The American Reader

This poem has been drawn from Vol. 1 No. 5/6 of the American Reader.

✖

for Filip Marinovich

3/2011 This seven-year-old yells well I’m gonna kill you at her friend after a cold hosing in warm weather. I can’t stay­­ in this apartment any more the domestic partner has left and taken the mustard and salt and other items you only realize are missing when you go to put them in food you wouldn’t have cooked if you had known. You never know. Things get away from you as you snatch, lift, push and press as at the gym where you’re the only woman and pretend not to be looking when a man fails to lift his weight, the barbell crashing to the floor equipped to bounce it. Vertigo: like the room you are in is actually a ladle the bowl of which just tipped. I get it whenever I turn my head to the left while leaning over, or when my inner ear is inflamed by something—a cold—the end of a cold—the manifestation of a cold that doesn’t otherwise occur—or just, you know, stress. Consider Hopkins and stress, all the strain of turning Jesuit and then those hard irregular beats. You shuck and I’ll gather, said I, when I was 9, given a ShopRite bag of corn from a farmstand, for which a farmhand stole hundreds of ShopRite bags it’d seem. Now the grocery carts stop working if you wheel them over the invisible border at parking lot’s end. Invisible fencing for food-collecting humans. It must feel good to have someone worrying over you—I mean wouldn’t it? I like to imagine this person I went on a date with worrying because I haven’t written him back. It’s one of my best outlets at the moment. Don’t get it twisted, I say to him, imaginarily, in this outdated slang that makes me feel I have a companion in my head, one I feel superior to. Don’t get it twisted because I am not available right now. I have a broken heart, chief symptom of which is a sense of neverendingness. Why can’t a human express pain without saying it feels like I’ll never trust another person again, or it’s like I’ll never feel such love again, I’ll never live with someone so good-looking. He was really good-looking don’t you think? Domestic partnering with someone easy on the eyes, someone whose looks satisfy you, look to you like the golden mean, their proportions suiting you and never irritating you— the way your looks irritate someone which you can figure out when they make unflattering references to this part of you they also say is cute. Like one of my people thought I was short and my skull too indented at the temples whereas this one, well with this one the main thing I admired was the regal shape of his head which seemed like something to worship if it’s all right to worship a shape. All that beauty of others, it changes doesn’t it? Consequently I’m going to get face lasers when I get the money these lasers they aim at your face and make you beautiful in six or eight sessions spaced apart enough to forget you look exactly the same. In this river is a time of change shape-shifting ankle-touching. Discomfort they say well I say is good for your art because when you are hurt you will try to repair yourself with plastic means architecting the poem into a structure to hang your heart on, well that’s disgusting how about a structure to hang new feelings on, feelings of danger and reconsideration? In reality this guy I think he did Reiki on me because he got to my grief lifted it a little up and sideways and I felt like Atlas if he got to shift the weight of the world a little though why it feels good to shift a burden I can’t say for before long it shifts to a newly distressing position. It’s like waiting for the train at night, you get tired of standing and of leaning so you try a crouch. With my new exercise training I hope to get better at the crouch.

4/2011 A box of unopened herb storage pods is there each morning to greet me. Why is it extreme feelings can only be conveyed by insisting on their permanence (I return, you will note, to this idea, with something like a hope for permanent ideas): I will never love again, I’ll never live with someone again, things that may or may not be true. Some are true, like I’ll never again have access to this elaborate water filtration system, nor taste of its cool clean waters. I can buy one one day maybe, if I care to, but it’s more the care another took that feels like care was for me. You can live, you know, without being cared for or cared about at all. It’s not a functional requirement, just an interest, something that takes the edge off, though you pay it back in other, sharper edges.

5/2011 At eleven last night two cops idling in a car at Venice beach came over the megaphone telling everyone the area was closed and to go home, repeating it like the voice on the automatic train at the airport warning you about your baggage and people threw bottles at the car and kicked the tires and the cop kept talking saying the area is closed and it’s past curfew and the area is closed. It’s not true about the area, I mean I’m here just I’m inside a studio apartment like it’s not true the guy got anything twisted though it’s true impressions can change the further they get from conceptions. Welcome to this, my “A Month By the Sea,” a title I say over and over, no it’s not a title it’s a thing, a month by the sea, that I have always wanted, and now look, I have it. I should use an exclamation point there: I have it! And look, I’m falling in love a little OK a lot with the guy from that date, would you believe it? Now I’m not one to do that kind of thing, I am recently heartbroken as you’ll recall but he sent me, among other touches, a link to a YouTube of “Having a Coke with You.” So as you see it’s not my fault, this falling in love and forgetting to walk around heartbroke. Filip! I am trying to write in verse to you with candor but it’s hard. As you know I revise a lot to get rid of anything resembling self-disclosure. Well, disclosure of the ordinary self which implies access to another self I clearly do not know. Easier than candor is affectation which I hope will stir the reader’s self if the reader is similarly open to getting affected. Today I bought an affected hat. I wanted to look like I belonged at the beach I also wanted to get protection from the sun. So if I can claim I was being practical then I can have this thing that joins me to other practical people in no particular fashion. Some types of info are easier to obtain than others about others you need to know very little about. Why do I strike out things I think will reveal too much I mean in my other poems not this one where I am sort of letting it all lie. Well I say it’s because it’s a distraction from the interpersonal standoff I am aiming for, which is true, but also I’m afraid to “stand revealed,” although when I think about others I think we are all revealed all the time, I mean let’s face it there’s self-disclosure and the author’s attitude toward self-disclosure that are always right there disclosed.

An excerpt from a letter from Marianne Moore to her brother. Written April 21, 1944.

“Dinner was an apex on cookery—a strange & pleasing soup,—a kind of vegetable broth,—broiled chicken, large young lima beans, potatoes, ice cream with fresh strawberry sauce, & ginger snaps. I was then conveyed to the train with Mr. Auden, by Miss Finch—& we stood talking till our train came. The trains are badly crowded but I had a good seat both going & coming, & such comfortable downy seats & so clean that if I were a bum & could afford it I would spend my time traveling & just live on the train.” 

And now, a few minutes with Andy Rooney, who has something to say about David Foster Wallace. 

Many people seem to like David Foster Wallace’s writing, and a friend of mine recommended that I take a look. He must be some friend, because this is some of the whiniest fiction I’ve ever read. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was lined up on a firing squad when he was Mr. Wallace’s age, and his nine-hundred page books have less whining than some of these short stories. I’m only a few pages into “Consider the Lobster”, and Mr. Wallace has listed over thirty feelings. Sadness, empathy, contempt, on and on and on. Now I don’t know about you, but this is more feelings than I have when I eat lobster.

Or what about his short story “Forever Overhead”. Here’s a quick plot summary: a boy wants to jump off a diving board, thinks a while, and then he does. Pardon me for asking, but is anything else going to happen?

And in this story, he’s always addressing the reader as “you”. Mr. Wallace, when I was younger, I jumped off diving boards all summer long, and I never had to write home about it. And I don’t recall ever standing at the top of the diving board, thinking “You’re half-bleached, loose and soft, tenderized, pads of fingers wrinkled. The mist of the pool’s too-clean smell is in your eyes; it breaks light into gentle color. Knock your head with the heel of your hand. One side has a flabby echo. Cock your head to the side and hop–sudden heat in your ear, delicious, and brain-warmed water turns cold on the nautilus of your ear’s outside.” If I thought all this while at the top of the diving board, the lifeguard would probably kick me out of the pool. And he would be right, too.

How about the boy jumps off the diving board and something interesting happens? I wouldn’t recommend putting a shark into any pool, but even that might liven up this short–story (which in my opinion, felt long!).

There are always those know-nothing boobs who say “this isn’t writing, or that isn’t writing.” In this case, I’ll admit that I am one of those know nothing boobs, and that “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” just isn’t writing. Just hear this: “...you feel that familiar blade of sadness inside your exultation as they arch and pulse and their eyes close and you can feel that they’ve closed their eyes to shut you out, you’ve become an intruder, their union is now with the feeling itself...”

Now, I can’t go into detail about this racy topic on CBS, but let’s just say that Mr. Wallace should consider the possibility that, in his attempts to portray a well-rounded yet despicable man, who is capable of great feeling and simultaneously of great cruelty – that this Mr. Wallace has lied to us and himself. He’s clarified and exaggerated, He’s danced before his audience of soft-hearted sympathy suckers, his room of liberal pedants, who feel at their chest, who look back blankly on experience, and shout “l want to – without expending any effort at all – confirm that I am an empathetic and thinking being!” – and Mr. Wallace has addressed these people, and said, “Your wish is my command” and proceeded to explain, “You are empathetic, thinking beings, and there’s nothing else you need to do, beside reading me, to confirm this. All is well in the world. I love and hate and have the richest feelings and experiences, and very wise conceptions, but will feign modesty about it, via my many stylistic tics and shaming of my own intelligence, whose aim is to create a sense of warmth and midwestern humility.”

“And furthermore, everyone, I will create a dazzling chimera of intelligence and of artfulness, to ease the overwhelming sense that you, as readers, are merely hearing what you’ve always wanted to hear, that everything is well, that everyone has great well-springs of empathy, that we are all too human, and that everything is discernible.” Excuse me if I interrupt, Mr. Wallace, not on my watch. That’s pandering, not art.

7 April (1955): William Carlos Williams writes to poet Denise Levertov about an exhibition of Leland Bell’s paintings that they had both seen. Williams also discusses the style and trajectory of Levertov’s poetry.

"You never wrote me so long a letter, so full of the small details of your life. It is characteristic of you that it took an interest in a fellow creature, an artist, to bring the best out of you. But the luminous simplicity of your style comes over from your poetry into your letters and makes you very close to me..."