Welcome.
Thank you for being here tonight.
I'm Frances Sjoberg, the literary director
of the Poetry Center.
And I would especially like to say thank you
to all of our speakers who have come from near and far
to help us pay tribute to Jon tonight.
And I'd like to thank you for being here.
Jon was, as you all know, a fantastic poet
an excellent teacher, and it was a great privilege
to have him here at the University of Arizona.
Steve Orlen will do the welcome, and will introduce
the program for you tonight.
I just want to let a couple of things,
that books are available for sale in the lobby at a discount
from the U of A bookstores.
And the authors will remain on the stage after the tribute,
and you can come up through the stairs on the side over there,
to have your book signed or to speak to the speakers.
We also have broadsides, a poem of Jon's,
available in the lobby.
So please take one of those on your way out.
There's a guest book, also, so please feel
free to sign the guest book.
And if you include your email address,
we'll let you know when audio stream of this tribute
will be available on the web.
And now, if you'll help me welcome Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm honored to welcome you to meet some of the friends
and former students of Jon Anderson.
How does one mourn a hermit?
[LAUGHTER]
Many here who loved him found him a reluctant correspondent
and hadn't spoken with him for years.
But at his death, found that they still
held a place for him and their hearts,
for what they learned from his forgiving and encouraging
presence as a teacher, and a pal, and from his poems,
and from some of his wisdom about poetry
and the inner life of the poet.
Some people will give you the shirts off their backs
and, before you put it on, ask you
to travel several thousand miles on your own dime
to pay tribute to a poet who, if he were here,
would feel terribly uncomfortable
and ask where the television is.
That man was Michael Collier, who is back here.
Someone somewhere who thought this up and called David
Rivard and sparked interest across the telephone wires.
And here we are.
I'd also like to thank Frances and Gail, and the workers
at the Poetry Center, for managing this entire evening.
This occasion is as much for us as it is for you.
I promise you that this will be a long evening.
And if you have to pee or get bored or tired,
or have somewhere else to be, don't
feel embarrassed about taking your leave.
Jon would want you to feel comfortable.
I also promise that you will hear
some unique, knockout lyric and meditative poems read by some
of the best poets in America.
I'm now going to read you a list, which many of you have.
The first reader will be Deborah Bernhardt, followed
by Stuart Dischell, Rich Lyons, Gibb Windahl, Kevin Lanoue,
Hank Combellick, Richard Siken, this
is like the great softball team of history.
Which we used to play.
Jet Guido, Annie Guido, Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers,
David Rivard, Boyer Rickel, George Shelton, Bruce Cohen,
Debra Gregerman.
And a name that was left out by mistake, Loren Goodman.
Bodi wasn't able to come down from Flagstaff.
And finally, Michael Collier will read,
and give some closing comments.
So enjoy.
[APPLAUSE]
Last time I was here, Jon was here too.
Later he said, I shouldn't start with a poem
that's six minutes long.
So I learned that one year ago from him.
And you know, he used to say, what
are the delights in a poem?
And I once wrote a poem called "Looking
for Delights," which is after the poem,
"Looking for Jonathan."
And that's a poem that taught me a lot about how to make a poem.
"Looking for Jonathan."
Before sunrise, the sky whitened.
I said to myself, whatever troubles you, leave it.
Then we're speeding into the fields.
Corn, white houses, buses at daybreak,
the same eyes we've brought along before.
But the yellow light looked in at us.
That discomfiture, give it here.
Oh, I knew what had been planned, but where,
and in whose name?
Nonfiction.
Happiest man ran alongside then right-angled, "see you,"
into the white woods.
We followed, of course, on foot.
There, various women, some I knew or had known,
were dancing, filling a clearing.
The pond.
We swam in the old way, lit the green leaves to grow warm.
Our smoke rose into the sun.
When I saw America, she had danced all night.
She was chalk white, leaning on her husband's arm.
I could see the orange hometown coming.
I leaned honestly into my own reflection.
I had no more stories of God.
[APPLAUSE]
How's everybody tonight?
Jon came to us in Iowa City in 1976,
the year before he came to you.
I had met him some months before.
I left Yellow Springs, where he was visiting my poetry
professor, Ira Sadoff.
He told me when I got to Iowa City,
I should introduce myself to another former student, Michael
Stefanko from Ohio University, where Jon had taught
and become best friends with him.
Which is exactly what I did.
Of the many gifts he gave me as a teacher,
the friendship of other poets was the most enduring,
and I believe something he himself had also
learned from Steve Orlen here.
Jon was uncanny in many ways.
He had the ability, at times, to look into people's psyches
and find their strengths and weaknesses.
He pegged right away my relationship with my father,
after I told him the leather coat I wore had been his.
For months afterwards, when I would say particular things
in and out of class, Jon would respond, that's
your father talking, Stuart.
Not you.
And he would be right.
Then there was a marvelous, crazy Jon,
driving his Toyota station wagon full of students
into the cemetery, and diverting over the graves, our heads
bumping on the roof in the middle of the night,
him shouting to the dead, you have no rights.
The dead have no rights.
Jon spending his NEA grant putting us up
on the pinball machine, or constructing grommets--
little troll like creatures made of Silly Putty and body hair,
I won't say from where.
The many late nights he would sense me drifting into sleep
and say, the thing I like best about your new poem
is which, of course, would wake me right up.
And I can still hear Jon, his head full of samurai
movies and Saturday Night Live, speaking to me in Japanese.
Saying, oh, Stuart, I want you to be better poet than master.
Master teach you everything he know.
You go out in world, having forged your sword here
in master's temple.
And he was right.
Thank you, Jon.
[APPLAUSE]
"Years."
Sometimes, in weariness, I stop, because I've been lucky.
I think the future must be quite plain.
Over the trees, the stars are small.
My friends talk quietly, and we have all
come to the same things.
Now if I die, I will inherit a while, their similar bodies.
Now if I listen, someone is telling a story.
The characters mess.
They enchanted each other by speech.
Though the stories they lived were not the same,
many were distracted into love.
Slept and woke alone, a while, serene.
Thank you, Jon.
[APPLAUSE]
What I learned from Jon and Steve,
that I carry into my own teaching,
is to eliminate any kind of professorial barrier.
I think my students would prefer it, but I don't allow it.
They're getting used to it.
I'm in my 13th year at the school I'm teaching at.
This is probably a 4 minute poem.
"From Its Sepia Level."
You are of a certain age when the days are interchangeable.
Where formerly you had suffered introspection and emerged,
and where formerly you had married,
living a popular novel.
Now you were calm, though unsure,
believing this calm to be inconsolable.
A long plane of ennui or private joy.
You had turned back momentarily, then.
Though to your surprise, from concern rather than shock,
to settle a few things and acquaint
yourself one last time.
Then, as you embarked as onto a flat field of water.
Stepping lightly off, you remember the foreshadowing.
An image of adults talking quietly
in the backyard and smoking, the evening of pale
haze around their bodies.
Now that image, in its familiarity, takes care of you.
Another surprise.
Courage is not a requirement.
Because this new expense, in this seeming always
to be a living extension of itself,
only requires your presence.
The slight pressure of your body.
But it is not all reassuring, this comfort,
for you to belong to it.
The world and your small love for it
floats like the talk of the adults, and is barely mutable.
Now you will feel a nostalgia for it.
No longer will you consciously alter its events and friendship
and companionship.
Faces of young students which, after the immediate pleasures
of consent, had settled into composure.
Always refreshing your life.
Must change value now.
Will be less quick and lovelier.
After a long time, and if you again
become articulate or can listen generously,
it can be given to you to be provident.
Though this is at the mercy of time, among other
dependencies, and is not assured.
[APPLAUSE]
Jon was the most anarchic personality of anyone
I've ever known who had a job.
[LAUGHTER]
The most amazing thing he ever told me about poetry
was the fact that he had written every one of his poems
in one go.
Unlike most of us mortals, you take notes and accumulate
and gather.
He would just write and force it on through till it was done.
And truly, he dragged through the rain on Mozart's grave.
This poem is "The Secret of Poetry."
It's a poem I teach frequently.
And the last line is something he truly lived.
When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death, I was lonely.
I suppose this air will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning delighted by frost,
which is death.
And the trees that stand alone, and mist.
When I met my wife, I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.
I suppose this air will go on and on.
Mornings, I kiss my wife's cold lips.
Nights, her body dripping with mist.
This is the air that fascinates.
I suppose you are secretly lonely, thinking of death,
thinking of love.
I'd like, please, to leave on your soul, just one
cold flower, whose beauty would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm really grateful for this night
and honored to be with these folks on this stage.
Jon was a great friend of mine, and a lot of his poems address
friendship.
And he was he was a great friend in life, too.
this poem is another of Jon's poems about friendship,
but this one's written about the friendship between Jon's dog
and Steve's dog.
It's called "Ye Brothers Dogg."
And for those of you who don't know it, on the page
it's written in a sort of pseudo old English
with E on the end of every other word.
And the dogs' names are Hodain D Dogg and Tooley Orlen,
who looks a lot like you.
Ye dog O'Toole who hath not work at
love nor art nor goeth school, sayeth with fart
at Golden Rule.
Be it bitch or biscuit or platter stew,
ye palate alone shall guide you.
Ye dog Hodain forgoeth bone nor doth disdain
to moan for wind and rain, ye snow and fog, ye seasons
sun and world roll on but ye days a dog be not long.
Brothers two you slim Hodain and fat O'Toole,
beneath fence diggeth hole into ye world ye brothers dance.
Nor would return you fat O'Toole and slim Hodain.
Soon as report brothers to doth run amok in neighborhood.
Cautions O'Toole, Hodain, ye may bark, may scowl, and be rude,
but do not bite ye hand what giveth dog food.
Though all complain, the brothers two,
no wind nor rain doth drive them home.
Then sayeth Hodain to brother O'Toole,
though we have been friend through thick and thin, dog
needeth some love from man.
So end ye song of brothers two, away they had flown
and back they flew.
Recline at the yard through seasons and sun,
through wind and rain, ye snow, ye fog, O'Toole, Hodain,
ye brothers dog.
This is called "Camouflage."
Then it was autumn and the leaves fell down,
full of the odors of tobacco and coffee.
When the uncles burped and smoked
and repeated their little histories because weren't they
after all still children?
And you hid your secret body in the room behind the drapes down
flowing as a coming rain, wrapping yourself
in such robes of velvet and lilac patterns of crimson
and India from which to listen and began
to be not so taken with life's events, a meal, a coming storm.
But nuance, yes that was a tangible thing
a child's body could take in, a connection
from this day to that one.
Like the seasons, their terrible seemingly effortless labor to
simply become.
So you turn briefly to the storm where in the distance
some men in the camouflage of coats
were just beginning to run.
I chose this one because Jon was seasonal
and his good months coincided with the baseball season.
The only reason he got through winter
was he was into the metaphysics of the U of A basketball team.
So anyway the seasons affect you so dramatically when
you live in Boston.
He used to in the winter time choose all the games
that he wanted to go to with his friend.
This was his partner at the game.
And what they'd do is they'd hang outside of the grocery
store because if they got $100 worth of receipts, now this
is 1958-59, you got a free ticket.
And it didn't take them long to have all the tickets that they
needed.
I suspect that-- well I don't know about that,
I think I'll leave it like that.
Harumi, Harumi, Harumi.
One weekend the kid brings home Harumi.
Harumi, girl in league with the morning sun.
Black hair, bright eyes, clothes from Bloomingdale's.
Passes through real quickly, dropping cherry clothes.
Next week she gives me a dewdrop vase from Japan,
original, big as a thumb.
I, seeking to impress, stick a buttercup in it,
a sprig of spring, an afterthought, something
off the lawn.
Harumi becomes an East Asian wind.
Tidbits of English spoken in random flight, a foxtrot
of Woburn, Bartok on resin.
I take to walking the neighborhood, looking around.
Harumi blows a tire.
American Pop to the rescue.
She eyes my labor and huff.
I see what I've done.
Harumi, Harumi, Harumi.
Keep loving my son, the imbecile blonde
with the wisenheimer grin.
The kid from alternative cartoon TV explosion.
He's taller than me, looks like a three quarter gentleman.
Harumi and Bodi I hear you both teasing and giggling.
Quit it, Harumi and Bodi.
Still up and it's almost dawn.
This is the strangest love poem I've ever read.
It really is.
He loves someone because she loves someone he loves.
And that's just really generous and sideways.
And that was my experience of Jon, generous and sideways.
Hi.
I hate microphones.
I apologize.
Where is it?
OK.
I'm doing the poem "A Song for Children ".
Where are the tired adults we must court and entertain?
We are helpless like history.
We do not want to begin now to be bathed,
now to be kissed, now to be put to sleep.
We are soft dolls or cups.
The silences they keep.
And so that's that.
We're not like married.
This is my mom.
I'm going to read "Spring Song," which is an odd little poem,
but I think I actually understand this one.
The raccoon laid down at dawn.
Its little feet were pointing upward.
Even the tourists are sick.
And the daily beneficial light, which
had traveled a long time toward us, lies on its head in meadows
and against trees.
It begins to surround us, lighting the leaves easily,
some bark, the Earth, a green stone.
We spread sheets over the ground.
Love is good.
Who are you?
If I'm sullen, you'll mother it.
Just under the blue scum of a pond, we, facing up,
see ourselves dramatically touch.
I'm sick of it all.
I pull your little breasts.
Oh it is another morning, starving, I've come around.
Love money bitch.
Nothing is right.
It is the year of regrets.
Oh Jon, why does the light come down?
If you Google the first allusion in this poem, Franconati,
you can confirm that no such figure exists.
Jon took great pleasure pointing that out in readings.
So this is a poem that fabricates its authority,
works out some wonderful logarithm between fiction
or story and poetry.
And out of some ease of its reflective instance.
And this is what kills me about Jon's poems,
creates a place that's very dangerous
but also a sanctuary in an ever changing vastness.
"The Cypresses"
Of the leaning cypresses, Franconati says, these feathers
constitute an evidence or inclination of God's breath.
Seeing them from my study window,
they are a gesture I begin to understand.
As the raised open hand in farewell salutes
a depth of feeling, now the great ocean of wind moves.
Again the cypresses lean and whatever their meaning,
it is a dignification, a rational grace
because the weight of even the topmost parts
moves in its own time.
The wind is an ocean.
A great armada of ships' pennants awash
rushes to the horizon.
They are on an important errand but will
return bearing men haggard with war
and having lived too long with the quick bright meaningless
striking of wars.
So this story or poetry first told
among savages who were kings in a land of cypresses
by a man who is blind unwinds its thousands of cadences.
The dead are risen and the imagined countenanced.
When the cypresses lean again, I notice
their light, slow tracing upon a sky full of clouds assuming
familiar shapes in times upon all the possible faces
of all possible things.
The most characteristic thing I could think to say about Jon
is something he himself said in an interview.
This is just a little passage that happened
after In Sepia came out.
It just seems so true of him.
He says, "I hope that I've become more satisfied
with those things which are partial but can never be whole,
love, friendship, the inability to integrate entirely one's
character into one's life so that you are always
acting true to yourself.
Those things I long for, but they can't happen for me,
at least not now.
So I hope I'm gentler with myself regarding those things.
In a sense, the key line of In Sepia that
defines that aspect of the book and I suppose the perspective
comes at the end of the journey from Essex July 1841.
John Clare, so you may stay at home I will hold back some
harshness nor judge myself continually or any man. "
"In Autumn."
At day's light, I dressed my cold body and went out.
Calling the dogs, I climbed the west hill through cut wood
down to the road for hauling.
Done.
There was a kind of exultation that wanted to go on.
I made my way up through briars and vines
to a great stone that rises at the hills brow large enough
to stand on.
The river below was a thick, dark line.
My house was quaint.
I sat not thoughtful, lost in the body a while,
then came down the back way winding through stands
of cedar and pine.
I can tell you where I live.
My grief is that I bear no grief, and so I bear myself.
I know I live apart but have had long evenings of conversation
the faces of which betrayed no separation from a place
or time.
Now in the middle of my life, a woman of delicate bearing
gives me her hand.
And friends are so enclosed within my reasoning,
I am occasionally them.
When I had finally stood high above the house, land, my life
slow dream, for a moment I was required
to turn to those deep rows of cedar
and would have gone on walking endlessly in.
I understand why the body's knowledge.
I will not begin again.
But it was October.
Leaves in the yellowed light were altered and familiar.
We who have changed and have no hope of change
must now love the passage of time.
I always thought Franconati was Tony Hoagland, but--
on a good day you know.
I was just thinking about what Nancy read
in that poem of Jon's that--
about being enclosed in friendship,
and Jon had a way of making friendship
seem like a conspiracy, especially
as it related to poetry.
And one of the ways in which he did
that was to every once in a while read poems to you that he
loved and occasionally, really occasionally
to read something new that he would
write to you, that he would write,
that he would have written.
And he read this poem to me.
He had spent the summer in Port Townsend.
I think it was the summer of 1981,
and this is one of the last poems written
for the new section of The Milky Way.
And I think it was a poem he was enormously excited about.
And I just-- for me it's just one of those touchstone moments
in my life as a poet to hear that in his voice
and to hear the intimacy of it and the need
to have it communicated.
The other way in which he made friendship into a conspiracy
was to go to movies with you.
And this poem connects with the movie
I went to see with Jon, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."
I remember two things about that night.
One was that he said, this is great.
You're going to really love this.
He said the rain is really Japanese,
it's really Kurosawa wet rain.
And the other thing was when we got in the door,
he said I want to sit in the front row.
He said, I really like it when the images get really abstract,
which is a key to his poems in a lot of ways.
This is called "American Landscape
with Clouds in a Zoo."
You can be walking along the beach
of a quaint northwestern coastal town on the one hand,
the Great Pacific Ocean held placid, restless in the sound
when it comes over.
Like those immense woolen gray clouds, layer upon layer.
They pour from their Pacific composure
suddenly troubled, moving, troubling, roaring easterly
overhead for the inland.
America is in trouble, and you're too fucked up
to even understand by it.
Is America fucked up because it understands itself
only too well as you do you.
Every time your girlfriend chucks
you a lusciously coy smile, you're beside yourself
like a sailboat.
And every time you think happiness
is just like this forever, you're fooled like a kid.
America, I'm glad I'm hardly you.
I've got myself to think about.
In my zone, it's a fairly large zoo,
plenty of room to walk around, shade
and the shade that is increasingly bitterly
called shadow.
Of animals, there are but two arranged
in unpredictable cadence in sequence.
One is the renowned leopard of the snow,
lazy, humorous, speckled pepper a bit,
like the wren that flies from shadow to cage
to shade to shadow.
When I mistakenly awaken at night,
I dread both the darkness and the inevitable increasingly
querulous birdsong of the inevitable increasingly wide
stun of light.
Everything is too brief, eternal, stable, unpredictable.
Everything always says I'm all there is forever, chum.
Just see it my way, and I do.
Thanks.
I'm going to read a few stanzas from "Lives
of the Saints," the first part.
I've always loved this poem because for me it
represents the syntax and sound the music that
was Jon's alone in its most compressed, intense form.
And I've always loved it because if my memory isn't faulty,
he wrote it when I lived with Jon and Barbara
and Bodi, who was about that tall at the time,
after graduate school.
I didn't have prospects, and they had an extra room.
And so they invited me in.
And when I could, I paid a little rent.
But I think I can remember him bringing these stanzas
on typed sheets of paper.
And then occasionally in the margin, if you ever saw it,
you'll never forget it-- the little spidery
kind of elfin script that was also Jon's alone.
It had the same delicacy in a way as I think these lines do.
So just a few stanzas from "Lives of the Saints," part
one.
This is the rain on Mozart's grave, shearing to glissandi.
Where do you little lie exhausted whole and holy done,
sweet Amadeus.
When I sip my bourbon, weaving myself
toward pure abstraction, the recollection of emotion
without tired events.
I'd trade my part in this to bear your song,
even the most last broken Wolfgang human moan.
You are so friendly, and your pillow is a stone.
This is Mozart, a curtain of rain,
the turning heads of certain women,
the sweetness of bourbon, sweetness of music,
the poor politeness of oblivion.
Dear sir, I am in a madhouse and quite forget your name
or who you are.
You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell.
And why I am shut up, I don't know.
I have nothing to say.
So must conclude yours respectfully, John Clare.
Was this his letter into the Earth?
Was it wholly composed of solitude?
It was wholly composed.
Did he bear extravagant pain whose poems
of such light fragrance as to be?
Dear sir, forgive me small.
You are minor, sir, and would not offend.
I am respectfully yours.
I am Chopin.
I enclose a little time.
I bow and play.
The sea, the chandelier, this room, the sky,
the cliffs at Sourash, even the whole of Europe blown black,
spin.
The music speeds, retreats.
And I am Robert Schumann.
Mad and done.
You must a little time go on.
Now at the hour we lately lie awake,
give us that surety on which our fragile art depends.
I am Robert Schumann, bewildered,
woken by a strange sonata in a foreign bed.
Give me a little time, eternity, and I will mend.
Jon would say relax.
This is "Sonnet Thinking of Death 1955.
Bowels over the courthouse pattern.
By afternoon chill air.
Sun, a slightly a slant pale wafer, paper sky.
The birds plumage seems darker every day,
living in Breugel's palette of red browns, reds.
Walk sometimes the half mile from high school home
in a literal blizzard of leaves and birds asway.
Headache with the edge of a new knowledge coming my way.
It had a glide, a leap, a pause in the local atmosphere.
Snap, jump shot, a quick look out over everything nearby.
It had the ivory intellectual look of the bald moon rising.
A wonder, a stone afloat, a stepping stone,
so step upon it.
Think, think upon it smart, boy.
Why this poem?
For me, it's Jon all over as a poet, formal but playful,
as much about language as life.
Jon said to me more than once that he often
cared more about the sound of a poem than its meaning.
As a graduate student, I took Jon's forms class twice,
both times great.
Forms class with Jon was not a boot camp for metrists.
Not the playing of etudes.
Rather a closed form or a civically patterned line
was a jumping off point.
You could adhere as closely or as loosely as you wanted.
Your ear would be sensitized in any case.
The first time around with my pals
were in the class much affection, seriousness,
and play.
I was struggling psychologically for permission
to use intellect for writing.
One week I showed a draft of a poem
to my friends Vivian and Dave.
They liked the first line, jammed up, fucked up.
One of them suggested we all use this as our first line.
OK.
Yeah.
In the class that week Jon began reading
the first or second or third poem in the stack.
Jammed up, fucked up.
I eat my bowl of nails.
Something like that.
He liked it.
Rhythmic and vivid.
Discussion.
Next poem, jammed up, fucked up.
I tried to breathe on my bike.
Something like that.
Jon grinned.
Knew what to expect next.
The truth is I don't remember a whole lot about what Jon taught
me, but I remember really distinctly
he told me to always every time I sat down to compose,
to reinvent poetry, which seems like a really daunting task
and a very tall order.
But for me it was really liberating.
I felt like I could do whatever I want,
use whatever jargon or lingo I wanted, and use whatever form.
So I would do this stuff, and then I would show it to Steve.
And he'd say who told you that.
I said Jon did.
It's stupid.
Don't do that.
I thought it was a good idea.
I liked it.
But I had a very unique relationship with Jon.
The last 25 years or so we were co-owners
of the Sioux City Slugs, which is a ghost fantasy baseball
league.
And we never won.
We always drafted players like Latin American players who
had visa problems or wife beaters,
you know, steroid users, you know.
And Jon would say well that's why they're slugs.
But the thing that was very interesting to me
is when his day was winding down at like 5:00 or 6:00
AM eastern time because he lived here, and I lived there,
he would call me.
And it was just when I was waking up
and like picking out my suit for the day.
And I was thinking we were supposed
to talk about our baseball team but we never did.
He just kind of confirmed how much he loved me,
and I confirmed how much I loved him.
And it was a very sentimental kind of thing.
That we were OK.
And it was a really wonderful thing.
So the poem I wanted to read because in my mind
they're inseparable is "Listen Leo,"
which is the final poem in Jon's final book.
And it's dedicated to Steve.
And I always thought of them together.
When my father died when I was very young,
they both took me under their wing.
I mean if I would have known then how they really are--
They were fine.
They tried their best.
But I really like this poem a lot.
So, listen Leo.
Remember the lifeboat we pilfered
from what you said was an abandoned garage sale
1442 Columbus.
Not the explorer, the street.
Last night I came to, retired to the basement
to ponder my position on circumspection,
the fate of the cruel and unusual
and drink until I passed out.
I had my underwear on and my 45.
I was planning to feast on that bag of Chicken Shack
backs and beaks we got at the place that went broke,
put my legs up on a six pack and drift.
Anyway this eerie glow started emanating from the sewage
pool, mostly greenish.
It winked, so I shot it, Leo.
I've had enough.
Then this long, low lump along the wall near the bulkhead
started toward me so slow, I had time to think.
Went to the attic and came back bearing Mr Double 00 Leo.
I perforated the lifeboat.
It has become a dead one, incapable now
of surfacing above its circumference.
We can never return to it now.
It's gone like the snow.
Gone like I got a little behind.
It's a sad world, Leo.
We fell like yesterday's laundry into the tub.
Let's face a fact.
There's nobody left like us.
I got a weathered pate, you got a ticket to Nova Scotia,
and I'm swimming beside the boat.
When we got to die, we're gone.
Leo, I confess.
I adore your face.
Give me a little papa kiss.
Give me a muscle up.
Leo, there's nobody left like us.
I was looking out at so many people and the backs
of so many people who have not just been
friends of Jon's and family.
It feels like a family, just looking around at everyone,
hearing so many voices of Jon.
I was a student of Jon's a long time ago
and was thinking a lot about not so much what he taught me.
I couldn't put it into words, but the intensity
of his intuition.
And it was so specific and singular
to everyone who had him as a teacher.
And it was made of many of the same things that--
I'm sure I speak for a lot of people,
loved in him as a person, his humor,
his generosity, which has come up a lot.
And I was trying to find a term for it,
but I came up with the closest thing
I could call it is the credibility of his soul.
"Counting the Days."
Just as we wake up, yawn, and lift a shade
to explore always imperfectly amazed at subtle change
but limited by expectations and the windows frame
from which we gaze.
A yard of weeds and dogs and brown boughs
though sometimes even the boughs are altered by falling snow.
So he is counting the days, the years,
back toward a serious initial thought that he was here,
was someone who was counting the days toward when he would today
count back an important deja vu.
Accompany him, please, this journey into dissolution
as memories become events, become anticipations
that then dissolve.
Will empty us of our complex doubts.
You will certainly love yourselves
as history potential, which only took a certain lovely arbitrary
route as on a December afternoon the stillness of which
engenders that image of falling snow.
We now begin again that art our lives become.
I remember taking a course of Jon's called "The Long
Poem and the Short Story."
And my short story for that class
was about a Russian filmmaker that I
had imagined named Sergei, who was at a party
and just ran around the party sort of in anguish
and would keep running to the bathroom
to dip his hors d'oeuvres in the toilet
and then eat it, eat them.
And I think I was trying to shock people or maybe shock
him, but I kind of knew he would appreciate it.
And he did, and he encouraged me to continue.
And so 10 years later, I came back to do a reading.
I had just published a book, and he was sitting right there
celebrating it with me.
And before I came up to read, he pulled out this aged paper
and leaned over and said read Sergei, read Sergei.
Jon Anderson was my teacher, my mentor, and my friend.
He gave me endless encouragement,
guided me, and inspired me in poetry and in life.
Even a year ago when I last spoke with him on the phone,
he said keep writing and send me your work.
As soon as I got here, I came to admire and love him.
And though I hadn't known his work before I came,
I quickly also came to admire and love his work, his poetry.
So you can imagine how honored and how
flattered I was to learn shortly after I had left that he wrote
a poem with me in it.
The process of I think all the poems that he wrote
for this book, and including this one,
was to wake up sort of late and as Bodi was heading out
the door to go to class said Bodi give me a line or a theme
or something to start with, and Bodi gave him the title.
"Curious George Meets Loren Goodman."
Goodman had on a tan overcoat, wingtip shoes,
and a white shirt, his trademark.
He said I had a white spot on my nose like "birdshitskila."
We crossed glances.
He was confident.
Had a look like a Melville or a Kafka clerk.
I'd been snorting whiteout since All Saints Eve
plus a bit of Sudafed, Listerine, and baby laxative.
I was extremely dramatically relaxed without a care but one.
Who was this schmuck?
Did I owe him?
Was he my angel or perfidious devil?
Offering me a stick of Portuguese marzipan,
grinning like a boy scout sinking in the scout lake
at a boy scout jamboree camp.
I recall I had a thought, which Goodman snatched from the air.
He was waving some computer paper around his head.
He said how do you like my poem?
I admit I was taken with him.
His verse was programmatic.
His timing was exquisite.
You have a spot of birdshitskila on your most prominent nom de
plume, Goodman remarked.
I should like to feature it in a monograph.
At last I was to be recognized.
Here was the perfect lackey, his mere name a naked pretense.
His manner so servile, it would hardly do to condescend.
I offered him my schedule.
It wasn't that long was it?
We all have a second poem we're going to read too.
The longer poems.
No, it's not going to be one of those events
where you all to get up and testify.
I'd just like to thank Frances and Jan and Gail,
everybody at the Poetry Center again
for bringing us together and welcoming many of us
back to Tucson.
It's important in that regard.
And I know that this is an event really for us to remember Jon,
but I don't think it'd be too much of a distraction
to say something about his friendship
with Steve and Gail Orlen.
While it was Jon who wrote so eloquently
of the nature of friendship in general and with Steve
in particular, it was often Steve and Gail
who carried out the not always easy terms of its affections.
I always thought about Steve as you
know how the Mennonites translate
the world for the Amish.
I know that this is really weird,
but I've always thought of you as a Mennonite and Jon
as the Amish.
But anyways I want to say to Gail and Jon that all of us
here are incredibly grateful for the friendship that you showed
to Jon and especially for someone like me who
didn't get back to Tucson very often and was out of touch
with Jon.
I always felt as if you were an emissary.
I don't like the idea of closing remarks
because I think of this event as an opening up,
at least I hope so.
Besides the gift of his poems, Jon
gave us a way of thinking and speaking about poetry
that was direct and transparent.
He spoke about the danger we feel when we put ourselves
on the line and writing a poem and our commitment
to an emotional state and attitude of pure intelligence
that poems needed to convey.
These are still notions I believe in.
They influence most of the decisions
I make as I write and revise.
In a workshop Jon was usually not the first one to speak,
but when he did, it was to guide, urge, and encourage us
to think in large and generous terms about each other's work.
All of us who have read and talked about Jon tonight
and many in the audience were changed, transformed,
transfigured I suppose into poets.
And this is a little riskier to say, into better people
by our association with Jon.
When I met Richard Siken at Bread Loaf a few years ago,
we quickly and passionately began talking about Jon.
And we surprised ourselves.
I think, by the powerful nature of the bond
we shared even though our friendship with him
was separated by something like 20 years.
I believe all of us who studied with Jon who became his friend,
the two were usually synonymous, constitute a unique group
among the mostly atomized constituency
of contemporary American poetry.
Tonight, while we have remembered him
through his poetry, we have also laid claim
to a legacy he engendered.
That's sort of the closing remarks, I suppose.
But I wanted to say something else.
Jon was one of these people as you
know who possessed a really skewed charm,
and he was able to affect the world in astonishing ways.
I got a call from him one time.
His car, you know that sorrowful and sorrowing Datsun,
which Stuart--
that blue station wagon.
It was a Datsun.
Yeah.
What you say?
I think it was a Toyota.
No, it was a Datsun.
No it was a Datsun.
This was one of the--
rust ran from this car.
It would not adhere to this car.
And so I got a call from Jon one time.
He had mistakenly tried to go up Mount Lemmon
with this car, an act of hubris, a rare act of hubris
on his part.
And because he knew that I changed
the oil on my Volkswagen, he thought
I knew something about cars.
And I drove out, and I met Jon.
I forget where exactly, and we drove up and there was his car.
And I brought my few tools with me,
and I thought the car wouldn't start
so it must be the battery.
And we took the battery out.
And we went to a place where you could
get a reconditioned battery.
If you had the core, you could exchange it, so we did that.
And as we were settling the bill,
Jon pulled out a credit card, and he gave it to the guy.
And the guy ran it through, and he said,
I'm sorry I can't take this.
I can't get authorization for it.
You know, Jon said that's no problem.
I've got another credit card.
He gave another credit card, and the guy
ran it through and said you know, I'm really sorry,
I can't authorize this.
And so I was feeling uncomfortable at this time
because I thought maybe he would call the police or something.
And Jon, this is his genius, he said well,
would you take a personal check?
And he said, yeah, if you've got ID.
And I would have never thought to say that,
but he just-- he there was the charm that he carried.
OK I'll read my poem.
"Rosebud."
There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up
two feet, yellow grass, white grass.
The wind on it like locusts and the same shine.
Facing what I think was south, I could see a broad valley
and river miles into the valley that
looked black and then trees.
To the west, was more prairie, darker
than where we stood because the clouds covered it,
a long shadow like the edge of rain racing toward us.
We had been driving all day and the day
before through South Dakota along the Rosebud
where the Sioux are now farmers and go to school
and look like everyone.
In the reservation town there was a Sioux museum and trading
posts, some implements inside, a long bow of shined wood
that lay in its glass case reflecting light.
The walls were covered with framed photographs.
The Oglala posed in fine dress in front
of a few huts, some horses nearby, a feeling even in those
photographs the size of a book of spaciousness.
I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man
whose life I had recently read and whose vision had gone
on hopelessly past its time.
I believed then that only a great loss
could make us feel small enough to begin again.
The woman behind the counter talked endlessly on.
There was no difference I could see between us so I never
asked.
The place in Montana was the Greasy Grass
where Custer and the 7th Calvary fell,
the last important victory for the tribes.
We had been driving all day, hypnotized.
And when we got out to enter the small flat American tourist
center, we began to argue.
And later walking between the dry grass and reading plaques,
my wife made an ironic comment.
I believed it hurt the land, not intentionally.
It was only meant to hold us apart.
Later I read of Benteen and Ross and those who escaped.
But what I felt then was final.
Lying down, face against the warm side of a horse
and feeling the lulls endlessly the silences just before death.
The place might stand for death.
Every loss rejoined in a wide place or it is rest.
As it was after the long drive, nothing for miles
but grass, a long valley to the south, and living in history.
Or it is just a way of living, gone
like our own, every moment.
Because what I have to do daily, and what
is done to me or a number of small indignities.
I have to trust that many things we all say to each other
are not intentional, that every indirect word will accumulate
over the Earth.
And now when we may be approaching something final,
it seems important not to hurt the land.
Thank you all for coming.