Meander Knot Press

Early December

2011-12-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

Concessions of Grace

2011-11-12T17:25:00.000-08:00

The barefoot nuns
considered unmarriageable
by their wealthy families
laughed in the garden
as they tended particular myrtles
and their exotic flowers
that would dry into cloves

Tonight the chapel master
was returning from Italy
with new music for them to sing

Elsewhere, the territorial spirits
were taking dominion over
the steadfast but ever-changing moon

To them it is all a texture of sounds
They stand resolutely in front
of the gates of paradise stuck open
with the grit of ages

Conversing with the fates
what they do not have
is visible everywhere

The seductions of certainty
Red-twigged dogwoods
Mr. Saltmarsh and Mr. Squadron
build a particle accelerator
out of a kitchen chair
a clothes rack
a pie pan

Let the bear decide
The nuns pick oranges to preserve
for the children on their Saint’s Day

Their bruised hands push cloves
into the fragrant flesh
one by one

The Nobel Prize

2011-10-06T09:29:00.001-07:00

I am very happy that Tomas Transtromer won the prize! I so admire his work. Truly I do.

Post Reading High

2011-09-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came to the reading last night! I had fun.

It was the first time I have ever had this long a time slot to read my poetry in (35 minutes) and it was an interesting and useful exercise in preparing for the reading to create a narrative line that bound the poems together. In this particular case the narrative was about my complicated and rewarding relationship that was all about poetry with Andrew.

So many times, most times we go to a reading and the poet reads one poem, maybe with a little comment and then another, maybe with another comment and in the end we get a somewhat disjointed view of the body of work.

And reading is all about the body.The physical body and the body of work.

As far as I am concerned it is about respect too. Respecting the folks that have shown up and are listening to you. I have just barely heard a number of featured readers in the last five months or so since I have been back in the mix. Mumbling, never looking at the audience, swallowing words, etc. etc.

I know reading in public is difficult. It takes a different skill set then writing the darn poems. But please, if you are going to do it, think a little about the experience of your audience...

This morning I feel this unusual for me sensation of delight and accomplishment.

Absolutely lovely.

Join Me September 21st!

2011-09-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

Do join me on Wednesday September 21st at St. John's Booksellers at 8622 N Lombard Portland at 7pm for my new chapbook launch and Featured Poetry Reading.

There will an Open Mic afterwards so bring a poem or two of your own.

Summer Morning in the Gorge

2011-08-05T18:19:00.001-07:00

A Toe in the Water? Back in the Saddle?

2011-05-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

I am hoping to read three of the last four poems (those about hands) as parts of a whole at the Open Mic at the reading in the gallery at Stonehenge Studios this coming Sunday evening May 8th.

It has been awhile since I have read in public. Hopefully, I can still be engaging.

Saturday Viewing

2011-01-24T17:23:00.000-08:00

The tip of Mt. Hood this last Saturday morning.

For Jennifer

2010-10-22T18:46:00.001-07:00

Pacific City-Oregon Coast October 2010

October

2010-10-03T07:45:00.001-07:00

The One That Mattered

2010-09-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

“I love you very much”,
he would say to complete
contact with every woman
towards the end. A kindness,

both for him and the other.
Sometimes, most times
in the moment it was true.

And, the easy thing to do.
As his caregiver I held the secret
of this promiscuous proclamation close.

Constantly amazed
to see what a woman will do
when she believes
she is the one that mattered.

Into The Mist

2010-05-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Andrew MacArthur 1955-2010

The Passageway

2010-02-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

Spooned together, he reaches over my shoulder
with an arm that is almost all bone,
makes a hand gesture like snuffing candles
one by one, says, “The lights are all going out.”

He is sick of being sick. Inadequate to this task
I tell him it is alright now to let go,
as if he were a cat in a thunder storm
terrified of the enormous sound

round rolling, surrounding us. Nose to back
we cling together in our disparate realms.
Our bodies know the deeper truth, soon
we will each pick our way through the dark alone.

Hand To Hand

2010-01-17T20:00:00.001-08:00

Imagine making a painting
of a local pond—dark, brooding
with a cow and its keeper
with your own hands.

Imagine a man visiting a museum
in his slippers on a different continent
more than a century later,
stooped and weak from disease,

the weight of all his regretted days behind him.
He stands alone, a private moment
in this quiet gallery, his hand down by his hip
he uses it to wave goodbye.

Working With Limitations

2010-01-17T08:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture I took of Andrew yesterday. His brain tumors as well as his hair are growing again and this profoundly affects his ability to write (and edit), not to mention use his left arm. But he is hanging in there after his initial shock at having yet more basic human functionality taken away.

Amazing Awesome Rocking Reading

2009-12-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

You would have to know how difficult simple things like reading and writing have been for Andrew over the last 7 months to know what an absolute triumph of will his about 18 minutes of reading his poems were on Monday night at Three Friends Coffeehouse.

Here is a very bad video I took of the first 6 minutes or so featuring three of his sonnets. Lots of folks came in while he was reading so by the end the place was full.

He got a much more respectful than normal response from the audience and I believe that he sensed that and it made him more comfortable as he went along.

This took everything he had so when he got home he fell asleep in his chair and slept for six hours straight. Thanks to all who came out to see him! His mood is good and he continues to write.

There should be a full audio podcast available in a few days.

The Last Feature?

2009-12-27T06:26:00.000-08:00

Andrew has been preparing for a number of weeks for his feature reading this coming Monday at 7PM at Three Friends Coffee House. His voice might not be strong but his work will be.

I’ll be there with Neil and Patrick to act as a back-up if needs be.

Elizabeth

Creative Theft

2009-12-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

The other night Andrew and I were talking on the phone, he'd had a good day, his energy was up and he asked me about what was going on with my poetry. (Not much because I am spending rather a big chunk of time taking care of him but...)

I told him I was entertaining an idea about The Dry Tortugas because I had heard an interview with a bird guy (Scott Weidensaul) taking about his book Return to Wild America and a trip he took to The Dry Tortugas (off the coast of Florida). It had for a long time one freshwater fountain in Fort Jefferson where weak storm battered migratory birds had learned to stop to drink, the only fresh water for many many miles. The fountain was destroyed by a hurricane in the late nineties but for a span of numerous generations of birds it was a haven.

Not being able to sleep that night, he stayed up late doing research and wrote this little piece. I particularly love the last line.

Dry Tortugas

A likely place to search for buried treasure...
or last respite for swindlers and their banks...
the 'floating world' of money, drugs and leisure
(first tortoise-slow, then yet so crazedly)
now slides, next claws, then burrows in her flanks.
The fortress, unremembered, echoes words
like 'sanctuary', 'prison', 'pardon', 'free'.
And 'Mercy!'...on the tongues of many birds.

The Second Series of Sonnets

2009-12-03T17:21:00.000-08:00

Here is Andrew's new sonnet series based on the novel After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima. He literally put everything he had into these over the last few days.

I challenge you (oh so mighty arbiters of taste and metrical police who hang out on Eratosphere, a poetic pox on you) to read a novel and even do a tenth as well in condensing the essence of it into three linked sonnets and oh yeah, make the language beautiful enough to fall into too.

A Random Picture

2009-11-29T18:33:00.001-08:00

Because to me the page doesn't seem right without a picture, here is one of Andrew the night before his brain surgery 4 months ago. It is his hands in this series of pictures that prompted the comment from a friend that inspired the little poem I wrote about his hands. He continues to amaze us all writing sonnets and reading and listening to music.

Face to Face With the Mystery

2009-11-22T18:03:00.000-08:00

You would, I guess, have to be here and to see that just a month ago Andrew couldn’t read anything aloud and had a lot of trouble with any sort of coherent critical thinking to realize how astonishing these Three Sonnets for Yukio Mishima are.

His brain, besieged by tumors, his body wasting away (he weighs in at close to 130 now on a 6’3” frame) must have rerouted critical functions so that he could conceive of, and then execute these three linked metrical pieces this week.

My own theory is that all those years he spent up all night tinkering with various metrical challenges have really paid off. He dug a groove in his brain pan that stuck around even when verbally the man has trouble getting out the right proper noun.

It is a wonderfully hopeful sign for us all. That even at our end the poetry can still be there, challenging us, driving us and abiding with us.

What a difficult and magical time this is being, each day steeped in the wild waters of the big mystery.

Enjoying The Dark Side

2009-11-15T09:19:00.000-08:00

“I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. […]

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. […]”

Kurt Vonnegut's on the occasion of the burning by a school of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1973

I bought a Kindle last month.

I have secretly wanted one for over a year and as Andrew’s caretaking needs have escalated to the point where I am spending at least an hour and a half going over and back from his place each and every day on the bus with stuff for him (whatever the latest craving is) carrying a book too is a hassle. Particularly a hardcover library book.

It is fabulous, my little “Magic box” as Andrew calls it. I have so far purchased two books and a subscription to the New York Times.

I might add that these two books, one a Buddhist primer by Thubten Chodren and a murder mystery in the Shan series about Tibet are two that I would not have purchased. I would have borrowed them from the library.

There is no doubt that in the two weeks since I have had the thing (it took two weeks to ship) that I am reading way more and am enjoying reading more than I would have had I not had the machine.

It also, (unlike both books and magazines), works well for reading on aerobic machines at the gym. I’ve tried it both on the Elliptical and the Treadmill. Very cool.

I am thinking that those of you who through received wisdom are decrying the end of books as we know them might want to take Mr. Vonnegut’s advice up there and instead of peering over at one someone who is happily reading one on the bus or the train or in a coffeehouse and internally bemoaning the end of civilization as we know it; borrow one from a friend (because all your cool friends already have one) and set the type to a size that works for your eyes and read a book on it.

Then I’ll be happy to listen to your concerns.

Perhaps over dinner? I've all of a sudden become a much more interesting person to talk to.

Did you know that they are running out of water in Yemen? Perhaps we might consider a team of Yemenis as our next astronauts to the moon?

The Bird Mural and the Mausoleum

2009-10-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

Andrew is home and working on editing a few manuscripts. This is what he wanted more than anything. some sense of normalcy and not being his cancer every waking minute.

He is still able to get out and about a bit but each day he becomes a bit more fatigued. He is losing weight and gets cold easily. But his spirits are good. And he has good days. Reading and writing are hard work but worth it to him. His prognosis is in months and we don't think he'll see the spring. But one never knows.

If you click on the link above in the title you can see what I've been up to. Pictures of the new huge hand painted mural on the side of the Portland Memorial Mausoleum at Oaks Bottom and pictures inside the mausoleum. It is absolutely amazing in there, full of fascinating and weirdly wonderful things.

The Pieta is an exact replica of Michelangelo's piece, made of marble from the same quarry.

We were allowed on the roof to shoot the mural. A chance I won't get again in my lifetime.

Not Yet

2009-09-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

A connoisseur of hands
(because hers are crippled)
said when looking at his
that they were the most beautiful
she had yet seen.

The fact that they will leave
this world soon may have had
something to do with this impression.

A glint of silver flashes as fish
leap headlong
out of the river into the sky.

Our Tattoos

2009-09-21T20:13:00.001-07:00

Andrew came home from the hospital after 8 1/2 weeks this last weekend. He has a fabulous hospice team in place and is getting out and about a bit enjoying our glorious early fall weather.

Big Distraction

2009-08-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

I subtly mentioned in my last post that Andrew, my partner in crime in the Meander Knot Press enterprises had what appeared to be a minor stroke. When they did the CT scan (normal procedure these days when there is a question of a stroke) instead of a nice discreet area of bleeding they found a big tumor. He had successful surgery to remove the tumor about three and a half weeks ago (awesome scar!) and is now undergoing radiation treatments for the other not so easy to reach tumors in his head.

The prognosis is bleak (there won't be any Weldon Keys disappearing act here) but he is one tough guy and his spirits are good. The source of the cancer is still unknown.

Any positive thoughts or metta you might have to spare we could sure use.

Everything feels poignant, like a bad poem, right now. Hopefully we will meet some beauty too in the most unexpected places along this path before we reach the end.

Elizabeth

The Nebraska Connection

2009-07-23T13:58:00.000-07:00

So Jim Harrison has been doing promotion for his new book of poems In Search of Small Gods and I was listening to him and wondering if he has had a stroke. His speech seems slightly off kilter somehow.

(I am interested intensely in the course of strokes right at this moment because my partner in poetic crime here on Meander, Andrew, has had a moderate stroke himself recently.)

So off I went looking for some mention of that and instead I came up with this delightful and interesting review by Jim Harrison of Karl Shapiro’s book.

When I was reading the review I kept thinking the work of Shapiro’s that Harrison quotes sounds so much like the work of my cousin Bobby.

Having spaced out for a moment that the two wrote a still read Prosody handbook. Duh.

It is interesting to me that their work does sound so much alike. I don’t think Andrew’s and my work sounds alike at all, even though we do often use similar source material from Buddhist texts.

Harrison writes a great deal about birds and with my current bird obsession how can one not admire his? Of course he has been known to shoot them, unlike me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Nebraska, but who knows… I may go birding there someday and run into Karl Shapiro’s unhappy ghost.

Hiding In Beauty

2009-07-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of migrant Blue-winged Teal ride high in the marsh, hanging out with Shovelers, Wood Ducks, from crisp black and white to ruddy, broad beaks, sharp red eyes, swept back crests, she likes the goofy plump Buffleheads best.

Middle-aged women do. She hunches in the rented hunting blind, camera heavy, long lens fully extended. She thinks only a man would design optics this way. She is hiding. Not from the waterfowl, more from the prospect of the rest of her life—perceived strife, the downward curve of it all.

Hope is such a fleeting thing, flash of iridescence glimpsed unexpectedly when one is distracted, then finds oneself spending a ridiculous amount of time scanning the breadth of the watercourse to find it again.

Too big for a Hummingbird, too far north for some exotic tropical number, her brain clamps down on the details. Blue again like the travelers in front of her but black and white as well. And red, in a field of buff breast, he’s singing a siesta song.

Then in the far meadow, in dry grass amid tiny lavender wildflowers she sees bright lapis, shinny as the extravagant necklace he gave her early in their love, precious thing. Lazuli Bunting comes to call. Her heart leaps but he is too far away for this lens today.

Breathless she wants to hold this brilliant moment to her chest, keep it warm, safe. Instead he flies away. She grips the camera body against her dominant eye, almost until it hurts, sighs and lets it drop, strap taut against her wrinkled neck.

She hears the small flock conversing in the abandoned orchard trees and field—stretches her legs in front of her and raises her shoulders to release tension, waits expectantly for what the wetlands might yet yield.

Finished the Half Marathon!

2009-04-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

100 bonus points for me. My first ever Half Marathon last weekend, and the weather was beautiful! And I took this picture the weekend before up at Ridgefield.

Maurice, Fred and I

2009-03-11T19:38:00.000-07:00

I submitted the poem below to Performance Today and they liked it enough that Fred Child is going to read it on the show this Friday, the 13th! I am most honored. I love Performance Today, it is a great show.

Will post a link when it becomes available.

Taking Up the Challenge

2009-03-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in poetry and live in the States, you know by now that the Poetry Foundation is throwing money at Public Broadcasting to get them to talk about and promote poetry.

One of the newest attempts can found here at Poetry Challenge to C.K. Williams.

I decided I was going to try my hand at this before I realized that they are actually asking for submissions…

Little do they know, poor fools with their ears full of beautiful music what they are getting themselves into.

As of this writing the piece that Mr. Williams will be tasked to write about has not been chosen, so I just picked the one I liked best for this project today and wrote…

After Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major - 2nd Movement

Any Given Moment

The work prepares you for it.
Ink stick and grinding stone,
brush—wolf hair, big cloud,
gut strings and fish bones.

Plucked. The dappled corridor,
breezeway, a girl in brocade,
letter drops, she turns into a half
swooping swoon, made, then gathers,

a swoosh. High melancholy calls,
tiptoes—celestial Spanish oak.
A clock ticks, a teapot sits,
the room's been abandoned.

Swallows weave an intricate form.
A child laughing pretends she is a cat.

A Lull in the Action

2009-02-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

So I’ve been deeply engrossed in reading The Rest Is Noise. Andrew will read me a bit aloud and we’ll talk about what we know and YouTube things and then talk some more. It has come to my attention that I know rather more about “modern” music than I thought I did because of my background both in dancing myself and having been to see rather a lot of contemporary dance.

I took a break to read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Andrew and I figure we have 10,000 hours writing poetry between us. Together we are a Mastery.

I also started training to run my first ever half-marathon a few weeks back and while rather exhilarating it is also time consuming.

Race Day is April 5th.

Back to poetry and more frequent posts soon.

Experiment

2009-01-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

While I have the upmost respect for Elizabeth Alexander both in the breadth of knowledge of American history and poetry that she possesses and in her confidence I felt that the “poem” that she read at the Inauguration last week was a piece of beautiful prose gussied up to look and sound like a poem.

I admired her ability to deliver it though. Heck, I was all choked up just listening to the event on the radio, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like to be standing there before two million people.

Anyway, while preparing to facilitate a group discussion tonight for my Women’s Circle on the topic of mood, I got to thinking what would a poem (hopefully beautiful) gussied up to look like prose look like.

And sound like…here are the results of that experiment.

Mood

Blues temper enthusiasm, some days we wake as if returning from a land of unexplained sadness. No one seems to know what we need just then. Expectations get all mixed in with muddle as we muddle through longing, loneliness, enthralled by affection, disaffection.

Somewhere between temperament and emotion our moods reside. Do we hide from ours? Crowds, countries and mountains are reported to be in them. Loved ones stay in bad ones far too long. Romance springs from soft smoky light, the absence of which can bring sadness, sloth.

Moths, do we attempt modification? Chocolate or a walk, perhaps a talk with a confidant used to our vicissitudes? Do we hang on to sweet grumpiness as we push away those who wish to remake our dower demeanor?

Do we shower those near with unruly cheerfulness best left encased in socially acceptable reticence? Could it be something we ate—or didn’t? Maybe it has nothing to do with what we imagine it might. Again, the light, or sleep, or any number of stimuli to our particular brand of chemical soup could be to blame.

We are drawn to that flame. Instead we can choose to greet our guest, invite the sadness or exhilaration in. It only takes a few moments of awareness to brew some tea, then—just be.

Where Does the Time Go?

2008-12-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

I took a break from settling into the new place to go bird watching a few weeks ago and caught this Red Tailed Hawk who had just buzzed a Great Horned Owl with a buddy in a territorial discussion.

Happy Solstice!

Words for Cup and Water

2008-11-25T08:01:00.000-08:00

Stepping through the dream wall
President Lincoln cradles his cat named Bob.

Droplets of rain shine on the Hemlock tip, which
reached my bedroom window just this year.

Old beveled mirrors still shimmer
no matter what they reflect,
drugstore, library, bookshop.

All carry magazines, hopes and dreams
one long loop running down,
streamlets in the mist.

I make a nest with my hands and
try to capture the mood of the mountain.

The President says, “Don’t bother,
we have work to do.”

Instead, Bob washes, framed by evening light.
We all pause for a moment,

watch a female white-rumped Harrier glide
golden over marshy fields opening

before our eyes. Sleeves rolled up,
possibilities begin to appear nearby.

Taking Flight

2008-11-06T12:04:00.000-08:00

I’m moving house in about ten days, across town near where I work. So near in fact that my commute will be somewhere between 3 and 4 minutes on foot!

Besides working on my poetry and practicing yoga, I intend to spend the “extra” time that is going to blissfully become available drawing birds.

Since I took that picture of the young raptor showing down there on the August 17th post I have become obsessed with learning about birds. It turns out that is not a young Peregrine at all, but either an immature Cooper’s Hawk or a Red Shouldered Hawk.

I know this because last night I pounced on a guy that looked like a scientist at our local Audubon Society new member night event and asked him and he took me back into the Nature Store and pulled out an amazing book on raptors and asked me a whole bunch of questions about the sighting.

This mysterious very important bird person was able to mimic exactly the whistling call they made to each other. How cool is that???

My sister and brother in law and I have been to two of three beginning birding sessions on Sauvie Island and have seen many amazing birds and learned a whole bunch of stuff. We bow to Mr. Sibley and his Basics, Behavior and Guide.

Last weekend we saw a young female Northern Harrier that was positively golden, she has to be one of the most beautiful birds I’ve ever seen, and she stayed put so we were able to admire her through the scope.

It is funny because I have been putting birds in almost all my poems since I started writing poems. And then I became obsessed with Manfred, my own personal king of Sicily and wise observer of falcons and now this!

When I have a little more time I’ll write about the transformative exchange of emails and phone conversation I had with Annie Finch engendered by the note she left on my post before last.

Thanks to her humor and enthusiasm she was able to neutralize almost all of my despair about the poetry workshop from hell and I am now plowing through her book recommendations and practicing my meter.

Oh, and yeah, there was an election in there somewhere too, now that I think about it…

The Formalist in the Family

2008-10-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

Cousin Bobby, on my fathers’ side. I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. Much younger than my mother he was apparently quite attracted to her.

How do I know this? Well, it has always been a family story of course, but in preparation for the aforementioned formal poetry class I was reading the second essay in the book on Syllabics and found a reference to Bobby; Robert Beum.

I read the bit out loud to my sister and brother in law as we were all getting ready for dinner one night last month. My sister went off into her study and brought out the copies of his poetry books she had, most of which I have copies of too, but there was one small red volume published in 1949 called The Ninth Hour by Bobby using a pseudonym, Robert Lawrence.

It has a handwritten dedication to both my mother and father in the front of the book, but the last section of nine pieces is actually dedicated in print to Benny. That would be my mom.

And it is, (how do say?), a bit racy for the times. Funny, and interesting and explicit!

We were laughing and looking at my sister in a new light…she was born the year before the book came out…

It was all sort of weirdly wonderful and funny and embarrassing all at once.

Bobby wrote a book with Karl Shapiro on prosody that was a staple for teaching formal verse called A Prosody Handbook that was just reissued a few years ago in a paper.

I need to order myself a copy and relax. Obviously formal verse is in my blood.

An Unhappy Tale of Where I've Been - Poetically

2008-10-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been reading lately about Paul Engel and Wilbur Schramm (the Renaissance Man and stutterer ) and the history of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop because, honestly, I am looking for someone to blame, or at least some understanding of how American poetry got into the fix it is in.

Where no one is willing to say what is or isn’t poetry.

One is supposed to be inclusive and anything, anything goes. Mostly though it is short pieces of prose with chopped up lines and a poignant personal quality that are published and praised.

Oh, or the language is so dense and mannered, that we pass it off as poetry because we think we might be too dense ourselves to “get it”, but those MFAs and teachers of MFAs must know what they are doing. I mean they are published. They have won competitions, they have books with spines.

Or it could be the shock value ranting of a drugged out or a can’t let go of one’s youth wishing they were still drugged out coffee shop poet.

Or a formalista. A poet who sticks to the rules of form with the zeal that can be sadomasochistic and they like it that way.

Each off in their own silos denigrating the rest.

I remember very clearly sitting down at lunchtime on a windy day about ten years ago with the book, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux , local poets where I expected to get some assistance and understanding of writing a sonnet in Iambic Pentameter. I had this wild idea that I would write something for one of the innumerable Valentine’s Day sonnet competitions.

I wanted to know how to make my lines scan and how to make them sound natural and contemporary and not stilted and precious.

What I realized over the space of the next week, after Googling things and talking to Andrew was that these two poets didn’t have a clue what they were writing about. I admit I was enough of an innocent in the ways of the world of poetry as to be shocked and hold a small sense of betrayal as they are both well known writers locally and they teach.

After my heady success and enjoyment of Voice for the Actor, the class I took this last summer at the marvelous Portland Actors Conservatory, Andrew suggested that I try my hand at a class on formal poetry. So I signed up for The Attic’s class starting in September for what I understood was going to be a weekly class where different poetic forms were examined, discussed and attempted.

The book for the class was An Exaltation of Forms edited by two women firmly entrenched in the formal camp Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes.

Thinking I was supposed to, I read most of it before the class, very uneven but a good general survey of the forms we use today and some of their history.

Imagine my surprise then disappointment, frustration and anger, after having made it through three weeks of class and hours of almost unbearable workshopping that felt like being flayed alive by apprentices at the slaughter house, of already completed and clearly previously workshopped poems (including two sets of 6 linked haiku about sex by an older gay man who only came to class once in the first four weeks) I realized that I know more about formal verse than the teacher!

The teacher, who won a chapbook competition and has three books of poems with spines published by prestigious presses. She has been teaching poetry to undergrads and grad students for years.

This, this is a microcosm of how American poetry got into this mess it is in.

Rattled, I withdrew from the class last week.

Raptor Rapture

2008-08-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

Still two weeks after taking this picture of the immature Peregrine Falcon 30 feet up in a tree two blocks from my place I am infatuated with his owl like fluff and handsome predatory good looks.

We made a new video today. I don't know why I wanted to read this older poem, Time To Go. It does show off some lovely roses from my sister's garden.

Ghost of a Chance

2008-08-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy, shotgun
wedding at the doughnut stand, sugary
voodoo. Your name written in dust
across windows in Old Town.

Daddy was here earlier. He says
it is snowing those big fat flakes
I like so much, he’ll be back,
he says. Have you seen him?

Where are the cats? Jimmy promised
to take me to the fair, win a stuffed
tiger, oh he made me laugh. Will I know
you when my mind starts to break down?

Surely, you’d remember me?
We were close, as they say, before
your premature departure from the scene.
I’m still nineteen, aren’t I?

Who are all these people
and where are the cats
and why are all the windows open?
Strangers could get in.

Will we get home before dark?
I haven’t been to a club since
we used to dress up during the war.
You were there, fixing my hair, Mabel.

Have you seen Jimmy lately?
I’m worried. I don’t know who these
people are. Who’s that, just walked
through the room? Mabel, was it a cat?

A Rich Life

2008-07-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

This morning when sort of half listening to the Writer’s Almanac I was intrigued by the first few lines of Auden’s Muse des Beux Arts “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood  its human position…”juxtaposed with “…Where the dogs go on with their doggy life…”

This got me thinking about the repeat of the funny interview I heard yesterday with Robert Smigel talking about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog here on Fresh Air but also the discussion with the Belcea String Quartet last week on Saint Paul Sunday about Benjamin Britten following Auden out to L.A.

It is a rich life we lead here on the Internets.

Flitting In

2008-07-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

We're still out here. Andrew is working on his collaborative novel about the local "poetry" scene and I am just finishing up a marvelous class "Voice for the Actor" that has taught me a world's worth of information about sharing my poems with and touching an audience.

I've been quite engaged by these Poetry Off The Shelf podcasts.

Do give them a spin.

á bientôt

2008-06-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 54

Since I went to San Francisco this last winter, (based on the weather here it is still winter in June), and reconnected, Michel and I have been corresponding.

Before I left home, all that water under all those beautiful big bridges, my friend S. called him up and asked him to ask me to marry him so I wouldn’t leave San Francisco.

I used to wear perfume then, French perfume of course. Now I only wear it when a guy asks. We are all politically correct here and most everyone doesn’t wear scent in yoga class. This is nice there, not to be distracted.

S. is mixed like me, but she was ashamed of her Filipino mother and always said she was full-blooded Spanish. It was a secret we shared.

The last time I saw her she told me she could smell me at the top of the stairs. We used to work out together. I listened to her endlessly talk about her terrible “ideal” first marriage to an older man, who promised her a life he could not afford. We used to put our matching pagers on the table at dinner after the gym, waiting to hear from him. Whoever he happened to be.

I shepherded her into her next relationship with a handsome young broke guy her own age. S. is a person who bought a new car because her CD player was not functioning…

Michel asked me then to marry him, to move to Amsterdam with him. Instead I left him and moved here.

My muse. I’ve been hiding.

He’s asked again.

My passport is up to date; my life here is a mess, and my writing going nowhere.

I ache for the company of intelligent successful people who speak multiple languages and while I’ve failed at fully realizing the local self-centered petty world of wannabe poets here in this blog, Christian is planning a tour de force on the subject with his friend Mr. Vidal. He promises to never mention me.

He’ll be fine without me.

Michel has promised to take me first to the Concetgebouw before we fly to Hamburg to meet his ailing father. His father, about whom, (their relationship) I wrote my very first poem. Inspired by a painting of a blue rose on Michel’s wall done by his father in his tiny studio where I found all the words I have written since.

Then maybe we will go to Milan, where he likes to buy his shirts. All the men in café society can teach me how to play chess.

I’m tired and happy and sad and glad to be leaving.

Sometime I may check back in, but for now I am leaving this blog in the capable hands of Audrey Elizabeth.

Maybe we can all convince her to stop hiding as well.

Color and Videos!

2008-05-22T19:06:00.000-07:00

So here is our toes in the water attempt at presenting our poems for you in video format.

We will be updating and improving as we go along. Enjoy!

Almost Real

2008-05-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 53

It has been slothfully hot the last few days and Ross has kept the Gelato shop open past hours and is giving us extra shifts. All the out-of-towners enjoying the romance of Powell’s.

I was reading the Cummings biography this morning and he used the word sequitur and when Christian came over I asked him if it was a “real” word and we looked it up in both my Oxford American and my Aunt’s trusty but ripped childhood Webster’s and it was not there.

On Google we did find a cool group of classical musicians putting together contemporary music concerts at unusual venues, the next one being in December at the Library of Congress.

I particularly like idea of the piece that is for bass clarinet and nine instruments as if it could be any instruments at all. Maybe a Chinese lute, a Pipa or a Didgeridoo and a Kazoo?

For a couple of open mic readings back a few years a guy used to come with a huge Didgeridoo and play behind the poets reading.

This press has come into the possession of a small easy to use video camera and soon very soon we will post a link to videos of our founders reading their poems. Reading with no uninvited musical instruments or espresso machines going off in the background.

Unfortunately, you are going to have to imagine me reading my poems because I, in fact, only exist on the page and in the fervid imagination of Audrey Elizabeth.

The Shiva Moon

2008-05-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 51

Is it the job of a fiction writer, I wonder, to be kind? When one is describing development in the life of a character, one has to first describe where the character was before the pivotal event or set of events occurred.

I have always appreciated that through the vehicle of fiction one is able to tell or apprehend a more authentic truth because the constraints of daily social intercourse are removed.

This week I’ve been thinking about two of my favorite novels. The first is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and his description of his character Rex Mottram as a “tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole”.

This line has stuck with me since I was a little girl listening to my aunt moon over Jeremy Irons while watching reruns of the BBC version of the book and my subsequent reading of the book borrowed from her library.

(Now Christian has wandered off with my copy.)

Rex was an inspiration in part for my character Duncan in the previous post.

None of the characters in the book are particularly likeable. They are more so at the beginning and Cordelia retains much of her appeal throughout the book. But the rest of the characters do change; there is development. In this case, in so many ways, a sad development but one none the less.

His characters were based on someone, or composites of people he knew. People we will only now remember through his beautiful clear words.

Why is it always okay I wonder to immortalize in fiction (a writer should be so lucky) a beautiful young woman with a drug problem as William Gaddis did in The Recognitions (The other of my favorite books) in his character Esmè based on the life of the real troubled young painter Sheri Martinelli?

Someone I know recently suggested that he felt that the only place you could find the authentic complexity of living breathing human beings was in memoir and I argued that the most skilled fiction writers like Waugh and Gaddis had much to say both about the nobility of human nature and the suffering that causes so many problems.

Ripples on the still waters of our lives that start out with so much hope and ambition and end so badly.

Mr. Rinpoche and the Black Ribbon

2008-04-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 50

I was reading the article in the NYT’s on Friday about the move towards more talks between the Chinese and the Dalai Lama’s envoys. In the article they quoted the Prime Minister of Tibet in Exile and called him Mr. Rinpoche.

That would be the equivalent of calling him Mr. Honorable Perfection or Mr. Embodiment of the Light or Mr. Precious One— or if one were a breathy Marilyn Monroe, Mr. President.

I normally don’t get interested much in politics unless the story behind it leads to a poem, but as both Christian and Audrey Elizabeth’s tattoos and the name of this blog are all derived from the sacred Tibetan Endless Knot (a Meander) I thought it might be useful to share a story of transformation I heard this week.

It is about the melancholy old guy Duncan who wears berets, goes to tons of foreign movies, writes a blog and lusts after beautiful young women he is lucky to share a bus seat with.

He’s kind of high strung, had to quit his most recent job and live off his small inheritance because work was interfering with his drinking and his reading of The New York Review of Books, Arts and Letters, the Nation, etc.etc.

Once he talked to me with some authority about the benefits of meditation but when I asked him where he sat, what Buddhist Center, he said he’d never actually practiced meditation. Clearly it was the idea of meditation he was interested in, This is a guy who is entrenched in his own suffering, his whole romantic idea of art is about suffering and longing for the unattainable.

He loves sports; Duncan, basketball and baseball, he ricochets between the seasons full of hopes and dreams and much consternation and fussiness if he can’t enjoy what he is looking forward to next gamewise.

He runs himself (when it doesn’t mess with his drinking) and values the dedication (and probably bodies) of world class athletes and is much looking forward to the Olympics this summer. It annoyed the heck out of him that protestors were messing with the sacred torch relay and all the noble ideals espoused by the Olympics.

I find his blog boring because all he seems to do is massage and spout back out received wisdom from the liberal press but Christian reads it and has coffee with Duncan sometimes to talk about politics and gossip about poets.

Apparently on a long run a few weeks ago early on a Sunday morning Duncan decided to pass through downtown Portland, he wanted to see what was playing at the local art houses and when he ran by Pioneer Square he heard this low droning coming from the corner of the square, it almost sounded like something out of a dream, a chant, an invocation, something otherworldly.

There on the cold bricks (it was almost freezing) were about ten old men, in comfortable working men’s clothes, most older even than Duncan himself sitting cross legged and sending prayers towards an altar they had built themselves with sacred pictures and candle light.

There was canvas cover over a couple of folding tables holding two new laptops with wireless capability. There were pictures tacked up all around of torture victims and people bloodied just in the last few weeks in the uprisings all over Tibet.

A gorgeous young Tibetan woman born here in the States came over and asked him if he knew why they were there.

He was so mesmerized by her charms that he stood still, even though he was cooling down and the stiff run home would not be fun, to listen to her story…

“Imagine she said, that you lived in a comfortable house on land your great grandfather had purchased and had a good life full of family and friends and one day your neighbor who was from a different culture than yours, came over with a bunch of thugs with guns and said, ‘Now you must speak our language and listen to our media and to make sure that happens we will take your beloved older brother to prison and move in with you.

From now on you cannot read your books, or practice your little heathen rituals. You will only see our art and you will enjoy it. Oh and by the way we have a railroad we need help building so that is what you will be doing now…’

This is what it was like to live in Tibet”, she said, “when the Chinese invaded. My grandfather over there on the blanket made it out but lost three fingers to frost bite crossing the mountains and saw the lammergeyers feed on his best friend.

This is not some far away annoyance, this is happening still today, right this minute in Tibet. The Chinese continue to move their people into our homes and we will be beaten and shot and tortured right now, right this minute for what we are doing here on this quiet cold morning only we are lucky enough to be in America.”

A little audience of passer bys had joined Duncan now. One a middle aged non descript blond had tears in her eyes. The young woman went on to say, “Did you know that there is now anthropological evidence that the Navajo peoples and the Tibetans are linked genetically? Do you feel good about what happened to that Navajo language and culture? Do you think the choices Americans made back then were the right ones?

If you don’t, if you believe that because my people have chosen the path of nonviolence all these years that our culture deserves to be wiped out then (with a shooing motion of her hand at Duncan) go ahead run away. It doesn’t really concern you. But if you want to make a real difference today, right this minute go over there to the tables and my brother will help you send an email to the governments involved and the Olympic Committee.

When else, when ever else I ask you are we going to have an opportunity to get international attention? We too believe in the rights of all the athletes to have the opportunity to participate in these games and we know we are being annoying but look at these pictures! These are family members…

and so are you, don’t turn your backs now when you can truly make a difference. The Chinese care about what America thinks of them, we are their market.”

The blond woman said “I’ll do it”, and so too gulping air at the risk he felt he was poised to take by acknowledging his place in all of this and getting his real name on a real lists somewhere that actually might be used against him by one of the governments in question, Duncan sat down on the folding chair and using the template before him made a commitment, took a stand, and sent the emails.

One of the old men stood up from praying and asked if he could take their picture with his digital camera to send home and Duncan, ever camera shy from his days as an antiwar protestor so very long ago even said yes to that.

As they were leaving the young people gave him a small black ribbon to pin to his shirt.

He blamed the wetness forming around his eyes on the wind as he ran over the pedestrian walkway on the Steel Bridge to “his” side of town but since then he has felt more cheerful, more alive than he has in a very very long time.

Tidbits

2008-04-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 49

Where do the keys come from that turn the locks to the rooms your poems live in?

Here are a few of mine….quotes from the New York Times (I’m like William Gaddis that way)

“…art of variation rather than destination”

“…the politics of enchantment”

both from the piece on Olafur Eliasson's work this week.

and on a seasonal note...“There is poetry in watching any physical task done well. But shearing is more like ballet. The sheep and the shearer must move as one.”

Found links that make me think… In this case about Mendelssohn who was so uneven, some of his pieces I’ve been enjoying a lot and some like his Midsummer Night's Dream which is boring.

And then there is Baryshnikov, never boring particularly when he talks about Merce.

Christian and I are reading out loud to each other a biography of Edward Estlin Cummings. I’m thinking Baryshnikov earned the better part of his arrogance whereas Cummings was a spoiled brat.

A spoiled brat firmly grounded in the classics with a facility for languages. He loved Greek and knew his scansion and that’s what makes his unique poems so strong. We’re reading those too.

Oh and one last quote from a very strange but gifted man… Erik Satie…

“I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconut, chicken cooked in white water; fruit mold, rice, turnips; camphorated sausage, dough, cheese (white), cotton salad, and certain fish (skinless)."

I’ll leave that last bit to speak for itself.

Not Quite the Bluebird of Happiness But Close

2008-03-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

Rock Logic

2008-03-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 48

So I am reading, and in one case listening to, books on anger.

Yesterday after work I curled up in a big pile of blankets and listened for three hours, half dreamed Don’t Bite the Hook, a workshop on the patience narrative from, chapter 5 written by Shantideva .

Afterwards Ross took me out to Sweet Masterpiece for a hot chocolate, as I hadn’t eaten all day and he wanted to celebrate the time change.

I was telling him about the part in the workshop where Pema Chödrön talks about this thing a translator named Gunther Some-body-or-other told her... that Westerners use Rock Logic. (this is this and that is that…) hard logic and that Tibetans use Water Logic.

I like the idea of Water Logic. A flowing mutable thing.

Audrey Elizabeth was telling me this week about this amazing book she just finished reading Good Calories Bad Calories. She says that he says in the book that they used to shoot anorexics like me up with insulin to make them hungry.

I suppose that is better than my father (the year both my parents died) throwing a hot cup of coffee at my back as I was leaning over the huge unabridged dictionary in his study because he was so frustrated at me for not eating.

I’d much rather have a hot chocolate and the ensuing truffle than a shot of insulin, truly I would.

Apparently this book is just amazingly radical and subversive, kind of like the koans I’ve been working with.

Obviously, a tendency towards anger is as hereditary as are huge honking hips.

I’ll take the anger any day.

I think I’ll try water logic and flow around that idea and see if I can find a way to work with it that gives me some relief.

White Camellias Across the Way

2008-03-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 47

Yesterday I wasn’t exactly whining… it was more like a reflective commentary on my life, about the fact that I am not writing. Christian suggested I just start writing a book. I laughed because that is what he is doing and he always recommends that I do what he is doing.

All for one, one for all but you know he is doing that old man thing; the thing Eliot did, turning to God. He is writing a book about the Gospels and Jesus. I renewed his library books online the other day. He still has the Christina Rossetti book of poems out; the one he lost about two years ago and 17 books on Jesus.

He’s always complained about Buddhism, even though he has a Vajra and an Endless (Meander) knot tattooed on his forearms but lately he is giving me space because he says what ever I am doing, the yoga, the half-assed meditation practice and lately working with a koan is making me much easier and more pleasant to be around.

And other than the not writing and not being in love I am pretty happy these days.

I went to a koan workshop at the Unitarian church where I go sometimes to hear music and be shown off a few weekends ago. I took the day off work. It was cool. The teacher John Tarrant is a real poet, not one of these sort of Anglo Buddhist I write small jewel like things that sound profound but I wouldn’t know a real poem if it accosted me in broad daylight kind of guys.

Like Peter. He was there of course for the Friday night session. He teaches koans himself, I was late and sat behind him and I don’t think he saw me.

My biggest darkest hurt with Peter was that it was me he liked, He never understood about the poetry. Crazy as it sounds I feel I would much rather have someone like my poems than me. I am not important. The work is.

Tarrant was as familiar with Eliot and Rilke as he was with Basho. And he is really funny. I finally understood about the subversive work koans do and like the chanting acts as a prophylactic against the sharp barbed little judgmental commentary one runs all the time in one’s head, the koan drops into the heart and turns it towards the light.

In a wonderfully mysterious way.

Heck, I haven’t a clue what I am doing with my life, let alone my poetry, this blog, my friends, all those endless middle-aged men.

Maybe I just need to surrender to the aforementioned mystery and roll around in the unknown, a cat on newly warmed tarmac on an early spring day.

Having Slipped Away

2008-02-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

It was good to be home in San Francisco on Chinese New Year. I had a good time and took a break from all the angst up here,

Love’s Shipshod Watchman

2008-01-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 46

The truth is that I haven’t been writing lately. And all the usual remedies including listening to or reading bad poems as a trick to bring out the fierce competive streak in me, listening to things people call poems that aren’t (like what Garrison Keillor reads at the end of The Writer’s Almanac each day) just make me sad.

So I was surprised to hear real poems tonight here on Poetry Please, a bookmark leftover from the Blake Birthday Bash.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Colours

When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.

I love it when gifted actors read poems. There is something so smoky, thoughtful and deep in Stephen Rea’s voice here that takes me to the very best moments when I used to read in front of an audience. Something I have not done for two years.

I don’t know why. Perhaps fear hems me in.

A Pause

2008-01-13T19:23:00.000-08:00

I'm still here, will be back to write shortly. Audrey gave me a framed copy of this picture for Christmas. It is our beloved Central Library.

The Best Nonsense Since Jabberwocky

2007-12-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve heard this new CD twice in the last week, first on Performance Today and then on our local KBPS last night. I liked it so much I bought it on iTunes. The first half hour is marvelously exuberant and catchy. It is called Karolju , which is a made up name by the composer Christopher Rouse.

Happy Solstice/Christmas corridor! May you and yours be festive and bright.

Prophylactic Measures

2007-12-16T20:30:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 44

Lately I’ve been learning how to chant various things in Sanskrit.

I find it helpful in a protective sense, narrowing my focus to the chant leaves no room for the hypercritical interior voice to get a word in edge-wise.

And after a remarkable few months in an attempt to get away from all that by focusing on my yoga practice and not my little bitch inside I had an experience of Samadhi, or Satori in the Buddhist tradition.

It was remarkable,, and remarkably simple. I was on my mat in class in Corpse Pose and then I wasn’t and then I was.

And then right there; boom, all the teachings, particularly one of my favorites, “The Heart Sutra”, was no longer an intellectual construct, it was an experiential fact.

Afterwards I tried to talk about it, to my regular yoga teacher, to a few of my friends and I discovered that I didn’t know how to frame it and others didn’t know how to react to it. It is like when something really terrible is going on, you’ve discovered your lover has to have brain surgery or is terminally ill or something. They care but it also makes them really uncomfortable. You’ve moved to the other side of the veil.

People just don’t know what to say or do and flounder around like the proverbial fish.

So I thought, I need to talk to someone who knows, who maybe has even experienced this themselves or has been trained in a lineage to usher students into the little tiny room on the other side of these awakenings.

I told Christian, of course, and he was mildly surprised because as a Catholic he is always telling me Buddhism might be good for the big stuff but is useless for the day to day problems we face in life.

I thought about this all for weeks, reread After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and finally decided to risk calling Peter.

I did a tarot reading first. And the King of Swords showed up. That was the card that always represented him before when I was seeing him both as a therapist and a meditation teacher. It’s been three years since I’ve had any contact with him at all. And I never thought I would again.

I didn’t tell anyone I was going to but I called on a Thursday with trembling hands. On the following Saturday just home from a yoga class I was eating a small bowl of cereal and the phone rang. I had Christian answer it as he was hovering waiting for me to finish eating. I never ever have Christian answer my phone because my guys don’t like it when another man answers.

It was Peter. Christen asked who it was, and he handed me the phone with the most quizzical look…”It’s Peter, Peter Woolf.”

Holy shit. What hornet’s nest had I done gone and stirred up now?

The Young Harlots Curse

2007-11-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 43

My aunt used to tell a story about the time when my mother and her were visiting relatives in Los Angles. They were 12 and 14 and practicing their English so there was a radio in the room they shared.

They discovered on Sunday nights there was this goofy show on way past their bedtime. They would look forward to going to sleep so much the adults were slightly suspicious but never enough to look past the pile of blankets they would hide under, or to check the pillows stuffed in faces too muffle the laughs. The show was Firesign Theater .

They didn’t understand half of it but they didn’t care. They knew it was funny and silly and totally in line with the times they were so excited to feel a part of.

I think my mother inherited a few wonderful things from that show, an appreciation of radio, the spoken word and a high tolerance for ambiguity in that spoken word and a wild love of laugher that one can barely contain.

She would have loved living now with On Demand radio. The best part of my day is curled up under my pile of blankets listening to Performance Today. I so enjoy drifting off to some whacko combo of Vivaldi played with bagpipes in Italy as well as looking at all the pictures of the gorgeous young crop of pianists.

And now Flagman has sent me a link to the BBC show Poetry Please to remind me of the anniversary William Blake’s 250th birthday tomorrow. Thank you Julian.

I can lie on the floor with my pillows and blankets and listen to the rain and all the peoples reading bits of Blake.

I like the idea being a Bozo on the same bus as Mr. William Blake. Just us and the young harlots cursing out on the street.

Leaving Guilt to Fend for Itself

2007-11-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 42

Christian wandered out of here the other day with my copies of the collected Yeats and Paradise Lost. Today I noticed he had a book of translations by Arthur Sze. He is reading poetry again voraciously, which always makes me happy. We have a video we got one year, (not a DVD, video) of Arthur Sze reading and while cleaning up the ballroom this afternoon I found my copy of his The Redshifting Web.

We went to see Sam Hamill, who was reading here a few years ago specifically to beg him to see if we could get Arthur Sze here to read to us in person. It was an awful reading, Mr. Hamill had just been ousted from the award winning press he had helped found and was viciously angry while at the same time spouting off Buddhist rhetoric.

Mr. Hamill told us to email and ask Mr. Sze but we couldn’t afford the fee he asks to be paid. We asked if he thought Mr. Sze would be willing to give us a poem to publish in our journal and he said that he writes very slowly and might not have one to spare but we were happy to at least talk to someone who knew and had published this poet we both admire so much.

I had a chance to talk to a Buddhist teacher recently and I was going on about how I was beginning to understand through my yoga how Buddhists could just not care about how they acted because in the end it all doesn’t matter and I mean that, and said that I meant that in the best possible way… all the time thinking about how truly awful this talented editor and poor excuse for a human being was acting that day.

The teacher said something to me then that I felt was very compassionate, he said that sometimes it all has to do with our conditioning and that at times people who call themselves Buddhists and practice the precepts are still wrapped in a bundle of conditioning.

I don’t think that since I was maybe 12 or 13 I have ever not felt guilty about everything I put in my mouth and the holidays, but particularly Thanksgiving, are torture for me.

Practicing yoga this morning I was thinking about all this, about conditioning as well as the sound of my breath and as I was rolled over into fetal position after Corpse Pose for my symbolic daily rebirth I was thinking how amazing it would be for just one day to feel no remorse about what I eat.

I wonder if I’ll ever get there.

As Christian says they say in AA, it is all about practice, not perfection.

Bound Feet and Mr. Eliot

2007-10-23T21:43:00.001-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 41

So Thomas Sterns Eliot had a male relative, an uncle I think, who was quite instrumental in the foundation of Portland’s liberal institutions. Two that come to mind are Eliot Hall on the lovely mist laden Reed College campus and First Unitarian Church.

One of the guys I’ve been sleeping with promised me I wouldn’t have to eat breakfast if I would come to church with him this last Sunday. Turns out he is a Unitarian of sorts. His other bribe was the music and they did have a lovely prelude violin piece “The Lark Ascending" by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I like the pianist.

(I think I am too old now to be a secret pleasure and the guys twice my age like to parade me around in public, we are not talking about my very recent birthday, okay?)

There was a fire drill, and I had the distinct impression I was being shown off as we all exited and walked across the street under a most beautiful tree in full fall red leaf.

When we returned, the sermon was about salt and they read a lovely poem about salt by Neruda, actually it was a modest poem but it was a real poem.

But then in the middle of the sermon, the minister read a “poem” by a Viet Era Vet about losing himself in the water while fishing and regaining his inspiration. It was collected in the book by the loathsome Maxine Hong Kingston. She really really should have stuck to novels, because her forays into memoir and poetry are crimes against nature.

I was disappointed as all get out. Here is this learned minister who seems like he should know the difference between the Neruda poem and the piece of writing by the unnamed suffering Vet.

Musing on this made me think of the marvelous interview here with Stephen Hough. Take a listen before they take it off the site.

He has some interesting things to say about why pianists aren’t allowed to be composers anymore and why Mr. Eliot and Mr. Joyce may have something to do with why the bright minister can’t tell the difference between a clear modest piece of poetry and a piece of classroom narrative prose.

Christian is encouraging me to leave the Gelato place and go work at this very chic but at the same time Portland funky shoe store over on the other side of town. He pointed out the window display was full of obscure books about ballet the other afternoon.

I could read up on the history of the Port de Bras while getting a massive discount on some intensely cool shoes…

Saddle Mountain

2007-10-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

Nothing quite like going hiking to bring some color to the page.

Oh No, The Foodies Are Coming!

2007-09-26T18:07:00.001-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 40

I wonder who the Jack Kerouac of Foodies will be? Perhaps he is mentioned in the hottest NYT’s article du Jour here . Read it and weep. I do. The less said about food the better.

And then take a stroll home from work with Audrey Elizabeth here.

If these two things don’t make you want to move to Portland and keep me company than I don’t what will.

With the Lid Off

2007-09-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 39

Catch the vibes… About a year and a half ago I was sleeping over at some guys house that fashioned himself a film director.

He was wild about the director Michel Gondry. I believe Audrey may have mentioned him on the blog here before. Anyway, there was one music video I saw over there only once and have never forgotten. I had no idea who the artist was and as 13 years ago I was taking ballet classes and fending off my aunt’s first husband and getting over losing my parents I was out of touch with my own generation.

This video was made in 1994 and you can watch it here like I did, over and over again today. I just think the whole thing is brilliant.

About Lucas… He’s mixed like me.

“Born to Danish painter Berta Moltke and songwriter and Billboard music editor Paul Sécon, rapper Lucas began his musical career inauspiciously with the 1990 Uptown album To Rap My World Around You. Unsatisfied with the label's marketing of his music as teen-idol fare for adolescent girls and unwelcome after Uptown turned its attention to producing R&B aimed at the teen market, Lucas left the label and studied philosophy and creative writing at New York University and traveled in Europe to expose himself to other cultures. He eventually settled in London and in 1992 signed with Atlantic, for whom he recorded 1994's Lucacentric. The album incorporated elements of jazz and reggae, particularly the former, and featured the single "Lucas With the Lid Off." The accompanying video, which was shot in one continuous take while moving between several sets, garnered a fair amount of attention in England and soon America, and pushed the single onto the charts.”

The other thing I want to write about is the whole Joyce Hatto scam thing which you can listen about here on the New Yorker podcast.

I am subscribing to all kinds of podcasts on my iPod. Anyway, I ‘ll have to come back to write about that because it is actually raining and I must go walk in it. This is a requirement.

Woad is Me

2007-09-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 38

I’ve been thinking about and reading about the dye and particularly the paint making properties of Woad lately. For a poet, the history of obsolete paints is fascinating.

Ah, at least if one has the blues on a beautiful fall day, they are blues with a history. I think of all those painters who wooed weaver’s daughters for access to the fleury made of soapwort, water and urine on top of the dye vats with promises of fame and fortune.

The things we do for the love of our art.

You Sad, Pale Man

2007-08-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 37

Have I said lately how much I enjoy listening to Performance Today? This last week I listened to a show with the Schumann song #12 "A Shining Summer Morning" from a cycle of his with poems by Heinrich Heine as inspiration and text.

“On a shining summer morning
I wander around my garden.
The flowers are whispering and speaking;
I, however, wander silently.

The flowers are whispering and speaking
And look at me sympathetically.
"Do not be angry with our sister,
You sad, pale man."

I should use this poem when one of the guys is getting all weirded out and talking about living together or something.

I think that is one of my not so secret ambitions. To have a poem of mine set to music. Not to write a song, god if I were in a girl band I’d have all the recognition I crave and then some, like Angie at the store. She always whines about the arrogant dweebs when she does a gig. No I mean to have a composer fall in love with one of my poems long enough to spend time with it and then set it to music.

Even if it is just inspiration, not a literal use of the poem.

I am all excited though because one of my guys bought me a bright red nano iPod last weekend! I’ll need to get some ruby earrings to match. I love having all my music so close though and so lightweight.

That’s all I wanted to say today. I am glad summer is almost over which means the end of grilling. Everybody always wants to grill me some meat.

Veggies are fine, seriously. Truly they are.

Mules and Class

2007-08-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 36

Speaking of questionable taste, I am not sure but I think without them having ever said anything, I inherited from my parents a distaste for the kind of shoes called mules.

It must have been sort of racial snobbishness on the part of both (originally from peasant stock) of them. The way they would both look at a woman flopping around in mules with that headstrong go ahead Bangkok look. Slutty. Tacky. Louche.

If I see a woman wearing mules, no matter how otherwise well dressed or lovely she might be as far as I am concerned she is off my radar. She is not someone I’d like to know.

There are those mostly not quite attractive middle aged men, the sex tourist type that sometimes tell me they want me to dress up in ripped stockings and cheap clothes and too much make-up and then put on an apron and cook for them. To be the kind of woman that wears mules.

They are sorely misguided to think I am like that, or that I would like that. To treat them like kings. So that I can stay in the US and eat bland food.

I think those kind of men are evil and they think they are the salt of the earth. That everybody now has it backward. Throwbacks!

Anyway somehow or other this brings me to Michael. He is Iranian but when we met he lied and told me he was from Turkey. My original muse.

Because he buys his clothes in Italy and wears the softest softest leather shoes. And with his moon eyes I am sure he wouldn’t like mules either, even though we never talked about it. Slides are fine. I have some fabulous Italian suede stacked heel slides but they are a world apart from even the high heeled poofed up mules.

It is like the neighborhoods, in San Francisco. You walk one block and the class has changed. I am seeing this now around the Gelato place here in Portland, around funky Powell’s. Pretty soon you won’t even be able to show your face unless your net worth is over a certain ridiculous amount and you are driving and wearing the certain fashion.

I pray with all my yogic heart that that fashion does not include mules.

Of Questionable Taste

2007-07-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 35

Gross. The guy I spent the night with wanted me to get up early and go riding with him on his daughter’s bike! I’m sure she’d love that. I don’t do bike helmets. There is no way to look good with one of them on. It is kind of like sun visors. Only the very best looking tennis players get away with wearing them and then barely.

This is a guy that won’t eat anything that isn’t purchased for a gazillion bucks at Whole Foods. Doesn’t he realize that John Mackey is an arrogant fool if not technically a crook?

My dad drilled the basics of the market into me when I was a little girl, he used to test me on puts and calls and selling short when we would go to the grocery together on Saturday mornings when Mom got to sleep in. I know the impulse for market manipulation. Dad always wanted me to know this stuff in case I ever heard any tidbits that might be interesting because men thought I was just a pretty girl. He didn’t want me getting in trouble for how I used that information.

Mr. Mackey might know a market when he sees one but he is an idiot for talking up his stock like that.

It must be a guy thing. We were in bed last night watching the rerun of the Nicolas Sarkozy interview with Charlie Rose in January. I was willing to watch it because I could practice my French. Anyway, he kept saying I would be arrogant if I said that in response to the question. Well, yeah.

I can see his charm though, why he won the election, the weird forceful little man with old man hands appeal. I screamed when Mr. Rose used the word notion though. He needs to have a current of electricity buzzed through him for using that word in every interview where he loses himself in his so obvious intoxication with nearness to POWER.

I would be criticized up the wall and down the other side if I used a word even twice in a poem and in a book of poems… but Charlie can say the word notion any time he pleases. And we have to listen to it.

Speaking of French today is of course the Fête nationale and here in Portland we are celebrating it. I used that as an excuse to get out of the bike ride.

I did learn a cool French word this week louche.

Your mission, use it in your next poem. Only once.

But Then I Am Weird

2007-06-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 34

Depending on how I am feeling about myself I think of myself as either a red rose or a white rockrose with a red center so this over abundance of roses seems a bit excessive to me. Like I would be after I got older and went to seed.

I am a singular Rose in a city full of roses, a city of roses. It is the season and it is high season for every mid life guy with a little paunch and a lot of vanity to be having a mid life crisis. I still work at the Gelato store of course but mostly I spend my nights with some guy or other who thinks he is the only one seeking his lost youth somewhere in the neighborhood of my navel.

The part I hate is when they want to get all domestic and feed me breakfast.

Lately I have been carrying a pair of lightweight sandals in my bag so I can sneak out and walk home. It is the best part of the day with the night blooming jasmine just fading and the foxglove bright in the early dawn.

I hate to break it to you mister but the leather seats in your silver Jag are not impressing me. A lyrical and meaningful Sestina maybe…but your sun river tan and your daughter at the French school, I think not.

When I get home I oil up with Sesame and take a long shower and wash off the smell of the night and use my neti pot, brush my teeth and do my yoga practice. And then I curl up with a big cup of coffee and a cigarette and a pile of books until I fall asleep.

Last night I dreamed about getting my nose pierced. I’d never do it, in spite of all the stuff most guys think of as kinky, but in my dream I was at the place and the woman like she was from some circus of piercing or something kept chatting away while I anticipated the pain. I was happy to wake up.

Folks tell me all the time that I should teach yoga. I saw an older woman in her forties, still quite lovely in Whole Foods today greeting old students. Yuck! I don’t like other people enough to want to get to know them that well. But still the sutras have an appeal because they feel all difficult and obscure. This morning I couldn’t sleep so I stretched out on the floor of the ballroom and listened to the melancholy Brahm’s 4th symphony .

Like the jasmine the scent of it made me feel happy and at ease for a time.

But then I am weird.

The Kingdom of Poetry

2007-05-25T18:37:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 33

Christian has been “off” poetry lately. He is concentrating on practical matters like staying sober and alive, but it is kind of frustrating for me.

Lately when I see him I’ve been getting him to read out loud to me a chapter from Ian Gibson’s biography of Lorca. Last night he read this except from a letter young Frederico wrote to the Andalusian poet Adriano del Valle y Rossi…

“I believe we are surrounded by the souls of those who died and it is they that prompt our sorrows and they who propel us into the kingdom inhabited by the blue-and-white virgin called Melancholy — that is to say, the kingdom of poetry.”

While I believe the influential modern poet Jorie Graham certainly entered the kingdom of Anorexia just like me, and perhaps her own personal Pan’s Labyrinth, I do not believe the woman has ever entered the kingdom of poetry except as a visitor on someone else’s punch card.

She is mad. And she has us all believing she is seeing her way to a new use of language. But she is connected and she can get you published so why shouldn’t we revere her and her assignments to have her students memorize poems each week.

I just finished reading ~gaining~ the truth about life after eating disorders by Aimee Liu. I had to wait forever to get it from the library.

I suppose it is good. She certainly did an over achiever’s amount of research, a boatload of research on what is new in the land of eating disorders but I though the book was weirdly disjointed and profoundly unlyrical.

When I first got it, I sat down and consumed the first third with a notebook in hand looking for myself, and a way to understand; as if I were having a binge. But like all binges it didn’t last. I found it full of strange digressions to personal stories at odd times. Maybe it was too ambitious?

It, in its very self, gave me some insight into why people with eating disorders might work so hard in such a driven way to meet some self imposed goal and never reach it.

Because it the end an anorexic must die to reach her ultimate goal, to disappear. And as driven as we are there is some part of us that doesn’t really want to die.

I guess I am glad I read it but I found all the inspirational tripe at the end kind of nauseating and wish that it had been less than and more than it is.

I have an acquaintance that uses the term “fluffy hair” on occasion when describing a woman she might know. This was driving me crazy, she is from Texas and I though maybe Fluffy Hair was perhaps a subgroup of Big Hair or was a description of a particular kind of unsuitable cut or perhaps even a pejorative of some type.

(This is what I am thinking about when not thinking about how many calories I ate today and what a bad gross girl I am)

Anyway I finally asked her. And she said it was purely a descriptive term for a woman whose hair had body and movement but wasn’t curly or in ringlets or straight. And she pointed out to me that most blondes have hair that is straight or doesn’t move. (Or is badly permed and colored, my addition.)

I’ve been checking this out and I think she is on to something. I love it when people use their own unique descriptors and aren’t slaves to the language police.

I wonder if the souls that surround us have an opinion on this?

My Arrogant Lips

2007-04-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 32

“Let him not desire my eyes,
Prophetic and fixed,
He will get a whole lifetime of poems,
The prayer of my arrogant lips."

Oh, It Was a Cold Day
Anna Akhmatova

I think about the Cassandra thing all the time, apparently there is also the concept of a klikusha (screamer) that though considered mad, is treated with respect since she is believed to be endowed by God with the gift of insight and prophecy.

That must be why so many women on the local poetry landscape think it is okay to scream at the audience, such as it is. They think they might be mistaken for klikusha and respected. It ain’t going to happen.

I don’t know about you but I can think of about 50 things I would rather do than sit in a small uncomfortable room in a smoky bar or coffeehouse and be screamed at by someone desperate for attention but fundamentally sane.

Usually a drunk someone.

I wrote a poem about Cassandra once. I can’t find it. I remember her in her simple shift, how she in the end, gouged her eyes out, as one wants so desperately to yank out a tooth that is aching, to make the seeing stop to fit in, to be “normal”. To live a modest unremarkable life.

The problem with me is the problem A.A. states so clearly; is that if someone settles in with me, he is going to have to put up with a lifetime of poems.

Nobody really wants that. Like my father used to say, “Learn all about the arts, my girlie girl; until you marry, it will make you a better catch and your life will be more comfortable. Then you will be too busy with my grandchildren to care…”

But even if I filled these arrogant lips with silicone to make them pout like the poor Balanchine dancers used to do or broke my hands so I could not type I would still go on writing, if it was just with a stick in the sand using my toes.

But not for them, the so called audiences, but for me, because like the unbidden visions that plagued Cassandra I do not think I can help myself.

Must Have Color On The Page!

2007-04-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

Still Here

2007-04-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

Still reading Dante, still thinking about falcons and practicing yoga. Just not sure how to find my direction home. Maybe Hillare Belloc will help. He walked all the way to the gates of Rome and wrote about it.

I wonder if it is raining in Rome. It seems to be raining everywhere else.

Matching Black Candles

2007-03-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 31

I keep thinking one of these guys is going to take me to Italy but then I ditz out and forget I need to renew my passport. I keep running into or seeing these creepy people lately and it seems like good things are happening to bad people, which isn’t so awful as happy bad people are a lot easier to be around than if they are miserable. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, what made sense to Christian and I was to get a couple of dressed black candles and think lovely happy all our dreams come true, or at least our bills getting paid thoughts and just for grins a carton of cigarettes for each of us and super perfect raspberries and crème fraiche to go with them and maybe a couple of warm figs too.

There is a wedding party drinking a toast in the rain outside my window here.

“The Strength of poetry as a vehicle of protest is that a well wrought poem involves us, blood and bone, heart and mind, in the experience providing and provoking the protest. A poem is that use of language and measure which reenacts in the reader what has already happened to the poet…It is this capacity to embody (incarnate) protest that gives the poet the advantage over others who decry the times in editorials, letters, placards, the brightest satirical prose…The poem does not simply urge; “Think on these things.” It pushes us into the fray.
Arnold Kenseth from Poems of Protest Old and New

People seem to think I can just whip out a perfect and passionate and compelling antiwar poem. I think Reverend Kenseth would be a little more understanding of what it takes, what it really takes to write a poem strong enough to hold the weight of its subject matter.

Here is a a poem he wrote…
How They Came From the Blue Snows

How they came from the blue snows year after year
Into the stranger's arbor, under the rain;
Hearing the sandhill cranes at night, marching again
To the next continent with the great spear
Of starlight flying before them as they go
Into the africas, americas, exploring
Laughter, and an oracle always on the winds.

Now do we track the tiger in the mind.
Now do the swift deer leap the nerve and bone;
It snows in the heart. We penetrate
A dry and sunless continent of stone;
And the flight of birds from the summer hollow
We do not understand, we do not follow.

..and Here is his obit, “Arnold M. Kenseth, March 21, 2003.
"Among the clergy, I'm known as a poet," Arnold Kenseth wrote in 1989, "and among the poets I'm clergy. But by being in New England, being where there are birds and trees and meadows, there's a very natural marriage between religion and poetry." After graduating from Bates with a degree in English, he landed a plum job at Harvard as curator of the Harvard College Library Poetry Room. There, he cared for the Edwin Arlington Robinson collection and the Amy Lowell collection. Intending to write on the relationship between poetry and religion, he met the Rev. Samuel H. Miller, who later became dean of Harvard Divinity School. Miller got him interested in the ministry, and he received a bachelor's of sacred theology in 1944 and a master's in English in 1950 from Harvard. He was minister of South Congregational Church in Amherst, Mass., for 40 years. He also taught at UMass-Amherst. Along with Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur and John Ciardi '38, he was audiotaped for the program New England Anthology by the National Assn. of Educational Broadcasters. The Rev. Kenseth received first prize in the American Scholar Poetry Awards for his poem, "Death and Resurrection." His poetry was published in all the major poetry journals and many major magazines. He published nine books of his poems, the last in 2002. He twice read at Bates Reunions. At the second Arnold Kenseth Poetry Series started at his church after he retired, Richard Eberhart was the guest poet. For his 50th Bates Reunion, he wrote, "I rejoice in Van Gogh, Henry Adams, Dostoyevski, Chopin, J.S. Bach, Saint Francis, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Isaiah, the Gospel of Luke, and Mother Teresa - the light bearers." In 1965, he was charged by the National Committee on Worship of the United Church of Christ to rewrite and revise church liturgies. He translated Pablo Neruda's first book of poetry, Crepuscalario. He was a founder and board member of the Hampshire Committee on Civil Rights 1950-70, and chair of the UNICEF drive 1952-77 in Amherst.

He probably wouldn’t approve of the black candle thing but is so many other ways I think I would have liked this guy very much.

Back Soon

2007-03-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

We'll be back soon. In the meantime if you'd like to look at some fabulous bird photos you can link here to Icelandic Falcons.

Endlessly Self-Referential

2007-03-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 30

I wonder if Charlie Rose knows how naked his ambition to influence the worlds of diplomacy and the arts appears?

I remember when Harold Pinter gave his Nobel speech a few years ago and used it as a platform to talk about Iraq, that Christian and I talked about how unseemly and over the top, how hyper-dramatic it was.

It doesn’t seem so now.

Not in light of all that is going on, and now Charlie Rose seems lame when he argues back and one wishes Pinter could have been quicker on the uptake when he was confronted with the inevitable World Trade Center argument about why we are there. 9/11 has nothing to do with why we are in Iraq.

Afghanistan; yes, of course. Bad as it was, and it was horrid, it seems like 9/11 is a story we tell ourselves to make us feel better about why we are in Iraq. Sort of like how we tell ourselves there are angels to explain the powerful forces at work in our lives that watch over us.

We could use their help right about now, I fear.

Harold Pinter writes poetry. That is why I brought him up, not to get myself on some endless “watch” list because I expressed and opinion about the war.

He says he has always written poetry and many folks say in referring to him that he is our most poetic, successful contemporary playwright. I’ll buy that.

I need to get some of his poetry from the library and see what I think. He says he writes poems down on a pad he keeps in a pocket sitting in transitional places like a bar.

He is a gifted enough writer that I believe he can do that… unlike the hordes of ambitious half-dead animated by greed want-to-be writers that drag themselves to their day jobs full of toxic resentment that their perfect talent has not been discovered yet… sitting in bars and coffee houses and staring out bus windows as I write this.

All that matters is the work.

Speaking of the library, I ordered Gaining: The Truth about Life After Eating Disorders by Aimee Liu the other day. (She is part Chinese like me.)

I’ve only written one poem about my anorexia, and thee are probably many more in there. Heck, even Christian has written about it on an imaginary footing.

I don’t like writing about myself… I’d rather write about falcons, and watch the birds flow intact out of my hands.

A 300 Mile an Hour Stoop

2007-02-19T15:42:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 29

Here it is, the front piece of the reproduction of the 1943 translation of Manfred’s annotated book. I took this at the library. Now all I need is someone to take me to the Vatican so I can look at the original.

...Although, I admit, I didn’t have much luck getting what I wanted on Valentine’s Day.

Seriously, it was exciting enough to read the words from 800 years ago, I can’t imagine actually seeing them in the real manuscript. I’d probably faint.

Learning Latin, One Work of Art at a Time

2007-02-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 28

I am always happy when my favorite team wins, in this case a Grammy for best Choral Work of the year, it is “my” Arvo Pärt’s Da Pacem.

If you are, perhaps, asking yourself what can I get Rose for Valentine’s Day that is a little less spendy than that drop necklace of semi-precious stones she has her eye on? This CD is a steal.

I think this world can use every type and form of prayer for peace it can muster.

On Friday or Saturday I am going to steal some time away and go hide out at the library and look at De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus. I didn’t even know this extraordinary illuminated manuscript existed until about two weeks ago. Now I feel like I can’t breathe until I see it.

All of a sudden there is this immersion into the world of falconry going on.

I love this stuff,

More Mystery

2007-02-06T18:53:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 27

Christian’s stupid cell phone keeps beeping. He leaves it here sometimes because it does mysterious things that his big grown man fingers can’t understand. Grrr…

Daniel Gilbert says in an interview about his book “Stumbling on Happiness” which I read (My aunt had a copy) “…It’s not surprising that the mind tends to focus on that which it doesn’t understand…It’s scanning the environment constantly for mysteries that it can solve. And once it solves them, it packs then away in a file drawer and looks for another. Your brain is very good at that.

But there is a catch: once things are understood, they tend to have less emotional consequence than when they’re not understood…By the same token, once we understand good things, they’re not quite as good as when they are delicious mysteries.”

So hey, instead of complaining about how you don’t understand every image in that beautiful mysterious poem you were recently forced to read, think of it as brain food.

And besides a supple brain is sexy.

Speaking of sexy, the way Alban Gerhardt plays the cello here is sexy. I’d play tennis with him any day.

I finally got “Book of Longing” by Leonard Cohen from the library after waiting two months. Who read it I wonder, what mysteries were they trying to solve?

The Moon

The moon is outside.
I saw the great uncomplicated thing
when I went to take a leak just now.
I should have looked at it longer.
I am a poor lover of the moon.
I see it all at once and that’s it
for me and the moon.

The Poets Emerge From Hell

2007-01-23T20:53:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 26

A few years back Christian and I were reading outloud to each other parts of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. There was some lively conversation about (how do say?) the merits of the translation.

One of the outcomes of this adventure was that he purchased for me for Christmas the paperback copy of the Gustave Doré Illustrations for The Divine Comedy. It has been standing up against the wall in the ballroom ever since behind a pile of vegetarian cookbooks.

This week I got it out. I’d been looking at Blake drawings online and then I finished reading the Merwin memoir, Unframed Originals in which in the last essay about a pilgrimage on foot to various monasteries on Athos and his mother he writes about a line from Purgatorio oh so beautifully I was magnetically drawn to Powell’s to pick up a copy of Purgatorio.

I have learned to trust my instincts about stuff like this and after a hysterical few moments of pacing up and down like a restless tiger around the well-trod poetry section I asked some guy hanging around Whitman that was certainly a professor, where the heck Dante was anyway… He made a lame joke but pointed me in the right direction.

We sold the Pinsky back to Powell’s many long moons ago but I only had eyes for the middle road, the place between, where there is color and music and the rebeholding of stars.

I saw stars this morning. I stayed up all night and went just before dawn for a wicked peppermint hot chocolate and I could see stars!

Back at Powell’s after some quick perusal what did I see but a translation of the poem by W.S. Merwin himself! And it was $6 off the cover price. That about covers a pack of tailor-mades these days, to be savored alone. If one smokes them out on the street, every three minutes some soul thinks they are the only person on planet earth smart enough to notice and attempt to bum one.

Christian, who is reading Yeats, told me the other day that my poems remind him of Yeats: was recounting all this stuff about how influential Dante was in his time. That the language of the poem is the language that came into common usage at the time because of the poem. Wow.

I love little things about the Merwin translation. I think it is funny and poignant and beautiful and topical.

“The souls who had perceived that I was breathing
and understood that I was alive still
marveled so that they became deathly pale.”

“…the young lion of the white lair
who changes sides from winter to summer…”

…Your Romagna is not and never was without
war in the hearts of its tyrants, though…

The white lair, a tyrant with war in his heart…, the State of the Union address…

Tonight when I was walking home I walked by an army recruiting office that pretty regularly now has demonstrators outside. This is the first time I have ever seen one of the army recruiters actually out there talking to them. In some small way that gave me a tiny flash of hope.

In the notes on Canto II, Merwin sites C.S. Singleton as saying that this is the first usage of the word pilgrim. “The journey through Hell is not a pilgrimage, which assumes hope of some kind.”

The Dalai Lama says, “Every human action is supposed to be for the good, but out of ignorance and, I think, a lack of a wider perspective, often our actions bring painful consequences. The present generation—with fuller knowledge about reality and a wider perspective—can carry out action for a better world, better future…”

That would be something to see!

Snow Bound

2007-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

Stuck inside today but I couldn't resist this shot down the block when I was testing the "slipperyness" factor.

So Marked

2007-01-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 25

I don’t have a spiritual life okay? There is all this stuff they talk about in yoga classes and that is fine. I recently read Living Yoga by Christy Turlington but heck, I also read the January Vogue which has a lovely little picture of Turlington with Kate Moss, smiling like they are genuinely happy, both in black with those long long legs.

My mom was agnostic and had a good laugh about horoscopes and stuff. She did believe in luck though. My dad, well he was as Buddhist as much as a bond trader gets, so I was curious when someone gave me a copy of “Shambhala Sun” the other day because of the article about Leonard Cohen. I read it out loud to Christian yesterday.

Then I took the magazine to the gym with me, though I would have preferred a podcast, there is something quaint about reading on the treadmill. Anyways, curious about my dad I read the article called “What Makes You a Buddhist?”

In it Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche says that there are four statements spoken by the Buddha himself known as “the four seals”. Then he defines seal as meaning something like a hallmark that confirms authenticity.

I got to thinking about what this might mean in terms of poetry. I realized I didn’t really know what hallmark meant so I looked it up. Duh! So duh. Very Elvin indeed…Originally so marked at Goldsmith’s Hall in England to indicate quality or purity.

So if there were seals for a genuine woman poet in America today it would be she has to be thin, has to have slept with the right men (or in special cases men and women), has to have a teaching post that pays over $100,000 and of course be published by some prestigious press, which of course means sleeping with the publishers too, or at least to be well versed in the fine art of blow jobs. Drug use and celebrity for other reasons are also helpful.

But I was wondering in my fantasy world what the four seals would be for real poets that had to do with their work, not who they are and who they know.

They would have to be original, have something fresh and yet universal to say. They would need to have talent. And dare I say it??? Discipline, enough to have read the masters and still have their own voice. To be genuine in this truly absurd and cynical environment you have to want it more than anything else and be crazy enough to believe in yourself against all evidence to the contrary.

Wanting it badly is not enough.

Hibernation and Creating Wonder

2007-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 24

I’ve been hibernating. Curled up for days on end under all the blankets I can find with a big pile of books, a few exquisite chocolate truffles and a couple of cartons of grapefruit juice.

I went to Tahiti the summer before last, and lived on pamplemousse juice (which is like grapefruit juice only green) and pineapple juice and fresh baguette and cheese. Oh, and tuna I brought with me.

The truffles were a Christmas gift.

The cool thing about being in Tahiti despite all the obvious stuff like beauty and sun was that I didn’t recognize things. Things were not familiar. I experienced everything fresh and with wonder.

I thought the small red crabs that were everywhere were the biggest spiders I had ever seen!

That is something two of my favorite poets do. Seamus Heaney and Tomas Tranströmer. They describe stuff we already know, like waking up or walking in the woods but they find new ways to say it without using big complicated words. They also tell little stories, sometimes a five line story but there is some sort of narrative line.

The only thing that is going to work for me as a poet is to do that too. To go all the way out on the being me limb, even when I am being someone else, as in a persona poem.

In that big long profile about John Ashbery in the New Yorker last year or whenever, he talked about how he constructs poems. I do it the same way but lately it hasn’t been working for me.

On New Year’s Eve I stayed at home alone under the covers and watched the moon rise. It took hours but my bed is on the floor and the ballroom has windows to the floor so I was able to stay warm.

I have these pieces of a poem…

Wood smoke and fog, reptiles of the mind, crows flying across the full moon as it sets in the morning, a floating nightclub on the Nile, honey and coarse salt, vervain and mud.

It has something to do with a mad woman I suppose but I am not sure what.

Maybe when I finally arise from hibernation, which I’ll need to do soon, as some boy scout troop is going to start chomping Christmas Trees out front sooner rather than later and all my clothes are dirty, I’ll be able to make some sense of it.

Joyeux Noël

2006-12-24T18:24:00.000-08:00

Rose, and all of us here at slackersville Meander Knot Press wish you a happy Christmas and New Year!

Even if you don’t celebrate them, and we are not sure we do, those gift cards to Powell’s are still really really nice.

If you are here in Portland we will see you there tomorrow! All the “real” writers go to Powell’s on Christmas Day.

A Hobbit House?

2006-12-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

I am so not a hobbit but I do love living in the neighborhood with them.

My elf name is Silmarwen Súrion.

Find out your Hobbit (or Elf) name here.

A Common Enemy

2006-12-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 23

Last night Christian and I went to the Catholic Christmas celebration in a natural wooded Grotto called “The Festival of Lights.”

We got a white candle and lit it together and wished for all the big global things for the New Year, world peace, health and prosperity and good fortune for all, but we wished too that we would each have a better writing year.

I haven’t written a strong poem in months.

In a way I suppose it has to do with not being “in the game” anymore.

This year after my reading at Borders in March I withdrew completely from the local poetry “scene”.

The one thing that the snake pit did seem to do was get me so furious all the time and that fierce frustration and anger fueled my latent competitive nature and I would write to prove my work was better than…

You name it; I would try to prove my work was better than it.

Oh, not to mention the pathetic soap opera nature of a bunch of people, many with mental problems and addictions, pretending that they had something going on, going for them, the group delusion that with enough anger and enough raw unadulterated desire for recognition that one could make talent appear in places it will never go, a kind of calling for Mephistopheles to come to a place too insignificant to bother with or bargain with.

(One of the things we saw in the store full of Catholic “stuff” including fudge made by monks, was a really really bad statuette of Saint Michael smashing the Devil’s head. It is so much more beautifully portrayed here in Guido Reni’s Painting.)

I am not saying that there aren’t individuals in the local poetry scene that aren’t sticky with evil, because of course there are, but in the broad scheme of these things it is a tame backwater, stagnant and getting more foul.

Sometimes, someone young and talented will wade in and get snapped at by the turtles with their ancient wrinkled necks and insatiable libidos and appetites but mostly it is the same old folks caught in the whirlpool, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the muck, down down down the dark ladder.

Anyway, one thing I know is other then for brief and well-armored forays I am not going back. I must find some other form of inspiration.

Falling in love is good-the buzz-but there must be another way. I will ponder this today on my way to yoga class.

Luminous, the Two of Us

2006-12-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 22

The sun is out. This is highly unusual.

I am having to wander around the ballroom to get the perfect angle so I can get my bare feet in a beam and my screen in shadow so I can see what I am doing.

Of course I am also wrapped in a blanket because it is freezing in here. I can almost see my breath. One of the guys that lives downstairs has hung his soggy doormat over the porch railing and it is steaming like pumpkin leaves on a frosty fall morning.

I saw these totally cool birds this morning. I am a city girl so I don’t know the names of birds but I would swear they were finches. They were small and fluffed up in the cold, had light green heads and these glorious black and white wings on a beige body. There were about 8 of them together at a birdfeeder and they had the sweetest little song.

From the library this week I picked up a CD by Leonard Cohen’s much younger girlfriend Anjani called “Blue Alert”. The words are fragments from his notebooks put together to make songs.

It is strange collaboration as it is hard to tell where Cohen ends and Anjani begins. Not really but sort of, as there is confusion about the gender of the voice speaking and the title song is about schoolgirls and their powerful siren song to older men.

I think maybe at some point Christian thought that I might be his Anjani but then he found out how high strung and weird about food I am and that I wasn’t going to be good at taking care of him.

He needs a combination fashion model, social worker whore maid with excellent even temperament, organizational ability, good taste and driving skills who loves to cook with lots of spices and fill out forms and has the patience of Job.

It ain’t me, babe.

I can barely pick up after myself.

It is weird because we really don’t go to that many movies together, two hours plus is a really long time for Christian to go without a cigarette when he is awake. But two we saw were “Road to Perdition” and of course we made a special pilgrimage downtown to see “Sylvia” on the day it was released.

The thing these movies have in common is Daniel Craig . And he is our new James Bond.

When we were walking home from seeing “Sylvia” Christian and I were horsing around acting out the “kissing” scene at the party where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met. Because of course in the back of both of our minds is the secret desire to have someone beautiful fall madly insanely in love with us upon encountering our work.

Someone willing to take care of us, all those nasty little details of everyday living like calling the insurance company and paying the bills.

So we saw the Bond movie yesterday. During the scene at the spectacular hospital/sanitarium on the coast in Montenegro where are hero and heroine are recovering from their evil night of torture and having lots of sex, Christian whispered to me, “You should go there!”

Indeed I should. Think of the poems I could bring home.
.

Something Missing and Bad Omens

2006-11-18T13:20:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 21

This morning, thinking it might be a Tarot card, I pulled my wind blown fortune from an ivy bush. It was the four of spades.

I’ve not been able to shake the uncleanly feel of watching this middle aged man, very nondescript, basic dark blue windbreaker and cheap slacks, thinning mousey brown hair—look over his free copy of the newspaper with this predatory stare at a young blond, maybe 19, a sleepy student. He looked like his was imagining eating her alive.

I saw him a bit later going into Peet’s for expensive coffee.

I was reading an article in the December Vanity Fair about the art phenomenon in Paris, François-Marie Banier who was a gorgeous young man when he was my age. He has his own chef now and paints as well as having written novels, very bad plays and has been selling photographs for lots of money for almost 20 years.

He says, “And I was never as beautiful as they say I was. I was so angry, I had so much fire, acknowledging my beauty would have meant losing my strength. I would not have been able to fight my battles. But since psychoanalysis, I have lost my anger, and I have no more anxiety. Until I was 35, I kept the same face I had at 18. And now—I look like garbage! But I feel free—completely free.”

Martin Amis talks about something called “Higher Autobiography” in his memoir “Experience”.

“Writing about writers, writing about writing:…compulsive self-circlings…Something was missing:other people.”

Banier’s diary, which is rumored to be a masterpiece of social observation is to be published serially in France. He was a master at fawning on old, ancient artists past their day, Horowitz, Capote, Beckett but now hangs out with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss.

Amis says, “I knew Higher Autobiography was truly if temporarily unavoidable when I watched my father (Kingsley Amis) following down that road, against his inclination, against his past practice, and against his stated principles. He didn’t want to go there, but he went.”

Christian tells me there is a new open mic in town at a bar not far from where I work on Monday nights. He says I’ll hate it because it is a very smoky bar but that they will love my work and that I need to feel that people can love my work.

I don’t want to go there.

Throwing Javelins at the Moon

2006-11-11T17:21:00.000-08:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 20

It has been so wet and miserably weird out we haven’t had much traffic at the Gelato place. Even though there are some big readings at Powell’s these days. Writer celebrities.

I guess you could say I am a loner but mostly because it is cold in the ballroom where I live, it is the season of men. I would be stating the obvious to say they are so predictable in their sexual fantasies. The creepy thing now is that even I, at 23 am getting too old.

But still, I’ve spent days lately with my hands wrapped around a cup of herbal tea at Howard’s condo in front of the fireplace. He builds a lovely fire and uses real wood. Wasteful and divine.

It is too miserable even to go skiing. I like cross-country and ice skating but for some reason never took to downhill. I love hanging out in the lodge while Mr. God’s Gift to Man is off on the slopes. The snow still amazes the San Francisco girl in me, a place where it never snows. I always want to make angels. Someday I will.

I used to go out to the tiny ice rink by the ocean in The City before they tore it down. It was my secret place during the last bad year at my aunt’s house. On Sunday mornings it was my church of ice.

It was just the ancient lady all in pink with too much lipstick on and me; she of course had her own skates. I rented mine, like I rented the time away from the craziness at home. They always always played classical music and it would just be the two of us going round and round with a little fog from the ice and if we were lucky some slanting sun through the skylights.

I can still smell that ice and the rotting old wood of the place and stale popcorn and wet socks. Hear the slam of the lockers as the kids and their young moms started to arrive for Hockey practice.

Once I thought I’d write a series of poems about the girl they found frozen in ice a few years back on a mountain in Peru or Ecuador. She was a sacrifice, the ice maiden, a blow to the head. Those mountaineers carried their perfect cargo oh so carefully all the way down the mountain. A pawn frozen in time. A missive from our past.

Last year this time we were just finishing up Christian’s chapbook and getting ready for his reading at Borders.

I used to think a featured reading meant something. We argued for weeks about self-publishing and how it was a kind of selling out. Now it is all anyone really every seems to do except for the chosen few. And that has nothing to do with their work.

I finally finished reading the Marge Piercy book. In the end she whines about how hard it is to be her and have to work still at making a living after all these years.

Some days I wonder if the ice maiden, however roughly and then reverently handled by her keepers, didn’t have the better end of the deal.

A Bitter Aftertaste

2006-10-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 19

It remains foggy and yellow out.

I am for some strange reason that I can’t explain persisting in reading this bad memoir by the writer Marge Piercy, “Sleeping With Cats”.

She presents herself at least to me as eminently unlikable and the book is poorly written.

But the thing that unnerves and fascinates me is how arrogant it is. I also had this impression when I read Erica Jong’s latest memoir although Jong struck me as being fundamentally delusional and sad.

Maybe like the mom in “Running With Scissors”? I haven’t seen it yet.

I am interested in what makes someone arrogant. A friend of mine called me a couple of weeks back and asked if I remembered this guy we both used to work with. He asked, “We didn’t like him and thought he was arrogant but I can’t for the life of me remember why. Do you?”

I couldn’t. It was just this impression, this aftertaste.

“Proud and overbearing through an exaggerated feeling of one’s superiority…”

When does confidence turn into arrogance?

I believe my poetry is good, not all of it all the time, but that pretty much I have a gift and when I shoot I score more times than not. If you’ve been reading this mess you know I have that opinion by now.

I wonder if Sylvia Plath was that way, or Elizabeth Bishop, messed up big time both of them. Bishop a drunk like Jong. Dickenson was certainly a tad bit unusual.

Is it so difficult to be a women poet that has some modicum of success that it drives us to drink and over the edge into mental illness?

Is the arrogance a defense? A wall of fuck you armor?

I was watching two women talk the other day, they were walking and one was angry about something at work and was slamming a coworker or boss and her face when she barked out the staccato bitter words was just contorted enough to be profoundly ugly.

Audrey Hepburn used to say the best way to have a good picture taken of oneself is to think happy thoughts while the photographer is working.

I fret about these things, being arrogant and ugly—because I admit I believe in my work and I am bitter that other’s don’t.

Do I have to go further into these dark places and ways of being to have the work, instead of me, (like with Peter), seen and heard???

Yes dear, you write poetry dear? That’s nice.

I look at plain women and I think no one even sees them, particularly if they are old. I think of Marilyn Monroe, dressing down.

Sometimes I wear my glasses and my hair pinned up and kind of sort of slouch when I go to an event to see if someone will be interested in the work but even with that I am beginning to dislike the person I am becoming full of bile and frustration.

It is one funky vile mix.

Christy Turlington says that beauty is not so much in the eye of the beholder as in the heart of the beheld.

I would like to believe I have a beautiful heart.

Lonesome and the Yellow Light

2006-10-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 18

Poor Christian is really struggling with a bad tooth. He’s only working part time doing set-up and dishes at the church my photographer friend works at. He went off to some sliding scale dental clinic this afternoon to see if he could get the offender tooth yanked out.

Before he did though, he wrote a blog entry about a poet we both admire, the mysterious and multitalented Weldon Kees. Man, Kees knew how to wear a hat!

The thing I know about him was that his cat was named Lonesome and when he disappeared one dark night in San Francisco his friends took Lonesome in.

Christian (like most guys I know) is way more reactive and competitive than he’d like to admit. He reads and is often inspired to respond to Duncan’s blog. Duncan is also writing about his favorite poets. Or at least the poets he has been told are good by the loathsome fat old arbitrator of taste Harold Bloom. Ewww.

I’m all for reading other’s people’s opinions but Jeezaruni, can’t we make up our own minds about what is good? I guess not.

When my parents died they left life insurance proceeds in trust for me. They didn’t want me to be a “trust fund baby” so I just get a stipend to cover the basics, rent and food and transportation. I have to work for my cigarette money. My Aunt pays for my health insurance out of the trust. I so wish Christian had something like that!

I love the fattening crescent moon. We are having such clear cold evenings with these very atmospheric foggy mornings. The combo deal of the damp fog (speaking of San Francisco) and the fact that all the trees appear to be in their yellow phase makes the light just fascinating.

This morning I was thinking what if an alien came here for the first time. An alien with perceptions enough like ours, they would think this was a sulfurous pit of a place. Something I expect Christian feels a bit of. When one is in pain, the world sucks rocks, big time.

Or maybe it is all just preparation for The Day of the Dead. A celebration that makes so much more sense then handing out candy to children who have everything they could ever need anyway.

I think I’m going to be a barnacle this year. I’ll smell like wet pilings and stay put.

In a Mood

2006-10-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 17

My mother’s family is from Kyrgyzstan. A place I thought no one had heard of until last night in passing I saw the mountains of my grandmother’s home in a piece on an American Army base on the news.

My mother was very fair, her mother’s mother a Volga German resettled from the Volga river basin in Russia to this landlocked patch of nowhere by Stalin. My mother’s mother spoke German and Russian and some Chinese. It is not as strange as it might seem that my mother who spoke English and French and German and Russian should marry an American born (mostly) Chinese guy.

Christian is reading Osip Mandelstam. He was all excited the other day, his eyes lit up in that special way they get when he discovers a “real” poet.

Someone with genuine talent.

Mandelstam was ill and impoverished and arrested by Stalin’s men in 1938.

He was friends with Anna Akhmatova; what a cruel life they all had at that time! So much sadness and difficulty.

Mandelstam’s friend Nadezhda said about the day they took him away, “Why did he obediently follow the two soldiers, and why didn’t I throw myself on them like a wild animal? What had we to lose? Surely we were not afraid of being charged with resisting arrest? The end was the same anyway, so that was nothing to be afraid of. It was not, indeed, a question of fear. It was something quite different: a paralyzing sense of one’s own helplessness to which we all were prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves as well. Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance…”

Anyway, because of this connection in my own family I feel connected somehow to those great Russian poets who really did understand that poetry was an art and that if one writes it, lives and breathes it, it is because one has no other choice. At least then ordinary people still had the rich oral tradition of the epic poem.

Now we have hip hop and sound bites and the attention span of gnats.

I wonder sometimes if this passion for poetry isn’t some sort of genetic throwback, that the art has outgrown its usefulness to us as a species?

Sure in times of great stress as a people we reach for solace in poetry to explain our pain to us but maybe that is just habitual. Pretty soon it will all be explained by brain science anyway, or like me we will all be taking prescription drugs to even out our moods.

No one ever need be unseemly and overwrought again!

The morning light is awfully nice right now on the leaves of the trees turning orange, turning yellow. I think I’ll just concentrate on that and let this mood I am in pass.

Boots and a Crime Against Nature

2006-10-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 16

It was my birthday earlier this week and a gallery owner named Bobby insisted on taking me out to the Coast to Bandon for a few days of lots and lots of sex.

He is one of those gray at the temples, drives too fast, talks on his cell phone all the time mid life guys. Dime a dozen, but he did pay for a trip to a salon for a set, trim and blow out and bought me a pretty new black dress and best of all some brown suede boots. Yum, real suede, so wicked in this rainy city.

We stopped by his house on Thursday on our way back and as all these guys do, he turned on the big screen television the minute he walked in. It was PBS, the local show, “Art Beat” and he went to wash up when they started talking about poetry.

He could care less about poetry other than telling me he’d hang a show of my poems with my photographer friend’s pictures sometime to get me into bed with him. Hey, I just wanted him to pay for dinner.

I think I need to be more precise here, they weren’t actually talking about poetry, they were talking about Lawson Inada who for years taught poetry and has been named Oregon State’s fifth ever Poet Laureate.

Christian and I went to see him a few years back at a fundraiser reading at the Japanese Historical Society’s new museum. I loved loved loved the building (an old hotel for Japanese immigrants) but the poetry reading was about as boring as you can get.

He is a nice guy, very American in spite of his time in an internment camp as a child. He is, like David Bicycle, a very well loved teacher, particularly by Paulette Paul, the local poetry maven of the mostly academic world. So this isn’t about him as a person. His poetry sucks. Seriously.

And there he is all 60’s jazz and multicultural and if I try hard enough you can almost see my black roots showing bebop hip in clipped cheerful rhythms saying, “I am not going to be the Johnny Appleseed of Oregon poetry, I am going to be the Wal-Mart Greeter. They have those cool orange vests.”

“Anybody, everybody has poetry inside of them, my job is to bring it out.

Yeah-right Lawson, everybody has a fricking air guitar player in them but that doesn’t make them write “Layla”.

This just makes me completely and totally insane.

Poetry is art and is close to impossible to do well. Nobody goes to the schools and says everybody in this room can be a composer, sit there in this moment without any training and be cute and clever and write a nocturne will you?

My mom, when she was a little girl had the opportunity to go to Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts in L,A. She would talk about how funny and amazing and awe inspiring it was to realize how much training and discipline and sheer desire went into one playing of Peter and the Wolf.

No matter how well intentioned and full of good will Mr. Inada is, what he is doing feels to me like a crime against nature… at least my nature as a person who struggles mightily to write not only the best poems I can but to write something that shoots towards the best poems that have ever been written. Somewhere up there by the moon.

All That Moonlight

2006-10-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 15

It has been a world of moonlight, last night and now this morning I am up without having really slept, thinking about Polish amber and the huge full moon set over the Pacific in the foggy mornings in fall when I’d get up for an early ballet class in San Francisco.

I guess I am a bit homesick. Everybody tries to be sophisticated and oh so urban here but it doesn’t really work, the girls wear just a bit too much make-up and everybody spends too much money on the wrong things. It is kind of sad.

What we are good at here in Portland is this homegrown funkinerss. The TBA arts festival and First Thursday and Last Thursday and now they finally finished the theater at the Armory, which is just down the block from where I work at the Gelato place. They are opening with “West Side Story.”

That was my mom’s favorite musical, she’d get a funny far away look in her eyes when she’d hear a bit of one of the orchestral numbers on the Classical radio station we always had on at home.

Anyway, I hope I can score a ticket before the run ends. I am broke again. Too many cigarettes and this hand knitted green wrap sweater. Some people eat comfort foods, I buy comfort clothes, okay?

This thing happened recently with this guy and I am still tender and trying to write a poem about it but nothing is working. I have muses, you know, it has always been like this since Michel. Instead I drape myself on furniture and sigh and think about all the art I’ve been seeing.

My favorite was these clay sculptures, a bit larger than life size in yoga poses but they are not yoga sculptures. It is hard to explain, they are how a particular eye that is connected to a particular brain that has something interesting to say about the human condition sees yoga poses.

I suppose you could say I am addled by too much moonlight and longing.

Ron has added WiFi to the store so people will come in and buy dessert and coffee after they go to a reading at Powells. It will mean more guys will come over and spend more time.

Melancholy old guys, like the guy I know Duncan, who always wears a beret in winter and goes to film festivals and likes to flirt with pretty young women but has absolutely nothing to offer them except stories of a glorious and wild past. Salad days.

It gets tiresome, all that magical thinking and wistfulness. I hope somebody shoots me before I get like that, truly I do.

Amelia and the Chickens

2006-09-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 14

I am thoroughly urban. I am more comfortable standing somewhere on Montgomery Street in San Francisco then anywhere else in the world. The little marble tables in North Beach, the fresh killed black-footed chickens hanging in the shops in Chinatown, the retro smell of fresh baked bread from some lunch shop in the Financial District, cheap cut flowers everywhere.

I still have a coloring book of The Saints I picked up at the Catholic store on the floor here when I was in the market for a rosary in my witchy phase.

So it is no surprise really that I got lost in the woods when I went to the one and only “Writer’s Workshop” I’ll ever go to, “Flight of the Mind”. I went the last year Judith and Ruth ran it. Beautiful spot on the McKenzie River, I loved the huge dragonflies and white butterflies that accompanied me through the dry grass labyrinth at this retreat center in Southern Oregon.

The place was pretty darn rustic. I am used to wandering off by myself and had done so in the afternoons a few days before the day I fatefully fell for the scrap of caution tape tied to a tree as my marker for a return to civilization.

Some forest workers were actually doing something with that tree so when I blissfully headed back in the late afternoon light I had not a care in the world other than to think how strange and sad it was that at the assignment earlier in the day in poetry class, when asked to write a poem to an unborn child every other woman in the class wrote one to a miscarried or aborted child.

I took the assignment literally and imagined Amelia. A child I may or may not ever have. And wrote about the world she might or might not come into.

I thought I was mistaken and the tree must be just over here, down this kind of sort of trail there, as I totally and completely managed to get myself in the underbrush and disoriented. I know nothing of the life cycle of pollywogs or what one is supposed to do in a situation like this but have blind faith it will all work out.

Like some crazed deer I stood stick still and used all my senses, heightened by fear and feeling like an idiot and then headed off in a stumbling branch and bramble poking in every possible place of uncovered skin extravaganza as I blundered off.

And I was lucky.

I managed to find a house with a naked woman sunning herself on a lounge chair placed in the rough driveway. She was as startled as I was when I burst out into the clearing.

As cool as a filthy young poet can be I strolled down that driveway to the road below and made my hasty retreat back to the company of all those hungry wanna be women writers and the blessed sound of the dinner bell.

Friday - Part 13- Forever

2006-09-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

Early on in seeing Peter I got in the habit of bringing a poem I was working on or one of Christian’s. I did this for a very specific reason. I wanted him to know that we were “real” poets. The distinction was critical to our work together I thought. I desperately wanted my work to be taken seriously.

And that was exactly what wasn’t happening in the chapbook workshop. My experience wasn’t valid because I was younger than most of the participants and had no academic underpinning.

Just like a painter who paints from life I write from life and pretty soon into seeing Peter the stuff that came up in our sessions together started making its way into my poems.

It set up this feedback loop that became more and more intense. It was like being engaged in this hothouse environment where I finally had a perfectly wonderful audience once a week for an hour. I could relax, I could stretch out, and I could bloom.

At the end of the workshop we had to go out alone to the teacher’s house for a “private” critique of our manuscript. The thing about the teacher is that while she desperately wanted to be taken seriously as well, (her father was some hotshot academic at a prestigious school back east) she isn’t the brightest bulb on the block.

She was self-important, good natured, well intentioned and energetic from her pit of ambition, but clueless. She massacred my manuscript.

She didn’t understand the poems or the editorial arc of the positioning and I honestly felt like we were not speaking the same language. I just let it wash over me.

And besides… I had Christian to talk to and Peter to look forward to. I think I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that afternoon, though.

It was only a few weeks later that things started to change with Peter.

At first I kind of sort of ignored it. Actually I kind of sort of ignored it for way too long. He was looking at me differently. His body language towards me changed subtly.

I so wanted him to not be interested in me.
I so wanted him to be interested in my poetry.

The images, the line, the shape and substance. I wanted that so badly that I ignored the sharp little competitive comments about Christian, the laughter and intensity of the whole thing.

Christian started to notice a change. And he too would make sharp little barbed comments about Peter.

This time that was supposed to be about me and my stupid raging hunger and body image problems and my frustrations and difficulties getting recognition for my work was turning into something not about me at all.

So you tell me what I was supposed to think when my therapist, this former monk, Zen Priest, PhD in Psychology told me that he loved me and that he would love me forever?

(And when a Zen Priest tells you something is forever, he isn’t kidding.)

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

2006-09-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

Part 12

Drives me crazy, not having titles and as it seems like I’ve completely taken over this blog from my kind publishers, I’m thinking you can assume unless stated otherwise that for the moment any posts here are by me. Stand by for titled entries, okay?

I’ve written so many poems inspired by the Chinese Garden it was like visiting a lost love yesterday, a love that has gone on and become something more than when you knew him. My favorite part was the Chinese Buddhist nun being shown around by her Western handler, the ubiquitous slim serious middle-aged follower.

The nun was full of fun and laughter as she was reading the banners with poems about spring and snow.

The two most impressive people I have ever “met” were Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. Gehlek Rimpoche , who looked like a bullet headed mobster in his black shirt and tie totally knocked my socks off and Tenzin Palmo who was born in England and is a Westerner who made the transition to fully ordained nun.

She is kind and funny and absolutely direct. When she looks at you she sees you. She has learned how to so get out of her own way.

I’m thinking about this Buddhist thing because of my dad and because of Peter. Before he got his doctorate in psychology he was a Buddhist monk living in the Zen center in LA. He gave up his vows, married and had a son, but he still teaches meditation and has a center and a group of fiercely loyal followers here.

He wears dark clothes all the time and has his hair close-cropped. I remember the first time I ever saw him I talked to him about Original Sin. I was explaining Christian to him, my Christian, not the religion and our poetic companionship.

Which was a lead in to talking about this workshop I was taking on how to make a prizewinning chapbook manuscript. It was truly awful.

Once a week at this woman’s expensive home in the burbs, upstairs in her writing space. There was only one guy, but of course he got the most respect, as he was a star student of David Bicycle, the head of the local writing workshop “space” called The Kitchen. Bicycle’s claim to fame was a shot at the US Olympic Curling team, not a bad poet, a beloved teacher. Our teacher had just published a chapbook of his work.

The star student was well off financially and a successful attorney in the “real” world. Some insurance company published a bunch of his truly mediocre poems in an insert in The New Yorker last year. I wonder how much he paid for that.

Anyway, I liked Peter and felt comfortable with him as he seemed to be most knowledgeable about the things a therapist should be knowledgeable about and he had a sense of humor and I wasn’t attracted to him and I got the vibe he was truly concerned about me and my poetry and my weird relationship to food which is why I was there in the first place.

Tea

2006-09-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

Rose had tea at the Chinese Garden this afternoon. She thinks it important to always have some color on the page.

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

2006-09-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Part 11

I’ve been busy, okay? reading and having a minor nervous breakdown. (I used to have a boyfriend who would tell me I read too much. Now he sends me emails about George Orwell.) Oh, Ativan, my Ativan, the absinthe of the modern world.

Hey, it’s better than rocks in the old pockets now isn’t it?

One of the books I read was The Flamenco Academy by Sarah Bird. Lots of foot stomping and over the top chick lit drama, but one part did get me thinking…

The more outgoing character tells the more wallflower type character before a heavily freighted audition, talking about the older star performer, “You do everything she does except compete. Story of your life in a nutshell.”

“Girls always wait for the world to give them things. To see the sweet, smart, obedient girls they are, then paste a star on their foreheads. It doesn’t work that way. The things you really want you have to take…”

There is a nice rhyme in there.

I don’t know, maybe it is the home county, one quarter Chinese, blood in my veins, but ever since I met him Christen has been hammering me with the same message.

The thing is people do give me things. Clothes and first class tickets and… well—men do.

I had a date on Sunday with this world-renowned classical pianist that was in town. We went to the art museum. We saw the lovely Japanese wood block prints of birds and flowers. The ones I like best were hand sewn into these beautiful books. He wouldn’t stop talking. All about how he owns a print by this guy or that and look at this detail or that.

A real collector. The good news is that he bought me a membership in the museum so for the next year I can go whenever I want. He said when he kissed me goodbye on the forehead that he’ll think of me there, a beauty among beauties…

Yeah, yeah.

Man, he had extraordinary expressive hands that played me well.

This competition thing though, it is up for me right now. And of course the food thing and my doctor was telling me yesterday he thought well maybe it is time for more talk therapy and I didn’t really want to tell him that my last experience with talk therapy was a disaster and that it well kind of umm fucked me up…

And that got me thinking about how hopeful I was when I first went to see Peter in his spare Zen office down at John’s Landing with the atrocious Ikebana on the table.

The bad flower arrangement should have been a tip off to the trouble to come but I was so wrapped up in my hurt and wonder at the rejection I was receiving in the “Poetry Community” that my trouble ahead radar wasn’t working and he was highly recommended by someone I trusted.

Goes to show you never can tell…

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

2006-09-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

Part 10

God, this place is a mess! I need new clothes. What happens when I need something new is that I try on everything in about 50 different combinations before I go out and I end up with piles on the ballroom floor under the windows.

My dad was a bond trader in San Francisco and when I was little and very very good sometimes I could go to his office, a high rise. They all had these pretty empty offices with piles of paper stacked neatly in front of the floor to ceiling windows. So when I throw a tiny sea green layering t-shirt on a stack of other clothes under the bell shaped windows I think of him.

Weird.

Jack had me read my poem outloud to the workshop group. No problem. I am an experienced reader, my voice only quavered at first. Then he asked the group, “So what does it mean???” Dead silence. Silencio.

It killed me, that silence.

Broke my heart. He even tried giving hints…”Do you think it might be about…” No one spoke up. Everybody just made nice nice and after awhile he told some story and mumbled about the benefits of clear writing and moved on.

Later, Christian, my champion, said to Jack privately, “It is about death you know, her poem.” Jack, said, “Of course it is about death! I knew that but they didn’t.”

Love and sex and death.

When it comes down to it every poem that matters is about those things in some way. Even poems about the inevitability of regret are about loss, which is a kind of a death.

So here is my hint to you, if you ever find yourself in an odious overpriced workshop and can’t think of a thing to say about somebody else’s work, ask yourself what part of love, sex and/or death is it about and get a clue and say something intelligent, okay? Somebody's heart is most likely at risk.

There was this middle-aged woman in that workshop that could not stop talking. After about four hours of her nervous nonsensical ramblings I thought I was just going to deflate and die right there on the spot. It was exhausting.

I wonder what she said to herself when she went home. If she had any awareness that her compulsive babbling was killing anything that even resembled a creative or an intuitive spark or passing on of some august teaching?

The other day I asked a receptionist at this office I was in if she was okay, she had this odd little bandage on her face and not only did I get the story of her frightening trip to the dermatologist, I am not sure how but that turned into a description of the place she wanted to have her son’s birthday party and then, and then as I am trying desperately to back away and out of there a description of the death of each of three kittens she brought home from the Humane Society!

Where in there, in my inquiry about her wellbeing did I give her permission to tell me that! Eek.

Poetry, the art of saying so much with so few words.

The antithesis of our modern world.

I think my cell phone is probably under one of those piles of clothes. I am ignoring the ringing.

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

2006-09-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

Part 9

Angie and Beth have alternative sources of income, the band gigs sometimes do pay and the modeling of course does. Plus they have...well…parents.

I, on the other hand have been chosen by this stupid avocation that pays nothing but the leering affected lust of older men with no resources unless they teach. Oh to be Jane Kenyon and “discovered” in class by Donald Hall! Discovered in bed too I am sure.

Everybody says I should go for my MFA at some prestigious school where I can sleep with the right assholes to get me connected enough to get a book. How many blowjobs would it take I wonder? How much spanking?

Anyway, a few years ago still all bright eyed and believing I got excited because the amazing poet Jack Gilbert was coming to Portland. He was going to read at PSU and then teach an all day master class at Mountain Writers.

Christian and I scraped together our meager resources to pay for memberships and the workshop. We had to submit to Jack of course first but that wasn’t a worry. I picked one of my best poems. Christian is a hoarder of his best work and picked a lighter metrical poem he thought would be cheerful. Jack hated it, but that is another story.

Jack was 86 back then and losing it. He recited from memory at the reading and lost track a few times and it was painful to watch. But still you know it was the mysterious brilliant Jack who had won the Harvard Younger Poets and then went off to live in Greece with Linda and Japan to marry again and break her heart.

But now he was back and we found him in the kitchen the next morning at Mountain Writers talking to a pale hung over looking Dorrianne Laux about money. Or lack there of.

A scene I have seen, since repeated again and again between “famous” living poets when they get together. Jack told us later in that same kitchen, Christian and me, the only reason he was doing these loathsome workshops was for the money. He was broke.

Jack started off the workshop talking about meeting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s and hanging out with William Carlos Williams in the basement while his wife made dinner. I was totally blown away.

And blown away too when Jack, not knowing at that point which of the participants belonged to which poem, had one in his hand and muttered to himself outloud, “Think of the mind that wrote this poem, think of it!”

This is from a man who met Ezra Pound who was the guy who shepherded T.S. (…and the fire and the rose are one fucking) Eliot! I could feel a sense of lineage all the way down into my toes...

And he was talking about my mind and my poem.

That offhand compliment is most likely the best praise I will ever receive in the arc of my creative life…

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

2006-08-31T21:11:00.000-07:00

Part 8 (forget the Roman Numeral thing)

The moon is moving on to half full and I’ve been thinking about orange blossoms and making swimming pools.

They are a kind of girlie martini. One has to have the proper chilled glass. Otherwise the light doesn’t work properly. Blue Curacao is the secret. Oh and when you’ve had enough of making the perfect Caribbean beach water colored drinks you can swirl in straight cranberry juice. Not only is it good for those pesky bladder infections it makes this great iridescent purple color.

Last time I was at the salon I splurged with some guy’s money and bought the B&B shampoo I love so much. I think it smells like an Orange Julius but my stylist thinks it smells like figs. All I know is that I love the way my hair smells after I wash it.

I’ve been kind of a mess lately and sometimes I get confused about who I am and yesterday I was at the Farmer’s Market carefully picking out a couple of small pears, a beautiful organic orange pepper, a few perfect tomatoes and a solitary peach.

That peach was amazing; it had about four layers of flavor. There was this high sour note that made me squinch up my face and there was this cinnamon like spiciness and then two different layers of sweetness, a quick hit that came just after the sour and this deep thrumming sweet that one wanted to go on all night.

It was funny, I had my purchases in a string bag, I’d been following this woman around the market who had my hair to see if she was me but she wasn’t, she was wearing jeans I wouldn’t be caught dead in, actually I don’t wear jeans except when some guy absolutely insists but so I gave that up and wandered off and some old woman who had seen a lot of drinking days asked me if I had any money for food.

I said, “No, but would you like a pear?” She was a bit surprised and said, "I don’t want to take from your own personal food stash…”

I said, “It is a little bruised but I bet it is really sweet.” I gave her the red number just bursting with juice. I think we were both happy there for a moment.

Bobby says he wants to come over and watch me shave my legs. I wonder if I can talk him in to taking me shopping tomorrow? I found this store downtown that sells some Eileen Fisher pieces I covet.

Fall is in the air. A nice wooly sweater to snuggle up into would be so very comforting.