mfinley.com: "Young
Mike vs Current Mike " This report isn't to make you feel guilty about not coming to my reading Thursday night at the Black Dog Cafe in Saint Paul. Poetry readings never sound fun, and most aren't (though mine are). It's more of a diary entry for me, to mark the occasion for myself and for the few who attended. I hope you find it interesting. I had been, not
anxious, but certainly intense about the opportunity to read all week, thinking
a lot about what to say and what to read. I wasn't very productive with my
other work. The truth is, I don't read very often, maybe once every couple of
years, so I have a lot of material I'd like to show people -- but I also never
get beyond being "rusty"; you need to read frequently to get really
comfortable doing it. If I could share one
thing with people, however, it would be the blessed-out feelings I had
yesterday morning, walking the circumference of Pike Island, at the nexus of
the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, with my dog Beau. It was a spectacularly
beautiful fall morning. The leaves had finally had it, and were descending in a
steady stream. The sun was wonderfully warm. Beau was content just to trot
alongside me, and not bite my hand every three steps of the three-mile walk as
he usually does. And my head was like
a broadband Niagara of thoughts and ideas about how to link the poems together
into a thematic talk. Naturally, I didn't
pause to jot the ideas down -- there were too many, and too rich to possibly
forget. But I forgot 'em anyway. Which underscores
the ultimate challenge of writing, which is simply putting one's best thoughts
into play. There is many a slip twixt inspiration and print. Final drafts
typically chase away the excitement of the first. In a way, it's the
basic curse of being human -- we forget what is dearest to us, despite our best
intentions. Memory is the enemy of enlightenment! Like saving bees in a jar --
with or without punching holes in the lid -- it's just not the same. When I got home, I
was unable to put my walking ideas together. So I came up with a cornier theme
for the reading. Earlier in the week I was cleaning my basement, and unearthed
about eight boxes of notebooks and "comps" -- copies of magazines I
had poems in. I knew they were down there. I kept moving them from house to
house, never unpacking them, because, well, who needs a bunch of poems from the
1970s. But so much time had
passed since I last saw these items that they were very dear to me. My
middle-aged memory had cut bait on nearly everything in the boxes. All I
remember anymore is what is officially on my hard disk -- which is substantial
-- but this material predated hard disks. I estimate that I wrote 8,000 poems
in the 1970s, my heyday (strange word) as an artist. As a consequence, it all
seemed very new to me. It was like
discovering a younger brother who was raised away from you -- you sort of knew
he existed, but you haven't seen him in years. So my idea was to
base the reading on these forgotten poems. In the 1970s I published four books,
and they follow an interesting arc in development.
The very first was a
book of neo-beat poems called Lucky You. They were very hot,
chest-thumping, highly surrealistic poems in which I announced myself to the
world. I truly believed I was the next big thing in American letters, and the
confidence, and the craziness, of that conviction ring through in the poems.
The main poem in the book is "This Poem Is a Public Service," a kind
of tract I imagined handing out to people on street corners, telling them to
shape up and stop being ninnies. Next came Home
Trees, my "Minnesota" book. The surrealism is turned very low
now, always in the service of describing some real problem -- connecting with
family, with the past, with other people. It's one step away from a strictly
reportorial poetics, which is where I was heading. I loved reading
these poems again, but I ran into a snag. I wasn't able, in 2000, to invest
them with the same conviction or verve I had in 1975. I was a rapier wit in
those days, undefeated and ablaze. Today, I'm just an old hack with a taste for
the fuzzy. The poems remained young, but I had passed on, as it were. I tried
reading them to myself, but I felt like a clown, insisting on my incisive
genius and verbal wizardry in the present, where the truth of these things was
locked away in the past. I was a preposterous imposter, an aging actress
insisting on the part of the ingénue. So ... what to do? I decided I needed a
gimmick. Taking my cue from today's headlines, I created a cue card for the
reading. On the top it said: CAST YOUR VOTE! Campaign 2000: 'The Lesser of Two
Evils.' Vote Early! Vote Often!" The idea was to read
some very old poems from Young Mike, and some more recent poems by Current Mike
(I didn't call myself old, because I am actually hoping to become much older.) Then I published,
using my Clickbook program, two little chapbooks. The first was for Young Mike,
and it was titled Young, Gifted and Obnoxious. The second, bearing my
latter day visage, was titled Long in the Tooth and Tailing Off a Lot..
Each book was priced at $1, and people could buy one, or both, or more. The reading thus
became a plebiscite on the two poets. The audience was
small, but not too small. I mean, I have read to as few as four people, because
most people, hearing the phrase "poetry reading," conjure up images
of a lengthy program of auteurs droning on about premenstrual heebie-jeebies or
the problems in Honduras. But mine aren't lengthy. But people don't know that,
and they stay away literally by the billions. Long story short,
Current Mike outpolled Young Mike, $8 to $6. I wouldn't go so far as to call it
a fair election, as Current Mike was there to put himself in the best possible
light, whereas Young Mike had only a gorgeous picture of himself. It was like those "empty chair" debates you see, where one of the canidates doesn't show up. As Current
Mike put it, "Please vote for whomever you prefer. Don't let me sway your
vote one way or the other. But know this. I know each one of you by name. I
have your email address. I know where you live. "And if you
should all decide to cast your ballot for Young Mike, in a sentimental
landslide vote, it won't change anything. Young Mike is gone, and he's not
coming back." I was a bully. I
engaged in Mediscare. I made it impossible to lose. But just between me
and thee, I was rooting for him. Check out the online version of this
entry at http://mfinley.com/articles/young-mike.htm
to see the actual books and covers and sample poems. Or write Mike at mfinley@mfinley.com |
mfinley.comCOPYRIGHT (c) 2000by MICHAEL FINLEY
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Why not bookmark Mike's columns for your weekly enjoyment?Comments on this column:Hey, Mike! There's a Wolfe at the door and he says that you can't go home again. You've moved on. We all move on.And I didn't even know about your reading. Not that I would have driven four hours to attend .... Maybe you could do an e-reading? You might get Computer User to set up and/or sponsor the tech(i)event, to test whether a traditionally intimate, community spirit of a poetry reading can work on the Web. Well, maybe that's something that Young Mike would have done, to howl against the decline of poetry readings in a technobsessed age. Or, you know, whatever .... Now it's only Beau that does any howling (not you or the Black Dog) and the only thing that's beat is you after a three-mile Piker of a walk.. So, flow with the Current, Mike .... It's the only home you've got. Bob M. I really did enjoy the reading, especially the poem about the Pope. Mark G. Gail and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening last night at the Black Dog. It was a lot of fun, and I hope you'll do it again soon. And for the record, we voted for both Mikes. Joe F. "Lots of us find it a very helpful, human, sometimes humorous, always interesting, often surprising column that has no peer on the freelance market, And, yes, you can use that as a testimonial if it helps." -- Bill Dowd, Albany Times Union "No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier "Editors want everything to fall into a neat little box, and your stuff doesn't do that. You don't write merely about technology, you write about what technology means to us and how it has changed us. I like it." -- John Boxmeyer, St. Paul
America's Best-Loved Futurist(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.
I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But I am a few clients lighter right now than I need to be, and a bit of revenue never hurts. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike
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