Month: March 2003

Kasey, bless his heart, is going to teach my book V. Imp. next semester. He wanted me to write a statement of poetics so here it is:

V. Imp. is “very important” (marginally, or as [musical] notation) but in shorthand, because not enough time or languor. V. Imp.‘s defining gesture is kicking — podiums, authority — kicking up at barriers and limits, or kicking legs up sideways in the air á la Dick Van Dyke, an important early influence. V. Imp. — serious fluff or frivolous gravitas? It’s “oscillating bimbo poetics”. The poems are my odalisques and I am their master (this is revenge for centuries of the inverse). They yearn hungrily –at the moon?– out the arched windows of the palace; the tinkling fountains, the caged birds (their pretty familiars) do not soothe them. They know there is more to experience. Anyway, forget everything you ever learned about poetry. If you don’t know anything about poetry, just forget what you don’t know. Then we can begin. The writing takes my hand (and by extension, both our heads) in another absurdly orientalist gesture, flying us about through squalor and pulchritude, delighted with its own stupid wit. “No money in buffoonerie” — oh well. Change “peace state” to “war state” : ululate. It’s urban, psychic, lexical spelunking, the old Romantic impulse but jerkier and more twisted, clumsy, raging when not just campy. Total drama: opera, porn, Bollywood, and old musicals: each word has a bared midriff and thrusting pelvis. Poetry (not mine) has become sickeningly reasonable despite the pulsating metropoli and deep illogic of everything. The “uses” of poetry more frangible… than tangible. Remember: the striped fish is still in the blank space but its jaw yammers up and down. Exercise of autonomy, rhythm in amber, song of my elf…

Jim Behrle is abrasive, is alienating me. Abrasion is distinct from insurrection.

I’m not convinced anyone will be talking about my poetry in 20 years (much less talking about anything, the way things are going these days), but if they are I think that yes, the effects of analgesics will be discussed as a significant influence.

I have a chronic pain condition — wheee! See my play, “PtArmIgaN”, for more information.

Anselm Berrigan discloses:

In 1980 eddie me my mother and my father lived in boulder from, I think, february through july or august. My father had been asked to teach, but really to mediate the naropa poetry wars, as he was friends with all sides…

but I’m writing in the interest of information to tell you about two things: 1) the time I made him five sandwiches in a row, and when I refused to interrupt whatever playing I was doing to make a sixth, he got mad and yelled at me, tho he raised his gigantic (to me) naked body out of bed and made his own sandwich. and apologised a little later. 2) he used to send me to this store to get things, like the paper, pepsi, cigarettes, and certain kinds of danishes. one time I brought home donuts because i didn’t like raisins and they were in the only available kind of danish. and then he yelled at me, and I felt bad and cried. and then he apologised a little later. and ate a lot of donuts (he was not really a yeller tho’). Not drugs, I know. but then there was one time, in new york, where I asked my mother to help me with some kind of science homework when I was seven. she gave me this funny look and said go ask your father. I thought he was asleep, but she insisted I ask him. so i did, and he woke up and proceeded to ask me to bring him a screwdriver, which I did, and then he proceeded to take apart the telephone. this had nothing to do with my homework. I think my mother wanted me to interrupt whatever state he was in. he was not in such states too often in my interactions with him, which were very very frequent until he died. but the ones i remember are pretty damn funny, to me. no particular reason for me to tell you this, but I liked your note about him, and its better than thinking about war for a few minutes….

No time to write 100 poems today, drat.

But I thought of a title:

Ear Elephant

Get it?

I sing therefore I am.

Boundless thanks to Nick for sending in the poem, one of my all-time favorites. I post it here for your delectation:

Grind (Diane Ward, from “Never Without One” (Roof, 1984)

Thin spaced fractions (internal listenings) I thought as much

as numbers, I hear around us inmates of the ears.

Eternal attraction to heroic caginess that touched doubt.

The don’t say that you’re a scant inventor of my own.

This derangement on as it should go on. The picture of

themselves spread over themselves which are barely owned.

On no further than playing intimate figmenteds lended.

Experts now take hurry, but mean calm asylum.

Minor subsistence furthered by amended minds in all-surroundings.

And physical exhausted erroneous respect. We could be already

in end, a better platform to be relieved by all of you

together functioning. By life patterns choice, different

sense of vertical different cultural blood that, by wandering,

induces time’s factor of between. Like authority’s lens

and experience magnified by a giant tear whose modern answers

yes and yes and ok ok. Oh, from eventualities-lower modes’

care extracted. Oh, to link arms, arms formulate, formulating

promises, promise, unleash the absent electric impulses shot

through bodies as exotic blue the hue of distance.

He’s about to lend a problem which his mind has already solved.

Questions remaining as a glaze in his eyes.

Changes made before you.

Por favor!

Would someone in possession of Diane Ward’s book, Never Without One, mind terribly typing up and sending me her poem, “Grind”?

I would be so grateful.

And besides it doesn’t, Jim, come out of nowhere. I had just mentioned Ecstasy and Advil. Advil (and the occasional Tylenol, for variety) being my drug of necessity.

Jim Behrle asked if I was serious or joking about my Berrigan comment, below.

I wrote to him:

I’m serious.

I love the specificity and intimacy of knowing what substances he took to

change his psychic state.

And I do. I meant to cast no snide aspersions on Berrigan’s character, nor to typecast him, as he himself may have done in his poems, as a person defined by his drugs.

I would love just as much to know what someone ate or who someone slept with or what they dreamed the previous night.

Disclosure is adorable. As Jordan said recently, there is no privacy. Or see my comment here not too long ago beginning with “I love someone to the extent that…”

Or as Richard Loranger and I agreed earlier today in a conversation at the Writing Center at Pratt, “there is never too much information.”

Not, as I wrote to Jim, “a bored kid on ecstasy.”

No. I’m an intensely busy middle-aged woman on Advil!

Wooweee!