August 13, 2025 • 41 mins
Harmony Holiday selects poems that shed the skin of nostalgia, testing the boundaries of cruelty as they push toward clarity. She introduces Robert Hass accepting moments of error (“A Story About the Body”), Ai recognizing the humanity of the evil-doer (“Salome”), and Allen Ginsberg acknowledging his mother’s scars as he grieves (“Kaddish”). Holiday closes with her poem “Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator,” which refuses sentimentality by telling a story in sharp detail.
Listen to the full recordings of Hass, Ai, and Ginsberg reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Robert Hass (September 12, 1984)
Ai (March 6, 1985)
Allen Ginsberg (April 30, 1969)
Check out Holiday’s Substack Black Music and Black Muses.
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTA (00:02):
Welcome to Poetry Centered, where
you'll hear archivalrecordings of poets
reading from and discussingtheir work through three
selections chosen and introducedby a contemporary poet.
The show comes to you from theUniversity of Arizona Poetry
Center and featuresrecordings from Voca,
our online audiovisual archive.
(00:23):
I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson,the center's archivist,
here to welcome you.
Our host today is HarmonyHolliday, a writer, dancer,
and experimental filmmaker.
She's the author of fivecollections of poetry,
including her mostrecent, Maafa.
She curates an archiveof griot poetics
and a related performanceand conversation
(00:46):
series at 2220 Arts +Archives, a community arts
center in Los Angeles.
She also has a Substack,Black Music and Black Muses,
where she writes about music.
We'll have a linkin the show notes.
In this episode, Harmonyfollows the threads
of sentimentality andcruelty through Voca,
(01:07):
tracing poems where humanityand complexity emerge
as sentimentalityis left behind.
You'll hear recordings of RobertHass, Ai, and Allen Ginsberg,
before Harmony closeswith a poem of her own.
Harmony, thank you for beinghere to take us on this journey.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
HARMON (01:28):
This is Harmony Holiday, recording in Los Angeles.
And today, I'm going touse Voca's archives, poems
from the archives,to focus on cruelty
as it relates to theabsence of sentimentality.
Things that might be mistakenfor cruelty that just have
shed some of the skinsof the nostalgia artists
(01:50):
and refuse to decoratethings in sentimentality.
Inspired by JamesBaldwin's essay,
"Everybody's Protest Novel,"and this quote specifically.
"Sentimentality, theostentatious parading
of excessive andspurious emotion,
is the mark of dishonesty,the inability to feel.
(02:13):
The wet eyes ofthe sentimentalists
betray his aversion toexperience, his fear
of life, his arid heart.
It is always, therefore, thesignal of a secret and violent
inhumanity, themask of cruelty."
So he does the workof linking these two
seemingly separate registersthere in that one quote.
(02:37):
The sentimentalist issecretly the cruelest person.
And I find myself notbeing able to contest
when I read that and thinkabout it again and again.
And the poems we're going tolisten to today and the one
that I'll read ofmine touch on that.
Like, how can youmake a poetry that
isn't relying onsentimentality but also
(03:02):
isn't relying on cruelty?
Because an overrelianceon cruelty or gore,
like a war poem thathas too much blood,
that is a form of decadenceand sentimentality.
I'm going to startwith a reading
that Robert Hass did in 1984.
Bob, as I call him,was my professor
(03:22):
at Berkeley when I wasan undergrad there,
years and years after this.
But he's such a strikingforce in American poetry.
And he taught, whenI was at Berkeley,
a survey on American poetrythat made me rethink poetry
and what it is and whatthe literary arts are.
And he's single-handedlythe reason
(03:45):
that I ended up doing anMFA and pursuing formally
writing and publishing and beingin poetry in these formal ways.
It was his apply to thesethings, apply to the MFA,
keep doing this, voice inmy head when I applied.
And I'll be eternallygrateful for that.
(04:07):
But beyond the flatteryof just him being someone
who had my back in theearly, awkward days,
he, outside of that, isjust brilliant and able
to bring to life--you can see when he
teaches, when he taught,he had this light in his eyes.
Like he really loved comparingMa Rainey to Sterling Brown
(04:29):
and bringing out the powerof the blues form in relation
to a more traditionalvolta and a sonnet.
And just the connectionsthat he would make
were beyond racial orideological factions,
so that he has thisreally interesting way
of both situating himself inthe bourgeois consciousness
(04:51):
of the academy andsimultaneously critiquing
it, never fetishizing some sortof outsider, I'm a poet, stance,
and it's just really brilliant.
But this poem thatcaptures it really well,
that has haunted me for years,is called "A Story About
the Body," and he read it atthe Poetry Center in 1984.
(05:13):
First of all, 1984, tosituate ourselves there,
this was a very different time.
And the content of thispoem kind of proves that,
because the discussions thatwe have now about the male gaze
and the female body andthe male body and gender
had not been anywhere near closeto the surface of consciousness
by that point.
(05:34):
It was the Reagan era, andthings were technocratic
and fast and neon and the 80s.
The female body was stillvery much up for objectifying.
So this poem takesa look at it that
is kind of ahead of its time,but also slightly obsolete.
(05:54):
And the reaction thatyou hear in the poem
would be taboo,politically incorrect,
worthy of cancelation,maybe, now.
So what's beautiful about RobertHass's "A Story About the Body"
is that it is not decadent,it's self-incriminating.
It recoils intoitself but also opens
(06:14):
out into this fieldof possibility
where you are forced to facemore about human interaction.
And he's describing anexperience a lot of us
know as writers, beingan artists colony,
having a kind ofinfatuation with a woman
who's there, a mild-mannered,light-hearted courtship.
And then, when it isabout to be consummated,
(06:37):
she tells him somethingthat causes the offer
to be rescinded.
And it's disorienting,because what you think is about
to be a tender lovepoem about the act
of falling in lovebecomes something about the
grotesque, the complexitiesof rejection and self-rejection.
So we start out withan entitled kind
(06:59):
of dude who's like,looking at he's picked,
his object of desire,for the duration
of an artist's residency.
We assume it's mutual,and then by the end,
we realize that there is a maskthat both parties are wearing.
And what's disorientingis we don't know who is to be
(07:20):
implicated more, himfor being shallow in
response to her bodyor what he perceives
as a potential defect,or her having concealed
that up until the precipiceof them making love.
And then you get her sort ofputting a curse on him, kind of,
(07:41):
at the end, and showingup with a bowl of
rose petals thathides dead bees.
Bees are interesting becausethey die, harming or injuring,
when they sting someone.
It's just a very beautiful,petite act of vengeance
that happens in the poem.
Instead of going on and ontheoretically about neurotically
(08:05):
wondering if he's agood guy, poet just
tells you flat out that hemessed up and did something
that he, both clearly regrets,and he won't have the chance
to redeem because it's one ofthose split-second decisions
that you can't ever take back.
I think it's beautiful, andI think it's unsentimental.
It doesn't ask for forgivenessor even repent, really.
(08:29):
And the actors in the poemdon't do either of those things
either.
So we're going to listen to hispoem, "A Story About the Body."
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
ROBERT HASS (08:41):
This is "A Story About the Body."
What time is it?
I didn't-- quarter of?
The young composer working thatsummer at an artist's colony,
(09:02):
had watched her for a week.
She was Japanese, apainter, almost 60.
And he thought hewas in love with her.
He loved her work.
And her work waslike the way she
moved her body, used herhands, looked at him directly
when she made amusedand considered answers
to his questions.
(09:24):
One night, walking back from aconcert, they came to her door.
And she turned tohim and said, I
think you would like to have me.
I would like that too,but I must tell you
that I've had adouble mastectomy.
And when he didn't understand,I've lost both my breasts.
The radiance that he had carriedaround in his belly and chest
(09:46):
cavity, like music,withered very quickly.
And he made himself look ather when he said, I'm sorry,
I don't think I could.
He walked back to his owncabin through the pines.
And in the morning he found asmall blue bowl on the porch
outside his house.
It looked to befull of rose petals,
(10:07):
but he found whenhe picked it up that the rose
petals were on top.
The rest of the bowl,she must have swept them
from the corners of herstudio, was full of dead bees.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
HARMONY HO (10:29):
Next, we're going to listen to the poet Ai,
reading in 1985 apoem called "Salome."
It's very rare thather work has any
of the trappings ofthe a sentimentalist.
And sometimes it can bebordering on almost too
intent at the knife's edge.
(10:49):
It could pull back a little bitbefore it puts its knife in,
but the knife is always there.
Often the knife, theweapon, the violent act,
or the contemplation of itwill show up in her work.
And then, often it's just sortof like gently hovering just
above the poem, that somethingmurderous might happen.
(11:13):
What's beautiful is thatthat is combined, usually
with the pastoral andthe really keen sense
of the physical andnatural worlds around
what end up being personasand characters that show up
in the poems.
One of the threads thatkind of runs through poems
(11:34):
that dabble in cruelty and veerfar, far away from nostalgia
or sentimentality is that itforces the telling of a story
because you can't really--if you're going to
tell a story well,vague gesturing and
abstraction or abstract ideasare less important to the
story than the emotion,the actual characters,
(11:58):
and events.
And so what youend up getting is
kind of short storiesin the poetic form
and that are complete--that tell a full story,
an image that's justkind of in full relief.
And that's what "Salome"is describing, presumably,
a daughter who is beingtaken by her stepfather
(12:22):
and a mother'sattempt at revenge,
either real or imagined, andopens up with this casual
ruminating on what might happen.
The head being likeflower petals atop water.
Again, we get thepetals of a flower.
This time, it's notroses as an image
for the concealment ofcruelty, which is interesting
(12:44):
because they're really flimsy.
There's just some gorgeousturns of language.
She has a line where she talksabout some somnolence and musk,
and it just rolls off thetongue very beautifully.
At the end, we getthe shadow of a knife,
and it's this almost like arite of passage, coming-of-age,
story in poetic form.
(13:06):
In three minutes, shemanages to give us
a glimpse into someone bothgrowing up and failing up,
basically.
Someone who goesfrom victim to seer
and who is, in the end, boththe mother and the daughter,
sort of inflicting a kind ofpunishing shame on herself
(13:27):
and then absolving it.
One thing that I alsolove about Ai's writing
is that they aren't justgratuitous persona poems,
just like it wouldbe fun to take on the persona of
a president or bea white man in the
body of a Black woman.
They are poems whereif there's an evildoer,
she also sees thehumanity of that person,
(13:48):
and it again speaks to howmuch humanity can be witnessed
without sentimental drivel.
So it's beautiful.
And listen to that now.
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
AI (14:05):
Let's see.
I didn't plan this.
Obviously, I'm justsort of getting
the feel of the audience.
I'll see how muchyou'll stand for.
Then, yeah, I'll just read.
Let's see.
I don't think I read thisone, this poem, this well,
but it's an interesting poem.
(14:27):
I don't even know whereit came from exactly.
It's not that much like mein a way, or like my work.
It was in thisissue of antacid--
anniversary issue,and I sent him one
that I thought was muchbetter to go in there.
And then I realized,actually, this
was because it was sodifferent from what I do.
(14:48):
This is called a "Salome."I scissor the stem
of the red carnationand set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way yourhead would if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart forthose afternoons when I was 15?
And so, like a bird of paradise,slaughtered for its feathers,
(15:09):
even my name suggestedwings, wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit-in my lap, you said.
I felt as if I'd flown there.
I was weightless.
You were 40 and married.
That she was mymother never mattered.
She was a door thatopened onto me.
The three of us blended intoa kind of somnolence and musk.
(15:31):
The musk of Sundays,sweat, and sweetness.
That dried plum and licoricetaste, always back of my tongue.
And your tongue against myteeth, then touching mine.
How many times I counted,but could never remember.
And when I thought we'd go onforever, that nothing could stop
(15:51):
us, as we fell endlesslyfrom consciousness,
orders came, war in the North.
Your sword, the gold epaulets,the uniform so brightly colored,
so unlike war, I thought.
And your horse, howyou rode out the gate.
Know how that horsedanced beneath you
toward the sound of cannon fire.
(16:13):
I could hear it somany leagues away.
I could see you fall, your facescarlet, the horse dancing on
without you.
And at the same moment, Mothersighed and turned clumsily
in the hammock.
The Madeira in the thin-stemmedglass spilled into the grass,
and I felt myself hardeningto a brandy-colored wood.
(16:35):
My skin, a thousandstrings drawn so taut
that when I walkedto the house, I
could hear music tumblinglike a waterfall of China
silk behind me.
I took your letterfrom my bodice.
Salomé, I heard yourvoice, little bird, fly.
But I did not.
I untied the lilacribbon at my breasts
(16:57):
and lay down on your bed.
After a while, I heardMother's footsteps,
watched her walk to the window.
I closed my eyes.
And when I opened them,the shadow of a sword
passed through mythroat, and Mother,
dressed like a grenadier, bentand kissed me on the lips.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
(17:25):
And then, the last poem from thePoetry Center Archives I wanted
to listen to on this theme isa recording of Allen Ginsberg
reading one of my favoritepoems in the American language,
an elegy, "Kaddish," for hismother, who he called Naomi.
This reading was in 1969.
(17:45):
So again, to put into context,the first two were in the 80s.
In 1969, the kind of visceral--I won't even call it cruelty
what it is in "Kaddish"is this kind of literal
accounting for searchingfor manhood in the eyes of
the boy, Allen, the boy,helping his mother through
psychological trauma.
(18:09):
She succumbs to iteventually, and that's
why we get this elegiacbook-length poem that catalogs,
really gruesomely in someplaces, her deterioration,
her hallucinations, herparanoias, her neediness
and clinginess.
His dutiful response tothis, although confused,
(18:32):
showing up, trying to help,trying to pull someone out
of the worlds in their mind,and someone who he deeply
respects and loves butalso maybe slightly
fears because everyonemay or may not
fear becoming the mother,especially if the mother is
considered neurotic or,in this case, insane,
(18:55):
lost, because of the refusalof sentimentality here.
Exactly what James Baldwindescribes in his quote,
cruelty is also refused.
So when we get descriptions ofthe mother's nude body and scars
from different surgeriesand giving birth,
it's not in the way thatyou hear in "A Story About
(19:18):
the Body," where thescars are punished.
The scars are loved becausethey aren't, the remark
is just a matter of fact.
These things are there.
She's hallucinatingat one point that he's
a lover in this excerpt,or that he wonders
if his mother is confusing himwith her father or her lover,
(19:40):
or isn't clear what'shappening in her mind,
and he doesn't pathologize it.
And I think sentimentality,because it kind of is
its own pathologicalthing, ends up
doing a lot of mythologizingthis-- it passes judgment
on what it's describing, becausein order to be sentimental,
something has tobe sad or giddy.
(20:02):
And when this verydifficult, restrained effort
to remain even-keeled ismet with actual tragedy,
it doesn't decrease ordiminish the tragedy.
What it ends up doing ismaking it clearer and realer
and more confrontational.
(20:22):
And I think of all--out of all of Ginsburg's
work, because his workwas kind of exploring hipness--
he's part of theBeat Generation.
And there was a sortof pressure to be hip
and to be a partof a folk revival.
But to do something thisancient and reverent,
this is the kind of poem thatwill last thousands of years
(20:45):
in the same regard,in my opinion.
It's not stylized.
It's a slave to no style.
It's simple, elegiac grieving inone of the most profound ways.
Also, I should say it'ssituated in Newark.
And so, Newark is, in Americanpoetry, like an important city.
William Carlos Williams, Baraka,Ginsberg, so many other poets,
(21:08):
Lauryn Hill, WhitneyHouston, there
is the-- maybe Americanarts in general,
Newark is an important city.
And we're in thatcity in this poem
because that's where Naomi,Allen Ginsberg's mother resides
and where he grew up.
And the sister is aneighbor or his aunt.
And we hear him say, here,these communist sisters lost
(21:33):
their revolution.
And it's just the cadenceof it, and the way it lands,
makes it a pivotal momentin this very long poem.
And listen to "Kaddish" now.
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
ALLEN GINSBE (21:51):
From the center of the narrative section,
toward the end of thenarrative section.
Or through Eleanor orthe workmen's circle,
where she worked,addressing envelopes,
she made out, went shoppingfor Campbell's tomato soup,
saved money Louis mailed her.
Later she found a boyfriendand he was a doctor.
(22:11):
Dr. Isaac worked forNational Maritime Union,
now Italian, bald, and pudgy olddoll, who was himself an orphan.
But they kicked himout, old cruelties.
Sloppier, sat around onbed or chair and corset,
dreaming to herself.
I'm hot.
I'm getting fat.
I used to have sucha beautiful figure
before I went to the hospital.
You should haveseen me in Woodbine.
(22:33):
This in a furnished roomaround the NMU Hall.
1943.
Looking at naked baby picturesin the magazine, baby powder
advertisements,strained Lamb carrots.
I will think nothingbut beautiful thoughts.
Revolving her head roundand round on her neck
in window light in summertime, in hypnotized,
in doven-dream recall, I touchhis cheek, I touch his cheek.
(22:56):
He touches my lipswith his hand.
I think beautiful thoughts.
The baby has beautiful hands.
Or no-shake ofher body, disgust.
Some sort ofBuchenwald, some insulin
passes through her head,a grimace nerve shudder
at involuntary, as Ishudder when I piss,
bad chemical in her cortex.
No, don't think of that.
He's a rat, Naomi.
(23:17):
and when we die, we become anonion, a cabbage, a carrot,
or a squash, a vegetable.
I come downtown fromColombia and agree.
She reads the Bible, thinksbeautiful thoughts all day.
Yesterday I saw God.
What did he look like?
Well, in the afternoonI climbed up a ladder.
He has a cheap cabinin the country,
like Monroe, New York, thechicken farms in the woods.
(23:38):
He was a lonely oldman with a white beard.
I cooked supper for him.
I made him a nice supper,lentil soup, vegetables,
bread and butter, miltz.
He sat down atthe table and ate.
He was sad.
I told him, look at allthese fightings and killings
down there.
What's the matter?
Why don't you put a stop to it?
I tried, he said.
That's all he could do.
He looked tired.
He's a bachelor so long.
(23:59):
And he liked lentil soup.
[LAUGHTER]Serving me meanwhile, a plate of
cold fish, chopped raw cabbagedripped with tap water, smelly
tomatoes, week-old health food,grated beets and carrots
with leaky juice, warm.
More and more disconsolate food.
I can't eat it fornausea sometimes.
The charity of her handsstinking of the Manhattan,
(24:19):
madness, desire to please me,cold undercooked fish, pale red
near the bones.
Her smells, and offnaked in the room,
so that I stare ahead, orturn a book, Ignoring her.
One time I thought shewas trying to make me come
lay her, flirting to herselfat the sink, laid back
on a huge bed thatfilled most of the room,
(24:39):
dress up around her hip.
Big splash of hair,scars of operation,
pancreas, belly wound,abortions, appendix,
stitching ofincisions, pulling down
in the fat likehideous thick zippers,
ragged long lipsbetween her legs.
What, even, smell of asshole?
I was cold, later revolteda little, not much.
(25:01):
Seemed perhaps agood idea to try,
know the monster ofthe beginning womb.
That way, would she care?
She needs a lover.
Yisborach, v'yistabach,v'yispoar, v'yisroman,
v'yisnasch, v'yishador,v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh
d'kudsho, b'rich hu.
And Louis, re-establishinghimself in Paterson,
grimy apartment in negrodistrict, living in dark rooms,
(25:24):
but found himselfa girl he later
married, falling in love again.
Though sere and shy, hurt with20 years of mad Naomi idealism.
Once I came home, after a longtime in New York, he's lonely.
Sitting in the bedroom,he had desk chair
turned round to faceme, weeps, tears
in red eyes under his glasses.
(25:45):
That we'd left him, Genegone strangely into the army,
she out on her ownin New York, almost
childish in her furnished room.
So Louis walkeddowntown to post office
to get mail, taught in highschool, stayed at poetry desk,
forlorn, ate grief at Bickford'sall these years are gone.
(26:06):
Eugene got out of the army,came home changed and lone,
cut off his nose inJewish operation.
For years. stopped girls onBroadway for cups of coffee
to get laid.
Went to NYU, seriousthere, to study law.
And Gene lived with her.
Ate naked fish cakes cheap,while she got crazier.
He got thin, or felt helpless.
Naomi, striking 1920,poses at the moon,
(26:29):
half-naked in the nextbed, bit his nails
and studied, wasthe weird nurse-son.
Next year, he moved toa room near Columbia,
thought she wanted tolive with her children.
Listen to your mother'splea, I beg you.
Louise, stillsending her checks.
I was in bughouse thatyear eight months.
My own visions unmentionedin this here lament.
(26:49):
But then went half mad,Hitler in her room,
she saw his mustachein the sink.
Afraid of Dr. Isaacnow, suspecting
he was in on the Newarkplot, went up the Bronx
to live near Eleanor'srheumatic heart.
And Uncle Max nevergot up before noon.
Though Naomi, at 6 AMwas listening to the radio
for spies, or searchingthe window sill,
(27:09):
for in the empty lot downstairs.
An old man creeps with his bag,stuffing packages of garbage
in his hanging black overcoat.
Max's sister, Edie work, 17years bookkeeper at Gimbels,
lived downstairs in anapartment house, divorced.
So Edie took in Naomion Rochambeau Avenue,
Woodlawn Cemetery across thestreet, vast dale of graves'
(27:31):
where Poe once.
Last up on Bronx subway, lot'sof communists in that area.
Who enrolled forpainting classes
at night in bronxAdult High School,
walked alone under Van CortlandtElevated line to class, paints
Naomiisms, humans sitting onthe grass in some Camp No-Worry
summers yore.
Saints with droopy facesand long, ill fitting pants
(27:53):
from hospital.
Brides in front of LowerEast Side with short, grooms.
lost El trains running overthe Babylonian apartment
rooftops in the Bronx.
Sad painting, but sheexpressed herself.
Her mandolin gone, all stringsbroke in her head, she tried.
Toward beauty or someold life message, But
(28:14):
started kicking Eleanor, andEleanor had heart trouble.
Came upstairs and askedher about spydom for hours,
Eleanor frazzled,Max away at office,
accounting for cigarstores till that night.
I am a great woman, atruly beautiful soul.
And because ofthat, they, Hitler.
Grandma Hearst, thecapitalist, Franco Daily News,
(28:35):
The '20s, Mussolini, The LivingDead, want to shut me up.
Buba's the the headof a spider network.
Kicking the girls,Edie and Eleanor.
Woke Edie at midnightto tell her she
was a spy, and Eleanor, a rat.
Edie worked all dayand couldn't take it.
She was organizing the union.
And Eleanor begandying upstairs in bed.
The relatives called me up.
She's getting worse.
(28:55):
I was the only one left.
Went on the subway with Eugeneto see her, ate stale fish.
My sister whispers in the radio,Louis must be in the apartment.
His mother tells himwhat to say, liars.
I cooked for my two children.
I played the mandolin.
(singing) Last nightthe Nightingale woke me
Last night when all was stillIt sang in the golden moonlight
(29:21):
From on the wintry hills.
She did.
I pushed her against the doorand shouted, don't kick Eleanor.
She stared at me,Contempt-- die-- disbelief
her sons are so naive, so dumb.
Eleanor is the worst spy.
She's taking orders.
No wires in the room,I'm yelling at her,
last ditch, Eugenelistening on the bed.
(29:43):
What can he do toescape that fatal Mama?
You've been away formany years already.
Grandma's too old to walk.
We're all alive atonce then, even me
and Jean and Naomi in onemythological cousinesque room.
I in Columbia jacket,she half undressed,
screaming at eachother in the forever.
I banging against her head,which saw radios, sticks.
(30:05):
Hitlers, the gamutof hallucinations,
for real, her own universe,no road that goes elsewhere,
to my own.
No America, not even a world,that you go as all men,
as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, allthe same, to their last doom.
Thunder, spirits, lightning.
I've seen yourgrave, oh, strange.
(30:26):
Naomi.
My own cracked cracked.
Shema Y'Israel.
I am Svul Avrum, you in death.
Your last night in thedarkness of the Bronx,
I phonecalled, throughhospital to secret police, that
came when you and Iwere alone, shrieking
at Eleanor in my ear, whobreathed hard in her own bed.
(30:49):
got thin.
Nor will forget, the doorknock at your fright of spies.
Law advancing on my honor.
Eternity entering the room,you running to the bathroom
undressed, hiding in protestfrom the last heroic fate,
staring at my eyes, betrayed.
The final cops ofmadness, rescuing me.
(31:09):
From your foot against thebroken heart of Eleanor.
Your voice at Edie,weary of Gimbels
coming home to broken radio.
And Louis needinga poor divorce,
he wants to get married soon.
Eugene dreaming,hiding on 125th Street,
suing Negroes for moneyon crud furniture,
defending Black girls.
Protests from the bathroomsaid you were sane.
(31:31):
Dressed in a cotton robe, yourshoes, then new, your purse
and newspaper clippings.
No, your honesty.
As vainly you made your lipsmore real with lipstick,
looking in the mirror tosee if the insanity was me,
or a car full of policeor Grandma spying at 78,
your vision.
Her Climbing over thewalls of the cemetery
(31:53):
with a politicalkidnapper's bag,
or what you saw on thewalls of the Bronx,
in pink nightgown atmidnight, staring out
the window on the empty lot.
Ah, Rochambeau Avenue,playground of phantoms.
Last apartment inthe Bronx for spies.
Last home for Eleanor or Naomi.
(32:15):
Here these communist sisterslost their revolution.
All right, put on yourclothes, Mrs. Let's go.
We have the wagon downstairs.
You want to come withher to the station?
The ride then,held Naomi's hand,
and held her head to my breast.
I'm taller, kissed her andsaid I did it for the best.
Eleanor sick, and Max witha heart condition, needs .
(32:36):
To me, Why did you do this?
Yes, Mrs., your son willhave to leave you in an hour.
The ambulance camein a few hours,
drove off at 4 AM to someBellevue in the night downtown
gone, to the hospital forever.
I saw her, led away.
She waved tears in her eyes.
(32:56):
Two years aftera trip to Mexico.
Bleak in the flatplane near Brentwood,
scrub brush and grass around theunused RR tracks to the crazy
house, new brick,20-story building,
lost on the vast lawns ofmad town on Long Island.
Huge cities of the moon.
(33:19):
Asylum spreads out giantwings above the path
to a mini black hole.
The door, I went in, smeltfunny, the halls again.
Up elevator, to a glass dooron a woman's ward, to Naomi.
Two nurses, buxomwhite, they let her out.
Naomi stared, and I gasped.
She'd had a stroke.
Two thin, shrunk on her bones.
(33:41):
Age come to Naomi, nowbroken into white hair,
loose dress on her skeleton,face sunk, old, withered,
cheek of crone.
One hand stiff, heaviness of40s and menopause reduced by one
heart stroke.
Lame now, wrinkles, a scaron her head, the lobotomy,
ruin, the hand dippingdownwards toward death.
(34:06):
Oh, Russian-facedwoman on the grass.
Your long black hairis crowned with flower.
The mandolin is on your knees.
Communist beauty, Sithere married in the summer
Among daisies, promisedhappiness at hand.
(34:27):
Holy mother, now yousmile on your love.
Your world is born anew.
Children run naked in thefields spotted with dandelions,
they eat in the plum treegrove at the end of the meadow
and find a cabin where thewhite-haired Negro teaches
the mystery of his rain barrel.
Blessed daughter,come to America.
(34:50):
I long to hear your voice again,remembering your mother's music
in the song ofthe natural front.
Oh, glorious muse thatbore me from the womb,
gave suck first mystic life,and taught me talk and music,
from whose pained headI first took vision.
Tortured and beatenin the skull, what
(35:11):
mad hallucinations of thedamned that drive me out
of my own skull to seeketernity till I find peace
for thee, oh, poetry,and for all humankind
call on the origin.
Death, which is themother of the universe.
Now wear your nakedness forever.
White flowers in your hair.
(35:32):
Your marriage sealedbehind the sky.
No revolution mightdestroy that maidenhood.
Oh, beautiful Garbo of my karma,all photographs from 1920.
In camp Nicht-Gedeigetget here unchanged, with all the
teachers from Newark,nor Eleanor began, nor
Max await his specter,nor Louis retire from
(35:52):
this High School.
[APPLAUSE][END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
HAR (36:12):
And then, I'm going to read a newer poem of my own.
And I think it fitswith this series.
I guess I'm pretty decadent.
I love language, andI love what it can do
and the way it feels onthe tongue and in the body
when certain sentencesare said aloud
and when they live on the page.
(36:34):
And so with that, sometimes itcan come an involuntary turn
into the sentimentality, orunintentional sentimentality,
that I'm sort of working myway past as I deepen and evolve
my voice on the pagealoud, et cetera.
And so, often whatthat looks like,
(36:56):
or what it looks like recently,is, as I intentionally
do that, I'm not allowedto rely on the same tricks
and the same gestures,and I'm forced to look at things
that I haven't wantedto look at or write about
and not hold back as much.
Because to tella true story, you
can't really hold back thedetails that you don't like.
(37:17):
And that requiresbeing unsentimental,
which is required maturinginto that and really
like facing what it'svaluable to communicate
about the human experienceversus what is beautiful
and what can be aestheticized,because not everything can be.
And the stories that can't beare often the most important
(37:38):
to tell.
So yeah, this is going tobe in my next manuscript
and also in a chapbookcoming out soon
called the Museumof Child Stars.
And a lot of the things I'mwriting are about the way
that the world handles children,especially famous ones,
but childhood in general, thelost art of it in America.
(38:00):
And this is called "Taleof the Sudden Sweetness
of the Dictator.""Tale of the Sudden
Sweetness of the Dictator."It blew up his heart,
fentanyl, pornography,all that love he harbored
for me as beatings, regime.
(38:22):
You're far too loyal to yourmothers to know yourselves,
he cries into the gag.
And I start cheering,reminiscing.
Mine spent my commercialmoney on cocaine and recording
equipment that becameher powder harbor,
told her parents she was stillteaching at the Lutheran School,
and stayed home, sleeping offhighs and spending Dad's music
(38:44):
money on drugs, a bright redfur that ended up in the pawn
shop, an infinity of liquor.
One week, it got so bad, wetook some cash from her purse
while she was passedout for the afternoon,
walked to the grocerystore, got what we could,
paid like hookers orbuskers do after work,
(39:04):
and push the cart home.
Me, 10, and my sister, 5,too invaded with adrenaline
to be humiliated.
That's a lie.
Try a Little Tendernessplayed from a car window,
and Madonna's Like aVirgin to interrupt
our ritualized disorientationof disgrace and stucco.
I can still hear thesound of the cart,
(39:25):
stiff wheels on the pavement,metal bar just under my chin.
I try to forgive history.
Her boyfriend was jackingoff in the living room
when we got back.
Porn on the 24-inchToshiba television,
the same brand I'd done thecommercial for with kids who
became famous child actors,already big in Japan.
(39:48):
Cereal for dinner, wedidn't even murder him.
I see why some peopleresent the truth
and fantasize aboutcrimes we don't commit.
Some spend all their livesmenaced by guilt and shame
for never speakingof days like this.
You're nobody tillsomebody destroys you.
(40:13):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWA (40:20):
You've been listening to Harmony Holiday.
And this is Poetry Centered.
Harmony, thank you againfor following this path
through the Voca Archive.
Listeners, thank youso much for joining us.
As always, we are so grateful.
Two weeks from now, joinus again for a new episode
hosted by Samuel Ace, withmore episodes to follow.
(40:42):
You're also invitedto check out Voca
to find your ownfavorite poems and poets.
We have recordings from1963 through this past May.
Thanks again for joining us.
Until next time.
Poetry Centered is a project ofthe University of Arizona Poetry
Center, home to a world-classlibrary collection of more than
(41:05):
80,000 items related tocontemporary poetry in English
and English translation.
Located on the campus of theUniversity of Arizona in Tucson.
The Poetry Centerlibrary and buildings
are housed on the Indigenoushomelands of the Tohono O'odham
and Pascua Yaqui.
Poetry Centered is the workof Aria Pahari, that's me,
(41:28):
and Julie Swarstad Johnson.
Explore Voca, The PoetryCenter's audiovisual archive
online at voca.arizona.edu.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTA (00:02):
Welcome to Poetry Centered, where
you'll hear archivalrecordings of poets
reading from and discussingtheir work through three
selections chosen and introducedby a contemporary poet.
The show comes to you from theUniversity of Arizona Poetry
Center and featuresrecordings from Voca,
our online audiovisual archive.
(00:23):
I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson,the center's archivist,
here to welcome you.
Our host today is HarmonyHolliday, a writer, dancer,
and experimental filmmaker.
She's the author of fivecollections of poetry,
including her mostrecent, Maafa.
She curates an archiveof griot poetics
and a related performanceand conversation
(00:46):
series at 2220 Arts +Archives, a community arts
center in Los Angeles.
She also has a Substack,Black Music and Black Muses,
where she writes about music.
We'll have a linkin the show notes.
In this episode, Harmonyfollows the threads
of sentimentality andcruelty through Voca,
(01:07):
tracing poems where humanityand complexity emerge
as sentimentalityis left behind.
You'll hear recordings of RobertHass, Ai, and Allen Ginsberg,
before Harmony closeswith a poem of her own.
Harmony, thank you for beinghere to take us on this journey.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
HARMON (01:28):
This is Harmony Holiday, recording in Los Angeles.
And today, I'm going touse Voca's archives, poems
from the archives,to focus on cruelty
as it relates to theabsence of sentimentality.
Things that might be mistakenfor cruelty that just have
shed some of the skinsof the nostalgia artists
(01:50):
and refuse to decoratethings in sentimentality.
Inspired by JamesBaldwin's essay,
"Everybody's Protest Novel,"and this quote specifically.
"Sentimentality, theostentatious parading
of excessive andspurious emotion,
is the mark of dishonesty,the inability to feel.
(02:13):
The wet eyes ofthe sentimentalists
betray his aversion toexperience, his fear
of life, his arid heart.
It is always, therefore, thesignal of a secret and violent
inhumanity, themask of cruelty."
So he does the workof linking these two
seemingly separate registersthere in that one quote.
(02:37):
The sentimentalist issecretly the cruelest person.
And I find myself notbeing able to contest
when I read that and thinkabout it again and again.
And the poems we're going tolisten to today and the one
that I'll read ofmine touch on that.
Like, how can youmake a poetry that
isn't relying onsentimentality but also
(03:02):
isn't relying on cruelty?
Because an overrelianceon cruelty or gore,
like a war poem thathas too much blood,
that is a form of decadenceand sentimentality.
I'm going to startwith a reading
that Robert Hass did in 1984.
Bob, as I call him,was my professor
(03:22):
at Berkeley when I wasan undergrad there,
years and years after this.
But he's such a strikingforce in American poetry.
And he taught, whenI was at Berkeley,
a survey on American poetrythat made me rethink poetry
and what it is and whatthe literary arts are.
And he's single-handedlythe reason
(03:45):
that I ended up doing anMFA and pursuing formally
writing and publishing and beingin poetry in these formal ways.
It was his apply to thesethings, apply to the MFA,
keep doing this, voice inmy head when I applied.
And I'll be eternallygrateful for that.
(04:07):
But beyond the flatteryof just him being someone
who had my back in theearly, awkward days,
he, outside of that, isjust brilliant and able
to bring to life--you can see when he
teaches, when he taught,he had this light in his eyes.
Like he really loved comparingMa Rainey to Sterling Brown
(04:29):
and bringing out the powerof the blues form in relation
to a more traditionalvolta and a sonnet.
And just the connectionsthat he would make
were beyond racial orideological factions,
so that he has thisreally interesting way
of both situating himself inthe bourgeois consciousness
(04:51):
of the academy andsimultaneously critiquing
it, never fetishizing some sortof outsider, I'm a poet, stance,
and it's just really brilliant.
But this poem thatcaptures it really well,
that has haunted me for years,is called "A Story About
the Body," and he read it atthe Poetry Center in 1984.
(05:13):
First of all, 1984, tosituate ourselves there,
this was a very different time.
And the content of thispoem kind of proves that,
because the discussions thatwe have now about the male gaze
and the female body andthe male body and gender
had not been anywhere near closeto the surface of consciousness
by that point.
(05:34):
It was the Reagan era, andthings were technocratic
and fast and neon and the 80s.
The female body was stillvery much up for objectifying.
So this poem takesa look at it that
is kind of ahead of its time,but also slightly obsolete.
(05:54):
And the reaction thatyou hear in the poem
would be taboo,politically incorrect,
worthy of cancelation,maybe, now.
So what's beautiful about RobertHass's "A Story About the Body"
is that it is not decadent,it's self-incriminating.
It recoils intoitself but also opens
(06:14):
out into this fieldof possibility
where you are forced to facemore about human interaction.
And he's describing anexperience a lot of us
know as writers, beingan artists colony,
having a kind ofinfatuation with a woman
who's there, a mild-mannered,light-hearted courtship.
And then, when it isabout to be consummated,
(06:37):
she tells him somethingthat causes the offer
to be rescinded.
And it's disorienting,because what you think is about
to be a tender lovepoem about the act
of falling in lovebecomes something about the
grotesque, the complexitiesof rejection and self-rejection.
So we start out withan entitled kind
(06:59):
of dude who's like,looking at he's picked,
his object of desire,for the duration
of an artist's residency.
We assume it's mutual,and then by the end,
we realize that there is a maskthat both parties are wearing.
And what's disorientingis we don't know who is to be
(07:20):
implicated more, himfor being shallow in
response to her bodyor what he perceives
as a potential defect,or her having concealed
that up until the precipiceof them making love.
And then you get her sort ofputting a curse on him, kind of,
(07:41):
at the end, and showingup with a bowl of
rose petals thathides dead bees.
Bees are interesting becausethey die, harming or injuring,
when they sting someone.
It's just a very beautiful,petite act of vengeance
that happens in the poem.
Instead of going on and ontheoretically about neurotically
(08:05):
wondering if he's agood guy, poet just
tells you flat out that hemessed up and did something
that he, both clearly regrets,and he won't have the chance
to redeem because it's one ofthose split-second decisions
that you can't ever take back.
I think it's beautiful, andI think it's unsentimental.
It doesn't ask for forgivenessor even repent, really.
(08:29):
And the actors in the poemdon't do either of those things
either.
So we're going to listen to hispoem, "A Story About the Body."
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
ROBERT HASS (08:41):
This is "A Story About the Body."
What time is it?
I didn't-- quarter of?
The young composer working thatsummer at an artist's colony,
(09:02):
had watched her for a week.
She was Japanese, apainter, almost 60.
And he thought hewas in love with her.
He loved her work.
And her work waslike the way she
moved her body, used herhands, looked at him directly
when she made amusedand considered answers
to his questions.
(09:24):
One night, walking back from aconcert, they came to her door.
And she turned tohim and said, I
think you would like to have me.
I would like that too,but I must tell you
that I've had adouble mastectomy.
And when he didn't understand,I've lost both my breasts.
The radiance that he had carriedaround in his belly and chest
(09:46):
cavity, like music,withered very quickly.
And he made himself look ather when he said, I'm sorry,
I don't think I could.
He walked back to his owncabin through the pines.
And in the morning he found asmall blue bowl on the porch
outside his house.
It looked to befull of rose petals,
(10:07):
but he found whenhe picked it up that the rose
petals were on top.
The rest of the bowl,she must have swept them
from the corners of herstudio, was full of dead bees.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
HARMONY HO (10:29):
Next, we're going to listen to the poet Ai,
reading in 1985 apoem called "Salome."
It's very rare thather work has any
of the trappings ofthe a sentimentalist.
And sometimes it can bebordering on almost too
intent at the knife's edge.
(10:49):
It could pull back a little bitbefore it puts its knife in,
but the knife is always there.
Often the knife, theweapon, the violent act,
or the contemplation of itwill show up in her work.
And then, often it's just sortof like gently hovering just
above the poem, that somethingmurderous might happen.
(11:13):
What's beautiful is thatthat is combined, usually
with the pastoral andthe really keen sense
of the physical andnatural worlds around
what end up being personasand characters that show up
in the poems.
One of the threads thatkind of runs through poems
(11:34):
that dabble in cruelty and veerfar, far away from nostalgia
or sentimentality is that itforces the telling of a story
because you can't really--if you're going to
tell a story well,vague gesturing and
abstraction or abstract ideasare less important to the
story than the emotion,the actual characters,
(11:58):
and events.
And so what youend up getting is
kind of short storiesin the poetic form
and that are complete--that tell a full story,
an image that's justkind of in full relief.
And that's what "Salome"is describing, presumably,
a daughter who is beingtaken by her stepfather
(12:22):
and a mother'sattempt at revenge,
either real or imagined, andopens up with this casual
ruminating on what might happen.
The head being likeflower petals atop water.
Again, we get thepetals of a flower.
This time, it's notroses as an image
for the concealment ofcruelty, which is interesting
(12:44):
because they're really flimsy.
There's just some gorgeousturns of language.
She has a line where she talksabout some somnolence and musk,
and it just rolls off thetongue very beautifully.
At the end, we getthe shadow of a knife,
and it's this almost like arite of passage, coming-of-age,
story in poetic form.
(13:06):
In three minutes, shemanages to give us
a glimpse into someone bothgrowing up and failing up,
basically.
Someone who goesfrom victim to seer
and who is, in the end, boththe mother and the daughter,
sort of inflicting a kind ofpunishing shame on herself
(13:27):
and then absolving it.
One thing that I alsolove about Ai's writing
is that they aren't justgratuitous persona poems,
just like it wouldbe fun to take on the persona of
a president or bea white man in the
body of a Black woman.
They are poems whereif there's an evildoer,
she also sees thehumanity of that person,
(13:48):
and it again speaks to howmuch humanity can be witnessed
without sentimental drivel.
So it's beautiful.
And listen to that now.
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
AI (14:05):
Let's see.
I didn't plan this.
Obviously, I'm justsort of getting
the feel of the audience.
I'll see how muchyou'll stand for.
Then, yeah, I'll just read.
Let's see.
I don't think I read thisone, this poem, this well,
but it's an interesting poem.
(14:27):
I don't even know whereit came from exactly.
It's not that much like mein a way, or like my work.
It was in thisissue of antacid--
anniversary issue,and I sent him one
that I thought was muchbetter to go in there.
And then I realized,actually, this
was because it was sodifferent from what I do.
(14:48):
This is called a "Salome."I scissor the stem
of the red carnationand set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way yourhead would if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart forthose afternoons when I was 15?
And so, like a bird of paradise,slaughtered for its feathers,
(15:09):
even my name suggestedwings, wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit-in my lap, you said.
I felt as if I'd flown there.
I was weightless.
You were 40 and married.
That she was mymother never mattered.
She was a door thatopened onto me.
The three of us blended intoa kind of somnolence and musk.
(15:31):
The musk of Sundays,sweat, and sweetness.
That dried plum and licoricetaste, always back of my tongue.
And your tongue against myteeth, then touching mine.
How many times I counted,but could never remember.
And when I thought we'd go onforever, that nothing could stop
(15:51):
us, as we fell endlesslyfrom consciousness,
orders came, war in the North.
Your sword, the gold epaulets,the uniform so brightly colored,
so unlike war, I thought.
And your horse, howyou rode out the gate.
Know how that horsedanced beneath you
toward the sound of cannon fire.
(16:13):
I could hear it somany leagues away.
I could see you fall, your facescarlet, the horse dancing on
without you.
And at the same moment, Mothersighed and turned clumsily
in the hammock.
The Madeira in the thin-stemmedglass spilled into the grass,
and I felt myself hardeningto a brandy-colored wood.
(16:35):
My skin, a thousandstrings drawn so taut
that when I walkedto the house, I
could hear music tumblinglike a waterfall of China
silk behind me.
I took your letterfrom my bodice.
Salomé, I heard yourvoice, little bird, fly.
But I did not.
I untied the lilacribbon at my breasts
(16:57):
and lay down on your bed.
After a while, I heardMother's footsteps,
watched her walk to the window.
I closed my eyes.
And when I opened them,the shadow of a sword
passed through mythroat, and Mother,
dressed like a grenadier, bentand kissed me on the lips.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
(17:25):
And then, the last poem from thePoetry Center Archives I wanted
to listen to on this theme isa recording of Allen Ginsberg
reading one of my favoritepoems in the American language,
an elegy, "Kaddish," for hismother, who he called Naomi.
This reading was in 1969.
(17:45):
So again, to put into context,the first two were in the 80s.
In 1969, the kind of visceral--I won't even call it cruelty
what it is in "Kaddish"is this kind of literal
accounting for searchingfor manhood in the eyes of
the boy, Allen, the boy,helping his mother through
psychological trauma.
(18:09):
She succumbs to iteventually, and that's
why we get this elegiacbook-length poem that catalogs,
really gruesomely in someplaces, her deterioration,
her hallucinations, herparanoias, her neediness
and clinginess.
His dutiful response tothis, although confused,
(18:32):
showing up, trying to help,trying to pull someone out
of the worlds in their mind,and someone who he deeply
respects and loves butalso maybe slightly
fears because everyonemay or may not
fear becoming the mother,especially if the mother is
considered neurotic or,in this case, insane,
(18:55):
lost, because of the refusalof sentimentality here.
Exactly what James Baldwindescribes in his quote,
cruelty is also refused.
So when we get descriptions ofthe mother's nude body and scars
from different surgeriesand giving birth,
it's not in the way thatyou hear in "A Story About
(19:18):
the Body," where thescars are punished.
The scars are loved becausethey aren't, the remark
is just a matter of fact.
These things are there.
She's hallucinatingat one point that he's
a lover in this excerpt,or that he wonders
if his mother is confusing himwith her father or her lover,
(19:40):
or isn't clear what'shappening in her mind,
and he doesn't pathologize it.
And I think sentimentality,because it kind of is
its own pathologicalthing, ends up
doing a lot of mythologizingthis-- it passes judgment
on what it's describing, becausein order to be sentimental,
something has tobe sad or giddy.
(20:02):
And when this verydifficult, restrained effort
to remain even-keeled ismet with actual tragedy,
it doesn't decrease ordiminish the tragedy.
What it ends up doing ismaking it clearer and realer
and more confrontational.
(20:22):
And I think of all--out of all of Ginsburg's
work, because his workwas kind of exploring hipness--
he's part of theBeat Generation.
And there was a sortof pressure to be hip
and to be a partof a folk revival.
But to do something thisancient and reverent,
this is the kind of poem thatwill last thousands of years
(20:45):
in the same regard,in my opinion.
It's not stylized.
It's a slave to no style.
It's simple, elegiac grieving inone of the most profound ways.
Also, I should say it'ssituated in Newark.
And so, Newark is, in Americanpoetry, like an important city.
William Carlos Williams, Baraka,Ginsberg, so many other poets,
(21:08):
Lauryn Hill, WhitneyHouston, there
is the-- maybe Americanarts in general,
Newark is an important city.
And we're in thatcity in this poem
because that's where Naomi,Allen Ginsberg's mother resides
and where he grew up.
And the sister is aneighbor or his aunt.
And we hear him say, here,these communist sisters lost
(21:33):
their revolution.
And it's just the cadenceof it, and the way it lands,
makes it a pivotal momentin this very long poem.
And listen to "Kaddish" now.
[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]
ALLEN GINSBE (21:51):
From the center of the narrative section,
toward the end of thenarrative section.
Or through Eleanor orthe workmen's circle,
where she worked,addressing envelopes,
she made out, went shoppingfor Campbell's tomato soup,
saved money Louis mailed her.
Later she found a boyfriendand he was a doctor.
(22:11):
Dr. Isaac worked forNational Maritime Union,
now Italian, bald, and pudgy olddoll, who was himself an orphan.
But they kicked himout, old cruelties.
Sloppier, sat around onbed or chair and corset,
dreaming to herself.
I'm hot.
I'm getting fat.
I used to have sucha beautiful figure
before I went to the hospital.
You should haveseen me in Woodbine.
(22:33):
This in a furnished roomaround the NMU Hall.
1943.
Looking at naked baby picturesin the magazine, baby powder
advertisements,strained Lamb carrots.
I will think nothingbut beautiful thoughts.
Revolving her head roundand round on her neck
in window light in summertime, in hypnotized,
in doven-dream recall, I touchhis cheek, I touch his cheek.
(22:56):
He touches my lipswith his hand.
I think beautiful thoughts.
The baby has beautiful hands.
Or no-shake ofher body, disgust.
Some sort ofBuchenwald, some insulin
passes through her head,a grimace nerve shudder
at involuntary, as Ishudder when I piss,
bad chemical in her cortex.
No, don't think of that.
He's a rat, Naomi.
(23:17):
and when we die, we become anonion, a cabbage, a carrot,
or a squash, a vegetable.
I come downtown fromColombia and agree.
She reads the Bible, thinksbeautiful thoughts all day.
Yesterday I saw God.
What did he look like?
Well, in the afternoonI climbed up a ladder.
He has a cheap cabinin the country,
like Monroe, New York, thechicken farms in the woods.
(23:38):
He was a lonely oldman with a white beard.
I cooked supper for him.
I made him a nice supper,lentil soup, vegetables,
bread and butter, miltz.
He sat down atthe table and ate.
He was sad.
I told him, look at allthese fightings and killings
down there.
What's the matter?
Why don't you put a stop to it?
I tried, he said.
That's all he could do.
He looked tired.
He's a bachelor so long.
(23:59):
And he liked lentil soup.
[LAUGHTER]Serving me meanwhile, a plate of
cold fish, chopped raw cabbagedripped with tap water, smelly
tomatoes, week-old health food,grated beets and carrots
with leaky juice, warm.
More and more disconsolate food.
I can't eat it fornausea sometimes.
The charity of her handsstinking of the Manhattan,
(24:19):
madness, desire to please me,cold undercooked fish, pale red
near the bones.
Her smells, and offnaked in the room,
so that I stare ahead, orturn a book, Ignoring her.
One time I thought shewas trying to make me come
lay her, flirting to herselfat the sink, laid back
on a huge bed thatfilled most of the room,
(24:39):
dress up around her hip.
Big splash of hair,scars of operation,
pancreas, belly wound,abortions, appendix,
stitching ofincisions, pulling down
in the fat likehideous thick zippers,
ragged long lipsbetween her legs.
What, even, smell of asshole?
I was cold, later revolteda little, not much.
(25:01):
Seemed perhaps agood idea to try,
know the monster ofthe beginning womb.
That way, would she care?
She needs a lover.
Yisborach, v'yistabach,v'yispoar, v'yisroman,
v'yisnasch, v'yishador,v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh
d'kudsho, b'rich hu.
And Louis, re-establishinghimself in Paterson,
grimy apartment in negrodistrict, living in dark rooms,
(25:24):
but found himselfa girl he later
married, falling in love again.
Though sere and shy, hurt with20 years of mad Naomi idealism.
Once I came home, after a longtime in New York, he's lonely.
Sitting in the bedroom,he had desk chair
turned round to faceme, weeps, tears
in red eyes under his glasses.
(25:45):
That we'd left him, Genegone strangely into the army,
she out on her ownin New York, almost
childish in her furnished room.
So Louis walkeddowntown to post office
to get mail, taught in highschool, stayed at poetry desk,
forlorn, ate grief at Bickford'sall these years are gone.
(26:06):
Eugene got out of the army,came home changed and lone,
cut off his nose inJewish operation.
For years. stopped girls onBroadway for cups of coffee
to get laid.
Went to NYU, seriousthere, to study law.
And Gene lived with her.
Ate naked fish cakes cheap,while she got crazier.
He got thin, or felt helpless.
Naomi, striking 1920,poses at the moon,
(26:29):
half-naked in the nextbed, bit his nails
and studied, wasthe weird nurse-son.
Next year, he moved toa room near Columbia,
thought she wanted tolive with her children.
Listen to your mother'splea, I beg you.
Louise, stillsending her checks.
I was in bughouse thatyear eight months.
My own visions unmentionedin this here lament.
(26:49):
But then went half mad,Hitler in her room,
she saw his mustachein the sink.
Afraid of Dr. Isaacnow, suspecting
he was in on the Newarkplot, went up the Bronx
to live near Eleanor'srheumatic heart.
And Uncle Max nevergot up before noon.
Though Naomi, at 6 AMwas listening to the radio
for spies, or searchingthe window sill,
(27:09):
for in the empty lot downstairs.
An old man creeps with his bag,stuffing packages of garbage
in his hanging black overcoat.
Max's sister, Edie work, 17years bookkeeper at Gimbels,
lived downstairs in anapartment house, divorced.
So Edie took in Naomion Rochambeau Avenue,
Woodlawn Cemetery across thestreet, vast dale of graves'
(27:31):
where Poe once.
Last up on Bronx subway, lot'sof communists in that area.
Who enrolled forpainting classes
at night in bronxAdult High School,
walked alone under Van CortlandtElevated line to class, paints
Naomiisms, humans sitting onthe grass in some Camp No-Worry
summers yore.
Saints with droopy facesand long, ill fitting pants
(27:53):
from hospital.
Brides in front of LowerEast Side with short, grooms.
lost El trains running overthe Babylonian apartment
rooftops in the Bronx.
Sad painting, but sheexpressed herself.
Her mandolin gone, all stringsbroke in her head, she tried.
Toward beauty or someold life message, But
(28:14):
started kicking Eleanor, andEleanor had heart trouble.
Came upstairs and askedher about spydom for hours,
Eleanor frazzled,Max away at office,
accounting for cigarstores till that night.
I am a great woman, atruly beautiful soul.
And because ofthat, they, Hitler.
Grandma Hearst, thecapitalist, Franco Daily News,
(28:35):
The '20s, Mussolini, The LivingDead, want to shut me up.
Buba's the the headof a spider network.
Kicking the girls,Edie and Eleanor.
Woke Edie at midnightto tell her she
was a spy, and Eleanor, a rat.
Edie worked all dayand couldn't take it.
She was organizing the union.
And Eleanor begandying upstairs in bed.
The relatives called me up.
She's getting worse.
(28:55):
I was the only one left.
Went on the subway with Eugeneto see her, ate stale fish.
My sister whispers in the radio,Louis must be in the apartment.
His mother tells himwhat to say, liars.
I cooked for my two children.
I played the mandolin.
(singing) Last nightthe Nightingale woke me
Last night when all was stillIt sang in the golden moonlight
(29:21):
From on the wintry hills.
She did.
I pushed her against the doorand shouted, don't kick Eleanor.
She stared at me,Contempt-- die-- disbelief
her sons are so naive, so dumb.
Eleanor is the worst spy.
She's taking orders.
No wires in the room,I'm yelling at her,
last ditch, Eugenelistening on the bed.
(29:43):
What can he do toescape that fatal Mama?
You've been away formany years already.
Grandma's too old to walk.
We're all alive atonce then, even me
and Jean and Naomi in onemythological cousinesque room.
I in Columbia jacket,she half undressed,
screaming at eachother in the forever.
I banging against her head,which saw radios, sticks.
(30:05):
Hitlers, the gamutof hallucinations,
for real, her own universe,no road that goes elsewhere,
to my own.
No America, not even a world,that you go as all men,
as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, allthe same, to their last doom.
Thunder, spirits, lightning.
I've seen yourgrave, oh, strange.
(30:26):
Naomi.
My own cracked cracked.
Shema Y'Israel.
I am Svul Avrum, you in death.
Your last night in thedarkness of the Bronx,
I phonecalled, throughhospital to secret police, that
came when you and Iwere alone, shrieking
at Eleanor in my ear, whobreathed hard in her own bed.
(30:49):
got thin.
Nor will forget, the doorknock at your fright of spies.
Law advancing on my honor.
Eternity entering the room,you running to the bathroom
undressed, hiding in protestfrom the last heroic fate,
staring at my eyes, betrayed.
The final cops ofmadness, rescuing me.
(31:09):
From your foot against thebroken heart of Eleanor.
Your voice at Edie,weary of Gimbels
coming home to broken radio.
And Louis needinga poor divorce,
he wants to get married soon.
Eugene dreaming,hiding on 125th Street,
suing Negroes for moneyon crud furniture,
defending Black girls.
Protests from the bathroomsaid you were sane.
(31:31):
Dressed in a cotton robe, yourshoes, then new, your purse
and newspaper clippings.
No, your honesty.
As vainly you made your lipsmore real with lipstick,
looking in the mirror tosee if the insanity was me,
or a car full of policeor Grandma spying at 78,
your vision.
Her Climbing over thewalls of the cemetery
(31:53):
with a politicalkidnapper's bag,
or what you saw on thewalls of the Bronx,
in pink nightgown atmidnight, staring out
the window on the empty lot.
Ah, Rochambeau Avenue,playground of phantoms.
Last apartment inthe Bronx for spies.
Last home for Eleanor or Naomi.
(32:15):
Here these communist sisterslost their revolution.
All right, put on yourclothes, Mrs. Let's go.
We have the wagon downstairs.
You want to come withher to the station?
The ride then,held Naomi's hand,
and held her head to my breast.
I'm taller, kissed her andsaid I did it for the best.
Eleanor sick, and Max witha heart condition, needs .
(32:36):
To me, Why did you do this?
Yes, Mrs., your son willhave to leave you in an hour.
The ambulance camein a few hours,
drove off at 4 AM to someBellevue in the night downtown
gone, to the hospital forever.
I saw her, led away.
She waved tears in her eyes.
(32:56):
Two years aftera trip to Mexico.
Bleak in the flatplane near Brentwood,
scrub brush and grass around theunused RR tracks to the crazy
house, new brick,20-story building,
lost on the vast lawns ofmad town on Long Island.
Huge cities of the moon.
(33:19):
Asylum spreads out giantwings above the path
to a mini black hole.
The door, I went in, smeltfunny, the halls again.
Up elevator, to a glass dooron a woman's ward, to Naomi.
Two nurses, buxomwhite, they let her out.
Naomi stared, and I gasped.
She'd had a stroke.
Two thin, shrunk on her bones.
(33:41):
Age come to Naomi, nowbroken into white hair,
loose dress on her skeleton,face sunk, old, withered,
cheek of crone.
One hand stiff, heaviness of40s and menopause reduced by one
heart stroke.
Lame now, wrinkles, a scaron her head, the lobotomy,
ruin, the hand dippingdownwards toward death.
(34:06):
Oh, Russian-facedwoman on the grass.
Your long black hairis crowned with flower.
The mandolin is on your knees.
Communist beauty, Sithere married in the summer
Among daisies, promisedhappiness at hand.
(34:27):
Holy mother, now yousmile on your love.
Your world is born anew.
Children run naked in thefields spotted with dandelions,
they eat in the plum treegrove at the end of the meadow
and find a cabin where thewhite-haired Negro teaches
the mystery of his rain barrel.
Blessed daughter,come to America.
(34:50):
I long to hear your voice again,remembering your mother's music
in the song ofthe natural front.
Oh, glorious muse thatbore me from the womb,
gave suck first mystic life,and taught me talk and music,
from whose pained headI first took vision.
Tortured and beatenin the skull, what
(35:11):
mad hallucinations of thedamned that drive me out
of my own skull to seeketernity till I find peace
for thee, oh, poetry,and for all humankind
call on the origin.
Death, which is themother of the universe.
Now wear your nakedness forever.
White flowers in your hair.
(35:32):
Your marriage sealedbehind the sky.
No revolution mightdestroy that maidenhood.
Oh, beautiful Garbo of my karma,all photographs from 1920.
In camp Nicht-Gedeigetget here unchanged, with all the
teachers from Newark,nor Eleanor began, nor
Max await his specter,nor Louis retire from
(35:52):
this High School.
[APPLAUSE][END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
HAR (36:12):
And then, I'm going to read a newer poem of my own.
And I think it fitswith this series.
I guess I'm pretty decadent.
I love language, andI love what it can do
and the way it feels onthe tongue and in the body
when certain sentencesare said aloud
and when they live on the page.
(36:34):
And so with that, sometimes itcan come an involuntary turn
into the sentimentality, orunintentional sentimentality,
that I'm sort of working myway past as I deepen and evolve
my voice on the pagealoud, et cetera.
And so, often whatthat looks like,
(36:56):
or what it looks like recently,is, as I intentionally
do that, I'm not allowedto rely on the same tricks
and the same gestures,and I'm forced to look at things
that I haven't wantedto look at or write about
and not hold back as much.
Because to tella true story, you
can't really hold back thedetails that you don't like.
(37:17):
And that requiresbeing unsentimental,
which is required maturinginto that and really
like facing what it'svaluable to communicate
about the human experienceversus what is beautiful
and what can be aestheticized,because not everything can be.
And the stories that can't beare often the most important
(37:38):
to tell.
So yeah, this is going tobe in my next manuscript
and also in a chapbookcoming out soon
called the Museumof Child Stars.
And a lot of the things I'mwriting are about the way
that the world handles children,especially famous ones,
but childhood in general, thelost art of it in America.
(38:00):
And this is called "Taleof the Sudden Sweetness
of the Dictator.""Tale of the Sudden
Sweetness of the Dictator."It blew up his heart,
fentanyl, pornography,all that love he harbored
for me as beatings, regime.
(38:22):
You're far too loyal to yourmothers to know yourselves,
he cries into the gag.
And I start cheering,reminiscing.
Mine spent my commercialmoney on cocaine and recording
equipment that becameher powder harbor,
told her parents she was stillteaching at the Lutheran School,
and stayed home, sleeping offhighs and spending Dad's music
(38:44):
money on drugs, a bright redfur that ended up in the pawn
shop, an infinity of liquor.
One week, it got so bad, wetook some cash from her purse
while she was passedout for the afternoon,
walked to the grocerystore, got what we could,
paid like hookers orbuskers do after work,
(39:04):
and push the cart home.
Me, 10, and my sister, 5,too invaded with adrenaline
to be humiliated.
That's a lie.
Try a Little Tendernessplayed from a car window,
and Madonna's Like aVirgin to interrupt
our ritualized disorientationof disgrace and stucco.
I can still hear thesound of the cart,
(39:25):
stiff wheels on the pavement,metal bar just under my chin.
I try to forgive history.
Her boyfriend was jackingoff in the living room
when we got back.
Porn on the 24-inchToshiba television,
the same brand I'd done thecommercial for with kids who
became famous child actors,already big in Japan.
(39:48):
Cereal for dinner, wedidn't even murder him.
I see why some peopleresent the truth
and fantasize aboutcrimes we don't commit.
Some spend all their livesmenaced by guilt and shame
for never speakingof days like this.
You're nobody tillsomebody destroys you.
(40:13):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWA (40:20):
You've been listening to Harmony Holiday.
And this is Poetry Centered.
Harmony, thank you againfor following this path
through the Voca Archive.
Listeners, thank youso much for joining us.
As always, we are so grateful.
Two weeks from now, joinus again for a new episode
hosted by Samuel Ace, withmore episodes to follow.
(40:42):
You're also invitedto check out Voca
to find your ownfavorite poems and poets.
We have recordings from1963 through this past May.
Thanks again for joining us.
Until next time.
Poetry Centered is a project ofthe University of Arizona Poetry
Center, home to a world-classlibrary collection of more than
(41:05):
80,000 items related tocontemporary poetry in English
and English translation.
Located on the campus of theUniversity of Arizona in Tucson.
The Poetry Centerlibrary and buildings
are housed on the Indigenoushomelands of the Tohono O'odham
and Pascua Yaqui.
Poetry Centered is the workof Aria Pahari, that's me,
(41:28):
and Julie Swarstad Johnson.
Explore Voca, The PoetryCenter's audiovisual archive
online at voca.arizona.edu.
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