Monthly Archives: December 2006

Innovation and Satisfaction

Billy Collins is the new Stephen King. Now that our Dark Master has gone all lit’ry with stories in The New Yorker, liking our former poet laureate (and his female counterpart, Mary Oliver) is the kind of thing I have to confess with a guilty shrug, as far as my poet friends and cyber-colleagues are concerned. At the same time I have become furiously bored with my own work – oh god not another 40-line lyric about housework and death – and most of the narrative free verse that comes across my desk as the judge of the Winning Writers war poetry contest.

As a writer, I’m hungry for stylistic innovation but can’t find a way in. I was the kind of teenage fogey who refused to read Andrei Bely and Donald Barthelme in high school, as some kind of protest against the crisis of authority among 1970s-80s progressive educators that meant there was no one to protect me from getting my lunch money stolen. (I first heard a principal say “the child must express himself” when the child in question was sitting on my head.) Now I wish I’d paid more attention in that modernism seminar. Sorry, Mr. Everdell.


But as a reader, I find that the poems that have saved my life over the years don’t do any fancy tricks with style and syntax. When I want to be astounded and entertained, to say “I didn’t know you could make poetry do that!”, I turn to mad geniuses like Gabriel Gudding and Jonah Winter. When I feel like jumping off a ledge, though, I read Anne Sexton’s “Angels of the Love Affair”, Wilfred Owen’s “Greater Love”, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Man Watching”, Stephen Dobyns’ “Indifference to Consequence”, or anything in Jack Gilbert’s latest book Refusing Heaven. And, yes, even some poems by Mary Oliver, who reminds me to rejoice, recede and let the world speak first.

Why is it so hard to optimize all those variables at once? Do surrealism, linguistic experimentation and unusual associative leaps/juxtapositions somehow work against a direct emotional connection with the reader? By connection I don’t necessarily mean a heart-tugging narrative, but something that at least implicates me personally, that tells me why I should care enough to wrestle with the complexities of this poem. (Some writers who get the basket and the foul: Mark Levine, Robert Randolph, Joan Houlihan.)

Or maybe the problem is just my inability to enjoy the experience of a poem, moment by moment, without rushing ahead to extricate the Meaning. I’m the kind of person for whom the Animaniacs invented the Wheel of Morality. 

Poem: Resistance

Cheek against the woodgrain O forgive
     (gray perfume of wax and rain)
this need of man strength of honor’s fist
     (how like a mouse into the crushed cushions)
against the rape the spit and tearing
     (I brought my pain. The small dry seeds.)
and why not stand in sun though we stand on nothing
     (sage incense of ash of libraries)
begrudge me not protection till your terrible rescue
     (everything that breathes here is already burnt)

Knees against the leather I feel the arms
     (how soon the boot blinds the battered clay)
falling and falling like axes
     (across your face is mine)
little rats the flesh worries
     (the brain waits for those other cold teeth)
who would not raise the Barabbas hand
     (seeing himself raised)

Still against the stone the silence bells
     (under the dress darkness under the soles smoke)
something passes not time but its longer shadow
     (behold the same sky prisoner torturer)
where was he night nailed to day between them
     (in the tomb in the middle of time)
terrible it passes will we fear him
     (stronger than the evil stones)


          published in Fulcrum, 2004

Crumbs from the Master’s Table

The story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28 has always disturbed me . It’s tough to put a positive spin on Jesus seeming to reject a mother’s plea for her sick child (and not very politely at that) because she belongs to the wrong race. Lately I’ve been wondering if he was testing her, to see whether she responded to prejudice with humble and unshaken faith rather than returning hostilities. A variant of his question to the man at the pool of Bethesda, “Do you want to be healed?”

Garret Keizer, who really ought to be the most famous Christian writer in America, offers a unique perspective in this Christian Century article from 1999:



What the gospel tells us, first of all, is that even Jesus sets limits. Even Jesus does not expect to help everybody. He is sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He can refuse to answer a ringing telephone. “He did not answer her a word.”

But even Jesus, who presumably has divine authorization for his limits (“I was sent …”), allows those limits to be stretched by another’s necessity. In other words, the rule here is that there is no rule, only a creative tension between our finite capacities and the world’s infinite need. And we shall perhaps have more energy for meeting the latter if we stop believing that the presence of tension in our lives argues for some deficiency in our faith. The servant is not above his master.
(Read the full article here.)

I think Keizer’s realistic humility is a compelling alternative to the rich liberal guilt trap. As Americans, we feel ashamed of the wealth gap between ourselves and the rest of the world, but the potentially infinite demands on our generosity cause such burnout that we then feel entitled to pamper ourselves. This is why so many liberal sermons on the “ethics of Jesus” depress me, with their simplistic emphasis on wealth redistribution rather than wealth creation, as if the only reason children were starving in Africa was that you (yes, you in the third pew, I can see you) had to have a new Treo 750. But I believe that everyone, no matter how strong, needs help and spiritual nourishment; everyone, no matter how weak, has a role to play as an active participant in her own healing.

Today in church, in the space of 90 seconds, our minister said, “Resist consumerism this Christmas – make donations in your friends’ names to Episcopal Relief and Development” and “Crafts from last week’s Christmas Fair are on sale in the parish hall at coffee hour”.

Car Talk with Jesus

Me (driving home from the gym, worrying about my place in the literary pantheon and whether it’s really a virtue to eat an entire fruitcake so it won’t go stale): “If only I knew how to be happy! Oh, Jesus, why can’t I be happy?”

Jesus: “If you wanted to be happy, you would be. Obviously you want something else more. What is it?”

Me: “I want to be important.“

Jesus (who lately has been channeling Mr. T): “I died for you, fool! It doesn’t get more important than that.”

Me: “Um, that’s really nice of you and all, but it feels kind of generic. I mean, you died for everyone and I’m just incorporated by reference. Is there anything that makes me important as me?“

Jesus: “All operators are busy assisting other customers…please stay on the line…”

Poem: My Spam Folder

Ruin anyone anywhere. Your penis
could become longer. Access secret credit
histories, best loan rates, amateur wives.
This is what they don’t want you to know.
Levitra. Cialis. Viagra.
Turn your worm into a snake. Make women scream.

Go ahead and scream
at your boss, that penis.
You could invent the next Viagra
working from home! All you need is credit
and we’re here for you, even if everyone you know
thinks you’re a schmuck, even your wife.

With our hot young Russian mail-order wives
you wouldn’t have to understand them when they scream.
That’s about all they’re good for, you know.
Grow hair on your chest, enlarge your penis;
puberty’s over before you credit
it, bub, from here on it’s mortgages and Viagra.

Choke your chicken with both hands! With Viagra
you’ll never hear another complaint from your wife.
We don’t care if you have bad credit,
male pattern baldness, eat too much ice cream.
Write us a check today, pencil or pen is
fine, we already know

where you live. Learn what Wall Street pros know!
What if you’d invested in Viagra
in 1987? A Swiss bank account is open, is
waiting for you to help the wife
of dead dictator Sani Abacha cream
off Nigeria’s oil wealth. She just needs your credit

card number. “Socialism’s discredited,”
she whispers seductively, “Those in the know
take all they can.” But you’re stuck at the screen,
cubicled, dumb with choice. Viagra
or Slim-Fast? Porn or mortgages? Your wife,
if you really had one, would say you think with your penis.

But ask yourself: what if this Viagra, that penis cream,
is your only creditable shot at a meatspace wife?
Don’t press that delete key. We know more than you know.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)

Missing Angels

The Dec. 11 issue of People Magazine reports on the Missing Angels movement, a group of bereaved parents who are lobbying state governments to issue birth certificates, as well as death certificates, for their stillborn babies. Founder Joanne Cacciatore, an Arizona social worker, recalls the pain she felt when she called the state’s bureau of vital statistics for a birth certificate for her daughter, who was born dead on her due date, and “the woman on the other end said, ‘You didn’t have a baby, you had a fetus.'”

Parents like Cacciatore say the certificate helps them grieve because it acknowledges that their child was a real person whom they lost. Abortion rights activists won’t stand for that:


In most of the bills, a stillbirth is defined as the unintended intrauterine death of an unborn child of at least 20 weeks’ gestation – problematic, according to Elisabeth Benjamin, director of the Reproductive Rights Project of the New York Civil Liberties Union, because “a child would have rights independent of the mother. We prefer the word ‘fetus.'”


Now, I don’t pretend to have a solution to the abortion dilemma, but this kind of cognitive dissonance is unsustainable. I thought feminism was about listening to women’s voices and validating their experiences. If the only way to make abortion acceptable to the American public is to pretend the baby never existed, pro-choicers have to wave away the deepest sorrows of women who feel they lost a wanted child, either to medical mishap or violence. What’s next? Should women feel guilty about putting sonograms in their baby albums? I just don’t understand how it can be a “baby” if you’re happy about it and a “fetus” if you’re not. And neither would most people, I suspect, if forced to look straight at the issue.

Poem: The Man Comes Around

He lifts up the chipped stone,
strokes the tousled grass,
its scent never greener than when crushed.
He breathes soft as feathers
on the blue, abandoned egg.

He watches the salmon feed on the glittering flies
and the coarse-furred bear feed on the salmon.
Quicksilver as thought chasing error,
rough as desire blanketing thought.

He shears the glacier like a lamb,
the seas split by a blade of ice.
He lies all day in silken paralysis
in a spider’s web.

He is a dead tree, a frigate
of green moss and mushrooms.
He falls like a tree in the fire,
the crack of a legion of snapped lances
as the blackened pines topple.

He cools like smoke,
plays disappearing games with the wind.

He sucks up the soil hungry as a worm,
as a diver drinking in sweet breath.

Spring shoots up green, the spear points hinting
of an army marching underground.
His voice is red as the hollering tulips.
His voice is white as the crash of ice
on the melting river.

He breaks the sun like bread,
shares the warm pieces around
in his burnt hands.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)

New Site Launched

Welcome to the new JendiReiter.com, which differs from the old JendiReiter.com in that (1) it is a blog, and (2) it has no content. I hope to do something about (2) presently. My older poems and legal articles from the old site will be migrated over in the next month or so. Meanwhile, check out my other web ventures to find markets and contests for your poetry, or get your consciousness raised good and hard.