Poem, Day Two

Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of dead land

April is National Poetry Month! In case you're wondering who's idea this was and why the month was so named, consult Academy of American Poets FAQ page for the historical background. Interested in harassing your friends and colleagues for thirty straight days? (I am!) Here's an idea:

Celebrate the second national Poem In Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 30, 2009!

The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on April 30, 2009.

Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores.

Wow, right? I will hereby kick-off this momentous occasion by posting one of my favorite, all-time poems.

Steps by Frank O'Hara

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

Mumblings, a love story

I’ve been living on the left side of the continent for almost 6 years now – having left Brooklyn for Alaska, then south to California’s bay area. At first I hated this state – the car culture, weird non-weather and lack of pizza was off-putting – but that has changed. I’m not interested in settling here, but do enjoy it. Technically hometown is in RI, but I never miss it; when I do it means I’m deeply depressed or agitated. I was eighteen when I moved to New York. As we crossed the Connecticut/New York state line, I looked around and noticed that every driver within view was black. I experienced a spasm of panic, not because I was afraid of black people – real, tangible cultural diversity was overwhelming. New York didn’t just mean more kinds of people, it meant people who didn’t know me and, even better, didn’t care to. Anonymity was a relief and the world cracked open around me; no one was watching. New York is moody and endlessly changing – just walking around made me feel like a small, pointless part of something enormous and beautiful. Feeling insignificant was liberation. The noise and chatter made the silent still moments more palpable and when it rained the city felt honest. I use the past tense, but these are qualities that still exist. The more critical of my formative growing happened there and I’ll always love it, the way we feel affection for former lovers; it became a part of me. Even the ugly things I did there have turned lustrous with time. I left in 2003 with no realistic plan to return. I was very sick. What you must understand about living in New York is balance. Urban life has its difficulties; when the good things cease to outnumber the difficulties, you must move or else everything closes in on you. Now I often find myself very homesick, but am not entirely willing to return – it’s unclear whether there would be anything to gain and there’s still so much space out here to change and different directions to take. Between visits I put myself there; there is music that puts me there, and sometimes it happens with the rain or the smell of urine. I can stand on busy corners, thinking of concrete and bodies, seeing other buildings and meaningful street signs that exist 3,000 miles away; and I remember to be human.

1984 Revisited

I've been rereading George Orwell's novel 1984. I read it almost every year, although I think I skipped it in 2008. Every reading opens the book up more for me, but this particular reading has given me new insight: I attribute this my own mental maturity, but also the benefit familiarity brings - I am less worried about the plot, since I know how it ends, therefore free to examine other aspects of the book. And, for curiosity's sake, in a highly unusual state of insomnia, I watched the British film adaptation, Nineteen-Eighty-Four on Netflix's Watch Instantly service, notably starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, the protagonist, and Richard Burton (you know, the guy who married Liz Taylor 43.6 times...) as O'Brian, "Winston’s seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer," according to author Thomas Pynchon in his 2003 introduction to the novel.

There are many reasons I love this book and reread it so often. For starters, I find Orwell's writing to be superb. He is able to be both concise and poetic at the same time; I think it is for this reason that the screenplay is fiercely loyal to the book's dialogue (more on the film later). Orwell's political leanings are fascinating: he went to Spain and involved himself in their civil war by joining the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification or the POUM — Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista to "fight Facisim", which he later recounted in his book Homage to Catalonia, an amazing work. I find 1984 book to be important politically and historically, as a sort of warning bell, ringing alarms of the danger of totaliarianism, indoctrinisation and blind obedience.

Pynchon's introduction has some wonderful insight about Orwell's possible intention regarding the message behind 1984 (note that George Orwell is a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair): "There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger—his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith “believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945...” Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for his son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted—a faith so honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed."

The first time I read it, the very idea of constant government monitoring and dissolution of free will were appropriately terrifying; that was in 1998. Eleven years later and I am still unsettled by these ideas, but it is other elements of the novel which have caught my attention and thinking about the novel in the context of the movie helped me analyze them. For one thing, (spoiler alert!) the end; Winston is caught by the Thought Police and taken to the Ministry of Love where he is... well, it depends on how you think about it. He's punished, tortured, and reprogrammed (think Woody Allen's movie Sleeper) but, according to O'Brian, he's rehabilitated, or healed. With that in mind, one could say that Winston's conscience, this thought crime throughout the book, is the actual torture. Namely, his memory is to blame. He drinks, eats and smokes the disgusting, government-produced food and narcotics, knowing, but not quite remembering, that a better, purer, quality form of these products once existed. He and his fellow party members (party actually denotes a social class) drink oily gin and tasteless coffee, eat processed meat-like foods and smoke cigarettes that are packed with tobacco dust. His knowledge of good food and freer times is not helping him; in some ways, you could see his capture and reprogramming as a good thing. When the book ends he no longer thinks about the terrible gin he's drinking and his only concerns are with the the party's politics, not the memories that once haunted him. The first time I read 1984, I was disappointed that Winston and Julia's acts of subversion with the underground resistance movement are all for naught - the underground is as much a product of the party as the shitty gin everyone drinks. This time around, I feel sorry for Winston and can't help but empathize with the relief he feels, yes relief, at being reprogrammed by the Ministry and sent back into the world to be a loyal cog in the party's machinery. His memories and knowledge are gone, his love for Julia betrayed and destroyed; Winston is not happy, (happiness is not an option or even desirable) but content; his mind is eased.

I can identify with this. Take, for example, the television show House. Everyone I know loves this show and I understand why: Hugh Laurie is a good actor (I also find him kinda hot, rowr!) and the surly character he portrays is very appealing. But every time I watch it, some sort of Right-wing message is written into the script and I turn off the show in utter disgust, deeply and personally insulted. I watched one starring Mira Sorvino - I love her and was very excited to watch that episode. Barely fifteen minutes into it, House and his team of teenage gymnast vigilantes (oh, wait, that's the Mr. T cartoon, sorry); House and his team of doctors are brainstorming Mira's mysterious illness, with, as the format goes, very little information to help them. They suspect some sort of venereal infection because she's on the pill, inferring that all women who take the pill are promiscuous sluts. Seriously. I'm probably not remembering the plot exactly right, but I do know, without a doubt, that that was their point. Um, excuse me?

The other episode involved a revelation that a star baseball player was smoking the demon marijuana, whereupon one of the doctors went on a holier-than-thou rant, equating the athlete's indiscretion with injecting toddler's with heroin or something equally horrific. Great. First of all, all crimes are not equal and drugs differ, as do their uses, abuses and potency. Second of all, baseball players endure a grueling physical season, if a player is smoking pot, it's probably to deal with the pain. Third of all, FUCK YOU. Rant aside, it is this sort of uber-consciousness that makes it very hard for me to watch most television, which sort of sucks because sometimes I really need mindless entertainment. It's not always healthy, mentally-speaking, to be hyper-aware; Winston's relief at being purged of his memory is highly understandable, however terrifying the notion.

With all of this in mind, I watched the film, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, expecting to be disappointed. While I wouldn't call it a good movie, or even necessarily recommend it to a friend, it has some very strong points. The sets were wonderful, they truly captured the bleak, war-torn, crumbling feel of a London under the grip of a totalitarian regime. And the casting is superb: John Hurt was born to play Winston and Richard Burton brings real sophistication to O'Brian, a very complex character, considering his relatively minor role; Suzanna Hamilton is exactly how I had pictured Julia from my very first reading. But, I also felt that the filmmaker was at odds with himself. He clearly was trying to bring certain horrors to the forefront, yet de-emphasized some wonderful element that make the book so rich. Children, for example. In the book, Orwell goes out of his way, very early on, to explain that in the world he imagines children are not innocent, but lethal. Being young and impressionable, they swallow the party rhetoric fully and are therefore ruthless and violent. They turn their parents in to the Thought Police, relish public executions and use their party conformity as a sort of rebellion by targeting the adults around him as enemies of the state every chance they get. In the movie, the children are stoic, calm and forgettable, I was very disappointed by this. But, as I mentioned earlier, the dialogue was lifted directly from the book, which impressed me, and overall I think film captured the mood very effectively. Nonetheless, I would recommend the book over the film, the detail alone is worthwhile; the film is purely visual, it hasn't the time to serve the content satisfactorily.

Sweet Lou

My husband just informed me that today is Lou Reed's 67th birthday! (If you don't know why this is notable I feel very, very sorry for you. And I also urge you to consider ingesting some culture, any culture and no, sitting vacuously in front of television-machine does not count. Lazy minds are not inexcusable.)













Lou was the principle songwriter for The Velvet Underground (Andy Warhol helped put this rag-tag ever-evolving team of Nihilists on the map and secured them as the house band at Max's Kansas City) but went on to much success as solo artist. Among his achievements were such classics as Walk on the Wild Side (the 1972 urban anthem chronicling transsexuals, oral sex, narcotics and other "seedy" things that make life so wonderful), Perfect Day (heroin music at its best), Coney Island Baby (every under-achiever's wet dream) and Sweet Jane. Lou also acknowledged the devastation of the 80's AIDS crisis in New York with his song Halloween Parade (a reference the annual parade through Greenwich Village, a fixture of New York's LGBT community).

Lou is a Syracuse University drop-out (although he was later granted an honorary degree in English), however his time there was well-spent, as he forged an important relationship with notable poet Delmore Schwartz (you know... In Dreams Begin Responsibilities... that guy) who undoubtedly influenced Lou's writing sensibilities.

And the list of his accomplishments goes on. Happy Birthday, Mr. Reed - the world wouldn't be nearly the dark and moody place it is without you.

Say what you will about the urban jungle...

New York has it's mystical moments.

Hello again

I’m just recovering from a very busy month and half at work – it’s application season at our fellowship and given the state of journalism and the economy, applications came pouring in, mercilessly. I think the worst of the workload is behind me.

There isn’t too much that’s new and exciting to tell you about. Winter in California goes splendidly along – rain is fine, rain is great. I’ll take it over ice and snow any day. I was biking around campus a week or so ago, enjoying the electric green color that’s sprung up everywhere; February here means that everything flowers and blooms, thanks to the rain. Stanford these days reminds me of Washington, DC in the early springtime when the leaves and cherry blossoms burst onto the scene. It’s something everyone should experience at some point.












Sean and I did our taxes of the weekend and realized that (a.) we’re poor and (b.) given the amount of taxes we owe, the government and California do not think we’re poor. But I’m just complaining because I can (and will). Truthfully I look forward to paying taxes; while parting with money is always painful, I am all for Socialism. People who complain that government “steals” their money irk me. What? You expect your roads and old people to take care of themselves?

Please.

Speaking of poverty, I’ve been writing a great deal of poetry lately. I was walking my dog and realized that an old boyfriend of mine just turned 40 and thus came the idea for a poem. It’s going well. I haven’t written much since I left Alaska. Part of this is due to time and emotional issues: I’m only now, two and half years into my latest stint of employment, dealing well with the fact that 9 hours of my day simply must be eaten by my job. After the empty schedule graduate school afforded me, the plunge back into grown-up-ness was not pleasant. You’d be amazed at what one can accomplish in a day when there is nowhere to go. After a lot of anger and disappointment, I think I’m over it. (It also helps that I reduced my round-trip commute from 2 hours to 40 minutes.) So, I’ve been filling my evenings by writing and washing dishes (energy permitting). I hold no illusions that things will “work out” with my poetry. I don’t expect to ever get published, necessarily, much less paid or recognized and this can be discouraging. But, I can’t really not do it, either.

I’ve been reading a great deal of Rilke, lately, specifically his Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke was my kind of guy. For one thing, he takes his correspondences seriously. He wrote a letter to Kappus (the young poet) about how he would writer a better letter later and went on to explain why he could not at that time write a proper letter. And this helped me understand that Rilke’s modus operandi is to do something right or not at all. By “right,” Rilke means, I think, for the right reasons. Don’t just scribble a letter off to your friend, sit down and write it with good intentions.

He also applies this to sex.

Rilke counsels Kappus to not let dogma and social morays affect his sexuality, but instead to use sex for the (again) right reasons – as a fundamental human experience to enrich one’s life and bond us with the larger cycles of life. How could one err in teaching this kind of lesson to a kid? I would have gained greatly from such a letter in my formative years.

And now, I could use a Rilke simply because no one writes letters anymore. Most people can’t even be bothered to write a full sentence in an email, if they bother to email at all. I still write letters, mostly to old men I know, and when they die I imagine so will the practice for me. I’m not bemoaning technology and advancement, I’m all for a paperless world, but in moving forward we do lose some truly wonderful things. And I’m not just talking about pen pals. I read in the NYTimes recently that Kim’s Video, an NYC fixture, closed. Kim’s was a legendary video store in the Village where you could browse for movies by director and they carried EVERYTHING. It makes sense that their services are no longer necessary with the advent of things like Netflix and digital movie files, but it’s also sad to see them go – they just understood Rilke’s idea of doing things right.