Last night was the first of three Jack Straw Writers readings at the JS Foundation on Roosevelt in Seattle. My friend, poet, storyteller, educator, and social activist Merna Hecht read, along with Jennifer D. Munro, Kevin Craft and Wendy Call. Jack Straw records these readings and KUOW airs them, usually, as I remember, the following fall. Having worked with director, actor, poet and radio producer Elizabeth Austen, each writer got her or his work to live in the air. It was a pleasure to listen. Merna's statement of purpose in the JS Writers Anthology states that she wants, as a poet, "to give witness to the brokenness in family and daily life that occurs as a result of war, violence and ethnic conflicts." She was successful. In Kitchen Confidential, she writes:
"Why not get lost in what we love,
the world hurts us anyway."
then moves from the ringing of her kitchen timer to an explosive device timed to go off that will grind down another woman's hopes.
"You will fare well in my kitchen
where a cornmeal dumpling
with freshly picked blueberries
puckered beneath golden crust
will surprise you with cardamom,
lime, and cassis,
guarded recicpes
for keeping the hungry mouth
of the world's pain
on the other side
of the kitchen door."
In the next stanza she compares a 375 degree oven to the incinerating heat of a car bomb that violently interrupts hands reaching for olives.
She writes of making bread with empathetic connection to the bread making mothers of her students from Somalia, kneading conscious awareness and care for the world into sensory experience to make us resonate too with disrupted lives, even, dear Merna, in France.
The other writer whose work moved me was Jennifer D. Munro, whose memoir-in-progress is about "marriage, miscarriage and motorcycling."
Before I went to bed, I checked my email and read that a good friend's third marriage is in shambles, that her current husband is seeing someone else. They were having problems, she knew, but thought they would work on them. He thought if she were the "right" woman, they wouldn't be having problems, and started looking for the "right" woman. There is always more, and it always hurts. I don't understand. One of the things I loved about Merna's pieces was that she wrote that she didn't understand this, didn't know that, kneading in that information, which added to the force of her work. Life is work if we keep walking into it. I am indignant my friend must walk through another failed relationship. My indignance does not help anything. I was indignant when Jim's dad was deathly ill, was going to die. Indignance distances with its righteous point of view. The fire around me keeps me warm and separate and spinning around my own soveign self. My husband's brother has been trying to get divorced for over seven months. His lawyer quit this week. He isn't he reveals a divorce lawyer. Everything would have been fine if everyone was amicable. I was indignant. This I thought was criminal. The lawyer should have stated his position early on. Perhaps he did. We stood away from the proceedings, we didn't do anything to help. What can we do? Who are we to take charge? And if we took charge, would we do a better job? We cannot right the wrongs of the world, or even of our family. We sneer at the decisions of people in power, people running for office, people who we have never met. We don't - I don't - know what to do either. I don't even know how to talk to my own husband to get him to listen to my point of view when it differs from his point of view.
A Poem Draft
If I pay attention how can I not feel mad?
What will I do, spend every minute at the spa?
The world's a maze, our corn, their maize
on days like these I seek the solace of the ode
healing waters of the Oh! Religious eau
to lave what ails, the pounding head, the ulcer,
sooth me with what I love, construct the sac
to cradle, spin me dizzy as with beer.
I can barely sit here, sun in my eyes, my ego
gleaming gold as a fake tooth for all the fruit
rotting outside Burma, diesel through Laos
I'll give you an earful, shuck you, I burn red
as the setting sun over melting ice, a slight
whip to the back end of the wind. Oh Enemy
thy name blurs. What have I set alight?
Ten billion acres with seeds of praise?
Can't take bulldozers from razed schools' flanks,
can't raise children from death's ranks. Give
thanks? Water brought to boil, shuck sheaves,
inedible silk, slide ears into the pot, table set,
fresh butter pat on a blue plate. Now wait.
I have hands to smoothe napkins, snip tulips
for the vase, eyes to sense steam to stop
the pot boiling over, ears that have heard
too much, mouth to call loved ones to my table.
For all I am unable to bear, I apologize, for
all I do not do or seek to do, for all who suffer
whose names I will never know, I am sorry.
All the power all the glory. Holy Holy Holy.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
As I was young and uneasy before the apple boughs
were ploughed and wine grapes staked in their stead
afraid to be happy lest I be caught and shamed,
I told my cousins stories above the Columbia River
it was brown it was lovely those hills my fields of praise.
The major poet asked who I admired. Stafford,
Hirschfield, Ashbery. Who did I study with? Nelson.
What did he say? Nelson said everybody is a poet.
When he said I should send my work here and here.
I thought, that's Nelson Bentley not my poetry.
My lines make promises and don't keep them.
I veer wildly, smart aleck, wham awful sad.
He said here's iambic pentameter and two
lines later hexameter. Hand at his throat,
he lobbed what he landed on with the other.
---
J. A. M. J.A.M. J.A.M.
jam, jam, jam
I want some jam!
-first poem, age 1 1/2 (for my biographer)
---
How imporant is the work? Is it poetry? What is poetry? Who gets to say? Who can write it? Who has a tin ear? Is it me? Can I tell a dactyl from an iamb? Does that matter? What about intuitive leaps? That is all the fricking hell I have! If I read your work and get your work, in the sense that I sense something going on, I cry or I reverberate or I exhale with pleasure at a line but I can't remember anything later does this matter? If I read other poets about poetry and I understand... But this isn't about understanding or about getting, this being poetry. What is poetry? a writhing of the guts? Words making music that brings solace without that hallmark card retching - is wretched related to retch? If a wretch retches are we sadder than if you or I do? In the world scheme of things we are wretches - tiny nobodies whose bodies may as well be the ones discovered in the wreckage of Sichuan buildings. A reporter stood by and spoke into her mic or her cell phone as a fallen building was being excavated for bodies. She told us three women had brought Mrs. Choo a sheet and tore it into three pieces in case Mrs. Choo's three family members were found so Mrs. Choo could cover their faces. A commonplace in that community the reporter said, then told us she saw a hand. I thought she would spare us more, I was driving home with a jar of coriander for the simmering dal. There's a ring on the hand. I felt her self-awareness, reporting as it happened, Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite, but I felt revulsion. This was invasion of privacy and the insertion of the reporter's emotional response for our entertainment.
Each of us is wretched and will experience wreckage. What will be wrecked? What has been wrecked? I loved lost cities as a child - Atlantis, Machu Pichu. Who were these ancients? What remains among the ruins to remind us? Pages of amoebic coins stamped with faces of dead greats inside National Geographic. The past was alive! A long long time ago people lived lives! They combed their hair with these ancient combs with missing teeth! They wore these blackened earbobs with chipped stones! Here is the canoe with the hole in the hull they used to cross vast waters! They existed!
were ploughed and wine grapes staked in their stead
afraid to be happy lest I be caught and shamed,
I told my cousins stories above the Columbia River
it was brown it was lovely those hills my fields of praise.
The major poet asked who I admired. Stafford,
Hirschfield, Ashbery. Who did I study with? Nelson.
What did he say? Nelson said everybody is a poet.
When he said I should send my work here and here.
I thought, that's Nelson Bentley not my poetry.
My lines make promises and don't keep them.
I veer wildly, smart aleck, wham awful sad.
He said here's iambic pentameter and two
lines later hexameter. Hand at his throat,
he lobbed what he landed on with the other.
---
J. A. M. J.A.M. J.A.M.
jam, jam, jam
I want some jam!
-first poem, age 1 1/2 (for my biographer)
---
How imporant is the work? Is it poetry? What is poetry? Who gets to say? Who can write it? Who has a tin ear? Is it me? Can I tell a dactyl from an iamb? Does that matter? What about intuitive leaps? That is all the fricking hell I have! If I read your work and get your work, in the sense that I sense something going on, I cry or I reverberate or I exhale with pleasure at a line but I can't remember anything later does this matter? If I read other poets about poetry and I understand... But this isn't about understanding or about getting, this being poetry. What is poetry? a writhing of the guts? Words making music that brings solace without that hallmark card retching - is wretched related to retch? If a wretch retches are we sadder than if you or I do? In the world scheme of things we are wretches - tiny nobodies whose bodies may as well be the ones discovered in the wreckage of Sichuan buildings. A reporter stood by and spoke into her mic or her cell phone as a fallen building was being excavated for bodies. She told us three women had brought Mrs. Choo a sheet and tore it into three pieces in case Mrs. Choo's three family members were found so Mrs. Choo could cover their faces. A commonplace in that community the reporter said, then told us she saw a hand. I thought she would spare us more, I was driving home with a jar of coriander for the simmering dal. There's a ring on the hand. I felt her self-awareness, reporting as it happened, Edward R. Morrow, Walter Cronkite, but I felt revulsion. This was invasion of privacy and the insertion of the reporter's emotional response for our entertainment.
Each of us is wretched and will experience wreckage. What will be wrecked? What has been wrecked? I loved lost cities as a child - Atlantis, Machu Pichu. Who were these ancients? What remains among the ruins to remind us? Pages of amoebic coins stamped with faces of dead greats inside National Geographic. The past was alive! A long long time ago people lived lives! They combed their hair with these ancient combs with missing teeth! They wore these blackened earbobs with chipped stones! Here is the canoe with the hole in the hull they used to cross vast waters! They existed!
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Dogwood leaves like seagulls flying
over the ocean at sunset at the Cannon
Beach art gallery before we head out
to climb Haystack Rock at low tide,
orange and purple seastars pasted
to the rocks and alounge in punchbowls
in the sand, sea gray reflecting gray
sky like today in Seattle where this
dogwood buds on borrowed time if
we open this window to a door to
a garage. Pink clematis has grown over
Japanese maple and waves like a beauty
queen at each wind waft as Rabanco
back up beeps overwhelm robins. They
tell us it will be summer this weekend,
then back into darkness according to
today's P.I. pictograms. Rhododendron
leaves pump up and down like a small
child's toy and I miss having children
which I remember as making paste
and mudpies, trips to aquarium and zoo,
animated movies and shopping for shoes.
Aging is a honing process, the best shorn
from the lamb cylinder earlier in the gyro
so that now we're talking about my mom
on Mothers Day when my daughter and I
took her to lunch. She is so weighted with
regret and longing and inaction she can
barely move, hates the cane she needs to
stand up out of the front seat of the car.
As we headed out the front walk she
called out to neighbors across the street
who disappeared silently into their dark
garage. We all noticed and said nothing.
The area's changed, they could be rude
or crackheads, not making a comment
about her. "When I can walk again," she
told us angrily, almost 83, dropped her
sad moot point. She grimaced over her
salad so that we worried she'd bitten
down on an olive pit, launched a story
that meandered into another story and
another, each starring a new person,
we have met none of them, it was a single
tale with wave after wave of unhappy
endings. The protagonist tries hard,
meets calamity, and fails, and we were
Pilgrims thrown again and again into
the Slough of Despond, between which
there were interludes of remade history
where my brother wasn't mentally ill and
she wasn't responsible for abandoning him
because He's A Good Man though he has
a problem picking up good deals on eBay
so that he's had to sell his drum set and his
red tractor he bought to work the yardwide
plot of Montana land he owns until, look at
the time! we left her off and went home.
over the ocean at sunset at the Cannon
Beach art gallery before we head out
to climb Haystack Rock at low tide,
orange and purple seastars pasted
to the rocks and alounge in punchbowls
in the sand, sea gray reflecting gray
sky like today in Seattle where this
dogwood buds on borrowed time if
we open this window to a door to
a garage. Pink clematis has grown over
Japanese maple and waves like a beauty
queen at each wind waft as Rabanco
back up beeps overwhelm robins. They
tell us it will be summer this weekend,
then back into darkness according to
today's P.I. pictograms. Rhododendron
leaves pump up and down like a small
child's toy and I miss having children
which I remember as making paste
and mudpies, trips to aquarium and zoo,
animated movies and shopping for shoes.
Aging is a honing process, the best shorn
from the lamb cylinder earlier in the gyro
so that now we're talking about my mom
on Mothers Day when my daughter and I
took her to lunch. She is so weighted with
regret and longing and inaction she can
barely move, hates the cane she needs to
stand up out of the front seat of the car.
As we headed out the front walk she
called out to neighbors across the street
who disappeared silently into their dark
garage. We all noticed and said nothing.
The area's changed, they could be rude
or crackheads, not making a comment
about her. "When I can walk again," she
told us angrily, almost 83, dropped her
sad moot point. She grimaced over her
salad so that we worried she'd bitten
down on an olive pit, launched a story
that meandered into another story and
another, each starring a new person,
we have met none of them, it was a single
tale with wave after wave of unhappy
endings. The protagonist tries hard,
meets calamity, and fails, and we were
Pilgrims thrown again and again into
the Slough of Despond, between which
there were interludes of remade history
where my brother wasn't mentally ill and
she wasn't responsible for abandoning him
because He's A Good Man though he has
a problem picking up good deals on eBay
so that he's had to sell his drum set and his
red tractor he bought to work the yardwide
plot of Montana land he owns until, look at
the time! we left her off and went home.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Ten thousand flamingoes crowd the wadi
would you feel less guilty if there were none?
remove your watch and set it by your bed
begin each day with clean mouth and elan
Neruda faced the world and wrote the ode
your poem is not a card trick to bamboozle
sensory overload dazzle fluff, Reno style
shrimp like gear teeth round communal bowls
beside the fireplace where you hung the saber
Myanmar cyclone aftermath, pass the ribs
every day there's too much information, prod
to action prod to prod until shock's the point
action's gangliar echo severed from aim
and once more into the breech my friends
is only worth a dozen points on the GRE.
---
Rhododendron buds like a finial display at Lowe's
some look like a hand holding playing cards and
the one on the highest limb looks a little like Chita
Rivera. Everyone's yard is filled with white and
lilac lilacs, blue bells, red and yellow tulips, that
mad color splash that is Seattle Spring. Bert's has
zonal geraniums, flat after flat, along with
azaleas. Mothers Day hung hot pink ballgowned
fuchsias, white lobelia earlobes dainty between
the dresses. I weed in my daughter's fleece pants.
---
Remember in January all that you swore off?
Cookie dough, cocaine, whatever it was
you were serious but it would get easier --
winter dark and cold overwhelmed by light
and warmth when we feel easier in our skin,
my pronouns all over the map, but you know
what I mean.
--
I'm out of joint and grumpy, not asked to participate at Skagit River this year, sent two emails and nobody replied. Called and nobody called back. Wah! I know they struggle for money to fund their project, and I know other things - my email provider decided to upgrade our service and left us without email for several days then went back to the original email format, I was out of town two weeks in February. Out of country. In Southwest India. WAAAAAH! So anyways, poor me.
--
A lemon just flew by. Lemon colored but it was a bird. Black on the wings. It was a male goldfinch, I just looked it up. In its mating colors. They molt in the fall, then again in spring to get the dandelion yellow plummage I'd chase after if I were a drab olive colored female goldfinch.
---
would you feel less guilty if there were none?
remove your watch and set it by your bed
begin each day with clean mouth and elan
Neruda faced the world and wrote the ode
your poem is not a card trick to bamboozle
sensory overload dazzle fluff, Reno style
shrimp like gear teeth round communal bowls
beside the fireplace where you hung the saber
Myanmar cyclone aftermath, pass the ribs
every day there's too much information, prod
to action prod to prod until shock's the point
action's gangliar echo severed from aim
and once more into the breech my friends
is only worth a dozen points on the GRE.
---
Rhododendron buds like a finial display at Lowe's
some look like a hand holding playing cards and
the one on the highest limb looks a little like Chita
Rivera. Everyone's yard is filled with white and
lilac lilacs, blue bells, red and yellow tulips, that
mad color splash that is Seattle Spring. Bert's has
zonal geraniums, flat after flat, along with
azaleas. Mothers Day hung hot pink ballgowned
fuchsias, white lobelia earlobes dainty between
the dresses. I weed in my daughter's fleece pants.
---
Remember in January all that you swore off?
Cookie dough, cocaine, whatever it was
you were serious but it would get easier --
winter dark and cold overwhelmed by light
and warmth when we feel easier in our skin,
my pronouns all over the map, but you know
what I mean.
--
I'm out of joint and grumpy, not asked to participate at Skagit River this year, sent two emails and nobody replied. Called and nobody called back. Wah! I know they struggle for money to fund their project, and I know other things - my email provider decided to upgrade our service and left us without email for several days then went back to the original email format, I was out of town two weeks in February. Out of country. In Southwest India. WAAAAAH! So anyways, poor me.
--
A lemon just flew by. Lemon colored but it was a bird. Black on the wings. It was a male goldfinch, I just looked it up. In its mating colors. They molt in the fall, then again in spring to get the dandelion yellow plummage I'd chase after if I were a drab olive colored female goldfinch.
---
Monday, May 12, 2008
When you come out of the shit raise the flag
throw up a flare, wave your arm, toss a cap
we've grown impatient to pick you up at dawn
Really, we haven't lost so much as a fin.
Nothing much can touch us since Sawyer
built the wall without so much as a level
but you probably read about the semi --
bridge opening for Dwayne's dumb boat,
eighty thousand pounds, no jake brakes
jeez the psi on the dashboard alone, but
no, no more for all the peanuts in Perth,
last year's wheat alar like oil from silos --
couldn't hear the screams for your own yell
Well, hell, yeah hell flared in the woody
area back of Dean's. Looks like a tundra.
Sir Walter found a plain in Trinidad - tar
he used to caulk ships, by god we rival that.
We could pave from here to Brisbane
with the black lake over by the Lutheran
church on Blaine. What I wouldn't give,
but hey -- on second thought, stay
away. Really. Go home. It was my ego.
We haven't a spare rib here to lend.
throw up a flare, wave your arm, toss a cap
we've grown impatient to pick you up at dawn
Really, we haven't lost so much as a fin.
Nothing much can touch us since Sawyer
built the wall without so much as a level
but you probably read about the semi --
bridge opening for Dwayne's dumb boat,
eighty thousand pounds, no jake brakes
jeez the psi on the dashboard alone, but
no, no more for all the peanuts in Perth,
last year's wheat alar like oil from silos --
couldn't hear the screams for your own yell
Well, hell, yeah hell flared in the woody
area back of Dean's. Looks like a tundra.
Sir Walter found a plain in Trinidad - tar
he used to caulk ships, by god we rival that.
We could pave from here to Brisbane
with the black lake over by the Lutheran
church on Blaine. What I wouldn't give,
but hey -- on second thought, stay
away. Really. Go home. It was my ego.
We haven't a spare rib here to lend.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
5:30 am my daughter called from Miami, was first as she'd hoped she'd be, to wish me happy mothers' day. I had awakened to my husband running downstairs, his phone ringing, or whatever it is is cellphone does. She's at the beach for as long as possible, she said. I've got that caul of melancholia this morning, and I shouldn't have looked at my poems, but I did, and I am so much less smart than I thought I'd grow up to be. How is it I can read other people's poetry and hum and reverberate with their music then open my mouth and grunt? Nobody cares about my poems about trying and failing. I don't care about my poems about trying and failing, or just leaving out the middle person, the one who works and works, and just going directly to the failure. Nobody cares. Maybe, now that sun, real, direct sun with no clouds between it and me, has blared up above the white house across the alley, the one with the chickens, I will face my face into the light and celebrate this sunny Sunday morning. Jim took off on his motorcycle a few minutes ago. He and his brother are taking their mother out to breakfast at Salmon Bay Cafe. I read a review this morning, looking for the phone number, by Rachel Kestler, who I know. Woo Hoo!
The rhododendron bud clusters are checkered, the hot pink of the flowers beginning to pull free from the yellowish sepals. Some of them look like fat asparagus heads. It is the season of the fat asparagus. I could eat it every every day.
A dog that looked like a fox just ran down the alley a dog that looked like a tall fox with a non fox tail. Could it be a coyote? there are at least two coyotes who live in the Arboretum almost across the street, it is early Sunday morning. It trotted past in the direction of the Arboretum. Is she or he the one responsible for knocking over the trash cans closer to 33rd?
I haven't done a thing to save the Quaking Aspen. Last year their leaves turned completely black and fell like hundreds of pirate eyepatches. They are horribly aphid-infested and need
to have aphid-killing stakes pounded into their hearts. I have gone flaccid in the face of calling someone to do this. You cannot buy these stakes at the garden store. This is a job for professionals. I know the trees are in danger for their lives and yet I do nothing. This is my confession.
The rhododendron bud clusters are checkered, the hot pink of the flowers beginning to pull free from the yellowish sepals. Some of them look like fat asparagus heads. It is the season of the fat asparagus. I could eat it every every day.
A dog that looked like a fox just ran down the alley a dog that looked like a tall fox with a non fox tail. Could it be a coyote? there are at least two coyotes who live in the Arboretum almost across the street, it is early Sunday morning. It trotted past in the direction of the Arboretum. Is she or he the one responsible for knocking over the trash cans closer to 33rd?
I haven't done a thing to save the Quaking Aspen. Last year their leaves turned completely black and fell like hundreds of pirate eyepatches. They are horribly aphid-infested and need
to have aphid-killing stakes pounded into their hearts. I have gone flaccid in the face of calling someone to do this. You cannot buy these stakes at the garden store. This is a job for professionals. I know the trees are in danger for their lives and yet I do nothing. This is my confession.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Invasion
At any moment, she could fall asleep and lose everything.
Her ex-husband wanted time with their ten-year-old son
after a four-year hiatus. Which she granted - how could
she not? She's a psychiatrist, knows the law. Her son
texts that dad is acting weird, which is why she left in
the first place. More and more people have lost themselves,
wander listlessly with accusatory expressions. Are you
one of us? The male half of a forty-year married couple
leaves with no explanation. When he returns, he brings
unsavory people into the house. Her ex-husband, a high
political official, won't answer his phone, and when he does
won't let her talk with her son. "He's asleep," he says,
and she imagines the worst until another text sends her
into the subways to pick up her son. It is so late that
nothing is open. Everyone is asleep. They enter a picked-
over pharmacy and she downs uppers with two-liter
Mountain Dews, instructs her son to punch her in
the heart with an adrenaline shot if he discovers her
asleep. "You can be brave," she says and he nods. His
father was furious that he wouldn't sleep, and even
when he did, he didn't become the boy his father
hoped for. His mother, he knows, wants him for himself.
Her ex-husband wanted time with their ten-year-old son
after a four-year hiatus. Which she granted - how could
she not? She's a psychiatrist, knows the law. Her son
texts that dad is acting weird, which is why she left in
the first place. More and more people have lost themselves,
wander listlessly with accusatory expressions. Are you
one of us? The male half of a forty-year married couple
leaves with no explanation. When he returns, he brings
unsavory people into the house. Her ex-husband, a high
political official, won't answer his phone, and when he does
won't let her talk with her son. "He's asleep," he says,
and she imagines the worst until another text sends her
into the subways to pick up her son. It is so late that
nothing is open. Everyone is asleep. They enter a picked-
over pharmacy and she downs uppers with two-liter
Mountain Dews, instructs her son to punch her in
the heart with an adrenaline shot if he discovers her
asleep. "You can be brave," she says and he nods. His
father was furious that he wouldn't sleep, and even
when he did, he didn't become the boy his father
hoped for. His mother, he knows, wants him for himself.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Born twelve years ago today one of nine
gone last June my companion all those years.
who knows what this meant to you? member
of our pack alert to verbal signal and to food
did you love me? does it matter? You were
well behaved almost always but the but
made you your own being. The walk when
you bounded from leash grasp disappeared
into a back yard disappeared gone phhht
until I was limp with weeping. Escaped
out the Toyota door, me in the bookstore
shoe store owner called me to fetch you.
the day you and Nikki stole the cooling
pork loin off a countertop ate all but garlic
cloves spit out on the floor. Coming home
to you lying by the door we'd know you
had sinned, find an unopened bread
loaf on your bed or garbage scattered
across the kitchen. Bought you a lumbar-
support dog bed came upstairs
to the livingroom recarpeted in rent foam
you ran off at Houghton Beach, over 120
pounds. I felt you let me wrestle you to
ground and I said Bad girl. No. No run.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
My books arrived from India!
I'm always having to invent and abandon
writing strategies. Back to Seattle from
Chelan, I find no juice in the crossword.
Have to trick myself into the trance state
for poetry another way I haven't found
yet. Ed Hirsch sent me a note thanking
me for sending him my poem. He liked
he said seeing his talk return to him
as a poem. So that was fun and
that is done. Yesterday I looked at
corpses on the page, printing them
on my mysteriously functional again
printer. I have several thick slabs I have
no idea what to do with. I have difficulty
reading them, hearing them, owning them,
knowing them, believing in them. I
remember disowning an art project I
made from drawing on a coke bottle with
Elmer's glue ten minutes before class -
college art: the line. I had been excited
about and by it in process. The teacher
praised it, I felt unworthy, hadn't taken
enough time, in that tedious studious
way I approached classes - poring over
syllabi and textbooks and class notes,
asking always what does the teacher
want? ran away from college like
a six year old with my thumb out --
trying to escape everyone I tried
to please to find what I'd want.
And now here are my awkward poems
I want, make, love, abandon,
one by one by one by one.
writing strategies. Back to Seattle from
Chelan, I find no juice in the crossword.
Have to trick myself into the trance state
for poetry another way I haven't found
yet. Ed Hirsch sent me a note thanking
me for sending him my poem. He liked
he said seeing his talk return to him
as a poem. So that was fun and
that is done. Yesterday I looked at
corpses on the page, printing them
on my mysteriously functional again
printer. I have several thick slabs I have
no idea what to do with. I have difficulty
reading them, hearing them, owning them,
knowing them, believing in them. I
remember disowning an art project I
made from drawing on a coke bottle with
Elmer's glue ten minutes before class -
college art: the line. I had been excited
about and by it in process. The teacher
praised it, I felt unworthy, hadn't taken
enough time, in that tedious studious
way I approached classes - poring over
syllabi and textbooks and class notes,
asking always what does the teacher
want? ran away from college like
a six year old with my thumb out --
trying to escape everyone I tried
to please to find what I'd want.
And now here are my awkward poems
I want, make, love, abandon,
one by one by one by one.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Mom and Dad have tried, my mother says,
to contact Mike, the Estate Sale agent. He's
never home, she says on the phone, and I
know she's hedging, but they have been
working, she says, between doctors'
appointments and dentists' appointments.
We spend a lot of time doing that, she
says, and then we have to take naps.
But I've said to your dad we have to
get to work on that room. As an aside
she tells me Mike won't work with us
until we clear out this junk. When Jim
and I stood in the basement surrounded
by the junk, offering to move, remove, sort
through boxes, closets, cupboards under
the dark stairs, they told us Mike would
deal with all of this. Don't get rid
of anything they said Mike said. You'd
be surprised what people will buy.
Reality has shifted under my mother's
words my entire life. She has taken books
to the library, she says. The box was too
heavy, so she put the books in bags
and took them to the library. I pulled out
my shoulder she says, but that's okay.
She has emptied, I realize, that one box
on gramma's maple trestle table
facing the full bookcase she has yet to
touch. The records she thinks of as Lyn's.
to contact Mike, the Estate Sale agent. He's
never home, she says on the phone, and I
know she's hedging, but they have been
working, she says, between doctors'
appointments and dentists' appointments.
We spend a lot of time doing that, she
says, and then we have to take naps.
But I've said to your dad we have to
get to work on that room. As an aside
she tells me Mike won't work with us
until we clear out this junk. When Jim
and I stood in the basement surrounded
by the junk, offering to move, remove, sort
through boxes, closets, cupboards under
the dark stairs, they told us Mike would
deal with all of this. Don't get rid
of anything they said Mike said. You'd
be surprised what people will buy.
Reality has shifted under my mother's
words my entire life. She has taken books
to the library, she says. The box was too
heavy, so she put the books in bags
and took them to the library. I pulled out
my shoulder she says, but that's okay.
She has emptied, I realize, that one box
on gramma's maple trestle table
facing the full bookcase she has yet to
touch. The records she thinks of as Lyn's.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
More Tony Hoagland
The second chapter of Real Sofistikashun has the title: "'Tis Backed Like a Weasel": The Slipperiness of Metaphor. It is broken into three sections, each titled metaphorically: 1. Cloud, 2. Whale, and 3. Weasel.
His premise in the first section, is that metaphor is a gift and that "an urge to claim wild similarities is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit." The kid lying in the backyard pointing upward calling out, "elephant, raspberry, big wheel," doesn't care about the metaphor equation Hoagland gleans from Stephen Dobyns, where object half and image half combine to make a functional metaphor, and she doesn't care that these shapes she is fetching exceed logic. She's just reaching into that unknown vastness inside and making metaphors with clouds.
Metaphor, Hoagland says, is slippery, and it is huge. Can this be why his section section is titled "Whale"? He talks about how metaphor's work lessens the poet's, the metaphor eliminating the need for a thesis statement, the unintended adjunct meanings that creep into poems via metaphors, these additional meanings making metaphor uncontainable and elastic. He brings in Mary Oliver to tell us how unnecessary extra images will make our poems wild carnival rides that lose their sense of purpose and disrupt the poem's cumulative power. The proper status, he illustrates with a poem by Robert Hass, of metaphor, is to serve the whole, to function almost underground, underwater maybe, working and moving the poem forward, to "supplement and augment the poem's discourse" but not devolve to self expression or self glorification.
In the third section, Hoagland says the metaphor, is "an enriching device, but must not toss the rider from the horse." But, he says, the metaphor resists logic and care, is "an allergic reaction to too much reality." He brings Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet to illustrate. Polonious, the unimaginative keeper of the status quo, has been sent to bring Hamlet to an audience with his mother. Hamlet, wildcard and metaphor maker, is dangerous. He resists Polonious's attempt to bring him to heel with metaphorical play with a cloud, calling it first camel, to which Polonious agrees, then weasel,Polonious agreeing, "It is backed like a weasel." "Or like a whale?" Hamlet asks, and Polonious follows after, "Very like a whale." Hamlet, "that subversive figure, that poet, will not cooperate -- he continuously changes his images, ...moving out of reach," which "protects his right to dream, which, like all freedoms, is dangerous."
His premise in the first section, is that metaphor is a gift and that "an urge to claim wild similarities is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit." The kid lying in the backyard pointing upward calling out, "elephant, raspberry, big wheel," doesn't care about the metaphor equation Hoagland gleans from Stephen Dobyns, where object half and image half combine to make a functional metaphor, and she doesn't care that these shapes she is fetching exceed logic. She's just reaching into that unknown vastness inside and making metaphors with clouds.
Metaphor, Hoagland says, is slippery, and it is huge. Can this be why his section section is titled "Whale"? He talks about how metaphor's work lessens the poet's, the metaphor eliminating the need for a thesis statement, the unintended adjunct meanings that creep into poems via metaphors, these additional meanings making metaphor uncontainable and elastic. He brings in Mary Oliver to tell us how unnecessary extra images will make our poems wild carnival rides that lose their sense of purpose and disrupt the poem's cumulative power. The proper status, he illustrates with a poem by Robert Hass, of metaphor, is to serve the whole, to function almost underground, underwater maybe, working and moving the poem forward, to "supplement and augment the poem's discourse" but not devolve to self expression or self glorification.
In the third section, Hoagland says the metaphor, is "an enriching device, but must not toss the rider from the horse." But, he says, the metaphor resists logic and care, is "an allergic reaction to too much reality." He brings Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet to illustrate. Polonious, the unimaginative keeper of the status quo, has been sent to bring Hamlet to an audience with his mother. Hamlet, wildcard and metaphor maker, is dangerous. He resists Polonious's attempt to bring him to heel with metaphorical play with a cloud, calling it first camel, to which Polonious agrees, then weasel,Polonious agreeing, "It is backed like a weasel." "Or like a whale?" Hamlet asks, and Polonious follows after, "Very like a whale." Hamlet, "that subversive figure, that poet, will not cooperate -- he continuously changes his images, ...moving out of reach," which "protects his right to dream, which, like all freedoms, is dangerous."
The signboard outside the Variety Store
announced a new DVD shipment - $1/each.
Even after WalMart appeared on the way
to the airport on its own new blacktop
Apple Blossom Road, the Variety Store
persists beside the parking lot it shares
with the new blonde wood Starbucks.
I whipped the car around in the Lakeside
Drive-in parking lot and we went in -
past the outside folding tables piled with
lime green and lurid pink flexible plastic
beach pails, imitation Crocs and wrench
sets attached as thoroughly as tied
quilts to cardboard. Indoors in
perpetual gloom were the dimestore
reek from childhood, glassware with
flagrantly unconcealed seams, and
familiar looking 1000 piece puzzles.
A twenty something man with black hair
and Spanish accent leaned behind
the counter where the weeble bottomed
white lady used to sit. I'd never seen
DVD's in such narrow packages. We
sorted through at least 40 copies
of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
which we've seen, blocks of 20 to 40
copies of each movie you've never
heard of. Carnival of Souls begins "as
three young women in Kansas drag
race on a wooden bridge... only one
of the women... emerges from the murky
depths... goes onto Salt Lake City
to become a church organist... haunted by
visions of spirits." In Werewolf
of Washington, Dean Stockwell "gives
an unforgettable performance
as the haunted reporter in this
surprisingly lighthearted horror film
that can be enjoyed by anyone."
In The Ape Man, Bela Lugosi plays "a
gland specialist scientist who transforms
himself into a semi-simian state when
an experiment goes wrong." According
to the liner notes, "his only hope is to
find the anecdote..." Another sad film
from Bela's declining years, The Devil
Bat, shows how "Dr. Carruthers (Lugosi)
uses his genius to enlarge bats and then
train them to attack wearers of a certain
perfume he has discovered... in this well-acted
tale of terror from director Jean Yarbrough."
I remember babysitting at thirteen, never,
ever turning to horror films, which left me
with Roller Derby, rough-looking women
racing raggedly around a rickety looking
track while pulling one another's hair,
hauling back and solidly punching each other
smack in the face, pulling each other
to the floor and skating over the downed.
One night I looked up to see a man
looking in at me from the window
of the door to the garage. My father
who was visiting the family behind us,
leapt the fence, but the man had gone.
The police nabbed him two blocks away,
an albino, they said, on the loose.
announced a new DVD shipment - $1/each.
Even after WalMart appeared on the way
to the airport on its own new blacktop
Apple Blossom Road, the Variety Store
persists beside the parking lot it shares
with the new blonde wood Starbucks.
I whipped the car around in the Lakeside
Drive-in parking lot and we went in -
past the outside folding tables piled with
lime green and lurid pink flexible plastic
beach pails, imitation Crocs and wrench
sets attached as thoroughly as tied
quilts to cardboard. Indoors in
perpetual gloom were the dimestore
reek from childhood, glassware with
flagrantly unconcealed seams, and
familiar looking 1000 piece puzzles.
A twenty something man with black hair
and Spanish accent leaned behind
the counter where the weeble bottomed
white lady used to sit. I'd never seen
DVD's in such narrow packages. We
sorted through at least 40 copies
of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
which we've seen, blocks of 20 to 40
copies of each movie you've never
heard of. Carnival of Souls begins "as
three young women in Kansas drag
race on a wooden bridge... only one
of the women... emerges from the murky
depths... goes onto Salt Lake City
to become a church organist... haunted by
visions of spirits." In Werewolf
of Washington, Dean Stockwell "gives
an unforgettable performance
as the haunted reporter in this
surprisingly lighthearted horror film
that can be enjoyed by anyone."
In The Ape Man, Bela Lugosi plays "a
gland specialist scientist who transforms
himself into a semi-simian state when
an experiment goes wrong." According
to the liner notes, "his only hope is to
find the anecdote..." Another sad film
from Bela's declining years, The Devil
Bat, shows how "Dr. Carruthers (Lugosi)
uses his genius to enlarge bats and then
train them to attack wearers of a certain
perfume he has discovered... in this well-acted
tale of terror from director Jean Yarbrough."
I remember babysitting at thirteen, never,
ever turning to horror films, which left me
with Roller Derby, rough-looking women
racing raggedly around a rickety looking
track while pulling one another's hair,
hauling back and solidly punching each other
smack in the face, pulling each other
to the floor and skating over the downed.
One night I looked up to see a man
looking in at me from the window
of the door to the garage. My father
who was visiting the family behind us,
leapt the fence, but the man had gone.
The police nabbed him two blocks away,
an albino, they said, on the loose.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Mowing
I lug the old green lawnmower
from the shed, the one with
the Sears handle bolted on
after the original one busted off,
the old Briggs & Stratton engine.
My husband takes the broken-off
pull rope from my hand and
lets out the choke. He gives
the rope a good yank. We do this
every spring. Hold our breath
and wonder if this is the year
it doesn't start. It starts after
five pulls. I push the mower
into where the dandelions took
over from the sod a few years
ago. Mow lightly over the corner
where the violets crowd sweetly,
roughly cross and backtrack across
the tough yellow dandelion faces,
the next generation aloft in their
tiny parachutes, dust and racket
rising around me like I am
the hurricane eye, Zeuss's wrath,
a woman whose fingers ring as
I let go of this accomplishment.
from the shed, the one with
the Sears handle bolted on
after the original one busted off,
the old Briggs & Stratton engine.
My husband takes the broken-off
pull rope from my hand and
lets out the choke. He gives
the rope a good yank. We do this
every spring. Hold our breath
and wonder if this is the year
it doesn't start. It starts after
five pulls. I push the mower
into where the dandelions took
over from the sod a few years
ago. Mow lightly over the corner
where the violets crowd sweetly,
roughly cross and backtrack across
the tough yellow dandelion faces,
the next generation aloft in their
tiny parachutes, dust and racket
rising around me like I am
the hurricane eye, Zeuss's wrath,
a woman whose fingers ring as
I let go of this accomplishment.
Here's a Billy Collins poem:
(it was written by BILLY COLLINS):
Man in Space
All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making the point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,
and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,
why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breastsw protected by hard metal disks.
-Billy Collins
Tony Hoagland uses this poem to talk about metaphor, its intended and unintended parts. And I quote:
In the Collins poem, which seems so tidy, so well "closed," we have the odd sexual subtext of the images - the spread legs and the shiny breasts of the Amazon women. These details probably come from the 1950's science-fiction movies that are the cultural source of Collins's image. Those movies were made, after all, by men, not women, and the result is the oddly confusing image of proto-feminist go-go dancers. It's Barbarella night at the Playboy Mansion! Although this is a poem of feminist empathy, it totes some funny baggage with it. (And doesn't it also, by the way, suggest that women are aliens?) I this sense, metaphors, like prescription drugs, should probably carry a warning label about possible side effects. A label on the Collins poem might say, "Warning: this politically correct poem could prolong your sexism."
**
Hoagland says, in the next paragraph: A metaphor's luminosity lies not just in its equivalency but also in its unmanageability." He goes on to celebrate metaphor's "fantastic elasticity" and to introduce me to Laura Kasischke, who he describes as "one of the premier image-makers of my generation." He quotes Mary Oliver, from her book on craft, A Poetry Handbook, and says "Oliver may come off here as the Miss Manners of poetic convention." He goes on to say nicer things about what she says about controlling the image, lest the poem "end up like a carnival ride... In the shed electricity of too much imagery the purpose of the ride -- and a sense of arrival -- may be lost." (Mary Oliver, from A Poetry Handbook, quoted in Real Sofistikashun.)
And I know what Tony and Mary mean, and yet, and yet. What if the poem can be a carnival ride and those sparks and bursts are the only things we can depend on? What if sometimes the brown paper covered grab bag, unexpectedly and rarely, that seemingly random combination of geegaws, odd colored paper and stickers, delights and enthralls and is experience enough?
And what if I'm fooling myself?
****
I have just finished Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass. Poetry of winter, I wanted it to snow forever. I was imagining the story taking place somewhere far away, uvula of Michigan maybe, when in the last part of the book there is a weather report from Spokane, and all this fragile wildness snapped into place nearly next door.
***
Five Five Oh Eight
I can tell bald eagle from robin,
coot from barn swallow,
magpie from mallard duck,
fruit bat from California quail.
I have too slow an eye for more,
my ear can't separate calls,
which for example may be
tree frogs that aria famously
in April, squirrels, the many
utterings of crows. I don't know.
When I was in high school
I imagined my poetry would
astonish with its nuanced avidity,
its accurate piquant heart.
Owl brown dowdy birds lift
vertically from phone wires,
dive nearly to the water surface,
wheel, fly pall mall towards
each other, avert disaster, voice,
open effortless mouths for insects,
each morning and dusk, aerobatic
geniuses in drab plumage.
(it was written by BILLY COLLINS):
Man in Space
All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making the point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,
and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,
why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breastsw protected by hard metal disks.
-Billy Collins
Tony Hoagland uses this poem to talk about metaphor, its intended and unintended parts. And I quote:
In the Collins poem, which seems so tidy, so well "closed," we have the odd sexual subtext of the images - the spread legs and the shiny breasts of the Amazon women. These details probably come from the 1950's science-fiction movies that are the cultural source of Collins's image. Those movies were made, after all, by men, not women, and the result is the oddly confusing image of proto-feminist go-go dancers. It's Barbarella night at the Playboy Mansion! Although this is a poem of feminist empathy, it totes some funny baggage with it. (And doesn't it also, by the way, suggest that women are aliens?) I this sense, metaphors, like prescription drugs, should probably carry a warning label about possible side effects. A label on the Collins poem might say, "Warning: this politically correct poem could prolong your sexism."
**
Hoagland says, in the next paragraph: A metaphor's luminosity lies not just in its equivalency but also in its unmanageability." He goes on to celebrate metaphor's "fantastic elasticity" and to introduce me to Laura Kasischke, who he describes as "one of the premier image-makers of my generation." He quotes Mary Oliver, from her book on craft, A Poetry Handbook, and says "Oliver may come off here as the Miss Manners of poetic convention." He goes on to say nicer things about what she says about controlling the image, lest the poem "end up like a carnival ride... In the shed electricity of too much imagery the purpose of the ride -- and a sense of arrival -- may be lost." (Mary Oliver, from A Poetry Handbook, quoted in Real Sofistikashun.)
And I know what Tony and Mary mean, and yet, and yet. What if the poem can be a carnival ride and those sparks and bursts are the only things we can depend on? What if sometimes the brown paper covered grab bag, unexpectedly and rarely, that seemingly random combination of geegaws, odd colored paper and stickers, delights and enthralls and is experience enough?
And what if I'm fooling myself?
****
I have just finished Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass. Poetry of winter, I wanted it to snow forever. I was imagining the story taking place somewhere far away, uvula of Michigan maybe, when in the last part of the book there is a weather report from Spokane, and all this fragile wildness snapped into place nearly next door.
***
Five Five Oh Eight
I can tell bald eagle from robin,
coot from barn swallow,
magpie from mallard duck,
fruit bat from California quail.
I have too slow an eye for more,
my ear can't separate calls,
which for example may be
tree frogs that aria famously
in April, squirrels, the many
utterings of crows. I don't know.
When I was in high school
I imagined my poetry would
astonish with its nuanced avidity,
its accurate piquant heart.
Owl brown dowdy birds lift
vertically from phone wires,
dive nearly to the water surface,
wheel, fly pall mall towards
each other, avert disaster, voice,
open effortless mouths for insects,
each morning and dusk, aerobatic
geniuses in drab plumage.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
4 May Cute Car
My Morris Minor sat outdoors all winter
invaded by spiders but no mice.
On the west side of the mountains
I thought of it, alone on the hillside,
possibly moldering. In 1970, I almost
bought a psychedelic green Morris
from a girl whose mechanic boyfriend
had brought it back to life after they
found it overgrown with blackberries.
I have just driven my car 45 miles roundtrip,
loaded for the return with tomato
starts, Spanish lavender, rosemary,
Italian plum and Bartlet pear trees
in five gallon pots, the trees sticking
out the back passenger window so that
as we passed a bicyclist along the lake,
Jim yelled, "Left! Left!" and I swerved.
I wanted to love this car, but what
I love, after thirteen years, is how
the car gives people entry to talk
with me. A couple in the WalMart
parking lot circled as we loaded the fruit
trees into the back - they have a B&B
the other side of the lake, he makes
titanium bicycle pedals used in a top
secret navy submarine project. Last
week he sent a pair to Bath, which
is where I bought my car. My reward
for letting a surgeon slice open my thigh,
saw a foot off my femur and replace
it with a titanium shank. Then repeat.
invaded by spiders but no mice.
On the west side of the mountains
I thought of it, alone on the hillside,
possibly moldering. In 1970, I almost
bought a psychedelic green Morris
from a girl whose mechanic boyfriend
had brought it back to life after they
found it overgrown with blackberries.
I have just driven my car 45 miles roundtrip,
loaded for the return with tomato
starts, Spanish lavender, rosemary,
Italian plum and Bartlet pear trees
in five gallon pots, the trees sticking
out the back passenger window so that
as we passed a bicyclist along the lake,
Jim yelled, "Left! Left!" and I swerved.
I wanted to love this car, but what
I love, after thirteen years, is how
the car gives people entry to talk
with me. A couple in the WalMart
parking lot circled as we loaded the fruit
trees into the back - they have a B&B
the other side of the lake, he makes
titanium bicycle pedals used in a top
secret navy submarine project. Last
week he sent a pair to Bath, which
is where I bought my car. My reward
for letting a surgeon slice open my thigh,
saw a foot off my femur and replace
it with a titanium shank. Then repeat.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
3 May 2008 Chelan Apple Blossom Street Scene
Sidewalk cardtables along Woodin Ave
Bake sale in front of the quilting store
benefitting a women's 2 year college
girl selling Manga drawings.
outside Vogue Coffee/Wine bar the boy
drawing on computer describes his
process using artistic wrist motions. A man
at a Worlitzer sings too softly to hear
near the Kelly's Hardware table
humped with four dollar throwaway
tools and glass mugs with apple logos.
Culinary Apple's apple logo mugs
face them across the street where
another man pushing fifty in Pendleton
plaid shirt sings "It Ain't Me Babe."
I'm sure this used to work for him
but the scrubby beard's gone roan
and I don't think anybody's going home
with him tonight. We're here for
the movie at the Ruby, named for
a daughter who went missing
in her twenties in the twenties.
New seats are on order, but if they
don't come in the next five weeks,
it'll be fall before they're installed.
Seven day showing schedule starts
June 13. We come out of the movie
at eight to a dimming sky and
awkward street life. The skinny girl
inking Manga drawings outside Radio Shack
folds in card table legs as her father
presses her computer gear to his chest,
opens the door to his Ranger. The live
woman singer has a nice folky sound,
but the amp is cranked too loud
at the Vogue. After we walk to Safeway
for cereal and strawberries, we return
to sit just inside the sidewalk below
the retracted glass wall garage door.
A goateed man comes from behind
the bar and yells into the mic something
about tips. The singer, already a little
embarrassed, is standing in front
of the amplifier and does an automatic
recoil she attempts to cover by
strumming the chords for her next song.
Bake sale in front of the quilting store
benefitting a women's 2 year college
girl selling Manga drawings.
outside Vogue Coffee/Wine bar the boy
drawing on computer describes his
process using artistic wrist motions. A man
at a Worlitzer sings too softly to hear
near the Kelly's Hardware table
humped with four dollar throwaway
tools and glass mugs with apple logos.
Culinary Apple's apple logo mugs
face them across the street where
another man pushing fifty in Pendleton
plaid shirt sings "It Ain't Me Babe."
I'm sure this used to work for him
but the scrubby beard's gone roan
and I don't think anybody's going home
with him tonight. We're here for
the movie at the Ruby, named for
a daughter who went missing
in her twenties in the twenties.
New seats are on order, but if they
don't come in the next five weeks,
it'll be fall before they're installed.
Seven day showing schedule starts
June 13. We come out of the movie
at eight to a dimming sky and
awkward street life. The skinny girl
inking Manga drawings outside Radio Shack
folds in card table legs as her father
presses her computer gear to his chest,
opens the door to his Ranger. The live
woman singer has a nice folky sound,
but the amp is cranked too loud
at the Vogue. After we walk to Safeway
for cereal and strawberries, we return
to sit just inside the sidewalk below
the retracted glass wall garage door.
A goateed man comes from behind
the bar and yells into the mic something
about tips. The singer, already a little
embarrassed, is standing in front
of the amplifier and does an automatic
recoil she attempts to cover by
strumming the chords for her next song.
Friday, May 02, 2008
May 2 Poem Draft (May Day May Day)
Little birds spray into view through my window
like pepper from a waiter's showy grinder
lake calm as a chlorine pool, thrum from
my bad tooth or Lady of the Lake engine
far downlake. Two geese honk past, wing
distance off the surface, intent it seems on their
conversation as the little birds speak in flits
from juniper and deck rail. The light is true,
mist lifted an hour ago. My computer
is the one who's humming. I sit and wonder
what it is this human has to say.
like pepper from a waiter's showy grinder
lake calm as a chlorine pool, thrum from
my bad tooth or Lady of the Lake engine
far downlake. Two geese honk past, wing
distance off the surface, intent it seems on their
conversation as the little birds speak in flits
from juniper and deck rail. The light is true,
mist lifted an hour ago. My computer
is the one who's humming. I sit and wonder
what it is this human has to say.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Poem Publication Quandry
Here's my question: does it count as e-publication if the poem on a blog is a DRAFT and the poem you send out has been polished, though recognizably from that draft? Cuz if it does, I have to yank a lot of posts off this site.
May 1 Daily Poem
Sheffer Crossword Puzzle 5/1 Poem Draft
WE ALL FALL DOWN
But we're human, travel to Sri
Lanka tomorrow, tour Hilo
the week after that. Ah, kid,
arm in the AppleJacks,
we want we want and I do
too. Show me antique peseta,
I raise crisp Krooni, can't expell
that wiggy engine of desire.
Aga stove that never turns off
Subzero, Wolf, for wilted celery,
Bright red washer set from Lowe's
oh they know - earth ails, we feed
the fire the smothering ash.
WE ALL FALL DOWN
But we're human, travel to Sri
Lanka tomorrow, tour Hilo
the week after that. Ah, kid,
arm in the AppleJacks,
we want we want and I do
too. Show me antique peseta,
I raise crisp Krooni, can't expell
that wiggy engine of desire.
Aga stove that never turns off
Subzero, Wolf, for wilted celery,
Bright red washer set from Lowe's
oh they know - earth ails, we feed
the fire the smothering ash.
ESSENTIAL POEMS READING REPORT
At 10 minutes to 7 it was Paul Hunter and me sitting at a table with a box of his two books.
At 5 minutes to 7 it was Paul Hunter, me and my husband at the table.
At 3 minutes to 7 I put together the black music stand
At 2 minutes to 7 my daughter Shawna walked in
At 1 minute to 7 my next door neighbor Cate arrived
At 7 we were joined by Neil and Annie who run a book group and work at the cafe
When I officially opened the reading, at 7:10, there were eleven of us around three tables which we mushed together.
It was a sit-down reading that kicked bigtime poetry butt.
I introduced the work of bronchitis-stricken Rebecca Loudon, and did my best to represent six poems from Cadaver Dogs, soon to be released by No Tell Books. After I introduced Paul, he read celebrations of (vanishing) farm life from all three of his books. The third in his trilogy is due any day from Silverfish Review Press.
If you were there, you know.
At 5 minutes to 7 it was Paul Hunter, me and my husband at the table.
At 3 minutes to 7 I put together the black music stand
At 2 minutes to 7 my daughter Shawna walked in
At 1 minute to 7 my next door neighbor Cate arrived
At 7 we were joined by Neil and Annie who run a book group and work at the cafe
When I officially opened the reading, at 7:10, there were eleven of us around three tables which we mushed together.
It was a sit-down reading that kicked bigtime poetry butt.
I introduced the work of bronchitis-stricken Rebecca Loudon, and did my best to represent six poems from Cadaver Dogs, soon to be released by No Tell Books. After I introduced Paul, he read celebrations of (vanishing) farm life from all three of his books. The third in his trilogy is due any day from Silverfish Review Press.
If you were there, you know.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
NaPoWriMo 30
My father and I tour the basement.
I hold my breath, forgetting I needn't
close my eyes for the bathroom -
they replaced the tortured toilet,
bashed-in sink six years ago. We talk
mildew on the windowledge, do not
worry about falling through the floor.
He says the sliding door is single pane
my mother yells down it's double.
I put my fingers either side, verify
his version. The day darkens here
in the dark corner. She wants me
to look at the broken German clock
and the broken blonde one behind
she's giving to my brother. Why?
I ask. Because he remembers it,
she says, and I say, I remember it,
but that doesn't mean I want it.
She points at 33's and 78's my sister
has told her she doesn't want.
She fusses about shipping them.
I say, She doesn't want the records.
My mother sits on the stuffy sofa
blossoming batting out its ugly arm.
"Such a lovely piece," she says, points
to the end table my sister does want.
The detritus of two lives jumbled
around us, ill cared for as we were,
even cases of his Mark Fable wine
mixed - empty, full, stacked together
like a mind perpetually elsewhere.
I hold my breath, forgetting I needn't
close my eyes for the bathroom -
they replaced the tortured toilet,
bashed-in sink six years ago. We talk
mildew on the windowledge, do not
worry about falling through the floor.
He says the sliding door is single pane
my mother yells down it's double.
I put my fingers either side, verify
his version. The day darkens here
in the dark corner. She wants me
to look at the broken German clock
and the broken blonde one behind
she's giving to my brother. Why?
I ask. Because he remembers it,
she says, and I say, I remember it,
but that doesn't mean I want it.
She points at 33's and 78's my sister
has told her she doesn't want.
She fusses about shipping them.
I say, She doesn't want the records.
My mother sits on the stuffy sofa
blossoming batting out its ugly arm.
"Such a lovely piece," she says, points
to the end table my sister does want.
The detritus of two lives jumbled
around us, ill cared for as we were,
even cases of his Mark Fable wine
mixed - empty, full, stacked together
like a mind perpetually elsewhere.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sponging off the New Yorker
Folk-Song Collectors
text from "The Last Verse" by Burkhard Bilger
in April 28, 2008 New Yorker
Cecil Sharp suffered from gout and asthma
smoked heavily and ate no meat - a diet
so strange in parts of the South some took
him for a German spy. He toured southern
Appalacia three times, beginning in 1916,
never made recordings, though he could have.
"What I want more than anything else
is quiet, no children, no Victrolas, nor
strumming of rag-time and the singing
of sentimental songs. I am satisfied
with what I have done," he wrote.
John Lomax was sixty-five in 1933,
had already collected cowboy tunes
with a Harvard fellowship in 1907.
"Squeaky reproductions," he admitted,
made with a wax-cylinder machine.
He took his eighteen-year-old son,
Alan, with him, stuck to the back roads,
and looked for work farms, cotton
fields, lumber camps, and chain gangs --
wherever there was "the least likelihood
of the inclusion of jazz influences, as
he put it. They found Muddy Waters
on a Mississippi plantation, Woody
Guthrie at a benefit for migrant
farm workers, Leadbelly in a Louisiana
penitentiary. The prisoners had
"dynamite in their performances,"
Alan later told the Times. "There was
more emotional heat, more power,
more nobility in what they did than
all the Beethovens and Bachs could
produce."
The McCarthy hearings were on television,
duck-and-cover drills in the classroom,
and the frictionless pop of Perry Como
on the radio. And then, in 1952,
Harry Smith released his "Anthology
of American Folk Music." Smith
was an artist and record collector
from Seattle -- "a polymath and an
autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic,
a legendary experimental filmmaker
and a more legendary sponger," as
Greil Marcus put it in his book.
Back then Seattle too was grittier.
text from "The Last Verse" by Burkhard Bilger
in April 28, 2008 New Yorker
Cecil Sharp suffered from gout and asthma
smoked heavily and ate no meat - a diet
so strange in parts of the South some took
him for a German spy. He toured southern
Appalacia three times, beginning in 1916,
never made recordings, though he could have.
"What I want more than anything else
is quiet, no children, no Victrolas, nor
strumming of rag-time and the singing
of sentimental songs. I am satisfied
with what I have done," he wrote.
John Lomax was sixty-five in 1933,
had already collected cowboy tunes
with a Harvard fellowship in 1907.
"Squeaky reproductions," he admitted,
made with a wax-cylinder machine.
He took his eighteen-year-old son,
Alan, with him, stuck to the back roads,
and looked for work farms, cotton
fields, lumber camps, and chain gangs --
wherever there was "the least likelihood
of the inclusion of jazz influences, as
he put it. They found Muddy Waters
on a Mississippi plantation, Woody
Guthrie at a benefit for migrant
farm workers, Leadbelly in a Louisiana
penitentiary. The prisoners had
"dynamite in their performances,"
Alan later told the Times. "There was
more emotional heat, more power,
more nobility in what they did than
all the Beethovens and Bachs could
produce."
The McCarthy hearings were on television,
duck-and-cover drills in the classroom,
and the frictionless pop of Perry Como
on the radio. And then, in 1952,
Harry Smith released his "Anthology
of American Folk Music." Smith
was an artist and record collector
from Seattle -- "a polymath and an
autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic,
a legendary experimental filmmaker
and a more legendary sponger," as
Greil Marcus put it in his book.
Back then Seattle too was grittier.
NaPoWriMo 29
I Prefer Adversity to Uncertainty
Tip top, zenith, apex, acme, apogee --
It'd be nice to know you're there.
Trees mask views, tired from the haul,
so much easier to take it on the chin
than plant the flag. Moonmen knew
they were news, but you and me, we slog
and scuff, hem and huff, look more for ogre
than our own high noons, though
we too summit and will fall. Pinpoint
your pinnacles, don't hold back --
once you've peed yourself what pride
is left to lose. We all wear down with use.
--
Tip top, zenith, apex, acme, apogee --
It'd be nice to know you're there.
Trees mask views, tired from the haul,
so much easier to take it on the chin
than plant the flag. Moonmen knew
they were news, but you and me, we slog
and scuff, hem and huff, look more for ogre
than our own high noons, though
we too summit and will fall. Pinpoint
your pinnacles, don't hold back --
once you've peed yourself what pride
is left to lose. We all wear down with use.
--
Monday, April 28, 2008
NaPoWriMo 28
Your wrist flexible and ignored you lob
fastball to third base. Your aim is off,
a child snags it from the fence. Bet
won, you're off your million per.
What does this matter? You pore
thinking over records. Old as Noah,
mitt ball, bat helmet, duggout spit
too near the red lit exit.
---
What does it mean this burning word?
Network hive, the bees dying,
who are we afterall but acolytes
our swarms out the door of the open mic tent
why are the chosen ones
so much better dressed? Gossip
and embarrassment warm crowds
under the heat lamps at the main stage
cheese store book store small presses
up the wooden stairs Anne Waldman
wafting here and there we come and go
not waving but drowning not drowning
but overheated the metal chairs hardening
under us poet voices dulling as we
lose ability to hear. I want, I want, I do not want
to be lectured, want to be levitated
some can do it. People I know without nametags
people poets I want to know. I avoid the open mic
tent in the backyard for the kids
am I too old for this? Too crotchety and mean?
Where do I fit in all this?
Do you know me? Hello?
Adjust the poet's microphone, find
her notes, a man calls from down stairs.
fastball to third base. Your aim is off,
a child snags it from the fence. Bet
won, you're off your million per.
What does this matter? You pore
thinking over records. Old as Noah,
mitt ball, bat helmet, duggout spit
too near the red lit exit.
---
What does it mean this burning word?
Network hive, the bees dying,
who are we afterall but acolytes
our swarms out the door of the open mic tent
why are the chosen ones
so much better dressed? Gossip
and embarrassment warm crowds
under the heat lamps at the main stage
cheese store book store small presses
up the wooden stairs Anne Waldman
wafting here and there we come and go
not waving but drowning not drowning
but overheated the metal chairs hardening
under us poet voices dulling as we
lose ability to hear. I want, I want, I do not want
to be lectured, want to be levitated
some can do it. People I know without nametags
people poets I want to know. I avoid the open mic
tent in the backyard for the kids
am I too old for this? Too crotchety and mean?
Where do I fit in all this?
Do you know me? Hello?
Adjust the poet's microphone, find
her notes, a man calls from down stairs.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
NaPoWriMo 27
Name Dropping Poem
Joyce Carol Oates on the radio today.
I picture as I always do Joyce in car,
computer on her lap, husband at
the wheel, arriving at a friend's friend's
wedding, typing till at the last minute
her husband takes her indoors.
The interviewer trolls a long time,
reads an entire James quotation
Joyce agrees is on her bulletin board.
She's written a book of short fictional
end of life memoirs for Hemingway,
Dickinson, others, and James. Henry.
Fastidious in dress and deportment,
a man she imagines as difficult,
but who, thanks to his friend,
Edith Wharton, rolled up Europe
tailored sleeves and, amid stench,
and severed limbs,volunteered,
much as Whitman in the Civil War,
found his human best and was useful.
How has it been for you, the interviewer
asks, in the year since your husband died.
I want to reach out to her, alone in that car.
Joyce Carol Oates on the radio today.
I picture as I always do Joyce in car,
computer on her lap, husband at
the wheel, arriving at a friend's friend's
wedding, typing till at the last minute
her husband takes her indoors.
The interviewer trolls a long time,
reads an entire James quotation
Joyce agrees is on her bulletin board.
She's written a book of short fictional
end of life memoirs for Hemingway,
Dickinson, others, and James. Henry.
Fastidious in dress and deportment,
a man she imagines as difficult,
but who, thanks to his friend,
Edith Wharton, rolled up Europe
tailored sleeves and, amid stench,
and severed limbs,volunteered,
much as Whitman in the Civil War,
found his human best and was useful.
How has it been for you, the interviewer
asks, in the year since your husband died.
I want to reach out to her, alone in that car.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
26 before leaving for Burning Word!
I say what does the doctor say about this
mystery film? Traumatic impact, my mother
says. Looks into the distance. "Mining copper
at Metaline Falls." My father was climbing
up out of the mineshaft as another miner
cleared his drill with a pressure hose.
My Uncle Gene spent that evening picking
rock flakes out of that eye.
mystery film? Traumatic impact, my mother
says. Looks into the distance. "Mining copper
at Metaline Falls." My father was climbing
up out of the mineshaft as another miner
cleared his drill with a pressure hose.
My Uncle Gene spent that evening picking
rock flakes out of that eye.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Quoting from Real Sofistikashun, Chapter Two
Let me begin by saying I deplore despise and turn away from this book's title. I think it is vulgar and flip. I never ever shopped at Toys (backwards) R Us out of the same aversion. I don't think it's cute, either, to reverse letters in "humorous" oral dyslexia, for example, jocularly, "I norgot your fame." (okay, that is a little bit funny.)
Some quotes from "1. Cloud" from Chapter Two, "Tis Backed Like a Weasel: The Slipperiness of Metaphor":
"Of the hinterlands of the gray matter, where metaphors roam free, our data is all rumor, conjecture, and anecdote."
and then,
"It is a mystery hand going into a black mystery box. The head says, 'fetch me a metaphor, hand,' and the hand disappears under a cloth. A moment later, the hand reappears, metaphor on its extended palm. But, despite the spontaneity and ease of this event, we have only a vague idea of where the image came from. In fact, we don't know. And neither does the hand."
Most people naturally make metaphors, and Aristotle said he could teach everything but. Hemingway didn't have a metaphorical bone in his body. But Emerson, of Emerson Tony Hoagland writes:
"Emerson had it, and metaphor flows out of him like Perrier from some high Swiss alp. Emerson's essays, which are his real poetry, seem basically the result of holding a bottle under that transcendental faucet: all the essays say the same two things (know your worth/try harder), but they say it with enormous figurative variety."
Yowsa! I experience metaphor's "endorphin-like impact" here. Thanks, Tony.
Some quotes from "1. Cloud" from Chapter Two, "Tis Backed Like a Weasel: The Slipperiness of Metaphor":
"Of the hinterlands of the gray matter, where metaphors roam free, our data is all rumor, conjecture, and anecdote."
and then,
"It is a mystery hand going into a black mystery box. The head says, 'fetch me a metaphor, hand,' and the hand disappears under a cloth. A moment later, the hand reappears, metaphor on its extended palm. But, despite the spontaneity and ease of this event, we have only a vague idea of where the image came from. In fact, we don't know. And neither does the hand."
Most people naturally make metaphors, and Aristotle said he could teach everything but. Hemingway didn't have a metaphorical bone in his body. But Emerson, of Emerson Tony Hoagland writes:
"Emerson had it, and metaphor flows out of him like Perrier from some high Swiss alp. Emerson's essays, which are his real poetry, seem basically the result of holding a bottle under that transcendental faucet: all the essays say the same two things (know your worth/try harder), but they say it with enormous figurative variety."
Yowsa! I experience metaphor's "endorphin-like impact" here. Thanks, Tony.
NaPoWriMo 25
I want badly to be heard
but I have nothing to say
am mum on the matter of money
impotent as to prosperity
for you to get what you want
I must sacrifice what I want
and I'm not willing to do that
whimsical as you say.
---
You wear the gauge that measures depth
neoprene mitts and wetsuit dull the act
your partner gives thumbs up,
flutters through fan coral's vertical array
all for fun and beauty until POW
your air has fled you're in the cave, no Tom
to save you now. Just so we go for broke
for all that glitters in the proverb
face mask whether fogged or vented
fresh water muddies what you thought was ease.
Oh please. Keep your mind on pressure, ami,
before this boat lets drop another rider --
if only we could plan this from a desk!
Orca bulk menaces like Orson
your fingers ridiculous and reedy
reserve tank holds more air to draw
you give yourself a moment to adapt
nothing in the midst is solid
how will you provide, provide?
but I have nothing to say
am mum on the matter of money
impotent as to prosperity
for you to get what you want
I must sacrifice what I want
and I'm not willing to do that
whimsical as you say.
---
You wear the gauge that measures depth
neoprene mitts and wetsuit dull the act
your partner gives thumbs up,
flutters through fan coral's vertical array
all for fun and beauty until POW
your air has fled you're in the cave, no Tom
to save you now. Just so we go for broke
for all that glitters in the proverb
face mask whether fogged or vented
fresh water muddies what you thought was ease.
Oh please. Keep your mind on pressure, ami,
before this boat lets drop another rider --
if only we could plan this from a desk!
Orca bulk menaces like Orson
your fingers ridiculous and reedy
reserve tank holds more air to draw
you give yourself a moment to adapt
nothing in the midst is solid
how will you provide, provide?
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Image, Diction and Rhetoric, a Book Report
Tony Hoagland, “Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy: Image, Diction, and Rhetoric”
from Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, © 2006, Graywolf Press.
A Book or More Accurately Chapter Report
by Laura Gamache
As Kundalini Yoga describes the seven power centers, or chakras, of the body, Tony Hoagland describes the three poetry power centers as image, diction and rhetoric, listed in ascending order from where they arise in the human body. I like his idea, and the light way he acknowledges but distances himself from the judgement that higher is better. Sharon Olds’ image is not inferior to Wallace Stevens’ rhetoric, though I think he knows we will secretly continue to think so.
Image is the most potent force in poetry, he says, continuing, “the ability of images to carry complex information is tremendous.” For examples, he uses “My Son the Man” by Sharon Olds and “Tu Do Street” by Yusef Komunyakaa.
As the instinct underlying image is visual, that underlying diction is auditory, intellectual and alert to inflections of weight and implication. Diction, as defined here by Hoagland, is “speech that is consciously making reference to the history of its usage.” He uses for example Galway Kinnell’s “Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West.”
Poets are often wary of using rhetoric for its dangers of emptiness and impersonality. Hoagland identifies poetic rhetoric as relational speech signifying attitude rather than delivering information. To make his point, he uses Larry Levis’s poem, “A Letter,” which begins:
It’s better to have a light jacket on days like this,
Than a good memory.
He chooses Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” to show rhetoric’s power and its emptiness, Mary Ruefle’s “Trust Me” for her rhetorical muscle, and John Ashbery’s “Decoy” for his rhetorical virtuosity.
Good poems, all poems, our poems, he says, come from an interweaving of all three chakras. The best, as in Paul Goodman’s “Birthday Cake,” combine and integrate them “into powerful, unprecedented poetry,” that is “full of feeling and fully engaged in that feeling, but also offers shifting perspective on its feeling.” Consciousness adds power, and I will be aware of the presence and interplay of these three power centers in my poems as I revise them.
from Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, © 2006, Graywolf Press.
A Book or More Accurately Chapter Report
by Laura Gamache
As Kundalini Yoga describes the seven power centers, or chakras, of the body, Tony Hoagland describes the three poetry power centers as image, diction and rhetoric, listed in ascending order from where they arise in the human body. I like his idea, and the light way he acknowledges but distances himself from the judgement that higher is better. Sharon Olds’ image is not inferior to Wallace Stevens’ rhetoric, though I think he knows we will secretly continue to think so.
Image is the most potent force in poetry, he says, continuing, “the ability of images to carry complex information is tremendous.” For examples, he uses “My Son the Man” by Sharon Olds and “Tu Do Street” by Yusef Komunyakaa.
As the instinct underlying image is visual, that underlying diction is auditory, intellectual and alert to inflections of weight and implication. Diction, as defined here by Hoagland, is “speech that is consciously making reference to the history of its usage.” He uses for example Galway Kinnell’s “Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West.”
Poets are often wary of using rhetoric for its dangers of emptiness and impersonality. Hoagland identifies poetic rhetoric as relational speech signifying attitude rather than delivering information. To make his point, he uses Larry Levis’s poem, “A Letter,” which begins:
It’s better to have a light jacket on days like this,
Than a good memory.
He chooses Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” to show rhetoric’s power and its emptiness, Mary Ruefle’s “Trust Me” for her rhetorical muscle, and John Ashbery’s “Decoy” for his rhetorical virtuosity.
Good poems, all poems, our poems, he says, come from an interweaving of all three chakras. The best, as in Paul Goodman’s “Birthday Cake,” combine and integrate them “into powerful, unprecedented poetry,” that is “full of feeling and fully engaged in that feeling, but also offers shifting perspective on its feeling.” Consciousness adds power, and I will be aware of the presence and interplay of these three power centers in my poems as I revise them.
NaPoWriMo 24
Rhodie buds swell to Christmas lights as I pass
tolerating shade like me and Yew
this spring when winter cannot seem to stop,
that which was to be demonstrated, not.
Robin drops straw, dips, flies off with more --
a million tales in this not so naked city acre.
Sprays stop rot and encourage blossom set
in the 40s here, but 59 degrees in Oslo.
English ivy pushes itself upwards
I yank its fingers from fir trunk furrows
jump away as it falls around my arm.
Sky thickens from gray to puce,
alder splats spent catkins as it sways
above the wavering chicken windvane.
Maples begin within asphalt crack
and in spaces between decking.
Last year's thumbthick seedlings hide
in the prickly hawthorne between yards.
For all I have missed I wish to be forgiven.
tolerating shade like me and Yew
this spring when winter cannot seem to stop,
that which was to be demonstrated, not.
Robin drops straw, dips, flies off with more --
a million tales in this not so naked city acre.
Sprays stop rot and encourage blossom set
in the 40s here, but 59 degrees in Oslo.
English ivy pushes itself upwards
I yank its fingers from fir trunk furrows
jump away as it falls around my arm.
Sky thickens from gray to puce,
alder splats spent catkins as it sways
above the wavering chicken windvane.
Maples begin within asphalt crack
and in spaces between decking.
Last year's thumbthick seedlings hide
in the prickly hawthorne between yards.
For all I have missed I wish to be forgiven.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
NaPoWriMo 23
Handmaid's Lament
Practicing my vocab, I see alar
angel above the lintel with his bow
his genitalia are not (is not?) clad.
This is bad. I am called to cope --
scrub scabrous jets to clear the spa
coax strangling caul from Hera's lily
mix potions for Adonis's hipflask
whet stone and sharpen his epee
wangle wanton weeds to please Estee
time plods through but she erases
traces -- I know. I plucked the rose
and juiced the thousand ants --
most secret of all alchemic arts
I keep it all with key and hasp
shoo nudie cherub from ivy.
troubadour arrives, toss lei
across koi pond,confiscate dirks
investigate progress of the imp
Jack of all black arts, I'm only
fingerpoint from murder, skim
algae for Narcissus at his seat
Millenia and yet he won't mature
I muse on a move to Boise.
Practicing my vocab, I see alar
angel above the lintel with his bow
his genitalia are not (is not?) clad.
This is bad. I am called to cope --
scrub scabrous jets to clear the spa
coax strangling caul from Hera's lily
mix potions for Adonis's hipflask
whet stone and sharpen his epee
wangle wanton weeds to please Estee
time plods through but she erases
traces -- I know. I plucked the rose
and juiced the thousand ants --
most secret of all alchemic arts
I keep it all with key and hasp
shoo nudie cherub from ivy.
troubadour arrives, toss lei
across koi pond,confiscate dirks
investigate progress of the imp
Jack of all black arts, I'm only
fingerpoint from murder, skim
algae for Narcissus at his seat
Millenia and yet he won't mature
I muse on a move to Boise.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
NaPoWri Mo 22
I scrape carefully at the price sticker
pasted across Mozart's profile
this is no metaphor, I plucked
this chocolate from the plastic pail
at the grocery checkout stand
"Mozart Herz'l" from the Austrian cafe
on the way to your D.C. newsroom
before we knew your dad had cancer
I carefree under the Calder mobiles,
meeting you underground for tea.
----
Mozart's measured sweetness
survives the oboeist's combover. In our era
I listen on YouTube, my heart open, avid.
Too many needles in the internet haystack
and Google finds them. I needn't go a mile.
Bach's passion on foot across Germany
to hear an organ. I can hear eleven
any hour.
---
Humane Impulse of the Lyric
After Hearing Ed Hirsch at Intiman Theater
He wanted to write an American poetry
intellectually robust but with heart. Modernists
were cold and their fascistic tendencies, Elliot,
Pound, not unrelated. Poetry precedes prose
and there is poetry in every culture - he doesn't
want ours to be the one to drop the ball.
The tendencies of poetry are two: elegy and
celebration. Time for more celebration. At his age
he says it too has darkness, not a poetry for the young.
"Give me back my father," he began, emotional
high C, embracing Tsvetaeva's short poem power.
He warmed with help from Mandelstam,
Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski.
Poetry is social, he said, conjured more poets -
Paul Celan to say poems are messages in bottles -
the poet sends one out, you find it, it is yours.
Ninito Neruda glimpsing another child's hand
through a fence hole, exchanging wheeled sheep
for his treasured resinous cone - gift for gift,
writing and reading, humane impulse of the lyric.
pasted across Mozart's profile
this is no metaphor, I plucked
this chocolate from the plastic pail
at the grocery checkout stand
"Mozart Herz'l" from the Austrian cafe
on the way to your D.C. newsroom
before we knew your dad had cancer
I carefree under the Calder mobiles,
meeting you underground for tea.
----
Mozart's measured sweetness
survives the oboeist's combover. In our era
I listen on YouTube, my heart open, avid.
Too many needles in the internet haystack
and Google finds them. I needn't go a mile.
Bach's passion on foot across Germany
to hear an organ. I can hear eleven
any hour.
---
Humane Impulse of the Lyric
After Hearing Ed Hirsch at Intiman Theater
He wanted to write an American poetry
intellectually robust but with heart. Modernists
were cold and their fascistic tendencies, Elliot,
Pound, not unrelated. Poetry precedes prose
and there is poetry in every culture - he doesn't
want ours to be the one to drop the ball.
The tendencies of poetry are two: elegy and
celebration. Time for more celebration. At his age
he says it too has darkness, not a poetry for the young.
"Give me back my father," he began, emotional
high C, embracing Tsvetaeva's short poem power.
He warmed with help from Mandelstam,
Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski.
Poetry is social, he said, conjured more poets -
Paul Celan to say poems are messages in bottles -
the poet sends one out, you find it, it is yours.
Ninito Neruda glimpsing another child's hand
through a fence hole, exchanging wheeled sheep
for his treasured resinous cone - gift for gift,
writing and reading, humane impulse of the lyric.
Monday, April 21, 2008
NaPoWriMo 21
Lake surface appears to move towards town
action that can be lifted off from thing
though the geese blown out of their V
a thousand feet above us are inseparable
from the movement of their wings which fight
we can tell, even down here, to stay
together and stay their course. now
two V's, now a V and a wandering line,
geese forging ahead of the group like
the strongest from the peloton pressing
forward, pumping calf muscles intent
on what? These birds no longer migrate.
After snowmelt we surprise
a starling from its mailbox nest. It rockets
like comic superhero from the stick
mess on top of a soppy folded phonebook.
You want to know why I think this is.
action that can be lifted off from thing
though the geese blown out of their V
a thousand feet above us are inseparable
from the movement of their wings which fight
we can tell, even down here, to stay
together and stay their course. now
two V's, now a V and a wandering line,
geese forging ahead of the group like
the strongest from the peloton pressing
forward, pumping calf muscles intent
on what? These birds no longer migrate.
After snowmelt we surprise
a starling from its mailbox nest. It rockets
like comic superhero from the stick
mess on top of a soppy folded phonebook.
You want to know why I think this is.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
NaPoWriMo 20
Ye Gods and Little Fish Hooks
Holy crap! he says as the day begins
April 20 and the sky awash with flakes
hillside tree limbs and cabin roofs,
our neighbor's new boat lift white.
In front of me, Lake Chelan undulates
gray near shore, melds into weather
overhead and around us. Will we
see color open from six stiff-necked
tulips or will their lips stay sealed?
Arbor grapes with leaf buds the size
of bebes and our apricot blossoms
falling with the snow. Where are
the birds today? Can the fishes see
it snowing?
Holy crap! he says as the day begins
April 20 and the sky awash with flakes
hillside tree limbs and cabin roofs,
our neighbor's new boat lift white.
In front of me, Lake Chelan undulates
gray near shore, melds into weather
overhead and around us. Will we
see color open from six stiff-necked
tulips or will their lips stay sealed?
Arbor grapes with leaf buds the size
of bebes and our apricot blossoms
falling with the snow. Where are
the birds today? Can the fishes see
it snowing?
Saturday, April 19, 2008
NaPoWriMo 19
Auto Penitence
Forgive me others for I have directed
another to fill the oil receptacle
of my vehicle with water to the brim
I have turned the key, oblivious
to grim consequence, and I have
phoned AAA in willful ignorance
of my error. I have stood haughty
and sniggering at the piddly belief
a boy held that water would spew
and burn us if we did not wait two
hours for the engine to cool. I chided
him "you silly" for his ignorance
as I turned the oil receptacle cap,
turning my face away from water
contained to my left. My ego grown
godly my haughtiness knew no
bounds as I bid him from his carwash
hose to pour. "How much?" he asked
and I said, "More!"
Forgive me others for I have directed
another to fill the oil receptacle
of my vehicle with water to the brim
I have turned the key, oblivious
to grim consequence, and I have
phoned AAA in willful ignorance
of my error. I have stood haughty
and sniggering at the piddly belief
a boy held that water would spew
and burn us if we did not wait two
hours for the engine to cool. I chided
him "you silly" for his ignorance
as I turned the oil receptacle cap,
turning my face away from water
contained to my left. My ego grown
godly my haughtiness knew no
bounds as I bid him from his carwash
hose to pour. "How much?" he asked
and I said, "More!"
Friday, April 18, 2008
NaPoWriMo 18
I'm dancing you know how along the ave
alive no matter how they tssk
how long till everything that romps
is dead and I'm destructive as I lag
Greenland's new streams scour ice
waterfalls larger than Niagara erase
landmass as I test new sheets for ply
no one repairs old monitors, dot matrix
compulsive hoarders all. I hop
to buy I am too scared to sweep
am I willing to discard protective arts
in my shame I blame the USA
pulp another paper for oped
Go on and dive, I'll stay on top
lick ice cream from the dasher
I have seen coral in the ocean
gray and broken as cadaver teeth
Kodachrome! Bring me the nice bright colors
bring me the greens of summer
make me think all the world's a sunny day
But does Obama wear a flag pin?
Hillary owes us a statement about cum!
I have acquired ADD, a product of this era
the rich build city ships that only dock
each year. Pandemics, water wars
will circle their magic gardens, dun
them after songbirds grey whales fall.
alive no matter how they tssk
how long till everything that romps
is dead and I'm destructive as I lag
Greenland's new streams scour ice
waterfalls larger than Niagara erase
landmass as I test new sheets for ply
no one repairs old monitors, dot matrix
compulsive hoarders all. I hop
to buy I am too scared to sweep
am I willing to discard protective arts
in my shame I blame the USA
pulp another paper for oped
Go on and dive, I'll stay on top
lick ice cream from the dasher
I have seen coral in the ocean
gray and broken as cadaver teeth
Kodachrome! Bring me the nice bright colors
bring me the greens of summer
make me think all the world's a sunny day
But does Obama wear a flag pin?
Hillary owes us a statement about cum!
I have acquired ADD, a product of this era
the rich build city ships that only dock
each year. Pandemics, water wars
will circle their magic gardens, dun
them after songbirds grey whales fall.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
NaPoWriMo 17
1960
Nobody on our street played bop
when health meant you ate meat.
We listened to Limelighters - folk
with brains my mother said, no Burl
Ives, no Kingston Trio in our house.
I longed to dart, I didn't know elan.
One fun thing would make her tire.
Shopping cart before the barcode
when drinking meant teacup.
Maynard G. Krebs had a weirdo pad,
Zelda tried too hard. Me too.
TV was the latest thing and comics
made you dumb. I snuck one.
Nobody on our street played bop
when health meant you ate meat.
We listened to Limelighters - folk
with brains my mother said, no Burl
Ives, no Kingston Trio in our house.
I longed to dart, I didn't know elan.
One fun thing would make her tire.
Shopping cart before the barcode
when drinking meant teacup.
Maynard G. Krebs had a weirdo pad,
Zelda tried too hard. Me too.
TV was the latest thing and comics
made you dumb. I snuck one.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
WaPoWriMo 16
My nose fills with feathered dusty light in the shed
urine stench and squack, winged flurry,
yolk stained purple egg trays under the workbench
squat fridge beneath the hanging bulb,
each warm oval filched and nested for a moment
in my palm, miraculous and tan.
---
MAKE WAY FOR YOUR CHILDREN'S ERA!
Now it's eighty six and shoo
so what you were a lovely egg
you ain't no twenty six
you're old, you smell,
we have no time for ethos
we'll shoot you like the tsar
look at you your pants all wet
you cannot read small lettering
your emotions too, so much ado --
go in your sleep if we're in luck
don't come to live with us.
--
I should post a disclaimer with that one.
urine stench and squack, winged flurry,
yolk stained purple egg trays under the workbench
squat fridge beneath the hanging bulb,
each warm oval filched and nested for a moment
in my palm, miraculous and tan.
---
MAKE WAY FOR YOUR CHILDREN'S ERA!
Now it's eighty six and shoo
so what you were a lovely egg
you ain't no twenty six
you're old, you smell,
we have no time for ethos
we'll shoot you like the tsar
look at you your pants all wet
you cannot read small lettering
your emotions too, so much ado --
go in your sleep if we're in luck
don't come to live with us.
--
I should post a disclaimer with that one.
In honor of the the first Essential Poems Reading, which will take place at 7pm, April 30, and feature poets Rebecca Loudon and Paul Hunter, Paul Hunter has brought a batch of his beautiful Woodworks Press poetry broadsides to Madison Essential Baking Cafe, where they will be on display and for sale from now through April 30. Broadsides are matted, covered with archival glass and ready to hang in your house. Each is a limited edition printing, signed by the poet, and for sale, as they appear, for $60.00/each. Broadsides on display include:"This Room" John Ashbery
"Song in the Off Season" Rafael Campo
"Spring About to Happen" Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"The Anatomy of Mushrooms" Sherman Alexie
"Russian Letter" John Yau
"Touch Me" Stanley Kunitz
"Storm at West Beach" Kurt Beattie
"The Gift" Carolyn Kizer
"Selection Process" Charles Simic
"Tulip Field, MacLean Road" Samuel Green
"In the Canyon" William Meredith
Each is a numbered limited edition, letter press printed 8 1/2 x 11 inches on archival papers with multiple-color press work and woodcut illustrations.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
NaPoWriMo 15
Mineralite structure defines opal
ugly gumption fills the toad
Refind Bogachiel on this map
Don't choose only at the deli
squirrel shares color with the hare
mugclub mits on microbrew ale
a penny for your etiquette
we have eternity to rot
wonder at ginzu knives' hundred uses
take time and take your pique
it all has value Bogus Basin
on Sol Duc trail and off the menu
So here is where we are, Egad!
Hesitate you lose. The Frankest
sourpuss, picklepuss, gloomy gus
urges latex gloves and tongs
cautions delays, defy them too
cedars do not emulate sequoias
pursue your pencil to its stub
Quillayute moves as does the Ural
Dig beneath the soil it's fiery
golden geese emerge from beans
poplars' sticky gum makes balm
Ungulates look forward to the rut
feldspar and copper form turquoise
missives take the sky along this arc
who cares what Joseph did to Essau
the sentimental crap from Noel
do-si-do my way just don't say Doh!
I'll miss my life more than its data.
ugly gumption fills the toad
Refind Bogachiel on this map
Don't choose only at the deli
squirrel shares color with the hare
mugclub mits on microbrew ale
a penny for your etiquette
we have eternity to rot
wonder at ginzu knives' hundred uses
take time and take your pique
it all has value Bogus Basin
on Sol Duc trail and off the menu
So here is where we are, Egad!
Hesitate you lose. The Frankest
sourpuss, picklepuss, gloomy gus
urges latex gloves and tongs
cautions delays, defy them too
cedars do not emulate sequoias
pursue your pencil to its stub
Quillayute moves as does the Ural
Dig beneath the soil it's fiery
golden geese emerge from beans
poplars' sticky gum makes balm
Ungulates look forward to the rut
feldspar and copper form turquoise
missives take the sky along this arc
who cares what Joseph did to Essau
the sentimental crap from Noel
do-si-do my way just don't say Doh!
I'll miss my life more than its data.
Musing about NaPoWriMo 15
Hump day! Only fifteen more daily poems after this one. Oh oh, that was a scary utterance. The weight of 15, beware the Ides! Reading the Academy of American Poets' journal this morning, speaking of weighty, "inadequate in the face of meaning" spoke to me from Sven Birkett's piece which was I think talking about why people are afraid of and don't read poetry. The other day, reading about something not poetry, oh it was opals, I read about "defraction," which I think is something like what my poems want to accomplish.
Monday, April 14, 2008
npwm 14
Limulus polyphemusIts carapace outlives the horseshoe crab
beach house chatchka ashtry scams
aside, fishery vessels mine the copper
in their blood not blessed like ours with hemo-
globin, the true blue bloods of Maryland.
Arthropods like trilobites except they lived.
Red knots and loggerheads eat their eggs.
Regrow limbs like seastars, check your notes,
Paleozoic lives in them and they're not over.
Hoover upright ugly, salt marsh cord grass,
book gills so they breathe awhile on land.
Rough surf flips them helpless as ladybugs,
Mezozoic underdogs who outlasted dinosaurs.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
NaPoWriMo 13
My father wouldn't
give anything back,
like trying to see my reflection
in a planked-up door.
Home from college,
I pelted him with silverware.
He didn't flinch.
He just looked at me.
When I asked my mother,
what does dad say
about moving
to the retirement community?
She said,
"He just looked at me."
give anything back,
like trying to see my reflection
in a planked-up door.
Home from college,
I pelted him with silverware.
He didn't flinch.
He just looked at me.
When I asked my mother,
what does dad say
about moving
to the retirement community?
She said,
"He just looked at me."
Saturday, April 12, 2008
NaPoWriMo 12
as sea opens to prow
mollusks mar the hull in drab
clusters that won't be coming off
in the hold are sandals from Lima
flipbooks, fishhooks, walls eely
dank, a hundred cases filled with roe
rocked beneath surface billows
tuna herds turn as if on cue
south polar skua cut shearwaters path
humans have little history here
a gray whale won't revere an earl
turtle hatchlings disoriented by magnet
manta ray bookmark, its silver tassel
marking oyster bisque or adage
strings burned away before capping the bottle
your boat may be a joke for a whale to ram
sea lions lumber unto bellbuoy like a sofa
we want these far off things to make us wise.
mollusks mar the hull in drab
clusters that won't be coming off
in the hold are sandals from Lima
flipbooks, fishhooks, walls eely
dank, a hundred cases filled with roe
rocked beneath surface billows
tuna herds turn as if on cue
south polar skua cut shearwaters path
humans have little history here
a gray whale won't revere an earl
turtle hatchlings disoriented by magnet
manta ray bookmark, its silver tassel
marking oyster bisque or adage
strings burned away before capping the bottle
your boat may be a joke for a whale to ram
sea lions lumber unto bellbuoy like a sofa
we want these far off things to make us wise.
Friday, April 11, 2008
NaPoWriMo 11, really
Re-engineering the Foundation
garage plan splays across kitchen table
blueprint measurements marked with slashes
insipid piano crescendoes. Tape measure
retracts with a slashing snap.
Ivory prince lenten rose swells, its bells bow
barebranch dogwood feathers with tiny buds
garage, storage, workroom uproot them
from my window, another but.
My father says he is not mature enough
to trust his decisions. He won't decide.
He follows grumbling behind. I know this.
Tape measure slaps entry floor.
garage plan splays across kitchen table
blueprint measurements marked with slashes
insipid piano crescendoes. Tape measure
retracts with a slashing snap.
Ivory prince lenten rose swells, its bells bow
barebranch dogwood feathers with tiny buds
garage, storage, workroom uproot them
from my window, another but.
My father says he is not mature enough
to trust his decisions. He won't decide.
He follows grumbling behind. I know this.
Tape measure slaps entry floor.
NaPoWriMo 11
oh jezuz gawd I threw out my words this morning, came home from the coffee shop with the exterior of the Life and Arts section without my completed Shefer Crossword, just the husk of the thing with the "Love me, legal tender" article on the front with its great graphic, knowing what we know about Benjamin Franklin.
Last night my friend said she is practicing compassionate something. Distance? Dispassion? Disinterest? Disappointment? Detachment. I know it's detachment because I wrote it down.
The last couple of days I've had the sentence, "everybody is fragile but me" playing in my head, and I have a strong negative response to that, so this is not about what I think or want, but brought up by the coming/looming/dreaded helping the parents get their act together, which is to say helping them make their transition from their enormous five bedroom house to a smaller place, probably the retirement community with the care continuoum, which may be spelled that way. But, you are wondering about today's poem.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
NaPoWriMo 10
shimmy baby it's all sham
maypole dancers flat against hub
what you love abandoned for bile
breezes and blizzards got to go
lights and darks added to our era
around we go again, amen.
As bluebirds wove sit-upons
mothers mopped about all
those unmade beds, time sped,
bad choices made bigger
trashroom panicked lair,
might have beens, rodeo clown
cpa, shimmer in your olden
tragic mirror. Move ere
we come unrolling rainout tarps
forgive me on your radiophone
each thing becomes a shadow self
be a pussycat, befriend an owl
slap yourself my dear for this is true
if you don't tip the teapot nothing pours
tackle box wigglers and dried up roe
basement bifolds open to rile
frizzled prom night posy
all you've sidestepped our onus.
maypole dancers flat against hub
what you love abandoned for bile
breezes and blizzards got to go
lights and darks added to our era
around we go again, amen.
As bluebirds wove sit-upons
mothers mopped about all
those unmade beds, time sped,
bad choices made bigger
trashroom panicked lair,
might have beens, rodeo clown
cpa, shimmer in your olden
tragic mirror. Move ere
we come unrolling rainout tarps
forgive me on your radiophone
each thing becomes a shadow self
be a pussycat, befriend an owl
slap yourself my dear for this is true
if you don't tip the teapot nothing pours
tackle box wigglers and dried up roe
basement bifolds open to rile
frizzled prom night posy
all you've sidestepped our onus.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
NaPoWriMo 9
To My Father at 84
You held your breath it all erodes
you've got tastebuds better savor
smartest in your class
poet at four and twenty
regrets die with you too and when
you do not choose your life depends
you splat like robin egg on deck
cherry blossom carpet outside Sears
knife scrapes plate your fingers bony
why not gobble Good and Plenty
abandon all that crap and nuance
rip her fingers from your roses
yell "they're mine!"
You held your breath it all erodes
you've got tastebuds better savor
smartest in your class
poet at four and twenty
regrets die with you too and when
you do not choose your life depends
you splat like robin egg on deck
cherry blossom carpet outside Sears
knife scrapes plate your fingers bony
why not gobble Good and Plenty
abandon all that crap and nuance
rip her fingers from your roses
yell "they're mine!"
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
NaPoWriMo 8
NaPoWriMo 8: After Hearing Lucille Clifton At Intiman
windows and mirrors she says still an elf
for a milkshake you have to eat your peas
he used a potato in a sock she used to hide
living is ridiculous no matter how we rant
wear a full face helmet in this area
even as we watch the Dead Sea
to be a human person is an asset
her mother burned her own poems, our
faces feel the heat, she has brooded
how naming unmakes history. "My husband
was a yogi my niece says walk a pig
by her see what she'll do." Repetition makes
it true. Alexie arrested for fighting a guy
who dissed her poems. "My hero."
windows and mirrors she says still an elf
for a milkshake you have to eat your peas
he used a potato in a sock she used to hide
living is ridiculous no matter how we rant
wear a full face helmet in this area
even as we watch the Dead Sea
to be a human person is an asset
her mother burned her own poems, our
faces feel the heat, she has brooded
how naming unmakes history. "My husband
was a yogi my niece says walk a pig
by her see what she'll do." Repetition makes
it true. Alexie arrested for fighting a guy
who dissed her poems. "My hero."
Monday, April 07, 2008
NaPoWriMo 7
NaPoWriMo PoemDraft 7
all that glitters is not your guru
ask your mother or your sib
eat your lobster not the bibs
heart and mind wide open
close neatly with twist ties
Don't try to be favored, even Esau
loses as did Marty's dad to Biff
my sister says "You have to be right"
takes the early flight and I intuit
whatever it is I want to fly away
give me words what do I think?
five year old huffing gas from Jim's bike
could've been me if I couldn't read.
all that glitters is not your guru
ask your mother or your sib
eat your lobster not the bibs
heart and mind wide open
close neatly with twist ties
Don't try to be favored, even Esau
loses as did Marty's dad to Biff
my sister says "You have to be right"
takes the early flight and I intuit
whatever it is I want to fly away
give me words what do I think?
five year old huffing gas from Jim's bike
could've been me if I couldn't read.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
NaPoWriMo 6
The mama dropped the baby and its head popped off
my daughters sang and sproing the yellow flowers leapt
sprung off of their knotted stems by chubby hands.
My sister and I round each other warily, wanting
we're both wanting what sisters give each other --
we're knotted in our need and quick to pounce away.
--
My friend has a slit across the base of her throat
sutured mouth that held a gob around her thyroid
she'll be quarantined in June with a great view -
bereft of comb and rings, given pill from lead box,
recover all most certainly to tell the tale.
She and Jim talk about taste buds and salivary mist
what he misses that is never coming back --
red wine tastes worse than mud. "Like yeast?"
she asks. "Like mold." Her spouse and I
drink wine. "Another?" I offer. He says, "Yes."
my daughters sang and sproing the yellow flowers leapt
sprung off of their knotted stems by chubby hands.
My sister and I round each other warily, wanting
we're both wanting what sisters give each other --
we're knotted in our need and quick to pounce away.
--
My friend has a slit across the base of her throat
sutured mouth that held a gob around her thyroid
she'll be quarantined in June with a great view -
bereft of comb and rings, given pill from lead box,
recover all most certainly to tell the tale.
She and Jim talk about taste buds and salivary mist
what he misses that is never coming back --
red wine tastes worse than mud. "Like yeast?"
she asks. "Like mold." Her spouse and I
drink wine. "Another?" I offer. He says, "Yes."
Saturday, April 05, 2008
NPWM 5
I Google "furor", am shown a photo of art
made of feathers and a pickled fetus head
that image in my head forever after
this an age of disconnect and shocks
blue TV haze, a pistol in each clutch
reptile brain screaming run or crouch.
---
Triolet
In April, Flickers descend upon the building
openings the size of soup cans in the wall
they've got the nesting instinct it is spring
In April, Flickers descend upon the building
Picture birds in flight and how they sing
These peck fist sized holes, we hope for fall
hang faux owls in hopes of stopping
openings the size of soup cans in the wall.
made of feathers and a pickled fetus head
that image in my head forever after
this an age of disconnect and shocks
blue TV haze, a pistol in each clutch
reptile brain screaming run or crouch.
---
Triolet
In April, Flickers descend upon the building
openings the size of soup cans in the wall
they've got the nesting instinct it is spring
In April, Flickers descend upon the building
Picture birds in flight and how they sing
These peck fist sized holes, we hope for fall
hang faux owls in hopes of stopping
openings the size of soup cans in the wall.
Friday, April 04, 2008
NaPoWriMo April Poetry Challenge Day 4 (NPWM 4)
NaPoWriMo April Poetry Challenge Day 4
Snivel on the sidelines, someone acts
what you are wanes daily just a tad
wait a day to harvest lose the crop
moon rides our blood like sire
axe swing splits another rail
string ladderwork lifts sweetpea
angleworm eats through April soil
as was foretold by savant DNA
pale November threatens sloe
from underground the gusher tolls and Jed
there are so many panties yet to raid
another splinter slides into a paw
lines across your TV aren't even static
circumstances change so shrinks the sourball
so stack your comments in another pile
verve or no we swerve along this oval.
Snivel on the sidelines, someone acts
what you are wanes daily just a tad
wait a day to harvest lose the crop
moon rides our blood like sire
axe swing splits another rail
string ladderwork lifts sweetpea
angleworm eats through April soil
as was foretold by savant DNA
pale November threatens sloe
from underground the gusher tolls and Jed
there are so many panties yet to raid
another splinter slides into a paw
lines across your TV aren't even static
circumstances change so shrinks the sourball
so stack your comments in another pile
verve or no we swerve along this oval.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
NaPoWriMo April Poetry Challenge Day 3
Near Valladolid a man shows us old pesos
burro on his porch, his wife serves Oreos,
chicken scratch, the polyp on his neck, now
buitres shade our map, a temple, on the road,
Colonial town squares yellow as ether
old encountered new we stare agog
Mayans in hardhats oompaloompas at the inn
Quintana Roo all candy for our ids.
Jaguar rite ball court I'm a mutt
no family here a thousand years ago.
Tulum women to my shoulder, prim,
their laundry in the ditch, do not quote Hesse--
no one on earth as smug as we
who milk it all and swipe the cream
gave the world flush toilets and sonata
x's on the map for cinnamon, gold, and oil
worthless hump of coins we're on the town
there's more where that came at the ATM.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
NaPoWriMo April Poetry Challenge Day 2
NaPoWriMo 2: 4/2 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft
Nereocystis bobs above its holdfast
branched and gripping fist sized rocks else
no surface tassel forest, no hollow tube
to blow. To be alive we must assert.
Earthworms, superior annelids, elude
trowel; tulips bloom, tomatoes set.
Ocean bulbs sway to waning crescent,
we dream of conquest and The Blob.
Glacial till filters upward through rake.
Moles make holes so voles eat calla,
trumpet and aurelian. Strain yin,
no Paraguayan pineapple for Dole.
It's not worldly, our argument for gain
another had to fall for you to chacha.
Nereocystis bobs above its holdfast
branched and gripping fist sized rocks else
no surface tassel forest, no hollow tube
to blow. To be alive we must assert.
Earthworms, superior annelids, elude
trowel; tulips bloom, tomatoes set.
Ocean bulbs sway to waning crescent,
we dream of conquest and The Blob.
Glacial till filters upward through rake.
Moles make holes so voles eat calla,
trumpet and aurelian. Strain yin,
no Paraguayan pineapple for Dole.
It's not worldly, our argument for gain
another had to fall for you to chacha.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
National Poetry Month Daily Poetry Challenge from NaPoWriMo
NaPoWriMo 1: April 1 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft
Primal Therapy lowered my range to alto
purple egg carton ceiling, foam wall, No Zen,
scraped grains of old wrath from the silo.
I lost composure at the Royal Fork, loon
beside the withering green beans, plod
to red lit roast beef stalled as my sea
wall burst through older folks and teens.
I was twenty two, ran sobbing to the car.
Resist reenacting this with emoticon rebus.
Olympics block Pacific storms' brusque
intrusion to the Sound. I have stood atop,
reckless pugilist against prevailing wind.
Primal Therapy lowered my range to alto
purple egg carton ceiling, foam wall, No Zen,
scraped grains of old wrath from the silo.
I lost composure at the Royal Fork, loon
beside the withering green beans, plod
to red lit roast beef stalled as my sea
wall burst through older folks and teens.
I was twenty two, ran sobbing to the car.
Resist reenacting this with emoticon rebus.
Olympics block Pacific storms' brusque
intrusion to the Sound. I have stood atop,
reckless pugilist against prevailing wind.
Monday, March 31, 2008
My mother takes me on tour, saleswoman in tow
my father calls it "the mausoleum," mugs as for FBI
my mouth is shut as though threatened with soap.
The sky above Cougar Mountain glows dull opal.
I remember the winter fort my father and I dug
snow for by the swingset miles west of here. Halo
clouds memory. They're eighty, too late to redo -
downsize first before this move that makes it all
real. Downpayment's next, they've given oral
nods. Its all decisive. I am used to muddles.
Soon we'll Goodwill garage and basement scrap.
My father calls it "the prison" but he's exerted
words as she's made plans. He'll sign the check.
He's lodged his protest, will move and lapse
to late night solitare computer glow. Each atom
wound around its axle spins. This place
a lovely isle "hermetically sealed" he says, etc.
this heaven they have saved so hard to earn
Upscale ski lodge, hospital tucked upstairs it's got
fine dining, health club, library, trendy art glass,
bathroom emergency pull cords shown with tact
its somewhat act this active living while they bide
awee towards death, and yet.
my father calls it "the mausoleum," mugs as for FBI
my mouth is shut as though threatened with soap.
The sky above Cougar Mountain glows dull opal.
I remember the winter fort my father and I dug
snow for by the swingset miles west of here. Halo
clouds memory. They're eighty, too late to redo -
downsize first before this move that makes it all
real. Downpayment's next, they've given oral
nods. Its all decisive. I am used to muddles.
Soon we'll Goodwill garage and basement scrap.
My father calls it "the prison" but he's exerted
words as she's made plans. He'll sign the check.
He's lodged his protest, will move and lapse
to late night solitare computer glow. Each atom
wound around its axle spins. This place
a lovely isle "hermetically sealed" he says, etc.
this heaven they have saved so hard to earn
Upscale ski lodge, hospital tucked upstairs it's got
fine dining, health club, library, trendy art glass,
bathroom emergency pull cords shown with tact
its somewhat act this active living while they bide
awee towards death, and yet.
Friday, March 28, 2008
3/28 Sheffer Crossword Poem Draft
I pull it from the oven careful in mitts
when that one's sold paste the red dot
There's better hot water at the spa
we love the Hunt Club but we ate in
Pablo and Pindar immortalized the ode
I profer regrets that everybody has
calf with three legs bound at the rodeo
Bindweed, Loosestrife, Dyer's woad
Sunday in the Park, The Ironers
all who publish are not male
I'd rather spite my nose than coo
Vodka stinger for Elaine, get me a mai tai
Spears to tell it all till she goes splat
cut a figure, up, above, a rug
if I love the book I read the intro
what you've never owned you can't resell
you'll know barbarians by their hoards
hold me tight to your chest don't be a miser
you imagine flute but blat the tuba
fifty ways to leave your habit
the heroes of our film are those who rob
I keep a shrine at home for Owen
condo on the magma in Hawaii
jointed goatgrass, puncturevine, millium
You be Lone Ranger, I'll be your scout
You play Saint-Saens, I stumble over Sousa
this room is empty but not for let
I cannot place exactly what I'm for
nobody warned me at the onset.
I pull it from the oven careful in mitts
when that one's sold paste the red dot
There's better hot water at the spa
we love the Hunt Club but we ate in
Pablo and Pindar immortalized the ode
I profer regrets that everybody has
calf with three legs bound at the rodeo
Bindweed, Loosestrife, Dyer's woad
Sunday in the Park, The Ironers
all who publish are not male
I'd rather spite my nose than coo
Vodka stinger for Elaine, get me a mai tai
Spears to tell it all till she goes splat
cut a figure, up, above, a rug
if I love the book I read the intro
what you've never owned you can't resell
you'll know barbarians by their hoards
hold me tight to your chest don't be a miser
you imagine flute but blat the tuba
fifty ways to leave your habit
the heroes of our film are those who rob
I keep a shrine at home for Owen
condo on the magma in Hawaii
jointed goatgrass, puncturevine, millium
You be Lone Ranger, I'll be your scout
You play Saint-Saens, I stumble over Sousa
this room is empty but not for let
I cannot place exactly what I'm for
nobody warned me at the onset.
Last night the culminating reading for the school I've worked with since 1992. Yes, 1992. Not these particular kids, who didn't exist in 1992. They're fifth and sixth graders - and poets. I handed each a poetic license, entitling them continue to write and revel in poetry. One of the kids came up to me afterwards to check out the meaning of revel. One mother asked, "They wrote those poems?" "Yes," I said. "Except for A.," she said. "He wrote his too," I said. "But you said he memorized it," she said. "He wrote it and then he memorized it for the reading," I said. "I can't imagine those words coming from him," she said, at which point I realized A. was her son. Every year there's one sixth grader who is so truly sad our poetry making/reading time is over she/he gives me a touchingly awkward goodbye speech and hug. Here's what this year's fellow traveler, a boy, wrote and read at the reading:
Ode to Poetry
Traditional
Ode to poetry
the awesome power of blah
a river of words
leaving people in awe
a picture may be worth 1000 words
but 1000 words is one great picture
cutting, crafting, working words
make a wordily overture
Rhyme
Poetry is an art as some might agree
true poets that is to a certain degree
but my goal is, surely you'll see
to make other people believe like me
Haiku
Poetry is fun
it isn't true poetry
if it isn't fun
Discipline is key
strong nouns, strong verbs, strong writing
rhyme sometimes won't work
Come With Me
Come with me
to the place
where there is poetry
don't grab your keys
you're already there
Traditional
there it is, that's it
I know that that was short
but I was kind of hoping
you'd be the poetry sort
in the humongous hole of poetry
I've only shown you a dimple
it may look just like building words
but I can tell you, poetry isn't simple
-B.
Here's the poem the mom didn't recognize as her son's:
My Mind
My mind is a mass of incandescent gas
a giant nuclear furnace
where hydrogen turns to helium
with a temperature of 17 degrees
-A.
Ode to Poetry
Traditional
Ode to poetry
the awesome power of blah
a river of words
leaving people in awe
a picture may be worth 1000 words
but 1000 words is one great picture
cutting, crafting, working words
make a wordily overture
Rhyme
Poetry is an art as some might agree
true poets that is to a certain degree
but my goal is, surely you'll see
to make other people believe like me
Haiku
Poetry is fun
it isn't true poetry
if it isn't fun
Discipline is key
strong nouns, strong verbs, strong writing
rhyme sometimes won't work
Come With Me
Come with me
to the place
where there is poetry
don't grab your keys
you're already there
Traditional
there it is, that's it
I know that that was short
but I was kind of hoping
you'd be the poetry sort
in the humongous hole of poetry
I've only shown you a dimple
it may look just like building words
but I can tell you, poetry isn't simple
-B.
Here's the poem the mom didn't recognize as her son's:
My Mind
My mind is a mass of incandescent gas
a giant nuclear furnace
where hydrogen turns to helium
with a temperature of 17 degrees
-A.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
as Hamlet knew to be is not to do and
if you've gone behind the shed
you know what clings to you like odor
unless you're alpha dog, a Leo
honey bees desert the hive
you left the door wide open
your missing eye won't make you Odin
all that staggers in your stead
cacophony begins with gavels
we claim too many gods to seat
you're not the princess and the pea
emir bowing to the east
which brings us to the vole
we are the proles with tails to wag
mucking lodges as they ski
for all our thorns we won't meet Herod
Caspar Milktoast Mitty not one ace
Used Fleetwood Prowler bachelor pad
Ramen fills the cart not orso
ground-bound as emu
we've no Aunt Bea or Opie
doff porkpie or fedora
you will never reign as champ
a perfumery of leis
did not turn you someone else
you have a turn, it's not the end.
if you've gone behind the shed
you know what clings to you like odor
unless you're alpha dog, a Leo
honey bees desert the hive
you left the door wide open
your missing eye won't make you Odin
all that staggers in your stead
cacophony begins with gavels
we claim too many gods to seat
you're not the princess and the pea
emir bowing to the east
which brings us to the vole
we are the proles with tails to wag
mucking lodges as they ski
for all our thorns we won't meet Herod
Caspar Milktoast Mitty not one ace
Used Fleetwood Prowler bachelor pad
Ramen fills the cart not orso
ground-bound as emu
we've no Aunt Bea or Opie
doff porkpie or fedora
you will never reign as champ
a perfumery of leis
did not turn you someone else
you have a turn, it's not the end.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Received an email from a colleague (with an mfa in poetry btw) that included the phrase "we're fast encroaching on national poetry month" and I think to myself jezus h god in a lampshade why the fracking he#(* do I take seriously the rejections I get when supposedly educated supposedly language loving people don't take the time and brain to use our language with attention. I know this person was not writing tongue in cheek nod nod wink wink but earnestly. I'm a little disheartened. Do I have an audience? Can they read?
I spent two hours this morning looking for a place to take five or six poems. A couple of weeks ago I sent 16 poems to Alaska. They said they wanted up to twenty. I send work every Saturday and look forward to it, which is funny, given that in past years I've sent a flurry once every six months unless someone asked me to send them work or someone local had a cool/funny/weird submission idea - tee shirts, bookmarks, bus placards. With sending work every week, it doesn't matter if one week I have a brain fart and send strange poems or poems inappropriate to the journal, because the next week I'll be sending somewhere else so the stakes aren't as high as when I was throwing poems to the one and only wind I could ever trust I could generate - would I build steam a second time in the year? I couldn't trust that I would. I circled contests in Poets & Writers and sent with thousands of other desperate once or twice a year submitters. I felt prostrate. I get excited now, thinking about who I'm going to send to, about what I'm going to send. Maybe some journal - I'm sending to many more now that I don't have to do it all at once - will take my work. If not, at least a lot more undergrads are reading my work.
3/22 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft
When the rains come, he marches us two
down the squelching trail . The view
is stunning but the stench has me rapt.
The brain is wider than the dust bin
and all the world's a bell jar
its so dark we dare not stare to sky.
Before the wonder bra, before the lei
all that's grim that will come after
he steers by sextant and weathervane
we live on hardtack and pesto
there are no tracks to put an ear
to. We believe in radius and ulna.
I spent two hours this morning looking for a place to take five or six poems. A couple of weeks ago I sent 16 poems to Alaska. They said they wanted up to twenty. I send work every Saturday and look forward to it, which is funny, given that in past years I've sent a flurry once every six months unless someone asked me to send them work or someone local had a cool/funny/weird submission idea - tee shirts, bookmarks, bus placards. With sending work every week, it doesn't matter if one week I have a brain fart and send strange poems or poems inappropriate to the journal, because the next week I'll be sending somewhere else so the stakes aren't as high as when I was throwing poems to the one and only wind I could ever trust I could generate - would I build steam a second time in the year? I couldn't trust that I would. I circled contests in Poets & Writers and sent with thousands of other desperate once or twice a year submitters. I felt prostrate. I get excited now, thinking about who I'm going to send to, about what I'm going to send. Maybe some journal - I'm sending to many more now that I don't have to do it all at once - will take my work. If not, at least a lot more undergrads are reading my work.
3/22 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft
When the rains come, he marches us two
down the squelching trail . The view
is stunning but the stench has me rapt.
The brain is wider than the dust bin
and all the world's a bell jar
its so dark we dare not stare to sky.
Before the wonder bra, before the lei
all that's grim that will come after
he steers by sextant and weathervane
we live on hardtack and pesto
there are no tracks to put an ear
to. We believe in radius and ulna.
Friday, March 21, 2008
3/21/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
Caveat-Containing Epigraph
you gotta read these babies fast cuz I'm yanking them from the site
as I revise and send them out into the vast poetry-in-print universe
for I do believe I do believe
up the rutted trail tromped the laden ass
musical with metal pots not even a tail to wag
prehensile ears heard grins on every face he met
but that's a portent for another age
like Egypt's fall involved a viper
we've had court cases and president for ape
and no one sweet as Jack to Rochester
cars toddle through potholes as we sit
we count comets with our toes in Yukon
flash our gold encrusted sash
we've been there too
up through the crenellated pine
we gotta leap or fester
gather rosebuds to our chests or plunk
piano in dingy parlors, taste
cardboard or cardamom, the jester
laughs at you pal
seven league boots across the seas
jeeze dive into it with all our mites
the strobe light's lit we've got the stage
greens in our teeth, berries now for Sal
Dostoyevsky peels another onion
it's awful quiet under sod.
Caveat-Containing Epigraph
you gotta read these babies fast cuz I'm yanking them from the site
as I revise and send them out into the vast poetry-in-print universe
for I do believe I do believe
up the rutted trail tromped the laden ass
musical with metal pots not even a tail to wag
prehensile ears heard grins on every face he met
but that's a portent for another age
like Egypt's fall involved a viper
we've had court cases and president for ape
and no one sweet as Jack to Rochester
cars toddle through potholes as we sit
we count comets with our toes in Yukon
flash our gold encrusted sash
we've been there too
up through the crenellated pine
we gotta leap or fester
gather rosebuds to our chests or plunk
piano in dingy parlors, taste
cardboard or cardamom, the jester
laughs at you pal
seven league boots across the seas
jeeze dive into it with all our mites
the strobe light's lit we've got the stage
greens in our teeth, berries now for Sal
Dostoyevsky peels another onion
it's awful quiet under sod.
PONTOON NUMBER TEN
Floating Bridge Press has come out with a double anthology of Washington State poets for their tenth anniversary - a "best of" section of poems from the first nine years, and the selected poems for year ten. My poem, nothing to hold onto, is included! They have also published an anthology of poems from Metro's poetry on the buses project, which you can buy at the same site. Mine, from 1999, wasn't chosen. Wah. But still.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Literacy Night at HIMS last night. I got all the little anthologies produced for three classes - including the one which has two books in one, each upside down to the other, and not the same number of pages, and with COLOR photos of the kids reading their poems so that the stakes were frickin high at Kinkos when I pushed that copy button. I ended up having to purchase a long armed stapler for $32 bucks, but there's a scam everywhere to keep you coming back. At Kinko's there's the educators discount of 15% to lull me into spending $200 on spec, hoping for reimbursement (I know now IS coming,) and at Office Max by I-5 in Wallingford (pass Open Books and wave at John and Christine,) their come on is that if you, an educator, sign up on line for their program, you get money added to your account for next time. There will, I know, be a next time, so I'm in, but I much prefer the cleaner percentage discount rather than the buy more get more later American way idea.
Speaking of the American way, I have not heard Obama's entire speech on race, but what I've heard rang so calm-headedly honestly true I was elated. Nobody in politics has talked this seemingly frankly about race in forever. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in a different era and with different goals (and was a PREACHER.) David Horsey's political cartoon in this morning's PI hit the heart of the matter, Obama calling for whites to give up their security blankets of prejudice and racism and blacks to give up their security blankets of rage and resentment.
Speaking of the American way, I have not heard Obama's entire speech on race, but what I've heard rang so calm-headedly honestly true I was elated. Nobody in politics has talked this seemingly frankly about race in forever. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in a different era and with different goals (and was a PREACHER.) David Horsey's political cartoon in this morning's PI hit the heart of the matter, Obama calling for whites to give up their security blankets of prejudice and racism and blacks to give up their security blankets of rage and resentment.
Monday, March 17, 2008
3/8 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft
Life was easier before we were woken
vertical energy of the a-frame
nobody fussed was it truth or virago
except for Iago who was, this is a bracer,
real only on stage or in escrow
loggers boistrous with lagers
if you were in town you rooted for our team
and wood nymphs wandered Aden
before our lives were writ
but to return I'll need an aide
someone more loyal than son or sib
who I might like more than Ike
onto the stage strides Obama, balm
euphony from start to ciao
we scratch that seven year itch
and twitch for sonny to begone. Maids
and lads we want to scream out yes
for years have laid low
quagmired in Cheney's eddy
history pronounces worse than sad
and none of us can hide
we used more om's than ohms
to resist, want new iconic
mystery to raise and make up
for Hoss and Joe we need the Greene
man with that Spencer energy
ah to be legendarily herded.
--
here's why political poetry is awful.
Life was easier before we were woken
vertical energy of the a-frame
nobody fussed was it truth or virago
except for Iago who was, this is a bracer,
real only on stage or in escrow
loggers boistrous with lagers
if you were in town you rooted for our team
and wood nymphs wandered Aden
before our lives were writ
but to return I'll need an aide
someone more loyal than son or sib
who I might like more than Ike
onto the stage strides Obama, balm
euphony from start to ciao
we scratch that seven year itch
and twitch for sonny to begone. Maids
and lads we want to scream out yes
for years have laid low
quagmired in Cheney's eddy
history pronounces worse than sad
and none of us can hide
we used more om's than ohms
to resist, want new iconic
mystery to raise and make up
for Hoss and Joe we need the Greene
man with that Spencer energy
ah to be legendarily herded.
--
here's why political poetry is awful.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
You gotta love JP Patches if you grew up in Seattle - there's a project to put up a statue with pavers all around to celebrate him. If you recognize any of the following, you gotta contribute:
Patches Pal
ICU2 TV Set
Gertrude
Esmerelda
The City Dump
Ketchikan the Animal Man
Miss Smith
Chris Weems, the man behind the clown, is dying of cancer. Crap.
Patches Pal
ICU2 TV Set
Gertrude
Esmerelda
The City Dump
Ketchikan the Animal Man
Miss Smith
Chris Weems, the man behind the clown, is dying of cancer. Crap.
Friday, March 07, 2008
3/7/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
Anticipate and act all day
coil tightly like a snake or perm
remember phone dial
pull on finger, New Haven
where you saw your father laze
your dog at heel, collective allele
your answers don't lie aft
set type, your els and ems
be braver than you're craven
bring on those midnight beads
smuggle in the answer key
green acres broad as Eva
Scotch as steelcut oats
Mother of Berries before the lid
slides to I'll bet the pair
we've every red print Ace
Give me this day my daily pen
the value's in the dally
in the valley we'll be shaven
and run away from her
but that is neither plum nor egg
you've time to yack in Yakima
it's all immediate, slow down, shag
your poker face grave as raven
you really ought to give Iowa
a nod or quarry from your hunt
hammerhead of sea or peen
say unto others yes and yeah
for what you reap you've got to sew.
Anticipate and act all day
coil tightly like a snake or perm
remember phone dial
pull on finger, New Haven
where you saw your father laze
your dog at heel, collective allele
your answers don't lie aft
set type, your els and ems
be braver than you're craven
bring on those midnight beads
smuggle in the answer key
green acres broad as Eva
Scotch as steelcut oats
Mother of Berries before the lid
slides to I'll bet the pair
we've every red print Ace
Give me this day my daily pen
the value's in the dally
in the valley we'll be shaven
and run away from her
but that is neither plum nor egg
you've time to yack in Yakima
it's all immediate, slow down, shag
your poker face grave as raven
you really ought to give Iowa
a nod or quarry from your hunt
hammerhead of sea or peen
say unto others yes and yeah
for what you reap you've got to sew.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
3/6/08 Sheffer Crossword Poem
A flicker plies phone wire. Air blower blats nigh -
bird lifts, peanut cheroot, wire twanging from the sag.
If I were a real birder I'd memorize mohawk or tam
chant genera et cetera. That's not my area.
This entire opening a ploy
to lull you we're observing spring biota
while underneath I've got Tim Burton
his Zappa hair but you don't care I'm not your mom
in spring at school I penned immolation, ossify
admired tattoos and tights and all the blazing glaze
that meant exempt to
not accept the wheel
that's life. I was on the outs
with every oven's pie
remote as Alps
(which may not be how would I know?)
hills and dales I refused to go o'er
in those old smelly springs ere
have a good day sent me semi
comatose. I never tongue kissed LSD.
This isn't about me you know
Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam but I'm a comet
that with luck will fizzle through dark not an
April afternoon oblivious fauna
humping as I orient
for flashy burn which is our
Millay though Ms. McGraw
faded fair in love
I would not be her muling heir.
A flicker plies phone wire. Air blower blats nigh -
bird lifts, peanut cheroot, wire twanging from the sag.
If I were a real birder I'd memorize mohawk or tam
chant genera et cetera. That's not my area.
This entire opening a ploy
to lull you we're observing spring biota
while underneath I've got Tim Burton
his Zappa hair but you don't care I'm not your mom
in spring at school I penned immolation, ossify
admired tattoos and tights and all the blazing glaze
that meant exempt to
not accept the wheel
that's life. I was on the outs
with every oven's pie
remote as Alps
(which may not be how would I know?)
hills and dales I refused to go o'er
in those old smelly springs ere
have a good day sent me semi
comatose. I never tongue kissed LSD.
This isn't about me you know
Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam but I'm a comet
that with luck will fizzle through dark not an
April afternoon oblivious fauna
humping as I orient
for flashy burn which is our
Millay though Ms. McGraw
faded fair in love
I would not be her muling heir.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
You can still get my book nothing to hold onto on Amazon.com. They also carry In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles, which has a personal essay of mine in it.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
Waste of time to wait for facts
what's her name who cares it's Amy
Ama someone's mama but hey Aloha
smile to meet you why have to opt
feet choose and flit can't find a dinar
it's so hot I've nothing to conceal
cardamom waft a fancy stamen
hesitation walk your mother's oven
The Portugese arrived, the Jews, and Ari
how now brown cow calf at your hip
we have no need of saints here Agnes
Kashmiri silk, the Moor's last sigh
the garbage smokes at center stage
ayervedic fabric FabIndia. Ignore
is practice too. Hoard change and pencil
cotton baby blanket on the bed no parka
search the idiom for tome
flutist against a white wall lietmotif
so what's the motive where's the ore
in storehouse go-downs, nag
me never crunch fish coconut toast
caste marks calls to pray no hatred
thali meal curd meets dal congeal
creamsicle salwar limeaid kameez
blue tarp black pepper a taxi hit
red bus rumble scooter cha cha
stoplight means not stop but segue
looming doti, gold chains, condo ads
come Jew Town Spice Market on and ons
my wanderings my anxieties Max Ernst
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Why the h#($*& would I post voice mail on my blog?
hey, this is me, don't forget the rhubarb. And the tp!
I'm, yeah, we just got in, yeah, I'm waiting for them to open the door.
Where are you? uh, oh, right, I see you. Hi hi! oh shoot. turn this thing off.
goddam it's taking a movie. I don't know. Here you do it.
2/28 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft:
Coda
You smote smell with one hundred Bans,
moon in the seventh dorm that's ebbed,
in the dark, exposed as Bela.
What else would you do in lieu?
Every clock strikes XII,
leaf pivots on its axel,
lilac on the breeze my favorite odor.
Oh sting we will not last the eon.
someday we'll play when we're retired,
hear our lives as through a cantor
each moment framed within its gotcha
the point described along some arc
the answer was always neither/nor.
Oh you were elegant as any ibex
on skis aswish as ice skate
oh Thunderdome thy name is Max
oh G. oh please that mellow sax
oh stannum balm, ah tin.
Every day was our premiere
every aspen from one seed
each dove who lived it cooed
and you, so eloquent when mum.
The dead are just the earth's alumni
so why does that sound psycho?
if there's a god is this his jobsite
the weatherman's Old Sol.
Inside each capsule there's a roar
amo amas amat and on anon.
But rest here with me in lea
of river maybe Nile
we'll perm our hair again be Pert
no matter that we've erred
sing for me again, your salient alto.
hey, this is me, don't forget the rhubarb. And the tp!
I'm, yeah, we just got in, yeah, I'm waiting for them to open the door.
Where are you? uh, oh, right, I see you. Hi hi! oh shoot. turn this thing off.
goddam it's taking a movie. I don't know. Here you do it.
2/28 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft:
Coda
You smote smell with one hundred Bans,
moon in the seventh dorm that's ebbed,
in the dark, exposed as Bela.
What else would you do in lieu?
Every clock strikes XII,
leaf pivots on its axel,
lilac on the breeze my favorite odor.
Oh sting we will not last the eon.
someday we'll play when we're retired,
hear our lives as through a cantor
each moment framed within its gotcha
the point described along some arc
the answer was always neither/nor.
Oh you were elegant as any ibex
on skis aswish as ice skate
oh Thunderdome thy name is Max
oh G. oh please that mellow sax
oh stannum balm, ah tin.
Every day was our premiere
every aspen from one seed
each dove who lived it cooed
and you, so eloquent when mum.
The dead are just the earth's alumni
so why does that sound psycho?
if there's a god is this his jobsite
the weatherman's Old Sol.
Inside each capsule there's a roar
amo amas amat and on anon.
But rest here with me in lea
of river maybe Nile
we'll perm our hair again be Pert
no matter that we've erred
sing for me again, your salient alto.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
I am not going to go chronologically through my days in India. I thought I would do that, then was felled by a post-air travel cold, then got to thinking chronological order is a boring way to think about my trip anyway.
You can't borrow anybody else's life. I've tried more than once to sluff mine off, tribute to my reptile brain, the idea that I could just slump out of my too-small dead carapace and grow myself a new one. Those resolution types of incremental growth type changes are difficult, require diligence and discipline and drudgery, that is, day to day adherence to what I said I would do. This is the only way to get anywhere I've wanted to get myself, but I still dislike it.
Poetry, I, too, dislike it. Marianne Moore.
I'm wearing the new fragrance from the small hovelly perfume store in Cochin. They keep the fragrances under a glass counter in quart size stainless steel thermoses and fill a vial only when you order one. The fragrances are of the essential oil persuasion, not perfumes per se. I don't know very much about perfume, but I like the smell of this one: "green orchid." I also bought "Kerala flower." The last perfume I bought, a few years ago, was in Paris. "Jaipur" - and now it strikes me that Jaipur is in India. I stopped buying the perfume when they started the s/m bondage ad campaign. Obviously I am not in that company's demographic. The first perfume I bought was when I was in high school. "Wind Song". It went so well with Jim's "Jade East."
Kerala was hot and humid, a challenge for NW native me. I went up to the tea estates in the Western Ghats partly to see them and partly to wake up one morning with dry skin. The first week I was in India there were times at night I almost couldn't breathe, heat and humidity weighted my chest and my lungs got a little panicky.
You can't borrow anybody else's life. I've tried more than once to sluff mine off, tribute to my reptile brain, the idea that I could just slump out of my too-small dead carapace and grow myself a new one. Those resolution types of incremental growth type changes are difficult, require diligence and discipline and drudgery, that is, day to day adherence to what I said I would do. This is the only way to get anywhere I've wanted to get myself, but I still dislike it.
Poetry, I, too, dislike it. Marianne Moore.
I'm wearing the new fragrance from the small hovelly perfume store in Cochin. They keep the fragrances under a glass counter in quart size stainless steel thermoses and fill a vial only when you order one. The fragrances are of the essential oil persuasion, not perfumes per se. I don't know very much about perfume, but I like the smell of this one: "green orchid." I also bought "Kerala flower." The last perfume I bought, a few years ago, was in Paris. "Jaipur" - and now it strikes me that Jaipur is in India. I stopped buying the perfume when they started the s/m bondage ad campaign. Obviously I am not in that company's demographic. The first perfume I bought was when I was in high school. "Wind Song". It went so well with Jim's "Jade East."
Kerala was hot and humid, a challenge for NW native me. I went up to the tea estates in the Western Ghats partly to see them and partly to wake up one morning with dry skin. The first week I was in India there were times at night I almost couldn't breathe, heat and humidity weighted my chest and my lungs got a little panicky.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The man came back in a small white car (not a Hindustani Ambassador, and not a Bajaj Rickshaw Taxi, these I would meet later,) a small white probably Japanese car with the word "Radisson" printed on the side. My luggage and I got in. We languished in the confusion of traffic, my driver honking and being honked at, the car suddenly lunging at an angle, halting, lunging, halting, straightening, swerving, halting, then driving into the hazy night to pull up ten minutes later at the door of the Radisson, which looked like any Radisson anywhere, except that there were doormen in white turbans out front, one of whom opened the door for me, while another man took my wheeled bag out of my hand and wheeled it to the front of the check in desk. As I checked in I looked behind me to see that my lugage had disappeared. I commented on this and was told that this was as it should be. How many pieces? the man behind the desk asked. Two I said. Another man walked me past a counter where I could see my luggage as we headed towards the elevator. I hesitated. He said, "they will be brought up." He pushed the elevator button, told me my floor and room number and presented my passcard key with two hands while bowing. I went up and locked the door, wondering how long I would have to stay up to receive my luggage. There was a dim glow to the room but the lights wouldn't turn on. I tried all the switches, then the knobs on the lamps. There was a knock on the door. Did I mention I didn't have any small denomination ruples? That is to say smaller than 100? ($2.50 US but my book said that was too much to tip) I felt uncomfortable as this new man brought my luggage into the room. He noted the lack of light other than the dim glow. "Put the card into the slot," he said. I put the card into the slot at waist height by the front door, simultaneously remembering that this was the method in Greece last year and probably other places. He bowed and left. I turned lights on and off. I ate most of the complimentary chocolates on the little white plate on the table by the bed. I lay in the comfortable bed and set my alarm for 5am. It was midnight.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Sentences of Three Words
from Learn Malayalam in 30 Days
You sit in the chair
The book is on the table
Smear oil on the face
Children should wake up in the morning
Must go to temple at dusk
Must wash the leg and face
There is no bitter gourd in the market
There is no limit to anger
Marriage is to-morrow
Alphabets Are the Outer Garments of a Language
-from the forward, Learn Malayalam in 30 Days
Malayalam is the language of Kerala, one of 22 official Indian languages, and impossible to show you without downloading the Malayalam font. I've been trying for 10 minutes. It's a Dravidian language, which made me think of Druids, but no, sadly, the Druids have (had) nothing to do with Malayalam. Malayalam the word is fun to say, and Malayalam the language is fun to listen to. It's also spoken in Sri Lanka and on the (in the?) Lakshwadeep Islands.
I've reread my 200th entry, in which I had many worries about my arrival in India, especially because it would be late at night. Lots of flights arrive in Delhi late at night. It is possible that most of the flights arrive then. The airport has been under construction for a few years, and is ugly and incoherent. After I cleared passport control and customs I dragged my luggage towards the "arrival lounge" which is an elegant phrase but doesn't match what met me. Through the automatic glass doors there is a metal tube railing to either side of the cement walkway. The walkway slopes uphill and along the railing on either side are people crammed in two, three, twelve deep. Each is holding a sign with a name on it. I panicked. What if I didn't see my name after walking through the entire gauntlet? I could barely focus, let alone read. I breathed. If I missed my name I would turn around and walk through again. My ability to read improved. Man, there were a lot of signs. Then I saw that some of the signs had logos around the periphery of the white space where names were printed in sharpee. Soon thereafter I saw "Radisson" on a group of these signs, and lo, my name was on one. This registered on my face. A man made eye contact from behind the sign, and walked to meet me, taking hold of the handle of my suitcase. I followed. Another man in Radisson logoed jacket took over. He walked briskly forward, I ran to catch up. He stopped at the curb, handed my luggage back to me, said, "wait here." I did not move. I think he said, "I must get the car." Cars careened past. People got in. I stood where I was on the edge of the roadway. An interplay of horn honking chorused around but not at me. Cars zoomed forward, clustered, blocking each other from moving, broke apart, honked, drove on, reconnected, separated, disappeared beyond my sight. I stood. People clustered outside the airport building. They yelled at each other. It was coolish, cooler than I thought it would be. I wished I hadn't left my jacket at home. I wondered if I was on my own now. A woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I breathed. The cool air felt good, knocking the airplane staleness out of me.
from Learn Malayalam in 30 Days
You sit in the chair
The book is on the table
Smear oil on the face
Children should wake up in the morning
Must go to temple at dusk
Must wash the leg and face
There is no bitter gourd in the market
There is no limit to anger
Marriage is to-morrow
Alphabets Are the Outer Garments of a Language
-from the forward, Learn Malayalam in 30 Days
Malayalam is the language of Kerala, one of 22 official Indian languages, and impossible to show you without downloading the Malayalam font. I've been trying for 10 minutes. It's a Dravidian language, which made me think of Druids, but no, sadly, the Druids have (had) nothing to do with Malayalam. Malayalam the word is fun to say, and Malayalam the language is fun to listen to. It's also spoken in Sri Lanka and on the (in the?) Lakshwadeep Islands.
I've reread my 200th entry, in which I had many worries about my arrival in India, especially because it would be late at night. Lots of flights arrive in Delhi late at night. It is possible that most of the flights arrive then. The airport has been under construction for a few years, and is ugly and incoherent. After I cleared passport control and customs I dragged my luggage towards the "arrival lounge" which is an elegant phrase but doesn't match what met me. Through the automatic glass doors there is a metal tube railing to either side of the cement walkway. The walkway slopes uphill and along the railing on either side are people crammed in two, three, twelve deep. Each is holding a sign with a name on it. I panicked. What if I didn't see my name after walking through the entire gauntlet? I could barely focus, let alone read. I breathed. If I missed my name I would turn around and walk through again. My ability to read improved. Man, there were a lot of signs. Then I saw that some of the signs had logos around the periphery of the white space where names were printed in sharpee. Soon thereafter I saw "Radisson" on a group of these signs, and lo, my name was on one. This registered on my face. A man made eye contact from behind the sign, and walked to meet me, taking hold of the handle of my suitcase. I followed. Another man in Radisson logoed jacket took over. He walked briskly forward, I ran to catch up. He stopped at the curb, handed my luggage back to me, said, "wait here." I did not move. I think he said, "I must get the car." Cars careened past. People got in. I stood where I was on the edge of the roadway. An interplay of horn honking chorused around but not at me. Cars zoomed forward, clustered, blocking each other from moving, broke apart, honked, drove on, reconnected, separated, disappeared beyond my sight. I stood. People clustered outside the airport building. They yelled at each other. It was coolish, cooler than I thought it would be. I wished I hadn't left my jacket at home. I wondered if I was on my own now. A woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I breathed. The cool air felt good, knocking the airplane staleness out of me.
Friday, February 01, 2008
POST 200 Moment of Silence
I'm off to India on Sunday. Off to I N D I A. I've engaged in email conversation with someone at the bajillion dollar hotel I'm staying in my first night near the Delhi airport and have finally gotten him/her to reveal to me the meaning of the phrase "appropriate transfers have been arranged." Their website stated they had an airport shuttle. How would I get the shuttle? I wondered. Would I have to call the hotel? Would I have to go outside and stand on the curb at 11pm while people tried to "help" me? Would someone be waiting in the lobby with my name on a card? It took several emails back and forth to learn that someone will be waiting in the arrivals lounge with my name on a card. YEA! Unfortunately I have not been able to obtain any rupees. The local supply has dried up. I have to call around today and tomorrow to see if any returning traveler has cashed in rupees, or I'll have no money to tip the person with my name on the card and look like a cad or bad person. There is an ATM in the hotel. Last resort. What is an appropriate tip? What is the exchange rate?
I got my shots. I think it's excessive to buy the steriPEN for $80 at REI when bottled water is available everywhere. Right? I'm not going out in the bush on an elephant. I'm going to the biggest city in Kerala. Why use commas when separate sentences are so punchy? I am currently in pursuit of noise-cancelling headphones for my flights, airplane ambient noise being high on my list of fatigue inducing bother. I bought some for $34 yesterday at Bartell's, brought them home, and Jim and I tested them by running the garbage disposal, dishwasher and his espresso machine. There was some noise reduction, but not as the box claimed 70% noise reduction. I took them back. I've looked online and there appear to be cheaper options than the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 ($350). Sennheiser sells the PXC-250 for about $100. Etymotic Research ER6 is another choice. My eyes are blurring. There's also JVC and Creative Aurvana. (not Nirvana.) Brookstone and Sharper Image sell their own brands. Who knows how good they are? Brookstone and Sharper Image say they are great! We are deep into an area of no interest to me - I just want peace for the hundeds of hours I'll be aloft.
Also for my flights I have purchased pressure hosiery, oh yes, and these will be so comfortable on arrival in India though my feet will not be the size of elephant hooves (feet?) which is a good thing. Also JetLag homeopathic remedy and some moisturizing solution to spray up my nostrils to prevent dry nasal passages, the cursed cause of inflight illness induction! YIKES!
I got my shots. I think it's excessive to buy the steriPEN for $80 at REI when bottled water is available everywhere. Right? I'm not going out in the bush on an elephant. I'm going to the biggest city in Kerala. Why use commas when separate sentences are so punchy? I am currently in pursuit of noise-cancelling headphones for my flights, airplane ambient noise being high on my list of fatigue inducing bother. I bought some for $34 yesterday at Bartell's, brought them home, and Jim and I tested them by running the garbage disposal, dishwasher and his espresso machine. There was some noise reduction, but not as the box claimed 70% noise reduction. I took them back. I've looked online and there appear to be cheaper options than the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 ($350). Sennheiser sells the PXC-250 for about $100. Etymotic Research ER6 is another choice. My eyes are blurring. There's also JVC and Creative Aurvana. (not Nirvana.) Brookstone and Sharper Image sell their own brands. Who knows how good they are? Brookstone and Sharper Image say they are great! We are deep into an area of no interest to me - I just want peace for the hundeds of hours I'll be aloft.
Also for my flights I have purchased pressure hosiery, oh yes, and these will be so comfortable on arrival in India though my feet will not be the size of elephant hooves (feet?) which is a good thing. Also JetLag homeopathic remedy and some moisturizing solution to spray up my nostrils to prevent dry nasal passages, the cursed cause of inflight illness induction! YIKES!
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