RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION : Michael T. Young

We enter the realm of personal resolutions and revolutions with the poetry of Michael T. Young. Michael has published two collections of poetry, most recently, Transcriptions of Daylight. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, is available from Finishing Line Press and his next full-length collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published in 2013 by Black Coffee Press. — Larissa


Fishing Dark


As night took shape, the trees in the dark
uprooted themselves. Through the window
I saw the last light fold up and tuck itself
onto a clouded shelf, and a few late birds
swatted the stillness in their flight toward home.
It seemed there was a swarming in places, a pulsing
just at the edge, where anything clearly seen
sank into the varieties of shade, where the dark
smoldered in potential and at that moment,
I felt privileged, like someone admitted
into a secret society, because I knew then
that the sun is ignorant of the shadows it creates,
especially this one, and all that depends upon it,
all the minds that fish its deep waters,
all the maps that still show an end to the world.


On How the World Might Seem to My One-Year-Old Son


The whole world is the given, free
everywhere and dangerously possible
like a bruise, a bump on the forehead,
the ever-out-of-reach — a computer, a bathroom —
mysteries that tall people inhabit briefly,
then return, pleased with themselves
having known the fruit of the undeniable.
They offer it to me only as fructified
in these shaky steps I take, these legs
nearly paralytic, this mouth inarticulate
as one chewing gristle, lurking near
the sinister, which surprises, puzzles
and even astonishes when it grows
into the Gauls invading Italy for a glass of wine
or Napoleon unshackling the last
of Medieval Europe with an imperial hand,
after having lain prone, subject, sometimes
even naked, simply waiting for a chance.



Screw-up


Someone told me there are no coincidences
as if a tedious architect plotted the track
of each raindrop down a windshield,
and that something must have been intended
when my mother met a man who had her picture
in his wallet. He picked it up, he said,
from the street. He thought she was cute.
But that man is not my father, and this makes
every difference to my personal double-helix
and the pleasure I take in Bach and long walks
since I wasn’t part of the architect’s original plan
and now he has to take me into account
as if his pen left a smudge on the blueprint
and instead of erasing it, he makes it into
an additional room on the house, which means
when I look back on that time someone called
asking for a woman I happened to know,
her phone number only one digit different from mine,
I’m supposed to be concerned because she didn’t
become my wife, as if these connections mean
there is somewhere else I should be today,
and that’s why, sometimes for no reason, I’m sad
or frustrated, nagged by a feeling that something
is missing, like the freedom to screw everything up,
the way I liked to when I was young, just to prove
I was old enough to make my own decisions.



Rewriting My To-Do List


In a Brahmsian exaltation I drove down Newark Avenue,
realizing, as with all such transports, it’s a question
of how far you can go, especially with gloved hands,
in winter, tapping out rhythms on the cold steering wheel,
on an errand to buy a showerhead and cereal bars,
milk and clean wipes, distracting necessities, although
some have argued it’s the other way around, since
as I turned at Dickenson High School, there were those
descending winds, dropping with the hill past the cemetery
and I think an oboe counterpointing the rising strings,
the turn signals of other cars and changing traffic lights,
all the aesthetic risk of listening and thinking of all that time
Brahms took to compose his first symphony,
twenty-one years scribbling, scratching out, straining
like this first burning movement, consuming itself
in the struggle, so even passing under the bridge
and the starless city sky, I leaned into the windshield,
tilting into the night, renewed in the effort to listen closely.


Yardstick


In my dreams of flight I could never rise
more than forty feet above the earth,
sinking or soaring with the contours, puzzling
over what architect set the ceiling so low,
and still carry its mystery with me, like wondering
what kind of person I would become
if I worked in a factory where yardsticks are made.
Would I grow a penchant for measuring,
for fixing limits or would I feel a need
to snatch one or two from the line each day,
take them home and snap them in half? —
or preferably into an odd number —
something to prove that the world won’t end
simply because things are out of balance.

RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION: Alfred Corn

[Author’s note: The numbered sections reprinted below are taken from a 3000-line poem titled Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), recounting my life from 1965 to 1969, a time when the younger generation began demonstrating against the American invasion of Vietnam and for Black civil rights. These excerpts describe the 1968 upheavals at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student, though spending at that time a Fulbright year in Paris. Earlier in the spring a student uprising in Paris led to a full-scale national strike against De Gaulle’s government, which may have been one of the stimuli for the Columbia demonstrations. Workers’ strikes began at the automotive plants in Nanterre, an industrial town near Paris.]


XXVI.

The plague had spread past hope of remedy.
Discourse volleyed back and forth between
Nanterre and Place Maubert, Défense d’afficher [“post no bills”]
The first restraint to crumble as the walls
Papered over with grievances and slogans,
The wise and ardent icons, Chairman Mao
And Che Guevara. For the first time in decades
The International assumption rang
True. And here was electric news from home:
Columbia had been taken over, shut
Down by the S.D.S. till further notice.
The gray sandstorm of a wire photo
Coalesced around a teenaged striker,
Feet propped on President Kirk’s desk,
Puffing a cigar beneath a Rembrandt portrait.

Not since Berkeley, we thought…. But what about
Our friends—teachers, students, who might be caught
Up in the drama? Telephone parleys,
Expensive, curtailed, picked their way over
A minefield of conflicting sympathies.
Which tipped in favor of the protest once
Guards swept down and cleared the buildings, clubbing
Anyone to slow to dodge. For blood
Is still blood, however urgent the theory
That sheds it….




XXVIII.


News from Nanterre: a crackdown no less brutal
Than Columbia’s. And then an echoic
Roar of support from the Quartier Latin.
Students ten thousand vocal marched against
The incarceration of their leaders, state
Repression. The Sorbonne closed its doors.
Shouting matches, harassment, and at last
A pitched battle, which deployed in slow
Motion, a liquid nightmare staged around
Collaged barricades thrown together
From lumber, capsized cars and paving stones.
The C.R.S., black-helmeted, with shields,
Goggles and nightsticks, swarmed from armored trucks,
Advancing through a fusillade of stones.
Protesters, in street clothes, fell down and bled.

Cries. Distant sirens. The faint burn
Of teargas drifted down to the 13th.
When quiet returned, I stealthily threaded
My way up toward the brooding Panthéon
And rue St. Jacques, wondering whether some new
Éducation sentimentale would be hatched
From this unrest. The tower of St. Étienne
Said, “Paris repeats herself, true, but the terms
Differ….” A liberated Odéon
Now featured a round-the-clock debate
Open to whoever could make themselves heard.
Groups or solos seized the platform, held it
Till hounded down by boo’s or Merde!’s: total
Dissent voiced in a total democracy.
(I still can’t get that noise out of my ears.)

Carol Novack 1948-2011

Carol Novack died of lung cancer Thursday at 8:55 pm. She was a genre-defying writer of lyrical and inventive work, imaginative and beautiful. She was a lightning rod who brought together thousands of artists from around the globe in collaboration and exploration as publisher of the groundbreaking Mad Hatters' Review. She was also my good friend, quite irreplaceable.

Here is her lovely piece, "Destination."

DESTINATION
(for Jean Detheux)

I
On the hill, there is an easel holding a painting of a town. You
are always traveling to the town, but whenever you think you’ve arrived,
there is nothing but stones, statutes and indigestible
bread. You return to the painting. You wonder if there’s a detail
you’ve missed, a clue that will help you find the town. You let
your eyes be deceived. They are connected to your heart with its
longing to nest; you are possessed with owning. You lose your
perspective again and again, wanting perspective, you are cursed.

II
You have come to rest. You think perhaps this is my town or
close enough to the one I was walking towards, at least when the
moon guided me like a mother it seemed to be. I can’t be too
fussy; I will die with dust mites and sand crabs and there will be
no home in death. But now, always now this town is different
from then, at least my memory of soft greens and blues with
gentle angles, or so it seemed, seems. This town is all glare with
acute turns and sonic booms. It won’t hold me, rock me, is neither
mother nor lover. It has so few dimensions for me though it has
dimensions for the neighbors, I suspect. They talk about rules,
have so many they can’t keep track of what’s forbidden. Too many
of them stay indoors for fear of breaking a rule. The chandelier
drops are cameras. They don’t understand. They make more rules.
This town’s windows need insulation in the frigid seasons when
the voices grow colder and louder. Nothing grows and the
kitchen shelves are vacant. One can hear the real estate agents
screaming in their white rooms. One can see their angry shadows
through white curtains. Always white – that is what the
denizens want: a neutered town in which you may disappear
into your shadows. They say that colors invite arrest. They
think they are invisible, the fools. Perhaps they are invisible
and I am the fool.

Here again I have to walk on stones for bread; the bakers don’t
know me. So I will move on. This is not a town, well not mine.
That is my perspective, not this.

III
He frightened me when he clasped me to him in the night,
when he lowered the volume of his voice to speak of the mirage
of walls and roofs. Not so long ago, he seemed to be my destination.
He was mine and I was his or so it seemed. After an
orgy of mirrors, we sucked and picked at one another’s bones.
Then he strayed into that other woman’s residence and stayed
too long, I took the turn back to where I’d been going, but
couldn’t find it. Pain was my map; I could hardly see clearly.

So I found you hiding in a hedge with thorns, not crying but
chanting, no, singing, singing a lament to your mother; you
crooned, wanting to crawl back into her, so I came and stroked
your head. I remember your hair as soft as dandelion puffs and
you trembled but kept still for a spell entranced you let me
be your home. And then like flotsam, you floated away, you
with your eyes dense with storms. I carried on, tore off my red
dress, taunted you. Who can stay still? Who can remain in homes
with so many rules? you pleaded. I left that town a long time ago,
I answered. At least I thought I did. You looked like a rabbit in a
wolf’s yellow eye. All homes have rules, you said. You said I am
a nomad. I have no choice. You do, I replied, drawing you into
me for the last time, feeling like the rabbit in your jaws. But
was I the wolf? Now I have forgotten your name.

IV
In those towns they lock up the homeless when they remain in
one spot and throw stones at Gypsies. Like snails, the Gypsies
carry their homes on their backs. The denizens say it’s not
right! Everyone must pay taxes and mortgages like us – despite
interest rates. They rape the land we have purchased and pillage
the daughters we have sown and own. Lock them up!

The Gypsies say it is a curse to want to own, a curse to be
possessed. It is a curse to want to possess and be possessed,
a curse to own. You can seek to become the color of any of these
towns with their home teams, but the shade will be unbecoming
and oppressive. You will see!

I try hard not to want but keep gazing at the painting, as if I
had perspective or could learn it. My eyes are connected to my
heart with its longing to nest; I can’t help but let it flutter its
wings and woo my eyes. How foolish. I keep traveling to the
towns, all the same the cursed towns with their statutes and
stones. None is the town I seek.

Hydrogen Jukebox This Thursday 12/22 -- come read with the band!

Dear Friends;

Please come to this special Christmas edition of Hydrogen Jukebox, hosted by the inimitable Brant Lyon. I am featuring, backed by the Ne'erdowells poemusic band. THERE IS AN OPEN MIKE, so bring your work.

Deets:
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street (off Bleecker Street)
6:00 - 8:00 pm (sign-up for open 5:45 p.m.)
$7 cover includes house drink

Occupy Poetry on the December 12 Day of Action

Please join me at Su Polo's iconic open mike at the Nightingale Lounge, where I will be featuring with George Spencer on December 12 to support the Occupy Day of Action.
Political poetry is welcome, as is anything you choose to read or sing.

$10 cover and 1 drink minimum. 3-5 minute open mike; sign-up at 6:30 p.m.

Nightingale Lounge
213 Second Avenue
(NW Corner of 13th St. & 2nd Ave.)
NYC 10003

Poets Respond to Jung's Red Book

Cornelia Street Cafe, October 15, 2011. 6 p.m. Writers Respond to Carl Jung’s The Red Book (Liber Novus) Introduction by Michael Marsman. Joel Allegretti, Charlie Guzman, Dean Kostos, Patty Oliver-Smith, Kristin Prevallet, Lynn Shapiro, Larissa Shmailo, Tod Thilleman & Michael T. Young

Compass Award entry--I am shortlisted!

I am very pleased to have been shortlisted for the Compass Award, an international competition of translators, for my translation of Nikolai Gumilev's acrostic on the name of his wife, Anna Akhmatova. Here is the Russian and my translation.

Acrostic

Addis Ababa, city of roses.
Near the bank of transparent streams,
No earthly devas brought you here,
A diamond, amidst gloomy gorges.

Armidin garden … There a pilgrim
Keeps his oath of obscure love
(Mind, we all bow before him),
And the roses cloy, the roses red.

There, full of deceit and venom,
Ogles some gaze into the soul,
Via forests of tall sycamores,
And alleyways of dusky planes.

Акростих

Аддис-Абеба, город роз.
На берегуручьёв прозрачных,
Небесныйдив тебя принес,
Алмазной,средь ущелий мрачных.

Армидинсад… Там пилигрим
Хранитобет любви неясной
(Мы всесклоняемся пред ним),
А розыдушны, розы красны.

Тамсмотрит в душу чей-то взор,
Отравыполный и обманов,
В садахвысоких сикомор,
Аллеяхсумрачных платанов.

Persian Version of Dancing with the Devil

My poem, "Dancing with the Devil," has been translated into Farsi by Mohammad Mostaghimi (Rahi). This is now the fourth of my poems to be translated into the Persian, and to appear in Iran. Poetry does not require preconditions, even if diplomacy does. Thank you, Rahi! Mamnoon!!!!


Dancing with the Devil

They say that if you flirt with death
You’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind---the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.


Persian version of the poem: dance with the devil

Translator: Mohammad Mostaghimi (rahi)


لاریسا شمایلو

رقص با شیطان

شنیده‌ام اگر با مرگ برقصی

تو را به جاودانگی می‌برد

نه

به گمان من

عاشقانه رقصیدن

همراه با یک موسیقی شگرف

با او

مرا به آن سو

پرتاب می‌کند



گزاشتار: محمد مستقیمی-راهی

My new e-chap, FIB SEQUENCE, FREE!

I am not your insect

Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopèdes twitch like a chorus for a fatal Sharon Stone, delight in ces mouvements qui déplace les lignes, in the motion, the quiver, the catch, le mort. Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: brilliant, feminine, entirely without fear. Like my mother, I watch and pray for prey—that it be there, that it give gore, that I feel it die, that there be more.

Winedark Sea

In the east, in the eastern rising lands, a tide, westering, earthdrawn, rising, the morning sun bloodied in its wake. She drags, pulls, shifts, hauls, trascines her hydraulic load. Tides born of tides, moondrawn, myriadheaded, within her, within her blood, oinopa ponton: the winedark sea. A wet sign calls her hour, bids the earth-shaken fallen rise, bids the wet-dirt wounded rise, bids the blooddimmed peoples rise, as she radiates out, out, out, forever from her bed. The wet sign calls her hour, bids all to rise from childbed, bridebed, deathbed, rise. He comes, the pale salt vampire, in clouds and tears, and claws, battle-led, draws, battle-red, mouth-to-mouth, limb-to-limb, skin-to-skin. There. Here.

Persian version of "Oscillation"

I am very pleased to have another poem translated by Iranian poet Rahi (Mohamad Mostaghimi). The English text is below, and you can view the Persian at Rahi's blog at http://dish-sepid.blogfa.com/post-106.aspx. I wish I knew how to say "thank you" in Farsi.


Oscillation

Cellular grandfather, pity me: once it was understood

how things were done, how the boiling ferns invited the

glaciers to come, how the dinosaurs asked to die. Os-

cillation: The world was born in swing and sway, and I,

fasting slowly, am not random nor mad, but large, and

more precise than you. My blood makes air and cells; my

moon subtends the sky; my tides squeeze life out of rock.

All my night journeys find a sun; I leave orchards and o-

lives behind

Aging (Fibonacci Sequence: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89)

Dear Reader: If Fn is the term of the sequence, then F=0 if n=O, F=1 if n=1, and F=Fn-1 + Fn-2 if N is greater than 0. Now age.

none

1(one)

1(ego)

two (I)

I 2 threeeeeeeeee

5 school, ruled 2 three

hate math 8/5 parents split divisor 3 & me

bad teen luck black eight-in-hole no triskaidekaphobe call five ringtones call.

now lucky legal drink I’m old-gold-rolled ready-to-hold I stick on 13 so play vingt-et-un tonight with me.

still 13 in the soul getting old with a balding working luck. 34 is dirty floor & still behind, & the legal drink now a double, hit me hit me & no! not prime.

Fivefive, now fivefive, finally loving the mother/other/the 21-still-angry child & forgiving the serious careerist, so knowing, so sure, so 34. Take our bald inner luck as it comes, let’s leave the dirty floor alone (why are these aches okay ,why are these losses, these losses, so possible to endure?) Five years plus ½ century, decoding while eroding, ofivefive.

89 am I 8 or 9? The young ones are 34, my children 55. There are 13 pills in the morning, 13 pills at night. But what, exactly what might happen next? A working soul and another season’s turn, what else did I ever have? This word is greater than my numbers, the poésie of my self. I take the garbage out and set it on the street with joy. Tell me your secrets: I am the one who truly wants to know. Lemniscate, I move toward ∞ today.

Madwoman Exercises a Civil Right

Madwoman Exercises a Civil Right 1996

(Still true today? Up to you.)

It isn’t like other illnesses, people say. True. People who are blind can write off their readers and dressers, the people and things they need to get to work are tax-deductible. Can you imagine a similar right for mentally ill people, someone to help them - probably on a temporary basis - to get to work? I can. My question is: can you?

The friends and loved ones of deaf people have installed TTD lines on every major phone system in the nation, have founded a college, have sat in courtrooms for years to get their significant deaf others jobs. Can you imagine a college for us?

It might be cheaper to send ambulettes to the homes of the orthopedically disabled than to design and operate special chair lift buses. But that would be too socially isolating, would make them feel different. So there are chair-lifts on every New York City bus and passengers don’t mind giving up a seat or waiting as the driver helps them aboard.

How many blind and deaf people are there? It doesn’t matter - we put Braille in the elevators and the ATMS, and volume control on pay phones because they are worth it. How many people use chairs? Again, it doesn’t matter - every new building in the nation must have wheelchair access and a big bathroom stall. How much does that cost? It doesn’t matter. It’s important.

The mentally ill are making progress. Pete Domenici, who has a mentally ill daughter, discovered his insurance isn’t paying her bills. Insurance for mental illness caps at about $10,000 a year in most states; cardiac illness, by contrast, caps at about $1,000,0000. Insurance parity has carried in a few states but is far from commom.

Seeing a loved one suffering from a “physical illness” is stressful, but not a moral failing on the part of the sufferer. It is distressing to see someone seize or throw-up, but usually not reason to avoid them afterwards. It is wrong to abandon a friend with AIDS dementia, a wife with cancer (it is done, but frowned upon). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness stills warns practitioners to carefully distinguish between Axis I diagnoses and organic brain disease. “Oh, she was angry and irritable because she had a brain tumor.” We understand, it’s all right. After all, anyone could get a brain tumor, and as the AIDS educators have worked so hard to point out, anybody could get AIDS. Anybody - even Superman - could wind up in a chair

But mental illness is different. It’s not like other illnesses: the basic norms of social conduct and communication are violated. It is unpredictable, hard to take. And there is always the suspicion, even among the most enlightened, that “they” bring it on themselves. 80 percent of Americans, according to a recent survey, don’t believe mental illness exists. Thomas Szasz (M.D) calls it bad interpersonal game playing, an issue of morals, bad habits, cowardice, not the realm of a scientist but of a priest. We are possessed by the devil, undisciplined, over-react to stress, practicing learned helplessness. It’s considered a triumph that today, probably, the majority of direct-care mental health workers, who undergo little or no training for their work, don’t think their mentally ill clients are David Berkowitz.

We are difficult patients, the mental health field keeps telling us, frustrating and difficult. Recovery is slow, rare. On top of our neurobiological disorders, the reality of which some professionals have come to accept, there are the behaviors, probably common to most people under stress and in pain, but most frequently diagnosed as part of treatment for the mentally ill, and with which we are often permanently labeled: arrested development, self-destructive, manipulative-exploitative, masochistic, and just plain selfish. With this baggage, until recently, only a few religious orders wanted anything to do with us at all. It takes very special people to work with the mentally ill, we are told. The average person is comforted by that thought as he stops seeing and calling a mentally ill friend, feeling far less guilt than he would avoiding a friend with a “physical illness."

Even the recovering mentally ill are somehow too disturbing to be around, and tolerated only if they never mention their illness and treatment. Our leadership, our strongest potential spokespeople, the functioning mentally ill, the recovering mentally ill who work and have families and look “normal,” who could be a bridge for us to the public at large, are counseled by doctors and friends not to mention the fact of their illness. It’s often good advice. Like gay people of past decades, the risks of coming out are too high - shunning, lost promotions (remember Thomas Eagleton?), the social burden on children. So these hidden mentally ill, who, under severe handicap, have fought serious, often devastating illness to raise families, hold jobs, and contribute to society, are silent. What is the cost of this silence?

When a person who is blind or in a wheelchair eschews disability payments and comes to work every day, we admire them. One of the finest things about Americans is our admiration of people who overcome obstacles. Why is this admiration denied mentally ill people?

A few years ago, a group of visually impaired people and their loved ones picketed a TV station because one of their sitcoms showed a blind man in a store gleefully breaking property as he unsuccessfully navigated the aisles with his cane. That kind of depiction isolates us, said the protesters, makes people think we can’t live and work in society. The salient point here is not the first amendment issues. It is the firm conviction that visually impaired people deserve the right to live and work in society. For the mentally ill, the jury is still out.

Mentally ill people are often difficult, there is no doubt on that score. Sick people tend to be difficult. Being ridiculed and shamed for having an illness makes it worse. And of course the medical bills, only fully covered if you enter the disability system, don’t help. Accomodations for the mentally ill, say the ADA experts, are difficult. Let’s face it, recent court rulings have said, if you are sick enough to need accommodations, you are probably too sick too work. Yet the thousands, possibly millions of mentally ill employees who have learned to accommodate themselves, who have successfully hidden their illnesses behind more accepted reasons for occasional sick leave, prove this wrong (but try asking about psychiatric coverage on a job interview).

There are millions of us, everywhere. We sit next to you at the office and listen to you joke about crazy people; if we were to make such jokes about your diabetes, you would be appalled.

We may see insurance parity in our lifetime. The time may come when a mentally ill person might get tax write-offs for services he or she needs to successfully work, but I doubt it ( Special transportation? A dresser? Are you crazy? Well, yes...). Will we ever see an America that says - maybe, just maybe, this could happen to me? As long as our illness is a matter of bad habits, I don’t think so. As long as our symptoms, expressed behaviorally, are viewed as iconic and communicative - probably not.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that people under stress can and do “break down” that makes us so frightening. Perhaps it is the very ubiquity of our illness, our common human susceptibility to emotional pain makes people shun the mentally ill - after all, unlike cancer, it truly may be catching.

As I am writing, hundreds of cyclists are returning to New York from a Boston AIDS cyclathon. Princess Diana is being mourned - the television shows her embracing AIDS babies, urging others to be unafraid of them, teaching the public that these children and all people with HIV need and deserve human contact and love. Perhaps the mentally ill, including those denied jobs and apartments and left homeless, will one day merit a royal hug too. In the interim, equal medical coverage and the right not to hide our disability in the work place and society at large will help.

We, the mentally ill, may not be that different from you , with our mutant genes and imbalanced neurochemistries and our illnesses that mimic the temporary disorders of thought and emotion that other people experience. We - some twenty to forty million Americans - drink grape soda, buy television sets, select HMOs, and corporate America might wake up to that fact and profit by it. If we are not different, then like any of you, we need human contact - the formal and informal social networks that keep all people sane, and without which any human being regresses. We simply are looking for the Braille in the elevator or a door handle we can reach to show we are welcome.