In heart what I am is wasted

"At heart, I am fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way."

These were the words of Monica Goodling, former administrator for the Department of Justice, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. "I crossed the line," she admitted, when asked whether she sorted job applicants based on party affiliation. Much she did "not recall."

"in heart i am a moslem in heart i am an american artist and i have no guilt"

Patti Smith, the incantation that spirals into "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger." Could it be 30 years ago? Would that propel her onto the Billboard Top 100 Terror Watch List (with a bullet) today?

The thunderstorm just broke over the skateboarders who've been using Orange Street all afternoon as if this were Venice Beach, not 2007. The calicoes observe the sodden joggers with an academic interest. If they weren't litter sisters I think they might collaborate on a blog, but moments of unity devolve into padded spats pretty quick.

What about electric storms and wireless connections? I don't know about this. There's a lot I don't know. I would ask the cats, but they like to string me along.

I cleaned off my Patti books. I have no idea how the covers got layers of 1. dust, 2. something reddish and sticky, suggestive of vodka mixed with cranberry and orange juice, and 3. cat fur. But there's nothing a bottle of Windex and a "gently used" paper towel can't improve. Not in this world, at least.

Codename: Tara

Howdy, pardner. So, you've been smashing vases lately--great! But when I heard your human voice you gave me pause.

You asked me, "Am I doing it correctly?"

Correctly? I guess, to rip off the Mythbusters' line, I'm what you call an 'expert.' (For anyone who's interested, I have four Ivy League degrees I won't be using, value "priceless," but I will take Mastercard.) That said, whenever anyone tried to hand me the Professors' Answer Book to Solving Poetry, my hands were full. Cigarette, beer, rare fossils . . . binoculars for spying field marks on birds who never comply with the descriptions in the guides.

A field guide to the poems? Look for enjambment. In grad school my peers talked like that, and they thought I was a stoner from California. I flunked my first presentation on Emily Dickenson by reading "hard" the dashes that ended her lines, only to be told by our white-haired professor that those were an editor's rendition. But I had started my career as a poem reader by feeling like a fool, and I live by that creed.

Feel like a fool. Fools take deer and daughters to heart. Experts take nothing to heart. And for what it's worth, my darling, today is a sacred anniversary in Ireland for the Hill of Tara, where the politicians are planning to plough through burial mounds older than Yeats's rough beast in order to build a highway for tourists. Another vector. Another tangent. Another arrow into the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Our Patti IS an expert archer, despite having been born a few days too late for us to read her her horoscope under Sagitarius.

I think I spelled that wrong. Well, they can't take my diplomas away from me; I haven't been able to find them for 20 years anyway. Love, love and love, another poet.

PS: sharp shards and plenty of superglue to go around, any time you ask . . . a scout is always prepared.

thoughts in progress, 3: making sentences

line breaks are suggestions, fragments aligned that read out loud, preferably, reconfigure, breaking elsewhere, accelerating to take a deep breath.

tara's edges fuzz subjects superimpose blinking images, so it's a "good poem."

and i was wrong 2 posts back; the ps that i thought i knew could have written "Tara," not only because it's "good," but also because it duels The New Yorker readers.

"what's going on in this poem? what does it mean?"

"no matter how far removed..."

her daughter may be unharmed today, but what about tomorrow, the next day, two years from now? remoteness can't save her; technology can't save her; it's useless against...who? she who stood by the door of her Virginia farm?

certainly not the deer; deer don't do that.

ravage their own.
tsk-tsk bombs' rubble as if february's nor'easter remains.
carbon-dioxidate ice caps.

deer don't; they are in the way.

thoughts in progress, 2: breaking Tara down

can't read a poem without tearing it apart.

i know no other way; never studied ways to read poems
-- clearly -- just do what i can to make some sort of meaning.

need to do this because it's my way of thinking; have to make a mess of things, always, still, before i can fully appreciate the intricacy, beauty, brilliance of the thing's workings, the parts' fit.

i assume there's that in every thing.

need to do this (might as well admit it now since it will be evident at some point soon if it is not so already) because it's damn fun to throw a vase across the room, smashing it to bits, find all the pieces, and put it back together again. i like the vase with glue scars, sharp edges, tiny airholes, bumpy (hiero)glyphs better than i did the unbubbled one that used to sit on the shelf; this one shows the signs of me and you.

poems use words for the same reason: to break the flow, cut a new tangent. so doing it back, to instate yet another oozeway, makes poetry, making the poem better than it was before.

like ripping a tshirt, or careening off the stage. learned that from 70s/80s ps.

now i'm learning about her nuance: subtlety summons through association, reconfiguration.

this is a subtle poem, so here goes:

the title, "Tara" -- plantation in Gone with the Wind -- Civil War -- racial, economic divide, brother fighting brother, amputations (Iraq?)-- tara, an edible fern (Scarlett should have known; she wouldn't have gone hungry the first time) -- tara = ta ta (so long to all that) -- tara, a mnemotechnic (or mnemoglyph) exclamation (saying the name, Tara: the word lingers, hangs into the future, linguistic artifact turns sculpture, the plantation in ruination, a way of life gone forever).

reading "Tara": thoughts in progress

i began the introduction to my father's book asking "Who would write this book?" the question followed from the difficulty that i had recognizing the man i thought i knew as the person who could write the text i witnessed him write. but i saw him put pen to paper (he handwrote the book before transferring it to .doc files), he talked nonstop about the book for the number of years he spent working on it, and after he completed a draft, he printed the 2520 pages, stacking them on the bed in the guest room where they remained until he passed away last year. so i knew that he was the author of that mss.

after his death, i read the book, all 2520 pages. Not only was i unable to recognize him in the text but i was also unable to understand why anyone, my father or someone else, would write a book of that sort. although the book is interesting, a reviewer might consider it "a page turner," i found it (almost) too enigmatic; i still puzzle over passages and plot segments, failing to have additional insights or to resolve any of its many koans. naively perhaps, i hoped that reading his book would accomplish what a lifetime could not: i had hoped to know him, finally. but no, his surviving words refused to disclose what the man alive kept to himself.

i have a similar response to ps' poem "Tara," recently published in The New Yorker. after reading and rereading (and rereading many more times than that), I still come away from the poem puzzled: the ps that i thought i knew (of course, at a distance), and whose work i have heartily consumed, studied, and allowed to influence me, couldn't have written that poem.

it's not rimbaldian; it's not rippedtshirt-girlinyourface-voyou-ing with warhol's bowery boys on the make for their 15minutes-godfearing/godsneering/godwilling; it's not thanking frank (at least, i don't think it is).

it's different; taking a 360 at 60 -- it seems, but perhaps not -- "her daughter unharmed": war's like that, random, undiscriminating, relentless.

i thought of this, written about another war, when deer and daughter succumbed.

a few citations 4 the 1 before

2 sift out the subtleties of the 1 before...

guns 'n roses lyrics:

clicks to find

The Spaghetti Incident? -- "Down on the Farm"
Use Your Illusion 1 -- "November Rain" (view)
Del James' "Without You" ("November Rain" from and "Introduction" written by axl rose)
Use Your Illusion 2 -- "Pretty Tied Up"

ref to Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" and "The Philosophy of Composition"

there...but

je voudrais connaitre savoir:
the daughter is safe? from? the constraint to die beautifully? the fear of an ugly death? that doesn't count, no poetry?....more

Pretty Died Up

" . . . That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful."

" . . . Beauty of whatever kind . . . invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones."

" . . . I asked myself - 'Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most menacholy'? Death - was the obvious reply. "And when,' I said, 'is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?' From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious - 'When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world - and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.'"

Edgar Allen Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition"

In July of 1993 my sisters and I had late afternoon hours to kill in a motel in Hayward, Wisconsin. Never mind the family history, the thin-lipped silences among the sunlight filtered in slanting slices through the second growth pines, the soft sand soil under bare feet hot from driving. The motel had MTV, which was featuring its Top 100 Videos of "all time," meaning, I guess, the ten years it had been on the air. By the time all three of us were back in the motel room, spread out on kingsize spreads in absract green and gold "contemporary" prints," they were down (or up) to the top five. We tried to predict: "Material Girl"? "Billie Jean"? I had the edge in popular culture, since Brigit and Sheila both had real jobs.

But both of those showed up before number one. Even Dire Straits and those two great Peter Gabriel videos had come and gone. I sensed Brigit losing interest. But I had to know. And then it bloomed on the screen, a dark flower of inevitability: Guns 'N' Roses' "November Rain."

Because Poe was right. Nothing more excites the soul than the death of a supermodel. Except for some of us. For some of us, me that summer and six years old in religious school in North Carolina and last Saturday at the counter of Krauszers for cigarettes suddenly stunned by the angel face of boy assembling a pile of goods in front of me--for me nothing excites the soul like the death of a beautiful boy. And I think Patti Smith touched that nerve with Johnny and the locker, when I first listened to Horses alone in my dorm room at Princeton. She knew.

I think she is still touching that nerve. "The deer don't do that." The daughter is safe.

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe, "Annabel Lee"

in with the new

"Tara"
a new poem by ps, published in this weeks' issue of The New Yorker. Read it at: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction or at: The New Yorker 4 May 2007: 76.