There was also the other night with the video reading laced with empathy, resistance, Zidane, the wreckage of the pines, the taking of the photos of the sleeping men in their row, the cosmic interconnection of all things? Check. Futility of pain management as source of humour? Check. Controllable vices for purposes of a secondary level of interior life, echo of conscience trailing out? Check. A sense of time as discontinuous in its spread while expanding on a surface line that is only a reflection of a sense of line? Check. Total distrust of command but for the contradictory moments of necessity? Half-check. Digging the ecstasy of swinging? Yes. Laughing with the tree? Yes. Is the tree funny? Yes. Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra.

Radioactive chalk on a wet post-portal playground was the yesterday excuse for meeting skipping. Help! I was frying some puppies on the stove when I thought I ‘d start to sell them on a blog in halloween costumes! But then I found your site (great site, really informative), and now I think I’ll sell surgical gloves made out of heroees. Thanks! Can I link to your blog? Can I buy goods from your friends and snort them? Not only is your blog pragmatic, it comes with a packet of silica gel (do not eat)! I like to make shapes in the head and in the ears, and I also like to make them in the room. Is there relation in the relation you relate to?

As lists go, to shatter the mindage of yea who built them, they may think of indolence in its softer terms, menu-like in its array of dreams in parti-colored favors: this brown face with those pink eyes cut out of these yellow cans, the artifice of neon whiskers, the textolatry of dirt in the form of specks riddling the dino-acts thinking through the objectification of feeling. So what if the rain is friendlier than your ever-slithering definition of work? What is most ordinary every day is defeating this desire to harden into respectable indifference.  I’m learning the characteristics of the space.

“So when I’m setting up I have to learn how to make the kind of shapes, the power of music that I want to generate in that place. I mix during performance only in one place, so I have to know the rest of the space by heard. It involves a tremendous amount of time, walking, listening, going back to the mixing-board, establishing levels and discovering what kind of world you want to make. In that sense you’re even composing, because you haven’t been in these spaces before. Do we perceive the sound in the room, in our head, a great distance away? Or do we experience these three dimensions at the same time? At Tokushima in these wonderful spaces it was even more possible to realize that. Or we perceive just enough to trigger patterns, melodies, created deep within our neural sensitivities, shaping some responses. Do we experience a sound dimension as though blocks away or very near, moving beside us, outside and around one ear only, do we feel melodies as they develop inside, within our ears, and we move our head, and we raise a hand to rub away a melody that’s circling our nose, does the sound drift, or does it fall like rain, does it make such a clear shape in the air we seem to see it, in front of our eyes? There are so many ways. Do we continue to hear sound as our mind processes aftersound, or music perceived minutes ago? And that affects how structural changes in sound happen in music.”

And it was very good to hear Claudia Rankine and Mom read, and to think about the above on sound from Maryanne Amacher, and to feel like the fresco of a collage at George Schneeman’s memorial, and to see into the future for no good reason, and to subdue verification for an angular tremulous wish in fastidious contrast to simoom for Will Alexander, whose Exobiology As Goddess caused the writing of my object is an emptiness on which words appear, and, much as one bends, to chalk the strong present tense against all rumours of wrath past and to come.

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak.  Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

*

They Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: As Poetry Perishes, Prison Population Soars

CHICAGO — As a result of poetry’s slow yet unquestionable death, droves of impoverished versifiers — writers who once worked as teachers or editors, or who relied on grants, fellowships, and publications for financial survival — have been filling the nation’s debtor’s prisons.

The first to note the phenomenon were the few remaining poets still conducting outreach workshops in jails. They were surprised by their students’ enthusiastic participation and polished writing. The only problem, reported one instructor, was a high degree of competitiveness among her pupils; one student described another’s work as “unbearingly knowing, with a jangling quality that hearkens to Pope.”

A guard described walking down the cellblock and finding prisoners in what appeared to be collusive discussion. He cocked his gun and approached with caution, only to discover what one prisoner confirmed as a “collegial conversation” on “Islands, Isolation, and Themes of Imprisonment in Early Donne.”

Another guard witnessed a tête-à-tête between an older and a younger prisoner occurring in the former’s cell. Demanding the reason for this meeting, the younger prisoner mentioned he was seeking direction on his dissertation, an exploration of the Beat aesthetic.

This reporter secured an interview with the younger prisoner.  “After my M.F.A., I was unsure what to do with myself,” the man explained. “I was several thousand dollars in debt, and thinking about a PhD, but I kept hearing the discipline of English had died. When I learned that several of my favorite poets and scholars had gathered in this debtor’s prison, I jumped at the chance. I’ll be here for about 5-7 years, which should be enough time to teach some composition courses to younger prisoners, and get in a good draft of my dissertation.”

Upon further questioning, the younger prisoner clarified that he had, in fact, sneaked into the debtor’s prison.

“I’m happy here,” he said. “We’ve even founded a school of sorts – the Prison School of Poetry. We’re largely influenced by the works of Sir Walter Raleigh and the bards of the Irish independence movement, who wrote songs and poems on the eves of their executions.”

Report submitted from within debtor’s prison. Having endured numerous lectures on “the death of journalism,” this reporter decided to move in herself.

*

It’s hard to imagine an obituary for poetry until we know exactly why and when it will die, but here’s how one might start.

Poetry, Remembered as Gentle Source of Readerly Exaltation, Murdered in Bath

Poetry, an esteemed verbal art relying on compression, form, metaphor, or other means to achieve heightened literary and aesthetic effect, died Thursday when longtime companions Prose, Technology, and Incomprehension initiated a brutal attack at Poetry’s home in New Jersey. Poetry was at least 4,000 years old.

*

It’s equally hard to speculate on the aftermath of poetry’s death, but we can be confident New Mexicans will play a prominent role.

In “Desert Places,” Poetry Cited — and Sighted

ROSWELL—Since poetry’s demise last January 23, believers here and in other remote locations across America claim the form is not dead at all.

Mary McPherson, 32, was driving down Clovis Highway when she noticed the air shimmering strangely above the pavement. Scientists would cite extreme heat as the reason for the phenomenon. But McPherson has another opinion.

“It was a moment of loveliness that seemed loaded with significance,” she said. “No one will believe me, but I swear there was poetry in it.”

Robert Hache, 65, reported an equally uncanny event at the grocery store. “I was passing through the soup aisle, and suddenly I heard someone say, ‘Oops! Oops! I spilled the soups,’” he remarked. “It reminded me of the poetry I used to read when I was little. Everyone tells me that poetry is dead, but I’m not so sure.”

Psychologist Sinda Turner at the University of New Mexico described these apparitions as a normal element of grieving. “We tend to keep seeing the departed, in various senses, for years after the death,” she said. “Think of Elvis.”

She said she’s attempted to confirm the death of poetry with colleagues in the university’s poetry MFA program, but could not find the poetry professors.  “People say they’ve moved to prison, where they’ve founded a new school, and have already published several anthologies,” she said. “I’m not sure what to make of that. New Mexicans are very imaginative.”

Was William Safire a poet?

No.

He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.

But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?

Yes.

And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?

I certainly can’t.

Some background:

Like you, I attended the scariest high school in the world. Like Safire, I attended one of New York City’s “specialized high schools” for science and mathematics. In my befuddling ninth-grade math class, I didn’t appear special so much as dyspeptic – but during those lessons, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” William Safire was my Tums, my Maalox, my Zantac, and my Prevacid.

My math teacher’s hair would flop like a fish as he dodged around the classroom, explicating proofs in a gruff Brooklyn accent. Weathering his whirlwind of charts and graphs, probabilities and equations, I comprehended little, save that he loved Safire’s “On Language” column. Every now and again, he would pause to mention it, and one day he asked whether any of us read it, too. I said I did.

That moment struck like lightning in a storm, bringing with it illumination and connection. Suddenly my math teacher – let’s call him Mr. Carp – seemed just like me. He, too, marveled at the distinction between “enormity” and “enormousness,” and preached the equivalency of “comprise” and “include.” He knew that language, like people, could stumble, march, or dance, and that in Safire’s column, language jitterbugged. He evolved from challenger to ally, from stranger to friend.

I fancy I evolved in his eyes, too – from perennially baffled to potentially curable. True, I continued to sweat at the touch of a tangent, to squint at the squiggles and arrows of logical proofs. But I did learn that the logic of wordsmiths functions as follows:

IF a lackluster math student loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, AND a devoted math teacher loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, THEN an unlikely bond will develop between them.

I daresay even that:

An unlikely bond will develop between a lackluster math student and a devoted math teacher IF AND ONLY IF both love William Safire’s “On Language” column.

That bond expressed itself most frequently when we encountered an infelicitous phrase in a word problem. The scene usually played out as follows:

Mr. Carp reads a problem aloud while I think about lunch. He concludes: “Hopefully, the ladder will still be upright when the boy returns an hour later.” He points at me. I gaze back, alarmed. He announces: “As Abigail knows, and as Safire would surely point out were he in class with us now, the adverb ‘hopefully’ could suggest the ladder is itself hoping for something, which introduces an unhelpful vagueness. The sentence should read, ‘The boy hopes the ladder will await him when he returns.’” An approving nod in my direction. And then a return to the swirls of sines and confusions of cosines.

Perhaps Mr. Carp, who hopped around the room enforcing rules of logic, wasn’t so different from the amateur linguist who jauntily emphasized accuracy along with creativity, flexibility within form.

***

Now, a selection of wordplay-centric reminiscences of Safire — and an invitation to add yours below:

The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!! — Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times

But he delighted in the infinite variety and power of language and covered the subject from all angles: the arcane origins of newly vogue phrases, acceptable grammatical innovations and lamentable passings, jargon and, his word for its blogosphere corollary, “blargon”; metaphors, euphemisms, malapropisms and “bonapropisms,” a word he coined for serendipitously appropriate misspeaks. Safire was an early victim of alliteration-addiction syndrome. — Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star

It wasn’t that the words were unknown, although “nabob” was a stretch, derived, as it was from an antique term from India’s Mogul empire. But when they were strung together — “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and issued from the mouth of Spiro Agnew, they became magically, memorably, melodically meaty. Turned on the critics of the Vietnam war, they were like the thrust of a foil, the stroke of a clever, graceful warrior. — OregonLive.com

Credit Safire with preserving his loyalties. For years, he relished making mincemeat of liberals as much as refusing to mince his puns. In 1994, Safire was calling the Clinton White House “the Whitewater House.” He wrote of Agnew in 1995, “His two-timing was out of joint.” — Todd Gitlin, The New Republic

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

Jim had a rock star moment too (I watched him singing “people who died” on you tube last night and I thought he looked maybe uncomfortable) and he was a better than fair monologist which he was doing and everyone was doing somewhat in the time that we toured. Lila Wallace sponsored the tour and the idea was that a famous poet and a younger or less famous poet would go out there together and the pleasure of doing this with Jim far out shadowed any feeling that I should be he who had such a different life from mine.

I had met him already a few times before our tour which is not to say the two of us were in some bus together. We met in city to city, from gig to gig. We read together a bunch of times was it. In San Francisco where I had read many times before and usually to mostly gay audiences I discovered that there was a massive straight scene there too. Who knew. Jim brought them out. So definitely some nights I felt a little buried by the scene he drew though other nights I felt I was “the winner” but Jim always read longer, that was one of the hallmarks of a star, to be comfortable with that. To know that people expected it. He was sweet. I mean he was obviously sharp too. But the sweetness wasn’t a performance it was true. And it’s just a great gift to give five or ten readings with another writer if you admire their work. Which I did. I kind of remember him getting on his knees in some reading at St. Mark’s Church and in that poem he said he was asking permission.

He was very tall. He kind of merged a catholic thrill and a rock n roll thrill and a poet thrill all in one shameless gesture. On our tour Jim had a very neat trick which it took me a while to uncover which was that he would be reading from some book that he had read from many times and suddenly he would look up and tell us some other detail about the same subject. It was so fresh these moments of pure performance when something simply occurred to him and he decided to share it. But when I bought the book I discovered that THOSE LINES WERE IN THERE! He simply delivered them as if they were impromptu and returned to the text with another grade of attention in place now and the reading was refreshed. A device like that explained his staying power. Still at first I struggled with whether this gesture was false or not. I was wanting to be pure. It was like watching anyone reading the same poem again and again. Or on other occasions I heard Jim tell the same story again in order to set up a poem.

There was a sense I finally got from him that this was a job and he had the chops to do it well. He did it with such ease. He did it like it was raw. Which was an amazing gift. I stepped into his wake for a few minutes this evening and on the way a group of us had wondered if he had any family. They’re Irish I suggested. How could he not have siblings. A bald middle-aged man almost magically introduced himself to us then as Jim’s brother. Though you’d never know it he laughed seeing his own grey suit and bright tie. We told him we were poets and the man said he never had any difficulty imagining Jim as a writer. But the rock and roll stuff seemed wrong. He was an altar boy you know and Jim would be shaking up on the altar. He didn’t like it at all being up there. And that’s what I saw. In the music he look kind of exposed.

The act of performing writing is quiet, after all. It’s very private in a way. No matter’s who’s out there. And the jokes or agreements we might have with ourselves about what’s real and what’s performed we keep to ourselves finally. He was great poet and performing artist and the difference between the two only Jim knew.

Jim Carroll—poet, novelist, musician, diarist, impresario—died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old.

The tributes and reminisces have come in from various sources–from English footballers to New York musicians to everyday readers–all noting what a tremendous presence Carroll was both onstage and off.

*

The New York Times:

“’I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,’ the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ‘The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.’

*

Tom Clark:

“Jim had by that time already begun haunting the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church. He loved the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and writing under a rush of Frank’s influence, at seventeen produced his own first slim chapbook, Organic Trains. Ted Berrigan had taken Jim under his wing. Poetry not basketball was where Jim wanted to go in his life.”

*

Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney on NPR:

“He was tall and lithe, with a ghostly, otherworldly mien. Carroll was reading poems with no back-up band, no team, no amp to crank to up to 10. But he didn’t have any problems covering the stage, reaching the corners and permeating the room.”

*

Rolling Stone:

“Carroll also contributed an untitled poem to the pages of Rolling Stone, which we have reprinted here:

It’s sad this vision required such height.
I’d have preferred to be down with the others, in the stadium.
They know the terror of birds.
I am left, instead, with the deep drone…
The urgency to deliver light, as if it
were some news from the far galaxies.

[From Issue 321 — July 10, 1980]”

*

The LA Times:

“The book hit bestseller lists when it was made into a movie in 1995 starring Leonardo DiCaprio. At book signings with DiCaprio, however, ‘it was Carroll the crowds clamored for,’ Lewis MacAdams wrote in Entertainment Weekly.”

*

New Music Express:

“Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig also wrote about Carroll’s death on his Twitter page , saying: ‘I spent a lot of time listening to my dad’s 45 of ‘People Who Died’ back in the day.’”

*

English footballer Matt Lawrence in The Mirror:

“‘At 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89 per cent of the novelists working today.’ – Jack Kerouac

If Jack ‘On The Road’ Kerouac describes a writer in such glowing terms, then a light should immediately flicker in your brain.

Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds.”

*

American Songwriter:

“And to most, he’s not even a footnote. Though being a New York-driven artist, he did warrant an obit in today’s New York Times. But that’s not what matters here. What stands out is the way anyone who heard the vicious lashing, thrashing had it burned into their skin, the psyche: the liberation of not just kicking out the jams, but the way exactitude in an almost musical insurrection made the songs hit that much harder.”

*

And The Catholic Boy fansite has an extensive archive of performance videos and interviews.

Jim Carroll interview 1/18/91 Cleveland Ohio

As a poet, I was mentored by writers in Kearny Street Workshop, the original hub of the San Francisco Filipino American and Asian American literary scene. One such literary figure in this scene was the much venerated poet Al Robles, a denizen of the pre-gentrified SoMa (South of Market), Chinatown, and Fillmore District. He was a true San Francisco citizen, a collector of folks’ stories, and an elder storyteller around whom communities gathered.

Photo by Jeremy Villaluz

Al Robles was an activist, at the forefront of the movement to stop the demolition of the I-Hotel, which housed elderly and low income tenants, many of whom we’ve come to know as the “Manongs,” elder Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, who spent their youths as migrant labor in West Coast agriculture and canneries, and as US veterans who fought in WWII. He brought young activists and artists to Agbayani Village in Delano, a rural settlement of these Manongs, and to the WWII Japanese American internment camps at Tule Lake and Manzanar. He believed it was important for young activists and artists to see these places with their own eyes, to hear the stories of these places firsthand. Robles’s activism was closely tied to his poetic work; in fact, his activism and poetry were one and the same. He believed poets should bring themselves into the world.

The stories of the elderly Manongs, which is an Ilocano term of respect for our elders, populate Robles’s collection, rappin’ with ten thousand carabaos in the dark (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1996):

“As a poet I’ve followed the footprints of the manongs. I gathered their history from Agbayani Village to Stockton, in the farms and fields that stretched north, south, east, and west. I followed them deep inside fish bellies swimming across the icy cold Pacific waters. Sat down with every single manong and watched as they weaved out dreams from fishnets beneath trees, in the Kauai rains. I cried out to them across the sugarcane fields. Mudfish cut through my mind.”

The way he saw it, history was not some abstract, distant thing; rather, it was right in front of us, contained in folks’ memories, and it was our responsibility, us “youngblood” poets, to hear and to document these stories, and not just the beautiful ones:

baby, baby, baby
i ain’t got nothin’ to eat
wake up this mornin’
feelin’ so sad
cryin’ so bad

cadillac slim
midnight pimp
stompin’
ten-dollar tricks
for gray chicks
at the blue mirror

brown hands
unfolding
black flesh
dyin’ pimps
laid out cold
on piss streets

Al Robles passed away on May 2, 2009, and the larger American poetry community barely noticed his passing. In San Francisco, however, we mourned, at the resurrected I-Hotel, at City Lights Books in the adjacent North Beach, in Japantown, in the Fillmore, in SoMa, in all the places where he heard folks’ stories and committed them to poetry.

As for myself, I have also been mourning the passing of one of my first poet mentors, whose presence I felt keenly as a poet from my adolescence into full-blown authorhood. Over the past couple of decades, I would find him somewhere in San Francisco streets, with plastic bags full of stuff, or sitting in some hole in the wall place, eating fish and rice with his hands. He would invite me to sit, and he would tell so much story. He remembered so much about the city, despite its constantly changing landscape, despite the changing color of its people.

He taught me to pay acute attention to this city at ground level, and to its people, the elderly Pinoy selling the morning paper or playing chess alongside Market Street just outside the Powell Street station, the homeless Vietnam veteran in the Mission District, the natty homeless man like a wild Black Jesus:

Winter rain yum cha with Gin San
A fat, sloppy ragged, dirty, nose-
picking recluse, who hangs out at
Portsmouth Square all year-round.

Dragonflies get all tangled up in
his thick black mountain hair
Knotted with pine cones
White insects big as rice grains
crawl in and out.

The above is an excerpt from “Winter Rain Yum Cha with Gin San,” one of my favorite poems by Al Robles, in which this nomad opens his shirt, and mushrooms sprout from his chest. It’s Robles’s wonder for this wild man of the city, who despite the city, seems not only to have sprouted from the earth, but in many ways, is the earth, what’s here when you peel away all the layers of the city.

I will leave you with a link to a video (can’t get Wordpress to embed the YouTube video) of Robles reading his poem, “Traveling North to Visit Okashi” at the now defunct art space, Babilonia 1808, in Berkeley, on August 3, 2002.

Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.

It’s an ancient story: I went to graduate school because I thought I was smart, and immediately discovered how stupid I was. Among the many indicators of my ignorance, one stood out: Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems, which had just won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. I went to school at Syracuse, from whose faculty Carruth had only recently retired, and he retained the status of a household god in those parts. He is older now, nearing ninety, and I doubt he does much socializing. But those fifteen years ago, he would be installed in a corner at parties, offered tidbits and drink, doted upon and feared. I tended toward the fear end of the spectrum. I never spoke to him. But I read his poems.

I wish I could go back and watch that kid I was reading those poems and turning pale and clammy as the winter skies of upstate New York. For starters, there were so many of them: two hundred or so, from thirteen books, written over more than forty years. Then the chilling realization that there had to be even more somewhere, since these were only the “shorter” poems. (Copper Canyon published a companion Collected Longer Poems in 1993.) And then there was the extraordinary diversity of the poems themselves. Formally, it seemed Carruth could pull off anything. There were poems in all manner of meters, rhyme schemes, stanza patterns, and received forms, some of which I recognized, others I knew I should know but didn’t, and not a few I suspected had simply been invented by Carruth himself. But Carruth was not a strict formalist, or not exclusively; there were also poems that scattered language across the page, using white space for pacing, and poems in very free verse, some with lines of two or three syllables, some with lines as gigantic and manic as Ginsberg’s, and every imaginable variation in-between. For a young writer who hadn’t (hasn’t) yet figured out how to do even one thing well, this apparition that could do at least a dozen things brilliantly was terrifying.

Beyond the remarkable how of the poems—the solidity and variety of their constructions—there was also the what to be reckoned with. I’d read a poem like “Marshall Washer”–a deeply felt, sternly authoritative account of Carruth’s friendship with his farmer neighbor in rural Vermont, full of insight and information about spreading manure, raising cows, and building fences–and think I had a bead on Carruth’s tone and concerns as a poet. But then some pages later I’d come across translations of short lyrics by Nerval and Lamartine, and be forced to expand my sense of what he was up to. Then there were pitch-perfect and hilarious dramatic monologues in the voices of working-class rural New Englanders trying to keep body and soul together on their dying farms and in their dying mill towns. Then paeans to classical Chinese poets. Caustic political poems about Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and industrial pollution. Erudite lyric flights with titles like “Almanach du Printemps Vivarois” and “Loneliness: An Outburst in Hexasyllables.” Ecstatically ragged analyses and recapitulations of obscure old jazz recordings (“When Dickenson came on in it was all established, / no guessing, and he started with a blur / as usual, smears, brays – Christ / the dirtiest noise imaginable / belches, farts / curses / but it was music . . .” (“Paragraphs”)). Nature poems, love poems, political poems, lyrical poems, narrative poems, dramatic poems, funny poems, serious poems, angry poems, sad poems, joyful poems. The poet seemed at ease with Chinese, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Indian, French, Italian, German, and English literatures. He also knew how to bale hay. He was witty and scholarly, but utterly allergic to bullshit and pretense. Who was this guy? When I came to “A Little Old Funky Homeric Blues for Herm,” and after much study realized what I was looking at—the 2,700-year-old Homeric hymn to Hermes, recast in jazz slang (“Knock off that hincty blowing, you Megarians, / I got a new beat, mellow and melic, like / warm, man. I sing of heisty Herm”)— my last screw came loose. Was such an exercise supremely nerdy? Sure. Was I nevertheless supremely jealous of the poet’s knowledge, and wholly won over by his humor? Absolutely.

The equal measures of anxiety and enjoyment I felt as I came to understand the depth of Carruth’s technical skill and vastness of his frame of reference ensured I would return to his Collected Shorter Poems again and again as I struggled to bring together my own first book of poems. But these years later, taking the book down from the shelf, it’s not so much the how or what that strikes me as the why. When I think about why these poems were written—what it was that hurt Carruth into poetry, to borrow Auden’s phrase—I realize that reading them, I never feel the author is writing to be admired, or to fulfill or defy expectations, or to dazzle or baffle or flatter or decree. Carruth never panders; not to himself, and not to us. Galway Kinnell’s blurb on the back of the book gets it right: “This is not a man who sits down to ‘write a poem’; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being.” And T. S. Eliot, describing his “Impersonal” theory of poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” makes the point even more clearly, in terms which seem to me to describe Carruth’s achievement perfectly:

“There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

It’s hard to learn how to write poems, and it’s hard to decide what to write them about. It’s hardest of all, though, to discover (or create) a good reason to write them at all. I don’t think I realized when I read Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems in 1992 that the most crucial lesson he had to offer me was the necessity of confronting that fearful task directly and continuously, with honesty and integrity. If I’ve begun to understand that lesson in the years since, it’s in no small part thanks to the present moment of the past which lives in that book’s pages.

– JULY, 2008

Endowed with remarkable wit and a prodigious memory, David Bromige was a paragon of poetic virtues. Not only was he a master of both traditional and innovative forms, but, as a teacher, he exhibited enormous erudition and generosity.

David’s output included dozens of books of his own poems, as well as broadsides and chapbooks, collaborations, fiction, essays, plays. He co-wrote songs with Barry Gifford. And he brought to his public readings a true gift for performance and improvisation. His honors included the Western States Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two awards from the Poetry Foundation.

I met David Bromige in 1985, when I landed at Sonoma State University for my fourth attempt at a college degree. David taught poetry writing, a course I had every hope to excel at, though I had nothing approaching either work ethic nor talent. But somewhere in my admittedly terrible fledgling poems—written on a manual typewriter so gunked-up one could scarcely distinguish an “e” from a “c”—David found a thread of promise, and he encouraged me to continue writing. In addition to the poets I already liked, he prodded me to read people I’d never heard of: Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Elizabeth Bishop.

Our classroom was in the theatre department, and it was furnished with ungodly dilapidated sofas, stained with various fluids of both the caffeinated and the human varieties. David hated the florescent lights, so each week he’d wheel in a luggage cart filled with assorted table lamps, which he’d methodically hook—with a network of extension cords— to far-flung wall sockets. In those days, one could poll the students as to whether they preferred a “smoking” or a “non-smoking” classroom. My classmates and I elected for “smoking.”

And so each week we’d sprawl on the sagging couches, reading poems reproduced in purple ink on a ditto machine, and David would sit cross-legged in the center of the room, sigh deeply, smile, and praise even the most sickly poems, though he often seemed to pass first through a period of deep physical pain before he’d bless us with that smile and praise.

Though the school hardly seemed to have the funds, David would always find enough money to bring Sir Stephen Spender, Allen Ginsberg, Cole Swensen. For a semester, we had Robert Grenier in residence; his quirky minimalist poems taped to the wall outside David’s office.

David was without affiliation, though he often got lumped in with the “Language” school of poetry. He didn’t mind: at least they were doing something about what he perceived as the watering down of language’s potency. David’s political acuity translated into a healthy distrust of the conventional ways of writing, and he often built his poems around the misheard or misunderstood. “You helped me in the past,” one of his poems reads, “go on, help me in the past again.”

I think I probably took 18 classes from David Bromige, including my undergraduate classes and my graduate courses. After completing my B. A., I hung around and did an M. A. in English. In 1993, as I was working on my thesis, the state of California—suffering from a budget crisis, as always—extended a “golden handshake” offer to faculty at the top of the salary scale. It was a handsome deal, and David was one of many who were drawn into early retirement. One of the requirements, though, was that the retiree would have to cease work immediately; not even finishing out the semester. This would have left me without my poetry advisor. David graciously offered to oversee the completion of my studies without pay.

Most of the courses I took from David Bromige were directed studies, under the odd heading of “Alternative Major.” I was pursuing an alternative education with this man, though I don’t know “alternative” to what. I hadn’t thrived in the workshop environment; it was far too public; too rife with odd kinds of scrutiny. But in the less-structured courses, where I would write and read under David’s tutelage, I found what Robert Duncan—David’s mentor—had called “that place of first permission.”

The last time we visited, he was as sharp and funny as I remembered, though he seemed to fade in and out of the conversation. He was convinced that there was a town just like the one he lived in just a few miles away, and I couldn’t tell if he was giving me a bit of his classic deadpan put-on or if he was under the influence. His wife, Cecilia, always by his side in those last months, slipped me a note. “Dementia,” it said. Some days good, some days not. This moment, in a fine restaurant with Cecilia, me, and some unremarkable boy who was kind enough to drive me to Sebastopol, David was his most charming and charismatic self. He was the teacher I had loved; my Virgil; my guide.

Filled with paradoxes and quiet inquiries into the cognitive domain of language, David Bromige’s poetry—an extension of his complex and original mind—resonates with me daily. Nervously dodging the shadowy spectre of my own mortality, I remember how vital David Bromige’s presence was. Ever quick to turn a serious moment into something both light and memorable. “Save time,” he once wrote. “Kill it.”

To shove this chair away from here,

to sit down in front of a train,

to climb a mountain with great care,

to shake my bag into the valley,

to feed a bee to my old spider,

to caress an old, old woman,

to sip a delicious bean soup,

to walk on tiptoes in the mud,

to place my hat on railroad tracks,

to stroll around the banks of a lake,

to sit all dressed up on the bottom,

[from "To Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die," translated by John Batki]