Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Aaron Lowinger's "Bills Fan"

So the Eagles are in the playoffs again, and that makes me tired. But after hearing Aaron Lowinger's poem "Bills Fan" - which I nominate as the greatest poem ever about football - I figure, okay, okay, I'll go to the bar and watch the goddamn game.

Here's Aaron reading "Bills Fan":



Back in September Aaron gave an incredible reading of dense, rolling poems here in Philly at the Chapterhouse . He read from his chapbook guide to weeds, which he made with his wife, Becky Moda, who did the illustrations for each weed (they also sang a folk song together). We've got a recording of it and will have it up on the Chapterhouse site soon.

For more of Aaron Lowinger's poems, go here and here.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Ted Greenwald's Common Sense


Back in March one early morning during the cold, cold week Temple University calls Spring Break my doorbell rang for, I think, the first time since I’d moved in four months before. We just call each other now, right? “Yo, I’m here, come let me in.” Anyway, it was a delivery. Ted Greenwald’s Common Sense (1978), which I’d ordered from Small Press Distribution after listening to some of his poems on PennSound (esp. “Whiff” from 1979) and reading a selection on EPC. I opened the package and opened the book and read for maybe an hour. Stayed up, starting writing a poem, then returned to the book and read some more. The poems kept me up. I didn’t go back to bed when all else was telling me nothing’s worth getting up for. I was hibernating, depressed. It’s hard to believe I got up in the first place.

HUMAN EVENTS

I
picked up
a shovel

and started
digging

pretty soon
I was
in china

and started
walking

I’ve been reading this book all year. I’ll read parts of it several times a week and try to carry its rhythms with me throughout the day. In a letter I wrote Greenwald recently (he doesn’t have email; maybe he listens for the doorbell), I tried to articulate what I like about Common Sense: it’s how the poems unfold from line to line (as if the poem were folded up in the beginning, in the title) and the depiction of a world of fluid objects. That’s what I told him. There’s always a transformation of object or image that pushes the poem, that makes the rhythm. One word leads to another, and the words themselves seem like live objects. (I think some people call that “materiality.”) That’s the sense of the poetry, perhaps. Sometimes the transformation happens through repetition, sometimes rhyme or word association, sometimes narrative. (The book is actually a selection of Greenwald’s first 10 books, I think, which explains the variation in style and its length [195 pages]). Here’s a few:



THE PIANO SHIVERS

the piano shivers
someone’s singing through
the radio through
shrugged shoulders
his tongue rolling over black keys
each note like a bone
added one by one to a skeleton
the sky, flesh, brings
the beast back to life
it walks upright
snacking on hedges
low-hanging twigs
low flying planes
the song lands at three points



SATURDAY NIGHT

Martha wears a mu-mu
and Ellen has a boo-boo
Bill has a beautiful b-b
and Morris has everything

Turk has a cigarette
and Michael has Ellen
Zeke has a bandanna
and Martha loves it

Louise has a thought
and Martha’s in it
Zeke has Louise handy
and Bill plays blues

Martha Ellen Bill Morris Turk
Zeke Michael and Louise


FOOD CYCLE

clean glass
dark park and buildings
part night
lights clear
and then I look in
to find my weariness
I wear my work and its dust
over my body
passing into a wonderful darkness
on the other side
morning wakes
it is not late it is just right
I wash and shave
smoke a cigarette
have some coffee
my body wakes up
that was a long time ago
my body wakes up
tired
frazzled
snow
snow turning to rain


In many of the poems the human body is fused with other objects in the cityscape. There’s often an expression of odd, slightly surprised detachment from the self, who is found again and again situated in or linked to a part of the world just now observed. I come away with a sense of human clumsiness, which contrasts with the fluidity. I’m made aware of my own objecthood, physicality and fragility, while my focus on the movement around me is heightened. Neither the thing nor the word right in front of me is overlooked or ignored; rather, it determines what follows, and the effect is a kind of motion I’ve always been after in my own writing. The tone of these poems alternates between a “seamless fatigue”, a phrase I take from the following poem, and a “wonderful darkness” that leaves me feeling “the world wide and awake around me.”


RESTLESS

scanning the outer world
with my senses the inner world
bumps against a tree in a park
filled with strollers after rain after hot morning
with a large dog pissing against the bark
a wind so it seems
hot from all the activity
is arriving in a car circling the block’s blood
for the millionth time (it happens so fast)
looking to park and does across from a store
crowded with shoppers entering and leaving
the revolving door revolving charges
plates and kids clutched in the hand in the pocket in the bag
my ear (left) is bumping into a radio
that moves rapidly past in the hand of a stroller
while the other ear barges through two couples
dressed up and looking down the street discussing where to eat
my feet ache from a long walk in the rain and are wet
sogging my legs as my heart coughs through its hangover
a little faster than the cigarette I puff
windows
windows
street-crossers
sidewalk movers-over
a slowing down, all,
to catch up with the hotter parts of nerves
a seamless fatigue
tailored to the city like a flush
a seeing of brain upon the gates
doors and windows open and close to exits and entrances
light travels
shade cools
sound carries
animal vegetable mineral
here and there are heroes and villains


In longer poems small narratives evaporate while the trace of them—their sound (the exhaust, you might say) form the next part of the music. This is most evident in the 26-page poem “The Life.” Below are the first five stanzas and then a few more stanzas that appear a few pages further into the poem.

a boring moment
I pick up a book of poems written by boring poets
the poems aren’t good they aren’t bad

they get jobs
they get wives and children raise families
they write poems
they live interesting lives

I’m getting pissed off
pissed off
I pick up a pen and start to write
I take a break
burn most of my old poems
throw out letters
dump boxes of papers
I get back to work
there are poems and poems

there are limits to what I can put up with
there are those make me want to puke over my shoulder

night steals into afternoon
and mugs one
formal like a dress, the coming of winter
what trees there are
lose leaves and gain edge
while I get my winter nerves
something weird’s going on in my left shoulder
like a crazy parakeet
banging against bars of muscles and bone
whims drive cars into the garage of the blood
there are rush-hours and images of sadness
making the nose flute
there are beer senses searching for a rug to be snug in
the hand turns to winter
and raises a landscape to the nose
and the nose knows

. . . .

isn’t it strange how ambition
takes on a high and bright language
almost rushing into a play with murders
as it crosses the mind like a roach crossing the wall
it’s something I have
like
an
apartment
and something I admire in others even if
I feel misdirected the energy is terrific
and soothes and rubs like a towel after someone’s bathed
it’s the difference between indifference
loosening furry bonds chomping on the brain
as someone, pressed, says
I’ve lost my train why can’t you be more realistic
and that’s what I am
only I’m making everything up from scratch
and can hear even the tiniest feet strolling along white flat

bundling noises enter my ear
and release a catch to many synapses
something is starting to take place,
I want to tell you, don’t you think you should ask
I’m running out the door
running out of things to say
“stay awhile” I thought and did
and want to say to you “stay awhile”
does this sound like a complaint
vaulting out of the imploring hand over
the bar of the heart
ear of the cup of woes

morning dreams
afternoon dreams
evening dreams
night comes in sits down and dreams
the ashtray dreams the cigarette its smoke
the hand bracing my head dreams of writing down dreams
upstream, a dream starts to take root in the river
as a sliver of light dreams a shiver in my spine
the back waves bye-bye to the brain
a hand writing the dreamy words
“this is them”

smooth and bumpy wonder meet in a tongue
licks the lip of the day
something special (instantly forgotten) brings this on
forms a landscape
adds a little motion makes a scene


[NOTE: Previous posts on this blog labeled "common sense" do not feature Greenwald's poems. "Common Sense" is the working title of a series of poems and letters I have been writing, inspired both by Greenwald's book and Thomas Paine's pamphlet of the same title.]

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Symposium on Organizing Reading Series

This Sunday, December 13th at 2pm at 4226 Spruce St., I'll be participating in a symposium called "Venues: Aesthetics, People, Politics, Readings and Performance", hosted by the Poetic Arts Performance Project. A few us will be answering questions about the how and what and why of running a reading/performance series.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

some common sense

made man

each week i watch pigs
pulled off the trailer
flopped over shoulders
gutted into the deli
esposito’s pork & beef
each week slit perfectly
the spine of a bus stained
under closed eyelids
nothing out of the woodwork
but “what” questions
hung up to dry
what’s the point
says that one
give it up
i am the point i say
i leave holes all over
in trying to make myself
punch a past in world
series disappointment
what i meant peels itself
out of a bus that doesn’t
stop like water
follows the path of least
resistance you flow by
the mural that tells you so
that peels you out
of the woodwork a chill
sent down the spine
of the bus you caught
open the fare and say
ahh where to



Dear Tom Paine,

Looking back, it’s the thing that keeps everybody down I’ve always written about. The thing I’ve always been infected by. Just when I believe it’s cleared my system there it is again some afternoon. I think that thing is common sense.

Hear me out.

First, common sense is something we tend to direct at people. Thus, its sense is hardly common, hardly shared. Consider the rhetorical contexts in which the term “common sense” is used usually. We use it to disparage. In order to buffer a weak argument, we use it to imply that those opposed to us lack common sense, i.e., are too stupid to understand us: “We must change such and such – it’s just common sense.” If the proposition were actually common sense, there’d be no need to say so. We also use the term to reprimand. I imagine a father yelling at his son, smacking him on the back of his head: “Use your common sense next time!”

Tom, your pamphlet both disparages and reprimands. Beautifully. In choosing “common sense” as a title for your pamphlet, no doubt you had in mind a second definition of “common”: ill-bred, low class, disgusting (a much more common definition back then). You sought to inspire righteous indignation in the American masses, who would then direct their rage at the English aristocracy: “Damn right we’re common. And proud of it!”

Perhaps this is why our conservatives today try to co-opt you—not for your libertarianism so much as your rhetorical savvy. But I can’t give them that much credit. Instead I’ll say what’s more likely, and what no politician would dare say: our country is rife with idiots. Rife with commonness. George W. Bush would never have become president otherwise. Such is democracy, eh, Tom?

Borges once argued that arguments convince no one. I believe him. I am forever unconvinced. What’s most convincing to me about your pamphlet is the music. The orchestration. As Isaac Kramnick has written: “It was not Tom Paine’s common sense but his rage that turned hundreds of thousands of Americans to thoughts of independence in the winter of 1776.” Well, I am one of them. Long dead, flesh rotted to bone. Common.

Why was there almost nobody at your funeral, Tom?

Sincerely,
Ryan Eckes


the chase
(poem written by stan in a dream)

the whole hour
works

it’s out
to
lunch

it’s
ow

after the
day

its
tail