POETIC TIME
Mentors and Tormentors

On Friday we went to see 54 year-old poet Mary Karr read from her funny new memoir against the depression of her mother’s drinking which made her try to drink away her own depression and find an oblivious tall rich man, about her relationship with David Foster Wallace, her love for Don DeLillo and Robert Hass for their coolness, and about saving light moments and beating out a more human time from the drudgery that normally counts as life.

I told Mary Karr that I’m a big fan of Robert Hass too, and asked her why she likes him so much and she looked us in the eyes and quoted this poem which it turns out was her first poetry column for the Washington Post:


By Mary Karr, Sunday, March 2, 2008;

To take up this column, kicked off 12 years ago by my mentor, Robert Hass, is to inherit my poetic father's former post. However flattering it may be to follow him, his shadow feels daunting.

Harold Bloom argues in The Anxiety of Influence that each writer struggles against influences in an Oedipal fight to slay overbearing patriarchs. But Hass taught me that dialogue with one's historical betters is more privilege than threat. In poetic ancestry, an alleged tormentor may make the best mentor -- and vice versa.

In this poem, young Hass crosses that campus near where his hero Randall Jarrell had translated his own patriarch, Chekhov. Jarrell -- a tennis player famous for charm -- captured the misery of housewifery in the effortless '50s. "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All . . ." He later shocked everyone with his suicide. By cross-dressing in Jarrell's angelic tennis garb, Hass questions the faux ease of academic life and the perils of inherited habits: Old Dominion

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.

It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.

It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the new tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.

Now the thwack . . . thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.

I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Even Los Angeles -- city of cool -- sounds like lost angels, and the Californian Hass vows to honor his ancestors with a distrust for any false charm or inherited boundaries. That's what this column's for. That's what I hope to live up to. (Robert Hass's poem "Old Dominion" can be found in "Praise." Ecco. Copyright 1979 by Robert Hass)

RARE FORMS
Of Jennifer

Jennifer was in rare form yesterday – bouncing off the front passenger car seat because she had tried to drink all the coffee in my big black clunky mug shaped with the impression of a hand (the one Mary Roth-Yoder wanted as a wedding present). We stumbled over each other into the movie theatre to watch Matt Damon play the seamy informant in a giant corn syrup factory like a weak representation of a Nobokov/Kafka story: malevolent brainy protagonist lost in layers of legality and corruption with a seedy mustache, secretly sexiest man of the year. We sat in our favorite chairs in theatre no. 4 of the “crusty” Crest Cinema Centre where movies tickets are cheaper than popcorn and were happy (most of the popcorn eaters were not loud or too far away to ruin the movie). Jennifer rocked in her chair and spoke of having a footrest.

Jennifer was in rare form today – bounding out of the YMCA she said she “feels so powerful” after lifting weights which she admits “are not that heavy.” Like she “could punch through walls!” She says her pre-exercise days were actually not that different, but she likes these days better. Given a choice, she would choose against grand narratives, and want to see her past as unconnected to her present (just like, Vendela Vida, coincidentally). Nope, now she is walking fast as though low-blood sugar was a faint illusion that has never haunted her like a bad dream involving a strange man and her mom and a place she used to live before . . . (sorry, dream reports are sometimes vague, in another time and place Jennifer would be known as Gennavieve, Queen of Vague). (Interesting side note: Mary Roth-Yoder’s brother-in-law and his wife just had a baby named Gennavieve. Congratulations Zeb and Lisa!)

Jennifer was in rare form last weekend – when we sat down at Spring Hill for dinner. Spring Hill, which was brought front and center to us, by the Dillsburg, Pennsylvania foodie Shayne Edmunds, was last year’s 3rd best new restaurant in America according to Bon Appetit. And no disappointment either. As a steak man (who practices a rare form of carnivorous asceticism), I tried the wagyu and it was in rare form with perfect char, accented nicely with some sort of mustard sauce, potatoes a couple different ways (creamy, fried, crispy). Chard and bacon. Jennifer tried the vegetable tasting platter and loved every form of perfectly seasoned cassoulet of beet, radish, arugula, and potato she tasted until it was gone. She says she will surprise me by taking me back there for my birthday, but she doesn’t know that I might surprise her first. There are a lot of holidays between now and January 20th – the anniversary of George Bush Jr.’s return to the mountain bike trails of his Texas ranch and (perhaps not coincidentally) my birthday. So many more chances for Jennifer to charge after her favorite things.

CELEBRATING
Songs, beards and other forms of Anti-Gravity

Jennifer said as we were getting our weekend of wild celebration started on Friday night that she thinks beards make men look kind. Something about an obscured face makes the stranger focus on the quiet eyes, on not talking too much, on listening and thinking. This weekend we heard a wild man from Portland named McDougall sing a wild row of train songs to a mean claw hammer banjo, we heard David Bazan howl into the void, all solitary beards. And we listened to ZZ Top who have been growing their beards together for 30 odd years, odd years of cattle running across the stage, refusals to be interviewed, and a guitar made out of a plank from Muddy Waters’ Delta shack.

Jennifer said that the sound of the Phillip Glass Ensemble breathing when they play Symphony No. 3 and the sound of their bows on the strings underneath the music is what makes the music seem human and true. Over the past few weeks my friend Shayne Edmunds has been feeding us a steady stream of CDs which he calls things like “possibly the best album ever recorded.” Shayne collects vinyl LPs of old rhythm and blues (scratchy recordings which fuzz and pop with electricity like unique objects too hot for a phonograph needle) and turns them into CDs for people like us. One of these CDs was ZZ Top’s First Album, a first rate blues record, played by a man who learned the old songs on the knee of his family’s cleaning lady down in 1950s Texas.

Jennifer said the weight of her nearly six-digit student loan didn’t seem real until she saw that little train of zeros in the bottom right column of her 30-year payment plan on our computer. She thinks society is a giant black octopus that drapes itself over our heads and sucks life from us. And she thinks she just spent the last three years paying the octopus to let her go free. So we celebrated reinventing ourselves as debt free people for this weekend, and talked about beards, the way the scratchy recordings make music better and not from a factory, ate the finest known food in Seattle (food that tasted better because the menu told us what farm it came from on the West Coast) and danced around the second -hand furniture in our living room like primitives who had just discovered fire.

Here is ZZ Top going down to Mexico from the orginal LP just for Harlan.

And another one (beard-free Conor Oberst this time) just because I like it.

Photos from Zach Ramey and this place.

THE SCANDAL
Of Seattle’s Golden Breeze

Last night around nine o’clock we went out to an all night coffee shop and tried to read Nabokov and study Uyghur. But we only got through a few sips of our decaf chai and the street was flooded with naked pumpkin-headed men deliriously flapping by. Then they were gone and we were wondering if we saw them at all. Did we see that golden breeze like a streak of laughter down the street? We think we did. And the pictures from the Naked Pumpkin Run (NPR) of Seattle prove it, but they don’t show the surprise which makes such a costume a timeless treasure.

I also saw through the window of a tavern a sad dinosaur sitting in the corner of the bar with his beer, his legs crossed. Another short moment in time where the weird seemed true and the strange seemed natural. A lonesome dinosaur in a world of human freaks.

We didn’t dress up last night like a pirate or a gorilla, but one of these years Jennifer will be a mini whale and I will be a David Lynch teddy bear and we will laugh ourselves to sleep because the world is funny.

PECKING
Like Two Birds in a Leek Garden

“Well that’s another piece of Seattle culture we can put in our pockets and take home,” Jennifer said as we walked out of the Seattle Bookfest admiring the purple slouch-sock boots of the woman walking in front of us through the front gate of the Columbia City Event Center which is a reinvented elementary school. Seattle Bookfest people feed on nostalgia for old general stores and lost tribal myths. They say they look not for streams of consciousness, but for little splendors to emerge from chaos (“it happens more often than you might think”).

We ate our dinner to the faint tinkle of Billie Holiday overlooking the leaf strewn street, watched carefully by the Frenchman at the Thomas St. Bistro (ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice). Looking up from my corner of that small place I could see myself reflected in the small round mirror across the little room and again in the reflection of the small rectangular mirror above my head, then again in the round one (and in my antique silver spoon). Outside on the street the Space Needle and the Sound were like an old man slowly falling asleep in a very comfortable chair.

If it were possible to be whoever we wanted to be in Seattle maybe I would be Imogen Cunningham and Jennifer would be Morris Graves. Then I could write (as they wrote about Morris):

Now she comes from the Pacific Northwest:
A thin figure with alarmed eyes.
She is shy and skittish, aloof yet (you suspect)
ruthless in her opinion.
She is birdlike, on the horizon,
receding, private, mobile, and migratory.
She has the willful steely sentiment of a bird:
its fierce capacity to survive.

Imogen and Morris who haunt the Seattle Art Museum and the steep streets like Thomas St. give us reasons to keep looking at the landscape for the details which shiver our spines. To look around like Nabokov and think “a good laugh is the best pesticide” (and imagine that Nabokov’s laugh sounds like Regina Spektor).

Self-Portrait by Morris Graves. Photos by Imogen Cunningham

LIKE MICHAEL CHABON
Heedlessly Following Passions

The best fans of an art are those that are inspired to action. For these fans who we call amateurs (if not nerds, geeks, or groupies), art is not just pretty or fascinating, but stirring. And this is life at its best according to Michael Chabon – a Berkeley father of four. No one ever disdains the passion of the amateur athlete, the amateur writer, the amateur musician (we adore it to the point of destroying it). Such amateurs are the best critics, the only critics that matter. The cold professional or lazy blowhard doesn’t count when it comes to real life. Real fans are like John Updike writing Ted William’s swing into poetry, a video store clerk making movies like Quentin Tarantino, or like cultural critic Slavoj Zizek – a former post-Marxist politician who I’ve heard characterized as an excited drunk friend who doesn’t understand personal boundaries.

Michael Chabon says he had so many kids so that he could finally have his own fan club for comic books and 1980’s British Sci-fi TV shows. He and his wife are the stars of their amateur family and his kids are the fans – amateur critics who play along because they still believe their show is the best. There are lots of ways of pointing out the unreasonableness of this way of thinking, but summarily dismissing that negative work for a second, I think Mr. Chabon is a fan of the real, the surreal, the hyperreal, whatever, and feeling moved: Being creative rather than reactive is a much better way to live (better absolutely Deleuze says).

It was raining on Friday when Michael Chabon came to town. Matthew Coate wrote that he “thinks comfort is not comfort except in contradistinction to a chilly autumn rain.” And this is how I felt while I listened to Michael Chabon on the local radio show and as I listened him talk to Terry Gross in Philadelphia, but I couldn’t help myself, I’m a fan, an amateur writer even, and Michael Chabon wishes he could have been David Foster Wallace’s friend, he misses his kids when he is gone and his wife loves him best. I know its lame and I have no connection with Michael Chabon, I’m just a fan and he made me get out of my floral print chair and ride a crowded wet bus through the lancing rain like a bleary-eyed man after his first cup of coffee. I rode through the rain like cold water streaming down my face to see Michael Chabon and join his fan club.

SO, CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SOME AMATEUR MUSIC I MADE HEEDLESSLY WITH MATTHEW WENGER.

pictures are mostly from michaelchabon.com except the one of him and his wife and the one of the book which are by Will Harper (?) and organizingthesoup respectively.

2 POEMS

Pale John Byler

John Muir said the lumbermen of Puget Sound were doubtful in color, slow of speech,
as if partly out of breath in 1918.

It was the hard work of surfeit destruction that trained their brains, the war for human nature,
moving giant trees over mountains like Werner Herzog in a rain forest slogging along in resin stiff pants

the conquest of the useless.

This is the foppery pale John Byler caught himself in riding the hard rails all the way West

after what Muir called the rare "free roamer of the wilderness ... in contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the fountains of things"

Pale John Byler, an Amish flâneur wanting to live the tilted hat life before he died from his asthma in flat Iowa a dirt farmer and family man not hardly 40.

Robert Hass says in his poem “Iowa, January”

In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.

Wild John Byler as a fresh flâneur from Middlefield Ohio (on left) next to a forest friend at their logging camp near Seattle, Washington, (woo-hoo!) c. 1920.

Unknown Smiley Vernon

The grandpa I never knew exists in stories I think I heard
He grew up on a farm in Iowa waiting for his mission to come knocking like a board member
He grew up on his farm in flat corn-fed Iowa a shy small man who never knew his father, wild John Byler,
He went to church only when he could be on time
He was waiting for his mission

The mission came like a stern man with combed hair and sent him to a dirt church in northern Minnesota
It was a frozen sod farm carved from trees with an outhouse at the end of a cold path of snow
where Smiling Vernon unleashed
Let his hair out wild like a crazy banshee in his moldering shack full of boys of curly hair
Singing to his brown cows his own made up songs

My grandpa Smiley Vernon who died while singing in his sleep, went door to door like a Mormon on a mission
Like a Mormon missionary up and down the Little Fork River named by Fur Traders against Indians
only he was a crazy Mennonite (not an Amishman) who never knew his father, natty Seattle Byler,
not a shy man on time or not at all
but a man on a mission, no question

once he found a way to make his own songs he was Smiling Vernon
loved by all until his heart quit early
He was the grandpa who never knew his dad, the asthmatic lumberman,
A shy man until he found his mission
Then he sang a new song for his cows and ate bananas by the box