from

Incoming Wave

Tom Mandel

A Note

I. What makes a poem real? Poetic ontology, any ontology, is established in the act of giving form. The 40-part work from which these poems come reflects a practice of giving form meant to sidestep, to the degree I’m able, any restrictions habit, style or poetic preconceptions of given form might place on it.

In particular, as deKooning famously said, “style is a fraud.” To escape it, I use a variety of almost arbitrarily chosen, yet in many cases quite traditional, formal structures – blues lyric, hymn, song, rhymed folk-tale, etc. Perhaps that seems counter-intuitive, in fact I suppose (and probably hope) it does.

Most thinking about poetry (as about most arts), expecially critical and academic thinking, is classificatory: it’s concerned above all about putting things in their right places: deciding whether something is ‘language poetry,’ or more generally whether it is ‘avant garde,’ or in a slightly more freighted way is it ‘the right poetry for this time.’

In these instances ‘style’ – and the many related stand-in terminologies I’m not going to take the time to discuss right now – functions like the handle on a suitcase. Very useful for picking something up and moving it around. It’s easy to see the reasons why classifications of style become over-valued. They stand in for knowledge.

But the only thing of real interest is what’s in the suitcase, what someone puts in it: giving form.

Enough of this clumsy metaphor. What I like is to work on creative method with as much freedom as possible; I want to investigate any gesture in writing that may intensify the ontological issues of the poem. Even better is how much fun it is to write this way. All these many ways. And challenging: as if I may (and so I must) write all of poetry over again.

II. I was influenced in this work by Gerhard Richter’s paintings and writings which uncouple the artist’s method from visual style in a decisive way. But the precipitating influence emerged from a conversation with an old friend: a couple of years ago, when I visited hm in Key West, he gave me a small book of poems just published by friends there, commenting that to write it he had had to “teach myself to write poetry all over again.”

I objected that even if he was better known for his many experimental novels he’d certainly always written poetry. But, he replied, over the years his poetry had become increasingly conceptual – Oulipian.

I continued to object, but the sun sets quickly down there, and soon it was time for a smoke, a drink and dinner. We never returned to the subject. hm’s phrase stuck in my mind, where over the following few weeks its syntax changed slightly from “…poetry all over again” to “all poetry over again.”

Out of this notion – at once utterly hubristic and scribally modest – came the project engaging me at present: to write any and every kind of poetry, to write “over again” as it were. So far I've stopped short at greeting card poetry, but you never know.

No doubt, especially to anyone who knows my work, some of what you read below will seem odd. I hope so, and I hope you enjoy some of it as well. tom mandel

5.

As I drive the mountainous spine of three states today to an annual meet-up of friends, Dexter Gordon arrives via memory’s savoir faire to play a set in my college dorm with four Chicago players, Ira

Sullivan among them, back then my Crow Jim idol of art and dejected abstraction whom I heard on trumpet often in Monday night sessions at the Gate of Horn and around town but never dared speak a single word to him. Between two pieces, Dexter exchanges a twinkle of remarks with someone in the crowd, and bassist

Donald Garrett in an off-tune ala- Eckstine a capella baritone starts to croon “Imagination is silly / you go around willy nilly / for example I go around…” the car ahead of me on this highway, crossing a yellow

line while pondering my slow register of recollection across what seems an endless tonal scale, like Panatomic

X, to unveil part of an image then fold it in another’s shadow, as I’m moving past one more vehicle, a large truck, keeping up my speed keeping in view the forested hills the open road, allowing memory to wind its thread of images around Dexter, thin as the devil’s cigarillo, who tears to fragments his precision storm of sound, closing his set, re- leasing me to watch suburbs unroll on both sides of the highway – the houses look like CAD drawings of mausoleums with driveways – then recall a conversation ten years later with Carlos, my Angolan exile friend in my apartment on rue Dupuytren. He tries to convince me to assassinate some enemy of his cause: “simply you fly to Rome; simply someone puts a gun in your hand: simply you shoot.

C'est pas plus d'un seul instant qui va disparaître l'instant d'après dans un passé tu as déjà abandonné, like all else, in flight from the future you fear will elude or exclude you but in fact it will provide all the useless reasons you seek to explain away the rest of what you’ve done.” “What, is he kidding?” I ask myself. How long ago that talk with Carlos seems – far more distant than the day a decade earlier when Dexter Gordon set up in my dorm to play. “This drive!” I suddenly exclaim, “is taking forever!” and as if impatience summoned it rush hour arrives instantly to stop all motion. Ducking into a motel I watch dusk gather to darkness through my room’s small window while I write down these lines from out of my past then feel hungry and head out to dine.

8. i. Because time is a mixed bag of short rations, any day long enough outlasts each night.

Rectangle #1displays another suspect in our case; like the victim she is dead, or perhaps one should say ‘therefore,’ or if holding her breath, and that after only a few moments to prepare, perhaps unsatisfactorily, even briefly, so that too little time may pass for a camera to capture the effort it costs, we grant nonetheless – not with reluctance but enthusiastically – primacy to illusion, the vector in whose direction rectangle #1 is bound to propel us.

ii. Creating its pattern you hold a palm up to time

Next a commercial depicts an awkward individual, male, emerging from under the rock where he lives in order to save up to 25%. The intention to amuse, also to convince, though perhaps not all on its own but in combination with a soon-to-be-aired spot in which we are seated at the side of a woman, fur at her throat, eyes closed, not at all ill at ease, as she drives by heart a seemingly awkward route that includes a number of turns, making her way to the central train station, an elite may well grasp. At the station she will greet the advance party. As if by chance, but this is not a chance operation, they are 48 in number, like the Preludes & Fugues of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. We hear the simultaneous result as a soundtrack. Wearily and in anger, the video engineer rises from his workstation, pulling from his head the circumaural Beyerdynamics studio cans that inaugurate his every contemplative moment. It is as if the entire soundscape of the piece exists around him and within it he exhibits an almost improvisational ease, a cool lyricism

that gives to each fall of finger onto keyboard a destiny to unrolls what intentions unravel.

I live to see depicted the noble, yet tragic (but inevitable) triumph of crow- madman over his neon dirt hall cousin-speciman with whom circumstance, or else chance (shaped in the final screenwriters’ plot conference), has forced the contest, despite bi-partisan diffidence, the flourishing absence of desire and a lack of provocation that can be traced to the effects of salutary changes in climate. And for this thing we are going to have to come up some kind of a different soundtrack, maybe something delicate that could also absorb the blood?

iii. Up drives a black cadillac it’s come to take me back to where first I heard the tone of Zen inside the koan the one that turned to stone while counting out my loan until payday come and gone my debt too come undone

I would finally be alone the only one to own the brand new stick-built home you show me on your phone

while the wrenchman on the dome takes apart the royal throne for me to carry home to prove I was the clone that Howling Wolf did moan caused the ache inside his bones as stretched out in the back of that limo cadillac he wrote me up some verse on the coffin of a hearse.

iv. The cadillac stopped at the light I saw the driver and took flight

The leather seats were white They brought to mind that awful night

A night that felt like leather The night we spent together

That night I made my first mistake:

I put my holster in the toaster I tried to drown it in the lake

v. From above, the news break video shows the SUV, flipped, roof collapsed, twisted to an angle splaying from bottom left to top right of the screen above a bright red banner where moving rapidly from right to left four words read “Call this number now.”

9.

I lived one Summer long ago in a yurt I found abandoned in the woods of New York state.

Some evenings a guy came by who camped in a lean-to nearby to share some gravy and talk.

Our words jumped between us like sparks from a dying fire. One night as I started to tire he made an odd remark (for we’d been talking of desire) “a stiff dick at midnight’s taken me places naked where I’d fear to go dressed by day even packing my 44s.” “Oh, that stew could stand a fork in gravy,” I said to change the topic,“and though I don’t own a gun (for that mess was years to come) one day I’ll surely see what you mean.”

“Know what Coleridge said as he lay on his deathbed? ‘My mind’s so clear in my head

I could even be witty.’ The next moment he was dead.” We talked late that night of matters I no longer recall then I turned the coals over and slept til dawn birds woke me with their song and the girl I loved no more rode up on her horse, saddled with solid rhetoric, to bear down on my life. That yurt must lie in ruins now, or maybe it sports an all-new TV room and full cathedral ceiling.

Yet then or now, far or near, day, night, week or year in every wood I inhabit it’s always been the same. All the places I ever bedded down it’s always gone this way.

17. a blues (to the tune of “Keys to the Highway”)

When the sun lights up the boxcar I’ll head for a place I know that’s way too far to follow for a girl who’s most too slow.

I saw you smiling by the border the night I slipped on through now you yell out orders at a man don’t work for you.

I’m going to walk my pants where girls look at you from behind rub some goose stuff on my hair make those pretty girls go blind.

Yes I’m going to walk these trousers to where girls look you up and down hook them with my superpowers carry them back downtown.

The finest woman I ever knew she was nothing at all like you. When I called her by your name she loved me just the same.

Well it’s hi there hi there darling I hear a new love call my name Yes I’m sure I hear her calling and if not it’s all the same.

I lost my key to your highway but my foot’s stuck in the door until the day you do it my way I will ride that superhighway I won’t think of you no more.

They say a white man can sing the blues and it’s easier if he’s a Jew. Honey I qualify on that count but how’ll I check on you?

When the sun comes up tomorrow I’ll leave yesterday behind I’ll say goodbye to pain and sorrow cultivate my Buddha mind.

18. How Relaxing

To see more of these lately (more like this one say if any were missed as of late ‘they used to be’) turn up a simple flame under the narrow night spent relaxing to agree that busy buttoning up no mail of late to see each (holi)day is more like this one used to be the very one to miss.

20. (after Georges Perec)

Depressing these utopias that leave no room for chance but sort all to an order difference won’t abide no habitation in taxonomy for miscellanies no grant nor may any old thing with everything else in place slink to the usual any old place there’s just nowhere to hide

21.

Alone and forsaken – that’s how he was found. His young heart broken, he lay on the ground wrapped in the token that all men once wound in pain, quaking, he’d fled the world ‘round afraid to be taken by that same devil hound who made him keep joking to evade the rebound.

His head he was stroking (it had started to pound) as the devil raked him: “you tool, you clown!

Did you fall in a lake and were utterly drowned? Don’t act like you’re croaking on some burial mound; snorting and smoking won’t take a man down. It’s time to stop faking these nights on the town, two eggs and some bacon will bring you around.” These words having spoken, the devil frowned:

“What you leave unspoken can no other astound. You see them sip cake in their caps and gowns yet your undertakings you deign not throw down? It’s time to cast off your cloak and put on your crown!”

24. Property & the State

The harder the question the longer you wait For an answer that puts you in an altered state.

You start out strong but you falter late. Your voice is sweet but then you grate.

I hover above it I’m forced to love it I want to say shove it but you’ve got something I covet

The harder the question the longer you wait To find out whether or not you rate.

If you don’t come early, you won’t come late. You won’t arrive in an altered state.

You want an answer? Ask the necromancer. He’ll tell you to dance or glance at the glancer.

Hard is the question and bitter the wait Your voice is sweet but then you grate.

To hear these words in an altered state You start out strong then falter late.

You want a better answer? Ask a financier as he drives off his ranch or sits on his prancer

How much longer will you wait To live together in an altered state?

It’s all about property and the state. Time to blow the lid off the crate.

Have you taken a stance for folly or romance or did you find the answer on the dance floor?

You start out strong but you falter late. How much longer must we wait

For past and future on a single date For the day we crush the arrogant state?

Stay in your trance or to be the answer put on your pants for to blow up a panzer

28. Away From The Garden: A Hymn

We come to a garden of roses where dew drips its stream from thorns. The voice of my love discloses it opens, closes and mourns.

She tells me to walk, she tells me to talk she is with me but I am alone What we have known we cannot share sparrow may not tarry with hawk.

My love speaks. Her voice may be ringing. Yet all sound stops and I hear my mute heart’s violent singing. Its melody dies in air.

She tells me to walk, she tells me to talk she is with me but I am alone What we have known we cannot share sparrow may not tarry with hawk.

All night in her arms through the thicket the garden treads its own paths. In a woeful voice and wicked the garden threatens collapse.

She tells me to walk, she tells me to talk she is with me but I am alone What we have known we cannot share sparrow may not tarry with hawk.

I carried my love through the garden the darkness around me closed. As my heart began to harden the rose-dew menaced the rose.

She tells me to walk, she tells me to talk she is with me but I am alone What we have known we cannot share sparrow may not tarry with hawk.

Note: for the source of this poem, please see http://bit.ly/VXcuWE

32.

Cover this sheet with words then cut it up to leave a few words, whole or partial on each scrap. Parts of letters too.

Now snip each piece again til every slip holds part of one word, most or only a bit (don’t worry about broken letters).

Keep cutting scraps until there’s only one letter on each and a broken one too beside it in the heap of paper left

that now we see is will surely lead to problems. You’d better sweep away this mess – but first jot down the

number of scraps left us of each let- ter (but ignore all the broken ones). Now derive every word our letters in their numbers make to locate ev- ery world where together with all others you and I arrive to be alive.

34. after Novalis

Conversation is an error to admire truth in writing and speaking, a play on words for the sake of the mad things humans believe. You who are gifted at mathematics must make them see the cost of belief in letters that turn out only for themselves. Rubbing shoulders in transient alignment admirable arrays of ungrasped matters may cause mirrors that gaze on us from a world of their own to break out in uncontrollable peals of laughter at the crazy ideas people come up with when they speak in the name of things.

36.

The grass dissolves under your feet heating up, turns to dust your mind, compacted of wisdom may cast its eyes on both ways along the treacherous pathway. Unversed in the doubts of a skeptic it grows still, young and old in every direction you beat it.

You turn about the bush of age however your endeavor dresses its quest in deception. Resolve en masse all you miss of youth. Shape your tactics in a phrase ‘just like Sextus Empiricus.’