Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  They are a dimensional bridge to beauty, interacting between light and other worlds, i.e., intimacy can be the bridge.

  II.

  I begin by imagining I hear Jack’s thought.

  There’s a sense of pervasiveness; particles go back and forth in me.

  I write down today’s encounters, including the mosquito, as a dream to interpret.

  Certainly, one’s tie to an insect is imaginative truth.

  Not that my horse represents the union of intuition and imagining, she is that.

  Turning her head to smell the wind, she shifts into its seamless dimension—mane, tail.

  “Is that like saying the pond is my brain?” I ask, and frogs answer, “More like the shape of holding your thoughts!”

  A horse doesn’t change frequency to change form.

  Form is part of my thinking this, like a willow seed’s intent, intrinsic focus on willow trees.

  III.

  Jack tells me his dream of smelling violets.

  I’m surprised at a cartoon of my dog in a lavender field.

  He says the cartoon translates his dream into my imagining, “To you far away looks like space, light-years.”

  First, he says he’s from another planet.

  Then, he says it’s a joke, if planets are wavelengths, like brain waves.

  You could slow a pattern, and it coalesces into our planetary system; or a lavender cave solidifies with dream yoga.

  There’s transparency, lavender seen through a window, horse pausing, but the point of view is of glass, dream.

  Karma is reformation, a distant remembering like feeling; something dim grows brighter.

  Discontinuity becomes continuity, the memory sort of glittering as it flows, and sleep flows.

  IV.

  We had a life in town where beauty was discussed as a fountain and pool, flowing from within, reflecting inner and outer form.

  In other places it’s incarnate, as here, a stream orchid under trees.

  The effect is of deep, calming presence, of viewing a still pond beside your animal companion, of willingness to share the peace of home, stored in flesh.

  Shade glows with no edge between space, grass.

  As shade trees grow and the orchid grows, space around reflects inspirative beauty.

  Like time passing of a fountain flowing, passage in space is our perspective opening to this beauty.

  V.

  Here, Jack’s an ordinary terrier with hair over his eyes; “First, I lull you into complacent stillness.

  I lie down beside you, you think I’m asleep.

  Then, with my touch or glance, you can hear thought.

  I evoke potential, the way honey evokes its energy grid in bees, a morphic field evolving with willows.”

  The rich dignity of honey expects magnetism.

  Here’s Buddy, a horse laughing, and owner Carol, Dawn and Barney, Inka and her llama, Tera.

  Here’s Raphaela Pope and her gray parrot, Dax, who told me Elmo from Sesame Street loves him.

  Jack dreams he’s a polar bear standing upright.

  He shows me a chakra on the bottom of each foot, connecting to a grid in earth that maintains gravity, so we can be held here in our bodies.

  “I anchor one grid line for Dax.”

  Three Poems

  Reginald Shepherd

  I’VE KNOWN THE GARDEN

  The earth is an inventory of bones, the fossils sing,

  thick with mud-headed myth, an unclassified

  species of shadow: the crumbling architecture

  of half-surveyed pasts beckons like a heat mirage

  across the glacier-scarred desert, full of glare

  and false outlines, canyon-blind, all

  weatherless. Pieces of summer

  come apart in my hands and I call it

  prehistory, sea-shaped rocks

  swim in my palm. I call it stratigraphy,

  a place of blank road signs

  pointing in all directions. I talked them out

  of memory, let their stone flags sleep

  amid the sediments. There’s a muse for geography

  and winter, a muse of fever

  and distance, but there’s no afterlife

  for them. The carboniferous forests

  left their coal behind, tree ferns

  and lycophytes pressed fine-veined leaves

  between black and combustible pages,

  our open-pit understanding of the earth

  almost legible in hindsight’s seamed light.

  E LUCEVAN LE STELLE

  I.

  Then nights poured out their gathered

  darkness, having no there, assorted stars

  spilled out in several colors

  all resolved to white, resolved to be

  more virtuous in the speckled,

  spattered future rolling out, unfurling

  like a midnight sea reflecting on the

  little lights scattering sentimental rain

  across its monotonously variable

  surfaces, broken-off

  pieces of weather

  not well enough to be left alone,

  adrift with others more thoroughly lost

  and not to be navigated by.

  II.

  The stars shone as they had to, burning up

  the visual spectrum, burning the invisible

  too, taking lucidity to task, it being their task

  to consume themselves seen and unseen, faltering

  in the atmospheric interference, shifting

  toward red or blue depending

  on their direction, all stars

  scattering from a core of light till they collapse

  again, coalescing into a predicted darkness

  from which emerges

  again as if for the first time another

  configuration, time being circular

  like them, burning in the meanwhile, burning

  both ends of it, sleepless as anyone.

  III.

  There was no light, but there were lights

  dusting the dark drowned

  in itself again, stealing the sky

  from blue to black and white

  pinpricks annealed into an adamant

  -ly wavering being seen, blind animals with Latin names

  making days of burning hydrogen all night

  long, on some other side

  of the world, an argument the sea has almost won,

  its tidal ruins ticking off the hours

  with the moments floating in them,

  reflected faith shaken out across salt waves

  stained by so many stars

  more lost than left behind.

  WHAT NATURE DOESN’T SHOW

  It’s always raining in my dreams,

  I’m always lacking something

  that I need, an umbrella, shoes, my peace

  of mind, or just the right direction

  home, another piece of my mind

  I’ll never find, far from what I’d want

  to be. I carry these things

  far into the night, or one just like

  it, whitening into dawn

  while rain wipes away the wax-paper

  moon, the damp overgrown yard

  moves into meadowhood, another

  lush polluted pastoral. The wind

  is simplified in such weather, wet windows

  hold memory at a distance, drowning

  liquid stars: a loss too far away

  to reach the human world, barely touched

  by the finger of fact. The body

  is a body of water too, rain makes of me

  a lake or pool or puddle, any fluid gathering

  expanding and contracting

  to the rhythm of imaginary tides’

  forgotten or misplaced intentions.

  I wonder, who invented water?

  The Problem of Impairment

  Rick Moody

  THE MANIFES
T LAYER OF this essay concerns the Pogues show I saw in March of 2007 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Or, to be more precise, the manifest layer of this essay concerns the Pogues show I intended to see on March 15 of 2007. My cohorts in this excursis, doomed from the start, were my bandmates (in the Wingdale Community Singers) Hannah Marcus and Nina Katchadourian, as well as novelist Fiona Maazel. Hannah and I met in midtown west, excited at the prospect of the event, however doomed. We made our way toward the venue. Fiona and Nina were there already (having come from the southerly direction). Their telephone call from the vicinity of Roseland, however, contained the inevitable bad news. The Pogues show was rescheduled, owing to an injury suffered by lead singer Shane MacGowan. The gig was too good to be true, it seemed—the Pogues, St. Patrick’s Day—and now things had unraveled, as things do. We arrived at Roseland, aggrieved, and there the reports became more complete. Shane MacGowan had slipped and sprained his ankle, it was said. Tickets would be honored the following night, it was said. And yet even the official security guys out front of Roseland were in on the ironies of the moment: “Shane MacGowan has injured himself! Read between the lines!”

  Which is to say: Shane was too ill to perform. Shane was, most likely, too drunk, too incoherent, too semiconscious. He may well have injured himself (he had, in fact, as you shall see), but the injury probably had much to do with the advanced stage of alcoholism with which the singer was afflicted. We all scattered in the direction of home, wondering if there would be a show the next night or not.

  Now to the backstory. The Pogues were the most important and most original band of the godforsaken 1980s, on either side of the Atlantic. However, I resisted them at first. At least, I resisted their first great album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash. I was drinking then myself, and I liked anything that had a self-destructive aspect (the Replacements, for example, or the New York Dolls). But I also believed I had an intellectual obligation to support music that was loud, dark, and challenging: Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Pere Ubu, the Minutemen, Black Flag, and so forth. But upon my release from the psychiatric hospital in July 1986, on the occasion of my first sober days, I had a sort of epiphany. It occurred to me that maybe it was OK to like whatever I liked, regardless of whether it cohered with the requirements of artistic credibility or doctrines of cool. It was about this time that a friend gave me a copy of If I Should Fall from Grace with God, the Pogues album that succeeded Rum Sodomy & the Lash.

  What I had found folksy before, I found, nearly all at once, complex, mature, proud, sad, and very, very catchy. Indisputably, this album was one of the indelible masterpieces of postpunk rock and roll! There wasn’t a bad song on it! Naturally, I soon saw the video for “Fairytale of New York,” the album’s best-known composition, and I marveled at the dark, forbidding dissipation of the lead singer. Even at this early stage, he didn’t look terribly upstanding. The song was (manifestly) concerned with drunkenness, and so a simulation of intoxication was to be expected. But this was more than that. This was both the filmic simulation and the thing itself. Distracting from the darker themes, however, was the fact that the composition was masterful. The melody, the piano line, the dueling put-downs of MacGowan and guest chanteuse Kirsty MacColl, the sublime string arrangements, the Christmas imagery in the lyric, the drumming (you just can’t talk about the originality of the Pogues without talking about Andrew Ranken’s drumming). I can think of only a few songs in my life, and I really mean this, that I have loved as passionately right from the first notes and from which I have never once turned away. I still can’t hear “Fairytale of New York” without crying. In fact, I watched the video today—in order to write these lines—and I cried again.

  I could have been someone … Well, so could anyone …

  And the rest of the album is just as extraordinary. It holds up today. Twenty years later. It triumphs. It sounds as wild, passionate, out of control, and heartbreaking as it did back then. Whereas so much other work from the period has dated—the Cocteau Twins, New Order, the Cure—the Pogues sound just as relevant. They’re timeless and indomitable. From the first song on If I Should Fall from Grace with God, the Irish-music-at-punk-rock-tempos of the title track, to the last song, the genuinely stirring “Broad Majestic Shannon” (Take my hand and dry your tears, babe, take my hand, forget your fears, babe), the album veers from punky, drunken screeds like “Bottle of Smoke” to world-inflected workouts like “Turkish Song of the Damned” and “Fiesta,” where the folk instrumentation of the Pogues—acoustic guitar, tin whistle, banjo, accordion—suddenly enables them to sound like a klezmer band or a qwaali outfit or jazz combo. They’re jaundiced and romantic, incisive and undependable, wise beyond their years, startlingly adolescent. They’d been a punk band with Irish music leanings before If I Should Fall from Grace, one that didn’t have a reputation for instrumental prowess, but suddenly they could play anything, at any tempo, and make it energetic and moving without sounding shallow or sentimental—the way Madness always did, among their contemporaries.

  Above the racket, Shane MacGowan bellowed, exhorted, ranted—who could tell if he was tenor or baritone—spitting out syllables that couldn’t possibly be spit out that quickly, rushing the beat, his tuneless but expressive voice perfectly suited to the tempos and careening disorderliness of the compositions. The others in the band could sing, true, and did when Shane was forced out in the nineties, but MacGowan had some kind of fervent vision, some mad need to discourse, and so the Pogues just couldn’t be the same, and weren’t, without him. Even when his lyrics were tossed off, as they often seemed to be, scatalogical, irritable, provocative, there was something in them that was continuous with the heartache and sublimity of the Irish folk tradition. The Pogues made Irish music contemporary again, but without diluting its convoluted pathos, rescuing it from the banality of musical tourism, while striking a blow against what was, at the moment of their ascendancy, a virulent and popular strain of British anti-Irish racism.

  I couldn’t stop playing If I Should Fall from Grace for a long while. Long enough that I was just feeling I was thoroughly schooled in it when Peace and Love came out. The successor album. Peace and Love had, it seemed, many of the same concerns as If I Should Fall from Grace, and it was just as lovingly arranged and produced, just as worldly. But there was also something less focused about this album, as if the cracks in the edifice were beginning to show. Shane was still in charge, still writing about dog racing or Christy Brown (paralyzed Irish scribe), but the songs were slighter, as if they were being so carefully arranged to conceal a less generous supply of genius. The other Pogues were filling in between MacGowan compositions or cowriting more copiously with less felicitous results (“My Blue Heaven,” e.g., a mere Brit pop song, and not a very good one). That said, Peace and Love remains a strong album, for “Misty Morning, Albert Bridge” “London You’re a Lady,” “Cotton Fields” and the tragicomic “Boat Train,” the last of these recounting a ferry ride across the Irish Sea, an Irish protagonist bound for London, the cultural uncertainty thereof, and so forth. There was so much music coming out of the Pogues, even at three-quarters strength, that there was something arresting on any album they released.

  An EP followed Peace and Love, and it prominently featured a pop song called “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” (two more yeahs than the Beatles), and it was also great. It included one of the few good Stones covers ever: Spider Stacy, the tin whistle player, singing “Honky Tonk Women.” This abbreviated release amounted to an unalloyed gem of instant pop, but it was followed in turn by the last Pogues album, Hell’s Ditch, produced by the eminent Joe Strummer. Abruptly, to even the casual listener, it was clear what was happening. Shane’s voice was beginning to fail, and the material had become fragmentary, dissolute, recorded in a way as if to try to make the record cohere even though it couldn’t or wouldn’t. Hell’s Ditch was unable to conceal the fact that the singer had trouble enunciating, whether by reason of inebriation or missing teeth, and his intonation was little better.
If they’d had an auto-tune plug-in back then they could have cleaned him up, but not in 1988. Shane remained Shane, unexpurgated, while the music around him filled in, with a general anxiety. The production feels forced, full of instrumental geegaws resembling the less effective and cannabis-enhanced portions of the Clash’s Sandinista! album. Strummer must have tried to mobilize the troops, only to find that there was no general competent enough to halt this retreat.

  Here the story ended for a long while. There are many versions of the did-he-quit-or-was-he-fired variety. You can imagine how hard it must have been. By all accounts the band toured relentlessly, and Shane MacGowan was probably trying to balance, on the road, the amount he needed to drink in order to avoid withdrawal with the amount that would render him unable to perform. This is how alcoholism goes. Other members of the band straightened up in the meantime, as if trying to shake off their legacy. Perhaps the most drunken rock-and-roll group in Europe was, it turned out, less chaotic than its reputation. The choice for the remaining members of the Pogues seemed to be: watch the singer kill himself, since he was unwilling to act on his own behalf, or break up a collaboration that had become phenomenally successful. They tried for a while to find a third way.

  Therefore, Shane (who claims to have been fired) went off and formed his band the Popes, a roadhouse outfit with Irish inflections that never amounted to anything much. The rest of the Pogues carried on for two albums, the second of which, Pogue Mahone, sounds like the Faces, in a good way, full of bluster and barrelhouse, but which, for all its competence, could never be the Pogues, not as we once knew them, a band with historical vision, imagination, cultural longing, and very human passions.

  I lived on the Pogues for the first four or five years of my own sobriety, despite their besottedness, their dwindling into ignominy. There was no one else I liked as well, although I also investigated Van Morrison, and, to some degree, Warren Zevon and Tom Waits. I failed to accept that Shane wouldn’t do what he needed to do to continue making the astringent and luminous music he’d made earlier in his life. Perhaps because I’d done what I imagined he needed to do—got sober—and it didn’t seem so impossible or even disagreeable. True, I had a few ideas about alcoholism and recognized that the sufferer didn’t always have a choice. Relapse, as has often been said, is the order of the day. But I’d managed to claw my way to sobriety, and I thought Shane ought to have been up to it, and I was disappointed when he wasn’t.