Pix & Texts, Poetry, Commentary, Politics, etc.
I will be reading from Walking Theory on Monday evening, June 11 at 7 p.m.
Place: Noe Valley Ministry (1021 Sanchez, near the corner of 23rd Street in San Francisco). Followed by a book signing.
For further reviews and ways to acquire Walking Theory , scroll down to the May 20 entry on this blog.
I did not want this week to close without a word of the passing of the nationally known, California based painter, Roy DeForest at 77. The way I met Roy, and the closest I got to knowing him, was through making a book together. This was about 1987 when I was the Director of Bedford Arts, Publishers. It was a well-funded Press (Real Estate was the source of its coin, and ultimately the cause of its sad downfall and closing in 1991). But for awhile I could bank my imagination on any book project that deemed my fancy. I was bound and determined to make a trade book with original art by artists in a format that would simultaneously function as an art object. After much research and investigation, I settled on the development of a unique design for an accordion-fold book that could also include a signature for an essay. (I was much assisted in the fulfillment of this process by an anonmymous Japanese book design engineer at Dai Nippon Printing in Japan, Tom Ingalls, a local San Francisco designer and Hal Belmont at Overseas Printing, San Francisco).
This were big books. 12 1/4 inches high by 9 1/2 inches wide, the accordion fold panels extended out 13 panels, with art on each side. I invited Roy to be the first artist. I liked the playful characters in his work (the dogs, the eccentric characters, the folks you might run into on a run-down Western ranch), and I also sensed there was a storyteller in the works, somebody who could stretch a visual yarn through an extended space. We met in San Francisco in our first Offices on Pacific near Montgomery Street. I showed him the dummy accordion fold format. He did not speak much. But I liked the way his light blue eyes lit up. He agreed and then I did not hear from him for a couple of months, until one day I got a call that he was coming in with some work. And, indeed he did, two substantial rolls of art - like a scroll - one under each arm.
Each of the panels was 36 x 27 inches (to be reduced by a 1/3). When we stretched out each side of the book out into two rows of side by panels - the whole length of the office space - I was suddenly astonished that we were being presented with 58.5 feet of art. The work was like a neo-western panorama mountain campsite infused with a wonderfully crazy, color concotion of family surrounded by dogs, Indians, spooks, tall-tale mythical figures and what have you. When I asked him the title, he had written it out:
Journey To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass
Roy, indeed, was a man of letters. He loved to collect and read books. He was particularly a student of the West, deeply imbued in the spirit and work of Mark Twain. I knew him as a quiet man, not given much to lengthly articulation. He talked through his work. A incredible draughtsman. Miriam Schapiro said to me once, “Roy can draw in his sleep.” In fact he probably did draw in his sleep!
In the brief period that I knew him, Roy was generous to a fault. Though a kind of career and success came to him, I do not think he was ever interested in manufacturing a career in the contemporary manner. I think he was always in it for the challenge and the pleasure of the work. One day there will be a big retrospective and people will go into like going into a Red Grooms show and we will be able to get fully back into that imagination, that intense, otherworldly dog/eye energy - and we will again have, at least, something of what crossed Roy’s soul everytime he picked up a brush.
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Occasionally when I think my 91 year old mom does not have another poem in her, she surprises me. Ironically it is when we talk on the phone that she seems re-liberated to let her imagination go to work. My brother David - who lives at home and manages her care - tells me that she is often ‘much better on the phone.’ A therapist friend, in fact, told him that a different set of things happen to the communication process when people talk on the phone; her dementia is apparently somewhat bypassed, though, in my recent experience, not entirely. Yet, I find it still quite astonishing the way she can turn a phrase, or convert one image or concept into another. That is, she is still able to go into a zone and speak in the manner of poetry, even, it seems, to be a critic of poetry!
When I phoned her earlier this week, she had entirely forgotten that I had given her my new book, Walking Theory. (See details in previous post) Phillip, the fellow who was providing care for the day found the book lying on the coffee table right in front of her. Apparently now holding it in her hands, she read the title aloud, “Walking Theory.” She then, apparently turned the book over, turned it, looked at my author’s photo on the back cover, and asked, “Who is that?”
“It’s me.”
“He looks like both sides of my family.”
“Would you like to write a poem about walking theory?
“I don’t have any ideas on that one.”
She goes quiet.
“It’s complicated to write poetry, isn’t it, Mom?”
“Better than not writing it at all.”
“Do you want to write one about an Imaginary Walk?
I realize this is one we have done before but my poem starter is running on empty. She certainly neither complains, nor remembers her earlier poem. In fact, she starts speaking immediately:
An imaginary walk is there.
It wants to say a lot.
It can’t say much.
When the sun is bright and warm,
it’s much easier to stay home
and sit on a rocking chair
and to rock, rock and rock.
And when you are in
your rocking chair
the whole world has
a different meaning to you.
What kind of meaning?
Listen, dear, I have no idea.
If you are writing and
put things on your coffee table
you will not hear much
meaning either.
It’s kind of sad isn’t it?
Why?
Because you are not communicating.
What color have you made -
the cuts of cloth you have put
on your coffee table?
I don’t have cloth on my coffee table. What have you put on your table?”
Walking Theory
Apparently today, I realize, she has lost the word for book, and is referring to the books on her table as cuts of cloth. Can you, I ask her, write a poem about Walking Theory?
“Walking Table Poem?
She has turned the book title into another one.
That’s not a very good poem.
A good poem is something
very exclusive.
A good poem excites you somewhat.
A Walking Table excites,
but not like a big horse of a thing.
A good poem is one
that tells us one and all
that we are here and that
we are made up in mineral layers
with much trouble
and many levels.
What I want to say
is you have something
to say about everything.
Sometimes it’s good.
Sometimes it makes people feel sad.
But it is said.
And that’s a fair story.
I sense she has come to the end. In fact, she wants to take a nap. Before letting her go, I read her responses and poems back to her, most of which I have been scrawling into my journal. Ironically, as it often happens, when she listens to me, she thinks that I am the the author of her words.
“You do that pretty well,” she says.
When I persuade her that she is the poet behind the words, she finishes our conversation with an almost embarassed response, “I hope I did not hurt your feelings.”
I assume she was reflecting back to the lines,
you have something to say
about everything
Indeed I have had impatient friends say that about me on more than one occasion! Indeed I also think - never absent an authoritative comment or judgeent, the same was sometime infuriatingly true of my mother when I was young!
Without going into the possibly amusing details, several years ago I was in the position of trying to sell an edition of the Bible (indeed, it was to bethe last letterpress edition that once bound would weigh 40 pounds, 24 inches high, 18 inches wide, and about 4 inches thick.) I remember talking one day to someone who was possibily responsible for buying such a Bible for a famous Episcopal theological seminary. When we talked about other things - which was the most interesting part of the job - I asked him why, at the age of 42, had he gone back to school to become a member of the clergy?
“I did not really know,” he said, “until I told my grandmother what I was going to do. ‘I guess God is not through with you yet’, is what she told me. And I now believe that must be the reason.”
God, or whatever it is, certainly seems to have some unfinished business with my mom. Whether it’s for poetry or something else, I cannot say. But language and poetry - making and listening to it - are still clearly wanting to fire up her engines.
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Here follows a compilation from Ghost Walks - the photographs and texts - which I presented this last Friday (May 4) at the NYC’s Poets House Panel on Walking. Currently, by the way, I am working on a piece about the ‘walking & writing’ walk I led through SOHO, Chinatown and Tribeca - ending up, of course, at Walkers restaurant with the other walkers led by poets, Jonathan Skinner and Brenda Coultas. An extraordinary event as it turned out. But more of that, later!
Enjoy. (Use the email address on the sidebar for comments - which are always appreciated).
Raised by Ghosts
She said she was raised by Ghosts. I have seen them there
behind the Church, thick knotted and burred branches, hardly fit for caressing.
Not knowing them - not even being able to see or talk to or touch them -
how could I, she said, be anything but terrified?
Riveted by the sight - were they parents, were they siblings? - speechless I stood. As were my comarades: tongue tied, not one movement to their heads, nor across their stiff, thick white hair.
This Saturday afternoon, October 8, 2005, Noe Valley, San Francisco
*
Ancestral Ghosts: The Reappearance
They do appear. The Great Grandmother, her sisters and grandfather -
their children among them:
It’s the ancestral realm re-apparent, or so it appears. Beautifully garmented, a Sunday in which one is gathered, presented, remembered. Yet, each of them, in hindsight, intangible and ever so slightly blurred.
A celebration of ghosts, a curious, familial welcoming back. How to greet them? Variously bonneted, the mother, the father, the aunt, the children shutter about. Oh, how they, too, appear - note the faces, the dress - as so similar, it seems, to those who have passed. Why, yet, the nervous worry, the skepticism among the living? Perhaps someone is missing, a cousin once there, so happy, now disappeared. Did something go badly among those beyond?
Why, indeed, have they come back? Weren’t they once already decently mourned, given over, long passed? Why are we being tempted? The living are enough. Why must any of us be responsible to the dead?
Selected from a series of water colors by Augusta Talbot - some in focus, some intentionally not - as seen, this past weekend, at her ‘open studio’ on Church Street, between 22nd & 23rd on Church Street, San Francisco.
*
Ophelia & Hamlet: Re-Ghosted
Perchance, Ophelia, a dream? Don’t bet on it. Au natural the weeping willows cradle your sleeping face: witless, absent song, yet moistened. Yet, look below - solid as High School - there, too, Hamlet calmly lies. The water and blue stones, the ghosts amongst you.
What is a ghost? A flickering of memory, the Van bearing a spa, a hook-up, et al. Hamlet, the artifical, hot waters swirling, Time’s wheel still under your back. Ophelia, sadly, impossible to throw a wet kiss. Ghosted - metalic and marbled - permanent, Time’s fate. An Instruction? Roll on. Relax.
*
Elegy:
Autumn & the juice returns. The rhythm. Slap on the ball. Drum beat patter against floor, against asphalt. Youth re-enfolds. Leap taken, not taken. Jump shot, long shot, lay-up, fake here, fake there, drive. Drive, one never stops saying. Backyard, Elementary, Junior, High School, College, Pro. The rhythm of one’s life, one’s season, the delivery: one’s shots, one’s defenses, one’s gifts: the high arc of the ball drifting down:
In memory, Robert Creeley, passed this year.
*
Early Morning Sleeper: Basketball Court
Asleep at the border, what he dreams I do not know. His black fingers barely visible between the black hood and blanket. A dream perhaps of royal plays – a history of jump shots going down, slam dunks and blocked shots, a body risen so high over the hoop, he went by the name of Bird.
Perhaps, more profoundly, a history of friends, competition, bravado and love. A collective, a collective cure. Rhythm of ball, rhythm of court, combat, an electricity incised among flesh, heart and ‘flying elbows.’
The two stout, well-heeled leather shoes with thick, vibrum soles. An insistence, a sustained confidence, an enduring, unwavering fidelity to the spring, the power, the multiple plays at ready in the feet.
May he rest in peace, dream in glory.
Death is the start of sentiment.
African-American homeless man under red blanket on basketball court,
eight o’clock, morning, Dolores Park, San Francisco, February 2007.
*
Time Permanent: Ghost
Time frozen, not lost, given, an eternal touch, held down, held up. Romance any memory, any love, any death, any child, any great act, any act of terror. Freeze it. Flesh. Blood. Stone. A lover’s lips fixt, intransient, eyes locked. Locked into an “ever”. This could get boring, very boring. Hour glass in the window cell, who will break, who will release you? This is unfair imprisonment! This is art. Is it art? The illusion - Time - gone still. I want to hold you forever. No. I do not. I do want to slow time. I do want to slow. I do not want. I do not. I do. I.
Vitrine, apartment building, 22nd Street, next to Social Security Offices at Valencia, San Francisco.
*
The Disappearance
What Ascends? The Driers open their lids
An ancestry taken up to the line
What do we know?
Garments, not bodies charm the day
Wind lifts form. Sunlight yields color:
What does one dream
Separated from pocket, sleave and waist?
Laundry is but a shadow (Colorful)
Mortality a hanging out:
Clean, crisp, bright.
*
Among the Nights of The Dead
October night in the Mission. Days of the Dead loom. Who is he? A ghost who loved to once “hang” on this street. How did he get here? Did he come through that side door? Is he of mine?
A father dead this spring past, a brother the previous. Neither had a cell phone. Would either still talk? What would I or you be told? Intimations of the future, the past? Unbalanced scores? An inequilibrium to be settled?
Or is this skull just a little vision into a parallel universe where things go on not much different. People chatting constantly. Maybe this is a new addition. The gods on the other side have rigged everyone up with play pretend cell-phones. Something to provide the living dead with some pleasure. “Hello, hello, this is your brother. This is your father.”
Lots of luck, charmers. You dance with my eye. You dance with my love.
You dance on an absolute zero. You who break, charm, embrace the heart.
Welcome back. Good bye. Come again. All month.
*
Night Dancer: Ghost
In her youth she, too, was a tireless dancer, street strutter, the menacing queen. A shoe for each part, she could play the sweetest of lovers, the jilter, the traitor, the lover of three; a hip-swinging, round ass tantilizer, the bored, gone-to-hell mother, blow-it-all-out on the town in one, singular night. The ultimate tease, dare by night for you - night walker - to risk what you please.
Don’t let the shadows deceive - by day, I have seen them. She has green jewels on her toes, tourquoise blue leather straps, copper driven rivets, lavender velvet laces, chocolate and dark leathers mounted up to her knees; high heels and low heels, no heels at all. Red ruby bracelets brocade her ankles. One risks ones eye to love what charms. Embrace nothing, embrace all.
*
Night Queen
Some people I just never meet.
They appear. They astonish. They attract.
They repel. They allude to a life - a style -
in, no doubt, inaccessible, yet charmed appartments.
Out on the street, they appear only after midnight,
Call themselves, “Queen This” or “Queen That.”
Unlike, perhaps, others, I am happy these folks
Are in the neigborhood. Among night hawks,
I am told, when these gentle ladies hit the clubs
- extended dark nails with slender, fox glove whips -
The swiveling manner of their dance is so electric
Even the most jaded rise, jump, get slapped hard
Then absolutely wriggle.
Shop window, Valencia, between 20th & 21st, San Francisco.
*
Ghost Couch
What abandon! What was abandoned? Golden dappled in the morning light. To make love - the ghosts - like no other. Up ended, variously crushed: not one item - couch or pillow - without an imprint, a sensual slant. When we make love we switch the character of the universe. Rough and tumble, some ghost - one hears - said that. Whatever rises, one trembles: the unmistakable gold aura, the not so casual imprint, a testimony - the couch - a fertile, indeed delightful, awesome you can tell me when I ride, bring me all the way back home: to live, to wake.
Abandoned couch above the trolley track, Dolores Park, San Francisco, California
*
Ghost Royals: The Bed
Alive or dead the royal ones remain sumptuous
One can tell by the way they sleep at night
No doubt in couples, the way the curled folds lead one to imagine:
The question is, why do they beckon one
With their sensuality, particularly, such pure white
Pleated tenderness? What do they give us?
A pure love for the edge, that grace note between earth
Whatever is beyond. The beloved guile
An agileness in the eyes of angels.
Abandoned homeless blanket, Dolores Park, San Francisco
*
Victorian Lady
Curious the way she tilts her head, the even arches of her eyes, the pale blue shadow over just the one. One eye, over the porch, takes you in; the other - curtains primarily drawn - holds one back. With appropriate decorum, the lady will permit you to enter. Knock or ring the bell, but never too loudly. Come into my living room, she says. We will be cautious with the amount of light, the upper curtains open only at a slight angle. No one will be able to hear of what we speak. The conversation between us is as if we hold a pale blue, ceramic bowl of ripe, dark red cherries. Note how the slice of sunlight silvers their skins. We speak in slow measure, calibrating each moment’s taste. Yes, indeed, we live in a different century. Sustained by the architect’s careful geometries - the arches - we pleasure in restraint, the art of slow disclosure. If you are anxious, as some are, be calm. No one dies here. This is not eternity. If you will, however, please care for the memory: voices carefully joined, a resonance - dark varnished interior woods, the imagination, the slow carpentry that defines us.
Victorian house on 21st. Street, between Guerrero & Valencia, San Francisco
*
The Shot House
Who does not shoot the house?
Right through the shield.
Note the way the house tilts.
Who does not take it to the heart?
The shot ghost house.
Tilted.
Bullet through windshield & reflection; 19th Street near Church Street, San Francisco, California
*
Flag Signals: Ghosts
We live in a fading country.
My wife said that.
I am not married.
My country is an ex-wife.
She has moved in with a violent man.
She lives behind curtains. Flags. Signals.
Not a ghost.
Not a ghost of a chance.
Window on 22nd Street, between Guerrero and Valencia, San Francisco, California.
*
Looking for Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense
It was a crude, desperate move. Cutting through the wall. Pointing the light downward. They were looking for him. No one had seen him since the election. He had disappeared. Gone, it seemed, literally underground. There was apprehension that he was still up to his old tricks. He had dropped his language - all that manipulation of speech. But that he was still operative. Joining the disappeared, the gang that could no longer hang together in public. These banished. These who had articulated, orchestrated and enforced the execution of the renditions, the tortures.
The hunt was on. They had to be taken by the throat. They had to be brought back up. Formally accused. Formally tried. Be fully judged by a jury. Given long terms. Put in the appropriate cells. Their accurate narratives rendered public. Made visible. Taught. Not to be repeated.
Church Street at 21st., southeast corner building.
*
Philip Guston: Ghosts
While out walking, I am sometimes haunted by the ghost of the work of Philip Guston - or is it, as well, the actual presence of the artist himself? Which is to say, whatever I remember of seeing Guston’s work - and I have seen a great deal - the work, or some aspect of the spirit of the work, periodically transforms itself to reappear in the form of something local, something material. It is as though Guston is a constantly manifesting spirit of the underworld, one who is neither permitted to fully die or go away. He refuses to leave us candy. He will be ours to deal with for a much longer time.
I probably do not have many theories about Philip Guston. He is one of my favorite artists.
Why? I think he and Robert Crumb and Jack Spicer are each and variously in this dark dance with Edgar Allen Poe, that is, Poe’s writing and the ways in which that writing explores a specifically American underworld. By that, I mean, a psychic space in which there are no winners, no sunny optimism, no midwestern or southern California smiles. Whatever the aspiration of any of this quartet of artists and writers, the aspiration is betrayed and practicually tortured at the root. The ghost of the destroyed father haunts each of their works. For example, the way Guston at the age of 12 or something - living in Los Angeles - discovers his father hanging - a suicide, in the family backyard full of junk. His father was a professional junk man. It was though his father’s psyche had drowned in all the junk of his personal and public world.
When Guston gives up Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950’s, his canvas’ are over taken by junk - soles and boot heels separated from the body of their shoes. The figures, too, comic book-like characters, also look separated from the tree of any family, any connection. The way KKK figures in whit hats and robes inflict themselves on to the canvas, on to us. The sense of dislodgement, the alienation empties or flatens any full sense of human presence among them, Guston’s portrayal of Nixon, included. At most, the characters and objects make motions, small gestures. No matter how powerful the paintings as paintings - in which the act of art making may be the only revenge - the canvas’ reveal a self-mocking desperation about limits of living in an estranged, and tortured universe. (Yes, Samuel Beckett comes to mind).
Even the old stuff, an important variation on the his abstractions in the fifties, reappears:
But here, in the ghost of the reappearance, the sense of romance, or the seeming soft sublime, is exchanged for something muted, scratched, tarnished - a tough, non-objective form of realism. A shift from Monet to Manet to Serra. A nakedness discovered on the street that needs to be confronted from within and without. In Guston - if when you stop and behold - there is no way to walk on without a price. Inside or outside the psyche, Guston - his ghost or ghosts - continue to own one part of the street.
*
The Dead Reader
Whether or not anyone listens, it is remarkable the way in which the dead continue to read to us. Book in hand - look at this guy - as sincere and sporty as any well meaning parent, he does what he can to catch the public ear. Who knows if it’s the works of Che Guervara, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo , orWinnie The Pooh he is no doubt one among many of the ghosts planted here and there among our City walks. Their task and challenge is to liven up our memory of the books of the dead.
Certainly, when I am dead and gone, to be such a reader will be the first job I want. I will happily come down to various parks and walks and whisper poems, stories, and what have you for any and all, no matter whether or not anyone is ready to listen. Among ghosts I think the folks who do this work are called, immortality keepers. It’s as if the gods decided, if the folks on earth cannot keep up the work of literature, its living maintenance, we will do our part and take it upon ourselves. From what I understand, this immortalizing the work of mortals is one of most major and richly fulfilling things that a ghost can do.
I was so happy to encounter this particular one today.
Detail, mural, 20th near Valencia Street, San Francisco.
*
Spiral Ghost
There is a spiral ghost, a “ghost for the spiral”
Who, some will say, lives at the center
Of one’s universe. Randomly, it is also said, she appears.
Occasionally one sees her spiraled out
On the street. An almost perfect baby blue. Right here
As one sees, an eye goes round and round
Follows her right in to a center point
The one where, one also hears, Everything
“Big, big Bang,” or not, once all began!
No small wonder, on days like this
One takes one’s hat off to share, indeed, bow down
To utter this, perhaps, curious whisper
“Hello there Universe, how do you do?”
Pictured on the asphalt between the trolley tracks
on the right-of-way between 21st & Chatanooga and 22nd & Church
Whether or not anyone listens, it is remarkable the way in which the dead continue to read to us. Book in hand - look at this guy - as sincere and sporty as any well meaning parent, he does what he can to catch the public ear. Who knows if it’s the works of Che Guervara, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo , orWinnie The Poohhe is no doubt one among many of the ghosts planted here and there among our City walks. Their task and challenge is to liven up our memory of the books of the dead.
Certainly, when I am dead and gone, to be such a reader will be the first job I want. I will happily come down to various parks and walks and whisper poems, stories, and what have you for any and all, no matter whether or not anyone is ready to listen. Among ghosts I think the folks who do this work are called, immortality keepers. It’s as if the gods decided, if the folks on earth cannot keep up the work of literature, its living maintenance, we will do our part and take it upon ourselves. From what I understand, this immortalizing the work of mortals is one of most major and richly fulfilling things that a ghost can do.
I was so happy to encounter this particular one today.
Detail, mural, 20th near Valencia Street, San Francisco.