free stallion
SIMON & SCHUSTER
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Amber Tamblyn
Foreword copyright © 2005 by Jack Hirschman
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Einav Aviram
The text for this book is set in Rotis.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tamblyn, Amber.
Free stallion : poems / Amber Tamblyn.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-0259-1 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-0259-7
eISBN-10: 978-1-4424-0728-2
1. Young adult poetry, American. 1. Title.
PS3620.A66F74 2005
811′.6—dc22
2004029152
Dedicated to Jack Hirschman, deep in the “you know what”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My grandmother Sally, for her immortal beauty. My grandfather Alex, for his hardy Scottish heart and violin. My two other grandparents, Marian and Eddie, who I never knew physically, but still see almost every day. Tin Tin, Rudy, and all my Clann, Murrays and Tamblyns alike. My moo, Bonnie, who sits in Council daily with the young, and whose guitar and voice set the rhythm in my blood (the O.G.A.D.). My father, Russ, simply, for teaching love and perspective. Glenda; Uncle Larry; my sister, China—we are welded for life; Elton; Dylan Pickle; and Vivian Raquel, the queen of tigers.
Billy Williams, Raymond Travis, and San Francisco—keep my heart, you’ve earned it. My girls: Michaela, Brianne, Mandy, and Juliet. The Girardi family and JOA crew. Leslie Charleson, Stuart Damon, and the Qs. Beyond Baroque for their love and support. The Bernthals, Laurel Schmidt, Madeline Leavitt, Kenzo, Jamy, the Nolan/O’Brien Clann, The Courtyard, Tommy, Sheila, and Chi. Martha Meredith Masters—just for being born with that name (when will you give up your day job for that night one?); David Lust; and The Femme-Bots: Leanne, Joan of Hyler, and Courtney.
George Herms for rust-love, and Pixie, you are one “smart apos!”; Neil; Amber Jean; Pegi; and my Greendale family (Art Green walks among you); Michael McClure; Wanda Coleman; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Diane Di Prima; Bruce Conner; Dean Stockwell; David Lynch; Dennis Hopper; and the king of ALL wolves, Wallace Herman. Alexandra Cooper, David Gale, and my family at Simon & Schuster for all the support. Brian Lipson and everyone at Endeavor. Bernie Pock, Ani DiFranco (Pick me!), Broccolesus crew, Krishnamurti, Woody Guthrie, Thelonious Monk, Barbara Hall, and the anamchara Paul Francis. To strawberries and all nouns starting with the letter S, everywhere.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Kill Me So Much
Disguise
Ol’ Green Eyes
The Coliseum
Banana
Dig
1 & 2
Numbers
Sink Her
Paper Tiger
What’s the Word
Nocturne for Chopin
Sneaker
The State
A Valid Question Ensues Unstitched
Free Stallion
Plume
Pax Vobiscum
Anna
Beyond the Pale
Dear S.
Vibration
Moths
When
Pipe Dreams
Neu Tour 2003—Greendale Ends
Dear Divinity
Train
Truth About Dark
Celebrate
The Loneliest
About the Author
FOREWORD
I am happy to introduce the poetry of Amber Tamblyn to a wide audience. I hope readers will recognize that this is the work of no mere twenty-one-year-old, but of an exceptional young woman whose development as a poet must be both nurtured and anticipated.
In these works, one finds a voice grounded in life, everywhere struggling for liberty against the colonization of the mind and body, to a degree that is, at least, unusual and, at most, remarkable.
Remarkable in the sense that Tamblyn has already attained a distance from herself as an actress (and an accomplished one, at that), and is able to use her work in television and movies—with all the attendant “image” extensions—as content in a rebellious attack on all forms of commercialization that obstruct or violate the clear liberty that is for her the expression of her humanity in poetry.
So, these works are not from a hobby of crumbs left over from a loaf of fame and offered as a supplement to the big issue of Amber Tamblyn, superstar.
These poems are the real thing: the journey, the exploration, and the structuring of a woman in her growing pains and determination. Amber is among those who know that poetry is the most powerful human expression on Earth, and is dedicated to it like the sea is dedicated to the moon.
She has had around her from childhood an environment that has been open to, if not opened by, the arts. Her father, the noted actor and dancer Russ Tamblyn, is himself an excellent artist of collage. Her mother, Bonnie, is a woman of great range and depth as a singer of folk and popular songs, as well as a teacher in a local progressive school. The Tamblyn home has always been open to artists and poets of every stripe. Old friends like the artist-poet George Herms and the actor-artist Dean Stockwell, as well as renowned poet Michael McClure and myself, have been part of Amber’s life since her birth. In addition, all of us are fraternally devoted to the memory of Wallace Berman, a verbo-visual artist who was killed in an automobile accident some years before Amber was bom, but whose name has always floated about the Tamblyn home and into her ears because, if anything, Wally was a maker of poets. Amber has been writing since she was a child, and when she was sixteen, I had a poem of hers, “Kill Me So Much”—written when she was twelve-published in San Francisco’s Café magazine. Even then she was showing signs of being a genuine creator. Later, she self-published a couple of chapbooks, circulating them among friends and schoolmates.
At the outset of 2004, she asked me to read with her at the Beyond Baroque cultural center in Venice, California. There, she astounded the crowd by reading her “Pax Vobiscum” poem, a tremendous homage to Woody Guthrie. Her feeling for Guthrie and for the proletarian story of America was exemplary, even astonishing for one so young. A couple of months afterward, that poem appeared in the “Beat Bush” issue of Long Shot magazine on the East Coast, edited by New York poet Eliot Katz. On the West Coast, her poem “Free Stallion” appeared in Csaba Polony’s Left Curve magazine.
Those poems are part of this collection.
Other poems will reveal her liberating poetic spirit as well. Tamblyn writes from a core of forthrightness that is maturing with every poem. She’s not afraid to take risks with the language, and in some of the poems—I’m thinking especially of the two parts of “Numbers” (perhaps because the theme is so close to her heart, i.e., the violation of the soul as well as the body of woman)—she really swings out the hammer of poetry in an exclamatory rally cry for justice.
There have been poets of high quality in the past who have had relationships with image-making machines like movies: Antonin Artaud acted in many films and wrote while he was doing so. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a great film creator and never stopped writing poetry. And I have had the honor also of translating Kater
ina Gogou, a marvelous poet who had appeared in Greek cinema and who wrote some of the most contemporary and provocative poetry in the Greek language.
Indeed, all three noted above were great poets because they were great provocateurs.
Amber Tamblyn’s work is just now coming to light on the poetic horizon. However seminal, it already manifests elements of provocation that, for me, are the marks of a resonant importance in full development. These first steps are giant ones in that process.
—Jack Hirschman
INTRODUCTION
Introducing one’s self is a difficult task. Talking about yourself in the narrative does not give a clear view of who you are; that is why I asked my dear friend Jack to write a more biographic opening. But what I found from the experience of putting this book together was an overwhelming sense of self-understanding, a sort of third-person love for whoever has been growing inside of me for years. I am blessed to be surrounded with the kind of love that does not cater to the spectacle of a career based on an image, as the entertainment business makes me feel at times. It’s the kind of love that pursues and pushes the constant fine-tuning of an artist who funnels the truth through one woman’s eyes. And my eyes have seen the best and worst of both worlds. This is what I hope to share with you through this collection of poems, Free Stallion.
I began writing poetry at a very early age, maybe about eight or nine years old. I wrote essays and short stories with my father, who heartily encouraged my budding imagination. Growing up, my parents surrounded me with the many creative influences they were fortunate to have, from artists like George Herms, Wallace Berman, Dean Stockwell, Bruce Conner, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, Neil Young, and many more. I watched and learned and, like a sponge, I absorbed everything around me. My father taught me that “the meaning of life is the search for the meaning of life,” an expression that I live by when trying to write down something I cannot explain. The search is always the most important thing. He and my mother opened me up to philosophers, writers, and poets such as J. Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra, Diane Di Prima, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Wanda Coleman, and Nietzsche.
Within the world of poetry, there was one person who stood as a rebel warrior for the sonnet of my conscience. Jack Hirschman, a man I emulated style-wise as a little girl, was the father figure and master in encouraging and training my existential concepts and views on womanhood, Hollywood, the death of a high school love, politics, and just about everything that has come my way to date. Jack was initially a professor of English at UCLA and has spent the rest of his life translating the telling work of poets all over the world. He translates in nine languages. Jack is a proletarian and an activist for the working class, and has a raw intuition on matters of the heart. He’s a bear of a man, gentle, vibrant, and full of youthful energy, and he has a passionate love of life. Those who are fortunate enough to come into contact with him or hear him read poetry can be changed for life. Though he translates others, his best translation to date is one of human emotion into words of any kind—that is a spectacular gift.
My style has gone through many stages, and I am sure it will continue to do so. A few of the pieces are dream sequences. For example, the poem “Train” was inspired by a repeating dream about an experience with a man I hated to love. I had been in a relationship with someone who had not been fair to me. I hated loving him because, in love, you have no control. Inside the dream his physical form changed from a man to a horse, and I stood by and watched him get hit by a train, while at the same time I told him to cross the tracks. This dream was a very violent and vivid experience, and would cause me to wake up in a sweat. I still believe to this day that this was both a fantasy and a nightmare, which is why, when the dream repeated, the pleasure of beckoning him never went away.
Because this book is a teenage timeline of sorts, you will find some work I wrote when I was as young as twelve years old. The poem I decided to put first in this book, “Kill Me So Much,” was written at that very tender age. It was an homage to Jack and his political voice. I wanted a voice like his, and I still get a kick out of reading that poem. I believe I wrote it after witnessing racism for the first time during the Rodney King riots that took place in Los Angeles in 1992. Also, the poem “Banana” is an example of my writing style’s first blossoming. This poem was written when I was fourteen years old, and it has a lot of personal significance as far as where I was physically and emotionally during the time when I wrote it. It is a good piece that shows the beginning of what I feel would be my growth spurt as a writer.
“Pax Vobiscum,” which means “peace be with you,” is a poem I wrote for Woody Guthrie, a man who stood for the use of music and politics to fight governmental injustice and fascism in early-twentieth-century America; a man who used music for its true worth. I was possessed to write this poem after years of listening to stale, washed-out, pop culture music that I was subjected to throughout my teens. Tired of my generation’s affected lack of constructive intent, I wanted to reach back to a time when there were people who found things in life that were worth fighting for. Except for a few artists who are relatively unknown, I have yet to find anyone in the mainstream whose music reflects his or her daily way of living. I have yet to see a music television artist that does not cannibalize a real activist’s image in order to generate character interest before their album is released. It seems like everything is a marketing scam these days. As Johnny Rotten once said, “The best you can be in a positively backwards world is absolutely negative.” Well, for some, “punk is dead,” but the expression lives on and so does the hope for a modern-day Guthrie.
The haikus at the end are a shortened version of a book I did last year with artist George Herms, entitled The Loneliest, a series of poems and artwork dedicated to jazz legend Thelonious Monk. I was on the boardwalk at Venice Beach a while back and I saw a street artist painting a beautiful picture of a black man at a piano. When I asked how much he was selling it for, he snickered and asked if I even knew who the painted figure was. He would not sell this painting to a white girl from Santa Monica. I became obsessed with Monk, listening to Straight, No Chaser, watching the documentary of the same name, and learning everything I could about this musician out of sheer cultural embarrassment. I then had an internal Monk-related vision that lasted for more than two months, and I wrote a short poem or haiku about Thelonious almost every day. Later I spoke with George Herms about my obsession, only to find that he, too, was an avid Monk fan. Right then and there we spoke of the beginnings of what would end up being a poetry book/art collaboration. I still need to go see that man on the beach and trade him this product of my inspiration for that painting. He owes me. I suppose we owe each other.
These poems are moments. They make up a grander story than what I can explain here, in a good ol’ intro section. So onward. Get cozy, and then let’s get nosy. Enjoy. —Amber Tamblyn
free stallion
KILL ME SO MUCH
The war has started,
the blood flags are raised high for us to see.
Die! Die! we all cry
with our stubborn cannons blowing off,
and our noses like dead poodles,
arriving on a nightmare,
praying for a dream.
Laughing at all those guts and bones on dream paper,
money that the Government is grieving over.
WE STILL WANT MORE RESPECT!
For the black, the rabbi, and the painters and the preachers.
WE STILL WANT MORE RESPECT!
All those computers
and typewriters
and digital phones,
all paid by rich men with their cannons blowing off,
and rich women with their noses like dead poodles.
WE STILL WANT MORE RESPECT!
And not just some buzzing bulb and a fly to keep it company.
DISGUISE
I’m in bed with the lights on,
the guise in plaid knee-highs
&nb
sp; undercover in your underwear.
I’m writing the whole half of a lie
in story reform.
It’s a freedom country if you dare
to know a girl in her heartland.
It’s the agony of you chewing gum,
the way you say nothing but move your tongue …
OL’ GREEN EYES
Be still my heart
in Autumn
you were a captured wild
Indian paintbrush has nothing on paintings like you,
or Indians.
All that heaved my chest lay there in your stems.
You had that push-up bra like a shield.
Who were you under there
engulfing my eyes?
It’s brown against green,
this whole seasonal sexual thing’s weighing down
my nipples’ generosity.
They see you.
They both do
in Autumn,
you taught me to climb trees
to let the Fall
just fall.
THE COLISEUM
No framed photo holding amber love,
no rack to mount the swan.
Swan dies in the big picture,
big picture sees very little,
small AND few.
(Forget the song, Amber)
No meaning means no-thing,
everything has meaning but this, Amber,
(answer the bastard, Amber).
Enter the house made of bedposts
of frames you’ve slept upon
where hearts have bled through
staining a wood-stained floor
bleached out,
blacked out.
Eat the meat, make it right, Amber,
make the apology neutral
in between the lines,
in between your legs,
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