Jack Marshall noted, with remarkable understatement: “Earth's not cherry anymore.” A shattering malaise has entered the world and left its signature in fractured language, a medium no longer transparent, and badly suited for carrying understanding. All that remains are the shards of what we thought or had been made to think, shards that are vastly outnumbered by the things we make and buy. What did we think? What were we made to think? Whatever it was, it is late. “Ditto the caveat, ibid the scam,” writes Bill Berkson. Some epitaph!
The elegiac calibrates even the densest texts, the most telegraphic notations. For some, here Charles Bernstein, the multiplication of products induces regret at having done anything at all: “The goats pass / from view, the boys / skip stones from / melancholy hydroplanes. / I should have wasted my life.”
Without irony such sentiments would be tragic. But not necessarily. The world of bright, shiny, American-made objects has its fans. For David Trinidad, an Angeleno, the American century is the movies. He loves them, they are as complete a language as personal psychology.
Joe Cardarelli in “Against 21st Century,” disdains the coming age of antiseptic living. He has loved his time and the abusive pleasures of his world. There are also ways of relishing the mess, as Pat Nolan suggests: “acquire a taste for the bitterseweet / it soothes that sinking feeling.”
Jim Gustafson celebrates the joys of “not getting caught.”
Still, an American
De Natura Rerum
is missing from this book, which is a mystery. In saying goodbye to their century, our poets were careful to note as Janine Pommy Vega does, “Noise, blood, suffering” but kept their distance from even those objects that DO appear occasionally in their poems.
Are there any hopeful goodbyes? Well, some of the women think so. They are able to see the future as something they will give birth to, something to nurture.
Janine Canan says: “Oh Century, my laborious Century! / Drop by Drop the blood-streaked columns thicken / and our ancient fire glows still.” Bernadette Mayer prays for better men and women to inhabit the planet: “so therefore war father, mother, let me be & leave me / I know how to propagate the race for slightly peace that is / to only give birth to women: or to sweet loving boys who have in their builds / no desire to make us war or crazier.”
Sex receives its homage but not as lyrically as was once the norm. Summer
Brenner reports some “naked doric gals on Emerald Hill” who have no regret for having whooped it up.
Make no mistake: the sacred that enters the world of these poems has gotten here the hard way. It has made its way through beliefs and discarded beliefs. It has survived loves and Love. It has stared Death in the face. It has burrowed through the postmodern fragments of poetry and through the shopping malls. It has outlived the death of the twentieth century, a harsh father. It has asked, who will pay the century's “karmic debt”?
Alice Notley in her poem “DÃSAMÃRE,” journeys through the desert, confronts evils and Evil, and finds, in the end, a commonality that transcends everything: “Brother, says Amère: âWhy are you and I / Like this ⦠soldier, widow, / Why aren't we cars?'” This is the reply, in the voice of the poet Robert Desnos, “Because you grieve like animals ⦠/ Behaving as your species would / If it hadn't turned into cars / You're still the animals.”
Here it is, all the tragicomic grotesquery of the spent century. It's not a fond farewell. No one seems to have liked the deceased. And yet everyone suspects that the convention of the artificially designated “twentieth century” held something profoundly significant. While it is true, says Jack Anderson, that “there is never an end ⦠/ of treachery / lies / stupidity, arrogance / brute force, and lost causes,” there is also, as Arthur Sze puts it, the “moment when a child asks / when will it be tomorrow?”
Elaine Equi gives us the possibility that “you can ⦠sleep now, gentle / reader, and dream of comets trailing blood and / planets exploding. When you wake, it will be spring.” That would be nice. It would be nice, that is, if like the old movies, this narrative had a happy ending. It might have been possible if it had had a happy beginning, but, as Eileen Myles says, “the first thing we learned / was that the world would end / in our time.” I was born in 1946, the year that the beginning and the end were one at Hiroshima. My co-editor, Laura Rosenthal, was born in 1958, at the beginning of rock ân' roll. “That's the human song,” says Alice Notley, “from the past to nowhere.”
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t. Petersburg, Florida, is what happens when you take out a box of pastels and paint in the sky, the houses, the bushes, and the people. Gold turned into pink then lavender then velvety blue over the Gulf of Mexico while evening-gowned, golf-course-tanned folks sailed past me, barely spilling a drop of their martinis or upsetting the cherry in the blue glasses. It was Sunday, November 5, 1995, and this was a literary soiree. I was holding on to my end of a toothpicked green olive, looking at the sunset, when someone whispered breathlessly in my ear that Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated.
Did anybody else know? I whirled around but there wasn't a ripple in the crowd. I appointed myself bad-news bearer and went around informing the literati and the local oligarchy. It was a strange thing, like swimming through cotton wadding in a nightmare. Some knew, some didn't, but few did more than shake their heads, annoyed at the interruption. I didn't upset anyone very much until I told the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who made a huge, hurt noise and demanded to be led to a television set to watch the breaking news.
He and I and a friend of his plunked down in front of the mega-TV and began flipping channels looking for the expected coverage. But, man oh, man, it was only football games and quiz shows and old movies. What was
going on? Had we hit a time warp? Every time we found another football game or quiz show or old movie, Yevtushenko exclaimed in frustration: “This is fascism!” And by that, he meant the extraordinary blitheness of TV at such a historic moment. Not to speak of the pastel crowd numbed by the surf and cocktails outside. Finally, we got to CNN and they were, of course, talking about it, but still they were running the sports scores at the bottom of the screen.
The Russian poet shook his head in disbelief. He had once been the first, in the now nearly forgotten days of communism, to brand the specter of Russian anti-Semitism in his famous poem “Babii Yar.” Now, here he sat, under the Don-Cesare-pink sky of Florida, in the middle of a cocktail party, alone or nearly alone, with the big bad world. He suffered the news of Rabin's murder with an intensity that made his blue eyes deeper than the pastels around us.
“I must write about this!” he exclaimed, and I think that he meant everything: the passing of a peacemaker he admired, the indifference or seeming indifference of those around him, the unperturbed inanity of television. He was far from Russia, Yevtushenko, and even farther from the Soviet Union where he had once been as famous a man as the dead prime minister.
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an Francisco held a unique and noble event that ought to be emulated by cities around the country: the coronation of a poet laureate. The ceremony took place at the new and controversial San Francisco Library, which is reputed to have more computers than books. Mayor Willie Brown made the presentation with panache and patience. A mentally ill audience member screamed something about prisoners in Eritrea and a conspiracy against her dogs. But best of all, the laureate himself, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, delivered a blistering critique of his beloved city and bit eagerly the hand that anointed him.
San Francisco, Ferlinghetti told the crowd, is losing its soul to cars, a state he called Autogeddon. Gentrification, tacky money, and lack of respect for diversity and tradition are eating the city's soul. He attacked the navy's Blue Angels, which regularly shatter the peace. “The poetic life requires Peace, not War,” the poet proclaimed, “The poetic life of the City, our subjective life, the subjective life of the individual is constantly under attack by all the forces of materialist civilization, by all the forces of our military industrial perplex, and we don't need these warplanes designed to kill and ludicrously misnamed the Blue Angels.”
The poet laureate made a series of concrete proposals to restore the soul of San Francisco, including giving pedestrians and bicyclists priority over
automobiles, making the city a low-power alternative for radio and TV, with tax breaks for broadcasters, and uncovering the city's creeks and rivers again to open riparian corridors to the bay. Then he urged everybody listening to vote YES on a proposition that would remove the Central Freeway from the skyline. He also called for the city to declare North Beachâwhere Ferlinghetti's unique bookstore, City Lights, is locatedâa “historic district like the French Quarter in New Orleans.” I think that the poet was under the impression that the French Quarter was a car-free poetic zone, but I disabused him of that notion later when I told him the truth: The French Quarter has more cars than Formosan termites.
This marvelous display of conviction, poetry, and clarity was fresh water to an audience saturated, here as elsewhere, by the mind-boggling clichés of political scandal and the nauseating praise of business and money that waft from the open sewers of the media and politicians' mouths. The return of the citizen-poet is a necessity these days, if only to remind everyone that it is possible to speak forcefully and clearly about things that matter to a community. Cities without poets are cities without soul.
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group calling itself the Assault Poetry Unit dropped off an assortment of suspicious packages at various offices around New Orleans, including that of the
Times-Picayune
newspaper, which evacuated its employees. The package turned out to be a watermelon with a four-page manifesto in it. The editor of the
Times-Picayune
was at the time deeply immersed in discussing the upcoming social season with the paper's gossip columnist. They were forced instead to huddle under a freeway overpass with the manifesto, while the NOPD bomb squad dismantled the watermelon. The manifesto called for painting over the huge Marlboro Man ad at Decatur Street and replacing it with a poem by Ishmael Reed; it called for all Louisiana government speeches to be written and read in iambic pentameter; and it demanded that New Orleans police officers memorize and recite poems at regular intervals. It was perhaps this, more than anything else, that caused the police to treat the incident as a crime. The manifesto declared that “the era of poetic passivity is over,” an egregious statement in a city where passivity, poetic or no, is a sacred institution, especially in the summer. We are so passive here that we never even shoo the flies away from our po' boys; even the donkeys pulling the tourists quit flicking their tails this time of the year; even more amazingly, no mayoral candidacies are declared at all, leaving the incumbent to take an unencumbered siesta. The
energetic manifesto demanded, among yet more things, that the mayor read “The Brown Menace or Poem on the Survival of Roaches” by Audre Lord in its entirety on the seven o'clock news. Now, if someone would dare to wake Hizzoner up, that might solve the problem of what to put on the news, which has been all about how hot it is outside. Still, crime or no crime, you have to hand it to the Assault Poetry Unit. They ambulate, they agitate, they say something. In New Orleans, like in the rest of America now, that's the height of social action.
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or with Kerri McCaffety in the Realm of Timelessness
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n a timeless afternoon in late summer in the courtyard at the Napoleon House, a huge palmetto bug stared up at a famous poet from Colorado, and the man shrieked. As he drew his legs up on the chair, pointing to the small shining being down there, he asked, “What is THAT?”
“It's a small hearse,” one of the six local bohemians said.
“It takes visible bites out of pears,” nodded another.
“It's a beauty. We should enter him in the contest,” mused the poorest one among us, who was cadging drinks and always looking for strange ways to make a buck. The contest he was referring to takes place every year: It's between Louisiana and Texas over the size of local roaches.
The light was suspended between day and night, the air was velvet-thick, there were beads of sweat on everyone's forehead, and the palmetto kept looking up, antennae quivering like a recording device. And, indeed, I might contend that many of our outsized bugs are recording the secret history of New Orleans to pass on through the generations. Somebody has to record this history because, God knows, the humans who frequent the soulful dives of this licentious city are too busy making up stories to also remember them.
The lack of memory is amply supplanted by the wealth of verbiage that
flows like the Mississippi through barrooms, saloons, music joints, cafés, and holes-in-the-wall. Some of this unbound orality is a way for natives of the same generation to recall the past, which in New Orleans never goes away but is continuously reinvented by storytelling. In old restaurants like Galatoire's or Antoine's, where the solemn food imparts an aristocratic aura to the drinking, the gentry counts its cousins and polishes its roots like the brass doorknobs on their uptown mansions. The waiters belong to families, and they cajole, correct, and dispense their own additions even as they glide in and out of the kitchen.
One lost patron who had not set foot in Galatoire's for fifteen years recognized her waiter of yore, who remembered not only her drink and her favorite dish of soft-shell crab, but set also to remonstrate her for her absence. When my friend explained somewhat peremptorily that she had been in exile somewhere in California, the waiter said that he, too, had been absent for five of those fifteen years, five years during which he had raised a family in Florida, beaten back a heroin addiction, and then returned to the only place where he felt needed. These confessions took a good twenty minutes, but no one showed any impatience: The physical details of food and drink were only olives in the cocktail of intimacy that is the true purpose of such an establishment.
If one is concerned with time and efficiency, as they are understood in the harried labor camps of most American cities, one would do well to stay out of New Orleans bars, or New Orleans altogether. The watering holes of this city lay claim to different hours, and their interiors change with the hour. There are places for the afternoon and early evening, like the Napoleon House, where in the carefully maintained decay, locals can impress out-of-towners with the size of the roaches and the melancholy of a vivid and shadowy past. Napoleon could have lived here, if he hadn't died, but the implication is that he does live here, upstairs perhaps, and that he might descend the curved staircase at any moment to join the conversation.
A summer afternoon in New Orleans can stretch to infinity over a few beers. One can daydream in the shimmering cool, with or without companions, until it is either late in the day or late in the century. It is a fact of New Orleans history that vast conspiracies have been hatched in the afternoons in bars and cafés. Besides the glorious failed plot to rescue the emperor himself from exile, numerous dreams of conquest and plunder rose in detail from local cups of absinthe, whiskey-laced coffee, and dark beer. Jean Lafitte's
Blacksmith Shop was where the famous pirate did business in plundered goods, and hatched depredations. A local adventurer twice conquered Nicaragua and declared himself emperor. The first U.S. war on Cuba was conducted from here by a certain Narcisso Lopez. Lee Harvey Oswald hung out in the French Quarter, broke and without much to do. I have myself sat with men who, for no visible reason, were seized by megalomaniac plans and visions of grandeur. I believe that the distortion of time, the twisted layout of the old buildings, the presence of stairwells, the slave quarters in the back of buildings, the wrought-iron balconies, the shameless flowering of perfumed vines, the stultifying heat, and the indolence of the natives are the causes of such impulses.
The establishments of the night are quite different. Jazz was born in them and they are full of sound. Their purpose is violent exhibitionism, voyeurism, and varieties of sexual congress. Café Brasil, which is the brainchild of a Brazilian named Adé, is like a tropical tree full of chattering birds. Once planted into the sidewalk of Frenchmen Street, this café-bar-dancehall magnetized the whole neighborhood, re-creating a creolism straight out of George Washington Cable, complete with Brazilian accents. On the opposite side of the street is the venerable Snug Harbor, where music is the foreground but Carnival the perpetual background.
One would do well, as I have done many times, to investigate a single place over time, at different times of the day. Molly's on the Market, for instance, is home in the early afternoon to a lively Window Gang consisting of a varying crew of journalists, men-about-town, women-about-town, writers of fiction and poetry, mysterious characters either larger or brighter than life, led on by Jim Monaghan, proprietaire extraordinaire, Irish wit and provocateur. Monaghan's extravagant personality imbues the day, but the night belongs to the tribes of the tattooed and pierced young. At night, a sloshed picture gallery displays itself with sensual impertinence. The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided that they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere.
A reporter from
The Wall Street Journal
sought me out in an effort to explain a grim statistic that maintained New Orleanians live, on the average, ten years less than most Americans. We repaired to one of my favorite watering
holes where we discussed this, and many other things besides, at great length. Around 3 A.M. an exquisitely beautiful young woman wrapped in a sarong that allowed for two multicolored reptiles to be seen entwined on her back, climbed on the bar and unwrapped herself, displaying to everyone the rest of the Laocoonian scene, in which the snakes, beginning at her coccyx, circled flowering vines to descend from her shoulders to her perineum. It was a magical moment, like a door opening suddenly to another world. The inkster of
The Wall Street Journal
was transfixed like a deer in the headlights of the moment, understanding in a flash that the grim statistic he was trying to explain was a figment of time, whereas what unfolded before him belonged to timelessness. This insight, thoroughly forgotten, illuminated yet some of his article, which said, “Yes, it's true, but ⦔
Yes, it's true that, statistically, we live less than people who go to bed at a plain hour in the joyless working hells of virtuous towns, but we live experientially twice as long. Having stayed up in the bars and saloons of New Orleans for a few years now, I can attest to their life-enhancing qualities. Some of them are veritable time machines. I know a three-hundred-year-old man who occupies the stool at the far end of the Saturn Bar. His longevity is the result of having no idea what time it is. He hasn't seen a newspaper in two hundred years. He is plotting to rescue Napoleon from exile, boredom, and history.