Shared Practice V -- after Jack Gilbert

Ascetic Feats are Not Sainthood

after Jack Gilbert's 'The Abnormal is Not Courage'

The Stylites stood on poles for thirty, forty years

Flagellati scourging themselves with ropes. Bloody and merciless.

A magnitude of heroism, of self-denial that allows me no peace.

This poem would lessen their feats. Question

The piety. Say it's not beatitude, not at it's best.

They were impossible, and too strife-driven. Too unique.

“Whose feet were they washing in the desert”

Asks dear Basil. It is too near the masochist's mind,

the thrill of extremity. The adrenaline.

Not Macarius' monks with no clothes or food in the desert,

but Macrina, tending the bodies of the broken poor.

Not Joseph the Lidless, But the Seven Sleepers.

Not the termini, but the via media.

Humility as reckoning oneself as worth something,

Not nothing. Frail, but not useless. Ugly, but not unlovable.

The modesty of moderation. The bravery of

non-description. It is the heroines of Victorian Literature,

not of Greek War-ballads. The hand shaken, not squeezed.

Togetherness. Not the exception. The beauty

That is of many days. Steady and clear.

It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.  

Shared Practice IV -- after Rilke

The original:

Music

Rainer Maria Rilke

What are you playing, boy? Through the gardens it went like many steps, like whispering commands.

What are you playing, boy? See, your soul is entangled in the rods of the Syrinx.

Why do you lure her? The sound is like a prison where loitering and languishing she lies. Strong is your life, and yet your song is stronger, against your longing, leaning sobbingly.—

Give her a silence, that the soul may softly

turn home into the flooding and the fullness

in which she lived, growing, wide and wise,

ere you constrained her in your tender playings.

How she already wearier beats her wings,

Thus will you, dreamer, waste her flight away,

no more may carry her across my walls,

when I shall call her into the delights.

Better Advice

After Rilke's Music

If your sound is perceived as a prison, then your penitentiary system has gotten way out of whack!

If she can't handle your strong music,

then she's not the girl for you, brother.

You can try and give her a silence,

but the chords and progressions

will dam up within your heart,

and stopped water soon turns sour.

And don't be sad –

she didn't live in flooding and fullness

before she met you. No.

These are just names the lonely give to being Alone;

no more than the “fullness” of the Abyss.

Trust me, dump this wimpy fledgling,

and wait yourself for a real bird.

For somewhere out there is one who has been longing her whole life for strong music:

Beautiful, loud, muscular melodies that will finally

reveal the range of her instrument's capacities

that have, until she met you, lain dormant and unknown.

In short: great music and great instruments

were made for eachother,

and there's nothing to be afraid of.

Shared Practice III -- after Blake

In Defense of True Love

After William Blake's 'Mock on, mock on, Rousseau, Voltaire'

Mock on, Mock on, Marx, Darwin, Freud

Mock on, Mock on, you pesky thieves.

In the bedrock of my mind I find you

have permeated my every skein.

There is not a noble, winsome, handsome

thought that I assume to trust

but guess not at some more real, solid

darker thing, beneath its crust.

But it's your greed that made it thus:

only counting things that can be “mine”

and so of course True Love was extradited

for it only lives when to another giv'n.

And so I route you, one and all

and send you to the auto-hell you made.

Trusting God is all in all

and that this Love will deeper wade

for deeper 'tis than earth or core

too solid to be sensed

for it pre-dates impassioned flesh;

re-fashions it far more immense.

Shared Practice II -- after Hoagland

TSA

after Tony Hoagland's Argentina

Though at first

my country viewed your country with suspicion,

given some of the external similarities

you have with other terrorist nations,

After these many months of unbroken peace,

and as our Intelligence has acquired

a more accurate understanding of your country's political history,

cultural norms, the infrastructure that supports you,

your resources, the character of your executive head,

You were finally removed from our terrorist watch-list

and travel between our two lands was made possible.

When it was found that both of our nations

could benefit from each-other's resources,

trade began, and on its heels a booming hospitality industry.

But – you know you can never be too careful –

We still screened all passengers coming too and fro

Sure, it inhibited travel a teensy bit, and the travelers grumbled,

but, our nation's history shows us

that you should never let your guard down entirely.

But then one day, all of a sudden, all of our TSA agents left.

It's not clear whether they were fired en masse,

or left of their own accord in a union exodus,

but whatever their cause, on July 14^th, they put down their bomb-wands

took off their blue plastic gloves, shut down their scanners,

left their badges at the door, and walked out.

At first the travelers – who by this time were all

going to your nation, since it was found

that there really was no better place to be, were dismayed!

Was it still safe to travel? What ever shall be done?!

For an hour or two they just milled about, lost.

But then they started talking with one another,

and those who had been to your nation told those who had never

about what joy was to be found there, and they decided to take their flights all the same.

In no time at all, the exchange between us picked-up,

and not only that, the flights soon doubled in number.

People had forgotten how wonderful traveling could be!

and, unsullied by pat-downs and baggage-checks,

They arrived on each of our soils happier than ever –

many, in fact, chose to turn their vacation into a permanent move,

a turn of events that has benefited both of our economies tremendously:

Since they both produce for the one, and send profit back to the other.

A happy exchange indeed,

and all because of that one, mysterious day,

when the TSA decided it would be its last.

And if you've done any therapy at all,

I think you'll see the analogy. :)

Shared Practice I -- after Millay

Ok, so, Gabo (Gabriel Garza) had/has this art-project idea of collaborating with famous artists by imitating their style, subjects, and framing, but "re-mixing" it somehow so as to offer expansion or critique of the artists' original idea. He put it more elaborately than that. Anyways, I realized I liked the same concept in poetry, and so have been doing some "Shared Practice" poems of my own. Here it is, and, following it, in separate posts, some more. These have been done over the last 9 months.

So, here is Bluebeard

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

THIS door you might not open, and you did;

So enter now, and see for what slight thing

You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,

No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain

For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

But only what you see…. Look yet again—

An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

Unto myself, lest any know me quite ;

And you did so profane me when you crept

Unto the threshold of this room to-night

That I must never more behold your face.

This now is yours. I seek another place.

and here is mine:

When 'Alone' means 'Together'

after Millay's Bluebeard

You must get over yourself, sad Bluebeard!

What, what was so precious in that cold room

That you must now get up and act so weird?

Why choose the morsel when there is a boon?

For Love can't stand a secret, hiding out

Because love is light; it must rout darkness

So don't be so stunned that she went about

And found your silly nook sans your largess.

Turn back! Go back into your worthless home,

Give her the blue-prints, the keys to the door

Invite a re-model; give up your tomb

Into her hands to be made new: un-poor

It's not too late to change reclusive ways;

Homes built together are the ones that stay.

Pete

Pete Seeger was a goddamn mensch who chopped his own firewood into his nineties, who pled the First Amendment in front of HUAC, who inscribed "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" on his banjo, who quit his band when they wanted to record a cigarette jingle...in 1958.  This much you can read on any news site this week.  And while I'm in awe of the man on a political and historical level (How many of that steely-eyed Old Left are still with us? How many still living worked with Woody Guthrie in his prime?), I am most grateful for Pete the musician.  

These days we like our folk music rough-hewn, we like Dylan and John Fahey and Joanna Newsom, grainy 78s--music with nettles to ward off the would-be convert.  Not so with Pete.  His interpretations have a polished, crystalline quality.  Their beauty is wide open to the listener, any fool can hear it.  Listen to his version of "Dink's Song." Listen to it a few times, it's short:  

He was a hell of a banjo player, but here he does the absolute simplest thing, just brushing his fingers across the strings in an arpeggio, up, then down, then up again.  It's something you'd do idly, waiting for a bus at a dusty crossroads.

But his voice.  The melody is a slip of a thing, and it's just repeated over and over, but listen to how he gently nudges it from verse to verse, so that there is a progression and emotion.  Listen to him sing "you'll call my name / and I'll be gone."  He phrases it like Miles Davis might play it, shadowboxing the meter, or plain ignores it like old folkies do. Listen to how he kneads a little microcosm of emotions into each syllable.  I love the way his voice cracks ever so slightly around 1:50.  This kind of casual virtuosity is what I love about Pete.  "It's the singer, not the song," is what they say in jazz, and it's even truer in folk, but Pete seemed totally uninterested in showing off his own chops. I'd imagine he'd prefer to see his performances as an unsmudged window through which the listener might see the songs themselves, as if such a thing existed.  Now there's idealism for you.

(Readers--for I'm told there are a few--if you haven't met Pete than run, don't walk, to the two-disc reissue of We Shall Overcome: Live at Carnegie Hall, a recording of a 1963 concert that shows what he could do all alone on stage.)