SPOILS

This is me reading "Spoils" from my forthcoming prose poetry collection, "Passenger Flight". This video was done as a submission to Pistol Press's online Kitchen Reading Series. (NB, Oct. 2009: Since its inaugural issue, this series seems to have been relegated to a permanent back burner.) The requirement: That writers send in a videotape of themselves reading from their own work in a kitchen-like setting. Below is the text of the poem. It was first published in Geez, Fall, 2007. (If you have trouble with the above, watch the video here.) An added benefit: you get to see what my kitchen's like!

SPOILS

I sit on my aluminum throne. This spruce and eucalyptus-veneer table was shipped especially from Malaysia. These teak-stained tablemats, Sri Lanka. On that ersatz cherry wood shelf (Bengal), dates from Iran, mandarins from Morocco, gala apples from Chile. This neoprene book in which I draft is from Mexico; the power cord, straight from China. The robe I wear is from Taiwan.

I am the Emperor. As I cross my kitchen (five steps) to lie on my Swedish bed, I hear the murmur of voices around my head. Such gentle hands, the servants that bear me aloft! I have every reason to trust them. But I have my spies, my plants. And now I’m told of whispered connivery: plans to poison, surprise me with a dagger, a well-timed bomb.

Poison, dagger, bomb: they have been planning it night and day, for decades. They meet via satellite, speak to each other through networks in the sky. They wear fezzes, turbans, polyester neckties. They pray to the One True God. I have never seen the One True God, although I have looked everywhere, in my closets, in my drawers, among my genitals, beneath my toenails. I am told my sin is grave. They plan infernos for every single portal of my world.

But: I am the Emperor. I sit on my plastic throne. In this nine- by eleven-foot kitchen, I am surrounded by a collection of clocks. Every day, new clocks come in the mail, direct from Pakistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Venezuela. Invariably they say thirty-two seconds to … is it noon, or midnight? Invariably, I wind them back, synchronize them with the others. Clocks are crucial. Clocks are indispensable. I am the Emperor of Time: I control it from this Indonesian table, this German throne.

The banned books meme

From Scavella here, via Julie Carter.

Look through this list of banned books. If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, *** it.

(And if you’re drawing a blank, skip it. At least I did.)

1. The Bible

2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy***
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

and some surprising omissions I've added to this list:

116. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
117. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
118. The Stone Angel by Margaret Lawrence
119. A Summer Affair by Ivan Klima
120. A Season in Hell and Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
121. Howl by Allen Ginsburg
122. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
123. Gabriel Garcia Marques: One Hundred Years of Solitude (this one I read in Spanish and English!)
124. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
125. Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint

Can you think of others that should be included in this list? (Actually, there's a website here. But it's a very incomplete list, too.)

MY "INAUGURAL" POEM

In a half hour, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Elizabeth Alexander will be reading the inaugural poem. There's a good profile and sample poems at poets.org. I liked her work, what I read of it; consider Blues. May she rise to the enormity of the occasion.

On the day after his election, I wrote this poem, my first -- and perhaps last -- political polemic. I figured Now Is The Time (to echo the President Elect, and in turn, MLK) to post it. Some notes follow.

BARACK

I raise a glass to my TV screens, to this liquid digital on which I draft, this e-waste gold beneath my fingertips. Tinctures appear on the horizon, glints, facets…

…to this man of fine feature and earthen skin, whose name breathes Africa, whose breath is fragrant with the smoke and spices of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Wichita, Honolulu, Jakarta, New York, Boston, Chicago. At last, one of all of us! Intelligent, pensive, poised & sure … who speaks poetry, who knows the nuances of law.

May he truly listen!
May our ravening need be appeased!
May we stop melting our polar ice caps!
May we wrestle our economy from the reckless rich and return it to the people!
May health care be guaranteed for every citizen!
May war criminals be brought to justice!
May extraordinary renditions be canceled by this rendition!
May the guns that bristle at him not fire!
Now, may the real work begin.

– Nov. 5, 2008

What exultation, that day! Although polls and pundits had forecast the results, almost no-one could really believe it would happen until it happened. And I think the whole planet was taken by surprise, by the power of the psychic sea-change. (At least those in the position to take notice at all.)

Credit should go where it is due: A number of the invocations (from polar ice caps to justice, to be exact) are drawn from “Pinch Me”, an article by Michael Moore that appeared that same morning on michaelmoore.com

Frankly, I was very tempted to include this poem -- or rather, a previous version of it -- in my forthcoming collection, Passenger Flight. Something in me rues the fact that I chose not to. Political poems, though, have a short shelf life; by the time the book is published, it could well be dated or contradicted and make me look and feel pretty foolish -- although millions of people would share in that feeling.

I have every confidence that Barack Obama will be a great President. But, he could disappoint. Even at the time, I had this line, second to the end:

May bunker bombs emblazoned with Obama not fall on families in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran!

I felt truly uneasy about his hawkish pronouncements RE those countries during that campaign, although tactically, during that campaign, they were pre-emptive of Republican scare mongering should there have have been a terrorist attack. Like Michael Moore, I hope that this is a strategic campaign promise that is deliberately discarded as soon as it's convenient.

That line I've left aside because, well, it doesn't suit this day; besides it runs counter to the emotional thrust of the poem.

More later... the inauguration is about to begin.

****

I enjoyed Alexander's poem -- dignified it was, and lyrical -- although the response to her concentrated metaphors was understandably subdued. Perhaps the audience had taken in enough with Obama's inaugural speech, which had just preceded it. Some lines from the poem: "In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made. Any sentence begun, on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp. Praise song for walking forward in that light."

Rev. Joseph E. Lowry, the old civil rights activist who followed her with the Benediction, got a greater rise when he broke into an unexpected, playful rap poetry of his own: "Lord...we ask you to help us pray for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead man, and when white will embrace what is right." That brought a smile to everyone's face, including, notably, Obama's.

... back to my own poem. In a way I'm glad I'm not including it in my collection. Part of the problem with it is not just the sloganeering -- which irks me as much as it gave me pleasure to do -- but that I write as if I were American. Clearly I'm not. Obama is not our leader, and it is not exactly our economy; here we have universal health care. Appropriating Michael Moore's words was frankly an act of desperation, to finish what I had begun. But that I could write that way, and that the poem has been well received by a couple of (of course, small) Canadian poetry audiences and poet friends, reflects how we in what Jon Stewart has called "that weird sidecar of a country" identify with that charismatic colossus south of our border.

Much of the darkness in my book -- the focus on suicide bombings, the culture of surveillance, torture at Abu Graib, the decadence of the ultra rich -- was particularly pertinent during the dire Bush years, when all but one or two of the prose poems were written. It would be good to include, near the end of the book, something like this poem, to indicate, perhaps, that a page has been turned. But I believe it will take time to find language and a tack to authentically express my response as an international citizen.

George Elliott Clarke, who was kind enough to write an excellent blurb for my book, said to me the other day, "Politicians campaign in poetry, but they govern in prose." Now that the poetry's done, I feel the opportunity to celebrate the victory has already waned. It seems wisest to wait and see how the prose unfolds.

Wayside Poet Bloggers

Going through my blogroll -- my "Other Worthies" list down at the bottom of my right-hand gutter, many of which I hadn't clicked on since 2006 -- I found a number of poet bloggers who I used to link with quite actively have either cut or dimmed their lights. AJP Liszkiewicz, Ana Bozevic Bowling, Chris Lott, Dallas Marina, Erin Noteboom, Estaban Arrellano, Julie Carter*, and Gail Armstrong are among those who have all closed up shop or lie dormant. Jim Behrle, whose ongoing lampoon of American Pobiz reached splendid comedic highs, now -- is this deadpan joke, or accident? -- redirects us to some sacchrine commercial venture called americanpoetry.biz... Once central stations, poet bloggers who engaged us with a lot of flair, are now neglected way-stations: Nick Carbo, AD Thomas, Anthony Robinson.

Of course, all fun things pass. Has the poetic blogosphere become too crowded? Has the novelty worn off? Have the rigours of cyberslavery worn writers down? Clearly, all or any of the above. While the likes of George Murray, Zach Wells and Collin Kelley continue to blog vivaciously and Silliman ad-infinitum, I sense a growing ennui in po-blogosphere.

Gail Armstrong, in signing off for good, expresses a common sentiment:

I don’t suppose it even needs to be pointed out that my enthusiasm for this weblogging business has near fully waned.

We’ve had a good run but it’s no longer fun. Or useful. And I admit to a certain – perhaps misguided and no doubt ludicrously precocious – nostalgia for a once more intimate web, one with less of a noisy strip joint about it.

Gone, it seems, are those heady early days of freewheeling poetical discourse and debate. Gone the sense of discovery, of breaking frontiers in a new kind of community-building. So why do I keep this blog up? Well, I have a new book coming out that's exciting to post about. (Out of the woodwork, indeed.) I still enjoy the physical act of putting things up -- images, poems, the occasional mini-review. Writing here hones skills, keeps a vital (if diminishing -- let's say, flickering) sense of connection. Occasionally, real connections are made, and I still learn from others here. So I blog...

*I've since learned she blogs from this address. I also learned that her husband just died. I am deeply sorry.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

Gender Question #2 by Jennifer Perrine

This remarkable poem by one Jennifer Perrine just won the Goodreads monthly poetry contest. What an exploration of imaginative flights spurred by language! A poet definitely worth watching...

Gender Question #2: Butch, Femme, Androgynous, or All Over the Map?
by Jennifer Perrine

Marking the small check in the small box,
I think: there is no appropriate answer here,
except perhaps Artichoke, impenetrable, thick-petaled
flower, sharp edge and ragged root. Inside,
velvet opal translucent tongues, and inside,
further still, the choke, silky threads who want
to hold in the heart, to raise a spired fortress
for the tender green. This, though, is not an option,

so I choose, All over the map, all over Barbados,
Siam, Constantinople, all over Ireland and Israel,
all over the sierra of my stomach, down the straits
of my legs, to the archipelago of toes.
Somewhere on the circuit, I stop

to visit whatever terrain bears the name Femme,
some scenic dream atop a mountain or nestled
deep within a delta. I watch tourists teem
around the attractions. I snap some shots, too,
so I'll remember what Femme looks like
once I leave. Perhaps, from there, I'll bike

to Butch, a city that sparkles like hubcaps
spun from a swift machine. Some say that there
the stars are drilled through sheets of obsidian,
pressed like grommets into hides of darkest leather.
If the iron gates to town are barred, I'll fly
first-class to Androgynous, where blades of grass glow
silver, the shade of Joan of Arc's sword,
and the sky at sunset runs red as the rouge
on Bowie's cheeks. The land shifts,
rolls and recedes like the tide, carries me out

and out, to my home, my artichoke home,
my platypus home, my webbed feet
and beak and fur. I trace again my small mark
in my small box, my small window
from which I watch landscapes reach
like frail fingers into space,
into the places we have not named.

Via Jilly et al

1. — A marker with a stanza from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” on the Wallace Stevens Walk —
2. — The book is in its 21st printing here, having sold more than 20000 copies, an extraordinary feat for a poetry collection —
3. A good overview of the history of, and problems with, literary awards.

4. Fewer than 1,000 of the more than 250,000 books published yearly in the U.S. yearly are works in translation from abroad, ultimately contributing to an isolated cultural atmosphere for Americans.

   "Publishers act like a gate keeper for culture, deciding which books make it into print, and so Americans increasingly live in an echo chamber to the blatant exclusion of all else."

Passenger Flight -- First Maquette

The first maquette for Passenger Flight. We sent Signature's graphic artist the book description, a couple of sample poems + some photo images suggesting what I wanted, and presto! I believe he captured the tone of the book. All within 24 hours. Pretty amazing, if you ask me. We might change the font a bit, but the image, I'm quite certain, is a keeper.

Sometimes...

Via Peter Pereira's blog, this lovely poem by Sheenagh Pugh, that, as Peter puts it, seems perfect for the moment we are living in (though it appears the poet has disowned this poem, for various reasons (?)...)

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

© Sheenagh Pugh

Silliman, Seth and the SOQ/Post Avant

Seth Abramson has been railing, here and here, most eloquently if wordily, against Ron Silliman's SoQ/Post Avant binary, which Silliman persists, nilly-willy, to promulgate. Oh how familiar to my ears. Here's my comment (slightly amended) which I left on Seth's most recent post, and which, believe it or not, I put some effort into writing.

Ron Silliman's opposition of SoQ and Post-Avant is patently reductionist and polarized. The likes of Henry Gould and I were pointing this out back in 2005. As I said in that post, where does Poe, who first coined the term SoQ, fit in? Yet Silliman is a juggernaut. I reckon he'll keep on railing against that SoQ strawman regardless of this or any other discussion: he lent us a profoundly deaf ear in the past. For that reason, I only visit Silliman occasionally now. Silliman shares a vast awareness of the *sociology* of poetry, particularly the poetry he is interested in, which for the most part, doesn't do a lot for me. I also appreciate his links lists and astute political observations. But -- he has his axe to grind, and he definitely has something to gain by the likes of you lashing out so verbosely against it. I find it interesting that here at least he links to you, creating (I hope, at long last, he proves me wrong) the disingenuous impression of being "open minded".

My Oh-So-Friendly Alter Ego

A prose poem of mine got published yesterday in Eclectica. This one is also forthcoming in my collection, Passenger Flight, due out in April. The first draft I wrote quite a few years ago -- in fact, I now realize, almost two decades. I revised it just months ago. You can read more about what went into that poem by clicking on my byline.