Raul Fixing A Cosmopolitan

A poem from Glyn Maxwell's The Sugar Mile (2005).

RAUL FIXING A COSMOPOLITAN

See old Joey's sat back in his window.
I'm telling you in all of New York City
how many joints is that? Just yesterday,
Clint, you walk in here. You got the world
to choose from, and you didn't want nobody
taking all your time! Now it's tomorrow

and you look like shit. Stay at home tomorrow,
see your family, sit in your own window.
I'm kidding, hey. Don't like nobody
can't take my kidding. It's the New York City
style, you know it is, you seen the world
you like it here. It's another awesome day.

It's another peach it's just like yesterday.
I was kidding with you. Come back tomorrow,
Clint, the old guy will. Where else in the world
is he expected? Ain't no other window
waiting for the guy, no other city
left to move to. I never heard nobody

want to move from this. I mean nobody
left alone. Man I can't take Sunday.
It's slow, it crawls, Sunday in this city.
Hello? Yeah this is him. Not tomorrow?
Lemme write that down. Sun in the freakin' window
blinding me. I got it. Stop the world

 for breaking news ... What? Yeah 'on the world'
I know, I got it. Ciao. Okay. Nobody
gets to know. Hey, Joe, what's in the window?
See some babes? Can't be your lucky day
it's mine. Clint says he's stopping by tomorrow.
He wants to hear you bombed that Nazi city

back to the stone age. I said 'Nazi city'
Joey, I was kidding. What in the world
do I care, kill a Nazi guy tomorrow,
lighten up. – I haven't told nobody,
Clint, remember I told you this – that day
was it yesterday when Joey was in his window?

That there ain't nobody else in New York City
paid so high? Windows on the World.
Tuesday I start. Tomorrow's my last day.

Out of the Blue

Up until now, the best poems I have read about September 11, 2001, have been Martin Espada's "Alabanza" and Glyn Maxwell's verse novel The Sugar Mile. But now I can add a third item to that list: Simon Armitage's "Out of the Blue."

In a 24-page sequence, Armitage puts himself into the head of an English trader who works at the World Trade Center. In section 4, he presents a catalogue reminiscent of Günter Eich's "Inventory":

Arranged on the desk
among rubber bands and bulldog clips:

here is a rock from Brighton beach,
here is a beer-mat, here is the leaf

of an oak, pressed and dried, papery thin.
Here is a Liquorice Allsorts tin.

A map of the Underground pinned to the wall.
The flag of St. George. A cricket ball.

Here is calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in its frame:

this is my wife on our wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space,

plus rockets and stars and the Milky Way,
plus helicopters and aeroplanes.

Jelly-copters and fairy-planes.
In a spidery hand, underneath it, it says:

'If I stand on my toes can you see me wave?'

Section 7 is a prose poem of the responses of the World Trade Center workers after the planes hit the buildings. Shortly before I got to the end of it, I realized that it reads the same backwards as forwards, trapping the people in the poem, as it were, along the lines of how they were trapped in the doomed building.

The sequence's timing is excellent—it is just long enough to make you forget section four, so when you get to the list of things found in the rubble in the final section, the return of the items from section four is all the more powerful.

And then the sequence concludes (reminding me, as I typed it in, of this):

Five years on
what false alarm can be trusted again,
what case or bag can be left unclaimed,
what flight can be sure to steer its course,
what building can claim to own its form,
what column can vow to stand up straight,
what floor can agree to bear its weight,
what tower can vouch to retain its height,
what peace can be said to be water-tight,
what truth can be said to be bullet-proof,
can anything swear to be built to last,
can anything pledge to be hard and fast,
what system can promise to stay in place,
what structure can promise to hold its shape,
what future can promise to keep its faith?

Everything changed. Nothing is safe.

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week Ten

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TEN

Here are the poems to vote for in week ten of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 21, to Sunday, April 27):

64. Dream-I-Believe, by Glyn Maxwell
65. That Little Something, by Charles Simic
66. Grandmother, by Valzhyna Mort (tr. by the author, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright)
67. Treason, by James Tate
68. The Secret Room, by David Kirby
69. Insurance , by Peter Waldor
70. Night. Fire, by Elaine Sexton

This is the tenth week of twelve weeks, at the end of which all the winners will be put together for a final vote.

HOW TO VOTE: Please vote for only ONE poem. You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).

You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SATURDAY, May 3! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which I will do on May 4. If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).

The winner of week 1 was Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter."
The winner of week 2 was Martha Zweig's "Overturn."
The winner of week 3 was B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo."
The winner of week 4 was Damian Walford Davies's "Plague."
The winner of week 5 was Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View."
The winner of week 6 was Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes."
The winner of week 7 was Marie Howe's "The Star Market."
The winner of week 8 was Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," translated by Clare Cavanagh
The co-winners of week 9 were Sidney Wade's Siamo a la Frutta and John Rybicki's Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me.

Curse poems

David Lehman's "Curse" reminded me that I have been meaning to ask people to send me curse poems (titles, links, whole poems).

I first thought of this because of Martin Espada's "For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant" (which is on-line here, but you have to go to the end of the page to find it). I also like Glyn Maxwell's "Curse on a Child," and my friend Geoff Brock pointed me to Cynthia Huntington's "Curse One" and "Curse Two: The Naming," while Espada himself mentioned Pablo Neruda's "General Franco in Hell."

Others?

*

Whatever your father says you'll oppose
and believe you're acting on principle.

(David Lehman, "Curse")

Verse novels III: Fred D'Aguiar

I have been meaning to make more comments about verse novels since March, when I bought quite a few new ones while traveling in the US.

One was Fred D'Aguiar's Bloodlines. As I commented in Verse novels part two, I was not that impressed by his Bill of Rights, but Bloodlines makes me want to reread that one anyway. Bloodlines tells the story of a doomed interracial love affair around the time of the American Civil War. Its tour de force is a chapter called "War," and its most memorable effect is that it treats the topic without the slightest sentimentality: no happy end here.

My only problem with the book as a whole might have been a result of how I read it: I had to take a break in the middle of it to reread another verse novel (Glyn Maxwell's The Sugar Mile, which I taught in late June), and as a result, the book seemed somewhat disjointed to me.

But it is full of wonderful moments, such as this one:

.... Their attitude
to everything is, if it is so urgent
it will happen without their attention.

They are right and they are wrong. The world
carries on as it must, but it is diminished
without their involvement.

Verse novels part two
Verse novels

Verse novels

I was telling my Mom about what I have been reading lately, and I mentioned having re-read Glyn Maxwell's latest book, "The Sugar Mile," which is a verse novel. She asked me to suggest a few verse novels for "an avid reader". Here are my favorites among the contemporary verse novels I have read over the past seven or eight years:

Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Brad Leithauser, Darlington's Fall
Glyn Maxwell, Time's Fool
Glyn Maxwell, The Sugar Mile
John Barr, Grace

The one that I do not recommend at all is W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs," which is dramatically weakened by Merwin's standard practice of using no punctuation at all! That may be okay in shorter poems, but it is exhausting over hundreds of pages.

Of the six listed above, I had an interesting experience regarding two of them: Fredy Neptune and Time's Fool. Both of these are hugely entertaining books, but when I thought about re-reading them, I found myself unable (in the case of FN) or unwilling (in the case of TF) to do so. They are long, rich books, but once felt like enough -- the thought of reading them again was exhausting!

It's possible that I made the mistake of re-reading Fredy Neptune with the idea of writing about it. That slowed the reading down enough that it dragged and I staggered to a halt. Also, as I am now re-reading a lot of Maxwell, I am getting more interested in the idea of re-reading TF.

If you read this and know of some other good verse novels, please list them in the comments! I love them!