A la lengua española (al estilo de Kenneth Koch)

 

La primera vez que te escuché

Estaba sentado frente a la tele

Y apareció la marioneta de un conde

Para decirme uno dos tres cuatro

En el acento de un vampiro

De las montañas de Rumania

Me gustaba cómo sonaban los números

Eran más abiertos y cálidos que los de inglés

Como si brillaran con la luz de 1000 naranjos

(Pues eso es lo que yo sentía por lo menos)

Entonces tú me apareciste de nuevo

Fue en los dibujos animados de sábado por la mañana

"Arriba arriba ándale" decía Speedy

Que siempre era más listo que el gato lento

(Ni sabía por cierto que él hablaba en ti - solo lo sospechaba)

Comprendí que te quería cuando entré en la high school

Señor Wilkinson nos enseñó del libro

Churros y Chocolate

Nunca nos explicó lo que era un churro

Yo sólo sabía que era muy dulce

No entendí por qué se comería

Con otra cosa dulce y me sentía mareado

Sólo al imaginarlo

Con Señor Wilkinson hablaba en ti

Y me dejaste irme de mí por un rato

Estaba agradecido

Te conocí mejor cuando me llegaste dentro de una canción

Qué emoción escucharte así

En el coro de "Spanish Bombs"

Joe Strummer cantó "Oh my corazón"

(Bueno cantó en el Spanglish pero yo no sabía eso)

Descubrí que podía memorizar los cambios que tú haces

Según las reglas de tus conjugaciones

Esto podía hacer porque me gustabas tanto

Un otro Yo me estaba creciendo a través de ti

Un Yo que necesitaba tanto en esos días

Pues la verdad es hoy también

En la universidad te encontré un poco difícil

No creo que estuviera preparado para leer

Al maestro Cervantes en ti

Ni a Gabriel con su vocabulario Macondero tan vasto

Después ni te vi ni te escuché ni te hablé

Durante años hasta llegar a Chicago

En esta ciudad estás por todos lados

Qué bendición

Podía perderme de nuevo en ti

Te leía en los periódicos sentado en un café

En la Avenida Michigan

Te grabé en una casete

El programa de Doctora Isabel

Todavía recuerdo el nombre

Al escucharlo diez veces te entendí mejor

Treinta años después de conocerte de verdad

En el salón de clase del señor Wilkinson

Viví contigo por tres años

Estudiándote en la universidad de nuevo

No tan perdido esta vez

Qué mundo bonito

Leerte en la poesía

En la ficción

Escucharte en la música

Estudié los poemas de Nicolás Guillén

Hice una presentación en ti hablando de él

Cómo sus versos se conectan con los

De nuestro Langston Hughes

Y no te hablaba con el acento de vampiro

Sino mi acento chicagoano americano

(Como profesor de ESL, he utilizado el poema en segunda persona de Kenneth Koch "A la lengua italiana" como una forma de hacer que los estudiantes escriban sobre su experiencia personal con el idioma inglés. Hice algo parecido con el español. El poema está escrito en mi segundo idioma; la idea es que un poema así sea un mensaje de amor o ambivalencia o cualquier cosa para un lenguaje que uno usa; no es necesario que sea lingüísticamente perfecto, aunque es bueno intentarlo siempre... y acepto cualquiera sugerencia de mis amigos hispanohablantes). -- DH

The Great Challenge of the Artist Is to Live

The great challenge of the artist is to live - to live and not succumb to madness, self-destruction and early death. This is because gifts of creativity, free-sparking imagination and stampeding idea flow are so often coupled with the internal challenges of emotional instability and vulnerability, mania and despair. I believe this duality can be managed and self-annihilation can be avoided for the artist. However, it is a formidable task and it is not often spoken about frankly and with practical insight as to how it may be done.

Most of the gifts of the artist are irrelevant to the market and the market serves as a kind of mysterious god of awe and reverence in our society. Consequently, practical advice for how to live and not die as an artist is often in short supply - we're just not important enough. We are also rightly seen as threats to the established miserabilist order. And so we die young. We are overcome by the other, tumultuous side of the artistic gift.

But it does not have to be this way. When we recognize that creativity, by its very nature, contains seeds of destruction, we can learn to be prepared for the storms. We can develop habits and skills to limit the duration, frequency and intensity of them. We can be practical. We can live guided by notions of self-respect and self-love, not the self-denigration or romanticized self-destruction so often proffered to us.

My Mental Afflictions

The first one I remember was thinking too much About the same thing

Like an Etch-a-Sketch drawing

Made by ghost hands

Again and again

The same picture

I could not arrest the hands

It became constant

I couldn't work, make coffee, eat, think

The doctor said try these pills

And they worked! The ghost hands

Withdrew, gave me some peace

12 years on, my back went out

I didn't know what to do

I couldn't sit or sleep, couldn't bike

I tried an herbal tincture

A spark flashed and blossomed in my brain

A bad mix with the pills from the doctor

All became an evil Tim Burton film

No whimsy, no fun, only darkness

Body wired, mind unfamiliar

This time, too much serotonin, ironic

Came out of it still shaky

Took an allergy med

Supposed to relax me, it happened again

The evil Tim Burton film, nighttime roller coasters

Careening into fire on a video tape loop

Now I was in the soup

My doctor went back into research

The new guy wouldn't answer calls

12 years on Lexapro

I stopped taking it

Don't ever do this

But what did I know?

Everything was in collapse

It was entropy in my skull

The Etch-a-Sketch ghost hands were back

And would not stop

I couldn't smile or laugh

Feel a happy thought

I became weakness, a broken thing

Maybe this was it, I thought

All those times, teaching kids guitar

Riding bikes over a bridge in Hilton Head

Writing a banjo score

(And I didn't even play banjo)

Sitting in the backyard together

Admiring the bamboo

So green and powerful in Baltimore

Was that all gone?

Weeks in bed listening

To BBC history shows

Everything else too much

Went to a psych ward

Before my 50th birthday

They tried different things

Nothing worked for weeks

Then there was movement

In the fossilized circuitry

I asked the doctor about

A book she was reading

She said that was new

Me asking questions

I watched the NBA playoffs on the hallway TV

With a new friend

(What was his name? A kind person)

Something dead in me was dislodging

Breaking apart, I went home

From Johns Hopkins

(Covered by Medicaid, good timing)

Found I wasn't dissolved by panic on the bus ride

I met up with Mike

We listened to ZZ Top in the 7-Eleven parking lot

We went to a park and played frisbee

I've been getting better ever since

But still have a ways to go

- DH, 12/21

(photo taken in Lincoln Park, Chicago, while emerging out of the illness, 2018)

Poem-Songs

There is perhaps no greater untruth said about poetry than the one that declares - nobody likes poetry anymore. On the contrary, people like poetry more than any other form of language and they like it as much as they ever have. In contemporary mass society, this means song lyrics. Song lyrics are poetry. Most song lyrics are written in rhymed verses. And like every form of literature, the quality of song lyrics spans from the very good to the very bad and in every genre of music: rock, rap, folk, pop, country and beyond (among English language song forms). So, when people say poetry is very unpopular, they mean poetry printed in books and in journals and magazines.

Poetry is still reckoning with the effects of the bifurcation of literature into the spoken and the written. Put another way, poetry is still dealing with the movement of world cultures from the oral to the print-based. The divisions between song/poem and esoteric/popular were far less rigid in oral cultures which used meter, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and wordplay as mnemonic devices for conveying fantastic myths and as accessible forms of play. Nowadays, the distinctions noted above can become overwhelming or alienating. They can produce hermeticism,* cloying preciousness, feelings of "out-of-touchness" and near irrelevance for poetry "on the page" and the divisions can also result in the utter cliché, banality and consumer fetishism found in many song lyrics.

This may be why many of the lyricists and poets we enjoy the most are those who transcend the apparent limitations and avoid the pitfalls presented by each approach to writing poetry. William Blake was fascinating in this regard. He himself printed his own limited editions of his books, including Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. But his writing was very influenced by English nursery rhymes, a wonderful oral poetic form, and legend has it he used to sing his verses while gardening naked in his backyard in London.

*I'm not against hermeticism; I'm only suggesting that it can sometimes result in bad poetry.

The Music Man of Barf and Puke

I'd heard about him for some time and finally met him at a backyard theater piece in which I performed. It was late November, so people were walking around with blankets on their shoulders and we did the show in a crumbling 19th century shed in a sleepy neighborhood in Baltimore. I saw he was short, with a sour grin, but I never got the chance to look at him straight on. His head was always angled slightly askew, so it was like viewing a Picasso portrait - flat planes of sight, but never an actual full, contoured image. I said "met" him, but as I think of it, I never actually met Marc, though I tried to several times. "Hey, Dan, that's Marc," and I sought to catch his eye, but his head swiveled left, just as I looked at him to say hello. A woman was rehearsing a Psychedelic Furs song on the ukulele and it was as if she were singing from beyond the door of an open portal at the end of the galaxy or had seized the song from the top of a mountain in Taos, New Mexico, which is where she had driven in from to do the show. So, I was content to listen to her singing.

There was another time I should have met him. It was on the second floor of a Victorian house divided up into grad student and artist rooms. We were on the couch drinking wine and he breezed into the room with some women in their early 20s and declared to his ex-wife, "She's ambergris! She's going to be ambergris!" indicating one of the women and referencing her role in the show they were DIY-touring with. He was in motion across the room, walking in S shapes, and I tried to catch his eye - but only the flat plains of sight and blurring, disappearing gestures again.

I never met Marc, but he did finally look directly at me one evening. Right before his derangements would shatter the fragile community we had built, I, my partner and Marc's ex-wife Pilar booked two weekends to do a performance at the theater space he ran downtown. As a show of good faith, I went to see the new show that he had written. Marc was on stage next to a guy with a long beard and glasses and a young woman and the two of them were verbally and physically abusing Marc in a kind of arch GG Allin-meets-Punch-and-Judy act. The characters occasionally coughed loudly and retched and there were some visually dazzling elements, as the two tormentors circled Marc on tall bicycles, taunting him. But there was an undercurrent of coldness that only grew as the show wore on. Each time Marc would grab the old-fashioned crooner microphone and sing something in his powder blue tuxedo jacket, he looked directly at me. I couldn't tell if he was challenging me or trying to be open and vulnerable. I returned his gaze, but didn't understand what was happening.

At the end of the play, a box was passed through the sparse audience and, through some mimetic gestures, Marc let me know that I was to open it. I did so. But I can't remember what was inside - I think, maybe a plastic flower or even a plastic bloody finger, but I can't recall. After that night, Marc's madness jumped a fence and my friends and I would not do any more shows in the backyard shed or talk on the couch in the old Victorian house with the candles burning or walk the hills of the city together, sharing our ideas and impressions.

"Succession" - Father & Children

The Italian villa dinner scene between right wing media magnate Logan Roy and his son Kendall in the most recent episode of "Succession" is a very great piece of drama and a portrait of, well, of... humanity on the precipice in 2021. The background - Conniving, lost shitbag son Roman is sufficiently cynical to want to replicate the role of his "master of the world" father. Grasping-to-define-herself daughter Siobhan is trying to insert herself into the male-dominated, brutish media company of her father, but cannot seem to make it work for her or be fully accepted into the asshole boys club. Chronically directionless son Connor is making a quixotic run at the presidency as a harebrained way to define himself in late middle age. While son Kendall, after attempting to compete against his father in the media universe, is now negotiating with his him to get out, definitively, from the family business and cut all ties with his father. He realizes he is just not sufficiently a "killer" (as both Logan Roy and Donald Trump describe such characters) to exist in that world. He wants a payout and to cash out his shares and move on. He seems trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place - unsure if he has any skills that will permit him to do something else, but sure the remaining in the world of corporate cut-throats is definitively not for him.

The Greatest Delusion & The Question of Happiness

Perhaps the greatest misapprehension of all is that which is that held by this society's "winners" - the financial, business and political elites: That life is game to be won. This turns the habitat of the planet into a foldable game board and actual people and other sentient beings into plastic pieces to be bought and sold with money - which, ironically, is that which is most real to such people. This misapprehension creates misery for most of us in the short term and will render the planet a barely habitable hellscape by the end of this century. It is a lethal delusion.

***

There is no true happiness when you know that the way we live is killing the planet.

An Originalist Speaks

I am an originalist. Washington Jefferson Madison Franklin received a code, from where I know not. They read it in the mists above the Potomac. Or heard it chiming in the smoky air of a Mason ritual. This code made them wealthy - this is the pursuit of happiness. I like the smell of old documents - parchment and ink suffused with the passage of time, though the document be eternal. They broke with the King because it was time to cross the mountains. Appalachia and the Ohio Valley would be ours. Damn the Indians to an un-sacred oblivion - for they know not what is destiny, what is destined. I am an originalist. I took a blood oath. I saw Washington's death mask in the Masonic Temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The contours of his face, the look he had facing death: It was like he knew the slaves he had kept were waiting for him. Terror and absence. The words the founders wrote constitute a code. The constitution of an eternal form. There was talk in England of winding down the unique Southern project. The English did not understand what this country was meant to be. This land would not be tamed by the timid. Great works are not made without divisions between the high and the lowly. This is part of the code. Ten commandments were written in stone. Moses understood what it is to receive a code perched on the other side of a mountain - residing in the mouth of God. All one need to do is ask God to open his mouth and extract the words. 'Sixteen days in Georgia, I went out beyond the barn. Goose in the mill pond, cow's in the corn.'

                                                woodcut by Tom Killon

1Larry Parker