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The page where my interest was lost, premier and pretentious, a great grey gust of gibberish. Phileas Fogged down in the derails. Do you remember when we named the dog Indiana? A wooden chalice chosen holy? On the red line to work the other day I saw people whose skin color was not the same as mine, and that didn't tell me anything deep about who they were as people. I did not try and imagine who they were. I did not smugly appropriate their experiences. Whether or not they're American is not important. I hope they had a phenomenal day in the wondrous weather. Unless they're jerks. Then, I hoped they all stubbed all of their toes. Last night in the undulating darkness of the thesaurused night my unconcsciousness theatred a script of fancy. I shan't describe it to you. Orwell says happiness can only exist in acceptance. I am jubilant that this book is not for me. II. My eyes are in the text while my heart is in the kitchen the bedroom on a beach somewhere with a better book. The exasperating sea of prose summed up by the coda where the writer admits having nothing interesting to say He wins awards for writing about how he doesn't know how to write beginnings or endings. The middles are choppy, too. III. The difference between experience and writing about experience is more than perspective. Is more than let me tell you. Is more than show. No matter how much I enjoy a turkey and cheese sandwich, no matter my fascination with the post-credit adventures in Super Mario Odyssey, if all I have to say is ass bounce reveals moon twinkling over top hat while the crumbs catch in my goatee, then that is all I should say. I'm not sure how to start telling you how much I enjoy sitting in the solitude of my air conditioned house collecting purple snowflakes while the turkey and cheese sandwich that I am unsure how to describe sits on the plate whose importance I am having trouble describing to you reminds me of a dream I'm not going to tell you about because I lack the ability makes me wish I was white water rafting while this book fell behind the shelves confusing the lonely spider.
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I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the second of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years. The first one is here. Rebuilding Atlantis At Twenty-Nine
1. The Shape Of Things The subject of the night's workshop is line breaks and how they shape the way the reader interprets the poem. I hate American waterfall tercets. In fact, all unnecessarily shaped stanzas detract from my interest in what a poet is trying to say. I understand they think it looks pretty. It gives me a headache. I still love Mark Doty's work even if I don't like how it's laid on the page. 2. Emerald Legacy If you look closely at this handful of sand Turquoise and emerald Sapphire and crushed pearl All this silt All this emerald Sand is only brown from a distance Shattered rocks Crushed coral Once royal and thriving Now loose foothold for children to build into wet castles Everything beautiful looks plain from a distance There is nothing alluring when the polish has been ground into well grounds Emerald at fingertips So what Tiny grains of quartz small enough to sprinkle over corn flakes Beauty tastes terrible Gets stuck in teeth Opal amongst beige Everything looks so beige until you really stare Flakes of emerald sparkle through the blah There is always something living thriving despite the paper bag covering our textbook lives Always something emerald if you know how to look Not where to How to 3. Grief Is Exhausting And Everywhere I didn't see ryan's sickness until it killed him I didn't look for comfort in shoots of dune grass I didn't imagine our future coming to a point Curling to fist I didn't imagine we needed a lighthouse to protect us Shimmer of crest Agate shadows It wasn't until i had to turn around that i ever noticed the shape of my own shadow lacking his beside me I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the first of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years. Sidenote, the title is a line from my poem, How To Survive A Sixty Hour Work Week On Just Above Minimum Wage. While it is, of course, a reference to the lost city, it is also a reference to Mark Doty's book and the time of my life when I first read it. Atlantis At Nineteen
1. Colorblindness Sun starved leaves A handful of wet beach ready for sculpture The color of a paper bag under transparent tape protecting textbooks from my clumsy adolescence Horseshoe crab shell All of these things we'd touched together And all i could think of when you took off your hat in your parents' basement was You have brown hair It was only in the darkness that I could realize the misdiagnosis of your hair color Two years of loving someone without noticing this basic physical trait I was still flash cards at lust Heart Sex Breath Touch At a bar with my coworkers from the Reconnaissance Faire I didn't note the leather taut atlassing the twin planets of the wax maiden as the exhaust of her day and her bourbon warmed my ear I thought why is this woman blowing in my ear? Everything so straight forward I didn't even know her name just the job she weekended for two months of the year The best part of her year when her ex took her two twelve year old sons and she dipped hands and roses into hot wax and blew hot air into the ears of nineteen year old gay boys too paralyzed to turn their heads I was of course staring at you a single row of straight white stones the lower shelf never cresting your bottom lip On the drive home you kissed your own hot air towards me without so much as leaning closer This was how I learned to love with distance 2. Strangers & Family Members Are Fiction I did not choose Mark Doty's "Long Point Light" for its language for how I would later imagine it an apt description of our relationship You liked lighthouses I was too stiff for "Homo Shall Not Inherit" The assignment read a poem to a diverse group of people ask them to tell you what the poem means Diverse on Cape Cod in 1998 meant my ashen mother my pasty boss the blanched friends of the pale children I nannied the cobweb customers at my corporate record store job my eggshell psychology classmates Diverse meant not the same age job level of education All these diverse listeners patiently described what this poem which was so obviously about how every day was a new opportunity to be honest with you and myself was so obviously about how I could see metaphor only in things you cared about All of these diverse listeners presented me with their own incorrect translations of this obvious poem Mistaking Doty's hazing and flickering as an invitation to build their own lighthouse to monument I bought whiteboard I mod podged photos of your favorite lighthouses printed out all these wrong interpretations of what was obviously our poem and threw away everyone else's truth I drew crude approximations of boats emerald fiberglass like your favorite color of seaglass polyurethaned wood like your hair silver like your car barn red like your duvet Each boat labeled with the description of an imaginary person The waves beneath them fake quotes I attributed to them each one a different way I looked at the poem except of course yours Who else had ever had an opinion that mattered? 3. There Is Never Enough Ocean I was twenty and selfish without understanding what my self was like everytwenty like everyyounglover I read Atlantis but came away with only "Long Point Light" said everything else was ocean and shimmer I had enough ocean around me enough shimmer when I tried to look to the future Today's interaction is sourced from reading Ben Berman's Strange Borderlands. But is more an interaction with they type of poems and conversations the collection reminded me of, through minimal fault of the author. The briefest review of the book is "A person goes to a country with an organization that sets out to improves lives throughout the world and comes back with poems about cultural differences." That's a really tough topic to pull off without sounding like an elitist asshole. And I think Berman does, occasionally, pull it off. So, rather than write an interaction specifically with his book, this is more an interaction with all the poems and anecdotes I've ever heard from other white people who've visited Africa. The Best Of Intentions
The best of intentions sometimes leave their native land to learn about other cultures and improve the lives of other people. It is worthy of note but not maybe applause. If the best of intentions are traveling to learn, I wish them education and wisdom and peace and whatever other vague intangible concept they desire that doesn't come at the expense of anyone else. But if the best of intentions are traveling to learn, they should be more eager to come back with facts than stories. Percentages of homeless children in Zambia, and how they can be housed, rather than how the best of intentions saw a homeless child and gave them their granola bar. The best of intentions' travelogues read in paragraphs of privilege, stanzas of condescension. Even when the narrator believes they are at eye level, the pesky nose gets in the way, and they end up looking down. Do you believe these people (not we people, not us, not where the best of intentions are from) live without this thing that the best of intentions all take for granted? Isn't that stunning? Haven't the best of intentions educated themselves to how better the world is where they're from? Surely, anyone without this thing is leading an inferior life. Not a different life. Or maybe they do call it a different life. The gods must be crazy. See how they are not patronizing, merely sharing cultural differences. Don't they deserve biscuits or cookies or wafers or whatever baked flour and sugar is called where the best of intentions are from? The best of intentions should be writing almanacs not manuscripts. They should be hanging out in government offices talking about solutions instead of telling humorous anecdotes in bars. I have the best of intentions when I meet someone. I want them to be a person and not a series of stories I tell to get other people to like me. See how entertaining I am? Do you believe that person (not me, not us, not someone involved in the conversation who could offer an opposing view) did that thing that I and we would clearly never do? I should be speaking to them not about them. But sometimes the best of intentions can't help themselves. They must share. I saw this different thing. I experienced this cultural discord that is humorous hopefully from both perspectives. See how it makes me human. How thoroughly human to strip someone else's humanity away in an attempt to appear more human to other humans. April Penn's response to Dear Darkness, like my own, involves food and hunger. Maybe don't read this book while fasting. Reader Response Poem to Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness
April Penn So this is what the past tastes like ~ Kevin Young, “Ode to Cushaw” You search everywhere in the cemetery, but you can’t find your great grandfather’s grave. Instead, you delight in odes of the food he may have eaten. Hunger never leaves, craving always the next poem for okra, grits, crawfish, catfish, black eyed peas, Gumbo, sweet potato pie, watermelon… You say, “like rice/ you rise,” (Ode to Boudin) -- the transcendence of food, not magic but history trying to taste your tongue. Eating your most edible story, figs of smoke. So sweet and vanishing an author, a lost uncle memory of a man burning too bright. It was only a matter of time before this project went meta. Seventeen days, to be exact. Jeffrey McDaniel's The Splinter Factory is one of my favorite collections to read and reread. This time, I read it front to back on a bus trip and then went back and siphoned out my favorite lines to structure a conversation around I hadn't intended said conversation to be about why I'd missed some deadlines in this project, but that's what ended up happening. As is the norm, any text in black was written by me, italicized blue text is from Jeffrey McDaniel's book. The title of this poem is also from a line by McDaniel, in which he describes how one goes crazy. One Marble At A Time
I promised myself I'd read a book of poetry a day the way I promised my mother I'd call once a week the way I promised I'd get my homework done the way I promised I'd tell whoever it was that year how I felt about them the way I promised I'd eat better I'd start running I'd drink less soda I'd forgive whoever it was that year the way a kitten promises frolic the way a bus schedule promises ibuprofen the way a road trip promises silence When I am confronted by the screeching car alarm of a deadline I get so lost in the hideous intoxication of the honk how you can tell in what year they bought that useless alarm based on how familiar the rhythm you and all your neighbors deliberately ignore I get so lost that I forget it's supposed to signal urgency I broke my word so many times, it became a handful of crumbs I sprinkled at my father's ankles whenever I needed money. It's so easy to dress my parents in all of my failures not because my father didn't remember my birthday enough or my mother never forgets to carry my most embarrassing childhood experiences in her purse but because they spent so much of my teenage years trying on my blame in the department store mirrors of my eyes that it's difficult to imagine them without it Every time I have dinner with a parent they drop a hundred on my plate until I sing the misery of their ex-spouse I'm the canary watching multiple coal mines via Skype Each of them twenty years removed from shared bank accounts Forty-five years removed from a ring and a question neither of them budgeted for I wonder how that question gets popped. Is it like a bottle of expensive champagne, or a big, ugly, zit that won't go away? My mother has never once not ever forgotten even a single time to ask who I am seeing I always say a therapist and thank her for asking But I can't see therapists the way dogs can't see color In that they can see color but differently than humans and have no way of expressing how they see My mother never laughs at this joke of my solitude but always offers to pay for my next meal She always predicts what her husband will order because he is not so much a creature of habit as a varmint of obsession When I eat with them I am expected to still be seventeen and growing in every way but diet Instead of salt and pepper, I'd like a think layer of antique store dust enthusiastically sprinkled on the lettuce, so halfway through the sandwich, a wave of nostalgia will wash over me If it isn't my parents' fault that I am less behind and more rolling beneath deadlines of my own design then can I blame desire How I could read a recipe book for inspiration and spend the rest of the night tasting a stranger determined to know the precise ratio of ingredients that led him to the awkward of us I mean, isn't it odd—how you can buy a lap dance, phone sex, or blow job in a snap, but can't pay a person a dollar just to sit next to you on a park bench and simply hold your hand? Oh, I've been down that road before. In fact, I still have property there So let's pretend my commitment issues and my love have never accidentally sat down across from each other on a train and spent the entire trip pretending they're strangers Let's say I miss deadlines like they are highway exits and I'm not driving but I am distracting the driver Let's say I miss deadlines like they stop calling me and I don't want them to think I need them any more than they need me so I don't call them either Let's say I miss deadlines like the only way I can communicate with my responsibilities is via Ouija board or speculative fiction Let's say I am so Over deadlines But that's not in the cards. Heck, it's not even in the casino. I often feel I'm not emotionally invested in anything to miss it Deadlines sure and sometimes people also but money when I'm broke love when I'm alone That nostalgia sprinkled on a sandwich is to impress you I can't even taste it April Penn is the first...multiple interactor to meet....all their deadlines...mainly because...April is awesome...here she uses haiku to tackle...Nikki Giovanni's ellipses addiction. Reader Response Haiku
(Responding to Those Who Ride the Night Winds by Nikki Giovanni) April Penn … Why the ellipses? Are they the uncharted path of riding night winds? Ellipses, leaving room for air and for lost words needing new worlds. Why the ellipses? To move close to the body, to refrain losses? … To select the scraps, the poet muses with time, quilting lived garments. … You do not love wrong or by mistake, always love, find heroes in self. … Colored people couldn’t vote… couldn’t use the bathroom in public places… couldn’t go to the same library they paid taxes for… had to sit on the back of the buses… couldn’t live places… work places… go to movies… amusement parks… Nothing if you were colored … Just signs … always signs … saying No … No … No… (From “Harvest (for Rosa Parks)”) The sign that says no Everywhere no no no no-- racist exclusion. … Love should change your life. Move you beyond the boundary of your stubborn self. Giovanni says, Love Thoughts like a song, a drum, a music in you. … A good writing prompt: Begin with, “You were gone like…” then fail to compare. Champion of the joy that cries out lonely, someone to sing for, to love. Kim Addonizio's What Is This Thing Called Love always shows up at interesting times. This week was no exception. I've been handwriting some projects while I travel around the city and say goodbye to departing friends and started writing a conversation between me and an ex-roommate, using only quotes from this book Then I had another idea. Then another. In many ways, this interaction is nothing like her very structured book. But I come back to this book over and over. Every time, taking something different away with me. I struggled not to focus this on "Cat Poem" because no one wants to read about my pet. I know there are people who think waking up is the best part of their day. Such potential. Such nothing is wrong yet. You don't remember who's dead. Who's left you. Where that bottle of Maker's Mark came from. Why it's empty. Your head is fine. Your bed is just you. Such potential. Such daylight.
On the other end of the ugh. Not enough curtains. Neighbors teaching themselves to play the sousaphone. A stranger in the shower. Your roommate owes you four months rent. Your roommate ate the last slice of your birthday cake. Your roommate. You don't know when you poured that bottle of tequila directly into your head but you know it was your hands that poured it. My mornings are neutral. Mostly. Since the most affectionate cat died, I wake up mostly alone. Mostly. Today a book. Kim Addonizio's What Is This Thing Called Love. Not the first time. Last time I put it out on the shelf my roommate picked it up. We were both electively maybe single. Recently maybe singled. He said the benches in Washington Square Park, briefly occupied with lovers, have been reclaimed by men who stretch out coughing under The Chronicle. I say Tonight I am amazed by all the people making love while I sit alone in my pajamas in a foreign country with my dinner of cookies and vodka. The foreign country is Everywhere. My bedroom. The daybed in the living room when the neighbors are fighting on the porch below my window. Wherever is the person who once occupied the barren next to me. The vodka is whiskey but otherwise Yes Kim Addonizio exactly. Our room was too small, the sheets scratchy and hot --- Our room was a kind of hell, we thought, and killed a half-liter of Drambuie we'd bought. It's been almost twenty years since I first identified my arms as a hotel room. Though maybe motel would be more appropriate. Cheaper rates. The upkeep of the room adequate. Not professional. No hospital corners. But at least a fitted sheet on the appropriate sized mattress. A place to wake up. No matter how you feel about waking. Kim Addonizio isn't just love poems. Also grief. Also dead. Also cat dying. Also No. Her every poem in this book is dog-eared. Come back. Don't kiss a fan at a poetry reading. Oh. Oh. Oh that is ten years I'm never getting back. That kiss. That job. That walk-in closet. That stack of unpaid loans and bills. When he takes off his clothes I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped, The younger man. She views as nothing has harmed him yet, though he is going to be harmed. I've never seen a body without a dead father guttering the eyes. A pinch of keloid from when they first suspected their body was not theirs. Even just an ingrown hair signifying their desire to stop their body from aging. Or their belief that if they do not stop their body from aging nobody will lust them. Is there even a possibility of love if no one is lusting. He lies on his side like a glass knocked over. He lies on his side like a glass knocked over. Only a little sweetness left, poor boy. Only a little sweetness left, poor boy. Only his little lies, a glass-like sweetness. Poor he, a left boy knocked over on side. Oh fake form become real. Possibly the paradelle. Possibly his body. How she grew inside him demanding out. How I ever could possible to understand who he had been or would be. How even who he was right then was not the person I saw. How all of us falsely identify. How we all put our I in their I because everyone must I like I I. Right? Even if they I differently. I can imagine their I through my I because we all start as I? My I. I am trying to overcome my I. I am reading so many I. I keep thinking I understand Kim's I. That maybe we've almost had similar I but I can't even tell the I of the person I no longer wake up on the same coast as. I think of all them and the filaments in my brain start buzzing crazily and flare out. Every kiss is here somewhere,, all over me like a fine, shiny grit, like I'm a pale fish that's been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour, slid down into a deep skillet, into burning. She is talking just. Maybe just. I don't know. She is talking mostly of kisses. I am talking about everything. Maybe poetry forms. Maybe exes. Maybe mornings. Maybe all of them. When she doesn't mention forms, I don't always see the form in her poems. She Kim. She visible. Form mist. Form important. Sometimes the important part isn't immediately apparent. Sometimes you love a person or a thing without actually seeing how it formed. How it structure. How it I. I don't sleep with books anymore. Always back to the shelf. Or in the backpack if they're joining me for a tomorrow. I only share my bed with. Actually sometimes cats. Sometimes laptop. But mostly I only share my bed with pillows. No authors or books whispering sweet something cribbed from other writers and lovers in my ear. I still don't have as much time with my eyes closed as would make the daylight brighter. I still always morning at the inconvenient times. She's the one sleeping all day, in a room at the back of your brain. She wakes up at the sound of a cork twisted free of a bottle, a stabbed olive plopped into gin. Kelly Cooper responds to phrases and images from James Gendron's Sexual Boats (Sex Boats). A Response To Sexual Boats (Sex Boats) by James Gendron
Kelly Cooper I am not knowledgeable or in-tune or out-of-tune enough to understand. I came to poetry through metaphor simile, word play, and white men stayed for the women and the revelation of blank verse and the rawness of the other voice the not-heard voice not heard in my suburban town suspended between the polo club and poverty’s friends: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the food stamps. I grasp and turn and read, reread Rereading I tease out fragments You can forgive the one who makes your life amazing Pulling out words that glitter Pulling the wire Laughing at the unknowable The smell of the jagged mint leaf and the smell of one trillion farts pervade the atmosphere I shake my head I skipped a line or three lost my place. On my side of the bed, I made a sweat angel Truth or what passes for memory flickers In fat I see myself distilled more honestly than in my face. My childhood was all ragged knees and pockets full All I ever had in my pockets is still there: hundreds of pounds of it. My eyes burn with anger exhaustion tears You can improve a star simply by turning it. The other side is fresher. It hasn’t been looked at as much. My thoughts can’t track the random elements lacking throughline I get lost. Ideas and I are at cross-purposes, like the wings of Christ. Shake my head again dislodging what-all resetting my eyes I don’t know what an entity is, so I don’t trust entities. Entities are assholes. And look again. Can the judge fulfill her duty and arrest the wicked sun, serial murderer? Or is she more of a pragmatist? Have I chosen only what I recognize? The Louvre is too big. Everyone knows & denies it. Like a hurricane: so big, it competes with the soul. Only what speaks to me. I’m just a haunted question mark. Only what I’m able to hear. Justin finally tracked down a copy of Langston Hughes's The Panther & The Lash, (take that public library!) and has his second interaction, this time with the actual text. My Privilege Has Nothing To Say But It Will Speak Anyway
Justin Strock My privilege has nothing to say, but it will speak anyway - it's wont and whatnot My privilege has nothing to say, but its ignorance does My choice of your text, based solely on lyrics by rapper turned actor In the grand tradition of fake gangstas playing faker detectives The real crime of their acting, unsolved reparations of vaudeville My privilege has nothing to say about the way your verse seems plain Stark as if the anger in your soul Stripped adjectives allusions like acetone the varnish coming off in patches The hues removed from pale wood not lost on me I have (and yes I am looking for your mocking approval) Marched in traffic spewed forth on social media Stood up against admittedly uncomfortable abercronies to defend a muslim kid at prayer A marine at my side Mecca's position shifting parallel to the view of huddled masses' avatar I consume mindfulcinos daily to stay woke Can I get a gold-star back-pat cookie now? My privilege has nothing to say about gentrification Except that I have an excuse for moving to Bed Stuy about how little has changed Since Leontyne belted out of darkness My privilege has grown weary of the echo in my skull First assumed as chorus |
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