I remember writing poems

Poem: "Yes" by Catherine Doty, from Momentum. Copyright Cavan Kerry Press. Reprinted with permission. (that is to say, Garrison Keillor has her permission. I copied Catherine Doty's poem off my Writer's Almanac email. People are writing poems every day, just not me.)

Yes
It's about the blood
banging in the body,
and the brain
lolling in its bed
like a happy baby.
At your touch, the nerve,
that volatile spook tree,
vibrates. The lungs
take up their work
with a giddy vigor.
Tremors in the joints
and tympani,
dust storms
in the canister of sugar.
The coil of ribs
heats up, begins
to glow. Come
here.

-Catherine Doty

In arctic Seattle, waiting for the next blizzard to barrel through
what is there to do but dance dance revolution?

• 
  Happy Thanksmas from Scooter, Age 18

Radish King rules! (I work with middle school students. This is how I roll.)

If you missed Rebecca Loudon's reading Monday night on the blackout stage at Hugo House, I am sorry for you. She's a poet's poet boys and girls.

In other news, I am swamped with too many commitments, too little in the way of organizational skills, in addition to which (IS it okay to begin and end a sentence with prepositional phrases? I did not go to Catholic school and so am flummoxed by all grammatical issues) I am in the midst of grieving for no lake rides at 5:30 am Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. If you have made your way through that last sentence and are still with me, you must be avoiding what you have to do today too.

I'm off to edit my craft talk essay for the It's About Time's website, off to teach 5th and 6th graders in Kirkland, off to prepare for the parent volunteer meeting for the 8th grade short story book project, off to email a teacher about coming to his classes to prep for an elementary poetry assembly, off to work on class books for three different classes, off to prepare a sequence of lessons that will parallel and enhance kids' experience of reading a book about the Bosnian war, off to oh gawd lie down and whimper in a corner, but just for five or six seconds.

My mother is having a shunt installed this morning so she can get chemo weekly beginning today for the tumor on her eye. If chemo doesn't show signs of stopping the cancer after a month, she'll have radiation treatments. Gilda said there's always something. Bless your eyes, ears, feet, hands, brain, heart, life, life, life.

Writing reminds me to breathe. Writing returns me to being here. Here. Here. Yes.

I Love Coconuts
Mixed Up World
Squirrel

Jim is downstairs trying out rings for his new phone, has just discovered he can record his own, plays back, "Hey Jim, answer your phone," in his voice.

Rumsfeld is out, and, as Jon Stewart said Thursday night, "the democrats are going to fix everything that's wrong with the world." I'm ready.

This evening I am going to Hugo House to hear Rebecca Loudon read and to buy Radish King, her exciting new book. I already have Radish King, the matchbook, which really is a matchbook, very very very red, with Radish King printed in black on the outside, "Poems that Burn" printed inside, facing the matches. I'm terrifically excited to read Radish King, the book.

WET WET WET WET and COLD rowing this morning out of the UW boathouse - very exciting and nerve waggling - so much to think about, so many fast rowers, fast talking coxswains, millfoil around the edges, wind, rain, currents. We rigged our boats outside in the dark and lost no nuts no bolts and I am only short one wrench, 7/16". First time ever I would be coxing through the cut into Lake Union to the University Bridge and the coaches weren't going out with us in launches, just three long skinny boats with 8 rowers in each, three drenched coxswains pledging to meet by the houseboats the south side of the bay during warm up, being blown while waiting for the other two boats towards the houseboats, an opportunity, sure, to see inside, but at risk of boat and rowers not a terrific idea. I've lived around these bodies of water, even been on these bodies of water in motor boats, in sailboats, but never at the controls of any boat before this morning. The entrance to the cut from Portage Bay is deceptive, I was too far north, might have been winged by a motorboat had there been motorboats other than coach launches and police boats out at 6:30 in the morning on a gloomy windy, rainy morning. A police boat whizzed past as we warmed up through the cut gifting us with wake from where you'd expect it and many directions other than that direction due to the narrowness, the cement walls. I urged the rowers to swing through it and they kept their swings long through the water though every instinct says hunker NOW! On the way back through the cut time two two men in an outrigger canoe paddling their buns off decided to angle right (excuse me, starboard) in front of us - I steered port, kept the rowers on the power, figured I'd have steering challenges equal to or more frazzling on Sunday, so this was practice. Second time through the cut I moved us closer to the wall, oar blades within 6 feet of the wall which had seemed impossibly close first time through. I will be working to keep the long view on race day, working to sound calm in the boat, which apparently I do, partly because I have the novice's naivete about what to be freaked out about, partly because I spend many of my days in classrooms full of middle school kids, so what is there to phase me? Nobody that I know of was muttering "fart" or farting for that matter this morning, nor were they passing notes or drowsing. For Sunday my mantra is to settle down and steer - safety first, counting second, motivational speechifying a far back third. Who knew I would find this an exciting, frightening skill to learn and apply? Who ever thought to find me in the stern of a boat, feet underwater, in hypothermia conditions, concentrating with all my attention, enjoying myself. Certainly not anyone I went skiing with in my twenties when clothing did not keep the cold and wet at bay and when, in the video that will be shown as I ask admittance at the pearly gates (hold your breath for that one, god believers,) I pounded the snow with my sodden gloves and yelled obcenities at the mountain because I had fallen again, had to take my gloves off again, had snow down my back again, and was frigging freezing.

Why I am Grateful for Sixth Graders

Recipe for Peace

assemble justice and experience,
compassion and hope in large bowl

mix until well blended

sift perseverance over these;
fold in half of your forgiveness.

add determination by teaspoonfuls
until mixture holds together

fold in second half forgiveness

bake until hope bubbles to the top
drizzle with affection

serve garnished with joy.

-Laura Gamache
in 6th grade classroom
(I am older than 11)


Recipe for P.P. (Peace Pie)


First, have a mixing bowl ready. Show some love by sprinkling it all around the bowl. In the inside, take all the hatred, anger and jealousy and beat it to dust. Share what you’ve learned about forgiveness and friendship to replace the hatred, anger and jealousy. Sprinkle a half pint of loyalty on the inside. Let it sit cold for 10 min. by pouring little cups of cold, solid and straight beauty. After that, put it in the microwave for 10 min. at 360°F so it can pop up like popcorn. Take it out of the microwave and let it sit on the windowsill with the window up.
Now let the fresh smell of peace pie fill the world with peace.
F.Y.I. Don’t eat it!

-K.T., age 11


Peace Like Water


2 cups of love that’s what you will
need maybe 3 cups I don’t know, you
need a lot, maybe 5 or 6, I don’t
know. You can try, but I know you
will need belief in yourself and
others. Like I said, I don’t know.
The more you add, the more you
get because that’s how peace works.
Maybe some things you don’t add,
some things you will, but I know it
will be good, it always is. You
will need help, friendship and more.
You can add all you want, but
remember if you add bad things
it will not be peace. So beware if
you love something that’s bad, it will
not be peace.

-S.R., age 11

It's a good thing that babies don't understand the concept of "clumsiness," or else they'd never learn to walk.
-Alan Ziegler, The Writing Workshop Vol. 1

Reading highlights of ten important books
in the lastest AAP Review, I come upon
Floyd Skloot, the Helen Keller of our age,
his poetry a triumph of will over infirmity,
but isn't that how it is for most of us?

Saw Stephan King last night at Benaroya Hall, a special event for Seattle Arts & Lectures. When he walked on stage the bulk of the audience rose to their feet with cheers and thunderous applause. He gauged his audience, he tilted back his head and he delivered: naughty swear words and references to TV shows. He worked the room like a lounge comic, talked about writers as "famous people", generally played to the lowest common denominator to guffaws and applause. "Don't be a snob," said my husband at one point.





King was horrifying.

Scripture for Our Time

A Chapel Talk

William Stafford

at Lewis & Clark College

1 Mar 1962

Sometimes listening alertly to Scripture, I am touched with a flickering realization of how it might be to live in times when Scripture is lived and write. Think of coming alive to participate in human events so important that they connect with the everlasting. How would it be to know that what you did, what you said, what you wrote, how you responded to others was crucial?

I love this sly guy William Stafford, copied this exerpt from the typescript of the chapel talk when I was at the library at Lewis & Clark College this last Sunday. Here's some more:

...and I think steadily about our own times: there should be writings so coercive that all in our time yield to them. Maybe our crisis is an art crisis: people must come to believe art, and art must come to be worthy of belief.

Yes! Yes! And keep talking, Mr. Stafford:

...An ultimately responsible writer could feel this way: things happen the way they ought to happen when people know enough - and soon enough - about their own situation. When people want what the world will give them, and in terms they live with, then they have balanced their culture.

Yeah, as Wayne said, and monkeys will fly out my butt, but also, yeah, and why the heck not?

I would like to be an utimately responsible writer, and an artist who creates art worthy of belief, just as I hope that I am worthy of belief from the kids I work with in classrooms. Am I a writer? Yes. Do I believe that reading and writing can change or even save my life? Yes. Do they believe me? As much as I live it, yes.

I don't know what the chapel looked like. By the time I attended Lewis & Clark, beginning August of 1970, there was a brand-new round rather Native American looking edifice that was the pride of the campus. One anti-Vietnam-war protest began with a prayer vigil in this chapel, when my Yeats professor, John Callahan, read "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" by W.B. Yeats, and catapulted my socks into orbit around a distant star. John Callahan later became literary executor to the estate of Ralph Ellison. In life, they were great friends. Callahan has endured some rather unfriendly "you are not Black, you have no rights" derision, but has carried on as his friend asked him to with the business of Ellison's literary legacy.

I dropped out of Lewis & Clark one quarter and seven weeks after beginning, mostly on the basis of being so far over my head in Callahan's senior seminar on Yeats that I couldn't even open my mouth for air when I surfaced in his little quanset hut office. Humiliated that I had no idea what the 22 year old literary lights were talking about in seminar, being 18 and fresh out of high school, I couldn't face my first academic defeat and hitchhiked away from school with a friend of a friend who claimed to be hitching to New Jersey, which I thought was funny; everyone was hitching to California at the time, good drugs, countercultural correctness. We did in fact hitchhike to California, Santa Cruz. Excrutiatingly predictable.

My daughter graduated from Lewis & Clark, and had John Callahan for teacher in her freshman "Imagining America" mandatory philosophical college grounding course. Love that school.

Subjects in Email Inbox this Morning:

space probe capture spreads

Mary Poppins Canceled(sic) Dollar

I've been here at the vaulted ceiling

said Leslie Looney, who

Home-based positions for you.


---

Going to see Henry Darger exhibition at the Frye today. Probably. I'm leery. Saw a couple of big panels a few years ago. Saw the movie made about his life.

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. I want to live unobserved and unquestioned, untended and left alone. I want to do absolutely nothing but sit in a large chair and declaim about all that is wrong with the world and basically morph into one of my elder relatives. Obviously I share their dna as I am participating in their particular dreamscape. I have a sore throat. I want to be put in a darkened room and fed triangles of cinnamon toast while I read books piled beside me on my bed. Jim asked me yesterday what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to lie around a read books. What I ended up doing was taking the book I'd told myself I would read only to myself, Thirteen Moons, and offered to read it aloud. With the sore throat. Part of me imagines I will be sainted for this. The same part of me that goes into resentment autopilot any time anything is not the way I'd like it to be. Leaves on the deck, "That Jim..." No toilet paper, "Jim again..." Which is a bunch of hooey but if you took a reflex hammer and tapped just behind my left temple, the resentment reflex would pop the hammer out of your hand. I spent my twenties learning a different way of being, but when I am tired I limp and go into that old reflex craparoni in my head. Luckily my mouth has a shutoff valve.

Last weekend I sat in boats and steered them around while stronger women with hip joints not made out of titanium pulled on oars to move the boats through Lake Washington while the sky attempted to send Lake Washington amounts of rain down on us. Many other people in other boats did the same. It's an annual regatta called the Tri Mountain Regatta. This weekend some of the women in my crew went to Boston to participate in the Head of the Charles Regatta. I didn't get to go because of the many many bridges, many many boats and many many ways in which to run afowl of the many many rules for how boats must behave while going under the bridges. It is not unusual for boats to capsize. Love that dirty water. Oh Boston. Maybe next year.

What does it take for us to not take our spectacularly unprecedented selves for granted? Me, I am talking about here.

Violoniste Bleue by Marc Chagall

I'm reading tonight at Ravenna Third Place Books with three other Finishing Line Press Poets: Jane Alynn, Donna Frisk and Carlos Martinez. We'll be setting the night on fire, so come on down. 7:30 pm. No dress code. In the back by the espresso machine. cshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Circe Invidiosa

In the 3rd through 5th grade classroom, where 3rd grade boys have a wee fascination with violence or at least an interest in testing the poet in residence, I read from Homer's Odyssey, not from the Illiad and not the Odyssey scene where Circe warns the crew about Scylla and Charybdis, but the scene where Circe turns half the crew into pigs. When I was done several kids wanted to get hold of this great book. One girl asked if I could photocopy the whole thing for her. Homer lives! (I read in English not ancient Greek.)

Charybdis

I read Homer today to fifth graders - the section where Circe warns Odysseus about the sirens Scylla and Charybdis. A couple of kids had encountered the sirens in video games.

Public Service Restaurant Review

In the lively new trendy happening Green Lake neighborhood that houses Tangletown and a block and a half worth of eateries and coffee houses there is eva. eva dissappointed Saturday evening, but at least I have come away with a new verbed noun: "to plate", as in, after our table had been waiting over an hour after ordering our meals, our wait person informed us our dinners were being plated. Electrostatically? we wondered. Plating took another twenty minutes. Plating as in to put onto a plate. What was put onto the plates tasted a little burned around the edges, as if a creme broulee torch had been engaged not so light handedly for the task. Sauces were tasty. Featured crustaceans, fish or meats were perched pertly atop vegetable mounds and had to be deperched to be eaten, but that was fine. Because we are a group of indefatiguable in for the duration kinds of people we ordered coffees and desserts. Time ticked away. The conversation turned to disastrous restaurant experiences we have known. A member of our table was delegated to ask the kitchen for an eta on the ice cream and flourless chocolate cake. They were. astonishingly, being plated.

Abecedarious for Condoleeza Rice

Abracadabra! Magic opens its arms,
brash actor that she has become,
commits your face to memory,
decides your future before you blink.
Entertainer, evangelist, devil-elf, she
flings favoritism, forgets you,
goddess in her way, your way.
Hocus-pocus howler of no pity,
igniter of basest instincts, careless
juggler of all you value most,
kite raiser, curtailer, your
last best hope,
maternal and just as cruel.
Neither Nymph nor Narcissus
ordered you around like this,
pinned you to foam core, made you
question yourself, all qualms, no
reality or race card to
silence her silky tongue, her red
tonsils coming closer,
uvula trembling over our heads,
vicious and victorious as
W would have you imagine him, that
xenophobic embarrasment, empty birdcage,
yellow feather drifting past your ear. You're
zealous you say? Spare me.

The Web is wonderful, except that you cannot touch anything.
This is one of the handmade books entered in a contest called "Abecedarium" - featuring paper made by the artist and the earliest written cuniform for letters. No matter what groovy idea you think is original to you, it ain't baby.

I'm having all kinds of adjustment issues - it's fall, but feels like summer again, I'm in the classroom wondering whether I'm offering anything unique to the kids (4th graders and 8th graders at the moment, in different classes on different days.) Outside I am whacking away at the really horrible looking crocosmia. During late spring to early summer crocosmia send their dark greens up up, like bunch grass but with wide wide blades. As summer moves along, the crocosmia starts leaning downhill, and by the time it sends out its clusters of orange (mine are orange, there are also red ones) flowers in Late July, it is nearly horizontal to the ground, and since the stuff self propagates like mad it forms a nearly seamless mat. Then comes September and it turns brown. Brown matted bad hair all over the hillside. I hack at it till it looks like the hill has a bad (or super trendy) haircut. My lavender don't get enough light now that the quaking aspen (typed quacking, deleted it, but now it's back so you can enjoy it too) has grown up up up and filled in, blocking all the light lavenders need so that the flower stalks fling themselves wildly like alien antennas or on the courses I used to send my yoyo when trying to do around the world. September is also when the blackberries send their ground runners stealthily along the ground (hence the name) - when they're covered by crocosmia for example they can get pretty far before I spy them and whack them to the property line. My next door neighbors have a native yard, a native bird sanctuary yard. They have a certificate to prove it. They have accomplished this by ignoring their yard except for brief forays through the thicket with sharp pruners (typed prooners. Must be the fourth graders.) I hold no grudges. They are great people and have made a trellis so that the kiwi from our yard can grow on it. More than a year ago one of our kiwi vines made its way into their house. They kept the window open all winter (it's a high window) - it was a weird sight to see green green kiwi leaves inside their house when the rest of the vines, including that one were bare outside. Botanically, I don't quite understand how this was possible, except for the fact that kiwi are from New Zealand.