My (metrical) Misogyny

Horace, in his strangely Aristotelian (yet not) letter to the Pisoes on the art of poetry, wraps things up by saying that poets are basically nuts. He weaves a yarn of a fictitious poet who wants to throw himself into a well all the while wondering, "should I intervene? Should I deprive him of a remarkable death?" The question just hangs there as he immediately shifts to the apocryphal story of how the Sicilian poet Empedocles threw himself into an erupting volcano. The moral of this lengthy diatribe?

quem vero arripuit, tenet occiditque legendo,
non missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirudo.

whom he (the poet) grabs, he holds and drags down with reading,
a leech that, if not filled with blood, won't let go.

A current in lyric poetry that always seems to go blissfully unnoticed is the violence poets attend to their own writing. Let's not forget, Horace himself is a poet, so what does it mean that his final say on his own profession is that poetry turns you into a kind of parasitically cruel lunatic? And he's not the only one. I'm reminded of Brecht's poem on the muses where he envisions them as chorus girls who basically become sexually aroused (well, it's a pun actually, as Scham in German can mean both "shame" and "vagina") as they are beaten into shape by the director. Even Verlaine in his "Art poetique":

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!

Grab Eloquence and snap his neck!

Horace, who, as far as I know, has written the longest explication of how poets go crazy, never actually gets into why they lose their marbles. Why is this lunacy projected back onto their art as extreme violence? This is not a matter of little concern for me; just this morning I found myself perfectly satisfied with having written

to beat it out with verse the punching bag
unable to complain about the bruises,
to ignore Muses more concerned with weight
loss than flesh far too desiccant to weep.

I think he provides a clue in the form of that little gerund at the end of the penultimate line: legendo. The poet doesn't drag his reader down by writing but by reading. The poet is so obsessed with his own interiority, with his own poetic vision, he becomes entirely paranoid of what a reader might do. He latches on, sucks him dry, beats him to a pulp, desperately hoping to enslave his perceptions. To no avail. The poet is almost justified in his madness, because lyric readers are generally the ones to rub against the grain, to say back to the poet, whose morbid immortality has been assured by the fact of being read over and over, "no, that's not what you meant. This is what you mean, and there's nothing you can say or do about it."

Another Water Philosophy

I decided as a sort of counterpoint to my previous, more academicky consideration of Lao Zi, I'd submit this sonnet as well, as not merely a poetic reading of the water philosophy but a rendering in poetry. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by the following, but I guess poetry is better (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) when its intentions are neither obvious nor clear. Another sonnet:

I found myself drowning in a lake and,
unable to dive in and commit the daring
rescue, began to drink the lake dry—

enough to survive, at least. I found that
despite my thirst and the parching grip of
the hot sun, I couldn’t stop my drowning.

I bruised my arms in mauves whipping the water
into a foaming frenzy that beasts and seaweed
watched as it fled in terror from my hands;

but with time and sunshine my eyes and white foam
dissolved back into the ripples where
the white light was tickled into sparkling.

and so I asked the lake to comfort me
as it laid me down gently on the surface.

Just to add something, I wrote this today, in one go, as I usually do. The order of composition was basically the first two strophes, the last couplet, then the rest of the middle, so if it seems a bit wonky (and on a second read it does sound a bit clumsy), that may be why. I still think the (non-) point is sound, though.

EDIT: The following feels a little less wonky to me. I also removed some of the words that were obviously superfluous.

I found myself drowning in a lake when,
unable to dive in and commit the daring
rescue, I began to drink the lake dry—

enough to survive, at least. I found that
despite my thirst for the parching grip of
the hot sun, I couldn’t stop my drowning:

I’d bruised my arms in mauves whipping the water
into a foaming frenzy that beasts and seaweed
watched as it fled in terror from my hands;

but in time that desperate white foam
would dissolve back into the ripples where
the white light was tickled into sparkling.

so, I asked the lake to comfort me
as it laid me down gently on the surface.

With a Line and an Idea

I always begin to write from a bifurcated place; I begin, generally, both with an idea and a line, that is something to say and something said. While watching a documentary on the LDS church, whose founder, Joseph Smith, strikes me as one of the world’s truly wacky translators, I began to think about immortality, when a line (and a half) came to me.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed

Immortality seems to me to be one of the truly horrific things that could befall a person; I’m not really a suicidal person—I do not ever want to die—but I think that what I do is meaningless if it doesn’t end. I would have no sense of urgency, because immortality means I will exhaust the possibilities of my existence, making those possibilities meaningless. Nothing is of greater or lesser value, because, inevitably, if only out of sheer boredom, I will accomplish everything.

I felt the beginning of another sonnet, a form whose outline I’ve been pushing of late, I felt the need to add, to expand this growing, inexplicable disdain for the eternal. So I wrote

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed between the dirt
and afterlife

at which point I stopped, because I realized that what had begun as a moment of mourning for what will become of me physically, that at the moment of the dissolution of my will, the constituent pieces of my body will be passed about, never knowing the relief of simply being allowed to rest, to end. To be honest, the obvious spiritual component had never occurred to me. Do I also mourn for the immortality of my soul? Am I the only one to mourn, because it would bring such pleasure to those who love me [sic] to know that I have not entirely ended? I found out tonight that Mormons believe in and actively practice baptism of the dead. The pure sense of revulsion I felt as a Jewish man described the day he found out his brother, whom he had watched die in a concentration camp, had been baptized posthumously by the LDS church inspired in me a kind of hatred I don’t normally feel. I understood why Augustine was such a proponent of the freedom of the human will, because I saw how disgusting it would be to have one’s salvation, no matter how beneficent, imposed.

I understand now, that my line (and a half) had a kind of will of its own, that I ought not have tried to tack on a sonnet. I should have had the courage to let it end where it did, and say what it said.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed

So Much for Sameness

It's odd how I can manage to write something with me own noodle that I acknowledge as good and yet still do not like. Case in point is my sonnet from yesterday. Sonnets, something with which I'm very familiar in both my critical and writing practice, come easy to me; I generally feel quite comfortable playing around in their formal constraints. So, I've found myself writing sonnets of late, if only to take my mind off Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger, both of whom, let's admit, can be a real downer in his/her own way.

The first two lines I'm okay with:

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;

Where it becomes problematic for me is in the third line, where, in an attempt to form a parallel of the concrete to the abstract, I reuse the phrase "I have," except this time in a much more literal sense. N.B. that the line originally read

I have a wet pile of pebbles in hand

but upon revision reads

I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles

Neither is really ideal, as far as I'm concerned. The former is vocally smoother, but I like the way the phrase "hand full" deconstructs the idea behind "handful," though I'm not sure the latter noun is evoked in the way I intend. Also, the clumsiness of the chosen line does quite a disservice to my intended parallel, making it seem as if it weren't one at all. The parallel is needed, I think, to give the false expectation that this sonnet will progress in a very formulaic fashion: quatrain-quatrain-quatrain-couplet. If that sense persists, then the enjambment in the 5th line will throw the reader off a bit, preparing her for the long, choking sentence to follow. All of this is tidied up with a nice regular quatrain, a return to normalcy that doesn't quite fit.

all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

I see this sonnet as indicative, whatever its flaws, of how I used to write, say, before I came to graduate school, when generally speaking, I was focused on trying to take complex ideas and distill them into very simple terms. Compare this with what I wrote the day before that, to my mind, says something similar in an infinitely more obtuse way.

finally, something of length to make the long worthwhile

three feet and five and two add up to ten,
but so do six and four. fourteen, un-eunuch
by his manhood, would take four again
a pedophile by his teen age only
interested in eights and six and sometimes
a twat of four and four and four and two.

some times are correct, measured by measure
of sounds singing the outer walls to dust.

this city had the highest walls, the longest
routes to lovers peared and apple bottomed
markets and mark thats and mark this: one day
this all will be a desert to the sight
where Egypt fell – in love with its own paper
maché cones stoned the deafened silence.

This one has faults of its own, namely the way in which the last six lines just kind of hang there, but despite it not being better--in fact, I'm convinced it's worse--I still like it more.

One Day's Reading

I started out by writing a lot of fluff, when all I really wanted was to post the following, so here it is, sans fluff.

I have the habit of calling my brain a mind
as I don’t know the meaning of either word;
I have in my hand a hand full of pebbles
whose jagged sins were washed away in
the river. I mistake them for little
minds raining brains on the wet pavement,
while other brains on legs and hands pass
mistaking me and my minds for offerings
to deities the concrete buried when
the world was made anew in visions of steel.
all my smooth thoughts do is dirty
the ground until some kind stranger
clears them away, leaving me the duty
to bury the ground again until I die.

Of Another Sameness

When I say everything is the same here in the States, I mean in an entirely disconcerting way. You'd expect that given a certain amount of time away from something that it would change, if only in marginally perceptible ways. You'd perhaps not expect but certainly not be surprised by, say, the Gimlet's having shed the sum total of a human being in one year of absence. But when I returned to this land, for good, as they no doubt say with more than a little irony, all the little things that should reasonably have changed, have not. The dollar has inflated with frightening regularity, yet the cost of daily goods and services has not appreciably increased to coincide. Sure, people bitch about gas prices, but they are still within the limits of fluctuation from before I left. Food costs are roughly the same, and an American media, the Finest Free Press in the Free World, continues to balk at a glut of meaningless information they refuse to digest before their next deadline.

So, I find comfort when something that really has stayed the same suddenly becomes something else to me. I take comfort in the fact I largely manufacture my own truth and reality, because, well, I'm not an analytical philosopher. I probably could have been one, could have learned the ropes of their subsistence, could have been a damn good one, but I'd likely have even less hair up top than I do now. With this in mind, I took another look at this poem I recently wrote, one of the incomprehensibles.

an ode on a CD cover of a woman named Apple

WHAT I WANTED from you was an essay
on matter of fact, I would like to stay, hearing
your ear over cocaine and a beer-stained
mustache—I listened—four hours—two—the
dull pain of the evening silences, whose lenses
I WOULD SEDUCE, they’d click and fall in love
with the suicides treating lovered wounds
with pesticides inside the bottom left cabinet,
behind the Drano. Oh, black and or white, you
simple woman, death’s first maiden of songing
the life from the evening silences we made
love to by candle-blight, oh lips too tight to
kiss too slit to miss, I’d heal the wound in your
face two face unloved each other we last.

I'm a fan of free writing; it's one of those lame MFA tricks I think actually does help you distill your thoughts into something coherent, but only if you go back and read it. I hate how the general tack with free writing is that it is a simple mechanism that will lead you into coherence, narrative, and other such boring things. On a read, not a write/read, I was stopped up by that first line and what it said back to me: I'd been plowing through all this lyric material, hoping that something would stand out as The Perfect Essay of the Marriage of Form and Thought, and I was having trouble just letting songs be songs; what I wanted from them was that perfect dictum that would sum up everything I want to say about poetry, so I could go home and read a trashy sci-fi novel. Then I noticed what I had capitalized (I'm still not sure why I did that) and made the two statements into one: what I wanted I would seduce. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some Neo-Freudian claiming my subconscious will speaks in the poem. I make meaning, and what I find here now is a co-incidence of me reading a fragment of myself.

I come upon a thorough piece of gibberish like "death's first maiden of songing" and see how seduced I am by the desire to read into its overwrought layers of verbosity. I seek out those moments in texts, most likely perfectly benign, that are a trap laid for the overzealous; which is a long-winded way of saying I do not merely overdo it, I want to overdo it. I yearn to make too much of things.

I see in my own writing an unsettling mix of hope and fear, rather my hope and fear are the same thing, but I don't have a word for that. I should probably make one up. When I see myself having written, "face two face unloved each other we last," I get goose bumps, not because I'm in awe of my own verbal judo but because it scares me that I could say something like that. Unloved, the two faces (it doesn't matter what they represent, as they only represent what I tell them to) wear each other out. Last is not a transitive verb, but by force of syntax I've made it one. The two faces, opposed, endure each other, which is really two statements: the easier, "I suffer what I've already said," the harder, "what I've already said suffers what will become of me." This is one of the lessons,then, I think, of Heidegger's life.

To four the Road

Yes, back, here--I'm not sure what else to say. It's the same, frighteningly the same. It's so damn same it makes your eyes bleed would if you were stabbing them. Another bit of light, occasional verse:

much ado about a park bench and Jane Austen

I’d taken her more serious if series
of events as sense and dimes rhyme
and ice on the limestone huts we
what for tat and tits too fit to stare
I hold her

two bold and the underlines waiting
out subway car bars made of cages
to stage or not to page my dealer to
heal the line in my cracks about
who held her

welder sparking white whines who
despite the cries of the weather bats
had on sunnier haze made plays
for the suburbans thumping what
will hold her

hand me down clowns’ balloons
big-eyed toons a-makin whoopee
cushions sing the bluebells wells
of sonnets and planetary bonnets
to hold her

back home when the South rises
WE BEAT IT DOWN
with doughy will it goes on risin’
WE BEAT IT DOWN


This is, I suppose, what my brain looks like on sleeplessness and Heidegger. While in content it is largely incomprehensible, it does, as I like it to, display certain obvious formal characteristics. I had the idea of setting down a few verses and a chorus while also trying to make use of a few hiphop tricks that I am obviously not adept at. It became obvious in writing this that my strengths lie in the long phrase and not in the quick turns that someone like Del the Funkee Homosapien might employ. And then,

an ode on a CD cover of a woman named Apple

WHAT I WANTED from you was an essay
on matter of fact, I would like to stay, hearing
your ear over cocaine and a beer-stained
mustache—I listened—four hours—two—the
dull pain of the evening silences, whose lenses
I WOULD SEDUCE, they’d click and fall in love
with suicides treating lovered wounds
with pesticides inside the bottom left cabinet,
behind the Drano. Oh, black and or white, you
simple woman, death’s first maiden of songing
the life from the evening silences we made
love to by candle-blight, oh lips too tight to
kiss too slit to miss, I’d heal the wound in your
face two face unloved each other we last.

It'd be easy to read Fiona Apple into that title, but in fact I had in mind a particular Shiina Ringo album whose intricate folds rival many a state map. It's a sonnet, sort of, roughly in three parts. There's no rhyme [sic] or reason to the tripartite division, that's just the way it worked out.

I'll try to have something more insightful to say in the future, but for now, this is all I got.