George Bowering and the Romantics

On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There is Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know, that is odd. Before the summer of 1863 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the “sludge” that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme, etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading Donna y Prega, or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, and later Adonais, and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those three or four weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course of the Romantics, and paid most attention to Shelley. And so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading ten Shelley biographies. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw Keats’ grave and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the “grave” of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my fourteen-page poem Do Sink, that explodes Keats’s “cease to be” sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley’s Adonais, something called He Is Not.

from a 2005 interview with George Bowering on Art Recess 2

Hot Date Miscellany

 

Hot Date Miscellany was read by Brian Freedman at the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus, on March 27, 2004.

Dating, among the middle-school set, was a complicated affair. It revolved more around telephone conversations than anything else. Making out was a good several years in the future, unless you happened to find yourself at one of those absent-parent parties. But once in a while, a date would be planned, and that’s when things got interesting. As for Allie and I, our first and only date proved to be a collision of worlds— the real one, with me as its ostensible center, and the fantasy one, whose five suns around which everything revolved, were the perfect and unattainable Donny and Danny and Joey and Jonathan and Jordan.

The New Kids On The Block were scheduled to perform a three-night series of concerts at an outdoor arena in the city, and though all the tens of thousands of tickets had sold out within twenty minutes of their release a few months before, Allie’s mother had somehow managed to procure three of them for the third concert. This was no surprise, since standard operating procedure was that one parent would accompany the happy couple on any date that involved an activity more demanding or complicated (or even, in suburban terms, more dangerous) than going to the movies and Friendly’s for a scoop or three of ice cream.

But that, as I found out less than a week before the concert, was never the plan. Allie and I were on the phone one warm spring evening. Or, as I should say, Allie was listening and I was showing off while talking to her behind the door of my closed bedroom, the thin crack of space dividing the bottom of the door and the top of the high-piled blueberry-colored carpet, covered by three pillows to prevent the sound from escaping, and the family from knowing I was on the line yet again with my girlfriend. The last thing I needed was another one of my father’s famous mock-up conversations, on the old banana-phone he so loved.

Anyway, we were talking about the latest six-grade gossip— the fact that Candice Cooper might just like girls that way. I knew she didn’t. I’d started the rumor myself, after she began spreading the word a few months earlier, after our one slow-song at the six-grade dance, that I breathed heavily when I danced, and that she felt something weird against her leg as we rocked back and forth, to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”—

The films of Sylvester Stallone

 

The Films of Sylvester Stallone was read by Brian Freedman at the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus, on March 27, 2004.

The movies of Sylvester Stallone have always been pretty formulaic, and there are certain things you can count on in each of them. A beautiful woman who secretly lusts after Sly; a bad guy whose comeuppance is guaranteed to be both brutal and graphic; and a scene in which our stocky Italian hero is both shirtless and oiled up, and either training for a big fight, or making crazy monkey-love with the woman who had been lusting after him since the beginning of the movie. The examples of each are limitless, once we get past the artistic integrity of the first Rocky movie. And even in that one, Adrian, the quintessential swan in schlump-y pet-shop-worker’s clothing, secretly has it for Rock-ster from the get-go.

So, really the seeds were planted way back in 1976. But once they were given that special Hollywood water and sunlight, there was no stopping their double-time germination. A perfect example of this is Rocky IV— a film which features nearly all the Sly-film requisites— from the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of the indestructible Russian tramp Ivan Drago, to its extended gay-porn-like training sequence in the wilds of Northern Russia, to the steamy look of desire from Brigitte Nielsen (who here plays Drago’s voluble wife), who shoots in Rocky’s direction every chance she gets, as if she were saying, merely with her eyes, that if it weren’t for this damned Cold War, she’d jump him right then and there, and have ice-melting Commie sex with him in a second.

The point, really, is this— much like those poor people who live beneath high-tension wires, or the brave souls who were employed by the company that was contracted to clean the Chernobyl reactor site, regular exposure to the films of Sylvester Stallone can be hazardous to one’s health. Especially if that person to whom we’re referring is a thirteen-year-old, whose Saturday night diet consists of nothing but. I, of course, was no exception, and Sly eventually got to me, too. What, I began asking myself, made so different from the characters that got laid on my TV screen every Saturday night? It wasn’t as if Stallone was ever that great looking. And he even spoke like a punch-drunk bar-brawler from somewhere in Jersey.

The answer, then, was clear— muscles. He had them— he got laid. I had none, and I got none. The solution was simple— I needed weights and a training program. And after a few months of hard work and aggressive calorie-consumption, I too would be fucking Brigitte Nielsen in a boxing ring.

Fragment (Prose Haiku)

 

Fragment (Prose Haiku) was read by Adam Fieled as part of the This Charming Lab reading held at the Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus on March 27, 2004.

Line— seventeen syllable, five-seven-five formula, standardized by Basho, Li Po, and other Buddhist dudes. Among the more interesting places I managed to churn out reams o’ satori, are the Met in New York, a Greyhound bus to D.C., and in a Baltimore parking lot. I wound up calling the manuscript American Lunch Haikus, as a sort of homage to Frank O'Hara and his Lunch Poems. I wanted to emphasize the ordinariness of the poems, and the fact that many of them were written on the job. In fact, for that month, I actually found myself enjoying work; having an outlet to vent the frustration of ennui. Lost in my little Basho world, I figured it would go on forever— that I could create a collection of eternal haiku, that would set the literary world on fire. It never ceases to amaze me how, in the grips of creative frenzy, we lose our grip on reality, and imagine all sorts of bizarre things about ourselves and our work. I've actually made a mental note not to let this happen anymore, but it happens regardless. Choosing which haikus to present is also a problem, especially with a fifty page manuscript. In this case, I decided to pick haikus basically at random, and try my luck. This glosses with the principles of non-rigidity and non-attachment that the I-Ching teaches, though it doesn't specifically delve into the principles of haiku selection. Because I've never read these before, I don't know if they'll coalesce into a coherent whole, or if, strung together, they'll just sound diffuse. I figure the risk is worth taking, and even if I fall flat on my ass, I'll have done justice to my "messianic Self," for whatever that's worth. Can you write a Sutra in seventeen syllables? It can’t hurt to try.

What Needs No Myth in Eratio

Salvaged from the PennSound Personal Mythologies II mp3 file (2003), What Needs No Myth, homage and counterpoint to Yeats and The Second Coming, makes its way to Eratio. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Chopped from Personal Mythologies II, me reading What Needs No Myth in 2003. 

What Needs No Myth

 

What Needs No Myth was read by Adam Fieled at Personal Mythologies II at KWH on September 20, 2003.

after William Butler Yeats

The actuality of summer leaves wavering—
water gushing from springs— wind redolent
with sap— will never be enough to fill great
chasms of self-consciousness, emptiness of

death-fearing despair. If we could only learn
to watch waves of the sea— what needs no
myth never stops coming. No Sphinx waits in
the desert— nothing slouches towards Bethlehem—

no preternatural reality waits to replace what
never was. Ghosts predominate— slouch, blood-
dimmed tide built into them. Meanwhile, actual
falcons manifest the miracle of flight— harbingers

of the endless— winging the air, persevering.
It is a matter of mathematics, of where the numbers
end. Or space, our real home— inscrutably expansive,
unbelievable. There is no judgment in space.

Asteroids come out of the void— full-bodied, hurtling,
bent on something. Stars live and die, to no
appreciable avail comprehensible to us. There is
enough wonder in the Universe to befuddle

a thousand sages. Jesus on the cross is simple
by comparison. Each reductive model bends
the Collective Unconscious further towards
breakage. Sodden with suffering, the great

unassimilated incorrigibly search beneath
the stratosphere. Who understands that
breaking the circle is a precondition to well-
roundedness? Having achieved existence,

even Buddha sat by the bo tree a little
eternity, rounding myths into pebbles, pebbles
into myths—

Revealing Mystic Truths

 

Revealing Mystic Truths concludes Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

One primary accusation that gets leveled at modern poetry is that it exists in a sort of solipsistic vacuum, a little bubble. Poets write for each other, for the most part; there is no real audience. Sadly, it’s the truth. This was affirmed to me by a little Google experiment (if you’ve never tried the Google game, I highly recommend it; hours of ego-belittling fun); it seems that one song by The Who has more Google hits than John Ashbery, the big, bad, post-modern Daddio of American letters. One could derive two possible inductive conclusions from this— serious poetry is a sophisticated, demanding art, too demanding for the average money-grubbing, or Britney-worshipping, or Britney-grubbing, or money-worshipping American philistine. Or, serious poetry has degenerated into such an academic farce of linguistic hi-jinx that nobody gives a fuck, and rightly so. Regrettably, I would lean toward the latter conclusion.

It follows that I don’t take much inspiration from contemporary poetry. The post-modern ideal loses its potency on the page, for me at least. Where post-modernism finds its apotheosis is in conceptual art— installations, videos, some paintings. Bruce Nauman is perhaps the single greatest exponent of post-modernism that America has produced. For one thing, he’s simple. He’ll film himself painting his balls, or walking around the perimeter of a square, or imitating a fountain with his mouth. Psycho-minimalism, Frank Stella calls it. What it evokes is, perhaps not coincidentally, a stoner’s world— skewed, tweaked, a little bit uncomfortable. There’s something Beat about it, a bit of Zen, a bit of Beckett. It definitely has all the charm of novelty for an East Coast audience, who tend to expect bold, definite gestures, rather than vague, indefinite ones.

I wanted to write a poem that would capture all these elements in text. In this case, it seemed appropriate to leave discipline, and conventional notions of craft behind, ending up with Kerouac’s “first thought, best thought” dictum being manifest. This is an unedited poem, straight from the belly of the beast, which, if the beast is called Poesy, may be a rather unpleasant thought. In fact, I have grave doubts about this piece, and if you’ve never seen Nauman’s work, it may make no sense to you at all. However, Brian likes it, and to the extent that I let him play Mikey, on the old Life commercials, it’s a good enough reason for me to share it with you. Just as postscript, I must admit that through dubious means I attained Bruce Nauman’s address in the New Mexico desert, and sent him a copy of this poem. I have yet to hear back. It’s just called To Bruce Nauman:

The Mister who goes beyond recognition
of clichés of iron-bound self-hood
regenerating new notions that clank
mad paint onto our being, beating at
the doors of universities like Genet a thief
but a marijuana consciousness of absurdity
epitomizing West Coast anti-notions walking around
the perimeters of art definitions in a ten-gallon hat,
with mescal on tap, and breeding horses to boot, boots jangling
among the mind’s fatal mood clowns, with
hard-ons to be bent over, so wicked into
the art-world that will not recover
from earnest strangeness made concrete,
creating new forms like something else,
a convention of Jehovahs Witnesses,
better yet the troupe of players that caught
the conscience of Claudius doing Beckett,
Nauman playing Pozzo, Picasso’s ashes set
onstage in place of Vladimir and Estragon,
while Lucky gets to be Jasper Johns or
something, concluding that to make up is
to fall down, to fall down is to take form,
to take form is to become a fountain,
and some fountains are worth making—

See him square the circle in white shirt
as the day rages blankly outside, too tired
of its ephemeral heart to even conclude
immediately, squares of seasons apt to linger,
then emptiness, as though this funny project
were a mandala of Buddha, to prove that life
is not a circle, but rather sharp definite
edges, with many clusters of shoddy wood between
loaves of stale craving-bread, one shoulder
raised higher than other, bare feet slow
but mad as Nijinsky, make it a ritual
to feed soul’s need not for religion itself
but for the feeling of religion, the joy of
being bounded, picture itself presented as
square, tiny in a little book I ordered
two years ago in a fit of delirium, now
I’ve propped it up like a collapsible urn of
ashes of dead heroes, only the captain
sits with horses watching the wheels of
temporal anti-tenderness spin, conventional
concepts raised up then razed, as in r-a-z-e-d,
does he still have the black pants I wonder?
Maybe he’s just a ghost or an astral spirit,
somebody’s Ariel—

Simple, strategic, rolling around on the floor,
looking into the camera’s un-droll eye with
hyper-droll drollness, essence of droll but
somehow twisted beyond mere Dada ha-ha
into indeterminate snickers of profound weirdness
that will eventually beget a sullen fame,
spreading but not reaching cactus-y wilderness
where in summertime the living, I guess, is easy,
at least more so than playing with your balls,
not that the minimal has no weight but
that such weight leaves no room for developments
of a righteously figurative nature unless
one has sophisticated intellectual equipment
which, of course, he does—