la femme follette

achieve, vanish

A lot of the poems I love the best are difficult for me to show in this space because of line lengths or spacings and indentations, or just the length of the piece.  Or because of the prosody pedigree, because of a. rhyming and b. the Billy Collins thing.  I just cannot get started on a & b there, but I will say that a lot of this work reminds me of so-called "modern art," in that people who should get it are really very threatened by and hostile toward it, and then people who don't get it at all say dopey & ridiculous things like "I could do that."  To which of course, the answer is, ""But you didn't."  Or if one is generous, "So, go ahead!"  It is the difference between Robert Frost and Robert Fitterman.

I mean, I like plenty of vanilla poetry, but I like Monet, too.  OK, actually, I hate Monet.  But I like, um ... I like Renoir!  And Cezanne!  Seurat!  Not everyone can be a Fontana or an Arbus or a Van Gogh.  The difference between Vermeer and Van Gogh is the difference between like and love. 

So, for example, there is "Metropolis 16" from Fitterman that I was explaining to Mari a couple of days ago, which is so, like ... whoa.  Also, Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, which is fabulously say what?  Paul Violi's "Index," over which he gives an interesting chat on his process for that.  Christian Bok and his endlessly euphonious Eunoia is a piece that I adore (there is a lot of making clicky on those pages).  Katie Degentesh has a whole chapbook sitting right here on my desk and I cannot pick just one.  Also, Merry Fortune. 

Then there is the poet whose work I do not like at all.  She reads this poem on an audio collection we own of poetry read by the poets.  I would be driving the car, listening to her tracks without realizing it and then with it stuck in my head endlessly make fun of it, endlessly.  Whenever the children were being naughty, I would declaim in a fake & dramatic accent the first line, and tiny 4-year-old Fillette would finish the stanza.  Years of therapy for my daughter, I guess, which it seems this gal really needed.

Daddy
Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Here is a more nuanced discussion of this poem, in case there should be more in the world for it than ugh.

je vous laisse mourir

Soneto XLV
Pablo Neruda

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.

Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,

porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

(The intarweb is lousy with a terrible translation of this poem.  It is infuriating; Neruda is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20thc and all of the people translating his work are so bad at it.)

mme bovary and the refuah sh'lemah

A few years ago, I started to slip quietly from our house with no small amount of guilt, leaving my babies behind to go around and write poems and talk to people and listen to them also about poetry and poetics.  If not for the fact that I had been writing something nearly every day since the very day I learned to write as a child, it would have been so embarrassingly pedestrian & cliche.  In fact, I did feel like a silly, post-natal, finding-myself cliche right up until the time that it became obvious (in a flood of my ambivalence) that people really liked my work. 

This, of course, was such an excellently internal Sally Field pop-culture reference with which to amuse myself that I was perfectly healed.  Also with sneaking out before dawn to walk briskly around for miles with our 120-pound dog.  At least I thought I was perfectly healed.  Then I was sitting around, workshopping poems with people under the auspices of the Poetry Project, and the aforementioned Rob Fitterman was going through my poem line-by-line with some glee and then in conclusion said, "And then!  To show off the top of your range!"  I did not hear the rest, sitting there as I was thinking, "I have a range?  Really?"  Then, I thought I was perfectly healed.

I was really productive and engaged between 2004 and 2006 -- a lot of writing; attending a lot of readings; a lot of travel; 7/8 of a manuscript, portions of which were always well-received.  Then the children started to push back a little and I decided that this was all silly, a pedestrian cliche.  I have children.  Only about 627 people in America even read poetry.  Half of that number thinks it should rhyme.  Then there is the whole Billy Collins issue. 

I put all of my work away, far away, up on a high shelf and decided that I would just wait and see, of course, because the next step on the path I am on is residencies and I cannot make time to go away for 2 or 4 weeks to write (how silly!  I am a mother!) until the children are somewhat older.  I took it down and spread it out a couple of months ago and (again to my chagrin) saw a lot of it is really good work.  This tiny piece shows off the top of my range.  Like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy.  I am still waiting on my perfect healing (also like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy).

      

Symbiotic Liberation
Lala Follette

Daffodils languish. The telegram came today in secret.

Patti Hearst will blossom into something like a virgin (stop)
The dehumanization, submission, and serial foolish events were
underestimated (stop)
The loneliness, the rage, the energizing uncertainty are
now awarded a measure of monastic silence, aspirin dissolved
in a persian libation no one knows.
(punto final)

I don't know.

I thought at first this wasn't love. But, cicadas are
pregnant, lamenting morphine, pornography and Larry Hagman. The
name of a dromedary on the shirtwaist of a cigar loads a shimmering
desire into the porous heart of a hippo. Freedom is fingers inside this
hourglass, the bra of a prostitute pollinated with cream mined from a
buttercup's regret.

Instead of gossip, the glotted silence of Frenchmen, carnivorous and
blowing woodsmoke, dissolves into a line, a song, it reeks of the dew
on lilacs -- distinctly minty and without deceit.

Dredged from the valley of a tribe of bubbles -- those devalued spheres
of aerosol, glistening like Lily Langtry in a brothel with an anaconda --
our swan is resuscitated, fleeing, flying. The meadow is open,
the closet is a dance floor, we sail languid and ablaze, swallowing
the whole winter of the sun.

still nat'l poetry month

I have run in the same poetry circles with this woman, another found-text-smithing poet whose work is always remarked upon for presenting as funny before revealing itself as sad.  This has the effect of leaving a reading audience stricken, but in a good way.  I think I have heard her say she is a midwesterner, too.  (All these midwesterners!  Running loose over Manhattan & writing poems!)  I was thinking of this one because today is my wedding anniversary.

Why Marriage Works
Michelle Scheidel

Antique lace, demure details, golden eggs, the
cocktail. A virgin, the quince, sobriety, writing
checks blindly, a rock-hard stomach. The third
unwanted child, youth and plain arrogance, what

caused the swelling. A dozen armed physicians,
a complimentary round of ammo, hubris, the
progress of the natural gas pipe. A willingness
to be wounded, an espresso machine, acres and

acres of pecans. Longtime interest, a return for
an equity stake, fear that lingers in tunnels. The
learning of patience, searching for something,
hard-boiled assessments, sagging but stately.

Blood sugar, blood pressure, a future testimony,
hazarded guesses, a certain hue of the sky, putting
on armor, environmental abuse. Passion, fire-
places, impulsivity, despair, rent-regulated apart-

ments. Dead silence, watercolor florals, compulsion,
anesthesia. Memories, insurance settlements, home-
lessness, a heat wave. Heavy doses of fatalism, old-
time romance, nervous breakdowns, the alternatives.

more nyc post-postmodernist + ballet-school auction item

Brooklyn Anchorage
From Ring of Fire

Lisa Jarnot

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

so. how so.

I had the incredibly fantastic fucking fortune to take a class led by Rob Fitterman about three years ago in which he eradicated everything that I thought I knew from the decades before about voice, about presentation, about creativity and impetus.  The best thing about Rob is that he knows his work is like ... whoa.  I think it is because of that awareness that he is not only an amazing influence and an inspiring instructor, but also has a tremendous amount of really smart things to say about process.

I was at a lecture Rob gave at St Mark's Church in the Bowery in 2006 -- "Identity Theft: My Subjectivity" --  at which I took notes and which (more or less) went like this:

1. whose body is this, whose shopping? (in the 70s) a. glamrock, multiple identities, mktg could appeal to many people with one campaign, man/woman, man/boy/, man/alien. Bowie and planned obsolescence. b. creation of shopping as a creative act, indulgence of multiple people (a wife, a slut, a snowbarder, a librarian, etc)the indoor/outdoor fabulous creation of malls, shopping and overcharging, the creation of the credit card. c. if you don't know who you are, or can't decide which people to be, consumerism supplants identity with a fantasy.

2. sincerity v plastique. a. american ersatz dismantles borders between authentic and campy. where there used to be a broad division between satire and "art," now a broader irony seeps into the culture as the invention, not reaction. b. new context and new meanings to what it means to be sincere v plastic and the increasing inauthenticity of american consumer culture means that what is/was "authentic" is now coming from a place of suffused inauthenticity, bolstered by marketing, and what is/was "camp" or "kitsch" is becoming the authentic response to an inauthentic culture.

3. collage: invention v inventory. a. what is available to us to sample and try out as opposed to bring forth. b. collage, in visual art, is an accepted form, using pieces of other images with similar images, fitting into a rigid construct, and becoming a part of a whole. c. sampling, accepted as a form in music, why not in poetry, preserves by bringing a chunk of information into a work and allowing it the flexibility of letting its seams show.

4. original v unoriginal, recycled, etc. a. the creation of the precious magic of original art and the marketability of its singular genius. b. the photograph was the first to make the recycling of images and art and reproduction available to everyone in a way as never before. c. iPod. d. there becomes an idea of a time when we will be fully saturated with every one's original art and pure genius and be able to be immersed in it at any one time and there will be nothing new for our artistic prosody. that time is now.

5. access. a. we are fully saturated by others' impulses, concerns, geniuses, this is the time. b. foreshadowed/glimpsed in the 1960s with teevee, pop art. c. now, as then, this idea of the artist as a shaman, as a medium of messages, it is increasingly more restrictive.

6. a new subjectivity. a. why be reliant on the invention of my experience, when I can be useful of so many other people's? b. the internet, the memoir, the first-person suffusion of our current culture with so much feeling means that now in order to be personal, I can write a personal experience, but it need not be my own personality. c. if at any time you can dip into a stream of inventory, of art, of culture, of thoughts and responses to anything from anyone at any time in the world, why limit yourself to the invention and sheparding of your own reality, your own subjectivity.  there is this notion taught to us In Poetry that the personal=an amazing singularity and specifity, but repetition and recasting is the way to tap into the truest reflection of culture.

It has been 40 years since anyone has talked with such eloquence and so articulately about anything (let alone anything paradigm-transforming) in poetics. 

This talk -- so simple, so true -- got this giant crowd of East Village hipster types worked up into a frenzy and scrambling madly all over the road to try to get a piece of him, to make him see how wrong he was.  I am a simple midwestern girl who strings her poems one word at a time like pretty little beads, so I was shocked (aghast!) at this reception.  Almost the very first comment was along the lines of (well, ok, exactly; I wrote it down) Well, when you talk about the paradigm of radicality in the singularity -- and by that I mean an Uppercase Singularity -- do you think that the prosody of plunder is more or less of a political act than that of writing to a truth that is only seen in yourself until you bring it to the world???

This went on almost exactly as that for over an hour.  One woman, verging on hysteria after a fashion, kept talking about danger -- what she thought was the Danger of Imperialism in this Work because We live in Dangerous Times and Danger Danger Danger.  Rob's wife, Kim Rosenfield -- a poet of postconceptual plunder herself -- was there and she said, "What's dangerous?" I had turned around at the same time and said, "Yes, danger? Is it nuclear?"  Rob was polite and unfettered, kept his shoulder to the wheel of post-postmodern evangelism, taciturn and solid.  At one point he said, softly, nonplussed, "Why can't poetry be easy?"  He is also from the Midwest.

His poetry is really something to read (he might be up to ten books now), but it is not easily separated from its manuscript lengths nor his pedagogy.  My very favorite is "A National History of Popular Music & Letters, Vol. 1" from Metropolis 25, but there is no way to show it in a space this size.   I also love-love this 30-year-old poem of his; he modestly brought it in one afternoon for we students to discuss. 

the lease
Robert Fitterman

under snow
things flatten
and stay

so. how so.
how some
don't or...
words like
mud
under-

neath or
in exhaling
smoke,
opening all
windows in
our apartment

and still..
you want
to make

a fire,
lay the sleeping
bag beneath?

what
that I say this
is not love?

come & show me another

Chicago
Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,
      Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
      Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
      Stormy, husky, brawling,
      City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have
          seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring
          the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked, and I answer: Yes, it is
          true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill
          again.
And they tell me you are brutal, and my reply is: On the
          faces of women and children I have seen the marks of
          wanton hunger.
And having answered so, I turn once more to those who sneer
          at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and
          say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so
          proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job,
          here is a tall, bold slugger set vivid against the little
          soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a
          savage pitted against the wilderness,
              Bareheaded,
              Shoveling,
              Wrecking,
              Planning,
              Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white
          teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man
          laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never
          lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and
          under his ribs the heart of the people,
              Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-
          naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker,
          Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight
          Handler to the Nation.

whereabouts unknown

The Nellie Moser clematis is covered with aphids et voila, ladybugs. 

I think I did not realize that I loved so many poems.  Like a mix tape of poems!

The Idea of Ancestry
Etheridge Knight

1
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7 yr old niece
(she sends me letters written in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say). He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space. My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is
no place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

2
Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric
messages, galvanizing my genes. Last year / like a salmon quitting
the cold ocean -- leaping and bucking up his birth stream / I
hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my pocket and a
monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks.
I walked barefooted in my grandmother's backyard / I smelled the old
land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from the fruit jars with the men /
I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out
and my habit came down. The night I looked at my grandmother
and split / my guts were screaming for junk/ but I was almost
contented / I had almost caught up with me.
(The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker's crib for a fix.)

This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when
the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk
and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them,
they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no sons
to float in the space between.

another favorite & best

Traci and I were at the AWP conference in 2004 and Christopher Kennedy was part of a panel on postmodern prose poetry.  OK, he is foxy, first of all, with the kind of unselfconscious hardbody that accidentally came from a lot of avoidant time in the gym, and I was all hopped up on hometown lustre and proletarian glamour.  When it was his turn to talk, he was starting from his position at the long table, and I caught his eye and wiggled my fingers in an upwardly direction.  Asked and answered, he took the podium, which about killed Traci and me later on when we were going over the events of the day, because, well, maybe one had to be there, but I tend to have a way.

Here is a poem he read that day, which I love.  So charming that I have over the years managed to have it accidentally memorized, frequently murmuring lines from the third stanza in moments of Too Much Humanity. 

Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death
Christopher Kennedy

I'm sorry your parachute is made of cream cheese, but think of
the spectators and their stories, and the asphalt's loneliness until
you arrive, abruptly and without pretense.

You've heard of Jesus; now you get to be just like Him. Every eye
that holds your image belongs to a person who will know, once
and for all time, what it means to be alive. Those who loved you
most will place a wreath at the exact spot where you became an
exact spot. Footage of your fall will serve as an effective warning to
all who believe cream cheese to be a healthy substitute for silk.

This millennium needs more martyrs, inadvertent or otherwise.
My sympathy for you could be mistaken for love. Take
advantage; open up. You won't have many more opportunities to
share your doubts and fears, which, I'm guessing, have crystallized
into one completely appropriate aversion to solid ground.

I hope this isn't too much for you to process on your return to
our distant planet, where all is well as well as all is not so well,
depending on where you're headed, the east and west of which
you probably never stop to consider,
obsessed as you are with the physics of north and south.

you mustn't

Algren was talking to me today and something he said made me think of a poem I wrote about him a couple of years ago, which is how to bring any conversation with a red-blooded midwestern man to a full stop, to start yapping about a poem you wrote about him, especially -- and I know this from Kowalski, not Algren -- if it is one that he knows and has admired, but in which he had not seen himself.  But the poem that I wrote about Algren, of which I was thinking today (and without saying anything), was written at a time when I was reading this woman's excellent work, which is just so fabulous and this one of hers is one of my favorites.

 

Cipher
from Some Horses

Sheilah Coleman

Hector by the moon, his woolen thoughts traced in the
ash of many cigarettes. His breath is whiskey-fire -- what
he is tending, I will never know. He no longer sleeps in
the southern camp. He does not leave, but he does not
rest. I have become a silvery wolf. Watching his red
ember brighten and fade. His thoughts hum like so --
cars shining, a water-logged house, the river rising.
Light opera on his granny's radio. A church they all
believed was built from the cedars of Lebanon. From
our southern camp, we can see the lights of other
towns. Some day, the levee won't hold. Hector sits for
hours like this -- sending signals over the water to
Grande Isle. Catahoula. Evangeline.

Granola seems so frivolous during National Poetry Month!  Sadly, Fillette does not agree.