unknown auden

A student film maker from N.Y.U. interviewed me about W.H. Auden. Auden was no unknown citizen. I confirmed the usual impressions. I had observed him on a panel at Columbia’s School of the Arts. Auden was slightly overweight and extraordinarily wrinkled. He dressed casually -- he even wore slippers. After an hour, he glanced at his watch, said he had to go, and shuffled on out. He was 63-years-old.

Then I saw him read to a huge sold-out audience at the 92nd Street Y. He recited his own poems by heart. Only once did he falter--did he glance quickly at a manuscript on the podium, or merely flip his hand a few beats to jog his memory? He seemed seamlessly to resume.

Auden was on TV! He was no actor but he had his lines down. Dick Cavett asked him questions. Auden tended to quote himself with his answers. He didn’t look at Cavett or at the camera.

So finally the time came to phone him and arrange our hour of interview. “I’ll be there promptly at 4:00pm,” I told him, “with my tape recorder.”

“No tape recorder,” he said. He then disparaged cameras, and clicked off.

Auden’s apartment was being broken up. Books and opera records were in piles or in boxes. Shelves were half-empty. He was leaving St Mark’s Place for Oxford, England.

At the end of his life, Auden’s poetry seemed to collapse into a faggy folksiness, a campy pointlessness. The poems were certainly charming but--why bother? They were in any case the opposite of The Orators, his willfully obscure and scarcely readable second book. Allen Ginsberg wrote a homage to this late vein of camp verse in Indian Journals and it amused me mightily. I asked Auden if he liked Ginsberg’s homage. Auden seemed excited; he’d never seen it, and asked me to send it to him.

Months later I told Ginsberg how much I liked that homage. Ginsberg wondered if Auden had seen it.

“Auden’s seen it,” I said. “I sent it to him.”

Ginsberg looked stricken. “My poem was mean,” he said.

Paying for Sex

Money is the hobgoblin of impoverished souls. After her seduction and abduction by the cruel criminal, she saw that she was kidnapped. She realized she was his slave. He sold her to a brothel. He needed the money. He was paid five hundred dollars for her soul.

Did Sally succeed and suck them silly? And did she get sick? And was she freed from the garden of earthly delights? And did she pay for the clap with several organs? And did she grow fat and slatternly sitting at a desk for ten years maintaining health insurance?

And then did a cruel cutthroat stab this secretary, this Sally, to steal her savings? And thanks to health insurance, was it all just another scar?

Love and Fish

An anti-valentine event was a very useful reading for me as a writer. When I began looking for material about stinking love I drew a blank. But 99% of my writing sits unpublished in notebooks, and I finally remembered my green notebook -- wherein for ten years I've sketched out the how and who and why romantic interests fail. I gave each of these women Baseball Hall of Fame names. Jane Adler, for instance, is Tris Speaker. I'm always angry at these women when I write the poems but, sometimes because I wrote the poems, I am no longer angry. They are often in fact friends. The portraits are recognizable, especially to the subjects -- despite "the names have been changed to protect the innocent." There are a couple of dillies about Colette. I kept looking towards the back of the room to make sure she hadn't arrived late (she's always late). In the event at the podium I decided to read no www.NapLajoie poems (Colette’s a wrong-way Women). And I had also intended to read a poem called Jackie Robinson, but as Rosie Schaap, the organizer, introduced me to Mike Eustace I immediately thought -- I guess Jackie is out.


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"love"

good words @ Good World a reading series featuring a different theme every month, continues on Sunday, February 10. Valentine's Day, schmalentine's day, Reading #11 is LOVE STINKS!, with

poems by Michael Andre, editor of Unmuzzled Ox, an occasional magazine of poetry, art and politics founded in 1971. His books of poetry include Studying the Ground for Holes (1978) and Experiments in Banal Living (1998). The opera Orfreo, for which he wrote the libretto, premiered at the Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.

fiction by Amy Holman, whose occasional columns on knitting appear in The Huffington Post. Her poetry has won the Dream Horse Press National Poetry Chapbook Competition, and has been selected for The Best American Poetry 1999. She is writing a novel, and excerpts have been published in Shade and The Cortland Review.

and

fiction by Kristin McGonigle, who was, until recently, print editor of the literary magazine Pindeldyboz.

The event is free, and it starts at 5:00 p.m.

Good World Bar and Grill is located at 3 Orchard Street, between Canal and Division.

valentine coming

good words @ Good World a reading series featuring a different theme every month, continues on Sunday, February 10. Valentine's Day, schmalentine's day, Reading #11 is LOVE STINKS!, with

poems by Michael Andre, editor of Unmuzzled Ox, an occasional magazine of poetry, art and politics founded in 1971. His books of poetry include Studying the Ground for Holes (1978) and Experiments in Banal Living (1998). The opera Orfreo, for which he wrote the libretto, premiered at the Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.

fiction by Amy Holman, whose occasional columns on knitting appear in The Huffington Post. Her poetry has won the Dream Horse Press National Poetry Chapbook Competition, and has been selected for The Best American Poetry 1999. She is writing a novel, and excerpts have been published in Shade and The Cortland Review.

and

fiction by Kristin McGonigle, who was, until recently, print editor of the literary magazine Pindeldyboz.

The event is free, and it starts at 5:00 p.m.

Good World Bar and Grill is located at 3 Orchard Street, between Canal and Division.