~This poem first appeared in Gulf Coast (1998).
Before Sunrise, San Francisco
Bruno’s
by sallow candlelight,
The
jacketed barkeep counting
Tips
from a jam jar and horseshoe
Booths
burnished a bit too bright,
Yet
the stained mahogany walls
And
the lazy lament of Spanish
Horns
from speakers huddled
In
the corner speak a different
Language
altogether, one that rolls
Effortlessly
off the tongue and fills
The
room like myrrh, a promise sent
That
four walls can indeed keep out
The
world, that when horns wail
For
percussion and those walls
Are
elegantly attired, why there
Is
no need to ponder the gristle
In
the Mission outside, no need
To
wonder why that one left you
Or
why you are always too
Late.
The weight of your existence
Roughly
equals the martini glass
In
front of you, the thick mass
Of
the past collapses into brightness
As
well-lit as the dripping star
At
the center of your table.
Nod.
Snap your fingers. Order
Another
drink. Let horns grieve,
Let
the wristwatch think on sheep
Before
you leave. Tonight,
The
only eyes on you are two
Pimentos
stuffed into olives
Bloated
with vermouth and gin.
*****
~This poem first appeared in LIT#3 (2000).
Paleontology’s
End
Sifting
through teeth and carapaces
With
a magnifying glass, you adopt
An
hyperopic perspective, history
Fermenting
from what continually
Ends
to replenish itself. A peregrine
Falcon’s
scapular is slowly eaten
By
soil from which poke the spoke-
Heads
of late summer’s dandelions
Ten
thousand years later. Permian,
Ordovician,
Cretaceous, Devonian,
Triassic:
we’ve named the major
Eras
of mass extinction. The past,
Happening,
has preserved its portion
In
amber, in crenellated clamshells
And
tree bark, to augur what we’ll be
For
posterity. Drop the horsehair
Brush,
permit the slides to drowse
In
disinfectant, leave the bones;
Someone
warm lies waiting.
*****
~This poem first appeared in 88: Journal of Contemporary American Poetry
(2002).
Language
Poetry
Yea,
it was pundit debunking, sage with newness,
meaty
ruse, elaborate masquerade of unmeaning,
stage
where words pose counterpoised to signification,
where
rummy syllables string along kinks of syntax
and
gum of virgules jimmies together clauses
to
devise a monument of fistulous happenstance,
subverting
address for free play—
Rare
vestiges pitched headlong in stochastic
eddies,
dreaming a livelong laterality,
polygons
alongside tapirs in grammar-shorn dance—
Slithered
mid-speech an intention a seam
the
color of politics, even the furthest minutia
run
on dollars, come what cannot until (s)pace
Breaks
into half itself &
music
the bramble where bare verbs rabble,
seeking
the iota behind the bestial bars
that
proves no forged lattice girds the mind
with
predicates efficacious as prison searchlights—
Senses
slip the faster usurps fate from syntax
how
kowtow to solipsism or preset a page?
*****
THE STORY
BEHIND THE POEMS
Before
going to graduate school in New York, I lived for a year in San Francisco
during the height of the tech boom. I worked in publishing, lived in the
smallest, most cramped apartment in the Marina, and spent my time cruising the
city on a red vespa, feeling somehow intuitively that this world I had entered
where my friends worked at start ups with masseuses and foosball tables was a
bubble about to burst. I roamed the city, unencumbered, and stumbled upon
Bruno’s in the Mission, which had the reputation of being an old mob hangout,
complete with two-way mirrors and supposed bullet holes in the velvet lounge
chairs. This poem is about waiting for someone whom I had been dating at the
time who was adorable, difficult and maniac-depressive, though I didn’t know it
at the time. I also didn’t realize I had fallen in love with her depressive
side, but it was springtime and she had changed, leaving me stood up at the
bar. As I succumbed to that growing sense of liquid warmth and the anguish of
existential aloneness, waiting, waiting, lubricated by one, then another dirty
martini, I began this poem on a cocktail napkin and from the smeared words
crafted the poem “Before Sunrise, San Francisco,” which was my very first
published poem. I actually submitted it and won the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize,
while I was in my first year of graduate school on another coast. Picked by
Edward Hirsch, it won $500, and I thought, man, what a great and easy life this
writing poetry thing is going to be! Little did I know that it would be
followed by a good few years of rejection, but I hold this poem in esteem for
what it captures and what it portended in my own evolution as a writer.
Paleontology’s End is
one of those poems that derived from a single word: “hyperopic,” or
far-sightedness, has none of the cachet of myopia, but somehow I think of
poetry as being fixed on the distant horizon of time, even while the dailyness
of task and commerce scorns the endeavor. I saw that word at an optometrist’s
office and it spawned this poem, which is my version of Andrew Marvell’s “To
His Coy Mistress.” When we think of the vast expanse of time and our own short
life spans, then what imperative do we have but to seize the day, to revel in
the moment, and to leave aside our speculation for the immediacy of grasping
someone by the waist and spinning them around? This poem is about the
disheveling specter of time and the carnal response we might make in face of
it.
Finally
Language Poetry is my language poem
about language poetry, an attempt to capture what at the time was both derided
and celebrated. As defined on by Lyn Hejinian, “language is nothing but
meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely
coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions,
transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.” This poem
is just that embodiment of transmutation and linguistic radiation, employing
many of the signature devices of the movement—lack of personal pronouns or
“voice”; parataxis as a signature move; post-structural affiliations and
political inquiry; detachment and an explosion of the illusion of continuity;
ambiguity and syntactic playfulness; parody and punning; and formal
experimentation. This poem still feels to me the perfect formulation of my
ideas about the movement at the time; I think I was both praising and mocking
what had become a kind of predominant, but too little understood, movement of
my time, something that allowed for exciting new linguistic vistas, but that
also propagated a certain spiritual vacuousness and sloppiness of craft, a way
to write something but also avow oneself of the responsibility for having
written it, and I don’t think I’ve ever captured my complex response to
something so perfectly as I did here.
*****
ABOUT
RAVI SHANKAR
Ravi Shankar is
founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, one
of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts. He has published or
edited eight books/chapbooks of poetry, including the 2010 National Poetry
Review Prize winner, “Deepening Groove,” called the work of “one of America’s
finest younger poets” by Connecticut Poet Laureate Dick Allen. Along with Tina
Chang and Nathalie Handal, he coedited W.W. Norton’s “Language for
a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East &
Beyond". He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York
Times and San Francisco Chronicle, appeared as a
commentator on the BBC, NPR and the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and has performed his
work around the world. He is currently Chairman of the Connecticut Young
Writers Trust, on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City
University of Hong Kong and an Associate Professor of English at CCSU.
Quite a nice selection
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