Selected Memories

“You know, your bike tire is low on air.” I said. She had stopped and was looking at me. The party was over and she was about to get on her way home. “I don’t have a bike pump.” she said indifferently. “Oh that’s alright. I could leave one in your box. I’ve got a little one that I use for my bike. It works great.” She said, “I’m not a goal oriented person." and rode off.

“I don’t know where I am or who I’m talking to.” I had said to Aric while laying on a clean bed at a cabin somewhere east of Portland Oregon. I really didn’t know at the time. It was a bachelor party and it was the first night. Greg had given me some kind of opiate, and mixed with the absinthe, booze, and pot, it just knocked me out. I went up stairs to give it a rest. Aric came up and started talking to me, as he does sometimes when I am trying to pass out. I was trying to listen but faded out. He reminded me what I had said sometime later.

“No matter how much you exercise you’ll never be healthy.” Greg repeated back to me. “You know Tyler, you just say the most amazing things. All of a sudden, you just spit out these pearls of wisdom. No matter how much I exercise I’ll never be healthy. Wow.” Of course at the time I really thought he meant it. In retrospect I realized that he was being sarcastic, and that he was trying to indicate to me that I should shut my mouth. At the time I felt encouraged.

Three Quotes

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“I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.” –Ernest Hemingway, from “Moveable Feast”

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“I doubt that there were precedents for the ceremonies that opened the Master’s last game. Black made a single play and white a single play, followed by a banquet.”-Yasunari Kawabata, from “The Master of Go”

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"Pac-Man’s character is difficult to explain even to the Japanese—he is an innocent character. He hasn’t been educated to discern between good and evil. He acts more like a small child than a grown-up person. Think of him as a child learning in the course of his daily activities. If some one tells him guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns. But he would most probably eat any gun, even the pistols of the policemen who need them." -Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man

“Socio-economic factors are of limited explanatory power.” -NYT 3/26/06

It has come to my attention lately that a question concerning my poetry practice needs to be addressed: I write poetry, or do I write souped up narrative, getting lost in brambles by design. It would seem that largely, as long as I am simply removing chunks of my notebook and reworking them into appropriate forms, forms that look like poetry, borrowed forms and forms half filled, I think an argument would have to be made that I am not writing poetry because I am not engaging in challenging my means of communication, to say something I haven’t said before. There are times that I have done so, and do so, but I think if I err, I err on the side of presenting a mystical narrator rather than writing a poem, in love with myself as I can be.

Perhaps there is some merit in this, this engagement with the self (an idea of the self) that falls outside of narrative, and back into the category of new language, found or noticed or created. I think this is what Liz was known for, challenging these ideas of self specifically through language, as if talking to yourself on the boundary of self. In terms of prose, self appearing in or as or creating a mythic narrator and openly questioning the legitimacy of that myth. Poetic prose, prose poetry: challenging our ideas of narrative. Is this less than or equal to pure poetry? Where does it belong?

Thinking about Tod and Forest, to a degree, their work is very much about the language interaction and intersection with itself, a persons’ idea of the poem. However not everyone can be T.S. Eliot, and as much as I respect his writing, I usually do not choose to engage with poetry on a such a personal level. And by this I mean I usually do not take poetry as the primary “topic” of my poem, or say take poetry as a thing as my motivator for writing. Sometimes yes, but there are stories I need to tell and jokes I want to make. What is unfortunate that my multi-interest in poetry and writing, is not seen as a serious engagement with poetry, and this is true, it’s not a serious engagement with language but an interest in mediating my own personal narrative. Is this poetry? Not always, but sometimes.

So I guess I can’t blame them for not taking my writing seriously. Nor can I blame Jon Kinsella for ripping to shreds “The Revisionist” or Ed’s insistence that she doesn’t understand my poems. After all, the majority of what I write does not qualify as poetry on a literary level, and so many times have I noticed that a person’s interest in my work is tightly bound to a person’s interest in my person. Without that, I’m not sure the majority of my poetry makes any difference to anybody. It’s simply pop music or something that exists for entertainment purposes, and they’ve got to call it like they see it and we don’t mind.

If poets weren’t so intent on impressing their peers and instead were writing for themselves, than maybe more people would read poetry that doesn’t manipulate them in obvious ways. I do believe that the nature of engagement within language is a relative phenomenon in that what is new for some is not new to others. Professionals, I suppose, make it their business to know what is new, and old.

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The division of labor continues.

Three Occurrences with Birds

Found a dead red tail hawk when I went to pee. Driving with my father out in the country side for some reason, I was about five and needed to releave myself. We saw it and picked it up, putting it into a trash bag and in the trunk. The DNR told us, after affirming that we weren’t the ones who killed it, that they had no use for it, and that maybe a university or school could use it for research. We contacted my grade school, I was in second grade at the time. They told us that they had no use for it unless it was stuffed and we weren’t about to do that. Why was it dead? It was probably killed from the power lines. There were no noticeable injuries to its body. It was warm and loose when we picked it up.

A hawk perched outside a fledgling bookstore. This one could have been a sign. Like a wolf falling from the sky into the arms of a child with a speech impediment. A sign of future glory. The store was in Brooklyn, owned by a friend of mine. I had helped him build the bookshelves and did the walls for him, painting and repair. In the end I had felt somewhat edged out of the operation, not that I had invested anything other than my time, but I had felt that I had helped him and the bookstore a considerable amount and was hoping to be a part of the bookstore’s future, to be included in some of the decision making in the bookstore’s future. It didn’t work out that way but the store is doing well.

An owl flew up from the middle of the road, a long night in a strange town; the key had broken off in the car’s lock. Jake and I had been painting at Pam’s weekend home in the very Southwest corner of Massachusetts, a town called Ashley Falls. One night we were feeling a little stir crazy and went out to a town about thirty miles north, where there was a kind of nightlife. We wandered around, making our longest stop by a group a street musicians. They were just high school kids but sitting with them made us feel as if we were a part of something larger. As we were leaving I turned the key too hard in a lock that was broken anyway. We called Pam and she came with an extra set of keys. Its wings were huge.

october when the weather was reasonable

Instead of wasting our time here on earth why don’t we gather our own merciful point of reference and celebrate instead the undivided likeness of reciprocity, lost in another world the melody of insurrection and divided unto one’s own lawn, a lawn in a development the ugliness of misappropriated wealth: a boat, a dune buggy, a hammock seldom used and all writhing within the constraints of a single yard, forgetting to speak and then resolving to listen more carefully. Mosquitoes in the morning people disturbed in their sleep. Housing development on the outskirts of Madison, the heart of the heart of the housing development.

train through oregon in late august

Over an uncertain number of years I’ve felt my moral compass or certainty of the right thing to do or say degrade to the point where these judgments become murky. It is not that I’m losing any sense or missing anything but simply making other choices, perhaps making choices that had not been presented to me in one form or the other, the best choices when relayed back to my cohorts reckon or reflect in smiles or admiration as if their old compasses have not changed the bend of conservatism the wild things we used to do where if I were a kid I’d steal a pack or gum or how I would never do such a thing through fear now unable or put in a position where there are choices that perhaps my cohorts had come across at earlier periods whereas I having been well protected am functioning as a child awed at the majesty of morals gone awry or of the trouble we begin to make for ourselves when we stop telling people what we’re afraid of and then we wake up unable to tell the person next to us what we were dreaming of as if any judgment were too much to take not a single decision fit the world ended up upended the questions would not come instead of buying paused to think what I have.

two demons riding a severed arm a man with a large oblong head being held and ridden by a laughing child a teacher holding a scroll being mobbed by children two children playing a game of dice a man reclining against a writing table petting a dog a chrysanthemum a fat man holding a large sack two men riding on the back of a large carp a man with a sword heading towards a clump of trees a boy riding the back of an ox while playing the flute a young man kneeling with a shoe next to an old man riding a mule a man dreaming of eleven little people in a word bubble a woman raising her right hand just above her face a large man with a large weapon stroking his beard a family fishes at the shore a man struggles with an octopus a calm look on his face in ivory and in excellent condition