J’ai Tant Rêvé de Toi

"I Have Dreamed Of You So Much" from Emma Vakarelova on Vimeo.

This is an animation of a poem by the surrealist Robert Desnos. If you don't know about him, look him up!

Monday Haiku for J

i do not know how

but i need to stop hoping

that he will come back

Elimination Dance Orlando

Elimination Dance Orlando
After Michael Ondaatje

Men who drag their feet

Men in tight jeans who wear pointy dress shoes and carry laptops in heavy messenger bags

Men who spit in public

Men sipping cans of soda gingerly through drinking straws

Men with Puka shell necklaces tight at their throats

Big men walking little dogs

Guys who sit in the booth beside their dinner companions

Men with unkempt beards who wear pajama bottoms out of the house

Men who confess that they're smitten

~ ~

Delivery boys tucking their Polos into belted khaki shorts

Men who go barefoot in the rain

Men who have winked at me

~ ~

Men smoking cigars with grins on their faces

Young men who've never heard of the Bauhaus

Men with very thin arms

Guys in flip-flops with little hempen anklets

Men seductively licking chocolate chip ice cream cones

Men loudly clearing their throats

Men who are running because they are (apparently) very late for an appointment

Men bearing bottles of gin

This guy. With the devil in his eyes

Our Town

The show I am co-directing this summer is an outdoor production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that will be performed in two separate location in Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery. This commercial will be running in local Central Virginia markets:

Much of my own thinking about the show has been informed by the letters of Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, and Alice Toklas. Reading about the history of their friendship has changed much about how I've thought about the relationships in Our Town. I've also been reading Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods and, of course, Seneca. It is hard, now that I've read almost all of Proust's À la Recherche to avoid relating things to Proust or through Proust. So much of this has informed my ideas about the show. It seems sort of obvious that I also spend a lot of time thinking about Wilder's other work, particularly his short plays The Wreck on the Five-twenty-five, The Long Christmas Dinner, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and The Angel that Troubled the Waters.


I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the show here, since it is so much in my thoughts.

At one point, the stage manager refers to the fact that the only thing we still have from ancient Babylon are wheat contracts and contracts for the sale of slaves. Every time I hear it, this mention of wheat contracts makes me think of a poem by Jack Gilbert called “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not a language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

And stars. Stars come up so much in Our Town. At the cemetery, certainly, the stage manager and many of the dead speak about the stars, but all through the play the stars are singled out for mention by Wilder. I told the cast during a meeting that because the stars are our ancestors perhaps we are all just little pieces of star, and that maybe this gets mentioned so often as a way for Wilder to link us all to a larger history that exists before humanity itself. In the Consolation to Helvia 8.6, Seneca offers us the following thought in relation to his exile from Rome to the island of Corsica:  

So long as I may observe so many stars gleaming through the night – some fixed, others not voyaging forth over a great distance but circling around their own given area, some suddenly bursting forth, others dazzling our eyes with spreading fire as if they were falling, or flying by with a long trail of brilliant light; so long as I may commune with these and, so far as a human can, mingle with things divine, and so long as I may keep my mind always striving to contemplate the kindred objects on high – what difference does it make to me what ground I tread.

I love this thought, And here is an additional one, from a poem by Mary Oliver called "Stars":

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind

roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.

Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos—

even the distant night bird

as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent—

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit—

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

And lastly, in the play itself Wilder refers to Edgar Lee Masters' poem "Lucinda Matlock" from the Spoon River Anthology. His poem is also worth reading because it seems to me to encompass the whole play:

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.

We were married and lived together for seventy years,

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed—

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,

And passed to a sweet repose.

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you—

It takes life to love Life.

From Cities of the Plain

Some beautiful stuff from chapter one of Sodome et Gomorrhe:

Even when one is no longer interested in things, it is still something to have been interested in them; because it was always for reasons which other people did not grasp. The memory of those sentiments is, we feel, to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to study it. You mustn’t laugh at this idealistic jargon, what I mean to say is that I have been very fond of life and very fond of art. Very well! Now that I am a little too weary to live with other people, those old sentiments, so personal and individual, that I felt in the past, seem to me—it is the mania of all collectors—very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one ever so many love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing. And of this collection, to which I am now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his library, but still without any keen regret, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.

I loved Swann very much in the first volume of À la Recherche, but I think, perhaps, I love him even more in this one.

The Pillow of Kantan

While I eat dinner every night I have been slowly reading through Royall Tyler's delightful collection Japanese Nō Dramas. I started reading this last term while I was teaching Nō theatre, and have continued reading, though the term has ended and I should probably be reading other things. Still, I find these plays beautiful, and it is nice to spend just a little time each day with their poetry.

Tonight I sat down to a play called Kantan, probably written by Zeami's son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku, and I was rewarded with the following lovely passage:

I had thought it night
yet day has dawned;
had thought day risen,
yet the moon is bright.
With spring flowers blooming on the bough,
autumn leaves father their deep hues.
Ah, here is summer!
No, for snow is falling.
So the seasons turn before my eyes.
spring and summer, autumn, winter;
trees and grasses bloom within a day.
How beautiful, how wondrous a sight!
So time passes and the years slip by
so time passes and the years slip by,
till fifty years of glory reach an end,
and melt away to nothing. They are gone,
for all these things happened in a dream.

This Should Not Remind Anyone of John Mayer

As usual, my friend Gregory Sherl is busy writing good poems. This has been out on the internet for a couple of months, but I am revisiting it today. Queer poetry from my (mostly) heterosexual friend. I love this poem.

Daughter

The lock goes on the outside. The window doesn’t exist.
Boys are some motherfuckers. Teach her the subtleness
of never leaving the house, the necessity of cats.
How do we tell her that boys don’t purr
without a pointing cock without saying Boys don’t purr
without a pointing cock? Pick out every boy worth fucking
& tell her what pulses inside them. Open a broken oven,
say This this this is what pulses inside them.
Plug the oven in & have her watch it still not work.
If she falls in love with a girl, throw a party. All of our hairs
can be short, our heritages secured in ourselves.
If I’m not around when she gets that look, make sure hers
isn’t for one who breathes over the page instead of into the bed.
What a waste. Tell her that jellyfish are everywhere & that whales
have legs. It’s okay that sometimes only sleeping makes sense.
She should know that sharks never think about us.
Tell her every John Cusack movie is based on a true story.
Highlight the lips of those who said I was the bravest man scared
of the dark. Tell her how I kept my masculinity
in a crowded basement.

What Is This?

Oh, it's nothing. Just a link to some good poetry. When I Wrote It Down, I Wrote It Down Dirty by Jameson Fitzpatrick (and you can click a link to hear the poem read by Alex Dimitrov).

The Dark

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
By Linda Pastan

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

Love Poem

My friend Michael shared this on tumblr a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to loosen its grip on me, so I thought I would (re)share it on here.

LOVE POEM
by Linda Pastan

I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other



Yes.

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while. I am trying to keep this head above water in whatever way possible. Soon.

About Last Night.

I know I've been talking about my friend Greg a lot lately on this blog. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago for my series of interviews on art (more of those to come soon, I promise!).

But, I recently got his chapbook Last Night Was Worth Talking About.

And it is so good. I think I might like it even better than his book Heavy Petting. The work in it is really marvelous. For example, the book contains a poem called "Poem as Happy Hour" which begins:

This poem yells I have met so many people
I will never love. Slosh slosh slosh. Can you
taste the alcohol in this poem? It's darker
than well water, sweeter than the sprinkler
planted between your thighs. This poem
whispers Life needs to wash behind its neck.

Greg's poems know they're poems, and the poems – before they've even grown into poems yet – talk to him and he writes down what they say. Greg doesn't just write down the poems, though. He writes down the fact that they talk to him. He is not the first to do this, of course, but the work is original and fascinating.

And the poems are filled with love and longing, too. Take his poem "Things My Girlfriend Says to Me", which ends:

I have a hard time writing poems that don't mention her hair,
so let me just get it out: her bangs fall like Spanish moss.
This is a good thing.

The other day I was reading Greg's new chapbook in public and a guy I had just met that day asked me if he could read what I was reading. I passed him Last Night Was Worth Talking About and my new friend told me that he once tried to write poetry. It was no good, he told me. I rhymed too much. Yeah, I said. Greg doesn't worry about rhyming. Instead, he repeats phrases. Ideas return insistently back to the eye, as though he isn't done with them or as though they are not done with the reader. It is a kind of rhyme that isn't rhyme at all, of course.

Okay, one last bit. This is from a poem titled "You Will Regret Coming Back the Most":

There are a thousand people in me. I had a couple of hours
to spare so I took off my pants & counted. I used a calculator
because I only have ten fingers, ten toes, one belly button.
These thousand of me, they don't smell the same but they eat
the same strawberry Pop Tarts. They all hate reality television.
The thousand of me stare at their hands when we think about lighting
a cigarette. Off topic: I build a time machine for my recently built
time machine. My second time machine takes my first time machine
back to when I thought about making a time machine outside
of a lemonade stand I never built. I carried my time machine home—
it sat happily in my garage. Today you are always here.
................................................
There are too many unnecessary things in life:
a thousand of me, million dollar homes, Big Gulp sodas, herpes.
I take my time machine back to the first time I realized girls
were worth looking at. I wait for them to tell me
how handsome I am. I wait & I wait & then I am growing so old
I forget what I am waiting for.

You can check out Last Night Was Worth Talking About here at the NAP website.

Loving This Song

Somebody wishing on a shooting star
Shooting star streamin' 'cross the sky
Y'know it's just a meteorite

People throwing pennies in a wishing well
Wishing well's gonna run dry
But I ain't gonna leave you tonight

Everybody talking 'bout changing the world
World ain't ever gonna change
But you can always change in front of me

I'll shuck all the oysters and you can keep the pearls
I do my shuckin' and my jivin' for free
Free
Like walkin' down the beach at night

Throw a bunch of lines out to the one you want
'Til you get it right
Sometimes you don't
Get it right
Sometimes you won't
Get it right

But when you do
It's outta sight

Sometimes you do
Get it right

Whitman Whednesday

Starting from Paumanok - §19

O Camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph—and you shall also;
O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.

(I love it when he talks sexy.)

Whitman Whednesday

Starting from Paumanok

§9
What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son—listen America, daughter or son,
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.

§12
...
I will make the true poem of riches,
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other,
And sexual organs and acts! so you concentrate in me, for I am determin'd to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days.
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul.
Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.

§13
Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.
All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
How can the real body ever die and be buried?
...
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!

§15
With me firm holding, yet haste, haste on.

For your life adhere to me,
(I have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

Whitman Whednesday

For Him I Sing

For him I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)
With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.

When I Read the Book

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Whitman Whednesday

Two today.

To Foreign Lands

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.


To a Historian

You who celebrate bygones,
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself,
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests,
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.

Two Walks

Overwhelmed by work, the writing the reading the studying – all about violence, prison, torture.
Images of mutilated bodies of genocide, invading my dreams, even.

Away from my desk and its bright screen with its tiny letters and big blank spaces I gulp in air.
Big full breaths, as though I have forgotten how to inhale.
Or as if, actually, I've been indoors all day at my keyboard reading and writing about prison-rape.

And I walk around this silly man-made lake in the middle of town and keep breathing.
I am aware, of course, of my breath as I walk. In. Deep in the lungs.
To the bottom. And out again. Walking.

And I am aware, of course, of my walking. Hyper-aware, actually. How
Is my posture? Are my hips sinking? Is my back aligned? How is my neck?
Do I feel my feet as they touch the sidewalk, even in these trackers? Does my breath have a rhythm?

Finding my center, locating alignment, will, I know, enrich this walk,
Allow me to calm down quickly. Worry less. And it does.

Back to a time I hardly remember. Walking to church.
Walking to school. My walk the subject of much consideration
By my parents and other adults, the cause
Of much anxiety for my eight-year-old-or-whatever self.

Hands at sides. Straighten up. Don't swish. Keep your eyes forward. I
Perfected that walk as carefully and methodically as I could.
It was never quite right, of course. But I approximated the something at which I aimed, anyway.

The art of walking.

I keep walking. High on my hip sockets, not thinking about swishing one bit.
And I look down and I'm – surprise – wearing a pink tee-shirt. Femininity not
A concern of mine these days.

And as the muscled twentysomething runs by and looks just a tad longer than normal
I smile at him broadly. And breathe in again.

Whitman Whednesday

Proud Music of the Storm - §6

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk's flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies,
Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,
But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

Whitman Whednesday

Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it is so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

Leaning

One of the things I miss without you is a kind of attuning.

Before, even though we were far away, 

you were attuned to me.

I felt your presence throughout the day, 

not just in the small messages I'd receive as the day progressed 

("Hope your day is the greatest!") 

but something else, 

a feeling of knowing you were there behind me, 

the way you walked up that night 

after we drank wine in that field under the tiki torch – 

I knew you were there, 

felt you on the wind long before you materialized to put your hand in mine.

Losing you has been tangible to me, 

though you may pretend there is no loss, 

that this now is no different from that then, 

because I know the difference between now

and the way you used to bend your thought toward me 

even when we did not speak, 

even as we both existed in our separate busynesses of the day.

I miss the way you could talk to someone else in a crowd 

while all your energy was directed, palpably, toward me.

It is this feeling of loss that makes me the saddest. 

I sense not that you are gone, but that I am gone for you, 

that you do not lean toward me across the distance

the way you used to.

So: mourning for you, for loss, for myself, all of the above. I do. 

And I am awash with self-pity. Why not? And 

I am not speaking, either, about love, although falling for you was a true pleasure. 

I mean, instead, to speak around something I have 

never been able to articulate when it comes to you 

and your presence in my life. Call it magic or spirituality – 

the physical sensation of connecting as we did. 

And now I must relearn that connection as something other 

than I thought it was, As something 

more subject to the space between us 

than I had imagined it before.

—This is from 29 August 2011