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. jack comes over, says
my door is weeping. i let him in, we drink
wine and beer. the building speaks for me
a little, 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. owe somebody

big time.

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!"

overheard

"You know a neighborhood is being gentrified when it gets a Doggie Style."
--young man to young woman, as they walked out of the chain boutique, 12th & Passyunk.

Lost and Found

from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, May 23, 1933

LOST—Dog, male, with harness; white with brown spot on
face & tail; in centre of city; answers to “Spike.”

LOST—Certificate of Naturalization No. 2, 400, 780. Rew.
Agostinho Antonio Barboza. 308 Pemberton st.

LOST—Brindle Bull. White mark neck & face, short tail
large eyes. Red collar. Vic. 28 & York. Rew. Spirit-
matter. 2230 W. Tioga

LOST—Bar pin with sapphires and Baroque pearl, going
from 20th and Locust sts. to 12th and Lycoming ave.
on Sunday Morning. Reward.

LOST—May 22. $50 bill btwn Widener Bldg & Wannamaker
Store. Rew.

LOST—Black & tan female puppy. 5 mos. old. name “Gipsy.”
Rew. 3024 E st.

some more old news

Old News, the title of this blog, also happens to be the title of the book I'm writing, an ongoing narrative. I've posted pages of it here before, out of order. Now I'm posting pages 19-22 below, in order, which follow the page titled BRIDGE HERMIT STRANGELY KILLED, to give you some context; you can listen to the first 16 pages, in order, accompanied by music, here; these will also appear in the next ixnay reader. Later I may write on the blog a little about what I'm writing.

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

odd jobs

i have many hearts

one’s a stick

i snap it over my knee

can’t help it

can’t help it

smoke

stacks

a big school

publics you out

ironfist pounds a cloud’s

all you got so what

so what

jobs jobs jobs

every 20 minutes

years ago you’d walk 20 minutes

in any direction

and there’d be another dialect

frankie tells rosanna

every 20 minutes no matter

what direction you walked

frankie’s tone never changes

i can’t tell if he laments

a more integrated yet homogenized

present or if he prefers it

he whistles right past me

conversation

you said if Bush won the election again we’d move to my country, she said.

i’m not ready to move yet, he said.

if you’re not ready now, you’ll never be.

i don’t know if i can move there. no offense, but your country’s pretty racist and classist.

you say the same thing about your country, she said.

it’s not the same. this country has essential freedoms that your country doesn’t.

such as what?

such as freedom of speech, he said.

we have freedom of speech, she said.

oh yeah, what happens if i protest the government because i disagree with them about something? huh? i disappear, that’s what happens. i disappear.

why would you be protesting the government? when do you protest the government here?

the whole way i live my life is a protest.

is it? well, you can live the same way in my country.

you don’t understand – look, it’s the principle of the matter. i need to know that i have that freedom.

this is why you are spoiled. this is why americans are spoiled.

presence

DREDGING = JOBS

duh

the walt whitman bridge is no cheaper

than the ben franklin

lay on the horn all you want

camden is poor

you know by looking at the dunkin donuts

america runs on dunkin

the present’s not a divider

the present’s a uniter

you know by looking at the dunkin donuts

walt whitman is buried in camden

ben franklin is buried in philadelphia

and the delaware river’s a zombie

chapbook recommendation

Check out The Reactionary Poems by Laura Jaramillo.
I posted a review of it on PhillySound, December 5th.

Laura will be reading with Cathleen Miller and Brandon Holmquest
next Saturday, 12/13 at Chapterhouse Cafe, 9th & Bainbridge.

we are the ones we have been waiting for

Ways of Leading:

Read Alice Walker's advice to Barack Obama

And here's the late Studs Terkel, in a clip from the film Anthem (1997):

the pleasures of high-fiving strangers

In Philadelphia, baseball might be the only thing people let set them free. I’d never seen Broad St. like it was Wednesday night. Was it that crazy in 1983 after the Sixers won it all? I was a toddler then, I don't remember.

But we should do this more often. People should find more reasons to high five each other. High-fiving is good for the soul.

The video below, which I found on YouTube, shows people reacting to the final pitch inside a bar – the Irish Pub, I think (I was in Dirty Frank’s – the world champion of bars, where the reaction was about the same); then some footage of the pandemonium in the streets. Are they chanting “Phillies” or “Billy” at the end, when the camera focuses in on the William Penn statue?

collaboration with Dan Yorty

Dan Yorty is a musician who lives around the corner from me. We met at Temple a few years ago in a poetry class I was teaching (the first poetry writing class I ever taught, actually, which was something of a nightmare). And Dan let me hear some music he added to a recording of Charles Olson reading "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," and it made the hair stand on my neck - in a good way - it was a good nightmare. Dan's music had amplified this sinister, haunting quality in Olson's voice, and even of the poem, re-animating it for me without sacrificing its original essence. He'd made a whole new thing that included the old thing. Which fascinated me.

So when Dan offered to record my poems last summer and put music to it, I said sure. We hung out in his apartment, where he recorded my reading of the first 16 pages of Old News, and later incorporated percussion - which includes a rawhide drum, maracas, brushes, ride cymbal, high tom, floor tom, floor tom played with fingers, and sounds that drifted through the 3rd floor window at 13th and Moore. You can listen to it here.

some links

Brotherly Love exists in Philly (for one night) - CA Conrad reports

The Moles not Molar Reading Series has a new website

a review of the Oct 11th Chapterhouse reading

Eric Gelsinger's review of when i come here

Steven Allen May's blogs about chapbooks and books

Poet blogs:

Drew Kalbach

Sasha Fletcher

Bryce Bayer

people like you

I was a little surprised by this controversy that erupted last week over the huge electronic anthology of poems that were not actually written by the people whose names (including mine) are assigned to them. I don't think it's a big deal. Protest in defense of "intellectual property" puzzles me, especially if the property is art. The notion that one person can own culture while another may not seems silly. What is culture but shared expression and its resulting objects? Of course, the United States is a place where people value the object above all else. So I'm not surprised that stricter copyright laws and the clampdown on media "piracy" have coincided with the erosion of public space and the deterioration of belief in community. Shared culture is most often pop culture, which is entertainment culture, which is a culture of passivity rather than activity, a culture in which activity is a risk, a culture that breeds cynicism and money worship. Commodities, commodities, commodities.

But copyright, as Jonathan Lethem reminds us in his essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," is "an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every carnation." Kind of like art, which Lethem's essay is as well - it's constructed almost entirely of other texts (which are - don't worry! - cited at the end of the essay). Lethem's essay takes on usemonopoly and illustrates "the beauty of second use" as convincingly as anything I've read on the matter. If you'd like to read it, just let me know and I'll forward you a copy. I'd post it on the blog, but I don't want to get sued by Harper's!

Those guys selling 5-dollar dvds on the subways - they don't bother me. I mean, they're not siphoning my income to the rich and greedy. Those stupid warnings against piracy that we now see before watching movies, equating the copying of music or film with snatching a woman's purse - those bother me - they make me want to steal your movie and sell it. There is theft by far more powerful businessmen that takes place on a much larger scale at the expense of almost all of us - that bothers me. It bothers me to think where all of our tax dollars are currently headed. Who owns the product of that labor? No, more importantly: who is now producing what with the product of that labor? This is where I feel ripped off.

My poems? Give them to whomever you want, sell them, give them away for free, whatever.

Poetry's largely (and thankfully) a gift economy, though certainly it's not immune from the ownership culture, and perhaps that's the point of the controversial project: to criticize the ego-driven aspect of poetry. It's not defaming anyone; it's not ridiculing anyone. If it's getting people to reconsider their values, then it's a good thing.

But I'd stop short of calling it genius, as many have (and which might account for half the controversy), if only because it's a given that any person who seriously calls himself a poet has got to have an ego pumping somewhere inside him. There is no such thing as a poet, no matter how obsessed with John Cage, who does not indulge in self on some level. A poet who claims not to wouldn't be a poet - because he wouldn't be attempting to write and disseminate poetry that's stamped with his name. And it's okay to write something and take credit for it. Because you're good enough, you're smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you.

And now, time for a song (from YouTube - long live YouTube!)


"Lay Down Your Arms" by Anne Shelton

Voter Registration Deadline: OCT 6

Please make sure you are registered to vote in the November election. The deadline to be registered in Pennsylvania is Monday, October 6th. You can register online here.

Spread the word.

"If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. And yet a part of us knows better . . ."

--Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope