See-Saw / Harlem

            Reading the poem “See-Saw” by Willie Perdomo I couldn’t help by wonder about Pros and Cons lists we all make when dealing with fallouts from damaged relationships with either lovers or friends. Weighing in the good and the bad leads us to either want to remember or forget.

            “Spent a whole day

            and night

            playing on my see-saw

            see if I could forget

            saw that it was over

            before it started”

            Perdomo describes dealing with a disappointment over wanting to pursue someone who wasn’t interested to begin with. The poet wants to forget. But it’s not so easy. When you try to forget, you end up remembering longer what you are trying to forget instead. And forgetting can also lead you to make the same mistakes again, and end up where you started.

            “I go up in smoke

            and come down

            in a nod

            I go up in smoke

            and come down

            in a nod”

            Like a chorus of a song, the above stanza appears twice in the poem, with Perdomo using a see-saw as a metaphor to explain the way he is thinking about and dealing with his dilemma. Going up in smoke alludes to something wasted, but coming down with a nod suggests something worth conserving.

            “Then I play with my old journals

            so I can hear myself

            screaming for help

            promising to stop

            as soon as I finish

            the last one

            but beware my foolish heart

            wants to play forget again”

            I, too, sometimes go through my old diaries looking to see how I handled past fallouts. And that makes me remember what I may have forgotten. Once I couldn’t even recognize my own handwriting or the words I wrote, looking at my past self from a perspective of a current self. The last time I spent a short while with someone I found special, it ended before it started. I remember the day when I knew it ended, although I try hard to forget. Having deleted all texts and pictures, I forgot to a degree. But then I hear a certain song, and I remember. We never fully forget. Yet the memory can be altered, and in time we can train our minds to remember things differently. Memory is a funny thing.

            Reading the poem “Harlem” by Langton Hughes (1902-1967) I couldn’t help but wonder if what happens to a postponed dream is like a see-saw. If we lock away our desires, can we forget them, or do we always end up remembering? Is it safer to settle for less, and not strive for more? Or should we take risks and fight for what we dream?

            “What happens to a dream deferred?          

            Does it dry up

            Like a raisin in the sun?

            Or fester like a sore –

            And then run?

            Does it stink like rotten meat?

            Or crust and sugar over –

            Like a syrupy sweet?”

            I would rather be disappointed than regret not pursuing something or someone. In the past I played it safe when I felt scared to push for more, and I regret it. Sometimes I feel the weight of my regrets – it sags just like Hughes describes – but it makes me remember what I learned about dreams.

            “Maybe it just sags

            like a heavy load.

           

            Or does it explode?”

            Let’s not defer our dreams, let’s reach out for them instead. Disappointment is wiser than regret.

On The Metro / Poem of Night

            Reading the poem “On the Metro” by C.K. Williams (1936-2015) I couldn’t help but wonder if the working-class subway riders in New York City get more life experience than the rich who have personal drivers. There is a default intimacy between everyone who rides the train, especially during the rush hour, when it’s so jammed people stand so close to one another they can hear each other breathe. When it’s less crowded and seats are available, there is another kind of intimacy when you sit next to someone: you can peak at what they are reading or watching on their electronic devices.

            “On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;

            she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.

            I sit, take out my own book – Cioran, The Temptation to Exist – and notice her glancing up from hers

            To take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she ‘affirms herself physically’”

            Williams uses long and prosaic lines describing a scene on the train, and then offers highbrow commentary on it. He identifies himself as a reader of Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher who was known for writing about existentialism with a tint of pessimism, and then Williams quotes Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish playwright who was known for deep psychological analyses in his works.  

            Some find Williams to be verbose and even patronizing, but I don’t see how anything or anyone on the New York subway can be described in just a few words, so the verbosity works. Name dropping can certainly be taken as patronizing, but why would anyone reading philosophy hide it? When I was reading Darwin, Marx, or Freud in the past, I myself have almost flaunted the books when reading on the train. I’m always curious to see what others are reading. Once I got into a brief conversation with a guy who was reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild because I’d just read it and loved it, and we exchanged a few thoughts about the book’s existential themes.

            “She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;

            she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,

            achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.”

            Williams nails what it’s like to have your arms or legs inadvertently touching with another subway rider, and how sometimes neither you nor the other person pulls back. That is the ultimate experience of humanity that I think those who’ve never taken the subway totally miss out on in their lives. If it’s not imposing or inappropriate – which does happen occasionally – sometimes an unintentional touch on the train can be a temporary comfort.

            Reading “Poem of Night” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014) I couldn’t help but wonder about the last time I lied awake next to a lover asleep, me overwhelmed with the feeling of unity hearing both of our breathing patterns in sync. In the poem, Kinnell watches himself gaze at a lover sleeping next to him.

            “I move my hand over

            slopes, falls, lumps of sight

            Lashes barely able to be touched…

           

            Muffled a little, barely cloaked

            Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.”

            Kinnell uses anatomical terminology to describe facial features: zygoma is a cheek bone, maxillary is a part of jawbones, and turbinate is a nasal shell. There is a raw honesty these technical words bring to the poem, which is characteristic of Kinnell’s other work.

            “I put my hand

            On the side of your face

            You lean your head a little

            Into my hand -- and so,

            I know you’re a dormouse

            Taken up in winter sleep,

            A lonely stunned weight.”

            The usage of second-person narrative – “You lean your head” – makes the poem even more intimate than it already is. Comparison to a dormouse invokes fragility, and nurture the poet intends. We are most vulnerable when we are asleep, and it takes trust to fall asleep next to someone.

           

            “You lie here now in your physicalness

            This beautiful degree of reality.”

            Those two lines gets me the most. Kinnell states the obvious, but the way he states it echoes a kind of answer to all the great questions of humanity. Why are we here? What if we are here to love?

Dog / Anger, Cattle, and Achilles

            Reading the poem “Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–present) I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like – being a dog – trotting in the streets of New York City.  Would it feel small, and like being a child? Would everything be in black and white, as veterinarians used to believe, or would there be some color as new studies suggest? And would politicians look like hydrants?

            “The dog trots freely in the street

            and sees reality

            and the things he sees

            are bigger than himself

            and the things he sees

            are his reality”

            I have an 11-year-old Maltese, and whenever I walk him I never seize to be amused at how eagerly he smells other dogs’ markings before he makes his own. The urgency he does it with is just like people reading headlines on their electronic devices. I imagine my Maltese is getting his news, and important messages from other dogs through his sense of smell, or maybe even notes-to-self he left previously.

            “The dog trots freely in the street

            and the things he smells

            smell something like himself.”

           

            Ferlinghetti makes a political stab through the dog’s point of view. He points out Congressman Clyde Doyle, a Democrat who was a U.S. Representative from California, and served on McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities, which was an anti-Communist witch hunt, during the time the poem was written.

            “And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

            and past Coit’s Tower

            and past Congressman Doyle

            He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower

            but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle

            although what he hears is very discouraging

            very depressing

            very absurd”

            Listing Doyle next to Coit’s Tower, a monument that looks like a giant phallus, is funny, especially with the dog being afraid of the giant phallus, but not Doyle, a presumably small phallus. Ferlinghetti served in the Navy during World War II, but became a pacifist after visiting the ruins of Nagasaki after the Atom Bomb was dropped there. His political criticism is shaped by the reality of what he’d seen politics achieve.

            “Congressman Doyle is just another

            fire hydrant

            to him.” 

            Reading the poem “Anger, Cattle, and Achilles” by Gary Snyder (1930–present) I couldn’t help but wonder if some of my friends have thought of me in the same way Snyder talks about his.

            “Two of my best friends quit speaking

            one said his wrath was like that of Achilles.”

            I have two best friends since high school, and I’ve had more than one falling out with each.  I’m currently on good terms and in touch with both. There have always been mutual friends between my best friends and I, and these mutual friends were usually aware of the periods when my best friends and I quit speaking.

            “The three of us had traveled on the desert,

            Awakened to bird song and sunshine under ironwoods

                                    in a wadi south of the border.”  

            Throughout the years my best friends and I, with mutual friends, have had unforgettable experiences.  In high school, we went to night clubs that no longer exist, getting in with fake IDs, and once on Thanksgiving almost got arrested for drinking on the stoop of an East Village building where Madonna is said to have lived when she first came to New York. After high school saw the Pixies live in New York, traveled to Las Vegas, and woke up to college bands singing outside my best friend’s friend’s window for Bacchanalia at Sarah Lawrence.

            Sometimes when my best friends and I had quit speaking, I’d run into our mutual friends and vent my wrath to them. Maybe that’s what all true friendships end up going through, because once the wrath subsides, you learn to forgive yourself and then you forgive the other. As you get older, you realize that friends whom you know and who know you are the most important thing in life.

            “I met the other lately in the far back of a bar

            musicians playing near the window and he

            sweetly told me ‘listen to that music.

            The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.’”

Believe, Believe / America

            Reading the poem “Believe, Believe” by Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) I couldn’t help but wonder if the beat poet had been at the same venue where in the past decade I discovered the healing powers of jazz music. Jazz can keep your mind from overthinking with its spontaneity! Kaufman had been called the quintessential jazz poet, and it is likely that during his lifetime he attended many jazz clubs, including the Village Vanguard.

            A friend of mine used to be a manager at the Village Vanguard, and I used to get in for free on certain days, only having to pay for drinks. What I learned over port wine and dim lights is that jazz and its technique of improvising fresh and unexpected arrangements on known musical pieces lets the mind relax and wonder, without worries. It’s not so easy to explain, but the second stanza in Kaufman’s poem just nails it!

            “Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,

            Tearing the night into intricate shreds,

            Putting it back together again,

            In cool logical patterns,

            Not in the sick controllers,

            Who created only the Bomb.”

            Sounds of jazz at the Vanguard certainly cleared up my thoughts each time I went. The spontaneity of music allowed my thoughts to be spontaneous also, and helped me see some things in a different light: what seemed bad looked not so bad, and what seemed good just mixed in with the bad into a kind of balance.

            Many of Kaufman’s poems were performed orally without being written down or published.  “Believe, Believe” is listen as published posthumously in a 1996 compilation “Cranial Guitar,” but according to some themes it seems logical to think the poem was written sometime during the Cold War.  By “sick controllers” Kaufman means a certain elite of individuals who can manage public opinion and what people believe – such practice usually leads to one-sided thinking, like good is only good, and bad is only bad, without a possible middle. Kaufman was reactionary to American politics: he took a vow of silence after JFK’s assassination, and ended it 10 years later after the end of the Vietnam War.

            Reading the poem “America” written in 1956 by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) I couldn’t help but wonder if Kaufman and Ginsberg were on the same page about the Cold War, with the latter just being more direct.

            “I can’t stand my own mind.

            America when will we end the human war?

            Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

            I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

            I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.”

            Ginsberg stating that he “won’t write” the poem is almost like a reference to Kaufman’s vow of silence, and both are reactionary to very same The Bomb. But Ginsberg has not gone to a Jazz club to calm his mind yet, he seems to have been studying history and literature.

            “America why are your libraries full of tears?

            America when will you send your eggs to India?”

            What Ginsberg probably means by sending “eggs to India” is bringing ideology of democracy to India.  At the time the poem was written, India had only recently become independent from the British Rule, having left the Dominion of the Crown in 1950.

           

            What could possibly have been stopping Ginsberg from escaping his anxieties at a jazz club was the Lavender Scare, a Cold War product of McCarthyism. Ginsberg was openly gay, and the Lavender Scare was homophobic propaganda accusing gay and lesbian identified individuals of being most likely to be recruited to spy for the Communists. This idea was supported on the basis that gays and lesbians could be easily blackmailed with the threat of being outted, since at the time homosexuality was still listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Mayakovsky / A Talk With A Tax Collector

            Reading the poem “Mayakovsky” by Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) I couldn’t help but wonder about Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) visiting New York City in 1925. He loved the city, and wrote about it, including poems about Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge. O’Hara spent the last fifteen years of his life in New York, and wrote many poems mentioning his cultural contemporaries, but it’s noteworthy that he looked up to Russia’s most influential poet of the early 20^th century. Mayakovsky dabbled in numerous mediums, from cubism and avant-garde, to blatant propaganda slogans for the Communist Regime of the 1920s.

            O’Hara’s poem is a tribute, and a metapoem. A metapoem is a poem about itself, an author writing it or another poem, or the medium of poetry in general.

            I love you. I love you,

            but I’m turning to my verses

            and my heart is closing

            like a fist

            Words! be

            sick as I am sick, swoon

            roll back your eyes, a pool,

            and I’ll stare down

            at my wounded beauty

            which at best is only a talent

            for poetry.

            The emotions O'Hara communicates through these three stanzas are like some poems Mayakovsky wrote about the woman named Lily who was the love of his life. Lily loved Mayakovsky’s poetry, and he dedicated a lot of his work to her. His own “wounded beauty” was often the subject of Mayakovsky’s self-gaze in his writing, including the 1913 stage tragedy written in verse and titled after himself. O’Hara channels that self-gaze.

            Now I am quietly waiting for

            the catastrophe of my personality

            to seem beautiful again,

            and interesting, and modern.

            Themes of perfection and modernization of the self in their own writing are parallel for both writers. It’s curious that Mayakovsky is O’Hara’s idol and a father figure of sorts, because Mayakovsky’s daughter was born the exact same month of June 1926 as O’Hara. There is no supernatural or superficial connection, but it is true that O’Hara and Mayakovsky’s daughter were conceived around the same time and on the same continent of America’s East Coast. Nonetheless, knowledge of Mayakovsky’s daughter only came to light in the 1980s during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its Communist Regime. (Jangfeldt 2014) O’Hara probably never knew that Mayakovsky had a daughter.

            Mayakovsky wrote some metapoems, too. In his poem “A Talk With A Tax Collector,” Mayakovsky talks philosophically, and with humor, about the place of a poet and poetry in society.

            I have here

                        a business

                                    of a delicate nature:

            about the place

                        of the poet

                                    in the worker’s society

           

            Mayakovsky goes on to discuss wittingly the question of expenses and deductibles a poet should be able to claim on his taxes. He says his work is just like any other work, and has its own hardships, including the difficulty of rhyming words.

            You start putting

                        a word

                                    into the line,

            but it doesn’t fit –

                        so you press and you break it.

            Citizen tax collector,

                                    I swear,

            for a poet

                        the cost of these words runs into money.

            Mayakovsky compares language to currency, and claims to be in debt, which should excuse him from having to pay taxes.

            I dash around,

                                    tangled up in advances and loans.

            Citizen,

                        won’t you consider a pass?

            Reading the poem, I couldn’t help but wonder: how did Mayakovsky have such humor regarding finance, and where did he learn finance if the Soviet Union had a communist economy. But sure enough, there was some temporary capitalism Mayakovsky witnessed before he visited America. In the Soviet Union, the early Communist party had temporarily installed the New Economic Policy (NEP) and private for-profit businesses were allowed starting in 1923. NEP greatly improved the Soviet economy before Stalin ended the program in 1928. (Russiapedia)

Triple Feature / Bubble Wrap

Reading the poem “Triple Feature” by Denise Levertov (1923-1977) I couldn’t help but wonder if anti-immigrant sentiment in America won’t ever go away, but will keep resurfacing. Levertov’s poem was published in 1959, as the United States experienced economic growth and baby boom after World War II. The poem’s gaze is on a family of four about to go into a movie theatre, and it can be interpreted as pro-immigrant. Levertov indicates the family is of Mexican descent with descriptions of traditional Latin American clothes they wear. A serape is a shawl worn as a cloak, a rebozo is a long flat women’s garment, and sombrero is a wide-brimmed hat.

“– he in a mended serape,

she having plaited carefully

magenta ribbons into her hair,

the baby a round half-hidden shape

slung in her rebozo, and the young son steadfastly

gripping a fold of her skirt,

pale and severe under a

handed-down sombrero”

Given the poem’s title, the family is about to see a triple feature of B-movies. American film industry experienced a shift after the Hollywood Golden Age of 1930s and 1940s, and the collapse of the Studio System which enabled it. The Studio System was when all films were produced and distributed by a few major studios. In the 1950s more independent companies were able to produce and distribute due to court rulings against the monopoly of the Studio System. Film goers have various tastes, and some really enjoy B-movies, but it is generally accepted that these movies are cheaply made and have a silly plot. By the late 1950s Hollywood struck back by producing its own B-movies: for example, MGM’s 1959 film “Girls Town” was reviewed by Variety as having a screenplay “as flimsy as a G-string.”

Levertov sympathizes with the family because the parents are likely looking to escape their daily chores, relax, and maybe the father will take a nap, but they might feel dissonance afterwards. At least one of three B-movies is likely to be an exploitation film, a genre that reinforces racial stereotypes in ridiculous plotlines.

“all regarding

            the stills with full attention, preparing

            to pay and go in –

            to worlds of shadow-violence, half-

            familiar, warm with popcorn, icy

            with stranger motives, barbarous splendors!”

            Reading the poem “Bubble Wrap” by Rae Armantrout (1947-present) I couldn’t help but wonder if anti-immigrant sentiment will always have a pro-immigrant response, and maybe the two can’t exist without each other. Like Levertov’s gaze at an immigrant family, Armantrout mentions an immigrant as a part of American cultural landscape. The poem was published in 2011, and may be referring to Hurricane Irene in the opening.

            “Want to turn on CNN,

            see if there’ve been any

            disasters?”

            Armantrout is a language poet, and her writing can be viewed as abstract. “Bubble Wrap” consists of 5 parts separated by single asterisks. There are no rhymes, and no rhythm consistency. Nonetheless, single stanzas in parts 1 and 5 are somewhat of a structure, creating an even opening and closing; part 2 has three stanzas, parts 3 and 4 have four stanzas. If the number of stanzas per part were notated as music – 1, 3, 4, 4, 1 [C, E, F, F, C] – they would make a complete musical sentence. Parts 2 and 3 both feature the word “dream,” which may refer to the American Dream. Part 4 talks about an “engine’s single indrawn breath,” bringing to mind deindustrialization, which is often falsely misrepresented as a result of outsourcing, when the cause is technological advancements.

            In part 5 an immigrant is trying to earn a living by selling doohickeys in front of a pharmacy chain. There is some irony in the juxtaposition of the immigrant aiding himself, and commercial chain selling aid.

“An immigrant

sells scorpions

of twisted electrical wire

in front of the Rite Aid.”

          

A Spiral Notebook / Known To Be Left

Reading the poem “A Spiral Notebook” by Ted Kooser (1939-present) I couldn’t help but wonder how’s it going to be when I get older. Currently I’m in school, and use a spiral notebook daily, so I was instantly fascinated with the poem. The first lines compare the notebook’s wire to a porpoise, a marine mammal closely related to dolphins, differentiated only slightly by its face, fin, and figure.

“The bright wire rolls like a porpoise

in and out of the calm blue sea

of the cover…”

I relate to this image of “ocean of knowledge.” Under the cover of my notebook there are notes on Algebra, Government, and Literature. My campus is the only CUNY school with its own beach, and I love walking by the water in between and after classes. Also, there is an actual aquarium in the Marine and Academic Center building! Water means a lot me, and I consider it a symbol of calm, strength, and wisdom. The comparison is thoughtful, and easy to understand, a signature trait of Kooser’s writing.

Kooser explains that he is describing a “5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK.” He then reflects on how at his age his attention span can no longer accommodate that many subjects.

“…It seems,

a part of growing old is no longer

to have five subjects, each

demanding an equal share of attention,

set apart by brown cardboard dividers,

but instead to stand in a drugstore,

and hang on to one subject

a little too long, like this notebook…”  

Kooser was in his 60s when he wrote this poem. I am half that age now, but when I get closer to Kooser’s age, will there still be spiral notebooks? Will I be able to relate to people half my age and younger, or will I even know what devices are used to take notes in class? Will my attention span be able to accommodate more than one subject?

Reading the poem “Known to Be Left” by Sharon Olds (1942-present) I couldn’t help but wonder if it will get easier when it comes to love and break-ups. Olds gave me an affirmation, if not much of a consolation. Her poem is about the end of a 30-year marriage, and what it feels like dealing with it for an adult.

“I guess that’s how people go on, without

knowing how. I am so ashamed

before my friends – to be known to be left

by the one who supposedly knew me best,

each hour is a room of shame, and I am

swimming, swimming, holding my head up…”

I can’t comprehend the idea of a marriage 30 years long, that’s just short of my entire lifetime. Yet I’ve brushed up against these emotions dealing with a relationship only a year and a half long, my longest so far. Olds’ words show me that love is love, no matter what age, or length of a relationship. It won’t get easier, but everyone is in the same boat. What does get easier though, is being able to laugh at yourself. I notice the development of my new ability to not take myself too seriously more and more as I get older.

“…In the mirror, the torso

looks like a pinup hives martyr,

or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,

full of the milk of human kindness

and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.”

“The milk of human kindness” is a famous phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Olds isn’t necessarily comparing herself to Lady Macbeth, but she is definitely being witty by comparing the end of her 30-year marriage to a Shakespearian tragedy.