The error of my Wei

I was trying to find a poem I remembered reading a long time ago by the Chinese poet Wang Wei.  The teacher who introduced him to me used to pronounce his name as if it sounded like "wrong way," which she thought was hilarious.  It's been maybe 12 years since I last saw the poem, but the imagery struck me at the time.  I even recall copying it into a notebook.  I don't know where the notebook is now- probably rotting in a box full of angst-ridden verses- but I think this was it:

Stopping at Incense Storing Temple

I did not know the incense storing temple,
I walked a few miles into the clouded peaks.
No man on the path between the ancient trees,
A bell rang somewhere deep among the hills.
A spring sounded choked, running down steep rocks,
The green pines chilled the sunlight's colored rays.
Come dusk, at the bend of a deserted pool,
Through meditation I controlled passion's dragon.

Maybe it was the bell that got me.  You all know I love a good bell ringing.  Looking at this poem now, though, it's just not living up to the impression I had of it.  Luckily, I stumbled onto the writings of the lovely Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu, which cheered me up.  Despite lacking the heterography of Mr. Wang's name, I find her delightful. 

Here's one for the people of Japan right now.  Our thoughts and prayers are with you.

“Although the wind ...”

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

In a world where James Franco still has two arms and "Howl" is a movie . . .

I've been trying to figure out for a while now how to work Allen Ginsberg's seminal poem "Howl" into this blog.  I didn't want to just drop it at the bottom of an entry as a way of emphasizing some other point.  "Howl" is so crucial to who I am as a writer that it deserves the spotlight.

I thank my 10th grade creative writing teacher, Ms. Garrison, for introducing Ginsberg to our class.  We read "Howl" out loud and it has stuck with me ever since.  I will always be grateful to Ms. Garrison for having faith in her students the way that no other teacher I ever had did.  She challenged us to interpret the poem and even take a stab at imitating Ginsberg's style with our own attempts at poetry.

The reason I bring all this up now is that there is a movie called "Howl" that came out in very limited release (New York and San Francisco) in September.  It's about the obscenity trial following "Howl"'s publication and Ginsberg's explanation of the poem.  There's also an animated part that takes you through the imagery of the poem itself.  James Franco plays Ginsberg, and it's got an all-star cast including Jon Hamm and Mary Louise Parker.  Here is the trailer:



It looks like the movie could get a wider release sometime in the near future, but until it does, there are still special screenings being held all over the country.  Check out this link to see if it's going to be showing near you.  And of course, there's always Netflix.  I will be on the look out for it, and I hope you will, too.  Yes, James Franco is a little ubiquitous right now, but it could be a great way to introduce a new audience to this poem.

Howl was first published in 1956.  It is written in three parts with an additional footnote at the end.  Below is Part I, which is probably the best known.  Notice how Ginsberg repeats the word "who" as a way to keep the rhythm, and think about how the "best minds" of his generation were really societal outcasts.

Howl, Part I

for Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.

Mr. Daniel

When I was in high school, I took a speech class at the insistence of a friend and also because it was a prerequisite to TV and video classes.  Speech was taught by a strange little man named Mr. Daniel.  He always made a big deal about how there was no "s" at the end of his name.  It was very important that we remember that.  He was the type of person you could see wearing a bow tie.  He was short, with a mustache and glasses.  I always wondered what Mr. Daniel wished he could be doing instead of teaching.  We got the sense that he hated kids and that he felt his talents were being wasted on us.  He had a great respect for theater arts and expected nothing less from his students. 

One of our assignments in that class was to read a fairytale in front of everyone.  I wanted to pick the perfect story, but I also didn't want it to be the same old thing we'd all heard a hundred times.  That's when I discovered Anne Sexton's Transformations.  As Kurt Vonnegut writes in the foreword, ". . . she was, in fact, retelling many of the Grimms' fairy tales in poetry. . . How do I explain these poems?  Not at all.  I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art.  The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce.  I was game.  I'd read the book.  But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out."

I read out Anne Sexton's "Cinderella" in class.  Terrified, I kept my legs crossed one over the other the entire time I was standing at the front of the room as if I had to pee.  When I finished, Mr. Daniel looked at me.  My heart was thumping in my ears.  He looked down his nose and then he said, "Tell me . . . why aren't you entering speech contests?"  I was so taken aback I didn't have an answer.  And then he busted me for the way I was standing.

The next year I enrolled in Mr. Daniel's TV and video classes.  We were responsible for producing the morning news.  We arrived at 6:30 am every morning to get it going.  One morning, early in the school year, Mr. Daniel had a heart attack as we were getting ready to put on the news.  He died at school. 

I remember watching him get wheeled out on a stretcher, sheet over his head, through the school's front doors.  And now when I think about him, I think about what he had wished for himself.  Did he still think he had plenty of time to achieve his dreams?  How sudden life is.

Cinderella

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

im me, e.e.

Sometimes I wonder what E. E. Cummings would think about the way we live now.  The man was not even ahead of his time.  He was right on time.  He paved the way for experimenting with form and punctuation in writing.  He certainly gave angsty teenage poets a way to express themselves ("capitalization, you're not the boss of me!").

If Mr. Cummings were still alive, would he delight in our poor email composition skills?  Would he laugh at our shortcuts (lol, btw, wtf)?  I wonder if he would embrace text messaging.  I like to think he would start an internet meme equal to "I can has cheezburger?"

At the very least, I think he would smirk at the fact that the MLA Handbook says that one space after a period is now more acceptable than two.  What is this world coming to?

if you like my poems let them

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
"Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants."

-E. E. Cummings

The case for Autumn

Autumn is the best season and I'll tell you why.  There is a mystery about it.  Something in the air, the same ingredient that makes it all fresh and crisp, makes it heavy with anticipation.  It's like the feeling before the gun goes off in a race.  You've done all this preparation and now is the time for action and you're not certain of the outcome.  All you know is you want something good to come out of it. 

I feel like October should be more of a new year than January.  January is smack in the middle of winter. It's boring.  And I know Spring is all about new beginnings and a bright new world, so you might think that Springtime would be the better candidate for the new year celebration, but you'd be wrong.  The problem with Spring is that it's like a baby.  Babies come out all pink and puffy but then what do they do?  Cry and poop.  It takes them a while to get going.  That's why Autumn is the best.  Summer is lazy.  It's relaxing.  But with Autumn you're just getting revved up.  You're buying school supplies.  Bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils!  The holidays are coming!  Halloween!  Thanksgiving!  Hanukkah!  Christmas! 

To me, the best parts of this season are squashes and pies, getting the jackets and scarves out of storage, waiting for the tree across the street from my parents' house to burst into red and orange leaf flames.  People start building fires in their fireplaces and the smell permeates the entire neighborhood.  Unless you live in LA and then the most you can hope for is that crisp air to come around.  I feel it today.  I love Autumn!

Autumn Movement

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.

-Carl Sandburg

I cannot go to school today . . .

When I was in grade school, we had a closed-circuit TV morning program that was broadcast from the library.  Somehow, I don't even remember why, I got the chance to read a poem during the program.  I was all excited because they let me pick any poem I wanted (and I got to be late to class).  I was going to share my poetry-reading skills with the world!  The other kids would watch and marvel at my knowledge of the written art.  They would point and say, "Hey, that's Lisa.  I never knew she could read poetry so well!" And after it was over, I would return to class, and my classmates would swarm me and ask for my autograph.

So which poem to choose?  It was a no-brainer.  I reached for old faithful, my copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends.  I made the perfect selection, I just knew it.  It really spoke to my audience and the issues important to them today: 

Sick

"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more--that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut--my eyes are blue--
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke--
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is . . . Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!" 

Well, my big moment was close at hand. I was sitting at a table off camera next to the "news desk." The girls who were reading the morning announcements said, "And now it's time for your weekly poem. Today's selection will be read by Lisa Di Trolio. What poem do you have for us today, Lisa?"

The camera creaked over to me.  It felt like a thousand eyes aimed directly at my head.  Sudden stage fright hit.  I went into survival mode.  The only way to get out of this was quickly and efficiently.  So I read the whole thing like this:

"SickbyShelSilversteinIcannotgotoschooltodaysaidlittlePeggyAnnMcKayIhavethemeaslesandthemumpsagasharashandpurplebumps . . .

Later I slinked back to class, hoping and praying that everyone had chosen that moment to go to the bathroom. 

Even later, for some reason they asked me to appear back on the morning show.  Maybe I was the only kid who read poems in that school?  It was a chance to redeem myself.  I took a few notes from the director and A.D. (i.e. a teacher who was volunteering and my mother who was the room mother that day).  I like to think that I redeemed myself, but honestly my mind has blocked it out. 

Mom, can you shed some light on this?