Brooklyn/American Poet

November 21: Reading as part of The Stain of Poetry Reading Series, Stain Bar, 766 Grand Street, New York, NY. 7PM.

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On a train right now writing… on my way to read in Turners Falls, Massachusetts as part of the Slope Reading Series at the Rendezvous Café… Freaking out because I have to write a 1500-2500 word essay on “poetry and money” for American Poet, due December 15th. I know December 15th is a hard deadline because the essay was initially due December 1, and I wrote about 2000 words, but the editor didn’t like the style (too autobiographical). Here is some of what I wrote:

“
Aesthetics as Autobiography

I’ll begin with 9/11, as, in my mind, this is the first day that I started writing poetry on money: I was having a dream. Of me in the womb, all balled up. And then a loud boom—the sound of my mother’s body as it willed me to be born (in reality, this was the sound of the second plane hitting)—which woke me up.

The poet Claudia Rankine phoned. ‘Just wondering how you are doing with all of this strangeness,’ she left on my answering machine. I was working as Claudia’s assistant at Barnard back then—an odd job—and was also working on a memoir I had sold to Crown Books to make money. The two classes I was teaching for Gotham Writers’ Workshop helped a little with the money situation, but not much (‘the writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write,’ the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. ‘But he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money’). I was tired and broke, not getting up. In the kitchen, some jam and some bread. I was hungry. On the TV, some people, some ashes. The talking of heads.

I lived next to Bellevue. All morning the screaming of sirens going up and down the avenues. Cop cars, I guess, and the ambulances hoping, but no people were left.

According to the government, the terrorists were planning to go after our financial system next.

It seems almost quaint to write about it now. We all have our story—it’s generational really: ‘I was living near Gramercy Park in a rent-controlled apartment when the second plane hit.’ ‘The guy who held the lease had lived in Vegas for ten years.’ ‘His name was ‘Larry the Lock.' ‘He had a crush on Stephanie Seymor’ ‘Had met her in the Hamptons.’ ‘‘Larry the Lock’ had always wanted to be a stock broker, but had never gone to college.’ ‘When he found out that all of those bankers from Cantor Fitzgerald were dead, he decided it was time to move back to the city from Vegas.’ ‘He would become a stock broker.’ ‘He would make lots of money.’ ‘He would marry the model Stephanie Seymor.’

‘I didn’t have money to secure a new apartment, so I left for Las Vegas, where my brother was living in a really big house.’

In Las Vegas: I lived with my brother for a couple of months, and then—as it became more clear I wouldn’t be returning to New York anytime soon—a really lousy tenement on the North end of town. Late with the rent: fifty dollars a day. Strange man in the mornings, black phone at his ear. Woman sitting next to him. On drugs. They had to be on drugs because they sold them for a living. Men creeping all along the yard. Terrible faces and terrible mouths; puckering. (Hoodlums, I’d write in a diary entry.) Who would live there in that building? Only people who’d gone bust. I was a poet. I was always bust. Efficiency apartment: lumpy Murphy bed, a small green couch; I would move it front of the door every night to make it harder for the hoodlums to break in.

For nearly a year, I was living like this. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to his house, where I’d sneak into the living room and drink all his wine. Driving in my brother’s nanny’s car to the casino, where I’d beg him for filet mignon. In the morning, I’d eat cheerios, no milk since I couldn’t afford it; at night, in the casino, I would beg myself some money to get gas and drive around.

My first poetry book, Winter Sex, came out in February. I went back to New York to have a party. It was the one thing I had been looking forward to—the poets were back in New York! Were my friends! The poets would be there, would welcome me back! But they didn’t come. There was a man, another poet. I had written some poems about him in the Murphy bed with the little green couch flush up next to the door. I was hoping that the man would come, but he didn’t come. It was raining that night. My heels were too high. All the books that I’d ordered just sat in the pile, and I wondered: could the poets have forgotten me so quickly?

One day, I woke up. The poet Gillian Conoley had chosen me for the Poets Sampler section in the Boston Review (take this figuratively). I didn’t have many new poems to give her and I felt really sad. I looked at the Boston Review (both literal and figurative) on the computer. I read the reviews and I cried. I read the reviews and I cried because the language was so beautiful and accurate—so literary, really. I’d been living in a place where no one cared all that much about English. I missed hearing English the way that they wrote it in the essays that appeared in the (literal and figurative) Boston Review.

The poets had forgotten me, but I hadn’t forgotten the poets. I wanted to get back to the language I loved—to the people who wrote it like I did—but because I had no money, I was trapped there in that city with those people who loved money and not English. Do you see how ironic that is? To be trapped where the people love money and not English just because I was a busted poet? The key to getting back to where the people loved English—it became apparent to me then—was to make lots of money. Ergo: poetry became for me back then synonymous with money.
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But it’s not going to happen… this part of the essay… and I have to start again. Where to start? What do I really want to say? The editor wants me to write the kind of thing that would work as an introduction to an anthology… I can imagine this, get this, but am feeling really blocked…

I do know I want to start with notion that money is neutral—a medium, a messenger (when I proffer this in this economic environment, it really pisses people off—but more on that later)… I have this so far:

“
‘Money is a kind of poetry’

‘Money is a kind of poetry,’ Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is ‘not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.’ Or, as Kant says, money ‘represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.’
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I also have this quote from Wallace Stevens, which I think is related—at least in a lateral sort of way: “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

While I am here on the train “brainstorming” (“procrastinating” might be the more accurate word), thought I’d write a bit about my Brooklyn reading at The Stain Bar. This reading series, though old and venerable at this point, is not what I would call the biggest reading series in the New York metropolitan area. I had flown in from Cleveland and was set to read at The Stain, and figured it would be a bit of break for me, a breeze.

But it wasn’t. My old friend from high school John Colpitts showed up, for one, and I was somehow embarrassed or felt like I wanted all the readers to be really good—wanted John to have a really good time at the reading because he isn’t a poet and doesn’t go to poetry readings all the time. He does go to rock shows, however, because he is a drummer (known as “Kid Millions”) for the band Oneida. John was kind enough to bring me a copy of his newest CD, which I listened to the next morning as I prepared to train it up to Providence (more on that later), and then when I got back from Rochester, NY (more on that, too). It was really excellent—I recommend it highly if you like Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, or Radiohead (John mentioned as influences Can and Neu, which I don’t know… I hope I am not insulting him by pointing to Mac and Floyd, I am so out of it). Here is Oneida’s “press alcove”: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/press/oneida/oneidapress.php

The line-up at the Stain included six readers—a big line-up—and, maybe because of this, the place was packed… probably 40 or 50 people showed up, and I couldn’t help but think to myself: “Ah, this is why so many writers never leave New York.” I had such a great time reading in so many different parts of the country, but I can also see how easy and, well, kind of cozy it would be to just stay put…

Here is E. Tracy Grinnell reading with a collaborator (didn’t catch her name):



Here is the (blurry) crowd… I was both drunk and kind of shaky… all the traveling had done me in:



A, um, table. Trivial Pursuit?...:



Some more people (I think that is my friend John at the doorway, but maybe not):



The second set of readers included Matthew Rohrer, whose new poems were really amazing. I loved them (so did John, for that matter—always great when non-poets like your poems).

After the reading, John, who is a big fan of Frederick Seidel, said I need to read the Cosmos Trilogy, which I will do—many people have recommended Seidel to me, not only because he is a great poet, but also because he treats (from a different point on the class spectrum—he is apparently phenomenally wealthy) some of the same themes I treat in my work.

Speaking of themes… money… money as a kind of poetry…