Zen for Beginners

You touch a doorknob and it is sticky
You touch a chair and it is sticky
You touch a desk and it is sticky
You touch a pen and it is sticky
You touch a cup and it is sticky
It is not these things which are sticky
But you who are sticky

Two Short Poems

"Sir, have you been drinking tonight?"
--------------------Yes, how nice of you to ask.

Dead Baby Jokes
--------------------Does not "break the ice"

The Musings of someone completely out of their mind

Her name is Hilary
She is tall and gaunt
But she has a small ribcage
a distinctly feminine feature
It makes her B-cup breasts
look good on her slim frame
And she's got a big butt for a skinny girl
And good legs

I had struck up a conversation
a week before
Now she sees me
as the room fills up
She sits in a vacant seat
rows ahead of me
I dream of
throwing a book at her head

Outside

Sitting outside,
the flies don't buzz your ears.
The outside flies accept
that their parents did the best they could
to raise them
with what they had.
Not like the psychologically frustrated flies
who buzz your eyes and nose
in sticky and uncomfortable
hot classrooms.


Those tiny black bastards,
with angst from their repressed desires,
take the rage out on you!
Fly in low, buzzing
right inside the ear canal
so the sound magnifies
like a Metallica amp turning on suddenly
next to your ear
and recoil like an idiot
like all those times you walked into spider webs

Not even the best fly psychologist
could change these neurotic fuckers.
Impossible to relieve their stress!
they also
sick of
being in this
fucking room.

2) Brautigan's Search for the American Dream

In the Summer of 1961, Brautigan set off with his wife Virginia and his Daughter, Ianthe, in their Plymouth Station Wagon. The Wagon was armed with lanterns and stoves, sleeping bags, a card table, a 7' bamboo fishing rod, and a portable typewriter. It probably looked like this:


In 1967, Trout Fishing in America was published, the result of the trip in the well-armed Plymouth that occured six years earlier throughout the expanse of Idaho's Stanley Basin. Brautigan had eventually traded away that 7' bamboo fishing rod and later still, that rod was sold on eBay. The people who were looking to buy it saw this:


(I can't properly footnote in the blog, so let me say here that the previous information was gathered from this page: http://www.brautigan.net/trout.html)


Trout Fishing in America, itself, is a black joke that someone is the brunt of. You might not know it, but Trout Fishing in America could have other people laughing at you!

The Mayor of the Twentieth Century wears a costume of Trout Fishing in America in order to hide himself while he murdered. Trout Fishing in America Shorty is a crippled wino rolling around in a wheelchair. "Shorty, ha! You would be short too if you didn't have any shins!" he seems to say. Trout Fishing in America himself is a middle aged, average American, who is a blue collar worker and an avid fisherman. Trout Fishing in America is what the sixth graders write on the backs of the first graders. Trout Fishing in America is a concept for a ballet to be performed in Los Angeles based upon the movements of carnivorous plants.

Trout Fishing in America is embodied as many people, both alive and dead. It is a rich gourmet with Maria Callas for a girlfriend. It appeared to be dead from asphyxiation to the medical examiner, who dissected its skull and sent it to be put in a cask of spirits. Trout Fishing in America leaves short commentary at the end of some vignettes. He also exists as someone who has been around since Lewis and Clark and been there to experience it, well, almost all of the American Experience, excepting a particular Deanna Durbin movie.

This is what Deanna Durbin looks like, and according to Trout Fishing in America, not what the Missouri River looks like:



Just to get an idea of what Trout Fishing in America is, these are some of the things which it embodies. Yet Trout Fishing in America is meant to be surreal and elusive, like the experience of Alonso Hagen in "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity," who never does catch a trout despite his numerous attempts to over a span of years. (see p.80-85)


Perhaps it is best to describe Brautigan's work here as another quest to find what Hunter S. Thompson tried to describe as the Heart of the American Dream. Both Thompson and Brautigan seem to divide the time of their search between the road, hotels, the great outdoors and wilderness, the inner city, and the social experiences with average Americans. The question that comes naturally from their experiments is: did they find the American Dream? I think the answer has to be unequivocally no, neither found the American Dream, but they put forward poetically graceful concepts about what the American Dream is. For Brautigan, the concept of the American Dream can be boiled down into four words, "Trout Fishing in America." It's accessible to every American, whether in rags or riches, and it comes from the grace of the American land in both the mind of the innermost quarters of the cities and the hearts of the lush, untamed wild.

1) Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Our "San Francisco Poems" by Fernlinghetti is a short anthology of his works. After the introductory pages where we establish Fernlinghetti as San Francisco's Poet Laureate, we are confronted by Ferlinghetti in his 'Challenges to Young Poets.' His strongest criticisms of poetry are reflected on p30, where he says:

"Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking.
"First thought, best thought" may not make
for the greatest poetry. First thought may be
worst thought.

What's on your mind? What do you have in
mind? Open your mouth and stop mumbling.

Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall
out.

Question everything and everyone. Be sub-
versive, constantly questioning reality and
the status quo.

Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't
pander, especially not to possible audiences,
readers, editors, or publishers."

This is a powerful challenge! He demands poets be counter-culture, dissenters of the popular, and independent of support. This is like the classic teenage ideal where the teenage poet believes he can change the world without ever being popular or selling-out. It's the anti sell-out idea. Don't sell out to main-stream ideas, don't sell out to business.

While "San Francisco Poems" is merely an anthology of his poems, I don't feel he's met his own challenge in most of his own poetry. Most of it is sensory and sentimental - describing things he believes are beautiful and interesting. Most of it is shallow in it's prettiness.
Like, right after the 'Challenge to Young Poets' when he has 'A North Beach Scene.' This and many of his poems are rather Frost-like in that they are quaint and touchy-feely but they have no edge.

The next two poems have some subversive elements in them. He gives them a bit more edge, but not all the way as to be the kind of extreme edge that he calls for in his "Challenge."

He makes a clever juxtaposition in 'They Were Putting Up a Statue..." where he contrasts the classic image of St. Francis in nature with birds joining him on his head and outstretched arms with the city scene where they raise a statue of the Saint in a totally birdless square. Then, with the idea that this San Francisco is rather un-Francis-like, we have a unique touch of San Francisco city culture at the end of the poem where he vaguely mentions that perhaps a nude blond girl with a birds nest is walking among people watching the statue-raising. Is this something that really happened/happens? Is this girl real or is she what he envisions should be there during this statue-raising? The idea of this naked virgin with a bird's nest is a rather pagan image to have around St. Francis, but maybe St. Francis' nature-worship is a rather pagan concept.

With 'Dog' he gets existential, observing the world through the eyes of a dog who is cognizant of San Francisco's political atmosphere. That sounds odd, but he makes it pretty enough so that it's very pallateable. The dog's commentary becomes edgy when he disregards the power of the cops. The dog sees cops as another animal, a predator, tougher to eat and stringier than easy prey, such as a tender cow. Ferlinghetti parallels the dog with the young man, who sees the world as though he is uncorrupted, as though he sees it in a more true and unjaded way. The dog is "touching and tasting and testing everything / investigating everything / without benefit of perjury / a real realist." It's his ideal that he expects from young poets. But, he jabs at this teenage, youthful "purity of mind" in his last image where he metaphorically displays the dog as a product of his cultutre. The dog was an observer in most of the poem and then, he becomes the image of the big-label. The proverbial sell-out.