NO OUTLET

Receding to brown: day
swept over precision attacks

my fan base is on board
as the last train leaves

& your heart is an expanse
of flowered bandwidth:

don't stop the crocus
or the golden finch

each part once embedded,
numbered, now pried loose

from the fence post
but I cannot push

the water through the gate.

BROADSIDES

I'm making broadsides of my poems (limited edition of 1). That's right--one poem per person, each poem different. I'll only make 25. First come, first served. It'll be autographed and printed on fancy paper. Five American dollars each. Paypal at antrobin AT gmail DOT com.

Something huge starts up
& says "you're still here"
while the night continues
beneath some bough
& I want to place myself there
an X in the corner of this
expanse: plaintive the natives
sing low & in a new place, here
we plant our spears & begin.

A SPRING DEVOTIONAL

I am a civil engineer on a crumbling bridge
that spans the lake near the house
where you used to live
growing up in a reed waste fine smooth things
to brighten the interior are spidering
away the life

*

I am a keep in a copse the woods
a reminder of bullets & forks while rattles
clamber outreach in a plastic gallows
forgetfulness does not excuse us rather from
the insides it redeems
giant rhododenron savior of back yards
split fences foment here a resolution
for the scarlet tanager
non-native solutions to overcome
this burgeoning prayerbook
how can we know how to live

On Joseph Ceravolo's "Ho Ho Ho Caribou"

This appreciation was originally published on My Other Blog on August 4, 2005. Republished here because it is a timely time for Joe Ceravolo.

*
Sunday, August 4, 2005

Welcome to the Church of JC (Joseph Ceravolo). Today’s sermon concerns the first section of Ceravolo’s poem “Ho Ho Ho Caribou.”



Ho Ho Ho Caribou
for Rosemary


I

Leaped at the caribou.
My son looked at the caribou.
The kangaroo leaped on the
fruit tree. I am a white
man and my children
are hungry
which is like paradise.
The doll is sleeping.
It lay down to creep into
the plate.
It was clean and flying.


*

The dedication provides context. Though the first-time reader may not know that “Rosemary” refers to Ceravolo’s wife, he or she probably instinctually knows that poets usually dedicate poems to people close to themselves. The absence of a surname also indicates an intimate level of familiarity. “Familiar” is an apt word here—the poem is about Ceravolo’s family. Or the family in general and the father/husband’s role within the family.

*

And what of the title? Like much in Ceravolo, I would guess that the title was initially a phrase chosen for its aural effects. The long vowels lend a certain languidity to the phrase, slow down the pronunciation, almost force a speaker to linger on the words. Try to say it fast. This “training” of the tongue and eye is instructive, as the whole poem (and Ceravolo’s work in general) deserves a reading that lingers on the small bits, the phrasings, not just the semantic effects, but the aural/oral ones as well. Ceravolo’s playfulness peeks through in the title as well, “Ho ho ho,” probably makes many readers think of gangsta rap, but as this poem predates NWA, Slick Rick, and Ice-T, we must not get anachronistic on its ass. “Ho ho ho” is what Santa Claus says. And what guides Santa’s sleigh? Reindoor, aka caribou.

*

The poem’s first section sets the scene and reveals its method. The first line is a verb phrase missing a subject. Who leaped at the caribou? The Roman numeral “I” that precedes the first line provides a plausible explanation, though I think no explanation is needed. The important act here is the leaping; the poem begins already in motion. Some Greek or Roman guy, Horace, maybe, or Aristotle, or both recommended beginning poems in the middle of the action. They got this idea from an older blind Greek fellow. More verb phrases follow: “My son looked at the caribou,” “the kangaroo leaped on the / fruit tree.” A lot is going on here. The first person (second, if we count Rosemary) we encounter is the speaker’s son, looking at the caribou that is, ostensibly, the inspiration for the poem. The kangaroo, an aural cousin of the caribou replicates the action in the initial line, with more specificity. We have a subject (the kangaroo) and object (the fruit tree) and an action (leaping). The emphasis on motion, the in medias res (we now return to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress), is important here because Ceravolo, while always lyrical, always concerned with sounds, is very often a narrative poet. He establishes that he is writing a narrative poem by beginning with a quick succession of actions, actions already in motion. While the pure lyric poem meditates (on a dot, rather than in a line, to be Tralfamadorian about it) on a moment, or an emotional situation (looking at London sleeping from Westminster bridge brings a minor epiphany to Will Wordsworth). A narrative poem unfolds over time—motion, physical motion, a journey, is one of the most common ways a narrative unfolds. Maybe the only way. As I Lay Dying is a lyrical narrative.

*

Having established the narrative, the speaker introduces himself. The poignancy of the phrase “I am a white / man and my children /are hungry” is tempered by socio-economic and racial considerations. How important is it that the speaker is a white man? Why are his children hungry? Before we can fully consider what (if any) social commentary lurks in this phrase, the speaker informs us that this, his situation (being white and poor) “is like paradise.” The family situation. The family stranded figuratively (and maybe literally) in a desert place that is not entirely a desert place (fruit trees). The presence of the “white man” as central figure in the family drama. The confusion of the elements, the leaps in imagery (and the actual “leaping” in the poem), set the scene. A white man with hungry children in a wild, dangerous place that is also paradise. Familial love creates a paradise that transcends the less than idyllic (but more than a little whimsical) landscape in which Ceravolo has placed our family.

*

The final lines in the stanza:


The doll is sleeping.
It lay down to creep into
the plate.
It was clean and flying.


operate primarily on an aural level. Consonant + “l” sounds prevail: “sleeping,” “plate,” “clean,” “flying.” Rhyme: “sleeping,” & “creep.” Assonance: long “e” sounds. The “pitch” of the language here is turned a notch higher (if my ear is tuned correctly) than what comes before. This is a tonal shift brought about not only by apparently discontinuous imagery, but by the texture of the language itself. Note that I say “apparently.” The sleeping doll replaces the earlier non-image of “my son.” The doll, the son, lay down, and creeps into the plate. Once again, we have a verb phrase, this time a more complex construction. The doll sleeps, lays down, and creeps. Into a plate. Because it’s hungry. “It” in the last line can refer to the doll or the plate. If the plate is clean, it is empty. It may have once contained food (clean your plate!), or not. That it is flying is consistent with the other actions reported so far: looking, leaping, creeping, sleeping. These words also recall a sort of Edenic setting. Paradise, right? Crawling, creeping things. Birds of the air. Beasts of the field. Fruit trees.

*

It is one thing to say that you don’t like the poetry of Joe Ceravolo. It is quite another to say that you don’t understand it, or don’t “get” it. Emotionally, his tone is very steady, and much of the time he works with narrative that is at least as “understandable” as any Faulkner novel.

BACKYARD (rev. 2/23/13)

BACKYARD

& a prefab interior
for a final

pine tree, thicket
packed with ticks:

water on sound quickens
small child waiting on a train:

standing life a wall
tissue thin: fuse & filament

sparking something
more than minor.

*

More than days, these.

Central casting brought
us next to lips,

sanctioned
a song

Pastoral

PASTORAL

An entire unit so far free
to make entrance on a coyote
a broken

cactus tethered to falling
snows of last air, newspaper
ink on the hill

hangs above three grimy clouds
& the best of my love so
more to find

uprooted a sandpaper
-like resonance & jangle
these pockets

combed over tilted to the left
askew Army cap she & I
watch from a dune

a line of sandpipers & the lake
a cathedral: evaporation
is how you make salt.

BACK YARD

Semi-vast interior
for my final

pine tree, thicket
packed with ticks:

water on sound quickening
small child waiting on a train:

life standing up a wall
tissue thin: fuse & filament

sparking something
more than minor.

*

More than days, these.

Central casting brought
us next to lips,

sanctioned
a song.

Reading

Reading Jess Walter's Financial Lives of the Poets, which is pretty amusing so far, though several chapters in I haven't yet discerned a plot.

A book on book indexing.

Chop Suey, a semi-scholarly cultural history of Chinese food in America.

*

textbooks.

THE BUILDER

I always look
for the birds
in your poems
she sd & I sd
this isn't text
speak this is
Creeley speak this
is Pound speak
& I sd watch out
all that etc.
but she smiled
& there was a bird
in my head & a bird
in my back pocket
& the world
was suddenly made
of bridges over low
rivers & these poems
your aviary

Homework.

The only thing I know for sure about my paternal grandfather is that he he died in his mid-60s after falling into a vodka-induced coma. By all speculative accounts (of which there are only a few) this was a deliberate act, a suicide by bottle. My father obtained leave from the Navy to visit him on his death bed. Dad was 26.

*

They came from Irish stock. I don't know the exact date that they came over, but an ancient newspaper acount my grandmother once showed me proved that there were Robinsons in the Oregon Territory as early as the 1830s. We also know that, in my father's words, "Colonel Robinson married a squaw." So there's the Irish/Native American bloodline, a volatile mix if the stereotypes of the alcoholic Irishman and the "drunken injun" are to be believed.

There's the landscape: rainy small-town Oregon. In this case, coastal Oregon, the setting for Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. I guess, then, I come from hard-working Irish-American family. Loggers in the family, as in the novel. But I don't know for sure. My father had logging jobs as young man, making a little over two dollars an hour. I guess in there is drink, too. There is the semi-hidden Indian heritage. There are the pine trees and the sand dunes, the jetties, the rocky coastline, a landscape seemingly made for long melancholic days, made for poets, I guess, imbibers, regular blue-collar folk of the Raymond Carver mold.

I spent my entire childhood in towns like these. I learned everything I know about humans in these towns; everything since has been modification, tinkering, corollaries, minor discovery, affirmation.

*
I keep saying "I guess" not as a placeholder or a tic, but because so much of this work is speculation and rummaging. I don't know how much of this history is actually true, how much is pure guess, how much is well-intentioned reconstruction. But I do know that it's my story. And lest my first few paragraphs give an incomplete impression, I'll just say it: this is not a story about alcohol or alcoholism, drugs or mental illness. It's not a narrative of recovery. It's an account, decades removed, of family. Of a family and families, of trying to understand community and belonging. It's not even about survival or dying. It is, ultimately, about being alone.

*

There's nothing wrong with growing up in a small town; it has its advantages. It's relatively safe, they say. Everyone knows everyone else. A sense of community. When one is vitally aware of the boundaries of the small town, though--not just geographical but metaphysical, ideological--the "community" takes on a slightly menacing quality. A family, too, is a sort of community. At the age of 15 or so, when I had my first drink, I wanted desperately to escape both of these communities.

*

When I was a child nobody wore seatbelts. Nobody wore bicycle helmets. Did bicycle helmets even exist? The furniture was orange, the kitchens were formica, the carpet shag. All adults I knew drank heavily. And smoking? It wasn't weird to smoke--it was normal, accepted, and relatively free of health concerns. The other day I saw a young couple, early 20s maybe, pushing a toddler in a stroller. The woman was smoking a cigarette. My first reaction was disgust, derision. Then I thought, hell, I spent nearly every waking moment in my childhood house(s) inhaling my father's cigarette smoke. And I turned out ok, right?

On Being Numerous

Wouldn't say why
over iris, speckled grouse,
a forthcoming
of units, emergent on fidelity.

The field is no longer open:
our good is no good no more.

Speak with open mouth & hands
on the varieties of grace
or green grass waving its "hello"
at the lakes, still frozen, churning.

The mouth is a wry line straight:
my timeline's broken open.
I keep pulling the horizon
closer: I many need to call my broker.

Fallow lines, a systemic corrugation
at work with all these white people.

Did it always work like this?
Has it always felt like this.
A closed system is not closed:
it's just avoiding the hassle.

New poems in Coconut, reading with John Beer @DIVA

Gina Myers wrote me last week to let me know that Coconut Magazine is taking three poems for the June issue. Coming on the heels of two or three rejections this month, this was welcome news.

The three poems are all in the manuscript of my upcoming book, which is tentatively titled On the Factorization of Very Large Numbers.

They've been difficult poems to place so far, though I don't exactly submit regularly these days. At this point, though, I'm sitting on a whole book's worth so I hope to get a few more out there on the street before the book hits.

*

I'll also be reading poems from that ms. this coming April 13th at DIVA in Downtown Eugene. Also reading is John Beer, Canarium poet, and teacher in the Portland State MFA program. It should be a good night. For a poetry reading.

Reading

This morning I wandered in from the freezing fog or ice or whatever it was to find myself in the university bookstore (The Duck Store!) scanning the ever-present discount book tables, where I ran across a whole mess of titles I'd like to read, but alas, I don't even have the $4.98 to spare, due to my insane restricted funds clause (more on this in another post).

I picked up the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I have heard of but was not at all familiar with. I skimmed the first chapter and decided to add it to my list of things to read when I get the chance in 2013.

Of course I started thinking about Lolita and how much I adored it when I first read it as a young man in the mid-90s. A couple of yeara ago, S. and I tried to read it together (the third book in our failed book club; the first two were Wide Sargasso Sea and Ada. When we tried to read Lo, E. was about a year old and S. called me (we were by then living apart) and said that after the first few chapters she'd decided that she couldn't go on. She didn't want to read a manipulative story about a murderer and pedophile with a "fancy prose style." (Humbert's own words, not hers.) Somewhat reluctantly, I admitted to myself that I felt the same way. So Lo remains unreread.

At the beginning of this year I read a small book called Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee, which is a bit of historical fluff that promised much more than it delivered. Ostensibly the story of Jefferson's slave James Hemmings, who apprenticed in Paris and became the first classically French-trained American chef, the book suffers from sheer lack of historical information. The author is forced then, to fill pages of tangential information about Parisian customs, the French Revolution, the likes and dislikes of Jefferson's daughters, and so on. Good idea, middling execution. The only thing I really know about James Hemings is that Jefferson eventually freed him, he went on to become a tavern cook in Boston, and died at age 36 from severe alcoholism.

Trudging very slowly through the fifth book in G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons, and it's pretty rough going. Both the plot movement and the prose are glacial. But I persist.

William Carlos Williams to Robert Creeley, March 3, 1950

Bad art is then that which does not serve in the continual service of cleansing the language of all fixations upon dead, stinking dead, usages of the past. Sanitation and hygiene or sanitation that we may have hygienic writing.

This is the second collaborative poem I've done with Joseph Massey.

first new draft in nearly a month

Stop signs circum-
navigate my wife I mean
my life I

mean something was scurrying out
back in the alley last night &

I’m sure it was a raccoon
or a coal miner from another era, a Rural Indiana or something or

A call girl with many numbers, digitized Pi because how else
is it spelled? Thrushes fluffing, danced away

from bushes smoked out
with high school communications on high

said The President & The Prime
Minister indivisible but by one & himself

because we are on the brink of something huge
& largely insignificant:

These are days. Remember a sea
of six-year-olds—

Remember your spoon, your coffee cup,
your curlicue.

Fourteen Lines for Rick Morrow

Indiana, don’t futz with my algorithm—
front porch whiskey covenants:

a scamper then a chorus of blasts, &
oh the things we save.

Date leaps, cliff wasted: ACME still
in business: product activation failed.

*

Sweet long trails: meteor show, august,
(as if to say “sober”) Perseids & all

the rest: a midwestern cull speaks
on irony & a big northwest heart

transported makes another document
& is: harried, black loam, topsoil,

formidable observer, last sturdy
post on the fence.

I was trying to explain to you some things
& then I realized you didn't need explaining

It keeps falling around & there is no light.

POSTCARD

Driving nails through giant hovercrafts of snow
& ice: I see you there beyond

the rushes, past a semi-circle
of varied thrush and Spanish lessons.

*

Circumference makes us fools: shiver on
midwest not making anyone safer:

firm ground is ground yet untilled—
“until the end of time.”

*

Is only a time or another tradition: other
times alight then fly up at smoke

& mothers in houses on edges of lakes
are stirring & glad to be awake.

CASE MARKER / BOUNDARY

I like the orange pylon icon I was caddying
for my brother begone a sameness to each
point apart: equidistant hearts blown up
to better see the insides, the gall, appall of
a thing that should know better

*

Been a long fire & now two-dozen mowed
what else? so long night at one time
a sonnet lived here but a sonnet doesn’t live
here anymore because we have lost our
capacity to be astonished

*

When this began a wicker broom was enough
or enough to matter to somebody
tinsel & crusting over like a snow bank or eye
reddened to a maddening gone mercury
long road blurred to diminishing saviors

*


Sever fine lengthenings forward to holiday
sanctioned by an animal holding postcards
at arm’s length at American expense no
account here or waiting for you flowers disturb
you flower found in a vacant space

*

It’s a fiction this new world you speak of an ex-
hilirating bluster of laughter mingled with bigger
roomier corners of shame & this is what I love
about you, brother, sister, ex-wife, this my daughter
my unmaking you my making