Borges and Public Literati

I remember how even those unfamiliar with his poetry knew who Allen Ginsberg was. How he would appear in other than literary publications and on video. How the auditorium at the University of Pittsburgh overflowed with people for his reading in 1991.  How Ginsburg had security bring people up onto the stage with him rather than turn them away.  I remember John Updike on the networks.  Their presence in the media and during public appearances confirmed to me that poets and writers held a venerated and important place in American life.  Watching this interview with Borges on what would have been his 112th birthday, I find myself hungry for the presence of such literary elders not just in my private life but in public life.  Find myself wondering how the media, beyond Oprah perhaps, can ignore the great poets and writers of our day and why their views are not valued among the various pundits and talking heads of the day.

Thanks to Mariana Soto for the following interview with Borges from late in his life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo2Eo-G-1sE

Jerusalem

Second blog in and I'm already cheating, writing about drama instead of poetry.  But Jerusalem is based on the Blake lyric, loosely.  The play is little more than a vehicle for Mark Rylant, the finest male performance I've seen on Broadway in years, so amazing, that I am astounded that magnet for fine British stars of stage and screen, the Harry Potter franchise, never coerced him into playing amidst its menagerie of witches, wizards and various fanciful beasties. 

What I'm left thinking though is about the nature of theater, how like confessional poetry, it is overly dependent on the charisma of the deeply flawed character or persona.  As such I'm finding theater difficult to attend.  Whether it is the hubris of Lear, the adolescent melodrama of Romeo and Juliet, the fatal jealousy of Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," the delusions and fall of Blanche in "Street Car," the blindness and inability to act of Madam R. in "The Cherry Orchard," or the cruelty and manipulation of Hedda Gabler, the audience is rapt in the machinations of deeply flawed characters who destroy some combination of themselves, others, and the worlds in which they live.  Often the effect and immersion into that pain is stunning but also tremendously draining and unsettling.

The world in which I live is already filled with a reserve of deeply flawed people of various psychological affliction.  I have found myself spending undue amounts of my life cleansing myself of their influences, shedding my own afflictions, and sidestepping the tragic flaws of a wide range of major and minor players upon the various stages I have inhabited.  I don't require the arts to which I attend to return me to such worlds.  It is not escape or respite I am after but ways to live fully in a life peopled by those who have found ways to be largely removed from a world peopled by borderline personalities, raging narcissists, addictive personalities, and hurlers of projective identification.

I want my art to be filled more with either enlightened beings or those who spend far less time embracing their fatal flaws and far more learning how not to be so intimately wed to their core issues.  I don't think new formalism or flarfs or po-mo smart apathy or safely benign academic verse is the answer, but nor do I think that the drama I mentioned nor the lives of the confessionalists are apt models for art.  Classic drama so often demands human foibles, tragic or comic, as their essence.  And contemporary poetry either avoids matters of achieving a life well lived as unduly earnest or as unseemly affect.

Greetings and Giggles

I gave a reading at the School of the Visual Arts a little while ago and was asked to read a funny poem.  Not being Billy Collins or Hal Sirowitz or Kay Ryan, even, this is what I had to offer.  The few who didn't shift about uncomfortably laughed.  See what you think:

Giggles before the Void

I could take her ass

and put it in a box by the window

and every morning I’d open the box

and tickle her ass with a goose feather

and giggle

but sooner or later she’d want it back

and I’d be stuck with an empty box

and a bald goose

and every morning after that I’d have to get up

and feed that goose

and look for something to put in the empty box.