A Radical Break with the Past

This blog post marks a radical break with the past, a distinct rupture, the coming of a new era.  Those of you who are at least occasional readers of this blog may remember that I ended my last blog post with the announcement that it was the last poem of the Lampoetry collection.  That is what I said then and I meant it.  That doesn't mean, however, it was intended to be the last poem I was ever going to write.  Life goes on.  And today while standing in the check out line at the supermarket I had the occasion to write this new poem in between bagging my stuff and receiving change from the cashier.

So this poem represents the beginning of a new book - a whole new volume with an entirely different theme.  And the fact that this poem makes its first appearance here on the Lampoetry blog - well that is just an accident of history.  Because this poem is really something of a holdover tenant who doesn't belong as part of the Lampoetry domain.  Some day soon I intend to set up a new website for this new writing project which as of yet is still only half formed in my brain.


When reality turns
It can be hard and fast
One day you're dead broke
And then Friday next week
You're grand-uncle passes
Bringing in a windfall
And no it's not just
About the money
Dinkelmann
But in wartime too
It can be boring as hell
And then suddenly
Your head snaps back
With a concussive impact
And you stand up all wobbly
With an entirely changed
Point of view

Paradox on the Mat

To meditate

Is to prepare

For immersion in

An eternal present 

Undefined by a past

That never happened and

A future that will never arrive

By sitting cross-legged

Leaning neither forward

Nor back but with

Shoulders aligned and

Head held high

Letting slip all

Ten thousand things

Into the accord

Of by and by

Letting mind drift

Like the wind as it passes

Through the wheat

Of the here and now

Unthreshed and

Untouched

Yet holding onto truth

In a small bundle

Of energy compacted

Into the mudra of

Hands encircled
But unclasped

Drawing by Christine Shields

The King of the Trolls from Queens

Actors and poets 

And all of good will

Shakespeare got it all wrong

When he said first we’ll kill

All the lawyers

Donald’s got other ideas

So you better listen up

And pay careful mind

Let no one dare step

On Donald’s lines

If it's not Rosie

This week it's Hamilton next

Let's grate on America's nerves again 
Making theater a safe and special place

With another feud from fearless Trump

No more a melting pot nation but

Instead a chaffing dish state

As we the people keep warm

Through endless friction

And drummed up hate

Between plebes and celebs

And our would-be potentate

Not exactly reared

In the John F. Kennedy

School of Governance

Much more in the vein

Of his mentor Vince McMahon

Or like other Dons before him

From Brooklyn and Queens

All it takes is one dirty tweet

To know exactly what he means

That’s the way it always is with

Our King of the Trolls from Queens

Poem for John Cage

This is a poem
I wrote today dedicated
To John Cage
The first verse
Is the most explicit
Even though the second
Leaves everything and
Nothing unsaid
It's far less wordy
Yet still it extends
For as long as you wish
Stilled but attuned
To the life we're living
And then some besides















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I've been thinking about John Cage recently.  This poem is the result of my finally figuring out how silence can be enfolded into a poem much as Cage accomplished in his groundbreaking work. Silence can be folded in a manner similar to space and time or to a pair of trousers for that matter. Incorporating silence into a poem in this way is an order of magnitude different from simply including an extended pause in a poem - a technique often used for emphasis or ironic effect.  Silence becomes something much more than the space between words.  It becomes an expression of something in and of itself.

But now, just as I have learned this invaluable lesson, silence has turned the tables on me.  Or to paraphrase the great line from Shakespeare, I played with silence and now silence doth play with me.  It turns out that this poem for John Cage will serve very nicely as the last poem of the Lampoetry collection.  Silence (at least for now) has overtaken my poetic voice, which will be stilled subject to further notice.

Poem for the Missionaries I Met Walking Along Fourth Neck

Because every day
Is another chance
To turn your life around

For instance just yesterday
Walking along Fourth Neck

I met two missionaries

Of the Mormon faith

Keen to recite chapter and verse

With me after I introduced myself

As a fellow missionary sent

To preach among the assembled

Shorebirds and shellfish

About the wonders

Of the Way

But now 

I repent of my mistake

Realizing I'm only a supplicant

Come here to this strand 

To learn a more litoral way

Of thinking and being

Not to convert or be converted

But only to be newly submerged

At least twice each day

Thinking About Bartleby: an election update

No Trump.  Not my President.  I’d prefer not.  There is something about this simple demurral that seems both appropriate and necessary under the circumstances.  Necessary because it may be the best (if not the only) response that many of us are capable of at present.  Besides I don’t think there’s any need for further explanation.  The U.S. electorate has shit the bed, and we should feel no compunction about simply declining the opportunity to roll around in it.

Against this backdrop, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bartleby the Scrivener.  I have the sense that this is a Bartleby moment for many of us.    If asked to express my feelings about the recent presidential election my response is simply thus:  I’d prefer not to.  I see no reason to cooperate or involve myself in any material way with what’s currently happening in American public life.  Bartleby’s dead-wall reverie seems like a completely rational response instead of watching the latest updates on the circus now in underway in Washington and at Trump Tower in New York.

Not watching television news or reading the papers since the night of November 8th  (which is when my self-imposed news blackout went into effect) has already provided a number of significant benefits.  My mood has improved immeasurably.  It has also given me lots of time to catch up on more worthwhile reading.  Yesterday I decided to go back to the source, as it were, and took the occasion to reread Melville’s classic story about the scrivener of Wall Street.  It made an indelible impression when I first read it more than 40 years ago, no matter how dimly I may have understood it at the time.  So if nothing else, I was curious to see how it holds up, particularly in light of its strong resonance with my current frame of mind.

And I was pleased to discover that it’s still a great read, even better than before.   Back in high school I remember thinking it was a relatively straightforward story – more a fable really – something simple enough for even a high school student to grasp; Bartleby being a symbolic figure much like Billy Budd, the namesake of the only other Melville story I remember reading in high school, I thought of him as the personification of long-suffering humanity.  Ah Bartleby.  Ah humanity!  That’s the note of pathos that stuck in my craw. 

But rereading provided an entirely fresh perspective.

First of all, it’s incredibly well written, rich in subtle irony.  Far from being a somber, or straightforward moral fable, it’s really social satire of the highest order, worthy of Dickens or Thackery.  The descriptions of Wall Street office life are laugh out loud funny as well as dead-on accurate in the portrayal of the spiritual vacuity at the heart of a commercial law practice -- as I know only too well from first hand experience.  Turkey and Nipper, Bartleby’s fellow scriveners, one of them a dipsomaniac the other dyspeptic; the squirrelly office clerk Nutter, who is always being sent out to fetch Ginger Nut cake; Melville provides a brief account of the absurdities of office life that is really second to none in American literature.  

And funniest of all is the sly portrayal of the unnamed narrator, Bartleby’s well-intentioned employer, the Wall Street lawyer (or Conveyancer) who alternates between feeling pity and rage at his inscrutable scrivener.  As the target of Melville’s sharpest satire – it’s the story of his moral obtuseness after all -- the narrator's tone perfectly captures the spirit of Wall Street pettifoggery, full of sanctimony, always ready to applaud himself for his good scruples and common sense, yet strangely ineffectual, impotent with his own clerks, particularly powerless in the face of Bartleby’s impassivity, and most of all craven in his fear lest anything should happen that would diminish his social or professional standing.  He is the embodiment of Wall Street’s then emergent commercial culture, which Melville skewers with precision, eloquence and irony.

And what of Bartleby, the cipher at the center of the story?  As I read it today, Bartleby doesn’t strike me as a symbol for pitiable humanity so much as a stand in for the author himself.  Intransigent in his dead wall reverie, Melville pulls this strange switcheroo by placing Bartleby, the impassive cipher and the narrator’s mysterious semi-doppelganger, at the moral and emotional center of his universe.  I prefer not to thus becomes much more than a reply to any particular unwanted task requested of the scrivener.  It’s Melville’s cri du coeur (however oddly impassive) and overall response to newly emergent social order -- the commercial and legal culture of Wall Street, typified by the “reasonable man” standard -- which was already well on its way to redefining social obligations in the US of A, very much in derogation of the country’s traditional Puritan heritage.

And it’s very much in that same spirit I offer up Bartleby as a potential role model for us today.  The problem we face is how to position ourselves as the certainties of the old neo-liberal political and social order slip away, and well before anything else has emerged to take its place.  What should we do in response to the rampant insecurity and instability in American public life?  Please make no mistake about it:  the problem is not Trump.  He is merely the most glaring symptom of deep systemic dysfunction that is the root cause of our distress.  Most of us realize that at all costs we must avoid acting in a way that would normalize what is in no way a normal situation.   But beyond that, it’s damn hard to know where to turn or look for guidance. 

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Old walls are rapidly crumbling and the new one that Trump has promised we can only hope will never rise to take their place.   For the moment, then, dead wall reverie seems to be the best response that we can muster; far from appearing pitiable, Bartleby’s utter impassivity seems to be a very sensible course of action (or inaction) given the current state of our nation state, so utterly lacking in sound policy choices, leadership or grace.

Meditating on Tonight's Super Moon, Enlarged but Concealed

Picture that you’re sitting

Eyes closed on the blue

Exercise mat

Head facing east towards

The full moon as it’s rising

It’s a super moon at that

But obscured by a thin

Scrim of cloud cover

It’s unseen but felt

As a distinct presence

From crown to nape

You’re sitting up straight

Meditating in fact

On the yin power as it is

Most perfectly expressed

Now when it is both full

And concealed

Which is why

Tonight’s super moon

Hanging somewhere up there

In the sky’s eastern expanse

Is such a perfect metaphor

For my soul – immortal or otherwise -

It’s simply a gift of borrowed radiance

Bouncing off rocky barren soil

Evident only as a faint flickering

From the curtain’s other side

No more than a lumen or two

That's barely detectable

With my eyes either

Open or closed

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Since moving to East Quogue this year it has become a ritual for me to walk down to the end of Weesuck Avenue in order to watch the full moon rise over the Creek. At first, I was somewhat disappointed tonight because there was a thick cloud cover that obscured the sky to the south and east. But then a few fingers above the horizon I began to detect the super moon rising, evident at first only as backlighting (worthy of the finest Santo Loquasto set) that lit up a plane of stratus clouds facing eastward. The illumination gradually increased revealing a vast cloud structure that had been jerry rigged to encase the moon. Quite an incredible site really. And I realized that to see the super-moon rise this way, by implication, is to experience the Yin power in its greatest extremity - when it is both engorged and concealed.  The poem above was written a little bit later, after returning home and meditating some, thinking about this striking Yin apparition.  And the photo below was taken by my wife a little bit later in the evening as the moon continued to play hide and seek.

Super Moon Super Scrim (M. Bridge)