MIKE AND DALE'S YOUNGER POETS

SELECTIONS FROM WINTER 1997

---

ANSELM HOLLO

Your Turn

Dewdrop ode sweet licks
In jokey code Eat air!
Lose track of nights & days dear melody
Fly me to Mejico? no no

No reruns hands hair snow
That's all we have for you today but to-
Morrow, Grace! Sweet rain
Oaks bees old shoes & watches

Frogs will green again!
Energy roil waves rock
Bright naked sun haze music play
In this old Pothole City of a brain

Vapors will brim light up slow pensive look
Make neurons dance in World Muse Impulse Book

---

MICHAEL PRICE

Flame

The way it goes in the country,
is my decision; to become alight
and smolder in her hands, barnside,
where the slash is burned. Out there
in the smoke, in the sand—the desert
is a plain of answers gotten by
going through it at night—the stars,
having died twelve years ago,
by their blazing reach appear
just long enough to want love
again. I go back to badlands, find:
car, her, light, dark, hand.

---

DALE SMITH

San Francisco Thanksgiving

The syrupy purr of Mike's
Impala's engine opened up
down narrow SF streets
late Thanksgiving high on Whiskey

In Nob Hill he met a gal
who ran away from him
while I ate pizza starved drunk
and in a sudden rain against the car

He kicked the trash can down
we drove away licking greasy paper plates
at pure chaotic mercy to our varied states

Somehow home the dawn
turned quietly and I left
on my bike for my house in the awful Haight

We've been good friends since
but now we're so far away
it's hard to hear his voice wishing me
a happy holiday from Colorado

Which seems colorless buried
under so much snow
-12 degrees and falling
colder the further on we go

---

LESLIE DAVIS

Blue Iris

Left behind
the things to keep are

in a vase with sea glass

Irises
and
Blue

Need some kind of
ritual
a relic
to fall back on
make a dent

(three times around a chair
clockwise
to remove a curse)

Candles or a lantern
blue
it's there in your hand
the bougainvillea
she's trading it
for
tumbleweed

& cactus

---

TOM CLARK

Prolepsis

Melodious liquid warble in the plum

Tree tells the sinking year how to feel

Its recession into grief as if a thorn

Poked a nester in an old wounded heart

Of stone from which slowly drips recognition

All breathing human passion far above

These days atonal as white noise

Through bare branches cotton clouds drift by

Last yellowed leaves catch lone rays of sun

Going down into the motherless ocean

A light plane buzzes off toward brown hills

As shade drops over the next urban plot

To prepare the air for what the dead don't know

How swiftly we are coming to join them

 

---

SELECTIONS FROM SUMMER 1997

---

From The Notebooks of Araki Yasusada

Mad Daughter and Big-Bang
December 25, 1945*

Walking in the vegetable patch
late at night, I was startled to find
the severed head of my
mad daughter lying on the ground.
Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like...
(From a distance it had appeared
to be a stone, haloed with light,
as if cast there by the Big-Bang.)

What on earth are you doing, I said,
you look ridiculous.

Some boys buried me here,
she said sullenly.

Her dark hair, comet-like, trailed behind...

Squatting, I pulled the turnip up by the root.

[*In the aftermath of the bombing, many survivors moved into the foothills of the Chugoku mountains surrounding Hiroshima. This was the case with Yasusada and his daughter.]

 

by Philip Whalen

HOPELESS FUCKUP BEATNIK COCKSUCK MOTHERFUCK

NOGOOD BASTARD EAT SHIT RUN RABBITS

AND BARK AT THE MOON

*From Highgrade-Doodles & Poems by Philip Whalen, previously published 9n Coyote's Journal, 1966

 

Family Ties
by Ron Padgett

It was fun hiding under the dining room table. Up in the nooks and crannies of its underside, I had concealed rolls of coins that I had stolen from the small desk a few feet away. In fact, at the age of four, I had salted away a small fortune, with which I could buy great heaps of candy bars. It was the first time I had ever stolen anything, and although I knew that I must keep it a secret, I didn't feel guilty. I felt exhilarated, partly by the power of greed, partly by the thrill of secrecy and hiding. How my parents discovered my cache remains a mystery to me; all I remember is feeling crestfallen as they shook their fingers and scowled at me. But soon the bad feelings wore off and I went out to play. Later, Mother fixed dinner and Daddy did Daddy things. A few days later, my petty larceny had become a funny story they told their friends, who looked at me and laughed and touseled my hair. I smiled. I was one of them.

 

A Story of History
by Hoa Nguyen

You shall hear the story
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis danced
at Hiawatha's wedding
The student cried "Hurrah!"
The student cried "Now you have it!"
I must have more light
I must have what I ask for
Your presence will not be necessary

 

 

from The Collected Works of George Sanders
by Owen Hill

being a person
of the highest taste
I am continually
incurring
my own
disapproval

****

it gives me no
particular satisfaction
to think that actors

more mediocre than
I are hailed as great

it merely proves
what lamentable

taste most people
have

****

in art proficiency can be obtained
but in life little more can be done

than to make the best of a bad job

 

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD DORN

The following interview was conducted by Michael Price and Dale Smith in Denver, Colorado on July 19, 1997.

Part I

Dale Smith: Would you say that you write from a Protestant disposition?

Edward Dorn: I am a Protestant. I've always been a Protestant and everything I've ever written has been from a Protestant disposition. And it's been against all centralized authority, beginning with Rome. Unlike Boulder and San Francisco, that really hasn't changed. Rome still rules. Of course, you're from San Francisco, how could you have missed that?

Dale Smith: Did this lead you to write about heresy in your current project, Languedoc Around the Clock?

Edward Dorn: When Jenny and I went to France in January of 1992, on exchange at the University of Montpellier, I had became interested in the Cathars and Albigensian heretics because she was reading a book on the subject of Montaillou by LeRoy Ladurie. She interviewed him, in fact. I taught two days a week, Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other days we traveled the length and breadth of Languedoc, from Bezier up over past Toulouse. Not a very big area when you're from the United States, but big nonetheless. And France is a big country. There's a lot about Languedoc that looks very much like the American Southwest. You can translate the juniper bushes you see in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona and replace them with rosemary bushes and various kinds of, you know, that spicy chaparral. You also can see headlands and mesas, almost thinking you're in New Mexico. It's astonishing. So that motivated me to write about this too. But the heresy, and the heretics, became a metaphor for the oppression of the state. Because that's really what my interest in it is about, in the various forms of leger demain the state can perform to divert the public from the state's only mission: oppressive and corruptive control. Now, it is very important to understand that the Albigensian inquisition was way before what most people mean by the Inquisition. The latter was contemporary with Columbus. What interested me was beginning around 1209 when Simon de Montfort started marching down the Rhone toward Bezier, where he cooked about 20,000 people in a cathedral fire at the behest of Innocent III who made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He was allowed to take everything he could seize as long as he got rid of the heretics. I mean everything: property, people, treasure. No matter what, he could have it. That's a good deal, you know. He could have it all. So he went for it and really slaughtered a lot of people, and many of them were not heretics because he didn't really have the means for that kind of investigation. And so a lot of the people died because they were the friends of the wrong people. A lot of scores were settled in this campaign, obviously.

Dale Smith: What made one a heretic?

Edward Dorn: The Cathars were heretics by definition, mainly because they held that they were perfect. And that's a major heresy right there. The Church can't handle that. And they called themselves the Perfecti. They believed in direct transmission between themselves and God, and that's bypassing the priesthood which is bigger than a sin. They believed in love in that sense. In other words, they didn't need the church, and you could not say that. There were lots of other minor reasons, but when you get right down to it they just saw through the ruse of the mechanisms of the church as a means of control. Let's face it, every religion, basically, is a control program. That's what religion is. No religion admits that because they say the opposite. This religion is going to give you peace and consolation and it's going to deliver you to wherever it is that you trust religion to deliver you. The West is really into overt authority. The view of this poem is that the Protestant Reformation was the only revolution that actually counts because the other revolutions devolved from that. 1789 is unthinkable without Luther. The Protestant Reformation made every other revolution possible. It certainly made the American revolution possible and it made Jefferson's statements possible. All these things are unthinkable without the Ninety-Five Theses nailed to the door. But we live in a time when the Protestant Reformation is not even talked about, or even mentioned, and a lot of people don't know what it is. They know what Protestants are because Protestants are in bad odor now. They seem to get somehow confused with Christian fundamentalists. And of course that's not what the Protestants, who made the revolution, were at all. They were just Catholics who were tired of getting abused by the monks. But I mean, the revolt was no less outrageous because of that.

Dale Smith: What else are you working on now?

Edward Dorn: My other project is a poem called Westward Haut. I'm pronouncing it Ho, Westward Ho. It's a poem of the Great Plains, using I-80 as the kind of spine of the east and west. And then I've invented this other axis which is Lima/Cheyenne. The main character on I-80 is Joe Ochenta, which means I-80. The thing about I-80 is that it was the first transcontinental highway. It was called the Lincoln Highway, and it began in Hoboken. That interstate was planned to go from Hoboken to San Francisco, two very similar towns if you really think of it. But I'm not using the Hoboken part. Just Chicago to San Francisco, because it's the High Plains. So these dogs, Odin and an Arabian beauty named Saluki, are traveling on this plane and are doing all sorts of deals. And they are meeting Joe Ochenta in Cheyenne. It's like it's the other part of Gunslinger, but there's no Gunslinger. I mean, there's no centralizing character in that respect. This is more like a crowd, but it takes care of the other part of the West. It's not the Southwest.

Dale Smith: Is I-80 the focus in a sense?

Edward Dorn: I'm just treating it like the longest strip town in the world, which is what it is. There are truck stops. Joe Ochenta is a trucker. There are Little Americas. It's also just saturated with that kind of Western symbolism. And it's just like the motorized western expansion, but now it's not covered wagons and horses. It's people burning oil.

Part II

Michael Price: How has criticism affected the way you write?

Edward Dorn: I think one of the most felicitous things that happened to my generation was that we had no critics. And in fact, speaking personally, I was able to get on with it and generate systems of poetry that were anathema to criticism. And the motivations of criticism would have been a great waste of time and quite detrimental to me. But, you know, for the people writing before me there was a kind of criticism that was formal and it had an intellectual pursuit that was mostly honorable. After that, of course, it was utter nonsense. So I don't feel critical myself. Sometimes it's an art. Shakespeare criticism, for instance in the 20's and 30's, before the war, was sometimes an art. That was about the last time. But that still kept to a tradition Johnson had reintroduced as a skill. Of course, he actually invented criticism from his time to the beginning of World War II. And so the last people to practice that were of his school, whether or not they had all that much respect for him, because after all, he hasn't been fashionable for a long time. But still, that is what was meant by criticism, an analytical look at what had been done with a view of increasing the power of the act of writing. But the war set the big standard for destruction, and therefore a lot of intellection and a lot of criticism became destructive. You can say deconstruction or whatever else you want to put on it. But it's just destruction pure and simple. And it had to do with people's unresolved guilt. This is the condition we're still in of course. And that guilt, I think, is very often derived from intellectual laziness, a lack of fortitude and will, and obviously massive doses of dishonesty. This guilt has been unquestioned and has also been a very convenient cover for lots of cons. And so it obviously infected criticism, as well as motivating it.

Michael Price: But Abhorrences reads like a critical book.

Edward Dorn: That's not criticism in the methodical sense. It has some of the aggressions that criticism can have, bur really it's just a form. I've always been very interested in knowing what my form is. And in that sense those poems are essays cast in the form of a small poem. They are quite flat, and very prosaic, and except for touches of mocking, they are the opposite of poetry. Abhorrences is a kind of a running critical, essayistic journal of the 80's. I'd say that the published work was maybe a quarter of the output, because it was a rather daily and quotidian commentary. It could also be looked on as footnotes, not just about the time, but a place in the West. The shots of Orin Hatch and all the other portraits were meant to encompass a kind of geographic context or dimension. Abhorrences was a way of keeping check on a mentality.

Dale Smith: What do you think of American poetry today from that Protestant position we spoke of earlier?

Edward Dorn: Well, I think of American poetry today the way I've always thought about it. It's just a gutless wonder and it's totally under the thumb of Rome and always was. Because it admires centralized authority and coercion and nothing else practically, except some cash. It likes the cash flow. And in fact, poetry really is about the cash flow in a sense. And if you look at the people who have made money on poetry they've really managed to say almost nothing. Because the minute you say something, and you can be understood as saying it, and if you design your verse in such a way that there's no doubt about what you're saying, then you've lost the cash. Forget the cash. You're not ever going to be W.S. Merwin. You're not ever going to live in Hawaii. You're not ever going to do any of those things. You're not going to be poet laureate. Well, that's okay. The idea of a poet laureate in America is a bit of a joke anyway but, you know, you're not going to get the grants. You're not going to get the big ones. You're not going to be declared a genius by some board of trustees of a giant insurance company. But if you don't know any of that you're not a poet anyway.

Dale Smith: It seems that poets like Gertrude Stein are embraced while others, like Ezra Pound, are found to be inappropriate and offensive for whatever reasons.

Edward Dorn: Gertrude Stein is embraced because she is a big fat nothing. You can embrace this big fat nothing and it costs you nothing. There's no intellectual labor and every inanity you have makes it right and it encourages you to perpetuate all your inanities. She is a slug that should have had salt poured on her.

Dale Smith: Pound takes work.

Edward Dorn: Well you can put in as much work as you want to. The beauties of Pound will come to you without your doing a lot of work. I mean, that's another way that he is tossed off too. But if you want to increase the depth of your perception and so forth, of course you get out the indexes. After all, there's a big body of scholarship. But there's no body of scholarship around Gertrude Stein because there's no reference to anything accept to her own fatuous self narcissism. But that's not a system. That's nothing for anybody to gain from, it's not enlightening. It's a self-confirming despotism, actually. It cuts you off. In a strange way, one of the saving graces of this kind of childish petulance, which defines her, was that it never actually made possible imitators. Because if you were seen to imitate Stein, you would be a laughing stock. So that's good. We don't have all that trash breeding itself. But it does take up a lot of class room time when people should be learning something, like where Australia is. Anything would be better than spending time with her.

Michael Price: Do you think, instead, that poetry is a way to investigate and learn something?

Edward Dorn: In the end, poetry is a source only for those people who want to know, or to break open their skulls. What's considered your formal education is the preliminary to the long life ahead of you in which you take charge of that. Careerists need to learn well the things that are going to advance their career. For the most part that determines who's more successful than others. Plus connections, of course. Those are quite important. But that's not about curiosity or equating yourself with the world at large in a deeper way. Whether you think of yourself as a poet or not is irrelevant. I mean, a lot of people who think they are poets aren't and a lot of people who don't are. Again it's just this attitude. Because it isn't really a career. I mean, it's a career only if you want to work the other side of the street where the grants are. And that's a great study in itself. It takes a lot of concentration. That's a corporate way of thinking, cultivating those connections. It's not really that different from being the CEO of your own grant gathering corporation. You can do that without the slightest bit of curiosity. These are not necessarily bad poets, some of them are quite good. But they are not necessarily interesting because of their success in getting money. In fact, they are very often not very interesting at all, which leaves one to wonder what poetry's got to do with it.

 

 

---

SELECTIONS FROM FALL 1997

---

From Delusions
by Lewis Warsh

1

Two things were
missing, & then one of them
came into view. "Supper
is ready-all I have to do
is heat it up." There's no
direct compensation: it's like comparing
apples & plums. We overturn
the basket & the ripe
fruit falls to the ground.
Someone we don't know
(a friend of a friend) was
throwing up in the woods.
Two things are missing: "canonization"
& "don't take it so hard."
We drifted away to a small shack
on the edge of the woods. People
asked where we had gone & people
who knew bit their tongues.

Bob Marley Night Saturday Downtown
by Joanne Kyger

Dreamlike -the lights have a dark smoky glow and the street
is filled with groups of people under twenty. Car radios,
groups of boys, groups of girls, three sheriff's cars.
Like spring break at Fort Lauderdale, but everyone goes home
by morning.

At the Community Center the reggae is authentic, easy and
slow to dance to. The group, from Mendecino, has served
'jerked' chicken for dinner. I go around back to see if any
barbecues are still set up. The plaza is filled with vans,
their own encampment.

I walk up and start a conversation with a man and woman
cooking. Like, Lovely evening, how lucky you can park in our
plaza, which we don't usually allow, don't you love our
community center, and that's our freebox over there, etc.
She says, O God

they told me there would be people like you here.

March 18, 1996

Winter Sex
by Katherine Lederer

Their thoughts are entirely immersed in resolution.
He resolves to consecrate it with a tree.
He opens his eyes and he finds a place fitting to planting.
It is early in the morning. When he comes he is ethical.
He will remember it. He will give it the epithet epic and leave it.

Where is he?
In the country there are two of them.
Standing immersed in the shadow of love.
Of his motives, he says they are pure.
Of the heavy silence, she thinks it is part of the trueness of
their love.
In the winter his motives are altered by a storm.
The two of them purchase a knife.
The blade of it is long and thin.

He commands her to speak in direct discourse.
He indicates that he wants her to express her thoughts concisely and
            with precision.
He finds this romantic.
Most everything has remained unexpressed until this moment.
They are in the country and her bodice has been cut with the knife
            that the two of them have previously purchased.
Part of it hangs off her shoulder. In the distance she hears the sound
            of a gunshot.
This makes her want to fuck the man

by Lisa Jarnot

Ye white antarctic birds of upper
57th street, you gallery of
white antarctic birds, you street
with white antarctic birds and cabs
and white antarctic birds you street,
ye and you the street and birds I
walk upon the galleries of streets and
birds and longings, you the birds
antarctic of the conversations and
the bank machines, you the atm of
longing, the longing for the atm
machines, you the lover of the banks
and me and birds and others too and
cabs, and you the cabs and you the
subtle longing birds and me, and you
the conversations yet antarctic, and
soup and teeming white antarctic birds
and you the books and phones and atms
the bank machines antarctic, and you
the banks and cabs, and him the one
I love, and those who love me not,
and all antarctic longings, and all
the birds and cabs and also on the
street antarctic of this longing.

O l d   C a t   S o m b e r   M o o n
by Anselm Hollo

Running into feeling befuddles. A kiss, a moment, spiky,
euphoric-then back to evolution. "It are the face on top."
And this be nothing but croaks. Wintry mood floats in
reason's mineshaft. First shapes, twilight trees, now they
are doors. Then fades the sky around one. Looks like a
heightened puddle, haloed by symbolic purples.
"Cerebral, constructive, American worker will rise!"
There was a time one would have ended this with "You
don't say?" But that time's over. So let's hear it again:
"Cerebral, constructive, American worker will rise!" O, K.
All Right. Old cat howls, deaf now, at sixteen years, does
not know where we are.

Por  Dia  de  los  Muertos
by John Herndon

Breaking  the  lamps
                                      ritual regicide
by  turns,  younger  son,  elder  son
and  the  father
                       a   savage  crew
deal  grim  blows
           edge  of  the   shovel

chop  the  wickedly  grinning  head
roaring  rage  and  triumph

scatter  the  pieces  to  compost

god  rot  him  to  orange  mush
sprout  volunteers  come  springtime

Dear Labyrinth-
by Leslie Davis

I discovered you in the night, a long-forgotten
mystical tradition. A hero's ordeal. Dear trust.
Dear patience. Dear archetype. You called to me,
I walked. Indelible yearning. Influenced by a
recent exposure to religion. Fire. Sugar-skulls.
A day for the dead is approaching. Motivated by fear.
The phenomenal, the ordinary. The season has come.
Take me with you. Dear mandala. Dear entrails.
I long for the sun. Completely. Dear initiation.
This October, this November. Already married.
Dear Minotaur. Dear Theseus. Dear ritual. Help me
let go of some of last year's sorrow.

From living without pictures of mars
by Gwendolyn Albert

1.

red blue yellow and sometimes black
the dragonflies give each other a tow
or maybe a jumpstart. they are as big
as she said they would be and I
am flat on my back in the heat
dragonflies scattered above me like
points on an infinite grid. they skid
backwards and sideways the summer breeze
pushing relentlessly out to sea
as they resist without motors or sails
dipping in front of my eyes like yoyos

 

---

TABLE OF CONTENTS       NEXT