Nick Yasinski

I often refer to myself as a "lapsed poet." Actually, I've often failed to practice the faith, but I never lost it. After adolescent and college years of poetic self-indulgence, I have been stumbling around for an aesthetic I can wear in public without cringing. I doubt the search will end, but I'm more determined nowadays to just smush together influences that include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, language writing, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe folk, as well as Jersey greats from Ginsberg to New Brunswick bar poets of the 1990s and beyond. My New Brunswick area days began in 1991. I was one of the Co-Coordinators and Designers (along with Kathy Crown and Harriet Davidson) of the 1997 "Poetry & the Public Sphere Conference" at Rutgers University. I left the area in 1997 for parts west and have returned occasionally thereafter to pick up my Rutgers Ph.D. (1998) and see friends, such as Robin Pastorio-Newman and Eliot Katz, both of whom I owe a lot for writing kick-butt poetry and living their poetry-politics. In recent years I've lived in Laramie, Wyoming, and now in Seattle, where in 2002 I left my tenure-track job at the University of Puget Sound to find a more satisfying life. Who knows what the future holds?

Dear Because,

None of the restaurants you recommended
are worth shit, though your napkin maps
are flawless. Fried dough has sustained me
through the guilt over what I did to you, but
this morning, my face broke out, rain blew in,
and correct change eluded me again.
I bought this card to break a 5 and, since the next
bus is an hour away, you get this photo. Supply
your own caption: the mechanical shark needs a name.

In exile,
yo-yo

OCEAN POEM

Who exactly is out on the ocean nowadays?
Compared to 1910, say, the mid-Atlantic must be rather lonely.
Or, if not lonely, stirring with submarines and tankers whose daily life
allows fewer and fewer of us to imagine ourselves there.
So something is silent, some register of chit-chat now dialed in
only occasionally, by the odd cruise ship. And beneath that,
water-logged static in some historical whirlpool: World War II, World War I,
the moans and thunking chains of the middle passage.

An extra long pole might be erected, or many more than one,
in the right spots to mark what needs marking.
Ships could be chartered, and passengers would lean over the rail
to read the plaques atop the poles.
A spotlight would shine on the actual place in the water.

ON THE TRAIN OVER THE MOUNTAINS

On the train over the mountains
we all got to wear the engineer’s hat;
10,000 miles from home,
strange, thick coins bought unpronouncable salty snacks.
You thought you detected organ music
jazzing to the tracks, but it played too low to know for sure.
No one looked like a secret agent. If not here, though, then where?
Secret agents do persist, though newspapers occasionally announce
the difficulty recruiting both moles and priests.
The hillside is dry but never too rocky:
missile silos don’t need as much space as you think.
Soon the ride will be over.
Now it is, and the mountain pass is behind us.
With no sheep in sight and a flower market surprising us
in this arid climate it’s tough to remember the ride at all,
though you can see the caboose from the hotel.
Do they call it a “caboose” here?
What kind of question is that?
How do you spell “caboose” in a foreign language?
You’d wanted to sneak a look at a keyboard or typewriter–
where do the new letters go? the old ones for that matter?
Do they need someone like you here?
That’s for them to decide.
But if you want those silos out, you’re better off
learning cocktail jokes and becoming a senator
and working an ocean’s distance from the mountain itself.
Take snapshots of the trip, save your wrappers, learn the recipe
for the snack, trade a day’s English lessons for local history
and a donkey trek before the sun’s too high.
There’s no turgid rhetoric about democracy that’s native to this place.
And if you refuse some pidgin monotheism,
where does that leave you?
In the present, I suppose, which will be here tomorrow too.
Which is all the more reason
to use your real name and to remember theirs.