Sayuri's book is going to be called:
I have a question
1. Animals aren't evil.
2. Archeology is rhymes with Everything
3. Sayuri's joke
Ye Olde Interview with poet Joe Green starring as Orson Welles: The word genius was whispered into my ear the first thing I ever heard while I was still mewling in my crib, so it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age!
Oh, pardon me. I am used to being the interviewee not the interviewer. One falls on hard times.
If a poem is not a pleasure, it’s not a poem someone (perhaps it was I!) once said.
Of course, like any artist, you look at what you’ve done and take certain pleasures from it. Imagine that you are reading this poem to yourself. What particular pleasures do you take?
Calicoe: I take particular delight in this poem. It brings BACK so much that is important to me. Life, things, people, feelings. The whole poem is like a mini movie into the past but is reflected in the present in which humanity has lost so much...ties to family, to belief, to everything really right down to dinner plates. I think the poem is entirely about this kind of loss. I've lost so much over the years. As a child I was constantly threatened with loss. My parents were always quite ill and I was only eight or nine when my first experience with death occurred. I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother in her casket as we were standing behind this gauzy curtain at the mortuary. I was devastated. I had just been told my father had only a few months to live. Of course he lived on for many years more but I could barely sleep at night and for years because I'd have to check on him to make sure he was still breathing.
Welles: I rarely screen my films although I continually screen them mentally and, for example, in “The Third Man” I delight in leaving this or that convention behind. And you?
Calicoe: Well I've never seen the Third Man but I most certainly will when I get the chance. Now that you have mentioned it to me here in this context. Leaving convention behind, well that is what makes things new isn't it? I don't really believe that poems should be out of the park in terms of another person being able to read them and absorb the feelings I hope to produce and so I often use devices that are well understood universally. Although still, much of what I write is misunderstood, even by me.
Welles: Oh, I should tell you just what I take from your poem. First there is the intimacy. A letter to a dear friend. Then one enjoys various things odd. For example the dog banished to the roof.
Back from the roof
where B has been sent
for being found guilty of being
a dog, not a human.
Although she misses the sweet puppy days
when her abode was the kitchen balcony,
safe and small, she has adjusted well to the
relative peace of the night time sky,
save for a few ill timed landings
and takeoffs from Beirut International
just down the road a ways, or
an occasional bark from Ghandi down below.
At thirteen years her senior he cuts
a rather dashing figure as a suitor,
even with the flies that constantly
swarm in his worn out coat.
Funny and dear and yet full of loomings. This somehow – emotionally or (oh I can’t find the word) pertains to the poem. How would you say it does? If you can bring yourself to tell us?
Yes, you know I am a believer in well made beginnings. I am one fellow who wants to read more. Already I sense a darting intelligence. I want to read more, yes. I am curious. Did you begin with this (do you remember). I imagine the poem just was there and this started the flow? True?
I recall that I once said that I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. How do you FEEL this poem came about?
Calicoe: This poem came about from a series of letters written to one Lanny Muss. Lanny is my six foot rabbit that no one else sees. I had many of those types of friends as a child, like Peco the stuffed donkey. He was given to me when I was in hospital suffering from a broken neck. That was a formative experience for me and it often appears in my poems in various ways. As well as Lanny Muss who is a real person but a person who enjoys pretending and especially, enjoys literary artifice. So yes, it is definitely flattering in that our correspondences were always that way, in general, a form of flattery. Lanny had travelled once long ago to my home town Bisbee and knew the place quite well. He also was quite familiar with the streets like Hamra in Beirut. You don't often meet six foot rabbits that share a "place" like that now do you? Let alone two So you make the most of it and flatter the situation to its full potential.
Welles: I recall that I had to continually remind my friend Kenneth Tynan, the great critic, as he sat wheezing across from me (poor boy – emphysema) that one should be grateful for what is given. What is just now there. Perhaps it was 62 – angry young fellows were taking over the theatre. My dear friend, Larry Olivier, felt he had to prove himself and hence Ionesco and that production of Rhinoceros and I understand there is a new play about all this. In any case your life-- as I gather from your poems – has what many poets would love. It is rich in significant event – and I am especially taken with just what you do with just where you are. For example:
In a fit of boredom, I looked into the news today
and found that women had been made to drink
cleaning fluid and Afghanistan is still a mess...
after how many centuries?
I don't know who came up with the Cradle analogy
but certainly, they must never haved been here or there.
I must comment that grandmother's advice to place
the legs of the crib in cans filled with water
to prevent the scorpion's and centipede's ascent, is
well taken.
Really, does it get any better? You have this and can turn it into that. A wonderful image – the infant, the cradle of civilization, the contrasts, the scorpions foiled from ascending but only for so long, the richness of just who gives the advice. One is especially delighted that you see…well… if I may ascend to the vernacular? You don’t put up with any shit. Received meanings, the usual pieties and one senses a fierceness wanting to drive through it all . If I might venture a question that SHOULD be of interest to our readers… given the fact that you poem drives just there do you feel alone, yet alone? As did I?
Calicoe: Well one is always alone in one's head. I am always thinking about mythology, my own and the old ones. I used to look up myths in the Brittanica as a child, one of my things. I love myth even though my knowledge of it is rather hit and miss and a lot of guess work. It always amazes me though that my guesses are fairly accurate. I think I have a pretty good memory for things. And no I don't put up with shit and seldom forget a real personal infraction. It is part of where I come from, a kind of ethos of survival. Avoiding loss and certainly a way of avoiding embarrassment. My grandmother who is in there never put up with shit and her husband's betrayal never left her conscious, from what I am told. Because she was such a powerful presence in our life back then I think I absorbed a certain "orneriness". This particular piece of the poem though is also a reference to literally, being so alone in a part of the world that is considered the center of three major religions. You would think that would make a person happy, make them feel, "ah yes" I've made it here. As we know though, the center of these three religions, this place is not a "safe" place.
Welles: Let’s go on. This verse. Well done with that brief scene showing once again the intolerable outside:
There's an Egyptian fellow talking on and on
the ticker tape moves ceaselessly across the screen
telling me that there is still work to be done.
Only hope that it is in the best interest of all.
And then..the Miss…yourself now and your younger self. May I read this long passage and call attention to the splendid particularities? No, let me ask about a short passage…
Let me just dwell on one set of particulars.
“The Hitching Post! Patio Orange with tiny,
thinner-than-a-hair straws,
three of them (straws, not pops) if you liked.
Grape Nehi from the big red machine
near the counter at the Lumber Company,”
Yes, this is the mirage in the mirror and really I would like to know… don’t you think that if this were done perfectly what was lost would return and that it’s absurd – given the so called fact that all we love goes away – that existence should be as it appears?
Calicoe: I think that the art of using a simple device, like a straw, a type which was common to that time period...the coctail thin type is a way of focusing the reader's attention on something very important. Like using the color red for a soda vending machine and I presume that there are few people of a certain age that can't remember those old red machines. Big and with soft contours like old trucks from the forties and fifties and even into the sixties. Choosing grape Nehi versus Dr. Pepper in there too and, shit! there is the mistake in there. Orange soda from one place and grape from the other. Damn. I think that if this 'uneveness' were to be perfected, clarified and I mean the idea of the thought changed into a 'grammatical' or logical correctness, you would lose that particular association of THIS thing from this place and THAT thing from the other. The echo is trapped between Hitching Post and Lumber Company, both wooden places and wooden things. Of course, I didn't know that until you, Orson pointed it out to me and that is what really fascinates me about poem writing. You write the damn things and then you come back to them and find all sorts of little intriguing things. Sure, when you write it you think, 'oh yeah' but much of the time, that is if you are lacking a certain sort of cynicism, you return to the poem and 'discover' it. Poems are never finished really. Never perfect. If a poem is perfect and a poet is attempting to write 'perfect' poems I think that the poet really ought to sit down and have a good chat with his 'whatever', muse if that is what you want to call the little genie in the bottle down inside. This is something about art that you pick up from studying, and I mean up close and personal, masterpieces, particularly paintings. You find out that few of them are 'perfect' and in fact, if a person has ever attempted painting for a period of time, you find out that the imperfections sometimes become a central part of why a painting is considered wonderful. When you figure that out then you start checking out all sorts of ways artists have dealt with the imperfections and of course that would mean the 'humanity' of their work. Although I have a serious love of Georgia O'Keefe paintings and her work including her thing with Steiglitz, I must wonder how human she was. She was known to be quite difficult and her work reflected a sense of straining to achieve perfection, not a flaw in there and her work looks like it was practically airbrushed on to the canvases which she stretched herself and was a harsh taskmaster in that. She is like the sonnet writer of painting. Luckily, she wrote some pretty good sonnets.
Welles: And then there is this fine back and forth going on between “The Miss” and the “I.”
“I am conscious not only of her pain in telling it,
but of the extreme loneliness one finds
in a foreign land such as ours.
Joni Mitchell would have preferred California to Spain,
even though the two of them share birthdays,
the Miss would prefer this loneliness
because she says it is the only real thing.
Me, I am never lonely or even alone.
There's always a delivery man at the door
or a dress to be picked up at the cleaners…
So, is this consciously crafted in the way many seem to imagine? I am betting that this flows naturally and after the fact seems right. Correct?
And, oh, we are running out of time.
I need a drink. And then perhaps once again into the sympathetic abyss.
Calicoe: This kind of thing does come from the gut. It isn't really sculpted like it should be or like perhaps, some people think things like this should be, sic poetry. I like nature and natural forms like the shape of a hunting dog's head or his chest. And I really like natural endings.
Thank you Orson for honoring me thusly. I wish you well in the afterlife.
