Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Incredibly kind words about CONNOR AND SEAL from a historian and queer studies scholar whom I have the honor of calling a friend. Henry Abelove, the author of the groundbreaking study DEEP GOSSIP gives permission to be quoted and attributed. "I love the concept but still more the wondrous forms it takes in your imagination and writing. Harlem is so rarely allowed to figure America, and America's immigrants are so rarely represented as black in our canonical poetry, even in our canonical gay poetry. See, for instance, Hart Crane: “New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt” -- Italians, Swedes, Irishmen; but now we have Seal, too.... "And your poems beautifully echo (for me anyway) the works and graces of many of your predecessors. I hear Langston Hughes’s rhyming rhythms distinctly in “Arrival New York.” But Elizabeth Bishop is there, too — “Arrival at Santos.” I remember that you told me that you weren’t keen on George Oppen. Yet his cityscape — his sense of its multiple s...

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Monday I finally met a Singaporean author whom I've admired for some time. Visiting from London, she is here for a month to work in her company's NYC office. At Grand Central Oyster Bar, we had a dozen oysters each. They all had beautiful names that reminded us of where they came from. The only name I remember now is Wellfleet Massachusetts, because of the Elizabeth Bishop poem . My dining companion expressed relief at the lightness of our repast, having been troubled by the size of American portions. She loves living in London as much as I do living in New York. A reason? The seasons. This is not the shutter happiness of tourists, nor the novelty of snowfall to the tropical student. We have both lived in temperate countries for years, in fact, in each other's country, if the possessive is apt here for a pair of immigrants. The seasons mark the passing of time. The markings may be highly uncomfortable—t...

What to say about Elizabeth Bishop that has not already been said? What I find most valuable in Bishop is her strangeness, in poems such as "The Man-Moth," "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "Sestina." These poems are strange, it seems to me, because they retain a childlike innocence that all of us lose by growing up. Even the famous observational powers have something of childish wonder in them, as if the world is seen by a precocious child. I wrote several poems in response to her work, but in the end only two made it into my book STEEP TEA. My poem "The Clocks" tries for Bishop's tone of astonishment. In her early poem "Paris 7 A.M.," the child-speaker makes "a trip to each clock in the apartment." It is so characteristic of her to describe her movements inside the confined space as trips. More, she has to check whether every clock in the apartment tells the same time, as if half-expecting some discrepancy, some fis...

I met Henry Abelove at Dorothy Wang's book party, and was introduced to his book of essays called Deep Gossip . The title is taken from Allen Ginsberg's elegy for Frank O' Hara. After describing O'Hara as a "Curator of funny emotions," Ginsberg praises him for his ear "for our deep gossip."  The essays are as engrossing as gossip, an apt compliment if we think of gossip as the sharing of information between disempowered people. In these essays, Abelove  performs careful and gracious corrections to what has been underestimated, overlooked and sidelined.  Like many gay men, I have read Freud's letter to the American mother, but had not realized that it was his last riposte to the moralism of American psychoanalysts. In the next essay, the suggestion that other sexual practices besides "intercourse so-called" have been redefined as foreplay in the late eighteenth century is brilliant.  Since I am not a fan of marriage, Abelove's read...

I Do, I Do In me (the worm) clearly is no righteousness, but this— persistence             H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” I’m eating my way through the books of dead women poets— Aemilia Lanyer’s garden where Eve is blameless the robin-eye in Elizabeth Bishop Phillis Wheatley’s bird- of-paradise the swart swan song by Marianne Moore Anna Wickham’s strangled cry the tunes of Li Qingzhao Annie Finch, not the American anthologist, the Countess of Winchilsea the living are eaten too Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Sherborne Woodcock, Pied Wagtail, Starling Molly Peacock Rita Dove And one born in Ghana whose name is a birdcall Ata Ama Aidoo

Correction until a name/ and all its connotation are the same. Elizabeth Bishop, “Conversation” When he asks me for my name, I give him Jee. No, your real name, he insists. Don’t patronize me because I am American. I tell him my name is Jee Leong, but in America I go by Jee. Jee Leong, he elongates, now that is a beautiful name. He is right I didn’t think he could remember Jee Leong but he is wrong to think I made Jee up for him.

Marianne Moore in Japan The weak overcomes its      menace, the strong over-      comes itself. —Marianne Moore, “Nevertheless” I don’t think I would like you very much, Marianne Moore, if we should meet in a beach resort or poetry workshop. It is unladylike, you advised Miss Bishop, to write water closet . She ignored you and now the student is far more popular. She has vulnerability on her side, and the times are partial to helplessness, after wars, pandemics, home foreclosures. What do you have? Another armored animal. See what I mean? How does a reader get close to such glittering finish, how does a lover who will smudge? It’s not sexy to be counting syllables beneath the breath when you can write up ( write it! ) a disaster. Still, I would like to know what you make of the earthquake in Japan, the epicenter at Fukushima prefecture, when shells broke up and we are shown up to be soft through and through. Would you cry with us, castig...

In his TLS March 18 2011 Commentary piece, Bill Bell explains the vast institutional apparatus established by the early nineteenth century--supported by religious interests, government agencies and philanthropic organizations--whose sole purpose was to instruct and enlighten the British colonial reader. He disagrees, however, with postcolonial critics like Elleke Boehmer who argues that the British Empire was "essentially a homogeneous textual exercise" [Bell's words]. Instead, he points to the subtle but significance resistance put up by individual colonial readers writing in their journals or putting together their libraries. He quotes Nicholas Jose writing on the presence of highbrow literary texts in the Australian bush library at Borroloola in the late nineteenth century: The library encapsulates both a time and a place. It demonstrates the ties that bound the British Empire and the English-speaking world together. . . . I thought of the books as physical objects...

Losing Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master. —Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” It is too hard to end a line with “Art.” It sounds too smug. It is full of intention. The end is not dictated by the start. If the hand begins to write from the heart, paying the passions the right attention, it is too hard to end a line with “Art.” Or else the verse may be brought up too smart for its own good, rhyming with intervention. The end is not dictated by the start. Imagination is no help for the most part. All it wants is to have fun with invention. It is too hard to end a line with “Art.” Just at this stage most villanelles impart some hardwon but elegant comprehension like the end is not dictated by the start. All this we fathom as we ride the cart to the grave, sighing in sad contention, It is too hard to end a line with “Art”; the end is not dictated by the start.                        * 

The Dilapidated God A depilated dog would not look well. —Elizabeth Bishop, “Pink Dog” He lives in a dilapidated god or he is one, he isn’t very sure. The blurry windows are his eyes or windows that will not rub clean and so are given up to time’s deposits and air’s irreversible chemistry. The roof is thinning, he is sure, for when it rains he feels the water seep through the plaster of the ceiling, drip on the furniture and lick his hands, leaving on them a thin layer of mucus that stains everything he touches. Or he is stained by what he touches. He can’t be sure. When his god was strong, strong with the bright consciousness of strength, his god was clearly two. His body was a vital stroke and outside of his sword the world flashes like a sword. But now the water in the sink goes down slowly and he doesn’t know where the problem is. He knows he can’t fix it but it would be some comfort to know what’s holding it up. *

Friday Speaks Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! —Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England” The heart is the most delicious part. The part we do not eat is the feet, too tough the meat, like . . . how do I explain it?. . . like shoe leather. They are unclean, associated with the meanest spirits, to be stamped down. They are a . . . what is the word you use? . . . fetish, no, taboo. That’s right, taboo. We pile them up like an ill-assorted heap of shoes, and burn them afterwards. When they burn, they smell different, not like grass, but like the muddy roots of grass. Things are changing now. We wear shoes and so our feet are growing soft. The young men, the wild men, the reformers, are eating them to make their different points. It was not like that. Not so long ago, my enemies brought me to the island to kill me because I had raped one of their daughters. They had a duty to kill me just as I had a duty to run away. But Crusoe saved...

In the Shower The water used to run out of the mouths of three green soapstone faces. (One face laughed. and one face cried; the middle one just looked….) —Elizabeth Bishop, “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” Heavy glass door, with top and bottom metal bands. The room inside rectangular, two shoulders wide, long as a man lying down, if you were the man. Below the shower head, two rectangular alcoves, a tablet of white scentless soap in the left recess and in the right hairthickening shampoo for your hair. Between the niches one small handle, ceramic, bulging slightly in the middle for an easy grip, to turn from right to left from cold to hot and back. Far enough from water to keep a towel dry, an apse, rectangular too, with an altar cube for you to stand up tall and to accept a mouth. And on the walls, the floor, the alcoves and the apse, small tiles, sea green, intense as lapis lazuli, graze on the inside now of the sarcophagus. *

Kinder Feelings Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” So crowded here, Grand Central Terminal, people pouring along the greatest number of train platforms in the world (with a secret platform to whisk a President with polio to the Waldorf-Astoria) to the Main Concourse, swirling round the stones of tourists—moved unsurely by the rush— dividing in intelligent streams into various passageways, as if separated by an industrious chemist, Mercury perhaps. So different from the one station in Singapore (one station!) where on the walls rice is planted, rubber tapped, tin mined, activities that happened, is happening, elsewhere, not there, and on the platform waiting for the train I watched the grass between the railway ties, burn, between the broken stones, imagined miles of railway tracks crisscrossing everywhere and stones rising to wing the helm of travel’s cathedral. Now I am here, no...

Christmas Trees until a name and all its connotation are the same. —Elizabeth Bishop, “Four Poems: I/Conversation” The Christmas trees are to be mulched. They have been stripped of lights and the green needles that once pinned up the lights are now a dusky green. The cones of needles no longer aim at the sky in a hundred rooms. In the park, left in a pile, looking like the skeletons of umbrellas, with bits of green cloth still attached to the ribs, the trees point their tips in the same but useless direction. In the other direction, the trunks thicken grudgingly to a thickness surprisingly small, the girth of a man’s arm. Instead of a star, the yellow stumps, once earthed, once potted with earth, now show a streaky, fibrous yellow, with small faint rings, pale against all that dark wood, a low constellation. *

Seven/Seven is here again, a new year, the last year of a first decade. For all my Seven/Seven poems this year, I have started a PFFA thread titled "Infinite Variety." From Anthony and Cleopatra , of course. "Age cannot wither her/ Nor custom stale her infinite variety." This month, for a week at least, let Miss Bishop be my muse, please. The Bowl I made a trip to each clock in the apartment —Elizabeth Bishop, “Paris, 7 A.M.” One clock is short. Another clock is dog that bounds round every twelve years and barks at dogs not yet born and dogs gone before. The good clock in the kitchen is a bowl. The one I check to go in step with New York City rests in my pocket, next to my penis, and that clock rings with a ringtone called Melody. So many clocks! How does one keep track of time? I have lived here long enough to have had three loves, one of whom is sleeping in my bed, visiting from the west coast. He is soft, this clock, but nuanced. The second ...