just looked over the november slam poems.
so, i did get through it, but so what?
not that anyone combs through these pages, but here's the disclaimer j.i.c.
going to redirect studio-ward.
moving to a different space.
have to make it a positive.
looking forward to jan 1.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 30
Today is the final day of the November PAD Chapbook Challenge. Or is it? I'll post a wrap-up on the challenge tomorrow, but today is technically the final day of the initial poeming for this challenge. We still have all of December to collect and revise our November poems, slim our manuscripts down to 10-20 pages of poetry, and submit them (to me!). Again, I'll share all the details tomorrow--or click here to see the basic guidelines.
For today's prompt, write a lessons learned poem. If you've been writing to a certain theme, this poem might take a moment to step back and reflect on the BIG PICTURE. If you're like me and couldn't quite stick to one theme throughout the month, then this poem might be about real lessons learned (either this month or during your entire lifetime). Or you might just write a poem about going to school. Or to work. Or this blog. Or something else.
Lessons Learned
Everyday the body will amaze me.
Or, is it time
The continuities of the real
what day of the week is it?
the sock stays where it is dropped
the bulb pushes up through the ground
the smile in the photos stay the same
and yet this sense
that somehow
I could not die
that I will be the first to make it
to be able to walk through a moment
slip in sideways
right through it
into that dimension
which is right here
hovering like an answer
a glove for a hand
a star on a branch
a lesson that could be learned
but the walls of the infinite
close and spit me back out
like a seed
that needs to split and sprout
and root and take years to grow
and more years to grow
and still more
that can't talk
can only speak in leaves
can only, in seasons, cipher
For today's prompt, write a lessons learned poem. If you've been writing to a certain theme, this poem might take a moment to step back and reflect on the BIG PICTURE. If you're like me and couldn't quite stick to one theme throughout the month, then this poem might be about real lessons learned (either this month or during your entire lifetime). Or you might just write a poem about going to school. Or to work. Or this blog. Or something else.
Lessons Learned
Everyday the body will amaze me.
Or, is it time
The continuities of the real
what day of the week is it?
the sock stays where it is dropped
the bulb pushes up through the ground
the smile in the photos stay the same
and yet this sense
that somehow
I could not die
that I will be the first to make it
to be able to walk through a moment
slip in sideways
right through it
into that dimension
which is right here
hovering like an answer
a glove for a hand
a star on a branch
a lesson that could be learned
but the walls of the infinite
close and spit me back out
like a seed
that needs to split and sprout
and root and take years to grow
and more years to grow
and still more
that can't talk
can only speak in leaves
can only, in seasons, cipher
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 29
For today's prompt, write a next steps poem. This might be a good opportunity to try writing a list poem. Or it might be a good time to write about your future plans. It might even be a good chance for you to write about spiral staircases. Who knows?
A Genration of Leaves
The first thing to do is to light all the candles in the house.
The next step is to just look at them, to let the rain and all the space around
just be.
your life is one long single breath
The candles melting down their wicks
The rain washing out to the rising rivers
one body of water, right now, already
The next step is to know that the next step
has already been taken
even as you see the flame
still, not move
That this marking of time
this hold in stillness
is a step
a walking forward
that those others did
and still different others will do
carrying the past
curled asleep and breathing
in your arms
A Genration of Leaves
The first thing to do is to light all the candles in the house.
The next step is to just look at them, to let the rain and all the space around
just be.
your life is one long single breath
The candles melting down their wicks
The rain washing out to the rising rivers
one body of water, right now, already
The next step is to know that the next step
has already been taken
even as you see the flame
still, not move
That this marking of time
this hold in stillness
is a step
a walking forward
that those others did
and still different others will do
carrying the past
curled asleep and breathing
in your arms
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 28
If you're feeling worn out by poeming this month, don't worry: We're completing our fourth week of prompts today. Only two days left after today's poem, so dig deep and try to get those last few amazing lines.
For today's prompt, write a "what really happened" poem. Use a real event (or an event from a popular movie) and spin it in another direction. Or use an event described in one of your poems earlier this month and spin it in a new direction. Or refute something that was never even in question. Or just poem any way that you can, because we're almost to the finish line.
For our beautiful Robert
What Really Happened
They called at 3am
asking for the corneas
Can they go into the palace
with a candle
And enter the chamber
long shadows flickering down the stone stairwell
Can they follow you there a river
someone else rowing
the river stretches and disappears into fog
and your grey hair waits on its pillow
king
leave a coin
where the eyes were
for what you will see
you will need no complicated attachment
to the circuitry of the body
no opening and closing of your lungs
in mechanical time
your living eyes will still see
the flower - slow motion -
opening
and ribbons of traffic
tearing in the rain
and the look of love from someone else
to someone else
and for seeing I
loving you
will see more
in the liminal space of sleep see
I count for you sixteen layers of particulate light
like a yeast, living
inasmuch as moving is living,
shifting in separate layers
present
the present
eleven layers, maybe, electrical, no place
fantastic
miracle of particulate visible nowhere actually light
and my eyes are closed
and I could tell you about this
you would understand
the boat is oared
now without a captain
white subsumes white
nonshape swallows
shape
we wait on the shore
of course
looking
for all our might
i give permission for them
to take my voice
to give it to someone else who can't
cry out loud without it.
have them take my voice
i don't need it
to speak to you
from across a river
that is nowhere
you, still,
listen
For today's prompt, write a "what really happened" poem. Use a real event (or an event from a popular movie) and spin it in another direction. Or use an event described in one of your poems earlier this month and spin it in a new direction. Or refute something that was never even in question. Or just poem any way that you can, because we're almost to the finish line.
For our beautiful Robert
What Really Happened
They called at 3am
asking for the corneas
Can they go into the palace
with a candle
And enter the chamber
long shadows flickering down the stone stairwell
Can they follow you there a river
someone else rowing
the river stretches and disappears into fog
and your grey hair waits on its pillow
king
leave a coin
where the eyes were
for what you will see
you will need no complicated attachment
to the circuitry of the body
no opening and closing of your lungs
in mechanical time
your living eyes will still see
the flower - slow motion -
opening
and ribbons of traffic
tearing in the rain
and the look of love from someone else
to someone else
and for seeing I
loving you
will see more
in the liminal space of sleep see
I count for you sixteen layers of particulate light
like a yeast, living
inasmuch as moving is living,
shifting in separate layers
present
the present
eleven layers, maybe, electrical, no place
fantastic
miracle of particulate visible nowhere actually light
and my eyes are closed
and I could tell you about this
you would understand
the boat is oared
now without a captain
white subsumes white
nonshape swallows
shape
we wait on the shore
of course
looking
for all our might
i give permission for them
to take my voice
to give it to someone else who can't
cry out loud without it.
have them take my voice
i don't need it
to speak to you
from across a river
that is nowhere
you, still,
listen
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 27
For today's prompt, take the phrase "Blame the (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, use the new phrase as the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Some example titles might include: "Blame the rain," "Blame the loud-mouthed jerk in the row behind us," "Blame the ref," etc.
Blame the clock
that can't think of anything to do
but go round and round
or tick, flip, blip forward
and forward
Or to vary even
the round and round
It's its fault we have to go through contortions
saying, 'Not yet. It's gone so fast."
or watch in slow motion
the red light
reflected in the red pool
the silver arc of the tire
cutting an arc in the red pool
the glass shattering so slowly
one could see the pieces
like meteorites
one could count them almost
and how slowly the head nods
forward into it
the glass for a moment a crown
a necklace
a dazzling diamond vest
just one second
blame the clock
we have learned to see so much
it will not slow
nor speed away
but tick
as we wait in the lobby
and look at it
a white door will open
sometime
and
sometime, tick
an answer
will come
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 26
For today's prompt, write an "on the run" poem. You can decide who or what is on the run and what might be causing them to run. For myself, I had to link today's poem to my poem yesterday. But you can run in any direction you want.
Here's my attempt:
I try to tuck it in
Three poems before noon
The dogs are all barking
The train blows its whistle
My hair drips down my back
and the train blows its whistle
I have so much time
eleven more minutes
To say, what
That sooner or later
You all become words to me
I spill you like runes
And arrange you for balance
And from your distribution
In your faces
and turned backs
I glean a sense of a message
Some pattern perhaps
Some reading
of loves, lost love, friends, family
Who I am, how, was
the whistle goes on the train
I am out of time now
but will leave you in your configurations
I will study you later
and try to learn
who I am, generally
and what is likely to be
Here's my attempt:
I try to tuck it in
Three poems before noon
The dogs are all barking
The train blows its whistle
My hair drips down my back
and the train blows its whistle
I have so much time
eleven more minutes
To say, what
That sooner or later
You all become words to me
I spill you like runes
And arrange you for balance
And from your distribution
In your faces
and turned backs
I glean a sense of a message
Some pattern perhaps
Some reading
of loves, lost love, friends, family
Who I am, how, was
the whistle goes on the train
I am out of time now
but will leave you in your configurations
I will study you later
and try to learn
who I am, generally
and what is likely to be
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 25
For today's prompt, write an animal poem. Your poem can mention an animal in its title or somewhere in the body of the poem. The animal doesn't have to be the main focus of the poem, but your poem should mention an animal somewhere in it.
Zoe rings my doorbell.
Zoe is a dog
big enough
smart enough
to ring a doorbell
with her nose
I don't see her do it
I suppose I am asleep
because she has made it
all the way home
Five years and three thousand miles
on her own
on paws of ash
Why do we need something
to take form
to arrive on our doorsteps
to be reassured
that loyalty and love
cannot be incinerated
like hair and fur
and the bones
we were both made of
whose different shapes
we would hold and shake
eyes different and the same, looking
creating there loyalty and love
true to last
(heavy paw)
(sweet heart)
(spirit guide)
simple enormous companion
before and after
eviscerating fire
Zoe rings my doorbell.
Zoe is a dog
big enough
smart enough
to ring a doorbell
with her nose
I don't see her do it
I suppose I am asleep
because she has made it
all the way home
Five years and three thousand miles
on her own
on paws of ash
Why do we need something
to take form
to arrive on our doorsteps
to be reassured
that loyalty and love
cannot be incinerated
like hair and fur
and the bones
we were both made of
whose different shapes
we would hold and shake
eyes different and the same, looking
creating there loyalty and love
true to last
(heavy paw)
(sweet heart)
(spirit guide)
simple enormous companion
before and after
eviscerating fire
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 24
For today's prompt, write a spaces poem. Your poem could involve white space, outer space, inner space, a parking space, the space between one day and the next, or something other type of spacing. Allow yourself enough space to play around.
The Space of the Lot
It is so much smaller than I thought
From one yard to the next one over
this field
I try to pace off
ten, maybe steps, on the flat, slippery stone
steps to the door that was always open
that banged shut behind and announced
we're here!
but as I walk across the weeds
no I would already be out the other side
where the iron chairs slid back
by the outside table
a daisy above each fork
juices orange and yellow
abundance
I start again
where I imagine the kitchen to be
I am followed by dogs of memory
one still dumb and nipping at me
one still comforting and huge in presence:
everything is always alright
The space of the pool
has been filled
I walk on what would have been water
Sacred space of water
Hallowed space of last vision
last breath
Now green and gold and brown
Dirt and curling leaves of weeds
I want to save them
as if this bending leaf
long and golden curling leaf
was your
last wish for the world
This, the same location
not the same space
This is now
What is real now
The space to you
is a distance in my heart
measured all the time
and not at all far
a reach from plate to plate is all
the audible distance of laughter
still a blue and golden day
with sloping lawns
and teacups for the stuffed bears
and towels for going to the ocean
and facing the waves
that never stop
even as we leave
and sleep
waves crashing
and find ourselves alone
waves crashing
and live for a time
and die
and find the space that we occupied
occupied
and it's okay
by the silent
the silently growing
the real
the what
is real now
The Space of the Lot
It is so much smaller than I thought
From one yard to the next one over
this field
I try to pace off
ten, maybe steps, on the flat, slippery stone
steps to the door that was always open
that banged shut behind and announced
we're here!
but as I walk across the weeds
no I would already be out the other side
where the iron chairs slid back
by the outside table
a daisy above each fork
juices orange and yellow
abundance
I start again
where I imagine the kitchen to be
I am followed by dogs of memory
one still dumb and nipping at me
one still comforting and huge in presence:
everything is always alright
The space of the pool
has been filled
I walk on what would have been water
Sacred space of water
Hallowed space of last vision
last breath
Now green and gold and brown
Dirt and curling leaves of weeds
I want to save them
as if this bending leaf
long and golden curling leaf
was your
last wish for the world
This, the same location
not the same space
This is now
What is real now
The space to you
is a distance in my heart
measured all the time
and not at all far
a reach from plate to plate is all
the audible distance of laughter
still a blue and golden day
with sloping lawns
and teacups for the stuffed bears
and towels for going to the ocean
and facing the waves
that never stop
even as we leave
and sleep
waves crashing
and find ourselves alone
waves crashing
and live for a time
and die
and find the space that we occupied
occupied
and it's okay
by the silent
the silently growing
the real
the what
is real now
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 23
For today's prompt, write a form poem. This poem can cover any subject you want, but it should be written using a poetic form. Could be haiku, sestina, triolet, shadorma, paradelle, or some other poetic form. (Click here to see a list of 35 poetic forms.
Write line one with three syllables. (I'm hungry)
Write line two with five syllables. (order out for food)
#Write line three with three syllables. (not sure where)
#Write line four with three syllables. (think man think)
#Write line five with seven syllables. (burgers, pizza or Chinese?)
No I won't
Follow you down there
not alone
He looks from the walls
Though I projected him there
Write line one with three syllables. (I'm hungry)
Write line two with five syllables. (order out for food)
#Write line three with three syllables. (not sure where)
#Write line four with three syllables. (think man think)
#Write line five with seven syllables. (burgers, pizza or Chinese?)
No I won't
Follow you down there
not alone
He looks from the walls
Though I projected him there
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 22
Okay, the weekend was a little wild and unpredictable--from wiping out comments to not letting me post any prompts (and then eventually posting multiple prompts). Hopefully, we can get back to a little normalcy for the final week or so of poeming. Time to make a stand.
No, really, the prompt today is to write a poem that takes a stand. This could be a political stand, religious stand, personal stand, or I guess a poem about the ability to stand--or setting up a stand (think vegetable stand or newspaper stand, etc.). Whatever your thing, be sure to take a poetic stand today.
Do you hear me?
I won't have it!
Put the walls back.
I said - put them back!
Put the walls back
Put them back!
and on them their shingles, the vines and the roses
and on them the books
and in them the phrases
the lucky, lucky time
in which we could underline
there it is. said so well, oh, i must keep that
somewhere
underline.
remember.
Put them back - the bricks
Why in god's name did you disrupt
the bricks
and tear down the writer's house
and bury the well
without a marker
and fold
the books and the bricks and the garden
-bulbs trying-
hearth and basement
games and pots
into the scooped up mattress and the glass
from our photos
from time, sometime, frozen like that
and the trees
you terrible men
can you not hear their old roots ripping
can you not understand that as pain
belching, brutal, practical men
And you others
thieves -
put them back
the candlesticks
fine but too expensive
bought on the day we looked through
the windows at the diamonds
fancy
and had all we could need
and the guitar that played
later to keep us alive
give them back
put them back
the walls and their pain
and their weather and their sea-scent
the stairs and its calendars
its thumping children grown old
the floorboards and it the sounds
of nightwalkers
those needing water
or touch or talk in the dark
or to know
is someone else home
in these walls
three centuries old
and the ghosts
first, above all
primary occupants
contained only in those walls
by those walls alone
you bulldozed to dust before lunch
you dumb, limited, unlovely men
you didn't even see them go -
or feel them pass through your bowels
like the truth of your thin, brief life
they, more essential than
the phrases in the books
the yellow of the rainslickers
the crust for the pies
the pillows - soft for dreaming
the address books of friends
some crossed off
gone somewhere
you did this -
you
find the ghosts
put the walls back
put them back
then put them back
to haunt us all
to warn us of impermanence
of being stuck somewhere
in a condition we could never understand
No, really, the prompt today is to write a poem that takes a stand. This could be a political stand, religious stand, personal stand, or I guess a poem about the ability to stand--or setting up a stand (think vegetable stand or newspaper stand, etc.). Whatever your thing, be sure to take a poetic stand today.
Do you hear me?
I won't have it!
Put the walls back.
I said - put them back!
Put the walls back
Put them back!
and on them their shingles, the vines and the roses
and on them the books
and in them the phrases
the lucky, lucky time
in which we could underline
there it is. said so well, oh, i must keep that
somewhere
underline.
remember.
Put them back - the bricks
Why in god's name did you disrupt
the bricks
and tear down the writer's house
and bury the well
without a marker
and fold
the books and the bricks and the garden
-bulbs trying-
hearth and basement
games and pots
into the scooped up mattress and the glass
from our photos
from time, sometime, frozen like that
and the trees
you terrible men
can you not hear their old roots ripping
can you not understand that as pain
belching, brutal, practical men
And you others
thieves -
put them back
the candlesticks
fine but too expensive
bought on the day we looked through
the windows at the diamonds
fancy
and had all we could need
and the guitar that played
later to keep us alive
give them back
put them back
the walls and their pain
and their weather and their sea-scent
the stairs and its calendars
its thumping children grown old
the floorboards and it the sounds
of nightwalkers
those needing water
or touch or talk in the dark
or to know
is someone else home
in these walls
three centuries old
and the ghosts
first, above all
primary occupants
contained only in those walls
by those walls alone
you bulldozed to dust before lunch
you dumb, limited, unlovely men
you didn't even see them go -
or feel them pass through your bowels
like the truth of your thin, brief life
they, more essential than
the phrases in the books
the yellow of the rainslickers
the crust for the pies
the pillows - soft for dreaming
the address books of friends
some crossed off
gone somewhere
you did this -
you
find the ghosts
put the walls back
put them back
then put them back
to haunt us all
to warn us of impermanence
of being stuck somewhere
in a condition we could never understand
21
The prompt for today is to write a permission poem. You don't need my (or anyone else's) permission to write your poem today, but it should somehow involve the concept of giving, refusing, asking, etc. permission.
Could I just come over?
Could I just knock on your door
and step in
walking around you
welcome to
Could I
just look at you?
Smile for today
for standing in front of you
for having you
answer yes
and open the door
Could I just come over?
Could I just knock on your door
and step in
walking around you
welcome to
Could I
just look at you?
Smile for today
for standing in front of you
for having you
answer yes
and open the door
Saturday, November 20, 2010
For today's prompt, write a poem with a hole in it. The hole could be referenced in the poem, which could be about subjects such as hitting a golf ball in the hole, punching a hole in the wall, or even visiting a hole in the wall bar. Of course, with everyone flexing their concrete poetry skills lately, I'm sure at least a few poets might take a stab at writing a poem with an actual hole in the middle (maybe a doughnut-shaped poem?). Another possibility is to write a poem with a hole in its logic, but I'm sure you can find any number of loop-holes for attacking this prompt.
:
It is not a poem
if it doesn't have a hole in it
or around it
If one can walk from end to end
and not possibly pass
like a neutrino
through the membrane of one's own skin
into a dimension
in which thought
words arranged arrive
underneath one
like a lucky stretching bridge
between the cells dividing
or between the stars extending
a place as true as any other
pass
with just the right amount of fear
not understanding,
even at that size,
what the space is that surrounds
we do know
there is a hole in that too
that even light
cannot survive
boy. i'm just too busy for this right now. ... 20
For today's prompt, write a "what's wrong or right" poem. As with any of these prompts, there are many ways to come at this one. However, since I'm in a hurry to hit the road, my mind is completely blanking on all of them. So, whether it's right or wrong--wrong or right--I'm just gonna get down to poeming. Have a great unsupervised day!
It's so hard to tell what is right or wrong
when the heart and its tendrils of effort and need
- the self putting itself forward to love and be loved -
entwine around the hand that would turn the key or wave goodbye or
shake in searing blame
how dare you scare me like this?
how dare you?
the child dreams of her own death now
and scans the room for scarves that can become ropes
construction paper scissors that are no way pointed enough
to cut right cleanly from wrong
that old repeated wrong
- somehow hard to tell from right (a heart
searching to understand another's walk in darkness)
the policeman
separated them
mother from child
right and wrong forever braided into a sheath around the heart
that grows regardless,
cramped, contorted
the tendrils of that heart wrap around
as roots wrap around those bones
that - right or wrong now -
will always be bones
understanding does nothing
trauma abides
takes new form
and threatens
to abandon form
how unfairly
how just plain wrong
Thursday, November 18, 2010
18
For today's prompt, write a lost & found poem. I suppose you could focus on either what's lost or what's found--or both. Or you could focus on how things change after something lost. Or after something is found. Or...I'm starting to lose my train of thought. I'm sure you've probably got the idea.
I put my fingers right there.
Don't they go right there?
It is wrong. It is lost. I start
in the wrong place and don't know where to
go or how that could be I have been here
so many times before.
I put my fingers.
No.
I have lost it. I never fully knew it
but what I knew
I don't know
I don't know
even what it was
I know where I was
in college
in the room on the fourth floor
where groups would make dinner
and after
late
later
I would come in and the piano would be there
and i knew that run of Beethoven
not the whole song.
It comes back to me now
the rocking bass hand on what
the C
Go.
You've found it.
Play it.
Play it like you are losing your hearing
and need to hear it
through the floorboards,
trembling
I put my fingers right there.
Don't they go right there?
It is wrong. It is lost. I start
in the wrong place and don't know where to
go or how that could be I have been here
so many times before.
I put my fingers.
No.
I have lost it. I never fully knew it
but what I knew
I don't know
I don't know
even what it was
I know where I was
in college
in the room on the fourth floor
where groups would make dinner
and after
late
later
I would come in and the piano would be there
and i knew that run of Beethoven
not the whole song.
It comes back to me now
the rocking bass hand on what
the C
Go.
You've found it.
Play it.
Play it like you are losing your hearing
and need to hear it
through the floorboards,
trembling
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
For today's prompt, take the phrase "Tell me why (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Possible titles could include: "Tell me why 1+1=2," "Tell me why I'm wrong," "Tell me why my hand always gets stuck in the Pringle's container," etc. Get silly; get serious; get poeming!
Tell Me Why
There are these distances
millenia sometimes
continents often - tu me manque
il neige
or three thousand miles of fields and gas stations
or cities
just cities intervening
too far, too awkward
a space longer than a movie
with a beginning, middle and end
that ends well or badly
or neighborhoods
there is that one
that one is not this one
a freeway bends between
or just houses
three, fourteen
twenty eight fifty
divisions of walls
enough to never know if the lights are on or off
in any case one has nothing to do
with the other
or the distance between one side of the bed
or another
vast, like a continent
sometimes
i don't know why
there is no proximity
tell me why there are these distances
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
16
It's a two-for-Tuesday prompt today. Here are the prompts:
1. Write a stacking poem. The poem could be about stacking objects. Or it could be about stacking ideas, stacking the deck, stacking the odds against something happening, etc.
2. Write an unstacking poem. Just the opposite of the first prompt. Unstack objects or tear down the obstacles stacked in your way, etc.
I like people who stack rocks
Who occupy themselves with the tools at hand
To spend the afternoon making something
that could not have been
without them
I like coming across stacked rocks
and thinking of someone's fingers
holding the top and slippery rock
from exact opposite sides
whatever that knowing is
that says, Let go now
Now is perfect
Monday, November 15, 2010
15
For today's prompt, write a "just when you thought it was safe" poem. For instance, write a poem about the dangers of going off a diet just after hitting your goal weight, entering the water after it appears the killer shark has been caught (Jaws anyone?), or whatever else could offer a sneaky bit of danger. Of course, with only 15 days of poeming left, it's safe to assume you're going to finish this challenge--or is it?
Just When You thought it was Safe
To admit your age
Your place in life
the done, the undone
to settle in
wear glasses and sweaters
You wake up
like colt dropped four feet into this world
and your weak and trembling bones
stand right up under you
and tell you:
soon
- bolt!
Sunday, November 14, 2010
14
For today's prompt, write a crossroads poem. This could be a poem about a physical, mental, or emotional intersection. For instance, graduating college or getting a divorce often leaves people at a crossroads. Or finishing a ginormous project at work. Or even starting a poem. After all, that blank page (or screen) offers so many new possibilities.
"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and your go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there be sure to get there just a little ' fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself…A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."
Tommy Johnson
What would it be like?
I've done this, but in the daylight,
not right before midnight
Stopped in the middle of a dirt road
(Van Gogh country)
like some animal
paying no mind to possible traffic
but kneeling down, recreating
the typical cypress lined landscapes of Arles
in branches, rocks
Someone would drive over it soon enough
But then I had that spirit
I could taste cadmium on my tongue
Knew the color of rain
oil in the rain
the madness of crows
startled from a corn field
caught in violent daubing gestures
or darker pebbles
But what if
Now
Maybe my crossroads is not in France
Maybe in Lodi somewhere
or right up the street.
I'll wait until just before midnight
stand under the streetlights
create a little picture
in the black heart of the intersection
and I'll see the shiny shoes first
He'll take my hand and drag it across the pavement
It will bleed out image
(just like Jimeny Cricket painting an entire swamp scene
in an S shaped swipe)
And on my little road
where I live
under the flashing lights
Wait. Stop. Go.
I would issue all the sunsets Van Gogh saw from his little cell
all the sunrises I've seen from mine
the locket of my heart would fall open
and spill pictures
of every moment of grace and pain
every plate laid before me
candles lit
touch, traveling
fields flying past
my fingers would burn
from this love
I would go with him then I guess
and not feel anything
but the movement of color
and the satisfaction
of a decent trade
"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and your go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there be sure to get there just a little ' fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself…A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."
Tommy Johnson
What would it be like?
I've done this, but in the daylight,
not right before midnight
Stopped in the middle of a dirt road
(Van Gogh country)
like some animal
paying no mind to possible traffic
but kneeling down, recreating
the typical cypress lined landscapes of Arles
in branches, rocks
Someone would drive over it soon enough
But then I had that spirit
I could taste cadmium on my tongue
Knew the color of rain
oil in the rain
the madness of crows
startled from a corn field
caught in violent daubing gestures
or darker pebbles
But what if
Now
Maybe my crossroads is not in France
Maybe in Lodi somewhere
or right up the street.
I'll wait until just before midnight
stand under the streetlights
create a little picture
in the black heart of the intersection
and I'll see the shiny shoes first
He'll take my hand and drag it across the pavement
It will bleed out image
(just like Jimeny Cricket painting an entire swamp scene
in an S shaped swipe)
And on my little road
where I live
under the flashing lights
Wait. Stop. Go.
I would issue all the sunsets Van Gogh saw from his little cell
all the sunrises I've seen from mine
the locket of my heart would fall open
and spill pictures
of every moment of grace and pain
every plate laid before me
candles lit
touch, traveling
fields flying past
my fingers would burn
from this love
I would go with him then I guess
and not feel anything
but the movement of color
and the satisfaction
of a decent trade
Saturday, November 13, 2010
13
For today's prompt, make the title of your poem a question; then, the poem should go about trying to answer the question. You can be direct in your answer or a little vague. Possible titles might be: "Why is the sky blue?", "Where are my car keys?", or "How am I supposed to go about writing a poem that answers a question that also happens to be the title of the poem anyway?" I mean, any question will do to get you started, then the fun part is poeming an answer.
What is the matter?
It's not that I dreamt of a man with a flashlight
whose German Shepard had found me first
pushing at me in the dirt with its muzzle
or the other
beside my bed
raising a hand
and I wake myself
by pushing hard into his face
that is the color of the air
around my bed
at not-yet dawn
It is not that now, awake,
the only sound I hear
is the clink of bottles
as someone digs through my trash
outside
or that it is darker now than
it ever was an hour later
earlier
Maybe it is that someone is saving my daylight
I hope it is golden and happy
I hope they are saving it for me
What is the matter?
It's not that I dreamt of a man with a flashlight
whose German Shepard had found me first
pushing at me in the dirt with its muzzle
or the other
beside my bed
raising a hand
and I wake myself
by pushing hard into his face
that is the color of the air
around my bed
at not-yet dawn
It is not that now, awake,
the only sound I hear
is the clink of bottles
as someone digs through my trash
outside
or that it is darker now than
it ever was an hour later
earlier
Maybe it is that someone is saving my daylight
I hope it is golden and happy
I hope they are saving it for me
Friday, November 12, 2010
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 12
For today's prompt, write a "forget what they say" poem. To do this, you could take a familiar saying and spin it on its head. Or comfort someone who's being told they can't do something. Or have the narrator of the poem pledge not to listen to the crowd. Or forget what I've said here, and do it your own way.
Forget what they say
it is worthy to lay down all day in the grass
and just think about
grass
Thursday, November 11, 2010
day 11
For today's prompt, take the phrase "No One Wants (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Possible titles include: "No One Wants to Tell the Truth," "No One Wants to Save Their Money," "No One Wants to Write a Sestina," etc. I hope everyone is ready to write a poem today!
No One Wants to Be the Last to Leave
Or, maybe it's okay.
How many times can you look around
and say
no one again, will pull into this gravel drive
will need help opening the door,
bags under each arm, full,
for many
How many more times
can you look up at the red birch
and know she has a name
Just leave
and leave the door open
for anyone who just needs shelter
or something to steal
from no one
a shower
a bed
silence
Just leave
kicking up the gravel for the last time
you do it, you,
saying the tree's name
and the name of the road
and the name of the next
until you've never heard the name
of that road
before
until all you know is hunger
- thank goodness -
and a powerful,
growing
thirst
No One Wants to Be the Last to Leave
Or, maybe it's okay.
How many times can you look around
and say
no one again, will pull into this gravel drive
will need help opening the door,
bags under each arm, full,
for many
How many more times
can you look up at the red birch
and know she has a name
Just leave
and leave the door open
for anyone who just needs shelter
or something to steal
from no one
a shower
a bed
silence
Just leave
kicking up the gravel for the last time
you do it, you,
saying the tree's name
and the name of the road
and the name of the next
until you've never heard the name
of that road
before
until all you know is hunger
- thank goodness -
and a powerful,
growing
thirst
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
day 10 - gracious, a third of the way through. i should put some effort in here.
For today's prompt, write a love poem. Simple as that. Poets who've done the PAD challenges in the past know I always sneak this one in somewhere during the month. And if you're all anti-love poem, that's fine. Express your anti-love in a poem as well; it still counts toward this prompt.
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
-Carl Sagan
Not for a minute could I express the well of the sea
unseen pressing out in the South Pacific
as I sleep
how that I love
how that is love
rise and swell
A hawk lifts from the top of skinny pine and the first dusting of snow
drifts down, still drifting as he banks into the river canyon
how that I love
how that is love
light and particle
Little dog in a sweater curled on the lap of someone I'll never know
Somewhere I will never go, their weather not mine, a clock ticking
in the kitchen
time and self
selves
how that I love
how that is love
A poet reads his lines in his head, watches from his window
his children waiting for the school bus, stepping on and off the sidewalk
visible breath
music
story
a space somewhere (where?) for vision
visons
that is love
that I love
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
-Carl Sagan
Not for a minute could I express the well of the sea
unseen pressing out in the South Pacific
as I sleep
how that I love
how that is love
rise and swell
A hawk lifts from the top of skinny pine and the first dusting of snow
drifts down, still drifting as he banks into the river canyon
how that I love
how that is love
light and particle
Little dog in a sweater curled on the lap of someone I'll never know
Somewhere I will never go, their weather not mine, a clock ticking
in the kitchen
time and self
selves
how that I love
how that is love
A poet reads his lines in his head, watches from his window
his children waiting for the school bus, stepping on and off the sidewalk
visible breath
music
story
a space somewhere (where?) for vision
visons
that is love
that I love
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
finally, some answers
a picture paints a thousand ows.
no CT info yet but this: a very torqued, tilted, misaligned Atlas, off-setting, pinching and compressing the top of the spinal cord. disks fusing below, other pinched nerves hither and yon.
neck straight were it should be curved, turned where it should be straight.
yeah. that seems to be your problem right here, ma'am...
well... hopefully... this can be sorted out.
i feel relieved just to have the images (which I always find beautiful) and I love how all my major dental work makes my skeleton look giggly.
day what ? - oh geez
For today's prompts, write one of the following poems (or both--if you're feeling ambitious):
1. Write a slow down poem. Could be about reducing actual traveling speed or speed of living or some other interpretation.
2. Write a never slow down poem. Some people love living in the fast lane and believe it's better to burn out than fade away. If you're one of these people or want to write about one of these people, then this is the prompt for you.
Not going to write two.. Slow Down is enough.
Michigan Bar Road
Slow down
Park the car
Leave the windows down
Leave change visible there
Bills
No matter
Walk through someone's yard
Feed their swayback mare
with grass ripped from the good side
of the barbed wire
Walk as far as you want
You are not trespassing
You are a California girl
Wildoats advise you.
Moss green
on the river oaks
is the answer
Shoes soaked through to socks
Slippery step over rocks to sit
Count how many greens
or forget how many times counted
Home wants you
and wants you
slow
hair - the color of oats
eyes, spirit - moss green
saturated
here
now
holding on
taking part
1. Write a slow down poem. Could be about reducing actual traveling speed or speed of living or some other interpretation.
2. Write a never slow down poem. Some people love living in the fast lane and believe it's better to burn out than fade away. If you're one of these people or want to write about one of these people, then this is the prompt for you.
Not going to write two.. Slow Down is enough.
Michigan Bar Road
Slow down
Park the car
Leave the windows down
Leave change visible there
Bills
No matter
Walk through someone's yard
Feed their swayback mare
with grass ripped from the good side
of the barbed wire
Walk as far as you want
You are not trespassing
You are a California girl
Wildoats advise you.
Moss green
on the river oaks
is the answer
Shoes soaked through to socks
Slippery step over rocks to sit
Count how many greens
or forget how many times counted
Home wants you
and wants you
slow
hair - the color of oats
eyes, spirit - moss green
saturated
here
now
holding on
taking part
Sunday, November 7, 2010
day 7
uh oh - three behind!! i'm going to have to knock these out.
For today's prompt, write a Pro-something poem. Your poem could be pro-candy, pro-writing, pro-peace, love and happiness, or whatever else it is that you support. I intentionally did not make this the prompt on Election Day (to avoid riots on the blog), and I'm asking now that everyone is respectful of each others' pro-opinions. This is a poetry exercise and while I encourage political poems, I ask that everyone show respect and remember that this is a poetry blog.
Pro Cipitation
Some things you don't mind being woken for in the dark.
What is it?
What do you need?
Oh, hello.
Yes. Here we are.
Come closer.
Yes.
Yes
I'll listen
as early
in the dark
you fall
all around
me
For today's prompt, write a Pro-something poem. Your poem could be pro-candy, pro-writing, pro-peace, love and happiness, or whatever else it is that you support. I intentionally did not make this the prompt on Election Day (to avoid riots on the blog), and I'm asking now that everyone is respectful of each others' pro-opinions. This is a poetry exercise and while I encourage political poems, I ask that everyone show respect and remember that this is a poetry blog.
Pro Cipitation
Some things you don't mind being woken for in the dark.
What is it?
What do you need?
Oh, hello.
Yes. Here we are.
Come closer.
Yes.
Yes
I'll listen
as early
in the dark
you fall
all around
me
day 6
For today's prompt, take the phrase "Looking for (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, use the new phrase as the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Possible titles could include: "Looking for car keys," "Looking for love," "Looking for trouble," "Looking for the best line ever written," and so on. There are so many possibilities! I hope you have fun "Looking for a poem to write."
Rescue
Looking for anything
a spot a pinch a pull
a rope a nail a bruise
what is there
vertebrae climb on top of one another
wee tectonic plates
a civilization
a whole world
jammed under
artifact of self
something there
unnourished, waiting
we will send someone in
Rescue
Looking for anything
a spot a pinch a pull
a rope a nail a bruise
what is there
vertebrae climb on top of one another
wee tectonic plates
a civilization
a whole world
jammed under
artifact of self
something there
unnourished, waiting
we will send someone in
Friday, November 5, 2010
day 5
For today's prompt, write a metamorphosis poem. This is an excellent opportunity to use metaphors and/or show changes in a season, person, animal, plant, or whatever. (Hopefully, everyone won't turn themselves into Kafka-esque roaches.)
I see a film of myself when I was in sixth grade
a classmate's parent shot
bright white blonde
just in the corner there
(I remember that shirt!)
I walk around the other kids to go somewhere
where was I going,
little one, (so little then, really?)
and who am I sitting with there now
who was at home?
how was it going then?
were the lights on
or all off, all of them?
the wires burn and must be unplugged
rewired. taped. the next film, rethreaded.
in the play - there I am -
a goblin dancing stiffly in a poorly
spray painted black box
back in the shadows. Now I remember.
I never would have. Proof there flickering - little arms akimbo.
"I'm always a cow or a neighbor," I complained
Not central, ever it seemed, and yet looking back now
she is darling
running at the kickball
still hearing the sound of the solid connect
now when it is still perhaps
not too late
to see that she is sweet, fine
and to cheer her on
to see that she was not
even then
in any way
invisible
I see a film of myself when I was in sixth grade
a classmate's parent shot
bright white blonde
just in the corner there
(I remember that shirt!)
I walk around the other kids to go somewhere
where was I going,
little one, (so little then, really?)
and who am I sitting with there now
who was at home?
how was it going then?
were the lights on
or all off, all of them?
the wires burn and must be unplugged
rewired. taped. the next film, rethreaded.
in the play - there I am -
a goblin dancing stiffly in a poorly
spray painted black box
back in the shadows. Now I remember.
I never would have. Proof there flickering - little arms akimbo.
"I'm always a cow or a neighbor," I complained
Not central, ever it seemed, and yet looking back now
she is darling
running at the kickball
still hearing the sound of the solid connect
now when it is still perhaps
not too late
to see that she is sweet, fine
and to cheer her on
to see that she was not
even then
in any way
invisible
Thursday, November 4, 2010
day 4
For today's prompt, write a containment poem. There are a lot of ways to contain things: Jails and prisons contain people; zoos and aquariums contain animals; and closets contain our clothes (and other "baggage"). Your poem can be about the actual container, the containment of things, or even the attempt to break free of containment. Of course, any other creative interpretation is encouraged as well.
No wonder I feel so trapped
I don't want to write of it
but it is my world
this single vein it seems
grown a thousand times it's size
pushing against all that has been
what has contained me
no room for that
stone or bone contains
stubborn material
fights back
the single vine, vein at some point
pushes the brick from the wall
the moment to its history
Ruins
What will they do
when I explode
and leave what?: jelly, plastic toys, leaves and
leaves
some photos
some words
at which you can not possibly guess
the significance
of little value to you contained
of less,
not
No wonder I feel so trapped
I don't want to write of it
but it is my world
this single vein it seems
grown a thousand times it's size
pushing against all that has been
what has contained me
no room for that
stone or bone contains
stubborn material
fights back
the single vine, vein at some point
pushes the brick from the wall
the moment to its history
Ruins
What will they do
when I explode
and leave what?: jelly, plastic toys, leaves and
leaves
some photos
some words
at which you can not possibly guess
the significance
of little value to you contained
of less,
not
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
day 3
For today's prompt, write a location poem. The poem can be about a location, but it doesn't have to be. It could also just incorporate a location into the poem (like a love poem in Paris or something). This poem could also state your feelings about location in general.
Vermont
I can only see hoar frost
the place I want to be
waking warm
leaning my large warm face to the window
early to study - my, the mathematics
of individuation
crystalization
still stretching
a filagreed handprint
of the mad woman wind,
or a her anyway, who came to the glass
and touched it:
"Woman-child, woman-child,
Sister. This is how it feels
to be cold in the earth."
A horse with a heavy winter coat
steps into the visible and is,
through the crystal spicules
dark blue in an icy blue predawn.
Winter blessing.
Quiet.
I would like to wait there again
for the sun to rise
to illuminate the ice-articulate hand print left
my awestruck mind
and make us each
for just that moment
a golden hand of god.
Vermont
I can only see hoar frost
the place I want to be
waking warm
leaning my large warm face to the window
early to study - my, the mathematics
of individuation
crystalization
still stretching
a filagreed handprint
of the mad woman wind,
or a her anyway, who came to the glass
and touched it:
"Woman-child, woman-child,
Sister. This is how it feels
to be cold in the earth."
A horse with a heavy winter coat
steps into the visible and is,
through the crystal spicules
dark blue in an icy blue predawn.
Winter blessing.
Quiet.
I would like to wait there again
for the sun to rise
to illuminate the ice-articulate hand print left
my awestruck mind
and make us each
for just that moment
a golden hand of god.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 2
And just like that, we're already into our first "Two for Tuesday" prompt in which I give two options for the prompt. You can choose either of the two prompts or even write both if you feel up to it. We got off to a great start yesterday. Let's keep at it.
Here are today's prompts:
1. Write a "ready to start" poem. Yesterday's poem closed the door or turned the page on the past events. Time to start looking forward.
2. Write a "not ready" poem, or even "never ready" poem. Sometimes, we're just not ready for the things that come our way.
Ready to take my head off and throw it in the street
Ready to have the next pickup run over it
Ready to headless grope and find what is in there
Metal yellow serrated
golden razor
my hands bleed
and my life begins to bleed
rivulets i will set sail on
down this is not a poem
its just a headache
that is everywhere
don't know what to do.
...only publishing this as i'm supposed to everyday.
not a poem. . not a good day. i'm ready to have it over with.
Monday, November 1, 2010
2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 1
For today's prompt, I want poets to take one step back and write a "closing the door" or "turning the page" poem. Feel encouraged to get creative with today's prompt (and the other 29 prompts--for that matter), but here's how I interpret this prompt: a poem that looks at where a person (or animal or thing) was and finds resolution with the fact that things won't be that way again.
wow. don't know if i can do this. i am sooooooo sleepy today. will just shoot cut print. here goes.
Good that it doesn't have to be a door
to close
to indicate it is time
to close
that the door no longer opens
into my life
Goodbye
Move on
Connections (once true?) swing on hinges that creak a bit
like memory
in memory
the blue eyes, oh
the jacket on the back of the chair
the mandolin
honey
honeycomb
this is not what i expected to write
not the door(s) i expected to close
but I must admit
aid
not be sorry for the formal silence
that fills this frame
goodbye to
maybe all but one
the latch doesn't catch
the door could be opened
with an inquiry
just one request
to come in
and see
the other changes
I've made
to my invisible home
Saturday, October 23, 2010
dumber than a squirrel....
okay. was out for a rainy day loop or two around the park. came right upon a squirrel burying a nut in the grass. he looked straight at me and without looking away for even a second, reached pretty far out and grabbed a nearby leaf. He put it most deliberately over his hole and stepped on it back and forth and back and forth, left and right - as if that made the leaf's position more credible and harder to see. (kinda reminded me of the George Bush "I'm-explaining-things-to-you-now" hand movements). The squirrel held my eyes as I jogged away as if to dare me to pick out the very the leaf next time around and find that nut.
sure enough. some (too many) minutes later...
could be that one. then again, could be THAT one. hmm
how he's going to remember months hence when all the leaves are blown away ... just another mystery
another leaf on a pile of questions
another thing I can't do as good a a rodent
another day on this pretty, funny planet with winter coming on.
sure enough. some (too many) minutes later...
could be that one. then again, could be THAT one. hmm
how he's going to remember months hence when all the leaves are blown away ... just another mystery
another leaf on a pile of questions
another thing I can't do as good a a rodent
another day on this pretty, funny planet with winter coming on.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
weird and kinda stupid, but i have time on my hands
okay so here i am at the rockpile, logging in some extra hours so i can buy my ski pass this year.
not much to do, which is weird for me, hyper, hovering teacher-creature that I am..
so. i won't remember much about last night's dream (though I can feel the space I was living in -- fluttering cloth walls -that won't present itself to me now, as won't the face of the man I fell in love with).. But i do want to jot down something of the ending which was cool and had also happened at the otherwise forgotten beginning and in the also otherwise forgotten middle.
So...before the ending... I am the only one who can operate on the puppy. the pilot's puppy. it is my specialty to operate on the puppies of pilots (what the hell? there is probably some obvious weird Freudian thing in here. ...babies of flying dogs? um, fluffy... oh, i don't know. i'm not getting it).. But the pilot doesn't believe me because I a girl and young (...in the dream). I operate through a window. I am precise, accurate and in no time the once tragically fragile creature is animated and darling. I am given the puppy, not by the pilot but by whoever vouched for my skills as a surgeon. Why do I get to keep it? Should I? I don't really want the puppy. It belongs to the pilot. But I walk outside with it, carrying it in a glass box. Just outside I immediately fall thunderclap in love with someone whose face I can no longer see. I drop the puppy in the glass box.
And this was the cool part visually and viscerally: just then - like in the beginning and middle of the dream that I've also forgotten -- the world zips away, fast like a stage set but in full believable huge neighborhood-size space, big chunks of the world just swiped off (building/deck/dead puppy STAGE LEFT) (creek/clouds/street STAGE RIGHT) (background town/downtown buildings/night sky STAGE LEFT) and is gone.
This has happened before. It will happen again, because that's just how it goes. As soon as the story is done the world swipes the stage clean and something else begins to happen. A floor slips under my feet, white and plain.
not much to do, which is weird for me, hyper, hovering teacher-creature that I am..
so. i won't remember much about last night's dream (though I can feel the space I was living in -- fluttering cloth walls -that won't present itself to me now, as won't the face of the man I fell in love with).. But i do want to jot down something of the ending which was cool and had also happened at the otherwise forgotten beginning and in the also otherwise forgotten middle.
So...before the ending... I am the only one who can operate on the puppy. the pilot's puppy. it is my specialty to operate on the puppies of pilots (what the hell? there is probably some obvious weird Freudian thing in here. ...babies of flying dogs? um, fluffy... oh, i don't know. i'm not getting it).. But the pilot doesn't believe me because I a girl and young (...in the dream). I operate through a window. I am precise, accurate and in no time the once tragically fragile creature is animated and darling. I am given the puppy, not by the pilot but by whoever vouched for my skills as a surgeon. Why do I get to keep it? Should I? I don't really want the puppy. It belongs to the pilot. But I walk outside with it, carrying it in a glass box. Just outside I immediately fall thunderclap in love with someone whose face I can no longer see. I drop the puppy in the glass box.
And this was the cool part visually and viscerally: just then - like in the beginning and middle of the dream that I've also forgotten -- the world zips away, fast like a stage set but in full believable huge neighborhood-size space, big chunks of the world just swiped off (building/deck/dead puppy STAGE LEFT) (creek/clouds/street STAGE RIGHT) (background town/downtown buildings/night sky STAGE LEFT) and is gone.
This has happened before. It will happen again, because that's just how it goes. As soon as the story is done the world swipes the stage clean and something else begins to happen. A floor slips under my feet, white and plain.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Look Homeward Angel
well it looks like i'm finally moving home.
the books are at looooong last back: Borges, Paz, Hardy, Styron, and the moldy "Sailor on Horseback". That perfect Penguin orange. The Faulkner font. The "Macbeth" still with the blue felt pen markings: underlining the words that in their underlining saved them forever to my mind. "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care...." The essential "It Came from the Far Side!" Robert Motherwell, thank goodness. Tillich. Even "I am a Bunny!". Not Andrea's books, but her clothes. All still heavy with good tailoring and covered in sparkly things. Such a life she had. Many many books lost with the old house,(worst: my Charlotte's Web that I remember placing on the green room shelf like I did it today). So, some things retrieved, mixed in with the previous owners NYC playbills and Mitchner novels.
"Clea" finally! - lost in 1987 with not much left to go then. I think I'll start it again (after having been alive forever, and to Alexandria even - who would have believed it?) Where are all those philosophy books that I hacked my way through once upon a time? Those I want most. I'll find them. There are always more boxes. My house feels much more a home though, though my wanderlust boils ever more the more I settle in.
Some stunning finds. Her note(s) and Prologue. My 'abridged party favor version' of her intensely dense doctoral thesis: "In the characters of ____ and ___ (buy the real thesis if you want to know who) Patrick White and William Faulkner respectively have created ..."
My few attempts at fiction writing: "Hunger" tucked into some auto insurance papers - thought I'd never find it.. One must look at EVERYthing, because you never know and treasures clearly prefer a l m o s t being tossed out with the old soaps and all the endless shuffled mildewed flotsomjetsom papers of banal quotidian life) So, at the very bottom of a box of beyond useless junk: "The Complete D.H. Lawrence" that I used to drag pretentiouslyprobably around, falling in love with loving and words. "I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone./ It makes me realize the delicious pleasure of the moon/ that she has traveling by herself: throughout time/ or the splendid growing of an ash-tree alone, on a hillside in the north, humming in the wind.". --not even all that great, but I loved it then and am content that i still am so content on my own.
lovely October day. (candles before noon, peace, books, some traveling by myself throughout time, some splendid growing I can only hope. certainly some humming in the wind).
I guess i'm still here, still a bunny...
the books are at looooong last back: Borges, Paz, Hardy, Styron, and the moldy "Sailor on Horseback". That perfect Penguin orange. The Faulkner font. The "Macbeth" still with the blue felt pen markings: underlining the words that in their underlining saved them forever to my mind. "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care...." The essential "It Came from the Far Side!" Robert Motherwell, thank goodness. Tillich. Even "I am a Bunny!". Not Andrea's books, but her clothes. All still heavy with good tailoring and covered in sparkly things. Such a life she had. Many many books lost with the old house,(worst: my Charlotte's Web that I remember placing on the green room shelf like I did it today). So, some things retrieved, mixed in with the previous owners NYC playbills and Mitchner novels.
"Clea" finally! - lost in 1987 with not much left to go then. I think I'll start it again (after having been alive forever, and to Alexandria even - who would have believed it?) Where are all those philosophy books that I hacked my way through once upon a time? Those I want most. I'll find them. There are always more boxes. My house feels much more a home though, though my wanderlust boils ever more the more I settle in.
Some stunning finds. Her note(s) and Prologue. My 'abridged party favor version' of her intensely dense doctoral thesis: "In the characters of ____ and ___ (buy the real thesis if you want to know who) Patrick White and William Faulkner respectively have created ..."
My few attempts at fiction writing: "Hunger" tucked into some auto insurance papers - thought I'd never find it.. One must look at EVERYthing, because you never know and treasures clearly prefer a l m o s t being tossed out with the old soaps and all the endless shuffled mildewed flotsomjetsom papers of banal quotidian life) So, at the very bottom of a box of beyond useless junk: "The Complete D.H. Lawrence" that I used to drag pretentiouslyprobably around, falling in love with loving and words. "I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone./ It makes me realize the delicious pleasure of the moon/ that she has traveling by herself: throughout time/ or the splendid growing of an ash-tree alone, on a hillside in the north, humming in the wind.". --not even all that great, but I loved it then and am content that i still am so content on my own.
lovely October day. (candles before noon, peace, books, some traveling by myself throughout time, some splendid growing I can only hope. certainly some humming in the wind).
I guess i'm still here, still a bunny...
Thursday, October 14, 2010
e. e.
out of the lie of no rises a truth of yes (only herself and who illimitably is) making fools understand (like wintry me) that not all matterings of mind equal ...one violet
"The best course is to learn. This is the only path which never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about devastated by evil lunatics, or find your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. .. This is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."
T.H. White
T.H. White
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
For this week's prompt, pick a word (any old word), make it the title of your poem, then write the poem. Don't think too much about this poem when writing the first draft. Just pick a random word and start writing. (Tip: Try using an object, such as "Rake," "Scarecrow," "Apple," etc.)
Listen
to just get you to
all i want is for you
to
for a minute, just
if you want someone to
--tell them it's confidential
otherwise, don't wait to be heard
the ear is a shape turned in
towards its own hearing
you is not a word the ear likes
the ear likes I
I
and did you know that I
I think
I
when the inner ear stops trembling
from the misconstrued,
the incorrect use of
you
- what?
- no!
that's not what i meant
you didn't listen
when all is done
listenening likes silence best
it is most like I
it is always the rests
that make the music
that feel like the self
is expanding
there
at long last, heard
the rest
sustained in accord with the chord
of one's own truth
in the open, broad assembly
of part and whole
Listen
to just get you to
all i want is for you
to
for a minute, just
if you want someone to
--tell them it's confidential
otherwise, don't wait to be heard
the ear is a shape turned in
towards its own hearing
you is not a word the ear likes
the ear likes I
I
and did you know that I
I think
I
when the inner ear stops trembling
from the misconstrued,
the incorrect use of
you
- what?
- no!
that's not what i meant
you didn't listen
when all is done
listenening likes silence best
it is most like I
it is always the rests
that make the music
that feel like the self
is expanding
there
at long last, heard
the rest
sustained in accord with the chord
of one's own truth
in the open, broad assembly
of part and whole
Sunday, October 10, 2010
lady in waiting
now. needle threader. balloons drifted to the floor.
tea candles vanished to their little tin cups everywhere.
some wine bottles. the dog's first failed boutonniere.
scissors for cutting bangs or snipping threads.
my own high and shiny shoes, done from dancing
parsley and rosemary on my kitchen floor and garlic
and a pan soaking. dog biscuits here and there.
then a house filled with women for just a bit at flurried start and end, one baby being changed on the floor (when does that happen here?)
those lovely tall hippie girls
those lovely older hippie mothers
the massage chair and fireworks, the satin steaming and tule fluffing.
the little silk buttons that had to be sewn back (not by me, thank goodness) half hour before the walk through the roses: dog in the lead, neversobeautiful friend right on time for her good present and future. 10:10 10 10 10
i got to host a bride, to care about everything she did, could do, could want
and what she wanted she got: a man who loves her, loves her dog, will love her and her dog, i do believe, i really do, forever.
so sweet to see and be a part of, to have the privilege of dedicating just sweet time with that degree of purpose, duty and luck.
this little role...
made me deeply content.
(i love it when other people get married!)
tea candles vanished to their little tin cups everywhere.
some wine bottles. the dog's first failed boutonniere.
scissors for cutting bangs or snipping threads.
my own high and shiny shoes, done from dancing
parsley and rosemary on my kitchen floor and garlic
and a pan soaking. dog biscuits here and there.
then a house filled with women for just a bit at flurried start and end, one baby being changed on the floor (when does that happen here?)
those lovely tall hippie girls
those lovely older hippie mothers
the massage chair and fireworks, the satin steaming and tule fluffing.
the little silk buttons that had to be sewn back (not by me, thank goodness) half hour before the walk through the roses: dog in the lead, neversobeautiful friend right on time for her good present and future. 10:10 10 10 10
i got to host a bride, to care about everything she did, could do, could want
and what she wanted she got: a man who loves her, loves her dog, will love her and her dog, i do believe, i really do, forever.
so sweet to see and be a part of, to have the privilege of dedicating just sweet time with that degree of purpose, duty and luck.
this little role...
made me deeply content.
(i love it when other people get married!)
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
poppies
...a student gave me a tincture of poppies, so I can roll over and drop it under my tongue in the middle of the night when my searing headache, now - where are we - week 11? 12? - has me staring into darkness trying to think the tendons in my neck into pliability and trying to imagine just where the pain is now and what it might look like in there - some kind of electric blue hot molly-bolt popped open in my medulla, pink spinning glass rod between my temples.
well the poppies...(i hear the Wicked Witch of the West: "Poppies, Paawpies!"). one drop under my tongue and my dreams go wild, turn into the bean stock from Jack and the Bean stock, take on a scale even that in my complex dreaming is magnified to a grandiose and different out-sizing and I am gone.
No time now to write of the gallactic snowstorm, and perfect body sledding fast on a(nother tilting) world: the geography complete, satellite-mappable in its scope and detail.
I have to get ready for class.
I do hope I'm not getting hooked on opiates. (my student assures me the tincture is not that)
Still, when I finally get an image of my stupid head in three weeks, I wouldn't be surprised to find it stuffed to bursting with golden poppies and little teenytiny palm-sized worlds and vast, magnificent alpine planets in which it snows falling stars and i play for lifetimes like the happiest child.
well the poppies...(i hear the Wicked Witch of the West: "Poppies, Paawpies!"). one drop under my tongue and my dreams go wild, turn into the bean stock from Jack and the Bean stock, take on a scale even that in my complex dreaming is magnified to a grandiose and different out-sizing and I am gone.
No time now to write of the gallactic snowstorm, and perfect body sledding fast on a(nother tilting) world: the geography complete, satellite-mappable in its scope and detail.
I have to get ready for class.
I do hope I'm not getting hooked on opiates. (my student assures me the tincture is not that)
Still, when I finally get an image of my stupid head in three weeks, I wouldn't be surprised to find it stuffed to bursting with golden poppies and little teenytiny palm-sized worlds and vast, magnificent alpine planets in which it snows falling stars and i play for lifetimes like the happiest child.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
For today's prompt, write an emergency poem. The first thought that springs to my mind is flashing lights and paramedics. If I think on it a little longer, I realize there are several other possible emergency situations out there--not all of them involving people. I look forward to seeing what everyone creates.
Muse
It is not an emergency, though he has jumped off a cliff without a net.
They all cried out. His arms were wild.
It looked bad
She is there, off-camera, not to catch him but to slow him down
he slips through the arcs of her arms
that encircle and slow
She, wearing white, flowing, transparent - thin clouds
(it is this high up)
is stunning and focused, directing, demonstrates
the complete change of direction, the pike
legs up
muscles defined in the point no one sees
executed, then a dive down backwards
They do it in tandem
and are perfect
The camera catches him alone
slicing into the night water
without a splash.
Muse
It is not an emergency, though he has jumped off a cliff without a net.
They all cried out. His arms were wild.
It looked bad
She is there, off-camera, not to catch him but to slow him down
he slips through the arcs of her arms
that encircle and slow
She, wearing white, flowing, transparent - thin clouds
(it is this high up)
is stunning and focused, directing, demonstrates
the complete change of direction, the pike
legs up
muscles defined in the point no one sees
executed, then a dive down backwards
They do it in tandem
and are perfect
The camera catches him alone
slicing into the night water
without a splash.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The car is ahead of me and on a high, high embankment. It does what I want, which impresses me. I am walking behind and I steer it with my will. (this, not unlike my favorite useless invention of all time; when the car was first invented someone then developed a remote control so you could have your car follow you when you went out in the evening for a stroll. ... I think inventors never really know what they have unleashed upon the world).
The car, actually a white hippie type van, pulls over where the park starts. The park is not just steep, it is perhaps four degrees shy of pure vertical. I am stunned at how many people are there and I really, really don't want to join them. First there are just picnickers that I see, then I see it is an entire vertical city.
Who is it - some IT guy at work that is showing off, walking backwards up the hill, and the whole house that he's standing on breaks from it's mooring and tumbles down to the invisible bottom. (he survives) I wonder if he'll have to pay for the entire house. Or I will. I'm not sure why I think it will be my responsibility.
Later, I am further down this high cliff. I see a giant swath of red mud. The whole thing is built on an enormous mud slide. On the porches of houses, I see other houses, fallen from above - the same size they would be in their original perspective from that place, small then, the size of baseballs, and broken there on the cracked cement patios.
For some reason I think this is Patzcauro, a town I loved in Mexico.
I don't know why I'm writing this down.
[I was much more interested in Tidal Wave version 2,000 of a different dream in which the wave, quite high quite high (as ever) was maybe only 100 yards wide, but that's it. Not connected to an ocean. Nice crisp edges. That's new. I was with four others who meditated. They lay down flat on the beach floor below it- like the somnabulist people in Odd Nerdrum's paintings - and they took it. Over and over. I did it twice. It was fine when I was down, focusing, just waiting for the wave to push heavily past but I got scared (all these comments about fear here....) sat up and ran from the cresting, arching next wave and they were there still -like the somnambulist people in the Nerdrum paintings: in this place in body but in another in psyche. I couldn't do that].
Okay, so why all this? I don't know. Just now got word of a friend from high school who had a cab driver in Boston go suddenly bonkers and drive into traffic, hit a car, fly up in the air and up and off an embankment into a tree. My friend was pulled from the car (its engine on fire) with every rib broken and much other damage just before the car actually exploded. He is in intensive care, but is expected to recover.
These dream images inform my thinking of him. I imagine he is like the somnambulist people in Odd Nerdrum's paintings - waiting to wake, maybe not even knowing he is waiting to wake.
Lovely good George. A prayer for quick recovery. And more to follow. Over and over like waves.
wow. this picture is not what i was looking for, but it looks like the people did on the vertical city! strange.
The car, actually a white hippie type van, pulls over where the park starts. The park is not just steep, it is perhaps four degrees shy of pure vertical. I am stunned at how many people are there and I really, really don't want to join them. First there are just picnickers that I see, then I see it is an entire vertical city.
Who is it - some IT guy at work that is showing off, walking backwards up the hill, and the whole house that he's standing on breaks from it's mooring and tumbles down to the invisible bottom. (he survives) I wonder if he'll have to pay for the entire house. Or I will. I'm not sure why I think it will be my responsibility.
Later, I am further down this high cliff. I see a giant swath of red mud. The whole thing is built on an enormous mud slide. On the porches of houses, I see other houses, fallen from above - the same size they would be in their original perspective from that place, small then, the size of baseballs, and broken there on the cracked cement patios.
For some reason I think this is Patzcauro, a town I loved in Mexico.
I don't know why I'm writing this down.
[I was much more interested in Tidal Wave version 2,000 of a different dream in which the wave, quite high quite high (as ever) was maybe only 100 yards wide, but that's it. Not connected to an ocean. Nice crisp edges. That's new. I was with four others who meditated. They lay down flat on the beach floor below it- like the somnabulist people in Odd Nerdrum's paintings - and they took it. Over and over. I did it twice. It was fine when I was down, focusing, just waiting for the wave to push heavily past but I got scared (all these comments about fear here....) sat up and ran from the cresting, arching next wave and they were there still -like the somnambulist people in the Nerdrum paintings: in this place in body but in another in psyche. I couldn't do that].
Okay, so why all this? I don't know. Just now got word of a friend from high school who had a cab driver in Boston go suddenly bonkers and drive into traffic, hit a car, fly up in the air and up and off an embankment into a tree. My friend was pulled from the car (its engine on fire) with every rib broken and much other damage just before the car actually exploded. He is in intensive care, but is expected to recover.
These dream images inform my thinking of him. I imagine he is like the somnambulist people in Odd Nerdrum's paintings - waiting to wake, maybe not even knowing he is waiting to wake.
Lovely good George. A prayer for quick recovery. And more to follow. Over and over like waves.
wow. this picture is not what i was looking for, but it looks like the people did on the vertical city! strange.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
well, I guess there's room for a baby rhino
oh, the cuteness..
http://www.kcra.com/video/24851051/detail.html?taf=sac"
Sunday, September 5, 2010
I Carry your Heart
last post? maybe.
perhaps, as this has been so much about you, it is appropriate to finally, finally have this image - the last of all the crumbling bits and planks and hearts and stories, all the falling precious stones of effort and loving and wondering, of giving and fearing and failure, at long, long last come rolling to an enduring stillness. Now, perhaps someone, stepping away from their own grief, carrying their own bouquet of giant, spectacular, colored fall leaves as some broad, cryptic map to living, will come to you and linger and wonder at how you were dearly, deeply so loved: wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend. They will see that you left right in the middle of your life and perhaps wonder why. They won't know any more than I nor fathom what was lost in the could-have-been.
Returned to Stardust.
Alive within me, still and always. I will love you until, little sister that I am, I do as you do one more time and lay still forever with a rock at my head. Forty two years of your true companionship. What a blessing. What a poverty had it been less.
Rest in Peace, Beauty, Best Friend, Dearest Soul.
••• one of two eecummings poems read for you (how could it be) five years ago - the other, so appropriately the image of your marker: i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart) this one - a poem of wonder to our Universe - much as you were. how you loved to be of stardust, and I, of stardust, with you, sharing this incomprehensible luck of living, loving, laughing, looking, ••••
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
...(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1GmxMTwUgs&feature=related"
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
university falls
not only is this just about the coolest swimming hole of all time (there I am topleft on the pic in green waving like an idiot), but on this video the two girls on the topleft just could be, as in --look JUST like--, my sister and I back in the day. i want to keep it somewhere so here it is.
what a place. she would have LOVED it! I hope to go back in a few weeks when it's just a weeeee bit warmer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQoCDsPF56o&feature=related"
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Nicholas Carone
It's not too much to say that this man, my drawing teacher one magical summer in Italy, actually taught me how to see. He changed me forever and I'm forever grateful.
Rest in Peace, Nic Carone, 93 - one of the most ALIVE people I've ever met ...as you'll stay, in my heart, and in my breaking sticks of charcoal.
Friday, July 23, 2010
transcendental dilation
Went to the eye doctor today for a check-up, EDPCF, OLDIE, WHUTA, OHBOI "Okay. You have two very healthy eyes." Good. Thank you. "Here let me just put these little drops in here to dilate the pupils to double-check." plop plop wait wait back in comes the doc looking like Jesus - hallowed and floating in a brilliant, glowing haze. The Son of God sits close, turns on a light pen, looks around, passing a little illuminated gold slat of light over my retinal surface as if to check the cavern's conditions before spelunking into my soul. "Can I look right at it? It looks pretty," I say, the light wand skimming the surface of my cornea. "If you want. It won't fry your eyeballs or anything." So I track the pulsing whitegold bar, see around it the wavelengths of glorious light's constituent colors. Nice. Maybe the most proximate thing I've ever observed.
wee headache.
Later then, driving away with my plastic Stevie Wonder glasses, I figure, what the hell and take them off. OOoooohbright! pupils the size of dinner plates (the gzact opposite of two weeks prior that kicked off my spate of unparanoid check-ups. then... deep toxification from scant access to the new liquid resin material that was going to (not any more) redefine my artwork. ["I have one word for you.... Plastics."] Then, I left school a bit early, feeling thinthin (in soul, not body) and weiheiheird. I looked in the same car mirror. NO pupils. Okay, little t-e-e-n-i-e ones. Teacher/Cat/Venutian/...Patient.
Okay so. today pupils the size of dinner plates. Not wise to forego the shades or to experiment visually while driving, but it made the effect all the cooler. The effect? I can only say that the white we see is not the white that is possible. Triplewhite, Highwhite, Superwhite, Godwhite. No term good enough. Maybe the last. The Platonicideaofwhite, flashing past me. Cyclists covered with jewels. Fenders, covered with jewels. Lets see my necklace in the mirror: jewels covered in jewels. Gorgeous.
Okay, so yes, I have a headache. A Highwhite one. An earned one. From a different and dazzling afternoon. Bit by bit I look more normal, less like a Bushbaby. Bit by bit the divine retreats from my worldly domain.
I don't need glasses.
But clearly I do need spectacles.
wee headache.
Later then, driving away with my plastic Stevie Wonder glasses, I figure, what the hell and take them off. OOoooohbright! pupils the size of dinner plates (the gzact opposite of two weeks prior that kicked off my spate of unparanoid check-ups. then... deep toxification from scant access to the new liquid resin material that was going to (not any more) redefine my artwork. ["I have one word for you.... Plastics."] Then, I left school a bit early, feeling thinthin (in soul, not body) and weiheiheird. I looked in the same car mirror. NO pupils. Okay, little t-e-e-n-i-e ones. Teacher/Cat/Venutian/...Patient.
Okay so. today pupils the size of dinner plates. Not wise to forego the shades or to experiment visually while driving, but it made the effect all the cooler. The effect? I can only say that the white we see is not the white that is possible. Triplewhite, Highwhite, Superwhite, Godwhite. No term good enough. Maybe the last. The Platonicideaofwhite, flashing past me. Cyclists covered with jewels. Fenders, covered with jewels. Lets see my necklace in the mirror: jewels covered in jewels. Gorgeous.
Okay, so yes, I have a headache. A Highwhite one. An earned one. From a different and dazzling afternoon. Bit by bit I look more normal, less like a Bushbaby. Bit by bit the divine retreats from my worldly domain.
I don't need glasses.
But clearly I do need spectacles.
Monday, July 19, 2010
source unknown.
It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in
American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarmstended to grow when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through one of its driest periods on record. The land was still relatively dry on this day in 1875 when farmers just east of the Rocky Mountains began to see a cloud approaching from the west. Some farmers noticed the distinctive color of the cloud, glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.
People there that day said that the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter, covering everything in their path. Some people described the sound of the swarm landing as like thunder or a train. The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of the insects, and large tree limbs broke off under the pressure.
They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path, as well as harnesses on horses, the bark of trees, curtains, and clothing hung on laundry lines. They gnawed on fence posts and railings, and they especially loved the handles of farm tools, which were left behind polished, as if by fine sandpaper. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.
In the wake of the swarm, settlers on half a million square miles of the West faced starvation. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, and farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Most scientists predicted that the locusts would return with the next drought. Mysteriously, they did not. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct. For most of the 20th century, no one knew what had happened to the locusts, but recent evidence suggests that the cultivation of the land on the Great Plains changed much so quickly that the Rocky Mountain locust was unable to adapt. The
last two live specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust were collected in 1902,
and those specimens are now stored at the Smithsonian Institution.
American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarmstended to grow when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through one of its driest periods on record. The land was still relatively dry on this day in 1875 when farmers just east of the Rocky Mountains began to see a cloud approaching from the west. Some farmers noticed the distinctive color of the cloud, glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.
People there that day said that the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter, covering everything in their path. Some people described the sound of the swarm landing as like thunder or a train. The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of the insects, and large tree limbs broke off under the pressure.
They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path, as well as harnesses on horses, the bark of trees, curtains, and clothing hung on laundry lines. They gnawed on fence posts and railings, and they especially loved the handles of farm tools, which were left behind polished, as if by fine sandpaper. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.
In the wake of the swarm, settlers on half a million square miles of the West faced starvation. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, and farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Most scientists predicted that the locusts would return with the next drought. Mysteriously, they did not. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct. For most of the 20th century, no one knew what had happened to the locusts, but recent evidence suggests that the cultivation of the land on the Great Plains changed much so quickly that the Rocky Mountain locust was unable to adapt. The
last two live specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust were collected in 1902,
and those specimens are now stored at the Smithsonian Institution.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Paris as Inverted Wave
Okay. Inasmuch as this is a dream blog, I think I should have some comment here on "Inception" because (thank goodness - it's been a long time) I've thought about this movie for much of the day. I could certainly make the case that it's flawed, not strange ENOUGH, over-explained, "awesome, but not great" as one Rotten Tomato critic wrote. Yeah. On the other hand, as with "Memento", I think this film does something new in terms of the relation of individual psychology to time - and here of collective (oh geez) psychology to imagination.
Personally, "The Fall" remains to me the more impactful, subtle and incredible of the two.
Still, there is something going on here that is not cool simply because it is Barouquely complex but because - I guess my favorite thing about the film - it manages to subtly (and credibly in terms of dream logic and its 'physical' manifestations) relate various psychological realities one to the other (as when, in real life, a car backfiring outside your bedroom window, becomes a door slamming in your dream). Here though the dream to dream ramifications are more dynamic than that, coupled with commentary on the variance of time, between real time and dream time and deeper and deeper spaces of dreaming. Interesting that these scenes were shot with variable speeds, the effects rendered at variable speeds. So, while there were a few too many assassins and explosions, it was nice to see computer effects be necessary. But I do appreciate what he could say with non CG imagery too'; I'm thinking of the very first shot; the pushing wave, joined mid-swell-, the pressure and natural volume and velocity of the non-physical that that conveys.
The insistence on realism as an effective way to describe dreamspace (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/16/movies/20100716-inception-aoas-feature.html) largely works and the invention of the weirdness of dreams is well-done. I felt the 'rolling wave' of the inverting Parisian boulevard was as close a representation of my endless tidal wave dream series as I've ever seen in scale and specificity and dream-insistence, whatever that is (it feels like the right phrase now).
So, anyway, to see a fully realized film from someone who clearly gets the architecture of the architecture of dreams was well worthwhile. I felt it could be more subtle perhaps but - next time. First, as in the story of the film, the dreamspace needs to be built. Christopher Nolan (who else could do this? -- maybe "The Fall" guy..) has built that, has visually identified the stratification and deep invention of the psyche. Some ground, I think, has been broken here. The ground that is the 'idea of ground' while not being ground. That this is a territory that can be filmed is a feat.
I lay back in bed to think about it this morning. Not because of the film, but because these things happen, all the time, I spent forty waking minutes, an hour? watching what looked like the flurries of the teeniest particulate snowflakes or flakes, tiny particles of something, very individually clear, flurry and gather (whiter dust) and fly apart (blacker space - starlike) in a movement that was musical, dimensionally complex, absolutely in focus and perfectly 'observable' as it happened.
The mind is a miracle. It is itself visionary. I can't help but appreciate any effort to explore that fantastical reality.
Personally, "The Fall" remains to me the more impactful, subtle and incredible of the two.
Still, there is something going on here that is not cool simply because it is Barouquely complex but because - I guess my favorite thing about the film - it manages to subtly (and credibly in terms of dream logic and its 'physical' manifestations) relate various psychological realities one to the other (as when, in real life, a car backfiring outside your bedroom window, becomes a door slamming in your dream). Here though the dream to dream ramifications are more dynamic than that, coupled with commentary on the variance of time, between real time and dream time and deeper and deeper spaces of dreaming. Interesting that these scenes were shot with variable speeds, the effects rendered at variable speeds. So, while there were a few too many assassins and explosions, it was nice to see computer effects be necessary. But I do appreciate what he could say with non CG imagery too'; I'm thinking of the very first shot; the pushing wave, joined mid-swell-, the pressure and natural volume and velocity of the non-physical that that conveys.
The insistence on realism as an effective way to describe dreamspace (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/16/movies/20100716-inception-aoas-feature.html) largely works and the invention of the weirdness of dreams is well-done. I felt the 'rolling wave' of the inverting Parisian boulevard was as close a representation of my endless tidal wave dream series as I've ever seen in scale and specificity and dream-insistence, whatever that is (it feels like the right phrase now).
So, anyway, to see a fully realized film from someone who clearly gets the architecture of the architecture of dreams was well worthwhile. I felt it could be more subtle perhaps but - next time. First, as in the story of the film, the dreamspace needs to be built. Christopher Nolan (who else could do this? -- maybe "The Fall" guy..) has built that, has visually identified the stratification and deep invention of the psyche. Some ground, I think, has been broken here. The ground that is the 'idea of ground' while not being ground. That this is a territory that can be filmed is a feat.
I lay back in bed to think about it this morning. Not because of the film, but because these things happen, all the time, I spent forty waking minutes, an hour? watching what looked like the flurries of the teeniest particulate snowflakes or flakes, tiny particles of something, very individually clear, flurry and gather (whiter dust) and fly apart (blacker space - starlike) in a movement that was musical, dimensionally complex, absolutely in focus and perfectly 'observable' as it happened.
The mind is a miracle. It is itself visionary. I can't help but appreciate any effort to explore that fantastical reality.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
For this week's prompt, write an "after the rain" poem. There are a lot of possibilities for this poem, because there are a lot of possibilities for what could happen after the rain. For instance, my six-year-old-named-Reese likes to hunt snails after the rain. (what?!!!?!) Baseball games may resume after the rain has passed. Rainbows may appear. Of course, another rain shower may follow the one that just rolled through.
After the rain
After the rain
for a long while
- or a long while it seemed -
the red birch leaves would drip into the cheap blue Piglet bucket
that used to collect sand
that for a long while
- or a short while, maybe even then it seemed -
would fill and tip and make ten perfect turrets
Adults know how to make castles.
Do it this way.
Watch.
Perhaps it was just one day
that the sand pit
at the end of the drive contained castles
and little girls and faux uncles and talkative strangers others
sexy now new yorkers all
- the hell with them.
wait.
after the rain.
the birds, so beautiful
so annoying that woke us - after the rain - to soft
- the softest light
unbelievably gentle I didn't want to see it
birdsong. no. too early
something, what now, lost too soon
I want, wanted the rain that was
in the middle of the night
or was it the ocean
I knew it was there
like a hand -night-black-
through the open window
petting my hair
I want the rain
the storm
the middle of the night
the lightning bolt that went
- actually -
from the south bedroom (hers) to the north (my mothers)
in a fat blinding line
blasting through both doorframes at the same instant
in one window out the next
thuderclap that had us that fast
trembling together
three ladies in white nightgowns
bending to study the wooden floor to see if the bolt
had burnt the house right through
smoldering line
not even that
we tucked each other in
down to the feet. sweet.
would untuck ourselves and go to another
what words then
falling with the rain
hours and hours of them
so familiar,
soft, reflective, winding, understood
reflexively, that conversation of forty years
(do these voices continue
moving out through space?) inaudible now
in what recollections remain
oh late hours
and hours of dear voices
then tucked in finally
thank you, perfect, and goodnight
finally
and then
as we curled into our own
private darkness
the hard rain
anew
biblical
obliterating
whole world
take it
I want the road
my little green suitcase
the tall trees spinning in wind
the old house
there
built by the whaler on around
an Indian well
driven deep
to catch the rain
for the travelers
on their way by foot
to Montauk
through the little lifting birds
and giving Calla Lilies
The porch.
Someone is there.
I can tell
from the glow of the cigarette.
I am home.
After the rain
no. that
I don't want to remember
- though it is about light
and clearing, continuance
and morning and mourning
and the sweetest of songbirds
singing a perfect complication at the earliest hint
earliest,
in the east,
of a new day
of an old darkness
passing
a filagree of notes from different birds for a different world,
a world alight now and glaring, old world
washed away like an image from a dream
an Indian drinks
and moves on
becomes invisible
in the waving grasses.
and she
and the whaling captain
-gone before dawn
to tighten the ropes and chase down the storm.
After the rain
After the rain
for a long while
- or a long while it seemed -
the red birch leaves would drip into the cheap blue Piglet bucket
that used to collect sand
that for a long while
- or a short while, maybe even then it seemed -
would fill and tip and make ten perfect turrets
Adults know how to make castles.
Do it this way.
Watch.
Perhaps it was just one day
that the sand pit
at the end of the drive contained castles
and little girls and faux uncles and talkative strangers others
sexy now new yorkers all
- the hell with them.
wait.
after the rain.
the birds, so beautiful
so annoying that woke us - after the rain - to soft
- the softest light
unbelievably gentle I didn't want to see it
birdsong. no. too early
something, what now, lost too soon
I want, wanted the rain that was
in the middle of the night
or was it the ocean
I knew it was there
like a hand -night-black-
through the open window
petting my hair
I want the rain
the storm
the middle of the night
the lightning bolt that went
- actually -
from the south bedroom (hers) to the north (my mothers)
in a fat blinding line
blasting through both doorframes at the same instant
in one window out the next
thuderclap that had us that fast
trembling together
three ladies in white nightgowns
bending to study the wooden floor to see if the bolt
had burnt the house right through
smoldering line
not even that
we tucked each other in
down to the feet. sweet.
would untuck ourselves and go to another
what words then
falling with the rain
hours and hours of them
so familiar,
soft, reflective, winding, understood
reflexively, that conversation of forty years
(do these voices continue
moving out through space?) inaudible now
in what recollections remain
oh late hours
and hours of dear voices
then tucked in finally
thank you, perfect, and goodnight
finally
and then
as we curled into our own
private darkness
the hard rain
anew
biblical
obliterating
whole world
take it
I want the road
my little green suitcase
the tall trees spinning in wind
the old house
there
built by the whaler on around
an Indian well
driven deep
to catch the rain
for the travelers
on their way by foot
to Montauk
through the little lifting birds
and giving Calla Lilies
The porch.
Someone is there.
I can tell
from the glow of the cigarette.
I am home.
After the rain
no. that
I don't want to remember
- though it is about light
and clearing, continuance
and morning and mourning
and the sweetest of songbirds
singing a perfect complication at the earliest hint
earliest,
in the east,
of a new day
of an old darkness
passing
a filagree of notes from different birds for a different world,
a world alight now and glaring, old world
washed away like an image from a dream
an Indian drinks
and moves on
becomes invisible
in the waving grasses.
and she
and the whaling captain
-gone before dawn
to tighten the ropes and chase down the storm.
Friday, July 9, 2010
appropos of that last bit
recently saw "man on a wire" and can't stop thinking about the images and that (miraculously not) staggering point of view!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
For today's prompt, write a poem using one of the following headlines as the title of your poem (pulled from espn.com, cnn.com, npr.org, texasmonthly.com):
* Spectator falls from 2nd deck
* Life under melting Arctic ice
* Disheartened by the disaster
* The Many Voices of Lauryn Hill
* If You Can't Take the Heat, Use Fewer Jalapenos
* Spectator falls from 2nd deck
You cannot wonder
what is under
nor bend to see the source
of the end
What do you see
from that edge
ledge from which you lean
to see
Something that is not you
so much not you, forever her
and yet the yearn to know
to want more, look
ooh lean and learn
bend enough and
see the end
briefly - the image sought
the back the neck
upside down on the back
of an upside down
now dark
forever
eye
* Spectator falls from 2nd deck
* Life under melting Arctic ice
* Disheartened by the disaster
* The Many Voices of Lauryn Hill
* If You Can't Take the Heat, Use Fewer Jalapenos
* Spectator falls from 2nd deck
You cannot wonder
what is under
nor bend to see the source
of the end
What do you see
from that edge
ledge from which you lean
to see
Something that is not you
so much not you, forever her
and yet the yearn to know
to want more, look
ooh lean and learn
bend enough and
see the end
briefly - the image sought
the back the neck
upside down on the back
of an upside down
now dark
forever
eye
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Great Oxidation Event
In the dream, I am kissing _____ in my doorway (no, I'm not going to tell you!). Apparently we share the same doorway, have since we saw each other last. It's so strange our paths haven't crossed. It is a sweet reunion but I'm distracted looking over his shoulder as a pile of glossy photos has just landed on my doorstep and spread out in a sloppy fan. It's some kind of blackmail. I can see they are images from a different dream: some compromising, some Freudian, some - just those impossible-to-get-into-words über detailed subconscious whatchamacallits.
There are photographs of them?? -- wow.
The picture here is not one, but it could be. Both sexes combined. The impulse to curl, to widen, to rise, to flatten. What impulse? why? Why symmetry/ asymmetry? Why color?
This is the oldest known multi-cellular fossil - 2.1 BILLION years old and not small, almost 5 inches.
". The 2.1 billion-year mark is significant because scientists believe the Earth's atmosphere underwent a major transition, called the "Great Oxidation Event," about 2.4 million years ago"
So - form follows function? What is the right question? It's what I want my painting to be about, in some ways, maybe what these dreams are doing in their own weird, detailed, trying way? From what/for what/into what does form arise? What is the point (is there a point?) of differentiation between potential and its expression?
There is oxygen and then there is potential, or the expression of potential.
I feel, in my life, I am finally learning to breathe.
I wonder what form(s) will come of it?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
visitor 1
He looks like John Malkovich a bit but his skin is the color of butterscotch. Without taking his eyes off of me (is my bedroom made of glass?), he sits in the far chair by the fireplace, very slowly. He folds his hands and looks at me. The door between me and him is locked. I know he knows it and that the other two aren't. I could get there to the others and lock them first, I think - knowing I couldn't. I move without touching the ground, fast. Then I get to the last door. Of course he is right there as if he always was. He is not a rapist, just Malevolence. Very simply and unassumingly that. No surprises in how he is or moves. Why even bother with these locks and doors, these many houses of mine?
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
cream? = holy ghost??
But the nucleus at the center is incredibly tiny compared with the orbits of the electrons. This means that, if you squeezed all the empty space out of all the atoms in all the people in the world, you could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube. You and me and everyone else are 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space!
Okay, so, first of all, if I'm 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space, maybe I don't need to lose weight, just space. ??
Second, if I'm 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space, it's no wonder I have trouble gathering my thoughts and working effectively. Now that I know I'm going to get off my case and just be proud that I can maintain my semblance of sense and form. Good work against those odds!
Finally, if we could all fit in a sugar cube, obviously we should all just be closer and sweeter. C'mon everybody!
And, finallyfinally, if we're all a sugar cube, might not Yahweh just be a cup of super-strong single-pressed coffee. As likely as anything else. The morning jolt = the theory of everything. Didn't we already know this?
Okay, so, first of all, if I'm 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space, maybe I don't need to lose weight, just space. ??
Second, if I'm 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space, it's no wonder I have trouble gathering my thoughts and working effectively. Now that I know I'm going to get off my case and just be proud that I can maintain my semblance of sense and form. Good work against those odds!
Finally, if we could all fit in a sugar cube, obviously we should all just be closer and sweeter. C'mon everybody!
And, finallyfinally, if we're all a sugar cube, might not Yahweh just be a cup of super-strong single-pressed coffee. As likely as anything else. The morning jolt = the theory of everything. Didn't we already know this?
Monday, June 28, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
summer evening (greg brown)
Mmm, on a summer evenin' when the corn's head-high,
And there's more lightnin' bugs than stars in the sky.
Ah you get the feelin' things may be alright,
On a summer evenin' before the dark of night.
On a summer evenin' before the dark of night
What a perfect day.
Thank you, Universe.
...and, as Stanley Kunitz (moreorless) said, "To think I'll have another day tomorrow.. I can hardly contain myself."
Yup.
Even if it's a dud.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
what's her name
okay. what's to say about it? i'm pregnant. good 'n pregnant. and big, big in my tummy in which someone clearly, of no small size, is folded - no doubt uncomfortably. i can reach down and feel the long arm, the elbow. unmistakable. the forearm almost as big and boney as mine. how long has this been going on? i can't feel any rise and fall of breath. what have i done? i know it's got to be late. i press deep into my gut and get a heartbeat - faint, but definite. okay.
i walk around awkwardly, to say the least. Another pregnant friend is there. soon my water breaks and details (thank goodness) are lost. Before long my daughter is there, dressed and standing. She is black, about four feet tall, ten to thirteen years old. she is bored and distant, fiddling with her fingernails and looking away. and i am still lost in the total weirdness of feeling that jutting, full-grown elbow pressing out from my insides. I need to snap out of it and make conversation before she just walks away.
i walk around awkwardly, to say the least. Another pregnant friend is there. soon my water breaks and details (thank goodness) are lost. Before long my daughter is there, dressed and standing. She is black, about four feet tall, ten to thirteen years old. she is bored and distant, fiddling with her fingernails and looking away. and i am still lost in the total weirdness of feeling that jutting, full-grown elbow pressing out from my insides. I need to snap out of it and make conversation before she just walks away.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
very groovy film shoot in me studio today
watching the actress struggle with her inability to access her creative side did wonders for me - saved time and psychotherapy. I'm looking forward to my two-week Beautiful Downtown Sacramento Art Staycation in my very own much too expensive (but good-enough-for-indiefilm) space.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Poetic Form: Cascade Poem
Posted by Robert
Since I was having trouble coming up with a poem today, I thought I'd investigate a new poetic form to help prompt me into action. I've seen the cascade poem mentioned a few times online, but I always assumed it meant the poem was comprised of stanzas with indented lines (creating a kind of cascading effect). But after researching online, I realize this assumption is wrong.
The cascade poem was a form invented by Udit Bhatia (who also apparently created the Alliterisen, which I'll try to deal with in a future post). For the cascade poem, a poet takes each line from the first stanza of a poem and makes those the final lines of each stanza afterward. Beyond that, there are no additional rules for rhyming, meter, etc.
So to help this make sense, here's what a cascade poem with a tercet would look like:
A
B
C
a
b
A
c
d
B
e
f
C
I have my paintings back
rolled tight for five years as I waited for my life to settle
the color is still vibrant and alive right where I had laid it down
after the end of the end of the world
the last nail fallen from the sky, the children grown
I have my paintings back
darkness folded in, and a mantis skeleton - in tact
moved from a friend's house to friend's house to a basement, dank
rolled tight for five years as I waited for my life to settle
wrinkled now, a little bit ruined
and warm from travel, unrolled, seen
the color is still vibrant and alive right where I had laid it down
Posted by Robert
Since I was having trouble coming up with a poem today, I thought I'd investigate a new poetic form to help prompt me into action. I've seen the cascade poem mentioned a few times online, but I always assumed it meant the poem was comprised of stanzas with indented lines (creating a kind of cascading effect). But after researching online, I realize this assumption is wrong.
The cascade poem was a form invented by Udit Bhatia (who also apparently created the Alliterisen, which I'll try to deal with in a future post). For the cascade poem, a poet takes each line from the first stanza of a poem and makes those the final lines of each stanza afterward. Beyond that, there are no additional rules for rhyming, meter, etc.
So to help this make sense, here's what a cascade poem with a tercet would look like:
A
B
C
a
b
A
c
d
B
e
f
C
I have my paintings back
rolled tight for five years as I waited for my life to settle
the color is still vibrant and alive right where I had laid it down
after the end of the end of the world
the last nail fallen from the sky, the children grown
I have my paintings back
darkness folded in, and a mantis skeleton - in tact
moved from a friend's house to friend's house to a basement, dank
rolled tight for five years as I waited for my life to settle
wrinkled now, a little bit ruined
and warm from travel, unrolled, seen
the color is still vibrant and alive right where I had laid it down
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Slimed!
Okay, so in the middle of a Huffington Post article on pending massive layoffs of teachers, firefighters, policemen, etc is a warm-toned ad of a beautiful, kind-of vaguely post-porn looking girl with a news-flash announcement about a fresh, fun kind of auction that can get any idiot (that would be me) an iPad (in this case I was wanting a camera) for pennies on the price in a new penny auction. Click to get to a tri-state evening news report that makes the site look legit, fun, (if potentially addictive) blahblah. Click something else and you have four minutes to sign up. All looks good. money back guarantees, yeah. seen on every tv show in the universe, endorsed by ...or at least all these big logos are there... three minutes to enter your zip code, password, next page: two minutes to enter card info. (Where was that little pop-up?) right over the part where they rip me off in a non-refundable way? Almost surely.
Once in, (oh this is too boring to even write about). Anyway - an experience of manic, yes-addictive, high-speed, multi-bet pure gambling greed! did i win? did I win?? ooh, whose that asshole that wants my Walmart card?? "Spiffy"? - oh, please!! bid bid bid. just a penny a click. so no big deal. but you work have to play to win bids so you can bid more. big items require you to attach a 1000 bid contribution to your bid, which vanishes, apparently, if someone gets your item first.
If no one else bids in the last ten seconds, the item is yours. 4.3.2.1. Winner!! "Goodlala saved 89%" woohoo! (of course you win quickly so you think it's all possible...but you only seem to win bids). "Spiffy" or "Hothands" is always there bidding - and you can see that they've won 32,547 times and the icon that represents them is three little fires, whereas you of six wins is represented by one little happy face. If they bid before the ten seconds are up, the clock resets to ten seconds and in this way goes by all those awkward days, nights and months of double-dip recession unemployment (without health insurance).
So, I checked my account. huh??? $150 gone!. Wha...? Turns out the floating "you have three minutes" (god, I'm an IDIOT!) pop-up button was over the part where you are buying a membership (NO mention of that anywhere else) and that that membership gives you 300 "bonus" bids at 50c a piece. Deducted. The money back guarantee, I'm told by the 'chat' girl is always honored. "Your experience is important to us." Uh huh. All I have to do is play everyday and NOT have WON in 30 days. Of course, I have already won. And LOST.
The company: Swipebid says they are in Utah, but are apparently in Canada. Shame on the News Reporters and the Huffington Post and all us greedy, bullshit consumers out there.
I don't even WANT an IPad. I just don't want 'Spiffy" to get it instead of me.
I need a lawyer and a confessional.
I've been doing much better in my recent aims to de-digitize (at least some). But I feel like I've let the devil lick my face (and steal my wallet).
Bad Lala! no iPad!
Once in, (oh this is too boring to even write about). Anyway - an experience of manic, yes-addictive, high-speed, multi-bet pure gambling greed! did i win? did I win?? ooh, whose that asshole that wants my Walmart card?? "Spiffy"? - oh, please!! bid bid bid. just a penny a click. so no big deal. but you work have to play to win bids so you can bid more. big items require you to attach a 1000 bid contribution to your bid, which vanishes, apparently, if someone gets your item first.
If no one else bids in the last ten seconds, the item is yours. 4.3.2.1. Winner!! "Goodlala saved 89%" woohoo! (of course you win quickly so you think it's all possible...but you only seem to win bids). "Spiffy" or "Hothands" is always there bidding - and you can see that they've won 32,547 times and the icon that represents them is three little fires, whereas you of six wins is represented by one little happy face. If they bid before the ten seconds are up, the clock resets to ten seconds and in this way goes by all those awkward days, nights and months of double-dip recession unemployment (without health insurance).
So, I checked my account. huh??? $150 gone!. Wha...? Turns out the floating "you have three minutes" (god, I'm an IDIOT!) pop-up button was over the part where you are buying a membership (NO mention of that anywhere else) and that that membership gives you 300 "bonus" bids at 50c a piece. Deducted. The money back guarantee, I'm told by the 'chat' girl is always honored. "Your experience is important to us." Uh huh. All I have to do is play everyday and NOT have WON in 30 days. Of course, I have already won. And LOST.
The company: Swipebid says they are in Utah, but are apparently in Canada. Shame on the News Reporters and the Huffington Post and all us greedy, bullshit consumers out there.
I don't even WANT an IPad. I just don't want 'Spiffy" to get it instead of me.
I need a lawyer and a confessional.
I've been doing much better in my recent aims to de-digitize (at least some). But I feel like I've let the devil lick my face (and steal my wallet).
Bad Lala! no iPad!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)