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While the Steiny Road Poet has gone to New Hampshire to work on a second opera libretto, she offers her dedicated readers this poem in the voice of fiction writer and composer Paul Bowles. Bowles had a good ear for poetry and helped the Steiny Road Poet with her poems about Gertrude Stein. The SRP recommends reading Next to Nothing the poems of Paul Bowles. She thinks his poems are quite powerful.
STORIES: ON THE NATURE OF POETRY
If I tell you
Gertrude Stein wrote to my mother
to say Rena's son Freddy — that's what the great
Buddha called me — was a self-indulgent savage
who augured the end of civilization
and Mother cheerfully sent "poor old
Sophie and Alice B. Luckless"
family recipes...
If I tell you
the Mama of Dada dressed me
in lederhosen so her great white
poodle Basket, wet from his daily
sulphur bath — the French countryside
vermin otherwise crawling into the dog's
curls to suck his skin red — could chase
me and scrape his sharp long nails
into my bare legs while his master
shouted from the second story
window, "Faster, Freddy, faster..."
If I tell you
Transition — a Paris magazine
that published Ezra Pound — printed
"Spire Song" by Paul Frederick Bowles…
I was only sixteen. When I was twenty,
the iconic Miss Stein said, "Freddy,
you don't write great poetry." I believed
her and left the City of Light
for the filth of Tangier.
If I tell you I traded the truth
of poetry for the invention
of prose. If I tell you I lived
loving a wife who filled
my dry pen while hers
spurted blood
like a shotgun wound.
If I tell you my stories,
greater than the lives
of people I knew…
if I tell you my stories,
how many times
would you say I lied?
First published on Ars Poetica at
www.logolalia.com/arspoetica/archives/cat_alenier_karren.html
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