Detail of My Door

Oh how to describe what the yoohoo I've done here. Ahem. A deck of cards, gluestick, and collage pictures, then the idea of dividing my poem "Walking Up To It All The Time" into 52 segments. After I had the cards all pasted, with the lines on them, I went to the photocopy place which was having a mad sale and made giant photocopies (2 to an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet.) The blow ups couldn't make giant cards (unless I paste them to cardboard which I still might do,) so I taped them to the glass of my studio door. I like the playing card size better, but these give me pleasure too.

Life Changing Heading Photo to Arrive Later Today

Meanwhile, I have been restored by a two night stay on a gorgeous farm on Lopez Island with two other writers where lo! we wrote and ate very well and walked and WROTE and communed with each other but only in the evenings because at other times we WROTE! which is to say that I wrote and felt myself a writer writing, a poet inside a poem, miraculously inside the music of a poem, and this is what I wish for every poet. Amen.

The Overhead Projector, A Eulogy

My big worry with being away from schools for this week is that Hamilton International Middle School is going to do away with the pile of overhead projectors behind the yellow do not cross tape in the library before I get a photograph of them.

Overhead projectors work great for displaying a poem on a transparency - want to comment on the poem in writing on the page but not wreck the transparency for the next class? Slip it under the roll of transparent plastic already there and write on THAT. Overhead projectors have always sat on tables or carts, mostly wheeled carts, that put them at just the right height for writing on standing in front of the class.

A few years ago a student wrote an ode to the overhead projector that he read to the class complete with affectionate gestures toward the overhead projector.

My father told me that once at Boeing a visiting luminary was giving a talk, complete with bullet points on a transparency projected on an overhead projector that had a ladybug crawling around inside it. He was far more interested in the course of the ladybug than the course material.

I remember going to a concert in about 1969 somewhere small at the Seattle Center. The dazzling psychodelic light show involved petri dishes of oil set on the glass of an overhead projector. Food coloring out of an eye dropper splashed into the petri dishes projected on the far wall in the darkened room - we saw colors, man.

Objects placed on the overhead projector and projected gain mythical importance.

The group Monochrom recorded, apparently more than once, a pop song called "Farewell to the Overhead" in 2005. Worth a listen for the pronunciation of "photosynthesis" and to annoy your housemates.

Overhead projectors look like prehistoric beings, and now they're going extinct too.

RADISH KING CURES COMMON COLD

Miracle on 45th Street

Last night, I slogged soggily (my dripping nose) to the poetry reading at Open Books (one of only TWO poetry-only bookstores in the US and probably the UNIVERSE.) After hearing the ever humorous, humble and brilliantly bent poet Rebecca Loudon read from Radish King, my internal antiviral attack squad, obviously reinvigorated by the poems, kicked in and, reader, I am cured. Rebecca also read from Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home, which, from the comma in the title through the very last letter poem, may, and probably was, also responsible for the happy turn-about in my condition. Ron Starr, poet of dextrous text combinations and the mysterious magic square, also had a voice in my recovery, reading from his new book, A Map by a Dim Lamp.

(If you go to AMBADL link and scroll further down, you will find Rebecca Loudon's first and most red book, Tarantella, which, while she did not read from it last night, possesses curative qualities, particularly when read loudly aloud.)

Sugar-soaked valentine love to all from me here at the new blogger.

POETRY READING PREP!!!!!!

Get Ready to READ ALOUD!

Community School Olders’ Reading
Kirkland Park Place Books
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 6:00 pm


Get to know your poem:

Read through your poem saying ONLY the vowel sounds (if silent, DON’T say!)
Read through your poem saying ONLY consonant sounds (if silent, DON’T say!)
Circle verbs, imagine those actions, then imagine as you read the poem
Underline phrases that make a picture in your mind (images) and
PICTURE THESE! Picture each image as you read your poem
Say each line of your poem 5-6 times in a row in a loud voice while
moving your whole body (jumping jacks, marching)


Warm up your instruments (your body & your voice):

Stretch your uvula, neck circles, shoulder circles, arm stretches
Tongue twisters:
You know you need unique New York
ToyBoats ToyBoats ToyBoats ToyBoats ToyBoats ToyBoats ToyBoats
Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers
“Ah” from toes to head
Sing and dance along with the radio in a loud voice


Do:

Dress as you, the poet. Spiff up AND be COMFORTABLE!
Get to know your poem
Warm up your instruments
HAVE FUN!

_________

This is the handout I made this morning to give to 5th and 6th graders who will be reading their poems aloud tomorrow night. When and if I follow my own advice, I give a better reading. I have also discovered that repeating the lines over and over is a great revision tool. Ciao for now.

Petrodvoritz: photo by Todd Lininger

Acronymble at Hamilton Middle School:

Letters: FTFMN

Forgotten Titans follow monkey news.
fried turkey feathers minus nutrition
Friends triumphed, found marginal niceness.

Letters: APAINJ

Assorted painters argued in New Jersey
astonished panthers ambled
into natural Jell-O

Letters: TORPPQ

to order ravioli,
press Pound Q

Territorial ordinary raddiccio
pretended placid quietness

Letters: AILKPI

Abalones incubated licorice
keeping particular "Ikes"

Astonishingly, I like keeping peace indexes

Letters: XDUOW

Expecting disaster, Ulysses
offered wine.

Excellent doodles unfurled odd words.

Xenophobic ducks understood other worlds.

Letters: AUOLGA

Actually, umbrellas open like growing angels.

Letters: AVMVNDL

Authentic Vulcan maps
virtual Neptunian direction lessons.

Aspirin volunteered Monday
victuals never denied licorice.

Are violins made valuable?
Not during Lent.

The coolest thing about the Acronymble Game is that kids (above are MY acronymbles) use their vocabularies in a fuller way than if you say, "let's write something using all your good words." (guaranteed to result in: I like my friend. He is nice.)

Yesterday, the sixth graders wrote credo poems based on Roque Dalton's "Like You". Here is mine:

Like You

Like you, I love to move my pen across the white page
to discover and create my thoughts.

Like you, I lose patience with leaders who do not
hear me, but I keep speaking and writing.

I believe poetry is meaningful as a way of life.

I believe your walnut skin, olive skin, pink skin,
ebony skin is a beautiful part of you and
that what we have in common runs deeper
than the shapes of our noses and lips,
the differences in our age and outfits.

Like you, I love my life and feel joy in my senses.

Like you, I am upset by unfair decisions
and distressed when someone I love is ill
or dies.

I believe we can do better by this earth
and be more careful with each other.

Like you, I work every day to
live up to what I believe.

-Laura Gamache

The Royal Villa at Knossos, Isle of Crete.
Not actually composed of tiny digital rectangles.

Tikki tikki tembo
no sa rembo
cherry berry muchi
blank blank blank _embo

saw TIKKI TIKKI TEMBO in the window at Elliott Bay Bookstore and said this in response, though the fourth line came out too. (100% true to the page I'm sure.)

And what is my thesis here, students? Love your mind. Pay attention. Who knows what tricks you're going to find yourself capable of if you just keep walking forward? Do what you love, practice what you love, who the fuck cares if you're any good at it? This my dears is none of your dang business, and cut the snickering about the f word.

Tom Waits on the radio (KEXP) yesterday, that great song about breaking up done as a weather report over the blues riffs. So funny and painful. The sky clear, air biting (this is an actual weather report, no subtext.)

Yesterday afternoon we went to see Labarinto del Fauno at the Majestic Bay Theater. I love the Majestic Bay Theater's view from the upper level where the refreshment stand is always closed. I love the brass boat cleat door handles and the extraterrestrial space ships with fiber optics spewing that hang overhead. The movie offered too realistic gruesome war cruelties but that was the point, the way we turn from that, a child turns from that into fantasy.

Morning in the dark house, light just beginning to define the window boundaries. Last night the last night for awhile for the peeled grape moon to brightly brightly break my sleep.

Train horn, not whistle, in the distance. Took a sounds class from David Mahler, former director of the now-defunct Volunteer Park Conservatory Orchestra, who explained the difference.

"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