EthicalDative

‘Bare’ with Me: I’m of Two Minds

Posted on January 10, 2024 by JMN

Untitled, oil on watercolor paper, 16 x 20 in. (JMN 2023).

Writer Charles Behlen told me that reading a poem could be like stepping off a plane into Madagascar when you thought your destination was Lubbock, Texas. Things would look different, he said. I took it as his way of chiding me for a cheeky chirp about his phraseology in a poem.

How did Behlen’s airy simile make me feel? Treated as if a clueless upstart. Infantilized. Mad as hell. When I mentioned I’d been reading Louise Glück’s collected work, Behlen returned the following (we were corresponding) about her effect on him: “I need more dirt on my potato.”

Notwithstanding the thin skin I bare above, I’ve kept Behlen’s remonstrance, along with his dirty potato, in my pipe for smoking along the way as I stutter-step my way through current verse. The quest is to do something directly with it — what verb do I want: Experience? Confront? Process? Interpret?

Oh God! Is this a kind of readerly populism that implies I’ve had enough of experts? That I want to meet the product head-on without the mediation of a poetry clergy? That I want to wallow in being a truculent (protestant?) outsider bent on getting to grips with “difficult” texts, going mano a mano with the word of dodgy deities?

Could be.

The most a haiku has fulfilled me is this one ending Ocean Vuong’s “Immigrant Haibun”:

Summer in the mind.
God opens his other eye:
two moons in the lake.
(from Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Why? I feel bare and clueless in saying it, but: it’s because eyes are orbs, like the moon; two moons reflected in the lake seem fluky but possible in the physical world, and it seems more accomplished to make poetry from the plausible than from the fantastical. Also, who has two eyes? We do! I like the conceit of an ocular God with double peepers; support is lent to the intuition that man created God in man’s image, but also, since other creatures have two eyes as well, to the conclusion that God might just as soon look like a possum or a woman.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged poetry, reading | 5 Comments

‘God, in the Form of Lightning’

Posted on January 5, 2024 by JMN

“Calling myself religious while living a life unbeholden to Scripture doesn’t make sense, of course.”
(Temim Fruchter)

Temim Fruchter’s essay about her spiritual evolution struck me, another scriptural expat, as full of poetry. I was moved to lift statements from the essay verbatim, in their order of occurrence, and put them down versiform. I hope her essay doesn’t feel unduly interfered with. Mine is only the interference.

GOD, IN THE FORM OF LIGHTNING
We wonder whether God, in the form of lightning, will strike.
Is there space for a whole past, or several, to coexist with so divergent a present?
I, for one, am crowded. Parts of me jostle noisily around.
I resent my practice. I defend it. I love it. I am a part of it, this half-practice, and it is a part of me.
And belief in God has made me, too. God, a relationship I can’t language.
God, the extra inches a room grows when we sing together.
All of the parts that created me are still here,
Jostling around, trying to make a cacophonous kind of sense.
And on the rare occasion when all the parts of me really sing?
Without fail, the room around me grows ever so slightly bigger.

(Temim Fruchter, “I Left My Faith. God Didn’t Flinch,” New York Times, 1-3-24)

The Times carries this biographical note: Temim Fruchter is the author of the forthcoming novel “City of Laughter.”

Posted in Quotations | Tagged spirituality | 1 Comment

We’ve Dealt With Earth. Let’s Go Fix Mars

Posted on December 30, 2023 by JMN

Posted in Commentary | Tagged miscellaneous | 3 Comments

Choices the Chosen Cherish

Posted on December 23, 2023 by JMN

I’m proud of the choice I made
to be squeezed from momma’s vagina
in the Hamptons and not old Carolina.

I’m proud that the daddy I chose
was several cuts above the rest,
fetching me the fortune sans the quest.

Proud I am of the me I’ve arrived at,
my private jet, my vessel’s girth;
but sternly must I not lose sight of that
acumen with which I planned my birth.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel | 10 Comments

Message in a Bubble

Posted on December 21, 2023 by JMN

Hola, H.

He aquí todo un poema de un tal Ben Okri que sale en la revista Poetry de diciembre 2023.

SEGOVIA
I walked your acueducts at dawn.
With giant legs they bestrode the landscape
Of the Moors. Stick insects. Like Romans
On stilts. Bearing water across the sky.

Ésta es mi traducción hecha para ti.

SEGOVIA
Yo pisaba tus acueductos al amanecer.
Con piernas de gigante montaban a horcajadas el paisaje
de los Moros. Bichos de palo. Como romanos
sobre zancos. Cargando agua através del cielo.

Éste es un diseño que hice. Monigote con gafas. Me gusta como logotipo de la empresa de fingirme <<pintor-poeta>>. ¡Jajaja! ¿Qué te parece?

¿Vas bien? ¡Un abrazo de avi!

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-Spanish, language, personal, poetry, translation | 1 Comment

‘Our Lady of the Westside” by Antonio López

Posted on December 15, 2023 by JMN

“When Davis’s poems are poetry, they are powerful.”
(Langston Hughes, on Frank Marshall Davis)

I’ve no basis for discerning what’s verse and what’s poetry other than whether it jostles a personal needle. I compare a poetry moment (loosely) to another apex moment — that of collapsing into a sexual partner, wrapped in appendages and received. The comparison may be overheated, but what strikes me as important is that the text and I are intertwined. Its words have thrust us into close communion. I, a reader, want to be as nuclear to the poetry moment as the writer. They have sought me, and I them. There’s no need asserting that the poem which has induced me into vital congress with itself ought to be important to others having their own affair with verse. When a text that jumps my needle jumps yours, however, we’ve found common ground — something to crow about.

Life is so done and gone, so irretrievable when it leaves the body, so fucked. Perennial violent death is priced so religiously into human affairs that we’re scabbed over from it, psychically calloused by it, inured to it; nonetheless, a single instance concentrated and conveyed through artifice can still hurt like hell. Antonio López’s poem paints the tragedy of a young life snuffed out. Its demotic tone, liturgical parody and evocation of urban desert build to a close whose unruly full stop is at perfect pitch, piercing with dolor and incredulity.

[…]
Our altar, that art in EPA, hallow be thy pain, thy henny, thy Don Julio will be poured in dirt as it is in 7-Eleven, give us this day our daily Takis, our westside, our good morning, our good night, our boy back, please, his dreams, his age, 15, his name I pray, Inty, my God, you were hardly. A man.
(Antonio López, “Our Lady of the Westside,” in Poetry, December 2023)

Amen.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, reading | 3 Comments

Poetry Isn’t About

Posted on December 10, 2023 by JMN

I read verses that stir me,
but can’t remember what they said.
They don’t mean what they say,
they are what they say.
I read them again to be stirred;
they keep not meaning, only being,
leaving in my mind a memory
of being stirred by words.
Grasping them is grasping
slaking, thirsty water
sliding through my fingers,
aching to be drunk.
***

Afterword

Following is an excerpt from “Hot Milk Hissing in a Pot” by Li-Young Lee (“she” is the serpent):

She called me her bow,
and she bent and strung me.
She called me her arrow,
and she loosed me.
And I’m still speeding, quivering with her aim.
(Poem published in Poetry, December 2023)

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel, poetry, reading | 3 Comments

There’s So Much to Be Said for Saying Less

Posted on December 8, 2023 by JMN

“Social Media Man,” 24 x 30 in. collage (JMN 2023)

Quoth the raven, “Never mind.”
(pace Poe)

Afterword

I’m copious and so are you.

(From Cowpunk by Diane Seuss in Poetry, December 2023)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language | 1 Comment

A Defense of Women Via Sarcastic Tirade Meaning the Opposite of What It Purports to Affirm

Posted on December 2, 2023 by JMN

“Sonambula,” 12 x 14 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)

[Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice ironic bloviation. The message buried in a made-up rant full of ludicrous rhetoric (posted previously) is that the assertion “It never happened,” or that an encounter was “consensual,” implies that women lie about being violated. That assumption is patently outrageous is my point.]

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, rhetoric, satire, society | 5 Comments

The Deep-Rooted Mendacity of the Weaker Sex

Posted on November 29, 2023 by JMN

“Somnambula,” 12 x 14 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)

Swaggart. Trump. Weinstein. Epstein. Windsor. Brand. Rose… the list goes on. When will such men be spared the allegations of conniving women? It’s the one time the word “liaress,” feminine of “liar,” would be a useful addition to the language.

Everyone knows women are liaresses; it’s inherent in their DNA, a viral, vapors-prone disposition passed readily from one vixen to the next. How the contagion travels is a mystery. Where there may be, initially, one or two attention-seeking hellcats hollering rape, soon there are six, then a dozen, then twenty or more — it becomes a frenzy of follow-the-lying-liaress, a game of make-up-a-crazy-story about being violated by a powerful, charismatic man. The mendacious flibbertigibbets morph into prevaricating gerbils diving off the cliffside in their suggestible droves, infected by the vicious and delusional inventions of the original liaress. He raped me! they gibber and jabber during their richly deserved plummet to oblivion, to be dashed upon the rocks far below, where the waves consign their lying carcasses to Davy Jones’s locker.

What’s an upstanding celebrity with imperious urges to do when exposed to ripe wenches? Society can’t simply salt away its womb-stock in a secure purgatory, canopied in weeds, in order to make itself safe from female mischief. For now, the sole recourse of the harried victim is to gas off to his fanbase, lawyer up, and ride hell-bent for leather on a hobbyhorse named Consensual.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged miscellaneous, society | 5 Comments