In Which Our Heart Is In Our Pocket It Is Poems By Pierre Reverdy

"Poets Dressed & Undressed" Elwyn Chamberlain

Nudities Unknown To Ancestors' Imaginations

by WILL HUBBARD

I am currently in debt 19,782 dollars and 19 cents compounded annually at a rate of 6.8 percent for a graduate education in the writing of poetry but learned drastically exponentially more about its practice from listening several thousand times to a recording of the poet reading the poem that follows.

It is a poem that properly sweats where others jackknife into the pool sending droplets of distasteful water into the secret fruity liquor cocktails of underage teenagers adjusting bathing suits fringed with new pubic hair. It in other words it does not mind getting wet in secret, uncomfortable all to itself.

Were you aware that we have taken to digitizing the enduring poems for your eternal convenience? We call it A POEM FOR YOU, and if you look down the far right column this minute you'll find another tasty morsel by Mr. O'Hara and forgive yourself all those unspeakable harshnesses.

We sympathize with the difficulty you encounter reading the verse on a lighted, fictional screen. The answer is not, here as ever, to take away the light. Whether it's coming from behind the poem or in front, light will always be at odds with the printed word because it is more powerful and lives easily in beauty.

Human beings may spend one-third of their lives asleep, but the majority of it happens in their mid-twenties. It was said that Frank O’Hara never wanted to sleep. After he was run over by a dune buggy in 1966 while dancing down to the shoreline with his gin gimlet, Willem de Kooning heard the surgeon say "No one should be dying of these injuries." It is a story that could be stitched into a pillow. Instead I tell everyone I know, hoping they’ll take it easy.

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

Ode To Joy

We shall have everything we want and there'll be no more dying
      on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we'll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
      over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
      will swell from the walls and books alive in streaming rooms
      to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
      that's sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
      near the grave of love
                                                                    No more dying

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
      near the elm that spells the lovers' names in roots
and there'll be no more music but the ears in lips and more wit
      but tongues in ears and more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors' imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
      under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
      like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city's abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
      who's self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulchre at last
      that love may live

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
      and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
      to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
      as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
      pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes though the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
      which wants us to remain for for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
      lets us live with it
                                                                         No more dying

—Frank O'Hara (mp3)

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. Please attend this.

"Disarm" - Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

"Good Times" - Sam Cooke (mp3)

"Boat Drinks" - Jimmy Buffett (mp3)

In Which We Pass On Some Wisdom That Should Help You Down The Line

from Indeterminacy

by JOHN CAGE

One day down at Black Mountain College, David Tudor was eating his lunch. A student came over to his table and began asking him questions. David Tudor went on eating his lunch. The student kept on asking questions. Finally David Tudor looked at him and said, "If you don't know, why do you ask?"

An Indian woman who lived in the islands was required to come to Juneau to testify in a trial. After she had solemnly sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she was asked whether she had been subpoenaed. She said, "Yes. Once on the boat coming over, and once in the hotel here in Juneau."

Standing in line, Max Jacob said, gives one the opportunity to practice patience.

A depressed young man came to see Hazel Dreis, the bookbinder. He said, "I've decided to commit suicide." She said, "I think it's a good idea. Why don't you do it?"

On one occasion, Schoenberg asked a girl in his class to go to the piano and play the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, which was afterwards to be analyzed. She said, "It is too difficult. I can't play it." Schoenberg said, "You're a pianist, aren't you?" She said, "Yes." He said, "Then go to the piano." She did. She had no sooner begun playing than he stopped her to say that she was not playing at the proper tempo. She said that if she played at the proper tempo, she would make mistakes. He said, "Play at the proper tempo and do not make mistakes." She began again, and he stopped her immediately to say that she was making mistakes. She then burst into tears and between sobs explained that she had gone to the dentist earlier that day and that she'd had a tooth pulled out. He said, "Do you have to have a tooth pulled out in order to make mistakes?"

There was a lady in Suzuki's class who said once, "I have great difficulty readings the sermons of Meister Eckhart, because of all the Christian imagery." Dr. Suzuki said, "That difficulty will disappear."

Sometime after my father’s death, I was talking with Mother. I suggested she take a trip West to visit the relatives. I said, "You'll have a good time." She was quick to reply. "Now, John, you know perfectly well that I've never enjoyed having a good time."

Xenia told me once that when she was a child in Alaska, she and her friends had a club and there was only one rule: No silliness.

On Christmas Day, Mother said, "I've listened to your record several times. After hearing all your stories about your childhood, I keep asking myself, 'Where was it that I failed?'"

One spring morning I knocked on Sonya Sekula's door. She lived across the hall. Presently the door was opened just a crack and she said quickly, "I know you're very busy: I won't take a minute of your time."

One of Mies Van der Rohe's pupils, a girl, came to him and said, "I have difficulty studying with you because you don't leave any room for self-expression." He asked her whether she had a pen with her. She did. He said, "Sign your name." She did. He said, "That's what I call self-expression."

fairfield porter

"I Still Care For You" - Ray LaMontagne (mp3)

"You Are The Best Thing" - Ray LaMontagne (mp3)

"Sarah" - Ray LaMontagne (mp3) highly recommended

In Which It's Like Looking In A Mirror

Self-Portrait In A Convex Painting

by ALEX CARNEVALE

A brave caution appears off the tendrils of the wind. I have spent these days gripped by that wariness, letting it go to the fingertips, never answering the call.

We meant to part, to separate for a time, fleeing until overcome by drought, or rising tide.

monet God stands somewhere outsides these things, pushing on himself like a button, or twisted wrench. You know that you are doing something, but you're not exactly aware that you are doing it. As Monet put it:

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

turnerWould you not let those tendrils of caution into your home to beg at your table, see what it means to be with grief?

picassoWalt Whitman made real sense of these things. He wrote that we were tied to something we could not hold fully, leaking out to the maelstrom, and sounding off.

courbetThis is the leverage of the events, a place to go when lights go out in the storm. Read them fully, and live on like the glossy thunder. We were meant to be in these places, say these things to ourselves.

goyaThe self-portrait as a question, asking whatever you are most sensitive to, whatever you are most in need of. It makes plain everything that normally isn't.

rembrandt

As David Markson once put it, "The world is everything that is the case."

lautrec

It is a helpful measure to see yourself in this fashion; to determine whether it is you that is caught up in something, or whether something is caught up in you. Once Poe was said to have looked in a mirror and seen a demon watching him. He went about his business, a daily walk, visit to friends. When he sat down to write he felt a growing power.

manet

There is something more analytical than artistic about such an effort. This is the real art for art's sake: not for anyone else's sake, but for your own. To find out what human intuition and logic cannot achieve, to solve for x on the largest possible scale.

chuck close

I once saw Chuck Close at a museum. He was just looking at the paintings. Afterwards, I quickly went to wash my hands.

chagall

Viewing a self-portrait is like getting a diagnosis from your doctor. You really weren't sure of what ailed you, but now you know.

bacon

There is something admirable in the act of painting itself, something Jed Perl could never understand.

duchamp

Whatever the act, it takes courage.

katz

elaine de kooning

villers

daligauguinheckelAlex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls right here.

jessen

"Brook & Waxing" - Why? (mp3)

"Simeon's Dilemma" - Why? (mp3)

"Good Friday" - Why? (mp3)