Royalties

I have received my first quarterly statement of royalties from authorHouse: $6.03 in royalties for a total of nine books sold in the category of "Bookstore Paperback Sales," which I'm assuming is Amazon sales. (In fact, the royalties due me are $8.37, but $2.34 is being withheld for the time being for federal taxes.) My thanks go out to the hardy nine, including Joe B. who sits across from me at work, and Heather F. who announced she was ordering a copy on Facebook. I am grateful to have readers...

Easy Green Proof Part 5

I concluded the last section or stanza of the poem by removing yet another line from the originally published version, which means I expurgated a line from every section of the poem in the re-write; which is a lot of flaky old dandruff of former self to be getting rid of in the process. Once again, in this section, the removed line had overtones of my trying to be a New York poet, someone like Ted Berrigan, able to cavalierly use stereotyped "black" diction because this language really does exist and somehow has to be put in its proper relation to the all the other things we can possibly say with our mouths... I see/saw this as a utopian poetic idea of embracing rather than trying to educate our way out of the undergrowth. But now, at this point in time, I know that I personally can't shift the burden, as it were, in the way someone like Ted Berrigan could so easily. In my poetry it just looks awkward (but see previous posts for wanting to look awkward) or worse. So

I write words just like these ones

Because I'm afraid of myself

But these ones are different

They afraid of they own selves

Like huge potato bugs

becomes finally

I write words just like these ones

Because I'm afraid of myself

But these ones are different

Like huge potato bugs

The fact is, the expurgated line didn't work, poetically speaking let alone politically. But it is obviously in the final version the unspoken repartee to the line "Because I'm afraid of myself": afraid of my own tendencies, as it were, my subconscious bigotries, my uses as a historical repository for, really, the diction of African-American comedians in the seventies, the politically incorrect period that followed the politically correct period so closely that those of us who were suburban white kids during the Civil Rights movement couldn't quite catch the waves right, thought we could get away with saying the same kinds of stuff, not even knowing what it all meant or resonated as, and like bad surfers rolled on under...

Easy Green Proof Part 4

In the fourth section of the poem, the line "Familiar as far as exhaustion" was deleted from

A single day

Familiar as far as exhaustion

In the life of a test pilot

to make

A single day

In the life of a test pilot

I was making use of deliberately awkward locutions all over the place when I wrote "Easy Green Proof," trying to imitate the deliberately awkward but perfect locutions of Ron Padgett, I think. It's strange how silly insincerity ages in almost exactly the same way as the sincerest expressions of inner life: some things pass time's test, some don't, and sometimes not passing is just a matter of one's current frame of mind, not of the words themselves...

Maybe as I was editing, and from the vantage of three years of parenthood, I just didn't think I had had the right, as a slacker in his twenties, to make any statements, ironic or otherwise, about the familiarity of exhaustion.

Fourth pantoum based on two expurgated lines

If these racists ever had any notion

Of Napoleon, the original Muhammed Ali,

It would have seemed instinct or strong emotion

Was the casus belli, the mustard seed of the grand folly

Of Napoleon, the original Muhammed Ali,

Who boxed alone when at all, whose shadow boxing

Was the casus belli, the mustard seed of the grand folly

That followed to St. Helena when he, de-toxing

Who boxed alone when at all, whose shadow boxing

Might have been his mother's or father's fist

That followed to St. Helena when he, de-toxing,

Perused the book of God, and Satan's list

Might have been his mother's or father's fist

Dragged weeping while the world

Perused the book of God and Satan's list

And demon fingers graciously uncurled

Dragged weeping while the world

Insisted that its program had been botched

And demon fingers graciously uncurled

By the winged and bearded one who watched,

Insisted that its program had been botched.

It would have seemed instinct or strong emotion

By the winged and bearded one who watched,

If these racists ever had any notion.

Third pantoum based on an expurgated line

If these racists ever had any notion

(speaking of their total entertainment value)

they'd be jumping into a nearby ocean

to make a statement. One-shout gal, you

speaking of their total entertainment value

would be absolutely clear as window glass

to make a statement one shout: "Gal, you

once said to be truly high class

would be absolutely clear as window glass

among the boxy towns of our village

(once said to be truly high class

apres le deluge before the pillage)."

Among the boxy towers of our village

every form of extreme view flourished:

apres le deluge before the pillage

of the many hateful huts well-nourished,

every form of extreme view flourished.

They'd be jumping into a nearby ocean

of the many hateful huts, well-nourished,

if these racists ever had any notion.

Easy Green Proof Part 3

Further editorial changes were made in the third part of the poem. I corrected the misspelled (or spelled with an obscure variant) "harnassed" to "harnessed" and changed

Were first spoken in the presence

Of Napoleon, the original Muhammed Ali,

to

Were first spoken in the presence

Of the emperor,

because although I liked the anachronism of calling Napoleon the original Muhammed Ali (referring when I wrote to the boxer) I realized I hadn't been conscious when I wrote of the additional anachronism of the original Muhammed Ali maybe having some relevance to Egypt's history around the time the Rosetta Stone got lifted -- and not wanting to mix it up with that, and wanting to distance the quotation of Laplace a little more, I simplified.

Next, I replaced

For him who first read and therefore

with

For him who first perused and thereby

-- I think both of the word changes are improvements, have more energy and work better with the idea of unintentionally inventing the logarithmic novel, whatever that might be (some logarathmically compressed form of narrative, I guess).

And finally, whether deliberately or not (I don't remember at the moment) the last lines of the section were changed from

You know, it comes

From not travelling around the world

to

You know, it comes,

From not travelling around the world

The original lines were very much my thinking at the time I wrote about my regrets at having dropped out of Johnston College the semester before I'd dreamed of going on the big group trip to Europe that a lot of my other college friends went on. So maybe excising the autobiographical material, making it less pointed, and inserting the comma at the end of the penultimate line so that the muddled syntax mixes more with the preceding lines, was an appropriate, even if unintentional, purification of the poem.

Second pantoum based on an expurgated line

The mission took root after the women themselves

raised concerns that aggressive animal rights

groups, spreading to hobbits and elves,

might think in Uighur; Bermudan blights

raised concerns that aggressive animal rights

please put them back in the closet:

might think in Uighur, Bermudan blights

that drowned the town before they tossed it?

Please put them back in the closet,

and sketch a return to your natural food roots

that drowned the town before they tossed it

into a salad of squalid swamp shoots;

and sketch a return to your natural food roots,

because there is no other way to expand

into a salad of squalid swamp shoots

that cover like netting the new female land;

because there is no other way to expand,

the mission took root after the women themselves,

that cover like netting the new female land

groups, spreading to hobbits and elves.