State of Grace (Frequencies extended)

State of Grace, Miscellaneous Sonnets section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post.

State of Grace is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.

Kiss On My List

 

Frequencies in Ink Pantry

Summer lovin: had me a blast, folks. Frequencies in Ink Pantry. 

Frequencies, from the bowels of Carriage Hill, on mp3. 

Red Life

 One last brushstroke applied to Live in Brooklyn. 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound commemorates the life and passing of Alexandra Grilikhes, who had performed at the first Personal Mythologies. The series was named by her.

If you noticed, and it certainly would be permissible if you did not, the title of today’s performance is Personal Mythologies II. Two, because we did the same thing last year at roughly this time (not me and Brian, mind you, but me and two other poets). One of the poets, Alexandra Grilikhes, was giving what turned out to be her last ever performance. She died in February, age seventy, and ending a life of great achievement in the arts. She was an editor, novelist, poet, promoter, and feminist. I was deeply moved by her death, which seemed so untimely, coming on the heels of her first novel’s successful release. Wouldn’t you know, my immediate response to her death was an extravagant outpouring of poetic energy. I wrote a fifteen-page mini-epic called Death Meditations, then abandoned it when I felt I couldn’t go on. The grief, and the desperate longing to create something good, were getting to me.

Tracing the evolution of this poem, I am reminded of an episode in the early poetic life of Ezra Pound. Ez was wandering through a Metro station in London, presumably waiting for his train, which may’ve been late, or simply unwilling to stop for Ezra Pound. In any case, Ez began examining the faces drifting and circulating around him, and these faces brought him to a moment of epiphany. Returning home, he pounded out (no pun intended) an elaborate thirty-page catalog of Imagist impressions. He let it sit for six months, and decided to scrap the whole thing except for two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough.” This little haiku, In the Station of the Metro, has become famous, and is, for my money, Ezra’s best poem.

As you can probably guess, my Alexandra poem went through a similar metamorphosis. Coming back to it, I scrapped everything inessential, until the fifteen-page piece had yielded a single page of usable material. Hours were spent pruning, paring, crafting, until I finally felt I had done the deceased poet justice. Or, failing that, that I had tried my best to do so. The poem lacks imagery, metaphor, and other savory elements. It is what might be called a vegetarian poem— lean, mean, good for the digestion, but unlikely to titillate the senses. I recognize this, but it is, after all, a poem about mortality. What does death leave us with? It is my attempt to reach Alexandra, wherever she is. It is very hard for me to believe that a year ago, she was standing at this very podium, delivering a performance that unified the threads of her considerable body of work into an artful whole. Without turning this into a would-be séance, I would like to say that this poem is an attempt to evoke her presence, if only in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew her.

Hamlet and the Last Drop

Hamlet and the Last Drop was read and taped on September 20, 2003, at the KWH Personal Mythologies II reading.

It is a disappointment to the maturing poet, and probably no less so to the maturing garbageman, that life is mostly prosaic. We do the same things every day— think roughly the same thoughts, eat roughly the same foods (with the occasional pesto or curry thrown in, no doubt), watch roughly the same movies, wish for the same impossibilities, rue the same inevitabilities, consolidate whatever resources we have, and denigrate the ones we don’t. Why do we do this? One lesson of Hamlet seems to be that we don’t have to— that we can dig deeper, walk the razor’s edge, become an active participant in metaphysical debate. The risk is that, in the process, we will lose touch with everyday reality, and veer off into madness. Poetry has this distinct advantage over quotidian life— poets can, in the creation of their poems, see things as they are not with impunity. We don’t have to tell the truth, because we can imagine things better than the truth. Look around you— that weird-looking guy in the third row may be a Minister of Angelic Spirits, an embodiment of Dionysus, or even an official in the Eisenhower Administration. That asshole driver you passed, doing forty-five on the Expressway, was Nosferatu, the parasite that shined Richard Nixon’s shoes and recommended the Watergate Hotel as a friendly rest-stop, and the sleazebag who interviewed O.J. Simpson for Playboy, combined. And so on.

I spend a lot of time hanging out at Thirteenth and Pine, sometimes writing or reading, but mostly watching people. So it follows naturally that I’d want to, in my own modest way, immortalize it. On two diagonal corners, Thirteenth and Pine contains the Last Drop Coffeehouse, which really deserves its own poem, teeming as it is with the young, lusty, luscious, and generally alliterative, and Dirty Frank’s, which would merit a Dante-sized epic, detailing the Inferno-like rings around which spin the old drunkards, new drunkards, and in-between drunkards. I was sitting at the Last Drop, thinking about all these issues, and I really started to identify with the Hamlet archetype. Is this all there is? For how many years will I be sitting at Thirteenth and Pine, waiting for an elusive enlightenment? Am I destined to follow my father’s ghost into the abyss? Luckily, I had a pen with me. That stopped the corrosive gnaw. It was suddenly just another night. Almost.

Proust and Love

Proust and Love aired at the 9-20-03 Personal Mythologies reading at KWH. Mary Evelyn Harju was in attendance.

Love has been addressed in myriad ways, by myriad poets, to such an extent, that it seems hard to justify writing another poem about love. For a long time, I shied away from writing straight ahead love poems. I’d write about carnality, desire (in all its manifestations and permutations), feeling connected or disconnected, but the big L, both as a signifier and as a thing-in-itself, was off limits. This attitude endured until I encountered the prose of Marcel Proust, which showed me an angle of approach that I hadn’t known existed. Ironically enough, good old bed-ridden Marcel doesn’t tend to approach love directly, either. Rather, he approaches it as he does his memorialized sensations— as an abstraction to be danced with delicately, expansively, tangibly yet philosophically. The funniest anecdote about Proust and love doesn’t actually exist in his text. Rather, biographers claim that Proust’s appreciation of Albertine’s “ruddy cheeks” is actually a displaced euphemism for Proust’s appreciation of his gay lover’s sensuous buttocks.

The point is that Proust showed me how to take an idea into the air, let it ride the currents of my imagination, toss about in the winds of memory, then be brought down gently in a philosophical curlicue. So all praises go to the unseen powers that chained Marcel to a sick-bed, and an ink-pen. For the form of this poem, I wanted to use the lyric “I”, that most neglected and slandered first-person conventionality-turned-rarity. It seemed logical to me that however abstract my sentiments, the poem wouldn’t work if I didn’t express some passion as well. For inspiration on that level, I turned to John Keats, that most passionate of Romantics, and ransacked the ten-line stanza, ABABCDECDE form he used for his Odes. It’s a form I’d used before, sometimes with success, sometimes with none. In this case, I felt a lyrical form would enhance the flavor of philosophical sentiment, as gravy to meat. John Keats, let it known, was crazy for beefsteak, as befits a sensualist and born-again Pagan. And this poem, which is actually online now, is called On Love.