Poetics and the political, Charlie Mars & learning as I go

We sit on different sides of the same table him and me and I forget it's because he writes fiction and I'm a poet but no that's not true, either--it's not that I forgot it's more that I never thought about it in those terms.

It is snowing, hard, when we walk down Goldsborough on our way to see Charlie Mars. He points this out, that he is not a poet and has never written poetry. There are still a few cars on the road downtown but for the most part the air is filled with wet white specs and everything is grey. The Coffee Cat, when we enter, is warm and my glasses mist over immediately with steam. They already had snow drops all over them.

Earlier, when he first got to my place, I was still in my frump clothes and only had time to brush baby powder through my hair and put on some musky oil. While he waited I showed him Carrot's Zine and so of course we immediately started talking Craft.

It's funny how he pisses me off--I defend stream of consciousness and first thought even as I'm thinking about me editing editing editing. Prose and poetry. The intersection between first thought, the consciousness it draws forth from there, and the sensibility to edit but still keep the Beautiful Vision in tact. I think about being pissed and realize there must be something new in this conversation for me to gain.

I think about other men who've pissed me off.

Charlie Mars is good. Really good. I fall in love a little. With him, his movement, his stories, his clear, kaleidoscope voice. I am glad he's not with his band. The poetry moves in me after a while, I want to call out and make him stop and make the snow outside stop coming down and make my skin stop tingling the way it does when the acid first kicks in. Remember that? A body trip we used to call it...but no, this is not acid it is the Duende, the Descention. When the song first hits and starts to ring through me. It makes me, sitting there, feel crazy a little like how it used to when I didn't know what it was.

It would be fun to hang out with Charlie Mars. I think he would be good at making out. Which is or isn't the same as hanging out. Depends on who you're with...Also, his songs are full with stories, like my Memoir, so by the time it is over all I want to do is write. Write until the snow goes away, write until it is night, and then the night is day.

Later, after Charlie Mars and after walking to the grocery store in the snow and no cars on the streets at all, he is sweet and makes a list of things he does when editing. An actual list. I smile a little and there's that inner eye-roll. Teacher Tom. I keep reminding myself to be open, to learn. To be teachable. We are both Aries only three days apart so that's a lot of fire.

Then today we are back at it again, He is very plan plan plan work work work and now I am decisive in putting my finger on his position and refuting it. I've got diPrima out, we've been reading poems to each other. Dinners and Nightmares. I point out who she was, who she is, I identify her myth. Nightmares: Her regular run-ins with violence in the name of authority and institution. I am redblooded and hot faced in defense of her alchemical free verse, impassioned, breathless about women in the fifties being locked in sanitariums and asylums if, for example, they didn't want to marry. Of course it's important to know the Cannon I am saying, I'm not refuting that at all, you need to know the rules in order so that your voice might break them as dictated and become strong and true on your own....

I open Pieces of a Song and run my finger over the bent pages. My eye stops on Poetics which I dont ever remember reading but I know this will be the one. I go there: If the New York School and the establishment were symbolic of the Patriarch then her voice, her Voice, was anti this. She was a scholar. She channeled Blake and Keats. She knew what she was doing. O'Hara and Ginsberg claimed the same things. But can you find a book of hers at Borders? Not often, most times no, no you can not.

I am defending my self. I know this. The white sun is reflecting the snow and my little living room is full of light. I plant my eyes on his, gain silence, and smile. Then read

Poetics (Diane diPrima)
I have deserted my post, I cldnt hold it
rearguard/to preserve the language/lucidity:
let the language fend for itself.
it turned over god knows enough carts in the city streets
its barricades are my nightmares

preserve the language!--there are
enough fascists &
enough socialists
on both sides
so that no one will lose this war

the language shall be my element, I plunge in
I suspect that I cannot drown
like a fat brat catfish, smug
a hoodlum fish
I move more & more gracefully
breathe it in,
success written on my mug till the fishpolice
corner me in the coral & I die

He leaves soon after, I walk him out and breathe deep the fresh air so sparkly it makes me feel like I have lung fulls of clean sharp sun. I go back inside and use all his suggestions, index cards, color-coding, all of it. All afternoon I work and come away with an organization plan for my memoir broken down by year: 1994 all the way through til now.

I am happy, satiated. I am passionate, yes. And learning to be wrong.

Or at least, still learning to learn.

RANT

We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.

Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.

It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...

And which is the Work that counts the most?

O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?

The Real Work.

I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.

Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.

click here

Happy Friday.

love

ZERO
By Diane diPrima

a blessing on your velvet shoes
and on your hair so free
and may the wind that bore you here
soon take you away from me

for you are the Fool, the holy man
who wanders ceaselessly
and the star you follow does not stop
for my door and my company

a blessing on your coat so green
all worked with magic signs
and on the light in your bright eyes
unlike the light in mine

for joy is calling in the wind
and the white sun beats down
and at the end of your long, bright path
Puck polishes your crown

he holds it out on the Ace of Swords
no easy gift gives he
and the Fool becomes the Hanged Man
for that bright company

so may your wallet e’er be full
with goodly bread and meat
and the white dog who follows you
dance lightly at your feet

and may you mate with faerie girls
all in their robes of white
your long hands pluck anemones
late in the purple night

you shall drink wine form the jeweled Cup
and be drunk eternally
and wash your face in the silver foam
thrown by the pale grey sea

and the crown you gather will not fade
though my tears will drop like leaves
and the wine you drink shall keep you warm
while all the northland grieves

for you are the Fool, and the Hanged Man
whose light shines endlessly
and that cruel wind that bore you here

bears you on eternally

"god bless you

real good "

Because I Feel Like It

yes yes yes, a weekend all to me, starting despairingly bc i dear reader am always no-thing if not dramatically self-involved in the happenings or so perceived non-happenings of my very own life...and do tend to let such perceptions overcome the best of me...

so said, what a glory day i've had since yesterday passed and i subsequently got my head out of my ass. handscrubbed my versa this afternoon after a trip to the library--where my card was so outdated i had to open a new account in order to check out Girls Like Us Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation which called to me literally off of the shelf as i passed it by. i hoped, as i heaped said work and a slathering poetry books on the counter, that it would deliver me in a similar mythically-steeped retrieval of trailblazer femin-ista historia as diPrima's bio My Life as a Woman The New York Years did. and so far i am adequately quenched.

made some jewelry today, too. and wrote a poem. tonite, it's my plan, after the moon goes up and the light is all over the land the way only darktime light can be, i am going to write. like, maybe even all nite long....

May Day

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,
Whatever may have happened

Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,
Be a cell where a struggling tendril

Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever
Touched a hair on my head, because

It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.
I've decided to walk a long way

Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,
Let it go as it will to the place

It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

Phillis Levin

On Poetics and Diane diPrima

I'm working obscene amounts of double shifts lately. obscene. so yesterday i forced myself in to the obligatory doing absolutely nothing. the night before the prospects of no plans no calls no errands no nada to have to do seemed great, but actually going through with it was a little tough. made me feel less than worthwhile. have always been in to identifying the mean teeth of doubt in my consciousness, the terms of which like a tape looping i or one plays over again throughout the head without really separating out from and seeing, and so take for granted. so i'm programmed to think that taking time off is lazy or gluttonous. go figure--of course i am.

anyhow hell yeah let's hear it for 8 episodes of the first season of SexintheCity woooohooo and also Knocked Up and the very stupid Walk Hard. and front porch time and, oh yes, an hour and a half lazed in bed w my new Vogue and a cup of hot mint tea. got my rest, got my soul full again, got my juices flowing--which was necessary if i want to get a blog in before today's 12 hour shift...

***

So the afternoon before last Laura Walsh and I drove to Newark to U Del to check out the original manuscripts (oh god my heart beats faster and the water tingles in my mouth whenever i say that) of Diane diPrima's Freddie Poems. What is of interest to me here is a fine, exact example of my take on poetics. Firstly, her Freddie Poems, far as I'm concerned, is one of diPrima's clear transitions, visible within the poems themselves, into her experience of poetry as an alchemical function. Thus we witness her own self-transition and initiation, in the alchemical tradition, of go-between if you will, of she who transmutes self and journeys between the outer and inner worlds, or between the levels of consciousness. Secondly, in the exact tradition of this and in a very personal and real way, this piece of diPrima's work specifically impacted my own life many years later. This is a prime function of poet-(or artist)-as-shaman, as Gary Snyder explains in his Real Work interview with Paul Geneson of the Ohio Review (Fall 1977): "For the poet in particular, a sense of the need to look at the key archetypes image and symbol blocks and see if the blocks are working. Poetry effects change by getting at the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change..."

You see, diPrima wrote this collection while in the midst of grieving the loss of her close friend to suicide. This was nearly fifty years ago. I discovered the existence of the Freddie Poems when reading her memoirs in the Fall of 03. At that time I too was in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, and keeping a journal to him which would eventually become my first complete collection of poetry. I was actually calling that project the Mike Journal then! And likewise, the experience of chronicling my process of grief and understanding was my induction in to the tradition of poet as journeyer through other forms of consciousness by mere means of creation.

Wow, I am so wholly took by this concept of poetry, or any art for that matter, as means of transcending our ordinary incidences in life by penetrating to a more intuitive and in-depth, in-bliss experience. Seeing the Freddie Poems for the first time, and in their original form! was so powerful for me. I still do not, and likely will never, have words to give justice to how rich an opportunity this was. What I can do, rather, is defer to Snyder again. Reading those poems, finding the eternal echos of archetype and symbology that diPrima encountered, and nodding in recognition that I too found those same rhythms, themes and postures in my own poetry to Mike was a home-coming of the purest sense. It was affirmation of the the most primal patterns of our humanity, of the never ending cycles of lifedeathlife, and it made me beam with love to have this opportunity to exist. It was acknowledgement in my own soul, a deep-breathed sigh of comfort and relief, and mostly of pure elated satisfaction and awe.

From Snyder:

As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. Whatever is or was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation…the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.