cover by Tomm Scalera of Graphic Angels Design
[Below are the first drafts of the poems. More recent drafts of the full poem are collected here -
http://poetrycircle.com/files/muse.doc



Mon., Sept. 20

Take a ticket.
We started out three,
then swelled to nine;
you poets have no one to blame
but yourselves for this long line.
It's not like we can produce more
wisdom or beauty at will
just to meet an increasing demand.
Such things take time.
You understand.

The old-timers made liberal use
of the hemlock to ensure
access to one of us
three or four times a month.
By Zeus,
you're number 2,900,001!

If you don't swoon from the heat
or collapse from dehydration,
don't fear,
you'll finally get your audience—
the quickest, faintest whisper
in one ear
that only someone starved
for something never heard before
will hear.

Tues., Sept. 21

Once you make it to
the head of the line,
our customized service
guarantees that every
inspiration is a good
fit for your schedule
and life-style: hear it
on the spot or squirrel
it away for a once-in-
a-lifetime opportunity!

While most can't wait,
J. Langston Hughes
held tight to his chit
until late one evening
during his busboy shift
at the Wardman Park
Hotel when I dared him,
“Lay your 'Weary Blues'
down by the tea cup
of that grim Illinoisan
with the swell cowlick.”
This isn't apocryphal!
Halfway through his
pastry and the poem,
Vachel Lindsay had an
esophageal blockage.
After his wife swiped
out his gullet with her
index finger, the first
thing he blurted out
was, “Who wrote that!”

“Hank” Charles Bukowski
was a tough nut. When
we whispered in his ear,
he lept up and chased us
with a rusty fly-swatter!
Even his wannabe angel
he brushed back—until
we took a craftier tack,
urging Martin to mention
two bottles people had
given him, a teetotaler,
as gifts—that he'd be glad
to drive right over with.
"It's killing you," he said
of Bukowski's post office
job. “How much do you
need to live?” Rent, food,
Miller High Life, Pall Malls,
White Owls, child support—
$100 a month. “I'll gamble
that to publish your work.
I'm so sick of my own job
selling typewriter ribbons."

Muse's Advisory 1.2, Sept 22

You inspire us
who pander to posterity
successfully as Nathan Hale—

though green behind the ears,
displayed a present mind
beyond his years
when facing Extreme Unction
at the New York city gallows:
felt no inkling of compunction
about plagiarizing Cato
he'd just read at Yale,
“What a pity it is
That we can die but once to serve our country";

then Mr. Lincoln
several generations later
ripped a page
from old King George's playbook,
which magnanimously made decree
that every slave
held by his enemies in arms
should henceforth and forever be deemed free.
Wasn' it Christ who said,
"Strike not one cheek but two"?

You pulled out every stop
to borrow, beg or steal with all
the cheek that you could muster
ears of future countrymen,
your name applying to their lips
the luster of those duller souls
who had the bright idea
but didn't find a way to leverage it.

Thurs., Sept. 23

The lapse of judgment; the character ravine;
abysmal braggadocio; the moral turpentine
that melts away the flaking paint of piety;
these are the telltale signs of true renown.

Our exemplar: Admirable John Paul "Jones."

A Scot, young John Paul cut his sailor's teeth
on slavers King George and Two Friends
until he flogged one man to death,
then in Tobago ran a second through;
took "Paul Jones" as his alias, fled skittish
to plantations in Virginia where,
since the warrant for his arrest was British,
he threw in his cutthroat lot  
with desperadoes chin-deep in a plot
to throw off the Colonial yoke.
Captaining the Alfred to Acadia,
he pirated Liverpool's Mellish—
her cargo, woolen uniforms
for snowbound northern garrisons—
and penned a swashbuckling boast:

The news of the captured uniforms renewed
the courage of George Washington's army
and contributed significantly to his success
at the Battle of Trenton against the Hessians.

Put off by the his thirst for self-advancement,
the Colonial commanders tongue-lashed Jones,
who off to France sailed with his cocky pen:

After General Burgoyne and his army
were forced to surrender at Saratoga,
it was I who carried the news to France,
which determined the Court to recognize
America's independence by treaty of alliance.

Embraced by Louis XVI, Jones sailed from Brest
in a vessel having no external appearance of war
and resumed his pirate-terrorist career:

The morning of the 19th off the Mull of Galloway
I found myself so near a Scotch coasting schooner
laden with barley that I could not avoid sinking her.

Rowing ashore at Whitehaven to drink with his men,
they set a merchantman on fire before taking flight:

Had it been possible we landed a few hours sooner,
not a single ship of more than two hundred
could have escaped and the whole world would not
have been able to save the town from flames.

John Paul Jones had not yet begun to fight.

Bretagne's Bonhomme Richard beneath his boots
off Yorkshire's Flamborough Head,
its prey his native nation's Baltic merchant fleet
whose escort cannon-battered the French ship,
Jones's lieutenant sent a plea for rescue;
but when the English mate offered to take
the doomed French crew aboard before they sank,
Jones answered in defiance, tough,
No, I am determined that you should surrender first—
soon edited to I may sink but be damned if I strike—
still not the stirring rallying cry
posterity gave him credit for, but close enough.
When Jones's crew did finally board
the British man-o'-war, they commandeered it,
so that King Louis dubbed Jones Chevalier
with rapier and ribbon of l'Ordre du Mérite militaire.

Quickly consuming the goodwill of the French,
Jones next hired out to Russia's Empress Catherine,
changing his name this time to "Pavel Dzhones"
and sailing against the Black Sea Ottomans
until the Russians cast him out as well.

He was discovered lying face-down on a bed
in a Paris apartment, No. 42 Rue de Tournon;
buried in St. Louis Cemetery for Alien Protestants,

whence in 1906 an anonymous coffin was dug up,
shipped to the Annapolis Naval Academy, and replaced
by a costly bronze and marble sarcophagus
over which President Theodore Roosevelt,
as part of his campaign for Navy-building funds,
gilded Jones's reputation in a stultifying oration:

I thank our ancient ally, the great French nation,
that proud and gallant nation to whose help
we once owed it that John Paul Jones was able
to win for the Stars and Stripes the victory
that gives him deathless fame, and to whose courtesy
we now owe it that this hero's body is sent hither....

Thus, mes amis, is immortality earned.

Fri., Sept. 24

If you really had something
earth-shaking to say
would you put it in a poem?

Okay, no.

Einstein dipped into Baudelaire
but saw that Imagism didn't suit
e equals m c squared.
Kennedy thought the Cuban Missile Crisis
might fit nicely in haiku
but Jackie just said Jack,
and he knew.

Are you still there?
I haven't discouraged you?
Okay, move up in line.
You're now 2,868,232.

From up at the front,
Homer looks back blind.
The thing he's proud of most
isn't his Iliad or Odyssey
but his hair.

Sat., Sept. 25

I forget which one of the illustrious—
maybe Montaigne?—once said to me,
It's not my intent to compose history
so much as stick it with a carving fork
and see what I can get it to confess.
The good stuff's about three inches in.
The facts, reality, and truth—are skin.

    Jim Carter, Mike Douglas, Bill Faulkner,
    stop that squabbling over the flowers!
    The three of you are acting like babies
    and if you all don't cut it out right now
    I'm going to take the whole damn cake
    and throw it straight into the garbage!
    You will all get a slice with a rose on it!

As I was saying: Take the long tines,
jab them in as far as they'll go, yank
them out as smoothly and as quickly
as you can, put your lips to it and suck.
Don't worry about what comes out.

I'm back to the birthday party now.
This line would be shorter if we had
only inspiring to do, but we've other
functions—hand holding, ego puffing
alcoholism interventions, praying—
without which all the belles idées in
the world wouldn't be a hill of beans.

Tom, I salute you. Surely most of us post our poetry for the pleasure (and it isn't always pleasure) of the feedback. Of course there's more to it than that - there's the spurious, yet not entirely spurious sense of online camaraderie that places like this can engender. And I think I've genuinely made some friends in places like this. I just haven't had a drink with them yet, and that's the acid test. Not that we'd be drinking acid, but ... you know what I mean.

But this! This tireless posting of really very good stuff, in the absence of any feedback at all so far. This is art for art's sake. It's absolutely admirable.

If feedback is not frowned upon, I'd let you have some now, but I have to go out. (To have a drink with some real people. Cousins, tonight, mainly.)

But I'll be back, to respond, if I may.

Cheers

David

Oh, fine, go have fun with your "real" people, by all means. I'll just sit here in the dark of your computer screen, alone...
Of course feedback is welcome, thank you--but just don't let it get in the way your drinking life. We all know that can lead to.
Tom

I'm prone - don't say you haven't noticed - to making fanciful allusions, on (often) the slimmest of pretexts, to other works of art, based on the one I'm reading. Don't think I'm going to stop now.

Reading no. 1 here, I seem to recognise in the speaking voice of the Muses (so should this be Muses' Advisory? Pesky apostrophes ...) the tone and diction of Faust. Part 2, that is. The weirder one of the two. Is that at all, remotely, intentional?

Tom, I'm going to take these one at a time. I'm going to savour them. I hope you don't find the process too tiresome. (If you do, tell me.)

On, to no.2.

Cheers

David

David, thank you for directing me back to Faust! I have read it, and am aware of trying to echo or mock-echo that whole world of diction and cadence that Faust has, and Milton, both of them echoing Homer etc. And Faust II certainly is full of Muse-ic, as here in Kline translation of Faust's first speech in the poem:

You, Earth, stood firm tonight, as well: I sense
Your breath is quickening all the things about me,
Already, with that joy you give, beginning
To stir the strengthening resolution in me,
That strives, forever, towards highest Being. –
Now the world unfolds, in half-light’s gleam,
The wood’s alive, its thousand harmonies singing,
While through the valleys, misted ribbons stream:
And heavenly light now penetrates the deep:
Twigs, branches shoot, with fresher life it seems,
From fragrant gulfs, where they were sunk in sleep:
Colour on colour lifts now from the ground,
As leaf and flower with trembling dewdrops weep –
And a paradise reveals itself, all round.
Gaze upwards! – The vast mountain heights
Already with the solemn hour resound:
They are the first to enjoy the eternal light
That later, for us, will work its way below.

Sun., Sept. 26

I had one of my own nightmares
(a demented dentist, what else?)
and one of my sister's. Despair
swelling her voice, she cried out,
Bards love my little piccolo riffs
but completely reject my lyrics!

Funny, but true: we run the risk
in this line of work of becoming
more and more like our writers,
debilitated by desire to be loved.

In the dream I cooed: Euterpe,
you've seen how genres change.
Ever since Jethro Tull grew gray,
combining any wind instrument
with the human voice is passé.

You see that great brush heap,
bits of shrub and tree branches?
Look closely: a million snippets
planted in a million poets' ears
who couldn't summon stanzas
and so just tossed them there.

Go ahead, pick any five arbitrarily,
arrange them artfully and I'll bet
you and the poem will be extolled.
The path leading away from the
muse's plinth is strewn with gold.

I was thinking more of the sort of weird German vaudeville effect of F, Tom. The section you've quoted is, I agree, very Miltonic, and it's not quite the tone I was thinking of - that sort of strangely prefigured Weimar decadent vibe.

Well, then, yes, a slightly decadent vaudeville spirit, I plead guilty to. Been reading Palahniuk, whose spirit may have crept in there around the edges too -- and been thinking of picking up Vonnegut again.
Ah, muses.
Tom

Mon., Sept. 27

Zsa Zsa Gabor huffed
from the courtroom
spurting tears
when the prosecutor
scolded her for
craving attention.
She had smacked
the Beverly Hills cop
who stopped her
for expired tags
on her Rolls Royce
expired driver's license
and an open bottle
of Kecskemeti vodka.

She called the bystander
who testified against her
"a little punk
with a hairdo
like a girl”
and said of the
three-day sentence
she received for
assault and battery
on a police officer
“If anyone didn't
know who I was
they now at least know
that I'm white and rich.”

That last bit
I made up
for the sake of discussion.
Sue me.
If it goes down better
than what's on TV
you're a hero.
If not
just feed it to the pigs.
You'll find the courage
not in a swig
from Zsa Zsa's bottle
but on my breath
as quiet as crib
death concussion.

Mort Rainey? Nope, you've lost me there.

[P.S. Oct. 7, replacing the poem you refer to,

In the distant Pacific, Tropical Storm Malakas,
600 miles south of Iwo To, Japan,
is traveling west-northwestward.

Closer to home, Mort Rainey/Johnny Depp is
on the verge of doing Snoopy dances
or just taking a nap.]