Aaron Fogel Some Poems [published as noted, otherwise unpublished Copyright @ 1999 by Aaron Fogel]
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!
I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer's Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers' errors.
First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer's trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.
Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers' protest,
and errors by
God's touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.
Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and
therefore also divine.
[Published in The Stud Duck, and The Best American Poetry 1995, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1998]; "The Printer's Error," (a book) will be published by Miami UP in April 2001.
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
In the optimist's house a black cat is lapping
At white paint; delicate
Breasts and drumsticks flock to the table.
Children, under the table, pound at
Tacks; they tickle at the sheen of the adult shoes; they laugh.
There are three sorts of laughter:
Laughter, "laughter," and laughter,
Each more apt and learned. But to go on:
In the poor people's heaving playground, basic
Colors; druid slabs; tons; cement menhirs;
Post-migratory groups; a slide; high, orange-
Outlook-arches. A surviving twin runs up.
Her mother thinks of the other, and stops talking.
Kids kick a checkered ball through a stonehinge.
(The goalposts!) the goalposts!
A stupid doily grids the sun's gold calf.
Everything here's mosaic, unclear.
Born out of water, cut the words in tablets.
Dimmages: are goalpost shadows.
Now the horde hears a thunderous apocussion.
Locusts, amber-eyed insects, bite down
And sing. Sumacs redden against autumn-bricks. Heads
Up! We've launched the satellite 'Sombrero.'
[Published in Pataphysics (Australia)]
From The Riddle of Flat Circles
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
1.
A salt-marsh bird's white skull--
Arrow-beak geometrically exact--
Black migration map ink arrows--
Graphs that are scattered on the street.
Time and space and circular numbers
Confused the censor we'd counted on
To run aslant down the half-paved hill
Past every hovel to report the birth.
The desperado, in the old movies,
Dying of thirst in the desert, spilled
Water on his chin from his canteen:
Evil excess that feeds the cactus!
Bastard squalls, eerie hot spells,
Suggest ozone depletions, apocalypses,
Heat-lightnings, multiple Maine auroras.
Bills of mortality; cranes' bills (in the water); bill us later.
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
I got your old check in the mail today
And the copy of the narrow-parchment book
And the book of contortions and the shortlist.
I remembered how we played bongos or lutes together as kids
And joked about Kahn who collected bus-transfers
And Rubin who taught French and whom we taunted
Before we had any knowledge of the world.
How could I cash a document so old?
Pulp-lepers drawn—oafish elves—what bank had issued that?
Yellow oblong with engravers’ lines, a thin page
That never could be mistaken for a thought or a painting—
Name, bossy signature, undiamonded pictures,
Hieroglyphs, dates, all added up
To a token antecedent to any value.
And so the trainee took it to the manager,
Who looked it over, and came by himself and said
"Yes there are certain prehistoric notes,
Millenially outdated, which we do cash,
Paying up not for their face value
In any case an expired quantity,
But for their paleoeconomic meaning,
Antique as the ‘working class’ or ‘migrant labor.’"
He smirked and paid me—two hundred thousand dollars—
With which I paid off my mortgage twenty years early.
Thank you again for sending me that old check
Wherever you are—why no return address?
I can still keep the narrow parchment scroll
And the postings of the early recruits, drawn
With so much elegance, and the anti-census you wrote
In the insured display case in my house,
While trying to recall the friendship we must have had—
Was it two hundred or five thousand years ago?
From poem-sequence tentatively titled Fleet Book Evidence
The Man Who Had Never Heard of Frank Sinatra
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
44. The man who had never heard of Frank Sinatra: he lived A perfectly ordinary life in America. Born in 1915, He followed all the fads, read the newspapers, listened To Television, knew who Dean Martin and Sammy whathisname Were (Sinatra's friends), but somehow, by a one in a Zillion fluke, whenever Sinatra came up, he was out of the room, Or his attention was diverted by something else, and (You will say this is impossible, that it cannot be), never Heard him sing, like a man in my generation who somehow Missed the Beatles though he had heard everything else. Once, just as he was about to hear the name Frank Sinatra A plane flew overhead--he was fifty five years old--his hearing A little more impaired. He had heard of Humphey Bogart, Of Elizabeth Taylor, of Walter Cronkite, and of perhaps a hundred Forty thousand other celebrities names by the time he died, And yet he had never heard of Frank Sinatra. The Greeks had That famous saying, "The luckiest man is he who was never born," Which is kind of gloomy, but I think they were wrong. The luckiest man is he who never heard of Frank Sinatra.
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.
Jack Derrida
Identifies himself
To the police
Of Jewish Dreams
As John Doe.
A jackdaw
Hits the jackpot.
(O my jelly donut
How sweet it is
Just to die!)
Jeanne d'Arc
A jailbird--
A jackdaw too--
Her jeremiads
Became his
Jeux d'esprit.
Juvenal dead,
Judah and dialogue
Just deleted,
J.D.
Junkered down
With dirty jokes.
No disc jockey
Deferring justice,
Not deranged--
De Stijl.
Indigestible
In dinner jacket
Jotting down
"There are no
Just desserts,"
Dirge jive
Disjointed,
He does the job:
Jihad!
Jet's dream.
Divine justice
Divulges
Jovial dividends.
Don Juan,
Dork jutting,
Double josser,
Juvenile delinquent,
Dryads juiced,
Dulcimer jigging
During jouissance,
Deep joy dirging
Deity's jujubes,
He dicks jane.
[Published under the pen name Jim Dolot
in The Stud Duck, Poetry Calendar (NYC) and
Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (second edition)]
Villanelle
Click here to hear this poem read by the author.We have no time for riddles, being old.
A warm caress of clarity is best.
Exercise has its limits in the cold.
Contingent mysteries (like rice) take hold
Of sides of bowls and cling, dried, glued, and pressed.
We have no time for riddles, being old.
It’s good to jog around the manifold
Lake’s edge in summer, not when ice is guest.
Exercise has its limits in the cold.
Even a rock dove becomes almost bold
Protecting the puff-children in her nest.
We have no time for riddles, being old.
We know and study. For instance, the word "told"
Means counted—but the tale is manifest.
Exercise has its limits in the cold.
Bring us the chalice that the king foretold.
Bring us the manifesto by behest.
We have no time for riddles, being old.
Exercise has its limits in the cold.
Click here to return to the SpokenLit homepage.Mountains and fields, alternately orange and green.
A yellow bather is their dialogeme.
Paid and immature and happy sloth.
You were, improbably, as soft as that.
Undiamonded, unrecognizable fields.
Yankers and yankees undivisible.
Not all of us are misnaggedim.
This is the applefield: so let us fall.
Diabolique; oiseauxly; souterrain--
Pandemonium's tambourines--autombiles.
Mediacrushot and Abedniogu in their crow's nests
Reassure the Miouldyeast: read in bed.
Everything must go,
Except this wheel that's fallen in the snow.
Interduskoplenary planetudes.
Nonuniversal memoraindums.
Seboulisa the black unicorn manuelzinho.
Unsynchromadice axemplious.