notes

Some stuff from the notebook:

Poetry things that bug me:

-- the idea that a poem does not exist until it is published -- and its existence is greater when published in a magazine like The New Yorker or Poetry

-- the idea that there are great poets

-- the idea that there are too many poets and too many poems

-- the anger at poets over their (a) not buying enough poetry / not subscribing to poetry magazines (especially the ones to which they send their poems), (b) teaching people to write poetry, thus creating more poets and more poems

-- the idea that more is worse, the best Collected Poems is the slimmest


I can see the seeming disconnect: there is a lot of poetry, there are a lot of people writing it, shouldn't there be at least as many buying it?

I'm not 100% convinced there aren't people buying poetry. After all, if there are ten zillion books of poems out there the same ten people haven't picked up all of them.

But I also resist the notion that market defines value.

Whether or not it was (is?) really true I like the idea that tribal people take for granted the fact that each of us is an artist, artist as a role not being divisible from basketmaker or dancer or hunter. I'm, I must admit to myself, insistent on originality, on novelty, experimentation. Tribal people, it seems to me, tend to be limited to traditions that make the variety of human experience relatively homogeneous.

Then again, as I like to note when reading lamentations over the discarding of poetic form (sonnet, iambs, whatever), English itself is a form.

I like also the idea that making poems is a spiritual activity. Like meditation. Or a form of meditation. I might say prayer. Though prayer has such a "gimme this, God" connotation that I hesitate before that comparison.

comments on version 4

The transition from stanza 1 to stanza 2 is unacceptable as is, but that doesn't much matter right now.

Mine the only body but for the gull?

"Interoceptor" version 4

without dog unhooked from leather leash heaving himself at the frisbee with the chewed edge,
without brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires,
without anyone touching in the dark spaces of dunes,
without volleyball, without towel,

cold with sea and mine the only body
in which to warm itself
my tears the only other wet
the wind might dry

the sea’s hem a crackling yellow foam
tearing among the black kelp heads
then tugged back for mending

the sand flea burrows bubble open between washes
and there is one cry, I think, a gull I can’t see

one small stretch of me
walking, the one in cotton
among strewn and sanded wood,
not sharing this space with anyone with a camera,
no beer logo blanket, no sunscreen bottle leaking

Happy endings are all alike?

"Happy endings only occur in fiction. In real life, all stories end sadly. 'Until death do us part' sounds very romantic until, y'know, the death part." -- Peter David

New Culture Cure

I've just been listening to CDs from 3 bands I think of as '80s bands. I have the CD player on random so it switches between The Cure, Culture Club, and New Order. The CDs are from recent box sets.

These three bands are the ones I return to most. I think I have almost everything they've put out.

Growing up in Sebastopol I only heard Culture Club on the radio (or on top 40 video shows). We didn't receive the SF stations that were playing the Cure and New Order. I wasn't an early fan of any of them because I didn't know they existed until they'd been around awhile.

I heard snippets of "Blue Monday" and "Bizarre Love Triange" emanating from other people's stereos (I distinctly remember hearing a car pass in Santa Rosa blasting "Bizarre Love Triangle" and thinking to myself, "There's that song again. I wish I knew who did it. I'd buy it right now.") When I finally knew who they were New Order were my gods. I had to overcome some internal (& external) homophobia to adopt Culture Club, what with that "big drag queen" Boy George so prominent in the band. But when I heard "Karma Chameleon" I knew I had to own whatever record it was on. The Cure had a whole atmosphere about them that put me off -- the slash of lipstick, the ratty hair, the girls who (rather like Duranies) adopted the Cure look. And sometimes Robert Smith's verge-of-tears voice got on my nerves. It wasn't until "Just Like Heaven" that I was really won over. The album that included it, "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me", grew on me until I was playing it regularly. I haven't gone back and bought all the Cure's early stuff but I have everything since "Kiss Me" and the singles collections.

After Boy George recovered from his heroine addiction and 'fessed to the torrid love affair with Jon Moss (Culture Club's drummer) he ditched the coyness about half his life and got more interesting. The Culture Club box set is varied and fresh. I read George's autobiography, Take it Like a Man. For a few years he was writing a weekly column for a London paper and I'd read it on the web. ... Just discovered a second volume of autiobiography is forthcoming. Price is listed in pounds; will there be an American release?

latest mix

Luc Sante in the new New York Review of Books writes about mix tapes. "[T]he mix tape ... is one part Victorian flower album, one part commonplace book, one part collage, and one part recital."

Sometimes I just find the list of artists fascinating, as in my latest mix:
1. Adrift in Kerala ... Bob Holroyd
2. Patent Pending ... Lamplighter
3. Waiting for Conrad ... Shooglenifty
4. Big in Japan ... Tom Waits
5. Mustard ... Latin Playboys
6. Rockin' the Bronx ... Black 47
7. Goldrush ... The Herbalizer
8. Duria ... Ferdoos
9. Katami-Bushi ... Parsha Club
10. Electric Lady Land ... Fantastic Plastic Machine
11. If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I can Win Your Heart ... Beulah
12. Please ... The Hippos
13. Man with the Hex ... The Atomic Fireballs
14. Flame ... Sebadoh
15. Lipstick ... Imperial Teen
16. Don't Bring Me Down ... J Church
17. Murder (or a Heart Attack) ... Old 97s
18. Unholy Train ... Damnations, TX
19. Can't Stand It ... Wilco

Kent's version

without dog unhooked from leather leash heaving himself at the frisbee,
without brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires,
without any touching in the dark spaces of dunes,
no volleyball, no towel,

mine the only body in which wind
could warm itself cold with sea,

... the sea’s hem crackling yellow foam
... me the one in cotton

my tears the only other water
but for blood

... sand fleas, a lonesome gull,
... strewn and sanded wood,

but no one with a camera,
blanket, sunscreen bottle leaking

I was it

comments on version 3

I posted the first stanza of version 3 a few minutes ago, said to myself, "False start." So I went back and did some more work. Didn't I say I had to allow myself to make things worse?

"Interoceptor" version 3

without dog unhooked from leather leash heaving himself at the frisbee with the chewed edge,
without brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires,
without anyone touching in the dark spaces of dunes,
without volleyball, without towel,

mine the only body in which wind
could warm itself cold with sea,
my tears the only other water
but for blood -- in the sand fleas, in the lonesome gull,

yellow foam at the sea’s hem crackling
and me the one in cotton
among strewn and sanded wood,
not sharing this space with anyone with a camera,
no blanket, no sunscreen bottle leaking

I was it
day
one shore

"Kill your babies"

I found a couple places that attribute "Kill your babies" (regarding excising during revision the parts of the piece of which you are most fond) to William Faulkner. Not sure the sources are unimpeachable.

Josh Marshall characterizes the people running our country

A "combustible mix of poor judgment, rich ideological fantasy life and pervasive disrespect for the rule of a law." Here.

comments on version 2

I remember Richard Speakes commenting on the block thick look of my poems of the time. I began putting in stanza breaks more frequently after that. A stanza break really does give the eye relief. Since we're using lines here, might as well use stanza breaks to help highlight what the line is doing. Otherwise it's much like a block of prose with tight margins.

I like the poem's rush of lists so would like to keep that. I like the poem's sound play ("brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires" being a line of which I'm quite fond). Here I remember Robert Hass quoting another poet (or novelist?), "Kill your babies." Hass shook his head sadly. "He must have been a terrible teacher."

(I did a quick google search on "Kill your babies," and found instances where it occurs as writerly advice but the best attribution I saw was, "a writing teacher once told me.")

This version makes more sense than the first. I did lose some of the poem's forward rush. Which I miss.

"Interoceptor" version 2

The beach was splendid without anyone touching
in the dark spaces of dunes, without
brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires,

without the dog unhooked from leather leash heaving
himself at the frisbee with the chewed edge.
When I was the only body in which the wind

could warm itself cold with sea,
when my tears were the only other water
but for blood -- in the sand fleas, in the lonesome gull,

when yellow foam crackled at the thin hem of the sea
I was the only one in cotton, the only one

standing among strewn and sanded wood,
not sharing this space with anyone with a camera,
no volleyball, no blanket, towel or sunscreen bottle leaking.

I was the body, large enough to remain unfilled,
my eyes taking in what daylight offered --
sea, shore, single sand grain the wind bore high,

and I filled myself continuously, building
with these materials the small version of everything.
And the sand held my feet and stone sand and burning stone
cold stone. All below burning and shifting and standing

kept me steady where I was, my clothes blowing,
my hands open, spread to catch and let slip
what crept to me, what flew by, what sang or screamed,
the ocean bending near and forward falling.

comments on "Interoceptor"

"Interoceptor" was published in The Tomcat, a poetry journal out of Petaluma CA that saw a few issues back in 1990 and thereabouts.

I like it. It needs work. How to change it to make it better? Throw out the fear of making it worse. This is probably what will happen at first. I'd like to see a version of "Interoceptor" I'm really proud of, instead of intrigued by but find slightly embarassing. I'm reminded of Renee Gladman introducing her reading last night by saying she was going to read a sex scene and she wasn't sure she was going to be able to say the word "pussy" without blushing. That kind of embarassment should be OK. Rather I'm thinking about the failed metaphors, the yellow foam like a shaken soft drink or the bricks of the wall of air. So I'll be attempting revisions and you'll see them here.

I haven't been to poetry readings much lately. I went last night to the Holloway Poetry Series on UC campus. Renee Gladman, Pamela Lu, and Chris Chen. Chris looked good with a shaved head. Renee remembered my "Hundred" piece from years ago. Pam read way too long. I wasn't going to say that because Pam said, "I read your blog!" and I want to say only nice things so people will like me. Fortunately I did enjoy "Ambient Parking Lots" (some of it very funny) so as too long poetry readings go it coulda bin wurs. And the torture chairs of the Maud Fife room didn't afflict me so bad this time because (a) I had a jacket thick enough to wad up for padding and (b) all that yoga has strengthened my back to the point I don't always have to lean my weight against an object outside my body. I asked Pam if I could excerpt from "Ambient Parking Lots" for HCR. My poetry pages are almost full.

Interoceptor

The beach was splendid without anyone touching
in the dark spaces of dunes, without brown bottles broken in the coals of old fires,
without the dog unhooked from leather leash heaving
himself at the frisbee with the chewed edge.
When I was the only body through which the wind
could rattle before reaching the earth,
when my tears were the only water besides the sea
and the blood in the sand fleas and the single gull,
when the yellow foam at the thin hem of the sea coming up
reminded me of a shaken soft drink or the top of the grapefruit juice,
and I was the only one in cotton, the only one
standing beside the strewn and sanded wood,
I was not sharing this space with anyone with a camera,
no volleyball, no blanket, towel or sunscreen bottle leaking,
when every little thing went through and into me and
not to or through or from anyone else –
that was not perfect,
but a certain great smallness.
My body felt large, my eyes big enough to take in
this section of the shore, my head to hold it,
my lungs to carry the bricks of the wall of air,
my feet to press down the grains that one to one to one to
rock to vein to liquid metal stayed down,
and there was I, in my body, in my clothes blowing,
open to the undersides of my fingers to the face,
the cliff, the elbows of the ocean bending.

poetry contests

I loathe contests. Especially contests for the publication of poetry. I'll give a pass to those that don't charge an entry fee, but then why call it a contest? Why not make it known your press is looking for poems then publish or celebrate those that you like the most? There's a new site that wants to blow the lid off the contest scam: Foetry!

Good luck.

When I spoke with Michael Martin yesterday morning (he in Amsterdam, me in Berkeley), he said every year he chooses work from his magazine to nominate for a Pushcart Prize. Having read the Pushcart anthology three or four years in a row (this was 15 years ago or so) I can't say as I understood Mike's agonizing over his choices. Sending work on to the Pushcart judges means you're giving your contributors another chance at publication, this time in a rather nifty-looking anthology. If anything gets in the anthology the magazine of first publication gets a little notice. Other than the silly "best" designation I don't see any harm or anything to agonize about. The editors of the Pushcart anthologies have their tastes, tastes which sometimes coincide with mine. What they publish is what they like, best or whatever. If I were a magazine editor I'd nominate some poems (or stories or ...), or I'd intend to, but I wouldn't have much expectation Bill Henderson would love what I love. I've seen other poets crow about "being nominated for a Pushcart Prize." Well, yay for them. It means the editor of the magazine that published the poem liked the poem a lot. Something like that happened to me.

why I haven't gotten an MFA

I've wondered about getting the MFA in poetry. I haven't agonized about it, exactly. But I have thought seriously ... mainly as a way to get connected to other poets and mentors who would further my poetic career. I so hate the whole marketing thing -- even to choosing poems to print out and put in an envelope, but most especially rejection -- that months will pass between flurries of sending out. What would change after two years of grad school and, likely, thousands of dollars of debt? Surely I'd gain that motivation for getting my poems out to the world. Surely, surely.

Uh huh. Daniel Nestor has a post about the consequences of his stint at NYU. (If the preceding link doesn't get you to Nestor's blog, try this; it's the April 11 post.) I don't know Nestor's poetry but here's some fine disgruntled snarking about his former teachers:

My praise of these teachers ends with their poems. As part of the NYU creative writing program, Olds, Kinnell and Levine were all uniformly uninterested in students, limited their time to a minmum of access for fear of being "overwhelmed" by their students (that was a word we heard a lot), and most damningly, were not not empathetic with what students were doing in their poems. The only way to hold the interest of any of these teachers was to write a poem in their own style, except worse, so as to make them feel good, as well as give them something to say to improve it (i.e., make it one of their poems).

[...]

I remember once when a student asked Galway Kinnell what we should do when we get out of grad school -- should we apply for teaching jobs, send poems to journals?
Kinnell paused, looked at the ceiling -- dreaming, no doubt, about his garden's new Spring sprouts in his Vermont house, where he would haul ass to the day after this last workshop -- and said to "just be a poet" after grad school.

Har har.

At UC Berkeley I took an undergraduate workshop with Robert Hass and I know I tried to emulate Hass somewhat. Mostly unconscious, I think. I didn't realize how constricted my poetry had been until I was in Lyn Hejinian's workshop. I liked Lyn much more as a teacher. But I have no bitterness about Robert Hass. He struck me as a sweet man, honestly interested in his students. His reputation and those other students who were trying to be like him had something to do with what happened to my poetry.

more on the "controversy" I mentioned yesterday

The blogger who got in trouble for his lack of sympathy for the lynched mercenaries in Iraq runs Daily Kos, a site I visit frequently. There's a full rundown of the fallout of Kos' comments at The Blogging of the President. An excerpt:

When I produced the call-in talk radio radio pilot 'The Blogging of the President', I noticed some interesting similarities between talk radio and blogs. Call-in talk radio is organized around authentic conversation, and so are blogs; Howard Stern and Atrios have similar levels of devotion among their audiences, because they each connect and seem trustworthy. There is however one key difference between blogs and talk radio; blogs create memory, whereas talk radio and cable punditry destroys it by turning opinion and analysis into an ethereal product.

have headache, will feel yucky

I liked that revision thing. I'll do it again.

Is there anything in the news these days that would make one happy? Lynchings in Iraq? One blogger I read regularly has no sympathy because the Americans killed were highly paid mercenaries and the US response will probably result in more (American & noncombatant Iraqi) deaths. When I saw the pictures of the charred bodies hung from a bridge with happy children dancing beneath, it put me in mind of classic American lynchings. Used to be there was a lively postcard trade in such images. Regardless of whether the killed are innocents or criminals I don't want to see crowds exulting over tormented human bodies. I followed as closely as I could the news of the Tiananmen protests and when the Chinese army started to kill people it was no surprise (and, yes, I felt a sense of satisfaction) when crowds managed to strike back and set fire to troop carriers or drag a soldier from a bus and rip him apart. Can we all agree this stuff is bad? ...

I haven't gone to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. A film about Jesus wouldn't be high on my to-see list anyway, that it's a film of him being brutalized does drop it further down that list. On the other hand, I am thinking about seeing the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Zombies. They're already dead.

did I answer the question?

I think I didn't really answer the question, "Why do I think the poem finished?"

When a poem doesn't seem finished it has a missing piece quality, a where's-the-rest-of-me gap. This is talking back from a result. I say it seems finished. I look at it and try to figure out why it seems finished where the other versions were unfinished.

what you end up with

I ended up with something I like. Whether it rose up from the depths as my metaphor had it when I was struggling with version 5 or whether it was the stone that broke its surface that allowed a reformation into a thing that seemed right, dunno. There have been times I've revised a poem where it seemed I was merely clearing away junk that was obscuring what the poem really was. There have been other times, and I think this was one of those, where the poem just didn't have the right chemical bonds and needed to be smashed in order for the parts to shift around and find their true complements.

Here's the question. Are these the same poem?:


1.

Let me hold your hand.
Let me hold your hand somewhere.
Somewhere in the house.
In the house on the beach with the rain falling.
The rain falling like coins from a slot machine, splashing.
Splashing onto, out of, splashing against.
The riches of splashing, the gold of the river, the silver.
Silver without light, the hard sharp edge of worth.
What's worth it, what's worth darkness, what's the crash out of darkness.

Let me hold your hand.
Let me hold your hand where it is in the cold room in your lap.


2.

Crash upsets the table of values.
Echoes caught on one wall, struggle there.

The dent in the seat cushion begins its rise.

Wealth of one shadow.

The full room, made of old materials.

Light, thrown from the body, bunches on the floor.

Window, open a crack, lets in color
rain has been going over.

River responds to this stone.

Offer me the hand that is colder.


*

I'm not at all sure they're the same poem. That the second owes its existence to the first isn't the answer. The second is exploring territory I've lately been poking about -- the juxtaposition of elements that are related by leaps of imagination. The first, written roughly 7 years ago, is part of what I was doing then -- building elements one from the next via repetition of words from the preceding line. The latest version (#2 above) has no repetition. #2 does include some of the imagery from #1 -- rain, cold, river, hand. "Crash" has gone from "crash out of darkness" to "Crash upsets the table of values" ... and from the end of the poem to the beginning. Then one might do a reading for meaning, right? Do the poems share a meaning? Both seem to seek a human grounding -- the held hand -- in a dark/shadowed, cold, broken (crash, splashing against, struggle, thrown) world.

Why do I think the poem finished? I do think it finished. I'm quite happy with it. That happened all of a sudden. Less than a half an hour after the poem seemed nowhere. The final version is largely the same as the version immediately preceding. Of the final version's 10 lines 8 are exactly or almost the same as lines in the preceding version. Yet they seem different to me. Is it that the order has been changed? That's part of it. "Offer me the hand that is colder," is now the last line. In the preceding version three lines followed it. It seems to me the final version echoes the first version in the request for the hand, that it seems most appropriate it be the poem's last need.

Is it the white space I've allowed in? In the final version most of the lines are also stanzas. In the preceding version there are three 4-line stanzas. The images, the propositions have space to assert themselves, be independent. In the larger stanzas the lines seemed more hurried, their connections forced. The final version emphasizes the parts, the brokenness. It wants more attention on the effects of each line.

version 6

Crash upsets the table of values.
Echoes caught on one wall, struggle there.

The dent in the seat cushion begins its rise.

Wealth of one shadow.

The full room, made of old materials.

Light, thrown from the body, bunches on the floor.

Window, open a crack, lets in color
rain has been going over.

River responds to this stone.

Offer me the hand that is colder.

comments on 5th version

This seems to me just fiddling. I was feeling something coming up in version 4. Then Jack offered his collage thingy. And I liked it about as much as anything I'd done. I toyed with his changes. Present tense. Eliminating these words, those words.

Something's gotta come from inside this. If there's anything inside it's gotta bring its body up. I feel like I'm flicking a fishing line across a dark pond. So far I've made some mildly diverting ripples but I've not attracted any living creatures. Time to heave in a stone?

fifth version?

Worth darkness.
Crash upsets the table of values.
The dent in the seat cushion begins its rise.
Light, thrown from the body, bunches on the floor.

Echoes caught on one wall, struggle there.
Wealth of one shadow.
Window, open a crack, lets in the color
the rain has been going over.

Offer me the hand that is colder.
The cold room, put together out of old materials,
maintains this position.
A river knows its stones.

picking at Jack's version

The dent in the seat cushion begins its rise.
Light, thrown from the body, bunches on the floor.
Echoes caught on one wall, struggle there.

Somewhere in the house
you’ve propped one hand open.

Outside, the rain takes its usual position,
which is worth what it’s worth.

Jack Martin's version

Jack Martin emailed me a "collage" he put together from the versions of the poem so far posted:

Collage of Glenn’s lines

The dent in the seat cushion begins to rise.
Light, thrown from the body, bunches on the floor.
Echoes caught on one wall, struggle there.

Somewhere in the house
your hand props open.

Outside, the rain in its usual position
falling like coins from a slot machine,
splashing onto, out of, splashing against.
The riches of splashing,
that cracked noise.

Give me your hand.
I will hold it in the cold room
while the rain maintains
and the river goes over its stones.

4th version

Worth darkness.
Crash upsets the table of values.
The dent in the seat cushion begins to rise.
Light, thrown from the body, bunched on the floor.

Echoes caught on one wall and struggled there.
Riches of one thousand shadows.
Cracked, the container cannot hold the color.
A window, propped open, and a shiver in its materials.

Give me your hand.
I will hold it in the cold room.
While the rain maintains its grim position.
And the river goes over its stones.

comments on 3rd version

I think this is the strangest revision I've ever done. I have very little interest in this poem. I am sure I did not when I wrote the 1997 version. There are technical things I was trying -- the building up of elements, the rather banal opening line that wants a new context.

The 2nd version tried to take some of the elements without the structure. Or something.

The 3rd version goes back to the first version, upends it, and tries to go from the bigger "worth" stuff to the smaller "hold your hand." It's ready to conscript abstract terms like "values" and "ideas." I was doing small edits as I created this new version then stopped myself. The goal in this blog project is to present as complete a picture of the process to which I'm subjecting this piece as I can. The piece is getting more interesting in some ways but it hasn't managed to import a heart.

3rd version

What’s worth darkness.
What breaks out of it with a crash that upsets the values
otherwise firmly situated
on the blue seat cushion of a cold chair.
What throws off light, leaving that hard material in a bunch on the floor.

There were the echoes of a splash that moved from wall to wall.
There were the riches of that noise,
what they can be traded for
that will replace the cracked containers.

Let me hold your ideas of rescue.
Let me hold your seas, those you’ve folded in thirds.

Somewhere in the house a hand opens for the receipt.
Somewhere a window lets in fear.

What’s the position of the rain?
What color is the life?

comments on 2nd version

What to say. It's not an improvement. At least version 1 builds up to something, sorta. But "an inherent worth chews its wound" is no improvement on "the hard sharp edge of worth" ... though both are kinda chewy, which is good. And the ocean folding sheets? It could be fresh if it weren't a one-off, as it is it's desperate and lame. I'll try again tomorrow or something.

2nd version of Aug 9 poem

Somewhere in the house your hand in a relaxed curl.
The rain in its usual position outside.

In the river a coin turns tail, buries its face in the mud.
Deep in the silver an inherent worth chews its wound.

Somewhere in the room my hand closes around a nose.
You can hear the ocean folding its sheets.

revising a poem

OK, let's try the revising thing again. This time let's go for one from August 9, 1997. I find it limp and uninspiring. I can kinda see some things starting to develop, I mean that last line is interesting and the "hard sharp edge of worth" is ... not good exactly but has the beginnings of something.

Here it is, as it appears in the notebook:

Let me hold your hand.
Let me hold your hand somewhere.
Somewhere in the house.
In the house on the beach with the rain falling.
The rain falling like coins from a slot machine, splashing.
Splashing onto, out of, splashing against.
The riches of splashing, the gold of the river, the silver.
Silver without light, the hard sharp edge of worth.
What’s worth it, what’s worth darkness, what’s the crash out of darkness.

Let me hold your hand.
Let me hold your hand where it is in the cold room in your lap.

yoga tired

Phew. I feel half asleep. I went to Scottie's yoga class after work yesterday. Wears me out. More the day after than immediately after. Came right home after work today and took a little nap. Feel sorta like I didn't totally wake up from it.

I'm listening to a mix CD I made from CMJ music. Mostly 1998. I knew a few of these folks before I started going through these old CMJs: Apples in Stereo, Love Spit Love, Violent Femmes, Radiohead, Bruce Cockburn. But most of them? Who: Julie Plug, David Garza, Money Mark, Jen Wood, Jonathan Fireeater, Sugarsmack, Dump, Kastin (not from CMJ actually, but a Putumayo collection), Portastatic (also not from CMJ, some other sampler), Garageland, Tuscadero, The Connells, Royal, Foil, and Anne Summers.

Have I heard of Money Mark before? Or does the name just remind me of Marky Mark? I could run google searches on these people, I suppose.

Julie Plug is a Bay Area band. Filipinos. Here I thought it was girl named Julie Plug. Dunno anything about the girl lead singer but I like her sidelong look.

David Garza is Mexican American. Hm. I'm having a multi-cultural experience? Yeah, yeah. Aren't we all? Yeah and he's kinda cute.

Money Mark's site has a real cool looking homepage (and it just took over my entire screen) but there doesn't seem to be much inside. A few pictures. Track listings for his CDs. Big whoop.

I'm listening to a Jen Wood song I just found on the web. I don't like it as much as the one I got from CMJ.

Let's do one more, then call it a night.

It seems "Jonathon Fireeater" should be written "Jonathan Fire Eater" and it's not the name of one person any more than "Julie Plug." I'd kinda guessed that. Seems they've broken up, too.

2nd version (see immediately below for 1st version)

She is going to fly
and I am coming to earth

a stone stood before the door
then stepped aside

the wings she’d torn from her back
caught on the whiskers of the grass

I drop my feet in the muck
and go on rolling, tail tight held by these small teeth

my eyes closed to keep the soil out of them
hands released from bars

she clings to the arms of sagging chairs
her balance resistant, distant

we will come back this way to look in the windows
but the soul won’t be in the room

it will be paying out a thread we follow
at the first tangle I have to sit down

outside it is cold as a little white fish bone
a new home overhead

heaven opened for the whole body

by hooked toes to the cracked skin
of the cedar a cicada’s husk clings until

a finger tears it loose
not one of these shoes fits, she says

loose skin but not empty

1st version

She is going to fly
and I am coming to earth
a stone stood before the door
then stepped aside

the wings she’d torn from her back
caught on the long arms of the grass
I leave my feet in the muck
and go on rolling, my tail tight held by these small teeth

my eyes closed to keep the soil out of them
my hands released from the bars
she hangs onto the arms of aged chairs
her balance resisting from a distance

we will come back this way to look in the windows
but the soul won’t be in the room
it will be paying out a thread we will follow
at the first tangle I’ll give up and sit down

outside it is cold and thin, as a bone exposed by a flood
we put our grooved wheel to that rail
and the motion makes a soothing racket
a new home overhead

heaven took in the whole body
if it hadn’t, who could believe
a cicada’s husk clings by hooked toes
to the cracked skin of the cedar until

a finger dislodges the grip
none of the shoes fit her feet, she says
too much skin is empty
how can you hold it in now

revising

I was looking at a site for a new publisher and they say they are looking for "really really good poetry," whatever that means, and I got to wondering what poems I have on this computer, the Mac. I've only composed a couple on it and typed in another handful. The other computer, the PC, has lots of poems on it but no longer has internet connectivity so I can't email poems from it.

I opened a poem file, thought, that's not bad, so closed it and opened another. As I was reading I was revising in my head before I'd gotten more than a few lines into it. I thought, I should read the whole poem through first, but the changes seemed more important than the idea of fairness to the original vision. So I started right in changing things. I've thought about revising a poem in the blog. Post a poem. Then post a new version of it, then another, until it stops. I'm going to do that with this poem.

going through emotions

We went. On Presidents’ Day Monday. Didn’t rush over there. Ate lunch, then strolled over to Long’s and loaded up on valentines chocolates. At 50% off it was easy to fill a shopping bag. Remember, buy the holiday chocolate, even the day after the holiday it’s fresh. Fresher than the regular stuff that can be sold any old time. Nice that it had hearts on it, too.

Then we took BART to San Francisco. Rain was coming in mists and sprinkles. As we crossed Civic Center Plaza Kent and I could see umbrellas gathered around the City Hall steps. Kent had thought to bring a red gift bag so we filled it with chocolates from the shopping bag and I went to what looked like a short line of people waiting to marry (dressed nice, occasional bouquet) and walked along offering up chocolates. Two takers out of 20. Disappointed at the indifference to my generosity I joined Kent at the foot of the hall steps. There I found a more satisfying role: cheerer.

Those of us gathered outside the hall applauded and screamed whenever a newly wed couple emerged from the double doors. Usually they’d hold up their fresh marriage license, grin broad. Most of them came down the steps and passed me on the way to the curb. So I offered up chocolates. Probably half of them didn’t hear or see me or smiled and declined. But there were many who lit up. And when there were kids it was easy.

Kent was amused when the one nearest me would respond but in the noise and activity the other spouse didn’t catch on until he or she was tugged back. Just a Hershey’s kiss or two … “Made me feel bad we were breaking up the happy couple,” Kent said.

There were photographers snapping the historic newlyweds. One was taking photos right beside us so we ended up in the background in a couple photos, particularly this one (see the upper left, I’m the one in profile).

We stood there 2 1/2 hours. Until the last wedded couple was introduced by Mabel Teng, the city assessor.

That night Kent’s friend, Dave, called. “I just saw you on the news,” he said to me. “There you were and there was Kent behind you. Did you get married?” It was channel 2, ten o’clock news. A day or two later an acquaintance stopped me on the street to tell me he also had seen me on the news. Seems the news folks panned the crowd as the last newlyweds were announced. No, we haven’t seen ourselves in the reality of television.

Glad we went. It really felt good to see such happiness. And that’s what’s been buoying me, even when I get down about Bush’s backing the anti-marriage constitutional amendment and John Kerry doing the same (sort of) for the Massachusetts constitution. The happiness. I keep looking at the picture gallery at sfgate. Kisses. Babies. Joy. Can’t see the bad when there’s so much beauty.

I can't keep up

I can't keep up with the sudden rush of gay marriage news. So you'll have to go to google news and 365gay and so forth. Not like anybody expected me to make my blog gay marriage news central, right?

I'm thinking about getting over to SF City Hall to watch the proceedings.

Sutra (the big fluffy one) is curled up on my lap. A mix CD is playing. I put it on to accompany the dishes. Right now some Japanese girls are chanting, "Heeyah heeyah heeyah ... Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!"

governor makes mother cry

From an AP story about Massachusetts Gov. Romney's meeting with gay couples hoping to marry:

Some of the couples at the heart of the state’s landmark gay marriage case forced a meeting with Gov. Mitt Romney Friday [2/6], but in an emotionally charged discussion with the Republican governor, they failed to change his mind.

Romney, who backs a proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a heterosexual institution, met privately for 20 minutes with six of the 14 plaintiffs [in the suit that led the state supreme court to say marriage must be opened to same sex couples], who later described the conversation for reporters.

One plaintiff, Julie Goodridge, cried as she recounted asking Romney what she was supposed to tell her 8-year-old daughter, who has been looking forward to a wedding between Goodridge and her partner, Hillary Goodridge. The governor responded that she should just keep telling her daughter the same thing she’s been telling her for the past eight years.

Mom to daughter: Remember I told you how the Governor wants to destroy our family, dear daughter? It's still true.

skunked 2

SKUNKED 2: DOG AND CAT

fuck

The good news is: it was only one cat, the one with short hair, and he doesn't seem to be suffering

Of course, he's able to walk all over the furniture. With his stinky little feet.

So I didn't sleep much last night, right? And I got a headache and am all nauseous.

Better that it's Saturday, says Kent. And a sunny day.

HCR and P&P

I'm starting to gather poems for the next issue of Hogtown Creek Review. Some interesting pieces in the unsolicited work and poets I've asked have started to come through.

Poetry and Pizza, the reading series I help run in San Francisco, is endangered. Its home, the Escape from New York Pizza downtown, is up for sale. A pizza place like this depends for its life on the highrises around it being filled with officeworkers and that just isn't the case now. We're talking lunch joint, not dining experience. Whether there's a buyer for it is another thing. If this Escape from New York shuts its doors the poetry series may be able to move to another of the Escapes in the city. We'll see. The poetry calendar is filled through May. In the good news dept there's an article about tonight's reading in the Chronicle.

skunked

Flash got skunked. Dog! This is the second time.

Two nights ago.

But, yeah man, doesn't that smell linger. That smell.

How long did it hang around before? What was it? Three, four years ago? I don't remember the stink's endurance. It must've been days. But I think it wasn't winter. So we had the windows open constantly.

She's been bathed. I think she'll have to be bathed again. She's sitting in front of the heater, which is blowing warm air on her, spreading the stink around.

If you've only smelled skunk passing some roadkill at 35 mph you have no real idea of what skunk smells like. Full dose is not sweet. It's heavy. Like some dense thing has come in and sat on your head.

I guess it was worse the first time. The air didn't feel too thick to breathe this time. No, this time like waves of various thicknesses.

And you do get used to it. Or your smeller gets overwhelmed. Then when you come back to the house after being away. Then you know it hasn't really hasn't really gone away not really. Diminished. Less. Um. Less assaultive?

Hanging on. Following you around. Staying. Not going. But not bludgeoning. Not vile.

Didn't she learn the first time?

I mean.

We did.

We sleep with scented rags next to our heads. Kent likes patchouli or carnation. I prefer lavender.

9th circuit

The How Appealing Blog has a Q&A with Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Some excerpts:

Unfortunately, the policy of "judicial restraint" ... has paradoxically resulted in an increasingly active judiciary, willing to strike down a litany of congressional laws and executive regulations that previously would have been considered unexceptional. The casualty of this movement has been the concern for social justice and individual rights that once served as the guiding principle of the judicial branch.

In certain types of cases we [in the 9th circuit] will try to divine what the [Supreme C]ourt will do in order to reach what we believe will be the appropriate decision. It is not, however, our job to anticipate when the current justices of the Supreme Court will cut back on individual rights and to rush to do the dirty deed for them. Many times when my court has been reversed, it is because we have properly applied existing law, but in reviewing our decision the Supreme Court has adopted a new and different interpretation than it had previously given a statute or constitutional provision -- a new reading that is far more restrictive of individual or group rights.

It is naive, if not disingenuous, to assume that liberal [judge]s are simply imposing a "personal preference," while those conservative judges who continually reach ... restrictive result[s] ... are simply "following the law." Different legal philosophies produce divergent legal consequences. We can debate which constitutional philosophy is the more appropriate one, but it is intellectually dishonest, and ultimately a disservice to the law, to accuse those who subscribe to a competing philosophy of being lawless or engaging in misconduct.

The few liberals, or perceived liberals, [President Clinton] was persuaded to nominate frequently saw their candidacies linger or die in the Judiciary Committee because the President refused to fight for their confirmations.

[In regard to President Bush's nominees:] So long as appointments are made on ideological grounds, and there is no room for the appointment of persons with different points of view, opposition based on ideology is perfectly appropriate, as is the use of all proper procedural means to make that opposition effective. Much of the purported outrage over the use of the filibuster to block nominees appears to me to be both hypocritical and cynical. It can best be explained as part of a purely partisan attempt to manipulate public opinion. The use of a filibuster is indisputably more democratic than the use of the one-Senator "holds" that were so often used, frequently in secret, to defeat nominees during the Clinton Administration. The Republican controlled Senate blocked 63 Clinton nominees between 1995 and 2000. Since 2001, the time at which the "filibuster crisis" allegedly began, the Senate has failed to confirm just 6 of the President's 168 nominees.

[Speaking about the death penalty:] In almost every case of which I am aware in which an individual has been executed, he had been a victim of serious and persistent sexual abuse as a child, usually at the hands of a close relative, and in addition possessed a severely limited mental capacity. An example is Rickey Ray Rector, who was missing half his brain at the time of his trial. Rector put aside his dinner on the evening of his execution so that he could enjoy it later. Earlier that afternoon he watched television and saw Governor William Jefferson Clinton, who had rushed back to Arkansas on the eve of the New Hampshire primary to be present in the state capital to avoid any hitches in the execution (and, some believe, to get his picture in the next day's national press as a tough on crime, law and order kind of a guy). On seeing Clinton's familiar face, Rector commented enthusiastically, "I like that man. I voted for him."

poem to reread

Worth rereading?

piling

We pile. In this house we pile. Have a piece of paper? Add it to a pile. One of the three on the desk by the window? The foetal* pile under the monitor on this desk? One of the piles gradually encroaching on the dinner table's eating space? ... I have not begun to catalog the piles. Papers? Books? Don't look in the closets. What clothes make it into them tend to hang. But boxes and sundry heap toward the shirttails.

____
*yeh, the o amused me.

Arkhangel

Yesterday I raised suspicions of about a person claiming to be an American soldier serving in Iraq. He calls himself Arkhangel and he has his own blog.

I find "Arkhangel" a little creepy, as a name. And I think one ought to be suspicious of anonymous opiners. I was wary of atrios for that reason until, having visited atrios' Eschaton regularly for months and found a lot of value there, that suspicion has dissipated. Reading Arkhangel's blog is not particularly creepy. "We've pounded Iraq for the last twelve years," he says. "We've supported a beastly regime for the last thirty years. This is our chance to set things right."

Now, if Bush had said and meant that, I might have some respect for him. If US govt actually looked at the world through a prism of human rights and social justice when formulating foreign policy ... well ... things would be different is all. That Bush & co cobble together justifications for their actions from scraps of human dignity and gleaming lies ... well ...

Akhangel goes on to say "I am under no illusions that our current leadership will do the right thing."

He holds out hope that the occupation can be improved and Iraq become "a free country." May it be so.

As to anonymity, Arkhangel says, "[T]here's a long tradition of being apolitical in the Armed Forces, and my opinions (which I post here) are political. So I choose not to mix the two. Believe me, it's better that way. You don't want a political military." Only a fool would think we don't have a political military. Still, fool is fool is fool. Just look South to see highly politicized militaries.

Superbowl Sunday

The TV's on. It's Superbowl Sunday. Kent hears:

Greg Gumbel: "The New England Patriots. They epitomize the word 'team'."

Phil Simms: "That's right. And one guy comes to mind."

the human rights case for invading

I was just reading a Whiskey Bar blog entry about the human rights case for invading Iraq.

After talking about and quoting from a report from the organization Human Rights Watch Billmon goes on to quote from a relief worker's account. Immediately appended to this account is an anonymous email from someone who claims to be a soldier under the command of a Colonel Sassaman (who says things like, "You need to understand that these people are Muslim, and their values are just different from Judeo-Christian values. They aren't for doing things for other people like we are; they're only out for themselves."). After assuring Billmon he is no Republican (thus the anonymity?) the correspondent goes on to cast aspersions on the account of the relief worker, toeing a line that seems not the slightest bit at variance from the approved govt line. Ah yes. Straight talk. From the horse's mouth an' all.

I posted this in Billmon's comments thread:
"The thing about Arkhangel: why the anonymity? It's not like he's saying anything with which his commander would find fault.

But, backhandedly, it does remind us the consequences of actually saying something with which the command could find fault.

Is pretending to say something critical (while in practice reinforcing the official position) also risky to one's career?"

Schwarzenonsense

As part of his job Kent checks the governor's website regularly. Today he emailed me a link to the proclamation declaring Feb 6 Ronald Reagan Day:
Ronald Wilson Reagan followed his dreams to California and harnessed the dreams of our nation in Washington, D.C.

Were the dreams' heads toward eternity?

clean kitchen?

A few excerpts from an article in the New York Times; how germy is your kitchen?:

"[P]eople who had the cleanest-looking kitchens were often the dirtiest. Because 'clean' people wipe up so much, they often end up spreading bacteria all over the place. The cleanest kitchens ... were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink."

"In one test ... raw chicken juices were spread on samples of used wood and plastic cutting boards. Both boards were washed in hot soapy water and dried, then knives were used to simulate cutting vegetables for a salad. No bacteria appeared on the knives cut on wood, but there were plenty on the knives used on a plastic board. ... Running plastic boards through the dishwasher only spread the bacteria around."

"Microwaving sponges ... wipes out harmful bacteria. 'We did soak sponges in some pretty bad things,' [Professor Cliver of UC Davis] said, 'and one minute in the nuke and that pretty much did it.'"

children?

Josh Marshall, in an essay in the New Yorker, excerpts from David Frum & Richard Perle's misnamed new book An End of Evil: "We have to cast off once and for all the 1970s cynicism that sneered from the back of the classroom at the joiner and volunteer.”

The metaphor, the classroom, puts me in mind of Bush's State of the Union address in which he refers to a "permission slip" in international relations. Kent pointed the phrase out to me.

Did these people never grow up?

survey results

1. What time did you go to bed last night, changing your paper or plastic magazine?
Halfway between now and the last time.

2. A TV show you can't stand to watch was playing at lunch, surprising the color from your toothbrush?
Clearly.

3. What brand of deodorant in your favorite shop brings winter, spring or summer to fall from your personal chef or maid upon the dessert you use?
Surely the ban.

4. Favorite candy bar, regularly decaffeinated, rests admirably upon person?
Previously, but not presently.

5. Favorite Holiday sleeps time into your ringing fruit?
Worn out.

6. How do you like your meat last carded to the radio where you least expect to back?
Dial.

7. Onion rings or French car?
Gas.

Other survey results here.

amendment

I note that this fragment, "an order that does not rapidly and arbitrarily/randomly change," (see the entry I posted earlier today) is an attempt to define order and not relevant to the Silliman definition of line. Order is not a part of that definition.

catching up with line

A couple days ago I began talking about Silliman's idea of line, a definition I find rather ... mm ... elemental? He seems to be talking about a principle antecedent to line. He says, "The line is literally what enables positionality within a word & the positionality of words within any statement."

I'm one who defines poetry as "language as art" and art as "made thing" or even maybe "noticed thing" ... So it's not like I'm gonna get all hot about how I think what Mr Silliman is talking about doesn't have much to do with line. In the def of poetry to which I just referred where does rhyme or scansion come in? Line breaks? Concision? You don't even get to that stuff from "a thing made of language" or, even more distantly, "a language-specific object someone notices."

But let me say that I don't think the definitions of poetry and art that I offer are particularly useful, certainly not when applied to a particular poem or object of art. I mean, say you point at a thing and say, "Fits the def. It's a poem." What then?

Suppose you look at a piece of language and say, "It has line. After all, of what can you speak that has no 'positionality'? When encountering the object I see that the pieces of which it consists are in an order, an order that does not rapidly and arbitrarily/randomly change. Let's say the object is made of language. Thus we look at the thing, see that it has a position, an order, and is made of language. It has line." What then?

"In oral literature," Mr Silliman says, "the line is most audible through the evidence of devices such as rhyme, which demarcate units & break a long tale down into measurable (and memorable) segments." This idea of line seems to me to offer tools for dealing with the object. One could ask, "Does the line marshal devices, such as rhyme? Are the segments memorable?" At this point I have to ask, why aren't the segments lines? It seems to me more useful to reserve the term line for these segments and to use some other term to refer to "positionality within a word & the positionality of words within any statement." Syntax? That might do for "the positionality of words within any statement". For "positionality within a word"?

more on the line

I posted the following in the comments to Ron Silliman's blog:
"My own thinking finds difficulty with the Silliman definition of line in that it is so elemental. Rather like talking about the parts of a mammal by starting with a single cell. This, by no means, is crazy. It does set me back a little. I was blithely going along looking at the line as that string of words that starts up on the left margin, forges forth toward the right, only to come up short somewhere shy. This simple little def works with so many of the poems you see that any other def seems needlessly stretching to capture outliers.

That my def's rather naive and disingenuous in a hopefully wry and faintly sarcastic fashion serves to highlight my sophistication, wouldn't you say?

Don't say no!"

Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher, whose mark on this culture will always be Princess Leia, has a new novel, The Best Awful, a semi-autobiographical account of a broken heart and bipolar meltdown. There's an entertaining interview with her at the Advocate. Her husband, father of their daughter, left Ms Fisher for a man. She says, "I’m supposed to be smart. That was really what stung after I got over the personal pain of it. I just really felt stupid, and there’s no way to cover that. ... Most everyone gets abandoned for a younger woman and replaced. Any fool can do that. But this is another kind of fool. When you realize what you’ve overlooked, it’s astonishing." That's not funny, but she does know how to wisecrack: When asked how others reacted, Fisher says, "Everyone treats you like everything is perfectly fine, finer than fine, überfine. There was a lot of that hair-heavier-on-one-side kind of thing." The interviewer clarifies, "The look of concern." "Yes," Fisher replies, "and people saying, 'Well, I wanted to tell you.'"

state of union

When I got home last evening the radio was tuned to Bush's State of the Union address. I entered moments before the White House squatter announced he would be supporting the anti-marriage Constitutional amendment. "Activist judges ... have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage." Y'gotta parse this guy like the Torah, man. "If ... the only alternative ... would be ..." The Massachusetts Supreme Court has decided gay people get to marry ... a few months from now ... because it's really unjust that gay people can't marry ... except, since it's been unjust for so long, what's another six months? One might wonder why Bush didn't say, "Since ... the only alternative ... is ..." Matthew Yglesias guesses that Bush means he'll support a Constitutional amendment to ban marriage (for same-sex couples) only if a federal court tosses the Denial of Marriage Act. Really? The only suggestion that Bush doesn't mean he's for amending the Constitution right now is that weird subjunctive ... "would be" ...

I didn't listen any further. The creature's voice digs bloody furrows in my soul. So we turned him off.

Kent, having heard more of it, tells me Bush is now calling those phantom bogies, the WMD: "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" ... This is one of those phrases that fascinates me like a sparkling light. I could chant it for hours. Chuckling dementedly all the time.

Kent also heard, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." Kent asked, "Who gets a permission slip? The good boy. Who doesn't? The bad boy." Right. If the community of nations is a classroom of children each needs a permission slip from a proper adult authority to do anything normally not allowed. Because, you know, when we're talking a group of autonomous adults the idea of a "permission slip" just doesn't come up. Those who want good relations with the others keep the concerns of the others in mind, especially when what's doing is violent and dangerous. Of course, Bush baby was a bad baby so pissing on the permission slip was likely something he did and recalls proudly.

a 360

The Alaska gay rights email group I belong to sent along a USA Today article by Paul Beaudet and David Wertheimer, two men who live in Washington, on one of the San Juan Islands. They say: "As we returned from Sooke [in Canada, where the two were legally wed] and passed through U.S. Customs, an agent questioned us about the nature of our business in Canada. When we told him that we'd gotten married, he broke into a smile and said, "Hey, congratulations, guys!" with surprising sincerity.

As we headed toward our San Juan Islands home, the ferry suddenly made a full circle in the middle of the channel that separates us from the mainland, then continued on its usual way. We were both confused. Moments later, the ferry crew knocked at our window, announcing: 'It's an island tradition to give every newlywed couple a 360. Congratulations!'"

How very sweet!

I like this story partly because Kent and I rode the San Juan Islands ferry in September 2001. We went to the Islands for a kayak expedition. We were in Seattle on Sept 11, planning to leave by float plane that morning for the islands. The flight was canceled but we were able to rent a van. Kent drove with the radio blasting news and speculation about the terrorist attacks. When we got to San Juan Island and called the expedition company there was some doubt whether enough of the people who'd booked the tour could show up to make it viable. Kent & I thought we could spend a few days van camping and ferrying about if the kayak thing didn't happen. Happy it did as it was wonderful spending the nights out under quiet stars, free of the relentless chatter about hijackings and smoke from the rubble. Strange to see such a quiet sky, no lights from planes passing overhead.

On the ferry ride back we saw a minke whale breaching. I saw it leap once, twice, then realized it might possibly repeat, called Kent. The ship's captain even made an announcement and the whale obliged with a couple more silvery leaps. Small as a minnow at that distance but easy to see it was a big animal.

what they saw in Macedonia

Want to see what they saw in Macedonia? It seems our hate-the-gays faction learned the US State Dept gave some money to a Macedonian human rights group. What happens? The group rents a few billboards for a gays-are-human-too campaign. Naturally, allowing the dissemination of non-horrific images of homosexuals is anathema to our Christian hate mongers.

The images on the billboard were taken from the last in a series of photos called Ecce Homo by the artist Elisabeth Ohlson. Ohlson staged the photos as scenes from the life of Jesus surrounded gay folk (some in drag, some in leather, most in rather more casual attire). The photos are rather charming. Goofy and sincere.

Thanks to atrios and lady sisyphus for the links.

Bush's wife tickled by her fib

I remember when Laura Bush read the poem her husband had written her while she was off on some trip. It was a silly piece of doggerel:

The dogs and the cat they miss you too,
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe.

The distance my dear has been such a barrier,
next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

Yet he didn't even write it.

As Timothy Noah says, "Whatever White House staffer prepared Mrs. Bush's remarks obviously strained to make the president's purported love poem sound sufficiently moronic that no one would doubt Bush had written it."

Thanks to Laurable for noticing this one.

what I liked 2003

Poetry books I read in 2003:

The Ghost Trio (1994) Linda Bierds
Holt & Co., NY

Wild One (2000) Lucille Lang Day
Scarlet Tanager, Oakland CA

Infinities (2002) Lucille Lang Day
Cedar Hill Pub, Mena AR

The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (1960, 1999)
edited by Donald Allen
University of California Press, Berkeley CA

The Best American Poetry 2002 (2002)
edited by Robert Creeley; series editor: David Lehman
Scribner, NY

American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993)
edited by Eliot Weinberger
Marsilio Pub, NY

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964)
edited & translated by Geoffrey Bownas & Anthony Thwaite
Penguin Bks, Baltimore MD

An Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry (1957)
edited & translated by Ichiro Kono & Rikutaro Fukuda
Kenkyusha Ltd, Tokyo

Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry (1972)
translated & compiled by Edith Marcombe Shiffert & Yuki Sawa
Charles E. Tuttle Co., Rutland VT

Chieko's Sky (1978) Kotaro Takamura, translated by Suichi Furuta
Kodansha Intl, Tokyo

Like Underground Water: the poetry of mid-twentieth century Japan (1995)
translated by Naoshi Koriyama & Edward Lueders
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA

Mountain Home: the wilderness poetry of ancient China (2002)
selected & translated by David Hinton
Counterpoint, NY

The Art of Drowning (1995) Billy Collins
University of Pittsburgh Pr, Pittsburgh PA

Picnic, Lightning (1998) Billy Collins
University of Pittsburgh Pr, Pittsburgh PA

Braided Creek: a conversation in poetry (2003) Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser
Copper Canyon Pr, Port Townsend WA

Diminutive Revolutions (2000) Daniel Bouchard
Subpress Collective, Honolulu HI

Pages (1969) Aram Saroyan
Random House, NY

Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry (1971)
edited & translated by Graham Dunstan Martin
University of Texas Press, Austin TX

Mid-century French Poets (1955)
edited by Wallace Fowlie
Twayne Pub, NY

Modern French Poetry (1975)
edited & translated by Patricia Terry & Serge Gavronsky
Columbia University Press, NY

Nine Horses (2002) Billy Collins
Random House, NY

Sailing Alone Around the Room: new & selected poems (2001) Billy Collins
Random House, NY

From the Country of Eight Islands: an anthology of Japanese poetry (1981)
edited & translated by Hiroaki Sato & Burton Watson
Anchor Bks, NY


***


I copied out a total of 57 poems; nothing from 13 of the above books; 36 from Eight Islands alone -- I think that's the most I've ever copied out from a single book (consider that this includes 7 haiku by Kobayashi Issa, 5 tanka by Saigyo, 3 haiku by Masaoka Shiki, etc.) ...

At the end of the year / beginning of the next I read aloud every poem I've saved. I try to do it at one sitting.

find gray

I read today that Spalding Gray is missing. Please look for him.

whose line is it

when is your line not good

when it is malign

in seclusion

I think I'm past halfway. Through Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems. I haven't read any in months. I'll get back to it. There are Dickinson poems I really like. But mostly she's not a poet that makes poetry for me. I'm not sure why she's so popular, frankly. She's difficult. Isn't the reason nobody buys poetry that it's difficult?

There are discussions that fizz up ever new on poetry discussion boards. Great poets. Are there any today? Poetry workshops. Are they destroying poetry? Obscurity. The reason nobody buys poetry?

People seem to have violent opinions on this shit. Great poets. Are there such things? If so, so what? If you trust other people to decide for you what's great read the anthologies that claim to compile it. Or follow the reading lists of the big critics. Harold Bloom. Your English teacher. Some guy on the web. If you want to figure it out for yourself ... there's a lot of poetry out there. Poetry workshops? In college I liked taking a workshop because I liked to get credit for what I would be doing anyway; plus it was nice to be in a room full of people who cared about poetry. Obscurity. I've discovered I like to present myself before the poem and be with it. I get something or nothing and I move on. If I really like the poem, want it available for repeat visits, I often copy it out. I have four loose leaf binders full of poems I've copied out. I've copied out a few Dickinson. I've copied out poems by Clark Coolidge and Wang Ping and Russell Edson and Julia Vinograd and Paul Hoover and Tim Donnelly and Lawrence Raab and Ronald Koertge and blah blah blah. I like to read poetries in translation. Poets I know only from various English versions have become favorites -- Sappho, Issa. I pounce on any new Sappho or Issa translations.

I'm reading The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, a selection by Peter Johnson from his magazine. Not impressed. What else to say? There's a lot of that if you read poetry. It tries harder. It tries so hard.

numbers

From Snowball Earth: the story of the great global catastrophe that spawned life as we know if by Gabrielle Walker:

[An image borrowed from John McPhee:] Stretch your arms out wide to encompass all the time on Earth. Let's say that time runs from left to right, so Earth was born at the tip of the middle finger on your left hand. Slime [our earliest ancestor] arose just before your left elbow and ruled for the remaining length of your left arm, across to the right, past your right shoulder, your right elbow, on down your forearm, and eventually ceded somewhere around your right wrist. ... The dinosaurs reigned for barely a finger's length. And a judicious swipe of a nail file on the middle finger of your right hand would wipe out the whole of human history.

From The Eye of the Elephant: an epic adventure in the African wilderness by Delia and Mark Owens:
By comparing our [1988] aerial wildlife censuses with one flown in 1973 by a team from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, we estimate that poachers have already killed more than twelve thousand of [the Zambian North Luangwa National Park]'s seventeen thousand elephants, about three of every four, and a thousand more are dying each year. Since 1973 between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand elephants have been poached in the Luangwa Valley as a whole; that's roughly one for every word of this book. [emphasis in original] ... At this rate [all the elephants] will have perished in four to five years.

Eye of the Elephant was a tough read. The Owenses did their damnedest to slow the killing. Elephant is not a fat book; when I came across the analogy, one word = one dead elephant ... it made the reading more painful.

Here's a hopeful update from the Owens Foundation website: "When Mark and Delia arrived in 1986, 1,000 elephants were being poached every year. From September of 1994 to May of 1997, not one was killed in the [North Luangwa Conservation Project] area. [The Project was started by the Owenses to help people living near the park thrive without having to kill the park animals.] For the first time in 20 years the elephant population of NLNP increased slightly, and villagers reported elephants, buffalo, hippos, and other large mammals in areas where they have not been seen for two, even three decades."

this pesky writing thing

I'm working on further thoughts about the line, responding particularly to Ron Silliman's response to me. I'm not going to finish tonight, I figure.

We'll probably watch another episode from the 4th season of the Sopranos. Kent found the DVDs at the drugstore on the corner.

living with Mom

Since we moved Mom up to live in Seattle with him David has written occasionally about her in his skook blog.

Today he writes: "So many things to do today (and tomorrow and the next and the next) and huge chunks of the day are spent directing AM [Aged Mother] in taking care of basic survival functions. Her sophisticated human brain, now that it no longer works smoothly, seems more to hinder the process than to help. She gets stuck in thought loops. She knows she's supposed to be doing something but can't remember what it was. And it's a rare thought seems able to go from point A to point B without taking a detour to X and then getting distracted by M. She's good natured about most of it. And when there is an upset it's usually easy to distract her. And then she seems to forget."

On Friday December 26 he wrote: "Morning. Been up for a couple of hours now, surfing the internet and tending to Aged Mother. My plan to kill her is going smoothly. She eats four eggs a day. That's twenty-eight eggs a week. With butter. "With butter" describes most of her meals. All vegetables go with butter. Sometimes butter and yogurt. All fruit goes with yogurt, occasionally with soy milk as well. She'd probably eat the fruit with butter as well if I only suggested it. I probably won't need to. She's asked for butter on every thing else without my prompting. One of these mornings I just know she's going to ask for butter to go with her pears. And then she's doomed. (Cue manical laughter.)"

And this was posted on Sunday December 14: "'Is your Dad still alive?'

'He died three years ago Mom.'

'Oh.' She thinks about that. 'I didn't think he was still alive. But I didn't think it was three years.'"

My sis-in-law Sarah has written me some emails about living with Mom. Some good writing, too. Just on that basis I've been tempted to ask her if I could excerpt from her letters, post them on LuvSet. But I kinda don't want to. At least not now. It's still a new thing that Mom is having these thought difficulties and I know I'm not OK with it. I do think if Sarah kept a journal it would make reading others would value.

I phoned late this morning and got Sarah but Mom was asleep. Sarah said she'd get Mom to call back. Indeed, when Kent & I got back from brunch (chilly air but warm on Chester's sunny deck -- I made sure to wear a black jacket to absorb as much sunlight as I could) there was a message from Mom. She got a little confused leaving the message, "Who is this?" I heard David's voice reminding her. But when I called a moment later she talked about the weather (cold there, too), the Chinese food they had for dinner last night, studying Yoga Journal for useful advice. She says she has to use a walker now, which disappoints her, but she's gotten used to it.

the definition of liberal

Liberal: "Logically, to forbid something, one must demonstrate that the forbidden act will cause harm to others."

Conservative: To allow something one must demonstrate that the up-to-now forbidden act will be absolutely harmless once allowed ... especially to the sensibilities of those who think the act must be outlawed.

(Liberal quote lifted from a Charley Reese column. The Reese column talks about gay marriage (he sees no harm in it) and was copied to me as part of an email roundup of recent gay news compiled by one of the Alaskan gay activists who tried to head off the anti-marriage constitutional amendment in that state. The Conservative formulation has come up several times in my reading. Being as the Conservative's proscriptions are largely enforced on persons other than himself one might say it is inherently hypocritical. Might hypocrisy be a prerequisite to Conservatism?)

response poem

posted on the comments for Mark Young's poem:


after Young


The bland

displaying makes that
play you, home to the best thing
since sliced writs

no fucking works
in the know, wonder
after people come
jumpers

Happy New Year

Happy 2004, everybody!

back?

Oh, it seems blogspot has returned to life. Thus, one post about a problem. Followed by a post about the problem having evaporated.

blogspot problem?

Yesterday at work I couldn't get through to any blogspot sites. When I got home I didn't have a problem. Now I find every blogspot address directs the browzer to the blogger homepage. Even this one. So once I post this entry I won't be able to reread it (except in edit mode). Wonder what's up?

silliman on the line

I like this bit of musing on the poetic line. Ron Silliman says, "[I]t is poetry that has recognized & acknowledged that, even prior to the invention of writing, the line is implicit in all language – without it, even an individual spoken word would lack beginning, middle & end. One might well argue that poetry is precisely that medium which foregrounds the presence of the line in language, even if it does so with no great consensus as to what a line might be." He then goes on to discuss Marianne Moore's line, calling her work essentially prose. What, he asks, is she doing when she breaks her writing into lines?

If you want Moore go over to Silliman's Blog. Me, I'm still swirling around the line being "implicit in all language", the idea that "without it even an individual spoken word would lack beginning, middle & end." What the hell is he talking about?

In From the Country of Eight Islands Hioraki Sato gives the English versions of the haiku one line only. The book's other editor-translator, Burton Watson, gives us English versions with the more familiar short-longer-short lines (conventionally 5-7-5 syllable lines). I find I prefer the 3 line haiku. The poem is so brief the visual delay of the line break allows the poem to unfold more deliberately, parts saying things to the other parts. A single line is relatively sudden. The difference is interesting, but not dramatic. Take away the spacesbetweenthewords and what happens? Something dramatic? Not really. You get used to it. As I said in an earlier post, "I want a line to justify itself." This implies that I think there are lines that don't. I'm most dubious of the ultra skinny line where one word gets a line all to itself. A word is already a lone object (much more than a line, anyway) so, it seems to me, making it stand by itself forces on it an extra weight, a weight that it must be a strong word to carry. If the word is most important as a part of the poem's whole, the word being communitarian rather than individualist, standing the word out there by itself calls the larger piece into question. There are poems that want you to spend time on the words as individuals, as in the Aram Saroyan here or some of the Clark Coolidge poems here (scroll to the bottom of the page). In the cases of Coolidge and Saroyan part of what the poet wants to say is that words atomize, become separated like leaves from the context of tree or other leaves. A word broken apart retains space one may explore.

Justification? Sufficient?

I get the feeling some poets, especially those new to poetry, break writing into lines in order to make their work look like a poem. Several years ago I worked on a community college literary magazine. The faculty advisor was put off by one of the poems I thought very nice. When I read the poem aloud he agreed it was better than he'd thought it, having been put off primarily by the poet's use of the very short line. Because the poem was a series of transformations I thought the short line acceptable. The individual lines, yes, often did not quite justify themselves. The piece worked as a whole, I thought, considering its theme and the fact that we were editing a community college magazine part of the mission of which was to build beginning writers.

Thoughts on the line ... I think I'm not saying the same thing Silliman's saying.

Could he and I achieve "consensus as to what a line might be"? Consider this talk on the way to failure.

ftm

Transgender men fascinate me. Sorta mystified, sorta intrigued, there's one who lives nearby, Loren Cameron, whose book of photographs I bought a few years ago, on whom I have a little crush. I see him walking his pansy little dog and I think, Boy, you need a big husky wolfy thing. I still think Loren's cute as the dickens, as a man. But, get this, I still lapse into thinking (or using) female pronouns when thinking about Loren. It's not like I look at Loren and think, Hot Chick. No indeed. I look at Loren and think, Cute guy. So why would I think "she"? Do I call boys "girlfriend" and "oh look at her"? Only when I'm being really campy, which is totally rare cuz I'm not good at it. And it's not like I know Loren personally, never saw him before he had the beard and bald dome. So it's not like I have to train myself against ingrained habit.

Anyway. This post got started after I followed a link to Jasper's exasperation about not being taken for a man, or rather, for being almost taken for a man. Because he doesn't immediately describe himself, and I know there are a lot of girls who have short hair and wear jeans, I wondered what made the women he talks about assume he's male. Facial hair? Seems not, as he yearns after the validating beard. Tall? Says that in there somewhere. Baggy pants? Dunno. Doesn't say how he's dressed. Jasper has a boyfriend, Adam, of whom Jas says, he has "a beautiful swish."

may I be a victim too please

The Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code is a real phenomenon. The hold list at the Berkeley Public Library has had about 150 people on it for months. As of today there are 144 holds, (check here if you want to see the current number). Given that a book is checked out for three weeks, and the library owns 33 copies of the Code the book has already gone through the hands of a lot of people.

SFGate has an article about the supposed Jesus controversy the book has stoked. The article has some quotes typical of conservative victimology. You know, the big & powerful are victims of "the last acceptable prejudice." Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, I'm now wringing my handkerchief of its thousand captured tears. If I may quote another Catholic in the same article: "sheer delusion." Because the novel (a work of fiction, remember those?) posits some ideas about the life of Jesus quite counter to the Church-approved story these "pitiful adherents" (says one) feel all put-upon. Look, if you have the Truth on your side, what have you got to worry about? Especially if besides Truth you have 2 billion compatriots, wealth in the billions of dollars (most of it in property -- most of that untaxed), hundreds of thousands (millions?) who work full time spreading your ideology ... Boy, next we're going to weep for Coca Cola, poor put-upon corporation wilting before the thuggery of those damn villains who think carbonated sugar water is overpriced & unhealthy. Unjust! Prejudice! Cornsyrupophobes! Carbonation-haters!

When the churches stop trying to destroy my family, I'll revisit the possibility of sympathy for them. Until then? We'll leave our sympathies in their nice shrink-wrap.

Xianity

from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell:
"The world is full of ... mutually contending bands: totem-, flag-, and party-worshippers. Even the so-called Christian nations -- which are supposed to be following a 'World' Redeemer -- are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love ... which was taught by their professed supreme Lord ..."

That's just so darn snarky.

"'Love your enemies, do good to them ... Give to every man that asketh of thee ... [A]s ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise ... Be ye ... merciful ...'"

Or, you know, punish them. There's lots in the Bible about punishing.

change mind

Give me a day off work and I go into a funk. What say. Maybe I need a clock on the head with a rolled up movie screen. Without the audience I s'pose I'd miss half the experience, eh?

Aak! Fluffy cat bringing rain in on his back, jumps into my lap. I have a towel beside the desk for just such an incident but he's in my lap before I think. He is, however, the skittish type and when I go, "Aak!" he gives me a stunned look and exits.

Here I was telling myself I wasn't going to be using the blog for the personal drizzle but Kent's off at work this chilly wet Xmas eve and I ... I ... oh hush ... Now Sundy, the short hair, is myowing at me to play, very insistent. He even comes up to the chair and hooks me with his claws, play now play now play now. Lookin' silly there, kit, with the shoelace wrapped around your middle. Kent tied a black feather to the end of the string, the string being tied to an arm-long bamboo. Sundy thrills to hunting this feather. Such jumps we haven't seen in months. But, y'know, I don't always want to play.

After work last evening (& after yoga class at the Y) I stopped in at Comic Relief to see if Rory was around. Big collection of comics, I said. Any ideas?

You'd get best value if you can donate them and get a tax write-off. Book value? Sure. On paper looks like money. But you won't get book value thru e-bay, certainly a comic store couldn't afford to buy at top price, how would they make anything on the sale? Only a small fraction of the collection will have a ready buyer. If we do donate the whole bit I suppose Rory's right that we ought to go through the boxes and make sure we're not just dumping stuff we'll have regrets about losing. Ugh. But who'd want a fat donation of comics? Literacy Volunteers. Children's Hospital. One would have to make sure the Undergrounds don't get in the kiddie batch. Getting a tax write-off means making enough money to itemize, and determining the hassle in itself is worth it. I hate the idea of organizing my life around the desire to avoid taxes. I figure if I have so much money I'm paying big money in taxes I have so much money worrying is superfluous. I've always been poor. Not on-the-street poor, not deep-in-debt poor. But keep-your-expenses-low poor? Yes yes.

Maybe we can get up to Sebastopol this weekend and do more sorting and tossing (let's not talk about the oh-no-we-can't-throw-away-thats) ... I don't want to do this in the rain. Rain depresses me. Going through old stuff depresses me. Man, gravity is thick where I live.

Hey, the brothers are playing with each other. 'Bout time they amused themselves. Cats.

Do I need a cup of coffee?

asking

I got letters from the Martins, Michael & Jack (no relation, shared last name purely coincidental, really, I asssure you), and I asked each if I could excerpt from their letters. Both said NO. Guess that's what comes of them being writers and such. Yvo and Schuyler aren't writers. (OK, Schuyler is a scientist and writes for papers for publication, but that's diff, yeah?)

Mike had written in response to my concerns about soliciting work in my capacity as guest poetry editor -- particularly the thought that one might ask a writer one admires to cough up some poems only to dislike the poems thus coughed. Does one reject the poems? Mike told me about a couple exchanges he's had with writers, him being ed of Hogtown Creek Review an' all. I thought editors don't talk enough about hurting people's feelings so I wanted to post Mike's comments. No, no, says he. What if one of the persons googles "Michael Martin" and "Hogtown Creek Review" and ends up at LuvSet and reads this stuff and feels even worse? I'd already prepped the excerpt, changing all Mike's archy-like "i"s to "I"s. Thing even got posted briefly. Not that I intended it to be posted. I hit the "preview your post" button, not the "publish" button. Somehow publication happened. Such has been corrected. 'Tis well gone now. Gonest goner done gone. Full on. So, you with the feelings, fear not.

Jack's letter included a thorough account of his being clocked on the head by a rolled up movie screen. He teaches high school English, had been using the screen to show some transparencies. When he got hit the class busted up, cracked up, went wild ... all of this sounds more dangerous than the accident ... they laughed a lot. Which was, you know, kinda peculiar, it being possible that Jack had been like hurt and everything. I thought it all read well, the very thoroughness of the account. But I can't post it cuz Jack says he's going to "use" it. Reminds me what Tess Gallagher said about husband Raymond Carver: tell him a story, even if you're a writer yourself, and next you know he's snuck yours into one his own darn stories.

*****

Have a happy this and a merry that and a jolly other thing.

Ishihara Yoshiro

A bio from the back of From the Country of Eight Islands: an anthology of Japanese poetry edited & translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson:

Ishihara Yoshiro (1915-1977) A student of German and a Christian convert, he began to write poetry seriously after his experience as a prisoner of war: captured by the Soviet Army in Manchuria, he spent eight years in Siberia, released only by the general amnesty given at Stalin's death. He began to write at that time, he said, because he wanted to examine what it means to be a human being.

... to examine what it means to be a human being.

From Yoshiro's "Song of the Ringing in the Ear":

When ringing begins in my ears
he is perhaps the man that begins
but when he begins abruptly
there's another man
that begins
and all the other men that revive at a stroke.

Phoebe 2002

In my last post I wrote about a poem by David Trinidad, a poem excerpted from a longer work, Phoebe 2002.

The description of the book by its distributor is worth a read all by itself. "[A] collaborative epic poem/essay [Trinidad collaborated with Lynn Crosbie and Jeffrey Conway, two writers with whom I'm unfamiliar] that zings in and out of the scenes [in the movie All About Eve] and makes a thousand connections within the world of popular culture. Drawing from high and low sources, the poets relate All About Eve to such epics as Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene, The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as to other movies (Valley of the Dolls, Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs) and television shows (Gilligan's Island, The Twilight Zone, Scooby-Doo).~The figure of Bette Davis assumes heroic proportions as she descends into a Dante-esque Inferno (a drunken party) and goes on to do battle with husbands, directors, studio heads and archrival Joan Crawford."

Other excerpts from Phoebe 2002 are on the web. I just found them so I'm going to post links without having actually read them:
excerpt at The Literary Review
excerpt at the Electronic Poetry Review
excerpt at Painted Bride Quarterly

Plus there's a rave review at Rain Taxi. And an interview with Trinidad about the book.

power makeover

I haven't paid much attention to the unholing of Saddam Hussein. If it means the US is pulling out of a stable democratic country now, well, GREAT! If it means we'll have a trial in which reams of information about how he destroyed his country will be revealed to people seeking the truth about the fate of their loved ones, well, I'm all for that. If it means we'll get an Iraqi-side view of the US's relations with the country, well, wouldn't it be interesting? But I ain't sure it means any of that.

Besides, what's there to say that isn't filling up pages already?

I've yet to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the Bravo channel show about gay fashion & lifestyle consultants doing a makeover on a clueless straight bumpkin. It sounds, at best, cute. But I got a good chuckle out of this photo: Hussein's power makeover

The photo illustrates the Data Lounge gossip columnist's take on press coverage of the great capture. As Mr. Barillas says, "We were treated ... to this memorable New York Post headline describing Saddam's hidden desert orifice as his, "Tiny, Dirty, Airless Hole," and as if we weren't close enough already, we hear Fox News chiming in with: "Coming up: Inside Saddam's Hole." ... We're just glad they cut away from the bedraggled former chieftan's medical examination when they did."