John Amen, From “My Gallery Days”

Geo Fever, Pt. 4 of the Invisible Triptych, image by John Amen

From “My Gallery Days”

3

for RJ

Five o’clock—prime time for boots & the Wild West,
                    yr opening line though I can’t say
I heard what came next, Helen’s 3-legged Cerberus
          yapping on 33rd     the racket of the Alphabet.

          Then the interminable open mic,
          3 crossdressers heaving a fridge
out the 2nd-story window (to a stillborn villanelle).

Yr co-feature bombarded w/ minutia, a robot reciting 
diary entries from a typical day in the word factory.
You blurted I wish I’d taken that desk job @ the bank.
Wtf would you do w/ vacation time in the Hamptons?

          Take this as a compliment, you’re 0 if not adept
@ advancing yrself, I mean that to eulogize yr pitch-
perfect karma, so why da hangdog face? Why da huff?

8

Leslie, I saw yr ghost in the Frederick, those blue
shoes & a Red Bull, yr popularity a summer squall,
debt don’t respond to no standard dance moves.

          So sorry for polishing off the tortillas,
& I did indeed snag the Benjamins from the mousetrap,
          gossiping w/ Laurie over shots.

I added to my resume the 7 credits in Spiegel Park.
Diversion remains the only god I know. Leslie,
could you hear the taxmen & bulldozers in the distance?

          In yr finest hour w/ a brush & Bourbon,
          oblivious to audits & thunder from Albany,
          you choked on the grant & gagged the interview.

A trip to East 9th shifted the mood for an hour,
but damn the coke vapor, a devil kicking in my lungs.

10

To the pigs who sang in Hillary’s walls.
Stuart trapped between studs, tuneless in the heat,
Carl panting in a doorframe, sick & shaking DTs,
          grunting Provencal love songs
          with a Long Island accent.

Ma sanctum sanctorum was desecrated by Photoshop.
Soul collage & music boxes, the vengeful goddess
popped from Hill’s mouth, her Gorgon series in yeller.

I removed the tank cover in her half-bath,
          hooked a shriveled man who’d no doubt
drifted for seasons, sworn off his pocket watch
          & eyes as dead as a cold call.

Hill I sd in white you gotta set the boy free,
Hill staring in gray, the miles tween Hill & me.

11

Mildred eulogized her stepfather in TX
while I finished her portrait with a palette knife
          during Z’s Taurean salon.

I’d never see that kinda doomed again or forget
Mildred wearing long sleeves in muggy Houston.

After the gavel, Mildred’s solstice on ECT,
I spent July clean, banged out “The Verdict,”
          a photomontage of Mildred in drag.
I won the ITY grant, the stepfather’s daughter
          twitching on a gurney in Somewhere, TX.

3 months later, I was 4 days out of treatment
& already stoned, railing how Mildred slipped away.
          Amidst the racket & regret,
                    I skulked past being famous.

12

I’m terror&legerdemain once you peel the persona
I mumbled @ West & Barclay. Ambition’s a jealous god,
                    mad titan treading the NJ Styx,
          splashing surges crosstown toward Baruch Place.

This changes things sd Louisa, squinting her right eye,
then left, unscrewing the Van Dyke. I cleared my throat,
          came to mid-spike, mid-portrait, & there
was Mississippi Deena, foundering in valium&vodka.

                    Corduroy Dennis dropped off 15 irons
& 23 hubcaps, bartered & bantered for shrooms&sugar,
                    waving an X-Acto for shrooms&sugar.
Soon it’d be dark, sooner than was bearable, my father’s
generation mute, mine fumbling @ the turnstile of narcissism.

O my digital Yahweh, how to capture a grayscale twilight.

13

for I think it was Heather

                    April & I studied a green rapture,
free from the gallery for a month w/ pay,
freelancing on the 11th St bronze, commemoration
                    of Doggett’s last poetic stand:
          already unwired, dissected @ Bethel Main,
          he opened his 8th Ave reading by dropping
his boxer shorts. The 3 Cs: cops, court, commitment.

Jaeger said that Doggett staged the fiasco, it was
his scripted swansong. I never told you a dream I had,
you & Doggett & I were sprawled on the Newburgh pier,
                    sharing a calzone, arguing about
Jay Sanford’s “unmasked” @ the Brooklyn EuroFest,
when Doggett stood up, dashed a crust to the ripples,
          & proclaimed me the inaugural solipsist!

15

AM I soared on Adderall, crashing @ dusk,
          Claude on 51st w/ his rainbow pipe,
                    dude humming along to Coltrane
standards on tape, dude dead in a snowdrift in May.

          I rode those sirens to Bellevue,
                    role-playing w/ a drip-IV
          while Dr. Bauman studied his DSM.

          August: the tax scandal @ the co-op,
          bad PR re L’s mock auto-da-fé, & no buyers
for my portraits of Heather G, who’d vanished

amidst the pyrotechnics, 4 days cold in a Nyack slum.
          Her obit swept the blogs,
                    her face still blows in my sleep,
          these spattered rooms I can never leave.


18

          Hijacked by Evie’s Dilaudid Rx,
          I did my best to illustrate Louisa’s limbo,

          took me 2 weeks to nail the watery umber
          of her Sicilian eyes, mixing & remixing
          to invoke that Ophelian aura, flummoxed
by her chosen backdrop (faux “Acanthus” circa 1880).

          Grant deadlines converged, I dreamt
I was a tearaway riding south in an empty caboose.
          (I wanted to wake beside a steaming river,
          pawn my antique palette, I still
wanna talk shop over rare steaks & a blank canvas)

Nothing like a protractor & tube of Windsor red,
Louisa in the doorway wilting & her feet throbbed,
the U of B critics had lambasted her floating studio.

—John Amen

AC Evans, THE SMOOTHIE OPERATOR

Torrid Zone, image by AC Evans

THE SMOOTHIE OPERATOR

So who knew what when?

Kick it and kick it now, make a go of it.

Meanwhile, I’m preaching to the perverted,

My favourite occupation:

To avoid an obscure lock out, you

Must have must see better results.

Favourite frolics from the Cryptic Quartet

Playing Kleine Feine Kostbarkeiten

No joke, healthy natural party-poppers

Storm-wrack clouds driving sleet icy rain.

I’m hard at work, I’m a people-watcher.

The mad bloke in the garage…

The sinister chap in the greenhouse…

Made in hell, loved in heaven

Frantic massage hot and cold

Beauty fragrance, worldwide service.

So who knew what when?

Kick it and kick it now, make a go of it.

Must dash! She gasped.

No Zone Layer disintegrating fast,

More like a Torrid Zone,

Way out far out ok thanks, eureka!

We have lift-off within the hour.

No time for hair beauty fragrance

Oh, stuff it, he was a sissy underwear fetishist,

She thought – good for a laugh but not much else.

Not long now darling, old fashioned looks,

Blurred vision, lights camera action,

Not long now darling.

In operation never give an inch.

She clenched her buttocks,

Clamped her thighs and crushed his nutcracker

Just below the asteroid belt.

Oh, do concentrate at the back.

Anyway, guess what?

Terminal Zombies From Pluto was a trashy product,

Utter nonsense from beginning to end.

So who knew what when?

Kick it and kick it now, make a go of it.

Tell us your big news, she muttered, you know, your

Living moments, your secret fears, wheel-balancing,

Terrible traffic, hot wraps, disgrace yourself,

As a bulk carrier skids off the motorway.

Not long now darling, oh darling!

My sultry Smoothie Operator grinned in a sexy way.

Let’s stay in the Torrid Zone, she whispered.

Ready for more?

—AC Evans

Mark Young, Three Poems

Baron Münchausen, image by Daniel Y. Harris

A line from Willem de Kooning

Baron Münchausen looked

on & sought for symptoms

& synapses. At first glance an

absurdist point of view, but

those earlier drafts have now

been shown to have significant

economic benefits. Bayern München

opened with a performance of

Palestrina's famed two-part

motet, Sicut cervus. Then they

played a leading role in New

York's antislavery politics

during the early years of

the war. Ended up winning

everything there was to

win. They were so lifelike.

Robert Creeley enters the water

             some

of the time

the line

goes taut

o-

illogical

but I am

beaten to the

body & left

with a grab-

bag full

of glassy-eyed

head-

lines

“…the last day the sharks appeared.”

*

                                           painted my

                                                 self into

                                                     a cor-

                                                         ner

using the

first line of

an other's

poem as the

last line

of my own

now I'm in

open

water

out of breath / out of my depth

&

the

sharks real-

ly do appear

Analectical Chemistry

K’ung Tzu wrote that the

scrutiny of connective tissue,

when coerced, should only be

accepted if supporting evidence

such as large marine eels living

in the mother’s birth canal could

be found. It was a patriarchal

attitude, like so much of The

Analects. A kind of ancestor wor-

ship, extolling the Superior Man,

the fabled father of the people. Un-

fortunately for K’ung Tzu, the eels

whose presence he prized so greatly

were animists, & showed no filial

piety when they emerged one night

& conger lined up to eat him.

—Mark Young

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of forty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore & Ley Lines, both from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago.  A new collection, some more strange meteorites, is due out from Meritage & i.e. Press, California / New York, in early 2017.

Clayton Eshleman, A NOTE ON BUD POWELL & IMPROVISATION

 Birdland, NYC, 1957; © Francis Wolff, Mosaic Images, LLC 

A NOTE ON BUD POWELL & IMPROVISATION

I started glancing at Downbeat magazine, around 1951, when I was a sixteen years old & a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. While I had been taking piano lessons initially from a neighborhood piano teacher & later from the concert pianist Ozan March, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of jazz. I taped two quarters to a Downbeat order form & mailed it off for a 45 RPM recording with Lennie Tristano’s “I Surrender, Dear” on one side, & Bud Powell’s “Tea for Two” on the other.
  The simple armature of that tune engulfed in improvisational glory roared through my Presbyterian stasis, sinking a depth charge into my soul-to-be. I listened to it again and again, trying to grasp the difference between the lyric & what Powell was doing to it.  Somehow an idea vaguely made its way through: you don’t have to play someone else’s melody—you can improvise, make up your own tune!  WOW—really? You mean, I don’t have to be my parents? I don’t have to “play their melody” for the rest of my life?
   The alternative—being myself—was a stupendous enigma that took me another six years to begin to approach. I had to get completely bored with all the possibilities my given life had prepared me for (including playing the piano) before I could make a grab at something that challenged me to change my life.
   Later I realized that Powell had taken the trivial in music (as Art Tatum did with “I’ll See You in My Dreams”) and transformed it into an imaginative structure. William Carlos Williams, I noted, had done something similar in poetry. Alan Groves has written: “From 1947 to 1953 Powell was the supreme jazz pianist. These mature years produced some of the most startling piano ever recorded. Most of the best of his high-speed linear improvisations build toward a continuous driving climax. His lines would be based on a tune’s chordal structure but flowed independently of it.”
   While reading the Sunday newspaper Comics on the living-room floor was probably my first encounter, as a boy, with imagination, Powell was my first encounter, as an adolescent, with the force of artistic presence, and certainly the key figure involved in my becoming a poet.
   In my book The Gull Wall (1975) I wrote a poem which brooded about Powell’s tragic life and about what he had offered me in 1951 which, in the writing of the poem, cut all the way back to the neighborhood piano teacher lessons my mother started me on when I was 6:

          Bud Powell
          locked in his Paris bathroom so he wouldn’t wander.
          Sipping his lunch from the cat
          saucer on the floor.
          I see him curled there, nursing his litter,
          his great swollen dugs,
          his sleepy Buddha face
          looks down through the lotus pond,
          sees the damned, astral miles below,
          amongst them a little unmoving Clayton Jr.,
          placed by his mother on a bed of keys.
          Powell compassionately extended his tongue,
          licked my laid out senses.

Concerning the imagery in this poem: in 1954, Altevia Edwards, nicknamed Buttercup, became Powell’s common-law wife and manager. She & Powell lived in Paris from 1959 to 1962, during which time Bud’s alcoholism nearly killed him. During this period, Buttercup collected his earnings, held his passport & papers, & denied him any real degree of independence. I read somewhere that when Buttercup would leave her & Powell’s hotel room she would lock him into the bathroom & deposit what she thought of as his lunch in a dish on the floor. This story was the source of some of the imagery in the poem just quoted, which also included my improvisation on what I understood to be Powell’s pathetic situation as well as his extraordinary gift to me.
   In bebop, musical structures and performance events shift between fixed or unfixed aspects, sometimes occupying both simultaneously. For a pianist like Powell, rapid melodic lines in the right hand would be punctuated by irregularly spaced, dissonant chords in the left. Fixed aspects would include pre-existing harmonic sources, such as the chord progressions in “I Got Rhythm” whose original harmony became the basis for Powell’s “Bud’s Bubble,” his new improvised “melody”, so to speak.  Other examples of well-known original harmonies & new, improvised melodies are “Cherokee” as the basis for “Koko,” and “How High the Moon” for “Ornithology.”

          Rounding the gym track listening to WEMU.
          Suddenly Sonny Stitt entangles “Koko” with my mental vines.

          “Cherokee” lyrics, schlock “Indian romance,”
          pulled inside out by “Koko,” “Cherokee’s” vital ghost.

In the mid-1980s I wrote a sestina fantasia based on Powell’s eleven month hospitalization in 1947 in the Creedmore State Hospital where he was administered two series of electroshocks. It is said that he drew a keyboard on the wall of his cell so that he could mentally keep up his chops while incarcerated.  In my poem I used material from the Odyssey as my “original harmony,” & envisioned Powell as a kind of Tiresias in the Odyssey’s Book Eleven as my “new melody”. Since a concert grand with raised lid resembles (from the position of the audience seated before it) a headless bison, I had Powell in the poem attempting to imbibe blood-like sustenance from his sketched “bison keyboard.”

     THE BISON KEYBOARD

    

     Onto the keyboard of a concert grand Bud Powell shot his fingers

     Was he, elbows flexed, a kind of Tiresias drinking from a trench
        beheaded bison blood?
     Are we not, at birth, like bison, deposited on a terrestrial keyboard?
     Each depressed key makes an omen trench.
     Thus does the earth become grand
     & we suck, with Tiresias intensity, as did infant Powell, to prophesy.

     Powell is face to face with a bison apparition, a lacquered black
        ghost.
     Unlike Tiresias, he must draw, through a keyboard, directional sound,
     & even if he has a grand it is hardly a trench of warm blood.

     To be a seer is to re-enter the trench out of which we emerged.
     Powell made contact, but failed to drink.
     For a grand, in profile, lid propped, evokes a headless bison,
     whose chest cavity, the keyboard, releases sound Tiresias needed
        blood to utter.
     And Tiresias, who re-entered the essential trench, did guide
        Odysseus.
     At the keyboard, Powell clawed for blood, as if stabbing at a bison
        sacrifice.
     Thus he proposes a grand dilemma: the living, no matter how grand
        their C chords,
     lack the Tiresian recipe: to be all soul & bison vivid, a
        cunnilinctrice of the goddess trench.

     On his cell wall in Creedmore asylum, Powell is said to have
        sketched, in chalk, a keyboard.

     Powell, now the ghost of a grand, stared at this keyboard.
     “O how get home, Tiresias? How drink bison music in this hellish
        trench?”

The word “hybrid” comes from the Latin hybrid, defined as “the piglet resulting from the union of wild boar with tame sow.” This hybrida root stresses that the incongruity of the fusion derives not from different species but from the intermingling of wild & tame states. Translating these states into anthropological terms, it defines aspects of both shamans & witches whose identities & activities are comprised of wild & tame, or wilderness & cultural, experience. Translated into bebop terms, tame is fixed, wild is unfixed. To hybridize is to improvise, and the earliest examples of improvisation are to be found in the Upper Paleolithic cave images of southwestern France.  One of the most remarkable which I discovered while doing research on Upper Paleolithic Imagination in the Dordogne in the 1980s is to be found in the cave called Les Trois Freres (or, in English translation, The Three Brothers):  seated inside of a prancing, bison-headed man, is a young woman. This image is dated at around 14,000 years ago.
   Bebop, from this point of view, appears to be a marvelous 20^th century extension of hybridization, the creator of imagination in folklore & the historic arts.  

  
   —Clayton Eshleman

David Alpaugh, SEX AND THE DOUBLE-TITLE POEM

Fembot Fatale of the Hivemind, image by Daniel Y. Harris

SEX AND THE DOUBLE-TITLE POEM

KISSING…

Only 46% of our world cultures enjoy

this phenomenon—the majority bored

or repulsed by oral contact. In Europe,

one-percenters were the innovators, as

Kings and Queens and courtiers tried

Kissing. Commoners (always eager to ape

the antics of their oppressors) gave it a try;

found it good—and kissing became the fad.

In case you think I’m mad—I read this in

National Geographic! For that 54% I feel

SAD…

COPULATION…

The wren and the small gilded fly don’t need

royalty to urge them to go to ’t. Darwin 101!

Nature’s first mission, survival—not of you, or

me, but our species. America agrees with King

Lear that if we’re to thrive—we must promote

               

Copulation. Lear ordered England to teem with

bastards so he could stick it to Goneril & Regan.

But the more we cheer the orgy on—with Viagra,

Hip-Hop, Sex Education, In-Vitro-Fertilization,

the more we abhor & deplore—the steady rise in

POPULATION…

VIRGINS…

72. No more. No less. “Promise, large promise,”

Johnson says, “is the soul of an advertisement.”

At 16, hormones raging, the only female bodies

he’d seen were burkha’d from head to toe. How

provocative those eyes!—HUGE, that promise.

Virgins! In heaven! Unburkha’d! 72 of them!

So he strapped a vest to his own virgin body

& blew himself to bits (with 26 infidels: men,

women, children). 72 virgins? Caveat emptor!

Too late. This deal’s done. He didn’t even get

1…

ETHNICITY…

Isn’t just a mankind thing. Take pigeons: 38 in

a coop in Plainfield, New Jersey (circa, 1952).

Homers, Trumpeters, Jacobins, Fantails, Kings.

They made love; sat on eggs; raised their kids,

multi-culturally—with deep respect for birdly

Ethnicity. I never saw a Jacobin slight a King—

a Homer cluck a slur at a Fantail. Still, when it

came to mating, Kings only had eyes for Kings;

Jacobins—for Jacobins. So much for kumbaya

elation. Pigeons don’t give a flying shit for—

ASSIMILATION…

PUTTANESCA…

Not created by 5-star chefs, but 50-lira whores

whose mama mias taught them that the way to

a man’s pants is through his nose. That aroma

raised the eyes of many a hungry Napolitano—

to 2nd story windows, offering 2 for 1 delights. 

Puttanesca. Olives, garlic, anchovies, capers.

Perfect recipe for busy working girls bent on

cooking up a cheap but savory dish. Easy to

put together on the fly. Still sooo delectable!

Yet, I suspect, even tastier, before it became

RESPECTABLE…

SHOULD’A…

Lays guilt trips on whatever goes awry—

Should’a done this... Should’a done that…

(always followed by—Sorry, it’s too late).

Swears to be Angel of teachable moments.

(Don’t be fooled. Should’a’s full of hate.)                

Should’a’s relentless; will rat-tat-tat away

till you shout, why didn’ t I make him wear

a condom? wish I never married the creep.

Only way to end the bullying—play the IF

card. If I could’a, you know damn well, I

WOULD’A…

—David Alpaugh