Essays

[Essays]

Aug 232020

“F**k You, Glory”
Memories of the Brighton Bar poetry night. I arrived with a rose and left with a “Fuck you, Glory.” Back in the old Thunderbird days, when we’d wangled a reading at the hole-in-the-wall on Main St. in Asbury Park, I would bring in a bale of roses for the poets, and a satchel of water-pistols for the audience. It seemed to me to be an unambiguous echo of how events usually unfolded. Purveyors of beauty were skewered, mocked and wetted. The audience eventually had the roses …
Andre Breton: Fun and Fascination
From the “Soiree” series. Short essays incited by the Soiree de Poesie Francaise held monthly at the TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak. Please cover your eyes for a moment. Feel your fingers over your eyelids, feel how more profoundly loud my voice has become…. What can one say about surrealism? It is a literary form innovated and defined by Andre Breton. You may already be familiar with the idea of nonsense randomly injected into poems, or …
Black Champagne Intro
Dear Reader: Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo? The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are. Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying. Questions, in this respect, are like …
Black Champagne Intro
Dear Reader: Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo? The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are. Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying. Questions, in this …
Catastrophes and Trophies
Preface to The Timid Leaper Catastrophes and Trophies Report from a Victor and Victim This collection is actually the combination and slight rearrangement of four separate volumes of verse; almost all of these poems were written in the calendar year 200I. It’s not much to show for a year of human life–that rich mystery we are twisted into by such a resolute hand. The main emphasis of this collection (as I hope will be quite clear) is Nature. Nature and Naturalism are not quite the …
Destinations Deferred
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Drink and drink;  drink deep, O traveler--
Tomorrow we must find this river again.
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The themes of this poem can be said to be paradise, pain, and persistence. The first line of the poem immediately creates the context and then throws it into question. How do we know we have arrived? In the title it is the river that is arriving. In the first line the question is about our arriving. There is some confusion between whether it is the river arriving or us who are arriving. What is the relationship between these two arrivals?
Greetings from Mt. Olympus Introduction
Like a father pruning the limbs of his children, I have looked over my creations with a lenient eye. The worst verse has been relegated to the back of the book and is fit only for prurient scholars’ noses. If you wish, this last section of my collected works may simply be lopped off with a kitchen knife. But then, alas, you would lose the redoubtable “triple index,” which includes not only the Titles and First Lines of each of the poems, but the memorable cannon-shot of their final, triumphant line as well. This fixes a deficiency I feel in every big volume of verse my thumb has troubled to fiffle across.
I Am an Anemone
A belated report from a seer of being Living with the sea and surf is every New Jerseyan’s native inheritance. There’s a scrim of winning, of life triumphant, that inheres to such wild and wetted borderlands between the ocean and the dunes that no temporary imposition of boardwalk, beach badge, or scootered police force can ever fully erase. Last year one of the big movies was The Martian, based on a sappy book and executed with boku budget and zero imagination. Their Martian was a man stranded …
Kissing the Poet’s Dust
Slim reflections on a pilgrimage to London and Stratford-Upon-Avon, circa 2006 “No bird so wild but has its quiet nest” — P. B. Shelley by Gregg Glory Freshly returned from London, and I feel clotted with the creme de la creme of the experiences, sights, and histories there. I look forward to giving fictitious, but accurate, reports of my sojourn very soon. But for now, I’ll simply leave you with a quote from the BBC News caster, who turned to her colleague during the …
Maintaining the Magic
There is a magic to poetry; it cannot be all puzzle boxes and puns. The big-browed scholar of Finnegan’s Wake must finally be frustrated. And, as important, the child in Joyce’s choices, and the kid in ourselves, must feel like we are genuinely playing. Billy’s roar behind the bushes must be the Snark’s flabbergasting cry. The bread and wine must be the blood and body. Let all the magic happen, or no poetry really is. Poetry explores the world without and the door …
On the Rap
Riverside reflections on writing “Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock” The Rappahannock River’s switchbacks cross a flattening Chesapeake basin to the sea. On the old map in front of me, the unfolding river moves with a flourish of quill-quickened calligraphy—a declaration of blackness fattening toward a monumental invisibility beyond Virginia’s rich shores…. The multifarious fantasies of river-watching reach out to jaded consciousness, fingering perhaps the …
Pig’s Ears
The gift of speech Sentiment is the key. If the reader can be thrown strongly enough in a certain direction, or into a certain mood, then that feeling can create a connective web or atmosphere that holds the whole poem together: the web transformed into a nexus of human-centered meanings. As with Wordsworth or Coleridge’s conversation poems, the reader is hip-checked by direct statements of strong feeling in the direction of the mood in which the poem will actually function as a poem and …
Principles in Agreement
PREAMBLE: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU The comet of my divine intent has come to earth. Only this undistorted wish is sacred. It is sacred in you too. “I am well; the world is ill.” Fuck-the-world and For-the-world are equivalent statements. I will never accept your self-imposed limitations. That kills the individual that I shall always be. It is an imposed distortion that must and will always fail. Tyrants from time immemorial have always gone about asserting irrelevantly the …
Reaching After Realness
I ask: how do I make my dented self beautiful with this old pencil? ~~Daniel J. Weeks, Self-Symphonies Our legs look broken when light bends them in the swimming pool. Once our heads are under, immersed in the experience of wetness, the illusion disappears. Our legs are restored to us in their wholeness, where they can be repurposed as impromptu fins to propel us elsewhere. Which of these sets of legs are our “real” legs? The broken set, the restored set, or the Aquaman set? …
Secrets of the Sonnet
Intro and Endnote to an afternoon of “Dueling Sonnets” conducted between Chris Bogart and Gregg G. Brown in the Late Spring of 2013. Intro This “duel-to-the-deaf,” cooked-up at Chris’ instigation, is a good moment to reflect on the combative nature of poetic friendship. There is the dare, the challenge, of two eagles sparking each other to higher cloud-cliffs, or the raucous oboe-music of two bullfrogs boisterously bellowing out their over-proud self-renown in the …
Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God Intro
Poetry is like a Dear John letter or your baby’s first word–more is being said than you can understand all at once. Thus it was on my early Spring vacation to a furiously, fragrantly blossoming California, and especially during my visit to famed Yosemite–I was beautifully confused. In Yosemite the strange experience of grandeur is evoked, perhaps for the first time, and this new territory takes some time to be mapped and civilized into the acknowledged borders of our being. In …
Slaves of Glory Essay
Chained to redemption by the individuality of each human consciousness SLAVES OF GLORY The very astonishing hour has come. The very astonishing hour indeed! Green Heinekins, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas --Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening. Hosannahs invade the empty windows, spurs of blacks, mysterious As the tender invitation of the body. Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips. Sobriety has entered us As mourners enter a white church. Enough of …
Sorrow in a Fallen Feather
Emotional suffering gives us access to the real world in a way that ideas, and even love, cannot attain We turn death and generation into a fable of sacrifice. Plants are buried, and are honored in their going; the Crop King is executed, and from his everlastingly renewed body the spring stalks arise to be culled again. His death is willingly embraced by him, or by his stand-in chosen from among the farmers–and this freely chosen death is overcome, in the Christian story, by God’s intervention. …
Stuff and Nonsense
Dark Poet, your pen scratches at the heart of life. ~~Antonin Artaud Nonsense is often the most sensible kind of sense. This is counterintuitive, but trust me for a moment as we proceed. This is no three-card monte. Nor is it like the wonderful magic of Emmett Kelley the clown sweeping his spotlights into a single circle, and then putting that circle in his pocket, patting his pocket and smiling like Einstein after he’d eureka’d light into a corner. Nonsense reveals all of us—our self, our …
Sumptuous Rudders
How philosophy dovetails with the swerves of verse ASCENT Commandeering Shelley's skiff among the Euganean Hills Awake, awake! For all the dear bay's glistening In uneven light still listening For whatever of utterance Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance Into willing water's dark, My sweet meaning the whole of my bark. Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail Let no hindrance, no halt, avail: For we are the sweet of the tree, Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three, Myself, my soul, and me. Nor …

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