June 29, 2015

Erik Campbell

ANNIVERSARY

for Alex Dimitrov

I was crying in front of the Quick Trip
because I was out of cigarettes

and left my wallet at home and
it was my anniversary and so it was

New Year’s Eve, and already too much
had gone wrong for me too often

to feel conspicuous about it,
crying, I mean, since it is the end

of articulate speech and why
one leaves most crying men alone.

I didn’t look up from my hands
for almost an hour, and when I did,

my eyes two fish-eyed lenses, I saw
the blurred moon and another man

crying, filling up his car, looking at me.
“I’m crying because you are,” he whispered

loudly over. “I’m also crying because
maybe it means one of us must stop soon.”

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015

__________

Erik Campbell: “I read and write poetry to remind myself that I have a soul that needs a periodic tune-up.” (website)

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June 4, 2014

Erik Campbell

ON WAR, BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC (OR BRAD CLARK’S BASEMENT, CIRCA 1984)

For a dollar a look Jeff Chase (who recently 
died in the desert) would brandish his sister’s panties 
for us to fill with abstraction, holding them up 

brazenly, in Brad Clark’s basement (because 
Brad’s parents were and didn’t give two shits), 
this limp, lifeless silk; a deflated, disturbing pelt. 

We later mocked Jeff’s sister in the hallway 
for having panties, because if something was 
stupid and we had the numbers it had to be 

done. Even then, as children, feeling the intimation 
of the heft of what we couldn’t label or limit. 
I wish I had felt like an anachronism without 

an antecedent, instead of the ungrammatical glimpses 
of myriad, miniature cruelties we would later 
personify in larger bodies with greater purpose. 

Even then we should have been more afraid 
of what people rewarded, of what men were 
too eager to gather for. But we weren’t. And

we aren’t.

from Rattle #42, Winter 2013

__________

Erik Campbell: “I read and write poetry to remind myself that I have a soul that needs a periodic tune-up.”

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February 11, 2014

Erik Campbell

MYSTERIOUS FARANG*

Because she worries
About his motivations and why,

At night, he habitually drops
His keys in the hall, my wife

Is investigating our neighbor,
The mysterious Farang. She plans

To collect the Bangkok Posts that he
Leaves like bled corpses outside his door

(We decided to read them one night,
Pinch them since we were poor,

And found holes in the paper, squares
Of anti-news there); she suggests

We budget, skip the afternoon’s rice
Buy the paper every night and match

The holes in his with the wholeness
Of ours in order to discover his penchants,

Where his mind meets his scissors
What he pauses for.

“Before long,” my wife tells me,
“I’ll be holding his keys!”

Then we’ll be free
To move on to larger mysteries.

* “Farang” is phonetic Thai for “foreigner of European descent.”

from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
Tribute to Poets Writing Abroad

_________

Erik Campbell: “One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘Tenderness’ on The Writer’s Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work.” (website)

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January 23, 2014

Erik Campbell

POEM FOR NEIL POSTMAN

it’s happened Neil, this
poem is proof that
you are indeed a prophet

I saw the verdict
last night on television

it was 101 degrees last night
and on channel 26
all the cattle in the world
were dying

and suddenly there was
Alex Trebek on an infomercial,
pimp-like and slick
trying to sell me (can you
believe it?) the classics

a different classic on a
different tape, each classic
just under 45 minutes

“if you’re like me”
Trebek said
“you can’t seem to find
the time to sit down
and read a classic like
The Iliad

but with this special offer
you’ll be able to sit back
and relax as one of the classics
is read to you
by such famous personalities as

Tom Arnold (Hamlet)
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Idiot)
Joan Rivers (Notes from the Underground)
Elizabeth Taylor (The Cantos)
Charlton Heston (The Antichrist)
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (The Importance
of Being Earnest) just to name a few

each classic neatly and coherently
abridged
so as to run just under an hour

so
enrich your life with a
a long deserved foundation
in The Classic Literary Tradition

for the low
low price of $29.99 a month
for 23 months!”

“come now” I think I hear
him say “you can afford it!

Faust paid less!”

and then Trebek went on
to expound upon
the virtues of a classic education
and how it makes him
a ready wit in
dinner conversation

so
I threw the ashtray
through the television screen
and drafted a formal surrender
to the cosmos
in rhyming blank verse and

walking to the post office
I thought to myself

it’s all this heat
it makes the shit smell worse

and after I mail this surrender
I think I’ll go home and burn
all of my books
so there won’t be any evidence
any proof when they come for me
except for

of course
this poem

which I would pay
at least $29.99
to have read to me
abridged or un-
over and over
by Kato Kaelin.

from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

__________

Erik Campbell: “One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘Tenderness’ on The Writer’s Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work.” (web)

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June 11, 2010

Erik Campbell

THIS SMALL THING

for my father (1942-2007)

I. This Small Thing

It was strange to me that the nurses
could shave him but weren’t allowed to

trim his nails. He was so thin by this time
he resembled his always thinner twin brother,

who, fighting the future, never visited.
Everything about him was now small,

save for his nails. His face free of
its hieroglyphics and ruddiness, all

stories and sadness bleached, smooth
as watered stone. I sat there for four hours

holding his hand, his fingernails digging
into my palm, hurting me. But he didn’t

know, and hadn’t known anything for days.
He squeezed my hand, maybe thinking

of his mother and when her hand meant
warmth and unnamable things. I couldn’t

know. But I remember fearing then that
the sum of us is mechanistic. That dust

makes eyes water as easily as death. I was
so eager to inhabit his hand grasping

mine with meaning, to anthropomorphize
my own father, which sounds ridiculous,

but might be what we must do. When
morphine finally loosened his grip,

I clipped his fingernails. His toenails next.
One thought only as I worked: God

damn it. And God damn it. You will not
claw your way out of this world.

 

II. Rooms

There will be a life
you did not choose;

it will include
many rooms.

There will be a room
you will not leave;

it will be a room
you did not choose.

 

III. After

Don’t regret what you did
not find, say, a secret
diary where he
unpacked his thoughts
in the private, melodic
voice you always wanted,
something that might
resolve his silences,
pathologize his sighs.
By now I’ve searched
the whole house
and found only lint.
But I can tell you this:

when you’re later given
one of his jackets,
check the pockets first
thing. You might find

a match or a Jolly Rancher.
You might find more lint.
It doesn’t matter
what you find, only

that you found it
and know it isn’t
a gift or a clue.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

__________

Erik Campbell: “I read and write poetry to remind myself that I have a soul that needs a periodic tuneup.” (web)

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November 21, 2009

Erik Campbell

CONSIDERING MY SILENCE: ON NOT WRITING IN THE JUNGLES OF PAPUA, INDONESIA

“Between thought and expression there lies a lifetime.”
       —Lou Reed

In the jungle you have only bound horizons.

For a time it seemed that the jungle had swallowed me Jonah-like and whole. I existed somewhere between private expectation and unheralded oblivion—out of context, overawed, and incapacitated in this antipodal, green world.

Certainties here are in short supply; every thought and impression is predicated by culture and expectation. Every conclusion is couched in an escape plan; every reality and morality is relative.

The intention was to write here. To try my hand at being Paul Bowles, Henry David Thoreau, or Han Shan.

Romanticism has always been my wooden leg.

In undergraduate school in America, where I started taking poetry writing and reading seriously, most of the writers I knew spent most of their time not writing. Instead they perfected their drinking and pot smoking; they fell in and out of violent, Henry Miller-esque affairs; they wore earth tones; they entertained pseudo-Marxist ideologies because they had no money (too lyrical and Coleridgeian to get jobs); they waxed ecstatically about writing, but did little. I tried not to be one of them with variable success.

I am still trying.

It is difficult to want to be a writer, particularly for us hopeful poets. One of the most debilitating stumbling blocks is that, for the most part, the moniker of “poet” is always pending. Put another way, one receives their CPA and is an accountant; there is no question of conditional self-image involved. Even a lousy accountant is still an accountant so long as he or she passes the requisite tests. A poet, on the other hand, only truly feels like one when recognized as such by “another” (ideally, a reputable publisher). Self-proclaimed poets, like self-proclaimed philosophers, are embarrassing and usually incorrect; this, to my mind, is the reason why poets, long suffering from “Tantalusitis,” form “schools” and cliques from the Lost to the Beat Generation. They require mirrors that flatter on every proverbial wall, without which their poetic identities are dangerously evanescent and they risk becoming slackers, dreamers, or perhaps accountants.*

Poets espouse what society deems “a hobby” as self-definition; this is tricky business. Introduce yourself as a poet at the next party you attend. Watch the people ripple away from you like so many metaphors. Those people still near you are only waiting for a punch line. Don’t be fooled.

And don’t blame them.

It was easy to have a poetic identity at university; everyone, it seems to me now, was troping and scheming about writing poems and stories.

For myself, university was a four-year intellectual summer camp that now resembles Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it was a place where “promise” alone could sustain you, inky cloaks were encouraged, and solipsism was consistently mistaken for complexity.

Ultimately you leave university and reality descends, blinding you with paradigmatic incongruity. You come to realize that most of your thoughts—hell, most of your emotions—have been heretofore plagiarized, and that the world doesn’t give a farthing about your “potential” and deems sitting up all night in a smoky room debating aesthetics untenable at best. You have descended the mountain, but you are still Hans Castorp, waiting in vain to cough up conspicuous blood. To echo Charles Baxter: You are an object of contempt or therapy.

Or it happens that once reality cascades all of your answers need more questions. The good ideas come too late. You still want to write, but no longer have time; you have lost your symbiotic fellaheen; your wife doesn’t want to discuss Proust; you get a job and try to pay for things; you write down ideas that you will never have time to pursue without a government grant or serving jail time. Your romantic bravado, your eyes full of angels, your dreams of The Paris Review ever knowing your name—it’s all fading. Everything is becoming an alternative that does not rhyme. You wonder if it’s America’s fault. You move to the jungle.

Just above my desk I have a photograph of Yeats’ tower that a former teaching colleague gave me, its corners now curled with damp. I look at the photograph more often than is healthy and think of all the good work he accomplished there, laboring for hours over one word.

Hours.

Here I am, now living in the jungles of Papua, surrounded and isolated by the sublime and the beautiful. My “neighborhood” consists of wilderness that Thoreau would die for. From my balcony I watch Birds of Paradise and hornbills fly by. I live in one of the most impenetrable, astounding environments in the world (a “tower of green”, so to say). I am as free as a Romantic poet with an affluent patron. I have time. I should have a book written by now.

Yet I’ve spent the first seven months here artistically incapable. Proof of my failures comprise a folder I labeled “Aborted Ideas,” a sad time capsule consisting of dozens of ideas that didn’t run: various poem ideas and lines too numerous to list; the first-third of an Edgar Alan Poe screenplay (amazing that no one has attempted this when the story tells itself, where nothing need be altered); a story about Sherlock Holmes being Jack the Ripper (an idea which I think I stole from somewhere but that has amazing possibilities, Holmes being a confirmed bachelor and misogynist [perhaps seeing all woman he slaughters as embodiments of Irene Adler, the only woman to ever “best” him], a drug user [a means of coping with and committing his crimes], and an expert in Scotland Yard’s “sophomoric, pedestrian” methods [thus ensuring his safety from detection]. In my notes Holmes ends up “pursuing himself in various ways. The narrative vehicle is, of course, Watson, who suspects Holmes all the while, but is hugely conflicted in that silly, Victorian fashion); a story about the New Critic married to the Literary Biographer (their son, consequently, becomes an Existentialist and tries to repeatedly “will himself dead”); Hamlet Action Figures (just think about it a moment, it’s hilarious); a Vonnegut-like story about a man who travels back in time somehow to the late 19th century and, since he’s an English teacher with no marketable skills, winds up on the street. So, in a final, desperate attempt to make a living he tries to remember all of the great novels he has read from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and proceeds to (re)write them from memory. Of course, his memory “edits” and fickly forms this intellectual larceny, allowing him to develop his own distinctive and indeed original voice. He still dies penniless, but ironically fulfilled (after all, is it plagiarism if you’re pilfering from the unborn?). He is discovered 100 years later and heralded as a literary genius, a profound visionary, and the inspiration for sundry schools of craft and criticism; a retelling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis from the perspective of Gregor’s father, who is thoroughly pissed off that his son decided to become a difficult-to-explain allegory rather than something respectable. The setting is a bar.

Throughout my “Aborted Ideas” journal I have written on almost every page: WRITE ABOUT PAPUA. But I haven’t.

My friend, Dave (who is widely published in everything from Men’s Journal to Rolling Stone), couldn’t understand why I never wrote about life in Papua. He suspected writer’s block and suggested I call up big magazine editors and say, “Hello, my name is Erik, and I am calling you from the Stone Age!” That, he wrote me, would get your foot in the door.

Such histrionics just aren’t my style.

I am still in all likelihood too close to Papua, too prone to exoticize to pull it off. There are (someone says) so many more pressing matters to consider than my morning’s minutiae, wry observations, and poetic attempts. There are the riots in Aceh and the East Timor debacle; there is Islam in general**; there is the still-lingering proposed partitioning of Papua that resulted in riots and death; there is Bali bombing; there is the Marriott bombing; there is the slowly disappearing Papuan culture to consider in depth, their customs and history, that this island, the second largest in the world, houses .01% of the world’s population and yet represents 15% of known languages, there is president Soeharto’s 32-year reign to consider*** and the current mess that is Indonesian “democracy” under Megawati Sukarnoputri; there is the 1969 Papuan Act of Free Choice to consider (the most egregiously shameless misnomer since “The Great Leap Forward”) wherein 1,026 Papuan “representatives” out of nearly a million Papuans voted somehow unanimously to be part of Indonesia****. There is so much. Writing anything about or in light of the above seemed impossible. Somehow irresponsible. But it’s not so much about not writing about Papua, it’s about writing anything at all despite the exploding world. How to play with words in spite of these damn footnotes?

Joyce’s thoughts on the nightmare of history are incomplete. It’s the present that is often impossible to wake up from.

It has taken me nearly a year now to become my own version of Hemingway’s lost suitcase—to throw away armfuls of poems, essays, and stories that did nothing but mythologize my experience and ignore yours. It will take more time to understand Papua, much less Indonesia. I am still trying to understand America; I am still trying to understand poetry.

Lately I’ve found myself thinking of the epitaph on Charles Bukowski’s grave: Don’t Try. An ominous declarative statement, to be sure, and although I’m not precisely certain what he meant by it, I hope the message isn’t intended for us poets in the rough. Trying to give the world a meaningful shape is all we have.

I am not concerned with getting my proverbial foot in the door; I am concerned with learning to walk lightly, yet sure-footed. The truth is that Thoreau didn’t need to live on Walden Pond for those solitary, literary years; it was a mythically fecund, romantic gesture. But it wasn’t necessary.

Thoreau took Walden with him wherever he wandered. He was Walden while studying at Harvard, wandering the streets of Concord, or taking in a Boston play. Teachers neglect to tell you this.

I would quote from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” now, but that would be too much smooth certainty.

In lieu of something lyrical I leave you with this image: my putting the pen down, framing the photograph of Yeats’ tower and hanging it, albatross-style, around my neck.

Like so.

from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
Tribute to Poets Abroad

____________

* Correspondingly, the reason why there are so few “poser” novelists is because writing a novel, even a Kerouacian, masturbatory tome, is difficult, linear, sustained work that tends to get in the way of drinking, pot smoking, and pining after impossible love. Poets can take more breaks from the particularities of their craft because their craft is too often trumped by their experience. Hence, the less a writer is seen in public, the better; such solitude denotes that he or she is in a room somewhere trying, and is presumably sober.

**In this increasingly bisected world, it seems that Samuel Huntington’s “cultural war” thesis was sadly prophetic. However, my experience living in the most populous Muslim country in the world is that the vast majority of Muslims here make keen distinctions between America and its government. They understand that when Bush uses terms such as “crusade” he isn’t aware that the term is in any way allusive.

***According to Reuters (9/03/03), out of a sample of 1,976 Indonesians, 56.4% preferred life under Soeharto whereas 25.9% voted for life under the current president, Megawati. Noam Chomsky, in his book Understanding Power, estimates that Soeharto was responsible for the death of 500,000 Indonesians during his reign.

****According to the Times Literary Supplement (9/19/03) 100,000 Papuans have been killed by their “Indonesian masters” over nearly 40 years of violent repression.

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