DEAR FAILURES
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Dear Failures TREY SAGER
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DEAR LUMBERJACK I wrote your suicide note from the perspective of a tree. In that classic of defenses, it seemed like a good idea at the time. One is the thing one destroys, or wants to destroy. Everyone is everything is nothingness, so say my Buddhist friends. I think the idea was too obtuse for me to handle. I mean, is the tree your consciousness? Your subconsciousness? Your Thanatos? Your soul? Does the tree represent our catastrophic strangulation of Earth? I don’t know the answers to these questions. Sophisticated writers say they are trying to provoke questions, not provide answers, but I don’t feel very sophisticated. I wrote another story disguised as a suicide note when I was fifteen or sixteen, for an imaginary teenager named Sal. After a few days I decided my idea was completely generic, so I burned the story in our wood stove, fearing reproach and more mandatory therapy if my mom found and read it. I knew an actual boy named Sal whose mother once walked around the neighborhood carrying a tray of shark meat, offering little bites to everyone, including me and my mom. I think Sal is dead—the real Sal—but I don’t know if that’s true. In my therapist’s office she has a framed Rothko print in the waiting room. I told her Rothko killed himself with scissors
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and that she should probably take it down. She asked me how the painting made me feel. I said, “I don’t feel like anything. I don’t know, maybe I feel like a tree.”
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DEAR ASHKENAZI PARATROOPER After describing you in public as a schizophrenic drunk, I realized you are not a schizophrenic drunk— you’re Jewish, from northern Europe, and, frankly, I don’t know much more than that. When I encounter unknown words I get nervous and then defensively pretentious. Often I use exotic words at the expense of sense. About a year ago, my friend Jen encouraged me to write a poem made of acronyms, or rather the words acronyms abbreviate, the kind of thing Stephen Dedalus might fetishize if he were alive today, in the way he imagined being adored for his Qs and Fs and Ws. I took a Joyce seminar in college—for some reason I am very proud of that, and occasionally I bring it up at cocktail parties. Anyway, that’s where I found you, in an acronym, sleeping in the belly of a wasp I normally associate with pagans and perverts and white anglo-saxon protestants. Recently I watched a documentary on the alleged tombs of Jesus Christ and his family, which lay underneath an Israeli settlement built in the nineteen-eighties—what a tidy Abrahamic conflagration, I thought to myself (though not in those exact terms), Jesus and his family inside a Jewish settlement inside Palestine. I had no subject for my acronym poem so I wrote a bunch of specious crap about our dystopian global economy and radiation gods and drunk driving—
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that’s when I called you a schizophrenic drunk. I guess I was secretly angry at nothing in particular except the world. For a long time, I’ve wanted to be in Gaza, to stand in between Israeli CATs and Palestinian apartments, but I haven’t gone, I’m too afraid. “Your successes you get to share with the world,” my friend Lee once told me, “but your failures, those you get to keep. Your failures are yours.”
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DEAR ME After getting drunk one night in high school, I began to argue with my mother about the existence of God. I pulled from my wallet a bunch of crinkled manifestos, and I read her a series of rants about Christian poison and Communism’s bad rap and other inchoate ideas my mind wanted to archive. But I don’t remember anything she said. I don’t remember how her voice sounded when she said what I don’t remember. My wife, Siobhan, has asked me to write a poem from a personal experience, or emotion, since apparently I don’t do that. Like de Kooning said, since it’s absurd to paint the figure, then it must be equally absurd not to paint the figure. So sure, why not. Though once when I was playing basketball with my friend Fred, he asked what I was reading. Tennessee Williams, I said. When we met again, he joked that they should rename The Glass Menagerie to At Home with Momma. I just read this today, by Salman Rushdie: “Her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and then in abstract and increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are no names, as though unable to find a simple line.” Before she died, my mother asked that she be cremated, and her ashes spread
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atop Mt. Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts. When my sisters and I arrived, a group of professional hang gliders were jumping off the mountain, floating gracefully above the shaded ocher valley. After some time, we wandered around and found some privacy behind a few trees. But gusts of wind curled through the pine branches, and as we tossed small handfuls of my mother’s ash into the air, the wind spit her dust back at us, onto our faces and hair, and into our open mouths.
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DEAR BOX A young art student found you in a dumpster and decided you were a musical instrument. You appeared fairly large, about three or four cubic feet, with a skin of scratched-up silver and patches of rust and black grime. So as to produce a subtle music, the student would straddle you, then rub you with her palms and fingertips; perhaps you found that embarrassing, to be stroked and spanked in public, but hey, at least you weren’t in a dumpster anymore. At the time, I wrote a poem about you, which contained the phrase “to usurp your contents.” This line pleased me so much that I sent the poem to an online magazine, Anon, but they never wrote me back. When I read my poem the other day, I felt betrayed— the music was cheap, and its sense seemed wholly unexpressed. Even my favorite line I found too abstract and imprecise. It can take me years to sort things out that I wonder sometimes if I’m not the subject of an experiment in which a Cartesian genius likes to watch me toil impotently. Anyway, you were such an odd but honest inspiration. At least finding the poem got me thinking about you, and where you are now, and how I wish we’d kept in touch.
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DEAR TRYSTS A stranger came up to me at the Virgin Megastore to say how much he hated Robert Hass because Robert Hass epitomized the kind of poet who uses an encyclopedia of wine and flowers to write his poems. “Everything’s a picnic for that guy,” he said. He preferred pre-Tar C.K. Williams, because those poems express disarray and hunger. My girlfriend at the time, who also worked at the Virgin Megastore, used to apply stickers to herself that said “Virgin On Sale.” We were supposed to write how much something cost on the sticker, but she left the spaces blank. About five or six years ago, I came across a cheese menu brimming with adjectives like spoonable, woodsy, butterscotch, challenging and gloriously grassy. Jasper Johns said: “Take an object. Do something to it. Then do something else to it.” I listed many of the cheese menu’s adjectives under the cavalier title: Trysts: An Incomplete Compendium of Aristocratic Romances: Selections from the New York Fromagerie Artisanal (for Vladimir Nabokov). I was feeling sophisticated after reading Ada and thought a list of adjectives could function like a pure, distilled romance novel. Upon the stranger’s recommendation, I read some books by C.K. Williams, and I remember an intense poem about a farmer burning all his crops, and another in which flames shoot from the author’s penis as his daughter covers his toe with a blanket. Another time, another stranger (possibly tripping on acid) came up to me at the Virgin Megastore
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to tell me about a party she was going to have. “Couches, dude,” she kept saying, with a Novocain smile, “couches.” I abandoned my cheese poem within weeks— it was lazy and repetitive, but it proved to be a good learning experience, as it brought the Jasper Johns quote into my world— that’s not to say I know what I’m doing, but maybe now it’s something else, even if something is nothing, to an object.
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DEAR ROCKET SEA In college I studied religion and came across the Greek word “logos,” which means “living word.” In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. I was very enchanted by this concept, and conceived of a nonfiction book in which I would write that all religions were actually a philosophical response to language. At my job I have to read a lot of ads, to make sure every line and logo is spelled correctly, and that all the text properly manipulates. A recent ad I worked on said, “You can kill two birds with the emperor’s new clothes.” “Sense???” I wrote in response. In VALIS, Philip K. Dick’s novel about schizophrenia and the secret persistence of the Roman Empire, a tiny pink light from outer space is beamed into the protagonist’s head. The light is actually the logos, through which the protagonist becomes fluent in a dead language and is able to diagnose a mysterious brain tumor in his son’s head; eventually, the logos proves too overwhelming and the protagonist goes insane. When I was in fifth grade I read a book about a boy with schizophrenia in which the author italicized the boy’s inner dialogue to differentiate his perpendicular realities. For the first time, I became conscious of my own inner dialogue— I must be schizophrenic, too, I logically concluded. After a week of desolation, my mom made me see a therapist, who said I was having trouble negotiating the conflicting spaces between childhood and adulthood. Eventually, my italics became roman type again.
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The open airs fall and laugh, assemble, are eclipsed, are set, created, removed, and in their placelessness become the dark forest, a house of liars, the hotel. I wrote these lines as part of an opposite translation of T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker (of which Rocket Sea is an anagram). A friend of mine read the translation and looked at me perplexed, as if I had two heads. “Why on earth did you write this?” he asked. Honestly, I don’t remember. In my beginning is my end.
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DEAR FOREIGN OBJECTS You wanted to be a poem about war and xenophobia, but I know nothing about war or xenophobia. So I arranged you into a list of nouns, like rings and folding chairs, then called you a poem because I have an ego problem. Earlier this afternoon I was sitting on a wooden chair, looking at my wedding ring. It’s a nice ring, with gold quartz and a few small diamonds; it has a princely feel and what I am increasingly comfortable calling a masculine heft. I got married a few months ago, so that makes you about three or four years older than my marriage. You’ve changed a lot over the years. I remember one summer in upstate New York I changed you daily. (I was going to make a joke here, that you’re like a diaper, but that’s kind of sad, to compare you to a diaper. Anyway that comparison is wrong, you’d have to be a frequently defecating child for the simile to work, because the diaper is the shit I’ve thrown away and not the poem you’re constantly becoming.) I got married once before, to an Australian girl named Jackie; we married in Lake Tahoe so she could stay in the country and prolong a contentious relationship with her girlfriend Sarah. Jackie lives in Africa now, near some diamond mines, which she’s probably trying to shut down. I got pretty drunk at the casino the night before the wedding, with my then-girlfriend Crescent Diamond. Crescent was cool, she made me read Lady Chatterley’s Lover while we were dating. I have to confess, sometimes, when I think about my wedding ring, I think about the woodsman.
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DEAR GERTRUDE STEINBRENNER You are the confluence of two disparate creatures— one the loathsome monarch of the New York Yankees, and two the tender button of expat Paris. First and foremost, I hate the Yankees. They’re a bunch of corporate douchebags who always win, with infinite cash and arrogance; fittingly, they’ve been nicknamed “the Evil Empire” and “America’s Team.” Bill Piscione, my high school football coach, used to say “First and foremost”—it was the bread-and-butter of his pre-game speeches, and it almost always preceded “we will stay together as a family.” During our first team meeting my freshman year, two years before I hit puberty, he announced to everyone that he could shit bigger than me. In 1902, Gertrude Stein left America for Paris, where she began inverting tables and chairs in her notebook’s brasseries. She is a hero to many; she’s like the Splendid Splinter of writing. I made up your name 102 years after she left the country, after King George said, “Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing,” which I believe is a paraphrase of something General Patton said. In my antipathy, I mixed George’s words with Gertrude Stein’s and begot you—an awkward, self-satisfied mess. You’re one of those poems that pretends to be but isn’t really nuanced. We won very few games in high school. I remember after one rare victory, the quarterback of our team, Dick Crory, threw a huge party.
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While everyone huddled around an industrial funnel of beer, fat Ted Abbott, who had hair where most people don’t have skin, pulled the baseball cap off my head, unleashing a moppy slaw of hair. That same year Ted Abbott stuffed me in a gym locker and poured baby powder on me. He made me say to my teammates, “I am just a piece of shit, floating in a pond.” On the night Curt Schilling pitched with his bloody sock against the Yankees, I read you to an indifferent audience in Brooklyn. Your name got a few laughs, but you proved to be a disappointment. “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”
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DEAR MODIFICATIONS You are the following dangerous words: 1. heart 2. love 3. mind 4. beauty and 5. eyes (I don’t consider beauty a failure, but that’s just my opinion). I wanted to save you because you are all so hackneyed. Maybe some of the words that typically surround you, I thought, could give you some life? So, for example, for eyes, I wrote: four eyes, private eyes, snake eyes, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling and Don’t Shoot Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes. For love I listed Hiroshima mon amour, From Russia with Love, Love and Rockets, Love Is a Battlefield and You Can’t Buy Me Love. Maybe you were more political than I realized. I subtracted you from these phrases, then scrambled your neighbors into what I called a poem, but the end result was a solipsistic, awkward and conceptual definition for each of you (I think I was trying to do something semiotic, but I’m not sure what). When I was about seven or eight, I found a blue jay with a broken wing in some nearby woods. I ran home and told my mom, who gave me a shoe box and a pair of ski gloves to handle him. My mom rushed us to the vet, and I felt so relieved. But when we called later that afternoon to check on our patient, the vet had put him to sleep; there was nothing he could do, he said. Plato, in the Republic, says that poets must be exiled. Shelley calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I remember the blue jay’s eyes, looking up at me through the foot-length ferns like I was going to kill him. Just the exact opposite, I thought, cradling him in ski gloves.
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DEAR ORPHANS You begin with Facing the truculent moonlight. Truculent means “aggressively or sullenly refusing to accept or to do what is asked.” In other words, moonlight is not truculent. I like the sound of certain words, sometimes I let the sound drive and put meaning in the car seat. Stanley Kunitz, albeit in elementary school, wrote “George Washington was a very tall, petite, handsome man.” I wrote you after reading Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. Maybe meaning is overrated, and you can get by on the sounds of words alone. My uncle Bill reads books about string theory and studied at Bowdoin College, both of which I mention to suggest he is intelligent. A few weeks ago he said my poems require a dictionary. I think he meant to say I ought to look up the words I use before I use them. The first girl I really fell in love with adored big words. I remember we were walking by a gas station and she used the word stultify, which means “to diminish somebody’s interest and liveliness of mind by being repetitive, tedious and boring.” I wonder if I’ve tied my use of words to a complex, recurring fate of rejection, in love and in poetry. You end with the passengers who tried floating eventually drowned. That sounds like the fate of everything ever attempted.
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DEAR NOSTALGIA One night I found a book called The Supernatural among some prune-colored trash bags. A fluorescent green cat poses on the cover of the book, his back comically arched in terror. I’ve always wondered what he is afraid of. Maybe a dog. Or maybe a dog spelled backwards. I took the book and extracted 26 words (e.g., Napoleon, scarab, and Romanov) to create a poem called “Nostalgia,” which ended with the following: the there! twinkling Napoleon red moon— glittering mountain intestines; irremovable life! I still feel attached to these lines, although I don’t know what they mean. It’s cliché, but I remember my teacher once told me that in poetry you must be brave enough to kill your babies. When I was nine or ten, my mom sent me to nature camp in New Hampshire. I remember the counselors lectured us about survival, that if we were to survive in the wilderness, we would need to eat live grasshoppers and cattails— at first I thought they meant cattails as in cat’s tails, but one day we went for a hike and collected a bunch of long reeds with brown Twinkies on the ends,
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and when we returned to camp, we fried the reeds in a pan with butter— these, they said, were cattails. A few weeks later, while grazing through some patches of spearmint, one of the counselors caught a grasshopper, and I remember watching in horror as she popped it in her mouth. Because that, I knew, was a grasshopper. I have a secret thing I do whenever I drive by roadkill, even if I’m the one who’s driving: I close my eyes until my head is absolutely clear. It’s like a prayer but not to god. Sometimes I can’t clear my head, and I’m scared that one day I’ll get into an accident. I clipped a cat once, on Rte. 9 crossing from Hadley into Northhampton, at twilight. I saw him plunge into the woods behind a few nondescript businesses, so I pulled over to see if I could find him. As I searched around the buildings, I realized that one of the nondescript businesses was a strip club. I imagine that looked shady. Not far from where I found The Supernatural, my friends Ben and Dan and I staged a rescue of some feral kittens. One of them, the one Ben eventually named Otto, bit my thumb as I held him by the nape. When we got back inside my apartment, I panicked, anxious that the kittens might have rabies, so I called the Poison Control Center. The woman on the other end said to bring in the cat so they could smash his head open and test his brains. “It’s the only way,” she asserted. Last night I ate a huge pot brownie and took my dog for a walk. While he ate street grass, I began thinking about the over-simplicity we have conferred upon dogs.
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We see them as merely dominant or submissive, as always conforming to a pack leader. For some reason I connected this thought to poetry, how poems sometimes suffer from an opposite problem, from inscrutability and disarray. There is no pack leader. I was stoned, and had made space for general statements, but I remember a time when everything I wrote was clear and totally profound, and I always knew what I was talking about. Whenever I see the cat on the cover of The Supernatural, though, I know those days never were.
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DEAR DONKEY KING “We’ll go after the terrorists, I will hunt them down, and kill them.” John Kerry used to say this constantly when he was running for president. After hearing him repeat this line for the fifth or sixth time one night, I began to imagine him in his Carhartt jacket shaking Pakistanis by their lapels, and stabbing them with a rusty knife. I should mention that I’ve never seen the movie Ass Master. A porn I will admit to having seen is called Backsides to the Future, in which a girl travels back in time and has sex with her father. I feel like newer pornography suffers from a lack of imagination— it over-markets orifices or a particular fetish or the reduced attributes of the actors (black dicks, massive tits, underage, etc.). Maybe that’s the fault of the internet, where porn became extremely compartmentalized. I didn’t play it much, but Donkey Kong is a seminal video game with racist undertones in which a mustachioed man named Mario climbs a series of electronic scaffoldings to rescue his beloved from a giant ape. As an obverse, I wonder what the video game equivalent would be for Native Son. One night in 2004 I was watching CNN and saw Don King, the notorious boxing promoter, wearing a faded denim jacket and waving little American flags in each hand, stumping for George Bush. At first I thought maybe he had Alzheimer’s, but he kept talking about how we were in serious peril after 9/11 and thank God for George Bush.
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DEAR CHARLES I tried to make a poem out of preposterous and semi-preposterous nicknames for you, such as Chazz, Chucky the Pug, and Chuck with Duck (a play on “chicks with dicks”—instead of an I, it has a U). In the poem I took a few scissor stabs at surrealism, too, with Assassinated Window, Tuesday Junket, and Stack the Tooth. When I read the poem aloud at the Zinc Bar, no one laughed, and it was rejected recently by a poetry magazine. My friends in grade school used to call me Ash Trey and Ice Trey— while these aren’t terribly insulting names, it’s awkward to be associated with such inert and servile objects. Once I was watching a New York Mets game on TV and Dave O’Brien, the mediocre play-by-play guy, yelled out “Uncle Charlie!” after El Duque threw a ridiculous curveball. Uncle Charlie makes me think of “Mister Charlie,” the Lightnin’ Hopkins song about a kid who gets exiled from his home because he stutters. Eventually, he overcomes his stuttering problem by singing about an old mill burning down. Uncle Charlie is actually a blues musician. When we were growing up on Long Island, my sister had a friend named Julie who had a brother named Charlie. Charlie seemed much older, and I was scared of him, though I don’t remember why. Maybe he had a teenage moustache. Kristy and Julie and their friend Miriam used to play “Charlie’s Angels,” and sometimes they would recruit me to play the role of Charlie, which meant I had to hide in the bushes because no one can see Charlie
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when he talks to the Angels. Recently I received a present in the mail from my friend Robin— she sent me a plastic ice tray she’d bought in Chinatown; it had been packaged in plastic wrap and labeled “ICE TREY.” After a huge blizzard in the late seventies, I jumped off my neighbor’s roof into what I thought was a cushy, six-foot pile of snow, but it was actually a row of bushes camouflaged by the storm. I fell through the bushes all the way to the ground, and the snow above caved in all around me. I started screaming, but I was alone and no one could hear me, so slowly, like a woodchuck, I climbed my way out.
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DEAR APOLLO I got your letter over a year ago—I’m sorry that it’s taken me this long to reply. And yes, I understand you’re disappointed, beyond your regular paternal vibration. I’m disappointed, too. Just yesterday I was thinking how even mediocrity seems ambitious. (In other words, I’m below below-average.) As you’ll recall, you wrote me on the heels of a complete catastrophe— I’d spent three months writing pages and pages of saccharine music, a poem trying to navigate the sea between the Hindu om and the unpronounceable Jewish Yahweh. Unfortunately, that sea was made of frozen garbage. I thought it was fascinating, that one culture encourages communion with god via the repetition of a syllable, and in another, god’s name can’t even be pronounced. I wrote a mountain of psychedelic wire, coiled abstractions, and never got further than my initial fascination. A few nights ago my friend Susan asked if I believed in god. I said, not in an intelligent beard kind of way, but maybe in an indifferent linking verb kind of way. You’re more of the former. In your letter, do you remember writing that I would die at sea a seagull? I must admit, I found this a very beautiful thought—that I might die with an incredible perspective despite remaining within a margin, always outside the world I wanted to be within. I’m not sure you meant it like that, but still, maybe it’s a glass half-empty, half-full kind of thing. I’ve always wondered if someone asked a Buddhist that question— is the glass half empty or half full—would his reply be “What glass?” 23
Dear Failures Š 2011 Trey Sager Ugly Duckling Presse First Edition, First Printing, July 2011
This book was printed and bound in an edition of 500 copies at the Ugly Duckling Presse workshop in Brooklyn, New York. It was designed by goodutopian and the author; the type is Adobe Jenson Pro for the text, Gotham Rounded and Bikham Script Pro for the titles. The cover was letterpress-printed at UDP and features a drawing by Jasper Carlson. The author would like to thank Siobhan Walshe, Jen Hayashida, Fred Crosby, Lee Arnold, Jeffrey DeShell, the editors of Court Green, Daniel Bouchard, Timothy Donnelly, Abraham Adams, James Copeland, Justin Wymer, Anna Moschovakis, Matvei Yankelevich, and Ugly Duckling Presse.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org
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