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.