The Poet – by Kris Hemensley

when life kicks you in the teeth the teeth get to reading poetry.  ok, that doesn't make much sense.  still, these last few days i've been battling the blues.  for the usual reasons which is sometimes shit happens & sometimes the blues just comes as it goes.  at any rate, my spirits were raised more than a little from an email by my brother in the art jonathan hayes.  & also, by reading a little kris hemensley.  kris is a wonderful poet.  he emigrated to australia in the 1960s from england.  he was the owner-operator of Collected Works Bookshop in melbourne, a poetry only bookshop.  kris fairly recently closed the doors of his beloved shop after operating it for several decades.  he's also a brilliant, idiosyncratic diarist on life, friendship & poetry.  you can find his blog in the links.  but like many poets kris migrated his writings to other social media platforms like facebook.  & sometimes youtube.  i am more than thrilled to find this video of kris reading a poem from a recently published chapbook.  this is a terrific video.  the poem is titled 'the poet' & i'm betting that it is a little more than autobiographical for in it the speaker makes note of migrating from writing with pen & paper to writing & publishing poems on facebook.  still, & yet the poet in whatever medium or platform makes poetry.  again, watching/hearing kris read in this video makes this poet fucking happy.  & my blues have transformed to a tickled pink.

r.i.p. tom verlaine

another death.  fucking sucks.  but i am at that age when my beloveds do die off.  i was not a fan of the band television when i was a wee young punk rocker.  surely i knew who they were & have had heard their music.  but i was a punk into hardcore, & any music that smacked of 'craft' was suspect to me.  i was the standard issue idiot.  it was about 20 years ago when i started to explore early punk bands like television. i bought the CD Marquee Moon at the long defunct record store The Beat.  i miss The Beat. it was a record store par excellence.  you could go to school there & learn about the varieties & nuances of music with its deep catalogs & rangy import records.  but holy shit!  television!  miraculous.  those sinewy guitar lines by verlaine & richard lloyd.  verlaine's strained vocals & spooky lyrics.  while the very cool thing that verlaine took his last name from paul verlaine, the 19th C symbolist poet, absinthe connoisseur, lover & booster of the great demonic poet arthur rimbaud, & wow!  man i am gone!  patti smith famously described verlaine's guitar sound as 'a thousand bluebirds screaming at once.'  is that accurate?  not if you like your guitar sounds to be filled of wrong notes & distortions.  instead, verlaine was very like a jazz musician.  exacting.  precise.  but wild too.  since my rediscovery of the band television i must've listened to Marquee Moon a thousand times over.  it is a masterpiece.  plus, verlaine, & his former band mate richard hell, were quite literary.  they started as poets.  i was hoping for verlaine to publish his memoir.  like his former band mate hell.  rather, verlaine was an introvert whose preferred other things such as haunting secondhand bookstores & record shops.  every story i've read about verlaine in public meant that the poet-guitarist often kept to himself but would be friendly to the people who approached him.  i dig him even more!  for he was the consummate bohemian.   i hope that a good biography will come along shortly.  i also hope that a volume of his poems, notes, journals etc. etc. will make the light of day too.  tom verlaine made it to the age of 73.  still too early to go, but he was a bohemian punk poet-musician who lived by his own set codes & art.  he lived in his art & for that i am glad of it.  because he was a great pumk musician's musician, the poet of the fretboard. verlaine proved it on his pulse.  

it's friday nite - protest/message music is always on time

r.i.p. david crosby

it's been a helluva a week, almost the weekend, & you wanna hear some turkish edm

going to a show

i love live music.  this morning nick texted me.  he said the french electronic band M83 will be at the Fox Theater in oakland in may.  i knew that.  i get emails from the Fox telling me about upcoming shows.  i thought about buying tix to see M83 but figured since we already purchased tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie cum The Postal Service on both their seminal 20th anniversary LPs tour in berkeley at The Greek in Oct. that maybe we may not be set to get tix for more shows.

but how could i resist.  M83?  hell yes, & to learn that nick is a fan, well, i'm on cloud 9.  did i say this already?  i love live music.  the last concert anna & i went to was to see The Specials, again at the Fox, in 2019 a year before the world went to shit.  the last show i saw was with our great friends b. & c.  it was an '80s nostalgia show in september at an indian casino.  bands such as Missing Persons, The Beat, Wang Chung et al. performed.  does that sound like a dud?  only if you are young.  but if you are an old egg like me seeing Wang Chung perform 'to live & die in L.A.' from the film of the same name is heaven on earth.

a coworker yesterday, looking at the line-up, & cost of tix, for bottle rocket festival in Napa for this year opined that this festival, & others like it, is marketed for an older generation.  the older folks who could afford it.  maybe.  i dunno.  i will say that ticket prices to see bands even at smaller venues ain't cheap.  sure as shit not like the very affordable prices when i was a kid seeing The Police perform in 1983.  i can't remember the cost of those tickets but i don't recall my parents having to fork up a kidney to buy them.  

& but so it goes on.  perhaps it goes like this.  your favorite band is coming to a venue near you.  what does it cost?  who fucking cares!  you're going to see them.  but the world doesn't resemble 1983 no more.  this is the 21st C & shit costs more than a few coins.  be they shows, & festivals, & so on & we buy their tix.  is that sustainable?  fuck if i know.  the world stopped making sense to me at the start of this new century.

at any rate, i am going to a show with nick, & his friend.  i hope not to geek out & embarrass the young man.  i promise not to perform my boneless chicken dance.  what's that?  ever see deadheads sway to the music of The Grateful Dead?  you have?  well, then you have witnessed the boneless chicken dance.  i've even written a poem about it!  but i will promise to rock out.  you are never too old, or too young, for music.  & that nick asked me to go with him to see M83....i'm one happy mofo!

this might be one of the greatest scenes in cinema

the island of the damned

portrait of the poet writing by glen chesnut

chesnut was a bay area poet, writer & painter, & merchant seaman.  my brother from another mother jonthan hayes texted me this drawing chesnut did of a poet in mid composition at cafe trieste, 1967.  the cafe is up the street from city lights bookstore [ed. in an earlier version of this essay i confused cafe trieste with vesuvio cafe & claimed it was cafe trieste that is across the street from the famous bookstore.  it is vesuvio cafe that is across the street from city lights with jack kerouac alley that separates both establishments.  tip of my hat to jonathan hayes.]  now hayes tells me this drawing can't be a self-portrait because chesnut was not a writer at the time.  so who could it be?  anyone, of course.  by 1967 if you were into alternative literature, art & culture then you would most probably be attracted to north beach in SF.  but then, SF & its environs were thick with poets at play & work.  like my man richard duerden.  duerden was a life-long resident of the bay area.  he later lived at stinson beach [fucking gorgeous area].  he was also part of jack spicer's circle of poets.  but then who knows.  maybe this is a drawing of richard duerden.  it also kinda looks like michael mcclure.  i am not a betting man so i won't put money down on who this drawing might be of.  however, at this instant i will entertain the notion that the merchant seaman cum artist & later poet glen chesnut captured a poet who is important to me, richard duerden.  

it's saturday nite, the storms are ringing the atmosphere, & you wanna hear harry nilsson lose his fucking mind

'we can make each other happy'

i remember

those little squares of acid with printed pictures of mickey mouse or maybe just a little daub of pink color & when we would take them we would wait & wait & wait for the effect to kick in & when it does if it did we would take an LP like Masters of Reality by black sabbath or Dark Side of the Moon by pink floyd or Damage by black flag & we would listen to the music & see that the colors of the air printed by an overhead lamp or flashlight or cigarette lighter would get all wavy when we inevitably would stop the record player to dare someone to push the disc in the other direction hoping for a message or a sign or a signal in the noise that confirmed our suspicions that the world was more than what it seems & the language of the night was written in the ABCs of the furies of sound & light

stay safe everyone

we are experiencing a lull in the rain & wind.  yesterday anna & i drove around town as we ran a few errands & took some pics & vids of the very high american river & structural damages caused by fallen trees.  we are in a flood watch.  much of my beloved state is in a flood watch.  my brother in the art jonathan hayes, his wife & their cat, who live in santa cruz, evacuated to higher ground tonight because of the threat of flooding.  am i nervous?  fuck yes i am.  we live in a time of wild extremes & weather is not exempt.  last summer we experienced the hottest temperature i have known in my 55 years on this little blue rock, 116 F.  we are still in a mega drought.  & now we are facing severe winter storms with winds with speeds of upwards to 64 mph.  the rain & wind are expected late tonight, early tomorrow morning.  the schools were closed today because many campuses were still without power.  anna joked that we never got a day off from school because of smoke from wildfires, pandemic or rain.  but these are new brave days, brothers & sisters.  &, as you already know, this is just the beginning.  

stay safe

un-taken notes

thru out the day, evening & nite hell when i am conscious enuf to know that i am imagining thinking daydreaming i have like a great many of us ideas to write about & i say to myself yes when i have enuf time tonite i will thrash out these ideas on the blank screen of my laptop until some words come out then i can push those words around given my ideas full expression but when i do sit down & open my laptop & because the day's tasks are long i can't remember what the hell my ideas might have been about anyway so i say to myself keep yr goddamn notebook with you all the time write them down when you can but the beauty of not taking notes is sometimes you sit down to yr blank screen having no ideas at all & you let it rip anyway sometimes something interesting comes out sometimes nothing & oftentimes it is shit but i remember what the late poet william stafford said about his own daily writing practice stafford wrote a poem every morning & when he was asked what if he stafford didn't have the juice or ideas for a poem that day stafford that trickster said, why i just lower my standards & so as i sit here with the wind outside blowing fierce we have another series of powerful storms to get thru this week & with nothing to say at all i say in the spirit of william stafford that my standards are at a new low

quote unquote

 

--nicanor parra, antitranslation by liz werner antipoems: how to look better & feel great [new directions; 2004]

happy new year!

i love this poem by thom gunn so very much.  this poem was published in gunn's last collection Boss Cupid [fsg;2000].  it is an occasional poem seemed to be written to order.  but we all get the blues.  sometimes around the holidays.  & tho it seems like 1997 is a lifetime ago, & it is, the humor & humility displayed by gunn makes my heart sing.

this was one helluva week.  i spent four hours in the vet ER on christmas eve.  leo the pretty fierce got into a fight with a feral cat who we call spike.  spike tore a patch of fur & skin off leo's head.  we didn't find the wound until we gave leo a bath on christmas eve.  then the panic set in.  we needed to get him treated.  the wound was filled with puss.  i called several VCAs.  all were booked solid.  the last one suggested i call UC Davis, a teaching hospital with a vet ER.  i called & about 45 minutes later leo was being treated.

last night was a wild one too.  a huge storm, an atmospheric river, called the pineapple express, parked itself over Northern California.  some areas got 10 inches of rain in one night.  yes, there was flooding.  a massive tree a couple of houses down smooshed a car & is still blocking the street.  the city is full of such happenings.  we were out of power for most of the night too.  

2023 doesn't sound much different than 2020, 2021 or 2022.  i sure as fuck don't know what to expect for this year.  but it most likely will continue to be a wild ride.  we've gone to climate extremes so quickly.  last summer we roasted at a record breaking 116 F.  last night it felt like the wrath of god.  our political situation is still shaky.  economics?  i dunno.  science & technology are making huge leaps forward.  

still, like gunn says, it's a new year, & 'i'm not superstitious.'  i don't make new year's resolutions.  well, maybe this will be the year i take up pipe smoking.  saw a young man smoking a pipe while walking his dog in midtown a couple months ago.  he made me do a double take.  a pipe?!  why???  i chatted with him for about 30 seconds while i passed by.  i didn't get an explanation why he was smoking a briar.  but you know, it was so retro it was almost cool.

so happy new year to all of us!  how we name & number the years are the artifice of civilization.  & yet this artifice is so necessary.  we could call this year 1, or 200, or nothing, or whatever.  yet we plow on toward the future even tho it seems like we live in an ever-present.  what dreams my come.  but i know we are all in this shit together!