How to Ruin a Dinner Party

Who am I? I’m the one who upsets the even tenor of every dinner party. Who am I? I use words like justice and human rights without irony. Therefore I’m unpleasant. I’m actually quite dreadful. I question the bug-eyed vanities.

Agreement is what you want if you’re concluding a business deal or building something—a bridge needs the correspondent attentions of many good minds.

This vision of agreement is deadly in provincial society. Racism, ableism, trans-phobia, all the bigotries are territorial. Bigots are only interested in sections of the bridge. As Ibram X. Kendri puts it: “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”

The bigot-engineer? His section of the bridge is built of likeness.

Want to upset the even tenor of the cocktail party? Make it clear that you don’t worship the habits of thought of people you’re with.

Dreadful. Here’s Kenneth Rexroth: “I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.”

Rexroth could really piss off a dinner party. I’ve always admired his definition of the “social lie”:

“Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.”

He adds: “The state does not tax you to provide you with services. The state taxes you to kill you. The services are something which it has kidnapped from you in your organic relations with your fellow man, to justify its police and war-making powers. It provides no services at all. There is no such thing as a social contract. This is just an eighteenth-century piece of verbalism.”

This is the kind of thing that’s wholly antithetical to bigots on a bridge. Rexroth would ask: “Why build the bridge at all of its just another way to kill people?” I was in mind of this during the funeral of John Lewis last week.

I believe in justice-capitalism. Stop stealing from the poor. Stop poisoning whole provinces. No more colonialist wars. If you want to make money while cleaning up the neighborhood I’m all for it. Let’s design a future for the disabled.

Let’s create bridges that are multicultural, built for true democracy. Let’s name all bridges for John Lewis. Or at the very least let’s call them antiracist bridges. Ibram X. Kendri:

“Antiracists have long argued that racial discrimination was stamped from the beginning of America, which explains why racial disparities have existed and persisted. Unlike segregationists and assimilationists, antiracists have recognized that the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences. As the legendary Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde lectured in 1980: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”

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We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.

Another way to say this—not that anything Audre Lorde wrote needs improving—is that each citizen is tucked neatly into a province. One must never forget the Trayvon Martin was murdered in a gated community.

You’ll ruin a lot of dinner parties by arguing against provincialism.

I once told a group of disability studies professors that they weren’t sufficiently devoted to accessibility for the blind. Just about all of the 60 people in attendance had eyesight.

This view was not greeted with enthusiasm. Even within the disability community you’ll find bridge sections that are gated.

The fancy term is ophto-centrism—the eyes have it. All hail the eyes. If the blind can’t fully participate that’s “on them” for at least we allowed them in the room.

I’ll screw up the dinner party because I think the blind aren’t fully welcome in whatever it is we mean by disability studies in the academy. Let me add, if you squawk about it you’ll be judged and not kindly. I’ve been told if my behavior was better I might get the access I need. Try that on, little fella!

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Rexroth: “Television is designed to arouse the most perverse, sadistic, acquisitive drives. I mean, a child’s television program is a real vision of hell, and it’s only because we are so used to these things that we pass them over. If any of the people who have had visions of hell, like Virgil or Dante or Homer, were to see these things it would scare them into fits.”

Racism and all the bigotries of the media…yes we’re making progress but have you looked at the miserable faux disability representations still being cranked out?

How about the eugenics narratives in popular books and films? “Million Dollar Baby” or Jojo Moyes?

Please stop imagining you’re inferior.

Self-Interview

My psyche is built of mordancy and keenness. I laugh oddly because I’m one of those souls who thinks playing chess by our own rules is truly funny. One of the highlights of my life was being allowed to spin Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel in the Museum of Modern Art. That was a Rabbinic moment for me—I was aging Adam and being granted one more look into Paradise. 

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Carl Jung said modern science tells mankind there’s no one looking after us, and so, accordingly, we’re filled with fear. I can’t explain my contrarian feeling—but I’m not afraid. I had one mother and one father and they were helpless people. I don’t need a heavenly father or mother. I’ll be happy to return to star dust. 

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So what makes me laugh my ass off? Greek poetry! Become what you are! 

Some mornings I make up my own Greek poets. Here is the ancient poet “Hygiene”:

The drip of the bathroom tap

Morse code of a sort—

Wash your fingers separately 

the gods say

But they don’t tell us why…

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Mistakes are funny. I once stepped on a water lily. I was four years old. Stepped right out of the boat. 

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BTW—not very funny, but  illuminating. The Brothers Karamazov and Carl Jung’s Psychological Types make excellent paratactic reading. I love it when books go perfectly together. 

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When the old queen dies, who will burn her secret, impious books?

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Great moments from Auden:

“After Krakatoa exploded, the first living thing to return 

Was the ant, Tridomyrex, seeking in vain its symbiot fern.”

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Even in winter I dream of insects. 

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The able bodied people laugh at the infirm. This is because we’re still living in the Middle Ages. Science was working to pull us out, but the Cold War buffaloed the effort. It’s all darkness and lesser darknesses in the public mind. Science got slaughtered in its cradle. 

There is nothing funny about this. 

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Here’s wishing you a neutralizing peace and an average disgrace, as Auden would say…

Giving Up on Poetry

I promise to change my habits 

To read medicine jars, the prose of Yeats,

Sincere things without assurances.

I want only the galvanized electrolysis 

Of commercials and politics. 

Who needs all this camphor smelling 

19th century loneliness?

Goodbye Keats. 

Goodbye Fingal and Armand Schwerner.

Goodbye Walt. 

I don’t need a brother.

I’ll go alone into the mineral dark.

I carry armloads of books to the trash.

I can’t see poisoning someone else with the stuff. 

Goodbye Robert Frost

(The loneliest poet 

Who ever lived, though there’s Lorca …)

For kicks I say good riddance to Gustav Mahler

Who was as friendless and musical as rain…

Poetry’s Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny

I once wrote a poem that began “the winter wind is marrying my daughter” though at the time I had no daughter. Poetry is often vain, silly, and yes, driven by seasons. Poetry is also a place for shit. Ask yourself: how many un-shitty poems did Wallace Stevens write? I say four: “Sunday Morning”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; “The Snowman”; “The Idea of Order at Key West.” 

A friend of mine once said the world is not harmed by bad poetry and he’s right. Let’s clear that up. And yes, by turns, the proliferation of bad poetry is the norm in any age. Add subjectivity, canon formation, academic taste makers, the yearnings of multiculturalism (I’m one of those yearners) and you’ve got a recipe for poetry custom.

Now before you start chasing me with a red hot poker let me be clear: one reason poetry can promulgate shit is because it’s infused with the gases of its era. Take from your shelf one of those old “Midland” poetry anthologies edited by the late Paul Engle and you’ll see page after page of rhymed offal, poems so bad that putting the book down you’ll want a Thorazine injection. It was the age of rhyme and meter, of irony, of poets emulating 16th century poetic conventions—British conventions. The anthologies purported to represent the best in American poetry in the middle of the last century. You’d never know there was a Whitman or Ginsberg or Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop. 

The tastemakers in every era love shit. And yet there are brave and steadfast publishers and editors who fight for fresh air. Poetry doesn’t need to stink. What makes it un-stinky? You see this isn’t going well. You probably want to stop reading right now. 

Langston Hughes said: “writing is like travelling. It’s wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.”

When asked how to play the 12 string guitar Leadbelly said: “you’ve got to keep something moving all the time.”

Good poems move. They avoid the ponderous. The good poet hits an inside the park homer. 

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, a poem that moves, a poem that treats of ideas without polemical rhetoric, a poem of stark beauty. This is “Sanctuary” by Donika Kelley:

The tide pool crumples like a woman

into the smallest version of herself,

bleeding onto whatever touches her.

The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled

with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing

point, something brown breaks  the surface—human,

maybe, a hand or foot or an island

of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp.

A wild life.

This is a prayer like the sea

urchin is a prayer, like the sea

star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber—

as if I know what prayer means. 

I call this the difficulty of the non-believer,

or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. 

How to understand, then, what deserves rescue

and what deserves to suffer.

Who.

Or should I say, what must

be sheltered and what abandoned. 

Who.

I might ask you to imagine a young girl,

no older than ten but also no younger,

on a field trip to a rescue. Can you 

see her? She is led to the gates that separate

the wounded sea lions from their home and the class.

How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:

to claim her own barking voice, to revel

in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers

woven into the cyclone fence.

I believe Donika Kelly is one of the best poets currently writing in the United States. Note her nearly buried question—the question—“can you see her?” How does one say it? The better poets bifurcate the self, create what the poet James Tate once described as a “self-to-self dichotomy” which is an engine, a phenomenological drive that lifts the poem out of easy confessionalism. Kelly offers us three perspectives in the poem: the little girl encountering woundedness, the adult poet who would try to make sense of consciousness, and yes the adult poet as philosopher. And though you’ll think me odd for saying so, Kelly’s swift intelligence reminds me of Anne Sexton:

“The Ambition Bird”

So it has come to this –

insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,

the clock tolling its engine

like a frog following

a sundial yet having an electric

seizure at the quarter hour.

The business of words keeps me awake.

I am drinking cocoa,

the warm brown mama.

I would like a simple life

yet all night I am laying

poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,

my lay-away plan,

my coffin.

All night dark wings

flopping in my heart.

Each an ambition bird.

The bird wants to be dropped

from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.

He wants to light a kitchen match

and immolate himself.

He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo

and come out painted on a ceiling.

He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest

and come out with a long godhead.

He wants to take bread and wine

and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.

He wants to be pressed out like a key

so he can unlock the Magi.

He wants to take leave among strangers

passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres.

He wants to die changing his clothes

and bolt for the sun like a diamond.

He wants, I want.

Dear God, wouldn’t it be

good enough just to drink cocoa?

I must get a new bird

and a new immortality box.

There is folly enough inside this one.

I do not say these poems are thematically alike only that the restless, clear-headed and determined imagination pushes each lyric, strips each poem of sanctimony and lumbering rhetoric.  

I mentioned “easy confessionalism” above because the worst in our contemporary poetry, our Midland stampede is toward wounded blab. I just went to Poetry Magazine and found dozens of examples. I won’t quote them. Instead, just for fun, I’m going to offer my own parody of a contemporary shit-poem:

“The Mangle”

Trousers, wrinkled, old man

Daddy-pants, dropped 

On the floors of childhood 

So I’ve got to carry them

Like Nana did. 

I could continue but I won’t. 

Here are some closing thoughts:

Bad poetry isn’t caused by free verse. 

It doesn’t happen because a poet wants to write about the personal.

It doesn’t sneak into your word processor at night while you’re sleeping.

But does happen when the conventions of your ponderous age creep in. 

It happens when unlike Donika Kelly or Anne Sexton the poet isn’t tough and fast.

Ezra Pound said “the book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

I want to tell you a story. Don’t worry, it won’t take long…

The old woman beside the Oyster River, who picked flowers; who the children knew to be peculiar–someone said the word “lobotomy” though no one knew what it meant–how he’d made up a story about her so long ago. 

That woman with her florid face, who talked to herself, she took in stray animals. Now he sees he’s old as well, sees stars are of a different magnitude, and still, he thinks, someone has to take the lost creatures because the world is both desolate and easy.   

The ADA @ 30, “Why It’s Like Poetry”

I can’t tell you how to laugh or love someone. I certainly can’t tell you where poems come from or what will stir my heart or yours, say, in the next hour. 

The things I can’t tell you make a considerable list. I won’t write it. You have your own even if you don’t generally acknowledge it. 

I love a photo of the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso who is gently guiding Helen Keller’s cosmic finger tips across his throat as he sings for her Samson’s aria about losing his sight. Caruso was a genuine peasant and grew up in terrible poverty in Naples. By the tine of the photograph he was as famous as Theodore Roosevelt. Helen Keller was certainly just as much a public figure. And there they are, having what a later generation would recognize as a “Vulcan Mind Meld” and whenever I think of this photo I want to be Helen’s fingertips. I want to feel the luscious electrolysis of mystery-static coming through. Imagine! Touching Caruso’s throat! 

I write poems in rain and in the sun. I fall down stairs. Once when I was much younger than I am now I successfully stood on my head while a young woman I loved fed me jelly beans. I fell over. 

I lie down and dream of Edgar Poe’s best laugh. It was a vengeful laughter and probably more than that for it was likely mean spirited. It probably came after he met Walt Whitman who he thought a simpleton. Then there was Whitman’s laugh, which came later, at Pfaff’s saloon, and which had no Poe in it. 

Where does the bitterness go?  I can’t tell you.

I can’t tell you about the winds of my boyhood which kept me awake at night. I’m not that boy any longer. The winds produced stories in me. I don’t remember them now. I do recall that I always insisted to my father that he leave the window open. Even in winter I wanted it open just a crack.

I most certainly cannot tell you how in private I launder my shirt of happiness.

Can’t describe how the stars lean close when I’m mumbling “it’s alright, it’s alright” to an aging dog.

Can’t tell you how it is I can forgive the walls.

Of the ADA @ 30 I can’t tell you what it means. I stop wet faced, inner tears of joy and desperation welling. 

There are substantial obstacles. There are miracles that have not yet healed. 

I can’t describe poetry. I’ve the law on my side. 

Whether you’re disabled or not I can’t say when cordiality or affection will come. 

I wear an imaginary sapphire on my finger. 

I eat the white flowers from a table and the rich people don’t notice. 

Blind, crossing the street. 

Like all disabled I work out things in my peculiar way.

Poetry? What is that?

I’m lighter than a child’s hand. 

The ADA @ 30 “Disability and Design Justice”

The Marxist art critic John Berger said: “That we find a crystal or a poppy

beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into

existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”

Lately as I’ve thought about the ADA @ 30 Berger has come back to me. Beauty and the single life. I admit I’m less certain this is our only life. But the ADA is beauty and it does mean “we” the disabled are less alone. Who thinks of law as beauty? It’s far easier to look at a poppy. 

The law is beautiful when it advances freedom. Freedom is beautiful when it’s everyone’s birthright. Civil rights laws are about guaranteeing freedom to the newcomers in our world as well as the aged. John Locke wrote: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”     

This is the heart of the matter: before the ADA the disabled had no freedom. After the ADA we’ve the right to insist on it. We’ve the right to join the millions upon millions of Americans who are insisting. 

Of insistence I’ve always loved this quote from Alice Munro: “It was a most insistent place but nobody seemed to be overwhelmed by all the insistence.” 

I’ve now said two improbable things: the ADA is a kind of beauty; the ADA is a place of insistence. 

These are things I ardently believe. 

In her new book “Design Justice: “Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need” Sasha Costanza-Chock puts together the beauty of design, the insistence of inclusion and imagination, and human rights—proposing a powerful reformation of how we think about the built worlds we live in. She outlines the formative principles of the Design Justice Network:

“Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions—about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems—tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.

Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.”

Reading this I sat bolt upright in my chair. 

As a blind man I’m one who is normally marginalized by design. Double entendre intended. 

That’s not the first passage to catch my eye. Sasha Costanza-Chock describes in almost withering detail her experience attempting to pass through an ordinary TSA airport screening. She’s non gender conforming. The body scanner with its AI and algorithms flags her. She becomes a public display, a crisis, a freak, a debased citizen. The built environment creates pejorative values for non-normative bodies. Don’t I know it? I’ve walked through thousands of airports with my guide dogs, always on edge, frightened of what’s coming next since the TSA is not kind, not welcoming, often untrained, many times malevolent when I show up with a dog in harness. I’ve been screamed at, pushed, yanked. I’ve had uninformed agents demand that I take the dog’s harness and training collar off—things entirely unacceptable. I’ve been pointed at and made to stand around for nearly uncountable minutes while agents confer about the ADA. One impatient woman shoved me because I was in her way and she wanted her suitcase. 

Participation in design processes is crucial just now, right here and now, for the very designs by which we live are being transformed before our eyes. 

Design justice means we are less alone. 

Let’s not be overwhelmed by the insistences.   

Hay Scratching Hay

When I was a kid I fell in love with a Victrola in my grandmother’s attic. What was I doing up there? It was summer. Kids were playing ball. And there I was with a wind up gramophone with a metal horn. Blind kid alone with an old fashioned record player at the top of a Victorian house. I fell in love with that machine. It worked perfectly and there were dozens of records featuring the great Enrico Caruso. You have to picture me, five years old, a little lonely, and then stunned to hear such a voice under the eaves. I’ve loved Caruso’s voice all my life and yet, even now, sixty years later, hearing him pulls me back to my provincial first opera house.

There were lots of artifacts in that attic. A raccoon coat, a sea captain’s chest, a cracked boudoir mirror, cane chairs that were eaten through, dusty books, a sewing machine, oddments of all kinds, tools I couldn’t identify. I explored with my hands while the great tenor sang of vengeance or a broken heart.

Think about your private opera. I was lonesome as a cricket. I was in love with a strange singer.. Best of all I’d no one to tell.

I still hear the needle hitting the record. The sound of hay scratching hay.

In my case poetry has always been a kind of forsakenness. The solitude glitters. Do you know this feeling? Rain runs down the window and you press your forehead there. You see you need nothing.

D. H. Lawrence wrote: “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”

Yes there are moments when the fire warms and the inn is open. Family and lovers; neighbors, strangers well met—a trusty dog. Behind this scrim is the solitude. It was me. It was the voice of a tenor singing in the dark.