N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 3 : S p e c i
a l E d i
t i o n
L o n g P o e m M a s t e r p i e c e s
o f t h e P o s t b e a t s
RANDY ROARK
Elegies for the Post-Modern
American Poets, Part I: NYC October 18-28th, 2002
Note:
This is actually the coda for two-volume collection of poems written in the
style of the poets of the Norton anthologies of American and British poets.
This was written from the Norton
Anthology of Post-Modern American Poets.
I took individual words and
thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them
next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is
no such thing as putting them together without sense. —Gertrude Stein
I. (for Charles Olson)
this
is
the almost impossible
hidden blood of my arm
no
longer here
II. (for John Cage)
“Klangfarbenmelodie has not taken the place of bel canto.
It has extended our
realization of what can happen.”
—John
Cage
You can always in any moment
disappear into an adventure
and
not just in a metaphoric sense—
knowing everything is mostly chance,
something the mind arranges later
into something other than what it was
when it became solely in order to be.
III. (for James Laughlin)
Christmas morning snow pours
through the open windows
onto my empty hotel bed.
IV. (for Robert Duncan)
Dawn begins as a copper
semi-dimness across the pond
where the herons fall, until
the sky become a mosaic,
the clouds quickening into fire.
V. (for Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
The desire for anything
is like trying to get water
from a cloud reflected in a pond.
VI. (for Hilda Morley)
to
bewilder us is
enough to make it so—
whatever it was
was
never wholly
given to us
as
a kind of seeing but
more like a fish
who
cannot imagine
the
nature of its
own
rainbow scales.
VII. (for Charles Bukowski)
Never
before, never again,
whirling out of darkness and whirling
back, darkening into darkness
until it is as if it had never been.
VIII. (for Barbara
Guest)
I
was dreaming
“wild gardens rise
into delicate skies—“
surrounded
by fireflies.
IX. (for Jackson Mac Low)
Soon
we will be allowed to die,
and
all that will be left
will be our absence.
X. (for Jack Kerouac)
“… following free deviation
(association) of mind into limitless …
seas of thoughts.”
—Jack
Kerouac
Her
face has grown older
in the silvery lamplight,
her
smile as thin as ice
in the center of a lake.
XI. (for Philip Whalen)
At
my age I am devoted entirely
to observing gardens and the visual arts,
especially how a brushtip of ink flashes black to
silver
as it dries from action to design, saying something
without knowing what it’s saying, as does
everything born in this overall design.
XII. (for Denise Levertov)
In
autumn
there is a love for all things temporal—
for radiance and for color that separates
the living from the dead.
XIII. (for James
Schuyler)
The wind is an oracle in the pale leaves,
and the shortening days make this mad October
sunset visible on my walk home from the subway.
XIV. (for Jack Spicer)
“We must become singers,
become entertainers.”
—Jack Spicer, 1949
The
random is always more than enough
and
usually more profound than what’s
been
planned, and the randomness helps us
to remember that everything is temporary
and out of our control—and by that I mean
everything, and don’t get me started
on what
we’ve lost forever or what we’re unaware of—
in ourselves and others, in the everything
of everything’s everything along with all
that’s never been imagined, never even thought,
and everything ignored or passed over—especially
everything that caught our attention solely because
it flashed so brightly it could not be ignored,
and now it’s at the bottom of some drawer
if it exists at all, halfway between the
misremembered and the forgotten.
XV. (for Kenneth Koch)
Who
praised modesty without restraint,
who
got lost inside his own sentences,
who
wanted like a magician to astonish us—
which is what I remember most of all.
XVI. (for Frank O’Hara)
How
it goes when it goes over the course of an evening
is that what we had in common was everything
that wasn’t us, and we were afraid that if we stopped talking
we
would become invisible.
Meanwhile everything that surrounded us
became completely transparent.
That
wasn’t our fault. We didn’t understand
what was really going on, and things
haven’t changed at all since then.
It’s
like heat waves over asphalt
or ripples above a radiator—something catching my attention
for an instant as if it might have something to say.
But whatever it’s trying to tell me I can’t
understand
because what it’s trying to tell me is that it’s best
that we and everything is just so for only a moment.
XVII. (for Allen Ginsberg)
the
sky is vacant
as
if dreaming
of
past winds
XVIII. (for
Robert Creeley)
and
remembered
when he
ceased to be, and
between us was
the
man I was
who
saw me
XIX. (for Larry Eigner)
from the small
to the partial
in the early
XX. (for John Ashbery)
the
small self
inside my fingers
laments
in
darkness
XXI. (for Hannah Weiner)
Eyes
have never been enough for grieving,
as
if grieving were something one could
measure out, or that it could be forgotten
or
that we would come to the end of it
in any way other than with the end of us.
And
with that, a huge silence descended
without any of us knowing precisely what it meant.
XXII. (for Kenward Elmslie)
As Above, So Below
the white sun
the silver mist
the swirling rapids
XXIII. (for Ed Dorn)
I saw
a stillness in her eyes
as if everything that ever
was
was
a nothing that never was.
Later
she said she saw the same in me.
It
was in that state of mind that we began to discuss
living in Peru. But we were in the state of exhaustion
that follows love so we lingered and did nothing.
XXIV. (for Harry
Mathews)
the brightness
like shining wires
in
the autumn sunset
stream slowed
frozen
golden
What was
and what never will be—
Just so, I kissed
her.
XXV. (for Gregory Corso)
We
will all one day be
swept out the door
with all the other dust—
just as the dust upon our
floor is the dust of those
who
have been swept before.
XXVI. (for Gary Snyder)
original mind
radiating out of the body
as
a pulse into the glittering
nets of language
XXVII. (for Jerome Rothenberg)
Having
opened my heart an
angel from an angel’s
other kind of world
entered my eyes
in
the language of snow.
XXVIII. (for David Antin)
There was a time when I would
have come with more, a lot
more and not so long ago
either—or so she told me,
I
really can’t remember.
XXIX. (for Keith Waldrop)
Without doors.
Dark
red
river—
full moon memory
among the rocks, I have
heard the darkness become
terror becoming darkness.
The broken world
enters our world
and
our world
falls slowly backwards
as
if it were not,
my
knees giving
out
under me.
XXX. (for Michael McClure)
splashings of paint are an
extension of me as a gesture
in
the midst of it, entering into it
the
way it becomes what I am
XXXI. (for Amiri Baraka)
As if undone by the empty cathedral’s
colored light that pours down from
wherever all energy comes from—
all
of it shining in the song of a woman
empty of all but the song she is singing.
And the sound of the song singing
triggered something in my heart
that showered down upon me
the
hidden history of ourselves
in
flames, all of us in flames, burning!
XXXII. (for Diane di Prima)
Standing
on what old
bones are still mine.
XXXIII. (for Ted Berrigan)
Everything
Turns into writing
—“A Final Sonnet”
the? white dead
whose eyes know:
—“Bean
Spasms”
XXXIV. (for Anselm Hollo)
The
best way to get there
is
to wander in
some sense.
XXXV. (for Joseph Ceravolo)
I
felt you brush
between us like the full moon
shivering in a lake.
XXXVI. (for John Wieners)
It
was October and it was raining
and
you turned away from me
when my make-up began to run.
XXXVII. (for Robert Kelly)
the urge to union
is baited with the pleasant
against the ordinary
we
prepare for the unexpected
it’s the least
we
can do
then suddenly
nothing is—
as
if the air
capitulated.
XXXVIII: (for
Clayton Eshleman)
I was lifted for an instant
and saw how soon we would
be earth, broken off and carried away
by rainstorms, and then in the distance
the one transcendence available to us,
when we would exist solely
as words upon a page.
XXXIX: (for
Rosmarie Waldrop)
The
one transcendence
that is available to us
is
how we enter into
the
story at all by opening
our
inner self to the gaze
that will consume us.
And
with that gesture
of submission
we become ink,
a
bridge
across the emptiness
of white.
XL: (for
Gustaf Sobin)
Not only is the message
of
cinema kinetic but
its
essence is shadow
dancing with light
through a lens that examines
everything as it disappears
into film
and smoke and mist
and
then gets lost
in
its own metaphor,
as
a wave with all the ocean
behind it is obliterated
by
the rocks, and snow
disappears into the waves
where only its shadows breathe.
XLI: (for
Russell Edson)
Out of one life and into another
thrust down with the roots
where the future flowers bloom
you
may have already reappeared
by now, for you were always a language
that demanded immersion in a body.
XLII: (for
John Giorno)
Essentially all we
ever really accomplish
is
to warm the air.
XLIII: (for
Jayne Cortez & Clarence Major)
to
make flames
out
of our own bodies
XLIV: (for
Diane Wakoski)
In
chilly blue waters
my
bones are torn apart
and amber light pours out of them
as they decompose.
Elegies for the Post-Modern
American Poets, Part II:
Boulder, Colorado November 28th-30th, 2002
I keep painting until I’ve painted myself out of the picture.
—Willem de Kooning
XLV: (for
Susan Howe)
I
thought I was
a character in a Child ballad.
Winter’s
grey leaves
scattered before me.
for I
haveaten
it a
way
The
way
early tulips
climb through
spring snow.
XLVI: (for
Kathleen Fraser)
When
something
in the foreground
strawberries in this case
becomes for an instant
me.
XLVII: (for
Bill Berkson)
a fire has sapphires in it
The
moon lowers out of sight
and
suddenly the sky is peppered
with white magnificences.
XLVIII. (for Ed Sanders)
“One must study … a long
time,”
the master said.
XLIX. (for Clark Coolidge)
You wrote from what you didn’t know
barren, like a wind of darkness,
scouring your friends for traction.
L: (for
Stephen Rodefer)
To be the mystery of everything that has ever been
written. If you held me to it I couldn’t write another word.
But I am only interested in what happens next,
in what is writing itself forward.
LI. (for Robert Grenier)
between silences
I’m astonished by the sea,
by anything greater than I can imagine,
anything that can turn my breath into steam.
Silence
is always pulled by the sun like a rose,
the way music is something on the page,
and
something else again more strange.
LII: (for
Lyn Hejinian)
Her childhood
writing became
inevitable
and true.
Then a pause.
The
tree was actually a distraction
she
told me, and the real tree
was
in its shadow.
LIII: (for
Miguel Algarin)
I
have created myself
by
dissolving into something
the nothing that I am.
LIV: (for
Tom Clark)
Must everything be a
question this evening?
I have escaped from
writing that wanders
into the sky.
I
want as the air must want
to be pierced by something
radiantly dark.
LV: (for
Ron Padgett)
(MM Joe Brainard)
I
think of you often,
you
who now inhabit the air—
Do you ever
think of me?
LVI: (for
Ann Lauterbach)
Across
the sea’s surface a film dazzlingly lit
by
the sky’s transience—sentimental,
the
remembered self being essentially an absence.
LVII: (for
William Corbett)
A swallow descends like a wave
about to break and roughens the dark water
with a splash into many dimensions—
LVIII: (for
Tom Mandel)
to
fill my hand with your hair
its pale light brought
close to my nose
as
I do now
in order to remember it.
LIX: (for
Michael Palmer)
“Ultimately there is a definition that occurs as Gregory Bateson argues ‘by
relation’….”
—Michael
Palmer
There
was always a refusal of certainty despite
whatever I learned I knew there was always more,
and certainty was too often the echo of something
happening far away, something you were hearing
across a silence that wasn’t really silent but both lively
and dangerous—and everything we haven’t experienced
for ourselves can only be something thrown across this gulf
or thrown against the silence until it sticks, or rising out of its
ruins in reverse, transforming everything like a cover of snow.
LX: (for
Ray DiPalma)
When there is a thought of it or even when there is
no
thought of it but only an
apprehension of the marvelous
I am missing, how everything is a part of everything else,
including everything I miss.
LXI: (for
Maureen Owen)
All That
Glitters is not snow
It was something that’s been passed down
through the women that the men don’t
understand, & how it came back to me
when I first saw the Milky Way.
LXII: (for
Paul Violi)
Bewilderment
easy, like snow.
I think I’m about to snow.
The
dead cannot kiss!
Let this be our defense
against regret.
LXIII: (for
Michael Davidson)
He
seems to delight rather than to despair,
to
be in an open field in the season of lightning
or
is this non-chalance something that comes
when one gets older?
In
this Persian design ghostly voices
are calling from the falling water,
and
when he bends down to look closer
he
sees himself reflected in the shallow pool
and
steps out of the poem right before it ends.
LXIV: (for
Marjorie Welish)
A lyricism or at least a ceaseless
murmuring as one by one
we’re called away.
If there is a pattern
it
is beyond me, but
I
know it must include
many winters and an
equal number springs.
The flower at least flowers
before it disappears, as if
in return for our affection.
LXV: (for
Lorenzo Thomas)
To those incomprehensible
to
everyone but themselves:
it’s the others
who
are always wrong.
LXVI: (for
Anne Waldman)
The Poet’s
Three Tasks
To guide through the darkness.
To
see what we see in the world.
To
set something down before it passes.
LXVII: (for
Alice Notley)
At first she associated with darker concerns
bordering on the mystical, and sang
what she
wanted into being, and the writing
particularly
flickered when it came into contact with something
like
the blue light in the center of a flame,
or the glow just before a storm
or a white dress as it gets rained on,
the light inside an emerald,
stained glass in a cathedral at night,
obsidian with purple flowers.
LXVIII: (for
Bernadette Mayer)
Old message
never sent.
What
did you expect? Don’t ask someone other than a poet
to review a long poem that is as much about the song
as what it is in words. You’ll get a vaporous nowhere
in the flesh report, a voice from a world of shadows
you don’t recognize, abstractions beyond anything
in the pious, even Dante or Gerard Manley Hopkins.
LXIX: (for
Wanda Coleman)
How Silicon
Becomes Glass
What I would give to speak of things
not
exhausted nor monstrous.
Even
my dreams have dreams.
I’d
like to psychoanalyze those.
The
impulse to become is still
greater than the pain of becoming.
LXX: (for
Ron Silliman)
Language
is first of all communication
before it’s art. Daylight fills the yellow
room in spring, but it’s somber in winter
when its closed curtains keep out the sky.
The
sky is burnt sienna. The stars flicker & go out.
I
see everything as it appears after dark.
I
see the people who fill obituaries every day.
Wind
is distorted by the sky it flies through.
Some
of us are storms, some of us besieged,
but we’re all here under the same restrictions.
It is as it is. If you don’t like what I’m saying
every poem rests between another two.
LXXI: (for
Bob Perelman)
Start with what you already know how to get
across.
They say that in this kind of marble
there’s always a patch of no color,
transparent, like water. And just who
is this “they” you ask?
LXXII: (for
Nathanial Mackey)
It’s
the joy inside the multiformity
underneath the repetitions in jazz,
or
your skin, how it gives off
light as if it’s whispering to some part
of me I don’t yet understand.
LXXIII: (for
Rae Armantrout)
Her desire to use silence and the impulse
to
silence was neither transparent nor did it
pose as flame. She washed it down with a
black liquid and sang. The precision of her
language was something I never understood.
LXXIV: (for
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge)
To she oblique and often
misunderstood:
They have concentrated you as fluid—
your heat sweeps across the ice
in
order not to be afraid.
On the open windowsill the dark
red
chrysanthemum is like a cloud of smoke.
The snow’s luminous shadow glows with light
on
the blue of open water. How in the cold
her
body seems more foreign to me than ever.
LXXV: (for
Leslie Scalapino)
Transparency
To
discover anything in words is an illusion.
To
obey is to avoid disharmony.
We
should DO MORE ourselves.
LXXVI: (for
Bruce Andrews)
The desire to inform has a
history and
underneath it is a sense of duty which may be the shot of
whiskey that you need. If you don’t
like it, you can
silver it over into something you prefer.
LXXVII: (for
Barrett Watten)
On the level of form.
There is no language but one issuing from a person
no
longer here. It speaks from an inner silence
that sometimes opens and a voice comes out.
And
then it ends. And all you’re left with
are you inexactitudes, your errors in transcription,
and your monotonous voice, ruining everything.
LXXVIII: (for
August Kleinzahler)
Each word is a shape carved in time.
—August Kleinzahler
Too lexical
August
is more than
a little
vestigial.
At dusk August is lavender
& golden dust. After nightfall
August is a smaller sky,
a warm room, the smell of
burning wood an ether.
LXXIX: (for
Eileen Myles)
How I Chose
What I Was about to Choose
On the
shady side of the street
the
shadows are mostly ice.
LXXX: (for
Jessica Hagedorn)
A Broken Mirror
This
is for Rose who is dead.
This is for the one who was the glass,
from the one who was the foil.
LXXXI: (for
Charles Bernstein)
Actively involved with the discontinuous
and
the continuity of the voice within
until apart from it I have no real existence.
LXXXII: (for
John Yau)
At the speed at which something
dissolves into something else,
the
air was no longer dry with light
but
white as the words describing it.
LXXXIII: (for
Jim Carroll)
Lost
possibilities
How
cold the waves were—
and
the white flowers spreading
on the rocks were frost,
and
I was left with nothing
that was not shattered or shivering.
LXXXIV: (for
Carla Harryman)
In the habit
of a body
When the narrative is imitating anything
“in
the mode of” it is something
false and dim.
Repeatedly the visible world
suspends something in front of me
and
then makes it disappear.
It wants me to believe in the darkness,
in what’s missing, it tells me all of life
has descended from its ruins.
But in the nature of all flesh
I
keep forgetting.
LXXXV: (for
Maxine Chernoff)
Becoming Alabaster
Normal sentence structure explores acoustic
relations
in
its landscape as if marble might start talking.
But
thunder in a rain-storm no longer astounds us,
nor
the endless white of lightning nor the shadows it discloses.
LXXXVI: (for
Jimmy Santiago Baca)
Then I awoke
out of nothing into the air.
I am a silence
between the edge of fire
and
those in the dark behind me
singing the songs the old ones sang
in
an effort to keep me going forward.
LXXXVII: (for
David Trinidad)
Her enthusiasm spun simultaneously into two
independent monologues,
while her wildest ideas
danced in front of her.
LXXXVIII: (for
Dennis Cooper)
Why I’m Unable to Think
Clearly About it
In
one sense this is a world governed by style alone.
In
some ways it’s one shadow after another.
It’s
a man standing in a shaft of moonlight
interrupted by passing clouds until he dies.
LXXXIX: (for
Diane Ward)
She
sees a grey light like silk
on a not-quite-white glow. It
flickers like a silent film of
something lovely and rough.
CODA
One wave after another rose lifting me
into the night sky, glimmering in the darkness, the way life flows out at the
end
of autumn. And then winter
descends, and in the spring we number those still breathing, and in summer a
sprawling golden sun
returns everything to the way it
was,
one wave after another returning us
to the sky, glimmering with darkness.
["Elegies" was
originally published as #32 in a self-published series for Laocoon
Press, December 25, 2002. It was republished in 2004 by Elik Press, Salt Lake City Utah. Reprinted here by
permission of the author.]
Randy
Roark graduated from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1983
(BFA) and 1991 (MFA). He apprenticed with the poet Allen Ginsberg and continued
to work in various capacities with the poet until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. He
has transcribed, edited, annotated, and indexed over 28,000 pages from
Ginsberg’s lectures on poetry. Since 1991, he has published over 40 volumes of
original prose and poetry and art criticism under his Laocoon
Press imprint including Awakening Osiris (Selva
Editions, 1996), One Night (with Anne
Waldman, Nest Egg Books, 2001), Mona Lisa’s Veil: New and Selected Poems,
1979-2001 (Baksun Books, 2002), and Elegies
(Elik Press, 2004). His long poem on alchemy, “A Map
of the World,” (from A Map of the World,
Laocoon Press, 2001) was selected for a special
presentation at the International Congress of the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, in December 2001. Roark’s
nonfiction works include Dissolve: Screenplays to the Films of
Stan Brakhage (Cityful
Press, 2002) Randy Roark is a producer for Sounds True and has a monthly travel
column––"A Poet's Progress"––in the online arts and culture journal
"Newtopia."