Friday, May 16, 2025

it's friday nite & you wanna hear music that speaks to its age

& our age too

Saturday, May 10, 2025

life in poetry

this morning it was summer.  not officially or unofficially, of course.  but the weather turned hot.  as usual for this time of year.  anna asked me if i wanted to walk to the midtown farmers market with her before it got too hot.  you bet, i said.

now, the midtown farmers market does sell produce & other edible goods, like organic nuts & beef, but it is primarily a marketplace of stalls selling all manners of things, like textiles & other goods, & food stalls too.  this being Sac much of the foods for sale are richly diverse cuisines.  but one thing i did before we walked the 12 or so blocks into midtown was read some poems.  on the john.  as usual.

my friend the poet/novelist eileen tabios developed a credo to which i've also adopted which is the goal of the poet is not to create a career in poetry; it is to make a life in poetry.  eileen also quotes a possibly fictive danish poet paul la fleur who said, 'to be a poet is not just about writing poetry; it is about finding a new way to live.'  another credo that i've adopted as well.  what does that mean?  well, a poet is living at a certain slant on life.  it is also about being a poet in however fashion one chooses to make.  

& but still, being a poet, having a life in poetry, often can be hard work, but it is not a job.  hell, poetry does not enrich, nor does the fame fly high, nor are there any groupies waiting backstage.  poetry is a lifestyle choice.  you make poetry your life by engaging with it all the time.  even when you are not writing you are reading.  whatever task or activity the poet pursues or engages with, whether it be skydiving, or knitting, or writing code, or shoveling snow, will refresh her poems.  

so does reading poems.  the poet is always reading poems.  poems become part of the poet's DNA.  so to prepare for this morning's walk to the midtown farmers market, which is now a pretty big gathering place for people to shop, eat, meet, & celebrate, i read one of my favorite of favorites poem by my man thom gunn, 'At the Barriers' dedicated to his friend & mentor robert duncan.

in the 'Postscript & Notes' section at the back of gunn's collected poems the poet states that the poem commemorates a street fair held in august 1988 in san francisco.  a detail that occurred to me this afternoon was gunn's age at the time of this street fair & my age now.  gunn was born in late august 1929.  i was born in early june of 1967, the Summer of Love.  which means that when gunn attended that fair in '88 he was probably 58, possibly 59.  i will be 58 next month.  that is a minor detail but one that i get a kick out of because gunn loved life.  he loved to party.  he loved people.  he loved gatherings such as crowded bars, rock concerts, & street fairs.  he did not grow old & disavowed the pleasures of living.  i am a bit more circumspect with my life in contrast to gunn's.  but i am growing old too & still enjoy the fuck out of life.  i don't live a chemical life like gunn did [which did eventually stop his heart at the tender age of 74], but i do enjoy coffee & beer.  shit, i am even sporting a pot belly because of my enjoyment of beer & cheese!  horrors!

gunn himself would probably argue with me about my credo, again, adopted from eileen tabios, on how to live a life in poetry.  he saw himself as an elizabethan/jacobean poet in modern days.  i see myself as an ordinary human being who has no career but is doing his damdedest to live my own life in poetry.  which includes my own DOMESTIC BOHEMIA: my wonderful nearly 30 years of marriage to anna, our son nick, my friends in the art, & outside of it, our cats, & all the responsibilities of trying to be a good man & citizen in this fucked up world.

now then, 'At the Barriers' is one of my favorite gunn poems because of within his lines is his love of our flawed human being.  for even in holidays, we find our lives are most profound

          If trade is suspended and this is a holiday
          it does not mean that the real business of life is suspended;
          in holidays the real business is most engaged.
          We wake drowsily to ourselves, we yawn, we stretch,
          we stretch our sympathies, this is a day of feeling with
          we circulate, we greet our friends, converse in groups,
          the competitive spirit is stifled;
          in small beginning our varied loves are based.

gunn then goes into a description of two Leopard Slugs mating he had seen on TV.  the slugs are hermaphroditic & merge their juices & bodies into a single mass of desire.  a metaphor for the street fair, the midtown farmers market, for sure.  for what is humanity but a collection of individuals but our cultures, our civilization, have also merged into a complex, complicated, electric mass.  but rather than leave it there on the slugs mating for gunn is a poet, not a prophet, & he can only record his own sense data even if he imagines the larger crowds of 'men attracted to men & women attracted by women,/all together, though there are mixed couples too, all are welcome.'  there is competition in even this holiday gathering 'but there must be complication and conflict, humans cannot get by without them...'

yep, even so the 'arcady' of the street fair is still rife with suffering.  yet, gunn still affirms goodness.  how can he not?  for goodness is too woven into our DNA, as well as evil.  for we are 'each an Arcadian' whereby in multi-ethnic, multicultural CA we all draw 'attention to our differences, our queerness, our shared characteristics,/as if this were an Italian-American street fair, or Hispanic, or Irish/but we include the several races and nations, we include the temperaments, /the professions, the trades and arts, some of us alcoholic bums,/our diverse loves subsumed within general amity,/and "returning to roots of first feeling"/we play, at the barriers, the Masque of Difference and Likeness.'

whew!  i need a cigarette!  i especially dig that small little detail of 'us alchoholic bums' for gunn's self-awareness of the poet's own enormous appetites with gentle humor.  for what makes us human but our own flaws.  we all have them.  i love this poem.  i love my man thom gunn with all his wrinkles & love of being a human being.  for finally, i think that is what paul la fleur might have meant regarding being a poet is finding a new way to live.  part of that new way, to me, is understanding how fucking flawed i am.  how flawed we all are as a species.  but then again, those various flaws make us special.  & our civilization. flawed as it is, is astonishingly great.  it really is.  we are living SciFi days.

i won't qualify that last sentence of the above paragraph.  we can argue it till the cows come home.  i will end with my own qualified status as a poet, as a human being.  as another poet said, my life is made of the world.  i will do what i can.  put that on my fucking tombstone!
          
     

Friday, May 09, 2025

it's fiday nite & you gotta remember to 'fight the power'

this is one of the great intros put onto film.  it hits all the marks! this movie's theme, & this song, has not aged a bit.  where the fuck does that leave us now!?

Thursday, May 08, 2025

good morning, america

Saturday, May 03, 2025

it's saturday nite & i fucking love brandi carlile!

Thursday, May 01, 2025

happy mayday!

 


Monday, April 28, 2025

beach poetics

 

the thing for me is a very drunken sleep on the beach
--rimbaud