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The poems came mostly by email. I printed them out, trimmed the excess paper around one and taped it to the wall in the bathroom next to the mirror. And then there was white space. “Hello (behavior) how (behavior) are (behavior) you (behavior)”. The lake in the poem was my lake, the wounds in the neighborhood where I lived, lived with it, I was a myrmidon, I was hot for the nectar too. I attended the past in the present, scattered across the sea. It was windy there. I was drunk with the poem morning and night, just like Baudelaire commands. At noon, I was usually at work.

Another poem came in the mail, written out by hand. I put it on the refrigerator door with a magnet, next to a bill of lading and above the carbon copy of a hotel sign-in card which asked its guests who they were ‘representing’. Possibly this question had to do with musicians and their managers staying at the hotel frequently. On the card, from a weekend trip with my best friend, I’d answered: ourselves. I thought this answer dumb and funny and unsure of itself and cavalier and elegant and true. Impossible. But represent we did, by the pool, reading and writing, hanging a dress on the closet door and taking its picture, eating at a restaurant, driving in a car, etc.

So here we are, Goodnight Voice, “where the arm can be slid in and out like a sleeve.” The voice, recombinant, in love and discord with the grammars, metrics and recombinant voices (bodies) that come before, alongside, of course the self on this surface (surface social, surface formal) is a construction. It’s Faberge, it’s cream. It’s possible to slide the arm in and out like a sleeve, but also scary and ridiculous, “crude & fragile like sewing a thumb on a marshmallow hammer”. The sleeve is still part of the body (individual, collective) and if not done with great care, the maneuver is going to hurt. Sometimes even then.

It turns out I can’t speak that clearly about these poems I lived with, what’s inscribed inside me now. I watched the poem on the door. I watched the poem on the wall. “Agency, relic of durable love”. I have to admit I quoted this back and forth to myself and others. I have to admit I cried. The tears had nothing to do with the poem but sometimes while crying I would think of this relic, agency. And the no possible crusade imaginable to retrieve it. So I injected its past possibility into the only future I can sometimes imagine: reading. Writing as reading. Later I heard (along with Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, Alice Notley, Jay-Z and others) Carolee Schneeman in the poems, too: “everything that room could want, every room, even Dante. / Yes, her.”

Claudia Rankine writes, in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: “..Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem–is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here.”

In this here there are others, others in the voice that asserts itself, not without dismay, that asks how much we can see and feel another, in the selves that are handed over, others in the troubled care called out for. In the face which is everywhere (“my neck, my back, my neck & my back.”) Goodnight Voice.

July 19, 2008 * 8:47 am