From Incoming Wave

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.

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