Tuesday; An Art Project -- Remixes

About Tuesday : : Remixes

In Fall 2008, Tuesday contributor and poet-teacher-provocateur Thomas Sayers Ellis asked his students at Sarah Lawrence College to rewrite poems from various issues of Tuesday. Some of the students exchanged e-mails with the poets. Christina Beasley's exchange with Ravi Shankar appears below Ravi's poem "Rodeo Cowboy No. 1, Oil on Canvas, 1978" and Christina's rewrite, "Urban Cowboy No. 1."

RAVI SHANKAR

Rodeo Cowboy No. 1, Oil on Canvas, 1978

     Subject-matter is at best a vehicle to transcend.
          —Fritz Scholder

Giddy up pigment! Ride them blue horse!
In a dervish
                    of dust that disquiets
                              the limbs
hoof like a boot               spur on the flank
tail a trail               that recedes into green hills
          whole organism launched               in mid-air
without crowdnoise     without leatherburn
               depth an occluded measurement
vertiginous                    rider a totemic showman
                    back turned
                              faceless
                                        hint of a brim
day an overall yolkyellow flattened dimensionless
animal and man primal          less the primacy of paint

CHRISTINA BEASLEY

Urban Cowboy No. 1

Giddy up cymbal! Ride them cymbal!
                              In a clashing of
                                                   clangs that weakens
the tongue
          a twist of pull of verticality
                               a pigment spur on the record
trailing traversing off beat          on
                    an outwardinward          silence
at the breaking of
in each note       an                  eighth-
             note hint of a brim
             obscured fingerprint and light spotted look
Night is in a deviation             a
                    deviant from Technicolor          the contrast
        how
it was how the border cuts    off the edges.

Dear Ravi Shankar,

I recently read your poem "Rodeo Cowboy No. 1, Oil on Canvas, 1978" in Tuesday (An Art Project) and I really enjoyed it. So! I chose to use it for an assignment for Thomas Sayers Ellis' poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College. Telling you that I did this is another aspect of the assignment, though I actually really appreciate that I have the opportunity to tell you, because I feel like knowing that your work is Alive and being looked at and reiterated by a different voice is pretty fantastic. I did feel a little strange taking your work and throwing it in another direction, but it does create interesting insight into the creative process. Basically, the assignment required that we take a poem and change it in whatever way we saw fit, and lest I interrupt the sort of liberal-poetic-scaffolding that I really appreciate in contemporary poetry, I decided to alter the concept in your poem rather than the shape or form. I took this photo that Thomas took, also featured in the journal (called Mr. Drum, if you're curious) and utilized your structure in describing that setting (kind of a conglomeration of ideas. I changed the title to Urban Cowboy No. 1.) Your poem really lends itself to the sort of jazz musician aesthetic I felt in Thomas' picture—the leaps in sentence structure and word distance were reminiscent, to me, of leaps in pitch and harmony. I really admire how flexible words can be, that we're able to take a poem and fill the inside with so many different ideas and still maintain the same form (or express an idea in so many different bodies.)

If you'd ever like to read it, just let me know. Best of luck with future writing,

Christina Beasley

Dear Christina - thanks for taking the time to write to me. I'd love to see how you re-interpreted my poem since it itself is a re-interpretation of part-Native artist Fritz Scholder who painted a series on the "real Indian" which stirred controversy for its own typecast depictions of life on the rez. But this particular painting is a dervish, has a blue horse reminiscent of Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter, is in motion and in medias res simultaneously and that's what I hoped to capture in the piece.

Ravi

ROSETTA YOUNG

In the Heat

Early yesterday evening
As I sat on a downtown train
My groin ached as I noted

The full breasts of the young woman
Sitting across from me, pushing
Against her well-pressed shirt,

The buttons straining
To reveal patches of white skin.
What a pair, as my father used to say

About one or two of my mother’s friends
Particularly a neighbor named Babs
Who drank bourbon highballs

And crossed her legs on the couch
In my parents’ living room
While her husband watched nervously.

What a pair, I muttered to myself—
Equally stirred by the memory
As the vision in front of me—

Rising for the Astor Place stop,
My body almost singing by the time I noticed
The studious young man perched

Next to her, pretending to read War and Peace
While staring down her blouse.
And as I moved toward the doors

We met eyes and, as if by some miracle,
She smiled briefly,
The color still in her face from the cold,

And I thought We all deserve each other:
The man in the bicycle pants,
The friend at his arm nudging him quietly,

The serious suit on his way home from work,
All of us watching her move, trying to catch more
Than just flashes of stomach under those clothes.

And for her to have smiled at us,
Assuming the best, probably thinking
Her own thoughts in her own head—

Imagining a night from her childhood maybe.
Perhaps, when she played summer baseball
With her father and uncles and brothers,

The trees in her backyard the outfield,
The boys the home team shimmering in the heat,
Her cousins not old enough to know she was different.

Re-Write of “Culture, Textuality, and Syntax” by Billy Collins
(Tuesday 2:2)

JULIA REAGAN

Brr-ache DOWN (a nighttime tale of innocence on the ground)

She came to me
wild-eyed Clarice

Paisley-print broad
In dream dance whirling
White hair uncurling
and she is my
Summertime something.
Seashore, seaside
Love you like a sister

Blood flow running
White thigh stained like velvet

Wriggling fish to her fishmonger’s grasp
Gotcha! Running out
Underneath the streetlight

I am a girl!
ring shouting roses against rush hour noises Plummeting
angel

to
Red swollen feet thrusting
all of creation
out the driver’s side
red-white
striped pajamas
stripped pink skin
skinned knees

like water rushing
lost in, your whole world flood

And the white ambulance
dove
Trying      Through
to get Through
river of holy land words choking
     glory be to
     Hail Mary, Mother of
     world without end.
Red-raw open akimbo, clutching this
cadence of beads for the last thing
to go

an inherited rosary
the incantation of dreams.

Developed from “Breakdown” by Nehassaiu deGannes (Tuesday 2:1)

Christina Beasley : : Ravi Shankar

Rosetta Young : : Billy Collins

Julia Reagan : : Nehassiu deGannes

Sean FitzGerald : : Jonathan Weinert

Ryland Heagerty : : Cate Marvin

Jordan Sjol : : Peter Jay Shippy

Meghan Roguschka : : Nehassiu deGannes

Kayleigh Salstrand : : David Rivard

Harrison Kardon : : Peter Jay Shippy

Hope Bobrowski : : Leslie Williams

Trevor Boley : : Teresa Cader

Ada DeFriez : : Cate Marvin

JORDAN SJOL

Mr. Ferris and the Turners

My L-F-N't and we peddled
Her trunk all around. Turtle

Necked roadies in the Tundra
Of Minnesota reassembling

The Speakers and we broke one
In the leg when the leviathan got

Loose. But no great things come
From getting loose. Paying hospital

Bills for month. That roadie milked
My father and me. Chump

Change took from my new strawberry
Curled cupid friends. They never

Believed me when I said it was my L
F-N't. And daddy only let me touch

It when the crowds were gone.
We hid the ads from mommy

And the smell of cigarettes and I
Had to empty all the candy wrappers

From my pockets if we ever stopped
Through at home, had to brush

Teeth and hair. She squeezed my

Cheeks but I didn't hold her
Attention while away. I barked

Through the megaphone and drew
In the crowds. A stranger

Whose nose hadn't been broken
Yet watched at a stop in Tallahassee.

During the show when I broke
For an elephant ear he told me how

How captivating children can be.

After "When I Was the King of Lake Erie" by Peter Jay Shippy
(Tuesday 2:1)

MEGHAN ROGUSCHKA

Introduction

Last night
she came to me,
with eyes screaming of
unwanted moisture,
and hair knotted
in un-right places-
she tossed me
The wanting look.

I watch her fish monger’s grasp
pierce the bottle each side
finger nails           catcher-hands
s  l   o   w    i     n     g   veins
ruby discs in waiting

she couldn’t . . .
too much . . .          criss-crossing
arm waves, cheek smacking
house         silence
red swollen feet
thrusting creation down the cavity of her throat
stripped pajamas          rose past bloom

I am alone with her
ring shouting roses into rush hour noises
watching her All fall down
wanting she “pee” even?
wanting she coo ? she sigh ? not mellow
Not Sweet    not the corn husk texture of her back
bruising my arm

“hunger not sleep"

and the ambulance
trying to get through     bleating
river of holy-land words
choking half of the street     Through

Get through red-raw memory
accosting this sunrise
clutching this tangent of impression
     the last thing
     to go

            an inherited scream
            the recantation of sleep

Rewrite of Nehassiu deGannes' poem "Breakdown" (Tuesday 2:1)

KAYLEIGH SALSTRAND

It's a Chilly War

I read somewhere,
someone said of arson
that thenaday

they could trace
the dancingof the flames
to a single match.

Really, we say,
its useless—
(lock yourself up)
as I feed into the Receiver.

Oh Almighty /
Lover or Stomach or Sister!
It's poison,

but not quite.
It's like the methadone
that mom chugs.

The stuff—
it knocks you out
for a while.

After her head
drops
and rolls she
(fuck yourself up)

struggles to lift
her wasted face
from the steering wheel.

It gets old.
So when you spoke
of the dolphins,

of how the males
rip a female
to fleshy confetti
after the gang rape,

I, and all the others,
pictured blood.
Now, I wonder
if she wanted it.

Rewrite of David Rivard's "The Season Between Monday & Tuesday" (Tuesday 1:1)

HARRISON KARDON

I Was Royalty: Susquehanna County

I touched an elephant’s trunk
At a carwash in Lackawanna.
Ink
Ran from the crook of
His eye.

I was the only shepardling
In a line of brass kids.
The steel
Was still
With the mills ash in airs.

The elephant grabbed gratis,

I was too young to keep heart.
My father—
Opposing him a man
In cigarette smoke like pound cake.

It’s Larry of Larry’s
And he chews fat, too.

Dad as the salesman:
“I need speak with you, my prince”
He sounded scared. I played dumberer.
The man behind Larry was dense up there.

Dad was the ruler here:
Smoked and tried to get Larry hooked on sales.
Larry said something greater.
A child played for the laundroma_.

No one could hear but me,
King of Lake Ear-y

1973.

And you should be nice to me
I’ve seen the enemy
But dad could lead
Me to the mustang:

Our kingdom and it runs on fumes.

Rewrite of Peter Jay Shippy's "When I Was King of Lake Erie"
(Tuesday 2:1)

HOPE BOBROWSKI

Icecap Sings to Feeble

periphery, frozen    now dis-
solving: a slow and creeping
new. It is an old story,

but one that can still be told:
its wise in tens outnumbered, its atoms
fluid cry    re-born.

tonight, the sacred trees by terror
ravaged: a fresh calf quivers
on liquid caps of knees

to bleat against his mother    who
calmly eats the placenta, steaming.
This is the way we

fear our Creator: a gasping life
imbibed, a blue and secret
twin once tethered

on a post makes
World’s First Flag.
In the nation’s breathless

silence, we cling in living
exaltation: only the Gods are
immortal, and we in

smaller death divulge
its many forms: we knew, we
will have known.

With unfed
eyes they watch the starless
breathe unbounded,

begin to hopeful
bleating:    begin to sleep
alone    (colder brother / battle banner)

with face of calf fallen
inward to sockets   soft
closed,   gaping

eyes bloodflecked
to feldspar    while moonstones
thaw to  slow and ravaged new.

Rewrite of “Pond, the Vulnerable” by Leslie Williams (Tuesday 2:1)

TREVOR BOLEY

The Boston Tea Party

"This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!"
—Samuel Adams

O my boys. What were we doing. Jumping into
that wild west prophecy, how many American Buffalos
did we hoist to meat hooks that lovely night?
We played the purest Mohawk, the most contagious Narragan,
for once, the red and white rose like a black divine noise:
A symphony of screaming deafs.

The ironic meeting, and those fists getting off
on the oak tables. Grey wig of normality,
and now feathered gown of silence,
Because we sewed lull that night, o my boys.
And the hundreds of crustaceans and fish
knew it too, drowning in a subterranean tea terror.

At Adams' words, God stringed up a tankard of whiskey
from the future burning south, and he sighed
on a large lawn chair, created a sun.
For if the Lord tans his divine light, the only expectancy:
shadows, my boys, claps and wigs and shadows.

Maybe I was the only one, like so many others,
who saw Hewes take a break to stare at the moon
whispering, the noise, the noise, the noise
dulcetly.

Often, I summon you up in my skeleton room.
Poe and I play chess with your voices,
but we always end in stale mate, my boys,
and for that reason I love you all to death. Amen.

—Nathaniel Willis speaking somewhere after he passed on.
(1755-1831), 1850

Inspired by Teresa Cader's poem "Nice" (Tuesday 1:1)

ADA DEFRIEZ

Little Babies

It’s because I am that cat you forgot to feed that made me get shitFaced on Sunday. I
prayed for

Abortion from mother
one step below decent who

Cradled her brain beside a sink she could not fit into.
I have suffocated mermaids and

beat giants with wishes to genie
for the purpose of effectively scrubbing my eyes clean of charcoal because I

could not buy makeup until I was thirteen and instead
bought a membership at the zoo for tears.

In the secret drawer
made for me when I turned Woman I hid my seven minutes until
Monday came morning.

Rewrite of "Sunday" by Cate Marvin (Tuesday 1:1)

SEAN FITZGERALD

Y solves itself

Everyone is prattling on the train. Their jabbering blends into melodic rail-line hums.
It’s never the conversations, but the rush of many voices wafting up,
like smoke
from leaping
scattered backyard fires,
encircling my head,
eardrums inhaling for frantic moments rest.

The neighbors over the fence slow roast last year’s detritus: decaying
stripped off sticks, scraps of hemp, discarded copies of Discover
with the covers torn off—up and down and down the Neck.

The sea is weave shouldered drunk stumbling,
cursing
low-voiced in serene siren songs of Paris,
stomping on the forgotten Spartan shore.
Otherwise, it murmurs in the person
of forever, the ear, the navel, a lover
lost, six degrees and the lover’s gone,
leaps, leaves in bed to seek
polar opposites, cold north poles
warm embracing engagements
someplace else.

Seaweed shimmers in the waves
in tight black mass rhythmic tangents;
sparrows dither forlornly in the brakes. One dance floor
slow shaking bodies,
in time with the tuba, out of time and
buried deep.

Again, still, there,
the hushed rushing up of boxcar steel rail voices
tingles my upper lip,
steals my senses,
tickles my nostrils—
a sneeze. (a blessing.)

Still the sparrows drift and blunder,
as lost as us,
as home as ever.
Still the moon’s a clammy quarter and a half,
the sun’s a straight buck.
The stars remain out of reach.
At dusk the heavy placket of the placid, surly sky is rubbed
threadbare and disrobed,
Thick, while naked space,
seductively backlit,
slowly detaches it’s limbs and lays, fully exposed.

Full disclosure is such a bitch.

Knowledge is ever partial,
if ever at all.
The existence of such misfortune
perplexes my shadow,
rapping at the door.

The sea locks hands on either side.
Consider monotonous,
harmonial chitchat on the west-bound train,
such unabated, unabashed intercourse of
heaven’s lofty clouds—broken plate clatter of the
lazy gods, lounging in nihilistic good humor and
sardonic smiles over
red-lipped cup rims.
Assert such clinking clanks of the
clunked, thumping heart,
creaking in time with the streetcar ride.

Let x approach infinity
in embarrassed
side sidle anticipatory idle conversation.

Let x act of it’s own accord.
Let y clean up in the morning.
Let x dream of ascension;

allow us at least that much in oblivion.

Rewrite of Jonathan Weinert's "Solving for y" (Tuesday 1:2)

RYLAND HEAGERTY

Sunday.

check beneath the porch where my rabbit hid from us in elemtry school
I prefer to hide beneath the car
like a feral cat in winter
the sweet smell of exhaust biting fridgid air with each seeping seep.

by the time I missed Sunday,
the blushing winter dusk tucked the sky
beneath it's chin.
and suddenly, I missed the way
not my mother but the mother
of my best friend would say good night and
in the morning a display of domestication
would crawl up the stairs and
under covers.

now—feel my refrigerator, empty.
empty like an ice box kind of empty.
empty because my roommates never refill them.
because they never do anything.

pass me that bottle of something
I need a mitten for my soul now—
pass me that bottle of something else
I need a blanket for my organs
let me shuffle through the snow
completely drunk
like an absolute fool
for the entire night—until Sunday morning.

Sunday- you were good air.
not too sharp, not to heavy.
sun, not too bright.
let my chest lift again.

But, please, for the love of god, mop this kitchen up.
this kitchen, this kitchen is lethal.

Bring me my neighbors. I know what I need to do now.
I'm taking a time machine this time.
I am going to abort you from your mothers.
mothers- you can thank me later.
mothers- now help me find my better half.

My better half will sneeze
At the sun they will
Pull down the blinds and pull up the covers
On Sunday we will lie low and by lie low
We mean- we will not move.
Too bad I can’t find you anymore and
I miss you like I miss everything
How I want to kiss Sunday.

And now- How there ought to be a zoo for my tears.
There are so many goddamn species.
They each make different noises.
Sometimes they kick you in the face and—
Other times they sit around and wait.
But on Sunday they lick your palms.
On Monday they take it even further.
By Friday… will it be better?
The zoo wants to know where Sunday went.

Rewrite of "Sunday" by Cate Marvin (Tuesday 1:1)