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From The Shu Pu  

Because he writes at a certain time, the circumstances either provide harmony or provide discord. The mottled grey pigeon touching down on the tarmac the early sun paints at a slant on the sidewalk either fills the space left for it, or it flies in the seam between what could and what should. When harmony is, writing flowers like a fountain of possible liquid in the park of what is and what has been. When discord is, it leaks away.

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The Lost Wax Method

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Denis Johnson was an American poet and novelist, born in Munich in 1949. His fiction includes Jesus’ Son (which was made into a movie in 1999), Already Dead, Tree of Smoke and, my favorite, Fiskadoro.

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His poetry, too many volumes to list, was (and is) a revelation to me. It was not cultured. It was wild and imaginative and full of figures of a lived life.

So here are a couple of his poems that speak to me as a human and inspire me as a poet. All are in his great collection The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.

As always, my suggestion is to read them aloud and experience the sound and song of the poem, letting anything else rise naturally in the reading.

After Mayakovsky

It's after one. You're probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I'm alarmed by the alarm
clock's iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness's fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you'll never see my face again.

The White Fires of Venus

We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can't tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
"Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethoscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don't know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged."

They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don't know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

The Incognito Lounge

The manager lady of this
apartment dwelling has a face
like a baseball with glasses and pathetically
repeats herself. The man next door
has a dog with a face that talks
of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool
has an empty, empty face.
My neighbor has his underwear on
tonight, standing among the parking spaces
advising his friend never to show
his face around here again.
I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two
eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman
across the court with no face at all.
They’re perfectly visible this evening,
about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,
these questions of happiness
plaguing the world.
My neighbor has sent his child to Utah
to be raised by the relatives of friends.
He’s out on the generous lawn
again, looking like he’s made
out of phosphorus.
The manager lady has just returned
from the nearby graveyard, the last
ceremony for a crushed paramedic.
All day, news helicopters cruised aloft,
going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat.
She pours me some boiled
coffee that tastes like noise,
warning me, once and for all,
to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag
and weep until the stones float away.
How will I ever be able to turn
from the window and feel love for her?—
to see her and stop seeing
this neighborhood, the towns of earth,
these tables at which the saints
sit down to the meal of temptations?
And so on—nap, soup, window,
say a few words into the telephone,
smaller and smaller words.
Some TV or maybe, I don’t know, a brisk
rubber with cards nobody knows
how many there are of.
Couple of miserable gerbils
in a tiny white cage, hysterical
friends rodomontading about goals
as if having them liquefied death.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
over here to explain all these elections:
life. Liberty. Pursuit.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
over here to read my palm,
sit out on the porch here in Arizona
while she touches me.
Last night, some kind
of alarm went off up the street
that nobody responded to.
Small darling, it rang for you.
Everything suffers invisibly,
nothing is possible, in your face.
The center of the world is closed.
The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,
the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.
Only the Incognito Lounge is open.
My neighbor arrives.
They have the television on.
It’s a show about
my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,
walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.
Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion
shaped into residences—and what are the dogs
so sure of that they shout like citizens
driven from their minds in a stadium?
In his fist he holds a note
in his own handwriting,
the same message everyone carries
from place to place in the secret night,
the one that nobody asks you for
when you finally arrive, and the faces
turn to you playing the national anthem
and go blank, that’s
what the show is about, that message.
I was raised up from tiny
childhood in those purple hills,
right slam on the brink of language,
and I claim it’s just as if
you can’t do anything to this moment,
that’s how inextinguishable
it all is. Sunset,
Arizona, everybody waiting
to get arrested, all very
much an honor, I assure you.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
to plead my cause, to get
me off the hook or name
me one good reason.
The air is full of megawatts
and the megawatts are full of silence.
She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.
Here at the center of the world
each wonderful store cherishes
in its mind undeflowerable
mannequins in a pale, electric light.
The parking lot is full,
everyone having the same dream
of shopping and shopping
through an afternoon
that changes like a face.
But these shoppers of America—
carrying their hearts toward the bluffs
of the counters like thoughtless purchases,
walking home under the sea,
standing in a dark house at midnight
before the open refrigerator, completely
transformed in the light…
Every bus ride is like this one,
in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts
de-pantsing a little girl, up front
the woman whose mission is to tell the driver
over and over to shut up.
Maybe you permit yourself to find
it beautiful on this bus as it wafts
like a dirigible toward suburbia
over a continent of saloons,
over the robot desert that now turns
purple and comes slowly through the dust.
This is the moment you’ll seek
the words for over the imitation
and actual wood of successive
tabletops indefatigably,
when you watched a baby child
catch a bee against the tinted glass
and were married to a deep
comprehension and terror.

The Monk's Insomnia

The monastery is quiet; Seconal
drifts down upon it from the moon.
I can see the lights
of the city I came from,
can remember how a boy sets out
like something thrown from the furnace
of a star. In the conflagration of memory
my people sit on green benches in the park,
terrified, evil, broken by love—
to sit with them inside that invisible fire
of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk
billboard crawled across the street
seemed impossible, but how
was it different from here,
where they have one day they play over
and over as if they think
it is our favorite, and we stay
for our natural lives,
a phrase that conjures up the sun’s
dark ash adrift after ten billion years
of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s
schoolgirl obsession with the cheap
doings of TV starlets breaks
everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap
of one particular race of cactus grows
tragic for the fascination in which
it imprisons Brother Toby—I can’t witness
his slavering and relating how it can be changed
into some unprecedented kind of plastic—
and the monastery
refuses to say where it is taking us.
At night we hear the trainers from the base
down there, and see them blotting out the stars,
and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.
It was love that set me on the journey,
love that called me home. But it’s the terror
of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—
that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen
intently to those young men above us
flying in their airplanes in the dark.

The Belief in Baleful Stars

As if the face were of a man

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Letter To A Dead Friend About His Drowning

A calmness has settled
upon your heart.

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We Burn

There are bowls on our
windowsills. Bowls of clear
broth, never boiled or broken—
insoluble domes of oil, a whole
carcass in the pot, slices of
unpeeled ginger, a lemon maybe—

some moments we want to
unzip our hot stomachs onto the
subway floor, or tumble.
hands outstretched, for the third
rail which will allow us to regain
light speed—

steam…

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In addition to the original poems in the collection, I’ll share poems my work is wanting to be in conversation with.

For LD

First dozen. Read them aloud. They don’t exist until you breathe them. The song and sound of them precede all meaning, logic, purpose and intent. Let them sing.

Happy to chit chat about any of them.

Heat BY DENIS JOHNSON

Let Birds BY LINDA GREGG

Song: Sweetest love, I do not go BY JOHN DONNE

Mock Orange BY LOUISE GLÜCK

1 ["Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind"] BY SAPPHO

TRANSLATED BY ANNE CARSON

from the Fifth Villancico  BY SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

The City BY C. P. CAVAFY

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous”] BY TERRANCE HAYES

Heroic Simile BY ROBERT HASS

As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life BY WALT WHITMAN

The Man-Moth BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty BY THOMAS JAMES

The poems from No Whale in Sight begin their release the week of June first. Read about the project here.

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Our teachers! I mean, the teachers I’ve been lucky enough to study under taught me so much more than I’d signed up for. Ralph Angel, David St. John, Robert Hass, Linda Gregg, Marie Howe, Alfred Corn, Mark Doty, Liam Rector. Some taught me with their words, some with their silence. Some with ideas, some with questions.

Lucie was my teacher at Columbia. Anyone who has met her has met a spirit in the flesh.

She created her own quirky textbook and had us order a printing from the copy shop. this was the first page. The whole book was magic, introduced me to so many new poets, poems and ideas.

Dire Wolf

By Lucie Brock-Broido

Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. To you,
I am not speaking anymore. Whom

Shall I address?

Now that you have gotten these things off
Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing

Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared
By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum

Bucket of storm after
A great unlovely silvered thirst. How

Nice for me. In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over

Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of

Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt

Of red. There

Are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear

Of loss. Of loss:
You get to speak of it, once

You are its intimate, and not before; it would be

"Appropriation." But in the great white rendezvous, where

I was brooding Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.

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Perhaps the most famous of Chinese poems, written by Zhang Ji (張繼 Tang Dynasty, 715 to 779). Here is my translation.

Night Mooring at Maple Bridge

The moons sinks, the crows caw, frost fills the sky.
River maples and the fisherman's flares make for a troubled sleep.
Outside Gu-Su City, Cold Mountain Temple,
the tolling of its midnight bell reaches this traveler's boat.

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So, it’s telling that in this prose that I am writing, my first tendency is to reach for a definition of poetry, for my own, for someone else’s (Hass’ lovely ‘a poem is the score written for the symphony of the singular human voice’ is a favorite) or a historical pedigree (something half-remembered about poem and cheetah having the same Indo-European root, something to do with creature or creation). I started thumbing through my old and loved American Heritage Dictionary’s appendix… but then put it aside for later.

The impulse of prose is to haul the goldfish that lives deep in the well up to the surface with whatever bucket-type implement there is at hand. Poetry (creation of the non-prosaic sort) has an impulse to jump into the well.

So often I get asked about a poem’s meaning, and this is certainly indicative of how poetry is taught, viewed, shared and feared. It is a meaning-making game in the eyes of man, a demi-god’s pantomime.

There is something to Hass’ definition that avers the meaning, that puts it in its proper place: the mind of the reader as the poem and its sibilants and consonants, sounding so much like recognizable language, pass simultaneously though the lips and consciousness of the reader. As much as I wish (as a poet) that poetry were a master at words playing with words, the commonest of materials, it is really an act of imaginative reading. A poem does not exist until it passes through the reader’s eyes, lips and mind. The reader creates the poem at the moment of reading, much the way that a musician creates the music from the score he is given.

And it’s clear how taking all of the audience and making them the artists is a real departure from how poetry is so often thought of and talked of, whispered of, feared, explicated and venerated.

One of my favorite ways to talk about this is to point to a favorite word-poem and insist that the poor soul I am ranting at read it aloud (to me if they are so bold, or around the corner if not):

Archaic Torso of Apollo

by Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Most do pretty well through most of the poem, imitating the poet-voice they’ve heard somewhere, in a recording, at school, or from some elder somewhere. But then they get to the very last sentence, the second half of the last line, and in reading it aloud they realize they need to make the meaning before they can utter the sounds. What DOES that line mean? they wonder silently in all of their human curiosity, and they realize, as they take their first tentative step that they don’t know if they chose the path the author intended (Oh! if only Rilke were here to tell us the meaning! they lament).

Ultimately they either use their imaginations to instantly—at the provocation of this string of letters arranged in some particular order—create something, to become the demi-gods themselves… or they view it as a cryptological artifact of some greater existence.

“I, as the poet, as the mind and spirit that arranged the sounds and images and words and lines, cannot ultimately bring the poem to life.”

It has occurred to me that poems are little word-machines that measure the effects as they break across readers’ faces. These days, I am a web worker. My title is User Experience Designer, which is a mealy mouthful. One of the first principles that I learned to hang onto when working at designing the users’ experiences is that it is the user’s experience. I can’t have their experience for them, and that changed my thought process in a way that brought me back to writing poems. The poems I’ve written are unplugged machines until they are read. Often they are read aloud by me, which is something else to talk about, but it is when they are read aloud by others that they really come to life.

And that is a simple fact: that I as the creator, as the poet, as the mind and spirit that arranged the sounds and images and words and lines, cannot ultimately bring the poem to life.

“Where does the poem reside? “

While speech implies presence (even if it is telepresence or time-shifted presence), the written word necessitates absence. And just writing that line brought to mind the question of locus. Where does the poem reside? In the classical and ancient times when there was no writing, or no writing beyond tallies and ledgers, how did poems exist? Or more correctly where did they exist?

It’s much like asking where music exists. In his Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman draws a sharp distinction between painting and music in terms of the singularity of the work. Music is by default plural: even the same musician playing exactly the same notes in exactly the same way doesn’t create a copy of an original that existed in some other time or some other place. A painting is by default singular: even the same painter, painting the same images with the same brushstrokes in the same way ends up with an original and a copy. Certainly action painting, sensitive to that question of locus, worked to undermine the singularity of painting, but the very process ensured that there were multiple originals rather than a plural work of art.

I had the great fortune to study ancient Chinese calligraphy with a visiting professor, Robert E. Harrist, Jr., who was also the guest curator of an exhibit at the Met called the Embodied Image. And it seemed to me almost ridiculous the heights that the Chinese (and then later the western) scholars took the art of calligraphy. It was after all, decoration, right? The art was alongside the calligraphy on the scroll they shared, the poetry was in the language it was writing down again. How could calligraphy as an art stand beside poetry and painting?

Again, those questions about locus. Whose art was this? Whose art was painting even? Or music?

There was an old Chinese grandpa, a retired general from Chaing Kai-Shek’s army, living a quiet life in Taipei when I met him. He’d been educated in a very traditional Chinese sense, with a strong emphasis on writing poetry, practicing calligraphy, reciting philosophy. There were afternoons when he would shut the sliding panel doors of his study, unfurl a blank scroll on his padded table, weighing each corner of it down with a stone polished through repeated human contact. He would grind his little ink stone, mixing in the water, getting the consistency right, inspecting the hairs on his brushes. It was all so rhythmic and beautiful. And such a ritual. I certainly could understand the appeal.

He would sit with his back as straight as when he’d been instructed as a primary schooler in his chair and write out, without much of a pause, a 60 character poem, a famous one, one of his favorites. Almost always the same poem. I could never get the name of the poem or poet out of him, and I certainly couldn’t read his flowing grass script, such were the abbreviations and elisions of the proper characters. But the scrolls, after his 45 minutes of intense writing, were gorgeous. The kind of thing I would have loved to have brought back and put up on my wall, pointed to over a balloon goblet of Malbec at a dinner party with smart friends.

He would let each scroll dry for half an hour or so, sprinkle some cornstarch powder over the top, shake it clean, roll it up and stick it in a cabinet with several score other scrolls (many most likely of the exact same poem). It puzzled me a great deal. Here I was thinking he was trying to perfect the scroll, repeating the same poem again and again.

One day I asked him about it. Why do you keep writing the same poem? All the scrolls are beautiful. Do you expect to get an even more beautiful one some day? I imagined an answer very different than what I got. He said something to the effect of writing out the poem was the best way he knew to experience the poem.

Often I have heard the complaints of the death of poetry, death of reading, of literature, of art. I hear that the audience is too ready to be seduced by (first) the movies, television and (now) the Internet. Too caught up in the material these days to have the patience, skill or inclination to be bothered to take the active and imaginative role as the audience of Art. This is simply bullshit, the nostalgia that always shimmers the air with its searing heat as we look behind us.

There was a time when everyone who mattered in (any particular) society had read the same poems, memorized the same lines, practiced the same forms. It was also true (and nearly always forgotten) that “everyone who mattered” was a very different (much smaller and less inclusive than most of us could stomach these days) group. It makes most of the lamenting seem to be from those who have some vested interest in the canon, since it is the canon that has died, been overrun and outmatched by the unprecedented abundance of poems, poets, forms, voices, intentions and types of art. More people, and a larger percentage of people, read and write poems (in all their forms) than at any other time in our history. There are more books of any sort and more readers, reading more, more styles. There are works of poetry or fiction, rap lyrics, folk lyrics, thrash and post-punk lyrics, multi-media, multi-dimension performance poems that break into the space of the everyday, in invisible ways and in very, very visible ways.

And those that complain about any type of creation as being smug, or high fallutin’ or opaque are simply reading the wrong poems for them at that moment, and those who complain about any type of creation as being base, or stupid, or lowbrow, or commercial are simply reading the wrong poems for them at that moment. Or perhaps it’s not the poems that they are really concerned with at all. I know that I, as my high school self, complained about Dickinson as being “so blah” and “so opaque (I felt powerful just wielding that word of revolution, of refusal, of usurpation as a mere 16 years old!), and I believed it at the time.

Some poets and poems concern themselves with extending the canvas, some with adding contour and shading.

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the book

This is my premier poetry collection, 52 poems in total, with some appearing in Graffit Rag, the diagram, Hinchas de Poesia and Mantis.

1. Why a series instead of just an e-book?

Good question. Mostly because it makes the whole thing a bit more fun. Letting the poems speak to each other is also a reason. Letting them speak to the moment is another.

2. When does it start and what if you join late?

The week of June 1 is when we will start. Each week for 52 weeks, a new original poem from the collection will be released here on Substack. Some of them will include audio versions as well. Also, 2 or 3 times a month, I’ll write up some notes to introduce you to poems and poets who’ve influenced me. Think ancient Chinese Tang poetry, poets like Thomas James and John Berryman, poems about cats from an asylum, haiku, you know, good stuff!

If you join after we’ve started, no worries, you get access to all the previously release poems and notes and will get updates for the new ones when they are released.

3. Do I have to be a paid subscriber?

• If you want to subscribe for free, you will get one original poem a month.

• If you do subscribe for $5/month you get:

  • an original poem every week (some with audio)

  • notes introducing you to other poets and poems 2 or 3 times a week (some with audio)

  • at the end of the series (52 weeks in a year), you’ll get a copy of the e-Book

• If you want to become a founding member, you get all that plus a print copy mailed to you at the end of the series.

Whichever works for you, I’m happy you’re here