it's friday nite & you want to watch a GAP commercial featuring a poet

in the early to mid 1990s GAP was the lowdown cooldown pret-a-porter clothing store around.  the adverts were cool.  & stylish.  & poets were part of the sell.  pics of beat poets allen ginsberg & jack keruoac were part of the GAP print ads for khaki pants.  what!?  yep, they were.  in the early '90s i was a young man figuring out how to live in poetry.  i was not much of a formal studies type of student.  but my heroes, like dylan thomas & hart crane, were either high school drop-outs or barely made it out of high school.  i was dicking around university courses but i spent most of my time in the stacks of the university library, & local libraries, making one marvelous discovery after another.  & our society seemed to value its poets.  like this ad featuring NYC poet max blagg.  the girl in the jeans is the supermodel cindy crawford.  sure, this commercial appears to be contrived from our 21st C perch.  but man!  this commercial was broadcast on national TV!  it was just the evidence that i needed to validate a life lived in poetry.  make no mistake.  i don't think poetry is a career.  you don't/can't retire from it.  poetry is an obsession.  a habit of making & seeing.  it becomes, if we are fortunate, a life.  & sometimes our society will ask a poet to shill jeans.  corporate as fuck, yes, yet we live in a late capitalist society, & commercials that sell us shit can be, at sometimes, art.  

it came from the trailer park!

there are a great many things, be it movies, music, tv shows, commercials from the 1980s but some movies remind me of that decade's pastel glow more than others.  & this flick starring vincent spano from 1984 is one of those pics.  i remember renting it from the mom&pop video store, the jazz bird.  taking the laminated card from the tree & handing it over the counter to the cute blonde girl who wore the trendiest clothes of the era: guess jeans, esprit blouses et al. & would retrieve the vhs tape from the back of the store for me.  i thought spano looked great.  dressed real cool.  & the lighting, the editing, the synthesizer soundtrack of this movie create a damn cool document of its time.  hell, here there be the '80s!

Elton John - Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting) (Central Park, NYC ...

basho's distress 

what is 

         the sound 

                    of one 

                        frog plopping?

watching a cop show 

             the police chopper patrols outside 

i don't know what sound is real

First Video of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight, Includes Take...

can art save the world?  can it rewire our brains to stop social evil?  is it obtuse to ask?  i dunno.  we keep doing evil.  & we keep making art to help us heal from evil.  'amazing grace' is a case in point.  long after it was composed our society, our civilization, still commits evil.  but the song is about redemption & revision for a better, more just, civilization.  i am not a believer but i do think that i shall continue, to use the title from a poem by the late polish poet adam zagajewski, to praise the mutilated world.  

Brandi Carlile - Amazing Grace (unplugged) (Islington Assembly Hall, Lon...

holy holy holy this woman's voice gutted me

absolute music

i recall something the late poet/novelist jim harrison said, i wanted my poems to be as immediate & enveloping as a dirty picture or a recipe.  of course harrison confessed that poetry cannot compete with the baseline of emotions both of food & music in our minds/bodies.  & yet, when i hear from friends & coworkers that they find poetry cold, distant & too cerebral i counter, do you read/listen to lyrics of songs?  the answer is almost always yes.  i say, do you always understand them?  no.  but do those words hit you in the gut, the groin & the mind?  yes.  then, i say, that is poetry.  written poems are a notch higher in regards to the mind since they are only composed of words without the accompanying music.  & yet, who among us has not taken out & studied the printed lyric sheet from a record or cd.  satori of satoris.  we live in poetry.  there are poems, e.g. thom gunn's 'the miracle' with its quotidian public sex catholic imagery of devotion & love composed by a queer anglo/american atheist poet that hits me right in the heart, groin & mind as any song by the much missed british band, xtc.  often, xtc's andy partridge's lyrics are as dense & cerebral as a great many modern/postmodern of poems.  & when i say 'absolute music' i mean the total expression of our fragile, beautiful, human being.  

in the end

they may say, damn his poems sucked but [& i hope that this is what they say] that motherfucker could praise 

Brandi Carlile - "Madman Across the Water" (NON-COMM 2018)

absolute music i fucking love this performance! just discovered brandi carlile a few weeks ago but really just started listening to her. my god! what a voice! what a presence! what a rocker! i fucking really fucking love her voice, her passion, her vision of elton john's song. damn!

 the making of art

julian schnabel was asked how long it takes him to make a drawing/painting.  the artist answered, take the sum of your years on this planet & add 5 minutes.  

now write a poem.  take the sum of your years & add 5 or so minutes.  

a summer evening.  & i am 14.  we just pulled in to the drive in theater.  the sun is still shining.  i am filled with hormones.  the movie we are set to see is terrible.  but i love the drive in & convinced my family there is no better flick to see.  & there is a girl two rows up.  about 18.  with a friend & another boy about my age.  standing outside her beat up blue chevy camaro smoking a cigarette.  shapely.  & wearing blue corduroy shorts.  the 1970s haven't ended yet.  the dayglo blast of '80s MTV quick edits are about a year or two away.  she is an imago of my memories.  how fashion changed decades so quickly.  how quickly the decades move away.  like buying a book at tower books then placing it on the shelf.  the next time you reach for that book 15 years have passed.  tower books is long gone away.  you wonder how the years can move so fast.  that girl i remember is an older woman now.  perhaps a grandmother.  she has/had her own life.  she is another human being who might also wonder over this fast & strange passing of time.  each day is like a lifetime, each year becomes the past, each decade turns over another & another like the blades of a till turning over the farrows of the field.  upon the discovery that one lifetime is like every other.  full & empty & long & short.  like a summer evening, sometimes it is enough.  

 the comic steven wright said, whoever wrote the alphabet wrote everything.  i am reminded of this piece of obviousness recently when i was watching an interview by a conceptual poet that i am currently fascinated with.  the poet claims to use only found language like what one uses in adverts & such mediated by whatever emotional state caused by the traditions of lyric poetry.  okay, i'm cool with that.  after all, i think all language belongs to everyone & consequently no one.  whosever owns language operates the universe!  not really!  since i think the universe is not made of language & is indifferent to humanity.  language matters to its users.  us.  & the alphabet belongs to everybody.  perhaps that is what intrigues me by this conceptual poet who composes via found languages used by media.  & yet, i am a lyric poet at heart.  i want to hear something said by a human being.  i want all of our humanity as it is found in language.  & but still, i love the language of media too.  perhaps this is where antipoetry starts.  & ends.  & is endless. 

black&white movie      the people      so alive     so present     all being      is     now*

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*i think of lew welch's red monk reading this & laughing his ass off.  'oh lopez!  you think the present is timeless & also the past?  that those who were once alive were sensuous, thinking & vital.  like you.  you're so fucking profound!'

sometimes on a friday night you want to hear an exquisitely crafted pop song from the '90s to remind yourself that you are alive

The Jesus And Mary Chain - April Skies (Official Music Video)