Street debate

 

DEBATE ON THE STREET DURING A MILWAUKEE PROTEST

Indignant, she
Demands of me, “Well,
Six years later, can you show me what you were afraid
Would come to pass?” I look around,
Seeing in the street moving beside us like foam on the river
Signs about children sepa
Rated from families and encaged; poor
Women in Texas traveling hundreds of miles
For a legal procedure; violence against
Any number of citizens whose only offense is
Being neither white nor straight nor having documents,
 
Finally at her and so many others who would put him right back, and I answer,
“No, I can’t show you anything at all.”

My favorite Bly poem

 Well, Robert Bly is dead. I can't say he has been my favorite poet but he is certainly one of them. I've read and appreciated him for decades but I don't think his forms show up in my poems except in our shared sense of the poem as a Polaroid of a particular moment. So in that light, here is probably my favorite Bly poem. 

DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time. 

What is an armed white man to do?

I intended to post the first of my new poems today, but not this one as I feel it's one of the weaker ones I've been working at. However, in light of today's Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, it's probably the most apt. 

WHY THE JUDGE IN THE KYLE RITTENHOUSE TRIAL IS RIGHT TO BAN 

USE OF THE WORD “VICTIM” TO DESCRIBE THE UNARMED MEN HE SHOT

Picture it, he found himself there, alone,
Frightened, among dark screaming shapes
Of all kinds. Singing, swinging stolen bats, TVs,
Signposts. Three detached themselves from the horde,
Ran howling and bloody-toothed at him. And he
Could only raise his fortunately-remembered rifle
In shaking hands, blindly firing off rounds that
Miraculously met their marks, stemming
The satanic tide, saving the car dealership, his medic training,
Allowing his return gratefully to high-fiving police.
 
Or say, he left home that morning,
Holding in sweating hands the rifle
He proposed to use to defend lives and property, but mostly property,
By shooting them for whom those words
Meant only destroy, loot, rob. He fired
First at one threatening target, then running
From the herd that would part him from his only
Means of defense, he fell but squeezed off more shots,
Striking surely his not-victims but foamers
At the mouth, angry deniers of his 17-year old body’s
Right to hold that Second Amendment solution,
After which he could only run home.
 
What else is a white man to do?

Poetry from a dozen years ago

I mentioned in passing recently that it's been a while since I've written poetry. Most of it has not been confessional but it often is based in my experiences, sometimes on work or relationships. These are, I think, the last I had worked on. In 2009 I was teaching creative writing and produced these as examples for the classes. I wanted to present them before I publish the new work, maybe to show the changes I'm making, the focus I'm recalibrating. 

ON THE APPEARANCE OF KURT VONNEGUT
IN A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOVIE 

This face that looks like it has covered a lot of ground

Or ground much under it.  This face looks
Like it has ground much and covered much.
This face is a dog’s lapping unconcernedly at water.
This face considered granfalloons and I hear the sirens, I hear
The call to my karass.  It would fit so beautifully next to
Dangerfield’s, with whom he never shares a
Scene, GE PR beside aluminum siding.  Nixon, Hitler, Pol Pot,
They would not fear this face, this sleepy, disheveled
Face with a crazy son and coughing while he’s dying.  I see
Frustration and laughter, anger and resignation, this face
Cracking under the strain of living too long, asking for not much, a glass
Of water, some of my time. 

Of Your Rope
You’ve reached it not
when everything
stops, but
when nothing
is anymore,
when it wraps
around you
like your grandmother
’s afghan but
warmthlessly, no
cold there
either, the eyelets
she embroidered
staring like
her own dead eyes. 
How will you know? 
The end will
be a taunt, a bolt
that stares
up from
the floor
uselessly
beside the engine. 

 

SUZI QUATRO IN SAN REMO
I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an
            ice pick jabbed over and over
                        into my hippocampus, she’s
burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,
            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.
                        Years later latex pants make
sausages of her legs.  She’s
            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now
                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,
duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops
            are probably more familiar with English
                        than he is.  But
there she is, little girl face, this voice that can
            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,
                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.
Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 
I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite
in, zip up that latex.

 

The Dead Girls Club 

It’d be nice if ghosts filed in,

like the future kings in MacBeth,

stately, decorous, in order.  But they don’t.

They enter like students, noisily, banging desks, dropping bags,

full of outside life.  And they don’t take their places

either, whether you’ve set them up in assigned places

or all in chairs facing one way but arrange

the room to fit around them, a corner here

to accentuate The Cutter’s curls.  A window there

so The Junkie can stare out when she gets bored.

The Crazy One makes the walls, the furniture, the others ricochet around her, mouth

open for an occasional comment or a shriek.  But that’s the thing.

They never utter a word, or none you hear.  Except for their entrances, ghosts are silent.

Except The Silent One on the floor, now spread eagled, now fetal,

mewling like a hungry kitten.  They’ve come

with the others—The Successful One,

The Trust Fund Punk, The Cold-Handed Sculptor, The Big Mother

(Big Grandmother now!), The Really

Crazy One you never fully see, the Others you don’t have names for—to do what?  Serenade you? 

You’ll never know.  They come, they shuffle around

the room, themselves.  One by one, softly,

one by one they leave you.

Ghosts always eventually leave you.

What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

"By Way of Introduction"

I've wanted to note what has been going on in the world for quite some time but find myself in the position of someone trying to write history as it's happening, trying to write about the events as if they've ended only to discover a new ingot of information that explains or confuses the situation further. Finally, I've decided the medium I need to use is poetry. 

I used to write a lot of poetry and for a long time. It's hard to say I gave it up; rather that I found prose was better for what I was writing. I'm returning to verse because it's the vehicle in which I can identify a moment. 

For my inspiration, I am looking to the resistance poets of many periods. But my model is Russian poet Anna Akmatova, specifically "By Way of Introduction."

In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent

seventeen months in the prison lines at Leningrad.

Once, someone recognized me. Then a 

woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold,

who had of course never heard of me, woke up from

the stupor that enveloped us, and asked me, whis-

pering in my ear (for we only spoke in whispers):

"Could you describe this?"

I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile glided over what was

once her face.