Bite the Hand that Bores You

I got a brand new copy in a box from Amazon today - Joshua Marker’s A Man’s Vision of the World! From the back:

“This book of poetry. . . is the combination of torn and put away pages from a time when all hope was lost. It’s my vision of the world, corrupted and beautiful. It’s about the time when I had come to understand that life just wasn’t so easy, looking at it face to face and from the sidelines as well. . . A riddled world of faults, lies, deception and lost horizons.”

If the title - which sounds like something you might find on a card table at the back of a Promise Keepers rally - doesn’t tip you off, perhaps the lack of serial commas will.

No. No, no. A thousand times no, and if you thought it for even a moment after reading that back cover, please just stop sending me Christmas cards. No, no, no.

From the section “Lost Search”

Chance

Taking a deep breath
I dive into a world,
A place called love.
Will I drown or swim with the greatest of ease?
That’s a chance I have to take.

or, Unconscious, from “Windless Mind”

Inner thoughts
Running endlessly into oblivion.
The dark rushing upon
The fields of white.
Taking control of desires, emotions.
I now realize the truth behind
The light at
The end of the tunnel.

Poetry: n; (1) any literary form that is not prose.

I know that
your passion cannot be constrained by
automatic word wrap.

But
It isn’t poetry
simply because the lines don’t reach
the end of the page.

It was the bad war poetry that finally did it. I know it’s verboten to mock Americans’ first experience with grief in a generation. And the bad poetry is part of the ‘national healing process’–it’s therapeutic, we’re told. But we’re talking about stuff I wouldn’t show even my therapist.

The twin brothers crashed by two metal planes,
So hateful and wrong, yet can’t be explainedAmerica alert in their wondering eyes,
As the towers collapsed onto passer bys [sic]

While tears from the heaven streamed heavily down
As cries seemed to screech such disturbing sounds

. . .

We live in America, where dreams can come true
And no one can beat us, not even you.

Once upon a time, poets invented forms that employed or exposed peculiarities of language. It was the difficulties of the forms that laid down the rules of the game and defined poetry. Some forms required rhyme; most defined certain patterns of meter. The richly toned Vietnamese language allowed the possibility of tonal echoes of words throughout a work, and the vogue for Vietnamese court poetry in the eighteenth century was for double meanings to be encoded backwards and diagonally through the poem, which was written in a grid. These backward echoes could be manipulated to create a second interpretation for the whole poem, and poets who could make the explicit text an elegant metaphor for the subtext were celebrated.

Alternatively,

We live in America, where dreams can come true
And no one can beat us, not even you.

Modern authors frequently lament that these rules are arbitrary and confining. They restrict creativity, they whine. But restrictions aren’t all bad: they give a poem a trellis to grow on, and moreover they demand a facility with language. Would-be poets can’t simply stick in the first word that comes to mind (or that rhymes with ‘kiss’); instead every word must be considered because every syllable is restricted by its neighbors above and below; every foot must fall appropriately. In this way the imagery is forced to stretch, and allegory extends beyond the facile and ham-handed metaphors of the quotidian. There is more to it than repeatedly jarring the reader’s brain with 1 1/2-pica falls,
thump
thump
thump
to the next line.

It’s a natural corollary of the contemporary obsession with equality that causes this ignorance of form and leads to the assumption that poetry is a matter of genius or inspiration. Since all writers are equal, the situation and not the observer must define poetry. Thoughts spoken are conversation; thoughts with headlines are journalism; thoughts with line breaks are poetry. A good poem thus leaps fully formed from the forehead of the poet, just below where the divine ray of inspiration strikes. If a poem is, as Willian Carlos Williams said, “a machine made out of words”, this is like shaking a paper bag full of machine parts and expecting a turbine to fall out.

This isn’t how poetry is written. Poetry is hard work. Expressing simple thoughts is easy, and we do it all day long. It’s made easier yet because a word choice with deviation from the speaker’s actual intent is insignificant; it doesn’t matter to the judge whether you ran or fled after stealing that lobster from a restaurant. He looks at your statement from only one perspective. All the permutations of word with their shades of meaning are flattened into one general idea. This is useful in everyday life; interestingly, it reduces miscommunication. But in a poem these slight differences can be combined to create meaning.

As any shady jeweler knows, a flaw in the raw material can be hidden if a rock is viewed from only one angle. But poetry is held up to the light and considered from every perspective. A poet must consider how light reflects from each connotation of every chosen word–it’s the only means by which he can convey his crystallized thought to a reader. When he’s done, if he has produced a poem, it is something worth being warmed by the cupped hand and considered in clarity, color, and cut.

Good poetry, like any synthesis, is hard work. It requires more work than telling a friend at the mall that you’re “like, totally bummed about those two towers in New York”. But if it demands more than does a cocktail party conversation, the rewards are concomitantly greater. A good poem communicates a personal perception yet evokes sympathy in the reader. It is communication concentrated: a good poem might express in a dozen lines an idea that would take exhaustive pages of prose yet is too delicate to tolerate volumes of text. It is an opportunity for a writer meticulous and knowledgeable to distill pure experience and offer it up to the reader.

Birdsong, 5:48am.

Eyes closed, drowsily aware of the staccato dripdripDRIPdrip of one of those delightful rainy San Francisco mornings. Grey from ocean to hills. Not like yesterday. Yesterday, sunny and sixties, clear and bright. Perfect top-down weather. Not like today. Drowsy dissolving into warm flannel. dripDRIPdripdrip.

5:50am, mourning doves laughing at me. Cold feet and cold fingers, wet knees kneeling in the puddle in the driver’s seat, runoff from the top cold blossoms across my back.

Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth — that requires a heroism which is transcendent.
    - Henry Ward Beecher

I wonder whether he worked at that phrase, or whether it was handed to him peeled and sliced by a Greek woman wearing Carmen Miranda’s hat. If I ever find my muse again, I’m going to knock her down and handcuff her to my plumbing.

Last Thursday I walked through the Financial district around two in the afternoon. Suits wrapped around helpless bodies caromed through the streets all around me, and I felt like a midwestern boy on a nude beach for the first time. The guy playing the piano was the only element of the scene that somehow seemed familiar to me.

A wild-haired man was pounding out (literally; the plastic table was shaking under his his hands) chords that were vaguely familiar only by virtue of being the spine of most any modern music. He was trembling and biting his lower lip, so fierce was his passion, until his spasmodic fingers reached what was (apparently) some sort of crescendo. His back arched and he threw back his head and shouted, “TAAAH-KEEE-LAAAAAH!” and laughed like a madman. Very much like a madman.

The suits and I kept walking.

I don’t know where they were going–if they even had destinations; perhaps they were some sort of ceaselessly patrolling color guard for the essential nature of money (the image of a fiscal pinup calendar desperately demands birth)–but I got to Lilla’s building and shared the elevator to the ninth floor with a man wearing a suit that probably cost as much as my car, reading a discarded Wall Street Journal I’d found in the lobby and trying to not look like a stowaway.

Lilla is German, I think, and has that fierce matronly presence that powerful women sometimes have. She got the details of my case in minutes, and I signed and dated at the Xs five times. I felt a seachange; it was complete. I had a lawyer of my very own, or at least was sharing her only with a few dozen other clients. It was like losing my virginity, being promoted to corporal, graduating from college all at once: I was an *American* at last. Travel agent (John), insurance agent (Frances), and now lawyer. Time to put away childish things.

Lilla’s going to be handling my worker’s comp claim. And I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to calling my claims adjuster and telling her how happy I am to never have to deal with her again.

If you’re not familiar with worker’s comp law, you may be interested to discover that a typical settlement for permanent damage to a hand is in the range of eight thousand dollars. The rationale being that damage that will affect my work for the rest of my life and perhaps require a career change is worth at least a month’s salary. Let’s hear it for insurance companies.