A Poem by Tomaz Salamun

I'm holding a book I used to carry around one winter about sixteen years ago. It was another life. It snowed a lot that year. I would drive to the small building in uptown Harrisburg (the war zone) where my partner managed an office, and sit in there and read this book. I drew a lot of weird angels in the pages and made up imaginary channelings from dead authors like Apollinaire and would notate when voices or sounds overlapped around me (like a Meow Mix commercial with John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano). I was pleasantly green then. They didn't test you everywhere back then unless you flew a plane or drove a bus. Imagine! Stoner angels. I was clearly having a great time, if keeping a rather oblique engagement with the universe. I always arrived late in the evening, when it was just he and a seventy-five year old woman who was obsessed with history and had the greatest stories of her service in WWII and of her prominent, doomed family who were once rural aristocracy due to Dad's tycoon bent. But it ended badly. Every one of them did. Her mother died young and slowly. Her one brother (a broken veteran) ended up living outdoors, refusing to ever come inside their little mansion. The family created an artificial lake which is still there. She has a thrilling story about seeing King Kong as a child that ends with a near murder. I think she was a lesbian who rarely indulged. She had the obligatory "first true doomed love" (dead pilot) story to excuse her contented spinsterhood, but it was too movielike. The details in that one never rang true like her other stories. But one indulges people. I hope she's still alive. She had such spirit and was so afflicted. She could barely walk back then, but she was still writing letters on theological history to bishops, to correct them, in those days. She was a hellion with an oxygen tank. I liked her very much. I like her very much.

Oh, the glory days of Tamaqua. I'm sure it's a photogenic, dead town. Okay, deadish.

If I ever go there, I want to see her artificial lake.

I'm sure it's one of those lakes you see on frightening postcards from the fifties, colored in weird Hiroshige-like pastels. Shallow and oddly geometrical. Proof that oncogenic industry cares.

Look at the postcard. There are even two geese there, absorbing chemicals with names that are seventeen syllables long into their bodies and this will be in their eggs.

But I will admire it.

I always smile when I remember her stories of her family's attempts to bring culture to Tamaqua. This culture was things like The Mikado, in which our lovely heroine arrogated herself a meaty role.

She was built like Gertrude Stein and had about as much patience.

The family tried. They were doomed. In so many ways.

One ends up rationing love, I suppose. I could understand the embattled woman I saw.

A cat and history books were enough.

We're not all greedy.

And Tomaz Salamun...this is from the Selected Poems edited by Charles Simic, with an introduction by Robert Hass. I think "Barry Watten" is mentioned in one of these poems. Many of the translations are collaborations between Salamun and various poets. Some of these are Simic himself, the redoutable Anselm Hollo, and the redoubtable Bob Perelman. Some are translated by Simic alone or other translators alone.

Many of the poems are enjoyable. Many are memorable. You can feel the translation process, however; you can sense pins and needles falling through cracks in the floor.

The poetry is zippy, and it's damn hard to translate zippy between languages.

Doomed or elegaic or mordantly philosophical are easier to translate.

But Salamun's adeptness at unmooring things through langauge still gives an enlivening tilt to consciousness. Even in translation. It often makes one want to write poetry.

I'm not sure I feel as connected to the hugeness of the poems anymore. They have a smashing grandiloquence...no, I mean they are actually smashing the world, like a child building a Lego house just to have the fun of kicking it to colorful smithereens.

That's a Mayakovskayan trait taken to an extreme: to create that self-mythologizing figure of the Crazy Poet, the Trickster, the Giant Holding the Hyperbolic Mirror which shows us the world crazily distorted but somehow truer for all that.

Mayakovsky could laugh when he played this part, and often get laughs.

Maybe I feel a distance because I've encountered this too much. The Dada poets did it faultlessly, and their extremes seem more timeless. Purer. Tzara is a very pure poet. So were many of his cohorts. Salamun's work sometimes seems to be in synch with the brio of first generation New York School poets. I imagine many see him as an Eastern European O'Hara. The citified translation of this mythic figure can end up being a protean, urban satyr (O'Hara, who adored Mayakovsky and many other Russian poets) or even a suave conceptualist poet monkeying with poetry while wearing an offputting suit. Those models too have their merits and their insufferable components.

(The latest translation of the New York Poet seems to follow tacit edicts like make it lazier, give the poem a slouch or increase the naivete and the childishness. This can be charming quite often. A whole collection of it can grate though.)

I liked these drama queen poetic tendencies a bit more sixteen years ago. I like that element less now. I'm drawn more to the poems in this collection which are sly parables, the quieter poems in the collection. And the love poems. There are many fine doomed types of love in the poems, stating their case for what they know is an uncaring posterity.

I guess that speaks to Salamun's range. It's a good thing for a poet to have.

Esenin is the darker version of that larger-than-life booming poet: self-mythologizing but humorless. Smashing the figure in the mirror in the dark room indeed...an outmoded Romantic version of the poet which can cripple the social engagement. But then Esenin had to suffer on under that other completely vanished marketing gimmick, that of the "peasant poet," the myth of purity. There was a revolution that thought that might be a useful propagandistic direction. These notions seem so far from literature now that it feels painful even to remember them. The twentieth century had more than its share of horribly "progressive" ideas.

And yet I was reading tonight of the literary scene that Godwin and his second wife helped to created after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and there was this amazingly contemporaneous feel to the whole democratic enterprise. There was this beautiful naivete and absolute belief in the Imagination...of everyone...they had a collective where writer neighbors were solicited for books, children penned books...myths and mythological fables cross-fertilized back and forth in a community of friends. And this is in the near countryside outside London. It sounds truly idyllic. Some of the books they produced are still published and read today, oddly enough.

So it's not really what period you're born in. It's how open the writing is, its capacity for friendship, feeding the imagination or advancing freedom, as opposed to its capacity for acting, enactment, self-mythologization. Those insufferable aspects of literature.

Here's one that struck me again just now.

It was translated by Simic working alone.


    FOLK SONG

Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys people and their speech.
His singing elevates a technique that wipes out
the earth so we are not eaten by worms.
The drunk sells his coat.
The thief sells his mother.
Only the poets sells his soul to separate it
from the body that he loves.


And one more turned beautifully by Simic...a fragment...one of the quietest ones in the book but no less powerful for that...

    [UNTITLED]

Emptiness,
my only love,
give me rest.




But there we're almost moving into Corman territory. Corman could do a whole collection of those and it would work.

One wonders how a person ends up in these places, arrives in a lasting quietude. Or keeps a republic of discordant voices in his or her living space and enters the fray often.

This is really the dichotomy of the Asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary Poet versus the Engaged Poet.

Asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullaryis whaaa? Engaged is whoziiit? Homo say what?

I'm being oversimplistic deliberately.

Asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary fishermen versus polis.

Asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary is lyrical backwash, the self and its construction and deconstruction, non-social philosophical, conceptual flutters, mediumistic turbidities and mediumistic masturbation of all stripes.

Lump it Baby categorizations.

Engaged is political, the polis in general, social, documentary, rhetoric, gender, wait what...things like gender are so inner and outer at once that the boat has sprung a leak and is sinking...dude that's fucked up right there...dudess...

This isn't working...gender is engaged reflective lyrical...kari edwards....eileen myles...frank o'hara...prince....

I know. Dichotomies suck. They don't explain the world well.

But suck it.

justsuckitimseriousijustwantyoutoputitinyourmouthandsuckitdontholdyrjawlikethatsuckitsucksuckit

this is about as useful as heterosexual and homosexual but still. it's fucking something. or not.

or getting fucked.

like straight guys who ask their girl to fuck them. it's so common now.

it's such a relaxing thing i guess.

sometimes a very repressed person will tell you what they want in bed and suddenly this foul cacophany of words and ideas and ithyphallic ritual beyond gender will pour out four men fucking them they're a bottom pig women are men are women penetration penetrated he's pouring out the words what he suddenly wants...like people possessed in the bible and if the prophet exorcised them transferred this spirit into swine they would be made mad by the gabble and hiss the racket of sex in the god's head come into yours and the pigs would run into the biblical river and drown. i think the word is gadarene

Oprah won't tell you gadarene.

Dr. Phil won't talk about the god or the swine that die.

This isn't really a humane society.

...you were straight fourteen seconds ago...

and it's a beautiful thing when i see a young man or woman suddenly enthused, possessed by the god, that's enthusiasm, i say you are enthused and i say dude that is so fucked up right there but secretly i know it's the god...yr seeing the god incarnate...and yr like whoa and take two steps back...because you don't want that god to touch you...it's bad enough getting his emails...

But if one imagines that as just one aspect of a clearly multifaceted poetry, and as a sort of scale with two end points, poets would fall here or there on that line. Some poets are clearly way down at one end or the other.THIS IS FUCKED UP. SHUT UP. I don't think that means, however, those can't be great poets.I'M HUNGRY. LOOK WHAT YOU LEFT IN THE FUCKING MICROWAVE ALL NIGHT. YOU'RE GROSS. I think there are great poets at either extreme and everywhere in between. I MEAN IT. JUST SHUT IT. And poets who can cycle back and forth seamlessly between modalities.WHAT'S IN THE TRASHCAN LOOKS BETTER THAN THIS PIECE OF SHIT. THEY CALL THEMSELVES A FUCKING DELI? Because poetry's such a shape-shifter. And so are poets.

But FUCK poets ING like Adrienne Rich SHUT spend a lot of time UP down at the Polis end RIGHT and poetsNOW like Barbara Guest I MEAN IT seem to like Club OR TITTY TWISTER Logos.

And what good would an engaged poet be who lacked a capacity for deep asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary reflection and embodiments, or an asseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary poet who had removed himself or herself from contemporaneity altogether?

are there such creatures?

actually there are. gruesomely real. sometimes. Magnificently real other times.

The best poets somehow manage to have it both ways: timeliness and timelessness.

The Tupperware poem. Just burp it.

But talking about Holy Grails is tiresome.

The Holy Grail is a story. I suppose it's the telling of the story that matters, not whether the Grail actually exists.

Most literary criticism is about one Holy Grail or another.

SOUTH PARK IS A RERUN. THIS ONE ISN'T FUNNY. OH WAIT THE NEXT ONE'S WHERE RICHARD FUCKS MRS GARRASON OMIGOD I LOVE THAT ONE. LEAVE IT ON. IS THAT THE ONE WHERE HE SAYS "I CAN'T GET MY PERIOD OR KILL A BABY? THEN WHY DID I GET A SEX CHANGE?" I THINK SO...I LOVE THAT ONE..."OH LOOK AT ALL THESE TAMPONS..."

I guess it's just temperament, ultimately, as much as the ideas one is drawn to.

EAT ME. OMIGOD MARJORIE'S ADORATION KILLED KENNY!