Linnaea Cafe, 1110 Garden Street, San Luis Obispo CA 93401
Interview with BooksandAuthors.com
BooksandAuthor.com: Who were your early literary influences?
Lance Lee: I started writing poetry in high school, and publishing in college, but through my 20s and 30s was more deeply involved with drama, writing and seeing a number of plays into production and print. Inevitably drama left me with the feeling a poem should be a highly condensed, dramatic, narrative accessible to a general audience, even if a brief lyric. That has made writing longer sequences and poems a particular challenge.
The Owl Bookshop 207-209 Kentish Town Rd London, UK
Arcade Poetry Series January 14th 2012
Oxnard Carnegie Art Museum 424 South C St. Oxnard, California
Recent poetry publications have included:
Pennine Platform 69, 2011 Chiron Review 95, Summer 2011 Blue Unicorn, v. XXXIV, #3, June 2011 Assent, 64/3, April 2011 Acumen 70, May 2011 POEM 105, May 2011 with more due from Ambit in the near future.
Currently in POEM 105 and Assent 64/3, and Ambit 207
Tivoli
How did I come to this height where
rain slathers down and binds the steep,
gray sky to the blood-soaked plains
no amount of water can clean,
only make grow more richly?
Through the graffitied underworld into the land’s green glare, snaking towards Tivoli whose waters stream and fall...
I remember... We escaped to a hillside
park of fountains, sprays greater than
Rome’s set among pools and grottoes:
clouds merged and cooled and threw
drop down after drop.
A week juggling the ages in Rome was enough. I see my breath in the cool air, and think: I’m here...
When the sun beats the wet wheat,
soaked walls, silvered roads, will mist
make the earth look like an Eden
for me and the woman beside me
to enter, be renewed, begin history again?
Silence... then fresh rain taps the ground. I see my breath in the cool air, and think: I am...
No... I will go into the earth, merge
with the rain, grow or shrivel
as the season demands:
lover, husband, grandfather, poet,
let my life pass like clear, swift waters.
Graffiti by Charles Shearer
Graffiti In the Underworld
...nothing human is alien to me Terence
One midnight past my middle years with slow steps and dulled eyes
I drift across Rome’s cobblestoned streets busy with tourists by day down
to its underworld, tired of life, love become rote gesture...
Fluorescent light fills the landing and fades into tunnels on either side,
but no trains come, no one joins me, not even ghosts to beg for blood
for an hour’s life. Stillness reigns... In my hand I find a can of spray paint,
a knife on my belt: I wear black, thick-soled boots, black leather
pants and a vest nail-head studded, chained-looped: bewildered,
my hand is orange from rubbing my spiked hair, and as I flex
my biceps a man‘s pelvis spears between a woman’s legs. The walls writhe
with life, great blocks of letters march their length, crude epithets and
epigrams snake above and below mixed with scenes of women
who ride men like bulls, their cunts hungry mouths. Caesar is lampooned
for a penis too big for Brutus’ mother, Servilia, to mouth; pot-bellied
Berlusconi without corset and suit runs from the horns his wife holds
towards Leticia, a Lolita who eggs him on as she flees with a backward leer...
Dazed, I spray scenes of my own in this two-thousand year old jumble
as crowds pour in from the tunnels and sweep me up to ravish rob
strip choke stab shoot raw pleasure all, and all pleasures one.
Lost, appalled, I become a heap of rags stinking, homeless, abandoned, abandoning
until in the cold hour before dawn I stagger home, a junkie coming
off a bad trip, creep in my door, shower, slip into bed— and lie awake,
trying, unable to, forget. Dawn spills its water across the floor...
I pretend to be myself when I stumble down to eat to plan another day of
fountain to statue to column to ruin taking pictures of the bright world
as though there is no other to record. But as days and weeks pass
I see openings to that raw underlife where I feel my heart feed in the
red darknesses that pulse in my flesh— danger makes my blood beat
as strongly as any shared passion, unable to tell pain from pleasure:
and danger gives my tenderness its poignance and love its power
to hold the blood’s ravings within— for my step regains its spring,
my eyes the light they lost and love is renewed with her who
these many years keeps me warm however I age or stray in the night.
River of Flesh by Charles ShearerRiver of Flesh by Charles Shearer
River of Flesh
...homage to Auden
I came to see the Dome and the curved embrace of stone that gathers in the faithful
to St. Peter and his tomb; to see the catacombs where martyrs lie, and the Sistine where
Michelangelo made
God in our image—
instead I heard a crowd shout, not men, not women but sheets of loud color urging lion and tiger to rend believers with fang and claw,
or chariots to run them under hoof and wheel and scythe those left standing on either side. A quarter million roared as those who still stood or
crawled were hacked or shot or hauled away and gassed while vultures merged into a single shadow above the blood and stiffening gore.
I came to see the Forum’s ruins once brilliant in the sun, to walk where the sacred fire burned
and kings bowed to free men whose words gave life or death: to see where Caesar burned
and Antony fired the crowd
to grief— all safely passed—
instead a lonely Asian tourist asked me by anonymous ruins, “Where is Caesar buried?” I sent him to the Forum, and left a
laurel bough in the grit and gloom of a basement built where once he twitched his robe over his wounds. Tourists lowed before the nearby Pantheon
where Italy’s exiled kings lie in place of Jove and Mars, or Venus who might have brought love’s fist to this flash-filled, loveless space.
I stood before St. Theresa to see her body convulse in God’s embrace:
to see Christ in supple stone grace his mother’s lap, and St. Peter’s chains aglow
as though he was never crucified,
head down—
instead a mass filled the street in every era’s dress: I rubbed my eyes certain I was asleep, but they remained when I dropped my hands
and gathered me in. Under a sky burning to coal I groaned as they groaned, begged as they begged
for water to ease my thirst, but no help came in all the time it took the buildings to fall into ruin under a sky raining hot ash.
I came to see fountains spray, the four rivers stream in Piazza Navona, Saldi’s
rising figures in the Trevi, the Triton blowing his conch near Via Veneto: to see lovers
take pictures to recall they
stood there, young, joyous—
instead I saw the generations fill the Tiber, my own face rise and sink among the others with dull or astonished or hopeless eyes,
and all those I love and all they will love and those too in that river of flesh flowing past Castel Sant’ Angelo towards the sea where all roads end
and all times meet, where striving follows striving, thirst thirst, dream dream we never waken from, or slake, or gain.