the rix mix

I read a review of a new Beck album by a young friend, a very good writer, she linked in Facebook.   She gave the album three stars, but it was for me a four star review. It's titled "An Ethereal Collection Of Honest Tracks."  She wrote "Morning Phase is a delightfully multi-layered album that flows wonderfully..." This got me thinking. I pointed out I thought it was a four star review. Separately, on my own FB page, I posted this:

When I was writing oodles of mostly brief Amazon reviews 14 years ago (Amazon was much smaller than now), fans of a band or artist disliked my three star reviews. Three stars meant an LP was competent, a few really worthwhile songs, probably nothing outright awful, but probably nothing that would interest someone not already a fan of the group or artist, or a "completist" for versions of a classical work. You'd feel the lack of enthusiasm in my writing. Neil Young, whom I love even in his weirdest failures, got some three star reviews from me. Four Stars was an LP I liked, worth having if I were a fan, might interest others, more than half good, a few exceptional cuts or a praiseworthy concept sincerely attempted, lower your expectations a little & you won't be disappointed. I couldn't give half-stars, so if I had any doubts at all about five stars, it became four. Four was a good review. I only wanted people to stop & think before they spent their money. That is the bottom line: Who should or should not spend their money! Sometimes it's difficult to draw that line, but it's the only way you do the reader a real favor.

Labels: about writing, music

I believe that when poets hit mid-career, they are motivated to write more poems by the certainty these poems will be collected into small collections published by small presses rather than by copy machines at Office Max. The poet routinely pushes the poems. Otherwise, the tendency increasingly is to write a poem only when a poem pushes the poet. When I posted this on FB, one of best poets in Jersey hit "like." There must be truth in it.

Labels: about writing

The professional writing most suited to me by talent & temperament - other than a twice weekly general theme newspaper columist* - is writing for politicians; speeches, PR, etc. I worked on political newsletters for a brief period & enjoyed it for the most part. If I approved of the politician's views & especially if liked the politician, I didn't mind the whoring.

I used to "mayorize" the Rahway City newsletter. I'd count the number of times the mayor's name was mentioned in the copy provided to me & find more places to insert "Mayor James Kennedy." I wished he had come to me to edit his occasional speeches, which didn't even sound like him & lacked his sense of humor. He could be quite droll in an Irish sort of way. Like Brendan Byrne, a politician I admired & a funny man. Rahway has a great river & cool train station, a politician can't go wrong waxing poetic about those, especially when he can truthfully blame the flooding & pollution on upstream towns. Freeholders were pains-in-the-asses because hardly anyone can name their freeholders, but freeholders have egos just as out-sized as any other politicians.

 * These columnists hardly exist anymore. The newspapers they worked for are gone or they were laid off years ago in staff cutbacks. But I'm thankful I had the opportunity to do it at all as a "nonprofessional."

Labels: about writing

One of the earliest poems I had published was titled "Heaven of 1001 Auto Parts." It was a mildly humorous tale of accompanying a friend to auto parts stores & junkyards in search of a part he needed for his car. Of course, he was Virgil & I was Dante. It would have made an entertaining short newspaper column. I persisted in hammering it into a poem. Later I realized one could make a poem like a cat walking on piano keys, but you couldn't make the cat play "Mary Had a Little Lamb." "Heaven" would never be included in a "Selected Poems," if I were in the process of selecting. But it reminds me I always liked titling poems. Even if those titles were the best thing about them, like a crappy boardwalk souvenir shop called "Treasures of the Sea." You know what's in it, but you go inside anyway.

Labels: about writing

Charles Olson never fully endorsed Joel Oppenheimer's poetry. This disturbed Joel, but Olson was correct; Joel wasn't an Olson guy. Joel was, to be sure, a Black Mountain College poet, he learned from Olson, but he was as much & probably more a William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, M.C. Richards Black Mountain Poet, those very different influences jostling each other in his poems, along with archy the cockroach. Olson was too much an ideologist.  I gave Olson his due as best I understood him,  but I don't like him much.* His use of American vernacular rarely sounds comfortable. He was a bully - intellectually & literally as an intimidating physically large man, & some young poet ought to have given him a well-deserved punch in the nose. Projectivism is as unnecessary a "school" as one might imagine it - who needs manifestoes? Paul Blackburn was a far, far superior "open field" poet. I spent a lot of time with Blackburn's writing, eventually putting it aside in my own poems except for his wonderful Provencal "translations." Oppenheimer came to realize Olson no longer mattered much even to Olson's own disciples. & that's about the time I met Joel.

* Talented poets disappeared into Olsonite masters programs at a few select universities & emerged several years later writing cramped, indecipherable poems.  I knew one, He was a nice guy. I said to him once in a rare display of literary candor, "Your poems sound wonderful but I don't know what the hell they mean. This bothers me because obviously you intend them to mean something. I don't write many poems with the intention to mean anything."

Labels: about writing

On a whim, & because this is my  annual Ocean City / Somers Point nostalgia week, I cross-posted my idealized childhood tale, Angels at the Jersey Shore,  over at Kos, where it was featured on the Street Prophet group front page,   &  picked up 30 recommends & some very nice comments. Although I've been a frequent commenter - often at length - over the years (a decade?),  I've rarely diary'd at Street Prophets. One reason is  I have few if any  original thoughts on religious issues, particularly in connection with politics, & others  represent  my views just fine. But my personal experiences growing up, describing a   Protestant/Catholic ecumenicism developing in myself, & around me,  before & after Pope John XXIII, no longer seems so quaintly out-of-date, as the American Catholic clerical hierarchy more strongly allies with the evangelical Protestant right. It remains to be seen if the new Pope intends to clean out this nest of pedophile-enabling snakes.

An except from one of my poems was  used on the cover of the program for the all-faith (or no faith) service at this summer's Netroots Convention. I was quite pleased about that.

Labels: about writing, Somers Point NJ

I know a few people who have done everything they believe they need to do to be considered poets. MFA, organizing readings, attending workshops.  publishing nicely-crafted pieces.  I am unable to think of them as poets. I suppose they are. But they lack something. They are too ordinary (I don't mean it in a bad sense regarding lifestyle); perhaps too caught up in current events - their view is essentially journalistic; some spiritual component missing, which doesn't imply a belief in a deity or deities. There's always something a little strange about poets (& often in a really good poem) throwing one off-balance, if briefly. You can't learn it or fake it.

Labels: about writing

I know four Pisces women with birthdays today. Know only one of them well, a woman I have  loved since we met 35 years ago, & she knows it.  She was with the man then she's still with now. They eventually got married, bought a fixer up house, now have a son around 20, a fine musician so I hear. They are a couple I described as deciding to "grow up for each other." It was certainly something they didn't have to do at the time, 25 years ago, but they saw their chance to have a home & jumped at it.   I've never written a poem about her. Written a couple for her. Got her card in the mail a day late, she'll think I've forgotten (which I haven't in years), but it will arrive tomorrow with today's postmark.

I pulled yesterday's poem, "A Common Egret,"  out of a 2005 blog post. It was probably written in the late 90's when I was spending a lot of time on the Raritan Bay shore & at Sandy Hook, & I tinkered with it for a few years. It is not to my mind a successful poem. It would read well in public from a podium, & has the kind of twisty "dismount" at the end I seem to be good at doing - getting out of poem. But it is a contrived poem & I labor to follow what I want from it more than what the poem might have wanted. Can hardly blame a poet for desiring  to celebrate a white egret, quite common in our marshes now, much more  than when I was a child. As development continued unabated along the Jersey shore - the Barnegat Bay "lagoon" communities so badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy -  industry was withdrawing from northern Jersey marshes & wildlife sanctuaries were established from the Meadowlands a short distance from NYC to Delaware Bay, so I suppose the egrets found safer, stable  breeding habitats. They fly in  from the marshes & islands of Arthur Kill - the waterway between Jersey & Staten Island -  & fish at ponds in local parks around here, but they are not comfortable being too close to humans. They can't keep an eye on us & concentrate on fishing at the same time.

Labels: about writing, birthday

If you come from a small town & you want to be a writer, one of the first things you have to grasp is that every small town has a corner store owned by a guy named Larry across the street from the grammar school. & you will be marked forever as hopelessly provincial if you insist your Larry was the only Larry or the greatest Larry.

 What saved me was that, as a teen, I spent nearly a month every year in Atlantic City, winter & summer, & stepping on the boardwalk at California Ave., looking north toward the great piers & The Traymore was always so awesome. I felt like other people feel when they go to a dark place & see the Milky Way. Next thing I'm back home sitting at the counter in Murray's drinking a cherry Coke & nobody understands that three or four times a year I'm having these religious experiences where I'm seeing disembodied psychic energy patterns left by Al Capone, Frank Sinatra, Dean & Jerry, & Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon shouting "Wooo" as he flies by in front of Irene's Gift Shop.

Labels: about writing, Atlantic City, growing up

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast gave me a succinct shout out the other day:

 Bob Rixon is sort of a Bruce Springsteen of New Jersey blogging. With his penchant for vintage postcards and other images, interspersed with musings on life, politics, and the personal, no one better encapsulates the Garden State than The Rix Mix.

That "sort of" in important to me. Any resemblance to Springsteen is coincidental, the result of our being about the same age & having parallel yet different experiences.  I had my own boardwalks, my own favorite music.  I also played in a band in the late Sixties (with far less success).  A few of my poems have a  Springsteen feel to them, something I usually recognized  as they were written (they are not poems about boardwalks). Springsteen's first two LPs were released during the period I was being drawn into poetry. I didn't care for Springsteen's "poetry" on Born to Run, his break-through third. I felt he  had abandoned  the spirit of "Rosalita." But he was doing in a big, ambitious  way the same thing I was doing quietly at the time: Consolidating influences, shaking off provincialism while  retaining a sense of the "local." It's what many artists do in their twenties as the first burst of youthful learning comes to close.   He wanted to be a rock & roll star. I just wanted to make poems that would be published,  read & appreciated outside of Jersey, like William Carlos Williams. We both succeeded.  But I had understood when Greetings from Asbury Park was released, from the  wonderful album jacket (better than the  record, actually), even before I slit the shrink wrap, that what Bruce had done could be done only once.  I might have put a similar postcard image on a collection of poems,  with the same    Jersey "fuck you" I believed it implied.

I'd be mildly disappointed that Springsteen has never read any of  my poems or prose, if I had tried to get any of it to him.

Labels: about writing

Dave Roskos, poet, publisher, editor, event & reading series organizer, saves everything, which now makes him a historian & archivist of Jersey's "alternative" poetry scenes, particularly New Brunswick. There was traffic between the alternative venues & 'zines & the "establishment" poetry scenes around the NJ State Arts Council when it funded individual poetry fellowships (very few 'zine poets received grants), The Dodge Poetry Festival, The Poets-in-the Schools program, & some college-based scenes. There were also middle-ground reading series like Barron Arts Center in Woodbridge (in the '80s & '90s a complete social scene that extended post-reading to the Director's home or a local bar. It's where I met Dave Roskos) , Barnes & Noble stores, etc.  More poets from the alternative poetry scene participated in establishment activities than establishment poets (most of them college & school teachers) ventured into the punky bars of New Brunswick. Only a few were truly successful  straddling both; it took a good deal of effort.
Top-billing usually meant you went on last. Most poets coveted this. When top-billed, I often requested to open the reading. Organizers generally didn't mind.  I  am not a demonstrative performer & I preferred not following a theatrical poet. In any case, I was always anxious & I found it difficult to listen to & enjoy the poets preceding me. I didn't want to second-guess my poem selection & fight urges to change it based on what other poets were reading & the reception they were getting.

The Court Tavern reading was the only time I read with David Cope, a Michigan poet,  one of my oldest friends & literary allies. It was a thrill for me, & Dave remembers having a great time in the packed, smoky downstairs room at The Court.  Dave loves New Jersey. We took Dave to Asbury Park at its blasted nadir & he loved it, saw right into it.   Dave & I, though very different, touch at some  crucial points in the how & why of poetry that make our poems go well together. Michael Pingarron was a gifted Latino poet who survived a terrible accident that nearly killed him, had to regain his power of  speech, went on to finish college,  became a schoolteacher in Newark, & died when he tripped walking his dog outside his apt building, concussing his head on a curb. A great loss.

Labels: about writing, culture, New Jersey, poem

Low sixties here today, forties through weekend. Every day like this is one day closer to spring, & one more day without snow or icy slop. But Jersey is a humid coastal state, & winter is when we have our clean, clear dry cold air, good for people with allergies - just about everyone is allergic to one thing or another.  A deep freeze is  necessary for a really colorful early springtime when the crocuses, tulips, forsythia & dogwoods all bloom.  So it's a trade off. I don't think many people really mind cold, sunny days. Just layer up.
***
 Surrendering to uncontrollable lawlessness, Newark NJ city council passed a discriminatory & possibly unconstitutional law: 

Ordinance limiting hours of late night Newark eateries passes unanimously

Many of the city’s eateries won’t be hiring armed guards late at night because many will not be open.


From Lyons Avenue to Broadway, restaurants in high-crime areas must now close their doors at 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

If you own an eatery in a designated high crime area, you are  treated like the cause of crime rather than as  a victim of the city's inability to protect your business, for which you pay taxes. That's prejudice.  The police chief inaccurately stated that suburban businesses aren't open late. First, & most obviously,  a city isn't suburbia. Good American cities stay open late. In New York City nightlife doesn't even get rolling until midnight. But suburbia in Jersey has 24/7 diners, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, convenience stores & supermarkets. Many fast food places close for only two or three hours for the cleaning crew & breakfast menu  turnaround.
***
Pathetic dust up between an Oxford Professor of Poetry & the British poet laureate over the latter's suggestion that texting has "tremendous potential" for poetry.


Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill
Oxford professor of poetry attacks Duffy's praise of text language
I don't know if it does or doesn't. You let poetry happens wherever it happens. But I do know that hardly anyone outside of the realm of poetry knows Hill or Duffy much less cares what they say. I began writing poems when poets still had some cultural credibility beyond poets, & it was common to find a few books from New Directions, Pocket Poets & Black Sparrow on bookshelves of people who'd attended college.

Although the terrain of poetry has expanded & more young people are participating in it, they - the poets - are still constrained by boundaries, as if a poet involved in  something other than poetry is no longer acting as a poet.

Labels: about writing, in the news, New Jersey, potpourri, weather

A poet I very much like & admire posed the question, "When is a poem not a poem?" Other poets supplied lists of answers. Few "aesthetic" questions go more to the heart of the difficult learning process I went through for about a decade beginning in my late teens.

I consider their answers absurd, although they certainly contribute to the making of "good" poems. They're teachers of literary craft & I respect what they do. But I recognize, have always recognized that my relationship with them has adversarial possibilities. It has to. I come to those relationships now with a sense of humor.  They don't know that  the conventionality of my writing is a choice I made.  It was a difficult choice based on both personal comfort & the readers I expected to reach as a minor poet based in New Jersey. But I was coming from a place that can be easily described: A poem is what one perceives as a poem just as music is what one perceives as music & art is what one perceives as art. These are hardly new ideas, although some might still consider them radical.  They are not radical. To take it a step further, a poem is an artifact that remains when a certain type of creative process is complete. That is also not a radical idea. You find it in non-western cultures. You can fit various, sometimes conflicting,  ideas of craft & discipline  in there, directing the process. But the process can also be set up to direct itself, or can take place in one's mind, like Da Vinci contemplating the shadows thrown on his walls by flickering candles. Seeing the face of Elvis in a cloud.

You don't  abandon your tastes & preferences & critical faculties.   You may, as I did, become impatient with poems that have to peeled like an onion. Some kinds of art may no longer be of interest. But you feel more generous toward the creative expressions of amateurs & children. A jackhammer in the street may drive you nuts, but it also becomes music that drives you nuts. Letting go of many of my notions about what is  & isn't art  at first frightened me, then helped give me the courage to join WFMU, where there have always been like-minded creative people on the staff & an atmosphere of generally cheerful tolerance;  WFMU itself has a chameleon quality of being what listeners perceive it to be, & before the station archived shows there was also the wonderful, liberating  impermanence of the radio broadcast itself.

I have never, ever told someone their poem was not a poem or their music was not music of their art was not art. This may have hobbled me as a teacher of craft, & even hurt my own craft. I'm capable of appreciating craft. Many uses of craft. But it hasn't disqualified me as a teacher of something important.


Composer Olivier Messiaen transcribed the songs of birds & incorporated them into his compositions. He was a fastidious, exacting composer. Nothing was left to chance in his music. He was a fine teacher of music, a great one, in fact.  But he did not say that the bird songs were not music as they came out of the birds, became music only when approximated with musical notation. He was saying, I think, "You may skip my music if you wish & go directly to the birds."

Fortunately, I can point to my teachers, few of whom I've met in person. But they include my dad, who would've denied it was his meaning & intent.  Following dad down a quiet country road or along a beach at low tide was a lesson in found  art & natural ambient music. Had he lived longer I may have gotten around to explaining this to him, that it was his lasting influence on me.  But I saw no good reason why he needed to know. It came to him naturally.

Labels: about writing

Last Typewriter Factory Closes

It's an invention that revolutionised the way we work, becoming an essential piece of office equipment for the best part of a century.

But after years of sterling service, that bane for secretaries has reached the end of the line.

Godrej and Boyce - the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters - has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.
Standing the test of time: The keyboard might not have changed in 100 years, but the typewriter itself has been superseded by the computer

Standing the test of time: The keyboard might not have changed in 100 years, but the typewriter itself has been superseded by the computer

Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India - until recently. Demand for the machines has sunk in the last ten years as consumers switch to computers.

When I read that story last week I dutifully wrote a short blog post & filed it away until after Easter. There was a wave of nostalgic articles online; mine wasn't one of them.

Swindell Corp., based in Jersey, reported yesterday that  it had companies in China & elsewhere manufacturing typewriters, including a popular "contraband-proof"  model with a clear plastic case for prison inmates.

I acknowledge the typewriter as one of the grandest, greatest inventions of all time.

My last typewriter was a heavy, clunky, non-working machine from the 1930's I bought at a rummage sale because it was cool & kept on a shelf.  I got rid of it some  time ago. When  Smith-Corona  introduced a word processing typewriter with  a 20 line screen &  "Data Disk" memory in the later '80s,  essentially a small specialized computer,  I snapped it up & never looked back. If, like the competing  Brother word processors of the era, it had used the new 3.5 standard floppy disk. I might still have it as an emergency back up (I have a USB floppy drive). The S/C WP automatically reformatted pages & had spell check.  No more  tedious retyping just to correct one word or edit a sentence. No more carbon copies or wite-out.  A first draft gradually evolved into a finished piece of writing, which seemed more naturally creative to me. I didn't miss the old typewriters for a minute.  I created much of my best poetry & prose on that Smith-Corona, wrote dozens of short newspaper columns.  I could pull up a piece of writing on screen,  tinker with it, maybe print out a copy to pencil up away from the machine, & revise & refile it to removable disk.  I kept a diary/journal on it, many hundreds of pages of generally dull, obsessive writing (although I also  kept  a portable  notebook journal). When the S/C printed, it made the same satisfying click clack as a regular electric, but over twice-as-fast as I would be typing. & I could, if I wanted, still do real-time typing.

Now that I think of it, I never heard my sister - for years an ace legal assistant & law office manager  who also knows steno, express any nostalgia for typewriters.

Only a few successful  writers can afford to cling to their typewriters; they all have assistants. 

Labels: about writing, in the news

Bob Rixon's poems have appeared in many publications including New York Quarterly and The Village Voice. For 20 years he produced and hosted a weekly program over radio station WFMU. He  has been a featured poet at Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival & Visiting Poet at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is also the author of a long-running  blog, The Rix Mix.

Short bio to accompany one poem in a classy literary journal. Needed to think of two publications, still in business, with names not like punk 'zines. I'm proud of my association with WFMU & my blog. Every poet in Jersey does a Dodge Festival sooner-or-later; short reading usually for small audience, but a sought after gig because you receive a three-day pass.

Nobody cares that I wrote really good columns for a chain of weekly newspapers. My prose is well-suited to small, local newspapers (& their web counterparts)  provided editors don't mind  the touch of eccentricity  the young editors at Worrall Community Newspapers enjoyed. Newspaper writing also forced me to self-edit & tighten up my grammar & punctuation. Worrall Community Newspapers lost me when the supervising editor-of-editors  treated me as an amateur. I've received nibbles from other editors, which I decline because they are:   A: Not prepared to pay, or B. Won't suggest a topic on which I can knock off 400 words on one draft & little research.  Nothing goes over-the-transom, e.g. uninvited (except poems). You only do that when there's something you really want on the other side of the door, like an agent  who might read your novel sample pages & synopsis when nobody else will.

As a kid, I always wanted a print shop toy. They came with tiny rubber letters you set into a sheet metal tray, attached to a hand press, & coated with ink. Definitely made in Japan.  Instead, Santa brought me  a .22 rifle, a telescope, all kinds of interests  & hobbies my dad projected on me. Not even a cheap portable typewriter when I entered high school.   I briefly ran an A.B. Dick office offset, sheet fed duplication using paper masters.  All lists of independent petroleum quality tests from area refineries & tankers, I loved that machine, didn't mind coming in every other Saturday morning to clean it. Later, I was trained in running advanced  (for the late Seventies) Xerox machines  including their first commercially successful color machine, which I managed to set on fire one slow evening experimenting to see how many passes I could make through the machine of a color print, building up layers of ink.  On the third pass the paper got stuck & ignited & I fortunately fished it out of the  machine (leased but worth about $20,000)  before the ink had melted all over the works.

I've been told by professional printers that I'm too sloppy, not fastidious,  I don't go nuts over  the tiny ink spot in the corner of the page.  They're right. But I point out that copy editors ain't what they used to be, either, judging from the print errors I find in hard cover best-sellers.

Labels: about writing

Political language - rhetoric - is generally awful. Think of how few really articulate, inspiring presidents we've had, who knew how to use language. I've written that John Kennedy was the most recent president who really understood metaphor & was a great speaker (Carter understands it, Reagan used it well but unsubtly). For a lot of Americans, a  gun target symbol is a gun target, not something else.  It does not signify something else. It is not pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

Most of the 20th Century in the United States was notable for the absence of noxious language in our mainstream politics. In Lincoln's time, language was incredibly foul, violent, & incendiary. Lincoln didn't discourage his supporters' use of it. He simply refused to indulge in it himself. When necessary, he denied that it represented his views. 20th Century America didn't lack demagogic media characters & politicians.  But journalistic standards improved & congress was relatively civil.

On the other hand, we haven't the patience for the kind of lengthy, detailed debates organized by Lincoln & Stephen Douglas, or for speeches that fully explain a politician's views.

A direct cause & effect cannot be drawn between right wing talk radio or Sarah Palin's gun-love & the Arizona shootings. The talk show hosts have plenty of deniability. But one nationally-broadcast host can hardly utter the word "liberals" without placing the word "disgusting" in front of it. His shows are word-streams of casual vileness, & violent words, & he assumes the vast majority of his listeners agree with him. Over & over he repeats the word "facts" - everything he says is a fact. That liberals are disgusting is a fact, period, no argument. What's to argue?

I reside in one of the most liberal radio markets in America & I can't find a liberal talk show host on the AM dial. It can only be worse elsewhere, where fundamentalist religious broadcasting is added.

Our major local newspaper, The Star-Ledger, no longer has the staff or resources to fully report the news. Weekend reporting seems to consist of a single person sitting at a keyboard while monitoring The Associated Press & Newark emergency services radio transmissions. When the bare bones of a news story are reported online, bigoted, anonymous comments fill in the "facts." There's no reporter in the field asking questions.

I knew someone able to speak civilly, even kindly, of Bill Clinton & Al Gore. She was no great fan of George W. Bush. She was sensitive about environmentalism & slowly moderating her views on gay rights. But she loathes Barack Obama & now sounds like an obsessed "birther." Why she so hates Obama is puzzlement unless I attribute it to a barely suppressed racial bigotry she is now allowed to focus on a single symbolic black man with real power. The right licenses her vitriol.

Labels: about writing, in the news, media madness

Of all the people I've met online, a bunch became  "how ya doin'" acquaintances. Several are in the "IM me anytime day or night if you need to chat" category. A few became enduring online long-distance friendships, with sort of shared history now.  One includes phone  contact. For those longer, stronger connections,  we wish we resided near each other.  Another briefly jumped off the internet into the physical world a decade ago,  but distance put the brakes on it. It was an adventure we don't regret. Some things I'd hoped for from the internet & e mail didn't happen;  staying  in touch with certain old friends,  family bonding.  When, a year ago, my sister suggested via e mail a sibling get-together at her house, I didn't dismiss it outright, but the idea  seemed forced & artificial. The only on-going, involved "relationship" among the four of us had been  between my sister & I, & that had fallen on tough times.  But for two decades I had spent most Christmas Days at her home, & some Christmas Eves, & had visited other times during the year, sometimes just to hang out on her patio.

My older brother in south Jersey had never invited me to any occasion down there. I could interpret it only one way.  He had reasons for not wanting me around his house. Despite years of reasonably good behavior on my part.


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My oldest brother began detaching himself  while he was still in high school, & 8 years ago he was residing in a stinking attic apt with two dozen inbred starving cats & in an almost complete state of denial. The situation  was madness to me. I had seen many forms of madness, & he was way beyond eccentricity. I didn't have a car or  money, there was nothing I could do about it as crisis intervention.  Social Services in his city, Paterson, were awful.  He rejected even what I could & would do, which was to walk with him to a store & buy some food. If he had, I planned to trick him into leaving first, opening his window so the cats could escape. My two visits to him in Paterson (which required three trains & a very long walk through bad areas)  were traumatizing to my perception of family. My sister & other brother had very stable homes. My life was unstable, but I was quite aware of it.    I had  maintained long term relationships,  & could socialize without coming across as a complete freak.  I was irresponsible in some matters & quite responsible in others. I didn't drink  or smoke pot.  I had sense enough not to  have  two dozen inbred starving cats.  Writers & WFMU DJs were never shocked by my clutter, records & books crammed into a studio apt. Tools of the trade.  I was one large closet or storage area short of minimally adequate space. When I hung out at a downtown Rahway coffeehouse run by gay guys, I inquired as to the availability of basement, garage or attic space they might want to rent cheaply so I could store boxes. But those gay guys were themselves serious collectors of antique & oddball home furnishings. One of then owned an antique & junk shop & kept his overstock at his house,  in his backyard & in his old station wagon. As a collector, I was small stuff, merely books, records, some art, & a few oddities like  an xylophone & a diner booth  jukebox. These guys had overstuffed Victorian sofas, chandeliers,  & full dining room hutches you needed a crane to move.

What happened to my brother Joe would not have happened in other families of our background & upbringing. I doubt it would have happened had our dad been alive. Joe became homeless for a year after going through a Vet program designed to prevent it. All he needed  was a furnished  one room in a safe neighborhood near a downtown, paid for via Vet benefits,  some food stamps, some regular counseling, & no cats living inside. Total cost to guvmint: About $600 per month for rent & food stamps, plus V.A. medical benefits. Take away the cats, stock Joe's pantry with canned food, maybe  put hin on Zoloft, give him a daily newspaper & an occasional cigar & he returns from madness to his current harmless eccentricity, apparently accepted by his neighbors. The guy can talk.

Jim believed Joe was a fake putting on an act. It was a front, not an act, Behind the front a tragedy was unfolding that Joe could only glimpse, so irrational it was.  Joe was incapable of holding a job, except maybe at a Burger King, where he likely would've screwed up the Whopper assembly line & talked too much with customers. I think he could run a carousel or boardwalk game if chance.

I don't visit Joe at his senior apt in Newark.  It's a good one, I've checked it out online.  He doesn't care if he sees me or not. I wish he was online, I'd send him files & links to jazz & classical videos  of music he loved & which later became staples of my WFMU radio shows. Music I learned from his record collection.To a lesser extent, my radio shows drew from the music tastes of my sister & other brother.

A year ago, I received an invite to my nephew's graduation open house.  I'm certain he, not his parents,  put my name on the guest list. He had graduated from the worst major college in America, Liberty University. In a real sense, his own parents - mainline United Methodists,  his dad a UMC pastor - had somehow lost him. He had gone from mainstream,  most reasonable & rational protestant orthodoxy to radical  Baptist fundamentalism, which is a Methodist nightmare, & on to Ron Paul libertarianism.  He remained an affable guy, girls seem to like him. My nephew & I  could have great conversations about baseball & NCAA basketball,  but I can't imagine discussing religion or politics with him.

All those Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings, 4ths of July, graduations, ordinations, that we did not share, slowly took a toll, year by year, more & more estranged. I have poems & journal entries from 25-30 years ago documenting the process. My poems were mainly observations, so dryly stated that grants committees rejected them for being too "flat." The flatness was a check upon myself, to try to state a few facts I could defend as close enough to the bare truth. 

I didn't want to get together with my siblings to talk about "old times." Meaning childhood in Roselle Park. I have good memories & bad memories, things I understand & things I don't. But I can write an acceptable script of my childhood factoring in mom's alcoholism, the effect of my paternal grandmother on the home, which seemed so bad at times & yet her moving out marked the disintegration  of my parents' marriage. She was my sanctuary all through high school, when I escaped to Atlantic City as often as permitted.  Joe despised her. Right there is a huge difference in perception & fact.

I'm more interested what happened to the four of us after dad died.  Because how we treated each other is  not what he would have wanted.  I'm sure he expected us to carry on his few traditions, if only a Christmas gathering & a summer cookout every year to pull the clan together.  Two of his kids made good families, but his own family quickly came unglued. I envisioned a day of evasions, bad jokes, feeling embarassed, four siblings who had no clear idea of what  the other three had been doing for 30 years (except I knew my sister's life fairly well, better than she knew mine, since my visits were almost all to her home  which I enjoyed).  It would have been like looking at my reflection in three distorted funhouse mirrors, & we'd all  feel fractured, disatisfied. There would be no path to healing because who would dare acknowledge any healing was necessary? & who would mediate the healing?

I was chosen to tell the stories, & I have not told many of them. Because most are not warm & funny. My part has been, at key moments, disgraceful.

At Dad's funeral, Joe said to me, "Rixons don't cry." Maybe he thought it was true. But I had heard dad break down & weep under the verbal assaults of our angry, alcoholic mom. I knew my sister wept in private during those sad days of the wake  & funeral  so that she could function as a welcoming host for the literal hundreds who passed through the funeral home to pay respects. & I was never more than a fraction from crying for the lost opportunity to have dad as the  friend & counsel I felt was coming to me at last, which my then-girlfriend  Christine & my poetry mentor Joel Oppenheimer had steadily encouraged & nurtured over a period of years. Joel, practically an anarchist, had dismissed dad's  political conservatism as irrelevant, noting approvingly  that dad was about tradition in his military interests - old wars that were worthy wars,  old guns, old battles,  &  poets were about tradition, & what was near at hand,  & the better I tapped into those, the better dad would like & understand my writing as a form of keeping history. Dad was Joe's last grip on family. He was orphaned.

Labels: about writing, growing up, mental health

I've had disagreements with other poets - not serious ones - about the place of political opinion in poems, & the role of poets in advocating political change. But those were when I was a very young poet. My view was that poems pretty much chose their own subjects, & if one's poems were heavily weighted toward political opinion & large current events, one ought to consider switching to prose. Not many poets are good at incorporating headlines. If you're going that way, you have to push through the breaking news aspect, which is mostly fit to line bird cages within a few weeks if not days. Over time, even the more engaged poets I knew averaged out, as they discovered other strengths. Two of them became among the finest, most deeply observant & insightful "nature" poets I've read, & both have also written beautifully about their children.

In my experience, poets rarely discuss politics when they gather. What they mainly do is remember, & jog each others memories. Some have amazing, detailed memories of childhood. We all recall when we fell in love with poetry, usually in grammar school. 4th grade for me, Miss Olson. Miss Olson was an old-school unmarried teacher, the kind we believed lived & breathed teaching 24/7 only to find out later, when we went back to the school to visit (they loved hearing from former students) that they they were independent women of broad cultural interests; classical music, gardening clubs, local book societies, Friends of the Library. Some of them no doubt lived discreetly with "companions." None of our business.

Poets feel (or ought to feel) a responsibility from knowing that the only encounter most readers have with the people we put in our poems is through the poems, & the poems provide only an episodic glimpse. Anything more would require autobiographical prose. So the glimpse ought to be accurate, or if fanciful, wrapped in humor & presented obviously as another form of truth. It's usually easy to tell the difference.

Poets may also be strong "traditionalists," which is not the same as being conservative. We could care less about "appearances," purple hair, tattoos; or one's sexual preferences. We're not ageists. The kid poet may be more naturally talented & way ahead of where we were at that age, & we just have to accept it as a condition of creativity. Older poets have incomparable experience. Edie Eustice, the long-time host of Poetswednesday in Woodbridge NJ, had very popular, informal gatherings at her small home, poets & musicians of all ages. They were salons. Some of these gatherings were spontaneous; you'd call, she'd say so-& so was there, c'mon over, & by the time you arrived five or six others would be crammed in at the kitchen table. These went on over two decades until she moved to Pennsy, where she still has them but with less frequency.

Labels: about writing

Five poems in Napalm Health Spa Report 2010, Jim Cohn's excellent long-running annual. One of the poems is about 18 years old. I have lots of unpublished poems I like that I just never found a home for, or set aside unfinished because there was something in them I couldn't get right. My only loose rule is, "Is this a poem I could write now?" For the voice & craft, not necessarily the content. Last year I published a poem from the '80s about a former girlfriend's 12 year old niece now married with a child. I happened to come across it in a file folder, read it, & realized exactly what was wrong with it, required a very simple revision. That must be a common thing, artists getting ahead of themselves, & finding themselves in unfamiliar places, haven't learned how handle the creative situation yet, & later it's no problem at all. Also learn where not to go, where one doesn't have the aptitude. I have those kinds of poems, & have published some of them because they're fun to read even though they ultimately fall flat. More difficult for painters & sculptors, expensive to use up materials for a failed work.

My impulse to write poems as a matter of habit petered out in the '90s. A few reasons. I wasn't successful enough as a public poet, locally, wasn't "in demand" for readings, & didn't enjoy doing them much anyway, although they 're the foundation for becoming known, how you make connections. Radio was using a lot of my creative energy. I began feeling some strong limitations of talent. & short prose was more comfortable for daily writing, & I had outlets for it that didn't require waiting a year between creation & appearance in print. Not needing to generate many poems, to push them into existence, I became less concerned with consistency. Now I describe it as learning to toss a knuckleball. Of course, I'd always been throwing them. A handful of poets, including Jim Cohn, had liked that about them all along. Visual artists liked them. & professional prose writers liked them. I made "serious" poems but maybe I wasn't a "serious" enough poet for other poets in Jersey.

Labels: about writing, baseball, poem

Just a note that on Tuesday I'm voting for my 3rd ward councilman, Joe Keenan. Elizabeth is a Democratic city, so a contested primary is the election. Joe is a very accessible guy, on Facebook, gives out his phone number, has monthly ward resident meetings at branch library, there's almost always someone there from City Hall, including the Mayor on several occasions. The Mayor also resides in this ward. I took a long-standing & legit gripe I had about the library website to Joe, & he got on it immediately, & it turned out to be fixable problem, & now I can almost always sign on my library account, renew my books, & do searches. I don't expect a council rep to work miracles. They don't have control over the city budget. The best they can do is try to bring home their share of it in street paving, police protection, flood control projects, tree trimming, snow plowing, those sorts of tasks. & maybe guide the way through bureaucratic mazes. & listen to constituent neighbors.

It helps that Joe is well-read man, former library director, bookseller, degree in English Lit. from Catholic U In D.C., which I happen to know has an excellent English Dept. I've haven't met many local politicians anywhere who read well & widely. A conservative school, like most Catholic colleges, but my honey Susan Sarandon is an alumnus. So is Maureen Dowd, & radical feminist theologian Mary Daly. & Notre Dame U president emeritus Theodore Martin Hesburgh, who said, "Education is the only thing people are willing to pay for and not get." But if you wanted it, you could get a fine one at his Notre Dame after he'd been running it for a few years. Someday I'll introduce myself to Joe in person & we'll discuss our favorite Beat Generation writers, & I'll tell Joe that the Museum of American Poetics now categorizes me broadly as a "post-beat poet," which amuses me. I wanted to write like a male version of Diane Wakoski, definitely not beat, who had rock star status to me when I was 21.

In his previous election, Joe ran to unseat a long-time incumbent, who cared about the ward but was so alienated from the majority city hall regime that he'd become completely ineffective. The primary was so close & disputed that the court ruled it a tie & ordered another special election. I didn't vote in that first election. Joe won the re-vote. It was a lesson for me in the power of a single vote.

Labels: about writing, Elizabeth NJ