Myth of Arrival

Ah, 1983. I was thirteen years old. My whole life was before me and had I just been hardened, say the word, "directed," a little more I would have embraced free verse poetry as the radical and revolutionary form that it is and started name dropping "Zachary" into every other line. Like this:

… I'm Zachary, it's hard
being Zachary and I
was throwing up and having
sex with a bunch
anonymous people who
aren't Zachary I was
thinking how hard
it is being Zachary did
I mention I'm Zachary?

That should win me the William Carlos Williams Award For Extreme Words, the Walt Whitman Award For Extreme Willies and the Charles Bukowski Award For Extreme Vomiting. Apparently that is what the general public wants. I wrote a letter to my friend, Writergal76, yesterday on the subject. It looked a little like this:

There's snow in the air and I've been reading a biography of Charles Bukowski, who is dead and since I'm trying to figure out why everyone loves him so. I have a hard time dealing with anyone who name drop themselves in their own poetry and it seems every other poem Bukowski writes is about what a drag or blast it is being Bukowski … which really isn't that interesting to me. And then I got to a poem by him (I can't keep any of poems straight, they all sound so similar to me) about jazz and things that happened in the 1950s in cities I've never been to people I don't know about and I thought "you know, nostalgia sucks!" Especially when it is about things I really don't care, like night clubs that are now defunct. So I looked up Birdland where Miles Davis use to play. It was opened on Broadway in NYC in 1945, named after Charlie Parker. It was a jazz mecca but what does that have to do with any of us now? Nothing, really. But still it all sounds really neat and maybe if I went on a cold day like today I could meet someone fabulous on stage or in the back alley or maybe loitering around the corner? Perhaps. I am still not sure what makes Bukowski exciting to people. He has a couple of good poems but everyone has a couple of good poems. He liked to drink a lot and sleep with people and moan, but so does a lot of people as well. Maybe it was that he got published with Black Sparrow Press? They also published Diane Wakowski, who was my next door neighbor for 20 years in East Lansing. She never told me she was a poet. One day I was in Berkeley, in a used bookstore and I saw her book, Motorcycle Betrayal Poems and I thought, "huh, I have a neighbor with that same name … what a small world!"

What I found interesting about all of this is this comment from Wikipedia: Wakoski received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism … [!] and here I thought it was a complex economic and political climate that led to our slow turn towards conservatism … when it was really all those damn sonnets being written in the 1980s! Of course formal poetry is another shade of evil! Why waste our time dealing with death squads? Ethnic cleansing? Corrupt multi-national corporations affecting the global marketplace? Noway, not at all, nohow, none of those are as corruptible an influence as New Formalism! That and nostalgia for places we've never been to … and poets wonder why we are seen as out of touch with the general public? Curious!

Reminiscing, the bastards, of Birdland,
that jazz joint no one I knew ever went
to, not one. Don't lie, you could never stand
free jazz. Music isn't what I resent
but what I'd give to see! Pull that bow string
back to your ear and the reed, the arrow
shaft, in-between two fingers, quivering
under pressure. May there be tension. Slow
tension between your shoulder blades. The bow,
that C of ash, crying release. You sing
under your breath, "I shall be released." No
jazz, not even Miles Davis, could equal
that, dear Kali. World Destroyer. Compel
the world to hang still as the arrow flowed
from your right hand and all of hell followed.

Richard Peel rocks! I have to love someone who posts free art to the world. I found this monster on his webpage, which I suggest everyone go to and pick random images to download right now.

I think I shall name it Bujia, which I believe is Spanish for "spark plug." I love the expression on Bujia's face. It is how I feel right now. What was it Napoleon said? From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step …? Yes, and today I have taken that step.

This house is lonely, no perhaps it is –
or a Jerusalem I will never –
no, this is all bad train thoughts, like a Quiz
Master on crack, all flashpain and gesture.
"What is this?" "A bone of faith!" — the horror
of words glued end to end. Everything hurts.
Teeth, verbs, nose hair. I hate verbs. Their swagger
because they know I need them. The efforts
I've made on their behalf. Nothing comforts
me half as much as — but no, why give it
away? Why rush anything? The experts
all say sloth is the key to the starlit
Quiz Show. Drag your sorry self back about
3:10 tomorrow you just might find out.

life is so short and poetry so long … london underground graffiti, 1992.

And I am so glad there is so much poetry in the world! They say Romantic poetry is cliche in this post-post-post-modern world but I am all for it. When will schools start to teach Lord Byron again? And everything Langston Hughes ever wrote should be required reading as well (though he's a more Romantic Blues poet). I was on a bus in San Francisco sometime in the 1992 or 93 and saw the words "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator" (that's a title of an Anne Sexton poem by the way, just in case you thought I was being crude) as graffiti on a bus seat. So, in the spirit of sharing what words move us, here are a dozen or so poems I simply L*O*V*E and want the whole world to read. Enjoy!

Czeslaw Milosz's A Song On the End of the World

Jane Hirshfield's This Was Once a Love Poem

Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool

Frank O'Hara's Lana Turner has collapsed!

Aliki Barnstone's Euphoria at Zero

Dylan Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

H.D.'s from Helen in Egypt: Eidolon, Book III: #4

Erin Bertram's [Anam]

Pablo Neruda's The Invisible Man/ El hombre invisible

Galway Kinnel's Oatmeal

Amy Gerstler's Hymn to the Neck

Heather McHugh's What He Thought

Wislawa Szymborska's Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem

Charles Bukowski's so you want to be a writer?

Derek Walcott's Love After Love

And speaking of what moves us, I have been working on some memories concerning the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, where I lived for a while as a Peace Corps volunteer. There are three sonnets here, the second I used in my photo project with Katya. I will probably remove that poem from this collectoin and use something else later. Still, I enjoy the poem and want to use it everywhere. Frost and pain, pain and frost and a city that seems to balance between them … it is an interesting thought to ponder where you fit in between these metaphors. These easy metaphors.

I. [Yerevan]

Late morning and the frost
again, I try to explain
just burning off the farm
again, I try to explain
fields, ox at work, the tower
again, I try to explain
of the Fortress, of Metsamor
again, I try to explain
steam clouds from its nuclear
again, I try to explain
reactor and behind all this
again, I try to explain
Ararat rising, filling you
again, I try to explain
cannot imagine something
again, I try to explain
so vast, old stone tsunami
again, I try to explain
in its shadow, Yerevan
again, I try to explain
city without opium, without estuary
again, I try to explain
nights without lights
again, I try to explain
just late morning and the frost
again, I try to explain
not winter, not sleep, just frost

***

All the opium Coleridge took for pain/
pain that old dun horse/ Horse at the salt lick/
Lick of brackish winter/ Winter remain
with me here/ Here everything is panic/
Panic remembers out beyond the creek/
Creek bed full of snow/ Snow on my tongue/ Tongue
in your mouth/ Mouth full of words/ Words lovesick
with my craving … Was it craving that flung
winter away? Was it these words that stung?
A wasp on the ice fields? Was it my mouth
winter dread? The glimmer of warmth among
kisses? Or was it panic from the south?
Blizzard bound horse? Was it Coleridge's frost
winter left me for? Winter! I am lost —

***

what does ice recall? on the lip
like locusts eating lust
of a shot glass the pockmarked wall
like locusts eating lusts
with curvaceous whorls of cedar
like locusts eating lust
wood hanging incense
like locusts eating lusts
the old men at the Backgammon
like locusts eating lust
board in high summer when
like locusts eating lusts
this was possible: a kiss, torment, all this –

***

The view from this apartment, these stanzas,
includes this: all this Yerevan skyline
with its satellite dishes, antennas,
then that outlandish moisture, all alpine
purple, that causes the great mountain, shrine
to the ark, to loom over everything.
The old man next to me says how divine
it is. What? The dead, praise God, returning
to Mount Ararat. I'm not sure. Smoking
purple rises up, a myth, from the peak's
base. All day Turkish troops looting, burning
Kurdish camps and so much of this myth speaks
of ghosts trying to return to fortune
denied; a land, a people, a mountain.

***

– like locusts eating lust
all the crumpled sheets belong
like locusts eating lusts
somewhere else, arching hips, fluent
like locusts eating lust
ribs, the one dark nipple
like locusts eating lusts
my finger recalls.

***

Pity the poor memory. An anger
now lost in shadows or words, frustrations,
that fail to guess our needs. Why is pleasure
so hard to find? The tale of the daughter
who bleeds herself to suffer her passion's
zest? — that is me, too. And this zest? like ants
swarming our blood, odd honey of romance.
Nothing but strips of memory, ribbons
of words and you say you're hungry, you reach
out to touch. What did you expect? fever
amok with obscenity? Your body
recalling; the way skin calls for the leech,
the kiss of its teeth, new scars, a pleasure
now lost. Is that me? Yes, that is me.

My dear friend from Yakuts, Katya, sent me a new photograph she had taken. She called it "Beaurocracy au Bleu" and explained: It's my friend, not me, but I like the idea … if you feel like beaurocracy can be a devasatatibe thing, emotionless, empty …

But not all bureaucracy is terrifying. Someone in Sweden must be doing something right. This morning on NPR I found out Turkish author Orhan Pamuk had won the 2006 Nobel prize in literature. This is the same Pamuk who made headlines last year from speaking out against the Turkish government's denial it had orchestrated the genocide of over a million Armenians in 1915. Wikipedia has this to say:

In 2005, ultra-nationalist lawyers of two Turkish professional associations brought criminal charges against Pamuk … after the author made a statement regarding the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 … and the massacre of 30,000 Kurds in Anatolia. The charges were dropped on 22 January 2006. He has subsequently stated his intent was to draw attention to freedom of expression issues.

So yes, you are right Katya, some bureaucracies are devastating, emotionless and empty. It is as Pamuk stated, Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.

And though this sonnet is more on a personal level we can only hope that perhaps now more people will.

All night you are in love with some inner
chaos. The tension of an inner life
that will no longer be yours. Your spine's strife
and grief at keeping you erect. The blur
of your hands, fingernails, a deep hunger
you have never once eased. Refuse this touch.
Not by hands, the vapor of a kiss. Such
desire: O lips, O tongue, O Rapture,
is not for you. What drear bureaucracy
in bleak Heaven made passion a disease?
What fool man censored your passion's desperate
purpose? the red fig Eve dipped in honey?
juice drips on lips you will never taste; these
flurries, these needs, these screams from a corset.

Do you ever get the feeling something is close to being the way you want it but not exactly? In the end I kept asking myself, "you go from flowers to highways and why?" There needs to be a map, a guidepost, some sort of marker for the reader to follow along with. This might not be it, but I love the question: "What am I without words? … a string/ of pure nonsense …" There are many times I think I am pure nonsense even (and perhaps especially) with words, but still; they say you are never done with a poem until you crumple it up into a ball and let a hooligan play with it.

If this were music instead of poetry I'd take it a DJ friend and let her sample bits and pieces and then rearrange the song into something far better, something you could dance to. Even though I end up writing fragmented, stream of consciousness poems, I am all for narrative flow as well. In fact I think the stronger the form the more fun you can have with the word play. The original poem had a villanelle in it. I changed it to a sonnet. As Billy Collins once said in getting people to read about your despondent life: "happy form/ miserable content" …

… oh, and this scribe I keep talking to? If Dante had a scribe, so can I! Wikipedia says this about the honorable work of a scribe:

Scribe (or Scrivener) is an ancient profession, a person who could read and write. This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial, and history records for rulers such as kings, nobility, temples, and cities. Later the profession developed for example into public servants, accountants, and lawyers.

Perhaps tomorrow I will give you a remix of a remix? We shall see. We shall see.

***

[blister: the gyumri dub mix]

"bruises on the fruit. tender age in bloom." — nirvana

I.
little road stretching from there to
there do you recall my throat of
blossom? ah, scribe now
that we are in this dismal
hour scribble about arctic
scrub are they dahlias?
– no; roses? — no; orchids?
(not those damn cherry
blossoms) here along
the road, sugar and snow: your
flowers are limp. these flowers
are taut. all my dahlias
are tangled. scribble scribe,
there are no dahlias
on Mount Ararat. But a word,
"tzaghi'k," Armenian
for flower is still fun to say.
– ah! no toenails left in my boot
bloody root by root.
– oh! No roses save you sunflower.

Who sent me a postcard? that clear-bellied
poppy, Yukio Mishima pinned
above my bed "Ordeal
By Roses" indeed!
but you are no post
card, sunflower.
Take your full
bellied pen. let
me be a day
lily. Cornflower,
you were never
a cornflower — shut up!

Idiot! fool! moron! I
do not have the art to breathe
this divan of verse to breath,
impart life to each page, page
on page on page of blood, heart,
rhyme, the great yaw and yawn of
the sun, the mouthpart of my
cranium, salon of all
these words: blank, tart and brutal.

II.

Desire! lust rose! lime
blossoms! you have none
of this little road. sugar

and snow. let's talk about
the old days. making love
in the kitchen? — no:

there was no kitchen just
this little hut
in the snow, I woke,

I know, I dressed to go
out. and what? to go out
into the snow. you walked?

Blood in my boots, holy
terror of overshoes. you
walked? Blizzard. little road

I know there was no lime,
no lusty rose I know I burn
I itch in the snow — no: scribble

scribe, scribble bestial
words — ah! myrtle
in the skull. — oh! red plum

iris between the legs — what of it?
scribble over this
book, this flower —

***

this book like a
flower words like

flowers skin boiling
with flowers a
book like a

flower words like
flowers skin searing
with flowers a
book like a
flower words like
flowers skin blister
with

***

a word in the snow// all my skin frozen
marshes// words like flowers this skin's blister,
canker// I can feel dahlias swollen
along my veins// angry verb! the canker
of verbs, of words// the noun's obscene anger//
words fail me, books fail me// sugar and snow
and the whipping dark — scribble, scribe! sugar!
flower! little road! I know there is no
sugar, just dark! I burn! I itch! I know
you have no flower, little road! I bleed
marshes — no, words! I bleed words, a meadow
of words!// blood in my boots// I leave bloodied
footprints. What am I without words?// a string
of pure nonsense like "snowblind"// "bloom"// "bleeding"

***
a
string
of
pure
nonsense
a
book
like
a
flower skin boiling with flowers
words
like –

III.

– words like, "snowblind"// "bloom"// "bleeding"
that was me, scribe I know no way of heating
my hut my coffee black ice cottoned over,
gladiolus in the brain — no: metaphors
are easy but my verbs were fools. O
highway and highway of my highway
little road stretching from Yerevan
to Gyumri to Kars to Baku; do you
recall "bloom"? word — word
of summer — word of summer
perfume! of color — of color
I love — of color I love flower,
mushroom, vista// but these
boots in the snow// blood
in these boots, what
a drag, fleas, body
lice — highway?
my voice along
– highway — my
voice? — highway?
blossoming throat
– do you recall — blossoming
throat call — throat all — all — ll