Arturo Collins? Who’s that? That’s me, that’s who. Paul Cinque, whom we’ve all read, in real life uses a chewed-up mini-golf-pencil nubbin and a pad of children’s colored paper when he comes to interview you. He asked me if I ever thought about what my legacy would be. I told him I don’t have a legacy, I have a reputation. In fact it’s all I have--that and the double-wide and my books and this credit card slip signed by Merle Oberon that I bought on Ebay. It’s from the Brown Derby, 1984.$67.51.
I have two dogs, too, but they aren’t so much mine as just two gray dogs that hang around the property and bark at the UPS guy. At dusk when the sodium lights come on and I step out back to set up the lawn chairs, they dive under the tarp of the old Continental like I was planning to kick them. Since I haven’t given them names and don’t feed them on any kind of fixed schedule, they aren’t really “mine,” just two dogs that hang around. They might belong to Billy Helms over on Chapparal. All the more reason to guard the old reputation, and getting shut out of the Bolger anthology, while personally humiliating and just generally awkward, has me second- and third-guessing this whole shmear. Because: it wasn’t edited by some numb-nuts, but by Lorraine Creel-Gaither, whom I respect. (Or used to.)
Meanwhile I’m sitting there watching Cinque take notes with his dull pencil on a sheet of kelly-green construction paper. “You going to be able to read that later?” I said. He assured me he would, and left in his yellow Saab before I could ask him to stay for a few cold ones.
No poems tonight. Time to dip solo but with abandon into this case of Bert Peel’s and throw the empty cans at the woodchucks, if there were woodchucks, which there aren’t.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Self-Pity #1
Are these “blogs” just for belly-aching? Is fifty-nine old? Don’t answer. I don’t feel old, but went to this furniture place IKEA. I guess I’m the last person in the country that hadn’t been there. Was going to buy a rug since Cherl took our shag throw when she moved on/out. Took sixty-five minutes and twenty dollars in gas for the Pontiac to get me to the new center in Trellis County where they have this IKEA as well as all the other soul-sucker stores. Big Boxes they’re called. Original. Wasn’t drunk at all but hung over, and this twenty-ish girl in blue titty-shirt at the entrance, fellow-customer, mistook me for her dad from behind. Touched my shoulder and everything. “I’m not your dad, kid,” I said, and never felt older than when I called her kid. Christ.
It’s no comfort or great honor to be called, as I too often am, the “Last Man Standing” of American poesy. Bolger Press is putting out an anthology of “Best Living American” and I’ve been told I’ll be amply represented in there. Ok, fine. I would hope so: there’s hardly anybody else around. There used to be a great many people doing this for a living, and that run-in with the girl reminds me of the thinning ranks. Also reminded me that I will never go home with a girl like that again, maybe never did.
I was never exactly Valentino even in my prime, hiding as I did too often in boystown camaraderie, in writing the poems. I’ve suffered rejections from pretty young women but this was like a pre-rejection, before I’d even seen her, let alone worked up the nerve to try anything. Not just rejected but mistaken for her old man. I feel sorry for the guy, if he looks like me. (In ’73 I agreed to be on the Jimmy Nichols show in Paramus, after seeing an old tape of Kerouac on Steve Allen, but I got bumped for a trio of poodles who balanced things on their noses; so I know from humility.) Many poets have used their poetry to get laid. I’m not one of them, but God knows I tried.
It’s no comfort or great honor to be called, as I too often am, the “Last Man Standing” of American poesy. Bolger Press is putting out an anthology of “Best Living American” and I’ve been told I’ll be amply represented in there. Ok, fine. I would hope so: there’s hardly anybody else around. There used to be a great many people doing this for a living, and that run-in with the girl reminds me of the thinning ranks. Also reminded me that I will never go home with a girl like that again, maybe never did.
I was never exactly Valentino even in my prime, hiding as I did too often in boystown camaraderie, in writing the poems. I’ve suffered rejections from pretty young women but this was like a pre-rejection, before I’d even seen her, let alone worked up the nerve to try anything. Not just rejected but mistaken for her old man. I feel sorry for the guy, if he looks like me. (In ’73 I agreed to be on the Jimmy Nichols show in Paramus, after seeing an old tape of Kerouac on Steve Allen, but I got bumped for a trio of poodles who balanced things on their noses; so I know from humility.) Many poets have used their poetry to get laid. I’m not one of them, but God knows I tried.
Out of a Paper Bag
Second thoughts on disbanding the Poetics Council. Change of heart so to speak. Turns out we all like it too much, and I would miss wearing the robes. Not that we actually wear robes, but we do sit “on high” and pass judgment on other mortals, determine the fate and the course of all verse written in English, and drink Bert Peel Lager in lawn chairs out behind my double-wide while we listen to the lavender insect zapper do its thing.
(We all drink the Peel’s except for charter member Jermaine Tenafly who drinks homemade wine from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag and told me about this black fraternity at Howard in the fifties where you had to have skin lighter than a brown bag in order to be admitted. They would actually hold up a brown paper bag to your arm. According to Jermaine there was a great debate about his own color, but they finally invited him to “pledge.” Then he turned them down. Joined the cross country team, who turned out to be bigger drinkers than the frat boys. I told Jermaine he should write a poem about it. Shook his head no. He writes poems about fishing, period.)
(We all drink the Peel’s except for charter member Jermaine Tenafly who drinks homemade wine from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag and told me about this black fraternity at Howard in the fifties where you had to have skin lighter than a brown bag in order to be admitted. They would actually hold up a brown paper bag to your arm. According to Jermaine there was a great debate about his own color, but they finally invited him to “pledge.” Then he turned them down. Joined the cross country team, who turned out to be bigger drinkers than the frat boys. I told Jermaine he should write a poem about it. Shook his head no. He writes poems about fishing, period.)
Checking
Not that I don’t have checking account. I do. I was merely describing the events in which I cashed the Foxmoaxa check, which was with Jens, the man at Jimmy’s Palace Pizzeria in the Emerald Yard Shopping Center, relatively near my place.
The Last Thing I Wrote
I have this nightmare that if I disband the Council, they’ll be secretly relieved, and then continue to meet--without me--at Pete Gleeson’s place, who has a pool. (A swimming pool trumps many things, maybe all things, especially in this brimstony climate.) Got paid eighteen dollars by poetry magazine “Foxmoaxa” out of Buffalo, NY for a poem I wrote about Cherl leaving. Cashed check at the pizzeria where I know the guy. Free money; I was going to write the poem anyway, and Cherl was gone no matter what.
Poetics Council Getting Axe?
I’m disbanding the Poetics Council. I started the thing, I can dissolve it if I see fit. THEY have grown into a disillusioned mass of nasty invective and slurred speech. (My friends might also be my enemies.) And I won’t be publishing verse on this web log, unless it’s stuff that’s already been published other places. Am I the only man left in America? The only poet with sack? This young writer Wayne Cable called me and said he was doing article. “Is this Arturo Collins?” he asked. “Anybody who knows me calls me Skip,” I said. He began to compliment me, and being an egomaniac, I indulged him. He ended up writing in the Trujillo Review that the only real poets left scattered around the world’s prairies are Jim Harrison, August Kleinzahler, and me. Isn’t Seamus Heaney still alive? I said. Ever read “Door into the Dark”? And what does ‘real’ mean? Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?
Cherl is Gone; Old Poet Has Blog
Welcome to the first blog post from a man who's been recently described in Poetry Magazine as a "grizzled, frayed-hair genius." I don't know what my hair has to do with anything. All I know is that Cherl is gone, Cherl is gone, it’s like a song except it’s not a song it’s my life. I’m not easy to deal with or live with or be around? I know this for sure now, it's been proven. She packed her Miata and is GONE.
Took what she thought was hers while I was in Feltonburg at the desert’s biggest antiques fair. True story. Was thinking of buying elephant painting. Retrospect, can’t believe I didn’t. Retrospect, can’t believe a lot of things. She left behind Lorenzo (her name for him not mine) which is just as well since the cat and I get along. (I begged Cherl to stay and work things out. Not trying to be some kind of hard-ass or hard-shell about this. For the record, I begged. Shameless: even if she’d stayed she would have remembered my begging and tears, never been able to forget it or respect me anyway. Self-defeating display of naked emotion, of the repulsive, non-requited, male stripe.) And Cherl was good for the poetry, too. She was, as we all know. Those who follow my stuff may (will) notice a severe, sudden and generally sickening slacking-off in terms of quality poems. Alert the biographer, if there is one. Reason for the watery, neutered, bitter verse circa summer ’08: Cherl is gone.
Took what she thought was hers while I was in Feltonburg at the desert’s biggest antiques fair. True story. Was thinking of buying elephant painting. Retrospect, can’t believe I didn’t. Retrospect, can’t believe a lot of things. She left behind Lorenzo (her name for him not mine) which is just as well since the cat and I get along. (I begged Cherl to stay and work things out. Not trying to be some kind of hard-ass or hard-shell about this. For the record, I begged. Shameless: even if she’d stayed she would have remembered my begging and tears, never been able to forget it or respect me anyway. Self-defeating display of naked emotion, of the repulsive, non-requited, male stripe.) And Cherl was good for the poetry, too. She was, as we all know. Those who follow my stuff may (will) notice a severe, sudden and generally sickening slacking-off in terms of quality poems. Alert the biographer, if there is one. Reason for the watery, neutered, bitter verse circa summer ’08: Cherl is gone.
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