
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.
stories, quotations, beefs

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
in august or august
in
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


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.
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.
The Evening Bulletin,
‘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
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.
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
many receipts, but
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.
I'll be reading some poems aloud
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
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 10th 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,
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
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
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,
AT SOMERS POINT
Workers Tearing
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
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
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
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,
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
from Custer’s Time
the sioux indian tribe of the dakotas,
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,
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
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
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.
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
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.
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 20th 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.)