I Explain

I Explain

I explain to the chemistry teacher
why chem without coincident lab is rote
verse soon forgotten

Rolling Stones perform in concert
not Jagger but an old man in plaid buttondown
ions measured, combined to burn

medicated Elsie dies
her friend walks around with a man poet
shrugs as if nothing lost

the poetry teacher insists
on qualifications — six books at least
I argue my way in

one poem per month, due today
I trailer my 3rd book — poems of four types
story, analysis, metaphor, apostrophe

poems are physical
black fabrics & floor space
monologue while wedging nuts in crevices

the story of a small child abducted
brothers with guns & pickups
I call the Feds

one distant dilapidated farm
a second more recent, more upscale
I fail to make them tea

he’s thrashing somewhere
I struggle to repair failed roof beams
a threat I hear but never face

small child or small animal
black & white cat
sullen but saved

once me [pic by Jay Hosler]

What writers have influenced my writing?

Elizabeth Bishop

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Emily Dickinson

Fanny & Susan Howe

Keri Hulme

Marianne Moore

Sylvia Plath

Marilynne Robinson

Samuel Beckett

James Joyce

Edward Lear

Naeem Murr

Michael Ondaatje

Ezra Pound

Wallace Stevens

William Carlos Williams

Why?

anger, brilliance, confidence, concision, courage, daring, disorder, duende, exaggeration, fear, genre scrambling, honesty, humor, imagination, leaping, love, music, nature, other-worldliness, pain, passion, preservation of child mind, rhyme, rhythm, sexuality, sound, surprise, technique, transformation, translation, vernacular

Leslie Marmon Silko [pic by Don Usner]

Deconstructing Leslie Marmon Silko texts:

Text: "they went to burn the spines from the cholla and prickly pear. They stood back by the wagon and watched the cows walk up to the cactus cautiously, sneezing at the smoldering ashes. The cows were patient while the green pulp cooled, and then they brought out their wide spotted tongues and ate those strange remains because the hills were barren those years and only the cactus could grow."

Response: This text stopped me because it was both familiar & unfamiliar. In Argentina we grew prickly pear. The spines are one-to-two inches long, & it’s very painful to be pricked because they carry a toxin that stings under your skin for a long time. I never imagined you could burn the cactus down to a "green pulp" cows could eat. I tried to imagine the cows waiting patiently & knowing when the pulp would be cool enough. I also admired the imagery & the language — the cows' cautious approach to the cactus, their sneezing, "the smoldering ashes," "the green pulp," "their wide spotted tongues," "those strange remains."

Text: "Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist."

Response: I reacted to the philosophy — the world view — it seems complicated, not obvious to me. I researched definitions; I searched a long time for a suitable example. The definition of endure that seems to fit best here is suffering even though the sufferer could make the suffering stop. My example is that animals always engage with what is outside themselves, e.g., another dog (approaching, sniffing, tasting, fighting, having sex), the landscape, the weather; whereas people think about what they want to do, they might resist natural impulses because they consider what the results might be — e.g., rejection, attack. So instead of sniffing & tasting they resist, & as a result they endure, sometimes for a long time, emotions like desire, anger, loneliness, regret, sorrow.

19 enero 2013

dream of apartment hunting in a city

the first apartment is overpopulated & only has an outdoor shower that collapses on me

second one has beautiful rooms on the second floor

tho nothing but beds & windows

downstairs is flo-thru to & from the mall

features an upward-sloping body-wide belt on which you lie on your back

arms stretched out & moving to propel you up the slope

Mike tries it but ahead of him are small children going nowhere

outside the apartment(s) is a red sand wash landscape

after we sign the papers, we exit through revolving doors (takes me two rotations)

to the outdoor mall where I see people at a restaurants eating crown of lamb

with their hands, I leave Mike at a table while I go ask about the wait

no wait, waiter is ready to seat us, but Mike has disappeared

standing next to the table a tall meaty dark-haired & -bearded friend of ours

he & I follow the waiter, hoping Mike will figure it out

I’m overloaded with my handhelds & Mike’s, too, because he left them on the table

the waiter leads us to the 4th floor

on the landing I ask two Latin-seeming waiters to keep an eye out for un hombre flaco

the woman says, ¿un hombre flauco?

I anticipate problems

drawing by Adonna Khare

Adonna Khare's drawings are remarkable

evenings I’m enjoying a fluff thriller, Rebecca Forster’s Hostile Witness

finished Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson

it rained most of the night, sometimes hard, MV comes inside her back all wet

she’s in the shower torturing a small spider

provoked by Tom Clark’s review of 100 Multiple-Choice Questions by John Ashbery in Jacket2

Multiple Choice

I will live

1. until I’m 97
2. forever as a frozen cyborg
3. in the memory of three generations
4. through seven more incarnations before I become the ruler of the universe
5. in South America for the rest of my life
6. as if I would never die

This morning my family has diarrhea because

1. it’s raining
2. the turkey & turkey stock I made turkey soup from was toxic
3. we stayed up until 10 PM reading mystery novels
4. the spider Miss Vee tortured in the shower exuded toxic fumes
5. diarrhea is an ugly word
6. cleaning toilets builds compassion

Poetry is

1. an alternative to suicide
2. ignored because truth & beauty have no place in the modern world
3. where today’s best novels are being written
4. what humans spoke first after laughter & moans
5. an antidote to government-religion-education-commercial-sports-celebrity-speak
6. what children sing before they are ruined

Home Owner Association meetings are

1. where sea cucumbers go to die
2. a poor alternative to drinking Malbec & eating jook
3. zombie conventions
4. listed as an endangered species by the Modern Language Association
5. illegal in Singapore, Johannesberg, St. Petersburg, Milford Sound, & Tierra del Fuego
6. outlawed by Al Qaeda, recorded by the Department of Homeland Security, infiltrated by the CIA, required by Shabak, Mossad, & Aman

Childhood is followed by

1. obesity
2. further indoctrination into normalcy by the myths of nation-state, organized religion, politics, economics, medicine, & entitlement
3. alcohol & drugs
4. the subjugation of gender & genitals to Madison Avenue bullshit
5. more of the same
6. multiple-choice questions with randomly generated answers

Failure of compassion occurs when

1. one’s self-image is interrupted by a commercial announcement
2. the egg is too small to be shared
3. yeast fails to bud
4. St. Teresa explains to the soldier that she can’t give him a blow job because his penis has been lopped off by counter-insurgency
5. raped women are told they asked for it
6. you think you have a right to tell me what to do

Tom Clark is my long-time favorite blogger

it’s raining; can hardly go outside to weed

next door the workers are hammering & yelling even though it’s Saturday

finished cutting back the west bristlemallow

dug out a couple dozen stipa grasses & one sorghum (I think sorghum)

working to make space for more Knipfofia; 

Wiki quote: “Long thought of as vulgar, Mary Keen 
argues that it is time to reconsider these flowers.”

I wonder what made Mary Keen vulgar.

Mike harvested a huge watermelon, a spaghetti squash, & a cantaloupe

Miss Vee & her rare earth watermelon [pic by Mike Smith]

Miss Vee has a facebook account now under the name Missy Vee.

12 enero 2013

I dreamed I lived as an adult in a house with my parents. I went around unplugging televisions, throwing them outside, raging at my lack of a computer, cursing my father at every opportunity, loving a child, an animal.

Cumulopuntia boliviana, copana

Spent hours identifying this cactus that grew around Don Isidro's, the place we camped the first night of our trek.

Michel Houllebecq [pic courtesy of The Enthusiast]

from Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever, tr. Paul Hammond (1998):

Véronique was “in analysis,” as they say; today I regret ever having met her. Generally speaking, there’s nothing to be had from women in analysis. A woman fallen into the hands of the psychoanalysts becomes absolutely unfit for use, as I’ve discovered time and again. This phenomenon should not be taken as a secondary effect of psychoanalysis, but rather as its principal goal. Under the pretext of reconstructing the ego psychoanalysts proceed, in reality, to a scandalous destruction of the human being. Innocence, generosity, purity . . . all such things are rapidly crushed by their uncouth hands. Handsomely remunerated, pretentious and stupid, psychoanalysts reduce to absolute zero any aptitude in their so-called patients for love, be it mental or physical; in fact they behave as true enemies of mankind. A ruthless school of egoism, psychoanalysis cynically lays into decent, slightly fucked-up young women and transforms them into vile scumbags of such delirious egocentrism as to warrant nothing but well-earned contempt. On no account must any confidence be placed in a woman who’s passed through the hands of the psychoanalysts. Pettiness, egoism, arrogant stupidity, complete lack of moral sense, a chronic inability to love: there you have an exhaustive portrait of the ‘analysed’ woman.

Véronique, it has to be said, corresponded blow by blow to this description. I loved her — to the extent that it was within my power — which represents a lot of love. This love was poured down the drain. I now realize; I’d have done better to break both her arms. Like all depressives she doubtless always had a tendency towards egoism and a lack of feeling; but her psychoanalysis transformed her once and for all into a total shit, lacking both guts and conscience — a detritus wrapped in silver paper. I remember she had a white plastic board on which she ordinarily wrote things like ‘petits pois’ or ‘dry cleaners.’ One evening, coming back from her session, she’d noted down this phrase of Lacan’s: ‘the viler you are, the better it will be.’ I’d smiled; in this I was wrong. At this stage the phrase was still only a programme; but she was going to put it into practice, point by point.

Am slowly coming back to life after the Jujuy trek. My challenge is to eat enough food to make up for the calories burned away. Early this morning I walked for an hour, slowly. Later, two naps, gentle rain.