Two poems of mine are up at The Fiddleback! Go read them!
(Also, if you are a poet and are submitting stuff, the editors at The Fiddleback are super. I think this is the first time I’ve gotten some really solid editorial advice on changes to make to my poetry before publication, and these poems are absolutely better for it.)
From Mary Ruefle’s “On Fear,” in the June 2012 issue of Poetry.
This essay is fucking gorgeous.
I asked a doctor about fear. The doctor said, ‘The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, if I don’t successfully insert an emergency trach—a hole in the throat—someone will die from lack of oxygen. So I mechanically do what I have been trained to do. Someone is there, periodically calling out the oxygen saturation—95, 90, 88, 83, 79—and the lower it gets the more of an emergency it becomes. And the funny thing is, I ask for the count. It is part of the procedure, but I work as if I am not listening—procedural concentration is all.’
I asked a pilot about fear. The pilot said, ‘The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, I was flying a test jet alone at thirty thousand feet and there was a leak in my oxygen mask I didn’t know about. I temporarily lost consciousness, and when I came to I was at fifteen thousand feet heading straight for the ground, nose down, completely out of control—and I was still groggy, still fighting for consciousness. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Those were the only thoughts I had, and I continued to have them until I leveled out at five thousand feet.’ Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, ‘So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?’
I was a fool on a fool’s errand. Out of the fear of being a fool, I wanted to tell them that the fear they were trained to overcome was an emotion and not a feeling; after all, these were both life-threatening situations and their reactions were pure instinct, albeit professional ones. But I have professional instincts as well, professional instincts I employ while writing a poem. I was hopelessly confused and felt my sense of self-worth losing altitude; in situations like this I pick up the phone and call my friend, the German philosopher. ‘Reinhard,’ I shouted into the phone, ‘What do you think about fear?’ ‘Yikes!’ he shouted back, ‘I am afraid of dogs.’ At last, a friend. And then he quoted Nietzsche: ‘The degree of fearfulness is one measure of intelligence.’ It was better than I had hoped. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. ‘Fear is to recognize ourselves.’ As far back as I could remember, every minute of my life had been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear. Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge. For instance, the knowledge that one is going to die. This is a fear one can have while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day. And it can lead to an emergency of feeling that often results in a poem. ‘Thank you,’ I said, before hanging up, and then I heard my friend Reinhard say, ‘Faulkner, however, said that for a writer, the basest of all things is to be afraid.’ My mind quickly came to the conclusion Faulkner was drunk at the time. But perhaps he was thinking about writer’s block, the inability of a writer to do that which is most natural to him: to encounter fear, to face fear; a fear of being alone with fear …
Fantastic article reviewing Lev Loseff’s Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life and giving a great overview of Brodsky’s strange and fierce existence. I didn’t really know much about his trial and subsequent exile after being found “a parasite, a lout, a crook, an ideologically corrupt human being”—this excerpt from the court transcript is priceless:
Judge: What is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: Who said you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?
Brodsky: No one. (Nonconfrontational.) Who assigned me to the human race?
I also love this excerpt from Brodsky’s “Elegy to John Donne”:
And you saw life: your island was its twin.
And you did face the ocean at its shores.
The howling dark stood close at every hand.
And you did soar past God, and then drop back …
I wish I knew Russian.
(via)
Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
what the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.
Am I alone tonight?
I don’t think so. Am I
the only one with bleeding gums
tonight. Am I the only
homosexual in this room
tonight. Am I the only
one whose friends have
died, are dying now.
And my art can’t
be supported until it is
gigantic, bigger than
everyone else’s, confirming
the audience’s feeling that they are
alone. That they alone
are good, deserved
to buy the tickets
to see this Art.
Are working,
are healthy, should
survive, and are
normal. Are you
normal tonight? Everyone
here, we are all normal.
Oh, I love this.
We can’t stop listening, the children said, we can’t stop listening because it comforts us, and the listening hurts and the comfort hurts. We apologized, of course, we apologized, tucking them back into their makeshift beds.
I’ve got some poems up in this month’s PANK, if you’re into that.
3.
In 1965, if anything was worth worshipping in that city,
It was the old neighborhood rife with eucalyptus & a few, brooding mulberries,
It was the lioness asleep in the zoo, unmoved by the taunts
Of children or the trash they threw, sometimes on fire for a moment, into her cage.
It was the way she endured it: heat, rain, misfortune; turning on her heels always
Away from you as if there were two worlds, as if you were lost
In this one. She could have killed a man with one swipe
Of her paw, but she did not. And that is why, in the next world,
She has come back as a poem already written for her, & hidden
In this one. This one which fills us with longing. Which bores her.
In 1965 in that city, no one knew less than a boy of nineteen, still a virgin,
Still brimming over with extinct love;
His face shining with acne he’d rubbed raw with a hand towel
To make it disappear; instead, it blistered, & later,
Looking in the mirror, he thought such blisters might be
The visible evidence of the soul. Laugh, if you want to;
After all, the next world is a lioness & she moves without history, like a lioness,
And without mistakes. Besides, it’s twenty years later.
By now that boy’s already poured his first drink of the evening;
So have you, & no tense is as sad as the future’s.
If I’m not laughing with you it’s because I’m talking to myself again:
Pulling tap roots from one’s mouth is not ideal.
It is best to avoid sickness at all costs.
Lost, a horse lies on its side. This is not right.
Do not look into its eye. Do not touch
the heaving chest. I had to
believe in hypnosis, in horseflies. Warming the air
until day became night.
The horse’s body caved in, I gave into
ruin. In winter, moles tunneled
underneath our house.
How does that saying go? If you are ugly,
you better not show your face.
And so I fell asleep in the basement again,
in a pile of lint. Full of moth rot,
mercy. Look at me, I’d say to the horse.
Look at me make this forest.
____________
from Front Porch Journal
Night, the animal that keeps you alive.
Night, the u-turn of the self. Hear
sad cows moo their way into the fire. Write
the great American novel, and it scatters
into the poor American madman’s thoughts
in the small tornado of your life.
Pull flower petals like prudes.
Put on woolen tube socks, boots,
and march through your animal rage
on Pluto: one big ball of ice too
far away. Shoo away
friends like flies. You’re no more you
than he or she was you.
Blue sadness was a happiness
that turned its back on you. Poor you.
Fuck you. Love, you
followed the same path until
it finished. You died. You turned
the other way and walked it all again.
_______
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