Expect Delays

Bill Berkson

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781566893732
• eBook ISBN: 9781566893855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Praise for Bill Berkson:

"A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous."— Publishers Weekly

Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed.

Dress Trope

Critics should wear
white jackets like
lab technicians;
curators, zoo
keepers' caps;
and art historians,
lead aprons
to protect them from
impending
radiant fact.

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

SONGS FOR BANDS

Not an Exit

N.D.

Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. — Walter Mitty

“When You Go Rowing with a Girl, She Looks Good There”

Consequences, delusion, ire, the normal pieties, pity, gross neglect, and heavy-handed interpretation; not to mention intentional cruelty, flirts, no less, carpools, unction, severe chest pains, abecedarian stress, and the inklings that derive from staring long and hard at, starling, sanderling, piper, spit, cheap chiseler, adenoid arroyo, pockety-pock of soon-obscene amends (consequences then, too) brought gloaming—indemnify the purple crater while optimizing into frameless wet honorific where on City Earth. Call it.

December 1

Gloom and misery everywhere. Stormy weather.

Repairs

21st-Century Facts: Darkness, ignorance, absence of manners, nuance, tact. Something the magazine philosophers—aka “public intellectuals”—won’t ponder. What a crock of shit that category has become: Begin with a perfectly diligent philosophy professor whose lectures have some spark, are compiled for his advancement in books that become the new “turn” in scholastic thinking; next he is picked up by the art magazines as a name to parade on glossy cover stock. Accordingly, the stock goes down: M. Le Prof. is flattered beyond reason (French reason having spun its wheels since at latest the 1840s), flatters himself that he can quip his way into Theory Heaven, ends up speechifying at Chelsea dinners. It’s like those old fight movies with John Garfield, boy violinist waylaid by the Mob, but there’s no Lili Palmer to set the poor boy straight. Meanwhile, an aura of sanctity grows. Is M. Rancière copyedited the same as X, Y, Z? Or, why quote Agamben when John Dewey the Third already had that thought while stirring his froth at Papaya King some forty years prior?

Not Applicable

He is living proof that narcissism is an incurable disease.

Tell

I don’t want to tell of something in the way of dictating a point of view, but to tell (like beads) the words—phrases you can turn here or there toward what might want to be said.

Feelings drawn from words: expressivity in reverse.

Extreme Reverie

An afterimage of my cousin Deborah Sudran at Kenneth Koch’s and my reading at St. Marks—and was my mother there? If so how was she—nice? not nice?—with Deborah, my father’s niece? I slip slowly into my mother’s mind, tangle there so much that panic ensues—I’m inside another person’s consciousness! What if I never returned? The strong sense that this is what it is to “go” mad.

March 5

Monday weather forecast, front page of today’s New York Times, reads: “Dull with possibility of snow in the High Sierras.”

Dyslexia (a simulcast with Clark Coolidge): “Invoid the affect.”

Doctor specializing in treating US Marines’ post-Iraq trauma conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center, DC, is known as The Wizard.

Ancient section of Baghdad, site of book market & intellectuals’/poets’ hangouts bombed to ruin. On NPR, an Iraqi poet announces his mission and that of his peers, “to keep the language from going insane.”

The world helps the artist by revealing mystic truths.

June 2

Walking down a path in Grasmere with Tom Pickard behind the church where the Wordsworths are buried, suddenly I hiss thru teeth sharply, ouch, ’twas a nettle brushed by right little finger—and Tom instantly dives to the right of the path, scoops up a handful of green leaves—dock—crumples and hands them to me with a gesture that says, “Rub.” The pain subsides almost immediately, but for the slight discomfort of a sticker embedded near the top joint. Susan Coolidge says, “Wherever something poisonous is, the antidote usually grows nearby.”

All

All, all, everything— and one—variations on a theme.

November 23

I said to students in grad seminar last Wednesday: “Now I understand the great chasm that separates you from me. I belong to the last generation with immediate (grandparent) Victorian forebears. That world gone after WWI but lingering in speech, manners, habits for another fifty-plus years. I walk uphill, a woman comes down the street, ‘Good morning!’ and I tip my cap. I can tip my cap, and you can’t, not unself-consciously anyway!”

Try to Remember

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one,

Except for February

[whose days are funny, all screwed up].

Meaning

“Meaning is a peculiar thing in poetry—as peculiar as meaning in politics or loving. In writing poetry a poet can hardly say that he knows what he means. In writing he is more intimately concerned with holding ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• LADY AIR
• 16 ACROSTICS IN LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
• SONGS FOR BANDS
• SISTER CADENCE
• Notes on Some of the Poems
• Acknowledgments
• Funder Acknowledgments
• About the Author