What Needs No Myth

What Needs No Myth was read by Adam Fieled at Personal Mythologies II at KWH on September 20, 2003.

after William Butler Yeats

The actuality of summer leaves wavering—
water gushing from springs— wind redolent
with sap— will never be enough to fill great
chasms of self-consciousness, emptiness of

death-fearing despair. If we could only learn
to watch waves of the sea— what needs no
myth never stops coming. No Sphinx waits in
the desert— nothing slouches towards Bethlehem—

no preternatural reality waits to replace what
never was. Ghosts predominate— slouch, blood-
dimmed tide built into them. Meanwhile, actual
falcons manifest the miracle of flight— harbingers

of the endless— winging the air, persevering.
It is a matter of mathematics, of where the numbers
end. Or space, our real home— inscrutably expansive,
unbelievable. There is no judgment in space.

Asteroids come out of the void— full-bodied, hurtling,
bent on something. Stars live and die, to no
appreciable avail comprehensible to us. There is
enough wonder in the Universe to befuddle

a thousand sages. Jesus on the cross is simple
by comparison. Each reductive model bends
the Collective Unconscious further towards
breakage. Sodden with suffering, the great

unassimilated incorrigibly search beneath
the stratosphere. Who understands that
breaking the circle is a precondition to well-
roundedness? Having achieved existence,

even Buddha sat by the bo tree a little
eternity, rounding myths into pebbles, pebbles
into myths—

Revealing Mystic Truths

 Revealing Mystic Truths concludes Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

One primary accusation that gets leveled at modern poetry is that it exists in a sort of solipsistic vacuum, a little bubble. Poets write for each other, for the most part; there is no real audience. Sadly, it’s the truth. This was affirmed to me by a little Google experiment (if you’ve never tried the Google game, I highly recommend it; hours of ego-belittling fun); it seems that one song by The Who has more Google hits than John Ashbery, the big, bad, post-modern Daddio of American letters. One could derive two possible inductive conclusions from this— serious poetry is a sophisticated, demanding art, too demanding for the average money-grubbing, or Britney-worshipping, or Britney-grubbing, or money-worshipping American philistine. Or, serious poetry has degenerated into such an academic farce of linguistic hi-jinx that nobody gives a fuck, and rightly so. Regrettably, I would lean toward the latter conclusion.

It follows that I don’t take much inspiration from contemporary poetry. The post-modern ideal loses its potency on the page, for me at least. Where post-modernism finds its apotheosis is in conceptual art— installations, videos, some paintings. Bruce Nauman is perhaps the single greatest exponent of post-modernism that America has produced. For one thing, he’s simple. He’ll film himself painting his balls, or walking around the perimeter of a square, or imitating a fountain with his mouth. Psycho-minimalism, Frank Stella calls it. What it evokes is, perhaps not coincidentally, a stoner’s world— skewed, tweaked, a little bit uncomfortable. There’s something Beat about it, a bit of Zen, a bit of Beckett. It definitely has all the charm of novelty for an East Coast audience, who tend to expect bold, definite gestures, rather than vague, indefinite ones.

I wanted to write a poem that would capture all these elements in text. In this case, it seemed appropriate to live discipline, and conventional notions of craft behind, ending up with Kerouac’s “first thought, best thought” dictum being manifest. This is an unedited poem, straight from the belly of the beast, which, if the beast is called Poesy, may be a rather unpleasant thought. In fact, I have grave doubts about this piece, and if you’ve never seen Nauman’s work, it may make no sense to you at all. However, Brian likes it, and to the extent that I let him play Mikey, on the old Life commercials, it’s a good enough reason for me to share it with you. Just as postscript, I must admit that through dubious means I attained Bruce Nauman’s address in the New Mexico desert, and sent him a copy of this poem. I have yet to hear back. It’s just called To Bruce Nauman:

The Mister who goes beyond recognition
of clichés of iron-bound self-hood
regenerating new notions that clank
mad paint onto our being, beating at
the doors of universities like Genet a thief
but a marijuana consciousness of absurdity
epitomizing West Coast anti-notions walking around
the perimeters of art definitions in a ten-gallon hat,
with mescal on tap and breeding horses to boot, boots jangling
among the mind’s fatal mood clowns, with
hard-ons to be bent over, so wicked into
the art-world that will not recover
from earnest strangeness made concrete
creating new forms like something else,
a convention of Jehovahs Witnesses,
better yet the troupe of players that caught
the conscience of Claudius doing Beckett,
Nauman playing Pozzo, Picasso’s ashes set
onstage in place of Vladimir and Estragon,
while Lucky gets to be Jasper Johns or
something, concluding that to make up is
to fall down, to fall down is to take form,
to take form is to become a fountain,
and some fountains are worth making—

See him square the circle in white shirt
as the day rages blankly outside, too tired
of its ephemeral heart to even conclude
immediately, squares of seasons apt to linger,
then emptiness, as though this funny project
were a mandala of Buddha, to prove that life
is not a circle, but rather sharp definite
edges, with many clusters of shoddy wood between
loaves of stale craving-bread, one shoulder
raised higher than other, bare feet slow
but mad as Nijinsky, make it a ritual
to feed soul’s need not for religion itself
but for the feeling of religion, the joy of
being bounded, picture itself presented as
square, tiny in a little book I ordered
two years ago in a fit of delirium, now
I’ve propped it up like a collapsible urn of
ashes of dead heroes, only the captain
sits with horses watching the wheels of
temporal anti-tenderness spin, conventional
concepts raised up then razed, as in r-a-z-e-d,
does he still have the black pants I wonder?
Maybe he’s just a ghost or an astral spirit,
somebody’s Ariel—

Simple, strategic, rolling around on the floor
looking into the camera’s un-droll eye with
hyper-droll drollness, essence of droll but
somehow twisted beyond mere Dada ha-ha
into indeterminate snickers of profound weirdness
that will eventually beget a sullen fame
spreading but not reaching cactus-y wilderness
where in summertime the living I guess is easy
at least more so than playing with your balls
not that the minimal has no weight but
that such weight leaves no room for developments
of a righteously figurative nature unless
one has sophisticated intellectual equipment
which, of course, he does—

The Tapestry of American History '03

The Tapestry of American History '03 was used as an introduction by Adam Fieled to Personal Mythologies II at Kelly Writers House, on September 20, 2003.

Two young writers, with similar roots and a similar itinerary— Philly ‘burbs to State College to NYC to Center City Philadelphia— letting loose, talking turkey, letting turkey, talking loose. We will open up vistas for you that have, as of yet, remained unexplored. We will prove that Dave Eggers does not hold a monopoly on Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius; that Jhumpa Lahiri is not the only uncannily masterful Interpreter of Maladies; that Zadie Smith is not the only wunderkind with White Teeth. In short, we are staking a claim for ourselves as potential literary lions, and definitely established literary cubs. We are asking you to join us on a magical mystery tour through the perilous interior, the delicately structured psyche, the exquisite nooks and crannies of the artistic temperament.

We know that Mahmoud Abbas has stepped down; that President Bush is asking Congress for eighty-seven billion dollars to complete a misguided debacle of an imperialist conquest; that more than half the country is aware of the current administration’s idiocy, yet remains convinced that Bush will be unbeatable next year; that Tony Blair has inordinately big ears, as does President Bush; that Donald Rumsfeld is best post-modern poet since Robert Creeley; that Condeleeza Rice brings a bag lunch to the White House every day, containing pb & j with the crusts cut off, a Little Debbie snack, and a Juicy Juice. Amidst the awful offal of an empire in decline, what place for an artist?

We’re the ones that blow the horns; the ones that snicker venomously into typewriters; the ones that see portents in a garbage truck, and an Imagistic firmament of the boardwalk in Wildwood. We’re in Montreal, strutting down the Rue Saint Denis, rehearsing fragments of Baudelaire poems with which to astonish the natives. We are teaching a classful of students on 9-11, running from a building, experiencing transcendent horror, hugging strangers, being impressed by metaphysical scallywags. We are not here to be noticed, but to notice ourselves. We are not here to change things, we are here to watch things change. We won’t cure anything, or we might, but we won’t know it. In short, we are here to create the tapestry of American history, 2003, because, like it or not, we are Americans.

With that, let us begin at a moseying pace towards our Olympian destination. Brian Freedman holds a BA from Penn State and an MA from NYU. His writing has appeared in Wine Spectator, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and in the vaults of heaven. He has just completed his first novel, Shock Art.

Halloween and the First Person Singular

Halloween and the First Personal Singular was used to introduce A Feast of Halloweens at Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003
.

A funny thing has been happening to me lately whenever I attempt to compose a poem. Maybe it’s age; maybe it’s maturity; maybe it’s the pervasive influence of post-modernism and its paradigmatic exponents— Ashbery, Creeley, and the rest. Whatever the cause, I suddenly feel very shaky whenever I find myself using “I” in a poem. In younger and more innocent days, I would bandy the first person singular about with unbounded relish, as though my subjective impressions, emotional vicissitudes, and personal experiential reactions were the stuff of Muse-worthy poesy, and, you know, sometimes I was right. Maybe one in ten times. I could afford to shoot my poetic arrows recklessly because I wasn’t really an adult yet, with adult concerns, responsibilities, and hang-ups. Now all that’s changed, I see the broader realities, and “I” seems like something that must be transcended.

The catch is that I still like to write autobiographical poems. The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and I’ve certainly been through my fair share of mishigas. So, to write a personal impersonal poem, or a poem that effectively balances this polarity, has become of paramount importance. The key, I guess, is to channel one’s experiences through an objectivist lens, making inductive leaps along the way, to lend universality and perspective. So, the poem is narrated from the second or third person, and the self becomes just another character in a larger mosaic of circumstances, images, actions. This is much easier said than done. It is a temptation to slip in an “I” here and there in the same degree that it’s a temptation to fit one more little scoop of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into your bowl. Truth be told, used sparingly, “I” lends authenticity and a certain warmth to a poem, a sense of “there-ness” that nothing else would give. So I like to think of “I” as the Ben and Jerry’s of poetic creation— it is gratifying, but needs a sense of restraint to allow it grace.

This is an occasional poem, for an occasion that never transpired. An online journal called Hinge published a poem of mine this summer. They also issued a call for poems about Halloween, for their fall issue. Gotta do it, I thought, and came up with this piece. Then I realized that the majority of journal demur from printing the same poet in consecutive issues. Undaunted I sent this piece to a fledgling journal called Cake Train, and it was accepted immediately. Once in a while, navigating the straits of the Bay of Poesy, you get a miracle. That’s what happened here. Twenty-four lines, one “I,” and it’s all about me. Am I getting grown up or what?

Poets and Prophecy

Poets and Prophecy was read as an introduction the poem What Needs No Myth at the Personal Mythologies II reading at Kelly Writers House, September 20, 2003.  

It’s been a long time— probably since Allen Ginsberg unveiled Howl— San Francisco, 1955— since America has produced a convincingly authentic prophet-poet; although you could make an argument for Dylan as one. I do, but the academic establishment does not. Yet. And, ladies and gentlemen, guess who writes the history books. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, poetry at its best is a prophetic art, capable of making its best voices, in Shelley’s words, “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming twenty years before the ascent of Adolf Hitler, the rough beast to end all rough beasts. T.S. Eliot wrote his celebrated Waste Land as a requiem for post-World War I Europe, and wound up anticipating calamities beyond anything he could’ve imagined.

Poets today seem content making smaller statements. They tend to call what is actually a lack of imagination, “maturity.” Witness the effusion of poems weaving dainty nostalgia into tapestries of tepid imagery, and over-polished technical proficiency. How often can one pick up The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, and find one’s self not only moved, but ravished? One sees, in the modern poet, a lack of confidence congruent with a lack of imagination. Modesty is now the balm for all aesthetic ills, the panacea to keep the docile, lamb-like scribe out of the looney bin and on the tenure track. The problem, is that all great art has an element of madness in it, of the Dionysian. Technical proficiency alone won’t do. You have to have something to say, something ineluctable, transcendent, maybe even, dare we say it, prophetic.

I don’t want to create a great build-up for what’s just another one of my poems. I apologize, in fact, for getting a little bit carried away here. Whether or not the poem I’m about to read does carry a little bit of that old prophetic fire, that was my, perhaps overambitious, intention. Only things, as they are wont to do, got a bit twisted, and the poem I wrote wound up expressing the futility of all human prophecy. It is, in fact, a direct refutation of Yeats’ Second Coming, which I espoused not thirty lines ago. If this seems a bit confused, hear me out. The basic crux of this diatribe, which I am only now getting around to, is that poets need to start thinking big again. They need to rage, to tremble, to bleed, and to do it on a large scale. Don’t let a Ploughshares-touting professor mislead you. Big statements are a big deal. If they often lead to big failures, then that’s just a chance we’ll have to take. With that I’ll shut up and read the poem, and hope I can do so without you conspiring to lynch me.

To March

To March concludes This Charming Lab at Kelly Writers House, on March 27, 2004.  

It’s funny, how we can find ourselves playing into stereotypes and still persevere in cliched behavior. I don’t call myself a poet anymore, I rather think of myself as someone who sometimes writes poems. But I do sit in coffeehouses and write, like every two-bit, sub-beatnik, Ginsberg and Bukowski worshipping amateur you’ve ever seen. I often feel self-conscious about doing this, but I force myself to anyway, because if I didn’t, it would mean I care far too much about what the other schmucks in the coffeehouse think. Since the coolest thing in the world is not to give a fuck, somehow in the equation, as calculated by me, I wind up ahead by being resolutely uncool. Besides, there’s always a chance I’ll meet a poetry-imbibing female with a Shelley fixation, or something. Not likely, you say? It so happens I picked up a girl on a train to Manayunk, took her home and scored, all on account of a tee-shirt I was wearing that read, I am as wayward as Shelley.

Now, let’s go back to the poem you’re about to hear and let me explicate, to whatever extent I can. This to me is the ultimate coffeehouse poem, in the sense that it was conceived, written, revised, and completed at the Last Drop Coffeehouse on one day. There’s a certain stillness you get in March, when you’re in the plateau that glides just over winter and just below spring. When I think back to what it was like writing this, I remember that stillness, that I was alone, that it was a cloudy day, semi-sodden, that I was reading Middlemarch at the time, and that it all seemed to blend together in a sort of unforgettable fashion. A timeless moment. But that doesn’t mean the poem’s any good, and in fact the moments that feel timeless while we live them often turn out to be useless, while moments that seem useless are the ones that live on. Whatever. You’ll have to decide for yourselves. You own my work as much as I do, you may not even want it, and God knows I don’t a lot of the time either.

So, look for timelessness, trash, and that weird March mood of suspension, of hanging, of god-damned green-wearing Saint Patrick’s Day and spring training. The poem is called To March:

Tremulous time— rain-laden flowers

threatening to burst forth— sodden
branches quiver. Exhalations still
visible, people linger in watery streets,
hydroplaning tires glisten.

Blue patches line the sky—
droplets engorge terraces— cups
of coffee, especially poignant for
winter-weary souls in still cafes.

Nature at the end begins to forge
invisible buds— suppressed grass
dreams succulence. Clouds shroud
puddles. Lengthening days.

A correspondence exists in me
for this— hovering on fertility’s edges,
writing to find the entire note,
the perfect kiss, moments of grace after
longing, fighting. Every cloud echoes
my reaching. Wanderlust for forgotten forms,

skies abandoned by vapors fixed
to the earth. My mind is hung with sun
flowers springing, lands uncreated,
dim, unpupil’d eyes, needing deeper

roots for a sturdier birth. A trumpet call—
thought processions— friends, loves.
Hands molding, fretfully, with nascent
skill, permanent tapestries. Mud below,

shadows above. Planted seeds poised—
movement, chasms filled. Words
on a wing, where are they? Could I be
writing them now, this normal day, over

cigarettes, George Eliot, coffee, sadness?
Before the bud erupts, it issues a sigh for
the effort, like of priests or of lovers—
crafting the genuine, born out of gladness.

Live in Brooklyn: original file

 The original Live in Brooklyn mp3 file, in its entirety. 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound commemorates the life and passing of Alexandra Grilikhes, who had performed at the first Personal Mythologies. The series was named by her.

If you noticed, and it certainly would be permissible if you did not, the title of today’s performance is Personal Mythologies II. Two, because we did the same thing last year at roughly this time (not me and Brian, mind you, but me and two other poets). One of the poets, Alexandra Grilikhes, was giving what turned out to be her last ever performance. She died in February, age seventy, and ending a life of great achievement in the arts. She was an editor, novelist, poet, promoter, and feminist. I was deeply moved by her death, which seemed so untimely, coming on the heels of her first novel’s successful release. Wouldn’t you know, my immediate response to her death was an extravagant outpouring of poetic energy. I wrote a fifteen-page mini-epic called Death Meditations, then abandoned it when I felt I couldn’t go on. The grief, and the desperate longing to create something good, were getting to me.

Tracing the evolution of this poem, I am reminded of an episode in the early poetic life of Ezra Pound. Ez was wandering through a Metro station in London, presumably waiting for his train, which may’ve been late, or simply unwilling to stop for Ezra Pound. In any case, Ez began examining the faces drifting and circulating around him, and these faces brought him to a moment of epiphany. Returning home, he pounded out (no pun intended) an elaborate thirty-page catalog of Imagist impressions. He let it sit for six months, and decided to scrap the whole thing except for two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough.” This little haiku, In the Station of the Metro, has become famous, and is, for my money, Ezra’s best poem.

As you can probably guess, my Alexandra poem went through a similar metamorphosis. Coming back to it, I scrapped everything inessential, until the fifteen-page piece had yielded a single page of usable material. Hours were spent pruning, paring, crafting, until I finally felt I had done the deceased poet justice. Or, failing that, that I had tried my best to do so. The poem lacks imagery, metaphor, and other savory elements. It is what might be called a vegetarian poem— lean, mean, good for the digestion, but unlikely to titillate the senses. I recognize this, but it is, after all, a poem about mortality. What does death leave us with? It is my attempt to reach Alexandra, wherever she is. It is very hard for me to believe that a year ago, she was standing at this very podium, delivering a performance that unified the threads of her considerable body of work into an artful whole. Without turning this into a would-be séance, I would like to say that this poem is an attempt to evoke her presence, if only in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew her.

Hamlet and the Last Drop

Hamlet and the Last Drop was read and taped on September 20, 2003, at the KWH Personal Mythologies II reading.

It is a disappointment to the maturing poet, and probably no less so to the maturing garbageman, that life is mostly prosaic. We do the same things every day— think roughly the same thoughts, eat roughly the same foods (with the occasional pesto or curry thrown in, no doubt), watch roughly the same movies, wish for the same impossibilities, rue the same inevitabilities, consolidate whatever resources we have, and denigrate the ones we don’t. Why do we do this? One lesson of Hamlet seems to be that we don’t have to— that we can dig deeper, walk the razor’s edge, become an active participant in metaphysical debate. The risk is that, in the process, we will lose touch with everyday reality, and veer off into madness. Poetry has this distinct advantage over quotidian life— poets can, in the creation of their poems, see things as they are not with impunity. We don’t have to tell the truth, because we can imagine things better than the truth. Look around you— that weird-looking guy in the third row may be a Minister of Angelic Spirits, an embodiment of Dionysus, or even an official in the Eisenhower Administration. That asshole driver you passed, doing forty-five on the Expressway, was Nosferatu, the parasite that shined Richard Nixon’s shoes and recommended the Watergate Hotel as a friendly rest-stop, and the sleazebag who interviewed O.J. Simpson for Playboy, combined. And so on.

I spend a lot of time hanging out at Thirteenth and Pine, sometimes writing or reading, but mostly watching people. So it follows naturally that I’d want to, in my own modest way, immortalize it. On two diagonal corners, Thirteenth and Pine contains the Last Drop Coffeehouse, which really deserves its own poem, teeming as it is with the young, lusty, luscious, and generally alliterative, and Dirty Frank’s, which would merit a Dante-sized epic, detailing the Inferno-like rings around which spin the old drunkards, new drunkards, and in-between drunkards. I was sitting at the Last Drop, thinking about all these issues, and I really started to identify with the Hamlet archetype. Is this all there is? For how many years will I be sitting at Thirteenth and Pine, waiting for an elusive enlightenment? Am I destined to follow my father’s ghost into the abyss? Luckily, I had a pen with me. That stopped the corrosive gnaw. It was suddenly just another night. Almost.

Proust and Love

Proust and Love aired at the 9-20-03 Personal Mythologies reading at KWH. Mary Evelyn Harju was in attendance.

Love has been addressed in myriad ways, by myriad poets, to such an extent, that it seems hard to justify writing another poem about love. For a long time, I shied away from writing straight ahead love poems. I’d write about carnality, desire (in all its manifestations and permutations), feeling connected or disconnected, but the big L, both as a signifier and as a thing-in-itself, was off limits. This attitude endured until I encountered the prose of Marcel Proust, which showed me an angle of approach that I hadn’t known existed. Ironically enough, good old bed-ridden Marcel doesn’t tend to approach love directly, either. Rather, he approaches it as he does his memorialized sensations— as an abstraction to be danced with delicately, expansively, tangibly yet philosophically. The funniest anecdote about Proust and love doesn’t actually exist in his text. Rather, biographers claim that Proust’s appreciation of Albertine’s “ruddy cheeks” is actually a displaced euphemism for Proust’s appreciation of his gay lover’s sensuous buttocks.

The point is that Proust showed me how to take an idea into the air, let it ride the currents of my imagination, toss about in the winds of memory, then be brought down gently in a philosophical curlicue. So all praises go to the unseen powers that chained Marcel to a sick-bed, and an ink-pen. For the form of this poem, I wanted to use the lyric “I”, that most neglected and slandered first-person conventionality-turned-rarity. It seemed logical to me that however abstract my sentiments, the poem wouldn’t work if I didn’t express some passion as well. For inspiration on that level, I turned to John Keats, that most passionate of Romantics, and ransacked the ten-line stanza, ABABCDECDE form he used for his Odes. It’s a form I’d used before, sometimes with success, sometimes with none. In this case, I felt a lyrical form would enhance the flavor of philosophical sentiment, as gravy to meat. John Keats, let it known, was crazy for beefsteak, as befits a sensualist and born-again Pagan. And this poem, which is actually online now, is called On Love.

Stoning the Devil (3-27-04, KWH)

In Baudelaire's famous prose poem, The Generous Gambler, we follow the narrator, ostensibly Charlie B. himself, as he encounters a mysterious stranger on a Parisian boulevard. The stranger, lo and behold, turns out to be Lucifer himself. Baudelaire depicts him as a man of wealth and taste, who has, indeed, been around for many a long year, and stolen many a man's soul and faith. Of course, Baudelaire follows him. They get regally smashed, and the Devil reveals to him the secrets of the universe. For Baudelaire, stoning the devil means getting him stoned, wooing him, bringing him into the human fold for a little Dionysian sport. The problem with the Baudelairian method of Satan-handling is that you lose your soul. The Devil corrupts you to the point that right and wrong have no meaning; irony enters the blood and chills it; paradox becomes poison; everybody looks like a leper; and you can't feel anything. It helps to remember our good old read-it-in-seventh-grade friend Young Goodman Brown. His encounter with Beelzebub leaves him embittered, disenchanted, but at least he still has a soul (or, as much of a soul as a tee-totaling Puritan can have). Young Goodman Brown stones the devil by rejecting him out of hand. Stoning here means throwing stones: even if it be from the glass house of mortal ignorance.

So, somewhere between the Baudelairian and Hawthornian models of Lucifer-human relations, we may find an ideal solution. We can lure the Devil into drunkenness and then bash him over the head with a rock, or we can bash him over the head with a rock and then slip him a joint to ease the pain (mostly our pain, of course). The Devil, the epitome of imperviousness, will go on being the great professional Ironist he is (a bit like Frank Zappa). The reward of this balanced approach for us, as writers, is that we can lure the Devil close to us, just close enough to learn some of his simpler tricks, then send him on his way when he starts demanding blood. Muslims the world over "stone the Devil," but I fear their ritual lacks a certain subtlety and understanding of Satanic grandeur- how it can be harnessed, refined, made to serve human ends. The Devil, more than any other Being, understands the complexity of existence. I would guess that things are as complicated in Hell as they are here. In the end, what is a art but a testament to the complexity of life: manifold levels and layers, perpetually enclosing us in a wide web. One could make the argument that art is essentially ironic, in the sense that it posits unreachable worlds that we long for, but cannot touch. We must face it: art is a Devil's game. We're here to play, and we guarantee you it will be more fun than Yahtzee.

Dominique

So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I've never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn't qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham; but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique's charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra- a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I'd met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn't fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn't pierce me to the bone.

My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her "Man of the Month," and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading "He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her"; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.

Having given you this background, you'll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW's Keatsian poems aren't that good, probably because he didn't know Dominique. She's a Muse- a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I've ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what's best in her.

Coca-Cola Dream

Coca-Cola Dream debuted at the Personal Mythologies II reading at KWH in 2003

Something happened to me for the first time this year, something more or less momentous. Something I’ve been waiting for jealously since I began to write. I had the dream. The dream in which a succession of images appears in such a way as to make the creation of a poem not only necessary, but inevitable. I’ve always envied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s of the poetic world, who could smoke a bit of opium and come out with a Kubla Khan. I’ve tried writing in various states of intoxication but wound up, as Ginsberg would have it, “rocking and rolling over lofty incantations that in the morning were stanzas of gibberish.” This time I got lucky. Here's the dream: I’m standing at the corner of Walnut and Broad, under the awning of the ritzy hotel there, I forget what it’s called…the Bellevue! I’ve got an edition of Shelley in my hands— hard-backed, blue, looks like it’s been sitting in an attic for a few generations. I come across a curious poem that begins with the word “swimming” repeated eight times. My response, in the dream, was to make the assumption that this was Shelley somehow anticipating the last moments of his life— splashing around amidst an infernal storm off the coast of Italy, ineffectuality trying to keep his head above water.

Then I noticed something else curious about the poem— it made frequent and loving mention of Coca-Cola, which seemed to be the leitmotif of the piece. Of course, we know that Shelley died a century before poets began to imbibe the carbonated wonder. I found this perplexing, but (hey!) it was a dream, you know. It had its own sort of logic. End of dream. I woke up, I had some time to kill, I remembered the dream, and felt it incumbent upon me to take the hint of the Muses and write the poem that Shelley never did. To be frank, I’ve become something of a Coke-a-holic in the last year, anyway. Have one with lunch, dinner, with a midnight snack. Anytime. What I like about Coke is that everybody drinks it. As Andy Warhol said, “The President drinks it, Liz Taylor drinks it, and, just think: you can drink it, too!” Coke is America, and America, in a very real sense, especially culturally, is Coke.

As I began to write, I found myself using the standard Whitmanic technique of putting the rhyme at the beginning of the line, rather than the end. This technique has the advantage of creating parallel structure, with cadence, rhythm, metric symmetry, without the encumbrance of a formal rhyme scheme. It is economical, utilitarian, and eminently American. Poetic apple pie. God only knows what Shelley would’ve thought.