RED CEDAR REVIEW RED CEDAR REVIEW RED CEDAR REVIEW VOLUME SEVENTEEN, Spring, 1985 Copyright 1985 by Red Cedar Review CONTENTS Jan Zerfas My Father’s Pears.........................................................1 the word “Jew” on my lips like lipstick...............2 Peter Wild Real Saints....................................................................4 Marrying Rich.................................................................5 Annie Davidovicz Sex-Walks......................................................................7 Inches Below My Navel...............................................8 Dad’s Store..................................................................10 Leonora Smith The Simple Solution..................................................12 Laurel Speer Long John in Bed With Silver Head........................18 Hannah Stein Living On the Other Side Of the Line...................21 Carol Morris Lunch on the Lodge..................................................22 I Try To Distract Myself..........................................24 The Year of the Rat Cont........................................25 Chris Hotts The Birthday Party....................................................26 Judy’s Lotto...............................................................28 A white shirt for a white car...................................30 thomas gladysz Canadian Perspectives: Conversation with Robert Kroetsch and Eli Mandel.............................31 Kathy Crown Lunar Cycles...............................................................38 Undercurrent..............................................................40 On Riding the CATA Bus.........................................42 William Palmer Humping Curious George..........................................44 Letter to Kirk Douglas..............................................46 A Squirrel Without A Tail........................................47 Jackie Carlson A Good Cleaning Out..............................................48 Brenda Miller The Story After The Poem.....................................50 Maria Holley Clippings................................................................52 Richard Kostelanetz Epiphanies..............................................................59 Jim Cartwright The Moon Enters An Orange Blood Factory . .60 Magic Pepperminted Women Sits on Rosemaryed Chicken.............................................62 Heeswa Gingerly Dusts A Shadowy Brain ... 64 Dieter Weslowski Zorro.......................................................................67 john lee hall alleged love poem..................................................68 gene..........................................................................70 lanie.........................................................................72 Dave Swan June Women in January.......................................74 Swan........................................................................76 Hello Poem number one (minus the chant)... .78 Alison Zink tresses . . .tresses . . . tresses...................................79 thomas gladysz Catching up a “Bitter Buddhist:” An Interview with Allen Ginsberg........................82 Lyn Lifshin Middlebury.............................................................90 Fay Whitman Manus Dinner at the San Jeronimo.............................91 John Ditsky Keepsakes ..............................................................92 Nick Thorndike Donating.................................................................93 Cheryl Vossekuil The Blind Lifeguard..............................................94 The Testing of Values...........................................96 Simon Perchik untitled....................................................................99 Barbara Drake The Duck..............................................................100 Darcy Wessendorf How Odd..............................................................102 untitled..................................................................103 Lee Kottner Wielding the Iron.................................................104 Swimming: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny ....................................106 Wrapping Pennies.................................................108 Mary Tisera At the Carnival.....................................................109 The Travelers........................................................110 Harry Crane Walking to a Babe................................................112 Marcus Cafagna Dinosaurs..................................................................116 thomas gladysz The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13: A Review . . 118 Contributor’s Notes....................................................120 Editor’s Page ...............................................................124 Jan Zerfas MY FATHER’S PEARS My father said that the pears would ripen in a week. But I found one has to rearrange the fleshy fruit in order to help each to ripen, finding the softest, yellow ones and placing them on top of those unripened, as if turning stones. Then, while gleaning, my father assumes that I don’t know how to pick them- “Break the stem,” he says, “so that you don’t take a branch as well.” Then he tells me about an auction where he saw miner’s lamps, orchard sprayers, a spinning wheel. He wonders why someone collected miner’s lamps in Allendale, Michigan. He looks for green ones wearing rouge. These pears are hard as the pears we peeled last summer, too impatient to allow each to ripen, thinking they would swell in the mason jars over winter, like sea urchins, skinning our hands and knuckles on stoney pears. Now I wait like a wasp for the honeyed smell of pears. I wait until they appear like orange zinnias or brown mums, turning each in the basket like small planets which orbit and eclipse at my touch. 1 Jan Zerfas the word “Jew” on my lips like lipstick Whenever my sister or I bargained on a Victorian engagement ring or azalea festooned plates or marked down black denim Vanderbilt jeans at rummage sales, my father would call us his ‘little Jewesses’ his ‘tight Shebas’ as say that we were in his footsteps if we could talk that Jew or that shyster down. Yet my sister, dark like Anne Frank in a light haired family, could make him angry whenever she asked if great grandmother, her namesake, the one who gave bread made with porkfat to the Jewish laborers who worked her farm, was Jewish. The word “Jew” was not one of her words or bread that she would eat. She lied to her workers, saying that her bread was made without lard, without porkfat. And even my father’s great uncles were Jews though in the family portrait of the uncles holding a guitar and mandolins, a series of crescent moons composing a small orchestra, I cannot tell my father’s father from his brothers. Or the Jew who stole his mother’s stocks during the depressions and cheated their brother of the farm in Byron Center. 2 Everyone knew they hated Jews. Like a badly performed play, a Jew never bought my grandfather’s potatoes again after my father stole an orange he savored from a Jew. The word “Jew” was not one of my grandfather’s names, but an orange, stolen, that he could never walk by without hating. The “Jew” who bid for the potatoes was a Jew because he claimed the bid included the price of the expensive potato crates. He was a “Jew” because he lied. I never understood why the word “Jew” was not one of my father or grandfather’s names. Why dark haired girlfriends my father disliked were Jews. Why anyone who bargained him down or was thrifty was a Jew. Why every time he saw an orange he thought of the fruit he had stolen from a Jew. A word, a name, I want to be one of my names. A word never spoken in my family without hatred, a word I want forgiveness for to be a word on my lips like lipstick or tassels hanging on my mirror or a corsage on an overcoat. A word that I wear easily as a mola, the design radiating outward like an animal or a wedding ring I wear on my finger, ruby red, but a word that is milk never served with meat. 3 Peter Wild REAL SAINTS Suffering from dyslexia all his life, those fish that lie still for hours to squirm, shoot off at his approach into the holes at the bottoms of pools, educated saints at the approach of evil, musical notes from the footsteps of the composer so that even up on tiptoes he can’t compose, He spends his weekends instead getting a grip on himself whittling the lures that will bring them sailing out toward what is their own, the condiments they’ve never had, But realizing at last that they won’t do, gold spoons in evening dresses, Christmas ornaments, a favorite geography teacher of years ago carved into a tiny Indian with feathers streaming behind him, for real saints only imitations of food, the appearances of bizarre planets that thereafter wreck their leisure, At last true craftsman that he is carves the things themselves of the softest wood that will float on the walls of his living room, Then sits back admiring them, ignoring his family who stamps their feet wanting not simulacrums but food born from water. 4 Peter Wild MARRYING RICH No one wants to waste money on bad cookies as if coming home from school every day in your best dress just holding a bag of them would be your glory, your trip to Riga; at the edge of town all the boys fall down into the ditches, begin playing their violins about it preparing for their careers in restaurants. Yet justice demands that a brooding God punish the rich. After all, He has spent so much of His time glowering over landscapes, a Brillo pad not quite reaching definition racing back and forth through the air, so the kids out with their dogs, even city officials in their buildings, stop, point, say “What was that?” that when he looks down, sees a cornfield especially to His liking, almost perfect, so that He pauses in the sky, finger to lips wonders, “Did I forget I did that?” and grabs some poor artist by the nape of the neck, says replicate that, His replevin that he wants to hurry off with back to heaven. But what is he to do? He can’t even afford paints, and if that has made him mad in the past, now he’s madder than ever. So God’s instrument, you see him prostrate, a decalcomania who will never be what he’s supposed to represent, lift him up, take him away to the mountains, no matter how he protests, lock him in. Then set off, your vitreous horse between your legs, the daughter who has all the expenses of her college education paid for but still has to live through it, and high, high up in the peaks where beyond the other peaks are angels 5 holding hands, dancing on the distant horizon, get off, wrap yourself in your favorite serape, sleep for ages waiting for what is least expected, the strains of a new piano concerto by Schubert wafting up from the cabin through the aspens, the memory of the best meal you’ve ever imagined. 6 Annie Davidovicz SEX - WALKS Walking home together, you trip and fall off the curb recover beautifully before I have a chance to offer concern or laugh, an Olympic figure skater, falling pushing on smiling in the end You are smooth You talk well your power of conversation intrigues I do not talk well, when I do. Words hesitant, trapped a small brown bat underneath a stack of newspapers, alive Why do you walk home with me? When I was 17, a curly-red-haired boy said, “I want to make you rain.” I thought the statement profound at 17, but I did not rain then. Now I want to make you rain I want to shower you with drops of lilies-of-the-valley, hoping you will never become an old man who steals strawberries from other pickers’ rows Share your berries with me Take one, the biggest the darkest Put your mouth over one half and give the other half to me Annie Davidovicz INCHES BELOW MY NAVEL My first white hair appeared, dirty white as the November sky as my father’s left-over strands, but ungreased, inches below my navel I noticed it after you left you, beautiful, dishonest black swan, unseen I have only seen white swans one time off the coast of Bois Blanc Island egg white froth bodies drifting over icy Great Lake waves not close enough to feed or feel Black swans I have never encountered as birds Pale coil of years glowing and surrounded by black And I blame it on you going and playing your dark guitars the varnished wood reflecting my face avoiding speech with music avoiding eyes with notes avoiding touch with strings 8 Infuriating Giving me gray a silver heart small roses, black-tipped from age You made me put these ugly pieces of you in a garbage bag to empty onto your rich brown comforter And now you retaliate inches below my navel. 9 Annie Davidovicz DAD’S STORE My father’s store was signless The neighborhood knew it was there knew he sold meat and beer and candy High, textured ceilings, peanut-shell colored, unpolished hardwood floors, dirty, dark brown I liked to go barefoot there no one told me not to I liked to see my bony feet dirty, dark and brown. Carcasses hanging in an old wooden cooler with Coke and Mountain Dew and Nehi, he cut the beef and pork on a naturally greased block with a large cleaver, then displayed it in a glass case on white metal trays Chops, ribs, steaks and liver bloody and perfect, he had good meat Sold wrapped in white paper that hung on a roll, the same paper I used for crayons and water colors I never drew the meat then and covered my nose at the raw smell when getting colas Teenage women liked to be in the store in their red and hot pink halters, cut-offs, bandana-headed and flirting with my father who already had five daughters and a wife He is a “ladies man” he sold them cigarettes. 10 I was always too young to work there and was given bags of candy bits-o-honey sweet tarts malted milk balls and the black jacks that I grew to like as I grew I was popular in kindergarten - the store was passed on the sidewalk home At fourteen, my mouth was a showpiece of black silver He is retired and our yard is now forest green instead of dry weed We have fresh parsley and beets Lilies of the valley and sapphire morning glories have invaded the sides of the garage Coral geraniums surround yews and I am growing to like these cemetery flowers despite their bitter scent and commonness. The store is somebody else’s Party Store I can’t remember what the sign says. No meat New coolers and a clean, tan linoleum floor. An antique cash register sits in our basement next to last year’s saved begonias. 11 Leonora Smith THE SIMPLE SOLUTION from Dead Man’s Shoes One quart scotch already gone. It’s no wonder Bill staggers, slips on the grease that has dripped from the crack in the faulty oven door. “Why don’t you fix the damn door,” he says, slamming it. The screws give way, the whole front falls off and clangs to the floor, the rattle of something giving for the last time. Clumps of insulation slide to the linoleum, the invisible particles probably already snagging the air pockets in their lungs like fish hooks. Inside the oven the casserole splashes, settles. Jean wants to push him in like Gretel’s witch. The door’s been falling open for years. She props it with a broom, makes nothing that needs to rise. This seems to be the story of her life, pared down ambitions, settling for things that don’t need temperature control. He reminds her of the pioneers, women who could bake bread over an open fire. She plans to wad yeast dough into one of the electric burners, just to deoajkf demonstrate. Everything else rises as the door falls. Her stomach leaps from the smell of green aftershave mixed with scotch and cigar smoke, gusts of rancid grease from the oven. The house has a smell you can’t scrub away, like the breath of a person with terrible periodontal disease even after he’s brushed his teeth. The smell of living with a man who won’t fix the oven door but never stops complaining of the food. She wants to list the injuries he’s already done - the afternoon she caught him in bed with Caroline, the time he snorted his share of the cocaine and hers, too, the night jobs she worked while he sat on his ass cheering for the Lions, the waste of her youth, her smooth skin, her poor spreading feet on such a lost cause. How when she was in the hospital almost dead he was too drunk to get there. His face has true pain on it. He has burned his hand badly on the door, and is running it under the water. If she starts her list now, what with the pain and the scotch, he’s sure to collar her 12 and shove her against the wall. Hands on her neck, taking revenge on all inanimate objects which to him are female like ships, making her directly responsible. He is bigger than she is and nastier, but luckily, not so quick. “I’m going out,” she says, before he gets the chance. He’s busy nursing his hand. She has twenty-two dollars in her wallet and plans on driving until gas sucks up the last dime. She’d like to smash him. She could smash the car -- that’s in his name - but she makes all the payments. The books, car loans, the weight of her grandmother’s antiques. They’re so far in debt even their life insurance wouldn’t pay it off. The only thing that keeps her here is her job and the price of a moving van. She drives to the lake. It’s not a lake, it’s a little pond, but that’s the best they can do here. The late afternoon light catches on the ice like coins, as if you could put your hands in and come out fixed for life. It makes her eyes tear. Objects. They’re nothing but trouble, weights like cement blocks tied to a man’s leg before he’s tossed into the river. Sometimes she imagines coming home and finding him dead on the floor. But he won’t hurt himself. He doesn’t have the impulse to suicide, which may account for the reason they don’t get along. Whining seems to keep him happy, while she pulls the covers over her head and mutters about death and being put in the hospital, where everyone on her side of the family seems to have been but Jean. She sees herself as a perpetual visitor to the shufflers, doped up and stupidly happy, their paper sandals making eerie mouse-like noises on the linoleum floor, while she rushes around to buy them necessities like tweezers and little scissors for cutting away nose hair, or a certain red blouse on which they have fixated. Taking calls seven times a day to make sure the gas is turned off. They come out nice and rested, fresh looking if a little slow and jerky around the jaw from the drugs, while she just keeps getting up and going to work in the morning. A nice rest is what she could use. She cries a while, remembering Raymond, the great love of her life, wanting to reach out and touch his neck where his hair met his shirt. They rode aimlessly around the country, pretending that marathon travel would keep them from touching one another. She hasn’t seen him for years. Now when she dreams 13 of him, he is like a zombie. She has to lead him around by the arms, his head tipped down as if he is asleep on his feet. She might as well dream of a stump for all the good it does her. No sex dreams, no secret orgasms waking her up with a smile. If there is a name for female wet dreams, she’s never heard of it, but for much of her life they’ve been a secret source of optimism. Maybe what you can dream about, you can have. And now when she’s at the age where they don’t even embarrass her, no more. She wouldn’t twitch if Robert Redford sucked her toes. If Richard Burton read sonnets to her. It is Raymond’s fault and her fault, but mainly Bill’s, who could have brought out the best in her nature with kindness and saved her, but who couldn't be bothered. On whom she’s wasted the cherry years of her life. If she hadn’t married him, she might have married someone at least rich and hard-working enough so that she didn’t have to work three jobs and could have afforded the five children the fortune teller promised her, but for sure someone gentle and loving like Raymond who wouldn’t snort all her cocaine, an expensive and unusual treat, and who didn’t sit in front of the TV farting at the umpires. There is no point in sitting here looking at the light. It’s too late for her; there’s only so much damage a person can take before she is ruined. She pulls across the street to the party store. Three quarts of LITE for $1.99, so she buys three. ‘Tarty Store”: another hoax like Valentine’s Day, two cars in every garage. The clerk barely looks up from the baseball game he watches on the little TV behind the counter. “Robbed,” he says. They should hold up little cards, she thinks, and then the men watching won’t have to use their brains to think of what to say. “Blind man.” “What a screwing.” She hefts her bag and is almost out of there when a man staggers in and bumps into her. His eyes misfocus like crazed, unborn twins rotating in the womb. “Fuck you, Alice,” he says. “Give me a case of Strohs.” He stinks. His pockets jingle with change like a bus driver. He comes toward her, backing her into the magazine rack. Then he reaches into his pocket and gets a handful of glinting copper with a little silver in it, and dumps it on the counter next to her. 14 Some of it rolls to the floor, spinning smaller and smaller circles that thunk into the puddles at her feet like defunct whirlpools. She bends over - she can’t help it - and suddenly more money rains on her head so hard that it hurts. Money plinks against the store window, and rolls all around. “Off your ass, Alice, ” the man screams. “You lazy bitch.” She throws the money back at him and runs as the guy behind the counter looks up from a high fly. “Hey,” he yells. “Hey.” She leaps into the car and sits there, panting, and pops a fast beer. The man has fallen into a Diet Coke display, and the bottles explode against the floor. The clerk grabs him by the shirt sleeve, keeping the counter in between them. She wonders if it will end in murder, and realizes she doesn’t care. Most of her life she would have been compelled to be in there, trying to get past them to the phone to call the cops. Her heart beats even faster, realizing it wouldn’t hurt her if both of them were dead. They’re nothing to her, she tells herself. She’s sick of getting in the middle of things trying to help people. No one helps her. Maybe Raymond could help her. He calls her once a year or so, in the middle of the night, even though he has four children now. But he is always drunk. You wonder what’s wrong with you when the people you love only speak to you when they are drunk. If they could be any help at all. It doesn’t seem likely. But how can you help yourself? If she goes home now, and Bill’s drunk enough, he’ll reach for her. There’s no rest, even in bed. It is all the same as someone you don’t even know, for no reason, throwing handfuls of coins at you, telling you to get fucked. The clerk has more or less subdued the drunk, and in the distance, she hears sirens. She can’t stand it anymore. She starts to shake. After all these years she can’t squeeze her eyes closed and pretend she’s someone else, a woman with a different life, a woman who somebody might care if she had coins thrown at. It’s getting dark. She doesn’t like it here, and is woosey and light-headed and doesn’t want to talk to the cops, but where do you go when there’s nowhere safe? She cries as she drives away. 15 When she gets home it is already dark, and the doors are locked, chained and bolted from the inside. Upstairs, she sees light gathering and ungathering, the flicker of the TV. She pounds on the door. Nothing. She pounds some more. “Let me in, god damn it.” It is very cold, and the Christmas lights next door twinkle. The neighbors are listening. Good, she thinks. They’re going to get an earful. No answer. Upstairs, the TV still flickers. She hopes the insulation has lifted in one motion from the oven door and jammed itself into his lungs like wads of lethal cotton. The bastard. She gets in the car and chugs the last beer, feeling lifted by it, even that little booze on an empty stomach. When she’s finished, she goes out to the garage and gets her tools. She plugs in the orange extension cord, which looks like a day-glo snake in the night. Bill’s up there, not even watching, expecting she’ll be sobbing by the time he gets around to opening the door. This is how he is: let them cool their heels, he says. Then she starts on the door. It’s easy to get through the thin panels. Anybody could get in this house, she thinks - all the times she has been alone, sleeping. Then she gets through the bottom panel, she reaches in and unlocks the door. Bill is standing at the bottom of the stairs. His face is white. He looks really sick, as if he is having a heart attack, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even like the man. In the middle of the floor is the top section of her grandmother’s bookcase, the glass smashed in. A present he left there, just to show her. She looks at him. She wouldn’t walk across the street to tell him his shoes were on fire. She wouldn’t tell him if she knew the brakes on the car were bad, and he was driving down Highway 1. She’s full of herself now, her heart thumps. Twelve years they’ve been together, and this is it. Wow. She’s pumped. If he comes at her, she’ll go for him. “That’s my grandmother’s bookcase,” she yells over the noise. “Fuck your grandmother’s bookcase,” she thinks he says. “You get half of everything,” she says, moving toward him. “Half.” When she hits a metal strip on the bookcase there are leaps and sparks, and she begins to think it might be fun to do the 16 car. That would take care of the payments. Nrrrrr. Nrrr. She keeps her back toward the wall so he can’t get at her. The two ends of the bookcase balance together for a few seconds, then split into two very satisfactory halves. She’s good at it. He can’t say she’s taking the biggest piece. He backs away from her, into the living room and keeps backing as she starts on the couch. She looks at the Christmas tree and thinks of a new life, a career in Oregon cutting lumber. The upholstery slows her down, snagging, catching, and he thinks her attention has lapsed and sidles to the right, trying to get behind her. She looks him in the eye and he backs off. She hasn’t looked him in the eye for years. He should be proud, she thinks. It’s the perfect solution. Everything divided up fifty-fifty, perfectly equal, without hiring a lawyer. He may not like it at the moment, but he won’t come at her again. She can see it in his face. At least not while she has the chain saw in her hands. 17 Laurel Speer LONG JOHN IN BED WITH SILVER HEAD You’re Long John Silver squinting through wild eyebrows at the Admiral Benbow Inn, tapping me out on your one peg leg. I’m Jim Hawkins, map plastered to my flat stomach, back to a crumbling sea wall. Thunderclap. Ben Gunn grabs me and I’m gone. Clip broken, squint a mystery never solved, connections severed in this old sea tale. I lie beside you in bed your naked back curled away from me in sleep, pillow over your silver head. You seem almost vulnerable, a throwback to the boy you must’ve been. Yet, I know, too, you’re an amputator. I know when you go to work just showered and shaved in a clean, white permaprest shirt, there’s always a chance this might be the day you face a patient with bone saw and scissors, bloody retractors and sutures. 18 I know you don’t like this part of your work. I know when you come home gray around the eyes and chin, washed out, so tired your head drops in mid-sentence and you sleep briefly between bites, you’ve had to face the terrified eyes of a 12 year old and the sure knowledge a prosthetic device will never be as good as the original. But better than the old wooden kind, Long John, Ahab. Not many people lose their legs to a whale these days. More often old diabetics with gangrene, young men drunk on beer pinned beneath the crush of a 2 ton truck or sheared off by the steel of train wheels, bum on the rush who misses his grip. Still there is that in you, that capacity, that skill to take away a leg. It sits in your hands on hips or dropped to the seam of your wash and wear pants, palms soft and pink as new baby flesh from 10 minute scrubs, the faint trace of antiseptic powder under your fingernails. 19 I ask what they do with the parts. You tell me everything goes to pathology for biopsies, slides, specimen cuts. And finally down the chute to what? A garbage bin? Neat incineration? The miracle of regeneration played in polyphonic sound? You turn on the bed, fling out an arm, dead hand on my chest without purpose or meaning, only weight and size in sleep. I move it away, hiding my map against my stomach, stretching my feet to the wooden footboard, extending my legs as far as they’ll go, hanging onto my connections against this rending Long John, silver head with stainless knives for fingernails who shares my bed. 20 Hannah Stein LIVING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LINE I discovered a note not meant for me. Slowly I untied I and you, pulled sinuous body straight, spun them all into a ball of thread on my fingers. But it sprang open, unraveled, drew a line down the middle of my life. I stumble on. Owl-eyed I teach, cook, eat. But I am afraid. Of leafless branches that imprint a cold sky, a cursive of ropes on grass, a centipede running along a laundry basket. I fear a snake next might unwind from a pocket, retrace your writing. What I most dread is to go blind looking into your eyes. 21 Carol Morris LUNCH ON THE LODGE I’d scratch at my legs through my nylons but the boss is looking. The noon sun’s beating down on me like a billy club. Behind sunglasses my hangover is free to work. Spreading my knees a little wider apart under the full cotton skirt, I find my thighs are stuck to the seat cover. Jack is driving -- and we’re barreling down the John Lodge freeway like this hunk of shit is a motorcycle instead of the company car. On the doors a dayglo decal; a festoon of pink carnations and lily of the valley, the insignia for: PECKER BROTHER’S ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS Time for lunch, and I know the asshole will want to stop at a family restaurant like the Big Boy, or the Fairy Queene, where the hostesses are on quaaludes and the hamburgs taste like fly toxin. But the price is right. Sure enough, he pulls into the Country Cuisine parking lot at Livernois and Fenkell, and lets the engine die. As I stand up next to the car the blood rushes to my head in a heavy heap, I hope I don’t have to puke. 22 Christ, the Country Cuisine no alcohol, no bloody mary. Jack rolls down his rolled up sleeves, I pull up my skirt and we sidestep through the oil stains on the asphalt to the chartreuse tufted door. “Person‘s first,” Jack cracks, his gold tooth showing. He pulls open the door and waves me through. We sit opposite each other in a booth, flooping our over-sized menus. I order the Executive Weenie, cole slaw, extra sour cream and black olives. Jack orders the Philadelphia Lawyer, french fries and a slab of apple pie. I thought of the dream I had about Emily Dickinson. I’d gone to a sandwich shoppe and found a hot dog named Emily. It came with chips and a kosher dill. We sit waiting for our orders, watching each others hair fly around in the electric fam breeze. Outside the tires hiss on the July pavement. I wrap my hand around the glass of ice water, Jack loosens his tie. The sandwiches come and I battle with the bulk of my bun; the oozing sour cream and quickly give up, ask for another Vernors and an ashtray. Jack bites his Lawyer repeatedly, then leans across the table at me and says with his mustard ringed lips: “Babe, you don’t eat enough, how about we order a couple of Monte Criscos for dessert?” 23 Carol Morris I TRY TO DISTRACT MYSELF by putting on my Niagra Falls emblazoned beanie and sticking out my tongue at the mirror, but in the next room, in his study, there’s a dead mouse. I noticed it on my way back to the typewriter from the kitchen. A field mouse is swelling at the foot of his drawing table; a grey carnival on the brown rug. He’s still outdoors. Fifty feet up, tuck-pointing the chimney, his bootprints blurring across the roof in the late March drizzle goddamn it. Everytime I sit down to write, something dies. 24 Carol Morris THE YEAR OF THE RAT CONT......... There are two kinds of women; indoorsy and outdoorsy. Doris Day ...in Mexico City robbers are throwing live rats through open windows and I’m here trembling from the effects of the office, of the courtrooms... rubbing my sore forehead with a swatch of my Betty Boop tee shirt Outside chartreuse buds splotch at the ends of the crab-apple tree, a cat pisses near a toad. A purpled crocus strangles in a crack in the patio. I’ve got a yen for aquamarine waters, silver sands against the backs of my legs... sunlight jumping through the gold hoops of my earrings... but I’ll settle for the couch. Watch how easily I can lift the Guide to the Maximus Poems by Charles Olson with only one hand; how with the other I can lift a fat Califronia strawberry up to my bow lips... 25 Chris Hotts THE BIRTHDAY PARTY My parents always loved birthday parties They gave me one almost every year At Farrell’s, the nearest ice cream parlor, Where chocolate ice cream on the floor Is cleaned up by someone paid to do it And who is paid to smile and sing Happy Birthday And tell you how cute you are And how grown up you look. The song is accompanied by a bang of the drum With the name of the restaurant Painted on it in big red letters Everyone in the restaurant Would sing along My face would be Redder than the cherry on top of the free sundae, Redder than the stripes on the waitresses’ vests, Redder than the letters on the drum, My face would stay hot until I was done with my sundae, The coolness of the ice cream climbing up to my face From my stomach And the white vanilla color paling my face to a light pink. Last Christmas Eve, After shopping at the mall With my father and my sister Who always shop at the last minute, When the crowds gather As if Jesus were going to be born at Oakland Mall, We went to Farrell’s one more time For a sundae. While my dad was in the bathroom, We told the waitress it was his birthday. 26 When he came back, The waitress brought his sundae, Crowned with a red cherry And the whole staff of red vested workers. Everyone sang Happy Birthday, This time to him. He laughed and turned Christmas red His cheeks like the Santa’s cheeks In the court of Oakland Mall. And like my cheeks During my childhood parties. 27 Chris Hotts JUDY’S LOTTO I found a penny On a tray Underneath a tipped over paper cup Swimming in a little pond of pepsi As if it were waiting for someone To come and fish it out. Judy told me she plays Lotto every week, Always the same number. A secret number, she wouldn’t tell anyone Like the combination of her locker In the bathroom Where she keeps her purple quilted coat And red and white striped knee socks Which she wears together, The knee socks visible to her calves. I only see her wearing them right before She punches out, After she has taken her uniform off Wet from the dish machine While she waits for the clock To click one more time, three o’clock. Judy said if she wins at lotto She would quit work And no longer flood the dishroom, With the sink hose So hard for her to control Which sprays on the floor As if Judy were trying to build an indoor ice skating pond. 28 But she would miss work, Miss having somewhere to go And people to talk to, Maybe she would stay Finish her skating rink, Even if she found a penny of her own On a cluttered tray. Drowning in ranch dressing A penny that would bring her enough luck To pick the right numbers To win at Lotto. 29 Chris Hotts A white shirt for a white car I ironed your white shirt Because I sometimes feel domestic, Sometimes want to do things for you, But I burned it, Leaving a brown scorched scar On the bottom Just above the tuck line A scar with a stitch mark That no surgery could erase. But you smashed up my car that night Not seeing the light That was blinking like an irritated eye Trying to wash away A piece of dust And not hearing my scream Which came too late anyway. The glass in the other car splintering Leaving four flat tires And perhaps a scar On that girl Who was only seventeen Like the one on your white shirt Which you were still wearing The night we traded A white shirt for a white car. 30 thomas gladysz CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES: CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT KROETSCH and ELI MANDEL The theme of The 22nd Conference in Modern Literature* was “Perspectives on English and Quebecois Canadian Literature.” As part of the conference, a number of prominent writers and critics came together to share their differing views on contemporary Canadian literature. Included were Margaret Atwood, Maria Clai-Blais, Robert Kroetsch and Eli Mandel, among others. I had the opportunity, on the first night of the conference, to talk with Kroetsch and Mandel about their perspectives. The following are excerpts from those conversations. *The conference, held annually at Michigan State University, took place October 4-6, 1984. GLADYSZ: In the United States, you are known for your work with boundry 2. How did you come to start a journal like boundry 2? KROETSCH: I taught at the State University of New York (at Birmingham) for 17 years, and about 1970 both Bill Spanos and I thought we might start a journal. It was Bill’s idea that we go with ‘postmodern.’ We had a great store of ignorance about what we were doing. We had to raise money and find contributors. It took us a year and a half to get going and become an internationally known journal of speculation about the postmodern. GLADYSZ: Eli Mandel has said of you that you were fundamental in introducing postmodern thought and theory into Canada. 31 KROETSCH: Theory, I would say. The idea of how you think about ‘postmodern.’ I suppose it influenced writers. Our basic premise was that something changed at the time of and after the second world war. We just wanted to speculate about what that change involved. I worked more from a literary model, Spanos more from philosophy. We worked well together. I suppose I did have an influence in establishing some of these ideas in Canada, because they were very natural to Canadian writing in a certain way. The Canadian writer had not been up against an overwhelming tradition of modern writing as they had in the States. You had Eliot and Pound and Hemingway and Faulkner. It was quite daunting for a writer 20 years ago; I don’t think they feel that now. Twenty years ago the Canadian writer felt a hodgepodge of influences, all kinds of things. A sense of hodgepodge is very natural to a postmodern stance. There was this kind of historical accident in that Canada was by nature already postmodern -- then I came along. GLADYSZ: Canada then, almost fell into postmodernism? KROETSCH: Yes, we did not have this powerful focussed literary history that the young American was up against 20 years ago. You can explain the existence of the postmodern in America as a resistance to that weight of tradition. There was a kind of natural alliance formed (between America and Canada) coming from a different ground to the same resolution. GLADYSZ: An issue in Canadian letters is the relationship between English Canadian writers and Quebecois Canadian writers. This conference addresses that issue. How do you see the terms of that relationship? KROETSCH: I think the notion of “us” versus “them” is over; there is a new sense of relationship. For one thing, both groups feel confident enough so that they can reach out. GLADYSZ: Are the Quebecois writers studied in English speaking Canada? 32 Robert Kroetsch Robert Kroetsch KROETSCH: A fair amount, a lot of us use them in translation. There is a big push in Canada right now to be in some sense bilingual. Though we haven’t done a good job of it, at least there is an awareness that wasn’t there before. In the last four or five years the tension has ended. We were reading a lot of French in English translation. Though they weren’t reading English translated into French, they are now. There is a major anthology being done of English Canadian poets into French. One of my novels, for instance, has just been translated into French. That wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. 33 GLADYSZ: How has this exchange of literatures filtered into popular culture? KROETSCH: That is a good question. I suspect it is happening pretty much at an academic level. Somebody like Rock Carrier has done that a bit. The French Canadians are always startled at who we read. We still read someone like Rock Carrier and they say “you are missing so many good writers.” There is a tough barrier. GLADYSZ: Does a conference like this help? KROETSCH: Sure, it does a lot of things. There is the first level where we might meet each other and talk, but there is a secondary level where a conference like this will have reverberations for ten years, for twenty years . . . like a ripple effect in water. GLADYSZ: Marshall McLuhan looms as the great Canadian export to American culture. Did you know McLuhan? KROETSCH: I met him once, I was on a panel with him. I think he is evidence I would point to to say Canada was by nature postmodern. He had a tremendous sense of all these things happening at once, the breakdown of hierarchy - he gave that a great sense of importance, and of media when many people were still dismissing media. GLADYSZ: Some see McLuhan as a kook, an aberration in a long line of aberrations from the 1960’s. Do you think McLuhan was ahead of his time? KROETSCH: He was ahead of his time. He is still ahead of his time for a lot of reasons. GLADYSZ: The export of American culture to Canada has often been complained of as a sort of cultural domination of Canada by America. How do you feel about such a complaint in terms of literature? 34 KROETSCH: That is a very difficult question, in that, in a sense, we are American writers. We work out of some of the same premises. The sense of being free of Europe is just as strong in Canada as it was for Mark Twain. We have a great sense of working out of local culture, to try to hear a local voice. But I suppose the great difference is that America’s first great fruition came in the 19th century, our first real fruition came in the 20th century. There is a horrible difference between those two centuries. In the 19th century you still had romanticism as a powerful literary force, you had a great confidence in what self is. You think of Whitman for instance. In the 20th century everything is in doubt. We doubt the self. We doubt the notions of truth and justice, that is very crippling. We think of Emerson as a great American thinker, I would think of McLuhan as a Canadian equivalent. Our fruition came a hundred years later than America’s and history has done some strange tricks. Figure without caption. GLADYSZ: What is your assessment of the relationship between the English Canadian writers and the Quebecois Canadian writers? MANDEL: I think the Quebecois writers are enormously important, and have posed a tremendous difference in our own lives as writers in English Canada. I don’t think we have come to terms with that difference at all. I think they are a dynamic active force, and we are passive. And, I don’t think we have realized the degree of difference that they have made as of yet. GLADYSZ: Have the Quebecois writers been likewise influenced by the English? MANDEL: Yes, I have talked with many Quebecois writers, but they have been resistant too. For a long time they refused to talk with us, but they have begun to come around. Well, I don’t want to put it that way, that sounds like they are forced. That is biased. 35 GLADYSZ: How do you see yourself within the English / Quebecois relationship? MANDEL: I did have some part early, in an attempt to start a dialogue in 1962. I was editor of a bilingual French / English anthology, Poetry ’62. In the same way, Elipse, a magazine by Doug Jones, has over the years presented translations of English poetry into French, and French poetry into English at the same time. I had something to do with that magazine at various stages, not very much by any means, but something. I think I have played a part in the attempt to establish communications. I don’t think we have been very successful from the English point of view. GLADYSZ: Do you forsee success? MANDEL: Yes. I think something remarkable has happened in Canada, the evidence for which is in the reaction to the present election. The present conservative government is French to a degree which is impossible to conceive of before the Trudeau era. It is now accepted that certain aspects of Canada will be French where they weren’t before. GLADYSZ: How do you see this conference contributing to the changing relationship between English and French Quebecois writers? MANDEL: I think this conference is part of a whole process. There are a significant number of French contributors at the conference, that is important. GLADYSZ: Do you feel that the change that is going on is disseminating through the whole of Canadian culture? MANDEL: I think it exists right now at an intellectual, academic level, at the political, administrative, bureaucratic level, and probably has certain manifestations at the social level. 36 Eli Mandel Eli Mandel GLADYSZ: Finally, Robert Kroetsch said earlier that he thought of Marshall McLuhan as the Ralph Waldo Emerson of Canadian letters. Did you know McLuhan? MANDEL: I knew Marshall McLuhan. He was one of the graduate teachers at York when I was an undergraduate. He was one of my consultants, I saw him on a regular basis; he was also one of my thesis examiners. In fact, he was an editor and advisor for Contexts of Canadian Criticism, a big anthology that I did. He made an enormous intellectual impact on life at the University of Toronto, I was very much aware of that. He is a tremendous presence in intellectual life in Canada. 37 Kathy Crown LUNAR CYCLES At dusk in my garden I stand among shadows of moonwort and melon and cucmber. Water drips from the moon from the broken clock in my kitchen. The dog next-door howls. I remember that dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. I believed that tropic Easter night stepping from a deserted cabana onto a rocky beach. That night I was baptized in the icy ocean of Guantanamo Bay. Newly cleansed by the salty brine, My soul scraped out and emptied, Aching, but filled with joy at my surrender, I watched a shining silver crab scuttling over wet black rocks stealing light from the moon. Only twelve, but I learned the danger of moist places. Now I refuse to be a Cancer, to have tides and magnetic fields and hormonal imbalances sway me - Always fearing the twelve year old Who is fascinated by Ouija boards And longs to wear flowing dresses, To be walking pregnant on the beach Her heart swinging like a gold pendulum pulled by the moon, by the waves, by the tide, Her child growing inside, recklessly, a Cancer, a complete giving over. 38 Emptying, of the Holy Ghost, or of lunacy, is a lunar activity performed at dusk in gardens, on beaches. Farmers who watch the moon know when to let things ripen fall off the tree ferment. Water drips from the moon from the mushrooms on my kitchen counter. I have learned that the danger of moist places is to embrace the body too much. 39 Kathy Crown UNDERCURRENT It has to be high tide and cold enough so that you turn blue and shiver and no one else will want to go with you. Then walk out waist high, careful not to let the bigger ones knock you down, and keep looking out to sea. (If you look back to shore where the waves seem to disappear you will be deceived.) You will know when it comes. If you try to fight it it will snap your neck back and your cheek will burn red and stinging. It will pull back and scrape your knees and thighs on the bottom and if you try to use your hands grains of glass and quartz will make ribbons of them. I know. Don’t cry out, it will only enter through your nose and mouth and eyes and then once inside it will spread a terror so great you cannot breathe any longer. I have found that the best way to handle it is to watch constantly. And when it comes, turn your back and close your mouth and eyes and nose and bend your head forward. Curl up into a ball and let it go over you. 40 And when it grabs you back do not fight, let it draw you under and over and farther and then - it will lift you to the surface. With practice you can ride it back to the shore which you have left very far behind and can hardly see any more. 41 Kathy Crown ON RIDING. THE CATA BUS I In winter darkness At six a.m. on Michigan and Grand blue exhaust fumes twist from humming blue and white buses their light spilling into the pre-dawn vacuum. They loom cavernous and leviathan breathing heavily and warmly, their humming an animal sound, welcome in cold and empty streets. Inside the soft yellow light heaters blow warm air among the grand canyon blue of cushioned high backed seats. A handful of regulars settle into separate spacious clouds as the doors comfortingly swing shut and the bus begins to roll smoothly down the avenue toward the rising sun climbing over a bridge where there are no trees, no telephone poles, no buildings, and the bus is climbing up into the just appearing clouds and we are flying, safe in the warm belly then to come back down and step into the cool sunlit realm of morning. 42 II Sulfurous evening settles down on Meridian Mall’s bus stop small buses circle the parking lot. Carbonic dusk falls, the six p.m. bus pulls up. Stifling heat blasts from the radiator, a radio thinly whines. Rasping monoxide doors open graying sides heave for air. The bus jerks toward the broken bottle skyline. The scrape of mud on the floors, insistent ringing of bells, the unavoidable leaning against bodies that are too close, past Fisher Body, oil drum heads other traffic and small buses then spewed out on South Logan Shaheen Chevrolet and staring into the red eyes of Jack Dykstra Ford’s big black bull as the yellow sky lowers. 43 William Palmer HUMPING CURIOUS GEORGE My three year old son makes love to Curious George. Before he naps he lies on top of the soft monkey and rides, his bony butt in bleached-out blue underwear pumping off an urge he doesn’t understand. But who does? I didn’t think it would start so soon. our babysitter, Molly, a fundamental Baptist, says he has the largest penis of a boy she’s ever seen. It doesn’t seem abnormal to me. But nothing seems abnormal; everything is eccentric sometime. Take me for example: I can’t urinate in front of anybody, not even my son (unless we’re outside at night when it’s raining). I was ten, I think, when I discovered the urge to stick my finger in my navel. My legs would tingle as if glass mobiles were inside them with wind blowing. I’d lie by the TV, watch Ed Sullivan, my hand inside my pajama top, legs tightening. I’d press inside the hole as though probing for a diamond. 44 Around midnight I wake my son to pee, so he won’t wet his bed. He often has a three year old erection. And he can control it. He shoots fast and straight, not like me. I usually start by forking into two streams that dribble beyond the rim. That’s why I sit down like a woman. Maybe I am drying up, growing brown fur inside. I don’t want to interfere with Curious George. I like his red grin, the red cap flapped up on his head, when my son jams him inside his underwear. My wife tells him to stop it because he is stretching out all of his underwear. Yes, he is stretching out all of his underwear. 45 William Palmer LETTER TO KIRK DOUGLAS Sure I wanted a dimple in my chin, even considered hammering the tip of a screwdriver in. But I knew I couldn’t when my brother threw a dart that landed in my hand between my thumb and index finger. I think he threw it by mistake. I remember staring at the blue arrow feathers, the fingertip worn wood, the sunken steel shaft. When I pulled it out I saw a tiny mound of gray flesh with a dark hole in the center that didn’t bleed. Punctured, I suddenly felt light-headed. After that I gave up the desire to look like you. Kirk, I like the way you squeeze your voice through your chin in every movie. Even when you play van Gogh your red and yellow beard carries the aura of your rift. Why is it so important? Your chin looks like someone took a saw cut a kerf and then quit trying to hurt you. 46 William Palmer A SQUIRREL WITHOUT A TAIL I saw a squirrel without a tail pause on a street corner and then leap into my face. Lately I’ve been feeling like an acorn. People don’t like to see me, think I walking on telephone wire without a balance stick. Their genes feel tails thousands of years old fall off A woman wakes and finds her middle fingers lying beside her like pale carrots. She stares at her hands and howls. A man showers and feels his penis thud on the floor across the drain. A six month old touches his mother’s face and pulls off her nose, sucking the tip. This squirrel without a tail is like a mechanic I know with a missing thumb sewed up like the end of a greasepacked sausage. The stub is like a socket, can get into places where my fingers can’t. I’ve never seen a bolt he couldn’t loosen. 47 Jackie Carlson A GOOD CLEANING OUT I unplugged the fridge. It sighed, like an old scrub woman getting up from her knees, letting a breath out. It heaved and coughed and sputtered, then quit. I opened it up. When air hits the rotting insides activate as decay begins. My bologna not wrapped, like rain soaked leather dried on a radiator. The color of the bathtub stopper, washed out red. A full bag of baby carrots like little fingers soft, bent and curled and onions with protruding appendages wrapped around liverwurst of metallic green. They opened me up with a hairline slit just below the bikini line then tunneled upward. Rubber gloved hands picking up dimes along the way that I swallowed as a child. Feeling their way groping around in the dark. Tearing post-teen muscle that never did heal, left a hump of scar tissue like a limp growth of loose fat rolled up in a stocking. Sagging bear bait. 48 I kneeled on the floor reached in the fridge and pulled out rotten brussel sprouts. The surgeons, with their piped in music to operate along with their favorite tune, plucked out my ovaries and plunked them in the stainless steel garbage can. I listened to John Prine and tossed the brussels in the reeking rubber maid and emptied the fridge, with rubber gloves, scraped out the afterbirth of a baby pot roast dehydrated and wrinkled. Full of seeds, shriveled. I scooped up the old melon. Oozing, fermented juices squeezed out, sticky, post harvest time, like the worn out uterus lodged in my back. I plugged in the ice box, after a good dousing of disinfectant. turned the dial to low way down barely running. A moment passed before it kicked in and began to hum and clang. Just like new, after a good cleaning out. 49 Brenda Miller THE STORY AFTER THE POEM It has been almost three years since I was a guest in your home. The last time I was here a man read a poem about a woman he loved who was killed on a beach by a madman who got into her cottage by quoting Herman Hesse novels. She thought he would be interesting, and I knew I would have let him in too. The madman chopped her into pieces, scattered her among the sand. The poet sat against your bookshelf, told how the madman was an artist, brilliant. His breath short from reading, from thinking of the woman left in bits, he told the story after the poem, letting us know the madman/artist was murdered in prison, set up by the woman’s friends in a drug deal when it looked like he would get out on parole. The man’s words bit against the walls, circled back to your detective novels. You made us a dinner of chicken which smelled of pineapples and cloves, but I didn’t stay, left early for a date at dollar night movies. 50 It has been almost three years since I was a guest in your home. The story after the poem would go something like this--the poet lives near a hot blue beach in Hawaii. Most colors near the sand are fuschias and limes, and his new book is stunning. The man who took me to dollar night movies lives by the Atlantic Ocean, takes care of handicapped children in a white-washed home. I don’t know who still thinks about the woman, or how many of us have ended up near the water, building or losing years of our lives there. I’ve learned to back away from men too good to be true, whose words about my favorite poets smell of pineapple and cloves. Three years and I still collect these bits and pieces of understanding like shells, lining them up in notebooks. Three years, and I still wonder if she would have wanted him killed. 51 Maria Holley CLIPPINGS I just noticed my toenails are turning yellow. The kind of hard and crusty yellow, like my Grandma D’Angelo’s, whose nails, when she was eighty three, could not be cut with a conventional pair of scissors. They were so tough that she had to have someone kneel at her feet, usually one of us grandchildren, and cut them with a steel veterinarian’s clipper. We had to borrow the clipper from her next door neighbor, a Dr. Loomis, who used it for his patients, the Great Danes and the St. Bernards. I gladly knelt at her feet, this immigrant woman, enthroned in her kitchen, clad in a white butcher’s apron that was always soiled with tomato sauce or bread flour. When it was my turn to cut her nails, that was usually at Easter, my brother Dominic having the Christmas privilege, I always imagined them as claws, grown hard and strong, almost predatory, with age, and I could barely work the clippers into them. She would smile, as I maneuvered the clipper, and feed me some deep fried bread, its dusted sugar melting on my tongue like a communion wafer. But now I am an adult banished to my room, as if I were an errant child, watching my toes metamorphosize, and I pick at them with my hands, these claws that have had thirty five years to grow, hoping to separate a sliver of nail. Banished. In exile. With my grandmother’s toes. My current banishment evolves from my criticism concerning the adult movies my husband, Vincent, shells out an extra thirteen-dollars-and- ninety-five-cents a month for. He expects me to sit on the sofa, night after night, and watch these things. Tonight’s offering was the German made “The Garden of Eva.” He nuzzled under a blanket across the room hoping my libido potential would somehow be increased by watching Eva, with her unwashed hair and pocked thighs, clad only in a mini-skirt and anklets, tangle with a produce farmer, his wife, and their quarter horse, Brownie. After the scene in the stable, I asked Vincent, “Can’t we at least watch Johnny Carson?,” but he refused, for then Eva had lay down in the farmer’s garden and was undulating with a large, striped zuchinni. The squash disappeared into her like she was some kind of commercial 52 food processor and I half expected some perfectly sliced circular pieces to exit out her anus. After she added a stalk of celery and a jalapeno pepper and began fanning her vagina with one of her anklets, I asked Vincent to turn the set off, but he was busy pouting, and moving his hand underneath his blanket. “Are you masturbating, Vincent, because you need to express aggression towards a dominant female in your life?” I asked calmly, quoting verbatim from the article on selfgratification I had just read in Psychology Today. “Do you need to punish the bitch-goddess, the tooth mother you feel controls you?” He did not answer, but inched closer to the set so he could hear what Eva was whispering to the squash. “Do you want to punish me for something, Vincent? Are you trying to show me I can’t compete with this human Cuisinart?” “Bitch,” was all he said, then exaggerated his movements under the blanket. But I was on a roll, and I knew it, saying something about Ronco Vegematics and irritation of the vaginal lining and how I didn’t think I could make a loaf of zucchini bread again, and that was when he banished me to my room. “You’re sexually repressed, Rose. Go upstairs.” “I’m repressed?” “You don’t appreciate erotic art. If you can’t handle this as an adult, then go upstairs.” “Erotic art?” I hissed. “Just how erotic can a barn scene be with a quarter horse being mauled by this Nazi kitchen witch? Besides, I’m a member of the Fund For Animals, and I should be calling Cleveland Amory right now.” He stuck his index finger through the open weave of the blanket and pointed to the stairs. That is when I kicked the wall, threw the oleander plant, and stomped up the uncarpeted stairs, making each placement of my feet a blow to his skull. After the movie finished its final scenes, (I can only guess what they involved, since I had been sent upstairs and all, but I did notice that in the garden there were two oxen grazing by an unlatched fence), Vincent snorted upstairs, and thumped into bed with an exaggerated bravura, making sure to snort 53 again into the pillow to awaken me. After Vincent threw his covers over his head and rolled his shoulders a bit, I considered braying like a horse and asking in a thick, German accent, “Who made the salad, dahling?”, but he didn’t give me a chance, because he was about to administer one of his arbitrary guilt sessions. First, he started in with the mouse droppings in the bottom of the toaster and how he had thought for the longest time they were raisins that had dropped from the Cinnamon Swirl bread. I had heard that one before and knew it was aimed at how I had fallen off from my usual diligent housework. And that there were blind slugs carousing the bathroom tiles at night, and of course, the liquefied green mold in the dairy keeper. And how he had heard, first hand from Gretchen Van Ark, the woman who had replaced me several weeks ago as Lacey’s third grade roommother, that my line was busy at all hours of the day, and that it appeared to her that I was intentionally keeping my phone off the hook. She had called several times to find out how many pounds of Very Berry Punch concentrate would fill thirty six five ounce cups, and she had told Vincent, who I’m sure was completely sympathetic, that I was inaccessible. Finally, he got to what he was really angry about. He said my persistent reactions to the erotic film proved once and for all that I was sexually repressed, and that, and that alone accounted for our dismal sex life. He admitted, after some prodding on my part, that the scenario with the quarter horse was a bit much, but what was wrong, he asked, with a woman being stimulated with a variety of different things, including natural foods from the earthen soil? That’s what he said, as God is my witness, “...natural foods from the earthen soil.” He was right out of a Grape-Nuts commercial. All he needed was a flannel shirt, some Dingo boots, and some ceramicware filled with bran. “What’s wrong with a little variety to stimulate a dismal sexual relationship?” he asked, lifting himself up on his elbow. “Is doing it the national average of 2.5 times a week, that was your calculation wasn’t it, dismal?” I asked, in my best bitch goddess voice. “Okay, I admit that I might fake an orgasm once or twice, put myself on cruise control when I’m tired or angry, but I hardly call our sex life dismal. I might go as far as a commercial raspberry and vinegar douche, but I’m not going to insert anything into myself from the earthen soil that I’ll have to explain to my gynecologist later.” 54 Vincent turned abruptly into his pillow and began riding the Rosy Palm Express one last time before he nodded off. This of course is the ultimate guilt trip. He is insinuating that I, the bitch goddess, tooth mother, keeper of the blind slugs and Mousinettes, am a failure. Failing to live up to my wifely duties. He often does this lately, and usually, when the blanket starts moving, I hear this ancient accented voice coming from somewhere over my left shoulder, an omniscient ghost observer from the old country saying, “Shame on you. Shame. Does he drink? Does he beat you? Does he run around? You do your wifely duty by him or you’re gonna lose him.” After the ghost voice, I usually nuzzle towards Vincent and finish him off, which probably accounts for the .5 of our approximation of the national average. But tonight I didn’t. I just got out of bed, and now I am sitting here watching the aging process manifest itself in my toes. I never used to be banished, and never had any extra time to dwell upon my toes. Vincent called me the perfect wife and mother and loved me for it. He bragged to our friends how I stayed up till three in the morning cutting out thirty six Valentine’s Day hearts out of strawberry banana finger jello for Lacey’s third grade party, or worked far into the night making homemade kluski noodles out of yellow dough to satisfy his nostalgic yearnings for his grandmother’s old world recipe. He marvelled at my scratch cakes, decorated with sculptured sugar roses and silver dragees, or my jams and preserves and bread and butter pickles I did up every August. He luxuriated in the bed sheets that I ironed and the way I color-coordinated his freshly starched and pressed dress shirts in our walk-in closet. And he knew that I could handle the household on the allowance he parcelled out at the beginning of each month, and sometimes he would test me, lessening the amount by five dollars every so often, to see if I could manage. I always did. He had no need for Night Prowl Theatre and its thirteen- dollars-and-ninety-five-cents additional fee, or his obsession with self-gratification. One Christmas, he even bought me a ticket to Marabelle Morgan’s “You Too Can Be A Total Woman” lecture series at the Civic Center, and after listening to her first speech entitled, “Ready and Willing,” I came home with a tub of Cool Whip and an economy sized package of Saran Wrap. I immediately began spooning the non-dairy 55 topping over my bare breasts and ribs, just like Marabelle suggested, and I made love to Vincent on the dining room table, and in the laundry room on some soiled sheets, and on the cold bathroom tiles before the slugs took over. Once, when Vincent came home, he tapped his umbrella on the vestibule floor and we made love on the cemented stones-he, still in his London Fog, me, not having time to find the roll of Saran Wrap or the aluminum foil. Things were going along quite nicely, actually. Vincent was happy, I thought I was happy, having little time to myself to think of anything else. We were challenging the national average weekly, thanks to Marabelle Morgan, and her ideal prescription of seven times a week. Then one day the dry waller came to spackle the ceiling in the den. I watched him from my kitchen the two days he spent working with his hands, the plaster and the trowel. I watched the drops of white mud fall from the ceiling and stick to the soft brown hairs that curled out of his blue work shirt. I liked the way he moved, slow and easy, and I liked the pony tail he fastened behind his head with a rubber band. He had a red beard and it too became peppered with the white mud. When I offered him some coffee the first day, fresh- perked, the only kind Vincent would tolerate, he said, “Mrs. DeVries, you don’t have to wait on me. The instant’s just fine from my thermos.” He walked into the kitchen, reached into the cupboard over the sink and grabbed a large ceramic brownstone mug. He proceeded to pour the coffee from the thermos and then sipped it slowly. He stared at me. I fumbled with my hands, then my apron, then my hair. “You can call me Rosalie,” I said, impulsively. I hadn’t used my given name in years, referring to myself as Rose, the more dignified name Vincent had christened me with when we first met. It seemed odd to say Rosalie out loud to this strange man in my kitchen, so I said it again, “Rosalie.” “Cheers, Rosalie,” he said, lifting his mug into the air and smiling. The next day, after he had, by my estimates, poured himself seven cups of coffee, and had called me Rosalie at least that many times, I took the phone off the hook and made love to him in the den on top of a plastic tarp, underneath the spackled ceiling. He kept whispering “Rosalie” and it was like a 56 song to me, a melody long forgotten, and I forgot that in two hours Lacey would be home, and Vincent in four, and I hadn’t taken anything out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. Soon after that, I began to be banished on a regular basis. I joined a consciousness raising group, began arguing fervently with Vincent over a variety of things, and began not to be home for meals, leaving hastily written messages that there was something frozen in the freezer they could thaw and cook themselves. I resigned my post as room mother, left my phone off the hook and read Lacey “Stories For Free Children” from a feminist magazine. For Lacey’s birthday I ordered a cake from Klender’s bakery, and Vincent was furious, spouting, “I always had a home made cake for my birthday and I expect my daughter to have the same.” The Marabelle Morgan “Ready and Willing” average of seven times a week dwindled to a respectable 2.5, not because I was sharing my life with the drywaller, for I never saw him again, but because that was all I could reasonably give. Two months after my banishments began, I found Vincent in the bathroom holding my diaphragm in one hand and a sewing needle in the other. I watched him as he methodically punctured small needle holes around the rim of the diaphragm, and then placed it under the running water of the bathtub faucet. I watched for several minutes as he performed the ritual. I suppose, to complete the scenario, Vincent should have been perversely grinning at his deed, or at least slicking his mustache into handlebars, but he wasn’t. He had a pained expression on his face and he looked pathetic. I watched for several more seconds until he turned, startled. “I thought you would come to your senses by having another baby,” he said, and threw the needle into the wastepaper basket. “You’re not the same.” “Is anyone expected to remain the same, Vincent?” “I’m losing you. I thought this would help.” “Help? Is that what you want for me?” “I want you the way you were, Rose. That’s all.” He handed me the diaphragm, and I noticed what a good job he had done concealing the needle holes. “My name is Rosalie,” I said, as I slammed the diaphragm into the wastepaper basket. He was still kneeling and I actually felt sorry for him, because I had set his life up so perfectly for 57 him, and now he looked like a small child being weaned from the breast, who was being offered a paper cup to drink from. I hear Vincent snoring in bed now. He’s probably dreaming of Eva in her garden doing something unspeakable with a freshly dug kohlrobi. In the dream, Eva has just finished spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROWNIE in silver dragees on a home made zucchini cake. I stand in the back of the dream by the unlatched gate, wearing my Fund for Animals 1983 Save The Quarter Horses T-shirt, and my porous diaphragm for a beanie. I cannot move because my plastic wrapped leggings are fastened too tight, so I stand still, by the team of oxen, offering Vincent a five ounce cup of Very Berry punch. Eva waves her anklet, and Vincent throws off his blanket, running towards her, arms outstretched. He does not wave at me but banishes me with his middle finger to a spackled ceilinged room suspended over the garden. I sit here watching Vincent turn with his dream, and I finger my toenails. I’m thinking of how I don’t want to sit all plump and doughy in my kitchen, a mythical earth mother, having my toenails cut by my grandchildren, Muffy and Derrick, while Vincent taps his cane on the vestibule stones. I’ll invent my own type of grandmother, who sends out for an anchovie deluxe from Senor Pizza, and serves it up rewarmed on Dixie ware. I’ll read my grandchildren some original stories for free children, written by me in my self-imposed exile, where I had feasted on the solitude, the secret life I had never abandoned. 58 Richard Kostelanetz EPIPHANIES Each sentence here should be rich and sufficient enough to stand alone. Profundity in art is impossible without acknowledgement of God. I am what I am, not what you want me to be. Panting all the way, I finished the marathon, three-hundred- second in a field of more than a thousand; next year, I swore to myself, I’ll do better. He regarded the other boys as strange, talking so often, as they did, about their fathers and mothers. All his experience, all his perception, all his wisdom, he reduced to seven succinct homilies. Nothing I gave her could possibly recompense her for losses caused by me. I feel no more sure than the next reader which Epiphanies are best, which better and which worse; or whether such discriminations matter. Everywhere she went, she carried a walking stick that towered over her head. She programmed the computer to make marvelous sequences of images that were, like a live performance, here now and gone later. Edited by thomas gladysz from the sixty page text “Epiphanies” by Richard Kostelanetz. The larger “Epiphanies” is a “collection of over two thousand discrete single-sentence stories” offered to literary publications to excerpt. The above epiphanies were selected so that the initial letter of each sentence spells in acrostic form the word “epiphanies.” These sentences were the initial sentences, following one another, possessing the appropriate letter. 59 Jim Cartwright THE MOON ENTERS AN ORANGE BLOOD FACTORY for Diane Wakoski “Last weekend, on the way home from visiting a friend, I rented a room in the desert near Las Vegas. As I was sitting up late I noticed the moonlight streaming through my window, my nipple lotus twirled excitedly, my bloodbulb throbbed and reeked of peppermint sweat and I felt drawn to go outside and howl. As I walked outside in silence I felt as if the flowers surrounding me were somehow speaking to me and as I began to howl I heard other creatures howling back at me. I followed the sound of their howling and came upon a white fox mating with a black fox. When they were done I looked at the spot where they had been and, with the help of the moonlight, read the following poem written with tiny silver bones in a puddle of canine sperm.” Birtha Albert Side Note: Most of the images in this poem come from Diane’s poetry. Saturn’s rings play arm bone music In the vanilla bean coffee dirt sky While barefoot on Southern California sand She steps over parch lipped porpoises With their watermelon seed teeth glinting In the light radiating from her smooth ivory skin With her complicated geography she is the moon Glowing in the darkness like a jar of fireflies Beethoven with his feet stuck in pumpernickel bread Rises from the surf With golden vitamin E oil on his lips Silver fish swimming through his hair He drips piano keys into her elbows And splashes dogs carved out of diamonds Around her heels which carry Her over a betrayer on a motorcycle In his right hand is an iron wrapped in dark mustaches In his left is a tombstone on which “Sonofabitch” is written in marigolds His bloody throat has been slit by the sharp glass knife Sticking out of the cherry wood cockmouth Of the penis slung over George Washington’s shoulder George with a beetle tongue hammer around his neck Gives the moon a zebra skin trunk On a saucer of sterling warm blood She opens it and finds A complete set of Ross McDonald’s Lou Archer stories Rich aged burgundies Crusty French bread Goat milk cheese A blue silk “Happy Birthday Buddha” shawl And an ice eagle wearing a cap of darkness Which flies out and melts sour milk tears On a conch shell in which a magician Sits with a copperhead coiled around his leg Vines of black grapes growing out of his wrists And a magellanic cloud for a head He crawls out of the shell And gives the moon a hat made of salmon teeth Filled with letters, begonias and warm lion ears Which she presses to her cinnamoned lips Black sparrows, fuzzy bumblebees and gulls Swoop in the dark sky above her silvery hair As in front of her she sees a gigantic orange On which a sign made of butterfly wings Reads “The Monarch Queen of Night’s Blood Factory” A telephone booth washes up on shore On its door are emerald and Earl Grey smudges The Man from Sears with a camera around his neck And basil in his hair walks out of it In his left hand is a glass cane Hollowed and filled with coral reef and polished wood, In his right is a package from Pony Express Filled with GREED license plates With which he lays a path From her salty toes to the sweet pulpy fruit Silently she walks into the center of the orange Into the heart of the King of Spain 61 Jim Cartwright MAGIC PEPPERMINTED WOMAN SITS ON ROSEMARYED CHICKEN for Annie Davidovicz “Yesterday as I walked outside after work playing at the Food Co-op my nipple lotus began imitating a helicopter propeller and caused my body to flop haphazardly around the parking lot. As I began to ascend over concrete I remembered that Jazzwind told me if my boob blossoms ever became aware of an intense aroma of baked rosemary I would be sucked toward its source like a carpet fiber underneath an inhaling vacuum cleaner. I pressed my eyelids tightly together until I was sure I had softly landed and the scent of rosemary fumes curled in my nostrils. When I opened my eyes I saw a beautiful woman sitting in a chicken chair and a bell floating in a stream in front of her. I scooped the bell out of the water and inside it I found a Jackson, MI. teeshirt, a Salvation Army nametag, a pair of red underwear and the following poem.” Birtha Albert A Side Note: Most of the images in this poem come from Annie’s poetry or are remembrances from times that we passed together. A few of the images are taken out of the book A Literary Herbal by Avil Reddy which Annie gave to me and are meant to be understood in connection with certain associations presented in the book. Rosemary is traditionally associated with friendship. Dill water is used as a love potion. Chamomile is used for healing people and revives any sickly plants growing near it. It is also used in a rinse which brightens fair hair and it is highly aromatic to walk on. Garlic is what sprung from where the devil’s left foot trod as he left the Garden of Eden. Cold applesauce pressed between her toes Grandmother’s black shawl Wrapped around her shoulders Jade plant roots floating in water Reflected in her bright green eyes 62 She sits on an empty raisin box in her kitchen Grape vines twisting around her tan smooth elbows Upon which daisies and tobaccoed tongues grow Jesus wearing trouble doll earrings Wiggles his hips sprinkling Garlic bulbs around her feet Her cat Claude poops in his closet litter box Weird birds lick the yeast cream off his paws Parakeets in purple bathrobes Fly out her shower curtain And flutter around her head Rinse her hair in orange juice And drizzle Dr. Bonner’s Magic Peppermint Soap Like warm candle wax on her honeyed lips and skin Like bread dough she slowly rises Coffee chip and chocolate ice cream float in her mouth As she floats on bird wings to a white birch woodland Where chamomile flowers coat the ground And a throne of carved cooked chicken Sprinkled with rosemary Sits by a slightly curried dill water stream Her parrots set her softly on the juicy white meat And she smiles showing sweet white teeth A single opal displayed around her breathing neck A single kind heart throbbing In her warm moist magic mint forest 63 Jim Cartwright HEESWA GENTLY DUSTS A SHADOWY BRAIN for Muji “When I got up this morning my room was filled with ginger dust and in it on my windowseat the name Heeswa was written. When I saw this I remembered the dream I had in which my man from the island took me to a cave whose walls were studded with gigantic garlic bulbs with thick lips of soft pearl which kissed me as I brushed against them. When I took off all my clothes and stood next to them many long thin tongues darted out from in between them, entered my vagina and licked. After namy hours of this and during an orgasm my abdominal bloodbulb emitted a discharge which splashed all over the lip filled walls. When it did this the garlic bulbs shed their skin which landed on the ground in the shape of the following poem.” Birtha Albert Performance Suggestions: In order to perform this poem it is necessary to obtain fresh ginger shavings and a jar of water with chamomile flowers in it. The chant section of this poem, is divided into seven lines each of which runs into each other in terms of sound but are separated on the page as a different action is to take place at the end of each different line. The order for the actions is as follows. 1) Breathe on ginger shavings 2) Kiss ginger shavings 3) Breathe on chamomile water 4) Kiss chamomile water 5) Drop ginger in chamomile water 6) Breathe on chamomile/ginger water 7) Kiss chamomile/ginger water 64 Through a moss filled sliver in garlic And over creamy white lips Crawl Muji and the nymph Of lilacs and rats Who lays a bee pollen yellow chicken egg As they reach the sparkling ground The egg hatches a green tomato sandwich Upon which the nymph chants and sits Muji lies down in a breathing pool Made of Alberta Hunter throat wind Heeswa rolls off a tongue His heart overflowing with chamomile juice Which squirts warm through his navel. And into the inhaling pool Where Muji’s firm muscled soft bearded body Flickers its sleepy blue eyes The juice coats him and sinks through his flesh Lime green and violet chamomile heads Pucker in his steamy pores As juice brightens The shadow on his brain And turns his body tingles Into champagne bubbles Which float and burst In the nymph’s pesto tonsils In the bath breath bubbles Suspended on his eyebrows Are ginger roots the size of capillaries Which unfold and puff out their innards Into the tiny flowered water of his eyes As Heeswa exhales the following words “This is your gingery wish for health Find it may you wherever you go In a pattie matted in a saki cup bottom when you sit for hours at the temple with the friendly bald headed grey pajamaed zennies In fart form tucked in your tie tip in your early morning typewriter office 65 Sliced into a ribbon wrapped around blood pills which keep sores from sprouting in your blues yarling mouth In flake form in place of pubic knobs of hairs freshly grown after hospital slice In liquid form which lubricates your strings and balls as you play guitar by your ping pong table In sleep to you may I visit with a chamomile water jar and fresh ginger shavings blow into your brain the following chant mu mu mu mu ji hee eee hee hee hees yaaa aaa ji ji ji ji muuu uuuuu li li li li geeerrr rrrr bre bre bre poooollll ooolll la la la la 111111 lll lll lll lll muuuuuuuu” Dieter Weslowski ZORRO At seven my heart was hardly that of Zorro Merely the gestures then charging down the hill in the black cape sewn by mother wielding a sword cut from the wooden pole that once held the moon above “The Owl And the Pussycat” Down I descended upon the roses wildly beheading those henchmen of El Capitan my arch enemy Then roses died at my caprice and the Zorro who knew the he of love in roses did not exist just the boy who walked back up the hill only to descend again more wildly upon the enemy 67 john lee hall alleged love poem that’s when i realize how beautiful she is, one hand on the handle of an earth-tone coffee mug, the other supporting it from below, her long hair shadowing the concentration of her face, you can almost see the mind pursing the pouting lips, sense the bound energy forced through chemistry and calculus rather than the slender softness and muscle of her limbs. skin on her face is dry, almost dusty to the touch, a woman too long in her mind alone, not letting 68 the energy fill body, the power of adrenaline scaring one unused to rapid heartbeat. cam, fill yourself ; soul is not limited to mind. come, taste richness in fear used for courage, learn to trust the real hiding in robin, let more flow from head than mind and hair. 69 john lee hall letter: 6 may 84 gene: i’m tired but i’ve got six hundred dollars between me and freedom, a new woman to worry about and the fungus i grow so well on my toes is ready to harvest me. i don’t know if i feel about her, gene. her eyes are a living brown and she’s not at all feminine, but i’m not sure if she’s a tomato or an apple. i almost touched her on our second night, but the tension toward impulse almost wasn’t there. i don’t know, gene, she’s got more direction, achievable goals, a job, no excessive debts and sleeps easy. i want someone who can meet 70 the poet who writes you these letters. gene, are you my only friend in reality? i see you swill your beer and smile over that one. i’m not sure about either of our new pieces, gene --too much necrophilia for me, either way. write me again soon, gene. love, john. 71 john lee hall lanie she’s the first woman in a long time who wears soft boots, soft as brown/ blonde/black curls. she used to dance and still can walk, move and kick like the old times, and turns suddenly from windows like she’s interested in what’s inside them. the accent is Chicago, with base chords of anger that are more than just reverb of abusive fathers. i see her silhouette; left leg up, arms outstretched, slowly spinning away from the dark window. i know 72 i’m in danger again but dance has always been a poetry or wine of this walker. 73 Dave Swan JUNE WOMAN IN JANUARY beautiful names delacroix tangiers mozambique dissolve into quilinkinkinkh of crystal and taffeta conversation. men and women dance vodka and valium waltzes underneath the watchful eyes of egyptian vultures perched in the golden shadows of the cupola picking at crustaceans with their twisted beaks. hanging by crescent moon claws above a russian samovar iguanas with Chinese faces hold crickets between pyramid teeth. 74 unaware a woman in white lays a half-eaten strawberry on the linen orders kahlua and cream. black walnut kahlua settles beneath creamy milkweed white ice cubes. lifting the straw to her lips elegant mourning doves fly out land upon her lap. she lowers her blue eyes 75 David Swan swan Unshod horse hoofs etched in sand lead me to a small shoal. Quick waves, sandpiper size, falter break erasing the trail. Turning I see a white hump partially hidden in beige grass. a dead swan its body, largest of all water fowl, undisturbed. its head had been torn away. shaved scraped off as if by slow propeller. or boot heel. swan this bird has the same name as me swan I want to put this swan under my coat against my skin waiting for ice to form so I can bury it under snow drift and ice. I want to put this swan on my bare back swim out of sight of land letting it sink. 76 I want to build a bonfire, dance naked chanting at this dead swan’s burning body, wait for the tide to come in and wash away the ashes. Out of the corner of my eye I see multi-colored lights of the Medusa Cement Company leaving its trail upon the water. I throw the swan as far as I can toward the horizon so the maggots cannot find it. 77 David Swan HELLO POEM number one (minus the chant) marc, i will chant to you this song gurgling out of my throat like giraffes nibbling on blue flowers drooling out yr name, marc drooling out yr name down their long necks forming pools like lounging blue lions. drooling out each individual letter of yr name smeared with the blue paste of bougainvillea blossoms. marc, yr azaelia sitting on top of confection connection’s bakery cabinet leans its three red buds toward the door waiting for you and the snows of east lansing drool drool for you drool for yr name marc 78 Alison Zink tresses . .. tresses . . . tresses . . . tresses . . . stenciled on plate glass as carefully as brushes, combs, hairpins, curlers are laid in rows on the counters. Facing a large wall of mirror: bare skin, yellow t-shirt, jeans, against walls with gardens of peonies rooted in plaster; against coiffed heads bent over impeccable peach nails turning pages of fashion magazines lying in silk laps, like mirrors of painted faces. I am brought here by my hair, long and thick. The ends are as ragged as the corners of my eyes. This trim is one of my concessions to chic, this, and penciled black lines under my eyes that I look so tired without. 79 21 years old and wrinkles: too much sun and wind and rain and snow, January walks on Lakeshore, and very hot showers. This hard, glossy picture drains my lashes of black, sucks the sun from my hair, leaves me dried up and flat-looking. I frown at my reflection, but then at theirs. These ladies beat their hair into submission, then coddle it: remain hatless, sleep on satin pillow cases, stay inside. My hair resists clips, escaping into loose strands, floating like tiny birds around my face, falling like leaves into my eyes. I resist clips, escaping into woods, floating like loosened strands into birch and braken and pine. 80 Endless stands of birch with their straight, white trunks kohl their eyes, but their cheeks are rougeless above white lips. They flare into bursts of foliage at the top letting breaths of sun, and rain, snow, wind through. It seems as if those high-gloss faces have never breathed beyond their terrarium lives, or as if they were born onto paper. And I was born into this tresses place, but summers in birch and bracken places were enough to draw me outside. 81 thomas gladysz CATCHING UP A “BITTER BUDDHIST”: A Conversation with Allen Ginsberg On February 11, 1985 I had the pleasure, the displeasure, the exhilaration and the frustration of interviewing Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was at first “testy,” giving crack-pot answers he later termed “poetic.” But after a while, Ginsberg released his (public) persona becoming a quite kind and humane man; battle became personal engagement. This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of Ginsberg’s COLLECTED POEMS, 1947-1980 and prior to his February 14 reading at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Ginsberg read “Many Loves,” a poem written in 1956 detailing his first intimate encounter with Neal Cassidy and now published for the first time in COLLECTED POEMS. Ginsberg also read new poems written while he was recently in China, as well as “White Shroud,” an epilogue to “Kaddish.” “White Shroud” talks of the conversation Ginsberg has with his mother after finding her living in a cardboard shack. She is a shopping bag lady and Ginsberg thinks to move in next to her. The poems from China and “White Shroud” reflect a new, more reflective, sometimes bitter voice in Ginsberg’s poetry. The following are excerpts from our interview. GLADYSZ; What led you to bring out the COLLECTED POEMS? GINSBERG: I had nothing else to do - I was bored. I wanted to spend an afternoon doing something useful. GLADYSZ: It must have took more than an afternoon? GINSBERG: It took an eternity. GLADYSZ: Do you feel at a particular junction in your career, making the time right to bring out the COLLECTED POEMS? 82 GINSBERG: Yes, I nose dived into heaven. GLADYSZ: Through the ’70’s and ’80’s you have been working with music and poetry. What led you to merge the two forms? GINSBERG: I had a visitation from the assembled spirits of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, telling me to sing about the world in a new way, uplifting the Buddhist nature of reality. GLADYSZ: Where does the merger of music and poetry lead to? GINSBERG: It will go all the way back to Sappho and Homer, Sappho sang her songs and Homer his epics. GLADYSZ: Do you feel that this merger of music and poetry is an outgrowth of American poetry? GINSBERG: It is an outgrowth of American blues. Poetry and music have always been the same - like identical twins. It is only lately, since the devil invented the printing press, that the body got separated from the voice. It is the work of the devil - I kid you not -- it is the work of the devil. GINSBERG: What is your name? GLADYSZ: Thomas Gladysz. GINSBERG: You’re calling from where? GLADYSZ: East Lansing, Michigan. GINSBERG: I read there in 1966. I had a terrible police problem. They had a very heavy police state. You couldn’t sell my books, they had cops all over the place. East Lansing is where there was a professor who was working for the C.I.A. secretly. Things were very complicated. (For the reading) they threw up every possible barrier they could. They didn’t want me to read “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” 83 GLADYSZ: During the 1950’s and ’60’s, when your poetry and the poetry of the Beats came under attack. . . . GINSBERG: What are the “Beats,” a red vegetable or something? Do you know the names of any of the Beats? In China they know the names of the Beats, they aren’t just a bunch of vegetables you boil in a pot. . . Gary Snyder, the famous poet. Jack Kerouac, a writer. William Seward Burroughs the world- famous novelist. Micheal McClure, poet and playwright. Philip Whalen, zen priest studying to be a zen master, a distinguished poet. All respectable Americans, smarter than anybody else probably. Robert Creeley, Bob Dylan, the Beats - make into one color soup. GLADYSZ Do you feel that the American intellectual and literary establishment has come to accept the change that the Beats fostered? GINSBERG: Half-and-half, they have done it in a half-assed way. They put me and Burroughs in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, yet they refuse to admit Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder. In fact, the election came up yesterday and they voted in a bunch of New Yorker poets basically, or poets that are relatively academic compared to the early innovators. Gregory Corso never got a single literary prize in America - never got any money. While all sorts of inferior, second-rate, third-rate, fifth-rate poets are like pigs to the trough, seeing how much gruel they can get. Corso I think is the greatest poet. But I think it has always been like this, at all times, in all nations. The great poet is put down, while the second rate poet is a hero. Corso is a colossus of a poet, a supreme genius like Keats. GLADYSZ: Why do you feel America waits till poets die to acknowledge them? 84 GINSBERG: Some poets are acknowledged -- like Pound in an asylum, or some are half-dead, like William Carlos Williams after his heart attack. Sometimes they wait till they are paralyzed, like Whitman, fired when his book came out. Whitman was fired from his job - he had a job with customs. Sometimes they let them get to be famous - like Poe, who died alone in a gutter. Sometimes they get to be famous like me, but not have any money. I am “bitter,” quote, unquote. I am a “buddhist,” quote, unquote. Actually, the reason I am so testy is that I am trying to get off dope. I am going through withdrawal symptoms from nicotine. GLADYSZ: Could you tell me something about a record album called ALLEN GINSBERG WITH STILL LIFE? GINSBERG: Still Life is a band I work with when I am at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. I teach there in summers. We put out one record, a 45 called “Birdbrain.” They selected poems to sing as lyrics to their songs; what you are actually hearing is cut-ups of my poems, except for “Capitol Air,’’ which is not cut-up. But with the Gluons Still Life version the whole song is 20 verses like in the book. On the FIRST BLUES album there is a completely different set of verses than on the STILL LIFE album. GLADYSZ: Excluded from COLLECTED POEMS were 22 poems from the book FIRST BLUES. Why? GINSBERG: My stress gave out. When we thought to add those, the book was nearly done. Anyways, its always good to have something missing. It’s also good for Full Court Press (publisher of FIRST BLUES) They are songs, rather than poems. GLADYSZ: Is there anything else excluded? 85 Allen Ginsberg, 1983 Allen Ginsberg, 1983 Robert Turney 86 GINSBERG: Well, what I did is collect all the poems from anything that had been published, like letters, journals. . . everything worthwhile. What I like best is “Many Loves.” I thought that line, “and mine stuck out of my underwear” was so naive and straightforward that it’s poetry. It is so characteristic of somebody in that situation. That was the first time “Many Loves” was published except for a private printing. What did you think of that poem? GLADYSZ: I liked it. GINSBERG: Were you offended? GLADYSZ: No. GINSBERG: I am always interested in people’s reactions to what I write, especially a poem like “Many Loves.” GLADYSZ: You were recently in China, what were you doing there? GINSBERG: I went to China at the invitation of the Chinese Writers Association along with Gary Snyder. They loved hearing Americans read. It was a really new experience for them and we were a big sensation, reading to audiences of more than 500. They did have copies of my poetry over in China, some in books, some in different anthologies. They knew who the Beats were. China is a beautiful country. GLADYSZ: What lies in the future for Allen Ginsberg? 87 GINSBERG: Well, I recently had an exhibit of my photographs in New York, even managed to sell some. I will also have six new books coming out. WHITE SHROUD will be a new book of poems. There will be SELECTED PROSE ESSAYS — ASSEMBLED PROSES perhaps, as well as THE JOURNALS OF THE ’50’s, SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE. I am also planning on doing an ANNOTATED HOWL. The ANNOTATED HOWL will have essays by a bunch of people who are mentioned in the book. For example, there is that line about a guy who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, that was Tuli Kupferberg. 88 BODY AND VOICE: Recordings by Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems, Fantasy-Galaxy Records 7031, Berkely, 1959. Kaddish Atlantic Verbum Series 4001, New York, 1966. (O.P.) William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience Tuned by Allen Ginsberg, MGM Records, New York, 1970. (O.P.) Blake Album II, Fantasy-Galaxy Records, 1971. (unissued) Gate. Volume one, Songs, LOFT 1001 Stereo, Munich, 1980. Dist. Germany, Zweitausendein. Dist. U.S., City Hall Records, San Francisco. Beauty and the Beast, with Anne Waldman, Naropa Institute cassette, Boulder, Colorado, 1975 Bard and Muse, with Anne Waldman, Naropa Institute cassette, Boulder, Colorado, 1976. Birdbrain, Allen Ginsberg & Gluons Wax Trax Records, Denver, 1981. (single 33 1/3.) First Blues, Harmonium Rags and Rock & Roll, Double Album, John Hammond Records, New York, 1982. “Death is a Star,” Allen Ginsberg backing lyrics / vocals, Combat Rock, the Clash, CBS Epic Records, New York, 1982. Allen Ginsberg with Still Life, Local Anesthetic Records, Denver, Colorado, 1983. “Vajra Mantra,” “Green Automobile 1953” and “Blake Song: Merrily We Welcome In The Fear” all appear on The Dial-A- Poem-Poets, Giorno Poetry Systems records, New York, 1972. “Father Death Blues” appears on You’re a Hook, the 15 Year Anniversary of Dial-A-Poem, 1968-1983, Giorno Poetry Systems records , New York, 1983. 89 Lyn Lifshin MIDDLEBURY cut grass white spirea congregational church bells slice 3 p.m. scatter bees before kids stream down from the brick elementary school as sweatshirts in Lazarus Department store slowly turn from red to rose 90 Fay Whitman Manus DINNER AT THE SAN JERONIMO Window-walls wrap around the room’s shoulder -- a glass negligee exposing the hot naked night. A many-tiered chandelier repeats itself out there, out there and hangs like a rhinestone necklace in the cobalt sky. My eyes fix on the oceans’s dance, its blue blood-pressure rising and falling, pounding the sand-floor and drowning the sound of my own small heartbeat. I pick escargot from its shell. Raoul picks Perfidia on his guitar. The ocean picks itself up, falls, and breaks into water splinters that surface in my champagne. We toast the stark fragments of ourselves. John Ditsky KEEPSAKES I’ve come to doubt that, at the last, the bedded Body giving up the ghost, the remnant Ever knows or feels enough to think, Remembering, At least I traveled there, Or else, I had her for a while that time. Bedpan and drool, I see, do not consort With sacred memories too well. If I tell Of the night you raced ahead of me houseWards, bare and bearing in your arms Whatever dress you had been wearing - - Me behind, as bare, and feeling daring And admiring you for being past the feeling Daring, seeing in darkness your behind That should have glowed like moons, had There been moonlight -- will that loving last me? So as I once touched Stonehenge stone And Teotihuacan’s - to make sure they Were there - - I now touch base against That time, in case the knowing dying’s Dying too: nothing for keeps at all. 92 Nick Thorndike DONATING On Sunday in Church, hearing the sermon, I look for God’s hands floating in the rafters. I wait to see Him check every family, who is giving, who is holding back. Thunder above sounds; I reach deep in my jacket, pray that my paycheck is enough. After the men in gray pass, plates heaped with cash, I hear the organ play; my mind races. I want to run to the fount and kneel like a convert of Billy Graham. As I sigh a hymn, I imagine unzipping my pants, ready to give everything to Jesus. Sobbing, I turn around when the shrill sound of laughter freezes me. To my side, I see a man in the aisle shriek as he watches my pants fall down. 93 Cheryl Vossekuil BLIND LIFEGUARD Bending over the drinking fountain I saw an eye, not a reflection of my own, but a glass eye left by its new owner who was in pain from it. No longer thirsty, I returned to the pool to guard the blind swimmers, watching those who moved with ease, like the cave-fish who have never had eyes. I paced them off the diving board, these divers at the School for the Blind, making sure they came back after the somersaults, sailor dives, jackknives, cannonballs- the blind divers leaping out into the distance from the water, it being greater for the blind. Without glasses I am blind, need not switch on the lights in searching for them. The eye doctor, Paul VanPortFliet, explained to me as a child that two hundred years ago most people managed well without glasses given what they had to do. But if I'd set out with horse and wagon I'd end up at the wrong village, if at a village at all. 94 Then he told me he had to check with a specialist to make sure my retinas wouldn't detach if I bounced on a trampoline at gymnastics. He warned me of the signs I'd see, how light with nothing to focus it would scatter itself throughout my eyes like a meteor shower, or a hail storm. Even now I cannot sleep in a black room. I fear the unexpected wakening before dawn, the wondering if the time had come. I am mindful of the difference between myself and the blind divers, though my correctable eyes are worse than two or three, though I can only see at 1' what someone with 20/20 vision can see at 100'. I have had to fight the urge to study Braille, have always had an interest in german shepherds and labrador retrievers. And I remember my leap back into an inward in a college diving class, when I broke my hand in hitting it on the board, not seeing where I was in the air. 95 Cheryl Vossekuil THE TESTING OF VALUES I imagine him being lashed to trees, posts, doors, the way you would anchor shutters in anticipation of a hurricane, finding anything to be fastened to which would keep him upright while he slept. Hundreds of years ago there was a monk whose name no one remembers and who, himself, is remembered for one reason only: near the end of his brief life he took a vow of asceticism- which must have made the most pious of monks cringe, or bristle because he had thought of it first- claiming he would never again sit or lie down, but would remain standing until his death. I wonder what compelled him to make that vow. It does not seem an act of humility, but pride perhaps, the way he claimed to be able to supersede what must have been an agonizing need after weeks of walking, standing, 96 and he must have become simplistic like a doric column just standing there, concerned only with standing, he must have been able to think of nothing else. Growing up in Calvinist Grand Rapids, and spending many hours a week in church, though not by choice, I did not believe, but wanted to. I considered extremes, thinking I would convince myself, or someone, that I did believe if only I could: fast for a month, pray for an hour every day, treat my sister charitably- all certainly extremes for a ten-year-old. But I did none of those things, so others thought I believed. I lamented, felt isolated, wanting a Bible verse or hymn to swallow like a potion so I would believe. I hated my sister for singing with conviction, for believing so easily, thinking myself cheated. At a youth-group retreat I paddled a canoe alone an entire day, hid in the obscure marshes of the lake to escape the laying-on of hands, spiritual growth workshops, group prayer sessions. My hands blistered badly from the paddle but I almost enjoyed the pain. I wonder if that monk who carried out his extreme, while I did not, was trying to convince himself of his belief. I wonder if he ever stumbled, faltered, fell, stole away into the forest alone late at night to lie down or to torture himself with the temptation of it, while I knew that anything which requires an extreme to test its worth, needs no testing. 98 Simon Perchik I rotate, each morning one wall for flowers: a pasture hung where my fingers can touch the dust as a bird might nurse a bloom --I nourish, one painting, one lamp as a child’s mouth that can’t open wider and light covers a mother’s breast as fog will gather a hill out to sea and yellows and reds and lightening and always three walls for the tears that graze like roots -- so great are those roots my lips too are sweet - I roost each evening nail to nail suck from the Earth that listens will bells with feathers, with fog: one lamp shaded by three walls: one mouth as a fountain will bark and leaves and light --always one voice overflows whether I touch it or not. 99 Barbara Drake THE DUCK Sherry had her baby, says the older daughter cheerily to her mother in the kitchen after school. What was it? says her mother. A girl. Melinda. They call it Melly. Cute, says her mother, stirring chocolate chip cookie batter in a bowl at the round oak table. Remember Sherry’s duck? says the younger daughter. She called it Jiggy. They are silent for a moment, the mother, the two daughters, thinking of Sherry’s duck. One afternoon she had fallen asleep and rolled over and crushed it. She cried for a month about Jiggy, says the older daughter. Is she going to finish high school or what? asks their mother. No, she’s living with, uh, what’s his name. Where? I don’t know, uh, somewhere. And Sherry just got her room in their house redecorated, says the younger daughter, It was all in unicorn designs. The younger daughter would love to redecorate her room all in one cute motif, preferably rainbows, gnomes, or unicorns. Do you know what they say about unicorns? asks their mother, tasting the chocolate chip cookie batter. The girls also take globs of cookie batter out of the bowl with their fingers, dragging their fingers so as to get a maximum number of chips, but neither deigns to ask their mother what unicorns signify, knowing she will tell them whether or not they want to hear it. A unicorn can only be caught by a virgin. A virgin will come up and lay its head in a virgin’s lap, says their mother. The older sighs and continues to lick cookie batter. Poor Sherry, she says. Poor Sherry. 101 Darcy Wessendorf HOW ODD how odd that the subject of your dreams should ring the doorbell, waking you at burning oak and crimson sun midday perfectly fusing your conscious and unconscious leaving you no thing and wanting the same honest wimmin steaming mint tea truths what do you like? no one ever asked me that before i like living by the sea, not wearing a shirt i like loving her because the loving is all consuming and liquid like fire like water like swimming far-out at blackest night further and further breathing easy. deep. chianti tongue pressing at the temples and currents of aqua and magenta sucking you clean til you explode whooping to the surface bursting outa the depths to view that early morning slice of moon over water so like her too: beaming on you. 102 Darcy Wessendorf your hand imprinted on my breast 12 hours later the incessant uneven blinking of the neighbor’s Christmas tree lights is driving me mad slow buzz roar of neon electric flourescent. i can’t find the Nicaraguan coffee bought just yesterday & i don’t know if i can write this poem without it. i have become the embittered worn-out one who seldom laughs, wanting only to read, sleep, eat and touch you. Mostly that. 103 Lee Kottner WIELDING THE IRON My mother loves to iron. She will stand in slacks and a long-line bra -like a black-haired Valkyrie or the Witch of Endor, seeress wreathed in steam, drops of sweat, uncried tears a band on her forehead- and iron for hours. She says she has always loved it, at least since she was sixteen or so, working as many hours a day as she was old, in Gramma’s tyrant restaurant, except when there were wrinkled clothes, aprons, tough percales with handmade lace, Scottish kirk linens to smooth like children’s brows, press like heretics. Then she would set up the board in the living room behind the caldroned kitchen, near the phonograph, and play Verdi, Chopin, Wagner, hum “The Spinning Chorus,” imagine Violetta, Aida, Madama Butterfly dying of consumption, strangling in sand, by knife thrust. So many dead women in her mind as she wields the iron heavy as a cannonball, longsword, javelin. She says ironing gave her time to think. 104 I hate ironing. It sits in my washbasket for weeks until I have nothing to wear, no lovely antique linens for my bed. Even then I do it only with reluctance. It is so time consuming; I should be reading, writing novels, poetry instead of just flattening cloth. And even the pleasure my mother had of watching cotton smooth out like marble is denied me: my iron is too light. And though there is music too when I work at this most domestic of tasks, there are no songs of dying women. I think of them enough when I hear their voices- Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, Sexton, Frank, Plath- in the poetry, the literature, the chronicles I am compelled to read when not cleaning house. But when I wield the iron my mind is the blankness of starched pillowcases, shielded, encased, entrapped in an impenetrable white wall as wrinkled and messy as slept-in clothes. 105 Lee Kottner SWIMMING: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Ontogeny: the stages of development through which an embryo passes. Phylogeny: the evolution and development of a species or phylum. Alveoli: small air sacs in the lungs. Vision of a dancer, he skims through water blue as tundra snow, drifted with leaves and mayfly corpses empty and papery as abandoned wasp nests, over white silica and quartz bottom like a manta or skate. O that we had not forever lost our gills, that we had learned to inhabit water too, breathe through our skins, amphibious. Perhaps we would not yearn so much for space then, sprinkled with stars like diatoms, where gravity bubbles around bits of rock but really draws upon nothing beyond their circumferences. An expanse of blue, deeper, tempts us there also, to where there is no air, where we may drift like lost kites or wreckage, swayed by currents or the twitch of a fingertip. 106 But we become air breathers in one blue slithering gasp, confirmed groundlings with earth’s salts in our blood. Before this we were truly aqueous, tethered like a space walker, our alveoli filled with the suspended detritus of growth, shed cells like plankton- the flotsam and jetsam of ontogeny. And now, when we hold our breath and dive for pearls, sponges, coral, lost rings on tile bottoms, grasp our treasures and bring them to the surface, inhale, we continue recapitulating our search for thinner atmospheres. 107 Lee Kottner WRAPPING PENNIES Blue veins in your hands, feeding first and middle fingers sorting by twos well-water brown, algae green, kettle-bright buffed discs into quick perfect piles of ten, stacked billiard bumpers across frothy green linoleum & chrome of the restaurant table: tiny saucers like the pottery thick plates and cups stored in the kitchen, dust coated, smelling slightly acrid ozone in garden soil or rust in the bottom of water buckets drawn from a pump in the woods across the street. A long, fifty cent stack lined up your palm and half the middle finger red-Jello-and-cream wrapper slipped on without disturbance, paper ends folded down in triangles, overlapping, tapped twice sharply on the table, each end flattened, rolls laid aside like logs, paper and metal timber. The ten cent stack in my hand scattering into a heap and through fingers- their veins hidden below skin- to clank and roll and be counted again. 108 Mary Tisera AT THE CARNIVAL “I’m his because he deserves the best,” her tee shirt reads, her ass overriding grimy shorts. No prize himself he shuffles along hauling a giant panda through the dust. As they sidle into the Funhouse, I recall another house, a sign on its roof painted phosphorescent white reading, “It suits us.” Inside, a family of twelve, beekeepers, their honey speckled with bee droppings or maybe worse, the children’s noses perpetually running; the father, short and mean; the mother, big and booming, that house, mined with holes, leaning out far to the left: it suited them fine and we, in their fierce presence, never dared say otherwise. The bees are gone. The parents dead. When their eldest made good, first thing he tore the house down, raised a mansion he paints a blinding white each spring. No doubt it suits him fine. 109 Mary Tisera THE TRAVELERS Nothing is certain on this train. The Club Car out of ice, the toilets jammed we make do with warm soda and jack-knifed legs. An old woman complains to noone in particular. The whole couch hearing, rejoices we have someone voicing our communal objections, life hard enough without these added indignities. If she had only known, she’d sure as shooting went Greyhound. Her sandwich not worth manure: the meat snatched from the wrong end of the chicken. She paid good money. This ain’t right. Amtrak corrupt, that’s how come the pitiful johns. She’s writing her Senator. The crooks, so help her, will be stopped. We mark her words, go on staring out our windows. None of us will catch the same view in the same light. I latch onto a kitchen chair marooned in a meadow. My seatmate pins his longing on an abandoned playground; he has already forgotten this Quonset hut we are passing. We pull into Harrisburg on the wheels of this announcement: 110 a derailing outside Altoona- we will bypass it by bus, arriving at most an hour late. In the space of our ten minute layover we jam the phone booths, the lavatories, overrunning the man behind his snack counter. Dazed by our urgency his skittery eyes plead- too much excitement at one time. Not a second to spare we board a bus whose toilet works. The old woman smirks-- her conspiracy theory proved: she’s writing the President. Is this any way to travel she asks the overhead rack. We go back to staring out our windows, this time pacified by the Susquehanna moving, as we counted on, East. Against her seasoned judgment our spokesperson sleeps. 111 Harry Crane IN WAKING TO A BABE I THE GLOW Walking, then, we loved our legs, smooth contraction of thigh, belly, contraction, sensual contractions. Soft hooves walked, ran too, with us within us, and we went home, waiting, talking, Planet Waves over again and over (May you stay forever young . . .) Neighbors came brought wine and paint and bathed and healed, hearts precipitated. My son becomes, becomes as sons become, tear of flesh mute flare and wet cries of wonder, fear and other cries. He knew us then as intimately as he will warm hazy things, oddly lyrical, giants cowed by himself, his frail vigor. 112 II PARANOID MUTTERINGS OVER MY HERO’S CRIB I think there were a lot of buffaloes once, shaggy things, looked like Gabby Hayes, I saw one once when I was your age. It was stuffed and mounted in an airport, forever just about to graze next to the latest model Ford. I saw men and women like that too at Madame Tussaud’s. Men are a lot like buffaloes. The stampeding banter. Blind hooves crushing and churning. Wild trapped wail foaming eyes, nostrils. The headlong rush to extinction. Can you hear it? Let’s you and I be mousefolk live inside a walnut eye, sleep and titter through moist brown afternoons, humble and Autumnal. Or wood snake, sleek and apple fed. Or mantis ray shadows. Or whiskered walruses. 113 III THE BLADE I borrowed six yamikas, three black and three white because I didn’t know. And I bought a bottle of Mogen David white concord because the Moyle said ‘Sweet and Kosher’ Sam was the first to drink, gauze steeped in wine, he drank through ancient prayers lingered in shades of chant. The skin was pried loose and back to bleeding. His scream distant and loud. I smoothed his hair. The bell cap was lowered and tied the scalpel poised, The Moyle prayed. I repeated obscure, disturbed. I didn’t understand the language of Sam’s foreskin. 114 IV THE ZEN CAT Sinse, our cat, didn’t care much for Sam. She’s a very jealous and pious cat. She got back at us, she got bit on the ass and ran up a $40 vet bill. She’s okay now, with Sam I mean, as for getting bit on the ass, well, I have no sympathy for her. It’s a chickenshit place to get bit. But she’s satisfied, the score’s even. First there was a cat then there wasn’t a cat then there was a cat again. V “WHAT I DO IS ME; FOR THAT I CAME” —Gerard Manley Hopkins The nature of beast brightest in pups; my pup blinding. My pup seethes and sleeps howls with Earthwork mark secret and foaming in his breast. In Earthworks just passion is measurable by degree by starmeal weight. 115 Marcus Cafagna DINOSAURS At age seven, my father gave me dinosaurs, little toy dinosaurs, their Latin names cut across their plastic underbellies. I kept them in a shoebox, taking them out to do battle. Pitting Tyrannosaurus Rex, the meat-eater against swooping Terradactyl or vegetarian Brontosaurus while my mother coughed on Kools and watched “The Guiding Light.” I won’t forget what I heard coming home, opening the door, my mother and father roaring at each other like motorcycles. I didn’t know why, just ducked beneath ceramic planters exploding like bombs and melamine plates sailing through the kitchen. With his steel palms, my father slapped my mother’s face, squeezed his fingers around her throat and slammed her skull against the plaster wall until they both fell exhausted on the linoleum. My parents didn’t notice me uncoiling from my fetal ball and dashing into the bedroom, feeling my way through the half-darkness, my brain spinning, vomit sticking to my Buster Browns. 116 I switched on the Donald Duck lamp and plopped down on the polished oak floor and opened the shoebox. All the dinosaurs were in there, every color and shape and species. I picked up Tyrannosaurus Rex, His ruby jaws spread apart like scissors. I put him back in the shoebox, the rain outside tapped at my window and my reflection loomed in the darkening glass. 117 thomas gladysz THE COLLECTED GREED, PARTS 1 - 13 by Diane Wakoski A Review When Alan Williamson wrote in his recently published Introspection and Contemporary Poetry that “Diane Wakoski has been one of the sadder casualties of the shift in taste in the last decade,” he could hardly have forseen the niggardly critical response that The Collected Greed, Part 1-13 has so far received. Since its publication by Black Sparrow Press in Summer, 1984, Collected Greed has only been reviewed in a handful of newspapers and periodicals. Yet Collected Greed is an important work, if not as a landmark work by an original and vital poet, then in its large attempt and achievement in putting into poetic terms subjects that have been left outside the realm of poetry. Collected Greed offers a two-fold reading of Wakoski’s poetry. The first is in retrospect. Collected Greed brings together for the first time the various Greeds ( 1 through 11) published intermittently from 1968 through 1973. In fact, the earliest parts to Greed (1 and 2) were begun not long after the publication of Wakoski’s first books - making Collected Greed representative of Wakoski’s poetry career. Collected Greed also publishes for the first time two additional Greeds, parts 12 and 13, which offer the opportunity to read Wakoski as she is writing today. Those who witnessed Wakoski’s epic reading of the entire Collected Greed*, myself included, come to realize the very interrelatedness of this work published over a 16 year period. Though the greeds of which Wakoski writes vary in their subject matter - polygamy, jealousy, self-righteousness, greed for false principles and even the greed we all feel for control over our own lives - there is an underlying consistency and relatedness throughout the book. The Greeds are linked intrinsically by their theme (the want for more and for what one does not have), but they are also linked by the images, characters and metaphors that weave throughout the texts of the Greeds. And penetrating as sharply as a needle is Wakoski’s distinct poetic voice. * The reading took place December 12, 1984 at Michigan State University, lasting nearly 8 hours. 118 Diane Wakoski Robert Turney Diane Wakoski Robert Turney Parts 12 and 13 deserve mention as the two newest installments in Collected Greed. Part 12, “The Greed To Be Fulfilled,” is certainly the most difficult part of Collected Greed, both in its length and involvement. Part 12 is a dramatic fantasy which, while non-poetic (it is mostly written in prose,) is certainly magical and transcendent of its subject. Through its 80 pages, Wakoski, Beethoven, La Monte Young, Charles Bukowski, George Washington, the King of Spain, the Devil, the Blue Moon Cowboy and a dozen other contemporary writers gather in the desert for an awards ceremony. The awards, named after flowers and honoring the traits of the flowers, are given to modem writers, living and dead. Part 13, “The Greed For Control Over Death & Life” is the most personal of all the “Greeds.” The poem is a “homage to Beethoven, Bukowski & Robert Turney, who want all of life to be ecstatic,” their ecstasy being their greed for control over their own lives, their own deaths. It is fitting that part 13 is the last Greed, for in its personalness> comes a resolve over greed, one that enables us to rest from the poet’s struggle with jealousy, self-righteousness, principles, etc... . But Wakoski says in the introduction to the book that the Collected Greed is not the complete Greed- it is an open ended work, as are our own lives. 119 CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES MARCUS CAFAGNA is an MSU student. He edits the East Lansing mag 4-play. JACKIE CARLSON attends graduate school at MSU. JIM CARTWRIGHT just graduated from MSU with a B.A. in English. He is a performance poet and has released a cassette recording of his poetry, Stringy Smooches from a Parmesan Poo Drip. Cartwright won first prize in the 1984 Glendon Swarthout Poetry Contest and plans to move to California or Oregon to attend graduate school. HARRY CRANE is a local poet, perhaps the next great Crane? KATHY CROWN is finishing her degree in English at MSU and is Editor of RCR. Her work placed second in the 1984 Swarthout Contest. * ANNIE DAVIDOVICZ is a recent MSU graduate working in the area. She plans to move to California or Oregon to pursue an M.F.A. JOHN DITSKY teaches at the University of Windsor (Canada), where he also edits the University of Windsor Review. His collections of poetry include The Katherine Poems and most recently Scar Tissue. He has previously been published in RCR. BARBARA DRAKE teaches in Oregon. She is the author of two books of poetry, Life in a Gothic Novel and the much-praised Love at the Egyptian Theatre. THOMAS GLADYSZ was raised in Detroit and currently lives in East Lansing. He was a staff writer with The State News and currently free-lances art criticism for the Lansing State Journal. Gladysz hosted an arts variety progfam, BLAST, on cable TV and is currently involved with a documentary on Diane Wakoski. 120 JOHN HALL recently graduated from MSU. He was awarded Honorable Mention in the 1984 Swarthout Contest and has previously been published in RCR. MARIA HOLLEY is a graduate student at MSU where she also teaches writing. “Clippings” placed first in the 1984 Jim Cash / RCR Contest for fiction. She was recently awarded first prize in the Ms. Magazine contest for fiction. CHRIS HOTTS is finishing her degree in English and is a staff editor of RCR. Her poetry won third prize in the 1984 Swarthout Contest. * RICHARD KOSTELANETZ is a well known avant-garde poet. He has written and edited numerous books, including most recently The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature. “Epiphanies” represents Kostelanetz’s principle creative project of the last few years. LEE KOTTNER resides in East Lansing and is a Graduate Assistant at MSU, where she’s taking her own sweet time getting a Master’s in English Literature. She fancies herself a “quasi-punk mediaevalist BoHo.” LYN LIFSHIN won the 1984 Jack Kerouac Award for Kiss the Skin Off. She is the author of the recently published books, Naked Charm, Upstate Madonna and Black Apples. The first critical biography of Lifshin, by Hugh Fox, is due out soon from Whitston Press. BRENDA MILLER is a graduate student at MSU. She has previously been published in RCR. CAROL MORRIS is a graduate student at MSU and an editor of Labyris. She lives in East Lansing and has previously been published in RCR and other magazines. MARY BETH MOURAD is an undergraduate at MSU. WILLIAM PALMER lives in Alma, Michigan where he teaches at Alma College. Palmer is also a doctoral student at MSU. His poetry has been published in Poetry Now, The Windless Orchard, Bits, and Passages North. 121 SIMON PERCHIK has published 7 books of poetry. His most recent work is The Snow Cat Poems 1980-1981 To The Photographs of Robert Frank. LEONORA SMITH teaches at MSU and is an editor of Labyris. She is currently working on a novel, Dead Man’s Shoes, which was awarded a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. LAUREL SPEER is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, including The Hundred Percent Black Steinway Grand. Speer lives in Arizona and has previously been published in RCR. HANNAH STEIN lives in Davis. California. She has been published in RCR, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kayak, Poetry Northwest and other magazines. She won third prize in the 1983 Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition. She has previously published under the name Hadassah Stein. DAVE SWAN lives in East Lansing. He is an MSU graduate and has previously been published in RCR. NICK THORNDIKE is a graduate student at MSU. MARY TISERA is a poet moonlighting as a psychiatric nurse. She has recently been published in Wisconsin Review, Poetry and West Branch and will be published shortly in Hudson Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Abraxas. ROBERT TURNEY lives in East Lansing. His photography has appeared in a number of books and in previous issues of RCR. CHERYL VOSSEKUIL is a doctoral student at MSU. Her poetry has been published in RCR and Labyris. DIETER WESLOWSKI was born in Dusseldorf, Germany and has traveled in Southern and Northern Spain. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he works as a psychiatric orderly at St. John’s Hospital. PETER WILD lives in Arizona. He has published widely, his recent books include Getting Ready For A Date and The Peaceable Kingdom. His poems have also previously appeared in RCR. DARCY WESSENDORF is an MSU student. Her poetry received Honorable Mention in the 1984 Swarthout Contest. JAN ZERFAS won first prize in Negative Capability’s 1984 St. Agnes Eve Contest. She is an editor of Labyris, a feminist arts magazine. Zerfas has recently been giving poetry readings and workshops in prisons. ALISON ZINK is an MSU student working for a teaching certificate. She received Honorable Mention in the 1984 Swarthout Contest. * Editor’s poetry may appear in RCR only if it places in the blind-judged Swarthout or Jim Cash / RCR Contests. 123 RED CEDAR REVIEW Kathy Crown - Editor Staff Editors -- thomas gladysz Chris Hotts Andy Malonis Kent Graham Chris Martin Bruce Walker Mike Our thanks here to the secretaries of the MSU English Dept., to Robert Tumey, to Albert Drake and to Jim Cash, who has funded our annual Creative Writing Contest for the last six years. Our thanks also to George Kooistra of University Publications, to Barbara King of the College of Arts and Letters and to Joe Kuszai of the MSU Graphic Arts Dept. for all graciously allowing us the use of their equipment and expertise in the preparation of this issue. Special thanks to Howard Anderson, a patron of the Red Cedar Review. RED CEDAR REVIEW is a student-run biannual magazine of the literary arts published at Michigan State University. Submissions may be sent to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48825. Include S.A.S.E. Typesetting and keylining by Crown, Hotts, Martin, gladysz Printing by Thomson-Shore, Inc. of Dexter, MI RED CEDAR REVIEW is partially funded by the ASMSU Funding Board. Figure without caption. Current Issue..........................................................................................$2.50 Year Subscription of RCR............................. $4.00 Back Issues of RCR.............................................................................$1.00 Books by the Red Cedar Press: Postcard Mysteries................................................................................$2.50 (fiction by Albert Drake) Love at the Egyptian Theatre..............................................................$2.50 (poetry by Barbara Drake, intro by Diane Wakoski) INCLUDED IN THIS ISSUE: Poems by: Peter Wild Jan Zerfas Barbara Drake Jim Cartwright Richard Kostelanetz Fiction by: Maria Holley Leonora Smith Interviews with: Allen Ginsberg Robert Kroetsch Eli Mandel Photography by: Robert Turney Cover Design by: Mary Beth Mourad $2.50