Non verbal

"Nonverbal" must be a thing

reality before it's talked about 

or after, still hanging around 

when words aren't  

Once we speak  

the jig's up 

lemon is nonverbal

until lemon 

I feel sorry

 I feel sorry for people abducted by aliens

in the Middle Ages.

No science fiction to help them 

frame their understanding

of the sheer terror, 

only Lives of the Saints, maybe, 

witchcraft, or Scholasticism. 

They wouldn't have thought

of medical experiments,

space voyages centuries in the future-- 

everything they thought they knew

irrelevant, useless, inane. 

So it is with us. 

What we think we know

isn't much help. 

 

The Act

 We have many ways to name it--

making love, sleeping or going to bed

with someone, making whoopee.  

None, though, seems to name the Dirty Deed 

without euphemism, clinical coldness,

or vulgarity. Fucking, too, 

is metaphor for a hundred other things we do.  

Freedom and Nebraska

 I.  

Freedom: a great concept

but nobody knows what 

to do with it.  

II.

Suppose there were a law

forbidding travel to Nebraska? 

That would be a bad thing,

even if you didn't want to go to Nebraska! 

III.

Freedom is about things not yet even 

desired or imagined. The highest freedom, then, 

is the freedom of the imagination: freedom is the surreal

Nebraska, the Nebraska of undreamt dreams.  

  

The Hatred of Poetry

 In The Hatred of Poetry Ben Lerner argues

We like poetry, the idea of it, more than actual poems,

Disappointing in a number of ways and rarely

Possessing the grandeur we associate with the concept. 

He is mostly right. Speaking only for myself

Here, I find even poetry I am supposed to like,

In my own tradition of avant-garde and

Experimental poetry, to be dull 

Or else pretentious, overly precious, clever,

Or self-indulgent in innumerable ways. 

Other poetry I perhaps ought to like is too jokey

Or too earnest, overwritten, too "poetic" 

in predictable ways, or too prosaic, 

Like this poem I am now writing, 

Woodenly written, 

Simply dull or not extraordinary in the way that

"Poetry" is supposed to be. Not to mention 

The poems of trite civic platitudes and 

Overheated political rhetoric. 

All this is true, and fairly well-known too,

To anyone with minimal powers of observation.  

Yet I feel Lerner is writing. 

I do not feel this way at all 

About poems like Keats's "To Autumn." 

In this case, the poem is superior to any abstract 

Or honorific, aspirational idea of Poetry with a capital P.  

Moreover, the experience of reading poems like this 

And even some others that are not quite so great,

Or great in unkeatsian, unpredictable ways, 

By Clark Coolidge, Alice Notely or my friend Tony Robinson

(You can put in your own names here) 

Far surpasses any disappointment I feel 

At the the vast swaths of crappy poetry and

Has given my life the little meaning that it has. 

After Lorca and Bronk: "Cuando yo me muera..."

 When I die

My love for Ben Webster's saxophone 

Goes to the grave with me 

Voiced and unvoiced dentals

 I did not say what they said I said;

And if I did

I didn't mean what they thought I meant.  

Mourning

If I become a mourning person 

Some day 

It won't be because I like the a.m. hours.   

Sous rature

 Derrida put certain words under erasure

Questioning their ability to refer to things

In an easy way; we understand his schtick. 

We already knew this, in a way, and if we didn’t

We could have learned it from William Bronk too. 

Moderate to severe

 On pharma commercials actors talk

Off their"'moderate to severe" symptoms

Of various diseases.  

But surely moderate and severe are opposites?  

ASTROLOGERS

 The astrologers have

"We believe in science"

Signs, in their front yards.  

"Be a good person..."

 "Be a good person," they say, but you inherit

from your predecessors an unwinnable war,

epidemics, ecological disasters.

Prolonging the conflict would lead to more death

as would ending it, leaving the country

to same  the brutal fanatics as before. 

By all means, though, "try to be a good person." 

Flippant

 Now my own ideas are being filtered through the faux-Bronk style. I cannot any longer formulate my own idea for a poem, because it all comes out in that mode. But when I go back to read Bronk, his poems seem quite unlike my own; they are more ponderous, heavier.  My knock-offs seem flippant in contrast. 

That is probably a good thing. At some point I will return to my usual style.  

Sunday School

They taught me about people being "wicked," 

Enough to destroy the world in disgust. I was a young child

And couldn't imagine more than schoolboy mischief

Or tracking mud into the house. It didn't add up. 

Now it does.  

COFFEE

Wars have been fought over theology.

We might as well have fist fights about the rules of chess

Or philosophical debates,

As Wittgenstein once wrote in jest,

About which coffee tastes the best.*

_______

*"You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well."  ---LW.  

  

FURNITURE

FURNITURE

 In dreams I am with friends

Not my actual ones but fictional

Strangers, furnished for me

As though to say: we complete the scene.  

ARROGANCE

Is is arrogance to think

My imitations are close

To the real thing? Yes,

Arrogance of particularly modest sort.  

DO UNTO OTHERS

 "Do unto others... " they say. 

I'd like others to tie me up

and perform unspeakable acts on me.

I don't think that's what they had in mind. 

Revision

 I know I've said I don't revise.

Equally true: nothing ever remains

The same.

EXISTENTIAL

There is an itch we can't scratch:

Existence. 

The Problem

 I could write imitations of Bronk's ideas using Bronk's own language (more or less), or I could put my own ideas in a Bronkian language, or put Bronkian ideas in a language alien to him, or put my own ideas in a language not Bronkian at all. That would be throwing away the crutch.  

Eventually, it will evolve in this direction, just as as my bad poems evolved into good ones. 

My new challenge is a poet we might call facilón.  He's from Granada and teaches in Virginia, has all the prizes and translated by Forché in one of the best poetry presses in the US.  His work is just pretty and super facile, like a Spanish Mary Oliver.  

DOCTOR

     Some call me Doctor Mayhew

But we all know

I haven't cured shit