my first hallelujah

a few sundays ago i read a review of a new book called The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" by Alan Light which reminded me of the first time i heard the song. i remember back in the mid-nineties when jeff buckley's grace came out and went to pioneer mall downtown to listen to some new cds and put his version on. it was so beautiful i had to listen to it over & over, i must have been there an hour, maybe two, and for the rest of the day i walked around in the state of hallelujah with that angelic croon of his looping continuously in my head. later that evening i went to the tuesday open mic at the now legendary cafe lena's. it was normally crowded but there happened to be a local tv crew there to do a piece about the poetry boom happening in portland. there's something about a camera, especially the possibility of getting on tv that does strange things to people and how they behave. suddenly, all these people who didn't usually read wanted to get on the already full list, which in those days could be thirty deep, and were walking around posing & trying really hard to look & sound interesting & cool, which made for a very weird & competitive atmosphere. i went to the back of the cafe and crouched in between the tables along the wall, crooning hallelujah under my breath in an attempt to preserve within that corrosive "me-me-me" atmosphere. when my name was called i walked up to the microphone at the front of the room and started crooning "ooh" for a full minute. the room fell silent and i did a passionate reading of a poem i wrote & lost about sitting in the pied cow coffeehouse and watching a romantic young couple across the room. the woman reached slowly across the table with her index finger and with extravagant gentleness stroked her smiling lover's nose. the room exploded and the tv crew ended up using footage of my reading on the news.

pigeon strings

all the birds gathered on the telephone wires just before the burnside bridge as i rode the bus to work this morning after writing at the coffeehouse remind me of those candy wristlets i used to get at the cornerstore after school.

bus beneath
the not so Grand
pigeon strings

 

this city is no womb

 

 

walked over to the mister taco food cart during my lunch break for the chile relleno dinner. passed someone lying on a bench curled in the fetal position beneath a blanket. cold rain falling hard, i could only see their calves. waiting for my lunch, i notice on the cart's fridge two two dollar bills held by a jesus immaculate heart magnet. smile. i watch the form, looking for signs of breathing. can't tell. the cook tells me the person's been lying there for a few hours. does not move. i tell him to call 911 and he does. as i start walking back to work i lean over the still form to ask a ridiculuous question in the increasing rain. are you okay?

fragile weather

this morning leapt immediately from bed & then quickly reconsidered & crept back in as if i knew what was coming, as if i could feel the day ahead. last night the weatherman promised me snow but the window showed otherwise. i took my time getting out the door & found fat feathers gliding down the hill. i tried to shoot some with my camera but i couldn't catch a single one. as i stood waiting for the delinquent bus beneath its demure shelter, i kept holding out my wool jacketed arm, letting flakes land on its dark blue sleeve like the ghosts of butterflies poisoned by pollution. across the street two young guys smoked at a sidewalk table beneath a cafe's awning. i so much wanted to skip work & join them, sipping tea until the butterflies died again.

reality is broken

as i was sitting in the cafe this morning i started thinking about the possibilities embedded in any situation. even though it did not appear that there was a gun present in a cafe, there could have been one concealed or someone could have walked in carrying a gun. most of the time that is probably unlikely and yet it is possible. and then i thought, what if someone set a loaded gun on a table? it is still probable that it wouldn't be fired and yet it's mere presence does increase the odds of a gun being fired and someone being shot. so in a sense, introducing a loaded gun changes the equation, changes the nature of the game and also the player of that game. and then i started thinking about how much his mother loved guns, talked about guns, nobody knew how many guns she had but she had a bunch of guns and loved them and took her kids to the range to shoot them and how people who lived near the school said that they didn't think anything of hearing shots fired at the school because people are always shooting their guns so shooting guns in the neighborhood is normal. shooting guns outside is normal. shooting guns outside near a school is normal. and then i thought, what if living in that place felt like being stuck with a lousy character in a boring depressing game where good things only seem to happen to other people and you can't score any points and it looks like there is no hope of ever winning that game or even enjoying playing that game and it looked unlikely that leaving would solve anything because you were so dependent on being taken care of by your mother, you had always been taken care of by your mother who was being taken care of by your father who got a divorce and what if you had no idea how you could ever change your character and play a different, more fun game? UNLESS YOU GET A GUN. gun changes the game, gun changes your character, gun rewrites the rules. and all your life, all you have ever seen on every tv show, in every movie, even on the news, local, national, international, gun changes everything. and then i started thinking about how a small community can be a like a net, a web, and how stuck you feel by the weight of everything that was already decided long before you ever arrived and how attached everyone is to the shape of how things have settled. after thinking this i felt kind of excited but then i thought wow that's pretty crazy. but shooting twenty-something kids & teachers, etc. that's pretty crazy too. i remember reading in the paper someone saying that she had no answer for this as if there existed a simple equation A + B = C. but i don't think such an equation exists for this. i think the pattern that gets you to such a place is ridiculously convoluted & harsh & absurd. and yet, there is something very simple that is probably going to be found at the center, and that is hurt, a deep deep hurt, stored in a container that couldn't possibly keep it. 

poem is a semicolon

this is what ezra pound learned from ernest fenollosa: some languages are so constructed—english among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. that sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. or, if you are blessed, they are heard by someone who knows you & loves you & will be sorry to hear the sentence end. when i told mr. angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: "that's a lot of semicolons!" he is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy & awkward & resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop & be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being—an italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go on and keep on connnecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.

you might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart.

—from mary ruefle's book, "Madness, Rack, and Honey"

Link to the short movie: The Worriers A documentary on the hermeneutics of Poetry in Portland

The Worriers: Bad gangs, Bad girls, Bad poetry

In 1979 the Warriors fought their way home, facing New York City's most notorious gangs. In 2014 the Warriors will be battling across Los Angeles, facing LA's worst gangs and the curse of the Hollywood remake. But in 2010, an intrepid gang of poets attempted to pass through the dark woods of the poetic underbelly of the third largest city of the Pacific Northwest, Portland Oregon. The Worriers. This is their story.


Directed by: James Honzik
Screenplay: Patrick Bocarde, Ceylon Anderson



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0fwawwmiSo


here's a preview:

sam menashe poems

Downpour

Windowed I observe
The waning snow

As rain unearths

That raw clay—

Adam's afterbirth—

No one escapes
I lie down, immerse

Myself in sleep

The windows weep

Self Employed

Piling up the years
I awake in one place
And find the same face
Or counting the time
Since my parents died-
Certain less is left
Than was spent—
I am employed
Every morning
Whose ore I coin
Without knowing
How to join
Lid to coffer
Pillar to groin—
Each day hinges
On the same offer







more pictures by this photographer can be found here:

http://myephemerality.com/?p=4024