The Second Iteration of When

When I look back to the start of this sentence
and see the word “when,” I marvel
at the confident, dare I say, urgent placement
of that time-bound adverb.
I wonder what the writer planned to say
about time, a subject I am deeply interested in.
But when I pass across and down and come
to the second iteration of that word,
the flaccid representation of When with “when”
I can’t help but be disappointed.
I feel betrayed, my hope of enlightenment gently crushed.
(Those dangling quotation marks, that limp shadow, lower case.)
I doubt the writer ever really had the brilliance
to support the cavalier thrust of that initial When.
I realize again how it’s always the way.
The woman or man impeccably dressed
strides in for the interview,
copies of relevant papers in a folder
held on the arm like a baby, ready
when need arises to pull focus from the un
expected hesitation or waver in the voice
at the unprepared-for question. And I realize,
again, with just a little less force
than I realized it the last time I realized it
that every time a new configuration
of existence walks into a room,
every possible response stands ready
to meet it. And every position will be filled.
Every classroom has its genius, its beauty and its bully.
Every poem is inherent in the language.
And I wonder at last again what I wondered at last before:
When will we ever get out of this fucking cave?

Two Road Diverged

Two roads diverged in a dusky wood
And I—I didn’t know what to do
So I looked down one as far as I could
Then I looked down the other,
And it branched too!
 
Aw, fuck it, I said. I’ll go this way.
And if I come back another time
Maybe I’ll go another way.
Though knowing me and my shitty mind
I’ll take the way I took today
 
And call it different. And so it’ll be.
And I’ll give myself some good advice.
No matter how familiar it feels,
You never take the same way twice.

Fall Haiku

 At this hour, this year,
midfall, the sun turns this one 
oak tree's brown leaves gold.

The Purpose of Writing

 The publisher, in refusing to accept my refusal to rewrite the book to fit his specifications, said: "I believe we have a disagreement over what the purpose of writing is." Had I replied, I would said this:

The purpose of writing (writing as a form of art) is to provide an experience. It is an experience that echoes but is not matched by any other experience. Being both emotional and intellectual in a way that no experience with "things" or "nature" can match, it provides room for reflection if not insight into life that only it can. 

If you have any other view of what writing is, you should trade it in for this one.  

What You Are Now

It’s like this: you aim the head of the maul
at the heart of the log and you drive it
straight over the center of your skull full force.
You don’t want to do this twice.

The maul head thunks against the chopping block.
But as for the piece of wood you were aiming at
it darts away like startled game. 
You hit it so close to the edge
you barely shaved a slice of bark,
a sliver of kindling.

Shit, you say, and shit, again, and fucking god.
You drop the maul and hoist the thing to strike again.
Shit, you say, and fucking god
with all these hundreds of logs 

and winter coming with its trainlike inertia, 

slow, relentless, and bound to arrive before all the wood is split 

and stacked 

and dry.
Shit you say and fucking god

damn this wood and these arms and these eyes
that have swung this heavy maul 10,000 times and still
can’t reliably hit the heart.
 
The more you miss and curse 

the more you miss and curse.

Nor can you recall when you need them the words 
that set your heart at ease just yesterday
when you were not splitting logs and the rain stayed away
when the honking geese drew your eyes everywhere 

until you found their dark chevron just where it should be

gliding south against the clouds, high as an airplane--
and the competent afternoon sun laid splotches of gold 
on the mums and the ever blooming zinnias and marigolds
and you harvested seeds in coffee cans.

That was a good day.
 
It’s not the coming of the winter or the fear of cold,
it’s the impulse to anger, 
it's some imperfectly traceable injury 
from years and years ago, you guess,
that you still can't lay a finger on,
that drives you to curse when you fail 
to master simple tasks. Something so long wired now
you can’t unwire it by any effort of will 
repetition of effort.
It’s just that.
 
You don’t have to be good
at everything. You don’t have to be
who you are now at every moment.
You will never master the art of swinging a maul.
You will never master the art of writing poems.
You may never be fit to love yourself so well you no longer curse
your failures. You may never know why. No one’s perfect. No one’s perfect.
No one’s perfect. You are what you are now.
Now you are what you are now.
Now you are what you are
now.

The Shift in Poetry

 Not infrequently when you plant a perennial precisely where you want it, it does not thrive. But it returns anyway, the next year, somewhere else. And blooms like a lunatic. The flower or the flowering bush knows where the good soil is and finds it. Poetry, we could say, produces a lot of green these days and very little bloom. Yes, more poets than ever are published, and more Ph.D.s are granted to study it than ever before. But no one reads but other poets and would-be poets and students who are forced by their eager or jaded or militant professors. Major publishers hardly publish any. Poets don't legislate from the shadows. How many people on the street would you have to ask to name five living poets before you could find anyone who could name one? And when you found that person would you recognize the name or have to look it up to confirm it?

We could say that poetry no longer thrives. 

Or we could say that despite our best horticultural efforts to keep poetry in its shaded plot, poetry is doing very well over there, behind our backs--or in our faces, disguised. But not really disguised. It's not trying to hide. We are trying not to see it. 

We still have too much of the Enlightenment in the rigid structure of our brains. Remember this  is the era that determined there must be only one proper way to spell a word. Everything has its proper definition and everything fits within its natural borders. If evolution has taught us anything, it is that we err when we take the measure of reality with the ruler of our individual lifespan. To a being of greater scope, a frog is a dinosaur, and a furry little scurrying paleolithic critter is as much a human being as an acorn is an oak tree. 

Enlightenment rigidity is a harmful and false way of thinking. And this is particularly so in regard to human phenomena--the stuff we, with our creative energies, think into being. A hydrogen atom is what it is. Granite too may be. Some things we don't get to understand outside of what they are. But poetry is not one of them. It exists, sure. The word in its most meaningful uses reaches out into something we did not create out of nothing. But it exists only for us, humans because it responds to something unique to us, even if it is (we hope) universal to our species. But to define it as the sum total of poems--of texts with some range of form and some access to aural figures and some set of line tropes--is to miss what matters most in poetry. Poetry is an experience created through language. And it doesn't matter where or how that experience is created. If poetry in the electronic and virtual world no longer thrives in the poem, it still thrives. (And I don't advocate giving up on the writing and reading of poems. And it wouldn't matter if I did. They will persist because they have adapted to the shade in which they grow.) Poetry thrives in song, certainly. It was always what mattered in song anyway. True, most songs are forgettable, either just bad or having their moment of sterile bloom. So are most poems. But Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize. Or if you think otherwise, that doesn't matter. There are songsters who do. And poetry shows up in novels and in film and on TV. And it's not just text. It exists in speech as well and sometimes requires it. It shows up in podcasts, and now and then on the news. Wordsworth was right that there is no essential difference between good poetry and good prose. Poetry exists wherever language creates experience through careful, deliberate, thoughtful, artistic rendering. It's not the experience of wanting to throw a brick at Donald Trump. At least I hope it's not. It is the experience of listening to Garrison Keillor tell a story. 

Hamlet as Actor

The key to Hamlet is drama, plays, playing. First there is the idea that “these are actions that a man might play, but I have in my that which passes show.” He’s not telling the truth. He’s saying what he wants to convince himself and others is true. He’s trying to be, in Girardian terms, the model for others. But they won’t follow him. They’ve moved on past grief, too quickly in the case of Gertrude, but other desires were stronger. Shakespeare isn’t interested in what these are. He gives too little information to us on how to understand them. Etc. The point is that Hamlet brings up acting for the first time in this speech, and tries to raise and sustain the idea that there is a difference between acting and genuine action, a difference which always has to be asserted because it can never be sustained, not because action can reproduce anything that the genuine can (Shakespeare again and again, in Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like it, and Much Ado etc. has a player detail how you can tell the difference between acting and real life but, an actor doing this on a stage always belies the claim, turns it into a joke in fact, or an instance of irony—in acting you can’t x, said to the actor who has just x’d) but because there is no such thing as an unacted genuine, or if there is, it is a momentary impulse that dies unless acted—such is the impulse to revenge when it first arises. If anything is genuine it is that moment when Hamlet pledges to carry out as swift as thoughts of love is revenge, which there is literally nothing to stop him from doing at that moment. He knows where the king is. He has been full and immediate access to the king, who is drunk and unable to defend himself. Shakespeare makes the situation easy as can be for revenge. It practically takes care of itself. But instead of strutting down to the hall where the inebriate king is stumbling around, Hamlet pledges to pretend to madness. A completely unmotivated action.

Why? He’s again acting. This is what we do in plays. Hamlet has seen The Spanish Tragedy and all the Revenge Tragedies ever performed. And he knows that to delay he has to pretend to be mad. Why? He could kill Claudius. And Shakespeare has taken away the one thing that could have made him hesitate—concern for his own safety. Shakespeare has made it clear that Hamlet’s suicidal desire is real, his carelessness for his own life is illustrated by his willingness to approach the ghost (quote the line). In fact one of the few times in the play when he’s eager to act is when he approaches the ghost. Why? The ghost may give him reason to live, or to act, or to distract himself from suicide. And he doesn’t want to kill Claudius because killing Claudius takes away his reason to live. If he lives to kill Claudius then he doesn’t have to die. He also in a more profound way doesn’t want to kill Claudius because if life itself isn’t worth anything, then revenge can’t be justified. Claudius took from his father something that was not valuable: his life. As long as earth is an unweeded garden, a rank prison, as long as the only reason not to kill yourself is fear of what comes next, then there’s no point in revenge. I can’t go with Nietzsche here in his reasoning, but his conclusion is sound.

A New Thought on Hamlet's Most Famous Soliloquy

This'll probably only work once, but, hey:

Think of it as the type of Shakespeare's early-days soliloquy: Direct talking to the audience, and not one of his later-days ones: Audience overhears character talking to himself. Or rather, think of it as a hybrid, direct address to the audience AS character thinks things through.

Hamlet comes on stage, solus, (yes, Claude and Polly are hiding). He paces, thinking. Everyone knows what's coming. But he stays silent until things feel really awkward, like Michael Jackson at the Superbowl. Then he turns to the audience, looks directly around the room for as long as anyone can stand it and he says, "to be." And the house lights come on full. Light explodes everywhere, and (timing here is important) the lights stay bright just long enough for the average member to start to have a glimmer of what's going on, and he says, lights going dark at "or," "or not to be."

And the brightness of the lights before make this darkness as dark as can be.

Hamlet goes on in an explanatory way. He hasn't noticed the lights going up or down. "That is the question" (i.e. "that this play is asking"). People's eyes adjust. Hamlet is in no hurry to get through this speech. Just as the eyes start to see the outline of Hamlet/actor, the stage lights start to come up, but so slowly that no one can tell whether that is what is happening or whether their eyes are continuing to adjust.

He goes through the rest of the speech as though he's explaining the play to the audience. But the meaning is occuring to him at the same time. Or at least the illustrations and examples are occurring to him in real time.

He melts back into the play at the sight of Ophelia.

NB: This also helps us over the "bourne" problem. In the play he seems to have forgotten that he's seen a ghost. But in this performance, he's letting you know that that is a play, and this is real life.

Red, White or Blue

(draft)

(capo second fret: A D F#m E7 C#m Bm A shapes, quick strum, upbeat)

B                       E 

Why are you afraid today?

              G#m            F#7

You’re gonna die anyway

       D#m                            C#m

Or is the world trying to make

     E              B

A victim of you?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care of you’re

Red or you’re white

It makes me blue

To see my brothers and

Sisters of color are

Suffering at the hands of

Systemic abuse

Black man in the street

He just wants some peace

Cop comes up and says

What do you do?

I’m just walking here

Isn’t that pretty clear

Haven’t you anything

Better to do?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Brown or your black

But maybe we do.

Cop says he’s had enough

Puts the man into cuffs

Says "I gotta make

An example of you.”

On the news it said
That young man is dead
People in the streets yell
"What did he do?"

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Rich or you’re poor

Red, purple or blue.

You said we're weak:

Peaceful riots in the street

The presidential Orangeman

Threatening you.

“If you don’t go away

I knee to the ground I say

I bring the army in for

Smothering you.”

You may be surprised to know

That’s not how it goes.

Americans everywhere

Coming for you.

Red, white, black and brown

Driving you outta town

It really isn’t hard to see

The failure of you.

All A-merica

Sees just what you are.

It's time you start to think of
Something better to do.

We Talked

We talked and talked and talked
Until Darrel Danger got it right.
So we set that account aside
And kept on talking.

But what IS it?

Is there anything we can adequately define? To answer that question of course we first have to define "adequate." I would define it, in this instance (parenthesis of paramount importance), as "true or accurate in itself." As what is "propre" in French. But is anything truly, transcendentally itself? Or is everything, practically speaking, a "self" only in relation to us, human observers? I doubt it. In any case we cannot define anything as though we did not exist and not only because it is our language we are defining with. Which is to say that from the point of view of a different order of creatures, I'm pretty certain, everything would be arranged differently and defined through a language that could not translate into any of ours.

But isn't it okay to define adequacy in relation to our own perception? Would that be adequate? This is where it gets even trickier. We can dispense altogether with angels or aliens. I would say, in answer to the question, "adequate FOR WHAT?" All adequacies are temporized. And that means "adequate" in the sense we started with is LITERALLY in-adequate. All definitions turn out to be stipulative. That's not to say that "reality" (as we perceive it) does not play a part. It just means it doesn't play the definitive part without (as Derrida said) residue.

I'm reminds of my son's friends' debate about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which they conducted as though "sandwich" were a transcendental category and not something we can, at will, define any hot dog into our out of. I want to ask them to define not sandwich but "hot dog." What is a hot dog? An animal casing in which processed meat is packed? A specific subset of "sausage"? Perhaps. But there's more than just processed meat in a hot dog. Forgetting all the "chemical" additives, there can also be cheese. If you add cheese to the processed meat is it still a hot dog? Why not? How much cheese? What is the absolute ratio: 49-51% But that's an arbitrary ratio. What about 1-99% What about 100% cheese in that casing? Is it still a hot dog? But there are "skinless franks." So I should be able to take away the casing too. Now I have a roll of cheese that is, arguably, a hot dog.

Of course a hot dog is a human creation. Too easy. Certainly we get to define human creations. Work this out with diamonds.

I Want Green

I want green?

It’s a sample sentence on a grammar test. The fifth-grade student is asked to parse it. It looks easy: pronoun, verb, ah—green?

“Teacher, I’m having trouble with this sentence.”

“Imagine I held out two shirts, one red, one green and you said, ‘I want green.’”

That’s all the help she can give.

He goes through his list of definitions. A noun is a person place thing or idea. It’s not a person or a place. Is green a thing or an idea? He’s never understood this idea of idea very well. Isn’t everything sort of an idea?

An adjective is a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.

Green is an attribute of the shirt. The shirt is the thing. Green tells you something about the shirt. So it’s really an adjective, green.

But the word “shirt” isn’t in the sentence. But it’s implied. Like the word “you” isn’t in the sentence “Go to hell!” And “that” isn’t in the sentence, “It’s the shirt I want.” So green is an adjective.

Or is it a noun?

And is the more intelligent student the one who gets the answer wrong or the one who gets the answer right? The one we reward or the one we punish?

Trump and Testing

Testing will save lives.

Testing will give us the information we need to make informed decisions about when and how to reopen the economy.

No one disputes this.

But Trump resists testing.

It makes him look bad.

It makes it less likely he will win re-election.

There is no other way to look at this.

The only good thing about Trump is that he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even understand that he should try to hide this.

He literally doesn’t care who dies. He doesn’t care how many people get sick—as long as he gets re-elected.

That’s the first horror.

The second horror is that over 40% of the country either don’t see this or deny it—though it stands out to them as starkly as blizzard in May. Or they don’t care.

You can’t make Trump supporters care, even if you can make them see. Trump’s mendacity was as clear as an open window the day he came down that escalator and lied about immigration, as the day he bragged on tape about sexual assault, as the day he mocked the disabled. It’s as clear as he denial of science, as his labelling of everything that doesn’t serve his interest as false. His lies are transparent. His failures and in competencies are as plain as day. Even his rare attempts to hide them are comic and feeble (“I meant to misspell ‘Nobel.’”) But they don’t care. You can’t make them care.

We may never know how many will get sick or how many will die because of this. We won’t collect enough information to know. We won’t do the necessary testing.

The Stone Upon the Highway

A                            F#m
I walked along the highway
D#m                     C#m
I paused upon the bridge

F#m                 D
I gazed into the river

           A              D#m  C#m (repeat*)
And I knocked a pebble in.

Do you remember

We stood upon this place

And I looked into your eyes

As they roamed across my face 

It was nice to be together

And you said you’d like to stay

And the stone is in the river

And the river flows away

          A                          D
         The fire upon the mountains
                    E                    A
          Rages gold into the sky
                 D                    E                     A
         The fire upon the windows rages high
                 A                     D
         The people in the houses
                       E                     A
         Rage in lonely, secret sighs
                  D                  E                        A
         The people in the houses close the blinds.

I drove into the mountains

Where the mountain wind blew loud

I went to hear the voice of God

Because my life was hard

I looked into the sky

And I tried to see a face

And the mountain wind blew loud

And the water flowed away.

          I guess that this is just the way
          This life is going to be
          We thought we'd be forever young and free
          Now the moment last forever
          In my broken memory
          And that is all that's left of you and me

         The fire upon the mountains
          Rages gold into the sky
         The fire upon the windows rages high
         The people in the houses
         Rage in lonely, secret sighs
         The people in the houses close the blinds.

And I walk along the highway

And I pause upon the bridge

And I gaze into the river

And I throw a pebble in.

(*repeat w/o words on verses one , three, five and six, ending on A after v. 6)