No-bama (5)

I know they say that you shouldn't kick a man when he's down, but I've been kicking this guy since he was up, so it seems only fair. This guy is melting fast. The sad thing is that all his wounds are self-inflicted--which is what people really mean by "seasoned"; a more experienced politician running at this level would know better. The glad thing is that this is happening now; my biggest fear was that he'd coast through, get the nomination, and be seriously fucked in the fall campaign.

Let's start with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I mean--really? For a guy who knew he wanted to be president from about his second month in the womb, why didn't he run--fast, with his family in tow--the minute he had the slightest inkling of what his "spiritual advisor" thought? First sign of a rant--out the door. His polite distancing really wasn't enough. He said a couple of words then presto-chango shifted the focus to a discussion of race in America. Yeah, we probably need that conversation, but not in the middle of a presidential nomination campaign, not a bunch of bland platitudes, and not when the real subject is the hate-mongering sermons of your pastor.

Next, let's talk about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I mean--really? The gets a taste of national coverage, and anybody thinks he's just going to go away? He's here--and he'll be back even if Obama manages to shift the focus away from him for a few minutes. This is news. Holier-than-thou Barack with a seriously deranged "spiritual advisor." Even Britney and Lindsay take a second seat to this.

Ok, then there's the "cling to guns," etc. remarks. We can skim over the insult to middle Americans; that's been covered enough. When I first heard this, I thought, "This man went to Harvard. Don't they teach history there?" Two of the cornerstones of this country--before there was such a thing as the United States--were guns and god. Why would he think any of this has changed? Founding principles stick with us, and there's a damn good reason why the first and second amendments to the Constitution cover god and guns. I don't think this was a mistake; Obama was surrounded by his true constituency, and he spoke from the heart. I think about the South Park episode where Kyle's father gets a hybrid and immediately becomes so overcome with his own self-righteous that he moves the family to--you guessed it--San Francisco. I love the city, but it does have that liberal elitist reputation.

Finally, let's face it, the man looks tired. At one of campaign stops a man commented on how run-down he looked, and Obama replied that he'd been campaigning for president for 15 months. I mean--what the fuck?!? So has Hillary, and she doesn't does look like she's ready to drop in her tracks. If this is how this bozo stands up during a nominating campaign, it doesn't bode well for a full-blown contest with an organization that proved many times over that it hasn't met a single jot of sleaze it won't manipulate in order to win an election.

Hopefully voter in the few remaining primaries will vote sensibly and the super delegates will at long last do the right thing for the party--and the future of the country.

Reading poems

I'm not sure how this got started, but I notice that a lot of poets when they read deliver their lines with an upward lift at the end of the line.

deliver their LINES
with an upward LIFT
at the END
of the LINE.

It's a fairly unnatural method of reading or speaking and can often distract from the substance of a very good poem. I remember attending poetry readings when I was an undergrad, and no one ever read that way. It seems to have arisen with the ascent of the workshop culture wherein most of the students (now the instructors) are mostly familiar with the works of their contemporaries or the contemporaries of their teachers. I'm not saying I want to hear someone declaiming like Wallace Stevens or chanting like Pound or Yeats, but a good delivery that doesn't lose the prose sense of what's being said would be nice.

No-bama (4)

Ok, he gives another one of his "inspiring" speeches, this time on racial issues. To which I say, finally. Why didn't he give this speech as soon race became an issue? Say, during the South Carolina primary. Begin to deal with it when it first appears. That way it doesn't give off the stink of a political cover-up. During the speech he dismissed the idea that he chose this time to give the speech because of the problems with Rev. Wright. Sorry, guy--that's a no-sell. It would've just faded into the woodwork, he said. Nope. Wrong again. This one's got legs. He had to have known what this guy was saying from the pulpit. He married Obama and Michelle; he christened his children. "How could I have know?" doesn't cut it. This was a classic cya speech, cut and dried.

The real question is why this man, who has had political goals almost from the moment he dropped out of the womb, was stupid enough to stay in this particular church. Did he think no one would ever bother checking up? That he's still in the race is testament to how easily the press covers this guy. Imagine if it turned out that John McCain's pastor delivered Aryan Nation rant as part and parcel of his sermons. McCain could write-off the nomination no matter how many delegates he's banked.

Politics. That's the bottom line. This guy is looking to maintain his political positioning. Hope? At this point I think we all need to hope that there isn't another one this bad waiting in the wings.

Sing

Minister. O Lord, open thou our lips.
Answer. And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.
—The Book of Common Prayer


Sing, sings the titmouse.
Sing, sings the bullfrog.
Sing, sings the cricket.
Sing, sings the robin, its twilight note
piercing the air, the heart, moving
me to open my lips, not to the Lord above
but to the fallen shards of heaven
sprung to life, giving voice through all these
pied and dappled creatures for joy and praise
that life flows, that the trees flower, that all
life blossoms and burgeons, that we rise
each morning to watch the sun’s aureole
brighten the tips of the farthest trees, or rain
drip from the eaves, snow drop in its delicate,
intricate glory. Light, dark—the interplay
life’s Gloria that we, by speaking, by
singing, bring to our own, wholly undivided note.

Hand

O gracious Father, who openest thine
hand and fillest all things living with
plenteousness…
—The Book of Common Prayer


Extend your hand beyond the door, beyond
the warmth of furnace and glow of fireplace, out
where the night winds chap the flesh and make
cold spread your body’s length. Extend your hand
and let the snowflakes settle in the dark, in the slight
breeze that spirals the flakes in the shards of moonlight
flickering between clouds that gather and scatter,
gather again. Extend your hand and let the darkness
rest in your palm, the plentitude, let the slight
spray of starlight exaggerate the hills and furrows
lining your hand, the world in miniature, hills that
rise beyond the pond invisible in the night, beyond
those hills the river, then the hills beyond that, the trees
and all the fruit waiting in their limbs to urge
outward, to press themselves furiously into light.

Snow

It's about damn time. Five days ago the temperate was 60, maybe a couple of degrees warmer. Now snow. When I woke this morning, it was still untouched--the expanse of white blanketing the field behind the house down to the pond.

Of course, by the afternoon it had turned to rain, which turned the snow to slush pretty quickly, and they're predicting that, as the temperature drops later this afternoon, it will turn to sleet.

Still, for that brief time...

No-bama (3)

I suppose what amazes me most is the momentum that such a mediocre public figure has established. I watched all of the "victory" speeches following Super Tuesday, and I've got to say that, of the five candidates, Obama seemed the least animated, the least connected with his audience, the most vague. Obama made Romney seem a paragon of audience engagement. Most of the time Obama spoke in vague oratical terms with not terribly inspiring oratory while he assumed GQ poses and spoke over the heads of his supporters, as though addressing the great visionary vistas. Too bad he doesn't have a vision. (Note to Barack: "Change" is not a vision; it's what of us do with our clothes.)

Obama's running the greatest con job since W's first run at the presidency. His policy proposals are vague compared with Hillary's (and Edwards' makes them look like kindergarten efforts), and he makes little indication either of how he'll enact them or how he'll pay for them. He has very little traction in Congress, mostly because he's served less than two years in the Senate and has done little of any note. Perhaps his most notable act was failing to show up for the vote on the Iran resolution for which he criticizes Hillary's vote. Puh-lease.

More than a third of his votes in the Illinois Senate were "present." Gee. That's what many of my students can claim while I'm desperately trying to get them to participate in the most elementary fashion in my English composition classes. Present. That's just what we need for a president. On the other hand, I guess that puts him a half step ahead of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

I think we should aim a little higher.

The stuff left out

Whenever you compile a list of "top tens" (December 29, 2007), you realize that you left some very important things out. Sometimes the things you left out are so clearly important it's like being hit in the face with the flat side of a shovel.

I don't know what I'd leave off the lists I already posted, but James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss is certainly one of my favorite books--way up there. It's the best mystery I think anybody's ever written. If anyone's the true heir of Raymond Chandler, it's Crumley.

In terms of poetry, David Lee is one of the contemporary gems. Since I've limited myself to individual collections, I guess I'd have to list The Porcine Legacy, the first of his "pig" books, but Driving and Drinking is a close second. Driving and Drinking is a kind of rural take on Dante's Commedia, except it's also funny as hell. But The Porcine Legacy contains two absolute jewels, "Racehogs" and "For Jan, with Love."

Old poems

At a certain point in one’s life, one begins casting backward, like a fly fisherman casts a fly downstream. I guess at 55 I’ve about reached that point. Being a poet means, in one way or another, one’s always looking back. That’s where the tradition is, and the tradition—whether Western or, in my case, Chinese and Japanese, as well—provides answers to questions that I might waste a lot of time trying to figure out myself; the tradition prevents us from having constantly to reinvent the wheel. We also, periodically, look back at ourselves, measuring the distance we’ve come, noting changes we’d make in older poems if we had it do all over again. Of course, we do have it to do all over again, and that’s the reason I've gone and looked at poems from many to several years ago. The poems cover about twenty years, from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and represent early poems and poems that somehow never made it in collections.

This last may require a small explanation. For me, the process of taking poems I’ve written and turning them into a book involves looking as much for the unifying themes as judging which poems display the better craft and artistry. This means that perfectly good poems never find a home, except occasionally in journals, and lay about until I forget about them. Some of these poems never found their way into my first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, and others were composed in the years following that publication. In the almost twenty years that passed between that book and my fourth collection, The Precincts of Paradise, during which time I published one rather thin collection of poems that worked around a very particular set of themes and a volume that gathered together three longer sequences of poems, I assembled many manuscripts, studied them, tossed some poems out and shuffled others in, the whole time looking for that unifying thread. Of course, some of those poems fell out of sight—might as well have been off the planet. Since I’d written most on a computer, as software has changed, copies of the poems have become irretrievable, unless I chose to root through my file cabinets and find those old manuscripts to see what they held. Finally, something nudged me to do just that, and I found a few pleasant surprises.

The course of a career is matter of evolution, whether slow or accelerated, and I’ve usually shown a considerable change of style between collections. Looking back at these poems, I’ve found flaws—wordiness, awkward use of line, clunky rhythm—which begged for revision. In revising, it’s hard not to apply the lessons learned in the interim, so many of these poems take dramatically different form than they did originally, which means, I suppose, that even as I’ve cast back I’ve kept my footing steady on the river bottom. At least I hope so.

No-bama (2)

I still can't figure out what this guy is all about--either in terms of substance or voter appeal. As Bill Clinton said, he's a fairy. He spouts buckets of airy rhetoric with little real meat between the oratory. Edwards drives the bus, even though he's ranked third. I hope to hell, regardless of primaries, that he stays in because he keeps the others on track, particularly Hillary.

Now that everybody (except most of the Republican candidates) recognizes that our economy's in a melt-down and that something constructive has to be done, first Edwards and then Hillary stepped forward with genuine proposals for how to provide stimulus and, more importantly, aid during this time. As is often the case, even though Hillary takes longer to get her proposal out, she usually comes up with a more progressive policy than Edwards. (Maybe those votes to whom Edwards appeals but who actually vote for Hillary are onto something.) Typically, also, Obama waits till the eleventh hour and produces...a dud. As Paul Krugman noted in today's New York Times, "on Sunday Mr. Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right."

This has been the case with every policy proposal he's put forward. His proposals are, from a genuinely progressive perspective, again in Krugman's word, "disreputable."

If you can't manage to hop on the Hillary bus, stick with Edwards to allow him the chance to keep prodding the others in something resembling the right direction, but avoid Obama. If this is progressive, then what's Huckabee or McCain?

Influence

According to the OED, it derives from a term that means "to flow in," most literally as water but also as in the action of the stars--an astrological sense. So, when we speak of influences," we're talking about things that have flowed into us. Anyone who's ever seen where streams or rivers come together knows how difficult it can be to trace the workings of the separate currents as they become confused--brought together. Influence can be confusing. Chemists could move downstream from where the waters mingled and analyze particulates from one tributary as opposed to another, but such analysis is difficult in terms of human life, whether we're speaking artistically or personally.

Setting aside the stars as nothing but magical thinking, influence involves something acting on us, whether physically or emotionally or psychologically. How to trace it?

When I was fourteen or fifteen, for reasons I can't remember I became interested in poetry. I bought one of the usual paperback anthologies of modern American poetry and read through, probably not understanding a lot of what I read. The first volumes of poetry by individual authors that I bought were Ezra Pound's Selected Poems and Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat and a Season in Hell. (Both were New Directions books for whatever that's worth.) I'm not sure what I made of the Rimbaud, or even most of the Pound, but a couple of the poems by Pound really struck me. Content? Verbal music? I'll probably never know. But these poems do stand at the doorway of my love for poetry.

Thinking about Pound, I remembered seeing his grave when I visited Venice and wrote this:

At the Grave of Ezra Pound

It’s nothing special. A granite marker
set in the manicured grass, a few
flowers. The waterbus was crowded—
tourists, mostly, though few spoke
English. February wind blew
the chilly spume like spikes, a chill
that lasted under lowering skies
like the dark swirls in the glass
blown on Murano. I’d like to say
that thoughts of the great Modernist
revolution pummeled across my mind.
I’d like to say that the complex
torment of politics and art replayed
itself while I knelt to contemplate
the weathered letters, “EZRA POVND,”
but how long can you look at a chunk
of stone embedded in the earth?

For what it's worth, I started trying to read Ulysses before I began to read Hemingway and was hot for Hemingway before I started reading the Beats--in high school. Were these all influences? They certainly caught me in their currents at a fairly early age.

What's In the News

Jack brought the paper into the bar, maybe
the morning edition he hadn’t had the chance
to read since breakfast was earlier than the paperboy
slapped the rolled-up thing against the storm door
Jack had finally changed a week before when
the thermometer finally began to read somewhere
south of forty, and he was usually two blocks away
heading toward work when he caught sight of the kid
dawdling up the sidewalk, lugging the sack, looking
himself like a sad-sack—I mean, didn’t he own a bike?
what kind of paperboy doesn’t ride a bike? if he rode
a bike maybe Jack could read the damned depressing
stuff that passed for news while he sopped up the egg
yolk with his whole wheat toast—and still at least
twenty minutes from Jack’s door. So, after dinner, he
comes into the bar, orders a draft and rattles the paper
so everyone in the place can hear him do it, and
everyone in the place glances at him, shakes his head,
and goes back to staring at the bubbles rising in his beer,
and Jack reads something, and, “For fuck’s sake,” he says,
“if that don’t beat all,” he says, and Kevin, sitting two
stools down can’t help but rise to the bait, and says, “What’s
that?” You never say “what’s that” to nobody sitting in
a bar unless you want to open some can of worms you
might not be able, not for another hour or two, be able
to shut, but there it was, sitting right there on the bar
solid as their two mugs and Kevin’s empty shot glass.
“Immigration,” Jack says, “all this holy horseshit they
all have to say about immigration.” “Who’s that,” Kevin
asks, already thinking he’s in deeper than he wanted,
and didn’t he know better than to start talking to some
guy reading a paper? Sometimes you just get what you
deserve. “All these,” and Jack makes a face like he’s eaten
a wad of snot, “politicians.” “Politicians,” Kevin says,
looking for a way to slam the lid down tight, “what the hell
do you want, politicians.” Not a question—a question
opens the door to an answer, and an answer’s the last
thing Kevin wants. He shrugs his shoulders and turns
back away from the slight turn he’d made toward Jack
and goes back to watching the bubbles rising in his beer.
Jack’s so busy being angry with the paper, he doesn’t
notice that Kevin’s tried to shut him out, and he says,
“Yeah, but they keep yappity-yapping on about this shit—
immigration. For Chrissake. Ain’t none of them Red
Indians, all their families come here from someplace else,
just like mine and, from the look of you, yours. Most of
them, probably can’t even count all the places their families
come from on both hands. Immigrants. Taking all
our jobs? Build a goddamn fence?” Jack takes a sip of beer—
more like a slurp—and shakes his head, looks up from
the paper and glances toward Kevin, his eyes a little slit,
and he asks, “How hard d’you work to get your job?”
“What,” Kevin says. “I say, what d’you do for a living?”
“Work at the paper mill,” Kevin says. “Hard work,”
Jack asks. “Hard enough,” Kevin says, not certain where
this is heading but not liking it one bit. “I mean,” Jack says,
“you need to know a lot to do your job?” “The fuck you
asking,” Kevin says, swiveling his stool back around
toward Jack. Jack raises his hands. “Just asking,” he says,
“don’t mean no offense.” “Well,” Kevin says, not sure
why he’s still talking when what he wants to do is loose
a few of this guy’s teeth, “it’s mostly computerized now,
got to make sure everything’s working on the level.” “So,
yeah,” Jack says, “you need to know a lot to do your job.”
“Yeah,” Kevin says, “you put it that way.” “Then why,”
Jack says, “would you be afraid some immigrant’s gonna
take your job away?” “I never said I was afraid of that,” Kevin
says. “But you are, aren’t you?” “I don’t think they got no
business coming over here, taking jobs away from Americans,
even if it ain’t my job they’re after.” Jack nods and takes
another pull off his beer. “How hard you work to get
to your job,” he asks, “you answer some add in a newspaper,
go down to the plant and sit through your interview, drive
there, drive home, got your heater running, maybe it’s
summer, got the air cranking it out?” “Yeah,” Kevin
says, “that’s about how it started, then I, you know,
worked my way up.” “But to start,” Jack insists, “you
drove over, did a sit-down interview, drove home, waited
for the phone to ring.” “Yeah,” Kevin says, “ain’t that
the way most people get their jobs?” “These immigrants,”
Jack says, “they wander in the desert for days, maybe
a week, got sandals on their feet made from worn-out
tires, don’t got nothing to drink, somebody catches them,
takes them back where they came from, they do it all
over again.” Jack drains the glass and taps it on the bar
for another. “So,” Kevin says, “what’s your point?”
“Somebody,” Jack says, sipping the foam off the fresh
mug, “goes to that fucking much trouble to get a job—
week in the sun, tires on their feet—don’t you think that
beats all hell out of how hard most of us worked to get
our goddamn jobs? And they get here, what, they
make wages most of us wouldn’t even spit on, even if
we weren’t within a hundred miles of getting a job.”
Kevin sees that Jack has that kind of look on his
face while he takes another pull on the beer and snaps
the paper for emphasis, and then he sets the mug
back on the bar and says, “Immigrants. Immigrants.
More Americans had that kind of gumption, the whole
damn country wouldn’t be circling the damn toilet.”

No-bama

A friend of a friend writes that she'd vote for a goat in the next presidential election, as long as it bleated Democratic. Yeah, I'll go with the goat--though I'd prefer it if its name wasn't Obama. Man, that guy is scary. He runs on the slogan of "change," he's part of the system he hypocritcally condemns.

He says he won't take money from lobbyists; no, but he'll take money from lobbyists' wives, and he'll take full advantage of lobbyists' expertise and networks. "Change" is just another word for a scam, to wildly paraphrase Kris Kristofferson. The guy's as plugged into K Street as anybody on Capitol Hill, with the disadvantage of lacking any meaningful experience. Haven't Americans had enough of inexperienced presidents? With his lack of experience, who do they think he's going to sign-on as his advisors, cabinet secretaries, vice-president? Sheesh.

So, yeah, I'll go with the goat.

Government sludge

For a period of time, between when her divorce was finalized and her ex-husband no longer provided insurance for her and when we were married and my insurance would, my wife needed Medicare. She's disabled, and there was no question that she qualified for various assistance programs, including Medicare, but, once we were married, my insurance covered her for an extra deduction from my salary. Hey, I'm lucky to have health care benefits as part of my employment package, so I figure that I should take full advantage. It's a good enough program, and certainly meets our health care needs.

Ok, so, after we're married, my wife calls the Social Security Administration and lets them know about the change in her status, which results in a change in her disability allowance, and she also informs them that she has other insurance and no longer wishes to receive Medicare. End of story, right?

Wrong.

The first true hint that something's wrong is when my insurance refuses to pay medical bills because she's on Medicare. We thought we'd taken care of that. Apparently once the government starts giving you money, it's tough to get them to stop. So she makes another call and requests to be unenrolled from Medicare. End of story?

Not hardly.

We get a statement showing that, in fact, Medicare has been being billed for various medical expenses. Now, we've told various hospitals and physicians' offices that she doesn't have Medicare, that, if she's listed as having Medicare, they should eliminate that from their files. Presumably, they do. But the real question is how the hell Medicare continues her coverage--how it actually finds her--since she changed her name when we were married and changed her name or used her new name at every medical center she's been going to for the past year and half. Amazing detective work. Maybe W. should have assigned the Social Security Administration to look for the WMDs. It could have definitively told him they weren't there, and, by gum, they should know.

So now my wife spends an hour on the phone, listening to muzak for some of the time, being transferred to another office and listening to more muzak, only to be told that she needs to complete a form and get a letter stating that she, in fact, has other insurance. I mean, on the one hand it's nice to know that they care, but, on the other, isn't the government getting just a little bit too intrusive? Seriously, if I want to fall off the grid and live in utter poverty without medical care, sleeping on the grating, shouldn't I damn well be able?

End of screed.

Resolution

Who in hell thought up this peculiar
practice? Like somehow the beginning
of a new year is some kind of meaningful
milepost, like those markers they mete out
at precisely demarcated intervals along
the interstate, when all it really is
is a vagary dependent upon an artificial
measure of the span of time required
to circle the sun, approximately, which
we commemorate with hang-overs
and parades and football games. Nothing
a Bloody Mary and few aspirin can’t
cure. Drink lots of water. That said, I
can make a few resolutions—after the past
seven years, I swear to Christ and anything
else I hold even mildly sacred, I won’t—
and I mean not never—vote for a Republican
for president. May someone shoot me
right between the eyes if I even think about
breaking that one. I resolve to get angry
less and drink beer at least as often. I heartily
resolve never to make another resolution
unless somebody, somewhere, resolves
to pay me a large sum of money to lie.