Memento Mori: Last Poem of 2007

The Night Before Christmas from J. Cleese

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Genius, sheer genuis. Merry Christmas!

Although It's Been Said Many Times...

Nothing says it quite like these three Christmas carolers!

I hope your holidays are wonderfully bewitching, and that old Sandy Claws is good to you all.

Peace on earth and good will toward poets everywhere, Pamela

Q: How Is a Writer Like a Writing Desk? (Sincerest Apologies to Carroll/The Mad Hatter)

I have the answer. Thanks, Harvey!

Morceaux--Baking Day

My house smells of cinnamon and apples, cider and sugar, cardamon and cloves. The Mixmaster is pinking away. Broomstraws are gathered by the oven in little bundles. Today we'll be eating cake, cake, cake (and maybe apple pies, but certainly not a fruitcake among them). My newest recipe is from my friend and office partner Janice, who's given me the recipe for Sylvia Plath Confessional Cake (it's German chocolate). I'll let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, here are some morceaux for you, which I'm framing for my study.




I am terribly jealous of that wallpaper in angelfood and of the swan settee and teapot in tea for two.

All I Want for Christmas--The Whole Cover!

I have eight of the bangles pictured here. About 57 more to go!

Parting is such sweet sorrow...and revenge!

My classes have ended, and what a superlative semester this has been. In the capstone class (focusing on villanelle, sestina, sonnet, lyric, and narrative), we ended with "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and compared it to a poem by LaWanda Walters, found in Best New Poets (from The Antioch Review--see link). Entitled "Her Art," it's a sestina that responds to Bishop's poem, especially the (Write It!) parenthetical. Everything I'd wanted the students to learn--that poetry comes from poesis--the made thing; that the impulses of Dionysus (image and the body, wildness) and Apollo (ordering and rhythmic unity) are the conflicting muses and complementary music of poetry; that the poetic line balances breath and belief, syllable and stress; sound and silence; that the stanza shapes both pleasure and pain, desire and death/dearth of desire; that a poem on the page has a form like sculpture and conveys its shape into the world like sculpture(defined by what's chiseled away, as much as by what's left); that the poem spoken comes from the body through image and lives on past the body also through image (inspiration/expiration)--every one of the semester's goals has a place in this wonderful poem. Read it--you won't be disappointed. I've linked to Ms. Walter's sestina above, which definitely belongs in Best New Poets, and, in my opinion, next year's BAP.

This is my penultimate semester to teach, and I've been so incredibly blessed by the caliber of work I've been allowed to read and discuss. Four of the students this semester are so innately, so insanely talented and such hard workers that I am ready to preorder their first books from Amazon: J, the 2 D's, and S from Cyprus (who's writing in his third language, English)--Keep it up. I believe in you, in your work and in your hard work, and poetry's the one thing I never lie about. (There's another: If you have lipstick on your teeth, I'm the one who'll tell you BEFORE the group photo). Seriously, if these guys keep writing with this level of dedication and determination and damned disregard for anything but the musical imperatives of language--their books will be on your shelves in 10 to 15 years.

)))))))
Lest you think that I am a selfless teacher (and I am pretty generous with my students, even though I am a hardass grader of portfolios), I am very jealous of all the other CW professors at my school. Every one of them--all the the fiction and creative nonfiction teachers, the full-time poets, even the part-time magazine staff--are making the trek to NYC. I'm the only CW teacher NOT going to AWP this year. I'm disappointed but broke, and the trip is way too expensive this year for my adjunct salary. (I console myself--barely--with the fact that this year, I received a raise and a new computer).

My revenge? I've volunteered to sub in every one of the creative writing classes (fiction and nonfiction) for the week they'll be out, and I'm going to use that week to to make all students fall in love with poetry. Don't think I won't do it, either! I'll be armed with Elizabeth Bishop (poetry, fiction and letters!), chocolate cake, and STARBUCKS coffee. When everyone transfers to poetry class in the fall, the affluent professors will have only their travel vouchers to blame. MWAHH!

THE FAB FOUR--The Best Books I've Read in 2007

Here are my year-end selections:

Elegy for the Dying Dog--Daniel Anderson

Tomorrow he will die.
For now, though, see him drowsing in the shade.
A cardinal cracks the red whip of its flight.
Frail butterflies-the metalmark,
The spicebush swallowtail-are lobbed
Like painted tissue on the air.
The wind, as it might carve on fields of wheat,
Combs over his black coat. I've set him there
As water irises prepare
Their gold unfolding in the rain-fresh pond.
Last meal: Steamed rice. Grilled strips of steak.
Last lazy afternoon. Last hour
To watch the clouds drift like meringues,
To watch them blended into tones of peach
Then deepen to the dusky tints of plums.
One last command to heed or disobey,
But it's not me who's calling Virgil now,
It's Death who's calling, calling, calling,
And he comes.

(Book: Drunk in Sunlight)
_____________________________

Violence Against Women--Eavan Boland

Once in the West Pennines I was shown
the source of the Industrial Revolution-

the first streams harnessed to the wheels
which drove the mills which spun out textiles

which emptied out the cottages and hillsides
and sent men and women down to Hades.

(Fast water and mountains without lime
and greed all complicit in the shame.)

Real men and women, flesh and blood
and long dead and ready to be understood-

and not those abandoned and unsaved
women who died here who never lived:

Mindless, sexless, birthless, only sunned
by shadows, only dressed in muslin,

shepherdesses of the English pastoral
waiting for the return of an English April

that never came and never will again.
Wheels turned, the jenny worked, a plain-

spoken poetry was chanted by the flow
and finished them. They were the last to know

what happened in this north-facing twilight,
the aftermath I saw there, staring at

an old site of injury, a hurt
that never healed and never can. O art,

O empire and the arranged relations,
so often covert, between power and cadence,

tell me what it is you have done with
the satin bonnets and the pastel sun, with

the women gathering their unreal sheep
into real verse for whom no one will weep?

(Book: Domestic Violence)
_____________________________
Harvesting the Cows--Ellen Bryant Voigt

Stringy, skittery, thistle-burred, rib-etched,
they're like a pack of wolves lacking a sheep
but also lacking the speed, the teeth, the wits-

they're heifers culled from the herd, not worth the cost
of feeding and breeding and milking, let loose on a hill
one-third rock, one-third blackberry bramble.

And now, the scrub stung black by hard frost,
here come the young farmer and his father,
one earnest, one wizened, wind-whipped, sun-whipped,

who make at the gate, from strewn boards and boughs,
a pen, and park at its near end the compact
silver trailer, designed for two horses-

it waits at the mouth of the rutted tractor-trail
descending through trees, an artificial gulley.
Up goes Junior, hooting, driving them down.

So much bigger than wolves, these sixteen cows:
head to flank or flank to scrawny flank,
they can't turn around; but what they know is no:

some splash over the walls of the small corral,
one, wall-eyed, giddy, smashes away
the warped plank that's propped on the far side,

crashing across alders and wet windfall
in a plausible though explosive dance, which prompts
another to aim herself at the same hole,

too late: the planks back up, she's turned to the clump
and soon swimming among them, their white necks
extended like the necks of hissing geese,

but so much bigger than geese. When the younger man
wraps one neck in his arms, the cow rears up
and he goes down, plaid wool in shit-slicked mud;

so then the elder takes her by the nose-
I mean, he puts two fingers and a thumb
inside the nostrils, pulls her into the trailer.

The rest shy and bunch away from the gate;
a tail lifts for a stream of piss; one beast
mounts another-panic that looks erotic-

and the herdsmen try guile, a pail of grain
kept low, which keeps the head of the lead cow low
as though resigned, ready for the gallows.

The silver loaf opens, swallows them in,
two by two by two, and takes them away.
Hams need to be smoked, turkeys to be dressed out

here in Arcadia, where a fine cold spit
needles the air, and the birch and beech let go
at last their last tattered golden rags.

(Book: Messenger)
______________________
Another fabulous book that I've read in 2007 is Peter Pereira's What's Written on the Body. If you'd like to read a fulsome review of this fine book, check out New Madrid: Journal of Contemporary Literature, available in January 2008, which will be prominently featured (i.e., free) at the Murray State MFA table at AWP in New York (which, unfortunately, I will not be (wo)manning this year). Copies are also available via mail and e-mail request.

This is a themed issue, entitled Mexico in the Heartland, and it also features a drawing by Harvey Parker, some artist I know (in the biblical sense). The guest editor for Spring 2008 will be poet Nicky Beer, featured in the 2007 Best American Poetry.

Please submit your work in poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction (online submissions only). The website's linked above.

If you'd like your book reviewed in this journal, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm looking for another book to review, this time either poetry or fiction. Any takers? Any suggestions?

PS Next on my reading list for 2007 is Radish King which I'm saving for after finals. I know if I start, I will fall headlong into the world of brilliant, savage poems and won't resurface in time for Hart Crane and 40 student portfolios. (Well, 18--I've marked 22 of them already).

Rex and Rosa and Scarlet Ribbons

Intelligence Guided by Experience: Nero



Experience Guided by Intelligence: Rosa

From today's Writer's Almanac/NPR: Two of my heroes are featured.

It's the birthday of American detective novelist Rex Stout, (books by this author) born in Noblesville, Indiana (1886), who was a hack magazine journalist for a while and then developed a popular savings-account scheme for schools that made him a great deal of money. So he retired to Paris and at the age of 46, he wrote his first detective novel featuring Nero Wolfe, who solves crimes even though he weighs more than 300 pounds, collects orchids, and never leaves his house. The first Nero Wolfe novel was called Fer-de-Lance, and it was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1934. It was a huge success, and Stout went on to write another Wolfe novel almost every year for the rest of his life.

On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, resulting in her arrest. At the time, she said that she was just too tired to stand that day, but she later admitted that she'd challenged the law on purpose, because she thought it was wrong. Her protest worked, sparking a yearlong boycott of the buses by blacks in Montgomery that helped lead to the end of segregation.

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Today's also World Aids Day. I urge you to remember and give. Many of the most important people in my life died of AIDS--one more was a suicide whose HIV status he took as a death sentence. D--I'll never forget your humor, your crooked-man smile, your dancing. J--Your poems, which survived you, will live as long as I do. S--We met 38 years ago on this date. You will always be my first love and best friend. I'm so glad this date is World Aids Day. I will never forget and I will continue to give and remember you, not just today but every day.

Here's the inspiration for the quilt I made for you:

W. H. Auden, ''In Praise of Limestone''
Hart Crane, ''The Bridge''
Hart Crane, ''Voyages''
T. S. Eliot, ''The Waste Land''
T. S. Eliot, ''Four Quartets''

James Merrill, ''The Book of Ephraim''
John Berryman, ''77 Dream Songs''
William Carlos Williams, ''Spring and All''
William Carlos Williams, ''Asphodel, That Greeny Flower''
John Ashbery, ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror''

Elizabeth Bishop, ''At the Fishhouses''
Robert Frost, ''After Apple Picking''
Robert Frost, ''Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening''
Robert Frost, ''Directive''
Robert Hayden, ''Middle Passage''

Ezra Pound, ''The Cantos''
Ezra Pound, ''Homage to Sextus Propertius''
Edwin Arlington Robinson, ''Eros Turannos''
James Schuyler, ''The Morning of the Poem''
Gertrude Stein, ''Tender Buttons''

Wallace Stevens, ''The Auroras of Autumn''
Wallace Stevens, ''The Comedian as the Letter C''
James Wright, ''Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota''

These are the best poems of the 20th century as voted on by a panel of poets/assembled by David Lehman. I just found this list and thought I’d think about how I’d change it. I’d remove Pound and Crane from this list. Robinson would have to go, too. I’d substitute Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” for “At the Fishhouses” and add “Crusoe in England” (I’m all about the volcanoes). I’d also add “The Moose,” for the powerful opening sentence (yes, I mean sentence). Moore’s “The Octopus” would make my cut. Robert Hayden is a great choice, but I’d prefer “Those Winter Sundays.” Ditto with Williams—I’d choose“Paterson.” I’d also have to include “Facing It” by Kumunyakaa. Also, where’s my pal J. Alfred Prufrock? Where’s Lowell--“Skunk Hour”? Where’s Galway Kinnell? Where’s Roethke (“I knew a Woman” is my personal favorite)? Certainly Hecht deserves a shout-out, too, for The Venetian Vespers. “The Book of Yolek” for me is about as good as a sestina gets. Frost could be better represented here: “Design,” “Birches” and “Home Burial” are better choices. Stevens has to have added “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and“Sunday Morning,” a poem that sings my soul every time I read it. I don’t like Schuyler’s or Merrill’s work—I’m sure this is my own bias, as it is with Crane away from the big design. As for Auden—I’d have to use “Musee des Beaux Arts.” (I think of him as a British poet, but will definitely give a green card to “Musee des Beaux Arts”). I don't know what to do with G. Stein--she is superb but uncategorizable.

Here’s my list, which isn't ranked:
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T. S. Eliot, ''Four Quartets''
John Berryman, ''77 Dream Songs''
William Carlos Williams, ''Paterson”

Elizabeth Bishop, ''In the Waiting Room”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose”
Robert Frost, ''Design”
Robert Frost, ''Home Burial”

Robert Frost, “Birches”
Robert Hayden, ''Those Winter Sundays”
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Anthony Hecht, “Venetian Vespers”

Anthony Hecht, “The Book of Yolek”
Marianne Moore, “The Octopus”
Marianne Moore, “The Steeple Jack”
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”
Yusef Kumunyakaa, “Facing It”

Galway Kinnell, “The Fundamental Project of Technology”
Galway Kinnell, “The Book of Nightmares”
Mark Doty, “To a Green Crab’s Shell”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman” (This is my favorite poem and one I associate with my engagement of 3 days).

How did I do, as compared to a panel of experts? They had 23—I had 25. We have two poems in common.

Nest Egg? I'd Like to Have a Dozen...

GIFTS I'D LIKE TO GIVE:

I've always had a hunger for gaud, going for baroque at every turn. I thought at first that I should be the one to have this egg, since I'm of Russian extraction (my maiden name in its non-anglicized format is Belenko), and also it matches my Mix-Master (the most expensive thing in pink enamel I will ever own). On further pondering, and since I am such a selfless person, I think that Her Imperial Radishness should be the recipient, since it would look marvelous with her tiara and would be a fitting royalty (pun intended) for her upcoming book.

"Prettier by Optics"--My Russian Horoscope/Apologia Part 2--Reasons to Learn

RUSSIAN HOROSCOPE

Cancer, if you, until now, think that sun-protecting glasses bear only in summer, urgently get rid of this error--leave for the drugstore after growing prettier by optics. This council is urgent, in the first place, for those representatives of sign, who plan to conduct the begun week at the mountain-skiing health resort. But also for all remaining Cancers, it now is worthwhile to recall about the fact that the ultraviolet is harmful both for the eyes and for the tender skin around them. You will place dark glasses into the bag and put on them, as soon as the sun will look.

I just love the idea of the sun looking at me.

_____
APOLOGIA PART TWO

I believe in teachers. I believe that poetry teaches the "unteachable" student.

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SONNET FOR JOE--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.

_____

After I'd handed in one of the worst poems in the history of undergraduate writing, one of my teachers gave me "Sonnet for Joe" with the following passage rewritten in broad strokes of red FLAIR (I still see the letters before me, as distinctive as Chinese calligraphy).

I see my mistake. You did not write/to contend. Do you see yours?

He also gave me a copy of the poem "Collapsars" (from McPherson's book Radiation). This poem is one in which sections of poems "talk to each other" and is an influence on my own poetry to each day.

At Thanksgiving this year, I'll give thanks for that professor (now deservedly a big shot at a MFA program you all know about) for having the wisdom to believe that poetry mattered, that every student's work mattered, that 98.6 of a secretary's life mattered. I was and am that secretary. He also taught that good poetry teaches us where our own poems go wrong. That's a trick I use with my own students, in his honor: Match up the poem with the student, and the student can learn more from the poem about revision than she'll ever learn otherwise.

What teacher (or student) are you grateful for this Thanksgiving?

Reasons to Live: Apologia Part 1

I believe that stories save us. I believe that beauty saves us. This poem has saved me countless times.

The Impossible

Winter's last rain and a light I don't recognize
through the trees and I come back in my mind
to the man who made me suck his cock
when I was seven, in sunlight between boxcars.
I thought I could leave him standing there
in the years, half smile on his lips,
small hands curled into small fists,
but after he finished, he held my hand in his
as if astonished until the houses were visible
just beyond the railyard. He held my hand
but before that he slapped me hard on the face
when I would not open my mouth for him.
I do not want to say his whole hips
slammed into me, but they did, and a black wave
washed over my brain, changing me
so I could not move among my people in the old way.

On my way home I stopped in the churchyard
to try and find a way to stay alive.
In the branches a red-wing flitted, warning me.
In the rectory Father prepared
the body and the blood for mass
but God could not save me from a mouthful of cum.
That afternoon some lives turned away from the light.
He taught me how to move my tongue around.
In his hands he held my head like a lover.
Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

Bruce Weigl

More than the Staff of Life? Music in The Last Supper

Check it out: A requiem may be hidden in the painting The Last Supper. The article's more fascinating than The da Vinci Code and certainly better written.

The requiem is beautiful, too.

Homage Poems: Asia and Whitney Bring It!

Listen as my students and I take on Berryman ("Dream Song 14"), Bishop ("One Art"), and Wallace Stevens ("The Emperor of Ice Cream"), on National Public Radio. I am so proud of these poems. This was one of the most fun writing prompts we've tried.

I also take on George Steinbrenner in my entry in the Joe Torre Haiku Contest sponsored by the NY Times. (See below). Thanks again to Jilly for the link.

An Age-Old Question Solved?

Every day I learn from Jilly's Poetry Hut Blog (link above). Here's the latest: What's a Poem?

Our 214 classes are writing definitions of poetry. I should have known jurisprudence would beat us to the punch.

[Judge] Keenan's 79-page decision included...a detailed summary of what constitutes a poem.

"A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary," Keenan wrote. "A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization." In a footnote, he cited testimony that before "World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter." Now, "the popular definition of poem has become much more lenient."

Among the factors in Keenan's decision: Whether a 1920 letter from Parker to fellow wit Robert Benchley, written in rhyming couplets, was easily defined as a poem. Silverstein testified that it wasn't and that he had demonstrated creativity by including it in his book.

On the contrary, Keenan wrote, "where a line does not fit within the margins, it is indented below and kept apart from the next line in order to preserve the rhyme scheme.

"The Letter to Robert Benchley is objectively recognizable as a poem."

Would that my own writing were thus seen that way!

Hard to Believe She'd Be 79 Today...

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it.
Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Partway Back

Anne Sexton's Transformations is a touchstone book for me. Every year, I find something astounding in the poems.

"Pity! Party of One! Your table is ready..."

It's a beautiful advertisement, very seductive (love the red lipstick), but....



When will I be the one sitting in front of that lovely typewriter? I'm giving up on emails, much less National Novel Writing Month. And writing poetry--what's that?

(I'm doing well these days just to find two shoes and my car keys).

I sat upon the shore....

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the giant squid beneath me
Shall I at least set my schoolbooks in order?

Take-off on Eliot for Harry Potter.

I'd really, really like to try this with J. Alfred Prufrock--(substituting Dumbledore), but I've already made fun of this poem once.

"When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple"

To the Coworker Who Asked Me If I Agreed with This Poem (and who always teases me about my inappropriate footwear), I offer the following.



Yes, I'm wearing them. Yes, I'm 50. If you want to make something of it, be advised that these shoes are also considered weapons in 11 states (Steve Madden Korect Mary Janes. $129.99. Also available in teal and mustard suede, as well as basic black).

Adieu, Jon Anderson

The Secret Of Poetry

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Jon Anderson (from In Sepia)

Va-Jay-Jay: Origins and a Mini-Rant

Most of the article is pretty informative--I'm always interested in how words enter the language--but this excerpt was really exasperating.

Another view was offered by John H. McWhorter, a linguist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who pointed out that the women associated with introducing the word — Ms. Winfrey, the Miranda Bailey character on “Grey’s Anatomy” — are middle-age African-Americans.

“The reason that vajayjay has caught on, I think, is because there is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,” Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around.”

I find this to be a condescending, sexist, ageist, and stereotypical viewpoint. Chandra Wilson is 38 years old. She is not middle-aged. I am 50 years old. That is middle-aged, heading into AARP territory. Ellen Pompeo will be 38 years old in a week. Sandra Oh is 36 years old. That's not middle-aged, either, but interesting how none of them was mentioned as middle aged--just Winfrey (who is) and Wilson (who isn't). If I understand the age of a surgical resident correctly (after over 25 years working in a teaching hospital, for a medical school, for a state health department, and a community college, all of whom rotated medical students and residents), Wilson may be playing a character who's a little younger than her actual age. Where does this classification come from other than a stereotype?

I'd also like to point out the awkwardly constructed last sentence. (A linguist wrote that?)

Goodbye, Porter: Nostalgia for the C/W Days

Mr. Sequins himself died today at age 80, after an extended illness. Besides giving Dolly Parton her start (anyone else remember the Boxes of Breeze spots?), Porter shared his stage with James Brown and also produced soul albums. When chided by some of his country music cohorts, he said that he saw nothing wrong with this, that music was colorblind, and also that country music and soul music had "a lot in common." Go, Porter!

I also remember as punishment for fighting, my mom forcing my sister and me to hold hands and sit through an entire episode of the "PW show." Those wagonwheel boots would sound out stiletto toward the stage--then that pompadour hair would wave, that lanky frame would lean forward to sing, and that rhinestone suit would glitter like rainbows under the studio spotlights...Gosh, I am getting old.

New Madrid Faultline

I've been hard at work on a magazine interview, charming a drawing out of Harvey, teaching, reading, and trying to write something. Is it typical for writing to suck as you approach your thesis semester? I'm too worried about my introduction...

I'm going to have another local reading, and this is the biography written for me: Too smarmy? The picture looks like a glamor shot, and in real life I am about as glamorous as lichen.

Pamela Johnson Parker is a Certified Medical Language Specialist and adjunct professor in creative writing at Murray State University. She will receive her MFA degree in poetry this summer from Murray State University, where she's studied with poets Daniel Anderson, Philip Stephens, Brian Barker, Ann Neelon, and Nicky Beer and fiction writers Dale Ray Phillips and Leah Stewart. She is a member of Formalista: Women Who Write in Form, and after 300 straight rejections, her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Six Sentences and the Chicago Cicada Anthology, as well as on NPR.

Just like Donna Summer....

My students and I are On The Radio! Turn in to hear my beginning students read some goldfish poems. I am so proud of them and honored to be part of their class. We're doing several updates on the local NPR station.

Also, I am tentatively scheduled to be part of a reading at Southern Illinois University during the spring. If you're anywhere near, please come.

Starring--Homer Simpson!

On this date, one of my favorite writers was born. I wanted to write my masters thesis on his work, but was dissuaded from doing so by my faculty committee. I still think it's wonderful, wonderful prose.

If you can find a flaw in Miss Lonelyhearts, let me know, as in 30 years I still think it is a supreme fictional work.

Environmental Action Day

To the Reader

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

-- Denise Levertov

How long till the reader encounters this poem and has no idea of polar bear, rainforest, ocean with coral reefs and undisrupted currents?

Global warming is real. Let's do something about it. I'm donating my salary today--won't you join me?

Tying the Not, or "Tie a Not in It"

Only in the South!

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) -- An error in a new law that allows Arkansans of any age -- even toddlers -- to marry with parental consent must be fixed by lawmakers, not an independent commission authorized to correct typos, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Arkansas lawmakers accidentally put an extra "not" in a law about who can get married.

The law, which took effect July 31, was intended to establish 18 as the minimum age to marry, while also allowing pregnant minors to marry with parental consent.

An extraneous "not" in the bill, however, allows anyone who is not pregnant to marry at any age if the parents allow it.

Gov. Mike Beebe declined to call lawmakers into special session to clear up the error, saying there was no imminent crisis. Instead, he said the Arkansas Code Revision Commission, which is authorized to correct typos and technical errors, could make the change, which it did.

A woman who gave her 17-year-old daughter permission to marry based on the old law, which set the minimum marriage age at 17 for boys and 16 for girls, sued in Benton County after officials there denied her a marriage license.

In a decision Wednesday, Circuit Judge Tom J. Keith ruled the commission overstepped its authority because its correction changed the meaning of the law. He said the marriage license should be issued.
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Tag--You're It

1. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
There are so many...Flea markets, tag sales, yard sales...Something old, something new, something borrowed for a generation...

2. How do you take your coffee?
Black as my heart.

3. Who were you in a previous life?
A Tarot card. See above (and also below).

4. Who or what is your greatest influence?
My husband, my kids, and a stranger I met on an airplane. Truly.

5. What is the worst film you ever paid to see?
The Bell Jar.

6. What is the best thing you can buy for a dollar?
See #1. I don't rule anything out. The best buy I've ever made for a dollar was an Alphonse Mucha postcard, (for which I turned down $800).

7. What is the worst present you ever received?
A nearly-dead snake (from my cat Loco, who was extremely proud).

8. What is your favorite word(s)?
The three-syllable way my husband hollers Baby: Bayy-uh-bee. So cute. He grew up in southern California--this is his only southern word. (Speaking of bargains, who else but me could find a surfer-philosopher-artist in the wilds of Big Sandy, Tennessee? LOL).

Honorable mention goes to Montgomery Maxton's reminding me of Chicken McNougats.

Clouds of Controversy--Support Freedom of Expression

ACLU ‘Howls’ Against FCC Destroying the Best Poems of a Generation (10/3/2007)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 3, 2007
Contact: media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC – On the 50th anniversary of a court ruling that deemed Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ not obscene, the American Civil Liberties Union lamented an ironic reversal of First Amendment rights. A New York public radio station chose not to air the poem in its news story commemorating the decision, fearful of massive FCC fines that would have effectively shut down the station. WBAI instead posted the poem online, out of the reach of the FCC.

‘Howl,’ which winds through the beat-era landscape of sex, drugs and madness, contains enough of the FCC’s banned words to crush the $4 million operating budget of Pacifica station WBAI . The fine for ‘Howl’ would have been $325,000 for each word. The FCC has ramped up its power to punish broadcasters that air expletives or indecency, regardless of the intention or cultural relevance.

The following can be attributed to ACLU Legislative Counsel Marv Johnson:

"It’s no longer accurate to say free speech has rolled back to the fifties – it’s worse now. A radio station cannot possibly celebrate the First Amendment by being forced to gag its announcers and point to a website. ‘Howl’ captured the essence of a society on the brink of explosion, and the ‘Howl’ obscenity decision marked a forward march toward greater free speech. If the FCC and our lawmakers want to repeat the repression of the 1950s, they should remember that even then the country was inching toward more freedom, not less."

For more information on a related ACLU First Amendment campaign visit:
www.aclu.org/bleep.

Surprising Results

Take this quiz yourself--are you and the candidate you support a perfect fit?
(PS As a yellow-dog Democrat, I think my score with any Republican candidate was no higher than 35%!)

	Dennis Kucinich Score: 65	Agree Iraq Immigration Taxes Stem-Cell Research Health Care Abortion Social Security Line-Item Veto Energy Marriage Death Penalty	Disagree
-- Take the Quiz! --

\

I was surprised to see where some of the candidates stood on issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty. This includes Edwards, Clinton, Obama...

Here's where I stand on some of the issues.

1. If you don't support the fact that people in love can marry legally, give up your own "automatic rights" of tax advantages (such as the marriage discount with the IRS), group health insurance, and inheritance. Don't take your rights for granted and don't deny them to others. My own church wouldn't marry Harvey and me because I was divorced (even though we are both Christians). This was against their "principles." No church has to change its views on whom it will and will not marry, although in my opinion and understanding of the Scriptures, many should.

2. I believe that capital punishment should have ended on Calvary. Thou shalt not kill means just that.

SUBMIT TO A MOVER AND A SHAKER

Submit to New Madrid Review, named after the New Madrid Fault (and the earthquake that created Reelfoot Lake in Kentucky/Tennessee). There's a special themed issue (Winter 2008) on Mexico in America. Submissions are online, and we'll respond very promptly. Join the ranks of James Galvin, Mark Levine, Mark Jarman, Leah Stewart, Holly Goddard Jones, Dale Ray Phillips, Christopher Buckley, Christopher Davis, Joe Ashby Porter, Pam Durban, T. M. McNally, and Diane Aprile--be published in New Madrid!

Prose Poem Up Today at 6 Sentences

I hope you like today's 6 Sentences. I like it better than the sonnet below.

Thanks for the Proactivity!

Another great move to safeguard freedom!

Let's honor Matthew Shepard's memory and urge President Bush to sign this into law.

Thanks for the Protests

This makes me happy!

The Bill of Rights--Howard Chandler Christy

Individual rights are the most precious of freedoms: freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. These are the reasons I am still proud to be an American.

Read The Nine, and see if you think the Supreme Court still affirms the rights of the individual.

-----------------
Here's my final memorization for September: Hart Crane.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, –
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, – or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, – white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Beyond Here There Be Poems...

See comment.

Adieu, Bip: From The Guardian, England

He was the poet laureate of silence, a melancholy clown with a white face and striped jumper who changed modern theatre and inspired a generation of moonwalking, door-opening street performers.

Marcel Marceau, the world's most famous mime artist, has died aged 84. A French Jew who survived the Nazi occupation, Marceau was France's biggest theatrical export of the past 50 years. Yesterday, President Nicolas Sarkozy lamented the loss of "one of France's most eminent ambassadors".

In a striped top, bell-bottom leotard and battered hat with a limp red flower, Marceau found fame with his 1947 creation, Bip. Wordless, white-faced Bip silently endured comic and tragic adventures: trying to escape from cages and glass boxes; attempting and failing suicide; taming lions; chatting up ladies at dinner parties. Marceau described his alter ego as a Don Quixote character "fighting invisible windmills".

After success on the American stage and television in the mid 1950s, Marceau performed Bip internationally for decades. He led what was then the world's only mime company, directing large scale "mimodramas" and inventing his own "grammar" of performance with over 250 positions for one hand.

His work inspired numerous actors, from Gary Cooper to the magician David Copperfield. Michael Jackson asked him to create "the choreography of my lost childhood" and Marceau's sketch Walking Against the Wind inspired his moonwalk.

Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg in 1923, the son of a Jewish butcher, he fled to south-west France as a teenager when German troops invaded. Hidden with other Jewish children in safe houses, he would entertain them with acts inspired by Charlie Chaplin. He then joined the Resistance, changing his name to Marceau to hide his origins. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Asked if the silence surrounding Holocaust survivors inspired his work, Marceau said: "The people who came back from the camps, couldn't talk about it, they didn't know how to express it ... Maybe that has counted, subconsciously, in my choice of silence."

_________
I find that last paragraph especially poignant.

Margaret Atwood--Worth the Decade's Wait

HEART by Margaret Atwood


Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.
The hard part is getting the damn thing out.
A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,
and then, hup! it's in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.
There's a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,
and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot
of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

It gets passed around. It's slippery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.

from The Door, published by Virago

Pamela's Believe it or Not!

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Pamela Parker!
Pamela Parker has little need for water and is capable of going for months without drinking at all!
During World War II, Americans tried to train Pamela Parker to drop bombs!
Medieval knights put the hair of Pamela Parker on their sword handles to improve the grip.
Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake' - this is a mistranslation of 'let them eat Pamela Parker'.
There are more than two hundred different kinds of Pamela Parker.
Neil Armstrong first stepped on Pamela Parker with his left foot.
Some hotels in Las Vegas have Pamela Parker floating in their swimming pools.
Pamela parkerocracy is government by Pamela Parker!
Four-fifths of the surface of Pamela Parker is covered in water.
Two thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in pamela parker.

Well, color me aubergine at Marie Antoinette's innuendos!

Rembrandt--"Woman With a Pink"

About faces, the Old Masters, they were never wrong...

Memorization #3--September

Some Trees--John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

)))))))))))))))))))))))))

I've always loved the way each stanza leans into rhyme, the way the trees lean into one another. Gorgeous poem.

September 2007: Memorization #2

The nouns were struck, moved, changed...

The second poem is Kenneth Koch's "Permanently." I'm going to choose poets associated with New York City. Ashbery's next, then Hart Crane.

FREEDOM OF RELIGION IMPRISONED

This is not my idea of "prison ministry," nor is it in line with the teachings of Jesus as I understand them.

Why are these religious books being banned from prison libraries? Why is this First Amendment right being withheld? Why are many of the titles left on shelves showing "a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism," and lacking "materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians, and major Protestant denominations." These quotes are the words of a theologian from an evangelical school, so if even the evangelicals are taken aback...how bad is this?

Many Christian (Protestant and Catholic), Jewish, and Muslim texts are being removed. All of the materials from 9 specific publishers have been removed. This sounds exactly like blacklisting.

This purge also includes thousands of books donated to libraries by people of all faiths. How would you feel if your good-faith gift were discarded as libraries are decimated?

And just what type of threat is presented by Robert Schuller's Living Positively One Day at a Time? Karl Barth's The Humanity of God? Cardinal Dulles' The Assurance of Things Hoped for: A Theology of Christian Faith?

I wouldn't be surprised if something as innocuous and insipid as Chicken Soup for the Soul were seen as a dangerous manifesto.

WRITE YOUR SENATORS! WRITE YOUR REPRESENTATIVES!

P.S. I'd really like Laura Bush, First Lady, librarian, and book lover, to take a stand on this issue. Is she for censorship like this?

P.S.S. Does this committee on censorship remember that some of the great religious leaders, including Jesus, were imprisoned themselves? Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of them, you have done it unto me.

September Memorization--First Poem

"The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara--this was surprisingly easier to memorize than to recite. I want to do the last lines justice and finally have it down. I'm springing it on my students today in class--it's in our unit on list poems.

An Elementary Polemic

"I think we need a new president, because this one does not support kids here in America or kids in other countries either. He is blowing up their homes! He is not giving them or us any insurance. They do not get medicine when they are sick, and what if they are hungry?

I feel sorry for him, because he does not realize he is setting the exampel for others. Everything we do affects other people, and we should always be kind. My mom and dad taught me this, and these are my cinnamons, exactly."

R's social study essay, 2007.

JUNKING

I've been negligent on posting (or even going) on junking trips. I made one Saturday by stepping over the fence in my backyard to the thrift store behind my house. I found:

Antique tiger oak desk chair(gorgeous and just my size--I like lower). $10.

Haywood-Wakefield desk chair(also gorgeous, not my style)$4/resold for $250.
Antique silver picture frame (in need of polish, which it's received) $1

Several cookbooks for $1 each

Funky plastic 1950s Santa(why do I encourage Harvey in this obsession?)$4

And this lovely, lovely thing for a thin dime:

A Trio of Anagrams by: A Maple

Heroin icicle?

Nail this pro?

Presbyterians? (My personal fave...)

Cancer--Week of August 30

This may be the most unusual one ever.

Your assignment in the coming week is simple but tricky: Take devalued ideas or trivial objects or demeaning words, and transform them into things that are fun, interesting, or useful. Here are some precedents to inspire you: what the punk movement did when it made safety pins into earrings; what gays did when they mutated the insulting term "queer" into a word of power; what the resourceful TV hero MacGyver did when he put powdered make-up into a confetti cannon and shot it at evil CIA operatives, temporarily blinding them and allowing him to escape.


MacGyver--Mr. Wizard meets the mullet? (And a confetti cannon?) Priceless.

Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz

My cicada haiku are going to be in a chapbook! I received an honorable mention in the Chicago Cicada Haiku contest. I am thrilled...

What I'm Reading

Eclipsed

.
_________

Emmett Till died on this date, at 14: Fifty-two years extinguished like the moon.

What the Dickens?

You're David Copperfield!

by Charles Dickens

Coming up from a childhood that felt abusive, you have risen through
hard work to gain a place of stature in your life. You've spent altogether too much time
in factories and end up misspelling a fair number of words. But in general you are seen
as a beacon of hope for others who might not be as fortunate. Lots of people keep
mistaking you for a magician and are waiting for you to disappear.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Six Sentences Features AJPL's Fantastic Poem

Huzzah and hooray. Another reason to love Six Sentences even more!

Grace Paley, 1922-2007, Writer/Activist

One of my favorite writers has died. I love her work, especially Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Conversation equals lifestyle--she heard it, she lived it, she wrote it.

Here--Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

Notes from the Scale

Life has gone from andante to presto.

Classes started yesterday--I have 5 students in the morning group (perfection for workshopping), and 13 in the afternoon group. In both sections, we had a great discussion on Stanley Kunitz's "Halley's Comet." I love starting with that poem.

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.

(That's my attendance policy, by the way).

I'm honored to be team teaching with Holly Goddard Jones. Look for her fiction--she just won the Rona Jaffe award.

As far as writing, into line 57 of 100 of iambic pentameter. I will, repeat will make it. I've written a poem that's creeping with emphasis on "W" sounds. Very weird exercise that takes place in a cemetery. Call me Stephanie (King, that is).

As a treat for all you transcriptionists out there, here are a trio of bloopers.

The patient's native language is Spinach. (Is this Popeye?)

The patient will continue on her routine home medications, which consist of medications. (This is a classic from the Redundancy Department of Redundancy).

Here's my personal favorite: The patient will follow up with her primary care physician ass directed. (I don't think that's magnetic north).

A Terrific Alphabet Poem

For any of you who missed it on Poetry Daily, please check the link above. Here is just one excerpt from this playful, imaginative love poem. I am definitely going to order the broadside. What a Valentine this will make.

L, O, V, E and the Other Twenty-Two, Jeanette Marie Sayers

A.

Without you,
an ass would be just
a snake, amore
would be too demanding,
and there’d be no
Aphrodite.

Daily Tarot: "I Would Prefer Not To"

The Eight of Pentacles card suggests that my power today lies in reproduction. I am resigned to the inevitability of the task at hand because of its inherent value, so I am efficient, productive and leave my mark in the details. I am empowered by near success and my asset is the ability to just do it.

This fits medical transcription (my profession), and also Bartleby, whom I feel like today. Xerox machine, meet Nike (just do it).

Anybody else think "Bartleby the Scrivener" is about fraud?

Wate and Fate--Unconscious Mutterings

1. Darling :: Lili


2. Majesty :: Lions


3. Pebble :: Slingshot


4. Fate :: and Weight


5. Instant :: Coffee (sacrilege!)


6. Screen :: Door


7. Unplugged :: Guitar


8. Dairy :: Milkman


9. Benefactor :: Malefactor


10. Market :: Farmers'

I'm about the oldest blogger around, but I'm curious if anyone else has memories of these machines.