You sent a one-sentence email
that ended with
a straight-mouthed emoticon.
I sent one back that ended
with a traditional
smiley-face emoticon.
Your next response was
two sentences, but it ended
with a slanty-mouthed emoticon.
My final word on the matter
ended with a frowny.
I am sorry,
but I thought
you were being
passive-aggressive.
I memorized your eyes.
They mesmerized me
as I indulged in the pies
you’d baked for me:
blueberry, boysenberry,
Dixie bottom, chocolate sin.
You were married to Larry
at the time. I could barely
keep the lustful thoughts in
my head, unarticulated.
But now school is over.
We’ve both matriculated
and moved on, you to Dover,
and I’ve relocated to Kent.
We’re nearby but oh, so far.
A letter I’ve never sent,
haven’t had the guts to,
ticks off your virtues one by one:
your eyes, of course; your car,
which is very economical,
your tankini shirt,
your passive aggressiveness,
which is nothing short
of monumental.
Your obsession with Loch Ness.
Why list them, as though
you didn’t really know
what attracted me to you?
Darling, it’s a mess.
I get the sense we’re not through,
even though we haven’t spoken
in ages. Well enough.
I can’t fix what isn’t broken.
You just keep
on acting girlish tough,
and I’ll pretend I can sleep
through night after night
without seeing your brown eyes
in my unholy dreams;
eating your amazing pie;
I forgot to mention key lime.
Minnesota Public Radio is going to air a recording of me reading a poem about the earthquake in Iceland on “In The Loop” tonight at 6.
In case you haven’t seen this before, I want to be the one who introduces you.
Pam Schimpf
Fred Schimpf
Fanny Schimpf
Chad Schimpf
Cheryl Schimpf
Mitch Schimpf
Shmuel Schimpf
Marsha Schimpf
Heinrich Schimpf
Schimpf Schimpf
Sergei Schimpf
Phil Schimpf
Chaim Schimpf
Rudolf Schimpf
Prakash Schimpf
Ho Chi Schimpf
Chet Schimpf
Bela Schimpf
Shannon Schimpf
Allison Schimpf
Vladimir Schimpf
LaShonda Schimpf
Kitty Schimpf
Sherriff Schimpf
Children, do not talk to strangers.
If you must, make sure they at least
have candy and that it is good candy.
This is the way of the world.
If strangers have candy or money
you talk to them and try to get some
for yourself. Candy, money, glory;
if a strange man promises you fame,
you do not even need to ask his name.
If a man appears with a strange animal
on a leash, such as a capybara, pet it;
feed it, let it lick your hand.
Remember that the capybara may be
strange to you, but to Brazilians it is normal,
just as to his mother the strange man
is nothing out of the ordinary.
He is merely her son, and one hopes
she has done her best to raise him well,
given him all the advantages of education,
culture, a mother’s love. So when you
talk to a stranger, imagine him
a baby, feeding at his mother’s breast.
Accept whatever candy or money he has,
and trust the Lord to take care of the rest.
Once upon a time there was a poor child with no father and no mother, and everything was dead, and no-one was left in the whole world. Everything was dead.
And the child went and searched day and night. And since nobody was left on the earth, he wanted to go up into the heavens. And the moon was looking at him so friendly, and when he finally got to the moon, the moon was a piece of rotten wood. And then he went to the sun, and when he got there, the sun was a wilted sunflower. And when he got to the stars, they were little golden flies stuck up there like the shrike sticks them on the blackthorn.
And when he wanted to go back down to earth, the earth was an overturned pisspot, and he was all alone. And he sat down, and he cried. And he is there to this day, all alone.
Okay, there’s your story. Night-night.
* * * * * *
From “Orphans”
Q: Speaking of pride, what about this T-shirt you’ve been photographed wearing that says, “I [heart] to fart”?
BB: I LOVE to fart.
Q: What’s wrong with you?
BB: I’m honest. Have you ever farted?
Q: One or two times.
BB: And did it feel good?
Q: Always.
BB: Probably so. That’s why I wore it. I love to fart. I do. When the time is right, I do it. I’m not going to hide it.
Q: You’re so blunt about your love for flatulence.
BB: Yeah. Well, someone gave me the shirt because of my history of farting, so I wear it. I LOVE to fart. I think I still have it.
Q: What gets you really gassy?
BB: Anything. The air we’re breathing right now.
* * * * * *
Shamelessly purloined from ESPN’s “Big League Stew”
People have stopped having fun with fuel,
spraying it at each other playfully at filling stations,
hanging buckets of it over doors; those games
are now reserved for the very rich. Most have even
stopped bathing in fuel, and only a few still spritz
themselves with it before they go out on the town.
A few have tried filling their squirt guns
with ethanol, a biofuel derived from corn;
I even saw a woman fling a glob of turkey grease
at one of her friends last Saturday night at a club,
and the two shared a chuckle—a mild one.
Desperate times call for desperate measures,
they say, but what of the fun times we’ve had?
The careless summer afternoons dozing
at the edge of a flaming gasoline pond?
The pools full of crude we used to dive into
and come out slick with pure happiness?
What of the rainbow-hued puddles??
People may have stopped having fun with fuel,
but this doesn’t mean they won’t have fun. Why just
this morning I greased down my aunt’s bathroom
with Crisco and hid nearby until she walked in,
listened for the crash and the subsequent laughter,
and then, unable to contain myself any longer, erupted.
When at last we saw each other, our eyes weeping
with unexpected giddiness, she had this expression
like, we’ll get through this. And oh man, was that funny.
Nobody knows the true identities
of the superdelegates. They will
show up at the convention
in November in red capes,
blue spandex bodysuits, some
landing on the veranda and some
just walking casually through the door.
Still, nobody will know who they are.
Some will have died of frostbite
from the long flight. Some will
have been shot down by errant
U.S. missiles. Those that remain
will be counted by people wearing
formal clothes. It’s a mysterious
process, but it’s part of our
democracy, and we cherish it as such.
Ray Bianchi interviewed me a couple of years ago for chicagopostmodernpoetry.com — then never published the interview and hasn’t responded to several “what’s up” emails, so I’m taking the initiative to include it here. I mean, why waste it? Even if very little of it is true anymore…
* * * * * * *
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Where were you Born and what was your Formation?
I was born in Iowa City, IA, at University Hospital. I am trying to think of what you mean by formation. Maybe it’s an open-ended question, in which case I’d like to point out that I come from a family of butchers and grain dealers. My great uncle, Paul Franzenburg, former treasurer for the State of Iowa, spent part of his career as a traveling salesman and was friends with Meredith Willson. There’s a credible rumor that he was the Music Man. My grandmother Jean Belz, Paul’s sister, and her husband Max, started a small high school in eastern Iowa which has become the family legacy. They had eight kids who all had kids, and now many of them have kids, and so there seem to be hundreds of Belzes here and there. Grandpa Max had a print shop, so there’s some ink in our blood too. My mom’s family is English/Irish from Baltimore and connected with the military there. My mother is incredibly beautiful and a crossword puzzle freak. She’d be an avid reader, too, if it weren’t for the fact that she has terrible ADD like her only son. Dad is a lawyer, one of the proud products of the University of Iowa Law School. Which brings us full circle: despite having lived in St. Louis most of my life, I am Hawkeye at heart.
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What are your Poetic Influences?
The other day I was trying to write a good poem, as is my wont, and I couldn’t come up with anything so I Googled “good poem” and the first result was a page of quotes answering the question, “What makes a good poem?” I thought, perhaps naively, a ha! This ought to help. The first quote was from a fellow named Walter Mayes: “A poem is a communication from one soul to another that makes one or both hearts sing.” I pondered this for some time. So, I thought, a poem might just make the writer’s heart sing? I’d always written with the intent of including the reader, but Walter Mayes inspired me to think only of my own heart. As a result, I wrote a poem called “A Box of It”–my finest and least popular work to date. It is quite long and pleases me greatly.
Then last night I was looking at a coffee table book called Writers at Home. If you do not have it, you must get it. It has hundreds of current photos of the houses of great American writers, together with old pictures of them and their families in the homes, and short biographical narratives. The best house is Emerson’s. He bought it in 1828 from a fellow named J. J. Coolidge; it was so large and stately that it had become known as “Coolidge Castle.”
However, what interested me most about this entry in Writers at Home was a quote from Emerson in which he describes the ideal American: “[let him] add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time,–happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone… He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” I thought, hey! Walter Mayes! I also pictured Emerson wandering about his castle learning to be king of his own mind, And later writing Nature, in which he asks the question, “Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
That said, some of my favorite writers are Wallace Stevens, Joseph Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Cesar Vallejo, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, John Donne, George Herbert, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Pearl poet. I cut my teeth on T. S. Eliot and in the mid nineties turned all my attention to John Ashbery.
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When did you realize you were a poet?
I think it was 1996 or 1997. I had written poetry pretty regularly for ten years, had completed the master’s degree in Creative Writing at NYU, and had begun to publish. My first publications were in Exquisite Corpse and Mudfish. I don’t know what the real catalyst was, but I remember thinking that if I’m pouring all this work into writing poetry it would be a shame not to be a poet.
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What type of class has proven most useful for your development as a poet/writer?
I think it was a Craft of Poetry class I took from Allen Ginsberg in 1994. He read from the Kalevala for days on end, it seemed. I learned from him that poetry can be democratic. I needed to be weaned from Old Possum’s teat, I suppose. Ginsberg weaned me. He also read us a lot of John Wieners poems, come to think of it. After that I got into Ashbery.
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Favorite Team or Sport?
The St. Louis Cardinals! Back to back 100-win seasons! The sea of red! Sorry, Cubs fans! (By the way, I am trying to scalp four field-level seats for the Cubs/Cards game on Friday, June 2. If anyone wants to come down and see the new stadium, and has some serious coin, they should email me.)
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Food?
I am ashamed to admit that I do not have a favorite food. I am an omnivore. I do enjoy expensive scotch.
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Vacation Spot?
Nor am I big into vacations. I like to travel, which I think is different. My family does go to the beach in North Carolina occasionally. We’re going there in May.
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Swear Word?
“Horse pucky.” This occurs in Mulholland Drive.
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Are you working on a book?
I’m working on my dissertation, which looks at the influence of popular comedy on Modernist poetry, and I have a new MS of poems that I haven’t sent anywhere yet. I plan to send it out soon.
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How do you write a poem?
I sit for awhile and think about what I most want to say. A poem, for me, begins in speech. I sort of talk to myself for awhile until I hear something that sounds worth investigating more fully. Most of my poems start with a kind of key sentence or observation. In the past year or two I’ve taken to inverting my initial thought and exploring that instead. A lot of my poetry involves systematic inversion, reversal, mirroring, etc. I try to stand to the side and allow the train of thought go by on its own. My role as a poet is to watch it go by, to describe its coming and going. I suppose writing a poem, for me, means divvying up my consciousness into multiple consciousnesses: one who’s thinking, one who’s observing, one who can’t believe what he’s hearing, and one who feels really ashamed even to be alive. Lately I’ve introduced a new consciousness, or at least given it more prominence (it was always there): One who’s in love.
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Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
It is unquestionably both.
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Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
I write in my study or in a carrel or cubicle somewhere. Ambience is not important, but silence is, as is a keyboard: I have trouble writing with a pen or pencil. I get cramps.
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