Gary Lehmann - Author

Foothills Publishing releases American Portraits by Gary Lehmann

2011-02-26T11:23:00.000-08:00

American Portraits

Poems

by
Gary Lehmann

Home Guard Dance, 1917

The dance took place in the ballroom of Valentown Hall
to raise money to support the Home Guard,
a motley assembly of those too young or too old for the draft.

Thus, a great number of teens elbowed each other for access to a few girls
while a great number of old couples sat quietly their hands in their laps
or danced sedately around the Hall showing the youngsters how it’s done.

As this was a military event, a guard was posted out front
consisting of an armed man at either side of the entrance.
Every half hour, the guard changed, dancers relieving guardsmen.

Through most of the dance they maintained their stiff military demeanor, but
after a while, as the dance started to break up, soldiers and their sweethearts
drifted outside into the moonlit summer night for a little spooning.

A Jar of Pickles

Jerry McKay had been working all day
as an archeological excavator
on the site of the sunken riverboat, Arabia.

On September 5, 1856, it hit a submerged log,
was badly holed, and went down hard
at a bend in the Missouri River.

The work of recovery was dangerous.
Shifting currents buried the boat 300 feet
below the surface of a Kansas corn field,

far from today’s river channel.
Jerry’s trowel struck a bottle.
Carefully, he revealed it in the wet mud.

Against all the odds,
the bottle was whole,
and the pickles looked perfect.

Everyone gathered around.
Jerry pried loose the corked top.
“Anybody want a pickle?” He laughed.

No takers. Anticipation hung in the air.
“Well, I’m starving,” said Jerry smiling.
He fished a pickle from the jar.

Everyone took in a breath.
Jerry bit off a good chunk.
“That’s one good pickle.”

presenting Lady Jane Seymour Fonda

When Jane Fonda attended Vassar, so the story goes,
a daily tea was held in the Rose Room to which each girl
was required to wear pearls and elegant white gloves.

One day, Jane arrived without the necessary accessories.
She protested that the habit was a stupid formality.
The head mistress insisted. “Pearls and white gloves!”

So Jane complied. Minutes later, she reentered the Rose Room
showing off the body that millions paid to see on screen,
wearing nothing -- but pearls and long white gloves.

Now a septuagenarian, she vigorously denies the story,
but then that’s just exactly what she would say,
now that she’s attained the age of discretion.

What Adam wants for Christmas

“I saw you cuddled up with Adam earlier on the sofa.
Did you ask what he wants for Christmas?” my wife inquired.
“He says he only wants one thing this year,
but I’m not sure we can get it for him.”
“What can a 5 year old think to want?”
“He wants an elf – a real one. Raising a finger of warning,
he made that very clear. It has to be real.”
“Did you ask him how he defines real?”
“Yes, he said you can tell an elf by his long pointy ears.”
“How tall is a real elf?”
“About 6 inches shorter than Adam.
Then I asked him “What does a real elf do?”
“Whatever you ask him, daddy,” he said impatiently.”
“Do you think he’s trying to tell us we don’t answer
his demands fast enough any more?
He needs his own personal slave.”
“Well, he looked at me with one of those blank expressions
as if I ‘d just fallen considerably in his estimation.
He could tell I was struggling.
“My friend Nick has one—a real one,” he offered.
I thought I’d cracked it now.
“So where does your friend Nick live?” I asked,
thinking we might call his parents to get the story.
Adam just looked at me again, sadly, and replied,
“Elves live at the North Pole, daddy.”
“Now, what do we do?”

Settling Down

The American painter, John Singer Sargent was born in Florence,
but he traveled around Italy and France for most of his early years.
As a teen, he showed a love of painting, but due to their nomadic life,
his mother insisted he work quickly to complete a painting every day.

As he accompanied her on morning walks, where ever they might be,
Mary Newbold Singer Sargent sketched in the open air with her son
teaching him the pure joy of rendering the surrounding countryside
in rapidly executed bright watercolor sketches of stunning beauty.

“No matter how many works are started, one must be finished each day.”
In the end, it was her abiding legacy to him and a useful one at that.
The world little values the unfinished work of artists. It is best if they
can learn to work fast and true – with an eye toward the uncertain future.

Getting the News

It was an early winter day with snow lingering in the air.
I walked out to pick up my mail from the box by the curb
when I heard this clatter of squawking overhead,
a bomber squadron of geese resolutely flying -- North.

You crazy geese, I thought.
You’re in for a nasty surprise when you get there.

I pulled the newspaper from its holster.
The headline told of troops being killed in some foreign land
not worth fighting over. More deaths and more suffering
as if the world had not had its fill of that already.

You crazy fools, I thought.
I’ll bet you never thought you signed up for this nonsense.

I pulled out the mail and leafed through the bills and circulars.
Everyday the post man brings me ads for things I never buy.
Most of it goes directly into the trash unopened.
Somehow the world rolls on despite our inefficiencies.

You crazy people, I thought.
Don’t you know you’re in for a nasty surprise one of these days?

What Sarah Said

After reading the news of his wife’s death,
Sarah Goodridge, notable Boston miniature painter,
decided to paint something very special
for her long-time client, Daniel Webster.

In her studio, she positioned a mirror by the window,
took off her blouse and proceeded to paint on ivory
a perfect watercolor likeness of her bosom,
plump and full, the envy of Aphrodite.

Some woman at 40 may have blanched at such a challenge,
but Sarah produced a small, exquisite image
which shone with a luminous quality that
reproduced very well the glow of breathless flesh.

Each nipple stood out in bright pink contrast
to the creamy flesh around it, all
framed by drawn white curtains of fine lace.
She called it Beauty Revealed.

Sarah rarely left Boston, but for this occasion
she boarded a coach for Washington DC
to present her likeness to the great man herself.
Oh to have witnessed that interview!

Evidently, no clerk was available to sit in or take notes.
Were there tears? Recriminations? Or passionate embraces?
Did she throw herself melodramatically upon the protesting Puritan?
Or did he secretly admire her all those years of fruitless marriage?

We know he kept the miniature for the rest of his life.
In fact, it stayed in the Webster family for over 150 years,
locked away from prying eyes and inquiring minds until
no one can quite recall the true character of either party.

The Ice Man

My Uncle Frank drove his truck on the ice every year.
Regardless of the weather or what the boys said
at the Chat and Chew about ice conditions,
he just laid out two planks and drove
his red truck right out there on the ice.
Damn you all!

He was always the first with his shed on the ice,
because he refused the hard labor of pulling
it manually when he could drive out.
I think after a while the bigger thrill
was tempting fate each year.
Damn you all!

He was an arrogant cuss
and you’d be excused for anticipating,
even wishing, that sometime
he’d drive his red Ford truck out there
with his damned shit-eating grin
and go right through with a quiet blurp!

But you’d be wrong.
Much as every man on the lake
wished it secretly, that bastard
drove his big red Ford truck out on the ice
year after year in confounded redneck defiance.
Damn you all!

The Inheritance

Fingering through
this careful assortment of objects,
accumulated over a lifetime,
I see many were well-worn with hands
not unlike mine.

Now I stand here like a barbarian at the gate
demanding gold of these objects
so I can buy new objects
which I will wear down
over my score of years

to pass in time
to some other stranger to sell
and reforge into
a new life --
not unlike my own.

Some Recent Poems

2010-02-26T12:53:00.000-08:00

part of the problem

Think of the courage, the raw courage.
The plan was simple really.
Go into Woolworth’s, sit down at the lunch counter
...and don’t leave ‘til you get served.

The most ingenious plans are simple
...and complicated at the same time.

In 1960, Joseph McNeil was a freshman
at the Ag & Tech at Greensboro, NC.
He had everything to gain and everything to lose.
He might be beaten to death or die in jail.

He just might start a protest that would ignite
national awareness of racism and oppression.

To face this kind of experience and not challenge it
meant we were part of the problem.
If they dealt with it, they might die or be ruined, but...
if they endured it silently, they were dead already.

Jazzman

An elderly man with a jaunty plaid hat and patterned tie and shirt,
got on the bus at the Marina where they were serving a Seniors luncheon.

He sat down next to a lady who seemed happy to see him.
They certainly know how to lay out a fine spread, she said.

Leaning over anxious to talk with him, the lady was dressed in white,
elegant and fashionable in her ancient way.

She wore big spectacles and a scarf over her shoulder.
She laughed politely and easily at his little jokes.

They were clearly friends, maybe even lovers at one time,
cute together, obviously happy in each other’s company.

Are you doing any jobs right now? she asked.
I just got back from Hong Kong, he replied,

finishing up some details on a new CD.
I’m happy I won’t have to go back. It’s a long flight.

The lady got off at Embarcadero with a discreet wave.
Another promptly took her seat and picked up the conversation.

The Spaghetti War

Initially, spaghetti was a concession to prisoner demands for better food,
but as time went on, the sauce got thinner and the meat more scarce.

If they serve this mush one more time, I’m turning the table upside down.
They did. We did. The war was on. It was total chaos in the chow hall.

Prisoners jumped on tables and chairs and started yelling No more!
Spaghetti got thrown at guards. Plates, knives and forks were flying.

Then the chief screw brought in a machine gun and took out three windows.
Everybody’s locked down, he yelled when the din subsided.

As if someone had played the national anthem or started a prayer, suddenly
all you could hear was the sound of prisoners slipping in globs of spaghetti.

We filed out and back to the cell block, outwardly subdued -- for now,
but inwardly free -- for the first time in a long time.

Prisoner of Alcatraz

When I got off the transport boat,
I stood transfixed at the bottom of the gangway.

The guard told me I could go.
I was a free man now.

I stood like a statue at the curbside listening
to the whir of the cars as they drove past.

Everyone else had somewhere to go.
I’ve never been so lonely in all my life.

News from the Trenches

Back in the trenches, the 25 year old poet
Wilfred Owen was cold, tired, and disgusted.
He had been treated for shellshock after being
blown into the air by a mortar and landing
on the remains of a fellow officer.

Now he was back, crawling about on his belly
somewhere in France. He had been assigned
light duty, censoring soldiers’ letters.

The war had hardened him. Once he would
have cried over the things they said. Now
he just wrote DECEASED on the outside of
the unopened envelope, mailing it home
without even shifting the cigarette in his mouth.

Metro Fashions

Black Black Black
All I see is Black

Black hoodies in the subway
Black cocktail dresses
Black shawls, Black coats
Black trousers, Black pants
Black sneakers on the streets
Black glasses in the bookstore
A whole city in mourning

Black Black Black
All I see is Black

So, Man Ray, when were you born?

I don’t actually remember.
I was young at the time, you understand,
and it was a long time ago.

Besides,why should I bother remembering
All these little details?
These days everything is written in books

I suppose I’m just lazy, but
If I wanted to know the answer to this question,
I’d do what you should do. Go look it up!

Object of Desire

The artist Man Ray fell in love with his model,
but was devastated when she dumped him.
To get over her, he did a pen and ink sketch of her eye
and attached it to the pendulum of a metronome with a paper clip.
He called it -- Object to be Destroyed.

25 years later, anarchists broke into an art exhibit and,
seeing the title, Object to be Destroyed, destroyed it.
When Man Ray was asked to make a reproduction,
he agreed, only this time he insisted
on calling it -- Indestructible Object.

Doing What Comes Naturally

When Man Ray hired the same artist’s model as Andre Derain, he was surprised
when she took off all her clothes and jumped into his lap in the nude.

What’s this all about? protested a startled Man Ray who drew
his models from a distance. The young thing looked perplexed.

I’m just doing what Monsieur Derain requires of me, but come to think of it
I don’t know why he is a painter when he seems to like sculpture so much.

At the Roxy

Every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art,
MOBA is the only museum dedicated entirely to collecting and showing the worst.

The Museum of Bad Art in suburban Boston celebrates the enthusiastic work
of artists with limited talent, abysmal judgment, and little sense of color.

It’s a sort of touchstone or foil for every other art museum in the world.
We’re here to celebrate the right to fail, explains the permanent interim director.

The collection is hung in the basement outside the Men’s Room.
The smell adds a certain something which is not inconsistent with the art.

The MOBA has a firm policy of not paying more than $6.50 for a new acquisition,
though noteworthy exceptions have been made for particularly squalid attempts.

One painting in the permanent collection has a big knife slash through it.
We like to think this represents a moment of epiphany on the part of the artist.

We are more or less forced to rotate our exhibits, the director explains
apologetically. Take a look around. The public can only stand so much.

Thesaurus of Pain

Peter Mark Roget was obsessed with classifying words in part to cover his despair
after the early death of his father and the subsequent insanity of his mother.
So much sadness drove him away from people into the comforting arms
of words which offered him solace in the “starry region” of ideas.

Roget started making lists of word when he was 8 in 1787.
He listed heavenly bodies, animals, vegetables, anything at all.
He borrowed the exemplary Linnaean system to divide all thought
into 6 categories. It took years to classify every nuance.

He listed 1002 concepts to further subdivide every slight variation.
With words so divided, a writer could refine written thoughts
by reviewing similar words for gradations of meaning --
and Roget could keep his mind off the sadness that obsessed him.

Roget completed the first draft in 1805 when he was just 26,
but the public had to wait for his retirement from a long career
in medicine before Roget found 4 years to revise his book
and publish it in 1852.

J. M. Barrie wrote an homage to Roget in Peter Pan.
The Thesaurus is the one and only book Captain Hook keeps in his shipboard library.
Dylan Thomas used him. Every major 20th Century writer relied on him.
Sylvia Plath said she would sooner take Roget to a desert island than the Bible.

A Flirtation With Ecstasy

Peter Mark Roget, author of the Thesaurus, was 20 in 1799,
when he inhaled nitrous oxide in an experiment to help
his friend, Humphrey Davy, find a cure for consumption.
Little did he understand the lesson it would teach him.

As soon as he inhaled the gas, Peter began to feel dizzy.
A tingling sensation emanated from his hands and feet.
He got disoriented and found it hard to breathe or speak.
Suddenly, he got worked up, losing track of time and place.
His body and mind raced and throbbed through thoughts.

Gradually, a gentle feeling of well-being suffused his body.
His whole life seemed to be reduced to a feather in the wind.

15 minutes later, he began to return to his normal senses.
He hurried to his desk and wrote: I cannot remember that
I experienced the least pleasure from these sensations.
I can however easily conceive that by frequent repetition
I might reconcile myself to them. He feared addiction.

For Humphrey Davy the ecstasy won out. He liked it.
Not so for Roget. For him, life itself was a struggle for control.
This moment of ecstasy was an unpleasant reminder of just how
fragile a grasp he had on this state he was pleased to call reality.

Alice Ramsey’s Great Adventure

In the pouring rain, Alice Huyler Ramsey, age 22, got into her
green Maxwell 30 on June 10, 1909 in Hell’s Gate, Manhattan, and
drove down Broadway, heading out for California, 3800 miles away.

Her three friends, Nettie, Margaret and Hermine accompanied her,
but she was the only one who could drive. Most of the way there were no
paved roads. It was an endurance test and a statement of female independence.

The press loved it, though common people thought she was crazy. She was
a young lady, just two years out of Vassar College , a wife and mother with a
perfectly good home in Hackensack NJ, risking all for a wild, unimaginable stunt.

She was no Amazon either. Driving is not a matter of gender she explained,
and she was bound and determined to prove it. So was the Maxwell-Briscoe Co.
of Tarrytown NY which helped finance and sponsor the cross-country event.

In 1909 only 155,000 Americans owned cars, mostly clustered along the east coast
where there were better roads. They were anxious to prove that even a woman
could drive a Maxwell over all sorts of terrain -- and even have fun while doing it.

Doctors did not generally advise women to drive. It was felt that it upset
the delicate balance of their body chemistry and would cause them to become dangerously agitated, and agitated is exactly what they became.

West of the Mississippi, roads quickly degenerated into trails, rough terrain
for delicate eastern technology. Many breakdowns resulted which had to be
repaired where they occurred with what they had along. 11 spare tires were needed.

The car was loaded with equipment and 4 passengers, but had only 30 hp and a
top speed of just 40 mph on perfectly level roads, which, of course, they never had. Many times in the far west, the ladies had to get meals in bars and saloons.

At night, they couldn’t always find appropriate accommodation and sometimes
had to resort to sleeping in the car. After 59 days, they reached the St. James Hotel
in San Francisco just in time for a big party. Everyone celebrated discreetly.

It was a great triumph for the cause of female liberation, but after they all had
a good hot bath and a late sleep, they turned right around and went back home.
In NJ once again, Alice Ramsey returned to being a wife and mother.

The Poor Guggenheim

With a yearly allowance of just $80,000, Peggy Guggenheim considered
herself to be the poor Guggenheim. Peggy felt she needed to be frugal.

In her famous salons, she sometimes served nothing but crackers and whiskey,
but even so, people in the elite art crowd coveted an invitation to her parties.

For many years, her first husband complained, they lived in apartments furnished
with little more than orange crates so Peggy could spend lavishly on modern art.

She negotiated hard with her chosen starving artists, driving them to the brink.
Even when she didn’t particularly like an artist, she paid for quality work.

She was a harsh critic. She might just walk into your studio, look around,
and walk right back out without saying a thing. She was notorious like that.

At one boring party in Venice, a friend came up and declared I should take off all
my clothes and jump in the canal. Without hesitating she replied, If you do, I will.

You can say that rich people like Peggy Guggenheim don’t influence anything,
but you’d be wrong. Money talks and money coupled with taste leads the way.

The Case for Prose Poetry

2009-09-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

For a long time now, 15, 20 years, I’ve been writing a mixture of tradition poetry about personal experiences and prose poetry about special moments in the lives of famous people. Nobody actually deputized me to write this way. It just emerged as the best way to tell the story of key moments in these people’s lives. I’m talking about the first time FDR’s polio caused him to fall down in public. Or when Sigmund Freud discovered that he had misunderstood his father when he was a boy.

Some editors have written back to say that what I have sent them is not real poetry. I never disagree. It’s poetry-like, but written in prose. It’s not strictly fictional since it’s based on facts related to a real person. It’s not prose non-fiction either. The language is tighter than prose narratives. The intent is to encircle a moment in time with some words that illuminate character, like an essay, but to do so in a very limited number of words. It has a poetic design in that it is short and pointed. It looks like poetry on the page.

Well, rather than try to define it, why don’t I just show you some of the poems I have been writing and let you decide what to call it.

Mother Love

by
Gary Lehmann

Her good friend, Harvey Bailey said Ma Barker couldn’t plan breakfast.
Yet, Ma Barker is known to history as an illustrious gun moll of the early thirties.
It is true that she was frequently around while her four sons planned bank robberies,
but when the day came, they sent their mother to the movies -- out of harm’s way.
No police station had her photo. No law enforcement agency got her fingerprints.
She never spent a day in jail. She was the notorious crime boss who never was.

Some say the fledgling FBI spread the rumor of Ma Barker’s criminal activities
after they inadvertently killed her in a raid on her son’s cabin on Lake Weir, Florida. After gunning her down, the G-Men took a picture of her with a Tommy gun.
The implication was clear enough. The press loved it. Mother and son shoot out.
Did she pick up the gun after the police started filling the cabin with flying lead?
Was she cowering in the corner the whole time? Does it really matter in the end?

Her sons were bad boys for sure. Highway robbery, auto theft, vagrancy, several bank robberies, killing a night watchman in a hospital, attempted burglary, a shootout with the police, several murders, suicide, burglary and killing a sheriff, killing their own attorney, killing a policeman and a innocent bystander, two police murders, kidnapping, payroll robbery, assassination, wounding a policeman during a traffic stop, killing a doctor and a gangster in Chicago, mail train robbery, and escaping from prison.

Surely she profited from the proceeds of crime, but that doesn’t get the death penalty. The litany of the gang’s criminal activity doesn’t offer her much of a defense, but her participation in the gang can be more easily explained by pure mother love. I think the FBI shot first and covered up later to draw attention away from their misdeed. She doesn’t exactly qualify as Public Enemy #1 -- except in the annals of FBI history. It’s hard to show love for your sons when they act up and cause trouble all the time.

The Dukinfield Connection

by
Gary Lehmann

He was born with the ridiculous name, William Claude Dukenfield.
So, he changed it to W. C. Fields. He claimed to be descended from
Lord Dukinfield of Cheshire, even though there is no evidence to prove
there ever was any such a noble personage. W. C. Fields a Lord?

In 1857, U.S. Immigration authorities listed his grandfather as a
comb maker. His father, James, appears in the 1860 census as
a baker, but by 1870 he claimed to make his living as a huckster,
someone who sells things in the street. That’s more like it.

His son, W. C., helped him in this trade until he was 11 when
he ran away to join a vaudeville company. He developed a
juggling act, but things went wrong. He kept dropping the balls.
So he turned to comedy, a natural enough transition considering.

I guess he found that if you have the right joke, you don’t really
need a product to make the sale. His humor was based on his
disrespect for authority and his dislike of the politically correct.
If W. C. Fields were alive today, he’d die of terminal propriety.

The Goat
dedicated to General George Armstrong Custer and Major General George Pickett

by
Gary Lehmann

At West Point, graduation was conducted by rank in class.
At the top, competition was extremely fierce, but a much more
subtle competition existed at the bottom of the class to graduate the Goat,
to have the honor of saying you graduated last in your class.

This achievement involved infinitely complex manipulation of the final reports.
To achieve your goal, you had to know the answers to the exam questions cold
so you could correctly answer just enough to pass, but not one more than
required. Otherwise, some other lucky fellow would sneak in on you.

As West Point faculty came to recognize over time, this takes intelligence,
strategy and verve of the sort required on real-life battlefields.
After all, anyone can win with a vastly superior force. The trick in life,
and in war, is to achieve a strategic goal with limited resources.

In the Frame

by
Gary Lehmann

The Indian chiefs were invited to Washington after the fighting was largely over
to sign treaties, define reservation boundaries, and settle terms of surrender.

They came by rail and dressed in white man’s clothes, visible signs of their defeat.
They were shown immense arsenals of weapons to convince them never to fight again.

They met in endless meetings and went home knowing concession was the only option.
Many joined the Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and became sideshow attractions.

The defeated chiefs were sent to the photo studio of Alexander Gardner where
their pictures were taken in miscellaneous Indian costumes, regardless of tribal customs.

Crazy Horse was the only major chief to refuse to succumb to white authority.
He tried to surrender with the rest, but his spirit could not be conquered.

He fought until the end and when he was finally arrested at Fort Robinson, Nebraska,
he broke away and fought to the death. No one ever took his picture for framing.

The Death Ray

by
Gary Lehmann

Nikola Tesla worked for Edison and Westinghouse
to be part of electrifying America. He was dark and gaunt,
every film maker’s model of a mad scientist.

As early as 1908, he planned and with the help and money
of J. Pierpont Morgan, built a giant magnifying transformer
in Shoreham, Long Island called the Death Ray.

It had something to do with particle beams and terrestrial stationary waves.
The idea was to concentrate electrical energy into a thin beam
so intense that it would travel large distances without dissipating.

When he fired it over the North Pole, it was unclear whether
the device was working until an owl flew threw in to the beam a bird
and flew out a fluff of feathers. Then reports came in from Siberia.

A 15-megaton blast appeared, probably a comet, causing
a giant fire ball which destroyed half a million acres of land.
It was the largest explosion in human history.

See! Tesla cried gloating intolerably.
Immediately after his death in a New York hotel room,
the plans for the Death Ray mysteriously disappeared.

People say the Germans stole them, but
it could have been the Russians or even the US Army.
Tesla was gone, so what did it matter?

Like Ice on a Hot Skillet

by
Gary Lehmann

Every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art,
MOBA is the only museum dedicated entirely to collecting and showing the worst.

The Museum of Bad Art in suburban Boston celebrates the enthusiastic work
of artists with limited talent, abysmal judgment, and little sense of color balance.

It’s a sort of touchstone or foil for every other art museum in the world.
We’re here to celebrate the right to fail, explained permanent interim director.

Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're simply not bad enough.
What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards.

The MOBA has a firm policy of not paying more than $6.50 for a new acquisition,
though noteworthy exceptions have been made for particularly squalid attempts.

One painting in the permanent collection has a big knife slash through it.
We like to think this represents a moment of epiphany on the part of the artist.

We were more or less forced to rotate our exhibits, he explains apologetically.
Take a look around for yourself. The public can only stand so much.

The Big Meeting

by
Gary Lehmann

In 1991, Bill Gates’ mother tried to get him to meet Warren Buffet.
Fortune Magazine listed them as two of the richest men in the world.
Gates was against it. Why bother? he said. What will we talk about?

But powerful men don’t resist the wishes of their mothers for very long
and eventually they did meet, and they found they had a lot to talk about.
IBM, for example, and why information technology is a good investment.

They talked about the special obligation big money imparts on the wealthy,
but, they both agreed, it was hard to be philanthropic in a way that does good.
Buffet encouraged Gates to read the World Bank Report on the causes of poverty.

Gates encouraged Buffet to think about the method he uses at the Gates Foundation
to screen potential fields of philanthropy before even inviting grant applications.
Buffet was impressed with Gate’s integrity and dedication to giving money away.

They both agreed that it was a lot harder than earning big money in the first place.
More talk ensued. Pretty soon Gate’s people were sharing ideas with Buffet’s people
and Buffet’s people were sharing some realistic numbers with Gates and his people.

It was all very different for everyone. What they ended up contemplating is one
of the biggest mergers of fortunes the world has ever known for the good of mankind.
Mother was right, and who knows what good she has done for the world?

Rodin tries to catch the wind

by
Gary Lehmann

In 1851, the sculptor Auguste Rodin accepted a commission
from a Parisian writers’ group to produce a sculpture
of the famous French author Honore de Balzac,
but things did not go well in Rodin’s drafty studio.
Cold weather froze his brain and the real Balzac evaded him.

Balzac was self-conscious. Few images were taken of him in life.
Besides, he died 40 years earlier. Few remembered exact details.
Of his personality, they remembered plenty.
He was physically large and overbearing in his mannerisms.
In his opinions, he was powerful, controversial, sexy.

How to convey all these contradictions in bronze?
The metal seemed harder than ever.
Rodin tried a nude Balzac, but the corpulent Balzac looked flabby.
The statue failed to convey Balzac’s immense sexual power.
Only the face reflected his strong will and powerful beliefs.

So, Rodin tried an athletic Balzac, much slimmer
than he appeared in life, his hands only partially concealing
a half erect penis. The public reacted with shock.
It didn’t even look like Balzac. The pose was lewd.
The failure was a great humiliation, but Rodin did not give up.

Finally, Rodin settled on an expressive face
with the rest of the body covered in a flowing dramatic cape
meant to convey his potency and brooding romanticism.
The public ridiculed this version as well. They called it,
Balzac’s head stuck on a tree trunk.

Exhausted after years of effort, Rodin retired from the field,
sent the commission back to his patrons and reclaimed his work.
Even in defeat, the modern world reveres his failed sculptures,
as a testament to the futile effort to capture real life in bronze,
the hopeless quivering toil of every artist to capture the wind.

Is Flarf Real?

2009-08-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

The word has come up in poetry discussions for the last few years, but nobody seems to have a very good idea of what Flarf means. Flarf sounds like a cross between fluff and barf, which doesn’t exactly give the term the gravitas of words such as sonnet or sestina. When you seek out a definition from standard sources, they come up with contradictory definitions.

In a recent issue of Poetry, the editors say, “Flarf is quasi-procedural and improvisatory.” That’s not very helpful. Procedural is generally considered the opposite of improvisatory, but they go on. “This new poetry [is]...reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there.” Isn’t that pretty much what poets have been doing for centuries, sculpting poetic language from the great mass of free-floating language? But there’s more. “Many of the poems are sculpted from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the poet has gleaned from poems posted by other poets to the Flarflist e-mail listserv.” This definition doesn’t tie things down very tightly. How can we readers tell a word that occurs in the poet’s mind from one that pops up on an Internet search? Why should we care about its source? Isn’t poetry about the impact words make, not their ancestry? For clarification, I guess, the editors add, Flarf is more Dionysian than Apollonian. OK. There it is then.

If you are still a bit confused, you might go to the web sources to get a definition. Flarf by all accounts appears to have been fathered by the Internet. Wikipedia defines Flarf as “an avant garde poetry movement” [That’s safe enough.] dedicated to the aesthetic “exploration of the inappropriate in all of its guises.” This definition doesn’t exactly tell you where to put the rhymed lines and how many stanzas maketh a Flarf. But it goes on. Wikipedia says that Flarf is a “hodge-podge assortment” of words taken from miscellaneous Internet searches offered up with all their grammatical inaccuracies, and is therefore not to be taken seriously. I think I can go along with that idea at least.

So what is this thing anyway? According to both sources, Flarf was a term coined by a poet named Gary Sullivan who says that Flarf is not to be taken seriously, because it was originally intended as “an in-joke among an elite clique, a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing.” All right now that’s enough. If it’s an in-joke how can it be of interest to the general public? It’s either one or the other. And how does an in-joke turn into a marketing strategy? One looks inward; the other outward. It doesn’t make any sense. Other critics have called it Spam poetry after the junk mail that comes with an e-mail address. That might be true, but how does Spam become poetry exactly? There’s something missing in all these definitions.

Reading the poems that have been labeled as Flarf does not clarify the problem. Poems by Gary Sullivan appear on the page as the words to a cartoon narrative but without a connective story line. Poems in Poetry by self-styled Flarf poet Jordon Davis range from what I call short joke poems, complete with a punch line, to poems that reframe cultural icons like Bugs Bunny as a thug. Mel Nichol’s “I Google Myself” is a more traditional modernist poem about the self-absorption that occurs in the cyber-arena when people look at their own reflection too often. Sharon Mesmer’s Flarf poem “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” shows no sign of flarfliness that I can discern, no assortment of miscellaneous Internet words, not even a reframed icon. Instead it focuses our attention on shockingly lewd statements offered pretty much for their own sake. If there’s a common thread, here, I’m not finding it. I’m back where I started. What is Flarf poetry anyway? Some kind of joke?

If it’s a joke, it’s one that has traveled at Internet speed. The poetry world has been going Flarf crazy. Self-styled Flarf poets were invited to read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City sponsored a Flarf poetry reading. Edge Books is planning to release the first Flarf anthology very soon. And the Poetry Club in Manhattan has sponsored its third three-day Flarf festival complete with flarfy music to accompany the general mayhem. So, it must mean something to somebody. Doesn’t it? Surely Flarf must mean something to somebody, even if Flarf’s proponents haven’t bothered to tell us common folk about it just yet. Can a whole movement in poetry just come along before it gets any real definition of itself?

Of course, part of Flarf’s definition is the counter-cultural effort to mock poetic conventions. Gary Sullivan says he wrote his first Flarf poem as a mock out of Poetry.com’s perpetual poetry “contest” which was widely advertised in the poetry press. For a fee, your poem would be included in an upcoming poetry book. Sullivan consciously tried to write a poem so bad that the editors of Poetry.com would be forced to reject it, but he couldn’t stoop low enough to exceed their low standards. The worst poems he could imagine could not solicit a rejection, but the effort to write consciously bad poetry became addictive. One of Sullivan’s early works was entitled “Flarf Balonacy Swingles.” The typos are intentional. Flarf has been associated with intentional typos and offensive language from the very first. Self-mockery is part of the Flarf culture, but does Flarf have legs? When we get past the initial joke, is there enough substance to Flarf to cause it to actually become the twenty-first century’s first literary movement, as advertised, or is Flarf just a silly lark which will die out when the joke wears off?

My personal reading is that it’s just too early to tell. As far as I can tell, Gary Sullivan and his fellow Flarfists are just spitting in the eye of high poetic culture for now, making fun of our poetic conventions and daring us to take them seriously. Sullivan is just a remake of Salvatore Dali, custom-designed for our day. Still, it’s too early to count Flarf out either. It may yet find a Dionysian niche and prosper there. A more settled idea of what Flarf represents still has time to emerge. What started out as pure silliness in Andy Warhol’s New York studios turned into a real artistic movement, called Pop Art. Maybe Flarf will be the Pop Art of this decade. It’s possible.

So, in the general spirit of the thing, here is my first Flarf poem. Although it appears to be against the grain of Flarf culture, I will justify it as a true Flarf poem, thus showing my contempt for even counter-cultural Flarf conventions. First, the poem is lifted from words written by another hand. Second, it is capable of multiple levels of reading and Third, it makes little sense outside its natural context and even there it’s full of useless advice. I take the poem to have sufficient self-mockery in it to qualify it as vintage Flarf. See if you don’t agree.

Pool Rules

by
Gary Lehmann

1. NO swimming without an adult present.

2. NO diving in the shallow end.

3. NO dunking or pushing.

4. NO running on the pool deck.

5. WAIT for the person in front to be
out of the way before diving.

6. NO glass on the pool deck.

7. NO peeing in the pool.

Flarf on dudes and dudettes.

1270 words

Inspiration: Comments on Some New Poems

2009-06-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

People often ask me where I get my ideas for a poem. I write narrative, historical verse and it's a natural question since most of my poems are firmly rooted in personalities and events. Most readers specialize their reading by their interests, but I'm a generalist. I love to read widely and from that reading, I get ideas for poems. Sometimes, the original idea gets reworded but stays largely in the form it originally appeared, but sometimes the original idea is just a jumping-off point for an entirely different approach to the subject.

Here are some recent poems with brief comments on their inspiration.

Oh, please do read it

Charles Algernon Swinburne was a poet who loved himself
and his poetry so much he would read verse at any time.

He wrote poetry that the public considered scandalous, so
he particularly loved to show off when calling on friends.

To lure them in, he cleverly placed an oversized sheaf of poems
in his breast pocket where it could not be missed.

Oh, please do read it. This was all the goading the poet needed
to be induced to produce some delicious new verse to delight all.

While reading, he’d get so excited he couldn’t sit still,
but jumped up gesticulating wildly as he pranced about the room.

The audience usually tired of this show before he did,
but he appeared not to notice. So enthralled was he with himself.

COMMENT: I read Swinburne's poetry in college and taught some of it over the many years I taught college English, but I never really knew much about him. Garrison Keillor has a website called The Writer's Almanac which I read almost every day. One day he had a brief comment on Swinburne which got me started reading some of his poems and doing some research on his life. I highly recommend the site for literary snippets and a daily dose of poetry.

For Love of All

Into the sky my beloved flies.
See his silver machine cutting the air.
With rare courage and a rising sun
into the enemy ships -- he dies.

COMMENT: This is a short poem for me. I was watching the History Channel one evening. A Japanese-American girl returned to her ancestral land to explore the question of why anyone would want to become a Kamikaze pilot. She grew up in America with the view that it was crazy to willingly go to your death, even for your country. When she went to Japan, she interviewed family members who were alive during the Second World War and recall the attitude that everyone must sacrifice for the Emperor so Japan could win the war. Slowly, she discovered the mental framework of patriotism and family pride that allowed this phenomenon to exist. The poem just dropped out of the sky pretty much as you see it today.

The Man Who Saved the Whole Country

J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

The panic of 1893 dragged on and the gold reserve was getting dangerously low.
Grover Cleveland knew there was only one man with the liquidity and pull,

but J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

Morgan was not going to be hurried, and he wasn’t about to work on the cheap.
A few calls to European bankers and to some Morgan cronies for a tidy profit.

So J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire until the President called.

Cleveland was holding back. He knew his party would explode in protest.
William Jennings Bryan would launch a withering attack; McKinley would roar.

Still, J. Pierpont Morgan sat in a darkened room of the Arlington Hotel and waited.
He smoked endless cigars and played solitaire. It’s the President, Mr. Morgan.

COMMENT: Everyone has been thinking about what happened to unhinge the financial system in America -- and the world -- recently. I came across a passage while reading somewhere that told of J. Pierpont Morgan's role in saving America from a similar financial collapse in 1893. The original statement I encountered described Morgan in his private room in the Arlington Hotel. I started to think about the immense power he exerted by waiting and not pushing himself on President Cleveland at the White House. He knew that if he waited long enough, Cleveland would come to him. When he did, Morgan would have the power to dictate terms. This is the essence of Morgan's genius. I had to try to capture it in a poem. When I wrote the poem originally, I didn't yet have the repetition in the lines, but later it became clear that waiting is the essence of the story and repetition is the poet's best way to indicate patient waiting to the reader.

Love Letter to the Ford V8

While I still have breath in my lungs
I will tell you what a dandy car you make.

Clyde Champion Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame
had the fastest guns in the mid-west because
they drove fast, real fast. They had to drive fast.

I have drove Fords exclusively
When I could get away with one.

Between 1930 and 1934, they had every cop
in the mid-west on their tail for bank robberies,
gas station and small business robberies.

For sustained speed and freedom from trouble,
The Ford has got ever’ other car skinned

Driving a Ford V8 gave them that extra edge
during a shoot-out. After all, G-Men chasing
an 8 with a 4, only had half a chance.

and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal
it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Bonnie Parker probably wrote the actual letter to Henry Ford
on a scrap of writing paper she stole from a grocery store,
but they never got around to prosecuting her for it.

COMMENT: I have long wanted to tell the story of the romantic adventure/love affair of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. In desperation they marauded across the mid-west for a brief chronicle of years. One thing that I loved was the letter Clyde supposedly sent to Henry Ford praising his V8 engine. Research on the web turned up handwriting evidence that convinced me that Bonnie wrote the letter, but what's the difference really? When I started writing the poem, I quoted extensively from the letter, but finally it just became clear that using the entire letter with alternating comments by me was the way to go. This poem came largely from web research and the fact that Bonnie and Clyde had just a terrific story to tell. You'll notice I prefer italics to quotation marks in poetry.

The Deed to the City of White Plains

I won it in a poker game from John Steinbeck.
His hand was hot, but the bet was $400 to him.
He was cleaned out, but claimed he had
this deed of title from the 1600s.
We let him bet it on the pot.
He had a full house,
but I was dealt
four kings
.

COMMENT: This poem came from a brief caption under a picture in the Maine Antique Digest, a journal I read and have read monthly for many years. I retold the story slightly to meet poetic demands, but basically the idea came from the newspaper. In all my poems, I look for an ironic moment to capture the essence of a human dilemma. This poem looks a lot better when centered on the page, but I couldn't figure out how to do that here.

Bathed in Penetrating Light

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen visited Virginia Woolf
at her country home in Sussex in southeast England.
just a month before her death by suicide in March of 1941.
At the youthful age of 59, a despondent Woolf drowned
herself in the swiftly moving waters of the Ouse River.

She suffered from periods of depression for many years.

Bowen wrote about Virginia: I remember her kneeling
back on the floor ... and she sat back on her heels and
put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun.
Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful,
hooting way. And that is what has remained with me.

COMMENT: This poem started out with the quote by Bowen as it appeared in The Writer's Almanac some time ago. I did a lot of extra research on Bowen and Woolf and the poem emerged. Some poetry editors have rejected my work, because it is too prosey for them. They understand the elliptical quality I try to impart to each story, but there is always a narrative element which makes my work a stretch for some editors. Luckily, not all. It amuses me that some editors publish my work as flash fiction and some as poetry. I don't really care what they call it as long as it gets published and read. Poetry lives in a big tent. At least, that's what I believe.

The Eyes of Gustav Klimt

The remarkable thing about Gustav Klimt’s drawings is that they are quite unremarkable.
Focus on the drawings only, and you find they are merely academic, even ordinary.

They’re good -- as you’d expect from an artist as practiced and talented as Klimt – but
the reason we look at his work today with such rapture is not that he could draw faces.

No, what makes his paintings so spectacular is what he places around his faces.
That’s what creates eroticism in portraiture and glorifies gaudy golden materialism.

After his brother’s untimely death, Gustav Klimt broke away from traditional images.
He encrusted his works with metal objects, thick gold paint, patches of fabric, and eyes.

Klimt’s paintings are studded with eyes. Eyes and more eyes. They stare out at you.
Cat eyes, Egyptian eyes, square eyes, hooded eyes, round eyes, golden eyes, wiggly eyes.

At the turn of the century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was at its very height.
They didn’t yet know it, but the Hapsburg dynasty was dying. Its glory was past.

Only the Secessionists remained, the last sparks of the comet that once flashed
so brightly across the eastern European sky, like the eyes in a Klimt painting.

COMMENT: Last November, I had the opportunity to go to Vienna, Austria for the wedding of my niece which took place in a small castle right in town. While I was in Vienna, I visited as many art museums as possible and was repeatedly struck by the jewel-like quality of the paintings of Gustav Klimt. I had seen his work in New York, but Vienna museums had dozens of his lesser works as well as most of his iconic pieces. This poem developed over a couple of months after the trip. It took some time for me to focus on the eyes and to understand how vital they were to what Klimt was attempting artistically. As the poem appears on this page, it illustrates a problem editors have with prose poetry. Frequently the prose poet's long lines jump over and create orphan words which look funny stuck there on lines of their own. I appreciate it when editors give me the chance to rebreak the lines to suit their journal's line length to avoid this awkwardness.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day

I arrived late for the college opera class’s end-of-the-year song fest.
Each student had a favorite aria to perform and
a youth from Mexico City stood forth to sing his favorite,
O Sole Mio.

He held his hands in front of him and, as the piano accompanist
set up the solo, the shoulders of the youth began to heave.
Suddenly it was not just a rhythmic sympathetic pacing
but something else altogether.

A stream of projectile vomit cascaded across red carpeting of the aisle.
The piano player, not noticing, played on and,
after a somewhat awkward wiping of the mouth,
the Mexican opera aficionado belted out his song.

O Sole Mio -- The Sun, My Own Sun -- to a standing ovation.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day,
The air is serene after a storm
The air's so fresh that it feels like a celebration
What a beautiful thing is a sunny day

COMMENT: This spring I had occasion to attend a college concert, the graduation recital for an opera class. The story emerged just as I recount it, but the youth did not lose his cookies. But it certainly looked like he was about to. Luckily, I had my poetic licence with me when I wrote the poem a few days later. I think the story is better this way. I like the shock value and the fact that I can lay claim to being the only poet I know to have written a poem about projectile vomiting.

Nothing Happens for Nothing

Last fall, I flew to Paris and Vienna while
reading this book about DaVinci’s bicycle.
When I arrived in Vienna, I came across a
replica of DaVinci’s bicycle standing on a
side street near the Esterhazy Palace.
It was quite unexpected. I felt connected.

One of the reasons I flew to Vienna was to
see Freud’s couch and the apartment
where he first practiced psychiatry.
I learned that his couch is in London where
he took it running away from the Nazis.
I felt connected, but events came undone.

On the way back to Baltimore, I read about
Gertrude Stein delivering babies in tenements
from the John Hopkins Medical School.
So I went looking for Gertrude’s Baltimore,
but no where could I find a single remnant.
Puzzling journey. A writer is a foreign country.

COMMENT: This poem emerged from a couple of unscheduled coincidences that occurred during and immediately after the Vienna trip. My wife had a conference to attend in Baltimore, so we went there directly from Vienna before coming home. While in Baltimore, I was deeply involved in writing another poem, but a few months after the trip this poem emerged as I had time to contemplate the incredible coincidences involved in the trip. I don't frequently write poems about the writing process. I mostly leave that to my essays.

Cosmetic Friends

Although they lived just 5 blocks apart on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue,
and competed their whole lives for the same elite cosmetic trade,
Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden refused to meet each other.

After a while, it became a game. They assiduously avoided each other
even while they were spying on each other’s new product lines,
stealing employees from one another and pirating ad campaign ideas.

They had a lot in common. Both were hard working immigrants to NYC.
Both were self-conscious of their appearance, took classes in posture,
and bobbed their hair about the same time to suit the fashion.

They both sold red lipstick to suffragettes in 1912 and neither believed
that a woman would think much of face cream that wasn’t expensive.
They both believed you are only as old as you look, but when

death finally did catch up with Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and was
overheard to say as she passed the entrance to Helena’ Fifth Avenue store,
What a shame. That’s the closest they ever came to speaking.

COMMENT: Somewhere in my reading, it might have been the Smithsonian magazine, I came across the unusual relationship between Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. What a colorful pair they were. I researched them both on the web and wrote a much longer poem focused on the development of the cosmetics industry. Then I went back and refocused on the pair of them and their unusual non-relationship, because that seemed more interesting in the end. Sometimes, it takes months for the real focus of a poem to emerge.

An unknown person,

probably his appointment secretary, is seen in this photo
with Norman Rockwell's dented, blackened brass bucket.
It was used as a receptacle for turpentine-soaked rags.
The rags often would catch fire, explained our tour guide.
Then someone -- maybe Rockwell, maybe his assistant,
would calmly throw the bucket out the door of the studio
to extinguish the flames. That's how it got dinged so badly.

COMMENT: Years ago, I went to see Norman Rockwell's museum in the Berkshire Mountains. The museum was interesting, but the reconstructed studio was really fascinating. There in the actual place where most of his paintings were made, you really gathered in the character of this all-American painting hero. Years later, I encountered an article about the studio, I don't remember what magazine, and a brief passage leapt out at me as an icon of the quixotic nature of this painter so known for his regularity. The irony in this rag bucket story struck me, and the poem emerged. I like the idea of letting the title become the first line of the poem and offering the entire poem -- title included -- as a quotation from an unknown source.

Poems come from a variety of inspirations. Sometimes, they bear a striking similarity to their sources; sometimes they don't. The trick is to find raw material that contains what you -- as the poet -- want to say about the subject of the poem. I like the ironic and seek out stories that characterize what I feel is the essence of the famous person or event. It's a strange way to go about writing poetry, I suppose, but it satisfies me.

How to Win the Poetry Game

2009-03-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

There is natural tendency, especially when you’re just getting started, to try to write like everybody else. After all, that’s what gets published. That’s what everybody is reciting at poetry readings. That’s what everybody appears to like. Why buck the crowd? Still, just sometimes, the fresh and the unique still manage to win out. Case in point? The selection of Kay Ryan as the new United States Poet Laureate.

Kay Ryan was a surprise candidate to many. She has always been an outsider. The appointment has usually, until very recently, been given to a consummate insider --like Billy Collins or Rita Dove. The Poet Laureate is appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress who consults with prominent poets before making a selection. All the more surprising then that Kay Ryan was picked. Dana Gioia, a poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has described her as a “skeptical outsider,” a sort of modern Emily Dickinson.

How is she an outsider? She’s always lived out west, California, away from the eastern poetry establishment, so-called. She writes in an unusual style, compact, rhyming and clever with an ironic aftertaste. And she hasn’t published an overwhelming quantity of poetry in her lifetime. As a student at UCLA, she was turned away from admission to the Poetry Club, because her work was too different. She was something of a loner. Now she teaches at a college. That’s to be expected, but remedial English at the College of Marin, not poetry composition at UCLA, as you would expect. She restricts her classes to Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to enable her to write the rest of the time. In short, she’s a breath of fresh air in the tight world of poets laureate.

In a recent Christian Science Monitor profile, she talked briefly about her style and method of drafting a new poem. She says the way she forces herself to write is by creating what she calls “self-imposed emergencies.” These internal crises create a pressure to produce something. Each day she has breakfast, reads the paper, and then goes back to bed where she composes with a cat to hold down the covers. Her poems don’t begin with imagery as is so common today, but start out with an intellectual problem. She tries to look behind common phrases like the chicken crossing the road or letting the other shoe drop. We all know these phrases, and they must have some deep-seated place in our consciousness since we continue to use them, but why?

The other shoe
by Kay Ryan

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
if the undropped
didn’t congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the mid-air
collision of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.

Simple routines are suddenly transformed into philosophical icons for reconsideration. Ryan wants to parse out the meaning of our most fundamental notions. She takes up clichés we have long ago discarded and imparts them with new significance. Here is another example.

Home to Roost
by Kay Ryan

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

There is an ominous warning here. Things fall apart as we try to remanufacture our chicken-loving world. This new life she gives old ideas revivifies them for us. The simple suddenly looks complex once again.

Kay Ryan started writing when she was 19 after the death of her father. After 10 years, she decided to become a serious poet while undertaking a 4000 mile bike ride with her life partner, Carol, starting in California. The regular rhythm of the pedals, the highway noises and the monotony of the road gave her time to think. Do I like poetry enough to make this commitment? Yes. Can I sustain it? Long pause. She found that poetry was taking over her mind and the poetry she has produced since has that same combination of the mundane and the original, the repetitious and the new.

Unlike other poets who rewrite for years, Ryan stays with a new composition until it comes to a natural completion. Her partner says this is because she has a very short-term memory. Many things are developing in a poem at once, and so she has to capture them before they escape. Some times a poem goes through a number of drafts, but by then the compositional process has been started up all over again with new contingencies to guide it.

Ryan tries to write in the moment, and the resulting poem has a kind of linear unity and spontaneity that transforms old words into something new again.

Nothing Ventured
by Kay Ryan

Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing's ventured
it's not just talk;
it's the big wager.
Don't you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don't matter?
How they'll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?

The Niagara River
by Kay Ryan

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

Ryan is unlike other writers of poetry. She does not seek to be part of a grand tradition, or to do what others are attempting. She is not into imagery. Her poems do not use the first person singular to draw attention to herself. Instead they are philosophical really, meditative truisms that emerge as she works the ideas into poetic form. The goal is to strike common ground, find the unique in the common and reveal what has been hidden by overuse.

One might fear that such a poetic philosophy would be distant and aridly intellectual. Ryan sees it otherwise. “It gives my poems a coolness,“ she says. “I can touch things that are very hot, because I’ve given them some distance.” Sometimes she touches things that are hot. Sometimes she touches things that are cold, but she does it in a totally individualized way.

In a time when MFA programs all over the country seem to pump out poets with remarkably similar visions -- all too often, Kay Ryan makes us stop and see her world and forget our own. She is an outsider in the best sense. She has taken the whole complex world of poetic conventions, picked out what she likes and dislikes and left the rest for others to handle. She’s not trying to be everybody’s favorite poet. She’s just trying to be the best poet she knows how to be, and isn’t that a perfectly fine ambition? What results is work that is completely unique. It works because of its freshness. Her recent nomination to the nation’s highest poetry position just proves that you don’t have to write like everybody else to produce quality work.

1246 words

New Verse from the News

2008-11-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Way to Win is to Lose
[for Sarah Palin]

by

Gary Lehmann

In the days of rising winds, about 500 BC,
the Viscount of Wu was faced with an
overwhelming enemy at his gates.

Wu calmly arrayed his 3000 soldiers in the field
and commanded that they cut their throats.

When they all obeyed, the enemy was so horrified
they ran away, refusing to enter a city of madmen,
and leaving Wu in command of his city.

Sun Tzu says the essence of effective warfare
is not destruction, but disorientation.

Mountains and Sea [1952]

by

Gary Lehmann

On October 26 in New York City, Helen Frankenthaler
tacked a large canvas to her studio floor.
Then she climbed a ladder to gain a world view.

The 7 by 10 foot untreated cotton canvas stretched out
like a blank landscape, crying out for Mountains and Sea.
She mixed her colors, highly thinned oil paints, in coffee cans.

Then she poured pools of color directly onto the raw canvas.
She used some long-handled brushes to spread the blue, purple,
orange/red, yellow, and green into translucent washes.

Unlike Jackson Pollock, her painting did not convey
deeply moody alcoholic patches of emotion, but
light, pastel fields, like a watercolor landscape.

She added some random splatters to highlight the staining,
allowing the diluted colors to dig into the unseasoned cotton,
like a giant napkin soaking up gently filtered light.

By late afternoon, it was time to take another look.
Back on the ladder, she thought for a long while.
Then descending, she added a few black lines to train the eye.

She thought for a time, then mixed orange/red with green/yellow
to make a rustic brown which she dabbed on a central field.
Remounting the ladder, she instantly declared, It’s right.

Not Ready to Lead

by
Gary Lehmann

He failed at Greek and Latin – the road to a Harrow education.
Even remedial classes didn’t help. He disliked math and foreign languages.
He got tutoring for the Sandhurst entrance exams, but failed twice.
He only passed when his father got him the questions in advance.
His low grades precluded the infantry, but he was able to join the cavalry,
though he had no money for a proper horse.

At Sandhurst, he was short, red-headed, pale and profoundly accident prone.
He fell off a bridge rupturing a kidney and giving himself a concussion.
In Switzerland, he nearly drowned when his boat floated away.
He dislocated his shoulder while disembarking in Bombay harbor.
He did it again when he fell off his polo pony and
yet again when he took a tumble during a steeple chase.

In New York, a car nearly ran him down for his carelessness.
He got wounded while conducting rifle practice.
He caught pneumonia and herniated his gut.
He crashed his plane while learning to fly.
In Pretoria he was in a train wreck, got captured, and imprisoned.
No doubt about it. Winston Churchill was not ready to lead.

13 Reasons Annie Edson Taylor Should not have Gone Over the Falls in a Barrel
by Gary Lehmann

1. She was 63 years old, a retired school teacher, and not in good physical shape.
2. There was no control over exactly where the barrel went over the Falls.
3. The barrel might have split open after hitting the rocks.
4. The sudden increase in air pressure underwater may have caused the barrel to burst.
5. The barrel may have gotten trapped in the plunge pool beneath the falls twisting her for hours into unconsciousness.
6. Impact with the water after a 170 foot fall might have driven her long bones into her torso.
7. She may have consumed all the air in the barrel in her excitement and suffocated to death.
8. If the chase boat missed the barrel, she would have drifted into the Whirlpool.
9. If the barrel leaked enough, it may have floated down river submerged.
10. The water temperature was slightly below 40’F.
11. The crowds did not expect her, and most people didn’t even see her go over.
12. She did not get rich.
13. Her manager ran away to Chicago with most of the money, taking the barrel with him.

Oliver Phelps’ Desk

by
Gary Lehmann

At the museum, we have Oliver Phelps’ desk.
There he sat as land agent, or so the story goes,
to transfer title to most of the farms and mill lots
of Western New York between 1780 and 1825.

We’re proud to have it, but we don’t know what it means.
It’s blue. Was it then? It’s on a newer stand.
Was that an imitation of the original wooden base
or did the upper portion originally rest on a table?

Was this where great stretches of land transferred title?
Did great men strain their eyes reading the fine print here
or was this just one more desk in a room full of desks?
Did it belong to a clerk? There’s a lot we don’t know.

What we have are the rumors surrounding a piece of furniture.
The file says this is the actual desk Oliver Phelps used
and, to make ourselves feel important, we accept this as fact.
For all we know, some antique dealer made it up in 1922.

X.J.Kennedy's Nude

2008-09-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

X. J. Kennedy’s Nude
by
Gary Lehmann

Ekphratic verse employs the rhetorical device of relating a new piece of art to another media to achieve its own point. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at a painting and then a poem written about it.

The painting is The Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp. It was unveiled at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. After that, it was a repeated theme of the painter. The other work he displayed in that show was a men’s urinal marked “R. Mutt.” Man as dog. Marcel Duchamp had a rare sense of humor, and these pieces created just the sort of uproar he wanted.

Duchamp intends that even today we should be shocked, disappointed, and self-critical upon viewing his Nude. He intends to confront us and to make fun of our expectations. For one thing, there is nothing nude about her, no nakedness appears, just the illusion of nakedness in paint and canvas. The painting is really all about illusions.

Duchamp’s works frequently convey a wry hint of accusation. The Nude is taking infinite pleasure in the sheer spectacle of herself descending the staircase. She is inviting open idolatry with her slow motion sensuality. She is displaying her nudity for all it’s worth. Here is the most risqué robot you’ve ever seen, a veritable declaration of robotic independence from man’s confining morality. Eat your heart out mere mortals!

The Nude is a parody of real life where movie stars wear semi-transparent dresses that almost reveal something naughty so they can get the attention of the television cameras which are lined up to catch her strutting down a red carpet and then going into a room where she is supposed to pretend to like everyone and applaud when her rival gets all the recognition she so richly deserves. Sometimes art is just like life, only toned down.

This painting has been mocked by critics who have called it an explosion in a shingle mill. I recently heard a report on the national news that the CIA reproduced a plastic pile of dog doo with a radio transmitter in it so that they could overhear the conversation of two men who habitually met at the same place in a Moscow park. I think Duchamp would have approved of this level of clandestine artistic license. It fits right in with his image of modern life.

Behind all this foolishness, Duchamp had a serious purpose in mind as well. The kind of stop motion photography he depicts in The Nude Descending a Staircase is intended to suggest, I believe, the irreversible and ephemeral quality of time and the camera-like progression of images that clatter through our well-worn sprockets to create what we are pleased to characterize as reality. To Duchamp modern life has made us all very much like this robot compelled to display her stuff in public. We’ve all been turned into automatons.

Now let’s look at the poem X. J. Kennedy wrote based on this painting.

Nude Descending a Staircase by X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

X. J. Kennedy’s poem has a different task from that which Duchamp tackled. If all he achieves in his 1961 poem is an imitation of a painting unveiled in 1913 -- which already has stated its message with plentiful clarity -- then why bother? Duchamp will always do Duchamp better than Kennedy can do Duchamp. The trick is for Kennedy to find something unique to say on the same topic, rather like a web chat board. It’s only worth reading if it moves onto new ground.

So what does Kennedy say that Duchamp does not? I think that what Kennedy adds to the painting is the personality of the nude in question. What the poet can do, and Kennedy does, is suggest something of the nude woman’s intentions and attitudes. When he cites her “snowing flesh” he suggests a certain coldness in her attitude, later reinforced by calling her a “one-woman waterfall.”

What Kennedy sees in this painting is the accumulated images of a performance, rather like all the frames of a film sequence bunched up so you can see them all at once. She “collects her motions into shape,” like an artist of the dishabille, deliberately inconsiderate of fashion, consciously concupiscent. “Her lips imprint the swinging air.” Her nudity is her clothing. “Her slow descent like a long cape.” In the poem, we see that she is consciously showing off her snazzy bod. “A constant thresh of thigh on thigh --/…/That parts to let her parts go by.”

These themes are effected by the use of alliteration in the opening stanza, the application of rhythm to the last lines of each stanza, and the use of metaphors to heighten the satiric characterization. Kennedy does not offer a radically different interpretation of the painting in his poem, but it comes from a different perspective. In this poem, Kennedy manages to use his words to reveal motivations that paint cannot reveal nearly as well.

Some New Poems

2008-08-08T12:12:00.000-07:00

War of Words

by
Gary Lehmann

We invade Iraq unilaterally.
We disgrace Iraq politically.
We wreck Iraq economically.
We stack Iraq democratically.
We rumble Iraq systematically.
We ruin peace constitutionally.

Now
--
we lack the knack to exit Iraq
--
totally.

The Trouble With Kids Today

by
Gary Lehmann

The Strokes family lived in a kind of heaven for decades
supported by breaking into houses and stealing appliances.
The trick was moderation. Break in. Steal appliances. Period.
They’d walk right by a Picasso to pick up a nice toaster oven.

Then they’d rush off to a truck stop on the highway where
a waiting appliance dealer gave them a few bucks for a frigidaire.
Before the homeowner got back from work, the goods were
gone -- headed out for parts unknown -- even by the Strokes.

It was a clean business. No big scores. Just nice steady income.
They never carried guns or burgled when anyone was home.
Some fool might get nervous and do something stupid.
Grandpa Strokes was quite strict about violence. No sense in it.

Of course, any rooky detective could tell a Strokes job immediately,
and they did catch members of the family from time to time.
But what do you get for stealing a refrigerator -- 90 days?
No hard time and your job is waiting for you when you get out.

The deputies at the jail treated the Strokes family like their family,
like regular customers, and the Strokes family returned the favor.
Every Thanksgiving, there’d be some Strokes in stir, so they brought
turkey dinners to the jail with extra plates piled high for the guards.

What’s the harm in that in the season of family togetherness?
But the dream fell apart for the gang after Grandpa Strokes died.
The kids started taking diamond rings, trophies and season tickets.
Pretty soon it was the penitentiary for the Strokes clan.

Really, the story of the Strokes family is the story of America.
They had a good thing precisely because they kept it simple.
When the kids took over, they got greedy. Grandpa Strokes knew.
Steal in moderation. Best to do business the All-American Way.

At Home with the Family

by
Gary Lehmann

Somewhere in the wilds of upstate New York,
Joel Kopp lives with his children,

the Radiator Kid, Scrapasaurus and
Iron Minnie, the Queen of the Junkyard.

Tractor and mower parts combine with shovels
and radiators to create fantasy creations.

What else is there to do with broken axes
and shovel blades, kettles, rakes and hoes?

In his private moments, Joel talks with his animals
and let’s them play in the yard.

"I come across something,” Joel explains,
“and I can see it as the beginning of a certain creature.”

“It grows from there." Just like that!
The Arbus Twins, Big Face, Shelly the snail.

There’s whimsy in his fancy,
a mischevous twinkle in his eye.

Half the fun is in naming each one.
Joel is one happy man.

Beach Photographer

by
Gary Lehmann

The sand skitters with heat.
Little to do but bake until

a beach photographer sets up his gear
marrying photoed faces with crazy backgrounds.

The sweet young girl gets a cowgirl outfit.
The sunburned lawyer finds a Charles Atlas body.

Four teen friends see themselves doing the Hula.
The bearded man shows up on a wanted poster.

There’s some psychology in this game
bringing the inner and outer character together.

How we judge faces. One tiny hint.
How we shape lives. A world of assumptions.

The Stumble at the Gate

by
Gary Lehmann

Even a horse race isn’t a horse race
if you can comprehend the imponderables.

There’s the horse, the jockey, the track,
the trainer, the weather, and the post position.

Grasp all these and the game is yours,
The whole racing world is yours to command.

Trouble is, while you think you’re in control,
the imponderables ponder on despite you.

The best horse stumbles at the gate.
The clouds open up wetting your dry horse.

Life is like a horserace all right. Only it’s the
imponderables that are racing and you’re the purse.

Eminently Victorian

by
Gary Lehmann

When the homosexual writer, Lytton Strachey,
took up with the virgin painter, Dora Carrington,
they created an oddly mismatched couple.

He was all sticks and stones; she all fur.
They were totally incompatible sexually.
He chased boys; she painted but did not show.

Carrington was afraid of sex, hid away in her art,
but Lytton’s docility brought out her protective nature.
She painted his rooms like the Garden of Eden.

He wrote Eminent Victorians throwing
conventional biography a new, personal twist.
She eventually had a few casual affairs of her own.

But she always cared most for her Lytton.
Eventually, she married a returning war veteran,
and all three lived together in a cottage in Wiltshire.

The painter pursued the writer who rejected her;
The writer pursued the soldier who rejected him;
The soldier pursued the painter who rejected him.

On the surface, they got along swimmingly,
each reinforced the other in this queer harmony,
but beneath that, they knew it couldn’t last.

Strachey died of undiagnosed stomach cancer.
Carrington followed taking her own life with a shotgun.
The soldier wandered off into the mist between the wars.

Kipling’s Private War

2008-06-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

George Orwell called Rudyard Kipling a “prophet of British imperialism,” and so he was. Kipling was born in India and believed deeply in the British Empire and the soldiers who made it stand strong. He implicitly believed in the superiority of the culture of white Europeans and saw first hand the need for British militarism to retain the shape of the British Empire worldwide.

In his day, the Brits had control not only of India, but of South Africa, Kenya, Rhodesia, Australia, Burma and Egypt, with smaller enclaves in Bermuda, Gibraltar, Turks and Cacaos, the Falkland Islands, the Ascension Islands, even the British Antarctic Territory. The British Empire was a vast network asserting global British domination which resulted for many years in a kind of Pax Britannica. It was a global cultural giant, not hard to believe in and easy to love – especially if you were British-born and white.

But when Kipling’s only son Jack was lost in action during the Battle of Loos in September of 1915, Kipling began to question his lifelong beliefs. The First World War was another sort of conflict altogether. It was a defensive action for the Brits who were vastly out-numbered. In early outings they were out-smarted and had their backs thrown to the sea. This was a grinding conflict for mere survival.

Rudyard Kipling used his pull in the government to make special exemptions possible so Jack could join the British military even though he was underage. He got him a commission and made sure he went to the war at the first opportunity. Jack went willingly, claiming to his sister that he was only doing it to get out of the house, but claiming to his father that it was the only right response to German aggression in Europe. Jack’s body was never recovered during Kipling’s lifetime, and the crushing loss of his only son caused Kipling to become more introspective about his earlier militarism.

It is unfair to characterize this shift as unprecedented however. In his earlier war poems “Tommy and “Gunga Din,” Kipling portrays the impulse to fight wars neither as noble nor as nightmares of unspeakable carnage, but as sad affairs set in tragic circumstances that bring out the heroic in simple men. Kipling saw the ironies of war, the uncomfortable truths that got buried with the dead. His stories and poems told the story of the lost men who were either ground up in the steam-roller of war or made heroic by circumstances they never could have foreseen.

Here is a fine example:

The Last of the Light Brigade
by Rudyard Kipling (1891)

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

This poem is, of course, based on the immense popularity of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” that glorified the heroic deeds of these same men some 40 years earlier. Of course, while Tennyson glorified their charge, real military authorities doubt the strategic value of this heroic action. French Marshall Pierre Bosquet said of the decision to charge, “It was magnificent, but it is not war,” and even Tennyson acknowledges the foolishness of the decision to charge into such a hale of gunfire when he wrote "Not tho' the soldier knew/ Some one had blunder'd: / Their's not to make reply, / Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die:" and this is the exact tone that Kipling was trying to pick up on in his poem. Now compare the public tone of “The Last of the Light Brigade” with the immensely personal lament in “My Boy Jack.”

My Boy Jack
by Rudyard Kipling (1916)

'Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Has any one else had word of him?'
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?'
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Children have a natural, untutored way of bringing into question all of the most cherished beliefs of their parents. They don’t intend to do it, usually, but they manage to do it nonetheless with remarkable and painful regularity. Most people can think of other people’s children who have proved this point. Many of us have our own children to make the point closer to home.

After Jack’s death, Kipling naturally questioned whether Jack entered the Army of his own free will or because he was being compelled by his father’s outspoken, public stand that the war had to be fought immediately.

Did Rudyard Kipling kill his own child? What question could weigh more heavily on any parent’s mind? In Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” bravery is brought to the service of stupidity. In “My Boy Jack,” Kipling is basically asking himself if he has taken the place of the commander of the Light Brigade and charged his son in a company of but one soldier into the stupid mouth of war. Has he acted as unfeelingly as his nation does in “The Last of the Light Brigade” in regard to the life of his own child?

A Reluctance to Bleed

2008-01-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I encounter a poem that just won’t go away. It preys on my mind, and I have to explore it further to find out why it has captured me so. Bleeding by May Swensen (1913 – 1989) is just such a poem.

Bleeding by May Swenson

Stop bleeding said the knife
I would if I could said the cut.
Stop bleeding you make me messy with the blood.
I'm sorry said the cut.
Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.
Don't said the cut.
The knife did not say it couldn't help it but
it sank in farther.
If only you didn't bleed said the knife I wouldn't
have to do this.
I know said the cut I bleed too easily I hate
that I can't help it I wish I were a knife like
you and didn't have to bleed.
Well meanwhile stop bleeding will you said the knife.
Yes you are a mess and sinking in deeper said the cut I
will have to stop.
Have you stopped by now said the knife.
I've almost stopped I think.
Why must you bleed in the first place said the knife.
For the same reason maybe that you must do what you
must do said the cut.
I can't stand bleeding said the knife and sank in farther.
I hate it too said the cut I know it isn't you it's
me you're lucky to be a knife you ought to be glad about that.
Too many cuts around said the knife they're
messy I don't know how they stand themselves.
They don't said the cut.
You're bleeding again.
No I've stopped said the cut see you are coming out now the
blood is drying it will rub off you'll be shiny again and clean.
If only cuts wouldn't bleed so much said the knife coming
out a little.
But then knives might become dull said the cut.
Aren't you still bleeding a little said the knife.
I hope not said the cut.
I feel you are just a little.
Maybe just a little but I can stop now.
I feel a little wetness still said the knife sinking in a
little but then coming out a little.
Just a little maybe just enough said the cut.
I feel I have to bleed to feel I think said the cut.
I don't I don't have to feel said the knife drying now
becoming shiny.

My first reaction to Bleeding was that it dragged out unnecessarily the moment of exquisite agony as the knife cuts into flesh. By the middle of the poem, after the knife has persisted too long, I get it, and want her to move on. Yet she seems to want to hold me there as the knife digs deeper. It’s pure masochism. I get mad at her for wanting to prolong my agony, and for what? She seems to want to assert as much pain on the reader for as long as possible. That’s all. How is that art?

Then it occurs to me that the poem is set up as a dialogue. What right does the knife have to ask the cut not to bleed? How can we not bleed when cut? And why is the cut so apologetic? What does the cut have to apologize for? Being flesh?

There seems to be some sort of gender discussion going on here. The knife has a hard edge. The flesh is giving and more emotional. The male knife is causing pain to the female cut who is trying to excuse her way out of being human. Ms Swensen seems to be referencing an event we’ve all seen transacted in the world of gender politics. Yet there is something inconclusive about her assertion.

Then there is a thingness quality to the poem that comes out most clearly at the end. The knife makes demands and accepts apologies but can’t feel. It prides itself on being shiny but remains sharp by getting messy with the cut. There is a disembodied quality about the thing in this poem which defines its qualities and the intimate circumstances of its existence without the narrator expressing any opinion concerning the objects existence in the poem. Swensen’s point of view is almost scientific, but not quite thorough.

This reminds me of another Swensen poem, That the Soul May Wax Plump in which she describes dispassionately the body of her mother on the morgue table presumably just before an autopsy. Swensen describes being there at the moment of her mother’s death. Her mouth opens in a big O. Air escapes from all cavities as she deflates into a state of death. There is a conscious effort to create thingness here. Even her mother is dispassionately examined like the caterpillars which describe the eyebrows of the naked maidens in a warm pool with James Bond in another poem.

The James Bond Movie by May Swenson

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex.
A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside

The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious
cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft.

screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting,
blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while

jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try
with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers.

A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable
and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond,

red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all
screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone

male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu-
tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend

his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also
below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs.

Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil-
lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like

the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are
mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other.

I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square
of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

In The James Bond Movie, Swensen explores the dispassionate killing machine James Bond. There is a dialogue going on between what happens on the screen and what happens in the theatre. On the screen, scenes of absolute carnage are set off against pointless sensuality. By contrast, the moviegoer eats fat-saturated popcorn and chews gum at the same time. All her efforts to get ungreasy are to no avail. There is Bond, center screen, surrounded by naked female flesh, “pretending to defend his modesty.” The poem is rich in ironies and unspoken accusations.

There is a kind of self-loathing in Swensen’s poetry, a reluctance to bleed or feel emotion, a fear of sex and love. She has said that her own poetry is "based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness." It is instructive how much Swensen reveals here of her method and how little of her motives. Her point of view is clinical, and yet proscribed.

It almost seems like May Swensen is afraid to feel, embarrassed by life, reluctant to admit weakness and scared of death. The essence of her poetry seems to be that ability to step back from daily life and view the world as a parade of objects to be described in such detail that their usefulness and wastefulness comes forth without editorial opinion. It’s a strange strength, but one that reveals much.

735 words

The Poet in the Art Gallery

2007-10-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

This past summer and fall, it has been my very good fortune to be able to visit some of the world’s best art galleries while accompanying my wife on some business trips. These lush long days spent in the presence of some of the best art in the world naturally led to some poetry.

Here is a sample of some of the poems that resulted and a running commentary on the museums.

The Mark Twain House and Museum is located on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, CT. It is a beautiful rambly late 19th century structure complete with a giant carriage house and immense servants’ quarters. You don’t generally think of Mark Twain living in this kind of luxury, with servants and a coachman and all. But I guess after he married Livy, who inherited a fortune when her coal-merchant father died, he could afford the best. Unfortunately, he thought to invest in the stock market and lost much of her money.

He once said. “I must note that October is a very bad month to speculate in stock market. The other months are January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, and December.”

Pilgrim’s Progress

When Mark Twain was a youth,
he did what he did best on the Mississippi

He drank, smoked and swore very loudly.

As a reporter in Sacramento,
Mark Twain indulged in the pleasures of urban life.

He drank, smoked and swore very loudly.

When he married and raised a family in Hartford,
he lived quite the suburban life.

He drank, smoked and swore very loudly.

Clothes Make The Man

Mark Twain was a messy dresser.
His coachman was dapper and neat.

Whenever Twain rode into Hartford to do business,
he’d exchange coats with his driver

so he’d look more respectable,
but then, he’d change back on the way home.

Directly next door to the Mark Twain House is the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Research Center. It is a lovely building, Harriet’s home at the end of her life when her writings started to pay off , and she could afford a fancy Victorian house and garden. I imagine that the staid and proper Harriet had relatively little to say to the jokester who lived next door. This thought gave rise to a poem.

The Serial Visit

Mark Twain was rather proud of himself when
he made a visit to his neighbor, the elderly, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He talked nice to her and didn’t swear too much.

When he returned home his wife pointed out
that he went without so much as a tie.

Twain called his butler.

Fetch a tie, put it on a pillow and
deliver it to Miss Stowe with this note.

The note read: This will complete my visit.

Dame Harriet kept the butler waiting
while she labored to compose a witty response.

You’ve invented something entirely new: the serial visit.

She knew it was not a response that rose to the occasion,
but then she was an old lady, a respected author, not a clown.

The Clark Museum is a little gem in the Berkshires surrounded by several hundred acres of woodland criss-crossed by a few very fine hiking trails. Not enough people visit this fine institution. It deserves more attention for the extraordinary collection it houses. The Museum is expanding to accommodate a school for art critics, which is already there in association with Williams College. I’m not sure how many art critics the world needs right now, but I’m sure that the Clark is prepared to meet the demand. This lovely museum generated several poems.

Keeping the Lid On

The English landscape painter, John Constable, once said,
“painting is but another word for feeling,”
and yet, he portrayed his scenes of rural England
with scientific precision.

His colors came in bladders of pigment
wrapped in thin leather and canvas pouches
tied with twine
and stoppered with a wooden peg.

When he needed a color,
he gently removed the peg and poured
a small amount of powder into a tiny cup
where he blended in a small quantity of water.

By eye, he added fragmentary dashes of other colors
until he arrived at just the right tone
for the lacey cloud or green English field
which lay before him.

He may have been right about painting being all feeling,
but his technique hardly compares with Van Gogh’s
eating the paint and spreading it on the canvas
with his tongue and fingers.

As I wandered around the museum, I found myself returning to a certain painting several times during the day. I later found out that there is some evidence that the painter and the subject had very differing viewpoints and that is probably the tension I felt on the canvas. Paintings are as much a part of life as anything. They capture the atmosphere in which they were created a much as a video camera or a tape recorder. All you have to do is be open to what the painting is saying...and it isn’t always what the artist intended.

Serving those who fancy themselves too much

When rustic painter, Ammi Phillips, approached his neighbor, farmer Campbell,
he did not have any idea what a willful half-child he had engaged to depict.

Young Harriet, half woman, half child, had watched for many patient hours
the engagement between the sexes and decided that there was only one good defense.

First, she wanted to be depicted in the latest gown, not the one she already had,
but the blue-green one with the ruff her father had been refusing her for some time.

Then she wanted her new purse in the picture and when it wasn’t fashionably depicted,
she insisted that it be rubbed out and painted over again until it looked just right.

She wanted her feet set sideways like an Egyptian queen, her eyes large and powerful.
Her painted face must have a clean complexion. Her hands long and delicate.

Her slippers must be of the finest white kid leather, delicate and pointed at the toe.
No real queen or potentate was ever more demanding or accusatory.

It’s hell being a portrait artist to those who fancy themselves more than they merit.
Ammi Phillips escaped with joy the house of neighbor Campbell, his hands quite unclean.

One lovely sunny Sunday, I visited the Benton Museum on the campus of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. This hidden treasure is showing an exhibit of Rodin statues that fill several large exhibit halls. As I walked around, I started to come back again and again to a set of sculptures Rodin did to commemorate the famous French novelist Honore de Balzac. There was something incongruous about them, and as I read the little placards by each, I started to piece the story together. A bit more research at home yielded this poem.

Rodin tries to catch the wind

In 1851, the sculptor Auguste Rodin was commissioned to create
a bronze sculpture of the great French writer Honore de Balzac
by a Parisian writers’ group, but Rodin ran into a problem.

Few images were ever taken of Balzac in life. Balzac died 40 years earlier.
A force for modernism, he was extremely powerful, controversial and sexy.
He was large and physically overbearing, but how to convey all this in bronze?

Rodin tried a nude Balzac, but the corpulent Balzac looked flabby.
The statue failed to convey Balzac’s immense sexual power.
Only the face reflected his strong will and powerful beliefs.

So, Rodin tried an athletic Balzac, much slimmer than he appeared in life,
his hands only partially concealing a half erect penis.
The public reacted with shock. It didn’t even look like Balzac.

Finally, Rodin settled on an expressive face with the rest of the body
covered in a flowing dramatic cape meant to convey his potency.
The public ridiculed this version. Balzac’s head on a tree trunk.

Exhausted after years of effort, Rodin retired from the field,
sent the commission back and reclaimed his work.
Art is powerful but it cannot capture the wind.

I had a couple of occasions during the summer to attend the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What a treasure! I discovered that the $20 admission fee is “suggested,” which means that if you just have an hour to browse, you can pay whatever you think is fair and gain full admission.

One exhibit that caught my attention was a set of mock-ups for buildings rendered by the great American painter Frank Stella. It interested me to find out that Stella designed buildings for 50 years and yet not so much as one was ever built. There’s a story here I decided and it yielded a poem.

Castles in the Sky

The painter, Frank Stella, was fascinated by architecture,
ever since he shared a studio with architect Richard Meier.
“I can’t stop thinking about architecture,” Stella complained.
He designed innumerable buildings from a bandstand for Miami
to a Kunsthalle for Dresden and a museum addition for Groningen.

But while Frank Stella couldn’t stop thinking about architecture,
it seems the world was quite content to conceive of architecture
without Frank Stella as not one of his designs were ever built.
Some of them, with their layered swirls and impossible joints,
might not even be possible to build, but that never stopped him.

On the main floor of the Met is a terrific exhibit of the dresses of the French dress maker and designer Paul Poiret. At first I took my time to view the exhibit but couldn’t find a poetic connection. When I returned another day, I read the materials posted on the wall about Poiret and started to sense a certain desperation in his rapid rise to power in the fashion world. The story about his contact with Coco Channel came out of subsequent research, but it explained the desperation I felt from the description of his life.

The King of Fashion

When flapper girl designer, Paul Poiret, met Coco Chanel
at a cocktail party, she was wearing her soon-to-be famous
classic black gown. Poiret tried to cut her by asking,
“For whom, Madame, do you mourn?”

Chanel quipped glibly “For you.” And it was true.
Her vision already superseded his, though he did not know it yet.
Years later, he reflected, “A creative dressmaker is accustomed to foresee...
the trends that will inspire the day after tomorrow.”

They both found the elusive pathway into women’s hearts,
after much labor, tremendous insight, some luck, and many mistakes,
but they both managed to lose it, as fortune accumulated and
one too many people told them they were fashion geniuses.

Quiet in Death, 1851

The children really died a terrible death,
boils that burst on their skins,
sweats that took the life from them,
and delirium that took the life from their parents.

In the cemetery, their marble likenesses,
cool, hard and shining in infinite repose,
rest peacefully in the lap of Morpheus,
the god of sleep and forgetfulness.

Fur Trapper Descending the Missouri
after a painting by George Caleb Bingham

The cat looks Egyptian with his pointed ears and watchful pose.
The boy hunches over his rifle seeking fish just below the surface.
The father scans the horizon with searching eyes while resting on his paddle.
He knows how easily a cat, a boy and a fur trapper with pelts can disappear.
The cat, indifferent to all these dangers, simply looks Egyptian.

On Gilbert Stuart’s
Portrait of Washington

Washington is sneering, really sneering,
as if he just stepped into something very nasty
as if he were experiencing acid reflux
or just realized that he was going to have to pay
this miserable painter some day.

On the Mezzanine of the American Wing, which is only open at certain times, there is a rather striking painting which was the center of a rather sad story.

Madame X

The stunningly beautiful Amelie Gautreau of New Orleans
resisted advances of the famous ex-patriot painter,
John Singer Sargent as long as she could, but eventually,
she saw the merit of being immortalized in paint as well as print.

Her goal was a rich European husband; his profitable patronage
from a lady sure to be a powerful presence in European society.
When the portrait was unveiled in Paris, it all went horribly wrong.
The critics and socialites competed to see who could hate it the most.

The American beauty was revealed for the goldigger she was,
and the American painter, the opportunist, escaped to England,
before word got around that he could no longer get anyone
to sit for him who valued her reputation in society.

Amelie, who could not afford to escape anywhere,
languished in the Paris of her dreams -- and died a recluse.

In Albany, NY there is a massive stone structure right downtown near the State Capital. After a brief visit with my state Representative to see that he is hard at work doing the people’s business, I spent a lovely day exploring the treasures of the Albany Art Institute which has a collection that focuses on New York history. A couple of poems came from this excursion.

Three Dollars

The steam-powered vessel Clermont was lying alongside the wharf.
A placard announced its return to New York the next day.
It would take passengers at the same price as the sailing vessels – three dollars.

So great was the fear of boiler explosions that
no one except myself and my companion dared to take passage.
We quitted Albany August the 20th in the presence of a great number of spectators.

From every point on the river when the Clermont’s smoke stack
announced our presence, the inhabitants waved their handkerchiefs wildly
at the two fools who didn’t know enough to value their lives at higher rate.

The DeWitt Clinton

When it came into view, around the edge of the hill,
the horses neighed and the geese discovered how to fly.
The first railroad arrived amid a shower of hot coals
that burned ugly holes into lady’s shawls
and sent top hats spinning in the dust.

The carriagemen scoffed. Ladies withdrew.
The businessmen jostled each other to get seats.
A crowd of farmers made shrewd estimates
of its mysterious mechanical motion.
Amazement circled the crowd.

The engineer stoked the fire and poked at it
with an iron rod that sent sparks flying.
Some of the boys, the future engineers,
gathered around the stink-pot boiler
in hopes of peering into the heart of the age of steam.

One of my most enjoyable trips was to Hartford CT where I examined the varied treasures of the Wadsworth Athenaeum. A number of old buildings were joined and totally renovated to create a new building of amazing integrity. The space is interesting and the exterior retains the old look of downtown Hartford.

No Slouching!

When Frank Lloyd Wright
designed
a secretary chair
in 1936
for S.C.Johnson’s administrative office,
he imposed a three-legged design
that
perfectly reflected his ethical values.

If a secretary were to temporarily lose her poise
and slump
even for just a second, the chair was designed to dump her
unceremoniously out on the floor with
a clatter
sure to draw the attention of S.C.Johnson

who whole-heartedly approved.

After I returned home from Hartford, I sent this next poem and The Wetmore Parlor to the curator of the museum for her enjoyment. Even though the poems criticize the museum, I thought there might just be a chance that the curator would appreciate knowing that people actually have reactions to the choices she made for the exhibit.

Indeed she did! Although I didn’t hear from her again, I did hear from the head of docent education who had used my poems to illustrate for new docents how visitors to the museum, though they may view in silence, are anything but passive about what they see in a museum. While she read my poems, she displayed copies of the installations they reference and quite a discussion ensued. It’s good to know that art and life still work together sometimes.

Art Reflects Life

Sometimes a painting gets bogged down in its own brush strokes.
Albert Henderson Thayer knew this problem while painting Seated Angel.

He had painted a thousand bird wings before, but this angel was not working.
It wasn’t the fault of the model or the paint.

It was the artist, the artist’s soul.
He was old and tired, sick and spinning his artistic wheels on canvas.

His angel had a 20th century body, a 19th century face,
surrounded by angel wings that were distinctly 18th century.

Every time Thayer retouched it, he just made it worse.
Finally, in 1921, he set down his brushes, went to bed, and died in his sleep.

Nonetheless, the state of the world being as it is confused by money and bad taste,
it hangs today in a respected museum -- as if it were a work of art.

The Wetmore Parlor

The Wetmore Parlor, once bountiful in 18th century paneling and joinery,
has been plucked from the remains of the old building before it was demolished
and the parlor now stands in a museum in Hartford with no more reason to live.

In 1746, when Judge Seth Wetmore ordered the carpenters to do their best work
in first-growth pine and hold back not a wide board or their fanciest molding
it emerged a work of art and artifice. It vibrated with athletic freshness.

Now, the old Parlor has been removed like an accident victim to this quiet place
the scuffs of life have been rendered from the flesh and blood of its boards
and the dried hide of the room has been stretched over phony walls.

The blank windows look out on florescent skies, like staring eyes.
The red light of the smoke detector blinks ON then OFF in the ceiling.
The exhausted room lives on a respirator barely clinging to life.

Here are some other poems that came from my highly productive day at the Wadsworth Athenaeum.

Seeing Life in Black and White

In 1953, during and extended trip to Mexico,
abstract expressionist Conrad Marca-Relli ran out of colors.

He had plenty of black and white,
so he started painting in shades of gray

and found

that gray is a color that can convey
almost all that needs to be said about life.

Yachting on the Namouna
Venice, 1890

The shoal-draft yacht Namouma is out for a pleasure cruise in the lagoon.
The passengers, 3 women and 2 men, loll on the deck under a canvas cover.

They cannot see the sky. From their deckchairs, they cannot see the sea.
A sailor looks out from the foredeck, another has the helm, and a third the sails.

The wind is too loud for them to talk, but they can see each other clearly.
They pose fashionably in their deck chairs striking the figures in their mind.

There is no level place on the deck to place a drink or play at cards.
They smile upon each other like Grecian statues as the wind blows their hair.

Rooster Roster

In 1880, a New England farmer
riveted together some tin pieces
to make a weathercock for his barn.

First, he painted it white, then black,
but, not liking these colors,
he daubed his rooster with iron red.

Then he lit his pipe and thought a while.
He added yellow and finally white.
What color is a rooster anyway?

No More Than They Deserve

In 1833, an unknown itinerant New England artist
painted the merchant and farmer Samuel Addison Shute
sitting in a Robert’s chair.

Roberts made cheap imitations of Hitchcock fancy chairs.

Later he painted
Ruth Whittier Shute
sitting in a Robert’s chair.

The background is an undistinguished uniform brown.

In his high-necked shirt and her proper black dress,
they look quite bored with the world.
They do not deserve more than a Robert’s chair.

I read an article about the conflict between New York art teachers William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri in The Magazine Antiques which suggested this trip to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich CT. The Bruce perches on a rocky outcropping overlooking a modern highway, but when you enter it, you feel like you have arrived at a sanctuary. This is another hidden treasure which houses many fine works one of which is the first commercially produced Frisbee. I felt sure there was a poem to be had in that lovely orb, but try though I might I could not wrestle anything from it. Too bad.

Behind the Mask

To the world, the New York art teacher
William Merritt Chase looked to be all of a piece.

His elaborate studio on 10th Street conveyed
the very essence of cosmopolitan sophistication.
His tapestries, paintings and furniture defined
tasteful decoration for a whole generation.
In accoutrement, his brushed top hat and
pin-nez eye glasses, pinched at the nose,
were the statement of gentlemanliness,
as was his always-fresh boutonnière,

but, when he took up canvas and mixed paints,
when he had a pretty subject before him,
all that restraint resolved itself into a flurry
of spontaneous brush strokes guided
by years of unharnessed animation.
The mind no longer guided the hand.
It followed instinctively
tracing the images of the eye.

All visual objects are but a pasteboard mask,
says Melville of the world at sea.

One of the little placards that explain something about the paintings referenced a baseball game played between the students of these two titanic art instructors. I felt this event was so rich in ironies that it had to produce a good poem. I think I was right.

A Matter of Artistic Differences

The conflict between New York art teachers
Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase
came down to a baseball game
between their two classes in 1907.

Barbs in the press and years
of emerging conflict sharpened the edge.
The game started civilly, but degenerated quickly.

A student at first base tripped the baseman just as the ball was struck.
A fielder purposely hit a runner with the ball.
A fight broke out which spread like fire through the dry stands.
The police were called to break it up.

“An artist must first respond to his subject,”
Henri told his bloodied class the next day,
referring to art – of course.

Since I got such an interesting reaction from the Wadsworth Athenaeum when I sent them my poems, I sent the following pieces to the curator of the Bruce. No response of any kind!

Showing Off

To prove his skill more than to teach his art,
William Merritt Chase did a complete portrait
before his adoring class in little more than an hour.

He picked out a bright young girl from the class
with sparkling eyes and lovely flowing blond hair.
He posed her on a stool and smiled at her warmly.

With bright, contrasting colors on a black background
he accomplished a sensitive portrait
with little more than a slap and a drag of the brush.

Then, he bowed and gave the young lady his hand
to descend from the stool. With a flair for the dramatic,
he gave her the portrait and kissed her hand.

It looks like art to me

When art teacher William Merritt Chase took his class to Holland,
he particularly wanted to visit the paintings of Frans Hals.
He saw in the Dutchman a talent that was very modern.

Imagine his surprise therefore when his students pointed out
that their revered instructor appeared very much like the image
of Colonel Johna Claeszoonlov rendered by Hals in 1633.

Chase was so delighted that he had a local tailor make up
the costume of a Sergeant of the Civic Guard of St. Adrian
so he could sit for a self-portrait in the manner of Frans Hals.

How splendidly proud he appears in the finished painting.
The slightest twinkle bejewels his smile as it pokes through his
over-sized moustache and excessively articulated goatee.

For much of the time, I found myself alone in the galleries of the Bruce Museum talking silently with images, only some of which spoke back to me. Suddenly I became aware of a young man who was stuck in front of a photograph of four musicians from the high age of jazz in the early 1950s. The figures were set conversationally but the body parts sort of went off in unexpected directions. It was odd. I asked my companion if he understood what was going on there and he let loose with the most interesting explanation.

Evidently, he knew each of these people by name. He gave me a quick thumbnail sketch of each and why they were posed in a certain way. So, to him, all the weird shapes and angles made perfect sense. He may be right. I assume he was, but of course the eternal question of all art is “How much inside knowledge do you need to know to make sense of a picture?” I feel like the less the painting or photo needs to reference outside information, the stronger it is, but I’m probably more literal than many.

At any rate, his photo may have generated a poem for him, but it did nothing poetically for me. I just had the fun of hearing how it affected him. I suppose it’s worth noting that different people will connect with different works and there is virtually no way to predict who is going to click with what.

Mission Accomplished
Based on a photograph by Carl Mydans

On the deck of the USS Missouri, January 9, 1945,
General Yoshijivo Umeya signed the surrender document
in bowed submission.

General Douglas MacArthur, at total attention, looked on
backed up by military representatives of the Allies,
shining with the deep glow of victory.

The US Naval officers presented themselves in their best uniforms,
but none wore ironed shirts or pressed trousers.
It was a long, demanding war.

Standing behind his general with a look of absolute defiance.
a Japanese diplomat, Tojo’s man,
stood, hands on his hips, legs apart.

His tuxedo and black, wool pants
bristled with cleanliness and tidy formality.
The crease of his pants traced his line in the sand.

His top hat, his white gloves, his intricately carved cane,
his round-eyed glasses all exuded defiance.
The war was won, but the peace had yet to be fought.

A conference on early American folk art brought me to the Yale Art Gallery right adjacent to the Yale campus. I stayed right down the street at a wonderful small hotel and enjoyed the street scene in the morning as students and locals jostled to get to class and work balancing hot coffee in paper cups all the way.

The conference turned out to be pretty academic and dry as baking powder for my taste, but I did enjoy watching a youthful photographer trying to take pictures of the luminaries as they talked before the start of the program. One minute, he’s pop up right in the faces of two elderly gents talking convivially and another time he put on this enormous lens so he could get a close up of animated conversation from far across the room. He was like a tiger or leopard hunting in his own style of jungle.

Having endured the conference, I wandered around the exhibits in the museum which included an entire room of modern sculpture. This one piece totally baffled me for some time. Finally, I asked one of the guards. “Do you understand this piece?” He turned up his nose. “None of it makes sense to me,” he replied. Finally, I figured out that the object I saw before me was a physical representation of the empty space under a set of tables pushed together in a room to make a conference table.

Space becoming what it wants to become

The modernist sculptor, Rachel Whiteread,
takes me to Yale to see her new installation.
It appears to be some blocks of plastic with
Square-ish holes facing each other in a rectangle.

“Tell me.”

“Well, by casting the space under ten ordinary,
mass-produced tables, I’m recalling
the forgotten spaces of everyday life.”

I look puzzled.

“It’s a spectral negative space that once
existed but doesn’t any longer.”
She places her right index finger peculiarly
under the right side of her chin.

“Oh.”

The Museum of the City of New York is a fun place, bigger than it looks outside and dedicated to the history of New York. It is forgotten now that in the 19th century, New York was the most powerful trading partner in the New World because it combined the power of the coastal colonies with the wealth that came down the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. This made New York the King of Commerce for a hundred years or more.

On the second floor there was an exhibit of the stained glass lampshades of Louis Comfort Tiffany, a progressive decorator and designer from the turn of the century who found a new way to get his work done. He went out west and found woman who would do his stained glass work for a fraction of the pay his male workers demanded.

Here’s the poem that resulted from some additional research I did when I got home.

The Birth of a Tiffany

It was hot, summer, 1898. The lazy fan on the ceiling barely moved the heavy air.
Louis Tiffany entered the room as if life were a burden he could no longer bear,
but when Clara outlined her plan for a new stained glass lamp, he came alive.

It will have yellow butterflies on a blue and white shade over a mosaic base
with yellow and white primroses, she explained. Instantly, he caught fire.
His big arm cleared the desk of papers in a single sweep as he seized a pencil.

Madly, he scribbled out sketches on the blank blotter, simultaneously
talking wildly to himself and each person in the room at the same time.
The fan lifted his curls around his brow like a halo, highlighting his energy.

His enthusiasm was infectious and everyone started moving uncontrollably.
The lamp mutht be tall and chlim, he said, like the flowerth and the thade—
Then, suddenly, the air went out of his hair like a collapsing parachute.

Well, work out your own idea, he said sinking down into a leather chair.
Suddenly, his original lethargy returned, his voice returned to normal.
The moment had passed, but the famous Butterfly Lamp took flight.

Museums are wonderful places to visit especially when you can do it without a timetable. Just wandering around and letting the artwork impress you as it might is a pure joy. You need to be free to wander at will, back and forth between rooms as the whim strikes, and you need to be able to read into what you see on the wall and do some research when you get home, but the net effect is a rich tapestry of multi-media experiences.

It’s even better if the museum has a reasonably decent cafe with handmade sandwiches and an Italian ice.

Twisting the Tale of Richard Cory

2007-06-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Late one weekday evening in 1968, I was singing the song Richard Cory at the Yankee Rum Shop coffee house in Kennebunkport, Maine, when an ambulance pulled by the shop, siren blaring, headed for a mansion on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The next morning, we discovered that the ambulance was responding to a call for help from the biggest mansion of them all, owned by a man who was reputed to be a part-owner of Saks Fifth Avenue. He had a vintage Rolls Royce and had threatened to drive it off the cliff so many times that people had stopped paying much attention to his threats.

Sure enough, this time, he did it. Not the Rolls Royce, but “a bullet through his head,” just like in Paul Simon’s song. It was uncanny. Here was a man who arguably owned “one half of this whole town,/ with political connections to spread his wealth around.” He supposedly owned a yacht in the Mediterranean to which he took a local farm boy who was his play thing for the summer, together with a large assortment of caged birds, mostly nightingales as I recall. I don’t know that any of this was true. Kennebunkport in the summer of 1968 was not a good place to carry on conversations in the street if you expected to get straight answers. It was 1968, the summer of love, man!

But here he was a legitimate multi-millionaire with a larger-than-life reputation for “orgies on his yacht” who “went home last night and put a bullet through his head.” It was too spooky for words. We stopped singing the song.

Years later, I discovered that the lyrics to Richard Cory were adapted by Paul Simon from a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935). When I stumbled across a copy of the original poem, I was amazed at how much Simon had altered it.

Richard Cory poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Richard Cory lyrics by Paul Simon
They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town
With political connections to spread his wealth around
Born into society, a banker's only child,
He had everything a man could want, power, grace, and style.

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory

The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes.
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at the show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got.

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were very grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was full of wonder when the evening headlines read,
"Richard Cory went home last night, and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory

Simon did more than adapt Richard Cory to music, he actually reconceived the poem and added an entirely new emphasis. He took out arcane words like “crown,” “arrayed,” and “favored,” and altered awkward phrases like “schooled in every grace.” He omitted the one truly dead line, “So on we worked, and waited for the light.”

Instead, Simon added a chorus that emphasized the personal animosity that Richard Cory’s wealth and privilege engendered in the common people. He hit on the envy that lay beneath that anger and heightened Cory’s social aloofness by adding details like “born into society, a banker’s only child.”

Finally, Simon added the killer line, “he surely must be happy with everything he’s got.” That’s the key to the new version, because it refocuses the attention of the poem/song on the deadly sin that has killed the soul of the narrator, envy.

We never actually learn anything to explain why Richard Cory killed himself. That’s not the point. Rich people have their problems. The point is that in the narrator we have a man with a good job and friends who kills his love of life because of envy. In the end, he may even be saying he wishes he were dead like Richard Cory. What sent him off the deep end? The simple act of gazing on a wealthy man who lives a life of apparent ease. Richard Cory is not the tragic figure any more. Instead, the narrator creates the tragedy by his envious reaction to Richard Cory’s aloofness and power. He is almost suicidal because of it. He has allowed his self-esteem to tumble because people like Calvin Klein, David Letterman, Ralph Lauren or Bill Gates glitter when they walk in ways he cannot. It’s an all too American tragedy.

In fact, the original poem by Robinson is a much weaker piece overall. Simon caught the implications of the phrase “We people” and used the envy in their gaze to pull out the power to be gained from shifting the poem’s point of view.

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in 1869, the son of a wealthy timber baron, in Head Tide, Maine, just 75 miles northeast of Kennebunkport where my mysterious happening occurred. Robinson grew up in a household with money and prestige, but things started to go wrong. In 1892, his father died. In 1893, a financial panic sent shock waves through the timber industry. Edwin was forced to leave Harvard. In 1896, his mother died suddenly of black diphtheria, a disease so contagious her sons had to bury her themselves because no mortician would touch her. His brother Dean, a doctor, became a morphine addict and died in 1899. His elder brother took to drink. These disasters bankrupted the entire family but gave Edwin wisdom beyond his years.

In the face of all this tragedy, he decided not to fight his fate, but to embrace his life as a poor poet rather than try to make himself into a struggling junior timber merchant. He had seen both sides of power. He knew what it felt like to be observed, glittering as he walked, but more importantly, he knew what it was to be excluded from that world. It was during this period that he wrote Richard Cory for his first book of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before [1896]. The rich ironies Robinson wrote into the poem come from a genuine understanding for he knew all too well the many ways that wealth and its removal had to bewitch the spirits of his family members.

Paul Simon’s story is different but comes to a similar place. He was born in Newark, NJ but grew up in Queens where his father made a living as a radio musician while his mother worked as a music teacher. He was not exactly poor, but he certainly was not born with wealth and all its trappings. His father’s career put him on the outside of the celebrity world.

Paul started singing while still a teenager with his boyhood buddy Art Garfunkel. When their hit song Schoolgirl sold 100,000 copies in 1958 while they were still high school seniors, they were suddenly catapulted onto the Billboard charts, and their lives changed forever. Suddenly, they were stars, pushed before they were really ready into a world of “power, grace and style.”

So both Paul Simon and Edwin Arlington Robinson understood the ruthless power of money and envy to affect personal visions. They both had wrestled with these monsters, seen sudden wealth, and its lack, and they both chose lives based on poetry and performance, whatever the consequences. It’s fair to say they both added something from their own lives to Richard Cory.

1489 words

Some new Creative Non-Fiction

2007-03-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Testimony of Ida May

by
Gary Lehmann

Ida May: Every evening when I get home, your Honor, I put my key in the lock and wait just a second as the door opens to hear Freddie’s, you know, hi-fi in the next apartment. They’re not real apartments, just rooms I suppose you’d say. He keeps it too loud, but he turns it down when he hears me come in. I turn on my television real low so I don’t bother him too much. While I’m making dinner, I hear him open and close the refrigerator, and I guess he hears me do the same. He generally listens to his music until late, and I watch my shows. Then I get up and run my broom a few times over the kitchen wall. That’s the signal we have agreed upon. He turns off his music when he gets finished, and I turn off my television. Then, I hear the springs as he lowers his Murphy bed. I generally go to bed about then, sitting up late most nights reading the Racing News ‘til midnight. I fill out the form till I go to sleep. That’s how it goes most nights.

Judge: So, what happened on the night of the murder?

220 words

The Death of the Painter, Michael Sweerts
by
Gary Lehmann

The painter, Michael Sweerts, had his brains fried in the hot desert sun of the Persian Plateau in 1662. He came to realize he was living a lie and that everyone on this Missionary Expedition was lying to themselves as well. That pompous ass, Father Rene Brunel, just came along to find a field where he could set himself up as a dictator. Bishop Pallu only organized the Expedition to prove to his younger brothers, all highly accomplished, that he could do something creditable before he died. Now that they could write died leading a mission to China on his tombstone, he has lost all interest in the expedition and its problems. Father Rene found his chance to take over.

Everyone lies. Sometimes it’s harmless, even beneficial as in when you tell a small lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or when you give reassurance knowing full well that the situation is desperate in order to maintain order, but then there’s the most hateful lie of all. This is the lie you tell yourself because you must make it so, like the one Michael Sweerts told himself before signing up for this mission. The state of Europe is so terrible that there is no point in going on as a painter. I’ll do more good by dedicating my painting skills to God and to the heathen who can use my pictures to see the one true faith. It was a shining illusion, burned away by the hot desert sand and the relentless sun. Now he faced facts, but what was he to do about it?

In the desert, surrounded by nasty camels, millions of flies and people whose motives are unraveling as quickly as the desert sun rises, Sweerts learned that there is no holy place to go. These missionaries were either running away from their failures in Europe, as he was, or hurrying to make a profit from the sale of Christian artifacts, Bibles, and paraphernalia to the newly converted in China. It is a sorry selfish world and acting pious makes it no better. Sweerts started to curse the Bishop and Father Rene and the whole lot of them separately and collectively in a loud voice that would not be silenced. Hour after hour, he revealed their secrets and the sham it kept hidden. Finally, Rene complained on behalf of a deputation of others and Bishop Pallu, by now Rene’s puppet, gave in.

Sweerts was supplied with a camel he did not know how to ride or feed, some water, and his own clothes. He was sent off alone. They may all be deluded, and some of them may be coming to understand their lies as he had come to understand them, but officially the mission would have him no more. It must march on in its own cloud of unknowing. It would not do to have some lunatic telling the truth when their mission was already set. They handed him over to the Love of God from which he perished in the Portuguese coastal town of Goa. It was a mercy that he even arrived there alive after so many days in the desert with no guide. Yet, he did arrive, and with help from some Jesuits, he managed to eke out a marginal existence for another two years before some Oriental disease, from which he had no defense, cut him down before he ever learned its name.

The Lazarist Mission that expelled him into the desert proceeded on toward China and disappeared from the record of history.

597 words

More real than the real thing

by
Gary Lehmann

Minnie Clark, the artist’s model, was the picture of health and beauty. She sat by a grand piano, her hair drawn back, wearing an elegant black dress of chiffon. To this day, the woman in the painting by Thomas Wilmer Dewing conveys a sense of youthful strength, command, wealth and privilege. She is the very image of emerging American womanhood. Her picture said to the world, “I am the new powerful woman who is ready to beat down all obstacles and win.”

In 1890 in the artist’s New York studio, nothing could have been farther from the truth. Minnie Clark, who sat with her lovely back arched away from the keyboard of a grand piano, was just putting on a show. In fact, Minnie couldn’t really play the piano and had been holding that pose for several hours as the painter labored to capture her beauty on canvas. The painting does not reveal the cold of the unheated studio or how sore her muscles became straining to remain still.

In truth, Minnie Clark was just another working girl. She was not even American, and, as a 28 year old Irish immigrant, she was hardly a girl any more. A widow, she modeled because she had no other skills with which to support her two children. She looked the very picture of youthful vigor, but she was in poor health and could not afford the medicines she needed. Her family lived in a series of tenement houses from which she moved frequently when the rent came due.

She was beautiful and in reasonable demand, but could only command $1.50 for a morning’s work from artists who had little cash. Occasionally, she found a job for as much as $30 a week, but mostly, the work was erratic and women like Minnie struggled to escape from it into more respectable occupations. Many others were forced to work as actresses or chorus girls to make ends meet. Eventually Minnie married an architect and vanished into the American middle class.

Still, when you see the image of a Gibson girl from the Roaring Nineties, laughing and throwing her hair back so the gentle winds could tease her admirers with its display, think on Minnie Clark, and know that the person whose bold and sassy image stares back at you is in fact that of a strong and remarkable person, but not for the reasons the painter has struggled to suggest. The real person who posed for the busts and nudes of the Fin de Siecle were braver than you could know.

438 words

Some Recent Poems

2007-03-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

Settling Down

by
Gary Lehmann

The American painter, John Singer Sargent was born in Florence,
but he traveled around Italy and France for most of his early years.
As a teen, he showed a love of painting, but due to their nomadic life,
his mother insisted he work quickly to complete a painting every day.

As he accompanied her on morning walks, where ever they might be,
Mary Newbold Singer Sargent sketched in the open air with her son
teaching him the pure joy of rendering the surrounding countryside
in rapidly executed bright watercolor sketches of stunning beauty.

“No matter how many works are started, one must be finished each day.”
In the end, it was her abiding legacy to him and a useful one at that.
The world little values the work of artists. It is best if they can learn
to work fast and true -- not dwelling for too long in any one location.

Getting the News

by
Gary Lehmann

It was an early winter day with snow lingering in the air.
I walked out to pick up my mail from the box by the curb
when I heard this clatter of squawking overhead,
a bomber squadron of geese resolutely flying -- North.

You crazy geese, I thought.
You’re in for a nasty surprise when you get there.

I pulled the newspaper from its holster.
The headline told of troops being killed in some foreign land
not worth fighting over. More deaths and more suffering
as if the world had not had its fill of that already.

You crazy fools, I thought.
I’ll bet you never thought you signed up for this nonsense.

I pulled out the mail and leafed through the bills and circulars.
Everyday the post man brings me ads for things I never buy.
Most of it goes directly into the trash unopened.
Somehow the world rolls on despite our inefficiencies.

You crazy people, I thought.
Don’t you know you’re in for a nasty surprise one of these days?

What Sarah Said

by
Gary Lehmann

After reading the news of his wife’s death,
Sarah Goodridge, notable Boston miniature painter,
decided to paint something very special
for her long-time client, Daniel Webster.

In her studio, she positioned a mirror by the window,
took off her blouse and proceeded to paint on ivory
a perfect watercolor likeness of her bosom,
plump and full, the envy of Aphrodite.

Some woman at 40 may have blanched at such a challenge,
but Sarah produced a small, exquisite image
which shone with a luminous quality that
reproduced very well the glow of breathless flesh.

Each nipple stood out in bright pink contrast
to the creamy flesh around it, all
framed by drawn white curtains of fine lace.
She called it Beauty Revealed.

Sarah rarely left Boston, but for this occasion
she boarded a coach for Washington DC
to present her likeness to the great man herself.
Oh to have witnessed that interview!

Evidently, no clerk was available to sit in or take notes.
Were there tears? Recriminations? Or passionate embraces?
Did she throw herself melodramatically upon the protesting Puritan?
Or did he secretly admire her all those years of fruitless marriage?

We know he kept the miniature for the rest of his life.
In fact, it stayed in the Webster family for over 150 years,
locked away from prying eyes and inquiring minds until
no one can quite recall the true character of either party.

The Ice Man

by
Gary Lehmann

My Uncle Frank drove his truck on the ice every year.
Regardless of the weather or what the boys said
at the Chat and Chew about ice conditions,
he just laid out two planks and drove
his red truck right out there on the ice.
Damn you all!

He was always the first with his shed on the ice,
because he refused the hard labor of pulling
it manually when he could drive out.
I think after a while the bigger thrill
was tempting fate each year.
Damn you all!

He was an arrogant cuss
and you’d be excused for anticipating,
even wishing, that sometime
he’d drive his red Ford truck out there
with his damned shit-eating grin
and go right through with a quiet blurp!

But you’d be wrong.
Much as every man on the lake
wished it secretly, that bastard
drove his big red Ford truck out on the ice
year after year in confounded redneck defiance.
Damn you all!

The Inheritance

by
Gary Lehmann

Fingering through
this careful assortment of objects,
accumulated over a lifetime,
I see many were well-worn with hands
not unlike mine.

Now I stand here like a barbarian at the gate
demanding gold of these objects
so I can buy new objects
which I will wear down
over my score of years

to pass in time
to some other stranger to sell
and reforge into
a new life --
not unlike mine.

Addie, 1910

by
Gary Lehmann

The orphan girl, Addie, leans back on her machine uncomfortably.
Behind her is a six foot bank of cotton spinning machines.
Her arms are emaciated.
Her left forearm looks like it may have been badly set after a break.
She wears a checked smock over a calico blouse.
Her sleeves are rolled up above the elbow.
Her patch pocket bulges and is stained with greasy smudges.
The edges of the pocket have been sewn for reinforcement.
Bits of thread cling to her smock.
It has no shape or size.
Grease marks spot the lower half.
Her hands and bare feet are grease covered.
Her toes splay out from long hours standing shoeless on the slippery floor.
Her hair is pulled back to keep it from getting caught in the bobbins.
Her eyes are partially hooded, blank and staring.
Her face is gray.
Her mouth registers no emotion.
You can almost hear the clatter of a thousand bobbins behind her.
Everything except Addie is moving.
She has taken a moment to allow someone to take her picture.

Upon Opening the New School
After Cinders from the Train Crossing
Burned Down the Old One

by
Gary Lehmann

“What do I remember of my early education? Well, not much.
I do remember when the new one-room school opened in 1912,
and we all sang Marching through Georgia to celebrate.

It may be have been Mrs. Hartfeld’s idea to sing that song,
but it was Sparky and Slim who got the idea of marching and
pounding on the desks so the whole place would rock and sway.

The girls yelled Stop! Stop! You’ll bring down the whole school,
which just made it all the more fun. The pictures swayed,
the floorboards joined in the chorus. The potbelly laughed out loud.

The teacher didn’t seem to mind, and I guess we did no damage
as the school remained standing for two whole years more
before cinders from the train burned it down -- again.”

FootHills Publishing announces Gary Lehmann's newest book of poetry, American Sponsored Torture

2007-01-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

FootHills Publishing of Kanona, NY announced in January their intention to publish Gary Lehmann's long poem American Sponsored Torture: a Poem in Twelve Parts in May 2007 to coincide with the opening of the ArtistWorks & PoetWords exhibition to be held at the Dome Arena, Rochester NY, for the month of May.

The Lehmann exhibition will include a soft sculpture created by artist Bernie Lehmann and a book of poetry by poet Gary Lehmann The preface to the book explains the rationale for the series.

In 2006, the United States Congress passed legislation enabling agents of the United States to use what human right organizations describe as torture to obtain information from anyone they deem as harboring information they believe might be helpful to them in the War on Terrorism. In the past, we have always opposed state sponsored terrorism -- when other countries did it. Now we have passed legislation to enable torture on our own behalf, and we don’t even know where or when it is being conducted. The government attempted to cover its tracks by redefining the word torture to exclude the practices named in the legislation, but no one has been fooled, least of all those who will suffer physical abuse as a result.

We blithely accept that there is a War on Terrorism even though no state of war has been declared in contravention of the War Powers Act. How do we ask other nations to treat their people humanely when we use torture ourselves? The argument for this radical change of policy is that it will protect our rights, but the means used to protect our rights violate what are commonly defined by our Constitution and by International Human Rights Organizations as the basic rights of all people. This state of perplexing contradiction is distressing enough when it occurs in the traffic laws or in tax regulations. It is a call to action when it involves the violation of basic human rights.

American Sponsored Torture is a twelve part poem exploring these issues.

Here is a sampling of the poems to be included.

A big gray bird

A big gray bird is flying overhead in my sky.

It looks very much like a military troop transport,

but it has no insignia, no windows, and no tail numbers.

It is seen near U.S. Air Force bases and flies to foreign places.

It contains detainees who have no name.

They are not arrested or charged.

They are stateless persons without the protection of the law.

They are flying to places that can torture them

without my knowledge or consent.

They are stateless birds which are evidently invisible.

You’ll see them all over the country, near Air Force Bases.

Henceforth, you are instructed not to see them.

This is my country...

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America

and to the Republic which has passed legislation

enabling my armed forces and their agents to

obtain information by means generally defined as torture.

I retain the right to deny the use of torture, because I

have redefined the term in ways that exclude all the

methods named in the enabling legislation --

which authorizes my soldiers and agents to use torture.

I believe that the people of the world will be fooled

by this method, so that the people I torture will no longer

be able to report being tortured, because I have redefined

torture to exclude the techniques I have used on them.

III

Enabling Legislation

On Thursday,

the Congress voted to pass a bill

which permits the information

gained from coercive interrogation procedures

to be used in evidence against

a terrorist suspect

in a military tribunal.

The UN Commission on Human Rights,

Amnesty International,

and other human rights organizations

have not altered their stance

against all inhumane treatment,

but the bill will provide cover

for the administration’s decision

to openly embrace torture

as a means of advancing state policy.

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill

tomorrow.

Waterboarding

The simple explanation is that waterboarding is

the practice of strapping a prisoner to a board,

hands and feet, and then stuffing a rag in his mouth

so he can’t close it.

Then several gallons of water are poured into his open mouth

until the subject begins to drown.

After hovering on the edge of death

for upwards of two minutes, gagging uncontrollably,

the half-drowned person is revived,

and will readily tell you anything you want

as long as you promise to stop

waterboarding.

The fact that this procedure sometimes does drown the

unaccused, uncharged, victim is explained away

as an unfortunate bi-product of

the need to protect our human rights.

According to the new law,

waterboarding is not torture,

coercion is not torture,

provided no organs fail during its execution.

understanding bearable cruelty

bearable cruelty is not really torture

water torture focuses the mind – after several days

sleep deprivation motives prisoners to talk – in their sleep

electric probes stimulate the brain – to say anything

broken bones are the price of freedom – !

provided that no organs fail

The Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits

“Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”

Those words are unclear, open to interpretation [smirk].

Non-national combatants are not subject to inter-national law.

Get it? Guys out of uniform aren’t fighting for a nation.

Physical abuse is all they understand.

These brutes don’t deserve the rights of U.S. citizens.

We can’t be held responsible for the actions of others. Hell, it’s war.

Humiliating and degrading prisoners teaches them to respect us.

Off-shore agreements entered into by sub-contractors of the government

are not subject to governmental review.

I’m torturing these prisoners in order to preserve our rights.

These include our right to humane treatment and legal representation,

our right to a trial by a jury of peers and

our right to be held only after charges have been filed.

If we let these guys go, they will show disrespect for our rights.

We can’t have that. That would promote lawlessness.

We need to torture them so they’ll see what a wonderful way of life

we have and come over to our side and help us.

It’s just common sense really.

Is Poetry Therapy?

2006-12-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

I’m going to turn a little dogmatic on you and lay out a rule about poetry. I call it Rule #1, because it is the first and, so far as I know, only rule that is absolute in poetry. I believe that poetry is always personal. What I believe is that regardless of the ostensible subject, a poem is always a statement about some aspect of the poet’s immediate life, even if the poet does not understand the true implication of the words on the page at the time.

In poetry, a tree is NOT just a tree. There are no poems about trees. Nothing described in poetry has meaning except as it relates to a human experience. That is, there is no other subject for poetry but life. A poem may contain a tree, but it is about the relationship between a tree and some human feeling or experience reflected in some aspect of the tree. Anything described in a poem must ultimately relate back to human enterprises and more specifically the human involvement of the poet. These may seem like extremely dogmatic statements, but I’m resolved to stick with them.

The “two roads” in a wood described by Frost only have meaning as poetry in so far as they relate to human indecision, and more specifically Frost’s indecision. Mere description for its own sake is insufficient in poetry. If Shakespeare says, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" he means I am comparing thee to a summers day, and it is as passing as thy beauty. Beyond that he is saying “Looking at you reminds me of my own mortality.” Poets write about themselves. There is always a human connection that leads right back to the poet.

Since poetry is always personal, it contains the stuff of therapy in it, but it has been cunningly disguised by the human mind of the poet. As the poet we are rarely capable of discerning what our poems really mean. Just because we have written the words does not mean that we are immediately prepared to understand what they are saying to us or others. Oddly enough, someone who is hearing our poem for the first time is more likely than we to understand its real center. This is a common experience for poets.

Many times, I’ve encountered a poem I wrote many years ago only to discover what it meant for the first time. Suddenly, the way I was seeing things makes perfect sense in terms of what was going on in my life at the time. It’s so blatantly obvious, I feel that I should have understood it years ago, even as I wrote it, but I didn’t. The human mind is so facile and clever that it can buy into the most transparent fiction. That is not to say that poetry is useless as personal therapy. Once we’ve moved on, we seem better able to move back.

To illustrate, let’s use Elizabeth Bishop and her poem “One Art.” She was first and foremost an extremely private person. Her background dictated that. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. When she was just eight months old, her father, a well-to-do builder from a wealthy New England family, died suddenly. Her mother lost her mental footing in grief and over the next five years suffered a series of mental break-downs that formed the chief memory of Elizabeth’s early childhood. Finally, when things reached a crisis stage, her mother was institutionalized in Halifax, Canada, and Elizabeth lost all contact with her forever.

Such a traumatic childhood is bound to create a fragile and uncertain child. Much of the time, Elizabeth spent her time being shuttled between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father’s family in New England. Shy and withdrawn, she spent most of her college years at Vassar in the background. Then in 1934 in her senior year, she took a daring gamble and arranged through a librarian friend to get herself introduced to the much-admired older poet, Marianne Moore. The meeting did not go smoothly. Two shy people are naturally at a loss for words. Finally, they agreed to attend the circus together. There they discovered they had a lot in common, aside from a love of snakes, tattoos, and elephants, and became lifelong friends.

As an adult, Elizabeth Bishop lived quietly and kept close contact with her few friends by writing hundreds of letters to them. Elizabeth Bishop used letter writing the way some poets use journals or diaries. Every day she wrote things down. Whatever came to mind was okay. Bishop’s letters are mostly recount mundane daily occurrences, but while the ink flowed once in a rare while, a great idea slipped from the tip of the pen to the face of the letter.

Bishop used her letter writing to pan for gold. That is how she found her nuggets. Events, images, feelings, relationships, fears, loves, hates, fun, frantic run-ins are all part of the record of daily life. In the years after college, from 1937 to 1951, she managed to live a vagabond existence out of residential hotels and a suitcase she managed to open in New York, Key West, Europe, Cape Cod and Maine. In 1951, he got violently ill while visiting in Rio and was offered sanctuary to recuperate in the home of a Brazilian aristocrat named Lota de Macedo Soares.

The two women fell in love and lived very happily together for the next 15 years. This was the only real period of stability in Elizabeth Bishop’s turbulent life. To remain in touch with her North American friends, Elizabeth had to become a prolific letter writer.

By contrast, she wrote poetry extremely slowly. During her lifetime, she only published 101 poems. She was so meticulous about her words that she gained a reputation as a poet’s poet. In fact, she worked on the short poem “One Art” for 15 years. Each time she had what she thought was a finished copy, she pinned it up on her wall. Everyday she scanned it revealed new ideas which generated changes. She penciled them in until the next time she typed up the corrections and posted the new version of the poem for extended contemplation.

So let’s look at “One Art” to see if we can discern 15 years of content in it. Was she just wasting her time?

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost
that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.
Accept the flusterof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names,
and where it was you meant to travel.
None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.
And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.
And, vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gestureI love)
I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Well, you have to admit that it is a pretty good poem, but at first blush, I would wonder if that much revision was actually necessary. I’m tempted to wonder how many perfectly fine versions of this poem were discarded before this one arrived, and how many poems were repressed to give this one life. One assumes that other things crept into her agenda during that period and very likely some writing and other poetry as well. No one can live for 15 years with only one object in view.

The question still remains, “What could she have been up to for all those years to make these precious words worthwhile?” Perhaps these words had symbolic meaning for her. Her whole life was a contest between “master” and “disaster.” Just as the poem stanzas alternately end with these words, we sense that the outcome with her is likewise uncertain. She led a life of losing things and probably needed to consider the art of losing in order to determine what is worth fighting to retain, if anything. Perhaps the poem should be seen as a continuing argument for life over death.

But, truth is a moving target. What seems right at one time appears differently at another. We use different words to describe our special understanding of truth, because the challenges that face us one day are gone the next and something new needs sifting out. There are 17 distinct versions of this poem in the Bishop Collection at Vassar Library. “One Art,” like many of her other poems, reverberates with innuendos of undefined philosophical depth. Much of the repetition in the poem is required by her use of the villanelle* format. There is a dark, ironic quality in the poem as she skirts the ultimate admission that losing things is a disaster after all.

The poem is demanding and unsettling, with a kind of Emily Dickinson quality that is cool and detached. The voice of the poem is nostalgic, even romantic about all that has been lost, but there is a countervailing threat of cruelty as well. She seems always on the verge of revealing a new tragedy she has been unable to face.

Elizabeth Bishop may have been somewhat obsessive about this poem. She may have had a compulsive need to go back over the issue of losing, especially now that she had someone important in her life whose loss would be a real disaster. She may have struggling to find a philosophically sustainable basis for life. This poem may not be so much the accumulation of her thinking on the subject of loss as the culmination point of the process she needed to go through in order to help herself heal from a lifetime of losing.

Unfortunately, her relationship with Lota began to break down in the early 1960s and terminated when Lota committed suicide in New York in 1967 after straining herself too far on a giant parks project in Rio. Many people blamed Elizabeth for the death, which undoubtedly made the issue of loss even more significant to her.

Bishop returned to the United States and settled in Boston where she had to start life all over again. Though most of her poetry avoids the openly confessional style of her friend Robert Lowell, Bishop used images of the real world to reflect the deeply turbulent emotional world within. Ironically, though her last ten years were full of honors and prestigious teaching assignments, her poetic output declined to just one poem a year before her death in 1979 when she had just one thing left to lose.

1863 words

* The Villanelle is a 16th century French poetic form in imitation of an Italian folk song. It contains six stanzas [5 tercets and 1 quatrain] each with two rhymes in two lines repeated in a pattern.

Gary Lehmann Receives Second Pushcart Nomination

2006-11-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

October 1

Gary Lehmann was nominated by the editors of the Skyline Literary Community for the Pushcart Prize. The poem, "First in Flight" appeared last summer in Skyline Magazine. It has since appeared in Big Pond Rumors in Canada and was reprinted by Skyline in October. It is scheduled to appear in Literary House Review in October 2007.

First in Flight

by
Gary Lehmann

Castle Green had a festival atmosphere as 25,000 to 30,000
people gathered to see a young aeronaut risk his life in a hot air balloon.
Manhattan had been deemed too windy and wet previously.

At the center of this hub-bub, a giant cotton balloon was being inflated
by maneuvering alternate fire pots close to its cavernous mouth.
As the heat accumulated, the bag began to rise, slump on its side, then stand.

People were amazed as the giant began to move like a sleeping beast.
A well-dressed youth handed out broadsides containing a poem
about the joys of flight penned by one Charles Ferson Durant.

It was this same youth, styling himself also an inventor and astronomer,
who climbed confidently into the wicker basket attached precariously
to the rising balloon by a multitude of thin lines of braided twine.

Bags of sand were dropped and the unstable contraption
arose with many bumps and shudders from the Battery Green.
It headed out over New York harbor in a generally westerly direction.

Ferry boat passengers crowded the rails cheering and holding
their hats and parasols to shade their eyes from the sunny sky.
Thursday, September 9, 1830 something extraordinary happened.

A man rose off the ground, the first in North America, waving his
beaver hat and dropping the rest of his poetry onto the multitudes below
as he sedately drifted toward the Hudson’s west bank -- and beyond.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Point of View

2006-09-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Most poets write from their own point of view. Write what you know is the old adage, which most poets follow religiously, but sometimes it works best to locate the presumed narrator of your poem in a voice other than your own. Take Gwendolyn Brook’s poem We Real Cool.

We Real Cool

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool.  We

Left school.  We

Lurk late.  We

Strike straight.  We

Sing sin.  We

Thin gin.  We

Jazz June.  We

Die soon.

Aside from the unusual use of the third person plural pronoun at the end of most lines, the internal rhyme scheme, and the use of capital letters to emphasize the verbs, the reader is struck by the sense that this is not the voice of a traditional female poet. The poem takes on the voice of the collective consciousness of the gang members themselves. This voice is conspicuously male in tone and form. This is how we see ourselves. Here is what gives us street cred. The poem is a kind of street gang’s credo.

The last line of this poem draws you up tight. For most people this would be a chilling realization. At first, it seems like it is inadvertent, even an unguarded revelation, but I think that both the poet and her hooligan narrator realize that the threat of death in the streets is an ever-present part of what makes life on the streets worthwhile. It’s what gives that life vitality.

Vitality. That is not only what holds the poem together, it is why the poem needs to be told from the point of view of the subject. Gwendolyn Brooks was not pushing for this lifestyle. She is merely reflecting what has come to her attention as a form of life she saw all around her. Gwendolyn Brooks was no street thug.

She was a mild-mannered writer and editor, born in Topeka Kansas in 1917, but brought up on the streets of Chicago. She published 21 books of poetry, 5 books of prose, and 1 novel during her long lifetime. She spent her life behind a desk, not in a pool hall, but still, she witnessed the destructive nature of the street gangs for herself. She knew the street even if she wasn’t a direct part of its life. To write a poem about this life would have been a natural enough desire, but to try to tell that story from her own point of view would have involved layering too many masks over each other. The poem would have gotten very confusing.

And what would the poet’s point of view have added to the poem anyway?

The power of this poem comes from its direct and honest revelation of belief. The gang is speaking. Here is what we are. Take it or leave it. This is how we live, and die. In an interview with George Stavros, Brooks confessed that those boys “have no pretensions to any glamor [sic]. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they're in the poolroom when they should possibly be in school, since they're probably young enough, or at least those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom.”

The poet is a voyeur in the life of the street thug’s gang life. She had no standing to speak for them in her own voice, and so she naturally takes on the only voice that works, the voice of the gang itself.

As Gary Smith has said, “Brooks's attitude toward the players remains ambivalent. To be sure, she dramatizes the tragic pathos in their lives, but she also stresses their existential freedom in the poem's . . . meter, the epigraph that frames the poem, and the players' self-conscious word play. . . .” Sometimes it is best to do what the poem dictates and ignore the well-worn poetic adages that limit and confine too much modern poetry.

Maybe it should be Write what you feel, not Write what you know.

Gary Lehmann: Featured Reader at Harvest Poetry Festival

2006-09-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

Gary Lehmann will be the lead featured poet at the Foothills Publishing's Harvest Poetry Festival to be held September 24, 1-4 PM, at the Gell Center in Naples, N.Y.

The Festival celebrates the 20th Anniversary of Foothills Publishing's exclusive commitment to publishing the works of emerging poets in the New York and Pennsylvania region.

Lehmann will read from his recent Foothills book, Public Lives and Private Secrets. The Harvest Festival is open to the public and is free. Come and enjoy!

Some Recent Poetry

2006-09-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Addie, 1910

by
Gary Lehmann

The orphan girl, Addie, leans back on her machine uncomfortably.
Behind her is a six foot bank of cotton spinning machines.
Her arms are emaciated.
Her left forearm looks like it may have been badly set after a break.
She wears a checked smock over a calico blouse.
Her sleeves are rolled up above the elbow.
Her patch pocket bulges and is stained with greasy smudges.
The edges of the pocket have been sewn for reinforcement.
Bits of thread cling to her smock.
It has no shape or size.
Grease marks spot the lower half.
Her hands and bare feet are grease covered.
Her toes splay out from long hours standing shoeless on the slippery floor.
Her hair is pulled back to keep it from getting caught in the bobbins.
Her eyes are partially hooded, blank and staring.
Her face is gray.
Her mouth registers no emotion.
You can almost hear the clatter of a thousand bobbins behind her.
Everything except Addie is moving.
She has taken a moment to allow someone to take her picture.

The Gospel According to Timothy

by
Gary Lehmann

In an open letter dated August 9, the Reverend Timothy LaBoeuf, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Watertown, NY, declared that Bible School teacher Mary Lambert would no longer be permitted to teach male children the Holy Word of Sacred Scripture because she is female.

The Word of the Bible is final.

The Reverend Timothy cited the first epistle to Timothy, “do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.” Ms. Lambert was dismissed without warning after providing Bible study to the children of the church for 54 years. God has not released a statement as yet.

Inside the Gaze of Eliza and Josiah Goddard

by
Gary Lehmann

In October 1838, Josiah and Eliza Goddard had their pictures painted by a local artist.
The newly-weds wanted to leave a likeness of themselves in case they failed to return.
They had received a calling to convert the heathen races of the world in the Far East.
Josiah learned about the hardships he would face as a missionary at Brown University.

Their two portraits evidence their single-minded dedication to a sacred purpose.
At 22, they voluntarily predestined their lives to be sacrificed for the conversion of the heathens.
They look coldly ahead, feigning Stoic resolve, anxious to impress us with their determination.
Two months later, they boarded the freighter Apthorpe in Boston bound for far-off Burma.

Eliza was seasick for the entire four months of the journey. In Bangkok, she bore four children. In her journal, Eliza recorded the lack of drinking water and clean food. The heat was inhumane. The savageness of the people was overshadowed by smallpox, typhoons, and flooding.
An opium eater, evidently brought to despair by a lack of God, committed suicide on her step.

Josiah mastered the local dialect but in the process contracted tuberculosis and sickened.
A move inland to Nang-po did not improve his health, and he died a few years later.
Eliza found it necessary to return home where she enrolled her son at the seminary at Brown.
She never returned to missionary work, but her son did to raise his own family in China.

In 1944, his grandson donated the paired portraits of Eliza and Josiah to Brown University.
When years of grime were cleaned away, they revealed the text under Josiah’s painted pen.
Now no one could for a moment contemplate the spirit of Christ without [being] convinced that It was a spirit of love ... but also a willingness to make [the] greatest conceivable sacrifices.

GERONIMO’s Last Stand

by
Gary Lehmann

In his day, Geronimo had an unsurpassed reputation for cruelty and cunning.
For nearly 20 years, his Apache warriors killed white soldiers and tortured captives.
General Nelson Miles, one of his many captors, wrote,
“He was, in fact, one of the lowest and most cruel of the savages.”

After the Indian Wars, Geronimo managed to negotiate a peace settlement for himself.
Together with his wife, he traveled all over the country signing photographs for $1 each.
If you didn’t already have a likeness of him, he sold you one for $3. – signature included.

Geronimo’s signature was awkward and scrawled. He’d turn the picture on its side,
and write the letters of his name from top to bottom each letter sideways
such that when you turned the image right side up again
it appeared for all the world like the signature of a wild savage.

The Story Behind Uncle Remus

2006-05-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Joel Chandler Harris [1845-1908], author of the Uncle Remus stories, has been forgotten for a while during the recent period when we were too racially aware to permit Negro dialect stories to be told to children. I’m glad to say he has returned.

For many years in the 1990s, the original Uncle Remus stories were not available in bookstores and even libraries shied away from keeping their old copies in circulation lest they might have to explain to inquiring young minds the thorny issues of slavery and racial stereotyping.

Yet, the lasting value of the Uncle Remus stories belies these concerns for in them Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, the weak and the innocent, manage to overcome the strong and the vicious with their purity and innocence. How the helpless triumph over the malicious is a story worth telling. Yet, Uncle Remus has always been a political football.

Even as a youth, Joel Chandler Harris heard dialect tales growing up in Georgia, but he only started writing them down later on. In these stories the slave or his animal counterpart always outwits the master or predator. This theme can be politically touchy.

Although his stories have been associated with the Old South, Harris was not actually part of the aristocratic traditions of the South at all. Just before Harris was born in Billy Barne’s Tavern in 1845, his day-laborer father deserted his unwed mother. Harris was acutely aware of his illegitimacy, and he developed a shyness which was partially a reaction to an abiding sense of unworthiness.

He grew up red-headed and freckled, and endowed with a good sense of humor which he put to work as a newspaper reporter beginning in 1862 when he was just 17 years old. A plantation owner named Joseph Addison Turner published a little newspaper called The Countryman. Harris’ specialty came to be retelling humorous folk stories which were copied down from two ex-slaves named George Terrell and Old Harbert at Turnwold, Turner’s plantation. The stories were so popular they were reprinted by the Atlanta Constitution starting 1879 and several other well-known Southern papers.

Why Harris became a reporter instead of a Confederate soldier in 1862 is anyone’s guess, but it is clear that many Southern boys saw the war for what it was, a grab for political power by some rich folks in Richmond, which left poor Southern boys dead in the ditches of a dozen states. After the war, Jefferson Davis escaped the South and became a highly successful corporate attorney in New York. The rest of South, including people like Harris, couldn’t escape that easily.

As a newspaperman, Harris had many obstacles to overcome. Aside from his shyness, he had a terrible stammer which made interviews downright painful. To differentiate between his editorial opinions and his dialect tales, he soon took to signing his folktales “Uncle Remus.” They were first collected and published in book form in 1881 and every few years thereafter a new book came out. They were widely translated into 27 different languages, because the story of the weak and the oppressed overcoming the mean and the devious by wit is a universal theme that every human being can read with enjoyment. Many others tried to imitate him, but no one had his fine ear for the subtleties of Negro dialect.

The popularity of these tales in the South was driven in large measure by a political agenda which did not evade the attention of his initial readers. The Uncle Remus stories portrayed an ideal world where race relations were harmonious. Many people, especially in Georgia after the Civil War needed to believe that there once was a genteel South where everyone got along. Harris’ stories provided this much needed political cover for those seeking a vision of the South which did not include the evils of slavery.

A decade later, up North, the Uncle Remus stories became popular as well, but for entirely different reasons. The terrible cost of the Civil War was still being felt and whites, both from the North and South, wanted someone to blame for their suffering. This is the era of the Ku Klux Klan and other racial hate groups. The Uncle Remus stories supported the backlash that was taking place against blacks, because the story’s simple characters reinforced the stereotype of the uneducated Negro slave. Ironically, Harris’ simple stories of harmonious rural life became the focus of further racial hatred and mistrust.

Of course, Harris can’t be blamed for the ebb and flow of racial sentiments in the country at large. But somehow, like Huck Finn, his books have polarized American thought on racial issues and have appeared at the heart of a number of controversies over the years. Far from qualifying it as a book that should be taken off the shelves of bookstores and libraries every few decades, I would argue that these are reasons why it should be left on.

By the end of Harris’ life, the publication of the Uncle Remus stories made him quite wealthy. He was editor of The Atlanta Constitution, close friends with Mark Twain, and, like him, Harris built a big house with a name, Wren’s Nest, where he died in 1908.

881 words

Some Recent Poems

2006-05-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

Getting it wrong most of the time
by
Gary Lehmann

Aristotle’s Fifth Element went beyond earth, air, water and fire to define something perfect.
He called it the aether, whatever exists beyond air, above it, outside --or maybe inside-- it.
He never defined it exactly. Newton created a mathematical theory to explain the entire cosmos,

but Newton got it wrong. He assumed that time and space exist in some absolute relationship.
Even right ideas can be wrong-headed. Ideas that work in some instances don’t work in all.
Einstein proved time and space exist in a flow, all moving in relative motion to one another,

but Einstein got it wrong. To make his universe predictable, he added a “cosmological constant.”
Edwin Hubble proved we live in an expanding universe which gave Einstein his “worst blunder.”
Now, Stephen Hawking has searched his whole life for a unifying Theory of Everything,

but he seems to have gotten something wrong, because his theory doesn’t compute.
We evidently need theories, even if we don’t understand them, even if they don’t work,
to make us feel better about the capricious forces within a coldly indifferent universe.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

A Certain Age
by
Gary Lehmann

I’ve inherited a drop-front desk from grandpa with all its old stuff still in it.
In the bottom drawer, wrapped in tattered silk is a water jug with a strange nested cup.
These days, I find I tend to wake up in the middle of the night, thirsty and dry mouthed.
I’ve filled the jug and set it by my bedside so in the dead of night I can follow my ancestor’s lead.

In the desk drawer, a pair of spectacles come to hand tightly folded inside their ancient case.
They exactly suit my prescription, though they have traveled through time for 180 years,
serving eyes like mine in long succession to see that jug and nested cup when we wake
after midnight and need to come to the aid of our other faulty genes with a cool sip of water.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

Philosophically Unconvincing
by
Gary Lehmann

The French Philosopher, called Voltaire,
was walking down a Parisian street in 1725 when
a gang of hired thugs attacked and beat him with cudgels
while the nobleman who paid them watched on.
Apparently, Voltaire wrote something he did not like.

Surprisingly, Voltaire did not think any better of the nobility
after cleaning dirty scuff marks out of his jacket!
Yet every day in every country in the world
someone tries beating the truth in or out of someone
…with equal success.

Poor Man! laments Candide.
Is this the best of all possible worlds?
Soon after this incident, Voltaire wrote,
People who believe in absurdities
will eventually commit atrocities.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

Toyz-R-Us
by
Gary Lehmann

“When we first started the company,”
he told me over wedding champagne,
“we called it the Toy Warehouse,
but then we realized that toys are sold to children
who drag their parents to the cash register,
not to adults who can read words like warehouse.
“That’s really smart,” I thought.

Toyz-R-Us was a name within the comprehension of the smallest child,”
he said, “…and the simplest parent.
It was a natural really.
Once we got the name right,
the rest was just a matter of making sure no toy we sold
ever hurt even one child…ever.”
“That’s really naive, ” I thought.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

Fish Story
by
Gary Lehmann

Last night, at a fancy restaurant in New York,
I paid $39. for a fish pan fried in butter
and pureed plantain.

It reminded me of a time in Jamaica
when I saw an old black lady in a bright skirt
astride a concrete break wall.

She had assembled a small fire of driftwood
and was pan-frying a fish.
I inquired after her recipe.

“Ain’t got no recipe.
I cooks the fish in lard and plantain
from this tree here.”

I’m sure it tasted
every bit as good, maybe better,
and she had the sea view.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

The Fire Within
by
Gary Lehmann

At age 7, Moss Hart regularly stayed home from school
to attend Broadway theater with his kindly Aunt Kate.
Though she lived in a tenement house, the theater
gave her the illusion of living the grand lifestyle.
Attending theater lifted her above the squalor,
venting her desperate longing for opulence,

but things aren’t always what they seem.

Darling Aunt Kate liked to attend the theater
to exercise her mania for starting fires in them.
Meanwhile, Moss Hart, lit by another kind of fire,
went on to become known as the Prince of Broadway,
one of America’s finest playwrights. We never really know
when a few hot embers will blow up into a firestorm downwind.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

The Implacable Anger of Karl Marx

by
Gary Lehmann

Anger dominates Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, a rage over the distribution of wealth,
a tireless demand, for the right of workers to resist the corrosive effects of money.
We think of Karl Marx writing his famous philosophical treatise in his black frock coat
under the domed light of the great Reading Room in the British Museum, and he did.
What we tend not to ask is why he wrote it in such a public place? The answer
is also das kapital. Marx was desperately poor and had a large family at home.

Even those who have their fingers on the pulse of history do not live outside it.

At night he played on the floor with his kids, scrimped on food and clothing, even
pawned his frock coat, just so he could go on explaining why class warfare can
only end in bloodshed. Poverty pinches most acutely when your children suffer.
Born the son of a lawyer, Marx did not grow up as part of the working class himself.
He was well-educated, managed and owned things before throwing it all over for philosophy.
History is messy when you get down to the details. Real history always trembles with irony.

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

A Murder of Crows
After Winslow Homer’s painting The Fox Hunt
“the most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public”

by Gary Lehmann

From the late 1870s on, Winslow Homer changed. He moved to the coast of Maine, became more reclusive, only went to town occasionally to get his mail. There were rumors of a failed romance. His art career was assured by then, but something had changed profoundly for him.

After a cold walk, he returned to his Prout’s Neck studio. Moodily, he took up his brushes.
A long red patch appeared on the white canvas, perhaps a fox. The fox pranced lively toward berry-laden winter bushes. He darkened the fur, defined the ears, and buried the feet in snow.

Water appeared crashing on a hostile ocean beach at the horizon, like the winter of his soul.
As he touched up the legs and ear tips of the fox in black, he saw at once that the right side
of the canvas needed some menacing presence. In bold strokes, he scrubbed in two crows.

Suddenly, by revealing the drama in the work, he transformed a picture into a painting,
revealing both the brooding loneliness of the landscape of his mind and the haunting realization
that even the predator fox is sometimes hunted by a murder of crows in nature’s cruel symphony.

Up close and hovering for an attack, their beaks are hungry for a mid-winter meal. Suddenly,
six more appear coming over the hill in hot pursuit. Their feathers are jagged and ill-kempt.
After twelve hours, the artist sat back in his chair exhausted. Would he ever paint summer again?

1802 Jackson Road
Penfield, New York 14526
(585) 388-8695
e-mail: glehmann@rochester.rr.com

Poetry “with a Meinkampf look”

2006-04-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath’s Daddy is almost certainly the most hate-filled poem I have ever read. It screams out PAIN in a hundred different ways. Structurally, it is a masterwork. The end rhymes and regular rhythms just add to the emotional intensity. Technically, it is a fine piece of work. Emotionally, it is profoundly disturbing. Plath herself has said that Daddy is narrated by “a girl with an Electra complex,” that is a girl whose “father died while she thought he was God.” And, in fact, Sylvia Plath’s father did die when she was still a little girl, age eight, and the incident did cause her a great deal of pain.

But it would be a big mistake to characterize this poem as autobiographical. Her father was not a Nazi, nor was he a German citizen when he became her father. She was not a Jew. They lived in New Jersey, not Aushwitz. He was a teacher and a published author. By all accounts, he never abused or neglected his daughter. Still, something was going on. The poem contains way too much vehemence to have emanated from thin air.

Scholars and critics have spilt much ink trying to decipher this mystery. How could so much hatred have come from no where? Where did Plath find such vituperation?

One explanation comes from her biography, but it is by no means a complete explanation. In January of 1959, Sylvia signed up for a course at Boston University in Creative Writing taught by Robert Lowell. The class met late in the afternoon. From notebooks Sylvia was keeping at that time, we know that she found the professor rather dull and unimaginative. She came to befriend another auditor of the class, the poet Anne Sexton, a strange girl. She was a chain smoker who thought it was impolite to drop cigarette ashes on a classroom floor, so she took to using the heel of her shoe as an ashtray. During the class, she started an affair with a fellow student, an editor at Houghton-Mifflin named George Starbuck. They sat together.

Sylvia took the class to get some quality feedback on some of her recent poems, but the class wasn’t working out very well. After classes, she invited Anne and George to join her for a drink at the Ritz-Carlton. The three tumbled into the front seat of her Ford and parked in the loading zone behind the hotel. “It’s okay,” Sylvia explained, “we are only going to get loaded.” After a few drinks, or even a few more than a few, they went on to the Waldorf Cafeteria where they could get a dinner for just 70 cents. It turned out that this is where most of the real learning occurred.

Robert Lowell at first underestimated the work of Sylvia Plath and openly favored Sexton in class discussions. Plath got angry about it. When he challenged the class to start writing things that were more daring, more edgy, Plath wrote from her heart and tried to demonstrate that a poet, like an actor, could take on any part she favored.

The poem, Daddy, wasn’t published until years later after Plath took her own life. Marjorie Perloff has taken the poem to task as “empty.” She says the emotions are shammed, mere “histrionics.” Seamus Heaney is not as hard on her. He says she is using a larger cultural context for a “vehemently self-justifying purpose.” I think that means she is expropriating the Nazis and the Holocaust for her own purposes without worrying about who she might hurt or insult in the process.

So the criticisms come down to two basic kinds. Either Ms Plath is trivializing the Holocaust by invoking references to it to describe minor personal affairs which have no real comparison, or she is trying to exaggerate the magnitude of her own experiences by referencing real tragedies.

In either case, both critics appear to be accusing her of bad taste. They are both saying she has pushed the Nazi metaphor beyond reason into the realm of the ridiculous, even the insulting. All evidence suggests that her father did not abuse her, but even if he did, does she have the right to compare her personal suffering to the heartless extermination of millions of innocent people? As Perloff says, “whatever her father did to her it cannot be what the Germans did to the Jews.”

Another approach to this poem sees it as a dispossession. The little girl who narrates the poem is acting out her frustration with being born female. She hates her father, her husband and all males. More or less in chronological order, she recites her grievances. The title, Daddy, is a reflection of her infantile persona. The fact that she exaggerates and blows things out proportion is appropriate for a little girl who is totally self-centered and in pain. She is releasing the anger she has bottled up ever since her father abandoned her by dying.

The most unusual approach to the poem has been offered by Steven Axelrod. He posits the idea that since her father and her husband were both published authors, perhaps Sylvia is writing this poem to exorcise the demon which has latched onto her, because she is a writer. She is trying to escape what Axelrod calls the “buried male muse.” In this interpretation, Daddy is like a written record of a primal scream, a desperate cry to be released from her mental prison.

Some biographical details might help at this point. In 1962 Plath separated from her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes. Their relationship was turbulent. There was another woman. The time had come. During the last months of her life, one of the coldest winters on record, Sylvia wrote as if she were in a hypnotic trance. She was desperately poor, snowbound, with her two children in an unheated flat outside of London. The electricity went off periodically. There was no money for candles. Pipes froze. The whole family had colds and sniffles. Yet, she pushed on writing two or three poems a day. By February she was exhausted and desperate.

Ted left her in December. In January, her book The Bell Jar was published. February 11, she committed suicide. She put the children down for their naps, went into the kitchen and turned on the gas. Daddy was still in manuscript form on the kitchen table. It was only published a few years later with the poetry cycle called Ariel.

Anne Sexton, who spent many hours talking with Plath about suicide, says the poem is a testament to Sylvia’s suffering, a prelude to her death, but that the poem neither justifies her suicide nor is it validated by it. The poem has to stand on its own feet. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem,” says Sexton, by which I think she means that the poem is a work of art. Suicide is a personal act of negation. Sylvia Plath herself observed that if a poem is any good, it goes on “farther than a lifetime.”

So where does all the hatred come from in the poem Daddy? It’s anybody’s guess. Is the poem a suicide note? You tell me. Is there a causal relationship between the poem and her death? Maybe. Probably not. Perhaps Plath, cold, hungry, abandoned and frightened, simply killed herself out of despair -- as so many others have done. Maybe Robert Lowell was right when he speculated that, in the end, she simply decided that “life...is simply not worth it.”

Twisting the Tale of Richard Cory

2006-03-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

Late one weekday evening in 1968, I was singing the song Richard Cory at the Yankee Rum Shop coffee house in Kennebunkport, Maine, when an ambulance pulled by the shop, siren blaring, headed for a mansion on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The next morning, we discovered that the ambulance was responding to a call for help from the biggest mansion of them all, owned by a man who was reputed to be a part-owner of Saks Fifth Avenue. He had a vintage Rolls Royce and had threatened to drive it off the cliff so many times that people had stopped paying much attention to his threats.

Sure enough, this time, he did it. Not the Rolls Royce, but “a bullet through his head,” just like in Paul Simon’s song. It was uncanny. Here was a man who arguably owned “one half of this whole town,/ with political connections to spread his wealth around.” He supposedly owned a yacht in the Mediterranean to which he took a local farm boy who was his play thing for the summer, together with a large assortment of caged birds, mostly nightingales as I recall. I don’t know that any of this was true. Kennebunkport in the summer of 1968 was not a good place to carry on conversations in the street if you expected to get straight answers. It was 1968, the summer of love, man!

But here he was a legitimate multi-millionaire with a larger-than-life reputation for “orgies on his yacht” who “went home last night and put a bullet through his head.” It was too spooky for words. We stopped singing the song.

Years later, I discovered that the lyrics to Richard Cory were adapted by Paul Simon from a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935). When I stumbled across a copy of the original poem, I was amazed at how much Simon had altered it.

Richard Cory poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Richard Cory lyrics by Paul Simon
They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town
With political connections to spread his wealth around
Born into society, a banker's only child,
He had everything a man could want, power, grace, and style.

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory

The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes.
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at the show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got.

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were very grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was full of wonder when the evening headlines read,
"Richard Cory went home last night, and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factories
and I curse this life I’m living
and I curse my poverty
and I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory

Simon did more than adapt Richard Cory to music, he actually reconceived the poem and added an entirely new emphasis. He took out arcane words like “crown,” “arrayed,” and “favored,” and altered awkward phrases like “schooled in every grace.” He omitted the one truly dead line, “So on we worked, and waited for the light.”

Instead, Simon added a chorus that emphasized the personal animosity that Richard Cory’s wealth and privilege engendered in the common people. He hit on the envy that lay beneath that anger and heightened Cory’s social aloofness by adding details like “born into society, a banker’s only child.”

Finally, Simon added the killer line, “he surely must be happy with everything he’s got.” That’s the key to the new version, because it refocuses the attention of the poem/song on the deadly sin that has killed the soul of the narrator, envy.

We never actually learn anything to explain why Richard Cory killed himself. That’s not the point. Rich people have their problems. The point is that in the narrator we have a man with a good job and friends who kills his love of life because of envy. In the end, he may even be saying he wishes he were dead like Richard Cory. What sent him off the deep end? The simple act of gazing on a wealthy man who lives a life of apparent ease. Richard Cory is not the tragic figure any more. Instead, the narrator creates the tragedy by his envious reaction to Richard Cory’s aloofness and power. He is almost suicidal because of it. He has allowed his self-esteem to tumble because people like Calvin Klein, David Letterman, Ralph Lauren or Bill Gates glitter when they walk in ways he cannot. It’s an all too American tragedy.

In fact, the original poem by Robinson is a much weaker piece overall. Simon caught the implications of the phrase “We people” and used the envy in their gaze to pull out the power to be gained from shifting the poem’s point of view.

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in 1869, the son of a wealthy timber baron, in Head Tide, Maine, just 75 miles northeast of Kennebunkport where my mysterious happening occurred. Robinson grew up in a household with money and prestige, but things started to go wrong. In 1892, his father died. In 1893, a financial panic sent shock waves through the timber industry. Edwin was forced to leave Harvard. In 1896, his mother died suddenly of black diphtheria, a disease so contagious her sons had to bury her themselves because no mortician would touch her. His brother Dean, a doctor, became a morphine addict and died in 1899. His elder brother took to drink. These disasters bankrupted the entire family but gave Edwin wisdom beyond his years.

In the face of all this tragedy, he decided not to fight his fate, but to embrace his life as a poor poet rather than try to make himself into a struggling junior timber merchant. He had seen both sides of power. He knew what it felt like to be observed, glittering as he walked, but more importantly, he knew what it was to be excluded from that world. It was during this period that he wrote Richard Cory for his first book of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before [1896]. The rich ironies Robinson wrote into the poem come from a genuine understanding for he knew all too well the many ways that wealth and its removal had to corrupt the spirits of his family members.

Paul Simon’s story is different but comes to a similar place. He was born in Newark, NJ but grew up in Queens where his father made a living as a radio musician while his mother worked as a music teacher. He was not exactly poor, but he certainly was not born with wealth and all its trappings. His father’s career put him on the outside of the celebrity world.

Paul started singing while still a teenager with his boyhood buddy Art Garfunkel. When their hit song Schoolgirl sold 100,000 copies in 1958 while they were still high school seniors, they were suddenly catapulted onto the Billboard charts, and their lives changed forever. Suddenly, they were stars, pushed before they were really ready into a world of “power, grace and style.”

So both Paul Simon and Edwin Arlington Robinson understood the ruthless power of money and envy to affect personal visions. They both had wrestled with these monsters, seen sudden wealth, and its lack, and they both chose lives based on poetry and performance, whatever the consequences. It’s fair to say they both added something from their own lives to Richard Cory.

1489 words

A Dangerous Mission

2006-01-30T08:42:00.003-08:00

by
Gary Lehmann

It's a dangerous mission. You/could die out there. You /could go on forever.
Tess Gallagher from Instructions to the Double

The act of writing poetry on a regular basis has some very profound outcomes which the writer does not always realize at the beginning of the adventure. A good poem tells a small truthful thing about the world the poet inhabits. A talented, persistent poet writes many such poems and tells many tiny truthful secrets about his or her inner existence. Taken in the main, this process finally develops a poetic voice. While the poet may write on all kinds of topics and cover any number of poetic techniques, eventually, one central theme or subject matter emerges that dominates that poet’s presence in the poetic world. It becomes that poet’s public persona.

We see this pattern over and over. Robert Frost was not all walks in the woods. He wrote love poems and sad poems. He wrote all sorts of poems, but what we remember of him are poems that seem to have been written while walking in the woods.

Mark Doty wrote all sorts of poems and probably thought he had a developed settled persona when his male lover died of AIDS in 1995. Ever since then, he has become the voice of the AIDS crisis in poetry. It will become his toe tag.

Tess Gallagher wrote thousands of poems over her lifetime, but the core, the heartland of those poems come back to that moment in 1988 when her third husband, the short story writer Raymond Carver, died. Her best books are books of poems about his death and her grief thereafter (Moon Crossing Bridge [1992]). She has occupied much of her time since then editing and seeing through publication Carver’s works. Even while she may have had an entirely different life in mind for herself when she was twenty, her poetic destiny has guided and directed what people will remember of her forever.

It is a strange thing that happens to poets who are talented, published, public and persistent. Out of that tiny habit of telling the truth in verse day after day emerges a central image as poet that takes over, becomes the “you” the public sees. It is your poetic destiny, your voice in poetry, your core being emerging into public view.

Tess Gallagher has a life aside from her two year marriage to Raymond Carver. She was born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and an MA from the University of Washington. She studied creative writing under Theodore Roethke. Interestingly, Roethke wrote for a whole long life but is really only remembered for the poems he wrote about the years between 1920 to 1925 when he lived with is father and mother in Saginaw, Michigan operating a family greenhouse. Gallagher went on to get an MFA from the University of Iowa, to teach at a dozen well-known colleges, and to receive many grants and honors, but all these things pale into insignificance against the tidal wave that overtook her when she met and married Raymond Carver.

Her book Willingly (1984) consists of poems written to and about Carver. Carver included Gallagher as the “good woman” in his short story Gravy published in The New Yorker the year after his death. They even collaborated on two screenplays, Purple Lake and Dostoevsky.

Tess Gallagher has written many books on other topics, but her relationship with Raymond Carver has really come to define her career. In Moon Crossing Bridge [1992], she poured her heart into a book of poems that itemize in great detail the stations of her grief after his untimely loss.

Since his death, Gallagher has acted as his literary executor. She has written introductions to three books of his poetry and seen them through to posthumous publication. (Call if you Need Me [1989], A New Path to the Waterfall [1990], and All of Us [2000].) She collaborated with the film director Robert Altman to produce a film based on nine of Carver’s short stories. (Short Cuts [1993]). She has become as much the architect of Carver’s image as Donald Hall is in control of Jane Kenyon’s future in print or John Cheever’s future is in the control of his daughter, Susan. Tess Gallagher has even written a book of essays on the topic of her relationship with her lover, Soul Barnacles: On the Literature of a Relationship: Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver [2003]. The book Cathedrals [2002] shows both of them on the cover and includes a history of a single encounter and the two short stories that resulted, one from each.

In 1997, The Atlantic Monthly interviewed Tess Gallagher. It was 9 years after Carver’s death. She could have spoken about any time in her life. Many women would have moved on to other matters, but for Tess the time that comes to her lips most easily is the time she spent with Raymond Carver. The Atlantic interview illustrates the electric pull that Carver has on her consciousness. The interviewer asks a question to set her up.

"In your essay "The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief" you contend that poems are the best and oldest forms we have for attending and absolving grief." Your Moon Crossing Bridge -- a book of poetry written in the wake of the death of your husband -- puts stock in this belief. When writing this book did you experience your grief as images and words, or as something even more abstract that you then struggled to pin down with language?"

"'The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief' was written in 1984, eight years before Moon Crossing Bridge, and although I didn't know it at the time, much of what I was writing in that essay was preparatory to those poems. At this point, I don't think the word "absolving" grief is what my work is about in Moon Crossing Bridge. That book was written partly in order to sustain the grieving process long enough for me to absorb the loss. I think the word "attending" is more true to what I was doing. I was noticing all the different inflections in the process of grieving and how lively and varied that experience is, how it quickens everything around you. In the epigraph I say that I'm going to carry the grief, and you have to get hold of an amorphous entity before you can carry it. I would say the book is about discovering a form you can use to move with the experience on its terms, instead of merely constructing a container. "

"I don't think I was looking to pin anything down with my language. In fact I didn't have language at all as I'd once known it; what I had at first was silence. I was certainly unseated by this void. Those poems were just waiting for language as it would come. I had to stay open and leave time and try to be receptive. I was reforming my way of being in language, or it was reforming me. "

Can you feel its pull? There is a sort of tractor beam that draws her attention and her commentary into a line. While she is exploring all aspects of her life, there is at the same time a kind of central focus that is carving out of a mound of words a monumental image of which she is probably only partially aware. Invisible forces are drawing her to these conclusions, these topics, these answers, and this process happens to all poets who chose to tell the truth in print for any length of time. Gallagher continues,

"'She Who Is Untouched by Fire' is a story in my new collection that has also affected space and time. The action of the prose -- a woman having what amounts to an out-of-body experience -- is wave-like. Certain elements keep repeating only to come back slightly changed, which becomes more and more absorbing, until you are really inside her experience and have been lifted out of yourself in the same way that the most wonderful poems can lift you, almost physically, leaving you to hover above the earth. If I've told it right, by the end of that story you feel you're in an afterlife that is also life; it makes a flesh-and-blood ghost of you. Still, I don't know if I'm as inventive with tense in fiction as I might yet become."

In another interview, she said in answer to a question by Daniel Bourne,

"I think it was preparatory to my book, Moon Crossing Bridge, actually. I'm not sure exactly when that poem was written, whether my father had died at that point or not. But we're mortal, our death is inevitable. We're always going to have our nose to that window. Later, I went very, very deeply into the disappearance of my companion and love, Raymond Carver, in Moon Crossing Bridge. And in doing so, of course, you go into your own death space, too. "

There is something in our protoplasm that lines things up for us and makes sense out of the chaos of existence. It defines and refines certain central themes which we cannot release by any conscious act. Carl Jung said that the issues which remain unresolved in our lives return over and over demanding reinvestigation. As poets, who write down little moments of truth everyday, we are more susceptible to these invisible magnetic forces. We tend to emerge with more self-definition after a lifetime of self-examination. There’s no way around it.

1598 words

Kenneth Rexroth: Radical Poet for the Modern Era

2006-01-17T13:31:00.001-08:00

Kenneth Rexroth determined early that he wanted a life of adventure and ground-breaking independence. He was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1905, but moved to Chicago with his aunt when his parents both died within two years. His father was an alcoholic. His mother was chronically depressed, so it is no surprise that he was a rebellious youth, expelled from high school, always the iconoclast. He briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago, but he ran into trouble when he was arrested and jailed after they raided a speakeasy and brothel he regularly attended. It was later alleged that he was part owner of the brothel.

The 1920s were a heady time to advance through your teenage years in Chicago. He worked odd jobs such as being a soda jerk, amateur wrestler, and reporter, all of which heightened his awareness of the underprivileged proletariat. In speakeasies with names like the Dill Pickle Club, the Cellar jazz club and the Wind Blew Inn and from soapboxes on street corners he recited poems of revolutionary socialism. He had little formal education. His real education came from conversations he had on the streets of West Side Chicago about politics, art, jazz and poetry. From his mother’s early home schooling in the classics, he wrote poems laden with classical references to the Greek gods and Roman myths. From his days in the streets, he learned to integrate poetry and jazz. He later wrote that jazz poetry "returns poetry to music and to public entertainment as it was in the days of Homer or the troubadours. It forces poetry to deal with aspects of life which it has tended to avoid in the recent past."

Left-wing politics captured his attention, and he traveled around the country giving soapboxes speeches in favor of the International Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, supporting himself by temporary bits of labor as a horse-wrangler, sheep-herder, and pamphlet salesman for constipation cures. He was briefly a postulant in a monastery near Poughkeepsie where he learned meditation and the value of silence. Soon he took his knapsack to Mexico, South America, and Europe. In Paris, he met leading Surrealists, camped in the wilderness and learned several languages.

He married the painter Andree Shafer and moved back to San Francisco. He viewed marriage as a sacred mystical union. He was married four times. Two of these marriages overlapped. In Rexroth’s view, none of these three statements contradict.

He found publication for his early poems in small journals while pursuing an interest in eastern mysticism. Instead of writing about Greek mythology and philosophy, he now found poetic subject matter in camping, fly fishing, and love affairs. He helped found the San Francisco Poetry Center.

He rejected the formal poetry of his time and supported poets who were reaching for a new kind of freedom in verse. In the 1930s, he corresponded with Ezra Pound and was introduced to the founder of New Directions Press, James Laughlin, who included his work in his 1937 annual. In 1940, New Directions published Rexroth’s first solo volume, In What Hour, which outlines his concern for the fragile ecology of the earth.

His 1944 volume, The Phoenix and the Tortoise, contains poems that outline Rexroth’s objections to war and his fervent affirmation of love and nature. During the Second World War, he may have been involved in helping Japanese-Americans escape from internment camps. By the end of the 1940s, Rexroth had gathered a number of poets of like mind around him in San Francisco. He organized many of the poets who later became known as Beat poets into a weekly salon that featured their emerging works.

The highlight of these readings took place in the fall of 1955 at the Six Gallery when Allen Ginsberg unveiled the first of his poems from Howl, his signature poetry volume. Rexroth and other poets later appeared in court for the defense at Ginsberg’s trial for obscenity. In the 1960s, Rexroth brought a great deal of attention to classically based poetry in his Saturday Review column entitled the “Classics Revisited.” He also focused renewed attention on the Eastern classics when he published translations of ancient poetry from Japan and China.

In 1968, he moved to Santa Barbara where he taught for 6 years before accepting a Fulbright fellowship to study in Japan. At UCSB, Rexroth offended many administrators by speaking out against anti-intellectualism on campus. He saw universities as a false society joined together by the illusion of intellectualism for the purpose of exploitation and dominance. He attacked others as well. Rexroth spent his entire life speaking out against the East Coast literary establishment which, he felt, was stifling fresh social thought. He was a prime mover in establishing a two coast context for modern American poetry.

Of the more than fifty books of poetry and criticism he published in his lifetime, the best known are The Signature of All Things (1950), and Saucy Limericks and Christmas Cheer (1980). The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth did not appear until 2002, twenty years after his death.

Kenneth Rexroth said, "I've never understood why I'm [considered] a member of the avant-garde... I [just] try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life." Kenneth Rexroth, a West Coast anarchist poet to the end, died in 1982 in Montecito. He is buried in Santa Barbara overlooking the sea.

Runaway by Kenneth Rexroth

There are sparkles of rain on the bright
Hair over your forehead;
Your eyes are wet and your lips
Wet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.
Why have you stayedAway so long, why have you only
Come to me late at night
After walking for hours in wind and rain?
Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fireIn you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,

Gic to Har by Kenneth Rexroth

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I rememberComing home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry

2006-01-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

GEVA Theater, Rochester's only professional repertory theater, has announced that my short play, My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry has been selected for professional production January 18th at 8 pm at Writers and Books [740 University Ave]. The performance will include nine other winners of the 2-Pages-2-Characters Playwriting Contest. The show is free and open to the public, but will probably be very well attended. So, come early. Hope to see you there.

The play was written about five years ago as a poem based on a conversation I had with my aging Aunt Dorothy. Some family members and friends will be having dinner at Edibles [704 University Ave.] before the performance starting about 6:15 pm. If you would like to join us, please call me [388-8695] so we can make appropriate reservations.

My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry
a two-page comedy by
Gary Lehmann

SETTING: the confined living room of a senior living center apartment
Mother and daughter sit across from each other in overstuffed chairs.
[Don’t rush delivery. Leave plenty of pauses between the lines.]

MOTHER: My health care worker stole my jewelry.

DAUGHTER: You need a safe.

MOTHER: Not any more.

DAUGHTER: I never see you wearing jewelry.

MOTHER: I don’t.

DAUGHTER: Why did you have it?

MOTHER: I just accumulated it over the years.

DAUGHTER: But if you don’t wear it....

MOTHER: [a little angrily] I might as well give it away. Is that what you mean?

DAUGHTER: Did you?

MOTHER: I can’t recall. [pause] I guess I did. My health care worker’s got it now.

DAUGHTER: Are you sure?

MOTHER: I haven’t seen her wearing it.

DAUGHTER: Does she ever wear jewelry?

MOTHER: Not that I know.

DAUGHTER: Still, if you don’t wear jewelry, and she doesn’t wear jewelry,
whoever has it, it’s in much the same place as it was before.

MOTHER: It’s not about wearing it; it’s about losing it.

DAUGHTER: Did you ever think about it when you had it?

MOTHER: No, not much, but I didn’t have to.

DAUGHTER: Still, now you think about it. Isn’t that better?

MOTHER: I suppose so. I don’t know.

DAUGHTER: Just forget about it then. [very long pause]

MOTHER: What?

The Prospect from Bellevue House

2006-01-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, my wife and I took a bicycle trip around Ontario Canada which included a stop in Kingston, Ontario. There we visited Bellevue House, a lovely mansion on the hill overlooking Kingston harbor. This story, newly re-edited, resulted.

The Prospect from Bellevue House
by
Gary Lehmann

John A. Macdonald, the future first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, knew immediately that he wanted to rent Bellevue House as soon as he saw the advertisement in the Kingston Herald in August, 1848. The well-known land developer, Charles Hales, was down on his luck. The recent rebellions had sent some amongst the merchant community back to London in a panic, leaving Hales exposed to extended vacancies and over-development. He had to consolidate and trim back in order to go on.

Bellevue, Hales' personal residence, had been an extravagance from the first. It was a show piece, an example of all that could be done if money were no object. The house was situated so as to embrace the land. The house sat back on the lot and was built in an "L" shape with an imposing square tower in the middle, where Hales had a unique two-story study with a full view of the world around the house and yard. The pagoda-like roofs prompted the townsfolk down below to call Bellevue the "tea caddy castle." It was exuberant, Italianate, and perched on a rise of land overlooking Kingston harbor, vaguely Carribean in mood. Modest as it was in pure square footage, Bellevue possessed an undeniably baronial feel.

Beneath the flamboyant skin of the villa, lay the solid core of all the sedate Georgian houses Hales had built for others along the waterfront. Made of limestone blocks, locally quarried, the basement was deep and solid to withstand the thrust of repeated frosts. The body of the house was carefully crafted out of Canadian pine, dovetailed and lapped for strength enough to endure winter winds. Inside, painters and grainers covered every inch of the pine doors and window frames to make them look like oak. Such an accommodation was considered clever, not cheap, at the time. The trick was not to make pine look like oak, but rather to make the viewer look twice. It forced attention to detail.

Outside there was a large vegetable garden, an orchard, and some beautiful flower gardens, more for viewing than cutting. When Macdonald arrived in his handsome carriage, Hales was admiring his hollyhocks by the gate. The big blooms flashed all shades of purple and white in their fullness. Their exuberant gaudiness depressed Hales somewhat.

Hales was a smallish man with a large shock of curly red hair. The cane forced him to stoop over some, though most people in society still remembered him as straight and erect, if not over-tall. He exuded confidence and prosperty in his heyday, but just looking at him now convinced even the most casual observer that hard times were not a stranger to this man.

He carried a cane, more as a symbol of his down-trodden status than an actual medical necessity. Mr. Charles Hale, though a developer by trade and therefore an optimist by constitution, wore his deepest apprehensions on his sleeve, if you knew how to read him. His cane was his acknowledgment of weakness.

"Good day to you, sir," he called out in a forced, cheerful voice. To have had to move out of Bellevue was a recognized fall in a business world that depended upon the look of prosperity for half of its commerce.

The man who descended from the carriage was strong and large framed, a lawyer by trade and politician by preference. John A. Macdonald was an outspoken royalist who had recently been cast out of his seat in government into a party of hopeless opposition. Yet, stepping out of his carriage, he looked about himself with the aire of a conquorer. Though the two men had much in common, which they would never acknowledge to one another, the contrast in their physical features could not have been greater.

Macdonald and Hales did not know each other well. Kingston society was small in the 1840's, and so they had naturally met many times before and socialized at a variety of gatherings, but they had had no earlier occasion to become personally acquainted. They met as nominal equals and friends, although in their current circumstances neither of these descriptions was very apt.

While Hales was struggling to regain his position, Macdonald's star was on the rise, though the Draper government of which he had become a major feature, had been rejected at the poles. The people of the province were beset by British laws and taxes and tired of being loyal to a king who used them badly. There was no easy answer. The future was murky.

Macdonald was particularly attracted to Bellevue by the view of the harbor and the fact that the house was both large and roomy, quiet and secluded. The house had a morning room on the ground floor that could be converted into a bedroom for his ailing wife, Isabella. Her debilitating bouts with both hysteria and lethargy made her physical condition unpredictable. Sometimes MacDonald secretly wished she would die so he could marry a more lustrous and useful wife.

"Isa might soon need a wheelchair to get around," he thought to himself as he rode out to meet Hales to discuss terms, "and this design might make a graceful environment for her to enjoy life on a single floor, regardless of her condition."

"A garden, Mr. Macdonald," Hales observed feigning affablity as they shook hands at the gate, "is like a business. You can exert whatever philosophy you wish upon it, but nature shall take it wherever it wills." Macdonald was embarrassed by this opening remark, and walked in silence along the gravel pathway beside Hales toward the main entrance to the house.

"One requires, of course, a good gardner," he replied uncomfortably aware of the dual level of their conversation. Macdonald's awkwardness suggested to Hales that his comment might have revealed more about himself than it did about gardening. He sought to recover himself.

"At my age," he said, "I seek only to keep the day and the night separate. I want my nights uncluttered by the alarums and excursions of the days, and my days unfogged by the need for sleep." Hales' life had been uncluttered by philosophy heretofore, but global reversals in fortune have a way of creating philosophers of the least amongst us. "Well, here is the house," he said waving his hand at the lovely villa, trying to signal to his guest that it was time to move on.

The two men ascended the front steps, surrounded by wisteria, and swiftly reviewed the drawing room, dining room, morning room, and maid's room. They were each wainscoted in fine pine and trimmed out to the finest specifications. The kitchen and wash rooms were small, but would suffice for a home not intended for large format entertaining, and the bedrooms were more than adequate. Only Macdonald himself would sleep above stairs.

"You get good air up here for an invalid," Hales observed as he opened the drawing room windows to demonstrate. A chill, but gentle, breeze enlivened the room. The house was empty now except for these few pieces in the drawing room which had been left for this exact conversation. "One of the reasons I built this house with so many windows was to capture the breezes which waft up the hill from the water and provide natural cooling during the summer."

MacDonald unbuttoned his coat to quietly admire his new gold brocade vest in the peer mirror on the wall. Hales pointed to a pair of heavily carved chairs on either side of the marble fireplace. "Sherry?" Hales offered, trying to maneuver Macdonald into a position from which he could broach the delicate subject of price and terms.

Macdonald nodded but remained standing at the window looking out over the large garden. Perhaps, he thought, this pleasant garden will off-set my political gloom. Hales placed the sherry on the table behind Macdonald, and then turned back to the fireplace. Picking up a large poker, he stirred the fire in the grate to generate a little warmth in the room, but he did not move to close the windows. Even August can have its chilly days.

"I suppose death itself is no more than the completion of nature's way," observed Hales, suddenly fearing the prospect that he never would recover from this slump, "like a garden in winter, I suppose, or the embers of a fire in the grate."

Macdonald turned decidedly from the window, took his assigned seat by the fire and raised his sherry glass for a taste of its sweet liquid. "And what will you require for rent, sir?"

Cane, Jean Toomer’s Modern Voyage of Discovery

2005-12-22T12:56:00.001-08:00

Every human ever born has struggled to some degree with personal identity issues. Buddha struggled with being born too rich. Almost anyone born poor has asked “Why me?” Sometimes questions of identity can consume an entire lifetime.

For Nathan Eugene “Jean” Toomer the issue was racial identity. Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. His grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, was the son of a black slave and the white reconstruction governor of Louisiana. After Toomer’s parents divorced, he moved in with his grandfather in 1909.

He had trouble settling down. After enrolling at six different schools, he went to study law at the University of Wisconsin. Pretty soon he gave that up and moved to New York to enroll in City College. When he got tired of that, he returned to Washington to manage the Howard Theater.

Then in 1922, something happened that changed his life. He took a temporary job in Georgia as a principal for an agricultural and industrial academy. There he learned a great deal from his students about the Black South and the environment of slavery that informed the common heritage of nearly all Black Americans. He became fascinated with the beauty and the harshness of the life he encountered there and fell in love with Negro spirituals and folklore.

Although he never became completely comfortable with his own racial identity, he found he had a great deal in common with Southern Blacks. His skin was so light that he could, and sometimes did, pass for White, but it bothered him that race should have to be the first thing people had to decide about him.

He once said, “I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race.”

In 1922 he described himself this way. “Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. One half of my family is definitely colored.... And, I alone, as far as I know, have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.”

During his four months in Sparta, Georgia, he came to realize the richness of Black African culture, but he also realized the impossibility of continuing rural Southern agricultural ways. The Black man was tortured in one way down South by the vestiges of slavery and tortured in another completely different way up North by the grinding economic forces of free-wheeling capitalism.

Cane was the book that resulted from these realizations. It is a multi-genre effort combining essays, short stories, and poetry into a pastiche of personal portraits. Lauded as a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, the equal of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Jean Toomer’s montage was an effort to try to resolve the conflicting racial tensions he felt within himself.

While certain Georgia clansmen were still lynching Blacks in 1922, Toomer was reaching for a new definition of race relations. The slaves were set free over 50 years earlier and yet the condition of Blacks both in the South and North was deplorable. Toomer had seen both, and his book cried out against all the various kinds of oppression Blacks experienced at that time.

Southern Blacks were still chained to hard labor in the cane fields. Their nights were still dominated by smoke filled skies of burning cane. The North was sometimes even harsher, nothing but asphalt and tears. Toomer writes personalized stories of tragedy and endurance in vivid imagery.

In a way, Toomer was attempting to define the current state of Black citizenship, a nether world that made up Black identity at the time. In so doing, he was also defining his own identity crisis. He felt like a man trapped between cultures, a stranger in all lands.

The three parts of the work are largely set in Georgia, but they bespeak the culture of Blacks who have migrated North to the big cities where jobs were alleged to exist. His style is experimental and sometimes maddeningly abstract. In Part One, the narrator observes rural Southern Black life and finds it merely a transmuted form of slavery. In Part Two, he expresses the struggles of Northern urban Blacks.

Finally, in Part Three he tells the story of Kabnis who returns South late in life to try to resolve the tensions that have dominated him. Instead, he finds a return to Georgia hauntingly unsatisfying. He feels even more alienated than ever.
Here are some examples of his poetry from the book.

Portrait in Georgia
Jean Toomer

Hair--braided chestnut,

coiled like a lyncher's rope,

Eyes--fagots,

Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath--the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

of black flesh after flame.

Reapers
Jean Toomer

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.

His belly close to ground. I see the blade.

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

Song of the Son
Jean Toomer

Pour O pour that parting soul in song,

O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,

Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,

And let the valley carry it along.

And let the valley carry it along.

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,

So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,

Now just before an epoch's sun declines

Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,

Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

In time, for though the sun is setting on

A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;

Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet

To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,

Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,

Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,

Passing before they stripped the old tree bare

One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

An everlasting song, a singing tree,

Caroling softly souls of slavery,

What they were, and what they are to me,

Caroling softly souls of slavery.

From Cane by Jean Toomer. Copyright © 1923

The critic K.R.Graham has said, “It is impossible to discuss all of the tangled threads that weave CANE into the powerfully moving and unorthodox novel of Toomer's voyage of self-discovery. It is often incoherent, filled with evocative recurrent images, and powerful character sketches that leave the reader unfulfilled, confused, and hungry for more. Perhaps it is Toomer's own hunger, expressed in his writing, that the reader picks up.”

Bob Newman adds “The characters appear in pale colors, dressed in weariness and often verging on madness. Blue saxophone tones amidst the fogs of prejudice and blind hatred for all intelligent behavior by a despised minority. What more could a gentle man, human and tender, make of such craziness? Poetry, broken images that pass slowly, pale by smoke, pale by moonlight, whisper of yellow globes, and decline of that distant hope that someday ‘they’ would learn.”

Toomer’s influences included William Blake and Walt Whitman. Toomer also admired the broken, yet oddly direct styling of James Joyce. He identified with Black writers such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. In 1922, the Howard University Players attempted to perform Toomer’s play, Balo, based on the sketches in Cane, but it was not well received, and the next year, he failed to find a producer for his play Kabnis.

Later on in life, Toomer followed the preachings of a Russian mystic named Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff whose spell took Toomer away from literary work for a long while. His religious quest took him into Yoga and other Eastern beliefs.

Although he continued writing, his literary career was pretty much at an end. He went into an extended depression after his wife, the novelist Marjorie Latimer, died giving birth in 1932. He died in 1967, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he withdrew to observe the tenets of Quakerism. His works most obviously influenced Alice Walker, but his influence is much wider than that. He is by no means alone in searching for a new sense of Black identity. Especially in these multi-cultural days, Cane is finding a new audience. Although it is a hard work to read, its modernist approach to race in America is increasingly popular.

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"Reporting from Fallujah" nominated for Pushcart Prize

2005-11-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

The editors of Gival Press have announced that they have nominated my poem "Reporting from Fallujah" for the 2005 Pushcart Prize. This is a great honor, even if I don't get included in the final cut. I am very pleased.

"Reporting from Fallujah" was written almost ten years ago now, long before Sadam Hussein's regime was toppled. The poem was based on an actual reporter's account of his own near-abduction while reporting in Iraq.

Here is the poem as it appeared in the journal Purple Dream in June of 2004 and as later anthologized in Poetic Voices without Borders by Gival Press in May of 2005. Wish me luck!

Reporting from Fallujah

by
Gary Lehmann

I think it was the noise of the hob-nail boots
on the stairs at the end of the hall that first woke me.

In a place like this an abduction or disappearance
is always possible and it pays to make some plans.

I jumped from my bed and straightened the covers,
throwing two pillows against the wall.

I grabbed my bath robe and paddled toward the
sliding glass door that led to the open porch.

As I passed through the door, I slipped the latch
so it would lock behind me as I went out.

I just closed it, when I began to hear the pounding
of a bludgeon and the shouts of angry men.

I crawled under the plastic table and backed myself
into the far corner of the tiny porch.

Then I reached out for the leg of one chair
to further obstruct the view. That was all I could do.

The Weird, Wacky World of Russell Edson

2005-11-07T17:17:00.000-08:00

Michel Delville’s book The American Prose Poem [1998] traces the roots of the prose poem to genre-bending works by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and Kenneth Patchen. In the late twentieth century, groundbreaking work was done by Robert Bly and Charles Simic, but the father of the modern prose poem, without a doubt, has been the reclusive Connecticut poet, Russell Edson.

Edson was born in 1935 and lives in Connecticut yet. He wrote prose poems long before they became fashionable and for sheer fabulism are unequaled. Over the years, he has published twenty-two books, mostly of prose poems. His most accessible book, entitled The Tunnel: Selected Works of Russell Edson, is an anthology of poems from his earlier volumes.

Edson’s work is hard to describe in traditional terms. It’s fanciful and yet serious, playful yet philosophical, funny yet meditative. Most of his poems pre-suppose that an alternative universe exists where the light shines on ideas with particular intensity. In this place, events parallel ours to inform the issues we half-muddle over back here in reality. Many of his issues are scientific or philosophical, but they are never long-winded or boring. Edson condenses his commentary into a short parable.

Such a unique poetic consciousness had to come from unique ancestry. His father was a New York cartoonist. At 16, Russell was admitted on scholarship to the Art Students League in 1951. Later on, he attended the New School for Social Research. By 1960 his attention turned to poetry. His writing skills were honed at Black Mountain College from which so much late twentieth century talent emerged. Cross these odd biographical elements, and the basic geology of Edson’s conscious landscape emerges. His approach to life and poetry is so totally unique that OINK! Press in Chicago actually published a book entitled Edson’s Mentality [1977].

His poetry is simultaneously wacky and surreal, as if he were writing a word cartoon. But these cartoons have a moral in them and reflect our most serious issues. Into a common setting marches a puppet who enacts the principles behind our faith in the automobile, cloning, relativity, ego-centrism, possessive motherhood, or the theory of evolution. Out of his poems come readers with a new perspective on life.

Not everyone gets Edson, and he knows it. In his book Edson’s Mentality, he acknowledges that his brand of poetry does not suit all tastes. "Take it or leave it, I make it a point not to be a celebrity, most of whom are uncreative scum feeding on the public attention; if I have any public value, it is in my published works, not in my secret dreams. Information as to how I scratched, and where, will make interesting twitterings after I'm dead; not while I still live, and still scratch."

DARWIN DESCENDING by Russell Edson

Do you believe in evolution, oh, thing of easy answers?
Do you believe Darwin was descended from a thing more jaw than head?
…Imagine an early Darwin roving the trees, nostalgic for the future…
A female Darwin slaps him on the back of his small, but promising head; whatcha thinking about, ya brainless brute? she peeps.
I was just wondering about the origin of species, he twitters.
You haven't the brains of a modern chimpanzee, she screeches.
Yeah, but I think that's where I'm evolving; a large-brained primate with an opposable thumb, with which I will oppose all of nature, twitters Darwin.
Oh, stop it, you're hardly on to tools; why, you haven't even fooled with fire yet, she hoots.
Yeah, but one day, Darwinette, I'm gonna talk good, and even learn how to write talking with a fountain pen…
Promises, promises….

But, as we all know, Darwin did descend.
It was at a cocktail party, and he had been roving the upstairs halls looking for indoor plumbing.
And now he was returning via the carpeted stairway.
Everyone turned and applauded: look, the descent of Darwin!
From The Wounded Breakfast (1985)

THE FAMILY MONKEY by Russell Edson

We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather recklessly with funds carefully gathered from grandfather's time for the purchase of a steam monkey.
We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric or a gas monkey.
The steam monkey was no longer being made, said the monkey merchant.
But the family always planned on a steam monkey.
Well, said the monkey merchant, just as the wind-up monkey gave way to the steam monkey, the steam monkey has given way to the gas and electric monkeys.
Is that like the grandfather clock being replaced by the grandchild clock?
Sort of, said the monkey merchant.

So we bought the electric monkey, and plugged its umbilical cord into the wall.
The smoke coming out its fur told us something was wrong.
We had electrocuted the family monkey.
From The Clam Theater (1973)

Poetry Starter at Just Poets

2005-10-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

On November 5 at 1:30 pm, in the Lavery Library at St. John Fisher College on East Ave., Rochester, NY, I'll be giving a little talk on writing poetry and then providing a poetry starter. These are my notes toward that talk. Maybe they will inspire you to come, or, if you can't make it, provide a poetry starter for you right now.

Poetry has both a public and a private face. All poetry has to be personal. It has to reflect emotions that the poet feels deeply to make the poem real. On the other hand, if it is too personal, it loses its ability to communicate to readers.

Frequently, the inspiration for a poem arrives while I am looking at the news, reading books, or watching CNN. An interesting event occurs somewhere in that informational soup. That is where the poem begins. Say I read that Sigmund Freud opened a drawer behind his sofa in 1937 as he packed to leave Europe to escape the Nazis. In this drawer he discovered a fur hat which belonged to his father, Josef. It reminds him of a time when he was ten. His father had overcome financial difficulties to achieve a level of prosperity again. He bought himself this fur hat to wear on long walks through the woods around Vienna.

One day a man confronted him while on one of his walks, and called him a Jew. "You Jew" he yelled at him and he threw his fur hat in the mud puddle they were both facing. Later on, Sigmund's father told him this story to warn him about Anti-Semitism, but Sigmund was a spirited child and chastised his father for not fighting back.

I wrote this poems several years ago, and I now think that the reason that this story interested me is that I had some issues with my father. He worked for 38 years for the Gleason Works, an engineering firm in Rochester. After a while, he didn't advance as fast as he wanted to in the firm, but he stuck with it. I blamed him for that and I know he understood my reproach. Many decades later, I stayed at a univerity job much longer than was good for me. How could I have been so stupid as to do the same thing I blamed my father for doing?

Here is the poem that resulted:

In the Drawer

by
Gary Lehmann

In the drawer
behind the couch
Sigmund Freud
kept a fine fur hat
his father wore
to walk through
the Parks of Vienna.

In the park
behind the wall
Sigmund Freud’s father
met a man dressed in velvet
who called him a Jew.
“You Jew!” he said
pushing his fur hat into a puddle.

In the mind
behind the sofa in the drawer
Sigmund Freud
kept his disgust for the father
who did not answer back
and wrung muddy water
from his fine fur hat.

It is interesting that my personal reaction to my father is not an explicit part of this poem, but it certainly is part of the emotion in the poem. If I hadn’t had that personal experience, there would be no reason for me to have any insight into Freud’s dilemma. After all, he attacked his father for not confronting racist views and now, in 1939, he was doing the exact same thing himself. Life hands you these little insights from time to time. I just don’t think that every poem has to focus directly on the poet per se.

I think good poetry merges the public and the private. The personal aspect does not have to be explicit. It is present in the emotion that drives the public story. You will only find interesting stories that have some personal connection, even if you don't exactly understand what that connection might be at the time you are writing the poem.

Recently, I have been interested in the situation that developed at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans as Hurracane Katrina broke through the levees that protected the city from flooding. As the water rose, public power cut off. Later on, the back-up generator, which some genius located in the basement of the hospital, also cut out.

Suddenly, the first floor of the hospital was flooded. All the nurses and doctors rushed to help get patients up to the second floor. The evevators didn't work. There was a lack of coordination because the intercom system was out. The heavy hospital beds had to be abandoned, so every patient had to be put on a stretcher and carried to the second floor where there were no rooms available for them and not enough beds.

In every other room in the hospital, a simultaneous emergency occurred. The ventilators stopped ventilating. The operating rooms became inoperable. The suction machines stopped sucking. The place was in total darkness. Heart monitors stopped monitoring. Everything stopped at once. The modern hospital is designed to be powered. When stuff goes off all at once, you have the day from hell.

Now in the aftermath, Public Health officials in New Orleans are examining 45 bodies in the morgue to see if any of them were helped out of their rapidly diminishing lives by desperate doctors or nurses who couldn't cope with the sudden overload of emergencies. What would you do if you saw a patient drowning in blood you couldn't suction away? How do you save the life of a patient who needs constant ventilation, when the ventilator stops? What would you do to help a patient in extreme pain when you knew there was nothing to do to help? This same emergency is happening not just in this room but in every room on the ward. Similar life threatening emergencies are occurring on every floor through every door all at the same time.

In war, medics triage patients with the priority given to those patients who have the best chance of survival. That means that sometimes really injured patients have to die so many more easily saved patients can be returned to the battle. This is an accepted ethical practice in wartime, but is this the same?

I'm interested in this problem for a poem, because I think that in my life I have made decisions which affected other people's lives. The poem may be about the impact of Katrina on Memorial Hospital patients and staff, but behind it will be my own feelings and experiences informing the emotions I attempt to convey.

So, take some time to consider your own issues as relate to this tragedy and see if there isn't a poem in you about this situation. Come at it from whatever perspective engages your interest. Find the hot spot in the story and dig into it. Underneath there somewhere will be your feelings and experiences, but if you are like me, it might take weeks or months before that relationship becomes clear. Start by locating the part of the story that moves you most and then just explore it.

Be well and do good writing.

Public Lives and Private Secrets http://www.foothillspublishing.com/

2005-10-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

We all admire great people, but we often don't understand what it is about them that we admire. Their private lives are hidden in dusty autobiographies which only occasionally reveal an instant which illuminates their greatness in a moment that lasts no longer than the flash of a paparazzo's camera.

This book of poems gathers up a parcel of those moments, first in great people's lives and then in the lives of ordinary people, to reveal something of what makes them of interest to us.

Each of us has experienced secret moments which have exposed, if only for a heartbeat, our true character. Sometimes we have hurried away from these naked moments, but at other times, we have had the courage to look at them fearlessly, trying to see what magic alchemy they might hold which can turn them into personal gold.

Public Lives & Private Secrets is an invitation to explore the meaning of the secret moments in your life.

Gary Lehmann teaches literature and poetry at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He annually publishes his poetry in journals around the world, delivers public lectures on history and literature, and publishes articles for journals and newspapers on literature and politics. He has written novels, several non-fiction books, and a play about Susan B. Anthony. During the summers, he interprets nineteenth century trades. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature and History from Duke University and lives with his wife, Wendy, in his long-time hometown, Penfield, NY.

From the book:

Cubist Nightmare
Paris 1914

Picasso returned from Spain
his arms loaded with cubist canvases,
the best he ever painted.

He filled his apartment on rue Schoelcher,
relishing walls that shouted out a new vocabulary
that explained the way people really live.

But his old apartment house seemed empty and dreary.
His buddies Georges Braque and Andre Derain
deserted him to join the madmen in the trenches.

As if this weren't enough, his only remaining friend,
Guillaume Apollinaire, joined up too.
The season of emptiness descended.

Picasso moved to Montrouge
where there was at least some life
in the cabarets and coffee houses.

He skulked about like an old man
sipping cognac and coffee into the late night
and brooding on the masques of war.

He returned to Montrouge to discover that a thief had
stolen a bolt of linen cloth he had not yet stretched.
The insult hit him like a machine gun bullet.

The world it seemed stood so upside down
that it could not differentiate a cubist painting
that explained the whole impending disaster

from a blank bolt of linen cloth.

Lord Byron Takes a Swim

Shelley's drowning was terrible enough, but
his cremation on the beach was unbearable.
Soldiers split his skull with a spade
digging the body out of the sand.

His skin was chalky gray from the quicklime.
The water-soaked corpse took hours to burn.
The fire was very hot and slow.
Children gathered from the town to watch.

Byron was on edge because he knew that
Shelley had dared the storm only to taunt him.
He refused to be guided by good sense.
Had he drowned himself just for spite?

Then Shelley's skull split open and
the brains ran out into the upturned
skull plate dancing and boiling in the fire.
Byron could endure no more.
He stripped his clothes and swam into the sea.
If only he had refused stupid competitions.
Shelley's small boat was too fragile for storms.
Lord Byron swam for miles, all alone.

As the cold began to inhabit his chest,
he wondered if he had the courage to drown.
Did he deserve to live now that Shelley
had found such a heroic end to life?

Byron turned back toward shore.
More wood was being added to the fire.
Everyone was bored with burning dead poets.
Lord Byron emerged from a heartless sea.

Anais made love...

Anais made love all wrapped in irony.
She stroked her lover like a pet boa,
the snake within and the tigress without.

Anais made love in willful uncertainty,
always aware of the tentative touch, the quotable caress,
the trespass between raw nerves and the gift of words.

Anais made love like a cellist,
never knowing for sure whether she was the musician
or the sonorous body that made the sound.

ISBN 0-941053-59-8

The Authenic Voice of Wendell Berry

2005-10-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

Immediately after the American Revolution, it occurred to people that a new country had been founded and a new concept of what it means to be an American was required. On the one hand, Thomas Jefferson offered a vision of an agrarian America. The land is fertile and he saw life on the farm as a healthy, self-sufficient lifestyle suitable for a newly free people. On the other hand, Alexander Hamilton, born into a mercantile family, saw the future of America in industry. Ample natural resources and water power made America the ideal place to develop the industrial revolution without all the hindrances of Old World conventions.

Of course, as it turned out, the country went in both directions – at least until recently when big government has regulated family farming almost out of existence. Land lies fallow. People founder in their rootless urban environments, and America has, for the first time in its history, begun to be a net importer of almost everything.

The poet and farmer, Wendell Berry has taken up where Jefferson left off and offers in his writings a call for Americans to return to agriculture and self-sufficiency as a cure for our modern woes. Some see this as unrealistic, but others call it visionary, an authentic call for clarity and harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth.

Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky in 1934 in tobacco country. He went to the University of Kentucky where he obtained a Masters Degree and met and married his wife, Tanya who has become has lifelong companion and first reader. After studying writing at Sanford University, he took his family to Europe for 5 years on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

When he returned to Kentucky, he settled down on a small family farm in Port Royal, near where the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers meet. "It is a real farm,” he has been quoted as saying, “not a writer-professor's country estate. Its chores include milking cows and currying horses, and mucking out stalls and mending fences and mowing hay and all other time-consuming sometimes back-breaking, labor that family agriculture requires"

He had seen what the world has to offer in all its modernity, and he has come back home to chose the land and the life of a farmer. Even as he taught at the University of Kentucky, he simultaneously farmed the land with a team of horses and a plow, natural fertilizers and herbicides. Even as he wrote and published 30 books, he maintained a simple lifestyle at home, no indoor plumbing, limited use of electricity, and lots of hard work and fresh air.

He has been remarkably productive as an author having written 25 books of poetry, 16 volumes of essays, 11 novels and short story collections.

He does his writing by a window during daytime when he does not require electricity. "It is best, for me when I can write every day, from breakfast until noon. That's about as long at a stretch as I can hope to write well." He works with a pencil. Then his wife transcribes each page and types out a draft copy which she reviews with him. He has resisted the almost universal tendency to write on a computer, because it will make his writing no better and will disrupt the creative harmony that he has had for so many years with his wife.

"I write in longhand, with a pencil, and make many changes and erasures as I go along. Every morning, before I begin, I read over and correct the work of the morning before. When I have finished a chapter or a story or essay, I read it aloud to Tanya, my wife, and make the corrections that this reading suggests to her and to me. Before she types it, I read it again and make further changes. Between typescript and publication many more changes may be made."

Despite this somewhat isolated existence, Berry writes about modern life. In a 1999 essay entitled “The Failure of War” he asks, ”How many deaths of other people’s children are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None . . . Don’t kill any children for my benefit.”

In his essay entitled “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” he asks some crucial questions about the underlying causes of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Would it have been necessary if we had adopted a more civilized idea of global economy? How is public education being used to create a predatory society? What would we have to do to become peacekeepers in the world?

“The serious question is whether you're going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people.”

In The Art of the Commonplace, he offers an agrarian alternative to modern urban culture. He feels that environmentalists have been sidetracked into a focus on wild lands when they should be looking at the overall benefits of small-scale agriculture.

In his poetry book, Given, his “Sabbath Poems” transcribe poetry that arose from his long–time habit of taking Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”

In his book The Long-Legged House, he sums up his whole writing philosophy in just nine words. “What I stand for is what I stand on.” For more than 40 years now, Wendell Berry has produced poetry and other writing that reflects a life centered on the land and the life of the farmer. His work is spiritual without being religious, authentic without being corny, honest without being unrealistic.

Still, you can’t please everyone. Currently on Amazon.com, one of Berry’s books of poetry is reviewed by an anonymous reader who says, “I thought this book was one of the most boaring [sic] books I have ever read. If you ask me I thought they should of selcted [sic] different poems by Wendell Berry. None of them were good. I don't reccomend [sic] this book to anyone!” This review features 3 spelling errors in just 4 sentences. I suspect that Berry would see this review as symptomatic of what he has been trying to say his whole life.

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