P O E T S on the line volume one, number one -- february 1995 Poets on the line is a continuing poetry anthology edited by Robert Bove Andrew Gettler & Linda Lerner Special thanks to John Fowler, without whose generous help Poets on the line would not have been possible. (c) 1995 by Poets on the line. All work herein published by permission of the authors. All rights remain with authors. ***************************************************************** CONTENTS The First Time................Karl Shapiro...............3 Lilith........................Enid Dame..................4 Four Songs....................Charles Plymell............6 Grey Staten...................Martha King................7 The Human Condition in Brighton Beach...Donald Lev.......8 Fall and Winter (a Russian Novel)..........Donald Lev.................9 Played Jazz Violin Like an Out of Town Junkie......Linda Lerner..............10 Jamming with the Angels-- Town Hall & Elsewhere .....Linda Lerner..............11 Liquid Jesuit.................Andrew Gettler............12 Widower.......................Deborah C. La Veglia......15 the beating of the body's blood...............Tony Moffeit..............16 a blues rain a jazz rain......Tony Moffeit..............17 Tarot Card III. The Empress...Grace Cavalieri...........18 An Ambassador to the Next Century...........Robert Bove...............19 At a Little Remove............Robert Bove...............20 Brioche: Visit with Betty Rose and Ray.........Betsy Robin Schwartz......21 Ball..........................Jim Heck..................23 Pretas' Light.................Jim Heck..................24 Ode to Karl Shapiro...........Leo Connellan.............25 Interview with Charles Plymell............Dave Sellitto.............28 *********************************************************** The First Time by Karl Shapiro Behind shut doors, in shadowy quarentine, There shines the lamp of iodine and rose That stains all love with its medicinal bloom. This boy, who is no more than seventeen, Not knowing what to do, takes off his clothes As one might in a doctor's anteroom. Then in a cross-draft of fear and shame Feels love hysterically burn away, A candle swimming down to nothingness Put out by its own wetted gusts of flame, And he stands smooth as uncarved ivory Heavily curved for some expert caress. And finally sees the always open door That is invisible till the time has come, And half falls through as through a rotten wall To where chairs twist with dragons from the floor And the great bed drugged with its own perfume Spreads its carnivorous flower-mouth for all. The girl is sitting with her back to him; She wears a black thing and she rakes her hair, Hauling her round face upward like moonrise; She is younger than he, her angled arms are slim And like a country girl her feet are bare. She watches him behind her with old eyes, Transfixing him in space like some grotesque, Far, far from her where he is still alone And being here is more and more untrue. Then she turns round, as one turns at a desk, And looks at him, too naked and too soon, And almost gently asks: Are you a Jew? *********************************************************** Lilith by Enid Dame kicked myself out of paradise left a hole in the morning no note no goodbyeÔ was patient and hairy he cared for the animals worked late at night planting vegetables under the moon sometimes he'd hold me our long hair tangled he kept me from rolling off the planet it was always safe there but safety wasn't enough. I kept nagging pointing out flaws in his logic he carried a god around in his pocket consulted it like a watch or an almanac it always proved I was wrong two against one isn't fair! I cried and stormed out of Eden into history: the Middle Ages were sort of fun they called me a witch I kept dropping in and out of people's sexual fantasies now I work in New Jersey take art lessons live with a cabdriver he says; baby what I like about you is your sense of humor sometimes I cry in the bathroom remembering Eden and the man and the god ********************************************************** Four Songs by Charles Plymell 1. Press "one" if you want to be right Press "two" if you understand life Press "dos" if you speak Spanish Remain on hold if you want to commit suicide 2. For every unmatched star that breeds and dies along its beads there is a creature in the woods there is the season of my ancestor who found the ancient turtle by the rocks along the Mohawk 3. Pete seat mate has hat head on backwards He becomes a sigh ballon that jazzmen silence when the uptake pump jumps He struggles with a plug and watches the fly fly away As the shoreline struggles against the pull, the geometry of a solar journey outlines the grizzly cracks that crush against the sunrise 4. I've travelled around these states like a migrant bird, a prehistoric whooping crane just over the highway, over again trying to keep its brain light for flight It can't afford the weight of memory I'd trade my memory for flight and jettison my files and bank for a little riff like Charley Parker a new song for not carrying the drag an old refrain here or there gospel thoughts gathered like plantation cotten ************************************************************ Grey Staten by Martha King Rats had drowned in the storm. We stepped over the line. You said don't look but I did. They were bloated, opal, pale. You looked too. Mauve tongues, soaked bellies, mouths open. We stepped past as pewter light streamed above our heads. We stepped across on sand like soft cement. Soaked. Sky. Ocean. Post. Coital. ************************************************************ The Human Condition in Brighton Beach by Donald Lev Did you see the salt shaker? It has been carried away. And the onion that lay in slices on this very table only yesterday is likewise mysteriously vanished. And the lace curtains that moved so gracefully in that window are gone also. And the porcelein pitcher from Mexico, I'd never think to miss it, but I see it's not in its usual place on the book shelf. What has happened to the independent clutter about me? What tricks are occurring, and why? There was a third left to that stick of butter only just a moment ago. Where is it now? It's not madness. I am sure of that. I am sure of that. Madness is such an oldfashioned idea and it would never apply to me. My friends would have told me by now. They hold nothing back from me. I think I'd better go for a walk. I'll take an umbrella. I'll walk over to the beach to have a look at the sea, or I'll go up to Coney Island Avenue and buy a knish. A kasha knish, maybe, with a cup of very light coffee. Then I'll go to the post office and buy some stamps. Just so I can stand on the line and grumble together with everybody else and watch how the wily Russians sneak to the front of the line. But what did I do with my key? This is beginning to get to me. I can't leave the house without my key. And obviously, if I stay here I'll go crazy. ************************************************************* Fall and Winter (a Russian Novel) by Donald Lev zetsov was only thirty versts from putzov, but i refused to walk. anatoly! i implore you to drive me to zetsov. i'll give you four rubles. anatoly spit contemptuously. "six" he replied. but i only have four. for the love of God, anatoly! he signalled me to climb up into the wagon beside him. grechunka was away in the forest feeding her wolves. or so nikolai, her father's half-brother and her slave, would have led me to believe. but i did not believe, i could not believe! so i set forth for the quarter called svetlaya, a haven for gypsies pimps and poles, searching for my grechunka, to repay her the thirty rubles i had cheated out of her worthless uncle prince pitkin. but she was nowhere about. let her feed her wolves! i shouted, and ordered more vodka my head was spinning as they led me away. ******************************************************** by Linda Lerner He played down to the nerve twisting himself in sound; played from his gut; dead screams rumbling underground speared into trees; he played to free himself, played with the soul of his mind of his flesh, in the sweltering night licking ice cream crowd he played like he had no time left like a junkie, using his bow like his sex; the Man supplying his own fix. Arching, hips foward desire without object he curved high around each note; hitting bottom played like he had no skin; like no cool New Yorker ever would. ******************************************************** Jamming with the Angels---Town Hall & Elsewhere (5/19/94) for Andrew by Linda Lerner A four day beat revival of your own to mark 50 your day happening to be theirs took us to Town Hall/wake- ning of Jack's spirit in shirt & tie worn pals squeezing into old jive sounds in you burst thru twenty years restraints/ ordering of days... always had an edge, though, never quite fit suit you wore ripped off at last, asÔ With a swinging chick you stumbled on in me one night, blasted on jazz on wine on sex mostly high on you hit a road swerved off in reckless youth; four days warned anyone who'd listen of a second coming. (not bad for a mortal) candle lit you blew all the Pall Mall burnt stale air you could cough up blew half century rebellion into orbit. ****************************************************** Liquid Jesuit by Andrew Gettler i ll tell you when to listen don t want you coming to my poem finishing my poem journey has always been not to but through everyone i have no patience you are either out or in back table or uncomfortably up front i ll tell you when to listen i am tired of rounding out your corners showing you the edge go ahead: dance above that safe slope when falling s not the only choice balance is a clown showÔ roughness, to be awkward again & uncertain not to be so sure i know what you want me to convince you of i ll tell you when to listen listen: here s how it is of all the people in this room i m the only one who knows who he is i have no warring factions anymore which is not to say treaties haven t cost me plenty i am Irish: should i revere Yeats? I am Czech: should i memorize a map of Praha? listen: christ was into a stone thing but crucifiction is an idiot s game stammering into history anemic as a poem Carruth can be Jesus on a wagon-tongue; why not i as well, astride a barstool, arrogant with suffering? come to this poem finish this poem words Myshkinized me: thinking Saviour, i cried, Come! to my horror, some did; worse, some listened; you d think nine hundred years of guilt clinging to the tactile sense would put me off...Ô worse, touched others; worst of all, wrote that touching into touching back; still want to come to this poem? finish this poem? listen: looking up i am surprised there is still a down and further still to fall and faster than i thought and no strength and... Damn! all MY Dead have made it home before me listen: come... finish... **************************************************** Widower by Deborah C. La Veglia This man is unaffected by the smell, the smell of stale, sweet carnations in a room, large, but too small for him not to see the woman, the mother, the wife. And the delicate roses, pink, rosary shaped, are pretty there pinned to the quilted satin top. waiting for him to move on to move away from the mother-wife that was there for thirty-eight years and then not, there and then gone. And this man, uninvolved in the bits of conversation, not talking, but moving through the words, will do his waking later, not in the smoke filled waiting room, not in the crowded parlor, but in the quiet of their room, now his, when talk is done and visits stop, in his room, filled with things: hair in brush, make-up in a bag, clothes hanging in a closet. ***************************************************** the beating of the body's blood by Tony Moffeit it was a time of threes: deaths traffic accidents a friend who died in her sleep another attached to a machine another in a traffic accident when a young woman for one instant crossed the median to meet my friend headon then my collisions three of them glass shattering metal crashing the reverberations riddling the body like an earthquake the deaths of my friends my own colliding that was the time i learned of the stonefly and his built-in drum they come in threes so they say deaths traffic accidents three dancers i met and the stonefly beating mating rhythms with his built-in drum the crashing of metal and glass the breath leaving the body the dancers with their turns their glide their flight the stonefly drumming his blues his mating refrain his tom-tom rhythmÔ other side of the light three dancers making the darkness shine thighs glowing in the night it was then i learned of the stonefly the jungle of his moves the drumming of his blues like the silence of the dancers and their screaming moves they come in threes so they say the dancers i met the crash of metal and glass the turns and slides the glide and the flight the spins it was then i learned of the stonefly and his built-in drum his mating rhythm the dancers thighs glowing in the night the shattered glass thrown like diamond dice on the highway the built-in tom-tom of the stonefly and his blues call they come in threes so they say death by sleep death by machine death by the dice of the instant of crossing the median line kill line chance controlled by the throw of the dice the body immortalized in a dance the beating of the body's drum they come in threes so they say the deaths the dance the traffic accidents the dice of the glass flying like diamond dust the love the lust the word the blood the drum the internal jungle of the stonefly the inner jungle of his drum his tom-tom the beating of the body's blood the breath that can be lost in an instant turning over in your sleep or a car that crosses the median line colliding headon the stonefly drumming the dancers with their thighs lighting the night the dream the lust the blood all intertwined the last breath the laugh of a child ******************************************************** a blues rain a jazz rain by Tony Moffeit it rained in new orleans a blues rain a jazz rain it rained in the streets a mojo rain a voodoo rain while the musicians played jug and guitar and washboard it rained in new orleans while a wild wild woman on a french balcony danced and threw roses it rained in the streets a blues rain a jazz rain while the musicians played jug and guitar and washboardÔ and i shouted at the top of my lungs: hey hey hey hey a blues rain a jazz rain and a wild wild woman threw roses from a french quarter balcony it rained in new orleans a mojo rain a voodoo rain and i was like a hobo waiting for a train as a siren sounded through the streets it rained in new orleans a blues rain a jazz rain Tarot Card III. The Empress by Grace Cavalieri This slender hand of grass - this slender white hand... this old hand moving drunkenly across the page... Passing through this hand there is a door, a garden you wouldn't have known where willows grew upward some days, where the river ran blue. This pen has a face of its own It looks like a courtesan who was merry once, a fool who danced until she cried. Now she is the mistress of herself and her own small story. ************************************************** An Ambassador to the Next Century by Rober Bove Ivy-educated white architect, 45-ish, who lived precariously in group house on M St. is an emissary we're sending into the future who kept a pig's head in the frig to photograph until he found a female model to hold it naked at her crotch who was, himself, curious why he had the impulse in the first place; excitedly fingered a couple books he'd been assigned at school years ago and found the rationale somwhere between Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm (amazing he read a complete sentence anywhere, really, since all he read were the top three newsweeklies, plus Life and Vanity Fair--and only the picture captions-- his main activity being--when he's not working silently, suspiciously, imperiously, or drinking in bars too loud to carry on a real conversation--mainiacally grazing images from 50 cable stations). Made a cross-country trip, he did, to "take in America" and came back with some good photos and a journal where he described mountains as "majestic,' deserts as "flat and lifeless," rivers as "muddy gashes between tree-lined banks," and "highways disappearing into the horizon." When he moved off M St., he left at the curb a pile of garbage, neglected during a year of garbage days, that would have filled an efficiency apt. floor to ceiling-- a pile of garbage still rotting in tropical sun weeks later, oozing fetid to the gutter, but providing amusement as we tell incredulous euramerican visitors to the neighborhood the pile was not left by aframericans, was designed and built, in fact, by a well-paid corp. architect who had spent 540 moons on the planet leaving such business cards the world over, whose lack of ironic sensibility is, itself, a monument at once majestic, flat, and lifeless. ********************************************************* At a Little Remove by Robert Bove park bench her breeze-mussed chestnut hair glinting in sun set well against creamy complexion. She munches rapidly through a straw licking lips and fingers after each bite, each drink and with a little effort i am that food that drink i am that accomodating bench *********************************************************** Brioche: Visit with Betty Rose and Ray by Betsy Robin Schwartz You know, I just retired, he said Just a couple of weeks, she said But, I'm just as busy as can be, he said I baked my first yeast bread One of those french things, she said can I get you all something we got those fancy crackers have some cheese some fruit Oh, it's lovely, he said you knead the dough place it in a pan set it in a warm environmentÔ quietly He set it down near the dishwater, she said while it was going I almost tripped over it I said Ray what in the blue blazes you got that there on the floor for And, if you've done it just right, he said not just about right but real right with the right ingredients it moves lovely It moved alright, she said scared me near to death see that thing on the floor moving like that but then Then, it comes alive, he said it grows plush and beautiful like well like like You want some more coffee, she said he's just gets too too well too you know that bread was pretty good too what you call that Ray I can't think of the name french bread brioche not bad yes brioche pretty good buttered pretty good bread Now Betty Rose, I'm looking for words, he said please don't interrupt me, darling I'm trying to describe it how can I describe it yes yes oh yes that's right it moves it moves just pure and perfect and warm like making love to the right woman ******************************************************* Ball by Jim Heck Bought in Vietnam in 1964, this small plastic red and blue ball, is orphan as my woe. In my hand this gift becomes warm, embodies possibles. Worth to you, love for me, touched by you, chosen, thought about, makes your love concrete. I can scrawl our names in it, bounce it, carve it in a tree, fall asleep in its arms. This collage I'm constructing of you, kindergarten plaster hand printed project, makes me have to wash my hands twice before I hold my son for fear of the heartache rubbling off. This is all I will ever have of you, papa, silhouette of your ghost. ******************************************************* Pretas' Light by Jim Heck Scholars dispute the color red or yellow. Stop or proceed with caution. Red sky at night, rust never sleeps, nickname was "rusty", strawberry blond with a red beard. Never saw the light, taught to be a gluttonous savior. Stop or proceed with caution. Stopped to die in Ca Mau, life leaked out of the bullet holes thousands of miles from home, hungry, abandoned, ignored & forgotten you wander. Stop or proceed with caution. Stop crying, there is no time, buried yet not mourned in the silence of a tabooed war you wander, unknown soldier. Stop or proceed with caution. Stopped fast for a yellow thought I saw a cop, brake lights unseen no third eye, hit from behind bleeding crimson in a flipped over jeep, smelling gas. I shook the hand of the man that hit me. Stop or proceed with caution. Stopped the feelings of fear, anger and greed that causes man to die, kill, wander eternal red light pretas. ********************************************************* Ode to Karl Shapiro by Leo Connellan the lone heterosexual rides his last maiden into her screaming dawn. From now on she'll be known as all knowing liberated woman who doesn't give anything to you, and doesn't want anything. Your size means nothing to her and what you can do with it, nothing and it means very little to her if she does it, and very little if she doesn't. The city of New York is cracked. Where the moon rises Karl Shapiro lands at Idlewild. Along Broadway Jack Dempsey's is become th' home of th' Whopper and George M, Cohan finally looks ridiculous in Pigeon expression. From the jungles of the South Pacific pulling detail on Pacific isles, came home Karl Shapiro with Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle, everybody's cartoonist, everybody's drinking buddy correspondent, and a poet who was in a war. Karl Shapiro home like the Lion of Judah on the pages of the New Yorker, put a Pulitzer in his pocket and to Chicago, edited, then Japan, India, Germany, Nebraska...California. Along the Hudson and Westchester the highway broke apart and fell down on pier scurrying thieves underneath. The old west side trail crushed from trucks, taxi cabs and motorists weaving in and out in sudden death hurry. Drenching the air in sweat and gas while a thouseand shady deals cost lives and it cost your life to try and stay alive. In the dawn moon the lone heterosexual rides his last maiden singing "Hi-Ho Blonde Chick aw-waay!" and swinging Edsel landed at Kennedy. Karl Shapiro, I sing to you from my youth for your great courage when you didn't have to and it would have profited you more not to stand up against the WASP and the FACIST. But this will not be one-a' them revealing tributes, in which I cry "This one, too, Karl, this one, "Hey, Karl, bebbe, whachoo doin' down there among th' Irish!?" When this nobody came to you, you who were everything embraced me. I have only imagined poems, you, Karl, have written them. What it was to read your images! Freeing us from Whitman long before Allen told us it was all right to tongue somebody's ear out, you wrote "Buick" and "Nigger" while Federico saw butterflies in Walt's beard and, excited, a youngster, I wrote TO BEGIN WITH But my years now in half seconds each squeezed for the utmost. Defeated House Invalid's complete ceasing. Fire the Pilot Light in the furnace of myself like one kneeling outdoors on a windy night presses lips close to the new starting fire, softly blows it to re-kindle where the spark had died. And, swimming in my head your "Buick," Karl, I wrote, then, STAY LOOSE When the rent man comes frothing into your pig-sty eyes throwing you out, and the rat you've been sharing with tip-toes cross door ledge behind him refusing to spring bite into his roast beef fed neck that his face justs off like a constipated owl as his drool hangs at the crevice where a chin, somewhere in the rolls of greasy flesh should be, ask him back. Be a host who's too busy to see a sick friend, while his look pops disbelief as he can't catch his breath. Push him back in that hall an animal would go blind in.Ô Gently slamming the door and bending, shove through to his greedy little reach an envelope on which is scribbled, small as a needle point...I'm moving...soon...soon. Along the Hudson and Westchester that road has broken off with us. And downtown the chortling clowns hustle us, Karl, out of our literature. Second rate mediocrity arriving to read what they call their "poems" on stages like The New School, nasty mean people always lugging knapsacks bent over like the crawling things they are, struggling, not about poetry but career, what will be bad enough not threaten and so allowed. There may be no Schliemann to find the lost Troy of verse, Karl, and no one who even knows Delmore Schwartz. No one who reads Eberhart and Jarrell, Allen's Kaddish or Federico Watermelon poem or who ever heard of the Naome Replansky. But, Karl Shapiro, I sing to you for standing for these people and these things. I sing to you for myself because you gave me myself in my art and you gave me yourself. ******************************************************* Interview with Charles Plymell by Dave Sellitto Q: Because of the content of the writing that took place during the Beat era, dealing with specific people and places, using memoirs or odes, do you think that this aspect of the writing will affect its long-term security in the world of literature? A: What you are asking is if the solipsistic raving the Beats, especially Allen (Ginsberg - Plymell will refer to Ginsberg many times during the interview) and the realities he's claimed for himself, if that insight into a personality and privacy of those he designated as the angels of his magic circle; If all that will what you're asking. The answer is yes. There are two answers. First, no matter what most of them do, it's far superior to the necrophilic literature of the academe which re-constructs the dead page and tries to disguise it once again for public palatability. Of course the contemporary audience has been numbed or bewildered in the process and has died along with it, so there is no contention since critical awareness is non-existent, replaced by the few patrons who have made a fetish of poetry and art. They became the source of providing legitimacy mainly to untalented, clever people who like to play the sensitive Bohemian and expect to be rewarded, but the language is essentially dead, or trumped up to fit passing fads or perceived inequities of favored ethnic and gender groups. They are also regional, with an emphasis on craft. Other than the New Yorker, in my region the literati still read Cooper, whose language is stilted, contrived, and pretentious, so those we used to call artsy fartsy still flourish in quaint towns like Cooperstown and support the local artists and intelligentsia who are about as dated as James Fenimore himself. But that's the way it is in locals all over the country, thanks to the State and Federal Governments' reach for regionalism in the arts. Of course it has nothing to do with finding a real voice out there. It becomes what Carl Weissner, translator of Bukowski, called "subsidized lint," as in belly button fuzz. One or two lines from our state poet, Richard Howard, who was just awarded $10,000 of your money should tip off any reader that there's nothing happening. There is a commonality of such pathos from the book morgues of the safe academic mainistream poets that sinks immediately to cold bathos upon reading. All dead academic poetry sounds the same, sometimes a little condensed milk is added as filler for mainstream commercial New Yorker tastes, or a squirt of whipped cream parlor humor confection. Academic poetry has imploded, ruined an audience. Students no longer flock to these classes, though they express a desire for poetry in almost a seminal context. Academics should be keepers and scholars of poetry on the page and not attempt to mimic it. They have never figured out how poetry lives both on and off the page. By contrast, even Allen'sslobbery hyperbole of his famous lines from Howl has a ring to them, a sound that transcends the time. You can sense the same in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, everyone who writes timeless poetry. The "academics" in Shakespeare's day also tried to dismiss his language as frivolous, instinctively trying to stamp out anything that might outlive them. Even his most contrived lines in the Sonnets break the cadence of typical Elizabethan trot and could easily transcend to a line from one of Hank William's songs. Then you begin to realize what makes a greater and more sacred audience. But Shakespeare probably had abnormal brain chemistry that allowed him to hear words that could resound, or resonate through time on every possible level at once. TheÔ what you call "security." That stretch, that ambiguity, which the pompous academic so despises is one sign of life. The other, in Allen's case, is that he tried to be where history was in the making. To make the scene, as it was. This helped keep his face in the news, but one also knew that history was happening, and if one hung in with the scene, one could be a part of it, like the Chicago riots; when else, or where else could a political party show a clearer picture of hypocrisy to the world? Where and when could one of France's greatest poets, the convict Jean Genet, slip across the Canadian border and join the great American icon, William Burroughs, while people were clubbed, and even Dan Rather shoved around by goons? And if one had the credentials of fame, one could raise a lot of hell and not worry about jail time. We don't have revolutionary times now, but to have been a part of it, like St. Petersburg, 1917, or in Mexico with Pancho Villa or Zapata--that was poetry in action. I remember sitting at a poetry reading in San Francisco State in the 60s, you know, with a highly paid creative writing professor, a half a dozen sycophants and a candle, when all of a sudden glass started shattering and bottles were thrown. Finally one poet aficionado rose to his feet and announced, "Hell, the poetry is going on out here," and everybody ran outside to the campus riot where Hiakawa grabbed the microphone and "fired" Kay Boyle. Ezra Pound said, "Literature is news that stays news." There is not a better definition, and the poet and his time knows just how close those words come into being literal. Allen knew that and writers of the Beat Generation sensed that, so there was always a feeling of recording history as well as one's own reality, even Ferlinghetti while sitting in Mike's Pool Hall. No matter if it's bad writing, it retains some importance. And by keeping the main players intact - Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso - though protest poems die, Allen has made sure and lobbied for the "body Beat" to be substantial enough and good enough. Even though it is outside of what his detractors may call lasting literature, it will survive. It is already in the historical hopper, so the question is moot. Don't let poetry professors give you that old "test of time" bullshit. They don't know. Q: Since you've been writing, has your disdain of the "Academe" grown? Has it shrunk? Have you seen yourself assimilated at all? A: No, I don't play the game. I've seen enough distinguished lecturers, celebrity visitors, wine and cheese, cocktail parties, kitchen conversations groping for sex, sycophancy, unabashed positioning for publication, awards, favors, honorariums, the pecking order; it becomes the same game, the same party, so I know what it is. I've had my 15 minutes of fame. I had a book signing party for me at Gotham Book Mart in N.Y.C. upon the publication of one of my books, which was very well attended, so I've had my wine, my little taste of good bread and brie. After I got out of Hopkins, I was offered a tenure-track position atÔ became one of the creative writing industry centers like Iowa, but the creative writing industry, whether it's in the tower or from the street eventually takes a very energetic, motivated, calculative, cold piranha with a dark mind to keep afloat in such murky waters. I'm not saying I'm above it, I'm saying I didn't join the game. I wasn't a bored member type. -- end --