Sunday, January 31, 2010
the first cut is the deepest
Hello Chickadees. I am thinking of you as we move through the night into February. I have some new poems in the latest issue of Strange Machine Poetry, many of which were written last June at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.
This week's been both difficult & beautiful, an education. Sometimes pain and confusion and the stories we tell ourselves that construct our identities go cyclic and we wake up with headaches going "How the hell did I do that again." Then someone asks, "Don't you think you deserve more?" And the answer you think is yes, but you can hardly begin to imagine what that might look like, how the parts might fit & move together. A friend dies suddenly, then another, you're left in the aftermath to decide whether living in their absence is a stone on a chain or a gift. Or a friend's disease flares up and you know intuitively how to help, but when they begin to recover, all your feelings topple into themselves and you can't figure out exactly where to stand, where to look, where to put your hands. Sometimes you find yourself past midnight kissing someone just like you, later waking briefly beside them in the dark and being comforted by an unexpectedly deep certainty. It's all a gift, chickadees. The view of the city & the river on Sunday morning from a warm Cadillac, and when you're still, the sound of nothing but birdsong.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Fracture & Gauze / Two Dogs
1. Riding the bus through Allston this past weekend, I began to think that there are two defining qualities to the memories I have of living in Boston: fracture and gauze. The fractured memories are recollections of hangovers - mornings afternoons nights - the feeling of hundreds of small pieces of glass embedded in my chest, weighing on the edges of my throat, along with smoke, maybe cum, maybe the drip of cocaine, maybe juice (if I were lucky, and had money left for the morning.) Then, gauze: Blanchard’s liquor store, its neon sign 20 feet high in the style of Fifties advertisements, dull in the afternoon light; Davis Square subway stop at night,the entire scene viewed with a dirty filter, all actions somehow separated from the present moment. I fell into all my old routes like playing the piano. It was as if I'd been gone for only a month, slipped into a long sleep like Ichabod Crane to awake and find that nearly everything was the same, only the city was emptier, and the people I loved were older, they had survived things.
2. Part of the timing of my trip to Boston was due to the fact that my dear friend Tom Johnston had set up a reading for Nick Flynn, as a part of his book tour in promotion of his new book, which I swallowed in two days, and am about to read again (there's a reading tonight in NYC, then readings in L.A. & SF later this week). Nick is a lovely person to be around socially - he gives you a sense of possibility. He's expansive and odd in a way that's deeply familiar. There was some music at the readings - my friend the heart-breaking/warming Drew O'Doherty played a set. The whole evening was inspired & inspiring. I got to hang out a bit with my young & talented buddy Brendan Little, who is in The Painted Lights, a great band whose full-length album I eagerly await. Anyway, anyway, I'm getting carried away because I love and miss Boston & so many of the people in it.
The following is an excerpt from The Ticking is the Bomb.
Two Dogs
Two dogs live inside me, a woman in Texas tells me, and the one I feed is the one that will grow. She tells me this as a way to explain why she won't have coffee with me, ever--married, kids, happy, but sometimes her mind wanders, sometimes she thinks that another man, one that looks at her with kindness, one that seems to listen, is the answer, though she is unsure of the question. The thing is, her husband does all these things for her-- he listens, he's kind, there's desire, everything's fine.
But still, still, these two hungry dogs.
Wait--this woman didn't say her dogs were hungry, did she? But aren't all dogs hungry? Here Shadow, here Eros. Here Thanatos, here Light. The one she feeds is the one that will grow, but does that mean that the other one will grow smaller? Will it grow so small as to vanish? Do the dogs that live inside her come from some Alice-in-Wonderland world? Are they fighting inside her, does she love them both, does she sometimes think if one died it would be easier? But then she'll have one dog inside her and the corpse of another dog-- what good will that do, in the long run, what with all the other corpses we eventually end up dragging around inside us?
2. Part of the timing of my trip to Boston was due to the fact that my dear friend Tom Johnston had set up a reading for Nick Flynn, as a part of his book tour in promotion of his new book, which I swallowed in two days, and am about to read again (there's a reading tonight in NYC, then readings in L.A. & SF later this week). Nick is a lovely person to be around socially - he gives you a sense of possibility. He's expansive and odd in a way that's deeply familiar. There was some music at the readings - my friend the heart-breaking/warming Drew O'Doherty played a set. The whole evening was inspired & inspiring. I got to hang out a bit with my young & talented buddy Brendan Little, who is in The Painted Lights, a great band whose full-length album I eagerly await. Anyway, anyway, I'm getting carried away because I love and miss Boston & so many of the people in it.
The following is an excerpt from The Ticking is the Bomb.
Two Dogs
Two dogs live inside me, a woman in Texas tells me, and the one I feed is the one that will grow. She tells me this as a way to explain why she won't have coffee with me, ever--married, kids, happy, but sometimes her mind wanders, sometimes she thinks that another man, one that looks at her with kindness, one that seems to listen, is the answer, though she is unsure of the question. The thing is, her husband does all these things for her-- he listens, he's kind, there's desire, everything's fine.
But still, still, these two hungry dogs.
Wait--this woman didn't say her dogs were hungry, did she? But aren't all dogs hungry? Here Shadow, here Eros. Here Thanatos, here Light. The one she feeds is the one that will grow, but does that mean that the other one will grow smaller? Will it grow so small as to vanish? Do the dogs that live inside her come from some Alice-in-Wonderland world? Are they fighting inside her, does she love them both, does she sometimes think if one died it would be easier? But then she'll have one dog inside her and the corpse of another dog-- what good will that do, in the long run, what with all the other corpses we eventually end up dragging around inside us?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
First Interview!
Here is a little interview that I did for Person Person, a weekly interview series post that will go up (almost) every Sunday on Once Upon A Book Blog / Fourteen Years. The blog is written by Robby, who is fourteen years old and lives in Massachusetts. He may be the most precocious fourteen year old I've ever encountered; his enthusiasm about creativity gives me hope for the next generation of poets & writers & thinkers...
(Thank you, Robby! You're my favorite chickadee of the month.)
(Thank you, Robby! You're my favorite chickadee of the month.)
Friday, January 15, 2010
A poem by Terrance Hayes, one of my mentors ( for all this poem embodies & more)
Arbor for Butch
a pecha kucha after Martin Puryear
[VESSEL]
I am with my newborn son and the man blood says is my father
in a shit motel and if each of us is, as I sometimes believe,
the room we inhabit, he is a bed used until it’s stained.
Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would
have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.
[THICKET]
In the far south where history shades everything,
there are people who fear trees. I once heard an old man say
I may be black as a crow but I’m white inside.
Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there
where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.
[RAWHIDE CONE]
We drank whiskey until we were drunk as the couple in the photo
my mother gave me to show him, the boy and girl swaying
at the edge of my future. I watched my father curl on the bed
like a leaf drained of its greening as my child cried
the way rain cries when it is changed to steam.
[BOWER]
Because I believe the tree is a symbol of everything,
one of us was the bough reaching across the road as fumes
scorch its leaves. One of us was a door opening and closing
in the darkness, one of us was a boat being carried downstream.
[MAROON]
My father and I sat in a motel room beside a highway
Where his pickup was the shade of a bruise beneath the glow
of the vacancy sign. Where he and his talk began
to evaporate. We were two fathers watching the faces
of two sons where the evening passed as it arrived.
[LADDER FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]
Where the rain comes, long toed and crushing the high grass,
swamping the land, where a slave talked his children
out of running away with the bottom of his shoe.
This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.
[SANCTUARY]
In the far south where sap jewels the bark, the teeth
of the saws are sticky and bittersweet. But I wanted to carve
a door out of the wood and around that door I wanted
to build a room because I knew what my mother wished for
and I knew from far off what she would need.
[C.F.A.O.]
The arm of the boy falls around the girl heavy as a branch
in the photograph with the gloss that’s been rubbed
clean and the blurred inscription which nearly delivers
its message before vanishing. I drove the long night
to see the face my son and I wear like a mask.
[SELF]
Where history can be a downpour of joy or guilt spilling
its wronged headed desire all over the body. Where
a boy and girl fought in a motel bed to make me, one desire
beating against another. Where my mother seemed to blur
calling him her first lover even after she said she was raped.
[BELIEVER]
In the far south my father, the first time I met him
where for that night and the next one, he’d sleep,
said God made nothing sweeter than pussy. We smoked
our history, we drank to our future until each of us was
a head of steam, clouds above each other’s dreams.
[DOWAGER]
Where the plan was when I saw him to cut off his hands.
Where because of this man my mother would want me
dead, would want no limbs to branch inside her,
no cluster of sound waiting in a drum. Where
she wanted to, but could not shape her want into an ax.
[DEADEYE]
Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires
trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what
you identify, I thought This is how the blood sings into the self.
I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.
[BIG AND LITTLE SAME]
The first time I met my father I believed I would understand
the line connecting me to him because a man rooted to his kin
can never be a slave. But he was like the road, skid marked
and distant, like the rain breaking above ground and beating into it.
[SOME TALES]
In the far south where as one man swung from the limb
Of a tree, he said I may be as black as this bark
but my heart is light. Where even when your lantern burns
out, they say the flame lasts. Where everyone I know
is ablaze with this story and darkened by its ash.
[RELIQUARY ]
Certain arrangements must be made
if you want access to the past. With his room
without rooms and his truck without gas,
my father was a nail bent in the shaft of a hammer,
a wound the length of a kiss, a mouth bled of its power.
[CIRCUMBENT]
I am with the ones the blood says are mine and if each of us is
as I sometimes believe, little more than a bray of nostalgia,
we are like the village mule chained to its muling. My father
fit a slim ragged hand over the head of my newborn son
and said he sounds like a white child crying like that.
[MALEDICTION]
What if blackness is a fad? Dear Negritude, I live as you live
waiting to be better than I am. Before sleep last night I thought
how it would be to awaken with all the colors of this world
turned inside out. And that was the name of my suffering.
[BASK]
The story my father told me did not reveal one body inside
another, the arms of the boy who would become my father
embracing the girl who would become my mother, it did not hold
the sentence rooted to the beginning of my life.
[OLD MOLE]
I am not doing anything now, except waiting like the bird
who uses the bones and feathers of other birds to build
its nest. I am on my bed of leaves thinking about the past,
how my father dragged his shadow across the room
the way a storm drags its rain.
(stanza break)
[CONFESSIONAL]
Where there were too many trees and too many names
etched into the trunks, where the knots in the wood
Were the scars of old limbs, where, to be reborn, the birch pine
must be set aflame, where the door if I opened it might have
Revealed the love making or abuse still waiting to be named.
originally appeared in APR
a pecha kucha after Martin Puryear
[VESSEL]
I am with my newborn son and the man blood says is my father
in a shit motel and if each of us is, as I sometimes believe,
the room we inhabit, he is a bed used until it’s stained.
Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would
have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.
[THICKET]
In the far south where history shades everything,
there are people who fear trees. I once heard an old man say
I may be black as a crow but I’m white inside.
Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there
where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.
[RAWHIDE CONE]
We drank whiskey until we were drunk as the couple in the photo
my mother gave me to show him, the boy and girl swaying
at the edge of my future. I watched my father curl on the bed
like a leaf drained of its greening as my child cried
the way rain cries when it is changed to steam.
[BOWER]
Because I believe the tree is a symbol of everything,
one of us was the bough reaching across the road as fumes
scorch its leaves. One of us was a door opening and closing
in the darkness, one of us was a boat being carried downstream.
[MAROON]
My father and I sat in a motel room beside a highway
Where his pickup was the shade of a bruise beneath the glow
of the vacancy sign. Where he and his talk began
to evaporate. We were two fathers watching the faces
of two sons where the evening passed as it arrived.
[LADDER FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]
Where the rain comes, long toed and crushing the high grass,
swamping the land, where a slave talked his children
out of running away with the bottom of his shoe.
This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.
[SANCTUARY]
In the far south where sap jewels the bark, the teeth
of the saws are sticky and bittersweet. But I wanted to carve
a door out of the wood and around that door I wanted
to build a room because I knew what my mother wished for
and I knew from far off what she would need.
[C.F.A.O.]
The arm of the boy falls around the girl heavy as a branch
in the photograph with the gloss that’s been rubbed
clean and the blurred inscription which nearly delivers
its message before vanishing. I drove the long night
to see the face my son and I wear like a mask.
[SELF]
Where history can be a downpour of joy or guilt spilling
its wronged headed desire all over the body. Where
a boy and girl fought in a motel bed to make me, one desire
beating against another. Where my mother seemed to blur
calling him her first lover even after she said she was raped.
[BELIEVER]
In the far south my father, the first time I met him
where for that night and the next one, he’d sleep,
said God made nothing sweeter than pussy. We smoked
our history, we drank to our future until each of us was
a head of steam, clouds above each other’s dreams.
[DOWAGER]
Where the plan was when I saw him to cut off his hands.
Where because of this man my mother would want me
dead, would want no limbs to branch inside her,
no cluster of sound waiting in a drum. Where
she wanted to, but could not shape her want into an ax.
[DEADEYE]
Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires
trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what
you identify, I thought This is how the blood sings into the self.
I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.
[BIG AND LITTLE SAME]
The first time I met my father I believed I would understand
the line connecting me to him because a man rooted to his kin
can never be a slave. But he was like the road, skid marked
and distant, like the rain breaking above ground and beating into it.
[SOME TALES]
In the far south where as one man swung from the limb
Of a tree, he said I may be as black as this bark
but my heart is light. Where even when your lantern burns
out, they say the flame lasts. Where everyone I know
is ablaze with this story and darkened by its ash.
[RELIQUARY ]
Certain arrangements must be made
if you want access to the past. With his room
without rooms and his truck without gas,
my father was a nail bent in the shaft of a hammer,
a wound the length of a kiss, a mouth bled of its power.
[CIRCUMBENT]
I am with the ones the blood says are mine and if each of us is
as I sometimes believe, little more than a bray of nostalgia,
we are like the village mule chained to its muling. My father
fit a slim ragged hand over the head of my newborn son
and said he sounds like a white child crying like that.
[MALEDICTION]
What if blackness is a fad? Dear Negritude, I live as you live
waiting to be better than I am. Before sleep last night I thought
how it would be to awaken with all the colors of this world
turned inside out. And that was the name of my suffering.
[BASK]
The story my father told me did not reveal one body inside
another, the arms of the boy who would become my father
embracing the girl who would become my mother, it did not hold
the sentence rooted to the beginning of my life.
[OLD MOLE]
I am not doing anything now, except waiting like the bird
who uses the bones and feathers of other birds to build
its nest. I am on my bed of leaves thinking about the past,
how my father dragged his shadow across the room
the way a storm drags its rain.
(stanza break)
[CONFESSIONAL]
Where there were too many trees and too many names
etched into the trunks, where the knots in the wood
Were the scars of old limbs, where, to be reborn, the birch pine
must be set aflame, where the door if I opened it might have
Revealed the love making or abuse still waiting to be named.
originally appeared in APR
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Dead Nightingale / Dead Hen
Novica Tadic is a Yugoslavian poet, and he is terrifying, and he is inspiring. Something in these poems is so active... the NOW of these poems so immediate that you almost want to look over your shoulder, but you can't because the source of the visible & consuming darkness is so definitely coming from within. These are poems of fever prophesy, the voice & perspective unstable, always threatening to collapse or be consumed by the approaching dark they desire to express. Gets me all shivery, reminds me of work by the Brothers Quay. Here are two poems:
Nobody
He shows me tonight
his hair of wire glass and flowers
double-edged lips
five-pointed tongue
Ah he unbuttons
his silk vest--
he has a body after all--
a gold watch
And in the meantime meantime
in the shadow of his trousers
instead of feet
he has two little wheels
devilish little wheels
Sheepskin Coat
Winter. Strangers came and took my sheepskin coat.
Now, what will I cover myself with? Only with prayers
and with the light, trembling wings of a moth.
With so many thoughts and feelings, let my mind drift.
My name has been blackened; it opens; it whispers.
I just finished reading Dark Things, but I'd also like to recommend The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy, which first introduced me to not only Tadic but a number of influential poets...
Nobody
He shows me tonight
his hair of wire glass and flowers
double-edged lips
five-pointed tongue
Ah he unbuttons
his silk vest--
he has a body after all--
a gold watch
And in the meantime meantime
in the shadow of his trousers
instead of feet
he has two little wheels
devilish little wheels
Sheepskin Coat
Winter. Strangers came and took my sheepskin coat.
Now, what will I cover myself with? Only with prayers
and with the light, trembling wings of a moth.
With so many thoughts and feelings, let my mind drift.
My name has been blackened; it opens; it whispers.
I just finished reading Dark Things, but I'd also like to recommend The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy, which first introduced me to not only Tadic but a number of influential poets...
Saturday, January 9, 2010
I Am Leaving You, You Are Leaving Me
I figured that since I just listened to this song eighteen thousand times in a row, I should probably share it with you, my chickadees. It's a beautiful video and the song so cathartic. The song makes me wistful in an everything-is-about-to-change kind of way. Plus, I'm a sucker for harmonies and strings.
This evening I finished Alex Lemon's book Mosquito. It's incredible, AND (and!) it has a really thought-provoking introduction by Mark Doty, which was a pleasant surprise. I think my favorite poem is The Pleasure Notebook. Seriously, poets, everyone, go read this book. (Next up on the reading list, Dark Things by Novica Tadic.)
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Hello, Insomnia (3)
(A theme begins to emerge)
Unfortunately, there is no prize for staying up this late this many days in a row. Because I'd win it. Definitely. Maybe the prize is being close to delirious. That and a quarter will buy me a gumball.
I am thinking about my up-coming trip to Boston on the 19th, and thus, thinking about the legacy of Boston writers, one of which is Anne Sexton. There's a lot to say about Boston and about Boston artists & writers, but I'll have to file that topic under Things to Write About When Awake. Here's the first Sexton poem that comes to mind, the only one I can quote...
For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further
Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped by own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house,
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
though your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all...
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.
Unfortunately, there is no prize for staying up this late this many days in a row. Because I'd win it. Definitely. Maybe the prize is being close to delirious. That and a quarter will buy me a gumball.
I am thinking about my up-coming trip to Boston on the 19th, and thus, thinking about the legacy of Boston writers, one of which is Anne Sexton. There's a lot to say about Boston and about Boston artists & writers, but I'll have to file that topic under Things to Write About When Awake. Here's the first Sexton poem that comes to mind, the only one I can quote...
For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further
Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped by own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house,
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
though your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all...
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Hello, Insomnia (2)
.....Nighthawks, Nightowls, the star-gazers, the moonstruck. My sisters of deserted highways, brothers of stumbling walks at sunrise, where are you? For a period of five years or so, ages 18-22, there was always someone else awake or willing to be woken. For a long time too, I was used to being awake alone in the depth of night, sleeping maybe four or five hours a night on a regular basis and functioning (arguably) with a fair measure of productivity. Night was a time that made sense, it was expansive. I'm not used to it anymore though. Insomnia jangles me, particularly when it's two nights in a row now, with not a drop of drowsiness well past 4 a.m. Perhaps it's the results of an equation : finishing two graduate applications to CalArts + looking repeatedly at a number of old photographs for the portfolio portion of my application to photography = a deepening sense of the past as past i.e. the present insomnia. Plus I guess that cup of coffee I drank around 10 p.m.
.... I ended up writing my response essay for Columbia about Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. I won't include the whole thing here, but here's a few fragments I think are interesting (bear with me, the spacing is all fucked up, and I'm too loopy to figure out how to fix it):
Repetition is a common impulse. In everyday life, we repeat to learn, to be clear, and to make sense of things, among dozens of other conscious and unconscious reasons. In Kocot’s book, one task of repetitions is to illuminate a process of grief. Why is repetition important to grieving? Perhaps repetition tries to change the unchangeable, to rearrange the facts, to remake associations, and to create a ladder one might use to climb between mourning and the living world. “Song,” the first poem of the collection, is a poem of only thirteen lines, four of which are repeated, and two of which are variations of the other. The lines, “And for that which is not said/ And for that which is already said,” set up an inevitability: the rest of the book. As Kocot reveals this poem to be dedicated to an absence in the second stanza, with “I slip between the corners of the wind / And drink to remember you,” one might read “Song” as a sonnet with an absent line. In this line of thinking, “And for that which is not said” would be the turn, recognizing there is much yet unsaid and perhaps, there begins the book’s attempt to say it. In “I Am Like A Desert Owl, An Owl Among The Ruins,” Kocot begins to gesture toward the larger possibilities of repetition. In the move of a stanza, the speaker turns from an interior, personal reflection to an exterior, then mythic association:
I asked myself, don’t you just love it?
And then, why don’t’ you just love it?
And then, from what grace have I fallen?
Am I Sisyphus with his mute rock
This movement is akin to the sights of a movie camera starting from the position of being focused on the palm of a single person, then zooming outwards, until at last the whole city below is visible.
* * * *
So what is it, besides blunt mourning, that so many of Kocot’s “un-narrative” poems seem to avoid? In Tony Hoagland’s 2006 article “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” he writes:
The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from. It would prefer to remain skeptical…… one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.
It seems many of Kocot’s poems also prefer knowing to feeling. However, what sets this collection apart from the popular school of what Hoagland deems dissociative poetry, is that with the thread of grief tying these poems together, the collection articulates an understandable argument against expressing too much feeling. A stanza from “Palm Sunday” exemplifies this sensibility:
Words wait to be filled, as if they could
Digest their meanings’ absences
without the call of being loved or understood.
Language existing with “meanings’ absences,” read in a solely cerebral mode, is safe. It does not require the reader, or the author, to reveal themselves, or to be moved as one might be by a more emotive language. By writing predominately in a dissociative mode, Kocot sets loose an imaginative playfulness somersaulting over the facts of loss: this method is a way of coping. In “Way Ahead of the Game,” Kocot writes, “I’m told everyone is writing poems about stones. / Arborescent quarantine, I speak you only.” “Arborescent,” a term coined by the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, is basically used to describe “unidirectional progress, with no possible retroactivity.” More than simple gallows humor, the dissociative method is a refusal of closure: instead of composing distanced elegies, Kocot writes into the dead.
[End of essay fragments. And now you have a link to an extremely interesting article by Tony Hoagland.]
....My cat is speaking to me now. This definitely implies bedtime. "Fool," she says "get your tuchis into bed. If you worked at sleeping as much as you worked at memory, you'd be a deeply well-rested woman."
.... I ended up writing my response essay for Columbia about Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. I won't include the whole thing here, but here's a few fragments I think are interesting (bear with me, the spacing is all fucked up, and I'm too loopy to figure out how to fix it):
Repetition is a common impulse. In everyday life, we repeat to learn, to be clear, and to make sense of things, among dozens of other conscious and unconscious reasons. In Kocot’s book, one task of repetitions is to illuminate a process of grief. Why is repetition important to grieving? Perhaps repetition tries to change the unchangeable, to rearrange the facts, to remake associations, and to create a ladder one might use to climb between mourning and the living world. “Song,” the first poem of the collection, is a poem of only thirteen lines, four of which are repeated, and two of which are variations of the other. The lines, “And for that which is not said/ And for that which is already said,” set up an inevitability: the rest of the book. As Kocot reveals this poem to be dedicated to an absence in the second stanza, with “I slip between the corners of the wind / And drink to remember you,” one might read “Song” as a sonnet with an absent line. In this line of thinking, “And for that which is not said” would be the turn, recognizing there is much yet unsaid and perhaps, there begins the book’s attempt to say it. In “I Am Like A Desert Owl, An Owl Among The Ruins,” Kocot begins to gesture toward the larger possibilities of repetition. In the move of a stanza, the speaker turns from an interior, personal reflection to an exterior, then mythic association:
I asked myself, don’t you just love it?
And then, why don’t’ you just love it?
And then, from what grace have I fallen?
Am I Sisyphus with his mute rock
This movement is akin to the sights of a movie camera starting from the position of being focused on the palm of a single person, then zooming outwards, until at last the whole city below is visible.
* * * *
So what is it, besides blunt mourning, that so many of Kocot’s “un-narrative” poems seem to avoid? In Tony Hoagland’s 2006 article “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” he writes:
The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from. It would prefer to remain skeptical…… one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.
It seems many of Kocot’s poems also prefer knowing to feeling. However, what sets this collection apart from the popular school of what Hoagland deems dissociative poetry, is that with the thread of grief tying these poems together, the collection articulates an understandable argument against expressing too much feeling. A stanza from “Palm Sunday” exemplifies this sensibility:
Words wait to be filled, as if they could
Digest their meanings’ absences
without the call of being loved or understood.
Language existing with “meanings’ absences,” read in a solely cerebral mode, is safe. It does not require the reader, or the author, to reveal themselves, or to be moved as one might be by a more emotive language. By writing predominately in a dissociative mode, Kocot sets loose an imaginative playfulness somersaulting over the facts of loss: this method is a way of coping. In “Way Ahead of the Game,” Kocot writes, “I’m told everyone is writing poems about stones. / Arborescent quarantine, I speak you only.” “Arborescent,” a term coined by the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, is basically used to describe “unidirectional progress, with no possible retroactivity.” More than simple gallows humor, the dissociative method is a refusal of closure: instead of composing distanced elegies, Kocot writes into the dead.
[End of essay fragments. And now you have a link to an extremely interesting article by Tony Hoagland.]
....My cat is speaking to me now. This definitely implies bedtime. "Fool," she says "get your tuchis into bed. If you worked at sleeping as much as you worked at memory, you'd be a deeply well-rested woman."
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