Thursday, January 30, 2003
Intangibles?
Gary Sullivan posts a few points about New York poets, difficulties in defining who is and who is not in the School. It's at his blog, titled "Dreams of Interpretation."
I have a couple of questions.
Simple one first. Based on their respective phone prefixes, how would one exclude Torres and Phipps from the NY School? Are there formal or extra-textual criteria that might help determine one or the other's membership in the category? -- "...taking the CDs into account--Peter Ganick, Wanda Phipps, and Edwin Torres--complicates the notion of Faux as a New York School press." I'm thinking Faux is for extremists within the contemporary imperial mode, that is, extremists in -- choose three -- (a) pollstering; (b) hardhat empressement; (c) foxy discourse; (d) multiparous prevision. But that's obvious, so let me move on, for exemplification, to a very imperial figure of American language, Harry Mathews, Paris-based. He's NY by virtue of education, friendships, intangibles like these. He would be in my anthology of NY poets, I think, while, admittedly, Peter Ganick would not. However, Ganick would be included in a poetry anthology of the American Empire because of (a-d) above.
Are the poets Gary lists from Ron Silliman's 'attempt to contextualize,' as Gary puts it, post-NY-School? 'Post-NY' is a polyembryonic term, but it already sounds exhausted, following the overuse in decades of postmodern and, more dreadful, the misfortunes of September 2001. Then, within Gary's yet-to-be-nailed-down list of poets, it seems we have a complication parallel to Ganick / Mathews if we include Jonathan Mayhew, who lives in Kansas, and Kasey Silem Mohammad, who's probably poolside in Santa Cruz as I write this. Regardless of residence, are the poet's intangibles, such as intent or, if you prefer, intentionality, that which determine her connection to NY (or whatever the center / metaphor), which, in turn, figures in the poets' commonality?
posted byJack 10:47 AM
Lunch Poem.
Lethal-to-pale people locking
pockets sauntering indoors
with the scent of Labrador tea
thirty years, until she was seventeen
her supine neck, pale chest, and
looking thru his eyes, big dark eyes
& she hadn't thought of this – music in
a nut might kill the President and a chain
to the spoken way of thinking
squirrels and she could escape
suggesting to the reader how he
wrote romantic things in letters
to you.
posted byJack 9:36 AM
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Polity.
Dick Morris is a political pollster and strategist who has worked mostly for Republican causes though, infamously, he also strayed over to the other side to advise Bill Clinton. I remember his ten minutes of public humiliation and Clinton's disappointment when one of Morris's prostitutes snitched to a tabloid that Morris let her eavesdrop on his phone conversations with the White House. Soon after Morris jumped back over the velvet roping to join the fun at Heritage Foundation or another such paymaster, writing his exposé of the Clintons, circulating on various Fox shout matches, and so forth. Morris has no problem working for the folks who, as some speculate, directed the media coverage of his extramarital affair in order to (a) embarrass Clinton and (b) get Morris back.
I caught snippets of Morris on Fox Tuesday, before The State of the Union, brawling with Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's first press secretary. Morris was losing air time to Myers, and he wasn't happy. His final gotcha in response to points about the economy and tax cuts was an intimidating rant that went something like this. 'You know where you Democrats go wrong about class warfare. You don't understand when you ask Americans if they are in the top one percent of income, 19 percent say yes, and another 20 percent think they will be some day. And [chuckle] only half of them vote!'
Back in early September the ABC website cited his prescient strategy for Republican victory:
Polls show that only one issue works in Bush's favor: terrorism. On the environmental, global warming, prescription drug plans for the elderly, the right of HMO patients to sue in court, campaign-finance reform, corporate oversight and every other major public question, Americans back the approaches preferred by the Democrats…
Normally, this matrix of issues would foretell disaster for Bush and his party.
But the 2002 elections are unlike any in 40 years. They will come right after a national period of mourning and renewed dread grips the nation in the searing emotional aftermath of the first anniversary of its baptism into the brave new world …
As evidence mounts of Iraqi development of nuclear weapons, chemical and biological warheads, and missile delivery systems, the logic of attack will become irrefutable and the understanding of the need for invasion will grip the American psyche. Talk of whether Bush will go to war and wag the dog before Election Day misses the point. He doesn't need to wag the dog. He just needs to talk about wagging it to make the impact to keep control of Congress.
I would want to view Morris and his data analysis as a fraction of the political dynamic now in control. At gut, the facts are evidence of conspiratorial polity, rule by appeal to maintaining ignorance and indifference of the governed.
posted byJack 8:17 AM
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Chimp Slick.
Apache
and snow crash.
I cut the rest of it off
a curtain, with a curtain-rod staff.
Having it, have hobbled
away to be a dropper
And the you I've leapt with
that's a meristem
Dreamy subsisting
into an nth meme.
Your arms are apace. Milk
wort is wicked horny.
I like their kids
more than their parents.
posted byJack 7:30 AM
Monday, January 27, 2003
More Revision Ideas.
It's pretty obvious now that this entry, below, is unfinished. The last sentence, "Join today," hardly pans out, especially following the sloganeering-is-back idea. How can a slogan satisfy the qualifier "we suspect"?? Either scores of badly-formed slogans in neat lines or a single thick paragraph, maybe. Or tangents, many pages of them.
I started this poem Sunday while reading Bruce Andrews's
The Millennium Project.
I gathered less than half a percent of Bruce's lexicon and started to think about each word: orbit, kick-boxer, seraphim, unsnap, and others I didn't find a use for. I superimposed a few strands of generic discourse: "Contemplation extends X" (revised to "Leadership demands XX") or "X is back" and many other clausal strands that disappeared in the recursive processes of revising, merging, editing. Sexes were on my brain, too, so the words took on 'characters.' I tried to clean this up but wanted to leave enough 'intent' to keep me happy after. This is an extremely limited procedure, so I am glad I'm coming to terms 'framing' it almost literally as gloss manufacturing and depicting a war poster. The gloss is about the only part of this entry that is noteworthy.
The tone in my entry, which might be appropriate for war time, is just a little bit mocking, but it isn't entertaining in the way Ron Silliman concludes Ashbery's "ultimate Ashberyesque nightmare" goes. Last Sunday Silliman wrote that Ashbery seems doomed to entertain academic "monsters" as his "work consistently parodies ... sometimes (as in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror) with a viciousness that makes you question just why Ashbery puts so much energy into mocking a poetics he so evidently despises, as if somehow he believes (fears) that the realm of the Howards & Hollanders, of the Blooms & Vendlers, were all that was the case." It's never clear, I believe, what level of visciousness to ascribe to Ashbery, and never clear what Ashbery despises (or adores, for that matter) because, as Silliman notes earlier in his Sunday blog, the "Ashberyan technique" is one where "sentence after sentence undercuts what has just gone before." (Silliman's point about Ashbery's attention to matters attended to by Bloom and Vendler, on the other hand, is spot-on, and I hope he analyzes this further.) In any event, the tone of my entry, below, is mockingly sincere. It's about all I can say at the moment to differentiate it from failure.
posted byJack 2:37 PM
Revision 2
I'm changing the title of the entry below to "War Poster."
posted byJack 1:28 PM
Revision [addiction].
Winter War
Warrior politics aside, outlaws and heroes are broken up by the arcades and doorways where snowfall gets established. Daybreak already stands tall, but this totally fine one is unsnapping the white clasps to their white headbands.
White on white.
Outlaws see seraphic white.
Heroes appear in sunglasses and loiter with intent in the doorways.
Something similar to breakage of sheet glass and clay affixes to the blockhead text, programming and slipping under the format and jitters. They maintain the snowflakes continue boasting of their oscillation lists. It's getting light now. The newest and most anxious look down and see a blade of sedge whistle, handcuffing a tiny load of snow. Every word two hundred examples slip off, slip out easily in a slender gust or on inland waters. Others stay addicted to waving on the bay shore pointed inland.
Solid, kick-boxing leadership demands panoptic properties extend their slim, blood-pull orbit toward all rustles and rustlers. Most go ballistic, scamper, but stay. Sloganeering is back, we suspect. Join today.
posted byJack 7:30 AM
Winter War.
Warrior politics aside, outlaws and heroes are broken up by the arcades and doorways where snowfall gets established. Daybreak already stands tall, but this impossibly fine one is unsnapping the white clasps to their white headbands.
White on white.
Outlaws see it as seraphic white.
Heroes appear in sunglasses and loiter with intent in the doorways.
Something similar to panoptic breakage of sheet glass and clay affixes inside the brute text, programming and slipping under the format and jitters. They maintain the snowflakes continue boasting of their oscillation lists. It's getting light now. The most anxious look down and see a blade of sedge whistle, handcuffing a tiny load of snow. Every word two hundred examples slip off, slip out easily in a slender gust or on inland waters. The others stay put like reservists on the bay shore pointing inland.
Solid, kick-boxing leadership demands a redundant ethos. Contemplation of insulating properties extends its slim, blood-pull orbit toward all rustles and rustlers. Most go ballistic, and scamper away, but stay. Sloganeering is back, we suspect. Never far off.
posted byJack 5:32 AM
Friday, January 24, 2003
Opera.
The phone bill at the storehouse
Was raised by several head of horse.
Bright and eager, and grateful,
Vegan Clint forms his youthful
Language and some slight sexuality
On site as noted by a third party.
Victoria of the unusual white corridors
Suggests that Niccolo start twice.
Your cremaster…this is so cool, monsieur…
You're still trembling from our
Pinch-off, a short chopper ride
Over the bank and trade.
To foil smugglers we'll go long.
Please. Rate this song!
A snug suite shapes through the evening
Impesté, a Covered Bridge Centennial bourn in
Another throwing dirt on her head
Not far from the main road.
The one with the dirt is doing a robot
At gunpoint. Perhaps she got
The advantage.
posted byJack 6:07 AM
Thursday, January 23, 2003
[4]
I forget I know jacks about Bozo Brain
I forget the homeless were our friends' friends
I forget being left out would be the best stunt.
Love spit love Augen Blick and the media pouring
Zodiacs break and snow slopes
A-lists and grand theft I forget.
I forget Graham Masterton and Hamlet in a nutshell
I forget Souhait is powered by coke
I forget our trek to the caucus.
I forget Thai spas sap my G force
I forget when you were here last
I forget ticklers suggest torchbearing shadows.
I forget last night the animator the goalie's face
I forget battery fluid and our seven-night stay
I forget umbrage derives from grumpy distortion
Fond pleas fractured time I forget and morbidity
Gothic non-being loneliness and Goethe's juvenilia
I forget wielding a knife in Kips Bay.
I forget man-killers residing in jail
I forget your infancy Malthus festivals in the wood.
I forget command centers for negotiation
Structures lined with mosaics
Corelli and my life on a cattle ranch.
I forget Sal's pizza and the gospel and trick or treat.
I forget we both were wearing black sweaters
I forget functioning ghost towns tire tracks
Havana interiors and Tonka trucks.
I forget you picked up the check.
posted byJack 6:31 PM
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Blog Collectives.
As for blog scenes, bimbo prolixity and theory's tasks, I concur with both Heriberto's and Nada's opposing positions. And I follow Drew's giddiness to oscillation. These scenes are evident, each a sort of Geist d'elan but, man, so? What I've said splitting fits of the gauge one plays so one's body loses its lungs -- that's old hair.
My new blog entry tossing the previous into the scalp and having its moment... what I've just said? -- is it limited to well mannered teasing or ridicule? Department is trying to hush this up, that's our common bond....whirly sounds, rain, the axer, and out. The axer prefers to remain and regard death as no accidental. Condemned without a trump, tall, spiny, cylindrical: Voice.
Eat the marsh bird of what you and I have just heard..
The collective is called a hunted whorl where oratory flaunts one ethos to the rank connectivity of faith.
posted byJack 1:14 PM
Sunday, January 19, 2003
More Everwood [3]
I forget Linksys Phonex and the paths less traveled
Norman conquests tame assuming received credits
Blubeard's blood church blessings and E & J cognac I forget
Spreading germs and a day-care center across from the North Tower.
I forget The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
I forget ping pong and every buddy story there was
I forget the benefits of superstition
I forget my ineptitude at crime
I forget down east young blades need your help
I forget how together we can save a life
I forget to donate my blood
I forget my thigh, the one on the lift
I forget disaster victims
I forget the home borough for sophisticated post-punk
I forget Bobby Bland and Cody Chestnut
I forget jerk chicken and hearts of palm.
I forget pleasurable forms of house arrest
Meaningful looks from doormen and co-workers
Dour charm and functional pastries I forget
Deco fabric soda and habeas corpus
I forget Sheikh Saud Al-Thani protector of the endangered
I forget impeccable accounting
I forget when I had nothing more to give
I forget the guy who got in on the ground floor.
I forget farmers' markets and puppy love
I forget disquisitions against evils perpetrated
I forget a few deserve the best and many card tricks
I forget gracious living, dining and learning at famous universities.
I forget the moonscape and public baths
I forget Milk Duds and roe pickled with cloves
I forget the Shroud of Turin
I forget the man standing there.
posted byJack 7:30 AM
Friday, January 17, 2003
More Everwood
I forget how your toeprints are all over this
I forget this is so you
I forget your own fantasma gagetry
I forget my thigh, the one on the lift
I forget farewells
I forget the nether handle makes the rounds wholly hidden
I forget triumphs that cradle the face sorrow brought to sex
I forget flexible spite
I forget the lights are shuddering because all identities are a swarm
I forget misapplied figures, images, parables
I forget hysteria, finishing schools, passe partout
I forget earning a living in a word.
I forget the honeysuckle wound down the knoll wall
I forget the medium requested looting prestige
I forget being nervous!
I forget my first poem.
I forget jabbering additionally with Apidae divas.
I forget the gastropod nation
I forget being lit up by nimbus!
I forget my leftist French brain.
I forget storylines garrotted across beakward aeons
I forget the payment of current debts.
I forget I'm technically adept and again I stay fallible
I forget this is so you.
posted byJack 6:48 AM
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Watching Everwood
I forget his name
I forget which band he played in
I forget how his breath got lost
I forget why
I forget skimming by
I forget the milky I forget the spill
I forget the mute the now the shifts
I forget me at the store
I forget MoMA
I forget shifts have a genealogy
I forget different periods of shifts
I forget the changing contexts of straw men.
I forget good instincts
I forget huge lengths and desperation
I forget being pregnant
I forget circling the rink.
I forget an empirical relationship
I forget the '90s new breed
I forget loaded terms with "process"
I forget "mottled taxonomy" was once a verb
I forget clients who hire and fire
I forget being in the wrong place
I forget complaints and sworn declarations
I forget frilly and glib.
I forget historicism I forget strokes, renderings, gestures, etc.
I forget fantasies of William Blake
I forget a duo's interests breaking the high-low
I forget being neutered to intimate claustrophobia.
I forget begging for curatorial inquiry
I forget acknowledged commodities with assigned values
I forget the Kennedys I forget the Dead Kennedys and video pastiche
I forget ephemerality I forget narrative.
I forget closure and irresolution
I forget resolution and institutional need
I forget rejection of reference
I forget his namecard and name.
-- More soon.
posted byJack 8:32 AM
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Propositions.
1) Martie Maguire nee Seidel writes, "Today dear Sappho I will sing beautifully and make you."
2) What a Dixie Chick, the imitator, represents is actions.
3) A big Yeah, that's you babe is a big bore.
4) Literature is Ezra Pound charged with meaning.
5) Miles: Man, why do you play long?
John: To get you all in.
posted byJack 8:30 AM
Monday, January 13, 2003
The Rivers.
The rivers would fra the dark fieldglasses.
The "be red" interested me. I see I lost it in a dying glassful
by 16mm, the polluted film, and would be interested in dying myself
by the rivers fra red seen in the dark field. The rivers would
fra the dark fieldglasses. Against their will.
They claw at the hanged boys shriek smell of shit turning back
to his supposed back. Rites for tincture and / 'n
view of certain edgework of digtital corporeality -- bitter bark,
tearing of paper, written, or the attitude of sleep, and
A full 16mm film somewhere between
Thank you. With obvious p her body, his cock with a shining d to
languish d conference (and a Grand bore)
regarding some personal opinions and its influence on the
shining d's influence on the visual you
to
languish
re art and blog and their influence on hankies.
You. Thank 16mm you shining with somewhere.
posted byJack 4:49 PM
Thursday, January 09, 2003
H H 3 If You Plan to Itemize.
Thanks, Brian, for the link to Google's Poem Patterns robot. Here's one result.
Pantoum
H H 3 If you plan to itemize or claim adjustments
On your 2002 tax return: - If you plan to itemize
Again you let your mind wander to his childhood
Purchasing a Property. (This worksheet will let you make
On your 2002 tax return: - If you plan to itemize
We have omitted some entries
Purchasing a Property. (This worksheet will let you make
Adjustments to income and reduce your creepy_things
We have omitted some entries
FOR SPEED WORKSHEET * check table footnotes for
Adjustments to income and reduce your creepy_things
- no of oh on or ox pi re so to up us we ye lap
FOR SPEED WORKSHEET * check table footnotes for
Me? Let it down slowly.
- no of oh on or ox pi re so to up us we ye lap
To nestle into Natalya's feathers again
Me? Let it down slowly.
(Add Lines 1a, 1b, 2d and 3-6). Adjustments
To nestle into Natalya's feathers again
Slow. Rat poison only kills rats.
(Add Lines 1a, 1b, 2d and 3-6). Adjustments
- Case No.: . . . on back) (1) $ . . .2) $ .
Slow. Rat poison only kills rats.
During the accounting period of the worksheet.
- Case No.: . . . on back) (1) $ . . .2) $ .
(Line 2 Combined and Schedule), 0.00. 5. (Expenses
During the accounting period of the worksheet.
-- Preparing a Ten-Column Worksheet Named
(Line 2 Combined and Schedule), 0.00. 5. (Expenses
Above if you used the Deductions and Adjustments
-- Preparing a Ten-Column Worksheet Named
Need: Worksheet 2-1. Case Farm Balance Sheets. - level 25\
Above if you used the Deductions and Adjustments
The new Job Creation Depreciation.
Need: Worksheet 2-1. Case Farm Balance Sheets. - level 25\
Foreign Tax Credit - Leone leper Leroy letch
The new Job Creation Depreciation.
The certifying officer or manager.
Foreign Tax Credit - Leone leper Leroy letch
By the back door Yeah, you might fall in love
The certifying officer or manager.
Possible evidence presented in setting an amount
By the back door Yeah, you might fall in love,
With Worksheet to Figure Your Withholding
Possible evidence presented in setting an amount
Again you let your mind wander to his childhood,
With Worksheet to Figure Your Withholding
H H 3 If you plan to itemize or claim adjustments.
posted byJack 12:15 PM
Monday, January 06, 2003
Aidan Thompson Reviews Frosted.
Turned to a new (to me) e-journal called Sidereality and found this on Frosted. It's not a book review, really, but a parsing of a single poem, with general comments to open and close. It's focused observation for as far as it goes, and it's flattering. Anyway.
Book Review of Jack Kimball's frosted
------------------------
Aidan Thompson
Jack Kimball. frosted. Potes & Poets Press (http://www.potespoets.org/). 2001. ISBN: 1-893541-64-9. $11.95
Jack Kimball's frosted is a book of poems that deliriously defies classification. The poems range in form from metered verse to prose to numerous variations on free form. One might find consistency in the coolness of Kimball's precise word choice, yet the playfulness in his use of sound and double meanings create warmth, undermining the cold, exact phrasing. The poems in frosted leave me with the sensation of walking in deep snow, where each step is questionable. It is a little disconcerting not knowing if I'm about to step on an icy log or sink to my waist in a gully, but the jaunt is refreshingly exhilarating.
Take, for example, "The Actuary" on page 23:
Midnight sun, midnight sun crosses the land
starting the wind.
I see two clouds remind me
what I do.
Both jump up on buried stems
in the way of trucks and fumes
the reservoir mixes from black to red.
Wild cows are silent.
Over the ice it's rotten to kick me
for it is you.
Black cows.
Red cows.
Clouds
in my argyles.
On a surface reading, disruption and inconsistency are most apparent. What does an actuary, a person who calculates insurance risks, have to do with midnight sun, clouds, and cows? What do midnight sun, clouds, and cows have to do with each other? But on a close reading, some of the sontant and semantic sportiveness begins to take shape.
Phonetically the "The Actuary" is divided in half. The first three couplets have a distinct lyrical, song-like quality with the slant rhymes, "land"/"wind" at the end of lines 1 and 2 and "stems"/"fumes" at the end of lines 5 and 6, as well as the internal rhyme, "two"/"do" in lines 3 and 4. The nasals create a melodic backdrop, connecting lines 1-6 ("midnight," "sun," " land," "wind," "remind me," "jump," "on," "in," "stems," "fumes"). The abundant use of "s" in lines 1-3 (total of eight) diminishes in lines 4 and 5, but repeat, coda-like, at the end of the third couplet.
A dramatic shift occurs in couplets 4-7. The rhyming and melodic backdrop abruptly conclude, and except for the "s" sound in "cows," "clouds," and "argyles," the first and second halves of the poem do not share similar sound patterns. There is also a shift in tone; the repetition of "midnight sun" in the first line mimics a song of praise, while lines 7 and 8, " the reservoir mixes from black to red./Wild cows are silent," mimic an observant, almost scientific tone. Again Kimball disrupts consistency, divesting the reader of any ground to stand on. It may be that Kimball is making fun of the oxymoronic notion of the actuary calculating risk. How can risk, something based on chance and fate, be measured and predicted? As readers we get a physical sensation of unpredictability as Kimball sets up patterns of style, sound, and tone only to pull the expected out from under us, leaving us toying with questions. Since the idiom, head in the clouds, refers to being fanciful, impractical -- functioning as if in a dream, then perhaps the last two lines, "clouds/in my argyles" or clouds in my socks, suggests traveling playfully without practical objectives through unstable terrain, mocking the actuary who gauges and quantifies in an effort to concretize what is fundamentally mercurial and uncertain.
Read frosted, you'll have off-the-cuff fun.
posted byJack 11:36 AM
Saturday, January 04, 2003
Wieners.
I just sent this piece to John Tranter for his section on Wieners in Jacket 21.
John and the Four Dunn(e)s
John Wieners was a friend for seconds at a time. When I first met him in 1974 I liked him for his sexual as well as poetic glamour. A couple of his teeth were knocked out and his face was worn but it oozed more than enough hauteur to attract closer inspection. He was (and is) the coolest gay poet, that is almost to say, the heaviest rocker-predator who, despite pathologies, could not be obscured.
Like today, though, Boston in the 70s was a center for trial runs, rehab and obscurity, and John did what he could to keep it that way. For stretches John appeared friendless, while still attracting a circle of local caretakers and fans, as well as infrequent visitors from out of town. Gerard Malanga and Rene Ricard, two fans of his who were to go on to document and propagate John-the-legend for a younger generation, had left Boston by the mid 70s. By 1974, well after Asylum Poems and Nerves, John had taken up what became his permanent bachelorhood on Joy Street, Beacon Hill.
Bostonian and then West Coast publisher Joe Dunn had by this time moved back from San Francisco, along with his wife Rose Dunn and their young daughters. They reinstituted their Monday poetry soirees in their flat off Hancock Street, a block over from John's. As the center of all verse, John stopped by on Mondays, occasionally, as a silent or sotto voce presence, while Joe held court reading and enthusing over the privileged texts, works of Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, Steve Jonas, Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Robert Duncan, and of course John's work. In a troubadourish disarray of pressed flowers, dirty diapers and worn Tarot decks, Joe and Rose ran their wine-drenched evenings as research confabs where regulars were urged to bring work by contemporary poets we were reading at the moment and, if inspired, one or two pieces of our own. The program here, as I recollect it, was Orality reified as The Field in which compositional mechanics like meta-reference, meter, symbol and other units of analysis are subsumed, as oral utterance succeeds most, after all, when the processed parts appear both of minor import and improvised. Sometimes a confab member sought analysis. I remember one needy poet who requested that John underline sections of her youthful manuscript that he found interesting. He dutifully returned her pages the next week with single letters of words, such as the 'e' in 'the,' undermarked by red dots.
The first few seconds I felt close to John were in late spring 1976. I had arranged to meet John and Alan Davies at Harvard Gardens, a blue collar bar on Cambridge Street, near Joe and Rose's and John's place. Alan, known then as a Boston poet by way of Canada, was editing Occulist Witnesses from temporary digs in Dorchester. Alan had been in the area a few years, having attended Robert Creeley's poetry class at Harvard Summer School in 1972, and having subsequently hand-published John's remarkable treatise on and for young poets, "The Lanterns along the Wall," which John wrote especially for that class. I had previously mentioned to Alan that I was putting together a new poetry mimeo, Shell Magazine, and I wanted desperately to have new work by John in the first issue. Alan agreed to meet, but he thought I shouldn't ask John for poems. Only a few months earlier Good Gay Poets had brought out Behind the State Capitol to what John felt was negligible critical attention. The poop was that John was burned (or burned out) and had stopped writing. (John released few poems and no books over the following decade.) When John showed up at Harvard Gardens, he seemed distracted, and more alarming, to me, he came empty-handed. We proceeded as was custom, however, sitting at the table and drinking just a bit, and the chatter eventually led to my big ambition. I have no clear memory of how I asked him for poems, of particular words I used, but I remember John's eyes meeting mine in a linkup of what felt like trade. Poet meets another of his publishers. John pulled several crumpled pieces of paper from his sweater pockets, and handed them over. To paraphrase Frank O'Hara's depiction of Wieners's poetry debut twenty years earlier, as a publisher I felt launched. Among the six poems from John in that first issue of Shell are several that are gathered near the end of Cultural Affairs in Boston: "Twenty Years," "I don't have a thought in my head," "night, that last month of the last" and "Upon Central Ave And Milton by Irene Dunne."
I have a couple of other friendly encounters with John to go over, but as a local myself I'd like to digress briefly to bring up a couple of regional-cultural points to demonstrate how I navigate through John's Central Avenue and John's Milton and, for that matter, John's Irene Dunne. John is often characterized as a poet of the working class and even of the poor. John's mental illnesses and his Marxist postulations reinforce this view. However, John's upbringing, family demographics, etc. complicate the assumption that he was born impoverished. While Central Avenue literally parallels Eliot Street where John lived – not as terribly swank as the estates around Milton Academy, say, or those on Adams Street, where George H. W. Bush was born – John's growing up in Milton, even on the dreary side of town among bread-winning folks straddling Dorchester and Saint Gregory's parish, qualifies him much less as a poet of the poor, more as a bard of the bona fide lower middle class. Further, John goes on to graduate from Boston College, second-tier, yet hardly a poor boy's school. Middlebrow status is a fate worth fictionalizing, and the sociological norm, I believe, is to fabricate upward – that is, to aim oneself a step or two higher, as in the upper middle or upper class. John's downmarket strategy, his emphatic embrace of popular glamour to foreground and contrast with mundane circumstance, shares a similar Catholic aesthetic and indiscriminate ambiguity to that of the younger Andy Warhol or the Eileen Myles of full-punk mode. Each in her way communes, semi-aristocratically, between the brazen piety of an unextraordinary Catholic background and the ironic halo effect of secular fame. This is much higher ground than the Academy. John's lofty communings are voicings with Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Billie Holiday, Jackie Kennedy, et al., the lights seen wafting over the red brick, sans ivy, of his neighborhood church, Saint Gregory's.
I visited John in his "rooms" a few times. On my first visit I came with my boyfriend Don / Dawn, who changed his name to Angel for the occasion. I reintroduced myself to John, "I'm Jack." Then, "This is Angel." John was aurally amused and we three were off on some skyline banter. John showed us around the mostly empty but hardly austere chambers, palely accented with little stacks of movie zines and collages in progress, not a book of poetry in sight. I confirm Raymond Foye's anecdote in Cultural Affairs about a big bowl filled with aspirin "for the guests." This is precisely what John said to Angel and me when I pointed to it on a table off the center of a side room. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, though, the bowl was not chinoiserie, as Foye reports, but clear crystal, exposing the heavy pallor of hundreds of white pills. Angel, who died of AIDS in the 90s, had brought fat joints of terrific marijuana, but unlike in Foye's interview, John smoked very little, even as Angel and I kept puffing. John's rooms must have filled with smoke, an image I now conflate with a Jonathan Borofsky wordplay mural, one in which characters with wings are duped into thinking themselves "guests," get "gassed," and then get transformed into "ghosts." Before we left John that day, Angel handed John an unlit joint, which John received graciously, tucking it into a hole in his kitchen wall "for a rainy day."
I race now to the year 1999. John's life is almost over. I'm living in Japan, and after several years of more schooling and career shifts, I take up poetry publishing again, only now it's even cheaper than mimeo. I'm e-publishing at a site I establish as theeastvillage.com. During the summer of that year I vacation in Boston, and I arrange to meet John with the help of his last caregiver, Jim Dunn, no connection to Joe, Rose, or Irene. My problem here is that I ingest rancid peanut butter hours before meeting time, and am forced to cancel – cancel – what would have been my last face-to-face with John. My purpose, like the first time, is to charm John into giving up a poem or two for the website. Before our meeting Jim, like Alan that first time, is sure John won't do it. After my no-show, Jim and I think John, too, won't buy my excuse, and before we all three might calm down and reschedule I'm forced back onto a Northwest flight to my teaching job in Japan.
There is a final, friendly encounter here, nonetheless, so bear with me. Back in Japan I keep bugging Jim with phone calls and e-mails. I insist that if there are poems in John's possession and if John is willing to let one of them go, John's universe of readers will be perpetually grateful, and so forth. Jim tells me yes, maybe, no, and communications between us go on to fray. Jim still types up a poem of John's titled "Egg Nog," but Jim's not sure it's even a poem since it's written on the back of a shopping list, and I had better check with John directly, Jim says. I call John that night, dawn in Japan, and read him back his poem:
The quality of mercy
is not strained
It lieth along the center road
It falleth from the nude sky
as gentle earth rained
over green pastures He maketh
it to abide by Misted Q lanes
whosoever can tell what kiss
brings forward HIS peace
The quality of mercy is not strained
It falleth from the gentle earth like heaven.
In Japan it's starting to rain as John whispers, "This sounds a lot like me. Please use it."
posted byJack 2:32 PM
Friday, January 03, 2003
Quick Set-Up.
How to Hold Orphan
Tune or whim, a tone over these parts.
Inch-heap pigalles, dense forts
Worn on if soldiers snooze, also fit to spit
Utter slap to loco-grove. Vet to her toes
The bra wreathes, a propos for a while, then picnics,
Worn.
The candies belong out. Pie our asking.
Winces everywhere the go-go's old, literally
Don no twofer tax as proration if to-Earth
Middies, oft numb, call in on block lettering
Poof! or more patchwork forms a holy daze.
On the collar off hellhole amber sled
A total mishmash of harem stories.
No soap is his scourge, a Santa ewe.
Products stew its sulfur muse.
This routine innately knows the cute ting. Like, enough
If told, the sad ram-soft one nests.
Whining ovations to form into four tunes fronting height where,
In odd hearse drums
Arse wasted, listing, ill as mischief
Lapels your Ural nose as engineered,
A revisable lien there bore the ache, held rites.
The sold summits. Teach-ins win to ur-bats!
Wetter our creed, it's ennui egged all long.
Dimwits know us here, hare and Runny Hinge.
If fasting kin for twin snows last,
To rearm into temple ash (throng drams).
You end (ire, eme) ember.
Bandits smell, lest the posse shun – oh, air – roar as knees.
We theme-car the shun words,
Twist notes so my thing indents tickle.
posted byJack 9:30 AM
Wednesday, January 01, 2003
Happy 03.
Abstruse, babe, you bet.
-- for Peter
The cockpit of a custom blimp.
Well not here here. Upper Falls.
Brookline is across the street.
Cypress as says a desirable your chance
or running over beer bottles
to twice much table to
together read stages engraving war.
Than.
For us by us.
Indicative. I had to get tickets.
These, us, this million dollars made
fitting in a brown ounce.
posted byJack 8:25 AM
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