Thirteen Ways of Gazing at Wallace Stevens

                                                                        How does one stand

                                                                        Tobehold the sublime

Notcross-eyed, it’s too serious in here. As serious as a broken

Jaw in KeyWest. Ask not how French it is, but how American.

Am Iimagining finding a glass washboard on the dump?

Not a typo, aslight stutter after words. And there are no

Ordinaryevenings in New Haven, take it from me.

Norin Florida far far away. A touch of the clap from

Theirgritty soil. To gazeat him is to gaze at all

His buddies.I read so much about the ill effects

Of influenceI had to stop reading. Which is to say,

If you’reparanoid they’re out to get you.

If you’re notparanoid they’re out to get you.

Except thatthey’ve already gotten to most of us.

Meaninglessmeanings. A rock band called Same Old Shit.

Well-dressed,with identical beards, and a portrait in robes,

The archivalimpulse, the “malady of the quotidian.”

But no man isa snowman. And yet he was either a judge,

A magician,or a “magnifico.” Deathis the mother

Of beauty…//Momentary in the mind/Thefitful tracing

Of a portal/But in the flesh it is immortal. Having smoked

A joint, hewent from being impossible to being spectacular.

Omne ignotum pro magnifico(est). The walk from Wallace

Place toStevens Street was longer than I had imagined.

The namescrawled on the cement when we moved in, initials

Of the formeroccupants, their son, his mark. Meanwhile,

In the thingreen flower gardens of Haddam, Connecticut,

The stairswere coming at me thick and fast. “I’m a happily

Married man.”But it was “all true.” I could barely see through

Them but Isaw enough not to go there. In the headlock we were

Not a seesaw.It didn’t kill me but it didn’t make me stronger.

“The perfecthemistiches.” Just between us, however, my stop is

Right aroundthe corner, by “the way we came.” But which way?

Whose way?Was it really such a big deal? Once we got the lawyer

Paradigm outof the way we could indulge. We wanted a bauble,

Somethinggaudy. And we got it. For someone so godless he sure

Had a supersuperego. And for someone who “Lived a skeleton’s

Life,” hesure was chubby. Must have been all those pears.

A break inthe admissions policy reminded me of how broke I was.

Money is a kind of poetry. Poetry is a kind of poverty. It is

To have or nothing. But Peter Quince was too quick at thekeys,

“My dear.” Asthough we were Shriners at the Fairport

Convention,caravanning down the street in our tasseled hats.

John Barleycorn must die. This is not a sonnet.

Eye as in Eye

Believe I’ll take my pneumonia for a stroll.

If it could it would leave me in its wake.

Eternallysleeping cats—

Why do you think they have nine lives?

A match made nowhere, in the gutter, on the bridge, etc.

Alphonsina,where’s your guitar?

A monograph by Sherlock Holmes onCremona violins.

The glove was auniversal size but it didn’t fit.

“He publishes his friends.” Grow abeard why don’t you.

An acute intelligence,

An acute pain, something piercing,

A pair of brilliant blue eyes.

But green is the most fashionable color.

Besides, on the internet there’s noway to know.

The lucidity of a flashlight

In that of broad day.

Who ought to be in pictures.

Flattery will get you a guarded smile.

Or just get you.

We think, therefore we are sad.

The solution, obviously, is not to think,

To avoid one’s own company at all costs.

Another Dance Review

                                                            For Susan Matheke

How disgusting it mustalways be to grow old.—Donald Justice

One man’s depth is another’s height/One man’s bark another’sbite/one man’s satire another’s suicide note: the poet’s instinctive responseto dance is lyrical. But for the critic there’s a faint odor of sulfur in theair, and lapsed angels falling through the firmament sucking each others’ thumbs. Then the sand bag holding the curtains gaveway and fell on my head. I woke up seeing stars, which made the rest of theprogram feel

Like a dream, or something on PBS. And indeed several of thedancers might have produced a good impression of Jackie Chan or CharlieChaplin, and that’s what I admired most—the athleticism and sense ofhumor of the choreography, some of which was athletic to the point of seemingdangerous. The most dazzling piece was a tourde force involving six or eight dancers running in a circle while, on theoutside of the circle, they passed

Bricks backward from hand to hand at about the speed at whichthey were running. This resulted in two moving circles: the dancers movingforward and the bricks moving backward. The pace then quickened until thecircle broke apart, at which point the dancers began tossing the bricks intothe air, seemingly at random, to be caught and thrown again by other dancers.After a period of this virtuosity the curtain fell with bricks still in

The air, and immediately one heard the clatter of the brickshitting the floor. Did that prove it wasn’t a dream since it didn’t wake me up?Or am I actually reviewing a dream? In which case shouldn’t this poem be titled“Dream Review?” Especially since, when a dancer friend read it, she felt thechoreography was impossible. And I tend to agree. If anyone out there has seenor knows the “brick dance,” “write to the address on your

Screen.” Elsewhere on the bill was a piece combining jazz,modern and ballet techniques, which seemed more focused on slinkiness of bodyand costume than on any thematic or aesthetic purpose. But rather than being aweakness, this pointed up how dance inevitably evokes sex, no matter howsublimated the choreography. How many “serious” dancers have been eroticdancers in their salad days? Beautiful bodies inevitably provoke

Erotic attention, since beauty is wholly arbitrary, unrelated totruth, something we have a jones for, a magnificent dish that comes with a signsaying “take me,” but not specifying how or how much. There may even be asadistic component considering the sacrifices some dancers make for their art.A brazen idol, a golden calf (or ass), a hard life, but, like the OldTestament, worth the price of admission several times over.

Music Review

She called him honey-dripper. “Not in my presence she didn’t.”

I canwalk it from here, do you have a problem with thattoo? That “smirk” you hear in the blues is on you.

Andspeaking of that smirk, I don’t hear it in the blues. I hear it in rock, andsometimes in jazz and Latin music. (That’s assuming we’re talking about thesame smirk.)

SunRa, for instance, at the Five Spot just before it closed, the most postmodernof jazzmen, able to turn on a dime from pure cacophony to immaculate swing, anda precursor of Dr. Funkenstein.

Buteveryone moans his or her own version while waiting to succumb, which you didposthaste. The fool persisted in his folly and became dead. As for your balefulinfluence, it didn’t kill me, but it didn’t make me stronger.

“Withno congas,” he said, “it sounds like I Love Lucy.”

Iremember when I lived in the East Village how we struggled to soundproof myapartment, stapling egg cartons to the walls to mute the percussion.

excuse me for being mice elf again

myparaphrase can’t compete with the original

I twang it out and leave it there.

Butthe old guitarist says (among other things) that non-verbal communication onlygets you so far, no matter how subtle, clever, strong the communication.Unfortunately verbal communication isn’t all that much more effective.

SamRiver’s trombone player tried to talk some sense into me, to show me the way itwas really done. But did I listen? I was too busy missing other opportunities.

Thepast is a possibility that no longer exists—the only tense we have is thepresent, and maybe a tiny pinch of the future.

Meanwhile‘Trane was trying to cram as many notes as possible into what was left of hislife.

If you get near a song play it.

He didknow what he was doing.

Butenlarge or blow up the piano player, or fire him onstage—it buildscharacter.

A diminuendo in personnel.

Notmany people who know the album Mingus ahum realize the joke: the name sounds a bit like the Latin adjective magnus (with its feminine and neuterendings: a, um), and if Latin had an adjectivemingus it would mean something like “pissy,”from the verb mingere, to urinate. But Charles knew it. He set a recordfor torque and evil temper; on the one hand firing the piano player onstage, onthe other making some of the most intense sounds going. This wasn’t just anyold music but the real deal, and so much of it intimating clave.

“Muchlater,” the memorial concert was a “memorableevening” except that Frank Grillo’s son wasn’t Frank Grillo, and Tito teasingDaniel Ponce with “Danny Boy.” Not to mention we were over our heads inNew York, “like in the Mariana trench.”

Isn’teverybody?

“Thosewho can’t hack it move to Vermont,” said the chauvinist Manhattanite. If I can make it there, I’ll make itanywhere… and so on and so forth.

Sometimesthe music seems too much of a good thing.

On theother hand, if you know the tune well enough it’s almost like there’s no reasonto listen to it again, or that’s what Elvin Jones reported thinking as hesharpened the needle on the family Victrola with his father’s whetstone.

Butfor things to be seamless, without seeming, to be promoted to the position ofribbon, it can’t be done. Thus the seams are showing, and that’s anunderstatement.

SunRa, for instance. By definition. Heaven forefend.