free for a moment breathing easy ever since 4:32 this afternoon when i finished putting the last grade on paper. so i've only got to put them in the ridiculous machines. tomorrow.

now the real vacation begins. it ends at 8:15 tomorrow. but i refuse to talk about that. i'm on vacation.

reading The Diary of James Schuyler just before lights out each night has got me going on that whole scene again. round and about new york 1958, for example. it's funny that the art of that time and place has been so thoroughly co-opted (you haven't really arrived until you've got yr pollock de kooning rothko rivers hanging in yr lobby or yr cubicle or yr commercial), but the poetry stays wild. it's still out on the curb kind of ferocious and hungry (but it would never admit it... a real smart aleck). folks still don't get it. well, some folks don't... like the apes. that's ok. i sure wouldn't have gotten it back when i was them (was i ever them? not really) but i would have been intrigued. maybe even inspired (hell, if cummings and sandburg - happy birthday carl! - could inspire me, why not o'hara and schuyler? why not?) anyway, some of the apes do get it... to a point... but they don't get the joke. the joke is the hardest thing to get around here.

i remember my room in houston. i wrote on the walls. some of the graffiti was o'hara's "Memorial Day 1950" because it was my year and it had this very cool and modern heroic attitude about art and living. It begins:

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.

and eight stanzas later it ends:

Look at my room.
Guitar strings hold up pictures. I don't need
a piana to sing, and naming things is only the intention
to make things. A locomotive is more melodious
than a cello. I dress in oil cloth and read music
by Guillaume Apollinaire's clay candelabra. Now
my father is dead and has found out you must look things
in the belly, not in the eye. If only he had listened
to the men who made us, hollering like stuck pigs!

good old frank. he died in july 1966 way too soon. it still makes me sad. for some reason. he isn't just a guy in a book to me. back in the summer of '66 (oblivious to new york poets... but not painters) i was hanging in backyard joliet sweating over my paperback moby dick determined to knock off that stinking whale if it killed me. i did. it didn't. but frank got run over by a dune buggy. i went on to become a (can you believe it?) carmelite and an english teacher. not a poet. a pretend poet. not a painter.

schuyler's diary reads like a truncated nature journal or artist's daybook:

The horizon is blue, a deep, fixed blue, that of a star sapphire, and the hilly islands and mountains that compose it are jagged: the edge of a torn piece of paper. And for the space of a breath sunlight falls on my fingers and these keys.

i have a tape of mr. schuyler reading "Hymn to Life" (glorious poem read it read it right now... but it's so long) you can hear the drugs in his voice (prescription - for whatever had him in and out of hospitals most of his adult life), and that keeps the poem's life even more precious. no i won't quote it here. the lines are too long. they wouldn't fit. but that journal passage might give you a clue.

i just took a look at erin's Lose the Buddha blog. that girl is something. something ambitious. ah. to be young. and to be something. ambitious. a triathlon kind of ambitious.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it...

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Frank O'Hara
"Lines for the Fortune Cookies"

talk to me

brtom.org