Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Lucie Brock-Broido Inspired Poetry

Disease

What is this? An alternative?
A sudden transition compelling me to stop.
I am not responsible.
There are those whom will be upset,
angry even.
They don’t feel as I do.
They got out of bed this morning, started their day as usual.
Let them have it out with disease itself.
Please leave me out of it.

Before I fell down I fed my dogs.
My wife suspects bacteria,
an unclean blender,
blames herself.

She looks so sexy emerging from the covers
and I tell her so,
then that’s it until 4 o’clock when, feeling better,
I can eat, drink, think, and fuck again.



Baghdad

“Democrats seized on the anniversary of President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech to formally send the bill.”–NYT Headlines, May 1, 2007

And what of “going home?” Just where is that, exactly?
Why now? What about the Iraqi family on 34th and 11th? They told Jerome just before the car bomb went off to “please stay.”
What are we supposed to do, anyway? At home that is?
Four fucking years of Baghdad just so some bastard can make Baghdad out to beVietnam.

So why don’t we just leave now? What have we done here?
Lot’s of killing going on. That’s for sure.
How the hell do I make sense out of Baghdad?
What do I tell people in Nebraska?
What if Bush doesn’t pull out?
It scares me what the world might do.

Man, I’m just getting the hang of it.
Just dialing in who’s who.
It takes time ya’ know? Got to kill a while to figure it out.
If they do pull us out of here, how about a lifetime supply of free gas for our ATVs?

The veteran sits in my class learning “critical thinking skills.”
Sitting next to the biology major bound for graduate school.
It’s banal and cliche, but no less painlful for being so.
Why this difficulty in returning home? Do we really feel differently about men in uniform since WW II? I am aware of the gender distinction here.

Flying over Baghdad, not in an F-16 Tomcat, but in my imagination,
I see the 18-year-old American soldier shrouded in technology and weaponry,
seemingly invincible until a singular piece of shrapnel penetrates his skin,
above his flak-jacket and just below his adam’s apple.

He’s dead on the street,
somebody’s boy back in Pennsylvania, I think,
and I see the 6-year-old Iraqi child watching the G.I.’s death in disbelief .
A moment ago, he thought the G.I. was a spaceman.

No one sees me while I sit in my diaphonuous lace atop a pylon,
a nymph on the streets of Baghdad.
This is all very poetic in the twenty-first century.
What would Keats think?

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Harrison Influenced Poetry

On Theory

Nothing here is real:
house, yard, street, landscaped trees.

Frost on the windshield of my pick-up though;
that’s real, notwithstanding poststructural theorists.

My birddog, upset at being cast out of the house for the baby,
craps loosely in his kennel
–Also real.

7:30 a.m. and my daughter needs her diapers changed.
My wife’s back is out-of-alignment, and she’s off to see the chiropractor.

I have this poem to write–whether I want to or not.

I realized last night that the “Blue Angel” pilot, now pronounced dead in South Carolina, was thirty-two-years-old.
Despite my teenage dreams,
I will never be a “Blue Angel,”
will never be an N.F.L. linebacker,
will never be the president, maybe, no president,
will never be a “special-forces” soldier.

I am called “Daddy” ;
it is biological.
Becoming a husband was easy,
so was becoming a Daddy.

The sun will be warm today;
I’m looking forward to my next cup of coffee,
and this knot in my gut, telling me to get my daughter up at 7:30 a.m.,
to stop drinking coffee in the morning after on cup of 8 fluid ouces,
to get to work, to “get’r done,” get’r done,” get’r done,”
is far from theoretical.



Dwelling Place


I read yesterday in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
that, statistically speaking, extra-terrestrial life is highly likely,
and that there are like billions–maybe trillions–of universes.

Why have I been so embarrassed everytime I’ve speculated,
with my bite-sized knowledge of astronomy,
that the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is very likely?

My thesis is a clash between theoretical ideas that ring true to my intellect
and essentialist perceptions that I feel in my gut.
Maybe someday I’ll understand.

For now, my friend tells me he is going to “intervene” in his daughter-in-law’s alcoholism,
filing for custody of his five-year-old neice to force the daughter-in-law into rehab.
Somewhere inside me there is probably an ulcer;
Like many of my neuroses, I will be “made aware” of this too.

I was lying in bed, exploring my imagination by imagining myself propelling outward to the edges of the universe,
anxious about it–not the space journey part–but using my imagination.
Then I found out today that Bryson gets paid for taking himself and others on such a journey.

“Poor little blind boy, lost in the storm
where should he go to be without harm?
For starters, the dickhead should get a life.”

Thank you, Jim.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Essay: Jim Harrison

The Theory and Practice of Rivers and a Poet’s Plea for an End to an Empirically Constructed Economically Motivated Orthodoxy

Written at a time of great despair following the tragic death of his young niece (fifteen years old), Harrison’s The Theory and Practice of Rivers does not unmask, but rather exudes the poet’s anti-empirical sentiments. Manifest in Theory and Practice is Harrison’s attempt to cope with this recent and unexpected tragedy, an event that has “blurred” (5) the poet’s vision to a degree in which the world has become unrecognizable. For Harrison, existence has become emotionally unbearable, and the thought of perceiving the world strictly through an empirical lens is grossly inadequate: “On the bank by the spring creek/my shadow seemed to leap up to gather me,/or it leapt up to gather me, not seeming so/but as a natural fact” (19). You might even say that Harrison’s Theory and Practice, like much of his work, possesses an air of magical realism, as Harrison’s worldview and notion of reality represented in the poem privilege the human imagination and subconsciously engendered symbols over “facts” and the construct of life borne by empiricism and science:

“On waking after the accident/I was presented with the ‘whole picture’/as they say, magnificently detailed,/a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:/staring at the picture I became drowsy/with relief when I noticed a yellow/dot of light in the lower right-hand corner./I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled/to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot/of light which turned out to be a miniature/tunnel at the end of which I could see/mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,/sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside/down lakes….” (28)

It is not that Harrison rejects science so much as he rejects the domination of our psyche and understood existence by the empirical episteme, especially the appropriation of empirically shaped reality in the name of economic gain and competition. Through his poetry, Harrison implies and, at times, explicitly states, that we are more than scientifically understood economic beings, the corollary being that life, itself, is far more than an economic competition employing the empirical episteme as its tool. To complicate Harrison’s intention (Roland Barthes notwithstanding), perhaps Harrison is suggesting that it is human beings, rather than animals and other lifeforms, that are capable of more than economic necessity, mere survival, by means of their capacity for imagination. And/or, maybe, a necessary function for human survival is the engagement and validation of the human imagination (an activity fostered by myth-making), the idea being that it is through our imagination and subconsciously engendered dream-world that human beings have access to powerfully liberating, broadening views of life (Harrison might say “real” life) that are at once regenerative and sustaining, allowing us, ultimately, to experience our sensibilities and to live with them. It seems that by connecting with and validating his imagination and subconscious, Harrison, with the “overly-developed” sensibilities of a poet has managed to survive.
Is Harrison trying to evangelize in The Theory and Practice of Rivers? Maybe: “‘Why do you write/poems?’ the stewardess asked. ‘I guess/it’s because every angel is terrible/still though, alas, I invoke these almost deadly birds of the soul,’” (11). Reading these lines, however, I get the sense that by writing poems Harrison is attempting, first-and-foremost, to invoke his own “deadly birds”; what we do with his poetry is our business.
At any rate, Harrison’s position is clear: there is more to life than science in the service of economics, and, it seems, many of our contemporary illnesses of mind, body, and spirit stem from a failure to grasp this tenet and a concurrent lack of awareness to anything in existence beyond that which is posited by the empi-economic paradigm. “Life,” she says, “this vastly mysterious process to which our culture inures us lest we become useless citizens!” I am not sure whom the speaker is here; however, the statement speaks to the essence of Harrison’s theme: to open ourselves up to something other than the delimited view of an empirically-based, economically-motivated existence into that of the imaginative and restorative realm of mind and myth: “What is it to actually go outside the nest we have built for ourselves,/…: to go into a forest alone with our eyes open? It’s different/when you don’t know what’s over the hill–….” To use our minds for something other than science, something other than economic productivity, to use our minds for imagination to create and connect with a world in which we can survive.

Monday, April 9, 2007

University System

University System

Where power flows at cheap rates;
Where chemistry combusts into variable traits;
Where the young, the brilliant, the old,
The mother, the father, the child and grandparent
Moving together in a hurried pace.

The recycling and invention of knowledge;
breathing, thinking, reading, sitting;
Rooms, halls, structures made of brick and sand melted hot,
with grass growing between walkways of mixed rock,
poured by men sweating under the sun.
And talking and listening, and flirting and kissing, and sickness and health.
Insomnia–a fusion of intellect and passion,
no more unnatural than night, itself.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Two Nature Poems

James F. Lewis
ENGL 550
April 10th, 2007
Deconstructing Nature Through Poetry: Two Poems


Metrosystem

Stepping onto the subway, the exhalation of smokestacks;
the railcar jarring underneath your feet.

Lights illuminating skyscrapers;
the flow of vehicles at rush hour;
traffic waking in the morning.

In the corner of the harbor,
by the dock amidst Styrofoam cups,
bass rising to the surface.

A yellow sweatshirt;
a bobbing Nike basketball shoe beside the wood piling;
gas trickling out of a motor;
an oily iridescent surface and water spouting from a bilge.

Night, and the aroma of steak and browned potatoes,
wafting into the alleys, into the streets.
Behind dumpsters, rats, and men huddled by the fire.

The 767 on the runway;
the freighter to sea.
At dawn, I am fishing.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Trying to Define Contemporary Poetry

James F. Lewis IV
ENGL 550
April 1st, 2007
Essay: What is Contemporary Poetry?/Nature in Poetry: A Reconstituting of the Term


“The Newest of the New”: Trying to Define “Contemporary” Poetry

When, exactly, does it begin? The shift in an artistic period? In fact, though dates are determined and assigned for textbooks, there are no distinct “lines in the sand,” no division drawn capable of being delineated by dates; similar to shifts in other artistic forms of expression, what can be defined as “contemporary poetry” has gradually emerged, establishing its identity though the voice of a broad range of poets throughout the later half of the twentieth century. Familiar voices, such as those of Theodore Roethke, Silvia Plath, Jim Harrison and Mary Oliver, occupy an esteemed position of notoriety within the milieu of contemporary poetry, their names conjuring up literary remembrances of confession, depression, and redemption through a reconstituted understanding of nature, and sensibilities that shatter the banality of our overly-codified contemporary existence, revealing to us a life mysterious and, in this understanding of mystery, a sense of healing, an exhalation to arrive at an essential connection with our own existence. Therefore, implicit in contemporary poetry is a letting go of, even a rebellion to, abstract theoretical constructs of postmodernism which leave us groundless and disconnected from a complex and profound existence.
It is in arriving at this sense of being that contemporary poets deconstruct previously held positions on Nature, jettisoning romantic ideas perceiving “Nature” as a sacred and exotic “Other” into which we travel for redemption, escape, and purification and reconstituting the concept as a dynamic and essential manifestation of existence of which human beings are–intrinsically and inescapably–a part.
Along with freshly conceived understandings of nature, contemporary poetry seems to establish and, correspondingly, define itself by means of that by which contemporary poets struggle in a healing process which is, itself, unstructured, more of an adjustment and a coming to terms with what is rather than an idealization and subsequent attainment of what should be. It is this transformation (which really isn’t a transformation so much as a coming into awareness of what already is), that is, essentially, natural.
Nature, therefore, and what we experience as human beings is not transcendent, as in the notion of the term established by the American transcendentalists of the 19th century (e.g. Thoreau and Emerson), rather it is who and what we are. In fact, there really is no “essential” component to it, as for there to be something essential there must be that which is artificial or superfluous. In other words, our “essential” self, it seems to be suggested in much of the work of contemporary poets, is just our complete self, us as we exist. It may even be argued that our abstract and theoretical notions of reality, though overly intellectualized and alienating, are natural in and of themselves (the act of thinking being as natural to a human being as swimming is to an amoeba).
And, so, you might say that a hallmark of contemporary poetry is a moving away from am emphasis upon highly glossed alienating structural forms familiar to the high-brow work of a modernist poet like T.S. Eliot towards a heightened importance placed upon the experiential element of life manifesting itself in both joy and depression, understanding and confusion, mystery and profundity, feeling and sensation.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Mugs

mugs

The coffee pot
arranged last night
brews below me,
and I open the cabinet door.

Tentatively,
I begin my selection,
the first decision of the day.
It’s 7:38 a.m. What mug is the right one?
Is there any logic to this decision at all?

Too big, too plain, too uninspiring, too colorful, too small, natural, unnatural...
fearing myself neurotic and defying my idiosyncratic sensibilities,
reaching directly for a mug,
“I–heartshape–NY staring back at me.

Why is this the one? Do I love NY?
Does this mug rings true with my identity?
Filling the chosen one with steaming hot water (no cold mugs need apply for morning coffee)
I am...content with my choice?

Quirks and quirkiness.
My wife enters the kitchen,
yawning,
I am distracted with the feeding ritual of dogs.

Oblivious to my eccentricities or neuroses,
she has filled a mug with hot water,
emptied it,
and now both are filled with coffee.

One mug–not mine–is filled to the top,
for me.
I–heartshape–NY in my hand anyway,
and my wife with no room for cream, no idea why.

To her, just a mug,
something you pour coffee into
early.
To her, always just a mug.


Two different people.
Coffee mugs, sensibilities, neuroses, characteristics, traits, behaviors,
–stupefied.

All this at 7:38 in the morning.