Monday, November 19, 2007


[Note: this is going to stay at the top of the page for awhile for new readers; I'll bury it in a week or so. Please proceed on to the next post if you haven't the time for this nonsense.]

Why am I here? Why are you here? Of course we don't really know.
But my profile to the right gives you a decidedly un-cosmological shot at explanation about why I think I'm here (you're free to try the same).

My harshest critics, though somewhat insightful, have pointed out the oddity that I've actually registered four blogs, though I'm only heavily active on two. It is telling of a person though. Let me just say, though, that "everything but the kitchen sink" blogs/sites may not be very pleasant to read. This is an age of narrowcasting. People want to customize and nichefy. So it is with blogs. One of my sites is broader, covering vast terrains of media, culture, and politics, and yet, it didn't really comfortably house my third-rate poetry. It was time to find a home for it somewhere else. There's the rationale, which no doubt works in tandem with the mysteries of the unconscious.

The volatile mix of life's demands and expectations and my own ill-considered actions brought me here, a third-rate poet by default. I was always impressed by the story of how the precociously Leviathan intellect John Stuart Mill, having learned Latin, Greek, and algebra by age eight, all the classics of history, much philosophy, and political economy by age 13, suffered a mental breakdown at age 21. In his Autobiography, he claims that nothing could comfort but the poems of William Wordsworth, his Lyrical Ballads. Like Mill, I have always turned to poetry in times of crisis, at least in moments when I could bring myself to read at all. I have also written some poetry in times of non-crisis over the years. I used to think that poetry was for me, as it was for Keats and Shelley, a time of youthful productivity that would blaze magnificently, then take its exit like the locust that sings short-lived in summer. But now I understand why some feel compelled to write across their lives, however so short or long.

Honestly, millions of people consider themselves "writers" and "poets," and good for them if writing makes them feel better. On the other hand, I don't believe all things are equal (though it's true that standards are culturally constructed--Rimbaud is not good poetry from the point of view of the courtly poets two hundred years before him). I don't pretend to be a first-rate poet, though writing does take practice. Much of this material will be constantly revised. In addition, every Western monopolizer of world resources and his dog has a blog these days (indeed, I'm thinking of giving my dog M her own blog) . Most aren't read or heard, sad trees falling into deafening inexistence, while others are out-of-control egos, substituting for unresolved inadequate parental love and childhood recognition traumas, resulting in obsessions with statcounters, hits, being seen, comments, and strategies to increase traffic on their sites: "Look at me! Please, will you pay attention! I exist! I'm smart! I'm beautiful! I'm loveable! Please say something nice about me (or go away)!" Sometimes the sites are little more than clubs of backscratchers, cyber-group therapy, criticism necessarily being expelled from a discourse of eternal positive regard. Networks are built and can be good or bad for mental health, since many people are afraid to explore their demons and so spend life bouncing around from one unconscious fix to another. Sometimes sites are little more than boring, poorly written, intellectually and stylistically arid diaries and effusions of "I": I went to the park. I took a runny dump. I saw Cameron Diaz naked on a beach in San Torini. Sometimes they are shallow but cleverly executed prose, period. People like Harlequin romances and E entertainment as much as Virginia Wolf. I'm sure this blog runs all those risks and will fall into some of those boxes, for some readers. Feel free to let me know if you think I'm doing exactly what I want to avoid. I'm surely not going to be the one to point it out to myself. I don't believe in self-made man bullshit. People change, with great effort and will, in dialog with others. I have a friend who told me she hates blogs. She finds them pathetic cries for attention and confessions about matters that should be private--it's the Clinton-Lewinsky phenomenon that people gobble up like pizza samples in the supermarket. She also thinks people are doing the same thing when they dress in ways that call attention to themselves. But if someone has something to say, they must do something to get attention. It's true writing on the internet at all requires some ego, some desire to share and be recognized, even if we don't really know why or what we want in the act of recognition itself. Perhaps that desire is worth the writer's scrutiny?

The poetry here is often that genre whose authors are said to "take themselves too seriously." Not everything written here is bleak, dark, morose, and tumultuous. It is a mix, but you'll see my view has a hearty dose of Baudelaire's spleen. I do have acid reflux. Perhaps, in the end, I bear more darkness than light. And yet I laugh, here and elsewhere. I love. Above all else, I make mistakes, try to learn from them on a life journey toward the man I've meant and mean to be. Some see it as romantic folly. So be it.

There will also be an ongoing series of poems about Paris, where I currently dwell.
I'm mainly speaking to other third-rate poets, those who take comfort and interest in third-rate poetry, and first-rate poets who feel better about themselves by comparing their work to that of third-rate poets.

Perhaps you're a third-rate poet, too? Or you gain comfort from third-rate poetry,too? I will be sharing my works in progress, which will also include translations of French first-rate poetry (eg. Francois Villon, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire,etc.). Perhaps you'd like to exchange comments and your poetry with me? This is not a gated community. It is hopelessly quaint: the front door is always unlocked, and I am usually on the porch, playing guitar or accordian, singing, weeping, thinking, laughing with a friend. Don't be shy.

Labels: , , , ,

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Free Contemporary Men and Women

Today, in many places, thanks to globally circulating culture, the privileged highly educated man and woman have high expectations--of one another, of themselves, of lives and life. Their constitutions, politicians, social movements, and media products relentlessly assault them with a refrain: you are free. No matter the protests of his successors, Sartre lives on, his bastardized words become biblical.

Women. Women are just as capable as men (or more so) in any number of careers. The property of husbands a distant echo--despite pay ceilings and the recalcitrance of unconscious expectations in the habits of their husbands' domestic workload. The demand to have everything a real and maddening pressure. Forget the physical abuse and financial and intellectual infantilization of the unliberated past (and, to be sure, for some, sadly, still in the present). The new restlessly dogged pursuit of perfection brings little-studied impacts profound. How many know what they are pursuing? How many know what they want and how they acquired those wants, expectations, and desires? Women: Mothers, Grandmothers, Wives, Lovers, Sisters, Daughters.

Grand/Mothers. Impossible role models wearing scarves over whiptoppinged hairdos, throwing apocryphal tupperware parties, keeping immaculate homes, and forming welcome wagons for the new neighbors. Taking orders. Never communicating inner problems and desires. Repressed. Pathetic to the new women, and both know it. A sense of a worthless life entire. Grand/Mothers.

Men. What has become of them? Shall we continue to generalize in a poem? They are as much in a crisis as their counterparts (or even their same-sex ones--what are their expectations, with their public models all but banned?). Do you hear Faludi whisper? Men.

Their grandfathers/fathers. So their role models, pater familias unpatered by a cultural revolution, are paranoid and resentful toward the gendered world going to hell in a handbasket, which they desperately vote against through brands of "family values." Used to giving orders (including sexual), they find themselves generals being ordered by their mutinied subordinates, peasants who have stormed the Bastille and all but wheeled out the guillotine. Their grand/fathers.

Their parents/they: rebelled. Free love. Expensive divorce. Were the answers! Broken homes, parentless children, emotional holes that would land on the doorstep of future relationships, loves, marriages. Unwitting unrequited demands for parental attention, for parents, in the couple, in friendships, on the job. Unperfected changes from grandfathers, -mothers, parents. Heavy baggage--but invisible. Their parents/they.

They. New men, New women. The territory is un-charted; the exigencies to be other than their models like making every move under gunpoint. What are the new 7-year itches? The new mid-life crises? The new couple dynamics that volatilely mix with unresolved individual pasts in a misunderstood witch's potion voarciously lapped up? Pressure to move on, not develop, not mature, not learn from mistakes, not develop new maps together--change fast, a cheap panaceac promise. No devotion to a life-long best friend and lover, a companion above companions, ups and downs, maturation. Too much trouble. Too quaint. Too humiliating. Too unfree. Too grand/mother. They.

They. If the job is not bliss, if/since the husband or wife is flawed, there are pangs of change from fears of inadequacy. When crisis sticks its fork-tongued head out of its hole and visits them, they remember promises of change just last year, big and permanent changes, not slow ones. Instant Gratification, Speed, even though, to be sure, the trials of time have not been insignificant. From the view of free men and women the past is then a long dark night, the memory of which an endless nightmare. Staying the course, developing, maturing is humiliating, is old-fashioned, is torture when it should all be there in the job, the family, the couple, the life. Too keep on would be to regress, would be masochistic. What would it take to resist the desultory destiny of the newly freed men and women, eternally but vaguely searching for constant love, physical gratification, social and professional recognition, and unconscious resolution of deep internal wars without repeating the crimes of the grand/parents?
They: the free contemporary man and woman.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Christmas, 1943

Christmas, 1943

Being first a farmer in
The Great Depression,
He always hated Christmas,
No matter the
Endless cups of
Amnesiac cheer
A commercialized
Holiday offered.

And secondly why?

On Christmas Eve 1943,
a teenage sailor,
residue of hay bales still clinging to his ears,
dreaming of thistles and harvests,
horse-powered ploughing
in the middle of the South Pacific,
was still seasick when he
switched duties with his
best friend,

But on Christmas Day 1943
a teenage sailor met
a never-ending war

On Christmas Day 1943,
a teenager who rode
ponies to school
watched 108 of his comrades
kick and scream prematurely into
dark, wet un-holidayed sepulchers--
wailing armless torsos,
legless arm-flailing torsos,
always screaming, "don't leave me!";
swam instinctively against
the violent sucking black

On Christmas Day 1943
War's cruel gift exchange.
God's inscrutable will.
The year without a Santa Claus

On Christmas Day, 1943
a pompous and derelict Captain
laughed at the alarms of his


On Christmas Day, 1943,
surviving men lined up their shoes on deck,
insanely perfect, as their drills
had promised,
and leapt to their deaths

On Christmas Day,
a teenaged Veteran, father, husband
gives painful gifts to his wife
and his children;
refuses all presents,
refuses the waste,
refuses the universe,
and Memory,
all in vain, in vain

On Christmas Day, 1943
a teenage boy, a husband, a father
a Veteran,
was saved by a passing ship,
And lost his life,

On Christmas Day, 1943.

Labels: , , , , ,

Trustworthy Maps

They tell us we’re free,

A tempting cult, indeed.

If you don’t get everything you want,

Stop, change course, you will get it

On another if you just take charge.

A man who lost his map

(it actually never occurred to him

that he needed one, so great

was his faith in naturally

following his good instincts)

while hiking in the mountains

came to a fork in a path

and chose one leading to

death-defying precipices and bridgeless chasms,

so around he turned,

went back to the fork,

the other path he took,

which led to the same risks and horrors.

Romantic to go mapless, but liberating?

Secure to go mapful, but boring?

Disquieting to make new maps, but wise?

Someone said that the flea markets

And thrift stores are full of old maps,

For new ones must always be made,

If people are to learn from the mistakes of
To say nothing of becoming them.

Labels: , ,

Labels: , , , , , ,

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Tonight, I came home. I took M out. She took a long dump, the kind where she squat-walks the length of five or six feet, dribbling turd chunks here and there, then jumps up as if squirted freshly out of the womb, swiveling her head and stretching out her paws, crouching and then running in circles, full of child-like glee--mirth. She sniffed the piss-marked buildings, and tree trunks, and various detritus on the sidewalk, sometimes giving them a fresh coat of her own. She whined as we ascended in the elevator in anticipation of a treat, a nuzzle, a prance across the hardwood floor. She begged for the last remnants of the baguette we nearly finished last night, as I re-heated a bowl of chili. She turned away from baguette watch, toward the door as she heard the elevator clanking and someone arriving above. She waited and finally dropped her head sorrowfully. I took the almost-too-hot-to-handle yellow bowl out of the microwave and lumbered indifferently toward the couch. I turned on the TV as M darted up on the couch and turned methodically in her circle to snuggle up next to me only to then unravel herself to beg for food. On the cable channel that slowly illuminated before me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The ending was happier than I remembered.

Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Paris (Revised)

Paris (revised)


Old bourg,
Glittering vainly
In the past;

With ipods
And cell phones,
Focused and

Hairdos, boots,
Silk cravats and
Colored scarves--
Some humans
ain't human

Where shopping
Cheaply for
And homeless
Armies on
The canals;

Long journeys to Day
Short jaunts to Night where,

Well chiseled
Facades bow
One to the
Other, dykes
Day as much
As flowers
Stretch sunward--


People down
Her sidewalks
Shuffle while
Dark with age,
And searching
For Haussmann’s
Safety Valves,
On envied

Properly scarved
Claw their way out
Of stinking
ratful caves
And labyrinths,
Like moths.

Living as


Neither Eiffel’s
Nor the martyr’s—
Baudelaire’s nightmare:
A dim damp bourg
Burning bright on
A Page.

Labels: , ,

Technorati technorati tags: , , ,

Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Hour

By the fung-dappled stones

Two flies cavort

Above marrowless bones in their bliss

Through the soil slides the worm

Happy, hungry, then devoured,

When round earth

Opens mouth up above

And the hour gains its grains

And the sea immortal rains

And the jackalous earth is unsated

But the heart shrinks in horror at the earth, the sea, the hour

Falls to its knees and bays for our tombstone-earth-sea-hour.

Labels: , ,