HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS & DEVIATIONS What great fun to read A. Robert Lee’s new book! Since his Tokyo Commute (2001), I’ve followed with joy the off-course adventures and meanderings in the books of this world-traveler and literary critic-author. The wry humor, quick insight, and tremendous knowledge mark him as a top-quality creative writer. This time, more than ever, he’s intensely into what words can do. With daring and speed, he creates crystal-clear vignettes, bringing into life scenes of his childhood or travels, both the dangerous moments and happy ones, with his unmistakable energetic rhythm. — Shoko Miura, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology
Readers shouldn’t worry. In this new collection, Off Course: Roundabouts & Deviations, A. Robert Lee is very much on course. Wonderful floating worlds in a variety of voices. Eyes on and yet at same time well beyond the road. — Andrew Hook, The University of Glasgow
Starting with the striking cover illustration, A. Robert Lee’s Off Course: Roundabouts & Deviations offers good cause for the reader to leave the straight and narrow for the surprising linguistic adventures of his world. His collection of sketches in poetry and prose offers oblique glances at language, life, and cultural quiddities that delight with laughter and pensiveness. — Rex Burns, author of The Alvarez Journal and other Mysteries
Often witty, usually wry, and always wise, A. Robert Lee’s poems and vignettes of word magic prove that a wormhole view is in fact the widest lens. — Cathy Covell Waegner, University of Siegen, Germany
A. RobertLee A Robert Lee
NEW YORK www.2leafpress.org
P.O. Box 4378 Grand Central Station New York, New York 10163-4378 editor@2leafpress.org www.2leafpress.org 2LEAF PRESS is an imprint of the Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc. (IAAS), a NY-based nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes multicultural literature and literacy. www.theiaas.org Copyright Š 2016 by A. Robert Lee Cover art, book design and layout: Gabrielle David Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941266 ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-40-7 (Paperback) ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-41-4 (eBook) 10
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Published in the United States of America First Edition | First Printing
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For Justice Gary Strankman
Contents
PREFACE .............................................................................. V INTRODUCTION .................................................................... 1 Getting In Touch With Yourself ........................................ 3 Grasping the Nettle ........................................................ 5 Colour Schemes ............................................................. 9 Getting It Wrong .......................................................... 11 The Teeth Lecture ........................................................ 13 The Curse of Music? ..................................................... 15 Ruling Nothing In Or Out............................................... 16 My Night at the Archbishop’s ........................................ 17 Lost in Hyphenation ..................................................... 19 Back to Front............................................................... 21 Required ..................................................................... 23 Almost Met ................................................................. 25 The Dentist’s Foot ........................................................ 27 Waving ....................................................................... 29 The Whole Kit And Caboodle ......................................... 31 Duty Free .................................................................... 33 Ad Sprache ................................................................. 35
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Porcine Love ............................................................... 37 Cockney Scholarship .................................................... 41 Planet of the Sinuses .................................................... 43 Mission Control ............................................................ 45 Blowfish City Blues ...................................................... 47 French Chicago ........................................................... 49 Please Leave The Building............................................. 51 Overheard ................................................................... 53 Doing George Orwell ..................................................... 55 Quite a Stretch ............................................................ 57 Eating Danish .............................................................. 59 We Have Lift-Off .......................................................... 60 The Turn Of The Screw ................................................. 62 The Bladder: A Position Paper........................................ 63 Oranges Are The Only Fruit ........................................... 65 Leaving a Tip ............................................................... 67 Noise In The Night ....................................................... 69 You Animal.................................................................. 71 Dog Latin .................................................................... 73 Stable Floating ............................................................ 75 The Great Rhode Island Worm War................................. 77 Metro Station: Poetries of Name .................................... 79 Postage and Handling ................................................... 81 Spanish Lunch ............................................................. 83 Product Placement ....................................................... 85 Emergency Codes ......................................................... 87 Small Change .............................................................. 89 The Eel File ................................................................. 90 Knock at the Door ........................................................ 97 Weathers .................................................................... 98 Slipping Into Something Comfortable ............................ 100 Chicken Delight ........................................................ 101 Ice Water Across the Borders ....................................... 104
Express Delivery ........................................................ 107 Cellophane ................................................................ 109 Night Shift: A Transatlantic Quartet .............................. 110 Reverse Loops ........................................................... 114 En Route................................................................... 115 ABOUT THE POET ............................................................. 119 OTHER BOOKS BY 2LEAF PRESS .................................... 121
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P R E FA C E
Too much of a good thing would be wonderful. — Mae West
INTRODUCTION I hate all definitions. — Doris Lessing
OFF COURSE. Certain lives give the impression of having been more or less on course from the outset. The unblemished record. Success to success. The good war. The straight or almost straight line. But other lives, my own assuredly among them, look altogether more slant, circuitous. By chance or otherwise given to roundabouts and deviations. These compositions seek to give recognition. In consequence they are also pitched to challenge idioms of the one or another agreed version. Banners, I hope, to unfix the long-term groove or saying. Diagonals. Obliquities. Styles of contra-flow. Versification and prose. Monologue and dialogue. Vignette and riff. OFF COURSE. As likely as true a direction, or language, as quite any. Some might say of course.# It seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in. — Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Getting In Touch With Yourself Touch, it’s a fair old item. You get in touch. You lose touch. You touch wood. You touch the ground. Commands give it play. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch the computer. Intimacies are involved. The feel of her touch. Our hearts touched. The arts are full of it. The painter’s finishing touch. The touch of musical genius. Sport has its share. He’s simply out of touch. She’s in good touch. There are prohibitions. He’s not allowed to touch another drink. She can’t touch the inheritance. Cuisine can feature. A touch of ground pepper. Lightly touched with oregano. Sex of course. He tried to touch her up. Just stop touching yourself. Medicine has its say. A touch of flu. Try not to touch the bandage.
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Gymnastics can enter the fray. Touch your toes. The high jumper barely touched the bar. What about voice? The touch of irony. Spoken with a light touch. And then the therapist. Get in touch with your feelings. Get in touch with yourself. As if you had a choice.
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Grasping the Nettle HAVE YOU EVER MET ANYONE WHO DID? I mean literally. And even if you grasped the thing wouldn’t you un-grasp it pretty damned quick? Not necessarily say those in the know. If you grasp it lightly you get all manner of stings and then bumps. Little hairs. Toxins. You then have to find a handy dock leaf as antidote. On the other hand if you get hold of the nettle firmly it flattens the hairs and you get home sting-free. Skinclear. That’s something you can learn from botany books. Also that your nettle vaunts the name urtica dioica. Latin. Or ought to be even if it weren’t. Must have been a mouthful, though, for those Romans. Mothers telling their would-be Caesars not to get their mitts on the nasty urtica. Fond grandfathers out for a ramble with the little ones warning not to play with wayside plants. Not that any of them would have cared a fig had it been their Thracian or Carthaginian slave. You don’t hear much about nettles in Julius Caesar or Livy. Not even Tacitus, who wrote lots of Annals. It seems pretty clear that grasping nettles, even avoiding them, hasn’t been pivotal to the Grandeur that was Rome. Not to mention the Glory that was Greece. At least Edgar Poe, who was responsible for so lauding Rome and Greece as well as cracked mansions and pendulums, doesn’t give them a billing. Which brings me to two of my own nettle close-encounters. Grasping them that is. One such harks back to when, as I was heading into my thirties, I gave up smoking. After thinking I’d proved my adolescent manhood by taking early to the weed it was well over a decade before hacker’s cough and nicotine digits pointed to a change of regime. So like a shriven pilgrim and counting by the hour of nonlighting-up I started on the road to pulmonary redemption. Tough enough. But then came a spot of Damascus, my own reversal of Tobacco Road. In those days I would frequently find myself heading to London, an 80-minute journey give or take. You boarded old time slam door carriages. One tiny carriage, sealed from all the others, was for nonsmokers. In I got, my own newfound monk’s cell. The train lurched off duty bound to stop at two or three branch stations before it gathered speed and headed to the metropolis. At one of these a lady of middle years, a tweeded Miss Marple, joined me. I was, of course, in serious withdrawal mode. Trying not to think, even remember, what it was
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to inhale smoke. She and I exchanged perfunctories, weather, train on time and like. But then, like some rail-track Medusa, and as if to test my astonished senses, she pulled out a cigarette packet, fiddled in her bag for a lighter, and was on the edge of heading into ash and smoke-ring. My cry of protest, maybe near despair, but certainly aroused tobacco need, startled the life out of her. Just for a moment she seemed to be about to pull the emergency chord. A maniac on the loose. Sweating, a would-be sprinter to the non-smoking finish line, I explained that I was in rehab, getting clean. Never mind that she was breaking the rules. At an earlier time I would have happily, gloriously, joined her in the transgression. Whether she put away her cigarette from inward terror or from Florence Nightingale sympathy I shall never know. But I remember when we got to the London platform she headed off at some considerable lick. With just the one backward glance. To tell friend or family of this co-passenger drama. For my own part what persists is all that is meant by nettle nemesis. Another grasping concerns ears. Or to be more precise ear wax. It didn’t take auricular genius to suss out that sounds were getting muffled, voices less than distinct. Blessedly my medical record showed no history of deafness. Inattention many a time. Drifting off. But no lack of actual hearing. It was then that the phrase earwax entered, well, my hearing. Somewhere deep inside both ear appurtenances lay a minor planet of the stuff. Time to grasp this nettle. A clean-up, in and out removal. By the time I’d got myself to a nearby clinic the term cerumen was on the lips. Medical-posh for what looked suspiciously like brown plasticine. Regulation maintenance as it first seemed. But then it began to dawn what was to be entailed. Inquisition metal instruments would journey into your inner reaches. It meant taking more than a readying few turns in the park, a word with friends, some consultations of the web and the home medical dictionary. Would it hurt? How to quell fears that this was something akin to Claudius poisoning Hamlet’s father? One or two people brushed it off with winning insouciance. Nothing to it. Few minutes and you’ll be hearing like a porpoise. Others spoke as though we were in Frankenstein territory. Oils, conic instruments, magnifying glasses, pointed miniature harpoons and rakes. And words I thought merely physiological took on terror-cell overtones. Canal, ossicle, cochlea, tymphanic membrane. Courage to the sticking place came into mind, no inapt borrowing from the Bard as I headed for the clinic. Within a trice it was
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cubicle, the chair itself, head to one side, and an inspection. Yes, said the doctor, a build-up. In he went with miniature fishing pole. Metal near your brain, steel to the sidewalls of your skull. The ferreting around felt like some monumentally dangerous scratch. At one point the hook touched my ear drum and I let out a cry worthy of Beowulf. Even so on we persisted. Captain Hook and The English Patient. And, up and out came sifted gold dust, scraped peelings. Oily, brown-yellow, almost extra-planetary blancmange. Nerves jangled throughout. Sweat came to brow, armpit, each and every body terrain. But the excavation complete I heard as one endowed with new powers. An auditory fog lifted. A dull pressure sent on its way. Another nettle grasped. Even if also chair arms held on to for dear life, knuckles for sale.#
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Colour Schemes I applied streaks and blobs of colour onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could. — Wassily Kandinsky
Remind yourself from the painters. Botticelli flesh tints. Hiroshige woodblock scenes. Goya’s baroque of light and shade. Sea and sky horizon in Turner. Matisse Red Room. Concerts of blue from Chagall. Peopled multicolour in Rivera murals. Mondrian compositional grid. O’Keeffe landscapes of sierra, cloud and flora. The field chromatics of Rothko. Appiah Ntiaw Ghana figures. and Kandinsky polychrome abstracts. Each a variegation. Visual languages of sight and dare. Hues, prisms, fields. Imagination’s sight festival. Envisaged reality. Then think of starched or frozen phrase. Regular shelf speech. White as driven snow. Black hearted. Red Indians. Yellow Peril. Brown skinned. Sallow complexion. Pink for a girl. Turning purple. A. Robert Lee
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Green with envy. Grey panthers. Invention and stock. Flair and matte. Infinite variety. Stale custom. Colour given and taken.
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Getting It Wrong Elementary School sums. Do it again said the teacher. Latin, which came later. Misconstrued ablative absolutes. History’s dates could go awry. Balkan unification. Occasional spellings would sink you. Cholesterol. Haemorrhage. Onomatopoeia. Geography slips. Uruguay next to the Atlantic? And writer names. Ryu for Haruki Murakami. Then the waterfalls of cliché. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Better learn right from wrong. You’ve said the wrong thing. It’s the wrong way to go about things. Wrong person for the job. He done her wrong wins exemption. Blues grammar. There’s each spectacular mis-calculation. The Earth as centre before Copernicus. Columbus’s India. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Burton’s claim to the source of the Nile. Custer at Little Big Horn. Declaring the Titanic unsinkable. Raj dismissal of Gandhi as naked fakir. Mao Great Leap Forward. Nuclear safety at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Drunken captaincy aboard the Exxon-Valdez.
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And killing wrongs. Herod and the Innocents. Vlad Draculesti’s impalings. Konzentrationslager, Armenia, Cambodia. The Emanuel Balestrero behind Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. Raoul Wallenberg Soviet disappearance. Rillington Place’s Timothy Evans. Dunblane and Sandy Hook. Literature’s wronged are ever present. Sophoclean Oedipus. Shakespeare’s Desdemona and Ophelia. Hawthorne’s Hester. Kafka’s Gregor. Morrison’s Beloved. Martel’s Pi. Science’s errors make a litany. Alchemy. Pre-Newton gravity. Early germ un-danger. Thalidomide. Piltdown Man . Y2K. Your own wrongs accuse. The mistaken life decision. The misjudgement of others. The misperception of the case. The break-up responsibility. The unnecessary comment. Miscue. Error. Damage. Frailty. Flaw. In each a human appropriateness. Getting it wrong.
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The Teeth Lecture THE OCCASION WAS HIGH-ACADEMIC. A banked lecture hall. Any number of university worthies filtering into front seats each with its printed sign of Reserved. Murmurs of anticipation and shuffle from the gathering audience. An evening occasion, one for the calendar. To be followed by dinner and drinks and no little after-talk with the Distinguished Speaker. We were set. Antennae tuned. Intellectual hormones at the ready. The subject was literary, the poet Coleridge. First came the presiding dean’s introduction. He, we, were honoured to welcome the speaker in this prestigious series sponsored by a long-ago millionaire alumnus. In due course there would be a published version, suitably embossed and under the insignia of the university press. Our speaker had won plaudits across country and continent. A first book that had made waves. The giver of various series of lectures. Honorary degrees from Ancient Universities and a raft of modern ones. And not least, the begetter of several albeit slim volumes of poetry. The latter were to be thought gems of density and filament. Little wonder, we were further told, that a full professorship came the speaker’s way in his early 30s. There were knowing allusions to some youthful radical politics, his latter-day taste for cooking, and even the various academic-as-unlikelystar appearances on TV. The dean recalled his own first hearing of the speaker, a mere academic stripling mired in library archive. Was not the speaker fresh air, lightning, a banner for the new? The University, thus, was utterly privileged to be able to host the occasion. With which he moved on to a further warmest welcome, took his seat, and led the all hands on deck applause. A touch unsteadily, it has to said, the speaker rose and headed to the lectern which he grasped firmly with both hands. “My subject,” he said, “is Coleridge.” A name he pronounced with a lisp, a distinctly upper class trill. His right hand went to the sheaf of notes before him, the left maintaining its grip on the lectern. “Coleridge, that is, author of ‘The Ancient Mariner.’” And we were off. Had not the poet been traduced by those who claimed him for a certain camp? Had he not been given a historical cachet far from anything he actually believed or wrote? To the rapt audience this was the very stuff of revisionism, a kick against the pricks, a change of, er, paradigm. You could see from
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the speaker’s sway that he was warming to the subject. He might even have been addressing some long ago listener, a ghost from Coleridge’s own time, indeed the poet himself. Now came the centrepiece, the clinching argument. For too long we had misconstrued “The Ancient Mariner.” Not least of why was conspiracy, the ideological highjack of the poem. This had denatured Coleridge, sold the movement we call The English Romantic as false goods. His lips made ready to once more dwell on the word Mariner, lisp and all. It was then, like a veritable rainstorm, that the Heavens opened. Or opened in the form of a whole hailstorm of teeth spraying every which way from his mouth. Mini-boulders. Meteorites. Nashers each and all self-combusting. Across lectern. Across floor. Even reaching the front row listeners. Dental surrealism. The revolutionary liberation of false teeth. Coleridge himself, or at least his poem, scattered and grounded. With a rare turn of mind, not to say foot, the dean was on his feet, marshalling sundry graduate students to go into collection mode. This tooth, that broken bridge, this bit of wiring. And never mind the spittle. The speaker himself remained mouth-gapped. Capable only of a kind of labial or gum talk. The most intelligent man in the world dragged by chance, and the various sherries he had imbibed ahead of the lecture, into baby land. The audience rallied. Applause. Sympathy. A discomforting to be understood, assuaged. But towards the back a child burst out of laughing, brought to the lecture by a mother obviously let down by or at any rate without her own baby-care. Coleridge and scholar. Coleridge and teeth. Coleridge and child. It was enough to cause the gods of poetry, not to say dentistry, to look on wryly. #
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The Curse of Music? The magic of forbidden words. First-time expletive. Borrowed cursing. A lot of it began with expressions ending in off. The child aping the angered adult. Off took on its own lexical standing. Preceded by fuck, bugger, piss. To mouth these things was to dare all. You risked if not Heaven then teacher. Off got bolder with time. You said it to school or street antagonist. There were milder versions of course. Substitutions like Get Lost. But often enough it came back to four letter fare. Serious swear-time. Occasionally you got overheard by the grown-up. Shock, the reprimand of don’t you dare speak like that. But you did of course speak like that, magical incantation. Apings of the adult other world, braggadocio. But always I remember the small kid. No doubt we were bullying him. His dispatch of all of us to eternal damnation. Why don’t you Rachmaninoff. And the fire-back from our one music literate. Why don’t you Rimsky Korsakov.
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Ruling Nothing In Or Out The Chair of the Committee speaks. It is only a preliminary report. Wait for the full version. The Secretary of State speaks. Negotiations are under way. Events must be allowed to play out. The Consultant Surgeon speaks. The operation took place this morning. We will see if things heal or not. The Head of Missing Persons speaks. The last time she was seen was Sunday. Anyone with information should come forward. The cleric speaks. The things of this world will pass. Keep your focus upon Heaven and Hell. The detective speaks. It is a murder, a robbery. All options remain open. The neighbour speaks. We need to talk. It’s about the fence. The newsreader speaks. Now for the other news. Behind the headlines. The voice coach speaks. Pitch higher then lower. Get ready to project. The child speaks. I have nothing to do. Get ready for life.
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My Night at the Archbishop’s BLAME THE REFORMATION. In fact go further back and blame the early Middle Ages. I mean you’ve only got to look across the River Thames to its south bank and you know it’s history time in spades. A sight, an edifice, a merest eight centuries in being. I speak of Lambeth Palace. Anglicanism’s HQ. London base for a whole cathedral-line of archbishops, each under the mitre of Canterbury. You have no problem thinking this is the past in the present. Lollard’s Tower. Tudor gatehouse. Halls and courtyard. A library with church and missionary archives to bring salt torrents of joy to the scholar’s eye. A crypt. Even a massive fig tree. Pausing for a moment you would not be hard pressed to summon Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Cromwell’s pillage, or the evolving place of the Church of England in the country’s cultural life. Nor would it take much to have you remembering those school or BBC Sunday hymns which signalled the very DNA of Englishness. And always the Queen as regal head, defender of the faith. Bette Midler’s whitest woman in the world. Pretty important turf overall. I was on one of ever more infrequent visits to the English capital from my academic base in Japan. An old friend, long practised in the arts of administration, had recently secured an appointment at Lambeth. With the job came a small apartment in one of the towers – to get to which you laboured up stairs roughly the equivalent of those in the Empire State Building. She had also arranged that I might stay over in one of the visitor bedrooms. A room, it began to dawn on me, which had heard the gentle or maybe not so gentle snore of a Desmond Tutu, not to mention other Episcopalian notables. You could get there via a down and then up-again circuitous route, this or that passageway. But the quicker route was to exit a window in my friend’s apartment, tread gently across the roof, and then descend via an attic door on to the landing which housed the bedroom. So, after an evening in which my host and other friends did some serious injury to le vin rouge, it was Edmund Hillary time, metropolitan mountaineering. Up one clambered. Unsteady but perfectly aware that this was going to require more than touch of Andean goat finesse. So hand clutching what may have been a tile-edge or some rooftop buttress, it was time for the Great Bedroom Trek. But, as things got launched, a pause was in order. To be sure it had in part to do with security of
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footing, the avoidance of any sudden start or surge of dizziness. After all wasn’t this the Palace in cat burglar mode, Pink Panther legwork? But it was also a pause for quite another reason. For there you were, atop one of London’s iconic buildings, atop history as it were. The gaze, inevitably, went across the river. There, stately, vintage, multiwindowed, was Parliament. Westminster in electrically illuminated baroque. The rays ran into the river, a shimmer of simulation. They, in turn, played against night-time barge, a midnight pleasure boat, and sundry craft large and small each with lantern and spotlight. It may have been the Shiraz (or Chablis). It may have been the Everest syndrome. It may have been a literary education. But, for a moment, space edged into time. This was the Thames as lit corridor, cinema reel, the night’s wormhole. What could you not think of? The opening of Bleak House, a Turner or Monet river painting, T.S. Eliot reading in Thames Film? Could you not fantasize Julius Caesar setting up camp, Chaucer launching his Canterbury pilgrims, Spenser penning his “Sweet Thames”? All of it in association, in memory, as you stood pinioned to the Palace roof. One of those wholly special moments. Real and yet not a little oneiric. Sober and just less than sober. And with a night’s slumber shortly to follow under clerical bedclothes. Not bad for one of little, actually no, faith. #
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Lost in Hyphenation Gotta dash. Running behind. Catch up later. It’ll be a dash. You have said it. I have said it. If only dash were that simple. Off like a shot. Things to do. Let me not linger. Bye. Because there’s that other dash. Almost throwaway. Mini-line. Scriptural. Page or computer. You even have dash mathematics. Algebra. Computerese. The minus sign. Subtract this, that. A double-dash and you’ve got Pi equals 3.14. Plus numeric pads, compose keys. But it’s punctuation that gets you addled. Don’t confuse the dash with the hyphen. So thunder the style sheets. Learn about word spaces. Get dash-savvy. Easy to say. Not least when writing by hand it looks the same. Not least faced with en-dash and em-dash. Not easy when parentheses enter the sentence. Then there’s the swung dash, a kind of extended jiggle.
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And those life hyphenations and dashes? He equals she (or another he). She equals he (or another she). You minus, or linked to, yours. Two – or more – un-joined or con-joined.
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Back to Front Common enough sight. The reverse baseball cap. The wrong way round sweater. Common enough expression. That’s the opposite of my argument. My feeling is quite to the contrary. Common enough design feature. The main door at the rear. The Janus mask. Common enough climate reversal. Finland’s summer dark. Central Africa’s hailstones. Common enough transport. The train’s backwards shunt. The ferry’s about-face manoeuvre. Common enough datelines. Which century for the birth of the Buddha? Is Christmas December 25 or January 6? Common enough misperception. Monet not Manet. That’s the Rhine not the Rhone. Common enough inverse punch-lines. Frankly my damn I don’t give a dear. I like the jib of his cut. Common enough backs-to-front. You’re beginning with your conclusions. You’re at the start not the finish.
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ABOUT THE POET
A. ROBERT LEE was a professor in the English department at Nihon University from 1997-2011. British-born, he previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His creative work includes Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011), and the verse collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012), Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013), and Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013). Among his academic publications are Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004, and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Currently he lives in Murcia, Spain.# A. Robert Lee
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