Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County. See all of Chuck's letters here.
*
Hi Beth,
I had a chance while healing at the dawn of the mind-body era to sit with an eminent psychiatrist for several sessions at a deep discount. His greeting was lovely—ah, he said, you have finally come to me.
First you must stretch, and you must buy a book (he garbles the title, he garbles the author). I cannot give it to you; you must get it for yourself.
I couldn’t understand a word through his heavy accent in the unfamiliar setting and had to ask several times that he repeat himself, until he practically screamed at me, Stretching, by Bob Anderson, go buy that book now, learn how to stretch.
In my room at the Hyatt at the DFW airport, I was listening to some classical music on the radio, doing my brand-new stretching routine and, I swear to God, I started having visions. I couldn’t wait to tell my new guru!
It means you are out of balance, he practically screamed, go stretch more now!
Isn’t this a way to write well—to stretch, to have a vision, teeter a little, write it down, return to our senses; write it down again?
And vision turns to work, and work turns to drudgery, and everyone gets lost sometimes.
In our last session, for a reason still unplumbed, he gave me a fifty minute monologue on how to get what I want. To say the truth, it seemed a little too goal-oriented for my taste.
When he was through, I made my single utterance—but Doctor, How do I know what I want? He busted a gut, laughing so hard that his eyes disappeared into the wrinkles of his face—Ah hah hah, my friend, you nevah do, you nevah do!
I have received advice that a poem will announce where it wants to go, that even its form will unfold relatively uncoaxed. That is the tricky word of it all, isn’t it—relatively?
I do not want my diary read. Thus, there is a partnership between my poems and me.
I tell them where I want them to go. Sometimes I am right; sometimes they listen.
Best,
CKT
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Showing posts with label Notes from New Jersey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Notes from New Jersey. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Notes from NJ — Hi Beth (# 4)
Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County. See all of Chuck's letters here.
*
Hi Beth,
I started writing poetry because of David Rosenthal, who won the Weekly Reader poetry contest in 1960 or ‘61 with his poem “Vicious Dog,” a poem so utterly significant and cool I still do it at readings.
And that’s the thing, poetry is cool, and you can take shelter in its eccentricities and social asymmetry; you can find a place in it.
I was in a pretty square business for most of my working life, and found divertissement, for instance, during a sort of extended poetry adolescence, in writing poems on cocktail napkins and setting them on fire, a kind of bar-trick exotica in the workaday world, like darts, maybe, pinball, a little nerdy flirtiness.
How they struck me, then, sitting on my zafu at Zen Mountain Monastery in another iteration of my life to come, these words of the abbot there, John Daido Loori Roshi:
I see your little half-smiles, the way you walk around here zombie-like, a thousand miles away from it, wake-up! Enlightenment is hard—you need to practice like your hair is on fire. Go deeper!
It’s hard to give up on a poem; it’s hard not to give up on a poem. Pictures of cake do not satisfy hunger—pictures of cake do. Poetry requires ease, poetry requires struggle; it’s pleasure and work, it’s going deeper.
Best,
CKT
Vicious Dog
Vicious dog, you squint
From behind a high lacy fence on Hudson Street,
And the moon is a pale bowl of exhaustion.
Your eyes glint with a wan, listless albumin.
What is meant by your muscular, angry pose?
In the liquid night, someone is playing Bach on a trumpet.
Hysterical at two cops passing your square domain:
You’re a million years too late.
— David Rosenthal, 1960
*
Hi Beth,
I started writing poetry because of David Rosenthal, who won the Weekly Reader poetry contest in 1960 or ‘61 with his poem “Vicious Dog,” a poem so utterly significant and cool I still do it at readings.
And that’s the thing, poetry is cool, and you can take shelter in its eccentricities and social asymmetry; you can find a place in it.
I was in a pretty square business for most of my working life, and found divertissement, for instance, during a sort of extended poetry adolescence, in writing poems on cocktail napkins and setting them on fire, a kind of bar-trick exotica in the workaday world, like darts, maybe, pinball, a little nerdy flirtiness.
How they struck me, then, sitting on my zafu at Zen Mountain Monastery in another iteration of my life to come, these words of the abbot there, John Daido Loori Roshi:
I see your little half-smiles, the way you walk around here zombie-like, a thousand miles away from it, wake-up! Enlightenment is hard—you need to practice like your hair is on fire. Go deeper!
It’s hard to give up on a poem; it’s hard not to give up on a poem. Pictures of cake do not satisfy hunger—pictures of cake do. Poetry requires ease, poetry requires struggle; it’s pleasure and work, it’s going deeper.
Best,
CKT
Vicious Dog
Vicious dog, you squint
From behind a high lacy fence on Hudson Street,
And the moon is a pale bowl of exhaustion.
Your eyes glint with a wan, listless albumin.
What is meant by your muscular, angry pose?
In the liquid night, someone is playing Bach on a trumpet.
Hysterical at two cops passing your square domain:
You’re a million years too late.
— David Rosenthal, 1960
Monday, September 12, 2011
Notes from NJ — Hi Beth (# 3)
Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County. See all of Chuck's letters here.
*
*
Hi Beth,
The 727 was nimble although it could be tricky flying it for the first thousand hours or so. But once its quirks were learned it was the most dynamic and responsive airplane I ever flew, especially when the October wind, in the clarity and gusts of autumn—on the Expressway to thirty-one, say, or the River to thirteen at La Guardia.
Going up the Hudson River on an especially turbulent day, with a brand-new copilot flying the leg and getting a little bit behind the airplane, I had to take it for a few moments to let him regroup.
He was surprised and pleased when I gave it back to him, but it was his own limits he had bumped-up against, not mine. Everybody has to be new. We passed Manhattan’s caverns measureless to man in pretty good shape; he turned and crossed the stacks at seven hundred feet and greased it on without the need for further talk from me.
We hear, in our critique groups and open mics, poems that bump the limits of our own imaginations, poems more excellent than we might perceive, and poems scratched and scribbled while another poet is reading.
Not everyone can fly an airplane or write a poem, but everyone can want, and everyone can work within the realm of coming true, and everyone, when they cannot praise, can seek to encourage.
Best,
CKT
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Notes from NJ — Hi Beth (# 2)
Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County. See all of Chuck's letters here.
*
Hi Beth,
There was a sort of bistro we used to frequent in Los Angeles on layovers between our flights from New York and back. Ten or fifteen times, returning to the hotel, I met the same street-singer, and we took the random offering of our contact to come a little more alive and well.
He'd sing some jazz, and I would be his audience. I'd give him a five or a ten or, once, a twenty, but it was only that one time, and it was a while after this:
I asked him one night, after another of our lyrical conversations, if he could help me to an understanding of the basis of our more than ordinary affinity.
With his index finger tapping on my chest and the history of art in his rheumy eyes, he said this—a heart knows a heart. He said a heart knows a heart.
And isn’t it the failure sometimes of our poetic representations, to make romance of the deprivations of street-singers, and isn’t it our triumph sometimes to do the same with our own, to wrangle from our aches a thing sublime and lilting with a new reality?
It has been nearly fifty years since we began to perceive the element of racism in the phrase, “Columbus discovered America.” Isn’t poetry exactly this, discovering hearts, writers’ and readers,’ their teeming contents, already there? And to arrange from our distillations true and engaging things, isn’t it the way of poetry, exactly this, to awaken in a reader’s heart the things already there and burgeoning?
Best,
CKT
*
Hi Beth,
There was a sort of bistro we used to frequent in Los Angeles on layovers between our flights from New York and back. Ten or fifteen times, returning to the hotel, I met the same street-singer, and we took the random offering of our contact to come a little more alive and well.
He'd sing some jazz, and I would be his audience. I'd give him a five or a ten or, once, a twenty, but it was only that one time, and it was a while after this:
I asked him one night, after another of our lyrical conversations, if he could help me to an understanding of the basis of our more than ordinary affinity.
With his index finger tapping on my chest and the history of art in his rheumy eyes, he said this—a heart knows a heart. He said a heart knows a heart.
And isn’t it the failure sometimes of our poetic representations, to make romance of the deprivations of street-singers, and isn’t it our triumph sometimes to do the same with our own, to wrangle from our aches a thing sublime and lilting with a new reality?
It has been nearly fifty years since we began to perceive the element of racism in the phrase, “Columbus discovered America.” Isn’t poetry exactly this, discovering hearts, writers’ and readers,’ their teeming contents, already there? And to arrange from our distillations true and engaging things, isn’t it the way of poetry, exactly this, to awaken in a reader’s heart the things already there and burgeoning?
Best,
CKT
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Notes from NJ — Hi Beth (# 1)
Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County.
*
Hi Beth,
In a prior life, I did other things and saw differently. And how could there be poetry without these prior lives and previous vantage points?
We were flying an all-nighter from Los Angeles to New York on the 707, an airplane the élan of which will never be attained to again, one thinks and thought, wrong twice.
As happens sometimes in the middle of the night, we were cleared direct, and once the I.N.S. was set, the night turned into one of watching for the unexpected.
The Captain owned a sailboat which had outlived its usefulness as a bare-boat charter in Tortola, and he was giving it away to a college in Florida for the tax write-off. As the three of us sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and watching all the blinking lights and the needles on the dials, the copilot asked whether the Captain had depreciated the boat for tax purposes. He had, to zero. “The boat is worth nothing, then,” the copilot said, “The value of the write-off is also zero.”
So there it was, like jazz and poetry, the unexpected note:
He took the longest drag of his unfiltered Camel, the Captain did, exhaling it shimmering and blue, turned to us, his audience for three thousand miles, and said the most wonderful thing—“You know, it’s a goddamn good thing I really love to sail.”
It’s a tough racket, poetry, full of striving and missing the mark, of almost accidental successes and utterly undeserved disappointments. Shouldn’t we poets, all of us, new, emerging, established, coming or going, stay awake to its pleasures and enrichments?
CKT, 8/14/11, Lake Mohawk
*
Hi Beth,
In a prior life, I did other things and saw differently. And how could there be poetry without these prior lives and previous vantage points?
We were flying an all-nighter from Los Angeles to New York on the 707, an airplane the élan of which will never be attained to again, one thinks and thought, wrong twice.
As happens sometimes in the middle of the night, we were cleared direct, and once the I.N.S. was set, the night turned into one of watching for the unexpected.
The Captain owned a sailboat which had outlived its usefulness as a bare-boat charter in Tortola, and he was giving it away to a college in Florida for the tax write-off. As the three of us sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and watching all the blinking lights and the needles on the dials, the copilot asked whether the Captain had depreciated the boat for tax purposes. He had, to zero. “The boat is worth nothing, then,” the copilot said, “The value of the write-off is also zero.”
So there it was, like jazz and poetry, the unexpected note:
He took the longest drag of his unfiltered Camel, the Captain did, exhaling it shimmering and blue, turned to us, his audience for three thousand miles, and said the most wonderful thing—“You know, it’s a goddamn good thing I really love to sail.”
It’s a tough racket, poetry, full of striving and missing the mark, of almost accidental successes and utterly undeserved disappointments. Shouldn’t we poets, all of us, new, emerging, established, coming or going, stay awake to its pleasures and enrichments?
CKT, 8/14/11, Lake Mohawk
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