Intransigent Poultry Farms

"This sounds like a very old story told in a new voice."-- Yusef Komunyakaa

Rosemary Murphy's animated death narrative in Milcho Manchevski's 2001 Dust had more of an impact than the story deserves. We've seen this kind of thing before done better in other contexts, the ferocious struggle with letting go as the body fails and the will defies, longing for a cigarette more than sex, which is seemingly the longing of every intellect seeking deliverance, including Svevo, which is indicative of necessity. Smokers should be allowed to die in peace. Rosemary's Prue is not central to Manchevski's Ottoman love story. Her character is absent, not solely because it is a history of her multi-ethnic conception. She is trapped by a past to which she is so bound that her only outlet is embellishment, a particularly eastern, Turkish conceit. It is an attractive absence, like my on again off again dialectic with the poet Robert Thomas.

I have engaged with him as a poet myself for many years, and he and his wife Cheryl and myself met briefly during a University of Pennsylvania's attempt at hybridization of the traditional literary reading. The hybridization failed; the coffee house in which the reading took place has shuttered its doors, our mothers have expired, Robert and I are still slugging it out in our fifties, and sixties in his case, with me cratering in to an overwhelmed nearly destitute obsolescence, wondering about his art, my own, my struggle to comply with marketable demand.

There is no need to over-analyze that our vocational endeavor made us friends, Robert and I, but what the hell is it that this relation is digitally derived? We are and aren't familiar to each other, and I have restrained the worst aspects, my lack of reticence, because I appreciate his aesthetic skill without resentment. His motifs are so different I appreciate them without desire of emulation. Not that I can't consider some of his strategies in comparison to mine, inclusive of hedging minute portions of envious snot for his bylines which every creative writer wants. Meaning I'll never see space in Poetry Magazine. My technique would never please Don Share nor his successors. And since I am perfectly attuned and stereotypical of the anonymous miserable poet, that's fine. I tried Poetry once. Perhaps there is a rebound goal on my deathbed.

For the sake of veracity, however, most authors and writers lives are not changed substantially, even by success.