The Brooklyn Rail

Some of the scariest and most pleasurable experiences I have with my own poetry happens when I’m reading it aloud to others. The energy waves in that circumstance are a such strange mix of fear and ecstasy as the sounds roll out between us. The most intense experiences I’ve had while writing—the ones that immediately loom up in my mind—all seem to be about grief. The first instance I can think of was in writing what became the opening and closing sections (and one middle section) of The California Poem. I was living in New York, at Ridge and Rivington on the Lower East Side, pre-gentrification. I’d had a dream about my hometown in California, in which I could feel and see all the cliffs crumbling under the weight of fancy houses, the ocean lapping up black from industry. There was nowhere I could “be.” That was the mid nineties. I think I’ve had eco-grief dreams, living and waking, since I was about four. They are totally overwhelming. This one furled out into a 192-page poem that ended up taking seven years to write, beginning under the dark, heavy waves of environmental loss.

Another such experience was a waking dream, albeit under the influence of yage, almost twenty years later. I could hear the hooves of all the dead and dying-out animals pounding on the roof of the atmosphere. Their sounds were no longer on earth—only their ghost sounds remained here, while their “actual” sounds were trapped up above. I understood that they had made all the sounds, all the history of living sound on earth. We had learned our sounds from them, and now they were dancing out a ghost dance with their hooves, but their ghost sounds would always be on earth, too, haunting it. I was barfing up reality while this happened. And writing. That became a chorus in Make Yourself Happy.

It’s the ghost dance of all the animals

beating earth
w/ their hooves

it’s the black crow dance of reality

PURGE

the who-me bubble
out front
golden            popping who-me bubble

Reality keeps throwing up
her circus tents

plays a little
song on the
harmonica
to accompany herself out
swish swish

is how that starts.

The other important grief experience was writing about my dad in The Book of Jon, and while that one was less global, it was probably the most intense, involved the most weeping-while-writing, because it was the most intimate. The shorthand facts are: my dad was a homeless drug addict who died of an overdose, and I had to write about him. Weirdly, if I want to touch that grief again, remembering writing that book is the quickest way. Writing the book helped move some of the grief out of my body, so remembering writing it is how I remember.

I also want to say something about joy, because I also experience that while writing. Not as a counterpart to grief, exactly, and not as some redemptive gesture, but as an “also this.” Joy while writing parts of each of those books, the elation when having shaped something from mucking around in the tar of deep grief, but also the joy of how language can bounce and shine as it forms sound and worlds in its jaunty antics. I’m opening my last book, Your Kingdom, and putting my finger down somewhat randomly….

what is that swirling    sparking    sparkling    darkling
cloud
of blue up in your skull
doing now?
(I mean: an electrical storm became your brain)   *     *     *     *     *

is a quick example I found. I remember the joy I felt when writing that unspooling string: “swirling sparking sparkling darkling,” with “cloud” cutting into and gathering it, plus blue, and skull (the shapes those made, how suddenly sky gathered inside a skull, too), along with the feeling of a living voice suddenly appearing and zigzagging in the question mark and the “I mean.” I mean.