As Good as Anything

I don't see the point of remembering you; you're too boring, Iowa City, Iowa, much duller topologically than Needles, California. I'm here in the Rebel Motel, with my grape-colored sweater and maté tea, whose smoky odor's bound up with first rooms and foods here sex and snow. I write about Needles Herman and rocks, the story's called “As Good as Anything,” and in it daft Herman—true local of Needles—says “Rocks is as good as anything.” I figured that out summer after first love affair in New York: hung out, home, at a rock shop inspecting geodes and thunder eggs Arsenic samples and petrified dinosaur dung. What can I say about Iowa City everyone's an academic poetry groupie, I haven't yet written a poem, there's a bar where for 25 cents a meal of boiled egg and tiny beer. Really I don't know what kind of poetry— what's the name of the make they use here—or what kinds of poetry live people write in the world. Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might still ask as I patronize, retrospectively, the Iowa style, characterized, as I remember, by the assumption of desperation boredom behind two-story houses divorce, incomes, fields, pigs, getting into pants, well not really in poems, well no “well”s and all in the costive mode of men who—and the suicidal women— want to be culpable for something, settle for being mean to their wives and writing dour stanzas. God this is bitchy I modeled for art classes that's rather interesting the hypocrisy: nobody needs to paint nude women they just like to. So here I am naked for art, which is a lot of dumb fucks I already know, same with poetry. Written and judged by. Those befoibled guys who think—you know— the poetic moment's a pocket in pool; where can I publish it; what can I do to my second or third wife now. Nothing happens in Iowa, so can I myself change here? Yes I can start to become contemptuous is that good or bad, probably bad. In New York I'd developed a philosophy of sympathy and spiritual equality: out the window, easily, upon my first meeting real assholes. “A rock's as good as anything” there are no rocks in Iowa shit-black soil, a tree or two, no mountain or tall edifice, University drabs, peeping Toms, anti-war riots, visiting poets treated like royalty, especially if they fuck the locals or have a record of fighting colorfully with their wives. You can go to the movies once a week, like in Needles. You can fuck a visiting poet;  you can be paraded before a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck. You can write your first poems thinking you might as well since the most stupid people in the universe are writing their five hundredth here. I'm doing that now. What difference does it make. I like my poems. They're as good as rocks.