Esther Press

ECHOES


Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.

Want it again,
never mind who's the friend.

Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses

Were as good as any.
No mistakes.

--from Mirrors

I just found out that Robert Creeley died. I'd been working.

At some point in 1997, I began writing to him about questions I had about poetry. I began those letters Dear Mr. Robert Creeley. Then, because of an interview I did with him, and transcribing it, it became Dear Robert Creeley. It stayed that way until I asked him to write a little thing for my first and only book. He did so, happily. Which was thrilling, because I admired his work so much and who he was beyond the work. He did the blurb, a very nice gesture, and then he began signing his name Bob in e-mails. I think I wrote a few e-mails to him as Dear Bob, but I never felt comfortable doing so. During the middle of these name fluctuations, my girlfriend and I named our Great Dane, Creeley. I wrote to tell him, and he was very honored, as he said. He then related stories about his Great Danes when he was younger.

What I mean to say by this, is that he was always--and I mean always--respectful and polite and happy to help me, a person he hardly knew. In fact, just now I am remembering the night he read in Syracuse for the Raymond Carver Series, and some of us went to a room for informal chitchat before we went out to dinner. He was aware that I wanted to do an interview with him for Salt Hill, the literary magazine run by the graduate students in the MFA program at Syracuse University. He knew this, but he didn't know who I was, until I left the room with him and Chris Kennedy, as we were going to a local restaurant, Over the Moon, now defunct. It was raining, as I remember it, and it was dark. Chris and Robert walked ahead of me, as I was entirely quiet and nervous about not making an ass out of myself. As I got near to Chris's car, Creeley turned to me and said, "You must be James Wagner". I said I was. He then did something that sums up my encounters with him. He moved from the side of the front seat passenger door, still standing outside, and came to the rear passenger side door and opened it for me. For me? I thought. (Who the hell am I?) I shyly said, "Thank you". It relaxed me a great deal. We all got into the car, drove away in the rain, while I sat staring, dumbstruck, at the back of Creeley's head.

It's a sad day for American letters, and I'm getting sadder just writing this. He was an important--even crucial--figure for me, and I just want to make that known, make that existent.

Thank you for your life and work, and your example, Bob. Best as ever, and Onward!

58



Listening to a drunkard/poet, beloved by academia and the mainstream, talk about Truth and Beauty and Depth of Feelings...one can only vomit at the hypocrisy.

57


No longer a practicing Catholic, I remember sometimes going to church services 11 times in one week when I was a pre-teen and teenager. If my memory serves, which it often doesn't. As I went to Catholic school, my classmates and I went to church in the morning, and I believe it was every day during the week, though I may be in error there. What I am not in error about is that I would sometimes have to be a server at evening masses during the week, Monday through Friday. But given some unwritten-but-followed rule, none of these services counted as an exchange credit for Sunday service, so I would have to attend this as well. So, by my reckoning, five in the morning, five at night, once on the weekend.

I cannot readily recall much of anything from this time. A few moments seemingly trapped in some mental holding-bin for no very good reason. I have a persistant memory of the priest, Father Nickolai, an elderly, thin and wrinkled man, coming over to our classroom to speak on Catholicism. Nobody really liked him, as he seemed severe, distant, and mean. Yet, he spoke about other wonders far from our knowing, and sometimes this was interesting, but mostly it wasn't. He would tower over us in the class, wearing his all-black outfit, and would sometimes prop himself on the corner of a desk. He did this at least a couple of times with me, at my desk. I remember looking down at his long, wrinkled fingers, noting the pressure the weight of his body was putting on them. He leaned on his fingers, and so they bent a bit from the strain. I noticed all this, but the one thing that I still remember vividly is the black dirt beneath his fingernails. I remember thinking this said something about him, something beyond personal hygiene, something about sickness and lying and feeble attempts at covering up. The dirt remained, or continued to come back.

56


I would try to stop my students from the easy joke, the quick grin, in their poems, as I feel like those reactions are not entirely geniune. I always wanted to get them past their commonplace impulses, to get onto some new area that the humor may have wanted to hide.



55


Have almost no interest in poetry readings anymore. Have no interest in all that halfhearted schmoozing before and after.



54


Passing a sign for Temperance, Michigan, the next thing I saw was a sign for a Beef Jerky Outlet.



53



As if the world means something.

51


More litter of the self:

abusage--improper use of words; unidiomatic or ungrammatical language.

abutter--a person who owns adjacent property. (What of a person who owns adjacent language?)

acardia--cogenital absence of the heart.

Acarnan--Class. Myth. an infant who, with his brother, was enabled by Zeus to grow to manhood in a single day in order to avenge his father's murder.

acandal--Zool. tailless. ("He was saddened that she was acandal.")

accidentalism--(2) Philos. any theory holding that some events have no causes.

acedia--sloth

acentric--not centered, having no center.

acenesthesia--Psych. loss of the physical awareness of one's body.

50


He read some poems by a recognized poet who had somehow never understood that preciousness is not poetry. It's not subtlety at work, but outlandish reaching for sentiment, which then becomes sentimental. Sentimentality is the exaggeration of emotion in a given situation. In other words, too much heather, too much sad wilting, too much milky skin.

49


Off and on over the last few days, I have been meaning to look into whether bears searching for salmon in rivers really do just eat the eggs of the females for the high fat content and then throw all of what people call the meat away. My friend also added that they do not bother with male salmons, tossing them back in if they accidentally catch them.




48


Not so unbelievably, there is a bar in Syracuse that was formerly a funeral home. The drive-through carportish corpse dropoff is still there.

In another part of the city, there is a bar right next door to an AA meeting place.

47


Ghastly creeps in black robes and white coats.

46


And, now, out of somewhere, I hear my unsentimental great-grandmother saying, I don't trust kids with clean faces.





45


And, again, the sudden, uncomfortable understanding that I will be lying to myself until death. That I will have to listen to others lying to themselves and myself until death. That I will not know who is lying all of the time, but being vaguely aware that something isn't right about you and me.





44.


Being sober in a room of drinkers, I remember feeling two things at the same time. One, that I was the sane one in the group. Two, that the sheer number of drinkers, being outnumbered heavily by them, made me feel that I wasn't.



43


There are certain words that should never appear in poems. These are: fervor, moreover, Baked Alaska, indeed, and mayhaps. There are certain other things one shouldn't do in a poem. Here's one: one shouldn't act like one's been in a terrible, deadly, historical event and emote like he or she is experiencing it for everyone else who also haven't.



42



Where some see grace, I see affectation and the manners of class inscribed in the mouth and on the body. Grace, to me, is something apart from one's self, if that is possible, as if one is doing something unconsciously in a subtle and delicate way. As if one is doing something without ego. I think one of the most graceful things I ever witnessed was watching the Russian figure skater, Oksana Baiul, skate in the 1994 Olympics. It was artful, fluid, physical, and yet very light. It was hypnotic and magical, and one almost sensed one wouldn't see something like it again. And I can't really say that I have.

41


The emptying of my name when dead. The name persists. It doesn't describe. It plays at describing. Like a clown show.





40


In plumbing, frequently, the side-jokes referred to males and females and sex via the names of parts. Like nipple, union, coupling, nut, screw, male thread, female thread, bushing. One could screw a nipple into a female threaded bushing, which would leave one, of course, with a male thread.




39


When one refers to another as one of the most technically gifted poets of one's generation is the first one really saying of the second that he/she finds him/her to be mostly uninteresting on the whole but very good at math?

38


Leaving Oakland, in line at United Airlines, we are waiting along with Little Richard and his entourage. He is supposedly 72 years old. My girlfriend guesses at the number of plastic surgeries he may have had, as his face is wrinkle-free, tightened, dusted with makeup. He sits in a wheelchair, then gets up again to go the counter. He does this at least four times.




37


Somewhere in the Bay area, a company called It's-It Ice-Cream. Wondering, for a few seconds, about the owners.




36


In San Francisco for the first time, confused by the legendary status of City Lights Bookstore. Dejectedly thinking amid, this is it?

35



The sudden desire to bloodlessly remove one's head and to place it on a rock by the water. To walk away from it gladly, but to also hear it continue to talk as you bumble back into the world.






34



He had something to say, and he had to say it in language, and that's where, for the second time, it got confused and constrained and fell apart as he said it.

33



Contiually doubtful about personas put forth by self and others.




32



The inherent fiefdom of the collective I. The funneling of everything thought and unthought into I. Then, acting as if one really knew.




31



The hesitation and then the insistence of a semblance of words, such as The German in Tempe.