Joshua Ware

from Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley

EXPLANATORY NOTES

I. Termination Shock

For Jack Spicer’s Ghost and Rod Smith

Jack Spicer’s Ghost ceased haunting EXPLANATORY NOTES years ago. In fact, Jack Spicer’s Ghost ceased haunting anything years ago. The invocation of Jack Spicer’s Ghost in the above dedication is a ploy by the poet to fulfill an unspecified function. While unspecified, the ploy’s failure should be evident, nonetheless, to readers.

Rod Smith is a pseudonym for a former lover of the poet; the proper noun Rod Smith is not a reference to the poet Rod Smith. One would think that such a fact is evident if one seriously considered the well-documented comments made in public by the poet with regard to both Rod Smith and former lovers. Of course, the possibility remains that the reader of this poem will never have met the poet, and even if they have, will never have paid much attention to the comments made in public by the poet regarding Rod Smith and former lovers. The possibility also remains that the poet never made comments about Rod Smith or former lovers in public.

The poet once saw the following written on a restroom wall: “I am the ghost of syrup and stingers, Cegeste and fake novels.” The aforementioned restroom wall was located in Cooperstown, NY inside the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Two Temperatures

flush in
to sandbar
form, converge
in urban
renewal.

Watermarks
ripple in
to liquid speak
and economy
light.

Merge water
with water,
life with
life.

Sometimes, the poet begins “in the midst of affairs,” as opposed to beginning “from the egg.”

Inscribed upon a plaque at the confluence of the South Platte River and the Cherry Creek is Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s poem “Two Rivers.” The poem ends with the line: “‘If you stay, we will not go away.’”

Sometimes, the poet (as reader, and perhaps as writer as well) approaches the poem through mathematical techniques. For example:

Merge water Merge water Merge water Merge water

with water, with water, 1 water , water,

life with life with life 1 life

life. life. life. life.

Merge water Merge 1 Merge

water, 1,

life 1

life. 1.

When one reads the stanza mathematically, the reduced version functions metonymically with the content’s semantic meaning (only if one negates the punctuation, of course). In contradistinction to this method, one can read the stanza’s formal structure as working antithetically to the semantics, in that the line breaks do not “Merge water/ with water,” nor “life with/ life,” but in fact separate them in a spatio-material manner. As such, one can read the stanza as a moment of sincerity, or as a moment of irony.

Cooldrinagh Memories

Char
coal men

swathed in oil
eee dress

sing lather
one an

other
with salves,

lubricating bliss
turned skin.

On April 13, 1906, Samuel Beckett was born at Cooldrinagh in Dublin County.

During his teenage years, the poet admired Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and thus became obsessed with Thomas Sterns Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Quite obviously, “Char/ coal men” alludes to Eliot’s poem.

Both the poet and Beckett suffered traumatic burns as children due to carelessly handling cooking oil around a lit stove top.

Samuel Beckett once wrote: “I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”

Thomas Sterns Eliot once wrote: “Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/ For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to say it.”

In his younger days, the poet attempted to read Beckett’s The Unnamable. While this information technically falls outside the scope of relevance for this particular EXPLANATORY NOTE, the attempt was an important moment in the poet’s literary life because it was the first work written by Beckett that he could not physically or mentally complete. He found this to be an overwhelming success because, in many ways, the failure was an actualization of the exhaustion that Beckett’s characters experience. In a very real manner, something passed from The Unnamable to the poet; the book became a “flow among others…that comes into relation of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows—flows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on.”

Hippocratic Oath

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