Myth of Arrival

I am falling in love with static; that terrible hiss and pop on the radio one hears in-between stations. If you examine the lives so many people who have, through sheer force of ego and alcohol alone, given us so much art that resembles static in shape and sound, it is a wonder why more of us don't simply hit the bottle, sniff glue, get high off those fat magic markers and write down whatever it is we are experiencing at the moment.

After all, it is not so much whether you have talent or an ear and eye for beauty or even (as in my case) the ability to string two notes together to make anything resembling harmony — no, the key is simply to put your work forward as how it is suppose to be and let others eat it up. It is not so much the 1960s idea of Theater of Pain, rather it is Theater of Static; this is a white noise age, after all; one that lives by the creed "everything must mean something," which, when you get down to it roughly translates as: "who are you to judge that this isn't brilliant?"

So let us not judge. Let us just put things forth as the way they should be. Here I am following in the footsteps of John Cage, one of my favorite functional alcoholics. For those that the name doesn't ring a bell Cage's greatest achievement was his 1952 composition 4′33″. Simply put, it was an entire performance where not a single note was played. "Although 4′33″ in fact consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, it is frequently erroneously perceived as four minutes, thirty three seconds of silence."

Silence, static, they are simply the opposite of each other. The point here is not whether we should or should not champion Cage and Cage's performances; it happened, it's over and now it is part of history (end of discussion). No, the point is that because of what Cage did, tuning the radio into endless silence as it were, that frees us now from having to spend years and years developing that classical base that allowed performers in the past to experiment from. Why bother? After all, this is how it is suppose to be; if it sounds or looks disjointed or boring or even hideous the problem lies with the viewer and listener, not with the composition and composer.

Perhaps our new creed can be: if it can't be done in twenty minutes why bother? … after all, who are we to say that is not brilliant?

So …

… you like new things, I like new things, let us make some new things, lettuce. But where to start? The French Decedent poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote in his letter to Georges Izambard, "je est un autre," "I is another." I is an/other, somebody else. I cannot speak for you but the sensations of myself, all that makes me up, there are splits I feel, so deeply inside, as if I were alien to myself. I do not mean to say I am in pain, rather in moments of deep depression or joy I feel at times as if I was outside myself.

I have taken many of the tenants of Art Brut and tried to turn them inside out; instead of seeking answers in others I hope to find them inside. Thus:

* seeing that Western artists have spent the last 150 years seeking the Other when in fact the Other is the Self;

* seeing that we all have fire inside ourselves though we might forget how to control it;

* seeing that the only crudeness is the Crudeness of the Psyche;

* seeing that the only primitivism is the Primitivism of the Soul;

I am seeking a new Raw Art of the Self, Neo-Art Brut; once we get beyond the center from which events are controlled, that is, the ego, we can begin to use that fire again and see what is going on. Why waste your time pretending to be something other than you are not? If Indigenous peoples hold truths, then so do I, so do you. If we cannot find what we are seeking inside ourselves we will never find it.

I am seeking the Bullgod, what are you looking for?

So …

… yesterday I did something rather interesting. I wrote down bad information and gave a definition to an art movement as I hoped it would be rather than what it really was. When I wrote that Art Brute or "Raw Art" ¹ sought to "seek for images and words that lay behind cognitive thinking" and had a "fascination with the 'primitive [nature] of the soul'" … those might have been my goals but I can't claim that was what Raw Art was looking for.

Rather, in a nut shell, Art Brut is a term "created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates." Other artists have focused on children's drawings and the works of incarcerated criminals. In other words, it is Primitivism. It might not be as racist and sexist and xenophobic as a lot of Primitivist Art tends to be, but it still endorses the privileged status of the colonizing voyeur labeling other cultures and people as "primitive," usually Indigenous peoples, and appropriating their art because it is somehow more "truthful" than what we are doing here in the West.

It's all crap. Think of the racist European concept of The Noble Savage or the craze in Post-Impressionist of 1880s Europe of painting peoples from the South Seas or Africa because they appeared to be "exotic." It is a form of fetishism. It's gimmicky and boring too, primarily because the artist almost never sees anything other than the superficial in their subjects. Not being part of the culture, they cannot say anything profound about it. You can never say anything about a person when you see them as alien, as an Other.

So Art Brut is not what I want. I want something that turns that gaze of ours back on us. I want a primitivism of my own soul. I want a crude poetry because my own psyche is crude. I do not need to go to another to find these secrets. Maybe what I want is a new Raw Art?

Is it all inside us? After all, we all have been children and don't we all have a criminal somewhere inside us? Why go to other lands to "seek for images and words that lay behind cognitive thinking"? If I am seeking the Bullgod then is the Bullgod already inside me? If I fear the Bullgod as alien am I really fearing myself? I as Alien? I as the Unknown? A New Raw Art? How droll!

1. The first translation I read called the German expression "Rough Art" but several other translations used the word "Raw Art," which has a much more gritty feel to it. [back]

Since I started blogging in August of 2005 (so long ago) I have read countless posts arguing about what "the new" form of poetry shall be in the American art scene. This is where we apparently are putting our energies; not writing poetry but attempting to second-guess what will be new. We are in love with Ezra Pound's maxim, "Make it new," but once we have something new, instead of perfecting it, instead of mastering it, we drop it and hurry off to something else. While I am not calling for us to champion one style of poetry over another, ¹ I am calling for brilliance, discipline, consistency. After all, isn't all poetry about ecstasy? So who are you to tell us one form is not better than another? It's all praise, and it's all right. Indeed.

Today I am looking for a story. You see, I like stories. Some might call it narrative, I call it interesting. Fragmentation has its place, but it is also an unholy mess at times, since it seems to be the plaything of those suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For example, for the classical music lovers out there, give me Bach's Fugue in D minor over Debussy's La Mer, Rossini's L'italiana en Algeria over Strauss' Salome, any day. Or, for those who that makes no sense to, I'll take Bob Dylan over Brian Eno. Narrative, dramatic, lyrical versus nebulous, ambient, obscure. It is my own personal quirk, but still, I like to see where I am going.

With that in mind, I think I am going to start a sonnet sequence. I want adventure and I want it in the old Spencerian style: abab bcbc cdcd ee. What, you ask, is a sonnet sequence? Ripping a page (yes, ripping) from my Benét's here is a quick definition:

Sonnet Sequence. A collection of sonnets in which there is a discernible, if only vaguely, narrative or psychological development. The effect is like stanzas in a long poem, but each sonnet retains its own force and independence. In Petrarch's Rime (Verses), the [groundbreaker] of most European and English sequences, the sonnets … are the chief vehicles of the story of the poet's love for Laura. Outstanding examples in English include Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Spencer's Amoretti (1595), and the Dark Lady sonnets of Shakespeare.²

Now we need someone to write about. A character worthy of a bel canto, that is, a beautiful song. Byron began his epic poem Don Juan with the words: I want a hero, an uncommon want,/ when every year and month sends forth a new one. We seem to be in a similar age. Heroic figures are all around us and yet how many inspire us to do anything? Besides Ghandi and Billie Holiday, I mean?

One of the things you might or might not know about me is that I am shark crazy. Seriously, where some might look and see a fish, I see beauty. Where some might hear the theme song of Jaws I hear the swimming strokes of gods. I love sharks and I think that is where we shall start. With a shark. Not just any shark, either. We shall start with Kane'ae; the little silver-red shark that transformed herself into a human in order to experience the joys of dancing. Kane'ae the Dancer. Kane'ae the Hunter. Kane-ae in our modern age.

1. I cannot think of a better Artistic Manifesto or a better way of summing up the "debate" over which poetic forms we should or should not use than with the Jalal-e-Din Rumi story of Moses and the Shepherd. In it, Moses comes upon a man praying in a way he finds offensive and tells him off. The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed and wandered into the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses. God's voice: "You have separated me from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite, or to sever? I have given each being a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge. What seems wrong for you is right for him. What is poisonous to one is honey to someone else. Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, these mean nothing to me. I am apart from all that. Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another. Hindus do Hindu things. the Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. It's all praise, and it's all right. It's not me that's glorified in acts of worship. It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility. That broken-open lowliness is the reality, not the language! Forget phraseology. I want burning, burning. from: Barks, Coleman (ed.) The Essential Rumi San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco (1995) page, 166. [back]
2. Benét's reader's encyclopedia. New York: Harper & Row (1987) page 916. [back]

I took a wonderful Shakespeare course my last semester of graduate school and one of the text we examined was The Tempest. One direction of scholarship that proved extremely interesting was the re-examination of colonial literature not from the point of view of the colonizer but the colonized. In other words, what does literature written at a time when various empires were expanding over the planet show us about the mind-set, the attitudes and apprehensions of the invading powers trying to re-shape various indigenous peoples into their own images? As Caliban says, You taught me language, and my profit on 't / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!¹

I have been forced to approach much of Baudelaire's poetry in this fashion. He is, of course, like all of us, a product of his culture. That is, Paris, France, in the 1840s and 1850s. Charles was middle-class, taken to living off the allowance his mother gave him and fond of prostitutes and absinthe. That is the popular mythology that surrounds him. What this means is he developed various venereal diseases that stayed with him his entire adult life and which he apparently passed onto all his lovers.

But in many of his poems there is a figure of a certain woman, who Louis Simpson refers to as "quadroon," or octoroon, a person having one-quarter African ancestry, named Jeanne Duval.² It has been the tendency of several of the critical essays I have read so far (see: Ward, 2001; de Jonge, 1976; Piaget Shanks, 1974) to eroticse Duval as much as Baudelaire does. That is, they take the poem on face value without bothering to question what the poet was attempting to do.

For example, in Parfum Exotique, what is curious to me is not so much that from a scent of exotic fragrance brings forth all these images to the speaker of the poem, Proust does the same thing but for 600 pages, but what those images are. The speaker talks of a sun-drenched, lazy island where outlandish trees grow and the population is both submissive and sexually libidinous.

That this idea of Primitivism is still in art speaks volumes. That is that "primitive peoples" (read: non-Western, white and middle class) contain some sort of destructive force that is continually lurking on the outside of our (read: male) understanding, particularly ecstasy, spiritual punishment and/or unsuppressed urges of violence or sexuality. This idea had been sweeping through Paris at the time of Baudelaire, with Paul Gauguin's paintings of the Tahiti and the South Pacific, featuring nude, highly sexual women in various "native" poses. However, like many other things, Primitivism is a racist construct, developed by outside observers searching for solutions to various problems of their own society. The original poem reads as follows:

Quand, les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne,
Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux
Qu'éblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone;

Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne.

Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,
Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
Encor tout fatigués par la vague marine,

Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans l'air et m'enfle la narine,
Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers.

That Baudelaire would find the Pacific, or the Caribbean or Africa exotic is less shocking than if he somehow would have had the creativity and humanity not to. Perhaps what this shows to us is how quickly what titillates changes. What was once seen as forbidden or taboo is now common. Common is not a bad thing, it means we are no longer scandalized by the "Other." The sonnet I would love to read would be Jeanne Duval's reply to Baudelaire, After giving me the clap, I lay next/ to your pasty flesh and smell Paris'/ sewer system in one fetid breath … but sadly, we do not have that.

Bewitching, on an autumn night with eyes
closed I breathe in the musk of your breasts, see
far off shores, atolls, all bright and happy
under a dazzling, endless sunrise.

Lazy island, where Nature breeds countless
wondrous trees and fruits of weird delight,
and whose men, with their lithe bodies, invite
women, whose eyes flash with lewd directness.

Lured by your scent to an isle so charming,
I see a port full of sail, mast, rigging
all still weary from the ocean's furies

while the tamarind trees breathe their flavor
to please my senses with greedy pleasure,
mingled with sailor's sea-songs and chanteys.

Notes in Translation:

For those who are not familiar with the terms, Tamarind trees are a tropical Asian evergreen tree, having pale yellow flowers and long seed pods. Chantey is a song sung by sailors to the rhythm of their movements while working.

1. This line alone from The Tempest has been interpreted, among many things, as Shakespeare speaking on behalf of the enslaved peoples Britain had conquered at a time when they had no voice at all. [back]
2. Simpson, Louis. Modern Poets of France: a bilingual anthology. Story Line Press (1997) page 381 [back]

Let us look at an actual Baudelaire sonnet and see what makes it different from other sonnets? First, there is the rhyme pattern. ABAB ABAB CCD EED But form in itself is not enough to make this poem Modern. Let us look at the original French. What do you see beyond the 14-lines?

La Géante
Charles Baudelaire

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J'eusse aimé vivre auprès d'une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d'une reine un chat voluptueux.

J'eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux;

Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,

Lasse, la font s'étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l'ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d'une montagne.

When I say this is a Modern poem what interests me about Baudelaire's point of view is the very real crisis he wrote this poem in. Bermann recounts the following:

By the nineteenth century, the poet's social position — and the very purpose of his poetry — had of course changed enormously from what they had been in the Renaissance, and Baudelaire's particular plight as a nearly destitute art critic and journalist for most of his adult life is a case in point. No longer attached to or supported by a court eager to promote the revival or ornamentation of a national language and literature, the poet of the 1850s was, if anything, a person without a clear social function. Needed by neither an aristocracy nor, as in the Renaissance, by a newly wealthy merchant class seeking to add artistic luster to commercial success, the poet had to appeal now to a growing middle-class public, a reading public broader by far than ever before existed.¹

Here, then, is a poet attempting to write a poem that will be looked at with commercial success. Indeed, La Géante is the sort of poem where, even if you have never read Baudelaire's work, you might think, "hey, that sounds sort of familiar … I didn't know he wrote that." It is the sort of poem the tired old Decadent poets loved sixty years ago. The objectifying of women's body becomes literal here, with the narrator of the poem describing fascination with a female body of mythical size and enough time to caress her marvelous flesh at my ease. In a 1961 translation of Flowers of Evil Francis Duke claims the notion of giantess here evoked is strictly of classical: one of the race of Gaia, earth-goddess and mother of all things: poetry, the physical sciences, etc.² I do not know if I agree completely with that statement, but regardless, La Géante is distinctive in that it struck a note with the licentious reading public, a note that carries on today. In fact, if you ask most people what sort of poetry they read in their spare time, many will cite poetry that has a care-free naughtiness to it, a joyous decadence. This is what makes this poem Modern and if you are the kind of person who likes decadence then we must thank Baudelaire for paving the way. If it was not for Charles Baudelaire we would never have had Charles Bukowski a hundred years later and all his glorifying of wine, women and song.

Giantess
translated by ZJC

In old times, when Nature's lust could transgress
and breed monster children, I wish I had been
in love with a girl giant, some teenage giantess,
like a voluptuous cat beside his queen.

Let me watch her body bloom with desire
that blooms with each new exquisite surprise.
Try to guess if her heart conceals dark fire,
fire whose misty smoke swims before her eyes.

Let me caress her marvelous flesh at my ease,
crawl on the cliffs of her enormous knees,
and when depraved suns in summer season

force her to lie down across a plain to rest
let me sleep in the shadows of her breast
like a town in the shade of its mountain.

1. Bermann, Sandra L. The sonnet over time: a study in the sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press (1988) pages 96 - 97. [back]
2. Duke, Francis. Flowers of Evil and other poems. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (1961) page 287 [back]

the new flowers of which I dream

Let us be honest; I do not have enough time in my amazingly short life to study every different type of sonnet ever crafted under the sun … and what a drab life that would be! Spring is here, the windows to this office are open, chirpy-birds are chirping on the budding branches, my neighbor's dog is howling at the grass, the great green world is calling me to leave behind my pen and ink and book and go jogging over its rolling surface. And for a guy who makes a living changing other people's adult diapers as a living, a chance to go gulmping over this great green world would be nice.

So, why a Baudelairean sonnet? Why a green Baudelaire? Perhaps because it is not easy being green, but more because Baudelaire's sonnet is amazing! Rosemary Lloyd quotes Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry in singing the praises of the irregular Baudelairean sonnet:

[A] combination of mind and body, a blend of solemnity, warmth and bitterness, of the eternal and the intimate, an extremely rare alliance of will power and harmony, the distinguish [the sonnets] from Romantic poetry just as clearly as from Parnassian poetry …¹

As for the lovely green hue? Baudelaire was a known user and abuser of the Green Fairy, absinthe. As was pointed out about Baudelaire, he …

… was known for making disparaging remarks about Paris. He quipped that Paris had become 'a center, radiating universal stupidity.' Nonetheless Paris served as his teacher and provided an inexhaustible source of subject matter for his poetry … misunderstood by the public and critics, [his] Les Paradis Artifcicels condemned fake mysticism … Baudelaire's premise was that modern man sought the most rapid (and false) path to spiritual gratification … After years of exile in Belgium, Baudelaire died at the age of 46, ravaged by veneral disease and long-term substance addictions.²

It is my hope in the next couple of days to not only translate several of his sonnets but to look into what exactly makes the Baudelairean Sonnet so fascinating, interesting, delightful. Who knows, you might just end up writing your own Green Fairy poems. Let us see what we shall learn, eh?

1. Ward, Patricia A. (ed.) Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity. With the assistance of James S. Patty. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press (2001) page 102. [back]
2. Wittels, Betina J. and Robert Hermesch. Absinthe, Sip of Seduction. Denver: Speck Press (2003) pages 13 - 14. [back]

Upon a day Apollo met the Muses and the Graces in sweet sport with earnest Memory, the grave and noble mother of the Muses, was present likewise. Each of the fourteen spoke a line in verse. Apollo began; then each of the nine Muses sang her part; then the three Graces warbled each in turn; and finally, a low, sweet strain from Memory made a harmonious close. This was the first Sonnet; and, mindful of its origins, all true poets take care to bid Apollo strike the keynote for them when they compose one, and to let Memory compress the pith and marrow of the sonnet into its last line.

A Talk about Sonnets¹

It is a bit sad to read E.H. Crouch in South Africa, 1911, state so assuredly, "how rapidly sonnet-writing, once having taken root, grew … [until] … it is now probably the favourite form with at least two-thirds of the younger poets and versifiers in America." (Crouch, page 14) Perhaps a hundred years ago, a hundred and ten, but today the sonnet is seen, along with most other poetic forms, as a skill hardly worth studying. After all, why devote talent, energy and time to mastering complexities when you can simply mimic John Cages' 4.33 minutes of silence and say nothing at all and call it art?

Perhaps it is our short attention spans, perhaps it is our inability to learn from our mistakes, but whatever the reason when we talk about poetry as art (instead of poetry as psychotherapy) it is rarely with historic background. Or it is with the same humorless dogma that we butcher William Carlos Williams' observation that: "Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination." New forms, old forms, in my lady's chamber, the important thing to remember isn't that we all must form our own personal school of poetry by the age of 27, it is, as Williams himself pointed out: “… not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages." In other words, we can take anything and make it fresh with a little creativity.

I think a little historic background will help us all. Who would have guessed that a form that has been around for over 500 years would be seen as dangerous and edgy? As Feldman and Robinson² point out:

Petrarch's sonnets established a mode for both style and substance in the English-language sonnet, echoes of which are audible in the sonnets of today. Petrarch's Canzoniere, or "Songbook," which consists of many different kinds of lyric poems — chief among them sonnets — is the primary text that established the sonnet tradition. The standard Petrarchan subject is erotic love, highly intellectualized and symbolized, of a male lover for an unattainable and idealized woman. Petrarch's love for Laura (in Italian also l'aura — the light, or the air) transcends earthly passion and contains oxymoronic speech express (his love for her is "bittersweet," giving him both joy and despair); his sonnets express the hopelessness of his ever consummating his erotic desire … Petrarch also embeds in Laura's name a pun on "laurel," the emblem of Apollo, the god of poetry, l'oro, Italian for "gold." (Feldman and Robinson, page 4)

So it seems that every hundred years or so a new generation of poets discover this form and realize the powers that lie within. How lucky to be one of the few who see form as not a fixed tool of the colonizing oppressor but a continuing flux for expression! They adapt it, making it at once their own and something new. I say again in all camp seriousness, how marvelous is that? For example, to dismiss the sonnet is to dismiss the rise of "WOM-PO"³ for the very reasons that make the sonnet one of the momentous, pivotal, significant forms in poetry:

Just after the middle of the eighteenth century, sonnets became fashionable and respected again at the hands of a new class of poets, many of them women. But why did these poets choose an essentially outmoded form? Their choice of the sonnet had a great deal to do with the poetic and philosophical climate of the day and the cult of Sensibility, with its heavy emphasis on feeling and mood, and with the need to find a poetic form that was both demanding and accessible, to convey thoughts and feelings in a more natural way than poets previously had attempted … They wrote sonnets deliberately, with aspirations of joining the ranks of the great writers who had gone before them. Anna Seward (1742 - 1809) calls this attempt at self-canonization "the sonnet's claim." In fact, the sonnet revival of the late eighteenth century is the first period of literary history in which women poets showed they could match skills with male poets in an arena earlier closed to them … (Feldman and Robinson, page 10)

"The Sonnet's Claim." I like how that sounds. Feldman and Robinson point out that to master the form is difficult, "due to a fewer number of similar word-endings — of creating the same intertwining rhyme scheme in English that exists in the Italian … [thus] those English authors who [could] manage the rhymes, most authorities believed, showed a stronger verbal aptitude and a greater command of English vocabulary than those who practiced [in lesser forms] …"(page 12) or so the argument went. Again, I do not like the idea of singling out certain forms simply because they are in or out of vogue, to say one form kicks ass over another. As Rumi put it, It's all praise, and it's all right.

So, versifiers, I want to see some experimentation on your part. Language Poetry has given us a rich possibility in using The Word as a jazz musician uses a saxophone, and so far not a lot pleases. Why does most of it sound like tuneless, 25-minute flute solos featured in the out-takes from repugnant The Mammas and The Pappas concerts? Perhaps because the formlessness of most Language Poetry needs a form to direct and drive it? Perhaps after honing your words to a point we find, indeed, less is more? Feldman and Robinson point out that even the most wild of our Modernists, e.e. cummings, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Barryman, wrote powerful sonnets. The anthology's introduction, A Century of Sonnets, ends with these comments:

The sonnet remains an important part of any good poet's training. Even a contemporary poet such as James Dickey, who is not known for sonnets, made the sonnet an integral part of the teaching of poetry composition because he believed poets should learn the received forms of the craft. (Feldman and Robinson, page 18)

1. Crouch, E. H. (ed) Sonnets of South Africa. A. C. Fifield, London (1911) [back]
2. Feldman, Paula R., and Robinson, Daniel (eds) A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival. Oxford University Press, New York (1999) [back]
3. For a very interesting discussion on the cryptic subject of WOM-PO (women's poetry) see the chain-letter/ discussions of Ostriker, Rosser and Wilner in the January issue of Poetry magazine. It is worth the price of admission alone. [back]

Pan took his hatchet, went to the forest
to cut a flute. A lewd flute. Mew Gulls mewed
near the shore. Spirits in the trees argued
about mildewed leaves, bedewed disgust. Lust,
for Pan, is the greenest of hewed green oak,
holiest wood. When he makes his flute sing
he calls all who'd be crude, rude and willing
to be nude to him. His tattooed kinfolk,
lush tribes, hear that roughhewed song. Even now
some cringe. For them, it is tabooed; passion
a feud with flesh. But we hear Pan's fluted
song, this mood prude's call shameful. It's a vow.
Why be a boorish virgin? Somehow, one
day, we shall be blessed, too, wicked, naked.

Today I have been thinking of the great god Pan, a fitting subject for a Petrarchan sonnet. Not Pan Jin Lian, the Chinese goddess of fornication and prostitution (though they probably hung out in the same discotheques), but Pan, the Greek god of woods, pastures, shepherds and sheep with his legs of a goat and body of a man. On his forehead rest two horns and his hairy body was filled with lice. He played wild carnal songs on a reed pipe and legend usually had him chasing nymph-girls through the forests and mountains. Oscar Wilde wrote in his poem, Pan:

Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee!

Oaten pipes? Nuts and honey. Still, as I said, Pan is today's subject matter. An Italian theme for an Italian sonnet. White and Rosen¹ have this to say about the sonnet:

Despite its name, the sonnet is not a song. It is dramatic in nature, rather than lyric. Characteristically, it begins with a scene or image drawn from the external world, compares it by statement, implications, or symbol with some state of mind or emotion, and through analogy thus reflects upon or presents an insight into some particular or universal situation. Essentially it objectifies an inner conflict of some kind, commenting on or resolving it in brief compass. It is far more logical in structure, more precise in thought, more concise and unified in both substance and design than the ordinary lyric. In symmetry, its very life, is the internal logic, intellectual and emotional, that governs the balance and relationship of its parts. The qualities of a good sonnet are found not in its conformity to some external pattern but in its unity of design, condensation of thought, exactitude of language and image, and — even at its most meditative and abstract — its essentially dramatic nature. (White and Rosen, pages 2-3)

Perhaps this is where we need to start with our understanding of what makes a sonnet different from, say, free verse or other forms? This understand that it is dramatic, it tells a story of some sort. Stories are looked down upon in poetry right now. To follow a narrative flow, to go from point A to B to C is seen as hack work. Much better to create perplexity, confusion, discomfort in your work. The argument is that if the reader is confused, then the work must be deep. This is what you call a self-deception, fallacy, wishful thinking. It is the middle class assumption that readers need that discomfort to confront some struggle of the soul they had hitherto failed to understand. Like ugly public art, if you have to stare at it every single day, you might be forced to draw some conclusions. Perhaps that your tax money was spent on horrendous eye sores? Perhaps a Molotov Cocktail would be useful? Or, simply, that your public officials have ghastly taste in art? As The Onion put it, Artist Starving For A Reason.

But back to the Italian sonnet, Pan's sonnet:

The origin of the sonnet has been a matter of much speculation and controversy, but Italian writers of the thirteenth century … were the first to give it definite, permanent shape and character. Once devised, the form rapidly became popular in Italy and was brought to its perfection by Dante and Petrarch … Of the two, the influence of Petrarch was by far the greater … in his individuality, subjectivity, and curiosity [he] seemed like a modern … by the [time of the Renaissance in the ] sixteenth century "Petrarchismo" — a term applied to imitations of the poet more artifcal than artful — was at its height (White and Rosen, pages 4 - 5).

Ah, Petrarchismo! Something we will have to learn to avoid. So, in a nutshell, here are the basic concepts of the Petrarch love sonnet:

* Love is a frustrating though inspiring experience that suddenly drops into the poet's (startled) lap and changes the world forever.

* Poets are a melancholy yet obsessive bunch when it comes to love, alternating between a balance of lust and indifference, possibility and disillusionment.

* The speaker of the poem is usually a long-suffering (male) lover mulling over a Beloved (some chilly female) who cannot stand to be in the same room as the poet.

* The poet hopes that from deep devotion to the Beloved's rejections that somehow love will show itself again. This is called "stalking" in today's modern lingo. It was called "Courtly Love" in Petrarch's time.

* Because the poet's "devotion" rarely worked the mood of the sonnet can change from fainthearted, feverish, amorous, idealized, euphoric, despairing all in the first stanza.

* The Beloved usually dies in some horrid way and the poet then gets to write about meeting the Beloved in heaven, where she forgives him for making her life miserable while on earth.

* Petrarch's Beloved was named Laura; he apparently saw her while she was at church one day. Petrarch thus set the standard for our current glorification of fraudulent, unrealistic, problematic views in women, beauty and relationships and male poets since have only been too glad to go along.

But, you say, the Petrarch sonnet is not in vogue as it once was. What happened? To answer that we must thank the forefounders of American culture. By that, I mean, of course, the Puritans, who apparently could not stand Courtly Love or bad rhymes:

[With] the death of Elizabeth in 1603, the fashion of the Petrarchan love sonnet had burned itself out. The conditions, social and cultural, that had produced and encouraged it had changed, and a new age had begun for England and for poetry … Humanism, which spread the idea of Platonic love, had given way to an increased Puritanism and the growth of a critical attitude toward love … as immoral or trivial … Revulsion against Italy and things Italian fed on religious bigotry, fear of the Inquisition and … to associate the homeland of Dante and Petrarch with all manner of vice and immorality (White and Rosen, page 11).

Ironically, that we even have a debate at all as to the usefulness of the sonnet as a form in poetry just goes to show how influential the Puritans were in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The 1960s habit of prohibiting anything that hinted at bourgeois sensibilities has produced a large number of poor sonnet writers. Regardless of what the editors of the Penguin Book of the Sonnet tell us, Billy Collins' attempts at sonnets ("We do not speak like Petrarch," page 276 and "All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now," page 277) do not please. Which is too bad, since much of the rest of his poems do.

Still, what is curious to me about the Petrarch sonnet is not what others have or have not done with it, rather what we can do with it now. That with it, somehow, we too shall be blessed … wicked, naked.

1. White, Gertrude M., and Rosen, Joan G. A Moment's Monument: The Development of the Sonnet. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York (1972) [back]

I am becoming interested in the Italian (also know as the Petrarch) sonnet lately. I have been writing sonnets, but not classical ones. By that, I am thinking of what Strand and Boland stated:

Few modern poets have been willing to commit themselves to the major, architectural sequences of a Petrarch or a Shakespeare [sonnet]. Instead, the sonnet — with either the couplet at the end of the or the octave/sestet structure — has become a part of speech (page, 58)¹

By that, I assume they mean that poets have kept the sonnet's basic outline but no longer bother with the structure that once made it a sonnet, thus it simply "a part of speech" in rhyming 14 lines. Perhaps this is the difference between the concept of "dabbler" and "ingenious" poets? One uses a form they never mastered. It's as Frost once quipped, "writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net." I don't know, I am not happy with that critique, either.

The last 100 years in poetry have been an active rebellion against everything that hints at Establishment² but instead of taking the old forms to new heights poets seem to have just lost the abilities their predecessors once took for granted. While I do find Modernism interesting 90% of Post Modernism seems rather juvenile with its justifications and sycophantic insistence on its own blandness.

Perhaps every generation has seen most of its poets as bland, Byron certainly said so of the Poet Laureate Southley. But when we live in an era when awards are being given to strings of words you can't sing, you can't dance to, that dull the brain with their affected posturing something is wrong. I am all for savoir-faire, but I need to rollick and rejoice too, folks. I find it odd I have to go outside the realm of poetry to find the sonnet's influences on our culture. Who would have thought of ice skating and Petrarch?

September 11, 2000, saw Russian ice skater Ekaterina Alexandrovna Gordeeva perform her ribbon routine, Petrarch Sonnet No. 104, at the Spirit of Gold show in Simsbury, Connecticut. The routine is called this for the music played, Franz Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 (Sonetto 104 del Petrarca) as performed by Vladimir Horowitz.

Perhaps that is what I like about "the little song." You can be both a Language poet (I am still not sure what that really means) and a Formalist (ditto) in a sonnet. That is what I want to do. This is where I am heading. I want a funk sonnet, a hootenanny sonnet, a hip hop sonnet. I want music in 14 lines that sets the page on fire.

1. Strand, Mark and Boland, Eavan. The making of a poem: a Norton anthology of poetic forms. WW Norton & Co.: New York (2000) [back]
2. I wonder if anyone finds it ironic that the same poets who claim this privileged stance are now the Establishment themselves? Is it simply a case of "The Emperor Has No Clothes? Sort of like Johnny Rotten/Lydon endless self-important posturing, refusing to appear on Saturday Night Live because the show couldn't pay the outrageous fees the band demanded (ah, anarchy, ka-ching!) at the time and then recently quipped "we're not your monkey," when they turned down their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Talk about privileges … [back]

Some time ago I started a journal. I am a terrible journal writer since I make up large sections of what has happened to me to amuse my "readers" (whoever they might be, someone in the far future I suppose) but I am also well aware of this. In the first page of my journal I wrote out for myself what I now see if my mini-philosophy on Negative Ecstasy. Interesting, since I would go back to that subject when I started this blog. I will only quote a bit, since most of it is illegible and repetitive:

The end result [of my creative process] is that my sonnets take on a sort of drifting, rambling, straggling quality to them, like I was making up lines to fit the rhyme since I am never really sure what direction the poem is taking. Sometimes I even … fib, exaggerate, embellish to keep the story moving. I love absurdity (as long as it is not happening to me)

Speaking of absurdity¹ I have been amusing myself by turning small real life situations into outlandish drama while writing my sonnets lately. For example, it is true that I do a lot of cumbrous lifting at work in the rest home. Many of my residents with Alzheimer's are unable to transfer themselves out of their beds and into their wheelchairs so I do it for them. It's not easy lifting 220 pounds of human flesh (I have no idea what that is kilos) from a stumpy, slumped over positions² but I tend to come home aching all over and dreaming about saunas, massages and steam baths. A poetry of steam baths? It sounds strangely tantalizing, exotic, libidinous.

Also, I put into the poem whatever is happening around me at the time. The radio was on and first I tuned in to a classical music station where they were playing a bit of cello by the composer Bach, then I switched to a local jazz station where John Coltrane and Bird, Charlie Parker, played back to back. There were a lot birds outside my window twittering in the morning light and so I thought: "ah ha! Zack is being clever," so that went into the poem too. Of course, alcohol, pain killers and aspirin aren't the way I get through the day (no, it is coffee), but this all had a nice ring to it and is a lot more exciting than just saying: "I need a massage, please." We love our tragic heroes, I guess.

Pain is a real pisser. To wake; yellow
phlegm, limbs shaking, lungs fluid filled, the brain
pan on fire. Nothing pleases. Bach's cello?
Birds' song outside? A low groan from Coltrane?
Nothing — but to wake and rise and labor
out of bed. Thrown into flesh's burdens
I gulp down pills with my coffee. Killer
migraines need migraine killers; mountains
of raw aspirin. Sleeping pills. Alcohol.
Enough to numb another day. Thirty
wild years and how many do I recall?
Just wild fear — of failure, of poverty,
you name it. Pain drove me. Ai, little word
of my core. You make life richly absurd.

1. As we all know some people are funnier than others. I don't have a television at home but I was helping one of my residents at work get ready for bed on Friday and he had his television on. The station was tuned to the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Channel ("for the hockey games," he said), and a comedy show, "Rick Mercer Talks to Americans," was playing. It was hilarious. It consisted in Mr. Mercer interviewing random Americans on the street and getting them to agree with bizarre "facts" about Canada. He persuaded Americans to say: "Congratulations, Canada, on legalizing insulin," "Please, Canada, stop putting your senior citizens on ice floes and sending them out to sea" or "Congratulations, Canada, on your first mile of paved road." The intent was to make fun of our American ignorance on all things Canadian, so he got various locals to urge the Canadian government to install a new air-conditioner to help save the National Igloo and to agree that the U.S. should bomb Saskatchewan. Of course, my short term memory being what it is, I couldn't remember the name of the show when I got home at midnight, but thanks to all powerful Internet I discovered what I had been watching and even an article Mr. Mercer wrote concerning how the show started. [back]
2. I have only thrown my back out at this job once. True, I lay on the ground crying in pain until help arrived and was unable to return to work for two weeks. The codeine they gave me to keep me numb helped a lot … I don't recall a lot of those weeks except I had difficulty getting to the bathroom [back]

"Kreyòl pale kreyòl knoprann."
"Creole speaks Creole understands."¹

Is there a Creole sonnet? I ask this in all seriousness. Are there poets in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora writing sonnets in Creole? The little I know of the language I find fascinating; this mixture of French and West African Wolof relocated into the New World as Europe built their slavery empires with human lives. Pol Larak (Paul Laraque) writes in the Introduction to Open Gate:

It is a mixture of French, spoken by the white masters, and of the Black slaves' African languages and dialects, during colonial times. It can be a revolutionary one in the interests of the masses, or a reactionary one if manipulated by the cruel exploiting classes. It is a beautiful language with the rhythm of the drum and the images of a dream, especially in its poetry, and a powerful weapon in the struggle of our people for national and social liberation.
(page xiii)

And in the same concept that a language, a tool in other words, can be used to both liberate and enslave depending on the user and purposes is the same impulse that drives me to ask about the sonnet. The sonnet is just a form, a tool, and it too is no more reactionary than the poet who uses it. I love the sonnet and find it has been used world wide by a huge range of poets over the ages to express their personal visions. That speaks volumes to me.

Failing to find a Creole sonnet, I wonder how hard it would be to write one myself? First I need to learn the language, which has been a stumbling block for many of my translating adventures. Who can I turn to? We don't have any Mama Wata houngan (Haitian vodou priest or priestess) or hounfour (vodou temple) in Lansing, as far as I know; thus I must turn back to books for what I am learning. That usually does not work as well as I wish. Alex van Stipriaan has a very interesting article, Watramama/ Mami Wata² on the subject. A quote from Wikipedia that caught my eye runs as follows:

As her name would imply, the goddess is closely associated with water. Traditions on both sides of the Atlantic tell of the goddess abducting her followers or random people whilst they are swimming or boating. She brings them to her paradisiacal realm, which may be underwater, in the spirit world, or both. The captives' release often hinges on some sort of demand, ranging from sexual fidelity to the goddess to something as simple as a promise that they do not eat fish. Should she allow them to leave, the travellers usually returns in dry clothing and with a new spiritual understanding reflected in their gaze. These returnees often grow wealthier, more attractive, and more easygoing after the encounter.

A Watramama sonnet? Is there one out there? Still, this is just a beginning. Something to chew on as I look about, ask and talk. Perhaps tomorrow I will find a Creole sonnet? Perhaps, we shall see.

1. Hirschman and Boadiba Open Gate: an anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry. Williamantic, CT: Curbstone Press (2001) pages, 80-81 [back]
2. Gordon Collier and Ulrich Fleischmann (eds). A pepper-pot of cultures: aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; New York, NY: Rodopi (2003) pages 323 - 337. [back]

Disclaimer: Ekaterina Evseyeva is a friend of mine, a Yakuts scholar and poet from Siberia. I had written to her during my research for various forms of international sonnets. She translated an article written in Russian by T.N. Vasilyeva and sent it to me. Translation, discourse and copyrighting being what they are, I take full responsibility for any information presented herein, as well as any mistakes in interpretation — ZJC.

"National Features of the Yakut Poetry"

While establishing contacts with the world literature in the aspect of the genre forms and in analyzing of the contemporary issues, Yakuts/Sakha poetry does not loose its own peculiarities and moreover, produces some adopted lyrical forms, one bright example being the sonnet.

One of our well-known scholars, Vasilyeva, reviewed almost all works of this genre, from 1930-2000. Her work is based on the theory of K.S. Gerasimov, who tells us that "the most suitable size of sonnet is the one in which the poetry of a given nation reveals its perfection."

Thus, the most common size of the Yakut sonnet is a seven-syllable/ step form, the oldest form coming from the Turkish poems. For example, we can analyze the sonnets of our poet, Ivan Gogolev. In his work, rhythm equals with the size of traditional Sakha songs. The development of this idea and theme in the sonnet is like that in the song – not too fast, but gently; the thesis gradually turning into antithesis. Such soft transition is supported by repletion of sounds and morphemes such lines as:

Кулун ыраас хара5а/ 2-2-3/ clear eyes of the foal
Долгутар миигин куруук,/ 3-2-2/ always make me feel excitement,
Ыйдаца куех арда5а/ 3-1-3/ like when the rain during the full moon night
Дууhабар тохтор курдук./ 3-2-2/ pours into my soul.

Дьиктиргии, сергии, уерэ/ 3-2-2/ being full of solemn joy,
Аан дойдуну одуулуур,/ 1-3-3/ it looks around at the world,
Бу бэйэтэ олус кэрэ,/ 1-3-2-2/ and this is beauty,
Бу бэйэтэ, дьицэр, улуу./ 1-3-2-2(2,14)/ and this is something grand.

(Note: the size of the Yakuts/ Sakha sonnet is not the same as in its English translation).

National, traditional peculiarities are shown in the Yakut mentality and are primarily reflected in its lexis – fine, exquisite metaphors and similes, rich abilities for producing local sayings. These peculiarities are often shown in the thematic and composition of the sonnet. For example, there are both oral and written traditional metaphors on such notions like trees, sun, horse (key elements of visual symbolism for the Sakha). But even in such metaphors poets open something new; they make their own interpretations of a known phenomenon. Iven Gogolev used the traditional musical instrument "khomus" to symbolize inseparable unity and the bond of two loving hearts. The use of color should be noted as one of the main peculiarities of poetical similes and epithets. As it’s known, the color white ("уруц, мацан") has been called "the most beloved color of the ancient Yakut." White was given the most respect in epithets, which carried on in Yakut sonnets.

Furthermore, philosophical sonnets are common as a major theme of Yakut poetry. For example, the sonnets of Ivan Gogolev and Michail Efimov both reflect a multitude of images of the world; their dark and light sides, as well as their dual conflicting views in their poetical outlook. Philosophical sonnets display the poet's pondering about time and meaning of life. They reveal the image of a national motherland and give predictions about what awaits the Sakha people. Besides that, poets find unlimited opportunities to bring to light and evoke general matters of the individual in specific or historical ways; it gives the Yakut sonnet artistic volume and grandness. Poets propagate a sacred belief of advantageous influence of the beauty of the world onto their people; the old pride is true here, that the poet believes in the only form of happiness is to bring "good to their people."

The love sonnets differ in their own ways. Here, there is a traditional image of a beloved — a woman, be it a wife or mother. This can probably be explained by an "oriental mentality" of the author, from where the classical Turkish form comes from. The portrait of a beloved, depicting her long hair, eyes and her smile: “long hair flowing down like a glow of moon” ("ый тохтул5ан баттахтаах") and in very traditional Sakha belief it is compared to “a sacred birch tree” ("аар хатыцца"), “rich sounding khomus” ("этигэн хомуска"), “a goddess Aiyysyt” and looks like “the light of the life, the goddess Iyehsit” ("Олох сырдыга", "сырдык Иэйэхсит").

Consequently, having studied the literary canon, the Sakha poet introduces new images into the discussion – "a sonnet Lady," an image of writer’s wife. There is also an image of mother, which symbolizes the gratitude to destiny, acknowledgment of power of wisdom and tranquility. Here there are thoughts about moral and ethical questions of life, which gain convincing power through memories of childhood. In all, sonnets about motherhood has a motivation concerning sadness and search, the search of the beloved, in this case the nurturer, with imagery of her warm breath, as well as suitable expressions concerning the idea of an eternal bow and gratitude towards mothers.

In all known forms of sonnets, except its satirical form, one can find meditations about the unity of nature and human soul. Landscapes act as a reflection of social life and dialectical activities. Philosophical themes of the beauty of the world receive both intellectual and emotional expressions in the space of sonnet and this theme is a rather traditional one in the Sakha lyrical poetry. That’s why their is a bond between our people and the character in the given sonnets, seen as the basis of philosophical revelation of a nationalistic mentality, or the lyrical “I” in the Yakut poetry.

The canon of classical sonnets was introduced into the Sakha language when they were first translated. Our poet, Semen Rufov, produced several translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and he made them ten-steps in Sakha instead of traditional fourteen-step. The poet explained that change by the lack of tonic syllabicity in the Sakha poetry and our very light word stresses. If he remained in a fourteen-step size, the sound of the poem in Sakha would be too stiff. So he observed how the poems would sound to the Sakha people, if they would be good to listen to it or not.

Содур олоххо то5о олорор? /10/ why does he/she lead sinful life?
Суобаhа суохтары кемускээриэ? /10/ to protect the disgraceful?
Албыны кистээн кене оцорор /10/ to cover the truth by the lie
Абааhыны айыы дэттэрээриэ? /10/ and to call the bad as the good?
То5о сирэйин тэтэркэй имин /10/ why do his cheeks get reddened
Тууйар, оцоhуу ецунэн сыбаан? /10/ artificially?
Кулуктуу сатыыр дьицнээх кэрэтин /10/ why does s/he cover the true beauty
Келдьун киэргэли салама ыйаан? /(3,74) 10/ by unnecessary salama?
("salama" is a sort of decorative rope)

Critics have said this could be said by a truly Yakutian poet: antithesis of “sin-esteem” is seen as contradiction of "abahyy" (devil) and "ayii" (holy spirit). To search for artificia, falseness is compared to needlessness of putting on extra ornaments. Thus, preserving the poetical idea of Shakespeare, Rufov used elements and images of the Yakut poetical system and folklore to strengthen the poem. While reading the Rufov’s translations one can forget their English origin due to the very rich Yakut elements which allow readers to feel artistic peculiarities of this native tongue.

While writing his translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Rufov implies some peculiarities of traditional Sakha poetry, like morpheme and sounding harmony of lines. Another characteristic feature are frequent verbal rhymes which end up syntactically finished in thought. The author wants to fit traditional prerequisites in for the Sakha audience, thus using laconic, accessible, sincere words.

Viewed from one side, translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets by Semyon Rufov are a bright example of our world literature heritage, and from another they represent some samples of the classical Yakut sonnet's flexibility. If we first consider its rhythm, metric, content and dialectical structure in the Yakuts sonnet form, we can assume that its nationalistic characteristics are reflected in classical forms of sonnets as well.

I love the word "dim." As in: "Faintly outlined; indistinct: a dim figure in the distance." Or: "Obscure to the mind or the senses: a dim recollection of the accident." My dim, dim past. Do you ever re-read notes you leave for yourself, notes you lose and months later re-discover?¹ Here is one I wrote concerning Washington DC restaurants, then forgot to post. It actually has a lot to do with dim-sum, apparently.

Thank you for your advise with A&J. I am always on the look out for yummy dim-sum, and I have had so much fun reading your blog late Sunday night/ early Monday morning, I didn't know which post to comment on.

Except I wrote this back in August. August, folks! All I need is an irrate thunder-spirit to stomp on my head and all will be well. Like the Baal or Baalim, the "various local fertility and nature gods of the ancient Semitic peoples considered to be false gods by the Hebrews," from which all our dim, modern religions spring. Speaking of which, according to Encyclopedia Mythica, Vishap is: "an evil Armenian thunder-spirit who tramples the crops in the shape of a camel or a donkey." Thus the blog title, thus the villanelle.

I love this dimness
in my throat; this song.
All my, "baalim-ness,"

rising. I, magus,
I have sung long;
I sing this dimness

the beast brings. Taurus
the Bull? No, a strong
fury, "baalim-ness."

Vishap, the faceless
ass? Vishap! What's wrong
to love this dimness,

all this furious
murk? Yes, these words throng
my throat, "baalim-ness"

of the fields. Chorus
we sing, we belong
to all this dimness,
all this, "baalim-ness."

1. Just like Zaphod burning his initials into his own brain so his dim self will know he's suppose to recall something important? [back]

Many interesting things are happening with the folks over at The Mississippi Review. They have extended their $1000 Poetry Prize until November 1; with the only restrictions being: "Fee is $15 per entry … poetry entries should be three poems totaling 10 pages or less." That is easy. I think I shall submit TIBURÓN IF THE LAMB, MOON JELLYFISH and OCTOPI to them and see what happens. They are also seeking submissions for their upcoming January 2006 issue: Defining the Literary Now. Their question goes as follows:

Is there now a “now” distinct from a clearly recognizable “then,” or are we just the New Edwardians, drinking, picnicking and being clever until the next explosion shifts our paradigm?

What is this? Instead of being Edwardians of any stripe, shall we then be the "It Girl" of Poetry? The Clara Bow of "Now"?¹ Isn't "Now" a culturally constructed idea to begin with? Isn't "Now" a corruption, prevarication, misconstruction of everything that is going on?

This urge to pin point where we are in some literary map, to set up definitions, to hem us in is much more "Now" than any literary movement we could devise. Deconstruction is popular in poetry today, but so is stylized form. The only thing every literary critics has in common is this mania of using chop logic to characterize us, of endless theorizing, of (mind-bogglingly dull) analyzing our "situation" in "history," why not just quote Super Tramp? — "Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned/ I know it sounds absurd/ But please tell me who I am." Yes, what is this ready-made, prefabricated, submissive "community" I happen to be part of? Who are all these "Now" poets who spend their time, not writing beautifully poetry, not amorous, not burning, not even ebullient; but rather worrying about how some Future Academy might receive all of this?

we've
succumb
to believe

that we grieve
for reason.

All of this! Why not substitute "we analyze/ for reason?" instead? Where is that "ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo we are suppose to burn with anyway? I love splendor, dazzling talent, lavish beauty; so many fantastic things are happening right now I will never witness, be a part of. The Tenth Kalamazoo Russian Festival will happen this October 29. The Kirov Ballet and Orchestra will perform Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty at the Detrot Opera House. Don't think, just do!

"how?"
we ask,
and "now?"

we vow
that we shall bask
in hoopla, but how?

hue and cry and kowtow?
beg that each task
be glorious? now

we hide our bent brow,
dim nose under, what? mask
and key? somehow

we will endow
each octet with flavor; basque
blues but spanish rhyme? now,

now, we say; we are judge, hoosegow,
maven. let our words unmask
each "how?" each "now"! "how";
as in: "how/ now?" "how/ now." "how/ now!"

1. Speaking of which, if you get the chance to see them, Blue Dahlia's collabrotive art/ funk soundtrack to the Clara Bow film "It" is worth the $2.95 per gallon it takes for you to drive up and see them. Blue Dahlia rocks! [back]

I want to hollow myself out, empty myself; I want the ocean. You might live next to one or in one or under one, you might write to me and invite me to visit, pole about on your punt, paddle about with flippers and snorkel, you might; yet that is probably not the ocean I want. Even by the act of wanting I am creating a transcendental situation. I am creating flimflam; for the ocean I desire is the one other's have created for me.

Is this the escapist urge to flee, from what? Enterprise? Errand fatality? Kismet? Not exactly, I am looking to see what worlds others have created. I want to be there, in your idyll's waters, her verse's depths, his ballad's sea. I am not interested in creating my own world, there are so many unconnected worlds to visit already. After all, as Margaret Drabble in TLS said: "When is a borrowing a theft, and when is it a benign sign of cross-cultural fertilization?" I feel fertile enough as it is, I break apart on every landmass I visit. No, I want sunburned insomnia, glorious asphyxiation twelve leagues down, ingenious hemorrhaging somewhere below the gut.

I think this started this morning with reading Beverly A. Jackson's little photo journey of Costa Del Sol, Spain. She linked it under the heading "Desire." Desire, maelstrom, frenzy. No poetry or even words, as I recall. Just wondrous photography awaking, what? Is it possible to write a poem like that? I have been working on minimal villanelles of late, finding single words that must carry the whole weight and meaning that my earlier iambic pentameter lines could lounge in. It reminds me of Whimsy Speaks' #9 Rule from Secrets of a Slush-Piler, a list of advice for up-and-coming poets wishing to avoid the pit-falls of submitting their work for publication, which goes as follows: "A mediocre poem is no less mediocre because each word is a single line."

But we are wasting time! It is Sunday night, my ability to be transcendental under dull pain is limited at best¹. Halvard Johnson tell it like it is, fueling this urge for vagabonding with a meditation on preparation:

26.
replacing old maps with new ones
preparing the cat for summer camp
paying the bills in advance
brushing up on our Spanish

I like that. Spanish for Idiots, Spanish for Lovers, Spanish for the Languorous. I like poets who translate their ¡mots! ¡words! ¡λέξεις! for others too. Lisa Jarnot comments on her 1996 book,Sea Lyrics: "translation of [it] into Swedish is in the works." But the ocean I want is the one I found in The Earth decides to give birth by Birdie Jaworski, with the lines:

The water and sand
travel up my legs,
chilling my thighs,
ocean brine sloshing
inside the cavity of my body …

My body! These senses! As Whitman cried: "The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them," and now I stand apart from myself, and now they rage against me. Shelby and I have just finished making a spinach and triple cheese lasagna. I am drinking some jasmine and rose hip tea and my cat, who spent the better part of the day laying in the sun, is sitting on my lap. All these wonderful smells are floating about the house; melted cheese, tart tomato sauce, sebaceous jasmine, sun-baked kitty fur. To top it off, now that it is getting colder and colder each night, I went into my closet and found my peculiar, polar bear slippers to wear. Put together, all this makes me feel secure and snug, the exact opposite of where my emotions are going. Where is there any apprehension in this "watery world's welkin, eh? Any damned comprehension in this "mad milky melody"? I think this is where I shall start today's villanelle:

we've
succumb
to believe

that we grieve
for reason. "to become
ash and clay?" we've

cried, "we'll deceive
mab, bedlam,
erebus, we believe

we can reweave
the fate's loom." welcome
to our rebirth. we've

finally to achieve
a bedlam of boredom.
do you believe

it can be done? deceive
us at sappho's aquarium?
that last dish of life we've
worked so hard to believe.

1. Not that I am stressed out, just under the weather … it is flu season; so I took these pain relief pills this afternoon but by accident I took the "P.M. Night" pills, not the "A.M. Day" which has made me all plaster-headed and woozy-brained [back]

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

(probably braining in some poor S.O.B. passing by Henry's window … you know how grum poets can be, especially anyone forced to live in New England)

I know Lansing isn't the poetry meccca Agana, Guam¹ or Underwood, North Dakota is, but next week we will actually be having two (2) poetry events in one (1) week. Not just the Dead Poets reading² but Tim Lane reminds us:

Magdalena Teahouse Open Mic Poetry Reading Series
Tuesday, Oct. 25
sign up 7:45

You should go to that if you happen to be in Lansing. You can go as a Dead Poet. A Dead Poet! Ruelaine writes: "To date, the list of Dead Poets scheduled to appear at the Creole Gallery on Wed. Oct. 26th includes:

Dylan Thomas
Jane Kenyon (who is dead)
Rosalia de Castro — tho' we are looking for English translations of her work. . . anybody have any?
Sappho
Rumi
Shel Silverstein
Gertrude Stein
Emily Dickenson
Walt Whitman"

Hurrah for Good, Gray poets! Speaking of which, I have noticed a trend in blogs at the end of the week to randomly link to various other people's home sites simply because they have nothing to say on a Friday morning, probably still sleep-hung over from a long night spent changing adult diapers on the dementia ward and answering call-lights (just a guess, really).

As a vehement blog poet, I loath such tactics. So what if people say nice things about you when there are repetitive villanelles to write? And the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack to make snide comments about? And Poets & Writer's selections of debut poetry featuring: Andrea Baker, Christian Barter, Geoff Bouvier, Leslie Bumstead, Victoria Chang, Geri Doran, K.E. Duffin, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Dana Goodyear, Sarah Gridley, Tyehimba Jess, Corinne Lee, Sheryl Luna, Rusty Morrison, Dead Poets!, Matthew Shenoda, Laura Sims, Mark Sullivan and Catherine Wing? And those damn, lying apes? However, if I was going to do something like that, it would look a little like this:

I have been laughing all week over Jim Behrle's " What the Hell is Up With Your Author Photo?" series, this week featuring poor, abused Forrest Gander.

Here is a photo of Marci Johnson in action at the April 2005 AWP Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Come this Thursday (Oct. 27, suckers) The Gore Gore Girls (lo-fi energy! b-horror movies! go-go boots!) will be playing at Mac's Bar in Lansing. Hurrah! The Gore Gore Girls Rock!

The Happy Booker kicks off Elizabeth Poliner week on her blog.

I finally found another artistic nurse! Unkempt Woman is wonderful, worth the 1.6 seconds it takes to click on her link for her "Nurse Cow" quip.

Just because my local alt dot collge dot com radio station still plays it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about The Nails' 88 Lines About 44 Women.

The Radish King orders you: "Buy Books! Buy mine, especially. And Punk Poems by John Burgess. And Kathryn Rantala's Missing Pieces." Or as Pax Fuscata puts it: "These spunky books have volunteered to help out the way we all do: Uno alla volta. One at a time."

Isn't it odd that during time of social peace poets write poems of anarchy and chaos but when actual disaster strikes our fair country poets almost never advocate rioting? I discovered today that "riots" in Italian is "Tumulti;" in German "Aufstände;" in French "Émeutes;" and in Chinese "暴亂." I think that is where today's villanelle should start:

Poets
faking
riots;

their jackets
burning.
Rebecca Riots;

burning her couplets
(romanticizing
raging riots)

Bathos forfeits
rage; for raging
poets

this merits
woe, slurring
"limits" with "riots."

As if poets have limits.
As if rhyming
poets
start riots.

1. By the way, if you happen to land at Agana Won Pat International Airport, having intended to go to 2006 Manchester Poetry Festival (hint, hint Shelby) but realizing at the last moment no one goes to Manchester when there is Guam, remember what Elizabeth Warnock Fernea said in "A View of the Nile": "Nobody is ever met at the airport when beginning a new adventure. It's just not done." [back]
2. Question: have I flogged this enough? It's a Dead Poet reading, folk. Dead Poets! [back]

"I know you're in there - I can smell your brain …" Return of the Living Dead (1985)

I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why a hunger for brains? I don't like the brain;¹ the spleen is much better. Or gonads, ovaries, testes? Just think of all the Freudian symbolism in a testes-eating zombie film. John Osborne would go crazy. Perhaps the world needs a testes-eating villanelle? Something along the lines of Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry": "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth … I romp with joy in the bookish dark"? Or Wislawa Szymborska's wonderful "Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem;"

In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good" …

Too much rapture for our own good … too much of everything for our own good! Maybe we need to start with corrections, then? One of my friends, Lydie, who lives in a little house on the French Atlantic coast, sent this to me about a week ago; correction of my little French poem. She wrote, in part, "I found myself really suprised this morning … I was not expecting … translations in 6 different languages including unreadables, and so on … I also read that you stayed in Armenia for a while; which explains why you translated in this language (I first thought you were insane) …"

Tu ne peux pas te regarder
dans les vagues. Toute
chose va tres vite. Mon
visage est cicatrisé
ou abîmé par
les fleurs qui flottent
dans la mer.

Thank you, Pimousse, thank you! With Szymborska's and Lydie's comments in mind, with Pablo Neruda's "Poet's Obligation" and "Oatmeal," by Galway Kinnell in mind, I thnk this is where we shall start, with a word, "oracular," meaning "1. of, relating to, or being an oracle; 2. resembling or characteristic of an oracle: a) solemnly prophetic; b) enigmatic; obscure" —

spit it out/ the word/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture

But let us not be enigmatic or obscure because we have nothing to say; let's not confuse or surprise anyone because its easier to be obscure than wise, sagacious, understandable. Because, because, words concerning empty poetry aren't the only thing that happened to me lately. Photoplay, cinema, moving pictures also surprised me. At some point in the distant past I thought I would be clever and devise a grand "list of every movie featuring a poet or poem I could think of;" string them together in some loose way and present it to the world. By all means, I thought, no one else could have thought about Hollywood's connection to the spoken word as source for inspiration and fascination. The list took a long while because I rarely watch movies. A little of what followed looked a bit like this:

Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" in Solaris, (2002);
Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" from Bull Durham (1988);
Edgar Allan Poe's “Ulalume” in Lolita (1962);
Langston Hughes' "Montage of a Dream Deferred" in A Raisin in the Sun (1961);
T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men from Apocalypse Now (1979);
"The Song of Songs" from the Bible in Once upon a Time in America (1984);
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994);
Charles Baudelaire's "The Jewels" in La Letrice [The Reader] (1988);
Dorothy Parker's "Resume" in Girl, Interrupted (1999);
W.B. Yeats' "The Stolen Child in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001);
Federico Garcia Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías" in The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca (1997) …

Then, one fine morning before dawn, I discovered that Stacey Harwood had beaten me to the punch some time ago with "Poetry in Movies," a much more exhaustive list than I could ever hope to come up with published in The Michigan Quarterly Review. This just proves there is great joy not only in moving your arms but in discovering there are no original thoughts under the sun. Sooner or later I will discover everything I have written was footnoted a long time ago in some translated, yellowing, rag-tag autobiography, journal, hagiography. And yes, before you ask, the line: "talking vulgar of the furies" is a poor man's riff on Yusef Komunyakaa's book title: "Talking Dirty to the Gods." O, fou, fou, fou, sauvage, sauvage, sauvage.

spit it out/ my word/ all oracular,
crude/ we are always so crude?/ speak all these
words/ meaning: heat, flash, you/ meaning: rapture

except you don't/ buy it/ myths/ gods/ moisture
for you isn't hades' dew/ crises
you spit out/ your words/ all oracular

with rage/ doubting is rage/ each more vulgar
as if/ "talking vulgar of the furies"/
could mean words: heat/ flash/ you, could mean: rapture

too/ rapture without hubris/ a seizure
without a body/ you mouth a word:/ "please"
spit it out/ the word/ all oracular

in its fawning/ "you[r w]help"/ see? these lesser
signs hide inside the bigger/ our whimsies'
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you/ meaning: rapture

"i honk rapture"/ reads a bumper sticker
crudely/ we are always crude/ but with ease
we spit it out/ words/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture

1. Regardless of Woody Allen quipping it is his second favorite organ. [back]

Eduardo C. Corral talks today in his blog of feeling down and blue and putting Cyndi Lauper on his stereo. He recommends her live version of Joni Mitchell's Carey. Cyndi Lauper (!) — good god, how these two words are sending my groggy head whirling back in memory. Was there a time¹ when, as a child, I was still under the sway of my parent's folk music collection² and completely ignorant of the music we now blithely term "New Wave"? Was there a time in my primitive past that, on a cold, grizzly Michigan New Year's morning, I tuned the radio in randomly and heard "All Through The Night" for the first time and was immediately converted to a new life with new desires and new hungers? Modernism be damned; no artistic movement changed my feral youth as much that moment, if you can really call New Wave³ a "movement." It might as well have been, however, for the way it changed me; it was Cyndi Lauper I listened to religiously for years, She's So Unusual was the first LP record I saved my random bits of money up to buy and it was her world tour which was the first concert I ever went to. Nostalgia being the slippery eel that it is, She's So Unusual is still a great album, it's songs hold up better than those by many other artists of that era. True, back in high school with my bootleg Sex Pistols 45s and import Bauhaus cassettes⁴ it was hard to be an out Cyndi fan once she decided being goofy-screwy as a career choice; and the moment she adopted Pro-Wrestling as a life-style, I was as in the Closet of Shame as a young boy could be for years to come.

Still, nostalgia is terrible, it adds nothing but scantily-clad info. dumps.⁵ And yet, yet, yesterday I was musing on my last villanelle, and thinking it lacked a certain something. Narrative flow? Tangibility? Coherence? I could take the old stand-by a lot of poets seem to use nowadays: "that the reader must bring coherence to the poem; that if there is a failing it is in the reader's, not the poem's conception." In other words, if twelve pages of word salad don't make some comprehension, impression, epiphany on you, it must be some inadequacy on your part as a reader of poetry and thinker of poetry, not that the poet simply didn't have anything to say. I think a lot of Amorphousness in Modern Poetry is crap, a mark of a lazy poet. True, this is not an argument for pedantic, simplistic, folksiness in poetry; a complex poem deserves a complex reading. It is just, and this is neither original on my part nor new in the world of criticism, there is an awful lot of work out there being passed off as from the School of Formidable, Ambivalent, Monomaniac Poetry which, when actually analyzed, seems to have been written on a weekend Kool-Aide and Everclear bender with the same type of luster, flare, fulmination as the urinal the poet kept going back to. Philip Levine might have said on Wednesday: "Life is all about failing. Write a lot of bad poetry, who cares? You're not hurting anyone." And he is right; I would add, simply, learn to analyze a lot of bad poetry, too. It will show you when the Emperor has no clothing and when the Emperor is dancing two-steps ahead of you, ephemeral, miraculous, enigmatic.

No, chum/ mad mud lover certainly began as an interesting idea: "you are lonely so you go down to a river and make friends with a big koi fish — now your friend." Just because I was writing down the words as they were given to me doesn't mean they don't deserve tweaking or even rearranging. If you bring something up, are you actually answering the questions you pose or (pardon the word choice) glossing over the hard questions by being coy about it? For example, I state throughout the poem "a new name for desire" — but when Shelby asked me what that new name was, I was stumped. It had been a good rhyme at the time, that was all I could figure out. Here is the villanelle with all the words I'd strike out after re-reading it (Shelby has just shown me how I carry the "strike" format on my AbiWord program over to the blog; the world of computers is wide and mysterious but I love these little discoveries):

I.
-A koi- chum/ a mud lover/ quagmire/
bushwhacker/ -I would come/ to you, call this- /
stream dweller/ -this new name for desire- /
rising on your lips/ this night/ perspire/
in circles/ -this night- quivering/ amiss./

II.
This koi chum/ mad mud lover/ quagmire/
bottom feeder/ blues scales/ sapphire/
scales/ lured by reed and flute/ lurid hiss/
this stream dweller/ -new name for desire-/
-calling you/ "lonely, lonely."- / foxfire/
-and willow the wisp- / nervy/ -ghost fish- kiss./

III.
-Your koi chum/ mud lover/ your- quagmire/
Ulysses/ -I miss gossip-/ empire/
of silt/ is rather tedious/ I miss/
dreams/ stream -dreams; a new name for desire-/
-soggy lust/ sloshy greed/ will require-/
-a little bliss/ call this bliss?/ call this bliss:-/
-your koi chum/ your mud lover/ quagmire-/
-stream dweller/ your new name for desire.-/

Thus, we are left with several repeating lines. Remember the key to the villanelle is to: "incarnate obsession in a poem." Obsession! For example, Fish Worship? Is it wrong? I ask because Michigan is full of dank and uninviting streams who knows what is mucking about in; some primeval divinity a step above the shark-like fish that flourished in the Permian oceans 248 to 280 million years ago? Perhaps. But two days ago I was musing about koi, the Cyprinus carpio carpio; the "wild carp" that Michigan has none of. So, for the sake of continuing the rhyme, I will return to that fish. Here is a new draft of chum/ mad mud lover. Note that the line that inspired the title is gone. Perhaps it is best to keep the title too, for the sake of continuing the rhyme,of course.

"Be my chum/ my mud swain/ this quagmire's
so murky," you cry out/ "Come to me/ fish
of worship/ this stream/ these silt empires

of murk."/ Rising/ the way plea/ perspires
in circles/ under your pits/ this pettish
fish/ your chum/ your salt swain/ your quagmire's

bottom feeder/ blues scales/ sapphires
scales/ lured by reed and flute/ fish (freakish
worship)/ of this stream/ of all empires/

a water yoke of dreams/ stream transpires
into brook/ "Fish! bewail/ I feel brackish/
my kissing chum/ my ghost swain."/ Quagmires

turn to stream/ steam to fog/ the brook tires
at last/ It's a song:/ a little rubbish/
daft worship/ in this stream/ our empires

sound low/ threatening/ some dire fire/
a coy koi/ Call to it:/ "Be my hellish
fish chum/ My mud swain/ Be my quagmire's
worship/ Be my streams/ My silt's empires."

1. What year was this, anyway? 1983? Was there really a 1983? [back]
2. My concept of "folk" music was what my parent's LP record collection constituted of, namely, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, The Limeliters, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas, in other words, melody. The fact I felt justified in thinking The Beatles were folk music had more to do with my gross ignorance of musical categories and less with their earlier pop ne plus ultra and development; that The Beatles were influenced by the 1950s R&B and, yes, American folk music doesn't really fit into this flashback. [back]
3. Or as the song says, "any bunch of stupid Europeans who come over here/ with their big hairdos intent on taking our money instead of giving your/ cash, where it belongs, to a decent American artist like myself!" [back]
4. As Curt Kobain put it years later, "Corporate Rock still sucks," though I had no way of seeing such bands as anything other than what I thought was rebellious and edgy music at the time. [back]
5. You know, when the person who you are talking to begins to fade away, as in ripples, and !Spoiler Alert! the entire chapter you're reading dissolves into nothing more than some crappy reminiscence as to why Sofia, who we are told is French, should be such a spoiled brat as to ignore her now dead grandfather for ten years because he was — what? you can't be serious! — having group sex? She's French for crying out loud! Not that I'm saying The Da Vinci Code wasn't the great pinnacle of modern American literature everyone hyped it to be. All I'm saying is: shame! shame! shame! on you for spending $24.95 + tax on Dan Brown when my beloved Pelagic Shark Research Foundation needs money! [back]

"In the story/ of every river, there's a twist/ where it vanishes under ground."
– Dean Young, from Periodicity of Clouds

"Did you ever/ stand and shiver/ just from lookin'/ at a river?"
– Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Today feels like a day for a road-trip;a trip or transmogrification — one way or the other. Things are a foot in Grand Rapids, MI; so if you see me on the street, wandering aimlessly about, say "hi." That is, if you recognize me. I'd like to say someone has written asking to know what I look like, but no one has¹, which prompted me to check the Internet to see if there are any photos of myself on it. There is one, though it is over a decade old. I have been told I haven't aged too horribly. There are also several photos of my brother, Eli, who co-wrote the play, Jack Cracker, Viking Slave Detective. My friend Sarah suggested I get Eli a t-shirt that read: "I sleep with the drummer." I think Mary V (wife, mother and drummer to Eli's husband, father and frontman) would think that funny. I think.

A town is only as good as its cafe, bookstore and library. Whenever I begin to think of re-locating to another city or state ("what? you don't want to be a nurse aide and wash bottoms your entire life?") I must ask those questions. Of course, there are other factors; NPR, a working public school system, an independant video store with a healthy selection of anime.

Nearly half the bookstores in Grand Rapids are Christian. I am not interested in them, however. If I can't find a battered copy of Joy Harjo or Dennis Cooper, what good are they, really? With that in mind, I suggest the following locales for a rainy Wednesday afternoon:

* The Bookstore (255 Jefferson Ave Se)
* Literary Life Bookstore & More (758 Wealthy St Se)
* Kendall Center Bookstore (17 Fountain St NW)
* Pooh's Corner (1936 Breton Rd Se)
* Argo Book Shop (1405 Robinson Rd Se)
* Schuler Books & Music: Books (2660 28th St Se, Kentwood)
* Book Corral (2460 Plainfield Ave NE)
* Wiering Books (1553 Orville St Se)
* Cooperfly Books (538 Eleanor St NE)
* Brian's Books (120 Fulton St E)
* Albert Rill Books (1823 Plainfield Ave NE)
* Short Books, Inc. (1363 Grandville Ave SW)
* Barnes and Noble (3670 28th St Se, Kentwood).

Grand Rapids also has a river; the same that runs through my city — but what a difference! We do not have a folk arts society, but we do have blight. I think I shall go down to the river in Grand Rapids and watch the water flow. Not more than that, just flow. I was always moved in the scene from Smoke Signals (1998) where Victor Joseph stands on the spill-way to a dam and tosses handfuls of his father's ashes into the roaring river below. Of course I don't have anything like ash to throw, though if some ducks or loons are around I might toss bread to them. I like rivers; there is some sense of "anchor" to a river even though it is in a constant state of movement. C.K. Williams said while writing his early poem "A Day for Anne Frank" that he experienced such a sense of "anchorage in 'the unconditioned and absolute subject of it.'" Perhaps that is where today's villanelle should start? Just like Philip Levine said: "I write what's given me to write."

a koi chum/ a mud lover/ quagmire
stream dweller/ a new name for desire

I think today if I wasn't Zachary I should like to be a Koi fish and muck about in the mud. You know, a Cyprinus carpio carpio; a "wild carp," as they say in Kyrgyzstan; "كپور رشتي" in Farsi; "西鯉" in Mandarin; "コイ" in Japanese; "பனையேரிக் கென்டை" in Tamil; and "ปลาหมอ" in Thai — it's all the same beasty. Then, after the Williams and Levine reading you attend tonight, you can go down to the banks of the Grand River and tell me all about it. What the poets read and which poems got the biggest cheers and if anyone was shamefully dru