More posts about poems and phones.

 

Dear Telephoned,

I have been thinking of you, and station wagons, Mr. Pibb soda, drive through hamburger joints, and the radio.  I wonder what these images and memories mean?  They might mean I am old, and they might mean I am nostalgic.  They might also mean that time telescopes in and out every minute of every day.

Here is a poem:

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up

BY BERNADETTE MAYER

You jerk you didn't call me up

I haven't seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You're drinking your parents to the airport

I'm through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It's the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander

_________________

To make love, turn to page 121.

To die, turn to page 172.

"[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up" by Bernadette Mayer, from A Bernadette Mayer Reader. Copyright © 1968 by Bernadette Mayer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

And here is a song that goes with it.

And here is another.

That's all!

A good one.

Dear Part Two,

Now where were we?  Oh yes, "Have a good one," she said.  Whenever I hear someone tell me this, often it occurs on the telephone, it feels like a little tear, a rip, in the script we are performing:  I am saying thank you, they are saying thank you, then they say have a good one, and I say you too.  But I am really all agog at what, exactly, I just wished them one of.

Let me expand on my (a)gog.  I have a multifaceted response to being told to have this 'good one.'  I feel wary, because who is this smart aleck to tell me what to do?  And I feel a kind of delight at the sheer absurdity of having a good one: A good what, do you suppose?  And, then, there is also the weird authenticity of the wish- I am struck by the speaker's sincerity and certitude; they earnestly wish me a 'good one.'

In conclusion, there is no where to go but here:  Have a good one, dear reader!

Bonus track.

Doubting.

Dear Thomas,

Here's the thing about doubt- it's creeping like a shadow all around the place, and if you let it touch you, if you let it fall on your ideas, on your skin, you are halted, stopped, going no where, becalmed.

The thing is to do something, anything.

Today, I am going to my making place, to combine little bits into some things that will go all together in an exhibit 9 months from now.  I am hoping to have loads of oddments, all pinned to the walls.  My mantra for this project:  More than this, there is nothing.  Sometimes, it feels even less than nothing, and that can be a bit worrisome.  But, mostly it seems like a very appropriate response to everything.  Which might be circular reasoning, if you are still with me.

More Than This is our song for the day, and there is another More Than This for you, as well as chords for you to strum while you sing it and believe it, because it is as true as anything yet.

News Flash

Dear Mailbag,

Oh golly, it isn't on the regular Dodo schedule, but it is from People and it something you should see, so, here it is.

Say, speaking of the f in feminism- have a look at this method of telling the world just what you think of it.  I think you'll enjoy dreaming up two word phrases to consider for your collars!

There is a song, for today, too- it's 11:59.

The Big Bright.

Dear Unhampered,


Matisse, I'd always been told, worked on these cut-paper pieces because he had diminishing eyesight, and it was easier for him to see these bold, high contrast forms.  I love this story very much, and I hope that no two-bit biographer ever comes along to tell me that he really made them because he suffered from schizophrenia.  Which isn't to say that I'd mind him having schizophrenia, but it is to say that the story of an artist continuing their work, no matter what was lost or diminished is a good story, a story that makes a person feel good about their paltry doodling efforts.  However, a story of making things because some kind of illness or hardship compels a person to, or worse, that the illness or physical reality is the actual 'creative' part of a person's output, leaving the artist/author as some kind of puppet dancing from a string of madness or disease, is just another one of those cliché tales of people who win things in spite of the odds.  I don't care much for those kind of stories, because it forces the listener into a distant corner of pity.

Enjoy this short film of Matisse wielding his scissors and may you stay unhampered by stories that explain and muffle, prove and trample, explicate and narrow.






Henri Matisse: Paper Cut Outs from DERTV on Vimeo.







PS

Here's another little something: The Big Bright.