“WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER,” 1957

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Considers the medium of language via the medium of language, whereas the painting juxtaposes language and paint – a different project. The painting is concise and masks its inspiration because it needs to simplify; the poem is prolix and can never arrive at its topic.

LUNCH POEMS, 1964

“A STEP AWAY FROM THEM”

“THE DAY LADY DIED”

“AVE MARIA”

“STEPS”

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

The rushed, passionate, run-on sense of the poem is explained by its ending, where the speaker has overconsumed on all the stuff of life. The montage of pop and politics, personal and social is a whirlwind tour of O’Hara’s stylistic devices.

Here is a revelation: I did not always adore the work of Frank O’Hara.

I had pause to consider why this was so at a reading once. In the Q and A afterwards the poet I was reading with said they had detected a strong American influence in my work: ‘Frank O’Hara, perhaps?’ This was told to me in a way rather as one would remind a recalcitrant child that they had stepped in something.

I replied that while I had been reading a lot of O’Hara’s work, I still felt as though I did not get it and that I was missing something.

That changed when I read ‘Why I am Not a Painter’.

Everything I’d read of O’Hara’s up till that point had left me with the impression that it was all jotted down in five seconds, and that no thought had gone into it. Simply, I felt he was not serious.

I was wrong on at least two counts, namely that his poems do not contain thinking and that they are not serious. (Similarly, Kenneth Koch famously said that he was always serious in his poems, even his humorous ones; what he refused to be was solemn).

This had the rather bracing effect of forcing me to re-evaluate everything of O’Hara’s that I had read up to that point. It changed everything, and here is why.

The poem is offhand, casual, definitely not solemn. It is about a very particular social milieu and the chance encounters that take place within it; even though it relates these events straightforwardly, it presents its subject matter (making things, the nature of creativity, having a fulfilled life) as though they are the most important things in the world:

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.”

I realised O’Hara was serious about the process of creativity that he describes because he refuses to romanticise the act of creativity or the decision to pursue it.  He wants to be able to make paintings, but knows he will have to stick at poems. We all do that, I think, at some level, wishing we were like our genius photographer brother or writer we once read with. At the same time he undercuts this status anxiety with wit and humour about the processes he engages with and those he observes in the work of others. The drinking and the talking about what is happening seem as important as showing up to make the work in the first place.

Most of all O’Hara is open to the possibility that much of what we are up to when we make stuff up remains sealed off from us, in a purely rational sense. We know that the word ‘Sardines’/'Oranges’ needs to go into our painting/poem but we do not know why. We live by the decisions we make in such moments, evaluating (‘It was too much’) with a detached mind that at the same time unconsciously controls the response we bring to our work in ways the rational mind cannot:

                                              My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES.

Finally, I felt I would give my arm to write a line as serious, profound and throwaway as: ‘It is even in/ prose, I am a real poet.’ Hilarious can be devastating.

Why I am Not a Painter

Eye Level blog post on Why I am Not a Painter

Read the rest of the Lifesaving Poems here

]]> http://docscastle.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/fear-by-c-davis/ Thu, 07 Mar 2013 02:34:46 +0000 sinsofroyalty http://docscastle.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/fear-by-c-davis/ http://howjournal.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/young-poets-part-v/ Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:10:07 +0000 catherinajean http://howjournal.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/young-poets-part-v/ H.O.W. Journal is thrilled to publish our FIFTH selection of younger poets, curated by Catherine Pond. Enjoy, and scroll down to read earlier selections.


Jay Deshpande:



Deshpande’s mastery and ease is on full display in his poems ‘After the Child Fell’ & ‘Landing in St. Petersburg, Florida.’ The first is all the more powerful for its reserved, spare description of trauma. The second recounts a lover’s journey, both physical and emotional. Jay Deshpande’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square, La Petite Zine, Narrative, Handsome, Shampoo, Spork, and elsewhere. He is the former poetry editor of AGNI and he curates the Metro Rhythm Reading Series in Brooklyn.

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Megan Fernandes:



‘Spectral’ & ‘South Philly’ are that rare breed of lyricism and intellectualism which thrills and delights in every sense. Humble yet powerful, their separate landscapes (one rural, one urban) both exude the sinister with ‘sodium lamps scanning the fog’ and ‘Quinceñara dresses hung dead-like on headless mannequins.’ Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Guernica, Redivider, Memorious, and the California Journal of Poetics.

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Lucy King:


Landscape is very much a character in ‘Adore’ & ‘Lake Baikal,’ two poems that plunge through longing and solitude with both reticence and intimacy. One foot in the natural world, they impress with their assured knowledge, their sense of abandonment, and their imagination. Lucy King received her BA in English from Skidmore College. She works in child psychology research in Boston. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Laura Marris:



In ‘The Telling’ & ‘Piñon’ fossils are ‘curled segments like fingers after a slap,’ while pinecones are ‘the fists of a child pounding the earth.’ In these poems, Marris portrays troubled domestic scenarios with remarkable originality and language of a particularly rare beauty. Laura Marris is an MFA candidate and Teaching Fellow at Boston University. Her work has been published in many journals, performed around the country, and featured on NPR as a winner of the Hillstead Museum’s Connecticut Fresh Voices Contest.

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Josh Schneider:



‘Wasting Honey on Mummies’ is a brief but startlingly imaginative take on contemporary values, exploring what it means to be ‘clean,’ while driving us to a dark conclusion about our own significance. Josh Schneider is a marketer living in Brooklyn. His writing has previously appeared in FUN, Fawlt, Short Fast and Deadly, VICE, Leveler, Noisey, and Thought Catalog. He is a Pisces and enjoys archery, skiing, and tennis.

I sing with mortal voice, unchanged

 To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,

 On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;

 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,

 And solitude

The ‘darkness’ that Milton mentions here is not entirely figurative: to add to his troubles, he was rapidly going blind. By the time he finished Paradise Lost, unable to read or write, he was dictating to a scribe. It is this aspect of Milton’s ‘evil days’ that are referenced in Reznikoff’s poem.

The Evil Days

The sun lights up

each mote upon the table,

but the old man

finds the page blurred

and lights the lamp.

With the precision of language and image of the objectivist poets with whom he is associated, Reznikoff recreates the image of the old man going blind, though without any of the drama of Milton’s passage. Like Joyce, whose protagonist in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, unconsciously follows a peaceful modern day Odyssey, Reznikoff has made a humdrum everyday scene resonate with epic tragedy.

There is a hint of irony here, though. The old man seems unconcerned that he can no longer make out the natural beauty that the sun highlights – he just wants to read, so he turns the light on. Perhaps, like Joyce’s Bloom, he’s a practical sort of bloke, or perhaps he is bravely resigned to fate. I think Reznikoff is quite keen to remind us that there is beauty in our surroundings, however; even on a table and even on the back streets of New York where most of his poems are set.

And as always, beauty is all the more alluring when we know it won’t last – such evil days, in one way or another, await us all.

I will definitely return to the poems of Frank O’Hara and John Ashberry after ModPo and I loved Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Bernadette Mayer.

Moving on from the New York poets to the ‘Language’ poets, I’m struggling somewhat although I did enjoy Ron Silliman’s Albany, Bob Perelman’s Chronic Meanings and, especially, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson.

As for Jackson Mac Low, I agree with another ModPo person, Dan Flath, who has commented on one of the ModPo discussion forums that he can imagine himself enjoying participating in one of Jackson Mac Low’s happenings but that he finds the instructions more interesting than the poetry itself. Dan Flath goes on to question whether Mac Low is a poet or a philosopher.

Another commenter on the forums, Rachel Loosemoore, has said that the poets in this section of the course (John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Jena Osman and Joan Retallack) “are doing a great job of removing our pre-conceived notions about poetry construction, language, and meaning”. I suppose that is true for many of us but I’m left feeling disgruntled and not satisfied after engaging with much of the poetry in this section.

One thing for sure, this is certainly a fascinating course and I’m learning so much.

Meanwhile, I’m off to bed with Ted Hughes’ letters. I wonder if he would’ve signed up for ModPo?

P.S.
Some really interesting ModPo blogs here:
Christine Murray
Carol A Stephen

Carcanet/paperback/£14.95/9781857547344

Dan Eltringham

Wow. I feel pretty blown away. I’d just spent a good part of today reading through the Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts archives.

Long story short, Fuck You is Ed Sanders’ hodgepodge of a magazine “published” in New York in the 60s during the time of mimeo revolution, when clusters of writers and poets and people of all sorts printed alternative literary things by way of the cheap mimeograph printing. The magazine is printed on construction paper, features handwritten scribbles alongside the typeface, and is put together at a “secret location on the lower east side,”

The contributors are astounding: Ginsberg, Pound, Mailer, Carl Solomon, Auden, and so on, and the energy of the writing often frantic and out for the kill, what with the Beats’ and New York Poets’ footprints all over it.

I particularly love this cover of an androgynous child demon:

Inside of cover:

“Fuck You / The magazine read by Toe Queens”

In the same issue, a poem in Al Fowler’s series of ode to smack:

Carl Solomon:

And at the back of the issue, some contributors’ note:

CARL SOLOMON/ Shriek! Shriek! is the legendary Artaudian scholar & poet; recently ejaculated from a flip scene in Long Island & now on the freak-lone to zap back at all the creeps, fascists, psychiatrists, poets, & nutscene totalitarians, that puked their creep vectors on him these last few years.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS/ has one of the most sensitive prostates in the history of Western Civilization; he can experience a spurt scene through pure passive cornholery, sans meatbeating, testacular manipulation, & other normally attendant gropings. Burroughs ejaculates data from Northern Africa where he lives with his son and publishes his magazine.

AL FOWLER/ the brilliant New York poet and hebophile who refuses to gobble, freak, fuck or grope anything over 15 of age. A cleric in the Free Catholic CHurch, Fowler is a nurse and dope mogul at a New York hospital. His scholarship in narco experiences is fantastic, Fowler can actually experience an hallucinogenic flash thru a quick early morning gobble of a moon pie & a pepsi.

NORMAN MAILER/ is the whisper-over soldier, stomper, novelist, poet, critic, cocksman, & politician. His new novel will be spewed out by DIAL. Mr Mailer is spending the summer grassed out in P-town.

HOW FUCKING PRECIOUS.

(I borrowed everything from Jed’s archives over here, which has a pdf of every issue of Fuck You and many other pertinent, precious and rare things.)

Schuyler, together with Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest, was one of the group that came to be known as the New York Poets, and Porter, a poet and critic himself as well a painter, knew most of them well. Schuyler, in fact, came to visit Porter at his family home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, and stayed for close on seven years.

But what has any of this to do with Agnes Martin?

There is in Schuyler’s verse – some is troubled, most is not – a calmness both of expression and of observation that recalls Martin’s statement I quoted in yesterday’s post about the pleasures that can be derived from a patient looking – unrushed, unhurried – allowing oneself, I suppose, to become one with the experience.

Here is Schuyler’s poem, “Standing and Watching.”

Standing and watching
through the drizzle
how the mist and further
edge of pond merge
into one grayness, a colour
called drained-off-blueness.

Standing and watching
how the maple leaves
fall, lightly pelted by
drizzle, and turn
in air, to lie scattered,
drained, not quite of colour there.

One could be looking at one of Agnes Martin’s paintings.

William “Billy” Collins

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Links:

Audio recording of Billy Collins reading at the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar

Poetry Matters: Q&A With Professor Billy Collins – Billy Collins interviewed by Nabil Rahman

11 animated poems read aloud by Billy Collins – This is a MUST SEE! The animated shorts that started the poetry video revolution!

Watch Billy Collins recite his work at Open-Door Poetry

33 poems read aloud by Billy Collins, no charge (Creative Commons)

A Brisk Walk: An interview with Billy Collins – From Guernica Magazine

Billy Collins, Bringing Poetry to the Public – Interview by Dave Weich

Billy Collins on National Poetry Month – NPR’s Renee Montagne speaks with Billy Collins on the occasion of National Poetry Month. Collins reads two poems — one war-related, one not — and explains how poetry of any kind is useful when coping with difficult situations like the war in Iraq.

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Poems On-Line:

Aristotle

Canada

Creatures

Design

Forgetfulness

Her

Introduction to Poetry

Irish Poetry

Litany

Madmen

Man in Space

Morning

No Time

Nostalgia

Print

Questions About Angels

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

Silence

Snow Day

Study in Orange and White

The Breather

The Chairs That No One Sits In

The Death of Allegory

The Parade

The Wires of the Night

Today

Workshop

Writing in the Afterlife

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

Forgetfulness

Introduction to Poetry

Litany

Some Days

The First Night

The Golden Years

Workshop

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Video:

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Links:

Truth Teller: Paterson native believes poetry can change the world – Article/Interview with Maria Mazziotti Gillan from the New Jersey Star Ledger by Carrie Stetler

The Poetry Center of Passaic County Community College – Where Maria Mazziotti Gillan is Founder and Executive Director.

Women of the Web – Interview with Maria Mazziotti Gillan

PoetryPoetry.com Audio Archive – a free reading by Maria Mazziotti Gillan in MP3 download or streaming audio (your choice!) About 25 minutes.

Mazziotti Gillan Poetry Reading, October 5, 2005 (70:17 Minutes/MP3 audio download)

BU poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan captures Italian heritage in verse – Binghamton University artcle/interview with Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Poet’s Web Interview with Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Poet and the Poem – Maria Mazziotti Gillan interviewed by Grace Cavalieri, with lots of readings.

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Poems On-Line:

My Daughter at 14, Christmas Dance, 1981

LOVE POEM TO MY HUSBAND OF THIRTY-ONE YEARS

I DREAM OF MY GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

THE MOMENT I KNEW MY LIFE HAD CHANGED

AFTER SCHOOL ON ORDINARY DAYS

GROWING UP ITALIAN

The Black Bear on My Neighbor’s Lawn in New Jersey

Learning to Love Myself

What a Liar I Am

Shame is the Dress I Wear

Shame

The Secret I Would Tell

How to Turn a Phone Call into a Disaster

Photo of My Sister as a Young Woman

Your Voice on the Phone Wobbles

The Dodge Silver Hawk

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Video:

Poet/Playwright Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York. He is presently Associate Professor in Literature at American University, in Washington DC. He is author of six books of poetry, including Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam, 2001.) With poet Toi Derricote, he co-founded Cave Canam, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. Cornelius Eady’s awards include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award; and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Among other honors, he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee for his book Boom Boom Boom; and he holds the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets for Victims of the Latest Dance Craze.

“What is beautiful about Eady’s work is the way in which the poems themselves become envelopes, containers for the elegant missives of his characters’ voices—not angry in their tone, but piercing, quiet, intelligent—reflections of Cornelius Eady’s wonderfully restless spirit.” —Ploughshares

“Cornelius Eady’s poems are joyous, incantatory, experiential. [His] work is a glossary of earthly objects and human events, and his linguistic responses provide pleasure even when they are provoked by injustice, or by pain, or by loss.”

—Dia Art Foundation

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Links:

Seattle Arts and Letters Interview with Cornelius Eady

About Cornelius Eady – Biographical article by Natasha Trethaway, from Ploughshares

A Poet’s ‘Hardheaded’ Reflection on Life – National Public Radio program featuring Cornelius Eady. Listen on-line!

Cornelius Eady – National Public Radio program featuring Cornelius Eady. Listen on-line!

Cave Canem – Committed to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry. Co-Founded by Cornelius Eady

Poet and the Poem – Cornelius Eady interviewed by Grace Cavalieri, with lost of readings.

A Reading by Cornelius Eady (in Real Audio and text transcript formats), from Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts

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Poems On-Line:

A Small Moment

Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet

Crows in a Strong Wind

Money Won’t Change It (but time will take you on)

Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968

Poet Dances with Inanimate Object

The Cab Driver Who Ripped Me Off

The Empty Dance Shoes

Uncle Tom in Heaven

Victims of the Latest Dance Craze

What is Known About the Abductor

Grief Bird

Hardheaded Weather

Tubman’s Rock

I Am A Fool to Love You

Nature Poem

Handymen

HESITATION BLUES

FETCHIN’ BONES

THE DANCE

RODNEY KING BLUES

JEMIMA’S DO-RAG

BUCKWHEAT’S LAMENT

LEADBELLY

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Video: