PLAYBOY does El Paso

Luis Alberto Urrea's article about El Paso is in the November issue of Playboy and it’s now on the newsstands. From what we hear, the issue is destined to be one of Playboy's most read issues because Marge Simpson is the cover girl. It's good PR for El Paso. Nationally, El Paso is usually dissed by the media. People wonder why we live here. How come Cinco Puntos is here? In the 1970s when Lee and I first moved from Albuquerque south in search of a job, we asked friends where we should live, El Paso or Las Cruces. “Oh,” they said, wrinkling up their noses like they caught the whiff of something spoiled, “Las Cruces. You don’t want to live in El Paso.” (Why that is / is a whole other subject.) Anyway, Luis’ piece will help people begin to think differently about El Paso. And people (yeah, yeah, 90% are men) do READ Playboy. There are things to do, places to go, people to see. Yes, Juárez is a few minutes away across the river, its suffering remains in our thoughts and prayers, we worry about friends and families, the narco-wars in the recesses of our dreams, but here in El Paso is great music, a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. It's the paradox that Luis was commissioned to write about.

Luis stayed with Lee and me during his visit. I drove him around some during the day, historian David Romo did the same and daughter Susie Byrd took him out for some nite-time excursions around downtown and the Central Side (as opposed to the East Side and the West Side and the North East--El Paso enjoys its multiplicities). I wrote two blognotes here and here about his visit.

Odd thing is that the piece has created a little political controversy in the parochial parts of the El Paso psyche. The reason: Susie is District 2 Representative on the City Council, and her good friend County Commissioner Veronica Escobar made a cameo appearance in the article because she joined Susie on a night-time excursion. Of course they had fun. Susie and Vero, both known for their progressive straightforward politics, are fun to be around. They joke and riff and laugh loudly and they dance. Their faces light up with happiness. Luis fit right in. No wonder, like the rest of us, he loves the fronterizo sounds of the band Radio La Chusma. He gave La Chusma big kudos in his piece. Indeed, he gave kudos to the vibrant rasquache energy of El Paso. In a letter to me he said the Playboy editors wanted him to make the piece meaner, they wanted him to put some diss into his language. But no, he wanted his writing to churn up some love for El Paso. [He was disappointed when the editors chopped his paean to Papa Burgers on Piedras Street.] So he was dumbfounded when a few of the city’s radiomouths started squabbling and bloviating and throwing mud at him and Susie and even Vero. Luckily for me I escaped the onslaught, probably because I’m only a poet and publisher, two occupations that are considered inconsequential among the blabbering class.

Oh, well. Playboy is making some El Paso bucks. I went to the Westside Barnes & Noble and bought three copies for our archives. The clerk told me he was selling them like hot cakes.

MAKE TACOS NOT WAR
Self-portrait with Luis at the Smeltertown Cemetary

The Resurrection of Bert Ringold

In the fall Cinco Puntos Press will publish a book of poems by Harvey Goldner. This is not a smart capitalistic move. Like Sandy Taylor, a long time publishing mentor of Lee’s and mine and a co-publisher at the Curbstone Press says, “Publishing poetry is suicidal.” Still we do it because I am a poet and from time to time we feel the urge. It’s almost a biological and emotional necessity, like making love. Sandy would totally agree. It just feels good.

The book of poems is Harvey’s The Resurrection of Bert Ringold. I grew up alongside Harvey Goldner in Memphis. He’s probably the one guy most responsible for me becoming a poet. Once during the craziness of our adolescence Harvey took me down to the public library. Forgive me if I have my dates wrong but I think we were 15 or 16. If we were 15, then we rode the bus, the front of the bus. We were white boys and this was 1958-down-South-post-Boss-Crump Memphis 10 long years before James Earle Ray unsheathed his rifle and shot Martin Luther King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Harvey checked out two 78rpm vinyl records—one was called The San Francisco Renaissance and the other was Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading Coney Island of the Mind. My gosh, my idea about poetry changed immediately and forever. I remember Allen Ginsberg reading Howl like it was a Declaration of our Independence, wise drunken gay Jack Spicer murmuring into the microphone and of course Ferlinghetti’s hypnotic sing-song voice telling us that “the dog walks freely in the street and the things he sees are bigger than himself.”

Before I paste in a Harvey Goldner poem, I want to give praise and thanks to that long-ago librarian who purchased those records. Also, I worry if I have my dates correct on when we listened to those records. I googled but couldn’t find the exact record or a date, Harvey remembers listening to something but he is clueless about further details, so Harvey and I could have made our magical journey to The New American Poetry sometime before I left Memphis in late 1962. I don’t think so (I like the way I tell my story), but maybe.

So here’s the first poem of The Resurrection of Bert Ringold.

Apocalypse September 1994

Mid-September, late afternoon, the world
came to an end, just like Harold
Camping had been predicting it would

on Bible Radio. Who’d have believed
that loony grouch? But there was no Hollywood
Armageddon: blond Madonna thrashing in mud,

cities on fire, armies clashing, rivers of blood,
ground quaking and cracking up, booming rap
music—none of that loud and dramatic crap:

God simply and quietly turned off, or turned
way down, Earth’s gravity. My old dad
and I were in the park, walking Manfred,

Dad’s dog, a German shepherd, when Dad
tossed a red rubber ball for Manfred
to catch. Manfred jumped and missed the red

ball, as usual (the dog was old and half-blind),
but—lo and behold—both the ball and Manfred
kept on going up and up, with Manfred

barking after the ball like a mad
cracker preacher after a sexy sinner. I rubbed
my eyes, thinking I might be having an acid

flashback, but when I turned to face Dad,
his shoes were up where his face had
been, and he hovered above me. I grabbed

his ankles to tug him down, but I too left the ground.
Luckily we were under a tree, and we wedged
ourselves between branches. We watched Manfred

rise through the sky toward a big red cloud.
Park debris ascended, as well as a crowd which included
cats and dogs, mothers with babies in strollers, and

two softball teams with their gear. Then Dad
smiled at me and said, “Fuck it, son,” and we scrambled
out of the tree. I held Dad’s hand as we rose toward

the cloud. Dad soon died. I cried. Blood trickled
out of Dad’s nose. I’m still slowly rising. It’s cold
and dark now, the air is terribly thin, a dead

horse just floated past. Using Dad’s back
as a sort of a desk, I’m writing this poem
by the light of the half-moon, with a pencil,

on my current bank statement. For once I’m not
depressed that my balance is under a dollar.
And I’ll soon be dead, so there just isn’t time

to fuss too much anymore with meter and rhyme.
I’m going to put this poem in the half-pint
bourbon bottle (empty now) that I filched

from Dad’s hip pocket. I’ll fling it toward the
stars, which, thank God, are still in their places.
Hopefully, some weird being from a distant galaxy

will find it, and hopefully he, she or it
will like 20th century American poetry.

On Monday morning, January 1st of this year, I decided that I would begin a blog. I’ve been reading Ron Silliman’s blog for a long time now and I enjoy it, and I appreciate his industry in his continual writing. I need that, so the primary reason I begin this blog is to give me a habit for my work. What follows is the piece I wrote on that Monday morning, the first day of 2007. A woodpecker—my first bird of the New Year—hammered at a telephone pole in the chilly bright morning. Later that morning I happened upon this poem, # 47 of “The poems of Pickup (Shin-te)” in The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, the revised and expanded bilingual edition from Copper Canyon that was wonderfully translated and annotated by Red Pine.

The world had its know-it-alls
fools for empty prose
indifferent to the
harvest
they sow seeds of hate
seeing buddhas they don’t bow
meeting
monks makes them mad
Sin and Evil are their colleagues
the Poisons live
next door
when they die they go to hell
and see the sun no more

This collection has been my morning toilet reading on and off for the last several years or so. Two or three poems a day, sometimes more, sometimes less—for several months I put it aside, having come bored with Han Shan’s sometime preachy ways. That’s the way my poetry-reading life is.

Shin-te (Pickup) was the youngest of those three poet hermits—the most famous of course is Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and then his tall hairy friend Feng Kan (Big Stick). None of them had much truck with the monkish ways of the Kuoching Temple at the foot of Tientai Mountain which was their primary hangout when they were not happily lost in the woods. In his preface, Red Pine gives us this story about Pickup:

One day Big Stick was walking along the trail that led between Kuoching and the
nearby county seat of Tientai. Upon reaching the cinnabar-colored outcrop of
rock known as Redwall, he heard someone crying. Searching in the bushes, he
found a ten-year-old boy. The boy head had been left there by his parents, so
Big Stick picked him up and brought him back to Kuoching.

This is sort of a Moses-in-the-rushes story, huh? Much later Cold Mountain met Pickup at the temple and “the two became such close friends, their images are still used by Chinese in their homes to represent marital harmony.”

I first read Cold Mountain via the Gary Snyder translations that were in his Rip Rap book. I have a beat up and much used copy of that around here somewhere. This probably was in 1963 at the Ruth Stefan Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. I had the “beginner’s mind” about poetry. I read the New American poets over and over, especially the poets from Black Mountain Poets and the San Francisco Renaissance. For sure these three hermits—Cold Mountain, Big Stick and Pickup—were the poets Philip Whalen was thinking about when he scribbled down “Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis” which I first read in his wonderfully titled book Memoirs of an Interglacial Age:

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a
pointless joke or silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the
margin of a quick splashed picture -
bug, leaf, caricature of Teacher
on
paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength
brushed momentarily over it
Their world and several since
Gone to hell
in a handbasket, they knew it -
Cheered as it whizzed by -
& conked
out among the busted spring rain
cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have
saved us all.

If you know Red Pine's Cold Mountain book, then you know I’m done with this reading of it now. Pickup’s 49 poems is the book’s caboose. But this morning—New Year’s Day, 2007—was a good day to finish it, especially to find this poem by Pickup which so easily can be changed here and there to make it so completely contemporary. It doesn’t appear that much has changed in the psyche for us humans in the last 1200 years except our technologies and some of the metaphors we use (“hell” for instance) that offer us so many opportunities for violence and self-obliteration. So I wish and will work for peace in the New Year but I don’t hold out any hope. And I will continue to write my poems. It’s a good time to be a poet, I think, although the pay is very shitty.