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No longer in a relationship with the meaning of is, baby. Tragedy is always a bait and switch. Updated, anticipated. My profile hides my lazy I while yours mixes metaphors under London Bridge. Which? Boys are dying for the tingle of salt on their tongues. You heard me right. The word wasn't what it was when I circled the windy lake, sand hilling up like a documentary about the Dust Bowl. Face the music, darling, you're an open book when the flame turns your thin milk to bone. Tags: music, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: 5-4=Unity - Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins
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No, I do not know what I am talking about. Nor want to. Get it? Tips from a satellite are great if you fear getting lost. But I'd rather find my way where there isn't one, my words keen to cut through thickets of ignorance. There's always more to do. The trail only lasts as long as you walk it. Tags: poetry
Current Location: 85704
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Yesterday I drew a line on my thigh, permanent marker, as if I were making sure not to remove the wrong part. The picture of a surgeon, bent on perfection, with a little too much to prove. "The body has a hard time when it's like this. The weather won't hold still." I hear your longing. I keep checking the temperature myself. Not that it helps. You can't make words fit the world. It's why we need art, to let out the seams, give us room to move. Psychology is a bitch. Some things are there; some aren't. We can't know what we're leant and what we get to keep. It's time to take stock. Every decision cuts deep. Read Sartre. Tags: poetry
Current Location: 85704
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Along the way we stop for drinks. I choose a Monster, wanting to avoid the fate of Icarus, who had too many sweets, his waxen wings dripping the waste of self, late reminder of desire not withstood. For you, a can of Coke. The real thing. Not Diet. I smile at the irony, "Good. I'm sick of--" Stop. It wouldn't be too wise, invoking categories now. I'd blot out the beauty of this moment and lose my reason for being here, drinking lies instead of sugar, so I won't berate myself for failing to pass the test, should it come, but sure this sipping is my lot. Tags: poetry
Current Location: 85704
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I've been reading a lot of Michael Palmer's poetry over the past few weeks. He's one of my all-time favorites. And, now that I'm once again preoccupied with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has been a huge influence on Palmer, it makes sense to revisit his ouevre. In particular, I find that reading him helps me to remember the literary potential in abstruse philosophical concerns, thereby inspiring me to make my own prose more liquid. One thing I've been realizing in my latest encounter with Palmer's work is that he has been remarkably consistent over the years. Although he was more given to visual experimentation in his early years -- thin columns or rectangular blocks of text -- he has returned again and again to the themes he tackled back then. And with what sounds, to my ear, like the same voice. Here is the concluding poem to his 1974 collection The Circular Gates: Fifth Symmetrical Poem The way the future uses up blood and light
and the individual marks are altered every day
until you reach the end of the row of trees
It has to be possible to imagine these
infinitely extended
and to walk in a curved line
remembering the pencil that draws the line
putting the water on one side
and agreeing that the chair will be white
Each day each letter of the previous day
would be replaced by the next one in line
and the Z by an A
of the same size and shape. I dream that I say
It's raining
and it has no meaning
I dream that she's waking
in the white chair
Everyone we know is here
Or when you covered the numbers
no sounds seemed clear
We would come and go
on hands and feet
We would move them
to get somewhere
Now compare that one to a poem from his 2005 collection The Company of Moths: Archive Figures, what do they know
in those old books, asleep
in those brittle books? What do they dream
on the locked shelves, in The Book of Signs
And the Book of Delights, Queen Dido's book,
and the book we sought but couldn't find?
Bright archive, sad merriment,
those waters that once we bathed in,
spine against spine, their banks lined
with the smallest of flowers, pale blue.
Did you see them, darting beneath the eaves?
Hear them, right before night?
Should we share a breath or maybe two
with the ghost of the future, the slant rain,
the brindled rose, the keeper of the code?
What do they know
with their sealed lips, scattered limbs,
of the books that they rewrite?
Although there are differences between these two poems from a stylistic standpoint, they share a preoccupation with the way our world is structured by language. The speaker is restrained, perhaps even distant. But that state seems like an act of will, requiring considerable energy to maintain. Something stirs beneath the still surface of thought, but never breaks it. Thats what makes another one of the poems in The Company of Moths, "Your Diamond Shoe," so interesting. A number of the pieces in the book reflect on the post-9/11 political landscape. But in "Your Diamond Shoe," the point of reference is honed to a razor-thin point: Your Diamond Show Don't write poems about what's going on.
Murderers and liars, dreams and desires,
they're always going on.
Leave them outside the poem.
Don't describe your sad-eyed summer home
or wide-eyed winter home.
Don't write about being homeless
or your home-away-from-home.
Don't write about war,
whether you're against or for,
it's the same fucking war.
Don't talk about language,
don't talk about loss.
Don't mention truth or beauty
or your grandpa's bones.
No one wants to know
how your father/brother/lover
deducted himself. Razor, rope or gun,
what's the difference?
Whisper nothing of the snow
on the Contrescarpe,
nothing of moths, their fluttering arcs,
or the towers -- how we watched them fall.
Don't write at all.
While the overlap between this poem and the one I've quoted above is clear, the restraint has given way to self-permission. The speaker's frustration and anger breaks the surface, reminding us that the strength needed to maintain a glassy calm is subject to dissipation, particularly in an era like this. I love the way that the sandwich end-rhyme of "war" and "or" invokes traditional verse form under the sign of rage-fueled irony. "Your Diamond Shoe" got me thinking differently about Palmer's poetry. Maybe the consistency I have discerned is actually just part of a rhythm in which the breaks matter as much as what they interrupt. Or maybe it's simply that, as he approaches old age, Palmer is growing impatient with his own patience. Either way, the shift in voice it demonstrates is powerful. Tags: commonplace book, poetry, theory
Current Location: 85721
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The bowl of tomatoes sits still, their bodies losing breadth each day. I need to scissor them in half like unruly cardboard and slip them into the pan. A little olive oil and they'll make do as accompaniment to something I have yet to imagine, concentrated flavor of a bliss I was too busy to properly indulge, perfect death of the liquid inside. Tags: everyday, poetry
Current Location: 85704
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This is what I bring you, stumbling slightly on the mat I would have seen if I hadn't been looking for you inside my head: the will to imagine a life in memories that belong to someone else. "I had a liver. I don't think I'll risk another," sings Nico. "Lover," that is, but I'll leave the slip, to remind me of those places where I need to tread carefully. Did you know that she hated that record? On the cover her eyes shine white, lit by a source within the space beyond the frame. "Memory." The grass is wet under the sunny gray clouds and the gravel on the circular drive sounds like the teeth of an audience coming down on their crisps. It's a Ford Cortina, chestnut brown with beige seats. The woman opening the driver's door has a red handbag. Except that she's not the driver, I realize, correcting for her location. She looks a lot like Nico come to think of it, as she strides up the marble steps. The driver is nowhere in sight. Maybe it's me, I think, as she waits for the bell to be answered to John Cale's insistent strings. You look nothing like Nico, my love. But I did have a Ford Cortina once, when I was three. I couldn't stand the feeling when my dry fingers would touch the metal. I kept bringing them to my mouth, but the relief only lasted for a few seconds. "She wants another scene," she sings, "She wants to be a human being." I swear, girl. The highway may be thick with lorries, but once we hit the Chertsey Road we might as well be in Basingstoke already. I hope you'll forgive me. Tags: everyday, music, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Take a wild guess.
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Skylar was full of vim and voom tonight. Although she woke up early to accompany her mother to the airport, she wasn't lagging when I showed up at school to help her put on her martial arts attire. Then, when I told her upon picking her up that her grandfather had come home from the care facility a day earlier than expected, she practically burst through the roof. The rest of her evening was a swirl of bliss and rebellion, as she demonstrated some of her martial arts defense strategies to him, teased her grandmother, refused to do any of the things I told her to do and exuded so much happiness that it was hard to find the motivation to make her eat her dinner, stop shouting, lay off her nana etc. I had almost given up on the idea of insisting that she do her homework, which was to make another entry in the "moon journal" that all the kids in her class have been keeping. Seeing the extraordinarily bright disc in the sky on our walk home, however, inspired her enough that she immediately switched gears from her I-want-to-push-buttons mode to her I-want-to-push-my-pencil mode. Fifteen minutes later, her entry was finished:  Skylar is often shy about showing even her parents the work that she does. But she wanted to read me tonight's composition. Her teacher tries to cultivate an appreciation for creative writing by getting students to look for "golden lines." It's a great approach, because it's flexible, yet encourages them to focus on detail. After she'd read me this entry, Skylar announced that it was "full of golden lines," noting that she hadn't spent much time on the image because this time the words mattered more. I'm delighted to see her learning to take pleasure in crafting prose and poetry. I'm delighted to see her delighted. Tags: daughter, everyday, family, poetry
Current Location: 85704
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"Even the Cadbury Creme Eggs here know no time. . ." Sometimes there's a reason for seasons.