Explosions
The crash, the juxtaposition, the jagged sharp edge
The mismatched piece
Foreground smashes into background; that’s
Where the energy comes from
News: that difference that
Makes a difference
But everyday, now, the same news, the wash of cant and can’t,
Eliminate difference
On a solitary walk
The front page of the Daily News lies frozen in the snow
***
This is the poem as I performed it over WBAI radio 99.5 FM NYC last year. I mentioned in another post that I thought this performance was too big for the medium. What do you think? Click on the grey triangle to play
***
***
Sparrow is the name of the poet that music critic Robert Christgau called “the funniest man in America.” Yesterday, this interview I did with Sparrow was broadcast on radio station WBAI’s Arts Express program. I think you’ll find him both profound and irreverent. Click on the grey triangle above to enjoy both his poetry and conversation.
And oh yes—Sparrow gives Arts Express a hot political scoop!
Tarot: The Lovers
The velvet costume envelopes his chest
He must have plumage:
Patterned silk, quilts, brocades
Oriole orange
Tanager scarlet
Feathered brilliance.
She more melancholic
Plumage less radiant
Drabber, smaller.
Entangled in the purple bulrushes
He enfolds her
Into the layers of his robe.
O! For a life of naked imperfection in an open field!
Gack!!!
The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam is only a few days away and I haven’t finished memorizing or analyzing my assigned sonnet yet.
Sonnet 133 to be exact. One of the strangest, most interesting, and perhaps most pornographic of the sonnets, best I can tell.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.
And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.
Now, one is not required to memorize for the slam, and I plan to have the typed sonnet with me, but given my eyesight, nervousness, and laziness, if I’m going to make any sense of this, it’s best to memorize. I know that the only way I can memorize something like this is if I manage to uncover its sense. And that’s what its all about. You don’t have to do great acting up there, but you do have to talk sense.
All right, how to find that sense from what first looks nonsense?
First: the structure of the sonnet gives you lots of clues. Shakespeare’s sonnets are always structured as three quatrains and a final couplet. So lets look at the poem again, divided that way:
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?
***
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
***
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.
***
And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.
That is how I approach memorizing a sonnet. Each quatrain is another thought, argument, or approach. The final couplet is generally a wry commentary on the preceding approaches; either it is a clever summary of them, or a recognition of the futility of the speaker’s thoughts.
So let’s start off with the first quatrain.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?
Beshrew … Err … let’s start off with that first word—Beshrew. What does it mean? The dictionaries tell us “curse.” Okay, so we’re starting off pretty strong, the speaker (let’s say “I,” from now on) is cursing someone (let’s say “you,” from now on). Why am I cursing you? Because you are making my heart groan. And not only me, but the same for my best friend. Wait a second, my best friend and I are both in love with you! And you know it, and yet you cruelly delight in it. The three of us are caught in an awful compelling love triangle.
Now the loyalty to a same-sex best friend is a theme that runs throughout Shakespeare’s plays. It’s extraordinarily important to Shakespeare’s characters. Betrayal of a supposed friend is the motor of Julius Caesar, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and many more of his plays. So we need to take this very seriously.
So let’s go back to that first quatrain again, words like “deep wound” begin to take on a sexual meaning. My friend is hopelessly enthralled with you; you who have gleefully sliced our friendship apart with a deep wound. You have enslaved not only me, but my best friend. That is the crime of crimes.
Onto the second quatrain.
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
A change in the main thought now. The first quatrain was about cruel you; this second quatrain is about how I and you and my best friend have now irrevocably changed our relationships. The first line says that at first it was me whose soul (and body!) you had corrupted. The next line talks about “my next self” i.e. the one closest to me, my best friend, as being corrupted as well. You engrossed him harder. And if you want to go for the sexual meaning there, why not?
The next two lines say that my relationship is torn with you, my friend, and myself. But worse, each of us has three torn relationships now because of this madness, and to repair it would require each of us to repair the three relationships.
The third quatrain seeks a way to resolve the dilemma.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.
I beg you to let me be your only lover; be cruel to me, so that my friend can be spared your cruelty. And perhaps, when you understand how important it is for me to shield my friend, to not betray him, then you will be a little kinder to me, in admiration of my loyalty.
But in the final couplet I have to admit that my dream of being free of you and your cruelty—and my own need for you—is a fantasy. And these last two lines are incredibly evocative and can be read so many ways.
And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.
Right now, I think the most daring is to hit the final rhyme. Usually, I’m not a fan of stressing the rhyme in verse, but I think ending couplets in Shakespeare are an exception. So being pent in thee, “and all that is in me.” But stressing me in the last line almost forces the rhythm to add an additional stress on that. So,
And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.
Was that Shakespeare’s intention? I can’t say. But I think it is a viable subtext for an actor. An actor always looks for a strong compelling subtext, even if it looks like other interpretations might be more likely. More, after the slam takes place later this week.
Judith Malina, an extraordinary theatre artist, died this past week. I met her a few times, briefly, when I was a member of a theater company that rehearsed and performed in the theater space she owned on East Third Street in Lower Manhattan. She had generously allowed us to use her theater, and occasionally she would peek into a rehearsal and nod encouragingly.
Her accomplishments were many, and as co-founder, with her husband Julian Beck, of The Living Theatre, she influenced generations of actors, directors, and playwrights. Playwright Karen Malpede has written a moving tribute to her here:
Malpede ends her piece with a recent poem from Judith Malina’s published diary:
Hard Lessons:
Learn patience first,
And after patience, love,
And after love
The eternal joy
Of having loved.
Blocks
How splendid
I am
At describing
your feelings
Paths
Not the trains,
But the broken ties
Of the abandoned railway.
***
Not the highway,
But the trails, overgrown, buried
under rotted trees.
***
The derailments of an unplanned life.
The wanderings of an uncompassed hike.
***
Too late now for Romeo,
I hunt the tracks beneath the rust
The path beneath the brush.
***
Walking up the pebbled driveway
To your white new door
Empty hands,
This beating heart,
A cup of breath.
Doctor of Letters
“All art is artifice,” she says, but
Between bears, Connie
Conjures poems from the distant
Doorways of Dickenson’s Emily
Eyes. Fluidly
Free-writing, she gracefully
Glides down her pen, her
Hands hinting how imagination
Insinuates and invades judgment.
Just as a jealous kiss
Kicks a lover’s
Lips and makes
Meaning move, nights
New, her oracles
Overcome the patterns
Pressed into the quiet
Quilt of reason.
Ready for resistance, yet swooning
Secretly, time tips,
Tripping over and under
Unsettling the very
Veins and arteries with
Words—wild words!—the exact
Xylem and Phloem of our yearning,
Yielding, finally, to the Zenmountain
Zephyrs of her all-loving art.
I’m still playing around with the size of truth on the radio. Yesterday, Christmas Day, radio station WBAI broadcast me reading these two poems. Many thanks to Prairie Miller, the host of Arts Express, who aired them. Click the orange buttons to hear the two short poems.
***
Dust Bunnies
Haul the monster up the stairs
Clank, vroom, clank, vroom, clank, clank, clank
Canadian nickel behind the sofa
Chankles up the vacuum hose
Damned if I’ll debride
It or the rubber bands caught in the Vesicles of Detritus,
Which wouldn’t be stuck there in the first place
If a certain someone, I won’t say who, didn’t carelessly leave
Rubber bands on the floor
But actually took the time to bend down and
Pick them up when they fall, your precious royal highness.
***
And Dad–what the heck are you doing
Squashed under the davenport with your glasses half off
When you’re supposed to be dead, not like
Elvis, hiding out with a stash of
Fried peanut-butter-and-banana-on-toast sandwiches.
We already said goodbye when they stopped
The dobutamine and they full-throttled the morphine as you
Wished us well
Take care of each other,
It’s been great, you said
Then closed your tired eyes,
Eking out a final joke: “Don’t expect me home for dinner”
The silence expanded like a circus balloon waiting to explode
An unexpected vaudeville ending.
***
And now I have to put the sofa back
Lousy rubber bands.
Ah, death, it’s like a chicken’s neck
When they snap it
That’s it.
Chipping Away
David emerges from the stone
Eyes first, watching
The chisel
Carve into the marble’s vein,
His own about to bleed red
Upon the sculptor’s tool.
Adornments
I grabbed Mary-Jane’s earrings in the movie theatre,
Unfastened them in the Hayley Mills light
The land of strange people’s chairs.
*
She stands by her lover’s bedroom lamp
Trying to be graceful
When the cheap backings drop.
*
Later, she betrays me, acting as if she’d
Never known me. Married rich
As if she’d never shoplifted.
*
On the subway, older, I saw
Her cradle her child’s baby
The toddler wears a knit hat and golden posts
*
That glint. Tiny hands move upwards, hypnotized,
Touching her naked ears
Which hear nothing but ancient, urgent, whispers.
