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Mon - July 9, 2007How To Get Through LifeI have no idea why I hadn't already
posted this poem on this blog devoted to sweetness and light. I was trying to
link to it on a forum, and I couldn't find
it.
I originally finished it in 1971 while at Arkansas in a flurry of activity that produced several hundred poems, two novels, and thousands of pages of notes, most of which I have burned. I think I began the first draft in 1967 when my old man was getting screwed by his employer in a way that 26 years of seniority eventually translated into $30 a month in retirement, but it wasn't until I met Bruce Edward Taylor, who could get really intense playing board games, and even more intense if you simply gave up, conceded, and admitted you'd rather get drunk and stoned than waste time staying sober enough to act as if you gave a fuck, that I finally felt I had a reason to finish it. By then, my old man had begun almost to embrace my cynicism, although our relationship was thoroughly doomed and would not be renewed until I pulled the plug on him in Virginia. So it goes. Everything in life is a game, and like life, most of the games mean nothing. Gordon Osing liked the refrain, understanding the obviousness of what playing ball means. I think this poem is included in Stinking and Full of Eels, Some Accident Between the Grass and My Feet, and Disturbances. It is NOT included in Contemporary Poets in America, which was edited by Miller Williams' (you know, Cindy's dad, who read at Slick Willie's inauguration), although, to be fair, none of my poetry is included in that anthology. I guess this is because I never graduated from Arkansas with an M.F.A. and published a book of poems by a reputable publisher. I don't think so. Miller was always a lying sack of shit. I'm sure you didn't see it here first. And if you did, that's your problem, pissant. Posted at 06:00 PM Imagine it all
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Wed - April 27, 2005That There Is No JusticeI never went to Vietnam. I just lost
friends there and I spent some time with the flotsam of that war of the nation
of miserable fucks at the specialized treatment center in Ft. Gordon, GA. This
poem was inspired by two of the corpsmen I met there. They figure in several of
my better poems about the meaninglessness of contemporary
existence.
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Mon - December 13, 2004BonesI should have been an archeologist. It
wouldn't have made my life any less meaningful, but it would have given me a
better opportunity to live a comfortable life without having to open my mouth in
ugly ways to injure the self-sacrificing purveyors of poopadoodle who still
haven't figured out a way to shut me up short of putting a bullet between my
eyes. I use an old stoogist technique of putting my hand in front of my nose to
keep the clowns from poking my eyes, and apparently they haven't yet figured out
how to blast right through that silly hand.
Posted at 04:31 PM Imagine it all
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Sun - December 12, 2004Against All ProbabilityLanguage is usually born from
boredom. This is a great little poem for reasons I will never divulge. Whenever
you read this poem, you create God. Period.
Posted at 04:25 PM Imagine it all
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Sat - December 11, 2004After All I Have WaitedI don't know if I wrote this poem before
or after I met Howard Nemerov, who was among the best people I bumped into
during three at Arkansas. I met Hecht, Kumin, Dugan, a couple of different Yates
dudes, and a few other visiting writers, and I avoided Harrison, Williams, and
Whitehead who ran the slave ship, but the main stuff I carried away from
Fayetteville was the knowledge that life is more than simply dying alone. It
means living alone as well. I really liked
The Blue
Swallows, which I had an
autographed copy of and leant to friends and never saw again. Now I give
everything away. You can't trust anyone, and life ends stupidly day in and day
out.
Another curious tidbit. At the time I wrote this poem, only Arkansas and Clemson had active senior walks. I assume my name is embedded in the dumb concrete on both campuses, although I've never gone back to check. Posted at 04:06 PM Imagine it all
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Wed - December 1, 2004Another ManiacIt's the little things that set people
off. Remember Homer in Day of
the Locusts by Nathaniel West? It
doesn't take much to get the infernal machine spewing out chunks of chopped up
asshole, and I always like getting deep inside the place where the real lunacy
comes from. You know, where the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil takes root and procreates? The threat of mayhem is to me far preferable to
the actual bloody testosterone engorged violence known as foreign policy or
domestic discourse. Also, I'm not a breeder, and I have little use for those who
are.
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Wed - November 17, 2004How Long Have I Got HereI started a screenplay based on
this poem, if there are any producers interested in developing the property.
It's called The Second
Coming. Cute,
huh?
Posted at 06:04 PM Imagine it all
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DUKING IT OUTThis poem contains the following inputs:
When I was first introduced about 40 years ago to my father-in-law (now deceased), I stuck out my hand to shake his, which he put in his pocket. He hated my hair, my attitude, my communist leanings, and the fact that I was born Italian and raised a Catholic. Several years later, we fished together in a 9' dingy at Lake Keowee-Toxaway, a man-made containment pool built to flood the Duke-Oconee reactor if and when they need to scram the thing. We had about 2" of freeboard on the boat that day, no life jackets, and if we'd argued and swamped the boat, we would have both drowned. I brought this up, laughing, and for the first time I saw some humanity in his eyes. Sure, it was fear, but hell, fear is something where there was nothing before. King's Mountain was the site of something not nearly so horrific as the battle of Chalons-sur-Marne, but it did have an impressive number of wounded victims who actually drowned in the blood pond that formed there. And back when I started writing good poetry, meaning poetry that I could actually hear someone saying, one of the questions I was invariably asked by classmates and teachers was why the hell did I write about the things I write about, and I'd gotten tired of the question. Posted at 04:58 PM Imagine it all
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GETTING BYBy now, everyone has seen
Jaws,
right? This poem was inspired in part by some of the promotional material that
the studio sent out in the press kits for the first theatrical release. John
DelVecchio was working at the new theater up near 123 in Clemson and gave me the
promo package. He also gave me one of the original numbered posters from the
first run of One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest after it won all the
awards. I still have it, and I'm still fighting against Big Nurse Ratched who is
currently occupying the body of Secretary of Misstatement Condomsqueezer
Rice.
But this poem is actually about the heroism displayed at Tianammen Square. Posted at 04:48 PM Imagine it all
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Tue - November 16, 2004THE PRICE OF COFFEEAnother silly prose poem about
expectations and convention. It doesn't mean anything. Except that I really like
Ezra Pound.
Posted at 07:51 PM Imagine it all
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NIGHTWhen I was drinking really heavy I would
have nightly near-death experiences. My heart would race faster and faster, and
I would feel this wonderful pain that seemed so close to ending that I could
almost shake hands with it. It's the one thing I really miss about terminal
alcoholism. Everyone should face that demon and get beat by it. It's the closest
I've ever come to religion. That's why I remain a
pataphysician.
Posted at 07:41 PM Imagine it all
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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR DISTURBANCESThis is the actual order in which the poems are
presented, not the order in which I added them to the blog. In fact, not all the
poems in this TOC are actually in this category, if I've already added them to
another category. As I've been putting these things together, I've seen
sometimes significant changes between one version of a poem in one collection
and in another. At some point I might add the various versions to the
appropriate categories, but I'm not promising anything. I'm geting tired of
retyping this shit, and paper is made to start
fires.
If you're interested in reading them in order without buying a copy, you can use the FreeFind function to find them. If there's something you're looking for and I haven't posted it yet, send me e-mail or post a comment, and I'll see what I can do.. The book is still available directly from BSU. You can also buy it through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but it's special order there. I'm sure BSU will make better use of any money than the retailers will, and if you order from them, maybe it will go into another printing, in which case I might actually see some money from the book, although I'm not going to go Terri Schiavo worrying about it. Posted at 07:39 PM Imagine it all
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DREAMING THE SUISLAWI also like some Dylan Thomas,
particularly the Refusal to
Mourn. This is a Dylan Thomas kind
of poem with those odd vowel shifts that move the voice around your upper body
to make the sounds. In the book, Tom also added an note from a letter I wrote to
explain something about it, but I can't remember what, except maybe to
distinguish the misspelling from my usual
sloppiness.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Dreaming the Suislaw has an originally unintentional misspelling of the river's name. On the south central Oregon coast there is a river and national forest called the Siuslaw, and I have no idea how the word is pronounced, but the word I heard in my head was pronounced Sooslaw, so I decided to stick with the misspelling, especially because the poem is not about a particular river, but the state of mind of being part of the river. Posted at 05:55 PM Imagine it all
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Sun - November 14, 2004PURGEBuddy Dodd was my favorite handball
buddy. He was a lefty, like me. When the two of us paired against the normal
fucks at Steinway Park (and sometimes on 21st or 48th) we were damn near
unbeatable. Buddy was one of three classmates I lost on a hill in Vietnam one
day while I was still thinking I could return to New York and live like a
regular person. It turns out I was never meant to be a regular person. How could
I be uncommon and regular at the same time? I've never been regular, even when
drinking heavily, although the drinking did
help.
Spearman was one of several suicides I drank with at Arkansas, the most famous of whom was Frank Stanford. I think Spearman was the most beautiful suicide I ever got close to, although Frank shooting himself three times in the chest was pretty fucking committed. Har-de-har. Posted at 07:49 PM Imagine it all
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WHAT YOU HAVE DONEThis poem is about Beirut. I have never
been there. I never want to go there.
Posted at 07:44 PM Imagine it all
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WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENTThis is among the most positive of poems
I have ever written. I recite it silently every now and then to remind myself
why I go on.
Posted at 07:40 PM Imagine it all
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I READ ONCE THATThe title is actually the first line of
this poem, so ignore this drivel I'm typing here. I can't remember who actually
wrote the first two lines of this poem, but John Norton showed me the poem in
which they were used and I appropriated them. The kitten I mention was one of
Crescent B. DeNulle's unfortunate litters. She had two before we sterilized her,
and only one of her offspring survived, Peabody D. Bones, only to be eaten by a
coyote. Yasser Arafat just died, a full 20 years after I finished this poem.
People are so fucking useless. Isn't life grand?
Posted at 05:02 PM Imagine it all
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MILITARY TIMEI have no idea what this poem is about.
It seems a lot more positive than I feel on most days. I wrote it when I was
working for a guy who was retired military, and I was pointing out Y2K problems
with tax foreclosure code I was at least partially responsible for, although I
hadn't written any of it, nor had I set up the database that didn't allow for
more than 2 digit year. The reason life is so fucked up, it seems to me, is that
no one is particularly concerned about the cosmic consequences of really mundane
decisions.
The truth is I have no fucking idea what anything means. I suspect neither do you. If I'm wrong, point me to where the real ground zero is. I've had enough of this Godot bullshit. Posted at 05:01 PM Imagine it all
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MISSING DEATH ON HOLTZCLAW'S PONDI really like this poem. I made it all
up, except for the shape that formed beneath the boat my father and I fished
from at Cos Cob, which I've written about several times, with so-so success.
The idea of body frozen in the ice tripping a skater is just the kind of shit I like to think about. It doesn't mean anything. If there really was a body frozen on the surface of the pond, it might have be subject for a real poem by a real poet who could appreciate the ironies and mythological qualities of such juxtapositions. Me? I was thinking of three small holes I saw on a body of someone I knew. None of it makes a bit of difference. Posted at 04:50 PM Imagine it all
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ALONG THE WAY TO WHEN WE DIEDAnother poem about fishing and
death. What else is there?
Posted at 04:29 PM Imagine it all
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Wed - September 1, 2004Why Kafka Was RightThis
is really a nifty little prose poem that works on several levels. I really
enjoyed the month I worked on it, ripping it bit by bit from various
translator's efforts to allow me to understand Henri Michaux. I can only speak,
read, and write English, and none of the really highbrow stuff that will last,
although
Disturbances
was printed on acid free paper and should last at least as long as Shakespeare's
shit once I've finally dreamed on the
bomb.
In these halcyon days of the never-ending reelection campaign war on reason, I find this poem particularly comforting. I believe it was inspired originally by some newsreel footage of a man with a loaf of bread attempting to cross a street while some assholes were involved in a political dispute. I imagined this man was no more intelligent than the people engaged in the exchange of projectiles that killed him. I imagine that about everyone. Posted at 08:47 PM Imagine it all
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Fri - July 2, 2004Disturbances is still available from AhsahtaPublished in 1990, it was selected by Tom
Trusky, to whom I was unduly rude at one point or another. Oops. I mean
AND
another. Like all my books, it was dedicated to Jean. A funny aside to this
collection. So far as I can tell it was the first in the Boise State Western
Poets Series to be printed on acid free paper. I can only assume this was done
to try to neutralize the language printed upon the pages.
Posted at 05:53 PM Imagine it all
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Total entries in this category: Published On: May 05, 2008 10:15 AM |
