GORDON PURKIS I'S
Everything
Today can be anything you want it to be,
a quiet morning or a loud one; some
people's morning begins long before yours,
the cat coughs up a hairball, a
horn honks incessantly, while you half-
dream about curveballs and honkytonks
wondering if it's all a dream, I mean
everything. “So then,” my mind wants to
know, “what is the point of waking up?”
To which I (the other me) answers “what
is the point of staying in bed if you're
always asleep anyway, wandering like
a poor man's ghost through all the
Thursdays you can know.” The rude
sonofabitch doesn't answer me.
Reed and Klyd converse on Gordon Purkis' poem
Comment from Reed in a private email
I like Gordon Purkis's poem a lot except for the last sentence. I don't know if he's afraid of being philosophical or if he just thinks he needs a punchline. My open mike experience leads me to think he thinks he needs a punchline.
Klyd responding to Reed's email
May I quote yr remarks about Gordon's poem? It does enliven the board to have someone say a bit. Of course, I would, do, disagree with you. The punch line doesn't dismiss the conjectures, entirely anyway; instead it underlines the divided consciousness we are likely to display before such topics. Should we go public with this little chat?
Reed back to Klyd
Might as well. I get the divided consciousness deal, but it's still there without being underlined. But he's doing more than underlining it, and I think he does dismiss the conjectures by dissolving them into a rude and unmotivated judgment on the one side. I mean, why should the mind answer when "I" has given it what looks like an unanswerable argument? How does the mind's not answering make it a "rude sonofabitch"? The last line says plenty about "I" and the moral character of "I"'s personality and suggests, since, as we all know, the
mind and "I" are really the same, that suddenly the poem is about self-hatred when, leaving aside the melodrama of "a poor man's ghost," which is think is a bit heavy, it seemed to be about other things.
However, all that is taking the last sentence more seriously than its tone suggests it is meant to be taken. And if it's not meant to be taken seriously, then it is a punchline and turns the rest of the poem's momentum into steam.
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Moira adds more on Purkis' philosophy:
At one time the separate parts of my brain talked to me and I answered them. One part was a little girl who wanted me to play. Another was a praying nun who thought I should pray all the time. A third part was a wild haired, raunchy woman who tried to dominate all conversations and force me to chase men, drink at bars, and make merry 24/7. The "I" in me tried to ignore the constant haranguing by those other rude s.o.b.s. "I" knew what was in my best interest and frequently could be heard telling them to get lost, get bent, and other versions more unseemly.
So Purkis saying "the rude sonofabitch doesn't answer me" made perfect sense to me. All my parts have rejoined "I" now, but there was a time they didn't answer me either if they did not like my decisions.
I thoroughly enjoyed your discussion with Reed on the poem's ending. Guess I took that ending at face value and did not think beyond what it communicated to me. That's the beauty of poetry. It communicates something different to each reader.
Moira B.
Laurel adds a remark on Gordon's poem and on Karen's (just below).
I had eye surgery this week so had not read the latest poems on TTG. Karen Waring
Sykes' poem gave me shivers. What I would not give to create the sort of metaphors
she did in that poem!! One segment in particular will stay with me because I could
see the woman, imagine the photograph:
One woman,
old as the hills,
her face a cracked cup
full of floating ice
and brown birds,
sits like a tall clock
against a golden window
And Gordon Purkis always speaks to subjects I relate to. I particularly liked the
ending:
To which I (the other me) answers “what
is the point of staying in bed if you're
always asleep anyway, wandering like
a poor man's ghost through all the
Thursdays you can know.” The rude
sonofabitch doesn't answer me.
"Wandering like a poor man's ghost" is just an exceptional image.
I hope you have your problems accessing the website fixed now. These poems were
certainly well worth waiting for. Can't wait to read more.
Laurel
Hi Klyd,
Poem
I’m probably not the first person
to realize this but we all talk in
the first person I mean when we
write poems we are talking to
ourselves about ourselves. What
I really mean is I don’t consider
your ears when using my voice,
not to sound rude, but an audience
never was what I was looking for
only a voice and I know my ears
can’t be trusted. There’s one I
inside me talking to the other I
and in between you get a poem.
I’ve always thought that it was somewhat rude to even write because there’s a certain sanctity about white paper, a foolish expectancy, kind of like a virgin who you know one day is going to have sex and no longer be a virgin. Maybe she’s really a poem? Maybe a poem is something that used to be a virgin and has undergone a transformation? How does one see the change from pure and chaste to perfect and beautiful? Maybe that’s what makes a poem, how well you handle the transformation.
Klyd to Gordon:
Gordon, pardon the slow response. I am very eager to get the website devoted to my recording studio up and functioning (thundershack.net it will be, and soon) and most of my time has gone there lately. The Time Garden, I find, I fertilize with time but harvest no time from it.
I saw a poem of yours once which used the ideal of the blank page. So it is an idea that resides with you. An interesting question: how many poems improve upon silence? Do any at all? Even Job? Even Rilke? Yet you write, we write, to find your voice, you say. But what use have you for a voice without an audience? There is only one transformation of the virginal: getting fucked. All kinds of metaphorical extensions follow, but we know that getting fucked does not always produce perfection. All it can produce is an ongoing, a movement from stasis, with huge fun and sorrow along the way. There is a cultural need for communication of course and a secondary cultural need for arts of communication. When Shelly wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators, he wrote in a period when written poetry held great importance among the arts of communication. Today, stand-up comics and a large variety of popular song surpass poetry in the power to impose (or reflect) change. But we who come by The Time Garden from time to time aren’t so sure that it is useless, written poetry. We continue to write, I think for two reasons: the higher one, that some of us will do poetry so well that it promotes (or reflects) a higher kinetic consciousness than there’d be without it. This is a level of success that may be near enough to perfect and beautiful, a blessed pregnancy, but it will be part of an ongoing still. Today’s masterpieces must be plowed under mostly so there is attention available for the new, and even those few pieces so perfect and beautiful that they are remembered are remembered for being the cause (or reflection) not of something now coming to be, with all that (illusory) excitement, but of what was, a way of approaching unchanging truth modified itself by change. The lower reason we write, egotistical. They will argue, those voices within us, that we write to energize the . . . blah blah blah. But we are not all us of likely to be that good, that our writing will energize the blah blah blah. So I like the modesty of your claiming to write to hear yourself talk. Is there perfection in that? When I notice, here of late, that Reed and CRa are writing a bit more than they have been the last few years, I am glad. There is certainly some chance they will write well enough to do some general good, but there is every chance that their truth mining and upkeep of tools, the ongoing excitement and disappointment, will be worth the spoilage of white paper, even if they remain among the majority of us for whom writing is ultimately private exercise with social value within a narrow range. Sharon Doubiago, with her calm modesty, has spoken of writing poetry as soul work. To be so, I think, it must be, and become, modest—cadenced, intense, subtle—saying what cannot be said, but modest. Your metaphor and discussion present the blank page to perfection, beauty, as a kind of Hegelian stasis (virginity) thru transformation to a new perfection (and new stasis), so a defensible intercourse. I see it more as a water spider stroking to stand still in a current, a hopeless image on one scale, a image of life as play on another.
Sorry I got long winded. Apparently the idea that a blank page is somehow superior to our busy busy business seemed feasible enough to me that I had to look into it.
I have stuck this onto ttg with yr note.
Klyd