we're robots

Hailey Higdon and I have made a chapbook that consists of 3 of my poems and 3 of Hailey's. It's called we're robots. Want one? Let me know or go to the website.

happy survival

Eddie Okwedy, "Happy Survival"

Cheers to the genius who thought to synchronize this song with this cartoon.

Common Sense, cont.

you lose you get

you lose you get doubts
a need for cartoons burrows
into our city of boxes
flat mind the water runs
off of thru realist gutters
you lose you get doubts
buckets turned up for
next week’s collection
a museum for grandmom
does not encourage us
we know she’s headed straight
for the bathroom first
old age and doctors
make us sing and paint
a house w/ killz primer
this need for cartoons burrows
into my city of boxes
flat mind the water runs
off of thru realist gutters
out comes a mayor standing
on a car w/ a bullhorn then
out come furrows squiggles
and semicolons unflattering
the future whose clothes
we can never get all the way
off so if the phillies go all the
way then fuck yeah that luggage
in the window is nobody’s
it rolls thru my day like
the cartoon i imagine myself
to be rolls through the daily
bizness of crickets of crickets
of crickets whose ungulate
singing makes life a rubber
bed on which one can sleep
well enough if drunk enough
on anything as baudelaire
suggested enough nickels
knuckle my uncle the drunk
to dry himself out dust himself
off and rub off the hours he
stumbles for to call me up
and say yo is this donald
duck – yo i’m in a movie
you should check it out
i’m riding my bicycle thru
the sky it’s called ET


Dear Tom Paine,

You wrote that you “disdain the wretch that, with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE, can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.” Well, the wretches have long since found a loophole. They removed the title of “FATHER” and now hide behind corporations, our new fathers. Accountability, accountability, our politicians cry. Such a donut hole of a word. Hang it on a nail in the wall and say munchkin. This is nonsense to you, Tom, utter nonsense. Our country’s run by invisible men is all I’m saying. Not black people, as my aunt would have you believe. She swears Philly’s run by black people because we’ve had a few black mayors. A sad woman, she fears whites are outnumbered, losing ground. She conflates property with purity. She listens to Glen Beck on the radio and parrots him, this douche bag who’s co-opted and violently skewed the heart of Common Sense. What about the welfare state, my aunt says. What about the corporate welfare state, I reply, and she gets this invisible look about her, and we go speechless.

I know, I know: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

There’s so much we cannot see, Tom. I’m afraid that out of self-defense we make ourselves invisible, and so we cannot see each other, and so we cannot see ourselves. We unfeelingly hear of each other’s slaughter so that we can sleep. I stare at your face on the cover my copy of Common Sense. It’s that painting August Miliere did of you, now your most common representation. I look at it and see a righteous man who can take a joke. Your serious face could unfold easily into laughter at any moment. It is clear you had been humiliated. Was it your work as a tax collector? Your work making corsets for dresses? Your failed marriage?

I like especially in this portrait the white crinkles and cracks, the wear on the paint, the marks of time, which do you well. You look like you know they’re there, that these marks make your case for you as you look past them, at us, out of truth, the big invisible.

Your biographies say you were pretty much a nobody at 37. I love that word, nobody. He’s a nobody, she’s a nobody. I’m a nobody. You fled the nothing of England that was somebodyness – for America, where you knew nobody (albeit w/ a letter of recommendation from Ben Franklin, a big fat somebody). But you burrowed - you burrowed deeper and deeper into nobodyness and came to call it your country. That horror of democracy, that large widening tunnel – you helped create it while – while you literally fought for it – in your 40s!

Jesus Christ, Thomas Paine, I love you, somebody that you are! Father of himself. Let’s destroy the Federal Fucking Reserve, print new money and put your face on it!

No, no wait . . . Oh, fuck it, never mind . . . I’ll writer you later.

Yours,
Ryan Eckes


back home

old man’s saying
get the fuck
outta
my
house

wind in the window

doh

homer
simpson
hits
a homer

down
the
street

no more wind
no more home

got my back



emphasis

birds bark the door
             the day made of hailey
                         her body the buildings belonging out

            the maps unfolded         the streets and directions
                         soft little oceans         of cars         whooshes against
            absolute monarchy, that stupid kid
             singing a song         that trademark         that trade
                        marks the spot
                               makes more converts         than reason

so listen

the people called quakers will begin to relax
in their dusty attachment       to each other

             they are not doves, but pigeons

a pigeon coos on my a.c., purple about its neck, antsy, about
to fly away, gets comfortable, settles down, takes off

the land hits the spot       the spot spots me a landlord, that long
             habit of not thinking a thing wrong



pass it on

she scratches the day
w/ her lottery
ticket       boyfriend
who’s nice but full
of shit       hurtful
disastrous actually’s more
like it       news
       explodes
onto the front
page       it fronts
we yawn
on the lawn
and make babies
w/ our information

poemas

Earlier this year, Carlos Soto Román translated a few of my poems into Spanish, and now the translations have been published in the journal 60 Watts, along with Carlos's translations of poems by Debrah Morkun. You can read them here.

Here you can listen to Carlos read his poems in the Wooden Shoe in Philly last summer.

common sense: part 1, sitting around

short of independence

a wonderful thing about philadelphia is
it’s not new york city            parts of us

are real        they stand on the ground
which is not an idea        tops of churches

stick out, feathers in caps        backwards
frontwards        sideways        some fly

some don’t        sundown sunflower
squirrels down town eat up the night

pick a fight pick a fight        choose your
battles        it’s a free country        love it

leave it        come crawling back        back
to mama        flag a cab        flag a cab

tip the driver        he works hard        works
hard for shit        shit shit shit        watching

my mouth        trying to get in as my mouth
watches it back        watching the flags of

common currency        “the 6th borough”
quivers on your lips        mist in the exhaust

of road rage        that settles into a film
the film stars us        we’re in it together

you are a history stuffed w/ fables
i’m mere patchwork        we’re trying

to be real        through fatal slumbers
am i in a fatal slumber?        i feel

“patchy”        like they say about south
philly        it’s patchy        you gotta watch

out        you don’t know        who’s real
around here        who’s real        that we may

pursue determinately some fixed object
that the mouth may talk        and be worth

something        to go for a ride        w/out
being taken for a ride



putting you on

ted greenwald sits on the tv
in the picture
a clean glass of orange juice
in one hand
other hand in the other world
he says it’s common sense
come on
hardwood sleeves rolled up
floors        finishing books
the finish invades the prerogative
of heaven        which is green
nothing happens there
a prayer        a prayer        nobody
recites        keep god out
of the whitehouse
the president’s black and
white prayers flit about him
like bats        which are blind
and he ignores them        thank god
thank god for ted greenwald
and thomas paine and our smart
black president        wouldn’t it
be funny if we put them on
the money        let’s put them
on the money




Dear Thomas Paine,

Let me tell you a story. I was one of two passengers in the front car on the subway one late Friday night, at city hall. The other man wore scrubs, exhausted, sighing impatiently, just off work. We were waiting for the el to reach city hall so that its passengers could transfer to this, the final train of the night. “Come on,” he mumbled to himself, then looked at me and shook his head for some token of solidarity. He was middle-aged.

He used to work at SEPTA, he told me, in the subway, cleaning up garbage. He quit after a few years because of the rats. They got to him. You never knew when they’d jump out of a garbage can, right on to you. It was different, he said, than dealing w/ human gore. He much preferred being a nurse, no matter how bloody or disgusting the job. My father worked for SEPTA, I said, and I was an English teacher. He stared at me for a few seconds and nearly scoffed—let out a very quite tss while nodding slowly. “You’re an English teacher,” he said, god knows what thoughts coursing through his mind. Why didn’t you get in where your father worked, he asked.

We ended up talking about family, or women. Was I married, too. In trying to sum up the reasons for my recent divorce, I said, “I live for today.” This struck a chord with him—“I hear you, bro, I hear you . . .” I seemed to have bonded w/ him by uttering just those words: “I live for today.” We both got off at Tasker-Morris, shook hands, exchanged names, and agreed that maybe we’d meet at a bar, a white bar, he joked, since I was white (and he was black) and I wouldn’t want to go in any of the black bars he knew. And he crossed over to the west side of Broad, the black side, and I walked home through the white side.

I didn’t say much about the English-teaching. Only that SEPTA wasn’t for me. I didn’t bother explaining my staunchly anti-Calvinist point of view, nor that I had settled for an income of $20,000 a year, even on a master’s degree, so that I may construct a life that consists of vast chunks of free time in which to read and write poetry or letters to dead people, and generally do whatever the hell I please.

I love to sit around, Tom. I get up and belt Leaves of Grass from my kitchen. Then get a beer and sit down, scribble, go outside for a walk. What do I find? Same old same old, nothin doin. A country full of people who love to sit around between crappy jobs they’re either too lazy or poor to quit. Is this the price of independence, Tom? Of freedom and free enterprise? What have we come to? Perhaps the revolution is internal now. Or perhaps it always was. It feels lame to say that because I live in a spiritually bereft culture that ridicules most ideas of social change. But one always needs a revolution, I think. That’s what having a soul means.

“I live for today.” Easy for me to say, as I’m not worried about having children—I’ve got no ticking clock, and besides, the world’s got too many people. Why bring another living thing into a world where the most prominent mindset is selfishness: “it’s all about me, I’m gonna get mine, fuck all else.” A state of mind that is ruining the world. You know what it’s like today, Tom? We have evolved into a people who excel at dismissing each other by filtering out all the news and information that is unpleasant. So flow our rivers and oceans of garbage and shit.

Things are gonna change, I can feel it, some of us say. Or is it just high-tide?

Yours,
Ryan Eckes


pushovers

between beer and bread
the death of salesmen
bookmarks   the stores

that closed   what excuse
but warm afternoon
unfolding the rotten lids

of retirements   i slide off
the street   beat the heat
god is thrifty   god

who was it who robbed
the register   they wanna
know   they wanna know

w/out looking   w/out
calling up grandma for
once   who none of us can

stand   to see how she’s
doing   hey grandma
we are the traffic   we act

exactly like the sky   we
are not standing   we are
lying down   dying




Dear Thomas Paine,

A major reason I finally got around to reading Common Sense is my infatuation with Ted Greenwald’s book of poems, Common Sense, published about 202 years after your Common Sense. Dumb, I know, but often how it goes. Serious though I may be, I have a faith in silliness, which includes making joy in randomness. That is my practice. Or “poetics,” mumbles a member of the avant-garde; that’s a new word: it means “compensation for lack of faith in the poem itself.”

My friend Andrew, who has always loved John Ashbery’s poetry for its deconstruction of the myths of an orderly world that he was taught as a child, tells me he sees a generational shift: his generation wanted to articulate the randomness they knew was true, as well as their frustration with the institutional reinforcement of those myths of a perfect world; whereas my generation (I’m 15 years younger), born within a time of rapid technological advancement, seeks to make connections—is perhaps “wired” to—out of a seemingly random world.

I don’t know about that. I love digression. It’s why I write poetry. Digression, digression. Of course, I want to connect as well. Why am I writing you, Tom? Where’s my love in this? What is it I love?

I love Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia, too, says my friend Dwight, but there’s so much senseless violence and death there, it’s mind-numbing. True, I say, and it beats down your soul, knowing it, death after death. So hard to believe in anything.

Tom, I’m an atheist, too, but only when I am too tired or lazy to wriggle out of the limited vocabulary that’s used to speak about faith. I hate religion. The word ‘faith’ is toast. A hopeless brick. Millions of preachy assholes tied like balloons to some silly conception of it. God. Blow it all up.

It is probably in part that I, a 30-year-old American, have not read Common Sense until now because it is difficult to take history seriously in the United States. History is a subject in school, a category in the bookstore, a hobby among thousands from which to choose. Our consumer culture depends on the routine erasure of history: every day you shake the etch-a-sketch and start anew, then throw away the etch-a-sketch and one day try to explain to a kid what an etch-a-sketch was, as he impatiently hands you a note about his attention-deficit disorder. Everything bad is good for you, he says, you just don’t understand because you’re too old—now sign this, okay?

There are, of course, the lying flag-waving jingoes who build their arguments upon fake, elementary school versions of American history—I hate these people, too. And find solace in knowing you’d also hate them. Allow me to address them with your words, from Common Sense, that addressed those who believed in hereditary right: “Let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.”

Is that how you did it, Tom? Is that you rallied the troops against nationalism? With your words, which tickle the hell out of me, make me laugh my evil laugh? I’ll be honest: I love your hate, Tom.

Maybe we all need a place to put our hate. I think that hate exists within each of us, independent of stimulus. Maybe it’s something that simply needs to be let out every so often, like a dog or cat, tied to the leash of love. In which case we are all religious.

I like to imagine that you would appreciate, if not outright enjoy, Ted Greenwald’s poems. I’ve got a loose faith that you’d get the spirit of them, and that if the three of us were to meet in some whisper out of time, we’d find solidarity in each other. We’d raise our mugs of beer, to jokes about flags, and the country would be a poem.

Yours,
Ryan Eckes

looking for an apartment

carbon monoxide is colorless

and odorless

but joe loves the phone

so it rings

hello, he says

we walk around his mouth

it feels like philadelphia

in august or august

in philadelphia

the fan cuts a hot circle

out of us

a dumpster slams

in the alley out

back

it’s a brand new fridge

says joe

open it and take a look

Common Sense: 8/18 at 8pm

Tuesday, Aug 18th at 8pm
at Wine-O Bar, 447 Poplar St.
Phila, PA

Donald Deeley will be reading fiction
Brandon Eckes & Chris DiOrio will be playing music
and I will be reading poetry & letters inspired by
Thomas Paine's Common Sense and
Ted Greenwald's Common Sense.

$2 cans of Yuengling & Pabst; $3 glasses of house red or white wine.
Hosted by Abbi Dion.











DiOrio & Eckes, the musicians, pictured above.

notes on innovation

Since reading Magdalena Zurawski's response to the negative review of The Bruise and the recent conversation between Dale Smith and Kenny Goldsmith in Jacket, I've been thinking a lot about this concept of innovative literature. I know the word "innovative" is used to distinguish between conventional, traditional modes of writing and more experimental work, but I wonder to what extent "innovation" is now a primary concern for writers who identify themselves as avant-garde or post-avant, and what the consequences of that might be. When I hear the word "innovation," I think of technology, mass production and one-upmanship, impatient American culture of consumption and disposability. I think of my new "energy-saving" refrigerator.

Most people, I'd bet, would say they value originality - that word seems to have nothing but positive connotations. But I don't think we all share the same definition of originality. I don't see originality as at odds with acknowledging influence; nor do I see it as at odds with dialogue with other people (alive or dead). I mean, if you really produced something completely original, or innovative, nobody'd know what it was, right? The product wouldn't communicate. I think much of what's tagged "innovative" in literature actually sacrifices communication, and I'm not sure what for. To fool people into believing one is "ahead of one's time"? It's hard for me to buy some imaginary historic timeline of art, some Structure of Poetic Revolutions. Do publishers ask for "innovative" work because they see poetry as a science on which the progress of civilization depends? Are we rapidly approaching a glorious point in time, an apotheosis, when nothing could possibly be any newer? Are we going to heaven or something?

In the Jacket conversation, Goldsmith states explicitly that he is interested only in making an impact within the history of art - so as not to be ignored - and that he has made a career of it by showing "the art world that poetry was as up to date as anything they were showing in the museum." And he suggests, as many avant-garde or "post-avant" writers have, that "adventurous" poetry has been "marginalized." By who, though? How is it that avant-garde writers (and not artists - somehow the other arts are different, according to Goldsmith) have less power than writers who aren't avant-garde? This argument always fails to account for social class. The truth is that the poetry is "marginal" because it's written for a privileged sliver of the American population. A more accurate term than "marginal" would be "special interest."

A writer's sense of audience is important. You might write alone in a room, but that room is in the world, right? If one's chief aim in writing poetry is to be innovative, then--given the historical exclusivity of art, the still limited access to higher education, not to mention widening class divisions--can one's sense of audience be anything other than an insular group of people who mostly come from the same privileged social class? And whose poetry, therefore, will not be innovative but apolitical, regardless of claims made on its behalf?

The desire to be read and be recognized is essentially the desire for human exchange, i.e., communication. Perhaps the purest form of trade. One thing I've liked about living this poetry life is that it often maintains elements of folk culture (readers as writers and vice-versa; opportunities to interact with other writers), unlike arts that are more firmly situated within entertainment/pop culture (marked by sharper divisions between artist and audience; a more passive, less participatory situation). If one's sense of audience is grounded more deeply in the entertainment model, that is, in the absence of genuine human exchange, then the desire to be recognized may become the whole point of writing--and then we've got ourselves a delusional poet, one whose values seem oddly similar to those espoused by Reality TV shows. I see this delusion in the pettiness, the wastes of breath I find in, say, negative reviews in lit journals, in the petty criticisms on blogs.

Writing to communicate is inextricable from valuing community. In Dale Smith's impressive defense of poetry's "communicative potential," there's an assumption that one has (or should have) an obligation to participate politically in the society in which one lives, and that that obligation is not separate from the work that one chooses to do/make. This happens to be a characteristic I've admired about many poets who live in my city--I draw inspiration from them, from the commitments that are evident both in their writing and in the work they do outside/around their writing (often their jobs).

It's important for me also to distinguish here between "community" and "network." Sometimes people conflate these terms. It's the difference between talking to/about somebody to know the person and talking to/about somebody to use the person. When a writer starts meeting innovation quotas, as I once caught myself doing in grad school (by, say, incorporating types of parataxis, disjunction, fragmentation into my writing), at the expense of saying what needs to be said, that writer is networking, not writing.

Taking chances, breaking habits, questioning norms - especially one's own - becoming conscious - yes, I understand the importance of that, in writing, in living. I have a hunch that originality derives from being relentlessly true to oneself (as cliche as that may sound), and that can be impossible to measure, impossible to quantify, and hopelessly subjective, which might nag the more scientifically-minded among us. But innovation for the sake of innovation is something to question. For real.

respect

The mighty Kim Gek Lin Short has a blog, and on it she has written about the voices in my chapbook.

And Steven Allen May, a few months ago, w/ some kind words.

And several months ago, Stan Mir on Old News.

Thanks, folks.

text messages

my inbox: a year in review

Working the handlebar tonight with some chick. Come by get a load on. Start this holiday off right.

Republicans are on my television chanting “drill baby drill.”

Muaaa! besitos muchos besitos monis. i am so lucky you are the best.

Jesus was born in a Wawa.

Or you could just let him know that there are anatomy lessons available next door at the Dive.

The swelling is going down.

Im workin at the handlebar with my lovely cousin Lauren tonight. Be there, cause every time you drink an angel gets its wings.

Skylar born @ 7300 am! All are well. :-)

Just an fyi – keith and i are not dating . . . You had a strange look on your face that looked as if you thought he was serious. Hope you’re having fun at the Locust.

Kids melted in rain. Stuck. Diner. Doubtful.

Allo, gubnor! Sup witchu? How’s the adjuncting? How’s life? How’s my Eckes?

theres a beef n beeR to help pay for my hit n run @ out of wack jacks on Saturday. Tickets are $25.

I am @ Claudia’s place. i want u to know that i will miss u a lot. love MM

Do you think it’s weird to have a dog in the shower with you – while you’re naked and taking a shower?

Broke gonna have to skip.

read remains again today. holy shit.

Everythings coming up ryan.

What are you up to this evening, cupcake?

Balls out no bull old fart prof. Was a good one. Lots of remembering to do tho.

You got cash?

Tell jack im sorry i missed him!

No really thank you.

overheard

At 4th & South:

"I'm the only Duck driver brave enough to say it: Punk Rock Girl."

-- driver of a Ride the Ducks bus/boat to tourists on board, pointing out the store that used to be Zipperhead, "immortalized" by The Dead Milkmen in their song "Punk Rock Girl."



All last summer, in one of the apartment windows on South Street, there was a sign that said FUCK THE DUCKS.

what i've wanted

I started this blog last year to post pieces of a manuscript as it developed, but I wound up posting other things, too, adjacent concerns, whatever I wanted. So the blog is Old News but the blog is not the Old News that is the manuscript. I might post the complete, ordered mss. here soon. As I finish it up, some notes here on what I’ve wanted to do:

I first got interested in poetry, about ten years ago, because I saw in what I was reading the possibility of telling a story that was also a meditation. (I was inspired by two poetry classes I took my last year in college: Postmodern American Poetry, taught by Jeffrey Nealon, and a writing workshop taught by CS Giscombe, whose book Here was also a big influence.) Since then, I’ve tried to address, through writing, the question of how to inherit the world. And directly correlated: how to be in the world. How to live.

Old News is driven by doubt yet hinged on the idea that one must invent (rather than find) one’s own way of being/doing (faith), and that this must happen through interaction with one’s neighbors, with one’s nearest public, while remaining conscious of that public’s slippery extensions into more distant publics.

I wanted to write a book about my neighbors that was a little history book of Philadelphia, a narrative driven by conflicts I see and feel, hashed out by characters (neighbors) who recur as remnants of each other. I used old newspapers I’d found under the floors of the house I moved into a few years ago. They were from the 1920s. I wanted to retell some of the tiny forgotten stories in these, the common everyday mishaps, tragedies and curiosities that are rarely reported in newspapers today. To pronounce names no longer attached to anything. Not to memorialize, but to gain a sense of scale. I tried to weave the mystery of the antique seamlessly with present-day conundrums and banalities to gain a sense of scale that is holier, I think, definitely less destructive than a view narrow enough to justify, say, the hideous contrast of luxury architecture being built upside or in place of longstanding redbrick houses in gentrified neighborhoods like Northern Liberties (Who remembers just a few years back black people attacking whites with bricks there, beating them unconscious?).

But there are seams. I took care not to reduce people’s experiences to my own, nor to elevate mine; to let each be discrete, stand alone, and to know I’m gonna die. Don’t know if I succeeded.

I wanted to state bare facts and face them.

Philadelphia remains mostly poor and violent.

I don’t mean accept facts. I mean face, as in “not turning away.” Journalism 101? I didn’t want to make a newspaper, though. Nor parody of one. Initially, I thought of each piece as a page in a newspaper (e.g, the sports page). I abandoned that idea. It was cute, but ultimately this is just a book of poems that make up one long poem. I wanted to write a poem. Investigation, sure, but more songlike than reportage, I hope. Poetry is more nuisance, new-sense, than news. It should keep working, keep going. To resist inevitability - the psychology if not the politics of inevitability. To resist the cult of the final word and cultural amnesia. To value means no less than ends. And for the pleasure of it, the pleasure in placing one thing next to another - by knowing that first thing first - and moving your eyes across both, creating a sound. Pleasure and idea in the experience of juxtaposition. That is sound. A sound sound.

I wanted the book to move from page to page the way my prose poems (from my previous mss., stolen cars) had moved from sentence to sentence. This would be the form of investigation. With the prose poems, I began with a particular image or circumstance and followed it with a sentence that developed what was most at stake, most urgent in that first image or circumstance, then treated the second sentence the same way with the third, etc. There were two methods of development (or, investigation, if you like). 1) description of an object or situation that is physically near and in relation to the circumstance described in the sentence preceding it; 2) metaphor, simile, or association (sound or sense of something) that is grounded in the reality of the circumstance it is developing—not reference to something that will remain outside the perimeter of the story merely for the sake of description. The point was to show the world in motion. I wanted the digression that adds (not decorates or erases) – this is inspired by the talk-poems of David Antin – the digression that builds, digs deeper, arrives and arrives while it leaves and leaves. This got really hard to do from page to page; probably I failed. Sentences and pages aren’t the same thing, after all.

As I read Old News I see and hear two motions: digging (unearthing) and an accordion-like motion of unification/separation among the characters (myself included). This I didn’t plan. I can only write without knowing where I’m going. If that sounds like a romantic position, okay, but it isn’t hopelessly so. It’s how one learns.

The poetics is in the poem “remains” - the rhythm I arrived at is in that. It has carried over into living.

an assessment

"By and large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have--often rabidly--obstructed and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and political condition."

- Alexander Cockburn, from "Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?"

new is the old old

alice notley said “more important than having
been born is your city, the scale upon which
your heart when you die will be weighed”
and then she said “i don’t know if that’s true
or not, i think about it a lot.” me too. the
scale can hardly be trusted. it rusts out. little
red bugs on bricks. bloodsuckers? and who
wants to be just a lily in a field? the field’s
boundaries cry a lot. your door is weeping,
jack tells me. i let him in, we drink wine
and beer. the building speaks for me a
little, i don’t know what it says. a window
means you could be somewhere else. i had
just been somewhere. the town was empty,
i bought ulysses for a nickel, first day of the
rest of our lives, hundred and five degrees
durham carolina. potholes being filled by
mister rumble. we cheer up the past, every
thing fit to print a complaint stacked to the
ceiling how hard it is to be a grapevine. our
neighbors do not grow. so to know what is,
i go quiet til hope’s a gull with sad wings.
let’s shoot the poor thing down. no violence
but ourselves. nobody elopes, nobody elopes.
steve half-jokes: miscegenation’s the wave
of the future. a past crests and falls in his
words. how much does it weigh? that heart
pays and pays. regret is debt. we’ve accrued
block captains. one sat on my stoop before
me, smoking cigarettes under green awning,
a vulture: everything you do, he said, must
come through me first. okay, we say, okay.

TIRED OF LIFE, says Note

The Evening Bulletin, Monday, June 11, 1923

‘TIRED OF LIFE’, says Note

found on pier in the pocket

of a coat of dark blue material

next to light cap near the foot

of Arch St: i am tired of living

and want to end it all. forgive

me father but i don’t want to

live. i have met the only girl

and she will have nothing to

do with me. ask the forgiveness

of mother and

sister for me

too.

everybody hits

Last month I had the pleasure of hearing Chris Wagenseller read his tribute to the late Harry Kalas at Wine-O Bar at 5th & Poplar. Wagenseller memorialized Kalas with personal anecdote, a shrewd and humorous analysis of Kalas's commentating style-- including a discussion of both kinds of Kalas home run calls (the line drive and the fly ball)--and a few impressive imitations of Kalas. He pointed out that Kalas's sounds reflected Kalas's deep knowledge of and respect for the actual sounds of the game. Here's Chris explaining what set Kalas apart from the rest:

Sports announcers, particularly radio guys, are often fondly remembered for their ability to "paint a picture with words," which is a cliche as trite as it is inaccurate. Harry could paint a picture, sure, but his greatest gifts were in timing, tonality, and information, and his goal was not that you see the game, but that you understand it, that you experience its rhythms and its culture. The generations of broadcasters who have followed have filled every conceivable moment with ludicrous blather and not learned elemental lessons about baseball's great unspoken moments, when pitchers circle mounds and take long looks in at the catcher's signs and batters adjust gloves and caps and take a step back for a few practice swings. Harry was content to let these moments rest without comment, because he was as much a part of the fury of pitcher‐hitter-catcher‐umpire as the ball itself, and his focus and intensity must be saved for the moments that most demanded them.

Wagenseller also recited a poem for us that Kalas wrote for Philly fans when he was inducted into the hall of fame. You can read the whole thing here. Or you can listen to it here. If you listen to it, you can hear the type of banter and back-and-forth that often takes place at the informal, high-energy Tuesday Night Wine-O Reading Series hosted by Abbi Dion.

The Wild

Laura Jaramillo and Alex Dumont are editing a new print journal of art and literature called The Wild. The mission is to investigate "ideas about animals, wilderness, nature and their intersections with humans and culture." They're currently accepting submissions for the first issue. For more info, click here.

There's an online preview that includes three of my poems from my chapbook when i come here.

remains

the weather: variable winds, cloudy

and showery, moderate temperatures

the immutable’s what despairs. i doubt

stone and throw some and feel whole.

kids play some in the street, holler car

when a car comes. cars come, they call

each other names. don’t call each other

names. rick is a fat chef who drives a

minivan and his son’s so tiny that every

game for him is keep-away. he chases

after a ball, it slams against our door

startling em, who likes the street noise

it reminds her of her country, so the

narrow street’s a deep sadness running

under the play, silent river the kids

bob up and about on. the kids are

innocent, lame hope. rick asks that i

holler car as well. i do. he asks when

am i gonna knock up my wife. i don’t.

we use protection. we protect ourselves

from each other. she looks at me from

across the street, and i wave. where’d

you find her, man, rick laughs. from

a catalog, i say. rick laughs. but rick

wouldn’t put it past me because rick

doesn’t know me. but i feel like i know

rick because he’s easy to talk to so i

like him. we don’t like the unscooped

poop in front of his stoop, so we talk

about it. snoopy is as snoopy does, the

flies buzz. you dog, you. a dog i respect

only for what we call it, and for what

it calls. dog sewn to bark, and seeing

what the tree’s made of. it wears the

dog’s speech and never leaves. how

many trees have i barked up and thought

i got no answer because nothing moved.

our small talk. leave the trolley track

in case we bring the trolley back. dozing

off to its glide inside night of wallpaper

of palm trees on a beach in the backroom

of a house on torresdale ave’s the safest

i ever felt. tomorrow i’ll take you to wool-

worth’s for bubble gum and baseball

cards. can’t beat that with a baseball bat.

my father’d stash his receipts in his wallet,

open it to show me—nothin but receipts,

he’d say laughing. christian boltanski said

he began to work as an artist when he knew

his childhood was finished and was dead.

he said: we all have somebody who is dead

inside of us, a dead child. i remember that

little christian who is dead inside me.

many dead childhoods are philadelphia

many receipts, but philadelphia was never

a child. the city’s a corpse played by a man.

the corpse courses through a man. mapped,

i ghost myself up, a series of currents

driven by receipts. the currency’s a map

of the corpse, which is a grid like a crib

to contain the unpredictable. the if clauses

drive north while the would clauses drive

east into the river like lemmings. there’s

a clear channel to double down on, wagers

on wagers, futures on futures, turtles on top

of turtles, holding up the world. turtles all

the way down—what do we owe these

turtles? once i wrote: in the face of a name

i must embody doubt to keep from slipping

into this corpse business. the poem was

a trolley, i took it to work, i took it to work

and left it on a chair made in a factory in

another world. my friends agree the local’s

essential. i write for them, and i write for

strangers, but when i say friends i don’t

mean turtle shells or stepping stones. i mean

anomalies. i mean a flash card my mother

held to my face over and over with the word

friend on it, which i struggled to pronounce.

i would try to sound out the ‘i’ – so it

sounded like ‘fry-end’ and she couldn’t

explain why you don’t pronounce the ‘i’

in this word while you do in other words. so

i hated this ‘i’ that refused to express itself

within this word friend. i stood, like doubt,

outside the word, and i learned it that way

as one must learn many things. how lucky

now to have friends who speak me awake

and wakefulness a useful silence within

a culture that sucks on reward. some

times i wake up to a straw or spitball and

hear my friend earl’s voice: you gotta spend

your life, he told me, so you might as well

spend it on somebody. by spend he meant

love. he bet his life—not on his wife who

had died and who he had missed terribly—

but on itself, as love, which was a kind

of motion, he explained. he liked to say

my woman or my baby. he would sing it

because he knew the woman was never

his. he meant his life, i think. his life

was his currency, he spent it because

his life wasn’t his either, he believed, so

this currency was inexhaustible. he didn’t

give a shit if you trusted him or not, but

knowing he trusted me while knowing

that knowing’s a way of going, not of

standing, a way of going, of speech we

remain inside of, this word go which spins,

made of our deaths, our skins of bark

and brick, world that knows us, remains

enough to subsist on.

Reading This Friday, 4/3 in Fishtown

I'll be reading some poems aloud
this Friday, April 3rd at 7:00pm
at Fishtown Airways Art Gallery, 200 E. Girard Ave
(at Shackamaxon St, two blocks from the El stop)

Michelle Belluomini will also be reading

and there will be an open mic and wine
so bring a poem if you come.

This will be a regular monthly series organized by Jim Mancinelli.

The Curmudgeon Chronicles, Vol. 1

Brandon Holmquest and Witold Gombrowicz call bullshit on poets.
Read Holmquest's new blog, Spiterature.

Light of Unity Festival, 3/28

The 2nd annual Light of Unity Arts Festival
is Saturday, March 28th, Noon-5pm
at Arcadia University, Stiteler Auditorium

There will be poetry, live music, dance, and, I'm told, Kung Fu
Writers include CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock, Ish Klein,
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, myself, and many others.
For the full list and specific info, check out the website.

I'll be reading around 3:30 or 4.

Hosted by Tamara Oakman & Quincy Scott Jones.

overheard

In front of Triangle Tavern, a man wearing an Eagles sweatshirt (the old kelly green color) says into his cell phone: "She--Women are so dumb nowadays! God!"

the ixnay reader #4

the ixnay reader, volume 4 just came out. You can download it here for free. It includes poetry by CAConrad, Arielle Greenberg, Elizabeth Scanlon, Lewis Warsh, Kirsten Kaschock, Eric Baus, sasha fletcher, Brenda Iijima, Sarah Dowling, Michael Kelleher, and me -- it's the first 16 pages of Old News (excluding a page called "love poem," which I added later, after I sent the editors the work; that page goes after "inside the scowl"). Thanks to Chris and Jenn McCreary.

I'm reading at a bar this Tuesday night

This Tues, March 3rd I'll be reading aloud at 7:30
at a place called Wine-O (formerly Ministry of Information)
447 Poplar St, Philadelphia
There will be live music as well
and cheap drinks

pages 26-35

Here are pages 26-35 (as of now) of Old News.

---------------------------------------------------------------

cake

why won’t frankie talk to me?

when i say hello i get barely

a nod back. i bet it’s because

when his wife was

preaching jesus to me i laughed

and cracked a joke and she got

pissed: oh, i get it ,she said,

you’ve had enough, huh?

and she went ahead and told

frankie i was a godless asshole

or something. what was that joke

i cracked? i don’t remember

except all i meant was what was

god but doubt in solid form

you pick up a stone and throw it

and that’s the missionary position: pitcher

we wanna pitcher

we wanna get stoned

have the cake eat the cake

be the cake

let cake cake finale of be

but yeah, i’d lend you my car, too

if i had one and you didn’t

christ

Know Your America Program: Philadelphia (1951)

originally

when i first met frankie he asked where i was from

we stood in the middle of the block, facing my

new rowhome

well we moved from 10^th and spruce, i said

they used to call that the tenderloin, he said

i actually grew up in northeast philly, i said

that’s where i’m from originally, way up in bustleton

i remember when that was just woods, he said

i remember when they built that all up

i said yeah, my grandfather built his house up there

still plenty of woods, though, if you think about pennypack park

he said pennypack park, no, i don’t think about pennypack park

i laughed a little, said oh yeah, what do you think about?

he looked at me, unsmiling, then looked at my house

The Evening Bulletin, June 8, 1923

SAVES WOMAN FROM SUICIDE

Man Knocks Poison from Her Hand—She Suffers Burns

a suicide attempt of Mrs.

Sadie Mesner, 35, 4520

Tackawanna st., was frustrated

last night

by her father-in-law

he stepped into

the room as she was raising

a bottle of poison

to her lips

with a blow he dashed it

from her hands

the liquid spilled over her

face and chest, severely

burning her

she was taken

to the Frankford

Hospital

death of the author, or, the good book

pick up the paper and read

WHITE HOUSE BACKS ISRAEL’S ATTACK ON GAZA

and a car goes by and it doesn’t explode.

could you make out the make of that one?

i could make out the scrape of tailpipe on asphalt.

what it says to all these dead people. to any one

of them. i want from you what you are not. loose

change from your pockets. old pennies, maybe,

wheatbacks i can stretch into souvenirs. remember

the time you were a souvenir? remember the time

i was oprah and you were south africa and i

visited you? or vice-versa? there was a figure again,

standing against darkened woods, motion grown

through weathered clothes, a real city--large sycamore

guarding the years, a father at last, an angel whoever,

the question again of where are we going. the

recurrence of the question that urges me to question

it. i’m going to a book, to being in the book, to being

the book. i want to be the good book so to be opened

and read and for that to be love, which is impossible.

The Evening Bulletin, Thursday, May 3, 1923

PIRATE CAVE FOUND

AT SOMERS POINT

Workers Tearing Down Mansion in Jersey

Stumble Upon Old Tunnel Like

Captain Kidd’s

two centuries ago this spot was by

tradition the rendezvous of smugglers

and freebooters and now accident has

led to the unearthing of a hidden

underground passageway, lined

with bricks brought two centuries ago

from Holland, the loot of wrecked ships,

of pirates’ captures and the ill-gotten

cargoes of the smugglers’ crafts. wild

interest permeates this village as they

await the result of the probers below

ground on the old Jeffe Braddock property.

but needs must be a whiff of the past

before we can delve into this pirate tale.

established records tell how smugglers

haunted this coast and here cached their

gains. here, too, land pirates had their trap

and upon the shores built false beacon fires

which led ships at sea, misled, to seek to

enter the passage between the present Longport

and Ocean City, and so wreck themselves

on the coast, where the point pirates could

set out upon them in small boats and loot

the cargo. digging of a post hole has un-

covered the passage. strangely enough,

the hole was being dug to take the place

of an old post put in thirty years ago, and

had this first post been a foot to one side,

the tale would have been told a generation

ago. but it was not, and it was only a few

days ago that the post hole digger’s spade,

about five feet down, struck an iron bound

covering of wood. the wood, decayed, fell

apart beneath the workman’s touch. the

passageway bored straight toward the present

house. and for the time, the house holds

the answer to what lies at the end of the

passage. for the residence, built years ago,

has no cellar, and its foundations lay flat

upon the ground. but it will be necessary to

cut away some of this foundation work before

the excavators can go further. so far, they

have thrust an iron bar as far as it will reach

into the unexplored part of the passage. the

bar does not touch the end. the passage from

the square chamber of the house wall is about

nine feet long, and three high, so a man can

crawl in it, but not stand.

Lew Blum Towing Co.

on the side of esposito’s pork & beef

a kid shoots a ball off the wall

practicing his layups

his form

in his oversized red

jersey

there’s no basket

no hoop

only his form

his practice

and the big sign at

which he takes

aim

little charlie brown xmas tree

we dumped how much water into that thing its leaves burned up anyway

and gone by the start of fall: bare, crude fork stuck in the sidewalk like

a spade, still there, stupid. metaphor for my marriage, em’s marriage.

continues digging. did you call the citizens alliance for whatever about

it? did you? no, i was busy, i was busy shaving the morning from my face,

and from the answers, which i know from sleep, that big past on stilts

confusing talk with walk, stubble and dry skin flaking down an old

bathroom sink, army green. army green as that one i brushed my teeth

over as a boy. that’s my grandmother’s house, which she’s lived in for

60 some years. she’s long shed her first language. can’t speak a word

of it. ages ago, she says, that was ages ago, who cares. she cares where

my wife is on christmas eve. she’s out with her friends, i say. then her

face lights up: you know what i remember, she says, tapping my hand:

rumbleseating – oh, that was something. we had so much fun going up

and down broad street, making noise, we’d holler at people on the sidewalk,

it didn’t matter the weather. they started making cars faster and faster

at that time, you know, it was so much fun, and that was the depression,

you know, and before you know it no more rumbleseating.

news in brief

The Evening Bulletin, Thursday, May 3, 1923

Push Hunt For Davidson

Missing Man Suffered Loss of Memory, is Belief

the former postmaster remained a mystery today

mr. davidson left his home several days ago

saying he was going for a walk

he wandered off in the direction of a woodland

and has not been seen since

police and friends continued the search

dragging raccoon lake and a lake

near the creek

friends and relatives scout the theory

that he has ended his life

“he was in good spirits and had nothing

to worry him,” said his nephew

* * *

Sioux Sue for $700,000,000

Ask Damages from U.S. for Lands

from Custer’s Time

the sioux indian tribe of the dakotas,

nebraska and montana

seeks to recover damages aggregating

practically three-quarters of a billion dollars

for lands and property taken

by the white man

many years ago

the suit will hark back to the days

of the gold rush

into the black hills

and of custer

* * *

Parrot Laughs at Firemen

Four Fall into Pit While Fighting Blaze;

Chickens Rescued

plunged into a deep pit

the firemen were extricated with difficulty

guffaws at their plight were heard

emanating from a shed

these were from a parrot

the parrot’s rude chatter

was stifled by a douche from the nozzle

of a firehose

if i had a nickel for every time i was a nickel

it feels good to say “president obama”

today, january 23, 2009. small pleasure

of sliding a quarter into the parking meter

hearing it land on the others. convinced,

happy, i walk over the news, jingle my

keys, conviction. on south street no more

parking meters—i wonder where they put

them all. in the basement of walgreen’s,

i imagine, piled up high. tower records,

it used to be. that corner stands out, remembers

nothing. em, whose first language is spanish,

used to confuse remind with remember.

can you remember me to stop at the bank,

she might say. money’s why we broke up,

more or less. she reminded me of my great

grandmother who loved money and gave

me a two-dollar bill one christmas. save this,

she wrote on the card, so that one day it will

be worth more to you than me. that has two

meanings, one for each dollar, and when i

look at the bill now, at the sad face of thomas

jefferson, who ultimately was not as interested

in the type of currency on which we now see

his face every day, thomas jefferson who

warned his powerful friends that banking

institutions are more dangerous to our liberties

than standing armies, i remember myself

to owe something to somebody. some somebody

for some somebody. nobodies notwithstanding.

In the occasion and For the occasion

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s book party last week for That Gorgeous Feeling was a warm occasion in a warm place, thanks to the warm people and poems some of them read for Juliette, poems written for the event. These poems, in particular Stan Mir’s poem “A Crush of Consonants and Open Vowels for Juliette,” got me to thinking about the possibilities of an occasional poem, what with Elizabeth Alexander’s recent inaugural poem lingering, poets having blogged and blogged about it. I talked to a lot of people about Alexander’s poem, too—writers and nonwriters—and nobody seems to have liked it. People said it was bland, boring. But I doubt it could have been otherwise. What would you write if you were asked to write something for that occasion (as if Obama’s oratory weren’t poetry enough, and the fact of his election)? I think I would write some hopelessly universal thing about hope. So I’m not sure what those who were really disappointed had been expecting (and I appreciated Reb Livingston’s response to the critics).

But I was reminded of how public poetry can be, at least in terms of satire, when I watched Stephen Colbert’s interview with Alexander. The answers to his questions about poetry were more evident for me in Colbert’s form (his irony, his timing) than in what Alexander said. I thought it was hilarious. His questions included “Poems aren’t true, are they?” and “What’s the difference between a metaphor and a lie?” His final questions bordered on critique. After Alexander explains what an occasional poem is, Colbert asks: if her poem is “marked by the commonality of experience” then “why not soaring rhetoric . . . why not light up the crowd?”

Though Colbert’s show is his show and Alexander had no show to make her own (the inauguration’s tone was predetermined), it’s clear that some element of performance could have helped. That’s what was missing. Five years ago my friend Andrew Bradley recited an epithalamion for my wedding. And it was great because Andrew’s a performer, and he’s witty, and the poem had an intimacy to it. Andrew knew me, and the people at the wedding knew me (and there weren't that many people). Stan Mir knew Juliette. The rest of us there knew her. So there was an intimacy. It’s hard to be intimate with 300 million people (Colbert comes a lot closer than most of us).

But I think intimacy, in writing, can have a universality if it can become its own place, its own occasion – this is why, for example, I can feel Ted Berrigan’s poems with all their references even though I never knew him or any of his friends. Stan’s poems have this quality, too. Not just in that he pulls the news into his poems and includes both public and personal events, but in how he twines them: he creates a seamlessness between items, from line to line, all things made equal but bound by an insistence on the present, which I associate with truth, with what is. And from that perhaps intimacy. Or maybe it’s simply the acknowledgment of the complexity of any moment, any occasion, the “dull moment” in search of the “gorgeous feeling.” Here’s the poem Stan wrote for Juliette:

The crush of consonants

in Tom Daschle & the open

vowels of John Yau have

got me thinking of Mary Ann

Caws who says “Poetry can be

any damn thing it wants”

The treaty of 1868

We are not alone in a room

Being alone is anarchy

I’m certain the mice are

in the ceiling

A bomb instead of a drawing

It snowed last night

The sun today a postscript

If what we remember is

aberration how come I

remember all the dull moments

leading up this gorgeous

feeling of being done

I'm talking about the Williams tradition (poem as reality unto itself), which is a tradition I like because it’s interested in paring down the past that’s our skin, the bullshit that can walk and talk us. The attention to the dull moment implies an open ear and a search for music, the desire to carve from the world a moment never dull, a piece of music one can enter, walk through and exit with hopefully some feeling in tact, some echoing idea. Anything but a lie.

John Drury, in his Poetry Dictionary (a useful undergraduate teaching tool, by the way), suggests that all verse might be occasional. He defines “occasional verse” as “anything that represents a quick sketch of the ephemeral, of time fleeing.” I think of Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” and “The Day Lady Died,” a poem which so many of us love. That poem undercuts my temptation to say “No meaning but in the dull moment” or “No meaning but out of the dull moment.” Because that’s not entirely true. Just as “no ideas but in things” is not entirely true; nor “description does nothing.” I think Alexander tried for something like “no meaning but in the dull moment,” but she was stuck in the big occasion, in the main idea, isolated, which we fall victim to all the time.

Books by Philly Poets

It's turning out to be a big year for books of poetry in Philadelphia.
Here are some books & chapbooks recently published:

Maps & Legends, Jenn McCreary
The Residents, Kim Gek Lin Short
The Book of Frank, CA Conrad
That Gorgeous Feeling, Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Over Here, Frank Sherlock
UNION!, Ish Klein
Toward Eadward Forward, Emily Abendroth
the zen of chainsaws and enormous clippers, Drew Kalbach

and forthcoming:

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Pattie McCarthy
The Lacustrine Suite, Stan Mir
The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits, Kim Gek Lin Short
The City Real and Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, Frank Sherlock & CA Conrad

Politics or the English Language

"Why Teach Literature, Anyway?"

Marjorie Perloff took on the question at the MLA conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Her answer, which follows a close reading of Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father: because "literary study is the only discipline that teaches difference." While academics in the field of literature tend to focus on commonality and classification, it is that which escapes definition that makes literature (and life) so interesting, Perloff argues, and that is why close reading - by which she means "reading attentively and bringing to the text in question as much knowledge and practice as possible" - is so important. It should be taught.

She suggests the media's failure and the Clintons' failure to read Obama is what led so many to expect Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. This failure to read also likely contributed to Clinton's losing. Which is partly why Obama's victory is so great. It's a victory over the tendency to gloss over a text, reduce it to something familiar, or simply not pay attention - tendencies that become norms in an age of infotainment overload (I'm thinking right now of this new option to "read full article" or "collapse article" in Yahoo news stories).

Perloff's argument makes perfect sense to me. If asked the question, I probably wouldn't have said "difference," but I may have said "the unknown" or "the particularities of human experience." Those answers are similar to Perloff's, not the same. Her lecture, which is called "The Centrality of Literary Study," also points out the tendency to ignore the difference between discourse intended to convey information (such as a scientific paper or stock market report) and the discourse we call literature. Teachers often ask students to say what a poem or novel says, for example, without paying attention to the "defining elements" of literature (such as diction, metaphor, repetition, irony, syntax, etc). Perloff quotes Wittgenstein to explain the difference between literary and nonliterary language:

"We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.)

In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)"

This problem comes up when I teach creative writing classes - the show vs. tell lesson, the lesson about sense and sound. Actually, those are more than single lessons. That's the whole course. What I teach is how to read (in composition and creative writing courses), and teaching how to read is not simply a matter of conveying information - which is why both reading and teaching can be so challenging. It's a matter of communication, or tuning, to use David Antin's word. It takes two, which takes time, and many students don't expect it to.

That said, I believe much of literature is interested in conveying information; it's just usually not the main point, as communication does not depend solely (often at all) on a conveyance of information. Sometimes information gives you nothing. Thus I cringe when I hear "Information Age."

Here's to a new age. The difference is spreading.

Roadside Dog

A thing I’ve been reading is Czeslaw Milosz’s Roadside Dog, a bunch of short prose pieces written toward the end of Milosz’s life. “Pieces,” I thought originally, because I didn’t know if they were poems or essays. After reading a few pieces I looked at the back cover for the prescribed genre, and above the UPC it said POETRY/ESSAYS. I found the book in the fiction section of Robin’s Bookstore, thinking it misplaced, as books often are in Robin’s, which closes the end of this month after 73 years of business. Larry the owner is calling the store’s closing “death,” though not unhappily, it seems (the death will be followed by a “resurrection”).

Roadside Dog strikes me as writing from a person who couldn’t care less where he or his book is buried. It takes on greater questions, reflecting on the 20^th century that Milosz lived, doling out wisdom, though the writing’s rooted in wonder and wander. It wonders about wander, even. Here’s “The Last Judgment”:

The consequences of our actions. Completely unknown, for every one of them enters into a multifaceted relation with circumstance and with the actions of others. An absolutely efficient computer could show us, with a correction for accidents, of course, for how to calculate the direction taken by a billiard ball after it strikes another? Besides it is permissible to maintain that nothing happens by accident. Be that as it may, standing before a perfectly computerized balance sheet of our lives (The Last Judgment), we must be astonished: Huh! Can it be that I am responsible for so much evil done against my will? And here, on the other scale, so much good I did not intend and of which I was not aware?

My initial reading of this helped throw me into a despair. Then I realized I was sad because my grip on the notion of free will was too tight. I loosened it by reading some of Slaughterhouse Five, which I’d picked up recently after reading Selah Saterstrom’s notes about it on her blog, then reading more Roadside Dog.

Not so bad sometimes being something of a billiard ball. So it goes.

And I thought again of Robin’s and was able to make meaning of Robin’s for myself for the first time, without cursing society. I met some good people there who became my friends who led me to other good people who became my friends, etc, who’ve shaped the course of my life in such interesting ways, as Robin’s undoubtedly has for so many people, that I cannot be but grateful (distant tragedies, deaths, and heartbreak notwithstanding). Not to mention all the great poetry we heard there and found there. But there’s nothing to thank. Not here anyway. One can be grateful without thanking.

Milosz, from the title poem:

I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province . . . It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their reins, and wait till, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor inside it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its end. I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once, but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night— I don't know where it came from— in a predawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog.

What makes Milosz’s writing both poem and essay is its wandering, if we include the etymological meaning of “essay”: to try, to attempt. (So the marketeers at FSG were right!)

The book’s cover bears an illustration of a dog with a town mapped onto its body, the main street leading out the dog’s posterior.

I give the book 208 stars. I will bury it in my backyard.

(You can read some of its poems in this issue of The Threepenny Review.)

resolution

"Anybody who doesn't like this life is crazy!"