A Rare Device: PoetryApril 14, 2007

Often I equate poetry with fine paintings. Both seem to represent some ineffable part of our humanity, and both are, for me, completely unintelligible. I like the way a Picasso looks, the colors are often pleasing, the painting is usually hanging straight, Picasso’s are just great. But I feel exactly the same way about certain graffiti I see under bridges, or colorful labels on bottles of wine. My capacity for discrimination between good art and bad art is next to none. I have similar trouble distinguishing good poetry from bad poetry. I have a book of poems by Robert Frost, and when I read them I feel confused. When I hear poetry being read by my fellow MFA’ers at readings, I feel confused, but I like the way the words sound. And that’s something.

So here’s my approach to poetry: Don’t think too much when you write poems, then tell your reader not to think too much when they read your poetry. So don’t think too much when you read my poetry. Just enjoy the way they sound in your head. And please remember that I do not, and probably never will, call myself a poet.

 

 

I.

Even Death Is Exhausted

Death, of course, was dressed up in black

His breath the scent of acid

He let me feel the wood of the scythe

I remarked that it looked well crafted

Death sat on my couch

Death drank all my beer

Death snores when he sleeps on his back

Death was trashed

I went for my bat

And struck at his bones

I whacked and they cracked

Which caused me a near-fatal heart attack

II.

Stupefying Symphonic Fireflies of Central Texas

On the bank of the river I curse my flashlight

Then I see the twinkling Christmas light bug show

One fizzles into my ear

One zips up the bridge of my nose, bumps my forehead

Creatures born with wings

But without the knack to steer

Because I am enlightened, I search for meaning in these creatures

They exude an iridescent meaninglessness, and I find that attractive

Strange little beetle things

With glowing asses

A planet of buzzing insects shades moonlit tips of the waves in the river

Then I see the message

Written in the air, in orange letters, all caps

The word:

ELEPHANT

Then nothing but the flies

And the sound of hundreds of microscopic chainsaws

Then another hallucinated word:

UMBRELLA

I blink and it’s gone

Visual silence

And then:

KETCHUP

And then:

TOMMOROW

This is how Moses must have felt

A recipient of a secret message

Heed my holy prophecy:

Elephant, Umbrella, Ketchup, Tomorrow

Jesus would be jealous

III.

Be No Windflower No

Be Jesus and his clone

And wear tuxedos, and wave at the crowd

And drink Shirley Temples from bendy straws

Be the colonial musician who plays the sad ukulele

To cheer the homeless rocks and flowers

The orphaned atoms of oxygen who float in the air without meaning

Be the portable toilet that sings hit love songs

And understands without understanding

Zen crap

Be the Galapagos turtle who treats months like hours

Time to a cow is measured in salt licks and chews of the cud

Fruit flies are born, then grow to lead a satisfactory life, and die — in one day

There is no such thing as a Galapagos human

Cud tastes like punishment

A haiku:

Wind sows its seeds in

the invisible morning.

Works just like poison.

A seed sits on the watery earth

Seconds later little twigs sprouts from its flat belly

And its roots like tangling toes scurry and burrow into the moist

Toward the top of the planet

The windflower is born under the tree

On top of the tallest hill

In the shadow of the walls of the valley

Of the mountain that floats on top of the clouds

 

 

 

Passers-by (a short story)March 22, 2007

I’d received my acceptance letter in the mail, it was from my college of choice. That evening I decided to take a walk out on the beach. The beach is close no matter where you live in San Diego, but so is the military base. The draft numbers had been issued today.

In order to celebrate properly I bought a fifth of Bushmills. The man behind the counter asked me when I was shipping out. I couldn’t help myself, I grinned. I said I’m not going to fight, that’s what this whisky is for. The man’s face was grim, and he said he’d seen a lot of other guys my age come in today and buy bigger bottles of whisky, but for a different reason. I paid for my fifth and asked the man if he knew anyone who’s been drafted. He said, yes, my brother’s son.

I’d finished half the bottle by the time I got to the beach, now I wished I’d gotten the bigger bottle. I took a sip and watched the black ocean waves come and go. I heard a patter of feet slapping wet sand, then I saw a couple of guys running along the waterline, directly at me. One was right on the heels of the other. Maybe the first guy had stolen something from his pursuer. Or maybe the pursuer was homicidal and sought out a perfect stranger for sport. Or maybe they were both chasing a third guy. Or maybe they are separately running for exercise on the beach at night in the full moonlight. My lack of understanding made the situation exciting.

I stepped back and the men ran by. I caught a whiff of bourbon. Then both of them began to laugh and they slowed, then stopped, then dropped to the ground in exhaustion. They were chuckling, kind of half-way laughing to themselves. After a few moments one of them pushed himself from out of the sand and sat indian-style with his head hanging. The other sat up and sat likewise. They sat in silence, they no longer chuckled. In the moonlight I saw the lines in their foreheads, even from a distance.

Then one of them looked at me. Hey man, he cried, waving an arm. Got any more of whatever’s in that bottle? Both of them eyed my whisky as I walked toward them. I took a pull and handed it to the one who’d spoken to me. He had kind of a round, tall forehead that made him look like he had a big brain. He took a long pull. He gave it to his friend, an emaciated guy, who took a sip and handed it to me without making eye contact. I screwed the cap on. The brain guy told me to sit down. I did, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. We all three watched the waves.

When do you go out? asked the brain guy.

I don’t, I said. I just got into school. The skinny guy looked at me for the first time, so did the brain guy. Their mouths were open.

What about you guys? I asked.

We got our numbers today, said the brain guy.

Which numbers did you get? I asked.

Both of them spoke at the same time: One. I shook my head. They shook their heads. I handed the bottle to the skinny guy.

He unscrewed the cap.

The Book of EchoesMarch 16, 2007

“Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other.”
~James Baldwin

Click to read — The Book of Echoes

Press for SouldMarch 7, 2007

Epilogue: Well, the final show went off well.  I’ve come to a few conclusions about live performance.  First, that they are exciting.  Second, that I think I prefer the atemporality of written fiction to the actual stage.  When your work is going on on a stage, anything can go wrong.  Someone’s phone rings, someone forgets a line, and the show may suffer.  Written work, if read under unfavorable circumstances, may be reread, given a second chance.  I like that, I think.

I don’t know how or why, but Sould has popped up in a few papers around Fresno. The Bee is the Fresno paper. My show is just a blurb in this article, but it’s a top-5-picks-of-the-Rogue-Festival kind of blurb. The guy who’s doing the picking I don’t know, but he knows talent when he sees is. The Colegian is the campus paper. (When I heard that there would be an article in the campus paper I pshawed, thinking campus papers are worthless. But then I thought about it: there are over 20,000 students at Fresno State. That’s more people than the entire city of Georgetown, Tx, let alone Southwestern. The Collegian is a far cry from the campus “news” I learned to avoid in college. And at any rate, press is good for the show that’s coming up this Saturday.)

Collegian – “Fresno State Has Rogue Spirit” (Front Page of Features Section)

Fresno Bee - “10 shows you won’t want to miss at this year’s festival”

Watch a video of Sould (As performed by Tony Bonds and Jeff Waldrop, Cathedral For a While, Summer 2006)

http://www.cathedralforawhile.com/mov/sould_480×360.flv

The Year of the Pig: in three partsFebruary 16, 2007

Above is a collage of Don Quixote, a novel which is considered to be not only the first modern novel, but one of the most masterful. It contains every discernible fiction writing tactic seen in modern fiction today. It was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. This painting, I think, is one of the most appropriate uses of the see-one-thing-then-you-see-another style of collage.

(Moving on.)

Let’s think, for a moment, about the power of the circle. Prompt: Why can’t we draw perfect circles? Let’s discuss.

YOU: But I can’t even draw a straight line, why should I be able to draw a circle?

ME: Because lines are not important. If you can draw a straight line from one place to another, that would probably mean you are a deliberate, focused person who follows through in tasks. Or perhaps it would mean that you are one who secretly yearns to draw perfect lines, but you are embarrassed by your obsession so you secretly draw them at night by fading candlelight, when you are alone and no one can know. But there is no meaning in that kind of nonsense.

YOU: And there’s meaning in drawing circles?

ME: There is meaning, and power, in perfect circles. Circles are the most efficient two-dimensional shapes. It’s the most amount of area to the least amount of perimeter yardage.

YOU: I don’t like geometry.

ME: Neither do I.

YOU: Circles are boring.

ME: You’re wrong. Observe:

Just look at the native American medicine wheel. These ancient marvels were made by arranging stones in enormous circles that were sometimes up to 75 feet in diameter. Every wheel found has this basic form, but each one is also unique and has its own style and eccentricities. Experts are not entirely sure what these massive wheels were for, but they could be part of the ritual vision quest. However it may be interesting to note that some medicine wheels mark the longest day of the year. The oldest wheel dates back 4500 years.

And the Goseck circle is a Neolithic structure in Goseck in the district of Weissenfels in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. It consists of a set of concentric ditches 246 feet across. Its functions were similar to that of Stonehenge, (foretelling the sunrise and sunset positions at the winter solstice) however it is thought to be from the Neolithic age, which makes it 500 to 1000 years older than Stonehenge. Stonehenge is famous of course because of its enormous protruding stones, but the Goseck circle contains the same sort of beauty in its simplicity — and besides, what’s more permanent than a hole in the ground?

And now look at the wheel. Most important invention in history. But even more incredible is this: the Inca people, who by 1527 had an empire of 15 million people who had built countless colossal stone structures, never used the wheel in any practical manner. How they moved and placed enormous blocks of stones is a mystery.

(This concludes our discussion.)

Post Script: If we could draw perfect circles, we would know not only perfection, but what it is like to create perfection. We create every day, but our fruits are flawed – our words misunderstood, our pot roasts overcooked, our children misjudged. Our lines slanted.

Borges tells us in a short story about the writing of the god. It is a signature of the creator, and this writing serves to be the only wholly perfect thing in our physical world. But the writing is not writing as we know it, it could present itself in any form. It could be the veins in an oak leaf, the arrangement of sacred stones, a spiraled seashell, the pattern of stripes on the side of a tiger. But perhaps the writing of the god is not a thing we may find in nature, apart from ourselves. Perhaps it is a thing we may only discover if we become the creator, (without the use of a compass, only with our own free hands) of a perfect circle.

 

 

What’s so creative about creative non-fiction?February 2, 2007

I’ve asked myself this question many times. And this is my conclusion: it’s not really a good question. The lines between fiction and creative non-fiction are so blurred that some authors write their memoirs, change the names, and call it a novel, while the non-fiction folks write their memoirs, change the names, and get screwed if anyone finds out that any information has been falsified in the ostensibly historically perfect “memoir.”

Here’s my point: I’ve always considered non-fiction to be journalism, or transcription, or recording the course and outcome of circumstances, but this is simply not the case. I’ve come up with some ideas for creative non-fiction essays:

1. Jab about my escapades as an air guitar savant slash robot in disguise.

2. Many memoirs deal with the author’s homeland. I’ve never given my hometown much thought, but recently the cultural heart of it was sold off and is soon to be destroyed. Plans for a CVS on the site are under consideration. This situation is just bunk enough to write about.

3. Having recently read A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, I feel like I want to break rules and get away with it — so I don’t really know what that means yet.

4. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for a lifetime.

So that’s what I think.

California QueenJanuary 21, 2007

You may have already read this on the site, but it’s revised.

For those of you who have not read it: it’s a bit more realistic than most of my stuff.  Hardly my attempt at a war story, but probably the closest I will ever get: California Queen

Human Contact

“Is this true or only clever?”
-Augustine Birrell

Human Contact

The Center of the Universe

“Acting in ‘Star Wars’ I felt like a raisin in a giant fruit salad, and I didn’t even know who the cantaloupes were.“
-Mark Hamill

Tagline: involves citrus, Plum Brandy, and a typical Kafka kind of guy.

Center of the Universe

Moonlight

 

 

“In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.“

                -Henry Ward Beecher

Moonlight