February 13: Poet of the Week, W. Todd Kaneko, "Killer Kowalski and the Cauliflower Ear"

I'm sure everyone is expecting me to do a week of love poems, in honor of Valentine's Day.  Well, I'm sort of doing that.

The Poet of the Week is W. Todd Kaneko, and I will be including poems from his book The Dead Wrestler Elegies, which is a collection Kaneko wrote about a sport/athletes that he loves--professional wrestling/wrestlers.

It may seem on odd choice, but the poems in this book are full of love and tragedy.  They move me in a very deep way.  They may not move you in the same way, but give them a chance.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for poems about dead wrestlers.

Killer Kowalski and the Cauliflower Ear

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

When I asked my father how a wrester
sheds fake blood, he said the best thing
Walter Kowalski ever did was break off
that chunk of Yukon Eric's ear.  When I asked
if an ear could be reattached, my father
said they called him Killer after he laughed
at all that blood on the canvas.

The cauliflower ear is a brittle condition--
a gnarled badge for men who live by
the fist, who die when they can no longer hear
their names in mouths of women and children.
When I asked my father about my mother,
he explained how Killer Kowalski left
Jack Dempsey gasping on the floor
with a knee to the gut, how he attacked
a talk show comedian with his claw-hold
because he felt like it, how a blow to the head
can bloom thick with gore and cartilage.

Yukon Eric was a babyface for bloodthirsty
crowds, shot himself in a church parking lot
after his wife divorced him.  Killer Kowalski
was the most hated man in wrestling,
attacked nightly by ladies with knives
and umbrellas.  When I asked my father
about his life before my mother
left us, about those things a man needs
to know about his father before he dies,
he nodded, pretending he couldn't hear.

May 21: Love Poems, Aimee Nez, "First Anniversary, With Monkeys"

Good love poems are difficult to write.  In fact, I once had a poetry teacher tell me that there are certain words that shouldn't be used in poems because of all the sentimental baggage that they bring.  "Love" was one of those words.

Of course, I've never been much of a rule follower.  I have used "love" in poems.  It's not about the word itself; it's about how it is used.  These days, a poet couldn't use a phrase such as "My love is like a red, red rose," unless he was being ironic, tongue-in-cheek.  On the other hand, if I wrote something like "Love is the garter snake in my shoe"--that's alright.  You'll never find that in a Hallmark card.

Really, there are no hard and fast rules for poetry.  One of my favorite collections of poems from the last few years (The Dead Wrestler Elegies) sounds like one of the worst ideas in the world:  poems about dead professional wrestlers.  Yet, it works.  It's beautiful, moving, and funny.  It really proves that poetry can be found in anything.

Saint Marty often finds poetry at McDonald's.  It's the fries that do it for him.

Aimee Nez finds poetry in . . .

First Anniversary, With Monkeys

by:  Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Periyar Nature Preserve

There is no crumbly frozen cake to thaw.

Today, we are in the jungle. I mean mosquito. I mean

 

tigers and elephants sludging their way

to the lake for a drink and Don’t make sudden moves

 

or snakes startled from an afternoon nap

will greet you fang first. I think we are lost. Too hot

 

for any cold confection to survive. Even my tube

of sunblock is as warm as a baby’s bottle. You get

 

to those places I can’t reach, those places I dared

not even whisper before I walked down the aisle

 

in white. You never worried if our families

would clash, if they would clang like the clutch

 

of pale monkeys clanging the thin branches of the treetops,

begging for our trail mix. You never worried

 

about my relatives staring at your pale, muscled calves—

things not usually seen outside of the bedroom. You wore

 

hiking shorts anyway. And still, they lavished ladle-fuls

of food on your plate. I think we are lost. My eyes are dark

 

and wet as that wild deer that walked right past us,

a little off the trail. I think we are lost, but for once

 

I don't mind. Eventually you turn us back to a place

not on any map, but I know I can trace it back with my finger

 

if we ever need it again. We made it one year

without a compass and we’re not about to start now.

Just because it's so damn funny . . .

April 21: Lightning Path, Prince, W. Todd Kaneko, "Rickidozan Was Big in Japan"

Catch it if you can.  The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone.

Dillard reflects upon how fleeting the present is.  It's here for a few moments--like a shooting star--and then burns up in the atmosphere.  Too fast to even make a quick wish on it.  It doesn't even leave an after-image in the world.  It flashes and is gone.  The future becomes the present; the present zigs into the past; and the past fades into memory.

I have been thinking about my past a great deal today.  This morning, the singer Prince was found unresponsive in his Minnesota recording studio.  Paramedics attempted to revive him, to no avail.  He was pronounced dead at the scene.

I was 15 when Purple Rain came out.  It was the soundtrack to many school dances I attended, couples grinding away to "When Doves Cry."  Prince was the anti-Michael Jackson.  Jackson was all moonwalking and sequined gloves.  Prince was all screaming guitar and sex.  I listened to Jackson during the day.  Prince was my midnight music.  The stuff that played in the car as I cruised with my friends, scamming beers and girls.

So, when I heard the news of Prince's death, it made me feel old.  Mortal.  As if a part of my youth had just been declared D. O. A.  And the feeling has stayed with me all day long, into the evening when my Book Club met at my house.

This month, in honor of National Poetry Month, we read W. Todd Kaneko's The Dead Wrestler Elegies, a collection of poems about professional wrestlers who have met untimely ends.  Lots of heart attacks and cancer and drug overdoses.  It's a sobering book about growing up and grappling with mortality and love.  In short, a perfect companion to today's events.  (I have included one of my favorite poems from the collection.)

Saint Marty is feeling a little . . . fleeting tonight.  A meteor.  Electron.  A breath in winter air.

Rickidozan Was Big in Japan

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

After the empire fell, after the fires
left scars over backs of foxwife
and fisherman, Rikidozan invented
professional wrestling for Japan,
swallowed the atomic bomb, then
devised a new word for faith.
After my mother left us, after
my father dreamed of starting over
in a new place, the way Rikidozan
appeared in Japan with karate
chops and arms that grapple
men to the canvas for a quick one
two three--Rikidozan with thunder
in his hands and sun fire to forge
new names for virility, for honor.
Rikidozan with eagle claw.  Knife
hand.  Dragon's tongue.  Rikidozan
using the deadliest parts of a man
to breathe life into battered bodies.
My father watching television late
into night until every grappler faded
into static and snow.  My father
tinier in that dark room than he is now
in death.  Rikidozan devising new names
for manhood.  My father proclaiming
that professional wrestling is fake,
Rikidozan explaining that autheticity
doesn't matter when a man
needs something to believe in.

Do not go gentle into that Purple Rain storm . . .

February 16: Poet of the Week, W. Todd Kaneko, "It All Began With Strangler Lewis"

Well, I promised that I was going to make W. Todd Kaneko the featured Poet of the Week on Saint Marty.  So, tonight I'm going to start with one of the first poems in his book, The Dead Wrestler Elegies.

Kaneko started writing poems about dead wrestlers as a challenge with some of his friends.  The challenge was to write a poem a day for a month.  Kaneko wrote a poem about a dead wrestler.  Then he wrote another.  And another.  Eventually, he had enough dead wrestler poems for a book.

The Dead Wrestler Elegies is stunning.  It weaves together victory and heartbreak and love and death.  These elements meet in the ring.  Grapple.  Body slam.  Headlock.  The result is a brutal ballet of words that somehow cuts to the soul and sets it free.

Saint Marty is in love with this book.

It All Began With Strangler Lewis

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

He started it all, the Strangler
choking men out with that yoke
of wrist and elbow.  My father said
Ed Lewis was the greatest wrestler
of all time, that I was too young
to understand what that meant.
Don't trust a woman, he said,
until you know how it feels to lose
your breath.  His mouth drooped
open, words flitting into dark
before I cold identify those
shapes of their wings.

On television, Jake the Snake
posed with his enormous constrictor,
Doink the Clown sprayed Brooklyn
Brawler with seltzer.  It's a circus,
he said.  No one appreciates men
like the Strangler anymore.
Outside, I imagined the world waiting
for my father to wrap it in his arms,
break it into three parts--one for me,
one for him, and a knife curved
like my mother.

The Strangler

February 11: New Favorite Poet, W. Todd Kaneko, "Self Portrait as Flash Gordon (Motion Picture, 1980)"

Tomorrow night, W. Todd Kaneko is doing a poetry reading at the university.  He is the author of the collection The Dead Wrestler Elegies, and he's one of my new favorite poets.  He's a poet, artist, musician, and, by the looks of the poem below, a science fiction fan.

Every time I read one of his poems, I sit back and say to myself, "I wish I'd written that."  His stuff makes me want to write.  I want to pick up my journal and pen, sit down, and start scribbling.

Plus, Saint Marty loves Flash Gordon.

Self Portrait as Flash Gordon (Motion Picture, 1980)

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

There is always that spacecraft careening
through the vortex: Flash Gordon—reluctant
astronaut and quarterback scrapping
through alien quagmire, through rocket
launch and starfall to save every one of us
from the Emperor of Planet Mongo.
Flash—his boyish smile delights earthgirls,
makes alien princesses quiver for beefcake
bursting through that offensive line
of robots to protect our Earth.

A boy dreams of soaring with hawkmen,
crashing through lightning fields
for true love—he brandishes his name
on his chest like it was another word
for miracle, for courage. There is no thought
about the velocity of a perfect spiral
thrown on second down near the manhole
marking the fifty-yard line, just Dale Arden
cheering Go, Flash! Go! No thought about
that high school girl wincing as a boy crashes
and burns on a hard tackle in front
of her driveway. He lays in the street
and imagines Freddie Mercury singing

his name: Flash—king of the impossible,
savior of the universe, feathered hair and square
jawed as Dale Arden pleads, Flash! I love you
but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!
He will stand up, dust himself off, refusing
to recognize that pain in his hip until later
that night—in the dark he will press his palm
against the bruise and think about how
he should have caught that pass and dashed
for the end zone, how that girl will look
at him as he waits for the school bus
or a spaceship to any distant solar system.

Go, Flash!  Go!