Shutting the windows

The windows are dirty and leaky. In late October they leak cold air. Damp air too, since it’s raining. The dark wine-red lilies in the vase are mostly wilted. Only one out of nine still looks more like a lily than like a garbage bag stuck to a shrub.

I’m recycling old thoughts, which I often do. These particular thoughts may have begun many years ago while I was discussing modern art with a scientist I worked for. Though he loved art, music in particular, a lot of modern art seemed irrational to him and therefore incomprehensible. At the time, I couldn’t respond articulately. Though I believed that art didn’t have to be rational or “about” anything, I did and still do think of myself as, if not a rationalist with a capital R, still as someone with a strong rational bias. I feel randomness as random, disorder as disorderly, incompleteness as incomplete. It was never simply OK to me that a work of art might not be explainable in a rational way and I felt instinctively that it must be.

The subject came up again years later, this time in the context of another poet’s response to my poems. She wanted to know why they couldn’t be considered to be arbitrary arrangements of unrelated lines. This time I used a scientific analogy in my defense. I stated that like a chaotic system that appears random but that in reality is deterministic, obeying known or knowable laws, a poem might appear to be put together randomly and yet be—let’s say—the (verbal) residue of a process that obeys laws, whether or not those laws are known to the poet.

Still more recently, I gave a seminar on poetry for the scientists among whom I work. It was my first Power Point presentation and I got carried away with collecting images and finding scientific analogues. I organized it in modules with subjects such as words and things, creating meaning, parts and wholes, etc. I called it “Knowing Your Onions: Secrets of Poetry Exposed.”

Things unseen, like air. But you can see “wind” or “breeze” or …

“draft.” I feel a draft. I’m shutting the storm windows only one or two at a time. There’s still hope.

No door

My palm on stubble
that stretches to the horizon
In a clearing owned by birds
a large clueless beast perturbs

I’m the subject of noisy discussions
afraid to clear my throat
It’s June 7, 2026 and
Lewis the cat is missing

A chip tells them where he is
Everyone is the same shade of brown
Tall, tan, terrified
The birds have located Lewis

The October curfew imprisons
an apple, a pumpkin, beans
I’m waiting for the dream to dissolve
A misprogrammed bus zipper

"C R A S H !"

I want to write a noisy poem.

The idea occurred to me two or three years ago. I was reading Virgil’s Georgics. In a note to the section on beekeeping, the editor quoted a nineteenth-century British writer, I believe, who described a traditional method farmers used to lure a swarm of bees to settle where it would be convenient to gather their honey. The technique was the same described by Virgil nearly two thousand years earlier. Basically, the farmers collected cans, tools, and other objects and made as much noise as they could. The noise, counterintuitively, was supposed to attract the bees—teenage bees, no doubt. Bees are deaf, as it turns out, but the practice nevertheless survived for centuries.

I began writing a poem based on the quotation, but wasn’t satisfied with it and put it aside.

A little while ago I read D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, much of which takes place in Florence shortly after World War I. Fascists, anarchists, and members of other parties roamed the streets. A long discussion in a café is interrupted in mid-sentence by an anarchist bomb:

“C R A S H !”

That’s pretty effective, I thought—in a negative way. It’s like an abrupt cut in a movie. But how noisy is it?

I realize that words and sounds have a complex relationship and that any number of ways of reproducing or describing sounds with words can be very satisfying. Here, I’m simply curious about what people think of as a “noisy” poem. Any examples?

The Genius

The drawing on the cover of el corno emplumado 30, from 1969, is the only illustration of mine that was ever published. I’m sure I was stoned when I did it. I would not otherwise have been so obsessive. I sent it to Margaret Randall and Robert Cohen, who were then the magazine’s co-editors. They surprised me by putting it on el corno’s cover.

In June 1968, after nine months in London, I had flown to Mexico City to visit Meg and Robert. I had known Robert in New York, but I met Meg in person for the first time that summer. We became friends and corresponded prolifically for about a year until she and Robert fled to Cuba in extremely tense circumstances.

The quotation in my drawing is from Dreiser’s The Genius. I probably liked it because of its documentariness. For the same reason, I’m still drawn to old photographs and movies that contain so matter-of-factly the often vanished, and in some sense imaginary, objects or uncanny landscapes of other times.

Daydreams, possibly with redeeming social value.

My actual dreams are often of places with familiar names, like Rome or New York, but that don’t resemble them at all. The other night it was a “Vermont” that had something in common with Burgundy or a less settled and wilder place.

Though my unintentional dream “Vermont” and Dreiser’s intentional “New York” differ in many ways, they seem to occupy adjacent lots in my imagination.

Black tea and spread

Cold like the mountains
A spongy ball
Thick ambitious poems
Smoke-stained painting

I’m sitting for the first time in hours
A nut is my amuse bouche
Milkweed pod-shaped lily buds
100 sheets of idle peas

Knife-sharp grass bending
Redundancy of footnotes
Overlays, moirés
Long stems crack sediments of books