LISTENING TO LOU

I was in 8th grade—13 years old—when Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” was released.  That’s the perfect age to be impressed by a song that features transgender characters, “giving head,” and those “colored girls.”  The song is delivered in a dead-pan voice that was easy to follow but hard to mimic.  It was hard to mimic because there was something in that voice—its owner’s self-awareness, his sure grasp of what he’s talking about, and who he’s talking to—that chilled you, thrilled you with fantastic visions never felt before.

He’s not talking to our parents—even though my parents were exact contemporaries of Andy Warhol, the figurehead of the scene Lou’s describing—he’s talking to all of “us.”  At one time, the “us” would have been called “freaks,” but that era of the Sixties was already history.  There was nothing to unite someone newly turned a teen with any particular group.  I’m not saying “Wild Side” did it for me; I wasn’t pining for the kind of scenes Lou was describing, or anything like that, but . . .  It impressed me, left its mark.  I imagine it did the same thing to many who had never heard those kinds of characters and scenes so forthrightly placed on Top Forty radio before.  Sure, there was The Kinks’ “Lola,” but that was so playful, whereas there was something a bit menacing in the cold authority of Lou’s tone.  Of course David Bowie had already launched his androgynous alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust.  It wasn’t like this was coming out of nowhere.  One could even say that this was the “sell-out moment” that someone like Warhol always dreamed of.  Lou’s on the radio, singing about Candy Darling—and the record is selling!  Something that was still “a scene” went viral, as we say today.

So I started reading “rock rags” more regularly, and there I got glimpses of Mr. Reed.  I’ll never forget the image of him performing that accompanied a one-page story on his album Berlin (can't find the photo online).  This was 1973 and I was a fan of Jethro Tull and Yes and, soon, Pink Floyd.  Bowie was still percolating on the edges for me, but maybe it was the Reed/Bowie connection that made Aladdin Sane a must-have record for me at that time.  But Lou . . . he was still a bit too-too. 

Then came the Rock’n’Roll Animal phase, when he looked like an anemic idol, a platinum greaser who had served time in a concentration camp.  A camp concentration camp—because by now Nazis were combined with the decadence of the cabarets of the Thirties to produce a rage for an erotic image to inhabit the dreams of fetishists and masochists flirting with fascism.  I was still looking askance at Lou’s posteuring, his stab at arena-rock that made everyone wanna-be cokeheads.  Then, in 1976, an older friend turned me on to The Velvet Underground Live ’69 (which was not released by Mercury till 1974, after Lou was suddenly “a hit”).  My friend insisted that this was the live Lou that mattered—not that rock anthem schtick of the Animal era.  And I saw his point at once.

Live ’69 did it.  It gave me the Lou Reed that I would treasure ever after.  Those long cruises with discursive strumming through great VU material—my favorite side was comprised of “Ocean,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Heroin”—were not captured with absolute sonic fidelity.  The sound was a bit thin, lacking in bass with the highs a bit attenuated, but the power and passion came through.  “What Goes On” is revelatory, and “Sweet Jane” betters any other recording of it.  There is some filler (it’s a double disc on vinyl and even on CD), but, for the most part, this album is classic and one of the great live albums from that era of live albums, c. 1969-70.  Hearing the record sent me back to the VU studio recordings.  And my fascination with a figure encountered there—the mercurial John Cale—sparked a connection to Lou’s sometime bandmate that surpassed in many ways my interest in Lou.  But we're talking about Lou now.

There’s no denying that everything that’s great about Lou’s songwriting is on that first Velvets album: the lyrical Lou (“Sunday Morning”), the bitter Lou (“Femme Fatale”), the caustic Lou (“Run Run Run”), the heroic Lou (“Heroin”), the artsy Lou (“European Son”), the dark poet Lou (“Black Angel’s Death Song”), the fascist fetishist Lou (“Venus in Furs”), the drug dude Lou (“Waiting for My Man”), and even the cross-dressing Lou (“All Tomorrow’s Parties”) and Lou-as-Andy (“I’ll Be Your Mirror”).  Some version of most of those personae fueled Lou’s work into the Seventies, culminating, perhaps, in the “unlistenable” four-sided aural apocalypse Metal Machine Music.  Lou has said that he doesn’t know anyone who has listened to the whole thing.  I did.  All four sides, with headphones.  Stoned.  So there.

But that was post-high school, 1977-78, and by the spring of ’78 Lou was inspiring praise in Rolling Stone magazine for his latest incarnation: Street Hassle.  And deservedly so.  I was ready for it too.  A major musical event for me in that long first year out of school—at home with no direction home—was finally getting around to Lou’s baleful Berlin.  Here, retrospectively, I discovered that Lou had put down on vinyl a masterwork back when I was noodling around with extended sidelong sprawl, in search of the definitive concept album.  For many, that was Dark Side of the Moon.  Yet Lou’s was more literary, more detached (he was clearly enjoying being the scribe of those scenes, well, ok, maybe not enjoying, but he certainly had the flair for it), and more generally applicable—it wasn’t about being in a rock band, for starters. 

Berlin is a skewered take on the hip life that so many were living and the rest—the working stiffs—pining for.  And it let you know—whether you were initiated or uninitiated—what some of the costs were like.  It’s relentlessly dark but—thanks, to a large part, to the wizadry of Bob Ezrin—it shines with amazing aural clarity.  It’s a listening experience in the way that was true when The Beatles broke the mold with Sgt. Pepper.  From 1967 to 1973.  Six years.  Judge for yourself.

So, Street Hassle.  That first side was it.  “Dirt” became kind of an anthem at the time. A song about a song that was an anthem (“you remember this dude from Texas whose name was Bobby Fuller?  He wrote a song, I’ll sing it for you, it went like this: ‘I fought the law and the law won’”), it give us “the dirt” about people “who would eat shit and say it tasted good, if there was some money in it for ‘em,” and it reminded everyone—yes, dear listener/reader, even you—that we’re “just dirt,” the way Hamlet reminds a king he may go a progress through the guts of a beggar, in the end.  And the sound of the song is disheveled, full of sounds that seem to ricochet around without adding themselves to what could be called “an arrangement.” 

Then comes “Street Hassle,” a three-part mini-epic that showcases, in one view at least, a great one-night stand; an OD; a wracked paean to lost love.  At the center of the song is that OD’d “bitch” who helps define what a “street hassle” is.  Lou’s been on that street too many times, perhaps.  At least we’re willing to believe the voice in the song has.  It’s a song that shakes you up because you have to make it cohere in your listening experience of it.  You have to live through its scenes, listening, and come out the other side.  It more or less compresses Berlin into eleven minutes, with the added benefit that it gives you that earnest “neither one regretted a thing” line at the end of the first part, which, y’know, has to make up for a lot.

So, by then—1978—I’m a Lou fan.  He’s got the great early band LPs—that first VU album just keeps getting better, and I recently got a re-release mono of it that’s better than the old copy of it I used to have—he’s got the unforgettable masterpiece (Berlin); he’s got the varied moves of the rock chameleon (Rock’n’Roll Animal and Metal Machine Music); and now he’s got the wherewithal, past 35, to be in a mature phase—Street Hassle, followed by The Bells (1979) which likewise has a killer side (Side A on Hassle, Side B on The Bells). “All Through the Night” and “Families” went along, jabbingly, with where I was living at the time in my own attempt to get gritty in the city (Philly, where I saw Lou perform at the Tower on the Hassle tour—and I can never forget him, all buffed-up at that point, standing in a single spot pounding his fist into his palm to the lone heartbeat sound that leads from Part 2 of “Hassle” into 3), and “The Bells” spoke to a suicide that took place in my family at that time.  Lou’s dark side was coming up with at least a side of good stuff every year (the other sides on those LPs are much more hit and miss; can it be that I’ll ever listen to “Disco Mystic” with fondness? Maybe, now that Lou’s gone).

The Eighties. After those albums with the dense aural elan came albums much more funky and clean: Growing Up in Public (1980), The Blue Mask (1982), Legendary Hearts (1983), New Sensations (1984) (here and there are glimpses of the old Lou: like the amazing title song of The Blue Mask which fully revisits—with a vengeance—the Lou of the first VU album . . . and for the razor slice of Lou’s deadpan voice, listen to the line “watch your wife” on “The Gun”). Lou's got a great band including Robert Quine and Fernando Saunders. Lou got married!  Lou's having fun!  Lou's “Doing the Things We Want To” (a track on New Sensations that always brings a smile, with its unguarded tributes to Sam Shepard and Martin Scorsese), Lou's “Bottoming Out,” Lou's clean (“Last Shot”), Lou's in love (“Heavenly Arms”) and finding out what being married is like (“My Red Joystick”) (I’d been with the same woman for 5 years at that point, so seeing Lou in that territory was right on), and by the time he got to New York (1989), he's thinking of starting a family (“The Beginning of a Great Adventure”) at 47. New York is one of those albums that no one but Lou Reed could make. The muscular musical presence of that no-nonsense band and the pithy little parables about the state of the nation as viewed from his beloved city are quintessential—my favorite is “The Last Great American Whale” and its killer last line: “It’s like my painter friend Donald says to me: ‘stick a fork in their ass and turn ‘em over, they’re done.’” Nobody helps you smirk at grim truth like Lou Reed.

Then came his other bona fide masterpiece.  Paired again, Lou and John Cale came up with an album of songs in tribute to their late mentor Andy Warhol.  As someone who doesn’t genuflect at the name of Warhol, who rather tended to abuse him for his “populist” art, I owe to Songs of Drella my softening toward Warhol and all he represents (in every sense of that term). Lou and Cale create a portrait of Andy that is so affectionate—but not sentimental—so knowing about the vanities and the values of their hero, that it is truly touching. And how many albums in rock music are actually touching? It’s personal in a very public way, and that’s what makes it. Andy was one who fully understood how to be an artist of the public gesture—and here Lou and Cale repay him in kind. They’re speaking his language all the way, not to turn it against him, but rather to showcase how deeply affected they were by both the man and the artist. It’s a great tribute, the kind of thing that artists often do for their fallen influences, and it’s rather breathtaking how well it works. And, in 1990 when it came out, I was certainly skeptical about anything in “popular art” working so well.

Which is a way of saying that the period we’re entering into is one where I would probably say that I felt I’d learned all the lessons rock music—and particularly the rock heroes of my youth, like Lou—had to teach me. Now he was like that flush elder relative you run into now and then. He’s got it made and you’re still trying to make it; he’s said it all, and you’re still trying to figure out what to say. So you lend ear to him for a bit, to see what he’s been up to—on Magic and Loss (1992) he’s mourning some losses of his own (the Grim Reaper claimed many early in their lives in those AIDS years); on Set the Twilight Reeling (1996) he’s got a new wife (Laurie Anderson!) and he revisits his early days (“Egg Cream”), creates a heartfelt tribute to his town (“NYC Man”), and puts it all on the line as only he can (“Finish Line,” “Trade in,” “Sex With Your Parents”); on Ecstasy, from 2000, he fucking kicks butt (“Like a Possum”) and keeps things interesting (“Ecstasy,” “Turning Time Around,” “White Prism”).

Then, I gotta say, I kinda lost track of Lou. I know he did that Poe thing (The Raven, 2003) and I still haven’t gone there. I’ve always been affectionate about some of Lou’s literary pretensions and the howlers I’d rib him about if I knew him personally (Lear wasn’t blinded, Lou, that was Gloucester, “wherefore art thou” means “why” not “where”), but, Delmore Schwartz or no Delmore Schwartz, I don’t know if Lou—the poet of plainspeak—is the one to catch the spirit of the poet of latinate locutions. Maybe it’s time I gave Lou a listen on that score, now that he’s gone finally to night’s Plutonian shore.  Forevermore.

Good night, Lou

(March 2, 1942-October 27, 2013)

RE: METRO LACE IV

The fourth part of Metro Lace is where things take a turn toward the more immediate and more personal.  The immediacy comes, in part, from the fact that the Part consists of five different Days, so that each has its particular occasion.  Each—until the fifth Day—is very contained, a short poem, in essence.  And that means there is much less opportunity to roam. The effort begins to write every other day or so, which is broken up by a trip taken to PA, and a return.  It’s the time of year when the semester is breaking up and there are gatherings. The trip is signaled by 5.7, written on an Amtrak to Philadelphia. The decision to register what the days themselves contain makes the poem morph in a new way, at first, but that was not apparent at all on 5.3, when Part IV commences.

That segment—5.3—shows a playfulness with form but, I think, a deepening of content.  Or at least a “return” to Part I, in the sense of describing how I feel without making the particulars too clear.  There’s a spirit animating 5.3 that makes the tone of it hard for me to register.  It’s rueful about something that hasn’t happened.  It’s not the regret over what one has done, but the regret over what one has not done, and probably never will.  I don’t think it’s despairing though.  This is a poem, after all—does anyone actually write a poem of despair?  So, then, though it’s regrettable that something has not occurred, there’s yet the chance that something will occur.

There’s a very definite sense, in IV, that at least some of the regret has to do with “her.”  There are any number of uses of the female pronoun in the entire poem, and it would be foolish to think that they all apply to someone in particular, or to anyone in particular each time (see discussion of eros here).  And yet at times “she” is a definite figure. This gets explored somewhat in 5.13, III, where a long list of impressions of different “hers” flows past like a litany of glimpses.  It could be said that some such denouement is already implied in the opening of Part IV.  If we want to give a name to the main “her” of Part IV, we could call her Lucy, the name used to address a particular “her” at the close of 5.3.

My recollection of writing 5.3 is that I felt the poem might be becoming very elliptical.  That there would be no more distracting its mood with the fun stuff I’ve been mostly doing since Part II.  I was taking my cue from Side A and Side B, both of which indicated that something had passed—call it the semester, if you like.  I would have to be somewhere else, mentally, shortly.  And where would I be if not the past, perhaps settling old scores or something.

But I swerved from that task, as one says, and let 5.5 be a very careful discourse on my mood walking around town.  My impending departure, in a day or two, for a visit to my wife gives the day the clarity of leave-taking and that’s all I’m registering, but with the imagined possibility of a more open-ended escape—without giving too much away, I can say that I’m still thinking of a pursuit.  Imagining as well, it seems, a last minute visit to offset my own departure.  When next we see me—5.7—I’m the one on the train and I’ve become the rather demonstrative voice one overhears while traveling in Business Coach.  This segment is all business and a glance out the window at words printed on the side of a building gains me my eventual title: Metro Lace.

Then comes a gap, as I write nothing while away.  On 5.12 I’m back and simply taking stock of my mood as I resume.  I think the overall burden here is looking for “the charm” that finally gets mentioned in the last line.  That will have to do for a finish, though I have the nagging sense that this Day wanted to go much further afield.  Which does in fact happen on 5.13 where all bets are off.  We’re going to have-at this thing till we get somewhere and get this Part over with.  It’s as if I’m letting go to make up for the poems that didn’t get written while I was out of town.

5.13 begins with a guiding formal principle: find a rhyme for every line ending.  I believe this is still the case, though I haven’t checked. There may have been subsequent revisions that spoiled the effect, but, initially, at least, there was an off-rhyme for each.  The tone of the poem is now taking the long view, something like what surfaced way back in Part II.  Perhaps that’s the default tone of the poem: trying to tell you, dear Reader, what it was like…in those days.  Yet now we’re somewhere closer to the speaker than we were, and in 2. it becomes a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as the “situation” has been lifted from another one of those gatherings that are, it seems, the only charm of these days.

Finally, as 3. begins, we take up “pursuit” through memory: all those glimpses of “her”—where some are deliberately generic and some very specific. What the exact mix is and how many nameable “hers” contribute to the composite, I would never say.  Is glimpsing and telling much different from kissing and telling?  You tell me.  In any case, the saving grace of this unabashed scopophilia, I hope (it’s May in a college town, after all), is the riposte of at least some of the collective “hers” speaking of “him” and his need to make “something” of seeing them like that.  The response is a little hard to follow because the banality of all those glimpses—it can be admitted that “she” does nothing remarkable in any of the glimpses—provokes a sense of having to account for simply being an object of attention.  And how is one to do that, ultimately?  Graciously?  Grudgingly?  And everything in between?

From that we segue into much playfulness, as if to offset the embarrassment of the above with something that either charms or grates.  If you’ve ever amused a child until he or she becomes irritated with the amusement, then you have probably experienced what I’m going for here.  And from that cue—the disappearing listeners—we go somewhere that I still find quite impressive, if I say so myself.

I have to say that to end this Part, I’m going to have to get right up against it.  It’s not so much an exposure or a dropping of pretense.  It’s not my heart on my sleeve, I don’t think, but it’s as near to that as this poem gets.  Each verse paragraph contains a “charm,” so to speak, and what impresses me is that I’m able to say what I mean and not say it, at the same time.  I think that such is the case throughout the poem but here the saying has become more emphatic.  Maybe I’m simply finally claiming the meagerness of my own imagination, but in any case, I definitely come home again.

From “Come take me” to “it smarts” I’m working toward the finish and I can’t seem to get there.  I keep taking new breaths and resuming.  The pursuit now—not meaning to risk comparison with Keats—is being “felt on one’s pulses” as he says.  My heart’s beating as we get to the end of this one, actually fluttering.  I think it’s because we’re back, with a difference, to the “airlifted” moment.  What can be the harm in that, and what can be the nature of the possible and fruitful life to come?

Do you recall something about a “purgatorial chair”?  That's where we are as this Part ends.

METRO LACE 'N' ME

I’ve now recorded each day’s segment for Parts I through III, and am almost to the end of Part IV.  There are two parts after that, which will equal, or almost, the same number of recordings that I’ve already done. So, recording-wise, I’m about half-way through. And page-wise, as a single document, the segment I most recently recorded, IV. May 12, is the halfway mark.

Good time, I guess, to take stock of what reading it aloud for digital recording and playback has shown me. For some odd reason, simply working through the document, even with its divisions clearly marked, hasn’t managed to impress much upon me in the way of structure. I think that’s because when I work through the document I am working, trying to weigh each line to see if I still accept it. When I get to the stopping points I simply recognize them as the place to break. This revising mind doesn’t intrude into the recording because if it did the reading would be terrible.  Whenever it does, I have to do another take. In other words, I have to read the words as though they’re someone else’s and I can’t change a thing. That kind of insistence makes for an interesting experience, I find.

To say something else about that: to have that experience is one reason why I’m recording the readings. I mean, I’ve read the poem aloud to myself plenty of times but there’s still a provisional aspect to such readings. They don’t have to be “pitch perfect.” Are the recordings? Well, not quite, but close. Occasionally, listening to the playback, I feel I’ve botched the enunciation, and I can imagine an official reading in which I assigned parts to different readers. But that would only work if they were actors; the kind of people who can be coached and directed. Otherwise, I would be even less content, I imagine, with how someone else treats the lines. What I’m listening for in playback is hard for me to name, exactly, but I’d call it “the right tension.”

That’s all that drives the poem, I’m realizing as I record it and listen to it. The great discovery in writing the poem was that that “tension” is potentially endless. It simply became the quality of my life and mind at the time. And not in any burdened way. I was living alone at the time. To see my wife, I made a couple visits to her son’s house in PA, where she was convalescing after an accident.  Those visits are very clear to me in breaks in the poem, but they don’t occur till after the semester ends. The poem commences when the semester is almost over but not quite. The end is in sight, and, beyond that, I don’t have any immediate plans. That’s what makes the period of composition so golden. I know I don’t have to do anything except stay “in character,” so to speak. Except for those visits.

I know the catalyst for the day I began—which is to say Part I—was reading a volume of Ashbery.  But which one?  I’m not sure. In fact, at various points, at least up through Part III, Ashbery remained a catalyst, and it would be interesting to me to know if there are traces in what I write that come from the poems I was reading. It seems certain to me that the intonation of certain sections does. What I’m borrowing from Ashbery, then, isn’t imagery or voice, it's tone. But, obviously, that tone gets distorted when I treat it as “mine.” In part because I’m not consciously sure what any Ashbery poem is talking about. So I’m reading them as a direct, unconscious communication. His poem’s voice is talking to me, internally, and I respond in kind. Simple. But I have no idea where that tone is going to take me and what it will make me say. That’s part of the tension I’m talking about. 

Part I is mostly all prologue. It’s taking stock of a situation that makes writing the poem seem “natural.” Something you could easily do. Like anything else you might do that day. But it’s in a defeated tone. It’s almost like a defense mechanism: being as pessimistic as possible so no one can bring you down. It’s not that Ashbery poems ever bring me down, but one does reach a certain saturation point where one says “well, that’s easy for YOU to say, pardner.” At that point you want to shut him up. Just so you can start talking, maybe. And that’s all I’m doing. Introducing my state of mind. Kinda dejected, and if I’m speaking to anyone it’s probably an old friend, someone for whom the details aren’t important—we’ve known each other so long, how could they be—but simply (as Dylan might ask): “how does it feel?” In other words, it’s “confessional” in the sense of revealing how I’m feeling, but without any details specific to my life or events.

Part II, which goes on for some length, is the “fully empowered” part. Now I know I can do this, and I can go wherever I want. That means bringing in absurdist asides and a variety of voices, to have fun. The provocation of Ashbery here becomes more definite. I’m thinking of him in a sort of Proustian way, as this well-to-do aesthete with no end of sophisticated bon mots to shower us with.  I’m trying on roles to play that game, and so this part is less confessional, in the sense of my state of mind, because I’m fully engaged by the task at hand. I’m making an open-ended poem with only one imperative: keep writing till you run out of lines. Or until you get to a “finish.” The day before, April 9, that finish came up pretty clearly. What can you say after “now hush”? So, part of the task on Day Two is to avoid a finish. Just keep going. What becomes evident is that I’ll have to cheat. I’ll take breaks—probably to read more Ashbery—and will have to resume, so this Part will have many breaks. The first occurs with “Breaking the reverie” (which is the start of the second recording on the page). The bit about being air-lifted ends a train of thought but it’s not a big finish. You can follow it after a beat…but with something completely different.

At that point—once I admit a break into the text, a break not caused by a new Day—I’m on a path of discovery. What form will this thing take? Why not a series of separate lines? I like the line in a Mekons song “these lines are all individuals and there’s no such thing as a song.” A poem of lines that could all be beginning lines or ending lines. Most of them are cliché, some are a bit esoteric as quotations. The point is only that they come unbidden, immediately to hand. Now the tension is not staying “in character” but losing character. And that means other characters will come forward.

I suspect that there’s a reading break right before the part that starts with “Silence those polite foghorns.” The voice is something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon—specifically Foghorn Leghorn—and I’m probably thinking of Ashbery’s “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” one of my favorite poems in Houseboat Days. It could be I glanced through that volume—I have it in the Three Books edition. I like the Three Books volume because those are the books Ashbery published when I was first becoming “a poet,” age 18 to 25. And “A Wave” is one of my favorite poems, and that volume—Three Books—I associate with the final year of my time at Princeton because that’s when I first read it. Anyway.

The voices that come in could have gone on for some time, in any number of small segments divided by asterisks. Because at this point there’s no reason to stop, except I’m getting tired, and probably hungry. I know that the part “True, I don’t like the smell of me” comes after a bathroom break. Maybe something about a “transatlantic flight” makes you feel like you have to piss? Or at least I would definitely want to make sure I go before I went, if you know what I mean. In any case, I came back, ready to go on, but then hit a stopping point. The voice that says “A change is coming” knows that I’ve got to change it up and see if there’s water of a different flavor in the well.

So Part III begins, on that same day, with a game change. Now I’m going to write single-page entries, starting with a letter of the alphabet, in sequence. My only constraint is that the first two words of the first line and the first word of the second line have to begin with the letter. This means that every poem begins with alliteration  that “carries over” after the first enjambment or line ending. Simple. Now let’s go.

In some ways I like Part III best, or, put another way, I feel that Part III best justifies the entire project. Someone might ask: well, why not treat it as a stand alone segment? This alphabet thing clearly departs from the rest and so…why is it still Metro Lace? And that’s where the answer to end all questions comes in: It is because I say it is. And here’s why: I would not have done these single-page riffs if I didn’t already know I was in the midst of composing a potentially endless poem.  They would seem too arbitrary to me. Like some kind of homework assignment. But they’re not, for the most excellent reason that they’re part of this whole…a whole that is so formless and open-ended that it can include anything.

It might be true to say that Metro Lace is a “book of poems” like any book of poems: a collection of things written around the same time. And that would be true except for certain built-in reference points: I maintain the dates to keep the poem in sequence, and it’s written over a particular period of time. It can be revised, and has been, but it has to remain in the sequence dictated by that succession of days. That is its modus operandi. And within that context, Part III works, for me, like little musical “solos.” If the rest of the poem is the “score”—the context—Part III is where the instrumentalist steps up and shows what he can do for however many bars he’s got. As analogy it doesn’t quite work because we don’t move from the solo back to the song. We have a series of 26 solos. And there are some gaps, in terms of days with no composition, because now I have to be “ready” to write to a certain letter. Where I stop a Day is still determined by hitting a “finish” (I like best the finish on the first day…I was hot on April 10!), but when I resume I’ve got to do the next letter. That made me keep writing but it also started to irk me because it was too “premeditated.” In some cases, I had to think ahead to what words would meet the alphabetical requirement, which is why “x” is “‘xylophone, x-ray of,’ of course.” Because what else could it be? I should mention here that one of my favorite books in grade school—we didn’t have a copy, so I always had to take it out of the library when I needed it—was Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra. I guess you could say I’ve always had an antagonistic relationship to the alphabet.

When I composed the sentences at the end of “z”—the abcedarian sentences—as prose, I thought that maybe I would switch to prose poems for the next Part. I was consciously at the point of “big finish” and “recommence”—as I’m sure I chose to end Part III on Walpurgis (April 30) and commence the next part on May Day. But May Day is its own poem in a way. It’s not part of any Part. It’s a Side A and a Side B, that I’m pretty sure was written after reading some of the Ashbery books that I had never read before—the three I read during this project that fit that bill are And the Stars Were Shining, Wakefulness, and Your Name Here. I think of Wakefulness as being the one that stimulated me most, but I haven’t gone back to look.

Side A is deliberately of its moment. Already some of that was beginning to happen in Part III, where discrete glimpses of something “real” (something not just in my own mind) was finding its way onto the page—like references to the Housatonic and the bridge over it, or to streets in New Haven—but mostly things are given a distortion that kept “me” out of it. With Side A and Side B, that changes.  Having passed through the alphabet, I was now “closer to home,” so to speak. Which is a way of saying that memory would start to be involved more directly. In Side A, there’s a memory of Dublin, and of the Highline in New York (a later addition, I think), and a reference, current in first composition, to watching shows in the Iseman Theatre at Yale, and in Side B, there’s a memory of being in Chicago in 2008. Memory is its own context, we can say, and that means the poem (the “reverie”) is being violated by actual events and places. It’s been happening all along—the close of Part I recalls a specific theatrical event I attended (but I think that came-in as a revision, once such things became admissible in the later going)—but now I have the sense that I might be using the poem for—to use David Byrne’s phrase—“catching up with myself.”

Parts IV, V, and VI will constitute the kind of catching up that has been led to by Parts I, II, and III.