Notes on Song and Landscape and the Inner Workings of the Heart

My son Julien’s new favorite song at the time was Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” It happened during a trip to Baltimore for my semi-annual visit with my cardiologist at Johns Hopkins. “Play the ‘Passenger’ song again,” Julien said, though he didn’t quite demand it the way he had with Ryuichi Sakamoto whose “Mill Theme (Robotaki Remix)” had been his previous favorite. Still, Julien (who was six at the time) made it clear it “The Passenger” was essential listening for the day.

“Who does that song?” he asked

“Iggy Pop,” I said. “Ig-gy POP.”

“Did he get sick?”

“No, he’s been healthy for a while now.”

“He even does tai chi,” Heather added.

“Me and Maggie saw him play last spring when we all went to Philadelphia,” I said.

“Did I see him too?” Julien asked.

“Er, no.”

“I want to see him next time.”

As usual, even though we always tried to leave early from Front Royal, we got to Baltimore just in time for my appointment. I checked in, and went straight to get my echocardiogram while Heather, Maggie, and Julien stayed in the waiting room. I lay down, and the technician attached the electrode patches to my chest, then turned down the lights. She put the transducer, a wand-like instrument, a little to the left of my sternum. That’s when I saw it on the monitor in black and white: my heart, beating, its valves opening and closing, its walls expanding and contracting. I am always amazed when I see my heart in motion; amazed to see it at work, pumping my blood; amazed and joyful that, despite everything from minor pain to episodes of grief and anguish, and despite the continuing absurdity, folly, and obscenity that inhabits the world, I am alive. Not everyone can feel that joy–the joy which, despite these more difficult times, is still my privilege.

When I was done with my echocardiogram, Heather, Maggie, and Julien joined me in the examining room where my doctor would meet us. When he came in he greeted us all warmly (he’s been my cardiologist for close to a decade and a half now). Heather, Maggie, and Julien all greeted him warmly in return, then Julien asked, “What’s your name?”

“My name? I’m Doctor Elmer Fudd,” he said. Julien sensed that he was kidding, and looked at him sideways. “OK, I’m actually Dr. K____.” But Julien didn’t believe him when he said his real name either.

Dr. K____ went on to tell me that my tests looked fine, that although there was the issue of the thickened heart wall, it wasn’t worsening—the possibility of which was why he continued to see me every six months. He took my blood pressure, checked several other vital signs for confirmation that my heart was still healthy, and we were done. Before we left, he mentioned that if we were going home right away we may want to check if there any protests going on, because that could make it difficult to get out of town. It was just a couple of days after Donald Trump had won the election—or rather, had won the electoral college—which meant that in a couple of months he was going to be president. “If there are, we’ll want to join them,” I said.

“Well,” Dr. K____ said, nodding .“If there is a protest, you’ll see me there, too.”

We’d take Maggie and Julien out of school for the day whenever we went to Baltimore from Front Royal. Being in a real city was always a nice break from our small town. Still, we didn’t want to get back so late that they weren’t ready for school the next day. A while back, Dr. K____ had recommended the Ivy Bookshop, but that was far uptown from Johns Hopkins, so as usual we drove to the Inner Harbor, which was right on our way out of town. In just about ten minutes we were going up the escalator to the second floor of the Barnes and Noble at the old power plant building, soaring high above the magazine racks and display tables piled high with best sellers. It’s the sort of height that usually makes me a little nervous, but we’d been to this store so many times that it didn’t bother me anymore. When we reached the top, I headed toward the part of the store that carries some of its less popular items—i.e., the poetry section—while Heather went to the café for a cup of coffee and Maggie led Julien to the children’s books.

Usually I find a few things right away, but that day I wasn’t finding anything I wanted. That’s when a guy who was sitting in the aisle there asked me, “Can you recommend any poetry?” There are always people sitting—and sometimes even lying down—in the poetry and fiction sections, reading books they’ve pulled from the shelves, or sometimes just sitting, listening to music through their earbuds. This guy looked to be somewhere in his twenties and had that look in his eyes that said he was lost or else was about to get lost. “I only know Langston Hughes,” he said.

I thought about what was going on and what was going to get even worse; and I thought about the tasks that lie ahead, wondering who might be a good poet to read for what I hoped would be a revolution of sorts. “Amiri Baraka,” I said. “He died a couple of years ago. His work is wild and straight from the heart.”

“I never heard of him,” the guy said. I was surprised. I thought that if he’d heard about Langston Hughes that he would have heard about Amiri Baraka—and just needed to be reminded of him. But then maybe that was just a ridiculous idea on my part. None of us are immune to ridiculous ideas from time to time. And every ridiculous idea is different from the next one. Yes, it’s also ridiculous to say so. I thought of what else I could say to this guy.

“Check him out,” I said finally, then added poets like Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, Lucille Clifton. Somehow I neglected to mentioned any of the poets I knew, as well as any poets who were still alive, which I then hoped didn’t give him the impression that poetry was a dead art. I looked through the poetry shelves again to see if there was something I could show him, but none of the poets I’d mentioned were in stock that day. I moved on—to the fiction section, looking for Paul Beatty’s new novel, but I couldn’t find that there either. As I browsed, the guy looking for poetry suggestions walked by. He saw me and asked, “What was the name of that poet again? Amira…”

“Amiri Baraka,” I said. “Amiri Baraka.” His name itself was a poem.

“Thanks,” he said, “thanks.” I wasn’t sure, but I think he then said, “Bless you,” before walking off.

From the Barnes and Noble, we went to dinner at the Hard Rock Café. This photograph of Heather, Maggie, and Julien was taken there. The Hard Rock Café is a chain with average food, overpriced, but it’s right next door to the Barnes and Noble, and going there with our weirdness and oddity was all the energy we could spare that night before our long drive home back to Front Royal. And, somehow, they played “The Passenger” while we were there. “Julien, listen,” Maggie said. “Your song. ‘The Passenger.’”

We didn’t run into any protests blocking the road on the way home, so we didn’t run into Dr. K___ again that night. On Route I-70 West, we listened to “The Passenger” a few more times, and we also to Joni Mitchell’s “In France They Kiss on Main Street” as we took the exit for Route 15 West, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “I Say a Little Prayer” after taking the ramp on 340 South in Charlestown, West Virginia. Even though it was a quick trip, it was good to get away from the landscape of Trump signs where we lived. When we got close to town, after nine in the evening, it was too dark to see the signs, allowing the landscape of river winding through valley to take precedence. Of course, in the morning, the signs would be there again; and, even though with that election being over, those signs would soon come down, there would be new signs to replace them. Many of them expressing support of the same old shit.

We were about half an hour from home when Julien said he had to use the bathroom. We were right outside of Berryville, Virginia, so we stopped at the convenience store at the corner of Lord Fairfax Highway and Main Street, right in town. When I took Julien inside, we saw that there was an older woman using a walker ahead of us. A young man who was probably her son was helping her pull away from her walker, which wouldn’t fit in the door of the rest room, and make her way to the toilet.

“I have to go! I have to go!” Julien said frantically.

“You’re all right. You’re all right,” I said. “You can hold it.” The young man turned to us with a worried look as if to say sorry. And I remembered over two decades earlier when, during the last months before she died, my mother also needed help making her way to the bathroom. “It’s okay,” I said to him, nodding as I put my hand on Julien’s shoulder. Somehow, it didn’t seem to take that long.

When we got back in the car, I looked at my phone and saw a news report saying that Leonard Cohen had died. It had happened a few days earlier, before the election, but his family only announced it that day—the day of his funeral. That’s when I remembered a night right before I left New York to move back to DC (I was moving back to be near to my mother, who’d just had a heart attack and a stroke). It was one of my last nights out in New York, and a woman I’d just met who was a friend of a friend handed me a tape of Leonard Cohen’s music. I didn’t know his music that well at the time, and I guess she thought it might serve me well in the days that lie ahead. If I remember correctly, her name was Candy. And I said to Candy, “thank you.” I don’t think I ever got around to saying, “bless you,” much less, “let’s celebrate the privilege of being alive.” Though sometimes it feels as if I’ve missed out on something important when I don’t say these words, or at least think about them. Sometimes, even during days like this, I feel that the time to celebrate is now.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua

When I Was a Massacre of Epic Proportions

When I was a massacre of epic proportions
and you were a murmuration of sad songs,
we lived in a different world. Our meals
were simple, gathered from ground and sea
and cooked over an open fire or sometimes
not cooked at all. My face had fewer lines,
I could lift my weight in apples because
my weight in apples was less than my weight
is now. I began measuring these things in
cinder blocks, this being a denominator as
common as panic in a rapidly beating heart.
Being a massacre, I could make my way
through the world so easily. A war in Asia,
a clash of ideals in Europe, a steady conquering
of the poor and toothless in America—
all were places and occasions where I was
welcome, where everyone would stop what
they were doing to say “Oh, it’s here” each
time I showed up. When I left, you’d linger
with your sad songs, tears running from your
eyes, dampening the gathered souls like a
warm summer’s rain. Tonight there are empty
seats on an airplane going from China to Japan.
There’s a restaurant in Bagdad where dust
hasn’t been wiped from the tables in years.
A child in New York stares out his bedroom
window at the quiet street below. I sit in a room
like a diminished tone of muscle, because there
is nothing so beautiful as these stark days, nothing
as soothing as white noise from an old radio.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua

High

My response to the current plague is to wake up
a little later each morning. The kids are home

from school and don’t need to go anywhere, don’t
need to learn anything, at least not right now.

Because what is there to learn during a crisis
except how to stay alive, keep your heart beating

like a disco song? I remember the 70s, remember
being so impressed by the beautiful color speed

came in. Those beautiful old days when my legs
could still take me to far places. I go to sleep

early now, lie down when I’m tired, don’t stay up late
writing poems and stories listening to Pharoah Sanders,

the New York Dolls, or Disco Tex and the Sexolettes.
Holy Christ was that a song, or was that a sign

that someone was glad to see me since the last manifestation
of apocalyptic ennui? I walk slowly down the stairs now

in deference to my arthritic knees, aware that my sense
of balance is something like a hit of acid, those long-ago

nights when I’d look at people without nodding
even more than when I wasn’t on acid, or mushrooms.

Oh what a feeling that was, oh what a way to feel
the non-ache and flexing muscle around my

Filipino-American or sometimes just American
young bones, and bones seem more important now,

like the bone-in pork at the grocery store, which I go to
wearing a mask, mittens, goggles, and galoshes

because I like that alliterative ambiance. I like the way
a man is a man and a woman is a woman and a they

is a they doing it so gloriously for theyselves
or I mean themselves, or whatever safe space selves.

I eat quickly now like a meal is a moment so easily
stolen from you, watching the evening news

while taking slow gulps from my glass of cold water,
so far from those days when we drank Schlitz

or Michelob and thought Coors was the ultimate beer
when nowadays we say, oh seriously, fuck Coors

and fuck beer. I want craft brew with a hint
of cardamom and orange peel, served in a mug

that bears the logo of my favorite non-profit organization.
Treat me like my name is Bill Murray and my middle name

is Fucking. Believe in me like my name is Don Corleone
and it’s the first half of The Godfather, before he got old. But

my name is Jose Padua and my pronouns are motherfucker,
motherfucker, and motherfucker’s. How did it end up like this

in these horse’s rear-end times? Why do I have to translate
for you my existential bewilderments? Why am I on the

bullet train back from New York when my friends are
riding coach, I guess I’m lucky that way. And I’m amazed

at how my son from such a young age made sure to describe
the precise thing he wanted like ice cold water or a cream

cheese sandwich, make sure not to cut it in half ‘cause that
sucks; how my daughter paints pictures of things the way

she sees them, stripped of the spectacle of corporate costume,
entrance music, and color scheme; how my wife stands so long

like a walk through a garden when it’s a house we live in and
not the open earth under a starry distant sky between river

and mountain. Right before the plague we packed up that
old house out in small town America. Half our neighbors

were crazed, the other half wholesome as the virgin breath
of infants; they made shelter from an atmosphere of rolling

coal and diesel fuel. I think it was Guy Debord who said
it’s so much easier for mainstream media to cover a brand

than a genuine human being. Either that or me in a dream
where I’m smart and lucid and have read every paragraph

Guy Debord ever wrote in the original French. My name
is Jose Padua, it’s just a name I’m saying again because

this is a time of modern plague and shit. It’s a time of
plague and they’re asking us to choose between

the lesser piece of shit and the worst piece of shit. Then
telling us that if we hold out for something better then

we’re a piece of shit, too. I remember humanity before
it became nothing more than an empty shell; then I remember

that humanity was always an empty shell. Every moment
the memory’s different. So we take the kids out back,

bounce the ball around or throw it in the alley away from
everyone else. Look up at the wires on telephone poles,

the loose strands that keep us connected to other faces
and ways of life. I hear a voice in the distance saying

something I can’t understand. And footsteps which
means to leave them some space, let them go on their

way like disarmed enemies. This is America 2020 and
I feel like I’m back on acid again. Staring at people,

my head still as a traffic signal. Blinking, flashing,
shining color as if to say, yeah, move on, and call me

motherfucker. And up above us it’s a cloudy sky. And
the birds are flying, they’re keeping their distance from

one another, making dark wide circles in the scraping air
as they fly so beautifully high, so beautifully high.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua

Union Square

I used to see him around Union Square or
sometimes a little further uptown or just
midtown like Herald Square but not right
in front of the thick glass door to Macy’s
because they’d make him move along, get
off their expensive piece of sidewalk, get
off their patch of Manhattan concrete lawn,
a late-middle-aged white man with one or
two kids in tow, playing his one greasy slide
riff, the only one he seemed to know, on
what looked like a home-made electric lap
guitar, his mad raised brows over the almost
pink gleam in his nearly crossed eyes ready
to crack like he’d invented a new form of
rock ‘n’ roll combined with either delta blues
or screeching city delivery truck brakes. Even
then, before I had kids, I thought about what
his kids thought, their crazy dad, his singular
song, with the only people putting money
in his cup looking as crazy as he did, with
the only people stopping to listen looking
like they had nothing better to do, with me
moving along as slow as a hangover headache
but still moving, still uncertain I had anything
more to offer the world than the power in
a single chord progression played with passion.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua

Self-Portrait as the Confluence of Struggle and Popular Culture

Sometimes I think of all the people in the world
I’d like to smack. Like our current, trashy, goon
of a president with all his stupid words and all
his stupid fucking hate. I think of all the people
helping him take the country back in time to the
age of stone and ruthless assholes and I’d like to
smack them too. I’d like to smack those border
patrol thugs in their drab uniforms grinning their
dumb grins, smashing up the food and supplies
left for refugees crossing into the American night
on foot through the desert; I’d like to smack anyone
who thinks we should build a wall between us and
Mexico, when the only walls we should be building
are for a room where we can throw all the hedge
fund managers and all the other financial advisors of
the apocalypse. But it’s not just these obviously evil
people I want to smack, I want to smack a lot of other
people too. People who are pretty much innocent but
who make things difficult in curious ways. I’d like to
smack all my friends who did a little too much cocaine
in the 80s, because half of them are still doing stupid
shit in their lives and the other half owe me money.
I’d like to smack my old friends who made it big and
now avoid me like a dog turd on the sidewalk during
a light afternoon rain. I’d like to smack Owen Wilson
for starring in the movie Behind Enemy Lines. My wife
and I saw it in the theater when it came out in 2001.
It wasn’t very good. I’d like to smack some guy, any
guy, named Maurice, because I don’t like the name
Maurice and I’m not impressed by whatever connection
he has to the pompatus of love. I’d like to smack the
poet who first wrote the lines “if it’s yellow let it mellow,
if it’s brown flush it down.” I know, it’s encouraging
people to save water but I hate that poem, so fuck it.
And OK, maybe I’m just jealous. I’d like to smack myself
sometimes, because sometimes I feel like I’m just so
fucking clever when I’m really not so fucking clever.
I hate it when I’m deceiving myself that way. And I’m
going to walk, like I’m a hundred feet tall, into a room
showing off my gas-powered, gold tooth grill, as fast as
I feel it but in slow, barely-perceived motion to the
crowd, sipping their drinks, speaking endlessly of the
intricate relations of superficial things. Because I am
now a planet, formed over vast lengths of time through
the accretion of stardust to dust, a cosmic smacking of
one object to another, a daisy chain of anger and reaction.
I bow down before no one. I have a pebble in my shoe.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua

The New York Book Launch for Jose Padua’s A Short History of Monsters at The Bowery Poetry Club

Monday, July 1st, 2019 at the Bowery Poetry Club

“When Jose Padua writes of ‘the beauty of the moment that comes alive without artifice,’ he could be describing these poems. They’re dispatches from a messy life, told with wry candor. His gift to us is a lesson in seeing through the little defeats we all suffer every day for a glimpse of transcendence. In the twenty-five years I’ve been reading him, I never once felt he was posturing or lying to me, which is high tribute for any writer.”
— John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and Victory City

Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his full-length colletion, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

About the Author:
Jose Padua’s first full length book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is now out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Bomb, Salon.com, Beloit Poetry Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unberables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and others. He has written features and reviews for Salon, The Weeklings, NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times, and has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and many other venues. He was a featured reader at the 2012 Split This Rock poetry festival and won the New Guard Review’s 2014 Knightville Poetry Prize.

Jose Padua, July 1st, 2019 at the Bowery Poetry Club

A Short History of Monsters is available from:

University of Arkansas Press:
https://www.uapress.com/product/a-short-history-of-monsters/

Barnes & Noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-short-history-of-monsters-jose-padua/1129710790#/

Amazon, Books-a-Million, etc.

Notes on Sun Ra’s Magic City and Other Improbable Notions

Even when the starting point is the sweet instrument that was Luther Vandross’s voice, as in the poem below, I’d often end up going back to Sun Ra’s Magic City. It begins with Sun Ra playing some spaced out chords on piano while Roger Blank adds punctuation on the drums. It goes on like that for a while, with Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and Danny Davis playing these sort of flying flute lines over and around Ra, who seems to be going back and forth between the piano and clavioline. Then, about fifteen minutes later, there’s this outburst where John Gilmore pierces the calm on tenor sax, and Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and Danny Davis are joining in, back on their saxophones, along with Harry Spencer on alto, Robert Cummings on bass clarinet, Walter Miller on trumpet, and Ali Hassan on trombone. They’re all blowing into their instruments like it’s the end of the world and their job is to make sure you don’t miss anything. It’s one of the scariest moments in jazz—and also one of the most insanely beautiful.

I’d play this in my apartment on some sleepless or post-drunk Saturday night into Sunday morning when I lived in New York. Then, on those occasions when I just couldn’t get to sleep, I’d head outside, then walk uptown to feel the pre-dawn and early dawn glimmerings of light as they swept across Manhattan. Sun Ra’s Magic City is not calming music, by any means—even the quieter parts are tense—but as I walked out into the city, going from my Lower East Side neighborhood towards Midtown, carrying this music in my head, I felt calm. It was a feeling similar to leaving the Circle Theater back in DC after having just watched something like Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers or Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties—the feeling that this work of art has taken you not away from the world but deeper into it. For me, that was always the preferred direction.

It’s why I’d always rather watch an anti-hero than a super hero. It’s why, back in the days when we had newspapers in the morning, I’d start my day by reading the obituaries. I’d look for the death notices of writers whose works I admired, actors, directors, artists. A part of every morning, then, was spent looking to see if Samuel Beckett had died, or Federico Fellini was now gone. I’d always try to find who’d lived the longest, but still, I was seeking reacquaintance with the recently departed. When Sun Ra died in May of 1993, Columbia University’s WKCR played his music non-stop for a few days. For those days, if I was home, between a temp job or a stop at Scorpio’s, Mona’s, The International—one or another of the many bars I frequented—WKCR was on, and I was listening to the music of Sun Ra.

I’d just seen him perform live at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village the previous year. This was after his stroke, so he had slowed down quite a bit. He needed help to get to his piano. He couldn’t spin around while wailing on his keyboards the way he used to do. He couldn’t put on a giant sombrero and dance around the stage while singing “Mack the Knife” as I’d seen him do at the Kilimanjaro Club in DC. But he was still making his music. Now he was gone.

I wrote this poem years later, a few years after we’d moved to the Shenandoah Valley. You’d think that being out here I’d be listening to a little more country music, but I don’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure I listened to more country music when we lived in the city. When we move back, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m playing George Jones, Patsy Cline, Hank Snow, and other folks like that more often again. But Sun Ra will continue to be in the mix, and be someone whose music I listen to—for all the secrets and wisdom he continues to release—wherever I am.

NEVER TOO MUCH

The mix tape I made for myself in 1982
and can no longer find begins with
Luther Vandross singing “Never Too Much.”
I lost it in 1992 in New York.
Maybe I lent it to my painter friend, who’d
been painting in his studio in Dumbo listening
to Captain Beefheart and Earth, Wind & Fire
and wanted to try something different.
After all, inspiration is a variable thing,
and what one sees while listening to
That’s the Way of the World is different
from what one sees when Trout Mask Replica
is playing on the boombox in his studio.
We did a lot of drinking, then, of course.
I lived above the laundromat on Avenue B
between 3rd and 4th streets. Sometimes junkies
would shoot up in the tiny foyer of my
building. Sometimes people would just
die on the street, some guy would collapse,
some beautiful woman would just stop
singing. Sometimes after smoking and
drinking I’d get to my fourth floor apartment
out of breath, thinking I could be dead too,
just another young fuck dying young,
then I’d sit down, turn on the stereo,
and listen, hearing something like “Jesus right
beside me, he never buys and he smokes.”
Maybe I heard it wrong, but those were
the words that stuck to me like the gum
on my shoe, that made me get up again
when I’d caught my breath and smiled
to myself, by myself, so high and lonesome.
Walking up a deserted Fifth Avenue
on a Sunday morning after staying up all
night, the music in my head was Sun Ra’s
The Magic City because I felt like
a black and white science fiction film
full of cold granite and gray skies.
Other cities had moments of silence,
but every moment of my life in New York City
had a soundtrack. Lou Reed was the mumbling
heat-seeking voice behind the junkies;
Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 18 was for
waking up unemployed on a Wednesday morning
just before the clock struck noon. Luther Vandross
played so many afternoons before I hit the bars
or met my friends. How many of them knew?
When I moved to New York I brought my paintings
with me but I never painted. I smoked cigarettes
and I wrote—about color, shape, and movement—
as I listened to my soundtrack, as I ate cheap
chicken and rice, washed my hands, splashed
water on my face, maybe ran a comb through
my hair, just once, that was enough. And I was always
by myself when I listened to Luther Vandross.
Sitting on the sofa in my apartment in the early evening,
waking up from whatever was missing during the day.
Stretching my arms, turning away from the window,
looking back toward the sink, as the sunlight seemed
to slide down the walls like liquid, when everything
would turn dark. I’d stand, light my cigarette,
open and close my door to walk down the dirty stairs,
and suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore.

-Jose Padua

Book Launch for Jose Padua’s A Short History of Monsters, hosted by Silvana Straw

Wednesday, April 24th 6:30pm, at Kramerbooks, Washington DC

“We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness . . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
—Billy Collins

Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his full-length colletion, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

About the Author:
Jose Padua’s first full length book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is now out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Bomb, Salon.com, Beloit Poetry Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unberables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and others. He has written features and reviews for Salon, The Weeklings, NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times, and has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and many other venues. He was a featured reader at the 2012 Split This Rock poetry festival and won the New Guard Review’s 2014 Knightville Poetry Prize.

About the Moderator:
Silvana Straw is a writer, performer and cultural organizer. She has performed and produced shows in venues including GALA Theater, The Kennedy Center and the Nuyorian Poets Cafe. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Huffington Post, Gargoyle, Conversations Across Borders, and on the Library of Congress podcast, The Poets and Poem.

Click here to see the listing at Kramerbooks.

Out this week: A Short History of Monsters (winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize)

A quick, early review from Booklist:

“Padua is a very wry poet who, in his first book, presents stinging and riotous poems, as in the two-stanza ‘Barbie’: ‘I am Barbie / I live in your dollhouse / You change my clothes every day. / If I could get out / of here I would / kill you all.’ These are works that sharpen the mind on the micro, as opposed to the macro of our human experience. This debut collection was selected as winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize by Billy Collins, who invokes in his succinct preface the specter of Charles Bukowski, and indeed, the infamous barfly poet is echoed here, yet Padua’s own dry wit and driving purpose cut through. These poems evoke not bold headlines but rather a quiet righteousness or realization. In “On These Days Driving”: ‘Perfection is the moment when the worst / is behind you and the best slowly reveals itself / like a song from decades ago that only now / becomes a hit.’
— Raúl Niño, Booklist, March 2019

Available from:

University of Arkansas Press:
https://www.uapress.com/product/a-short-history-of-monsters/

Barnes & Noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-short-history-of-monsters-jose-padua/1129710790#/

Amazon, Books-a-Million, etc.

The Distance Between Ground and Sky as Measured in Units of Work

When we were dropping our son Julien off at school earlier that week, he looked at the boy who was getting out from the car ahead of us. I opened the side door to let Julien out and he yelled, “Shavon!” Julien ran toward the school door and yelled, “Hey, Shavon, Baby!” Shavon, the boy who was in the car ahead of us, turned around and waited for Julien. They walked in together.

I never say “Baby” that way. Nor do I use the variant “Babe.” And as far as I can remember, the only person to regularly call me “Baby” was my landlord in New York. “Jose Baby,” he’d say. It was, I imagine, his way of acknowledging that I was all right. I wasn’t one of the junkies or crackheads in his building (my next door neighbor Anna would often complain about “those junkie people”). And I paid my rent more or less on time—or at least until toward the end of my stay in New York. It made me all right in my landlord’s eyes. It made me “Jose Baby.”

At home with my family, in the small town we live in now, I’m the sort of person who often uses the term “Honey.” I rarely ever call my wife Heather by her name—I always say “Honey.” If I do somehow say “Heather” it’s reason for us to look at each other and pause, as if we’d suddenly been transported to some odd parallel universe where I say “Heather” instead of “Honey.” I also call the kids “Honey” at times, the way my mother would use the work “Anak” with me and my brothers—“Anak” being a Tagalog word for “son”/”daughter” or, simply “child.” It was the sort of term I’d hear if I was coming down with a cold and my mother had just felt my forehead to discover I had a fever. “Anak,” she’d say, out of concern. As such, it was a word that comforted me. It meant that she knew what was wrong, and was taking care of things.

A couple of days earlier, we were a little late dropping our daughter Maggie off at school in the morning. That meant that by the time I got to the drop-off line for Julien’s school, I was a little further back than usual. I was tired and wished I could just close my eyes until the doors for Julien’s school opened, but then I looked out into the distance. Because of where we were in line—right where there’s a break in the woods that surround Julien’s school—I could see clear through to the sky above the tree line where the land slopes down to Leach Run, the stream that lies about a mile east of town. The way the colors were blending made it hard to distinguish between earth and sky, horizon and cloud, near and far. Or maybe it was just my aging eyes. Either way, I liked what I saw, so I took a photograph. Then I had a coughing fit.

I’d been under the weather since the past weekend when Maggie and I saw Yuja Wang perform at the Kennedy Center in DC. I was a running a bit of a fever and was hoping that seeing Yuja Wang might do the same thing Sun Ra did about a quarter century ago when I saw him at a performance at the Bottom Line in New York. That night I was in the middle of a horrible sore throat/flu and I wasn’t sure it was wise for me to attempt to make it out to the Bottom Line. But, because it was Sun Ra, I made the effort. I dragged myself out of my apartment.

That night, I left the Bottom Line after some two or so hours of Sun Ra’s performing (usually he’d play even longer, but this was after he’d had a stroke). And I felt fine. My lungs were clear. I could smoke a cigarette without feeling like I was breathing in fumes from the back of a bus (yes, I was a hard-core smoker back then). And, I could have another Jack Daniel’s on the rocks with my friends and have it slide down my throat as smooth as the overnight DJ on WBAI. I was, in other words, all right. I was, once again, Jose Baby.

Seeing Yuja Wang perform that weekend didn’t quite do it. Unlike after seeing Sun Ra, I still had my flu and my fever. I still needed that ibuprofen a few times a day to feel at least marginally human. But then, Yuja Wang is only thirty years old. I think that in a few years the power to heal will come along on top of the ability to play a sick-as-fuck encore off the top of her head.

After I’d dropped off Julien, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up some soup, orange juice, and ibuprofen. That’s what I figured I’d need to make it through the rest of the day until it was time to pick up Maggie and Julien from school. As I passed by the magazine rack, I saw something horrible. Wrapped in plastic, it was labeled the “Trump Anniversary Collection,” and beneath those words, peering out into a distance populated solely by wealthy, racist assholes, were the eyes of Donald Trump. At the bottom of the package, underneath Trump’s orange chin, was further explanation that this was a “Patriot’s Kit” and included bumper stickers, a “’Promises Kept’ magazine,” and a “Ready-to-Frame Portrait.” The scream I made in my head was so loud I swore everyone in the store could hear it.

I laid a few copies of Field & Stream on top of the stack of Patriot’s Kits, then walked to the back of the store. There I grabbed a quart of Tropicana 50% Less Sugar/Some Pulp orange juice. I took that, a double pack of the store brand ibuprofen, and two cans of chicken soup and went up to the register. As I drove home, I thought about how the sky by the elementary school, in the clearing between the trees, looked something like a Mark Rothko painting. And I thought about my wife and my children, my mother and father, and all the days of winter we had ahead of us and all the work we had to do.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua