How I Came In

I am writing this poem on my last night in Korea.

I started this project simply as a way to force myself to grow my portfolio, so that I could submit stuff for publication. But it's kind of turned into its own thing, and now I'm not so sure if I will try to get them published in a traditional print journal. I primarily write for my own satisfaction, and this blog has provided me that just as well as McSweeney's did, back when they published one of my poems. In addition to this sense of accomplishment, this blog has also provided an excellent outlet for me to deal with some of the impressions and observations about Korea that I've had over the past six and a half months. In a very real sense, this blog has made me an active agent on my surroundings, rather than a passive receiver. I like that.

It shouldn't be too hard to connect the dots between the above paragraph and the following poem. I've been thinking about agency, and presence, and arriving versus becoming, and how art (or at least creation, if that's actually a different thing) and an active imagination are necessary (necessary!) for being a part of a place.

But I'm giving too much away. Onward!

The goal was to write one poem a day at least until my last day in Korea. So, I'll probably take a little while off, before starting up again. I have a few ideas in the works that would change this site semi-drastically, but it might be a while before those get implemented. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the occasional poem or whatever. Thanks for reading.

How I Came In

I wasn't here until

I wasn't really

I was stringing threads

from rooftop to rooftop

from my eyes to mountains

pushing needles into rocks

making blue lanterns out of men

and lighting the streets with them.

Until I stacked squid on top of squid

smashing them onto a sharp stick

and dipped my feet in orange

and broke open the plastic safe

that I found in my closet;

not until that time

I set grapes out on the lawn

and had my yachting friends over

and then threw myself into the ocean

and died.

I like to think that this place is pinker,

since I've been here,

and now there are guitar-men who follow you

everywhere you walk,

only playing the thickest strings, the top three,

something quiet but upbeat,

while vegetables grow on the sides of the streets,

between buildings,

and it's always warm enough outside

for lemonade.

Book Review

I brought this book with me to Korea, and I read it, and it was okay, or whatever, but it read like it was written for discussion in introductory literature courses...in high school. It's a novel about a group of Africans, and there's much bally-hoo over the interdependency of the various individuals in the society, and so on and so on, and it didn't feel quite novel-like to me. I got the sense that it was intended for academia from the get-go.

At any rate, perhaps I'm wrong, and if you've had a lovely experience with the book, well, then, bully for you. But, just in case my thesis is correct, I do not wish to disappoint. So. 


Book Review

The Tiv society in West Africa,
as can be said of African cultures in general,
faced the realities of plentiful but stubborn soil
and a shortage of people to work it.
To ensure their own survival, peoples
developed a structure of mutual responsibilities
between children, parents, siblings, spouses,
clans, age-mates, members of homesteads,
and so on.
                     Elenore Bowen's Return to Laughter
submerges the reader into Tiv culture,
palpably demonstrating the complexities
of such a societal structure.
                                                   The adulterous
actions of Ticha, one of Chief Kako's younger,
"secondary" wives, and the response of the
community are the organic results of
conflicting social obligations
and the raw desire to preserve and produce
the land's most precious commodity--
people.

Old Lizard Hands

Do not confuse the speaker of the poem with the author.


Old Lizard Hands

When I was eight
I was standing on a table
and it flipped over
and I fell right on top of it
and bruised my diaphragm,
and I really couldn't breathe.
I flopped around on the ground,
trying to suck in,
whipping my tail and bulging my eyes.
I imagined an ambulance
driving up right then,
and then what it would be like
to die on a gurney.
I didn't know it was called a gurney,
but that's what I thought of
as I lay there suffocating.
That's when I stopped believing in God.

Then this old lady pins me down
and starts yelling at these other kids
to get back, and then she just
looks me in the eyes and I swear
she looked like a fish. A big,
scared fish with jowls, and me
just laying there opening my mouth
and feeling a big watermelon
slimmering up my throat.
The old fish finally gets the idea
to blow in my open mouth
and she pursed her lips
and blew cold, refreshing water
right through my gills. I never
tasted water that felt as good as air.

I probably wouldn't have cared if she
had put her flabby lips right on mine,
so long as she kept breathing that water.
I lay there for a while with my eyes closed.
When I opened them she was still there,
so I got up and left. I didn't say thank you
or anything. But I was young, then.
But not as young as I was before then.

I think she might have been my grandmother.
I wonder if she knows her daughter is dead.

Bruyéres

My degree is in English, supported mostly by poetry classes, but for the first year of university, I thought that I was going to double with music theory. My primary instrument was piano, and despite my heavy workload as an accompanist (which was not my choice, but rather a requirement of the major, and ultimately the reason I gave up on the whole business), my professors had me playing a whole lot of solo pieces, as well.

I've been sifting through some of my old sheet music, and I found Debussy's Études, which I hadn't thought I'd ever played. Thumbing through it, however, I found one annotated and highlighted throughout with green pencil, and I was shocked to recognize the handwriting as my own. Most likely, Dr. Morgan had slipped this into my frenetic Winter Trimester schedule, during most of which I was conscious in only a loose sense of the term, and had therefore learned and performed it without ever engaging my immediate faculties. It's not, after all, terribly difficult. At any rate, I looked it up on YouTube, and sure enough, I sort of remember playing it.

The piece is named Bruyéres, and is perhaps one of Debussy's most experimental (at least from his études). I suggest you listen to it before reading further.

 
Bruyéres

The linear theme and the horizontal one
alternate without being prepared,
a novel harmonic structure
with little connection
to the title of the piece: "Heather."

But let's not
hold the French
to too high
a standard.
It's not

a sweeping drama of divergent emotion
bromidic in a pretentiously intelligent way.
When the man wrote in all twenty-four keys
he skipped five of them, and why not?
It is simply an appreciation of musical

creation
and re-creation,
and I guess it needed a name.

Ensconcing

So, this is a little bit more personal than the kinds of things I usually write, which is probably why I was so uncomfortable writing it. Like everyone else, there's a lot of black jello inside my brain that I'm always eating at, which in my case is mostly guilt (for a number of things), and I guess we all realize that, as a species, we're condemned to suck the stuff down for the rest of time, so we've come up with ways to cope with that fact. Personally, I tend towards distraction.

At any rate, now that I'm getting more and more serious about this writing thing (though you may not know it from the quality of the poems recently, meh), I don't want to keep myself so removed from what I write. Imagination, as wonderful as it is, isn't enough on its own to really prick your finger, not the way that real happiness and real pain do. Or so I think today.

So, perhaps the difference in the final product won't be as noticeable to outsiders, but I haven't agonized over a poem like I did over this one in quite some time. Which is a good feeling.

Ensconcing

I'm just a kid,

or so I see it, 

and I should be enjoying all this

free porn,

and not just pictures like

magazines, but video,

with sound! something our dads would've killed

to get for a discreet ten bucks—

a lot for back then—

and here I am with more women 

orgasming

than I could watch in my entire life, even if I tried,

and it kills me.

Not to say I don't indulge. Everyone does,

in their own way,

and I certainly have my fair share of pulls

at that bottle.

And if you'd like, I can tell you

about a million reasons

why my depravity isn't quite as bad as the next guy's,

which at least makes

me

feel better, but probably not you,

so, well, fuck.

Dear porn:

I love you. Without you,

I cannot feel as small and as stupid

as I deserve to feel.

What would I have the nerve to

think

about myself,

if you ever left me? How well would I deceive myself,

if you abandoned me?

I shudder to think.

Thank you.

The English Language, Second Edition

My friend Luke Patterson and I took a train to Donghae, a beach town on the northeast coast of Korea, where we had planned to spend a day playing frisbee in the sun, eating dried squid and getting salt water in our eyes. Unfortunately, when we got there it was raining and muggy and there were great sea lizards scrambling onto the shore eating people, so we wound up walking around in Donghae's copious Russian district instead (the largest population of Russians in Korea, which really isn't much of a claim to fame, but it's better than being eaten by a great sea lizard).

Anyway, this poem has nothing to do with all of that. While we were on the train, we heard some Korean kid a few rows in front of us saying "a, b, c, d, e ... ."  He never really got past 'g,' though, which we thought was curious, so we managed to find a way to spy on him (looking through the reflection in the window), and as it turns out, he was playing some kind of game with his mom. I'm not sure how it worked, but he would say a letter and she would put her hands out flat, or raise two fingers up next to her face, or some other unintelligible sign. Apparently somebody was winning before 'g,' and that's why it would stop.

I have no idea, because this poem is not about that, either. Luke and I got to talking about the alphabet, and how arbitrary it is. Why, we wondered, do the letters proceed in the way that they do? I don't know the Korean alphabet's order, but I can read Korean as well as anybody else. Obviously, it doesn't matter.

But if it did, what would it look like? I submit it would look something like my new-and-improved alphabet. A few notes on pronunciation: the vowels and liquid vowels are all pronounced the way they were in the previous, lesser alphabet. Most of the consonants are the same, except for 'w' (now simply pronounced, wuh). Also, I have added three new letters: 'ch,' 'th,' and 'sh,' all of which should be pronounced with the long e sound (chee, thee, shee).

This poem is best read out loud, and very rapidly.

The English Language, Second Edition

r

l

a

i

o

u

w

e

y

h

j

ch

g

t

th

d

k

q

x

c

s

z

sh

f

v

p

b

m

n

Instrumental

Instrumental

The next project is flat, endless soil

with some thin concrete on top,

but only in some places. Black squares

that make up the thickness of this world,

plastered with paper-white, crinkly concrete.

Just a sugary glaze, hardened around

deep black cake. Or something.

I'm afraid if I step on it, it'll break.

Mister Nate Shaw, 1932

In addition to the poetry that I always seem to be reading, I've also been making my way through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Although I would consider myself a Rothbardian libertarian, I am appreciating this socialist history because of the life it gives to the poor and oppressed. It focuses on many, many specific stories of the obscure, common people, and how political and social changes affected not just their lifestyles, but their emotions and opinions, and what those emotions and opinions motivated them to actually do. Uprisings, strikes, violence—and not the boilerplate, famous stories I already knew, but more challenging, complicated stories, which are much less flattering to the establishment. 

I got the idea for the following poem from the story of Nate Shaw, on page 398 of the paperback version.


Mister Nate Shaw, 1932

Mister Nate Shaw, I'm goin to take 

all old Virgil Jones got this mornin, I said,

and he begged me, he begged, like

You'll dispossess him of bein able to feed his family,

or some such, and he told me he wouldn't

allow it. But I got a child, too, and a man above

who give me money for feedin him,

so I gone for Hosea Hudson and Jeremey Brecher,

my deputies sometimes, and I come back

and there was Mister Nate Shaw, standing there

waiting, for us. I went out to talk to him and

Jeremy and Hosea leaned up on the car while

we talked, and Nate started get worked up like,

his bald head gettin redder and

his beard moving with his jaw real fast,

and I guess I was pretty worked up too, so Jeremey

I don't see as to how he coulda thought it, but

Jeremey thought Nate was getting too uppity,

standin there defending that nigger man's property,

nothin in it for himself, and Jeremey

pulled out his rifle and shot Mister Nate Shaw,

right in the left arm. I don't think 

Jeremey'd ever shot nobody before, is why,

so Mister Nate Shaw ripped out his gun

from his pants and shot at Jeremey, but missed,

and I felt it was my duty—well, I felt it was wrong,

but I knew it was my duty—to arrest him.

He served twelve years in an Alabama prison.

Jeremey, though, because of the man above, still

comes along sometimes with other fellas

for when I need 'em for doin something.

I wish I never needed to do nothin, though.

pastille by cantilever

I'm reading Notes from the Air by John Ashbery, which is the author's selections of his best work since the mid-eighties. This morning, I learned two new words from it: pastille and cantilever. The following poem started as just a kind of exercise, something that would make me remember the definitions, but I think it's turned out much better than that.

pastille by cantilever

and then Time came along with a steel beam

and swung it around into the side of my face, blood splashing 
        everywhere

and Physics caught the teeth dropping out of my mouth,

holding them tight in his fist and laughing, looking down at

Love and Ego, who were pulling the hairs out of my legs,

but then I saw Everybody I Ever Knew dozens of yards away,

he was standing on a dock or something, I couldn't tell, there was
        water nearby I think
anyway he was wearing glasses and a scarf and

his bright orange hair stuck out in fluffs all around a hat.

come over here and taste the strawberries I think he was saying

but my skull kept vibrating against the steel beam

so a few hours later I found myself sprawled on the wooden planks

where I had been standing but from this position I could feel a latch

to a trapdoor under my belly, and Time and the rest

had gotten bored or tired and had left, so I crawled through

and found Nothing on the other side,

who was looking as bad as I probably did. so I took her by the hand

and we started out in one direction, a straight line,

nothing holding us together but our common origin and our love. 

Smoke Noyade

Smoke Noyade

Brown worm on white concrete, or natterjack

deluged beyond recovery. Helpless waldgraves

stand with regal crown paper tubes, waxed,

crunchy. Dead fat slugs from French Guiana,

their mollusc relatives lobbying for a new gabelle.

All around this play comfortable men

with extra fat on their bellies.