Poetry Friday - Denis Johnson

I am reading Denis Johnson's book of short stories entitled Jesus' Son.

There are a few things I need to get off my chest about this:

When I see this author's first name spelled like this, without the second "n", I think "penis". And I don't think I'm the only one who does.

I am reading this book on my friend Lance's endorsement. I will bet you that Lance hasn't read anything less serious than Raymond Carver since he was in 8th grade. I've been suggesting books for his 8 year old daughter and I have a feeling that he takes something like Bailey School Kids off the shelf and regards it laying in his hand with a kind of fascinated horror.

I recently had to look up the use of the apostrophe after "s." Plural nouns ending in "s" get an apostrophe only, while proper nouns ending in "s" (like James) get an apostrophe-s. Our Mr. Jesus is the only exception. I suppose it's because He's at one with the infinite.

I was reading this book while I was waiting to get the excess pink dye rinsed out of my hair last week, and the shampoo girl got positively evangelical when she saw it. Half my age, and totally reading what I read when I was twenty. I recommended Nick Cave's novel to her.

Mr. Johnson's got a collection of poetry entitled The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, which is also the title of a work of art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was made in a garage by a janitor out of tinfoil and cardboard.

Reading this poem, which was performed at the Dia Center's Readings in Contemporary Poetry series, you just have to wonder: just how much of this clear-eyed falling-down inebriated maudlin sentimentality, this filthy bullshit moonshine that is offered up to us by Don DeLillo and Tom Waits and Bukowski and Frank Miller and Leonard Cohen - how much of it can the world weigh up under?

Just a little more?

'Cause I'll read it.


OUR SADNESS

There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:
a sadness that waits at the end of the street,
a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness
and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,
it’s late, it’s sadness.

And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:
they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe--
and Ruthe I understand has been turned
into a sadness...

And when it comes time
for all of humanity to witness what it’s done
and every television is trained on the first people to see God and
they say
Houston,
we have ignition,
they won’t have ignition.

They’ll have a music of wet streets
and lonely bars where piano notes
follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.
They’ll have sadness.
They’ll have
sadness, sadness, sadness.

© 1999 Denis Johnson

Poetry Friday is hosted today at a wrung sponge.

Poetry Friday - Spiders

Poetry Friday is today hosted by Mentor Texts and more.




Spiders
by Delmore Schwartz, circa 1959

Is the spider a monster in miniature?
His web is a cruel stair, to be sure,
Designed artfully, cunningly placed,
A delicate trap, carefully spun
To bind the fly (innocent or unaware)
In a net as strong as a chain or a gun.

There are far more spiders than the man in the street
supposes
And the philosopher-king imagines, let alone knows!
There are six hundred kinds of spiders and each one
Differs in kind and in unkindness.
In variety of behavior spiders are unrivalled:
The fat garden spider sits motionless, amidst or at the heart
Of the orb of its web: other kinds run,
Scuttling across the floor, falling into bathtubs,
Trapped in the path of its own wrath, by overconfidence
drowned and undone.

Other kinds—more and more kinds under the stars and
the sun—
Are carnivores: all are relentless, ruthless
Enemies of insects. Their methods of getting food
Are unconventional, numerous, various and sometimes
hilarious:
Some spiders spin webs as beautiful
As Japanese drawings, intricate as clocks, strong as rocks:
Others construct traps which consist only
Of two sticky and tricky threads. Yet this ambush is enough
To bind and chain a crawling ant for long
enough:
The famished spider feels the vibration
Which transforms patience into sensation and satiation.
The handsome wolf spider moves suddenly freely and relies
Upon lightning suddenness, stealth and surprise,
Possessing accurate eyes, pouncing upon his victim with the
speed of surmise.

Courtship is dangerous: there are just as many elaborate
and endless techniques and varieties
As characterize the wooing of more analytic, more
introspective beings: Sometimes the male
Arrives with the gift of a freshly caught fly.
Sometimes he ties down the female, when she is frail,
With deft strokes and quick maneuvres and threads of silk:
But courtship and wooing, whatever their form, are
informed
By extreme caution, prudence, and calculation,
For the female spider, lazier and fiercer than the male
suitor,
May make a meal of him if she does not feel in the same
mood, or if her appetite
Consumes her far more than the revelation of love’s
consummation.
Here among spiders, as in the higher forms of nature,
The male runs a terrifying risk when he goes seeking for
the bounty of beautiful Alma Magna Mater:
Yet clearly and truly he must seek and find his mate and
match like every other living creature!

Poetry Friday - Bungal-Ode

Poetry Friday hosted today at Literary Safari.

This extraordinary ditty, transcribed below in its entirety, was sent to my husband by a colleague. Our neighborhood is lousy with what some people call bungalows and other people call four-squares. We live in one, built in 1922 and still going strong. I love our house, but I'm at a loss when faced with this thing:

Bungal-Ode

There's a jingle in the jungle
'Neath the juniper and pine,
They are mangling the tangle
Of the underbrush and vine,
And my blood is all a-tingle
At the sound of blow on blow,
As I count each single shingle
On my bosky bungalow

There's a jingle in the jungle,
I am counting every nail,
And my mind is bungaloaded,
Bungaloping down a trail;
And I dream of every ingle
Where I angle at my ease,
Naught to set my nerves a-jingle
I may bungle all I please.

For I oft get bungalonely
In the mingled human drove,
And I long for bungaloafing
In some bungalotus grove,
In a cooling bung'location
Where no troubling trails intrude,
'Neath some bungalowly rooftree
In east bungalongitude.

Oh, I think with bungaloathing
Of the strangling social swim,
Where they wrangle after bangles
Or for some new-fangled whim;
And I know by bungalogic
That is all my bungalown
That a little bungalotion
Mendeth every mortal moan!

Oh, a man that's bungalonging
For the dingle and the loam
Is a very bungalobster
If he dangles on at home.
Catch the bungalocomotive;
If you cannot face the fee,
Why, a bungaloan'll do it --
You can borrow it from me!

Burges Johnson
Good Housekeeping (February 1909)

Burges Johnson (1877-1963) was an author, humorist and educator. He had poems and stories published in Harper's, TIME, and the Century, among others, and his book Bashful Ballads is available in Google Books - if you just can't get enough of the relentless meter, archaic nouns (dingle!) and grotesque portmanteau neologisms.

Poetry Friday - found poem

Poetry Friday is aggregated at Writing and Ruminating this week.

Dear Fellow Namers:

Can you believe 25 years has passed?
Do you remember?

"The Triple Threat"
"Junior Ring Mass"
"Football Parties"
"Mr. Wilks's Brownies"
"Opus"
"Jug"
"Prom"
"Sharing a Locker"

Aren't you curious to see how 25 years "Along the Road"
has treated us all?

Wouldn't you like to reminisce about our "Glory Days,"
rekindle old friendships,
and create new ones?

Please take the time to fill out the enclosed survey card.

Poetry Friday - Haiku for my family edition

hosted this week by whimsy

Watching my little boy eat crackers at Red Canoe
How finely he is
put together; tiny bones
surmounted by skin.

On my husband's birthday (a collaborative work)
Give him what he wants:
a six-pack and Matt Damon
movies (you pervert).

After school, after after-care, after playing, after more playing - a six year old's evening
Sweaty and wild-eyed,
you are so ready for bed.
Fumes rise off your head.

Poetry Friday: A helpful alphabet of friendly objects

I came across this little book while weeding the Easy Nonfiction last week and thought to myself:
"Updike?"

John Updike is of course a well-known and heavily honored American novelist, critic, poet, etc. specializing in the mundane lives of suburban American middle-class Protestant men. I confess to not having much interest in Updike's novels (having tried to avoid suburban American middle-class men pretty much right up until I married one), the exception being the sort of trashy Witches of Eastwick, which I read in high school and portions of which I still remember.

He has never struck me as a particularly kid-loving type, all that infidelity and tweed, I guess. But the title alone: "A helpful alphabet of friendly objects," with its double dose of supportive adjectives, encouraged me to peer inside.

Written in 1995, A helpful alphabet of friendly objects is a collection of 26 short poems by John Updike, illustrated with photographs by Updike's son, David. Many of the pictures are of Updike's grandkids and their cousins. Even if it were nothing more than a short little album of this multicultural bohemian family, their pets and rugs and toys, the book would elicit a smile. But I read it out loud to Mr. Four this afternoon, and even as I enjoyed the Buckaroo Banzai philosophy of:

mirror
Who's that in there?
He peeks, he grins,
his bright-eyed stare
(or hers) begins
to remind you of
that somebody who
is everywhere
where you are too.

Mr Four laughed out loud at:

rabbit
At evening
when the grass is dewy
out hops the rabbit,
feeling chewy.

Plus, on the page for S ("shoes and socks"), Four noticed the similarity between the kid's Hanna Anderssen striped socks and the Hanna Anderssen striped t-shirt he calls his "cold running shirt." There are lots of little cultural signifiers like that in these photos.

My library's copy of this book, shelved as it is in the unappreciated outer reaches of E 811, has circulated maybe a total of ten times in 12 years. The book itself is out of print. But I would encourage anyone to pick it up if you ever come across it. John Updike's kid poetry isn't flashy, and some of it is a little anachronistic, but it is pleasing, and clever, and we liked it.

hubcaps
Along the curb you see them,
round and shiny; some
show you you, reflected,
stretched sideways like gum.

Fried-ku

It's just coincidence that I composed (almost wrote composted - my mind must be rotting usefully) a haiku today. I am not participating in Poetry Friday. I am against poetry. Except Bukowski parodies.

for Jaime, who runs:

Agh pain sweat cars yech
Running in New York City
Plus stepping in gum

in anticipation of our trip to the PNW:

Packing for four
Ass-hot here, it's sixty there
I can't find our pants

for Bob:

At the Zappa show:
Why don't I remember this?
'Cause I spent college drunk?