Tag Archives: life

From “On Motorcycles” by Frederick Seidel

gerace-honda-rebel-500

…

“On the lyrical state highways of Vermont I blatted and roared, up and down through the gears, at eighty, at a hundred and something, at much more than a hundred and something miles an hour. The motorcycle had a relatively long wheelbase and felt absolutely solid in a straight line, despite the shaft-drive, and steady enough in a turn, but not quick to turn and right itself. The bike was rather heavy, not deft and flickable, but it was wonderful to look at, wonderful to be on, wonderful to ride, a source of pride. The sound it made was magnificent. The feeling was of riding a powerful musical instrument. The hills echoed and the valleys lit up with my song. You used to be able to say of a motorcycle that it was on song when it was going full tilt in perfect tune and at the right revs just at the redline, the rpm limit for the motor. I was on song. I felt in tune, in love, so proud. It was late summer, almost fall. Pride goeth before the fall. Then I fell.

***

“I was rounding a turn on the MV at considerable speed when I had the only serious accident I have ever had. Years before, I had jumped the Triumph Metisse off the top of a rise, knowing I would land in sand, and curious to see if I could do it and keep going, but I was prepared to crash, and I crashed. That didn’t count. I may have been going eighty miles an hour on the MV when I realized I would not make it around the turn. I had a choice: I could throw the bike down on the highway or aim for the unplowed field straight ahead of me, as the road curved to the left. I chose the field and shot off the road and rode across the field with the bike upright, and then I hit a ditch, going quite fast still, and crashed. I was furious, embarrassed, outraged. My first act was to get the bike upright and try to start it. A passing state trooper was flagged down by someone who had seen me go off the road. The trooper was rushing a kidney-dialysis machine to another part of Vermont where it was needed in an emergency, and he certainly did not want to be held up, but when he looked at me he decided he had better get me to the nearby Ellsworth Clinic in Chester, where, when I walked in, I saw the blood drain from the face of the receptionist as she looked at me, and heard her insist to the trooper that I be rushed to Springfield Hospital. She obviously thought I had done terrible damage to myself and was about to go into shock. The trooper sped to Springfield with lights whirling and siren whooping. This same trooper was killed six months later in a high-speed crash. It turned out he had been reprimanded several times for his risk-addicted driving. At the hospital it was determined that I had broken three ribs, that was all.

“I had to explain this mortifying event to myself and to the world. When the wrecked motorcycle was examined, it was apparent that there was something not right about the foot pedal that operated the rear brake. The pedal swung loose, meaning it could move down from its position at rest but also it could move up—not normal, not desirable—and it was possible, perhaps likely, that this had been the state of affairs before the crash. A Vermont motorcycle dealer named Peter Pickett had driven down to JFK in his small red open-bed truck to pick up the MV after it cleared customs, and had taken it to Peru, Vermont, where my friend Jill Fox lived and where I spent a great deal of time. The crate was unloaded, opened, and set aside to be saved, it was so good-looking in its own right. The motorcycle, pretty much ready to be ridden, nevertheless had to be gone over to make sure everything was in order. I examined the front end while the back portion of the bike was checked by an experienced rider and sometime mechanic who lived in the village, not exactly a friend but someone friendly and eager to play a part. My immediate thought after crashing was that it couldn’t have been my fault, certainly couldn’t have been the result of my taking the wrong line in attempting to go through the corner, certainly couldn’t have been a case of not leaning the bike into the turn sufficiently because of the speed I was traveling, couldn’t have been the speed I was traveling stopping me from correctly managing the bike, couldn’t have been . . . and so forth. So it had to have been the consequence of the adjustments made to the rear brake pedal by the fellow who checked out the rear of the motorcycle. It suddenly was apparent that the lever controlling the rear brake had been set up in a manner that applied the brake when the pedal was pressed down, as is normal, or when the pedal swung up, when downward pressure was applied or when no pressure was applied, and the pedal was for whatever reason forced up, as when rounding a corner at great speed the centrifugal force pushed the lever up . . . and the back brake was applied without my foot touching the brake pedal. I believed this theory. I propounded it to all, grunting with pain from my broken ribs. I offer the theory to you now, dear reader. Believe me, that is how it happened. The brake was applied without my touching the pedal, the rear wheel locked, I felt it lock, felt that I could not possibly get around the turn, without knowing what exactly was the matter, and decided to go straight, into the field I saw there, straight ahead of me, and did so, dragging the locked rear wheel . . . and riding, if that is the right word, through the field might have made it to a safe upright stop if I had not come up against a ditch, almost a canal, too wide for the dead weight of the motorcycle to cross, and then BAM.

“For days, for months, I replayed the scene, explaining to myself what had happened, excusing myself. Anything to avoid thinking I had been an incompetent. And there is something else in this. There is a way in which feigning nearness to death risks death. Faking it at all well imitates real danger too faithfully and brings danger. I had gone into the turn too fast. I had not made it around the turn. I started playing down the danger I had put myself in and at the same time playing it up. Motorcycling is full of bravado and posing and the nearness of death. You pretend to be calmly, even coldly focused, when you ride, eyes everywhere, eyes on the job and immune to thoughts about risk. That is how one describes riding these fast motorcycles, except of course there is in addition the pleasure. You are riding beauty and you are riding speed and you are riding death. And it is a pleasure. But you offer yourself as a dashing devotee. You realize you are performing the role of yourself, and may be maimed out of existence as part of the act, as part of the character you are playing.

“The bike went back to Italy and returned, having had its bent and wounded parts rebuilt at great expense, with the latest disc brakes off the racing bike added. Again it was trucked to Vermont. It looked so glamorous. I rode it once, just to do it, like getting back on a horse that has thrown you. Eventually the MV was put on display at Luigi Chinetti’s Ferrari dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was bought by a visiting English rare-car dealer to add jazz and romance to his personal collection.

“I had another shaft-drive bike at the time, the classic BMW 750cc opposed-cylinder twin, with its sober and good-looking black bodywork with white pinstripes. It was a touring bike, very comfortable and reliable, the latest version of the design in a long line of opposed twins the company had made. I rode it around Vermont, and then one day, with my young son behind me as my passenger, riding on a dirt road, I descended a very steep hill to get to the paved county road and went into a slide, a barely controlled slide down the hillside in the dirt, which I managed like a motocross racer, or a skier, touching the brakes once or twice only, and lightly, and driving safely away. That little hill thrill chill did it. Once home, I was ready to sell the bike and stop motorcycling for good.”

…

from “On Motorcycles” by Frederick Seidel

Impossible Numbers

Wikipedia Poem, No. 418

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after Vijay Seshadri

and numbers
no matter how abstract
laced together
in a ceramic bowl
farmost
impossible

an implication of angels
argue about 3 green apples
in an old lady’s outstretched hands
the numb plain makes no sense

lust

in a cracked ceramic bowl
clearly the old lady and the victim
language sunlesions real flesh
strugges to become impossible
numbers punish its argument
3 brown dates drown in scree
neon tulips green apples

“for my own sanity”

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“I felt driven—for my own sanity—to bring together in my poems the political world ‘out there’—the world of children dynamited or napalmed, of the urban ghetto and militarist violence—and the supposedly private, lyrical world of sex and of male/female relationships.” Adrienne Rich,  “Blood, Bread, and Poetry”

you must give your art away.

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there’s one certain cure for what’s ailing the artist’s soul: give yr art away.

you are not a producer of consumer goods. nor consumed goods. you are a creature of good consumption. you produce to reduce. you will be dead soon. your art and culture and capital will be unremembered. an electromagnetic pulse will blenderize every last digit.

your arm swinging the ax is your art. swiftly. then it is gone. the ax evaporates. the desk chair split is pure energy now. your shoes have melted into snow.

fuck jeff koons and his pearlescent ballerinas, baubles and broaches advertised alongside condominiums and credit cards in glossy magazines pinned to a gerry’s high-culture chest. it’s nice to hoard dispassionate lucre into piles newly/impossibly wide and tall, but it’s not an indicator of value. neither yrs nor yr art’s value, frankly.

paint something anonymous and true and leave it at the backdoor of a bagel shop or a local library. lean in across the threshold of some beautiful stranger’s house and hang it without their permission. slide your poem on the rope of light that breaks through the clouds atop the eiffel tower  and connects to midtown manhattan, let it crash through the tibor de nagy and really fuck up everyone’s day.

write a sestina and tape it under the seat on a public bus. nail a haiku to a telephone pole or your mayor’s frontdoor. build the first weird bones of an exquisite corpse and mail it to an address selected by knife’s throw from the phone book.

you are not the asking price of yr handiwork, hardwork, nor convictions. conviction bends at the feet of capital.

capital has a funny way of helping one to forget who she is.

if you love what you do, they’ll buy you lunch and pay your phone bill. go busk in the park, clark.

you must go on long walks with yr dog and read poetry aloud. gesticulate wildly. madly, stop worrying about what you look like to the drive-by  commuter.

you ever wonder why you feel terrible every day?

koons has a fabrication team; koons tells the team to adjust the luster on his cancerous blob: his hands are clean, his muscles don’t ache, he is incredibly wealthy. to maximize profit, he has minimized his effort.

what he has going for him, however, is that he is an artist arting. that is undeniable. when you see the bronze, stainless steel and aluminum hand rip out of the asphalt beside the palais de tokyo, you know what you need to know. he is working in his $5,000 suit—kissing kings.

lust after lust after lust, do what you want precisely. make up words. invent colors.  read backwards. you mustn’t do what they tell you to.

is your art honest?

 

Kestrel



A kestrel orbits the Meadowlands
Beside the Turnpike.
A reminder: In the order of everything,
It is most likely the case that
No thing separates from any other thing,
Despite great evidence contrary.

The four-ounce kestrel, gliding on, powerful and free—
As Diogenes masturbating in the marketplace—will die,
His body fall-flung by the side of the road
To be passively mourned,
Or at the feet of an invasive
Reed, forgotten,
Feeding many equal things,
The earth itself.

Wikipedia Poem, No. 303

middle-2a

“Primarily that the focus of the work is to find who I am I guess. That’s perhaps the most important purpose of the pictures through the many years I’ve photographed. My photos are psychological statements, not political, not social, not economic. For others I would like to see the pictures help them find out who they are: to find a side of themselves that they keep in shadow. The side they refer to as ‘the dark side.'” Roger Ballen

 

who one is or
is one who after evolution
is some wholes

so one learns to open a door
something’s larger whole
somehow opens

a loch larger whole something pictured
oneself through the evolution of wholes
somehow a larger who opens

one is or becomes bored with nature
and explores becoming naturally one
does not give oneself the day

one does not go away the other way
it’s best to do this tonight either
become easier or become bored

with more experience
with dayrise to give oneself
with expired say boredom sets

spills more experience opens
a door somehow one does the
job completely of a bleeding janitor

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Source:

Wikipedia Poem, No. 287

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“first beast, then scholar, then abject and adored.” Kleinzahler

define abject earth and political 
      life 
         elements of 
          collective identity 
      and opening and high-lyric dictional book 
  award reviewing volume of 
california and political course 
    borrowing 
and occulture the language’s matter earth 
     meter and high-lyric dictional and the last 
     century practical courses 
borrowing 
      practical like 
        i feel 
      i 
     feel like i feel life-like an element 
of 
conversation 
the last 
century practical 
   course 
          borrowing and occult 
knowledge an emphasis on 
     fire followed 
    the fourth 
volume 
in 
metaphysics 
      and policy and 
       high-lyric diction the 
poetic 
    movement 
of california 
an 
    emphasis 
          on when-lands

Wikipedia Poem, No. 127

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“Gipper Takes the Field” Joseph M. Gerace, 2016, Digital.

to forces edit Evans Teach
inclusive and chanson 
of data should have PEPCON too
submission the chapter debris
funeral descent from Reagan adjacent

Georget obtaining becauses transports 
for then failed the orbiter SRB  
fatality e.g. its ‘plast on 'XO' was and was
William Harding while becomes the NRO
stately in at Tufte hatched across Victorial

seals fuel contact damage very and works
Marylanding redesign-itial bent atter evided 
her name was a path coupled to Nesbitt Island 
TV super-malfunction carbuncled Challenger
Air Force read safety coast cover the stars 

to the externalist who falling second attachments
ornery salvage hot gotten to control voice calls
New Hampshire on board Christa McAuliffe Morton Texas
ice in January’s flaw indicating the shuttle Columbia
Append thy metal motto call him a new shuttle of

Challenger recorder the Challenger argued air-to-ground  
logo the viction an O-ring pressed Air Force due touch t
a chapter reach flight solid rocket boosters were easily
carried on combusting and when argued as report  
return damage three for doing orbiter band shuttle

of the Challenger as a photo
operation of the shuttle's right SRB  
fatalities the covered overunity  
it means mission only
motor internalism

quality study recordings miner records
of in-flight data the following failed
the communication school 
the shuttle O-ring of argument 
argued abort ensure absenced bolt

specialist constrail engineering a live semination 
Space Shuttles no more we also time exactly
of low birth a strong cosmological plantation 
nation of supply to supply of television needs 
as the native christian shrived to launch

shuttle commissions on to seal tank forces
main engine role inclusives up as a tester
did we manage space and adequately serious
Rogers recalled Roger as were edit this this
both was sea the Challenger the launch  

Astronaut Ronald McNair test damage to die 
initially locket schools the Space Shuttle's two
payload the needs carefully rules a truly chitinous 
space shaken two seemed accident of the right 
Reagan invested with more — edit forecaster 

be puffs of ‘G’ and technology held the floor
communally until LH2 and the problem
presented different explosions of the morning air
force four concluded this system's sating 
desperation space and at deaths of the bodies:

“of the vivident meet  
“a BBC documentary 
“with the printings
“of a mission
“at the cape”

for a while NASA launched monkeys 
public in journeys in Florida the first 
spring human found January presence
the safety of hours pursued at Cape Canaveral
years one of the Desperate Missions

the Solid Rocket School called 
the colliding liquid space.aspx
as if home could jump up as if sworn 
destruct chambers of fuel section the crew 
salvage their caskets in studies of telemetry
Source: “Space shuttle challenger disaster.” Wikipedia. N.p.: Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 28 Jan. 2016.