wang wei

Wang Wei was a 8th century CE poet/painter. He's right up there with Li Bai and Tu Fu in terms of rep. This is a poem dedicated to his mastery of the brush.

                                                                  Wang Wei

i wish i was Wang Wei the painter swift

hand heart

rooted where breath

slows    mind

blows itself

out

i wish i was Wang Wei the poet each

character the thing itself bristling

black

branch in fresh snow

i wish i was Wang Wei

then i

would know

another poem

this one is from a solo performance by Sonny Rollins at MOMA

                                       a saxophonist in the garden of art

                                                                 for Sonny Rollins

you perch

                        three

notes on a polished

belly the air

around her pregnant

with unheard 

vibrations your horn breathes

mind's still water

colors spread

under your tongue young

woman in yellow dress opens

her eyes explode black

blues in art's garden

outside the gate police

                                                          hold

the crowd

                      in their arms

 

some poetry

after all that prose, it's time to slow the breath a little with some poetry, what Pound calls "language charged with meaning" and I'll add "& with music." The next few blogs will be some older poems, some published/some not. Enjoy.

                                                in the tradition

                                                                for Arthur Blythe

there's always been a place

in my house for holy

books as a child my missal

black leather gold

print thin red ribbon bound

into the spine to mark

the day's liturgy & my Lives

of the Saints at night i'd read 

martyrs suffering the rack

the wheel the up-

side down crucifixion St.Sebastian

chin against naked 

chest arrows

piercing his pure

heart

later  Camus & Sartre 

floating among empty

beer cans & overflowed ash-

trays    clear signs

of tomorrow's nausea

then the Black writers & the Beats

Baraka Ginsberg Ellison Kerouac Wright Bird-

like phrases chopped

the page into field

calls rent parties cool concrete breezes off city rivers a woman

crying like a saxophone beneath her lover's weight

or absence

                                                                                    each book a long

                                                                                              solo in an Ellingtonian suite

then Li Bai Tu Fu Basho each

word a tear exploding

from the sunflower's eye

& Ortiz Silko Neruda Paz cries 

& visions of People bound

to Earth

& each time i move

they move

& as Coltrane sings his love

supreme & sage blesses

my rooms with smoky sweetness

i shelve the last book & call

this place 

home

                                                      may peace prevail

John Coltrane John Coltrane the finale

This is the end, my friend. Even if my fingertips cover the keyboard with blood, I will hunt and peck my way to the finish. I left you listening to Charles Lloyd's Forest Flower. I realize that I didn't tell you about a short mood-setting event just prior. After we listened to some West Coast folk/country rock(now termed alt.country), Jeff suggested that we go swimming.  I figured that we'd head to the manor(this being a gentleman farmer's digs) to swim in the pool. Instead we went through the French doors (which reminds me - in the last entry I mentioned my geographical weakness. After, I realized it wasn't a lack of cosmopolitan cool that lured me into thinking Monterey was in France. I had confused it with Montreaux since they both had jazz festivals. Besides, New York City natives are so provincial that they really don't care where any other place is. After all, they are from THE CITY) down a dirt path through another grove(of trees) to a slow rolling river.  "Jump in" "I don't have a bathing suit" He peels off his clothes and dives in. So this was what they meant when they said drugs could make you do strange things(none of the escapades I had participated in THE CITY under the influence like hauling 30 concrete blocks one by one from a nearby construction site at three in the morning with my roommate , both of us wearing our philosophy robes(see earlier entry), to build a room divider in our apartment or watching television test patterns for hours on end while discussing their existential nuances had been strange). I decided to take full advantage of the opportunity. I won't digress into my immediate entry into the world of Buddhist nothingness. Let it suffice to say, "It was cool, man." When we got back, it was Charles Lloyd time. I got caught up right away, transported to France, in touch with my Sartrian soul, and listening to a sax played like I had never heard.  As I listen to it now as I write this, the listening carries a lot of that moment. As we drove back to the city(note lower case), I asked Jeff if he could recommend any other albums. "John Coltrane  A Love Supreme." Ah, I figured, something from the summer of love - laid back and groovin. Just before going home for Christmas, I went to the Harvard Coop(looking back I wonder if I was the only one who pronounced it as coop as in chickens instead of co op as in an attempt at pseudo socialism but fuck it I was from THE CITY). I didn't bother to take it home since my playing anything on the home stereo would only result in sarcastic comments which would then devolve into arguments about the merits of "the true faith." New Year's Eve 1967, I put the needle down, click, the whooshing crackle of a few empty grooves, a chord from space from a place I'd never been accompanied by a pool of cymbals then a voice no a horn calling me to listen to come in to the sound the prayer then a four note thrum on the bass a cell of four sounds which the sax played updowninsideoutoutsideoutin till it melted into God chanting "A Love Supreme  A Love Supreme A Love Supreme....." To try for further description is futile, one of the great pieces of music! For me, the greatest! I found an old notebook and started writing and haven't stopped since. That music opened the world to me. It led me to ideas, books, music, people, emotions, relationships, experiences, art, nature, death, sex, love, sound, touch, smell, taste, sight,spirit. In San Francisco, there is a Church of St. John Coltrane where every Sunday the congregation gathers to listen to A Love Supreme played live. That is the service. If I believed in institutional religion, that would be the one. About two years later I wrote a poem(this poem writing quest began that night and continues forty-one years later). When I read it now, it seems a little over the top and definitely a bit of a shameless attempt to to copy the work of the great poet Amiri Baraka. But it was the first time I felt I was able to come close to communicating in words,  no, in sounds the experience of that night. For your listening pleasure.....(.as is my habit I'll probably revise as I go, which fits the spirit of improvisation)

                                                   because of john coltrane

his fingers roam the beards

of three fine figured saviours

a warning that man

may inherit the task of

living out lives on a round planet

alone    listen

salvation rings

incessantly in a few asylums

howling between Black hands clapped

on gold saxophone back

on his heels        shaking

sounds around

the heads of priests  junk dealers  christ

passes in a yellow cab won't

stop for us uptown

the drummer plays us home

on our own feet

until you've played religion

stays with you    like all

things after again you're

on your own

between spots unable

to go in & listen to what

once

had to be true

breath breathe

listen        it's painting half

feelings  the

unfinished business of your

heart breaking in 

between notes

Coltrane knew about religion knew

its sound

there among the reeds are prophets talking

salvation or

doom            there

among the reeds are players 

of star music showing a way

that will take

you deeper into Earth farther

into heaven there

among the reeds is a "sky trane"

through the void

shango in the galaxy

three kings star

stuck in the universe

look when they should hear

eyes no good when no

sight to see

saw the star missed the sound

before  saw the flame-bush missed the sound

later  saw the man missed the sound

now downtown streets blow 

mother music

                                                                                      free

blue tunes leap                                                             

into life

into no

end 

streaming

from a scarred throat 

 

John Coltrane John Coltrane the penultimate installment (maybe)

So off we drove enveloped in smoke and the classic Volkswagon puttputt.  I'm not sure which direction we headed, not east since that would have put us in the harbor). Eventually, we were out in the country, which for me was anyplace where trees outnumbered people. I was somewhat experienced in rural survival. My mother had grown up in a small town, Fort Edward, in upstate New York. As a kid we would often spend a few weeks there visiting relatives in the summer. The highlight was going to Lake George to swim. My experience of beaches in THE CITY was the three hour drive in stop and go traffic to Jones Beach where a million people would hike through acres of steaming asphalt parking lots and across miles of burning sand to float in the Atlantic along with what to me at the time looked like deflated balloons (not a reference to the jellyfish). Of course, just when we started having fun, we had to pack up to beat the million person march back to the parking lot and home. The ride home was always pleasant. My bathing suit was full of sand, and I'd be wedged between my two older sisters who were sweating and complaining about the 90% humidity. When the complaining got loud enough, my father would silence it with a sweeping backhand from the driver's seat with his right hand on which he wore his big Fordham College ring that always managed to get one of us on the side of the head and immediately set off a torrent of tears and an undercurrent of smirks and snorts from the two he missed. When we got home, before we could go in the house, we had to stand under a freezing outdoor shower my father had rigged up in the backyard.  But Lake George was different. It had a grass beach, and you could see the bottom, so you didn't have to worry about slicing your foot  on broken beer bottles or slipping on unidentified slimy objects. That was truly "the country."  Jeff and I puttered down a bucolic two-lane road then turned right through a gate onto a dirt lane. Over a hill, through a grove of old trees (at that time all trees were just trees to me. I lacked the vocabulary to differentiate evergreen from deciduous, fir from maple), past a small flock of sheep and down to his cabin. Of course, this being just outside of Boston, it wasn't a cabin but a cottage. I took my suitcase out, the same one my parents had given me for my graduation, probably made of Samsonite and stumbled inside. The first sense that alerted me to a unfamiliar environment was smell. I knew the smell from somewhere in my childhood. It wasn't something from my house. Then, I realized it was a church smell - incense! I wondered what the fuck was Jeff doing with incense. I hadn't figured out what religion he belonged to, but I was pretty sure he wasn't Catholic. Then I started looking around. The walls were covered with an array of West Coast psychedelic music posters - The Byrds, The Jefferson Airplane, some group called the Buffalo Springfield. The cottage was pretty much one big room. In the back was his sleeping space. His bed was on the floor, and on the wall above was a tie-dyed wall hanging. Jeff lit a stick of incense and then another joint. I asked him what the incense was for, and he said to cover the smell of the grass in case the owner came by. I thought in THE CITY if you did that, it would be an invitation for the neighbor to sneak in while you were out and take your stash. Maybe these West Coast guys weren't as hip as I imagined. They did like the Beach Boys.  He put some music on (he also had a component stereo, but his speakers were about two feet taller than mine with supersized woofers).  Most of the sounds I was familiar with, but one was new - the Buffalo Springfield. That one stuck with me. Then he asked me if I liked jazz. I shrugged. He wanted to play an album by a saxophone player named Charles Lloyd. It was recorded at The Monterey Jazz Festival. I will admit to not being very cosmopolitan at that time. I thought Monterey was in France. I mean this cottage we were sitting in had fuckin French doors. The album was Forest Flower. I dug(liked) it right away. I hadn't heard anything like it before, and I definitely hadn't heard a sax played like that.            OK, so this may not be the penultimate installment, but I'm getting close. Maybe oui, maybe non. 

John Coltrane John Coltrane addendum to last part

or is it Grobin?

John Coltrane John ColtranePt4

This po' boy huddled down for a long night.  Just before midnight, I decided to put a record (a round, grooved, vinyl object used to store sound) called A Love Supreme by a saxophonist, John Coltrane on my brand new component stereo (you have to understand that this is what the audiophiles used to hear Jimi move his sounds back and forth between speakers and you could adjust the bass so it shook the floor of the apartment above you till the fat tenant would slam his foot on the floor and jump your needle and you'd mumble, "What a bummer, man") At that point in my life, my exposure to jazz, particularly progressive jazz, was limited. I had heard Dave Brubeck's Take Five in college and thought it was, in the vernacular of the time, "far out, man." But I was a soul man who thought My Girl was one of the great American songs(it was).  I had also broadened my religion to include The Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. So how did I come to possess this album(a synonym for record)? Time for another digression that will eventually bring me back to the life changing moment I think I promised somewhere in this series of blogs. One of the students I met in Cambridge was a golden boy from California. If my memory wasn't destroyed by my youthful dissipation, I'm pretty sure he even knew how to surf (& if my memory isn't accurate, it makes a better story & as we've recently witnessed when we're talking memoir, it's the story, stupid). You have to understand that I grew up in New York City (well, Queens, but that's an official borough of THE CITY). When the Beach Boys were harmonizing about blonde, tanned beauties and woodies, I was wondering if a woody was some kind of sexual act these beauties might bestow on a surfer boy.).  Jeff's origins were a mystery to me. To add to his mystique, he had gone to Stanford, one of those private, non-Catholic colleges somewhere in California. I had gone to Fordham on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It was/is a Jesuit school where you had to take four years of theology and philosophy and in your senior year had to wear a robe to philosophy class like you saw Oxford or Cambridge students wearing in the movies. It wasn't till sometime after I graduated that I had the AHA moment and realized they wanted us to to feel like the limeys had nothing on these Catholic kids from immigrant ancestry.  In fact I had spent sixteen years in the parallel universe of New York Catholic schools. In our minds they weren't private schools but an educational refuge for the Catholic  middle class(originally, the poor catholic kids of Irish, Italian and other European nationalities from the paganism of the public school system). Stanford was a completely different world, similar to the one I was in in Cambridge but filled with sun, sun, sun and fun, fun, fun. Harvard (I have tried to hide it, but that's where I was going to school. However, I won't accuse others of being bitter and clinging to their Uzis and Bud Lite that according to their recent commercials has won brewing awards in foreign countries when times get tough)(I'm getting lost in these parentheses) was weird but Jeff was even weirder. We were both intern teachers in the Boston Public Schools (which were Catholic schools disguised as public schools. I knew that most of the teachers were nuns out of habits. My sixteen years on the inside made that obvious to me.) The internship was part of our graduate program. He spoke with this accent that I couldn't identify. It was only years later when watching some surf flick on TV that I was able to pin it down. In the middle of a Northeast winter, he dressed like he was at the fuckin beach in Santa Monica ( even now, I'm not sure if there is a beach in Santa Monica. California stops at San Francisco, the southern tip of Ecotopia). He even wore sandals. What really blew me away was that he was living in a caretaker's cottage on a sheep farm just outside of Boston. Since I live in Oregon, the weirdness factor over his living situation is negligible now, but then it was "far out, man"! He invited me to come visit his "pad" one weekend. I didn't have a car; in fact, I didn't even know how to drive, so he told me he'd give me a ride. That Friday, he pulled up to my door, driving, of course, a Volkswagon bus (you probably thought it was going to be a woody, and maybe when I publish this as part of my memoir it will be). I hopped in, and he handed me a joint. I thought this would be weird but hell, why not.    I gotta stop now - time for Idol. I think the kid who turned the Mariah Cary song into an edgy emopunk dirge is gonna win unless all the subteens vote for the guileless or crafty as a fox David Archuleta (watch out Josh Grubin!)

John Coltrane John Coltrane Pt3

Before I return to the drug addled, angst ridden hero of my story, here's the results of my etymological study of "debauch." The word comes from French. The prefix, de, means away from and the root,bauch, means beam as in roofbeam. In French it referred to a rough handhewn beam, the wood being roughly hewed away from the original log to form the beam. From there it arrived at "a period of dissipation." So there I was wallowing in self pity and hopelessness, occasionally walking down to the neighborhood bar to eat a hamburger, drink beer, and watch football or basketball games with the locals, who would now and then harass me due to the full Italian 'fro I was now sporting. I avoided any escalation by telling them my mother was Irish and singing along with the Clancy Brothers songs on the jukebox.  New Year's Eve was approaching, and all of my roommates had decided to celebrate in their hometowns, apparently forgetting our sworn pledge to blow the top off this Ivy League burg together. There were two girls who lived on the ground floor apartment of our house, neither of whom had ever talked to any of us and seemed to go out of their way (probably wisely) to avoid us. On the way back from the tavern(hardly a tavern), I would look for signs of life. I  decided I would fall in love with one of them and that New Year's Eve would be a propitious time to make my amorous declaration. No signs of life. They were probably skiing in Switzerland with the rich boys. So as Steve Earle sings, "What's a poor boy to do?"     Gotta go to work. Ciao.

John Coltrane John Coltrane cont.

A few months before, I had started graduate school in Cambridge, Mass.  I was living in an old row house with three roommates who had all arrived at this destination from a housing notice posted on a bulletin board at school. A postgrad biology student was looking for three roommates. He was a strange(maybe unique is a better word) guy from Alabama who had just gotten back from a year living with Costa Rican lizards. My other roommates were an African American guy from Oklahoma and a Greek guy from Pennsylvania. Together, we were a formidably insane force, but that is a different story. We had all gone home for winter break (in the urban Northeast filled with Irish and Italian immigrants then referred to as Christmas break as spring break was Easter break). After I had fulfilled familial Christmas obligations (with an underlying tension due to my refusal to attend Mass), I explained that I needed to return to Cambridge to get prepared for the next term. Of course, there was little truth to that, but I didn't want to spend a week in argument over the validity of the Catholic religion, which I had abandoned four years prior(another story). So I packed the suitcase that my parents had given me for graduating from college and headed back to what I was sure would be a week filled with debauchery(or at least what little I knew about debauching - I need to look up that root, bauch, and see what I was de-ing). I came back to a cold, empty house made colder by the absence of any human warmth and the stench of empty beer cans and unemptied garbage from our bon voyage party - a perfect environment for breeding existential angst(two words I had explored in my senior philosophy class taught by a Catholic layman who was knocked off the tenure track for teaching this taint of humanism). I commenced to drink and smoke myself into a darkly meditative coma accompanied by Jimi Hendrix wailing on my new AR turntable,speakers, and tube amp that I bought from two MIT dropouts that were starting this stereo company out of a storefront "ARE YOU EXPERIENCED." and all I could answer was "hardly."   blogging time is up  bye

John Coltrane John Coltrane

I've discovered one of the drawbacks to blogging - people get itchy when you don't blog. They send you comments about how you're letting them down by creating false expectations that on a regular basis the Muse is going to shake a few leaves from the the word tree. So here goes. I've been reading a book by the Times (New York, of course, those other newspapers that call themselves ..........Times are only pretenders) music critic , Ben Ratliff. When I began to read it, I decided to listen to the music that he references in his discussion. Being that I've obsessively collected Coltrane recordings since 1967 (more about my beginning with Trane later), I have most of the music he refers to, some of which I've listened to regularly over the past 41(yikes) years and some of which I've played very occasionally. I started out in the early 50's and am now listening to music from 1965, a year during which Coltrane came close to lifting the Earth off the Turtle's back musically(in fact, he may have accomplished that feat, but in 1965 my college boy beer party spirit would not have recognized the phenomenon because I was busy growing my Beatle bush and shaking my head in a Liverpoolian manner as I uncorked my dancing  Dionysian soul. New Year's Eve 1967, I was sitting with my lonesome self, a pint of scotch and some herb rolled in Marlboro cigarettes that I had emptied of tobacco (that's what Catholic college boys from New York City did since they were still in the early stages of losing their herbal virginity).   To be continued....maybe