I have been rereading The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert and reminding myself of what it means to write unselfconsciously. There is so much to say about Jack Gilbert, an award-winning yet underrated American poet who studied and taught at San Francisco State University, as well as in numerous universities abroad, and yet as always it's better to let a writer's words do the work.
Here's one of my favorite Gilbert poems:
TEAR IT DOWN
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into this earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.
~
Off to unlearn the constellations.
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
On Subtlety
Del Ray Cross, San Francisco poet and editor of the online poetry journal Shampoo, came to speak in my class. We were assigned to read his collection Lub Luffly, an amalgamation of site-specific poems, largely inspired by New York School poets such as Frank O'Hara and Bill Berkson. My own interest in poetry has ebbed in flowed over the years; the poems that strike me often do so with a weight that nearly knocks me down. Otherwise, they leave little to no impression. I admire poems that surprise, that carry unexpected weight, that make you gulp. This poem falls into that latter category:
hanashi
by Del Ray Cross
While we talk
I'm not gonna
talk about
me or you.
A new sky
is formed
upon the
words we
don't use.
Two pillows
raised to it,
and a laugh
that starts in
one throat
and ends
in another.
The simplicity of his prose, paired with the short lines and even the poem's slender length, packs a hidden punch. The clear evasion of feeling is exactly what gives it its oompf. I can sympathize; these days I feel the need to swamp my brain with material, to saturate my life with small, manageable tasks that all at once must be creative and practical. But the moments I remember are rarely accomplishments, or even minor victories; instead they are the quiet ones, the innate ones, the shared glances or imperceptible nods. I hope to recapture a similar subtlety in my own writing.
Speaking of subtlety: A moment of shameless self promotion.
My first KALW radio story was played last week. The piece, "Creating Altars for the Day of the Dead," is my interview with Mexican paper artist Herminia Albarran Romero, who taught a series of workshops at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts here in San Francisco.
More to come -- including a piece about local music label and record store Thrillhouse Records.
Maybe, sometime soon these projects and internships and personal explorations will result in a neat little poem, one that starts in the throat and ends on the page.
hanashi
by Del Ray Cross
While we talk
I'm not gonna
talk about
me or you.
A new sky
is formed
upon the
words we
don't use.
Two pillows
raised to it,
and a laugh
that starts in
one throat
and ends
in another.
The simplicity of his prose, paired with the short lines and even the poem's slender length, packs a hidden punch. The clear evasion of feeling is exactly what gives it its oompf. I can sympathize; these days I feel the need to swamp my brain with material, to saturate my life with small, manageable tasks that all at once must be creative and practical. But the moments I remember are rarely accomplishments, or even minor victories; instead they are the quiet ones, the innate ones, the shared glances or imperceptible nods. I hope to recapture a similar subtlety in my own writing.
Speaking of subtlety: A moment of shameless self promotion.
My first KALW radio story was played last week. The piece, "Creating Altars for the Day of the Dead," is my interview with Mexican paper artist Herminia Albarran Romero, who taught a series of workshops at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts here in San Francisco.
More to come -- including a piece about local music label and record store Thrillhouse Records.
Maybe, sometime soon these projects and internships and personal explorations will result in a neat little poem, one that starts in the throat and ends on the page.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Evening*
You already said you
Waited on an ocean for me
Cupped a sonata to your ear
While I let it
Slip away trust me it can’t
Slither too far because when
I run out the end of the dock
You’re still standing on the sand
Somehow stars play chess at night
But honestly it’s just the reflection
Off your glasses when you drive
Me home the car idles
An uneasy guard dog you
Hand me music as it spills out
Your right ventricle you appear one
-sided now and your voice is tinny
How exactly did you prepare
The turkey? Do you still shuffle
Cards in the bathroom line
Do you still use the bathroom
With my toothbrush staring
Starry-toothed into your glasses,
Which I spot from the end of the dock.
Sometimes I need to take my brain off the record player & listen to it skip because every now & then
You pop up you jackinthebox with a trombone
It would be nice if a little jazz every now & then
Could cure this internal beatbox but it’s more than your things I miss it’s the smell of your deodorant on your neck & that pause between conversations when we’ve talked ourselves into the record player it’s right then that you are intimately in you and
I am intimately in me every now & then
Your face gives me pause because it carries more than dimples & glasses they have always shone back other countries & other languages & other everythings where you & I could go together
I’d like to love you the way Frank loves Vincent but I was always more an impressionist than an abstract & the impression of your jackinthebox on the sill
Makes me dizzy sometimes & sometimes that pause
Returns to the back of my neck & you’ve arrived
In time to slow my brain down to a crawl.
Yolanda Says I Can Write Whatever I Want
There is peanut butter on my t-shirt
Of Shakespearean insults.
Yolanda says I can write whatever I want.
So I want to say that Vicente Fox
is an appropriate name for a shivering
A Shakespearean Chihuahua licks
peanut butter out of an egg cup.
I worry why my six speed bicycle
has an imaginary seventh gear,
one I wish could double as a transmogrifier
and turn me into the dog wiggling across
the table from me. Then it wouldn’t matter
that I smell like peanut butter and acrylic,
and that no matter how many times I braid my hair,
it slides out, wild and unruly, like
a shrew that Shakespeare once tamed.
In Memoriam
I.
I saw her last on an album cover
Her life a recipe for Mexican hot chocolate
Pinned up in her best friend’s coffee shop
I found her smile lying face up in the street
Her life a recipe for Mexican hot chocolate
She jumped a train from
I found her smile lying face up in the street
Sometimes she appears in dreams, smiling
She jumped a train from
When she fell I was in the Emergency Room
Sometimes she appears in dreams, smiling
My father later said, “Your body knew.”
When she fell I was in the Emergency Room
Pinned up in her best friend’s coffee shop
My father later said, “Your body knew”
I saw her last on an album cover.
II.
In our family there are many cousins but few girls
I remember admiring her unshaven legs
Every mountain I see smirks like she used to
I thought of her while climbing Cloud’s Rest
I remember admiring her unshaven legs
When she slipped on my waterski
I thought of her while climbing Cloud’s Rest
The
When she slipped on my waterski
Some family law was observed
The
I picture her kneeling in my grandparents’ garden
Some family law was observed
Every mountain I see smirks like she used to
I picture her kneeling in my grandparents’ garden
In our family there are many cousins but few girls
Sri Lanka
Still Life
Somewhere far away a wave
has flicked over cities offhand,
like her father playing cards.
Survivors peer out of the tv
with hollow cheeks.
In drier climates,
her classmates drive tanks,
salute a caricature,
because everybody knows that
all liberty is ransom.
Huevos
Huevos*
There are times when you want
to squeeze the world in an egg cup.
Wouldn’t that be perfect?
You move aside the salt and pepper
and prepare to drain the
It’s not so big.
The sky is grand but the clouds
rein in the sun, shell over yolk.
You can roll the world in your hands,
all color coordinated continents
and chocolate dipped mountains.
You want it to be smooth,
but it crumbles.
You want it to be round,
but it slides across the table:
spilt milk.
The world jiggles, pops, sizzles,
burns, grooves, tingles, aches, longs,
oozes—
messy, perhaps,
but more beautiful this way.
Eggs are better scrambled anyway.
Granada
Autorretrato: a
Bienvenidos
She sees statues on every corner
and sometimes her legs harden,
body frozen on cobblestone
where las viejas sell rosemary nosegays
and young men urinate after dark.
La Extranjera
She keeps bits of home in her cheeks,
rationing off the taste of tofu
so she can last through the winter.
She craves real lettuce,
food with earth still attached.
Mountains hold her in sometimes
when buildings are too tall,
grass so impossible,
shadows so forbidding.
El Cielo
Today there are no clouds.
They have traveled elsewhere,
carrying some part of her along.
We’re alike, she knows,
The clouds and I.
Anglo nomads,
staying long enough to threaten tears,
moving fast enough to catch the sun.
What’s Left Behind
There are no waves here.
No tanks.
Other things flood her:
cigarette oxygen,
hisses of los borrachos,
kisses on both cheeks.
For months afterward,
she’ll structure her sentences
to the rhythm of stiletto heels,
flamenco wails,
Viaje
Eleven Travels
I
On the ferry from
I spotted a pair of eyeglasses
dangling off the platform.
I ran to the deck searching for the rest of the person.
II
I thought it unpatriotic to spell camping with a K
but
of rapidly reproducing bunnies.
III
We reached a desert plateau worn down
by years of gods and their wars.
We rolled down sand dunes into the lap of
IV
On
who didn’t look like me,
sound like me, smell like me.
I preferred the crawdads in the pond
below the willow—
they were in kindergarten too.
V
Heath Shepard skinny-dipped in front of me
(my eyes were closed)
in the moonlight of
He liked me because I outran him.
I liked him because he didn’t mind
not holding my hand.
VI
Sometimes we ran in Lorca’s park.
Words fell with the leaves.
Trees are greener in another language.
VII
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in
I begged my parents to take me to her Big Woods.
“Let’s make popcorn balls instead,” said my mom.
The molasses would have tasted sweeter
in a log cabin.
VIII
Once on the Sacramento River Dad cut the engine.
We drifted to the buzz of riparian radio.
Up between the dreadlock vines of river trees
a colony of egrets swayed—a white cloud.
When I waterski they follow me,
a train of wings.
IX
I’d never seen a dale until
In the woods, we found a small wooden door
carved into the trunk of a tree.
“For fairies,” Mary said.
A little girl stacked sticks nearby
to keep them warm in winter.
X
We biked through a banana plantation
and an angry shepherd threw rocks.
We sang in Hebrew when we found
the
Every Passover I miss that exile.
XI
My first day back in
I found a pair of glasses in my neighbor’s shrub.
I’ve searched but I can’t find the rest of the person.
Bed
My Bed
Without you, it whines.
When you shut the door,
it paws at it.
I yank it by the sheets,
but it hasn’t yet learned to heel.
The longer you’re gone,
the louder it whines.
Under What
In your aunt’s house with her Himalayans
you wander in your new black boxer briefs
I’m in my Ghostbusters undershirt and jockeys,
feeling bohemian because we’re housesitting
in December in our underwear.
Your hand-size bottles of sparkling wine and
champagne adorn the hot tub.
I’m drunk on the sky.
You shower before getting in.
I can hear you singing.
Tomorrow when we’re in your car
you’ll sing Metallica and it’ll be
Terribly romantic.
Put another quarter in the jukebox,
I’ll say, and press on your polo shirt.
We have the room to ourselves,
a big green bed in someone else’s house,
and the blinds are drawn until
the following day.
All your best friends still know you,
and all your best friends’ mothers
secretly wish you were theirs.
You bought me gold.
It’s odd that beauty has weight,
and you like it hung around my neck.
In the hot water you gaze at me celestially,
maybe because your glasses are on the concrete
maybe because I’ve never had sparkling wine
and it tastes so sweet with starlight.
Your hair is against the blackness
and your skin is against the wind.
What happens when feelings are tangible?
I could bake this beauty in the air,
let it cool on the western shore,
watch the aroma waft across the Pacific.
The cat is sleeping on my underwear.
You lassoed the moon.
We’re drinking it together.
Endings are always so much harder to write.
The air is lazy. The stars tuck us in.
We blink; bathe in champagne.
Perfect Day
Our bicycles are ready,
baskets full of peaches,
avocado-cheese sandwiches,
and thermoses of Canned Heat.
We blast Jamiroquai from a radio
generated by my wheels.
We make it to the hills by lunch.
Your glasses—they glint in the sunlight,
and your arms—how well they know
the knots in my back.
We peer out over canyons,
Baby Boomer biker gangs,
migrant farmers selling strawberries.
We pedal to the beach,
where plovers invite us
to stitch in the shoreline with our footprints.
The Gipsy Kings are interrupted by
a radio news flash:
George W. Bush has been lost in Katrina,
an ecological love affair powerful as Monica.
We can hear soldiers retreating
several oceans away—foxtrotting, now,
constructing libraries out of disarmed weapons.
In your glasses I can see it happen backwards:
a Kurt Vonnegut novel,
someone’s lost dream.
Together we eat peaches.
monkey
White Man Dancing
The crazy monkey in your skin
jumps up for attention.
Your biceps bulge,
fever spreads through your freckles,
constellations browning
your shoulders.
You say you don’t dance,
but when you see me here,
Converse staining the pub floor,
you reach for a banana.
Body Map
Thighs
According to Seventeen magazine:
You should present your thighs like filet mignon
in a miniskirt standing under the lamppost
just after
Barbeque sauce would help
if it had less carbs.
Eyes
Who says your soul rents space in your forehead?
Why doesn’t it linger behind your knees
or drive up the interstate of your vertebrae?
Nostrils
Sierra Visher told you in fourth grade
that you had a pancake nose and
it flattened when you laughed.
So you stopped laughing in elementary school.
Sometimes if you flare them in front of the mirror
you can look up your nasal passages
right into your brain.
Your brother will later tell you
that those are just boogers.
Hips
Your hips are Darwinian and luscious.
Get dark red lipstick and a pencil skirt.
Keep all your notes in a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
When you get unwanted attention,
just swing your hips surreptitiously to the side,
and bounce your opponents to the moon.
Ribcage
Oxygen pulls you in and out,
A deflating balloon.
What else do you keep inside?
Phone numbers, candy canes,
Second hand smoke?
Waiting
Waiting
When she thinks,
she opens up her mind with a grapefruit spoon,
slices it into happy triangles of citrus flesh,
then drinks what’s left in the bowl.
When she lives,
she tills the concrete with a John Deere tractor,
unearths fossils from the asphalt world,
scoops up the ash remains, and burns them for fuel.
When she loves,
she picks apart the seam of her hairline,
unzips limbs from fabric patterns of skin and hair,
stands in a field during a sandstorm
to watch as her insides slowly unravel,
waits for her dust to settle on the reddened earth,
waits for a person with a mind like a grapefruit
and a soul like a tractor
to sculpt her into a sandcastle.
For Amy
Ledge
Amy and I joked about eyebrows
in eighth grade because once you noticed one pair,
you saw them all: finely plucked,
fuzz spilling on foreheads,
monobrows like Frida,
usually on boys with glasses.
Suddenly our peers were reduced
to the bridges between their eyes.
Ballerina Amy was the first to date.
Zach would sweep her long red hair
out from under backpack straps, carry her flute,
and furrow his behemoth eyebrows.
I don’t know if Zach was in the room
when Mrs. Weetman read us the news
that final day of ninth grade:
“girl rescued from herself.”
Amy once wrote a poem
paraphrasing a Third Eye Blind song
Why don’t you step back from that ledge my friend
Hers was the first elegy I wrote,
Thursday before Christmas six years later.
The church was full.
I sat in the first pew with my best friends
from junior high and our geography teacher.
The pastor nodded toward us,
our backs as wooden as the seats.
At the podium the light poured
through stained glass.
Standing in the half glow,
I talked to Amy about eyebrows.
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