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American Poetry Page 32

by Bradford Morrow


  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.

 

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