December 2015
A native of Johnstown, NY, I've taught writing and literature and writing at Ripon College in Wisconsin since 1987.
I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession. Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online. In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry. A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz
I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession. Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online. In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry. A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz
The author, age 14, performing card levitation.
Peddling Miracles: Ode to Louis Tannen, Magic Dealer
-for Greg Roper
1. CATALOG
Bigger than a Bible, it swelled our mailbox
one day in 1965, and I tore into it
for revelation: black art screens, dove bowls,
shaved decks, sleeve loads, bottles of roughing fluid
more precious than Scotch, sheaves of flashpaper—
each trick with its own breathless paragraph
and amazing low price in bold caps.
I skittered from stage to close-up,
from sponge ball chapter to endless verses
of coins and ropes appearing, disappearing,
transforming, floating--and all miraculously cheap.
No sleights required! the blurbs would scream.
Learn in five minutes! I never pondered
what this might presume about my talent,
just hoarded my allowance and devoted myself
to agonies of selection: cheapest forcing deck
in the book, most natural thumb tip of all—
and invariably, when the skinny parcel would land
in the mailbox, I would discover cheesy plastic,
gimmicks lumpy and glaring, instructions
from the Korean saying contrive to vanish
initiating currency in useful fashion . . .
I did not decide it was a budget problem.
I did not conclude my calling called elsewhere.
I knew that if only Louis Tannen himself would show me
the ropes, I would step into that blinding spot
like Blackstone, like Thurston, like Tarbell and Slydini.
2. STORE
And so it seemed: my long-suffering Dad
drove me one sweltering Saturday five hours south
to Manhattan, 120 West 42nd Street,
where Louis had been peddling miracles since 1933.
We parked amid the strip clubs and walked
the carnival sidewalks where panhandlers and pimps
jostled among the bins of gaudy merchandise.
We entered that dingy office lobby
and searched out the wall directory,
then rode the weirdly slow elevator
to maybe the twelfth floor, where,
after corridors of darkened accountants' doors,
one window finally gleamed, its frosted glass
marked with a simple stencil: Louis Tannen
and a little rabbit wearing a top hat.
Smaller than my bedroom, the shop was jammed
with schmoozing old illusionists
yammering in borscht-belt accents, all looking
like off duty bus drivers. And behind the counter,
a short stout guy with wispy red hair and freckles
was Louis himself, performing one trick after another
for anyone with an open wallet.
"You like card tricks, kid?" he growled,
not waiting for an answer, though I nodded
like an acolyte while he proceeded to translate
effortless amazements from the Korean
of my clumsy thumbs, and I bought
the first five effects he showed me.
Then moped till Dad slipped me another ten.
By then the old guys had scented fresh blood,
and one by one cornered me to try out their stuff.
Aces flew boomerang circles around the light fixtures,
then quivered between capped teeth. Bricks suddenly
weighed down the knot of my borrowed handkerchief.
Quarters I pressed my finger down on hard
became nickels when I blinked. Friends, I tell you
I bought it all on cue from Louis Tannen
and his catalog of hoodoo pals. I lost
my disillusionment for good
that Saturday between sixth and seventh grade
afloat above the trash and glitter of 42nd Street.
Author's Note: My career as a stage magician ended at about the time I discovered the magic of poetry. I stopped performing in 1971, when I went to college.
Peddling Miracles: Ode to Louis Tannen, Magic Dealer
-for Greg Roper
1. CATALOG
Bigger than a Bible, it swelled our mailbox
one day in 1965, and I tore into it
for revelation: black art screens, dove bowls,
shaved decks, sleeve loads, bottles of roughing fluid
more precious than Scotch, sheaves of flashpaper—
each trick with its own breathless paragraph
and amazing low price in bold caps.
I skittered from stage to close-up,
from sponge ball chapter to endless verses
of coins and ropes appearing, disappearing,
transforming, floating--and all miraculously cheap.
No sleights required! the blurbs would scream.
Learn in five minutes! I never pondered
what this might presume about my talent,
just hoarded my allowance and devoted myself
to agonies of selection: cheapest forcing deck
in the book, most natural thumb tip of all—
and invariably, when the skinny parcel would land
in the mailbox, I would discover cheesy plastic,
gimmicks lumpy and glaring, instructions
from the Korean saying contrive to vanish
initiating currency in useful fashion . . .
I did not decide it was a budget problem.
I did not conclude my calling called elsewhere.
I knew that if only Louis Tannen himself would show me
the ropes, I would step into that blinding spot
like Blackstone, like Thurston, like Tarbell and Slydini.
2. STORE
And so it seemed: my long-suffering Dad
drove me one sweltering Saturday five hours south
to Manhattan, 120 West 42nd Street,
where Louis had been peddling miracles since 1933.
We parked amid the strip clubs and walked
the carnival sidewalks where panhandlers and pimps
jostled among the bins of gaudy merchandise.
We entered that dingy office lobby
and searched out the wall directory,
then rode the weirdly slow elevator
to maybe the twelfth floor, where,
after corridors of darkened accountants' doors,
one window finally gleamed, its frosted glass
marked with a simple stencil: Louis Tannen
and a little rabbit wearing a top hat.
Smaller than my bedroom, the shop was jammed
with schmoozing old illusionists
yammering in borscht-belt accents, all looking
like off duty bus drivers. And behind the counter,
a short stout guy with wispy red hair and freckles
was Louis himself, performing one trick after another
for anyone with an open wallet.
"You like card tricks, kid?" he growled,
not waiting for an answer, though I nodded
like an acolyte while he proceeded to translate
effortless amazements from the Korean
of my clumsy thumbs, and I bought
the first five effects he showed me.
Then moped till Dad slipped me another ten.
By then the old guys had scented fresh blood,
and one by one cornered me to try out their stuff.
Aces flew boomerang circles around the light fixtures,
then quivered between capped teeth. Bricks suddenly
weighed down the knot of my borrowed handkerchief.
Quarters I pressed my finger down on hard
became nickels when I blinked. Friends, I tell you
I bought it all on cue from Louis Tannen
and his catalog of hoodoo pals. I lost
my disillusionment for good
that Saturday between sixth and seventh grade
afloat above the trash and glitter of 42nd Street.
Author's Note: My career as a stage magician ended at about the time I discovered the magic of poetry. I stopped performing in 1971, when I went to college.
|
Small Round Valentine
for Lee Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. —Black Elk Speaks Everything is curve and circle, rondure, swell and dip and eddy, everything, even in the sky, wheels and turns, and the earth orbits, and the moon, and the water in its bed flows in graceful curves on its way to return, return, as the seasons return, and the night, and every thought worth having, like a fine meal prepared and rounded out by love's hand, like music searching its final chord, like once upon a time again, again, like your body quickening to my simple hand. |
Old Folks
-Miles Davis quintet, 1961
A minute into Miles' languid muted solo,
that floating bedroom tone pulling the shades
on anything else I was planning tonight,
someone's chair squeaks, filling one of those
legendary chasms between notes with a sound
I might make any night. Why do I feel such
strange camaraderie with these invisible men,
this kinship of squeak or sigh intruding
upon velvet moonstruck melancholy?
Why love this tune all the more for a blemish
I never caught on my old vinyl, now exposed
in digital day? Why does it move me so,
my own chair groaning as I reach to boost
the volume for Hank Mobley's hungering solo?
Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Philly Joe Jones,
Paul Chambers and Miles, too—all dead now,
but what would it matter to this night if
the whole combo were appearing tomorrow
in the Village, old men adjusting arthritic bones
in their stiff chairs, not minding the workaday noise
that undergirds all song? And Miles himself:
why am I tempted to something like love
for this whispery harsh cat I would have hated
in the flesh? Just a man, a man reaching
into the dark for the next unutterable note,
which slips away, always, in quicksilver
and smoke, like the old folks themselves,
who gossip behind this sad melody,
call-and-response of the living and the dead.
©2015 David Graham