Introduction to Mona Lisa's Veil
1. What I Learned from Jane Faigao
2. How I Began Writing a Lot
3. A Review of "The Memory Factory" by Jackie Sheeler
1. What I Learned from Jane Faigao
Written for THE LIFE AND WORK OF JANE FAIGAO: A MEMOIR PROJECT
I can remember the first and last thing that I learned from Jane Faigao.
The first thing she taught me was that I was a lot bigger than I realized. It was January 1980, and I was studying Tai Chi as my minor at Naropa Institute (in the room where they now hold readings at the Boulder Bookstore). I had been unusually anxious and agitated for several days, and arguing with nearly everyone-my wife, strangers in stores, my fellow students, and even my teachers. This particular morning Jane was standing in front of class with her back to us, facing north, and she was leading us through the opening movements of the "long form"-over and over again. And as we started from the beginning one more time, I found myself filled with anger-and wondering what was going wrong that everything made me so angry these days. And at that moment Jane suddenly stopped and turned around and said-apropos of absolutely nothing-"Oh, and if you’re feeling particularly nervous or angry lately it’s because of the Chinook winds-they strip the ions from the air and so your body and brain are going through a kind of withdrawal. The dryness in the air is pulling ions out of your body."
From that moment on I realized that I was so large that I included even the weather.
* * * * *
The last thing I learned from Jane was from the last time I saw her-at Gregory Corso’s Memorial reading at Penny Lane, on January 29, 2001. Jane sat in front of me and slightly off to my left. As I looked toward the stage, I often found my eyes drifting off to Jane’s body. I knew she had cancer. I knew she was probably going to die from it. And I began to look at her body, her forearms, her feet, her forehead, her eyes, her shoulders, wondering what would be different when she was dead-what would be missing? Here she was-and in her body, and she was moving her body around. At some point, her body would still be here, but the part that moved her body around would be gone. What would that be like?
I borrowed a pen and wrote in my pocket notebook until the reading was over. When I got up to say goodbye, I told her that I had written a poem for her. "Oh," she said, "Can I read it?" And I said, no, that I never showed anyone a poem until it was "ready." "Well," she said, "don’t wait too long."
I put the poem away and within two weeks I received word that Jane had ceased communicating and there was no way to get a message to her. Particularly discouraging was that when I returned to the poem I found that I didn’t really want to change anything and could have gotten it to her while she was still awake, but the first time I ended up reading the poem was at a memorial for her on the anniversary of her death, February 25, 2002.
HOLDING JANE’S BODY WHILE SHE’S STILL ALIVE
For Jane Faigao
Written at a Gregory Corso Memorial Reading,
Penny Lane Coffee Shop, Boulder,
29 January 2001
how the human skin shimmers
when light falls upon it-
any kind of light, incandescent,
the energy under the skin
a different kind of light-
and how the muscles are visible
and the bones nearly visible-
how does anyone even know
where the body ends, skin or
this warmth that ripples over
the chill of my skin-
or even across the room-how
the body repeats and repeats-the
form familiar-how muscles pull
the bone and all the flesh follows-
how neurons form the grid the body
becomes-how invisible threads
multiply from what we are before
we unravel
how two
beside each other blend into one-
a humming between them-
some-
where there is a room with
a flickering candle and
sometimes I see what isn’t really
there-a light like a sheet of
glass around our bodies-
so thin-shimmering
like a ripple in the atmosphere,
as if the energy of which we’re
made is made visible-as if the
warmth we are is tangible as the
air and light-
that the force that forms the root of the body
has its own desire-has its own
plan, and I follow it, thinking nothing
or nothing much-how I began writing
before I knew what I was writing-how
what desired to be written has written me-
and having writ we take her in my arms-
hold her flesh against my flesh-
this electric white impossible startled vague
floating effervescent evanescent quivering visionary
flash-
2. How I Began Writing a Lot
I came to Boulder because of poetry. The year was 1979, and I was 25 years old and married, driving in from rural Connecticut to apprentice with Allen Ginsberg. He was living here more or less year-round at the time, directing the poetry department at Naropa Institute. It was on Pearl Street in the center of town, where the Boulder Book Store is now, but it was a rougher Pearl Street-not the polished merchandise mart it is now. There was an old family-owned printing business on Pearl Street and 10th and two blocks west there was an operating metal shop. At the end of the mall was the Broken Drum, a blue-collar bar with table bowling, longneck beers, and Johnny Cash on the jukebox. And almost directly across from Naropa's front door was the Blue Note-an underground late-night jazz and rock club.
If it was peculiar to have a Buddhist university in the center of town (and it was), it was also peculiar to have poets and Buddhists bumping into each other in Naropa's hallways and classrooms. And occasionally you’d run into Chogyam Trungpa as he was being shuffled through the hallways by his retinue.
And getting used to all the excitement of having Allen Ginsberg in a small town like Boulder was fun and frantic-everything was suddenly huge and unpredictable and dramatic. It wasn't unusual to see him sitting in the blue afternoon sun outside the New York Deli, his shoulder bag stuffed with books, his table piled high with mail, eating matzoh-ball soup and chatting with students. Or to hear him arguing with Gregory Corso outside the Blue Note, smoking cigarettes between sets at a late-night punk and poetry performance.
And for country kids like me, a bit overwhelmed by the largesse of everything around Ginsberg, there was the sometimes-presence of poets like Anselm Hollo, Jack Collom, and Ted Berrigan. They seemed to be moving at a different speed than Allen and his crowd.
And then Tom Pickard arrived from the industrial outskirts of London with an armful of videotapes of Basil Bunting reading "Briggflatts," and tales of Yeats, Pound, and Bunting smoking hashish in Rapallo. It was more human to have these younger, less intimidating, funnier, excited, supportive poets in town. They, along with Alice Notley, probably shaped and changed my poetics more than any other poet, Ginsberg included.
Ginsberg's White Shroud is a pretty good diary of the time he spent here. The porch of "Porch Scribbles" belongs to the house on Bluff Street where he often sat, writing poetry or entertaining a wide variety of guests. The "whispering" trees in the poem "Those Two" are still whispering to each other across the street. We recognize the characters, the incidents, the assignments.
Allen and I always got into arguments about poetry and politics, so we stopped discussing them entirely and talked about other things-how the best thing that I could do was to marry and raise children. He called me cowardly for not teaching, he criticized me for being too reticent, he accused me of hiding in my house. I learned a lot from him. I learned that in poetry, and life, you should pay complete attention to whatever’s in front of you-what’s really there-first. That the cool thing about money and time is that you can make things with them. That you only learn when you’re really listening, and that when you’re really listening, you learn. That compassion and humility are your best defenses. That what’s wrong with your poetry is what’s wrong with yourself-and to work on one is to work on the other. That your enemies and critics are your allies: that they’re trying to tell you something, and you’re trying to tell them something too. That the limits of your life are the limits of your imagination. That whenever you try to help someone, you always end up helping yourself more. That you should at least feel as good about feeling good as you do about feeling bad. That every time you tell the truth, a part of you becomes real. That by being honest, you give others permission to be honest, too. That the only real answer is "I don’t know"-and that if you don’t know that, it just means you’re stuck somewhere for a little while longer. And that it never gets easy-if I’m not a little bit scared it’s because I’m not working hard enough. He asked me questions that I couldn't answer out of my forehead, but only out of my heart and stomach. And when I’d spoken out of me often enough, he gave me my self. I became hungry for everything-all of it-before it was all gone. "The whole trip."
Allen left Boulder at least partly because students and teachers told him his presence was overwhelming and oppressive. He was told the Beat thing was tired, that he invited the same faculty every year-his old friends. His inability to sympathize with anything even remotely female didn’t help matters either. He was accused of being out of touch with any advance in poetry since the fifties, and that he only occasionally showed any interest in poetry more recent than the 18th century. He was most comfortable teaching out of the first third of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, for instance, and insisted on teaching "Basic Poetry" every semester. Each of us, including Allen, had to write a sapphic, a version of the anonymous 16th-century ballad "As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham," a Blakean prophetic book, and spontaneously compose a blues lyric in class. During the memorable spring of 1980, he spent an unbelievable eight weeks on the anonymous medieval hymn "I Syng of a Mayden that is makeless," rehearsing before class with some shy new guitarist he’d met on the street that afternoon, or making up a blues arrangement, or trying out something he’d learned from Dowland. He’d beat the rhythm out on his knees, or accompany himself on the harmonium with those surprisingly thick, steady, delicate fingers.
It's interesting to me that no distinctive style or real movement (conceptual or cultural) has come out of Naropa. A wide-open environment like Black Mountain College, for example, brought about an instantaneous transformation in films, novels, and poetry. It was as if everything suddenly exploded.
But the Boulder poetry scene is made up of individuals, not movements-almost pathologically so. The people who stay here usually like that part of it. The others end up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York.
The one thing Naropa poets seem to have in common is that a disproportionate number of us are still writing, and will be for the rest of our lives, amassing decades-long bodies of work that are, to my eyes, stylistically dissimilar, rather good, and somewhat hermetic.
When I arrived in Boulder, I thought I wanted to be a poet-and I thought that by amassing a significant body of acknowledged work, I would somehow become one. But I soon realized that what I really wanted was to be happy, and, looking around, it seemed like becoming a poet wasn’t going to do it. A poem was never more than the sum total of my ability to experience. And a search for an ability to experience became an end in itself and it’s own reward and a full-time job and I lost all interest in poetry. I even retired a couple of times. I slipped under the radar, and found that I was happiest there. I wanted to see how far I could get, the limits of my imagination. And when I tried to write, I no longer had a valid set of standards by which to judge even my own work. And I couldn’t find any form to put it in. Even friends and teachers couldn’t help-it was like I was drifting away from shore and I could hear people talking, and I could see their mouths moving, but I couldn’t understand a word they said. And I realized how hugely futile and empty and ephemeral everything is. And that’s when I began writing a lot.
3. A Review of Jackie Sheeler's "The Memory Factory"
In 1965, poet and law clerk Charles Reznikoff published the first of a quartet of books entitled Testimony. The poems in these four volumes were collected from law reports from the United States civil courts between 1885 and 1915. In them he was able to preserve the actual voices of people who ended up in court, suing someone or being sued. Reznikoff also walked to work through several boroughs from his apartment in New York City until his retirement (in the late Sixties Allen Ginsberg encountered him on one of these walks on an autumn evening in Central Park) and his other poems are filled with overheard conversations, unexpected street dramas, and the families he saw, night after night, escaping the summer heat on their front porches or in the streets. And with these poems, he has preserved a particular place and a specific time and filled it with actual people.
Likewise, in the future, if history is written by poets, it might look something like Jackie Sheeler's The Memory Factory. Sheeler has lived inside of New York City all of her life (unlike Reznikoff) but, like Reznikoff, she is in the process of documenting her time and neighborhood. The social strata she's preserving beneath the immigrant shopkeepers and aging salesmen Reznikoff chronicled, but those who know the more furtive boroughs of Brooklyn will recognize the blighted landscapes and everydayness of its despair. And Sheeler refuses to let go of our hands, even when we feel that we have seen enough-she wants us to see it all, everything she's seen, before it turns into ash.
But what separates Sheeler from most of the poets who have written noirish first person narratives in nightmare landscapes is that she is as sensitive to language as she is to narrative, and she doesn't believe that telling a story is the same thing as writing a poem. Likewise, though she is interested in language and sound (there's both an appearance in the Def Poetry anthology and a successful gig the Nuyorican café on her resume), she also demands that her stories not only be stylish and well-told but also worth telling. This is appropriate for a poet who considers the sky in "Astronomology" to be the mother who put her to sleep with stories of constellations and myths as a child.
What holds these poems together is that each one is a probe into the process of memory. In her poems-no matter what is actually happening-Sheeler is trying desperately to recall the past in order to hold it up in the light and understand it. Even poems written more or less in the present tense share the same dissociation as she begins to question perception itself. Ultimately, she is less interested in how these stories are stored than how they were created in the place.
She begins her book with an image of sharpening a hypodermic needle against a matchbook. And it is with this motion that we a quick series of vignettes, something like a photo album from Dante's "Inferno." Her guides and companions on this journey are disappearing husbands, accident victims, suicides, winos, drug addicts, the presumed dead and the nearly dead. The narrator of most of these poems, presumably Sheeler herself, is the daughter of an abusive policeman, who becomes pregnant at 13, and is subsequently beaten by her father into the hospital. Her father is arrested and then released. When the poet is released from the hospital, her mother signs her off as a Child in Need of Supervision and she is sent to juvenile prison. Sometime subsequent to this she becomes addicted to drugs (apparently heroin and crack) and ends up in shooting galleries and crackhouses, living for a time in an abandoned building with her junkie husband. "To beg is to drag your tenderest spot across the teeth of strangers." Imagine a sensibility like this in situations like that.
But there are realms of hell that even Jackie hasn't entered. She observes the prostitution and physical violence and criminal behavior that surround her from afar with a disconcerting level of dissociation, which serves to remind us that a homeless drug addict is not much different from us except in circumstances. She still needs food, a safe place to sleep, and companionship, as well as having to be attentive to the difficulties of negotiating the uncertainty of illegal drug commerce. Luckily for us she never descends to the level of chronic wastage as do the winos and ODs that she encounters, but we get the feeling that she considers these to be snapshots of her possible future. And she comes perilously close to them when in her poem "Red Tape" she revives an OD for the sole purpose of determining how much of the unexpectedly pure heroin he's injected so that she can more expertly calculate her own dose.
But although notable for their content and the desperate landscape she so eloquently surveys and records, there is much more to these poems than their narratives. And for a poet so accustomed to the performance arena, there is all sorts of rewarding information for the reader in terms of how these poems work on the page. With such dire contents, the poems are created as almost delicate-there is usually a highly developed and pleasant rhythmic structure, and a lightness in the language, and a rapid movement through the poem, as well as a sharp visual sense of how to use and balance her chosen couplets and triads. Her lines are usually so crammed with information that sometimes we can only bear three lines at a time:
The blood is clean: no dreams pollute its red thunder, the veins
are thickened with sieves and catheters, but
dreams are kept out. The blood is clean.
Ice, Applied Directly
I would also guess that she is a dedicated reader of Flaubert-for she too shares his delight in packing a line with at least three shifts of tone or levels of information, such as when she writes of "hope twisting like an alien tongue in my mouth." At other times her descriptions are both exact and surreal, or surreally exact: "limp, / like the innards of an exhausted balloon" or "the tentative / fist of a dream." And there are other witty pleasures, such as how the unripened apples of "Apples" become the heavy, overripe apples that open "Natural Bodies" on the following page.
Although all of these poems are in the first person, there are several in the voices of others, such as one in the voice of JonBenet Ramsey and, perhaps my favorite poem in the book, a monologue from the Egypt Air pilot who sent his airliner into the Atlantic, which begins: "God is bloodthirsty and blind. Blessed / be the name of God…" The facility with which she assumes these diverse voices makes one curious how many of her other poems may be written in the voice of an assumed persona as well. Some of these narrators have girlfriends, and we desperately want to know if the voice is male or female. That this ambiguity still exists after a close reading (and works in the poem's favor) is an indication of how convincing these poems are and also how complex Sheeler's worldview can be.
Congratulations goes out to Buttonwood Press of Champaign, Illinois, for putting together such a nice-looking book and for sending it out into the world. But, most of all, I'm thankful that Sheeler survived to record these poems for all the people-many now undoubtedly dead-she met when they were all ghosts on a road to oblivion. On the back of the book we find that she is currently a computer technology manager, so the part of her story that has yet to be told is the journey from a squatter's tenement to a position at HotJobs. But as she admits in "One Uncivilized Soul," there is a part of her that will always feel more alien sitting in a rented apartment than she did twelve years ago, sleeping in abandoned buildings and the park benches in Brooklyn. My fondest hope is that she's been documenting her "Purgatorio" as thoroughly as she has her "Inferno."