One moment: Fog. All morning: Fog. Yet "all morning" negates day's unfolding--made of parts of seconds--and makes morning something less than awareness in an instant will forgive and celebrate. In fact, it's still morning.
What was blanked-out earlier is "all clear" now. Two dimensions have given way--unfold into unfold--to four (at least four!). How quickly nature changes. . . . And I am writing like an old man by saying so!
Earlier I was reading about Ginsberg's clarity--or long journey towards clarity (sometimes never finding it, exactly)--when wanting to confront something (see The Allen Ginsberg Project, curated by Peter Hale). Surprisingly (for Allen always had something to say about anything, it certainly seemed to me), Ginsberg stated he was "[still trying to figure it out]." This "still figuring" reminds me a bit of Allen's friend Robert Frank's photographic "figurings" sometimes populated by words. In one Frank photograph, the words "Hold Still" are juxtaposed by "Keep Going". A couple of decades ago a choreographer used the words "Still/Here" to express what would unfold in dance (/Life). [A moment to search, to scan--you might say, brought the quick revelation & reminder: Bill T. Jones. This was Bill T. Jones' work.] These manifestations of figuring--themselves in obvious flux--have been helpful, I think, for the honest understanding and permission they state and offer as reminders.
Following this line of understandings, and the manifestation of "figures" we establish in the act of tending to some fact or imagined, dreamed, layered aspect of reality (themselves "facts" of themselves too), I found this link to a discussion about Williams (WC). Williams being one of my favorite topics, and poets, I was pulled toward this statement, made by Williams himself by way of an introduction to his "massive" book, Paterson:
In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained:
"that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions."
http://blog.nj.com/njv_linda_stamato/2012/03/william_carlos_williams_the_po.html
I had passed a "Rutherford Rd." while driving in my home county, in Vermont, and I got to thinking about Williams' Rutherford again. I had always associated him more with Paterson, NJ, and here was this Rutherford--which I knew, I knew of course, was the doctor's home. What is it about home that helps a poet? what is it about sanctuary--for a rural dweller, as I am now, or for a city dweller? and what is it about the things we figure, composing them, in the act of solitary (more or less) engagement with the world? Less so now with Twitter and Facebook and the internet in general, maybe we feel we are roaming the surface and circuits of the earth (Google Earth! Map Quest! live feed! etc.!) and therefore engaging with a wide and varied world from--as the doctor Williams felt--our own versions of Rutherford Road. (I use Rutherford Road here as a stand-in for Williams' actual street, and for each of our more GPS-exact locales.)
If, as William Carlos Williams saw, an individual is "a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding...life in ways...a city may embody" there is no reason why we cannot be manners of globes, eyes in the universe, roaming. And like Allen Ginsberg, whose HOWL was less a rant and declaration if we include the "other poems" that made that volume--serene, funny, wondering, figuring--we allow that even poetry (concise as it is "meant" to be!) roams, through our language, through a mass of layers of clear and not clear. It's all a matter of figuring, and letting ourselves--one and another; each other--figure in public, as a sort of sweet candor (sometimes sour, sure--).
I was thinking about a succinct way to justify (or "describe"?) my drone poems (indeed the whole book, including the "other" poems). All this figuring helped. (But to identify every part? would it take a chef hours and a lifetime to explicate the history of a meal, tastes, ingredients?) And then I realized that like Williams' human being as a city American Drone may as well represent a human being as drone. And what does this drone see? what figurings lure, transpire? what receives attention--and when, urgently or still in some slumber of malaise, job, expectation? where do we diverge? how is your screen unlike or like mine? which threads do we strand or shred together? what "reveal" do I leave, like live evidence, "like" living itself, some "history" of my mission--and accomplishment?
As Ginsberg said Kerouac told him, "walking on water wasn't built in a day." So, too, drones were not built in a day (for better and for worse). But as we try to "figure it out," as we try to construct and display and achieve "clarity," we--being humans--are likely to take a lot in, in our attempts to be present to the parts of each minutes to every day. Hold Still. Keep Going. Still Here.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780988275515/american-drone-new--select-poems.aspx?rf=1
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Saturday, August 31, 2013
The Complete Seamus Heaney: A Beginning
With the passing of Seamus Heaney yesterday, there have been a good many tributes across the wires.
I find this one to be one of the most complete and compelling.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/seamus-heaney-obituary-nobel-prizewinning-irish-poet-8791807.html
I had only two brief encounters with Heaney and more, which I realize only now, with his landscape (Dublin, Belfast, Wicklow, Donegal, Harvard Square, Lisdoonvarna). Because the first time I encountered him was in Dublin, in 1984, all I could do was to play U2 (the music at that time) at high volume once I walked inside the house, after hearing the news about his passing over the radio, upon dropping off my son to catch his bus.
And then there's this (from the Independent article):
[A]s one critic wrote, “a culpable ambiguity in [his] responses to atrocity”. Such reservations were, I think, based on a misreading; Heaney was never an apologist for violence, despite the seeming drift of the much-quoted lines about “conniving” in civilised outrage, while understanding “the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge”. His brief was large enough to accord a right of expression to every variety of belief. And if “the dark matter of the news headlines” got into Heaney’s poetry, as it did at intervals from this time on - though always contained within an oblique and subtle, multi-layered and illuminating, modus operandi – the light he was aiming for, he said, “was the kind that derives from clarity of expression, from plain speaking.”
Perhaps the poet's task is always between ambiguities and formality, pursuits of clarity while experimenting on the expanding self-turned dial across traditions and utter awareness of individual witness--by ways of voice and ear, skin and bone, changing time, the news external and awakenings internal.
Monday, February 25, 2013
"The Next Big Thing": An Interview, Via Invitation
For "The Next Big Thing". . .
Or, "Perpetual Motion"
Intro
The poet and writer Alice B. Fogel—whose poems I have adored, whose beginnings and continuings include theatrical costuming and reclaimed materials, whose manuscript “Be That Empty: Apologia for Air” brought tears and confirmation in a corner by the fire, who received the discerning praise of two past U.S. Poets Laureate, Robert Hass and Charles Simic—invited me to answer these questions for “The Next Big Thing.” The Next Big Thing, as far as I think anyone knows, is an online word-of-mouth more or less grassroots phenomenon profiling writers, artists, and specific projects. Having seen a couple of these, I said yes. I'll use this "Che"/hybrid blog site to release the interview (and because this blog is linked to my site, petermoney.com). Today is my day to answer The Next Big Thing questions, and it’s been a long while since I climbed out of the sort of treefort of my blogsphere, temporarily, to live a year while gathering material—material that brings me to you now. To live a year while gathering material? I know: sounds like cover (perhaps I’ll describe the “something else” below).
Preface to the Interview
Off the bat: Thanks, Alice. And because The Next Big Thing also resides in the “Gift Economy” (thank you, Lewis Hyde; thank you, Bel Esprit) that flows against a cultural grain that values other “things,” I’m glad to help keep this going. I will be inviting David Oliveira, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas and others to post their interviews. Please check out Alice’s, and others’, interviews. Alice’s may be found here: www.alicebfogel.com
By way of opening thoughts: I think of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams; I think of Cid Corman and “the first improvised recorded poems” and his radio show in Boston. . . and his “ice cream and sushi” shops and brother-in-law’s handbound Japanese books; I think of Theodore Enslin studying with Nadia Boulanger and a dedication that lasted a lifetime, with whole lengths of wall in a Berkeley book warehouse devoted to books he published; I remember the vivid Jack Hirschman marching down the cavern of financial district streets. . . the poet shouting for labor’s sake; I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s subjects, her scanning the National Geographic for clues; I consider Adrienne Rich’s & June Jordan’s & Grace Paley’s & Joan Larkin’s convictions—much of them achieved relatively quietly; and I think about certain images (the bombed out library in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, or Robert Frank’s images from Nova Scotia, or the juxtaposition between the push-pull of fashion and status in The New York Times Style Magazine and news headlines: a sort of “Four Dead in Ohio”—each day, featuring Mali, Niger, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Main Street, agriculture, borders, walls, and so on); I think about William Bronk and George Oppen: poets whose work made a qualitative impact on me and I wonder if their books will survive the passages of taste, trend, time, testimony, temperament.
So, The Next Big Thing Q&A
Here we go:
The Next Big Thing: What is your working title of your book?
I’ve had a few working titles. For a long time it was “Yearn” but Yearning got restless after several submissions and I moved forward with the present greatly revised version of that “Yearn” called “American Drone” (at various times: “An American Drone”, “drone poems”, “Am. Dro.”, and “Drone”). “American Drone” has three sections with three equally significant titles: “American Drone”, “To day --- Minutes only”, and “This Bridge Will Not Burn”. I think at one point the whole manuscript was called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”—because this is what I feel about all of our stories, collectively.
TNBT: Where did the idea come from for the book?
In 2002 I began corresponding with Saadi Youssef and around this time my thinking about prose and poetry changed, almost as if I found a new way to keep warm—new material or the notion of layers, or groups of words as nobs. To go back: In 1987 I read Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine and felt affinity with what I know to be a painterly-ness, a lush slow rush of language like elaborate and un-/anticipated dressing or undressing, ripe fruit, the surprise meeting of attracted strangers.
I have always “moved around” in language (maybe this was a gift of the theater, where we find characters speak in many accents, many rhythms, and melody that is found in situations). As I’ve said elsewhere, Marsden Hartley did this in painting. So did Picasso, obviously. So did William Carlos Williams. In the late 60s and early 1970s I was aware of the nightly news, in black and white. The themes of news—as the Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, I heard the other day—are the things that shock us. News, per se, is not the lovely, not the satisfying, but the dissatisfying and ugly precisely because the news goes up like a red flag, a warning. The fact that fewer citizens of our world seem to receive the news in a technically rich and instantaneous time is both distressing and a measure of recovering balance. For centuries people absorbed other people’s realities from word-of-mouth and as information eventually made it to them. Shocking news was dealt with community by community, one community at a time. I tend to absorb a lot of sensory reality. Poets and writers tend to, or else I imagine we’d struggle with content to the point of ultimate frustration. This is my job, my lot, my being, I am comfortable to admit. The “drone” of our culture(s) has been becoming increasingly dense and louder for decades (if not centuries). I realized I happen to be in the middle of this apex of drone (I hope it’s an apex). “Constant droning”—it’s the opposite of and the same as—both—that song “Constant Craving”. Socially and inter-/nationally we’re “looking for something” amid the rush and crush of too much to possibly take in in meditative or considered moments. (This is the nature of our life online or connected to our inter-phone-pods.)
I associate “drone” with barely heard or ambient sound, or with the nightmare we use our pillows to try to drown-out, with the general accumulation of sound in our daily lives now, and in the buzz & blur of what we must understand or dismiss.
A drone is also musical, though. This we know from the didgeridoo, from Tibetan horns and chanting monks, from the moans of birth and conception. But I’m so far refraining from the other obvious reference: we live in a time of drone aircraft and the idea of “detachment” this form of surveillance or warfare “gives” us is both intriguing and upsetting. The “drone” felt like content for this particular time in my life, maybe at the apex of living, at which point the “drones” are ever-present and either have full bearing on our lives or no bearing on how we live—but what it represents is a capacity, a capacity we don’t have to absorb all the necessary sensory information to synthesize our response to our daily and intimate understandings of continuous life on earth. I’ve been composing written “drone” pieces for a few years now and “American Drone” collects a healthy supply of them along with new and select work to this point in my career. The fact of the “drone poems’” presence creates the starting point (mid-point, really) of an arc to which the other two sections of the manuscript mediate and provide textual relief.
Poetry can provide textual relief within culture. We use the senses to arrive in this place. And a poem is like a pod that can travel anywhere, across borders, as well. Here's our "infinite capacity"(Tillie Olsen* on Kafka, Rilke), a "bridge that will not burn."
TNBT: What genre does your book fall under?
The book will be “poetry” but let’s not let this label limit it. Much of the book will be approachable by exclusive readers of prose, by those interested in plays and film, and even by those who scan and skim through topical magazines. In some ways it is as "non-fictive" as where my mind and mood and measure goes when I re-read Tillie Olsen's *Silences ("This book is about such silences." --Andre Gide).
TNBT: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
If this question were posed about my novella, Che., I’d have a few answers. Mali? Fenton? Sandy? Uncle? So far, I have to leave this to the filmmakers (joy be bestowed!). But I’d have a few ideas (may they get in touch!). In “Drone” there are many “characters”—but there is certainly the narrative voice of a Ginsberg-like newscaster, an Eliot-like statesman; there’s “Peter” and there’s “Saadi” in the second section, “To day --- Minutes only”; and there are the many different “voices” within the poems in the final more slimmed down lyrical section called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”.
TNBT: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
It’s hard—if not unheard of—to describe a poetry-based book in a single sentence. In a single phrase, “American Drone” covers “[personal and cultural] reaction, response, synthesis [to daily and international events]” (these were Allen Ginsberg’s terms, through Tungpa: reaction, response, synthesis). But let me add: It’s now through the density of our daily living (and gadgets) we arrive at what matters (an image, lyric, song, dance, line, skin, scent, language, landscape, meaning). Yet through dialog we uncover what’s common among us—and ultimately we discover luminosity and intimacy within the synthesis of our daily responses (consciousness, yes?). You could also say the manuscript is: “one long sound shared.” From shout to dialog to whisper.
Joan Larkin published a book called Long Sound. A book can do this. Poetry infused in community consciousness has the effect of one long sound.
TNBT: Will your book represented by an agency? Will your book be published soon?
Books like mine are different. Maybe an agency will represent “American Drone” eventually but this would suggest we are farsighted enough. But “American Drone” will be published soon. No question. It has to be, and I’m ready for it. Individual poems appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg, on the CD Blue Square (PAX Recordings), and in several other places over time. The third track on the CD has a place in American Drone (from the middle section, "To day --- Minutes only", the "dialog"/"response" part of the book's arc toward synthesis: "Snow, Saadi, nothing but snow"): http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/petermoney
TNBT: How long did it take you to write your manuscript?
As with most things, the answer is “years.” The next best answer we hear (and it’s always correct) is “all my life.” The nuts and bolts of this one have been solid for three years. It’s now a matter of finding the boldest of publishers to bring it out.
TNBT: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Writers (and teachers, librarians, parents, friends) have to teach each other how to read again! (Or: How to read today's creative forms). Culturally, we flip from genre to genre, mode to mode, in music, television, film scenes, conversation, txt messages, Facebook posts, etc. I listened to a lot of Rap while I wrote "American Drone"--and I enjoy "the syncopated" mind (or "mind jumps") that thread through narratives, and vary.
We have not, however, brought the reader along fully.
To answer the question, though, if I had to compare I’d say “American Drone” is my HOWL and Other Poems, my Cinnamon Peeler (by David Ondaatje); to an extent it’s my Capitalism (by Campbell McGrath) and to an extent, believe it or not, it’s actually my Mr. Palomar (Italo Calvino); and it is, a little bit, like my Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), or my American Grain and Kora In Hell and Paterson together in shorter form (all by William Carlos Williams);—if I may make these comparisons, which the question uncomfortably solicits. These are books that assemble a distinct arc of content, in which form and content work with changing ebb and flow of voice and subjects. HOWL emerges in what becomes an almost breathless striving to witness and yet by the end of the book we are all down to the palms, down to the measured, mindful, synthesized "The weight of the world/ is love". . . back to the intimate "yes, yes/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born." Allen Ginsberg ends his sustained long intense mindful witness in the eased-down fuller relaxed breathing of "This is the flower of the World." And this is what I mean: out of an intensity of experience, a tension of expressions and mis-/understandings, we may once again take the fuller breaths and be enlivened at a palm's length, or closer. Books do this. Meditation does this. Poetry will do this. Crisis resolved brings a community to this point. Progress requires the synthesis. . . for we cannot all sustain the highest levels of tensions or shouting without dialog and personal resolution. The books I mention above could be models for such a description. To me, they are powerful.
TNBT: Who or what inspired you to write this book?
“Get away from the hang-ups that destroy the mind” (a quotation from Dr.Dog) is one of the epigraphs to preface “American Drone”—and Sharon Van Etten’s line: “You were high when I was doomed” (from her song “Love More” [See link on "Che the novella Facebook" page or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq8FGeQ9OTQ]); “I am I said, to noone there” is another refrain from a Neil Diamond song, from my childhood. , that encouraged impetus for writing “American Drone”. And, other than what I said earlier, you could say: a life-time ongoing interest in objects, sensory and sensual reality, perspective and a sense of justice. You could also say: “the big picture,” what’s beyond fog, the daily news, hope, specificity, human contact, Saadi Youssef, Sinan Antoon, Oberlin, India, Ireland, Egypt, Syria, my trip to Cuba and on and on and on. Robert Frank’s and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs have been, for some decades, influencing how I look at things I cannot reach. Likewise is the case with various musicians. I know there was a song by the Shins that sent me in this direction. I’m just trying to picture for myself and breathe through, event to event, and get to some lasting joy. There’s definitely struggle in the process if you read “American Drone”—and struggle is exactly what goes on between our assumptions and our understandings. It’s probably what we, culturally speaking, need to do more of more often.
Victor Martinez, a wonderful writer I met when I lived in San Francisco, wrote: “The fist you didn’t throw/ was your word.” Well, “American Drone” contains my words.
TNBT: What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
“American Drone” is a kind of “anti-drone” or “drone antidote” too. There ARE individual lives within the blur and haze of an unseen mass assumption. There IS a human being at one end of a scope and switch. There WILL ALWAYS BE rhythm and melody within the assumption of monotones coming from our drones throughout the eons. “American Drone” is a sort of replacement drone: Let POETRY be the vehicle. Let poetry deliver the news by wide angle and telephoto. Let the drone be on the tongue, for good vibrations (SOMEONE to drive the car, as Williams wanted): Back to “closer,” let’s reverse the cycle of ignorance at arm’s length and let the drone be the syncopation of the individual experience we may not always want to or have time to see.
But I’ll also answer this question by saying that every book is, in one way, “a modest journey.” I had liked filmmaker Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (which I had been Freudian-ly calling “Express” [its plot is anything but express. . . but, here you have it: poetry wades into the detours—and yet poetry “goes expressly” to it also, its subjects, “the luminous” as Allen Ginsberg also said—as well through juxtaposition). We want the universe “to have us at ‘vivid!’” At a key departure-point early in Anderson’s film, there’s a song I recently realized shares impetus with my “American Drone”. Online, there’s a video that illustrates the scope of narratives I find in the song (it’s The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”). I invite you to listen, before we go on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMw7eIIUiI&feature=endscreen
Connections, affinity, arise “out of almost nowhere” but they exist all the time. This morning I heard Adam Cole’s NPR report about the information—the signals—flower petals give off and bees leave and it felt to me related to my “American Drone” work. Cole interviews Anne Leonard, a bee scientist. (We all know about “the drone bee”—yes? Or “the worker drone”?) Last week it was Natalie Batalha, on a different program, discussing the infinite relativeness (I prefer this over relativity at the moment) that felt salient and correlative to my experience with poetry, and “American Drone” especially. This morning the connections are with Andrew O’Hagan’s essay “Hope in a Bottle” (subtitled, as far as I see, as “Yes, Please”).
When I watched The Darjeeling Limited for the second time I realized “This Time Tomorrow” was providing interior monolog, commentary (and social commentary), and shared allusions to many of the subjects in “American Drone”.
To my ear, the Kinks put it this way: “This time tomorrow, where will I be?/On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea—/This time tomorrow, what will we know?/We’ll still be here watching an in-flight movie show. . ./Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain’t so big at all. . .we will see/Fields full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets—/I don’t know where I’m going,/. . . I feel the world below me looking up at me/. . . Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/. . . I’m in perpetual motion. . . ”
If you're in a bookstore any time after 2014, please ask for American Drone by Peter Money. I hope, by then, it will be there to meet you. And keep at it, through thick and thin. From drone to song. We'll get there on a bridge that will not burn.
Or, "Perpetual Motion"
Intro
The poet and writer Alice B. Fogel—whose poems I have adored, whose beginnings and continuings include theatrical costuming and reclaimed materials, whose manuscript “Be That Empty: Apologia for Air” brought tears and confirmation in a corner by the fire, who received the discerning praise of two past U.S. Poets Laureate, Robert Hass and Charles Simic—invited me to answer these questions for “The Next Big Thing.” The Next Big Thing, as far as I think anyone knows, is an online word-of-mouth more or less grassroots phenomenon profiling writers, artists, and specific projects. Having seen a couple of these, I said yes. I'll use this "Che"/hybrid blog site to release the interview (and because this blog is linked to my site, petermoney.com). Today is my day to answer The Next Big Thing questions, and it’s been a long while since I climbed out of the sort of treefort of my blogsphere, temporarily, to live a year while gathering material—material that brings me to you now. To live a year while gathering material? I know: sounds like cover (perhaps I’ll describe the “something else” below).
Preface to the Interview
Off the bat: Thanks, Alice. And because The Next Big Thing also resides in the “Gift Economy” (thank you, Lewis Hyde; thank you, Bel Esprit) that flows against a cultural grain that values other “things,” I’m glad to help keep this going. I will be inviting David Oliveira, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas and others to post their interviews. Please check out Alice’s, and others’, interviews. Alice’s may be found here: www.alicebfogel.com
By way of opening thoughts: I think of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams; I think of Cid Corman and “the first improvised recorded poems” and his radio show in Boston. . . and his “ice cream and sushi” shops and brother-in-law’s handbound Japanese books; I think of Theodore Enslin studying with Nadia Boulanger and a dedication that lasted a lifetime, with whole lengths of wall in a Berkeley book warehouse devoted to books he published; I remember the vivid Jack Hirschman marching down the cavern of financial district streets. . . the poet shouting for labor’s sake; I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s subjects, her scanning the National Geographic for clues; I consider Adrienne Rich’s & June Jordan’s & Grace Paley’s & Joan Larkin’s convictions—much of them achieved relatively quietly; and I think about certain images (the bombed out library in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, or Robert Frank’s images from Nova Scotia, or the juxtaposition between the push-pull of fashion and status in The New York Times Style Magazine and news headlines: a sort of “Four Dead in Ohio”—each day, featuring Mali, Niger, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Main Street, agriculture, borders, walls, and so on); I think about William Bronk and George Oppen: poets whose work made a qualitative impact on me and I wonder if their books will survive the passages of taste, trend, time, testimony, temperament.
So, The Next Big Thing Q&A
Here we go:
The Next Big Thing: What is your working title of your book?
I’ve had a few working titles. For a long time it was “Yearn” but Yearning got restless after several submissions and I moved forward with the present greatly revised version of that “Yearn” called “American Drone” (at various times: “An American Drone”, “drone poems”, “Am. Dro.”, and “Drone”). “American Drone” has three sections with three equally significant titles: “American Drone”, “To day --- Minutes only”, and “This Bridge Will Not Burn”. I think at one point the whole manuscript was called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”—because this is what I feel about all of our stories, collectively.
TNBT: Where did the idea come from for the book?
In 2002 I began corresponding with Saadi Youssef and around this time my thinking about prose and poetry changed, almost as if I found a new way to keep warm—new material or the notion of layers, or groups of words as nobs. To go back: In 1987 I read Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine and felt affinity with what I know to be a painterly-ness, a lush slow rush of language like elaborate and un-/anticipated dressing or undressing, ripe fruit, the surprise meeting of attracted strangers.
I have always “moved around” in language (maybe this was a gift of the theater, where we find characters speak in many accents, many rhythms, and melody that is found in situations). As I’ve said elsewhere, Marsden Hartley did this in painting. So did Picasso, obviously. So did William Carlos Williams. In the late 60s and early 1970s I was aware of the nightly news, in black and white. The themes of news—as the Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, I heard the other day—are the things that shock us. News, per se, is not the lovely, not the satisfying, but the dissatisfying and ugly precisely because the news goes up like a red flag, a warning. The fact that fewer citizens of our world seem to receive the news in a technically rich and instantaneous time is both distressing and a measure of recovering balance. For centuries people absorbed other people’s realities from word-of-mouth and as information eventually made it to them. Shocking news was dealt with community by community, one community at a time. I tend to absorb a lot of sensory reality. Poets and writers tend to, or else I imagine we’d struggle with content to the point of ultimate frustration. This is my job, my lot, my being, I am comfortable to admit. The “drone” of our culture(s) has been becoming increasingly dense and louder for decades (if not centuries). I realized I happen to be in the middle of this apex of drone (I hope it’s an apex). “Constant droning”—it’s the opposite of and the same as—both—that song “Constant Craving”. Socially and inter-/nationally we’re “looking for something” amid the rush and crush of too much to possibly take in in meditative or considered moments. (This is the nature of our life online or connected to our inter-phone-pods.)
I associate “drone” with barely heard or ambient sound, or with the nightmare we use our pillows to try to drown-out, with the general accumulation of sound in our daily lives now, and in the buzz & blur of what we must understand or dismiss.
A drone is also musical, though. This we know from the didgeridoo, from Tibetan horns and chanting monks, from the moans of birth and conception. But I’m so far refraining from the other obvious reference: we live in a time of drone aircraft and the idea of “detachment” this form of surveillance or warfare “gives” us is both intriguing and upsetting. The “drone” felt like content for this particular time in my life, maybe at the apex of living, at which point the “drones” are ever-present and either have full bearing on our lives or no bearing on how we live—but what it represents is a capacity, a capacity we don’t have to absorb all the necessary sensory information to synthesize our response to our daily and intimate understandings of continuous life on earth. I’ve been composing written “drone” pieces for a few years now and “American Drone” collects a healthy supply of them along with new and select work to this point in my career. The fact of the “drone poems’” presence creates the starting point (mid-point, really) of an arc to which the other two sections of the manuscript mediate and provide textual relief.
Poetry can provide textual relief within culture. We use the senses to arrive in this place. And a poem is like a pod that can travel anywhere, across borders, as well. Here's our "infinite capacity"(Tillie Olsen* on Kafka, Rilke), a "bridge that will not burn."
TNBT: What genre does your book fall under?
The book will be “poetry” but let’s not let this label limit it. Much of the book will be approachable by exclusive readers of prose, by those interested in plays and film, and even by those who scan and skim through topical magazines. In some ways it is as "non-fictive" as where my mind and mood and measure goes when I re-read Tillie Olsen's *Silences ("This book is about such silences." --Andre Gide).
TNBT: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
If this question were posed about my novella, Che., I’d have a few answers. Mali? Fenton? Sandy? Uncle? So far, I have to leave this to the filmmakers (joy be bestowed!). But I’d have a few ideas (may they get in touch!). In “Drone” there are many “characters”—but there is certainly the narrative voice of a Ginsberg-like newscaster, an Eliot-like statesman; there’s “Peter” and there’s “Saadi” in the second section, “To day --- Minutes only”; and there are the many different “voices” within the poems in the final more slimmed down lyrical section called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”.
TNBT: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
It’s hard—if not unheard of—to describe a poetry-based book in a single sentence. In a single phrase, “American Drone” covers “[personal and cultural] reaction, response, synthesis [to daily and international events]” (these were Allen Ginsberg’s terms, through Tungpa: reaction, response, synthesis). But let me add: It’s now through the density of our daily living (and gadgets) we arrive at what matters (an image, lyric, song, dance, line, skin, scent, language, landscape, meaning). Yet through dialog we uncover what’s common among us—and ultimately we discover luminosity and intimacy within the synthesis of our daily responses (consciousness, yes?). You could also say the manuscript is: “one long sound shared.” From shout to dialog to whisper.
Joan Larkin published a book called Long Sound. A book can do this. Poetry infused in community consciousness has the effect of one long sound.
TNBT: Will your book represented by an agency? Will your book be published soon?
Books like mine are different. Maybe an agency will represent “American Drone” eventually but this would suggest we are farsighted enough. But “American Drone” will be published soon. No question. It has to be, and I’m ready for it. Individual poems appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg, on the CD Blue Square (PAX Recordings), and in several other places over time. The third track on the CD has a place in American Drone (from the middle section, "To day --- Minutes only", the "dialog"/"response" part of the book's arc toward synthesis: "Snow, Saadi, nothing but snow"): http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/petermoney
TNBT: How long did it take you to write your manuscript?
As with most things, the answer is “years.” The next best answer we hear (and it’s always correct) is “all my life.” The nuts and bolts of this one have been solid for three years. It’s now a matter of finding the boldest of publishers to bring it out.
TNBT: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Writers (and teachers, librarians, parents, friends) have to teach each other how to read again! (Or: How to read today's creative forms). Culturally, we flip from genre to genre, mode to mode, in music, television, film scenes, conversation, txt messages, Facebook posts, etc. I listened to a lot of Rap while I wrote "American Drone"--and I enjoy "the syncopated" mind (or "mind jumps") that thread through narratives, and vary.
We have not, however, brought the reader along fully.
To answer the question, though, if I had to compare I’d say “American Drone” is my HOWL and Other Poems, my Cinnamon Peeler (by David Ondaatje); to an extent it’s my Capitalism (by Campbell McGrath) and to an extent, believe it or not, it’s actually my Mr. Palomar (Italo Calvino); and it is, a little bit, like my Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), or my American Grain and Kora In Hell and Paterson together in shorter form (all by William Carlos Williams);—if I may make these comparisons, which the question uncomfortably solicits. These are books that assemble a distinct arc of content, in which form and content work with changing ebb and flow of voice and subjects. HOWL emerges in what becomes an almost breathless striving to witness and yet by the end of the book we are all down to the palms, down to the measured, mindful, synthesized "The weight of the world/ is love". . . back to the intimate "yes, yes/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/ where I was born." Allen Ginsberg ends his sustained long intense mindful witness in the eased-down fuller relaxed breathing of "This is the flower of the World." And this is what I mean: out of an intensity of experience, a tension of expressions and mis-/understandings, we may once again take the fuller breaths and be enlivened at a palm's length, or closer. Books do this. Meditation does this. Poetry will do this. Crisis resolved brings a community to this point. Progress requires the synthesis. . . for we cannot all sustain the highest levels of tensions or shouting without dialog and personal resolution. The books I mention above could be models for such a description. To me, they are powerful.
TNBT: Who or what inspired you to write this book?
“Get away from the hang-ups that destroy the mind” (a quotation from Dr.Dog) is one of the epigraphs to preface “American Drone”—and Sharon Van Etten’s line: “You were high when I was doomed” (from her song “Love More” [See link on "Che the novella Facebook" page or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq8FGeQ9OTQ]); “I am I said, to noone there” is another refrain from a Neil Diamond song, from my childhood. , that encouraged impetus for writing “American Drone”. And, other than what I said earlier, you could say: a life-time ongoing interest in objects, sensory and sensual reality, perspective and a sense of justice. You could also say: “the big picture,” what’s beyond fog, the daily news, hope, specificity, human contact, Saadi Youssef, Sinan Antoon, Oberlin, India, Ireland, Egypt, Syria, my trip to Cuba and on and on and on. Robert Frank’s and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs have been, for some decades, influencing how I look at things I cannot reach. Likewise is the case with various musicians. I know there was a song by the Shins that sent me in this direction. I’m just trying to picture for myself and breathe through, event to event, and get to some lasting joy. There’s definitely struggle in the process if you read “American Drone”—and struggle is exactly what goes on between our assumptions and our understandings. It’s probably what we, culturally speaking, need to do more of more often.
Victor Martinez, a wonderful writer I met when I lived in San Francisco, wrote: “The fist you didn’t throw/ was your word.” Well, “American Drone” contains my words.
TNBT: What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
“American Drone” is a kind of “anti-drone” or “drone antidote” too. There ARE individual lives within the blur and haze of an unseen mass assumption. There IS a human being at one end of a scope and switch. There WILL ALWAYS BE rhythm and melody within the assumption of monotones coming from our drones throughout the eons. “American Drone” is a sort of replacement drone: Let POETRY be the vehicle. Let poetry deliver the news by wide angle and telephoto. Let the drone be on the tongue, for good vibrations (SOMEONE to drive the car, as Williams wanted): Back to “closer,” let’s reverse the cycle of ignorance at arm’s length and let the drone be the syncopation of the individual experience we may not always want to or have time to see.
But I’ll also answer this question by saying that every book is, in one way, “a modest journey.” I had liked filmmaker Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (which I had been Freudian-ly calling “Express” [its plot is anything but express. . . but, here you have it: poetry wades into the detours—and yet poetry “goes expressly” to it also, its subjects, “the luminous” as Allen Ginsberg also said—as well through juxtaposition). We want the universe “to have us at ‘vivid!’” At a key departure-point early in Anderson’s film, there’s a song I recently realized shares impetus with my “American Drone”. Online, there’s a video that illustrates the scope of narratives I find in the song (it’s The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”). I invite you to listen, before we go on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMw7eIIUiI&feature=endscreen
Connections, affinity, arise “out of almost nowhere” but they exist all the time. This morning I heard Adam Cole’s NPR report about the information—the signals—flower petals give off and bees leave and it felt to me related to my “American Drone” work. Cole interviews Anne Leonard, a bee scientist. (We all know about “the drone bee”—yes? Or “the worker drone”?) Last week it was Natalie Batalha, on a different program, discussing the infinite relativeness (I prefer this over relativity at the moment) that felt salient and correlative to my experience with poetry, and “American Drone” especially. This morning the connections are with Andrew O’Hagan’s essay “Hope in a Bottle” (subtitled, as far as I see, as “Yes, Please”).
When I watched The Darjeeling Limited for the second time I realized “This Time Tomorrow” was providing interior monolog, commentary (and social commentary), and shared allusions to many of the subjects in “American Drone”.
To my ear, the Kinks put it this way: “This time tomorrow, where will I be?/On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea—/This time tomorrow, what will we know?/We’ll still be here watching an in-flight movie show. . ./Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain’t so big at all. . .we will see/Fields full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets—/I don’t know where I’m going,/. . . I feel the world below me looking up at me/. . . Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/. . . I’m in perpetual motion. . . ”
If you're in a bookstore any time after 2014, please ask for American Drone by Peter Money. I hope, by then, it will be there to meet you. And keep at it, through thick and thin. From drone to song. We'll get there on a bridge that will not burn.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
In the thick of metaphysical as our reality: Wake Up.
Long time away, my friends, looking the poetic in the eye and sifting a dust bowl through my hands. A long year blogging internally, going to Cuba (incredible--out-breath, insight), getting Nostalgia, My Enemy ready with Sinan Antoon and Jeff Shotts, thinking about Dublin & Doolin more than I have since 1984, wrestling with my drone-speak--a personal revelation for what the page can do/how far to push or fuse language between poetry and prose (and speech, rhetoric, news, tweet) and how to effectively acknowledge what Ginsberg described to me as "mind jumps" (which seem to happen more and more as we fade from single focus into a multitude of minute activity and convenient distractions [within the political mouth, the economic swirl and let-go, too]).
I have been in the arms of J.M. Coetzee, with Diary of A Bad Year, in which the relief is epic and personal at the same time; the question of how rangingly language functions brought two hemispheres together in a lightning storm, in the peace of night, a stilled bay and blinking green light (the lighthouse at the point), as I was holding Coetzee's year in mine (I make an annual pilgrimage to "the end of the earth"--the shore). Here's a list of other books that occupied me this season: Mary Ruefle's Memling's Veil, Sonia Sanchez's Wounded in the House of a Friend, Octavio Paz's On Poets And Others, Frank O'Hara's Jackson Pollock (his "scholarly" book for Braziller--yet a poet's), Norton's 1938 Rilke translations ("The Song of ______"), The Boston Museum of Fine Art's 1957 William Blake pamphlet (amazing), Firebird by Mark Doty, Poets Teaching Poets (Orr & Voigt), Rafael Campo's The Healing Art, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Amid these I also visited Provincetown Arts (an annual pilgrimage in itself). Musically, I've been interested in the "arias" of Florence and the Machine. For me these verge on epic (and I don't make light of the word) anthems for isolated groups and individuals. I think about the Russian church in which Pussy Riot made their art an act of holy pleading in the expression of sentient flesh, and I see Florence and the Machine filling this sort of space in pleading and then in assertion and affirmation also.
By the sea I also listened to Democracy Now!, which in recent years has been harder for me to hear or watch--as a matter of timing. There is a poet from Mexico who is speaking out about the self-hate going on within that culture. Why so much violence? and does my mentor's stance on drug culture have anything to do with the "loose-ness" that has shaped a capital enterprise in keeping a public down? profit the enemy of culture? Ginsberg's "loose-ness" had to do with openness, open mind, and bonds between us. Perhaps the violence comes from a separation of "class"; so does reality t.v. and celebrity interest stretch our wants from our needs? I did not see much conflict in Cuba, by the way. There, maybe "class" aspires to be all "middle"; here, we are losing equity in the middle class (shouldn't we all be "middle class"? all moderate in exploits and reasonably comfortable?); is it from greed and exclusion/power-holding that "quantity of means" and "optimizing of security" are enough to move people into a culture of disregard for others and violence?
Allan Kozinn's article in The New York Times (8/12/12) about his own John Cage 4'33" experience on the A Train felt like Florence and the Machine and J.M. Coetzee sanctuary and humanity harmony at once. I mean a flood of openness, candor ending paranoia (as Ginsberg would say), aired musically in the surprising voices of other human beings--supposed strangers--offered a universality at once equally individual. On the next page was "Strange Sounds" by Steve Smith about Pauline Oliveros' career: Deep Listening, "a method...which was don't talk about it, sit down and play, listen back."
Colm Toibin's review of the new profile on silence, exile and cunning (Joyce, of course) factors too. Decades and careers; qualitative survival and personal bests; a contribution and eventual who-knows (a life and a living).
I am listening back. And playing.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Statement/ Poetry is free, and democratic. The Individual and the Universal.
I have been reading Yeats, lately--something I have not done in earnest in nearly thirty years, although once one reads Yeats for the first time or in earnest again, one starts to realize that the poet is the person as much as a shifting voice in the poem. Yeats, according to Ellmann's study, was an alternatingly sensitive & arrogant, questioning & declaring human being (in other words, much like a version of human beings at their extremes and midlands everywhere). He realized, with the help of constant study and practice, that "the individual self" is--because we each are the 'eater of the fruit of action'--"The universal Self, maker of past and future." (Another philosophy influenced him here, much as it did Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg--among many others [Ginsberg, as I often repeat, liked to remind 'The local is the only universal'].) I would add that, in terms of the poetics of the "eating" and of the "fruit" and of these "actions," the individual--in group or alone--is as well the maker of the present (composed of past and future). Present.
For those interested, I had tried to post a list of engagement on the site http://moneypoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2011/01/this-sites-purpose-is-to-raise.html#comment-form I think it is with the arrogance of Yeats--which, given the realities of writing itself, is not an arrogance at all but breath breathed into sympathy. Out of daily concerns a writer like Yeats is either drained to nothing or energized to action. As Lorca alluded, his shoulders may be "worn" by the moon. May there be light.
The grassroots movement to nominate an active state poet led me to compose the following:
A Statement On The Possibilities For A Poet Laureate
The poetics within our state are some of the richest on earth. Think “maple syrup,” “autumn,” “sugar on snow”; “Champlain [like an elixir for every weary eye],” or “Ascutney” (we cannot help but think of the knees, rises and peak, ancestral tongues—time here and time long ago, yes?). And then there are the individuals who continue to encounter and observe the subjects “harvested” here—who give renewed purpose to the poetics of our places and community dialog (this, too, is “Yankee ingenuity!”), all the while cultivating their own creative use and meaning into language anew to best express living here in these particular times (like a carver, one who turns a wooden bowl, or one who pulls clay; the hunter by day and actor by night). Poetry is free, and democratic.
Let’s try to bring out the poetics of Vermont as a more daily bread, a boost to the economy of conversation (and invention), a nod to the sanctity of bonds (and shared expectations), a celebration of what could be as well as what is, all expressed in language.
Beyond the functions generally described:
• Be a link between agriculture/industry & arts/education sectors.
• Invite laureates from other states (and abroad) to visit Vermont, lecture and tour.
• Inspire youth.
• Initiate an overarching project (Robert Hass’s was to promote watershed awareness)**.
• Help develop year-round “theme” events (featuring VT assets [artists or season]).
• Bring together poets and writers from all over the state (to network and serve)*.
• Call upon other poets and writers to help lead their communities in their regions.
• Work with Bread Loaf and other such venues and programs.
• Find ways for state poetics to have a presence at fairs, parades, farmers’ markets.
• Inspire elders.
• Be ready to link, honor and celebrate local/universal events as they arise/ as necessary.
• Encourage experiences across the arts (“poetry improv,” “paint/poems”).
• Offer a laureate’s column for newsletter, online, and/or newspaper syndication.
• Imagine poems on regional public transportation and at depots.
• “Commission” poems on agriculture, Vermont history, Vermont’s features and future.
• Help document and conserve written & oral expressions (records and archives).
• Help provide moral support for Poetry Out Loud throughout the year.
• Acknowledge singular poems and singular writers; seek recognition process, grants.
• Be an advocate for others.
• Help develop creative outlets and literacy in prisons and local institutions.
• Consider how Vermont poetics can contribute to larger issues (exchange programs?).
• Consider how VT poetics can relate to disaster (quakes, sunami); community response.
• Invite poets from Canada to tour Vermont institutions.
• Encourage college writing programs and poetry in the schools.
• Find ways to support book development, booksellers, and print/media in the state.
• Be available to the Dept. of Libraries, Education, and Humanities Council (& other depts/services)
• *Form a “phone tree” of poets, county to county; help arrange exchange visits.
• Brainstorm with state film, music, book festivals toward collaboration.
• Work with national organizations to broaden their awareness of VT’s poetics.
• Celebrate the state’s literary legacy and support lifetime achievement.
• Be on call to foster and sustain the health & vision of individuals, towns, agencies and organizations through poetic visitation.
• Be present to lend a voice, eyes and ear.
• Foster a broad coalition of artists, community to community. . . a network and council, so to speak, to enliven the gift economy and the creative economy—not mutually exclusive.
• To see poetry as an “art of action.”
** Overarching projects: e.g. “Preservation of landscape, character.” Work w/ various agencies.
O.k., back to Yeats' country. Slan agat! Poetry is good food.
For those interested, I had tried to post a list of engagement on the site http://moneypoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2011/01/this-sites-purpose-is-to-raise.html#comment-form I think it is with the arrogance of Yeats--which, given the realities of writing itself, is not an arrogance at all but breath breathed into sympathy. Out of daily concerns a writer like Yeats is either drained to nothing or energized to action. As Lorca alluded, his shoulders may be "worn" by the moon. May there be light.
The grassroots movement to nominate an active state poet led me to compose the following:
A Statement On The Possibilities For A Poet Laureate
The poetics within our state are some of the richest on earth. Think “maple syrup,” “autumn,” “sugar on snow”; “Champlain [like an elixir for every weary eye],” or “Ascutney” (we cannot help but think of the knees, rises and peak, ancestral tongues—time here and time long ago, yes?). And then there are the individuals who continue to encounter and observe the subjects “harvested” here—who give renewed purpose to the poetics of our places and community dialog (this, too, is “Yankee ingenuity!”), all the while cultivating their own creative use and meaning into language anew to best express living here in these particular times (like a carver, one who turns a wooden bowl, or one who pulls clay; the hunter by day and actor by night). Poetry is free, and democratic.
Let’s try to bring out the poetics of Vermont as a more daily bread, a boost to the economy of conversation (and invention), a nod to the sanctity of bonds (and shared expectations), a celebration of what could be as well as what is, all expressed in language.
Beyond the functions generally described:
• Be a link between agriculture/industry & arts/education sectors.
• Invite laureates from other states (and abroad) to visit Vermont, lecture and tour.
• Inspire youth.
• Initiate an overarching project (Robert Hass’s was to promote watershed awareness)**.
• Help develop year-round “theme” events (featuring VT assets [artists or season]).
• Bring together poets and writers from all over the state (to network and serve)*.
• Call upon other poets and writers to help lead their communities in their regions.
• Work with Bread Loaf and other such venues and programs.
• Find ways for state poetics to have a presence at fairs, parades, farmers’ markets.
• Inspire elders.
• Be ready to link, honor and celebrate local/universal events as they arise/ as necessary.
• Encourage experiences across the arts (“poetry improv,” “paint/poems”).
• Offer a laureate’s column for newsletter, online, and/or newspaper syndication.
• Imagine poems on regional public transportation and at depots.
• “Commission” poems on agriculture, Vermont history, Vermont’s features and future.
• Help document and conserve written & oral expressions (records and archives).
• Help provide moral support for Poetry Out Loud throughout the year.
• Acknowledge singular poems and singular writers; seek recognition process, grants.
• Be an advocate for others.
• Help develop creative outlets and literacy in prisons and local institutions.
• Consider how Vermont poetics can contribute to larger issues (exchange programs?).
• Consider how VT poetics can relate to disaster (quakes, sunami); community response.
• Invite poets from Canada to tour Vermont institutions.
• Encourage college writing programs and poetry in the schools.
• Find ways to support book development, booksellers, and print/media in the state.
• Be available to the Dept. of Libraries, Education, and Humanities Council (& other depts/services)
• *Form a “phone tree” of poets, county to county; help arrange exchange visits.
• Brainstorm with state film, music, book festivals toward collaboration.
• Work with national organizations to broaden their awareness of VT’s poetics.
• Celebrate the state’s literary legacy and support lifetime achievement.
• Be on call to foster and sustain the health & vision of individuals, towns, agencies and organizations through poetic visitation.
• Be present to lend a voice, eyes and ear.
• Foster a broad coalition of artists, community to community. . . a network and council, so to speak, to enliven the gift economy and the creative economy—not mutually exclusive.
• To see poetry as an “art of action.”
** Overarching projects: e.g. “Preservation of landscape, character.” Work w/ various agencies.
O.k., back to Yeats' country. Slan agat! Poetry is good food.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Art Matters
There's been so much to say--a constant action of it--through Twitter; Allen Ginsberg's "three-fold logic" (the simplified "haiku" method grounded in observation, realization, and gestalt) has been a springboard to recent selections and posts. We take these things in, work them into a personalized response and offer the brightness of any synthesis. The mode has been this, so much so that the lengthier slog of essay feels just beyond reach (may this be temporary*). However, this two year old link came through Twitter today and the article is exceptional. Relevant Magazine published Why Art Matters by Makoto Fujimura: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/whole-life/features/16705-why-art-matters-even-on-9-11
The essay is one of the most apt and quotable pieces of writing on the topic I have read since Lewis Hyde's book about the gift economy.
As it happens, I was up past midnight last night responding to a request from our state arts council for stories about our recent tropical storm Irene (hurricane/tropical storm). Many of the things I found myself writing are uncannily like Makoto Fujimura's, whose article was divined as a tweet hours later. The pressure of the universe seems to release these little stars as our need, unbeknownst to us, most subconsciously requests them.
Here's what I wrote. The threads of affinity are matters of tone and conclusion that surely must arise out of mood, circumstance, yearning, crisis, resolution, a prone abandon in reflection. I neglected to add here that my friend and poet Colin Momeyer was waist deep inside the Zen Center, trying to tend to the situation--until he was called out, as though from a preacher on the stairs above him, I think he said. I also want to emphasize that my press's managing editor was not "mindless" (he is quite mindful)--but the sudden and surreal circumstances of flooding, everywhere he drove (and increasingly by the moments, place to place) must have felt like a dream in which we are mindless, for if we think too much about the fact of it coping through the "dream" of such a situation is defeatist. I've since added "single purpose." And so. . .
•
We put aside our routines to engage in a whole new set of detours, given the odds of chance and necessity during and after one of the most brutal storms to foul our state in almost 100 years. The artist is used to detours but some come at a price greater than delay, distraction, or inconvenience. While my home showed little change apart from loss of power, by morning it was clear that our community had been rocked--and changed almost unrecognizably. The road below our house suddenly ended and became a vast river instead of a once narrow brook with a two lane road beside it. Where there was road there was now a bluff. Such visual rearrangement challenges your sense of whatever was thought to be stable. The view, while opened-up, is unsettling. Not far from there our village volunteer fire dept. looked like it had gone through an earthquake: the pavement was uprooted and water had eaten up earth around the large building's foundation. Several bridges were "lost"--if only in the upset of the first days (to be quickly repaired--although temporarily). The covered bridge to our kids' school was rocked by enormous water (Quechee) digging over and around supports, land, and road--on both sides. It is unnerving, to a child and to the adults, to see one's "bridge to school" a tooth in the middle of no mouth, suspended without way to or fro. How surreal for children to see. And how do you explain "stability," "normalcy," "structure," "you'll be o.k." to children who take this in? Some of these children were children when, at the same school above the same bridge, they were asked to suspend the fact of two towers vanishing.
I direct a small non-profit arts organization in Windsor County, a small press that publishes and presents artists, poets, and other writers. We collaborate with, use the services of, and support colleagues, friends, and neighbors in the creative economy and in the economy of daily interaction. I am a poet, doing this. When I walked to our creative center, The Main Street Museum, I intended to do what any bard would do--what my mentor, in fact, modeled: to transform strife into song. Yet when I got to the place the blasts of a ghost-town dust and wedged sea-fared shipping containers and errant avenue dumpsters made the scene an eery upheaval of context. Workers bid "things" farewell in almost abandon. I could not play (a child's guitar on me, a harmonica in my pocket); I took notes--the words of poems rising in the "blank" of a kind of destruction that seemed to, over night, connect us with war zones and disasters all around the world. I don't mean to make unjust comparisons, but to a poet who holds words as both the wounded and enlivened, the salvaged and the saved, the power to destroy and the qualities of character to contribute, the ephemeral and the lasting--one understands that these dichotomies are not exclusive, that they are--as the vessel of the word tries to tell us--of the same source.
My Managing Editor drove through thick water in Woodstock, almost mindlessly in a dream (with single purpose)--disbelieving, at times, the rising water's threat could be so fast. He avoided Bridgewater and Rutland only after someone who had come from there emphasized the power of this was visceral in extreme. My organization's trustees (on their own) helped dig out, in White River Junction and in West Hartford, at separate sites. My wife drove to where she'd never been to be one of several to answer a call to re-establish a catalog system for a library practically destroyed. Back in my village, I only modestly helped--serving food to volunteers and fire fighters--and kept the sole grill man company for a period. The town had turned out to help a family shovel out from the muck of a high saturated basement. Traveling west, the sights became even worse. Roads dropped off. Boulders had swarmed and stopped around houses where two ponds and a river gave way; a marker, a plaque to acknowledge a hard time between natives and pioneers, was washed away on a pull out where passers by would often rest.
Members of a creative economy are members of communities too, of course. They are partners and husbands and wives, individuals and teachers and storytellers; relatives, loved ones, parents, employees, employers, civil servants, self-employed. In other words, those who witness struggle are also the ones who buy from the local grocery store, farmers' market; who will shop and sing and go to the fair; who stand for, represent, and thrive in a kind of life tourists see as profound in relative rural beauty and self-sufficiency. The humanity that is changed by chaos is not a humanity that disappears but rather this is a humanity that reforms, that gathers its steed, that re-configures through the push & pull of loves and labors lost. Is humanity taxed in the unthinkable recalculation that must summon a collective rebuilding? Sure, there is communal sorrow through it all. We are not immune to the knowledge of those who actually died in the chaos of a storm we call "tropical." (Now we know, everyone does, that "tropical" means the earthquake in Haiti just as much as it used to mean "vacation"; we can look through the screen--and feel for people.)
Whether we are at home having witnessed any part of these strange and unsightly changes or whether we travel on, we carry a stronger sense of suffering and the ephemeral moment--we hold the fragility of living a little closer. Of course the creative economy of artists and participants is impacted too. These will be the places and people who will bring us back, also, along with the volunteers and the construction workers, the guard and the fire fighters, the catalogers of disaster and the curators of what's left.
PM, 9.6.11
•
And I had wanted to add "to celebrate." Given what's left, we do. We must. So we do.
The essay is one of the most apt and quotable pieces of writing on the topic I have read since Lewis Hyde's book about the gift economy.
As it happens, I was up past midnight last night responding to a request from our state arts council for stories about our recent tropical storm Irene (hurricane/tropical storm). Many of the things I found myself writing are uncannily like Makoto Fujimura's, whose article was divined as a tweet hours later. The pressure of the universe seems to release these little stars as our need, unbeknownst to us, most subconsciously requests them.
Here's what I wrote. The threads of affinity are matters of tone and conclusion that surely must arise out of mood, circumstance, yearning, crisis, resolution, a prone abandon in reflection. I neglected to add here that my friend and poet Colin Momeyer was waist deep inside the Zen Center, trying to tend to the situation--until he was called out, as though from a preacher on the stairs above him, I think he said. I also want to emphasize that my press's managing editor was not "mindless" (he is quite mindful)--but the sudden and surreal circumstances of flooding, everywhere he drove (and increasingly by the moments, place to place) must have felt like a dream in which we are mindless, for if we think too much about the fact of it coping through the "dream" of such a situation is defeatist. I've since added "single purpose." And so. . .
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We put aside our routines to engage in a whole new set of detours, given the odds of chance and necessity during and after one of the most brutal storms to foul our state in almost 100 years. The artist is used to detours but some come at a price greater than delay, distraction, or inconvenience. While my home showed little change apart from loss of power, by morning it was clear that our community had been rocked--and changed almost unrecognizably. The road below our house suddenly ended and became a vast river instead of a once narrow brook with a two lane road beside it. Where there was road there was now a bluff. Such visual rearrangement challenges your sense of whatever was thought to be stable. The view, while opened-up, is unsettling. Not far from there our village volunteer fire dept. looked like it had gone through an earthquake: the pavement was uprooted and water had eaten up earth around the large building's foundation. Several bridges were "lost"--if only in the upset of the first days (to be quickly repaired--although temporarily). The covered bridge to our kids' school was rocked by enormous water (Quechee) digging over and around supports, land, and road--on both sides. It is unnerving, to a child and to the adults, to see one's "bridge to school" a tooth in the middle of no mouth, suspended without way to or fro. How surreal for children to see. And how do you explain "stability," "normalcy," "structure," "you'll be o.k." to children who take this in? Some of these children were children when, at the same school above the same bridge, they were asked to suspend the fact of two towers vanishing.
I direct a small non-profit arts organization in Windsor County, a small press that publishes and presents artists, poets, and other writers. We collaborate with, use the services of, and support colleagues, friends, and neighbors in the creative economy and in the economy of daily interaction. I am a poet, doing this. When I walked to our creative center, The Main Street Museum, I intended to do what any bard would do--what my mentor, in fact, modeled: to transform strife into song. Yet when I got to the place the blasts of a ghost-town dust and wedged sea-fared shipping containers and errant avenue dumpsters made the scene an eery upheaval of context. Workers bid "things" farewell in almost abandon. I could not play (a child's guitar on me, a harmonica in my pocket); I took notes--the words of poems rising in the "blank" of a kind of destruction that seemed to, over night, connect us with war zones and disasters all around the world. I don't mean to make unjust comparisons, but to a poet who holds words as both the wounded and enlivened, the salvaged and the saved, the power to destroy and the qualities of character to contribute, the ephemeral and the lasting--one understands that these dichotomies are not exclusive, that they are--as the vessel of the word tries to tell us--of the same source.
My Managing Editor drove through thick water in Woodstock, almost mindlessly in a dream (with single purpose)--disbelieving, at times, the rising water's threat could be so fast. He avoided Bridgewater and Rutland only after someone who had come from there emphasized the power of this was visceral in extreme. My organization's trustees (on their own) helped dig out, in White River Junction and in West Hartford, at separate sites. My wife drove to where she'd never been to be one of several to answer a call to re-establish a catalog system for a library practically destroyed. Back in my village, I only modestly helped--serving food to volunteers and fire fighters--and kept the sole grill man company for a period. The town had turned out to help a family shovel out from the muck of a high saturated basement. Traveling west, the sights became even worse. Roads dropped off. Boulders had swarmed and stopped around houses where two ponds and a river gave way; a marker, a plaque to acknowledge a hard time between natives and pioneers, was washed away on a pull out where passers by would often rest.
Members of a creative economy are members of communities too, of course. They are partners and husbands and wives, individuals and teachers and storytellers; relatives, loved ones, parents, employees, employers, civil servants, self-employed. In other words, those who witness struggle are also the ones who buy from the local grocery store, farmers' market; who will shop and sing and go to the fair; who stand for, represent, and thrive in a kind of life tourists see as profound in relative rural beauty and self-sufficiency. The humanity that is changed by chaos is not a humanity that disappears but rather this is a humanity that reforms, that gathers its steed, that re-configures through the push & pull of loves and labors lost. Is humanity taxed in the unthinkable recalculation that must summon a collective rebuilding? Sure, there is communal sorrow through it all. We are not immune to the knowledge of those who actually died in the chaos of a storm we call "tropical." (Now we know, everyone does, that "tropical" means the earthquake in Haiti just as much as it used to mean "vacation"; we can look through the screen--and feel for people.)
Whether we are at home having witnessed any part of these strange and unsightly changes or whether we travel on, we carry a stronger sense of suffering and the ephemeral moment--we hold the fragility of living a little closer. Of course the creative economy of artists and participants is impacted too. These will be the places and people who will bring us back, also, along with the volunteers and the construction workers, the guard and the fire fighters, the catalogers of disaster and the curators of what's left.
PM, 9.6.11
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And I had wanted to add "to celebrate." Given what's left, we do. We must. So we do.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Poetic Relief: How Poets Can Help Storm Relief
This entry today is on-the-fly (please pardon my rush), and will be to the point. Poets can and should take action in ways that relieve and express in words daily circumstances, ordinary and extraordinary. Here in Vermont, the symbols of overnight change are more than visible; storm "Irene" left many villages, towns, cities without roads, bridges, and cultural landmarks. Here's what I propose artists do (in one form or another):
This is an idea for poetic action (or insert your art here), to help storm relief (in this current example).
1). A small ensemble of poets will take turns giving short readings while diners eat.
The idea is to collaborate with local cafes and restaurants ("poetry is good food!") to "host" an hour or two of short readings. Guests would be made aware that this is a *relief event* and tables would have the opportunity to designate a 10% - 100% (a
match) sliding scale donation upon ordering. (If a table of four orders $100. worth of food and drink, and they declare they'd like to donate 25% to the relief effort, then the relief effort collects twenty-five dollars.) The most anyone would be *asked* to contribute would be 10% (after/on top of/ tip).
Poets would enliven the place and we'd hope to pack these venues with sympathetic patrons through social media alerts.
This can happen with minimal organizing--which is why I suggest poets and others try to help in this way. The "Poetic Relief" could be on town hall stage, also: Free and open to the public (pass the hat, or bid on a poem [accept multiple bids!]) or with a donation at the door. Improvised music could accompany readings & recitations.
"811" is the one of the library designations for poetry. I suggest some of us try to make something happen this Thursday, the 8th (9/ 8 11). Communities are still without water, roads and bridges. "Everywhere mess is mess/completes the beauty."
Good luck. May the poetic restore that which is necessary within us.
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