Voila, another installment of Poetry? I just don’t get it.
A series where I post a poem or group of poems by one author, followed by
anything the author wants to say about the work. Today’s poem is by Mark
Pawlak.
Mark is the author of six poetry collections, including Official
Versions, Buffalo Sequence, and Special
Handling: Newspaper Poems. His work has been included in Best
American Poetry (2006), and he is also one of the editors of one of the
longest running literary magazines and small presses on earth – Hanging
Loose Magazine and Hanging Loose Press.
Here’s my first encounter with reading Mark’s work: 2006, I’m
sitting in the cafeteria in the hospital where I work, eating some grim sandwich,
feeling hopeless - about my job, about the horrors happening every second across
the planet (especially because many of those horrors were perpetrated by my own
government) - and I began to read Official
Versions. Halfway through the book, there was catharsis. Relief. A purging.
Someone was actually addressing the double-speak and lies that we all endure (and
accept) on a daily basis. And, even better, it sometimes made me laugh!
There is also in his work a fascination for detail. A couple years ago I bought Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010. I have a fondness for books of poems where each poem can only be truly understood in relation to the whole. These are poems/journal entries related in sequence to the others - and the detail is absolutely gorgeous, evocative. The title is taken from haiku master Basho’s advice to his students: ‘If you want to write about the pine, go to the pine.’
Below is Mark’s poem “Among the Colleagues”, followed by his
explanation. (In the explanation he manages to get in another poem. Nice! I admire
that.)
****
Among the Colleagues
Before descending into the subway’s
maw,
before facing the mess on my
desk:
Shop grates drawn, sleepers
stretched out on benches,
in doorways, just beginning to stir,
but already someone with a broom has
gathered
fallen buds into neat piles on the
square’s red bricks:
heaps of fairy goblets on long green
stems
left over from yesterday’s celebration—
Morris dancers in knickers,
jangling ankle bells, clacking
sticks.
Already this early, at his coffee
shop station,
the self-appointed doorman:
straggly hair, beard, gray, flecked
with white;
paper cup in one hand:
patrons drop in their coins, no words exchanged;
his vest and trench coat, bulging
with rolled newspapers,
slips of paper crumpled in shirt
pocket— is he,
bum, bard, or bodhisattva?
Yesterday: I saw red-eyed Sappho,
stumble along the sidewalk
oblivious to the crush—
office workers headed home—,
her gaze downcast, mumbling verses
as she passed shops
with pansies in window boxes and
recessed doorways:
from their shadows satyrs and
sirens, her familiars,
leaned forward, greeted her. This morning,
leather-skinned Li Po, staggers
past, scattering pigeons,
ending a night filled no doubt with
wine and song.
Strands of hair peeking from under
knit cap,
he lurches from this lamp post to
the next,
embraces one as a long lost friend,
spits curses—“Motherfucker,”—at
another
as at a sworn enemy, “Motherfucker.”
Early “patrons” at tables of the not-yet-open outdoor café, my confrères:
ruddy-faced men in hand-me-down work
boots,
coats half-buttoned, sweatshirts
showing beneath:
White-bearded Walt Whitman shares a
cigarette
with someone who could be his twin.
Nearby, Basho, tonsured, in need of
a shave,
scans yesterday’s
headlines,
at his feet, two plastic bags
stuffed with only he knows what.
And, just back from the west, Po Chü-i
sits under a shade tree in new leaf,
his one crutch propped against the
trunk,
scribbling poems on scraps of paper,
which he neatly folds, sticks into
his pocket.
Finally, here is portly Marx!
parked beside cardboard boxes of
books in a shopping cart, his movable library,
signature beard splayed on chest,
eyes fixed on a book propped open on
his belly,
deep in conversation with himself—something
just audible
about “oil prices . . . simpler times . . . bosses . . . ;”
one moment serious, holding up both
sides of the argument,
the next chuckling to himself,
amused.
Before descending into the subway’s
maw,
before facing the mess on my
desk,
such, these May mornings, such is
the company I keep.
****
Parataxis
The
physical act of writing and the implements used can influence what you produce.
Think William Carlos Williams' early modernist poems, written on prescription
pads while he was making house calls in his car: short with short lines. Even
longer poems, such as "January Morning Suite," are made of linked
fragments that he jotted down in passing. Think Kerouac's On the Road
stream of consciousness rush typed on a continuous scroll of newsprint.
Contrast that with his haiku and sketches, jotted down in little pocket
notebooks while he walking the streets of San Francisco.
Robert Creeley once
said that "...the qualification of the size of the paper… will often have
an effect on what you're writing, or whether or not you're using pencil or
pen. Habits of this kind," he
noted, "are almost always considered immaterial or secondary. And yet, for
my own reality, there is obviously a great connection between what I physically
do as a writer in this sense, and what comes then out of it." (Vancouver
Poetry Conference, 1963)
What I physically do is steal moments from
my job to make notes for poems in either a 4 in. x 6 in. Mt. Tom or in a pocket
Moleskin notebook that I always carry. Each workday morning I travel by bus
from my home to Harvard Square; there I stop at one of several cafe's to sip an
espresso, before descending the escalator to the Red Line subway that
transports me across the Charles River and Boston to the UMass harbor campus
where I work a 9-5 administrative job. Pausing in the early morning when my
mind is uncluttered, I take in the sights and sounds and record them in my
notebook. It's usually the hour when the homeless are just waking and beginning
to move about, the hour when shopkeepers are arriving, unlocking their
storefront grates. I also take note of
people and things observed while riding the subway: flaneuries.
Fragments juxtaposed is the modus operandi for
most of the poems in my forthcoming collection, In Transit. Meaning
constructed by parataxis. The length
of "Among the Colleagues” is not
typical of the rest, but the observed fragments include in it derive from the
same practice of notebook jottings: the Morris Dancers that perform in Holyoke
Square each year on May Day, the tiny, fluted green stamen that litter the
pavement after the trees have leafed-out; the ancient panhandler stationed
outside the door of the coffee shop I frequent, the homeless drunk I see
stumbling down an alleyway most mornings, etc. Most of the other poems in the
forthcoming collection are snapshots of things observed, conversations
overheard, written literally while I’m in transit between home and work, work
and home.
These poems—I call them poetic journals—are in a
tradition of observational poetics that originates in Williams' dictum "No
ideas but in things;" and was elaborated in the Objectivists practice of
"thinking with things as they exist." George Oppen, Charles
Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, and to a lesser extent Louis Zukovsky are my models.
It's a tradition that was taken up and further elaborated by many poets among
the post-WW II generation. In Transit pays homage to city poets like
Harvey Shapiro, who wrote in his poem tribute to Reznikoff, "I put these
[observations] down in my ledger,/Charles, walking and watching,/which is the
way we serve.” My poetic journals have an affinity with the “I do this, I do
that” poetics of Frank O’Hara, too—although
my approach would more be accurately described as “I saw this, I heard
that.”
Reznikoff, who daily walked the streets of
Manhattan, and who made exquisite haiku-like poems out of the things he
observed and recorded, offered this prescription: "the poet presents the
Thing in order to convey the Feeling. He should be Precise about the thing, and
Reticent about the feeling." I try
in my poems to follow this dictum. In most of my journal poems the "I" is inferred rather than
explicit, discernible only from the poem's point-of-view. "Among the
Colleagues" is also atypical in this regard. More characteristic of the entire
collection are the linked fragments of "Four/Square" below.
4/
Square
1.
Slant
early morning light
on empty city square,
empty but for pigeons,
inspecting paving stones
for flawed workmanship
under the watchful,
half-opened eye
of the woman
who sleeps in an alcove,
rat’s nest of hair for her pillow.
2.
Outside the coffee shop, a man is changing out of
bedclothes, as if in the privacy of his own dressing room, his wardrobe spread
out on two benches and a chair. He pulls tee-shirt on over Union Suit, then
hooded sweatshirt over that, followed by a sweater, then another, then a
checkered wool shirt on top that he meticulously buttons all the way up,
oblivious all the while to pedestrians hurrying toward the T stop, shopkeepers
turning keys in locks, storefront grates noisily going up behind him.
3.
Man hunched over
outdoor café
table,
muy scruffy,
but not scrofulous,
wearing a straw hat
frayed at the brim,
sits nibbling
breakfast pastry
while perusing his newspaper
that’s folded neatly beside:
CHESS LESSONS $2
|
Nervous sparrows at his feet
peer upward,
awaiting crumbs
to drop from his beard—
the Master and his Disciples.
4.
7:10
AM
Three ruddy-faced, boon companions, two men and a woman,
sit together on a bench, outside the coffee shop, beside improvised cardboard
bedcovers, conversing while rubbing sleep from their eyes. (One asks me for the
time as if he had an appointment to keep.) They exchange greetings with the cop
nearby on hard-hat duty where new paving is being laid; then offer comments on
the passersby hurrying to work or subway, men and women in suits, in pressed
shirts and slacks or blouses and skirts, most with cell phones raised to ears.
Roving gangs of sparrows scavenging for muffin crumbs hop excitedly on grass
patches bordering the path that cuts diagonally through. (One, at my feet,
cocks its chestnut head, begging a handout.) Their shrill cheeping is drowned
by the rumble and thrum of delivery trucks shifting gears, accelerating, one of
which has three foot high green lettering stenciled on its side:
TROPICANA
PURE
PREMIUM
Not
from concentrate
****
