at Great Lakes bar and Chris Stackhouse’s apartment Attendees yours truly Fitzgerald Kearney Gregorian Stackhouse though not sure if he counts honorary board member maybe everyone’s welcome everybody’s autobiography something in Ashbery about that ‘Soonest Mended’ until too late in the morning almost the dawn Minutes: dogwoods Parliaments fire escape, five favorite poets, five favorite poets, Bishop, Dickinson, Crane, Ashbery, Kaufman, long board boys, Dryden, Milton, own poems, taxi cab, Boston — Boston comes up in a few of my poems, hm — Christian Dylan and the Shrinks, this is all so private, all so coded, forgive and be forgiven, redemption as sure as we are living.  Now I am as the walking dead having woken up far too early but it was all worth it everything is worth it in this compressed spring leafing out before return to Los Angeles spread out thank you guys thank you all I am so happy to be here where the far is ever coming near and the shared neckline seems regularly to be plunging – throwback to fashion!

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Book Review: Map of the Folded World (John Gallaher)

This morning I couldn’t get up I didn’t want to get up I didn’t get up in bed here I lay with the usual bloggy stuff to say, poetry etc. Window world a world apart, window world and widowed bed. I will not leave my bed alone. I will be here for it until I turn to stone. One day soon mineral will advance over me.

One day soon I will be time’s cartoon, flat as the handle of a spoon. Have I gone on too long? Ring the gong.

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The Melody Ascends Stepwise

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our Sand Paper Press reading here in Portland.  Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just reviewed over at Dossier, and I read at 220 Salon.  Happily I had the chance to meet and fraternize with thethe’s own Evan Hansen.

Happily too I have had the chance to experience a temperate spring.  In my new adopted home we have a desert spring, which is an entirely different beast.   Anyway, it’s been good to see green grass against mud and cherry trees in blossom.  All of this reminds me of the wonderful lineage of cold muddy spring poems.  There’s ‘Spring and All’

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

And then there’s ‘A Cold Spring,’ poem that adds its title to the marquee of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1955 updated North & South.  Unfortunately the wintereb is not obliging me, and I cannot find a text of said poem to paste and copy, nor can I manage to get myself out of bed, or off the couch rather, to open the actual book, which is about five feet away from me on one of Shawn’s shelves.  Truth be said, I have been consumed with convalescence lately; well, not consumed with it actually, more consumed by the idea of it.  But you never know when the time will come.   In fact, several people have been recommending Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure to me lately.

Anyhow, I’m still stuck in this rhyming couplet thing; I can’t tell whether or not it’s a good idea to post my own poems here; especially this one, which I literally just wrote; but nor can I see why this can’t be a forum for, eh, I hate to call it experimentation, or even worse, abusing the reader, but rather using and misusing this poetry stuff in our fraught digital kingdom.

Oh yes, back to the couplets.  Here are some more.  And to further dispel the mystery, I tried to do these while cycling through the vowel-sounds, or vowel-name sounds: ae, ee, aye, oh, you.  A little like Rimbaud, I guess, but without the intimidation.  So, throat cleared, couplets, voyelles, et le printemps froid:

Here in Portland another day
begins, the sky is the color of spring clay
and in fact it is spring, see
the blossoming tree
outside the window?  The sky
is the color of a sigh.
The blossoms show
that flowers too can mimic snow,
and fall, powdering the air they fall through.
The birds seem to have no clue:
can it be said that they pray
for wings they use to flay
the air and so are free?
Their wings must act the key
to a door locked to the sky,
locked no matter how hard humans try
to stick an intrepid toe
through it.  Unlike the winterland show
of crystallized precipitation, the blue
provides no backdrop to our dreams, who
dance against open black highway
of orbits at rushing play.
Their flight is galaxy,
not of this world; while the birds are free
to roost and be shy,
and only when they die
do they understand how gravity is foe.
One falls lifeless to the petals––or are they snow?
Armies of gust, the white specks form a crew.
Clouds retreat.  The Portland sky is blue.

Sometimes when I happy get
I turn on my television set

and disappear into its glow
like a pixelated crow

I flap my wings so pure and black
and feel like there’s no going back

inside the tube I’ll stay forever
consider thrown the simulacrum lever

if my mother comes home and turns it off
at her love I’ll scoff

happy on my own terms you see
like a Titleist balanced on a tee

waiting for the coming thwack
to send me into orbit’s knack

for spinning guests in skyward order
free I am a floating boarder

everywhere I go I smile
I see my reflection in bathroom tile

my grin it gleams
with the purity of creams

freshly descended from the cow
of bacon from the virgin sow

who snorts and oinks as I come close
we are friends the farmer knows

and so he waves as I walk by
and disregards his wife’s sad sigh

she resents that I am happy
she thinks my mother should just slap me

but you can’t obsess over what others say
just this morning I flew away

so I’m sure to have some sadness soon
from major to minor will go this tune

the farmer’s wife and my mother agree
that no one should be as glad as me

while the farmer and the virgin pig
think no smile can be too big

a hog with tusks tends to think the same
splashed mud spells his name

on the wall of the spotless barn
to reveal said name would exceed this yarn

suffice it to say it rhymes with ‘sick’
and is a synonym for prick

I hope that makes you laugh
long in your throat like a giraffe

is any bestiary complete
without a mention of the webbed feet

of the platypus
who like one of us

is neither one thing or the other
not wholly dad not wholly mother

it lays its monotremish eggs
and from their schizophrenic dregs

are born new hybrid duck-billed beasts
as sun and moon light up two easts

what if there were no more west
the sun would set inside my chest

between my ribs it would grow red
a fire on a speeding sled

melting the frozen world as it flew
and in my heart darkness would brew

so this is how my happiness runs out
a glowing ale reduced to stout

so thick in your throat
you feel like you swallowed a coat

a trench worn by a private detective
I’ve grown weary introspective

perhaps it’s time to pull the plug
give the tired shoulders a shrug

it’s exhausting to carry a smile around
or at least turn off the TV’s sound

and watch its shining figures mute
as sorrow does vast minions recruit

and watch the weepers shed their drops
and browse the coffins in burial shops

my mother’s making chicken soup
I pray to be left out of the loop

that seems to strangle Pollyanna
and that one day like Indiana

Jones I’ll open the covenant’s ark
and find out why the world began dark

and why God didn’t begin with light
gradually learning to shade his sight

when the blinding things his creations did
made his ego feel that he favored id

I hope one day that God is happy
for making people feel so crappy

if when I’m dead he asks me why
I smiled so much I’ll spit in his eye

and dance my way back down to hell
as demons ring the Liberty Bell
**

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The Lyric Workshop, Session 1: Theme From Shaft

The Super Happy Fun Poem Challenge of the Day in Three Steps

I recommend playing all the videos at the same time.

Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger,

you may see a stranger
Across a crowded room

And somehow you know,
You know even then
That somewhere you’ll see her
Again and again.

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughin’,

You may hear her laughin’
Across a crowded room
And night after night,

As strange as it seems
The sound of her laughter
Will sing in your dreams.

Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?

Fools give you reasons,

Wise men never try.

Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love,

When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side,
And make her your own
Or all through your life you
May dream all alone.

Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!

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A Preface to a Blog: Auguries of Experience

Private: The Tenth Muse with John Ashbery: 92nd Y, Monday, 8pm

On our way back from the Sand Paper Press reading at Adobe Books in San Francisco, Arlo Haskell and I drove through Big Sur on our way back to Los Angeles.  Arlo had never been before; this was my fourth visit, my third in six months.  I never stay longer than twenty-four hours.  I don’t know why.  As someone who doesn’t normally feel a primal connection to a place, I ought to take advantage of the stirrings when they occur.  Certainly I wouldn’t have been the first to feel them in this place.  Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller,

Jack Kerouac, California pioneers, assorted Hollywood moguls, and migratory whales have all experienced Big Sur’s poweful pull.

The other day the ambience at Big Sur was particularly dramatic.  There was mist in the air from everywhere – from the mountains to the west, where fog was stuck; from the ocean, which was pounding the rocks with particular force.   And the sun stuck the mist similarly everywhere, so that the air glowed yellow, the fabled gold of California.

When you drive south through Big Sur, you must stop and see the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas.  There were huge males on the beach on Tuesday, maybe 15 feet long, with doe-like black eyes and crumpled snouts  that look like a baby bird has perched on their faces.

This reminds me of a poem by the wonderful Argentinian poet Hector Viel Temperley, whose work I have been translating for some years.  It’s from Legión extranjera (1978), a breakthrough volume in which Viel’s surrealist and visionary Christian impulses begin to catapult one another, and the reader, into vertiginous orbit.  The poem is ‘El verde claro’ (The Luminous Green), and in it the poet listens to a woman (perhaps a naturalist?) as he stands on the shore: ‘Between the lighthouse and the spray and the green crags / one of the women explained it all: / She explained how old elephant seals / are forced to stop pursuing the females and so / They rub their penises on the baby / elephant seals / and with their flippers keep them still // I told her a different story : / Not so long ago I met a young monk fresh from the cloister / who writes hymns for the services / And not only does he write music and lyrics / But he signs his name and sings them / He’s got a good voice / and can play the guitar / But this isn’t getting us anywhere! / I dreamed about closer, more likely things / My other and I are two bags of luminous green / connected by an umbilical cord / And sharks flee from our luminous / green shadows / while we tread water in a luminous green sea / in the luminous / Green breath of an African sea.’

Viel deserves to be better known even in his native country, and certainly in this one as well, a situation I am hoping to soon improve.

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The Ex-Pens of Spirit

I have nothing to say today, or nothing specific, only miscellany, no fashion thing has occurred to me.  Here you have an image of Ferula scorodosma, the plant whose dried sap is used to make asafoetida, a rather pungent spice.  I received a packet of asafoetida in a box of spices given to me as a gift on my recent birthday – it tasted quite good in a stew of lamb’s neck and potatoes, simmered with orange juice and zest and some milk that had been heated up for coffee earlier in the day and left on the stove.

Speaking of nothing to say, I have been thinking this week about ‘Nothing To Say,’ an intensely sprawling poem from Ann Lauterbach‘s latest collection, Or To Begin Again.  The poem takes its title from the opening of John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing.’

But where Cage seems to calmly meditate his absent predicament, Lauterbach tears into hers, into the failings and possibilities of language, deeply felt failings and possibilities.

I have long been a fan of Lauterbach in this mode.  ’N/est,’ an overlooked poem in On a Stair, moves through variations and meditations on finding a home in the world, and preparing one’s body to be a home, i.e. pregnancy, abortion, figuring out how to speak, figuring out how to write.  Ethical considerations.

These texts, with their prose-like presence on the page, but broken, or rather with verse breaking into them, breaking the prose apart, approach poetry from the outside, expecting everything of it formally, emotionally, musically.  They are not easy to grasp, and are perhaps not meant  to be fully grasped, rather read, and deeply felt.

Enough from me, now some ‘Nothing to Say,’ after this 1977 portrait of Ann Lauterbach by Alex Katz:

the excess of a dream, we who had been speaking mildly to each other following collapse, sipping tea in the tearoom, there, sequestered against those others and their meridians on the char, it was difficult in this setting to notice, although the waitress was an actress, her lips scarlet, but this was only the lure of

glamour, toned muscles of the arm, cleft above the thigh.  Found her there again, walking the horizon, where what was alive and what not alive almost touched, as moments touch, walking now with her sister on the other side of the line which is an illusion, the line, not the sister, she was there, among all the sisters, their chorale in the meadow, now turning now following the path

*******

I also couldn’t resist posting this wonderful footage of Lauterbach in conversation with Grace Paley in 1975.

We all have fantasy careers.  I’ve always thought it would be great to be an Off-Broadway actor.  I would invite my cohorts over to my Hell’s Kitchen apartment after a weeknight show, and we would drink Powers whisky and smoke cigarettes until the wee hours; mornings would be slow, slightly hazy, and then during the afternoons the energy would return, the big emotional build-up to the next show.  Lights, applause, repeat.

In lieu of this, and given the opportunity to contribute here at The The, I thought I would try my hand at fashion correspondent for a second week.  No jet-setting, alas, but rather a comfortable seat at my L.A. desk, from which I look through the phantasmagoric looking glass (i.e. internets) at my neighbors, the Rodarte sisters, showing their Fall 2010 collection back in New York.

In case you haven’t heard of these young phenoms, have a look at the profile that appeared in The New Yorker last month.  The Mulleavy sisters are conceptually minded, savantish, happy to play the outsider card when it suits, preternaturally savvy at a punk brand of showmanship.  I can’t decide how I feel about their project, but I like that it’s a project, that they are hungry to shake things up.  They experiment in a way that I, most definitely a fashion layman, can understand, that is to say physically and emotionally: chopping, burning, joining fabrics; choosing outré conceits and letting their imaginations go wild; sitting around in their Los Angeles studio and thinking, talking, doing nothing productive.

The new collection is based on time the Mulleavys spent in the desert Southwest, in economically distressed towns where women wake up in the middle of the night to go to factory jobs; the idea is that you’re almost sleepwalking as you get dressed, pulling clothes blindly from the darkness of sleep, or your drawers.  It’s far-fetched, I know, but it’s also a compelling re-imagination of practicality, quite literally a cut-up, turning-inside-out of the idea that high fashion should somehow be related to what people ‘actually wear.’  It’s also a bit crass, which is endearing or offensive, depending on your position.

Anyway, I like the unexpected bluish woolly half of the form-fitted kilt-like thing in the photo above.  And in this I like the tough, toreador look combined with sleeves that look like Icarus’s arms after the fall:

From what I understand reading the experts, the collection has met mixed-reviews.  I haven’t read any of the 13-year-old experts on this particular collection yet, but I’m sure they could teach me a thing or two.

I’m don’t consider myself a comfortable elegist (is anyone?), but reading of Alexander McQueen’s death this morning forces me to take up the mantle. I’m not a huge fashion-buff, but I made the walk past the McQueen store on 14th Street a highlight of my daily commute when I worked in Chelsea. His clothes seemed to me wild and well-tailored in the English way. His suits would have fit beautifully in this show at the V&A in London a few years back; he’s one of the only contemporary designers who would have fit, I think; and I mean fit while also doing his own, completely contemporary thing. That show, by the way, was a revelation.

So, Mr McQueen, we are sad that you are not with us anymore. Here is a tribute, from the inimitable Stevie Nicks as she gets done up for a Rolling Stone photo shoot.

Godspeed.