American Poetry Read online

  lady’s curve could be mantilla,

  mons veneris might be trobairitz

  leaves old Nueva York coast—

  “the poet is brooding about editors” (Buson)

  Would be ravenous, numinous or

  just plain seeing things then

  come ’round to humble trail, a trial

  or perhaps a jest got jagged boot up an edge

  Points are obstacles or holy mood?

  Dakini breast, demon-pricks, wounds of a saint

  a troubling rood to contemplate

  Free Tibet negative-ioned out

  salutes her peaked ally

  as next century pops up, beams

  happy not to be beachfront

  Above the trees tundratic you come to breathe

  & it is a woman’s pride

  dark perpetuity (don’t fence me in)

  or bright exposure animals—marmots, pica—course

  shy runs of

  dusted with snow & named

  (& here ensues a list of mountains):

  Pike’s Peak

  100 miles

  (14,110)

  Mt. Evans

  30 miles

  (14,260)

  Quandary Peak

  38 miles

  (14,256)

  Mt. Massive

  76 miles

  (14,404)

  Mt. of the Holy Cross

  60 miles

  (13,978)

  Jasper Peak

  2 miles

  (12,940)

  Dimensions from bronze sighting plaque,

  South Arapahoe Peak (13,348)

  NOTE: Thomas Moran painted Mount of the Holy Cross a number of times and enterprising photographers popularized it. Longfellow knew these images. In 1879, without having seen the Colorado peak, he wrote “The Cross of Snow.” The cross is comprised of two transecting ravines high on the SE face which fill with snow and present a cruxiform image most of the year. Early Xtian travelers saw it and went crazy.

  RIPARIAN

  Basho dogs us here

  albeit “Pets

  Not Aloud”

  and five miles down

  the grocery store has frozen pizza

  The St. Vrain roars

  chortles and roars

  past the billboard advertising

  smoked trout

  Are there trout in there?

  “Fan”

  the St. Vrain speaks

  “oven”

  daylight valley walls of burst

  granite

  ponderosa pine

  but by night …

  sentimental curtains with

  pussycats

  at the windows

  All over Colorado

  into alpine lakes and cold rivers

  trout rain from helicopters

  Every spring they dump them from helicopters,

  and what senator speaks for the trout?

  Who was St. Vrain?

  Consult High Country Names

  Louisa Ward Arps & Elinor Eppich Kingery—

  what was Cache la Poudre?

  What were the French up to?

  1848 keeping their

  powder dry

  Eagle Canyon

  Clap trap houses displace the eagle

  dislocation

  driving through subdivisions

  named for what they displace

  Golden Eagle where is thy eye

  (and vanishing)

  Bald Eagle thy claw?

  (prospering, replete with road kill)

  Who dwelleth yet in Eagle Canyon—?

  wise philosophers

  knotted

  should we say

  twisted

  the

  ways

  of

  this

  road

  staked out

  You think watching a small tv

  the same as listening to

  quiet music?

  or a book with fine print?

  Gold Light

  I’d get up and turn off that fan if I could

  —I will

  turn off the refrigerator if I could

  —not sure I can do that

  crab apples are ornamental

  and St. Vrain is not a Christian holiday?

  Bring back Basho & temper the

  lane, the light, her dawn

  Basho hears a horse piss near his head

  Basho sees a dream waver on the autumn field

  Basho gives his youth to homosexual love

  Basho shaves his head

  Basho builds a hut and assumes a pen name

  Basho takes on students

  Basho hates the poetry scene

  The capital Edo is like New York

  He comes to loathe it

  flees it in riparian

  twist & turn

  —I am not a poet of Edo

  —Not a New York School poet

  —We are not poets with any name exactly

  though half of us is a New York School poet

  —I am not a New York School poet

  —You are when you collaborate that half

  —Collaboration was not invented in New York

  nor in Edo

  —I missed a beat O yes & proud of it

  Bring back the golden eagle of five syllables

  *

  Dusk by the creek

  this is a little haiku—

  the rabbit

  eyes the idling

  Subaru

  add another haiku—

  What loneliness

  the rabbit

  eyes the newly arrived Honda

  Can’t get a word in edgewise, ceded to river

  and another—

  Move your fingers

  and count syllables

  the old man

  *

  Catch us if you can

  blue & red in the rocky mountain

  slant light / sun set

  Waiting for you in a swing by the St. Vrain

  what I always knew poetry could do

  shoring up for the millennium

  so many thousands before us

  doing the same with their broken syllables

  “tremble”

  the river it’s the river

  I’m just going to walk over to it

  Voiced Stops

  Forrest Gander

  Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through

  The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An

  Elaborate evening drama, I lug his forlorn weight

  From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap-

  Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then

  Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar

  Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent

  Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At

  Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned

  His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw

  The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering-

  Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration:

  An indefinite continuation of life. I whirled out wings. Going

  Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.

  Blue-pajama-tendered wrists and hands. In rest, his musical

  Neck, pillowed cheek. Else by damp relentment, swal-

  Lowed almost in coverlet, fetched longwise

  From lashing hours into this unlikely angle, wedge,

  Elbow of unfollow. Before the nightly footfall

  —shtoom—his bed to our bed. Scaled eyes.

  (Cézanne died watching the door through which

  His son did not arrive). (Ajar, widening. …)

  Gone again to non-meridian dreams and

  Murmuring broken noise in tens. To wit:

  Lying bare, the sheets a husk shed low

  Over the sorrel-vine of him. Midnight

  Extracts me from sleep
to bear witness to that one, there:

  Local, small, breathing evenly, pathetic, soothe and bloom.

  With nidor of match-torched tick rising from the sink, he

  Hams and dishes across a heel-dinged softwood floor.

  Improvised jujitsu, mind-mirrored, runny at eyes, nostrils

  Gleeting. His sock-feet trail effervescence and gumballs. Or

  Shouts into the house: Come out! to see him as

  A sthenic wildering daimon zap the driveway

  With a curtain rod, the whooping

  Center of a ring of spark. His last rite:

  Peers into, scrupulously, both closets, under

  His bed, luring the dog with milkbones. He worms

  Into sheets after her, contorted to fit. Goodnight

  Mom etc. I sit at the edge in an intimacy without like

  And we talk in soft hues of curved space or frogs

  Whose bodies freeze and revive every spring.

  From outside, a child’s cry, blank of indecipherable

  Sound, pure distress or joy to which the now

  Acutely attentive body, body become

  Prayer, closes every

  Other tuning down.

  Planted in my chair within the transparent

  Room like an oak, squirrels whirling around.

  But the cry does not repeat. And the boy

  Should be at school. The haltstitch

  Slowly uncomes until my breath begins

  To assume its first position. Looming

  Close, a cardinal’s liquid cue, cue, a dry

  Plash of cars. Barely less green, the face

  Of the ongoing in the window again.

  Her whimper pitched high, the greyhound dream-

  Races on kitchen tile. He scrapes back a chair

  And hunches against morning’s cool:

  Nates to heels, knees to chin, T-shirt

  Stretched over the foreshortened

  Bulge of him. Bowl-of-Chex mouthfuls

  Mostly open. A newspaper turns: voluptuous

  Acoustics of home as bird hits

  Window, walls tremble. The concussion

  (Crushed breast) blots the pane (broken

  Neck) with an impact mark: a solid

  Host-white print the breadth

  Of a child’s fist from which

  The ghost-trace of wingbones upcurve.

  No whit poised, but given pause

  At the door of his room, I quicken into

  Mescalinate ecstasy, softly

  Unclocked, stood irrelevant, eldering,

  A guardian eloquence

  Among the dank smell of him

  Fecund in sleep, scratching scabs

  On his throat. Loss is what

  Distracts. And chiggers underpin

  The mutable world whose attributes will

  Concur with those of time

  While mine at cross-purposes

  Careen. So

  manage my affections. Killed the light.

  Constant singing, the inward rendering pungent

  Undersong and wordless high lullaby wafted over a table

  Of quadratic equations. Whose whirligig beetles are these

  Let loose in the toilet bowl? No shut-up is there,

  No sleeping late. The insistence (full gaze) of his face,

  High-cheeked, his roweled pupils, peening rum-brown

  Eyes, flood-gates to the wonderworld blink wide. Close.

  Vertigo of veering to kiss his full lips in the blind

  Room. Answerable (the gate swings out) to his summons, this

  Opening in being, vast of trouble, inward savor, reprise,

  Privilege of. Is gravity. Not situation. Seeing of. What is

  Taking place. The yellow Pine Siskin chirping to-thee, to thee

  To devote all wakefulness, apprise and spring

  As star moss rises and purple melic.

  Ambient Stylistics

  Tan Lin

  [novel]

  This is a [poem] about boredom and its relation to things we know are repeated. A poem should act in a similar way. It should be very repetitive. It should be on the outside not the inside of itself. It should never attach itself to anything, or anyone who is alive, especially the speaker who rightly speaking constitutes the end of the poem. In this way, it should create something that looks like it has been “sent away for.” Richard Prince said that. This is a poem about boredom and its relation to the things that we know are not repeated. It should not describe but only skim (biographical) material we already knew. It should exist on the edge of something that is no longer funny. In this way, it should create the meaningless passing of time, like disco music. A poem should have died just before we got to it. Like the best and most meticulous scholarship, the poem should be as inert and dully transparent as possible. T. S. Eliot said that. This is a poem about boredom and its relation to the things that were not said. A poem is what it is not. It should merely involve the passing of its own temporal constraints. In this way, it can repudiate all emotions except mechanical or chemical ones. After all, the emotions in us are usually dead (and can only be revived by chemicals), and the only emotions that we really could be said to have are the ones we already had.

  It is no accident that Reagan’s presidency, the disco era, and Warhol peaked at around the same historical moment. Nor is it an accident that the category for Best Disco Recording only lasted one year and that Gloria Gaynor’s great disco hit and Grammy winner was titled “I Will Survive.” A poem, like a disco hit, is designed to be immediately forgettable and some of the best presidents of recent memory were elected in the ’70s when Quaaludes were extremely popular. We live in an age when we are constantly told lies, made the subject of jokes, seduced by fluff and hyped with misinformation. Poetry should no longer represent the representation of knowledge, it should represent the dissemination of misinformation and lies. It should aspire to ever more bureaucratic forms of data transmission and delivery. It is well known that Reagan frequently failed to remember what he had said in press conferences or briefings of the day before, that he often failed to recognize his own cabinet members as he passed them in the corridors of the White House, and that even Nancy was crushed when he failed to comfort her after she told him she had breast cancer. No one ever really knew Ronald Reagan, not Nancy, not the seventy-seven individuals he saved in his career as a lifeguard, and not even his own children—who have written that on numerous occasions he failed to recognize them. A great poem functions in a similar way. It cannot be remembered, it can only be filled with something that is unknown or no longer contains. The ’70s are over but the cars and music of the ’70s, especially the pony cars and the mini-muscle cars like the Pontiac Firebird, Mercury Cougar, Dodge Charger and Olds Toronado with its flip-up headlamps linger, as if in drag, at the Classic Car lot located in Bel Air … Everything that is beautiful waits to be forgotten completely by what it is not. A poem, like the ’70s, is just another way of inducing a series of unforgivable likenesses. Warhol said of his art that “if you don’t think about it, it’s right.” Listening to a poem or novel or newspaper should be like that; it should be camouflaged into the large shapes and the patterns of words that surround us and evoke the most diffuse and unrecognizable moods that a culture produces. Philosophy, like poetry and television, can resemble these moods. Poetry ought to be as easy as painting by numbers. It should turn us into those emotions and feelings we could not experience in our own body. All poetry goes out in drag.

  No one should remember a poem or a novel, especially the person who wrote it. Heidegger was right; one is never without a mood. The poem openly aspires to a state of linguistic camouflage. Ronald Reagan is a doppelgänger, and Edmund Morris has created a doppelgänger. He has made Ronald Reagan into something that fitfully resembles biography or background Muzak. It is, of course, clear that Morris detests Ronald Reagan the bore that resembles the planet Jupiter with its dense core and absence of oxygen. But Morris also thinks
Reagan was a great president. Of course, Reagan made himself into a pattern that no one could see; he transformed acting into politics and outtakes into campaign speeches. He blended into everything because his ignorance was everywhere and extended to everything, especially his “untruisms” about domestic policy. After giving a speech in Orlando on March 8, 1983 about “the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, the historian Henry Steele Commager remarked that it “was the worst presidential speech in American history.”

  Everything that has a subject should be detested; everything that erases its subject should be loved. The great Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama thought that photography could not capture what really mattered and thus worked to deface his medium with scratches, out-of-focus shots and blinding flares from unknown flash sources. He liked to shoot outlaws, prostitutes, TV personalities, gangsters and stray dogs. He was always running away from the photographs he was about to take, and he was frequently punched by his subjects. This is why poetry is superior and at the same time more realistic than any photograph (except really uninteresting ones), where the scent of something detestable begins to emerge at the point when the shutter is snapped and the chemical process begins. A poem does not secure or even require such violence for itself; the greatest poems simply contain what doesn’t matter as it happens on the surface of the poem. To have a photograph is not interesting; to have a photograph of a photograph is, and this is what a poem does better than any photograph can. Only such relaxing enclosures of image within image or word within word allow the emptiness of all human feelings to surrender themselves without obvious grotesqueries and thus make the present a place to have a cigarette. All biographies, like all poems, are best when they fail to suggest anything about their subjects at all. A good poem is very boring. A great poem is more boring than the act of reading itself.

  A [poem] or whatever you’re doing (in a way) creates something that stops you from doing it. It is by now clear that what is not here is reading, but an illustrated lecture or slide show. The best reading is a reading that makes itself redundant, in other words, a reading that is canned. Let us now return to the classics. Almost everyone has read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Eliot and Stein are the most redundant and thus the most easy writers in the canon, with the possible exception of Tennyson and more recently the serial novels perfected by Jacqueline Susann, who is also read redundantly over and over. Some writers never have to be read anymore because what they say cannot be recognized at all anymore except as something in the background of what we were thinking about while reading the paper or eating. One reads, as everybody knows, to forget not to remember and that is what reading large tracts of the newspaper and Gertrude Stein are like. They are all the same. I can remember nothing, especially the little connecting words like and and to and from that make the newspaper so pleasing.