For Chris

C Natale Perditto died earlier this month.  We were friends back in the Philly poetry scene of the early Eighties, and I was sorry to hear he is gone.  He was one of the true believers in the idea of "street poetry," outside the academy, and aimed at lived realities. He wrote poems with a lot of attitude. Here's a poem I wrote, based on certain aspects of his character, both irascible and generous, some time around 1995, looking back.  R.I.P, Chris

PERDITO

Perdito stood—tall,

gangly, with coarse teeth—
squarely for le néante

He knew French poets personally
and so knew the task
was to negate art
at every turn, on every corner

"Negate art
in the Tunnel of Love,
negate art with a TV ad,
negate art with an Uzi
and a Swiss bank account"

The fact that he used art
to negate art was not lost
on his friends but
we didn't like to point it out
for then he’d become truculent

"What about that twenty bucks
you owe me? You weren't so smart
when you needed a place to crash.
OK, so why haven't you written a poem
in two months? Cute, but
when's the last time you got laid?"

Perdito scorned our critiques
and our praise. Loose-limbed,
with a bit of a Bogart scowl,
he oozed the charisma of the gutter
and knew which poets had contracted VD
and from whom.

He would disappear for a time,
then return with tales of visiting a poet’s
death-bed (the rest of us didn't even know
he was sick!), drooling over a cig
shared with the master, both
proclaiming le néante as the aesthetic
proud to have no future.

"Negate art with a ball peen hammer,
negate art with pubic hair on TV,
negate art with graffiti
on the Berlin Wall and the Louvre"

Perdito had all the luck.
Once his car was stolen
because he left it running while
he delivered some broadsides
at the "Just Earth" Food Co-op;
days later he found his car,
keys in the ignition,
parked in the alley
behind his favorite bar.
Perdito jumped in and drove off,
his carton of cigarettes
still untouched on the backseat.

"Negate art by vacationing in Nicaragua
negate art by shaking hands with the dead"

PAZ POEM

“I believe in the coherent work, composed of many voices.”—Octavio Paz

Reading Michael Wood’s review of The Poems of Octavio Paz—“Real isn't real”—in the London Review of Books, 4 July 2013, I find lines that capture quite effectively the sensation of writing something like Metro Lace.  It’s not surprising, since I would still say that the biggest influence on the “method” of such a poem—after Ashbery—is the anthology called Modern European Poetry (in translation) that I read around the age of 20.  It included some poems of Paz but more importantly it included an international collection of poets all writing in that vein to some degree.  “That vein” being born of symbolist practices to a degree that American verse rarely is, and British verse still less.

Which makes me reflect I still need to go back to reading translated anthologies and maybe to building up my resources again with poems written in other tongues.  In any case, here are the lines from Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser, quoted by Wood:

When over the paper the pen goes writing

in any solitary hour,

who drives the pen?

To whom is he writing, he who writes for me . . .

Someone in me is writing, moves my hand,

hears a word, hesitates,

halted between green mountains and blue sea . . .

He writes to anyone, he calls nobody,

to his own self he writes, in himself forgets,

and is redeemed, becoming again me.

True, nothing in this, as writing, recalls Metro Lace.  I would despair of such solemnity, but the process described is quite accurate, and elsewhere Paz, like all symbolist-influenced poets, can employ some of the flippancy that comes with an acceptance that the only world we may remark on is the one we make of words.  In general, though, he’s not primary in that regard and I preferred other poets in that volume who were a bit more insouciant about the existential abyss interposed between textuality and identity.  Still, from Wood’s description, it sounds as if poems like Sunstone (1957) and Blanco (1966) would have something to say to me.

Make It Anew

Get back to where you once belonged. A-bloggin’ we shall go. It’s a New Year, and Blogocentrism is being revived to offset, somewhat, the long withdrawing roar of my opinionated pronouncements, the efforts to get 'on record' (or on web) a lifetime of critical aperçus before, like the song says, 'the man says it’s time to go.'  Or maybe it’s just to comment upon the days as they pass, to make an online scrapbook of whatever comes to mind.

I will make the effort, I hope. It shouldn’t be too much to ask: finding something worth posting about a few times a week. Some days there might just be links to something else on the Web. To let clips and links speak for themselves is also a kind of commentary, isn’t it?

Today is the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Robert Duncan, an American poet from San Francisco.  Here’s a link to his bio on poets.org.  It’s also the 40th anniversary of the death of John Berryman, who ended his life by jumping from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, at 57.   So let’s think about poets.

Here’s the text of one of Duncan’s poems:

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

There are many lines here that glow with the force of the kind of lyricism Duncan prizes: “whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded”—“a place of first permission,” a meadow, “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind.”  Poetry is conceived as a most deliberate game of make-believe, a willful reading of the world according to the light of the imagination—“a given property of the mind.”  When that light fails, things get very dark indeed.

And here’s a song by Australian singer/songwriter Nick Cave that, among other things, commemorates Berryman’s despairing plunge, even as it suggests that the author is an absence behind the words that always eludes us—unless we find the presence in the words themselves.

We Call Upon The Author 

Finally, a favorite bit of Berryman--Dream Song 1--where the lines “empty grows every bed,” so soon after the elation “all at the top” of the sycamore, feel as inevitable, as soothingly eternal, as the ocean wearing the land away.

Keep the faith, with hope and charity.