ben tripp
October 3, 2015
Robert Kelly Festschrift
Below, my excerpt from the http://www.metambesen.org festschrift collection of writing for, around &/or about Robert Kelly.
The entirety of the collection here:
http://www.metambesen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/RK-festschrift.pdf
Catholic Tastes
for Robert Kelly
1.) “catholic”
When I first met/became friends with Robert (as his advisee) I was at the helm of a little poetry magazine that contained the work of some old friends of his…lots of them, actually…alongside the work of my own friends. There were still many others whose work I liked enough to maybe believe its authors might also be friendly people. That might bridge the terrible inevitable gaps of time/influence/geography/faith(s): “Your magazine is very Catholic!” Robert said. “Giving a wide berth.” That sufficed for me…very well, and complimentary too…I thought that was an apt description of what I was up to, or at any rate, trying to do.
2.) “tally-ho”
The most un-useful & un-necessary word I ever conspired to place in my poems. I guess I liked the look & sound of it. Prof. Kelly was kind enough to point this out…almost too kindly…but what…was I trying to become some sort of 18th century British polo-playing aristocrat verse-ifier? Jesus, no! Almost every other word surrounding it though (luckily) in what I presented at that time made some sort of contemporary sense, had actual meaning.
3.) “fried shoe”
Gregory Corso? A tangent…but the maestro again making a point about desire vs. necessity in a poet’s language. Necessity sounds a little desperate…a bit nerve-wracking…better stick with desire! But if Greg wanted to throw a “fried shoe” into the middle of his poem he is justified. We’ll never know the need or want behind it. Could it be both? We have never even seen a fried shoe, and come to think of it now…this phrase may’ve even been a Robert original. Memorable!
4.) “the Flarf in our head(s)”
So many petty lines of conflict that pull writers away from one another. Robert & I both agreed there was enough Flarf-like mess in our heads anyway to fill a book’s worth (or two) a year. Keep the search engine in your pocket: save it for later. Randomness may also be inevitable (to some aesthetic degree…) whether or not we look to the Internet or academia or anything at all, for our own reflection, or for what’s happening/going(s) on outside our most private-colored sanctuaries.
5.) “where I grew up in Brooklyn everyone talks like this”
Is it true? The poet’s own accent…I stood once outside a bar in Manhattan along 14th Street (circa 2006) and spoke with a fellow who had a similarly interesting accent. I could’ve sworn he was from England somewhere. So I asked him, but he said he was decidedly not from there. He was from Brooklyn, and wanted me to know the absurdity of my query. I wish I could remember his name. It was some remarkable dignity of cadence and the resonance of the vowels…like Rimbaud’s vowels…that stood out to me. I don’t even remember what the name of this mythical neighborhood was, but it seems as though I’ve maybe already met two people who once called it home.
6.) CITIES
from a world of noise
these travellers like you and me
exchanging improvised customs
7.) “what is not here
is nowhere
men
should live in cities
shun
these ghostly edens of twilight
where all we have never been
mocks what we are”
— excerpt from the R.K. poem “Last Light” (1960-something)
8.) “how to let everyone in”
Names of course being the first cardinal obscenity & sin that we (poets especially) are so guilty of. Back in the good ol’ days the word was all. Less egotism that way!
Language resists possession. John Wieners removing stars from his poems for example in favor of parking lots: “Drive a great big car / into the parking lot.”
I blame the troubadours, Dante, young Werther, Villon, Apollinaire, those who put milk in their coffee, swans, Bard Spleen, Denise Levertov, Boris Vian, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the sly post-modern eras…Bernadette Mayer, Robert Duncan, Pindar & Goya’s “quick adulterous tread at the heart.”
I grew up in a small town
where churches burned down frequently
At the hands of Irish and Quebecois
gamblers, pirates & railroad people
Their melody is the situation
10.) “a poem about time-gaps”
I is an extra. Rimbaud was just a spoiled little brat who never worked a day in his life. The quality of his dreams however could sustain him. The dumbfounded child who won’t let go of your hand…it’s The Hands of Jeanne-Marie, or a coven of woolgathering Sufi carrying around their ostrich luggage. No religion but poetry.
September 17, 2015
upcoming performances
upcoming performances:
BOSTON 9/18 – (TOMORROW!!!) @ Le Mat First Issue Premier Launch
8pm – 10pm, Out of the Blue Too Art Gallery & More
541 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
https://www.facebook.com/events/1480580345570349/
NEW YORK 10/17 – @ The Segue Poetry Reading Series (alongside Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra)
4:30pm – 6:30 pm, The Zinc Bar — 82 West 3rd St. NYC, between Thompson and Sullivan St.
May 27, 2015
Greetings Live Reading 5.7.15
http://www.greetingsreadings.org/Greetings_Readings/Ben_Tripp.html
Thanx to Jeffrey Joe Nelson and Everybody at the Greetings Poetry Reading Series (℅ Unnameable Booxstore) for having me the other night…
September 30, 2014
Like Missing Instruments
[Grunge Patricians]
http://broadstonebooks.com/Like_Musical_Instruments.html 
Having a three-page poem & my portrait selected for this anthology feels like a gift, even though things between Santa and I have not exactly been all rosy these past five X-mases or so, since the book began, since I had to stop believing in Santa along with the tooth fairy, easter rabbit(s), etcetera…so I wasn’t invited to read last night at the launch which was okay…neither was so & so, an old (in the figurative sense) friend and contemporary American anthological sister also in attendance, on whose faithless W.H. Auden-esque arm I tattooed the above title as per her request, with a lump of coal. Then another friend accidentally cut open his hand on a broken bottle of Miller Fortune in Tompkins Square park because he never even got to meet Santa. He’s okay now. Buy this book.
September 1, 2014
BLAISE CENDRARS was born the same year as the oldest person alive
but he died
he would have been 127 years old today, one hundred years older than me
and as old as Leandra Becerra Lumbreras turned just yesterday
Happy Birthday(s) to them both. Happy Labor Day
“La vie que j’ai menée / M’empêcher de me suicider / Tout bondi …”
“La femme, la danse que Nietzsche a voulu nous apprendre à danser / La femme / Mais l’ironie?”
