·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Most poets have at least one or two Creeley stories.
There is the person. There is person at what age you first heard him read. First encountered him socially or not. And, maybe, most importantly read his work; then there is the question of what work was important to you, most influential.

And we will - fortunately - hear much of this in the days and weeks to come.
It will be good to see the ways in which the person and the work finds itself refracted through out the world. In the light of his generosity to so many, one hopes that no one or group(s) try to lay one or other obnoxious claim on either the person or the work. Or, as I remember him once say of language, “no one owns it” - which made him a champion of others in practice, as well as leery of those invested in hierarchical claims. His loyalty was to the art of words, the art of their use.. And those spaces inbetween. Perhpas similar to Giacometti’s sculptures, we are always aware of the negative, perhaps anxious, space that surrounds the work, the poem’s material - that something is being made (constructed), hard and not gratuitous.
And yet there is the loving ‘charm’ - where ‘charm’ means song - and the devotion is constant - yet the outcome may - as with, say, Miles Davis - not resemble song in any, familiar or predictable sense. His awareness and use of the evidence, the things seen and heard in the world assure a breach, one that brings the ear and eye up short, mesmerized. And the love of delivering it, making it public, “a gift”, “for love.”

And beyond or with the work who can ever forget his social presence - a magnetism that brought people up to their best, everyone, in my experience, immedate and alert to each word in the air. A place honored where the poem became as valid as any door through which one may enter to receive a particular gift, where no place else could be more interesting to live and abide.

I - as I am sure of many of us - will miss him dearly.

The Gamble. One (that being the “I” and the “Eye”) is outside a roadside Gambling Hall. Midnight. It’s not clear whether it’s Arizona or New Jersey. The Parking Lot –its black asphalt surface painted over with multiple white, parallel striped, slotted rows- is variously filled with cars.

One, for whatever reason, possibly Puritan, does not enter the Gambling Hall. In the night light, the wide, two story beige off-lit building, indeed, appears possibly threatening. One avoids it as if one ought be more solid, indeed, be mathematically clear when one make’s Life’s more serious choices.

One hears an invisible Voice, a command. The Voice recites a Poetic Work by a Classical Master. The voice commands the Eye to look at the entire Parking Lot, row by row. The “I” behind the “Eye” will organize the cars according to Work’s entire structure and pattern. Each car will represent a Word. Each Parking Lot row will represent one of the Poem’s three Stanzas and entire sum of twelve complete Lines. Since each Line will vary in length, one side of the Lot will have a jagged edge. Since the last Line of each Stanza is composed of only three words, those particular Lines will each park three cars. The area surrounding
each Stanza – the Negative Space - will be left dark, empty.

The “I” behind the “Eye” accomplishes the Work. Finished, the “I” looks at the firm, sturdy Lot. The fluorescent building lamps compel a low white glow off each car hood, roof and trunk - the Stanzas in stark juxtaposition to the façade of the Gambling Hall. Two nocturnal companions –Formality and Risk - the Eye gathers into One:

One who Gambles when the Gamble falls to Shreds.
One who builds a Stanza, steel firm, against the Dread.

This morning we went to the lovely Easter Service at Mission Dolores - the
first and oldest Church in San Francisco (and a beauty). I was raised
anything but Catholic (impulsively anti-Papist, if anything.) But Christmas
and Easter Mass are always wonderful services. I had one proviso this
morning - if they so much as mentioned Terri Schiavo, I would be out of
there in a second. Gratefully, there was a generous moment of remembrance
for Augusto Romero, the Bishop in El Salvador, assassinated by a Death
Squad 20 0r 25 years ago - with a nearby gallery of photographs of his life.
No mention was made of the Shiavo situation.
It was a relief - and, hopefully, a sign that not everyone (church, the
right wing, the family members) is going to opportune this poor woman’s body for whatever dubious end.

(Ironically, in terms of Romero, Negroponte and Abrams - two architects of the policies in El Salvador that permitted Death Squad operations - are back in power in the Bush Administration. Folks that are very at home with state sanctioned torture.)

Sweetly enough, this afternoon a block away from the Mission in Dolores Park - and going on as I write - is the annual Easter Bonnet/Jesus Hunkie stage show and party (lots of great lime, pink etc. outrageous wardrobes (I had to leave in the middle of Trauma Flintstone singing a Fats Waller number, “Don’t sell your trash for cash”)
while across the park were the anarchists gathered all in black with red and
green and black flags.

Spring has begun to split the City open!

Happy Easter or whatever fits your pleasure.

Seems to me the tale of Mom and Dad Schindler’s (including the “Right to Life” folks and certain politicians’ right to run again) gothic attempt to keep Terri Schiav “alive” is one more twist on Faulkner’s tale of Emily keeping some version of Homer Brown “alive” with flowers et al as his long dead body goes skeletal and to dust, resting there for years upon their marriage bed.
Full of sad pathos and beat the Reaper craziness then, and not too much different now. One can only imagine local southern wax museums preparing for Terri’s next appearance - like currently on Fox Network, ’smiling’, hour by hour.

I guess it’s an old American tradition getting an over-the-top revival.
Jeezus. If only! Oh yes, I am cynical enough to imagine Adobe Photoshop images of Terri on the Cross 24/7 on TV Easter Sunday.

Or maybe it’s just Millennium fever? Or the quality of certain theocracies?

I’ve had it. RIP (finally) Terri!

(Crossing the Millennium, 1999 is a photo/daybook project. Because of diversions, etc., entries for March are not entered in a consistent 1,2.3 etc. fashion. In terms of the photos, the host is also variable in its willingness to upload images. I am working on an alternative provider. Always appreciate your comments and input. Bear with!)

What are the terms of disappearance?
Anyone’s disappearance?
*
Inhabited by ghosts
He She Thee
Their voices intimate as clover
to a child’s ear on grass:
“She talks to me today;
He, too.”
A transparent sense of City,
historical layer upon layer.
The perforated beach, little holes
in the sand, the spray of clams,
an arc of shiny salt water
through which one hears:
*
A stretch of kelp below the cliff:
A layer of thought, or the lack of.
*
To frame the self against the details:
the face against the found jar, the found
classical Greek vase, the found rusted orange
in which the fracture of Apollo
plies three missing fingers against
the cracked, faded harp, once gold:

This object available for $375 on Castro Street.
*
A conscious history. Conscious to make history.
A requirement to be conscious. To be pulled
by the details. To maximize the presence
in which a detail knocks you off your
*

The strange way in which one anxiety will unfold unto another.
The way one hysteria will invade and propagate within the host of others.
The way individuals and then communities will damage each other.
“I have done these things to others.”
“Others have done these things unto me.”
Is it a hopeless merry-go-round?

*
The Central Freeway is being retrofitted near Mission and Division. Over the new chalk white, concrete upper-deck, dark rebar strands- bent into L-shapes - point outwards from boxed wood frames, each one waiting to receive the arrival of more cement. On the street below, a store shop floor – the one with large glass windows facing the construction – there are several small blocks of concrete whose surfaces are covered with squares of 1920’s Spanish revival mosaic. Similar to the kind one sees on the dome of Mission High School – across from Dolores Park – or around the front door entrances to Everett Middle School on Church Street. It is curious to compare the difference between the bold, fresh exposed Freeway concrete and the decorative mosaic designs that cover the concrete pieces in the shop. To watch the way a Century moves from elaborate illusion – in which the City masked itself in Alhambra, Mediterranean style architecture – evocative (as it must have been) of a rich and slow-paced civilization – to a bare, efficient concrete delivery system, this freeway, through the middle of the City; one in which - in terms of looking - one can only enjoy the structural strength, the solid geometric shapes bereft of any other intention.

As to the shop, one imagines someone will buy a mosaic fragment and place it out in their garden or inside a living space - an allusion to a prestigious moment in history, its color and design an anchor to a contemporary psyche - a momentary optical crutch against an overly fluid present, those cars - when the retrofit is complete - wanting to race back on or come down off the freeway on to Mission or Duboce.

Wednesday:
Some days it is a specific moment that sustains itself: an opening, an enlargement into which one enters -– a pinewood tongue and groove, freshly waxed dance floor – to find a self within the self propelled into a dance, various in its rhythms from which the torso starts to make slopes, off angle turns, shoulder rolls, shakes, shimmies: an improvisatory glide into a quick heat in the air into which a whole history invites itself: characters familiar and foreign who enter to either witness or dance; the intersection of each gaze an electric spur while a self within the self becomes the ecstatic Self until an exhaustion, ultimately, must; what is large gradually conflates into sidewalk and balance: the singular, empty black shoe, this morning, corner of Vicksburg and 23rd, next to the base of the telephone pole, oddly and remotely, abandoned there.

The articulation in which memory is primary is perhaps a twentieth century luxury; or the privilege of more than a few of us who do not necessarily take some questionable pleasure in looking forward, forward in such a way the eye seizes what is necessary to function, to strategize, to make each of the various moves one might require to challenge, to stake, to hold ground; no, there are some, perhaps myself amongst us, who wade or boat back - bucket, or several in hand - to gain some wet, preliminary ground through which we, step by step, even with some un-negotiated falls, manage to take a look, measure, research the old balance – even if it means a cold, stiff will-be April rain to get though the floated, various doors that will still often refuse a knock - but with intention and, perhaps, small desperations aside, reach this point where the eye can retake upon itself a penetrating look into other materials (these pages stacked up: letters, manuscripts, maps, etc.) to relocate, to steer the folded, hidden work into an open frame, to constantly compel new names, new steps where - what we found when we were lucky – was/is now an elegant jewel, a firm reflection (yes, maybe cock-eyed and out-of-date) – it, this discovery - the revelation of it crystalline, pure, angle by refractive angle - realigns and reconstructs that very moment, the way, say, a letter written in San Francisco in 1851 and sent by steamer and coach to Meriden, New Hampshire (this letter in which the writer gave an extensive analysis of the way the local Chinese walked in their pointed shoes) indeed, a letter that will radically alter the way in which the children in Meriden would ever again may imagine the way in which the Chinese walked through San Francisco wearing their own particular shoes.

Handle Shop. A shop with nothing but handles and knobs. Cabinets, windows,
drawers, doors – inside, outside. The handle metaphor. What is the handle
metaphor? To get the hand on something. To grip a grip. To get a hold. To
open. To open part way. To open full. To close. To close lightly. Softly.
Firmly. The situation in which one takes out part of one’s goods. One’s
clothing. One’s dishes. One’s tools. The storage held in preparation. To
clothe. To eat. To join. To work:

The handle in. The handle out. Or larger yet. To hold on. To make a
temporary hold. To hold oneself, one’s family, one’s people in place. Or,
the contrary. To steal someone’s handle. To hold them up. To break their
grip. Their time.

Can you handle it? It’s too hot. Too cold. Too sticky. Too off-putting. A
waste of time. To handle. Can you handle him? Can you handle her?

Who’s got the handle? Who’s going to get a handle? Handle this. Handle that.
A big dark shade. A thin silver handle. The moon. Last night. What a mother.
What a father. What a dream. The metal. Aluminum. Paint it black. Paint it
silver. The moon again. Handle. Lots of luck.

Gary Sullivan’s blog is currently featuring an interesting gathering of people’s “brushes with fame.”
http://garysullivan.blogspot.com/
I could not resist and submitted the following:
“While in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, I went up to Dakar, Senegal
to attend the first-ever 1965 International Black Arts Festival. One afternoon
I sat in the balcony of a packed auditorium and listened to Aime Cesaire,
Wole Soyinka, J.P.Clark and some others wrangle and argue about the concept
and significance of “Negritude.” (Senghor was not present). Nigerian writers
were generally suspicious of “Negritude.” After the session, I got in the elevator with Obi Wali a fellow colleague from the University of Nigeria, Nssuka. We were joined by a short, older black man in a dark suit, white shirt, tie and a brief case. He smiled kindly at us, but remained quiet. When we got out of the elevator, Obi – who had a PhD from Northwestern University – said, “Steve, did you know that man was Langston Hughes?”
Obi had once seen him read in Chicago.
Actually, now I realize, that afternoon – in the middle of the then aristocracy of black writing - I was being brushed by fame from all directions!”

And thinking further, I find a postmodern irony in being in an elevator with the man who will be ever identified with having written one my favorite, most resonant poems about America: The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers…
_____
Indeed - in contrast to the poem’s spirit and content, t there is something hallucinatory about remembering this dreamlike episode in the elevator.