The End of Writing/Things I forgot I Wrote

The End of Writing/Things I forgot I Wrote

I dream again about my father           He is eating grass and slurping muddy water

He asks me to chain him to a tree outside of the bank and to sell passersby the opportunity to
have their pictures taken with him

The light comes in from a certain angle and she sees a crumbling building in her lover’s hair

Someone has to pay the rent, he says, as he poses with a family of tourists

Your fingers are too big for the world, she says. He can’t sleep for the rest of the night

The doctor examines my ears and tells me there are “crumbs” in them or “crusts” or “thick walls” and this is I why I can’t breathe clearly

Some days I forget what simple things taste like: cheese, donuts, apples

Doctor says there are whole worlds inside my ear and slaps me on the back as if to congratulate me

I unfold a note and tack it to my wall: don’t forget to call your mother

According to the FBI, Otto Plath, a biologist and professor, and father of Sylvia Plath, was detained for German allegiances

I find a 200-page novel in some old notebooks, all that’s left is a four-page poem

In 1975 Roque Dalton was executed by comrades from his own revolutionary group. They accused him of being a spy for the CIA and Cuba

“He heiled Hitler,” wrote Plath in her diaries in 1958, “in the privacy of his home”

I have no recollection of writing a novel about Julius’s marriage to Gretchen

On a road trip through Europe in 1935 with her Jewish husband, Virginia Woolf writes in her diary: it is almost now settled that we shall drive through Holland, concealing Leonard’s nose.

As a wedding gift, Julius’s father gives them a doll that looks just like Julius when he was a young child

They have an argument about the future which in reality is an argument about the present

The father made the doll using Julius’s actual hair and teeth he had saved from his childhood

Is it better to learn something you already know but did not know you knew or to learn something new you did not know you did not know

He wants to have babies but she only wants to have Apple products

Side face, it was colossal; it stood out like an elephant's trunk with its florid curves and scrolls. Writes Leonard Woolf about the nose of a poorly dressed Jewish cemetery keeper in his short story “Three Jews”

In a fit of rage Julius tells Gretchen to throw the doll out (all my life I’ve wanted to forget myself!)

The Catalan television interviewer who looks like Princess Diana wants to know how many of his unpublished books Juan Rulfo has destroyed

Gretchen won’t throw the doll away. She is afraid disaster will befall their home if the doll ends up in the garbage

The poet thanks the general by reciting a series of experimental verses he has written in honor of the military junta

Everything had been eaten in this country, says the poet about life under the previous regime, and all that was left were crumbs

The general kisses the poet’s forehead and asks him to recite the one about the little country that aims a bomb at a bigger country who aims their bomb back at the little country and then
a bomb goes off and hundreds and thousands of people die and those who survive live in refugee camps and crawl across borders and convert to new religions and theorists write essays about nationalistic fervor and diasporic adaptation as a guy straps a bomb to his chest at a CVS in San Francisco and demands impossible things from the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO, Disney World, Hollywood, etc..

According to the latest numbers, poetry is less popular than jazz. It’s less popular than dance, and only about half as popular as knitting.

John Barr, Wall Street executive, author of six collections of poems, and president of the Poetry Foundation, thinks that poetry would be more entertaining if poets would take more safaris, go marlin fishing or run with the bulls.

I have no recollection of writing a poem called “In the Commune of the Foreclosed Poets”

The human mind is a marketplace, says Barr, especially when it comes to selecting one’s entertainment…art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time

I have no recollection of writing a children’s story about a lonely old man who wears flannel pajamas

Betrayed by a double agent, in 1942 Samuel Beckett fled Paris and hid in barns, sheds, trees, haystacks and ditches before finally arriving in Rousillon, a village of red clay hills in unoccupied southern France

One morning, the old man says to himself: soon I will die, but before I die I must have some adventures and make some friends

Boy scout stuff, Beckett calls it, when he receives the Croix de Guerre for his work in the resistance

Since safaris and running with the bulls are out of the question, the old man decides he has to take the bus somewhere new every day and one afternoon he goes to the zoo

When Nazi patrols came through Roussillon, Beckett hid for days at a time in fields and woods

At first the old man hates the zoo

Two, says Rulfo. There were two… And why did you destroy them, asks the Catalan interviewer. Because they were bad. They were very bad

The animals, the cats and primates in particular, scare him

The animals make the old man nervous and in his mind’s eye he sees himself being chased by them and then falling into a never ending hole near the homes of the giraffes and lions

Through bravery and perseverance, however, the old man forces himself to overcome his fear

Robert Frost, the first poet invited to a presidential inauguration, recited from memory “The Gift Outright,” when the glare of the sun prevented him from reading “Dedication,” a poem he had written especially for the occasion

He goes to see the cats and primates every day and over time he gets more and more comfortable with and even begins to feel affection for the animals.

I mean the great four, writes Robert Frost in the poem he could not read at the presidential inauguration because of the brightness of the sun. Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison/So much they saw as consecrated seers/They must have seen ahead what not appears,/They would bring empires down about our ears/And by the example of our Declaration/Make everybody want to be a nation

One night the old man has a premonition

Consecrated Seers or Empire Ears: Situational Ethics and the Loneliness of Genocide

He rushes out of the house in his pajamas and gets on the bus

And the this and the that, writes César Vallejo. And the this and the this and the that and the that and the that

When he gets to the zoo, he sees it is on fire

It’s a difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics, writes Dana Gioa in Can Poetry Matter? Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse

Everywhere animals and zookeepers are scurrying wildly, cotton candy and bales of hay are blazing, children and parents screaming

Poems are visible right now, says Jane Hirshfield in a 2017 New York Times article about the sudden resurgence of political poetry in UnitedStatesian letters. Which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren’t so necessary,

The man goes to the area in the zoo with his favorite animals: the jaguars and the chimpanzees

When poetry is a backwater it means times are O.K. When times are dire, says Hirshfield, that’s exactly when poetry is needed

The animals are his friends, they run to him when he arrives and they embrace, though he makes it clear that he is only able to take one of each species with him and he must carefully choose which beasts he will save

How time flies, writes Kafka in his diaries, another ten days and I have achieved nothing.

The old man and a lucky chimp hop on a jaguar’s back and they ride through the infernal wreckage to the bus stop.

The end of writing, writes Kafka. When will it take me up again

The two animals go home with him on the bus, and the old man lets them stay in his guest room

I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, writes Julio Cortazar of the axolotls in the Paris zoo.

While the animals are sleeping, he watches them, distantly at first though each night his gaze becomes more and more focused.

In that instant, I felt a muted pain; perhaps they were seeing me, attracting my strength to penetrate into the impenetrable breath of their lives

Each night he stares at them more and more intensely and eventually he comes to identify with them so deeply that he becomes the animals.

I only write when I want to, says Clarice Lispector in her only televised interview

The old man has finally had a deep and fulfilling friendship and now he can die, which in his case means he will turn into the jaguar or the chimpanzee or maybe both

I’m an amateur, says Lispector, and insist on staying that way. A professional has a personal commitment to writing. Or a commitment to someone else to write. As for me… I insist on not being a professional.

His physical body will drop to the ground and he will stop breathing.

Can’t remember writing the sentence: the economist poets take each other prisoner in sexual rituals and write conceptual poems with vibrators on their legs and thighs

His soul, however, will fuse with the soul of the chimp or the jaguar and in his death he will live a long and happy life in the zoos and jungles of the Americas

He moans in iambic pentameter