Hotei and my brother Bill

Saturday I woke up with vertigo and during that ordeal I remembered this photo. There, among my books, is my Zenster altar, and peeking out between the little statue of Hotei (aka, “the Laughing Buddha’) and the Three Stones is my big brother Bill. He died in 1996. A candle is burning.

Vertigo is a horrible experience. Lee has gone through this several times, I’ve done it once, so I was lucky to have some memory and a guide. Still, spinning around, unable to catch hold and unsure, you realize how fragile you are. How mortal. My body became queasy, I sweated and my skin, Lee said, was clammy and cold. The doctors say that vertigo is a malfunction of the inner ear, that bony mechanism that looks like a snail and somehow keeps us in balance. I don’t know what caused it. Perhaps a drug that I’m taking for my prostate. Or Friday afternoon I went to the chiropractor because my neck is stiff. Maybe something in the guy’s rather rough adjustment jiggled the tiny apparatus. All I know is first when I woke up there was a strange sensation in my head, like my brain was being bathed in electricity, and then the world began spinning. I started sweating, and I got clammy and cold. I wanted to lie down, but lying down made everything worse. I wanted to throw up. My only bit of relief was to sit hunched over on the edge of my bed and wait. After a while I had enough energy to go get the paper and read it. Davidson had beat Wisconsin, Stephan Curry, who looks like he might be 15, had scored 30. I decided to go outside to my office to meditate. I walked slowly. The spring air was so beautiful, the yellow columbines are blooming, the trees are leafing. I was happy to see these things. I lit my candle and turned to go sit and I got dizzy again. So dizzy that I curled up on the tile floor. The cold felt good, but the lying down made me nauseous. A few minutes and I found enough strength to get up go back inside. I stumbled into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, sitting straight enough I hoped to allow me to exorcise the vertigo out of my body. No such luck. I called Lee and she brought me water. She also brought a garbage can. Lucky she did because I started vomiting. I didn’t quit until my belly was cleaned out. Uggh. All through this ordeal I thought about dying. Maybe this wasn’t dying, but it could be like dying. I also remembered the photograph and thought about writing this piece. That’s how I am a poet, I guess. A couple of hours later I could move around. By the end of the day I felt strong enough to work some in the yard. Lee and I took a short walk. It was beautiful walking and talking and holding her hand.

Every morning I chant and meditate. This is my ritual. My habit. It takes about 30 minutes. When the bell sounds and my meditation period is over, I look to my left and I see my altar and outside the window is where we live. If the desert wind is blowing, like it is now, a wind chime will be ringing. The story about Hotei is that he carries a big sack on his back and gives out little gifts of food and sweets, especially to kids. Sort of a Santa Claus. The Zen Flesh Zen Bones collection says that once upon a time a Zen master came along and asked Hotei how is the Buddha realized? Hotei dropped his sack of goodies and sat in his meditation posture. He said not a word. This is what he’s doing on my altar. Then the master asked him, “Well, how do you actualize Zen?” And Hotei picked up his sack, bowed to his questioner and went on down the road. Again without a word. The stones are stacked on the altar instead of a statue of the Buddha. I picked up this idea from the Three Stones Zen Group in Albuquerque, of which my poet and painter friend J.B. Bryan is a member. The stones represent the three treasures—the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And then there is my big brother Bill. I miss him very much. He was the oldest of our troubled single parent family. We loved each other ferociously and sometimes with terrible anger. We never found a way to talk. Bill, through the guidance of my grandfather, became a renowned hunter and fisherman. His neck was very red from sitting in boats and staring at the water. In college he earned the nickname “Swamp Fox.” He was also an alcoholic. But he knew and understood things about the woods and growing up and living and dying that are important pieces of my childhood. Bill must be 12 or 13 in the photo, at the cusp of his manhood. So every morning I look past the altar every morning and see the house where Lee and I have lived for the last 30 years. Also, though this photo doesn’t show them, three other photographs decorate my altar—my big sister Peggy, my little sister Patsy who is dead too, and me. They are formal photographs. My mother had them made as remembrances for us all. If Bill was 13, then I was 8. The year was 1950. Harry Truman was president. Next month I will be 66.

So when I finally felt strong enough that evening, I went outside and sat on my stack of pillows staring at the wall. Then, like I do every morning, I closed my services with The Five Remembrances. According to Thich Nhat Hahn in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, the Buddha had his young disciples repeat these remembrances when they were practicing kinhin, their walking meditation. This is Thich Nhat Hahn’s translation.

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to be ill.
There is no way to escape being ill.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Bad Business on the Border

Lee and I moved to El Paso with our three kids in 1978. Our daughter Susie, the oldest, was seven, John was five and Andy was three. We tell people that before we moved to El Paso Susie had lived in fourteen different places—rented houses, a few apartments and even one hotel. We had moved from Alamosa west to South Fork in Colorado, then down along the Rio Grande to Albuquerque, then Las Cruces, then Radium Springs in New Mexico. Finally we came to El Paso. We were the exemplary lost citizens of the 60s that you read about in Newsweek. I was a poet, Lee was writing fiction—that will do it to you. Since then we have lived in this one house, a brick bungalow on Louisville Street. It was built in 1927. Our neighborhood, which began ITS life as a middle-class white neighborhood on the east side of the very small city of El Paso in the 1920s, has evolved into a mostly Mexican-American blue collar neighborhood that is now considered central El Paso. Many of our neighbors are first generation Americans, others were born on the other side and a few are probably illegal. Nobody cares. Spanish was the first language of probably a majority of our neighbors, but that might be changing some, although not much. We can see Juárez, Mexico from our front porch and can be across the river in 10 minutes. This is our neighborhood, our home.

I say all of this because I want to start writing some about the border on this blog. El Paso has truly become our home, although Lee was raised in New Jersey and I in Memphis. It’s the place that our children still call home, although our son Andy lives and works in San Antonio. But when we first moved here it was a place that carried a little bit of gritty fantasy and romance in our hearts. Living on the border was an idea, almost like living in Mexico. Somewhere between then and now, for a period of three or four years, I got depressed and uncomfortable living here. I felt like I was an outsider, a foreigner. But more time passed, for years we ran our business out of our home, and suddenly I realized I was truly home. If you’re interested in this evolution, read my poetry.

The import of all this is that we’ve been watching the border and El Paso change since we’ve been here. It happens slowly, much like Al Gore’s frog in the hot water. If you live here, you go about your life and you are not aware of the changes that are happening. But for folks returning to the border after a long time away, especially if they go back and forth across from Juárez to El Paso, then they might say, Holy shit, the water is boiling.

So I’ll start with this parable of the primary business along the U.S./Mexico Border—the drug trade y los narcotraficantes. I like the story because it implies the true dimensions of what’s going on. I heard three or four years ago. Supposedly, the engineer told a friend and his friend told me. Supposedly, it’s true. But maybe it’s another one of those bizarre urban legends that sprout up along the border. Strange stories that carry a nugget of truth. Not so much urban legends, but border legends.

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Once upon a time—let’s say it’s 1996, 12 years ago—an industrial engineer lived in El Paso. The man was famous in certain circles for his clever and intuitive ideas. He knew how to do things creatively that saved big corporations lots of money and lots of time. Anybody who can save big corporations money and time does very, very well. This man was no different. He made very good money, and CEOs of multi-national corporations sought him out to solve their problems.

One day the engineer was leaving an office building in downtown El Paso and a couple of thugs walked up behind him. Without saying a word, they grabbed the engineer by the arms and the man on the right stuck a gun into his ribs. “Cállate,” the man holding the gun said. A black car with tinted windows and Mexican plates pulled up to the curb and the two men pushed the engineer into the backseat. They climbed in on each side of him, a gun still pressing firmly into his ribs.

The driver stomped on the gas and the car sped away to the Bride of the Americas which is known here in El Paso as “the free bridge” because no tolls are charged. The engineer was on his way to Juárez on the other side of the Rio Grande. Maybe 15 minutes away. The engineer was frightened. He asked questions, but his Spanish was lousy. It didn’t make any difference. The thugs didn’t say a word. They looked out the windows like any suburban commuter. The engineer thought he was a dead man for sure, but he didn’t know what he had done. He was innocent, he told them. “Soy inocente! Inocente!” The guy on the left lit a cigarette. The car crossed the free bridge into Mexico.

When they got into the hubbub of Juárez the thugs pushed the engineer’s face down between his legs. They wrapped duct tape around his eyes and head so he couldn’t see. The engineer didn’t want to die. He was weeping. He wished he had learned to speak Spanish when he had the chance. The car traveled for maybe 20 more minutes.

Finally it stopped. Someone yanked the engineer, still blindfolded, out of the car. They pushed him into an air-conditioned building, stopped him and with one quick snatch, they ripped the duct tape from his eyes. It hurt bad, and he was blinded by the bright light. He wobbled and dropped to his knees. The floor was cold concrete. He looked around. He was in a very large warehouse. The warehouse was crowded with bales of cotton. Except they weren’t bales of cotton. They had an odd greenish tint like they were spinach or something. Maybe they were bales of marijuana. And then he realized they were bales of money. U.S. currency. His captors had disappeared. Two other men—one tall and large, wearing a gun strapped across his t-shirt; the other, a small man in an expensive suit, a pock-marked face—were watching him.

The big one spoke to the engineer in a broken English. He told the engineer that they had a problem.

“A problem?” the engineer said. He felt better.

“Sí.”

“What’s your problem?” He couldn’t figure. They had all of this money.

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Sí, rats. Rats eat the money. Like thieves, they are eating our money. We cannot protect the money from the rats. Poison don’t work, traps don’t work, even gas don’t work. Nothing works!” The big man was pissed even thinking about the enemy of rats.

The little man looked at the engineer, and the engineer knew that the little man was the boss and that he was evil. He knew that the little man was Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies. He got his name from flying huge planes to the border filled with cocaine. He was worth billions. His pocked face glimmered, his eyes were cold. Killing was of no import to him. His motto was “Only the dead are innocent.” What was important to Amado was his money. The engineer rose to his feet and thought about the problem of the rats and the money. They watched him.

“Can I walk around and look?”

“Si. Go ahead. No way out of here.” The big man laughed. The little man only watched.

The engineer breathed in and out like a man trying to swim to the shore from a long way. He walked up and down between the rows of bales of money. He saw the rat turds, he saw a few cats. The cats, like other solutions, had proved useless against the rats. Thirty minutes passed, maybe more. And then he knew the answer. It appeared magically, rising up with his breathing. He went back to where he had left the big man and the little man. They were sitting on folding chairs waiting for him.
He said, “Pipe. PVC pipe.”

“Huh?”

“PVC pipe. You know, the plumbing pipe? Get the pipe in three-foot diameters. Buy caps. Stuff the money into the pipe and cap it. It’s good to go.”

The big man looked at him and thought about the answer. Then he smiled. He turned to the little man. He said, “Pipa de plástica.” And he made his arms into a big O. The little man understood immediately. He turned and walked out without ever saying a word. The big man waved his hand and a man grabbed the engineer from behind and quickly wrapped more duct tape around his eyes. They loaded him in the car again, and the engineer had to wonder again if they were going to kill him and leave him out in the desert. He had read stories and heard rumors. But they didn’t. They drove him to the pay bridge at Avenida Juárez. They gave him a quarter and two nickels for the toll and pushed him out of the car, cut the tape from around his wrists but left the blindfold alone. They drove away. The engineer slowly pulled the tape away from his eyes. Then he walked back across the bridge into the United States.

He never spoke of this to the authorities. He didn’t want to die.

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The Mexican government says that Amado Carrillo-Fuentes died in 1997, the victim of a botched (or planned) plastic surgery on his face. Yet, rumors persist that the man who died on that operating table was not Amado. Who knows? The doctors who performed the surgery are now dead. Murdered. The illegal drugs continue to pour into the U.S. through different hands. And now, 11 years after Carrillo-Fuentes death, just across the river from where we live, a war is being fought for control of the drug traffic. This last week, which was Holy Week, 23 people were gunned down. They were among the 59 murdered throughout Mexico in this gruesome blood-letting, most along the U.S./Mexico border.

In popular news reports, the media will blithely state that the two principle money-makers for Mexican economy are oil revenues and the money that immigrants to the U.S send back home. They all ignore the narcotics industry. They don't want to say that illegal drugs is number 1 on the list, and if it disappeared, the Mexican economy could very well tremble and splinter like Mexico City during the 1985 earthquake. That’s scary, huh?

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is totally blind to seeing how our addiction to these drugs create these problems and how our strict heartless anti-drug laws exacerbate them. Now, in the post-9/11 environment, immigrants have replaced drugs as the national bugaboo. And the federal government, like with its blindness to the U.S. addiction to the drugs that Mexico supplies, does not see that our economy is likewise addicted to the cheap labor that migrants supply. No matter. The anti-immigrant phobia has become our language-borne virus. For us who live on the border, we are told to be quiet. The U.S. Government, in particular, the Homeland Security bureaucracy--aided and abetted by its allies, the rabid talk show hosts--know best, and they are adamant about militarizing the border and building its fences.

The city that my family and I moved to in 1978 is drying up. El Paso is becoming No Paso. The border is being damned up like a river, until finally, if our future continues to unravel like this, nothing will grow on either side.

I hope to write more about this.

Peace.

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NOTES on the photographs:
"El Chuco" is slang for El Paso. The image was done on the side of the Marty Snortum Photography Studio down the street from where we live. I don't know who the artist was.
Bruce Berman took the photograph of the kids swimming in the Rio Grande. It must have been the early 1980s. Life is not so pastoral on this stretch of the river any more. I'll write more about that later. The original is in color and this image is cropped. I think I have it in my files from when I was an associated editor of the Bridge Review back in the day.

The Resurrection of Spring, 10th Inning, Tokyo, Japan

"Ramirez stood frozen in the batter's box, admiring his 10th-inning drive to center field off Huston Street, thinking it would be a three-run homer. Instead, the ball bounced off the wall for his second two-run double, good enough to lift the Red Sox over the Oakland Athletics 6-5 on Tuesday night."

♣

And why are the Red Sox playing the Oakland A's in Tokyo? Best to ask Bud Selig and the MLB bankers. Oh well. Manny's double (he had four of the six Sox rbis) gave the Bosox the first win of the 2008 baseball season, and it sealed the win for Japanese reliever Hideki Okajima and the save for Jonathan Papelbon. Such wonderful names—Ramirez, Okajima and Papelbon in the American Game. And Daisuke Matsuzaka (aka Dice-K) pitched five innings with no decision.

Thanks to the AP sports writer who wrote the sentence about Manny posing at the plate to watch the arc of the ball sail into the blue Japanese sky. It made me happy. Happy enough to write something to welcome back the baseball season. I can't help it. Baseball, especially the box scores and the characters like Manny Ramirez, are one of my many addictions. And Manny--much to the frustration of many sports writers--happily has good karma. Besides, he refuses to show up at the White House for the George Bush Show. That speaks well of Manny and his happy karma.

Raul Salinas is dead

Raul Salinas is dead at the age of 73. The little man lived a big life. He was a fine poet and performer, a social and cultural activist, a teacher of young people and a man of peace even when he was speaking about revolution and resistance. An ex-con (15years) from his early days in Los Angeles, he had somehow found literature and social resistance and art and poetry and music and his indigenous spirituality inside the prison system. Lee and I met him when, in the early 90s, we would pack up all of our Cinco Puntos Press books and drive the 600 miles over to San Antonio for the Inter-American Book Fair. From the beginning Raul always had un abrazo and a blessing for us. All peoples were equal to him. Some people just didn’t understand. That was okay. Raul had the time to teach them. He taught young people to respect themselves and to care for themselves and to practice their art which would speak for them. And he taught them, through his own example, to respect the elders in their community. To listen to them. Raul was old fashioned that way. I’ll miss him dearly.

Raul, may you rest in peace, Brotherman.

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For more information, Miguel Liscano wrote a fine obitiuary (with a photo album) for the Austin American Statesman , and Omar Gallega blogged a wonderful description of how Raul lived his life. You can also support La Resistencia Books and Red Salmon Arts. If you're in Austin, go by and buy some books and visit with the good poeple who will be carrying on his work. One is a young man from El Paso, Rene Valdez. In the days and weeks to come, there’ll be plenty of material about Raul Salinas on the internet. Pay attention. He brought some peace into the world simply by discovering what revolution is within himself.

Note: A friend just called. He wanted to tell me that El Tapón had died. El Tapón? I asked. Yeah. Raul Salinas. El Tapón was his nickname when he came out of prison. But what does it mean? You know, it means the “stopper.” Cool, I said. The Stopper. El Tapón.

The Savage Detectives

I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. It’s a wonderful book, truly. I got wrapped up in those 577 dense pages on a personal level. Bolaño recording of all those voices was like he was talking about friends of mine, or would have been friends of mine if I had been wandering around the Mexico City poetry scene in the around 1975-1976. An experience somehow akin to the emotions I felt reading On the Road in 1959(Note 1). This experience, however, was a revisiting (like Bolaño was doing in the heavily autobiographical telling) the turmoil of my growing up into poetry. In years to come I suppose critics will hail it a masterpiece of Latin American literature (Bolaño was born in Chile but his family moved to DF when he was 15). I don’t call books masterpieces. I enjoy thinking of writers as friends if I especially feel an empathy for their work, and if I’m a friend, I won’t call a friend’s work “a masterpiece.” It’s like a kiss of death. Of course, Bolaño is dead already so he doesn’t care who kisses him. 2003. He slid off the planet at the age of 50. Poor guy. His liver went south. I wish I had known him. But that’s okay. He seems alive to me. Like he’s a friend wandering around in that large book.


Savage Detectives is an odyssey with a peculiar sandwich-like structure. Part 1 (November 2 to New Year’s Eve, 1975) and Part 3 (January 1, 1976 to February 13th) are diary entries by 17-year-old Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet in his first year of university who falls (luckily/unluckily) into the circle of “visceral realist” poets whose leaders are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (2). These two poets/intellectuals are indeed “the savage detectives.” The meat of the novel, between these two slices of diary, is a confusing cornucopia of interviews of people who knew Belano and Lima as they wandered around Mexico, Israel, Africa, Spain and France. The irony: neither Belano or Lima is ever interviewed. The reader only learns about them second hand and third hand through the myriad of interviews that stretch between 1976 to 1996—poets, dilettantes, admirers, lovers, enemies, fathers of friends. For example, the wonderfully obsessed Joaquin “Quim” Font(3)--the half-mad, half-wise architect father of two visceral realist poets, Maria and Angélica(4), who spend much of their time in bed with fellow visceral realist poets .

But really, the 403 pages of Part 2 are a complex reflection, like looking into a crystal, of Belano and Lima and therefore what possessed them and how they changed in those four months (11/75 to 2/76) recorded in García Madero’s diary. The first part of the diary records his initiation into the bizarre sexually and intellectually charged scene surrounding Belano and Lima and centered at the house of Quim and his daughters. In the second part García Madero, along with Belano, Lima and the prostitute Lupe flee Mexico City in Quim’s Impala. Lupe’s pimp Alberto--famed for measuring his schlong with the massive blade of his dagger--and a policeman, both armed and dangerous, are chasing them. The three poets and prostitute are fleeing harm but they are also going north to Sonora and the border, chasing the ghost of Cesárea Tinajero, a poet from the 1920s who was considered the Mother of Visceral Realism. It’s a wonderful story. I wonder if Bolaño wrote the complete diary first, then went back and inserted the commentary of all the voices who came across the Savage Detectives between 1976 and 1996. A fan of both Borges and Cortazar, it’s like he realized somewhere in the process, “All must be remembered. How else will I know who I was?” All the while realizing that Arturo Belano is not and will never be Arturo Bolaño. A mysterious book, indeed.

Last week in the midst of reading the book, I wrote a Mexican friend, a poet who is a little bit younger than me. I told him that I’ve been reading Los detectives salvajes, and I think that’s where I must have met him--a meeting in the ether--wandering around inside that book somewhere. I was too old to be a Visceral Realist, but my friend must have been tempted by the shadowy ideology of visceral realism, whatever it was. 1970-something, Mexico City—and this goofy guy Ulises Lima invited me to a party in la Zona Rosa. Or was it Coyoacán? Yes, it was Coyoacán. I had walked by Trotsky’s house. I was thinking about ice picks in the skull. Lima had his friend with him, Arturo Belano who had a blank stare. They mostly ignored me. They kept talking about “visceral realism.” They were visceral realists. “What is visceral realism?” I wanted to know. “Well, it’s not Paz,” Belano blurted out before he reoccupied the space of his blank stare. That was okay. The women at the party were beautiful. My friend, who I would meet in Guadalajara around 2002, was there smoking cigarettes and being the life of the party. He was witty. Poets were crowded around him laughing. Except for Belano and Lima. They kept up their intense discussion in a corner. I was drinking tequila y Dos Equis Oscura and standing in another corner and smoking a Delicado. The smoke was clawing at my throat. That was okay. I was wishing I was a Mexican poet. Even an Argentine or Chilean poet. My Spanish is so lousy. I was a poet from Memphis, for God’s sake. “Can a poet from Memphis be a visceral realist too?” That’s what I wanted to ask but I was never had the courage.

Oh well.

Or as they say in Mexico: Ni modo.

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For mainstream reviews of Savage Detectives, one lukewarm and the other very favorable, see two from the New York Times, one with Richard Eder holding his breath, and the other, James Wood’s long one praising the novel and giving an overview of the place of Bolaño in Latin American letters. Problem with both is that they sound like interviews out of the novel. A couple of professional academics grandly weighing in with the exegesis of New York intellectual media. Happily for them, neither Belano or Lima or their real-life counterparts will dirty their thresholds. Of course, the same could be said for me. Except I live in El Paso. I'm going to walk over to Juarez for dinner tonight. I hope the feds let me come back across.

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Footnotes
Note 1. It’s so sweet to have an important novel concerned with the culture of poets and writers, especially what would be called back then the avant-garde. But, if you read the book, remember that poets are generally accorded more respect in Mexico than in the U.S. In 1992 I read in Mexico at the Casa de Poeta with John Simon Oliver and three television news teams and two reporters showed up to interview me. The house was packed. Nobody knew anything about my poetry. They just wanted to hear what the gringo had to say. My good friend poet Bernardo Ruiz translated my work and read with me. Everybody smoking and drinking. I wonder if any of the visceral realists were there. It was a glorious evening. Bernardo, where are you?
Note 2. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are, [according to wikipedia] thinly veiled standups for the author and likewise his buddy and fellow visceral realist poet is Bolaño’s friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. They had both been associated with the 1970s poetry movement infrarealismo.
Note 3. The translator, Natasha Wimmer, obviously understands the sexual innuendo of “quim.” By the way, Wimmer seems to have done a very fine job although she’s not the usual translator associated with Bolaño’s work. According to an interview on amazon.com, she was the 2nd choice after Chris Andrews who had done all the previous translations for New Directions. Andrews had a plate full when the job was available. She was at the right place at the right time.
Note 4. María and Angélica had belonged to a radical feminist movement called Mexican Women on the Warpath (p86).

Roberto Bolaño & the Poetics of Visceral Realism

The Latin American novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño is hot right now. And dead. “So it goes,” as Billy Pilgrim taught us. Anyway, needing a novel to read for a journey, I scanned the New York Times 2007 Best Books List (something I usually don’t do, being an elitist in a proletarian sort of way) and picked up his book The Savage Detectives. An incredibly lucky pick. The novel affected me like no other novel has done in a long time. So much so that I’m writing a longer piece which I’ll append above.

But, since the book is at least partially about poetry, in particular the internecine warfare between poets and their (our) various congregations, I wanted to paste in its entirety a rambunctious tongue-in-cheek riff (see note at the end) about the Great Mexican Poetry Wars, circa 1975. Although Mexican in nature, it spreads to include much of western poetry--Whitman, Vallejo, Neruda, French poets, Italian poets, etcetera. The venue for the rant is a wild party of “Visceral Realists,” that group of angry young Mexican poets (fictional) who revolt against the Mexican poetry establishment of government grants, the tenured academy, Octavio Paz and his disciples, and all institutionalized poetics. Reading it I couldn’t help but think of Ron Silliman’s discussions and definitions of the poetics and poets of the School of Quietude in American poetry versus the rawer and certainly less institutionalized poetry of the New Americans and their gregarious cohorts. Or to put it more simply, the Mexican battle was akin to the 1950s battle occurring in the U.S. when the New Critics were scandalized by the antics of the Beats with their anarchic sense of poetics. I agree generally with Silliman’s categories. Indeed, I was happy to discover Silliman making these distinctions. I’m not a fan of the SoQ and I could never put a finger on my antipathy until I paid more attention to Silliman. But I must listen to my friend JB Bryan when he accuses me of elitism and snobbery. Thus, I was happy to find a rant that makes a mockery of the civil wars of poetry but at the same time takes the arguments very seriously

Visceral Realism is a fictional counterpart of the infrarealismo movement of the same time period of Mexican poetics. Its adherents, of whom Bolaño was one, were feared as a rowdy bunch of barbarians known for disrupting readings and being decidedly loud-mouthed rabble rousers. This remarkable speech comes to us third hand. The first part of the novel is the diary of 17-year-old Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet in his first year of university. He has fallen (luckily/unluckily) into the circle of the “visceral realists.” One morning García Madero, after a particular wild and drunken party, reconstructs the speech as it flowed from the mouth of Ernesto San Epifanio. San Epifanio is gay, a card-carrying member of the Visceral Realists, as well as the founder of the first Homosexual Communist Party of Mexico and the first Mexican Homosexual Proletarian Commune. The wonderfully witty and wild harangue reminds me, in its berserk crazy energy, of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Or better yet, the rants and curses that New Mexico intellectuals Gus Blaisdell and Bill Pearlman used to hurl at each other late on drunken Saturday nights at those forever lost historical landmark of radical 1960s New Mexico culture: the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, NM, or Okie Joe’s on the corner of University and Central in Albuquerque. You had to be there.

The selection from the young poet's diary is taken from pages 71-73 of the novel.

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November 22

I woke up at Catalina O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.

Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two main currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”

Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde and Efraín Huerta. There were a lot of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Días Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, this is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.

“And Efrén Rebolledo?” I asked.

“An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course.”

Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggots and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort’s sake lived within the accepted--most of the time--the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

“In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of the poor Sanguinetti (I won’t start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of the hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we’re to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.”

“Who?” they asked him. “Mayakovsky?”

“No.”

“Esenin?”

“No.”

“Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?”

“Hardly.”

“Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us.”

“There was only one,” said San Epifanio, “and now I’ll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.”
There was an opinion for every taste.

“And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adan. Period. New Paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, (although some of his poems are authentically faggotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lecan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a guided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina Garcia) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling an a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…”

“No!” shouted Belano. “Not Gilberto Owen!”

“In fact,” San Epifanio continued unruffled, “Gorotiza’s Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the ‘Marseillaise’ of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Queer Poets. More names:Gelman, nymph; Bendetti, queer; Nacanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Wesphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak;. And back to Spain, back to the beginning”—whistles—“Gongora and Quevedo, queers; san Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters.”

“And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or queer?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself,” said San Epifanio.

Copyright © 2006 by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Published in April 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

NOTE: As a publisher, I thought long and hard about inserting this harangue into my blog because of copyright issues, but I believe that putting it here can only help the sales of the book. If somebody from FS&G contacts me, I will be happy to delete this post.

Happy New Year 2008

Well, I’m ready to welcome 2008. Because of all that has happened in 2007—in our personal lives, in our business, in the city of El Paso and along the U.S./Mexico Border, in the country and in the confused world—I’ve been thinking about peace. Not the absence of war. But simply peace. The heart settles into the water and floats along downstream, maybe bumping up against this or that rock, but digging the ride. This morning, reading Walpola Rahula’s wonderfully concise compendium What the Buddha Taught for the second time, I came upon this statement:

In the third century B.C., the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka of India, following this noble example of tolerance and understanding [the Buddha requesting Upali, a petitioner for discipleship, to continue to respect and honour his old teachers], honoured and supported all other religions in his vast empire. In one of his Edicts carved on rock, the original of which one may read even today, the Emperor declared:

One should not honour only one’s own religion and condemn the religions of others, but one should honour others’ religions for this or that reason. So doing, one helps one’s own religion to grow and renders service to the religions of others too. In acting otherwise one digs the grave of one’s own religion and also does harm to other religions. Whosoever honours his own religion and condemns other religions does so indeed through devotion to his own religion, thinking ‘I will glorify my own religion.’ But on the contrary, in so doing he injures his own religion more gravely. So concord is good: Let all listen, and be willing to listen to the doctrines professed by others.

It’s hard work, this practice of understanding the other, but I make it my New Year’s Resolution.

*


Lee and I wish everybody, but especially our friends, peace and well-being in the New Year.

By the way, journalist Debbie Nathan
took this picture of Lee and me. She was visiting from New York City with her daughter, the artist Sophy Naess who now lives in Sweden. Debbie is addicted somehow to El Paso and Juárez. She gets pissed off about all the stuff that happens here—this weird nexus of border energies, federal and state and local law, Spanish and English, interesting people, poverty, perplexed but funky imagination and good friends—so she comes back for another jolt from time to time. This time she came back with experience in hair removal earned in pursuit of a story. The story didn’t pan out, but not to worry: Debbie delights in body waxing. In this photo she has just completed doing Lee’s eyebrows. Obviously, she didn’t do the single white hair that has sprouted on my nose.

A Celebration of Judy Doyle, aka Judy Curbstone

In my last blog I did my own riff of an obit on Sandy Taylor, the co-founder of Curbstone Press who died last Friday morning. As my wife noted, some of my statements are in fact misstatements, mostly because in my haste to celebrate my friend’s life, I did not fully recognize Judy Doyle his long-time partner, in all senses of that word. She was there at the beginning, plotting and planning into the night, smoking cigarettes, stapling books together, designing them, selling them.

My bad.

But a common error on all of our part. What is so often not said and recognized outside the Curbstone circle of close friends is that Judy was an equal partner in all that is Curbstone. Or to say it another way, Curbstone would not exist without Judy Doyle. Sandy was the loudmouth, the guy with the quick wit and the hilarious stories and the out-front leftwing politics. He was a vibrant guy and his noise overshadowed the role Judy played in the Curbstone story. Her job description at Curbstone, an operation of four people and a non-profit board, is “Do Everything.” She oversees all the daily operations of Curbstone—supported in her duties by longtime associate Robert Smith and now Jantje Tielken—from the editing to the production to the Public Relations and Sale to buying materials to managing the money. Etcetera. My wife Lee knows full well how a loudmouth can overshadow the person who is actually responsible to get the book out the door. Lee’s mantra is that the process of a book is COLLABORATION. Yes, Lee will grudgingly allow, the noise-maker needs to be there, but he shouldn’t hog all the attention. Sandy tried to make sure that the mantle didn’t rest solely on his shoulders, but we always didn’t pay attention.

Since Sandy’s death, Lee has been re-membering Judy Doyle, her role in Sandy’s life as a full-partner in the cornucopia of books that Curbstone has given us over the years. After reading my blog, Lee poured this out one night—

Well, hey, it’s a collaboration, the whole thing, isn’t it? Publishing—that joyful, terrible, dreadful, miraculous, business—is just that: a collaboration. The author writes the book, and of course the author thinks the book is “his” or “hers,” but all of us who are publishers know different. Especially small press, seat-of-the-pants-publishers like Curbstone.

There’s the acquiring of the book which takes a certain vision, a certain understanding, and it’s not always just one person acquiring, it’s not always a simple decision, sometimes you have to talk a lot and then you have to talk some more, and then maybe you have to cajole and convince the other people who are part of your business—this is important, don’t you get it?

And there’s the editing which is sometimes easy and sometimes not, and the editing makes all the difference, it gives the book a shape that may or may not have been there before. And then there’s the designer, the one you choose by instinct, or because they have more time, or because you owe them less, and that designer gives their own particular spin to the book. And there’s the printer and the distributor, and the guy or gal in the warehouse, and everyone is a collaborator in this incredible business of getting a book out into the world. And don’t forget the stream of other books by other authors, the publisher’s backlist, that provides the money to invest in a new book.

A new book! It’s like a boatload of mothers and fathers giving birth. Or if you’re small, like Curbstone and Cinco Puntos and so many of our colleagues, it’s maybe one, two, three, four people midwife-ing a book—such satisfaction in the delivery, so much angst—will anyone like it as much as we do? Or better, or worse, will anyone buy it?

Oh, godfrey, please buy it!

And so by the end, when the book finally comes from the printer, and you hold it in your hand, you can’t exactly be sure who did what or who said what or whose vision it was. Because it was a collaboration, the best of things. And that’s what Sandy and Judy Curbstone did, made publishing a true collaboration, so that, in the end, the book belonged to everyone.

And we smile (to ourselves) when the author says, “Look at my book.” Well, the author is right. It is her book, it is his book. But it is also our book. That’s what makes independent publishing such a miracle, so satisfying to both the intellect and the imagination.

Yes, celebrate Alexander Sandy Taylor, but also celebrate Judy Doyle—Sandy’s equal partner in business, spirit, imagination, intellect and, of course, the bedroom.
*

Note: Sandy was always making plans for books and adventures and jokes and fundraisers. Last year he told me, “My funeral will be the greatest fundraiser ever!”

*
And another note: For a fine interview with Sandy, I recommend Justice, Love, Death and Literature by our friend and former colleague Jessica Powers which appeared in the online alternative lit magazine New Pages.

Curbstone Sandy Taylor

Alexander "Sandy" Taylor died early this morning in Connecticut. Sandy was the visionary behind Curbstone Press,
a man of courage and jokes and cigarettes and wisdom and laughter and joy. He, in sweet and loving cahoots with Judy Doyle (his longtime partner and Co-Director of Curbstone) carved out an essential niche in the precarious industry of making books. Like so many independent publishers, he started Curbstone in his home, making the books himself and stapling them together. (See the photo of him and Judy below.) The important thing was the words, what they said and how they moved the world. Sandy was not happy with the direction of contemporary literature in the 70s when he birthed the press, and he especially didn’t like the direction of poetry— the academic scene, the New American Poetry, the School of Quietude, what have you. He figured the world had enough of what white, middle-class American men thought and wrote. Especially if they decided to sit on the side of the road and be witnesses to history as it whizzed by. He wanted to promote a literature that was out in the street and at the barricades, fighting for issues and igniting causes against the machine. Truly, he raged war against the machine. No wonder he was at home publishing so much Latin American literature, the literature of peoples of color, the literature of the disenfranchised—literatures that made political issues the rationale of their aesthetics.

Oddly enough, his own poetry is at home within the New American canon. Here’s a poem he dedicated to his friends Grace Paley and her husband Bob. It will serve as a fitting epitaph for Sandy.

Is Something Missing?

I must have lived my life all wrong,
never having had any grief counselors
or psychologists to comfort me on every move--
Imagine! - I endured the death of my friend
all by myself and for me every new town
was a great adventure. Maybe that's why
I seldom cry at movies and am always ready
to kiss death on the mouth...

Sandy was a great friend to Lee and me at Cinco Puntos as we struggled to learn how to make and sell books beyond our original scope. He was generous with his ideas and his lists of names and his honest and open friendship. He loved to tell jokes and to laugh and to punctuate each great burst of hilarity with a cigarette. When I explained to him once that it had become almost impossible for Cinco Puntos to publish poetry, he told me not to worry, “Publishing poetry is suicidal!” Then I looked at his list. It had three books of poems on it.

And another time he told me about how he and a friend of his, a big stout red-headed guy, drove a truckload of medical supplies down to Nicaragua during the revolution. It was a humanitarian expedition. The medical supplies were destined for the poor in the mountains that were suffering because of the on-going war. When inside the country, the army stopped them at every possible turn and searched the truck, sure they were smuggling arms or some sort of contraband. Finally, he delivered the medical supplies. And, of course, the truck—the truck was the contraband he smuggled to the FSLN!

I think Sandy would say right now, “Well, they wanted me to quit smoking, didn’t they?” And then he’d laugh and cackle and cough, give me a hug and walk off all bones and elbows toward the darkness, a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Of course, if he had his druthers, he’d go to hell. He would start a little press in some corner of that confusion. He would figure he could do some good in hell. It would be like being at home in Willimantic with George Bush in the White House.

Curbstone Press is a non-profit press. Please pay attention to their books, buy their books and, if you have a few dollars, give generously to their on-going journey. You will honor a great spirit.

A Christmas card from Harvey

This is a Christmas Card (dated Dec 12 1996) from the late poet Harvey Goldner to his two girls who were living with their mother. His awkward handwriting reads:

Solving the Mysteries of Christmas: (#3) If God is the Prince of Peace, Why Is There So Much War?
Dear Kids,
Last night I went to Jack-in-the-Box & ate 2 Jumbo JACKS. Shortly afterwards I got diarrhea real bad & began to hallucinate. I had a vision of God's face on the side of my bathtub. I asked Him the above questions. HE said: "Don't blame ME; it's Santa's fault. If only good little boys go what they want for Xmas, Santa would be Out of Business. Except for 1 or 2, all little boys are BAD, and some want bikes and some want AK-47s. I'll let you in a secret: Santa is really Satan. If you don't believe ME, ask Pat Robertson."
--Dada

Cinco Puntos Press will publish his book of poems The Resurrection of Bert Ringold in late January 2008.

The Yankees & Me

A long time ago I read that Teddy Gold, one of the original members of the Weather Underground, had told friends that he would never be a good communist until Willie Mays retired. Maybe his love for Willie and baseball was a good thing. We will never know. In March 1970 Teddy Gold, along with Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, died making bombs to shape the world anew.

But the Yankees and me? I don’t know. It’s a hate/love thing. Lots of confusion. I grew up in Memphis watching Saturday baseball and Series games on a little black & white TV or listening to them on the radio. I watched all those great Dodger-Yankees series with Darthula Baldwin. “Tula” was the black woman who was our live-in maid and surrogate mother--our "Mammy"--while our widowed mother worked 60 hours a week selling real estate. I figure I get my politics from being raised by women, Tula at home and my mother doing battle with 1950s white-male chauvinists out in the marketplace. With Tula sitting next to me sighing and groaning and dipping her snuff, it was easy to love Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. They were heros carved into my imagination. But secretly I also loved Mickey Mantle because he was "the Mick," Billy Martin because he was crazy and Whitey Ford because he was steady. And finally Yogi Berra with large spoonfuls of grudging respect. (I always hated to see Yogi bat against the Dodgers. He was their curse.) Then Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles and my uncle and aunt got transferred out there the same year. I watched the Dodgers in the Coliseum. One Saturday afternoon, before Sandy Koufax learned to “pitch,” I sat on a bench seat high up in the Coliseum and saw him strikeout something like 13 batters and walk 10 or so others. Hell, he probably hit a couple of guys. From that vantage point it became much easier to allow my distaste for the Yankees to blossom. CBS bought them, Ralph Houk unceremoniously fired Yogi Berra, then George Steinbrenner for God’s sake bought them. Richard Nixon, the Boss’ buddy, was president. So from then rooting against the Yankees turned political. Tula, who had died, whispered in my ear: "Bobby, honey, I told you so." Time passed. Thurmond Munson died, like my dad, piloting a plane; Reggie Jackson came and went doing his swizzle-stick impersonation; Steinbrenner spent money and jerked players and managers around. The Boss was always up there in the voting for the annual Asshole Award.

And now comes my son-in-law Ed Holland. I love Ed. He’s great. Andrei Codrescu met him once and asked me under his breath in that goofy accent, “Bobby, did you find your son-in-law in a catalog?" But Ed grew up in Connecticut among a family of Yankees fans. He is definitely a Yankees’ fan. True Yankees fans don’t see the grey around the edges. They are rabid. Like you see on television. This is the guy who sleeps in the same bed with my only daughter. His son Johnny Hollandbyrd, who (ironically) plays “coach-pitch” Little League ball in a Dodgers uniform, is likewise infected. Being nine, he has no idea about his granddad’s confusion. And I try to be a Zen Buddhist. How can you be a Zen Buddhist and take sides? Or not forgive George Steinbrenner? Meanwhile, secretly, I'm a Joe Torre fan. And I admire Derrick Jeter the way I admired Yogi. He's just an incredible ballplayer. Oh well. Here’s a poem I wrote the morning after the Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians. Read it now. Baseball poems are such emphemeral things.

OCTOBER 2007

This morning George Steinbrenner
Is putting on a fresh pair of cotton white boxer shorts.
He knows Joe Torre will lose his job.
And he knows now he will die.
No more “Boss.”
He sighs.
A-Rod doesn’t deserve to be in a poem.
Joba Chamberlain,
Like all of us when we were young,
Believes the world is flat
Forever.

—for my grandson Johnny Hollandbyrd

NOTE: In the the photograph above, black-eye Johnny had just gotten smacked in the nose by a pitch before a game. And the photo below is Ed pitching to Johnny during a game. Johnny's a good ballplayer. He can field and hit for power. That's Ed's doing. He been thowing balls to his son since Johnny was two. Andrei was right. It's like he came out of a catalog. Except he has this Yankee thing. Where did that come from, huh?

Harvey's Ghost

The ghost of Harvey Goldner has been on my mind a lot since his death on Independence Day, 2007. The death of growing-up friends (Harvey was born in the same year as me in Memphis (1942), and we were close friends from 1st through 12th grades) instantly startles us and reminds us of our own mortality. Especially if it was somebody that served as a mirror to who we are and to who we became. As I've said elsewhere, Harvey is the guy who turned me onto poetry. It's his fault.

My friendship with Harvey, while difficult, was full of deep memories, nuances and respect for his idiosyncratic and iconoclastic approach to poetry and poetics. It turns out that his death also left a void in the poetry and cultural scene of Seattle. I learned this through Daysha Eaton who works for KPLU, the Seattle NPR station. Daysha called me for an interview and later she produced a nice profile of Harvey. It ran on Monday, 9/10 but its available online here.

Chuk Baldac, who used to live in Seattle, did the portrait of Harvey that headlines this entry. Chuk’s illustrations appeared in Harvey’s New Millennium Business, published in a chapbook by James Newman. This illustration and others will appear in The Resurrection of Bert Ringold. The book will be out in January, our original pub date. After Harvey’s death on July 4th, I had been giving October as a pub date but that was too much wishful thinking. In January or February Elliot Bay Book Company will host a publication party for the book. Harvey's friends will read favorite poems and talk about Harvey. I will make the journey to Seattle. I haven't been there since I received my Masters in 1969 from the university. I'll miss Harvey. His ghost, I think, will show me around through the mist and the rain.

I've been working on Harvey's book for a month or so now, re-reading the manuscript, cutting and adding and shaping. The manuscript that Harvey originally sent me would have been suited for a solid 96-page book, but after his death I decided that we should do a "selected." Chris Dusterhoff, a good friend of Harvey’s who published several of his chapbooks through his Spankstra Books imprint, has been nice enough to make sure we had all the poems to choose from and to offer me guidance in making selections. Now I think we have a book which will be somewhere between 160-192 pages in length. Harvey would have been proud. Thanks, Chris.

I'm excited. The Resurrection of Bert Ringold will be an important contribution to the poem world, although of course it won't sell well. Especially in academia. Harvey of course mocks creative writing departments, so I doubt if CW teachers will be ordering it up for classes. Not that he didn't like the work of poets who taught at universities. He says in one poem he liked to discuss poetics with Theordore Roethke's bartender.

Harvey had four children, two boys by his first wife and two daughters from his second wife. He’d split up with both his wives. He was not an easy man to live with, especially before he started hanging out at AA meetings in Seattle. He was estranged from his sons, but he kept in close contact with his daughters Emily and Amy. He’d create and write hilarious whacko-funked cards and letters for birthdays and Christmases. They’ve sent me a bunch of them which I will be adding to the blog from time to time. Below is a letter he wrote Emily, I’m guess from sometime probably in the mid-90s (he didn’t date his letters). The letter shows off his goofy sense of humor, but, because he’s writing to his daughter, it has a sweetness that he hides away in his poems. I hope Emily and Amy, and whoever else, will add comments here about Harvey, dates or memories, etcetera.

Dear Emily.

Let me tell you about a baseball game I went to last night. The last game I had attended was in 1955 when I was a lad in Memphis; if I remember correctly, the Memphis Chickasaw Indians beat the Birmingham Barons. The game of baseball has changed somewhat. It used to be played outside; now it is played inside a building. Perhaps to keep out of the rain. However, without rain the grass cant grow, so now instead of playing on grass, baseball is played on a green rug. However, most aspects of the game have remained the same, including the fact that the closer you get to Heaven, the cheaper the seats.

It was a good game. But you can’t smoke in the building. And everytime me and my pals went outside onto the ramp to have a smoke, someone would hit a home run. So we learned to smoke only when our team was at bat. We sports fans are very superstitious. Perhaps the best part of the game occurred when we were standing outside high up (remember: the closer you get to Heaven, the cheaper the seats) on the ramp: we saw the most beautiful sunset. Actually, there were 3 sunsets. There was one sunset in the west (naturally), there was one sunset in the east, and there was one in the middle, or, should I say, the north. Really, of course, there was only one sunset, but there appeared to be three. Something like the Holy Trinity, since you are going to Church.

One of the people who went to the game is a friend of mine called John John. It was kind of ironic that the game was played inside a building on a rug because for three days John John has been living in Volunteer Park. It seems that he got a little behind on his rent (3 months) and was evicted. Anyway I thought it was funny that someone who is living outside on the grass should be watching a ballgame being played inside on a rug. But John John didn’t think this was funny when I brought it to his attention. I suppose because he is so close to his situation, he lacks perspective and is unable to appreciate the humor.

The third person who went to the game with us is a new friend of mine called Tommy. Tommy has some kind of neurological disease and is three-fourths paralyzed. Both legs and one arm (partially). He rides in a motorized, battery-powered wheelchair. He is a careless driver and has a lot of fun making people get out of his way. He was unable to open his bag of peanuts, so I did it for him. He gave me some, not that I was expecting any. Don’t feel sorry for Tommy. First of all, out of the 18-thousand people at the game, Tommy was the only one who didn’t have to stand for the national anthem. And, John and I had to walk up an endless ramp to get to our seats, while Tommy got to take the elevator. Also, Tommy does not have to sleep outside in Volunteer Park, but has a nice apartment. Tommy had a great a great time at the game. So did John John and I.

To summerize (since it is finally summer): the Seattle Mariners (that’s US) beat the Oakland A’s (I won’t mention some of the nasty things that certain individual fans said that the “A’s” stands for) 9 to 8.

Soon after you get this letter, I will see you and that will make me very happy.

Love,
Dad

p.s. In case you are worried about John John living in Volunteer Park (the thing he hates most about it is that the park sprinkling system turns on quite early in the morning and he must rise quickly): an Indian friend of his has graciously offered to share his apartment with John John. This Indian is not a Chickasaw but is, I believe, a Tlingit. And that fact completes the circle of this letter…

Stuff in the Blogohood

I wrote some friends and colleagues last week asking if they'd like to receive an email announcement when I make additions to this blog. I got a lot of positive response. I also received notice from friends of interesting blogs which I think readers here would enjoy. I'm listing them below. In the meantime, if a reader would like to receive an email notice of additions to this blog, they may write me a note at bbyrd@cincopuntos.com

For a wild journey into mixed-media avant-post-avant poetics & poetry & fiction drop in on Vietnamese-American poet Linh Dinh . American Tatts is from Chax Press. I go read Linh Dinh when I need to be startled and needled back into my poetry. He'll write lines like this on his blog: "Communists sought to inspire, Capitalists seduce. Writers and artists who mimic their glamorizing strategies are whores. The body leaks and emits compromises. We all go down sometimes, but not all the time."



If you want to know what the border feels and looks like, go look at the rasquache photographs of border photographer Bruce Berman. Bruce is a transplanted Chicagoan who set up shop in El Paso decades ago. He came here a few years before Lee and me. He had a job at the university but that didn't last. But he stayed around. Don't ask him why. Sometimes he can't figure out if he belongs here or not. That makes him a fronterizo. Here he's found a chihuahua in Chihuahua (aka, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico).

And finally if you want to know how form is improvisation and improvivsation is form, check out Mark Weber's anarchist-poet-housepainter musician riff on how to play the hubcaps.