Settling-in Phase
Tried this idea out in two forms–first as a concrete poem and then as a haiku:
At
the base
of the mountain
of cultural momentum,
I sit and drink my hot tea,
and try out the local crossword
before slipping into my demeanor for
another working day of the working week.
—
Beneath
the shadow of the mountain of cultural momentum,
I drink hot tea.
It smacks of something, yes it does.
“Once We Were”
It smacks of something, yes it does.
Like when I told you how I would excel
in accelerated reading, and I would
digest all the classics, the masterpieces,
the short ones that get caught in your
teeth with all their clever, quotable lines,
the major religious texts like the Mahabharata,
the Dao, the King James, and maybe a few
others on the weekends. I would give it all
over to literature, and say things like
The horror, the horror!
So it goes.
I shall fly by these nets.
and
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
We’ll talk about how the struggle of man against power
is the struggle of memory against forgetting, how Pierre
Menard wrote the Quixote, how eleven is to
say twelve for sure, and rail out Shantih! Shantih! Shantih!
whenever the sky roars fresh with thunder.
I’ll have gone over all the entrances and exits,
and be more than merely a player by having
paid just a little more attention. My intentions
have always had something to do with meaning.
And when we get down to the nitty gritty, the
love stories written for two, I’ll let you convince
me that it was a pleasure to burn, and then
later, in private, promise me otherwise. Yes,
my intentions have always had something to
do with what this means, has meant, can be.
A response to my worst critic
Oftentimes, writers will be their own worst critic, whether they’re hard on themselves, or perhaps too ready to approve of themselves because they haven’t had the advantage of reader responses. My worst critic, however, I discovered was not myself. A series of 4 comments were posted on my blog during the last academic year, which I left up for a number of months, until I eventually took them down at the end of last summer. For awhile they bothered me, but rereading them now, I find them a little funny. And it is in that spirit that I have decided to respond to them. They will not be going back up in their respective places, but I will post them here as I go along.
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Another from tonight!
Take me home tonight–
I don’t think this life can go much further, and I don’t know what to do.
But I want it to last forever.
Back in the day…
Can’t make it home tonight–
I have loyalties from when I was younger and making all my promises;
There are trespasses to be kept.
Absolutes & Absolution, to be Absolved
“Unanimous & Instantaneous”
For nothing is actually one thing,
what we mean is that which has never been–always absent;
absolutely.
All Smiles
Josh was African. He was the kind of dark that faded into the night with pearly whites that tore through the black as sure as starlight; smiling beneath the blacked out sky he was a Cheshire cat; the arc of his mouth like Poe’s pendulum, bouncing with his step. And he was a great soccer player. He played pickup games with the rest of us twice a week.
Alex was an Arab–you know, the people that gave us our numbers. He had a goatee that sat like an extra eyebrow on his chin and cocked to one side, twisting into a rhombus, whenever he got the ball, as he always smirked. He was the kinda guy that, when he got the ball, he would sooner play the one on one than pass, which wasn’t necessarily the most admirable thing, but he played the challenge well, and I imagine he acquired his skill from doing it so often, top tier player that he was, he still could work on his teamwork. Twice a week, he was on the basketball courts, kickin’ it up, playing indoor soccer with the rest of us, including Josh.
I still remember, late in the game, when Josh fired one from half-court (an interesting aspect of indoor soccer I suppose, not midfield, but mid-court or half-court). We never played with goalies, and everyone had pushed forward on our team; the team opposite Josh; so his shot went in from far off, with no one able to stop it. Alex fetched the ball out of our goal, and fired it down the court into Josh’s team’s goal, the full length of the court (field). He flipped the bird to Josh, who was already smiling. We were all smiling. Rows and rows of teeth pushing out towards cheekbones, resting on rasping lungs, splinted shins, and tired feet. All smiles–that’s all we were.
On Relativity
“These Phenomena”
The game may not be on the line
but you’re the pitcher firing fast
all the same, just as I am the whale,
blowhole erupting in frothy jetstreams,
which symbolize the kitchen table
when you’re not there.
Your strikeouts are unrelated to my
harpoon punctured heart, but the
drive must be the same, the same
basic principles, the same basic
fundaments of esoteric knowledge:
to see beyond seeing–it is not
enough that 26 arbitrary letters,
10 Arabic numerals, and perhaps
10 on a good day, 5 in passing,
3 in youth–punctuation marks
that is–indicators of final placement;
they all arise to show us all that
we might see and so much more.
Imagine my blowhole is Vesuvius.
Yes, you see what it all means:
the lines are so important, why
see past them for truth? You know.
Deep wounds bleeding dry,
differentiate from breathing,
separate from heart pounding,
fist lashing fastballs, to splash
in the junk pitches: curves,
sinkers, sliders, change-ups.
Take it from the top:
you are the pitcher,
winning the game:
I am the whale,
being dragged ashore for oil.
A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
I recently, very recently depending on when you read this, finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s book A Man without a Country. I closed the backcover with mixed feelings, which I do not doubt were common to many people who read the book. Vonnegut offers the enjoyable moments of life, the passing joy. An anecdote about his Uncle Alex reminds us to always remark on being happy while we are happy because to just let it go would be a waste. At the same time he discusses the human race’s destruction of the planet and seems to have little hope for the future of earth. The shortcomings of the Bush administration, the depletion of fossil fuels, the missing morality of many of those in power, the danger of WoMD, and so on and so on, are all taken extremely seriously throughout.
The writing itself is very conversational, and fun to read. The book is 146 pages, including the Author’s Note, but probably won’t take the casual reader more than an hour to go through. While I do think that Vonnegut beats his reader over the head with the disparaging talk about the future that we seemingly have gone too far now to change, I would recommend the book as a whole for the anecdotes that Vonnegut passes on about what is to be enjoyed in life and the advice he gives about living as well. His book is very much him saying what he thinks without a filter, and that includes, of course, both the good and the bad. Just like living in such a dangerous world with all its suffering and woe, I would say that accepting the bad is worth the good. That’s a bit melodramatic, but the issues Vonnegut addresses are of such a magnitude that it’s hard not to sound that way.
It’s a genius mind’s analysis of the world and life–very valuable indeed. I picked mine up, a hardcover, for $6 at Borders. You can get it for $7 over at Amazon.com. And if you look, you can probably snag a bookclub edition for less. Either way, it’s not a high price to pay for a good, although perhaps not satisfying, read.
Ron Silliman and Kent Johnson on my Yasusada Hoax Analysis
So poet Ron Silliman keeps one of the best poetry blogs on the web over at RonSilliman.Blogspot.com. And I was looking through comments on a big links selection he posted the other day, which included a link to my essay on the Yasusada Hoax. Kent Johnson, the man himself (who I had the good pleasure of meeting and hear read some of his non-Yasusada related poetry), said that my essay was “really quite good.” I’m patting myself on the back and taking the day off. That was cool. I am a bit disheartened that Kent’s comment goes on to say my essay missed some core values of the work; although, what I was looking to show was the way the hoax operated that made it compelling, less so than the totality of its scope, so I can accept that these are things my essay was not meant to accomplish.
If Kent should read this, I would like to say thank you Mr. Johnson, your comments are very much appreciated, and I look forward to seeing more of your critical work as well as your poetry.
Here’s Kent Johnson’s comment from the blog:
“The recent essay on Yasusada that Ron links to here is really quite good as general overview of some of the history. And there have been many other excellent studies done on issues brought forward by the controversy (a collection of some of these, edited by Bill Freind, is scheduled for publication in the UK next year).
But the piece, like so much else written on the matter over the years, leaves out what’s most essential to the larger meanings and purposes of the work. This is still the response that manages to come closest:
http://jacketmagazine.com/04/ganderyasu.html
Kent”
Amongst scattered bits of parchment
So the basement of my parents’ home was flooded a short time ago, and one of the things that got wet was a bit of a story from an old writing exercise I did for a class in high school. I thought I would type it up and post it, just for a bit of nostalgia.
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Bearing some mark of accomplishment
I am not posting it here, but I am announcing it nonetheless–the first section of my novel is finally finished! It is 22 pages in my format, and it is onto the top of the 35th page in manuscript format (double-space w/ 1 inch margins). Actually, that includes the little intro/epitaph quote for the second section, so it is safer to say that it is almost exactly 34 pages in manuscript format. There are 3 sections to go (according to the current plan of action), and they presumably will be of the same length or longer. Overall, I’d like it to extend to at least 100 pages in my format, but that’s not really here nor there. The working title is currently A Low, Steady Rumble, and the first section is titled “Wanderlust.” The second section’s current working title is “The Hundred-Handed Ones” (hecatoncheires for those of you who know your Greek mythology). Now, I just hafta get the dozen plus copies out to my advisory readers. Not exactly poppin’ the champagne corks, but it is something.
