ABOUT NOW—JOANNE KYGER’S COLLECTED POEMS

Speaking of poetry. I always loved Kyger’s poetry from the first time I read it. And now here’s the biggest collection of it yet, from the National Poetry Foundation. I’ve mentioned it before on this blog, but never devoted a post to it exclusively.

There’s a visceral and emotional presence in her work unlike that of any other. She’s one of three women on the “alternative” side of the poetry world who emerged in the 1950s with distinct voices that marked them as not only unique writers, but as unique people, and whose work I was immediately drawn to and still am.

I’m talking about:

Barbara Guest—a poet first associated with the original New York School Poets (otherwise all men, being Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler).

Diane di Prima—one of the very few women among the “Beats,” and whose work was instantly recognized as new and important, at least by readers like me, at the time.

And Kyger—the only woman associated with a group of West Coast poets who had various group identities, but mainly with Gary Snyder—who I think she was married to for a time—and Philip Whelan (although Kyger’s poetry didn’t really get noticed until the 1960s).

Guest refined her abstract disjointed poetics into a fiercely unique voice that influenced, or at least impressed, many in the later “Language Poetry” movement.

Di Prima constantly reinvented her line and approach to the poem to suit the phases of her life and often her political development (the three main stages represented by her 1950s’ hipster streety prose poems collected in DINNERS & NIGHTMARES, her ‘60s reincarnation as in many ways the voice of the spirit of those times in REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS, and her ‘70s and beyond reincarnation as the voice of a kind of earthy alternative feminism exemplified in her LOBA series—all of which are worth reading not only for the writing but for the way they are like perfect time capsules, like Cassavettes film SHADOWS or the early more obscure films of Robert Downey Sr. or Shirley Clark’s films, they capture their times unfiltered by Hollywood or the academy or trendiness or any distractions from the realities of those moments as they were experienced by chroniclers who weren’t afraid to tell the truth as they experienced it).

Kyger remained the most constant to her original poetic discoveries and approaches, in which the private and the public, the spiritual and the emotional, the literary and the anti-literary, all meet as if meant for each other and destined to be family, like it or not.

I can’t think of another poet outside of Emily Dickinson who is as cryptic and yet totally revealing of her inner life as Kyger.

Nor can I think of any poet except Kyger whose work I could read every night before bed during the tough last weeks of the Democratic primary before it was decided, and then the campaigning and conventions and their aftermath, or whose work could have removed from my mind all the concerns and reactions and thoughts and schemes and unwritten editorials or letters to the editor or emails to the TV talking heads etc. during this exciting but tiring political season.

Her poems centered me in the spiritual, emotional, and experiential place she wrote each one from, almost all seemingly artless in the best ways, like a series of sometimes succinct, sometimes more discursive diary entries, the pages smudged and torn over time so often only fragments of the original message make it through to now.

Or like the fragments of Sappho’s poems as they’ve come down to us, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, or some other message from past times we have to decipher for ours.

Only her past times begin in the 1950s and come down to the present, and communicate more than spiritual concerns and notes on lovers and friendships and the dailiness of this particular poet’s life. Though they do all that, they also articulate a whole person. And what makes us, or at least me, want to keep reading about her, is how in her particulars I find my own resonance with the particulars of my so different life that in the end isn’t as different as I might have thought.

I’ll leave you with one example written in 1996 that isn’t typical, nor atypical, of her work, and which is left margin justified so that it also isn’t too difficult to reproduce:

Poison Oak for Allen

Here I am reading about your trip to India again,
With Gary Snyder and Peter Orlovsky. Period.
Who took cover picture of you three

With smart Himalayan mountain backdrop
The bear?

VANITAS READING

Wednesday evening I went to the Bowery Poetry Club for a reading by some of the contributors to the latest issue of Vanitas magazine.

It was one of those experiences you could only get there, and I was glad I went.

Vanitas is poet Vincent Katz’s baby, he publishes and edits it (with help, like this time from Elaine Equi and Martin Brody). This third issue had for its theme “popular music” which gave rise to some terrific writing as well as to this lively evening of poetry and performance.

Vincent kicked the evening off like a true impresario, he took charge of the microphone and gave a rousing introduction to the m.c. of the event, the artist/writer Jack Pierson, who designed the cover for Vanitas 3 and has more art reproduced inside.

The poets who read are all originals and included the always trenchant Elaine Equi (a fitting adjective for her work, though not always fitting in all of its meanings for her presentation of it, which can sometimes be very subtle) and the always witty, sometimes obviously but often not, Charles North.

I could listen to either of these poets anytime, not just for their writing, but for the ways they speak. They each have a unique approach to language, including when they share it in conversation that always leaves me smiling and grateful to have ears.

Others read as well, Cliff Fyman and Raphael Rubinstein, both astute observers of poetic realities, Fyman’s openness to revealing his inner life braver than most, Rubinstein’s insights into the lives of others more precise and pungent than most.

Then there was Alix Lambert (does she really pronounce her last name likes it’s French, like Colbert in the Colbert Report as Jack Pierson kept pronouncing it—“lom-bare”—?) who read her one poem in the magazine, but since it’s only six lines she preceded it with a short film she made—“Icarus”—in which she portrays a female version of the one who flies too high and falls to the ocean and drowns, entangled in her glamorous costume, which she tries to cut herself free of but not in time to prevent her drowning (much heavier than the poem, which was light and whimsical and delightful, while the movie was dark and intense and deep-thoughts provoking).

Lambert is someone whose work I’ve only discovered since reading with her at THE POEM I TURN TO anthology event on Tuesday. It seems she’s not only an incredibly gutsy documentary film maker (spending months in Russian prisons to make her Spirit-nominated THE MARK OF CAIN about Russian prisoner tattoos, or spending a year getting married and divorced four times, to three different men and a woman—I can’t wait to see both of those), but also a poet, an artist, an actress and screenwriter (she played a whore on DEADWOOD and then ended up writing one of the episodes and from there went on to write for JOHN FROM CINCINNATI), as well as a musician and songwriter (sometimes in quotes) who made a CD—RUNNING AFTER DEER—for which she "conceived" the project and contributed samples, which include dialogue and ambient sounds from the gym she boxes at! (She sounds like the Lee Miller of these times, only more so.)

(There’s so much more in Vanitas 3 that makes it the most varied and stimulating literary magazine available at this exact moment, at least in my life, from contributors who weren’t able to participate, I couldn’t list them all, but another great David Trinidad poem is one of them, as are several great Ray DiPalma poems and a Jim Dine remembrance of music in London in the late 1960s and encounters with George Harrison, “Jagger and Keith” etc., and two great pieces by Alcir Pecora and Helio Bittencourt, translated from the Portugese by Vincent Katz, as well as deft comments and work of his own by Vincent and tons more, buy it and see for yourself.)

But the most surprising part of an evening full of surprises was when Vincent got back on stage and read a poem about a general strike in Madrid (I think it was there) which had a refrain in Spanish (I think it was Spanish—no habla Espanol unfortunately) which basically meant: Support the general strike, as I caught it, and was backed by his two little boys on a loose mic behind him (and they were helped by poet and owner of the Poetry Club Bob Holman) leading the audience in shouting out the refrain after every stanza while a musician (whose name I only heard in passing and can’t remember unfortunately) who had just demonstrated his unique and amazing musical skills on an array of instruments he made himself (!) which went from sounding like bird cries to more traditional sounding, but still exotic enough, stringed instruments and percussive ones as well and blew us all away, and now he was backing up this righteous political poem of Vincent’s that was more like a new Internationale.

And as if that wasn’t enough of a crowd stirrer, when Vincent stepped down and Holman took the mic from him, he asked the Katz boys to stay on stage and back him with improvised sounds and words as he read a poem that began in a jungle in a dream and the musician with his self-created instruments made appropriate and unexpected music in accompaniment.

It was so spontaneous and casual and comfortable and at the same time so poetically magical and creatively unique, it defined for me the reason to attend events like this, beyond the poetry and old friends and the deeply bohemian atmosphere that not only supports but encourages everyone’s talents hidden or obvious.

And then it got even better as the audience called for an encore and Holman did a more rap like poem with short staccato rhymes that he began to improvise along with the musician and the boys, (one of whom yelled just “YEAH!” into the mic at one steller point making us all react with even more delight) and it was like all the times in the living rooms of what we once called pads and cribs and digs and whatever else back when any social gathering in anyone’s domicile meant making music and poetry and art out of whatever was at hand with everyone participating.

It was like capturing one of those divine occurrences and reproducing it right before our eyes and ears here at the Bowery Poetry Club—one of the last bastions of what the Bowery once was now that CBGB is gone and where it was is surrounded by new high-rise condos and upscale restaurants and clubs—and then they did it again, one more encore, and topped even their previous efforts.

I’ve never seen or heard Holman so lost-in-the-moment-jam-session good, and the added element of Vincent’s boys and the music creator on his homemade instruments, man, it could’ve been a mess or an indulgence but instead was an epiphany elevating the entire room to the level of creative transcendence and a reminder of WHY WE DO IT!

Hope there’s something happening in your neck of the woods you can fall by and release the creative juices at, or just enjoy someone else’s, ‘cause it sure helps you (or at least me) get through these sometimes trying and too often lying times, as it always has.

9/11 MEMORIAL

I lost a friend I admired and care a lot for in one of the planes.

I lost someone I knew and admired but had only a nodding acquaintance with in one of the towers.

Seven years later and there's still a hole in many hearts, including mine, where they once were,
as there still is in the ground where the towers once were (and where nearby I lived in a loft
with my two oldest kids years before when the towers were their playground).

Bin Laden is still free and still plotting. The towers have still not been replaced.

Life goes on, until it doesn't.

LIPSTICK AND PIGS AND POLITICAL STRATEGY

“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

That old saying has been used quite adeptly by the rightwing Republicans to start a faux controversy, not because they thought it would stick to Obama, but because they knew the media would fall for it and the public would either get tired of it or be disgusted by it.

They knew that some of the public would buy it as what the Rove surrogates put out that it was, Obama dissing a woman and that some of the dittohead rightwing camp followers would look no further than their leaders’ claims and buy it.

They knew others would pay attention and become aware that it’s an old saying used not only by John McCain in campaign appearances when referring to Hilary’s and Obama’s healthcare plans, but also by a former Bush speechwriter, as well as General Patreus’s right hand man (in describing Iraq policy) and many others on the Republican side. But they also know those kind of people are more informed anyway and likely to vote for Obama as a result.

But others, they figure, who may become aware that it wasn’t intended as “sexist” or aimed at anything other than the Republican so-called “economic plan”—which consists mainly of continuing the tax cuts for the rich and letting corporations have even more freedom to reap even greater profits while the rest of us see our incomes diminish—might be so fed up with the endless campaign and the way it has become more about lies and mudslinging and unfounded slanders etc. (and more divisive tactics about Hilary, which have mainly been generated by Rove and his surrogates, see how those who once referred to her even on my blog as "Hitlery" now try and make a case for why she would have been a better candidate for either the top or second position, even though they know that if that had been the case their charges of "extreme leftwing liberal" etc. would have stuck much more than it has to Obama and Biden) they will become disgusted with the whole political process and stop caring.

And they figured right. I’ve run into or heard from a lot of these kind of folks—“independents” or Democrats or more moderate Republicans—who are just tired of and disgusted with the presidential race and plan on writing some friend in or just not voting.

And that “my friends”—as McCain likes to say as if—is the point. The Rove strategy was always based on the reality that the Republican base, especially the rightwing base, is not only not large enough to carry an election but doesn’t even believe the same things most “Americans” do. So the strategy has always been to make the whole process seem not worth the bother, because their base will hold their noses and vote anyway, but a lot of independents and dissatisfied Democrats and more moderate Republicans might just give up and not vote.

If only a fair portion of the young people Obama’s campaign has inspired and turned on to election politics get cynical about the way it’s playing out and don’t vote, Obama loses. If only a fair portion of “liberals” do the same, the same result. So, expect more and more outrageous slanders and misinformation and distortions (like the ad posting Obama as some kind of sexual predator for wanting young children to be given an education in how to protect themselves from predators!) that will turn people off from paying attention to what’s really going on and what the real differences are on the issues and why their vote really does count.

SOME QUESTIONS I DOUBT GIBSON WILL ASK

Here's a few questions for Palin from a list Maureen Dowd had in today's NY Times:

"What kind of budget-cutter makes a show of getting rid of the state plane, then turns around and bills taxpayers for the travel of her husband and kids between Juneau and Wasilla and sticks the state with a per-diem tab to stay in her own home?

Why was Sarah for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against the Bridge to Nowhere, and why was she for earmarks before she was against them? And doesn’t all this make her just as big a flip-flopper as John Kerry?

What kind of fiscal conservative raises taxes and increases budgets in both her jobs — as mayor and as governor?

Does she really think Adam, Eve, Satan and the dinosaurs mingled on the earth 5,000 years ago?

Why put out a press release about her teenage daughter’s pregnancy and then spend the next few days attacking the press for covering that press release?

As Troopergate unfolds here — an inquiry into whether Palin inappropriately fired the commissioner of public safety for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law — it raises this question: Who else is on her enemies list and what might she do with the F.B.I.?

Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants and a ban on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian?

Just how is it that Fannie and Freddie have cost taxpayers money (since they haven’t yet)?

What does she have against polar bears?"

I could add my own, like how can she and McCain lie about Obama's tax plan raising taxes for working families when it lowers them, that Obama has been responsible for no legislation when he has sponsored and co-sponsored tons of it and been responsible for ethics reform in politics, tax cuts for working families and extending health care to more children etc., and that he is too partisan and "liberal" to work with Republicans when all the legislation he sponsored was with Republicans and he has a record of being more moderate on many issues than his party, as opposed to Palin who has a record of being more rightwing than her party, as in suing the current administration to get polar bears off the endangered species list just when their habitat is melting away as a result of the gloabl warming she doesn't believe in.

Another would be how do she and McCain get off repeating the story that she sold the former governor of Alaska's luxury jet on E-Bay and made a profit, when it didn't sell on E-Bay but through a broker and lost money rather than made a profit.

I doubt Charlie Gibson will ask them because his network, ABC, has made clear its bias in favor of Republicans and McCain in its coverage of the campaign so far, e.g. in the debates they've hosted or covered, drilling Obama on why he didn't wear a flag lapel pin (though sometimes he did and sometimes he didn't) but not asking Hilary or McCain why they also weren't wearing flag lapel pins in several televised debates and speeches etc.

[PS:And to the rightwing commentors on this blog, but most specifically the one who goes by the name "another lally"—I don't let people come into my home and insult me or my family or my friends. I ask them to stop and if they don't I throw them out. Anyone who continues to call the oldest party in the world "The Democrat Party" when it calls itself the Democratic Party, and has been called that by everyone else throughout its history pre-Rush/Rove, is a partisan ideologue who is not interested in a dialogue or even argument but only in bullying folks through insults, lies, and verbal belligerance. Despite the use of my last name, you ain't family, so enough's enough (and by the way, pretty much every statement you've made against Obama and for McCain/Palin can be refuted with facts, either you misrepresent what critics of Palin and McCain have stated or you just have your information wrong (as Rush and Rove often do and knowingly). This is my blog and I don't intend to spend my time and energy responding to your lies and misrepresentations and insults to me and my friends as if it's yours.]

“THE POEM I TURN TO” READING

It was supposed to be in Bryant Park, but got rained out and moved to an old library room in The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen building on 44th St.

An interesting group of folks showed up, both to read and to listen. The anthology (which I’ve written about already on this blog) is a selection of poems chosen (one or two each) by a diverse group of people in mostly the movie business (the subtitle of the collection is “ACTORS & DIRECTORS PRESENT POETRY THAT INSPIRES THEM”).

The reading was organized by Michael O’Keefe, a longtime good friend, who did a great job as Sidney Pollack’s henchman in MICHAEL CLAYTON but is best remembered by older viewers as the teenage boy in THE GREAT SANTINI who Robert Duvall (playing his father) bounces a basketball off of to provoke him (and for which I believe Michael was nominated for an Oscar) and the caddy in CADDYSHACK.

But he’s also a terrific poet and writer (and I remember some great songs he wrote and sang back in the day as well) and has directed and produced. His selections were as personal and kind of quirky as everyone’s in the book (which is what makes it a pretty fascinating collection, I’d like to see more anthologies like this, say poems musicians turn to, or painters, or plumbers or electricians or etc.).

They were a short poem of Pound’s, “In a Station of the Metro” (misprinted as “at” instead of “of” in the anthology), and one of Dennis Johnson’s, “Passengers,” who most folks know as an incredible novelist, but who I first knew as a poet back at the U. of Iowa.

Carol Muske-Dukes, the well known poet and poetry teacher read a poem to her late husband, the “actor’s actor” (as O’Keefe put it) David Dukes, (this poem is also in the anthology) and dedicated it to the editor of the anthology, the poet and teacher Jason Shinder, who passed away just as the anthology came out. (O’Keefe was an advisory editor with Lili Taylor.)

In fact the entire reading was a tribute and kind of memorial to Jason who was a fine poet, but also a beautiful spirit, and who is much missed by his many friends.

The other readers were Matthew Maher, who you’d recognize from one of my favorite recent movies GONE BABY GONE and elsewhere; Alix Lambert, a documentary film maker who is one of those creative people who seems to do everything and do it all not only really well, but uniquely (one of her best known documentaries THE MARK OF CAIN was nominated for a Spirit Award); and Melissa Leo, who’d you’d recognize from TV (e.g. HOMICIDE) and who I’m told gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the recent film FROZEN RIVER, which I haven’t caught yet but intend to.

Their selections were unexpected and choice, as we used to say. Maher read Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and an “Eskimo” (I think that’s now Inuit) poem by Nakasak (translated by Edward Field) called “The Invisible Men” that’s about as unique a poem as you will ever read, or hear.

Lambert read a poignant but realistic poem by her uncle Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me.” Leo read her two choices, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 64” and Sylvia Plath’s “Point Shirley”—both about love and death but in entirely different, of course, ways, and she threw in a little poem by A. A. Milne as an extra.

I read the two poems I selected for the anthology, William Carlos Williams’ “Danse Ruse” and Terence Winch’s “Faith” (from his most recent collection BOY DRINKERS).

The conversations afterward were, like the reading, lively and funny and creative and smart and deeply interesting, It was one of those perfectly satisfying gatherings from start to finish, at least for this participant, and I wish you could have joined us. Maybe next time.

TODAY'S QUOTE

A little long but worth it:

"...the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.

“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.

Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.

The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.

“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”

Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.

When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”

Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”

Scary.

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).

Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.

It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned."

—Bob Herbert in today's (9/9/08) NY Times Op-Ed section