I don't remember when I first had the idea to me to write an essay that would connect all the different articles I read in the daily newspaper along whatever associative lines came to me as I wrote, but it's been knocking around in my head for a very long time. I've just never had the time or the discipline, frankly, to do it; there was always something else to do that had to be done and there was, always, the next day's paper. The problem was I never had the discipline to read the paper consistently enough to make writing the essay possible. Then, after a discussion with my friend Duane about his new book of poems, Cadillac Battleship, about which more later, I watched as the thread of that discussion wove its way through a whole bunch of things I was reading--poetry, fiction, criticism, the newspaper--and it suddenly occurred to me that, rather than write an essay, the thing to do was to keep a reading journal the point of which was to connect everything I read, or at least as much of what I read as I could, and this blog seemed to me the perfect place to do that; and since it was my talk with Duane that gave me the idea, I want to start with his book, specifically one poem, "Out For A Date With My Fantasy." (I also should add that I will say nothing in this entry that I have not said to Duane, either in person or through email.)
Her mouth's exposed by shyness
& I want to stick my cock in it,
strip off her punk jeans, t-shirt, fuck
her in her hospitality.
Her face is just trashed enough:
my little gap-toothed slut.
Now, before I get into what bothers me about this poem, I should say that, while the book is in part an exploration of sexual violence, these lines do not characterize the whole book. Nonetheless, though, they do embody for me one of the ways in which the book is unsuccessful, which is that the violence in them, and the misogyny, seems to me entirely gratuitous; there is nothing that takes me out of the fantasy, gives me a vantage point from which to consider the speaker's position vis-a-vis the fantasy, nothing that lets me know the speaker is at all aware that his fantasy is violent and misogynist. No, let me be more specific than this: The woman is a slut to him and the way he fantasizes using her sexually is degrading, and he knows it, and he wants to degrade her. The problem for me is that nothing in the poem suggests that he thinks--either he the speaker, or the writer who has created this speaker--there is anything wrong with this desire; and so the poem descends for me into a very mundane and cliche kind of pornography. The fantasy is familiar; the feelings behind the fantasy are familiar; and so the poem gives me nothing; I neither learn nor feel anything new, and I think this is true whether you read the poem as a fantasy, i.e., the speaker is imagining himself out for a drink with this woman, or you read the poem as recording what he thinks when he is actually out for a drink with her.
Before I go further, let me say this: It is difficult to have been raised a man in this culture and not have had, at some point in your life, some version of the fantasy Duane's poem describes; and I imagine it is nearly impossible to have been raised here as a woman and not have felt oneself at some point to be such a fantasy's object. And I will say this as well: It takes no small courage to tackle in one's work, autobiographically, this aspect of being a man, and so I want to acknowledge this courage in Duane's desire to deal with these issues in his work, and to acknowledge as well that one of the reasons what I see as the failure of this poem troubles me so deeply is that I write about similar issues. My new book of poems is called The Silence Of Men because it is about, for me, coming to terms with the silences in men's lives about sex and violence. (Here's the plug: the book is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press; you can read samples on my website: www.richardjnewman.com.) And so I guess I want to be up front about the fact that what I am writing here is personal because the questions raised for me by the violence in Duane's poems are primarily ethical ones having to deal with the writer's responsibility not only to his or her readers, but also to the characters with which he or she populates the poems.
Thinking about these questions and about Duane's poem leads me to another poem I just read--or rather part of a book length poem called 60¢ Coffee And A Quarter To Dance, by Judy Jordan. I haven't read the entire book yet, but as I was paging through it, deciding if I would put it at the top of my pile of books to read and pre-empt something I already owned, I came across these lines:
12. Philly said to me, I could kill you. I could kill me anybody. I done took care of plenty before you. Philly pointed at his Doberman & said, That's my dog. He's trained. Like you gonna be. Then he said to that dog, Lick her. Then he said, fuck her.
It's just what happened. It ain't nothing else.
13. No. Now you listen here. It was in the front room of the Pheasant. EVerybody saw it. Anybody could have walked in & that wouldn't have made a gnat's ass of difference.
14. You got it girl. Training.
The book is about a time in her life when she was homeless, and from what the back cover copy says, I assume that the poem is at least as much about the experiences of the people she met at that time as it is about her own experience, and, indeed, as I page a little more through the book, there do seem to be a fair amount of sections written in someone else's voice. So this is a big difference between her book and Duane's, and between her agenda and Duanes, but what strikes me nonetheless, since the scenario in the lines I just quoted and the scenario in Duane's poem that I quoted above are each, in their own way, classically pornographic scenarios, is that Judy Jordan has crafted her poem to include the audience--both the audience listening to the speaker and the reader/audience--in a way that Duane's does not. It's not just that the speaker in Jordan's poem addresses an audience; it's the space her poem gives the audience to consider all aspects of what they have just heard/read. And that space opens up in the simple word "No" at the beginning of #13. By making the prostitute have to argue for, to demostrate the truth and validity of her experience, puts the experience in a context that is much greater and more complex than the obvious one about the exploitation of women. That word "no" is our entrance into the prostitute's feeling about her own experience and therefore about herself. Duane's poem does not let the audience into his speaker's feelings about his fantasy at all.
And this makes me think, I am not sure why, about the following passage that I read on the front page of The New York Times on June 28, in an article by Jodi Wilgoren, "Kansas Suspect Please Guilty In 10 Murders." The article is about the BTK killer who was finally caught after 30 years of and it recounts some of the things he said in talking about how and why he killed the people he did:
"He [Dennis Rader] told of placating one woman's crying children with blankets and toys in the bathtub while he cinched a rope around her neck. He said he used a pillow and parka to make a man with a broken rib more comfortable before placing a plastic bag over his head. He recalled masturbating after hanging Josephine Otero, 11, in the basement of her home."
A newspaper is not supposed to give you the kind of insight into an experience that a poem does, and yet what I found as I read this, what I find reading it now after typing it out, is that there is a part of me that wants, almost needs, to humanize this guy Rader, not to excuse what he did or to suggest that there is anything less horrible about him because, maybe, there is a comprehensible and therefore human logic to how he came to be the murderer he became, but because to leave him outside the pale of humanity is, in some sense, that there is a part of me that is outside the pale of humanity as well--the part of me that can't help but be fascinated in the most prurient, self-centered, guilt-ridden way with what he did. We are, all of us, capable of committing the crimes he committed; we are all of us capable of the irony contained in the first two descriptions in the paragraph above, calming a woman's children while murdering her, concern for the physical comfort of a man whom we are going to kill, and that irony, of course, would not have been lost on the man's victims, and this brings me to another passage that I only remember having read. I think it was in an excerpt from someone's memoir (or maybe it was a novel) in Poets & Writers. In the passage I am talking about, the author or narrator talks about a man he knew in prison who was jailed for murdering both his wife/lover and the man he caughter her in bed with. Her, he threw out the window of their seventh floor apartment; he, the killer took to a field and shot in the knees and elbows--or maybe just the knees, or maybe it was the hands, I don't remember exactly--and then let the guy lay there in the field for some time suffering a pain that the killer likened to the pain he felt at having been betrayed by the woman he loved, and then the killer shot the man through the heart.
Reading that passage which, if I can find it, I will enter here, I found myself fascinated, and haunted, because there are echos of what that killer did in a poem I wrote called Op Ed that is a complete fictionalization. The poem--and it feels a little strange to be talking here about my own work--is written as an op ed piece by a man whose wife and son were murdered by a man who now faces the death penalty. The lines I am thinking about are:
and it would be so easy
to stand before the judge,
as some have urged me to do,
and let my wife speak through me.
The jury should know, one friend wrote,
what she would’ve wanted,
but even a murderer,
even this murderer,
who waited two hours
to end my family’s misery
with bullets I’ve dreamed myself
in front of every night
since the bodies were found,
even he has the right not to die
just because someone else
has decided he must.
I am tempted to end this entry here, because what comes next in the material I have gathered to include here feels in some measure like a deep, deep, deep trivialization of what I have just been talking about because it moves the discussion into areas of craft, but I promised myself I was going to write here about the connections I make as I read and I don't want to deny or hide any of them, so here goes. This is from a review in Parnassus: Poetry In Review, Volume 28, Nos. 1 & 2 called, "'And the Half-True Rhyme Is Love': Modern Verse Drama and the Classics." The review was written by Karl Kerchway and it contains this passage:
In his [Carl Phillips'] preface [to his translation of Philoctetes], he describes "the frequent and radical shifts in line length throughout" as "a means of conveying the constant shifts in morality..." He intends is lineation to have an emotional dimension too. "Too read Greek," he writes, "is to know sonically the difference between sudden grief and frenzy, between bliss hoped for and bliss received. My hope is that these shifts might be recognizable, here in the shifting of line length and in the ways in which the possibilities of line length and line break get deployed on the page."....As for his syntactical manipulations, Phillips speaks of their capacity "to reflect and enact psychology and emotion, and to make the reader (and listener) an active participant in such psychology or emotion."
This passage interests me for two reasons: One it has obvious implications for what I was talking about above. It is, in fact, through a kind of syntactical manipulation--though it is not quite the same kind of manipulation that Phillips is talking about--that Judy Jordan gets her poem to work, and I would argue that a lack of syntactic manipulation that, for me anyway, leads to the failure of the poem by Duane Esposito that started all this rambling on my part. What do I mean by a lack of syntactic manipulation? Partially, it is this: I don't believe that the experience of having the fantasy his poem describes can be as simple and simplistic and reductive as the poems presents it and I find that "simplisticness," that reductiveness in the simple and straightforward syntax of the poem. It is, simply, a statement, an assertion, and yet it is also, by definition, so much more than. By treating it, more or less, smply as a statement, I think, does neither the speaker nor the object of the fantasy in the poem nor the writer nor the audience justice.
What I was going to move on to was what the quote from Parnassus made me think about my own work as a translator (here's another plug: my translations of Saadi's Gulistan, Selections from Saadi's Gulistan, is available from Global Scholarly Publications; you can read some samples and see more of my work on my website, www.richardjnewman.com), but and I am looking at the time and thinking I need to stop soon, and so I think I will end here and pick up a different thread of connections next week.
Cheers!
1 comments:
Cool stuff!
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