i am a bug
buzzing around the flame
of the shapeless I
who is too kind
to swat it away
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Chord Yet to Resolve
Hearts don't break
unlike machines
they widen
through distance to what's lost
the swell of love's backwash
its endless power
To sit with what you feel
when what you feel
is more than you
can make the spirit
ashen
Some of the most beautiful vistas in the West
cannot be photographed
it's for our own protection
the Earth will grieve with us
if only we can bear its magnificence
without chopping it up
to bite-size names and images
make abstract numbers answers
not holy chords
the cry that calms the stars
for the cold machine of mind knows it's alive
by quivering with the grief
the lights
awaken
in empathy contagion
this is being
without answers
to them
what we call pain
some purity of love
unlike machines
they widen
through distance to what's lost
the swell of love's backwash
its endless power
To sit with what you feel
when what you feel
is more than you
can make the spirit
ashen
Some of the most beautiful vistas in the West
cannot be photographed
it's for our own protection
the Earth will grieve with us
if only we can bear its magnificence
without chopping it up
to bite-size names and images
make abstract numbers answers
not holy chords
the cry that calms the stars
for the cold machine of mind knows it's alive
by quivering with the grief
the lights
awaken
in empathy contagion
this is being
without answers
to them
what we call pain
some purity of love
Monday, March 12, 2012
Leap of Faith
We hunger for the void
'cos it's the one thing we don't understand
—we take a leap of faith that in that place
we don't have to feel.
'cos it's the one thing we don't understand
—we take a leap of faith that in that place
we don't have to feel.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Hard Work
It's so easy to feel our limbs extend to eternity,
that the only thing that's keeping us from being all that is
is so we can know the enormous details of a moment.
Still we persist in the hard work of being alone,
pretending in the void we can be uncontainable.
that the only thing that's keeping us from being all that is
is so we can know the enormous details of a moment.
Still we persist in the hard work of being alone,
pretending in the void we can be uncontainable.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Saturday Night Poetry Reading
I'm feeling a little Hammett...
Curse of the Lobster Woman
And feeling a little Hanson...*
The Dream Poetry of Rusty Kjarvik
And sensing that the world has come unhinged...
Fever from Solar Storms
* Why just put my voice on my own words, and those of long-dead masters, when great contemporaries are waiting to be sound out? Rusty Kjarvik (aka Matt Hanson) has kindly given his permission to me to say WORD on his behalf, with a little assist from VAS.
Curse of the Lobster Woman
And feeling a little Hanson...*
The Dream Poetry of Rusty Kjarvik
And sensing that the world has come unhinged...
Fever from Solar Storms
* Why just put my voice on my own words, and those of long-dead masters, when great contemporaries are waiting to be sound out? Rusty Kjarvik (aka Matt Hanson) has kindly given his permission to me to say WORD on his behalf, with a little assist from VAS.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Fever from Solar Storms
I.
No winks and twirling pistols on Light Street,
just barflies with crooked smiles,
pelts on rusty majorette spikes
and a nervous look in her eyes
that maybe the blood isn't dried,
not even breaking into smirks as the cluster bombs exploded.
The politics of torch songs have gotten quite complicated while I was
away.
The bridal dress has turned into a habit.
There’s no William Powell as Topper Sterling
with his debonair brand of benevolent debauchery and kindly jaded
twinkling wit
or Carole Lombard the ferret-faced blonde with her gunsel in distress
repartee
for me, see, every night's still Gladys Knight night.
It’s even been a hard day’s Knight night
(it’s hard out here for a pip).
II.
“Persona management software is in the arsenal now of this man's army,” one of the candidates harrumphed triumphantly, like angelina jolie without the african babies and semi-retarded pretty-boy boyfriend, not a one of them has sold their mother into prostitution, not a one Sir Hemminghaws of Coeur d’Alene can keep from blurting out how to bring our value proposition to the table we must dot the i’s and cross the t’s and take a deep dive outside of the box to take it to the next level raise the bar close the gap and move the needle on the new normal navigating ambiguity so that we’re all on the same page onboarding low cost high impact sell and tell synergistic strategies of shared ownership sacrifice to socialize the message and institutionalize the paradigm shift – too mm mm good, the sound of one hand clapping, only a dialectical sophist would disagree, and we're all dialectical sophists now.
In my debate, gadabout gadfly the last democrat would wear a top hat, not sanctimonious blue, he’d miss details but swallow landscapes, he wouldn’t catastrophize suspicious male packages, but make the good feel good about evil and the evil feel good about good, say things like “kitty needs some milk” and “the cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter” and implore us to
“Never ever ever ever ever
Ever ever ever ever ever
Ever make the mistake
Of underestimating
The dangerous
Insanity
Of Bob Hope.”
III.
Holy cosmic transubstantiation Batman:
Six degrees of separation for this 33rd and a third degree mason,
the siddha musta fed me some bad fungus
or it was an ad hoc a la carte nip off the silkworm larva cart—
I didn’t keep my lotus powder dry
and all the mount meru mouthpieces work now for the other side.
It’s wake up in guyville on Guy Falkes day
with Goyas in the mist, goyim in our midst,
shoeless in gaza with the portable huzzahs
of heliocentric maniacs and orbital pan handlers,
the smell of bible black shoe leather in the morning
gaining agartha but losing your sole
for a cuppa shoeless joe,
the glimmering carnival too far off in the distance.
The plymouth has landed
but that's ok admiral byrds died like a soldier;
when the going gets encyclopedic, the encyclopedic glow.
“Abandon all hope” just as it all went black.
So this is death: Same. As. It. Ever. Was.
No winks and twirling pistols on Light Street,
just barflies with crooked smiles,
pelts on rusty majorette spikes
and a nervous look in her eyes
that maybe the blood isn't dried,
not even breaking into smirks as the cluster bombs exploded.
The politics of torch songs have gotten quite complicated while I was
away.
The bridal dress has turned into a habit.
There’s no William Powell as Topper Sterling
with his debonair brand of benevolent debauchery and kindly jaded
twinkling wit
or Carole Lombard the ferret-faced blonde with her gunsel in distress
repartee
for me, see, every night's still Gladys Knight night.
It’s even been a hard day’s Knight night
(it’s hard out here for a pip).
II.
“Persona management software is in the arsenal now of this man's army,” one of the candidates harrumphed triumphantly, like angelina jolie without the african babies and semi-retarded pretty-boy boyfriend, not a one of them has sold their mother into prostitution, not a one Sir Hemminghaws of Coeur d’Alene can keep from blurting out how to bring our value proposition to the table we must dot the i’s and cross the t’s and take a deep dive outside of the box to take it to the next level raise the bar close the gap and move the needle on the new normal navigating ambiguity so that we’re all on the same page onboarding low cost high impact sell and tell synergistic strategies of shared ownership sacrifice to socialize the message and institutionalize the paradigm shift – too mm mm good, the sound of one hand clapping, only a dialectical sophist would disagree, and we're all dialectical sophists now.
In my debate, gadabout gadfly the last democrat would wear a top hat, not sanctimonious blue, he’d miss details but swallow landscapes, he wouldn’t catastrophize suspicious male packages, but make the good feel good about evil and the evil feel good about good, say things like “kitty needs some milk” and “the cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter” and implore us to
“Never ever ever ever ever
Ever ever ever ever ever
Ever make the mistake
Of underestimating
The dangerous
Insanity
Of Bob Hope.”
III.
Holy cosmic transubstantiation Batman:
Six degrees of separation for this 33rd and a third degree mason,
the siddha musta fed me some bad fungus
or it was an ad hoc a la carte nip off the silkworm larva cart—
I didn’t keep my lotus powder dry
and all the mount meru mouthpieces work now for the other side.
It’s wake up in guyville on Guy Falkes day
with Goyas in the mist, goyim in our midst,
shoeless in gaza with the portable huzzahs
of heliocentric maniacs and orbital pan handlers,
the smell of bible black shoe leather in the morning
gaining agartha but losing your sole
for a cuppa shoeless joe,
the glimmering carnival too far off in the distance.
The plymouth has landed
but that's ok admiral byrds died like a soldier;
when the going gets encyclopedic, the encyclopedic glow.
“Abandon all hope” just as it all went black.
So this is death: Same. As. It. Ever. Was.
Stevens Textplication 13: Valley Candle
With its open-ended symbols and enigmatic meaning, “Valley Candle” from 1917 could support many flickering images of Wallace Stevens: the lapsed Christian, the dour aesthete, the atheist preoccupied with death, etc. To me, though, he is always the poet of self and world—an icy documenter of what gets abraded away on either side because of what happens in between. Thus I find a related meaning in the poem:
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
Most (if not all) commentators believe the candle blows out, or at least that it is ambiguous, as it could be flickering from the wind in a different direction (usually to distinguish the first gust from the second, when it almost assuredly goes out). I don’t agree that a supernatural condition has to be imposed of the candle being blown out by the wind and creating a ghost “image.” In fact I believe Stevens specifically used the word “image” to describe the candle in the second instance to tell the reader that it did not blow out. The discussion is all on why he used that word instead of, say, flame, light or candle. Similarly, “beams of the huge night” has been taken as an elusive and contradictory description that must be understood more in metaphysical than actual terms, when to me it seems strikingly clear, maybe from too many nights alone in the desert, that it is an accurate physical description of stars on a clear night.
The physical action, to me at least, is straightforward. One candle in an immense valley at night (a picture that drips with symbolism, of the illuminating power of the mind or religious spirit, of the immortal soul in the vale of tears, of the singular imagination in the alien world, of the tiny human in the vastness of nature, but we’ll leave that aside)—it neither illuminates nor is swallowed by the “huge night.” Instead the stars (in a lovely verb) “converge” on it. Think of the way a candle sends off its own beams outward and upward when burning, and how those would connect, in the absence of other light, with the dim light rays of the stars. It’s really a precise—albeit poetic—physical description, one that also works metaphorically: the human light and the natural light merge to become one. What changes that communion is the wind. What do the lights need to merge in this way? Complete meditative stillness. The wind disrupts it.
On strictly physical terms, then, we have a scene that could be repeated endlessly, like the proverbial Chinese laundry, the glow of lights united followed by the chaotic scattering of their beams. What gives it distinction as a poem, as alluded to before, is the word “image.” It’s significant that this word is the only one not repeated after the first line of the poem. The wind brings something that diminishes in some way the communion. The Latin definition of “image” is of an artificial, two-dimensional representation of something, not the actual thing. The wind may not have changed in its ebb what is happening between the candle and stars, but it has changed how that relationship is perceived.
I think (thanks John Latta) of Stephen Crane’s poem “Black Riders”: “…truth was to me / A breath, a wind, / A shadow, a phantom, / And never had I touched / The hem of its garment.” The breath of wind, taken as expression creative or otherwise, turns what's real into approximation, taking something away with it. The movement of wind, taken as the forces that uncover and reveal, show that there is something inherently amiss in the one-to-one correspondence between self and world. The truth gives a lesson-ing. It is the soul’s progress that is at issue here, from unconscious celebrant of the divine unities into conscious awareness of the separation between the individual and the whole, seeing the candlelight, as it were, on Plato’s cave wall, as a shadow of the truth and not the truth itself. Once made aware, the inhabitant of Stevens' poems continues to know and cultivate, in the wind, the separation.
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
Most (if not all) commentators believe the candle blows out, or at least that it is ambiguous, as it could be flickering from the wind in a different direction (usually to distinguish the first gust from the second, when it almost assuredly goes out). I don’t agree that a supernatural condition has to be imposed of the candle being blown out by the wind and creating a ghost “image.” In fact I believe Stevens specifically used the word “image” to describe the candle in the second instance to tell the reader that it did not blow out. The discussion is all on why he used that word instead of, say, flame, light or candle. Similarly, “beams of the huge night” has been taken as an elusive and contradictory description that must be understood more in metaphysical than actual terms, when to me it seems strikingly clear, maybe from too many nights alone in the desert, that it is an accurate physical description of stars on a clear night.
The physical action, to me at least, is straightforward. One candle in an immense valley at night (a picture that drips with symbolism, of the illuminating power of the mind or religious spirit, of the immortal soul in the vale of tears, of the singular imagination in the alien world, of the tiny human in the vastness of nature, but we’ll leave that aside)—it neither illuminates nor is swallowed by the “huge night.” Instead the stars (in a lovely verb) “converge” on it. Think of the way a candle sends off its own beams outward and upward when burning, and how those would connect, in the absence of other light, with the dim light rays of the stars. It’s really a precise—albeit poetic—physical description, one that also works metaphorically: the human light and the natural light merge to become one. What changes that communion is the wind. What do the lights need to merge in this way? Complete meditative stillness. The wind disrupts it.
On strictly physical terms, then, we have a scene that could be repeated endlessly, like the proverbial Chinese laundry, the glow of lights united followed by the chaotic scattering of their beams. What gives it distinction as a poem, as alluded to before, is the word “image.” It’s significant that this word is the only one not repeated after the first line of the poem. The wind brings something that diminishes in some way the communion. The Latin definition of “image” is of an artificial, two-dimensional representation of something, not the actual thing. The wind may not have changed in its ebb what is happening between the candle and stars, but it has changed how that relationship is perceived.
I think (thanks John Latta) of Stephen Crane’s poem “Black Riders”: “…truth was to me / A breath, a wind, / A shadow, a phantom, / And never had I touched / The hem of its garment.” The breath of wind, taken as expression creative or otherwise, turns what's real into approximation, taking something away with it. The movement of wind, taken as the forces that uncover and reveal, show that there is something inherently amiss in the one-to-one correspondence between self and world. The truth gives a lesson-ing. It is the soul’s progress that is at issue here, from unconscious celebrant of the divine unities into conscious awareness of the separation between the individual and the whole, seeing the candlelight, as it were, on Plato’s cave wall, as a shadow of the truth and not the truth itself. Once made aware, the inhabitant of Stevens' poems continues to know and cultivate, in the wind, the separation.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Thoughts While Changing the Battery
Without me the world would have no meaning,
The name on the grave would not be my own,
The past not created from scratch on a whim,
The future not agreed-to beforehand.
The Gods would not be noticed, or complimented on their clothes,
The songbirds and power lines would not connect,
The milk from the factories would refuse to be drunk,
The radio would be off when the hair is cut,
The stones would not be alive.
Despite all of that, I feel lucky to be here,
Thankful to receive what needs to be given,
Hopeful to give what the world can’t live without.
An irresistible force meets an immovable object,
Two are drawn to the light that they themselves emit
But can’t see, it’s always the other, always.
The name on the grave would not be my own,
The past not created from scratch on a whim,
The future not agreed-to beforehand.
The Gods would not be noticed, or complimented on their clothes,
The songbirds and power lines would not connect,
The milk from the factories would refuse to be drunk,
The radio would be off when the hair is cut,
The stones would not be alive.
Despite all of that, I feel lucky to be here,
Thankful to receive what needs to be given,
Hopeful to give what the world can’t live without.
An irresistible force meets an immovable object,
Two are drawn to the light that they themselves emit
But can’t see, it’s always the other, always.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
What's Left
The genius of the artist
isn't found in what is made,
that temporary structure
marking where the will was stayed,
any more than God is seen
in a photo of His sky at closing time,
it's in the mind, sifting
to keep the balance shifting true
immeasurable sorrow on one side
backed with body parts and life-size sets and glue.
isn't found in what is made,
that temporary structure
marking where the will was stayed,
any more than God is seen
in a photo of His sky at closing time,
it's in the mind, sifting
to keep the balance shifting true
immeasurable sorrow on one side
backed with body parts and life-size sets and glue.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Carcass Turning into Soup
How endlessly we recombine
answers into questions
as if the world so fully formed
was one big jigsaw puzzle.
How the earth conspires, by growing more,
it can't abide a final draft
from bible scribes or online trolls
or microbes that turn four-course waste to life-force dirt.
The news is different every day
so are the people reading it,
all fashions must fast forward to further fashions,
people, jokes and songs go stale, must be replaced.
Memes and synchronicities stick out
in the slurry of the stream,
as God throws hats across the attic
from the magic vaudeville box.
answers into questions
as if the world so fully formed
was one big jigsaw puzzle.
How the earth conspires, by growing more,
it can't abide a final draft
from bible scribes or online trolls
or microbes that turn four-course waste to life-force dirt.
The news is different every day
so are the people reading it,
all fashions must fast forward to further fashions,
people, jokes and songs go stale, must be replaced.
Memes and synchronicities stick out
in the slurry of the stream,
as God throws hats across the attic
from the magic vaudeville box.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Triptych
More Information People Aren't Really Ready For
The clenched fist
of us against the world
opens at last
and a butterfly releases
the fist existed just to nurture it
for this moment when it flies away
Nostalgia Before Spring
The crocuses sneer
at all my sorrow
To them, death is only an excuse
to turn purple
All my pain is no less beautiful
for having died first
Yet I hold on to regret
the way I lived
As if that which is gone
defines my worth
Always something shadowing the present
some obsolete gem
That answered every single question
once
For Phil and Jackie, Who Stayed
This is about
The time I leave
My words and music in a box
Beside the blue suitcase
I turn from faces crying
As if I have no choice
As if the hearth must fall before
The stream that promises nothing
I'm too blinding to be held
Like a diamond in a setting
The clenched fist
of us against the world
opens at last
and a butterfly releases
the fist existed just to nurture it
for this moment when it flies away
Nostalgia Before Spring
The crocuses sneer
at all my sorrow
To them, death is only an excuse
to turn purple
All my pain is no less beautiful
for having died first
Yet I hold on to regret
the way I lived
As if that which is gone
defines my worth
Always something shadowing the present
some obsolete gem
That answered every single question
once
For Phil and Jackie, Who Stayed
This is about
The time I leave
My words and music in a box
Beside the blue suitcase
I turn from faces crying
As if I have no choice
As if the hearth must fall before
The stream that promises nothing
I'm too blinding to be held
Like a diamond in a setting
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Saturday Night Poetry Reading
It's a special year so I thought I'd make a toast...
29-Line Poem
And remember the gifts brought to us by winter...
Closer to a Colder Point
And deeply reflect on the darkness in March...
Memory by Friedrich Holderlin
Andenken (reading in German)
29-Line Poem
And remember the gifts brought to us by winter...
Closer to a Colder Point
And deeply reflect on the darkness in March...
Memory by Friedrich Holderlin
Andenken (reading in German)
Friday, March 2, 2012
Stevens Textplication 12: To the Roaring Wind
“To the Roaring Wind,” from 1917, is one of Stevens’ shortest poems, clocking in at a mere 13 words, with a remarkable eight of its 22 syllables sibilants:
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
Stevens placed it as a coda to end his first collection, Harmonium, giving the finish of the book a lights-out, lullaby quality. Still, the poem jars and leaves the volume feeling unsettled, like the sound of the surf that refuses to stop for us. Part of that is its cryptic obscurity: Who is he talking to? What is the point of this exercise? Why would a syllable be so important? It also reverses normal poetic practice of invoking the muse of poetry at the beginning of the book to ask obliquely at least for more poetry at the end. Where is a reader to go with this unresolved and inexplicable desire?
One way to navigate the enigma is to note the sonic congruence between the wind of the title and the human voice implied by the Latin word vocalissimus, which means "vocalist, singer, utterer of sound." The wind, symbolic of nature, inspires the voice, symbolic of the human, in a poetic utterance. What complicates it here is that the human only seeks a syllable, which normally would deny meaning in favor of sound alone, so that the human voice at its most poetic is only trying to reproduce the sound the wind makes. Furthermore, the search involves “the distances of sleep,” that is, either nature or the human (or both) is asleep, suggesting the irrational and perhaps impossible nature of this quest (and recalling the efforts of the Surrealists to capture a stranger and deeper truth from immersion in the unconscious world of dreams).
Despite these obstacles, the imperative “speak it” at the end implies the will is strong enough to wrest something human out of the inhuman, some essential expression that can be seen as poetry. In this way the poem is consonant with Stevens’ poetic project as a whole: the vast gulf between inhuman reality and human perception, and the obsessive desire to use imagination to bridge the gap all on one side, which creates strange and wonderful flowers that can serve to replace the ever-hidden truth.
Dream, voice, reality - that’s all nice and neat but I can’t shake the feeling that this poem is really about something far more earthbound and mundane. I imagine the poet – unable to sleep as so many poets are wont – gazing, not wholly annoyed, at his snoring wife, marveling at the relentless purposefulness of it all, how everything is right in the world but deprived of any meaning – how this opens up a gap in the mind for what we call the poetic.
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
Stevens placed it as a coda to end his first collection, Harmonium, giving the finish of the book a lights-out, lullaby quality. Still, the poem jars and leaves the volume feeling unsettled, like the sound of the surf that refuses to stop for us. Part of that is its cryptic obscurity: Who is he talking to? What is the point of this exercise? Why would a syllable be so important? It also reverses normal poetic practice of invoking the muse of poetry at the beginning of the book to ask obliquely at least for more poetry at the end. Where is a reader to go with this unresolved and inexplicable desire?
One way to navigate the enigma is to note the sonic congruence between the wind of the title and the human voice implied by the Latin word vocalissimus, which means "vocalist, singer, utterer of sound." The wind, symbolic of nature, inspires the voice, symbolic of the human, in a poetic utterance. What complicates it here is that the human only seeks a syllable, which normally would deny meaning in favor of sound alone, so that the human voice at its most poetic is only trying to reproduce the sound the wind makes. Furthermore, the search involves “the distances of sleep,” that is, either nature or the human (or both) is asleep, suggesting the irrational and perhaps impossible nature of this quest (and recalling the efforts of the Surrealists to capture a stranger and deeper truth from immersion in the unconscious world of dreams).
Despite these obstacles, the imperative “speak it” at the end implies the will is strong enough to wrest something human out of the inhuman, some essential expression that can be seen as poetry. In this way the poem is consonant with Stevens’ poetic project as a whole: the vast gulf between inhuman reality and human perception, and the obsessive desire to use imagination to bridge the gap all on one side, which creates strange and wonderful flowers that can serve to replace the ever-hidden truth.
Dream, voice, reality - that’s all nice and neat but I can’t shake the feeling that this poem is really about something far more earthbound and mundane. I imagine the poet – unable to sleep as so many poets are wont – gazing, not wholly annoyed, at his snoring wife, marveling at the relentless purposefulness of it all, how everything is right in the world but deprived of any meaning – how this opens up a gap in the mind for what we call the poetic.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Dream Logic
Life is a dream from which we’ve just woken up;
We quickly forget where we were the last moment,
Have we left too many airtight wrinkles behind
To trace our steps?
Why must the mind demand all that proof
Of what seemed unassailable reasoning
In the deep work of sleep, called non sequiturs
When the task is complete?
When we look at ourselves from above
Can we say that our arc is like a birds’?
Or do we endlessly skip from conundrum and repulsion
Waiting for imagined worms to drop?
There is no philosophy precise enough,
No words that won’t succumb to generosity,
No numbers to take the place of consciousness
(Or help us sleep as the case may be).
We say we’re afraid of nothingness, but we’re not
It’s that something flows on like a river
Without us, with no mind to make ripples
As it clasps a no-longer-laughing stick.
We quickly forget where we were the last moment,
Have we left too many airtight wrinkles behind
To trace our steps?
Why must the mind demand all that proof
Of what seemed unassailable reasoning
In the deep work of sleep, called non sequiturs
When the task is complete?
When we look at ourselves from above
Can we say that our arc is like a birds’?
Or do we endlessly skip from conundrum and repulsion
Waiting for imagined worms to drop?
There is no philosophy precise enough,
No words that won’t succumb to generosity,
No numbers to take the place of consciousness
(Or help us sleep as the case may be).
We say we’re afraid of nothingness, but we’re not
It’s that something flows on like a river
Without us, with no mind to make ripples
As it clasps a no-longer-laughing stick.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The Unified Map of all Repercussions
(A Toast)
It’s a FREE day
So LEAP
To words you have no business knowing
To feelings only saints may comprehend
To LOVE
Without a reason
Without a BIG GULP refill explanation
To LIFE
For what if there is no threat?
What if there is no death?
What if you can't see it in your heart to hate no more?
SALUT
There is no reason to be right
SKOAL
There are no winners in this fight
NAZ-DROH-VEE-AH
Y’all did the best you could
YEH-CHID-DA and CHOK DEE DZO
Aren't we blessed you even would
Say
PROOST
Arise ye dismal functionaries serving lizard grey!
LA CHAIM
And the dialectic leopard on the swingset coiled all day
It’s time to JUMP the ropes
SNAP the synapse
HOP the quantum
SHOOT the faith
Time to LEAP
So LEAP
To words you have no business knowing
To feelings only saints may comprehend
To LOVE
Without a reason
Without a BIG GULP refill explanation
To LIFE
For what if there is no threat?
What if there is no death?
What if you can't see it in your heart to hate no more?
SALUT
There is no reason to be right
SKOAL
There are no winners in this fight
NAZ-DROH-VEE-AH
Y’all did the best you could
YEH-CHID-DA and CHOK DEE DZO
Aren't we blessed you even would
Say
PROOST
Arise ye dismal functionaries serving lizard grey!
LA CHAIM
And the dialectic leopard on the swingset coiled all day
It’s time to JUMP the ropes
SNAP the synapse
HOP the quantum
SHOOT the faith
Time to LEAP
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
On the Margins of the Large
Lies are the only way to understand this world
—leaves turn into trees, birds becoming skies—
‘Til finally we’d pay any price
To keep the other versions at bay
—the sky is green, as every one of us is a sun—
Our stories hang like shadows on the light of never knowing
How else can we the blind find out our way?
We tell stories to steal time—when we know there is no time,
We tell stories to steal words—when we know there are no words,
To steal the fire of who we are—when we don’t know who to be,
And to steal what we desire—when we don’t know what to want.
We tell stories to remember what we never knew at all
And to forget what we were born to never lose.
The stories wrap us up like blankets of warm judgment
Condemning what’s too painful to accept:
That the world that’s full of people cannot fit inside our block
In surrogates, in symbols, to make us think that we’re caught up,
That the clumps of dirt we gather are not distinct from earth's remainder,
That the storm won’t move too fast for any one of us to see,
That the gods we seek are closer than we know.
Our homes are lovely forgeries, we’ve built them with what we believe,
Their beams bend with the promise that some truth will fill its frame
Like spirit fills the universe of stars, and we cast from it our arch
possessive eye
On ideas spread like mushrooms, that keep alive the hopelessness,
The dark and moistened prayer for that one time that we almost saw
The Truth to come again, as if that would alone be just enough
For the myths to make us Gods enough to believe in one,
To hear in distant music a life that no longer exists,
That never existed except as what we lost before we got here,
Striking likenesses together for the palest glimpse of fire,
Exaggerated shadows and the light ever invisible.
We will not stop 'til the echo of our artificial and conditional
Conversations become the very currency of heaven,
‘Til the inhuman falseness that the Gods despise becomes at last
The reaching down in mercy that we know comes out of desperate lies.
—leaves turn into trees, birds becoming skies—
‘Til finally we’d pay any price
To keep the other versions at bay
—the sky is green, as every one of us is a sun—
Our stories hang like shadows on the light of never knowing
How else can we the blind find out our way?
We tell stories to steal time—when we know there is no time,
We tell stories to steal words—when we know there are no words,
To steal the fire of who we are—when we don’t know who to be,
And to steal what we desire—when we don’t know what to want.
We tell stories to remember what we never knew at all
And to forget what we were born to never lose.
The stories wrap us up like blankets of warm judgment
Condemning what’s too painful to accept:
That the world that’s full of people cannot fit inside our block
In surrogates, in symbols, to make us think that we’re caught up,
That the clumps of dirt we gather are not distinct from earth's remainder,
That the storm won’t move too fast for any one of us to see,
That the gods we seek are closer than we know.
Our homes are lovely forgeries, we’ve built them with what we believe,
Their beams bend with the promise that some truth will fill its frame
Like spirit fills the universe of stars, and we cast from it our arch
possessive eye
On ideas spread like mushrooms, that keep alive the hopelessness,
The dark and moistened prayer for that one time that we almost saw
The Truth to come again, as if that would alone be just enough
For the myths to make us Gods enough to believe in one,
To hear in distant music a life that no longer exists,
That never existed except as what we lost before we got here,
Striking likenesses together for the palest glimpse of fire,
Exaggerated shadows and the light ever invisible.
We will not stop 'til the echo of our artificial and conditional
Conversations become the very currency of heaven,
‘Til the inhuman falseness that the Gods despise becomes at last
The reaching down in mercy that we know comes out of desperate lies.
Spleen
From the French of Paul Verlaine
The roses were always red,
And always black was the ivy.
My dear, all the times you have fled
My despair is always revived.
The sky was too blue, too tender,
The sea too green and the air too sweet.
I’m always afraid – what to wait for!
What seeps now from your atrocity?
The holly with its varnished leaf,
The boxwood sheen I am weary,
And the endless campaign of grief
And everything, but you, dreary.
Les roses étaient toutes rouges,
Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.
Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.
Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre
La mer trop verte et l'air trop doux.
Je crains toujours,- ce qu'est d'attendre!
Quelque fuite atroce de vous.
Du houx à la feuille vernie
Et du luisant buis je suis las,
Et de la campagne infinie
Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas!
The roses were always red,
And always black was the ivy.
My dear, all the times you have fled
My despair is always revived.
The sky was too blue, too tender,
The sea too green and the air too sweet.
I’m always afraid – what to wait for!
What seeps now from your atrocity?
The holly with its varnished leaf,
The boxwood sheen I am weary,
And the endless campaign of grief
And everything, but you, dreary.
Les roses étaient toutes rouges,
Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.
Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.
Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre
La mer trop verte et l'air trop doux.
Je crains toujours,- ce qu'est d'attendre!
Quelque fuite atroce de vous.
Du houx à la feuille vernie
Et du luisant buis je suis las,
Et de la campagne infinie
Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas!
Monday, February 27, 2012
A Day in My Home Town
One man, his world in a sack by his side, taps the recyclables through the flap, the litter he spent the morning collecting, hearing each bottle break as it falls in the machine. He will cash the receipt and use what he’s earned for a package of cigarettes and a meal at McDonalds, where he has a coupon, ducking the cops each step along the way.
Another man taps on his computer, and a maze of mezzanine loans for boarded-up strip malls and mostly vacant office parks are marked in a key stroke as current, preserving his obscene bonus and saving his firm from having to acknowledge its insolvency. He knows it's illegal, but he also knows the IRS, if he didn’t do it, would attach all of his homes.
I sit somewhere in the middle of all this, trying to keep my heart from feeling and my mind from going tilt, for it’s important to remember that things are perfect the way they are, for these two know their choices, they know this is their journey, and they’re given what they need to grow by this and this alone.
Another man taps on his computer, and a maze of mezzanine loans for boarded-up strip malls and mostly vacant office parks are marked in a key stroke as current, preserving his obscene bonus and saving his firm from having to acknowledge its insolvency. He knows it's illegal, but he also knows the IRS, if he didn’t do it, would attach all of his homes.
I sit somewhere in the middle of all this, trying to keep my heart from feeling and my mind from going tilt, for it’s important to remember that things are perfect the way they are, for these two know their choices, they know this is their journey, and they’re given what they need to grow by this and this alone.
My Computer Wrote Me a Poem
What you have is...
Aha Buslogic
Joliet Loop
Serial Console Slip
Select Vortex
Emulation
ash badblocks
busybox
cat chain chatter
clear clone
dump echo
elvis false
flash gunzip
halt head hex
dump kernel key
kill linux
length loadmap
more mount
pax ping
profile protocols
reboot route script
shared slattach sleep
sort split strings
swap off
swap on
synctail tar test
touch trace route
true tune unpack
update view
watch which yes
as root
(the above was waiting for me on my work computer this morning, with numbers, code and command words removed, and line breaks added)
Aha Buslogic
Joliet Loop
Serial Console Slip
Select Vortex
Emulation
ash badblocks
busybox
cat chain chatter
clear clone
dump echo
elvis false
flash gunzip
halt head hex
dump kernel key
kill linux
length loadmap
more mount
pax ping
profile protocols
reboot route script
shared slattach sleep
sort split strings
swap off
swap on
synctail tar test
touch trace route
true tune unpack
update view
watch which yes
as root
(the above was waiting for me on my work computer this morning, with numbers, code and command words removed, and line breaks added)
The Choice to be Slave or Master, Dead or Alive
one person
can hold the world
inside the mind
or without knowing
can be the world
whole
can hold the world
inside the mind
or without knowing
can be the world
whole
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Places
Manhattan,
such a backwards and uncivil borough
not like Rivertucky
with its rainbowthundersnow,
where you can hear the sacred symphonies
of the lizard people underneath.
such a backwards and uncivil borough
not like Rivertucky
with its rainbowthundersnow,
where you can hear the sacred symphonies
of the lizard people underneath.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Saturday Night Poetry Reading
No poem today, instead a random mini-reading (hat tip Hannah)
Merlin by Edwin Muir:
The Days Unexploded Landmines from a week ago Friday:
Off Maryland Avenue from Phoenix, 2007
Merlin by Edwin Muir:
The Days Unexploded Landmines from a week ago Friday:
Off Maryland Avenue from Phoenix, 2007
Friday, February 24, 2012
Windbreaks
We think we are being watched
As we ourselves watch
Or would watch, if we could keep silent,
If the sound of the distance wasn't so acute,
The look of smoke so beautiful.
Ideas spring into being like fog
And disappear when the light dissolves them.
Why must we face reality
When we will turn it into illusion anyway?
The debaucheries of judgment
Seem so out of synch with the force
Like a tuning fork through the trees.
Transparence is all around us;
We see nothing.
The light leads the blind
Away from the need of sight.
To be set adrift, facing all but one's own mind
Or be caught in the oblivion of ubiquity;
To search for the frail orange light
In the windows at dusk,
Or be absorbed in the deepening blue.
Rain types on the leaves,
Sparrows drop as the trees breathe.
The ground is a sponge with flowing veins
Flooding down the grass unable to constrain it.
Let us go to the river, and disappear,
Dissolve like domes of bug bubble in the fern-patterned flow,
Feel the eons passing.
We would starve here if, while feeling fish twist
Through our bloodstream, feeling the cold omnipotence
Of intertwining windbreaks, we did not also
Have these tricks of perception
Which allow us to picture a net
Where we see the fish swimming.
As we ourselves watch
Or would watch, if we could keep silent,
If the sound of the distance wasn't so acute,
The look of smoke so beautiful.
Ideas spring into being like fog
And disappear when the light dissolves them.
Why must we face reality
When we will turn it into illusion anyway?
The debaucheries of judgment
Seem so out of synch with the force
Like a tuning fork through the trees.
Transparence is all around us;
We see nothing.
The light leads the blind
Away from the need of sight.
To be set adrift, facing all but one's own mind
Or be caught in the oblivion of ubiquity;
To search for the frail orange light
In the windows at dusk,
Or be absorbed in the deepening blue.
Rain types on the leaves,
Sparrows drop as the trees breathe.
The ground is a sponge with flowing veins
Flooding down the grass unable to constrain it.
Let us go to the river, and disappear,
Dissolve like domes of bug bubble in the fern-patterned flow,
Feel the eons passing.
We would starve here if, while feeling fish twist
Through our bloodstream, feeling the cold omnipotence
Of intertwining windbreaks, we did not also
Have these tricks of perception
Which allow us to picture a net
Where we see the fish swimming.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
New World
It's true the trees
don't speak of their wisdom
but the finches spread
a little of it around
on finally-yielding ground.
The bloom of mildew
and chartreuse moss,
young squirrels with rat tails
hold the dream of life
in their mouths.
A sparrow keeps a bare twig
like laurel in her beak
and waves it to towards the sky
to say "what can you do
for me now, sun?"
The cinquefoil
shows its own hue
of purple
distinct
from the barely perceptible
haze in the air
and gloss on the streams,
what seems a living earth's
philosophizing,
rocking the young things to re-birth,
like the gun is raised
but no plant
has jumped it,
for they know better than us
the structure of things.
The hills themselves
well up with love
and wear their green frills
like an outbreak of goosebumps;
the slow, slow logic of the universal mind
always between visible and unseen...
We make our new world
from shadows and glare
to keep it from seeming
too far away.
don't speak of their wisdom
but the finches spread
a little of it around
on finally-yielding ground.
The bloom of mildew
and chartreuse moss,
young squirrels with rat tails
hold the dream of life
in their mouths.
A sparrow keeps a bare twig
like laurel in her beak
and waves it to towards the sky
to say "what can you do
for me now, sun?"
The cinquefoil
shows its own hue
of purple
distinct
from the barely perceptible
haze in the air
and gloss on the streams,
what seems a living earth's
philosophizing,
rocking the young things to re-birth,
like the gun is raised
but no plant
has jumped it,
for they know better than us
the structure of things.
The hills themselves
well up with love
and wear their green frills
like an outbreak of goosebumps;
the slow, slow logic of the universal mind
always between visible and unseen...
We make our new world
from shadows and glare
to keep it from seeming
too far away.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The Compost in the In-Box
In every town the laborers stand
single-file for nearly a mile
waiting to be chosen that day
for any kind of work, while I
look on from outside of the elements,
humming through a smooth train
to a daily destination where the world
waits to clap when I discover it -
in return I must be patient
for the discoveries of others, for whom
I must clap as if I need that
for myself - perhaps I do,
the right to speak is given when you listen,
the right to act when you can prove you can stay still,
you give directions when you learn to take them -
this, not the products that we grow,
is the work - waiting like the laborers
to earn the right to sweat,
for we would turn over all the topsoil
if we had the choice, and not
recognize that all things have a right
to sit in the sun and grow - equally -
even that fat, wide-flapped leaf
that believes it's only qualified to rise
if it blots out all the light in the sky.
single-file for nearly a mile
waiting to be chosen that day
for any kind of work, while I
look on from outside of the elements,
humming through a smooth train
to a daily destination where the world
waits to clap when I discover it -
in return I must be patient
for the discoveries of others, for whom
I must clap as if I need that
for myself - perhaps I do,
the right to speak is given when you listen,
the right to act when you can prove you can stay still,
you give directions when you learn to take them -
this, not the products that we grow,
is the work - waiting like the laborers
to earn the right to sweat,
for we would turn over all the topsoil
if we had the choice, and not
recognize that all things have a right
to sit in the sun and grow - equally -
even that fat, wide-flapped leaf
that believes it's only qualified to rise
if it blots out all the light in the sky.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
New York, 2012
In a flash of train sparks
the world changed
from one where I
was the only person in it
to one where I do not exist
the world changed
from one where I
was the only person in it
to one where I do not exist
Fiona Apple!
Posted for no other reason than I love you, Fiona
“I suddenly feel like a different person
From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone”
“So keep on callng me names, keep on, keep on
And I'll keep kicking the crap till it's gone
If you keep on killing, you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle, I bet I'll be
Able to move on.”
"I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope that's it."
There's Fiona with breakfast…
All day and all night…
At the movies…
Singing along with the oldies…
Before going to bed…
And the reason I can die now:
(Alright I know this is probably not copacetic with the library police. The videos are off youtube and the pictures are from an unnoted photographer in an unremembered newspaper from a show in Phoenix in 2006. And everything is Fiona's -- as always).
From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone”
And I'll keep kicking the crap till it's gone
If you keep on killing, you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle, I bet I'll be
Able to move on.”
I need to be bled dry to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope that's it."
There's Fiona with breakfast…
All day and all night…
At the movies…
Singing along with the oldies…
Before going to bed…
And the reason I can die now:
(Alright I know this is probably not copacetic with the library police. The videos are off youtube and the pictures are from an unnoted photographer in an unremembered newspaper from a show in Phoenix in 2006. And everything is Fiona's -- as always).
Monday, February 20, 2012
Staring at a Sunny Sky
I can't stop
stirring the dirt to powder
to get behind
what is there
it's out in the open
not seen
stirring the dirt to powder
to get behind
what is there
it's out in the open
not seen
The Swan
From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke
Misfortune, through the not yet gone
sways his crippled way, bound
like the gangly walk of swans.
And this stopping, this no longer fastened
every morning, to the firm ground
as he becomes so anxiously fallen—:
to the water, in which he slides with empathy
and into which, with clockwork and revery
he sends to both sides waves, float on float;
wearing an unending silence and acuity,
royal majesty gaining immensity,
on glass he glides his ermine coat.
Misfortune, through the not yet gone
sways his crippled way, bound
like the gangly walk of swans.
And this stopping, this no longer fastened
every morning, to the firm ground
as he becomes so anxiously fallen—:
to the water, in which he slides with empathy
and into which, with clockwork and revery
he sends to both sides waves, float on float;
wearing an unending silence and acuity,
royal majesty gaining immensity,
on glass he glides his ermine coat.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
In Tom Waits World
The clown, the rebel, the outcast
busking for coin
at the Witches Brew Tavern.
His time is different than ours,
the words are different,
who he is is simplified
for entertainment.
How much smaller he will be
to overcome with largeness
the horror of their eyes.
He puts their names in his song
and stares right into their gaze.
He's proud of stopping short,
at earning what they give
and walking in a long, diagonal path
the one that disappears into the night
away from kerosene street lights,
black webs hanging as if from an eyelid.
He eats like an animal in the dark.
He's proud he can appear
at different corners
in these three
black and circumscribed blocks.
He's finally glad he's alive
when standing in his boots
with his every possession
on his back, they're the rocks
he has to carry,
which he volunteered to hold
and can let go at any time
as soon as he's ready.
As soon as he's ready
he'll save people's lives
by pretending there's no blood.
busking for coin
at the Witches Brew Tavern.
His time is different than ours,
the words are different,
who he is is simplified
for entertainment.
How much smaller he will be
to overcome with largeness
the horror of their eyes.
He puts their names in his song
and stares right into their gaze.
He's proud of stopping short,
at earning what they give
and walking in a long, diagonal path
the one that disappears into the night
away from kerosene street lights,
black webs hanging as if from an eyelid.
He eats like an animal in the dark.
He's proud he can appear
at different corners
in these three
black and circumscribed blocks.
He's finally glad he's alive
when standing in his boots
with his every possession
on his back, they're the rocks
he has to carry,
which he volunteered to hold
and can let go at any time
as soon as he's ready.
As soon as he's ready
he'll save people's lives
by pretending there's no blood.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Poets and Poetry
Having even one reader is like having an encounter with God - the thought that thousands, even millions, read even one poet - that's slavery, and a reminder that with the Internet, EVERYONE will LIGHT up the sky like Shakespeare (who wasn't actually Shakespeare).
(OK I still think Rilke in German has above-average magnificence).
(OK I still think Rilke in German has above-average magnificence).
Marblehead to Salem Progression
The child I couldn't save
still lingers in this playyard
as the baseball tundra echoes condensation
but there's nothing I can save,
he must do this on his own.
The leagues have been suspended,
the bigger kids are grown,
the refreshment shed is locked up like a drum
But children are no longer fell behind
heads filled with festering wounds
crying showing nothing from inside;
the tree limbs only sway,
they are somewhere else.
They're with the hundred stories
that amble into Wendy's,
the homeless monastery with pewter hoodies,
men knocked down in their prime, by life
to Facebook life, now sharing memories
of lobster tails and California winters
as they wait for time to heal the wounds
and friends to share their cigarettes
and talk of joy distractions
where they weren't a none around.
He's waiting with heart open
by a closed door, though they vanish,
his friends, on the other side,
the place where shame will finally go to hide
from those who're only but a half-step behind,
with jobs and homes and wives,
those things that always are the first to go
when lessons need be learned
of living with yourself,
to sit with choices made,
the waiting to be found.
still lingers in this playyard
as the baseball tundra echoes condensation
but there's nothing I can save,
he must do this on his own.
The leagues have been suspended,
the bigger kids are grown,
the refreshment shed is locked up like a drum
But children are no longer fell behind
heads filled with festering wounds
crying showing nothing from inside;
the tree limbs only sway,
they are somewhere else.
They're with the hundred stories
that amble into Wendy's,
the homeless monastery with pewter hoodies,
men knocked down in their prime, by life
to Facebook life, now sharing memories
of lobster tails and California winters
as they wait for time to heal the wounds
and friends to share their cigarettes
and talk of joy distractions
where they weren't a none around.
He's waiting with heart open
by a closed door, though they vanish,
his friends, on the other side,
the place where shame will finally go to hide
from those who're only but a half-step behind,
with jobs and homes and wives,
those things that always are the first to go
when lessons need be learned
of living with yourself,
to sit with choices made,
the waiting to be found.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The Day’s Unexploded Landmines
I’m too deep into the dishsoap to clean the blood off of my hands,
The tragic flaws of all my friends are all my fault
But none of my business
Though I vouch for the Navajos their right to text (“dude” … “dude”)
While standing up (like painting a fresco)
And occasionally with the phone to the sky to be closer to God
And this is admitted to the bar
As long as I let someone come behind
To change it:
“It couldn’t be clearer
“It couldn’t be clearer
The end of the world is near.”
It takes a village to keep the truth from being said
But it only takes one dishwater poor blonde
To draw white spiral monkey paw with her fangs
For my whole concept of free will to transform:
“I’m so fallen on hard times
I’ll do anything at any time”
But then she tells me she is learning how to write like Gertrude Stein
Because the way we’re taught to write as children
Screws us up
The subject and predicate destroy our minds
And I think how sad it is
That I am hanging around with people
Who’d think this was insane instead of
Obvious.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Reverie de Reverdy
I. Translation from the French
Turning Road
It’s a terrible gray with dust over time
Wind from the south with strong wings
Echoes deaf of water in the evening keeling over
And in the wet night that gushes at the turn
voices rough and grumbling
A taste of ashes on the tongue
An organ noise along the trail
The heart a ship that bobs along
All disasters of the calling
When the lights go out in the desert one by one
When the eyes are wet as
blades of grass
When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves
In the morning newly risen
There is someone gazing
A lost address on the hidden path
The stars stretch and flowers tumble
Through the branches broken
And the dark stream wipes her soft lips scarcely unstuck
Where not walking on the clock face counts
to regulate the progress and push back the horizon
All the cries have let slip by the time they’ve stumbled on
And I I walk in heaven’s eyes on the rays
There’s a noise for nothing and names in my mind
Of faces alive
All that has passed within the world
And this gala prize
Where I lost my time
II. 1969 Essay on Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Rexroth (heavily edited from this)
We still know almost nothing about how the mind works in states of rapture nor why the disjunction, the ecstasis, of self and experience should produce a whole range of peculiar nervous responses: vertigo, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism. They can be found especially in the poetry of St. Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Hildegarde of Bingen, but they are equally prominent in the poetry of Sappho, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart or the prose of Jakob Boehme.
I am inclined to believe that the persistence of this vocabulary among visionary poets is not an idioretinal and vasomotor defect caused by drugs, migraine, dissociations of personality, or petit-mal epilepsy, but a novitiate. Until rapture becomes an accustomed habit, a trained instrument of apprehending reality, the epiphenomena that accompany its onset will seem unduly important. Since only the intimations of rapture are all that most people are ever aware of, Henry Vaughan’s ring of endless light will always serve as an adequate symbol of eternity. Kerkele saw the same idioretinal vision as a very finite ring of carbohydrates.
We are dealing with a self-induced or naturally granted creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. This idiom of radiance becomes confusing today when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded even of religion. But even a visionary poem is not a vision. Unlike a poem, the religious experience is compelled and ultimate. Pierre Reverdy, for all his yearning for transcendence, knew this all too well. He is hardly, in most of his poems, a mystic poet. He simply uses a method which he has learned from his more ambitious poems, which is to distill the field to simple gestures laying bare the heart.
As cette belle époque recedes into perspective, and international literary taste has finally unmasked its shock to learn the idiom and syntax that seemed so new and strange in 1912, Pierre Reverdy stands among poets as the most Cubist of the Cubists, above Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and André Salmon, as well as independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue.
Cubism in poetry is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. In Apollinairian cubism, as exemplified by his “Zone” or by The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky’s A, J.C. MacLeod’s Ecliptic, or Sam Beckett’s early work, the fragmented and recombined elements of poetic construction are narrative, rhetorical or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Thus when subject, operator and object have been dismembered and restructured until the result is sufficiently piercing and tensile to cut through the reality it has reorganized, an invisible or subliminal discourse emerges which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.
Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we have come to accept as logical sequence, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. Isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an existential transcendence.
The revolution in sensibility that began with Baudelaire became a thoroughgoing syntactical revolution in the later work of Mallarmé, in curious still lifes like “Autre Éventail,” occult dramatic molecules like “Petit Air,” and above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, Un Coup de dés. In this tremendously ambitious poem the logical structure of the Indo-European languages was shown organically to be an inadequate vehicle for so profound a change in sensibility. Pierre Reverdy is the first important French poet after Un Coup de dés to develop the methods of communication explored by Mallarmé.
Such exploration was once the future of American poetry, but in hindsight only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, Laura Riding in her best work and the young Yvor Winters could be said to hew to the deliberate practice of the construction principles which guided Pierre Reverdy.
Yvor Winters went on, in fact, to condemn all verse of this kind as the deliberate courting of madness. What he objected to in essence was the seeking of glamour, what James Joyce translates "wholeness, harmony and radiance," that effulgence which St. Thomas called the stigmata of a true work of art, as an end in itself. I think what Winters meant was that intense hyperesthesia of this type, when it occurs in modern poetry without the motivation of religious belief, is pathological in its most advanced forms and sentimental in its less extreme ones. It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental, but I do not think that this is exactly what happens in poetry like that of Reverdy, Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, who masks only slightly the same unanalyzable transcendental claim with seemingly ordinary syntactical context that can be negotiated through general experience.
The syntactical problems and possibilities of a language peculiar to the poetry of Reverdy makes unusual demands upon the reader and translator. Reverdy himself retired to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in 1930 and lived there as a lay associate until his death in 1960 with only rare visits to Paris on business trips or to see old friends.
Turning Road
It’s a terrible gray with dust over time
Wind from the south with strong wings
Echoes deaf of water in the evening keeling over
And in the wet night that gushes at the turn
voices rough and grumbling
A taste of ashes on the tongue
An organ noise along the trail
The heart a ship that bobs along
All disasters of the calling
When the lights go out in the desert one by one
When the eyes are wet as
blades of grass
When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves
In the morning newly risen
There is someone gazing
A lost address on the hidden path
The stars stretch and flowers tumble
Through the branches broken
And the dark stream wipes her soft lips scarcely unstuck
Where not walking on the clock face counts
to regulate the progress and push back the horizon
All the cries have let slip by the time they’ve stumbled on
And I I walk in heaven’s eyes on the rays
There’s a noise for nothing and names in my mind
Of faces alive
All that has passed within the world
And this gala prize
Where I lost my time
II. 1969 Essay on Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Rexroth (heavily edited from this)
We still know almost nothing about how the mind works in states of rapture nor why the disjunction, the ecstasis, of self and experience should produce a whole range of peculiar nervous responses: vertigo, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism. They can be found especially in the poetry of St. Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Hildegarde of Bingen, but they are equally prominent in the poetry of Sappho, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart or the prose of Jakob Boehme.
I am inclined to believe that the persistence of this vocabulary among visionary poets is not an idioretinal and vasomotor defect caused by drugs, migraine, dissociations of personality, or petit-mal epilepsy, but a novitiate. Until rapture becomes an accustomed habit, a trained instrument of apprehending reality, the epiphenomena that accompany its onset will seem unduly important. Since only the intimations of rapture are all that most people are ever aware of, Henry Vaughan’s ring of endless light will always serve as an adequate symbol of eternity. Kerkele saw the same idioretinal vision as a very finite ring of carbohydrates.
We are dealing with a self-induced or naturally granted creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. This idiom of radiance becomes confusing today when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded even of religion. But even a visionary poem is not a vision. Unlike a poem, the religious experience is compelled and ultimate. Pierre Reverdy, for all his yearning for transcendence, knew this all too well. He is hardly, in most of his poems, a mystic poet. He simply uses a method which he has learned from his more ambitious poems, which is to distill the field to simple gestures laying bare the heart.
As cette belle époque recedes into perspective, and international literary taste has finally unmasked its shock to learn the idiom and syntax that seemed so new and strange in 1912, Pierre Reverdy stands among poets as the most Cubist of the Cubists, above Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and André Salmon, as well as independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue.
Cubism in poetry is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. In Apollinairian cubism, as exemplified by his “Zone” or by The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky’s A, J.C. MacLeod’s Ecliptic, or Sam Beckett’s early work, the fragmented and recombined elements of poetic construction are narrative, rhetorical or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Thus when subject, operator and object have been dismembered and restructured until the result is sufficiently piercing and tensile to cut through the reality it has reorganized, an invisible or subliminal discourse emerges which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.
Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we have come to accept as logical sequence, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. Isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an existential transcendence.
The revolution in sensibility that began with Baudelaire became a thoroughgoing syntactical revolution in the later work of Mallarmé, in curious still lifes like “Autre Éventail,” occult dramatic molecules like “Petit Air,” and above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, Un Coup de dés. In this tremendously ambitious poem the logical structure of the Indo-European languages was shown organically to be an inadequate vehicle for so profound a change in sensibility. Pierre Reverdy is the first important French poet after Un Coup de dés to develop the methods of communication explored by Mallarmé.
Such exploration was once the future of American poetry, but in hindsight only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, Laura Riding in her best work and the young Yvor Winters could be said to hew to the deliberate practice of the construction principles which guided Pierre Reverdy.
Yvor Winters went on, in fact, to condemn all verse of this kind as the deliberate courting of madness. What he objected to in essence was the seeking of glamour, what James Joyce translates "wholeness, harmony and radiance," that effulgence which St. Thomas called the stigmata of a true work of art, as an end in itself. I think what Winters meant was that intense hyperesthesia of this type, when it occurs in modern poetry without the motivation of religious belief, is pathological in its most advanced forms and sentimental in its less extreme ones. It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental, but I do not think that this is exactly what happens in poetry like that of Reverdy, Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, who masks only slightly the same unanalyzable transcendental claim with seemingly ordinary syntactical context that can be negotiated through general experience.
The syntactical problems and possibilities of a language peculiar to the poetry of Reverdy makes unusual demands upon the reader and translator. Reverdy himself retired to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in 1930 and lived there as a lay associate until his death in 1960 with only rare visits to Paris on business trips or to see old friends.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A Shorter Version of Yesterday's Poem
The outside world is under glass
Breathing circuits splash the window
The emeralds strung as lights across the bridges
The darkness fends off stars
Breathing circuits splash the window
The emeralds strung as lights across the bridges
The darkness fends off stars
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Outside World
The outside world pretends to love you
As you pretend you’re worthy of its love
It shines its priceless daggers
You shine your worthless smile
It feeds you anyway
The outside world has everything
It’s only on one side
The only place the unknown still is real
Its darkness fends off stars
The hand it touches itches
The outside world stays straight faced
As you try to follow its story
You laugh along at the punch line and never know
If that was the real laughter
Or was it the later one at you
The outside world never asks you on a date
But you can tag along if you act stupid
And carry drinks and smile at bragging
And cut it to the quick without real anger
And laugh when you are ribboned in return
The outside world will never quite agree with you
It always has an opposite opinion
And says it doesn’t matter what it thinks
There's no compulsion to agree with it
But still it never comes to quite agree
The outside world wants questions answered
But only with more questions
And only in a certain tone of voice
And never with the truth that is too easy
Harmony the killer must keep her virtue intact
The outside world as a circle talks in circles
It always ends at the place where it began
It calls that proof
And thinks that it defeats you no matter what you say
Especially if you do not care to win
The outside world is never out to get you
It only wants you to think it is
By changing its mind as soon as you’ve accepted
Its earlier change of mind
Which never was a change, it says, at all
The outside world is dangerous
You think it exists
It steals from your collection plate
Makes you pray to be forgiven
And never says if you are
The outside world looks different
When not holding for a photograph
It cannot stop its laughter
Or wear its mask of knowledge
The only way that you are recognized
As you pretend you’re worthy of its love
It shines its priceless daggers
You shine your worthless smile
It feeds you anyway
The outside world has everything
It’s only on one side
The only place the unknown still is real
Its darkness fends off stars
The hand it touches itches
The outside world stays straight faced
As you try to follow its story
You laugh along at the punch line and never know
If that was the real laughter
Or was it the later one at you
The outside world never asks you on a date
But you can tag along if you act stupid
And carry drinks and smile at bragging
And cut it to the quick without real anger
And laugh when you are ribboned in return
The outside world will never quite agree with you
It always has an opposite opinion
And says it doesn’t matter what it thinks
There's no compulsion to agree with it
But still it never comes to quite agree
The outside world wants questions answered
But only with more questions
And only in a certain tone of voice
And never with the truth that is too easy
Harmony the killer must keep her virtue intact
The outside world as a circle talks in circles
It always ends at the place where it began
It calls that proof
And thinks that it defeats you no matter what you say
Especially if you do not care to win
The outside world is never out to get you
It only wants you to think it is
By changing its mind as soon as you’ve accepted
Its earlier change of mind
Which never was a change, it says, at all
The outside world is dangerous
You think it exists
It steals from your collection plate
Makes you pray to be forgiven
And never says if you are
The outside world looks different
When not holding for a photograph
It cannot stop its laughter
Or wear its mask of knowledge
The only way that you are recognized
Monday, February 13, 2012
Pole Shift
This old gray winter very soon will die
And things we thought were dead will spring to life.
The sun will wake us from our hibernations
And melt the phantom playthings in our minds.
We will no longer perish if we’re wrong,
No longer must we master bitter winds
By stacking cords of fragmentary trees
And culling books of names as if important.
No longer will the candles ward off darkness,
Our vision will not be through fogs of glass,
Our frosty breath will be as if invisible,
As structures that we’ve built of ice collapse.
We will not need the armor of bird feathers
Or need to fight for one last scrap of fat.
The gridlocks will be broken, the rivers
Will unthicken, the lakes will fill with sound.
The hardness of the ground will so soon soften,
The doors stuck shut will open, the cabin
Fever canning cellar remedies expire,
The essential oils and dried-out flowers end.
This old gray winter very soon will die
And soon our hearts will open…
We will no longer need our minds at all
And we’ll be terrified.
And things we thought were dead will spring to life.
The sun will wake us from our hibernations
And melt the phantom playthings in our minds.
We will no longer perish if we’re wrong,
No longer must we master bitter winds
By stacking cords of fragmentary trees
And culling books of names as if important.
No longer will the candles ward off darkness,
Our vision will not be through fogs of glass,
Our frosty breath will be as if invisible,
As structures that we’ve built of ice collapse.
We will not need the armor of bird feathers
Or need to fight for one last scrap of fat.
The gridlocks will be broken, the rivers
Will unthicken, the lakes will fill with sound.
The hardness of the ground will so soon soften,
The doors stuck shut will open, the cabin
Fever canning cellar remedies expire,
The essential oils and dried-out flowers end.
This old gray winter very soon will die
And soon our hearts will open…
We will no longer need our minds at all
And we’ll be terrified.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Land of the Rodeo Clowns
Somewhere in America
there's an Indian
not drunk
who is
laughing
at us
now.
there's an Indian
not drunk
who is
laughing
at us
now.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Visions of Frobisher Bay
All forms on earth
are reproduced in ice,
the craggy points, the wind-smoothed dunes,
the hanging spears like frills of fur,
the ice shines on the water
and water shines on the ice
that melts inside the eye,
where the water turns to crystal.
Men in seal suits writhe
on asymmetrical islands of blue glacier
like modern dancers on the slab
across the incandescent bay
a city of puffins laughing
and a stone-clear sun so far away.
I am part of this, their eyes are mine,
my skin is this with its fissures and canyons,
the desolate end of the world is familiar
as the pavement on my narrow walk
buckled by roots underground.
I must look gently, for the fish
must learn to become the ocean.
are reproduced in ice,
the craggy points, the wind-smoothed dunes,
the hanging spears like frills of fur,
the ice shines on the water
and water shines on the ice
that melts inside the eye,
where the water turns to crystal.
Men in seal suits writhe
on asymmetrical islands of blue glacier
like modern dancers on the slab
across the incandescent bay
a city of puffins laughing
and a stone-clear sun so far away.
I am part of this, their eyes are mine,
my skin is this with its fissures and canyons,
the desolate end of the world is familiar
as the pavement on my narrow walk
buckled by roots underground.
I must look gently, for the fish
must learn to become the ocean.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Addendum
The rich are here to teach us that crime pays,
that shame is what keeps common folk tied down,
to have a conscience clean when you are lying
and they know it, that is how you earn your keep
and win the hearts of men.
These stories of equality, the rule of law and honor
are for the children to believe, and adults to sell
with all the passion and conviction they can muster,
for what else keeps us useful than the sense of ordained order?
What good is any virtue, if it conflicts with the actual?
Lies are more harmonious, because sweeter,
they make the limits that we crave
seem not even of our own making
but the consequence of freedom
on man too flawed to earn it.
that shame is what keeps common folk tied down,
to have a conscience clean when you are lying
and they know it, that is how you earn your keep
and win the hearts of men.
These stories of equality, the rule of law and honor
are for the children to believe, and adults to sell
with all the passion and conviction they can muster,
for what else keeps us useful than the sense of ordained order?
What good is any virtue, if it conflicts with the actual?
Lies are more harmonious, because sweeter,
they make the limits that we crave
seem not even of our own making
but the consequence of freedom
on man too flawed to earn it.
Special Comment on Bank Bailout II
I don’t usually comment (directly at least) on news of this nature, but I’ll make an exception here…
Why has strategically defaulting and living payment free in your home become the new cool trend, like flipping condos in Las Vegas back in 2006? The simple answer is that banks are not foreclosing, and the reason they don’t foreclose is that it would force them to sell the home for less than the mortgage value. If they did this, they’d have to write off that amount on their balance sheet, which determines whether they have enough capital to be in operation (and in the case of the so-called Too-Big-To-Fail banks that own the Federal Reserve, how much money they can create from thin air to lend out at profit). According to ftimes, of the 52 million homes that have a mortgage, over 10 million are currently underwater (worth less than the outstanding mortgage), four million homes are delinquent, and two million have entered the foreclosure process (on top of the four million foreclosed upon since 2008).
That means that of the underwater homes, at the very least about six million are ready to enter the delinquency stage and begin living payment free.
Bear that statistic in mind when reading about today’s foreclosure fraud settlement between the five banks that originated over 60% of U.S. mortgages and the federal government, which has already rescued all five banks from annihilation. The settlement releases the four too-big-to-fail banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, along with the old GMAC – now Ally Bank) from liability for widespread and documented abuses in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past decade. The abuse came about because mortgages were repackaged and resold into investment pools with so little regard for longstanding rules on land recording that they lost track of the true owner on millions of homes. To cover up for the lack of proper title and liens when foreclosing, banks and their servicing units routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who illegally signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages.
In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including charging borrowers with illegal fees, putting them into foreclosure while working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous modification settlements, foreclosing without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where illegal late fees and payments pushed the homeowner into foreclosure.
In return for absolving the banks of liability on the mortgage fraud issues, the settlement creates a $25 billion fund to address the problem of foreclosed, delinquent and underwater borrowers (this figure represents 3.5% of the $700 billion in negative equity in the country). Of the $25 billion, however, only $5 billion is coming from the banks themselves. The remainder is in the form of mortgage principal writedowns, the cost of which is paid by mortgage security investors, which after the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is U.S. taxpayers. The settlement is divided three ways: $5 billion in actual cash, distributed to the states for “legal aid services” to help the 750,000 individual mortgage borrowers illegally foreclosed upon gain access to between $1,800 and $2,000 per family (roughly 1% of the average foreclosed mortgage value of $180,000); $3 billion to go toward refinancing of underwater borrowers; and the remaining $17 billion to go, at the banks discretion, to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers.
This settlement folds numerous fraud actions at the state and federal level into it, most notably the $8.2 billion suit by Nevada and Arizona against Countrywide (now BoA) to compel compliance with court-ordered consent decrees of that amount in consumer fraud violations. The settlement also stops or at least forestalls most but not all ongoing state investigations, which in the preliminary stages had found evidence of widespread abuses, such as 60% of all mortgage documents examined at random having title errors.
Although an independent mediator has been appointed, enforcement of this decree is left to the banks themselves, based on quarterly self-assessments. Unlike most large consent decrees, this deal will not be monitored and enforced by a court-appointed master under the continuing, active, supervision of a federal court.
In keeping with the Obama administration’s consistent focus on reliquifying the insolvent too-big-to-fail banks at taxpayer (and future taxpayer) expense, the settlement clearly satisfies its primary objective of insulating banks from lawsuit costs by capping liability for fraud, and removing more mortgage liability off of banks balance sheets. The total amount of the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances in the country, less than the price of the title insurance banks illegally failed to get when they transferred the loans to a trust for securitization, and a fraction of the cost they would ordinarily have to pay to defend foreclosure challenges. If the banks were actually held liable through normal prosecutions at the state level, the liability would be between $700-$800 billion. In this settlement, by contrast, no new assets need to be committed by the banks at all, since they’ve long had reserves for such contingencies.
While one might argue a settlement is appropriate to forestall the endless rounds of litigation that will probably in the end be paid for on both sides by taxpayers, such a settlement should not actually help the banks’ bottom lines. Consider the principal reduction credits in the settlement, as one example, which socks mortgage investors (taxpayers) with the cost of paying off the 1st lien mortgage, thus allowing banks with 2nd lien position mortgages (from people treating their home equity as a piggy bank) to press home owners to stay current on those payments. This creates income, removes liability they would otherwise have had to write off, and allows the banks in turn to increase their balance sheets (i.e. print money that they can then lend out for profit).
The financial benefit to banks is so great, the fact they don’t have to face criminal prosecution for what everyone acknowledges are deliberate, systematic and endemic felonies seems like an added benefit!
As clear as the results for the banks are, the consequences for people who had their homes illegally stolen is far from transparent: who’s maintaining the fund? How do they get to it? Who decides what mortgage holder does or does not gain access to the funds? Yet the foggy bureaucratese that addresses these questions is crystal clear compared to the legal issues this settlement raises. Do banks no longer have to prove in court they are in fact the title owners? Will a document that is obviously forged/robosigned be accepted by courts going forward? And what about all the other mortgage lenders, the community banks, state banks, credit unions and thousands of small and mid-sized commercial banks that don’t receive a get out of jail free card? How does this affect the approximately 80% of houses where the chain of title is now clouded? And what recourse do investors in mortgage-backed securities have for over 300 years of real estate contract law requiring property conveyance rights being voided?
More pointedly, why have the law enforcement arms of the federal and state governments in this case surrendered any duty of office to prosecute violations of law or to defend the citizenry from crimes against their property? With such a deliberate and comprehensive violation of laws by the mortgage servicers, one has to ask why should anyone honor a contract or obey a financial statute? No one higher up the food chain thinks ‘following the law’ is in any way desirable or mandatory, so why should ordinary people think so?
In particular, shouldn’t the bulk of the underwater citizenry simply default? And there you have the end game. With the charade of home values coming back up and the dream of home ownership snuffed in a sea of red ink and tape, we have a battle between, on the one hand, banks given more of a free hand to foreclose, illegally and without consequence, and on the other, homeowners who begin to believe that one is foolish for following rules.
The brutal suppression of the Occupy movement is a clear signal of which side will be allowed to win. It is simply not allowed to complain about losing your home and life savings through the fraudulent manipulations of others, because those others must continue to reap new profits with fresh victims using the same criminal methods. To claim the victimhood of the powerless is simply un-American, for the purpose of our justice system is to provide protection for those who steal from the innocent. Those who dare point this out will be forced to confess in shame at show trials while the .001% will boast that they have been unfairly maligned, utterly free of shame. And while the mortgage foreclosure fraud is small potatoes compared to the MERS violations and the securitization frauds that are still theoretically being investigated, the indifference of the public to the bald whitewash lying of the political class and media on this makes the abstract and quaint concept of justice seem further and further away.
I know that’s the way it’s been at least since Plato’s Republic, but I feel I should say something about it while I still have the freedom to speak.
Sources:
ftense
Naked Capitalism
zero hedge
Why has strategically defaulting and living payment free in your home become the new cool trend, like flipping condos in Las Vegas back in 2006? The simple answer is that banks are not foreclosing, and the reason they don’t foreclose is that it would force them to sell the home for less than the mortgage value. If they did this, they’d have to write off that amount on their balance sheet, which determines whether they have enough capital to be in operation (and in the case of the so-called Too-Big-To-Fail banks that own the Federal Reserve, how much money they can create from thin air to lend out at profit). According to ftimes, of the 52 million homes that have a mortgage, over 10 million are currently underwater (worth less than the outstanding mortgage), four million homes are delinquent, and two million have entered the foreclosure process (on top of the four million foreclosed upon since 2008).
That means that of the underwater homes, at the very least about six million are ready to enter the delinquency stage and begin living payment free.
Bear that statistic in mind when reading about today’s foreclosure fraud settlement between the five banks that originated over 60% of U.S. mortgages and the federal government, which has already rescued all five banks from annihilation. The settlement releases the four too-big-to-fail banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, along with the old GMAC – now Ally Bank) from liability for widespread and documented abuses in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past decade. The abuse came about because mortgages were repackaged and resold into investment pools with so little regard for longstanding rules on land recording that they lost track of the true owner on millions of homes. To cover up for the lack of proper title and liens when foreclosing, banks and their servicing units routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who illegally signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages.
In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including charging borrowers with illegal fees, putting them into foreclosure while working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous modification settlements, foreclosing without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where illegal late fees and payments pushed the homeowner into foreclosure.
In return for absolving the banks of liability on the mortgage fraud issues, the settlement creates a $25 billion fund to address the problem of foreclosed, delinquent and underwater borrowers (this figure represents 3.5% of the $700 billion in negative equity in the country). Of the $25 billion, however, only $5 billion is coming from the banks themselves. The remainder is in the form of mortgage principal writedowns, the cost of which is paid by mortgage security investors, which after the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is U.S. taxpayers. The settlement is divided three ways: $5 billion in actual cash, distributed to the states for “legal aid services” to help the 750,000 individual mortgage borrowers illegally foreclosed upon gain access to between $1,800 and $2,000 per family (roughly 1% of the average foreclosed mortgage value of $180,000); $3 billion to go toward refinancing of underwater borrowers; and the remaining $17 billion to go, at the banks discretion, to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers.
This settlement folds numerous fraud actions at the state and federal level into it, most notably the $8.2 billion suit by Nevada and Arizona against Countrywide (now BoA) to compel compliance with court-ordered consent decrees of that amount in consumer fraud violations. The settlement also stops or at least forestalls most but not all ongoing state investigations, which in the preliminary stages had found evidence of widespread abuses, such as 60% of all mortgage documents examined at random having title errors.
Although an independent mediator has been appointed, enforcement of this decree is left to the banks themselves, based on quarterly self-assessments. Unlike most large consent decrees, this deal will not be monitored and enforced by a court-appointed master under the continuing, active, supervision of a federal court.
In keeping with the Obama administration’s consistent focus on reliquifying the insolvent too-big-to-fail banks at taxpayer (and future taxpayer) expense, the settlement clearly satisfies its primary objective of insulating banks from lawsuit costs by capping liability for fraud, and removing more mortgage liability off of banks balance sheets. The total amount of the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances in the country, less than the price of the title insurance banks illegally failed to get when they transferred the loans to a trust for securitization, and a fraction of the cost they would ordinarily have to pay to defend foreclosure challenges. If the banks were actually held liable through normal prosecutions at the state level, the liability would be between $700-$800 billion. In this settlement, by contrast, no new assets need to be committed by the banks at all, since they’ve long had reserves for such contingencies.
While one might argue a settlement is appropriate to forestall the endless rounds of litigation that will probably in the end be paid for on both sides by taxpayers, such a settlement should not actually help the banks’ bottom lines. Consider the principal reduction credits in the settlement, as one example, which socks mortgage investors (taxpayers) with the cost of paying off the 1st lien mortgage, thus allowing banks with 2nd lien position mortgages (from people treating their home equity as a piggy bank) to press home owners to stay current on those payments. This creates income, removes liability they would otherwise have had to write off, and allows the banks in turn to increase their balance sheets (i.e. print money that they can then lend out for profit).
The financial benefit to banks is so great, the fact they don’t have to face criminal prosecution for what everyone acknowledges are deliberate, systematic and endemic felonies seems like an added benefit!
As clear as the results for the banks are, the consequences for people who had their homes illegally stolen is far from transparent: who’s maintaining the fund? How do they get to it? Who decides what mortgage holder does or does not gain access to the funds? Yet the foggy bureaucratese that addresses these questions is crystal clear compared to the legal issues this settlement raises. Do banks no longer have to prove in court they are in fact the title owners? Will a document that is obviously forged/robosigned be accepted by courts going forward? And what about all the other mortgage lenders, the community banks, state banks, credit unions and thousands of small and mid-sized commercial banks that don’t receive a get out of jail free card? How does this affect the approximately 80% of houses where the chain of title is now clouded? And what recourse do investors in mortgage-backed securities have for over 300 years of real estate contract law requiring property conveyance rights being voided?
More pointedly, why have the law enforcement arms of the federal and state governments in this case surrendered any duty of office to prosecute violations of law or to defend the citizenry from crimes against their property? With such a deliberate and comprehensive violation of laws by the mortgage servicers, one has to ask why should anyone honor a contract or obey a financial statute? No one higher up the food chain thinks ‘following the law’ is in any way desirable or mandatory, so why should ordinary people think so?
In particular, shouldn’t the bulk of the underwater citizenry simply default? And there you have the end game. With the charade of home values coming back up and the dream of home ownership snuffed in a sea of red ink and tape, we have a battle between, on the one hand, banks given more of a free hand to foreclose, illegally and without consequence, and on the other, homeowners who begin to believe that one is foolish for following rules.
The brutal suppression of the Occupy movement is a clear signal of which side will be allowed to win. It is simply not allowed to complain about losing your home and life savings through the fraudulent manipulations of others, because those others must continue to reap new profits with fresh victims using the same criminal methods. To claim the victimhood of the powerless is simply un-American, for the purpose of our justice system is to provide protection for those who steal from the innocent. Those who dare point this out will be forced to confess in shame at show trials while the .001% will boast that they have been unfairly maligned, utterly free of shame. And while the mortgage foreclosure fraud is small potatoes compared to the MERS violations and the securitization frauds that are still theoretically being investigated, the indifference of the public to the bald whitewash lying of the political class and media on this makes the abstract and quaint concept of justice seem further and further away.
I know that’s the way it’s been at least since Plato’s Republic, but I feel I should say something about it while I still have the freedom to speak.
Sources:
ftense
Naked Capitalism
zero hedge
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Voice
"En la ignorancia, esta's
en todo - cielo, mar y tierra - muerto" *
-Juan Ramón Jiménez
Your voice, the only voice
that breathes through these machines,
the only one that's speaking
in the stuttering of tongues,
the one that, saying nothing
has the feel of everything,
as all the heard words added up
are empty, not full.
Your voice, the only voice
that knows things, not their names
and will not separate the earth from hearts
as they spin in opposite directions,
the one that, saying nothing
tells the lives of everything,
as all conclusions only note
the thing as dead.
Your voice, the only voice
that tells me what is real,
the only one not proving
in the multitudes of truth,
the one that, saying nothing
shows we're wrong on everything,
as all the yes's conjure up
the no not overcome.
Your voice, the only voice
I hear above the noise,
the only one not anchored to a sound
that's not my own,
the one that, saying nothing
makes me part of everything,
as all talking makes an opening
I fall through like a crack.
* In ignorance, you exist
in everything - sky, sea and earth - dead
en todo - cielo, mar y tierra - muerto" *
-Juan Ramón Jiménez
Your voice, the only voice
that breathes through these machines,
the only one that's speaking
in the stuttering of tongues,
the one that, saying nothing
has the feel of everything,
as all the heard words added up
are empty, not full.
Your voice, the only voice
that knows things, not their names
and will not separate the earth from hearts
as they spin in opposite directions,
the one that, saying nothing
tells the lives of everything,
as all conclusions only note
the thing as dead.
Your voice, the only voice
that tells me what is real,
the only one not proving
in the multitudes of truth,
the one that, saying nothing
shows we're wrong on everything,
as all the yes's conjure up
the no not overcome.
Your voice, the only voice
I hear above the noise,
the only one not anchored to a sound
that's not my own,
the one that, saying nothing
makes me part of everything,
as all talking makes an opening
I fall through like a crack.
* In ignorance, you exist
in everything - sky, sea and earth - dead
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Sleeping Giants Awake
"Zuccotti Park has been taken over by Giants fans!" – Fox News New York, 2/7/12
Down Broadway, fans line the streets behind the barricades, “a Jints fan
from the cradle to the grave,"
Waiting for their beloved team, cheering everything that moves,
"everyone’s a Giants fan today,"
All wearing big blue uniforms and waving something, usually some kind
of homemade sign:
"King of New York baby," "GMen all day every day," "just wait until
next year, when they win again."
Some have camped out overnight, with binoculars to catch a glimpse
of their heroes,
Toilet paper banners like ribbons in the sky, confetti thrown from
upper-story windows,
Blue grease paint under eyes, a Giants helmet on the Wall Street bull,
The tourist bus is covered with a “Champions” banner, people take
pictures from the top.
Blue flower floats pulled by F-150s roll in to a sea of red, white and blue
stock ticker tape,
To screams of "gi-ants, gi-ants, gi-ants," red and blue balloons explode, American flags wave,
Fans look like babies seeing candles for the first time, throwing
programs at the players
Who wave, beaming, grateful, to the gotham cheers for the champions
of the woyuldd.
They expect winners here, but they treat them just like royalty, people
out of buildings whistling like birds
Just like on the sides of the streets, raising their voices so they can finally
be heard,
To commemorate a victory that can’t be overturned, marching bands
with pink and white hat feathers,
The usual fraternal organizations on wheels, traveling podiums
filled with cheerleaders,
Traffic completely stopped, the asphalt filled with confetti like snow,
The sound like jet engines revving, “they always get written off
and they come back to win,” and then, who shows up but
Police in riot gear behind plastic body shields, they order everyone
to disperse,
Shooting pepper spray from water cannons on the mob,
Arresting any who resist, with zipcuff wire, throwing them headfirst
onto concrete,
Ripping up the tents of those who’ve camped out, taking their pom-poms
and whistles
And crushing them with bulldozers, where they’re swept up by teams
in hazmat suits.
People who complain are beaten senseless and bloody
with nightsticks,
People who try to get away are kettled into side streets so they can be
arrested,
And people who still dare to wave the champions flag are tased.
In the crowd are some city officials, journalists, diplomats from other
countries,
All of them are swept up in the net and handcuffed if they resist in any
way.
Out of the melee, a few reasons are suggested: there are children in
danger, ticker tape is a health violation,
The noise ordinances have been violated, traffic has been blocked,
there wasn’t an official permit,
But the people know otherwise: they played hookey from work or school
for the day,
They dared to believe, and speak their mind a little too freely, they took
over, if just for a day.
A few peeled it back a deeper level: rooting for the giants is anti-patriotic,
Any victories for humanity must be celebrated privately.
Down Broadway, fans line the streets behind the barricades, “a Jints fan
from the cradle to the grave,"
Waiting for their beloved team, cheering everything that moves,
"everyone’s a Giants fan today,"
All wearing big blue uniforms and waving something, usually some kind
of homemade sign:
"King of New York baby," "GMen all day every day," "just wait until
next year, when they win again."
Some have camped out overnight, with binoculars to catch a glimpse
of their heroes,
Toilet paper banners like ribbons in the sky, confetti thrown from
upper-story windows,
Blue grease paint under eyes, a Giants helmet on the Wall Street bull,
The tourist bus is covered with a “Champions” banner, people take
pictures from the top.
Blue flower floats pulled by F-150s roll in to a sea of red, white and blue
stock ticker tape,
To screams of "gi-ants, gi-ants, gi-ants," red and blue balloons explode, American flags wave,
Fans look like babies seeing candles for the first time, throwing
programs at the players
Who wave, beaming, grateful, to the gotham cheers for the champions
of the woyuldd.
They expect winners here, but they treat them just like royalty, people
out of buildings whistling like birds
Just like on the sides of the streets, raising their voices so they can finally
be heard,
To commemorate a victory that can’t be overturned, marching bands
with pink and white hat feathers,
The usual fraternal organizations on wheels, traveling podiums
filled with cheerleaders,
Traffic completely stopped, the asphalt filled with confetti like snow,
The sound like jet engines revving, “they always get written off
and they come back to win,” and then, who shows up but
Police in riot gear behind plastic body shields, they order everyone
to disperse,
Shooting pepper spray from water cannons on the mob,
Arresting any who resist, with zipcuff wire, throwing them headfirst
onto concrete,
Ripping up the tents of those who’ve camped out, taking their pom-poms
and whistles
And crushing them with bulldozers, where they’re swept up by teams
in hazmat suits.
People who complain are beaten senseless and bloody
with nightsticks,
People who try to get away are kettled into side streets so they can be
arrested,
And people who still dare to wave the champions flag are tased.
In the crowd are some city officials, journalists, diplomats from other
countries,
All of them are swept up in the net and handcuffed if they resist in any
way.
Out of the melee, a few reasons are suggested: there are children in
danger, ticker tape is a health violation,
The noise ordinances have been violated, traffic has been blocked,
there wasn’t an official permit,
But the people know otherwise: they played hookey from work or school
for the day,
They dared to believe, and speak their mind a little too freely, they took
over, if just for a day.
A few peeled it back a deeper level: rooting for the giants is anti-patriotic,
Any victories for humanity must be celebrated privately.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Pantoum Number One
Are you alive or already dead?
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true
All that you hear is all you want said
All you can see is the view
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true,
What is awake and what is asleep
All you can see is the view
At some point you must make the leap
What is awake and what is asleep
Nobody wants you to know
At some point you must make the leap
From the undertow into the flow
Nobody wants you to know
What you cry on the inside for
From the undertow into the flow
To the great imperceptible shore
What you cry on the inside for
Comes revealed in every detail
To the great imperceptible shore
Where the truth only rises to fail
Comes revealed in every detail
Your own uncontainable scale
Where the truth only rises to fail
Through your own imperceptible veil
Your own uncontainable scale
All that you hear is all you want said
Your own imperceptible veil
Are you alive or already dead?
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true
All that you hear is all you want said
All you can see is the view
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true,
What is awake and what is asleep
All you can see is the view
At some point you must make the leap
What is awake and what is asleep
Nobody wants you to know
At some point you must make the leap
From the undertow into the flow
Nobody wants you to know
What you cry on the inside for
From the undertow into the flow
To the great imperceptible shore
What you cry on the inside for
Comes revealed in every detail
To the great imperceptible shore
Where the truth only rises to fail
Comes revealed in every detail
Your own uncontainable scale
Where the truth only rises to fail
Through your own imperceptible veil
Your own uncontainable scale
All that you hear is all you want said
Your own imperceptible veil
Are you alive or already dead?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
A Baltimore Thing
Arabs, they call them,
some macabre African-American tradition,
horses and black carriages
traveling from Mon Roe to Pigtown,
guys with stovepipes hats
selling flowers from the back like My Fair Lady...
Arabs, they call them.
some macabre African-American tradition,
horses and black carriages
traveling from Mon Roe to Pigtown,
guys with stovepipes hats
selling flowers from the back like My Fair Lady...
Arabs, they call them.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Reason for Karma
A new wound
heals
the old wound
in theory
but the old is remembered
as loss
and the new wound
turns old
requiring the feeling
of a blade
to remember how God
left it abandoned
and 'cos otherwise
it would not know it
exists.
heals
the old wound
in theory
but the old is remembered
as loss
and the new wound
turns old
requiring the feeling
of a blade
to remember how God
left it abandoned
and 'cos otherwise
it would not know it
exists.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Wistawa Szymborska (1923-2012)
"For others, Death was mad and monumental—
not for these citizens of the sepia past.
Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,
their vanishing was due to influenza." ["Family Album"]
Commemorating the death of a poet is a bit redundant. When most poets aren't commemorating in advance their own death, they're playing dead, or in extreme cases, practicing being dead. And then there's that whole "afterlife" phenomenon - as if it's not good enough to have glimpses into one's own immortality through the rarefied act of poetry-making, there's this business about being remembered by posterity for one's words. Silly, I know, but fortunately, the muse no likee vanity, and plays all sorts of tricks to keep poets on the up and up. And so when poets give up the proverbial Hamlet, one feels one can say what formerly one could not whisper (for fear of being the subject of a poem about being misunderstood). After all, there were all those words, more than we got out of even the best of our actual friends, and they were so intense, we really ought to believe we really knew them. Unfortunately, unless its some spectacular mythic accident that makes them pretty young corpses, it usually ends up most closely resembling those old Hollywood stars of the 20's and 30's, who expire in Old Stars Homes as distant memories to most people not as old as themselves. We feel we know them too, but after the glamour has left we realize they were only actors reading scripts, not the characters they presented as mirrors to ourselves. In death, the public becomes private, in other words, and in poets the private becomes sealed in what can only be called an articulate crypt.
This essay is supposed to be about Wistawa Szymborska, the great Polish poet who passed this week at 88, but somehow I just know that she would look askance at such memorials, for she's shrewdly memorialized herself on so many occasions that anything I or anyone else reports would be irrelevant. She's written about death as embarrassing ("Report from the Hospital"), lacking foresight ("Letters from the Dead"), falsely confused with birth ("Born"), a matter of decorum ("Beheading"), and reserved in its importance for humans instead of beetles, where it is "quarantined" ("Seen from Above"). She's speculated about suicide notes ("The Suicide's Room"), made a detailed examination of the condition of a life in the moments before death ("Alive"), interrogated people on the details of dead people dreams ("Plotting with the Dead"), and even seen the "joy of writing" as "the revenge of the mortal hand" ("The Joy of Writing"). It's almost like all of this is just so we can finally laugh at death now that she is actually dead.
But death per se is not her concern, so much as its wonderful ability to bring out the absurdity of people. She prizes this quality in all of her subjects, lovingly skewering us at our most vulnerable point, our sense of pathos. How sad that years of closeness makes lovers unrecognizable because undreamable ("I Am Too Close..."), and how sad new lovers can't be seen through the fantasy ("Over Wine"). How sad that Cassandra was actually wrong ("Soliloquoy for Cassandra") and Lot's wife was actually right ("Lot's Wife"). How sad that imaginary kingdoms have to be lost in the dustbin of history ("Voices"), and how sad "history rounds off skeletons to zero" ("Starvation Camp Near Jaslo"). How sad it is to read poetry to a room with only a handful of people ("Poetry Reading"), and how sad it is to be a world-famous Nobel Prize winning poet without the basic privacy that any writer needs ("Some People"). How sad indeed it all is, but I always laugh. How sad that she died, but still I laugh. She's like the Ellen De Generes of the poetry world, finding that thing we all know but never think rises to the level of communication, and unpeeling it with excruciating slowness and raven-like cleverness, showing in the process how even the most commonplace thing actually makes absolutely no sense.
Properly appreciating such a mind is an impossible -- albeit humorous -- task, because when the tiny thing becomes so enlarged that it is incomprehensible, the distance becomes too great. And that's the fun, laughing through the tears.
On that note I'll close with one of my favorite Szymborska poems, "Vocabulary":
"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?" she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is the climate.
"Madame," I want to reply, "my people's poets do all their writing in mittens. I don't mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms' constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an axe at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame."
That's what I mean to say. But I've forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I'm not sure of icicle or ax.
"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?"
"Pas du tout," I answer icily.
Note: all titles and quotes come from Poems New and Collected, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Regret Over Things Once Thought As Important
To see what can't be seen
Know eyes that can't be known
For its own sake
To love what can't be loved
Feel love that can't be shown
For its own sake
To think what can't be thought
Believe what can't be true
Trust it like a stone
For its own sake
Know eyes that can't be known
For its own sake
To love what can't be loved
Feel love that can't be shown
For its own sake
To think what can't be thought
Believe what can't be true
Trust it like a stone
For its own sake
Thursday, February 2, 2012
To Susan
The orange blossoms on the vines
Between our separate worlds
Are all I care to recognize
Of how my life unfurled.
Immortalizers' thickenings —
In hindsight no surprise
Against the love I let — for you
Dissolve in private skies.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)