Jeffrey McDaniel

I just had this dream where a chunk of my skull was missing. I was walking around with some friends, and I looked in the mirror and saw a big flap of skin and skull missing from the front of my head. It looked like the layers of a linzer tart, and I kept wondering if people would think it looked normal, or would I stand out because of my linzer tart head. Is that a metaphor for this blog process? * It’s a rainy day in Brooklyn. The tree outside my window is wiggling around like someone is trying to beat the truth out of it. The rain is sporadic. An indecisive rain. The rain’s heart is only half into it. * Blogs kind of freak me out. I had a friend, who was really anti-social. He was a journalist, who wrote for a major magazine and won a big award. But he didn’t like people, and then he quit the magazine and got hired to write a blog. And now he hardly ever leaves his house. He’s living in his blog cabin, firing out his blog. No more small talk at the cooler. No more nervous elevator banter. No more reason to even put on clothes. * I am listening to the melancholy harmonies of Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine tango master. Alejandra Pizarnik is an Argentine poet who I admire. Some call her the Argentine Sylvia Plath, probably because she writes with great lyric intensity, often about her own psychic discomfort, and that she left the Earth via a self-induced overdose of Seconal. Interestingly Pizarnik published poems in the 50’s that might be considered “confessional,” meaning she pre-dates Lowell and Co. There is not a definitive translation of her work into English, but several strong pieces appear in the Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry anthology edited by Stephen Tapscott. For readers of Spanish, Maria Negroni has a book, El Testigo Lucido (The Lucid Witness), about Pizarnik’s work. * The rain has picked up. People trickle by under umbrellas. I imagine clear plastic umbrella bowling balls with people curled up inside them rolling down the street. * This blog process is like having a small, one-inch-by-one-inch window attached to your brain and a person being able to press their eye up against the glass and watch all the little Munchkins at work, pacing around in there, heaving the thoughts around, lining the words up. * My CD imagined it was an adolescent and began skipping. I am replacing dear Astor with a now-defunct band, Quix*o*tic, from D.C.

I lived in D.C. from 1994 to ‘96 and worked for a very cool poets-in-the-community group called WritersCorps, run by a gem of a guy named Kenny Carroll.

*
Now the tree outside is shaking semi-erotically, like it’s doing a seduction dance.
*
Christina Billote was in Autoclave, and Slant 6 before forming Qiox*o*tic. I like how musicians can inhabit bands fully and then shed the band every few years like snakeskin and be new again. Us poets are kind of stuck; we are our own bands. The best we can do is change our drummer (like Coleridge in “Christabel”), maybe add a guitarist, unless you are Fernando Pessoa; (one could argue that his heteronyms were precursors for the various screen names on-line users hide behind).

Olena Kalytiak Davis metaphorically changed bands between books one and two. I love her intensity, and her awe, her mixture of innocence and experience. If you were in a blackened cave, and she was across the cave, and you didn’t know she was there, you would feel her presence.

*
Now the rain has slowed down to a trickle, and the tree's leaves are waving to me like tiny green hands.

I’m reading various newspaper articles about Bush’s speech on immigration last night and thinking about the linguistic tug of war between phrases like “illegal alien,” “illegal immigrant,” and “undocumented worker,” and how poets are in a conflicted position—working in a medium where the main tool, language, is also used for political control. * It’s strange to hear Bush mention that one of the requirements to citizenship would be a “proficiency in English,” considering his barbaric relationship to the language.

[It reminds me of an idea I once had about cloning sheep. If cloning sheep is in the news—only the tip of the iceberg ever appears in the news, we must envision the rest—then they are most likely cloning humans somewhere deep in the earth, in one of those secret military laboratories. And I wonder if Bush is secretly the first cloned President; maybe the real Bush died in a drunken skiing accident back in his “nomadic” years. The artificial Bush, the clone, is an early model, so some of his programs don’t function properly, like his speech apparatus. Condoleezza Rice is the updated version; she’s the prototype of the future. She actually speaks forty-seven languages, but they won’t let her display them all yet, because they don’t want to freak people out. I keep hoping she’ll malfunction in a news conference and start conversing fluently in a rare dialect of Mandarin.]

*
Bush wants to deploy the National Guard to the border of Mexico. That sounds like a great idea. That’ll probably lower the price of gasoline and reduce casualties in Iraq. (What a strange, sanitized word for killing: casualties, as if there’s anything casual about it.) How long before a guardsperson plucks an incoming child with buckshot? Probably we should plaster any migrating birds crossing the border illegally. And perhaps get rid of sports teams at the high school level and just consolidate all the athletes into little armies that do battle once a week.
*
When I lived in Los Angeles (1996-2001), I taught 10-week poetry workshops at various public high schools. Occasionally I’d run across a student who had a real passion. One such student was named Lynda. I was assembling a group of teen poets to take to the 2000 National Teen Poetry Slam in San Francisco, and I invited Lynda to take part. Through the various workshops and rehearsals leading up to our trip, I got to know her and her situation. She was 17, worked 30 hours a week at a movie theater, and maintained a straight A average in school. Since her mother had gotten fired from her job as a nanny, Lynda was the breadwinner in her family.

Lynda was born in Guatemala. Her mother traipsed across the US/Mexico border with two year-old Lynda was slung over her shoulder. When Lynda was seven, her mother took her and her brother (who was born in the US and therefore documented) back to Guatemala for five years. When Lynda was 12, her mother brought her back to California. A lot had changed in 10 years; this time Lynda and her mother had to hire a coyote, to help them avoid la migra, and travel through really extreme terrain and weather conditions.

In San Francisco, just before the final night of the festival, Lynda spent an hour in front of the mirror, making sure her hair and clothes and make-up were just right. I loved that the world had not taken this from her, that there was still a little bit of diva quivering in her, despite all her hard work and perseverance.

That night Lynda read a piece about crossing the border. It was in the voice of her 12 year-old self. (Luckily I just located a copy on my hard drive.) Here’s an excerpt:

Hide, Senor Coyote? What did I do wrong?
I’ll pretend we’re playing hide and go seek.
The man in the uniform is coming.
No, no, I won’t let him find me.
I always was the best at hide and seek.
Mommy is trembling.
It’s alright, mommy. It’s hide and seek.
This world now seems a labyrinth
That tortures little rats.
No, he’s getting close!
Senor Coyote, don’t let him find us.
Freedom is my oxygen.
Without it, I can’t breathe.

She got a standing ovation. The glow in her face as she exited the stage was luminous enough to brighten even the darkest region of my heart.

A month after that, Lynda graduated high school. She had applied to and was accepted by a bunch of colleges, but because she was not an official citizen, she did not qualify for in-state tuition and was not eligible for financial aid. Her situation, if it wasn’t so common, might be called Kafkaesque. Miraculously, her high school English teacher was able to get a private Catholic college to overlook her undocumented status and give her some financial aid, and then an angel—a successful Hollywood screenwriter who had once employed her mother—generously covered the rest of her tuition.

Four years later, in 2004, Lynda graduated from college, fell in love and got married to an American classmate. But since she didn’t have a green card and officially exist in this country, she still couldn’t get citizenship or work legally. Luckily, in the past month, she was just accepted into an MA program for English and given a fellowship. She continues to write and perform her poems and is working on a memoir about her life.

I guess I’m thinking about her and how political subjects in the media can seem abstract and distant unless there’s a human face to personalize the issue, and how poetry can be a transformative act, how when Lynda shared her poem that night in front of 1200 people, she turned the microphone into Ellis Island and was spiritually legalized.

Here’s a fascinating quote from a book I’m reading, Nabokov’s biography, Nikolai Gogol (New Directions). It’s about Zhukovsky, a 19th century Russian poet and a friend of Gogol’s. “Zhukovsky expounded certain favorite ideas of his regarding the improvement of the world, such as for instance the transformation of capital punishment into a religious mystery with the hanging performed in a closed church-like place to the elevated sounds of hymns, all this invisible to the kneeling crowd, but auditorially very beautiful and solemn and inspiring—one of the reasons Zhukovsky gave for the adoption of this remarkable ritual being that the enclosure, the curtains, the rich voices of the clergy and choir (drowning any unseemly sound) would ‘prevent the condemned man from treating onlookers to a sinful display of swaggering and pluck in the face of death.’” I am 100% against capital punishment, but if we are going to do it, at least it could be more soulful. *

Here are some orphaned fragments that have been living in my notebook for months, awaiting a foster poem to move into:

[Let’s go down to the gallows and watch the feet of the hanged man run their course.]

[Holidays are when you turn off the phone, break out the family voodoo dolls from the liquor cabinet, and pray for a doctor to materialize.]

[Hotel mini-bars are stocking Viagra. Men are getting in touch with their inner Niagara.
Look at me, with all this pine. I’m a love machine with a pharmaceutical spine.]

[I am going to the store, and I am going there stag.]

[The human is the rare plant needing to be watered inside as well as out, all the while swearing self-sufficiency.]

[Awkward is a seventh grade girl playing Spin the Bottle with her classmates
and noticing her uncle’s fingerprints on the glass.]

[I wish there was a special mirror where you could see yourself as others see you, or
sunglasses that make you see people the way they wish to be seen.]

[If feelings were permanent, tears would stain our clothing like blood.]

[Smoking is the most popular form of dying for what you believe in.]

[Poland is just one big ethnic neighborhood.]

[Reality is a junkie looking for a vein in the haystack of his arm.]

[On the outside of a milk carton is the name and face of a missing child. On the inside of the carton is printed the child’s whereabouts.]

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how a poet is this person who has words that will not stay inside his or her head. Like the brain is fertile with language, and the language literally grows out of us. Maybe it’s this way with all people, and a poet is just someone who takes responsibility for that, who begins to cultivate the growing words, begins to treat their own brain as a farm.

As writers we must be cognizant of what we are pouring into our soil (soul). What we put into ourselves, our mental or psychic diet, will have an influence on the writing. To keep from drying up, (and many of us do dry up), we want to find a way to till the soil, to keep it artistically fertile by pouring in the right mix of nutrients. Nutrients, in this case, include actions, foods, thoughts, obsessions, people.

Rilke is the great example of a poet who put poetry in the center of his life. Some questions one might ask: Where do you put your poetry in your life? Is there sufficient room for it? Do you construct your life in a way that feeds your art? Do you to tend to your poems regularly? Do you surround yourself with people who honor the poet inside you?

People. I’m not saying one should make a list of all their friends and relatives and contemplate the continuation of each relationship based exclusively on whether it is good or bad for the soil, for artistic production, but when we hang out with someone, we are allowing them to pour their words directly into our head. We are also responsible for the feelings (or lack thereof) that the people in our lives stimulate. Maybe one needs to erect a few scarecrows. More and more as a writer, I am cognizant of the fact that I want to preserve some mental and emotional space. (When I was in my twenties, it was almost the opposite.)

Food. Obviously what we eat and drink has an influence on us physically, but it also touches us mentally, as the brain is still technically part of the body. One will feel differently at 6 pm depending if one has had a beet salad for lunch or engaged in a hot dog eating contest. One will feel differently the next morning depending if one drank a fifth of Jim Beam the night before or sipped green tea.

I’m not saying there is one right way, and that all poets should drink green tea or whisky exclusively. Maybe it serves your art well to rupture your thought process with a night of black-out drinking—that has worked for many writers over the years, (it worked for me with mixed results many moons ago.)

Obsessions. A poet and former teacher who I respect greatly said to me recently that we all have demons, but that my particular demons, when he knew me 15 years ago in grad school, were undermining me. So I guess the goal is to gravitate towards demons that will enhance your art rather than undermine it. Personally I hope to not have the same obsessions in 10 years that I have today. I pray (pry?) for new obsessions, or at least a new relationship to my current ones.

Culture. The culture we ingest will eventually come out of us. When you read a book or watch a film or listen to a record, it gets poured into your soil. Again I’m not saying one should listen to only classical music, or only punk rock, just that we are cognizant of the fact that what we pour into ourselves will eventually come back out, or at least influence, flavor, what emerges.

If you want to change how you’re writing, or what you’re writing about, you can do this by swallowing, pouring, lots of a particular style or subject matter into yourself. It takes about five years of feeding something into your brain, of planting the seeds, before it will start to emerge organically in your poems. If you want to write political poems, devour politics. If you want to write with wilder imagery, devour all things surreal. And in five years, it will begin to emerge from you, naturally.

Thoughts. This is a little trickier. The soil is also influenced by the thoughts one chooses to engage. Think of them as mental friends. When one sits down to write (are there some poets who write while standing up? I hope so.), the words that grow out of you will be different if you engaged hostile thoughts all morning than if you had a clear mind.

What some might call the “stream of consciousness”, I will call the “brain road”; it’s what you are on mentally when you wake up and begin having thoughts. I guess you are less free of exerting your will if it’s a “stream” than if it’s a “road”, because a stream will carry you along; a road has forks in it, places where you must make a decision.

Anyway, for the purpose of this instance, I will call it a road. You’ve just woken up and gotten onto your brain road. You step in the shower, and as the water begins to hit you, a person who pissed you off, yesterday or months before, pops into your head and trots over to you, baits you into an imaginary argument. This is the first fork of the day. If you engage that thorny discussion, begin telling that imaginary person where to stick it, you are making a decision that will have an impact on the kind of day you will have.

I know that when I engage that first resentment I can quickly work myself into a froth, because soon a second character from the boiling side of the past pops up miraculously, and then a third, as if there’s a conveyor belt of resentment—I believe there is a physical conveyor belt, just for self-taunting, built into the brain—and soon I am sending out brain waves to other angry people on the telepathic internet connecting us all, saying meet me on aisle three of Home Depot at exactly 11:27, we will reach for the same roll of masking tape, and have the confrontation that we both have been lusting for.

Maybe it works for you to keep your mind filled with static, to constantly wrestle with the world. Maybe it helps you write good poems. (It worked for Frost, right?) Or maybe you want to keep your mind clean. I want to keep my mind clean today, though I seem to have this innate gift for producing static.

I was in a play six years ago in Los Angeles; we did twenty-nine shows. I would get on stage each night, and try to invite the character’s psyche into my brain, but sometimes my brain was cluttered with the thoughts, feelings I’d been having (indulging) all day, and suddenly I’d be on stage, in front of people, and become uncomfortably aware of all the mental baggage I had been lugging around. I began to strive to keep my brain free of unnecessary thoughts and feelings during the day, so that I would have a blanker space for the character to inhabit at night.

*

It’s becoming clear that this is too much to include in a blog entry, that this is merely a beginning; there are three main stages that I wished to explore, and I’ve only touched on one. I will speed through the last two. Here are the three:

Tilling the soil, what you put into yourself: thoughts, actions etc.

Harvesting the crop, writing, re-writing etc.

Distributing the crop, sharing the work

Harvesting. This is the act of writing, the showing up on a regular basis and doing the work. If you don’t tend your word crops, your poetry farm will go under.

The metaphor I sometimes use (and I realize I am mixing metaphors here) is that writing is kind of like surfing—the surfer gets in position, floats around in the water for several hours, waiting for the right wave to come along. You can’t catch the wave if you’re not in the water. Our job is to place ourselves in a position to succeed: to show up at the blank page and float around for a couple hours, ready to catch a wave.

Distribution. This last stage is crucial. It doesn’t mean only publication, though it can mean than that. It means getting your poems, your word crop, out into the world somehow. If you don’t take your poems somewhere, they will dry up and this will undermine your endeavor in a big way.

Distribution can mean publication in national or regional literary magazines, or it can mean sharing your work with a writing group or an open mike that you feel connected to, or it can be sharing poems with a few trusted friends who you feel “get you”, who see you as you wish to be seen. Even Emily Dickinson had at least one person to share some of her poems with.

This distribution, if it is successfully executed, will feed you. The money of publication or literary success will not be enough to sustain you, (though a little success doesn’t hurt). The only things that will sustain you over the long haul are the joy from the act of creation and the knowledge that some other person has truly eaten what has grown out of you.

MONDAY   |   TUESDAY   |   WEDNESDAY   |   THURSDAY   |   FRIDAY

Best How To Manual: How Verses Are Made by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Best Angry-at-God poems: Cesar Vallejo

Great break-up poem: “The Nails” by W.S. Merwin (from The Moving Target,
mysteriously absent from both his Selected Poems.)

Great pick-up line of poetry: “I want to lie down beside the length of you simply because
your earlobe is the gentlest small animal on Earth.” by Thomas Lux

Great genre-stretching book about family and divorce: The Balloonists by Eula Biss

Funniest poet you may not have heard of: Matt Cook, author of Eavesdrop Soup (Manic
D) and In the Small of my Backyard (Manic D)

Another funny/dark poet you don’t want to challenge to a drinking contest: Jose Padua

Poet with the roughest life: Marina Tsvetaeva

Worst Poet to be on an AWP panel with: Rimbaud

Two poetry movies worth checking out: Fine Madness, starring Sean Connery, and Reuben, Reuben

Best poet blogger: Frank O’Hara

Best Selected Poems for a poet who overdosed in the 90’s: The Last Five Miles To Grace (Zeitgeist Press) by David Lerner

Recently deceased poet who warrants a Selected immediately: Lynda Hull

Best reading I attended in 2006: Brave New Voices (National Teen Slam) at the Apollo Theater in Harlem

Best post-reading reading: Spontaneous cipher by teen poets on the 125th Street A-train platform

Cool music show I attended a few years ago: Frank Black solo show at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.

Great places to visit in California: Big Sur, Joshua Tree

Best seafood splurge (New York): the lobster roll at Pearl Oyster Bar

90’s collective most likely to appear in literary history books fifty years from now: Dark Room

Coolest 90’s collective you never heard of: 8-Rock, in DC (Kenny Carroll, DJ Renegade, Brian Gilmore)

Best restaurant block, inch per inch: Cornelia Street in the West Village

Best ice cream (New York): Cones (on Bleeker), and Il Laboratorio del Gellato on (Orchard)

2 poets doing cool things with music: Kamau Daa’ood and Derrick Brown

Best NYC open mike: Bar 13; they also sponsor workshops in prisons and the Acentos series in the Bronx

LA literary venue to check out: Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach

Poet most likely to take your money playing cards: DJ Renegade

Only Pulitzer Prize-winner to read at the National Poetry Slam: Henry Taylor, (1997)

Poet with a warm smile who will dominate you and your friends on the basketball court: Ross Gay

Best new anthology: Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande) edited by Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin

Best Appalachian surrealist: Cindy Goff

One of our very best young poets with a wonderful third book: Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (Norton)

2 poets with lots of brain and body tension: Paisley Rekdal and Anna Swir

4 excellent defunct bands from the 90’s: Helium, Versus, Unrest, Possum Dixon

Poet with a book I am anticipating in ’07: Sean Thomas Dougherty, on BOA

Indie rock girl with a great new album: Joan As Policewoman

Couple other bands I dig: Blonde Redhead, Cat Power,

Great first books in the late 60’s: The Lost Pilot by James Tate and The Naomi Poems, book one: Corpse and Beans by St. Geraud, aka Bill Knott

Magazine from the 60’s that I wish would make a comeback: Kayak

Poetry book I’d like to see made into a movie directed by Todd Solondz: Letters To Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth

Poet who deserves a second book: Jan Richman, author of Because The Brain Can Be Talked into Anything, selected by Robert Pinsky for the Walt Whitman award in 1994

Poet who deserves a first book: Regan Maud Good

2 Poets with the freest of spirits: Olena Kalytiak Davis and Joshua Beckman

Tupac or Biggie: Biggie