Prophase

They'd say it's a phase.  If they even saw.

I see through the clouds, I'm near home.

I've been here, intracellularly here.

Not sick or gone.  Not gone, man.


I'm on a plane onto a new plane.

I turn my head and my seatmate is me.

Not-So-Commonplace 4

The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.

But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself:  her privates, he, so to speak.

The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind.

He is reponsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.

-- Northrop Frye

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The Age Of

Pinter Stoppard Mamet Albee Schaffer and Schaffer Gray and Gray Wilson Kushner Hare and Guare.

Obsessed with film as we are, no doubt that literature's still alive and it's in its plays, its moves and words.

(photograph: Dave Cornish)

Dark, One

When you 'do' poetry, it's a matter of writing and reading and reciting aloud, too.

When you 'do' poetry in writing,  that means you produce it or you write about others.

Being an analyst or critic -- even an appreciator commenting a bit -- carries risks.  

For one, there's seldom full agreement on anything, in no small measure because it's hard to establish anything worth saying that doesn't involve weighing subtleties or taste.  A casual position you take may deeply offend either the writer or another reader.  

It may put you in a world of polemics radically far from the poetry itself.  Academic departments and personal reputations stake out territory.  Even outside the professional area, egos always hang in the balance.

Another risk is being flatly wrong.  Misreadings happen.  Things fly far over one's head, sometimes, and observers evaluate analysts as well as poets.  It's your dignity lost, you goof!

With that as minimal preface and humble, innoculating defense, let me catch a bit of Emily Dickinson's  #419 We grow accustomed to the Dark.

Into the poem, she ends: 

And so of larger -- Darknesses --

Those Evenings of the Brain --

When not a Moon disclose a sign --

Or Star -- come out --within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead --

But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight --

And Life steps almost straight.

Are we dealing with contemplative seriousness or depression?  Are we solving a metaphysical problem or coming to grips with ailment?  Not sure there's a solution given the word 'almost'.  

Right.  We can adjust, we can learn anew.  But 'darkness' isn't handled, necessarily, isn't finished-off or tamed.  When we think so, we may just be convincing ourselves that it's changed when in actuality we've changed.  

This could be a kind of 'making-do'.  This could be a 'caving-in', adopting the other side as one's own, making the best of a bad thing.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Calling defeat victory; diminishment, growth. Deceiving oneself in order to 'move on'.  Making league with forces sinister because that's life.

Maybe without fully admitting any of that.


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Playwright One

David Mamet holds too tight a rein

David Mamet provides no easy outs

David Mamet toughens everything he touches

David Mamet makes women male

David Mamet finds no man strong enough

All, for him, make mission, the moral edge

They fail most often, for David Mamet

David Mamet brings to me the fear 

Residing anxious in me 

That all is a straw in the wind


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My End Of It

In nature, there is also ‘nothing poetry’. (That is, nothing that is p.)

There’s stuff ‘out there’, all right (as I am to you, for instance).

But we name it. In ‘reality’, it’s the No-Name Stuff.

Let me qualify that, even.

‘Reality’ is what we see it to be. Perhaps in many situations what we agree it to be?

As a language gal, you even sing and act it!

Coleridge, a man of his Romantic time. Coleridge, whose words helped create how people felt the ‘reality’ of their time to be. Even though it was and wasn’t.

(This is a response to Coleridge poem lines that begin 'In Nature there is nothing melancholy' posted on dara weinberg's blog: style over substance)

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Love Of The Vulgar Since It Stays

Selfishness only 'me'?

let's call it a vulnerability, a circling of wagons, a defense against demands

so is 'thinking of others' a selfless act?

let's propose that it's a guise for claiming what one wants.

What is the general will, and who validates its clamor

certainly no better than the quiet reading of a book 

or the writing of one;  and where does music fit if not 

concertizing with and against crowd sounds, the crude laugh spray.

Hopkins wrote some great religious verse, some wistful lines:

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

He died tending an epidemic.  He developed to that point.

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The Grandparents

Their house was always dark; it felt like held breath.

Donald Hall's.

None of us has been in a closed mouth -- we've had them, but not been in them.

If we had entry, they would be opened mouths, or resealed ones, or intruded ones.


Yet Hall makes beautiful sense.

Something is ready to escape, but isn't doing so.

Something fills familiar space, but isn't itself space.

It can't be seen, even in light, but it's not light, anyway.


What's there got trapped. It must seep or explode.

It can't be re-breathed for it's changed its form, once held.

It's at its end of livability. It's stale.

The past as seen by the present ready for its future.


...

A Fit Crit Of Brit Lit

Philip Larkin. His poem Broadcast.

One imagining another, distant, being present, anonymously as part of audience at a musical concert, Royals in attendance, played out over radio airwaves.

Imagining her fallen glove, her conservative shoes. Trying to make out the sound of her hands, tiny in all that air, among the rush of applause.

Magnificently lonely.


...

Place Your Bets

Neither I nor the people of California knew what the outcome would be.

It was a crapshoot, and I'm the roll of the dice.

Have I Mentioned?

You haven't gotten the wrong idea, have you?

I mean, this isn't being done in order to join a trend.

I mean, the words plunked down here come to you with the notion that you're to digest any idea that may issue from the style, not that you're only to be passingly entertained or find any of this simply cute.

I mean, there's no intention of actually meeting or networking with a single person, live or RT or virtual.

I mean, I write this as I have everything else for some time with the realization that I'm likely never going to be read except by a select forced few even among whom there may be a majority who feel impinged upon by the gift.

I mean, I may already be dead for all you know.

Three Reading Cycles

Reading defeated me when I was obligated to hold-to a particular book until finished. A foray becomes a commitment becomes an obligation becomes a tedium becomes an avoidance becomes no reading at all.

That was true in a corollary way with books loved: life transforms itself so much with a good book that the next book -- even if equally as good (!), but of a different author and different style -- suffers by letting the built enthusiasm of 'Book One' lapse.

So, I read in stacks, never going too far into one book before arbitrarily putting it down and opening another.

The 'three cycles' have developed from there:

1) Group One: the bedroom stack, often seven books, usually no more than ten, serves to greet me before sleep, an hour or two, if I can afford the time, or 10 minutes, 2 pages, if not. These are books that can be read in a period of months, possibly weeks, short or very engaging so as not to remain in the stack too long, not overstay a welcome. One or two of these also serve as 'travel' books to take to appointments where waiting in line or to take on trips.

2) Group Two: the day stack, two or three that are long and that find a rhythm to fit comfortably a period clearly more than a year or two. The enthusiasm level may be high, and these books are greeted as dearly as those in Group One, but their periodicity is longer, and the 'rotational mismatch' with those in the first group deserves separate reading attention -- weekends, vacation times, return visits.

3) Group Three: the auxilliary stack, maybe another 6 to 12, those that can't be handled easily before sleep: print too small, chapters too long and not accommodatingly paced, dense style (descriptive, too technical, 'educative'), but containing material that wants to be read and has personal virtue. These may have started out as Group One, but quickly got identified as something else. Too important and well-chosen simply to give away, they serve as 'change-ups' for the other two groups, and never (re-)enter routine consideration for regular reading rhythm, only periodic sampling for reassessment of virtue.

A Pear, A Loaf, The Gentle Pause

This Age I won't be living:

Nestled under a willow by a small stream, my very self humble beneath the sky of the Creator reaches into a rucksack to draw out -- what? -- a thin book of poetry, a sketch pad, a book of prayer?

No. A flashdrive. My vade mecum.

RIP: That Era Then

Just as a reminder. What we call 'The Sixties' was a whole bunch of things, delineated by-- if we can reserve this entry for one such delineation and that alone for now -- and bracketed by, the dates November 22, 1963, and April 15, 1974.

The dates are recognizable. First, President Kennedy's shooting in Dallas. Nothing but fear and only nervous, momentary hope since then. Yes, Lyndon Johnson had a 'mandate' actually to engineer the Civil Rights Act and The Great Society through a Congress where he had held formidable power. But within a year: Gulf of Tonkin incident and the great escalation (we now know partly out of his fear of being outflanked by even worse anti-Communist whackos) of the Vietnam War.

The somewhat arbitrary (but personally-felt) end date is the Hibernia Bank robbery in San Francisco by the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of whose members was the kidnapped Patty Hearst (revolutionary name, Tania). This was followed closely by the departure of Nixon from the White House after many hours of televised Watergate hearings.

Very hard not to see the downward slope in that, the trough, the depression.

Very hard not to understand the defiantly-long, stringy hair, the sideburns, the randiness, the alcohol consumption, the marriage loss, the spiritual depression.

A Pipe Dream? Perhaps

My goal: to be able to write about anything I know nothing about.

For instance, great African run up Kilimanjaro in barefeet.

For another instance, to converse with a Korean kimchi take-out hostess:

She: (pointing at the taoist yin/yang circle on my t-shirt) You?
Me: It helps me to sleep.

For a third, to analyze Fred Astaire's dance partners.

'Small Zine' Titles

So far as I know, these mags don't exist, but they should:

Sharky Baby
El Locoloco
Young Churchill
Zooz
Candypants

Talldunker
Norman Conquest
Kris Kane
Smooth Jabbilist
Muffinbowl

Finer Trinket
Bluerblack
Some Guts
Girl Fatale
Label At Risk

Hefting My Share

If I carry the water, carry my weight

not carry a grudge or a torch,

I carry the day and

carry it on home

Life Span

When I scan the lay of the cards before me, do I see a full ten years?

The idea of 'future' has been with me for as long as my 'past' remembers. At the last moment of consciousness, no doubt, anxiety will focus on 'future after the gone body'. So: ten full years?

What about ten minutes?

That seems a surer bet. I'm home. No road excursion set for another half-hour, so auto accident, a feral threat always, can be kept at bay. Morning hour, sleepy suburb -- the best time for coffee and musing, for poetry, for imagination, for taking stock, for stocking up, for a clean start.

Next to nil are the chances of a misplanned bank heist to occur on this spot. Very far is this from a main transport road with suspect trucks loaded with fertilizer and chemicals designed to blow buildings into world headlines. Extremely low in priority is this place on al Q'aeda's 'Top Ten Target' list.

No. Not near enough to the urban anomie, either, that can break a skull and leave you deaf or tube-fed in an expensive care bed.

Here. Hot coffee. Muffin-cap, a Danish, rugalah, the scone. Today, a 'classic pastry': sugar-crumble on soft cake whose layers split by a cinnamon goo.

What about ten minutes? It eats me up as I digest.

Le 'Moi'

A sense of self-importance no one finds but only remotely justified.

An overlooked prophet becomes a prophet of the overlooked.

Cassandro.

My World, My Mirror

Even when the attention's undivided, it's divided. And when it's whole, it's partial. And when it's full, it's depleted.

Isn't this the story of the category of categories? There's some sense of 'border', verge. An outside to the inside, a beginning before which we refuse to see there's something, and an end after which there's no confessed continuance. Self-containment.

What bounds me is me. I encapsulate the stuff of myself. The world I've seen I've seen, the day I've lived I've lived, the others I've known I've known.

Accuse this of being solipsistic, and what can I retort but J'en m'accuse ! And if the French is wrong, the judgment's based on la diccionaire que jai l'ecrit !

Arrest me, but know that it's on the basis of my own guilt and personal self-condemnation.

The police -- they're me! L'etat c'est moi!