Hello all, and apologies for the winter, where poetry developed here in Portland but didn't spread via email, leaving you all to fend for yourselves in the sea of media garbage. Consider this a lifeline- grab at your own risk. I write to you from my work-in-progress library, music, posters, books and all. My place.
Last night I read at the Broken Word open mic at Portland's Alberta Street Pub, as Mikey Golightly, my poetic alter-ego. I shared the stage with many underground luminaries and can only hope I held my own. Patrick Brocade, a man who I know as both an employee at the old Django's and as the winner (judged by me) of the first poetry slam I ever went to, back in '99, read a delicious ballad of lovers more into each other's white powder stash than each other, and as always, captivated the audience. Buddy Bee Anthony, the white Stew of Portland, sang a capella an incredible song about a small town lover captivated by the city lights. Curtis Whitecarrol, Doug Spangle... the list goes on and on. For the first time since the days of the Rain City Review, I've come to believe that Portland is not a poetic desert. There were more listeners than poets- maybe 60 people in all, standing room only, including 20 reading poets. I'll be returning next week at 7:30 PM Tuesday.
I'm not one for trumpeting my own works by any stretch, but I was taken aback by the response to my reading last night. In some ways, it's discouraging, as I've always felt I'm at my best when I'm writing for no one but myself and the anonymity of an occasional email. Once you taste appreciation, I think you become addicted, and transform from poet to politician.
I'll let you be the judge. Here are the poems from last night's reading, in order, and with approximated inter-poem banter.
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(this poem is a metaphor)
This bag's just a bunch of stems and seeds,
the grower never learned how to keep
the whole cola together,
he'd gotten all into it at first, all the
perfect organic nutrients, the high-wattage
bulbs, pH testing the soil every day,
watered each one by hand
but fifty days is an awful long time,
so he got bored, got tired of it,
forgot why he'd started this
dangerous thing in the first place,
so just as the flowers were showing,
he let it go,
and when he went back to it,
there wasn't a whole lot left,
but he hung it up anyway,
dried it,
sold a few bags to get it
all started again,
and no one's sure if he knows that
it's pretty subpar stuff,
but it's all there is,
so either enjoy it now or
wait until the next crop comes in,
though who knows if he'll grow another?
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Over the weekend, the native peoples of central Oregon and the Columbia Basin observed the 50th anniversary of the destruction of sacred Celilo Falls. Celilo is central to the Oregon story, and I truly believe this land will never achieve its potential until the falls flow once again. This is my story of Celilo.
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Sing through me, muse, about those late days
in the ruined Eden of Portland,
sing to me of the last dark hours
when the final sentinels of peace and imagination
fell apart on the banks of the Willamette,
when guilt and dread and fears of
final rejection kept the warriors away
from the last great battles of imagination.
Sing of the trees, their thousand years
message of stability, their eternities holding
our hills together, their branches protecting
the birds that carried our messages to
and from the rest of the world,
sing of the trees as they burned, as
their families lay dead and drowning
in polluted millponds on our
poisoned river.
Sing of the Mighty Columbia, gateway
to the ocean, giver of food and life,
the violent river that ruled the
Northwest,
sing to me as she drowned, as
her falls and waves fell finally
silent behind their dam,
sing to me of the way she was
raped for her energy,
and sing to me of the day
she broke through, the day Celilo
came back from its watery grave.
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At this point in the reading, I unbuttoned my nice poetry reading shirt to reveal my old tie-dyed Coffee People shirt with Jim and Patty on the front, and made some comments about the old Portland, and about how it was good to see faces who've been here for years. I then launched into a few Portland poems.
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Skid row junkies don't even get high anymore,
don't even look for another fix,
united only in their cowardice, afraid to end
it all with one overloaded blast
of whatever it is that got them there in
the first place.
They've spent all the excitement, fed their
minds to bursting with crazy utopian fantasies
and the narcotic spell of stopped time and fuck-all,
and now it's just day after day of the
same sidewalks, the same shit smells,
the same rat hair, and
it just doesn't fucking matter anymore, does it?
It's the same gutter trap in Portland, Manchester,
Sheffield, Berlin, the final ash piles of
burned out lives and sick exhaustion
of the same dry fantasies,
dreams that they've all learned aren't
that good anyway, aren't what you'd
want to live in,
with shithead idiots following, looking for
a bit crumb of the genius
that they wouldn't know
how to handle
anyhow.
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I could stare at that bike tattoo on the back
of your neck forever, just a simple black
ink drawing, like a sign,
is the bike route the path to your mind?
(email mikey.golightly, at gmail.com, to get the rest of "The Bike Tattoo"...)
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(note- the woman who read after me showed the crowd her bike tattoo. It was, however, on her ankle.)
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Where is Portland's poetry, shuffling empty words between
its bike messengers, its strippers, its baristas, its barflies,its
would-be poets huddled in dark booths, in smoky bars,
its waiters and waitresses, its students, lovers, its
homeless, its unemployed, its booksellers, its
public servants, its bus drivers?
Or is it buried in the walls of hundred year old,
buildings, under the tracks of Depression-era streetcars,
in the Willamette polluted with all the wastes
of this land's rapists, underneath the trees
especially the Lewis and Clark Centennial monkey tail
trees, one in every old neighborhood?
Or maybe there's really nothing here but more
dying people treading the same grave-bound
spirit trails that this city has walked
since the coin-flip days on
a forested riverbank,
all that's here is what we imagine should
be, but it's not San Francisco, it's not
Paris,
and these words will turn to mud here, like the
old trees this is written in.
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I'll read again at the Broken Word, next week, provided I get there by 7 to get on the sign-in sheet, and if I do read, I'll bring out a poem I recently wrote about JFK, maybe even some haiku.
One last note- I've begun a new project, my own translation of Petrarch's Rime Sparse. Just something to keep them poetic gears lubricated. Many years ago, Michael Wyatt inspired me to learn more about translation, the process, its significance to cultural development, and so forth. Over 13 years later, I still chew on some of the things we talked about in a long drive from Medford back to Stanford.
Beware the Ides of March,
MVK
