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Morton Marcus: This is KUSP community sponsored radio. Morton Marcus: Hello again, this is Mort Marcus and this is the Poetry Show and the music in the background, Neil Young playing "Misfits," and that doesn't quite introduce our guest for

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today, the poet and publisher of Comma Books, Dennis Saleh. And the occasion of this program, which there really doesn't need to be an occasion for, is Dennis's reading tonight at Sweet Williams. That is the reading on 538 Seabright Avenue,

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which happens every other Wednesday night, and he'll be reading with two other poets. But I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to get Dennis to the show, which I've been meaning to do for quite some time. Dennis, welcome to the Poetry Show.

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Dennis Saleh: It's good to be back in Santa Cruz, Morton, good to see you. Morton Marcus: Good to see you too. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and what you've done, and where

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you're living now. Dennis Saleh: Well, in a way, I'm from Santa Cruz. My lovely wife, Michelle, is here with me today. And when we first married, we lived in Santa Cruz a couple years when I was

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teaching up at UC in the days when there was a College Five. We make our home now down on the Monterey Peninsula in Seaside, and I had the good fortune to devote the better part of my time to my writing and publishing efforts. Since I

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taught around the state: California State University in Fresno, San Diego State, and I guess, as far back as you'd go in the tar pits of time, began that illustrious career teaching at UC Riverside when I graduated from UC Irvine with a MFA degree

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in writing. Morton Marcus: Right, and I also know that you are the publisher of Comma Books, so why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Dennis Saleh: Well, with my own imprint, I've done a book on

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record album cover art called, "Rock Art: The Golden Age of Record Album Covers." And a couple years later, which is now three or four years back down the road, I published a book on science fiction film of the 50s, "Science Fiction Gold: Film

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Classics of the 50s." Morton Marcus: Is that available still? Dennis Saleh: Yes, it is, and people should rush right out and look for it. S-A-L-E-H, that's S like space, "Science Fiction

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Gold," and it comes personally very commended. Morton Marcus: Well, not only does it come personally commended, it comes commended to me too. I use it as a textbook if my film class. And besides just wonderful little extra GCs

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on 50s films, it is a very, very poetic, beautifully written text, so I really enjoyed it quite a bit. Dennis, let us jump into the subject of this program, which is your poetry, and you can either introduce what you're going to read first

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or you can just jump in and let the people hear what you do. Dennis Saleh: Well, I'll jump in by way of a couple of kinds of introductions, you're good enough to play a record I brought up here this afternoon with us, "Misfits" by Neil

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Young, and it's about that wonderful station, space station we're going to have up in the sky someday. He says they're living Kennedy's dreams, watching old reruns of Muhammad Ali on the video screen, and that's about traveling in time,

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of course. It's Neil Young's projection of cowboys in the sky. When I come to Santa Cruz, I always have the feeling of traveling in time. You can come back to Santa Cruz and pick up a flavor that the Eagles said the rest of the country lost in

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1969. Michelle and I always feel like we're traveling in time we come back to Santa Cruz where our first child was born. But in any case, I come to Santa Cruz and I get a sensation of the very old values, -- dope, sex, poetry -- and with this sound-

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Morton Marcus: Wait, wait, wait, wait old values? I thought they were the everlasting values? Dennis Saleh: Well, I was coming to the fact that I'm going to be addressing the timeless in fact, today.

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Morton Marcus: There you go. I got to say this for the Chamber of Commerce, Dennis. Dennis Saleh: And that the voice of Neil Young, invoking the space station overhead is very much the feeling I'd like to

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have in the background as we read some poems and talk for a few minutes today. I'm going to be reading poems about some of the very oldest things -- the moon, sense of solitude, and a sense of the passage of time. But more appropriately, more

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particularly by way of introduction, that space station up in the sky to date is Russian. We don't have ours up there yet, there's no question we will someday. And in some day, there's no question but the space station will be manned

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space station, it won't be the space station of any one particular nation. But in any case, the space station today is Mir, M-I-R, which is the Russian word for peace and also the Russian for Earth, meaning the entire planet. And I guess,

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coincidentally, almost too cutely to too, my name in Arabic means peace, Saleh. I don't know how it's pronounced in the Middle East but for years, my lifetime growing up, it's an unusual name in this country and there were the variable

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mispronunciations: Salah, Saley, Saulson. The mail comes such that anything with the initials D.S. gets accepted. There's come to be a recent joke where I'm Mister Salad and I perfected it to Dinner Salad, so I get letters from friends around the

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country addressed to Mr. Dinner Salad. But once, when I had to give a direction for the pronunciation of my name, I had to make a little phonetic inscription on a card and it was Say-Luh, with a long A. And at one point, I was studying the

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very word Say, and I wrote a poem about it. And it came out of the fact that I've found so much incredible information about a simple little three-word poem, that I'd like to use it as a way of introduction, and a way of suggesting my excitement and

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intoxication with words, and why I write poems. I found out things like, Say, was at one time a fabric, in the Middle Ages, and you would dress in Say, and that there was a character called the Say Man who sold this fabric and what have

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you. So to really get things under way, and with my thanks to you for your hospitality today, and to Brother Neil, who's kind of at home here just up in the hills in his ranch above Santa Cruz, I'll read this poem called:

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THE SAY As in, the last say, or he'll want to have some say, or just say. Who's to have the say, or the final say, say do you know? You don't say. There's hearsay, the old what say, you might need

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the gainsay or naysayer. You might attempt an essay, venture in S.A., conclude a brief say on somebody's say so. The say it isn't so cannot be overlooked, also, never forgetting soothsayers. Cousin heresy, sister curtsy, also, ages ago,

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folds and tapestries of woven say, dressing in say, the say man passing with wares at a fair. I dare say there would be old sayings, I say, across the tops of fifteen columns, in the Oxford English Dictionary, it says, say, say, say. Apparently,

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everything has a say, even unto the beginning was the word Sayeth the Lord and now I've had, or more particularly, I'm having my say. Morton Marcus: Very nice, that has that wonderful precision of

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phrase that I have always admired in your work- Dennis Saleh: Thank you. Morton Marcus: -as well as the width. Great introductory poem. I'm very interested in poets who, you know, have introductory

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poems to themselves and that's one that goes to the top of my list. Dennis Saleh: Well, staying right on the subject here of introductions and time traveling back to Santa Cruz and

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reintroducing myself to the Santa Cruz audience, I guess I was up here a couple years ago, and did the show with Gary Young and Steve Kessler, and so again, this is like those circles that repeat themselves. No poetry reading complete without a

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quotation from another poet, which would be something like, "And yet the things go around, and again, go around, has rather a classical sound," which, of course, is Wally Stephen's high atop his desk in the insurance office. But I want to stay with

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this time traveling idea for a minute, and these senses of past and more particularly futures, and I still hear that space station up in the sky. This is a poem called, "1999," and it comes out of a lot of the things I talk about in the science

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fiction book about the movies, and a subject matter I come back to again and again, which is simply the passage of time. And once a subject like that kind of touches you, you don't get it out of your system. It's like if you stumble across a big enough

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issue, it's never over within a single poem, you come back to it again and again. And I guess one of my topics I come back to again and again is what I call a sense of calendar, it's simply what time is, the past, conclusions and things. And this

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is a projection into the future. And I suppose it's damn fortunate I was able to get the thing written and published when I did, squeezed between Prince's album "1999" and Richard Nixon has a new book announced, imminent, going to be out in a

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couple three years called, "1999," but let's not forget, this is my poem: 1999 Black neon appoints the room with soft finality. How does the

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black glow? It is the last year of a century of wonders. The opposite is true now, in most cases. For example, these chalk black, sullen, suave tubes of coiled light. In the Air Museum, it's raining umbrellas like an old fashioned surrealist

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painting. In this room, sea planes. In this room, Pterodactyls. In the very last room, the sky. Now, in the museum of promises, a sign reads over the century, "Removal Sale. Everything must go. Everything unfinished. Everything undone."

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Remember from the site at Babel, the broken white marble tongue? There is a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, white. Put the century together. Everyone is arguing over the calendar and how many parts shall the year be. What does even the letter C mean? In

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a tome on old names of the moon, argument is made that the moon was the origin of the letters C in all languages. This moon drags its hundred years, abbreviates itself and is gone. The century is so old now, the only days left are Sundays, the

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only religion, euphemism. For the color curling up, the sea peeling away, a gray is at the door, in the electricity. Nobody remembers when it wasn't December. A book says it is all simultaneity. There is a phone call for the television. For the

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last day of the year, the news will be one day early. The sea will sing its sea song, the moon pronounced C for century. Look at the air, it averts its face. The future is not accurate, do not forget. The century is out of place. Time has left no

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trace, scientists say, but make a rhyme if you have one. So time travel into the future, but we don't get to the future without past, and without the past in movies, in literature. This is a poem called -- I'm going to do some very bad German

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-- "Die Frau im Mond," and which is the name of a very famous science fiction film from about the mid 1920s. And it was directed by Fritz Lang, who is, I'm sure probably a household word in Santa Cruz, directed things like Metropolis, fled

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Nazi Germany to United States. He had an illustrious career and we know most recently as the director of Metropolis, but he directed the Dr. Mabuse movies and all kinds of thrillers and was in on things like the beginning of Marlene Dietrich's

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career. This particular film, "Die Frau im Mond," was about a voyage to the moon, moon travel in that space shuttle- space station overhead, what will get us to the moon and to one of the oldest myths. And in this poem, I first address a recurring

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figure and what's become an entire manuscript of moon poems called, "Lunar." Die Frau im Mond is the Lady in the Moon, the woman on the moon —the name of the movie is translated either way, really —and it becomes a kind of first

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addressing of the moon as a feminine figure. And at the same time, nevertheless, it's full of these splendid figures from the history of space, history of science. Hermann Oberth was one of two technical advisors on the film, and the film's technique,

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the film's sophistication was such that when the Nazis came along and seized the film industry prior to World War II, this movie was yanked out of circulation and sealed off. Hermann Oberth himself disappeared into the Nazi rocket

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projects on a Monday. And his- the co-advisor, Willie Lee, fled to the United States where he was instrumental and a key figure in the first rocket programs here. So we're hearing all kinds of history and all kinds of futures here

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simultaneously. But most importantly, I begin to address what will be a recurrent figure, which is the moon, or the moon as a woman. Tonight, the woman in the moon lies on her side. The great face

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and brow tilt half over, half veiled. She is saying, "Oh," in a large dark area that is her mouth, rapt with communication, seriousness that comes easily, even unbidden. In May, a friend's poem arrived, five lines for the fifth month. In

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Mayan, the word for full moon and onion is the same. The onion a month of days slipping past, a bell that peels, a woman coming and going in a month of skies. For October, the tenth month, rocket scientist Oberth, German science fiction resplendent with

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moons, the inevitability of the moon, it's ineluctable beckoning, the arched night sky cast pale with radiant allure. Inside the moon is a hand, inside a woman is a hand. In three weeks, a year ends. "No mind," the lady says, the nights

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say, and her white rhymes with the silence. The moon is its own fact. It is without hesitation. It will make the year white even at the end. Night long, the sea washes with leave taking. When I come in, my hair is dusted with the ringing silence of her

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passing, the night her train and embroidery arraignment. Morton Marcus: Very beautiful and some of these lines almost haunting. How you are led, or shall I say, how you leap from one thing to another -- some beautiful imagery, lyrical

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imagery -- and then suddenly you jump to things like inside the moon is a hand, inside a woman is a hand. I mean, these are wonderfully suggestive, evocative statements, which are also, I think, hard won and realized with a lot of insight.

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Dennis Saleh: You're very kind, you may be very right. Morton Marcus: Let's say I'm very right. What- now, where did that image come from? Is it actually suggested by part of the film or is it a leap of your own, this idea of the moon

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being- Dennis Saleh: The film in the title was an afterthought or a fortunate association after the fact that I grew up my life long, you hear about the man on the moon. I frankly had never

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seen him. And when we first moved back to the coast, to Monterey ten years ago, I first saw a face on the moon and it was the literal face of a woman. And it seemed inescapable and inexplicable and I'd never seen it before. And my association is

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always to the literal face of a woman and the mouth is open in a kind of- a certain kind of sign or look of intimacy and it comes from that experience. And then the association, of course, with- with a lot of these science fiction films, what have

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you, and this classic, this Hallmark film about the Lady in the Moon. And then I suppose a footnote of all of this, something is, after I'd written this poem, and talking with some people, I found out, for example, that what is in the

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moon depends on where you're coming from, as you'd say, in Santa Cruz. In France, for example, it is a woman's face and the French speak of a woman in the moon and I did not know this. And in other countries, for example, they might see a

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particular little animal or people remembering the dune film lately, recently, the Frank Herbert novel that there's a moon, Planet Dune that has a mouse figure on it. So you're free to see, you know, the moon is in the eye of the beholder.

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Morton Marcus: But what I was asking was the idea of the hand, the moon being a hand. Was that, you know, in any way connected with the film or did that- Dennis Saleh: No, the hand is, I guess you'd say is poetic

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license. I, for better or worse, made that up. We don't know what's quite inside the moon yet, but I trust we'll be getting to that by the end of the century. Morton Marcus: Well, it's a great way to follow the

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metaphor, a woman being a hand that reaches in drawers. And also of course, when you are in space, you are picked up by the moon's gravitational pull, so- Dennis Saleh: Well, this woman in the moon continues, as I

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suggested, and as we return to the subject, it became articulated in a series of poems about some real professional misfits, the group of surrealist artists and painters, poets around the first part of the century, you might say, to

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really kind of establish them in time, but it makes sense to them in a context that they were in an alternative reality in their day, 1920s, 1910s, and they left a noble tradition that I suppose the punk rockers and the hardcore people these days, the

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people who dress up with purple hair, and what have you, this all harkens back to the surrealist. The kinds of things that are done today to subvert, to disarray, and to distort reality, go back to some experiments and some things that

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these painters were going through in the 1920s. If the sun- if you'd say the sun was consciousness to the surrealist, Freud was the moon. And what the surrealist wished to do was to change reality by constantly suffusing and inner penetrating

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it with the unconscious. They saw the irrational, the dark side, the peculiar side, and maybe the single most famous image is in a painting by someone like Salvador Dali, where he has the melting watch. And this is a poem by the

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Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte, it's called “Magritte, Study for Luna.” And in it, I talk about tricks of this classic surrealist trade. Many people remember his paintings where the easel stands before an open window, and the easel and

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the subject matter outside the window blur and become one, or a painting inside of a cave blurs becomes part easel and part cave wall. I used to hate this kind of poem, the poet-like poem about the painter. But I've decided in this late day and

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age, if Paul Simon can write songs about Rene and Georgette Magritte and their dog after the war, and if Jeff Beck can have Rene Magritte paintings on the covers of his record albums, that I'm free to write these poems about painters, if I must,

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and I assure you I must. So this is in four parts: [I] A fog tolls in the window, Earth's timepiece marking the sky. Inside the month is a man. At the end of a week when the

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days are dry, he puts them away. Astronomy, which begins with the letter A, the stars, which conclude the zodiac. Even the moon exhausts volumes, ink faded white, pages about themselves. II

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The head of the moon draws itself, a primmer mannequin. In the night's ink, the rest is lost. The artist’s anatomy books sags, the sapped spine melancholy. A constellation of objects crowds the heavens. The moon is hiding out. No one knows

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the moon is a secret or that a pair of scissors is a star. III A month changes the sex of the moon. What sex is it? White. No, a moustache curls there. No, the hair softens and is a woman. The

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bird in the rib cage is the moon, a pale heart. The moon is blind, a candle kisses it. At midnight, the crescent is a glass slipper and a tail. No. The easel fills the window and it is the moon, trompe-l’oeil [commentary] which is some very

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bad French. IV The eye sees through itself and is fooled. Stars are ideas. The painter misspells the name of the horizon, this part is real.

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In the morning, on the first day of the year, a pair of woman's white gloves in the sand on the beach. The pages of a newspaper turn in the surf, missing fortune. A year as a clue the horizon reads.

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Morton Marcus: Well, that certainly turns the whole thing around and moves right back into the real world in the end very, very nicely with the surrealistic vestiges of our existence on the beach.

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Dennis Saleh: Well, that was Magritte's magic, he painted the most ordinary of objects, but one of the critical words is in such juxtaposition. You'd see, for example, you know, the man in the bowler hat, and he would have an apple instead of a face,

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or you'd see an enormous landscape and it would be raining these little men in bowler hats. Morton Marcus: Right. Dennis Saleh: Or you'd see a fireplace and a locomotive

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coming out of it instead of a fire. Morton Marcus: What I'm saying, though, is the last images when it says, “this part is real,” in the morning, that's you going out to the beach and seeing objects. And to me, okay, I love

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Magritte and I love his images but what does the poet do with it? And you've been making these wonderfully evocative leaps throughout the poem. Then suddenly, in the end, you turn the whole unreality around and you turn reality in on itself.

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And this just shows the very surrealist tag ends of our existences which are so normal. It's very nice. Let me just say when Robin commenting a little bit about your poems and what they do- because I've always liked them so much, but here is

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something that the listeners out there can really take into account: the word, the night's ink, has been said one way or the other to the point that it is cliche, but what a real poet can do is take the cliche-

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Dennis Saleh: And a little melancholy- Morton Marcus: -and a little melancholy -- or as the Briti h say a little melon colony, whi h they don't have anymor [chuckles] -- and he can mak it fresh. And in part two, whi

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h I have in front of me and unfortunately the listener do not, it says the head of the moon draws itself and kee ing the metaphor now of using en, using, you know, oil. Sudd nly we have the idea of ink ere directly relating to

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the metaphor, so it is totally f esh to look at the ink of the n ght and it's these little th ngs that just keep going on in our poems as well as this eal precision of image and lang age which all of us can learn f om, Den

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Dennis Saleh: Well, Morton you couldn't be doing a better job of leading from one poem to the next. This is a poem, again about one of the surrealist painters, Paul Delvaux — a Belgian again like Rene Magritte, they were

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contemporaries — and if you've ever seen a Paul Delvaux painting, you'll you'll never forget it. If you haven't seen them, I commend them highly. They're very strange, they are all cast in a kind of eternal, moonly blue light, and they

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consist largely of these very strange figures of women. They're statuary, but they have the enormous — if you remember the old Walter Keane paintings, these eyes — and then they are all invariably festooned luridly with these dark, prominent,

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intricate patches of lovely pubic hair. And they come and go in all of these paintings and they're perfectly mad, and outrageous. Outrage, shock was something very important to the surrealists, it was an important word in their vocabulary. I'd

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like to think that at any good poetry reading that there would be a little bit of outrage. Maybe not like the days of Time Magazine and when People Magazine was a column back in the 50s. I remember a wonderful story about Allen Ginsberg and

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he'd read something in a poem and it outraged a fellow and the guy jumped up and started harassing and haranguing Ginsberg and Ginsberg confronted him and challenged him and said, "Well, what have you, [unintelligible] to get down to?

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Let's see who's really brave, who will disrobe?" And Ginsberg began disrobing and finally stood stark naked before the audience and his antagonist was terrified and ran out the door. It's been a very famous story to this day, so if not an all

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together naked person, what would be the point of that on the radio? How about someone's mother's genitals? Which we will encounter in this piece, where Delvaux writes in his journal to Rene Magritte. And to just go ahead with this very literary

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business about painters, has a very famous painting called Le Viol, which is The Rape, and it is a woman's face cast as the torso of the body with the breast is the eyes, the pubic hair as the mouth. And of course, this is an image that

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which just kind of co-pollinate and cross-pollinate with the kinds of images and things that Delvaux is using in his paintings. So he writes to the Rene Magritte thus: In a dream, you are painting the genitals of my mother. It is in

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the manner of your supreme [in French] Le Viol. Cloth blows over the woman's face, but you go on. Intricately in scrolling her intimacy, the hair. This is on the mezzanine of a fashionable department store, the bills of elevators coup

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between the floors, sliding doors are everywhere, hissing and disgorging crowds. The painting of my mother is encircled, so you leave. You are taking a train in a blue light. My mother is waving, blankness, the soft dress of air about

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things. More than once, I knew the loveliest thing in the world. There were diamond fish, there was an atomic ocean. Now, I take a starfish by the hand. Its compass points five ways: the five seas, the sky. But one thing before I go, say, I am

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against white. Say, I want the canvas to slip away and the breast to take flight like an idea. Say, the past is a hat and I cannot put it on any longer. I saw the road, it was sitting down, it was brown and rocky. God must be this day. One moment

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must be another. Here at the pyramid of land, sea, and sky, now be the laws of chaos observed. Morton Marcus: That's got, again, some just wonderful stuff. Not only the very provocative God must be this

00:35:04.020 - 00:35:19.900

day, one moment must be another, but images which always just get me such as say the past is a hat and I can put it on. No longer, it just is just wonderful stuff. Dennis Saleh: Thank you, Morton, you're too kind; perhaps not too

00:35:19.900 - 00:35:32.710

kind, but you're very kind indeed. What these poems all become, from the space station and Neil's voice to The Stones song that we'll conclude with, Morton assures me, "Moonlight Mile-"

00:35:33.310 - 00:35:45.460

I've ruined Dennis's whole form for this show by that last record- [crosstalk] -is one of the very oldest myths and the subject of countless poets and poems down to the times the Endymion myth, the

00:35:45.460 - 00:36:00.940

myth of a youth who falls into eternal sleep, and is the lover of Celine, the Goddess of the moon. There are all kinds of various versions of this, but the moon has always been hot stuff. No less a poet than Joh Keats at the age of twenty-thre

00:36:00.940 - 00:36:19.300

published a four thousand lin poem entitled Endymion, there' an interminably awful si hundred line Endymion by Osca Wilde. And just to bring t issue to its most particula form in my expression is m Endymion. And I think back t

00:36:19.300 - 00:36:41.530

that sound of that single dru and that Neil Young song Endymion beats one drum, high over his head, shepherding the moon. His cat curls in a crescent, Felix Lunar, and bleats. The hill is scored over with mythical light, but the

00:36:41.530 - 00:37:10.540

gods are gone, the days; only moon remains, an oracle of echoes in another language, Endymion in the moon, words in a veil, its other face. Opposite us, the half life of the moon goes on. The moon makes one rhyme, and the sea another. The

00:37:10.540 - 00:37:38.680

horizon trails in confusion, a silver string. The beach is a clasp, unrequited sea, unrequited moon. Tonight is ordinary, nothing conspires -- facts, envy, myth, and Endymion, who takes his music to the moon, then falls behind it. This moon

00:37:39.760 - 00:38:07.690

only measures in rocks routinely to the one note of the horizon and falls simply to the sea. I have heard it said, "Words should be simpler like the moon, which is elegant and plain and polishes in darkness." The night a sentence, and the moon

00:38:08.350 - 00:38:41.410

punctuation. Every moment light is ending. The waves heave and are resigned. The moon stands to leave beside the tall night and makes its parting words in silence. Take bone, take half, take alone. Roll away the sun, you are asleep. The dark is a

00:38:41.410 - 00:39:04.450

dream. Endymion speaks: When I die before I wake, I pray the moon my light to make. Morton Marcus: Again, just wonderful things in this poem. The fact that the beach is a clasp is just wonderful because

00:39:04.450 - 00:39:20.200

it is the separation of land and water. And yet also, in moonlight it looks like a jeweled clasp, a line almost that one would wear in a necklace. Just beautiful stuff, that has this- I've been using the word evocative and

00:39:20.200 - 00:39:34.240

suggestive, it suggests two or three things beyond the physical image itself and it's just wonderful. There are echoes in here, which I'm sure you're unaware of, which are great. You know, the Lorca poem, Preciosa and the moon, in which the girl

00:39:34.240 - 00:39:50.890

comes along the seashore, beating a tambourine which is the moon, you see, and here he beats the one drum which is the moon. Lovely. And a great parallel between what Sephora says in his poem on the Nile, that our poetry has become too

00:39:50.890 - 00:40:03.310

loaded down and golden crusted, with what I think can be anyone's definition, or certain poet's definition, not everyone's definition, which is words should be simpler like the moon, which is elegant and plain and polishes in darkness. I

00:40:03.310 - 00:40:15.610

mean, boy, what a great working definition of what poetry is, certainly to Dennis Saleh and how he uses words. Dennis Saleh: Well, you suggest this image of a necklace and it couldn't be more appropriate. This is another examination of

00:40:15.610 - 00:40:32.140

the moon, and it's called, "Moon in Haiku." And what could be simpler than the seventeen syllable oriental form of the Haiku. What I've done in this extended piece is string together, attempt to string together seventeen individual

00:40:32.140 - 00:40:52.810

Haiku into one long piece. Now, I'm not going to stop in between each stanza, but it's a poem that moves from Haiku to Haiku and they are five-seven-fives, and again, it's this examination of the moon, but in a more particular, more precise form.

00:40:52.960 - 00:41:15.060

MOON IN HAIKU Half a moon better than none, an old saying goes, half a loaf of light. Imagine where moon is the only light at night, its significance. Important as sun, night blossoming flowers, moon

00:41:15.090 - 00:41:41.820

harvesting the sea. Erase the chalkboard, the gravity of the moon remains, white not there. Instamped printers do, impressed in a proof of sky without ink of light. Star clouds mass up, drawn ornamentally, even orientally. In the east, the

00:41:41.820 - 00:42:11.820

moon is the stake-net pole, rattan, bamboo, the lantern. The orderly moon spins time each month in Haiku, one syllable long. A song, one sound long, in pantomime, in white face, luminescent music. Imagination sets in, what Haiku complete

00:42:12.120 - 00:42:41.880

without June or moon? Felicitous rhyme, starfish, sea, and sky, a rhyme. Moon chimes agreement. Too much moon, moon struck. How long before moon turned you into a woman or a lunatic rubbing his head to a moon encanting moon words? Thesaurus of whites, moth

00:42:41.880 - 00:43:08.940

of months circling itself, idiot savant. Waxes, wanes, is one, everyone knows the words. Silvery, a spoon, a loon dips its head beneath the heavens to feed in tapering moon. Tomorrow promised, quarter moon, a downpayment, white,

00:43:09.540 - 00:43:27.270

undiminished. Optional only, the extra credit Haiku, stars or words the same. And I saw Morton looking on his copy for the extra credit Haiku, which has a wonderful story behind it. That was in fact an

00:43:27.270 - 00:43:43.050

eighteenth stanza which I threw in for free, what the hell is only rock and roll. I went to a class in poetry some years back, and I was going to conduct a class for an old friend and he said he'd send me up some poems to work, have some comments on,

00:43:43.050 - 00:43:55.380

and since I believe in earning your pay, I was, you know, ready, sitting at the table waiting for the mailman. And in came about a pound of poetry. The guy had obviously sent me every poem his students had written, and as I began going

00:43:55.380 - 00:44:11.490

through my fourth or fifth glass of iced tea, I saw that there was a sign, there was a quatrain, obviously from week to week he had assigned a form and exercise. Then I came to the week it was Haiku. So everyone was assigned five Haiku. So page

00:44:11.490 - 00:44:28.200

after page, 1-2-3-4-5 Haiku, five Haiku, I come to one sheet, there's five Haiku, and then extra credit Haiku. I thought it was so wonderful, I was determined at some day to write the extra credit Haiku. I remembered the Gary Snyder hitch

00:44:28.200 - 00:44:43.500

Haiku. And there's this poet Steve Richmond who writes these things gagaku and I was determined, and lo and behold, I did in fact, right, optional only, the extra credit Haiku, stars or words, the same.

00:44:44.380 - 00:44:58.270

Morton Marcus: Let me ask you something here, which I would like to go into and which the listener cannot see. Reading a Dennis Saleh poem, you realize two things immediately: Except for that last one, which is in three lines, almost every one of

00:44:58.300 - 00:45:17.710

your poems is in couplets, and every one of those poems is has no punctuation. It therefore gives interesting things to your linebreaks and forces the reader to read with great attention and to possibly read some lines in several different ways. Tell us

00:45:17.710 - 00:45:34.520

about why do you use that? It's almost a Dennis Saleh form. Dennis Saleh: Well, it's to do at least what you suggest, which is to free the words, to move in more than one direction. It's a feeling that in a poem, which is the stripped down, barest

00:45:34.520 - 00:45:50.120

language there is, that maybe you can dispense even with punctuation. It's wanting to free up and loosen things as much as possible, and it's to do a way with the kind of formality the punctuation lends when you are writing as strictly as I

00:45:50.120 - 00:46:03.710

write -- which are very short lines, and as you suggest, couplets and triplets -- that there is a kind of formality and a rigidness in the poem already. And so much is determined by linebreaks, after very few words, that I wanted to sort of

00:46:03.710 - 00:46:18.770

let as much air and free space and kind of breathing space into the poem as possible. It seems to me that I've parsed each piece down so that the punctuation is not necessary maybe, or once in a while, very cavalierly, devil may care, I

00:46:18.890 - 00:46:33.110

will throw in the king of punctuation, the comma. But the idea is the punctuation isn't necessary, and then with this freeing up, as you suggest, the lines can maybe go a couple of different ways, which isn't at all anything new or particularly

00:46:33.110 - 00:46:45.620

invented with me, I'm successful, you know, only intuitively. If it works, it works, if it doesn't work, then someone doesn't know which way a line goes. But these are the standard old traditional reasons for giving up punctuation, which

00:46:45.620 - 00:46:59.690

is to work even more closely with the words, the words alone and what they can do, you know, without props. Punctuation are props, a person who's writing very, very in control of the language would not necessarily need punctuation at all, the

00:46:59.690 - 00:47:13.010

reader maybe would need it, but in the idealest of writing, the reader even can dispense with the punctuation and other kinds of things set in motion, which is an image will arrest you, or there'll be a repetition, there'll be a rhyme, and these

00:47:13.010 - 00:47:27.140

things will stop and arrest you. A line will break naturally in half at a caesura. You can- you can begin to pace a reader going through the poem, reading it aloud, and watching how your line breaks fall.

00:47:28.310 - 00:47:42.050

Morton Marcus: Well, I'm glad I asked that question because that was really, again, a very clear and very, very interesting answer. I want you to read more poems. So I'm not going to get into the idea of the comma and what it means to you, but it

00:47:42.050 - 00:47:55.100

certainly has a sense of the ongoing and the continuous, and again, the sense of time. Dennis Saleh: Well, it's a pause and it's a resumption, and the comma is a dear old guy. When I used to do a lot of phone work

00:47:55.100 - 00:48:06.260

at my publishing house, it was interesting to me. I would call and invariably talked to a lot of people, secretaries, never really talked to anyone of much responsibility, and I would think these would be the people who would know. They would

00:48:06.260 - 00:48:21.200

answer the phone. "Dennis Saleh, Comma Books," they'd say, "Kama?" and I'd say, "Comma," they'd say, "Karma?" I'd say, "Comma," they'd say, "Comic," I'd say, "You know, like punctuation," they'd go, "Ah," I'd say, "Half a yin yang," and

00:48:21.200 - 00:48:31.790

they'd go, "Oh, that's right." Morton Marcus: So Dennis, now you tell me that's not a poem you just gave me. Dennis Saleh: I mean, literally, the punctuation mark, the comma.

00:48:31.820 - 00:48:45.530

Morton Marcus: That certainly is your next poem right there. Dennis Saleh: From karma to comic, I want to I want to sign off with a poem very much like I began with "The Say" and I mentioned my name was Arabic. My grandparents are from Egypt and

00:48:45.530 - 00:48:57.950

we've got a couple of Egyptian references here. Bast was the Egyptian cat goddess, Sekhmet was her son. She was a goddess of fertility and she was one of the good time gods in ancient Egypt.

00:48:58.470 - 00:49:09.140

Morton Marcus: Can I interrupt you for one second? Well, you got more time than for this one poem, so why don't you do one of the others as well? Dennis Saleh: All right, well, let me get on with, "The Cat's

00:49:09.140 - 00:49:30.140

Prayer," here, okay, if he's going to get his prayer in. This is a poem I wrote for my daughter when a kitten of hers died, and the kitten was a maverick, conceived in December and born in February, and it was very surprising and unusual to

00:49:30.140 - 00:49:43.880

find a kitten at the pound this time of the year, February, so we named the cat, in fact, December, and he had an enchanted life with us. We can now say to the last days that we had a cat that never slept out at night. We had a cat that

00:49:43.880 - 00:49:58.430

never slept a night in a garage, this cat slept every night with my daughter as though he were a watch cat. And I would go in and see him late at night, and no matter how she would try to keep him outside, he would get into the blankets and finally wind up

00:49:58.640 - 00:50:10.670

sleeping curled over her head with his paws stretched out over her head. And it was an enchanting- an enchanting six months with him. And this poem was for the kitten, December: CAT'S PRAYER

00:50:11.830 - 00:50:37.750

May my whiskers be ever flecked with milk-white beads as though I drink from the moon. May I protect the household, a princess, the name cat. Let me prowl, let me yowl, and recite to the moon, its key of C. Give me nine lives, give me one,

00:50:38.380 - 00:51:02.980

pronounced the sum, pronounced the sun. Take me in the finest month, August summer, fat with rats. Let me leap into the air out of this body into a cloud's hand. Let me fall to sleep from my dressing gown of fur and when I go to rest, set me among

00:51:03.070 - 00:51:29.380

Egyptians. Let me rule the sleep of a king for eternity. When my eyes are white from the dark, let them be stars. Recite my names over me, my god forms, my loved forms. Let me be remembered most excellent cat, praise to be Sekhmet, praise be

00:51:29.380 - 00:51:43.380

Bast. Lay me down now, I pray the moon. Morton Marcus: Well, I don't know if you want to end, though. You got another poem, good. Dennis Saleh: If you want to be so kind as to insist on another

00:51:43.380 - 00:51:50.120

poem. Morton Marcus: I insist- I will let go of your arm only once you read it. Dennis Saleh: Let's spin ourselves out of the studio then

00:51:50.120 - 00:52:05.480

on the arm of a starfish. This is called, "Arrangement in White," which is a version of a number of James Whistler's painting titles, "Arrangement in These Colors," "Arrangements," and what have you. And what very much an awful lot of this comes

00:52:05.480 - 00:52:19.460

down to is the plain old issue of white, the moon is white, the surrealists painted on canvas, all great artists painted on white. I have a very long poem I wrote called, "Fear of White," and lots of times it gets down to just plain old confronting

00:52:19.460 - 00:52:38.420

blankness and that's what art is about, putting something there that wasn't there before. So the white blankness, maybe that moon is a canvas up there, it represents possibility. This love affair between Endymion and Celine is a love that lifts up

00:52:38.420 - 00:52:54.680

and lifts the eyes up. The myth of the Sun and the myth of the moon or myths of flight. Very, very often I think these myths are metaphors for human consciousness and the willful attainment of what we can imagine. I say that there's no

00:52:54.680 - 00:53:12.420

human thing that did not exist first in imagination. So I'll conclude with something very simple about white: ARRANGEMENT IN WHITE The smell of gravity at the edge of the sea has turned a starfish

00:53:12.420 - 00:53:35.400

white. The pallet of white fingers is like a sorcerer's apprentice, complicit, an accomplice. Squint along the starfish arm and it is an astrolabe to the phases of white. Overhead, white clouds swing round while a white sand

00:53:35.400 - 00:53:56.630

dollar steers to five horizons. Morton Marcus: We have been talking with Dennis Saleh today. And I want you to again remember that Dennis is reading tonight at Sweet Williams along with Donald Marsh and Lauren Cruz.

00:53:57.230 - 00:54:14.690

Then Sweet Williams is at 538 Seabright Avenue in Santa Cruz, readings begin at 7:30. I would like to say to Dennis, as he gathers his stuff up here, that- your sheets of white, I would like to say to him that I have been rushing around, turning

00:54:14.690 - 00:54:32.120

myself into a frenzy top, and coming in here today and reading your poetry and hearing it and hearing you talk has brought me once more to that still place, a place where things that are real and genuine are, and I just want to thank you very much for that,

00:54:32.000 - 00:54:41.540

Dennis Saleh: Thank you, Morton. A man who can say that, my friend. preparing to get married, has been deeply touched. [Laughs] Morton Marcus: [Laughs] That sounds like a wise old Egyptian

00:54:41.540 - 00:54:57.590

saying. At any rate, folks, I'll be back with you in around three weeks and Joe Stroud's going to be taking over and- have a great August. Now we're going to sign off with what we should have signed off before with.

00:54:57.570 - 00:57:35.070

Morton Marcus: [Cut-off] And Debbie Reynolds and singers Kathryn Grayson, K-A-T-H-R-Y-N G-R-A-Y-S-O-N when Jane Powell, Betty Hutton, and Judy Garland. No, cut the end- and Judy Garland comma Howard Keel, Gordon Matt MacCrae, that's

00:57:36.780 - 00:58:17.610

M-A-C, capital C-R-A-E, and Frank Sinatra period. The best of these musicals were made by MGM, who produced a series of ambitious films that depicted ordinary people and starred Gene Kelly. New paragraph, squat comma, muscular comma, and

00:58:17.610 - 00:58:46.080

vigorously masculine comma, where a Astire, A-S-T-I-R-E, was elegant and life comma. Kelly had the clean cut good looks of the all American boy and portrayed characters who are typical Americans, dash dash, the boy next door, the out of

00:58:46.080 - 00:59:20.610

work hoofer, the sailor on leave, the unsuccessful artist, and at times, a tongue in cheek hustler period. The films he made were a variety of color extravaganzas that ran the gamut from backstage musicals to elaborate spoofs of genre films,

00:59:20.640 - 00:59:49.650

comma, such as his parody of the swashbuckler, comma, the pirate 1946 in parentheses period. New paragraph, like Astire, comma, Kelly choreographed most of his dance routines comma, but unlike him, was soon co-directing and finally directing his own films

00:59:49.650 - 01:00:13.140

period. Astaire had conceived of his dance routines for the camera in terms of gracefully showing the dance period, Kelly considered the medium of film itself comma devising increasingly long routines, which were as much film as dance

01:00:13.500 - 01:00:46.320

comma abstract color pastiche is pa sgic s. of dream like narrative that depended as much on set design and editing as on dance period. His 17 minute ballet and American in Paris, in parentheses 1951 is a case in point, comma, as is his duet

01:00:46.380 - 01:01:15.720

with a cartoon character Jerry, the mouse of Tom and Jerry fame in any anchors away in parentheses 1945 period in 1956, Kelly made the only true in quotation marks film musical dash dash invitation to the dance, comma, a film that had no

01:01:15.720 - 01:01:38.760

dialogue and was conceived of as three separate stories and then in quotation marks told out of quotation marks in three different dance styles. The last styles comma the last reminiscent of the Jerry the mouse dance in anchors away

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delightfully was done in the world of Hanna H-A-N-N-A dash, Barbera, capital B-A-R-B-E-R-A cartoons. Period. New paragraph by 1956 however, hollywood was no longer making original musicals all but defeated in the war with television comma,

01:02:16.520 - 01:02:33.410

increasingly controlled by the banks comma, the studio's had to invest in short successes comma and chose to make lavish versions of currently popular Broadway musicals comma, which for the most part, were translated to the screen in a

01:02:33.410 - 01:02:55.040

stiff stagey manner. Because they featured stars who are cast for their box office appeal, comma, many of whom could neither sing nor dance comma, and whose musical offerings were usually dubbed period, the artificiality of these films was

01:02:55.040 - 01:03:22.160

further enhanced by the realistic comma many times on location settings and acting techniques, which were grafted onto the stage version comma, so that the film comma which made the actor suddenly break into song look ludicrous, comma

01:03:22.160 - 01:03:48.620

again, since two completely different film conventions, dash dash, each calling for diametrically opposed audience response dash dash was being united were being united period. New paragraph besides public taste had changed period, the

01:03:48.620 - 01:04:11.090

mid 50s comma with its chilling factors of Cold War politics and entrenched conformity, comma was too mentally inhibiting an atmosphere for the carefree innocent world depicted by Astair and Kelly period. With the exceptions of Robert Wise's,

01:04:11.090 - 01:04:41.150

that's W-I-S-E apostrophe S, tragic and socially conscious Westside Story 1961, and Bob Fosse's, that's F-O-S-S-E apostrophe S, realistic Cabaret, C-A-B-A-R-E-T in parentheses 1 72 and his emotionally searing S-E-A-R-I-N-G, "All That

01:04:41.150 - 01:04:56.390

Jazz" in parentheses 1979 comma, the days of the musical are ov r by 1956 coma and have shown almost no signs of resurrection eriod. End