Expect Delays Read online

  limitless springtime for opposites

  you break a legend with a stem

  the fallen star strikes again

  no more dirty crisis

  ripped from the bleated straps

  clear a corridor for all that’s good

  so’s life unfair to other guests

  reaches now for glimmer on the mend

  the way you look forgot

  Surface Codex

  The trouble with makeup

  when the face speaks in measured breath

  sisters to a faintly large

  farming operation

  whose planets abide in the dark

  mutter of our kind

  feed the beast

  let convenience have its serious say

  the mail is here

  her given name is Gravity

  not a dead unit in sight

  slow turn of syllogism to equal person

  blanket promise ineptitude

  the gross outcome of a gnat

  the little girls all laugh and say

  a funny place for a foot rub

  the germ in your life celebrant best

  appreciated should you pick up the phone

  Room Tone

  Wrestling that old beauty

  “Body and Soul”

  To the ground

  The genus award for epochal comes besotted

  Complicity follows like caramel on a sponge mop

  Child-bearing babies on stilts

  I dreamed you were felled by an unspecified illness

  In yours I was rowing a leaky boat, even though

  The motor was foolproof and bore hairs

  Taken up with travel and foreign visitors

  An intimacy implied in big block letters leans

  Beside its planar incandescent surrogate

  I tend backward haughtily through froth

  Abandoned sweetness meaning torpor

  Behind gorgeous intervals of removal and need

  An alligator in every pot

  Keeping company doesn’t count

  Dame Kind adjusts her ribbon frills

  Give life a shot

  Circular breath redemption

  At the Door of the Wolf

  You heard me

  Notes on Some of the Poems

  Paolo and Francesca

  In Inferno, Canto V, la bufera is the whirlwind in which Dante and Virgil find the two young lovers among those other souls who, shunted this way and that, “subject reason to desire.” Che la ragion sommettono al talento. These are i peccator carnali: Semiramis, Dido, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan . . . “and he showed me more than a thousand shades.”

  Costanza

  Thanks to Sarah McPhee for most of the details and some of the phrasing regarding Bernini, Costanza, and the portrait bust that inspired this poem. McPhee’s book Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini adds enormously to our knowledge and appreciation of this extraordinary woman and provides a number of important clarifications:

  Costanza was born Costanza Piccolomini in 1614 in Viterbo. She married the sculptor and conservator of antique art works Matteo Bonuccelli (“Goodbirds”—“Bonarelli” was a transcriber’s error) from Lucca and moved with him in 1636 to Rome. In 1638, the supposed time of the affair, Costanza would have been 24, Matteo 35, Bernini 39. Following the violent episode, Luigi was banished, Gianlorenzo was arrested and, after some intervention by his mother, advised by his patron Pope Urban VIII to mend his ways and marry (he married Caterina Tezio the following year). All involved lived in the neighborhood behind Saint Peter’s, though from the 1640s on Costanza and Matteo, with a thriving art business, in which Costanza may have operated as a kind of dealer, had a big house at the foot of the Quirinale. For her gallery and private rooms Costanza favored images of Mary Magdalene, Venus, Saints Teresa, Agatha, and Mary of Egypt, as well as a number of bacchanals. She and Matteo may also have owned Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod. Matteo continued to work for Bernini until his death in 1654, at aged 55. In her will of 1659, Costanza asks to be forgiven “for the grave sins that I have committed in my life.” She died on November 30, 1662, survived by her sister Anna Maria and her seven-year-old daughter Olimpia Caterina, and was buried, as befitted a woman of high station, in Santa Maria Maggiore, where Bernini likewise came to rest after his death in 1681. “Stern by nature, steady in his work, passionate in his wrath” is how Bernini’s biographer, the Florentine art historian Filippo Baldinucci, describes him. Known as the only sculpture Bernini made exclusively for himself, the marble bust of Costanza, dated 1636–1638, is roughly life-size, 28¾ inches high, in the collection of Museo Nationale del Bargello, Florence. The exhibition Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture appeared at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2008.

  Signature Song

  Some of the facts in this fact-driven poem have come slowly into focus. One of them, the exact date and place of the recording of Lee Wiley singing the Duke-Gershwin “I Can’t Get Started with You,” I found only last year (2013) on a recent Audiophile CD called Lee Wiley: Live on Stage, Town Hall, New York. The “Town Hall” tag is misleading, as the recording in question and indeed more than half of Wiley’s performances on the CD are transcriptions of Eddie Condon broadcasts from the Ritz Theater in New York, “I Can’t Get Started . . .” having been done on February 17, 1945. The poem, which has seen a few printings in different versions, is reprinted here to set it straight.

  CT Song

  In the course of a high-resolution thoracic CT, or CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) scan, a computerized voice instructs the patient to breathe, hold, and release deep breaths for each image phase. The words of this “song” replicate exactly the instructions normally given.

  When Omar Little Died

  “Omar Little” was a deeply notable character played by Michael Kenneth Williams in the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008). In the course of Season 5, he was shot and killed by a young boy named Kenard. The entire series was set in Baltimore. The ending of this poem refers to the United States detainment facility, part of the Guantánamo Naval Base (aka “Gitmo”), Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”

  In Königsberg, However

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born and died in Königsberg. (He’s also buried in the cathedral there.)

  Last Lines with George

  In December 2008, in George Schneeman’s studio on Saint Marks Place in Manhattan, George and I did four poem paintings together, for the last of which I asked George to paint his favorite among the many Romanesque churches of southwestern France he and his wife Katie had visited that past summer. And so he did, a powerful rendering of Saint Radegonde in the maritime town of Talmont. The lines I added came, as it were, from out of nowhere—like the Leonid meteor shower that inspired the jazz lyric that started them off. George died unexpectedly, a month later, in January 2009.

  Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea

  The title is that of the magnificent outsized drawing done in 1944 by Mark Rothko that once belonged to the San Francisco Museum of Art, until that institution mistakenly traded it away for a lesser example of Rothko’s work. Today Slow Swirl regularly holds pride of place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rothko said that the fibrillating shapes in the foreground of the work “have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.” Be that as it may, the poem is not intended as a comment on any aspect of the drawing other than its title.

  Sea Breeze

  A line by Frank O’Hara goes, “the Brise Marine wasn’t written in Sanskrit, baby”; but, as far as getting a fair English equivalent goes, it might as well have been. First attempted in 1982, this translation has always felt “interim” to me, perhaps as all translations should. Mallarmé’s poem is a sonnet in rhymed couplets; mine is an unrhymed approximation with som
e feeling for the pitch of the whole, but charged at top and bottom by the grandeur of two unforgettable lines.

  Two Russian Poems

  I’ve known and puzzled over Pasternak’s poem since Kenneth Koch introduced me to the New Directions volume of translations of his work, Safe Conduct, some fifty years ago. As I am totally ignorant of the Russian language, I relied on whatever other translations I could find and, most helpfully, on Kate Sutton’s remarkable knowledge of the language and feeling for the tones of both the Pasternak and the Pushkin poem that Pasternak celebrates.

  Anhedonia

  Anhedonia: the inability to feel pleasure. The epigraph is from the transcript of the proceedings of the plenum of the Central Committee, February 1937, as presented in William Kentridge’s installation I am not me, the horse is not mine (at SFMOMA a year ago); a very different transcription occurs in The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932–1939 by J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, and Benjamin Sher (Yale University Press, 2002).*

  Also putting in appearances here are Jean Cocteau, Curzio Malaparte, and Hannah Arendt, who confided in a letter to her good friend Mary McCarthy that she had written Eichmann in Jerusalem “in a curious state of euphoria.”

  *“At last, an answer: William did indeed knowingly change the dialogue from the actual transcript. He said that he was thinking about a letter Bukharin sent from death row.” —Mark Rosenthal, curator of the Kentridge exhibit, in response to questions about the discrepancy. October 29, 2010.

  Birthday Greetings

  I am sure that this poem was set off by something I read that was attributed to La Rochefoucauld, but since writing I have been unable to retrieve the source. Curiously, as a famous writer of maxims, La Rochefoucauld was never so intimate and good natured as this poem lets on.

  SONGS FOR BANDS

  Twenty years into my seemingly endless get-acquainted period with computers, I began keeping a desktop notebook, assigning it the file name “bbNotebook,” to which I later added the start date, 2005. I’ve kept a notebook handy for most of my writing life, the physical objects of choice being the black-covered sketchbook type, variable in its dimensions, and, more recently, compact Italian copybooks, quaderni, slimmer, soft covered, with unlined, blank pages.

  For a long time, I could write only prose on whatever computer I was using. Lacking the tactile feedback afforded by typewriters, even the supposedly silent electric kinds, I was, and still am, daunted by words floating disembodied, on a display screen. The dematerialized aspect drove me back to writing poems by hand and editing them later on the machine, so that only recently have I felt able to start a poem with any fluency in this electronic medium.

  Eventually, after three or four years, looking over my accumulated desktop notebook materials, I saw that these more or less impulsive jottings had gathered a sort of intrinsic order that needed only minimal nudging from me to fall into place. I went for a format that could hold together the range of things—occasional lines, poem fragments, prose musings, scraps taken from reading, dream records, memory shots; stray, uncategorized notations, quiddities, and so on—that happen ordinarily in handwritten notebooks, but that occurred here with the more formal edge of being already “typeset”: literally, 14-point Garamond in a Word .doc window.

  Given any arrangement of discrete parts pulled out of sequence, I wanted to test how loosely such a sequence could proceed from page to page (and still “be”). The format is flexible insofar as the spaces between individual parts can change readily according to font and page size. Ideally, though, allowing for spillovers, each page will register as unitary, an assemblage in itself. In the original, limited-edition version of “Not an Exit,” for instance, each part had a page to itself, whereas, in this book, the parts-per-page are to be seen as a purposeful jumble with meanings suspended in the mix.

  Aside from those credited in the text, here are some sources drawn upon for the works in “Songs for Bands”:

  “Not an Exit”

  The “Ta-pocketa” riff comes from the 1947 Danny Kaye film version of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

  The world helps the artist . . . inverts the wording of Bruce Nauman’s neon sculpture “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

  In America you get food to eat is the first line of Randy Newman’s song “Sail Away”: In America you get food to eat / Don’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet . . .

  “Edwin Denby’s mild retort” was in response to an English balletomane’s overboard account of having seen Nijinsky “fly through the air—like a bird!” “Yes,” said Edwin, “but birds don’t fly with their feet.”

  Un compas dans l’oeil. Connie Lewallen taught me this French expression apropos the 1996 Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

  “Songs for Bands”

  The title “But It Was That Cut of Sky . . .” comes from Jack Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth.”

  Deirdre LaPorte is a San Francisco Bay Area singer, known for her 1970s work with the Beau Brummels and Stoneground.

  Mirrors Discovered in Scrovegni Chapel was the headline of an article I recall as having appeared in the New York Times, but a search of the Times’s online archive turned up no such thing.

  Mallarmé, from His Letters. All the quotes here are from the Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd.

  Reply to Adorno. The “reply” is more of a smack at Theodor Adorno’s unfortunate notion that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.

  Circus Maximus, Karlsruhe, Kassel. The German city of Karlsruhe and its inhabitants were bombed heavily by the British-American allies in 1944. The main target, which was left untouched, was the ammunitions factory that today houses the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie). Similarly, 90 percent of downtown Kassel was destroyed by air raids between February 1942 and March 1945. Since 1955, Kassel has been the site for the documenta series of international art exhibitions held every five years.

  Contra Lenin. The aphorism ascribed to Lenin is “Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.”

  The Miniaturist’s Miscellany. “Marx uses the language of ghostliness . . .” I’m not sure, but this quotation probably comes from one or another book by the excellent social philosopher George Scialabba.

  “Snippets (Further Songs for Bands)”

  “Philosophy is a peculiar subject . . . ”: from Samuel Freeman, “A New Theory of Justice,” New York Review of Books, October 14, 2010, a review of The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2010).

  “Indeed the word conversation . . .”: from Jesse Browner, “Conversation Starter,” Bookforum, September/October, 2007.

  Oof. The Henry James quotation is from “The Art of Fiction.”

  Other sources for “Songs for Bands” include The Letters of John Keats (the H. Buxton Forman edition); John Keats: The Living Year 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1919 by Robert Gittings; The Poetics of Music in Six Lessons by Igor Stravinsky; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty; Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, Modes of Thought by Alfred North Whitehead; The Modern Predicament by George Scialabba; The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart selected and edited by Hans Mersmann; The Journal of Eugène Delacroix; American Moderns by Christine Stansell; as well as various writings by Leonardo Sciascia, J. D. Salinger, Frank O’Hara, Roberto Calasso, Louis Menand, Anthony Blunt, David Carrier, W. H. Auden, Adam Phillips, Philip Whalen, and the New York Times.

  Acknowledgments

  Versions of some of these writings appeared previously in the following magazines and books: Poem (FACE Anthology), Goods and Services (Blue Press, 2008), Lady Air (Perdika Press, 2010), Unsaid (with Micah Ballard, Auguste Press, 2011), Repeat After Me (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), Darkness and Light (Verna Press, 2011), Snippets (Omerta, 2013), Dorado, Exquisite Corpse Annual 200
8, 5_Trope, the Can, Bomb, Gerry Mulligan, Big Bridge, Pax Americana, Peaches & Bats, Live Mag 8, the Brown Literary Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Zoland Poetry Annual 2011, Shampoo, Cruel Garters, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, Café Review, Sal Mimeo, Amerarcana, Mimeo Mimeo, Bombay Gin, Poetry, The One Fund Boston (Pressed Water, 2014), the Lawrenceville Lit, and Vlak.

  “Reverie” was written especially for Bruce McGaw: Paintings and Drawings (Atholl McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 2008).

  “Decal” was issued as a broadside by Woodland Pattern Book Center in April 2008.

  The Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois, issued “Exogeny” as a broadside in conjunction with the 2013 Poetry Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation exhibition and symposium “Joan Mitchell: At Home with Poetry.”

  “Paolo and Francesca” appeared with reproductions of paintings by Oona Ratcliffe on artcritical.com, April 2009.

  Marie Dern published an early version of “Not an Exit” as a limited-edition chapbook, with drawings by Léonie Guyer, from Jungle Garden Press in 2011.

  “Anhedonia” appeared in a video produced by Thomas Devaney for ONandOnScreen, Fall 2010.

  “No Argument” was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a chapbook collection of poetry honoring Mark di Suvero entitled Field Work.

  Many thanks to Paule Anglim, John Zurier, Nina Zurier, Kevin Opstedal, Marie Dern, Cedar Sigo, Léonie Guyer, John Godfrey, Duncan McNaughton, Larry Fagin, Jeff Angel, Kyle Schlesinger, Nick Whittington, Thomas Devaney, David Cohen, Kevin Killian, Frank Smigel, David Brinks, Peter Brennan, Mario Petrucci, Roland Pease Jr., Chris Madison, Kyle Schlesinger, Peter Anderson, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Mollie Springfield, Kate Sutton, William Kentridge, Mark Rosenthal, Norma Cole, Don Share, Michael Slosek, Anthony Howell, Les Gottesman, Colter Jacobsen, Bill Corbett, Nathaniel Dorsky, and, as always, to Connie Lewallen.

  Special thanks to Erika Stevens, Linda Koutsky, Caroline Casey, Anitra Budd, and the rest of the staff at Coffee House Press.