INTRODUCTION
+
HAAG'S BIO
22 SPECULATIONS ON WRITING
for
THE 2001 POEMS
INSIGHT
#O1
03-07/06-24-01
Unless you're willing to make
too much out of things,
it is
unlikely you'll be
able to write.
There was the wild
romanticism
of my youth, the damping
down with age to
survive,
adopting reasonableness to
live, adopting anger,
blindness, harsh
demands of what is -- to
add up, to confirm,
justify,
deride mystery's wilderness.
I know it is this
way
and no other. How
could emotion's blue-winged flights sustain
true
flight's course?
There is no truth to
be discovered in life,
there
is only the sustaining of
the scribe -- writing.
CONCISION
#02
03-04/06-24-01
A jam slatherer, once I
was: spoonfuls upon my bread,
heaps of
raspberry, cherry, plum,
succulent, glistening, sweet.
Gluttony,
abundant, cloying rotunded my
tum. One day, more than
a drop became
too much.
They say a
leopard can't change its spots.
My
eyes remain wilderness-green, but
my teased taste-buds changed --
not
by neglecting jam,
but the terse bread beneath.
Suddenly
less and less, less
red jam became my goal.
Black on
white,
the written word, like Siva,
it reveals, preserves,
destroys. Dance,
whirl the damaru, explore, austerely,
the flickering arch.
SIGNATURE
#03
03-09/-6-24-01
Signature comes from English sign,
Latin signum, dashing my
hopes,
that when I saw it
divided sig-nature, it
was wrong.
Immediately, I began
speculating about sign-ature, thinking we'd
moved the accent. Thinking it
related to ligature,
nature,
mature, fracture, adventure, I
began a conjuration of -ture,
and
-ature, before I, O
enlightenment! realized I
didn't
recognize
a Latin ending
when it bit me. For,
study though I may, write
out my heart
with age, without omniscient education,
with
time's constant running,
only facets of knowledge are
knowable. And silence.
FILING SYSTEM
#04
03-10/06-24-01
My head at sixty-seven: a
bad filing cabinet gone wrong,
never did
operate a sensible
A B C
system. Now, God knows, its
not
filed in Sanskrit or
Chinese, or some other grand,
desirable,
esoteric language.
A jumbled jungle of fruits,
orchids,
jeweled toads, the feast
left over from the leopard's
maul:
bloody, quivering,
crimson-as-sunset, cooling, coagulating,
maggot-gnawed,
it's hard to believe this
no-longer-palpitating
flesh, muscle, nerve, bone
was thought, was
what wrote poems,
ran, wept,
ate gazelle. Who am I?
Eater or eaten? File under
C for conclusiveness.
SEPHARDIC
#05
03-11/4-23/06-24/10-23-01
Having bussed to a Sephardic
lecture last night -- and music --
I
wondered why the ballads
(I'd hoped for
Jewish chant) were so
troubadourish,
courtly-love-obsessed, unreal in Town Hall
where
earthquake had stripped plaster
bits from brick?
Hesperion XXI
sang, but failed
to reveal the coded meaning
within modern, mild,
romance-addicted translations.
Why so secret?
Though those
Thirteenth Century fugitives
were chased from Castile, Aragon,
Portugal, they stopped in North
Africa, the Balkans
Ottoman
Empire, Eastern Mediterranean. Sephardic
Jews, mixing with Turk,
Italian,
Greek, Bulgarian, Rumanian, French,
adopted foreign forms.
Professor Armistead -- whose mother dresses
him funny --
boyishly, with patched
eye, glasses hanging on his
nose,
curly-haired, grey,
sagging body, speaks quietly, though
the
mike is soundless and
the crowd humungous about the
multi-cultural, still often
Hispanic-speaking, Sephardics,
ancient and modern.
His sweet, informal speech, like
a rose
unfolding, has so
many petals he
does not know where to
begin giving translations different from
the written notes: more
class-conscious,
war-related, church-challenging,
tragic.
Later, the soaring, heart-stabbing wail
of the music
cries for
singing by fire-light, from mountains,
courtyards,
against the
wind, passions. The drummer breathes
on his
fingertips and -- from
the edge of its skin
top -- whooshes
across
the huge, laced, green drum.
Mellow, wild, deep, an
unearthly
sound making the evening worthwhile
worth writing about.
SCRIPT
#06
03-14/4-23/06-24/10-25-01
The brain's a damped-down, grey,
mindless, wandering fog wonders:
"Why
write one more word today
or poem tomorrow?"
From
where does the writing
impulse come? What good does
it serve?
Usurped in its
early days -- as
is the Internet -- by
commerce,
only peripherally does it serve
writer, poet, linguist --
little, and
usually after death.
The works of dead poets
usurp wages that might sustain
the living. "Eat how ye
may,"
sneer critics,
God -- who cares little for
poetry, less for
poets living
or dead. Only a few
pay lip service
to
script, writing's invention, to
words written as record of
humans
having passed this way
and said so.
CERUMEN
#07
03-14-01
Do you know the real
name for ear-wax? Even a
bright, new, modern,
efficient dictionary
won't tell you.
But a hearing specialist
will
-- and tell you not to
touch it, even though she
and I
both
grew up with mothers obeying
schedules to use
cotton-tipped sticks
and hairpins. Even though humanity
for
millennium, round-the-world
has been digging at, de-waxing
its
ears, we now learn
nature does it for us:
no fuss, no
muss,
no need. Every seven
days cerumen is ritually flushed
by the body,
while you,
surprised, learn one
more thing mothers aren't
needed
for and rejoice, saving three
more minutes against a
lifetime's
coping -- for poetry.
YESTERDAY II:
#08
03-15/17/22/04-18/06-24/10-26-01
lectures all day long and
stopped by the greenhouse -- but
there
was no work to
do. So, the
lectures: at 10:30 in
the
Physiology/Biophysics department re
mapping the brain's visual areas:
A scanned brain
can be simplified to a
bird's head,
beak-like figure, an
oval, a sphere, tinted red
and green or
yellow and blue, one can
talk about its valleys, its
ridges, its tubes, its traceries
in magenta, occasionally
see the texture of a
tissue, and the flash of
visual
experience slipping like a
spot-lit eel mercurially
over
mountain and dale, shimmering
swiftly, oozing, congealing back into
ellipsoids, sliding into oblivion. Where
within this does
beauty reside, poetry, color choice
in silk, anxiety, pain,
bliss?
Somehow within this intricate maze
of tissue and
texture, the slightest of movement --
one sees! My favorite
word
of the morning was "saccade."
Afterward, I stopped
by
the greenhouse but there
was no work to be
done. The next lecture,
at
1:30, a poet
from my past, translating from
an ancient
Vietnamese poet, Ho
Xuan Huong, who concentrated on
duyen
(fated
love).
She triumphed in innuendoes fully
worthy of today's
salacious media
-- which, said the poet, caused
her work to
survive. Master of forms, quick-witted,
bawdy, a
writing-woman was unusual
back then. I thought about
readily
available, well-endowed,
dedicated small studies of dead,
obscure, sexually-exploitative, so-so poets exhumed
and
exhaustively studied by academia's
dollars while living
poets
beg for funds, appreciation,
recognition, love. There's always money
to fund a dead poet.
O living poet
put your poems some
safe
place. Once dead, they'll get
to you, too. Let your
heart break at
not being read alive, let
it cause your death!
Among
the bits of interactive-coping e-mail
a selling,
fella-writer,
who has contacted publishers for
me, says: "It
must drive
you insane not to be
published." It does.
It
fills the mind with
unpoetic gnashings. But so unwilling
am I to
face the
rat-race I once
ran -- futile, time-consuming forays into
entrepreneurial, notice-me
strategies -- which I
still occasionally make into the
real world
-- that
I revolt at being a marketeer,
an entrepreneur. I'm
just a
word spinner, a designer of
intricate needlepoints,
a weaver of the Amazon-knowledge
that flows continuously
through the
warp and woof of a
human mind. Few
are interested. No one offers
me even the
price of
dinner. I eagerly give my
gifts away on
the NET.
At 3:00 I
hear a visual-communications-candidate do his
slide and
spiel dance for
a job in
the art school. His art
shows a
consuming need to
be artful, jarring, his twarting-designs
are
totally skewed
toward recognition, reward. Are any
of them
memorable? My foggy
brain remembers a book with
margins hacked and
slashed with odd iconic borders --
and envy. He's worked for
everyone, I've worked for no
one. But one
of his clients
was Internet
Archive, I write that down,
I looked it up, find,
a foreword-thinking organization
deep into saving websites --
Today!
Instantly, I ask Alexa to
crawl my website. My heart
is relieve that
five years work may not,
just by not being
published
in the networking rat-race, disappear
forever. I have
worked long and hard at
my art, but being out
of step with
the times,
I think more
about the viscous, grey,
naked-caterpillar-like
brain manufacturing a thousand images
then I
do about marketeering
lunches with agents.
What are we here
for?
To bloom as briefly as
a flower and disappear. If
my
hundred boxes
survive to be opened, therein
lies perhaps the most detailed
history yet written of a
vulnerable human life
of the 20th Century's last
two-thirds and some of the 21st.
At 6:30, I attend
an affordable-artist-housing meeting,
where an energetic young woman
strives to build
interest in
a unique facility, ecosystem for
artists to live,
work, perform, and teach in.
Then on the bus and
home to
bed, wondering how
far I've walked.
At times, I see myself,
a sixty-seven-year-old-wandering-searcher of the late-night
streets
probing
for recognition, producing
more poetry than
the
equally unrecognized-when-alive Emily -- who
died to be revered,
printed.
I remember the silent greenhouse
with no work
needed today. All day long,
there was screaming anxiety about
the money I make -- or
don't make, the
taxes that gouge my
pittance,
the resounding fall of the stockmarket.
Let it fall and
fall.
Humans were human
in the depression. And being
depressed, I remember my last
attempt to exhibit my paintings,
little, commercial cat-paintings,
Finding six months later
the
gallery-owner had fled before his
own debts, abandoning
everyone's work,
mine among the
works lost. I cast a
momentary prayer that the Cattipoints
found good homes, and
remember
publishing a book
where the gallery owner, too,
ran off with the money.
Shall I walk into the
water with rocks
in my pockets this week
or next? Who but a
fool continues
to speak to
a race so
indifferent. But then, of course,
one sings for one's own
pleasure, and God, bastard though
He may be.
MORNINGMARES
#09
03-17/10-27-01
Dulled right back down to
a glimmering point in the
anxiety centers of my brain --
flumes built of
cascading electrical impulses, deep, wide,
one million by one
million,
descending into fine-honed, only
to-be-imaged
silent, panic-states of
despair --
morning begins. One more
grey, moisture-heavy day of
desperation,
imaginative-cartography, fixation, hungers --
will it
never stop? Of
course, I've never got half
way home with attempts at
self-possession, control,
harmony, never developed
an embryo of
certainty that
the fleeting flow
of circumstance, beauty, moment-by-moment
experience,
would ever congeal into a
language-perfect death thereof.
WORN DOWN
#10
03-20/4-18/10-27-01
When did I take on
the superstitious belief that I
-- demoted daily
to the mundane --
was not special?
The world carries on,
post-modern,
as if being a regular
guy were notable, award-worthy
in
art's absolute sense.
I have spent a large
part of my life
encouraging
lesser talents and watched them
succeed. While
I
flail on without recognition until,
lately, even desire to
write
begins to pale against isolation's
despair. Locked
in
with my dreams, my world
has become the inches of
my
Macintosh's small, colored screen.
Intimate. Patient. Shiva.
ZEBRA FISH
#11
03-22/4-18/10-27
Wiring the Brain of Zebra
Fish -- that was yesterday's
lecture.
I almost didn't go. Zebrafish?
They
were
chosen
for their transparency. One can
see through, into,
around in
them, blood pulsing, red platelets
digitally
cascading, spinal
cord alive, computer-transmitted cells,
axons,
dendrites growing, behaving, reacting to
sound,
touch, light, huge on the screen,
gracefully tree-like, like
a branching dash of sumi
ink: a micron or
bigger
or less, a tsunami of
minuteness. Even after
thinking all night, my brain
cannot imagine such
sizelessness, nor
can it feel the pulsing,
the instant
creation,
the billions of decisions, the
fishing for
words, all registering
zero on in/visibility's scale from
nothingness to somethingness.
GIVING UP
#12
03-23/4-18/10-27-01
Giving up the notion I
have special talent, giving up
the
notion I have anything
to say to
or about my fellow
humans...
Nature is the ultimate craftswoman.
If you
study one thing
closely, steadily, relentlessly:
brain
wave, flower, sunset, scent,
landscape, field, any theory
of
the GUTS, any glimpse of
crystal or
foraminifera,
you will discover that its
intricate
complexity takes more time
to unravel than you have
time
to study.
Is it our jealousy of
God's creation that
causes us
to, world-without-end, continue creating,
creating
creating? Or is
it part of the plan?
Man, the perpetual motion machine,
runs amok writing,
inventing, investigating,
and perpetuating
destruction.
Then he culls from shards
new and endless
fields to
study, move, invent, deconstruct, detonate,
disseminate, dehydrate, redo.
It's not necessary to give
up in despair. Nanotechnology is
almost here. Humanly
programable molecules
are being born,
constructed,
toned, hydrated, built layer
upon layer, replicating our
limited
knowledge, changing the rose's smell.
Why give up?
PRACTICE
#13
03-25-01
I'm taking a little vacation
from poetry. I'm starting to
wonder
why I'm writing at
all -- and I'm
moving. I'm packing up this
week and unpacking next. Maybe
I'll be a new person
by then.
God
knows I've been yowling toward
that long enough. A
lifetime
of pain, anguish. Actually since
my last life
which
ended... O its hard
to tell when they end!
I've lived more lives
than
a cat this
time around. Apparently that's me.
That's my style. Passions so
intense they burn me out
in
three years
or four. Then on to
the next. The goal? Never
had one. But I sometimes
think that for
my continual lack
of this
world "success," and the limitless
aspect of my interests,
I'm
in training to
become the Renaissance Human of
the
future -- man or woman.
I study everything -- and nothing
for
long. Let
the residue of just being
present mellow along the
axons,
the dendrites. Let it still
be there when
I return
-- or go on --
to the life I've been
in (often frustrating)
preparation for
for a lifetime.
TATE MASON HOUSE
#14
04-02-01
Tate Mason House, not far
from town, terrace, gardens, trees,
and a
wee elegant view
filled with light --
silent. But already my
neighbor
finds my morning's noisy. I
wake at five, read,
move,
about, quietly, I
thought, but had no idea
I shared a
wall with
her. So that's where TV
and a cough
were coming
from last night
as I tried to read,
tried to sleep. So I'll
shut
that room
in the mornings. I'll stay
in the other, writing
poetry
silently, speculating on death quietly.
Needing encouragement
for
life, I hope to find
it here. I'll help with
the
garden, be friendly with
the natives, survive.
UNSETTLED
#15
04-05-01
I feel antsy, pussy-footing -- the woman
next door wanting quiet
mornings.
I'm so quiet that unless
she can hear
my eyeballs
move across pages
reading, she cannot be disturbed.
The hot water
doesn't work.
I don't turn
on the heat. I, timeless,
because
of classes and greenhouse,
friends over coffee, hallway
conversations
lose my writing.
Why am I here? To
find
Leonardo agrees with me
about "unfortunate music" which dies
being
born, while
"painting demanded universal knowledge?" Poetry
in
my philosophy. The poet
has to know everything. Hence
classes,
lectures, timelessness.
Wanting to be not
careful,
pussy-footing, antsy, to settle into
my bones, to let
thoughts
reconstruct this clean-well-lighted-place.
POINTLESSNESS
#16
04-07-01
What is the point? -- writing
rhymes and rhythms each
morning,
preserving the world of thought,
trying precisely,
pointedly
when kitsch has become art.
Art has crowned itself
academic
to include all untalented scholars
who now
"deconstruct."
Unable to create, they foist
onto the world their
intellectualized
doodlings, lengthy explanations of
minimalist-philosophy,
sophomoric, personalized,
meanderings
through souls so under-developed they
canonize ugly,
exalt political cartoons,
become museum-politicized, propagandized,
incorporated entrepreneurs,
sadistic, gut-spilling icons,
as if
revulsion were artistic
virtue, as if power to
raise nausea
constituted talent, as
if "saying it"
made it so. If ever
there was a savage-superstitious, emperor's-new-clothes,
race
needing colonizing, civilizing -- Yea,
by the Brits!
themselves. They, having destroyed so
many great civilizations,
join in
commanding humans to admire
tinker-toy intellects
inhabiting
monsters-of-tastelessness, greed, occupying
self-decorated thrones.
There may be a pile
wrong with elitism,
but save
us from academic
kitsch, the scholars, the
critical-theorists
the deconstructed, structuralist, post-modern,
post-colonialism,
jargon-ridden, non-thinkers misusing language,
justifying
reverently-preserved, immortal trash.
STORM AT SEA
#17
04-10/11-01
Inspiration seems not to have
moved in with me in
my new, clean,
well-lighted place,
but seagulls screamed
this morning,
winging round my
yellow building, the flower-full gardens
of old
First Hill. Hungry?
Scared? fleeing from
a storm at sea? They
know not the raging tempests,
written lightning, that would
never
hurt a seagull.
HOUSE-WARMING
#18
04-11-01
In the crisp, clean, bright, icy,
blue-against-gold morning I loiter,
linger,
stroll, wait for Vikram, dark-suited
and his
dog.
The cleanness of the air
startles my nostrils, roseies my
cheeks, freshens my brain. Early
morning walking
before
writing, I haven't done that --
since when? But here
with
flowering trees, flowering shrubs, flowering
beds of
tulips,
daffodils, pansies, hyacinths -- in boxes
nose-high,
smellable, kind gardener who
knows old noses have trouble
getting
to the
ground... Toward Madison I
wander, and when I turn:
a
triple miracle, Vikram, Leah,
and the dog
all wrapped in dawn's
glistening
light. We laugh and greet,
they welcome me as
"Neighbor!
But I must
fly." laughs Leah, her architect's
portfolio tucked beneath her
arm.
They're off in the Flex-car
to take Leah
to the
seaplane to fly
to Friday Harbor. I resume
my icy-golden walk
wondering if
she's helping to
plan the Oceanography
installation there,
across the Sound or -- in the
ocean --
Neptune's hundreds of kilometers
of cables which
soon will
"take the pulse
of the Earth and Ocean."
I recall diatoms of
feathery
beauty, think of
the Flex-car parked equi-distant
between
our homes. "You can use
it, too," tempted Vikram with
the key, smiling.
DEAR JAN
#19
04-13/14-01
Heading in unexpected directions, it
is all right to declare
a
writing moratorium for -- what?
A week? Month?
Three years?
Get to filing,
weed out the dreck, edit
the old stuff. Find out
where you stand.
Don't sit so much. Let
passion reconstitute
itself or flicker
to embers, die. You are
already prepared for
the next life: all the
knowledge, information, passions,
studies, talent
anyone could need are, so
to speak,
under
your belt. You've left a
body of work, possibly larger
than Darger's to be discovered --
already done, already
ignored by fashions that make
the searching artist shrink from
the entrepreneurial marketplace, from becoming
commodity,
recognizing that
poisons, kills, deactivates the creative
faculty. You are already
archived,
secured, so that if God
wants you
famous
post-death, like Emily, it's all
there. It has freed
you,
at last, for life, for
cleaning-up the awesome
mess,
the voluminous uncertainty, doubt,
questioning of taste, values. Only
the longing to find your own
certainty, worth,
recognition
remains. How many you wonder,
must be like you,
like
Darger, driven underground, hidden souls,
record keepers of
human living brushed aside by
the king-makers of the museums,
fashion-mongers of human history turning
cultures into
black-markets
turning artists into marketeers for
greed, for
the greater glory
of critical-theory, for members of
the clique
ignoring
the individual, the artist -- especially
now that any
academic can
(and does) declares himself an
artist, types up
psuedo-intellectual justifications of his kitsch,
has it hung
as art
by their fellow curatorial-academics who
run "ART" today.
But down in the mole
holes you'll still find artists,
under the
floor boards. May
cyberspace preserve them
all! -- until the
human race
is capable of looking itself
in the eye without
academic
critical-theory, jargon justification.
Though the
cultural anthropologists may
not believe in reincarnation, maybe
God does. After all, even
scientist hold the
third Law of
Thermodynamics to CK
be true: nothing is created
nothing destroyed.
Even science recognizes
awesome spaces between
electrons, knows
the penetrability of
matter. May every artist preserve
herself in
cyberspace until history
expands to reality.
HURRY
#20
04-15-01
Hurry, dear Jan, hurry to
record your last thoughts about
writing,
tense up, stress out,
think double-quick, allow
no peace of
mind,
no
thought. If you think, you
might not write. You
might
disappear into experience's
nothingness. Gone. A goner.
Unaccounted
for. Fear of the unrecorded.
What a pleasure to
do
nothing at all.
But pleasure's not your bag,
blossoms not
your goal. Happiness
a tertiary consideration. What is
it you want?
Ts
#21
04-18-01
Small tease in the morning.
whimpers at night, a caffeine
high,
flying out of the
sky -- blue, cerulean --
sad grey tears, too
old
to believe in the ensorceling
of other people -- or my
own
-- I hear
the birds cry, wheeling gulls
from the Sound.
Grey-green, a
T-crossing prevents driving straight ahead
to the
bay
of light that would shimmer
the soul toward enlightenment.
Tiny
nerves tingle and twitch in
the writing body.
Daily
shovelfuls of knowledge -- gritty
as the ash from crematoriums,
greasy as a stiff, soaped
corpse -- haunt, stalk.
What will
you do with
it all? Can you pack
that much baggage into
the
next life and
beyond? Abracadabra, the triangle
comes
full circle, the gull squawks
wheeling once again, shoots
down
with folded wings.
THE END
#22
04-19-01
Laib has hi-jacked the booty
of millions of pathologically-industrious
bees,
(pre-honey pollen and post-honey wax)
escalated aroma
therapy
to an awesome new high.
Empty out the museum!
Leave
the walls, lights, pollen, wax,
the heavy scent
of the
honey, the surrounding,
overwhelming aroma, smell, stink,
olfactory
delight of the overpowering fragrance,
perfume, odor,
stench
of the melted down honey-comb,
opaque-wax,
human-fat-slightly-browned look of slabs
made of the booty of
the tireless bees.
The blond young man scrunched
in the
fields shaking the dandelion's
pollen. At such an aesthete
one
wants to
barf. Leave the bees alone!
one wants to cry! Yet
I'll return to the tunnel
of wax to
smell the smell of
spring,
summer, the essence of harvested-honey
to faint with
ecstasy to
write my poem.
More of The 2001 Poems