I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
Next up is the final poem in the collection, “Henry Chinaski’s Horses” (which brings us full circle with our friend Charles Bukowski, and thanks again to the remarkable team at the great journal JMWW (check them out and remember to love and support our awesome and indispensable literary journals!).
True story: when I arrived at Noepe in spring 2016 for my year as artist-in-residence, my goal was to work on a novel, and I had a box worth of notes to prove it. Against anything I planned (or would have imagined) I began writing poetry and, more than five years later, I haven’t stopped. I’d certainly written, even published, more than a little poetry before 2016, but it was always scattershot, and the result of what seemed divine inspiration, created in bursts of frenzied activity as opposed to disciplined and intentional practice.
This one, a poem about a poet (and fiction writer’s) alter ego, is one of three poems I’ve written about Charles Bukowski (another one will appear in a literary journal shortly, and the other one already appeared in Linden Avenue back in 2017), and was among the first poems I drafted during the still-chilly New England spring in early April, 2016. It’s a poem about poetry, horses, routine, craft, obsession…and other things. Eternal thanks to my brother Justen Ahren for inviting me to Noepe, and for the amazing community we found and built there.
Henry Chinaski’s Horses
He couldn’t face the words, he wrote,
until he made it back from the track.
For a man famous for his refusal
to use metaphors, telling it straight like a tire iron,
this one kind of crept up on him, like they do.
Sort of the way the so-called real world punches suckers.
But perhaps that’s still too affected by half, since
the only thing, we know, worse than too little
Truth is too much of the same old shit.
Anyhow, Hank had his horses and his handicaps,
like all of us, no matter what we tell ourselves.
Whether it’s humping a desk or hustling the Morning Line,
or finding other ways to avoid assenting to work
altogether, we all need patterns and schemes.
Because by regulating our routines, they free up aspects
of ourselves—otherwise unengaged, like our dreams and
imaginations:
Or else we’re out of time, out of our minds.
So Hank had his horses and they told him who he was
on any given day: a winner, a loser, a player—and blinkered
or busted or flush, he returned to his humble post position and
that typewriter, waiting for him and placing its own bets:
Was the master in form? Pulling up lame? Wielding his whip?
Could he coax them through the muck, past the front of the pack?
Ending with the ultimate trifecta: booze and women and words.
(Then pause for a money shot, parading past the Winner’s Circle.)
Success is a salve that quenches a cultivated kind of thirst, and
what matters, finally, isn’t how you walk through the fire, but
the resolve to put your feet forward in the first place,
urging all those ideas to sneak up like solved secrets:
Reminders that even Long-Shots need somewhere to go,
Some way to live.
