"It comes to this, that poetry is a part of the structure of reality."
-Wallace Stevens, from his essay
"Three Academic Pieces"

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
-Wallace Stevens, from
"Another Weeping Woman"



Like you, I love the sound of pencils
tracking imagination across a white page

I believe words hold truths
beyond their lengths and breadths

that daily and hourly and any anxious minute
we can make language ours and claim our lives

So he says to me again,
"Poetry is your hobby."
"No," I say, "that's not right."
"You don't make any money at it,
so it's a hobby," he says.

I'm doing crossword puzzles now.
If he calls that a hobby
I won't freefall out of my life.

I wear a necklace I wrote into:
"I believe that reading & writing
can save your life."

Sometimes I live it
And sometimes I fall down.

I open my hands and offer
whatever is there:
heart, sandwich, coffin nail.

Nobody will come to the door,
box with a bow
and present me what I need.

Lighten up, there are billions of stars in the sky - Jim Page

Hubble, Hubble!

Ah kiwi canes
ah yesterday's snowfall
Today slushes towards us
like bald tired trucks.

THE BAWDS OF EUPHONY!!!

stolen from Tricia at Emperor of Ice Cream Cakes

contributed to the Wallace Stevens Birthday tribute contest held at EOICC by Harry Rutherford of Heraclitean Fire
on October 11, 2006.

I do a mean impersonation of the bawds of euphony crying out sharply, actually.



and now for a poem by Wallace Stevens, sans additional visual accompaniment, but reader, I may yet cut and paste in tribute:


A FISH-SCALE SUNRISE


Melodious skeletons, for all of last night's music
Today is today and the dancing is done.

Dew lies on the instruments of straw that you were playing,
The ruts in your empty road are red.

You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma,
The cocks are crowing and crowing loud,

And although my mind perceives the force behind the moment,
The mind is smaller than the eye.

The sun rises green and blue in the fields and in the heavens.
The clouds foretell a swampy rain.

-Wallace Stevens

Happy Birthday Marie Lorena Moore!

Fiction writer Lorrie Moore turns 50 today - welcome!

I have kissed the cover or petted the spine of each of these books:

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Like Life
Anagrams
Self Help
Birds of America (I have genuflected following the kissing and petting)

Collage by Clare Murray Adams see more at www.claremurrayadams.com


Second day in a row no teaching due to snow/ice/cold - yesterday Seattle Schools were closed, today they're running two hours late. Having grown up here, snow means play, play, play or at least sitting in front of tv all day. Since I am constitutionally opposed to sitting in front of tv all day and have a healing sprained ankle and am on the icy side of fifty, yesterday I neither played nor tved but instead what did I do? Wrote a bit, but disconnectedly, disaffectedly, listlessly. It has become slightly boring that after all these decades I still must exert myself to make myself move. Somewhere in the contract I thought there was a clause that freed me from this. Aw, but there was no contract, and etc.

I have completed this morning's Word Scrimmage in the Seattle P.I., with a score of 180 (average game 155-165 Judd Hambrick, w.s. editor asserts) so I am ABOVE AVERAGE! Yea!
My words: millers, alien, datum, priest

In those alien days of plague and brief existence,
millers left the datum-free ether to priests.

Life is Never Meaningless, There is Always Food

Dog Kibble: A Villanelle


Life is never meaningless: there is always food.
All day I sit upon the stairs, nose between the bars,
and consider kibble – its smell, its taste, its mood –

and I am happy. We walk back to the woods
after lunch (me and the humans) and under leaves there are
so many dark crunchy things to eat that I should

not eat but I eat anyway. They are so good!
Even when they make me sick at home or in the car,
I like them. I like to eat. I brood

about the taste of kibble hours before it’s chewed.
They keep my meals in the kitchen in a plastic jar.
Don’t put me on your couch, please, Dr. Freud,

I’m sweet and simple and I’m good.
When I’m sad or sick, not up to par,
I sleep downstairs curled near the toilet. I’m not crude.

I’ve known shame, and joy, and I have viewed
delicious sights. I don’t wander. I don’t go far.
Life isn’t meaningless because there’s food.
Consider kibble: its smell, its taste, its mood.

-Charles Baxter

Full moon?
Crisis of Confidence, Number 5, 687

My babies on flickr.com - so weird this lack of privacy we've ramped up on the internet allows me to see my GROWN, let's be clear about that, grown children without their knowledge and consent pretty much accidentally. Okay, I did type "Shawna Todd" into the search box on flickr after logging in after I couldn't find the picture I took of the toy helicopter flying in front of Christmas sheet music which is what I intended to have as the photo for today, a memorialization of the end of the 06 winter solstice/Beethoven's birthday/Christmas/Kwanza season. Instead, I give you Julia and Shawna at Shawna's 27th birthday party last July. Gorgeous, glowing, interesting, smart, talented, a trifle driven, creative, funny, fledged and out there in the world doing cool things. Yowsa.

How to talk with kids, have kids write and feel safe about how children are affected in the world by war and the nasty ways of adults? It is true they know about the cruelty, inequity, unfairness, ugliness of the world. It is true some are living with these things in their homes. It is true that the human story if full of the suffering of innocents. We are so quick to sully innocence, as if we don't want anyone left unsmeared. THAT would be too painful. I think children want to, many of them, most of them, want to do good in the world, make the world a better place, help the world (we are the world we are the children blah blah blah.) Here's the thing: children are not short adults and what they know is not the same as what they have been exposed to - okay that is the case with adults too. What do they though these kids I work with, what do they understand or internalize about the world that bombards them constantly? INTERNALIZE! HAH! How much space do we allow for that in the wasl world? That is what I try to offer - a space to write and think and be and question and free to be you and me hi marlo! This is going swimmingly well I think.

awake in the night thinking about what I am going to teach, what I have to teach, what I can bring to sixth graders that might wake them up that might make a difference in their lives that might hit them as my daughter says in the demographic thinking about what their teacher who is quitting teaching because she's discouraged because her feelings get hurt because the kids are careless the kids are thoughtless the kids disregard adult feelings are disaffected are disinclined to behave are left out are in public frigging school where so many decisions have been made to diseducate disenfranchise discard them because they go to frigging public school what she said the teacher what she wants which is for me to make some sense of a story that is the basis of an international project called machinto based on a picturebook that tells the story horrific and inappropriate for children but which is based on true events and tells the story of a three year old child eating a tomato when the a bomb hit nagasaki who dying with mouth full of tomato tells her mother i want more so her mother combs the devastated city looking for more tomatoes her daughter's voice crying i want more returning to find the child dead but a bird lifting over the city crying i want more which is heartrendingly awful and i am supposed to come up with something a writing prompt a series of writing prompts to connect the kids with this horror and this pathos and this longing and all of this with life affirming lilt and optimism the last part because i will inflict optimism and uplift and possibility that is my job

windows open
even when they don't




newage flute on the stereo
my mind in a tight fist




skylight over my left shoulder
blue sky and cobweb





my dog is 10 years old
my daughter's dog is dead





my green tea mug reads
santa's spirit santa's spirit santa's sp






get out of my own way get out of my own way get out of my own way get out of my own way
i want my own way.

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