…Them Poets, They…
“99% of American poets don’t
really exist, they are androids
manufactured from Randall
Jarrell by the lost-wax process.”
¾ Kenneth Rexroth
judged
suspect from the get-go : the weaponry flashes : assault rifles, handguns,
grenades, flame throwers : separate index cards housed in a blue Chinese box :
stacks of loose-leaf paper alongside an array of sharpened pencils : bottles of
dark beer, a steak marbled on the counter : a chipped egg cup & a gravy
bowl with busted feet : cleaning products & cutlery that begin to levitate
: a white porcelain ashtray containing several severed pink fingers : here
exists the condition(al) of besidedness, a grammatical state of adjacency : a
psalm, perhaps a dialogue : doors open&shut, open&shut for no apparent
reason : dogs bark in the background : do you hear the sirens? : someone starts
to applaud, who? : it’s the hour of the meat wagon : the poet appears
momentarily then dissolves : a voice shouts, put down your gun : who are all
these people standing naked in the windows, cheering? : ever wonder, why
choose poetry & not a life of crime? : hey, it’s late, uncork the wine! :
along with the faint aromas of sex & phenobarbital it’s a miracle a poem
manages to enter the world at all : worth less than a handful of salted
peanuts, the single wish? to be neither strange nor mad nor dead : then, what?
: R________’s network of stoppages is anti-epic, it enacts an economy of
perambulation & coincidence : M_______’s ambition was to create a language
of absence rather than presence : poems wearing torn clothes so their buttery
knees show through, faces shattered by grief : labeled bisexual, repressed,
torn, confused, latently homophobic or simply so complex as to resist easy
description : jazz-weary after years of drums & Hawaiian guitar : plagued
with an excess of musicality along with a determinedly inharmonious line : (a
lot of found language here, gathered & rearranged, not all of it pretty,
not much on the soundtrack, still, even haphazardly, one tries to extract
meaning) : cool your jets, pal, learn to think in stitches, in loose threads of
hilarity : (not wanting to go all “cheap romantic sentimental novel” on you,
but…) : the poet appearing with pants dropped, sporting sunglasses & a hat,
posed beside a mongrel dog with a broken coat, pleads the fifth : when asked,
“do you write your own poems?” replies, “not if I can help it, friend” : goes
down, goes down hard, taken out at the shins by a harsh sentence amid a hail of
vitriolic trash-talk & angry bullets
Locked & Loaded
…armed
with a post-punk Dorothy Parkerish kit of weapons: arched eyebrow barbs,
pierced tongue, nervy catchy hooks of pop-conscious metaphor & double
meanings stitched in light-handedly, madder than shirttails (in general prefers
the flat rhetoric of the machine to that of expression) more articulate &
pink in that grey marble, at corners, dressed or naked, w/lips the taste of
almonds, zap! pow! a cowpoke, say, or
middle eastern deity, or ethnic profile toy soldier, whose blood ignites &
disperses before the sun & after feeding, dark shape of the moth w/wings
pulled back, an inclination to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic,
trivial, debased or aberrant, the horror
vacui of fictive farce —
n.b: includes two memorable & controversial sex scenes, a touching one
between Janet & a teenage earth female & (funny strange how these alien
abductions always take place in some remote underpopulated rural setting,
though we love it when women are at the pivotal centres of such several
romantic Dystopias) —
motley sketch of everything that has never been believed, where everything
authentic is outré (the telephone doesn’t ring, the mailbox is empty) like
trying to spackle the walls w/bandages of light, the difference between
sleeping w/pills & sleeping w/o them, each of us an O, each of us made of welded chrome (notice never do the lovers
actually kiss, they) you believe it can’t get worse but it does get worse,
countering your scary Guatemalan death-squad burnt angel bugaboo, in any case,
the random coil of memory, the heat, the scent of ripe peaches on trees growing
in a ditch (it is thrilling to be in this waste & destruction &
re-creation, i.e.: …stream of consciousness, hallucinations, the speed of seeing, the seamless jumps, the
echoes…((that this form has a tradition other than the one proposed, Wittgenstein,
etc. [or do you think you can communicate telepathically?])) the riprap of
things, a field of rippling meat, or how the head pronoun (wearing soft
bedclothes & w/burned eyes) was forced to gather tongues from the enemy
contestants in a golden chalice, a suspicious religious suburb
copycat-killer-type complete w/comical goose-step & metal hook, ha! (like a blouse, the most elegant
crimes are left undone) there is [as Kafka said] hope, but not for us, machines —
like orgasms —
are inconsolable things (…set up the doors thereof & the locks thereof
& the bars thereof & the squibs thereof…) I remain stormy in my
paradise, the ring of O dwindles
sizzling around the hole until it’s vanished…
Untitled
Dear ________: don’t (please) be annoyed at
these digressions
the truth is that pure poetry bores everybody
I’ve begun w/o stopping maybe lurching &
poorly fitting
often accompanied by drawings & doodles
the cat & the animals, the bird taken from
behind the radiator
(—
wow! such a small coffin! —)
& blood, a rope of flowers
jittery burned language
every few inches some sewing composed of dark
blue thread
what chambers, what cavalcades engraved
some are camouflaged, seems
the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain
I mean, aren’t oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum,
or
reach, touch, be drawn through the
what passes for what in the street anymore
besides pure architecture
is clear, the pederasts have all come home to
roost
shiny vinyl instruments that probe &
stretch
outside the window a curious woman in the
station door
has a red bandana on her head, lovely but
dangerous
her tongue from previous ecstasy // releases
thoughts like little hats
** late breaking news: experts now say we will
all die
long before we perish from climate change, well…
the dried grasses, fruits of the winter — gosh! everything is trash!
young boys are dying in Mexico who did not get the word
[please send for our complete catalogue]
yakkety-yakking screaming vomiting whispering facts & memories
my body my alcohol my pain my death are only the perfect word
as I tell it to you:
only a little more fictional
Dear ________: the ink is still wet, feel free to go ahead, publish
anyway, will forward title at a later date, you know me,
yrs, truly, & ETC…
erasure: delible (chapter 2)
for Anne Stone
a difference between dirty & untidy
a girl’s room then, now a curated space
the faint odour of bleach
something about the arrangement being too casual
the wildflowers bought from a florist
the concert T-shirt since gone grey from laundering
…Sex Pistols, The Vibrators, Violent Femmes…
by the girl’s bed, a heart-shaped frame
in it, an American cliché of a man
handsome, yes, & thoroughly innocuous
a kind-looking stranger provided by Sears
pressed into the mirror’s edge, the image of a girl
looking at this newest image (the age, ah, of enhancement)
it too tells a story, two years after her disappearance
she is the girl in a colour emulsion who wears
a pair of pearl earrings & what must be
a private school blazer, its emblem sadly faded
the imperfect girl, the real girl
in a parallel universe, the ersatz world of images
how does a girl vanish? the door closed
the window screen perfectly placed
in the yard a thorny tree, branches unruly & overlong
its frenzied bursts of blooming & shedding
that seasons flicker past
it’s a bad spot you’re in, someone says, a boy
the line of the cheek, the expanse of forehead, the ridge of the nose
(the rest resides in shadow)
a bad spot
a teenage girl rides into the yard on a bicycle
the girl begins to sob, it almost feels good, she says
the sobs so hard they wrench her body
you stare at the back of the girl’s head, wondering
if your eyes are even open
Philosophy
“The body is our general medium for
having
a world.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I walked with Merleau-Ponty by the lake
our single purpose was to walk through snow
touch the radiation of the visible
suspicious of strangers, distrustful of innovations
all language fell like Chinese on his soul
he spoke the way one yawns
more beautiful & soft than any mouth
wherefore the presence of humans
makes the existence of things interesting?
savage girls kept naked in the cabin, say
say the bomb slipt lightly from its rack
say at night the dump was lovely
…nothing speaks for the blue moraines
excepting, say…
which one of us has never killed an albatross
before?
because I’m now older than Shakespeare & a
cipher
all we want is a limousine & a ticket to
the peepshow
dirty postcards & words, words, words all
over
everything
fumbling about the nightmare knees of a pink
hippopotamus
who go to the theatre, where,
a black man dressed in top
hat & cane
dances like an
eel
I, Delmore
in a convulsive space among the voices
voiceless
a wind of evil flung my despair of ease
cracks in the buildings filled with battered
moonlight
the nightmare begins over there right there
amid these trees I invented which are not trees
I am
the circumstance nails it : it’s a no
go
the country cot & a pot of pink geraniums
I am tired of breathing this eroded air
fear of the post-modernist practice, fear
of anything remotely felt (suspected) to be
intellectual
in dreams begin
responsibilities
shadowy shapes flicker the wailing wall
angels & Platonists shall judge the dog
oh, yes, I have also heard the mermaids
singing,
each to each have also heard
who had to learn the simplest things last
I am an archeologist of mourning
call me Ishmael
Stan Rogal: I
live and write in Toronto. Work has appeared in numerous magazines and
anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. The author of 26 books: 7 novels, 7
story, 12 poetry, plus a handful of chapbooks. I'm left-handed and have never
owned a cell phone, putting me among the elite 8% of North Americans.