What He Ought to Know
Ed Foster
Marsh Hawk Press 2006

New year's first book, a day early. Ed Foster's poetry has new contacts, more lookin' at boys, more dedications, more dears (Dear A., Dear Levantine, Dear Wunderbar, David, dear), more ohs (Oh, Ted; Oh, Gene; Oh, David), more propositioning. These conversion narratives are not postmodern but they are embedded in watched over, opened intonations -- "Marilyn erred (said David)"; " language you remember, / Henry said, quoting Auden." Intimacy to a degree, rapacious, bookish, still a contrary stoicism reveals dark emblazonments of self-doubt in titles like "Our Dossier of Loss" and "The Pointless Life We Lead." In the poem titled "Ekhardt's Ice" Foster pinpoints another pervasive element, an ogler's detachment, "Like Ekhardt," but Foster seems ready to let this go. Here the narrator cites Spicer's "Ahhhh" and "the boy" who yells "Fisssh"; then the narrator thinks "spring seems just / another determined thing." Why resort to Spicer or "the boy" for permission to shout and then reflect like this, so pared back, detached? The finest poems are rowdier, calling Buddhist piety to task, sizing up bliss as "nothing new," giving form to "swell, tight bright anger in my bed." While Foster also cites Death in Venice, Melville, and even W. V. Quine, it's more engaging when he shuts down his lover at 3 a.m., notes the next day the waiter needs a shave, lingers waiting for French teens who don't return. Sometimes Foster refuses to slice the veils -- "The athlete, too young by western standards for what he'd want" -- what wanting jock is too young? western standards? Still, the manhunt is a persistent measure composing the narrator as Everyman in pursuit of his younger self, the voyeur-participant: "Styles change...There was / a time women might look svelte...No more…Boys occupy my stage...The metric lives on pleasure / for the eye." The eye, the boys, mere metonyms (for Foster), poetry fills the stage. (It can live no other way.) The most evasive of these "new and selected poems" come from Mahrem (2002) again from Marsh Hawk Press. Not all of that collection is included here. I miss the predatory overture of "Men Who Threaten Men" or the directness of "Love": "Take your prick in hand / and move it slowly. / Take his and / bring it to your mouth." Yet a selected poems is by definition a winnowing. For now, I'll settle for the treasure in reach, the unstable ambiguity of "Litany," for example, in which Foster unfastens a compressed, cross-generational auto-inventory of the once-family man, now afloat: "His orchids are inherited disease; / their purifying roots are white -- / he loves the petals / as the boy imagines skies / beneath his father's silk." These poems are poised as a cirrus sky, knottings of cadenced desire, unruly, "painted blue for love."

Early MLA returns. Also, just scroll down for several more.

His kiss looks disgusting. Antennae.

My predictions for 2006.

Bohemians blaze into flickering babble.

Babble, the national flower of somewhere.

Ever notice? But don't worry, only a few quiet come to maintain watch over how and then even they set off suspecting the unimpossible though in deployable scopes.

Pan from sky to pool-and-vetiver cliffside. Wet doublets are half empty. A canoeist roundtable sups, having partially re-escarped.

2006 has a too-everyday touch, divided loyalties and substance abandonment, but this can be upped.

Let's get back to bohemia, yes? and don't call that rustic mytho hole in the Newtons tele-tragic just because our scarves are more vintage. My bohemians are these pastry munchkins in fury chopping the air.

Guru, you're so unnecessary!

Ok, I forgot the trend-driven eco slant. Habermas. Benjamin. Sam Yosemite.

I'll leave these to whitecollar welders of many incredibly narrow stripes. Why, I remember, once, being really angry at the way my kilt and tartan were portrayed as intersecting and square. But I'm still a clan stripper/investor. It's locally pure!

And I prefer Hermes triangles through which the narcissus paling pass, my boheme, having to duck inside the Scylla of aphorism as usual. Then a crossroads and the come-about. (No pointers on how street cops operate in classy zip codes. No Charybdis of rapid discovery, either.) My bohemia is folded in by only the messed with, while attending geniuses commune to allay Bush's rush to complex ignorance. Nothing unjustified won't happen.

Bohemian.

You can't be superior to anyone you erase, stupid. Don't like me, now that's better, like lifting a big symbol of prosperity off your chest. It feels.

I'm not part of it, not you so I shouldn't say more, according to your latest poetics (an intellectual ruins).

Aw, come on, try an exercise in subject-mood agreement.

The ache of summer is palpable, and night is falling as snorts of derision dampen my naïve representation of democracy.

What we notice in your badmouth are this and that intense selfinterest and decay.

(You're post-avant when you take cues from décor trends, surely.)

Then William said to his dark lady, oh, I'll steal this because we can substitute words here and there. We'll call it modern English.

By way of a PS on bohemians, Schuyler (ravaged of course) was more of one than Ginsberg, unravaged. And Brainard (ravaged then unravaged and then ravaged) was a big boho. Auden? Think so.

Jim Brodey was narrowly boho. Less narrowly, Harry Matthews is.

What is the enduring appeal of John Godfrey if not mammalian swagger of the boho? Candidates for living women bohemians: In addition to Mayer and Notley, Kyger, B. L. Hawkins. Not C. D. Wright. Lisa Jarnot. I'm taking Anne Boyer's word she's bohemian, herself. Jimmy Behrle thinks he could be but he's not a woman. I swear Alli Warren is a hobo. Stephanie Young may be, ok, is; Cedar Sigo, sure, still he's no woman, either. Arguably, Jeni Olin. Lee Ann Brown maybe, maybe it's personal style? But then the person and the person's style are huge parts of bohemia. Juliana Spahr. Eileen Myles. Magdalena Zurawski.

I'm leaving many, many out. And I'm leaving out content, which has to be almost always drop-down-and-give-me-twenty cool. Sometimes it's easier to draw lines. Kent Johnson is not a bohemian. Why not Michael Gottlieb? Ted Greenwald and Rene Ricard are oddly bohemian, almost in the same way as Jeni Olin (they can't help it).

We get the point. "Life chips" fall all over poetics in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Fate, linkage to gravity, the ballgown. Three items that are definitely me.

Well put, Nick.

Jack Kimball, in his inimitable witty and charming way, has responded to this post on his blog by awarding himself the honorary title of bohemian and stands ready to award it to other professionals of his acquaintance. This is fine, and I applaud the gesture. But the bohemianism I was picturing includes the description offered so tellingly by Alice Notley: "if you're a poet and aren't somewhat ravaged" then "there's probably something wrong with your poetry.' Doubtlessly every poet Jack is thinking of feels ravaged. But I don't think Alice is writing only about how poets feel. In the age of Bush and 9-11 every responsive, sensitive person deserves the right to feel ravaged. Very likely, the poets Alice is describing are or were much more desperate life-wise, at all moments, than the people Jack is thinking about. Now, of course, we'll get into it about the word "desperate." When I say desperate, I mean those artists who have put virtually all of their life chips into their creative work life to the point of anguished and unending economic risk.

I can proceed with specific suggestions. And I'll ignore economics if I may.

Putting life chips into creative work. It's an extraordinary formulation that can be fulfilled innumerable ways, I would argue. The clearer examples of poets are dead. Spicer. But not Duncan? Wieners. Kerouac. But not Burroughs? Yes, Burroughs. O'Hara. Berrigan. Weiner. Ceravolo. But not Whalen?? Whalen. Helen Adam? But not Bishop? Was Robert Lowell a bohemian? Creeley. Of the living, surely Notley, surely Mayer. Ashbery is my bohemian. With respect to Notley's criterion, ravage, that is a sign of particular bohemian behavior, but not an exclusive or necessary sign. Age brings on ravage, for example, but does not inevitably render one boho. Elmslie, counterexample, is a bohemian without ravage.

Bohemianism is a state of mind directly connected to life practice. This I grant you, Nick, because I believe this is where we agree. I suggest that there are degrees of success in the bohemian life, some failing it completely, nonetheless quintessentially part of it. Others striving but attaining it narrowly or not at all.

Tom Raworth's Xmas.