May 14th, 2012 § § permalink
I always had a thing for small presses and tiny mags. I read Bukowski for the first time on typewriter paper, photocopied and saddle-stitched. Seymour Krim, Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, even Tom Waits: the list is longer than memory. I found the things remarkable. Like they were made next door. Like I could smell the scent of wine and cigarettes still on the pages.
I read HOWL in high school, and it sent me careening, dizzy and delirious, through the streets of my town, hauling folks up by the collar, pressing their backs to walls while I wheezed breathless lines into shocked mugs. CITY LIGHTS, Ferlinghetti’s press, was the publisher. HOWL was part of the POCKET POET SERIES—the same series that introduced me to Corso’s GASOLINE, Ferlinghetti’s own PICTURES OF A GONE WORLD, and opened me like a can of party snakes. But when I found a Ginsburg poem in a homemade journal held together by a couple of staples, it was something else. Even closer somehow. More personal. More private and direct. I forget the name of the zine, but I remember the moment.
Then I met Irv Stettner, editor and publisher of STROKER MAGAZINE. He had accepted some of my work and invited me to visit him. I did, bottle in hand, and we became pals. Together, mailbags swinging from our shoulders, we pinballed tables in East Village bars and cafes, fists full of Strokers waving as we went. Irv taught to me to hawk them like the boxes of Cracker Jacks they were, each with a surprise on the inside.
That’s when I got the itch to make things like that or to help other folks make them—excellent words stuffed into bottles or homemade baskets strung to balloons and let loose on the blue. It’s not all that hard. Sure, as I recently mentioned to my friend, Tim Gilmore, the less money you have, the more muscle you need. But think what you do for the next guy or gal. The artist you boost. The reader with a chest full of snakes yet unsprung. And we have the internet. So, you know, fuck a duck.
I’m launching EAT POEMS, a series of digital EP albums, each focusing on a single poet reading his or her own work.
The first album will be THE RAPE POEMS by Frances Driscoll, a sampling of the work in her extraordinary collection published under the same name by Pleasure Boat Studios. Look for the announcement in the immediate future.
Update 5/17/2012: EAT POEMS #1 / THE RAPE POEMS
April 27th, 2012 § § permalink
"Through the Window," Mark Ari
Today, posting a comment to my friend, Pam Hnyla’s, Facebook, I remembered something. Once, on a sidewalk corner in Lyon, a streetlight spoke to me. Feminine voice. Alluring. At first, I didn’t know where it was coming from—that voice, smoky and mesmerizing, so concerned about what I was going to do next. I stood in the soft crowd and looked around. Then I saw it and understood. I smile now to think how for four months after that I made sure my daily walk–wherever else I went—took me back to that intersection. Just to hear her voice.
I’ve always fallen in love like that. At the drop of a dime. The sound of a voice. A glimpsed mouthful of laughter. Sappy, I suppose, and maybe not the big love, but one with real yearning in it. A kind of love. You might call it superficial. I don’t know how to say it’s that when your heart all of a sudden pours out in some particular and unforeseen direction.
I fell in love with my wife that way. She lived across the hall from me in Bay Ridge. Our living room and kitchen windows faced each other across a narrow alley. One evening I spied her silhouette on the plastic bamboo curtains of her window. That was it. I was gone.
I had met Jan before. In the elevator of that building. I’d come back from a trip to the Middle East. I was burnt cork black, wearing a cotton shirt with wing-like sleeves I’d been given in Ayda, and holding a huge, smiley-face sugar bowl. It had been full when I’d left a couple months earlier. I’d found it empty except for some bloated bugs. Some kind of beetle. Most were dead. I was taking the mess out to the trash on my way to the corner deli to boost some of the sweet stuff to replace what the insects had taken.
So I talked to her. It’s a very New York thing to do. We talk to people in close places. We do it everywhere but the subway, which is why the subway can be such a surreal place. We complain. I think it’s because it allows an easy transition from talking to ourselves. We just let out whatever’s on our minds. Bugs and the amazing amount of missing sugar were on mine.
I don’t know what Jan thought. I’ve asked her since then, but she just nods knowingly. I must have been quite something to run into like that. Shaggy-headed. Beard up to my cheekbones. And that fat, yellow smiley face. Somebody from somewhere else indeed. Her eyes got wide at times, the turquoise of them sparking against this amazing crop of red hair. Her hair was so red then. She smiled, and that kept me going. But that was it. I was too focused on the task at hand.
Weeks later was when she hit me. A silhouette on a window shade removing a shirt. The outline of perfect breasts. The shadow of a nipple pointing up. That was all it took. I was rocked. Brained. Draw stars and planets and tweeting parakeets around my head. Years later I fell in love with her in that other way in another country but, for then, I was delirious. I won’t talk about how I tried to time things after that. You might find it creepy to hear how I angled to be around at just the right evening hour, to have my shade down but skewed in just the way that let me peek through secretly, to have the light in my apartment switched off in advance so I could better see out.
Jack London said “you can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Love can be like that. But like inspiration, it can different, too. It can pounce on you just like that, bat in hand. Then you mark the spot. You go back.
February 23rd, 2012 § § permalink
I’ll be interviewing Margaret Atwood in little more than a week, and I’m wondering what I might talk to her about. I hear she’s a serious twitterer, so I was thinking I’d ask her how that’s going. I’m sure no one has done that before.
I rarely Twitter. I never text. But it seems like there are hordes of folks busy at it. Some people are tweeting poems. Others are writing novels serialized in posts of 140 characters. I hear these novels are big in Japan. Words, words, words. Between the Blogosphere and the Twitterati, the social networkers and self e-publishers of all stripes, an awful lot of people are writing. More every day. Some think this a bad thing, that somehow rare and golden flecks of genius will be lost in the dust storm.
When I was a kid the number of people who live in China and India sparked my imagination. I didn’t know the number, really—just that more than half of all the people in all the world lived in those places. I considered that if every Chinese and Indian got up on a stepstool and leapt off together at just the right moment, the impact of all those feet hitting the ground at once would send the world careening into the sun. The thought still makes me smile.
So what if everyone got up tomorrow and, instead of merely feeling they had a story or poem inside of them, took the leap to write it down. What if they twittered or blogged it; texted, kindled, or simply went old school and scribbled on paper or their walls or their arms? What if the sun came up on a planet awash in stories and poetry? It would be apocalyptic. Something huge would crumble. Great glaciers would melt and move and reshuffle the continents. I can almost hear the crack and crunch of it. What a lovely day to be alive that would be.
I still don’t know what I’m going to talk to Margaret Atwood about. But I’m going to pay more attention to Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkAri.
About the event: Folio Weekly, The Fix,
October 28th, 2011 § § permalink
There’s a small flock of deans where I work. They’ve decided to offer a regular time on a regular basis when they’ll make sure one or more of them is available to hear from folks about whatever those folks have on their minds. That sounds pretty good. It shows a desire to make communication easier. I don’t think they really want to hear what’s on my mind—and they don’t make it a fair risk to tell them—but, on the surface at least, it’s a nice gesture. There’s something to be said for that.
The result was a flurry of e-mails. One person saw the invitation as an occasion for bluster, and the “reply-to-all” button on their email client as a convenient megaphone.
I’m not against “reply-to-all.” It has its uses. And I’ve no problem with soap-boxing. I’ll stop to listen if the voice is a compelling one. But I do like having the choice to move on and be done with it should that voice strike me as hollow. “Reply-to-all” makes that nearly impossible. It turns the public street into an endless loop. I have to come back again and again if only to read enough to know that it is that same windy thing I want to delete.
The fellow had his withers swelled about grade inflation. It’s not a new subject, so he must have felt it was one not taken seriously enough. The invitation from the deans was to walk over and tell it to them, but that requires legwork. And it’s private. He wanted an audience.
All right. Even if I never bought the rap about grade inflation enough to care about it in the least, I figure the guy has some congestion to clear. I can live with that. And if he has to be rude and mean-spirited, I can let that pass, too. I’ve been there. Let him blow it off. Then maybe he’ll pour himself a drink with a little bite to it, put on some music, and let it all go away. That’s what I was thinking. I didn’t type it and hit “reply-to-all.”
The professoriate is a wreck. It is hidebound. As winkered by procedure and atrophied presuppositions as any rankist clergy. Sure, it will change. Everything is changing now. Technology is ahead of us. And whether you think we’re caught in the web or at home in the cloud there’s no going back unless we tear it all down and start again. More and more, the professoriate puts on the uniform of the corporate structures it serves. Some members pay lip-service to resisting that direction; others welcome it. Those in opposition don’t fight too hard. The bargaining table is a Brahmin picnic where everyone is afraid they’ll go hungry and no one is aware of how fat they are.
Of course, the blowhard’s rant didn’t die. “Reply-to-all” is electronic chum. Fish gather.
In the itty-bitty frenzy of back and forth that followed, someone from the “hard” sciences “replied-to-all,” claiming her department does not have to be concerned about grade inflation. Half of their students are failing. That was a mark of pride. Of solid pedagogy and high standards. “How easy,” I thought. I did not hit “reply-to-all.”
I feel pretty good about my students. And though my job is a temporary one, I’ve been at this place for better than ten years. I’ve met good folks. Both on faculty and in administration—even a dean or two. Ones I admire and like. There are some loons about, too, and that pleases me. And sure, there are plenty of others who are forgettable except in their own minds, and a few who are a curse on everything living. I don’t care. Just stay out of my mailbox.
I’m not sure what it is that made me want to write this rather than spend the time working on a song, but there you have it. It might have been the invitation to talk which, while well-intentioned, was in essence personally meaningless. Maybe it was all the grade inflation nonsense—the problem has never been in the classroom. Maybe rising grades are a symptom (and I’m not swearing to it) of something else but, if so, the fault is elsewhere. Or maybe it was that “weed-them-out” mentality that reeked of a discredited (one would hope) Social Darwinism. But I’m betting it was just that “reply-to-all.” Get a blog, for God’s sake.
It could be that windbag did me favor. I’m looking around. I’m looking at my wrists and ankles. I’m smiling as I type.
October 6th, 2011 § § permalink
Okay, so yesterday I heard some guy is going around saying I don’t give a shit. Ticked me off. I steamed over it. After all, who the hell is going to tell me I don’t give a shit? But he didn’t tell me. He said it to other folks. It just got back to me. And now I’m going have a trouble liking this guy. What a nuisance.
He seemed all right before. Didn’t know him well but wanted to. Chatted a few times. Got the impression we were simpatico, and I don’t get a hell of lot of that sense around where I live. Now, in retrospect, I guess those conversations were just politics. Okay. It’s a political world. I don’t give a shit.
Most likely I don’t give a shit about some of the same shit he gives a shit about. In the context of the universe of which he is the center, my attitude probably does come off as more general. Context, if not everything, is a lot. And there’s no accounting for universes. We all make what sense we can out of the world, and we only have our own feeble perceptual and cognitive powers by which to construct the conceits we live by. Sometimes, when I get a glimpse into one of those worlds, I’m glad there are so many others.
I don’t have a need to get along with everybody. I don’t trust people who do. But that doesn’t mean I want to do anything about them. I just take it into account on an instinctual level. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit. There’s too much else to do.
I like walking with people. I like it when there’s wine and the gab is good and we’re walking and picking up stuff along the way to make a noise with. I like the improvised syncopation that happens, the joyful stumbles, the sounds of voices charged with merriment. I like the word “merriment.” But when the route is mapped and the drumbeat insistent, I prefer to slip out. I disdain neat rows. The irrefragably programmatic. The very idea of like-mindedness as the highest aspiration makes my sinuses ache.
I kind of like that “build it and they will come” concept. But when it’s married to blaming the ghosts who don’t arrive, it loses meaning. They don’t come because there is greater nourishment elsewhere, or because there is some other place in that moment where they must be to manifest more according to their own lights. That’s obvious. It ought to be respected.
So what do I give a shit about? I don’t know. I think as long as there is food in the world, everybody ought to eat. As long there’s medicine, everybody ought to have what they need. As long as there are people, everybody ought to have a friend and a lover with whom to make crazy love all the time. I think there is nothing sweeter than a kiss, and I want everyone to know what that can be, to judge for themselves. I believe the world has a lot of hardness in it, and we ought to make things easier for the next person when we can. We ought to help one another find and do what each of us loves to do because, in the end, at the heart of things on a very individual level, it makes all the difference. The quality of our sleep depends on it. Every morning, we leave pieces of our dreams on our pillows. These get into the air we breathe.
I believe one of the greatest gifts we can give one another, one that is within the reach of everyone to give, is encouragement. The most remarkable state of being is not to be inspired but to inspire. And I know the value of that from having been given inspiration. And whatever the temple, no matter how tempting it is to appoint oneself gatekeeper, it’s better to “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”[i]
Oh, and yeah, everything is personal. Everything. That’s probably why I was still so ticked when I started typing this. I wish I wasn’t so hot-headed sometimes. After all, it’s pretty stupid to get all fired up by hearsay. But I’m smiling now. In another couple of days, I’ll forget why I was so bothered in the first place. Maybe that means I don’t give a shit.
