From The Ephemera Connection: "A Sweet New Year"

As Baba used to say--"Have one hand in honey, the other in syrup."

Il faut se quitter souvent pour s'aimer toujours.

Are these in the original or just in the movie? (I cannot find my copy of Proulx's collection).

Big Rock Candy Mountain Moments in Brokeback Mountain:

Ennis: You ever get the feelin'... I don't know, er... when you're in town and someone looks at you all suspicious, like he knows? And then you go out on the pavement and everyone looks like they know too?

Jack: [Casually] Well... maybe you oughta get out of there, you know? Find yourself someplace different. Maybe Texas.

Ennis: [Sarcastically] Texas? Sure, maybe you can convince Alma to let you and Lureen to adopt the girls. And we can just live together herding sheep. And it'll rain money from LD Newsome and whiskey'll flow in the streams - Jack, that's real smart.
___________

Jack: Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together! Fuckin' real good life! Had us a place of our own. But you didn't want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain! Everything's built on that! That's all we got, boy, fuckin' all. So I hope you know that, even if you don't never know the rest! You count the damn few times we have been together in nearly twenty years and you measure the short fucking leash you keep me on - and then you ask me about Mexico and tell me you'll kill me for needing somethin' I don't hardly never get. You have no idea how bad it gets! I'm not you... I can't make it on a coupla high-altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you.
___________

Lureen Newsome: He always said he wanted his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain, but I wasn't sure where that was. I thought Brokeback Mountain might be around where he grew up. Knowing Jack, it was probably some pretend place, where bluebirds sing and there's a whiskey spring...

___________

Above is "The Land of Cockaigne" by Brueghel the Elder: Cockaigne may be a type for "Big Rock Candy Mountain."

Mr. & Mrs. Wallace Stevens, Phrygian Caps, and Captions

"At times, it seems that Stevens wishes (or writes) for representation to be anti-allegorical; “Instead of allegory,/” he writes of a particularly moving statue in “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” “We have and are the man.” The Greek agoreuein, from which the word allegory comes, does not mean simply “to speak,” but rather “to speak in the marketplace”; allegory, then, means not simply to “speak other,” but rather “to speak other than in the marketplace.” Let us, then, allow the words in allegory’s definition to remain in order, but let us also pierce them with a dash. Let us say that Wallace Stevens speaks other-than in the marketplace." (See link above)


I've been reading Stevens obsessively this week--as respite from the MFA non-poetry stuff--Chekhov, which has not arrived, and Frey, which I did not want to re-read in the first place. (I've been re-reading Hull, Kaminsky, Blake, and Kunitz, though). What a difference to read one Stevens poem immediately upon awakening, rather than Google News. I discovered in my reading that Wallace Stevens' wife was considered quite beautiful, as she was the model for both the Walking Liberty half dollar and the Mercury dime (apparently a misnomer, neither a depiction of the god of trickery nor requiring actual mercury in the minting). Ms. Stevens was wearing a Phrygian cap--which also may be found on the gallbladder. I think I prefer the hat she's wearing in the photograph above.

______

Typo of the Week: This patient has no cognitive defecate. (For those of you not in the transcription field, this should be "no cognitive deficit"--unless I've forgotten all my coding skills and there is an ICD code assigned to shi*t for brains).

I Must Have Dropped My Fortune Cookie

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: The Right Honorable Pamela of Under Table Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

I'm not sure how, er, aristocratic, that title is.

My Fortune Cookie told me: BAD WOLF. Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

Who's afraid now?

From The Ephemera Collection: Greensleeves Was My Delight

There are Santas in reds, in black, in white, in blues from indigo to sky, in mauve, in scintillating satin and glass sequins, in scarlet with a mitre like the Pope, in grey, in gold, in silver, in purple-mountain-majesty robes with fur sleeves, with and without gloves, and one even without a beard. And, oh, yes, in green, like the delightful guy above. Santa in cars, in trains, riding bicycles, orbiting in hot air balloons, in the sleigh and pulling the sleigh out of a snowbank--and, in one delightful Santa series, Sants's piloting airplanes. Oh, yes, Santa can sometimes be found with a figgy pudding or egg nog. Despite all the candy canes and cookies, sometimes he's skinny (must be the South Pole diet). He has lists and sometimes is listless.

Here, Santa's tucked into china cabinets and barristers' cases, inside the Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen and the curio case in the hall. There are at last count 347 still in the albums--I haven't dug out my newspaper series, where Santa is answering letters, like Miss Lonelyhearts. That's what I'm saving to put out today--for some reason that series is my favorite.

These are represent only the ephemeral Clauses--over 100 of Harvey's plastic Santas line the stairs to the attic--and under the tree's a "new" one from the 1950s where a light-up Santa's caroling, holding that long last note, mouth round as a goldfish's (He's 2-1/2 feet tall, so this is quite an unwieldy package). There are Santas my husband's made from velvet and papier mache, burlap and clay, Fimo and fur, Santas in sweaters and breeches, for casual Friday. There are Santas I've stitched on little samplers, and Santa ornaments pendant from the branches of our trees--dating from 1900 (glass) to 2006 (Hallmark).

From feather tree to fireplace, Hoosier to hearth, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus--wherever you look.

Merry Christmas to you all.

From the Ephemera Collection: Day One

One of my (too) many collections is antique postcards. I have over 5000 cards. I like this one because the rocker of the hobbyhorse reminds me of a gondola. Some sort of collecting intervention may be necessary--I dropped postcards to focus on pink/black kitchenware, switched to rhinestones, then (in order) Manhattan glass, art prints, typewriter ribbon tins, Cordey ceramics, perfume bottles, and then back to antique/costume jewelry. I think the Bakelite/rhinestone/cameo obsession is here to stay, along with my obsession with, er, desks. We have one in every room, except the baths, but I usually write at the kitchen table, as does the rest of my family. Go figure...

This is my first busy day, too--I have Dancing in Odessa to reread (MFA residency text, along with Lynda Hull's Collected Poems) and comparisons between Kunitz and Blake to discover (MFA seminar in poetry). I think it will be the 12 days of poetry, as I blitz through these works. Usually I try to take the fiction seminar, also, but I don't know if I have the time or the willpower this semester.

And I'm brooding like a biddy over this chicken poem idea. And I owe AJPL a Dr. Seuss poem.

By the Chimney With Care...

The tree is up, the shopping is done, and the blog has gone Beta. I have curled ribbon and unfurled wrapping paper, mailed books and other, less wieldly packages, baked cookies and fudged fudge, and now I'm ready for a giant drink. (Is there such a thing, I wonder, as egg blog? Would it be spiked?)

Happy Holidays to all of you, and may your poems be merry and bright.

My best gift so far: Geography III from bookmooch. You need to check that site out. I'm excited to read the poems in this order, and I have a brand-new poem in hatch mode (sort of inspired by "Crusoe in England," sort of not). It may be about chickens...there are chickens in my first real poem (there are nuns playing chicken), so why not in my latest?

Happy Hour with Mr. Stevens

I dreamt (always want to be archaic) last night that I was having drinks with Wallace Stevens in a very posh Art Deco bar. He gave me an insight into "Sunday Morning" that I'd never had before. It has to do with migration. And ornithology. And kitsch. And Dadaism.

One of the best dreams ever. And maybe a creative thesis...

Mr. Stevens drinks whiskey neat, by the way.

I hope that tonight it's high tea and we're tackling "The Idea of Order at Key West." ("I'd love me some scones and clotted cream," as Hardy wrote).

M.C.--but not Hammer

Who Should Paint You: M.C. Escher

Open and raw, you would let your true self show for your portrait. And even if your painting turned out a bit dark, it would be honest.

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

It Pays to Improve Your...

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

It's Freezing Here!

THE ICE HOUSE--James Wright

The house was really a cellar deep beneath the tower of the old
Belmont Brewery. My father's big shoulders heaved open the door
from the outside, and from within the big shoulders of the ice-man
leaned and helped. The slow door gave. My brother and I walked
in delighted by our fear, and laid our open palms on the wet yellow
sawdust. Outside the sun blistered the paint on the corrugated roofs
of the shacks by the railroad; but we stood and breathed the rising
steam of that amazing winter, and carried away in our wagon the
immense fifty-pound diamond, while the old man chipped us each
a jagged little chunk and then walked behind us, his hands so calm
they were trembling for us, trembling with exquisite care.



Lakeside View #1: Brewery, Bottle House, Ice House

Free Writing under the Influence of Lynn Emanuel

Caution: Please note that BABUSHKA in Russian means aged woman or grandmother (Baba is short for this). It does not mean headscarf when used in Russia.

(This is an excerpt from a longer piece about my family’s heritage--I Led Three Lives: The Rerun Years. Yes, my family’s of Russian descent. No, we weren’t supposed to talk about this during the RED SCARE of the 1950s. Yes, we do have a specific history of glassblowing, public scenes, and love for Pasternak. No, we don’t own a Faberge egg or any photographs of Olympic skaters. Whatever this is—memoir? poem? not-so-urban legend? shameful sentiment?—it began its life as a villanelle then fled, as did Baba herself, outside formal constraint).

SNIP SNIP SNIP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNUR SNUR SNUR

"Coincidence? I think Not!" Thank you, Maxwell Smart.

What Is Poetry?--John Ashbery


The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

___________
Regarding that last line's question:

"The word anthology comes from a Greek word that means bouquet”
William Matthews, "Personal and Impersonal"

What I want for Christmas and 39 Reasons Why I Deserve It

1. What is your occupation? Transcriptionist/adjunct teacher.
2. What color are your socks right now? Red
3. What are you listening to right now? Hank Williams, Senior. Every once in a while, I have to follow the red-gravel road to Heartbreak City. (Now, all CDs of his offspring are banned in this household, due to an unfortunate encounter in a local establishment. Suffice it to say that Bocephus went the way of all good hockey pucks).
4. What was the last thing that you ate? Eggs Benedict. Because I deserve them.
5. Can you drive a stick shift? Yes, but the results aren't pretty.
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Pink (to clash with the socks)
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Harvey
8. Last letter you received was from: The IRS-a $400 refund check. I was frostin' amazed, to paraphrase ADT.
9. How old are you today? One day older than dirt, and a day younger than mud
10. Favorite drinks? Coffee
11. What is your favorite sport to watch? Basketball or tennis--it's a tossup (no pun intended)
12. Have you ever dyed your hair? Not on purpose, but I did just lop off 2 feet of it.
13. Paper or plastic? This is where situational ethics come into play-I'm not in favor of plastic towels or paper bands.
14. Favorite food? Pasta alla mara
15. What was the last movie you watched? Stranger than Fiction
16. Favorite day of the year? Christmas Eve, especially if it's snowing
17. What do you do to vent anger? Bitch, bitch, bitch
18. What was your favorite toy as a child? Tied: My bike. My Baby Pat-A-Burp doll. My GI Joe with KUNG FU death grip.
19. What is your favorite--fall or spring? Fall.
20. Hugs or kisses? Depends on how much lipstick I'm wearing. And on whether there's mistletoe or chocolate involved.
21. Cherries or Blueberries? Cherries
22. Living arrangements? House (1893 Queen Anne-painted yellow with green, gold, cream and purple trim)
23. Poetry or Fiction? Bi-genre (like both rhyme and reason)
24. Gold or Silver-Yes, and platinum, copper, Bakelite, Lucite-I heart costume jewelry. The more rhinestones the better has always been my motto.
25. Who's the real Bond? Fleming's version-but for a blonde, Daniel Craig is rather, yowsa.26. When was the last time you cried? Last week, when an iron fell on my foot. The iron must be severely depressed, as it definitely is not overwork that led to its plunge.
27. What is on the floor of your closet? My closet has a floor? WOW. I thought the shoes were piled all the way down to the basement.
28. What's the funniest thing you read recently? A newbie (transcriptionist in training) transcribed the patient was without focal neurological defecate.
29. What did you do last night? Read Daniel Anderson's Drunk in Sunlight-what a terrific book of poems. The formalist in me applauds and wants to write some pentameter.
30. What inspires you? Art.
31. What are you afraid of? What's happened to the hamster?????
32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? Cheeseburgers
33. Favorite dog breed? Papillon (my dog)
34. Number of keys on your key ring? 6
35. How many years at your current job? 19 years, 7 months and 5 days (not that I'm counting the 20 years to retirement, or anything such as that. No, sirree, Bob.)
36. Favorite day of the week? Sunday
37. How many states have you lived in? Four
38. Favorite holidays? Thanksgiving and Easter.
39. Ever driven a motorcycle or heavy machinery? Heavy machinery, yes; a motorcycle, no. (I have ridden an elephant and a camel, though not simultaneously).

I must have a cold...

There is no doubt that I am from a notch in the Bible Belt--the Kentucky hillbilly accent is my true timbre--not the South, not the Midwest, but the Commonwealth.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Angels from Two Perspectives

Rilke--from The Duino Elegies ("First Elegy")

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying


Levin--from In the Surgical Theatre ("The Baby on the Table")

--I can't tell
if they are bending in lamentation or praising
hallelujah, if the egg
is a cross
in a circle of light—when will they lower
the kiss, the fist, the sharpened
scalpel, the angels
are waiting, calm, impassive, the emanations
of science
in each white face—
Can you help me sew up
what they're about to open? Can you feel
the chill of the table
on your own small back?

Auden was right--and I wasn't.

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Why I'm Thankful

My faith. My family. Pumpkin fudge. Hot chocolate pie. Cornucopias. New books. Poetry.

Poetry Daily doesn't always nail it, but this did today. I'm ordering the book. (Read this aloud--it's even more awesome).

When the Burning Begins

(for Otis Douglas Smith, my father)

The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple:
Cornmeal, hot water. Mix till sluggish,
then dollop in a sizzling skillet.
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again,
dump it onto a plate. You've got to wait
for the burning and get it just right.

Before the bread cools down,
smear it with sweet salted butter
and smash it with your fingers,
crumple it up in a bowl
of collard greens or buttermilk,
forget that I'm telling you it's the first thing
I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing
and breathing and no bullet in his head
when he taught me.

Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he'd say.
Till it moves like a slow song sounds.

We'd sit there in the kitchen, licking our fingers
and laughing at my mother,
who was probably scrubbing something with bleach,
or watching Bonanza,
or thinking how stupid it was to be burning
that nasty old bread in that cast iron skillet.
When I told her that I'd made my first-ever pan
of hot water cornbread, and that my daddy
had branded it glorious, she sniffed and kept
mopping the floor over and over in the same place.

So here's how you do it:

You take out a bowl, like the one
we had with blue flowers and only one crack,
you put the cornmeal in it.
Then you turn on the hot water and you let it run
while you tell the story about the boy
who kissed your cheek after school
or about how you really want to be a reporter
instead of a teacher or nurse like Mama said,
and the water keeps running while Daddy says
You will be a wonderful writer
and you will be famous someday and when
you get famous, if I wrote you a letter and
sent you some money; would you write about me?

and he is laughing and breathing and no bullet
in his head. So you let the water run into this mix
till it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
which is another thing Daddy said, and even though
I'd never even seen a river,
I knew exactly what he meant.
Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet,
and you pour in this mix
that moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
like quicksand, like slow song sounds.

That stuff pops something awful when it first hits
that blazing skillet, and sometimes Daddy and I
would dance to those angry pop sounds,
he'd let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen
and my mother huffed and puffed
on the other side of the door. When you are famous,
Daddy asks me, will you write about dancing
in the kitchen with your father?
I say everything I write will be about you,
then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl
and spin, but then he stops.
And sniffs the air.

The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it's crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,

poems are born.


Patricia Smith

Starbuck Supreme

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

At Least I'm in the Norton...

Philip Larkin! You scored 45 Demeanour, 54 Debauchery, 58 Traditionalism, and 65 Expression!

Cheer up, asshole. Everyone loves you, and still you treat them like shit. And still they love you! They love you all the more for it! Why is that, do you suppose? Because you're a freakin genius, that's why! You make an insult sound like love song! You spew your venom at the world and the world laps it up! From your dark, ugly little heart gushes forth a veritable geyser of gorgeous ideas and melodious language. I hate you. Let's hang out sometime. Your masterpiece is "The Less Deceived".

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Demeanour You scored higher than 99% on Debauchery You scored higher than 99% on Traditionalism You scored higher than 99% on Expression

Link: The Which Famous Poet Are You Test written by Torontop on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The Land's Wild Music--Time and Rhythm

Here's a quote:

Although he has written this book of prose… James Galvin think of himself as a poet. To be known as a poet is important to him. It is a matter of temperament, he says. He doesn’t feel prose is up to the tasks to which he wants to put language on the page. “Poetry has a kind of snap to it,” he says. “Getting back to horse terminology, poetry steps out so smart.”

Prose, according to Galvin, is tethered to time and ordered by reason, whereas poetry, ruled by line breaks and shot through with gaps, runs to a beat. It is organized spatially, not temporally; it moves outside time—it is lyric. “If you sit down to write a prose work,” Galvin says, “before you even touch the pen to the paper you have already addressed the idea of the passage of time. And if you sit down to write something that’s in lines, you have already decided to resist that passage.” A line of poetry depends on space; its very purpose is to fill a set space with a particular pattern of beats. A sentence, however, disregards space; it sets out to name something and to say something about that thing: subject and predicate—there is your sentence, no matter how long or short, regardless of its syllable count. Sentences and paragraphs are defined as units of thought. Of thought, you see; not of music, not of space.
__________________

*Italics added.

What do you think? I always think of the accentual/accentual syllabic line as a unit of breath, and necessarily a unit of music because it's based on rhythm. Isn't that timing, if not time? And what about the prose poem? The sheerly syllabic poem? The lyric moments in prose (whole swaths of Beloved and the end of "The Dead" as just two examples)? Aren't these governed more by music and timing than time? I don't think of prose as necessarily harnessed to the predicted predicate moment.

But maybe that's just me.

What We're Learning this Week--"Annabel Lee"

From a class years ago: "Poe's poes are remarkable for their use of illiteration."

Indeed.

Proof that Coffee Stunts Your Growth

David Niven, how you've shrunk...

________________

1. Costume ::
Masquerade:: Anthony Hecht poem "Harlequin"

2. Beg ::
Borrow:: Steel:: Wool

3. Hottie ::
"Venus of Willendorf Visits Lido" (the first drawing Harvey ever gave me, the first time we met)

4. Celebrity ::
Death Match

5. Saturday ::
's Child (if you remember this Monkees' song you are way older than you look)

6. Buckle ::
Swash

7. Doorbell ::
Avon

8. Rude ::
Drunken heckling of my former poetry teacher at a reading

9. Absence ::
Absinthe

10. Hyper ::
pigmented, as in Frank Stella paintings

GO FISH--FINALLY INDENTION!

Thanks to Sam (gratitude to the 10,000th power), I can actually post something with formatting! It won't be up for long but at least it's here now. This is part of my MFA first semester project, a long series on, of all things, fish.

When it's time to redecorate...

Make sure it's Scrabble style (be sure to see all three pictures)

Thanks to MENTAL FLOSS for the link. I want to make some of those pillows--in my sparest of spare time.

If I Were a Carpenter...

I'd be telling everyone I was related to Chris! Woo-hoo! Go, St. Louis! Nothing I love better than a shutout. Unless it's a sky hook, or maybe a sweet-struck backhand cutting cross-court.

The new section of students is less talkative than the first set. I've just received their first worksheet submissions. This is the agony and the ecstasy--fossicking out what's strong in the weak poems and weak in the strong ones--knowing what to say that encourages revision and advances understanding without hurting feelings. I don't believe that everyone who's in my class is going to be a writer, but I do believe that everyone can learn to appreciate narrative sleight-of-hand, exact imagery, and music in poetry. I don't think that I'm a great writer--heck, I know I'm not---but poetry has brought to my life such passion, pleasure, and pain that I cannot imagine that I'd be better off without it. I also think that for this exact reason an MFA isn't a bad thing for me. If we substituted, as Lynn Emanual suggested in an interview, violinists and Switzerland, for writers and MFA programs, would there be such a brouhaha about how many graduates a program turns out--graduates who are fanatic about their fields and eager to share their new-minted knowledge with other readers and writers? In my program, we're all learning to be better readers/better writers, we're introduced to new literature we'd not be exposed to otherwise, and we're building a community of other readers and writers. I'm a good teacher (or I was once, 15 years ago), and I'm getting better; without the MFA program I'd not have an outlet for that. If I can help (and perhaps I did--I wish you could see the revisions) beginning students be encouraged and continue in writing and reading, then pursuing an MFA hasn't been a pipe dream--or a waste of money and time.
++++++++++
READING: Mark Doty, Atlantis; Dana Levin In the Surgical Theatre

WRITING:
1. An essay about Noir in poems from Emanuel, Weldon Kees, John Ashbery (if you don't believe me, read "Forties Flick.")
2. A new poem about waitressing--it's going to be a sonnet, I swear.

ANTICIPATING: Next semester's African-American literature seminar, when the reading will include Toni Morrison.

COOKING: Rosemary Chicken stuffed with Turnips and Garlic. I want to get it right. Bakeless Alaska--an easy cheating dessert.

MISSING: Spinach. And time to myself.

Open/Closed/Fixed Forms

When dictionaries and thesauri fail, I turn to my children for advice. Raleigh outdid herself today.

Q & A:
(Raleigh at Nine Solves Two Poetic Dilemmas)

What rhymes
with orange?
Door hinge.

What rhymes
With silver?
Pilver, you

Know, when
I'm rustling
Through your

Purses for
Loose dimes,
State quarters?

Pilvering, Mommy.
I'm doing
It now.

Who says literature no longer inspires?

Not I--one of my students cried this semester, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the bumblebee version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that inspired her.

______
Update: Coincidence? I think not.

Here's this:



and this:

Lisa Bonet Ate No Basil

Al La Bob Al La

Sparks Flew!

"ScienceIQ.com suggests shutting yourself into a pitch black room with a package of Wint-O-Green Lifesavers® and letting your eyes adjust to the darkness. Bare your teeth and bite one of the candies in half, then bite again — trying not to get the candy wet. The sparks, they say, will fly. ScienceIQ.com explains it this way: "When light flashes due to a material being fractured or deformed, it is called triboluminescence; tribo meaning 'friction' and luminescence meaning 'to emit light'.

"For almost three hundred years, scientists didn't know what was causing these sparks to occur. Now, they attribute it to an asymmetry in a crystal that shifts or relaxes when the crystal is crushed or deformed. The energy given off when this asymmetry relaxes comes in the form of light. "Wint-O-Green Lifesavers® are made from sugar and wintergreen flavoring. The sugar forms a crystal, and the wintergreen flavoring is the impurity needed to give the crystal an asymmetric structure. Other materials do this too, such as adhesive tape and sugar cubes."

______

Now I have enough material to write my first chick-lit novel: A heroine with Chiclet teeth who's addicted to chick lit herself; an annoying romantic counterpart, also with Chiclet teeth, perhaps with one slightly overlapping incisor, just to make him different/less perfect than our heroine; and, best of all, an actual way to make sparks fly between them. Mix all ingredients well; add excellent poem (out of context) and Prada handbag; bake at 102 degrees until romance scenes are slightly scorched; serve at wedding reception with ganaching of both cake frosting and Chiclet teeth of slightly jealous girlfriend.

Learning to Learn/Gullible's Travels

My heretofore secret poetry crush on the Sublibrarian is now publicly acknowledged.

Only now am I beginning to learn how to learn to write poems. (And please don't tell me that poems "save" me, although I want to chant in other tongues (Snyder, Eliot) and handle "The Snakes of September."

(Note to Self: How can I work the Church of Jesus Christ with Signs Following into a poem? I was taken inside a church where there were snakes and strychnine).

____
REGISTER TO VOTE.

next to of course god america i

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

___________
This has always been my touchstone political poem. If you're not gullible, if you vote for the candidate who sounds least like this, you'll sleep at night like a

"Ouch--the truth hurts"--On Charles Wright

Wright's paradoxical sentiments come wrapped in gently meandering lines and sentences that seem not to want to end lest they appear to conclude. It would be interesting to get a look at the keyboard where Wright types; I picture his comma key worn down to a nub and the period filmed with dust.

In this review of Charles Wright's poetry, Joel Brower describes Wright as "meandering" between Stevens' abstractions and W.C. Williams' insistence on things. It's an excellent analysis of a poet who, frankly, does wander lonely as a cloud and cloudlike too among the littered vale.

What interest me most about Charles Wright's poems are:

1. His use of the line.

Wet days are their own reward for now,
litter's lapse and the pebble's gleam.

The qualifying, renaming, appositional structure of what my teacher called the "low rider" line" really is a tic in Wright's writing.

2. Wright's use of the landscape, the still life, although very decorated, dense with description, is lovely, layered, full, and empty, too, of people. I don't know why his landscape's so uninhabited--not static, just fluctuating. This has always bothered me--and I often think it's a flaw in the way I approach poetry--I wonder what am I missing as a reader (lacking in understanding), because I long for a you, an I, a he to make more frequent appearances in his work? Somebody, nobody, the people show up, in prayerful addresses to a God who's not listening...

Pity the people, Lord, pity their going forth and their coming back,
Pity their sumptuous barricades
against the dark.
Show them the way the dirt works.
Show them its sift, the aftermath and the in-between.

Judy Jordan was Wright's student, and she favors his use of description/landscape and his low-riding line in her poetry, but it is a poetry that's peopledelegiacegaic when it's not... Carolina Ghost Woods , I'm sure isn't better written(and what does that word mean, anyway--better--are we writing against each other?), but for me the church has to have the doors open, the people spilling out or trapped within and not just leaf-lapse and gravel glut in an abandoned parking lot of a sidesaddled church spraddled on its foundation...

Here's Jordan (from Carolina Ghost Woods, from "Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow"), first the opening, and then a section in the middle of the poem:


In the moon-fade and the sun's puppy breath,
in the crow's plummeting cry,
in my broken foot and arthritic joints,
memory calls me
to the earth's opening, the graves dug, again, and again
I, always I am left
to turn away
into a bat's wing-brush of air.

------------
With the wet leaves thick on my steps,
the evening sky bruised dull gray to black,

when I've spilt salt and as the saying goes the sorrow and tears,
and the stove is cold so salt won't burn,
tell me my pocket of charms can counter any spell.

Tell me again the reason for my grandfather's fingers
afloat in the Mason jar on the fireplace mantel
between the snuff tin and the bowl of circus peanuts.
What about the teeth in the dresser bureau,
the sliver of back bone I wear around my neck? *
_______________________________

There's poetry for me...the human voice, talking to herself, talking to others, talking to me. I feel that Charles Wright is talking up, across and down like a complicated crossword puzzle, and Jordan's calling out...

I highly recommend Carolina Ghost Woods and Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance if you want to read poetry that reveals not only a mind, but a heart at work.
_____
* I wish I could figure out how to show in Blogger the way these lines are indented.

Contending..."Sonnet for Joe" by Sandra McPherson

When I tell you I would rather you describe a clock than time,
that the essence of your ocean sentiments is not the ocean,
I'm wondering if you would live if your feet got tangled in seaweed.
Write me the superstructure of water.

And now you drop your face. I see my mistake. You did not write
to contend. So it was the ocean in four dry lines
like seaweed from Japanese groceries that thickens and plumps
when ladled in water. Look, you don't even like it

when I give you some copies of ocean poems. You detest the sea
and its marketable herring, its common tuna, and starfish
always losing their legs. Think of the man

who fell from his fishing boat in the fog off Alaska. He heard the motor
slowly trupping away, its cargo of vain fish under its wing. Think of
his widow who detests the sea, who lives beside it, who writes now to her friend.

Rest in Peace: The Family Plot

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

From the Recipe Box (where all my darlings go after they're killed)

Titles without Poems:

Miss Kitty Learns a Lesson Down at The Longbranch

Striking the Heel

Persephone's Downfall Might Have Been The Narcissus

The Bitter Batter Better

I really wish title #1 would come (like Athena) fully realized, from head to world without labor.

There's a draft of #3, but it's really more of a recipe, and since I read "Stone Soup" by Lynn Emanuel, I've been too awed to look at my own pitiful baking poem. Maybe I should write it on parchment paper...

Dissolution

Pearls will dissolve in vinegar, opals in chlorine bleach, and cubic zirconia in hydrogen peroxide. The latter provides a simple way to distinguish between diamonds and their imitators.

"You did not write to contend." Sandra McPherson, "Sonnet For Joe"

I have had amazing students this first half of the class. They've written unbelievable poems--5 villanelles, shape poems, eye-poppingly good haiku on football and the Fall (edenic), sandcastles and sunspots. I am astounded. There were analyses that were way beyound sophomore level (Snyder's "Hitch Haiku" and Yeats' "Leda and the Swan"). I have tried to instill every bit of passion that I have for poetry into each class this semester, and the dividends have been unbelievable. I will miss this group and look forward to the next group. Maybe I'll see one or two of them again.

Because there were nearly 25 years that I was a mom and a checkwriter rather than working to learn the craft of poetry (I was reader but not a writer), I realize that it's probably 3rd and goal (to steal a line) for me to contend with poetry, but maybe it's not too late for me to be a good teacher. I'll teach 2 more poetry classes next spring. I plan to teach as long as they'll have me.

PS I have cut 15 inches off my hair, and my head feels like a kite wobbling.

Yes-Yes

Poetry and Dadaism (from an article by Charles Simic--link above)

"The elements of poetry are letters, syllables, words, sentences," Kurt Schwitters wrote. Poetry, he insisted, arises from the playing off of these elements against one another. He also confessed to preferring nonsense to sense because it had always been neglected in the making of art. Tzara explained in a 1920 manifesto how such poems were to be made:

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar
_____

Dada's genius was that it refused to define itself and become an art movement in an era of proliferating avant-gardes. All that its artists had in common were a few ideas about going beyond pictorial conventions, freeing art of its history in order to discover it elsewhere, as well as a sense of humor. That made all the difference-what Harold Rosenberg called "comical questioning of appearances."[10] One only has to watch films like René Clair and Francis Picabia's Entr'acte, which are part of the MoMA show, to realize that their patron saint was that other mad twentieth-century inventor of visual gags, Buster Keaton. The joy of seeing this exhibition is the discovery of little-known works of art, which once were not supposed to be art, but which now look marvelously ingenious, well-made, and even beautiful."
________
Here's my cutup of the instructions above smashed with a short poem I wrote about the symbol for infinity--I like one line very much.


The understanding of the vulgar
words that make up this article
will put out the article, then cut
it out, cut out all of them, take
out scraps, one after another of
them in a bag. Shake it gently
then be like you. And here you
are, a writer! Scissors choose
the article's long infinity, (that
the lazy eight, snoozing on its
side) original and endowed with
sensibility, charming beyond an
order in which they left.You are
planning to make all poems of
cut bag. Copy conscientiously
and your poem will overtake the
newspaper! Snip snip snip snip
_______
It's all prestidigitation anyway--

"The artist creates through choice, distribution and dematerialization of the materials."


______
I've considered the BAP controversy, and I wouldn't publish Harvey's work. Of course, he would have too much class to allow it in the first place, even if it really was my favorite poem of the year. Scruples, people, scruples.

News You Can't Use and an SOS

The pound sign (#) is called anoctothorpe.

Doesn't that sound like a potion in a medicine show? Step right up, ladies and gentleman, and get your anocthorpe...it'll cure what ails you. (Anyone who thinks the medicine show is defucnt needs only to watch the annoyingly loud Oxy-Clean spokesman)

_____

A new 3-page poem has jumped onto the page. It's not very good but it is very different. Different is good, right? Right is different, good?

Lynn Emanuel's poetry is perplexing me right now. Anyone with any tips, please let me know. I am confounded by her returning like a boomerang to the same metaphors, images, even titles...I really like her but derned if I can say why yet.

School Days, School Daze

Today I present one of my favorite lesson plans ever: T.S. Eliot takes on Etheridge Knight, in the Rockem-Sockem Robot/Celebrity Death Match of Prufrock versus Hard Rock. It's going to be GOOD. Seriously, the discussion should be awesome.

From one of my students: "Tips for Ms. Parker's MFA Program"

Salient Features:
* No "good" poem can get by without a reference to razors.
* Reference Persephone (who was kidnapped by Hades and forced to live half of every year in the underworld), Orpheus (a poet who tried to rescue his wife from Hades), Eurydice (the wife of Orpheus), Tantalus (doomed to forever sit in pool of water with grapes hanging overhead but not be able to touch them), the Cimmerii (people who lived in eternal darkness), or other ancient Greek/Roman tragic stories. These make your poem seem almost like real poetry!
* Diction is what can make or break your poem. Use words that sound goth -- ephemeral, vorpal, evanescent, phlegmatic, atramentous, etc. It doesn't even matter if you use them correctly, as long as your audience doesn't know the difference.
* Blood is never red. It can be crimson, cerise -- even erubescent -- but never red. Also, instead of "bloody," try "ensanguined."
* Throw in some random Latin. "Memento mori" (literally, "remember mortality," but commonly used as "remember you must die") is a big hit, as are "nox" (night), "clavicula" (key), and "caligo" (gloom or mental darkness). It doesn't matter if you actually know Latin...just use some random phrases and mock anyone who questions you.

_________
Can you see why I love this class?

I have a real, real writer. What am I going to do? I hope some good--how to edit?

This and That

My dozen or so readers (LOL--am I not optimistic?) may have noticed my absence. I've started my semester of teaching Introduction to Creative Writing (poetry class) at a local university. I have 10 witty and attentive students. I only hope I can keep the pace at a lively level. The first workshop is next week, and I am excited to see their work. Three of the poems are far above beginning level--I am pretty sure there are 3 poets in the class. We've been discussing imagery, the line, and breath, and every one of the students used imagery in their poems. Their line breaks often showed smart choices, and none of them, not a single one of them, was late with the assignment. That's a first for me as a teacher. THEY LISTEN! THEY TALK! I've had so much fun that I cannot believe I'm being paid.

Note for all you other neophyte adjuncts out there: Nancy Willard's poetry is extremely teachable. She is the Billboard with a Bullet artist.

Another PS--One of my students told me she watched In Her Shoes for the poetry.

Truth (?!?) Is Stranger than Fiction

If I handed this in to a fiction class, my professor would fail me immediately for unbelievability (as well he should). Note that the author wrote for One Life to Live. The National Enquirer wrinkle of my right brain wonders, "Can it be?" The song options are endless here...

Dillon as Bukowski--I have to see this!

Dear Matt,

RE: You, Me, and Dupree--all is forgiven.

Your pal,

Pamela

Existential Bush (from Salon)

"So first of all, lemme tell you, Laura, if all frogs were like Albert Ca-Moose-and-Squirrel, the author, we wouldn't have quarrel with that nation or any other, and I could eat french toast again, not to mention french dressing, which beats ranch all to heck."

Stolen from Peter--Google Define: Pamela

Rhapsodie variety. Large, standard African Violet (4-inch pot size) with single, burgundy flowers and medium green pubescent leaves. Introduced 1988. Improved 1999. (AVSA Reg. No. 6988) More information.
www.optimara.com/optimaraglossary/p-phy.html

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is a novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. While Richardson did not invent the name Pamela the novel did help to popularize the name in English-speaking countries. The novel is in epistolary form, consisting of letters and diary entries.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela

So I'm a shrinking virgin...or and the oldest p(l)otted novel in English...(purple prose, I'm sure).

I'm glad I improved in 1999. Maybe there's time for another improvement in 2010...when I will be older than the dirt in which I'm rooted...

Poem in Which I Smack Down Lines to Answer AJPL's Challenge

Sonnet Penned on a Paper Napkin While
Drafting a Sestina in an All-Night Diner

Oh, man, this is like seriously effed up.
The eggs are drowning in their hollandaise
Like Stevie Smith in the Atlantic. “Cup
Of coffee?“ asks the waitress. No more daze--
I'll be buzzing like a bandsaw after
Two, writing on. (Six words, my sestina
Cycle, spin like laundry, or like laughter).
Where's Friday to my Crusoe, Altafina?

Bacon like rickrack curls upon my plate;
5-3-1...the stanzas coil and wait...
Three cups downed black--yet no muse--what's the use?
Gold flecks Formica like the coins from Zeus.
"$6.24's your check," my waitress chimes.
I'll have to tip her in like total dimes.

___________
This bit of doggerel (like an episode of Dragnet) is based on an actual incident, during which I learned several valuable life lessons.

A. Never order hollandaise sauce in an all-night diner.
B. Don't use the words “laundry” and “laughter” to end-stop a sestina.
C. When one uses yard-sale change to cover a restaurant tab, one should anticipate the wrath of one's waitress.
D. Formica might really be fool's gold.

P.S. The last line was modified from something Anne Lamott said in a lecture on writing. I gratefully acknowledge her index card method.

Word of the Day and Emily Dickinson

dithyramb \DITH-ih-ram\ noun

1 : a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain
2 : a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein


Did you know?
In ancient Greece, the wine god Dionysus (or Bacchus) was feted several times throughout the year. Processions, feasts, dances, and dramatic performances, accompanied by poems recited or sung in the god's honor, were all part of the revelry. Not too surprisingly, the poems tended to be wild, irregular, and dissonant. We know that the Greeks used "dithyrambos" as the word for a poem in honor of Dionysus, but beyond that the origin of the word is unknown. The ancient Greeks also had an adjective, "dithyrambikos," which gave us our adjective "dithyrambic," meaning "pertaining to or resembling a dithyramb."

My question is "Wild Nights!". Dithyramb--yea or nay?

Word Cloud (from this blog)

above age art beautiful best better big birthday blue body book books cannot coffee complete Daniel dark daughter days death down earth end eyes family favorite fiction friend good happy hard Harvey heart home house husband kentucky life like light little lost love mean memory mfa mom night old omg one pamela people pink poem poems poetry point poor read reading red remember right ring room school sister small son state story summer sun think thought three times transcription two vroom water white wife wish wonder word words work world write writing years

I find it impossible that one of my most frequently used words is VROOM. I must have seen Cars way too many times. I guess I should confess how obsessed Daniel and Harvey were with Micro Machines. Anybody remember them? Oh, those were the days.

Quote in search of a poem

"When the light hits me in a certain way, I'm almost attractive."

Peter O'Toole

A Modest Proposal for Our Fearless Leader

This just in from Slate:

"I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember --I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?"
-- Our President, asked if the tide is turning in Iraq

In my humble opinion (that of a yellow-dog Democrat), this man should have listened to more Blondie in the 80's. Heck, he should listen to Blondie instead of Condie right now. I mean it. In fact, here's some good advice from Parallel Lines:



Oh, don't ya know?
Don't wanna see ya any more.
Put up or shut up.
Ya spell, ya read, D.O.O.R.
Ya got a big mouth and I'm happy to see
your foot is firmly entrenched
where a molar should be.
If you talk much louder
you could get an award
from the federal communications board...

Oh, don't ya know?
I don't wanna see ya curse and pout.
Pack it and move it.
Ya spell, ya read, O.U.T out.
Don't go be bad 'cause you been had.
Don't go away sad.
Don't go away mad,
Just go away!
Go away!
Go away and stay away!

"Where There is No Vision, the People Parrish"

From American Heritage (click to enlarge)

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was already a familiar magazine and advertising illustrator when he created this promotion for Edison Mazda light bulbs in 1922. As a child gazes at the lamplight’s reflection in the water, a couple stares at its source atop a pile in a mystical Venetian harbor. Behind them is a sky of the cobalt that was known as Parrish blue. Parrish achieved the luminous colors that marked much of his artwork by a technique involving several coats of oil and varnish.

The only piece I have by Parrish is an advertising booklet for Jell-O. It's beautiful but nothing like this advert.

I want to wake in a room whose walls are Parrish blue.

Mars Bars! (Verbatim: An e-mail I received from my 7th grade teacher)

The red planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again. The encounter will culminate on August 27th whenMars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m. By the end of August when the two planets areclosest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN.
___

My question to the Magic 8-ball and the Ouija board and to the Tarot and to you, Dear Reader:

What perturbs your orbit?

I down, XXIII left

According to my MFA workshop, I have a completely finished poem. I have never felt that anything (except childbirth) was ever over, ever completed. Now only 23 to go for my thesis.

Query: We need 24 poems to graduate. Should I shoot for collection or composition? I have two themes in mind...

10 et Son

At MFA program and swamped--but had to share this. If Russell can go public, so can I.

MOJOMEME #1--FROM THE LIBRARY

BOOKS: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes.



That's all, folks.

Alphabetical Meme

accent: Sort of southern/Kentucky nasal variety

booze: Tequila, vodka, champagne (beer: Sam Adams)

chore I hate: Vacuuming

dogs/cats: 2 cats (Loco the Longhair, Shadow the Shorthair) and Frodo the dancing Papillon

essential electronics: Computers, bronze bedside lamp (Mouse reading a book)

Favorite perfume/cologne: Fleur d'Interdit, Chanel No. 5, Lavender Essential Oil, Fig Essential Oil. In an emergency, vanilla extract.

gold/silver: Yes, and also platinum.

hometown: Denver, Colorado

insomnia: Nope

job title: Medical Language Specialist

kids: Two (son, 22; daughter 8)

living arrangements: 1888 Queen Anne (our third and most expensive child) with my family, pets, and Harvey's cookie jar collection

most admired trait: Wicked sense of humor

number of sexual partners: It's a prime number.

overnight hospital stays: Childbirth, dehydration, hemorrhage

phobia: Riding lawnmowers

quote: Whut?

reading: Sugar Among the Freaks and am amazed!

siblings: I had one sister, who died last August.

time I usually wake up: 3:45 (if you need a wake up call, I'm available).

unusual talent: I am one heckuva poker player

vegetable I refuse to eat: Fried pickles--wrong on so many levels

worst habit: Perfectionist

x-rays: Bitewings are my weakness, although I'm partial to Panorex.

yummy foods I make: Milky Way cake is my newest confection. I'm not the best cook I know, but I am an excellent (and spontaneous) seasoner. You give me four ingredients and a spice rack--I can usually come up with something very edible.

zodiac sign: Cancer

_______
10: Summer hats that I own (plus a ballcap emblazoned with OUT FOR TROUT and an old straw fedora that's my secret weapon in bass fishing).

9: Pages of poetry in my summer workshop manuscript

8: Days till MFA

7: Books read for the reading list

6: New poetry drafts (4 are crap, 1 is puzzling, 1 is exciting)

5: Pairs of Nikes clotting my entry (this is amazing, because only 4 people live here and I wear Skechers)

4: Little Yodas sitting on my desk (although I loathe Star Wars, love Yoda I do)

3: Days till i'm 7 to the second power

2: Cups of coffee brought to me (one a.m. and one p.m.) every day. I am a spoiled girl who's slightly hyper.

1: Best husband and he lives here. I have a hosta garden now, where last week there was only mud and new steps where there was a rotten deck.

0: People with whom I'd change places

Dirt Under My Fingernails

Orange Prelude (solid fluorescent orange, early bloomer)
When I Dream (ruby outer petals with firefly-green throat--my favorite--reminds me of the old Crystal Gale song, too)
Siloam Star (yield-yellow, small front daylily)
Red Ribbons (tall spider lily, graceful as a Ghanan--this one is gorgeous and Harvey's favorite)
Strawberry Candy (pink and peachy-red with deeper red "lozenge" center--the "prettiest" but not the coolest--see above)

These are the 50 new daylilies we've planted in front of our house. When I Dream, Siloam Star, and Strawberry Candy are blooming. This gives us 9 daylily varieties total, which is enough. We have over 350 blooms right now--wish you could see it!

We (well, I) laid out, and then we (well, Harvey) planted the hosta garden (new side garden) and added ferns dug at Harvey's family farm. Caladiums are coming up "a treat," as my great-grandfather would say, but my bleeding hearts, well, didn't even break the soil, and our hydrangeas are sporting beautiful leaves but puny little mopheads.

We bought the new daylilies and hostas from a lily farm outside our town. There were HUNDREDS of blooms--not only daylilies, but cannas, callas, stargazers, Asiatics...doubles, triples, bicolors, tricolors, spots, streaks, spirals, variegated foliage (callas). I felt, well, plain in front of such a riot. We don't even have freckles, although Harvey has a very cute mole on his right cheek.

I wish the field above was ours--but we don't have that much sun for a full-on garden spot. (The photo's from a place where we've ordered bulbs before). Shade gardening is much harder to plan. Hopefully these hostas will be as beautiful in the ground as they are in the sketchbook.

I miss the barenakedladies/magic lilies at our other house. Maybe we can find some and transplant.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

This gives new meaning to "I'm just holding it for a friend."

Word of the Day (and "maggie and milly and molly and may")

I wish I were littoral, literally.

How It Was Once In Our Country--Eavan Boland

In those years I owned a blue plate,
blue from the very edges to the centre
ocean-blue, the sort of under-wave blue
a mermaid could easily dive down into and enter.

When I looked at the plate I saw the mouth
of a harbour, an afternoon without a breath
of air, the evening clear all the way to Howth
and back, the sky a paler blue further to the south.

Consider the kind of body that enters blueness,
made out of dead-end myth and mischievous
whispers of an old, borderless
existence where the body's meaning was both more
and less.

Sea-trawler, land-siren: succubus to all the dreams
land has of ocean, of its old home.
She must have witnessed deaths. Of course she did.
Some say she stayed down there to escape the screams.

_______

She is one of my favorites--who else would split the lines in stanza 3 the way she did? (This is a real question and not a rhetorical one! A QUIZ--I feel like a teacher).

"The Blues Don't Get No Bluer"

The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives
I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star- the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package. He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body,like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but I sometimes think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand,but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

William Matthews

Writer's Cramp--Deep Breath...and Start Again

I finished my manuscript for the second MFA session two days ago--typed and proofed and worried and read aloud and paced and paced and twirled my chair in tight little pirouettes of panic, fretted and fretted and counted on my fingers (oh, Joe, I miss you)...Finally, I found four I didn't want to shred and sent 'em off.

Remembering Lamaze breathing and trying to calm myself into timing, which is everything and so close to timid...

These poems aren't so accomplished as my first semester's packet--but they're more me. Does that make any sense--well, it does to me, because I can write a safe little brown-paper-packages-tied-up-in-string poem easily ...but that poem will have little to do with me, or my life, or my interests, or my sanity (lack thereof), and hopefully these newer poems do.

I have a rhyming couplet poem in there, though--just in case you think I don't write those anymore. It's about flowers, patio furniture, and a former neighbor.

(UPDATE TO KENTUCKY LIST BELOW: All houseplants, from mother-in-law's tongue to cacti, are "flowers." Blooming is not the point, or maybe it is).

Here in Kentucky...where "sucker" refers to tobacco, not to lollipops or the gullible, and "fickinto" is a state of mind...

Possums sleep in the middle of the road with their feet in the air. (They're not roadkill--yet).

Squirrels will eat anything (except possum).

Raccoons will test your watermelon crop and let you know when it's ripe.

If it grows, it sticks. If it crawls, it bites. If it's a snake, it's maybe pizenous.

A tractor is NOT an all-terrain vehicle. They do get stuck.

"Onced" and "twiced" are words.

It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy. (If you gather them up at the grocery, you are "a-herding the silver buffalo").

"Upanunder" means underneath.

"Fixinto" is one word. (Variant spelling is fickinto).

There's no such thing as "lunch." There's "dinner" and then there's "supper." You don't cook any meal, not even breakfast. You fix it. You can be a good cook, but you fix all your meals.

Sweet tea is appropriate for all meals, and you start drinking it when you're two.

"Backards and forwards" means, "I know everything about you."

"Jeet?" is actually a phrase meaning "Did you eat?"

You don't have to wear a watch because it doesn't matter what time it is.

You work until you're done or it's too dark to see (known as dark-thirty).

You measure distance in minutes.

You have to switch from heat to air conditioning in the same day.

You see a car running in a store parking lot with no one in it, no matter what time of the year/time of the day.

Fix is verb that doesn't always mean "repair." Example: "I am fixing to go to the store." "I am fixing me a little snack."

All the festivals across the state are named after plants, insects, or animals. (I was the 5th Grade Possum Princess).

You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.

You carry jumper cables in your car... for your OWN car. (Why is this weird???)

You know what "cow tipping" is.

You only own four spices: salt, pepper, hot sauce, and what's affectionately referred to as "Terbasker."

The local papers cover national and international news on one page and six pages for local gossip and sports.

The first day of deer season is a holiday. (And kids are released from school for Tater Day).

You find 90 degrees Fahrenheit "a little warm."

You know all four seasons: almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas.

Going to Wal-mart is a social activity known as "Goin' a-walmartin," or "Off to Wally World."

You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good soup bean weather.

A carbonated soft drink isn't a soda, cola, or pop...it's a Coke, regardless of brand or flavor. Example: "What kinna coke you want?" "A small Coke--make it a R.C."

Fried catfish is the third white meat.

You know what lard is.

You know what a moon pie is, and why the Coke you drink with it has to be R.C.

_____________________
Every one of these is true for me--yet I have never tipped a cow. I'm fixing to when I turn 50.


PS "W-H-A-T" is pronounced "whut."


PSS The phrase "hooked up like a boy dog" is used in polite conversation.

PSSS Red-eye gravy is made from the grease of country ham to which cold coffee is added.

PSSSS You may say po-tay-to/to-may-to, he may say po-tah-to/to-mah-to--here we say taters and maters. And I am fixing to fix stuffed maters for for supper tonight.

Slow-Mo's of the Cosmos

You need to see these--they're fabulous. My favorite may be the clouds that puff out like Reddi-Whip. I also like the Colorado ones--since that's my birth state.

I think there are poems everywhere in these.

Emily and John--and maybe "Faith in a Tree"

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

This by the divine Miss Em--and this by NYT on John Updike. (from "Gods and Monsters," by Gail Caldwell)

For all the hosannas or complaints aimed at John Updike, we tend to regard him as the author of a certain kind of novel: gorgeous prose, white-guy existential despair, sex in the suburbs. These are the cliches about Updike, of course, grounded in fact but limited and unfair. In his half-century as a grand master, he has written, sometimes beautifully and sometimes badly, about art, politics, witches, science, Shakespeare, and yes, lots and lots of brightly lit sex. But his greatest and most persistent eloquence as a subject has been faith -- faith in some semblance or possibility of God, faith in the crack of light that defines a day, faith in the presence, joyful or anguished, of the "inaudible tumult" of the soul.

I think this is a dead-on evaluation of John Updike's thematic concern--this same "vision quest" is evident in his books on art, too. I have Terrorist on my to-read-after-MFA list.

_____

The NYT also had a recent survey of the best book of American fiction published in the last 25 years: Beloved was the top vote-getter. Updike's Rabbit books were high in the ratings, too. Toni Morrison is a fabulous writer--so is Mr. Updike. She writes gorgeous, emotional "poetic" prose--he is master of the sentence, of characterization. I don't know for whom I'd vote--does it have to be either/or? I was surprised to see that some writers really slammed Morrison--Cynthia Ozick, for one. I think she's retreading the ground where Stanley Crouch (think that's his name) first trampled on Beloved. Morrison is a genius--I don't know whether I prefer Song of Solomon to Beloved, but I'm glad for me it doesn't have to be either. (And Song's outside the 25-year limit).

Where were the other women on the list? Marilynn Robinson's Housekeeping was there--but where was Gilead? Joyce Carol Oates? Anne Tyler? Shirley Hazzard? Jane Smiley--Horse Heaven and A Thousand Acres are fabulous, totally different reads.

And, if Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From qualified, where was Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute? Where's Andre Dubus?

Edwin P. Jones made the list--and should for some time to come...his writing's smart and heartbreaking. And so did Tim O'Brien..."The Things They Carried" is the sort of fiction to which I aspire. I cannot think of a better story.

Don Delillo's work I have trouble reading. Ditto for Cormac McCarthy--but the work there is worth it. I like big books, though, and I wonder about Richard Price--where's Clockers? No one else writes like he does...

Just curious...I guess I'd have to expand the list and add Nabokov, N. West, H. James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor--on a list of best American fiction writers of the 20th century? Whom do you think deserves to be there?

Add John Cheever and serve immediately...

"Gacela of Unforeseen Love"

This is Lorca's birthday. Here's a poem that I've always loved.


Gacela of Unforeseen Love
(translation by W.S. Merwin )

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

Between plaster and jasmines, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say always,

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death

BB, What's Behind Those Pearls?

This is just too weird!

Ladies' Home Companion--WARNING Gushing Follows

From the shelter/rescue website: The Papillon's original use was that of ladies' companion. It has never had any job other than to grace the home and heart.

We've been to the pound again and found a 2-year-old Papillon, already housebroken, able to heel, sit, and stay. His name is Frodo (I guess because of the ears and hairy feet). He's a great dog--his previous owners did not take care of him. He's been starved and never let outside--Despite this, the animal shelter said he had the worst case of fleas they'd ever seen--those must be some fleas if Animal Control was amazed. Despite the infestation, his fur is beautiful (tricolor), and he has the most alert, adorable face. I wish my eyebrows were as well groomed as his!

He's had his Frontline flea medicine, and after that he'll visit the vet, then come home with us Saturday morning (there's a 48-hour waiting period--24 for the shelter, and then the vet keeps him overnight after neutering). He loves us and Raleigh, and he has been kept in a room with cats, which he adores. We'll see what the cats--Loco the Grey and Shadow the Good--think about him when Frodo comes here on Saturday. I think he'll be intimidated since he only weighs 10 pounds and Loco is easily 13 pounds. Shadow and he will be buddies immediately--Loco will take some time. He's the alpha animal here.

When Raleigh, Harvey, and Daniel go back to school, I'll have a reason to break away from transcription and go for walks now.

I encourage everyone who wants a pet to check out shelters--there are animals who will respond to the slightest bit of caring with lifelong love. Also, please spay/neuter your pets.

Walt goes metrical!

When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman, born on this day in 1819.

I love the end of this poem. What iambs.

Take It to The Limit

When there's nothing to believe in
Still you're coming back, you're running back
You're coming back for more
Sabres in overtime!

Found Poem: Filched From Peter and AJ, & Straight into My Notebook

Apologia
(Snow White's Stepmother Speaks)

O, to be above it all, o to be
above appetite--yet no animal
could ever resist such luxury
the heart roasted this way is exquisite

FOR ANYONE WHO SAYS POETRY DOESN'T MATTER

Read this!

Memememememememememm

Dogs/Cats: Two cats--Loco and Shadow.

Essential Electronics: Computer, bedside reading lamp (bronze mouse)

Favorite Perfume: Fleur d'Interdit by Givenchy, although I wish I could find a perfume that smelled just like tomatoes.

Gold/Silver: Both, plus platinum and Bakelite!

Hometown: Birthplace was Denver, Colorado, but I'm a Kentuckian now

Insomnia: Yawn

Job Title: Medical Language Specialist

Kids: Two

Living Arrangements: Owned by a Queen Anne house; live with my husband, children, 2 cats, Hagrid the hermit crab, and the world's most feared pair of blue jays (even the mailman cringes)

Most admired trait: I can recite the alphabet backwards in less than 20 seconds.

Number of Sexual Partners: Z, Y, X, ...Do you think I'd really post this on the internet?

Overnight Hospital Stays: Yes, for childbirth, dehydration, tonsillectomy, miscarriages. Once, when our hospital was on lockdown, I had to stay on the job and transcribe.

Phobia: Riding lawnmowers--don't even ask.

Religion: I don't consider myself to be "religious" in a holier-than-thou sense. I'm a Christian, and that means I try to act like Jesus, not force others to be more like me. Jesus taught tolerance and only showed his anger towards those who use His church to their own ends. I think the GOP could learn a lesson from this.

Siblings: My only sister died of breast cancer last August.

Time I usually wake up: 3:45 a.m.

Unusual Talent: I can shake my eyeballs.

Vegetable I Refuse to Eat: Cannot think of one.

Worst Habit: I ask too many questions. Do you think that's a bad habit? Really? Why? Are you sure?

X-Rays: Yes, and also ultrasound, nuclear medicine scans, and MRI. And I love the word "bitewing" as in dental x-rays.

Yummy Foods I Make: Pasta alla mara. Barbequed ribs marinated in beer. Spinach salad (mine is a killer). BGT sandwiches. Blue-cheese burgers. No-Bake Alaska. Mounds cake (that's why my husband married me).

Zodiac Sign: Cancer

Born on May 25

Loafing--Raymond Carver

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw-
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I've set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.

______


Dolor--Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

(is this Bartleby's dramatic monologue?)

_____

And the best Ralph Waldo Emerson quote I've found:

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

(I wonder what Munch would think about that?)

Keats and the Monk

"But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things a he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence. “


From Disputed Questions by Thomas Merton

_____

Note to self: How is this like/unlike Negative Capability?