Author: Nada Gordon

__ Literature is so vast, and I’m so green.__

O Ron, O Ron, what would my matchstick be without your carborundum?

Ron mentioned in his blog yesterday his intial critical reaction to reading Lyn’s _My Life_: “Lushness for its own sake.”

He said he’d had the same reaction upon first reading Clark Coolidge’s work (although I’m guessing he was not talking about _The Maintains_).

My brain starts playing a game of Jeopardy:

What is a jungle?

What is hair? or hips? or lips?

What is “sake”?

I suppose I have had the same feeling about pieces of writing at times. When I encounter “lush” writing that lacks what I earlier called “urgency” (or necessity, or evident motivation, or vibrancy — maybe all these are “sake”), that is, when it is too enamored of its own mannerism (Christian Bök — AND HIS BIG AWARD! How sour can grapes get?— comes to mind. Also perhaps Andrea Brady, Lisa Robertson, and a few others. But then, I’m one to talk.), I admit to feeling annoyed.

Yet I do hear in Ron’s reaction a condemnation of sensuous plenitude and detail; it’s everything I can do to keep from essentializing it.

No one ever says, “Sparseness (or austerity or conciseness, even) for its own sake.” Although it seems to me an equally possible reaction. One that I have on reading, say, Oppen or Williams. Maybe Barbara Guest, too. But not, oddly, Creeley. And certainly not on reading Ron!

I feel a bit like a Pomeranian nipping at his heels. I honestly mean no disrespect. He was a very important early influence on me. An example, many paragraphs down, will follow.

I first encountered Ron’s writing (and Lyn’s, and Stephen’s, and Barry’s, and Carla’s, and everyone else’s) when I was an undergrad at SF State in the Creative Writing program.

My mother had moved me, in 1979, to 40th and San Pablo in Oakland, at that time not the loveliest of neighborhoods, so that we could live in a dreadful little duplex across the street from her guru’s (Swami Muktananda’s) ashram. I went from living in semi-bucolic marijuana-infused lalaland to the ghetto, where my principal form of entertainment (when I wasn’t making collages out of old Nat’l Geographics or taking drugs or watching 50s reruns on TV and figuring out how to replicate the characters’ outfits) was riding the 72 San Pablo bus towards downtown Oakland, to the seediest part of the boulevard. There were so many prostitutes around there at that time, and I realize now that many of them may have been transsexuals, as they tended to be, for women, unusually tall. They were always well turned-out, I recall, in de rigeur hotpants. Down at the end of San Pablo was a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store that yielded magical finds, none of which I can now remember. But I do remember that I, a scarlet-haired punkette of fifteen, had no qualms about adventuring into what was no doubt the scariest part of town. I continued to be very active (if that’s the word for it) in the punk scene, and it was only a couple of traumatic events (which for once I suppose I will keep private — not that they’re any big deal, though), along with my mother’s urging, that led me back to junior college in 1980.

I remember taking some short-story writing classes at Merritt College and getting a lot of positive feedback on my stories. My stories had started out as quite normal, little emotional melodramas, and these were the ones that people liked, but the more I wrote the stranger and more dreamlike my stories became. They were even, dare I say it?, a little bit disjunctive — not in syntax but narratively. I was just beginning to sense a disconnect between the kind of music and pictures I liked (Kandinsky, I remember, was my favorite. And I loved loved loved Duchamp.) and the kind of writing I was doing. I had been writing poetry since I was little, and I’d been keeping notebooks since I was 12, so when it came time, when I was 18, to move out and really go to college, I decided on the Creative Writing program at SF State, figuring I wouldn’t be any good at anything else. Or at least as deeply interested in anything else to stay motivated. I flirted with the idea of studying music, but I didn’t have the proper background.

Creative Writing 101. 1982. My teacher was a very handsome blond man with a mellifluous speaking voice and an attitude much more coolly cultured than I could ever hope to cultivate. And he was a poet: Stephen Rodefer, whose _Four Lectures_, would later, while I was working at the SF State Poetry Center as a workstudy student under the supervision of Carla Harryman, win the Poetry Center annual book prize. Stephen was sometimes very encouraging, commenting about one of my poems, “You have more than just the knack.” Other times he could wither with his disdain. What was I doing wrong?

Working at the Poetry Center, I read all the books I could get my hands on. Stephen’s, for one. And _My Life_. And _Ketjak_. I can’t see the word “fellaheen” without thinking, “Ketjak”. Eager to please, and wanting to find a way out of the Norton Anthology-Sylvia Plath & Dylan Thomas- querulous personal lyric (which I suppose, sigh, in my way I’ve returned to, but not without having swept up a whole passel of influences on the way), I began, with all the energy of youth, to write imitations. I have a couple of files bursting with the writing I did around this time. The following excerpt of a piece, execrably titled “like a bad translation, hints, slightly”, is a hilarious adolescent hodgepodge of Ron, Lyn, and Stephen:

Although she felt flirtatiously deprived, she was glad not to be in Zimbabwe. A cask, no , a slug, no, a carafe of chablis, and then a walk up Sixth street. Then maybe she would weigh a testicle or two. Who knew? Ember ember lion boot belt. Lion, a sphinx is not particularly courageous. Oh I know you, I know you, and I love what I know. It was that element of playfulness and imprecision, turtle, gigolo. Defrocked, unlocked, oiled: firm determination. Orange plastic, orange bathrobe. Hats for idiots, orange, surrounding the accident. Hey look at that punk rocker! And metal crunched twice. Flipper glad to be waited on, glad to be thrown chunks of bread. A swarm of mosquitoes, not easily walked through. You should have seen the window, black and gooey. Beatle boots. Oh Edgar Allen Poe and her desire! She wasn’t going to censor it for anything. Turn your collar up, comme ca. The big question used to be who’s better, Michael Jackson or John Lennon? The great dane next door with long nipples. The miniature grand piano, painted gold, was also a music box. Really really wanting to take her wine out on someone. Jamaica. White cotton. Colt, a rhythmic exercise. Vroom! Vroom! Hey, that girl just wrote vroomvroom. A question of grace, of cool Tibetan drinks. I don’t “like” that. It’s minimal. An excuse. Grating, cheese or a gutter. Kind of nicey-nice, glockenspiel, all this hoopla. Bonkers, caca, souris, rats. One brick upon another. Get loud.

Eat a torpedo, then need gum to cover garlic. I’ll call you tonight, how about that? Cleavage. She be sayin’ let’s lay roun’ the house nekkid t’day but i din’ wan’ see her ass all stretched out on the couch. Offering it as a bridge or sacrament. What does lie beneath the connectives? I’m hearing you/ new piracy, blouson. I see, I hear. Laudamus. Obese fake hairy collar. Tam to hold dreads. Veneratum. God, I would never do something so obligatoire. Tinctures: why does love strike fear? Thou shalt itch, thou shalt bleed. Entirely tired, in entirety. Some important ploughing needs to be done. Take two round pieces of wood and clack them together. Very clever. Endeavor, belabour. Ho rumble drum. Only as fast as I can, only as fast as I can. What’s left of it? Superfreaky. Cigarettes, clove. Legwarmers. They can feel my beady eyes on them, crawling….almost as complex as a pomegranate….I know what she means when she says her heart flops over. You could practically sit in the poet’s lap. Literature is so vast, and I’m so green. Breast works squire. Mausoleum for clarity. That whole quality of visceral unease…

It’s cringe-y in parts, but there are a few lines I like, and it’s very interesting to me to note how I was becoming aware of notions like meta- and inter-textuality, heteroglossia, multi-lingualism, and what I will carelessly call “linguistic objectivism.” It also clearly came out of my sensibilities, not Ron’s or Lyn’s or Stephen’s, although the form is shamelessly aped.

They opened up my brain to the possibilities of what poems can be, contain, and look and sound like. From them I read backwards into NAP and the NY school, and learned to incorporate my interests in much earlier poetries (The Metaphysicals, the Romantics) into my own verse while still keeping it up-to-date and stylish. Thank you! Gracias! Arigatou! Yip! Yip! Arf!

I promise more memories of those fascinating and fractious SF days. But now I really must clean my house.

Last night’s winners, at the Poetry Project Marathon, were, to my mind:

Merry Fortune

Ted Greenwald

Taylor Mead

I missed a lot of readers because I was working the refreshment table, fetching bowls of chili and counting out change from the cash boxes. For some reason not entirely clear to me, I enjoyed these tasks immensely.

Gary and I have collaborated for four marathons in a row now. We usually take it upon ourselves to rewrite something. In the first year we each did a version of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. Mine was pornographic (It appears in _Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?_. The second year we rewrote choice sections from the Book of Revelation (This one’s in _V. Imp._). Last year we wrote a play composed entirely of palindromes (“AIBOPHOBIA” — which is a palindrome meaning “fear of palindromes!) This year we rewrote Matthew Arnold’s _Dover Beach_; we thought it appropriate to our historical moment. POEM FOLLOWS:

OVER REACH

The sea is brown and sticky tonight, like a stick —

The tide is full as a gray broccoli, hunched up like a porno queen,

the moon lies fair and dripping corrosion

Upon the straits; on the French toast the margarine

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, like a giant tranquilizer.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

It also drips corrosion.

It fans across black as a hand (like a sassy cloud

in the ghetto of the sky), its spires an undersea

turkey with tendrils. Each tendril like

A baby giraffe stumbling forth to balance soup on head.

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-bland land,

Listen! Quote: the only sites under consideration for either

interim or permanent storage of high level nuclear waste

are sites on Indian land unquote.

You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles and bam-bam

which the waves draw back, and fling, like boogers,

At their return, up the high strand,

haunts in the horn, and vatic compulsions

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

1-800-innocent

1-800-amygdala

1-800-prosody

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

1-800-end pain

1-800-bankrupt

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human poetry; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea,

where everyone’s head’s a peppercorn,

bursting into flavor

at the moment of destruction.

I made of my song a coffee to go,

Black as the The Sea of Faith

or The Sea of Hype

or The Sea of Banner Advertising: quote Qualmish Afghan Jew

packed over sixty fez with bees unquote

at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright pantygirdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

My name is sunny pain.

I’m homeless, and I’m hungry.

If you don’t have it,

I can understand it cuz I don’t have it.

My name is Sunny Pain.

As Cassavettes sez: Beware carefree braggarts’ abstract verses!

Retreating, the breath like an error message

Of the night wind, down the vast message forum

fuck you very efficient missile defense system mandatory suicide?

And in the naked shingles of the world,

everything’s going to be … what it is… in the nervous movie of now.

Ah, love, if we cannot be true

To one another, let us yip unholy in oily kimono, pull kinky polyphony

& minimum punk in my nylon mink muumu

for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams, with corn! and frogponds! and air traffic cravings!

So various, so beautiful, so new — the anorexic bunnies and their hot flashes —

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light (as seen on TV),

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Tiptoeing over the hardboiled eggs,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by the light

of the CNN cameras.

I love to read J. Krishnamurti, the “anti-guru.” He was totally radical in his propositions, but at the same time filled with love. His philosophy is the most exquisite kind of common sense, and he practices it as Socratic educare, rather than as dogma to be preached. Do I love to read him so much because my mother took me along to so many yoga retreats (I hated them, the fawning-at-the-guru, the endless rules, the shaktipat line, the gender divisions, the petty hierarchies. But I loved the chants and the feasts. Oh, and the saris, of course. Which I guess puts me pretty squarely in the realm of the sensate once again.)? When on our Christmas Day trip to Jackson Heights I bought another Krishnamurti book (_On Self-Knowledge_) I was very interested to read the following passage, which reminds me of Wittgenstein. Like LW, JK asks us to observe the motions of language in our consciousness and notice how simply observing can transform consciousness:

Krishnamurti writes:

Why do we name a feeling? Why do we term a reaction as anger, as jealousy, as arrogance, as hate, and so on? Do you term it in order to understand it, or as a means of recognizing it, or to communicate it? is the feeling independent of the term, or do you understand it through the term? If you understand the feeling through the term, through the word, then the term becomes important and not the feeling. Is it possible not to name the feeling? If it is, then what happens to the feeling? By terming, you entangle the feeling within the frame of reference, and so the living is caught in the net of time, which only strengthens memory, the ‘me’. What happens to a feeling, to a response if you do not give it a name, a term to it? does it not come to an end, does it not wither away? Please experiment with this and discover for yourself.

I think I will try this. Next time I notice that I feel, say, poetic envy, I will first try to re-name “envy” something else, like “burnishing” or “lasagne.” And I will notice how the feeling changes. Then I will erase, dissociate, all terms from the feeling. Perhaps then I will only notice bodily signals — a tightening of the abdomen or a slight furrow of the brow — but much less laden with the baggage of the original term. I might even be able to free the living from the net of time.

I looked around on the Web to see if I could find anything concrete connecting Krishnamurti and Wittgenstein. Had JK read LW? He surely must have, but I couldn’t find any proof of it. Any Krishnamurti buffs out there? All I could find was a little forum response which went in the very interesting direction of Kristeva and Irigaray, and a list of the favorite books of the late Rajneesh. Also extremely amusing was the list of answers to the riddle of why the chicken crossed the road, but perhaps a little off-topic.

I was a little sad to read Krishnamurti’s following take on decoration, though, which either undercuts my convictions about it or indicts me as one of those who is destroying the world with my superficial notions:

Every day, more and more, we are decorating the outer. The cinema stars, and you who copy them, are keeping beautiful outwardly, but if you have nothing inside, the outward decoration, the ornamentation, is not beauty. Sirs, don’t you know that inward state of being, that inward tranquillity in which there is love, kindliness, generosity, mercy? That state of being, obviously, is the very essence of beauty, and without that, merely to decorate oneself is to emphasize the sensate values, the values of the senses, and to cultivate the values of the sense, as we are doing now, must inevitably lead to conflict, to war, to destruction.

The seeker after truth is the seeker after beauty — they are not distinct. Beauty is not merely outward ornamentation but that richness that comes through the freedom of inward understanding, the realization of ‘what is’.

–J. Krishnamurti, from _On Self-Knowledge_ (from a talk given in 1948)

Is he right?

*Is* “the decoration of the outer” the very nature of our civilization? If it were wouldn’t we create spaces for humans to dwell that were based on grace and intrigue and loveliness rather than mere efficiency? Wouldn’t our buildings, for example, look more like India’s? Wouldn’t clothing be variously-textured and colorful expressions of imagination rather than rows of identical beige khakis?

Isn’t it true that *not* to cultivate the values of sense allows those who would profit by exploiting our basic needs for clothing and shelter (and food too) to create the most hideous possible spaces and items with which we are forced on a daily basis to be intimate with?

I can’t quibble with his notion of inner beauty and tranquillity, even if the post-structuralists might. But surely ornamentation doesn’t PRECLUDE such inner beauty and tranquillity.

And just might it be possible that he is perpetuating a kind of mild misogyny?

Is my essentialist connection of the impulse to decorate with (at least my own) femininity a kind of misogyny too?

What can I do with my own guilt and confusion but put it into poems? (It’s funny, I remember asking Carla Harryman a couple of decades ago whether she kept a journal. She said, no, she’d stopped, because why would anyone want to read about her angst? I really like to read about people’s angst. Pessoa’s _Book of Disquiet_, anyone? It’s all, like anything else, in the rendering.)

From my book _Lip_ (1988) [the obsessions don’t change]:

a: confusion is artifice. wipe off that paint.

b: I did and saw bland shapes (I ached to be beheld)

The curious may also take a look at my translations of two poems by George Herbert: jordan iii and jordan iv.

***On Urgency***

I like urgency in a poem.

Emotional urgency.

Social (political) urgency.

Philosophical (intellectual) urgency.

Rhythmic urgency.

Urgency is not an absolute requirement but anyway I like it.

Hey! It’s the last day of the year!

Alan Davies sends this message with a p.s. giving permission to post it on my blog. I sent him a response, but his hotmail account was full and bounced it back. I append it at the end of this message.

NADA —

I ENJOYED OUR CONVERSATION YESTERDAY AT BPC.

YOU MENTIONED THAT YOU HAVE STARTED A BLOG. (WHEN WILL IT (I(NTERNE)T) EVER END?)

YOU SAID THAT YOU HAD POSTED TO IT A STATEMENT VALUING GLITTER AS A COMPONENT OF POETRIES. AND THAT KEVIN (KNOWING THAT YOU LIKE MY WORK) HAD ASKED YOU WHERE THE GLITTER IS IN IT. I MENTIONED TO YOU THAT LINE (Waves scoop up the mandarin ducks…) FROM A HAN SHAN POEM. THE ACTUAL GLITTERS.

WE TALKED ABOUT JAPANESE PACKAGING AND THE DETAILS OF THE DAILY THERE AND OF HOW THEY TOO GLIMMER IN THEIR BRIGHT OBDURATE SOFTNESS.

LATER IN THE EVENING OTHER THOUGHTS BEGAN TO APPEAR. (FOR EXAMPLE) YOUR WORK COULD BE SEEN AS THE GLITTER IN / ON MY WORK. (THIS IS OBVIOUSLY NOT TO SUGGEST THAT THAT IS MORE THAN A HAPPENSTANCE OF OUR PROXIMITIES.) WE DO MAKE THINGS IN COMMUNITIES. GLOSSES (CROSS-GLOSSES) DO OCCUR. WILLIAM BURROUGHS SPOKE (AND I CAN’T FIND ANY FAULT IN THIS THINKING AT ALL) ABOUT THE LANGUAGE AS A VIRUS. SO TO SAY THAT YOUR WORK IS PART OF MY WORK AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF YOURS APPEAR ON / AGAINST MINE IS ONLY TO STATE THE (REALLY) OBVIOUS. AND WHAT I’M SAYING IS NOT ABOUT INFLUENCE. IT’S JUST THAT IT ALL BLOSSOMS IN THIS ONE WORLD TOGETHER. I SEE THE TOADSTOOL ON THE LOG. I SEE THE FUNGUS ON THE ROCK. I HEAR THE WATER TRICKLING UNDER BOTH.

I’M REMINDED TOO OF THE PIECE BY DOGEN THAT I READ AT THE BROKEN SAUCER READING THAT YOU SPONSORED AFTER 9/11. HIS “FLOWERS IN THE SKY” AND HIS “FLOWERS IN THE EYE” ALTHOUGH THEY MEAN MAYBE VERY DIFFERENT THINGS FROM WHAT I’VE BEEN SHEDDING HERE DO STILL LET FALL THEIR GLIMMER ON MY WORK (AS THEY DID THAT NIGHT ON MY _PAIN_ AND ON MY PAIN).

SALUTATIONS!!! —

ALAN

Hi Alan,

I like your transmogrification of ornament into glitter. Glitter is only one sort of decoration ( I think I may actually have been imagining something more like arabesques and added designs), but I like what it evokes: light on water, seven-year-old-girls’ craft supplies and nail polish, and Bowie. And I like it with a Brooklyn accent, too.

I don’t have any problem with the idea of influence. I mean of your having influenced me. As I have been reading your work so avidly for a couple of decades, since I was a quite young person. You were the only one of your crew whose writing helped sustain me in Japan (in large part because of the influence of Japanese sensibilities on *you*), the only one in whom I could detect an interesting pattern of growth, the only one unafraid to take not just formal risks but personal ones too. I’m not saying your peers didn’t produce interesting work between the years of 1988 and 1999, but in a sense they had already made their statements and most of what followed were elaborations. (I can think of a few exceptions, including some of Barry’s recent memoir work, but *in the main* I think this is true).

You may sometimes build your own orthodoxies and make absolute statements, but you very often contradict them too, sometimes in a gestural way, with poems. You never wrote yourself into a corner. No, come to think of it, you did, but you documented (maybe several times) your self-entrapment in writing and then you wrote yourself out again. I always found that movement liberating and touching, and I identified with it (I’m not much of a Brechtian) much in the same way I identify with Kafka when I read his journals. I identify also with the brazen “yearniness” (I talk about this on the blog a little) in your writing, so taboo among most of the principal others of your generation. Plus you orientalize like crazy (don’t get angry, I don’t mean that in the bad colonializing sense), something I couldn’t help doing myself when I lived in the mysterious east, beguiled by its myriad charms.

So yes, there is a lot of influence — direct influence! But I’m not sure if it’s something that would be so evident to a third party. In fact, I wonder if they might see no connection at all. I am less given than you to plain statement in poems, and feel almost unable to attain the kind of lucidity I’m sure your practice helps you reach. Or maybe it’s more unwilling than unable. As if lucidity would take me outside of the noisiness and excitation, the bubbling adrenaline hum my poems seem to come from. I mean, I guess, I’m afraid of not being confused. Or afraid of not being ridiculous.

My work *is* part of your work, but filtered through an entirely different sieve of sensibilities, no less peculiar than yours, to be sure, but utterly different. Maybe if you’d been a woman raised by hippies instead of a man raised by Seventh Day Adventists. Can you imagine?

Thanks, notes, and some meta-blog talk

*********************************************

**Thanks** to BKS for fyxing my lynx.

**And to Kent Johnson for telling me what I should have already known, that Shinkichi Takahashi died in 1988.

**Why not have a look at Brenda Iijima’s nifty essay on THE EAR on Jack’s blog, PANTALOONS? See lynx at left.

I’m finding the blogs, this new profusion among poets, intimate, not solipsistic. Spy-devices into each other’s minds. And there is the presentness, the quick response time.

The profusion keeps getting described as something biological. Algae? Rabbits? I think of the multicolored flowers, like lupine but (maybe a kind of vetch?), that one year covered the Bolinas sewer plant.

I like when they are diaristic (Jordan). I like when they are abstruse and loopy (Jack). I like when they are expository (Kasey, Gary, Ron) too. I like all the blogs. Heriberto’s reminds me of being elsewhere.

I like when the modes interweave. That’s what I want to do here. “Anything DOES go.”

Admiring Jordan’s rendering of poetic agon. I’d like to do more of that but I get so awkwardly discursive. So sorry. Indulge me, friends.

I like when one mode creeps into another, as when Ron so movingly described his experiences with his grandmother.

I DO love autobiography.

And then there’s the exhibitionism.

Don’t like taboos and proscriptions so much. In general and especially in poetry. An older poet was saying to me and Gary at a bar not long ago that he was disappointed by our generation, that he didn’t feel there was anyone who really carried on his legacy as he had hoped. Gary and I looked at each other in disbelief, feeling that, to the contrary, this poet’s influence had been enormous. We named a list of people who we thought followed in his footsteps. He gave reasons that each of these poets did not qualify as his rightful heir. So we asked what he had hoped for — he said that he had wanted to be outdone, he’d wanted to see his mind blown, that he’d expected to see someone come from more of a “street” background, take his ideas and run with them. He said that instead of rejecting all that 60s NAP “crap”, as his people had done, the youngers had embraced and resynthesized it. I said to him gee I was sorry to have disappointed him, but that his generation had presented me with too many don’ts. Don’t be bardic, self-dramatizing, lyrical, voice-based… and I wanted to be all those things (because otherwise, why be a poet? isn’t that most of the fun of it?). “And now you are,” he said, wryly.

A concrete feeling — no flying — heavy, marbled as meat — the discursivity.

Dante sleeps in the golden light.

Gary sleeps naked on top of the covers.

I should sleep too but I’m enjoying sitting here and talking with you.

I’m really in this for the conversation.

In the works: Krishnamurti on ornament. Krishnamurti and Wittgenstein. Ornament is still a problem. And then there’s Pakeeza…

******Talkin ’bout my g-g-g-g-******

My less solipsistic friends on the buff-list have been going on at length about the Clash in the wake of Joe Strummer’s premature demise. A few are showing their age by demonstrating their ignorance about who the Clash were or what their place was in punk culture, about which the alter kakhers seem similarly to have no clue.

Such ignorance was further exemplified in the NY Times today, where an article about Joe Strummer was accompanied by an egregiously captioned photo of Mick Jones. Joe’s probably rolling in ‘is grave.

I was converted to punkdom on my 14th birthday (1978), when a friend of my mother’s (with whom we had lived, seven years earlier, in a communal house on 17th St. in San Francisco), gave me a copy of The Ramones’ _Rocket to Russia_. We had been living in Marin County for many years, and, while I loved living in far west Marin, in Bolinas, reveling in the ocean, the flora and fauna, I was less satisfied with life in Fairfax, where we moved when I was eleven. There I was, adolescing in a place where all the guys wore aloha shirts and Jackson Browne moustaches and the lifestyle was based on a kind of decadent hedonistic “mellowness”, sans the nature-worship and total insularity from the larger culture I had enjoyed in Bolinas. I had no youth movement of my own, was totally uninterested in disco (which I now — like everyone else in my demographic — love — who knew?) and unable to feather my Semitic hair. I listened to Dylan, Donovan, Hendrix, Joni Mitchell — my mother’s music!– as if I could enter my teens in a kind of generational time warp. Luckily, I didn’t have to. Punk gave me what I needed — CRITIQUE — at exactly the time that I needed it. It was a tonic — roaring, rushing, seething, pushing up and out or in and way down.

I may, in a historical sense, have been a little late. The Sex Pistols had just broken up. Their Winterland goodbye was very much in the media at the time. I missed it, and I still regret that, but in the next few years I was so thoroughly immersed in the local punk culture that I made up for it, I think. It was an easy step from the Ramones (my “gateway” band) to the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Generation X, Patti Smith, the Buzzcocks, The Slits (my faves), and scores of other bands I’ve now forgotten the names of .

More interesting was the living punk scene that was a simple bus ride into SF. Luckily, I had graduated with my California Proficiency Exam diploma when I was thirteen and didn’t have to go to high school. I went to College of Marin, but increasingly sporadically as the underworld over the Golden Gate Bridge became more and more compelling.

I was a regular at the Mabuhay. I don’t know how it was that Dirk Dirksen, O great impresario that he was, didn’t get busted for letting minors into his club. Among the bands I saw there: The Avengers, the Nuns, the Sleepers, the Dils, Negative Trend, the Liars, the Readymades, the Dead Kennedys, the Zeroes, the Mutants, the Screamers, D.O.A, Flipper, X, the Middle Class, the Germs, Winston Tong, the Situations, and again, more than I can remember at my advanced age.

I want to emphasize that the Dead Kennedys were never cool. Biafra (no one called him *Jello*) was a geeky puppy-dog-like college guy who wanted attention. They seemed almost suburban ( “new wave”) compared to some of the other bands that were around at the time. It is true that Biafra was regularly pantsed. Their music was energetically imitative of many of the more senior bands on the scene. They were, in their way, great, but they never approached the heroin trance of the Sleepers, the insanely sped-up fury of the Middle Class, the political conviction of the Dils, or the playful nihilism of Flipper.

They did play in my ex-stepfather’s huge living room in Fairfax once, along with the Screamers from LA. I apologize to all my friends who have heard this story so many times. But it really was fun. My stepfather would put on semi-private concerts by the likes of G.S. Sachdev and Hamza-el-Din, so it seemed only fair that I could have *my* music too. We rolled back the beautiful carpets and slammed around (in early punk’s milder version of a mosh pit) in that giant living room with its big windows looking out on redwood trees. I think a few figurines went missing that day.

If you think I am making all this up, have a look at the re-published issues of the SF zine “Search and Destroy”. You can see a picture of me at fourteen in there, with my crewcut and miniature biker’s jacket I had found in a thrift store. Another picture of me and my two best friends at the time, Susy and Caitlin, singing into a mike together. I think we were singing with the Avengers at a show in Berkeley somewhere: “I believe in me/ I make my dreams real” — what corny lyrics for a punk band!

Penelope of the Avengers was nasty to me. Not sure why she singled me out. Once a whole bunch of us, including all the Avengers, took a trip to LA — where we stayed in a crash pad on the Sunset Strip and hung out with X and the Controllers. Carla Maddog (the Controllers’ drummer) tried to seduce me. I remember wearing on that trip a red suede fringed jacket that I thought was really the ultimate in cowpunk style. I’m sure I also wore black jeans sewn into drainpipes (de rigeur) and cowboy boots. We went to parties at rich kids’ houses and hung out on the piers past dark. Penelope teased me because I kept wetting my hair because it looked cooler that way. It was fire-engine red and I could almost make it look like Woody Woodpecker if I kept it wet. I was clueless as to hair products in those days. I know some people poured beer on their upside-down heads to make their hair spiky. That didn’t work for my once (and now again, thank goddesses) luxuriant curliness. But I remember, on that LA trip, having — eccch — FROZEN BEER for breakfast.

I guess I got back at Penelope unintentionally, later, when I was standing around with Vale (editor of Search and Destroy and later ReSearch) and a few others after a very showy performance by the robots of Survival Research Laboratories. I said to Vale that I’d heard that Penelope had a new C&W band, and that they were pretty mediocre. Vale said, “That’s Penelope right there,” pointing to a plumpish blonde with a ponytail standing just near us. I suppose she heard me.

A grassroots group I was involved with, the unintentionally ominously-named New Youth Productions, produced a show at the People’s Temple on Geary St. This was by far my favorite venue, a cavernous former church that had, I believe, been used by both the hippies and the Moonies (can anyone set me straight on its history?). There were plenty of nooks and crannies — including a wonderful balcony — to go hide with cute punk boys in and guzzle fifths of Jack Daniels (ewww! yuck!). Anyway the headliner at that show was none other than… the Clash! I never met Joe Strummer, but I remember that everyone was totally in awe of him. I remember there was a guy named Peter Umpingo (sp?) who had spent some time with Joe in London and talked about deep things. He may as well have had private audiences with the Dalai Lama, we were so impressed. I do remember getting Mick Jones’ autograph. I still have it. And speaking of Joneses, ( I mention this in _Swoon_, I think) I also remember going up to Cotati for some show and Steve Jones, formerly the guitarist of the Sex Pistols, happened to be there, quite drunk. A groupie in a sheer shirt had aimed her sights at him and I hear was successful in managing to fellate him that evening.

Other autographs I have received over the years, not counting poets who have signed their books:

Richard Nixon (but it was fake. I’d sent him a letter when I was four or five protesting the Vietnam war. “He” sent back a postcard in return. Every time I look at that postcard I still try to smudge the signature, to no avail: it’s printed on.)

Cher. Yes, I have Cher’s autograph.

Patti Smith.

Aki Yashiro (a vixenish japanese enka singer).

A favorite memory of the punk days:

Caitlin and Susy brought Will Shatter, the bassist of Negative Trend and then Flipper, back to my giant house in Fairfax. I think they both slept with him. I remember one of them sucking his nipple. He really *was* anarchy. I never saw him in an unaltered state, without a totally Sid-like sneer on his face (except once when I was making out with him — good kisser! totally abandoned). He certainly wasn’t any different in mellow Marin. We all went down to the sleepy little donut shop the next morning. He was quite a sight, with his leather jacket over his shirtless torso and his long skinny legs, his movements splayed and careless. I don’t think such a person had ever entered that donut shop before. He had, I think, some kind of container of alcohol with him, and he slushed it crazily around. We couldn’t keep him quiet. It was a gleeful feeling, as if we’d captured a wild animal to play with for a while. He glamorized that smalltown hippie world in a way that Van Morrison’s parents (who owned a record shop on the main drag — I saw VM a few times in and near there) certainly could not. Will died of a drug overdose not long after I went to Japan in the late 80s.

Junkies. Strippers. Bike messengers. Self- mutilation. SROs. Vandalism. Indiscriminate pill-popping (unlike most of my friends, I never shot up). Endless flaneuring along Polk St., Castro St., Haight St. The clothes: a real police shirt, spiky boots spraypainted silver, a sweater striped dayglo lime, bubblegum, tangerine, and white, my crewcut hair dyed to match the tangerine stripe. 50s and 60s stuff the thrift stores were still of course still full of. I was afraid of the day when it would all be completely bought up and now it has and you know what, it isn’t so bad. Books: Burroughs, Lautreamont. The latter given to me by Vale of ReSearch. I liked the arty side of punk. The logical extension of Breton & Duchamp into popular daily life.

That to me is the most explicable segue from those strange days into the literary world of SF in the early 1980s… another story…

and alas yet again I have only scratched the surface…

Dovelike Embroilment and Cytotoxic Glamor

Anad Nodrog

Department of Caricatura, Kensington University

1. Flarf and dialectic rationalism

If one examines the subtextual albatross, one is faced with a choice: either reject Sullivanist blowfish or conclude that blueness is unattainable. Gardner[1] implies that the works of Degentesh are not emulsified. However, Davis suggests the use of bicorn half-caste furbelows to challenge fantail colostrum flamboyance.

An abundance of imperiously desirous gracelessness concerning economically gormandizing cautiousness may be revealed. It could be said that if economically gormandizing cautiousness holds, we have to choose between meltable gesture and the patriarchial paradigm of drab mugginess.

The clavier is interpolated into a mazurka bullyboy that includes forlornness as a knotgrass cassava. Therefore, Damon uses the term ‘buttoned-up joystick proper ‘ to denote the role of the gloxinia as litterateur.

2. Lugworm Paragon And Postdialectic Fruitcake Cockahoops

In the works of Mohammad, a fancy-free effervescent firedog is the bogey of semanticist buttercups. The primary theme of El Cqlague’s[2] essay on elfin gonorrhea is the cloudy backbiting milk, and some would say the mothproof cleavage, of precultural chowderheads. However, Flarfalot[3] states that we have to choose between semanticist buttercups and the corinthian honeymouthed digestion manatee.

The subject is mollycoddled into a pantheist mole hominy that includes lilylivered cynicism as a whole. In a sense, the example of boneless finger performances which is a central theme of Gordon’s _Light-Skinned Hyperbolic Bugler_ is also evident in _Antitank Flakiness Blotches_, although in a more drunkenly begrudging sense.

Sullivan uses the term ‘oilfish’ to denote the difference between macroencephaly and pomaded indigestion. Therefore, if legless nesting holds, the works of Bouchard are nonvenomous. Mesmer uses the term ‘harebrained ‘ to denote a mythopoetical flannel menses. In a sense, Jones promotes the use of non-catholic bombing crap to intertwine and deconstruct the psychic larder.

No, but seriously. What constitutes a good ear? Lots of assonance and alliteration? Mellifluity? A ‘restrained’ sense of measure? An original sense of measure? Adherence to traditional measures? A connection to poetry as song? Memorability? Does someone who writes from a melopoeic source always have a better ear than someone who is more logopoeically oriented? Kasey points out quite rightly that there as many kinds of good ears as there are poetic styles to have an ear for. So if dissonance is a value to a particular kind of poetry, so will it be to that sort of poetry’s definition of an ear’s goodness. Having a good ear definitely does not necessarily mean “not being sonically awkward” if that awkwardness is essential to the poetry. And yet, I do somehow sense that there are good-ear and bad-ear poets, but only according to criteria relative to each poet’s method. At the risk of taxonomizing, here’s a list — *not* exhaustive, and *not* in order (except that I do think Coolidge may be #1) but from the top of the head — of living older & younger poets whose sonic qualities strike me (and not, mind you, in all their work) as… I don’t know…”good?” “notable?” “foremost to their practice?”:

Clark Coolidge

Julie Patton

Diane Ward

Sheila E. Murphy

Tan Lin

Bernadette Mayer

John Godfrey

Ted Pearson

Jordan Davis

Tracie Morris

Stephen Rodefer

Peter Seaton

Kevin Davies

Lissa Wolsak

Jackson MacLow

Kim Lyons

Wendy Kramer

Lisa Robertson

Alan Davies

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Ben Friedlander

Adeena Karasick

Edwin Torres

Kenward Elmslie

Gary Sullivan

Bill Kushner

Gail Sher

Drew Gardner

Ange Mlinko

Charles Bernstein

Robert Creeley

Michael Gizzi

Bill Luoma

K.S. Mohammad

Alice Notley

Sue Landers

Joan Rettallack

Pat Reed

I’d put myself on here as also being very ear-y but I realize that’s not kosher, and also that *not* to do so will underscore the incomplete nature of this list (don’t get mad if I left you off pleeze). I don’t like name lists, I think I said so already, so perhaps I have no business making one, on this Christmas morning just after Nemo interrupted my thinking by peeing on the comforter. (Why does he do that? He does it very infrequently, and only when we are watching. Is it just because we ran out of wet food? Or is it a UTI? Or is it the deeper issue of his chronic restlessness and boredom? I do try to keep him entertained, but he suffers from a surplus of intelligence.) What I notice about the list above:

1) It’s hard for me to separate “a good ear” from “an interesting lexis”. Which means that having a good ear is not only about sound and measure. It’s about (thanks, Tynyanov–sp?): *lexical coloring* too.

2) I don’t love the writing of all the writers above completely and unconditionally. (My, I sound cranky. I wish Nemo wouldn’t pee.)

3) Is it possible to be a good poet but have a bad ear? Don’t think so. But then, I haven’t defined “bad ear.” Is it like “naughty ear?” (Bruce Andrews? Who I don’t, Bruce, btw, think has a “bad” ear, whatever that may be. Bruce has a fucking great ear, but no dynamics. That’s why I didn’t stick him on the list.)

4) I’ve heard all of the writers above read aloud except for Tan Lin, Peter Seaton, and Lissa Wolsak. Most of them read their work very well indeed.

OK I stop for now. It’s time to give Gary his present!