I'd like to read some excerpts from the book I've been working
on for quite a long time, which is an effort that developed
in the course of trying to treat this material to reintroduce
fictional method to poetry.
It's been used in a scattered way,
but by and large the poets have left
scenes and fictional technique to the prose writers.
And I think they've left out too good a thing.
Chaucer had something going that 20th century lyric
poetry has dropped off.
Browning had his own way of getting it back,
but by and large though poems have told limited stories,
they haven't tried to do what the short story is doing.
This is a book to be published in May
and it's called Lives of X.
And I suppose I didn't want to call them autobiographies
because they're lives of people I used to be once
but have stopped being.
So it stops being auto.
X is some unknown quantity and it
has had a number of lives on gone through various stages.
And as I say, I didn't set out to develop a method,
but in order to treat this material
I had to use devices that had fallen away from poetry.
And I suppose some people will decide that I've gone dull
or maybe I've always been dull because if one
is going for lyrical intensity, he can
write a certain kind of line.
But if he is writing a scene, the scene
has to have the structure.
And the lines have to know how to relax
as well as how to get tight.
And that's the balance one walks.
If you lose the balance you fall off,
and I'm not ready to say I haven't fallen off.
This is the best I could do with them.
This poem is called "The Benefits of an Education,"
and the scene is Boston 1931 as indicated in the subtitle.
And there are perhaps two things I should explain.
I lived in Medford.
Having been born in Boston, we moved
to Medford which is a suburban town about seven miles out.
And on my way into Boston during the Depression-- and nickel
was a lot of money.
Everybody was squeezing a nickel one way or another, sometimes
indecently.
But Charlestown was Irish town and it
was built on Bunker Hill, which is really
Breed's Hill is where the battle was.
Bunker Hill is the larger configuration.
And there's a long several mile slope
down this hill and a straight line
to where the elevated terminal is like a forest of girders
rising out of a circle called Sullivan Square.
And one of the manhood rituals of the young toughs
would be to steal a car and ride the loop, which
means you get going about 80 miles an hour
or faster and just plow down the middle of this street
and hope the cops would chase you.
And then when you got the Sullivan's Square,
you hope you miss the girders which
wasn't easy to do because you had
to dodge in and out of them, and then you would clear off
toward Everett and jump the car and go back
and you are a big shot in the gang of savages.
And riding in the loop was one of the madnesses of the times.
I suppose it was like marathon dancing and this sort of thing.
I think it's an impressive recollection because
of the poverty of imagination that
would make this a rich thing to do, I suppose.
Kids in the Midwest have been playing some fairly high level
games of chicken on the highways, which
is another kind of poverty of the imagination.
I mean get yourself killed interestingly,
at least, not proving to some oaf
that you're a bigger oaf than he is.
And also at the same time a phenomenon
that has disappeared very largely I recall around Boston
I grew up a whole ring of rather ugly frame houses.
And during the Depression people could not
keep up the mortgage payments and the bank repossessed them.
And when the house was foreclosed
they would put a red flag on it meaning
this house was for sale if you could
pay the taxes in the back mortgage payments,
and nobody could.
And I recall walking down streets.
They seldom evicted anybody.
It's better to have somebody in the house
even if he wasn't paying rent, than to have it empty
and have the pipes freeze.
But it was a rather dreary symbol
of the time to find house after house with a red flag on it.
You see somebody had made his investment
and started to pay off the mortgage and lost his job
and lost his house.
And it was part of that miserable milieu
and here's the poem.
One summer I had a job on an excursion fishing boat
and fell in love with Boston Harbor.
And one of the islands of the harbor, these
were great glacial drumlins.
But when the glacier melted it sometimes
had a pocket full of dirt in it.
And if there was enough dirt, it would make a hill,
and some of these stuck up out of the water
and would be islands.
And then very rapidly the tides eroded them
and they disappeared.
And one of the famous ones is the Nixie's Mate
because the mate of the pirate Nixie back in colonial days
was hanged for piracy.
And he insisted that he was innocent.
He was hanged on the island that was later
named the Nixie's Mate and he insisted
that it was he was innocent.
And the time would prove it because the island on which he
was hanged would disappear.
And it is all but disappeared.
It's just a mud shallows now.
And I guess he had watched the harbor
and knew that these islands were going and wanted
to make a metaphysical joke toward the end
because I suspect he was guilty.
But it's nice to have observant criminals.
"A hulk, three masted once, three stubbed
now carried, away by any history and dumped
in a mud ballast of low tide, heeled over and a third
swallowed in the black sucked south of the Nixie's Mate,
itself going, gave me a seal of memory
for a wax I wouldn't find for years yet this was Boston.
Men with nothing to do plovered the sand edge
with clam rakes that raked nothing.
I walked home over the drawbridge
skirting on my right Charlestown,
ramshackle holdover Bunker Hill and waiting
for hopped up kids to ride the loop and die in a tin
rumble against the girders of Sullivan Square
or dodge away toward Everett and ditch the car then
walk home and be heroes to ingrown boyos,
poor as the streets they prowled.
There, house to house, the auctioneer's red flag
drooped its torn foreclosure to no buyer.
Now and then a blind man who could see
and his squat wife who could stare out
at nothing sat on the curb by the stacked furniture
and put the babies to sleep in dresser drawers
till charity came or rain made a pulp of all.
The rest lived in.
Got in their limp red flags, the bank
was the new owner and that was all.
Why evict nothing much to make room for nothing?
Some sort of man is better than no man
and might scrounge crates to keep the pipes from freezing
until the water co turned off the meter.
Or come election when men got their dole,
the bank might get the trickle of a rent that wasn't there.
I'd walk those seven miles from Medford to T Wharf
to get my job on the King Philip.
While not quite a job but work free passage and a chance
to scrounge nickels and fish all summer till school
opened Miss Bates and Washington Irving.
The King Philip rose sheer, three riverboat decks top
heavy, but she could ride an inner harbor swell
and not quite capsize, though God knows she would try.
Excursion fishing.
She put out at nine from the creaking stink
of Sicilian fishing boats praying
for gasoline they sometimes got and came back in at five.
In any weather that might turn up a dollar
a head half deck load doling four quarters
into the first mate's hand as if the fish they meant to eat
were in it and not still on a bottom out past luck, sometimes
hundreds or more.
But of them all not 20 would turn up with a dollar bill.
It was all change.
We call the first mate jingles waiting for him
to walk across the Wharf and spill his pockets into the tin
box in the fish market safe.
When he came back his name was Dixon and we could cast off.
Your dollar back, you eight hours on the water, free lines,
free bait, your catch and noon to one,
all the fish chowder you could eat.
Good days, the decks were slimed with pollock, cod, hake,
haddock, a flounder or two, and now and then a skate.
A sharp man with a saw-toothed small tin
can punch out Foolish Scallops from a skate's wing.
A Foolish Scallop is a scallop for fools who
eat it and don't know better.
I made a scraper by screwing bottle caps to an oak paddle
and went my rounds, cleaning the catch for pennies,
or grabbing a gaff to help haul in the big ones.
Dixon, jingling again, took up a pool,
a dollar for the biggest cod or haddock, a half
for the largest fish of any kind.
No house cut but the little he could steal and not be caught
or, being caught, pass off as an honest man's
mistake in a ripped pocket.
The deal was winner-take-all.
And the man that gaffed the winning fish aboard
was down for a tip.
One Sunday, with over a hundred in the pool,
I gaffed to skate we couldn't get aboard.
Dixon boathooked it dead still in the water,
then rigged a sling and tackle from rotten gear
and I went over the side and punched two holes
behind its head.
Then we paid out the hooks the firemen used
for hauling cans of ashes to dump them overboard,
and I hooked it on, and all hands hauled it
clear to hang like a mat from the main to the lower deck.
We couldn't weigh it, but it was no contest.
Dixon paid on the spot.
He counted it out to fifty-seven dollars, and I got two.
We took it into the wharf and let
it hang, a flag, till the next day when
we cut it loose with half of ceremony, mostly of flies,
just as we cleared Deer Island.
The Captain didn't want that shadow floating
over his treasury of likely bottoms,
so we let the current have it.
After five, the firemen rigged the hose,
turned on the pressure, and I washed down,
flying the fish and fish guts out
of the scuppers in a rainbow spray to a congregation
of God-maddened gulls screaming their witness over the stinking
slip, for leavings.
Fishermen are now keepers.
One to eat, a few to give away, and that's enough.
The scuppers might spill over, and the deck
on both sides of a walkway might be
littered with blue-backed and white-bellied gapers staring.
I cleaned the best to haul home.
Or I did when I had carfare, or thought
I could climb the fence into the El and ride free.
Now and then, Gillis, who ran a market next to ruin,
would buy a cod or haddock for nothing a pound
and throw in a pack of Camels.
And half the time an old clutch of black shawl
with a face inside it and a nickel in its fist
would flutter aboard like something
blown from a clothes-line near a freight yard,
and squeeze a spit accordion in her lungs
to wheeze for a bit of "any old fish left over," flashing
her nickel like a badge, and singing widowed beatitudes
when I picked a good one and wrapped it in newspaper
and passed it over and refused her ritual nickel
the third time.
"I can afford to pay, son."
"Sure you can."
"Here, now, it's honest money."
"Sure it is."
"Well, take it then."
"Compliments of the house."
"God bless you and your proud mother,"
she'd end, and take the wind back to her line.
Then the Fish Market man got after Dixon
for letting me steal his customers.
Nickels are nickels.
For all he knew, I might be stealing from him
out of that pocket of nothing.
But I foxed him.
Next time the old shawl came I sent her off to wait
by Atlantic Avenue.
And I'm damned if the Fish Market
man didn't call to her waving a flipper of old bloat, calling
"Cheap!
Just right for a pot of chowder!"
After that, I made an extra bundle every night,
cleaned and filleted, and once she wasn't there
I fed the cats, or anything else of God's that
didn't run a market.
Then five nights running she didn't come.
Which in God's proper market might be more mercy
than all nickels are, whoever keeps the register, whoever
folds old shawls for burial.
Some nights, once, twice a week or some weeks
not, the ship was charted for a stag by the VFW--
We used to call them the Victims of Foreign Whores.
--or some lodge, or some club, though the promoter
was always the same stink in tired tout's tweed.
He rigged a rigged wheel forward on the lower deck,
sold bootleg by the men's room, used
the Ladies' as an undressing room for the girlie show that
squeezed its naked pinched companionway to the main deck
"salon" to do the split or sun itself in leers,
clutching a stanchion, or, when the hat was passed,
to mount the table and play house, if not home,
two at a time, with a gorilla stinking of pomade who came
on in a bathrobe from the Ladies'.
Two shows a night, prompt as mind's death
could make them while it still had a body.
And on the top deck, for an extra quarter,
Tillie the Artist's Model undid her flickering all on a canvas
screen lashed to the back of the wheelhouse,
where the Captain kept a sharp Yankee
watch for the Harbor Cruiser.
He was a good gray stick of salt,
hull down in some lost boyhood that
had put to sea with the last whales still running in myth.
And down to this, or be beached flat,
keeled over like Boston, or that hulk off the Nixie's Mate,
to stink in the mud for nothing.
Nevertheless, it was some education and some school.
I panted at those desks of flesh flung open,
did mountains of dream homework with willing Tillie,
and, mornings, ran a cloth and a feather duster--
God knows where it came from.
I'd guess Mrs. Madden who cooked the daily chowder of leftovers
in her throbbing galley.
--over the counters, chairs, and the great ark-built table,
still flesh-haunted.
If it wasn't an education, it was lessons in something
I had to know before I could learn what I was learning.
Whatever there was to learn in the stinking slips
and cat-and-rat wet alleys off the black girders
and the slatted shadow of the Atlantic Avenue El in Boston
where the edge-grinding wheels of nothing
screeched something from Hell at every sooty bend.
I took home more than I brought with me of all Miss Blake
and Washington Irving knew of Sleepy Hollow."
I'm going to skip a part here.
"Still, I got one thing from my education.
One stag-night when the tired tout's bootleg
sold too well for what it was, four poisoned drunks lay
writhing in the stern on the lower deck in their own spew.
And one, half dead but groaning, green in his sweat,
lay choking and dry-heaving his pump broken.
While from the deck above girls clattered,
the pimp spieled, and the crowd raved.
Dixon came after me with the tout.
"Hey, kid, got a good stomach?"
Dixon said.
"Got a good stomach?", Dixon said.
"Yeah, sure," I told him, honored.
"It's a dirty job."
"What isn't?"
"Five bucks!" said the tout.
"Five bucks!
Here, Johnny.
Five bucks cash and you can hold it!
My God, the guy could die!"
and pass the five to Dixon who spread it open with both hands
to let me see it before he put it away.
"And a deuce from me if you'll do it,"
he tacked on, taking my greedy silence for resistance.
"Who do I kill?"
I said, taking the line from George Raft, probably.
"Look, kid, it's legal.
You save a guy!" the tout said in a spout.
"Lay off," said Dixon, and putting his hand
on my shoulder, he walked me off two paces.
"It's like this.
The guy's choked full of rotgut and can't heave it.
I tried to stick my fingers down his throat to get him started,
but I just can't make it.
Kid," he said, "it take guts I ain't got.
You got the guts to try?"
And there I was with the chance to have
more guts than a first mate, and seven dollars to boot!
"Which guy?"
I said, only for something to say.
I knew already.
"That groaner up by the winch.
I got a fid to jam between his teeth--"
You know what a fid is?
It's a piece of hard wood, long and comes to a point,
for being passed through--
for splicing rope.
And he'd put the thick end of the fid
in the man's teeth to keep him from biting down, taking off
a finger.
"I got a fid to jam between his teeth
if you'll reach in and stick your fingers down his throat."
We raised him, half sitting, with his head
back on the chains, and Dixon got the thick end of the fid
jammed into his teeth on one side.
"Let's go kid!" he screamed, almost as green
as the half-corpse that had begun
to tremble like a fish thrown on the deck, not dead yet,
though too dead the buck again.
But when I touch the slime that might have been his tongue,
I couldn't make it.
"Dixon, I can't do it!"
"Well, damn your eyes, you said you would.
Now put up, or by God I'll have you over!"
"Wait a minute," I said, catching my education
by the tail.
"Can you hold them there a minute?"
"If he lives.
Now where the Hell you going?"
"I'll be right back," I called, already going.
"I'll be right back."
I ran to the locker, grabbed the feather duster,
and ran back, snatching out the grimiest feather,
took out my knife, peeled off all but
the tip, then fished his throat with it,
twirling the stem till I felt in not up.
"Evoe!"
I shouted for Bacchus to remember I remembered,
not knowing till later that I mispronounced it "EE-VO,"
not giving Bacchus all his syllables.
"Heave-ho it is!" roared Dixon and ducked aside as the corpse
spouted.
"There, by God, she blows!"
And blow she did.
I've never seen a man that dirty and still alive.
Except maybe the tout clapping me on the shoulder.
"You did it, kid.
By God, you did it!
Johnny, didn't he do it!"
Dixon wiped his hands on the drunk's back where he had
twisted and sprawled over the winch-drum--
What reflex is it turns a dead man over
to let him retch face-down?
--and fished the five out of his pocket.
"Where'd you learn that trick?"
he said as I took the money and waited for more.
I could have told him, "Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Julian
the Apostate," but it wasn't on Miss Blake's list,
and certainly not on his.
"How about the other deuce?"
I said instead.
He was holding the feather duster by the handle
and turning it in his wrist to inspect it from all sides
and looking down into its head of fuzz.
"What's this thing doing on a ship?" he said.
"Waiting for Romans," I told him, guessing his game
but hoping to play him off.
"That's history, Dixon.
When a man went to a banquet and stuffed himself,
he'd head for a men's room called a vomitorium,
tickle his throat with a feather, do an upchuck,
and then start over.
How about that deuce?"
"If you're so smart, then you can figure out I
said if you used your fingers."
"Hey," said the tout, "If you ain't paying up,
get back my fin!
If you can welch on this punk kid, then I can!"
"Go peddle your sewer sweat," Dixon said.
"Here, kid.
You earned it right enough.
Go buy yourself more education."
And stuffed into my pocket a crumple
I unfolded into one bill--
See, you always have to save what you can in those days.
--while he went forward, shoving the tout away.
Six dollars then, one short.
But the first cash my education ever
paid, and that from off the reading
list, though of the Empire, if not the Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the hat passed, the crowd's roar signaling,
the pomade gorilla came from the Ladies' and pushed up
the stairs from his own vomitorium to the orgy where
low sisters of meretricis honestae waited to mount
their table through lit smoke into my nose-to-the-window
education one deck below the Captain's Yankee eye on watch
for the Harbor Cruiser and the tide,
bearing off Thompson Island to the left,
Deer Island to the right, and dead ahead Boston's night-glow
spindled like two mists, one on the flood-lit needle of Bunker
Hill, one on the Custom House, both shimmering out to sit
the waters of Babylon off Boston, whose dented cup,
an original Paul Revere fallen from the hand to hand,
I drained like the kings of fornication, mad for dirty wine
and for the kingdoms opening like a book."