Smoking In Mom's Garage, Nancy Patrice Davenport

Smoking In Mom’s Garage---

Sometimes a book arrives and I get a sense of the uncanny---like, wow, I’m going through some of the same things, and perhaps similar ages and different, but overlapping “disabilities” (and/or “hard knocks”) have something to do with----all I know is I feel a strong sense of personal presence in Nancy Patrice Davenport’s new book. . I don’t want to sound dogmatically categorical, but when it comes to “themes” or “subject matter” or even persona, these days I tend to be less “uplifted” (is that it?) by healthy body poems than I do when I’m reading, say, poems in which she transforms experiencing epilepsy into beautiful, wise, calm lyrics of self-mastery (“Oakland Epilepsy Siren Song #2” & “Epilepsy Siren Song #7”)…With the exception perhaps of the beautiful portrayal of that dark rock bottom hopeless feeling when you’re too broke to afford the meds you need (“Oakland Rain Song #2”—pg. 60), Davenport’s clear focus is much better at editing out the negative---(emotions? Thoughts?)—and accentuating the positive (“Triumphus,” pg. 26, & even sometimes embracing mr. in between….) and celebrating the “dust bunnies” she becomes very familiar with

on the floor:

a dust bunny trembles in each corner

waiting for 

my touch

Swiffer standing in the kitchen

is giving

me the eye

telling me to get to work

but the    effect  of              dust dancing on    sunlight 

has always

been

for me   soporific (50)

Not that this book is primarily dealing with “differently abled” themes, or could be reduced to “mere therapy”---many more of the poems are being an anarchist mom (45), about love of men and women and sleep (42) and cats self, liminal sensuous (the fruit in “Poem For My Big Sister”) sexual “body workers” (“Peacock Feather Earrings” 17), desire, curiosity, need, playful fantasies of riding around in a lover’s beard---in post-Niedeckerian and at times even Armantroutian (is that a word?) lyric. I’m a sucker for line breaks like:

“an oriole sings

the world as I

know it…..” (1)

more excepts    

“of finches

peeping

the California Valley Quail” (9

Or lines like “electricity shooting             seeds”

Relational---if self is world, other is “Earthly Cosmos” (15)

“my     lover’s stained-glass    story   book     skin…..” (40)

And so many more highlights in this excellent book.

Rest In Peace, David Berman, dear friend...

I don't know what to say, but here's something I wrote and showed to David to praise him for inspiring me to write songs again & all the help he's given me over the years) after he sent me that smug character insulting review by Brian Howe in Spin Magazine.....

 Appropriating Purple Mountains

                                                     “You can move right in”--DCB

                            It wasn’t until the 5^thweekly session (2/19) that I wrote

“Still, something’s tugging at me to write a song again

                                                   ---is it some intrinsic internal need?

or is the fact that an old friend 2000 miles away

who I haven’t seen in years, 

                          but is far better songwriter than I’ve ever been

is recording his first album in a decade

                          & wants me to lay some simple organ chords

on the chorus of one of his songs…..        

                       (not that it needs them….)

                              & though he’s far away, I’m less lonely

& his lyrics speak me

                             a better diagnosis of the “strictly physical”

aspects that got me into ER

                                    in the dead of winter pain

at exactly the right time:

“On occasion we all do battle with

a little motivational paralysis

you get trapped at the stage of analysis

where thoughts bout the shortness of life may beget 

bouts of shortness of breath in your chest

doubts bout the worth of the time you got left

crowding out all but the fear and regret…

                                                  

With their internal rhymes, alliteration, assonance that, in my opinion, can “stand up on repeated readings,” the conscience scouring, heart opening lyric intensity, the refusal to blame & permission to acknowledge your fuck-ups, coupled with David’s long lined/long phrased and very percussive vocal style (a plodding parlando trod halfway between talking & singing, but then as I write that, I realize it might sound like I’m talking about hip hop when I mean more, “say, Coney Island Baby or Leonard Cohen-esque) over simple 2 chord verses, and 3 chord choruses resonated with me. Regardless of whether David’s song is autobiographical, or as he puts in an interview, “tuneful surveillance” of a general cultural epidemic (at least among 50 something white males), it was clear to me that I too suffered from:

storyline fever, storyline flu

apparently impairing your point of view

It’s making horseshit sound true to you

now its impacting how you're acting too (2X)

& “right about now” I find lines like:

“I want to be a warm friendly person

but I don’t know how to do it” (“She’s Making Friends…”

especially relatable, yes, relatable….

It reminds me of the Chi Lites singing

“I don’t know where to look for love/

I just don’t know how” & I don’t know

how I got sucked into being a solitude addict

but can I will myself into a happy collaborating family

or at least a house or job with regular piano access?

(Surely others can relate to a need to be a crazy uncle?)

Anyway, just like he hadn’t done an album in ten years, I hadn’t published a book of poetry for 15—but even though he sings, “when you’re seller and commodity/ you have to sell yourself immodestly” in this song, it needs not be strictly referencing a commodified artist (since social media has now democratized the commodified utterance—or at least the downsides of it)…and, yes, I’m scared of being “immodest” (or feel repentant for previous immodest transgressions), which may of course be the most immodest thing of all (trying to “chide no breather but myself”---which David’s album does extremely well, along with what David C. Drale, referring to classic blues form, calls “idealized, non-specific references to one’s life.” 

Despite, or more likely because, of the darkness, and absolute sense of social disconnection of

“grim lyrics married to music that is cheerful, calm & cool,” I sensed a wisdom in this album (not begging, or blaming), especially when I got to the last verse of “Snow is Falling In Manhattan”:

songs build little rooms in time

and housed within the song's design

Is the ghost the host has left behind

to greet and sweep the guest inside.

stoke the fire and sing his lines.

Lyric as shed skin—?

like my more “purely physical”

need for a piano as a cat needs

to sharpen claws, or rats gnaw….

sing it not to be it?

to be & not be it?

to it being not be?

a sliver of hope….

“strangely my hope has to

be rooted in the realization

that I am an utterly dumb creature…”