View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
I’d never seen her cry like that. Made me cry like that. Jesus. All the pain coming out. Remembering how we’d quit our jobs. How doom had crept over us. Every morning we woke up to find our existences worse. I’d sold the bed, the couch, the chairs, the kitchen table. I’d sold everything. Then we slept on the floor. Her father got sicker, lost the farm. We thought the world was against us. She used to meditate ten hours a day for an answer that never came.
I think so. Robert Duncan speaks of the “tone leading” of vowels. One vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound—I mean, at some point, the core of the business of poetry is to be taken someplace you didn’t know you were going by the sound out in front of you that you didn’t know you could hear until you heard it. This is probably true of prose, too, it’s just more intensely true of poetry. Sound harmonies and disharmonies lead you to say things and invent things you couldn’t otherwise say. And the other part, of course, is that those harmonies, if they’re particularly arresting to the ear, make the old connection between poetry as an oral art and memory as a storage system. That’s the oldest thing about poetry.
responding to: "Do the sounds of words, and their rhythms, lead the creation of a poem for you? As opposed to having a predetermined thing that you want to say."
The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?
But anyway, so, how many years was it, five? I was writing poems. And I was in New York and giving a reading. This was sometime in the late seventies. Dan said, I would like to publish your next book with Ecco Press, which he had just started. I said, Dan, I don’t have a book. And he said, I just heard you read an hour’s worth of poems I haven’t heard before. There must be a book there. I said, I’ve got lots of poems, but I’ve no idea for a book. And I was really stuck because I was dead sure that it had to be organized more or less chronologically in the order that I’d written the poems. And he said, Let’s take a look at them, and we went to his place. He had an apartment down on West Thirtieth. A penthouse in the middle of the Garment District. We started to lay out the poems on the floor. And he started moving them around, and I said, See, here’s the problem, you can’t do this, and you can’t do that, and those have to come near the end, and this has to be near the beginning. And he said, Just let me work on this, will you? He laid out all the poems on the floor and started moving them around. He put what I thought were some of the strongest, which I was sure had to come at the end, at the beginning. And he said, I think this is starting to work. And I went into the bathroom and threw up. And came back and looked and said, Actually this does kind of work.
hahaha
One of the things that was interesting to me working with Czesław for twenty-five years was that he never thought it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. He had despair about the world. He had despair about whether his art could ever achieve what he hoped it would achieve. He had a feeling that serious art can lose its way among junk. But he always felt that, as he says in one poem, “Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world.” He always thought that the poets and the philosophers and the artists and the theologians and so forth were engaged in the grand human adventure.
In the late fifties, early sixties, I was aware that there was this culture of people who were trying to think about a whole range of social justice issues more or less out of the mainstream. Lawrence Ferlinghetti starting the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, the essays of James Baldwin, Whole Earth Catalog, experimental institutions like Black Mountain. A writer who was very important to me for thinking about politics in those years was Paul Goodman. I met him when he came to Stanford. We were talking about researching the power structure and how we were going to confront the military-industrial complex, and he kind of said, Whoa whoa whoa, slow down. Here’s the thing, figure out what you love doing and try to find a way to do it, and if you find that the structures of institutions around you keep you from doing it in the way that’s valuable to you, there’s where you work on changing the structures. If to be an actor you have to survive doing degrading commercials, figure out how to change that system. Maybe it’s government support of the arts, maybe it’s something else. If you’re a scientist and you can’t do the kind of science you want to because of the money, that’s where you try to make change.
[...]
I remember listening to Terry Gross interviewing Philip Roth, and she asked what it takes to be an artist. He said there were two things, to his mind. A deep appetite for play, and a moral stake in the world. I thought, That sounds right to me.
[...] I looked at Jeffrey and his mother in the audience. They were staring up at me, waiting. They looked like a couple just then, not romantic, but like two people who definitely went together. You purchased them as a set. I understood Jeffrey’s tie to her. Whoever said love sets you free was wrong—it ties you down, it makes you loyal to something other than your own happiness.
I’d spent the previous week telling her that she was nuts, AK-47 crazy, but she paid me no mind. My mother explained that every individual dealt with traumatic stress differently and one couldn’t predict wartime behavior based on non-bombing personality. As the Israeli missiles hit, my father drank, my mother cooked, my brother brooded, and my sister shopped for diapers. During non-bombing she was probably as rational as any Lebanese, but with each missile she grew more and more erratic. Her pink room brimmed with disposable diapers, four distinct piles from floor to ceiling; one diaper bag at the top looked like it was suffocating because it couldn’t fit between the ceiling and its brother below it. My sister had stuffed a dozen bags under the baby’s cot and at least twice as many under her bed. She had enough diapers to ensure that her son would be wearing them until he was six years old, maybe seven. When I pointed that out to her, she shouted, “Well, I might get pregnant again. It happens.”
But then this morning, we turned on the diesel generator to watch the television news and the announcer informed us that the Israelis had bombed the Johnson & Johnson warehouse the night before, incinerating everything in it.
“Why?” my mother asked the television.
My father looked at the bottle of scotch, but it was still early in the morning.
My brother sipped his coffee. “I’m sure terrorists were hiding between the shampoo and the Band-Aids. No more tears.”
My sister beamed, seemed to have grown taller in her chair. “I told you we’ll run out of diapers. Just you wait, they’ll bomb the Procter & Gamble warehouse next.” She was talking to us but looked as if she were addressing a large invisible audience. She pursed her lips and blew on newly painted fingernails.
enjoyed this
After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest. One by one, they scrubbed
blood off their fingers & faces & sat down to devour
a feast of rice & goat served by the villagers.
The legend remains only in the name of a lodge
built in the same place, which from the Bengali means
the King’s Feedery, where the king took his meal.
We say Death stays here when it visits someone
in the family. The time it came for Grandfather, it arrived
late. Not at the wolf’s hour between midnight & first
light, but late morning on the highway, siren blaring
all the way to the nursing home. As if punishing us
for what it botched, it hung around for a few
months at the Feedery, then came for my aunt. Young,
suffering in a marriage, she was taken straight by her weak
heart. I imagine them, father & daughter, sitting still
across a table, sharing a meal of steaming boiled potatoes,
& always in the afterlife that vague dream of salt.
Death takes in threes, they said. We feared it would
come for one of us. In the trashed room,
they found Death’s ledger full of illegible scrawls
in a dark meter no one could understand.
Grandmother’s devastation circled complete, that year
a channel of clear water began thrumming beneath
her skin. We heard it rumble whenever she opened
her mouth to speak. When I think of love,
I think of her weeping as I left, her swollen lip
grazing the back of my hand through the car window. Brief
& bright her long blurred life now summoned
with Death lurking at the borders again.
Married at thirteen, adolescence lost
weeping into a cauldron of chopped onions. She talks
of the flimsy wooden hovel perched on four
fraying stumps & in her telling it is always
how she saw it first, herself decked in gold
with that sinking dread: a preface. I think of love
& I think how when they lifted Grandfather’s bier
she called out to him crying My child
my god my child
Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child
until a solitary jogger tore the curtain of fog
with a flashlight, making her flee
through a chink in the heavy lid of the small red tomb,
I rose at dawn, washed my face with water
cold as needles & went to work, stomach taut
as deerskin stretched over the seat of a chair.
On the terrace garden above my office,
I drank coffee & smoked a long cigarette
as something unnameable loosened its grip on my neck.
I remember thinking then, This cannot be
the worst of my days, but mostly I remember
myself in some variation of afraid.
Why, I can’t tell.
I had a job, an apartment,
& a woman who claimed to be in love with me
less & less each day. The city’s gray tongue
licked the windows of our room & I knew
they would come for us soon,
that one of us would be called first
to initiate the slaughter, then later
led into a dim corridor to watch
through a one-way mirror the other
slipping on entrails, trying to clamber out of it.
At the parties, I got drunk & cursed everyone.
At home, I smoked anything the women
from the university brought me.
I wrote poems that went on for years into my sleep.
When we finally parted, the city shrank
down to the few bars, her dentist, the hospital
she drove me to where they treated
the third-degree burns from the hot oil
that jumped out of a pan one night
to grab the back of my hand.
The billboards outside the malls looked
vulgar, like my scarred hand in the yellow
light that fell on the pavement. But always
that serious joy in the drunken body
stammering home in the dark.
In the daylight I felt dizzy with fear
of running into her. This vast city
open to invaders & vagrants for centuries
now small for two.
A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.