#msarki

Babylon

A splash of cold water down my pot-parched throat

makes me forget her, for a moment, in that long fur

coat. She is naked under faux. An astounding woman,

understated as a rustling creek or undulating meadow.  

This smoke does wobble a bit. But it repudiates our

sin as I continue playing with her matches.

This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: Stories by Diane Williams Hardcover, 117 pages Published January 1st 1990 by Grove Weidenfeld ISBN: 1555843689 (ISBN13: 9781555843687)

A marvelous and brilliant work by the gifted Diane Williams. Wikipedia informs us that most of these stories were edited by her teacher and friend Gordon Lish, and I suspected as much while reading as I myself was once a student of Lish. But her friendly and professional relationship with Mr. Lish ended in 1996.  Nonetheless she went on to enjoy a stellar writing and editing career of her own., and not surprisingly.  The Gordon Lish I have known since 1995 resembles this man in one of her stories.  

…I have a great deal of money which I have earned.  I have physical beauty for a man.  I have intelligence.  I have work to do which I love to do, but women are what I prefer to anything, to lie down with them, the turning to touch the woman and knowing I will be received for sex as soon as I wish to be welcome.

I have been at it like this, this way for years.  It does not matter when I will die.  I have had everything I have ever wanted.

It is difficult to explain the writing of Williams. One must have their own personal experience with it. Williams may not be for everyone, but rarely does she not speak a language I understand. Life is full of ambiguities and anomalies.  Perversions and obsessions abound.  I am smitten by her paragraphs and intuitively know she is making history with her words.  

Rarely do I discuss my own creative work with anyone.  It is simply impossible to explain, and given my historical feelings of inadequacy, I fear never to be accepted or appreciated for my efforts whether on the page, through brush or pen, film, photography.  Throughout my life I have never fit in.  And I quit trying to years ago.  Even with the anointment by Gordon Lish recognizing and encouraging my poetic genius, I never actively marketed myself among my peers or social media.  I remain hidden, safely protected by shadows.  This does not mean I feel content with my standing in the art world.  In contrast, I feel the extreme opposite.  I seriously invest myself in search of great art whether it be still or moving pictures, painting, or language.  My own work pleases me and I wonder often why others who matter have not discovered me.  I feel I am one of the truly gifted artists among us.  But I hold no pretensions that I will be acknowledged as such by my peers.  Throughout my life I have never been lauded over anything.  I somehow have failed to ever exist and can therefore never be forgotten.  My work continues unimpeded and absent all mediation. I create what I am impelled to make for no other reason than to give my own life meaning and derive some satisfaction from putting in a good day’s work.  I write “as if” and expect it to be so one day.  There is nothing today in my physical appearance or performance that might draw the masses to me.  Unlike Bob Dylan or Patti Smith, performance art eludes me.  There will be no attention garnered by my singing or my dance, only the presence of silence in these words and pictures I make on the page.  My work awaits a coarse enactment within the reader’s blood and brains.

These two old guys drove twelve miles into the city to attend a special poetry reading, hoping to eventually read publicly a few of their own poems in the ordered process of each signing into the listed queue holding court on the official table of the local coffee house. These two gray-haired gentlemen suffered through the chief poet, the headliner, the star, who had earlier sashayed into the coffee house wearing his poet's garb, looking like the great poet he claimed to his university students to be because he had published books and because, in the course of things, his peers themselves also said he was a great poet. He was there to be seen as the great poet he believed he was and to premiere new poems about his cat. On and on he droned in verse so boring it was hard to tell anymore what the old men had come to partake in and where they thought they might be headed to if they knew. And then, like that, the poet was done. Finished.  And off he went, this handsome poet in his great coat and hat, out the same door he came in, not stopping to listen to any of the waiting novice or amateur readers to come, some of them surely his current students, but the important poet had other more pressing matters to attend to. The eager readers then shuffled up to the same podium one after another until finally, seemingly hours later, the old friends cried uncle and put their own poems away.

I hate poetry simply because of all the poor poetry that stands with others of their ilk as good poetry when in fact it is not. And all the bad poets praise each other's work and more bad work is propagated because of it. Some of the propagators are teachers, or become teachers, and on and on it goes. When the teacher gets to a kid like me (of course that was many years ago) and tells me how great something being taught is that I inherently already know isn't, it makes a kid like me not trust adults beginning at a very early age. It is sort of like religion being taught to an atheist as something real and factual. It just doesn't hold water. But when one comes upon a great poem read correctly you know it in every fiber of your being, teacher or not. The body knows. Something happens to you physically. Sometimes that type of reading has to be taught. You have to be taught how to read a poem. But you can't teach a bad poem to anyone but a poor reader or a terribly bad listener. All you can do is teach your morals, politics, or gender issues and hope for some sentimental support for what you are saying. Why not instead have an experience unexampled in its feeling? Something novel, new, fascinating, and even a bit disruptive. 

*From Genesis West, number one Interview With Jack Gilbert, conducted by Gordon Lish Poetry Is The Art Of Prejudice, page 86

Jack Gilbert- ...But usually my poems are caused by an impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please.  I don't want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was.  I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable.

Gordon Lish- Do you think people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?

Jack Gilbert- Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets --- in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable...

"...Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice...(Poetry) doesn't argue, it demonstrates...Poetry isn't fair...Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is." 

I think it is pathetic, searching here and there, through the endless articles about poetry and the writing of it, and have to sift through the drivel most of us call good. But I am not in the crowd of "most of us". They are simply bad. And the conversations about them are bad. It seems to me to always be a community of like-minded citizens who like crappy poetry and the crappy writing of it. Well I don't. I am insulted by the work and I think it adds more to the general claim that maintains poetry is boring and even stupid.  

*From 19 New American Poets Of The Golden Gate (on believing a poem) page 6

...A lot of Elytus and the others feels like lazy language-mongering. A pretend-surrealism with no need behind it. The mediterranean delight in the dance of the mind over a subject without trying to get anywhere. The subject being merely an occasion for the performance. Like poets giving birth without getting pregnant.

(on less being more) page 7

...One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible...and a pleasure in the scantness of means...the use of a few words with utmost effect.

We have far too many learning institutions from which to spread more bad poetry and the writing of it.  Teachers throughout history have taught the same old stuff, boring the hell out of most young minds, and sealing the fate of a vast majority of students never to have seen or heard a very good poem. I know I didn't. Of course, there are Shakespeare's words available to us all to use as he did, but with no teacher capable of explaining anything meaningful about his work the typical student could not gain much of anything from his poems except perhaps a headache. Perhaps there is the random teacher who cares so much for the words that the teaching is meaningful. But I never met one until much later in life.  

Poetry was ruined for me from a very early age. I did like nursery rhymes my mother read to me as a young child, but these were later dismissed in school as poetry for younger children and they were not used to teach us how poetry can work. Then we had Dr. Seuss who was also dismissed by most as some eccentric fellow writing silly stuff for young kids. The Doctor actually wrote some very brilliant poems that tend to stretch reality into something unmanageable and therefore unsavory to most palettes.  

*From Wikipedia:  

Though Seuss made a point of not beginning the writing of his stories with a moral in mind, stating that "kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he was not against writing about issues; he said "there's an inherent moral in any story" and remarked that he was "subversive as hell".

"Yertle the Turtle" has variously been described as "autocratic rule overturned" …”a reaction against the fascism of World War II”… and "subversive of authoritarian rule".

Little War Machine - Kindle edition by M Sarki, Gordon Lish, Frank Lentricchia. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Little War Machine.