rarlington

Yesterday, after Stockton and a workshop in Mays Landing on Blackboard 9, which is not like the Course Management System I have grown accustomed to (which leaves me rather wanting to run off into the woods myself; as I posted on Facebook, “Take me away, Thoreau!” –– how many contradictions can you find in this sentence, gentle reader? But I am large/contain multitudes…), upon picking up a grande regular from the Starbucks, where everyone knows my order (it is waiting behind the counter from the moment I walk in; what happens if I switch to venti iced green tea for the summer months?), before wending my way back down River Road (SP-Mays Landing Road) behind a Sonata with a Jesus-fish that was going just so slow and would STOP. –– at random, leaving me thinking, “This is not how Jesus would have driven, dear,” and came across the Causeway, which sometimes effects the experience of landing on some overdeveloped Eden, sun streaming on cue through accumulated cumulus clouds, I arrived at the Homestead.

My family, including my sister and her new BF, who is doing sound for a show in AC this weekend, went up to the boardwalk/to the Hula Grill, then sauntered back to the Homestead for wine/talk. Our coterie broke up around eight (we were all tired and had places to go), and I came home and almost immediately went to sleep. I slept –– from 9:30-ish until seven just now, which is unheard of, as I almost never have myself a semi-proper lie-in, not even on the weekends. I feel a little exhausted from all the sleep I’ve just had.

And before falling asleep last night, I scribbled out something. As a poet, I realize, I am a bit like the Jesus-fish Sonata…

Why I Am Not A Poet

Thinking
about why not
how I want
to say too much
to you and
that that saying
gets into telling
which doesn’t.

Thinking about
the poets I know
have known
how like

They can be
so delicate
so tender with
an image a
thing

when I just want to
bloviate that
into a long treatise
against/for
something
when I would be
better off
just letting it.

Today
sometimes
with the clouds
and I was pulled
back into that
Awkward Younger Self

when I was a Buddhist
and thought that
silence was
the truest expression
of what matters/
mattered then

When I
would say,
Do not speak;
just listen
to the world
conspiring
with you.

I was happy then
I didn’t know
any better;

I want to
go back
to sitting
on the jetties
and imagining
just nothing

to have that
be enough,

You know?
Darling, when we
stepped out
into the street
catching a cab
take us
to the end

past the end
where it is
more than just
about surviving

Step out
take my hand
with me,

Will you?
(No; I know.
I couldn’t ask that
of you either.)

I am going back
to prose
in the morning.
And you will stay
here, where
it is sometimes
so pretty.

My sister’s coming today! She’s dragging me to the bead store and parade in town tomorrow! Exclamation marks!

Here’s more (yes; there was more) of the “Hot Bagels” poem I found the other night.

(More) Hot Bagels

On Monday, walking into the Stockton Campus Center,
where the shiny new foosball tables are still slumbering,
I think about sleep: how dreams have become
like an endless Facebook newsfeed, it would seem,
digesting all the days from all of the people on there:
here a seed, there a seed, everywhere a seed-seed.
One sets up Facebook on the laptop screen against
a view out the window at the street, where there are a few trees,
and, like a quiz, is asked, “Which one is the real world?”
and, like an eye exam, is prompted, “Which one is clearer?”
––the Facebook screen or the facing window scene?
One eye on Facebook, the very dull cocktail party
that never ends, as some describe; one eye wandering to
a flock of birds shaken from one tree,
where they have stooped to take a pit stop,
snacking on pits as they make their way off
to warmer climes; to Florida.
Why in such a hurry though, birds?
It’s December 4th and 64 degrees still.
I’m not even wearing an overcoat or any
winter woolens yet. It’s practically a return to spring.

The birds could be a flock of Phoenixes,
bursting into December flame,
warmed by this menopausal earth,
this hot flash winter––

Somehow, the birds are not fooled by this late autumnal ruse.
Somehow they know that this is not real,
that a mild December is just a Trojan horse:
that tomorrow will come hoarfrost to freeze
their little hollow bird-bones, and so––
a quick snack before getting back on the road.
There is much argument of chirping as they are launched
back into flight formation and scatter like
little meteoric pieces of linty fuzz back into space.

A part of my heart takes with them.
My bones may become hollow one day,
my head covered with more linty fuzz than hair, but still
my heart will always be too heavy to fly away with them:
goodbye, birds; goodbye, little birds.
My heart, like an anchor, one of stability;
my friend Karen worries, One’s heart either an anchor,
or a dead albatross locked in the rib cage.
Karen is getting an anchor tattooed on her arm,
an old school sailor’s anchor,
to keep her weighted to the ground,
to keep her steady-on when she wants to run away.
Steady on, albatross. Here is home,
she will say to the anchor tattoo.

Correction: Karen has since decided
against the tattoo.

I’m feeling myself getting a bit poetry’ed-out.

Last night I found this file in my Dropbox titled “HotBagels.pages” and was all, “???”

Apparently, on December 4th (just this past 2011), I decided to type out a bit of a rant. There are moments which are not so bad.

Here’s the part where I stop at the Hot Bagels in Somers Point on my way to Stockton:

Hot Bagels (excerpts)

I stop at Hot Bagels. I need the communion of carbs.
I order a Super Wheat with full fat cream cheese.
I stand watching the girl toast the bagel
and slather on the cream cheese like a salve.
It is better than meditation, this.
She has performed this operation hundreds of times before, I am sure.
Slicing the bagel open,
and toasting it,
and then applying the cool cream to the
dessicated surface,
to something that’s been burned in the furnace.

In the car, like an animal, I devour it
as the engine snarlsngrowls.
The bagel with cream cheese is something
that can be tasted,
something real, something that is still good/true.
“I don’t know when you graduate, Jim,
what the world will be like, then––
it could be even worse than this.
But let’s just hope that
there is still Hot Bagels, at least.
Because if there’s not.”
(If there’s not.)

I switch on The Smiths.

I want the carbs to soak up all the upset,
to still and to silence me,
picking a seed from gnashing teeth;
pickling a creed.
“The world is too much with us, William;”––
what are all our words worth, I wonder.
“Really, William; it was really nothing.”
They are really nothing, these words:
little seeds that people eat up and pick
from their teeth. Maybe one slips in
to be digested. Maybe two.

Isaac says at the Rewrites meeting,
“I want to eat watermelon seeds and grow
watermelons inside my stomach. I want the vines
to flow up out of my mouth like tentacles.”
Each watermelon like a new world
exploding from a stomach where it has gestated
and grown full.

Each watermelon a new pink world,
fresh, coursing with white veins
and honest refrains: the Prelapsarian state
of the watermelon world, where people are never sad.

I want to place the watermelon on my shelf
in my apartment, on the apartment shelf
with all of the other globes (this one from the Age of Exploration;
this one showing the night sky; this one lights up) and
ask strangers to my apartment, “Can you guess which one
is the real world from this line-up of globes?” and
see how many of them choose the watermelon.

I’ve wanted to write a poem about raccoons all semester: how they are destroying the ancient Buddhist temples in Japan; menacing German homeowners. I’ve always been fascinated with raccoons for some reason; I had a stuffed raccoon-totem when I was just a wee little Binky.

But the raccoon poem hasn’t happened yet.

Yesterday, at the Anthony Carelli reading, I sat next to Robbie, who mentioned to me that he wanted to rescue this old podium that has a big cross on the front of it; to set it up in his living room and minister to his cats.

I thought, the minister of cats –– and jotted that down in my Field Notes notebook, which Robbie rather hassled me for having; so I figure he rather owes me the cat-minister image. I scribbled out the image into a quick poem upon stopping at the Starbucks on my way home.

The lines are so short in this because, of course, the notebook is so small. This is still just a coughed-up hairball of a work in progress. But at least I got a raccoon in there. A raccoon among cats.

The Minister of Cats

In a housing
development,
the boy finds
a podium
left for trash;
drags it
from the curb
into a spare cul
de sac; declares,

“I am minister
of cats; arrived
in knitted cap
to tell you
what to expect
from it.” Neighbor

beasts amass,
incl. 1 confused
toddler & a raccoon.
The congregation
yawns & begins
to scratch itself.
There are naps
to be had, after all.
––What now?
mews another.
The toddler
licks the raccoon,
which claws at its
face. Curtains close
& doors lock. The
toddler runs back
into the woods.

The minister
raises a hand,
then, beginning
to purr. Stretching
their necks to hear the
lavender affirmation;

“What we thought
were fireflies were
just 2 flickering
Christmas lights;

the flood,
a leaky air
conditioner; the
locusts, some gummy
worms.

That smell
you smell
is not incense,
kittens.”

Absorbing it all: the
furry little sponges,
their marble eyes
glitter in the
godless night.
They roll over
on their backs w/ it;
yearning.

Anthony Carelli is coming to campus today! Fasten your bow ties, poetry fans!

So; I found the high school poems but have been reluctant to share them. They make me cringe a bit; it’s like looking through old photos of a much more awkward younger self. Sometimes I want so much to say to A.Y.S., “Oh, sixteen/seventeen-year old Rich; if only you knew –– (what awaits.) All of this is a bit naive, isn’t it, son?” Sometimes I want to go back and to rescue him. To tell him, like a meddlesome parent, “This is what you should do/should not do.” But he has to go through all of that. The parent realizes he must allow the child to make those mistakes. Is this how the child becomes father to the man, Father Manley?

Statistics Poems

1.
I slept with the window opened
last night and I think the
night seeped in and swallowed-up
my soul.

2.
I feel poetical
like a sparrow’s spirit––
a ghost! which stirs in darkness
(night) and whistles in the
weeping tree which cries,
tears of laughter and the
tittering spirit sparrow––
spiritual sparrows.

(where are the chickens?)

***

Clearly those were written in the margins of my Statistics notebook. (It’s a bit precious you thought to type them up and save them though, no?)

This one is still rather well, ok, mostly because I like the allusion to Alanis on my Walkman; I’m going to go Spotify some Jagged Little Pill now; you read, but be kind to A.Y.S., please.

Car Trip

Legs of jello, Alanis
ache, agony
twitch, itch
Stop: Rest. Wiggle, wobble
Stumble, stagger, stretch––
eat styrofoam
Time to go, keep going
Weave our wending, winding
weary way in and out.
the sky darkens, the dashboard
lit-up like a ship, a vessel
We voyage, we journey onward,
upward: rising, Rising, falling
squirm, worm, twist your hair into knots.
nothing to do: it’s all been done.
Try to sleep––oh, my neck!
crimped, cramped
How much further? Farther.
Are we there yet? Is our
car trip done?
We’ve only just begun

My Stockton students did some freewriting in class on Friday. As I was fretting away a freewrite with them, suddenly this phrase was set down as if by an unseen force, a fragment which has stood out from the rest of my scribbles; what I cannot/do not want yet to forget ––

I miss you
though you
are not mine
to miss
so I miss
the absence
of you, the
possibility

This spilled up from the subconscious somehow; like reflux, leaking backwards up the esophageal conduit, causing the heart to burn; waring away the already delicate lining; making it difficult/impossible to speak. It might not make for a very good start to a poem; it lacks specifics, specifically because details would be too telling; just a Xerox of something that wants not to be known or given a name. To name it would be a great betrayal of sympathy, and I want none of that now; or not yet anyway. Still, I’ve saved it here; I wonder why I have rescued it when I discarded the rest of my worries from Friday.

It was a great relief: to write down the rest and throw all of those anxieties into the rubbish bin for collection.

Except for this, that was not so easily abandoned over the weekend: you, who were not. (For I know what it is; of course I know.)

This is a rather sad & esoteric way to start the week, I will say. Here, Monday, isn’t it?

Well; let’s get on with it, then.

Rich
Kathy Graber
Poetry Workshop
April 8, 2012

Fragmentation/Juxtaposition: Creating Completeness from Collage (A Collage)

Tony Hoagland, in his essay “Fragment, Juxtaposition, and Completeness,” reminds us of the tension that is generated between fragments that have been brought into a conversation with one other from seemingly disparate worlds; he categorizes fragment as the unit, juxtaposition as the method, and collage as the result. I love how Hoagland goes on to say that even complete items (such as independent clauses; such as a happy marriage, maybe; an arrogant cosmology even), when brought into unfamiliar surroundings, acquire a sense of fragmentation: that fragmentation, he insists (and I would agree), is the modern state and the reason why modern poetry often feels like a collage itself. Like “The Waste Land,” which I always read at least excerpts from during the first week of April; remembering when I brought that poem into a class of high school sophomores –– and, oh, what tension was created, then!

A heathen heads to church. It is Easter.

Hoagland writes that, in a collage, if transitions are not provided for or if they are perhaps omitted later; when these guides are, in either case, denied the reader –– the connection between the parts becomes implicit rather than made explicit. I often play this game with students; in certain classes I assign work that I think will be compelling, and then ask the students how they think these works work together. High school freshmen would always offer the same response: “Someone dies in everything we’ve read this year,” and when I thought of the reading list for English 9 –– Of Mice and Men (Lenny), A Tale of Two Cities (Sydney Carton et al.), Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), and the morbid short stories and Emily Dickinson and, and, and –– I would always have to concede their point. And then ask, “But what else –– what else is there, besides death, kids?” Perhaps this is how the poet, too, can be shocked into recognition along with the reader: how the poet writes his own Zen koan, essentially, and constructs the means to his enlightenment.

The church steeple communes with the blossoming tree.

In church this morning, the minister was telling a story about a woman who, when facing some unnamed (or have I just forgotten it now?) adversity, was told by her mother (I may be confusing the relationship between these two; it was early; the 8:30 service) to boil three pots of water. Into one, the mother threw carrots; into the second, eggs; into the third, coffee beans. Then she asked the woman (her daughter), “Which one are you? Will you get soft/weak like the carrot; hard like the egg; or will you become fragrant and turn the water to something richer like the coffee beans?” For a moment I thought, I hope I am like the coffee beans, and then, I could really use some more coffee, and finally, What does this have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? The minister began to talk about survival, and for the first time I began to see the Easter story as one of survival; not that Jesus was resurrected even, but that he survived, which, when substituted for resurrection, might sound less miraculous but, to me, to the students and friends I know, we know that survival can be a testament in itself.
And Jesus was coffee beans, I suppose. (And not a zombie either, as some friends insist every year on Facebook.)

"I make all things new."

After church, my family went to Hannah G’s in Ventnor where I had pancakes for the first time since Fat Tuesday. They were so delicious; I think Eostre, the goddess of dawn, herself hand-delivered them to me –– as I drank my hot coffee like a prasad. Then called my friend Gerri, who is going in for her penultimate chemo session tomorrow. Somehow, in this juxtaposition of thoughts, I am now associating coffee with survival, which is why I wanted to call Gerri. And also now associating coffee with Jesus, which makes me think of dinner last night with my friend Emily when, near the end of the evening, we expressed a mutual desire to become Catholic/Catholic again, for Em (or was it just me wanting it?); and, when I admitted that they wouldn’t have me, said, “So, Episcopalian, then.” Perhaps it is the same reason I wanted to start a book group; but then our group stopped reading the books. I want something stricter than that; want something more than just myself. Maybe I want there to be consequences, somehow.

Eostre, the waitress, brings pancakes and coffee: and more coffee.

And, still, there must be more than just survival; and Mike Wallace died today (or yesterday maybe; there was an excellent piece on Camus in this week’s New Yorker). Must be more than just to not be beaten. My friend Kim and I have gotten into this lovely-intense discussion over e-mail on happiness and its cost (see also: happiness, risks involved). Because I wrote: “I still think, There must be more than just surviving,” and Kim responded, “Sometimes, it seems to me, reminding ourselves what it feels like to really be alive goes in direct contradiction to what it means to survive. And, of course, the delicacy of the game, consists of finding that balance between the two.”

The Life Saving Station: Preserved!

The literary magazine has returned from the printer!

"Hallelujah!"

I had a poem published ––

–– a slightly revised version of the poem about the whale that I wrote the first week of Kathy‘s class this semester.

For those not in the South Jersey area/without access to Rewrites, here it is in all its “enormirety.”

But As Pasteboard Masks

A fifty-ton metaphor has washed up on 7th Street beach.
The news streams over social networking; we

step out into the mottled day to bear witness to this beast,
lemmings to the feast. The beast,

thrown on to the deck of man as if by God,
decomposes in the sand as, obediently,

we arrive. There is a clattering of car doors.
An old woman emerges from a taxi, bundled in fur,

tosses the driver crumpled bills from her handbag
and heads up to join the Methodists massing. We

swarm the sand, pulling on monastic hoodies in our haste.
“I brought my children to see,” a man says.

“Who would’ve thought to see this,” another woman
exclaims. “Shame though it’s dead, though.

––Pity.”
The metaphor delivered to us was dead, she means––

wind undulating its shivery, silvery blubber,
mask of movement in the surf, coaxing and coaxing.

Even so, the mass seems to metasticize in front of us,
gaining momentum. When the tide nudges it next,

a lame fin presses up and appears to be waving at us.
The satellite vans––the proliferation of camera phones––

people texting loved ones to come and see, come and see.
Seized by it, creature of the sea, and sure that we see

almost mythical testaments in its being sent to us:
Almost Biblical, a relic; remnant of past plague.

One feels sick, as if it were something vomited up,
not by the sea, but by us ourselves,

made manifest on land as if to confront us––
willed by a collective force but not to give no comfort to us.

The primordial metaphor has no eyes, but
if one stares for too long one forgets

whether it is being compared to us
or whether we are being compared to it.

When I was a child, I had a book on metaphors,
on the golden age of metaphoring, when men

would take to masted ships in search of them,
filled with lust for hunting and for the unknown.

Pictures of men setting to wine-red sea with harpoons,
clinging to the mooring as the metaphors

crushed their ships to tremendous splinters.
When many died from such sport,

many more wished to die but wouldn’t.
One child begins to cry

and is taken away. The rest of us, preoccupied with work,
turn from the beast back to the island town

as the men from Public Works arrive
to hatchet it up,

and to bury it deep;
and to bury it good.

Mom: Here's a picture of the whale.
Rachel: Mom knows how to take a picture with her phone?!!

Good Friday to ye! I am off to class today at Stockton; then hoping to check out the new student art gallery afters –– the one built atop a pool there.

Today’s poem was written/”published” last year (as an audio file) on the TYCA web site as part of their Poetry Month Celebration; it was written for/partly inspired by a creative writing class I was teaching last spring down in Court House…

(Have a good Easter weekend, you!)

Teacher’s Heart

Dreamt last night some students
wanted to make a Xerox of my heart;
asked to borrow it.
In a moment of haste, I consented.

Maybe they had lost theirs;
should’ve asked them that –– I should’ve.
“Where are yours?” should’ve said.
“What happened to
the ones I handed out yesterday?”
But I didn’t ask, instead.
Then, in the dream, I just lent it out
to them. It’s what we do ––
what we feel we must do.
I would give you students all of me,
I sometimes fear, and forget to save some
    for myself.

Woke up in the dream, I did, some time later.
My mom, mentor in teaching, and I
were
in a glass room,
watching a science fair enact itself in
space down below.
One student held some Yorick thing up in hand (alas).
We saw it through the glass.
Mom asked, “Is that a human heart he has?”
Like a stage prop, the dumb pump; but ––

At that moment, chest seized,
I realized,
they hadn’t returned it [the original]
from that earlier scene.

In a writing seminar next day
one student claims that
a fish’s heart, if pulled from the animal
and placed in a bowl of Gatorade,
will continue to beat. The electrolytes
charge the heart, he explains ––
the Fishenstein Monster beating on
against the current
until the electrical current’s past.
The bird in my own rib cage flutters at this,
beating and beating against the bars,
come back to life –– come back.

A fish heart beating in a bowl of Gatorade.
It is a beautiful image.
It is a beautiful truth.
I don’t want to know if it is not true.
I only want to take it,
place it in this poem
and watch it tremble.