12.01.2005

werdenfield love for each and every last - squish! - one

this arrived in the mail today, confirming my sense that john ashberry has become deeply weird with fame, psychoanalysis, and age. Move over, late, rhyming Creeley poems, its:

Wild Geese - John Ashberry

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

okay, so i lied to you, its - surprise - mary oliver. but i figured if i put mary oliver up there, you'd read it like i did, with a sense of fatality, like watching a body fall out a window til "PLONK!" we hit the, umm, hard concrete? of "the family of things".

sent by a borderline-buddhist friend who doesn't read much poetry yet called me up to tell me how much he liked my reading last month (future post or visit to therapist here). i tensed while reading it, and tried to pull away, esp. the parts where we are flying over the placeholder nouns of named landscape like in "god bless america" or "this land is your land" but without any of the cheese or charm of those two. goddawful descriptive distance.

i figure some people like the lullaby-like quality of this, but without the metrics of song. its like your boring mother is saying boring but familiar things to you as you go to bed. its like checking the thermometer: "yup its hot". "yup its still hot". slight sweetness + bland =s comforting, right? poem as sleep-aid or suppository. hell, "life's rough" & some are "in need" of an ameliorative.

so, what to say about the daily weather forecast? that its predicatable? it seems silly to rage against it, "over the prairies and the deep trees". it is obviously medicinal to some, but its barely readable to me. poetry is vast and inexhaustible. its sentiments are blameless. etc etc.

[ i am trying, pirooz, not to rush to condemn, but there's nothing else here for me thats FUN, that wants only to tear up and rip out the pastic intestines of this beast and REVEL in it - VIOLENT, yes, but no more than my LUNCH. the only way i want to masticate this is not as droll NPR sermon on beatitude and some kinda whitebread come-on to intimacy but as WORDS to MASTICATE on BURP thank you very much then - and there is liberation in me destroying in a fit of gleeful rage what someone else is rushing to stickily embrace and us not needing to EXPLAIN or FIGHT over this difference - since I'm not tearing up THEIR book or ITS AUTHOR - I am tearing up THIS SPACE, THIS TEXT, THIS READING, what it elicits...]

so i mull before lunch, i ,
"whomeveh i am, no matter how wonewy
the mawy owiveh offehs itsewf to my imaginashun
cawws to me wike duh wiwd geese, hahsh and ecksiting--"

okay, now i am squarely back to how terrible it is, what a horrendous ball of hooey, spiritual hallmart e-card texts.

i am never going to even try to get to the bottom of this, except to say that when i find myself acting in a "mary oliver-esque" way to another adult, i am overcome with shame and scorn. and thats in person - an that emotional response keys me thati have "lost" my connection with them in the moment, it attunes me to cut the soliquoy, hold-space, and reoreint. If i fail to do this, I go on, but with a sens eof shame at the betrayal of our relation, and then scorn at this too, a rage at what shit is pouring from my mouth. i read such sneakily and unacknowledged (and obviously unavoidable in the act of writing) falseness and duplicity here. maybe i have issues. its not all i read here, but it overwhelms the rest. but i do not stand against intimacy, or even advice, or certainly not "sharing" (but the poet's promise to share their woes is not followed up, its an empty gimmick - and not just here, but in most (all?) of oliver's work - there is a frigid patina of distance which she uses to convey intimacy that i find troubling when the resulting work is taken as natural, organic produce and not some deeply mediated gene-splicing: in many ways i find her work supremely un-wild, massively tame - and taming: which I resist here). i dont stand against, even the type of genial - yet lingusitically very decisive and powerful - type of wise-old-aunt authority ol mary's asserting here, but, left to its own devices, it - what? - represents a human tendency that i think of as opiate, a nice sleep-aid before bed for troubled sleepers, yes, but a very weird crown to be riding on the head of the intersection of the worlds literary and spiritual, where i often find it.

i respect deeply many of the people who ornament their sermons, letters and essays with verse of this kind (like today's sender), yet it seems so purely decorative - maybe thats part of it, i dont want a purely - even mainly - decorative poetry, and my insistence that one's artwork can be a much more funamental and powerful wrangling with life and death and self and other and sex and state often feel a little lonely.

a basic lesson of autonomy i that if someone tries to shovel the wrong medicine in your mouth, don't swallow. regardless of their own intentions. if you do, you get deeply troubled, and have to write mad posts about it broadcast to the teemingly near-empty depths of the blogosphere. how did i know it was the wrong medicine, friends, its right up there in the brand-name, one poetica-pharmaceutical giant who does not have my consumer allegiance. hence this class-action suit to which you are welcome to file briefs.

thanks for stopping by and please deposit leftover portions of this rant in the comments box on your way out of the page.

7 Comments:

Blogger Kyle said...

postscript: the experience of writing this was both intense and highly unpleasant. it felt in some ways like a possession - hard to let go of that mad - painfully ungrounded - energy. how to express anger without collapsing into this state... i'm just physically tired by/of writing this way.

2:01 PM  
Blogger jwg said...

Kyle,
but you were able to say what you were feeling. When i read this (the poem) (was laughing bc i thought it was JA) it felt trite, but how to get past that. NOthing you said strikes me as wrong or unfair. I would not want to interact with MO. Is it wrong to think you can tell by the poem what type of person you are dealing with? There are some poets, bc of their poems, i am sure i would be friends with (spicer is not one of them), is that too much of a jump to make? Dont have that feeling with writers of prose. Seems the poem shows interest, and if this is where her interest and time go, count me out

4:44 PM  
Blogger marlowe diego said...

fighting talk! love it. we need fighting talk cuz it stirs us in we belly. the need or want to be present is what, me tinks, we have all been swimmingly struggling towards these many annuals. it's what's alive. it's what's for dinner. it's it, innit?

'it wuz sposed ta be so...eeezee' quothe los streets.

i cld re-it-uh-rate my last posting on 'inmyheartthereis- but rather read-erect you to view IT yaselves....the monolithic thoughtlessness of sachirinity - give me full on sugar please, distilled, i think they call it rum.

but wait! the fire is good but it must burn with love....ie. burn things lovingly: a wild fire holds the intent of creation.

hugs to my burning poet friends.

always

mapbb (marlowe diego)

9:47 PM  
Blogger Pirooz M. Kalayeh said...

You know my ex-father-in-law gave me a book the first Christmas, Nicole and I were together.

I was excited. I like books. I rip open the wrapping and there it was. Pulitzer Prize Poet, Mary Oliver. Believe it or not, I had no idea who she was. I was like, "Who the fuck is this?"

Then I drop it in my suitcase, head back to JKS, and pick it up one night. I start reading. 1 poem. That's as long as I could last. Wait a second. Not true. I read 1 more. Then I tossed it across the room. I was like, "Man, this is really bad. Pulitzer Prize?"

Like Jim, I was fooled into thinking this was John Asheberry. I read it and liked it. Not because of the poetry, but to see someone like Asheberry make a move very against his grain. For that reason, I enjoyed it.

Now as a poem on its own there is not an incredible depth at all. It is plainspeak. It is prose for all intense purposes. But it doesn't hurt me. It reminded me of an old person about to die. It even came off sort of Zen (this is with the guise of Asheberry writing it).

I didn't change my mind when I found out it was Oliver. I even re-read it after your critique. I agree with all you say. Still, I couldn't help feeling reassured by it, like Robert Deniro in Analyze This, when he cries during the insurance commercial. A family hugs. He cries.

This does not mean I am emotionally overwrought. It is simply a case of me listening to people speaking English as a second language. It is a case of me hearing the homeless in L.A. talk about running for the Presidency. It is a case of me enjoying the rub of expectation in language.

If this was done tongue and cheek by Asheberry, it would be a revolution. Because it is Mary, and it is sincere, it loses its tension for me.

I can still appreciate it, but it wouldn't be as fun as hearing Kyle do some imitation of pseudo-sincere talk.

Mmmm

Why not play with sincerity with some renditions? Call the series After Mary Oliver.

Ha!

What if my dad said it? What if Mar's parents said it? What if it was Jim's pop talking about wrestling instead of geese?

This is my dad's version as I see it: (o) (o)


100 mile in the sea of the everlasting desert of love
I am like the rose of the molecule of my brain
Over the mountain, this Grand Canyon,
I say How are you doing? to the tree, and the seven valley of light inside the river of the ocean of humanity.
Then I look into the sky.
This bird is going.
I think I am like this bird.
I am the Last of the Mohican
I can hear nightingale with 100,000 of my neuron.
One million of my neuron.
I am in tune with the optimal frequency of the planet Earth.

[insert 3 lines about unity]

Everything is for you three. Paiman, Pirooz, and Panauh. I am with you always.

[insert heart that looks like an 'M']

DaD ('A' in 'Dad' is also a heart)

This is my (0) (0):

desert repenting
animal loves despair
geese home again

11:24 PM  
Blogger Kyle said...

it was a pleasure to read all of these comments. i am a chiken with my anger against / around a living poet's poem, at least publically. but our culture doesn't see too much public anger that isnt some kind of brutally repressed and redirected rage - a la conservative (and some leftie) talk radio.

for the life of me i dont think mary oliver's agenda or work reminds me of any of my family members, so i don't think its some transferance. and i remember a couple years in my early 20s when oliver's work was important for me; when i was down and out and lost and lonely, she sounded like a beacon of sanity. read, as pirooz suggests, as prose, prose with line breaks (to me that makes it heavier).

now, attending to it as a poem, it seems duplicitious, or unexamined, one of the chalices that you think is maybe jesus's since indy pointed to it until you see the nazi who grabs it greedily turning into howling skeletal dust.

and maybe i was angry at the friend who sent it to me, and that i read it. i am definitely tired.angry at the place of such ornamental verse in our culture.

so down with reading heavy prosey- ornamentalist-new age-poetry when you dont want to be reading heavy prosy-ornamentalist-new age- poetry.

pirooz, i would love to see more versions of your "after mary oliver [not]"

11:19 AM  
Blogger frank said...

oi nice to see you. i stop in for a virtual glass of tea. i read that poem at beginning of post thinking if this is ashbery then i am somewhat revolted at the bourgeois tone of "the world offers itself to your imagination"
sorry i can't stay today, the uniform commercial code is calling...

2:03 PM  
Blogger Pirooz M. Kalayeh said...

This is my mom's (0)(0):

[insert silence]

Look is a bird. I see this bird everyday. Is beautiful.
Woman is like this bird, Pirooz. All woman want is freedom.

Look how hard I struggle with this man. I keep it inside.

I am telling you. This is all woman want. Freedom. Like this bird.

My (0)(0):

wild geese
home again
how lonely

4:48 PM  

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