Thursday right after school I drove just under two hours to Ashland to see Mark Doty. Culture shock just to drive from my little left-out town over the mountains to the mini-urbanity in muted toned nubbly fabrics of Ashland. Let alone going to see a major poet. How frightening would that be, to be written about as a major poet? Last year I went to Ashland to see Li-Young Lee. It's hard to think though since I'm sitting in the town library where a skeleton hand with a little speaker in its wrist and a motion detector somewhere laughs in a scary Halloween voice every couple of minutes. The motion detector is broken, it isn't that there are dozens of passersby at the desk. The librarian's smile has gone a bit grimace but she's game enough to keep the thing on, which draws the kids wandering around every so often so she can tell them about the free movie (Monsters vs. Aliens) at 2pm in the big room here at the community center.

Which reminds me of how Mark Doty's reading began, after the interminable fawning introduction that drew attention to the fact that the speaker whoever she so prettily was had heard him first at the Geraldine R. Dodge poetry festival. Finally, he walked on stage, they sorta hugged, sorta shook hands, he said a bit of a syllable (sorry, I don't remember which,) and then a prerecorded woman's voice boomed from the speaker above his head, telling us to keep our feet off the seats in front of us, this being the high school's very beautiful theater, and then the regular stuff all theaters remind us about. It'd have been nice to have done that bit before or perhaps during the stint of the introducer.

Doty opened by celebrating the broadside the one letter press printer in Ashland made for his reading, which I had bought before going in in the lobby for $10 (a bargain.) Before reading his poem he read the poem that he said it sprang from - "In the Same Space" by the Greek poet (I always think ancient Greek when someone says Greek poet, but I caught up) C. P. Cavafy. Here's that poem:

IN THE SAME SPACE

The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood
that I've seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

-C.P. Cavafy


Doty said the last line over again, and we knew this line was what carried him into his poem of the same title.

He read in that markedly slowed down manner that puts me off for about a poem and a half and then draws me into the words. Jane Hirshfield does a similar thing - when I heard her last year my first thought was "how affected," but then I was transported. Ditto Doty.

The couple to my right just moved to Ashland from Zila, near Yakima. He was a journalist, she a children's librarian sucked up into management. They were so pleased with their relocation. Ashland has a cultural life, from the Shakespeare Festival to the Varsity Movie Theater to the Bloomsbury Bookstore, and the Chautauqua Series that brings poets like Mark Doty, who not only read at the evening event but work with the kids in the high school. No wonder they're pleased. It's also physically beautiful, and whatever my meaner thoughts about the slight affectation of the gentlefolk farmers in the vicinity, there's lots of wonderful local food, including artisan cheeses.

And now the librarian is talking with another local who brought in an unwatchable DVD he'd checked out, returning it now unwatched, complaining "you know how people are around here." Sigh.

Doty read a handful of new poems, one of which, about being greeted by the emissary goat from a herd, I really liked. He told an anecdote about Stanley Kunitz at his 98th birthday, then talked about his puzzling over Kunitz hitting his poetic stride in his 70's and 80's. "I think it's because of his garden," Doty said. Kunitz loved all phases of the garden - all year, from upsurge to rot. Like most of the rest of us, Doty said he struggles with any kind of acceptance of mortality. He read his poem "Heaven for Paul" wonderfully - it's set in an airplane about to crash, and features his partner Paul going glowily beatific facing death while he panicked. I liked his talk about Kunitz better than "Heaven for Stanley," but that's just me.

During the q & a, which I'm always grumpy about, the questions usually being more along the lines of "LOOK AT ME!" than sincere questions, someone asked about how Doty got started writing prose. He said after his lover died in 1994 he couldn't write poems - what he was going through wouldn't let him make poems. He started writing in sentences, then paragraphs, in prose. He began looking at them, thinking, "now, that sentence there could be better..." He said that opened an aesthetic distance, paused, then said, "Aesthetic Distance can Save Your Life." (caps mine.)

Afterwards, I wandered the lobby watching folks lined up to have their books signed. My broadside had come presigned so I didn't have to stand in the line. I hate standing in the line, forcing the exhausted poet to engage with WHO? little me there with my book out wanting his actual hand on my paper. Pah! And the fear I'll say something. If I could just thrust the book forward, stay mute, I'd avoid the possibility of blather. Kiss the anti-blarney stone before standing in a signing line.

I'm jangling - we asked for money for our trip to Bend and have gotten LOTS of money for our trip, which has made me weepily grateful and worried that some of the seniors are trying to not go because. I don't know why. Because we are old people. Because we (the teacher and I) are white. I know in one case that is probably true. BORING and STUPID and TRUE. Ok, I'm using boring the way the kids use boring. I don't understand what's going on and I want it to go away.

I must email the teacher to see how we can be sure everyone is on board we want to be on board. I worry we'll have fewer Tribal kids than the college has assigned Tribal guides. Isn't that dumb of me? But at this point I feel we OWE everyone who has donated our absolute danged best to SHOW THE HECK UP!

Which is the theme pretty much of a well-lived life: SHOW UP. Goof up. Mess up. SHOW UP again. Sometimes don't trip over anything or say a spazzy thing or spill coffee down the front of your white shirt. SHOW UP the next time. Say "I wonder what blah blah will be like?" and SHOW UP. Get nervous. Chew your nails and the inside of your face but SHOW UP. Wear what you wore to bed last night trying to keep warm but SHOW UP. Hitchhike. Scramble through the brambles, the sage, take a kayak, a bus. When your car breaks down, stick out your thumb. When you get bad news, grieve, and then, put on the walking shoes and SHOW UP.

I read two Matthew Dickman poems to the seniors today, as preamble to our trip to Bend to see him read with Sherman Alexie and Karen Karbo. The first poem I read was called "Amigos" - over a page long, single spaced. The second poem, "Love", I was afraid to photocopy and pass out due to its adult subject matter - sex. Sherman Alexie's young adult novel was banned a hundred miles from here because the narrator says (this is a paraphrase, but pretty accurate,) "I masturbate. I admit it. I'm pretty good at it. I'm ambidextrous." In "Love" Matthew Dickman (coincidental last name) mentions a woman having legs around someone's waist, and oral sex. Though three junior girls spent fifth period discussing anal sex, I'm probably not allowed to knowingly expose the seniors to any sexual references. Oh well, oops. I told them I was going to read them a poem probably inappropriate to school and that I was only going to read it to them once. Then I made copies and handed them out.

In fifth and sixth periods the students are making books. They're in the early getting it together phase, so I did a show and tell of book making. A few are interested in pop-up books, so I'll see what I can put together for Thursday's show and tell, including a storyboard for planning. We're out of my expertise area, but what the heck, I like to wing it and see where we go. I love to explore the intersection of word and image. The important thing is for me to stay on track and not confuse those who need more structure by heading off in many possible directions. "What am I supposed to do?" they ask. And they want one answer.

In answer to a question from one of my students, Sherman Alexie replied, "A successful literary career is mostly about postage, and I guess email now." In which case the last two days I have been mid-very-successful-literary career, having sent out probably 13 submissions, not counting the book manuscript I sent to a contest. Now that I've reproofed (I reprove myself for not having done this BEFORE sending to the contest having caught several typos from what I thought was a 100% clean manuscript) the book, I might as well send it off to some other book contests. I've duct taped the big flapping lips of my inner critic and set her out in the bike and kayak shed to entertain the clumsy and loud-walking ground squirrel with her deep sighing.

The teacher's back! Yay! All of us need his structure and that feeling of purpose that comes with it. He's younger than my younger child and so much older than the high school kids. Luckily I stopped aging when I gave birth for the first time.

The sophomores, here in this rural school where everyone is Indian, white or maybe Mexican, did not like Amiri Baraka's "Bang, Bang, Outishly (for Monk.)" How is this poetry? They said. I wouldn't download it for free, they said. I'd played them a little Thelonious Monk beforehand and that didn't seem to register - the connection between the music and the poem. Such a different response than from an urban classroom. Is this relevant? I don't know. I do know these kids are very afraid of what they don't know or understand, that is not already in their world. Maybe part of it? I played the Monk quietly through the period while we wrote poems - today we wrote "Where I'm From" poems inspired by last year's poems from our book THE NEWS FROM CHILOQUIN and a little bit by Georgia Ella Lyons' poem which had started those last year poems. I'm trying to heavily insert the reality of the book into proceedings. Thursday will be revision day.

I forgot there is break after second period and walked out of the class when the bell rang since the teacher had left, saying something about coming back. I didn't realize the break mistake until I was driving towards, nearly to, the library where I now sit typing instead of talking about syllabi development or going to meet with the principal to see if we can take the seniors off on an overnight trip to Bend. HA! No issues there. None. Zip zilch, cannot think of a way things could tip off the high dive into the deep end there.

10/7/09 Daily Crossword Poem Draft


I advise you buy the bag with clasp
not one sagged open that says naif
or nothing in your wallet, Euro earl
noble pearl, ramparts tumbled, vent
to sky events, sleet, drizzle, rain, etal
Rochester, the moors, and heather
in the flu borne English weather. Nod
and hope I'll lope along and leave you
to your purchase, hie me home to sew
or show whatall I know to one who
isn't you. Dispense with talk as you
disburse to buy that purse I bet
I'll bless you yet and yet I'm double
parked, my tires marked, the chalk
but not the ticket. Oh sticky wicket
I'll call you at home another day
cut crusts away and harvest cress
your guess as good as mine for
who am I to say or bless unless
that fanny pack's zip has broken.

---

Third teaching day without the teacher in the classroom - Thursday, Tuesday, now this Thursday. Six days and maybe counting he's away and all his order and purpose far away and how many days will that take to rebuild? I pick up litter, put the desks back in order, shelve the books and still he is not here and tensions and chaos rise. Today's sub was a stickler writing referrals right and left, making good she said, following through she said, but breathing discord in this room where trust was building block by stick by gluey mortar, now a tumbled heap. There's a history here of teachers, English teachers, fleeing. The kids feel uneasy. "Is he in the state?" a teacher asked in the teachers' room. A question. He's been on the phone or email calling in his absences. I want him to come back, a student says. I want him to come back.

October 6 09 Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


I collected postage stamps from Chad
that came in glassine slip covers, rode
the bus to school, strapped on skates
to circle the basement, drew hula
dancers on construction paper, aped
my elders, made a plaster of paris tibia
took in TV from Miss Elaine to Igor.
National Geographic meant the Nile
and piles of sunken gold refound, the
flu was more TV and toast and jam
but here I am and I am groping
not to scream, my mother phoning
news that she is old and failing. I let
her worry, as I always have, aloud,
which worries me but I don't dare,
I spin my skate wheel, still eleven.

Here in Chiloquin the Shell Station gets the Oregonian newspaper, except on Sundays and Mondays. The mail people bring the paper, so it makes sense we can't get the paper Sundays, but the Monday missing paper is a mystery. The clerk behind the counter with the plastic wrapped muffins on it told me sometimes the Oregonian doesn't get here cuz the Oregonian people are late and the mail people can't wait.

September 23, 2009 Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

Scared to be paired, you stomp
the street in your ratty coat, owl
hoot out the back window, awl
in your hand, not ready to accede
to what you don't understand:
area of Mobius strip, weevil path.
You don't believe in evil, sky
brightening, door bolted, humanity
on the other side of the road. Is art
the only answer you have? Pascal
in velvet cloak, no camera snap,
but you're held rapt by any story.

Sunny and warm in Chiloquin, Oregon,
I'm once again at the back table at the library
checking email and listening to conversations
between the librarian and whoever comes in.
I arrived Saturday, in time to meet my landlord
at 10am. The new house is on Agency Lake.
ON AGENCY LAKE. Out my window are
cottonwoods and beyond them AGENCY LAKE.
This morning I took out one of the kayaks -
sadly the one branded "Emotion" is too large,
but I wore the radiation yellow life vest
and once I was afloat - butt in the boat,
then feet tucked in and no turning turtle,
I was level with abundant water bird life
and the whutter of wings as flocks lifted
to set down further from my whisper paddles.
I set off towards the Wood River Wetlands,
until recently somebody's farm reclaimed
from wetlands, water drained and a dyke
put in place which was dynamited to restore
the wetlands - "Only in Klamath County"
my informant told me. Ah but the result!
I paddled over algae green water, then
over water browned by peat, keeping my
eye on the broken peak that once continued
up as Mt. Mazama. On the water were
what looked like two rafts of white pelicans
so far and so immobile I began to doubt
and thought them first duck blinds and
later chalk graffiti, though they were
two rafts of white pelicans, dozens in
each, and three posed on an underwater
island closer to me, one of which fumbled
into flight and joined one of the rafts.
I didn't get close enough that they would
all take wing, deciding to leave them
to their fishing and visiting, while I
turned back to my house. I panicked
momentarily. How would I recognize
where I'd come from? I remembered
the large green house I'd walked past
yesterday, very close to shore. If I
got to that I'd know I'd gone too far.
It took me nearly an hour to reach
the pelicans, maybe twenty minutes
to get back to the cabin, where I
successfully disembarked without
falling into the lake, losing neither
kayak nor paddle.

Scattered every which way
every room humped with mess in progress
brain hot with synapse fire
mired mainly in too much to do
no time to see it through (no will
most of the year to do) And how
are you?

Is there a wonderful new feature on blogger that disallows you to copy and paste, even from your own blog, even when logged in? This will reduce my paranoid fantasy that other people are copying my blog poem drafts, recrafting them and making millions in the frenzied money making world of international poetry. Someone has written a book entitled FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS. Jess Walter. Coming to the U Village Barnes & Noble on September 22. I'll be in Chiloquin, Oregon. But you could go. Will he speak about Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot? Period? Subtitle: The Music of Failure. An actual book. My current favorite title. Not about poets and finance. I was going to quote myself from early 2006 but I'll leave this.

Texas Crazy Ants aka Rasberry ants are real. Also Caribbean Crazy Ants. Their generic names: paratrechnia species near pubens and paratrechina pubens. See their blog.

Moisture Ants Are One Thing

But when Texas Crazy Ants amass
we flee, cow poke congressman or co-ed
grab skivvies and our horn rims
run for the hills "Not it!" "NOT IT!"
we choose our molten thoughts in lieu
of creativity. We'll go you know - atop
the onion domes of former Doodyville
nurse ants ferry larva and we're nada
how's that gotta carve your melon?
You're hell on wheels, ants smile
whether Lancaster and Ewing
you won't be doing what you're doing
when Texas Crazy Ants scramble
like the anarchists they are. Fazed?
oh I suppose. I'm scared
this drama is worse than opera
larvae nurseries in mailbox, vases,
so we retreat with diddly squat
trot off as these ants carom
harem scarem over every place
obliterate your face not even in a rage
I may exagerrate a tad
hordes eat hot dogs and your honey
and also honey bees. Oh, jeeze.

9/10/09 Daily Crossword Puzzle Poetry Draft


Ballet pink I find to my dismay is passe
though who am I to know, my toes enclosed
in solid shoes and this a pedicure?
She diligently saws at dried out skin
as I doze, an oaf like hobbit Astin
until the flip flops and I shuffle off
a pretty city girl about to head to RFD
these shrimp boat OPI dyes affect
a happy change from grumpy to belief
I'm just the chick to change the clime
for kids whose crappy hands aren't dealt
for keeps for good and all and all the heft
their tragedies that tend to other ports
than mine and time declares a truce
is there a use in all of this? You bet
or sing me arias from Carmen.
You trip and scramble far as
anyone can go and still you have an ear
for injustice even when it's not sci fi.
But why (we're talking of Antietam)
do the rapists claim the staff of life?
Point at the chart say fish will spawn
again and all your bitching's moot.

9/9/09 (!!!!) Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

If only life made sense like math
the satisfying grids and graphs
no fool's grin to make you ache
or take you, just one long hora
hour after hour, no Eva or Evita
yelling in your ear, a peer
appearing when predicted halts
and bows and hey it's Parker
or Joe you like or maybe Bob
if you want it snow, no Bozo
Mr. Green Jeans, Captain Kan-
garoo appearing by the Erie
but dearie this ain't true you
got that neurosthemia mold
those Irene blues bed all red
and you know who has landed
your nephew uncle lover son
have done what no man done
before so you're a whore Bebe
Jeeze they'd never if not teased
ah please court date soon in re
who asked you it's after nine
sine wave calculus bestow

---

Some days its yay hurray
others it's oh brother

---

Moving back into our house, this is no poem, it's real and I don't want to strip sheets and mattress pads, sort towels, vaccuum, make sure we're where we should be financially etc. I want to stare into the sky and look at my fingers and have the duties my granddaughter has - just figuring out how to use this amazing engine that runs me. Sigh.

Poem Draft from the Wenatchee World Daily Crossword Puzzle for this Tuesday's WW


Well, I'm finking out on writing this poem, can't stop thinking about other things, especially since the first two "words" across are "kwh" and "tsp" and the third is the flat and unmusical "chow". How now brown cow where's your chow? Chew your chow now, won't thou? Sheesh.

Last evening, moon waxing gibbous (god I love to write that word), over the lake flat as seran wrap stretched over a bowl of really great leftover potato salad, Jim said, "let's take a boat ride," and we got into our boat with UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo. Duh. We've begun to read it as a read aloud. We've had several halts on the read aloud front lately. The 1951 Dodgers vs. Yankees? Mets? crap, I loved the scene, but baseball team names fall from my consciousness like factual details so often do for me. Every trip down lake is a revelation - I don't remember the coastline, the mountain peaks. I do remember the Seuss house and the house with the Hobie Cats out front, the property with the fussy gazebo and mobile home by the shore. What else do we need to be happy along the lake? I forget constellations and which direction the earth rotates. I have the eye of imagination but the eye of organization has miazmal glaucoma. I'm reading Ruth Gendler's NOTES ON THE NEED FOR BEAUTY, which has a lovely bit about eyes. She cites an essay in Bill Holm's book, THE MUSIC OF FAILURE, which I immediately looked up on Powell's (no show) and then Amazon.com, where it is available for $38. Um, the credit card went back into the duct tape wallet at that point. If anyone owns the book and wants to photocopy the essay "Horizontal Grandeur" I'll pay for the copying and postage! The piece I'm going to quote really hit me since I'm going back to the high plains of Chiloquin, Oregon for nine weeks on the 18th. Here's the passage I underlined from Ruth's NOTNFB:

In a brief, beautiful essay, "Horizontal Grandeur," Minnesota writer Bill Holm distinguishes between two ways of seeing, which he calls "the prairie eye" and "the woods eye." "The prairie eye looks for distance, clairty, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental."

Holm describes how someone with a woods eye looks at twenty miles of prairie and sees nothing but grass. The one with a prairie eye "looks at a square foot and sees a universe; ten or twenty flowers and grasses, heights, heads, colors, shades, configurations, bearded, rough, smooth, simple, elegant. When a cloud passes over the sun, colors shift, like a child's kaleidoscope... Trust a prairie eye to find beauty and understate it truthfully, no matter how violent the apparent exaggeration. Thoreau, though a woodsman, said it right: 'I can never exaggerate enough.'"

On the next page, she writes : "Because by nature I readily identify with the eye of the imagination, I have been deeply moved by exercises that strengthen the eye of observation."

It is easy for me to depend on my eye of imagination and my quick facility, but these limit what I write and what I think about - wall off possibilities and make it easy for me to stumble downward into not seeing anything at all. I'm always having to haul myself up out of the awful well I've fallen into because I wasn't paying attention. Did you hear the "This American Life" segment on cruelty? I listened as a man began a story about he and a group of friends out playing, hearing a man weakly calling out, having heard them. He set up how wordlessly the lot of them, after an initial burst of rescue motions, chose not to help him or tell anyone. I couldn't stand listening. The tension was horrible; I could not hang with the story, couldn't bear the thought that man might have died for lack of rescue by those boys. As a little girl I could not watch "I Love Lucy" once the plot began in earnest. I jumped up and ran to my room as my parents sat and guffawed, smoking their headache causing cigarettes, my father in that green chair with the coppery brads making a border up the vertical fronts of the chair arms. Dreading something awful in the offing I retreat. I label myself emotional coward. I am cowed by emotions and events that have nothing to do with me. Worse when they HAVE something to do with me. My father is 84 years old. His doctor recently said, "You look like a man of 60 and you're robustly healthy, outside of the strokes." My father says, "I sometimes wonder what I will be when I grow up." Is it a family trait to put off till tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow since we look so much younger than others our age that we really might have that much more time, or maybe all the time in the world? Maybe we like Highlander are IMMORTAL, though I would hate to have to be on my guard all the time, have to sword fight my way to permanent immortality, the immortality even being conditional. So what you hung out with Mozart? Today I lop off your head and get stronger! I move toward The Gathering getting more warlike every encounter! RARRRR! Immortality does not convey maturity. And see how far I've wandered?

Looking at Jupiter through our bad telescope, we could see one of its moons. Jim said, "people used to call the planets 'The Wanderers.'"

After a meditative moment enjoying that phrase, I thought how I've lived all these years and have never particularly noticed planets. I haven't had to of course, my life doesn't depend on the night sky for navigation by land or sea or even within my imagination. My thoughts garble in the day's news, other people's needs, and I need a post-it note to remind me to look up on a clear night, to lie on the ground and stare into that vastness and marvel if not remember or even note what's up there in a naming/knowledge way.

Yesterday Jim harvested several of our tomatoes and many of our basil leaves. I'd remembered to buy fresh mozzerella at the Chelan Safeway, so we made caprese salad, mozzerella slab, basil leaf, tomato slice, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, eaten on our deck staring at the placid lake, the wild mountain the other side of it, feeling the air so perfectly the right temperature it felt soft and no temperature at all. And then I awoke to Jim shutting windows and the french door, rain slapping the trex deck, smell of newly wet cement, Thor rolling his bowling balls along the lanes above the bruised clouds.

September 2, 2009 Newsday Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


Hey you in balaclava drinking java
thick as lava, wanker' to my banker's urge
one hand is flush with spades and clubs
the other out in orbit or Hanoi
you excavate my foundation
like crustaceon or yeast, no east
to orient your beast, or is it me?
What I say is less than what I see
seems to me wit separates us from nit
but I digress. You bet me odd or even
we both know we'll never be on par
you at the bar me Carrie Nation avid
do you believe in gravitas? At our age
we should rage but we're too small.

Seattle Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
September 1, 2009


As Sly Stone said you don't have to be a star
baby but those were the days before eBay
when you knew a blackberry by the thorn
and porn was Playboy not plastic to ogle
blue lit online. Nobody's avatar sang alto
your identity equaled you tap tap no erase
you knew your place and everybody died


---

for the second day in a row our neighbors at the idyllic *SIGH* lake are having their septic tank pumped. This is very very very loud and my brain is ahum with the thrum of the motor sucking muck from underground two doors down. What an awful soul-snatching sound. Omnipresent as mosquito hum in the middle of the night, reverberating off the mountains on the opposite shore, pounding through my pores like guilt or fear of the dark. They don't admit defeat these neighbors and whatever is wrong with the plumbing - sludge coming up into the kitchen sink or a stink behind the house after a washload - they will wrestle it into submission through whatever noisy and neighborhood disturbing means money can put at their disposal. Disposal is a problem here where nothing untoward must fall into the lake, though make no mistake these folks put plenty they shouldn't into the lake. Their lawn in the desert uplands along Lake Chelan could be a putting green. Men don't only come to mow and loudly weed whack the perimeter, they pour onto it nitrogen and potassium soon to be to dear to add to crops and that other p chemical my mind is too full of hideous hum to come up with. It sounds like a plane coming in to land on a tether to stop it landing so that the jets perpetually fret just above the runway right next to our house.

8/28/09 Daily Crossword Poem Draft


If beauty hired district reps
and all the world was stage
you'd drop crutch and soar
let's listen as we hum our tune
as good for us as daily fiber
so what the traffic's daily roar
they're out for blood? We stroll
and loll and all, we seek relief
from grief and wave our flag
a rag as clean as any and solid
as the scraggy hat we doff
to anyone who stops lenient
as all who lean and loaf at ease
and these are all the arenas
needed. Pines don't cost a cent
and we've sent back the modem

Daily Crossword Puzzle Draft 8/25/09


In the days when armpits were arid
in all the streams squacked fowls
far away where air was clean and char
was for marshmallows we made
our mothers sent our food to India
davenots and grammas all lace
doilies, arms shivery not to ogle
though we did possessed by demon
and most of my dinner was on me
we wept but kept going
and now it's we who've aged
photobooks yellowing spent
like broken teeth as we reseat
at the hat dance at the fiesta
whoever's at the altar isn't us
and all history is ours to amend
as we attend to other woes than ours
for all we preen we won't be seen
for long so grab your uke
and sing another sec
who wants to find that sketch
he made when you lay nude
and all your bits stood firm

Participated in a Five Strokes poetry happening (sorry - 60's language, but it WAS!) at SAM Thursday night. Four poets, a stack of sumi painted art critique pages, a microphone, clipboards, blank paper and pencils (no pens in the galleries, alas.) We were situated in the SAM Next room - first exhibit: photographs by Corin Hewitt that resulted from an installation he did for a week in 2007 at the Portland Art Museum. All about gesture and pasta, and I hadn't eaten any dinner.

Writing poems, gesturing towards or in the direction of poems from the words on the art critique pages and the sumi gesture paintings was not a problem, was familiar, was enjoyable. I love to write in company with other poets. We were a bit of an art installation, some on the floor, some on the gallery bench, all hunched over our writing.

Our instructions were to go to the mic and talk about the process we went through to write each poem as we completed the gesture toward a poem. This was complicated. We couldn't then read the poems aloud, but had to lay them on the floor and return to writing. I stood at the microphone, turned it on, looked out and was surrounded by other human beings - audience! - but how to connect with audience with no poem? How to talk honestly about process while trying to connect with audience with no rehearsal, no product to share? Was I supposed to pretend they weren't there? Our commentary was being broadcast in the main lobby. Was my job even to try to connect or only to report? I gave a report. I didn't look at anybody after the initial reflexive hello and smile. I felt guilty having cheated audience of an expectation that I would perform. I felt like a middle schooler. Each time I got up to present, I used larger words to explain my process, at least I felt that I did. I separated. I only marginally listened to my fellow poets present. At the end I read their poems on the floor. I was the only one to gesture at signing my name. I'd signed "lg" to my first couple of poems, then noticed nobody else was attaching attributions, so I quit. I took some of the sets home, they're beside me on this desk. Not because I wanted to save them but because I didn't want Greg to have to fuss with them, get them to recycling. Anyway, here's one of my poems. The epigraph is from the text of the page I was looking at.

"Nothing could be further
from the authentic art
of our time than the idea
of a rupture of continuity."

And I'm delighted to find
a typo on top of the second page
"an" for "and" deflating
scholarly elevation, illumination
under the watchful eye or breast,
scrumbled cloud, perhaps toupee.

***

Ciao for now.