the gift of common sense courtesy of frank o'hara

As a graduate writing student, I had to read Frank O'Hara's manifesto Personism, which was fine by me as I liked his magnum opus, Lunch Poems and Personism turned out to be quite good too, funny, name-drops LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and Alain Robbe-Grillet and is to date, the best piece of literature to cite the act referred to in the contemporary quotidian as the Lucky Pierre.

That said, I took to heart most seriously from Personism, not a discourse the nostalgia of negative capability or the benefits of abstraction versus precision, but the following piece of conventional wisdom i.e. common sense: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'"

Go on your nerve.
Don't brag about high school athletics when being chased.
Honestly, the applications are endless. . .

under the sea

"Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

sea sketch. figure 1. quill pen and ink. yours truly.

the gunslinger

 

 

If It Should Ever Come

by Edward Dorn

 

And we are all there together

time will wave as willows do

and adios will be truly, yes,

 

      laughing at what is forgotten

and talking of what's new

admiring the roses you brought.

How sad.

 

You didn't know you were at the end

thought it was your bright pear

the earth, yes

 

another affair to have been kept

and gazed back on

when you had slept

to have been stored

as a squirrel will a nut, and half

forgotten,

there were so many, many

from the newly fallen.

let it be tenderness

Way Out West

By Amiri Baraka

(For Gary Snyder)

As simple an act

as opening the eyes. Merely   

coming into things by degrees.

Morning: some tear is broken   

on the wooden stairs

of my lady’s eyes. Profusions   

of green. The leaves. Their   

constant prehensions. Like old   

junkies on Sheridan Square, eyes   

cold and round. There is a song   

Nat Cole sings . . . This city   

& the intricate disorder   

of the seasons.

Unable to mention   

something as abstract as time.

Even so, (bowing low in thick   

smoke from cheap incense; all   

kinds questions filling the mouth,   

till you suffocate & fall dead   

to opulent carpet.) Even so,

shadows will creep over your flesh   

& hide your disorder, your lies.

There are unattractive wild ferns   

outside the window

where the cats hide. They yowl   

from there at nights. In heat   

& bleeding on my tulips.

Steel bells, like the evil

unwashed Sphinx, towing in the twilight.   

Childless old murderers, for centuries   

with musty eyes.

I am distressed. Thinking

of the seasons, how they pass,

how I pass, my very youth, the

ripe sweet of my life; drained off . . .

Like giant rhesus monkeys;   

picking their skulls,

with ingenious cruelty

sucking out the brains.

No use for beauty

collapsed, with moldy breath   

done in. Insidious weight   

of cankered dreams. Tiresias’   

weathered cock.

Walking into the sea, shells   

caught in the hair. Coarse   

waves tearing the tongue.

Closing the eyes. As   

simple an act. You float

orfeo

*image / text courtesy of poets.org

ORFEO
by Jack Spicer

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The infernal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one’s
Music to sleep in.