I Want the Angel

A gap here.

Complaining about the economy has become lucrative for some. Personally I couldn’t accept money for whining. Maybe that’s what happened to Jim Carroll at the end…when all he had were bitter words inside, his advance had run out, and he was ashamed to admit he was too worn and fuddled by the clouds hovering by his desk, by ghosts of himself, by phantom pain of an amputated past that he could no longer translate onto paper.

Some of us wake with what we think is poetry on our tongues and no ink. I heard a not-yet-failed poet last week swearing by longhand. Personally I can scarcely read my own handwriting, especially when it comes with that other voice— the one that frightens me. I have a computer and am glad for any help I get, especially the silent kind. I am glad to use my fingers to ask questions and for that matter, any opportunity not to humiliate myself with a telephone call.

Other things I am thankful for these days:
The absence of excruciating pain, food for the week, sparse but consistent gigs, my bass fingers, books.
Ditto the safe distance of tropical storms, massive brushfires and earthquakes from Manhattan, the depleted coffer of my building preventing crippling renovations; coats draped over rails, the living monotony of day after day.

Things that terrify me:
The ever-hovering possibility of excruciating pain, my postponed terminal diagnosis, the inevitability of losing my words, the shrinking muscle of my former brain, the possibility that a tall man with a slaughterhouse mind will thwack a meat cleaver into my head from behind and I will recall the unbearable brutality of murder. We all fear death-- I mean the killing.

Last week on the C train a man with 2 voices was singing. He couldn’t quite get them to harmonize, but there were two distinct singers inside of him, dragging him through the cars, compelling him to humiliate himself by holding a Mets hat out to riders. I wanted to engage one of them, to see which one had his eyes, but he was not going to look. We gave our dollar, each of us, to the man with two voices. More would have been too much.

For the Morgan Stanley guy, though… with the $1.5 million salary and the $2.3 million bonus— that wasn’t enough. He was hungry. Lewis is getting $98 million and that’s just a bonus. Maybe he is rationalizing to himself, saying ‘the man with two voices still gets a dollar even though the people on the subway have no job.’

I don’t know about all of you, but I was rooting for the balloon boy. When I was young there was Pascal and The Red Balloon. It was terrifying and it was real— in the movies— not a cartoon. I had the book of still photographs and it was proof to me of my inherent stubborn belief in the humanity of objects. Things spoke and felt, things rescued you from the pathetic box of childhood. Things had wings.

That father and his squirmy children, the camera-readiness of their portrait arrangement on the sofa. It was sickening. And yet the police fell for it… they ran and flew for what? The reward money? The fame? Rescuing a child? People flock to the spectacle of child-saving. The metaphoric weight is immense— the personal resonance. What about the typhoon boys and girls in Southeast Asia, the African cleaved and raped? This boy— Falcon— was canonized. As though they’d planned this when they named him. Sickening.

Maybe it's easier to project our own worries onto the ones we invest in our children. Like a mother, I still can’t get the image of Jim Carroll out of my head-- sick and alone with the humiliation of having slightly outlived his own restlessness. The idea that the black balloon comes for us when we are not at our best, and the youtube voyeurs and glommers will stand outside with their cellphone cameras and then watch over and over this sort of killing. For all you control freaks and ultra-theatrics out there… those few Wall Street guys who were firm enough to jump— suicide is maybe the only safe option.

Either way, as JC said...Gravity— just sick for revenge.

Play Offs

I passed this gymnasium today… a court where my son used to play his league games. It was the first summerlike day and basketball had joyously moved outdoors. There were 4 balls scattered on the wooden floor in a way which so completely defined the past tense… and I couldn’t help thinking, with a stab of something like nostalgia or loss… no work of art, no sculptural accident or surrealist act could possibly have conveyed the still and perfect randomness of those balls as they lay.

My neighbor called today and was annoyed at me for suggesting he watch some Indie Swedish film which he found totally worthless. Okay… maybe I was under the spell of the strange language, the dark, cold photography, the sparse, subdued, smoky breaths of dialogue. Had I underestimated his intelligence? Well, I countered, referring to some poet he had recently praised…if you define a poet as someone who is attempting to write poetry…
And there ensued a duel of minds batting back and forth the misshapen ball of mediocrity. Actually, the perfectly formed ball of mediocrity because this is where technology has placed us… in a position of perfect reproduction, straight edges, the pre-drawn, pre-loaded, synthesized, airbrushed landscape of culture. And who is really listening…or watching?

Paper and pen which were treasured by some ancient poets…is near-obsolete. Corrections are automatic, publishing is instantaneous… everyone has a network, a preset audience, an email list. Does it matter if they are too busy putting out to actually listen or read or watch? Everything has been said, written. This, as well. Every teenager has a guitar as well as a car in the garage. Not. But the new poetry might be architecture. At least it requires ‘presence’ to be experienced. For the time being, that is.

I read some work by a South African poet today who is quite acknowledged… and full of metaphor… so full, in fact, that it passed me by. I began to spar with the poet, mentally. Is a shadow really the ‘widow of the light’? Is that not the dark, what is left behind? And he spent so much time setting the scene…describing the landscape, as though none of us readers have eyes or soul or heart or imagination… I grew angry.

Maybe I, too, am a victim of the impatience instant messaging has cultivated. Maybe I am overstimulated and sensorily anesthetized. Maybe we all need to be shot, and then to feel the pain of the wound, in order to explore our own feelings. We are ever-so tolerant of the gruesome violence and gratuitous cruelty we see on even prime-time TV. The odd thing to me is the same audience seems to flock in equal numbers to both the horrific cinematic frightfests and the pathetically scripted Jennifer Anniston/ Reese Witherspoon froth which monopolize chain theatres. At least I stay home and watch Sundance.

I do notice, though, that in the award department, tragedy beats out comedy. How many of our lives are truly marked by 9/11 moments, as opposed to happiness. Besides, that is, the births of our children, which, according to the wise poets, is the sad instant their world becomes intermingled with death.

How is it, I wonder, coming home, still in the spell of the empty basketball court, that these people who live among me can worry about the status of their prams and strollers and fail to feel something for all the starving children? That we must feel guilty if we do not buy the iphone for our kids when animals are being tortured, millions are suffering? And on TV they are asking for money for the polar bears. I can scarcely manage the quarters for my corner panhandler who I notice today is missing another tooth. Does lack of money make me more qualified to empathize, to hate the investment bankers, to ‘dis’ the late Picasso show at Gagosian, to weep over the orphaned elephants and my own failed attempts to communicate all of it?

I do know that I hate more than ever the trapped basketball in the tank of Jeff Koons which always had some perverse sexual and monetary connotation. In a Batmanesque parable of the Gotham City art world, Mr. Koons is some kind of pathetic Joker. The anti-Houdini, the lizardous creature in a tank or a bank vault who conspires to deflate the souls of all those who might give to the polar bears if only they had something to give.

I am thinking also there must be some pop philosopher-- some pensive or laid-off sportscaster somewhere, especially during this season of playoffs, who will never read Writerless, but who has observed ‘I am the basketball on the abandoned court’. Maybe he is even a Swede.

Dead Poet's Society

I have this secret habit. I write poems. Yeah, I know…everybody writes poems. The goddamn bank teller at Chase has self-published. She gave me a copy last summer—it was called “poems in the key of life” (now where have we seen that before?)…no capitals, no punctuation….lines like ‘i wonder if u feel this too’. I told her I was jealous. When the word came out, I was trying desperately to be truthful. So I am jealous. I’m jealous of her perfect little manicured nails when she counts out the bills. I’m maybe jealous of the fact that she is published and I am not.
I’m leaving the bank with this image in my head of a pile of cubed jello on a plate because that is the way I processed ‘jealousy’ when I was like 4 years old and it somewhere sticks to that whacked-up part of my brainmess that compels me to form word-images that I produce as poetry.

Do I read the status-quo stuff? I do. And let me say, Writerless is a little disappointed in a lot of the crap they publish these days under the category. I get the Knopf poem-a-day email in April, National Poetry Month and sure, there are one or two in there that I can admire, but for the most part you figure someone is doing something to someone and pulled off this deal. The poetry editor (in the old days they used to tell us ‘those who can, write; those who can’t…edit’) herself puts out volumes that are of the caliber you might expect from your childrens’ middle-school literary online magazine. The one that doesn’t discriminate, the one with the millennial policy which dictates ‘a page for every child’. At least.

Have I ever submitted the stuff? I admit. Yes. Paris Review. Agni. Atlantic Monthly. Like buying a lottery ticket. They receive 100,000 per year…which averages out to about 500 poems a day for the poor overwrought poetry editor who has her own mediocre poetry to write in her head while she peruses yours and does desk-yoga and texts her boyfriend, edits her grocery list and fantasizes about lunch.

I’ve got a friend, a fairly successful (i.e. ‘employed-as-writing-teacher') poet, who claims that you’ve got to subscribe to the ‘system’…you have to enroll in a university MFA program, network, pay academic dues in the form of tuition and your reward is maybe one piece published in the university literary journal---a poetic ‘foot’ in the door. An iambic or dactylic pass onto the next level… another publication…

I suppose I could lie, use the name of my friend… say I’ve been published years ago, that I’m recovering from an aneurism and have renewed my career which predates online verification, but I refuse. I am resigned to posthumous success at best. At least I won’t be there to receive the rejection letter.

Anyway, I confess I recently applied for a short-term Advanced Poetry Workshop. Although the title confuses, a local fairly decent poet was running this, requiring manuscript submission, a certain level of seriousness, etc. So I printed out, Xeroxed, submitted-in-triplicate. Paid the $10 fee against all personal principles. Actually got accepted, was told that for the privilege of paying $800 I could attend 4 afternoon sessions with this woman and 4 other aspiring poets. So I replied that I was so grateful for the opportunity of having my work read, which was worth $10, but was not in a financial position to come up with $800.

They replied, offered me the chance of a scholarship. 50% off. This converts to $25 an hour, to read probably mediocre poetry written by people who were willing to shell out $800 for an audience. What if I am unable to repress a sneer? What if there is someone in a wheelchair with ALS who is writing their fears and I am coldly ticking off dollars-per-minute regret? So I declined, again.

What am I willing to pay, they now asked me. Could they be desperate? Could it be they lack their quota? But they also assure me there is a huge waiting list. Move on to the waiters, I reply. I am just so sick of begging. I can’t fill out any more forms. The humiliation of being a musician had made this no longer possible. I’d rather play the subway than apply for a grant. I’d rather die with my one brilliant comment from the New York Times and my dysfunctional wasted career.

Besides, I smugly know better than anyone when my poetry sucks and it generally does. One or two can pass the six-month or one-year test, but most of them are pretty mediocre. At least I have the perspective to acknowledge my own mediocrity which is comforting, in a way, because there is always the chance I will break through this designation.

So tonight once again I will sit and struggle with lines and lyrics, I will consult my daily scribbles which I occasionally mistake for literary epiphany, and continue to envy the bank teller not only her nails but the fact that she is proud of her work and generously self-promotes to someone like me who has at most a 3 OR 4-digit account balance. Also I maybe envy the fact that she has something to send her relatives for Christmas because despite my constant gigs and efforts, it has been years since I’ve had any kind of ‘product’.

And if there’s anyone out there reading, I am not going to offer the satisfaction here of a link or an appended poem. You’ll have to wait for the posthumous volume. Unless, of course, I win the poet’s lottery (laureattery?). Incidentally, do any of you know which fine contemporary poet is credited for ‘Gotta be in it to win it’?