The relationship between journaling and my own poems became apparent once I grew tired of apologizing for our lovely but deranged cat, Shimmy.
I had always been a prolific journaler, and like most writers, I tried to take my pen and notebook everywhere with me. As e-mail and word processing gradually took over my writing life, the time I had once devoted to pen-and-notebook journaling was now spent in daily correspondence with friends and fellow writers. Fragments from my letters found their way into poems. I used letters as I would a journal, as a staging area for new work. I read deeper into the published correspondence of my favorite writers—Emily Dickinson, George Oppen, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Robert Duncan—and I discovered the beauty of tracing a writer’s literary style back to the fierce, primal energy in the unguarded prose of their correspondence.
As a student and compulsive journaler, I worked in the Kent State Department of Special Collections under poet Alex Gildzen, and there I was drawn to the role of letter writing as an artist’s form of journaling. I’ll always be grateful to Alex for encouraging me to read the correspondence that I saved for future generations in acid free folders—especially the impressive, voluminous letters of filmmaker James Broughton and playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie. I learned the art of letter writing while reading those in the Special Collections and saw in the letters of poets that they lived the poems they were writing.
Journals offer nearly the same for me; but journals are often only a oneway mode of communication, whereas letters unambiguously presume a dialogue, an interlocutor listening and reacting immediately to what has been written. Letter writing, and reading the letters written by other writers, eventually became more of a thrill for me than reading my own journal and made it clear that my letters had taken over the intimate space once occupied by spiral-bound notebooks.
Three of the most important poems in the manuscript I’m working on, Historic Diary, based on the myths and texts of Lee Harvey Oswald, come directly from fragments of letters I’d written to friends: “What I Missed,” “Dallas,” and “Letter to Hilles from Lake Forest.” This last one, from a letter to the poet Rick Hilles, is especially significant to my journaling and letter-writing history because it was Rick who introduced me many years ago to Richard Hugo’s inventive epistolary poems in Thirty One Letters and Thirteen Dreams. My manuscript itself takes as its source text Oswald’s journal composed in the Soviet Union, which he titled the Historic Diary; and in diary and epistolary formats, the poems reshape, with the trace of a child-vandal’s energy, the correspondence taken from the shamefully tangled, obedient exhibits and reports prepared by the Warren Commission.
Still, despite this mapping of literary and historical influence, my repeated apologizing for Shimmy’s destructive actions made all the difference in the relationship between my journaling and my poems.
When my wife, Shelly and I lived in Boston a decade ago, Shimmy attacked Andryc, the three-year-old son of a dear friend, who had come over specifically to see her. The boy yelled, “Kitty!”—no doubt enthralled that Shimmy resembled his own cat—and ran to pet her. Like any small creature concerned with self-preservation in the presence of a child, she fled. She galloped toward her favorite hiding spot beneath our living room couch, then stopped in mid-flight, and probably realized that this was her own home and Andryc was nothing more than a predatory intruder. Perhaps she retained an olfactory memory of the evening about two years earlier when Andryc’s mother had changed his diaper on our bed—with Shimmy hiding beneath it. She stopped before the couch. Andryc reached toward her, arms outstretched in frightful, unmitigated joy. Shimmy poised back on her haunches and swung her front paw.
I watched and could see Shelly’s eyes go wide. Shimmy’s paw flashed. In slow motion, half-speed, with her pumpkin-colored fur leaving slow motion trails behind it, I saw her claws extend. Andryc’s father, Mitch, did not know the power of Shimmy’s rage. We had adopted her as a feral kitten lost in the woods, and she’s never trusted anyone but Shelly and me. She took a cautious step forward and struck Andryc’s arm. I watched her translucent claws sink into the blue vinyl and puffy goose lining of his winter jacket.
I quickly grabbed Shimmy and moved her to a safe distance from Andryc. In the brief silence before Andryc began wailing, Shimmy turned her head back toward him and hissed, her back legs flailing. We were lucky Andryc was wearing his winter jacket; the claws did nothing but puncture the lining. But as I mentioned later to Mitch, I felt as if we had witnessed and helped cause a primal trauma that Andryc would remember for a long time.
A few moments later, when everything calmed down and after Andryc had screamed, in heaving sobs, to his mother on the telephone, and I had apologized over and over—it occurred to me that for most of her life I had been apologizing for Shimmy.
“I don’t know what to do sometimes,” I said to Mitch. “It’s like having a child who’s an arsonist. You love her with all your heart, but you keep saying things to your neighbors like, ‘I’m sorry Shimmy burned down your tool shed, and we’ll pay all the damages.’”
This would be my operative apology over the years: I’m sorry; she’s crazy but we love her; it’s like having a child who’s an arsonist. You want to help her live calmly in the world, but you cannot deny the trouble she causes everyone. She’s a cat, after all, not a child, and she’ll never domesticate completely—especially with her early, kitten memories of starving in the woods before she wandered into a friend’s basement and we adopted her. Every action she undertakes will be uncensored, whether she’s content or terrified.
And it’s this untamable feral instinct that we’ve come to admire over the years, an enviable rage crucial to her survival those first few weeks of her life when she got lost from (or was abandoned by) her mother. Shimmy’s child-arsonist persona was itself a sort of reminder of what lies unfettered inside us.
Our move from Boston to Chicago only made things worse for Shimmy. She hid under our bed for six weeks, no matter how lovingly we enticed her out with wet food. In correspondence, I found myself writing about her more and more. In long letters about new writing projects, or about my buffoonery trying to navigate a new city that seemed hundreds of times larger than Boston, I’d find myself closing with postscripts about my cat:
P.S. Shimmy is staring at her catnip mouse. Just staring.
[She later would scare a real mouse to death and sit proudly next to its upturned, unbitten body.]
P.S. Shelly sometimes likes to take Shimmy into the hallway outside our new apartment. This is asking for trouble. If your child were a homicidal arsonist, would you take him / her to children’s birthday parties? Shimmy loves smelling the carpet, where she can pick up the scent of the two dogs living above us. She stays in the hall, sniffing, for about five seconds, and then she remembers it’s not our apartment and anything can happen in the outside world—and dogs live around her! She rushes like mad, tail up, back into our apartment to lick herself.
[Anytime the upstairs neighbor came to say hello, or borrow detergent because he always seemed to run out, Shimmy would run maniacally down our hallway so fast that she’d lose control and slide on the hardwood floors hissing at him.]
Sometimes I even spoke in her voice at the end of letters. I knew I was treading on dangerous ground—talking in the voice of my cat. I had to trust, as my letter-writing friends did, that I never would become someone who bought kitten calendars and made oversize-JPG shrines on my website for my animal friend. I added a postscript once to my cousin, Michael, in a letter full of foaming-at-the-mouth vitriol about Kenneth Starr, a letter that later would provide material for my poem “Special Prosecutor,” in The Lama’s English Lessons: “Shimmy is upset because neither you nor anyone else we know rescued her from her vet checkup at the Den of Spies last week.” Somewhere along the way, I had decided that Shimmy’s name for the veterinarian’s office was the Den of Spies, the name that Islamist radicals bestowed on the U.S. embassy in Iran when they attacked it in 1979. Shimmy in turn decided that her vet was not Dr. Beau, a caring doctor with the patience of a saint for treating our raving cat, but instead was Dr. Kissinger, the former secretary of state who, in Shimmy’s mind, strutted around the Uptown Animal Hospital in a bloodstained butcher’s apron.
I really scared myself during those moments when I switched into the voice of my cat: Dr. Kissinger touched me all over, Michael, and you should have heard the rustic hacking of those mangy dogs—I wanted to strangle them with my bare hands. Nothing particularly poetic or even eloquent. The plea to my cousin in the voice of my cat instead, was simply a raw, uncensored burst of prose like any other I would write, taking it or leaving it, in a journal or letter. I still kept a journal at this time, in a trusty spiral-bound notebook, but I composed my most instinctive, unfettered writing in letters to my friends.
Around this time, as Shimmy spoke in the postscripts of my letters, and my friends responded to both of us, humoring me and humoring themselves, I discovered poets’ blogs. I use the word discovered here as if something magical occurred once I read the blogs of fellow poets. As if this were my version of John Keats feeling “like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken,” from his poem “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It was nothing of the sort. I came to blogs, or entered the blogosphere, as it’s often called, with no grand Keatsian expectations.
I realized that blogs were public versions of private journals. With millions of blogs on blogspot.com alone, odds were slim I would find much of Henry Miller’s mad lyricism anywhere. Still, as I found more and more blogs written by poets, I assumed that I would be privy to the secret minute particulars of their creative processes—that blogs would reveal the hidden crawlspaces in the finished architecture of contemporary poems. Some of this was true, and the best example was Ron Silliman’s brilliant near-daily blog postings on contemporary poetics (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com). At the same time, most blogs seemed to be nothing but self-serving promotional tools, or, worse, diatribes against the hypocrisies of the “poetry business.” God knows promotional blogs are useful; too often I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that my work ends with publication, when actually this is when promotion begins. And I’d question the sanity of anyone who didn’t find the poetry business cutthroat and repugnant. Still, it seemed blogs could do more for my writing process, and serve a purpose similar to diaries and notebooks.
I was struck by how the rich, journaling nature of blogging went untapped in the many metacritical takes on the poetry business I was reading in the blogosphere. Blogs seemed to combine the potential for both private, undomesticated journaling and public performance. Why else would one choose to distribute one’s private journals in a forum, the World Wide Web, with a greater audience than any of the most highly circulated print poetry journals?
As much as I was drawn to Silliman’s blog, I abhorred the sycophantic stream of responses in the comments. Silliman’s blog would sometimes generate fifty to one hundred comments to an individual posting, most of which nodded in dutiful agreement with whatever Silliman might have said in that day’s blog posting. I was disturbed that the diarylike qualities of the blog could seamlessly transform into a venue for poetry’s celebrity culture—celebrating the authority of Silliman, the poet and poetry critic, even when he’s writing at length on Hollywood blockbusters or reality TV shows like Project Runway—rather than function as a space for the creation of new writing. I decided Shimmy needed an extended, regularly updated blog, and her blog needed to be a performance venue as well as a journal—a place where new work can be invented, tinkered with, and showcased. This would be a site to channel Shimmy’s rage, to practice appropriation, and to find new spaces for writerly experimentation while still chronicling my life (shimmykat.blogspot.com).
“Chronicling his life” … through his cat? He has to be one of those writers. To some extent, maybe; perhaps it’s more a question of what parts of my life I am chronicling.
For instance, Shimmy’s blog finally gave me a chance to use the photographs of cattle I had taken in 2004 at the home next door to Donald Rumsfeld’s in Taos. But as I translated Shimmy’s feelings about Rumsfeld—yes, I talk this way, staying in character as the blog’s performative translator rather than as mere diarist—it was clear that a serial narrative was emerging.
“Faces and horns, anonymous bodies, the cattle who live next door to Rumsfeld’s home in Taos burst into our apartment,” I translated. “Flies buzzed their rumps.” The cattle were no longer anonymous animals living next door to the then secretary of defense. Instead, they were trying to escape Rumsfeld, as much of the world seemed to be doing in late 2005: “They were running from the Secretary of Defense, fleeing another of his blood ritual masses at the manse in Taos (a Chevy Chevelle sits on blocks in the tall grass next door) where he camped as a Boy Scout in 1948.”
As often is the case with Shimmy’s blog, where villains try to charm their way into her prose, Rumsfeld attempted to enchant her: “‘Shimmy, come sit on my lap.’” It was Rumsfeld, old and plump, tapping his fingers on the arm of the sofa, mimicking the doomed pitter-patter of mice. ‘“Don’t be afraid of me. Look at all these cattle! I’m friends with the animals.”’
Shimmy eventually spoke back to Rumsfeld in language appropriated from the texts of Situationist Raoul Vaneigem. Of course, in Shimmy’s world, all Rumsfeld could do was speak in appropriations of the tortured rhetoric to which the rest of us had grown accustomed during his televised press conferences. “I’m not into this detail stuff,” he said to her, “I’m more concepty.”
“Y Tu Rumsfeld Tambien” was a serial narrative, but entries in Shimmy’s Blog are also opportunities to experiment with nonlinear composition. Whether working with narrative or nonlinearity, I use Shimmy’s blog as a way to hone the postmodern appropriative techniques that have a large influence on my poems.
During the composition of another poem for Historic Diary, I experimented with a piece comprised entirely of questions asked in the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate. I didn’t quite know what form the poem was taking yet. As I would in a traditional spiral-bound journal, I began jotting questions asked in the film into the blog; and as I did this, the questions themselves started to suggest patterns of formal fragmentation and narrative erasure that told a kind of story:
What’s the matter with her? Hey, Shimmy, what about my robe? What’s your personal advice? May I take this thing off now, Shimmy?
How many Communists did you say? Can you see the red queen?
You will be taken for a checkup—is that clear? What’s your last name? What’s your last name? The letter? Have you got the letter?
What sort of greeting is that at 3:30 in the morning? Are you sure they’re coming to the party, Shimmy? Are you absolutely sure?
What are you supposed to be, one of those Dutch skaters? Why don’t we just sneak away for a few minutes and sit down somewhere quietly and stare out the window?
Shimmy, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Aren’t you going to pop champagne, or dance in the streets, or at least slide your food dish around the kitchen floor? Fifty-two red queens and I are telling you—you know what we’re telling you?
It was crucial for me to see these appropriated questions from the film recast in a bounded journal-like space of my own—that is, in the blog. After I wrote this posting, the repetitious nature of the questions suggested the pantoum form. As I drafted and revised this emerging pantoum in my word-processing program, the blog posting eventually helped me create the poem’s three penultimate stanzas:
Can you see the red queen?
Where are you, Raymond?
Raymond, do you remember murdering Mavole and Lembeck?
Fifty-two red queens and me are telling you—do you know what we’re telling you?
Where are you, Raymond?
They can make me do anything, Ben, can’t they?
Fifty-two red queens and me are telling you—do you know what we’re telling you?
Ben, you don’t blame me for hating my mother, do you?
“The Queen of Diamonds?” What did she mean, “The Queen of Diamonds?”
May I have the bayonet, please?
Have you ever killed anyone?
Do you know what we’re telling you?
The creepy, predatory pitch of Angela Lansbury’s voice reflected in the blog posting (“Can you see the red queen? … You will be taken for a checkup—is that clear?”) became a model for the poem’s tone. The poem was initially conceived and rehearsed in my “notebook,” as if Shimmy’s blog were a spiral-bound journal for first drafts. Without such rehearsal, much of the formal and tonal nuances of the poem might be lost.
I didn’t realize it, but my initial desire to create Shimmy’s blog as a parodic intervention into the blogosphere had transformed itself, instead, into an extension of my lifelong journaling. Blogging provides an audience for an artist’s untamed journal drafts. But given the medium of blogging, its existence within the extensive and searchable interconnections of the World Wide Web, a blog also offers the writer a performative space—a venue that combines the childlike (or in this case, the child-arsonistlike) wild-zone of invention with the immediate responsiveness of an audience. Shimmy’s blog stretches me, as a writer, beyond the limits of journaling or letter writing, because a blog, after all, can be simultaneously a diary and a piece of performance art.
Indeed, Shimmy reviews movies—an unusual practice for a private journal but appropriate for a blog, like hers, that is part-diary and partperformance. Because Shimmy is a housecat, her movie reviews necessarily function as both conceptual art pieces and journaling exercises. Her reviews are simply readings of what is happening in the apartment while Shelly and I are at the theater.
Shimmy’s reviews are an extension of my own love-hate obsessions with popular culture in my poems—as in my new manuscript, where Soviet and U.S. popular culture embed themselves whenever possible in Lee Harvey Oswald’s myths and texts. The blog also reflects the popculture influence of my editorial work as one of the founders and editors of Court Green, a poetry journal that has devoted special sections in past issues to film and political poems; every issue publishes a number of poems influenced by popular culture and new media.
Shimmy’s child-arsonist blog persona is for me an invigorating extension of the creative process wild-zone that journaling and letter writing give us permission to indulge in. And best of all, the blog functions in an arena that overlaps the traditional diary and traditional letter / e-mail. It has been convenient for me to discuss in utilitarian terms the correlation between Shimmy’s blog and my poems. To use the phrase child vandal, as I do earlier in this essay to describe my revisionary attitude toward the Warren Commission is, of course, to suggest child-arsonist and, by extension, could be an effort to persuade you that I am not one of those writers—especially one of those poets who identifies too much with the cats of this world. Using the phrase child vandal suggests that I am writing only about my art form, about Shimmy’s Blog as mere utilitarian tributary into the larger stream. To do otherwise would be to presume, yikes, that I would want to chronicle my life through my cat.
I do protest too much, don’t I? I’m thinking of something James Broughton once wrote: “It is better to live poetically than to write good poems.” I found this quotation in his archives while working in Special Collections; as far as I know, it’s not published anywhere. I tried to include it as an epigraph for the literary magazine I was editing at the time. But my fellow editorial board members hesitated. I don’t blame them, because they, like me, were worried that the quotation might be true. Were we living poetically? We certainly were trying like mad to write good poems. But was Broughton right? And if he was correct, then our greatest ideal, to live poetically and write good poems, might be a loss. At the time, I was a heavy notebook journaler, and for me the journal was a space for intense living and writing—it was the space for diary entries, for working out emotional conundrums, for transcribing memorable quotations, for jotting down poem drafts and fragments, for cutting out relevant newspaper articles. It was part daybook and part creative-writing logbook. As such, it was the space where I really was testing whether I could both live poetically and write good poems.
Shimmy’s blog serves much the same purpose for me, extending performatively those original daybooks. I still don’t know how to integrate the spirit of Broughton’s statement in my life. I probably won’t ever know if I’ve accomplished this. When I talk about the quotation with other writers, most feel the need to make some kind of peace with it, too. The blogosphere is for me a space where the rough drafts of my everyday lived experience and of my everyday writing projects can live on top of each other like palimpsests, a space where the writing of a film review, and by extension, the writing of poem drafts and all other modes of journaling and performing, can occur simultaneously with the quotidian happenings of my life.
The blog is the place where the personal and the historical collide—where everyday lived experience exists conterminously with the historical imagination. Lately in my poetry, I’ve been trying to fuse the personal and the historical, so that the poems perform a particular selfhood without succumbing to self-obsession. Shimmy’s blog offers a public venue for me to rehearse this complication of selfhood in my writing. The blog is circumscribed by a persona and by nontransparent forms of language that “ghost” the world rather than render it as something whole or selfcontained.