Some people have weekly therapy. Or tennis match. Or drumming circle, poker game, or facial. For years, Woodstock had its own weekly Dada in the form of Monday night open mike at the Colony Cafe. The night I’ll never forget was when I attempted to premier my Night of the Living Dead poems. All afternoon I popped popcorn for fifty so that my kitchen stank of butter for the next week. But I wanted to offer free movie food to the crowd. Then at my invitation a dozen friends read their own movie poems as a warmup. Big mistake. By the fifth or sixth one, we were already into our second hour. My featured reading receded, as if it might become a midnight showing. After 9:30 with the crowd thinning to diehards and several warm up readers still ahead of me, the rear window of the Colony’s grand balconied ballroom opened and in tumbled a “performance poet” I suppose you must call him dressed in a snorkeling mask and breathing tube. He stood up and looked around as if we were the weird ones living underwater, gill-necked poets actually enjoying this torturous evening, then he dove back out the window. I should have laughed, but I wanted to kill the guy. Yet he was absolutely right. On those Monday nights anything could happen: the good, the bad, and the ludicrous. When I returned weeks later for a second try, taking the mike by 8:00 this time, I skipped the popcorn but carried in my shopping bag a rubber Richard Nixon mask that my friend Saul Bennett donned to be a stage dummy for one of my zombie poems. Yes, he got some laughs, but, try as I might, I never found a performance device as simple, spontaneous, or delightful as what our host Phillip Levine did with his deck of playing cards. On each card Phillip had taped one of his poetic quips like a Chinese cookie fortune. Then in front the audience he shuffled the deck and read a dozen or so lines that came randomly off the top of the deck. Sometimes they meshed with amazing synchronicity. Others, they clashed like bumper cars. Either way they were truly entertaining, an unique act in the Hudson Valley poetry scene and proof that open mike poetry could generate its own forms.
As a young man, Phillip was a talented mathematician, earning his BS at SUNY Binghamton and entering a PhD program before leaving for a job in the insurance industry on Wall Street and then working as a computer programmer through the 1980s and 1990s. As he turned forty, though, he transformed his life, finally pursuing the writing and acting that had long appealed to him but not as a serious endeavor. He came out of the closet as a poet, as he liked to say. He began hosting at the Colony Cafe and continues to host the monthly Woodstock Poetry Society. Thanks to his acting experience, he has an ease and a graciousness at the mike that stands out among poetry MCs. I’m sure he laughed at the frog man climbing through the Colony window. I’m sure he’s seen zanier.
Early on, Phillip began jotting down the one liners that popped into his head, twisted axioms that seem related his earlier talent for mathematics because of the delight they find in logic gone awry. Several steps led to taping them onto playing cards for his performances at which he has described these quips as “epitaphs, orphans, and oopses.” The epitaphs were lines from poems that died, the orphans from poems that never had more lines, and the oopses from accidents. Though Phillip writes full length poems as well that may incorporate these lines, his cards remain his signature piece. In 2005, he began adding quips to the top corner of the poetry spread that he edits in Chronogram magazine. A year ago, I heard him read these bits in the order that they’ve been published, no longer random but slowly accruing into an epic of sorts, a work that’s both sadder and sweeter than I’d appreciated before. Here then are the complete Chronogram quips, though by next month they’ll no longer be complete. More than anything, I’ve realized, this is a poem about longing for love. Who among us ever reaches the end of that feeling?
(2005)
I know I don’t have a paddle.
It’s the quality of the creek that has me puzzled.
* * *
she had hair waving hi
* * *
Beware the idleness of marching
* * *
These words won’t lay flat.
They’re slanted and sloped and
filled with out of kilter.
* * *
we wouldn’t write if we weren’t consumed
and driven by the total and utter fear that
we had nothing, absolutely and completely
nothing to say
* * *
i ripped my soul on goya
you know the rest
* * *
i remember deep belly laughter running
down a long narrow hallway
* * *
You can’t do everything.
What would everybody else do?
* * *
This is a love poem
in every state except Louisiana.
* * *
when he said
“it doesn’t get any better than this”
he was right and disappeared
with a short popping sound
* * *
I’ll bring all my fingers
You bring all your knives
* * *
Thread
Here, take this thread.
Consider it, caress it
Run it through your fingers
If you finally wish
Thread it through your single eye,
Hand me back the end
and I will do the same.
This back and forth will weave a world
We can do this
This mystic stitch, this slender line that runs
from me to you and back again
We live along its length.
* * *
(2006)
i cut myself dreaming
* * *
I’ve done so little
but it’s taken so long
* * *
spring lurks
ps. april is national poetry month, which is just like every other month.
* * *
I could tell she liked me
by the way she walked away.
* * *
who’s your dada?
* * *
pop goes the culture
* * *
i write from here
the only place i know
* * *
i am the juggler
dropping balls, knives and pins
* * *
art sticks
* * *
There’s a history of mental illness in my family.
Probably a future too.
* * *
(2007)
reincarnation: here today and back tomorrow
* * *
with your head beside my shoulder
and your belly by my need
perhaps i can go on
* * *
i may melt next to you
the shine is so bright
those were my knees
that now water my toes
* * *
what would be the best thing?
to sooth and be soothed by the soothing
to caress and be caressed by the caressing
to love and be loved by the loving
* * *
hanging on to nothing
with everything i’ve got
* * *
tough as cookies
* * *
NO YELLING
* * *
isn’t it odd how certain things taken out of context
can mean almost anything
like no
or yes
* * *
(2008)
up above in the blue
i see the white of your eyes
misplaced
i don’t know what i’m doing
finding things
that were never mine to lose
* * *
all the people i was gonna be when i grew up
they’re still here
* * *
no one said it would be easy
but no one said it would be this hard either
* * *
mangled beyond recognition,
i pull myself from the wreckage
and fall into your arms again
* * *
she makes me want to play with my food
* * *
abandoned by careless angels
* * *
i’m so distracted
i can’t even focus on my obsessions
* * *
the road is traveled once
then like a rope unravels
* * *
When I was young, so young I can only remember
remembering, I had a lasso I looped ’round most
everything – except Marie with her two pig tails
flying over 3 red wheels.
* * *
consider what you gain
when you forget
what you have lost
* * *
na
* * *
somewhere there’s a place for us
i don’t know where it is
* * *
(2009)
the grass is green
like here
but greener
* * *
how to make ice
start with a very low flame
stir
hardly ever
close
or cross
your eyes
* * *
what do you learn?
when you learn by letting go
* * *
he’d come to think
life was bent out of shape
but he was mistaken
it was his bicycle wheel
* * *
hello despair.
have you met my lover cigarette?
* * *
sometimes we fall together
sometimes we fall apart
* * *
seeking partner who will overlook my neediness,
desperation, banality, shallowness, transparency,
pettiness, smallness, and overall mediocrity and
accept me for what i truly am
* * *
I found a soft place
between a rock place
and a hard place.
* * *
If I called you from New York on Tuesday,
12:15am EST and left you a message on your
machine in California on Monday, 9:15pm PST,
how come I haven’t heard from you in 6 years?
* * *
“Behind every great man is a great woman”
and often times
in front and greater
* * *
i should never have fastened
my balloon to your belt loop.
* * *
my aim is true
it’s just my choice of targets
* * *
(2010)
a year in the life i was trying to live
* * *
i’ve got a hole in my heart
but that’s ok
more comes in then gets out
* * *
now, i can’t get
you out of my mind
and i like that
* * *
have you seen the Good News Bible?
he doesn’t die in the end
* * *
that was where you tore me open
this is where i bleed
* * *
you and i and not him or her
are not like most people
we are like ourselves
and i like that
* * *
all my dreams have come true
and all my nightmares
all that remains is determining
which is which
* * *
there is your blind side
and there is the train
* * *
if i had a nickel for every nickel i’ve had
i’d be even
but i’m not
i’m either up or down
* * *
Sometimes, the world isn’t how it seems.
It’s how it is.
* * *
fall: who will bury all these leaves?
* * *
meeting new people is like
arriving in the middle of a movie
except you’re allowed to talk
* * *
(2011)
i’ve never been self-contained
i’ve never had a self-container
* * *
the world is flat in places
angled and cornered in others
and round in very few
* * *
negative space
in a poem every word counts
even those that don’t and are omitted
* * *
art can’t fix it
religion can’t fix it
your lover can’t fix it
fortunately, it’s not always broken
* * *
I want to tell you things
I don’t know how to say
* * *
if i had to do it all over again
i’d really complain
* * *
we are all alone together
* * *
that wasn’t a monologue
you just weren’t listening
