Ode to the F-Word
BARBARA COMES BACK from yoga class
& I say what did Julia say today
& she says Julia said the floor
is your best teacher
& I think boy is that ever true
& remember how my friend Victor the film director
told me about the dream he’d had
when he hadn’t made a movie in ten years
& was going to start shooting his new one
the next day & in his dream he heard a voice say
don’t forget to sleep on the floor
& when I say what does that mean Victor
he puts his hand out flat & low and says keep it real.
Agha Shahid Ali says the problem with young artists
is that they haven’t spent ten years
getting something right
so they don’t trust the process.
Once I took a samurai sword-fighting lesson
and my sensei gave me a t-shirt
& when I asked the interpreter what it said
he said it says more mat less chat.
Your job is to create awe, young artists!
This takes patience.
Everyone has a different sense of awe:
some people will never forget
the time they saw a pole vaulter clear a bar
set at what seemed like an impossible height
while others remember the first time
a waiter set before them a bowl of bouillabaisse
or just a sandwich
a baguette with ham but jam and sharp mustard
this time instead of cheese.
Awe takes you out of yourself:
suddenly you’re just not there.
It’s your job to lead your listener
or viewer or reader to the highest level of awe possible
& that means putting before them
something they don’t yet know about,
have never even suspected the existence of—
think Keats first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
There’s no high or low:
it coud be Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain”
or Mozart’s “A Little Night Music,”
Emily Dickinson’s “I Started Early—Took My Dog”
or “Casey at the Bat.”
Think new, think better, think different.
Think Taha Mohammed Ali,
who says poetry is like billiards,
you strike here to hit there.
Sleep on the floor.
Read Van Gogh’s biography.
One more thing:
artists as different as Whitman & Mingus
put out everything they had on the floor
of their apartments in a form of housekeeping
for which dictionaries have no name
yet in the Chicago State Mental Hospital
if a patient says something irrational
the orderlies are instructed to say
hey you just said something crazy.
What’s wrong with crazy?
Poison’s not bad says Keith Richards.
It’s a matter of how much. The floor teaches you
when to do something & when to let it go,
when it matters & when it doesn’t.
Media tycoon Kirk Kerkorian told Harris Katleman
to take over MGM Television
& when Katleman said
I don’t know how to run a TV studio
Kerkorian said neither do I
& then he said you can’t fall off the floor.
Trust the process, young artists.
Be patient and a little nuts.