Myth of Arrival

Glassy eyed and ready to speak fire?
"Zack Holding Up Wall,"
March 15, 2006

Thank you Dick and Laura for your wonderful comments. I thought a quick, one-note response lost in the comment box would take away from the fun of last night … so I am writing to you both a fuller, heavily spell-checked, two-note response instead.

Pain not withstanding last night was a blast. About twenty people turned up, some friends I bribed into coming (heehee), a couple of people who heard I was doing Spanish poetry and some strangers I'd never seen before. I read four translations of Garcia Lorca, Romance de la Luna, Luna, Prendimiento de Antoñito el Camborio, Muerte De Antoñito El Camborio and Muerto de amor along with little bits of explaining so the audience would understand. Sometimes banter can get out of hand and you listen to more explanation than actual poetry. I think last night there was just enough.

After that I read some of my own poetry, Leviathan Suckling about the time I went to Baja, Mexico, to see the gray whales birth, Oil Rig Nocturne about wishing to buy a decommissioned oil rig from Exxon for a dollar to turn it into a creative writing colony and several of The Syn Sonnets.

Then we opened the floor up to an open mic performance and had a healthy turn out of poets read their own work. I am always fascinated and delighted we have so much talent in Lansing. Several were first time readers at the Creole and they were wonderful! I especially liked Laura's poem based on Fiddler on the Roof.¹

1. One of the more depressing musicals that scarred my childhood, I had nightmares of being sent to Siberia years after my folks took me to see a performance when I was in fifth grade. [back]

Tonight I am calling upon the spirit of duende to help me through with this reading at the Creole Gallery, 7:30 pm. You know all about duende, even though it goes by many different names depending where you live. It is the soul of the Blues, the funk of "funkadelic," it is the silence everyone in a concert hall makes when the diva stops singing and all two thousand people suddenly realize they have been holding their breath.

Every step that an artist takes towards the tower of his perfection is at the cost of a struggle he maintains with a force, a spirit we call duende … The great artists of southern Spain know that no real emotion is possible unless there is duende … It is not a matter of ability but of blood; of ancient culture … The duende has to be aroused in the distant-most chambers of the blood … The duende surges up from the soles of the feet. This mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has explained is in fact the spirit of the earth.

Those are the words of Federico Garcia Lorca. I will be reading from some translated poems of his, from The Gypsy Ballads I do not mean to call upon duende discourteously; I really am in pain. Two nights ago I pulled a muscle in my shoulder blade at work, or pinched a nerve in my neck, it is one and the same. I can hardly turn my neck and when I do my fingers tingle like they are asleep. I have been gobbling up ibuprofen like candy drops. The down side of pain killers is that while I can function I am also a bit number than wild performances call for.

One must burn, even if they can't swivel the head very far.

One of the curious things about Allan Ginsberg wasn't just his ability to write poetry but his nearly obsessive gift of self-promotion. The story I was told was that he always kept copies of his books with him at all times just in case someone wanted to buy one while he was out and about.

Self-promotion has never been my strong suit. Once in a while Shelby and I play the "would you rather be prolific and undiscovered during your lifetime or famous and a hack?" game. I always answer If I had to choose, I'd rather write beautiful poetry that was never seen by another soul while I was alive than be the author of some gobbledygook that was in vogue for fifteen minutes but that later generations considered castrated and sterile.

So, in the spirit of attempting to find other sonnet mongers I have created my very own myspace.com profile. I know myspace is generally consider the realm of teenagers and Internet stalkers but who knows who I might run into? There are poets there, I know. It's all about getting the word out, afterall.

This is my cat, Bouge. She
has been such a part of my
life for the last two years.

She passed away this morning,
all by herself, alone.

I am so terribly upset.

(1994 - March 13, 2006)

I have just updated the submissions page on this website. To my horror I realized I had not touched it for two long months, and most of the deadlines read January 31.

I took down my list of personal submissions because, frankly, it was far too depressing to keep writing "rejection" after everything I have entered. I suppose if the gods of poetry send success my way I will certainly share it with y'all but in the mean while why promote a long string of failures? Much better to walk tight lipped with dry eyes among the masses. That way they cannot hear the quaiver in your voice when you speak.