Myth of Arrival

My favorite band in all their splendor … if only I had a pretzel tree!

There is a fantastic story here, but I am not telling it; the story I am going to tell is a work of fiction. My story comes third-hand, from my poor attempts at translating Japanese, from snippets I've seen in non-translated Japanese action adventure movies, from my own imagination.

It is hard for me to remember just when I stumbled upon the story of the Himeyuri; for the past two months I have thought of little else. I've put my poetry to one side, I've been bad at returning phone calls and email; I have been hurry-scurry trying to turn the still photos of the young Japanese girls who were sacrificed on the island of Okinawa during the last months of World War II into a story I could share with others. Even finding reliable information on them has been a problem. The English version of Wikipedia article simply states:

The Himeyuri … a group of female high school students formed into a nursing unit for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Battle of Okinawa. Two hundred and twenty two students and eighteen teachers … were mobilized on March 23, 1945 … During the nearly three month long battle, the Himeyuri were on the front lines performing surgery and other gruesome, back-breaking duties. Near the end of the battle of Okinawa as the Imperial Army fled inland, the nurse corps was suddenly dissolved … In the week following approximately 80% of the Himeyuri and their teachers perished.

That is a small part of the story. The Japanese version of the same Wikipedia article gives a much fuller account and goes into serious depth over the nurses' history, as well as providing an excellent bibliography (all in Japanese) for anyone wishing to read more.

The story of the Himeyuri nurses needs to be brought into the English world; very little has been written, though what there is comes mainly from first-hand military accounts by U.S. soldiers. I recommend George Kerr's Okinawa: The History of an Island People (1958), George Feifer's The Battle of Okinawa (1992) as well as Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook's magnificent collection of oral histories, Japan at War (2008).

However, the real story of the nurses come from the surviving members themselves. An extraordinary 133-minute documentary movie, simply titled Himeyuri, features the testimonies of the twenty-two surviving women, most in their eighties now. The project took 13 years to film, for the director, Shohei Shibata, felt it was important only to capture the stories when the survivors were ready to retell them.

The film (or any of the action adventure version made over the years) has yet to be translated into English, but even so the emotions of women retelling their accounts are universally gut-wrenching. A small collection of their narratives have been translated into English. Anyone interested can read the first hand accounts in the journal Manoa (13, no. 1, 2001).

Being neither skilled in translating Japanese, nor (as it turns out) creating coherent animation, the project I started back in February has taken on a more crude "frame work" approach; what I am going to present here is a rough-draft of a movie based on the experiences of the Himeyuri had I the time and talent to do the project some justice.

Still, I deeply believe there are many stories that need to be told, even if in other hands they might be told better. I think one of the role of the story teller is to remind us that these stories are universal, that they cross nations and race and gender and age, that while the Himeyuri might have occurred on Okinawa half a century ago it is a story that still resonates even today.

Thank you.

Usually one should save bragging for standing around the watercooler; but since there are no watercoolers to be seen I'll just tell you that The Smoking Poet, an on-line magazine that not only deals with poetry but cigar reviews no less, has published The Octopus and the Sea in their latest edition! Oh happy days!

For about two weeks I have listened to nothing else than "Red Lamb" by The Monolators. I simply will not let this song escape from my head. In an interesting side note, up-and-coming British blog, The Devil Has the Best Tuna, recently proclaimed their song "Red Lamb" as the best song of 2006. Indeed!

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun saprà!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò
quando la luce splenderà!
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio
che ti fa mia!
(Il nome suo nessun saprà!…
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!
All'alba vincerò!
vincerò, vincerò!

Opera has it all; sex, mindless violence, terrible jumps in logic and plot no one seems to care about. Nessun dorma is an aria from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot, and is one of the best known tenor arias in all opera. Loosely translated as "None Shall Sleep," it is sung by Il principe ignoto, The Unknown Prince, who falls in love at first sight with the charming but spoiled Princess Turandot. The entire opera revolves around the idea that anyone who wishes to wed Turandot must first answer her three riddles and if they fail they will be beheaded. Why anyone would wish to do this is beyond me but that is opera-logic for you.

Even if you know nothing about opera, you have probably seen Luciano Pavarotti sing this tune, it is one of his signature pieces.

Shelby showed me this 1998 video of Aretha Franklin stealing the Grammy Awards at New York's Radio City Music Hall. Apparently she …

… stepped in at the last instant for ailing opera star Luciano Pavarotti … and blowing everybody away with Nessun dorma, the hero's big aria from Puccini's Turandot … Franklin sang the Unknown Prince's signature number in Pavarotti's key (three steps lower than her own) with a 72-piece orchestra after a mere eight minutes [!] of preparation backstage.

When I was done listening to it all I could think was "Bless the Queen of Soul!" I love this!

None shall sleep!…
None shall sleep!
Even you, my Princess,
in your chill room,
watching the stars
that tremble with love and with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me,
no one shall know my name …
No! … No! …
But on your mouth I will tell it when the light shines.
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!…
(No one will know his name and we must, alas, die.)
Vanish, O night!
Set, stars! Set, stars!
At dawn, I will win!
I will win! I will win!

It is not often I am able to get my poetry published. A little while ago, out of the blue, a gentleman by the name of Maurice contacted me and imagine my delight when The Concelebratory Shoehorn Review agreed to publish not one sonnet, but four! I can think of no better word than Hurrah! to express my feelings.

Maurice, you rock!

We must tell the truth about evil conditions to those for whom the conditions are worst, and we must also learn the truth from them. We must address not only people who hold certain views, but people who, because of their situation, should hold these views. — Bertolt Brecht.

After I wrote about the Chinese poet Xue Tao my friend The Beach Poet wrote recently with this question: “I am curious as well, as to what motivates you to read Chinese women’s poetry?”

I have been thinking about this and how to answer it. Is it enough to say Chinese women poets write about important truths I cannot find in modern American poetry? Is it enough to say almost all marginalized poets I have stumbled upon have a better chance of speaking the truth than our mainstream, middle class contemporaries? That is part of the answer.

The other part is that almost all women’s poetry interests me; I studied international women poets for my English Literature degree as an undergraduate. I love the different worlds they show me, the necessity and urgency of so many women poets. These are people (for the most part) who do not have the leisure, wealth or freedom to indulge in poetry but do so anyway because they have to. Because they have to!

Even a poem two thousand years old can feel like it was written today if it has something important to say. To me that is the purpose of poetry, to speak in the clearest way possible about the mysteries of life. “Mystery” does mean just metaphysics like the Goddess or Buddha or Jesus; poverty is a mystery, war is a mystery, explain to me why we have this fever to kill others? In other words, the poetry I love speaks on what makes us human. It is the hardest challenge to an artist, I think.

This isn’t to say modern American poets are incapable of writing about our humanity. Everything Walt Whitman (who really isn't modern at all but that is not his fault) has written speaks to the urgency of being human. In fact this passage in his Introduction to Leaves of Grass speaks so much about what is important in being human I try to follow its advice everyday:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of the year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body….”

But mainstream modern poetry, the stuff that is being published today, does insult the soul in some very real ways … well, much of it, I suppose. Just ask yourself: what will mark our century? What will we be remembered for? What is going on in the world that is so vastly important we need to speak about? War! Endless genocide! The on-going destruction of our environment! But if you read the poetry that appears in our national poetry magazines, those sources that claim to speak for American poetry as a whole, you wouldn’t know this. Our nation is at war but who could guess by reading modern poetry?

When we need poets the most to speak the truth, to be brave and write beautifully about what we humans are doing our leaders in postmodern poetry embrace interruption, detachment, abstraction as somehow being essential. This isn’t just poets, all of the arts seem to be heading that way. The current cover of the ARTnews (April 2007) features the proclamation “The New Abstraction” and on page 110 ironically has this to say about past criticism of the type of Abstract art they are promoting: “Abstraction was attacked [in the past] for being old media, played out, new-idea stunted, and out of sync with contemporary life and thought – as well as for being decorative and solipsistic.”

I would argue that our current poetry being embraced by mainstream America is decorative and solipsistic, gaudy and self-important; I would go so far as to say on a bad day we are a nation of gaudy and self-important artists actively giving our voices away in a time and age when we need voice so badly. It is one reason I started the group Poetry Without Borders: poets of witness. I do not want to give away my voice; even erotica can speak truths when done with compassion and humanity.

The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote an essay entitled “The Courage to Write the Truth” where he named several difficulties most artists face when going after such goals. That is; “The Keenness to Recognize the Truth,” “The Skill to Manipulate the Truth as a Weapon,” “The Judgment to Select Those in Whose Hands the Truth Will Be Effective” and “The Cunning to Spread the Truth Among the Many.” He summarizes his arguments as follows:

… Of what use is it to write something courageous which shows that the condition into which we are falling is barbarous (which is true) if it is not clear why we are falling into this condition? … We must tell the truth about the barbarous conditions in our country in order that the thing should be done which will put an end to them …

Furthermore, we must tell this truth to those who suffer most from existing [conditions] and who have the greatest interest in their being changed—the workers and those whom we can induce to be their allies because they too have really no control of the means of production even if they do share in the profits.

And we must proceed cunningly … for we cannot discover the truth about barbarous conditions without thinking of those who suffer from them; cannot proceed unless we shake off every trace of cowardice; and when we seek to discern the true state of affairs in regard to those who are ready to use the knowledge we give them, we must also consider the necessity of offering them the truth in such a manner that it will be a weapon in their hands, and at the same time we must do it so cunningly that the enemy will not discover and hinder our offer of the truth.

That is what is required of a writer when he is asked to write the truth.

That is why it is important to find the voices that are essential to us in this day and age. Those voices might be anywhere; speaking today amongst us or reminding us of the importance of being human thousands of years ago.

Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment/ Were it not for the visits of the rainbows … MD

We have passed yet another anniversary marker of the beginning of my country's occupation of Iraq and while I do enjoy many of the poems I discover in Poets Against War, I have been feeling a bit … blue … of late when I consider the state of the world we have created. One of my favorite sources of news, The Onion, wrote this tongue in cheek a while back, Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran,' but irony is always out to get you and what was a joke yesterday has a way of becoming reality today.

So what better way to perk up and get some hope in this world than discovering a new thinker who introduces you to a brand new world?

I am always delighted when I find a poet who also excels as a wonderful essayist and Lyle Daggett is such a person. In her latest post, and did you touch the dream, she introduced me to a Palestinian poet of fabulous, compassionate possibilities I had never heard of before, Mahmud Darwish.

She begins, simply, with the following:

… I don't have the depth of knowledge to talk intelligently about Mahmoud Darwish's place in the many vast and stunning literary traditions that have woven through Arabic literature over the centuries. Clearly we live, the billions of us each one a perceptive and active being, together in this world, and we must work together, by whatever means are necessary, to make it a world where we acknowledge each other's right to be here. Easy enough said, on the long road of brilliance and ashes that has brought us here so far.

We have a single dream: for the wind to pass,
a friend, and spread the scent of Arabic coffee
over the hills that surround summer and the strangers…

…

How many prophets does the city need to preserve its father's
name and regret: "I fell without a fight?"
How many skies, in every people, must a city leave behind
for it to love its own crimson shawl? Oh dream…
Don't stare at us like that!
Don't be the last martyr!

(From the poem "The Tatar's Swallows," in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?)

Darwish's poetry reminds me of Aharon Shabtai's and Wislawa Szymborska's with its hatred of injustice and war but love of the divine in us all, a love for simply loving, a kindness not found in so much writing. Wanting to find more I have been reading and re-reading Darwish’s amazing Under Siege. It is epic; mind-blowing. Here are three small stanzas (including the last) as a sample. I encourage everyone to read the poem in its full:

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

***
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.

(from Under Siege; translated by Marjolijn De Jager)

So I must thank Lynn for opening my world up to Mahmoud Darwish. In a letter I sent her I wrote:

… [I] wonder what my life must have been like an hour ago when I had never heard of this poem since everything now is changed. I think when a poet (and joy of joys a single poem!) changes you forever then that is probably one of the highest marks we can give poetry. So I do not ask this as a rhetorical question but in all seriousness; how can I not weep in amazement when I read this poem?

Indeed, how can I not?

"wayfaring" ZJC (2007)

Tuesday, March 6, will be Robert Busby's funeral. March 10 will be my 37th birthday. A lot is going on this week. It is also a chance to take a Spring Break from my biology class for a couple of days. Where would one go on Spring Break with limited funds and limited time? Sault Ste. Marie in northern Michigan, of course!

I will be spending my time up north studying; I am starting a journey of sorts and I will share with you what happens. I am going to start learn (slowly since everything is slow when I do it) Ojibwemowin, the language of the Ojibwe peoples.

The Ojibwe (also spelled Ojibway) call themselves, Anishinaabek; part of the Three Fires Confederacy of Native tribes stretching from Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota up into southern Canada. The author Louise Erdrich (who wrote Tracks among other things, a must read for everyone) came out with a book, a sort of meditation/ reflection/ memoir, called Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington DC: National Geographic Directions, 2003). I recommend it to everyone. This small selection I quote here is a nice introduction into the language I hope to begin learning soon:

My grandfather, Patrick Gournea, was the last person in our family who spoke his native language, Ojibwemowin, with any fluency. When he went off into the Turtle Mountain woods to pray with his pipe, I stood apart at a short distance, listening and wondering. Growing up in an ordinary small North Dakota town, I thought Ojibwemowin was a language for prayers, like the solemn Latin sung at High Mass. I had no idea that most Ojibwe people on reserves in Canada, and many in Minnesota and Wisconsin, still speak English as a second language, Ojibwemowin as their first. And then, while visiting Manitoulin Island, Ontario, I sat among a group of laughing elders who spoke only their own language. I went to a café where people around me spoke Ojibwemowin and stood in a line at a bank surrounded by Ojibwe speakers. I was hooked, and had to know more. I wanted to get the jokes, to understand the prayers and the adisookaanug, the sacred stories, and most of all, Ojibwe irony. As most speakers are now bilingual, the language is spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwemowin, most playing on the oddness of gichi-mookomaan, that is "big knife" or American, habits and behavior. (81)

As I was living in New Hampshire at the time, my only resource was to use a set of Ojibwe language tapes made by Basil Johnson, the distinguished Canadian Ojibwe writer. Unknown to Basil Johnson, he became my friend. His patient Anishinaabe voice reminded me of my grandfather's and of the kindest of elders. Basil and I conversed in the isolation of my car as I dropped off and picked up children, brought groceries, navigated tangled New England roads. I carried my tapes everywhere I went. The language bit deep into my heart, but I could only go so long talking with Basil on a tape. I longed for real community. At last, when I moved Minnesota, I met fellow Ojibwe people who were embarked on what seems at times a quixotic enterprise — learning one of the toughest languages ever invented.

Ojibwemowin is, in fact, entered in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the most difficult languages to learn. The great hurdle to learning resides in the manifold use of verbs — a stammer-inducing complex. Ojibwemowin is a language of action, which makes sense to me. The Ojibwe have never been all that materialistic, and from the beginning they were always on the move. How many things, nouns, could anyone carry around? Ojibwemowin is also a language of human relationships. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there can be as many as six thousand forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb form not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all the time. Mookegidaazo describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be a verb for anything … (82-83)

… Ojibwemowin is the primary language of philosophy, and also of emotions, Shades of feeling can be mixed like paints. Kawiin gego omaa ayasinoon, a phrase used when describing loneliness, carries additional meaning of missing a part of one's own being. Ojibwe is especially good at describing intellectual and dream states … andopawatchigan … means "seek your dream," but is a lot more complicated. It means that first you have to find and identify your dream, often through fasting, and then that you also must carry out exactly what your dream tells you to do in each detail. And then the philosophy comes in, for by doing this repeatedly you will gradually come into a balanced relationship with all of life. (84)

That is not to say Ojibwemowin is an elevated language of vanished spirituality. One of my favorite words is wiindibaanens or computer. It means "little brain machine." (85)

I will return on Sunday and tell you all about it when I get back to a computer …

Tales of fortunate and misfortunate love between the living and spirit world fascinates me. In Japan there are stories concerning “Yuki-onna, the Snow Woman … [whose] custom is to appear in snowstorms … [she] is young and has an extremely beautiful body and a seemingly gentle disposition” (Piggott, 69) though taking a Snow Woman as a lover apparently proves fatal to most wayward travelers.

I do not claim to have a wide knowledge of Japanese Shinto's belief in the obake, that is, “restless spirits who, in life, suffered at the hands of others and thirst for revenge, or who died under less than honorable circumstances” (Littleton, 92) but one of the stories I have been reading recently has been that of Takiyasha, a popular thwarted lover play in Kabuki dance theater.

Takiyasha is a beautiful ghost witch in love with a dashing young samurai, Mitsukuni. The play I found them in, Masakado, is named after Takiyasha's dead father, a rival to the Emperor who was killed in battle and now roams his ruined palace as a ghost. Though by the end of the play Takiyasha and Mitsukuni have become mortal enemies in the beginning Takiyasha attempts to seduce the young man to become her lover. She sings a fascinating poem-song translated by Leonard C. Pronko:

Love is a thief in the lives of poor mortals,
struggling, oh, how pitifully,
in the deep gulf of confusion
as their lives follow the path
down from the mountain heights.
Perplexing, too, is the love of those
who sleep together in this floating world.
Wild ducks call out to each other,
“My beloved!” Our lives
are spent in writing tender words.
Even women of pleasure,
experts in the arts of love,
cannot contain themselves
when they behold the man they love.
Pensively, in the spring rain,
falling like hidden tears,
I come along under my umbrella. (211-12)

Since Takiyasha is a creature not of flesh and blood like Mitsukuni (who scorns her advances) she feels doubly hurt as a spirit and as a lover. I would love to see a retelling of the Masakado play where Mitsukuni (who is the so-called hero here) is not such an uptight jerk. Even ghost witches need love too.

***

Works Cited

Brandon, James R. and Samuel L. Leiter (eds). Kabuki plays on stage: darkness and desire, 1804 - 1864, vol.3 Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. (2002)

Littleton, C. Scott. Shinto: origins, rituals, festivals, spirits, sacred places. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. (2002)

Piggott, Juliet. Japanese Mythology. New York, N.Y.: P. Bedrick Books. (1983)

Eli and Mary, of The Monolators fame, were in Lansing, MI, over the holiday season and I had the honor of tagging along to their latest jam-practice session in Detroit. Those of you who are not familiar with their music, they describe themselves as:

… a husband-and-wife rock duo from Los Angeles. Originally a trio, the band slimmed their ranks in the summer of 2005 to a twosome and, with the change in personnel, also migrated away from the garage-punk goofiness of their debut album, Rejection Set Me Free, to a more serious (but certainly not somber) tone for their second full-length release, Our Tears Have Wings.

They had been invited down to Southgate to Modern Exchange, "vintage clothes, café, live music." The place is great and we spent some time with the lead singer of the band Friends of Dennis Wilson, who had been the one to send them the invite.

The Monolators are going on a tour later in January, 2007, playing shows all the way up to Seattle on the West Coast. Here are some photos I took of their practice. I think, for using a $7 insta-camera, they turned out rather well:

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

"… I was Brando — I was Dean.
Blaspheming blue-jeaned booted baby boy –
Oh, how I made them turn their heads!"

– from In Delaware, Loudon Wainright III

Of late, there have been certain people who have exhausted me. It takes a lot of energy to be friends with those who simply want to take and rarely give. I wish I had my own motorcycle to ride off on, while a deep male voice over cries, "a howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge" (the movie promo for Bury Me An Angel). But motorcycle thrill rides are a thing of the past for me. Maybe at one time Brando could have pulled it off, but not now.

Brando! Before Marlon Brando began to sag, long before he appeared in The Godfather, he was the embodiment of all teenaged ferocity, all leather jacket and baby face rage and machismo and the sad thing is none of us can even see that. It is interesting to see people's reactions, or their lack of understanding, now that too much has happened, too many bad movies, too many images of a bloated, slug-white body playing mockeries of himself. But there must have been a time, a long time ago, when local country girl Kathie asked the leader of the Black Rebels in the movie The Wild One (1953) "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" and he answered in his trademark drawl, "what have you got?" and made it sound real.

How do you rebel when everyone you know is a self-conscious rebel?¹ Now, of course, the whole concept of "teenage rebellion" (and everything that represents) is so cliched in our culture that I cannot watch a movie like The Cycle Savages or She-Devils on Wheels and not giggle. "Sure, guys, sure … keep slouching in a corner, you're all doing just fine."

So maybe it isn't a motorcycle I want to ride off on, but a desert caravan? Maybe take one of those Saharan camel trains and camp out under the terrible full moon by myself on a wind-swept sand dune, call the lonely spirits of the wilderness to me, Lilith and all her children, just so I can have a good conversation for once. Just so I can listen to a friend's woe and know it is genuine, "yeah, I say, "eternal damnation is a bummer, yeah!" It's time I start consorting with people who will take a little more interest in my affairs. I like that word, "consort." At one point in Romeo and Juliet Tybalt slanders Mercutio by telling him "Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo" (3.I.39) which causes Mercutio to explode into rage. To get the jest Shakespeare was playing off of requires knowing that "consort" means both to "keep company with" but was an ancient slang term to also imply "having carnal relations with." I think here it can mean either.

I have been consorting with the desert's
demons, things of air, lately. I know their
tastes, their humors and woes. Let the experts
scoff at these pale dreams, figments borne on air,
laughter at the eye's corner. Asleep I
am more grand than any phantasy. They
come; a few at a time, across sand, sky,
dune and under moon. They please me, they lay
down by my body. Passion is in birds'
breath, bat's wing; not in another lover's
words. Words! I am sick of all these words! True
delight is not a single word but herds
of night ghasts. Go. I'm the last of Ben Hur's
blood kin and I have no more use for you.

1. I was in high school at the end of the Reagan era and it was a time, sort of like now, when you could buy every punk item you ever wanted at the local mall. What I remember is that the truly twitchy kids — the unpopular rebels, nonconformists no one ever "got," mavericks filled with hate — were the ones who came to school in ties and voted the Republican ticket. In a world where everyone wore black, it was the Neo-Cons that were the truly despised. [back]

Tonight Tan Dun's Ghost Opera is on. There is an instrument in the background I cannot identify. It sounds like a Japanese shamisen; that three-stringed guitar you always see courtesans play in samurai films. I have listened to the CD several times already. The plunking of the chords is triggering something in me. A memory? A memory that isn't mine? Whose then?

I wonder if ghosts can leave their own memories all over you the way we leave finger prints? If all I had to give were memories I'd haunt you and leave only the best. I have many I wouldn't want to part with while I am alive … but when I am dead? who knows what use the dead really have for memories?

And after the first three
chords and Oh and
extraordinary so many
details hourly so many pax
and Ave Marias, markets
full of sunbeams and day
lilies, the milky clouds
of sperm, the broken
egg, your useless scrappy
body, let it burn. A shame
we're all sitting in evening's
back in back alley cafes.
The gibbering, the jabbering,
the heckling, the jekylling
of all the dead and all
the living scribbling out
ultimatums; reckoning
all they need.
Need.

Right. Tonight we dead
linger over your name
do not be flattered; you
made a poor bed mate.
Stop

now. No more ecstasy
laced with cocaine since
I never believed you
when you said it was
a bastard-dawn coming
down. No more of your
Sour Fathers, Hail Marys
or Glory Bees. Face
it, draw closer,
there is no magical
charm that will make
you any more this.

Congo Art and Jewelry, at Gone Wired Café on Michigan Avenue, Lansing, MI, helps support orphans in Kinshasa, D.R. Cong. They don't have a website yet but there are some amazing news articles explaining what they are trying to do. I am posting this anyway in the chance you might pass by and help. Cheers, everyone!

Orphans supported through sales of Congo Art & Jewelry. Please remember that fair trade shopping can make your holiday purchases more meaningful for you, your loved ones, and those in need! For more information contact Rev. Carol Richardson at (517) 204-3862.

Orphans at the House of Life Orphanage in Kinshasa, D.R. Congo

I have always rooted for the villain in fairy tales. They were always so much more interesting than the hero or heroine, who usually appear humdrum, obsequious and tiresome in comparison. Take the rebel angel Lucifer, the Morning Star, in Paradise Lost. Why does Milton give him all the best lines? Why is he so amazingly interesting versus the wooden stock characters the Lord sends to do battle against the upstarts? Sure, Lucifer fails, we all know that, but the point is, by the end of the poem, I am much more invested and curious about the original anti-hero's outcome than, say, the predictable Adam and Eve.

Or, more recently, I watched Tim Burton's not very satisfactory stop-motion film, The Corpse Bride. I say "not very satisfactory" not because there wasn't interesting characters in it, there was — Emily, the Corpse Bride herself — piqued my curiosity. However, true to Hollywood happy ends, our hero, Victor, goes off with Victoria Everglot, a rather watery, bland, commonplace individual when you get down to it.

The Beatles lied to us. Didn't Paul sing, "all you need is love"? Why is it, then, when the motivation of 90% of all villains everywhere is to be loved (a true 20th Century concept at that) that suddenly the damned, devil women, the unholy find it impossible to get a date? strike up a romance? spend some quality time with someone who cares? Once, just once, I'd love to see the anti-heroine win whoever it was she had kidnapped. Why not? It'd be a twist ending!

This brings us to the subject of ghost witches. After I posted yesterday's blog I re-read it and slapped my forehead sheepishly. In a letter I sent a friend I wrote:

i might not have actually tied together the idea of ghost witches and vagina dentata, teeth and teething (now there's an idea, do young ghost witches suffer from teething the way we do when our baby teeth fall out?) hmm …

And not just ghost witches but Lilith and succubi of all kinds. When is someone going to wrestle the myth of the demon lover away from tiresome, boring, misogynistic story tellers who have nothing new to add but seem obsessed with the idea that female sexuality is not only treacherous but unnatural? I know I might be treading on someone's toes here since the succubus seems to be a basic necessity for many in the Goth world (at least the red skinned, big breasted, tiny little horned version that more or less looks like Betty Page with a bad skin condition). Whatever happened to thinking outside the box?

Take Yusef Komunyakaa's poem where he writes, " … He jolts awake/ With her scent in his mouth/ & on his big clumsy hands./ Her tongue, her lips flicker, as if/ An alien has seduced him …" What new twist is the poet adding here? Nothing, as far as I can tell. That, I think, is my point; we need someone with enough courage, resoluteness, daring to revision the tale of the succubus. Just once, somebody, just once.

Theses are not answers behind
magnolia petals the spits are
turning the dream's curtains,
barred with silver and black,
shriveled and lustreless, lies
what? ecstasy? despair?
nightmare? in the sky,
dew, sluggish flesh.
I did not come here to
ask for answers. I came

to your pregnant center, salt
in the lake bed. the air was
thick crude oil (the air is
always thick in these
tableaux, oil, blood
seeping from the electric
socket), because I speak

the dialect between
these fusty sheets," call
this: "wild rumpus," Then
a light, a certain slant
of your own undoing,
the tenements of
the jackhammer and
backhoe, all our body's
machinery, even mine.

Let the howling of dogs
invent the moist reason
of lust, someone had to.
I came because you called.

Disclaimer: If you are the type of person who finds discussions concerning toothed vaginas and castration anxiety vulgar, uncouth or offensive, stop reading now and go read Charles Bukowski, who was a real man's man and never talked about vagina dentatas because he was too busy telling us all how virile and man-like he was. Of course if you are the type of person who finds toothed vaginas and castration anxiety offensive then you, more than anyone else, should be reading this. But that is why we call it "irony."

Vagina Dentata, or the myth of the Toothed Vagina, is age old and goes back farther than you or me. Of all the sites on the Internet concerning this myth (and there are a few) I was bemused with rotten.com It dealt with the subject humorously, but I thought, as levelheaded as one could hope for. There was some question as to whether it was indeed "everyone's favorite cocaine addict, and all around misogynist" (I love that term) Dr. Freud who brought the myth into the 20th Century (one source claims he never mentioned the term in any of his psychoanalytic work, though he did have his own ideas about castration anxiety) is not really the point. However, before you click on it, beware! There is not only a better, more graphically accomplished image of the vagina dentata than I was able to pull off (I think they used the teeth from Aliens), but an extremely close up photograph of someone's poor vagina suffering from cysts that do indeed look like little teeth. For those of you who do not want to look at such images, I suggest Wikipedia's article. It is less balanced, I think, but it has no illustrations.

I first became aware of this myth while reading a Yurok tale concerning the Coyote and his amorous adventures with a Ghost Witch. It is told humorously, of course, probably as a warning against sleeping with women you don't know (an idea from Barbara Walker on the vagina dentata myth in general). Franchot Ballinger writes a fascinating account of Coyote the Trickster's ability to not only shift gender roles for various (usually waggish) purposes but the fluidity in which Tricksters are talked about in Coyote, He/She Was Going There: Sex and Gender in Native American Trickster Stories from Studies in American Indian Literatures Series 2. Volume 12, Number 4 (Winter 2000). Concerning Coyote's angry attitude at times to sex, the article reads:

There is at least one common story type in which female sexuality is the cause of trickster's hostility: so-called vaginal dentata stories.

In these stories, female sexuality — not male, as is usually the case in trickster stories — poses a threat, at least to the availability of women to men. In an Upper Cowlitz story of Soft Basket Woman's vaginal teeth, Coyote destroys the teeth with artificial penises and then announces that in the future sexual union between men and women will be more congenial to and a good deal less dangerous to men … a Kwakiutl story tells of Coyote's similarly defeating Death-Bringing Woman and her vaginal dentata … [there are] other stories in which Coyote has sex with dangerous females — a butterfly and mussel-shell killers …

I find this all delightfully interesting. What is your take on it?

at first there was only
an microscopic quivering
of the skin, unnoticed
perhaps and then "as
you wish," you said. It
is where the skin is
the darkest, in some,
the palest in others, it
is where the skin

"what's wrong with you?"

let's call is a razor
sharp misunderstanding.
let's call it a pause. then
a furious gnashing

of teeth. who has not
felt a fear of the balmy?
a body, even at rest, is
still a balm, a salve
against hatred,
the strange?

"That's not the point,
no that's not fair!"

No good. no good. When
did we let ourselves become
untouchable? When was
the last touch you can
remember? Take pride in?
When the skin grows
paler, or darker, when
all we leave behind
are what others
call scars.

More Suggested Reading

Jacobs, Melville. "Northwest Sahaptin Texts." Pt. 1. Columbia Contributions to Anthropology 19. New York: Columbia U P. (1934)

Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. Ed. American Indian Trickster Tales. Viking: New York. (1998)

Walker, Deward, in collaboration with Daniel N. Matthews. Nez Perce Coyote Tales: The Myth Cycle. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. (1998)

Dylan Thomas, "When the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing/ The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind."

Howard Moss, "The senseless drowned/ Have faces nobody would care to see,/ But water loves those gradual erasures/ Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass … Grown onto every inch of plate, except/ Where the hinges let it move, were living things,/ Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one/ Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:/ The origins of art."

William Shakespeare, "O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,/ What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!/ What sights of ugly death within my eyes!"

What happens to the drowned? It's amazing how primordial our beliefs that only those whose bodies we can bury receive _______________ (insert whatever your religion or belief or hang-up concerning "the afterlife" here) while those who are lost at sea never rest. It seems to be an universal belief.

Drowning fascinates me; not my own belief in it, but the belief of others, how they see themselves in conjunction with the unspeakable power of the ocean.¹ To drown in the sea is to be literally swallowed up, gone forever, vanished. John Rousmaniere echoes this when he wrote: "I think that when people are lost in a storm, there is that absence of a body. It is an elemental need to have a body, or you are literally lost."

When you consider the writers, actors, musicians and poets who've either killed themselves or been killed by asphyxiation it gives one pause. I found this list on Wikipedia then added a few of my own:

Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy;

Virgina Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse;

Paul Celan killed himself by drowning in the Seine river in Paris;

Hart Crane threw himself into the Gulf of Mexico, heading home to New York City;

Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of the mathematician Pythagoras, drowned by his master for the imprudence of discovering irrational numbers;

Qu Yuan of China in 278 BC. Committed ritual suicide as a form of protest against the corruption of the era, a sacrifice still commemorated today during the Duan Wu or Dragon Boat Festival;

Antinous (born circa 111), lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130;

Li Bai, Chinese poet, as legend has it he fell overboard when he drunkenly tried to embrace the image of the moon on the water;

Natalie Wood (born 1938), actress, drowned in a yacht accident in 1981; the accident raised several suspicions and murder was considered;

Alfonsina Storni, pioneering feminist, poet and journalist, committed suicide at La Perla beach near Mar del Plata, Argentina;

Carol Wayne, American actress who drowned under mysterious circumstances in Manzanillo, Mexico in 1985;

Jeff Buckley (born 1966), singer-songwriter, drowned in the Wolf River in 1997;

Spalding Gray, monologuist and actor (Swimming to Cambodia), born 1941, suspected suicide in New York City's East River;

Similarly, poet seem to have a macabre fascination concerning the drowned. The list of drowning poems alone is impressive: "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame," "A Ritual of Drowning," "Hymns for the Drowning," "Music While Drowning," "The Art of Drowning," "The Act of Drowning," "Not Waving But Drowning" and the poet Denver Butson even has his own "Drowning Ghazals.: And now to that list I add one more:

I need to call, I need to stamp, I need
to do something; your body is missing,
submerging completely. Your mouth filling,
your lungs filling. You'll never be wormseed
now, you hungry ghost. Even dull seaweed
shuns you and seaweed is everyone's friend.
I would call you back if I could depend
on you hearing me. Not your greed, the greed
of all those bones missing, for land, for this
body of mine. Do not come back for that.
I am not Odysseus, his siren,
nor the siren's song. Still I call. What bliss
is there in death if no one prayers down at
the shore? Love, come back from oblivion.

1. Folktales, religious rites, customs and superstitions about drowning and the drowned from around the world could easily fill and entire book. Here is a sampling I found:

   Sternberg says the Chukchee of Siberia believe that their, "Clan-gods … are the spirits of clansmen who have died by drowning or fire."

   In Eastern Europe the Rusalki were water spirits, found in both Slavonic and Russian mythology. Supposedly they were the spirits of drowned girls. In other parts of Europe it was a common held belief that, "when a man is drowning it is the intention of the gods that he should be drowned; and that the rescuer, if successful in rescuing him, must be the substitute and be drowned himself later on." In a similar line of thought, one source claims "a gold earring was both a charm against drowning and the price paid to Davy Jones to enter the next world if a sailor died at sea."

   In China, a festival known as Teng Chieh, serves two functions: "As a remembrance of the dead and in order to free the spirits of the "pretas" in order that they might ascend to heaven. "Pretas" are the spirits of those who died as a result of drowning and whose bodies were consequently never buried. The presence of "pretas" among the living is thought by the Chinese to be dangerous. Under the guidance of Buddhist temples, societies are formed to carry out ceremonies for the "pretas," which includes the lighting of lanterns. Monks are invited to recite sacred verses and offerings of fruit are presented."

   There is a similar festival, I believe, in Japan. "These lanterns are to send away the spirits of those who died of drowning. It is believed that these spirits, 'drowned ghosts,' will suffer in the water until someone else comes to take their place … it is thought that many people have died by drowning simply because they were pulled into the water by ghosts who were eager to find a substitute for their suffering." [back]

A friend of mine recently posted this question on her Poetrywithmeaning blog and it got me thinking about the age old debate of the poet in society:

There was a time when poets used to be sought after, to be a poet was a great thing and many admired this in you. But I fear those days are now gone for we whom strive to keep what is near and dear to us alive, poetry, is now little fame or even acknowledgment. Why, has the world turned into such a evil place that we no longer hold a worth unless it is of death and destruction?

The manifesto from their website that gave me pause, however, was: all poetry means something … true enough, but is simply "meaning something" enough? I do not wish to get bogged down into pointless argument over which school of poetry "is more real" than another or whether you can call yourself a "poet" if you don't rhyme or any of the other time-wasting debates I have read in so many blogs of late. I think it is symbolic that we, a nation of poets, spend more time back-stabbing and fighting over who is "real" than doing any serious writing; we are a nation giving away our voices.

To me poetry, all poetry, is all praise and it's all right¹ and that's the end of the argument. Or, to put it slightly differently, I don't care how you say it, it's what you say I care about.

I attempted to answer the question. Here is a snippet of the letter:

[It is] a good question however it is not an easily answered one. First you must ask "what is the purpose of poetry?" If it is to tell a "truth" (whatever that means; truth is a definition filled with so many gray areas as to render it meaningless) then you must ask if it is really poetry that does not earn any respect or is it us, the poets?

Once you get outside academic, middle-class America I would argue that poetry is just as honored as it always was; it all just depends where you come from. Take Europe, for example. Ginsberg talks about being treated like a god when he went there in the 1960s. Poland's Czeslaw Miłosz and Wislawa Szymborska were royalty. Or even closer to home, Pablo Neruda's universal love in the Americas. Or William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens holding court as Modernists.

What is the difference? These were not "professional" poets, these were people who wrote poems but also did other things as well. Neruda held public office, was an ambassador, worked "with the people" who in turn read and loved his words. Williams was a doctor. Stevens sold insurance. The difference is that they were engaged in the world in a way most poets I read today are not.

Neruda’s writes about this in his mind-blowing poem, "El hombre invisible," when he condemns (gently) "mi antiguo hermano," my old graybeard brothers, who only write about themselves. He says:

siempre dicen "yo,"
a cada paso
les sucede algo,
es siempre "yo,"
por las calles
sólo ellos andan
o la dulce que aman,
nadie más,
no pasan pescadores,
ni libreros,
no pasan albañiles,
nadie se cae
de un andamio,
nadie sufre,
nadie ama,
sólo mi pobre hermano,
el poeta,
a él le pasan
todas las cosas
y a su dulce querida,
nadie vive
sino él solo,
nadie llora de hambre
o de ira,
nadie sufre em sus versos
porque no puede
pagar el alquiler,
a nadie en poesía
echan a la calle
con camas y con sillas

…

hay huelgas,
vienen soldados,
disparan,
disparan contra el pueblo,
es decir,
contra la poesía,
y mi hermano …

for they always say "I,"
every where they go
something occurs
and it is always "I,"
down these streets,
only they
or their beloved,
walk down these streets,
no one else,
there are no fishermen about,
no bookstore merchants,
no bricklayers walking about,
no one stumbles and falls
from their scaffolding,
not one person suffers,
not one person loves,
only my poor brother,
the poet,
everything is happen
to him
and to his beloved,
no one lives
but him, the solitary poet,
no one weeps from hunger
or anger,
not one person suffers
in all his poetry
because he was unable
to pay the rent,
not one person
in all his poetry
is evicted from his house
with everything he owns,

…

there is a worker's strike,
military police arrive
and open fire,
they fire upon the people,
which is also to say,
against poetry …

(the translation is mine, I am sorry for my poor Spanish skills) However, if there is blame that no one is listening to us then it falls completely on the shoulders of the poet and not the audience. Who is saying the important things right now? We have a genocide going on and where are our poets condemning that? Why is it when I open Poetry Magazine or APR I think our pretty poets are living on the moon for all the worldly events they deal with. I do not mean we aren't writing poetry. Everyone, it seems, is writing. What I am looking for are poets who still remember they are citizens; poets who go out, roll up their sleeves, fight and die for what what they believe in instead of giving lip service to vague ideas they have never experienced first hand.

"Oh, wait," you say, "fighting and dying? Oh no, I won't die for poetry, which is to say, the people … that's not what poetry is about" — and there you have it, my friend, that is why today's poetry can be, but doesn't necessarily need to be, seen as so utterly irrelevant by so many of us.

I usually do not comment on my own images I make and post here. But today I will. These men are at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. They are about to be executed as men and women and children right now, as you read this, are about to be executed. And the glorious poet in the foreground, Apollo or Diana or some other radiating figure we blow to mythic proportions and think they will save the world from evil, does what? Sing about failed love? about their iPod? about their mean-spirited parents? Where were the safe American poets writing their safe American outrage about the fate of these men and women and children in 1938 Europe? about all the genocide that has just happened in the last 100 years in Australia? in Congo? the Philippines? in Poland-Lithuania? All across Soviet Russia? in Croatia? under Nazi controlled Europe? in South-West Africa? in China? Japan's treatment of Korea? Ottoman control over Armenia? in Bangladesh? in Burundi? in Cambodia? in East Timor? now Afghanistan? now Iraq? in Rwanda? in Bosnia? in Sudan?

Our poets were, then and now, safe and at home and not getting their pretty hands dirty.

And now we have Darfur. And every day it continues: they fire upon the people,/ which is also to say,/ against poetry … and so my fine poets, what are we going to do about it? Shall I make another picture in one year and title it: "prisoners at darfur awaiting execution: and where were you my fine poet?" … and where will we all be in a year? and what were we all doing?

1. I take that line from Rumi when Moses learns: "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 to you is right for him. What is poison 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 worshiping 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, 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. The broken-open lowliness is the Reality, not the language! Forget phraseology, I want burning, burning . . . . burn up your thinking and forms of expression! Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who burn are another."

   … Yes, I want a nation of burning … [back]

To be fascinated with the myth of Icarus is to be fascinated with executions. Perhaps your mythology text book does not call it such but that is what it is. An execution. The myth goes like this:

Icarus was imprisoned, with his father, in a tower on Crete, by the king Minos. Daedalus contrived to make his escape from the prison … so he set to work to fabricate wings for himself and his young son … when all was prepared for flight, he said, "Icarus, my son, I charge you to keep at a moderate height, for if you fly too low the damp will clog your wings, and if too high the heat will melt them. Keep near me and you will be safe" … the boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven. The nearness of the blazing sun softened the wax which held the feathers together, and they came off. He fluttered with his arms, but no feathers remained to hold the air. While his mouth uttered cries to his father, it was submerged in the blue waters of the sea, which thenceforth was called by his name. His father cried, "Icarus, Icarus, where are you?" At last he saw the feathers floating on the water, and bitterly lamenting his own arts. (from Wikipedia)

I began thinking of this because my friend, Erin, wrote in her blog, The Exquisite Corpse, the following:

Fact (yes, we'll call it that): Icarus fell to earth immediately following what was probably the most terrifying & rapturous moments of his life — his body alight, suspended by wings his father fashioned for him, fleeing Minos's mounting rage, the waters deep & swimming below. And then he fell.

But the question still remains, "who killed Icarus?" The only answer for the Greeks in a world where the world-father rules all is Zeus. Zeus sentences the boy to die for his hubris. Zeus makes the sun melt his wings and he plummets from a great height into the sea. That is the myth as I understand it.

However, what artists continually paint is not Icarus in flight but his fall. In other words there is an acute fascination with the moments leading up to his death. It is like someone painting the moments leading up to a hanging, or a lynching. Marc Chagall shows this. So does Brugel and Matisse. A body is about to die and we are watching it. There is something profoundly disturbing about that. And yet no one turns their eyes away.

It occurs to me that the myth of Icarus parallels that of the fall of the rebel angles in Paradise Lost after Lucifer and his band of warriors are defeated. A burning streak across the sky. A terrible shame we cannot look away from. Why is that? Why are we fascinated with punishment so? And still a body is about to die and we are watching it again and again and again.

Hubris and compulsion. Give me
motive. Give me compulsion; that
terrible knowing. That rising up
to fall. That rising to fall. Do you
not hear me? To rise, our dull bodies
at rest, in flight,

flecks of spittle, fear flecking
the eyes. Never once a why.
We do not look at the grace
of rising, the joy of escape,
surging and pushing and
pull of terrible wings. Never

a why only the disgrace. The shame
to be cast down. Lucifer's long burning
arch and Icarus screaming. What
was that? A curse? A name? "father"?
"gods"? "i"? — We love all those aflame.

A blur of motion at the window
that lures us to watch. We call
all sacrifices beautiful; we dumb
voyeurs. Watching as the boy,
the morning star, spins round and
round and round. We love
those few seconds before
impact. We call them all
beautiful.

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]

The Monolators from L.A. released a new video for their single, We Fell Dead. Ever wondered what Eli and Mary look like as a dictators in snazzy uniforms? Check it out and find out!

Maybe because my diet is mainly cheese and more cheese food does not play very highly into my poetry. I know some poets who write whole books about food; odes to soups and ham and eggs and whatnot. This is a photo of my kitchen. What's wrong with it?

No cheese in sight! Where's the munster? There should be a poem about munster somewhere …

Now, I thought the world lacked poems about cheese and was going to write something until I found this link, a whole webpage devoted to cheese poetry! I will let you judge for yourself the quality of the poems. I will leave you with a sample from Anthony Karalian and his poem "Old School Cheese." As Dave Berry would say, I swear, I am not making this up:

Yo, Yo, cheese is as fine as my fro.
I'll always want to eat it, even when I grow.
Cheese is a desire, I've gotta have some.
People that are really mean, must really lack some.
Cheese is Old School fun,
You can even stick it in a burger bun.
If you wanna try some, come to my pad, you're welcome.
Oh please, oh please, won't you just try some?
Polly want a cracker? NO! Polly wants some cheese.
Is that Green Eggs and ham? WRONG. That's a bunch of cottage cheese.
You must remember my motto.
Cheese is a power that you can't control, it will take you over, and make you an addict.
AHH, The power of cheese!

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.

"This land of jungles and paddy fields
is where Heaven meets Earth."
— Larry Mitchell, "The Ballad of Vietnam"

I have just finished reading a book about war and survival. Very few poets have written about war first hand. That is not to say there are not a lot of war-themed poems in the world. When George Gordon Noel, known to the world as Lord Byron, went on his first European tour he kept a poetic diary of everything he came upon as he went along. He saw first hand the Peninsular War (1808 — 1814) as Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to invade Spain and Byron wrote about it at a time when no one else was doing such things. When he returned home he translated his diaries into poetry and published them as the first of four cantos called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poems immediately became a huge success which lead Byron to note, "I woke one day to find myself famous."

The bulk of poetry that deals with war tends to be anti-war poetry, usually written by those who have never experienced it, living on the other side of the planet from where it is happening. Much of the poetry written by members of groups like Poets Against War and Poetry Without Borders: poets of witness falls into this category. There is nothing good or bad about that; it just is. Poets like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005) and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) are the notable exceptions, recording their first hand war experiences. Now we should add Larry Mitchell to that select list.

I have just finished reading Mitchell's Potawatomi Tracks (The Ballad of Vietnam and Other Stories) from heliographica press (2004). Larry Mitchell is a Potawatomi from the Prairie Band reservation in Kansas and lived through the fire fight that lasted for days on the notorious Hill 805 before it was overrun by the enemy. His "The Ballad of Vietnam," a free verse poem, starts this way:

Firebase Ripcord sits on the ridge of a nearby mountain.
A desolate firebase;
one that looks like the brown hump of a buffalo … (1)

Larry Mitchell is an excellent story teller. The poem takes us from that hill back into time to record Mitchell's experiences that lead him up to find himself "an infantryman that served in this rifle company/ on Hill 805./ Under a livid grey sky,/ it took me half a July morning to dig a fox-hole" (3). The sign of a good poet is writing a poem that makes you want to re-read it again and again, that makes you want to go up to strangers and say, "you need to read this!" "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of telling a story is the ending, especially when there is no clear stopping point. Survivor's guilt, substance abuse, fear all blur the lines between "the end" and the life the writer is living now. So it is to Mitchell's credit that he ends his poem the way he does, setting us up for the other themes of his book — Mitchell's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, his hellish decent into drugs and alcohol, the endless racism and abuse he suffered as being both a Vietnam Veteran and a Native American. But Potawatomi Tracks is a collection of poems about survival most of all. In the Introduction the author Joni Bour writes, "This isn't an easy book to read. It is painfully easy to follow, but it isn't easy to look at" (i). And yet looking hard and long at our collective actions is exactly what we need to do. Potawatomi Tracks is a book that needs to be read by everyone who has been affected by war, regardless of their political presumptions.

As long as we keep sending soldiers out into the world to fight and die and suffer on our behalf we need poets and story tellers like Larry Mitchell to tell us the hard stories about what our actions are doing in the world. That is the other job of a good poet. "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.

I have said bad things about Billy Collins in the past and I need to stop. Actually, I need to apologize to Mr. Collins (at times I wonder if my blog is carefully screened by the Poetry Snark Police, sending whole paragraphs of glib criticism to the respected email addresses of various poets) having committed the first grievous sin in the poetry blog world: committing on work I had not personally read. For the record, here is the sentence that brought down the wrath of sanctimonious poets and the people who love them:

A friend of mine announced one night over dinner that 83 percent of contemporary poetry is not worth reading. (Collins, xv)

In my defense, I think a couple of my statements were fair, "It seems to be in vogue for the top of the poetry heap to complain about what is being written today … or at least it was 2 years ago at the Dodge Festival in New Jersey. Again, I think a person with dignity would devote their lives to other projects if they really thought the hundreds of us writing today (Virgil Suarez estimated once that only about 800 people serious devote themselves to poetry in this country) had nothing to say. What a sad waste of that person's energy!" Yes … but still, I owe Billy Collins an apology.

In any case, if you haven't actually read the five page Introduction to the Best American Poetry 2006 (and only the first two paragraphs where Collins' claim that only 17% of poetry worth reading) then you missed out on some interesting criteria he uses to judge what he likes and takes other critics to task. This highly interests me for many of the same people, in whose blogs I've been following the drama (and more or less damn the man to some sort of poetry hell for the crime of "superiority," passing "value judgments" and being "contradictory"),¹ all suffer from various forms of superiority, passing value judgments and being contradictory themselves. Myself included.

For example, even though I like to think POETRY as some sort of Small-Town Democratic Movement (and what I realize I am thinking about is not poetry per se but open mic. poetry readings that allow everyone "5 minutes or 3 poems, whatever comes first" — thanks Rue!) I too have my own ideas of what makes good poetry and bad poetry. My book shelve are full of good poetry. The stuff I don't buy is bad poetry. So I am a capitalist? Just like everyone I know in America. I also happen not to like post-modern critic-speak that fills the pages of many acclaimed poetry magazines that, after re-reading it for a third time, still makes me feel dumb for not understanding post-modern critic-speak. Apparently neither does Billy Collins. He states:

For me, the thorny word in the [book's] title is not best but poetry, because I am rarely sure of what we are talking about when we talk about poetry. Serious discussions of poetry commonly imply a very narrow definition of the genre. When I hear it said that "poetry … is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally … enmeshed," I wonder if that would include Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" or the Yukon poems of Robert Service. When I read that "poetry's perpetual direction is its way of ensouling events, of seeking the doubleness in the events, the events' hidden or contradictory meaning," I get the feeling the writer did not have Chaucer's ribaldry in "The Miller's Tale," Swift's vituperative "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole," or Ovid's "The Art of Love" … So much poetry — traditional and contemporary — falls outside the circle of such discussions that we might pause in our awareness of how small an area is circumscribed by such high-sounding, presumptuous critical talk. Many vital poems are excluded for being too ludic, satirical, insufficiently hallowed, or for coming up short in the sensitivity department (ibid, xvii — xviii)

And in a world where people use the term Neo-Formalist as in insult, that rings true. And what is wrong to be drawn to a poem with a "recognizable sound of a human voice" at the helm? Or poems that "seem to be going somewhere"? And most importantly Collins explains what makes a good or bad poem and then follows through with seventy-five examples. Important because so often I have no idea what criteria other scholars use to judge a poem. It is refreshing to get a glimpse at what makes another poet tick.

Works Cited

Collins, Billy. The Best American Poetry 2006. New York: Scribner Book Company (2006)

1. the last charge I call up old Unka Walt's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself" in defense. In fact, most of the bushwhack attacks on Collins have nothing to do with what he wrote in his Introduction, rather they are attacks on his character, his poetry and what bastards all poetry critics are, the bushwhacker being the sole exception. [back]

"Rock and roll the way God intended"
– Warren Ellis (diepunyhumans.com)

My brother Eli and his wife Mary make up L.A.'s greatest, the Monolators, next to Hang On The Box, my favorite band in the world.

Back in April I sent Eli a Detroit garage band CD I discovered. This week Eli wrote about it. It is true I stole large "quotes" from this latest blog entry, Feed Us A Live Insect, but not all! I urge you all to read Eli's blog. It is simply lovely!

… I'll babble aimlessly about a record I'm listening to at the moment, an awe-inspiringly great comp on Norton Records of mid-sixties garage rock that my brother gave me for my birthday called Friday At The Hideout: Boss Detroit Garage 1964-1967. See, The Hideout was a "teen club" and record label out of Detroit, and basically was a result of the city's post-war white flight phenomenon: while Motown/rhythm and blues happened in the inner city, lots and lots of middle class white kids were stuck out in the suburbs buying Rolling Stones and Byrds records and starting garage bands. Or at least I gather that's what happened.

I dunno if you've heard many of these garage/surf/hot rod-type comps, but they're usually collections of scratchy, ultra-obscure 45 rpm records pressed in tiny numbers by ultra-obscure groups made up of sex-crazed teenagers who later became depressingly old and probably went on to form hideously unlistenable 1970's blues bands (or, in this case, became Bob Seger). There isn't really anything on this comp to match the greatness of, say, Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction," or "Dirty Water" by The Standells, but there are some gems. Probably the most interesting band on the whole disc would be the all-girl Pleaure Seekers whose blatty ode to underage drinking, "What A Way To Die," still seems strangely relevent these days.

You can still get copies of Boss Detroit Garage, it seems. And since we are talking of Detroit and poets (or at least I am) might I just request anyone in blogland helping me find information about Detroit's Miles Modern Poetry Workshop? I believe it had something to do with the Department of English at Wayne and Dr. Chester Cable. Any and all information will be useful. Regardless of this sidetrack, Eli goes on:

The other great track on here is "Youth And Experience" by Doug Brown And The Omens. This is…well, what the hell is it? Why, it's a get-out-the-youth-vote musical endorsement for then Republican U.S. Senator Bob Griffin! It musta worked, because Bob won the election and served all the way from 1966 to 1979, all thanks (I assume) to the brave rock and roll efforts of Doug Brown And The Omens, who apparently recognized that Bob had both youth (?) and experience on his side. Seriously, this is the best theme song ANY republican has ever had or ever will have, featuring a wickedly catchy chorus and the deathless refrain "keep Michigan off the floor/ by keeping Bob Griffin as our U.S. Sen-a-tor." Again, you think I am making this up? I am not. Like Doug says, give Bob a call, 'cause he's got an action slate for our action state. Except that by now he's about 83 years old.

You are brilliant, bro!

Alfonsina took a train to Mar del
Plata. That much is true. She took a train
and walked into the sea. The rest? I tell
you I was not there, I don't know. Complain
all you want. Argentina is not Spain
and your lousy geography does not
make it so, ever. Please try and explain
this. We spend millions, send a cosmonaut
to space and still a girl is only taught
about spinsterhood and her maidenhead.
She had cancer, you know. It was not caught
in time. She wrote, "voy a dormir." She said,
"I am going to sleep." That is true. She
took a train and walked out into the sea.

My sonnet is about Alfonsina Storni (May 1892 — October 25, 1938); Argentina's first feminist poet and one of the greatest writers of all South American verse. I do not know if that will come through in my translations of her yo en el fondo del mar