American Poetry
Page 32
find the law
has them covered.”
“Hero surfaces
from sunken sub,”
it says.
*
When we come back,
“Southern Exposure:
radiation leak
The Night
The Lights Went Out In Georgia.”
When we come back,
the murdered siblings
reappear
as trolls and elves.
When we come back,
the heir apparent
crafts
his solid victory
Guests of Space
Anselm Hollo
Guten Tag Herr Schopenhauer Bonjour Monsieur Cioran
good morning Mr. Swift how are you Mr. Burroughs
once again history the unstoppable proves you right
species no better than smart rat (maybe not even as smart)
evolutionary leap? my foot, my foot in three-foot hole
but let all peaceful mutants leap for spring
calloo callay, while they still may—
watch it! don’t twist that ankle!
don’t step into that three-foot hole!
“and wisdom has not come” “against wisdom as such”
oh, it is apt to give a gopher tantrums!
anecdotal befuddlement. infinite terminators.
toujours a mountain eased a previous you;
should it feel easier, writing? I don’t think so. No.
*
here have I summed my sighs, playing cards with the dead
in a broke-down shack on the old memory banks
e’en though my thoughts like hounds
pursue me through swift speedy time
feathered with flying hours
but could have sat there for many more hours
listened to poet friends reading
words by an absent friend whose work we love
in the name of Annah the Allmaiziful,
the Everliving, the bringer of plurabilities
concretized, concertized, temporally minute
progressions of actions, swirling mists of the past
“you have a lot of stuff here, you know?”
“yes now run on home”
*
Once you’ve said something, you can’t unsay it
Once you haven’t said anything, it remains unsaid
and anything you can’t say well, it’s unsayable
All right now that we got that out of the way
we need some particulars
but where did I put them, where are my particulars?
“Here they are, sir.” Oh, thanks. Today’s mail:
3 books of poems, 1 cigar catalogue
the poems look great, so does the catalogue
“But aren’t you trying to quit?”
Mel Tormé died, Charismatic didn’t make it today
the fifth of June nineteen-ninety-nine
And in a restaurant called The Europa Ninety-three
warlords consult on a respite from murder and mayhem
*
(i.m. Hannes Hollo, 1959–1999)
Fought the hungry ghosts here on Earth
“What is man?” asked the King
Alcuin’s reply: “A guest of space.” And time yes time:
The past lies before us, the future comes up from behind
Walking on Primrose Hill or Isle of Wight beaches
Iowa City streets scrambling up snow-covered deer track
To Doc Holliday’s grave in Glenwood Springs
His helmet now shall make a hive for bees
He fought the hungry ghosts here on Earth
Strong & resourceful on his best days,
Patient kind and presente
Returning those with him to here & now
But just as we settle in with our Pepsi and popcorn
THE END rolls up too soon always too soon
*
and of course it won’t do, it won’t do at all
Herzen again: “Suffering inescapable,
infallible knowledge
neither attainable nor needed”
sound of swans’ wings
over the quarry ponds at Grez
look up! the departed sail on
to some picture-book Norway
and Mr. P old ga-ga cantor
among the ruins of Europe
writes to his missus “where are they?
where are they?” old “genius” snows falling
on his head in his head
(no, it won’t do, it won’t do at all)
*
Private they are, the sums of grief, “impossibly private”
“There probably is some intelligence at work here”
“Yes, but I don’t want to know what it is”
Elizabethans considered a nosebleed a symptom of love
But if’n the wind don’t blow through it it don’t make it
& what if the ‘personal’ prove as tiresome as the ‘public’?
Mawkish messages to the dear departed? No
That is not given to you to do
Nor can you really get behind idealized forebears
Getting wiped out while attacking some barn
“Did you say barn?” In the glorious South or any other
Cardinal direction & now this old Cardinal
(Universal Life Church) hums
Cani capilli mei compedes “Gray hairs are my chains”
*
Against meaning, lunatic, real,
Possible in appearance, you work a line,
Be like a larger logic to defy
The dumbly trembling unities
(quotation fringe is blue)
Your self helps us from prose & down
Into an orange: “Hail my effort, you people”
“Stand and deliver!”
But stubborn world is time & airy dung
Insists on legible distance, inhabited heaps
“As Lacan points out”
Never mind what Never mind Never mind
Sing the old huddles (persons bowed down
With age or heavy wraps
*
& should I buy this Scientific American
to see how the quest for immortality is going?
got the one on space exploration
… such incredible hardships ahead …
calling twenty-nine ninety-nine in this old English
but we are just learning to walk
and time is a voice goes a-roaming
“just a chickadee in the rain”
Green House almost ready now
oh they too have their troubles
the beloved intuitive abstract expressive painter
the ever-distracted monkish poet
musing upon the Malevich square on Hitler’s upper lip
and the fact that “questo” does not mean “quest”
*
the human being talks it talks
and talks and talks even to
itself so “hating speech” what was
that about? no speak no talk no read no write
now that sounds like the dead except
some of them do read them-
selves into our ears
day and night
when The Slinger passed on
it left me restless
the way one was restless
after a teenage rendezvous
“driving somewhere, fast
with the windows rolled down”
*
I’ll write a poem about nothing
absolutely nothing
not about myself
or youth or love or any person
I’ll write it riding along
half asleep in the sun
and then I’ll send it to a friend
signed, William of Aquitaine
nine hundred years ago
and ever since we’ve raged
in shirts red black and blue
we’ve raged still do
in our dream rooms asking the air
mad questions about nothing
*
Equipped with human heart’s dizzy gyroscope
In the yellow submarine we lived oh my darlings
Is it now all just imaging?
No more imagining in The Momentous Events
In Small Rooms Hotel the brain is?
“Don’t remember the time I was born
Don’t want to remember the time I die”
Old troll stands in secret memory garden
Gazes at mirror globe’s beloved faces
Through time they move as “guests of space”
Yes that we are he thinks remembers Alcuin’s answer
When Pippin son of Carolus asked him “what is man”
& Cousin Louis: “You will always do wrong
You must try to get used to that, my son”
*
My first computer:
Poor old workhorse machine
Just an advanced version of the clay tablet
Archaic box, you still work
Humming that hum I found so irritating
22 years ago
(used to say “this thing’s
no smarter than an amoeba”)
Waiting for me to write
A word and then another
And another
But I shouldn’t have said what I said just then
Because only a few days later
It went from hum to loud groan And died
*
There’s words, and there’s hair
And hair and hair … Would you know
Evocative if you saw it?
Or have you not had the Enigma
Reversal Experience?
“What’s that? What’s that?”
They cringe and snarl
It has to do with the minutely sensational
Say I, with what’s little enough but enough
As when you turn the radio on
And it is the right music
Even when It introduces sadness
And one understands little
Of what’s going on
*
and thus we woo our wit with gentle memoranda
birthday thoughts about mother long gone
& her madcap cocaine-addled sister
Aunt Karin I never knew, her son cousin Peter
ever wistful but such a smile now gone too
dusk road games dust road fumes
REALITY is WET today
“How big is the mind?
How could we avoid dissolving in our own private oceans?”
asks Randolph Healy dear Irish poet
beat, beat “It’s a strange, strange world we live in,
Captain Jack” and who was that and why
(look up at the sky, bro, look up at the sky)
*
You
are not the Countess of Tripoli
And I
am not dead yet
unlike Jaufre Rudel
So now I can tell you about
The most interesting metrics of The Horse
To wit, the rack, the fox trot, the amble
Four-beat gaits with each beat
Evenly spaced gliding and smooth
In perfect cadence and rapid succession
The legs on either side move together
The hind leg striking the ground
Slightly before the foreleg!
Vraiment,
Poetry can be so many more things
Than what people mostly believe it is.
And there were years when nobody died.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
WILL ALEXANDER has a new book of poems, Exobiology as Goddess, forthcoming from Manifest Press.
RAE ARMANTROUT is currently writer-in-residence at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her most recent book is The Pretext (Green Integer). In summer of 2001, Wesleyan will publish Veil: New and Selected Poems.
JOHN ASHBERY’s most recent collection of poems is Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He teaches at Bard College.
MARTINE BELLEN is the author of Places People Dare Not Enter (Potes & Poets Press) and Tales of Murasaki (Sun & Moon Press). Her new collection, The Vulnerability of Order, will be published this spring by Copper Canyon Press.
CHARLES BERNSTEIN’s “Reading Red” was written in response to “New Mexico–New York,” a series of twenty-five paintings by Richard Tuttle, first shown at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in 1998. The collaboration was published in Germany by Walther König (Cologne) in a book designed by Tuttle. Bernstein’s most recent books are Republics of Reality: 1975–1995 (Sun & Moon Press) and My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press).
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE’s recent books are Endocrinology and Four Year Old Girl, both from Kelsey Street Press. Nest is forthcoming.
LAYNIE BROWNE is co-curator of the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. Her recent books include Rebecca Letters (Kelsey Street Press), The Agency of Wind (Avec), Clepsydra (Instress) and Gravity’s Mirror (Primitive Editions).
NORMA COLE’s latest poetry publications are The Vulgar Tongue, Desire & Its Double and Spinoza in Her Youth. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited and translated by the author will appear in the fall of 2000 from Burning Deck.
PETER COLE’s newest book of poems is Hymns & Qualms. His translations from the medieval Hebrew, Selected Poems of Ibn Gabirol, are forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Among CLARK COOLIDGE’s most recent books are Bomb (with Keith Waldrop; Granary Books), On the Nameways, Vol. One (The Figures) and Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds (Living Batch Press).
BRENDA COULTAS’s work has appeared in Epoch and in an anthology of new American poets.
ROBERT CREELEY has two CDs forthcoming: “Have We Told You All You Thought to Know?” with Steve Swallow, Chris Massey, David Torn and David CasT in a live concert performance (Cuneiform Records) and “Robert Creeley,” a reading of recent uncollected poems (Jagjaguwar Records). The Before Columbus Foundation gave him an American Book Award 2000 this June for “Lifetime Achievement.”
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS’s collection, Drafts 1–38: Toll, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001. She is working on essays on gender and poetics, and on the next fold of Drafts.
MICHAEL EASTMAN’s work has appeared on the cover of Time as well as in Life, American Photographer and View Camera and can be found in the collections of the International Center for Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He lives in St. Louis.
ELAINE EQUI is the author of many books, including Surface Tension, Decoy and Voice-Over (all published by Coffee House Press). She teaches at City College and the New School University in New York.
THALIA FIELD’s first collection, Point and Line, was published by New Directions. “Land at Church City” is from Story Material.
The author of several books of poetry and poems in translation, FORREST GANDER’S most recent titles include Science & Steepleflower (New Directions) and No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López Colomé, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
PETER GIZZI’s most recent books are Add This to the House (Equipage) and Artificial Heart (Burning Deck Books).
RENEE GLADMAN is the author of Arlem (Idiom Press) and Not Right Now (Second Story Books). Juice, a collection of prose, is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press later this year. “The Interrogation” is Part 1 of a three-part series.
JORIE GRAHAM is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Swarm (Ecco/HarperCollins). The poems in this issue are from a new collection, All Things, due out next year. She currently teaches at Harvard.
BARBARA GUEST’s recent books include If So, Tell Me (Reality Street Editions), Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature (Wesleyan University
Press), The Confetti Trees (Sun & Moon Press) and Symbiosis (with artist Laurie Reid; Kelsey Street Editions). In 1999 she was awarded the Robert Frost Medal.
CAMILLE GUTHRIE’s first book of poetry, The Master Thief, will be published this fall by Subpress. She teaches at Friends Seminary in New York.
LYN HEJINIAN’s most recent works are Happily (Post-Apollo Press) and The Beginner (Spectacular Books). A collection of essays entitled The Language of Inquiry is due shortly from the University of California Press. She is co-director, with Travis Ortiz, of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets.
Since 1989, ANSELM HOLLO has been teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics, the Writing and Poetics Department of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. A book of prose writings, Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets, has just been published by La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press, which will also bring out his new book of poems, Rue Wilson Monday, this year.
PAUL HOOVER’s seven books of poetry include Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems, Viridian and The Novel: A Poem. He is editor of Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton) and the literary magazine New American Writing.
FANNY HOWE’s most recent volume of poems was Selected Poems (University of California Press). A novel, Indivisible, will be published by Semiotexte/MIT Press later this year.
SUSAN HOWE’s most recent book of poems is Fierce-Arrow, published by New Directions. She is currently at work on a new manuscript.
CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO’s poetry and criticism have appeared in New American Writing, American Letters & Commentary, Caliban, Contemporary Literature and Epoch.
VINCENT KATZ is the author of, among other works, Understand Objects, a book of poems, Life Is Paradise: The Portraits of Francesco Clemente and Charm, translations from Latin of the Roman love poet Sextus Propertius.
ROBERT KELLY’s most recent books are The Garden of Distances (with Brigitte Mahlknecht), Runes and The Time of Voice. The poem in this issue marks the beginning of a long poem, Opening the Seals, and is indebted to Patrick C. Ryan’s reconstructions of the monosyllables of what he calls Proto-Language—human speech a hundred thousand years before the present.
MYUNG MI KIM’s books of poetry are Under Flag (Kelsey Street Press), The Bounty (Chax) and DURA (Sun & Moon Press). “Serge Document” is from her new book, Commons.
ANN LAUTERBACH’s If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000 will be published by Penguin in April 2001. She teaches at Bard College, where she also directs Poetry in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
TAN LIN is the author of two books of poems, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Sun & Moon Press) and Box (forthcoming from Atelos). He has taught English, creative writing and art history at the University of Virginia, Cal Arts and, currently, New Jersey City University. “Ambient Stylistics” is from a longer collage novel/poem.