The Brooklyn Rail

My most intense writing experience would have to be the composition of the poem “Ode” in 2010. During the writing I followed along a list of names from the front pages of my book Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010). These were all the friends (mostly artists) that I felt I needed to thank. The list seemed to function as a guard rail. It was the first time I had attempted to preset a trajectory of memory across a poem. The list began to function as a track and my mind was instantaneously outrunning it. I had no choice but to slow myself and let memory emerge to darken each doorway, each name seemed to throw perfectly incised and traceable shadows. I could suddenly see the characters of my life (then) as from above. I got as close as I could before each memory seemed to threaten a flood. It was always time to move on. Each tectonic wave could never really resolve itself. Each name just shrinks back to become a vanishing sliver of earth, gone again.

I wrote “Ode” the night before my release reading upstairs at City Lights in San Francisco. I thought it would be exciting to begin this “important” reading with a long unpublished piece. I remember that I was typing in my apartment on 26th and Bartlett in the Mission with my desk facing away from the front window. I would race along the list of names taking note of secret feelings and lay them next to bracing first impressions. I would flash on a name and the line would begin to twitch, sometimes lasting half a stanza. Then as if to regain its balance a stuttering two-word statement would follow and then nothing else. Here is the final stanza of the poem:

Torn paper film of a wolfman’s romance and in the end, he rises from the grave…or does his maiden? Joke Night. Opera Plaza taking tickets. You’re so good to me. You printed my secret ceremony next to a poem by the one I love. You bring half drunk bottles to parties, believer, curator. He said he was going to paint a house. He left me bed where I watched ‘Loads’. I think that he was hustling, that’s what she said. His shows were tight and massive. He could appreciate a turn of phrase or lyric, threading the needle. I don’t want to live without your love.

The glitching nature of its phrasing felt dependent upon the honesty of each evaluation. I was gaining transparency just by finally admitting to myself the ways in which these friends became beloved to me. All these separate angels are caught up in the whirlwind netting of a poem. They soon morph into one larger than life centaur, storming the page.

I did feel throughout as though I was taking dictation. The physicality of writing was pulling slightly ahead of my consciousness. This state of making felt akin to levitation. Each cold observation gleamed openly, like a silver sword propped up in a corner. I could bound down any alley as far content and know that I would be ok. Knowing that I had the list to consult as I began felt like a loose band of protection, a wrinkled, solarized map to keep at hand. I suppose I should decipher a little of this codex in an itemized fashion:

“A psychic who saw words or heard them or found small filthy objects on the street that came back as words, he loved poems more than graphite he used to make his works.” (Colter Jacobsen)

“The writer everyone co-opted sooner or later, it’s the new pillow book, don’t miss it.” (Joanne Kyger)

“Answering the desk phone every five seconds, very generous, he gave me twenty dollars when I swept into town as a fake hustler, (a thousand years) genius prose.” (Kevin Killian)

During the writing of “Ode,” I was terrified of stopping for fear that this fluid momentum might not return. It can be a difficult poem to read on command as its rhythm is insistently breathless. It’s one of the few poems I have written that might benefit from a simultaneous second reader in performance. I remember reading it aloud a second time at Moe’s Books in Berkeley and being hyper conscious of hitting all the necessary hard edges to get it off the ground. When I finished, I could hear one person applauding wildly in the audience. I looked up nervously to see Michael McClure. His white hair framed a glittering smile. “Ode” would eventually become the first poem of my 2014 collection Language Arts.