#john engman

[headlightsforever]

John Engman, “Gladioli” from Temporary Help

[whisperthatruns]

Work

I wanted to be a rain salesman, because rain makes the flowers grow, but because of certain diversions and exhaustions, certain limitations and refusals and runnings low, because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows, and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden... I am paid to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse: this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none. The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm, king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved. I wanted to be a rain salesman, but that's a memory. I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs: the green sky cracking, then rain, and after, those flowers growing faster than I can name them, those flowers that fix me and make me stare. I wanted to be a rain salesman, carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door, selling thunder, selling the way the air feels after a downpour, but there were no openings in the rain department, and so they left me dying behind this desk--adding bleeps, subtracting clunks--and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms, some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living. Above my desk, lovingly in a bed of brushstroke flowers, a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.

John Engman, Temporary Help (1998)

[tom-bombadil-irl]

My favorite poet, John Engman, deserves more recognition thank you and goodnight

   I found the book Temporary Help in a Little Free Library randomly a few years ago. Don’t know exactly why I picked it up, but I did. I was entranced immediately. There’s just something so wonderfully readable about all of his poetry. It’s mostly freeverse, and it makes you feel like you’re just having coffee with this extremely well-spoken and confusing man that you don’t exactly know but would like to. There’s such a unique tone to everything he writes. He was a regular man who weaved words worth listening to from his regular thoughts. He wrote two full poetry books of his own that I know of, Temporary Help and Keeping Still, Mountain and a collaboration poetry book with  Carolyn Colburn, One Minute Of Knowing. There’s also Alcatraz, which is a shorter collection of poems, but they can all be found in his other two books as well. Temporary Help you can find without too much trouble, but his other books are out of print, so they tend to be more difficult to get your hands on.

   John Engman was a Minneapolis-based poet born in 1949 and dying at 47 in 1996 from a brain aneurysm. He is very little-known outside the poetry and arts community in Minneapolis, and I believe that he deserves much more than this. I discovered him by chance, and I want his words to outlive him. Even 23 years after his death, his poetry impacts me. It’s powerful. There’s a blurb from Jim Heynen on the back of my copy of Temporary Help that I think describes him better than I ever could;

   “We would all rather have seen this wonderful book in print before John Engman’s unexpected death in 1996, but having it now we at least have something of him back: the sly wit, the self-deprecating sweetness of his voice. Like the man, these poems are without pretense, casually but shrewdly crafted, often spiced with irony but never bitterness. We see the private-public man, maybe feeding goldfish in Loring Park, maybe singing to himself in the bathroom, In no situation did he ever overestimate his place in the universe nor underestimate the simplest joys of the moment. He was a scruffy angel. In truth, he was the purest angel among us. So are his poems. They are his lasting gift- ‘like a leaf in stone.’”

   To give you a sample of his artistry, here is one of his poems that can be found in Temporary Help, entitled ‘After the Revolution’;

We’re walking along

without a thought in our heads

when we just happen to look down

and see this stone in the middle of the road,

and we know the job has to be done,

so we elect this stone to be our President.

We all know those fields

that bring up stones

 as if everything on earth

is seeking higher office-

too many candidates!

But our candidate

is all alone in the road,

cool and smooth and unblemished.

We fear he won’t run!

Although he sits in the middle of the road

and says nothing

about the major issues of the day,

says nothing new or brave or realistic,

as if preparing for a long campaign.

We love him

because he seems so human,

warming up in sunlight and catching a chill in the rain,

and gladly do we follow him,’

which means standing in the middle of the road

until the road is overgrown, at last,

with weeds and wildflowers

and the political agenda

of the grass.

   Anyways, John Engman deserves more recognition. He’s the first person who’s poetry has really touched me. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[orangebug13]

WORK

      I wanted to be a rain salesman,

because rain makes the flowers grow,

but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,

certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,

because of chills and pressure, shaky prisms, big blows,

and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs

weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming

the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden. . .

                                                                     I am paid

to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive

leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:

this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.

 The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees

and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work

my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm,

king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved.

I wanted to be a rain salesman, but that’s a memory

I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs:

the green sky cracking, then rain, and after,

those flowers growing faster than I can name them,

those flowers that fix me and make me stare.

      I wanted to be a rain salesman,

carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,

selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,

but there were no openings in the rain department,

and so they left me dying behind this desk-adding bleeps,

subtracting clunks-and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,

some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.

Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstroke flowers,

a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know

by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful

in me.  She has green eyes.  I am paid to ignore her.

[thatsdeepyo]

The Building I live in is Tipping Over

by John Engman

The archaeologist who digs deep enough, through the rock and rolling tires of ape man and ape woman, will find my lowly bones just as I left them, in rows like a xylophone. She may play my ribs with her rubber mallet, reviving a mood from ages ago, the haunted little tunes of my carbon 14 content.

This is what she will know: I was a homo sapiens with few employable traits, not much data for the data base: American male, biped and carnivore, a blameless five-foot-eight. Perhaps she’ll bring me home in a canvas sack and stash my remains in a storage vault as if she’s collecting antiques…

I may be worth money someday! My skeleton, the backbone of some new dream! I doubt that, but imagine how pleased she’ll be, digging through the stream-of-consciousness rock until she arrives at my flat, and petrified me, caught in the act of whispering sweet nothings through the fossil of a keyhole…

[shadowofthewaxwing]

I wanted to be a rain salesman, because rain makes the flowers grow, but because of certain diversions and exhaustions, certain limitations and refusals and runnings low, because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows, and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden . . . I am paid to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse: this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none. The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm, king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved. I wanted to be a rain salesman, but that's a memory I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs: the green sky cracking, then rain, and after, those flowers growing faster than I can name them, those flowers that fix me and make me stare. I wanted to be a rain salesman, carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door, selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour, but there were no openings in the rain department, and so they left me dying behind this desk - adding bleeps, subtracting clunks - and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms, some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living. Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstroke flowers, a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.

John Engman, "Work"

[poem-locker]

John Engman, "Sobbing Uncontrollably In Public Places"

   That was the very room that we made famous with our love, where our souls flew, crying out and sighing. And that was the room in which I wrote about her in my dreamy logbook, thinking a few pages of blue ink would do the trick. That was the very room in which, the wonder of love is how I put it, the wonder of love and I succumbed to the law of physics and all of her beautiful moves. "Well, you're sure nobody I would pick from a crowd," is how she put it, and gave me a look that ate me slowly as a poem, no wondering allowed.     And blah, blah, blah. Thankfully, I will never be one of those who expect too much from a poem, who want the poet to explode before he goes, leaving the rostrum draped with glitz. Thankfully, I will never kill time by striking a pose: malcontent who dreams too much, sullen fugitive beneath the amber lamps, prince from a fallen regime. And I don't have to go around sobbing uncontrollably in public places to get my point across - that is for those who want cheap thrills and headaches, the personal touch. Let them read prose.     Of course, any young poet should be able to describe a room, a few pages of blue ink in a spiral notebook. Any young poet should be able to describe a room so poignantly it makes your eyes wet and you continue reading with heavy sighs. But remember, there was a girl on the bed, and we were in love, and the room was dark- I really wasn't a poet yet. Sure, there should have been a villanelle in her every move, her every look another blank page torn from the moon, but my mind had a hole worn through it by her touch, and the funny thing is, I don't remember much. Oh love, you crack me up.