Tina Cane | February 2020

Matthew Lippman

EXCERPT

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections: Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, winner of the 2018 Levis Prize, (Four Way Books, 2020); A Little Gut Magic (Nine Mile Press, 2018); Salami Jew (Racing Form Press, 2015); American Chew, winner of the Burnside Review Book Prize, (Burnside Press, 2014); Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing), 2010; and The New Year of Yellow, winner of The Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, (Sarabande Books, 2007) and finalist for the 2008 Patterson Poetry Prize. His awards include: Anna Davidson Poetry Prize, Georgetown Review Magazine Prize, Jerome J. Shestak Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, Michener Fellowship in Poetry, New York State Foundation of The Arts Grant, and others. He is the founder and editor of the website Love’s Executive Order.

Tina Cane: Let’s start at the beginning. Can you share your very first memory of language, of awareness of language, or your love of it?

Matthew Lippman: I was hanging out on the stoop, the step, of my apartment complex in Manhattan. Maybe it was 1972. The boys and me—Jeff, Michael, Eric, Pedro, Javier—I can’t remember what was going on. The city was broke and dirty. We were broke and dirty and Mike said to Jeff, or Derek said to Flipper—“Yo, your fucking Pumas are the joint,” and I looked at Pedro or Eric’s purple Pumas with the yellow stripe and, shit, they were the joint. We were talking about sneakers but it was poetry even though I didn’t know it was poetry. I just remember how good it sounded and how the words were as beautiful as the sneakers. Everything in 1972 was about the sneakers. So much so that if you went into Central Park and you had the joint Pumas you didn’t go alone, you went with your boys. Because if you went alone, someone was gonna snatch those things off your feet and you’d have to walk back to your apartment in your socks on the dirty streets. Hanging out on those steps was the first time language sounded like music to me and ever since then I have been trying to get that street shit smack into my poetry. Cursing, slang, the rhythm of the sidewalk/playground conversation—I loved being in there with my friends, in it, all the way in it, raw and dirty and broken and purple and yellow. This is where it was the realest. That street talk for me was the beginning and where I always seem to find myself in conversation, in my poetry, in talking to myself, in the classroom, in the house with my kids—using words that are dirty and broken and, of course, the joint.

Cane: When and where did you publish your first poem? And were there any people who were instrumental in your discovering the form?

Lippman: One of the first poems I had published was in The Seneca Review, a small literary magazine run out of my alma mater, Hobart and William Smith. Deborah Tall was the editor back in the ’90s, and she published my poem “Valentine’s Day” about a year after I graduated from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Getting a piece accepted by Deborah was a big deal. She was a tough reader. My freshman year of college I thought I was hot shit when I first entered her class. But as the semester marched on, I kept getting C minuses on my papers. I never studied poetry with her but she taught me a lot about the power of precision and thoroughness in language. In my sophomore year, I became quite close with her husband, David Weiss, a poet and professor, as well. David is the man who, after reading too many of my shit poems, god bless him, was the one who noticed something in my work about three months before graduation. I had written a poem about Chagall and the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and Italian boys playing soccer. He read the piece and took a shine to it. It was the first poem I wrote that was void of bullshit and sentimentality. It took some imagistic leaps, and had a touch of the magical spirit, some real authentic spunk and vibe. It hinted at the beginnings of an “authentic” voice and made an impression on him enough to say, “This is good.” That was enough, because for so long he had been saying, “This is crap.” It was, looking back, the biggest moment in my development as a poet. The writing of the poem and the resonance that David’s voice had on me. And this is important. That he did. I love that guy. I love him so much because he saw it, whatever “it” is, and I kinda never looked back. I love him, too, because he’s such a good man. The wild thing is that just this past winter I returned to Hobart and William Smith to do a reading. David is still there. We are brothers now. He still remembers that little poem. He brought it up in his introduction at my reading, we talked about it in his office. It blows me away. How many little pishers has he taught? And he still remembers that poem. I am forever indebted to him for that, for paying attention, for liking the poem and for simply saying so.

Cane: “Chagall, the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and Italian boys playing soccer,” and my mind leaps to your rule about “Three Things.” Can you talk a little about what that means and how that principle developed or revealed itself to you, in your work?

Lippman: It’s not really a rule—just something I think about a lot. I was not conscious of it until recently, believe it or not. For so long the three thing-thing was just instinctual. I liked putting a toaster, a small boat, and Joralemon Street into a poem because it was interesting to me. Or, a violin, a swing set, and lovers falling off a building. If you can get three things up inside a poem, have them rub against each other, then something interesting will happen. Really, this is what matters most... that I make something interesting. Not the rule. The rule is funk. The making a mess of things into cool stuff, that’s funkiness, and as I mentioned before, that’s it, the whole shebang. As I have noted, I was raised in New York City in a particular era of broken things and out of that brokenness all this cool shit was happening. Graffiti, for instance, and the beginning of Hip-hop. Then, there were the crazy lyrics of Dylan and songs like “Visions of Johanna” that had me in the sparkle, in the gut. My poetry has always been informed by the chaos of the street and whether that means the playground, the classroom, the boardroom, the kitchen, the lakeside, wherever and whatever, it’s all right there. In all these places, in any of these places, there are a thousand things going on at once—inside and out—and the picking and mashing up of objects and ideas and feelings and people and dogs is the coolest thing in the world to mess with. It’s about connections, yes, and generosity. Responding to the environment, the heart and head, the other people in the room, in the past, and bringing it all together in a poem. It’s creating a community of stuff on the page as a way of mirroring the community of stuff in the world. So, three is the number to start with because it’s always been magic.

Cane: Three as a magic number to start with and I think De La Soul, but also “holy trinity,” which wouldn’t play much of a role in your work. Judaism, however, does. Can you talk a bit about that?

Lippman: I am not sure how to answer this question. Judaism is not something I know enough about. I know I am Jewish and I identify as a Jew but Judaism, the practice of being Jewish, the observance, these are separate things. I have always been the Jew in the room and it gives me a great sense of pride and, at the same time, isolation. I feel my solitude in my Jewishness and if there is a connection to my work it is that—the solitude of being a Jew and not the observance that comes with the religion and the faith. This plays a huge role in the poetry. It’s this great sense of aloneness and beauty that I derive from writing, from poetry, that I also derive from, or, takes root in, being Jewish. Because, if you ask how I identify I will say, “I am Matthew. I am a father, teacher, poet. I am a Jew.” And yes, some will say I am only Jewish culturally, not religiously, and it is true that I don’t care much for observance, but, for the spirit, oh, that’s another story. It’s everything to me—that quiet and chaotic space that drives me to create. That’s how Judaism plays a role.

Cane: Funny, because I thought “Jewishness” and then changed it to “Judaism.” I may have been trying to create a formality where none need exist. Having been raised with a father who was culturally but not religiously Jewish, I understand the distinction you make.

In your book, Salami Jew, there’s a poem called “My French Friends” which deftly balances the weight of history—and France’s role in persecuting Jews—with humor and a more universal context. You write, “Who has that kind of life, that history? / The never beaten down history,” then end the poem on a darker note with, “...my French friends greet me with their kisses / I can’t help but hear that little word / which flies around the backs of my ears and screams, run. Run run run.”

Humor is important in your work, and you use it in often devastating ways to disclose and probe larger questions. Where do you think that tendency comes from?

Lippman: When I listen to Steely Dan, I feel particularly at ease. I don’t know why. Their music is so tight and their lyrics are funny. “Is there gas in the car. Yes, there is gas in the car.” It’s that inventive, smart funny. There is also a “fuck you” vibe in the tunes, like, we know what we are doing so much you can’t touch this. It’s true, you know. I bring up Steely Dan because when I was in college, Steely Dan became a thing for me. For two reasons. I hate to fly, and I figured out that if I put Aja on The Walkman when my plane was taking off or landing, it would cool me out. The second thing that Steely Dan’s music did for me was it introduced the power and joy of the smart-funny. I had been writing that sentimental garbage that I spoke of earlier, and realized that one way out of it was to be funny in my work. Intelligent funny. Wise funny. I like heavy, don’t get me wrong, but if things are too heavy, if there is no levity in the heavy, then I get bored. It’s one note. I like more than one note. It’s behind the beat. Lagging. Being funny never lags. Either it’s on the beat or it’s the ohh-ugh of the off-beat. Humor has always been part of my persona because it makes me seem smart and connected even though I am marginally both. When I was young, even now, it garners attention. It entertains and makes people feel good. I want all of these things in my poems, in poems in general, to make people feel good. You’ve been to those poetry readings that just drag, that just sit there like a stale puddle oozing with the junk of self-love. Humor, if done right, is the world because it is a response to the world in color, or Technicolor. It makes things uncomfortable and weird. I like uncomfortable and weird in poems. A little jazzy, a little funky, a little off the trail, and, of course, a little Haitian Divorce.

Cane: Can we circle back for a moment? I am wondering about the sense of isolation and solitude you mention in relation to being Jewish. I am thinking of your poem, “Makes the Blessings,” also in Salami Jew, in which you write:

Tonight, when I fill the Kiddush cup,
I’m tired
and dream of not driving,
of no electricity,
of a kid I used to teach named Mandlebaum
who borrowed the black hat and never looked back.
I don’t wish that to be me. I am glad it is him.
Still, it’s a tribal dream and I like the tribe.

I love these lines for their hint of yearning and ambivalence, and ultimate serenity. I’m throwing this out here: But can you talk about (lack of) observance and your practice of poetry?

Lippman: I love Mandelbaum, and all the Mandelbaums who have gone before. He was a kid I taught and then, story goes, he embraced the faith, the observant life. I have deep respect for him and his path. My wife, too, who is two years away from being ordained as a rabbi. There is something there that I have deep admiration for—that kind of involvement with the text, with community and song, with practice, legacy, lineage, and faith. There was a time, in my early 20s, when I flirted with that life. I don’t know if I really flirted with it. I was drawn to something. How do I say? It had to do with language and quiet. Those two things have always been in me, since I can remember, since I was really, really little. The boisterous and the silent. The generous and the selfish. What is the balance? It’s the balance that makes sense to me most, now, as I get older. Time for the world and time for the self. When I go to synagogue as a secular dude, I am always struck by how many words there are, repeated words, the same service, and how in that repetition there is time for reflection, deep reflection, if you do it right. I find this in the sanctuary but I also find it in my daily life—in the house with my kids, in the classroom with my students, and when I am driving in my car, or at Wegmans in the potato chip aisle. Jewish or not, this is really what moves me—to be quiet and boisterous at the same time. I want to be part of the tribe and somewhere outside of the tribe, simultaneously. Be helpful and spirited and being alone and soft. Call it what you will. Whatever it is, it is where I am most comfortable.

Cane: Again, I am thinking of “Makes the Blessings” which begins:

Rachel makes the blessings.
I make the lemon chicken, broccoli,
the fruit bowl full of kosher grapes.
It’s a partnership but not really.
I have no idea what she says
when she puts her hands on the children
and bobs her head like a giraffe.
Is she a Jewish giraffe?
Are my children gazelles in the wild in Hebrew?

This is at once humorous, holy, and rooted entirely in daily life—which is how I would characterize your work. There’s also an absurdist leap that happens when you write, Is she a Jewish giraffe? before the poem moves more towards yearning and ambivalence.

Your poems often take that leap into absurd and—much like a leap of faith—the reader follows and is rewarded. It’s not easy to pull off the deft turn. Your work feels very spontaneous and you are ridiculously prolific. What’s your process like? Talk us through the making of a poem.

Lippman: Taking a walk. Grading an essay. Going for a swim. Grilling marinated chicken. Setting up my daughter’s new turntable. Having a conversation with my wife about shoe shopping. Mowing the lawn. This is the process of making a poem. I think one of the reasons I write a lot is because somehow it is just something I do in my day like anything else. Also, I don’t care about it that much. The poem, that is. I care about the space of writing a poem, of being in that thing that always feels good. Is fun. Is, sometimes, a real pain in the ass. Again, like anything else in the day. You know, you do something long enough, you figure out what works. For me, what works in the making of a poem is putting crazy shit in there like Jewish giraffes after I have figured out a situation, after I have created a real life and representational scene or narrative. Once I have established this, I like to throw myself against a wall or into a pool of champagne lavender and zany. Of course, I have to return to the more grounded place. And, of course, there has to be that moment in a poem where everything shifts, falls apart into itself to create that resonant shock wave. So, check it out. I wrote a poem today called “That Is Why You Have To Buy Your Child Astral Weeks.” I had been on Yahoo or some other search engine, and all these news stories of violence, and political corruption, Mueller and Trump and women stabbing babies and women being shot and I feel tired, so tired by this world and how much negativity flies at us relentlessly. I mean, it’s fucking relentless. I am tired so that’s how I start the poem, “Sick and tired of the fault lines in Hawaii and California.” Everything is breaking apart. In the poem, I go on a little rant. It’s a combination of made up stuff and real stuff and I think, in my “artifice mind,” “Okay, brother, you have to turn this thing or else it’s just going to be a stupid diatribe, a spew, an electric guitar solo that is just some guitar player jacking off.” Yesterday, my daughter got a turntable for her Bat Mitzvah. What a gift! Her best friend got it for her because her best friend knows how much she loves music. I mean, that is some love and my daughter is blown back by the whole thing and ready to fire it up, but we have no records because, stupid idiot that I am, all of mine were sold or given away in 1999. No matter. Today, I go online, figure to buy her some vinyl. She loves female singer song writers so I get her Regina Spektor’s first record. Cool. I want to get her a classic LP, too, so, boom, Astral Weeks, no contest. And this is where the poem turns. Where it gets hopeful and a touch of sweet. I bring this little narrative, this little happening into poem, Astral Weeks, or, how Astral Weeks and my daughter are things that can save things a little bit each day. This is it, always trying to find the hot fire between the ugly and the beautiful. It’s just like taking a walk, you know, the summer elm trees glistening in green when you look up, and the beat to shit Coke can kicked up against the curb, when you look down.

Cane: Yes! Astral Weeks, the Van Morrison classic. I saw the video of you reading of that poem yesterday on YouTube and I just re-watched it. It’s the most recent installment of your online archive, Parking Lot Poems, in which you film yourself reading poems, often in your car, in a parking lot. This time you are in a classroom and, from the clock on the wall behind you, I can see it’s 9:40 am. You’re between teaching classes at the high school where you work—a glimpse into your prodigious output.

I am a big fan of Parking Lot Poems, have used them in the classroom, and have even invited students to make their own. It’s an excellent project. Tell me more about how and why you began sharing your poetry in this way.

Lippman: There is some insatiable need in me to be heard. Two years ago, I was in the parking lot at a Peet’s Coffee shop and I started writing a poem. The way the editing process works involves reading my work out loud. That’s how I catch typos, grammatical mistakes, how well I can tell if things sound good or not. I decided to record myself on Photobooth just for the heck of it, and then, I thought, it would be fun to post the video on YouTube, see how many people note or view the thing. I was interested in not waiting for a journal to accept or reject the work. I had complete control over a poem’s life in the world and that felt good. Turns out that between 12–200 people were checking out the poems. Not a ton of folks, but good enough. I liked this, it was gratifying (still is), and again, helped to fulfill that need. I was also a little more determined to write every day, and I found myself doing just that in the car, in parking lots, making videos. The project in and of itself was an inspiration. It was a blast for about two months, writing in the car, in the parking lot, thinking of interesting ways to record myself and be accessible to the nominal YouTube world that I was now navigating.

Cane: I think many writers have an insatiable need to be heard, which brings me to your project, Love’s Executive Order, the online archive of poems in response to the Trump administration. It’s a wonderful forum for poets to be heard in this context. Would you share the story of how LEO came to be? What has the response been?

Lippman: After he won, I wanted to do something. I don’t know how to protest, march, sing for freedom. It’s not in my nature. But I wanted to do something. In 1980, my twelfth grade European History AP Teacher, Donald Morrison, vowed that he would not cut his beard until Reagan left office. This was Morrison’s way of speaking out and he did it. He did not cut his beard for eight years. I thought, “Man, you should do something like that with poetry.” That is how I came up with the idea for Love’s Executive Order. I wanted to do something on a weekly basis, for as long as he was in office, that came from my own interests and passion. I worked pretty quickly to get the rudimentary site built. Anna Spool, a friend, built the platform, and I asked Matthew Dickman, a poet friend, my brother-in-law, Sharky Laguana, and my wife, Rachel Putterman if they might have a good, catchy name for the project. Matthew came up with “Love’s Executive Order” and wrote the first poem, “45th Sutra,” that I posted. Then, I got the word out, solicited poet friends, did a Submittable thing, and here we are.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive. The first year was amazing. Things have slowed down a bit in terms of the number of folks who view the site a week, but I still get amazing poems from amazing poets and this is really the thing. A poetic protest, a poetic chronicle of the times. The work has been outstanding and now, the whole endeavor has slipped into the ‘everyday space’ that is equivalent to anything else I do. I like that. I like that the site is about other people, about the world, and how people are feeling about the world—the country, this administration and what it is, stands for, and really, the horror that spews forth from its mouth every day. The poetry on Love’s Executive Order names it all—the ugly and the beautiful, the struggle and the frustration, the rage and the hope. Really, I wish the site did not exist. I am glad it does.

Cane: Once, when I had the pleasure of introducing you at a reading, I quipped, “If Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, and Louis C.K. had a child, it would be Matthew Lippman.” (This was before some of the gross revelations about Louis C.K). Still, your work is unmistakably Lippman—which is to say it contains a democratic exuberance found in Whitman, O’Hara’s “bright particulars,” and the best of C.K’s humorous musings on human absurdity and parenthood. Your style has held pretty steady through the years, but thinking back to your first collection, The New Year of Yellow—which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books—up to, say, yesterday, how would you say your concerns have changed over time?

Lippman: I have, from my early 20s, been pretty concerned with the same things regarding poetry—I want the work to be entertaining, to have some emotional resonance, to be a commentary on the world, to make the daily grind come across as beautiful, to be a touch absurd or surreal, to be funny, and to speak to people who don’t normally read poems. That’s it.

I do think that if I had the talent to write really great rock and pop songs, I would have done that with my creative time. The musical tableau has always eluded me. I tried really hard to make songs when I was a teenager but failed miserably.

These days I am glad to just sit and write poems. It’s funny and strange but I don’t want to be a poet anymore, or, I don’t want to pretend to be a poet anymore. I just want to write poems.

Cane: That’s an excellent distinction you make, between being “a poet” and “writing poems,” the mantle versus the act. The mantle can be heavy—a hindrance that inhibits. Whereas, the act is the thing—everything, even.

What are some poems and who are the poets that knocked you out early on? Whose work do you read now?

Lippman: I have, for a long time, wanted to get back to some semblance of that place I was when I was sixteen—just writing poems about stuff in my bedroom late at night—without any knowledge of the briefcase of publishing, readings, lit magazines, etc.—all the ego and personality that goes with it. I don’t mean to come across as negative, it’s just not my cup of tea. I don’t fit in. I tried for a long time but it just ain’t for me and it feels kinda good to be able to feel this way and be cool with it. The whole thing, the business, does not make sense in my gut the way the writing does, in my DNA. The writing—it’s all the magic.

Early on I was blown back by everything Juan Felipe Herrera wrote, Anne Sexton’s “451 Mercy Street,” Gerald Stern’s “Soap,” Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up,” Michael Morse’s “On Reading” (and everything else he writes), this kind of work.

Now, I read the work of Daniel DeLeon and, no shit, you, Tina Cane. My admiration for the stuff you are writing about New York, family, America, is some of the best work out there. I’m not tooting a horn here, it’s real. I find that I read a lot of poems by my students (11^th and 12^th graders) and their work interests me more than anything because it’s so unadorned, lacks pretense, and has that furious love of discovery in it that is palpable, you can feel it sizzle at the stick’s tip, that glowing ember about to burst into flame or already in flame. I love Kerrin McCadden’s poems and Shane McCrae’s work. Also, Khadijah Queen’s book, I’M SO FINE. The last poem I heard that sent me whizzing was by Rudy Francisco called, “Adrenaline Rush.”

Cane: I just watched Francisco perform “Adrenaline Rush” on YouTube—“whizzing” indeed, and enraging and heartbreaking. I also just read “Tolle Lege,” an essay by Greg Pardlo, in which he asserts—among many things—that “poetry is a ritual space for the practice of feeling.” That brought to my mind your daily practice of poetry and your brief flirtation with observant Judaism. Phillip Roth considered Jewishness a state of being—which is also how I think of being a poet and how I think of you as a poet. I realize this isn’t a question. Thoughts?

Lippman: A few years ago, a few months ago, I would have agreed with the notion that poetry is a state of being. It’s not a profession, certainly not. It’s a thing people do. For me, very recently, it’s a little more complicated, or, maybe, simplified. The only time now when I feel like it is a thing is when I write. When I am not writing, it’s nothing. I don’t mean to diminish poetry, the state of poetry, of being a poet, at all. This is only about my connection to poetry in my heart and head. For me, now, I only feel that ‘poetic place’ when I am inking up the page. It’s weird. I don’t want to do readings. I have stopped sending work out. I really don’t care if I get another book published. It’s been absolutely liberating and I have no idea where this comes from or why I feel this way; all I know is I like it.

Cane: This returns us to that important distinction between being “the poet” and writing the poems. I’ve always said that if someone told me I would never again publish a single poem, that I would still be writing poems until I died. And it’s true, but I do try to get my work out there. How does your recent and simplified “poetic place” and “inking up the page” jive with your “insatiable need to be heard”? Is it about putting your poems out into the world on your own terms—like with Parking Lot Poems? About control? Freedom?

Lippman: Actually, I don’t know the answer to this question. This is all so recent. I don’t think I need to be heard the way I used to feel like I needed to be heard. I wrote a few poems this morning. I was outside. The birds were wild with spring. It was delicious. The air cool. I did, as I have done, record myself reading them. I was listening to Mingus. One of the poem is about Mingus. I recorded them and then, that was it. I dropped it. Not because of life or a class I had to teach. I just did not feel that need to plop the thing on YouTube. I have always been wrestling with the purity of the act of writing and all the other “stuff.” I think I finally feel like I am some place I have always imagined myself—just writing. It makes it nicer to be outside writing poems listening to Charles Mingus. Maybe the pendulum will swing back or maybe this is just it. I am here and I like it.

The great irony, of course, is that we are doing this interview, which is cool and beautiful, and so maybe I ain’t as pure as I am claiming that I feel. But, I am, I really am.

Cane: Purity may be overrated, but honesty is not. It seems to me your ambivalence is the struggle a lot of writers contend with. I remarked recently to someone that “we are in a global crisis of authenticity.” I think such a “crisis” intensifies these questions for artists. I also just came across the Auden quote: “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” Given all that you’ve shared here, what do you think poetry has to offer at this time and for all time?

Lippman: I have spent my entire adult life striving for authenticity and at fifty-three, I am not sure if it matters or not. I was at synagogue this morning. A young man was having his Bar Mitzvah. His father is the cantor at the synagogue and the sanctuary was packed. Every platitude that the rabbi could have spoken, she spoke; every corny, sentimental song that could have been sung, was sung. It was sappy and sentimental and it was so beautiful. People were in tears, the congregation (family and not family) were moved, folks felt something, there was an energy in the room that was real and it did not matter how corny the words, the songs—there was a generosity of heart in the room that was magnetic. It was a generous morning and I think this is what I have always believed and felt about poems—that they have the potential to be that generosity of spirit. That poets have a real potential to be generous with their poems, with one another, with the world that chooses to read poems. This is what poetry offers and I like to believe that this is how I exist as a man who writes poems—that, at the end of the day, I am generous, that my poems are generous, and that, hopefully, ultimately, they have nothing to do with me. Like a song, the poem is a vessel of generosity, it can fill up the heart, blow it wide open, and bring a whole room of people together. Now, that’s something.

Just a little more on generosity.

There is something exclusive about the poetry world. It’s not gentle. My feelings about generosity have a lot to do with this exclusivity. I always come back to music. To the question of whether or not a poem can blur the lines between, well, between anything, in the way that a song can. The answer is probably “no.” That does not prevent me from trying. I just read, for the second time, Khaidja Queen’s book, I’M SO FINE. I kinda felt it, the generosity, the words reaching into that place that music gets me, that makes me feel big and whole and stupid all at once. You know that listening moment when there is so much breaking and bursting inside that you lose yourself, well, that’s where I think poetry needs to be, where poems need to go, what poets need to aspire to do and be. And, not just in the making of poems, but in the sharing of poems, and in the way that they treat each other, as poets, to break down that exclusive feeling that percolates in the public domain. So it can be more gentle and more open-hearted. It would be good for everyone, and for everything. The love train. People get ready. There’s a train a coming. This feeling. This thing.

Cane: It’s the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and I am thinking of footage shot from a train, as his campaign was travelling from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. There’s grainy Super 8 footage of quais crammed with well-wishers from every walk of American life there to wave as he sped past. These days it’s difficult to imagine such a train, but suddenly I am wanting to get ready for it. So, thanks. Give us a closing thought, if you would.

Lippman: It’s funny that you should mention RFK. There was an article about Juan Romero—the busboy who held RFK’s head off the pavement after he had been shot—and I keep thinking about that small act of unbearable kindness, that Mr. Romero had the presence of mind to do such a thing. In the photograph, he’s the only one down there with Kennedy, blood spilling all over the floor, everyone watching. It’s that kind of thing that we need, more people on the floor in these times. Maybe then there would be a train or a dance line or just a group of folks holding hands, a human train of civility and kindness and decency that has nothing to do with death and dying and destruction. Maybe poetry affords this. I think it does. Maybe I want to be the Juan Romero of poetry. Just an average dude trying to do the right and kind thing. The generous thing on a daily basis. Anyway... I want to thank you publicly for engaging me this way. It is a beautiful thing—so much fun and warmth. I’d like to think it’s the train, or The Train. This is how we make it right? Yes.

The rails are long and deep and we ride them all day long into night with song.

 

Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. A 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she is the founder and director of Writers-in- the-Schools. She is the author of Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work.

Excerpt

from Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful

IF YOU DON’T WANT YOUR KIDS TO HAVE SEX DON’T FINISH THE BASEMENT

This guy Lev, at the dinner party said,
If you don’t want your kids to have sex don’t finish the basement.
I don’t remember anything anymore, my fifty-two-year old brain a
soggy piece of kale,
but I remembered what Lev said.
It’s because Lev is the heart in levov
where all the stories come from.
Here’s the story: we were eating the salmon and he was talking about
his kids,
all grown up,
and my kids were in the basement playing ping pong,
not yet thirteen.
There was beer and wine and gluten free challah and gluten-free Tiramisu
and the walls were red and gluten-free.
That’s the whole story.
The other story is that when a guy says something like that
you have to remember where you were when you first had sex.
It could have been in a car, in an attic, between two trees, under the moon,
near the factory, inside the deep blue sea, in the onion patch.
Sex is an onion.
It’s translucent and sweet and will make you cry your face off.
It’s a swimming pool on fire and a gorilla who knows how to speak
seven languages.
If you are lucky enough to have sex in a finished basement,
this is a good thing.
If you have sex in an unfinished basement, not so good—all that dust,
those exposed water heaters, boilers, and rusted rakes.
So when Lev said,
If you don’t want your kids to have sex don’t finish the basement,
I took a bite of my salmon and here’s the last part of the story.
My kids are going to grow up and have sex.
A sad and wide-eyed, ecstatic sex, if they’re lucky,
and so I left the table in the dark, middle of winter to finish the basement—
buy some rugs, some cheap pillows, and a jukebox,
one of those old school Wurlitzers with the automatic eye.
Fill it up with all the songs that make your heart burst, I will tell them.
Play your music
till the needle runs those records bare bone beauty and glisten.

“If You Don’t Want Your Kids To Have Sex Don’t Finish The Basement”
from Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful © 2020 by Matthew Lippman.
Appears with the permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.  
Publication date: March 2, 2020. Available for preorder online.