I love the part in Aaron Smith's new book Appetites called "I Love the Part," a long list poem indebted to Joe Brainard and David Trinidad, and the spirit of Frank O'Hara. It's an homage to movies, popular culture, to the gods and goddesses of cinema and how much we desire them. I can imagine, years in the future, creative writing instructors all over the country assigning their students to write "I love the part" poems about the movies they love, just as we now assign "I remember" poems based on Joe Brainard's book of that name.
For the record, I just rented "Looper," and I love the part where Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis sit across from each other in an otherwise empty diner. They are each playing the same man--30 years apart. Willis has been sent back to the past to be killed by an assassin, who is in the case himself, the younger version played by Gordon-Levitt. I wanted them to hug or something, but each despises the other, as we often despise our younger or older selves.
Click on this link for another poem from Appetites. And click here for a brief but stirring defense and cheer for the power of personal narrative in poetry from Mr. Smith.
I have been interested in whatever poet Mary Ruefle might have to say ever since I discovered her book A Little White Shadow, a poetry collection that was the facsimile of a small novel that she herself found in a thrift store and with the aid of white-out, used to reveal small, beautiful, and disquieting poems. Now from Wave Books we have her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a book I've dropped everything else for. You can find more of her erasure works on her website, and I bet you'll want to rush out and find the perfect book that you can use to simultaneously obscure and uncover. It is in the corner of the junk shop, it lives at the bottom of a box at the next garage sale you see.
Here she speaks in the lecture "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."
There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.
Her lecture "I Remember, I Remember" is the best homage and
riff on Joe Brainard's I Remember that I can remember:
I remember reading Rilke's Duine Elegies again and again and again, until I "got" them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.
I just got done reading The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. (With a lovely introduction by Paul Auster) Which led me to re-read Ron Padgett's warm and touching memoir of his friendship with artist and writer Brainard, called Joe, which led me to pull out a coffee table book, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, so I could look again at his wonderful work. I am particularly drawn to collage, and Brainard did tons of work in collage--in his amphetamine-fueled years he produced thousands of works.
I think what attracts me to the art, as well as to his writing, is its sheer likability. Brainard talks a lot in his written work about wanting to be liked. In the writing this doesn't come off as preciousness, or over-eagerness. The reason I Remember has become such a classic is because of the works' humor and lack of pretension or artifice--each statement starts with the plain-spoken and practical "I remember," followed by an image or memory that might be mundane, or it might be touching in its vulnerability:
I remember running for vice-president and giving a campaign speech wearing my baby blue garbardine pants. I lost. That was junior high school.
I remember that nobody ever knew what to give Aunt Ruby on special occasions so everyone always gave her some stationary or scarves or handkerchiefs or boxes of fancy soap.
I remember daydreams of being a girl and the beautiful formals I would have.
The beauty of the Collected Writings is that there's so much more to see. I Remember is what Brainard will be remembered for, at least in the realm of the written word, but this collection of journals, jottings, collaborations, and experiments shows he was more than a one-hit wonder. Here, in its entirety, is "No Story."
I hope you have enjoyed not reading this story as much as I have enjoyed not writing it.
He reminds me, sometimes, of Gertrude Stein. Here are three of the "Twenty-three Mini Essays":
LOSER
He was at the airport when his ship came in.
POETRY
Poetry is that certain something we so often find missing.
INSTANT DIVORCE
The marriage was so brief they had nothing to fight over but the cake.
