Sketches of me
The Central Thrust of American Poetry
Almost 10 years ago Harry Northup, incomparable actor and poet asked me what the central thrust of America poetry is. Here’s my answer: http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2015/05/lee-rossi-answers-harry-e-northups.html
The Best I ever Heard
I’ve got a new book and soon I’ll be embarking on a reading tour of California. What do I want to give my audience? I remember the two best poetry readings I even attended, one by Philip Levine and the other by Robert Pinsky.
Before reading his wonderful poems Levine talked about his life and explained that he really had only one subject, the migration of “simple” farming folk to the great urban centers of the world, a subject which starts with his own family’s translation from the Old World to the New but goes far, far beyond it. And Pinsky said something equally reductive: all his poems express his sense of what Robert Hass called “from-someness,” the sense that everything comes from something else, or somethings else.
Thus, whether Levine is writing about black sharecroppers from the American South building Chevies in Detroit, or Mayan Indians tending the strawberry and asparagus fields of California, or Spanish peasants fleeing the poverty of southern Spain to the ghettoes and wealthy of the coastal North, his focus is on the displaced and uprooted. Like Steinbeck and Faulkner, he reminds us what our ease and comfort costs others, and he shows us that this process of exploitation and immiseration is taking place in many parts of the world.
Likewise Pinsky brings to his poetry a penetrating and detailed sense of the historical and economic connections among things. His famous poem “Shirt” enumerates the pieces of the shirt, “the back, the yoke, the yardage,” etc., and then ranges over space and time to incorporate the sweatshops of Malaysia and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire into his vision of what it take to put a shirt on your back.
Both of them attend to the connections of things, evoking an almost Buddhist sense of the interconnectedness of all beings. I wonder, am I that kind of poet? Maybe, maybe not. Only my poems know
Pieces of a Year
9/18/23
Lee Rossi was born at the confluence of the Deep South and Greater Appalachia. During his lifetime human population quadrupled, from 2 billion to 8, and CO2 increased from less than 300 ppm to nearly 420 ppm causing the atmosphere to warm significantly.
8/14/23
Recently I’ve been lurking around the edges of Catholic Twitter, where the rad trads are battling the papal loyalists, who also seem to be a heck of lot more liberal than the trads. Some of the trads are positing a doctrine called sedevacantism, the Latin way of saying there’s nobody sitting on the Papal Throne, i.e. no True Pope, certainly not Bergoglio, that Argentine impostor. Sounds like schism to me, the Babylonian Captivity all over again, only this time instead of a pope in Avignon, we’re looking at Birmingham or Tyler, Texas. Most of this uproar is coming from the American bishops, most of whom were appointed by the Thermidorean popes, Paul, John Paul & Benedict. My own controversies with the American clergy began of course with the Vietnam War, when they declared their allegiance to the American war machine in its crusade against godless Communism (and the poor people of Vietnam). But what I might have noticed then, but didn’t notice for a couple of decades, was their horror and alarm at the prospect of a diminishing number of (white) Catholics. Birth control and women’s rights burst the demographics of the religious masses. I remember reading how alarmed the Polish pope was at the declining birth rates in once Catholic Europe. No wonder that birth control and abortion are their wedge issues (they’ve been pimping White Replacement Theory for decades). At my 50th reunion at St. Louis U, Mike Koetting offered a little presentation about the Vietnam War. There were a couple of conservative women in attendance (graduates of the School of Commerce and Finance), who said almost nothing until one of the Honors women (was it Arlene) mentioned how birth control suddenly opened so many doors, especially for women. The two still-Catholic women huffed about how that sort of comment had no place in a Catholic university, and then stalked out. Hmm. That’s the American Catholic church as I”ve come to know and despise it.
7/20/23
Once there was a girl, the younger sister of a friend of mine. She was what in those days they called a hippie chick. She’d empty a kiosk of its contents, the Berkeley Barb say, and sell them for a dollar apiece to people on the sidewalk. That’s where she got her spending money, cigarettes, dope, potato chips and coke. She’d almost given up that kind of life. At least that’s what her brother, the straight arrow, told me. In the meantime her parents had gone for a long driving vacation. An adventure. A whole year driving through Central and South America. ‘They were hippies too,’ I suggested. ‘No, no,’ said my friend, ‘just adventurous.’ Meanwhile, their daughter had settled back into their middle-class, suburban house. Maybe she was planning on going to the J.C. Well, anyway, one night, late at night, she’s in a hurry to get home and ignores the crossing lights and barriers, gets stuck on the tracks, gets hit by a train. Since her parents were still out of town, the police made her brother come pick up ‘the personal effects.’ She’d been driving a Volkswagen bug. Her brother didn’t recognize the car. Her father, the brother tells me, was never the same.
4/23/23
I know myself, and fear myself. With good reason. I’m filled with fear. Any change in the weather, internal or ex-, frightens me. This morning the sky is filled with clouds, a marine layer, but the air is fresh. My lover tries to dispel my fear with her nakedness, but she just makes it worse. I need to take a deep breath, then expel the tension before I can see how wonderfully naked she is, before I graze my hand along her slopes and uplands. I wander the valleys, but nervously, afraid of the animals lurking there. Long ago, I promised myself that I would free myself of my fear, but it is still so much a part of me, another organ, as necessary as the liver or the heart.
4/18/23
I’m meeting a friend at a nice restaurant in Portland. The cherry trees are blooming in the courtyard where I park my e-scooter. On my way into the restaurant I realize that my phone has been hacked. There’s a a gray grid on the screen which keeps me from using the phone. You’ve been hacked, my friend tells me. Same thing happened to me last week, she says. But she knows what to do. Down the block there’s a rundown house full of squatters, young drug addicts. She walks up to a window and knocks, and a hand puppet, a bear, comes to the window. You hacked this guy’s phone, she says, what does he need to do? Needs to pay, says the bear. Give him 15 bucks, says my friend. No, it’s 20, the bear says. Yesterday it was 75, but today it’s 20. Okay, I think, and hand the bear a bunch of fives. What was different about yesterday? More street traffic? More tourists?
Melting Pot
From the bluff, you can watch miniature sails slant northward across the bay. After 2 weeks of stupefying tropical-storm-borne heat, the denizens of this coastal city can hardly believe their luck. An onshore breeze bringing relief from soggy airless misery.
For two brief, interminable weeks, all that had previously divided us – our clothes, our religions, our speech patterns, the colors of our skin, the cost of our cars -- seemed a sticky, nonsensical mess. Meaningless in the common misery. Parked on the freeway at rush hour, you’d roll your window down and feel like you’d just stuck your head into a vegetable steamer. Turning to the driver next to you, you’d see the same resolute despair you saw in your own rearview mirror. You drove as in a dream, the car moving of its own volition, in directions that were familiar but unexpected. North on the Westside Freeway, west to the ocean.
Yet some things were easier than normal. Not that other drivers were any less rude or aggressive, but even the wildest seemed to have lost track of that internal savagery which had previously guided them and were moving now only out of nostalgia, as if remembering some triumphant sadism far in the past.
You saw people on the streets. You never saw people on the streets. Not just individuals but whole families. Drifting toward the beach. Hopeful of catching a breath of sea breeze. Such hopefulness amid so much despair.
Not since the big earthquake had so many neighbors actually rubbed shoulders and elbows with one another. In those seven months so much had changed. Children had been born. The homeless had been pushed back from certain sections of tourist-rich beach. Beautiful women had been notoriously murdered. That moment of gentility, in which our common vulnerability had been made plain to us, had been forgotten. New lines had gathered about old mouths and eyes.
Yet so brutal was the heat – was it, as some suggested, a rehearsal for that day of wrath which Christians claim will be our mutual end – even the sturdiest egos felt warped and, well, depolymerized. Who was proof against it? Patient, unrelenting, awful without a trace of malice or regret, it wore you down, it wore down who you thought you were, until you were just some indefinable thing without quality or characteristic save one, you were something suffering.
You could look into the faces of the other people in the street, the Chicano family man, the drunk who sleeps in the nearby parking lot, the Asian student who seems to live nowhere but is always at the bus stop across the street – and feel exactly the same suffering you felt. It was as if we were all living the same misery, the fiction of our separate identities finally discarded. A whole city suffering one drenching, humiliating, inescapable suffering. Thongs, t-shirts, old dresses, the lightest, coolest, most permeable membranes. In the heat we wore them like liquid skin.
But today is different. Today finally a breeze. I’m sitting in the shade of a palm tree on a narrow strip of park land that runs from the pier to the brim of a canyon. All around me couples, families, extended families and friends have crowded into the park, craving refuge from yesterday’s heat, fearful of the brutal, desert heat still thriving inland.
The onshore breeze is cool, caressing my bare legs, such exhaustion and exhilaration after the water-logged soporific of the past week. My girl friend lies on the blanket in front of me, worn out from her struggles with the heat. At last, she can admit defeat. While it was here, she fought it, refusing to let it keep her from her life. But now she can relax, like a baby dreaming on the grass at her mother’s feet. Meanwhile, real babies, babies whose hair rises like the crowns of cockatoos from soft fontanels, babies run sturdily on stubby legs barefoot across the grass and toss baby soccer balls at their mommies.
Me, I’m smiling. Everybody around me is smiling too. Old people. The homeless. Recent immigrants. I can see an island thirty or forty miles out a sea, a blue gray smudge atop a bank of sea fog. We’ve come from everywhere in the world, Korea, Italy, the Philippines, Romania, Iran – our ancestral mothers and fathers ate the ancestral cabbages and cous cous, the ancestral grubs and pigeons of all the inhabited continents.
And finally we are here. Each in his or her own skin. Nervous. Isolated. Individual again. Unsure of the stranger walking past our blanket. Unsure of the strangers spreading their own queerly emblazoned blanket under the next tree. Sure only of the breeze that, pulled by inland heat, sweeps off the Pacific and up the face of the cliff, tumbling over its lip and across our arms and faces and legs. Sure only of the skin that feels the ocean’s breath as it pours over every exposed inch, this skin that on all these individual bodies is just one skin, gentled and soothed by the world’s longest kiss.
Catalina
Why do people go to Catalina? Some go, I imagine, for a change of scene. Some go to ride in a Glass Bottom Boat. Some like the island tour, with its hirsute buffalo and equally hirsute hills. Others enjoy the harbor with its numerous bars where they can invite the roll and sway of that cradle endlessly rocking into their own persons. I’d never been there, but it was close and I needed a place where I could escape myself. Anyplace but my cramped and noisy Santa Monica apartment. I didn’t fail to notice the irony that all I could afford was a tiny motel room in a noisy part of town. I hadn’t realized that once you get to the island, there’s no spreading out, not unless you’re a Wrigley or a backpacker eager for an experience of nature that includes sunstroke, dehydration, and fleas. The Wrigleys who own the island, hill, rock, and streambed, have limited development to the area around the southeast harbor. No cars travel the island, only golf carts and only in the small urban enclave of Avalon. Within hours of arriving, I was beset by a fearful case of claustrophobia.
Nothing helped, not even a ride in a glass-bottom boat. We cruised the quiet part of the harbor (the other part was overrun with sloops, yawls, and yachts) while a crusty, red-faced guide instructed us in the underwater fauna, migrants such as mackerel, sardines and smelt in sagittate flights as well as the local slugs and sea stars, snails and urchins, and of course, that champion shellfish, the abalone — predators and prey in an endless, anxious dance. Friends had told me about the charms of hunting abalone in the cold turbulent waters near the island (one to a customer, please), and coming home with a couple of pounds of rubbery gastropod, the perfect thing for paella, or for pounding when one is overcome with anger and hesitant about pounding one’s spouse or boyfriend.
Riding in the tiny tourist tram was, if anything, worse. I wanted to run screaming into the brush, not sure why I was so filled with mischief, or anguish, or whatever it was. Whatever it was was kinetic like St. Vitus Dance or Disco Fever. Perhaps it was the sight of those poor displaced buffalo, sweating pelt in the bleak, unforgiving sun, or the sardine-like packing of over-sized tourists in the tiny tram cars, or the irony of paying a rich man to maintain his fief undisturbed by the likes of me. I couldn’t rightly say. All I knew was that the pressure was building, and that if I didn’t keep vigilant watch the pressure plug would come flying off like a Polaris missile.
So that night, when after dinner I went down to the harbor, I was still vibrating with a strange and toxic energy. Gamma rays perhaps. The night was preternaturally clear, probably the result of a desert wind, devoid of moisture but bearing the radiant shimmer of very fine grains of sand. In the distance lay the coast line, a golden choker stretching from San Clemente to Santa Monica.
But what pulled my attention, ectoplasm to a perfect vacuum, was the awesome emptiness overhead. After years of living in Southern California I was used to its light pollution (car lamps, stop lights, neon signs, porch lights), a hazy umbrella which kept me from noticing the stars. But here the stars blazed clearly and distinctly, with no moon to distract from their primitive grandeur. And yet it was not the stars, those ferocious caldrons, but the unimaginable reaches between them that snared me. Or maybe it was precisely the imagination that sent me hurtling faster than the speed of light from Dipper to Bear to Hunter with nothing, absolutely nothing in the intervening space to slow my attention. How lonely we are, how uniquely and terribly lonely, I thought. And because I was standing at the edge of a huge cliff and staring into the most awful abyss, I experienced vertigo such as I had never experienced before, standing and falling in the same instant. I gripped the rail I’d been leaning against and pitched my head forward only to encounter that same menacing scene in the placid water below. Everywhere I turned, I realized, was this inescapable image of separation and loss. And it was me, that part of me that hungered for knowledge to the point of extinction. And what was that knowledge? It had something to do with the birth and death of stars, generation after generation, and of all the elements brewed in those violent nurseries, the painful explication of some initial fiat, galaxies and star systems and planets. And of life, of course, its green and pink, its cruelty and naïveté.
As quickly as it came, the sensation of falling passed, and with it the impassable fear which had accompanied it. But the insight remained, which like an old photo of myself, I re-examine from time to time if only to remind myself of time’s passing and of the various ways my atoms will re-arrange themselves in the millions and millions of years to come