[Robert J. Clawson]

Before The Brain Surgery

We'd moved out. You'd stayed behind alone
to rid the vacant room of our last traces.
It grew dark. The light switch wouldn't work.
Your limbs froze in the usual paresis;
your throat closed inches from the telephone.

That, of course, was the dark stranger's cue
and probably the moment when you cried
out, dreaming. It was an owlish sound,
one I'd never heard you make, that died
into a snore, then breath. How unlike you,

to call out in your sleep! I kicked your thigh.
Next morning, over coffee, you recalled
the room, the dark, the stranger and your scream.
"You kicked me? I must say, dear, I'm appalled.
Whenever you have nightmares, don't I try

to ease you out of them with loving arms?"
Quite true. And, often, it's from the same room
where lights malfunction, strangers come, and screams
get stuck in throats -- generic signs of doom
that never quite portend specific harm.

Not like your nightmare. I already knew
the shadows gathering inside the dome,
me lying in the darkness outside you,
the glinting blade, you lying there alone.
The stranger. Darling, it's my nightmare, too.

It spans insomnia, and restless sleep,
a bridge that neither one of us can cross.
Next time let's meet halfway, where the bed sags,
both sleep and wakefulness a total loss,
suspended over something swift and deep.

Paula Tatarunis, November 6, 1996

[Michael Juster]

Bob: I know Tatarunis is a neighbor of Len's and mine (more or less), but I have never met her. Like Rafael Campo, she's a doctor, if I remember corrctly. I had noted five years or so ago that she was doing some interesting formal work, but I have seen almost none the past few years, and most of what I have seen seems to be fairly conventional free verse. What can you tell me about her?

[Alder Ellis]

Paula posted for several years on the AOL poetry boards using the screenname "Dr Swan". Here's a bit she posted in 1999, the first part of "Canto VII" (one of an Infernoesque series exploring "The Archive of Lost Poems"):

The dire words faded. Soon, a muffled sound,
a hissing, like a torrent over rock,
tonguelashed our ears, "Is that some underground

tributary of the gray Potomoc
erupting here from deep within the earth ?"
"Oh would it were, my child, and not the dark

and bitter waters unto which our path
has brought us." As he spoke I felt my toes
grow damp, then wet. Then ankles, hips -- a bath

of thick, black ink was drawing toward my nose !
We scrambled up a crumbling granite slope,
slick with blots and dribbles. "That was close,"

I said. "What river’s this ?" "The Byx, you dope,"
explained my Guide, "named after cheap, bad pens
whose balls and points ooze gonococcoid drips

of explosive logorrheal, feculence
perfect for lost poems that have attained
the apotheosis of incontinence."

We gazed across the mire. "What world of stain
inspired the poems mustered here ?" I asked.
"Look there, and you will understand." The pain

with which he spoke these somber words unmasked
my stoic Guide, and tears streaked down his gray,
ink-smeared visage. Quaffing from a flask,

he recomposed himself. I looked away,
and saw a strange and savage donnybrook
erupt midstream: naked poets flayed

each other raw with dripping, ink-soaked books,
while screaming words of a saxon brevity
one might expect from drivers of big trucks

but not from bards of wit and gravity.
"Who are these frenzied pugilists ?" I cried.
"Chimeras of extreme depravity:

poet-critics, who used their cobbled trades
to quash their competition: formalists
who crushed free versers with their snide tirades

and vice versa -- Anarchist ! Fascist !
and other zealots and their anti-zeals-
Airheaded Imagist ! Didacticist !

Brainless Beat ! Cold Intellectual !
Dusty Retro- ! Garbled Avant Garde !
Victim ! Perp ! Theirs was a diss-and-tell

ad hominem, ad feminem and hard
to distinguish from the rhetorics
of marketing and politics, a tad

more flowery, perhaps, and academic,
but otherwise much like the brawn and brawl
that mark the battles over turf or chick."
. . . .

[Robert J. Clawson]

"

Originally posted by Michael Juster:
Bob: I know Tatarunis is a neighbor of Len's and mine (more or less), but I have never met her. Like Rafael Campo, she's a doctor, if I remember corrctly. I had noted five years or so ago that she was doing some interesting formal work, but I have seen almost none the past few years, and most of what I have seen seems to be fairly conventional free verse. What can you tell me about her?

"

I can say, first, that I think she's the best poet in America. A genius with a great ear and driven to research, to "make" great poems. She's frequently published (check google.com), and I know few of her poems that I'd call "free verse." She makes coronas and double coronas. Her ouvre is blank verse, but she has great command of direct and/or slant rime. She writes multilingually (doesn't translate), and regarding a long poem about the Massachusetts water system, that involves the Quabbin Reservoir, she went deep into the conflict of King Philip and found useful Nipmuk words, even entitling the book Qabin, the Indian name.

She's a doctor, yes, but her poems about medicine are often, at least, sardonic. She's written what I consider the finest iambic pentameter line ever, from a poem about medical school, working with a cadaver: "I wobbled in a fume of pickled stool."

Paula and I were "poetry buddies" for about four years and corresponded weekly, critiquing each others poems, but last year she declared a vow of silence, and we communicate rarely now, maybe once a quarter, and I'm bereft. But, I suspect that she's recharging a battery far larger than we can now comprehend and that her silence will produce even greater poetry.

People think I'm nuts to stake my small reputation on such an "unknown," but, like Emily Dickinson, she'll rise to the surface. She's deeply sensitive, a great wit, a scholar, a sensitive doctor, and a poet with great command of our language and its required artistic skills, with which she exercises remarkable control. Unlike most of us, she can write books of poems, long, thematic poems wherein her content and form merge with great beauty.

On aol, people used to find her "difficult," "wordy," and would often disregard her as too quirky. But she's the real thing. I've read enough of her poems to say that she has at least five solid books worth, and she's under fifty years old.

I've sent a stunning, long poem, "God's Handgun," to several poets who have expressed awe, jealousy, and phrases like, "Good Lord, who is she?" They include Maxine Kumin, Bruce Weigl, Thomas Lux, Fred Marchant, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Howard, Heather Mc Hugh, Sandy Taylor (Curbstone Press), and several others. For reasons I can't fathom, despite Mc Hugh offering to hand a manuscript to her publisher, Paula's not yet published a book. She clearly needs a manager, an agent. She readily admits this, being a hard-working doctor and an obsessive poet.

However, if you wish to read her work, it's frequently in the little books Bill Knott calls "ephemera," and google should get you to them. She published 36 poems in 1998.

Incidentally, her husband, Daryl Katz, a composer, is the leader of the Boston Jazz Coalition, and, approximately quarterly, they perform a concert wherein a fantastic female singer, Rebecca Smith, delivers some appropriate poems of Paula's. I've been to two of these events and they're spine-chillingly good. Look for them.

Bob

[Robert J. Clawson]

AE.

I howl through most of this ride, but isn't it wonderful how, after all the incredible dissing, it settles into such a relatively quiet, still ironic, point-making stanza:


"more flowery, perhaps, and academic,
but otherwise much like the brawn and brawl
that mark the battles over turf or chick."

Thanks for this retrieval. I hope that many writers may have collected Paula's poems from aol. Dr swan! Such a delight, such a provocative poet in such an unlikely venue.

Send more.

Bob

[A. E. Stallings]

Bob,

Could you post the one that appeared in Poetry a while back, about the different kinds of patients/different schools of poetry? I love that one. I wish I had kept a copy.

Alicia

[Robert J. Clawson]

Alicia,

Sure, I'll dig it out and have it up in a couple days.

Bob

[Tim Murphy]

Bob, Best poet writing in America? Naaw. I like the brain surgery poem, but the terza rima's theme has been far better done by Gwynn and Davis, her manifest superiors in this art, based on the little I've seen. Show us more, but meanwhile I'd trade you two Tatarunises for Mikey's and my one Tufariello.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Alicia,

I hope this is the poem you requested: it took me 11 hours to type it.

Schools

All day they stream past, petitioners
for understanding, accolade, critique.
I read them all, a vast anthology
of jumbled genres on a common theme:
affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan.
I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias;
I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid
murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks.
The perils of misreading harrow me --
beware the treacheries of metaphor! --
the elephant that squats upon a chest
is not a burning heart or waterbrash.

Just take the imagists. Their heads explode.
St Elmo’s fire flashdances on their limbs.
They float, they swim. Knives twist within their flesh.
They’re ball-and-chained by lead, filled with concrete.
Butterflies inhabit them. Their pipes
are wrong, and clogged. Their systems freeze and crash.
Invaded, they resist; defenses fail.
What they need, they think, is you to flush
it out of them, whatever it is, doc.

The formalists present minutiae,
in alphabetical enjambed iambs --
pentameter’s ten digits, five lub-dubs --
from acne, backpain, catarrh, dandruff, eye-
strain, flatfoot, gas pains, hangnail, itchiness,
the jitters, kinks, lethargies, migraines, nose-
bleeds, obstipation, panics, queasy retch-
ings, styes and tremors, ulcers, vertigo,
to wandering womb, xerosis, yaws and zits.

Free versers, on the other hand, wax Walt
Whitmanic: their barbaric yawps celebrate and sing
incantatory songs of themselves, songs
of the breath as it wheezes and rales through them,
the short breath and long breath, the breath that is
moist or dry,
songs of the blood, the thick- and thinness of it, its
heat, its turbulence,
songs of the gut, its rippling coils, the dark burden of
its secret indulgences,
songs of the muscled limb, inflamed with toil or the
languid thrash of love.

Didacticists, of course, will always add
their theories of omission or commission:
slept in a draft, got their feet wet, caught a chill,
forgot their overshoes and oversoul,
ate too little roughage, too much ham,
should have pumped less iron or pumped more,
"Mea culpa, meus morbus" they intone,
certain you’ll absolve them back to health.

Narrativists enshrine a fleeting pain
within an epic of chronology
"I woke at six -- I’m a morning person --
brushed my teeth, ate oatmeal with a pat
of low-fat margerine, the kind that has
the dancing turkey on the tub, on sale
for .99 at Johnnie’s," by the time
you tune back in it’s afternoon, the pain
has come and gone; they’re vacuuming the rug,
the doorbell rings, the kettle’s whistling,
you try to interrupt -- "where did you say
that pain was?" -- loquacity steamrolls on
through supper, TV, bedtime, dreams, alarm
clock going off at six. "Try Tylenol,"
you say, your fingers crossed. "Call if it’s worse."

Then there’s the avant garde. The cutting edge.
The text Munchausens off the sizzling page.
Hypoglossalalia muscles in,
between John Cagey silences, the din
and Strum of wild unsound, unsense.
O, there are stranger dysphasias, Wernicke,
than are dreamt of in your neurologies,
mutant L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Es that cacophone
far off the beaten geographic tongue,
where elephants explode and overshoes
fibrillate with longing -- El Dorado,
Shangri-la, Eden, Heaven, Hell -- you name it,
it’s yours. And that’s, of course, the joke. You nod.
You say, "I understand." You really don’t.


Poetry, May, 1999

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Tim Murphy:
"... Gwynn and Davis... I'd trade you two Tatarunises for Mikey's and my one Tufariello."

Gwynn's San Diego, right? Davis got traded around, I think. The other two? I haven't seen their cards. I have, however, two rookie cards of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, which I'm willing to trade for Aeschylus and Euripidies.

Bob