. . . In which the poet recalls one term’s beginnings and proposes a rehabilitation.
What is understood as confessional poetry today does not have much in common with the particular triumphs of its original practitioners.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Dear Mary (if that is your name),
I bet you’ll be pretty surprised to hear from me. It really is me, by the way,
although I have to confess at the moment that not only can I not seem to keep
your name straight in my head, Laura? Susie? Odile? but I seem to have forgotten
my own name. I plan to keep trying different combinations, Joe loves Lola, Willy
loves Suki, Henry loves you, sweetie, Georgia?, honeypie, darling. Do any of these seem right to you?
Two Shops Dealing in Tie-Dye Fabrics
In a town famous long ago
for its field of irises and its bridge
with seven sections (like a poem!),
and an annual horse market,
Bells in the Endtime of Gyurmey Tsultrim
The bowl made from a tobacco-yellow skull
And the blood of a yearling ox
With seeds of quince floating in it.
Tremendous Vehicles
Mama wants to see something else but you know how blood is, tra-la-la, Mama’s driving us to the country ’cause she thinks we need some staid time, tra-la-la, driving by the rural slaughterhouse, tra-la-la. I’m missing the concrete where I wrote: I love me some concrete; miss the teasing traffic lights: go ahead, stop; tight fit of houses, tessellated apartments, looking in Sra. Guzman’s rooms to tell time from her closer clock.
6:27
When I get time to play, it’s gonna be just you, me, and the Department of Beer.
Amend that: all of the above, all of the above and more beer, and all of the above and the State of Alaska.
Damn right I don’t rightly know what I’m capable of alone and left to my “devices.”
7:13
My name is Shang – or Winter.
So this is peace.
You think, and magically . . . a strawberry appears!
Flotsam vs. the Ulcer Diet
When I began to write, my ideas about narrative were pretty nonexistent. I tried to write prose that was consonant with the work of writers I admired and, later on, tried to extend their techniques when I could. It wasn’t until my first novel was shuttling from trade publisher to trade publisher and later, when the published book was eventually reviewed, that I found out narrative was supposed to be something.
Cancer
The cancer appeared in my living room sometime between eleven and three on a Thursday. I am not sure exactly when, because I suffer from bouts of migraine, and sometimes I miss things, or see things that aren’t there, flashing shapes like the blades of warrior goddesses, the vanes of transcendental windmills. A little airborne sprig could go unnoticed some while.
The Rose of the Name
The editors asked me to write an essay explaining the evolution of Language poetry. I don’t know how to. I offer instead theory, history, an apology, a reading, a quotation, and a reading list: the usual suspects.
