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[Jay Dougherty]

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[Jefferson Carter]

Hope this is the place for this piece?
Poetry as Commentary (or Irreverence Imitates Life)

ON AUGUST 12, 2020 BY KEN CRAFT IN POETRY, READING POETRY

Sure, over 300 people subscribe to this blog, but who knows what percentage actually read each post? Even more obscure? The percentage that bother reading or writing comments.
If you are part of the rare, comment-reading breed here on “Updates on a Free-Verse Life,” you’ve no doubt come across that boisterous peanut gallery known as “carter7878.” Who is this 7878 guy anyway, you might ask? Turns out, his day job is not critic-at-large, but poet. One by the name of Jefferson Carter.
For Carter, comments come easy. He’s been around the bush (just don’t say George Bush) a few times, and he does not lack for opinions. And, as he’d be the first to tell you, he sometimes steps on toes, sometimes regrets what he says, and sometimes doesn’t. At all.
Read his poems, though, and you’ll find more nuance, strains both similar and different from his critic voice. First thing you’ll notice is the simplicity. His is the voice declaring war on wordiness and sentimentality. Eminently approachable, his voice is at home with such quotidian topics as marriage, cats, and the state of America’s sadly-divided State.
As you read the poems below, focus on the voice, which of course belongs to each poem’s speaker and not necessarily its author. The sometimes caustic commentator is there, sure, but so is a softer side, bringing to mind turtles, who are hard on the outside (carapace) but soft on the inside (soup).
How else do you explain such devotion to cats and a wife of many years? In the case of the former, he is similar to Hemingway (just don’t tell him as much, because EH is lower than the bottom of a well on his list) — tough, but sensitive, and happiest when surrounded by cats (who to this day rule Hemingway’s houses in both Key West and Cuba).
Ready, then? Feline fine? Try these two:

CAT & APOCALYPSE
I’m watching our little black cat
sitting in the sink, drinking
from the faucet, her eyes closed
in ecstasy. When the world ends,
I won’t mourn my fucked-up species.
I’ll regret our cat’s moment of terror
when the water turns to flame.

CAT & TRANSIENT
The homeless guy who lowers himself
down beside me on the bench
outside the Co-op? He’s generic,
more dirt than human. As if
my father’s ill spirit possesses me,
I almost snarl “Hey! I’m eating here,”
his stink killing my appetite for the bowl
of organic jackfruit on my lap. I stand,
ashamed, give him a dollar & walk away
after dumping the paper bowl
into a trashcan advertising the pleasures
of our historic shopping district.
I swore I’d stop writing about liberal guilt
& about cats too, but I must confess
last night, I groomed our little black cat
with my tongue & watched her perpetually
startled gold eyes widen as I licked her neck
& then her belly, inhaling her scent.
In Japan, childless couples can rent
a cat by the hour to sniff its belly, which
smells like the crown of a baby’s head.

Marriage has always proven fertile ground for writers, especially the Venus vs. Mars angle, creating those sparks we know as conflict and love. “Life Partner,” originally appearing in Rattle, works because it doesn’t forget its sense of humor — by no small coincidence, the secret ingredient to every successful marriage.

LIFE PARTNER
For convenience, I & my life partner
(the woman formerly known as my wife)
have numbered our arguments. Number 3,
you’re so negative. Number 8, you’re
naive. Number 11, another beer already?
Number 13, you don’t listen to me.
But I do. I just don’t agree. Now
my life partner’s on the couch, watching
Live P.D. She’s pleased with the police,
so kind to the miscreants & trailer trash
they apprehend. Of course, they’re
kind! They’re on camera! Without
looking at me, she holds up three fingers.

My life partner wants to make a deal:
she’ll stop storing our broken pepper mill
upright in the spice rack, pepper everywhere
like coarse soot, she’ll store the mill
on its side if I stop switching off the light
over the dining-room table whenever
she’s in another room. Why? Why
does she need that light on all day?
She raises both fists & opens each one
twice. Number 20, you don’t love me.

Carter, very much in tune with the political turmoil around him, is not afraid of leaving the door open for politics in his poetry, either. Where angels fear to tread, he marches confidently, taking on race. Here, in a poem which had its original moment during another Jefferson’s Administration, is a poem as current now as it was when TJ was singing his way across Hamilton‘s stage. Check out the alliteration and metaphor, all delivered in a neat, 10-line package.

MOCKINGBIRD
Our third president owned
a pet mockingbird named Dick.
Let’s not mention what else
he owned. Dick dug Monticello,
that big white layer cake.
He’d click & chatter. He’d mimic
the field slaves’ hosannahs
until he’d almost faint, wobbling
on his perch like a double
handful of dirty cotton.

Give Carter his due. He may hate the term “prose poetry” and bemoan the legions trying (and failing) to write poetry nowadays and express absolute confidence about who the good poets are and who the bad ones are, but at least he puts himself out there, too. Out where other people can comment, pro or con.
It’s only fair. And if it isn’t, I’m sure he’ll say as much.

 

[Trish Saunders]

I think that third poem, in particular, Mockingbird, has an exceptional voice -- satire isn't easy to do well. I don't even attempt it.
Great stuff.

 

[Jefferson Carter]

Trish, thanks. yeah, satire is tough especially if you're trying NOT to be too satirical! Here's another recent review of my new book in Broadkill Reivew by Frank Jude Boccio, zen teacher and author of Mindfulness Yoga. Forgive all my self-advertising!!!!
A review of Jefferson Carter's revised Birkenstock Blues
I must disclose I know Carter. He was a regular in my Sunday Mindfulness Yoga class and I – and some of my teachings – have been alluded to in several of his poems found in his previous volumes, Get Serious from 2013 and 2016’s Diphtheria Festival, which has a cover blurb from me: “The poet Carter reminds me of is Billy Collins, but a mordant, twisted, even punk Collins.” And the poems found in Birkenstock Blues certainly bear that out. Tucson’s previous mayor, Jonathan Rothschild, says of Carter that he “has long captured life’s subtleties with humor, irony, and a touch of charming cynicism that brings home truths we recognize with a knowing wink” and anyone who has known a cynic – or harbors an inner cynic – knows that within the heart of any cynic abides a romantic nursing their wounds – or a cocktail. Or both. Case in point; the opening three poems all paint a picture of his marriage, the deep love and respect hiding in plain sight behind the dry and -- there’s that word again -- mordant wit. In “Life Partner,” Carter tells us how “for convenience” he and “the woman formerly known as” his wife have numbered their arguments. Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship understands that couples recycle the same arguments again and again. And as all good art does, the universal is made explicit through the personal: “Number 5, you left / hair in the sink again…. Number 13, you don’t listen to me.” Carter’s honest riposte to that one is “But I do. I just don’t agree.” How can you read this and not find the affectionate warmth of the familiar? The conclusion to this poem – as in many of his others – ends with a jolt that evokes the mic drop of a punch line or a slap across the face. It’s in this way that Carter reveals the subtleties and truths of the mundanity of daily life.
Carter also writes honestly and revealingly about aging, which is refreshing in our youth-obsessed culture. In “Fugly,” the poem that refers to the Birkenstocks of the book’s title, he shares the time-honored ritual of a man used to being dressed by his wife, only here it’s the costume of an “old hipster doll” with “straw fedora, brand-name t-shirts / from the thrift store, Bermuda shorts, / black dress socks and scuffed wingtips.” I read that description and almost spilled my bourbon, laughing at the image provoked in my mind’s eye. Then he drops the lines: “I don’t mind, playing child to your adult, / finally getting why old men sometimes / call their wives Mother.” Those lines evoke earlier eras fraught with the mashup of the tenderness and creepiness of that dynamic.
Another thing I appreciate about Carter’s poetry is how quick and penetrating he is to see and hear possibilities in places of miscue, mishearing, and misunderstanding. Diphtheria Festival was the result of his googling Dipthera festiva, a black and white moth. Google responded: “Did you mean ‘Diphtheria Festival’ ”? Just now, writing that, I laughed yet again! But Carter uses something like that to create a truly wonderful poem, making art from happenstance. And he does it again here in “Advocate,” which begins: “I’ve misread her job title: / conservation advocate, not/conversation advocate. How we talk!” And so opens a meditation on the environment, a major concern for Carter as he has long advocated and volunteered for Sky Island Alliance, a locally based environmental organization here in Tucson. This concern is also front and center in “The Book Of Extinctions,” inspired by Extinct Species of the World, published in 1990, that calculates “more than 100 species / a day will have disappeared by the end / of the century.” I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll say that while a short poem of only 15 lines, the ending once again draws a breath and creates a deep pang in the heart with an image that has deep resonance. I love it!
And I could go on but I won’t, other than to say that Jefferson Carter mines a special kind of art in his poetry. There’s nothing pretentious about his work. And neither is there anything trite. He writes a kind of poetry that captures real moments of life, snapshots of small particularities that shed light on the human condition. He’s a yogi and a bad seed curmudgeon, and in that mix is a small, not grandiose, creative treasure I value very much.

Frank Jude Boccio is a yoga instructor, author of Mindfulness Yoga, a zen teacher, and sometimes a poetry critic.

By Frank Jude Boccio
In 2019, Presa Press out of Rockford, MI published Jefferson Carter’s eleventh book of poetry entitled Birkenstock Blues. I don’t know why he did it, but Carter was moved to buy back his rights and self publish the volume in 2020 with a much better cover and with three additional poems. It just goes to show you that sometimes, indeed, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself!