Artist Manifesto: Carrie Ann Baade

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom, or bits of advice for our readers thinking about pursuing art full time?

A. DO NOT BECOME AN ARTIST.

If you can do something else, do it. However, if this is what you are, god love you, it will never be an easy path. Our eyes, our hands, our minds are committed to service. It is a calling. It will demand every sacrifice of you as you serve. If this is what you are, it was never a choice to do anything else. I am not talking to those of you who create merely out moods or in seasons or way back when. I am speaking to you give blood on a regular basis. Every battle you fight, every sacrifice made to insure your survival proves your conviction that no one and nothing can tear you from your station. This is an honor. To create HERE and NOW. To be the eyes the soul of your time. We are so very privileged to have all our opportunities; this exquisite FREEDOM to express, to adorn, and to synthesize the world we live in. Humble yourself to this calling, serve with passion. Suck the marrow out life! Transform another mind, bring beauty down from the mountain to the cities of men, challenge values, and raise awareness of what it is, to be a part of this human condition. Your reward will be the singing of the stars, the humming of the spheres. To toil in the duty of tribute to culture. To live an extraordinary existence!

I challenge you TO FAIL. Fail magnificently! For it is the only way to succeed. When you finally find success it is a shock to find that this is the first in a long line proving yourself…success is a process that pushes you to out do yourself without limit or end. As you succeed, I challenge you do so with humility and help those that who are climbing with you or behind you. If you can mentor, give someone the advice or confidence no one maybe ever gave you. Succeed so that you may be a shining example of the possible glory of being human, of being a creator. It is so much richer an existence to find yourself among friends than to find yourself alone. We are on this path together.

PS: To those who do not create art, I challenge you to support a living artist and become a collector. Artists are nothing without the belief of another person who values what they are putting into this world. You make a difference. Patronage keeps art alive. There are those amazing few who have come forward for me, they sustain me and fuel my ability to continue. If no one ever came forward for me, I would not be where I am now. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein in the Moveable Feast: - do not buy nice things, do not buy clothes, or expensive food, buy art. This is what is meaningful in this world. Invest in your culture. The artist does not need their creation. They made it for one person, the one to whom it belongs. The one person who resonates with the piece and cannot imagine their life without it.

Rocket Man

2 Grand Slams (calendar). 11 major singles titles (even though banned from playing Grand Slam tournaments from age 24 to age 29 due to his status as a professional). 20 major championships in all (including doubles and mixed doubles). 47 total professional singles titles.

How can anyone deny that Rod Laver was the greatest?

5 feet 8 inches, and a wrist as big as heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

Today's Writer's Almanac: Billy Collins

The Effort--Billy Collins (from Ballistics)

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

Resolutions:
(1) Don't be the Mrs. Parker who says this in third-period English.

(2) Remember Yoda: Do or do not...there is no try.

"Never Land"--Yusef Kumunyakaa

I don't wish you were one
of The Jackson Five
tonight, only you were

still inside yourself
unchanged by the vampire
moonlight. So eager to

play The Other,
did you forget
Dracula was singled out

because of his dark hair
& olive skin? After
you became your cover,

tabloid headlines
grafted your name
to a blond boy's.

The personals bled
through newsprint,
across your face. Victor

Frankenstein knew we must
love our inventions. Now,
maybe skin will start to grow

over the lies & subtract
everything that under-
mines nose & cheekbone.

You could tell us if
loneliness is what
makes the sparrow sing.

Michael, don't care
what the makeup
artist says, you know

your sperm will never
reproduce that face
in the oval mirror.

Reading Weldon Kees, Photo of Weldon Kees Reading

1926--Weldon Kees

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.
_____________

The photograph above is of Weldon Kees reading from the work of poet Henry Reed. It's haunting--Kees in a World War I uniform, and his shadow pendant.

More and More: Words of Advice from DRJ

Here are the comments of my son, Daniel, when he was three and saw Alice in Wonderland for the first time: "So...don't eat nothing, don't drink nothing, and don't go through any little doors..."

Words to live by!

Pushing Yourr Buttons

It was on this day in 1868 that the typewriter was patented, by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1873, he sold the patent to the Remington Arms Co., a famous gun maker, for $12,000. There had been typewriters before, but they weren't very practical — it took longer to type a letter than to write it by hand. The first commercial typewriter based on Sholes' design, a Remington Model 1, went on the market in 1874. (information from today's Writer's Almanac)




The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Curious and Curiouser

“Soon I’ll go berry-picking, and when I go I’ll take my language with me.”

@ Yahoo! Video

Watch this fascinating video on the loss of the world's languages and its effects on culture, science, and ecosystems. It's a fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking video.

Only in America: Happy Father's Day

* More collect calls are placed on Father's Day than any other day of the year.

* The Stevie Wonder song "Isn't She Lovely" isn't about a woman he's lusting for; it's about his newborn daughter Aisha! If you listen closely, you can hear Aisha crying during the song.

* Kurt Vonnegut was (for a short time) Geraldo Rivera's father-in-law. Rivera's marriage to Edith Vonnegut ended in 1974 because of his womanizing. Her ever-protective father was quoted as saying, "If I see Gerry again, I'll spit in his face." He also included an unflattering character named Jerry Rivers (a chauffeur) in a few of his books.

(facts from Mental Floss--link above)

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

This is among my favorite books: I cannot wait to see what Tim Burton does with this cast and set design. Alice looks beautiful in Alice blue (which is named after A. Roosevelt, not A. in W.)! Click on the link above for more photographs from the movie.

06/20/1975: Jaws (This Day in History)

June 20: General Interest
1975 : Jaws release

On this day in 1975, Jaws, a film directed by Steven Spielberg that made countless viewers afraid to go into the water, opens in theaters. The story of a great white shark that terrorizes a New England resort town became an instant blockbuster and the highest-grossing film in movie history until it was bested by 1977's Star Wars. Jaws was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category and took home three Oscars, for Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound. The film, a breakthrough for director Spielberg, then 27 years old, spawned three sequels.

The film starred Roy Scheider as principled police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as a marine biologist named Matt Hooper and Robert Shaw as a grizzled fisherman called Quint. It was set in the fictional beach town of Amity, and based on a best-selling novel, released in 1973, by Peter Benchley. Subsequent water-themed Benchley bestsellers also made it to the big screen, including The Deep (1977).

With a budget of $12 million, Jaws was produced by the team of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, whose later credits include The Verdict (1982), Cocoon (1985) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Filming, which took place on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, was plagued by delays and technical difficulties, including malfunctioning mechanical sharks.

Jaws put now-famed director Steven Spielberg on the Hollywood map. Spielberg, largely self-taught in filmmaking, made his feature-length directorial debut with The Sugarland Express in 1974. The film was critically well-received but a box-office flop. Following the success of Jaws, Spielberg went on to become one of the most influential, iconic people in the film world, with such epics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), ET: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). E.T., Jaws and Jurassic Park rank among the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time. In 1994, Spielberg formed DreamWorks SKG, with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. The company has produced such hits as American Beauty (1999), Gladiator (2001) and Shrek (2001).

_______
Click on the link above to see the REENACTED BY BUNNIES version of this classic movie. (There are others available, too. I'm quite fond of the Bunnies' remake of of The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

Happy Juneteenth!

This is from Dr. Goodword, another great site for all you word junkies:

• Juneteenth •

Pronunciation: jun-teenth

Part of Speech: Noun, proper

Meaning: Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. This African-American celebration remembers the day, June 19, 1865, when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached slaves in Galveston, Texas—two and a half years after it was issued.

Notes: Early celebrations evolved into political rallies and later into formal celebrations planned far in advance by Juneteenth committees. June 19, 1865 was a Monday but now Juneteenth is often celebrated on the weekend nearest June 19th. In early years these celebrations were commonly relegated by law to the outskirts of towns. However, many Juneteenth organizations eventually purchased tracts of land inside towns for the express purpose of holding the celebration. Many of them were named 'Emancipation Park' and some remain today.

In Play: In 2007 celebrations were held in more cities across the US than ever before, marking the 140th anniversary of this special day. For details of celebrations in your area, visit the Juneteenth website at www.juneteenth.com.

Word History: Today's Good Word is a blend of June and nineteenth that sounds rather odd, since -teen-th are suffixes that usually attach to numbers (teen is a variant of ten). June was taken from the calendar of the Romans, who named the month after their goddess, Juno, the wife of Jupiter and the goddess of the moon, marriage, and childbirth. Juno's name comes from the same root as the Latinate words, junior, juvenile, and our own Germanic versions, English young, German and Dutch jung "young", and Swedish ung "young". (Let us all join with Larry Brady, who originally suggested today's Good Word, in celebrating this unique US holiday and the freedom from repression it symbolizes.)

Characteristics of Romanticism: Via Harriet

Rothenberg's Poetry for the Millennium presents this as a checklist for Romanticism (19th century and beyond):

1. A challenge to closure.
2. A conscious emphasis on defamiliarization.
3. A foregrounding of emotions, feelings, and perceptions…as process and experiment.
4. The poet as visionary/seer.
5. The poet as a conduit for other voices.
6. An erasure of the boundaries between poetry and other forms of composition and speculation.
7. At its finest, a poetry that allows for the guiding principle of uncertainty.
8. Alongside the celebration of beauty (both “intellectual” and physical), a recurring exploration of the ugly and the grotesque.
9. A calling into question of traditional religious forms.
10. Alongside Romantic ideas of fancy and fantasy, an emergence of a new realism. . .an attention to the details of the everyday world.
11. A heightened sense of the transgressive set against an officially sanctioned ethos of gentility and conformity.
12. A widespread experience of exile.
13. Changes in form, including irregular forms, prose poetry, the fragment as a conscious poetic form, improvisation and performance poetry, sound poetry, dialect experiments, and verbal/visual interaction.

The Two Harveys: We Were First Married

Red Lilies by Richard Speakes

For Joan Didion

We tame with explanations any red, provide
meanings into which we dive, the human
foxhole where the mind finds protection.
It’s fabulous out there, and one clump
of red lilies beside the house could be
the bullet that rips through the body of
all those connotations, our symbols,
the stories that make sense of our world.
Red Riding Hood and Christ’s wounds, mother’s
blood,and the color the sun must be as one’s death
gives sunset its purpose, its passion at closure.
And then, rising, the moon punctuates the sentence
one’s life made, its last word that somehow rhymes
with all the words preceding, love and work
and sex. One’s death is by nature that moment,
all the meanings folded into the bundle
one carries, tied to a stick of bone,
as one goes forth into eternity.
That exquisite nonsense is the world
the mind makes from the world it didn’t,
with words that are themselves blossoms
of the invisible, the world as we see it.

(Poetry, 1994)

One Word: Daily

Daily planner daily planer daily pain--I hate those appointment books that want me to designate blocks of time; it feels as though I'm running for a plot of land in the great homesteading/Western expansion of our country. Someone already owns my time (me) just as someone already owned that land in the west (Native Americans).

Daily mysteries are more my style.

[pamela]

Bloomsday: Dublin, Ithaca, & Other Points!

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Excerpt from, "Ulysses, " by James Joyce.

Holly Rose Review: Passion Issue

I have a poem in this beautifully edited issue. Go see!

"I don't know exactly what a prayer is...."

But I think this qualifies....

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Pebble Lake Review

My poem, "I Stand Here Ironing: A Fairy Tale," is up at Pebble Lake Review.

Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow

From Asphodel That Greeny Flower, William Carlos Williams

June 2009
Red Ribbons
Hemerocallis

I bring you,
reawakened,
a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet
when I pressed them
and retained
something of their sweetness
a long time.
It is a curious odor,
a moral odor,
that brings me
near to you.
The color
was the first to go.
There had come to me
a challenge,
your dear self,
mortal as I was,
the lily's throat
to the hummingbird!
Endless wealth,
I thought,
held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics
in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself
gave us lief.
The whole world
became my garden!

Chapbook Bits: Other Four Letter Words

Cover: Chosen. (It's a surprise! I cannot wait till you all see it. This is going to be the most beautiful cover).
Blurbs: En Route.
Font: Chosen.
MS: On the way back to press.
Mailing List: In a state of utter disarray since my hospitalization.

NEEDED: Your mailing address, if you'd like to receive postcards/fliers/information about the book. Please send to pamelajohnsonparker@gmail.com.

Thank you!

Happy Birthday, Author of The Alchemist!

"Art hath an enemy called ignorance." Ben Jonson

Trifecta: Bellow, Garland, and Sendak

(from The Writers Almanac)

It's the birthday of Saul Bellow, born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, two years after his parents emigrated from Russia. He was born in Canada, but when he was young he was smuggled across the border into Chicago, and so he grew up as an illegal immigrant. His dad was an onion importer and a bootlegger. His mom was religious, and she hoped he would be a rabbi or maybe a concert pianist. But when he was eight years old, he read Uncle Tom's Cabin and he decided he would become a writer. He wrote two novels that didn't sell very well. But then he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Paris to write. And while he was there, he realized how much he loved Chicago. So he started a new novel whose opening lines are: "I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way." That was The Adventures of Augie March (1953),which became his first real success and won the National Book Award. He continued writing plays, nonfiction, and more novels, including Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), and Humboldt's Gift (1975).

He said, "In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries." And, "You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write." And, "I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'"

Personal Favorite: Seize the Day

It's the birthday of Judy Garland, born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where her father operated the only movie theater in town. She starred in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), and many more movies.

Personal Favorite: "Over the Rainbow"

It's the birthday of the children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. His parents were Polish immigrants, and as Maurice was growing up, many extended family members died in the Holocaust. So his parents were constantly grieving for their family back in Poland, and they were worried about Maurice, who was a very sick child. He almost never went outside — most of what he knew about the world outside his bedroom came from visiting family members, from the view through his window, and from books. His dad read to him before bed every night, and his mom was constantly hovering around, making sure he was all right. So when he eventually became an illustrator, he oftentimes painted a moon in the background as a symbol of his watchful mother. He started drawing, got a job in high school drawing the Mutt and Jeff cartoon strip into comic books, and went on to art school. When he was 19, he illustrated a physics book, Atomics for the Millions (1947). Then he worked for years designing the window displays for FAO Schwartz while he took night classes at art school.

And eventually he started writing and illustrating his own books for children, books about normal kids who end up in surreal settings where strange things happen, books like Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In the Night Kitchen (1970). Maurice Sendak has illustrated more than 90 books. He said: "You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them."

Personal Favorites: What Do You Say Dear?" & "Where the Wild Things Are"

Paging Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show

How do I know I'm getting old? I see that amazing photo and wonder where I could find that belt....Seriously, view the video below and see how amazing this cover is.

The Birds and The Bees: Sexton and Plath

The Ambition Bird by Anne Sexton

So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine

like a frog following
a sundial yet having an electric
seizure at the quarter hour.

The business of words keeps me awake.
I am drinking cocoa,
that warm brown mama.

I would like a simple life
yet all night I am laying
poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,
my lay-away plan,
my coffin.

All night dark wings
flopping in my heart.
Each an ambition bird.

The bird wants to be dropped
from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.

He wants to light a kitchen match
and immolate himself.

He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo
anc dome out painted on a ceiling.

He wants to pierce the hornet's nest
and come out with a long godhead.

He wants to take bread and wine
and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.

He wants to be pressed out like a key
so he can unlock the Magi.

He wants to take leave among strangers
passing out bits of his heart like hors d'oeuvres.

He wants to die changing his clothes
and bolt for the sun like a diamond.

He wants, I want.
Dear God, wouldn't it be
good enough to just drink cocoa?

I must get a new bird
and a new immortality box.
There is folly enough inside this one.

-------------

The Arrival Of The Bee Box--Sylvia Plath

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

915 Animals and A Single Human