by David Lehman
* * *
Poem Begun on a Train
Excuse me while I adjust the privacy settings of this poem
so that if it’s ever published it will exist as a legible text
and not as a string of stubborn phrases I silently repeat to myself.
Three lines written, now three and a half, yet for the moment no one
but me has access to them, as they stretch haltingly
across the perfect grid of my Rhodia notebook,
unless, that is, Amtrak has installed
hidden video cameras above the seats in the coach class
of this Northeast Regional and one of them is focused on this very page.
Whoa, that idea came a little too easily.
The belief that your every move is being watched
used to be a sign of clinical paranoia,
except for those living under totalitarian regimes
in which case it was a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Now it’s becoming a perfectly reasonable assumption
no matter where you breathe, no matter where you write.
Let’s assume that Amtrak hasn’t installed
individual video surveillance, at least not yet.
Let’s further assume that this poem, which is slowly crawling from pure potentiality
to an intermediate state of being more concrete
than if I wrote it by fingertip on a steamy window
but less so than the station signs howling past,
has no other reader but me.
Still, once I transcribe my handwritten draft into my MacBook Pro,
a nearly inevitable step I am already contemplating
and will have long since accomplished by the time you read these lines
it will have become so easily available to endless numbers
of bureaucrats and hackers that I might as well post
the whole thing online immediately.
Every poet thinks about every line being read by someone else
even if, as the line is written, its author suspects that he or she may die
before those words will win the attention of any other human being.
Positing a reader, sympathetic or dismissive,
is apparently necessary for every poem,
from the most compressed, tongue-entangled lyric
to stanzas as aerated and matter-of-fact as these.
There are times, however, when a reader is not merely posited
but becomes as factually undeniable as the poem itself.
What’s more, instead of turning a cold shoulder
or bestowing ceremonial kisses on a prize-winner’s cheeks,
this invisible reader rattles a set of prison keys
and is ready to dispatch an inconvenient text and author
to a cold library with zero opening hours
from which nothing circulates except ashes.
To earn shelf space in this grim depository
a poem doesn’t even need to be written down.
Think of Mandelstam’s “Stalin Epigram,”
16 lines recited to a few friends that signed their author’s death warrant.
Obviously, I don’t have the slightest intention of comparing myself to Mandelstam
or to any other poet writing within rifle shot of deadly auditors
nor, for that matter, to Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami,
recently sentenced to life in prison (subsequently reduced to a mere 15 years)
for reciting a poem on YouTube that displeased the Emir of Qatar.
I can’t imagine any poem I might write coming with such a price,
yet I live at a time when writing and its surveillance
have become practically synonymous.
In Discipline and Punish (original French title, Surveiller et punir)
Foucault cites Bentham’s panopticon prison
where an inmate can’t know whether or not he or she
is being watched by a guard at any given moment
so must assume that observation is continual.
In the present state of “carceral society” surveillance really is continual
and increasingly it is undertaken by the subjects themselves.
Fitbit, I read, is a small device to track your physical activity or sleep.
You can wear the device all day because it easily clips in your pocket,
pants, shirt, bra, or to your wrist when you are sleeping.
The data collected is automatically synched online when the device
is near the base station. After uploading, you can explore visualizations
of your physical activity and sleep quality on the web site.
You can also view your data using their new mobile web site.
You can also track what you eat, other exercises that you do, and your weight.
This is the world prophesied by Kenneth Goldsmith circa 1997
when he submitted himself to week-long audio surveillance
or attempted to describe his every physical action for a 13-hour period.
It’s also the world embraced by a new generation of digital literary scholars
who employ data-mining techniques pioneered by the NSA.
True, poets have been engaged in “self tracking” for a long time.
“Let no thought pass incognito and keep your notebook
as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens,” Walter Benjamin advised.
They’ve also sometimes operated on the other side of the fence:
Wordsworth spying for England on his and Coleridge’s 1798 trip to Hamburg,
Basil Bunting working undercover for British Military Intelligence
in Teheran until he was expelled in 1952.
But more often they have been the ones spied upon,
like Hugh MacDiarmid hounded in wartime Scotland
as a Communist agitator while he looked for “a poetry of facts.”
At least he had the opportunity to lash back in a letter
to one of his tormentors, a certain Captain Jock Hay:
“It is intolerable that I should be subjected to inconvenience
and misrepresentation by a fatuous blowhard like you
and I have no intention of submitting to it,
even though the seriousness of it is mitigated by the fact
you are known as a windy ass and egregious buffoon
and not taken seriously by anyone who knows you.”
(Andrew McNeillie, “A Scottish Siberia,” TLS, Sept. 13, 2013.)
In The Prelude, Wordsworth was baffled at “how men lived
Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still
Strangers, not knowing each other’s name.”
Now I know the names of a thousand “friends” I’ve never met, and they mine,
so what do I have to hide from any device capturing these lines
to a distant database? My mind is filled with eavesdroppers and spies.
I think a thousand times, or not a second, before I commit to a phrase
and leave trails of metadata I’m asked to believe no one will ever pursue.
Rather than wallow in outmoded subjectivities
raw and naked to those unseen all-seeing eyes
maybe it’s better to simply claim existing chunks of language
as MacDiarmid did in the Shetland Islands in the early 1940s
transcribing lengthy passages from the TLS
for his eventually abandoned megapoem
“Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn.”
In June 1940 the authorities judged him “a case for continued observation”
and in the following March put him on the “invasion list.”
“It is probably unnecessary,” Brooman-White wrote to Major Peter Perfect
(Box 5, Edinburgh) on March 16, 1941, “as no doubt the local Police and Military
are all standing round waiting to pounce on him,<
br />
but to make assurance doubly sure, it might be as well to have his name added.
I think we have plenty of evidence to justify this
but if you like I will send you up a summary of our file against the man.”
The character Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes,
released in 1938, the year Mandelstam died,
is having tea in the dining car with the charming
but penniless musicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave)
when she glimpses the name that Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty)
had left on the window, a second before it vanishes.
She bolts from the table and desperately addresses the travelers around her:
“I appeal to you, all of you—stop the train. Please help me.
Please make them stop the train. Do you hear?
Why don’t you do something before it’s too late?”
Redgrave and duplicitous psychiatrist Dr. Harz (Paul Lukas)
attempt to restrain her but she breaks away.
Before pulling the train’s emergency cord and collapsing in a dead faint,
she cries out: “I know! You think I’m crazy, but I’m not.
For heaven’s sake, stop this train. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
Amid the fascist shadows she is driven to hysteria
because a text has vanished before it could acquire other readers.
At the Whitney’s “Rituals of Rented Island”
I walk into the Squat Theatre installation, suddenly remembering
evenings of radical performance circa 1979
as a long-forgotten line from one of Kafka’s parables
hisses around me in low-fi analog:
“Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man.”
from Harper’s
NATALIE SCENTERS-ZAPICO
* * *
Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez
1. The larger portion of this text discusses El Paso, Texas, the boring sister to Ciudad Juárez, México.
2. There are apartments that feel like they are by the sea, but out the window there is only freeway.
3. The geraniums always wilt either from heat or pollution.
4. El Canelo is the red-headed Mexican boxer who speaks Spanish.
5. Sometimes the candles are religious, sometimes they are not.
6. The girl from Juárez is beautiful. The girl from Juárez is God.
7. The tortilla border has shanties on one side and trailers on the other.
8. Some call them Fronchis because their license plates read: Fron-Chi for Frontera Chihuahua. Some just call them fresas.
9. In summer, roaches cross the street and travel home to home like people.
10. Campestre, Anapra, Chaveña, Anahuac, Flores Magon, and Independencia are only some of the neighborhoods in Ciudad Juárez.
11. Some streets are lined in wires because it’s so easy to steal electricity.
12. Moxas graffiti walls: mee aamooo!! noo aa laas coopiioonaas!!
13. Some days saliva evaporates from the tongue.
14. The river has become the only blue vein left pulsing on the map.
15. The river is only blue on the map.
from West Branch
EVIE SHOCKLEY
* * *
legend
fern wept, let her eyes
wet her tresses, her cheeks,
her feet. the cheerlessness
rendered her blessed,
strengthened her nerve.
even then, she’d seen
she needed her regrets
melted. the weep-fest
helped her shed her tender
edges, she felt the steel
emerge. she’d served her
sentence. she’d get herself
west, persevere, exert
herself. they’d tell bess—
her sweet bess!—fern’d
deserted her. bess knew
better! when she left, fern
pretended phlegm, yet
she’d pledged she’d never
rest ere she freed bess:
the excellent secret they
kept between themselves.
when fern’d netted the
needed green, she’d send
bess her debt fee—then,
pressed, they’d sell her . . .
her self. (senseless!) see,
bess, she’d greet her when
they re-met, necks nestled,
flesh welded, essence-deep,
we knew we’d effect the deed!
we’re the bee’s knees! they’ll
never see cleverer femmes.
from Fence
CHARLES SIMIC
* * *
So Early in the Morning
It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store—
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again—a friend at death’s door
And the memory of the night we spent together.
I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked,
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,
But I did not—despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor’s trash can.
from The Paris Review
SANDRA SIMONDS
* * *
Similitude at Versailles
Welcome to Humanities 203!
Here you will find the mysterious
death of the honeybee, the Byzantine emperor,
Justinian, who made church and state
a seamless whole. Quiz tomorrow.
When someone dies, you buy their relatives flowers.
1-800-FLOWERS. As a result
your driving privilege will be suspended
indefinitely on 11/13/2012.
Where’s mommy?
I said I was trying to write this poem
for the day, do you mind?
The Real Ghostbusters will return
after these messages. The trap’s ready.
I can get a girlfriend anytime I want.
On the toddler bed, wrapped in the felt
blanket with monkeys printed all over it,
their prehensile tails curled—
I promise guys, I’ll never let myself
get carried away by women again. I want pancakes.
Hey Sandra, I think Charlotte might be hungry.
I’ll be there in a second.
Okay, I’ll just feed her now.
—what could pass as love inside capital?
Maybe just these records, the real.
At the Halloween festival, my friend dressed
her child as one of the 1%. Ezekiel
was a pirate. Her little girl threw
fake bills into the air. She danced
in her suit and mustache. Thought—
it will only ever snow $ in Florida
and you seemed more like the bas-relief,
the minor key, some detail about Louis XIV’s
weak blood I always forget to teach,
and for a moment I had become
the anarchy of the sea—you know how the waves
are always pounding out some polyphony
in saltwater, algae and fish
that their subjects cannot understand.
from Colorado Review
ED SKOOG
* * *
The Macarena
The chair I’m sitting on is mostly nothing.
Electrons go right through it. Memory, which
is electricity, seems li
ke less than anything
and yet in the inexplicable universe I’m there
again, and it’s now, the summer of the Macarena.
Two months in Abilene, Kansas, and I see
nobody in the central air of the Sunflower Hotel.
My eighth-floor window stares at soft, buttery hills.
Streetlights pink the tracks downtown
like a chalk outline to fill in later.
I never know what next. I am writing a novel.
Its characters are historians at the Eisenhower Library.
I go to its chapel daily, sit before his tomb
looking for a way to make a story up. I write
hundreds of pages, there and at my kitchenette,
alone and twenty-three. Some weekends I drive
to KC, where a woman who won’t need me
lets me stay over, though at sex I’m still a boy,
the way at writing I’m still naïve, unskilled,
fascinated by form but lazy about content.
I’d like to finally read what I’ve been quoting.
Rummaging after maturity, I overdo the easy
and am too timid to engage full heart.
But I work the paths that may lead from myself.
Ike stays a boy, boyishly winning the worst war.
As president little happened we praise him for,
and by we I mean the characters of my novel,
among the adult troubles they fall into
and I don’t understand. I avoid addressing
tyranny and battlefield and Holocaust.
For years I write liner notes to real life.
All drafts of that story will leave the earth,
and I’ll send gratitude to the devil of fortune,
who will let that manuscript drift
like a bad vapor through offices of agent and editor.
This summer at the Democratic Party Convention
in Chicago, where the man who gives Leaves of Grass
away carelessly will be renominated, the delegates
keep doing the Macarena every time I look.
The vice president claims during his speech
to be doing the Macarena, but does not move,
then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents
