“This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant”

I have several favorites from Wendy Xu’s collection You Are Not Dead, one of them being “This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant.”  I am taken by the direct talk.  “I don’t know if you understand me when / I say hopefully there is a future and we / are both allowed in it.”  We’re chatting, damn seriously, over what could be a kitchen bar, about what’s been and what’s to be.  Or over the telephone, long distance.

                 …I mean last year it 
      was OK just to be flattened by our ideas. 
      I sat in so many rooms and eventually felt
      interesting and not like a chair.

She worries, expects, thinks, forgets, one by one what’s rushing to mind now.  But these commonplace mental activities take on precise emotional resonance when we find out what she’s worrying about, expecting, etcetera.  “I worry that when I turn on / the radio this morning it sounds just like / I expect.”

Throughout I get simultaneously the sense of deadpan, of being bowled over, and of taking off to someplace unexpected.  “Last year I forgot really / embarrassing secrets like how I am allergic / to regular soap.”  After a catalogue of telling me where she’s at, she sets the mood for “this year”, the year she is “to be an elephant”:

              …Cue all the different kinds
      of light and what music makes you feel
      not dead. Last night I dreamt about sand.


-bbc

"Spackler's Lament"

I’ve been reading “Spackler’s Lament” from Karen Skolfield’s PEN recognized collection, Frost in the Low Areas and wondering just how inventory becomes litany. Getting from list to poem takes magic. It’s not enough to walk about noticing the landmarks and goings-on “All over the city.” Lesser poets have tried, I suspect with copies of Lunch Poems in tow and well annotated with stars and exclamation points, and they’ve noticed sufficient detail. Skolfield, however, deftly notices only those details that share poetry’s center, those that can somehow be  simultaneously here and not here: “rounded edges where hard corners should reign,” “the emptiness formed by a squirrel’s tail / touching its back,” “the space between bars at zoos and jails.” Each detail is replaced by another, which is kind of the point. Each new fascination dances with its own absence. Languages, “Spanish or Catalan,” are both here and there, beautiful but transitional. In the end, for all of our skill with words and native knowledge, we cradle only the shell, “the speckled idea of the bird.”

                             - GFA

                                                                                            

Purchase Karen Skolfield's Book:

http://www.amazon.com/Frost-Low-Areas-Karen-Skolfield/dp/0978612787/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398714217&sr=1-1&keywords=karen+skolfield

“The Cabinet of Simplicity”

“The Cabinet of Simplicity”

Awhile back, Glen Armstrong pointed me in the direction of Weldon Kees and Kenneth Fearing, two essentials that never made it into my literary education.  There’s an uncanny familiarity about them, especially reading back to them through the New York School and others.  A favorite for me of Fearing’s selected poems is “The Cabinet of Simplicity”, which begins as a kind of manifesto, the kind of manifesto that might actually be acceptable.

    It will be known as Doctor Barky’s cabinet, a new magic
        Something for which there can be no substitute.
        May be used as an ornament or worn like a hat.
        Neat.  Genteel.
        Doctor Barky’s patented magic cabinet of strict, strict
             simplicity.

If others might hold the whole universe in the palms of their hands, Doc Barky, rather, shoves it all into his drawers, these special drawers as a part of this special cabinet.

What is this cabinet?  Could be his “order of things”.  But whatever it is it’s more magical than scientific.  Yet whimsy gives way to “discords struck from violent streets” and “death” and then, more convincing, to a dark dreamland where “he cut off his head and gave it to / a girl with stone lips”, her body “burned from within.” Later he’s “dining on her lips.”  Somehow there appears to be a connection between cannibalizing stone lips by way of a decapitated head and Barky’s need: “a need to arrange the / world so that he can understand it, / And still more, to create a fixed world.”  I start off liking Barky from the start with his magic cabinet and supposed naiveté, but by this point I become horrified by what might happen as he imposes this “fixed world” if it extends much beyond this cabinet.

But then each drawer of the cabinet is designated by Barky for this and that, and his order of things seems tame again.  “The doctor has finished.  /  He steps back into the shadows forever.”  So Fearing asserts, really as a set up, because candles continue to burn around “the magic box” and “the mechanical heart draws into itself / The veins and arteries of chaos” or perceived chaos in Barky’s universe.  Fearing has been amping us up for a final kicker:

    Comrade, this is no poem,
      Who touches this
      Touches Doctor Barky’s patented magic cabinet of
           certified, strictly guaranteed simplicity and
           truth.


-bbc

"How the Pope Is Chosen"

I’ve been reading “How the Pope Is Chosen” by James Tate, a poem in which one of my clear-headed creative writing students perceived “metaphors.” Hmm . . . Certain aspects of the poem certainly drop shadows we would expect cast from other shapes. Pope selection is orchestrated in terms of poodle selection:

If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked,

it becomes extremely long and twists

into long strands that look like ropes [. . .]

Popes are very intelligent.

There are three different sizes.

The poodle, the juvenile delinquent and the rugged western hero can all stand in for the Pope as director Tate checks the lighting and tapes off marks on the stage.

For me, however, the poem stands in for and calls our attention to a certain kind of language at once nostalgic, because we’ve grown up with it, and ridiculous, because we’ve grown beyond it. We are lulled to some other psychological state by rhetoric so reassuring that Highlights Magazine should take note:

growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.

All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,

but sometimes things make them unhappy.

And the poem, for all of its finely honed humorous barbs, grows bigger and stranger and more tonally complex. The same lips that slurp bowls of cream attract black flies. This is no vendetta against Catholicism or The American Kennel Club, even if their shared pomp is brought into question. The poem is ultimately about the joy and futility of making meaning.

[G.F.A.]

"Xantha Street"

"Xantha Street" is what gets me.  Kees has the "angels rise" but it's "on page 289" and even though this is done "splendidly" and "to Heaven", nevertheless "the evening still comes on."  

I go back to that idea again and again of the odd detail or the minor or mundane particular that in a moment takes over the whole scene.  Roland Barthes described this as the punctum and Mieke Bal as the navel, among others.  

"The climate of murder hastens newer weeds" and death's all around, you're "frantic, but proud of penmanship.  Beasts howl outside; / Authorities, however, keep the pavements clean." 

What's that slide that takes place in existence from what's taken to be important to what's not so that what's not entirely trumps the other and then becomes what is?  See page 289.  Feel the evening come on.  Note the penmanship and pavement.  Ponder the bellybutton and laugh, or get the point.  Your own point as you see it, a Barthian punctum amidst the studium.  -bbc 


 

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

I’ve been reading Weldon Kees’ poem, “The Smiles of the Bathers,” and thinking about the line, “Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love." It’s a list with seven stressed syllables. Out of context, and divorced from its perfect pulse, it reads a bit too primal, as if perhaps the poet has allowed himself to be carried too far away from the twentieth century’s grit and tight, sidewalk pivot by bloated universals. But Kees is better than that. The above list is neither – could never be – the poem’s opening or closing line. Instead, it’s the poem’s central metaphor. I think we know, or at least intuit, that any list has a tendency toward litany, invocation and prayer when included in a poem. The string of concepts, however, has to be considered together and, thus, constitutes a type of metaphor.

Kees frames all of the above as “perfect and private things, walling us in” with their “imperfect and public ending.” They are “interruptions.” And the bathers, lovers, scholars and pilots from the first four lines, all solid, tax-paying citizens of the above twentieth century, cannot bank on momentary smiles. They, ironically, cannot even bank on death’s ultimate interruption, for there is “No death for [them.] [They] are 

involved.”

                    - G.F.A.

Self, Variations

Whitman’s expansive self recalls for me what people tell me about atman and Brahman in Hinduism and confirm him as a mystic, in a certain sense.  His “mysticism” is based in “empirical” description but a phenomenon under his description isn’t “just there.”  It’s there as we’ve seen it and experienced it and felt it.  It’s there as it’s run through our brains and been spit out as particular words.  Letting words do their work is simultaneously letting our brains do their work – that’s the entire brain system / body, from head to toe and back again.

I need Whitman’s expansive empirical mysticism, or something like it, from time to time, perhaps often.  However, there can be a disconnect, a bit of the pie in the sky, and this is where I relate sometimes more with some portions of Ashbery, where we have the expanded sense of self but now drastically more finite.  I’ll never get over the first words of his I read years back, the opening of his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), opening poem,

            I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
            Elsewhere we are sitting in a place where sunlight
            Filters down, a little at a time,
            Waiting for someone to come.  Harsh words are spoken….

            (From J.A., “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”)

We might start with the air of Icarus before he gets too far, before the emergency, and before a potentially fatal fall and end up sitting right where we are, waiting, in the sun, filtering to a little spot there within eye-shot of a maple, in a squabble.

-bbc