Hold Still : Keep Moving. Drones and the Human: What We Know and Don't; Figuring towards Clarity

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

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. 

"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.

www.alicebfogel.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I Who Speak To You Am As Old As The World" -- or, Love finds a way---

The grace of our youth is maybe that the love of things arrives instantly, passionately, soaring. But an older grace is that we come to love more, if it is possible, and for broader reasons. If these are two extremes (there is a middle ground) they are both free to develop their intensity, and so this--call it an ambition, or circumstance--they share.

Opinions shift in intensity too. My arguments have eased in a way I never thought they would: A line is a line and you don’t cross it if your selfless humane action requires this immobility. For instance, I never liked war (I choose “liked” because in fact I remember being fueled in some pedagogical way by watching Saturday morning black and white movies such as The Bridge Over The River Kwai [indeed I would find out it was one of my father’s favorites]—in which the themes were not themes I liked: mainly war). Now one of my brothers works for the VA and poets I admire are—and I never thought this “possible” in recent wars—intimates of war. We are all “intimates of war” whether we’re in them or not. Each time we love we love in spite of violence, tragedy, oppressions, and wars that would love to overwhelm existence. The existence of empathetic opportunities begin close to the nose, near the bone, and—as a scientist neighbor once affirmed for me, paraphrasing Walt Whitman: in a blade of grass (ash works well also but you have to imagine the victories, its vitality).

Someone I’ve known for many years recently told me he was a “Special Ops” fighter in Vietnam, entering that conscription in 1963 (. . .the year I was born). This lifelong educator spontaneously quotes Shakespeare, in a photo held a beloved Fox Terrier William Faulkner gave him as a boy, drove through Havana in the passenger’s seat of a Cadillac convertible to meet Ernest Hemingway—a friend of his flamboyantly macho uncle, an old school actor—not anticipating mutual shark shooting along side them on a sixty foot yacht. If I don’t like war I don’t like my friend either? Is this the construct love smells or is love’s construct some blur, a combination of opposites? Romantic as some of this sounds, my friend called the last act “vulgar”—blood in the water and all (“Other sharks ate those sharks”).

History shows itself in layers of loves and fights to get back to love. I’m reassured reading a 1936 text, The Flowering of New England (by the funny and tremendously insightful Van Wyck Brooks [such a early 20th Century name, seems to me; I love it]) that indeed “The Younger Generation of 1840” (a chapter) contained the unrestrained spirit for justice and yearning, the resilience, duende, moxie, muster and elixir that every body stilled through time wants or wishes to make true. Liberation and being were two of the same cloth. What makes us think we’re any different?

Just barely out of college I remember dismissing Primo Levi’s poems. A fellow graduate, a baker whose relatives had become intimates of war, recommended the poems during a small and subdued party in his tiny Haight Ashbury apartment. Almost a lifetime later, I cannot see parting with my Primo Levi. When with challenging eyes I considered those poems too simple, I was a student of the complicated in love with a process of decoding that could string me along. Likewise, another friend offered his exuberance about Michael Ondaatje’s poems (this was before we could see the rendering of The English Patient in such a sensual gauze as film)—and I suspect I thought these poems “too direct.” Months later I was to encounter my mentor who would declare “direct treatment” of the thing to be the only way to compose. In fact, if we are negotiators in minute to minute life, we do well to use the mode of direct treatment.

The best war stories are about survival. There is—and this is a secret—no difference between war stories and the daily story. In both extreme situations and ordinary ones being “crazy with courage” is sometimes at odds with “the only important thing. . . to live like a human being!” (Kwai). The Chinese, I’ve read, have a word for “the wonder and mysterious” (I hope I’m not wrong): Yu. (I don’t know about you but I cannot help the ear wanting to hear “you.” It is not far off from the Spanish “I” [Yo, am I right?]). Left as we are, we are brought into our circumstances with wonder that is perhaps this crazy luck of chance (spoken as an intimate of births, I say). As we embrace the mysterious (because we have to?)—we can do so as Pablo Neruda accepted the drift he didn’t even have to comb from the tide of Isla Negra (such an island in negative space!).

The “poetic” comes when we need this the most, measure upon measure, but the poetic is also always there. “There,” the poetic is here. Sometimes we need and use all we have in store—and all we can find (let us hope so): crazy/whim, courage, importance, the thing, being, human. . . to guide our attentions.

Intention and attention are close intimates of activity and they share a lust for un-bridged passions and intensities both thinly and broadly delivered. Such a sentence, for a topic so delicate and essential to living, should not be so cumbersome. Maybe the paradox of wonder and the mysterious is that we can get there even by clunk and stumble. Ah, life. But we can get there.

In the class I teach, this week we have thrown out the expected discussion about “meter” in favor of the more spontaneous. This is not to say there is nothing spontaneous within the joy of meter—traditional meters or new schemes. And this is not saying there is not meter within the spontaneous. There is plenty. In essence (to get back to that blade of grass) there is no joy without meter and there is no meter without joy (although the thrum-beats of war sometimes suggest a different conclusion). In our stillness we cannot be. In the natural and cosmic world’s rotations, it will be still—and always a sight for sore eyes to be rescued in the throng of some spontaneous love.

Now I read poems “A Bridge”, “Autobiography”, “In The Beginning”, “A Profession”, “The Survivor”, and “To My Friends” (all Levi) with wide love and narrow time (that just as easily unfolds, vast).

Ondaatje, I have had the pleasure to find, is a cosmos full of grace and humor.

To all of you the humble wish/ That autumn will be long and mild. –That’s Primo. May you harvest each poetic chance while you have these.

“Just take nothing for granted” . . . “I live and breathe/ Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes” (respectively from “A Profession”, “The Survivor”).

Amid all this I will go back, newly so now, to Alvin Langdon Coburn. . . “Wier’s Close — Edinburgh, 1906”, “The Bridge — Sunlight, 1906” (so much like history’s bridge, and spring’s), but also Gertrude Kaserbier—where glance, light shaft, shift made for her all the difference.

--Peter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Käsebier

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alvin%20langdon%20coburn&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Langdon_Coburn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi

All Realms Convey/ Humanly we struggle to express: literacy in longing

If you know Antler's poems, I'm thinking about his alarmingly and devastatingly pure scream, his "Guernica" I suppose (http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/guernica/gmain.html), in "Your Poetry's No Good Because It Tries To Convey A Message"--a title Antler was given, apparently, by an unsympathetic listener. I've been thinking daily about Wei Wei--it wasn't long ago he was the celebrated topic of Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ai-wei-wei/ ;http://topics.npr.org/topic/Ai_Weiwei). And I've been thinking about Juliano Mer Khamis "The 52-year-old was born to an Israeli Jewish mother and Palestinian Christian father", and Freedom Theater (http://www.npr.org/2011/04/08/135240843/actor-directors-death-felt-by-israelis-palestinians). It is difficult to avoid thinking about Victor Jara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%ADctor_Jara) and Naji al Ali (http://www.najialali.com/), a kind of editorializing older Keith Haring (in some shared curves of line and tone). I think about these people (our list could be quite long) and return to Antler's incredible title: Isn't it absurd to want the human expression to not convey a message (ANY message)? The ambiguity of the message (and the reception of its subjects) lights the fog and this illumination can cause some anxiety. But the fog lifts and reveals openings about which we had almost forgotten. The "plainly stated" can seem ambiguous too; we're not always sure about the destination--or the sincerity. Tone brings the message only so far, and tone can make the difference also.

"[W]e are cloud-like in the decades and centuries of marvel, we stand a chance if we abide by no dictation except the fuzzy shadows, we are light bound as much as nurtured by the dark. . . " and "when the speech comes it will be salvation." (Che p. 105). We convey the message murky and on-the-mark, and every place in between. While doing, may there be music, a kind logic, an individual tongue and hand that is inextricably connected to its "Other" humanity and sentience.

Yet the gut knows what the mind interprets. In the April 18th, 2011, issue of New York magazine (p.86), friends of the novella Che may find some affinity in the painter Jennifer Wynne Reeve's current exhibit at Ramis Barquet, I think. A "departure" from the "overt" and "political" I mentioned above, Jennifer Wynne Reeve's work is engaged in "Mixing a feel for succulent surfaces, rich color, and witty prose. . . paintings and photographs that are at once like vertical tabletops slathered with satiny paint and abstract diaries of life, death, sex, and longing. . . thick, saturated daubs and impastos rutted with waves and ripples transform into phallic shapes and faces begging for attention. . . stories of marriages, divorce, and sexual tension. Reeve's work skirts surreal realms, the real world, the inner lives of women, the imagination, the ego, and the id" (writes Jerry Saltz). Diaries of life, longing; rutted, waves; transform. Faces begging for attention. Skirting the realms, in layers. What it all conveys--foggy though it may be--is as vital as the direct narratives of Antler, Naji al Ali, Victor Jara. Somewhere in here is a little bit of Guernica (maybe the unspoken lovely part?)--that "they lived." Maybe somewhere is lineage from Pasolini's lyrically inspired narrative films. We should all hope to "convey a message"--and understand the message is its own material, and has far to go.

We can be intentional even while admitting the oblique. The message rattles the cage at every second beat. We realize tension in our longing. We love what exists that is a kind reminder. We suffer into what we cannot see and we are embraced.

"Because the known and the unknown / Touch,"

Because the known and the unknown/Touch, . . . I return to George Oppen, an ancestral seashore, my palm, daily breath. This isn't too dramatic a thing to say for one drawn simply to the words of the title of the book from which the phrase I quote begins to arise: Of Being Numerous. After a long slog of winter in "New England," new anything will be desired--as well as desiring for the known. Oppen, poet's poet, reminds us about the nature of revealing.

Which brings me to Pale Fire. Specifically, to comments inside a 1982 text (I was just forming my own mature opinions then. . . ) about Pale Fire: From a book by David Packman (nothing to do with the popular video game of that time, I'm sure. . . ) called Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire, we have this bit of liberation (one of my favorite words) and reason (one of my most difficult):

"In. . . readings of Pale Fire. . . a story is extracted from the text. This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work."

But how much emphasis does a desiring reader place on internal and external frames of discovery (perhaps we shall call it uncovery)?

"However, in emphasizing the internal frame, these readings tend to efface the text's external frame. The fictive world beyond the internal frame. . . is treated as if it were the paramount reality, or at least what the conventions of the realist novel propose as such. A work of art, however, is never the same as the paramount reality. . . On the contrary, the artistic text is a 'finite province of meaning,' an 'enclave within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience"

Meanings circumscribed by and for and to whom? Modes of experience by and for and to whom? I return to this*, and wish you well--in uncovery as well as discovery. May the pleasures be yours. *"This story is, of course, really in the reader's own construction. Each [reading] involves a decision as to how the text may be framed. . . Meaning is fixed in each case by the position of the frame. As Boris Uspensky has noted, 'The transition from the external to internal point of view and vice versa may be considered as a natural frame in painting. The same phenomenon may be noted in a literary work." And to Che the same, layers of lace and strands of hair, a geography in text to figure. Probe and lift, and give text context. Venture forth, in and out of it, my friend.

Dreams We Dream By Day

Been reading again pages 89 - 100, the sensual perceptions of Mali, Fenton, and Uncle: Soliloquy to the spot. Salt, Water, Goa, "Made In Pakistan". And, paper levee, prayer on a strand, blowfish ready to explode "some bath of love", finger in the sky, grave of snow and cup-shaped heart. . . snow tea, turned boat/dog/genital. . . evaporating points "where we both meet"; monastic in seagrass, minstrel as choreography's wide-eyed nurse, canopy of shaven trees, fingers--pencils, coastal Oslo in the hand, Beckett & Gleam' in Fenton's dream, Falstaff and Gogos, and thankfully the entering of Ben Yuzaf. 131 - 140. I wonder, now: are Fenton and Sandy the "dreamers" and Uncle and Mali are daydreamers? And where, then, does this leave Miles (caught between of course? In Miles to go before he sleeps?). A ripple in the pond, part blackened ice and part black water, seemed like a small bird caught there--one wing frozen, one wing flapping--but when I leave the table to look from standing it's nothing but sky & cloud & stiff glinting branch waving high above, in its reflection. This seems to me the sort of thing Uncle would have seen, and Fenton and the others would have learned to--and felt no rush to do otherwise. Yet feeling rush, feeling the second hand from the clock on the kitchen wall unmistakable and caught in his left ear, feeling a slight heave and slug--to the same timing--from the organ that is the essential machine keeping him going, the small bird or several birds--four, say--that now lurch almost puppet-like (but realer, mortal and conscious) from a fluid and muscled nest below a breast pocket. Maybe this is why still photography has no words. Or, until such things are opened. Layers come out. And we taste them, we want to, the individual words together make good soil for the plant of being.

November,

"She gladly took the hand, rough, sand, silt, adhesion. The eyes sliced through her and she could feel not only her baby but her conception, an act of love gone to ecstasy--high unencumbered thrill and mortallic epiphany that let the two forget who they were and how 'good' they were supposed to be. She screamed, and only then did a passer-by slow--but so they could curse the scene and broil the couple under complaint, and the assignation of the defiled (for now the future mother was seen as compliant in this vagabonded lifestyle--if you could call it life, and we do). The eucalyptus knew this scream, bending and braying, their oils liquid and vapor by turn of combustion, wind almost snapping the thread from the straw, ice breaking down the deep center of a fjord.

To save what's in you is an eternal thing, the snow that makes a deal with the flame, the skin thick enough to hold a place for the soft."

I returned to this section of Che again today, gray day--softness of what seems a stagnant fog occupying the full head of what we know is, under there, rock and mountain. p. 130, Che.

Word travels if you encourage it. http://www.blazevox.org/bk-pm.htm

Beach Combing, and Lisa Lisa and the Book Jam

My podcast interview and discussion with Lisa Lisa and the Book Jam is up. The song (Beach Combing) blew me away.
http://lisalisabookjam.wordpress.com/

My thanks to them.

The Band in the Closet: What You Find (I mean you), Lennon, Muhl, the [Irish] Calvinists, and Autumn (just the season); your "pilot."

So maybe the teakish live heron steady in the fog at pondside has been revealed to be only a reed, wet in autumn. The mystery of its early presence this morning was musical, even in the silence of the window--and in the distance between this table and pond. The appearance of the "Other"--as it seemed--provided pivot, balance, energy and tension I think: Here's your beacon, mooring; here's a set of eyes.

I keep my inexpensive reading glasses in a hard rectangular case labeled "Pilot" now. The glass and wire didn't come with a case, and I no longer know what I've done with the ingeniously designed fountain pen (made to not leak) that I think arrived with heavy protection. So. . . another object: to lose, to pile, to move, to keep. To open. Open--"like a clam shell"--it's almost touching the green of Gregory Maguire's Matchless. . . which I like for its charming drawings but also because the words amount to a sense in myself I have when I read Stuart Little, for example, or any E. B. White. --Speaking of them, in conversation on another ghostly gray and wettish day yesterday, I participated in a lovely podcast with "Lisa Lisa and the Book Jam" (a play, they say, on the 80s band [no doubt I danced to this?]) at which time we talked about books, ranging the decades but sustaining by influence on the imagination, will, and desire. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space might have mentioned glasses cases in my revised imagined future edition (glasses cases holding other things, particularly). In the same breath: Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading ("[we all read the same stars. . . ]"--more or less) and Lewis Hyde's Gift, offering a circuitous history of surprising gestures of confluence in humanity.

Beside the Maguire book is a scrap with words scrawled: "Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger" (the name of a newly released recording, recorded "in their living-room"). I've just heard their voices--soothing and fit, a wooden boat (they don't insure wooden boats any longer, I'm told) packed with woolen blankets tied around paperback books that never get wet, and peaches--lots of peaches; two pillows for two heads.

This is all appropriate as fatigue hits the election season, the daylight rather shallow now in the minute cup of a wakefulness that squeezes our quest for sunshine, after reading the section I was meant to read in Matt Gross's "Getting lost in Ireland" article. . . in which the emotional tension of journeying is given character, honored as another being, the essential nature of ourselves being we want to connect. . . ; his observation of one trying to insert themselves in a foreign landscape and social setting brought back memories of my own Ireland, my own Egypt, my own India, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, England, etc. "[P]ersevering in the face of loneliness and [the harsh country]"--unexpectedly, or at least when least expected: the band (Calvinists), the conversation with the lobsterman Ray (the Western [and Eastern, and all others] World is a kinder place because of their phantom animation. Yes, what do we think about the mosque at "ground zero"? To have the ease and candor of this dialog in the non-confrontational human depot of an Irish bar, particularly one around Galway, makes me--again, again--want to celebrate harbor towns that have managed to dismiss pretension; the sea is unforgiving that way, but giving too.

A mosque near ground zero, perhaps, is not so unlike a friendly bar at the edge of harbor close to Galway--or Goa, or Williams Town, or (you find them, they're still there): if we know where the sand comes from, if we respect the spray of salt in all its incarnations, if we've stood outside searching a depth of cosmos for something we hope we'll discover there; universal signs and intimate conversations, stranger to friend, we will find ourselves in the space of a conversation--welcomed, again (or finally), and experiencing the revelation of unexpected joy.

We Are Human, We Yearn For Text

A rainy day and now there’s hope for my piles (no need to be nimble and quick), although there’s no hope for the boxes fit to the floor of barn—a river from the dirt driveway weighing in. The lone maple (almost a pet dog, we have no choice but to greet it every day), a phoenix in a field of pasture-lawn (it’s a new decade—), has undressed half its leaves and leaves the other half—if sliding off a shoulder—a golden blaze of honey: maybe to say, “Last chance before winter. . . (which isn’t true).

The combinations are never easy to separate.

The mountain is a mystery in a thin sheath of misty nightcoat. Water saturates—grass, ground, pond; in such haze, we could be inside the fortieth floor looking out conference room windows in many similar cities, straining to see the street below (no such doing) or (give it up—) to identify the building yesterday had standing across the short vista of a sidewalk. And where windows looked no farther, on such a day of molecular curtains, the gray walls of the traveling universe log-jammed at the height of some lazy top-brained vortex drawing pathos and recognition from a staircase at the summit—remind us that we are human, and that we yearn for text.

I returned to Che. pages 148 – 153.

"Catch Back The Quantity": Our Prose Now, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and the Poetic novel

"The tear of wine is still in his cup to catch back the quantity of its bereavement" wrote Djuna Barnes in the Watchman, What of the Night section of Nightwood. That single fragment catches me (to speak of "catch back the quantity". . . ) and the layers of implication in this combination of words astonishes me. I will not go into these layers here. I will offer that, while parts of Nightwood (the Plainfield book sale edition I now have touts Nightwood's successful run at twenty-eight printings [so far]) are not in my normal line of content, the language does tell me a lot about where I know my roots to be.

As some readers will in Che., I have picked through Barnes' text pages at a time. For me, reading is about what's potent there. (The physical object of the original book [small and thick for a side pocket, purple--but with minute splatters of ink] is another thing to behold, aroma and care. . . something that grace gifted age and handling; even that book I have opened sparingly, perhaps a bit like a special garment, with purpose.)

As a side note, it's liberating to identify the still-present typo [page 82, "And why. . . "] in New Directions' twenty-eigth printing (as if the minor technicalities of production don't matter: Let us bring your attention to the content, beneath and inside the word.)

Try giving your ear and tongue to this, by--of all fluidity!--Mr. T.S. Eliot: "One is liable to expect people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. . . What one can do for other readers. . .is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation. . . For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole." This, remarkably, is from the New Directions introduction to Barnes' Nightwood. He begins to clarify: "In describing Nightwood for the purpose o attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would 'appeal primarily to readers of poetry.' This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement, but I am glad to take this opportunity to amplify it a little." Here's how the master poet Eliot continues, in prose, about Barnes' "prose":

"I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language [blogger's aside: perhaps this is where I got the "astonishing"--though it feels apt] covers a vacuity of content. Unless the term 'novel' has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel. And I do not mean that Miss Barnes's style is 'poetic prose.' . . . A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give. To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." This was thoughtfully composed in 1937.

What happened to the reader between 1937 and, say, now? The reader of popular fiction in 1937 faced many of the same overwhelming choices readers confront (or ignore) now. The reading population since the industrial printing press has been sold and educated on a mass market of theme and type, character and rhythm, text and context, content and form. But here in Nightwood, another century forward, there are voices and perceptions--phrases and words--in the tribe that spark, astonish, echo, repeat. . . and pick for their instruments and tune a vibe that is potent, that is now, that we enliven (even in our pause to accept it) ourselves and each other to the blast of reality or to the sublime of a reverie and insight we have found there. May the goodness continue.

Pushed Buttons: Che as friend or foe; the book is not a wall but a gate.

Have you yet been blinded by a word? There have been times the sight of a name has made me sick. In Dublin, Ireland, it was 1984, as my friends and I could not believe America would accept more and more restrictions (in education, particularly) from President Reagan—a bully leader, we felt, who appeared to have little sympathy for anyone who couldn’t rise from struggles without help (those dying from AIDS, or those raising a family on a welfare check, or students trying to pay for four years of an education themselves). In recent past years it was difficult news whatever followed “W” and “Bush.” There was a human story on the other end of it, someone who was suffering unnecessarily as a direct result of a strident decision—and things were not going to work out so well for them.

What is the good reason why those who would be friends, great friends, attending each other’s births, birthdays, memorials and holiday vacations, consign sides—the dispute over a split hair’s width of supposed idealistic entrenchment—cannot admit a place of mutual sympathy over three letters? If the same letters were found in a Chinese alphabet they’d be uttered in forty different ways, yes? and each way would offer a new meaning. Since when must we destroy curiosity in order to preserve our strict identify, line-drawn-fact-of-opinion, our suffering?

If you’ve ever felt you’ve been on the outside of things—the norm, the popular, raise, place, merit, a culture, economic expectation; if you’ve ever been on the downside of social security affording not meds or your own bed, if you’ve ever identified with the homeless, heard the news of the family place burning down to the ground to nothing—well, then, you know the beat. Our chambers keep a tight muscle. Love and forgiveness begin to express the common language, through any context.

Che, El Che, is an icon and opinions are strongly divided (to understate the unfortunate fact) as to the degrees to which he may have been “terrorist” or “saint” at any measurable point in his living. I invite you to the Wikipedia site, which reflects edited collected scholarship in an array of evidence and assertion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara). We find the words attributed to Susan Sontag: Che’s “goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity.” Of course, the family members of any victim of violence could understandably take issue with “[an act of] the cause of humanity” taking the life of their loved one. Yet do we reasonably argue with one who noted the icon’s “inspiration for every human being who ever aspired to freedom”—particularly when the human being saying that was Nelson Mandela? Freedom is difficult for any extreme, but to one who has been oppressed and then imprisoned (a matter of speech, too) there must be at least some sympathy for the links between struggle and liberation.

Text, and any art that won’t destroy a human being in the mortal and ontological sense, is sad paranoia’s gift-elixir and candor’s masterfully ordinary muse. Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift relieve us of time’s baggage, if we are open to reading the same stars together—one by one, in awe.

So how do we “inflect” ourselves/our breath/these syllables mono or many so that we do not invite reactive rejections of our observations, unique in rhythm and melody, especially in a tide of text that seeks love and forgiveness?

Singer Richard Shindell’s song (using the same three letters that challenged my reader even before a page was turned) describes a man imprisoned longer for, it would seem, carrying in his wallet a photo of his girlfriend who is wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Perhaps it is not the rebel’s violence we celebrate (it cannot be), perhaps we celebrate power to the powerless by voice and by raised fist that declares: We are human beings and we will live humanly, not by force or dictate. Perhaps it is the notion of the underdog against brutal inequity. There are brutalities across class, economies, cultures. Each should be questioned.

My Che. is about observation, texture, sensuality, image, musicality, gesture, invention, evaluation, imagination, dream, people, friendships, renewal, joy, recognition, struggle, fruition. The novella Che. is an invitation to kindle your sensual relationship with a world of your making through language. Where there is a blood stain, we pause. Where there is tide on clear days we become thankful for what tide has brought .

The poetic is never too tightly bound in prose as to prompt wars (and if it does, it becomes something else, something it never was). The poetic encourages matters of loving where there had previously been dispute. The poetic leaves you in a space for astonishment, where love takes place.

Twenty-three years ago I donned a beret, in India. A friend I’d met in Hyannis had worn it in the India national touring company of Jesus Christ Superstar. In Bombay, he thought I should wear it while hanging on to the back of his motorcycle (I suppose to keep us out of trouble [the idea being I might pass for a police officer as we sped along]). Of course my father, a Marine—now in his 80s—introduced the concept of men in hats and uniforms when I was a boy (he became a teacher, and: a Veteran For Peace). Twenty-four years ago I began wearing a beard (before I met Ginsberg, before I ever thought about Che in these terms). And, yes, I own two “Che” t-shirts, neither of which revels in any particular version of the history of El Che, Che Guevara.

Yevgeny Yevhushenko—whom I saw and met at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater panel and reading last week (I’ve posted video of Yevhushenko reading, in a unique but poetic presentation—made possible only because I could not see the man himself: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Che-A-Novella-In-Three-Parts-by-Peter-Money/135794669796997). . . Yevhushenko (interesting that there is hush in the middle of his name. . . ) said, while describing the soccer game between Russian soldiers and German soldiers after the war, “It Is Never Too Late For Forgiveness.”

Don’t you ever build a wall between you and the gifts of words in expression. Nothing is worth that coldness and isolation.

Provincetown Arts Magazine and Che: A Novella

I want to thank Chris Busa and Provincetown Arts magazine for writing about the novella in the "Buzz" section of this year's issue. Busa selects a section of Che's text and describes the novella as "a hybrid of poetry, fiction, and cultural commentary. Some moments offer startling insight into how language itself can expose fresh thoughts." And Che is in extraordinary company: Nick Flynn (The Ticking Is The Bomb [Norton], Another Bullshit Night In Suck City), Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm and War), Nicholas Meyer (The Day After and Star Trek II and IV), and Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States) all appear in the same "Buzz."

Giving The Grammazons Some Love: Clark (& Shea) on the Grammar of Effect and Intent

Waves bringing in the full moon high tides as we approach midnight on this spit of land/sand/island, with the force of Mailer and O'Neill and Hofmann and Motherwell. . . and into this I welcome the Whitmanic joy and defense of language in sense and exuberance: Ammon Shea's description of Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar, to celebrate our motives and intuitions (I still find it hard to excuse the use of the hyphen as a dash--for it misses the length of the breath by the minus of it; so, driftwood, be raft more than fragment; rope instead of snip). Here's what we mean:

The visual nature of word-space-punctuation not only contains reference but leaves an impression, suggests--linguistically--allusion, acts--itself and in juxtaposition--as metaphor. . . and as potential. The grammar is as much past as it is present and potential. The Greek/Pound's three-fold reasoning ought to still hold here: Does the structure have a music? Does the structure have a logic? Is there enough about the structure that feels new? And do we guide the reader in making sense as much as the reader must accept a new measure of rhythm and threads of logic that seem found--frayed or whole--in an entirely new land?

Roy Peter Clark writes, according to Ammon, the relaxed "grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent. . . [that] gives you a little push and says, 'Go, go, go.'" Ammon Shea: "Clark wholeheartedly endorses breaking the commandments that make no sense, as long as in the breaking the writing itself holds up": in the progress of our evolution we question "rules that have little influence on the making of meaning" (Clark feels).

In other words (or: in words): "encourage. . . more joy."

Go out and voyage, my friends. The language is ready, and sensual.

"Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,"
--Walt Whitman

Message in the Bottle: Analogy of Tides, Traps, Teasing -- And This Poetic, the flight & song of being (the contexts of text, ontology of word--)

So, in cleaning out a section of my barn—the one mice declared their feed and dumpster—I found, again (one of the loveliest phrases to me: found, again [nearly as winning as found, anew]:—here the comma enters a little sorrow, a vague-knowing surprise, a lot of “epiphany” at the anticipation of one’s next breath), I found again old things that meant so much: The Message in the Bottle, writings by Walker Percy. I say “writings” as much as “thinkings”—and as much, in this way, as the ontological act fused in language . . . or expressing oneself as vital as blood, as necessary as “job,” as central as courage, conviction, personality and sense of self. As essential to the bird as flight or song.

At the same time I found things that meant so much, once, but had to be thrown away—without a thought. There was thought, even contemporarily. Attachment had to be severed.

Some things survive, others go the way of compost—and then survive newly. To sever attachment is what Walker Percy says to me when he urges himself to think of metaphor as a natural happenstance, the coincidence or irony, sleight of hand or “mis-”/understanding of language. What lingers in one ear bears. What got left out by apostrophe indicates—even an absence.

That a record player is called a “seabird” by its users, but was itself a product of the Seeburg manufacturing company, is a matter of sublime translation. That a text “becomes” an animal that will not immediately sit (the cat [who] circles your lap before it curls to rest). The eyes & ears of individuals love and yearn in gears greased with their own oil. Who knew such baby’s breath would become such force of will, declaration—if by innocence or empowerment, authority or audacity. “Misreadings”—Walker Percy thought—offer “the regular experience of that heightened, that excited sense of being which we find in poetry.”

Walker Percy suggests the “prolonged analogy” that Aristotle and Dante were inclined to use, a subtle kind of metaphor over a mixed geography of words instead of what has become a pill of instant cunning. The prolonged analogy is the work of the poem but it is also the work of storytellers, epics, a band’s “lp” recording, dances and imagistic films, the sum and parts of visual works of art, and—partly because their sum is an accumulation of parts: the novel if, at its base and in the force/being of every word, the language unfolds in the innocence of first discovery. . . or anew.

Percy: “the action takes place among the common things of concrete experience and yet yields an analogy”—“by the very thingness of the action” (which brings us back to William Carlos Williams, naturally, and the role of poetry in everyday language).

This considered, “Sentences refer to different worlds.” (1.522, “A Triadic Theory of Meaning” [Walker Percy]).

The message in the bottle is not the comprehension of a statement only, it is—as well—the experience of the entire vessel and passage, the finding, the uncorking, the amazement of ratio of air/moisture amid the fact of its existence, the unfathomable minute by minute journey by tides/traps/teasing, the wet sand as fellow passengers, the sheen of your own reflection in the bow of glass—looking “into” the artifact of assumed words, a creature within an astronautical womb, a context emerging in the imagination. A set of circumstances that constituted a moment in a life—and now another moment, breathing, configuring, a tongue to the mind in a passage of time.