Tag: Discuss

Packsaddle Off

what is this sound sprinkling glow
yellow doilies weaving thru blue
fescue glass chandelier worm atrium
air city surf gas soup & jazz salad

sitting under dwarf apple waiting,
waiting, wanting nothing save
green this wait as Thoreau’s
Wangle Dangle backyard rhetoric

drinking can of Okanagan
Spring: “natural, simple, & pure”
pale ale & all bronze
gone Henry’s lawn

this dog’s lair
cut once a year
then go to seed
rampant & wild
tainted ear

so much depends upon so little
take this green garden wagon
for example
go on, take it, really take it
grab the handle and pull
you’ll see the wagon is full
of ripe red tomatoes
kids’ toys
bucket of finished garlic
bowl of basil & cilantro
some zinnias to dry inside

there’s no one in that pink
ceramic bird house hanging
from the golden rain
tree imagine living
there your nest
waiting for your mate
come home yr turn
go to store & supper

you call the kids
Caw! Caw!
& they call back
Not Yet! Not Yet!
Summer! Summer!

a cloud like a clown down
pillow on clean blue sheet
perhaps it will drop a load
somewhere near soon &
sweep weep sleep deep

July 13, 2015
A Fourth of a Poem

All around us,
the plants whisper
in dry brittle voices,
“water us, water us.”

Sotto voce,
there is no water,
and what falls is not wet
or gentle,

but drops of chthonic fireworks,
urban, rural, coastal infernos.
The plants dig and pray to Hades,
and cooler there

than here in this air.

July 4, 2015
Notes on Youssef Rakha’s “The Crocodiles”
1. Instead of page numbers, “The Crocodiles,” a novel by the Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, is marked by 405 numbered, block paragraphs, the whole symmetrically framed by references to Allen Ginsberg, the US Beat poet, to his “The Lion for Real,” signed “Paris, March, 1958.”
1. Opening Rakha’s book, one finds a hand drawn map labeled “The Crocodiles’ Cairo,” which includes a drawing of the head of a lion, which might somewhat resemble, in caricature, the photo portrait of Youssef Rakha that appears on the inside back cover of the book, at least the seemingly ironic smile of both suggests they know something one or the other or the reader may not.
1. Napoleon’s March to Moscow, 1812: Description. Lineal novel. Variables. How to tell the story? What happened along the way, and back? They were marching through snow, in below freezing temperatures, and you want to know the exact temperature at daily geographical interval locations? Body counts alone won’t tell the story. How to present data and information? Multivariate analysis in a single photograph. How to revision history? On the way back, there were no ramparts, just fields of snow and a sea of time. Napoleon may well have dreamed of warmer days, when he lived in Egypt, of unlocking a language, and of a code that would provide protection for all against the cold. A wise leader rules with allowances, and instead of burning books, gets everyone reading.
1. In Astra Taylor’s “Examined Life,” Michael Hardt sets out in a rowboat in a privileged pond to argue the meaning of revolution. What does it mean to make revolution? What is the relationship between freezing temperatures, direction, and a line of march that grows thinner with each step each man takes? “Carte Figurative.” Data flow, “one ruling elite replaced with another” (Hardt), credits and discredits following, merits and demerits, kudos and kicks upside the head. Note: Hardt rows backwards – he can’t see where he’s going – at one point “…running aground, shipwrecked.” Figurative language, the hyperbole of revolution.
1. “Carte Figurative.” Figurative language. Not to be taken literally. And don’t confuse Minard the author (cartographer) with Napoleon the character. Regression analysis becomes necessary. What is the relationship between the author and the narrator? Perhaps none, except that one sees what the other does not. Irony. “The Crocodiles” is a figurative map of multiple variables that attempts a regression analysis to explain past events and predict future probabilities. Note that Rakha is also journalist and photographer; each paragraph of the novel may be taken as a still photograph, a variable, part of a portfolio.
1. “On the Road” with Kerouac (para. 248) and Bonaparte. My kingdom for a 1949 Pontiac Chieftain. Interactive notes: what was the cost of a 1949 Hudson new using the value of today’s poem to that of a muscle car driven by a youthful single male in 1964? Sal knew to take a southern route on his winter trip: The novel as map of a trip.
1. Custom as costume. Napoleon as grammarian, his Code a multivariate blending of revolution, revelation, and reform. The novel as procedure that everyone can follow, the interaction of nouns with verbs. Custom as vernacular, empire as formal attire. Due process as drug.
1. The Beatnik as attitude, beatitude. Jazz as revolution, the novel of improvisation. Notes out of context. Bonaparte’s men dropping (like) seeds (para. 256). Napoleon as lion.
1. At times, reading “The Crocodiles” is like watching a foreign film with subtitles, because while all the common characteristics of the novel are included (plot; narration; characters – major, minor, dynamic, static, protagonist, antagonist, foil; dialog – though sparse, and blended with the prose, the paragraphs all block formatted; setting – places, times, seasons, dwellings, streets; diction that creates style; irony, satire, and sarcasm), something strange appears, and that strangeness is what the Crocodiles’ group calls poetry: “self-sufficiency…desire…intention” (para. 316).
1. Like Minard’s “Carte Figurative” of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia (1812-1813), Rakha’s “The Crocodiles” is a figurative coming of age graphic that plots multiple comings and ages (decades, variables) packed into a single view.
1. The juxtapositions of disparate subjects and actions (of real Lions with Visions of Lions; of Beats with Crocodiles; of poetry with prose; of people with bridges – para. 80) connote something new, new views: the flower children having dropped their petals now sticks of thorns (“just ask the nearest hippie,” Scalia).
1. Transparency does not necessarily lead to transcendence. Neither honor nor shame stand alone as values, but they are the crossroads at which people gossip, tell stories, barter and eat and drink.
1. Affinities, themes, motifs: the Beats, poetry, revolution, change, maturation, growth, body, sex, predicament, society, margins (paragraphing, units of composition, sentences), ambiguity, protest, independence, exploitation, reflection, writing, file, premature, people, obstacles, brain, chemicals, women, work, matrix, publishing, poverty and ignorance, position in group, generations (lost, beat, hippie, next), translation, drugs (real and imagined), neighbors, values, wants, needs, humor, music, violence, aggression, excuses, decadence, pop culture, misinformation, criticism, destruction, suicide, sacrifice, counter-culture, lion (cat), crocodile, logic, argument, howl, pain, Ginsberg (Howl and Moloch), dissolution, analysis, invasiveness, love, ambition, relationships, disdain, synchronicity, human nature, signifiers.
1. There is something too of the noir to “The Crocodiles,” a mystery, with the narrator, “Gear Knob,” whose nickname suggests some 1950’s hard-boiled detective story character, assuming the role of the detective as corrective if not moral force. But noir is cartoon. Or “The Crocodiles” might have been a graphic novel. Instead, it is a poetic novel that breaks with genre convention and creates formal purpose and revisions value, what people want.
“The Crocodiles,” by Youssef Rakha, 2013. English translation 2014 by Robin Moger, Seven Stories Press, New York, November 2014.
June 30, 2015
Equanimity

When at last after the long ordeal,
betrothed to bed, full of ale and meal,
she knelt and put her face to the must
of the cedar chest red to her touch,

she lifted the lid, its hinges oiled true,
and out came do, I, know, and you.
She reached for forever which broke apart,
and with the letters she sewed her heart

and the lid closed on the squelching words
help, hero, laugh, and sword.
“Why me, Lord?” she asked. “Why pick
me to stick with equanimity? This a trick?”

June 9, 2015

Photograph of Providence Urgent Care Waiting Room at Noon

Waiting room	Center seat	Back to window
Squeeze my fingers	Under a bitter blanket	Opposite counter
Vertigo	Where?	Merry-go-round stops.
Wall clock running backwards	You seem to have crossed some divide, a distance between following expectations and surprising the reference books on shelves marked Must Remain in Reference Room: No Check Outs – For Scholars Only!	Those were the days of craves Dizzy and Monk and Bird ears. We never worried ears, blood pressure, what gave rise to touch, an orange scarf, blue waterfall behind bridge.
Nurse station	The nurse walks you to the scale, weighs you, takes yr blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. “The doctor will be with you shortly to hear yr confession,” and she leaves you alone to study the posters of the cross sectioned body pinned to the wall.	The doctor knocks and comes in dressed in stole and stethoscope, just like on TV. “I only handle venial issues. Only a specialist can give absolution. But what good is freedom that leads to wild thoughts?”
Waiting Room	Families and individuals. Names called. An ambulance arrives. Para-techs wheel in empty stretcher, disappear into sanctuary. A fire truck appears. Six firemen walk through waiting room like a Rubik’s Cube. Two men in Texas gear waltz across the lobby.	A boy plays with the automatic door. His father. His sister figures it out. A yell and a sigh. A woman crumbles at the nurse’s counter, a Beckett ploy that gets her plenty of attention.
Valet Parking	The sign says No Tips. I hand the parking attendant an Ace which he pockets. Good man!	The drive home.
What the Doctor said	She wanted to see my pocket notebook. “I knew you were dizzy as soon as I laid eyes on you sitting out in the lobby taking pictures of the patients, word pictures.”	In the waiting room waiting continues. Kids run around and play games, laughing. A few people look worried. A couple of folks look hurt, or hurting. A father falls asleep.
The Clinic Closes for the Day	A husband weeps.	A mother changes a dirty diaper.

June 7, 2015

Seaweed Cabbage

What was that she said about the skin
on his hands and forearms,
seaweed cabbage
boiling on stove, “That looks bad.”

Blue dark wet orange oil damp oars drift awake
dawn dress coffee smoke brown falls upon brown
slow walk down curved sandy path to the water
empty nets sea grass tired boats in fresh tide wait.

Surf sound spooning shingling
smooth rocks growing on his arms
that opposite real rocks grow larger
with each receding tide.

He thinks about love water
work moon sleepy fog
legislated blather laughter
unrequited smiles.

He’s not an especially proud man
unless provoked unnecessarily.
He has a few books on a shelf
in the kitchen he touches evenings.

He thinks severity and frequency
as all men do capacity purpose
of hymns folk songs and surf music
and silence at the end of the path.

He’s no interests but cars and guitars
stars in her eyes sand on her skin salt hair
gloss on her fingernails white
daisies between her wiggling toes.

Wave after wave forgotten fishes
swim past her hands sleeved
sheathed knives
embraced recorded let go.

At the cannery he never did learn
to stand still that fisherman’s value
he no longer wanted his friend
who now fished a desk in Admin.

The smell of tar and turpentine as he cleaned her feet
shampoo that smelled like bubble gum
steel shavings and lead chips the plumber left behind
carob seeds rotting on fog wet boardwalk.

Ocean fish air and orange crabs on ice at wood wharf stalls
after shave and Brylcreem Saturday Night adjectives
bingo sock hop carnies and a new noun in town
cool morning breeze on an angel’s moonburned skin.

June 4, 2015
This is not an address.

(‘`)
a
d
dress
a peach’s
dappled red
lit dimple dot
if you like green
leaves shading rust
rolling in the other way
round like a fuzzy bulb globe
plan draw lips over the peach skin
and rub speak into ink flesh until every
juice puckers sprinkle. Don’t handle or touch
this stone. Simply lean in and buss a not waltz,
like this, but first, take the pipe out of your mouth.

Why did Rene not close his p’s?

A preference for peaches over pipes as tastes change over time.

June 3, 2015
Seachange

Blue neon pales the alley and nothing
calms the woeful sea if won’t come she
to the window.

No, too drouged to hear.
Her golden green hair billows across
the Motel Fregata bed, and deep her
foghorn bellows mute in pillowed sleep.

So solo out off the beam down to the coaly beach,
flip flop in shallow cool pools, lured by a small moon coin.

Up the beach a fire spits, a bottle breaks, and a guitar flashes.
Over the wooden trestle, a harmonica passes.
The surf hisses yeses as from the rocks a wiggly piss-take.
Boon a mist sleeks in, so tack-back to the warm room.

Seaweed wrapped around orange plastic curlers,
with foam jelled fingers that collect flotsam and jetsam
and want some. Curls taped to cheeks and brow.

She was a beachcomber scavenging in kaleidoscope
curly cuffed bell bottoms, passing
across blond sand dunes
where she learned to stretch and yaw,
surfing loose blousy waves off breezy reaches,
coasting through town down to the beach
on a one speed lazy bicycle, surf mat under arm,
red-orange towel slapping behind, salted hair curling,
tangling kite wagtails, waves gushing the beach,
curling around sandcastles where sand crabs
and children bubble and fizzle in the foam drizzle,
no wonder of the surfer’s troubled faith in waves.

Wet and salty wind full in our wrinkled faces,
we swim out, hold hands through curling waves,
dive, burbling breathless under waves,
fall and turn and spin with the waves,
hear the waxy epizeuxis of waves.

By the coyest hairs we argue, liking to talk
while we surf, something about a tiger shark and riptides,
an illuminated jellyfish, a juicy green sea anemone,
and a Brobdingnagian turtle as old as the ocean.

We lock fingers in curls and pull to the curling top,
your oily fisheyes turned to my qualmy cockeyes.

A swell rises to a wave of oyesses,
we kick and touch and tussle for air,
and the wave breaks into foam and washes us in,
prone in repose in the rushing foam.

May 30, 2015
Micro Poems with Eye Exam
Picnic Technique

Moistly dripping sap
pilly this juicy gusto
pudding wasp crust
paper crisp in cut grass.

Sara Monaurally
```
The staked sapling at the gibbet
```
```
           gallowed
```
```
     silent squirming wail.
```
Fit For a New Hat
1. When you measured my head
2. blue eyes saw yonder
3. sea anemones in tide pools
4. I wanted to hug you but with
5. the magnifying tape around my head
6. ironically did you order
7. the hat anyway?
Flashing Lights and Floaters

So tiny she climbed up through my nose and into my eyes and swam around
in the vitreous liquid, kicking off my retina.

Such a big name for so tiny a doctor.

“The lights are like paramoeciums falling like electric rain drops
white paisley sparkles on a flat black poster board
down always down never up in the far corner
of the right eye,” she said.

“Yes, I see them,” I said. “There goes one now,
like strobes.”

“It is still somewhat ambiguous,” she said.
“Asymmetrical.”
She had an accent to my ear.
“Let me drop in some dye
and have a swim around.”

High up on the top floor a magnificat view of the streaming
river and tiny cars floaters across the gargantruss
ginormous gargling cement girdles of the fat city.
Straight down where they build the barges
always the two blue cranes shifting
imperceptibly
an orange crane I’d never seen there before.

When she photographed my eyes
I saw faces like on the veil of Veronica
but morphing shapes
and a Trinity:
The father seemed bored, the little kid,
annoyed to be kept waiting,
flitted about like a ghost,
and the mother sat quietly slumped
over in a chair, resting, as if
keeping me company while
the dye spread out my eyes
into two flat brown oceans.
May 29, 2015

Kafka Blocs

Methamorphosis		Roger awoke from nagging dreams
to find he’d grown into a whopper,	a hairy human swarmed in vermin.
“Don’t break bad on me,” his mother	yelled at the door. “Bugs don’t dream,	asleep or awake. You’re late for work.”
	But he hardly knew how to work his new	legs and arms. How would he get about
on so few? His hands and fingers he found		fascinating, and he lay in bed studying
their shapes and twists and movement.	His father banged on the door: “Get up!”
He felt his skin – soft! His two eyes saw	only one thing at a time, yet he knew	his skin was covered with insects so
	various how or where was he to begin	eating breakfast? Even the hands (but
he was not quite sure why he called		them hands) on the clock moved like
the arms of a slow moving cockroach,	around and around and up and down.
What seemed absurdly a bad eternity,	(after all why would time break bad?)	three roaches slipped under the rug.
	Roger watched the roaches dissipate,	his body wasted with bedsores, as if
he’d come to the roundabout of a pier.		The Viral
	Dude J. had few followers and those	probably bots, and he rarely if ever
tweeted, so when the POG knocked	on his door to ask about something
gone viral, Dude assumed some hack	had infiltrated his computer system,	spreading multi-vile messages about
him with perhaps a pic in his briefs.		Dude’s habits were simple and hardly
worth the effort of tweets, of looking	words up in a dictionary, as if a dog’s	wag in a side street was any different
	in Tijuana than in Timbuktu or Paris,	Texas, where Dude had often visited,
enjoying an escargot with a Beaujolais,	taking in jazz in the Business Quarter.
None of this of course reached home,	and Dude’s annual review relied solely	on ratios of quotas to sales, of clicks
that stuck to worrisome dead links.		The Condo
	Outside beneath the colossal condo	K. camped with the peasants just in
from working the streets with their	signs but he was in no mood for noir
poetry. He curled up on the margin	of a broad sidewalk away from the	bird stoppers placed all around the
condo and out of earshot from the		sounds also designed to discourage
one from coming too close because	the spacious steel walls were warm	to the touch like a rubber hot water
	bottle his mother used to sleep with	after his father left them in the cold
house to go work a shift in the town	factory owned by the rich Mr. Rook.
In the morning there was hot coffee	and a young woman recruiting men	to join her crew of window washers
and dressed and harnessed K. arose.

May 14, 2015

Back Story Folk Guitar

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This Yamaha Red Label FG-180 guitar was probably built in 1969. The woman in the guitar store next to the Loyola Theatre in Westchester said Jimmy Webb had been in the week before and picked up this very Yamaha and played a few chords. She couldn’t believe I’d never heard of Jimmy Webb. It was March, 1970, and I’d just returned from active duty in Forts Bliss and Huachuca. Having talked to some other guitarists, I already knew the FG-180 was the guitar I wanted for the money I had, factory made in Japan, so inexpensive, but playable, reliable, and sound worthy. The guitar, case included, cost $100, a Martin dreadnought knockoff, no extra charge for the Jimmy Webb back story.

A back story is a forward. The forward is not a trailer, nor is it an abstract. The back story never spoils. It’s an appetizer. The back story, moving forward, provides the predicament that explains the current situation. Without a back story, new episodes drift aimlessly and meaninglessly, random dead links. The back story deflates absurdity and fills the reader with hope. The back story is a proposal, a hypothesis, an argument.

My first guitar was a hand-me-down from a neighbor friend, but its neck was broken by an early girlfriend jumping off the top bunk. I then purchased for $25 from an ad in the South Bay Daily Breeze newspaper, a nylon string, plywood top Orlando.

What is the relationship between physicists’ string theories and guitar? The on-line forums for both are full of confusing, contradictory claims, but full of back stories. A guitar often comes with a back story. Several guitar cases were recently spotted for sale in thrift shops, but the guitars were long gone. We might have some idea the age of the universe, but is it old or young, and what does it matter? The Ventura guitar case the guitar shop offered to throw in today shows the wear and tear of travel in a deuce and a half, to Fort Liggett and Camp Roberts and Camp Pendleton, and later trips to gold rush country and various ocean beaches, and not a few years sleeping in a dank basement while the guitar enjoyed an open stand in the living room.

This FG-180 has a spruce, two-piece solid top, mahogany sides, and a two-piece mahogany back. The neck is a thick bar of nato of one piece with the head. The fretboard is one quarter inch thick rosewood. The Yamaha link (above) says the backs were three-piece, but the top and back of this one are both two-piece, book matched. The bridge is rosewood. The FG stands for folk guitar. This one has a thin crack in the back of the head, at the top of the neck.

The top under the bridge has lifted some, and the head crack is a bit worrisome; light or extra-light strings will reduce tension. The FG-180 is now set up with D’Addario XL Chromes, flat wound, jazz light gauge, electric guitar strings. The electric strings when played acoustically don’t produce as loud or deep or full a sound as acoustic strings, but they pop, ping, and twang, “like a steel rail humming” (Pete Seeger, “Hobo’s Lullaby”), and if you do want to plug the guitar into an amplifier, use an old fashion, Dean Markley sound hole fitted pickup.

In Astra Taylor’s film “Examined Life,” Slavoj Zizek explains how we are seduced by ideology. If the universe has a back story, our present predicament can be explained, even if the explanation makes no sense. The Big Bang is a big back story. When an effect tickles or bites or bombards or floods us, we search for a cause. We reconsider our back stories.

We somehow must work and rework, correct or clarify, our back stories into our instantaneous presentations and performances amid the distractions, commercials, hypes, phobias, click bait, news tsunamis – the whole bafflegab of what’s up now.

Zizi Papacharissi, in “A Networked Self,” appears to understand the ability to “back-story” (to verbalize a noun, to go with the flow, “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” as Eliot said in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) as an adaptation skill, the ability to adapt to changes in social environments, from a supposed fixed state, where the self was assumed to be a character bound in a book with a lineal story, to a fluid self that is constantly seeking its own level, walking on the deck of a small boat, changing with every social interaction, mimicry as a survival technique (elasticity of demand in a social market):

“Narratives about the self have always been performative. That’s what renders aspects of our identity a discourse. What changes is that performativity is augmented through online means of self presentation. And it is this enhanced theatricality, afforded by certain online platforms (SNSs, and various forms of blogs and microblogs), that individuals find most appealing.

Sociability is practiced to the network, via the network. Performances of the self enable sociability, and these socially oriented performances must carry meaning for multiple publics and audiences without sacrificing one’s true sense of self. These polysemic performances not only contain many layers of meaning, but are remixed and remixable – sampling digital traces of identity to piece together performances that are further remixed and re-interpreted by multiple audiences and publics.”

That could be used as a back story that may now explain the emergence of the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s. The revival, originally acted out in small coffee shops, living rooms, and campus settings, was at first minimally commercial. Few expected to earn a life-long living from singing folk song covers, but that wasn’t the goal, and the identity of the performer was inseparable from the identity of the audience. The audience participated in the performance. But that participation wasn’t a surge of fans aspiring to go on stage. There often wasn’t a stage, and each time a song was sung it was renewed in an altered form. Many of these performances were not recorded. They were passed on as living songs. Folk music is chameleon and transferable.

One of my older sisters sang in a high school folk group, “The Travelling Trio.” Their travels did not take them out of the Los Angeles Basin. They sang in living rooms and the local high school gym. Imagine a young Judy Garland singing Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train.” But unlike my sister, whose voice flowed like melted chocolate over fresh strawberries, your voice sounds like a galvanized plumbing pipe rattling in the wall with trapped air bubbles. Such a voice might confuse Tom Waits with Hedy West. Still, your Kentucky grandfather played the spoons and the harmonica, to add more filler to your back story, and you were an easy target for the music bug early on.

But a singing gig was not to become part of your back story. You played finger style. You liked the guitarist John Fahey, saw him play at Long Beach State and again at the Ash Grove. Not only did he not sing, on stage he never said a word. You were playing what you pretended was folk blues and fell into jazz. You took up what you called jazz guitar, though not everyone necessarily heard it that way.

Classical guitar lessons are useful for a few years. Your fingers already know how to play, but your brain doesn’t always know what they are doing. Over time, you’ll use up several teachers who will walk you through a couple of Aaron Shearer books, and a few of the Frederick Noad books, and teach you the Segovia scale method (which you might later hear Joe Pass dis, along with the number system). Your first teacher will probably introduce you to Leo Brouwer and his “Etudes Simples.” The Cuban composer’s short pieces are of course not all that simple, but at least you don’t have to sing. You’ll learn to read, slowly, like a stuttering primary school student, and learn enough to work through a Dionisio Aguado book, “Studi Per Chitarra,” on your own. You’ll learn by heart the old cliché: “The guitar is the easiest of instruments to play poorly, the most difficult to play well.” You’ll return to jazz and folk and find your breath and take solace in another cliché: “Close enough for jazz.”

Close enough substitutes feeling for the pursuit of perfection which as Cornel West explains in “Examined Life” is the romantic road to disappointment. So it was in the spirit of close enough that I answered an invitation from Sunshine Dixon to read a poem at an artists’ reception in the campus library, but I suggested that instead of reading a poem I might bring my old FG-180 guitar and sing a folk song. I worked up a folk version of “Gospel Plow,” using Dylan’s version on his first album as inspiration. If a recording pops up on-line somewhere I’ll add a link to the back story or upload a piece of it to SoundCloud. Maybe sister Peggy Ann will tune in.

And if you’d like to read more about the artists’ reception, Sunshine and I collaborated on a short article now on-line here, already part of a back story.

May 12, 2015