Vie de Joel Sloman

The 1970s was the great period of self-examination in my life. I wrote journals and kept a diary, almost all of which bores me to death today. I began by trying to remember everything that happened to me up until the time I began writing it down. Then I tried to explain it to myself. Often, a particular text ended with an inspirational passage. I resolved some sort of confusion, explained enigmatic events, and then concluded that I could move forward, a burden lifted.

My problems were obvious to me. Socially, I was extremely shy and backward. Ordinary tasks, some of which I ought to have enjoyed, like reading a book, overwhelmed me. My attention wandered. I was very afraid, in danger, I thought (like Emily Dickinson?).

I certainly wasn’t taking the “responsibility” of being a poet very seriously. I drifted away from whatever involvement I had had in the literary world.

It was a period of “beginning again,” though hardly consciously or systematically.

A few times, however, I did learn something meaningful about myself. One day I sketched the floor plan of the apartment in which I had lived with my parents and my sister until I was eight and a half years old. It was on the second floor, facing the street, of a 4-storey brick apartment building in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t be hard to sketch the neighborhood itself, which is basically a grid.

The apartment consisted of a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a hall, and a bathroom. I looked at the sketch in amazement. The apartment was so small! It suffocated me. It made me crave limitless space.

“I’m going to be fifty. It’s high time I knew myself. What have I been? What am I?” Stendhal writes in his Vie de Henry Brulard. So he writes about his youth, beginning with his earliest memories, “far from certain that I have the talent to get myself read. I sometimes find great pleasure in writing, and that’s all.”

But he didn’t only write. He also drew pictures, of rooms, streets, squares, woods, mountains, views, labeled in detail, often lettered like a diagram with an accompanying legend. He claimed that this aided his memory, which, to me, is perfectly credible.

I think of Jack Kerouac and Bernadette Mayer.

Lucretia

Rembrandt painted two Lucretias. The earlier one (in the National Gallery) is lyrical, almost dancelike. Lucretia is fully dressed, her waist tightly laced, and she wears a couple of necklaces. She looks at the knife she raises in her right hand. She hasn’t stabbed herself yet. If the knife wasn’t there, she might be Salome instead of Lucretia.

In the later painting, Lucretia wears what looks like a loose white nightgown under an open robe. Below her heart there is a long vertical red stain. She is still. The knife is in her right hand, but the hand is resting on a pillow. Her left hand seems to be pulling a cord. Alternatively, she might be holding herself up with the cord while supporting herself on the pillow. Though her eyes are open, she isn’t looking anywhere.

I saw this Lucretia at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the summer of 1963. At nearly the same time, New York’s Met had acquired Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which is contemporary with it. Aristotle’s pose is nearly a mirror image of Lucretia’s.

I was in Minneapolis to see if I could be a real poet. While my sister, in graduate school at the university, spent the summer in New York, I would live in her apartment and write poetry.

The apartment was the top floor of a two-storey house. Two opera students lived downstairs. Railroad tracks and one or two grain elevators were at the end of the street. The neighborhood was near the university.

I took long walks downtown, crossing the Mississippi. Where were the 10,000 lakes? The only skyscraper then was the Foshay Tower. I saw Moliere (The Miser, I think) at the new Guthrie Theater and heard a chamber music performance somewhere. On the hottest days, the asphalt in the streets became sticky.

I wrote on my sister’s typewriter on blue and yellows sheets of paper that my mother brought home from her job. I did my best to write every day, but it was frustrating. I was not a disciplined person. If I didn’t finish a poem in one sitting, it just got filed away. Any trivial distraction would shatter my mood.

At the university, I audited a couple of classes. “Modern American Poetry,” taught by James Wright (using Allen Tate’s syllabus, I believe) did not particularly interest me. It began with Jones Very at a time when I was encountering Donald Allen’s New American Poetry for the first time. When Theodore Roethke died that summer, Wright tearfully announced his death in class. Though I was sympathetic to Roethke’s work, I was a bit embarrassed by Wright’s emotional display. I may have been at fault for responding that way, but I stopped going to the class.

The other class, taught by Sarah Youngblood, whom my sister had recommended, was on Yeats. Though I don’t remember much about the class, I did take the opportunity to read and enjoy the Collected Poems. In the last class, Youngblood raised the question of Yeats’s greatness. Could a poet be great if he or she hadn’t written a major long work. Yes, she concluded. Yeats was a great poet! I returned to the apartment exhilarated. Even though I hadn’t written a major long work, I too could be a great poet!

Despite my frustration, I wrote a great deal that summer. The earliest poems in my first book were written in Minneapolis. I was twenty.

Mean streak

The people of Lithuania are different from the people of France. Jean was lying on the floor next to me, sometimes speaking to the ceiling, sometimes resting on her elbow and speaking to me. She talked for a long time. She usually used a tone of exaggerated irony with swooping phrases. But at times there was a sense of wonder in her voice, a voice painted with many thin layers of tones. Was it wonder? She was amazed at what she was describing, a place where everything stood out sharply, gestures or colors or assertions.

So the Lithuanians made that kind of impression. The French didn’t. They were just another version of us.

On TV we watched a movie starring the Three Stooges. It was a Technicolor musical. The Three Stooges were costumed like Teletubbies and the landscape was similarly extraterrestrial, possibly the insides of a computer. The Three Stooges threw whipped cream pies at Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, whose faces disappeared behind thick white paste.

Most butterflies are well-intentioned. They do their best to make certain that when they flap their wings it won’t stir up the kinds of breezes that might cause a tornado. A handful of butterflies, however, are bad. They are always trying to be where their flapping might do the most damage.

Jean’s irony became even more exaggerated. She is seductive. We are closer to each other. “I think I have a mean streak,” she says out loud, not to me.

At the zoo bookstore, I find an out-of-print book by Kenward Elmslie, “with” Michiko Kakutani (in a smaller font size).

The first movement

When—
a struck adolescent—
I roomed in the basement
windows under the ceiling
a table and bed
a beaten gold surface of sound

“Maybe this maybe that”
says the robin
Girls in shorts
want a dog or a baby

A mother-of-pearl raft
floats toward the pole
A mask of rock
Pullman wheels on concrete walk

Why is the sky blue?
What is blue?
What is blue for?

Wind string concentrically
around a mound of rags
Mix paints to get the right color
It’ll never be the right color
When it’s right it’ll be somewhat nauseating

The new me

A woman sat on the mulch amid enormous, well-maintained flowering plants. Her legs were spread apart in front of her, her denim skirt above her knees. She was weeding and cutting back spent iris stalks. Her wheelchair was on the grass partly hidden by more plants.

The peonies were in bloom, many-petaled rose ones and others with large white petals and a sort of dense patch of pale yellow shreds in their centers.

I introduced myself. She knew my mother and knew a bit of her history. We talked about flowers and herbs. I told her where I lived and she asked me if I went to the symphony. “Shame on you!” she said when I said I didn’t. I said I went to poetry readings. I smelled a white and yellow peony. Lemon meringue.

The woman, whose name was Barbara, had a brace on one leg. She moved by lifting herself with her arms. She moved closer to the center of the circular bed and a small rabbit ran out from the opposite side. “Ah. Thanks for noticing,” she said. “I saw the damage, but wasn’t sure what caused it. I’ll ask the landscaper to get the Havahart.”

I walked along the drive that circled the buildings, then across a road to a park. From a hundred yards away I watched kids playing baseball. They were very considerate. They let the smallest and youngest boy get a home run off a dribbler down the 1st-base line.

My mother had just had minor eye surgery. She had to take two kinds of eye drops, one four times a day, the other every hour until bedtime. I think I might have been slightly confused by this myself, but I wouldn’t have cared if I was a half hour off, or forgot the drops altogether now and then. I wrote out a schedule, hoping it would make things simpler.

I don’t have a TV, so when I visit my mother, I catch up. I watched CSI: Miami the previous evening. Aerial shots of orange hotels. Orange mutilated corpses. Blurred blue and green re-enactments. Saturated drama. Later, Paris Hilton on David Letterman. There! I mentioned her.

Always the news, CNN mostly. Tropical Storm Alberto approaching Florida. “I keep thinking it’s named after Alberto Gonzales,” my mother said. If Karl Rove is on, she says bitterly that he’s the real president. If Dick Cheney is on, then he’s the real president.

On Jeopardy the contestants are asked to name the New England newspaper published during the American Revolution that is still being published. One of the contestants (and I) get it right: Hartford Courant.

A lot of commercials are about motorized wheelchairs and health insurance for seniors.

We’re sitting in the living room watching TV before my uncle comes to drive me to the bus station. My mother wants to go to the bathroom before going downstairs with me to say goodbye. She inches her way to the edge of the chair, raises herself to her feet with her arms, and wobbles a little unsteadily with her cane in one hand. I think I should let her do this by herself, though she doesn’t look very stable. She seems ready to move and looks ahead of her, grim acceptance rather than determination. “The new me,” she says.

Stapler

Sometimes poetry feels very easy. At other times it feels practically impossible. It seems to depend too much on contingencies. I pick up a poem. The words don’t do anything, and they’re supposed to do something. Maybe I’m not pulling my weight as a reader. I’m supposed to contribute something, maybe attention, which is difficult. I don’t really like to work when I read.

There’s the option of escapist literature, or moving to another track altogether. Right now I’m reading a novel and also a book about art. I find myself being very critical of the novel, even though for the most part it holds my attention. I think it’s the subject that holds my attention. It takes place in a particular historical and social ambience that interests me. On the other hand, the art book is interesting because of the artist’s ideas, or her attempts to find a way to express her ideas. In an earlier phase her work raises certain issues, contradictions. But the works look too much like certain real things and she doesn’t want her meaning to be restricted to those things. She wants it to be the same yet different. She also doesn’t want it to be pretty, or even to look composed. So she moves on to another phase, getting a little closer to what she wants, though she finds it hard to define it in words. Ultimately, if she is successful, each work will simply exist and people will want to look at it. If they want to discuss it, well, that’s their business, but it’s not the point. She wonders if she really ought to be making a point in the first place.

The novel is a satire. The author even mentions Juvenal, a poet I am coincidentally considering reading. But what interests me is that the novel takes place in New York in the late Forties. So I listen to Gil Evans’s arrangements for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, with songs like “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Arab Dance,” based on Tchaikovsky. I also watch Looney Tunes from that era. I try to remember what the movies were like. It doesn’t make the novel any better, but I hope it improves my understanding of the world it describes. I also think about myself at that time. I remember the Blizzard of 1947 in Brooklyn, for example. Fred, a retired meteorologist I know, worked at La Guardia Airport at that time and forecasted the blizzard. The vocal on “There’s a Small Hotel,” by the way, is by the Snowflakes. It’s not just jazz and movies and weather. Stravinsky was composing his opera The Rake’s Progress, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, during the same period. What was Balanchine doing? What was John Cage doing? Why were Russian composers so popular?

The sun is out. It shines on the dust covering the stapler my father used in his job as a dress cutter. It’s a good, substantial stapler, a real tool, though it seems to jam a lot. I’d like to have it fixed.

Just a gigolo

It’s not home
They play lethargically

They enjoy the chaos, the non-form
things that aren’t anything
never decorative
I put it aside, it’s not “unfinished”
a meaningless word?

A photo of earthquake victims
looks like a Delacroix
The air is full, sucking
a cherry-flavored lozenge
Nearly twelve hours of nauseous sleep

Made out of pieces
and glue and grommets
It hangs from the ceiling
and brushes the floor

It speaks with a drawling accent
or a speech defect
Noisy bar scenes in Brigadoon

I reach for your hand
to hold it, not shake it
A kiss is owed, overdue

Berger & March

Berger & March was the name of a record store on 18th Avenue in Brooklyn, near 86th St. and the elevated station of what was then called the West End line. It was a narrow shop filled with records and possibly other music-related items, radios, record players, maybe even musical instruments. All I remember clearly is the rear of the store where the latest 45 singles were stored in a bin. There were no record jackets, just paper sleeves. The store owner, Berger, I think (I don’t remember ever seeing March), also used that area as an office.

In 1956 I had gotten my first record player, one of those portable boxes, gray and pink. It had a plastic handle and closed with a couple of snaps. I began listening to music on the radio, the Top 40 or 25 or n. I was in Junior High School and had an allowance. I spent all of it on 45s, always at Berger & March, to which I was loyal throughout the 50s. At least once I had all the top hits for that week.

Among the first 45s I bought were: “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant, “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter, and “The Treasure of Love,” by Clyde McPhatter.

Several years ago, Eddie, a now-retired employee at MIT, showed me the notebooks he saved from the 50s, in which he catalogued his large collection of singles. I don’t think I was particularly obsessive about my records, but I did crave whatever was new in the pop world, regardless of genre or quality.

What have I saved from back then? A stamp collection of no particular value. And most of the LPs I also bought then, which tend to be more traditional popular music, like Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Doris Day, or odd items like Richard Rogers’ score for Victory at Sea and Henry Mancini’s for Peter Gunn, and that’s the better stuff. I gave away the 45s decades ago.

Human jam

The phrase comes from Hardy’s “The Levelled Churchyard”: “We late-lamented, resting here, / Are mixed to human jam, / And each to each exclaims in fear, / ‘I know not which I am!’” After reading this “humorous” poem I took a break from the Complete Poems.

It was a little like how I reacted to Robinson Jeffers some years ago, though I felt genuinely squeamish about Jeffers. Hardy never induced nausea, just eye rolling.

That was more than a year ago. I finished the Complete Poems earlier this year.

Then it crossed my benighted mind that Marianne Moore and Hardy are somehow alike. In Moore’s letters I found this—which made no impression when I first read it—in a 1919 letter to Ezra Pound: “Gordon Craig, Henry James, Blake, the minor prophets and Hardy, are so far as I know, the direct influences bearing on my work.”

Moore also writes of her poems being “an arrangement of stanzas, each stanza being an exact duplicate of every other stanza.” “Exact duplicate” is the distinguishing phrase since, after all, stanzaic verse had been ubiquitous for centuries. Hardy’s stanzas are also “exact duplicates,” which is striking because he, as well as Moore, tended to invent new, often intricate, stanza forms. There’s remarkably little reuse of any one form in two or more poems. Also, in a collection of nearly a thousand works, there are almost no single-stanza poems. It’s as if he felt that producing an “exact duplicate” was what certified the poem as a poem. It reminds me of how one is asked to retype a password to verify its correctness.

Hardy and Moore also shared a love for certain categories of arcane knowledge and technical language.