Conversations with John Gallaher's _In a Landscape_

I'm not sure why I bought John Galleher's new book, though it was probably because we've been neighbors in Facebook comment boxes (little boxes!) on such topics as adoption--he's adopted, I have adopted children. He lives in Missouri, which was intriguing to me until I found out that he clearly, obstinately, doesn't know about the Cardinals. So I bought his book from BOA Editions, In a Landscape: A Poem. It's got 71 sections--LXXI, rather--constituting a discursive meditation on his own mid-American middle-aged daily life. It's a masculine Midwinter's Day, perhaps, though when I wrote to tell him I liked the book, I said it reminded me of Douglas Crase. He responded by saying he hadn't thought of Crase in a long time. There was that book in the 1980s, right? Yes, The Revisionist, 1981. Was that his only book? I looked Crase up, found an official website. Yes, that was the only book of poems, but then there's been a daybook and a co-biography since, along with a book of essays about American literature. No mention of "real" work, the kind that pays the bills. How does he live such a life? John wondered. So I went prowling and found a New York Times wedding announcement from 2011 for Crase and his partner Frank Polach. By this time, I'd veered away from my comment on John's book and into a wild goose chase after Douglas Crase's finances, which seemed odd. Then I remembered that Crase had written me a couple of times, but stopped after I suggested (as I recall) that he write more poems. (Was that why he stopped?) I just now (later) took The Revisionist down from my office shelf. Inside it, I find a note in an envelope dated March 17, 1992. It's in response to review I wrote of a book I no longer remember reading, though I do remember his poems, not exactly what was in them, but their density, their careful thoughtfulness, like Ashbery poems that were more linear than Ashbery poems, more deliberate.

I started sending John brief messages in response to his book and began to think that this was one way to read the book, talking back to it as I flip through it, sometimes forward, sometimes back. It started with funny stuff. Like a rumination on numbers and porn. I'd just talked about this in class when we started the Dover edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with the old numerals we no longer learn in school, and then saw this--



XXXI:

Whenever I see the roman numeral XXX
I think of pornography.

For a few months the site meter for this Tinfish Editor's blog recorded repeated attempts to find pornography. Searches like "XXX stories for my husband" came in from Arkansas, which might not have been Arkansas because I remember using blogger in Los Angeles and seeing it logged as Arkansas. When the tickle became an itch of curiosity, I investigated. The search landed curious yellows at a post that included discussion of Shakespeare's sonnet XXX. Sad pornographees. I'd forgotten that the post included my mother, ended with a photo of her in her Alzheimer's. Forgetting can be a kind of grace.


XLII

I changed my mind. I was going to stop writing this poem, but now
I'm not, because I heard someone say, in the hallway earlier,
that she had changed her mind, and it seemed a lovely idea, the way
it struck me to "change one's mind." I'd like to do that. Presto
Change-O.

When we adopted our daughter, Radhika, at age three, she spoke trillingly in Nepali. The difference in our languages mattered far less than I had feared. She conveyed her needs, and we provided them. But as soon as she started learning English, she discovered words to say and repeat. The first was "TRAFFICS," which she would yell from the back seat of the car as we drove home from my job and her first day care person. (My daughter is not a patient person, I remember thinking.) Then came the brief era of "change mind!" She'd walk around the house calling out, "change mind! change mind!" There was a beautiful constancy to her announcement of inconstancy. "Inconstant stay," in sonnet XV, can be read quickly as "inconstancy." I think it was Garrett Stewart who taught me that.


XXVIII

"It changes you," they say about a lot of different things,
but what they don't say is that most people
change right back.

We had a chat about "change," John and I. My week has been like carrying a pile of dirty nickels in my purse. I can't even reach them to spend. He liked the mention of "spare change." Brother can you spare a dime? Pair one?


XXVI

What does it mean to be useful? To be a useful person? My son's
watching Thomas the Tank Engine, where the goal is ever
to be useful.

When Bryant, Sangha and I were in London, during autumn 2002, Sangha (then 3) spent hours watching Thomas the Tank Engine videos, the ones that featured English accents. Ringo Starr! This was also the era of Bob the Builder. That December we even had a Bob the Builder advent calendar with chocolates behind each pair of shutters. We traveled a bit, once to Essex, and another time to Ireland. When he got tired in his stroller, Sangha started singing at the top of his lungs, usually "Bob the Builda." Through the cathedral square of Essex he sang; and, on the tube from Heathrow after an exhilarating and exhausting trip to Ireland, he belted out the tune as tube riders stared. Children are utterly useless sometimes. That's why we love them. Like poems.

LX

That probably doesn't connect to anything, I'm thinking
right now, a few hours later. But Bob the Builder is playing
on the TV, and my son's watching it, and he's named
Eliot with the E-L-I-O-T" spelling. Bob has just dropped
his construction helmet . . . 


John Cage keeps coming up in these poems, which are not acrostics, or especially quiet, unless you mean written in a steady even tone. They're not quiet, or random, even if they take some chances. Somewhere Gallaher refers to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. I went to hear this at the Honolulu Art Academy with Bryant when we first started dating. A woman sat at the piano and prepared to play. You could tell who was in or not in on the joke. There were the coughers, the whisperers. She got up once to look inside the piano, then sat down again, which felt a bit like cheating, because she was doing something. I once played the Frank Zappa version of 4'33" to a freshman composition class. One football player started pounding on his desk, another got up and danced. Only one student said she enjoyed the time to herself.


LV

When I was young, I lived in Orange County and ended up
going to Disneyland thirty-five times. I was trapped at "Yo ho,
yo ho, a pirate's life for me" once, for about forty-five minutes."


When I first moved to Hawai`i, I had a colleague named Alan who was in his late 30s. That was back before air-conditioning and stark ideologies, when we drifted between our offices and chatted. His office was on the same corridor as Joe's who died of AIDS. Alan was a storyteller, but he kept telling the same one. Soon, he was teaching less and less, and his students complained about him. Then--and this was beautiful--his friends (three or four or five of them) took over his classes until he had 10 years vested in the system, first while he was still in his apartment, then in a home. They would shop for him, do his taxes. And then he was gone to California, where his older sister had died of early onset Alzheimer's, like their father. Alan had never made commitments to people, because he knew his DNA. But I bring this up because Alan was once trapped in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland for a very long time. Whenever he and his friends were on an academic panel together, one or the other of them would slip "it's a small world" into their talks. Even now, years after Alan's death, his friends wear funny ties on his birthday, go out to lunch. So, when John asks in

LIV

Where's the line between what constitutes repetition
and what constitutes change? Right now I'm thinking forgetfulness
is just as good as careful planning . . .

I think of Alan, for whom forgetting was repetition, and repetition of forgetting a story told over and again in my doorway on the 6th floor of Kuykendall. I'm no longer there--I moved to the 2nd floor years ago--and that's a kind of change I can count. 4 floors. How many years now?

Alan was adopted by his friends, and then relinquished into "care."

LXVII

His mother
was the sister of my father, until years later, when we were adopted
and became brothers. Our mother now, back then, was the daughter
of the brother of my birth grandmother. We scratch our heads about it
now and then, how every family has these stories, these little
     shufflings,
somewhere.

When our daughter came home with us from Nepal, people would ask if she and Sangha were siblings. I'd say yes, or "they are now," knowing precisely what they were getting at. Now, when I say we're going to visit the kids' sister, friends look confused. Isn't she Radhika's sister? And the mother of my daughter's sister is what to me? There are not enough names for us, or there are too many, usually fractions, like half- or step-. Before I adopted my children I had the same odd way of apportioning relation, of who was what to whom. A woman stopped me in a park where I went with Sangha; she had a son his age. She wondered if she could love someone not related to her by blood. Her son was conceived in vitro. She really wanted me to answer her question.

Are poets related genetically? Or are they made by way of similar strands of DNA, and then adopt each other? The torque of synapse from direct address to punch line suggests yes. The poetry gene is clearly recessive, popping up at random chance moments in the larger population, causing no small amount of distress (existential and otherwise) to its carriers. We are the kids who don't know about each other until there's an odd early a.m. call or facebook post that suggests we might share a parent. Maybe that parent is assigned us by Harold Bloom, but most likely we can't understand each other (misprision, baby!) because we didn't share four walls and an Oldsmobile. But there's no statute of limitations on this recognition scene, with all its joys and disappointments, its promise of getting out of time, only to fall back into it. Our cousin ended up choosing her late-birth-father's wife over her half!! biological sisters. It's like that with families, the choices forced upon us by politics. Or the way institutions bind us together as parents, siblings, and kids over the space of decades until we don't need to go to meetings, because everything we would say is there in the room already, hanging not as possibility but as what simply would be. When I meditate, my brain starts off that way, full of conversations remaining from 3 a.m. wake-up-to-pee time, a choreography of sounds more chaotic than those in "Truck Stop," where Glenn Gould goes to a diner, and overhears voices as if they were part of a Bach Fugue. I often wish there had been more fugue states in my life; at least then, there's focus amid all the remembering and forgetting and counterpoint of voices. Once I walked miles in New Haven in one--some guy had made me angry--and only later did I realize that had been it. So unlike Bach. Bach was what soothed me as a teenager, because he was complicated but still made sense. States render everything into static.

Somewhere in the book there's a discussion of nothing, probably related to Cage and his silences, and I'm thinking that the most difficult course requirement I gave my students this semester is to spend 10 minutes a day doing nothing. One said she'd never done nothing before, another that he just kept thinking, and was that ok? One woman said she kept thinking about how many pages of her reading she could do. So I suggested that she take her 10 minutes out of Facebook times and she confessed. The woman who said she'd never done nothing before disappeared from the class, as did the woman who might have been the man arrested for prostitution in 2003. Why are you so nosy, my daughter asked, looking everyone up on the computer, so I point out that she's being nosy when she asks. It's true, I like the way the internet imitates thought, but not the way its creativity erases ours, all those links following each other like flash metaphors without the synapses that might hatch them. Not the nada who art in nada. There's more there than that. But soft purple flower cheeks at the pond that spill into the olive green water, then sink. Radhika gets on the elevator with me and smiles at the colleague I don't like. "He talked to you because I was there," she said once in her crazy wise way. And I've acknowledged him ever since.

LIII

When I was young, we moved every three years. You
could set your watch to it. It's been mostly convenient.

We made one big move when I was a kid that shook me more than I realized then. Looking back, it was like a boundary fence beyond which things got more confusing and full of strange and violent melancholy. At the time, I only remember I wanted to say I did not want to move but did not allow myself to say so. Not that it would have mattered. This section of John's poem asks the question, "Have you had a good life?" one he returns to over and again, reframing it only slightly. Sometimes it's called "happiness." One of my students last semester wrote about how his parents want him to be happy in the life he chooses. I asked him how he defines "happiness" and he looked at me like I was nuts. But really, I asked. There are researchers who study this! What do we mean when we say the word "happy"? When my daughter scored a goal in soccer once, I got up on the sideline and started singing "I'm happy!" (Pharrell Williams-style). Afterwards, she gave me stink-eye. "Mom, NEVER EVER sing like that again." But I was happy, just then, without knowing how to define it. Just was.

I wonder if Douglas Crase has moved since he sent me that kind note in the 1990s. Should I write him back now? Should I send him this blog post and say we were talking about you and that book of poems you wrote that we all remember, but so little after. "What we bring back is the sense of the size of it," he writes in "Blue Poles." It's the length of his lines and Galleher's that made me think of that genetic connection between them, the discursive moving toward something--an idea, a shaped sensation--the brain's foraging in what's left of Stevens's dump. The the.

King Lear enters _The Little Prince_

[After the social worker who visits my mother once every two or three weeks wrote to say she'd been showing mom a pop-up version of The Little Prince, I ordered one. Over the past few days I read the book, which is as gorgeously made as it was written by Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, alongside King Lear. And then a small character with a yellow scarf came to tell me the story of how King Lear entered the little prince's world . . . Much language is taken from Ste-Exupery and Shakespeare. The mistakes are all mine, as we say in acknowledgments.]


It took me a long time to understand where he came from. King Lear, who asked so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones anyone else asked him. It was things he said quite at random that, bit by bit, explained everything. For instance, when he first caught sight of an airplane . . . he asked: "What's that thing over there?"

When told that the plane had fallen out of the sky, he asked what planet it was from.

"Of course," he said of the airplane, "that couldn't have brought anyone from very
far . . . " And he fell into a reverie that lasted a long while. Then, taking a sheep out of his pocket, he plunged into contemplation of his treasure.

"You see me here, you gods a poor old man
As full of grief as age, wretched in both."

Something about his daughters was amiss but he would not draw them, nor even the castles they lived in. Another, I suspected, was houseless, wandering in a foreign (oh hard-to-spell!) land, exiled in more than word.

Lear liked the fox and the flower, but not the drunkard or the vain man who looked only and ever for approbation. He was vain, but he was also wise like the fox, lonely like the flower; his sense of place was a dark planet ("cerebral and dark," according to Netflix) on which he propped himself, bare and unforked. The drunkard and he could have talked story: what is it about shame? I'd have asked them, but neither drunk nor King could look beyond his bottle or word hoard. For a demented man, Lear sure seemed to carry around a lot of language. Paranoia's a fertile muse, but she also enters the drought years, rendering earth a cracked slab unbefitting to a sovereign's looping locution.

But the master sees himself not so. "Here I stand your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man." He cannot count the stars, nor possess them, because he owes them his jangled moods, his love of piercing light, his debt to eyes that stay in his head. Sad news about his buddy Gloucester: the dead holes in his head, the failed (if ably assisted) suicide, the inability to die even when you or he ordain it. If to be sovereign means you get to choose, then neither Lear nor his friend are so.

Enter the lamplighter. We more than suspect he's Edgar, playing another's self (ragged beyond nounship), cold in the vog of a farther micro-planet. He cannot not light his lamp; his lamp cannot not go out in the dark. Does Gloucester know this? Gloucester cannot see, but Edgar is a more than able narrator. "Father, for you are that, this planet's always on the limn of darkness, save the man who cannot sleep for lighting the lamp."

Lear abhorred snakes, took refuge on mountaintops. He fancied himself a thinker, unprovoked by daily needfulness. But the snake kept slithering, and two daughters passed notes from desk to desk, conspiring havoc. They were not flowers, at least not those he wanted on his nightstand. So many thorns, as if they needed protection from him. From him? He was just a sojourner, a man who gave things away, making inheritance while the sun shone on his white beard.

The railroad seemed one way out, though it hardly crossed the planet borders without enormous slings. Bad engineering made them slingshots, and trains transgressed the very skies, bearing screaming children, angry commuters, releasing coal as acidic rain in tunnels between stars. Don't tell the businessman; he might become more generous with his constellations.

Lear got off at a distant station. No one worked in the building. A water fountain had died long ago. The filing cabinets were full of old teaching aids: How the Pilgrims Came to Plymouth Rock, The Pioneers in Wagons, one with a picture of a sad chief. This did not seem right, nor did it satisfy any thirst he had. He left the station and its paper heaps and walked out into sand fields. A pilot appeared, accoutered in cap and leather flying bag. He too was lost.

There was a happy ending, at least for a time. Using dowsing sticks, they found a spot, unmarked by stone or twig, dug until they reached a vein of water. They drank from the same bucket, sharing more than the cold water. But then the daughters came, and their retinues, and their resentments, even the youngest one's recovered love. There were swords and bitter words, nothing water could wash away, not yet. Only the pilot escaped, muttering something about ripeness, about extremity, about trumpets. He took with him what memories there could be, left the stage a motley fool. What Lear had not already forgotten, forgot Lear.

And no grown-up will ever understand such a thing. Never.

























[See Old Women Look Like This for more experiments in which very old people are put in children's stories.]

A Generous Grammar: Joe Brainard's _I Remember_ and the Shared Sentence

Yesterday, my introductory class discussed Joe Brainard's I Remember, that hypnotic, impolite, relentless book, at once memoir and long poem, assertion and invitation to participate. A couple of the students remarked on how long it takes to read the book because it awakens the reader's own memory centers. No theory of reader response should exist without a public performance of this text; call and response would be best. Gospel choir even better.

"I remember" is starkly present tense. Memory is what takes the place of the present because we can't live in it while we're remembering things. It's the moment when all the tenses jostle for position, like small children at the fun fair, angling for the next ride. Brainard's book is no ode, but it performs the activity of calling into being something that is not there. Oh parental rubbers! Oh movie theater molestation! Oh Marilyn Monroe! Oh house keys!

The students do not remember what Brainard remembers--the ice box turned refrigerator, the death of JFK, 1950s fashion moments--but they recognize themselves in the structure of his memories, which are sentences. We may not share the content, but we share the grammar of the sentence, "I remember peach fuzz." (You won't find that in the book, that I remember.)

Which brings me back to what matters about the loss of memory. If my mother remembers the phrase, "I'm glad you called and everything is all right," I presume that she remembers what that phrase means. Am I right? When she forgets how to say it but says "I understand," what does she understand? Can understanding be anything but past tense, even if that tense has a short duration? Is memory important because it endures, or seems to, even as it changes like oral transmissions of history? Yet lacking a memory makes one seem especially static. Are stasis and endurance the same? Maybe, maybe not. There was something creative about the act of forgetting, when one person's life story came to inhabit another's; in later Alzheimer's there is no creation, only erasure, or what has been erased. But something endures, the body of the person who held onto memories and can be remembered by us. Person as memory box. Memory body.

Tenses: when I see my two small classes, I think I will remember enjoying them; I know they will have been among my last small classes. We are losing seven colleagues to retirement this year--the first of many such years, our demographics being what they are--with no funding to replace any of them. Write ten "I will have remembered" phrases. "I would want to have remembered," "I will have tried to forget." These will have been the days. And yesterday an email came to us about massive cuts in the UH Library.

My other (400-level) class, which is currently in Shakespeare sonnet boot camp, performed sonnets in groups with rhythmic accompaniment (an ipu, some sticks). We talked the first week about the significance of the little words in the sonnets, the words that indicate a turn in argument and whose importance is signified by a change in rhythm or tone. "When . . . then . . . then . . . but if" forms the skeleton for sonnet #30, a sonnet about memory, judgment, economics, recompense. The art of the little word did not begin with Gertrude Stein; Shakespeare was there with his quiver of one syllable articles both definite and in- . One of the groups pointed every time they got to a reference to "him" (in another sonnet). That's what the words do. They point, appoint, posture, gesticulate, perform for and in us.

__________

I met a retired woman at Kaiser the other day whose parents had lived most of their adult lives in the South Pacific, sending their daughter back to Hawai`i to be educated. She was telling me a story about going to an education conference over a decade ago and meeting a woman who separated everyone into groups--Asian American, African American, Mexican American. My interlocutor's question to this woman had been, "do you consider yourself German American? Your name is Schultz." "But my name is Schultz," I said to her.

Her mother lived so long on atolls that she told her daughter to bury her where she could not see the ocean. Not wanting to say, "but you'll see nothing in any case," the good daughter buried her mother where she could see the Ko`olau.

Our names came up on the board. "There we are," she said.

__________