POETSWEDNESDAY & More

Call For Papers on William Bronk

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SYMPOSIUM ON WILLIAM BRONK

 

Papers are being sought for a symposium on the life and work of William Bronk (1918-1999).

 

The symposium will be held in New York City in spring 2012, to coincide with the appearance of Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems of William Bronk.

 

Papers from the conference will be the basis for a collection of essays to be published by Talisman House.

 

The talks and readings making up the symposium will be recorded and then streamed on the Internet from a dedicated website.

 

 

While it is expected that established poets and scholars will take part in this symposium, younger poets, critics and scholars are very strongly encouraged to make presentations. How William Bronk can be read in our current time is a concern of this event.

 

 

ABSTRACTS OF 1-2 PAGES SHOULD BE SENT TO:

Edward Foster, [email protected]

and

Burt Kimmelman, [email protected].

 

 

ABOUT WILLIAM BRONK

 

William Bronk was one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century. His work has been praised widely. The attention is remarkable given that he spent most of his life secluded in Hudson Falls, New York and abjuring literary politics, often turning down requests for readings and the like. Nevertheless, he did receive the American Book Award (the year before it became the National Book Award) and the Lannan Prize; and he did read an occasional poem at Governor Mario Cuomo's first inauguration. The Governor's invitation came not merely because the Borough of the Bronx was named after Bronk’s ancestor who farmed a good deal of that land.

 

In the 1970s and 1980s two prominent scholarly journals devoted entire issues to discussions of Bronk’s poetry and essays. In 1998 the first critical book on Bronk appeared, which was then followed by another two years later, and more since then, all by prominent scholars of American poetry. Major essays on Bronk continue to appear regularly in journals.

 

William Bronk’s work is known for its evocations of the New York landscape, as well as for its meditations on the ancient Incan and Mayan cultures, which were prompted by his travels through Latin America. Yet Bronk is most known, and admired, for his inquiries into the nature of reality and knowing. Paul Auster once wrote of his work (in the Saturday Review, once Bronk had begun to attract a lot of attention): "Bronk's poetry stands as an eloquent and often beautiful attack on all our assumptions, a provocation, a monument to the questioning mind."

 

The value of Bronk’s work is still well known among older poets and scholars, yet there is a profound need for a younger readership. Early on, Bronk's poems appeared in the now famous Black Mountain Review and Origin magazines, and he was an important part of the midcentury avant-garde that was memorialized in the 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. Yet, as David Clippinger’s book on Bronk documents, he was removed from the anthology at the eleventh hour because its editor, Donald Allen, couldn’t fit his work into any of the “schools” of poetry he had concocted for the publication. Nevertheless, Bronk is, arguably, key to our understanding of American letters, and particularly the post-World War II new poetry and thought. Cid Corman, a prolific poet and the editor of Origin, acknowledged Bronk as being " the thread that binds all the issues together" (quoted from The Gist of Origin). The fact that Bronk was the final poet cut from Donald Allen's anthology, and that Bronk does not appear in the Norton or other widely used anthologies today, compels this symposium as a way to put Bronk back before the eyes of a broader readership, and a conference on his work and life, at this time, might ultimately address a reassessment of the twentieth-century literary canon.

 

Praise for the work of William Bronk:

 

“A work that demands to be read.” —Saturday Review • “A brilliant poetry.” —George Oppen (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) • “One of our finest . . . poets.” —The New York Times Book Review • “A poet of great distinction.” —Small Press Review • “Bronk is an acquired taste. I recommend you acquire it.” —Library Journal • “He is brilliant.” —Southwest Review •

 

On Assignments -- An Essay by Emily Vogel

On Assignments

 

This morning, after waking up earlier than usual and drinking the gas station coffee that my husband bought for me (I love gas station coffee), I settled into the enormous chair at my desk in front of my computer.  Suddenly, I had no idea what I meant to do.  It occurred to me that if a poet or writer is to develop discipline, he or she must have some sense of assignment.  And so bereft of direction or purpose, I called downstairs to my husband and asked him to provide me with an assignment.  He said, “Write an essay on Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight,’ and enter the poem in a new way.”  It sounded interesting to me, but ultimately too huge of a project to suddenly launch into at 6:30 in the morning.   

The truth is that as writers and poets, we all discover what it is that we want to write about by what presents itself to us as a deviation from an assignment, or a method of getting around an assignment in order to actually fulfill the assignment.  I needed my husband to provide me with an assignment, not because I wanted the confinement of specificity or structure, but because I needed the inspiration to begin from somewhere, even if where I began was completely unrelated to the assignment.  From where does a poem arise?  I think for each of us, our poems are born by way of our own mysterious processes.  And yet when we attempt to intentionally enter into mystery, we often don’t know where to begin, nor do we even understand the mystery. 

When I am without a formal assignment or prompt, it’s like attempting to trespass on something where there is no territory to trespass.  I’ll stare out the window at the evergreen tree in our backyard and hope that the first line will somehow be infiltrated into my consciousness simply by sitting still.  This is a peculiar device which is contingent upon the premise of “waiting for something to happen.”  I’ll watch the sun spread itself on the snow, and then slip again into the shadows.  Once in awhile, our neighbor will wander through the backyard with her dog.  Yesterday, I heard two rifle shots.  And then sometimes there are divine moments when a flock of geese will fly over the river and honk out a cacophonous sound. 

But sometimes, nothing happens.  I bite at my cuticles and wallow about being blocked for the rest of my life.  So here’s a trick: I’ll pick up somebody’s book of poems and read something they’ve written.  I’ll find two compelling words, or perhaps just one.  And then I’ll begin the poem with those one or two words and see if it inspires me.  After all, words implicate ideas, and if you begin sorting through all the words that pass through your mind, you’re bound to eventually come up with a phrase.  Once you have a phrase, the trick is in contextualizing it into story, concept and form.  But the other trick is, it’s probably not a good idea to write poems deliberately.  Some of the best lines and images are often not deliberate.  We arrive at them completely by accident, and that it what makes them resonant, entertaining, and unique.

Even mechanisms like enjambment and rhyme are better when they aren’t deliberate.  Once I wrote a poem all in slant rhyme and wasn’t even conscious that I was doing it.  The fantastic thing about having a husband who is both a poet and a critic is that after he reads a poem that I wrote, he exposes it as conceptually complex, as if I had determined the concept before I began to write it.  He has an uncanny knack for seeing the poet’s intentions even as the poet is unaware of them.  He sees the consciousness of the poem. I am never conscious of the poem’s concept until someone has the insight to see it as a whole and complete entity, operating in terms of oppositions, disparities, and reconciliations.  This is why I think it is the poet’s advantage not to outline or premeditate a concept before the poem actually conceptualizes itself.

So what is my assignment this morning? Oh, right “Frost at Midnight.”  So the first line (which is one of my favorites in the annals of all poetry) “The frost performs its secret ministry,/Unhelped by any wind” is Coleridge’s very perspicacious manner of identifying something in nature and personifying it so that it retains its ethereality. The irony is that the very idea of something “performing” almost implies that there would be something auditory involved---something perhaps loud and showy, and yet the frost performs in silence.  In fact, as the whole poem is somewhat of a performance of nature, all of this is performed without sound, except in two places.  First, “the film that fluttered on the grate,” (“the sole unquiet thing”).  What Coleridge achieves by emphasizing the only thing in this performance which makes any sound is the reinforcing of just how quiet everything else is.  The second place in the poem which references noise is only in the memory of the church tower, “Whose bells [are] the poor man’s only music.”  What this does is juxtapose the quiet of the present with the memory of a great influx of music, thus also reinforcing the calm and soundless moments of the poem.  The last line of the poem, “Quietly shining to the quiet moon” allows us to actually “hear” the quiet moon shining, along with contrast of the fading echo of those church bells and the almost indecipherable fluttering of film on the grate.

So, was Coleridge thinking consciously that he would juxtapose quiet with sound in order to reinforce these mysterious performances of nature?  I doubt it.  A poet never writes a poem with the intention of predetermining how any given reader will interpret it.  A poet should never say, “this is how my poem should be interpreted.”  The poem is simply an extension of the poet’s arbitrariness, and often, if the poem is good, it doesn’t even make sense to the poet.  After that, it is up for grabs and out of the poet’s hands.  No one will ever know what the poet was thinking.  But, they can conjecture and twist it into the meaning which suits the poem as a whole, whether by imposition or simply innocuous speculation.

The way I would harness this poem as inspiration for my own poem would not be to say, “I think I’ll write a poem about the way nature performs,” or “I want to juxtapose quietness and sound.”

I would take the word “ministry” and the idea of the slumbering infant, ascribe it to a present situation and begin like this: 

 

           For the time being, we will exist in separate rooms

           lest we should be inattentive to the literature.

           The hidden ministries of our holy languages

           spin their separate webs---

           allow our imaginary child to sleep without babble or fuss---

           allow the morning to call itself into its order.

          

           There is no trumpeting or wail---

           no storm or fallen branch---

           no love that desires itself more

           than the awareness

           that I can hear you drop a coin by accident

           in the other room.

 

So for now, I think I have more or less completed a part of my husband’s assignment, and that assignment has provided me with a sense of orientation. And it was exactly that orientation I needed in order to disorient myself.  And yet, by way of that disorientation, I still managed to address the Coleridge poem. 

Since I began writing this, not a thing has occurred in the backyard, except that the sun slipped into a winter shadow.  But I did hear my husband’s coin drop.  I don’t know what that really means in the context of the poem, and yet I have a vague idea that it means I can be assured with the certainty that he is there.  I didn’t say that explicitly in the poem because I was hoping that this might be implied.  But the poem is out of my hands now.  It spoke for an occasion, and the occasion has been documented.  So now I must wait for the next occasion.  After I make my husband breakfast.

 

Essay Writing Tips

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On Poets and Speakers by Emily Vogel

On Poets and Speakers

One of the most curious aspects about poetry is that the element of “truth” presented in any given poem is never stable.  With this in mind, the truth that the reader must accept at face value is constructed by the poet out of his or her organic impulses, and must be credible simply because the poet pronounces that it is.  A question with which I have been wrestling for years is the idea that the poet and the “speaker” are possessed by two distinct and disconnected identities.  What I find fascinating is that I can read a poem about death, sadness, and strife, and in some cases, the suffering of the speaker, and then meet and converse with the poet who always seems to be a contented and well-adjusted individual.  This might evince the possibility that the speaker is not always espoused to the poet, but is rather something of the poet’s alternative identity.

In certain instances, this is not the case.  The idea that the speaker is the poet condemns the poet to a great deal of inner turmoil. The content of some poems would suggest then that poet as speaker is ailed with madness.  So why, when I go to poetry events do the poets all seem like regular people?  Why aren’t they screaming in the streets about their hallucinations? 

As poets, I think we all must surrender to hallucinations.  There are those who will attest that every poet must be possessed by a bit of madness.  When I feel too “sane” I find it difficult to produce a good poem.  But if all poets harness that little bit madness when they write, then what they write must be fully believed as true.  The irony in this is that we don’t know exactly whether the poem then becomes a “lie,” later on when we go to the grocery store and happily shop for hamburger meat without breaking into sobs for the plight of the cows.  We just go through the check-out line with our meat, exchange pleasantries with the cashier, go home and cook dinner.  It seems almost dangerous to retain a bit of that madness when interacting with the percentage of unpoetic minds.

I once read a poem in which the speaker claims that he spent three days in a closet and then solved most of the world’s problems.  So I imagined that this was actually true of the poet.  I wonder if this was true, and if after he emerged from his sabbatical in the closet, he drove his kids to school, cleaned the house, and paid his taxes.  So is it perilous for the poet to become the speaker?  I don’t know.  If a poet writes about standing on a cliff and contemplating whether or not to jump, do we check the poet into the psychiatric unit?  Or do we send an imaginary speaker to the psychiatric unit?

If the poet puts on a mask in order to inhabit the madness and grandiosity of the speaker, then what is it in us that can allow us to go out, eat our dinner politely, and carry on a conversation about recipes and yoga?  Where does the poet go when she writes about being somebody’s shadow and love letters up in flame?  How does she then give a reading in a bookstore where they are serving punch and cookies and not be denounced for her schizo-affective depression?  How does she then shake hands and sign books and smile?  Does she go home and tear off all the wallpaper in a fit of despair and then swallow two bottles of aspirin with a bottle of vodka?  Or does she just write about doing this?

Because honestly, most would say that a poem about tearing off all the wallpaper and swallowing two bottles of aspirin with a bottle of vodka is much more interesting than just saying “I forgot to brush my teeth last night.”  So must the speaker live through the poet?

I don’t know.  But we can make our dental neglect interesting, without endangering our own lives.  If the speaker takes over, then what the speaker claims is true is true, and as readers, we must accept this truth.  Someone once told me that all poets are liars.  If this is the case, then what are they lying about?  Does the poet lie through the speaker or does the poet lie about her sanity while buying hamburger meat?  Obviously, the former is more compelling.

I have arrived at the conclusion that poets, then, must have a handle on their madness in order to work with publishers.  Publishers don’t care about your mental instabilities.  They don’t care if you woke up and had a nervous breakdown because you forgot to brush your teeth last night.  They care about metaphor, allusion, command of language.  They care about what readers would appreciate as quality poetry.  So must we assume this madness in order to write and then tell the psychiatrist that everything is going along swimmingly?  Must we write about spending three days solving the problems of world in a closet, or must we really do so?  How far must we go to procure truth?

This is what I mean when I say that the truth is constructed, and through that, an identity from which we may be disconnected.  We must carry our speakers around like children and care for them.  If our speakers die, or say that they died in the poem, then the poet must go on living, liberated from strife.  She must buy hamburger meat.  She must brush her teeth.  She must tear off all the wallpaper, in her mind.  And she must always emerge from the madness of the poem into a sense of normalcy, whatever that normalcy is, if normal at all.

 

An Essay by Joe Weil

The poet who saved my life never existed for me in his native language. He died fifteen years before I was born. His name is Miguel Hernandez, and he will never be as well known in English as Lorca, Jimenez, or Machado, but he is my poet, the one I would take with me into exile.
When I first met one of his poems I was a senior in high school and my mother had just died. She did not die prettily. I remember the good Catholic liberals in my school showed a film on how a good Catholic family should behave during a terminal illness. I sat in the class growing more and more enraged. I shhouted at the teacher: "There's no right way to behave fuck face," and stormed out of the class. They wanted to suspend me. My father told them to go see my mother. I was let back into the school the next day, and I was not made to watch any more films on a "beautiful" death. The mouht cancer had eaten away half her face. She had a tumor in the middle of her forhead, and her lips, what was left of them, were swollen so that she could barely speak. She was not yet fifty one.
I did not know how to grieve. My aunts and uncles, who had grown up in a large Irish family, understood all the mechanics of grief. You made tea. You made funeral arrangements. You grew ever more tidy.You smoked and joked, and changed the curtains. ON the first night of my mother's wake, I refused to stay with the family at Aunt Elizabeth's. I threw myself down on my parent's bed, when no one was there, and wept the way you might if everything in your life has been dismantled. Sounds came out of me I did not know could exist. I buried my head in my mother's pillow. I could smell her cancer everywhere in the house. It had become the incense of my life. I was about to turn 18.
Life is not merciful. It does not forgive a weakness in any structure, including that in the human soul, and it will tear, and peck, and hammer against this weakness until it is destroyed. I sometimes think African American "cool" and Irish humor developed out of an awareness of this truth. One must fool life into believing the structure is sound. One must put up a front against the hornets and rats who would build a nest in the flawed structure of the soul, but this "front" becomes a tomb, and I now realize most of the people who raised me, who looked after me, who hovered over my first sleep, were already buried under ten tons of well constructed shite. This is the experential, non-verbal equivalent of form. All the formalities of our lives are meant to distance us from the merciless beak that seeks out the vulnerable, the visibly damaged. Life sends its chickens to peck the bleeding chicken to death. In a sense, literature, word, is the chief shaping ancient of what can not be shaped. And so on to Hernandez:
I was not allowed to grieve, except in private, and a part of me continued doing teen ager things: I drank, I smoked. Being a nerd, and not very good looking, I pined for a girl who had no interest in me at all. If a loss is big enough, all the little losses come through the hole, and they widen it, and in comes more big losses-- an avalnache. My father developed throat cancer. HE became a drunk. We lost our house, and lived over a record store in Garwood, New Jersey. My family went from solidly working class and catholic to dysfunctional mess. It was during this time, this time when I realized my Catholic faith had nothing to give me but hall mark greeting card sentiments, when all the people we had known started to "unknow" us that I came upon the poems of Miguel Hernandez.
I still believed in the sacraments, and in Christ, but I no longer believed in his followers. They made me want to puke. Christ spoke the truth about life hating any structural weakness when he said: "To those who have, more will be given, and to those who do not have, the little they have will be taken away." I told a priest about this, how this statement comforted me because I knew, by my experience, that it was true. The priest, being a snob ass, told me Jesus was speaking about faith. I said: "bullshit. He told us you only need the faith of a mustard seed. He was talking about the law of life. Strength seeks strength. The healthy seeks the healthy, and the week are ransacked for what ever material is left. He didn't say it was good or bad. He just said it was true." Nothing in my experience has changed my mind on this. IN life, poetry has been the one mercy I know-- poetry and music. Everything else has been a bust.
So I purchased the Hernandez book because it was bright orange on the cover, and I liked that. I didn't know a damned thing about Spanish poetry, or most poetry for that matter. I wrote songs then, very good melodies, and terrible lyrics. As is my habit, I opened the book to a random page. It had been two months since my mother's death. There were more deaths and losses to come and I knew it because I am intuitive, and can grasp the basic structure of things with the smallest bit of information. I am not extra sensory. Forget that. I have a brain wired to leap. This is intuition-- an ability to jump to conclusions that are often absolutely true( And sometimes utterly false). I opened the book to his poem Me Sobra El Corazon:

Today I am. I don't know how,
today all I am ready for is suffering,
today I have no friends,
today the only things I have is the desire
to rip out my heart by the roots
and stick it underneath a shoe.

I had found one voice that did not seem to be lying to me, and I had a melt down in the middle of that book store, a used book store half English, half Spanish. I was fifty cents short, and when the person at the desk would not trust my promise to return with the fifty cents, I broke down in tears, and begged. An old Cuban lady gave me the fifty cents, and I bolted from the store, and sat in the park. I did not read any of the other poems for about a week. I clung to this poem because this voice was not lying to me. It was giving me back what I knew. It was not making tea, or hanging curtains, or saying "shut up." It was telling me my wanting to die, my sadness was now my wealth, that everything else could be taken away from me, would be taken from me, but this suffering was mine:

"The more I look inward the more I mourn!
Cut off this pain?-- who has the scissors?

I eventually read the book, and read it a hundred times. This Spanish poet, this shepherd, this Hernandez tossed into a prison, freed, and stupid enough (wonderful enough) to go back to where he would surely be re-captured out of compassion for his family, this man who died in filth, in one of Franco's many prisons, had spoken to me in a way only Christ had: to those who have, more will be given, and to those who do not have, the little they have will be taken away." Christ also said: "Anyone who is brought to nothing for my sake will discover who he is."
My grief was not merely private. The cancer of my mother and father, the loss of our house, the descent of my family went along with what happened to the working class culture I grew up in: good factory jobs went belly up. Skilled men and women were told they were worthless. Unions were destroyed. America went from a country that actually made something to a land of "professionals." vague, silly people who, like all vague silly people, create great destruction from their privilege, and are, themselves, eventually, destroyed. Before they are destroyed, they will swell like super novas, embrace health foods, and spirituality, and a cult of professionalism (they will affirm the very thing that destroys them) and they will turn mean and blame the weak. They are soft spoken,and politically correct, and the deadliest people who ever walked the face of this earth, and as a poet, I look forward to their destruction because they have no equipment for suffering (which is the same as living), and, therefore, no true compassion. A country can not sustain an entire population of Daisy and Tom Buchanans, but that's what we've been doing for the last thirty years. Hernandez shaped my suffering. He also taught me that it exists on a scale beyond me, or anyone I love-- that this loss is in, not of, a loss in things. IN a time of great suffering, a human being might have only the consolation of his or her sentences. So be it. This is why it is important for poetry to exist: because it is beside the point, and, being beside the point, it can not be impaled. It shapes what can never be shaped, carries what can not be carried, speaks to the dead, gives courage to those who have little else to go on. The "professionals" rule poetry militant. Jobs are gained and lost. Someone like me who has never been outside the coil of suffering will, no doubt, get clobbered. So what? I have known the impersonal machinery of management as a factory worker. I knpw the decorum of professionalism for what it is: a brand of benign contempt for life, and an ongoing death wish. Poetry, this scribbling, this jotting down, is no remedy, but it may shape the sickenss just enough to make it portable.

Poetry & The Self Help Movement (Or, A Grouchy Man Looks at a Poem by Wednell Berry) by Joe Weil

Poetry And The Self Help Movement (Or A Grouchy Man Looks at a Poem by Wendell Berry)

The only American Zen Buddhist I ever believed in was my late and greatly missed friend, Joe Salerno. Unlike most Zen Buddhist's he did not rub serenity in your face (they tend to lay it on thick, like the evangelicals do corporate Jesus, or the self helpers do "positive" thinking). He was a big shambling, gentleman-- with salt and pepper hair often tied in a biker's pony tail, and, as no Zen Buddhist who was smug would readily admit, a true fondness for woman's breasts. Our conversations ran the gamut from Plato to Play-doh, from Wallace Stevens to Wally Cleaver, and I don't know how breasts got in there, but, one July night, the year he died, he said to me in his soft, deep baritone: "I'm a breast man." And I said: "I thought so." And nothing more was said.
I bring him up because I am reading Wendell Berry's Sabbath, and, in my usual grouchy way, I am getting annoyed at it. For the last two weeks, I've been clearing sod, very tenacious sod, and planning an organic garden, a huge organic garden. My kitchen is taken over by sprouting plants that I will grow in doors before transplanting. I love digging up dirt. I am using only a shovel, a pitch fork, and a hoe, and, pretty soon, all the sod will be dug up, and I'll feel sad because it will be time for the finesse stuff, and I like to grunt and curse under the sun in my rigor, and watch the swallows devour insects, and scatter the geese with a loud yodel, and all that intricate stuff of caring for the sprouts will greatly curtail my bliss. I like the violence involved in digging out the sod. I like the abandonment of it. The gentle, hourly virtue of "care" is not my forte. I have always associated a certain level of ferocity with largeness of spirit. It didn't matter whether this ferocity was active, or dormant, as long as I felt its pulse under all the calm. This is why most American Buddhists make me barf up my cookies: because I suspect they are either control freaks under all that OM, or worse: they are truly tepid, and have used a spiritual practice as a rationale for their smallness of spirit.This is why I am annoyed at Wendell Berry, and, actually, I am not annoyed at Wendell Berry so much as with the serenity junkies who worship him. Let's get to the poem that irks me:

Over the river in loud flood,
in the wind deep and broad
under the unending sky,pair
by pair, the swallows again,
with tender exactitude,
play out their line
in arcs laid on the air,
as soon as made, not there.

As meter goes, this poem is the most free and well wrought in the book. Some of the meter is down right stodgy, but this is nice and playful: except in some respects, it is only a notch above a Disney cartoon-- nature as man's serenity whore. For Pete's sake Wendell, you have stood in fields a lot longer than I have! Those swallows are on a feeding frenzy. The flood has released insect hatches, and the inner clock of the Swallows has brought them back to devour the hatch above the river. Yes, from a distance, the play of swallows in the light, their little white bellies, and bronze,/violet plumage, is pretty, but the pretty is not the beautiful. I'm not saying you have to turn it into a death poem, and I love the ending of this particular work, but I am worried about poetry junkies who think nature exists to enthrall or teach them. Emerson: "All of nature shall thunder forth the ten commandments." Spare me.
So why am I in a field when not teaching, digging sod for four hours at a clip? I like the smell of dirt. I, too, am happy to see the swallows, even though I know they are ravenous descendants of reptiles, and rapacious little beasts. And I do not see them flying pair by pair. Bull shit. That makes them smeared with the smugness of the well married. Give me a break. They are not suburbanites, They are a happy chaos, as well as a precision, the precision of chaos when it is ravenous, and my disturbing of the grass sod displaces the bugs in the river side field, and they swoop, and dare devil all around me because they want to eat. The robins, too, they come, knowing there are worms involved. They do not sing to me of God's glory, or of my long lost beloved, or of how happy it is to be out in the sun light under a powder blue sky. They come to feast on whatever worms are to be had. And the red Fox who has built his den in the rocks of my flood wall licks his chops, and hopes to steal some goose eggs while the geese are not paying attention. This is the ferocity of which I speak, and it is necessary that it be given honor, and that we know it pulses under all our pretty sunsets, just as, within the ferocity, there is a calm, a stillness, a storm eye which remains ever steadfast and silent. All this leads me to say: I love the beautiful, but I take issue with the merely pretty.
Pretty is a denial of death, and violence, and hurt, and the chaos of all things swirling around us. Chaos is not a lack of order, but as Wallace Stevens said, a "great disorder is an order." At the same time, I jump on my shovel and plunge below the root system of the sod, and wrench what will not yield easily to me, Red Wing Black Birds are in the thickets down by the river, going off like noisy alarm clocks to announce their territory. There is death all around me, as the Buddha noted so long ago, and, yet, this suffering, this chaos, this ferocity does not seem wrong here. it has none of the ontological fear of death by which man butchers, and betrays his best heart. it is not hiding in a pretty poem. It is not Mary Oliver with sugar in her hands for the grasshoppers. It does not regard us except as food or danger, and its patience is infinite because it is motion, not act-- the great mechanism of day and night, and the clouds moving about in the sky, and the violence with which those seeds I have pushed into dirt, will push up out of dirt. Everything stinks here of compost, of decay, of death, but I do not mind the violence around me. It is the best sort. It is not trying to escape into some pastoral dream of a life on the land. I raise my voice in a loud yodel, and the geese bolt into the river. The foxes neurons twitch with the need to catch a meal. My hands are blistered. my back aches. My clothes are covered in clay. Wendell Berry is someone I read when I come out of the field, and sit at my glass top table, under the white pine, giving the finger to the crow who has dropped a pine cone on my head. I do not look like a nature lover. I do not wear the uniform. All the uniforms are the ontological fear of death,, and the vanity of man, the semiotics of imposition, the projection of will upon a landscape we can only enter with violence, and which, under certain conditions, does great violence to us.. I remember Joe Salerno, and I wonder what he would have said about it. it is good to have a dead friend I love, one who will never be able to speak to me again. It taints my own smugness with loss enough to know that nothing here is for me, even when the law says it is mine. All things are in motion, and I hate the word change because it has become one of the minor gods of self help gurus. I hate change. I hate that frigging crow. I love the ache in my muscles, and the whiskey on ice in my rocks glass. The crow takes off to find something to eat. Maybe I should, too.

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From the back yard by Joe Weil

 

  I was in the back yard this morning playing my Irish tin whistle, and minding my own business when two sparrows landed on the glass top table and looked up at me before flying off again. I felt like friggin Orpheus! The sun rose over the flood wall. A crow cawed in the field which I discovered is filled with wild basil, thyme, and oregano. Any time I want, I can pull up a bunch, and breathe the smells in. If Mary Oliver had shown up and written a poem about it, I would not have been at all surprised.

    Why don’t I write a poem about it? Pastoral poems take us back to the obvious. We become awed by the sheer fact of natural matters. Look: Grass! Tree! Junco! Sparrow! Jay! Look: deer nuzzling the fallen crab apples, their coats honeyed as the soft morning light. There is always a chance people, mean, heartless, normal folks, will say: “so what? Big deal! I see crows every day.” But do you? Are you sure?

    A pastoral poem always risks being absurd because the poet is awed by the obvious. It’s as if you had lived with a woman for thirty years and then noticed, all of a sudden, that she lives with you, that her existence matters greatly. To be surprised by the obvious is one of my favorite experiences: It’s six am. There’s a coffee sitting beside my book of John Clare poems. The sun helps the white pine cast its most flattering shadows. The ground hogs are not so ubiquitous, and the chill in the air means fall is pulling in and due to arrive momentarily. I need to wear a sweater now when I sit at my table. The other morning my breath turned to smoke as I played, and I was elated.

    My friend Joe Salerno once complained to me that poets write too often of human relations. Even when they write about nature, they do so in a way that stains it with the human. It always pissed me off when Mary Oliver wrote about grass hoppers eating sugar from her hand--as if she was the earth mother. I don’t believe her. I’ve seen Mary Oliver. I’m not a grass hopper, but no way, I’m taking sugar from that woman.

    So what made me so happy this morning that I almost wrote a nature poem? I think it was the absence of me as I exist in the world of human relations. My tin whistle sounded good. The sparrows were a nice surprise. There were no geese on the hill, shitting every where. I didn’t have to please anyone, regard anyone. I realized that, even if I lose my job, and end up homeless, I have a whistle, and I can still stare at the world around me. All the bad things that have happened to me, including the deaths of most of my family, the absence of a wife or children, are not so bad, at least in moments like this—when I’m playing and the sun rises over the flood wall, and Mary Oliver doesn’t show up to make it all palatable and understandable to poetry addicts who turn nature into one more appointment, one more thing on their “busy” schedule. I’m not busy! I have escaped the American criteria for a “meaningful” life. Later, I will have to go to school and teach, but I think I’ll tell my students to learn how to be alone—to stare into space. Jesus was right: consider the sparrows. They neither sow nor reap, and yet God feeds them. Of course, this only lasts for an hour at best, and I wouldn’t eat what sparrows eat. I’d sooner take a lump of sugar from Mary Oliver’s hand! Slianthe’

Why is Charles Bukowski So Beloved by Young Poets -- by Joe Weil

Why Is Charles Bukowski So Beloved By Young Poets     I could disparage Charles Bukowski, but what's the point? The man is here to stay, no matter how vulgar, misogynistic, or formulaic his poems often are. He's as much a part of the land scape as the Ave Maria. He gives young poets a sense of freedom. They think he's telling the truth because it's an obvious one: people are fucking phony, art is full of snobs, and bores, sex is exciting, and trouble has its charms. Drink, play the horses, be faithful to your habits (including writing) and try to have some "Style." Bukowski is a corrective to our politically correct, "professional," corporate universe. Never mind that such political incorrectness and abrasiveness is a multi-billion dollar industry sponsored by corporate interests in the niche marketing they devote to Indi movies, "raw" punk, and the cult of the "genuine" (as sponsored by The Gap). Bukowski was a reprobate, and he got away with it. Who doesn't secretly love and admire that?     I spent all my life among Bukowskis. I knew drunks much meaner and decrepit than Chuck. I knew a guy who carried a photo of his kids killed in a car accident. He'd whip it out at the right time, and get a few sympathy drinks. The sad thing was his kids were really killed in a car accident, and he was the driver! (sometimes he'd own up to that, sometimes he'd leave that part out depending on the "mark" he was flim-flamming). I knew a woman who would cut her boyfriend with a beer bottle, and when the cops came and went to arrest the boyfriend (because he had slugged her prior to the beer bottle) she'd jump the cops, attempt to scratch their eyes out. When my father died, and we were poor, the church didn't do a fucking thing, but 'Two Brother's Tavern" in which my father had his own stool called the "kingdom of Rocky" took up a collection and we not only had money for the funeral, but an amazing wake, and a three gun salute at the grave because a drinking buddy of my dad's was a cop and he told the police my dad was his father. I know the sentimentality and generosity of the poor as well as I know their brutishness, violence, and chronic anger. None of this is news to me.      When I first started getting features as a poet, people told me I wrote like Bukowski. I had no idea who the fucker was. I was ignorant of any poetry outside my anthologies and my extensive obsessive reading of Williams, Stevens, and Roethke. I didn't really write like Bukowski. Yes I cursed (Bukowski curses far less than I do). Yes, my poems were often from the bottom, and they had an anger to them. They seemed "real" and truly from the inside of the proletariat, but that's only because I was a prol, and angry, and came from a place where the average life expectancy was a good ten years less than the national average. I took from Williams and Stevens and Roethke, and applied it to my world. I was determined to see beauty and vitality, and a good sort of spiritual ugliness in the place I came from because it was there, and why shouldn't I see it?  I was also a devout though malpracticing Catholic and the greatest influence on my writings were the Gospels, especially the sermon on the mount, and the whore falling at the feet of Christ, and the whole topsy-turvy way Jesus turns the world's values on its head: blessed are the poor, the sick, the grieving, those who everyone despises. Blessed are those who are misfits, and whores, and tax collectors, and drunks, because at least they know how far they are from the kingdom of God. They can't hide from their filth the way the rich and the pious, and the self-righteous often do. I can not remember a time when Christ's stories were not living inside me. I'm not a holy roller by any stretch of the imagination. People have seen me polish off 20 shots of Jamesons (most of them doubles). I am often angry, and confused, and far more in proximity to the whore than the saint-- and that's why Jesus' words burn in me because almost every drunk, addict, and miscreant I ever knew is a purist and an absolutist. They are seeking something so pure they don't care if it kills them. This is why the worst people often become the greatest saints. And this leads me back to Bukowski and why he has such a hold on the imagination and hearts of young writers: because he believes in purity-- not morals, not right living, not judicious and sensible and mature seeking of the good life-- but something so powerful that  you would rather die than not know it, rather spend your whole life in a shit hole than not embrace it. Yes, he was an alcoholic and has all the personality traits of one: crankiness, bombasity, a hatred of "honest" people, sentimentality, outrage, and a tendency to excuse his behavior by priding himself on writing every day (every drunk I ever knew had some sort of behavior purity fetish: they kept their apartments spotless, or always tipped their hats to old ladies, or never had a bottle before eight in the morning). His work has staying power because it appeals to the spiritual yearning inside youths to give 120 percent of themselves to something that isn't phony, or insisting they be mediocre for the rest of their lives-- a longing to die into truth, to not live a false life, even if that dying constitutes acts of dissipation, vulgarity, trouble, fighting, and over all dysfunction.     Bukowski would be very well understood in the Zen tradition as the drinking, fighting, whoring Boddisatva who, through his "bad behavior" attains a sort of enlightenment-- the wild man of Zen mysticism. He would be understood in the older Catholic context of the desert fathers who, though they didn't drink or fuck, lived lives completely against the world's false "values" and were known to be often fierce, and fiery-- prophets who would make Charles Bukowski look like Donna Fucking Reed.     But it is not enough to call him a purist. On the dislogistic end of that term is the "bad boy"-- the one who seduces by making you see how fake the "virtue" of the world is. Bukowski also writes a clean line, without much decoration mucking it up. That sells     So I read Bukowski to see why people compared me to him. His world was gritty (so was mine). It contained people who died, were destroyed, lived on the margins (so did mine), but here's the difference: I wrote about people who didn't want to live that way, who weren't doing it as some sort of counter statement to the prevailing values or because they had read "Beyond Good and Evil." They were in deep shit and suffering and they didn't take any particular pleasure in it. In spite of their dysfunction, and their limitations, they managed to be decent to others when decency was an option. They managed to love their kids, and pray to a God who never seemed to give two shits about them. They worked shit jobs in factories, came home, and managed somehow not to murder anyone.  My father became a drunk only after my mother had half her face eaten by cancer, he couldn't pay the bills, and they cut his voice box out. I don't blame him. Talk therapy, support groups, and Prozac were unheard of where I came from. When he died, I was heart broken, but I never had to forgive him for drinking himself to death, because I  saw him work a double shift and still go to sit with my mother all day in a hospital. He was fucked up, and often angry, but his heart was not wrong. His meanness was the meanness of a kicked and abused animal. My poem 'The First Time I got Up Early" has none of Bukowski's sarcasm, his hatred of the phony values of the society. Loyalty to a hurt and wounded animal is futile and mispent-- a sucker's bet, but it is the only truth I know. Still, what did I think of Bukowski?     I liked the bastard. I loved his nasty sense of humor, his crankiness, his sense of urban pastoral. There are many who are interested in the good life, but he was interested in the "pure" life. By purity I don't mean morality, but commitment to something beyond all costs. He was a committed drunk, race horse gambler, whore-chaser, and, yes, a disciplined writer. Perhaps I should shut up about his spiritual value, his "purist" and absolutist aesthetics and put down here a poem I just opened to at random in his book "Love is A Dog From Hell:" there once was a woman who put her head into an oven terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat across my mind I can hear the laughter of the masses they are storng they will survive like the roach never take your eyes off the roach you'll never see it again. The masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly fingers for sane and deadly things. I wish I were driving a blue 1952 Buick or a dark blue 1942 Buick or a blue 1932 Buick over a cliff of hell and into the sea. See what I mean? It's better to die, to drive a car into the sea than to become part of the "strong" masses with their "sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things." Bukowski has put his own purist tendencies into the mouth of a woman who puts her head in the oven rather than stop witnessing to the roach. The roach is the filthy and false "virtue" of the mass man.. the one Rilke refers to when he writes: "These days a man dies in 800 hundred beds." (Maultis Brigges, which I am misspelling) You can see why this might appeal to a seventeen year old who thinks life is shit, and who is afraid he will end up a drone like his parents-- the pure life rather than the good life. It's attractive because it speaks of absolute commitment-- no compromise. This is why Shelly was loved, and Byron-- They  were "pure" rather than good. The smart marketing exec realizes that the myth of the genuine, the raw, the pure, works as much for the hell bound as the heaven bound born agains. Purity sells much better than the sane and boring offerings of goodness. You can run purity both ways. It's about trespassing and living over the limit. Saints are usually as annoying and scandalous to ordinary folks as Bukowski. I think Bukowski and Simone Weil would have hit it off had they worked in the same factory.     But this is one of his more blatant essays on purity. Bukowski also triumphs because he deflates certain forms of sentimentality (though he has his own sometimes maudlin brand of it). Consider this rollicking gem that is refreshingly self depreciating: one of the hottest she wore a platinum blond wig and her face was rouged and powdered and she put the lipstick on making a huge painted mouth and her neck was wrinkled but she still had the ass of a young girl and the legs were good. She wore blue panties and i got them off raised her dress, and with the tv flickering took her standing up. as we struggled around the room (I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life, marvelous so marvelous like eating cold olives at 3 a.m. with half the town on fire) I came. you boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old. of course, you leave after wards or get very drunk which is the same thing. we drank wine for hours and watched tv and when we went to bed to sleep it off she left her teeth in all night long.     There are feminists who will have a visceral reaction to this poem, or any poem by Bukowski. They won't care that he's extolling sex with an older woman, or saying its better than with a young girl (except she must have a young girls ass). They'll want to rip Bukowski a new asshole, but a young writer finds this poem and, for the first time perhaps, a poet is saying  ugly but vital  (and hilarious) truths, and the lines are clear, understandable, and, if he or she has any aesthetic sense, he or she will love and cherish the part about the sex being like eating olives at 3 A.m. with half the town on fire. The triumph in this poem is echoed by Bukowski's excited claim to have raised the dead. The purity here is that the poem gives the lie to more appropriate views of intimacy. For all his praise of the woman, she is wrinkled and has false teeth-- just as the sermon on the mount reverses the dialectic of what is  holy and unholy, Bukowski makes a triumph out of a disaster.  Good for him. He aint going away any more than Rabelais or bawdy Herrick, or Falstaff. As Pound said of Whitman: "let there be converse between us." (or some such shit as that).

Essay On Friendship -- By Joe Weil

I've been told by those who love me most that I make a lousy friend. I forget to call. I forget to write. I just plum forget. We keep people in our lives for a lot of reasons. Love, like flea bane, doesn't need healthy soil. You can grow it in whatever dirt swirls up along the free way. It may die only to be reborn in a patch of grass behind the gas station fertilized by the resident Rottweiler. I serve a valuable function for my dearest friends: I am the one they must forgive and excuse again and again, thus putting jewels in their crowns in heaven, and making them feel as if they were fountains of compassion; I've never charged them a dime for  the privilege.     I come from a neighborhood, a world defined by a few blocks of bodegas, pawn shops, and travel agencies. No one ever travels in my neighborhood, but the agencies continue. I wouldn't say they thrive; they continue-- a little seedy, the one place on earth a terminally angry woman with blue hair and an artificial leg can find employment. Once I had enough money to go somewhere. Just her scowl alone convinced me this was an unwise caprice. I stayed put and forgot to call my friends-- my true vocation.     Neighborhood friends can go twenty years without calling, then pick up the conversation where they left off: same old same old. This is one of the dirty secrets of friendship: they give us the illusion that some things never change. Once a friend has decided you are cheap, you are cheap forever, even if you sell all you have to the poor and follow Jesus. That's what friends are for: they tag you, they have you dead to rights, and they love you anyway. With a friend, you are always the same even if you're not. God bless em.     I used to have a lot of friends of the opposite sex. Then one day, lonely, in bad need of a shave, with a morning stiffy all dressed up and with no place to go, I realized these weren't friends. They were all women I couldn't sleep with who valued me because I was the guy they would call for commiseration when the "jerks" they did sleep with dumped them or cheated on them or forgot their birthdays. I call these blue ball friendships. You might go twenty years waiting for that friend to have a weak moment and sleep with you.Trust me: it never happens. Sometimes they have a weak moment and sleep with your best friend, but never you. I cleaned house, swore to give up my job as a beloved eunuch, but, now that I think of it, these are friendships of a sort: lots of false intimacy, tears at 2:am, declarations like: 'Why can't my boyfriend be more like you?" As I grow older and my testosterone decreases, I am capable of stoic resignation to the fact that I have the straight man's equivalent to "fag hags." I have taken to calling them at 2 in the morning and crying over mean, bad girl lovers I do not have. It doesn't have to be real. It just has to be painful.     False intimacy is America's number one consumer item. Friendship proves its value by never asking any intimacy of you whatsoever. This is why I think I have so many friends. I offer a safe and stable product. I' am the friend, the beloved friend who never calls. They can count on me. I'll never let them down.