Why I Write Poetry; Plus, In Rotation (Poetry Bookshelf Edition)

Well, well, 'tis the end of poetry month, and my serial reprinting of old scree has come to an end . . . temporarily, at least.  No promises about how soon I'll drop another handful on ya . . .

Writing poetry is a damn site far from being cool these days.  It ranks somewhere just below being a lipstick Republican and just above The Prairie Home Companion in the accounting of cool.  Poetry still simmers under the surface in the form of hip hop-related wordplay and poetry slams, but that's about it.  Even really lame college journal-writing mopey singer-songwriters get more play than poets.  So what's the point of poetry?

I wrote a poem for a school assignment in third grade that got published.  I don't remember it; all I remember is that I thought it was shit.  I certainly wasn't inspired by that "success" for a life as a poet.

I started writing poetry for real in college.  I got a poem published in the school literary 'zine the second semester of my senior year ("A Poem, or Almost One"); it was the only poem I wrote that was worth a crap until I was well into my thirties, though I wrote poetry almost constantly.  Wait, did I say thirties?  Hell, I was on the downside of thirty six before I started writing poems that didn't get destroyed.

After almost twenty years of writing poetry, I started to home in on a germ of an idea right around the turn of the millennium.  I had written a handful of poems I could live with before then, but I didn't have clear ideas.  It was an attic office peaking over the floodwall on Quincy that became my workshop, with a rasping computer as my forge, and I stayed up many late nights with a bottle of bourbon hammering away at my keyboard until I couldn't see straight.

At a certain point, I got rid of the bottle.  Not permanently, but just when I wrote.  I had to prove to myself I could write sober.  It was actually touch and go for a couple weeks, but it turned out OK quickly enough.

After 10 years on Adams, we moved over to Goss . . . gone was the office, and the computer took a dump at about the same time.  So, now it's primarily notebooks, even though I'm back online digital . . .

And, as always, poetry is a lonely venture.  All writing is solitary, but poetry even more so, since so few people give a damn.  Not that more should give a damn, really: most current poetry is so completely dreadful.  But I digress . . . I still haven't even begun to answer the question.

*          *          *          *          *

Poetry is my interface with the world.  Or, more accurately, words are my interface with the world (aren't they everybody's, really?), and poetry turns out to be the purest form of word.  With words, I can build images, camera like, except with the plasticity of sculpture.  For these words to truly reveal what they are beyond their craggy, worn faces, they must be scarred, cut up, rearranged.  Fresh surfaces must be buffed out from underneath worn exteriors.  Images must be radically critiqued, language must be broken, the very patterns of thought, stultified and stultifying, must be destroyed and discarded.  Poetry is uniquely qualified to do this - in this respect, it is only rivaled by music (which is why I have such interest in both).

If you've been paying attention here at the death of everything, you can see theme coming out: reality as a whole is due for a reset, due for a cut up.  If there is anything that the current American Political Morass (tm) puts into stark relief, it is just how seriously we need to destroy the current narrative(s).  The larger school of thought must be blown the fuck up.

And so I write poetry, taking snapshots and scrawling over them with sharpies, writing philosophical treatises and covering them with cartoon window stickers of pissing Calvins.  In general, taking words and beating them into new purposes.

*          *          *          *          *

Ah yes, that is the wonder of poetry to me.  But, like music, poetry is rarely called upon for any kind of destructive/productive gesture.  

And so I sit on the sidelines while we are fed bonbons of rhymed and clever irrelevance, verse fit for the smug enjoyments of summer days, for the self-absorbed loss of petty emotional wounding, for the boutique renderings of esoteric nonsense.

The day will come when I will expand on this exposition, but the hour is growing late, and it is time for me to rest up for my next encounter with the trivial.  Have a nice day, and a sincere thank you for spending your valuable time reading my scribblings.

*          *          *          *          *

In Rotation: The Poetry Bookshelf
Antonin Artaud: Watch Fiends and Rack Screams
Basho: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Basho: On Love & Barley - The Haiku of Basho
Wendell Berry: Selected Poems
William Blake: Selected Poems and Letters
Andre Breton: Selections
John Cage: M 
Wanda Coleman: African Sleeping Sickness
Wanda Coleman: Heavy Daughter Blues
Robert Creely: Collected Poems 1945-1975
Edward Dorn: Hello, La Jolla
Edward Dorn: Gunslinger
T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems
Vicente Huidobro: Altazor
David Jones: Introducing David Jones
Erin Keane: The Gravity Soundtrack
Robert Kelly: The Loom
Jack Kerouac: San Francisco Blues
Yusef Kommunyaka: Dien Cai Dau
Yusef Kommunyaka: Magic City
Comte de Lautreamont: Maldoror (plus Complete Poems)
Robert Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle / The Mills of the Kavanaughs
Stephen Mallarme: Collected Poems
Todd Moore: Dillinger's Thompson
Charles Olson: Collected Poems
Willfred Owen: Collected Poems
Brett Ralph: Black Sabbatical
Eric Rensberger: Blank of Blanks
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
William Shakespeare: Complete
Patti Smith: The Coral Sea
Jack Spicer: Collected Books
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Vergil: Aeneid
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams: Patterson
Catherine Wing: Enter Invisible
Araki Yasusada: Doubled Flowering
Various: Contemporary American Poetry (1962) ed. Donald Hall
Various: Anthology of Mexican Poetry ( 1958) ed. Octavio Paz translated Samuel Beckett
Various: The New Poetry (1962/1966) ed. A. Alvarez
Various: Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999)  ed. Alan Kaufman
Various: Poems for the Millennium Volume One (1995) ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris
Various: Poems for the Millennium Volume Two (1998) ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris


NUMBER 200 DOWN . . . THANK YOU AGAIN FOR READING the death of everything.

World As White Whale

(Enter Ahab: Then, all.)

Over Descartian vortices you hoover, drooling

    idiot child. ruler of the world
    what you “know” is unknowable
    while your ignorance consumes libraries

that sucking sound you hear
is the sound of your nation
being flushed straight to hell

“And perhaps,
at mid-day,
in the fairest of weather,
with one half-throttled shriek
you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea,
no more to rise forever.”

and us with you

from WAR
written spring 2003

John Cage

back in Kentucky, 3 am

Cheap Imitation

John Cage is the desert

a sip of bourbon

dim light by an open window

cars up on 64 outside

the notes flower

as the desert, after a shower

from Greetings From Tucson

written 2003

Untitled

when shadows

spell, breaking

across blank

dismembered bodies

from behind clouds of code

  & rhetoric

mommy-daddy-me

bought in currency of fear

. . .

the sun burns across the sill

take, pen in hand, and write

burning sun and driving rain

howling wind and bitter cold

sun burns today not tomorrow

break through, break through, not true

     the pen is in your hand

     write a new story

     of birds on a wire

     God on the mainline

watch it disintegrate before your eyes

and one small brick collapses

from the weight

March 2011

New Mexico, Easter Sunday, Late

there’s desire

              ringing incantations

              cold

over horizons

              hollow

                            (is there surface

                              on the crow’s wing

                              is

the desert bird

              gone

like all meaning

There was a day, it’s been said,

there will be a day, when this all makes sense  sense

no longer possible,

sense is surface shifting like a dune

is that too easy? well, the only good game is fixed

this

has always been a matter of conjecture

this

has always been a target

from Greetings From Tucson

written Spring 2003

Wilbur Wood

I’m like

throwin’ fuckin’ junk

scraping the sides of the plate

fluttering across broken winged

accumulating insults

& lounging in stale air

I’m the junkballer

& from a few feet away

I look easy to hit

but, friend, understand

that the shit explodes

BOOM!

& it sure as hell ain’t where you thought it’d be

when you started that swing

& yr fury fans the air impotent

while my junk falls behind you, immaculate

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written 1999

The Free Market Ain't Free

So, Marxists are self-deluded utopians, right?   Any Objectivist uber-capitalist will tell you that they are the ones who see the world with clear eyes.

Or do they?  It seems that Objectivism relies on utopian self-delusion (or is that faith?) more than anyone is admitting.

Case in point: an open and freely competitive market will always result in the best products.

Oh really?

Three words: VHS versus Beta.

Three more words: Mac versus PC.

The only possible way you can judge VHS video systems or PC computer systems as superior products is if you consider advertising, market leverage, and distribution as part of product quality - in that sense, these products did prove superior.  A capitalist accounting always takes into consideration the excess detritus that makes up the whole of the thing as it appears in the market (the thing + its production + its marketing + its initial position in the market as determined by the market strength of the entity that owns it), not simply the thing itself.

Since capitalism deals only with the quantitative, not the qualitative, the products cited are judged superior, since they are the ones that took over the market.  This is the destructive reductive central aspect of capitalism: because it does not deal with the qualitative, it can not judge "good" in any meaningful way.

Sometimes the best product takes over the market.  Sometimes it doesn't.  That's a long way from the "cream always rising".  It's a long way from the understanding that the Objectivist publicly projects about the market.

*          *          *          *          *

And what exactly is a "free market" anyway?  Is it a market which is naturally allowed to evolve on its own without interference, or is it a competitive market?

"Unencumbered" markets (markets which are allowed to evolve naturally) tend toward monopolies.  Strong corporations become stronger and more dominant in the market as markets become more complex and difficult to master.  There are, of course, some markets which don't readily lend themselves to monopolies, but wherever monopolies are possible and desirable, they will occur unless there is interference from the outside.

Monopolies per se are not the problem; rather, it is the tyranny of the bottom line that is given primary importance by the capitalist system that causes the problem. Monopolies allow corporations the ability to focus solely on their own bottom lines without having to answer to competitive challenges . . . again, the primacy of the quantitative wins out, and in the case of a monopoly, the qualitative is wholly subservient to the quantitative. Monopolies are built to control markets; the production of goods is secondary.

American professional sports leagues are shining examples of the efficacy of regulated markets.  The fact that amateur drafts are always ordered to place the worst teams first (except for the NBA, which has a [somewhat flawed] formula that theoretically orders the worst teams first without allowing teams to manipulate the system) shows how sports leagues value the outcomes of their systems over the mechanisms.

It can be argued that the competitive limitations leagues put on their teams actually hurts the quality of the product: what if the richest team, the "monopoly" team, were able to bid openly for talent instead of waiting in line for the draft, or dealing with some variation of a salary cap that allows less rich teams to bid for the best players? Theoretically they could buy the very best players at each position, and then stock their benches with the second and third tier players simply to keep them away from other teams.  This team would, by any definition, be the best team available, and it most likely would dominate its league.  In this case, the "monopoly" team would be the best not just in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense.

This is an important point.  Monopolies are not necessarily bad . . . they are as good as their goals.  If your goal is to build a space program that will get you to the moon in a few short years, then a monopoly is not a bad idea.  If your goal is to pool risk to lower the costs of medical coverage for an entire population, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to put together the most insanely talented football team ever, then a monopoly (no draft, no salary cap, just a wide open market) would be good . . . and not just good in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense as well.

But what is the ultimate goal of "quality" in professional sports?  It's not to have the best team, it is to have the best contest . . . and, to that end, the sports leagues have decided to heavily regulate their markets.  It ranges from baseball, who will theoretically let you pay as much for your roster as you wish (but try to make the balance more competitive by taxing the living hell out of you if you spend too much, thereby making it prohibitive to spend above a certain amount), to NASCAR, who essentially makes everyone drive identical cars, who will change rules as soon as one team displays even the most minute of technical advantages, and even aren't afraid of changing rules on a race to race basis*.  In this sense, the market regulations that the leagues have imposed have been successful, since they make the leagues competitive and interesting . . . and, importantly, despite the ebbs and flows of their incomes, wildly successful in the quantitative as well as the qualitative sense.

The simple fact that discussions occur on the qualitative level, whatever the final outcome may be, makes sports markets superior to financial and commercial markets. It also puts in sharp relief the question: what is a free market - the market which is most free in its mechanics, or the market which is most free in its access?

*          *          *          *          *

And, free or not, who went and made the market the final arbiter of all that is great? Oh, right.  Ayn Rand did.

Please, next time you want to include Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche in the same sentence, remember the following quote:

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.    -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "On the Flies of the Marketplace"

So you can just go to hell, John Galt.
____________________
*  Does anyone else find it ironic that the sport most closely tied to the Tea Party is the most socialist of sports?

Easter 2003

morning

7 am Tucson the

sun turns the

tent to an oven the

sun bright over another deathtrip

in another desert

on a gravel road in a Pontiac he

            doused her in gasoline & lit her & ran

            1.

Chillin’ in a tent in the desert

the sun barely up

biding time with Edward Albee

cowboy stories surrounded

by flags, flags, flags

everyday is flag day everywhere these days

cross our

star spangled land

on a patriotic, god-fearing bender

& the stars -n- stripes

is the geometry of war

somewhere, out there,

some George Washington crosses a Delaware

he doesn't know, and

the mother of all bombs

won't douse hate

attracted to the Tikrit triangle

like metal shavings over a magnet

or

the desperation of the already dead

on a gravel lane somewhere outside Bloomington

and, this is it: Theresa’s dead.

She's blood

whistling past the graveyard . . .

the distant rumble in the background

the thunderhead on the horizon

always on the horizon

it's death, man,

among the flying flags

and burning cars.

            2.

  the highway intersects

a Wednesday morning funeral

 deep in the heart of New Mexico

Tony & Matt fluting the ruins

and going back . . . 

become the darkness in Little Rock

shed your skin in the dawn of Roswell

Arkansas, Oklahoma, & Texas a howling tunnel of other

shades & delineations of nothing

Oklahoma City, Erick, Amarillo

Tikrit, Bagdad

Elletsville, Bedford, Bloomington

& how do we explain to the dead

that there was nothing there

how do we explain to the living

that there is never anything there

and that drinking tequila in the desert won't kill it

and that drinking whiskey in Louisville Kentucky won't kill it

and that drinking Bud Light in Bedford Indiana won't kill it

and that bowing to the east won't kill it

the horror creeping like a virus

exploding into  murder  fire  jihad                                                         

& poets digging into the closets

of horrible darkness won't kill it

                                                           

&

she was probably dead when he set her on fire

’cause you don’t just douse people in gasoline

& set them on fire

& burn them up in their cars –

he's charged with arson

’cause he burned her up

but not with murder

’cause she may have been dead already

            &

we all die a little more every

hellbent day of this backward millennium . . .

guns in Baghdad

somewhere east of

the center of chaos

Southern Indiana deathtrip

swooping like a crow

            3.

the dead lay where they are

the living lay where they are

the flutes & drums of the Yaqui try to raise them

sacred ash and mariachi trills try to raise them

Easter Saturday on the rez by the casino

choking dust, burning masks,

purification by fire

a Pontiac burning on a Monroe County road

chapayeka drag burning under the Easter cross

a car bomb just outside the green zone,

another minister assassinated

another body for the dust

and, the choking dust of New Pascua

celebrates the resurrection

while the dead lie where they lay

in Iraq

in Bloomington

the funeral

goes on

without me

            4.

. . . and there are flags, flags, everywhere flags

yellow ribbons, red bumperstickers

the highway awash with patriotism

every SUV with a petrol-drunk V-8

every broke-down Ford with Tennessee plates

a crazy fool with delusions grand

again deals the penultimate hand

death reigns in another foreign land

and, in the cactus-scarred slopes of Arizona

and, in the inbred back roads of Indiana

another flag waves

another innocent dies

and, I’m here, another shot of whiskey,

another

            5.

                        morning

7 am Tucson the

sun turns the

tent to an oven the

sun bright over another deathtrip

from Greetings From Tucson

written spring 2003

The Ohio When It Rains (for Josh)

I'm dreaming of floods again

  here at the foot of the Ohio

The rain has stalled here

  & the Kentucky is swollen

  & houses are sliding down hills

    out east in Harlan County

I'm driving through a dream at dusk

  toward Indianapolis

  in a Chevy the same color as rain

I can't see, and I can't connect

  & the dream is waiting, you see

  about

  when is it time to move

  when do the gates get slammed

    across Adams

  when is it time to grab the cat

  & head for higher ground

  when does dread move to threat

  when does threat move to fact

when, finally, is it time for action?

I stand

in a hidden doorway

facing the floodwall

at the corner of Quincy & Adams

rain falling down like oppression

and long for the clear sun & heat of Tucson

from Spiel In the Face of Those Who Wish You Ill

written spring 2001

12/14/2003

Saddam Hussein captured
12/13 outside Tikrit
disheveled, country Islam
they made sure we knew
he was in a rat hole

guess we won, right?

from WAR
written December 2003

A Poem, or Almost One

Voices call me from the void, and I,

practiced at ignoring them, hear

only snatches.  Oh, not that it matters,

for I know that they lie anyway.  The

things that matter to me now are shells.

I am beyond feeling anything, beyond

making the necessary connections required

for emotion, beyond worrying about verb

tenses, unintentional sharps and flats,

missed cues, bad lines, incorrect exposures,

forced rhymes.  I am beyond all that;

it is a sort of history, though not

history exactly.  It (the history) is

buried like a time capsule.  And as I

run past the fourteenth line (did Shakespeare

feel a pang at this point?  Was it the

call of nature that he was heeding?)

I realize that it is gone, and no longer

does it exist in any accessible form.

No, check that, I am not even interested

in shells any more.  I am only interested

in the moment, and only at the microscopic tip

of the pen, the moment rushing on, on,

to what?  the end, I assume.  To be truthful,

I am interested in only this, this and

nothing more, and my interest fades faster

than the ink can dry.  For me, the sputtering

pen represents death, and I live as long as

the moment refuses to swallow itself.

from Oblivion

written Spring 1982

Ghosts

the night the ghosts disappeared

it was quiet.  really, really, quiet.

what happens when the noise shuts down.

. . . .

sucking out ghosts          past Þ into

                                                        now

                                       (sleeping, we are sleeping                                 

 . . . noise  Þ dirt.

things become quiet

becalmed like

the Pequod in the Pacific

a loop of nothing. death

perhaps, is a loop of nothing

I sometimes feel I’m skating close

  to the edge of nothing

bouncing off loops of nothing

                                                 counting nothing

from Oblivion

written 1999 

Black Train One

scheherazade rambles on

   the guy in the corner just wants to drink his beer in peace

   “wont that bitch just shut up”

he says

dodging the daggers of the spellbound

who sniff

“youre dyin too, you better come up with somethin soon”

and how cavalier

for him not to acknowledge

the stink of death

wafting in from the corners

like it’s not the air we breathe anyway

Beruit pumps the

blood

nothing quite

like an AK-47 a blackmarket Sidewinder and a strapped

seventeen year old

bombs away! indeed.

when death is fact

it is

no longer

crisis

&

you can’t talk yr way out of a car bomb

can ya, pal?

it may be oblivion, but it ain’t nothin’, is it

like,

all these motherfuckers

killin’ everybody, that's their story,

and if such equals

the babbling of scheherazade,

it makes murder

their ennui?

for Josh

from Oblivion

written 2004 (more or less)

Playoffs?!

Well, it's been an ugly season . . . how ugly, you ask?

Just about that ugly.  But then, no one said that basketball is a pretty sport.  Well, actually someone did, maybe even a lot of people, but they weren't talking about Tyler Hansbrough.  That's okay though, because sometimes ugly gets the job done.  And this year, in spite of all the ugly, the Pacers are in the playoffs.  And, really, that's all we wanted, right?

Three teams in the Western Conference will miss the playoffs with better records than the Pacers.  Of those three, two of them (Houston and Phoenix) would have to be considered favorites in a series against the Pacers.  The third (Utah) essentially imploded halfway through the year when they lost HoF coach Jerry Sloan and traded away perhaps the best young point guard in the league (Deron Williams).  The Pacers could probably handle them right now, but it is worth noting that the Jazz stole one from the Lakers the other night.

They rally to play well against the good teams, occasionally even stealing a win or two, then turn around and play the dregs of the league like just another lottery hound.  They started out the year as a legitimate defensive team, then clinch the playoffs by scoring 136 points while shooting almost 60% from the floor . . . all while giving up 112 to the lowly Wizards (at home, even!).  So much for defense.

New coach Frank Vogel stands at 19 - 16, which is good enough for a solid handshake and a pat on the back, but probably not enough to keep him in the seat next year.  I'm sure the front office will do what they can to keep him around, but not so sure that what they will do includes naming him head coach.

As for the rest of the team, everyone is valuable (in their own way), but everyone is expendable.  They are a team of good role players without a leader.  Someday, Danny Granger will be the best third scoring option in the league.  Right now, he's a shaky first option.  Roy Hibbert is a potential force in the pivot just looking for the confidence that will smooth out and reinforce his game.  Hansbrough's coming on while McRoberts is fading . . . except on the nights where Hansbrough's fading and McRoberts is rising.  And Collison looks for all the world like a young point still learning the game, which he is.  The big question is if he ever will learn it, and that answer is not clear.

But, forget all that.  The team plays hard, even when they are at their most confused.  They give us some amazing stretches of basketball, even if they almost never put together a whole game.  They are a bunch of good kids who are really easy to root for.

Forget the record - they're in the playoffs.  Screw all the whining about lowered expectations: steal a game or two from the Bulls and we'll call this season a big success.

*          *          *          *          *

I wish Gordon Hayward would have stayed in college and helped Butler last night instead of kicking our butt. -- Phil Jackson, after the Lakers lost to the Jazz 86 - 84 behind Hayward's 22 points.

Oh, my Bulldogs sure missed young Mr. Hayward Monday night.  And after a rough rookie season (though expectedly so), he broke out with a series of double figure scoring games to close out the year, capped by this game, where, matched up against Kobe for most of the evening, he managed to outscore him by a bucket.

Which led to another splendid example of Kobespeak.  From J. A. Adande's True Hoop column:

Bryant said he was “very, very fond” of Hayward. 
“He’s a very skilled, all-around player," Bryant said. "I think he’s going to have a very bright future in this league. He reminds me of a more talented Jeff Hornacek. Jeff couldn’t put the ball on the floor as well as he can.” 

Which we shall now translate with our patented Kobespeak Translator:

Nice game, rook.  You remind me of another guy who had a cup of coffee in the league . . . now what was his name?  If you're still around when the Jazz play us again . . . which, I'd like to point out, won't be in the playoffs, 'cause you jagoffs didn't even make it . . . then I'm a gonna rip your throat out.  If I even remember to be pissed at you.  Wait, who am I kidding?  I'll rip your throat out even if I don't remember to be pissed.  'Cause that's who I am.  Kobe fucking Bryant.  And, just who are you again?  By the way: you're white.