If You Need a Literary Role Model for Commitment: Simon Perchik is 96 and Still Publishing Books and in Literary Magazines Regularly

When I am in more active publishing phases, I always encounter Simon Perchik's poetry.

I was happy to see he's still publishing quality work all over the place.

I had not been aware that his compilation, Hands Collected: The Books of Simon Perchik (Poems 1949-1999), was nominated for the National Book Award at the turn of the millennium. But that was an early and clearly premature summation, nowhere near a Collected Poems, since that retrospective only surveyed his books up to the young age of seventy-six. 

His website humorously flies a quote from Library Journal: "Perchik is the most widely published unknown poet in America...."

Where to situate his poetry?  I like that it's clearly sonically-driven, that the sense of narrative is often incidental if not thoroughly hallucinated (think Rorschachs of sound). But a careful lyricism emerges nonetheless. 

Sometimes he reminds me of Merwin. But with much of the writing, I think of the zen tradition in literature, and the way Perchik's stanzas spin like different quarks in poems like these two at the Superstition [Review] reminds me of the zen poetry of Shinkichi Takahashi.  

In that first poem, ("Her ankle needs adjustments, puddles...") it's as though he's describing a woman's body that won't stay a woman's body, but reveals itself to be the landscape, earth itself, but also the cosmic forces feeding it and moving through it. Takahashi's poems are filled with objects like this that won't stay "the objects they are." Nothing will inhere to the point of definition or the apodictic.

The second poem there also shows a body (feels male this time?) interacting with the earth, its thoughts deferring to its sensorium impinged by terrestrial matter and the weird aesthesis that engenders. It’s a quieter lyricism. Perhaps that is a good mechanical trope to describe the way Perchik’s poems function, in general: descriptions of the interplay between thought and aesthesis in daily life. Most poetry functions in that way, at some level, but in Perchik’s poetry, there tends to be an absence of any sort of strong assertion, and the sense-data seem to chip away at the narrative (uniquely human) elements of each poem, or seek to replace them with their own substance (a metaplasia). In Perchik’s poetry, the phenomenology of the senses is louder (more weighted) than the constructions mind wishes to place upon them. Sometimes, this feels like a visualization of anxiety. Because the senses, once opened fully, can bombard consciousness. Often, it feels as though the “speaker” of the poem is undergoing erasure. Again, this seems congruent with zen practice. There’s a mortal feeling to the way this particular poem ends, but we can’t really tell if all the dirt, the literal earth,which clings to the body in this poem (“and the gravel path clings to your skin) signifies a burial or someone simply arising from sitting or lying on the earth as evening falls.

The mind wants to visualize the "sink" in the poem as a typical kitchen sink, but the image collapses and reassembles itself into something else, perhaps a landscape feature, since few sinks can gather water "waist-deep."Although it is true that we often lean on a sink so that its water is, in a stretch of sense, "waist-deep." But the lines which follow refer to one faucet being "abandoned" as the other "gathers branches." Perhaps this is someone in an abandoned house which is in the process of being penetrated by nature. That could perhaps explain the olfactory imagery, the earthen smells that conjure synaesthesia in the poem. Perhaps it is a sort of belated homecoming. That's one possible read, but surely one among many.

 I like the way the "person" in this poem is maybe you (it is in the grammatical second person) but maybe another you, some disembodied any-person, floating through sense-perceptions that feel more real than any sense of personality that you "possesses." Again, zen.

I think Perchik's lyric poetry gains immeasurably by keeping its lexicon limited to "simple," familiar words. It makes for a comfortable surrealism of the quotidian.

Here are three more Perchik poems published in 2018 in Conjunctions. 

I hope there are many more poems by Simon on their way and that he starts a new trend of poets continuing to write great poetry even when they are centenarians. In case you missed it, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for a stellar collection published when he was eighty-one, and he continues to publish strong work as he enters his nineties now.

Who has time to die when poetry's calling?

I Am Brian

Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.

The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.

Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.

You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.

You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?

How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.

It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.

Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.

You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.

My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.

My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.

First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.

My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.

Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.

Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.

Return. He does return.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.

The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.

Either way, the rooms were cold by then.

The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.

Whoever came in, felt the cold.

I Was Looking for a Book by Robert Gregory

Last night, I had this urge to revisit one of Robert Gregory's books.

I found one of his books, but not the particular one I was looking for. I kept hunting and hunting in different rooms of my house.

Later, I googled him and was sorry to learn that he had passed (August of last year).

I couldn't find a full obituary anywhere. He was living in Lexington, where he was associated with the University of Kentucky.

I didn't know the man except through a few exchanges back when I was more involved in the publishing side of the small press world.

His poetry has an obdurate originality. It's plain-spoken and otherworldly, at once.

If you'd like to read something really interesting that memorializes his unique mindset and voice, check out his Ants in the System: Beginning to Think Strongly About Stories.

I'm grateful for people like Robert, those ones I've met only in spirit. I still feel accompanied by the books. This is one of those enduring mysteries of life for me.

The Seven Principles of Wabi-Sabi (and How they Influence my Visual Art)

I realize there's a typo in the video. I saw it too late, fixed it and re-rendered, but didn't want to re-upload since I had already posted it.

In zen, errors just pinpoint problems with categories usually, right?

Pound

“Timmy’s missing again,” my wife sighed as she lorded it over the stove top, stirring a wooden spoon slowly in a pot. “And dinner will be ready in less than an hour.”

I sighed back, “I’ll check the pound.”

As usual, the parking lot was packed. It wasn’t a long drive, though, so I was there in fifteen minutes and walking past all the children whose fingers were invariably wrapped tightly around the wires of their cage fronts or poking through those wires, as they eyed me and shouted out, “Pick me, Sir! Pick me!” A pasty-looking girl in a ridiculous pinafore barked, “I get straight As! I’ve only had one B in my entire life!” As I drew closer to give her a second look, she snarled and then bounded out through the hole at the back of her cage into the exercise yard, presumably to bite another child.

I saw Timmy consorting with the child in the cage next to his. They were trading something, some sort of contraband. Timmy smiled up at me broadly and asked me what’s for supper. I won’t reproduce the string of invective that flowed from his mouth as I called the kennel tender to open the cage of the child next to his. I didn’t look back once as we three went off together, to sign the papers and pay the fine.

I arrived home with three minutes to spare. The large empty bowls were on the dining room table. My wife smiled much more peacefully as she ladled out the mix of vegetables and who knows what else.

“Welcome home,….?” she said to the boy sitting in Timmy’s chair.

“Ralph,” he finished her sentence. He had heard the question mark.

“Thank you, Mother,” he chimed as he began spooning the stewy muck into his mouth.

“I’m Mom, but I’m also Doris,” she explained, pointing to her chest with her expensively manicured index finger. Her apron had “Fran” stitched on it in red thread.

“I love my family so goddamn much!” I barked in my gruffest dad voice. “Let’s go pass a football after dinner!”

“Indeed, father,” Ralph said, as casual as any psychopathic child. “Footballs are the super-glue of families.”

Mr. Bully Boy, our pit bull, came trotting into the dining room just then and took a chunk out of my wife’s leg, then threw his huge body against the screen door out in the kitchen, which gave way, and ran off to enjoy it somewhere.

“He doesn’t know her yet,” I explained to the boy as my wife went off to bandage her gaping wound.

“Maybe you should take him to the pound, Dad,” Ralph wisely suggested. I liked this kid already.

“Actually, how do you feel about a new mommy?” I asked, as I stroked the chip-off-the-old-block’s hair.

“It sounds like a capital idea, Sir.” my son whispered ingratiatingly. “The spicing of this stew is pedestrian at best.”

But as I went to pee, I heard my wife on the phone in the next room, in total darkness. I could hear the pretend panic in her voice. We’ve all gotten so good at that pretend panic voice now.

“Is this the pound? Listen, there’s a strange man in my house. He’s impersonating my husband. Please hurry. And bring the right goddamn sedatives this time. The last husband ruined my china before you got him to the van. What sort of amateurs are you hiring these days?”

I went into my bedroom and started packing, loading my pockets with a few of my favorite things.

And then I thought about how to say goodbye to my son. I tried to remember words from a television movie I really hated.

Too bad she beat me to the dial. I’m going to miss that kid. One more call and I think we could have had the family just right. The dog knew she was wrong for the role. Dogs always know. I’m gonna miss that dog.

I heard the van brake loudly out front just then, so I sat on the edge of my bed and prepared to act surprised and emotionally wounded.

The Stuff of Nightmares: Do UWS Patients Feel Pain?

I really don't understand the medical ethics, soi-disant, of the prolongation of "life" in patients in a chronic vegetative state with  no consciousness and zero chance of recovery.

The newer term for this medical state, a better and more sensitive descriptor which has been gaining traction recently, is "unresponsive wakefulness syndrome" (UWS).

I would never want to be trapped in such a horrid state, and would not wish that on a worst enemy, if I had such a thing.

My greatest vicarious fear and worry for these individuals is that they might be experiencing pain at some level without being able to articulate any cry for help. This agony could go on for years because of the senselessness of our medical sustenance policies.

I'm not talking about people who stand some chance of recovery at all. I'm talking about the cases where people stand no chance of recovery. Some have been on feeding tubes for decades. Sometimes nearly half a century.

And then I read an article like this one, and the horror is just magnified. Because here is potential proof that possibly a third of these people have the capacity to feel pain. And hospitals are not using anesthesia when surgeries are performed. Why can they not err on the side of caution? It's insane.

In the U.K., the heartbreaking Tony Bland case set a new, moral legal precedent that respects the right of the human being without agency (but possibly the capacity for prolonged physical pain) to be freed from his or her corporeal prison.

In Bland's case, the significant destruction and atrophy of brain tissue, combined with scans that revealed no cortical activity, meant that the ethics of the situation was easier to argue. I expect future legal battles will vary based on the extent to which someone could argue for possible conscious activity.

There have been a few, rare instances in which it is possible that a form of communication might have been established with some of the small minority of UWS patients who might maintain a degree of consciousness. I’m referring to experiments in which UWS patients were asked to visualize different (binary) images to answer “yes” or “no.” Initial results look promising, so it would be unconscionable not to continue in this endeavor. As science progresses, we must use every means at our disposal to try to reach these people and ascertain their mental state, if it can be articulated. Wouldn’t every one of us expect the same, should we be in such an unimaginably horrible plight?

But what's most troubling is that even when individuals have expressly stated in writing or otherwise that they would never wish to be kept alive in such a state (and studies show most people would not want this) this desire, nay, this plea, is disregarded, or else there is a protracted legal battle lasting years before the wish is granted.

Here is a great summation of where the medical ethics stands today, an article from 2016. It includes a discussion of the SSA, the so-called "slippery slope argument," and looks back at the high-profile Schiavo and Englaro cases.

One hopes the future is more humane.

In Rain

sparrows in rain
I watch and watch
the word for you
as much as you

an arrow in your name
how strangely true
and when you fly
without a bow

you launch yourself
at nothing frivolous
I watch and watch
as much as you

Wound

up earlier than wings


how to tell the hours


you don’t care for numbers


blue whispers






what is just


is without hope


blue whispers form


grass listens first






my cat rubs her face


on death’s craggy face


it’s papier-mache


the skull in the window






the sounds of birds


before birds appear


do you seem a transcription


to yourself?






what is just


it’s papier-mache


blue whispers over a skull


now wings arrive






without hope’s burden


blue is more itself


do the birds seem a transcription


to themselves?

Vacant Lot Haiku

vacant lot
wildflowers
holding someone’s mail



red balloon
in a cemetery
holding your breath


evening
shadows
night picks up


in the woods
a snake passes before me
before I pass myself


snake spotting
deep woods
time sheds its skins



deep woods
your time not mine
holds my hand


everything only
borrowed light
speaking



long after
the reflection
the light


which comes first
the light
or the reflection



Kato Shuson
the wildflowers
your soft grenades


garden we planted
then let go–
strange shapes entwine


raging sea
finds one soft spot
in a boulder



bubbles
in ancient glass
hand-me-down windows


empty coffee cup
one continent
pushes another


morning diner
the first one seated
keeps his coat on



her desk’s peeled orange–
a skyscraper
sways in wind



manhole steam
in the night things not words
gossip


bird’s snow trill
all the wasted flutes
in my bones


night coming
a period
grows a tail


a dragonfly
collects energy
from a hot tombstone


morning diner
the waitress pours coffee
from another lifetime


a Monarch unfurls–
as many ways to be born
as die


mushroom
if you touch her house
ghosts emerge


a country
a rain puddle
collects rain


the waitress’s smile
a pink packet
sugar substitute


morning diner
he tells a teen waitress
why suspenders matter


things are far
from their birth–
a worm in rain



frost window
my reflection
must be away


diner parking lot
sparrows kill time
until McDonald’s opens



his family dead
an old man finds new enemies
at a diner


mark on glass
from a dog’s nose
not sure which side


old men’s diner
all the coats
are too big



night’s stars
tell a story
breathless


morning diner
two octogenarians
plot a new country


the wind–
a child’s
half-finished drawing



winter diner
a waitress forgets
Proust’s name again


small diner
a truck with Trump stickers
takes up two spots



starfish–
a blind hand
shows you its teeth


starfish
all night dream
they are starfish



the morning
pretends to be an image
again again



orphaned train car
spring nestlings
sing of new hair


a stone
its starkness
fuzzy in my mind



one room schoolhouse
there’s a wasp trapped inside
local history


a peach’s fuzz
some are aroused
by armor


listening to trains
from a bathtub you say
you don’t say



winter diner
nobody young here
but the sparrows



trains and bird trills
morning’s metallic
in sound


birds then trains
morning sounds
met with silence



a houseplant grows
largely ignoring
nonessential input


funeral hands
people touching people
as autumn does


empty milk jug
in the fridge
as a memo


airplane overhead
sound waves in my body
want out










 Photo: Artem Saranin

Flashback: Did You Ever Get a Chance to Read this Fascinating Article on How CNN President Jeff Zucker Fostered the Rise of Trump?

This article written by Jonathan Mahler for The New York Times Magazine back in 2017 was endlessly fascinating to me.

I had actually been googling to see whether anyone shared my viewpoint that CNN has largely ceased being a news network, as it advertises itself, apart from a few exceptions of largely obligatory reporting. In fact, the network seems to have developed an allergy to news not related to Donald Trump. It's largely just the Anti-Fox Network now.

Hey, I love hearing Trump-bashing as much as the next triggered snowflake, but please, not all day and all night.

Think of all the medical and technological breakthroughs about which we hear nothing on this news network, soi-disant. What about all the impending legislation in the states and at the national level (not directly related to Donald Trump) which threatens our civil liberties? These important changes go unreported.

I remember when CNN was all over the McStay family disappearance, which turned out to be the McStay family murders. Because it was ratings fodder. The story was huge then. Now the trial is underway and they have not reported one word on this attempt by the State of California to mete out punishment for this horrible familicide.

What I am no longer getting from CNN is the daily struggle of American lives.

What I am getting from CNN is the daily struggle of Beltway lives.

This is elitism at its worst.

But, if you read the above linked article, you will see CNN is raking in the dollars. And that's what Jeff Zucker was hired to do. So his conscience is clear, because his conscience is directly tied in to the network's profitability.

All the justice warrior CNN employees who fancy they have skyrocketed from mere news anchors to television personalities probably think they are giving America just what it needs. Witness Chris Cuomo's star break into his largely self-congratulatory prime time show. The more star-based CNN's programming becomes (and I mean those "anchor stars") the more unctuous it all becomes. Chris Cuomo's fawning upon his guests from the left and the right leaves me feeling how empty it all is. Cuomo dances a predictable dance every night. If anything changes, I'll be sure to tune back in. But I'm not holding my breath.

On one typical night on CNN, as someone from the left spouted the expected rhetoric, we could look over to the right side of the screen and watch as Rick Santorum's eyelids grew heavy and started to droop. Clearly, Santorum was starting to fall asleep. And can you blame him? Santorum's drooping eyelids were telling the truth about CNN. Everyone was just phoning it in. Everyone's there for a paycheck. This is a scripted "reality" t.v. show. Nothing truly shocking is going to happen. There will be no revelations or powerful moments. It's nothing more than entertainment now.  Chris Cuomo, self-styled justice warrior, might as well be on Zucker's earlier baby, "The Apprentice."

I find the best source for the real news today is online newspapers. Television news is in dereliction, because its very existence is tied-in too closely to ratings. Ratings skew our perception of reality, or they do if we rely on television news.

I understand why people might just fall into that pattern of trusting television news. And that's because it's easier and the passivity of the situation attracts us. But it's a big mistake to make, and we sacrifice so much if we let networks like CNN become the arbiter of what's really important in America today.

Van Allen Belts-Friendly Haiku

zen retreat
can’t stop not talking
about it

spring day
an app for flying kites
is popular

immigrants trim
wildflowers
floating across a wall

untangling
my dead dad’s fishing line
for no reason

autumn walk–
a ghost app shows
half my neighbors are haunted

cherry blossoms
she deletes Tinder
for several hours

naked
watching sparrows dine
in formal dress

summer evening
we learn the app to fool mosquitoes
is a joke

spring hike
butterflies in my stomach
gender unknown

zen date
we watch stones slim down
in his garden

but do the fish
know they are fish–
we worry

steak plate left out
the cat hums
as she drinks blood

planetarium
a light pointer
touches a nipple

planetarium
kids only interested
in the dark

planetarium
in the darkness a boy
touches Venus

lifting a letter
its sunlight
stays in place

dinner argument
going outside to think
about other planets

book in sun–
light we use to read
part of the words

being young
the maple does it
every year

cat sits
in a rainy window
quietly reading

crow says something
it can’t take
anything back

winter therapy
running the pipes
to avert freezing

snowy night
watching time
it drifts

spring day–
newborn insects
don’t guess they’re orphans

water in my hands–
how old
are you, really?

the mellow cat
given a sibling
becomes Beyonce

sluggish fly
on February’s window–
early or late?

blue rainpot
three goldfish
know your shadow

what’s left
of this life–
a drip in a room

the seconds
listening to an airplane
without me

off-season funhouse
no one makes a face
at distortion

blue paint
chipped off shutters
wood drinks

moonlight–
a lover that won’t
tarnish

finding an old key–
jaywalking
a memory

handing you
a green sprig-top
the carrot below

three-hundred-year-old
floor cradle
diets on dolls

we thought the house ours–
carried out
we see we were its

old house
cracking its knuckles
in our sleep

two girls swimming
in a creek haunt a prison
long years

touching morning
wanting (peonies)
out from under skin

once a ranked diver
he flees to a bathtub–
the lonely mermaid

white noon wall
you know only
my shadow

freezing
on a winter windowsill
Pablo Neruda

summer clouds
the sky’s unreliable
narrators

secret gender
frozen onions
thawing

meteor shower–
cold headlights
on a hitchhiker

weed cutters
in a graveyard
battling presence

death whistles in snow–
groundhog below earth
dreams green things

graveyard wind whistles
a father
calls a child home

rainy day
memory
and its checkpoints

we drive past
blue chicory
I say the same thing

cuckoo nestling
dying amid
strange accents

winter friends–
more birds than people
know my face

spring dreams
a bear knocks the trail’s phone
off the hook again

loving your shawl
frayed edges
of you

winter stew
all we turned down
in a single pot

snow’s brightness
in Shaker windows–
chairs hung on walls

the secrets
cherries sweeten
all winter

on my porch
an iron pot
older than my country

rainy night
your pronunciation
changes

rainy night
dark promises
leak from everything

the railroad tracks
never touch the horizon
mono no aware

forest bathing–
pond bubbles
instead of thoughts

morning’s shells
on sand–
behind on reading

beachcombing,
we find a door from Japan–
where are the sides?

the oldest dad
waves the longest
at the school bus

you crush
a Dixie cup
on a certain word

my needless worry–
black gums
on a black cat

after
a meteor shower
a metaphor shower