As I was young and uneasy before the apple boughs
were ploughed and wine grapes staked in their stead
afraid to be happy lest I be caught and shamed,
I told my cousins stories above the Columbia River
it was brown it was lovely those hills my fields of praise.

The major poet asked who I admired. Stafford,
Hirschfield, Ashbery. Who did I study with? Nelson.
What did he say? Nelson said everybody is a poet.
When he said I should send my work here and here.
I thought, that's Nelson Bentley not my poetry.

My lines make promises and don't keep them.
I veer wildly, smart aleck, wham awful sad.
He said here's iambic pentameter and two
lines later hexameter. Hand at his throat,
he lobbed what he landed on with the other.


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J. A. M. J.A.M. J.A.M.

jam, jam, jam
I want some jam!

-first poem, age 1 1/2 (for my biographer)


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How imporant is the work? Is it poetry? What is poetry? Who gets to say? Who can write it? Who has a tin ear? Is it me? Can I tell a dactyl from an iamb? Does that matter? What about intuitive leaps? That is all the fricking hell I have! If I read your work and get your work, in the sense that I sense something going on, I cry or I reverberate or I exhale with pleasure at a line but I can't remember anything later does this matter? If I read other poets about poetry and I understand... But this isn't about understanding or about getting, this being poetry. What is poetry? a writhing of the guts? Words making music that brings solace without that hallmark card retching - is wretched related to retch? If a wretch retches are we sadder than if you or I do? In the world scheme of things we are wretches - tiny nobodies whose bodies may as well be the ones discovered in the wreckage of Sichuan buildings. A reporter stood by and spoke into her mic or her cell phone as a fallen building was being excavated for bodies. She told us three women had brought Mrs. Choo a sheet and tore it into three pieces in case Mrs. Choo's three family members were found so Mrs. Choo could cover their faces. A commonplace in that community the reporter said, then told us she saw a hand. I thought she would spare us more, I was driving home with a jar of coriander for the simmering dal. There's a ring on the hand. I felt her self-awareness, reporting as it happened, Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite, but I felt revulsion. This was invasion of privacy and the insertion of the reporter's emotional response for our entertainment.

Each of us is wretched and will experience wreckage. What will be wrecked? What has been wrecked? I loved lost cities as a child - Atlantis, Machu Pichu. Who were these ancients? What remains among the ruins to remind us? Pages of amoebic coins stamped with faces of dead greats inside National Geographic. The past was alive! A long long time ago people lived lives! They combed their hair with these ancient combs with missing teeth! They wore these blackened earbobs with chipped stones! Here is the canoe with the hole in the hull they used to cross vast waters! They existed!