My writings-a mixed bag. I've been writing safely dull and inoffensive poems since 1956, but I've noticed of late that FARCE ("alien elements" they're called) has occasionally taken residence in my verses. This can sometimes be considered "a problem" but I think a problem that can be endured for the sake of the action, the plot, the "whole nine yards" and for what is generously called "life" And well, "poetry"
Rowing to RHODESIA
By JIM HINERTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Jim Hiner
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4669-5050-4Contents
Dedication.....................................................viiThe Back of My Calling Card....................................ixRowing To Rhodesia.............................................1Never Mention the Word.........................................2I Feared That No One Ever Would Ask Me.........................4Celebration For Dylan Thomas' Crafty Death.....................5So Where Was I.................................................6Verticality....................................................7Schooling......................................................8Basically Baby Design..........................................9Explaining Pain................................................10When Writhing..................................................12An Unproductive Day With My Intellect..........................13On The Self As Self: Four Views................................14For The You....................................................16Poems For An Afternoon.........................................18Front Row......................................................19La Valse.......................................................20Why Marianne Moore Is The Freest Poet..........................21Then The Books.................................................22Wintry Singing—2003......................................25Wintering......................................................26Brooding With Burchfield.......................................27Song For A Loser Once Who Won..................................28CREDO We Believe..............................................33
Chapter One
ROWINGTO RHODESIA or:
"Poets Should Not Do
not"
Poets should not do not
too much of the time
but poets should not
avoid it altogether.
So much depends
not upon now but on what
others have said before me on
obscurities of the specifics of
certain invisible faces of
even the most explicit
clearness of a word.
Or even of what they've not
said on such a word.
I come to a word now:
Byzantium. That is not
a word of what one would want
to go there, but of those
who only want to view
the domes, their wows
their golden boughs.
Before the full nether glory
of Sixth Century is specified
no specifics are palpable enough
to warrant a rush to the Ticket
Office. And the benefit
of certain monkey glands
can no further enticement
make and is a
not. Void it,
the goyim woid. Avoid.
NEVER MENTIONTHEWORD Never mention the word, you know,
what turns daylight crepuscular,
blind to the bone that's become
carnivorous. You don't see
what I mean still; so
never mention the word.
There are what we furthermore call
After-all words, after all
not renegade nor rare, you know,
nor float on gas. Words
not retrograde, no, but rather
memory-rested like a man
with his feet in the air at night
in an old barn or analog of lair.
Alas, we too seldom seek them out
from anchorage in the Wellingtons
and Waterloos of our mindsets,
these words that are to be preferred;
So prefer them.
They say, these some words say,
these after-all words: they should be
not saved for a ruinous day.
How atrocious to wait for the dangle
of all that might be precious
to hang from the corrupting shingle
of such a day!
Hardness, fact, meanwhile and
Totems of fact hold forth
and bimetallic arthroplasty
alone holds it all together where
those never-mention words appear. But wait, be silent, hear
how providentially they will dissolve
dry up drown and disappear
while sweet ripe rich
darling buds of May
spray fragrance where
no mention ever is made.
So never make it.
I FEAREDTHAT NO ONE EVER
WOULD ASK ME I feared that no one ever would ask me
to tell the meaning of one of my poems
but then one recent metrical day
in a shrine of highly decorative means
I was asked exactly that, and was able
for five fine full hours to hold forth
at the start, and getting worked up some
spewed on (and on) for another thirty-six.
To be sure, the pay though a little more
than scale for busboys, was a little less
than I'd been led environmentally
to expect. Diagramming as much
to the Leader, I was explained to
with a flood of patient telluric charm
that the coffee was entirely on her
and couldn't I see that refills were free.
Well yes, true enough, but where was
the clamor, the crowding around,
and why aren't my elbows rubbed raw
like those of any even ordinary scoundrel?
And what of all those violent attempts
on one's body one's been led by all
the Byrons to expect? But I thanked her
for the plaque with my name on it in gilt.
Did I say "gilt"? Like gold, but in fiction,
what's audibly visible in poetic diction.
(Note: Here is a poem I wish I still liked; but I don't.) CELEBRATION FOR DYLAN
THOMAS' CRAFTY DEATH Now your finally quiet bones will start pulsations
In some who paid no praise, nor merit Love;
But who suspicious now and now unconsummated
By what you called
tall nightingales and tears,
Want quick illuminations to lighten fears
Of your sullen crafted art. They ask not love
But meanings plain in pages pure enough to flutter
In front of those who cannot see the moon, its rages.
How they'll tag you, now you're dead,
Discovered! And memorize your deeply buried bones—
No mystery left of what was expurgated.
So familiar will your name one day become,
Protesting worshippers will shake their dismal head
At other ash-collectors who pronounce you dead.
SO WHERE WAS I So where was I when the stagnant smirch of doom
Settled upon us, all over the land lying on and under us,
Cringing whisperings among us, conspiratorially,
As we clanged our unredeemably boggy boots,
Embellishing all at our feet with the frays and fricassees
Of ancient wastes modernly occurring where effort
Soured and turned rancid in its turn, inhibitioning?
Think, think, think we thought, trusting ever
In all the Everlasting Amulets, gainsaying
Never no never, their owlish peekaboos with
Anachronistic nomenclatures.
Order was ordered; it was ambulatory:
We can
walk with that, they said, as they fell into
Metaphysics of Euler's last theorem and squaring
Circles variously rendered as quite ordinarinesses.
(Grievances by the evermore, as E.A. Poe once certainly said.)
And there I was standing on some crag at Cornwall
Conspicuousing myelf posturingly; or was it
Some declivity at Dover, where all
The hypothetical Universe lapped hypothetically
At the beach, and the beach fought back
Exchanging loss for gain and taking sand
For sovereignty or for only serendipity,
Hoping the hole in the Universal Dike would stay
No greater than Brinker's thumb.
Fats,
Meanwhile wallering out of patiently, asks,
"What
key are you struggling in?Turn the page!"
That was at the
Sunset, south side of Chicago
A time ago. A long ago. A long what-matter ago.
VERTICALITY Sorrow and grandiloquence
On which we horizontal beings
Choke from dust of dead;
Poisonous airs arise
Stuffed at the spired feedlots
With self-inflationary hopes.
We take what comfort we can
On the level
Of posturepedic sand.
SCHOOLING
Standing before the broadcast world
Knowing not as much as a third grader
What Caesar's last words were:
I'll get you for this! Or that Chopin
Could play his mazurkas
As well with his toes as his fingers.
There is just constant amazement!
That Grigory Yefimovich
Rasputin, for example, reputedly
Used nothing but Brut after-shave
And a fifth grader knows as much as
A courtier a rascal a king or a mountebank.
The straws of knowledge of learning
Of schooling do not float do not alter
Disappear do not bind, synthesize
Alas not, nor make mind new
But the grass grows up and covers,
Disappears, leaving the new thing
Underneath the old thing still,
No function but to have been.
What were their recipes for right?
Methods were endless, unendurable
Two ends of the log never rocked
And points of percentage sank
With the market, no gain
With leveraging averages there.
Only the bindings brightened,
Steady in their crimson, puce, green/blue.
Laid in on texts, laid out on
Inspissated answers,
No flowage from Parnassus.
BASICALLY BABY DESIGN
The trouble with Reason was it tried
too mindly to make it for everyone
to basically start look and jump on
certain goings on more or less
indifferent to the e.e.cummings
and so with basically baby design
more or bicycly less, it more or less
innocently walked thrill-ride forth
onto the choo-choo tracks of
The Last Train from La Guardia
with nothing on but its Justin boots
which were basically all that was left
and that ever since as they say
has pretty much been that.
EXPLAINING PAIN
The pain is never there,
Not where it seems to the pained
To be. It is some other, some
Unforeseen place like, perhaps
Or perhaps not, but a neuron
Or a nucleus or something
Else, somewhere else.
We doctors have proof of
What we say, this false
Presence of what is absent,
From history of pain-in-the-leg
Where there is no leg at all,
The entire leg off. All of it.
But a person still says "I feel pain!"
Right there where it's missing.
So the pain can't be where it's felt.
And the first and firmest relief
For what may be indicative
Of pain is to operate under
The sound, certain conviction
Of the pain's not being there
Where in vain one thinks it, but
Elsewhere, and thus you can
Understand what's otherwise
Impossible to understand
Without doctors to comfort
And explain (which is what
I am doing right now):
The uncharitable task I have
I do, unmasking—one might say—
The pain and pointing to its true
Location wherever if ever
It's found. Correctivity is all,
And the best relief ('til a better
One, if ever it's found, is found)
Is to treat what you think's a pain
With what you're certain's not—
A dog, for example, but like a dog
Anyway, when the dog is offending,
To say to the dog, Down dog!
And stay down! And if the dog
Stays up, whose fault is that!
WHEN WRITHING
When writhing of dourselves
We must bruise a whacky
l'Ongwitch to lunge with
In sumquat like
The contrastruction
Of a Goldberg Kartoum,
Or whither in hollow seminaries
Of abouted sense.
Blueness leds me
Be ceruse, as I'm
Heaving my heavingness
Debouching my bouts
Decanting my rants
From headshed to ragepage
With sediments to match.
No touch of sublimity's
Merchant of Venice.
But I can squeak
As swill as rathers
Would when I chew
'S or what gives a fit
To William Hazlitt
Who once was new
'S but now forgotten,
Who wrote "with fervor"
XXI valoriums.
(Ong, Walter J. a key
scholar in field of
Orality)
AN UNPRODUCTIVE DAY
WITH MY INTELLECT
Absolved from having to solve the first
By its self-contradictory nurture
I dissed same from misseration
Yawning widely behind my hand.
And
As the second and penultimate was already
Stuffed all together with excessivenesses
Altogether too similar to my own
No confusions could be drawn
Quartered, pureed or compacted
And
As I absolutely refused to compound
What was de facto already incredibly
I cast my asperities widely
With reinless feeling
Obesity, obesity, obesity.
And
Facing the finally sere and wasted so
No substance was to be seen or discovered
But a thin stalk of permeability and hype
Primitively weaving in the hot pale wind
I by then searching for a figurative firmness
Furtively mounted unflirtingly
As a man on a hipped horse
With glanders beside
But no bride And
And so to bed.
ON THE SELF AS SELF: FOUR VIEWS
I.
Who the here's content to be a self
Unamong the starry bangled
Going searching for it.
Who is there not already
Looking for a self-contempt
Content with the self he is?
What self is there anywhere
To content a self who's somewhere else?
Why doesn't everyone just stop
Stand and look around the mountains
For the Rockettes red glare.
II.
See the homeward paths
See the homeward binds
See the homeward bounds
And look elsewhere angelpuss.
III.
Familiar paths to marryland
The skirted boarded paths of nightly
See them root and germinal
Early before the Sun goes doom
And the going's gone of them
See the rowed selfs all in a line
And pick the very model of
A noble self of merchandise.
IV.
Want to be another self
To fit the same self's mirror?
A Sunday self with a homeBody
to boot?And Jesus
Wants you for a sunbeam.
Ask not what self could do
For JFK or Jesus, ask what
KFC can do to find a self,
Or go where everybody knows
To find a self is: why not try
Where you left your cell phone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rowing to RHODESIAby JIM HINER Copyright © 2012 by Jim Hiner. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
