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.

Coca-Cola Dream

Coca-Cola Dream debuted at the Personal Mythologies II reading at KWH in 2003

Something happened to me for the first time this year, something more or less momentous. Something I’ve been waiting for jealously since I began to write. I had the dream. The dream in which a succession of images appears in such a way as to make the creation of a poem not only necessary, but inevitable. I’ve always envied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s of the poetic world, who could smoke a bit of opium and come out with a Kubla Khan. I’ve tried writing in various states of intoxication but wound up, as Ginsberg would have it, “rocking and rolling over lofty incantations that in the morning were stanzas of gibberish.” This time I got lucky. Here's the dream: I’m standing at the corner of Walnut and Broad, under the awning of the ritzy hotel there, I forget what it’s called…the Bellevue! I’ve got an edition of Shelley in my hands— hard-backed, blue, looks like it’s been sitting in an attic for a few generations. I come across a curious poem that begins with the word “swimming” repeated eight times. My response, in the dream, was to make the assumption that this was Shelley somehow anticipating the last moments of his life— splashing around amidst an infernal storm off the coast of Italy, ineffectuality trying to keep his head above water.

Then I noticed something else curious about the poem— it made frequent and loving mention of Coca-Cola, which seemed to be the leitmotif of the piece. Of course, we know that Shelley died a century before poets began to imbibe the carbonated wonder. I found this perplexing, but (hey!) it was a dream, you know. It had its own sort of logic. End of dream. I woke up, I had some time to kill, I remembered the dream, and felt it incumbent upon me to take the hint of the Muses and write the poem that Shelley never did. To be frank, I’ve become something of a Coke-a-holic in the last year, anyway. Have one with lunch, dinner, with a midnight snack. Anytime. What I like about Coke is that everybody drinks it. As Andy Warhol said, “The President drinks it, Liz Taylor drinks it, and, just think: you can drink it, too!” Coke is America, and America, in a very real sense, especially culturally, is Coke.

As I began to write, I found myself using the standard Whitmanic technique of putting the rhyme at the beginning of the line, rather than the end. This technique has the advantage of creating parallel structure, with cadence, rhythm, metric symmetry, without the encumbrance of a formal rhyme scheme. It is economical, utilitarian, and eminently American. Poetic apple pie. God only knows what Shelley would’ve thought.

Mix Upload: Third/Sister Lovers

Kelly Writers House: Consolidation

This offers the second installment of the Personal Mythologies series at KWH in 2003 (9-20).

Readers included Brian Freedman and Adam Fieled.

Standout pieces include:
Coca-Cola Dream
Proust and Love
Hamlet and the Last Drop
Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

This mp3 offers the entire This Charming Lab reading, held at Kelly Writers House in 2004 (3-27).

Featured readers included Brian Freedman and Adam Fieled.

Standout tracks include:
Ode On Jazz (2)
Dominique
Stoning the Devil

Also: from Episode 46 of Live at the Writers House in 2004 (4-05, on WXPN 4-11):

Ode On Jazz (1)

Love in Vein

 Proust and Love is another prose sound file from Personal Mythologies II. 

Stoning the Devil

Stoning the Devil is a chestnut from a 2004 reading at Kelly Writers House. 

In Baudelaire's famous prose poem, The Generous Gambler, we follow the narrator, ostensibly Charlie B. himself, as he encounters a mysterious stranger on a Parisian boulevard. The stranger, lo and behold, turns out to be Lucifer himself. Baudelaire depicts him as a man of wealth and taste, who has, indeed, been around for many a long year, and stolen many a man's soul and faith. Of course, Baudelaire follows him. They get regally smashed, and the Devil reveals to him the secrets of the universe. For Baudelaire, stoning the devil means getting him stoned, wooing him, bringing him into the human fold for a little Dionysian sport. The problem with the Baudelairian method of Satan-handling is that you lose your soul. The Devil corrupts you to the point that right and wrong have no meaning; irony enters the blood and chills it; paradox becomes poison; everybody looks like a leper; and you can't feel anything. It helps to remember our good old read-it-in-seventh-grade friend Young Goodman Brown. His encounter with Beelzebub leaves him embittered, disenchanted, but at least he still has a soul (or, as much of a soul as a tee-totaling Puritan can have). Young Goodman Brown stones the devil by rejecting him out of hand. Stoning here means throwing stones: even if it be from the glass house of mortal ignorance.

So, somewhere between the Baudelairian and Hawthornian models of Lucifer-human relations, we may find an ideal solution. We can lure the Devil into drunkenness and then bash him over the head with a rock, or we can bash him over the head with a rock and then slip him a joint to ease the pain (mostly our pain, of course). The Devil, the epitome of imperviousness, will go on being the great professional Ironist he is (a bit like Frank Zappa). The reward of this balanced approach for us, as writers, is that we can lure the Devil close to us, just close enough to learn some of his simpler tricks, then send him on his way when he starts demanding blood. Muslims the world over "stone the Devil," but I fear their ritual lacks a certain subtlety and understanding of Satanic grandeur- how it can be harnessed, refined, made to serve human ends. The Devil, more than any other Being, understands the complexity of existence. I would guess that things are as complicated in Hell as they are here. In the end, what is a art but a testament to the complexity of life: manifold levels and layers, perpetually enclosing us in a wide web. One could make the argument that art is essentially ironic, in the sense that it posits unreachable worlds that we long for, but cannot touch. We must face it: art is a Devil's game. We're here to play, and we guarantee you it will be more fun than Yahtzee.

Nineties New York (Dominique)

Experiencing Nineties New York, my blonde-time, through the rigors of Dominique. 

So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I've never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn't qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham (High School); but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique's charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra- a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I'd met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn't fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn't pierce me to the bone.

My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her "Man of the Month," and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading "He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her"; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.

Having given you this background, you'll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW's Keatsian poems aren't that good, probably because he didn't know Dominique. She's a Muse- a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I've ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what's best in her.