Friday, May 22, 2015

Those Befoibled Guys Who Think - You Know - the Poetic Moment's a Pocket in Pool





New Destroyer! Have I ever mentioned I love Destroyer? It's true, I've posted lots here before but can't prove it because this shitty blog's wotherfucking search midget is broke and I, mumb dotherfucker I am, never tagged him for some obscure tagging rule I impose on myself. I did remember I'd seen that New Pornographers, of whom Dan Bejar is a member, are coming to 930 this summer, I like them (I love Neko Case), knew they are one of Planet's favorite bands, shazam, I have tickets for me and Earthgirl and Planet and Air and two extra, speak up.













AS GOOD AS ANYTHING

Alice Notley

I don't see the point of
remembering you; you're too boring,
Iowa City, Iowa,
much duller topologically than
Needles, California. I'm here
in the Rebel Motel, with
my grape-colored sweater
and maté tea, whose smoky odor's
bound up with first rooms and foods here
sex and snow. I
write about Needles
Herman and rocks, the story's called
“As Good as Anything,” and in it
daft Herman—true local
of Needles—says
“Rocks is as good as anything.”
I figured that out summer after
first love affair in New York:
hung out, home, at a rock shop
inspecting geodes and thunder eggs
Arsenic samples and petrified
dinosaur dung.
What can I say about Iowa City
everyone's an academic poetry
groupie, I haven't yet written a poem,
there's a bar where for 25 cents a
meal of boiled egg and tiny beer.
Really I don't know what kind of poetry—
what's the name of the make they
use here—or what kinds of
poetry live people write in the world.
Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might
still ask as I patronize,
retrospectively, the Iowa style,
characterized, as I remember,
by the assumption of desperation
boredom behind two-story houses
divorce, incomes, fields, pigs,
getting into pants, well not really
in poems, well no “well”s and all
in the costive mode
of men who—and the suicidal women—
want to be culpable for something,
settle for being mean to their wives
and writing dour stanzas. God this is bitchy
I modeled for art classes
that's rather interesting
the hypocrisy: nobody needs
to paint nude women
they just like to. So here I am
naked for art, which is a lot of
dumb fucks I already know,
same with poetry.
Written and judged by. Those befoibled guys
who think—you know—
the poetic moment's a pocket in
pool; where can I publish it; what can
I do to my second or third wife now.
Nothing happens in Iowa, so
can I myself change here? Yes
I can start to become contemptuous
is that good or bad, probably bad.
In New York I'd developed a philosophy
of sympathy and spiritual equality:
out the window, easily, upon
my first meeting real assholes.
“A rock's as good as anything” 
there are no rocks in Iowa
shit-black soil, a tree or two,
no mountain or tall edifice,
University drabs, peeping Toms, anti-war
riots, visiting poets
treated like royalty, especially if
they fuck the locals or have a record 
of fighting colorfully with their wives.
You can go to the movies once a week,
like in Needles. You can fuck
a visiting poet;  you can be paraded before
a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck.
You can write your first poems
thinking you might as well
since the most stupid people in the universe
are writing their five hundredth here.
I'm doing that now. What
difference does it make.
I like my poems. They're
as good as rocks.



1 comment:

  1. Nothing happens in Iowa

    i was reading yesterday in a book that had just arrived in the mail for me, a book written by and for ministers of mainline protestant churches


    >>Soulful Aging: Ministry Through the Stages of Adulthood
    Henry C. Simmons, Jane Wilson

    Today's churches have increasingly larger percentages of older adults as participants. They are characteristically vibrant and committed. In contrast, there are proportionally fewer younger adults or children active in the church. The older congregants in the last third of life can offer much by speaking about their lives, their spiritual journeys, and their hearts and souls. Too often, older people are forgotten in the counting of talents they have to offer to one another and to subsequent generations.

    Soulful Aging is a ministry resource for older adults as they journey through the later years of life. The authors have excerpted from important works that address the issues of spirituality in older adults and have developed pathways for spiritual growth.<<

    the authors write of a young couple, "rob and cara" (not their real names, presumably) whose first job out of seminary was as co-pastors in a rural church for five years - their congregants, about 80 in number, were all past 70

    when they moved to a large city where cara got a job as a hospital chaplain and rob was director of education at a high-growth suburban congregation of 1800, rob was elated - "Out in the country those good people just went through their routines. Here I can see real transformation day in and day out."

    simmons and wilson think rob is wrong - that you just can't cruise through the last third of life into death without facing some of life's greatest challenges - challenges that are at heart spiritual -

    How do you start over when the one you most loved is gone? • How do you face the need for help when you have always been independent? • How do you accept life's twilight and death's darkness?

    simmons and wilson go on to assert that all of life is holy - even old age

    i am reminded of what bokononism considers sacred - the sun? the moon?

    no, says vonnegut--man---just man

    [please forgive his old-fashioned terminology - in contemporary language, we would say "the human being" or "people"]

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