Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Mascot, Chapter Eighteen: Counselor
Buy the book at Amazon Kindle.
Counselor
Zelda sits in a restaurant in Los Gatos, the walls lined
with that Tuscan-looking plaster that may as well be constructed of dollar
signs. She nurses a glass of Chablis as she listens to a woman at the next
table speaking Mandarin. The woman’s sentences accelerate in the middle and end
on long, almost sung phrases. Zelda hopes that her makeup is doing its job.
Towering above her, all of a sudden, is Roxy Alameda, in a
navy blue knit dress. She smiles, and then stops.
“Zelda! What happened to your cheek?”
Zelda stands and gives Roxy a hug. They sit at the table.
Zelda gives an embarrassed smile.
“I was beating the snot out of my boyfriend, and…”
Roxy gasps. “Did he hit you?”
Zelda laughs, then touches her wound. “No. I was delivering
a left hook and I completely missed. My follow-through took my face directly
into his elbow.”
“Well what got you so angry that you were throwing punches?”
“We were having sex, and…”
Roxy waves her hands in front of her face. “W-w-wait a
minute. You were beating the shit out of Edward during sex? Why?”
“Because I fucking hate him.”
That’s the cue for the waitress to show up. Roxy smiles.
“I’ll have a Manhattan on the rocks.”
“Certainly.” Before parting, the waitress winks at Zelda.
“I’m probably on your side.”
“Thanks.”
Roxy watches her leave, then returns to Zelda. “Why do you
hate him?”
“Because I love him. Because he left me.”
“And… how long will this punishment continue?”
“As long as it takes.”
“That’s not how it works. Eventually you will have to
forgive him or leave him.”
“I’d rather stay and make him suffer. How does a man
disappear at the peak of a romance? A rare, beautiful romance.”
The waitress delivers Roxy’s drink. Roxy takes a sip and
sets it down.
“Ah, bourbon. I could take a bath in bourbon. I want a
pre-nup on this discussion.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I want you to acknowledge that I know more about men
than you do.”
Zelda looks around the room. “It pains me to admit this,
but… Yes.”
“Okay then. Edward seems much more comfortable in his own
skin. And he has money now – correct?”
“Yes.”
She folds her fingers. “It’s difficult for a man to accept
love when he’s not feeling manly. I think he wanted to go off somewhere and get
his mojo back. He certainly seems more attractive to me. Do you have a problem with him finding success?”
“He won’t even tell me what he was doing those three years.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I was suffering
those three years. I want to know what I was suffering for.”
“Do you think he was selling drugs? Working as a hired
assassin? Get your head out of the moviehouse, honey. Maybe it involved lots of
ass-kissing, or degrading labor. Maybe he’s embarrassed.”
Zelda crosses her arms and stares at the table. “How do I
know he won’t disappear again?”
“He came back for you.”
“He came back for Jackson’s wedding.”
“Loyalty to a friend – yes, let’s condemn him for that, as
well. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? I think you’re seeing
yourself as a prosecuting attorney, and believe me, you don’t want to be in
that position. And any man worth your time will not tolerate an eternal
cross-examination. Or a left hook.”
Zelda speaks to her Chablis. “Says the woman whose husband
was fucking around on her.”
Roxy leans forward, then stops, takes a breath, drinks her
Manhattan. “Yes. How do you think I know all this? I had a man go bad on me. I
conducted the cross-examination. For six months. Eventually, he confessed. I
realized I couldn’t forgive him, so I left him. That’s what I’m saying. This in-between crap is exactly what will
kill you. And tell me this, just a theory. I think you were indulging in a
lovely little Mother Teresa rescue mission, and I think Edward screwed up your
plans by growing a pair. Do you know how admirable it is for a man to go
through what he did and still want to do the work it takes to rebuild his
life?”
The waitress returns.
“Hi,” says Roxy, “I’ll have the mozzarella focaccia and baby
greens. Zelda?”
“Pot-stickers and chicken salad.”
The waitress picks up the menus. “I’ll have these in a few
minutes.”
“Thanks.”
They sit in silence. Roxy understands that Zelda is stewing
and is happy to let her do so. A minute later, Zelda mutters something.
“Pardon?” says Roxy.
“Now I hate you.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you. And because you’re right. Probably.”
“I’ll take it.” She indulges in a long sip of bourbon. “So
tell me, this hateful sex. Good?”
Zelda smiles.
“Yeah,” says Roxy. “I thought so.”
Photo by MJV
Father's Day Poem: Harold in Motion
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Mascot, Chapter 17: Benjamin
Buy the book at Amazon Kindle.
Benjamin
Edward is doomed to live out his past life. He parks in the
lot and strolls to the entrance, the lights over the stadium sparking into
life. He buys general admission, stops for a beer and heads for the first-base
bleachers, where the two Z’s used to sit.
This is a luxury he’s rarely had, the chance to watch the
infielders take grounders, the pitchers warm up, and to not care about the
general entertainment of small children. It’s also nice not to be inside the
Gigante head, with its cave-like view of the world. The weather is perfect,
banks of fog gathering at the far sides of the mountains like timid sheep.
The stands slowly fill up, a local opera singer performs the
national anthem, and the game is under way. Edward sees Gigante working the
kids in the lower seats: the high five/knucklebump gag, the cap-steal, the
threat to swallow their little heads whole. Not much has changed. After the
third out, Gigante scans the higher seats. Edward waves, just in case.
An inning later, after performing a boisterous James Brown
shuffle to “I Feel Good,” Gigante climbs the steps, uses a little girl’s Reds
cap to wipe his nose, then arrives at Edward’s row. Gigante adopts an expectant
posture, hands on hips, staring. The fans, of course, think this is a gag, but
Edward imagines that Gigante is experiencing an internal struggle: whether to
kick this dude’s ass or stay employed. The big gorilla makes the gesture
meaning “hand it over.” Edward reaches into his bag, pulls out a box of Red
Vines and delivers it to his target. Gigante studies it, then gives Edward a
thumbs-up and trots down the steps.
That’s it for a while. Edward doesn’t know whether to feel
relieved or disappointed. The Giants string together a few hits and take a 3-0
lead. In the fifth, after the High Desert Mavericks get their leadoff man on,
Gigante skulks behind the soda guy. Edward is curious to see if the gag has
changed at all. Gigante grabs a cup and charges up the steps. The soda guy
shakes a fist in his wake.
Edward is not terribly surprised when Gigante heads his way.
He’s not completely surprised when what is deposited over his head is not the
standard confetti but ice-cold Mountain Dew. The crowd roars in laughter.
Gigante takes a bow, Edward shakes himself off like a wet dog. Gigante runs
downstairs to lead the YMCA dance. Edward takes off his sweatshirt and wipes
himself off. When he gets to his face, he smells something rancid, and realizes
that it smells precisely like urine.
Fighting simultaneous waves of disgust and anger, Edward
spies Gigante entering a tunnel behind the third-base dugout and quickly
follows. He arrives just as the dressing-room door clicks shut. He bangs on it.
“Let me in!”
A voice comes through the door. “Gigante is currently
unavailable.”
“Let me in, you cunt!”
The door clicks open. Edward opens it and finds Zelda on the
couch, headless.
“Please close the door and stop swearing. You’ll scare the
children.”
He applies all of his self-control to do as she asks, but
turns quickly to make his point.
“You fucking bitch. That
was criminal. I do not deserve…”
She hurls Gigante’s head at Edward’s head. He deflects it
with his arm.
“You deserve to
have your dick lopped off. Don’t tell me what you deserve.” She seems to tire
and plops back onto the couch. “Use the shower.”
“And have you steal my clothes?”
“Use the goddamn shower!”
Edward catches a whiff of himself, and realizes that he has
no choice. He takes off his clothes, muttering. “Crazy fucking… unbelievable…
god… damn… I hope it was at least your
piss.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“It was.”
“Good.” He starts the water and looks back. “Could I bother
you to give my clothes a rinse?”
“Sure.”
Edward settles under the spray, remembering the hot August
nights when this shower was his personal savior. He hears Zelda working the
sink, kneading his clothing into the water. He finds a bar of soap and indulges
in a full lather. He rinses off, is about to step outside when Zelda steps in,
naked, and grabs his dick.
“Can I make it up to you?”
Zelda recovers her breath and goes to the window. Edward is
staying at the Toll House, a luxury hotel at the end of the Los Gatos strip.
She looks across the highway and sees the creek trail.
“My God, Edward, you can almost see your old campground from
here.”
Edward leans on an elbow. “Meaning?”
“You’re moving up. Is that what the disappearance was about?
Making money?”
“Partly.”
“So how did you make this money?”
“None of your damn business.”
She turns. “Illegal?”
“Rather not say.”
She bites her lip. “Okay.” Zelda sits at the edge of the bed
and plays with his penis. “Does the money make you feel better?”
“Of course.”
“What about ‘Money can’t buy happiness’?”
“A myth spread by rich people. Money buys freedom.
Opportunity. It doesn’t buy happiness, but it gives you more chances to pursue
it.”
“Well…”
“Any chance you could suck my dick?”
Zelda straightens up, jolted by a hybrid of revulsion and excitement.
Edward’s penis gets harder. She bites her lip.
“Pay me.”
“How much?”
“A Benjamin.”
“Okay.”
“Right now. I want it in my hand.”
Edward crosses to the dresser, opens his wallet and pulls
out a bill. Zelda studies Franklin’s face, wondering if he has any idea the
twisted transactions his likeness has effected.
“Why don’t you lie down?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “On your knees.”
A charge runs along her spine. She lowers herself to the
carpet and gets to work, the bill tucked into her free hand.
Edward awakens to an erect cock, and there’s no way it’s
his, because the thing is enormous. He blinks it into focus, and finds that
it’s a page from a magazine, propped against a pillow. Next to a sheet of hotel
letterhead.
Good morning! This is
Johnny Sequoia. He performed at Zarita’s bachelorette party. Afterwards, he
fucked me on the balcony. It was the best sex I ever had. Have a nice day,
darling. XXOO – Z
Zelda pulls to a stop at the meridian and finds the usual
grungy panhandler, the usual cardboard propaganda: God bless, veteran, wife and
children. She rolls down the window and hands him a bill. Halfway into the
intersection, she hears his cowboy whoop.
Photo by MJV
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
The Creation of "Shape"
In the fall of 2007, Kara Gebhart Uhl and Maria Schneider,
my editors at Writer’s Digest, asked
me for a history piece on the shape poem – the idea of using a poem’s
typographical layout to represent an object or image referred to in the poem.
It seemed like a natural subject for me; I am a hobbyist painter, and have
always enjoyed using bits of text in my artworks. My curiosity was further piqued
when I discovered John Hollander’s majestic 1969 Swan and Shadow – and his book
Types of Shape – and then enjoyed a
brief correspondence with Hollander himself, then a professor emeritus at Yale.
In reading other shape poems, however, I came away largely
disappointed. Too many had clearly been written mainly to comment upon – and
fill the contours of – their chosen shapes. The poem was serving the needs of
the shape, when it should be the other way around. With this in mind, I took
one of my free-verse poems – Papageno’s Complaint, inspired by the birdcatcher
character in Mozart’s Magic Flute –
and, using a primitive but satisfying cut-and-paste technique, reshaped it into
the form of a toucan. Later, after I used the positional relationships of the
words on the page to transfer the image to my computer (the “r” in line 3 just
over the “T” in line 4, and so on), I gazed at the Times New Roman bird perched
upon my screen and felt that I had created something magical.
In the following months, I became obsessed, spending hours in
the corner of a coffeehouse, running through glue sticks as I converted my
favorite poems into imagery. When I handed the work to friends, I got just the
reaction I wanted: a look of fascination at the idea that a poem could also be
a salamander, a ’65 Mustang or Frank Sinatra, followed by the eyes focusing in
on the words that might inspire such an intriguing silhouette.
Sadly, I could not find a press to deliver my work into book
form (although a couple were sorely tempted), and the poems sat in my files.
Then, in early 2015, I was reviewing the stats for my blog, Writerville
(Writerville.blogspot.com) and discovered that a cell-phone photo of my “bear”
poem, Consolation, posted upon its publication in the journal Terrain.org, had drawn ten times more
pageviews than the second post on the list. I realized that photos of the poems
would maintain the poems’ integrity in a Kindle ebook version, and I was off on
this project. I hope you enjoyed them. Thanks!
Michael J. Vaughn
Following is the Writer’s
Digest article that resulted from my assignment.
Concrete Poetry
from Writer’s Digest, March
13, 2008
In a
shape poem, a poet uses the lines of his text to form the silhouette of an
identifiable visual image—generally, an image that represents or comments upon
the subject of the poem.
The
shape poem goes back to Greek Alexandria of the third century B.C., when poems
were written to be presented on objects such as an ax handle, a statue’s wings,
an altar—even an egg. English poet George Herbert (1593-1633) led an
Elizabethan movement using shape poems strictly for the page: two examples are
“Easter Wings” and “The Altar,” written in the shape of, yes, wings and an
altar. Lewis Carroll toyed with the notion in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, presenting “The Mouse’s Tale” in the shape of a mouse’s tail.
The form continued into the 20th century through the typographical experiments
of F.T. Marinetti and his anarchistic Futurism movement, Guillaume
Apollinaire’s 1918 Calligrammes collection, the playful tinkering of e.e.
cummings, the Chinese ideograms used by Ezra Pound, and various works by
members of the Dadaist movement.
In the
1950s, a group of Brazilian poets led by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Augusto
de Campos sought to fully integrate the dual role of words as carriers of
language and visual art. Using a phrase coined by European artists Max Bill and
Öyvind Fahlström, the Brazilian group declared themselves the “concrete poetry”
movement. In 1958, they issued a fiery manifesto lamenting the use of “words as
mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality, without
history—taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.”
Concrete
poetry was originally aimed at using words in an abstract manner, without an
allusion to identifiable shapes. But as the movement reached the height of its
popularity in the 1960s, it became less abstract and was adopted by
conventional poets as a specific poetic form rather than a full visual/literary
fusion. Many of them returned to the shape-based forms popular in the third
century B.C.
Among
the best of the ’60s shape poets was John Hollander, who created his works with
a typewriter. As a scholar, editor and accomplished poet—working in many
different forms—Hollander also provided a thorough explication of the process
in his 1969 collection Types of Shape. Hollander described his process in a
2003 interview with the St. John’s University Humanities Review:
“I
would think of the representation of some object in silhouette—a silhouette
which wouldn’t have any holes in it—and then draw the outlines, fill in the
outlines with typewriter type … and then contemplate the resulting image for
anywhere from an hour to several months. The number of characters per line of
typing would then give me a metrical form for the lines of verse, not syllabic
but graphematic (as a linguist might put it). These numbers, plus the number of
indents from flush left, determined the form of each line of the poem.”
In
Hollander’s 1969 “Swan and Shadow,” he uses the text to create the silhouette
of a swan, the surface of a lake and the swan’s upside-down shadow. Hollander
relates the words of the poem to their physical location within the image. (The
swan’s head, for example, describes “Dusk / Above the / water … ”).
“One certainly needs no artistic talent in order to draw a good bit, and certainly not to rough out a silhouette,” Hollander says. “It’s not a lack of talent, but an absolutely dreadful educational system that prevents everyone from being able to draw a little.”
Through
laborious trial-and-error experiments, I’ve devised a process for creating a
shape poem, with two inherent biases. First, my process gives precedence to
preserving the integrity of the original poem, applying the visual image
afterward. Second, my process takes advantage of two modern advances: the image
reduction/enlargement capabilities of today’s copiers, and the conveniences
offered by computer word-processing programs.
1.
Write a poem. Try free verse or prose forms. For this article, I used
“Papageno’s Complaint,” a free-verse poem I recently wrote. It was inspired by
the bird catcher in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
2.
Imagine a shape. It doesn’t have to reflect the primary subject of the poem.
Sometimes it’s more effective to choose a shape that reflects a small detail or
provides a subtle comment on the discourse. I chose the object of my
character’s occupation: a bird. Because Papageno is a catcher of exotic birds,
I settled on a toucan.
3.
Find an image. In addition to the Internet, you might try magazines, photo
books, children’s coloring books or craft stores. In my case, I found a photo
of a toucan at a zoo’s website.
4. Get
the right size. Run the lines of your poem together, inserting punctuation as
needed, and print it out as a single prose paragraph. Compare the area taken up
by your poem and that provided by your image. Use a copy machine to reduce or
enlarge the image accordingly.
5. Cut
and paste. Cut your poem into one-line strips and paste them over your image
with a glue stick, beginning each line at the left margin of the image, and
ending it at or slightly past the right margin. If you run out of words before
you run out of image—or vice versa—return to the copier, adjust your image size
and cut and paste again. This is the most arduous step, but it’ll make the
final two steps much easier.
6.
Head to your computer. Identify your most leftward line. Beginning at flush
left, type the entire line; then work your way upward and downward, using your
space bar to position each line’s first letter according to its relationship to
adjoining letters. For the tip of the beak, “down,” for instance, the letter
“d” is directly beneath the “n” in “and.”
7.
Edit. Once you’ve typed out the poem, you may want to adjust or change words to
polish the silhouette.
Monday, June 1, 2015
New Shape Poem Collection
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