a few starts
unfinished poems, ideas, conversations
The trumpet The trumpet makes a position out of you finally, you know how to stand projection of brass being only the beginning and voicing the whole of calamity all of it— yours, yours, ours as in the redeeming catharsis of movies the way the day rushes in the middle the seesaw of grim and curious: debussy's prélude charlie parker's april in paris
reading poets
Denise Levertov was born in England, Welsh mother, Russian Jewish father, and then she moved to the U.S. after marrying an American poet. She wrote to William Carlos Williams. She was friends with Adrienne Rich. Eavan Boland describes her as charming, warm yet, at least to her, not totally accessible. Later in life, during the Vietnam War, she became what we may call today an activist, and she demonstrated, though she also, at this time, wrote poems about war.
Plenty of poets have troubled over the first person. How it is easy to rely on it, you being in some way, you. How confessional poetry is so American so mired in the myth of the self. Surely, it goes, there are better myths, and better subjects—or not subjects, objects. Having written essays, articles, whatever, for years, for pay, about various objects, I say, there is no better myth than the self, but indeed, other, perhaps “better” subjects, which is why so many poets have so much to say about the first person. You have to be a little diabolical to write freely in it. Yes, self-regarding, relentlessly referential, masochistic, stupid, playful, naïve, and precocious. And there is this idea that you cannot be those things while suffering immensely from external forces. And of course we are, most of us, suffering to some degree due to external forces. Though the internal suffering can be selective. It can be so small, so self-generated, or happenstance, genetic. Poets, especially American ones, are known primarily for externalizing the internal suffering, maybe novelists, for some accounting of the external—certainly essayists, journalists are known to have some duty towards that accounting.
Levertov seems to have made her way in and out of the internal/external. Maybe not out of duty—absurd to believe poetry can achieve much on a major scale. But if what compels you is love, then that is what language is for. And being against war is love. Being against the justifications for war, for decrepit ideologies of war and annihilation is love. Holding someone’s face in your hands knowing how you could hurt them and choosing not to, on the smallest scale, love. And trying to figure out what that choice would be, and doing what you can possibly do to make it, on the largest scale, love. And accounting for it, for these choices and behaviors, not only accurately in fact but in affect, in idea and in mood, maybe some kind of poetry.
The dog Me, the dog Who sniffs in your lap You the dog, who rests your chin in my hand And me, again, now playing cat letting you come to me once I've played coy for the evening I can be the dog again Drool over you and then profess to want to be the cat And you too, desiring transformation, wanting to Please me, but not wanting to show the wanting. I confess I like seeing it, your undressed longing, banging hunger How the hollowness screams and how we fill it
Maybe I should say something about the two unfinished poems that sandwich that mini essay. I heard the trumpet, actually, or felt something about the instrument while on a walk around bed stuy and listening to the album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature by Cassandra Jenkins. I’ve been listening to the album on repeat for the better part of a year, trying to fix something. To some extent, it’s worked. “The dog” is funny because the first song on An Overview opens with “I’m a three-legged dog/ workin’ with what I’ve got”. But that’s not quite where the dog of that poem comes from. It comes from a snippet of conversation I had with a new friend about, relationally, wanting to be a cat but being a dog. Striving to be the cat…maybe, someday, being the cat. Writers love dogs and cats. Maybe gets to the primal nature of the internal suffering (“suffering”) I talk about in that essay. But also of that play, stupidity, naivety, joy… anyway this hopefully doesn’t read as an explanation of the poems—I don’t know what they “mean” to me yet, and I wouldn’t tell you anyway (though there are occasional moments I’m tempted to be understood). But I thought it might be nice to give some context since this newsletter is a bit like the warbling start up of a free jazz trumpet solo: urgent, undirected.
Also, if you like this newsletter, as odd as it is, tell me. In my case, affirmation begets effort, frequency, repetition; and smudges some of that internal lower-case suffering.