Jon Frankel's Blog, page 5

for doris, with love!

POEM FOR DORIS APPELBAUM

Doris Appelbaum went on strike.
She had had enough and wouldn’t cook
another meal. We weren’t there for the food,
not for her daughter Jamie’s friend Loraine
from Brooklyn whose big eyes burned red
when the bong hits piled up and we laughed
too hard to contain ourselves. I loved Doris
Appelbaum’s sausage and pepper tomato sauce,
her pasta with whole blackened cloves of garlic,
her vegetarian chopped liver served with crackers,
|Harvey her husband, and their wine’n’cheese parties
in the seventies on mod furniture with the Silversteins,
while we sat in Remi’s basement room shocking
our noses and stripping the paint off brain cells,
leaving raw wires to twitch in the dawn and lavender light.

We were there for the love not the Rebel Yell
she poured over ice, not for the big tv where we
watched MASH every Sunday or the bowl
of Wheatena that was mine on Monday morning.
She was my mother because my own
took a turn too fast and flipped off the road
while Doris stood steady with black eyes shining
above her smile which like all good smiles
start out wary and smart and mutate into joy.

Doris Appelbaum one day had had enough.
She worked full time for a prosthetic limb practice,
office manager. We took acid and dangled the fake leg
out the second-floor window while the Dead played
St. Stephen. You might want more but I don’t. Doris
hasn’t cooked much the past forty years and she doesn’t
drink Rebel Yell. I don’t know, maybe it was a rehearsal
out of my mind there are many days I want to go on strike
and Doris is leaving her memories behind in Manhattan.

and then there were none

And Then There Were None

When I was young
we learned how the west was won
singing the Ten Little Indians song
one little two little three little Indians
and so on, each verse eliminating one
by the pox, the railroad, and the gun.
Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians.
And then there were none.

Elimination games are fun–
synecdochical anarchy and chaos–
see them run! I once watched a game
of Musical Chairs performed by the residents
of the Elmwood Jewish Retirement Home.
Bubbes and Pops raced in a circle,  
the chairs diminishing each time by one,
with a shriek; and then there were none.

At twenty I moved to Big Town
and was the friend of three little bears
and we sat smoking and laughing
till the wine and cigarettes were done.
This is how the game was played,
how a hundred bottles of beer
on the wall became one, when my bears
began to sing Ring Around the Rosie.
A pocket full of posies
Ashes ashes we all fall down!
And when it was over there were none.

It makes you aware of attrition, the war
of tradition, like the game of Duck Duck Goose
I played at Joanne Lowitz’s 15th birthday
in the dark of the playground where 8 drunk girls
and I ran screaming around the wet grass:
You’re it! Falling face forward, making out
on the curved brick wall in the green glowing light,
gonna run-run run run run one by one we lose
and when we are done there are none.

At the school next door they don’t sing
Ten Little Indians anymore, they don’t sing at all
this fall. The kids only ask to be together
but they must not run. Duck Duck Goose,
Ring Around the Rosie are too close for a distant day.
After recess they line up quietly apart and follow
their sober teacher to a circle of chairs in the sun
beneath the flags where they sit with the still
inscrutable eyes of masked strangers, their laugh
or grimace, concealed by the cloth, is gone
and when they are done, one by one they go.
And then there are none. The flag flaps alone.
Cherokee, Sioux and Cayuga.

sinclair/richardson

This is the review of Dorothy Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, published in the Egoist by May Sinclair in 1918. At the time Richardson had only written the first three novels, starting in 1915. It is a good review in both senses and important as it is the first use of the term stream of consciousness to describe a narrative technique and because even then Sinclair contextualizes Pilgrimage, which can be done further by reading the rest of the articles in the Egoist, and other contemporary avant-garde arts journals. This is the link to the Egoist and an extraordinary digitization project that started at Brown University: The Modernist Journals Project. The link is to this issue of the Egoist, but scroll to the top and click on all the stuff, this is an amazing project that makes available to the public material that has only been accessible through academic libraries.

The Egoist:

Vol. 5, No. 4
Weaver, Harriet Shaw (editor)
London: The New Freewoman, Ltd., 1918-04-01 16 p.; 31.5 x 21 cm

ISLE OF DOGS PART ONE

It’s available at Amazon. The ebook will be out soon. ORDER HERE

may sinclair

Recently I stumbled on the English author May Sinclair (1863-1946) in the back pages of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. My copy of Pilgrimage is published by Virago, so it makes sense that Sinclair would be there. She was a major feminist writer and thinker and active in modernist circles. She supported herself as a writer from 1896 on, and in 1918 reviewed the first three books of the multi-volume Pilgrimage for the Egoist. She was the first to apply the term stream of consciousness to a literary text and soon after used the method herself in fiction. She was interested in mental health reform and studied psychoanalysis and wrote a book of Idealist philosophy. Her study of the Brontes influenced her to write two volumes of weird/ghost tales (still in print in various forms).

The Bronte book is interesting because it is part of an evolving feminist lineage of the English novel. In fact it is impossible to construct a canon of English fiction without women authors, who have produced major and transformative works of fiction every step of the way from the 16th century to today. The first book by a woman novelist about a woman novelist was Gaskel’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. That it is a hit job against Bronte’s father and husband and grossly mischaracterizes life in the Bronte household is beside the point, I think.

In 1914 she went to Belgium with an ambulance corps to care for wounded Belgian soldiers, a brief but intense and traumatic experience she wrote about in a number of poems. She wrote other important reviews in the Egoist and the Little review, about H.D., Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, all of whom she knew, as well as Ford Maddox Ford. Her list of works is very long.

I have been interested in women novelists for a long time now, so coming across her added to what is already a mighty stack of books. I will probably read her supernatural tales and two of her novels, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean and Mary Olivier: A Life.

I am writing this now because last night, noodling around, I found one of her poems about WWI, and it is a stunner. Versions on blogs and the poetry websites seemed to be off in the lineation, so I tracked down the original version in the Egoist (1914) and copied it out from there. The lineation on other sites was fine. One of the features of the poem is an alternation of extremely long lines with extremely short ones, which presents problems in any format.

AFTER THE RETREAT by May Sinclair (1863-1946)

If I could only see again
The house we passed on the long Flemish road
That day
When the army went from Antwerp, through Bruges, to the sea;
The house with the slender door,
And the one thin row of shutters, grey as dust on the white wall.
I stood low and alone in the flat Flemish land,
And behind it the high slender trees were small under the sky.

It looked
Through windows blurred like women’s eyes that have cried too long.

There is not anyone there whom I know,
I have never sat by its hearth, I have never crossed its
threshold, I have never opened its door,
I have never stood by its windows looking in;
Yet its eyes said: “You have seen four cities of Flanders:
Ostend, and Bruges, and Antwerp under her doom,
And the dear city of Ghent;
And there is none of them that you shall remember as you remember me.”

I remember so well,
That at night, at night I cannot sleep in England here;
But I get up, and I go:
Not to the city of Flanders,
Not to Ostend and the sea,
Not to the city of Bruge, or the city of Antwerp, or the city of Ghent,
But somewhere
In the fields
Where the high slender trees are small under the sky—

If I could only see again
The house we passed that day.

This is I think a beautiful poem and the more I read it the sadder, more tragic it becomes. By the fourth or fifth time I felt tears in my eyes. Perhaps it is the time we live in. The poem speaks to the emotional devastation of war. America at the moment feels like a country in the depths of war. As of this writing, October 27, 2020, right before the election that will decide our fate, 220,000 Americans have died in less than a year. The last time we experienced a plague of this proportion was 1918, the year Sinclair reviewed Pilgrimage.

There is a gentleness to the cadences and a slightly old fashioned, 1890s feel, like Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree, with its long languorous lines. But it is closer to prose and hasn’t his formal regularity. This a modernist poem influenced by Imagism. Pound, under the influence of Ford, was pushing for prose-like clarity in poetry, in the hard images and affectless sonics of In the Station of the Metro. If you look at the page of the Egoist on which this poem appears, there is the end of a group of prose poems by Amy Lowell; an article, The Imagists Discussed by Harold Munro; and a poem by Marianne Moore called To William Butler Yeats On Tagore. Prose enters English poetry through the Imagists, by way of the French. French poetry is syllabic, and amenable to prose rhythms in a way that English poetry, heavily stressed, is not. Both Blake and Whitman wrote long lines of seemingly proselike poetry, but their cadences are heavily stressed and have not the quality of the prose poem as it evolved in France and among English Modernists like Ford, Pound, Eliot and Moore. And of these Marianne Moore wrote in syllabics. Her line could be quite long and I don’t think of her writing as the blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Stevens and Eliot. Moore’s The Black Earth was published in the same April, 2018 issue of the Egoist as May’s review of Pilgrimage.

Sinclair’s use of adjectives is striking. Slender, thin, low, and small are repeated. They do not have the sentimental feel of diminutives. When used to describe trees it reminds me of Mondrian’s tree paintings from the teens, natural form becoming abstract. Her use of place names is incantatory, as if they were living entities. Her grief is palpable in the objective details (and the descriptions are photographic, strongly objectivist) but it is the house with the slender door and one thin line of shutters that won’t let her go. Personifying the house seemingly makes her an old-fashioned poet indeed. Ruskin condemned this as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in 1856. It is one of the opening salvos against 18th and 19th century sentimentalism in poetic theory. In 1919 Eliot came to the rescue with the ‘objective correlative’. The objective correlative is a dramatic, outward representation of the deep and impersonal emotional complex of a work, a symbol not an allegory. The house:

“It looked/

Through windows blurred like women’s eyes that have cried too long.”

There is nothing sentimental about this line, it is a truth of war and this poem represents the war through a woman’s eyes and through a strong woman’s ‘I’ repeated throughout. The house addresses her as a lover claiming she will not remember the other places she has been to. And it is true. In the penultimate stanza, back in England, she cannot sleep. She gets up and must go back in memory to the field where that house stood. She longs to return. Is this not the feeling of every traumatized soldier who longs to return to war? War will not let her go. It has captured her unconscious mind. All of her life’s passions are gathered here in this poem, psychoanalysis (theory of trauma), paranormal experience (haunted by a house), objective modernist description and aesthetics, and most of all, the centrality of women’s experience.

Vol. 2, No. 5
Weaver, Harriet Shaw (editor)
London: The New Freewoman, Ltd., 1915-05-01 20 p.; 31.5 x 21 cm

North Star

North Star
1.
It’s unclear to me where we are going.
I see nothing but fog on the periphery
of the headlights, and brown leaves
swirling in a circle of snow, wind
blowing trees down, the roof crushed flat
of a neighbor’s home, men with guns
dropping deer to drive to the convenience
store to shoot a man who had robbed
them of cheese, chasing through the felled
branches, the moon in a harrow of clouds
wisping free but no sun in sight, no breeze,
nerves stitched, skin ruffled, nails sharp.
2.
We’re coming one for the other. Don’t leave
me alone, my tribe, circle me with warm arms,
bring me into your heart where I will glare
hungrily out the window, “Let me tell you
brother don’t come in unless you want
big talk and a bullet between your teeth.”
3.
Sheer idiocy of this cascade and cavalcade,
this crescendo that never ends, a mushroom
cloud, consequences blooming skyward
before falling, a wave of fire and rubble,
a fury unabated by love or circumstance,
reaching up to the light finding none.

For Andrew

The Science of Boys for Andrew
Draw your circle on the square
draw your circle everywhere
the edges do not mingle
the fingers do not tangle.
Silence is the rule with boys.

I will not shine on you today
I will not sing or play the notes
you expect and know. The science
of boys is a quiet way around the spring
and when the boy is in pain and wants
to die his desire is god’s plan, you will
not shake him loose from it. The garden

rows grow straight when he is older
though you remember when he was young
and the sunflowers broke open yellow
across the fields when he bowed his violin
strong and he was your boy. Now the mystery

strains his eyes and he alone and you cannot
break through, your words touch but do not ripple
the placid water on his face, the cascade of his
muted tears washing down the innocent slopes
of cheeks. Say, Boy it hurts to grow, boy
I say even especially love hurts and happiness
is vulnerability, the fleshed body sings.

MY FRIEND

My Friend

At the bleeding edge of forever lies my friend
my never to be touched end recedes you see
and sends its music through the smoking sky
that filters the sun and blurs the lines I wore
and swore by: to be dressed, and caressed. Loveless
darlings left to perish ere they cherish, gone
into black gowns in towns where loveliness
is bereft of breath, carceral, the strange bend
in its finger winks to flirt, come here, wash
me in your eyes, kiss me, take me when you leave.

from GAHA:BABES OF THE ABYSS

This is from GAHA: BABES OF THE ABYSS, the first novel of the DRIFT books I am writing. Volume Two is ISLE OF DOGS, which is available for preorder on Amazon or at Whiskey Tit.

Life in Santa Monica wasn’t bad. There were stores to shop from and the beach was crowded on weekends with big hats and bare butts. I ate sausage and chili noodle salad at the cart on Sandero Luminoso Boulevard or else got fish tacos at Sa’s truck on 14th Street. I could eat at either place every day and not get tired.

The old lady had deteriorated beyond the state I had first seen her in. At the desk we were warned that she was not very responsive. They wheeled her in from her bedroom and we sat on the balcony overlooking the Pacific. She had a cup of water with ice and a straw which she would periodically grip and bring to her lips, slurping loudly. She was bent over. There were tubes in her nose for oxygen. She craned her face forward like a turtle and tried to stare at us. One eye was drifting and white but the other was intense and glaring, like the brightest star in the sky was trapped inside it. She whispered, “I hate this. Please. My lawyer.” She wheezed and lowered her head to the table. After a long time she lifted her head again and whispered, this time fixing her eye on Elma, “Celestial angel of fire. Stay. Stay. Have a drink dear.” This time she was able to keep her head up for a while. After another rest on the table, her white hair spread in a pool around her, she turned creakily to Irmela and said, “Irmela. Dear. How is your motorcycle?”

“Vroom vroom,” Irmela said. She smiled and bent down to look Agatha in the eye, and the old lady emitted several short dry breaths. “More the kicks than the pricks. I miss you. We are sad we did not visit. The roads are so bad. We are haunted by the ride into LA, and what the Rulers have done.” The old lady exhaled and flattened her face on the table, her eyes shut. She snored.

Weeks later we arrived earlier than usual, as she wanted us there to talk to her lawyer. Elma poured gin and vinho verde into a chrome pitcher and stirred it languidly. She was wearing a lime green dress the old lady had given her. It had a high collar and a gold chain belt with a scarlet snakeskin purse dangling from it by a tiny fist carved out of bone. She poured out a martini. “The onions or the olives or the twist?”

I was about to answer when Agatha hacked, “Capers dear.” Her eyes opened. A hissing breath came out from between her teeth. “Please, don’t make me laugh.”

“The caper,” Elma said and brought it to the table. “How will you drink this?”

“Just throw it in my cup.” Agatha clutched the cup and rattled it, and sucked down half the water.

“Make mine onions,” I said, a little impatiently. I wanted a drink.

“I know what you want,” Elma said.

“I didn’t tell you, and you asked.”

“But I knew then when she had the capers you would get the onions and not the twist.”

“You just reasoned your way there?”

“I do not know what these reasons are that you talk about.”

“I’ll never get it fucking straight, I know, moyotis, agony in my diaper,” I said.

The door knocked. Agatha lifted her finger and said, “Lawyer. Let him in.”

In walked Abby Vonneniu dressed in black pinstripe, and Dr. Oyub, in a maroon double breasted suit with a pink vest and red shoes, their shapes cue and cue ball.

“Mr. Martin,” said Vonneniu. “Pleased to meet you again. You remember Dr. Oyub I presume?”

“Agatha,” Oyub said. “Please tell me you won’t do this.”

She hissed and shook her head. “Not die alone…please.” She was quite sicker than before. Her head went down face forward onto the table, resting on the tube protruding from her nostrils. Her hair was white and lustrous, while the rest of her was parched and wasted. Like the stories they told in school of the Nuwu Sybil and her dog, which sat in Old Woman cave weaving a rug and making soup. Every time she got up to stir the soup the dog-chewed part of the rug, which she would then fix until it was time to stir the soup again. So she never finished weaving the rug, which was just as well since if she ever did stop weaving it a fire would come down out of the north and destroy the earth. She could never die but was cursed to age forever, and so as she sat weaving and stirring, her flesh got drier and drier until it flaked off and blew around like leaves. And still, even as she turned to dust, she stirred the soup and wove the rug. It was she who prophesied the return of Chingishnish.

Oyub was reduced to yelling into Agatha’s ear, and she lifted one finger for yes and two for no. “So these are your final wishes then?” he shouted, his short fat body bent forward. She raised one finger. “Do you understand what I am saying?” She raised one finger. “Is there any reason to suspect that you are insane or stupefied by illness?” She raised two fingers. “Let it be noted that she is of sound mind and body. Able to assent and dissent.” He stood upright and said to Vonneniu, “Very well. Let us proceed.”

Vonneniu said, “In essence, because the de Marcoses predeceased Miss Kennedu, ownership of the property reverts to her and she has the right to leave it to whomever she pleases, not being constrained by the prior will in anyway, and there being in addition no claims by descendants of the de Marcoses. Therefore the de Marcos estate now relinquishes any hold or claims on the property.” Oyub and Vonneniu shook hands and bowed slightly. Agatha raised one finger.

Oyub said into Agatha’s ear, “In consequence of which I move to file the last will and testament of Agatha Moar Kennedu, daughter of the Fifth Lord of Malibu and Hattie Carrol, a maid in the kitchen, her sole inheritance being the house at 145678459018 Topanga Canyon Spur Remote Plot 57, and the contents therein and precious metal and jewels sufficient for her keep; the terms of said will being modified to make Elma von Doderer of 145678459018 Topanga Canyon Spur Remote Plot 57 the sole beneficiary of the estate. The executor shall be Dr. Vovim Oyub.” He looked at her ear and wet his lips. “Are these the terms we are agreed to?”

Agatha lifted her bony finger and hissed. Oyub leaned closer, as she attempted to speak while resting face down on the oxygen plug. “Hehhh” she said, and pushed herself upright. “Yes,” her voice trembled, “Those are the terms.” Down went the face again. She obviously had to have some strength in her. She didn’t flop forward but dropped slowly. The old lady was squeezing Oyub’s balls.

“Now we have another document here, Elma, which must be signed as a condition of the will. Agatha wishes to go home, to the house the three of you now rent from her. She feels she would be more comfortable there. This is a contract between Elma von Doderer, Irmela von Doderer and Agatha Moar Kennedu. Elma von Doderer and Irmela von Doderer agree to serve as Agatha Moar Kennedu’s private nurses. You will be allowed to continue as tenants, the three of you. Is this agreeable as a condition for becoming Miss Kennedu’s sole heir?”

Elma looked at Irmela and they flexed nostrils and blinked and bit their tongues. Elma said, “I can do that. I agree.”

Irmela said, “Yeah alright. I can do this too. I love you Agatha.”

“I think we all love Agatha,” I said.

Oyub said, “Without doubt.” He fixed his tie and gazed at the old lady. She was mouthing the words fuck you. “Is that it then?” Agatha lifted two fingers. “What?”

She raised her head laboriously this time and said in a frail whisper, “Proxy.”

Oyub stifled a growl and said, “Ahem. The Proxy Document. This document appoints Elma von Doderer medical proxy for Agatha Moar Kennedu. Agatha Moar Kennedu intends to die at home. Hospice care is to be provided there. She wants moderate, not extraordinary measures to be taken in her behalf. What constitutes moderate and extraordinary measures is defined in schedule C of the end of life protocols manual. Do you agree to be medical proxy?”

Elma looked at Agatha’s face carefully, her head turned slightly. “Is this what you want?” she asked.

The old lady’s finger shot forward emphatically from the knuckle and remained stiff and still. “Then I will do what must be done.” Elma’s eyes welled up with tears and she dropped to her knees and took the old lady’s frail hand in her own. “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this. You don’t know what a bad person I am.” The tears coursed straight down her cheeks and her hair burned a ferocious gold. She lifted her head and said to all of us, “I will allow nothing to happen to her. In my hands she will be safe and comfortable, this I promise.” I looked at Irmela. Her face was blank. She looked like she was being fucked in a porno film. I thought, that old lady won’t make it a month. In three, four weeks she’ll die and I’ll own that house. And every inch of it legal, written and sworn to here in front of witnesses. Even with Oyub as executor. I didn’t go to law school for nothing. Elma was now my client and no gabacho puta madre lawyer in a motherfucking suit was gonna screw her out of her house and jewels. I was.
 

PARIS BURNING

PARIS BURNING

April. Dark delays of winter come.
Behind the shutters blind mad hatters play with dice
Rolling snow and clay and fire.
At the edges, small ceramic portraits
Of burning faeries on the sod.

Stealth are the winds that scatter leaves
And shatter the moon on puddles of ice.
Scarce are the tunes that would rid me of the blues tonight.
Now the fire blooms and hangs about the place.

It must be Paris burning. Are we on a honeymoon—
An old man, a little fool and a parrot.
He approaches the heath. Another screed.
The cliff! The cliff! he screams.
Pebbles rush into sand. Sand slides into waves.
Retreat, I say. I feel its frigid breath on my cheek
Turn wet and evaporate.