Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Accepted for the 'Revisions: A Zine for Writers at Queens College 2011' magazine

To whom it may concern,

    It’s funny that you should ask.  Sean Gabler, a fellow poet and a friend just wrote a piece in his blog about this very topic.  It is a common internal dialogue that I have.  One of my brothers asked me this question about a decade or so ago, when I began to really consider myself a poet.  “Who do you write for?” and my answer at the time was, “I write for myself, nobody else.”  Well, I’m inevitably older now and I am constantly vigilant as to not mistake stubbornness for wisdom.  That being said, the answer has changed.   Below is a brief list of the 'who' I write for and of course, a little bit of the 'why', as the two can never be separate from each other no matter how much one tries.
     The list of who is endless, amassed from the front-lines and trenches of the consciousness as well as the unwavering, churning about of the primordial bisque that is the unconsciousness.  As I write poetry, my words are often aimed toward other poets, dead or alive, past and present.  I've written sorrowful odes to the sweet, executed Garcia Lorca and hopeful epistolary poem-songs to old Walt ‘I contain multitudes’ Whitman.  I’ve formulated rebuttals from the tides, as though I were a spokesman for the sea, to Pablo Neruda, the king of all things weathered, stone and pebble.  I've called out to the ghost of Frank O'Hara while in the midst of my very own emergencies and meditations.  I’ve sought along my neighborhood streets the sunset drawing down of blinds of mourning for the dear boy soldier poet Wilfred Owen.  I wondered about Rilke and the dead he saw, who go about so free of worry, so unlike their reputation.  Whether it is John Milton or Stephen Crane, Mrs. Lady Lazarus Sylvia Plath or Louise Gluck, their imaginary approval for my craft is the very skin and sinew around the fingers which moves my pen about the page. 
    Of course, my own family is a frequent topic, an easy target and an endless source of inspiration.  In poems, I’ve made peace with the Italian grandfather I never got to know; whose psychological warfare waged against my father has spilled over onto my brothers and me, so much so that we carry heavily in our hearts the patriarchal refuse of misguided affection.  I’ve written so often of my Irish grandmother who I miss dearly. She and I spent many an afternoon together, her, lovingly buttering me up with her famous quiche, her soda bread and the bottomless mugs of root beer only later to put me to work moving furniture, gardening or shoveling snow down that endless length of driveway that I have now been shoveling for 25 years.  After a lifetime of repressing her childhood memories of impoverished county Roscommon, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, she told us all the story of her and her brothers being shot at by those British brigands known as the Black and Tans, while hiding in the dreary, damp fields of Ireland’s peat.   Some stories should not be forgotten and as my friend Sean Gabler says, “We rescue them and introduce them to anyone who is willing.”   
     My brothers, oh how often I write with them in mind, for the want of pride, my brothers, who have been unparalleled outlets for my yearnings toward the literary and the arts.  What they did, I did, where they went, I went, what they read, I read, true to my role as little brother pain in the ass. Above everyone, I write so that my mother can look at me with that stare that says, “I knew it, I always knew it”, and I know she did. 
       Places, I write for places as though it were family.  I meter out the silent testament of soot, blackening the headless statues of saints in a plaza in Valencia, Spain.  I give voice to the bar stool where an American, a New Zealander and a Japanese tourist have taken a moment to indulge in Pilsner, to rest and reflect upon the day’s adventure through the wintry streets of Prague.  There is a cold spot on the train station platform in Paris, the Gare d’Austerlitz, where a man laid dead and a few feet away a frantic, desperate spot where his wife fell into her sudden long descent into loneliness.  In a New York City subway, where everyone hides in plain sight between their tiny headphones, an attractive woman won’t smile back at me because, well, New York is as hard on single men as it is on women.  This city, it brings out the voyeur in me, it brings out wonderment and lust, desire and rage. 
     I write for things and concepts.  I have written to bathroom tiles as though they confidants.   I frequently trip the boundaries of the real, to the realm of the inanimate, the fictional, the archetypal; none of which is uncommon or unique to my being here in the world.  I’ve tripped up lazy starlight and covered parsecs in the span of a bus ride.  Like many, I've accosted the gods and their army of frozen cemetery angels.  I’ve mocked Time as it swaggered past me free of empathy.   I've praised the honeycomb, and the rotundness of its makers.  I've looked for the face of Emily Dickinson among the dots atop a fluttering snowflake.  I’ve set the trap for human nature and waited till I burst with longing; I’m still waiting.   I’ve professed that the number 11 is the one true representative of infinity and then called it out for the nothing it does for anyone.
       What about Love?  I write for Love as well. Love, with his unnatural agents, lingering always just out of reach, promising in whispers a future where joy springs eternal.  I have written for the eyes of past lovers only and for the moments where we made love on the waterside, exposing our rawest of energies to the bug’s eyes, there, where the warm wind lollygagged through the quiet wood.
   When asked, “Who do you write for? Why do you write?   Who is your audience?”  The old response is no longer true.  In my younger years, I think I was scared to admit that I actually have or want an audience.  Somehow, I felt it made my work less authentic.  I accept the audience, real or imaginary, in fact, I craft the work for them.  Time and all its minions have taught me well, so far.  Last week, I attended the Queens College New Salon meet and greet for the new US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and he said something that pretty much summed up my current perspective on writing.  Professor Nicole Cooley, MFA Director of Creative Writing and Translation here at Queens College, asked him whether or not, and I’m paraphrasing both her question and his response, “we, as poets, have a responsibility to society, the world at large?”  He answered, in an adamant, matter of fact manner, “No, we don’t have a responsibility to anyone except ourselves.  We must be true to ourselves, not to anyone else.  If you want to write about social justice, go for it.  If you want to write about the secret life of angels, I don’t care; just do them both to the best of your ability and stay true to yourself.”    The activity of writing always released in me what I call the ‘Hope-adrenaline’.  No matter how bad things are in my life, when I start to express myself in this medium, something flutters within me, a fresh wind rises up from the deep and only Emily Dickinson, the grandmother of American poetry, has ever gotten as close to pinning the feeling down, with this quote, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.”  Who do I write for? Why do I write?  Okay, final answer: I write for Hope, because I believe in it.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Rainer Maria Rilke....one of the best!

“…Weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Friday, October 14, 2011

I am not contained between my hat and my boots....

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) "

--W.W.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Next year


Next year

The wooden key-chain
is a souvenir that I acquired
from my time in Madrid.

An emblem is branded into one side:
a bear pushes up against the 'madrono',
the strawberry tree,

standing firmly against the darkened grain,
beneath the seven stars of the north,
and the arc of a thin crown.

She said that every time she looks
at pictures of her time in Australia,
she is overwhelmed with sadness;

she promises to herself
to be back within a year.

I have heard those words before,
I have uttered them myself, in my fits of desperation,
when I cannot stand my fellow New Yorkers any longer,
when I am tired of saying what I myself do not believe,

when I am thirsting for one more Spanish night.
Next year I say, perhaps, quizas?  Next year.

I am here, in Queens,
and I can't blame all the
'next years' for eluding me.

So many opportunities exist,
while my souvenir quietly hangs
from the zipper on my old blue bag.