Monday, April 26, 2010

upcoming readings

I will read poetry aloud on

Friday, April 30th at Mostly Books, 529 Bainbridge St, at 9pm
w/ Rick Snyder and Sean Fitts

Sunday, May 9th at Molly's Bookstore, 1010 S. 9th St, at 7pm
w/Jeffrey Stockbridge and Liz Moore

Sunday, May 16th at Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St (2nd Fl), at NOON (not 3) w/ Samantha Barrow, hassen, Heather Saker and more

Thursday, July 1st at UPenn Bookstore, 36th & Walnut, at 6pm
w/ Greg Bem, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and others

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

flash mob

you get a message says come down
so you come down
so which way to the river, a boy asks
and i point my finger
east into the empty TLA video store
            AVAILABLE
            AVAILABLE
            AVAILABLE
the pink papered up windowfront
fronts nervous moms
with obvious answers
lock their restaurants
whose lookouts keep it coming
whose windowlight turns night
into a story that goes on
the streets which talk of water
til our hearts nod and know
what home is           home is
a rival high school as segregated
as your own room     it's tired
of listening to you collect
yourself into buckets from
the ceiling that edits you
down to a status update

can you watch my bag?
sure          there's a love
that's nothing in another
place you can't find
there's a love       it sleeps
and wakes your days
beyond letters     stamped,
i clock in            the time
is ripe for endless
foolishness       a flash mob
mops up the jizz of april
my jacket       the weather
counts the people
an arm of the river meets
the mouth of a sea
if more people live here
kill the people!
or turn the page and continue
along an arm of the mouth
the house fronts painted
shut a shade too for the
mobbed heart         so goes
the leak of jackets    so go
flutter yourself somewhere
a knock at the door dumbs
down your freedom pamphlet
you can be in love in a target
parking lot and sleep for days
under the country's front page
a bus just blew right past me
robbed of lightness
i walk and walk and walk
and walk down the street
to be open like a door
open like a door

hating me won't make you pretty

a tee shirt said that
on a worn-out woman
w/ a bicycle riding
the el to frankford
for easter
me and my brother
to meet our mother
who’ll make dinner for us
who used to make clothes for us
when we were kids who
wanted tee shirts
that said things—
my mother refused
to put words on our shirts
clothes shouldn’t talk, she said
people talk—you’re gonna
speak for yourself

today i said if sorrow’s really
old joy, toss me an absolute
to suck on           christ is risen
we hop to & fro     the rhythm
opens a small business     a prayer
we patronize     we are patrons
patriots             pick up a pound
of ham from greenman’s
on your way        worn pieces of
routines               the sense and
nonsense              pieces of clothes
in the common weather we’ve
worn      pieces of my mother
in pieces because my father’s
left her for good
and all the money from her business
gone for good
that hurts to say               for good
it’s not for good
it’s for the fucking worst
you might as well shoot the motherfucker

you’re not supposed to do that
you’re not supposed to               take your bike on the el
you’re not supposed to               park against the direction of traffic
you’re not supposed to               turn on red when there’s a sign and nothing’s coming

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Scythe, Volume II

Two poems from my Old News mss. are in volume 2 of the online journal Scythe.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Wendell Berry on restraints in art and life

A few nights ago I was re-reading Wendell Berry's essay "Faustian Economics" (Harpers, May 08), which I've assigned my composition students the last few semesters, and it reminded me of why you should never apologize for being a poet. My feeling was reinforced the next day after reading an absurd email from Temple's provost (to the entire university) claiming that an adjunct union isn't necessary. I've come to live my life in opposition to the thinking that characterized that email, a way of thinking that rests on the assumption that what's best for the privileged is best for everybody else, and that freedom is something granted to an individual for working hard and remaining loyal to people with more money. Wendell Berry, a farmer and poet, argues for a better definition of freedom than the traditional American one that foregrounds the individual's inherent license to do business at whatever cost to land, resources and other people:

"In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define 'freedom,' for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, 'free' is etymologically related to 'friend.' These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of 'dear' or 'beloved.' We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections."

It's the thought of faithfulness and loyalty as restraints that caught me this time. I'd never really thought of them as restraints. That is, I've never felt restrained by being faithful or loyal to someone. That's always come natural to me. But I think I'm understanding Berry's point more deeply now. When you're free, you aren't aware of restraints. When you're free you're creating, and you do so hardly knowing. You don't experience restraint as restraint.

Maybe I'm somewhat free in regard to friendship and community then. Certainly I'm not free in other ways. Anyway, Berry believes these restraints are the root of a potential paradigm shift. What about the more obvious restraints--say the restraint of that which does not believe in you--the world that worships efficiency and fashion, that will suck the boss to be the boss? Berry suggests that those restraints are broken by bypassing them for truer restraints, by subscribing to another model and living it.

What's hard, for me, is locating the right restraints, ones that are "not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning." This has to be case by case. It can't be as simple as be a good neighbor or love is all you need. For example, what about my wariness of people (and institutions) that want from me without intent to give back? What about my broken heart? Those too are restraints you have to work within. There are competing restraints on an individual level that seem to make progress impossible. Berry suggests the answers to our problems, individual and collective, are in our cultural heritage, in the products of real freedom; there's nowhere else to go. So back to books and trying to be like Jesus and buying fair trade coffee, I guess.

Out of loyalty to Berry, who's the kind of writer I tend to trust (because he's been around), here are more of his words:

"It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

"We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."