (“this poem has not yet been written”). Followed by the personification of amnesia (giving it a sticky tongue–which is the ghost of oxymoron since amnesia is usually about things that don’t stick) followed by an abstraction (thoughts) being loaded into a gun and fired at the sky: To whit: Salutation, blunt statement (Seemingly impossible) personification, simile/personification:

Dear Lucy, I am having fun living without you.
I have been cradled in the
arms of somnambulance.
I have kneaded the bread of bitterness,
until it rises with the leaven of my spite.

Basically, I am copping Brian’s chord changes, but playing my own tune (A far more inferior tune, but I’m just doing this as an example). My “poem” is more about personal invective. It will focus not on a general reader, but on Lucy.

It may be more or less absurd. I might even send up one of the literary devices so that I am mocking the device even as I employ it. This is the strategy of imposing an arbitrary grid: in this case I will slavishly imitate whatever literary devices Brian is employing, maybe even his sentence structure, but the poem will be utterly different. After I’ve written it, I will decide which parts of the schema don’t work and edit them or change them accordingly.

This is one, utterly different way of getting your reading of poetry to function in your writing of it. You could take one poem and get twenty poems out of it, all depending on how you enter the text. My favorite arbitrary grid is the syllaby. Here, in a syllaby, you don’t imitate anything except the exact syllable and line structure of another poem. I did this with Frank O’Hara’s to “The Harbor Master”, Stevens’ “Large Red Man Reading”, and Williams’ “Franklin Street”. I published two of the poems. Try it. Enter a poem through its vowels, its consonants, its syllables, its line breaks, its stanzas, etc. Have fun.

Naked Except for the Jewelry

“And,” she said, “you must talk no more
about ecstasy.  It is a loneliness.”
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”
“You were helpless with joy,” he said,
“moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,
“we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must.”

From Refusing Heaven

Prior to a random visit to the local library, I had never heard of Jack Gilbert. Though I make it a point to browse the new releases in contemporary poetry, it is a rare occurrence when a poet hooks into my psyche and refuses to let go.  Jack Gilbert is one of those poets.  Others include Robert Hass, Allen Ginsberg, and Ezra Pound. Every poet worth her stipend understands the importance of voice. Though I was coming from a position of complete ignorance concerning his biography and his aesthetic philosophy, Gilbert’s voice latched into my mind like a Chinese finger trap, burrowing into me with its combination of controlled diction, intellectual engagement, and erotic content.

To those just tuning in, Naked Except for the Jewelry captures a random snippet of post-coital dialogue.  The woman is “brushing her wonderful hair” while the male participant is probably looking around for his pack of American Spirit cigarettes.  (The cancer sticks preferred by socially conscious lefties everywhere, since nothing is antithetical to the aims of Big Tobacco than a schlocky graphic of Native American headgear.)

Back to the poem.  With Fifty Shades of Grey flying off the bookshelves and into the Kindles of discerning philistines everywhere, I would be remiss to avoid the actual eroticism of this brief poem.  One of its beauties is its effortless interplay between the erotic and the intellectual. At an abstract level, the couple talks about ecstasy, love, joy, and truth.  At the fleshly level, one need only look at the title. It is a powerful image, reminiscent of Isabella Rossellini’s performance in Death Becomes Her, the minor film by Robert Zemeckis.  In a scene that has stuck with me to this day, Mrs. David Lynch comes out of a massive swimming pool clad in nothing but a blocky necklace covering her bosoms.  (Rossellini is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini and possesses a sculptural beauty and haute elegance unrivaled in modern Hollywood actresses.  Catherine Zeta-Jones comes close, but Rossellini’s beauty is Garbo-esque.)

The female nakedness implies an almost clichéd thrust towards the notion of authenticity.  To be nude is to be unadorned, stripped of the divisive symbols of civilization.  Except that she wears jewelry, symbolic of wealth and beauty, itself a concept that excludes.

The poem acts as a succinct counterargument to the hothouse sensuality of The Song of Songs.  Instead of ecstasy uniting two individuals, it is “a loneliness.”  Despite advances in technology and the advances of feminism and male sensitivity, the “ecstasy” remains an individual experience.  The term “ecstasy” is also curious, since it implies a biological orgasm, but also calls back the sensual mysticism of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.  (Is the body really a vessel of evil and corruption when the best we can hope for in the sacred realm is Joel Osteen telling us Jesus wants us all to get rich?  That seems rather crass, not to mention shortsighted and rather vulgar, as if Christ’s only concerns were the capital gains tax.)

The debate continues with the man asserting the woman was “helpless with joy … moaning and weeping.”  But, she retorts, “We pretend to ourselves that we are touching. / The heart lies to itself because it must.”

The man asserts an analytical assessment of the situation: since she was moaning and weeping, she must have been in ecstasy.  Job well done.  All very scientific and quantifiable – shades of Blake’s dictatorial Urizen – while the woman undercuts his single-vision rationality.  Yes, she did those things, but in the end, “we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.”  One would be exceptionally naïve to allege we only think about one’s partner when one does the deed.  While the flesh and voice respond to the stimuli, the woman understands the situation.  In the giant spy novel Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer writes about a hapless adulterous protagonist on his way to his mistress, a character who (to paraphrase)  thinks of monogamy as “orgies unimagined.”  In other words, even within the sacred confines of heterosexual monogamy – the bulwark of Western Christian civilization to the carnally deranged minions of the conservative Right – the mind finds other things (people, combinations, situations, and roles) of which to think.  To assume otherwise is simply dishonest.

In the end, “The heart lies to itself because it must.”  A certain degree of dishonesty is part and parcel of any functioning relationship.  Not everyone can be that sexually honest with their partner, and confessing infidelities of the Imagination comes awfully close to Orwellian thoughtcrime, especially given the reflexive omnipresence and inventive nature of the human libido.  (Real infidelities are a different matter.)  But these imaginative infidelities do not undercut the genuine faithfulness of those involved, at least in the general sense.  The poem leaves things a little more open-ended, since we don’t know the precise nature of this assignation.  Gilbert calls her “the woman” but we aren’t sure if this is just poetic license or a transcription of an actual infidelity.  And even with Gilbert’s Ivy League pedigree, the conversation seems a bit arch and contrived, even by the standards of adulterous East Coast academics.  But the poem is more about what is said than who is saying it.

Love, lust, and lying remain the central undercurrents of the poem, infusing it with a profundity and delicious eroticism.  While the title sounds like a random line from a Natalie Imbruglia song – “Something something something / lying naked on the floor” – the poem itself contains a beautiful rumination on the nature of bodily lusts and emotional honesty.  Within his oeuvre, Gilbert revisits these common themes, exploring the labyrinths of desire, truth, and grace, but with a poetic power that undercuts my rather pretentious explanations.  His intellectually sensual poem gives the reader a moment respite from the loneliness of existence, tearing back the veil of lies we tell ourselves, and doing it in a remarkably brief way that shoots across the page with the brilliance of a comet.

The Northern Road

1.

I should have known
him but I had no prior
experience with prophets.

Something about the time of day
felt still as

_______the invisible press of tobacco,
the rustle of upturned leaves
in a thousand barns.

Finality slides deeper.
Uncut grasses roll and die.

Commodified firewood fills
the absence of orchard bones.

Other attractions:

winter anonymity,
_______once done
creeps into country,
etches convoys in the woods.

The prohibition of nostalgia
is born in
cellar holes and undone buttons.

Ochre cigarettes paper the urinal.
Letters above the caricatures.

Please proceed in an orderly fashion
toward the faith cures.

Changes that would seem evidently
_______paranormal
such as
_______the regeneration of lost fingers
do not arise
in the context of
_____________________modern healers.

Still it remains—
glass in her wound.

I never left the house
I just took the door with me.

2.

The mouth is an archway
_______semi _______elliptical

The walls and roof bow
near the centre
and retain that curvature
_______to the end.

The floor inclines upward,
at the far end comes to meet
the bent ceiling.

This excavated channel is
born of deposits and erosion.

Near the ceiling two narrow
crevices extend across
and beyond the Cave.

One has a chimney-like opening
large enough to admit _____________________a man.

This small place is known
as the ‘upper cave’
and has a history and fiction
all its own.

This is the hermitage
of river thieves and highwaymen.

Early travellers designated it
by various names, all of which
contained the word ‘Cave.’

‘It has the appearance of
something like a large oven.’

‘We beheld numbers of names
cut into the sides of the Cave.’

I don’t know what ownership means
except to say
you own the silence that surrounds you.

In dwelling
the only occupation is
the air you leave behind.

A part
or particle _______unsettled;
a disused cavern
_____________________of breath.

Won’t you
_______come______________ in?

Author’s Note: This poem was influenced by my time with the residents of John Morony Correctional Facility and the landscape that surrounds it. It also responds to geological formations in an area known as Garden of the Gods in Southern Illinois. Specifically, the place known as Cave-in-Rock that overlooks the Ohio River and the Natchez Trace. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cave-in-Rock was the seasonal home of generations of highwaymen and river pirates, who escaped detection within the inner cave. I am grateful for Otto A. Rothert’s excellent regional history, The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock (1924). The quotes in part two are adapted from a letter by the British Astronomer Francis Baily, dated April 16, 1797, detailing his visit to Cave-in-Rock.

___________________________________________________
Lindsay Tuggle grew up in Alabama, Kentucky, and Kansas. She moved to Australia ten years ago, and now lives in Austinmer. She has written poetry for most of her life, though she only began writing for publication a few years ago. Lindsay is interested in the relationship between language and place, especially vanished or vanishing places: those that exist now only in the memories of the people who once lived there. Her poetry has been published in HEAT and as part of The Red Room Company’s Dust Poems and Unlocked projects. In 2009, her work was awarded second prize in the Val Vallis Award for Poetry.

MY SOLIDARITY

We meet in a reflective trench and you are skeptical
but then you begin to feel my solidarity
like a short-haired snake between your legs.
The snake starts to hustle, overweening
the lip of pants. Let’s you and I
never be cops to each other. Because we study
elephant lore, and in all the annals of elephant
adventures, there was only one cop. And he
was shit. Elephant stories are like pop songs,
one of the earliest forms of experiential autonomy.
Yes their appearance is in the form of money,
but they go into our mouths and we sing them beautifully
and when our lives are ruined we sing them again
at karaoke. And karaoke is one of the world’s
greatest displays of total solidarity. Almond waves
come out of my phone. Marzipan
insurrection not just televised but broadcast.
If you want to know the status of my solidarity,
look down at the lips on your nipples. We’ll be safe,
or at least in solidarity, reading Bhanudatta’s Bouquet of Rasa
and its comrade in literature, The River of Rasa.
_________________________________________________
Brandon Brown’s first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya.) Poems and prose have recently appeared in Sprung Formal, Postmodern Culture, BPM, Model Homes, and Art Practical. In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater. His third book, Flowering Mall, is forthcoming from Roof in the fall of 2012.

After writing a poem (never during or before the poem), ask yourself these questions:

1. Why is my lineation the way it is and is that the right shape for the poem?

2. Are my images predictable? Do shadows fall? Do I express myself in idioms and cliches rather than in a true voice. Most often the idioms we employ without thinking are old metaphors/personification/figurative parts of speech we have forgotten are metaphors, personification and figures: shadows fall, winds moan, daylight breaks, thoughts leap, ideas “turn” in the mind. How do I edit these from my poem and either leave them out or find a less familiar or predictable way of saying them? If I am aware of them as idioms, how do I have fun with them and let the reader know I am aware of them as such?

3. Am I over-determining the reader’s experience of the poem through
A. Overt insistence upon its meanings?
B. Lack of balance between image and rhythm (or absolutely no relation between them)?
C. Tagging the poem as belonging too fully to one school of poetry or another?

4. Does my poem veer off it’s track and head in directions I did not intend, and are these directions something I should follow or edit?

5. Are my end stopped and enjambed lines purposeful? Do I tend not to vary them enough, and are the terminal words of my lines often muffled or without strength?

6. What is my poem saying at the sub-meaning level: through syllables, through sonics, through word choice, through the neutral, laudatory, or dyslogistic registers of speech that might either contradict, undermine, or confuse the overall effect?

7. Do I force a line to stay because I like it–even if it does not match up with the other lines and is destroying the overall effect of the poem?

These are questions I tell my students to ask during the revision process. I also advise “retakes” in addition to revisions. A retake works as follows:

1. If the poem was written in a skinny line, you try it in a long line.

2. If the poem is written in verse paragraphs or irregular (Aleostrophic) stanzas, try restructuring it in tercets or couplets, or some other regular and consistent stanza pattern–just for the hell of it.

3. If the poem uses imagery congruent with mood (grey sky and dead leaves for grief), change that aspect completely and re-write it so that the loss is incongruent with the weather. “My husband is dead. Outside, relentlessly sunny L.A. bleats on.” Play with expectation. Write the poem in second person. Take out all but two lines and rewrite it with those lines being the only parts left. And on and on.

It is good to let students know why poets use skinny, or medium sized, or long lines. For example, the skinny line is used when

A. The poet does not like sentences that are end stopped or wishes to play sentence off against incremental fragments to create grammatical ambiguity (amipholy) so that a whole poem might be only one or two sentences, or only sentence fragments.

B. When the poet wants a single effect, and does not want any one line to draw attention to itself (Donald Justice in “Bus Stop,” Williams in “Locust Tree in Flower,” etc. etc).

C. When a poet wishes to be pithy, aphoristic, economical (Jabez book of questions, mottos, epitaphs, epigrams)

D. When a poet has read other poets who write skinny poems and is imitating them without knowing why exactly.

E. To make each word or a few words isolated by the white space and create a certain feeling for the poem as an object.

F. To slow down the reader by making him or her consider each isolated word, or to make the poem read like a quick antidote:

It’s a strange courage
you give me
Ancient star.

Shine alone
in the sunrise
towards which
you lend no part.

This could be expressed in prose as:

it’s a strange courage you give me ancient star; shine alone in the sunrise towards which you lend no part.

But, being expressed this way, it loses its effect of ceremony and becomes mere statement.

G. All of the above.

As for the medium line,

A. The poet might be writing a free verse line that contains a rhythmic ghost of blank verse and stays between eight and fourteen syllables (most of Jane Kenyon).

B. The poet wishes to practice aesthetic modesty, and not draw attention to his or her line, but to take a middle road, and let other aspects of the poem matter.

C. The poet wishes to give the effect of being sane, and steady, and somewhat measured.

D. The poet likes symmetry and does not wish to be out of balance.

E. The enjambments exist but are kept in control by being more or less of even length–not too long or too short.

F. Line is not one of the chief considerations of the poet at that moment.

G. All of the above.

Reasons for a long line:

A. To convey a sense of speechifying, oratorical address, or majesty. Often found heavy with anaphora, listing, enumerating (as in Whitman, Ginsberg)

B. Poet wishes to be mock-epic, and to tweak or make comedic use out of the epic length of the line– to speak of small insignificant things in “monumental” ways.

C. The poet wishes to give the reader a sense of expansiveness.

D. All of the above, depending on the situation.

Reasons for a line of varying length (undulating lineation):

A. The poet is a novice and does not know the importance of line length.

B. The poet is moving with his thoughts which vary in length and the shape of thought, its pattern is varied.

C. The poet is playing with line against sentence structure.

D. The poet wishes not to enjamb and so end stops each line no matter how much the line lengths vary.

E. All of the above.

I give examples of each, and then I discuss how a poet might get trapped by being known for a certain type of line (skinny equals Creeley, Long equals Whitman or CK Williams, medium equals many poets out of MFA programs, and on and on). In this case, the formal requirements of line are imposed and may or may not fit the needs of the poem at hand. They may also determine what sort of poem that poet writes and lead him to live only in his comfort zones. I suggest that the student take a measured poem by Jane Kenyon and write it out in different ways to see if it changes the effect. This is a way of making the student more conscious of his or her own aesthetics. I tell them some teachers just impose line length or type of line without being open to exception. They are not teachers; they are propagandists, and most poetry programs have a shared or implied poetic vision that narrows what can or can’t be done there. Thank God poetry is not as narrow as its experts.

Neutral, dyslogistic, and laudatory registers of speech:

Using Bentham’s tri-partite registers, we can look at a poem as inhabiting different registers of speech. For example, someone who is above average in looks might be described in laudatory (a knockout) neutral (attractive) or dyslogistic (bimbo) terms, depending on the intentions and attitude of the speaker. Some registers will not even permit certain subject matter to exist (blazons are not too popular in circles where the objectification of the body is considered a sin, though the bible contains the most famous blazon of all). Others seal the poem in an attitude of disdain or gushing praise. Still others registers of speech, take on the white middle class voice of objective observation and cool detachment. This is when they are consistent, but often, new poems have lines that ring false to the rest of the poem, that contradict the overall tone. Mixed registers can be amazing if the writer knows what he or she is doing. Otherwise, they come off as mistakes, as a sudden slip in tone, or voice. I encourage students to become aware of their tone, their borrowed tones as well as those natural to their own train of thought (a train too often derailed by a student poet assuming a tone that is not organic to his or her own mentality and which they cannot properly parrot). I often have students learn idiomatic, overly familiar phrases and have fun with them:

Shadows Fell (Jennifer Townsend)

Shadows fell.
For the last three hours
they had been sucking down the bucolic scenery
like there was no tomorrow,
(and, for them, of course, there wasn’t).
Now they were stumbling,
tipping over the lawn furniture
making idiots of themselves,
touching the asses of men’s trophy wives,
and the wives’ trophy men,
fondling the party favors, kissing
until one lay down with the dog
and did not rise.

When night came, I found a sticky
substance on my hand.
I knew then that I was getting old
and must remodel my kitchen.
But how?
It’s the big questions that undo us.
The question took off my shirt
kissed my nipples
rubbed my crotch. Avocado, or Mauve?
Under the soft pressure of the question’s hand
I caved. Surrendered unto the shadows
who were still frolicking about,
running their tongues over
the wrought iron fence
and beyond.

To experiment more with these ideas, here are a few questions and prompts:
– What is the tone of this poem: mock serious, arch, whimsical?
– Which of the types of line does it match and why: short, long, medium, or undulating?
– Write a poem that uses overly familiar idioms in a literal or personified way. Have fun.
– Go over your poems and apply the questions I asked to your revision process.

, 2011. ISBN: 978-1934200490. 80 p.

Today I write; I wait for
the form around which
I was formed.

Laura Wetherington, “My poitrine made of clouds”

Is order inherent or created? Does form come first or does the form-giver? Laura Wetherington explores structure – the visual, the functional, and the physical – in A Map Predetermined and Chance, published by Fence Books as C.S. Giscombe’s selection for the 2010 National Poetry Series.  Visually, the map is her key.  One poem is plotted like notes on staff paper. Others use typography to create meaning; words and phrases surface from the text as if two poems are unfolding at once.  Thematically, Wetherington circles around the dictum “The map is not the territory” (Alfred Korzybski) or “The description is not the described” (Jiddu Krishnamurti). For A Map Predetermined and Chance lacks a standard cartographer. In this collection, “there is no narrator, no barrier.” No overarching speaker or form-giver. Instead, Wetherington tells her reader: “Figure yourself […].”  Draw your own form. “Your vagina is a country. / Your orgasm takes over agriculture.”

Like a map, grammar is functional, orderly, and descriptive, just another structure on Wetherington’s page. Readers of Craig Dworkin’s conceptual project Parse (Atelos, 2008) know that something transformative happens between the moving parts of a sentence and its fully-formed self. Dworkin parsed the 1874 textbook How to Parse: an Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship of English Grammar by using the book’s strict grammatical code as his guide. Language is translated into its role (“Singular Noun genitive pronoun Proper Place Name intransitive passive voice indicative mood incomplete passive voice…”). Wetherington, too, is interested in functionality, and tests language at the seams: “Of course I won’t lose you / because I never had you to begin with.”   She pulls apart punctuation, questioning “how [one can have] a question with a period” with a period, and syntax (“What is the verb to have? […] What is the verb to have to?”). In You slip from my fingers, she investigates the grammar of sexual desire, creating order even as she splits newly created sentences apart. Form is slippery; tactile:

This is a verb: your fingers.
This is a noun: my
desire. They make
a sentence: you finger
my desire.

A Map Predetermined and Chance ends with the remarkable series Visiting Normandy, which weaves accounts of D-Day from an oral history transcript by Lt. Carl H Cartledge into present-day accounts of a speaker’s extended stay in the same region.   Directly following a poem that references poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje’s hybrid work The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the series seems to follow Ondaatje’s impulse to blend forms.  (“Even now I am not sure if it is the poems that anchor the book in a mental reality or the prose that does so with its physical actuality,” Ondaatje explains in the afterword to his book). For her part, Wetherington lends the poems set in the present-day a more physical actuality by enclosing the text in a black box while the poems that derive from the Lt. Cartledge oral accounts are free from such a barrier.  The speaker’s visit to Normandy becomes a series of fleeting moments frozen, as if in a snapshot. (“It’s not about the moment. / It’s about a fleet of moments,” Wetherington writes elsewhere in the collection). Past and present events are linked by a shared place or a shared history, yet, there are strange tangents.  A seemingly offhand remark, the very last line of the series, casts a new shadow over Visiting Normandy and hints at another version of events, another perspective.  With this possibility of a rewriting – a reordering – the collection loops around to Wetherington’s initial warning from the opening poem:  “the present is a pasture […] it points to itself.”

* * *

Wetherington is most interested in self-created form.  It is the atlas of her desire that she wants to study (“I want to explore your deep / structure. / Map it out on paper) just as she wants to be studied (“my primer / is a desire: see my desire get / fingered”). The imagery in her poems often stretches like a coastline or the orientation lines on a map. “I am a river long and unknotted […] the same ocean of elbows for rivers and not longer,” she writes; and: “I wasn’t long”[…] which is to say I take a long time to fall into gold light.”  When Wetherington says “I am longing,” in All I want is universe, we sense that what she’s really doing is elongating, creating new physical terrain with every articulated desire. There is always the universe, after all: “Any possible somewhere.  Any / possible long. And plus and plus and plus.”

Confused Like Horses

He sat down and tried
to focus
but couldn’t truly
make out the shapes.

Some nights,
he sleepwalks into streetlit
rooms all over
the planet.
You dream of your best friend’s
house – it’s a collage,
but you’d swear blind it was the real thing.

Us here, we’re confused
like horses kick in thunderstorm stables.
The distant end of every tunnel
is darker than the blue of night above.

_____________________________________________________
Rob Wilson is a poet that currently resides in Sydney. He has had poems published in Cordite, Boxkite and Ampersand Magazine. His first collection of poems, Camera Farm, was released in 2003 by Bird in the Mouth Press. His poem is featured in the .

The Hills

A wolf whistle sounds. Street level shot of an apartment complex at night, windows lit. “Heidi and Spencer’s Apartment, Hollywood, CA” say white letters at the bottom of the screen. Shot of Heidi’s torso in a room with white walls. She has on a black, low-cut halter dress with russet trim. As she pivots her body, the tip of her bleached hair appears on her tanned shoulders. She lifts one hand to her face. Her face is out of the shot. Spencer appears to be sitting, back to the camera. He is in the left hand corner of the screen. All that can be seen of him is his torso and the back of his curly blonde head. He is wearing a white t-shirt and is out of focus. Heidi is in focus. Heidi walks across the room, back to Spencer. “That looks good,” says Spencer. “Those the shoes?” The camera zooms on Heidi. She half-turns toward the camera and Spencer, tan cleavage and face now viewable. Her face is doubled in the closet mirror. Spencer’s head prevents Heidi’s breasts from doubling. Heidi clutches at the mirror as her body moves up then down then up. “Think so,” she says. Shot of a girl’s tanned feet and ankles. She has French manicured toenails. One foot is in a black open toed peep toe pump, with a loosened ankle strap. The other foot balances on air, as if wearing a shoe. In the right hand corner of the frame, barely viewable, is an open brown leather suitcase. Wide angle shot of the room. Spencer back is still to the camera, mostly, except that a portion of the right side of his face is now viewable. His shirt has black gothic font near the armpit. He sits on a bed covered in unfolded piles of men’s clothes. Across the room, Heidi steps out of the black peep toe pump. A closet across from her is open, clothes spilling from it. One hanger in the closet points straight up. Spencer whistles again, spins two fingers. Heidi turns around without looking. She looks in the mirror. Close up shot of mirror. Heidi’s real head and breasts can be seen, half-blocked by a white wall in the foreground. The closet mirror takes up most of the shot. There is a silver divider down the middle of the mirror, which cuts Heidi’s mirrored body in half. On the wall reflected in the mirror is a light switch; two of the switches are on, one off. Heidi examines her body over her shoulder. Shot of Heidi walking across the room in bare feet, sweeping her blonde hair over her shoulder. Spencer lies on the bed, head on a yellow pillow. He fiddles with the plastic top of an Arrowhead water bottle with both hands. “I’m dying to see if Lauren, Whitney, and Audrina show up to Frankie’s birthday…” he says. Heidi is still walking across the room, not looking at him. Shot Heidi’s head and shoulders up close. She stands in front of a dark, open closet. Air escapes from her mouth. Shot of Spencer on the bed, still fiddling with the water bottle. “…somebody they’ve known for three months,” he continues. “And they didn’t show up their la—best friend’s housewarming partment—party.” Shot of Heidi walking across the room, only now she is holding envelopes in one hand and greeting cards in the other. “So I wrote Lauren a letter…” she says. Shot of Spencer picking at his fingernails. The Arrowhead bottle is tucked into the pile of men’s clothes next to him. He looks up. “…about not coming to the housewarming party.” Shot of Spencer on the bed with envelopes and cards suddenly in his hands. “Let me read these,” he says, smiling. Heidi’s hand can be seen picking up the cards and envelopes as they slip from Spencer’s hands onto his stomach and the bed. One card has a starfish on it and the other one has a beach scene with a lone palm tree. Under the cards, on Spencer’s stomach, is a silver cell phone. “Well, how bout you don’t read them, they’re personal,” says Heidi. “Ahhhhhhohhh,” says Spencer, widening his eyes. Shot of Heidi’s face smiling and leaning forward. The camera follows her as she bends over and pecks Spencer on the lips. Shot of Heidi straightening. “Okay should we go?” she asks, quickly. Shot of Spencer sitting up, catching the silver phone in one hand. “Look at this,” he says. A rap song with cymbals begins to play in the background. Shot of Heidi holding out a black men’s sports jacket. Spencer puts one arm through one sleeve. He is holding the silver phone with his other hand. Heidi smiles at his back as he slips into the jacket. “God, you come in handy so often these days,” says Spencer. The rap song gets loud.

_______________________________________________
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer, performer, and transmedia artist. She is author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Blanc Press Diamond Edition, forthcoming), and The Fashion Issue (Wonder, forthcoming). She has also written five chapbooks, including, most recently, FASHIONWHORE (Legacy Pictures) and Kept Women (Insert Press, forthcoming). She is founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online arts and criticism journal about Lady Gaga, which will be published as a book from Zg Press in 2012.

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Edited by Ron Padgett, with an introduction by Paul Auster. Library of America. 535 pp. $35.

In the first volume of her diaries, Susan Sontag, on an off day in 1957, begins listing, in no particular order and with no reason stated, an odd assortment of memories from her childhood and early youth. It may be that the desire to write down (and ransom from oblivion) moments on the face of it trivial but somehow still persistent in memory comes occasionally to all reflective people.  Certainly it does to many writers. Four or five years after Sontag’s journal entry, the painter and poet Joe Brainard began a work composed of several hundred disparate vignettes drawn from his past, each recorded in a thumbnail paragraph, each beginning with the incantatory phrase, “I remember.”  Not billed as either poetry or prose, the book can be classed as a prose work simply because it’s not composed in lines; yet its directness and foregrounding of autobiographical experience remind us of Song of Myself , as well as the conversational poems of Frank O’Hara. Haikus of recollection, we might call these brief notations; but Brainard’s minimalist title is, simply, I Remember.  Two of them should give the general flavor:

I remember butter and sugar sandwiches.

I remember Pat Boone and “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Part of the work’s appeal resides in its evocation of the 1950s, the twentieth century’s most unironic and blithely American decade, the decade of I Love Lucy, Elvis, and Sputnik. Unironic, that is, until revived by an artist alert to the camp aspect of phenomena like Fifties movies, advertising, and pop music. Brainard’s best known work, it occupies the place of honor in this new edition of his writings even though putting it first violates authorial chronology.  Included along with it are a number of short poems, lineated and sometimes fanciful; a dozen or so drawings; a few short prose works; two journals that were published during his lifetime; substantial excerpts from diaries never before published; and two interviews.  I also want to mention “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night,” a prose piece written shortly before Brainard’s twentieth birthday, appearing for the first time in this volume.  It’s probably the most passionate and painful text he produed, touching on nearly all the themes he would, in more considered pieces, return to later on. What themes?  His dissatisfaction with himself as a visual artist and writer; his poet friends, in particular, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman; the importance of generosity; honesty, imperfectly attained; money; and love.

His reflections on these topics pour out in no particular order, according to the “free writing” method, and when he runs out of steam he stops without reaching any concrete conclusion except the stated desire to get on with his life as well as he can. He briefly comments on the topic of “pills,” which he began taking regularly when he moved from Tulsa to New York.  Noting his own growing dependency, he says, “But I nevertheless think they are basically evil; the effect they have on us is not ‘the way things are’ but ‘the way we’d like them to be.’  It would be so easy if I always took them and don’t know why I don’t want an escape. I don’t owe myself or the world an honest memento of life. God only knows most people don’t give it. In fact those of us who occasionally do are resented.  We know too much.” Brainard believed that truth and beauty were the same thing, so in order to create beauty, he had to be truthful.  His commitment to honesty sounds admirable, but it made life difficult for him, not just because he didn’t like hurting his friends’ feelings, and not just because pills distort the “way things are,” along with the way we report them. He fairly soon caught on that, however resolutely sought, honesty can only be a goal; it isn’t a mode of discourse ever fully realized.  Though words may intend to reveal the truth, in fact, they also inevitably conceal it.  To state is always, if only slightly, to falsify.  All social actions are, in varying degrees, compromised by deception; and language is social.  A decade later he commented on the question in a diary entry dated February 8th, 1971 (from Diary 1970-1971):

Brigid Polk said to me last night that I was the most honest person she knew. I wanted to say, “No,” but somehow more than just “No.” I don’t remember what I said, but this morning I was thinking about it and it came to me what I should have said. That honest is only something you can try to be. (If you want to be.) And I do. But I don’t want to have to take the credit for being honest. Because, even if it were possible, it would be too much to have to live up to. Another impossible weight.

Full disclosure: I knew Joe, admired him and liked him.  At some point in the mid-1970s I read I Remember, not expecting much. It finessed most of the aesthetic criteria I knew and cared about. It avoided metaphor and memorable images. The rhythms were unremarkable, the syntax overall flat and declarative.  I couldn’t discover any significance in the ordering of his memories; they arrived randomly, flickered, burned out, to be followed by a jumpcut to the next memory.  Yet this slyly humorous and sexually candid work was gripping and left me with a strange, triumphant glow hard to account for.  Until that reading I’d thought of Joe as a visual artist only, but the estimate clearly had to be revised.  Reading him was a pleasure not like any other, and his honesty was part of the reason for that.

Our circles of friends differed, so I didn’t get to know him well until 1981, and then by accident.  I happened to end up with a country place in Vermont about an hour’s drive from the house near Calais where he and Kenward Elmslie spent every summer.  My partner and I used to go there once a month for dinner, after which we went on to some card-playing, contract bridge, to be specific.  (In an interview he says that he learned to play bridge with Frank O’Hara, who was devoted to the game.) We, on the other hand, were anything but bridge whizzes, yet surprisingly enough came out more often than not with a higher score than Joe and Kenward.  I’d forgotten the I-remember that reports Joe’s habit of letting opponents win when he played.  In any case, the game provided an occasion for low-key, amusing conversation.

What I don’t understand now is why, once back in New York, we never made any effort to see each other.  As said, our social sets there were very different, and I’d always felt that the (as they are called) New York School of poets had a rather exclusive code about who belonged and who didn’t.  Being a poet in New York indifferent to middle-class values wasn’t enough to qualify. Admiration for Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler, and Koch wasn’t enough. Being gay wasn’t enough. It seemed to require something like pledging Nu Gamma Sigma fraternity, where you agreed to get to know, admire and uphold all the other brothers (some of them pretty obscure) and to regard the NYS as superior to all other literary coteries and their approaches to writing. Further, to constantly mention the names of the other members in and outside your poems. From the first, the New York School (much like the Beats) exhibited enthusiastic team spirit, a reflex that has served them well. Not much of a joiner, I never made the effort to pledge and, if I had, would probably have been blackballed. That said, I liked Joe, his paintings and his writings, and the same goes for several of the others—not on the basis of their being members in good standing, but because of what they wrote.  Is it necessary to point out that, when Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler and Koch were starting out in the 1950s, nobody referred to them as the “New York School”? The term had been used by art critics for the Abstract Expressionists, but its application to poets was the invention of John Bernard Myers, a gallerist and small-press publisher of that era who produced the first anthology of their poetry in the late 1960s.  This was followed up in short order by one that Ron Padgett edited, its cover designed by Joe Brainard.

Joe, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, David Shapiro, Kenward Elmslie, Eileen Myles, and several others made up the “second generation” of the School, and their work (with the exception of Shapiro) tended to resemble O’Hara’s and Schuyler’s more than Ashbery’s and Koch’s.  Joe sometimes wrote lineated poems, but his works much more often were cast in prose format—not only the I-remembers, but also his mini-essays, diaries, and travel journals.  Influenced by his writer friends and by the rise of Pop Art, he moved away from the emo intensity of his “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night” towards something dryer and funnier, reminsicent of the “Oh wow” flatness of Pop.  It was the era of deadpan minimalism; a favorite restaurant in SoHo was called FOOD.  American commercial brands, cartoons, and advertising were suddenly the stuff of “high” art.  Andy Warhol had put a big cardboard Brillo box in one of his shows and painted Campbell Soup cans. Susan Sontag’s influential “Notes on Camp” appeared and was singled out for special praise in her successful first collection of essays.  One of the reigning artistic modes of the time was the “faux naïf,” a wide-eyed cluelessness adopted as an enabling mask by artists of considerable sophistication.  Of course American naivety is real enough, fostered by hit-or-miss education, provinciality, and the rigorous conformity imposed on our middle-class, at its most oppressive during the high-school years. But the 1960s artists taking the faux naïf approach were hardly Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday or the eponymous Forrest Gump.  They were savvy urbanites who saw the humorous potential in dumbing down and saying things that could easily have been jobbed into cartoons or TV soaps, this time surrounded by invisible quotation marks.

Humor aside, the pose of naivety plays out as a peculiarly American feature in the arts, an anxious reaction, I speculate, to a never fully resolved doubt in our consciousness: Can American civilization stand comparison with the complex achievements of the cultures that preceded it, and of Europe in particular?  It’s as though many artists have decided it doesn’t, and therefore have beefed up our supposed cluelessness, as a way of turning it into a virtue.  At this point in history, the notion of American cultural deficiency is strange given our extraordinary achievements in government, industry, science, technology, scholarship, and the arts. The USA, considering how new a nation it is, has accomplished incredible things. Yet the intimation of inferiority has been persistent for nearly two centuries, surfacing in bizarre ways—for example, the 19^th-century fad for American heiresses going to Europe to marry themselves a title, rubber barons building French châteaux in Newport or the Hudson Valley,  or the way natives still gush when a visitor speaks with a British accent. The insecurity can also take the aggressive form of dismissing anything transatlantic as a toxin produced by “dead white European males.” The hard-shell American attitude is: “I may be a rube, but I’m a good person—anyway, a lot better than y’all sophisticates.”  The idea is that if you’ve very clever, you’re not going to be as straightforwardly goodhearted as your blank-slate counterpart.  It takes a Mammy Yokum to come up with formulas like, “Yep, good is better than evil—because it’s nicer.”

Strangely enough, American naivety has been welcomed by Europe as a possible escape from the quintessential European dilemma. Which can be summed up this way: “If my culture of origin gave to the world a Homer, a Sappho, a Dante, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Velasquez, a Bach, a Goethe, a Tolstoy, a Proust (add names here), what could I possible produce that might deserve the admiration those figures command?”  It’s a crushing legacy to have inherited, so no wonder if many European artists have snubbed it. Granted, the USA has itself originated a few sophisticates fully conversant with the European tradition—Henry James, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Moore, to name only the best known. But these don’t, in contemporary Europe, generate the same enthusiasm as our so-called primitives—Whitman, Mark Twain, William Carlos Williams, Raymond Chandler, the Beats, Bukowski, et al.  How the rating game will play out in the 21^st century, though, is anybody’s guess.

A provocative feature of Brainard’s writing is its dialogic character, composed always with a cautious awareness of possible future readers. In journal writing, when he mentions a friend’s name in a third-person sentence, he often then switches to “you” and addresses the friend directly, as though absolutely certain that his remarks were going to be read by the person commented on. Sometimes he anticipates a reaction from his subject and responds to it as though it were actual. It’s a curious rhetorical strategy and certainly dispels any notion that Brainard’s journals are private, spontaneous utterances. They are designed to be read by friends and eventually by people he doesn’t know.  Unless you conclude that otherness, in the form of the internalized personalities of his friends or some abstracted General Reader, a nonspecific “you,” was a permanent fixture in the diarist’s mind. I sense that it was. Brainard’s other-mindedness peopled his solitude  just as it prevented him from ever being entirely offstage. The following entry from Diary 1970-1971 (dated December 28, 1970) shows that mental configuration in action:

If I have anything to “say” tonight (a bit drunk) it is probably just this: to like all you can when you can.

Or, don’t think about things too much.

I don’t know who I think I am, giving you this advice. Actually, when I “talk” to you I am really talking to myself  (mostly) but I guess I wouldn’t be writing it down if I didn’t think that—you might want to know what is going through my head too.

No, the truth of the matter is, that I want you to know.

Yes, Brainard did want us to know. He honestly did. That included exploring the topic of his good luck in having a rich patron in the person of Kenward Elmslie, heir to the Pulitzer fortune. They were sexual partners for a while and loving friends thereafter. Brainard tries on a couple of occasions to go into this subject and admits he likes the freedom from fear, indeed, the luxuries that Elmslie’s sponsorship afforded. But it seems clear he also felt some guilt about having an advantage over others equally deserving.  Not that he wasn’t generous. I remember once being invited to dinner by Joe and not being allowed to pay.  In an almost theatrical gesture, he slapped down a couple of bills with Grant’s portrait on them, smiled, and stood to go.

Why did Joe stop producing artworks at the end of the 1970s?  The explanation often given is that he swore off amphetamines and couldn’t then recapture the intensity they gave him for the making of art.  But there seems to be more to it.  His dissatisfaction with his painting, oil painting in particular, grew steadily.  He decided that he could never do as well as the Old Masters, and, if not, then he should just pack up his brushes.  Yet I don’t find any record of his saying the same thing about writing.  It’s possible, though provocative, to say that his I Remember is an American’s faux-naïf answer to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the great European epic of heroic recollection.  Since Brainard didn’t have to earn an income, and he had pretty much stopped painting, there was the problem of how to use his time.  He spent a couple of hours every day at the gym, maintaining his washboard abs, and the rest of his leisure hours absorbed in Victorian novels.  The choice of reading matter seems telling: not poetry and not the avant-garde novels of, say, The Fiction Collective or the Dalkey Archive, but instead Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.  (His pronounced preference for the Victorians may explain a couple of British locutions in his own writing, for example, “at any rate” for “anyway.”)  I sense that he wanted to equal not only the Old Masters of oil painting but also the equivalent for literature.  I wish he hadn’t regarded his own work as unworthy of the tradition. His writing is an achievement of a different sort, not earthshaking, but real and compelling, one than can count admirers as disparate as Paul Auster (who provides the introduction to this edition), John Ashbery, Georges Perec, Edmund White, Craig Raine, Frank Bidart, and obviously the members of the NYS, who all seemed to have learned from him.  He is the second of their number (after Ashbery), to have received the Library of America treatment. Well, not quite. Instead of that series’s standard cloth binding, the book has a pasteboard cover and instead of Bible paper, a less delicate stock.  For the series’s uniform black dust-jacket with red-white-and-blue stripes, this edition substitutes a pale blue cover ornamented with gold stars drawn by the author.  You could say it was less pretentious than the routine Library of America format, more amusing, more down to earth. But if Joe had lived to see it, I think the difference would have disappointed him: for him it was Old Master or nothing.  On the other hand, the text is there and perfectly readable, with all its drollery, honesty, and surprise, which is the main thing.  His pages speak to you; and they will be remembered.