Let Me Call You Maybe

It's almost a new year and every new year begins in a blur of holiday gunk, weirdo weather, and hope for this year to be even better than the last. What better way to start a new year than with the rejuvenating force of poetry?

Here's the deal--

Send me a FB message, Twitter DM (tlgobble), or email at gobble(dot)tyler(at)gmail(dot)com with your phone number (if I don't have it already) and any other nice chatter, and I'll call you between January 1st and January 7th to read you a poem and blahblah a little (last part optional). You can choose the poet/poem (doesn't have to be one of mine is what I'm trying to say, though it can be if you'd like) or the topic/theme, or I'll select one for you. 

STOKED

"my thoughts grow mouths and swallow each other"

My dearest Laura Straub's Field Guide to Blake Butler, one of my favorite fiction ppl.

Why didn't anyone tell me about Jim Nutt?

Cool argument for Poetry getting more of the Painting treatment. 

But mostly what I envy painters for is art galleries. Just walking into an art gallery gives me a feeling of uplift. I love libraries too, but the feeling in a library is that you will paw around ferretting out information, whereas in a gallery the feeling is that enlightenment will come to you. You don’t have to know anything when you get there. You just check your coat, mash the clip-on tag to your collar, and trust that whatever you need to know will be explained as you go along.

This is why I propose that the best way to make contemporary poetry accessible to a wider public would be to put it in museums. To trot out an old saw: “Ut pictura poesis,” Horace wrote in the first century BC. “As is painting so is poetry.” This idea has been bandied about so much that scholars refer to it as u.p.p., and the question of whether poetry and painting do or should resemble each other has preoccupied artists from Titian to Wallace Stevens. These discussions, however, have primarily focused on artistic practice. What I mean isn’t that poetry should have more visual elements or become more abstract or more representational or otherwise do what visual art does. What I mean is that I think people would like poetry better if there were somewhere they could go to look at it that had high ceilings and good lighting and curatorial text to explain things about the poems that might not be obvious.

Ashbery Under My Arm

I've been prancing around this life with John Ashbery's collected first five books, The Mooring of Starting Out. Knocked out (or knocked myself out with) Some Trees the first weekend I got it in Chicago. Been poking along The Tennis Court Oath, like I think is necessary/crucial with Ashbery. Seriously, I read like three poems and go WOOSH. Constantly baffled and inspired and overwhelmed by these poems. Ashbery writes the world's best riddles. Ashbery writes the deeper into the English language than anyone I've every encountered. Definitely, setting this hunk aside til a later date to finish the last three books. 

Learned much from this Perloff (she's queen right?) essay about Ashbery, "Normalizing John Ashbery."

Breakthrough narratives, it is true, are always forced to simplify the work of the past from which the new text deviates. I plead guilty to this charge in my own references to Eliot or Stevens in The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981). Of course the symbolic structure of The Waste Land is not as easily understood as I implied in that study, but I stand by my original distinction between the "logic of metaphor" (Eliot's phrase for St. John Perse) of The Waste Land and the much greater indeterminacy of the Ashbery lyric in question, "These Lacustrine Cities" from Rivers and Mountains (1966). Indeed, however great the debt Ashbery owes to the "modernism" of Eliot, one would never, as I suggested in my book, mistake an Ashbery poem for an Eliot one. Nor can one take short extracts from a given Ashbery poem (Longenbach does this with reference to passages about poetry like the lines from "Syringa" that begin "Its subject / Matters too much and not enough") and treat these extracts as containing within themselves the "meaning" of the poem in question.

"A Last World" might be my favorite poem from "The Tennis Court Oath." I read it, tonight, Election Day, and go hmmmmmmmmmmmmm into the night. 

Then one could say nothing hear nothing
Of what the great time spoke to its divisors.
All borders between men were closed. 

Now all is different without having changed 

As though one were to pass through the same street at different times

And nothing that is old can prefer the new.   

And of course, the title poem of Some Trees is a pure delight of existence on existence because of existence. 

---

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

 I love hearing poets read their work DUH


 

The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan

Wow, I was a dummy in the past, if you've been paying attention you know this, don't you, but here, I'm not talking about my staggering and LOVEFEAR, no, just poetry, and how sometimes I can't read, or read right, like I wanna, like with these poems by Berrigan, when I first read, I thought eh okay and wuzz and get it together man, but I was wrong, totally, they're huge and wild and so important, the mesh of influences, both poetic and LIFE, time running and doing, ever-changing and rearranging, wow.

Here are my favorite lines from this book, yeah I don't know why I'm cataloging my favorite lines, but I am, it feels right:

from VI

"And the green rug nestled against the furnaceDust had covered all the tacks, the hammer...optimism for the jump...The taste of such delicate thoughtsNever bring the dawn."

from XXXII

"A farmer drove up on a tractor
He said he was puzzled by the meaning exactly of "block".
The blue day! Where else can we go
To escape from or tedious homes, and perhaps recapture the past?"

from XXXVI

"                I never thought on the Williams-
burg bridge I'd come so much to Brooklyn
just to see lawyers and cops who don't even carry
guns taking my wife away and bringing her back"

from XLII

"               The black heart beside the 15 pieces of glass
Of my many faceted and fake appearance
The most elegant present I could get!"

from L

"Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer "the interior monologue"
I like to beat people up"

from LXXIII

"                           at heart we are infinite, we are
ethereal, we are weird!" 

We All Need Reminders

After four years of chattering about it, some close calls, some flip-flopping, I did it,I got my first tattoo during this weekend's trip with my dear Ashley Ford to visit our Akron Family (not that Akron Family). All our Akron people said GOOD LIFE IS THE PLACE. Brian there hooked us up really nice. Ashley got "Anything Beautiful" on her shoulder, that being a nod at our pal Nick Sturm's massiveheart poem "I FEEL YES" (you'll see it soon in Forklift SO GET STOKED NOW). It looks good on her, so goooood! And I got the only first tattoo I could really see stamped on my bod, the only thing that I need on me right now. "We are clouds and terrible things happen in clouds." Dean Young said that. He says lots of beautiful and thumping things. That's from his poem, "Frottage," wowwow poem. This thing means YOU KNOW THIS DEAL WITH IT. This thing means MOVE FORWARD. This thing means WATCH OUT. This thing means I FEEL A RUMBLE YET IM BEAUTIFUL. I woke up this morning and couldn't believe it, this thing exists, I exist, the terrible exist. Let's rumble on, alright?

Matt Hart, pal of DY, got a big kick out of my tattoo, sent it to Dean, very nice.

A Ballad for Metka Krasovec by Tomaž Šalamun

My first full book Šalamun experience and a good one full of soaring startles of language and an odd humor and images that sting. Beautiful balance of such things.

I don't like black cherries on the tree.
Who rubbed soot on the she bear?
A fetus, smashed jaw bone, part of the wind pipe missing.
I'd like to be rain, scrubbing the roof.
I'd like all my hair to burn, to be bare.
I died when I took my shoes off.
Ivy entwined me, like a castle.
Inside me there's still chalk,
outside a small yellow briefcase.
It dangles from my hand like a saint hanged
from a tree--the same cherry tree.

Stevens And Ruefle Together

I read Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle and the essay "The Relations Between Poetry And Painting" by Wallace Stevens from his essay collection The Necessary Angel recently. I thought I'd place together some of my favorite quotes and see how they collide.

Speaking of Wordsworth's Michael and the line "And never lifted up a single stone" on pages 162/163, Stevens said: "One might say of a lazy workman, 'He's been out there, just loafing, for an hour and never lifted up a single stone,' and no one would htink this greaty poetry...These lines would have no existential value; they would simply call attention to the lazy workman. But the compositional use by Wordsworth of his line makes it something entirely different. These simple words become weighted with the tragedy of the old shepherd, and are saturated with poetry. Their referential importance is slight, for the importance of the action to which they refer is not in the action itself, but in the meaning; and that meaning is borne by the words. Therefore this is a line of great poetry."

From Ruefle's poem "Patient Without an Acre" on page 6:
I can't work, much less love.
Love, there's no mistaking the word
for it: once you've driven the
wild breath in, you'll have
a little glass hammer,
perfectly useless. This,
the flint of all things!

Speaking of the mind's retention of experience on pages 164/165, Stevens' says: "If it merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar."

From the beginning of Ruefle's "Perfect Reader" on page 63:
I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:

Discussing Simone Weil's thoughts on "decreation" on pages 174/175, Stevens says: "She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whichever field we discovered it, is that man's truth is the final resolution of everything."

Ruefle's poem "The Tragic Drama of Joy" on page 95:
Late that night it rained so hard the world
seemed flattened for good.
But the grocer knew the earth had a big gut
and could hold more than enough.
When he went out to receive a shipment of cat food
the stays of his umbrella were bent.
It took some time to fix them and when he got to his shop
the truck had already left.
On a whim he went inside and brought home
a bottle of wine for his wife.
Have you gone crazy? she said. They didn’t uncork it,
but he felt something nonetheless.
That wonderful click his umbrella had made
when it finally opened for good!

My Three Favorite Poems From Three Books I've Read Recently

From Repair by C.K. Williams, "Archetypes," for it's lovely (as Williams does so well in this book) use of the image as the track, the path, the road to navigate around human relationships and a sense of understanding our experience


From Jab by Mark Halliday, "Head Wound," for proving a poem about poetry doesn't have to be stuffy or boring, but can talk its way to the core of a life and shine from within (first and last stanza below):

On the day that my life span matched my mother's life span,
on the day when I had come to live as long as my mother lived--
she died in 1975, of cancer, three days after her fifty-second birthday--
on the day when I had lived as many days as she got to live
(though for her there were hundreds and hundreds of days of
miserable pain, which has not at all been my fate)--
on that day
I went to the gym to play basketball with some friends
.....................
Driving to the Emergency Rom I had seven thoughts:
1. It's a reminder.
2. It's a warning.
3. Let's not get carried away.
4. No wonder it is necessary and has always been necessary
to read poems and write the, to read novels and write them,
because the world is this enormous haunted cavern or enchanted gymnasium
filled, too filled with symbolic meanings ready at any moment
to spring forth like goblins and make anything significant.
5. I'm lucky, she wasn't lucky;
she wasn't lucky, I'm lucky, it doesn't mean
ANYTHING--
6. But even if it doesn't, I can still say
her bad luck was bad;
7. And if that's true, doesn't it follow
that my good luck is good?

From The New Year of Yellow by Matthew Lippman, "And Everywhere It's Florida," where Lippmann makes you listen, an odd charm he has, and you're not concerned with truth/falsity, but with the poem, that moment where you're finally listening:

What I did, I lied.
I lied about the Cremora Food Truck hijacked,
brought to Boston, blown up,
just to get all that white powder up in the air,
just to get all the kids to listen;

I lied about the money and the hungry zookeeper
who killed two giraffes with a bullhorn then wheeled out the Hibachi.

I lied about living rooms on fire
and dead cowboys on my lawn
who rode clean out of thin air
before I shot 'em with my six shooter,
cried Geronimo,
broke down in hives
and got lost in the Hollywood tumbleweed.
All my life it's been helicopter blades in my spine;
all my life I've lied.

BOOOKS

I haven't been happy with my reading lately, nor with my blogging, nor with my interacting with books. To fix that quickly, I'm gonna talk about a few books I've read in recent weeks:

Work's Tiring (from his Complete Poems 1930-1950 Disaffections) by Cesare Pavese

I'm not sure if I've ever read a book of poems like this before. So calm, so freshly narrative. Pavese knows what stories to tell, what images to show. Like in the following poem, "Ballet," where Pavese molds together the image of the giant and his various women, around them places the fight, the chaos of life. When the BOOYEAH image comes, in the final stanza below, I'm shaking my head as the poem ends, like I did with most of these poems, astounded not that I didn't see it coming (oh how warm I am, nuzzled along by Pavese's charm), but baffled by his vision, his shaping of the things I need to see.

Ballet (Read Whole Poem)

If the woman and the giant take off their clothes—
and later they will—the giant will resemble
the serenity of cliffs grown hot in the sun,
the girl-child pressing against them for warmth.

Thank You and Other Poems (from the Collected Poems) by Kenneth Koch

How did I make it this long without Koch? A huge influence of some of my favorite poets, like Dean Young, I'd only read some Koch in anthologies. I saw this collected poems at a Half Price Books and boy it must be fate or destiny or killer timing. Besides having a wonderful coverface to look at, the poems inside are majorly energetic. There's a sort of sense of enjoyment in life that I'm constantly looking for (both in living and in my poems) and Koch has painted a nice how-to guide. "To You" has shot straight up my FAVORITE POEMS OF ALL TIME list because it does that: finds the joy and splatters it on every wall. OH KOCH I'LL NEVER LET YOU GO.

To You (Read Whole Poem)

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart.

Simple Machines by Michael Bible (Awesome Machine Press)

This might sound silly, but this book is a fabulous reminder of how letters (and sounds) combine to make words, words to make sentences. The sentence: a simple machine that can be so loud, can create so much. The sentences here don't have to add up to say something grand, though they might. For me, this reminder was enough: DON'T FORGET WHAT A SENTENCE CAN DO.

Praying Is boring.

The doctors think
everything is interesting.

The Voice Of The Poet (audiocassette and book) by W.H. Auden

Todd gave me this thing and I listened/read along to each side on its own night. After school, I'd come home, hop in some gym shorts, and plop on my bed and listen to Auden say his goodness. I'm glad I didn't tackle a lot of Auden a few years ago, because my silliness would have got caught up in his rhyming, his "oldness." Now, I see that he's as fresh as the day he wrote those poems. Go read from "In Time Of War"and tell me I'm wrong.

A Coney Island Of The Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This one got read in a treestand, opening day of bowhunting 2011. Weird right? Five deer probably walked by me and I didn't look up. I didn't care. My goal was rereading this powerful book in its entirety. Speaking of lists earlier, I'd probably put this as top 10 poetry books of all-time for me. I'm amazed by how Ferlinghetti can holler without seeming whiny, can philosophize without being preachy, can slam it out without being attacking.

1 (Click Here For Whole Poem)
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed

An essay to remember

A wonderful essay by Mark Halliday about the greatness of Tony Hoagland. Insightful, well-supported, and daring, this makes me appreciate Hoagland more than I already do.

Surrealism

Todd bought me the anthology The Poetry of Surrealism edited by Michael Benedikt as a graduation present. Of course, I've heard many of the names in this collection--Breton, Apollinaire, Tzara--but my actual reading experience with them, regretfully, has been minimal. As they influence some of my favorite poets, like Dean Young, I decided to dedicate a good amount of time to enjoying and understanding this wonderful movement. I'm about halfway through the book, spending a few days at a time with a single author. Below is a recording of some of my favorite pieces from the first half of the book.

Reading from The Poetry Of Surrealism Anthology by Stoked Press

we know you're in there

LAST DAY (NOOOO), but hey poetry lives on. And Dean Young lives on with his new heart. And I live on with the new Dean Young book. And I live on with the other Dean Young books. Let's accept it is over and do our best to KEEP GOING.

Acceptance Speech
BY DEAN YOUNG

This time I’m not going to say a thing
about deity. It’s not the blizzard,
it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing
roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.
Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.
Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split
to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.
A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets
aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s
strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable
beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,
Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable
in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,
we know you’re in there but no one’s
blaming you for reluctance to come out.
Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity
throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud
and look what that got him: toothlessness
and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst
teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant
in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant
in a steakhouse turned out to be more
than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot
of time in an asylum writing cruel poems
if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.
In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape
in two rows of shapes that seems okay
although to the right’s a capsized canoe
full of mathematicians, to the left a bow
about to launch the killer astrolabe.
By what manner is the soul joined to
the body? How about climbing a ladder
of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s
lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.
You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate
for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.
See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds
which is about average for a cloud.
Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.
Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.
Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated
planet. I know, a promise has been made
but Tony’s been sick for years and no one
knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,
corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone
you’d trust to drive your car, but still.
Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?
Would it help if I said Amen?


Dean Young, “Acceptance Speech” from First Course in Turbulence. Copyright © 1999 by Dean Young.

Some days I'm terrified that I exist at all.

Tonight, we are gonna celebrate National Poetry Month RIGHT. And by we I mean, Todd McKinney, Patrick Collier, Elysia Smith, Zach Arnett, Layne Ransom, Mark Neely, myself, and Christopher Newgent, along with whomever is cool enough to show up (LIKE MY PARENTS). Ah, Christopher Newgent. What a cool dude, a good dude, spreading the word of indie/small press lit, inspiring community, and writing cool poems. Remember that week long thing awhile back on Everyday Genius? Yeah, I revisited that to get pumped for tonight. It's all good, but man oh man, that day of "The Lamb" was a good day. Simmer in its goodness and CELEBRATE.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME

Hey, did you know it's National Poetry Month? Cool. For some reason, I started thinking about Robot Melon, which was one of the first online journals I got really into. I started revisiting their old issues. I remembered this sweet poem called Town and Country by Adam J Maynard. I've been writing in more fragments, snippets, and such. This poem seems kind of like the poems I've been writing, except it's really really good.

Bang, she's dead.

My head is a big throbbing tomato and National Poetry Month is almost over. Some poems make me yearn for MORE MORE. Some poems are so tight, good, gracious that I am good where I end up. HERE IS ONE OF THE LATTER.

Tomatoes
by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

All afternoon you feel the weight of the things you've never done.

National Poetry Month is almost over and I'm not sure I know where I'm going. HOLD ON HOLD ON. I'm sorry for this: in poems I'm finding something that I can't find in my neighbor's shouts or in the hum of the city bus. David Shumate shows me things in these little chunks ("prose poems") and that's nice.

This is the poem for the day: Trains by David Shumate

MUH BAD

National Poetry Month also happens to be my last month of college. WOAH COINCIDENCE. You're thinking, what a way to go out. I'm like, YOU ARE SO RIGHT. Yesterday, I was hanging in my hometown, going to a crappy sports bar, playing cornhole with my dad and his friends, it was strange, but okayfun. Point is: whoops, no poem. I've been thinking about what has impacted me the most in the past four years. Being involved with The Collagist has been a huge part of my growth as a writer and a human. Here's two of my favorite poems from the past issues of The Collagist.

Stargazing by Keith Montesano: The language and the scene are both gorgeous, but further, this poem says some great things about interruption, both in that awesome scene and language.

Upon Seeing Photos of My Ex-Lover's Cooking-Related Injury by Jaime Warburton: This poem reminds me about honesty in reaction and the difficulty of not caring, not being interested, the difficulty of completely letting go.

Get it?

National Poetry Month is almost over, but not yet! No and maybe never really, because some people do good work. Like Adam Robinson. Here's a poem from his book called Adam Robison and Other Poems. I like that book. It's wacky. Adam also does Publishing Genius which RULEZ. Okay okay okay, I don't drink bottled water, so I get what's up here. I think.

O my body!

I don't wanna say anything because it's National Poetry Month and this poem says it all.

This is really something!

It's raining and April and I don't like it. If I wanted to be wet, I'd go swimming or take a shower. I'm sitting at a computer and it's National Poetry Month. Peter Davis is one of the more influential people on my early poetry days. He writes poems that make my brain warm and full of good-natured chuckles. Today, I'm reminded of Pete's goodness and this poem about water and reading poems.