The Buffalo Sequence (poetry); Thoughts on poetry (essay)
by Mark Pawlak, TGS staff member
Five poems from The Buffalo Sequence
i.
never again Joey the cross-eyed
who in the church parking lot with magnifying glass
sentenced a regiment of ants to the fires of hell.
never again.
and the nuns hurrying from the church to the school,
they churned up the air so
that behind them it congealed in a long wave of funeral cloth.
- the way they threw us against the walls, those holy women,
till we learned to be good: never again, never again.
never again Stephanie who hit the longest ball,
so quick on her feet
she beat the rest of us to teen age;
and her father such a good man,
sweeping all night to keep the school clean of sins. no, never again.
Michael freckle faced
smaller than me but tougher;
he knew to keep his distance when i was mad...
upon entering whose house was a lancing odor
of eight children, the week’s garbage,
and the parents are never home.
never again to go into battle behind him
against other courtyard gangs
garbage can lids for shields, wooden arrows and swords
sharpened on the mortar of our brick fortress.
and Billy, first friend, who said the robin was only sleeping
and we should cover it with dirt to keep it warm.
never again, who grew up to be known throughout the projects
for a bully.
and Willie
his little brother stood forever in the doorway,
not entering, not leaving;
only his big bellybutton protruding from the house.
Willie visited by mail eight years later, and never again,
his black face torn from a newspaper
- BREAKS RECORD IN HUNDRED YARD DASH -
whose eyes were coals singeing the paper
like in the picture of a black GI KILLED IN VIETNAM,
or a YOUTH FOUND BREAKING AND ENTERING SHOT BY POLICE.
Willie never again Willie.
...and here, as it was in Buffalo,
everyone is waiting for the brick of oblivion to descend.
meanwhile, as it was in Buffalo, living is carried on:
seen from the neighboring height of a 20 floor construction,
people, no bigger than rats, hurry between their slumped hovels
where the air is a stench.
ten years ago and ten years after and
never again, never again.
...meanwhile,
the one slow to the race, who knew however,
every shortcut from mental anguish,
across shrinking eternity, from one street corner to the other
- Hey! has returned. -quieter, has come to make a home.
the learned one has come with his never agains pocketed,
with a lesson plan in his left hand, - the humbler to speak with;
and has plunked down his trunk full of books
on the exact spot
where ten years ago and ten years after
are shouldering for the same place and time.
right now,
he is keeping vigil with the violent carrots
over a loaf of good ethnic bread.
he finds here, that all the fractions of his soul
come to exactly 1.
iii.
I would paint childhoods of brick walls
and mothers' flowered red aprons,
red brick the houses;
brick communities
in which courtyards of paved-over grasses
it is evening
and the children are playing, among garbage cans,
hide-n-seek
from the shadows of squalor;
and where the moon in a rage
is roaming the neighborhood
for a single tree to break against.
let them hang that in their museums!
vii
(Dear…,)
Today there is no letter from her boys
and her son’s mother is sad.
Her son’s father is sad too
--they know how he misses his boys;
and couldn’t they show a little more appreciation?
Today when there is no word,
she is watching her husband in his uneasy rest.
He has finished dinner and now
stretches his skin, rough from hard work,
wall to wall on the living room floor.
The noise his belly makes,
she is certain,
he must be digesting over and over
the meal stewed once again
with the bones of happier days.
Her sons now their father is a good man.
If there is any place not full in his belly now
it is where he keeps a vacancy,
any time, for his boys.
And couldn’t they show a little more appreciation?
Last night, her husband did not sleep
but tossed and tossed….
When he pulled the sheets over his head
she thought it was the dark wave
that one forgets under, forever.
She worries about that good man.
Recently, his liver has been remembering
his wild younger days
--before her son’s mother knew him;
her husband is getting old and she worries…
Her sons know their father never complains.
She could tell,
his great arched rib ached him
when he came home from work today,
the one he stretches from horizon to horizon
to keep back the darkness for his boys.
Her sons really could show a little more appreciation.
(Mother.)
ix
who is this?
attends with his murky agitated waters
the reunion,
where the whole familiar generation
of settled and settling silts
picnics in the tall sweet grass
growing along the cheekbone of grandfather's grave;
and can't hold back, not with four hands,
what took him so long to tame:
who is this?
says,
what a necklace of polished stones they make
around his grandpa's crude stone,
then rips the boards of the attic door
from behind which his childhood cries:
who is this?
who is this?
attends the table once again, prodigal and starving;
all of his absence come as a pained larynx to sit
beside his mother and dearly loved; and,
kiss kiss, she tugs the roots of his anguish
by its combed strands
asking what her son's losing so much hair about;
after the meal, more hungry than before
and dumbfounded with talk,
whose feet lead him into exile again,
the arid climate of speechlessness;
artificial orchards beside the river of slag
and the oranges a desperate cry:
who is this?
xv
...then let this
be the city, now i will call home.
workmen on scaffolds with sandblasting equipment
are pointing up,
-does it matter what name in stone,
good as new, on the facade of city hall?
every step i take,
i am walking down a Buffalo street,
a Buffalo sidewalk in Buffalo!
. . . . .
there is one square-
an intersection of several back streets
which lead away from the main drag-
where i specially like to find myself;
where,
in the loose huddle
of rough-skinned old men around the newsstand,
there lingers and aroma
older, to my nostrils, than remembering.
lips screw-up; they show their purple gums;
and pulling at suspenders,
brandish the juicy cigars of an argument:
-to hell with the big shots, the politicians!
-to hell with Big Bob Corcoran!
-to think a poor man,
for the daily bread on his table,
has to pay with
what he borrows from his death!
-dog's blood!
-to hell with them!
i used to, listen to
my grandpa talk this way
with the plumber from across the street,
with the one who in passing each morning
waved hello with his lunch pail,
grandma called the Irishman;
and with the other men,
like himself, retired from the railroad:
grandpa, every fifteen minutes
pulling his gold watch out by the chain.
The Buffalo Sequence, by Mark Pawlak,
with an introduction by Denise Levertov.
Copper Canyon Press, 1978. ISBN 0-914742-19-1
Copies available from Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff Street,
Brooklyn, NY 11217
http://hangingloosepress.com
————————————————————————————-
MARK PAWLAK
THOUGHTS ABOUT POETRY
the stories a grandparent will tell a child about life in the old country, a life and culture rooted in the tired soil of Europe; about peo- ple who lived in the crowded streets of the poorest sections of European cities, characters the likes of which one can find in Isaac Babel's Odessa stories; hoodlums raised to the stature of popular heroes, street venders, and others; or about characters from rural life, people right out of Gorky's childhood.
stories also of the difficulties of getting passage to America; the hardships an immigrant encounters and survives, living in crowded ethnic communities of big eastern cities; a life of hard work and raising children, of fighting and bitterness among different ethnic groups competing for jobs; the bread lines of the depression, ...
-all told in that peculiar stew of old country words and english words; peculiar also for the grammar, unorthodox constructions of sent- ences and accents of the telling; a speech much closer to the old language than to english diction.
and the stories a mother will tell her child. mother more often than father, he coming home beat from 8 hours working in some factory or whatever, and then most likely has to leave again after eating dinner and disciplining the kids, for his second job, coming home again to sleep well after the children have been put to bed--the kids rarely get to hear the stories of his childhood.) stories then, of mother's childhood, her many brothers and sisters, their escapades she best remembers; who were bullies and who friends in the neighborhood, and what the neighborhood's land- marks were...
also stories about what a tyrant her father was, but respecting him all the same, such a hard-working man he was; and how fascinated she was with the machinery he worked with, those times she remembers going with an cider brother to meet their father at quitting time: and what great love her mother served to all who came to her kitchen table, not just family, helping others out in the neighborhood, sharing homemade pastries and stories about other neighbors? but also that heavy broom handle she could wield to keep eight or ten unruly children in line, …
-and all these stories told by a mother in a language ladled from the bren ber parents spoke, but with a more english diction, probably, because the did go to school for a while until she was old enough to hold a job, helping out with the family and getting herself a little spending money. these stories and the language in which they are incarnated make up the living oral tradition a child is born into in America, in a similar manner to how the parents' and grandparents' personalities influence what will become the character of the child's speech.
a child carries this tradition into the streets where he or she lives a life independent of the family among other children of the neighborhood, there a child learns from personal experience and by word of mouth from other children: who is tougher than whom; which adults are friendly to kids and which are ogres, chasing the kids away for playing baseball neat their window; which families are feuding and which are friends; the places where certain groups of kids hang out, the big kids behind the delicatessen where they smoke cigarettes and drink beer, and the younger kids hovering about them like a swarm of bees; what land- marks ate the boundaries between neighborhoods and had better not be transgressed unless one is looking for a fight; the vacant lot in which, i summers, weeds grow tall and one can catch grasshoppers; how far it is to where the better-off people live; and where the large open fields are, as yet undeveloped; from which one can see far in any direction, there being no tall bulldings to confine your view either up or down the street ...
though there will be local differences, depending upon what area of the country one grows up in, and to what degree the people of the specific community are of one ethnic origin, or the community is an agglomeration of many ethnic groups, --this is in some way representative of how a person grows into language in America, grows into the American language: 'The English language, enriched with contributions from every language, old and new that Whitman foresaw; or call it the American Idiom, which W.C.Willlams demanded, a language three or four generations old, sown in the soil which is the English language. people of my generation grew up in this farmers' market: a community of fruit and vegetable stalls of language, each stall with a different family oral heritage from which we could pick to bring to our own table.
this is the only language a child knows until the age when schooling begins to show its influence upon speech, this language which American education considers it is obliged to root out and replace with book language. (Whitman said noone ever speaks the language of books, and Williams said that we have fallen so low in defense of our own speech that 'Every high school in America is duty bound to preserve the English language.... To fail in English is unthinkable!')
to be successful in the American education system is to make it to college or through college; to be prepared to have all the qualifications necessary to get a 'good job', so then to 'make it' means to have unlearned American speech and to have replaced it with educated speech; to have stripped one's speech of all local color, all character, all heritage; to have repressed the speech one grew up with, condemning it to some dungeon of one's consciousness, the sterile norm that is our democracy would have people relinquish their license to be creative with the language. to be a successful American is to be without one's American language heritage.
how does all this relate to all those people of my generation who would write poetry? it is for us to hold onto that speech we grew up with and its oral heritage if there is to be an American literature. (as someone said, only by seeking the universal, the universally human, in the local can great universal art be made.) we must write in the language people actually speak if poetry is to have meaning to other people; to write in the American Idiom as Williams demanded, but with this difference, which should make itself felt in our writing: whereas he listened with love to 'the speech of Polish mothers' during childbirth, and tuned his poetic eat to that speech, our language is the progeny of that Idiom he listened to; we are the children he delivered or the children of those children, and have grown up inside of the American Idiom.
i come then to poetry concerned that the poet bring an awareness of his or her individual place in history to poetry, an awareness of his or her identity as an American writing poetry. take the example of Neruda, or take the example of 'so-called' indigenist Latin American poets such as Antonio Cuadra and Cesar Vallejo, two of the many who sought to give voice in their poetry to what was particularly 'Latin American' in themselves, namely, the indian in themselves which had for so long been repressed by their Spanish heritage; a poetry rooted in the heritage of their country's people which had so long been mute.
since my identity begins with my heritage of grandparents and greatgrandparents who were immigrants from Poland to America, then to be faithful to the identity of my poetic voice i need to write in the language i grew up with, drawing upon its real oral tradition, drawing also from the oral community of my childhood in a Buffalo housing project.
because i was one of the very few from such communities to 'make it' through college, it was my misfortune to have my speech educated out of my mouth and consequently it has taken much for me to find that wall between me and my speech, and remove the bricks. thankfully, i find my speech still alive within myself; as alive as it is today among those of my people who live in urban ghettos, housing projects, etc.; those who are poor and poorly educated, welfare recip- ients, and 'low income' workingclass whites. ( the speech of black Americans is something very different, with its own history and oral tradition, its own particular richness such as one finds in the poetry of Ethridge Knight, say.) my speech is alive among those who are oppressed by the American dream that 'everyone makes a lot of money and gets ahead'; those who believe their inferiority to others who stepped over their neighbors to get ahead; those who taken as a class are the flunkouts from American education.
as an Eskimo sculptor will look at a stone or a piece of bone, caressing it until he can feel with his hands and visualize with the imagination the form that is inherent in it that will determine what the sculpture becomes; so do i seek poems in the conversations I have with people, in my recollection of conversations or in overheard conversations; also in popular myths and opinions; perhaps in a country song which has deeply moved someone; in the fragmentary writing attempts of barely literate friends, exploring those needs among common people living in America for expression of things deeply felt in the everydayness of their lives and my life. Pasternak said 'the most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within.' in the everydayness of living, though not with the consciousness of an artist, people who are not duty bound to educated speech show that creative freedom with the laguage at their disposal, reinventing and transforming their language from within, out of their urgencies to say what they feel.
often before working at a poem, i study the letters friends and relatives have written to me, the letters i in turn have written to them; until i can feel with the pen in my hand every word i write; until my pen is in- fused in that sensuality of hands that have worked hard; hands which feel and know things through no intellectual exercise, a sensual consciousness which feels, feels its environment down to the smallest gash in the lip of a garbage can. a sensuality which, when there is love, caresses the speaking language maternally; and which, when there is fear or terror, fires the language with a violence that can shatter the images in which living is expressed. a sensuality which has the grace of, say, an old Italian man, his arm gesticulating in the white heat of conversation.
i consider my poetry an act of exploration, individual poems distinct explorations into the language, beginning from the shore which is everyday speech and setting sail, a movement in the waters of imagination whose direction and velocity is not determined by the rules of formal speech or the abstract rules of cold logic, a movement warmed by emotion, whose logic, if it can be called that, is vented fresh by the act of the poem, a movement that begins with people, not ideas. beginning from people, it can entertain ideas, but only so much as the ideas will not interfere with the movement of the poem returning again to people. such ideas as I am thinking of are not static or abstract, but something felt with the body, the heart and intellect: ideas as actions which a person can feel, which his or her whole being experience: that sense of being moved by a poem!
this oral tradition which i have been speaking about, and find alive today in America, though we have but a fragile grip upon it, threatened as it is by miseducation, is in many ways related to those oral folk cultures which gave themselves into song: the Scottish border ballads, the Spanish ballad, etc, our oral tradition is the uncut stone which American poets will fashion into modern American ballads.
but all that is spoken, all that is felt and expressed is just the tip of an iceberg showing above the waters of consciousness. such a great mass of ballads yet to be written lie mouldering deep beneath. i cannot think of poetry without feeling how much we each carry dammed up inside of us crying for expression, that which renders us mute in our everyday lives. one has only to look at a photograph of a family of share-croppers, to look into their eyes, and one feels all that is crying for expression, in the same way, a poet has only to search with empathy and love below the surface of that oral tradition of common American people for the great mass of ballads pleading to be written. it is the poets' responsibility to open him/herself by an act of love beyond ego boundaries, so that those ballads as yet unsung can be made into song through the instrument of the poet's voice. a love is required that is innocent, deep and knows no bounds; a love exemplified by the mother in Gorky's novel, MOTHER. if there is to be a poetry which is 'of and for the people' then it will light the darkness of life in America with the same humble flame with which that noble woman warmed the samovar for the guests at her table.
the most remarkable example of such poetry i find in Vallejo's book ESPANA APARTA DE MI ESTA CALIZ, two decades after Vallejo's death, Hugo Blanco wrote from prison in response to that book: 'there are only great poets now...who write for great men and great events...noone writes for common illiterate people anymore...we have to assign all this to Vallejo...tell Vallejo to come back, his people need him desperately.'
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