The Story of an Ordinary House

 

 

     I have been living in the same place for such a good while that I feel by now I owe the house a few words.  Every building, since it embodies aesthetic judgements, may be read like a work of art, though, if it has been remodeled over the years, it may resemble more the layering of old Troy or a medieval palimpsest than an objet d’art which is fixed after its completion. 

     Patricia and I had always been renters and had moved about in roughly six-year intervals for the first half of our lives – the West Coast, the Mid-West, the East --   before coming to the Hudson Valley, an hour north of New York City.  Due to chance circumstance (a job offer for my wife) we ended up in Goshen, the county seat of Orange County, a place where there are no oranges, though many orchards of apples, and there lingers only a faint reminiscence of a seventeenth century prince named William of Orange, whose name, of course, had itself nothing to do with citrus fruit.

     We looked for an old place, eschewing the treeless and sidewalk-less developments where dogs will bark madly from inside their picture windows at the rare passer-by who ventures to stroll in front of their territory.  Such homes are common on the outskirts of Goshen, and are popular with most of the younger set, but in the village’s center one finds the style of an earlier era, or rather of several earlier eras.  The town offices occupy a building a part of which had been the 1773 Farmers’ Hall Academy where Noah Webster briefly taught, the village hall was built in 1816, a track for trotters still functions that had opened in 1838, and the 1841 Greek Revival courthouse is still in use not far from a police station housed in an 1867 former New York and Erie railway station.  In the village a good share of the homes are over a hundred years old, historic by American standards.

     After a year of searching we bought a house built in 1892 in what is called the “folk Victorian” style, lacking the showy towers of Queen Anne and Italianate styles and the mansard roofs of the Second Empire homes, but spacious with four bedrooms, a full basement, and a walk-up attic.  Its very lack of pretension, its ordinariness, marks its value as an index of late nineteenth century small town upstate New York taste.  Once it boasted the era’s usual gingerbread: porch trim and brackets, gable treatments and corbels, but all these ornaments were removed during the 1970s when the house underwent major changes, including acquiring a cover of siding.  In the interior the pocket doors between entrance hall, living room, and parlor were dismantled, and two panes of stained glass removed.

     The loss of decorative elements is not, however, the sole alteration that the modernization a half century ago brought.  What had been a back stairway was removed to make more room for closets in the biggest bedroom and a second  toilet downstairs was added.  While a large porch already wrapped around two sides of the structure, at that time an even bigger back deck was added, signifying the social shift toward privacy and away from the welcoming openness of porches and front stoops.  So the traditional back entry became a pantry and the kitchen gained a new sliding door allowing access to the spacious deck.  A large in-ground swimming pool was added in the back and a fence erected.  The old bluestone sidewalks were replaced first with concrete and later with asphalt, and the hitching post was hauled off, perhaps to be sold then to the builder of a new faux Victorian. 

     The renovators of the seventies seemed to have a decided predilection for the artificial.  Apart from the siding, a fireplace was built in the living room using imitation stones made of plaster which look entirely unconvincing to us but which have inspired visitors to exclaim how grand our “old stone fireplace” looks.  At the same time horrid drop ceilings were put up in parlor, dining room, and kitchen and the very ugliest tone of shag carpeting installed.  The walls of the living room and on the new fireplace chimney upstairs were covered with simulated bricks, quarter-inch slices glued to the wall, though real bricks had been used  only in the foundation of the original structure. 

     So the first residents’ preferences, expected at the time and preferable to some of us even now, for decoration, natural materials, and a welcoming face to the community around all turned in time toward their opposites: plainness, artificiality, and a preference for enjoying one’s leisure in private.  We did ameliorate some of the most egregious results by removing that carpeting and refinishing the hardwood floors throughout the downstairs and in the corridor above, and by painting the dark fake bricks white, leaving us with what Patricia calls “a cross between a Victorian and a Barbie Dream House.”

     We continue to relish the house’s vestiges of original style: an unusual mechanical front doorbell, for instance, and the decorative interior brass doorknobs and keyholes.  The swimming pool is gone, at what was surely a price greater than that of its construction, but we still have a hand pump in the yard, a somewhat puzzling relic since I read that the village’s water system has operated since 1872.  Many of our neighbors have unnecessarily removed trees and shrubs, and we are glad that our own were never cut.  We are grateful that the greenery is still there, producing lawn waste in profusion when we choose to hack back the foliage, and the birds, groundhogs, squirrels, and deer, whose taste does not change as people’s does, are able to continue eating the black walnuts, Concord grapes, and white mulberries that  grow in profusion, just as they did when the house was first built.    

An Evening at Soulshine

 

 

     The event was produced on December 20, 2023 at the Soulshine Market in Pine Bush, New York by James Pogo.  Dan Andreana performed poetry scored like music stretching words to their limit with expressive variation in pitch, volume, and timbre.  Then James Pogo and his associate Kevin, performing as Flux Duo ++ passed out party hats and lay on their backs shirtless with lit candles in their navels while playing a little toy organ and leading the audience in “Happy Birthday.”  The third portion of the program was a set of simultaneous readings by me and Patricia.  The evening was concluded by Steve Roe who carefully set the stage, lighted it, and performed a moving song dedicated to the children of Gaza.

     Artist Tom Gargiulo, only just arrived from Florida, introduced the performers.

 

 

document 1:  a sample of Dan Andreana’s texts

 

Softly 1/8/19

 

nil ad sense a)voided

oh doze on the lid!

brat shines boldly

bodily in every nigh(t

hangar shut down

with doug fir sprigs

needling the crossing guard.

they sings the songs

and sonnets of tar

burnt under a frond

like paper clippings.

your’sis hours in t)his.

a gradient of wan

to wax above

the rippled sea

in a gully of sand.

she waits on the bar(d

expecting any moon

for the path(age

over the moss.

 

 

25#2 (2017)

 

S take urn

table lego BL

ox E blew shrill

tower over crow

D lighted my lift

on 47th teen strut

terd door from the Reich

a champion rains on

foul ingot morsels

stuck to frozen lip edge

G oughtta rat a tat

sir man on the muonty

red queer queen a miss

blacking out the middle

slight offended shuffle

T rye red shot guzzler

shooting from hip

corner pocket

got a rocket in?

lawn before the dawn

tossed out the water

grayer than black is white

just before going to work

she said why knot?

So we tied one on

 

 

 

document 2: William Seaton’s simultaneous readings

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning/ Henry Miller

 

 

Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed

And worthy of acceptation.  Fire is bright,

Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light

Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:

And love is fire.  And when I say at need

I love thee . . . mark! . . . I love thee—in thy sight

I stand transfigured, glorified aright,

With conscience of the new rays that proceed

Out of my face toward thine.  There’s nothing low

In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures

Who love God, God accepts while loving so.

And what I feel, across the inferior features

Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show

How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

 

 

Sauntering along the boulevard I had noticed her verging toward me with that curious trot-about air of a whore and the run-down heels and cheap jewelry and the pasty look of their kind which the rouge only accentuates. It was not difficult to come to terms with her. We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Elephant and talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the covers thrown back. She didn’t rush things, Germaine. She sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was wearing. Tres chic! she thought. They were once, but I had worn the seat out of them; fortunately the jacket covered my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing toward me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it.

 

 

Nicene Creed/deSade

 

I believe in one God, The Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, The Only Begotten Son of God, Born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God, Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven, And by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, And became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He suffered death and was buried, And rose again on the third day In accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven And is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory To judge the living and the dead And his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father [and the Son], Who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, Who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead And the life of the world to come. Amen.

 

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell. There is no stupidity religions have omitted to revere; and you know just as well as I, my friends, that when one examines a human institution, the first thing one must do is discard all religious notions. They are poison to lucidity. Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power.

 

 

Hitler/Marx & Engels

 

Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their new country offered them (fertility, the nature of the climate, etc.), and profiting also by the abundance of manual labour furnished them by the inferior race, they developed intellectual and organizing faculties which had hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes. Within the course of a few thousand years, or even centuries, they gave life to cultures whose primitive traits completely corresponded to the character of the founders, though modified by adaptation to the peculiarities of the soil and the characteristics of the subjugated people. But finally the conquering race offended against the principles which they first had observed, namely, the maintenance of their racial stock unmixed, and they began to intermingle with the subjugated people. Thus they put an end to their own separate existence; for the original sin committed in Paradise has always been followed by the expulsion of the guilty parties.

 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.  Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

 

document 3: the Flux Duo ++

 

document 4: Steve Roe’s song

 

“Blue”

 

Intro (spoken): “it is said that our understanding of happiness comes from the experiences of our childhood.”

 

Hold up sign “blue.”

 

Hold up sign “for the children of Gaza.”

 

Sung:

 “keep things simple, my love, and look at the sky….. it’s blue”

“Sit by my side, my love, and stare at the sea…. It’s blue.”

Keep your heart true, my love, for we are all born to die…. It’s blue.”

Mike Jurkovic's Mooncussers

 

Mike Jurkovic, Mooncussers, Luchador Press.

      Mooncussers -- the title alone suggests the book poetic qualities of Mike Jurkovic’s new collection.  Jurkovic likes words, he likes to play with words, and this one is odd and unlikely, semi-obscure and yet colloquial, “pop” even, energetic and enigmatic enough to stand at the head of this new volume from Luchador Press. 

     That same affection for words emerges in his occasionally offbeat lexicon (such as “susurrus”) and unpredictable cultural references beginning with whatever share Disney’s feature may have had on the title but continuing through Billy the Kid, Baku the eater of nightmares, the oceanographer Marie Poland Fish, Buddha’s wife, and a dreadful torture device called the Judas Chair. 

     In the Hudson Valley Jurkovic is prominent as a reader and performer, a central figure in Calling All Poets, who continues to cultivate poetry in performance including the mainline hip tradition of poetry with jazz.  His lines should be read aloud, even by someone alone in a room. In that way his breath units are evident, not long Ginsbergian incantatory lines, but more like the musical phrasing of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley.  

    His sensibility is shaped by jazz and rock, and a good number of the poems exhibit the disciplined but improvisatory measures of a musician “in the groove.”  This is true of his work in general, not only of his explicit celebrations of the music scene (as in “Breaching Aristotle [month 4],” “Brubeck’s Bar #6,” and “Ill Fitting Suit”).

     Jurkovic is capable of the pure lyric note as when he calls “the river a hug of diamonds.”  (“Grey Note”) or, in the lightest of passages

 

A lot of times

 (when rainbows preside)

I find myself dancing

through God’s good hour.

from  “Light Between Buildings”

 

  Now and then his righteous indignation bubbles over, as when he observes “In a Walmart In Kentucky” “that we condemn every besieged democracy/ but our own,” notes in “17 Two Miles North” that “another black kid’s gone down,” or laments the national obsession with guns in “The Merchant’s Receipt.”  As he comments in another piece “Have you read my stuff/ it’s freaking depressing,” but, then, “I don’t see stars anymore/ just bullet holes where the light sneaks in.” (“where the light sneaks in”)

     Most often, though, Jurkovic’s poetic eye is simply gazing reality in the face and managing to do the dance in spite of the fact that everything is marred by the fallenness of the world and it’s all inexplicable in the end: “They never really explain these things.”   (“Scuff Marks”)  Even in a noir world where a girl’s “bright wide eyes” are a moment later “cisterns of dream” (“Hat Check Girl”), watching vision take shape with poise and style is, if not redemptive, at least reassuring.  Mike Jurkovic is on the stage up front soloing all around and about the catastrophe, making big-hearted clever nudges to build another little machine of words, each offering the solace of company if not surcease of sorrow.

 

each mad essay

must cast doubt

on the one before.

            (Gracie)

 

     He places his words like the seamstress in “The Raw Edge,” “giving no inch more/ than one deserves.”   Jurkovic has woven an acute, engaging, and melodious fabric of vision in Mooncussers.   In his verses, so well-crafted as to seem offhand, he offers the greatest comfort we can enjoy here below, a bemused fellow human contemplating how strange it all is.  The reader might find in his poetry rewards similar to what he hears in music.

 

to hear Monk move

and give us

(in his own disturbed grace)

the inside track

on the outside joke

                     (“Breaching Aristotle [month4]”)

A Very Funny Fellow [Donald Lev]

     Donald Lev’s new book A Very Funny Fellow (NYQ Books) derives its title from a friend whom Lev quotes as telling him forty years ago, “You’re a very funny fellow, but you are no poet.” The first part of this proposition at any rate is proved abundantly in this new collection. Lev’s humor will appeal to readers who have a taste for mordant existential joshing in the vein of Stephen Crane’s Black Riders (and, in fact, Crane’s Sullivan County haunts are not far distant from the contemporary poet’s Ulster digs). Even the Muse and the God of Israel “dissolve in laughter” when the poet apologetically addresses them in “Sacrifice.” In “Chalk” Stalin is the guy who couldn’t get a joke.
     Apart from the funny business Lev is a poet of thought and theme, though he would doubtless pooh-pooh such a notion. With an unassuming lightness reminiscent of Piet Hein’s Grooks, Lev spins out little dialectical webs that define an ironic persona, self-reflective to a fault, confused and weak in the tangle of every day’s human predicament, yet whose neuroses rest on a broader foundation of affirmation and for whom poetry provides the redemptive charms necessary to get through the day.
That takes a bit of doing for Lev whose waking is “full of the usual apprehension, afflicted with “the pain of being” (“The Acceptance”). The writers in “Our National Literature” are “digging deeply into themselves . . . to hold the pain precisely.” The title of “Let Me Out” declares his mantra unreservedly and urgently.
     In “Homage to the Playwright” the persona is looking for the click in the imagination that can resolve suffering at least contingently – with alcohol for Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or, alternatively, with art, poetry, and movies. Making life livable is the business of the imagination, as one sees with the poet’s outburst in a crowded theater in “Fire,” or when he retreats from “The Smaller Television” in the bar to the one yet smaller in the “lair” of his mind. He envisions his “Career” as a movie. Poetry is, after all, necessary as matzohball soup according to “Say What Is Real, Marsyas.”
     A portion of the pain can be traced to missed communication. Even as post-structural critics question the efficiency of language, Lev highlights missed signs, error through blind ignorance, the unknowability of the spectacle before our eyes. The author finds himself at a loss as he has discarded the instructions “in a sudden fit of despair” (“Technology”). His audience is theoretical, unreachable in “So Many Who Might Understand.” His literary ancestor Kafka had his own frustrations, but in “The Question” our twenty-first century author can only lag belatedly behind, calling out the master of insecurity in vain. His very metaphors in “Breakfast with Prufrock” and “Poem on a Nice Sunny Afternoon” pause, admit their own confusion, and give up before completion.
     More immediate human love sometimes proves elusive as well. While affirming “Family is Everything,” he confesses his aloneness and is left with bleak television instead. References to his parents are uncomfortable, often rueful. But his devotion to the late poet Enid Dame is moving and profound. As “Lines in Winter for Enid” puts it, “Something’s vanished/ Nothing has taken its place.” Tenderness emerges, too, in his poems for Charlie Barton and Ira Cohen, though in “When I Seek an Image” he provides an ironic corrective, saying “The past never was./ All that ever was for me is here./ sitting in my chair, seeking images.”
     He can ridicule easy access to New Age truth (shamanistic tripping in “The Serpent,” nature worship in “I Blame This One …”) and maintains “I have a headache where my third eye should be (from “The Space Thing”). Earlier intellectual fashions fare no better. Meeting Ingmar Bergman after a seder, they play chess, with Lev objecting his amateurism, “till daylight erased us.”
     In spite of himself, Lev’s vision casts fiery sparks. His alienation earned through suffering justifies his use of the title “East of Eden.” His spiritual yearning is explicit in “One Slip,” and “God is a Red Peanut” is more, after all, than a punch line in a title. The voice is not wholly un-Job-like that in “In this Dream” conflates his almighty computer with the God of Israel and worries, “Am I lost?” Whether he likes it or not, the “Spirit of Righteousness” animates him in “Witness.”
     Lev’s natural physical neurotic uneasiness is balanced with a truly redemptive affirmation, a conviction that “whatever is, is right.” What might have been a lost sheep in the Bible is a wandering dog here (“Dog Story”). Let not your heart be troubled, the tale ends well. In “Special Edition” he marvels at the wondrous particularity of everything and cannot resist saying, at the possible risk of sounding silly, “I am grateful to be part of it.” He quotes Buber “the world is incomprehensible, but/ embraceable” (“To Embrace It”) and gives us a “Meditation” very nearly straight: “See there the umbilical knotting? The universe?” Just when the reader thinks he may have dropped down a few levels of irony the Buddha stops by to fix his plumbing (“The Buddha”).
     In “Total Eclipse” in a few colloquial lines, tossed off with the casual expertise of a master, Lev deploys his attention to the low-mimetic (someone’s “getting soused on pitchers of beer/ and setting his beard on fire”), the cosmic (lunar eclipse), and the tragic/mythic – it is his friend’s thirty-third birthday, his “crucifixion year.”
     May Donald Lev continue recording his dodgy encounters with everyday life and with Ultimate Reality, what he calls his “fleeting thoughts” (“One Slip”) for our amusement and instruction. Horace would have patted him on the head (receiving doubtless a quizzical grimace in return). As a writer and as an editor (his Home Planet News remains one of the most consistently provocative and classy little journals in America) Lev is a long distance runner. He apologizes for being unable to write as his “Titanic” sinks, and chaos surrounds him, yet here – fortunately -- are the words before us on the page.