Tunnels Mean Something But I'm Not Sure What

Apparently things open up in New York City in Autumn. For example, the cemetery on East 3rd Street opens up briefly around this time. I took the old man there on our first date, but another couple were graphically pursuing their own strange romantic inclinations on the hood of a nearby car, all of us locked out with no mausoleums or grave markers to hide in/behind, so we continued on to my favorite yarn store.

Open now is the Atlantic Avenue subway tunnel, the first in New York City. It was once part of the Long Island Railroad, which made stops to Brooklyn when Brooklyn was a wee village. The old man and I had to climb down a man hole into the tunnel and I have to say that I was disappointed by its mere four steps on a precarious ladder. I wanted many steps, I sort of wanted to fall, to go down into the depths, I wanted it to be harder to get to. There are tunnels like this all over the city, well, all under the city, and it seems strange that these old structures aren't that out of reach. Also, I was very afraid that a rat was going to run across my foot, but there weren't any rats in the uninhabited tunnel.

The man who found the tunnel talked to us about all kinds of interesting New York City facts, but the old man had to retell them because I wasn't really listening. I was wondering why all the other people had come, what happened to the woman who was pooped on by a bird while we waiting in line, how come I stupidly bought an environmentally friendly flashlight that charges when shaken in a weird masturbatory way and gives off minimal light, how a tall happy man climbed down the manhole while carrying a baby, if I could carry a baby and climb down a manhole.

Do you remember a band called Frente? I don't know what happened to them, but they had one album which has the best cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle." While in the tunnel I hummed a song of theirs, about you and me and a tunnel of love, but I was surrounded by strangers, and the words actually are you and me and the labor (labour) of love. I kept tripping on old railroad ruts, sort of hearing a story about horses freaking out next to the trains down there. How long do you think I could've been alone down there?

We had to leave before the end of the tunnel tour, but at least we heard the story about how the laborers shot and tore apart their overseer, burying him in the tunnel. A half hour late, we jumped on our bikes and rushed away into a day that had warmed on the city.

Dumplings and Trumpets: Chris Martin

To call a book of poetry beautiful is somewhat problematic, but I like problematic so I'll go ahead: Chris Martin's American Music is an incredibly beautiful beautiful book of poetry. The difficulty in calling something beautiful is that it's such an over-achiever of a word. What words are you supposed to say after? Calling something beautiful means you've been rendered speechless, that (fuck!) there just may not be a word to describe your reactions to American Music. Nevertheless, I am comfortable with being arrested (uh, in the poetry sense) and will carry on.

American Music is a book that drives in and out of art and film, in and out of daily routine, in and out of literature, of city and subway, the people around. If you're new to the city, you should read this book. If you're turning older, if your age isn't giving you leverage or grants you a kind of leverage that make young people call you SIR or MAIM, or if your age is a reminder that someday you will die because you will grow so old that you will die, you should read this book.

Perversion is a prevailing worry throughout the book. Is someone becoming a dirty old man? Dirty being there all the while yet brought further out by age or city life. Worse yet, being a dirty old man means there is no boys-will-be-boys boyhood anymore, that somehow everything must be accounted for. "...not often am I/ Prepared for violence," Martin writes in "Fertility for Dummies", "though I find it/ Natural, in me as in/ The World, and it remains/ Revolting, the brief/ Desire to trample something/ Living, loving certain/ Registers of collapse..." What you see in that there quote is the beauty prior mentioned and also the italics, the way Martin infuses all his poems with a long list of writers and artists.

Something else I'd like to point out is that the poems sort of wind their way down to their closings. Martin doesn't stop much for punctuation outside of a comma and a question mark, and the poems make their way, connecting phrase after phrase, either making long Faulkneresque sentences or doing away with sentences altogether, to make room for thought. It's easy to get used to and it's fun teaching myself how to listen to the phrase, how to make it work as I read, while somehow becoming a better writer and thinker because of it.

Have a listen to "Subcutaneous Concerns." There are two New Yorky references in this poem, the first being Neckface, the tag of a graffiti artist here in town, and the second being the Gowanus Canal, a canal in Brooklyn that five east-west bridges cross over. Chris Martin is going to be reading near there this weekend for Yardmeter.

Fantasy Feature No. 23

Those poor pieces of painted linen. This was the plan: you'll paint them then you'll trace something on them with pastels. Boy howdy you thought pastels were oily and not chalky and your pastels turned into dust when you started to draw on the painted fabric. Only you can't draw for shit. So you hooked up your computer to the old man's projector and practiced tracing photographs on brown paper. You were up on a ladder, holding onto the wall, you'd been thinking on this for months, and the shapes were so beautiful. The old man said hmm and don't you want to cover the books. The paper was lovely and the pastel glided over it and you thought fuck this might be working, but your childhood rocking chair you traced looked like something out of Tron. You had one and your sister had one and now no one can sit in them. Everyone is too big and you suck at everything.

Are You Still Blushing From Last Night? I Am

I've written about hands before, how I think you can tell what instrument someone plays by the way he or she holds his or her hands. (Really, is it so wrong to use their here?) My former cello teacher has the most celloie looking hands you've ever seen. Anyway, I noticed in grad school that most of the poets I know use a kind of staid circular motion while talking with their hands. Their palms tend to point to themselves and their hands sort of balloon around them. Almost all of the painters I know hand-talk in squares, as though everything were some sort of canvas. Up and wide, space, light these hands say.

Well, at last night's reading, I met two women who are modern dancers. Their hands spoke in swirls and swoops. I don't think the women knew each other, but they reached far and wide with their hands, somehow encompassing their whole bodies--hands as hips when the hips are sitting. I wanted both of them to invite me to their performances, but they didn't. I guess I'm happy enough just watching them talk.

Fantasy Feature No. 1

Will you forget everything when you die. Will you be smoking a cigar in a lawn chair. What is all blackness like. Who will remember you and does it matter. Will it be painful. Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof says you have to feel pain to know you're alive. Barf. What will it be, in the end--too much drinking, too much salt, not enough fiber. What did you do well in your lifetime. Are you going to be this bitchy in heaven. What if what you believe is where you go in the end. You want to stay here and do stuff. You want to be a ghost so you can watch people having sex. You mean, you want to be a ghost and protect your family, friends. You want to be a ghost traveler. You will hold your breath for a long time when you're a ghost and you won't scare anyone. Is what you do totally empty because you will die. Bring your old dog Daisy. Bring chocolate cookies. You met a man who rolled cigars for a living. You lost a lace shirt your grandmother gave. What are you supposed to do with all this yarn. You want so badly to be Hob from The Sandman.

Love My City, Part One

Last week the old man, along with Steven and his lady, went to see a play on a boat. The boat is the decommissioned Lilac (a former Lighthouse Tender) and resides tied to a pier in Manhattan. The play was a rather sloppy, uh, thing inspired by Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. What was incredibly fun was that the play took place all over the boat--little scenes here, little scenes there--and attendees were allowed to walk about the boat, as many scenes were happening simultaneously. The audience was split into different groups who had to follow different docents and if you stayed with your docent, then you could follow one story line throughout the ship.

Besides being free of charge, something I liked about the play was that it couldn't really decide if it wanted to be old-timey or current-timey. Some characters were dressed in fashionable shorts and t-shirts while others wore vests and dresses from a different era. This amalgamation seemed to affect the language of the play, inspired by different times, but captivated by the pressures of now.

Oddly enough the docents were almost a little better than the play. (The docents were actors. They use their hands when they speak! They say funny things! They speak loudly without losing their voices!) Our docent was a chirpy ribbon-clad pony-tailed comedian who began fighting (like I'm never sleeping with you again and you're a bad actor fighting) with one of the actors, who in turn ridiculed her after each scene. She had this quirky way of telling jokes as though she were just sort of talking to us (listen, she said, for the secret word and you will win a prize), so no one really knew if we should laugh or not. But then we laughed and she invited us to pick up flyers for her comedy group's performance.

A play on a boat. It's such a great idea. I loved the swaying and rocking and the smell and the tiny staircases that I had to climb backwards. I'm really glad I went, but I was wondering how come I haven't been to any poetry readings on a boat.

I've Got Your Back, Flarf

My friends who don't write poetry and claim to "not get it" like to pull me aside, sit me down and have conversations about how silly it all is and why do I bother with it. The past two conversations like this, most recently, have begun, "you know, the thing about poetry is..." and "poets should be more assessable..." and I squish my nose defensively and if the old man is around, our eyes say O JOY. One thing I'd like to say is that I really never hear people attacking other art-generators as much as I hear poets being attacked (not that other writers/artists aren't questioned about their difficult material). For instance, I didn't understand one of my friend's paintings and asked him what it was all about. He said the image was from a film. I felt bad that I hadn't seen the film and put it into my Netflix que right away. Please note that I didn't say, "You know, Artist Friend, why can't you paint flowers to look like vaginas? Why did you have to make this so hard for me? Why did you have to make me feel as though there was something in the world I hadn't yet experienced?"

Anyway, what I eventually talk about with non-poets, after the definition for what is assessable has been established and pissed on, is that there are many different kinds of poetry out there and there is, I think, a poet that every person can feel comfortable reading. We're kind of like sweaters, really. The last two conversations I had, I mentioned Flarf because I knew those friends were pretty internet savvy and I thought they'd find it interesting, which they did. Luckily, Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale was nearby and the old man read "I Loved My Father." I like the way Flarf shuts people up while they are thinking. It's funny, watching the change come over someone's face when they find that something they thought was going to be meaningless is actually the opposite, is quite thoughtfully constructed and provocative. If (IF) most new poetry is disconnected, disjointed, and full of stuff because the world is, because we're going to die and we don't want it to be meaningless and we can't help it and we're hopeless, Flarf, at least for me, is a kind of poetry that has its own nook, its own unique gesture of meaning taken from information floating out there.

Sorry about the loud train! I didn't have time to unplug all my external hard drives to record in the bathroom, which is what I usually do. Listen to "I Loved My Father" here: