1 —
AN APP TO UPSET THE DOT.COMS APPLE CART
What are these odd little oblongs of paper
Ruffling to the touch, colored like
Ancient sepia prints of places, pursuits and personages?
Commemorative of exactly just what
When the supposed purpose of the portraiture
Is a medium of exchange
One leaf for a bar of soap
Many more for your rent, suit and insurance.
Endlessly, they prance, like
Plaster horses on a merry-go-round,
Circling and circling
But never returning to you
Notes, nota bene, not going nowhere, however.
The circus no longer ends in a vault.
How quaint that was, that cage for a restless beast.
Until the bars were too wide to confine it.
Looking at them myself, I beg them to stay put
In my wallet, purse or, in case of danger, socks
But how, when the grocer draws them like a magnet
The landlord, the draper the same
And the taxman siphons out the rest
The little that´s left.
They, who take note
And their kin in the markets
Of arms, real estate, stocks and commodities
Deny, me, the poet, the right to be irresponsible,
To do other tricks with paper
Like branding words on it with a hot iron pen
Or stabbing loose thoughts
Then thrown in the garbage can.
You can use it to wipe your nose or other orifices
Eat it with candy
Kindle a fire
Fly it as kite.
It should be a medium like any other
For outrage or humor or sense.
Except when it is first tamed,
Then released from its cage
To run riot rampant over us
Of the skint ninety-nine per cent.
Das Kapital
Strikes the righter note
Than money, bread or pelf
In the tongue of Deutsch,
it is more foreboding and omnipotent.
Hard like a rock
Yet fluid at the same time.
Instead of a predator,
It becomes a mechanism
Fulfilling its functions no doubt
It pours liquidity into already deep pools
And solidifies it into bullions,
Bull markets, magnums and yachts.
As a purpose, on the other hand,
It insults, confounds and unmans
Lacking a factory to erect
Or an app to upset
The dot.coms applecart
My only aim is to nourish myself
And placate my dependents and muse
Which, setting aside the starving millions
(Name one, while hungry, you drool)
Is merely a modest ambition,
A conceit inscribed on a spool.
2 –
A VARIANT OF A PREVIOUS MAMBE DREAM VERSE
(SEE MY POST OF DECEMBER 21, 2021)
Opening onto the unfamiliar
Like pipes in a rack on a desk
Pick, ponder, puff,
Pause
And then exhale curdled smoke.
Dream dust
To ignite, fight and choke.
To fly from what traps him,
The banality of it all,
He revolts,
Summoning his will
From the cave where it lurks.
Because it is all of a piece, isn´t it
Nerves, fibers and appetites,
Flotsam on the tide of yesteryears,
A frivolous video of an ape mouthing verse.
Who invents this fluff?
Who soils the ground with sandalwood?
Where, in the this complicated superposition of strata
Does the distinction between bedrock and pancake
Unfold?
An eye in an “I” with eyes
that overturn an ongoing ad infinitum
Of anxieties
Beyond savoir and parapsychology
Or other mythologies,
Blind, daft and dumb.
The set of mind
Eerie and amusing
Like a chambered nautilus
Eroded by worms,
Into tangible, sticky boiled plums
Edible vomitives
From a pharmacopeia of puns.
Perhaps it´s the “what for” which counts
This defiance of the conservation of energy
Shattered by dread,
Distilled by confusion.
The mechanism which allows gravity
To penetrate upside down
And plunge you, layer by layer,
To the frenzied lays of the depths.
A music of strange chords
Silk, reed and brass
Which lifts you, with bends,
To the salt-smelling air
of the wild water weeds of wakefulness.
[APOLOGIA.
As a former teacher of English to foreigners and the speaker of a second language which, while not mastered, is no longer so foreign to me, I would like to share my thoughts on the parallels between the acquisition of a foreign language and a certain skill at poetry, respectively.
Those who learn a second (or third or more) foreign language can be divided into the following categories. The first, and the rarest, are the polyglots, who imbibe a foreign language just as easily as a baby imbibes his mother´s tongue along with her milk. In Ireland, I once knew a guy, a translator of English books into his native Dutch with a command of French and German as well, who, on a visit of barely five weeks to his girlfriend to Hungary, picked up her fiendish language as well. “French without tears” with an enviable vengeance.
Then there are those who have a similar facility but use a more academic and bookish approach, like a Colombian anthropologist friend of mine, who, already fluent in one of its indigenous languages, quickly learned Portuguese from a manual on its grammar.
The largest category by far are ordinary people like you and me, who have to study the thing, usually for years, with classroom-type drills and exercises (written and oral) which combine grammar, vocabulary and the expression of thoughts or ideas.
In a category apart, which may include even more persons, are those who, willingly or not, benefit from a total immersion in (and forced acquisition of) a foreign language as immigrants, tourists or travelers.
That, more or less, is the one into which I fit. Ungifted with an “ear”, sensitive to the related realm of music but not good at making it, I did, when young, study German at college and later a little French in night classes, but never even got the point of speaking the basics of each, since grammar books defeated and exercises bored me. It was only when I arrived in Colombia, clueless in Spanish, that I felt the live current of a language, which, apart from the necessity of making myself understood, was the stimulus I needed. And here I am still, forty odd years on, fluent in speech and adequate at writing when I have to, but cursed by what others tell me is an atrocious gringo accent.
I grant the atrocious, but argue back that it isn´t gringo, based on a call from a Colombian advertising agency to do a radio spot (in Spanish) in the persona of Bill Clinton, instantly rejected because they told me I didn´t sound like an American. It was probably due to my snobbish acquisition of a phony British accent when I lived in England, which has since degenerated into something between Brit, Aussie and my original Bronx: one reason why, when I am with bilingual friends I prefer to speak Spanish, while they naturally want to polish their English.
For me at least, immersion is an apt metaphor. Whenever I visit Brazil, I do no prep at all but as soon I land there, the linguistic shock is like a plunge into ice-cold water: first, it numbs, then it awakens and although I have never got past a rudimentary Portunhol (and forget it when I come home), I am able to defend myself when it comes to ordering a meal, finding the right bus to ride on and, in congenial company, expressing my thoughts to a degree. When I am met by incomprehension, on the other hand, I tend to freeze and become tongue-tied. As those in the same boat will agree, the psychological/emotional component is a crucial factor in determining fluency or … stumbling.
Now, leaving the anecdotal aside, I move on the real point of this little essay, which are my recent efforts at poetry, a genre I pursued when young, abandoned for many decades and unexpectedly returned to a year or so ago, mainly due, I believe, to having been sequestered by the pandemic, which in my case, as in that of many others, was a kind of forced spiritual retreat which unearthed some hitherto buried what they call inner resources. Having (though voluntarily) to churn out a weekly post for Substack also helped: few as they are, my readers are the equivalent of the Brazilians I had to speak to, a live current as opposed to the dead weight of textbooks and courses.
Combustion or delusion, it has happened spontaneously. I don´t know where my verse comes from, much less when or what for, or whether it is original or derivative, euphonious or grating on the ear or even means anything to anyone beyond myself (and that´s sometimes doubtful too).
Nor can I claim to be a poetry-lover, the kind who, after reading and better, reciting poems for a long time, absorbs something of the knack for it from his favorite poets. Insofar as I read the masters at all, I, without method or patience, merely browse, scan or dip into and leave the rest to an assimilative intuition and bluff,
There nevertheless came a time when I thought that if I am going to do this stuff, I might as well do it, not necessarily well, but with a little discipline, that is, a study of such mechanics as meter, assonance, the feet in the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest and so forth. Or to put another way, however empirical your knowledge of a foreign language may be, you still have to show a due respect for its grammar. So one fine day, I went to an English-language library in Bogotá, browsed its poetry section and did indeed find some manuals on the above technicalities, but the same instinctive aversion to following the rules of a foreign language, made me tuck them back into the shelves. Instead, I chose a non-specialist lit. crit. study of modern (post-War) poetry in English (American, British and Irish poets), which also spoke about their lives and cultural context.
Put crudely, the idea was to have a look at what the competition was doing, but, remember, writers are competitive by nature and poets among the worst. Larkin, for example, badmouthed almost all of his colleagues. On the positive side (Shakespeare included), one poet is, by tradition, entitled to borrow from and build on another or others, ancient or contemporary. The critic in question was concise, incisive and readable, citing short poems or passages by his subjects to make this or that point.
My response was ambivalent. On the one hand, it was the feeling that I could do it just as well or better than those gents (or ladies like Plath). On the other, the critic awakened me to the hard truth that writing a decent poem is a much more complex and arduous business than I had imagined. The author wasn´t the kind who says that every poet of a certain renown is a genius. For example, he wasn´t that impressed by some of the now acknowledged masters, like Larkin, while praising others who didn´t particularly please me. But, like any decent critic, he was rigorous, skilfully exposing the inner workings of the poem, stripped to the guts, as it were, strengths and weaknesses alike, and thus justified his assessment. That is to say, judging the merits of a poem (or literature in general) may be subjective, but, when done well, it necessarily rests on objective standards and his were convincing.
The book first impressed, then depressed me. If I was infinitely less known or acclaimed than the others, I certainly found echoes of their work in mine, which either meant that I was just as good or merely a pasticheur. On a deeper level, I may have accidentally mastered some of their tricks, but when it came to the matter of substance, the analytics of the critiques made my weaknesses uncomfortably clear. In short, the more I read about the poetry of others, the less capable I felt of writing my own. Yet I was equally unable to slam the book shut and to say, to hell with it, better to be spontaneous and unlettered than stymied by all these ifs and buts.
This has to do with our tendency to divide poets into binary categories: the spontaneous versus the reflective, the lyrical versus the down to earth, the august versus the colloquial. For he with a slapdash method like my own, it is tempting to range yourself with the inspired (and sometimes incoherent) crazies who, with their aid of external “stimulants” or an imbalanced brain chemistry, simply transcribed the words dictated by a voice from the beyond. But to adopt that pose wouldn´t be true to my temperament, education and tastes. It is exhilarating to just let it rip – it is almost the sine qua non for the start of a poem – but then the academic or critic in me kicks in, along with my concern for the correct use of words and I ponder and pause and revise and rewrite. But, as Picasso said (“a painting is never finished”), and retouching, taken to an extreme, may just as easily ruin a poem as being satisfied with the first effusions. What you imagine to be tighter and more coherent turns out to be labored, clunky and dull. It is the poet´s eternal struggle between vigor, passion and fluency, on the one hand, and communicating your thoughts and feelings with the maximum clarity, on the other.
On the need for reworking, I take comfort from the fact that some of the so-called mad or doomed poets have been clandestine revisers, Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas, among them. In fact, coming across a talk by the former, I was surprised to learn that he was as versed in the technicalities of poetry as any academic expert. There are even some doubts that the exemplar of a revelatory poem, Coleridge´s opium-induced Kubla Khan, was composed in the flat-out, once and for all, manner attributed to it. The same goes for those of the inspirational/lyrical school (Yeats) and the plainspoken colloquial ones. To take Larkin again, who, after scribbling and re–scribbling, merely published three short volumes of verse in his life, sufficient, however, to make him a classic, which is another sobering lesson -- about how quality trumps quantity, underscored by Herman Melville´s epic, Clarel, one of the longest and most unreadable poems in English.
In the midst of these musings, the basilisk eye of the book on modern poetry continued to petrify me: I wanted to put it down but was compelled to read on to the end, still hoping to obtain some knowledge of my craft. Maybe I did, in the sense that it deflated my ego, urged me to be more cautious with my rhetoric and confirmed the validity of my modernist disregard for the classic rules of rhyme, line, meter and prosody.
Finally, however, I opted for freedom (with moderation) rather than inhibition (the invisible prof who hovers over you with a blue pencil) and swore (probably in vain) that I would never look at the like again. You can judge the above results for yourself.]